By the time Olivia finally drags herself though the front door, it's as if the creases have been etched below her eyes, as if even her cheekbones have fallen. Alex is on her feet before she's even fully absorbed the sight, but Olivia says softly, "No. Don't."
And Alex doesn't. She stays still and follows with her eyes as Olivia falls to the sofa like a shell casing. Then she perches on the sofa's arm, keeping a cautious distance from Olivia, her jeans rubbing against leather upholstery.
Olivia still smells blood, like particles of it went up her nose, like a fine mist of it is still coating her leather jacket and chest and her hands and her eyes, and she can't look at Alex.
It's dark outside by now: Olivia stayed at Lauren Cooper's bloodstained apartment long after they'd wheeled the half-headed body past her, long after Lake, Melinda, the techs, even IAB had gone home. She'd watched the light fade on the blood that splattered the generic abstract paintings on the wall, hadn't risen from her crouch by the doorway until long after Cooper's ghost would have floated out of a dark wall with anguish and resolve still clear on the remaining half of her face, if Olivia believed in such things.
"Baby, what happened?" says Alex softly. She thinks that she's never sensed this kind of coldness radiating from Olivia before. For Olivia, the only feeling seeping through her cracks is gratitude that Alex is not their ADA anymore, that she doesn't know the details of this case.
It was weird, sick need as much as professionalism that kept Olivia by the newly discovered victim's side, crouching beside the icy metal of the drawer and hoping that her head was blocking the snuff film from the panicked woman's view. When the paramedics arrived, Olivia found Agent Cooper trembling against the back wall of the warehouse. Cooper looked into Olivia's face as if she were drowning, as if she had drowned already, and then had latched her lips to Olivia's with fervor. Olivia was pulled underwater, and it was only Lake's footsteps near the doorway that caused them to spring apart.
Alex remembers a few of the details from Olivia's hasty phone calls—a serial killer, an investigation tarnished by a rogue Fed from Behavioral Analysis—but the truth is now that she's not with SVU all of the cases blur, differentiated only by how long they keep Olivia away from her, while she is at work and after she comes home. She doesn't want to push Olivia: the confusion of the last few years has made her slightly afraid of her lover, made her carry the knowledge that Olivia would not be wrong to reject her. But she feels the vibrations in the room like it's ready to shatter.
"Those who fight monsters …" Olivia murmurs, trying to shake the words loose from her head.
"What?" says Alex.
Olivia meets her eyes for a split second only, and Alex is terrified at the depth of empathy and terror in them, indicating as they do a need that she will never be able to fill. "Alex, she killed herself," are all the words Olivia gets out before her breath starts coming in spiky gasps.
As they tabulated Amy Doe's wounds, horror mounting, Olivia noticed Agent Cooper's face leaking the anguish that Olivia herself had, over the years, learned to seal carefully inside her own. She watched Amy Doe breathe, her chest vivid with burns and bruises and blood poisoning, and watched Cooper's breathing mirror Amy's, and watched the tsunami of that anguish advance and sweep Cooper from the room. It was only a matter of minutes before Olivia followed her, a little too eager herself to leave the victim, with her panoply of scars and her weakly beeping vitals and her dead fingers, behind. She found Cooper leaning over halfway down the corridor, hands at her knees and tearstreaks on her face, trying to breathe. Her eyes looked like mirrors, her eyelashes dripped, and Olivia pulled her up and each woman kissed the other as if she were trying to consume everything that hurt her, Cooper's tongue thrusting ferociously into Olivia's mouth and her nails scraping Olivia's shoulders beneath her jacket. Olivia pulled Cooper to her by the waist and tumbled them into the accessible bathroom before another dozen nurses saw.
Alex swallows her own alarm and shifts so she is kneeling in front of her lover. "Breathe with me, Liv. It's okay, just breathe. Look at me." Olivia doesn't, of course, but she struggles to hear the steady rhythm of Alex's breathing and not the shot that still resonates in her ears. She chokes on her words. "She—she—"
"Who?" says Alex, her words gentle, unhurried. "Who killed herself, baby? The victim?"
Olivia shakes her head, surprised she has enough control even to do that. "Lauren Cooper," she manages to say.
"Lauren—Jesus, the agent?" Olivia nods, her chin trembling. She can feel Alex's gaze probing, trying to understand her expression. "Oh god, Liv, did you see?" Olivia nods again. "Oh, baby," says Alex. "After everything you go through."
The panic starts to work its way through Olivia again, and she thinks she might be having a heart attack, she thinks her chest might explode. Alex notices. "Breathe, sweetie," she says in a liquid voice. "Just listen to me and breathe with me. In for five, out for five. Nothing else. Okay? Olivia? One. Two. Three. Four …"
She keeps counting, and Olivia tries to stay with her. Alex takes Olivia's hand, running her thumb over the knuckles tenderly.
They came together, Olivia with a grunt and a gasp and a scraped palm against the tiled wall like Cooper had wrenched something out of her, Cooper with a long, thin, drawn-out wail and eyes screwed shut as if Olivia had hurt her. Cooper's fingers stayed inside Olivia until Olivia swore she could feel the calluses and the hangnails and a weirdly forceful aftershock rippled through her. Then she brought her hand up to Olivia's mouth and Olivia sucked the digits obligingly. They stared through each other's eyes, Olivia's searching and Cooper's full to the brim with studied blankness, and held each other as their breathing slowed; then Cooper zipped her trousers, ignoring the sopping and torn underwear beneath them, and Olivia fastened her bra and buttoned her blouse, noting the hickey on her collarbone that she would have to hide and the scratches on her side from Cooper's ragged nails and the bloodstains from a cut on Amy Doe's calf on her right shirt cuff, and there was not even an ounce of tenderness about the situation. Still, Olivia, leaving the bathroom three minutes after Cooper had gone, walked out on shaky legs, like remnants of the fierce orgasm still clung to her core. The next time she saw Cooper was in the surveillance photo taken outside the internet café, and the next time she saw her in person was in the interrogation room, the cold slab of the metal table between them, and Olivia knew from that same spot in her center what the woman had done.
She's breathing now, slowly, more easily. Her living room slips into focus again, and she notices that Alex is no longer crouching by her legs, but is seated on the sofa, leaning back into its corner, watching the muscles in Olivia's face.
"Come here," Alex says, finally. And finally, Olivia does.
She inches back towards Alex and leans back against her chest and shoulder, Alex's legs steady on either side of her. Alex folds her arms around Olivia, hands dusting gently beneath her lover's breasts. Olivia closes her eyes, inhaling Alex's sweet, light lemon-cinnamon scent, and Alex kisses her hair. Olivia thinks this tenderness might kill her.
"I have too much to lose," Olivia told Cooper in the last two minutes of the woman's life. She is pretty sure that she's the only one in this room with something to lose, that Alex would be better off without her, and she hopes, with a desperate gnawing in her gut, that she can keep Alex from finding this out. Now she twists her head so she can see only a blurred and distorted version of Alex's fine, patrician jawline. She cranes her neck back so she can kiss it.
Alex runs tapered fingers through Olivia's hair. Olivia tucks her head into Alex's shoulder, hiding her eyes in her neck. If Alex sees her eyes she will see the studied blankness that has risen to the surface, and Alex might be, Alex is, the only reason that this side of Olivia's head remains attached.
Alex feels a few tears slide down her neck and cling to her T-shirt collar, and she keeps her fingers curling steadily against Olivia's scalp. "I know," she says. "Oh, babe, I know."