Don't own anything, not making money off it, etc….
Chapter 1
Olivia sat at her desk and rubbed her eyes. It had been a long morning. She looked at the clock on her computer screen. It was only 1130. She was working on her third cup of coffee. She took another swig of the coffee and stood back up. She joined her colleagues outside the first interrogation room. She'd given it her best, and her best was damn good, and the man inside still wouldn't crack. They liked him for the kidnapping and murder of an 8 year old, and if they were as good as they thought they were, they could link him to at least 3 or 4 others. Now though, they needed to get something from him. Fin had tried, she'd tried, she AND Elliot had tried and now Elliot was going at him on his own.
Inside the interrogation room, their suspect sat cool as a cucumber. Elliot matched his demeanor as he tried a different tactic. Tried to be his friend, someone who understood. Someone who understood the frustrations of children, but how in the end you still loved them so much. Olivia was hopeful. Elliot was good, he'd break this guy after all. Suddenly there was a palpable shift in the air. The suspect turned and leered at Elliot.
"You have kids, don't you?" he asked Elliot.
"Yeah," he replied slowly. "I got kids."
"UhmmHmm," their suspect replied. Olivia wouldn't have believed the change in this guy. He went from average joe to slinky perp in a split second. "I bet you like this job because it makes you feel useful, putting sickos away. Protecting your kids from the big bad wolf. Well, you must not be very good at it, people still out there killing little girls. Not very good at all. " He looked up at Elliot, who had stilled. "What's the matter, Detective? I hit a nerve? Big bad cop not man enough to take care of his kids?" He sneered at Elliot and in that split second Elliot fist caught him in the jaw, knocking his chair backwards. Elliot grabbed him by the neck and pulled him up to take another swing at him when Cragen grabbed his pulled back arm. All of a sudden Olivia was in front of him, between him and the suspect. Cragen was pulling him out of the interrogation room and Fin was putting a shaken, but still whole, suspect back in the chair.
"You. Upstairs. NOW!" Cragen barked at Elliot. Elliot shook his head as if clearing his own mind and marched up to the locker room.
Olivia just shook her head. Something was wrong with her partner and she didn't know what. She suspected it had something to do with his family. Whenever things were tense with Kathy, or rotten with the kids, he was a monster at work. When things were bad at work, he was rotten at home. After years of being partners, she knew how he worked. She needed to get him to open up to someone or he would break. His anger would be too much someday. Walking back to her desk for yet another cup of coffee, Olivia sighed a heavy sigh. Elliot was a good partner, the best, and her friend, probably her best friend, but damn, he was complicated and took a lot of work.
She gave it 15 minutes. Time to let his knuckles stop burning and his head to clear. She bolstered herself with another swig of coffee, grimacing as it burned her nostrils. 'Munch must have made this round,' she thought. She headed upstairs towards her partner.
Reaching the top of the stairs she heard a loud banging. Opening the door to the locker room she saw Elliot standing in front of a very dented locker. His right hand still in a fist. He was panting. "Elliot?" she called softly. His head dropped to his chest so she knew he had heard her.
"Elliot," she said again as she walked towards him. "What is going on? "
"Ah…I….I dunno, Liv," he admitted after a second.
"This is not about Fletcher, is it?" referring to the guy still sitting downstairs in the interrogation room. She'd seen him get worked up and take a swing at a suspect or a perp before, but she'd never seen him attach a locker because he couldn't get a confession. It was still way to early in the case for that level of frustration.
"She's gonna take my kids, Olivia. She's gonna take my babies. She says I'm not there enough, that I work too much, am unreliable. She wants to leave and she's gonna take my children." She heard his voice crack as he spoke through his fingers, hands over his face.
"Oh Elliot." Olivia's heart was breaking for her partner. She knew everything he did, he did for his family. "Kathy…Kathy said that? They're your family, Elliot. She knows that. She can't take your family. She wouldn't do that to you." Olivia tried her best to comfort him. She didn't know if those words were entirely true, but she thought it was what he needed to hear most.
She could tell that it wasn't exactly working. He was still tense, she could see the muscles tensing under his shirt. She took another couple of steps towards him.
"She loves you, Elliot. The stresses of the job are hard on her too. Talk to her, don't shut her out. She is your family, El." She reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder.
Without warning, he spun around towards her, his eyes spitting fire, glazed over and unfocused. His hands clenched and unclenched into fists.
"STOP TELLING ME WHAT TO DO." He yelled at her. Olivia almost took a step backwards at the ferocity of his voice. The shock was evident on her face but she recovered fairly quickly.
"Elliot, you've told me before she thinks family is the most important thing. She knows—" her soft voice of encouragement was cut off by a hiss coming from his mouth.
"Shut up. Just shut up, Olivia." She flinched again at the anger in his tone, directed at her. "What are you trying to give me advice for anyway? What do you know about family? A rapist father and a drunken mother? Who are you to give me advice on how to take care of my family. You don't have kids. You don't have anybody." The words were angry, the tone hard.
Her stomach dropped to the floor at the same time her hand flew up of its own accord and slapped him across the face. Almost as quickly his hand flew up and hit her hard across the face, his palm stinging. Her head jerked to the side, cheek burning. Her hands flew up in front of her and he grabbed her left hand in his upraised right one as his left swung across and slapped her on the other side of her face. She gasped as his ring cut into her skin. She didn't move. He was grasping her tight, her left wrist in his fist. She could feel his finger nails digging into her skin and she let out and involuntary gasp as she felt something in her wrist pop and then a deep interior pain. She didn't fight back; she simply stood there, waiting. Waiting for another blow, waiting for another verbal assault, just waiting.
Elliot's blue eyes were almost black; they were unfocused and unblinking. He was looking at her without really seeing her. She didn't think he was seeing anything but red right then. She didn't know how long they stood there. When the pain in her wrist got too much to bear, she broke out of his grasp, rather easily and darted for the door, leaving Elliot much in the same position that she had found him.
Olivia ducked out of the locker room and into the women's restroom next door. Thankfully the area had been empty and no one had seen. She didn't think the damage was bad, but needed to make sure before she headed downstairs. She looked in the mirror. Both cheeks were red. She could see the outline of a hand, but she doubted anyone else would without knowing what to look for. Underneath her right eye was a cut, 'from his wedding ring - ironic' she thought. It was bleeding, but not badly. It would start to bruise soon, so would her lip, which she felt tingling. She ran the water cold and placed a wet papertowel over the cut, holding pressure. In 5 minutes, the bleeding had stopped. She looked at herself again, straightened her clothes. She'd do, as long as nobody looked too carefully at her. She headed down the stairs, grabbed a stack of paperwork from her desk without missing a stride and went straight for Cragen's office.
She knocked and entered when she heard him bark "Come in." She opened the door and slid in, keeping her back to the doorframe.
"Olivia, what do you need?" He asked, barely looking up from the stacks of paperwork on his desk.
She took a breath. "I'm done."
He stopped what he had been doing and looked up at her. "Excuse me?"
"I'm done, Don. I can't do this. Either he gets his head shrunk, gets his head out of his ass or I'm done. I cannot, will not, work with him like this."
"Olivia…" the Captain said with a warning tone, "Don't say things you will regret later."
"I won't regret this later, Cap," she said with finality.
"What did he say to you? What did he do?" the older man asked.
She ran her fingers through her short brown hair as she took a deep breath. "Don't ask questions you don't want the answer to, Captain."
He walked around the desk towards the detective, who he cared deeply for. "Olivia, what did Elliot do?"
"Who…What…" she stumbled over her words. "Whoever…WHATever that was. THAT was not Elliot Stabler. Either he sees a shrink or I'm done here. I'm taking the rest of the day off, I'm taking these files, I'll work from home." She said it as a statement, but she looked at him for his approval. He gave a slight nod and she headed out the side door of his office.
Captain Cragen brought one hand to his mouth and blew into his fist. What the hell was he going to do with this mess.
Olivia practically jogged out of the building, flagging a cab in front of the station. 'One lucky break,' she thought, as the biting cold wind cut through her thin button-down shirt. She'd left her coat inside and it was below freezing outside. Jumping into the back of the cab, the cabbie looked back at her already shivering form. "You forget your coat, Miss? Run back in and get it, I'll wait."
"No, it's okay, just…" she replied, then stopped as she say Cragen walking down the steps with her coat and bag.
He passed them through the window to her, saying "Olivia, are you SURE you are okay? This isn't like you…"
"Yes, Cap, Fine. I promise." She turned and leaned towards the cabbie, giving him her address less than a mile away.
Her boss stood and stared again as he watched the cab drive off.
Inside the precinct, Fin and Munch were still staring at each other. They hadn't seen Olivia come down the stairs, entering the bullpen from the Interrogation Room only shortly before Elliot came down the stairs. They saw their Captain leave an empty office, throw open Benson's desk and grab her shoulder bag, grab her down coat from the coat rack and hurry out the front door.
"What the hell what that about?" Fin asked, a little cranky himself.
Munch shook his head. "No Idea. Hey, Stabler, where's your partner?"
Elliot glanced up from the messages he was pretending to read and glanced around. Where WAS his partner? "Dunno." He looked again, forehead creased. He'd been so preoccupied about how he was going to apologize he hadn't thought about where she'd gone when she left. Elliot jumped up and headed back upstairs. Checking the cribs, the locker room and then the women's bathroom and finding them all empty, he started slowly back downstairs. He was still trying to remember exactly what had happened in the locker room. He'd been punching the locker, Olivia had come in, had said something to him. Then he remembered yelling at her. In his mind it was static, he could remember yelling but not what he'd said. He remembered hearing the crack of a hand across a face, one, two times? Three times? His? Hers? His own cheek stung but so did his hand. What the hell had happened up there. He started to panic. He couldn't remember, not what he'd said, not what he'd done. And now Olivia was gone. What HAD he done?
As he walked as slow as possible down the stairs back into the bullpen, he saw his Captain coming back inside. He caught the end of what he was telling Fin and Munch. "—gone home for the day, not feeling well. You two will have to interview the rest of the witnesses on your own." Elliot, get the ADA in here to talk about what to do with that loser," gesturing to the room where their suspect still sat. "Then meet me in my office."
Cragen paced in his office. What the hell was he going to do. Taking the job as the boss sounded good in practice, but they never prepared you for the majority of decisions you had to make. Fifteen minutes passed before Elliot knocked on his door.
"Elliot," the older man said. "Sit down." It was a command, not an offer. Elliot figured that out quickly and sat in one of the chairs opposite the old wooden desk. Cragen sat, playing with a pen, before he tossed in angrily onto the desk.
"You need to see a shrink, Elliot." He figured it was the only way. Olivia was right. He himself, as Captain, should have seen this coming. He could do this and try to keep Benson, and hopefully both of them, but if he didn't he would lose them both.
"WHAT? What the hell is going on here? Over that loser? I barely touched him. You and I both know I've done far worse, " Elliot said accusingly.
"It isn't about him, he is only a very small part of it," Cragen replied.
"What's the other part?" the detective demanded.
"I've been given an ultimatum. I don't want to lose a good detective," Cragen said straight.
"An ultimatum? By the brass? You're going to fire me if I don't see a shrink? How do they even know—" He was cut off by his boss.
"It's not you I am worried about losing. "
Elliot looked up at him. Cragen didn't say anything, but allowed Elliot to put it together himself. "Olivia?" he asked, the shock evident in his voice. "Olivia asked you to fire me if I don't see a shrink?" He was incredulous, that his partner, his FRIEND would do that, even after today, AND that Cragen would consider it.
"No, Elliot, of course not. She said she would quit. She said you needed to get help or she'd quit. And I believe her." Cragen looked at the younger man for his response.
"Look, whatever she said to you about today, we'll work it out. It wasn't…I didn't mean to…."
"Elliot, she didn't tell me anything about what happened today. What DID happen? All I know is that there are two very bruised lockers upstairs and I have a detective who is VERY VERY good at her job telling me she is going to quit. I don't want to lose either of you, OR both of you. So, you tell me what you are going to do."
Elliot sat in the chair, flabbergasted. 'How the hell was he supposed to defend himself when he couldn't even remember what happened,' he thought.
"Can you even do that? Make me see a shrink for no reason?" Elliot asked, defensive again.
"No reason? Elliot I have a thousand reasons, any one of which are enough to get you a seat in front of Huang for the next six months. If Olivia…OLIVIA….of all people says you need to see someone, I'm going to listen to her. For your sake, not just hers." He looked at Elliot, daring him to object.
He didn't. "Okay," he said. Then, more quietly, "Okay. What do I do now?"
"Go back to work, solve this case. I'm already down one detective. I'll call Huang, set something up unless you want to see someone else." Cragen looked up in question.
"No, Huang's fine." Elliot stood and turned towards the office door. Before he opened the door he turned back. "Cap?" The older man looked up, hoping he didn't look as tired as he felt. "Liv okay?"
"Yeah," he replied. "She's okay. But you asking makes me wonder why she wouldn't be."
Elliot pursed his lips and walked out the door.
Olivia, true to her word, worked through the files all afternoon and evening. She ordered tacos for dinner from the taqueria down the street, only ate half of one and tried not to think about the disaster of a day. Elliot's words kept running over and over through her head. As the throbbing in her wrist got worse, the words got louder and louder. She had a pounding headache. Grabbing two Tylenol from the bathroom cabinet, she looked in the mirror. There were circles under her eyes, the small cut on her cheek under her outer right eye was red and angry looking, surrounded by a small bruise, but not bleeding. Her lip was a little puffy, but if you didn't look closely you wouldn't notice. Her head ached, her shoulders ached and more than anything her heart ached. Her chest was heavy, as if filled with tears that wouldn't come. Looking at her face once more in the mirror, she held her hands out in front of her. There were four half moon shaped lacerations on her left forearm, but thankfully no bruise. The left wrist was swollen, and it looked a little crooked. She opened and closed her wrist a few times, wincing at the effort. Sighing, she turned, grabbed her coat and bag and headed out the door, files and takeout still sitting on the table. 'One good thing about not having anyone,' she thought, 'is not having to explain yourself to anyone.'