A/N: So… um…this would be my transition from the X-Files to SVU. Be kind.
Disclaimer: Not mine, but I am really hoping to be "interrogated" by Stabler one day. What he doesn't know is that as soon as he rolled up his shirt sleeves he would get his ass jumped.
Classification: angsty fluffy vignette (possible?)
Rating: R for bad words. But I should have said that before you read the word "ass" in the disclaimer, shouldn't have I?
If he were to breathe, his life would end. The increase in oxygen perfusion would grant his brain the fuel necessary to comprehend the situation. He knew that understanding was impossible. If he were to grasp the necessity of that much blood, he was sure, his life would end.
She had been trying to help and the 12-year-old had pulled the trigger. First at Olivia and then himself. All he knew was that it was imperative to apply pressure, but that seemed funny to him. There was no more pressure than attempting to hold two lives together with your bare hands. She was lucky that she was unconscious, she couldn't smell the copper, couldn't taste the gunpowder, couldn't feel the syrup of her life seeping from her body, couldn't see how if she went he would cease to exist.
He doesn't want to think about how his voice cracks as he demands the operators send a bus damn-quick, because two lives are on the line, one bleeding out and the other being strangled by the other's precarious vice on mortality.
He commands the EMTs to do everything, "Please," he grovels. He already sounds broken. They assure him that they will. "It's their job," they tell him. It was his to protect her and he failed. He wishes that oaths were binding, that saying the words absolutely predestined their realization. If that were true he would still have a wife to whom fidelity wouldn't seem like a burden, he wouldn't have fallen so hard; he wouldn't be sitting in the back of an ambulance covered in her blood slowly being suffocated by the residual smell of cordite.
He shoves the nurses away from him and towards Olivia. "It's not my blood," he forces out, "Hers, all hers." Why don't they understand? If her blood doesn't remain to ensure her vitality he will, in fact, be critical. He will end.
She's in surgery. John is the first to arrive. He is ghost white, a shade only accentuated by his dark attire. He wants to tell him to get the fuck away because he shouldn't be dressed as if he is going to a funeral. This is not her wake. He prays.
John knows that there is nothing to say. He knows enough of life to understand that words cannot erase action. He buys Elliot a cup of coffee from the hospital cafeteria which he presents in hopes that it will reawaken the morose and shaking man next to him. The smell causes Stabler to promptly vomit. He doesn't need greater consciousness to survive this situation.
The surgeon appears. A ghostly specter in scrubs. It hit her vertebrate. They won't be sure of the damage until she awakes. He thinks that if she awakes that damage will be inconsequential. His legs shake. He stumbles forward into the ICU. Her room is dim, her skin in pale. As he leans forward he can see the broken capillaries around her eyes. The blood is still flowing. She's pale, but not dead. Not dead.
He sits in the guest chair. They fake teal leather squeaks. Teal. Why the fuck is it teal? He almost laughs There is an oxygen tube in her nose. He breathes out with each beep of the heart monitor. It sustains her as she sustains him. He knows that just as her heart sustains both of them; it is begging to be addressed. It will have to be breached. It begs to submit to feeling. Truth will have to be spoken. She breathes so he can. It has to be so. It has to.