Trials and Tribulations - [Bensler EO]

Part Eight - Remember

In times of great pain, it was easy for Olivia to forget her strengths. Even in the handful of moments that she thought her life would end, she held onto what made her strong. It was always the faces. The voices. They stayed with her, they fought for her. 

The faces of the people she had helped never faded. They just went... quiet. Their voices in her head, reminding her of what she had done to help them, they slowly but surely fell silent. She saw their faces, their lips moving but no sound. 

She remembered every face, it made her a good cop. Depending on the survivors to remind her of her durability was her downfall. 

She was forgetting it all.

Her eyes drifted over to the orange prescription bottle on her countertop. One of what would likely be hundreds in the future. She wasn't sure if it was a customary action or if her doctors just saw her as depressed, but they had called in a script for an anti-depressant. As soon as she cracked the white pharmacy bag open, she was forced to ask herself if she would ever actually take them.

Would it end the numbness that she felt? Would she even want the numbness to end? She worked in trauma, she knew that feeling numb was the mind and the body's way of protecting itself. The lack of feeling anything at all wasn't so bad. She had expected to feel more emotional pain than she actually did. But now she was left to weigh the pros and the cons. Was feeling nothing at all worse than feeling everything?

The first night, the little purple pill of Sertraline sat in her palm for longer than she'd have liked to admit. The alarm clock next to her bed had flashed from 9:33 to 10:14 and the pill was still in her resting against the ridges of her palm. All she could do was stare at it while the glass of water on her nightstand turned lukewarm. 

Maybe it wouldn't force her to feel the pain that was currently numbed. Maybe she could chase the feelings she had before. The doctor's words bounced between her eardrums for days. 

"The life you had before isn't coming back. You'll have to stop chasing it eventually."

She didn't want to stop chasing it. She never wanted to stop. That would mean she was no longer chasing herself and she desperately wanted herself to come back. The Olivia Benson she knew was wandering in the depths of some deep dark cave somewhere, a mindless placebo in her place. Even auto-pilot became exhausting. 

Could the pills do that? Could they bring her back without awakening the sleeping bomb of negative emotions inside of her? Could it lift the psychological novocaine that was protecting her without breaking her in the process?

By the time the clock had ticked 10:15 that night, she had taken a deep breath and swallowed the pill. 

What the hell, right? 

But three days had passed and she was starting to notice that the medication was changing her. She knew its full effects wouldn't come in for a good two weeks, but the smaller things were becoming apparent.