Before I Hit the Ground
Elliot/Olivia
Spoilers: Pursuit to Smoked
Story has some alternate universe tendencies. Canon remains canon however. Story was inspired by the song Helium by Sia. Hope you enjoy.
"He's a married, catholic father of five."
"Yes. That would be Elliot."
"But he said…."
"That he should have come back sooner."
"Olivia, most men aren't really the type to show that much of themselves when they feel like their axis has tilted."
"Elliot is… Elliot, Sicily."
" The little you so subtly divulge about him each time I call, says enough."
"I say all I need to say. He's my partner. And, because, again, he's married, catholic father of five.'"
"You divulge very little because if not, it'd run a little too close to divulging something you don't want to."
Sighing, Olivia lifts her cellphone from her ear and sits it down on her coffee table, hitting the speaker option before heading toward the kitchen.
"I'm getting wine now," Olivia states instead of responding. As she reaches to the cupboard door to pull down a glass, she says pointedly, "I'm not on call tonight, so talk about something else or I'm disconnecting and then turning off my phone."
"What? Olivia, I'm just trying to keep up with you is all. I hear about your cases in the news, I see you in the newspaper, yet I hear little about your life, from just you."
"Sicily, little has changed," Olivia interjects resignedly as she pours red wine into her wine glass. "I mean it."
"You mean little has changed … with Elliot."
"I'll disconnect."
"Fine. Sure. Whatever."
Dropping back down onto the sofa after she reenters the living room, Olivia sighs as she stares at the screen of her cellphone.
The conversation she's having with her childhood friend resonates further in her mind now that that the sun has set and the dreary, desolate glimmer of seclusion can rattle her.
"Have you talked to anyone?"
"For what?"
"For your drinking."
Raising her brows, Olivia picks up the phone with a free hand and talks into it as if her friend can see how rattled the question has made her.
"What?"
"I'm just kidding, but that did get your attention, did it not?"
"Sic, I have never wanted to talk with a shrink. When I do go, I just feel like I've told every deep dark secret that I could possible harbor when in actuality, I've said little to nothing. I don't like…feeling exposed."
"I totally get it, Olivia. But this was someone you worked with. Closely, am I right?"
Taking a sip of wine, Olivia lets it seep into her tongue before swallowing harshly, washing away the images of Sonya's blood with the sound of her own swallow inside her ears.
"Yes," she rasps at first. "She was the acting A.D.A. We've had a revolving door since Novak. But, but Sonya, she'd been around for some tough cases lately. She had some problems of her own…but..."
"Well at least you're talking to me."
Scoffing lightly, Olivia continues, "I just really… didn't want to see her go like that."
Silence permeates the atmosphere on both sides of the connection.
Olivia tip toes around the glaring red stop sign in her mind and then runs right through it when she exposes a truth about the situation.
"I didn't want to her die at her lowest."
"Did she have family?"
"No," Olivia breathes out simply. "No she didn't. She only had me at that moment."
She hears her friend breathe on the other line, not knowing her facial expressions, not knowing her thoughts or hearing a reprieve. Olivia starts to feel the overwhelming cacophony of the earlier sirens vibrating against her skull, muffled voices all around her and the smell of dried blood on her skin.
"Olivia?"
Sicily quietly calls out to her over the connection, but Olivia's mind takes a nose dive off a precipice she thought she was father away from. Sonya's lifeless gape, and the smell of alcohol on her dying breath wafts through Olivia's memory and suddenly Olivia's on her feet before she can contemplate why she should sit back down.
"Sonya Paxton was just like my mother. A drunk. Belligerent at times. And isolated from those who might care for her. That's why I haven't talked about it."
"That's why you called tonight?"
"Not completely."
"Why?" her old friend prods gently.
"Because… because my own mother died going down a flight of stairs and Sonya died in my arms, the same arms I wrapped around my partner not an hour later."
"There's something wrong about that to you?"
"Yes!" Olivia unintentionally hisses, throwing her body forward, as she paces with her cellphone in front of her face. "My mother could make me feel like the dirt on the ground. Sonya reminded me of her so much. She treated our unit like shit, but now I understand why. Now I understand why my mother treated me the way she did."
"They had their own demons."
"Exactly. And I don't want to be like that. I don't want to treat anyone like that."
"And Elliot showing up when he did?"
"When he turned that corner as I came out of the bathroom where I left Sonya…. It's…. It's why I haven't hit the ground yet."
. . .
The look of confusion on the blonde's face doesn't surprise her when the other woman opens the door to their Queens home at, and looks down at her watch, 10:58 p.m.
"Olivia?"
"Kathy hi, I… uh, I know it's late, but is Elliot awake? It's important."
Olivia steps backward a step, allowing the blonde to push open the screen and steps outside.
"Yeah, he's upstairs settling Eli into bed… finally."
Olivia slides one hand into her back pocket, and lets the other one hang limp at her side, not knowing exactly why she drove all the way to Queens this late at night. She pretends she doesn't feel the shift inside her, pretends it is not rumbling within like a low magnitude earthquake.
"I can wait out here," she shrugs slightly as she steps down the top stair and turns toward where she parked across the street.
"Olivia, is everything okay?"
Olivia turns her head toward Kathy again, not making eye contact at first, but eventually connecting with the only other set of blue eyes that send a pang down her chest.
After a moment, Olivia nods her head, while biting back a cheeky retort of No. Why else would I be here?
She then turns her head a little more, this time toward the front door as if to prod the other woman to send Elliot down. "Yeah, fine. We're on call tonight," she lies… "and I just wanted to get on the same page with him, in the chance a case comes along."
Kathy nods slowly, something obviously on the tip of her tongue as well, but she turns and heads back inside. "He'll be right down," she reassures as she disappears behind the front door.
Olivia stuffs her hands in her jacket pockets as she nudges a patch of grass with her foot. She waits for him to come down, trying to think of something to make her sound less pathetic than she really is as to why she's at his doorstep at nearly eleven o'clock at night.
She only closes her eyes briefly before a white flash behind her eyes takes her back to the sterile atmosphere of that Cathedral restroom and Melinda's deep, professional voice as she examines the crime scene.
"Olivia."
Her eyes snap open and it's not Melinda's voice anymore, but Elliot's as he stands on the bottom stair of his porch. He watches her at her position on the narrow sidewalk with his own hands stuffed into his sweatpants pockets; the loose material slung low on his hips.
She takes note of his off duty apparel and regretfully informs herself that she wasted precious time reliving the scene from several hours earlier instead of finding a way to tell Elliot that…. she's losing it.
"Liv?"
His softer vibrato startles her and she's unable to make eye contact, instead, she glances in the direction of her car across the street..
She feels her eyes blurring then, and she fights against it before turning her head towards him.
"I'm fine," she pushes out, her voice muffled by the emotion swelling up inside her chest.
He propels himself down the last porch step then, noticing the difference in her and stands toe to toe so she can't look away. He removes his hands from his pockets and they twitch at his sides as he stares at her with worried eyes, his head slightly tilted.
"I didn't say you weren't…." he whispers with his eyebrows knitted tightly together, being softer in nature than she's seen him most cases. She supposes it's due to his time at Quantico, plus the down time he's had at home, the time spent away from the evil.
The question in his eyes almost sends her into a panic because there's only a few times he's ever looked at her like this and she knows she must be handling this worse than she thought if now is one of those.
"I'm…." she starts and runs a hand through her ruffled brunette waves. "I just wanted to come by and let you know again that I'm… happy that you're back," she replies, her voice tapering off with each syllable.
His eyes never leave her form, despite her eyes roaming all around them, and she sees how he noticeably swallows, and then nods.
"What's…," he starts to say with a slight shrug of his shoulders. "What's with the… look you have then?"
Sniffing inadvertently, she smiles at the irony of him asking why she looks like this. But she doesn't hold it against him because they don't normally do this. She can count on both hands the amount of times they've been together at this hour, that didn't involve a case.
"Actually, Elliot…" she breathes out, finally filling her lungs with air and pushing forward toward that ever looming precipice. "I just…. Needed… someone to talk to tonight… someone who saw…. What I saw. That's all. I really didn't mean to disrupt your first night back in Queens. I guess I could have talked to you tomorrow, but… I…"
"Liv," Elliot softly interjects, lightly grasping onto her flailing arms she hadn't realized were bobbing around as she tried to interject some logic into her visit tonight.
The truth slowly creeps into them both as his warm palm encircles the knuckles of her right hand. She's going through some sort of breakdown over the emotional trauma of watching Sonya Paxton die.
And she's letting herself need his comfort.
The impact of that truth seeps into them both as his warm palms slide up her wrist and around her forearms. His eyes are focused on this action while hers trail down his forearm, towards his chest and then land on the side of his face.
She watches the way he's trying, really trying to soothe something he doesn't quite grasp inside of her. At least not yet.
"You're okay," she thinks she hears him plea. Lifting her free hand, she lays it flatly against his shoulder and she finds herself awkward and unsettled by the proximity of their stances, but oddly at peace with the warmth that seeps into her stomach as he rubs her arm with his palm.
"I'm sorry, Elliot," she finally huffs out after a few moments of his comfort. "I'm a mess and we can forget about this. I'll let you get back inside with your family. I just needed to talk to you for a few minutes."
His hand stills but he doesn't step away.
"I don't think you should go home right now," he mutters into the darkness, their forms bathed in the slight beige glow of his porch light. It streams over the narrow sidewalk that leads from his porch to the street and spills over them.
"Yeah, but… you don't need my problems."
"Your problems are as a good as mine."
"Elliot," she sighs as she tries to step away, her arms slipping from his grasp. "I tried... I really did."
Taking a deep breath, Elliot straightens his back before loosening up again and crossing his arms lazily over his chest.
"What did you try?"
She shakes her head, not wanting to go there again, not wanting to burden him with her own demons slowly materializing out of the crevices of her interior. But she doesn't get a chance to hide away as Elliot's hand is wrapped firmly around her bicep this time, the heat from his touch enough to seep through the material of her jacket.
"Olivia, tell me," he prods gently. The moment washes against her, a gentle reminder of a similar moment inside the sedan when she'd found Simon. "Tell me. You're not thinking of doing something, are you?"
Glancing up with moisture in her eyes, her brows pinch together before she angrily pulls away.
"No."
"Then what, Liv. I haven't seen you like this in a while. I should have come back from Quantico before this case got too far along. I should have done my part, look at you," he admits, rubbing his forehead.
"I'm fine, Elliot."
Sighing, his chest visibly deflates as he steps a few feet away before running a wary hand down the back of his closely shaved head.
Licking the inside of his bottom lip, he then looks at her, and prods with his eyes first before vocally.
"Then, what'd you try?" His eyebrows furrow, his face contorted, still bathed in the subtle porch light, much like the night he'd found out his hero had been a fraud. The night she'd been willing to go out with the older man, dressed in a blue silk dress.
Except she doesn't have the silk to hide behind this time. Just the gruff exterior of a beat down cop who's admitting defeat. Dick Finley isn't the fraud this time, it's her. She's let her emotional guard down and now she can't separate her heart from the case. It's all just so much.
"I tried not to compare her to my mother. But I did and now I can't stop thinking about her dying in my arms, her blood on my hands. I almost feel responsible."
His expression only wavers slightly as his posture deflates further, with another rush of air from his mouth. He plants his hands high on his hips, stepping closer once more and she feels the tension in his body before he even touches her.
He stands close, but he doesn't make contact yet. His hands fall to the side and she notices the nervous twitch in his fingertips. Surely, they're filled with the electricity ready to slice through her much as they had earlier that day and just a few minutes before.
That afternoon, his fingertips had run gently across her back and she'd not been able to keep from falling against him in that hallway. Her body had collided with his as if in an electromagnetic field.
His body kept hers upright with the embrace, and his presence, his urgency had kept her feet on the ground.
She doesn't recall a moment in their partnership of absolutely needing to see him from around the corner as she had in that moment.
Out of the corner of her eye, she can see the subtle lift of his hand and she almost laughs because she imagines the blue sparkle of electricity spiraling from his fingertips as he brings his hand to her hand.
She imagines he's going to duplicate that moment, that image in her mind of him holding her together, but she's one step ahead of him. He's already done too much. This isn't his problem; he's done his job. He's already stood there and taken in her problems.
Pulling away from his hand paused in mid-air, she swallows, closes her eyes and reopens them to the confused expression on her partner's face.
"I'm going to go. I need to do a few things, then I'm going to head home."
Nodding with his hands back on his low-slung sweats, his bites the inside of his cheek but doesn't protest this time. "Unfinished business with Alicia Harding?" he asks, knowing her well enough to know she won't be heading home soon, instead she'll be taking this case one step further, working until she's far enough away from that precipice.
Sighing, she turns on her heels and looks at him from the corner of her eye, biting her bottom lips before nodding, "I'll see you tomorrow. Thank you…." she trails off, "Thank you for tonight. Go back inside. See you at the station."
She turns and leaves this time. She doesn't look over her shoulder because she knows the look on his face too well. It'll only leave her wanting more from him, something he can't give her right now. But his presence must be enough.
She should accept that. He should accept that.
As she pulls the car around and drives back down the way she came, she looks in the rearview mirror and the solid frame of his build is replaced by the solid glow of the porch light, the ground where he had stood bare.
The ground where she stood, bathed in half in darkness, half in light.
TBC.