A/N: I usually save the author's note for the end, but I think this story needs a bit of an explanation: I basically found the first half of this on my computer from a few months ago, remembered the idea, and finished it the other day. As of right now, this story is going to be a bunch of different oneshots, not in chronological order, that involve Olivia and Elliot as a married/engaged/togetherish couple and the weird little life I built for them, which means three kids and a dog. I don't even know. For the sake of the story, we'll say that they got together after Fault.

This particular chapter takes place about 10 years later and was written to We Don't Eat by James Vincent McMorrow, which you can listen to here: watch?v=kR3HRMO7nZg.

Thank you so much for reading, reviewing, or messaging me. I'd love to know what you think!

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The days feel longer now that she has something to come home to, protect, live for. She'd had it in her head once that she'd already had all those things, but now she knows. Now she's different. She isn't the same woman she'd been when she started this job; she isn't even close. She's called a truce with a world that has yet to absolve her of the past, all the little things gone wrong that she'd had no control over. She knows now that maybe it wasn't her fault, and that maybe she can breathe without feeling like she owes someone something, somewhere. She has things, she has people. She has lots of people. She's lucky now when she looks at her life as a whole, as if she was standing far away and watching it happen. But still, the days feel longer.

Her world does not begin and end with a desk in the squadroom, her nights aren't composed of leftover pad thai and sleeping on the sofa with the TV on as background noise, just because. She isn't scared. She doesn't count Elliot's breaths from across the crib anymore. She doesn't have to. She doesn't have to look at the people in the park anymore, or the families crossing the street, and ask, Why them? She lives that life. She does. She lives it every minute of every day when she wakes up to her children and husband and dog. They have a fucking dog, and she loves every minute of it.

She still walks home, but it isn't a purgatory anymore. It isn't the moments of quiet anxiety before she disappears from the rest of the city until the next morning or the next phone call. She feels present now, like she has somewhere that she belongs. Work and home are no longer synonymous, and she's thankful for that. She's needed that. She doesn't cling to the walks like she used to. Now it's a few minutes to herself, the minutes that she needs to separate here from there. The job from her family.

"Don't try to do that," he would say, in the beginning. And he still does. "It just... it doesn't work if you compartmentalize it, Liv. It's still there. And you can't... you can't hold it all by yourself."

"I've done this job by myself for a long time, Elliot."

"Not like this," he would tell her. And in her inevitable glare, he would sigh and add, "Just talk to me, alright?"

And she would. She does. Still.

But the days are longer now. They're longer now that he doesn't work at the 1-6 and now that she has someplace else she wants to be and now that her partner seems like he's just graduated middle school. She calls him "kid," and she's half kidding, and he rolls his eyes at her. His name is Ryan Kelsey, and his hair is red, and she thinks she could take him in about three seconds. She thinks her sons could take him in about three seconds, actually, but he's one of the good ones. Elliot likes him, Don likes him. He knows when she wants to go home.

"You should go see your kids, Olivia."

"And leave you to handle this by yourself? No thank you."

"Yeah. Mhmm. Just pass me the crayons and juice on your way out and I should be occupied for two to four hours."

"Shut up, Kelsey."

He shrugs. "At least call. They'll want to talk to you before they go to bed anyways."

Tonight, New York is muggy. It's April and she feels like the air is thicker than it should be, a little too warm for this time of year. She's felt her blazer clinging to her skin all day and she wants to peel off the day with her work clothes and leave them in a pile on the bathroom floor. She wants to pretend that she doesn't know that a little girl in this city isn't coming home to her parents tonight, and she wants to read Junie B. Jones over and over again because little league soccer and weddings gone awry are just about the only types of drama she can handle right now. She wants to watch her three-year-old spill spaghetti sauce all over the table, and listen to her son's attempts at practicing the oboe he'd begged for. She wants her biggest problems to be a PTA meeting, or the drop-off time at bitty ballet class, or the classroom snack rotation.

She wants to protect them all, forever. She wants to lock her family inside of their apartment and make every morning Sunday. She thinks that it's impossible that she wants so much for them but can only do so little, and it's nights like these where being everything becomes heavy. She's a parent, a wife, a detective. She's a little bit of a woman, even less of a girl, but it's all still there. She is so many things with so many jobs and it has to be too much, it has to be. There has to be a limit to how much of this she can take, of how overwhelmed with it she could be. "It weighs so much," she'd whispered once, across the bed.

She had been on her stomach and Elliot had rolled to face her. She remembers the way the sheets pulled around him, and she remembers the way her heart felt too full, too inflated.

"What does?"

"Everything." Silence. "Just... everything, Elliot."

She could have been crying. She doesn't remember that part.

"Everything what?" and he isn't moving closer yet.

"I..." her voice popped, cracked. She doesn't think of it as breaking because he doesn't, either. "My job. My life, here. The kids." She'd breathed again. "You. It just... it weighs too much, Elliot. Is it supposed to? Is it supposed to make me feel like this?"

She had been desperate, and she remembers the way his laughter had filled their bedroom. It had been in the summer, she thinks. It had to have been the summer, because it was so warm when he was laughing like that. Full. Brilliant. She remembers the way the tears had fallen then because he was laughing and she didn't understand. She was breaking, she was being tugged down by it, and he was moving closer and closer until he was near her again and his hand was brushing by her temple and she could feel the laughter reverberate from his stomach onto hers.

He didn't ask what it felt like. He already knew. "Do you feel like... a million things are pulling you a million different directions? And you're just... helpless in it, and overwhelmed by it, because you want so much and don't know if you'll ever be able to do a damn thing about it?"

She'd nodded. "Yes, I... oh God. I need it all to be okay. For them, and you, and everyone, and I just... I don't know what this feeling is. This needing-it-to-be-okay feeling. I've never... I've never felt it like this before. Never this much." She'd paused, and the word came back to her. "It's never been this heavy."

He'd kissed her then, and ran his thumbs under her eyes. He could breathe and she had wondered why. She had needed so badly to know why.

"That weight, Olivia? That feeling? It's just... It's love. That's what it is. That's all it is."

Oh, she remembers thinking. Because he had been right, and she had never felt that much of it before.

She's almost home as she reminds herself, It's just love, Olivia. It isn't a responsibility, it isn't something she has to fix, to act on every minute of every day. Love is one of those things to get lost in, fall in, sit in for a while. It's a gift she's never had before, and even though she's had it for so long now, and been blessed for so long now, it still feels new. It still feels overwhelming on the nights when there are people moving everywhere and lives to be lived in every second that rushes by and children and women and sons and daughters and families in every corner of this city, but some of them are home, and some of them are happy, and she doesn't have to be a savior. She just has to be one of them, and that is her only job tonight.

There's an elevator in their apartment building now, the one they have lived in for seven years and still call "the new place." She takes the stairs anyway on nights she feels like she has to keep walking, keep giving a little, and have more time to begin the forgiveness. She has to forgive the world a little before she brings it home, and nights like these are harder than others. She is tired, but not the sleepy kind. It's the kind that just needs to sit and watch something pure, like her daughter trying to figure out how to write her name or her sons trying handstands against the back of the sofa.

The stairs carry her away, and she's knocking on the door now, and she can hear "Mommy's home!" and a cacophony of steps and something falling on the ground and socks skidding down the hallway and that stupid dog barking, barking because she is here. She's home.

She goes to put her key in the lock but the door opens before she can twist it, and there is a three-year-old grabbing her legs and a husband smirking at her and pasta burning on the stove in their kitchen. It overwhelms her how familiar it all is, how comfortable and lived-in her life feels. She is not alone, she is never alone, and she's picking up her daughter and stepping inside and walking over to kiss her sons at the dining room table.

"How was workin' a lot, Momma?" and there is a gappy grin looking up at her from her shoulder. She kisses the little girl on the nose, and love is not so heavy this time. Love is light tonight, and it's living inside of her, and breathing the air that she breathes in the moments she lives in.

"It wasn't as fun as hanging out with you, lovey," she answers. "How were the cupcakes?"

It had been their turn to bring in pre-school snack. "Chocolate-y," Ella answers. "I liked 'em." And she squirms down to go sit with the dog on the floor.

Olivia turns to Declan and P.J., who are both immersed in and frustrated with math homework. Declan is her oldest child, and he is bright and typical and everything that you would expect from a little boy that is this close to being nine. "And how are you?" she asks, smushing a kiss on his hairline.

"I'm okay. Soccer tryouts are tomorrow."

"Good thing you're a professional then, right?" she winks, and he rolls his eyes.

"And you, Patrick Patrick?" she asks her six-year-old, who looks up at her from behind his glasses and laughs.

"See, Dad!" he calls, "She always says it twice!"

"It's because she doesn't like your middle name," Elliot answers from the kitchen, "So she just pretends it isn't there."

"S'your own fault then, Mom," P.J. shrugs, and she wonders when he got so smart. The dog comes and sits on her feet, and she leans down to pet it.

"Hi, Banjo," she whispers, "Good dog. Good boy."

Elliot comes up behind her and passes her a glass of wine before setting his malformed lasagna situation on the table and turning to face her again. He's shockingly okay with being the parent that's usually home to make, or order, dinner. He'd left the squad a little over a year ago after cutting it too close with a round of bullets because he'd realized that there wasn't anything left for him there anymore, and that their children couldn't grow up with both parents potentially being on the wrong end of a gun every day. He'd wanted her to come, to leave with him. They could both leave with pension, and they'd had her mother's money. She hadn't been finished yet. She thinks she will be soon.

She thinks that there is too much more to life than than filling out DD5s and arguing with Tucker and chasing down perp after perp after perp. There will always be another victim, but there is only one her. She can't save lives forever and forget her own, and she can't risk hers over and over just to wake up to the same risk in the morning.

She is valuable, somewhere within this chaos. This is what justifies her, what makes her who she is. This is what love feels like, and this is all that she has been given. Elliot, her children, this life. The quiet and settled kind that somehow manages to simultaneously be a freight train, loud and scary and unsure and hilarious and endless and beautiful. All of it. She has all of it.

Elliot loops an arm around her waist and tugs her closer, and Ella laughs when Banjo licks her face, and P.J. is screaming at Declan for taking his pencil, and the lasagna is now looming dangerously close to the edge of the table. She thinks that there isn't a single place on this earth she would rather be, and she thinks that out of the million steps she could have taken today and every other day she's lived, she's glad she's taken the ones that have landed her here.

She needs this. She can bear the weight of it, always, so she breathes and lets herself fall. All the rest, she will handle tomorrow.