Ok so I know I need to update Tethers and I will this weekend, I promise, but I've been really busy and the recent angsty/sad/beautiful Rollaro fics as of late inspired me with this and I just couldn't get it out of my head. Trigger warning for suicide, character death, and the occasional not-so-nice language.
Nick always found it fascinating how one moment something could be here, and the next moment it could be gone.
He remembered when he was a kid, just four or five, kicking around a soccer ball in his front yard with his sister. He kicked it a little too far, and next thing he knew it was popped and ruined by a car speeding by in the street.
"Nick," his mother had consoled him, "We can get you another soccer ball. But don't go after it into the road next time. Toys are replaceable, but you sure aren't."
The first person that he's seen one second and lost the next was his first police partner. His body was still there, but his skin lost its color and his crimson blood had spouted all over himself. He couldn't help but think of his soccer ball.
But his partner was not a toy; he could not be replaced. He had a wife and kids and dreams and a sense of optimism that kept Nick going when he first joined the police force and didn't know if he could handle it.
Even from the start when they did not get along, he promised himself that he would never take Olivia Benson for granted.
.
Amanda had always preferred white wine over red.
Of course, she drank beer the most often and whiskey second, but Nick couldn't help but notice that whenever there was fine offered that she went for white.
"Yeah, so?"
"I just never really pegged you to be a white wine kind of girl."
"I just never really pegged you to be the type of idiot who thought personality was somehow attached to someone's wine order. What are you into astrology, too? What's my sign, Nick?"
"I don't know. But your birthday's in May, so whatever sign goes along with May 14th. Speaking of which, you got any plans then?"
Rolling her eyes, she hit him on the arm and walked off. He couldn't help but notice the blush of her cheeks and smiled. Did she really think he'd let her spend her birthday alone?
"So, you and Rollins?" Fin asked, breaking him out of his train of thought of cake and wine. (White, of course.)
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Olivia's party for passing her sergeant's exam really wasn't the place for their ambiguous relationship to come to light.
.
Amanda did not like to be vulnerable in front of anyone, except maybe in front of her Frannie Mae. She was extremely stubborn in that way and would never admit anything that could be even remotely construed as weakness.
So when Olivia told Nick that she had called in sick, naturally "Zara" was sick, too and he had just received a call saying that he needed to "pick her up from school." Olivia ended up giving him the whole day off to take care of his "daughter."
Zara was in California, but he hadn't had the heart to tell that to anyone but Amanda yet.
Naturally, Amanda was not pleased when Nick arrived at her doorstep.
"You should've called me," he told her, not pleased by the amount of heat his hand felt radiating from her forehead.
"Well it appears calling Olivia did the trick," she snarked back.
She could hardly stand, but she was definitely still Amanda.
"You should be in bed."
"I was until I heard you knocking on the door. Why are you even here?"
"Because you're sick," he said simply, not wanting to tackle the elephant in the room.
"I'm fine," she mumbled, but she was leaning against him, resting her head on his chest.
"I know," he chuckled, wrapping his arms around her.
There was nothing in the IAB regulations about taking care of your sick colleague who you were sleeping with, right?
.
"Has Carisi called yet?"
"No, I'm sure she's fine. It's Rollins, she's always late."
"But never this late."
Olivia can pretend that everything is fine all she wants, but Nick cannot just put aside the nagging feeling in his stomach that something is just not right. It's eleven, Amanda should be here.
She had been back after her time off following Patton's trial for a week, and she had seemed surprisingly, truly, fine. Fine, as in completely one hundred percent fine, and not the kind of fine she always told him that she was.
And that was what convinced him that she was not, in fact, fine. He knew she was tough and capable of hiding even the most piercing of pain, something that she had proven time after time, and it wasn't like he was expecting her to come back a sobbing wreck.
But he expected something to be off. And as far has he could tell, nothing was.
It all just seemed a little too good to be true to him.
.
He woke up on the floor of Olivia Benson's bathroom, with the light of the room burning through into his aching skull. And for a moment, he had forgotten why he was there. For a moment, the excruciating physical pain he was in was the greatest relief and peace he had felt in months.
But then he felt Olivia looming over him and the familiarity of the situation washed over him, reminding of the exact day and reason why he kept falling back into this and all the pain came flooding back.
"You can't keep doing this, Nick. Amanda-
"Don't say her name!"
Amanda.
Where had his Amanda gone? It still didn't feel real. It had to be at least the fifth time his boss had dealt with his drunken ass, but he still couldn't accept it. It had to be some sick joke, and one day he would wake up and go to work and she would come strolling through the door.
It hadn't happened yet, but she was late. She was always late.
"She wouldn't want for you to be doing this."
Fuck Olivia. What the fuck did she know about what she would've wanted?
He thought he knew what she wanted better than anyone else on the planet, but apparently he was wrong. Brutally, unforgivingly wrong.
He doubted Amanda even knew what she wanted, if she could still want or feel anything. He stopped believing in heaven and God when Carisi finally called.
.
He had a bottle of wine sitting in his refrigerator for exactly a month and a day. He bought it the day before, and had been planning to bring it over that night, but he never got the chance.
He wasn't going to try to sleep with her again, but he wanted to extend a peace offering. He just wanted to talk to her again, that was all. After their fight, he realized that she was the only person he talked to her about anything other than Zara or work. He missed her, and everything seemed a little too perfect on her end, and he just wanted to patch up the holes of their relationship.
But he never got the chance.
He knew that he shouldn't have gone to work. He knew that everyone was going to be crying and lighting candles and hugging each other because it had been one month, and he had wanted none of them. One months were for celebrating when you were an idiot in high school, not for commemorating the suicide of your coworker-with-benefits (on a good day).
There was no point in getting all stupid and emotional, and acting like the pain was any less in intensity than it had been any other day since it happened, or that Amanda was any less special or missing from the team than she was before.
But he had just smashed a bottle of wine against the wall, did that count as "celebrating her life?"
.
It only took Carisi a few times to realize that if he needed to be in contact with Amaro, he would have to call Olivia or Fin.
Nick would never answer any of his calls ever again.
.
"Amanda, you're crying."
"No I'm not."
"Amanda, I'm a detective. Tell me what's going on."
"No," she protested, pushing him back as he tried to pull her to him.
"Whatever it is, I'm not going to judge you, ok? Just tell me what's bothering you. Maybe I can help."
After a few minutes of silence, he realized that his request was just going to be ignored.
When he took her hand into his and she didn't pull it away, he considered it a start.
And when he felt her hand squeezing his, he wondered if he cared about her a little more than he intended to.
.
Fin gave the eulogy.
She was estranged from all of her family and the team supposed that they were the closest thing that she had to it. No best friends or anyone presumably close to her came forward to give it, and Fin seemed like the best choice.
Nick would have volunteered, having the most to say that he wished she could hear, but he knew he couldn't get through it without falling apart, and it didn't seem fair to reveal their relationship-of-sorts while everyone was mourning her at her funeral.
Cragen and Munch were there, the latter of them trying and failing to be inconspicuous in flanking him the entire time.
Had Munch known the whole time, or had Olivia or Fin tipped him off with their suspicions?
He didn't really care.
He hadn't really cared about anything since she had shot herself.
He watched Olivia, usually so strong and outwardly put together, much like Amanda, sobbing into the arms of Fin. Amanda may not have had the best track record with Olivia, but he knew damn well that the older woman had cared for her. Was she disappointed in and frustrated with her at time? Definitely. But was she prepared to lose her? Definitely not.
Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Cragen watching the woman he loved like a daughter fall apart, and he couldn't help but wonder if he now regretted bringing Amanda in from Atlanta.
.
They're severely short staffed, but Olivia does not put in a request for another detective.
.
She was extraordinarily beautiful when she was laughing.
She was a beautiful woman, and he knew that the moment he first laid eyes on her, but there was something so special about her when she laughed. Really laughed, not a sardonic chuckle at the dark humor that ran abundant in the squad room, or a polite laugh at a joke cracked by a witness.
She was incredibly wound up, they all were. "Don't take the job home with you" was exponentially easier said than done when you worked in sex crimes for a living, but he knew that Amanda had the hardest time relaxing out of all of them. Well, maybe not Barba, but that was more than likely due to his caffeine addiction.
Looking at her body quake with happiness at whatever Bill Hader had just done on Saturday Night Live, he decided that he would be ok with whatever it was between of the two of them being a long term thing.
.
"Nick? Nick, what's wrong? Nick? Can you hear me?"
Olivia rushed to his side, having heard his phone drop to the floor. He had lost of all of his color in his instant and his body was trembling. Fin also rushed over to help, pulling out a chair for Olivia to gently push him into.
"Come on Amaro, tell us what's going on. Maria? Zara?"
"A-Amanda," he stammered out, saying her name out loud for what would be the last time for months.
"What happened to Amanda?" Olivia asked softly, hoping that whatever her former partner would say next did not match the devastation and shock hat had taken over him.
"She sh-shot herself. She's dead."
.
Phrases like "mental illness" and "ending the stigma" were thrown around a lot more often than they were before their colleague had taken her life. It wasn't as if they had never talked about those issues, with mentally ill people unfortunately being more likely to experience violence against them than those who weren't mentally ill, but it had never been so salient.
Nick knew that he should be more active in the walks and fundraisers that they were participating in, considering that the gaping hole in his chest and his life was due to the loss of a woman who possibly could have been saved had she sought treatment.
But he couldn't quite bring himself to do that, because he knew that none of it would bring her back to him.
.
He woke up one morning with a hungover person in his house, instead of the other way around, which had become the usual.
To be fair, he probably would have ended up on either Fin or Olivia's bathroom floor or couch yet again, but when had ran into Sonny Carisi drunk off his ass at the bar he had intended to drank until passed out at, he thought that maybe his own liver deserved a break, if only for one night.
It might have been what Amanda maybe would have wanted.
"Hey, oh, Nick. I'm sorry, man. I didn't mean to-
"As much as I like to be a hard ass on you, it would be very hypocritical of me to yell at you for this one."
"Yeah, Fin might have mentioned that he and Olivia have been taking you in quite a bit."
"Look, I'm not exactly proud of it, but… Amanda... she… I just don't know how else to… deal with it."
"We all know, man."
"Was it really that obvious?"
"We all wondered but none of us had any proof, but watching your downward spiral pretty much confirmed it, to put it bluntly."
"I'm not the only one on a downward spiral," he joked halfheartedly, just trying to deflect the conversation away from the miserable excuse for a life that he had been living for the last five months. For all he knew, Carisi was just enjoying himself and letting loose the previous night. He had of course been shaken up and saddened by the loss of his colleague, but he didn't have the connection that the rest of the team had with her.
"I can't get it out of my head. Her. The blood. The gun. I've seen dead people before but… Fuck, I'm so sorry. I shouldn't be talking about this with you."
"No, I'm sorry. When Olivia asked one of us to go to her apartment, I should've gone. It should've been me who-
"What the fuck are you talking about? I'm glad it was me. If you had went we would have lost the both of you."
"What?"
"You would have shot yourself right then and there."
"Carisi, there's no way-
"We're all scared, Nick. We're all scared that you're going to follow after her."
It's not like in the movies, it's not like he has a sudden moment of realization that life is beautiful or worth it, or like the fog has been lifted, but it does trigger a little bit of something within him. He decides that he's sure he knows for certain that Amanda would not want him to die before his time, be it intentionally or by drinking himself to death. Olivia's already taken him to the hospital for alcohol poisoning once.
When Carisi leaves, he picks up the phone and talks to his daughter for the first time since his world fell apart.
.
On her first birthday since she passed, Nick brings a bottle of (white) wine and a cake to her grave. He doesn't down the whole bottle himself, even though he really wants to, because he knows that he's supposed to be actively trying to stay alive now. He tries to tell her how much he misses her, but he only knows Spanish and English, and neither of those languages have the words to convey just how much he wishes that he could hear her voice again.
He tells her how Fin is his partner now, and how they all don't hate Carisi anymore, and how Noah is now officially Olivia's son. He tells her that Barba sometimes pins a picture of her to his tie when he's trying a particularly difficult case, and how even though she never got to meet her, Casey Novak now has a little girl whose middle name is Amanda.
He tells her that he's not mad at her anymore, but that nothing is ever going to be as good as it was before she left this earth. He tells her that he's always going to wonder why and wish that she had come to him for help. He tells her that even though she's put him through all of this, that he will never, ever regret meeting her and becoming more than just her coworker.
And most importantly, he tells her that he wished he realized that he had fallen in love with her while she was still here.
He's about to leave when he hears footsteps behind him; he's surprised he had so much time alone with her, considering that she was probably going to have a lot of visitors on her birthday.
He turns around to see his new partner, with a solemn and knowing look on his face.
"So, you and Rollins?"
"Yeah, me and Rollins."
.
"Amanda, we're going to be late. It's one thing if you're late, because Olivia's not going to question that, but I kind of have a reputation to uphold."
"Don't care," she mumbled, trailing kisses down his jawline.
"Amanda," he tried again, but even he knew the sternness in his voice was not convincing.
"Oh come one, don't be such a choir boy, Nick."
On the one hand, he did not want Olivia to be mad at him, but on the other hand, Amanda was in his bed and the way she was touching him…
He would just have to deal with Olivia's wrath that morning.
Besides, a few extra minutes with Amanda couldn't hurt.