**This story was my first ever fanfic, in fall 2014. I did a MAJOR revision in January 2016, so even if you're read it before, you may want to start again from the beginning. I promise it's now significantly better.**

Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters or ideas from The Killing. It's all just for fun.

Spoilers: Watch the series finale before reading this!

Sarah Linden walked through her empty house, feeling like a ghost. There were memories everywhere she looked, but they were mostly bad ones. She shuddered to think of the things that had happened here. No, she wouldn't miss this house. She wouldn't miss this city, either. What's more, she was sure that no one here would miss her. Never mind that she had lived in Seattle for her entire life.

As she took one last look around her empty dining room, something told her to bend down to the heating grate in the floor. The second shell casing. She picked up the tiny piece of metal that had hammered the nail in the coffin of her friendship with Holder. She tried to tell herself that it didn't matter, that it didn't hurt, not really. She still tried not to think back to that day. The truth was that she now realized just how colossally stupid she'd been – delusional, really - but it was too late. There were some things that couldn't be undone, and pulling a gun on your partner was definitely one of them. She told herself that it had been inevitable anyway. Not the gun, but the end of things between them. Just a matter of time. After all, wasn't it always?

A few minutes later, she locked the door of her house for the last time, got into her car and drove away without a second look. She headed for the highway, bypassing the familiar sights that had made up the setting for her entire life so far. Within an hour she had left Seattle behind her, and she didn't look back. At least, she didn't intend to look back.

The problem was that she saw Seattle – or rather, she saw flashes of her past in Seattle – everywhere she went from that day forward.

When she left town that first day, she had had no plan other than to get away. Fast. Her first instinct, as it had always been, was to run. She knew deep down that that was what she was doing, and she knew that it wouldn't solve her problems, or help her leave the ghosts of her past behind. And yet, it was what she had always done. So she got in her car and drove, with just a few of her belongings – the rest of her things were in storage – and a tank full of gas. Nothing else. No plans. No forwarding address. No goodbyes. It was better that way, she told herself. No, she wasn't running. Not really. She just needed… a change of scenery. She'd told herself the same lie so many times, she almost believed it.

Of course, it would have been easier if she'd known what precisely she was running from. Or what, if anything, she was hoping to find. Deep down, she may have known one or both of these things, but she refused to admit that to herself. The only way she knew how to deal with problems was to push them away, just like she'd always done with the people in her life who wanted to get too close. It had worked up til now.

How is this "working," exactly? Do you see yourself, your life? You have nothing, no one, the voice of reason in her head asked her frantically. But she didn't listen to that voice. She silenced it along with the rest of the questions in her mind. She'd think about that later. Right now she just needed… to get away. To run.

Some weeks later – she wasn't sure how many, having lost track of time when she'd left Seattle - she found herself driving down a lonely, narrow road along the California coast just as the sun was setting over the ocean. The view was breathtaking, with every color of the rainbow swirled together across the sky. She knew that any normal person would have stopped and appreciated the view, at least for a few minutes. And yet, she never considered stopping even for a second. She was looking for something that she hadn't found yet. Or was she still running from something? It was as if she thought that if she kept moving, she could outrun all the unknowns. Surely she would know when she found whatever it was that she was looking for… wouldn't she?

The colorful skies were startlingly different from Seattle and the constant gray, rainy weather. Even after several weeks, she hadn't gotten used to the fair weather during the day and the beautiful sunsets in the evenings. For some reason, on that particular late afternoon she suddenly realized that she hated that colorful sunset, and that she actually almost missed the gray skies.

What's wrong with me? she wondered to herself. No one hates sunsets. She tried to rationalize it, told herself that the gray skies were more suited to her state of mind.

That's bullshit, she thought to herself. No, she had to admit that she liked the view, it was just that the color was something she didn't want to get used to. It wouldn't last, after all. It fades amazingly quickly, and then leaves everything in darkness.

You see the connection, don't you? the voice in her head demanded loudly. You don't want to get used to something beautiful because it makes the darkness that much darker afterwards. She sighed, and begged the voice to please be silent for once. The message was a fairly obvious metaphor for her life, and suddenly she felt overwhelmed and exhausted.

She tried to push the questions and deep thoughts from her mind and drove on into the falling darkness. She preferred the darkness anyway… or at least, she kept telling herself that she did.

As she continued down the scenic coastal road in the now inky blackness, trying to think about anything but her realization about weather and sunsets and her life, her eyes flicked ever so quickly to the passenger seat, as they did from time to time, completely against her will. The seat was, of course, empty, except for her small backpack, and she forced her gaze back to the road. To the now dark sky. To the headlights of the occasional passing cars. To the rocks jutting out from the landscape along the left side of the car. Even staring vaguely into the distance was preferable to looking at the seat to her right. Anything but that empty seat beside her.

You have no right to even think about him, she told herself. Not after how terribly you fucked everything up – just like you always do. You're the one who made the choices that led you here.

Fucking up all manner of relationships was her specialty, after all. It was better to just keep driving, and think as little as possible.

...

Stephen Holder had solved the case. He and his newest partner had even made it look easy. He had had 4 partners in the past 10 months, which was some kind of record at the SPD. He just kept putting in for a new one as soon as a case closed, no matter how well it seemed that he'd worked with whoever he's worked with on that case. The higher ups had their own suspicions about why he was doing it – it didn't take much of a genius to figure it out, really – but he was getting the job done. He'd even started doing things by the book, stopped acting like an undisciplined rookie. No more kicking in doors with questionable probable cause, requesting a warrant for something that he had actually already searched, or asking for a wiretap for a case that had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism under the guise of the Patriot Act. Something had calmed Holder down. It seemed more like a brooding, unhappy calm than a change for the better, but nonetheless, his superiors indulged him.

His most recent partner, Carpenter, was a newbie that he had been put with so that Holder could train him – a fact that Holder found rather humorous. They'd gotten along well enough, but whenever Carpenter suggested hanging out after hours, Holder always found a reason to decline. He claimed one excuse or another, and eventually Carpenter gave up. The truth was, Holder just wasn't interested. He lived alone, and he wasn't interested in making friends. He had just become a father, and his daughter was his whole world. Besides little Kahlia, who he saw as often as he could, he had his NA meetings and his sister – who he'd managed to reconcile with recently - and her kids for company. He really didn't want or need anyone else in his life. It was better that way... Or so he kept telling himself.

Had he become a little bit anti-social? Maybe. And so what if he had? To someone who had known him before Sarah Linden left for the second time, it might have seemed that some part of who he had been had disappeared with her, just as suddenly. Or maybe it was just a result of the stress that he had been under during the Stansbury case.

And then there was that whole Pied Piper thing… Linden had said that Holder had had nothing to do with it, but Reddick had his doubts. Those two had been two peas in a pod for that whole investigation – a fucked up pod, sure, but he had serious doubts that Linden had done something that big completely and totally on her own. But he had no proof, and then the murder was ruled a suicide and… well, there was nothing more to say.

So there were some plausible reasons for Holder's change in behavior, and for why he didn't seem to want to keep a partner. Holder was still the same "mystery wrapped in a conundrum," but everyone noticed that something was different about him. Where he had once been more than willing to engage in meaningless banter with his coworkers, he was now all business. He was just… off. Different. But people change, of course, and most people just let it go. It was his business, after all.

Of course, no one would dare suggest to his face that this change might have anything to do with Linden. It was an unwritten rule in the precinct that you did not mention the name "Sarah Linden" when Holder was around. To say that he was still angry with her, now almost a year after the Stansbury case had closed and that whole mess with Skinner had been "cleared up" by Mayor Richmond, was an understatement.

However, unbeknownst to his coworkers, it wasn't quite as simple as just being angry. He tried his best not to think about her at all, and to move on, knowing that those angry thoughts went against the whole "happy, joyous and free" thing he was trying to do. And staying clean was crucial, especially now that he was a father. So instead he went to his NA meetings, tried his best to be a good brother and uncle, worked hard and just generally filled his time with the people who hadn't accused him of betraying them and then fled into the night.

No, he certainly didn't have time or energy to waste thinking about Sarah Linden.