A/N: After a very long break from writing any fanfic I have decided to have a go at something new. I have also finally learned how to be patient and not start posting a story until I have the majority of it written so updates should be regular!

Disclaimer: I of course own nothing and am just borrowing the SVU world and characters because 13 seasons of Olivia and Elliot being dysfunctional partners wasn't enough.

Chapter 1

"Watch where you're going!" the cyclist yelled, swerving further into the road to avoid the woman who had stepped off the kerb without a glance in either direction.

Olivia's head snapped up, startled and ready to shout back in retaliation until she realised it was completely her fault.

It was a bitterly cold morning and, mid-way through an abduction case and going on very little sleep, she was feeling less than happy to be on her way to the precinct before it was even light outside. Her thoughts were far from the road in front of her.

As she was walked the last couple of blocks, trying to clear her hazy mind with some air, the beginnings of a headache caused her to sigh. So far, their investigations were supporting the theory that the kid had been taken by his estranged father. His parents' separation and the ensuing custody battle had been acrimonious but they had no reason to suspect the child was in any imminent danger. Regardless, they never took chances with children and the hours they had been working over the past few days were as long as if a life had been in imminent risk. It was starting to take its toll.

With a yawn, she entered the familiar glass doors and found herself rubbing sleep from her bleary eyes. She wished she had picked up a coffee on her way in so that the caffeine would already be hitting her system. Her brain seemed to be lagging behind her body. On autopilot, she continued up to the squad room and threw her purse onto her desk.

"Please tell me someone's filled the coffee pot," she mumbled, by way of greeting to her colleagues. "I'm running on empty."

Even in her sleep deprived state, she was aware of the stunned silence which met her.

"What's wrong?" she asked with a frown, turning to where Elliot, Fin and Munch all stared back. She had rarely seen the men so quiet. It was as though someone had hit pause on the normal hustle and bustle of the room.

"Liv, are you okay?" Elliot asked.

"I'm fine," she responded, her eyes narrowing with confusion.

"Where have you been?" her partner continued, appearing equally puzzled, but also oddly concerned.

She glanced at the clock, noting that it was still well before 8am and finding no explanation for her colleagues' strange behaviour.

"Home," she answered. "Resting like the Captain ordered." Her fingers found their way to the bridge of her nose as she tried to soothe the pounding sensation in her head. "Have we got something?" she asked. Cragen had sent them all home to stop them burning out. Surely Elliot would have given her the head's up if he'd returned to the precinct through the night?

"For two days?" Elliot questioned, ignoring her query about the case.

"What?"

She scanned the faces of the others for some confirmation that he was winding her up, though she knew that his tone was far too serious for a prank.

With a deep breath she tried to refocus. She had said goodnight to them less than six hours earlier, before passing out on her couch surrounded by papers on the Martinez family. Hours had passed; not days. A dizzying heat flooded her body as she suddenly wondered what she had done with the file. It hadn't been in her hand when she had made her way up to the squad room. Surely she hadn't left it on the subway? Come to think of it, she couldn't remember catching the subway today. Or driving. How was that possible?

Her temperature seemed to increase further as she struggled to remember when she had last had the file in her hands and what she had been doing. Her memory of what she had last read was hazy at best, even taking into account her lack of sleep.

Olivia hadn't even noticed she had lost her balance until she felt Elliot's arms catch and steady her.

"Sit down," he urged, easing her into her chair. She obeyed, more as a result of the urgency in his voice than from any understanding of what was happening. Before she'd had a chance to question him his hands were in her hair, gently brushing over the side of her head until she felt a sting and could finally identify the root of the throbbing pain. "Get Cragen and call a bus," Elliot ordered, moving his hands to her shoulders as he crouched in front of her, his eyes scanning the rest of her body.

"El, what's going on?" she mumbled, the previous sense of panic intensifying as her gaze drifted beyond him to where her photo took centre stage on their whiteboard.

"Everything's okay," he assured her, with a look that did anything but give her the comfort his words tried to promised. "You're back."

In the ten minutes which followed, Olivia was moved from the open bull pen to the relative privacy of Cragen's office. Her superior and partner hovered anxiously by the door as she perched on the edge of a chair, trying to wrap her head around what was going on.

"Thanks," she half-smiled, as Fin appeared with a blanket. She was clammy, but shaking, and glad of the extra layer.

"You need anything else?" he asked, helping her to drape it around her shoulders.

"Could I get some water?" she replied, having become aware of her dry mouth as she tried to answer their questions. Her brain remained a step behind on interpreting each sensation her body experienced.

Fin hesitated and exchanged a glance with the other men. She had been missing for almost 48 hours with no recollection of what had happened to her, and bruising patterns suggestive of being restrained. They knew what would have to be done at the hospital.

"Liv, do you think you can hold on until we get you checked over?" Cragen asked. Right now she wasn't thinking like a cop, and the preservation of evidence was the last thing on her mind, but after spending two days imagining what could have been happening to his detective, he couldn't get it out of his. He wanted to make her feel better but he also wanted to catch whoever was responsible and find out what they had done.

"Captain, I wasn't raped," she insisted, catching his meaning quicker than she had processed anything else. She wasn't sure of much but she would have known. She looked at her bruised wrists, circling them and feeling the general ache of her body sharpen in the joints. It was an easy assumption for someone who worked in sex crimes to make but she was certain she would have known. "I really need something to drink." Even her own voice sounded distant to her as she spoke. Her head bobbed slightly as she struggled to stay alert.

"We don't know what happened to you and it's looking like we'll need all the evidence we can get to figure it out," Cragen reasoned, not missing a single disoriented movement, despite Olivia's best efforts to keep her composure.

"Come on," she responded with more force. "I'm fine - I just need some water." She coughed, involuntarily emphasising her point.

"We can take an oral swab before she goes to the hospital," Fin suggested as a compromise, unwilling to contribute to her discomfort for the purpose of obtaining evidence they didn't even know existed. It wasn't following protocol to the letter but it wasn't going to cause any harm. "We'd do that for any other vic if we had to."

The word was out of his mouth before he thought but she was so relieved at having someone on side that she didn't even notice it. She agreed to let them go ahead, even if she still protested the necessity. She knew she didn't really have much choice.

Elliot was gentle as he swabbed the inside of her mouth, his focus on completing the task before she showed any sign of distress and before his hand started to shake and risked giving away his own feelings about the situation. He had been quick to volunteer, finding that he was suddenly reluctant for anyone else to touch her. He'd almost startled the others when he'd spoken up after standing in silence since he had helped her into the Captain's office.

She thanked him with the slightest hint of a nod as he sealed the swab into an evidence bag. Fin already had a cup of water to hand and she accepted it gratefully, gulping it down with relief until the nausea of the cold liquid hitting her empty stomach forced her to stop.

"You okay?" Elliot asked, noticing the little colour drain from her face.

She nodded, taking shallow breaths to avoid the further embarrassment of throwing up on the floor of her captain's office.

"I'm good," she insisted, unconvincingly.

"The bus is on its way," he reminded her, his eyes drawn again to the bloody, matted hair to the right side of her head.

"I know," she told him, taking her turn to offer reassurance as the cracks appeared in his routine. "I'll be fine."

"All right, Detective, let's get you off to the hospital," the paramedic announced, in a tone that seemed far too cheerful to Olivia. There was a fine line between being reassuring and being irritating and the medic had crossed it by a mile. To add to the detectives annoyance, the brief assessment of her injuries, which seemed to involve a disproportionate amount of prodding at her head wound, didn't really shine any light on what had happened. They were eager for her to be seen by a doctor because of the head injury and memory loss but they couldn't offer much more, other than to remark that her pulse was faster than normal - an observation of which Olivia had been very much aware from the restless thudding of her heart since she had arrived in the squad room.

The younger of the two medics made to help Olivia into the waiting wheelchair but she brushed away her arm with more strength than anyone had expected. As time went on she was becoming more aware of her situation and of how she was being perceived by others.

"I can walk," she insisted, not wanting to be carted through the precinct like an invalid. There had been enough people staring when she had arrived and walked straight into the investigation into her own disappearance. She was already craving the privacy that she knew was hours away at best.

The paramedic was ready to argue but Elliot's silent shake of the head told her not to bother, and Olivia got to her feet, leaning on the back of the chair for support. She wasn't entirely convinced that she could walk, not having moved without assistance since Elliot had caught her almost an hour ago, but she wasn't willing to admit it when her colleagues were already looking so worried.

She wanted to be done with all of this and to be home, where she might be able to slow her surroundings to the point of being able to process what was going on.

"I've got you," her partner whispered, sliding seamlessly into place beside her and taking hold of her arm to replace the support of the chair. "You didn't think I'd let you ride alone?" he added, as she turned towards him, ready to push him away as she had the paramedic. He shot her a warning look which told her not to protest.

"Thank you," she relented with the closest expression to a smile she could muster up. She supposed having him by her side was better than collapsing to the ground. Even if it meant leaning on him in all senses of the phrase.

"What the hell happened?" Cragen muttered, turning to his remaining two detectives. His anger wasn't directed at anyone in the room but it caused both Fin and Munch to spring into action.

"We'll haul Martinez' ass back in," Fin proposed. They had found the boy they had been searching for on the first day of Olivia's disappearance, when most of the squad were still focusing on the job in hand and only Elliot had been tasked with locating the missing detective. As they had suspected, his father had been involved and when questioned had been quick to threaten the "bitch who'd been sticking her nose in his business". Olivia had spoken to his employer the previous day and it hadn't taken long for their questioning to turn towards whether Mr Martinez had also had a role to play in her disappearance.

Cragen shook his head.

"He's not our man," he responded. "We need to look at alternative theories."

Martinez wasn't a plausible suspect. Fin was just angry and searching for someone to blame. They'd already questioned the man and while he'd been happy to make threats against NYPD, Cragen was fairly certain he wasn't the type to follow through.

"Get all the CCTV that you can of Olivia from this morning. Start outside and trace her back. She had to come from somewhere."

The benefit of being in such a busy city was that it was almost impossible not to be caught on camera at some point. Locating Olivia's route to the precinct would give them somewhere to start.

With Fin and Munch getting the search underway, Cragen returned to his office, closing the door and taking a moment for himself before he figured out what else required to be done. He dropped heavily into his chair, letting out a sigh of both relief and tension. His desk was littered with the debris of the past two days. Throughout the time his detective had been missing he had stayed at the precinct with the rest of the squad, taking short breaks to lie down in the cribs and eating the little food he could force down at his desk. The question of pulling rank and going home hadn't even crossed his mind. He'd only left twice - once to pursue a lead and the second time to attend a meeting. It had been a long time since he'd wished that hard for there to be a bottle of scotch in his bottom drawer and it would have been the worst possible time to slip.

His phone rang - the commissioner looking for an update. In all the commotion he hadn't yet let anyone outside of the squad room know that she had been found. No doubt his superiors would want all the detail quicker than it was available and there would be press to manage too. Despite their best efforts to keep any information released under control, the disappearance of a sex crimes detective had got the interest of more than a few journalists.

Elliot had Olivia, Fin and Munch had the investigation, he'd deal with everything else.

And then he would go to another meeting, just to see him through until normality returned.

"Last stick - I promise," the doctor assured Olivia as she finally succeeded in inserting an IV. Olivia flinched slightly but didn't otherwise react. She felt like a pin cushion already and one more needle made no difference. "This will get your electrolytes back to normal . You're dehydrated and your blood sugar is low - that'll be contributing to the dazed feeling."

Dazed didn't begin to cover it. It was now almost three hours since she stepped into the squad room and still nothing felt entirely real. She had been poked and prodded in every possible way. Blood tests. A CT scan. Photographed from every angle. A full rape kit. She was almost glad that she'd felt out of body for the whole experience.

"I'll be back to check on you in a while," the doctor smiled, leaving her patient with a reassuring pat on the arm. Olivia smiled back weakly as she had been doing in response to every sympathetic glance since she arrived at the hospital.

"How are you holding up?" Elliot asked, stepping forward from where he had been keeping watch in the corner, as soon as the doctor left the room.

She shrugged, unsure of the appropriate response.

"I want to know what happened to me," she said after a long pause. To her relief, the examinations carried out had shown no indication of sexual assault, and, other than the gash on her head and bruising around her wrists and ankles, there was no physical injury.

"You will," Elliot assured her. "You'll remember."

"What if I don't?"

"You will. We'll go over it again." He pulled up a chair, the metal legs scraping across the linoleum, and sat down beside the bed. Memory was a funny thing and they both knew that it could take time for victims to remember the details of an attack, but neither of them was good at waiting for answers.

Olivia sighed and leaned back into the pillows behind her. If it was possible for anyone to be more frustrated at her amnesia than she was then it was her partner. He couldn't seem to accept that she had nowhere to start. Until now there had always been a doctor or nurse interrupting his questioning to take her vitals or draw more blood and she found herself missing that buffer.

"Not now; I'm tired," she responded, unwilling to go back over the things she couldn't remember yet again.

"Later then," he agreed. "It'll be easier after some rest."

Olivia sighed again, unconvinced, but closed her eyes to avoid prolonging the conversation. She was grateful to have had Elliot with her but his constant need for answers was getting too much. She already felt like she was in a goldfish bowl and didn't need the additional intrusion. After several minutes of trying or feigning sleep - she was unsure which - she became aware that he hadn't moved.

"I'm trying to sleep," she mumbled.

"Then stop talking," he retorted.

She opened her eyes and glanced over to where he watched her over the top of a newspaper he had borrowed from the nurses when he had been herded out of the examination room in the ER.

"Aren't you going to leave?" she asked. Her tone was more good humoured as she let herself remember that he wasn't just a detective prying into her life. This was Elliot and he was probably the only reason she felt safe enough to close her eyes at all.

He grinned back at her, with the same look he'd given her as he helped her out to the ambulance earlier in the day, crossing his legs into a more comfortable position.

"Not a chance."

As long as he was quiet then he wasn't doing any harm.

She lay back against the pillows, allowing her eyes to close again. Her mind was racing but her body was so heavy and it wasn't long before she felt the sounds of the hospital swim and fade. Elliot was probably right - some sleep would do her good.