Trials and Tribulations - [Bensler EO]

Part Twenty Three - Desolation IV

His shoes tapped anxiously against the checkered rug of the waiting room. He could already feel the bruises forming on his elbows from the hardness of the wooden armrests.

He was alone in the waiting room. The receptionist had wandered off behind closed doors and the only other people in sight were walking through the halls. No television playing, not even those god awful soap operas that seemed to be a given in waiting rooms.

For once, he was truly alone. The silence rang in his ears, growing louder with each passing second and fighting off his wandering mind felt futile.

She had nearly died under this roof. A few floors down in an emergency room bay. When he closed his eyes, his vision was replaced with the memory of the lobby rushing past him. He had run through the waiting area faster than the speed of light, fighting off the bile rising in his throat.

Even now, a sliver of fear rises in his stomach when his phone rings, and he's been meaning to change the ringtone for a while now.

'Is this Elliot Stabler?'

He had been so damn mad at that point, trudging down the streets with no intention of going anywhere specific. He almost didn't answer it, that's what strikes him the most. He'd looked at the screen and saw the unidentified number, and he had come so close to sending it to voicemail.

He doesn't like to think of how he would've felt hearing it in past tense from a voicemail. Not knowing if she was alive or dead. It was hard enough to hear it from a live voice, hearing it in the past would've pushed him to the ground from the weight of the guilt.

'You're listed as Olivia Benson's emergency contact. We're calling to notify you that she's currently in critical condition here at Memorial Sloan Kettering's emergency room.'

He'd damn near dropped the phone before he spun on his heels, running in the opposite direction. The anger hadn't faded in that moment, instead it fueled his fire like a rainstorm of gasoline. The hurt, the fear, the utter rage, he'd ran so fucking fast.

He'd pushed past every door, frantically searching through every glass pane as he just ran. And with his feet barely on the ground, he had said a prayer. It was not a prayer he would've said whilst sitting under the tall and ornate ceilings of his church. It was a curse, more violent than his angry pleas at God after his arrival while alone in the chapel. It was different. It wasn't words, because there had been no words yet. There was the wind blowing in his ears as his feet carried him and there was the falsetto cries from the monitors. Nothing else.