A/N: After the past few articles released about the premiere, I'm terrified. I don't know what this is. Don't hate me. I guess there are some potential spoilers in there, but I really don't know any more than you do. It's a million times better if you listen to Child by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes and In The Embers by Sleeping At Last.
"Daddy?"
"Yeah, baby?" He sighs, because it is Maureen's voice that worries him. She'll always call him Daddy, he thinks, like she's twelve or sixteen or six. But her voice has something different in it today, something dark in it that tugs against his stomach. He had told her no a million times. Two million, probably. But Maureen had always been more determined than he was overbearing, and when she was offered a job as a legal representative at St. Luke's Halfway House earlier this year, he'd sat by and watched her take it.
He'd warned her that it would be hard, that there would be days when all the horror and emptiness would reek around her, fill her lungs, but that she would be okay. Those days would end. She'd be thirty in October. She reminded him, with her swagger and confidence and I-can-change-the-world-today-attitude, of Liv in the earliest years of their partnership. Maureen wasn't a cop; she was a lawyer. But the overused suits, the determination to wake up in the morning and fix something, the hair that fell immediately to her shoulders and the eyes that still didn't quite get it—it was all there. And it brought him back. Catapulted him, actually, to a time in his life when everything had been easier.
There is silence on the other end of the line. Maureen inhales slowly and then lets all the air in her lungs go in one quick puff, a sigh but not really. "Daddy, I, um. Can we... can we meet someplace? I... I need to talk to you." She's upset.
He draws his bottom lip into his mouth. "Are you alright?"
"Yeah yes I—I'm fine, but... I need to talk to you. Soon. Right now."
"Maureen baby, you're scaring me." He is sitting up on the sofa, his back board straight. "What happened?" His primal instincts are kicking in and he wonders how fast he can run to get her, wherever she is.
"It's not about me, Dad. It's... I'm fine. I was at the courthouse today, one of my girls was there for a hearing and I—it's not about me."
It's not about me. His sanity is going to the gutter. He doesn't know what goes on in that courthouse anymore and he doesn't want to. He's spent too many hours brooding at the food stands by Reade and Centre to ever care to go back to that place, to even think about it and the uncomfortable, buttoned-up feeling it gives him, but something in Maureen's voice shocks his brain silent. The resentment doesn't creep in this time, the misplaced indignation stays in the far recesses of his mind. He thinks he's going to throw up, because there's only one other reason she'd call. "Maureen. What happened."
It's not even a question as it rolls off his tongue.
"Dad," she says, and her voice is too soft. He can practically see her slipping the kid gloves on. "Dad, I saw Liv today."
He swallows, says nothing. He waits for her to continue instead. He'll talk about anything else, he'll deal with anything else, but he can't deal with this.
"She was in bad shape. Really, um—"
"How?" he croaks. Screw being retired, screw being nobody's partner, screw the guy that took his place and couldn't watch her back. He'd left so somebody better could come, could fill her up, could give her something instead of all of his nothing. His voice is gruff and scared and scary and he wonders why his daughter hasn't told him to calm down yet, that he's overreacting, that nothing really is wrong.
"The case," Maureen starts, and her voice hitches. "It was hers. It was just the arraignment I guess but, um, it was hers, she was the plaintiff. It's all anybody would tell me and I couldn't... I didn't feel comfortable saying hello." He can't breathe. He doesn't remember what lungs are or how to work them. "She looked bad. Had her arm wrapped, and something happened to her forehead. She cut her hair."
"Maureen—"
"I know you don't want to know. I know you can't—that you're going through stuff, that you're still going through stuff. But seeing her today... she looked so awful, Dad. She looked like she needed somebody to come and pick her up and carry her away. I've seen kids like that, I've seen teenagers and junkies like that, I've seen victims like that. And she isn't one. She wasn't one, ever." There's so much that he wants to tell her she doesn't know.
If he could talk, maybe he would. Maybe he'd tell her that he couldn't ever protect her, couldn't ever be who Olivia had needed him to be, and that's why he had left. He hadn't been the big strong man, the partner she'd come to trust. He had let her down. He had shot a little girl, he'd let his emotions get in the way, and he'd lost everything they'd built for both of them since she'd come back from Oregon, from Sealview, from the hospital on the day his youngest son was born. They'd tried so hard to be done playing with fire, and in the end he was the only one that couldn't stop.
"She needs somebody," Maureen says after a long time. He feels frozen, like his internal organs have all been put over ice. "And that person needs to be you."
"I—"
"Go, Dad."
And he does.
X
He feels like a ghost, like he's out of his skin, like he can't possibly be moving as fast as he is. He doesn't remember hanging up the phone, doesn't remember when Maureen's words had really hit him and he'd realized. Olivia was the plaintiff. The victim. A perp had gotten to her and she'd gotten hurt, and her arm was wrapped in something, and he's positive that no one had reminded her to eat if she'd looked as pale as his daughter had said. She'd cut her hair and he knew she wouldn't, even after two years without seeing her, because she'd loved it long more than anything.
He's lived in Greenwich for almost a year. He's loved her for all of it, and he's loved her enough to stay away. He knows that she probably has somebody else by now and to be honest, he doesn't care. He isn't in it to be loved by her, he just needs to make sure that wherever she's getting it from—her strength, her stability, her microwaved fettuccine alfredo and beer at two in the morning—she's getting enough.
He takes a cab because the anger hits him halfway to the subway and he can't, he physically cannot, be around anyone that doesn't know right now. He can't watch New York go on, he can't watch yuppies and college kids and investment bankers and nannies live their Manhattan lives when she's hurting, when she needs something that they don't know about. He'll hit the first man he sees, he'll punch the advertisement on the wall next to the Quiet Car sign. He realizes that he must really be a ghost if he's so dead inside that the rage has taken this long, and with his back against the smelly black leather of cab 5Y62, he gives into it like a drug. He lets it take him like her mother had let the bottle sway her away night after night, sway her down the subway stairs, kill her before she knew how amazing her daughter was. He's going to be sick, and he thinks that maybe if she'll let him in she'll let him throw up in the toilet first before he breaks something, and break something before he holds her and doesn't let go.
How is that she's gone so long with nobody?
Riverside Drive is quiet and nice and he finds that ironic. Her building is undoubtedly the shittiest, even at three in the afternoon, and he wonders if she's even home. She probably is. He doesn't allow himself to think about how their captain would never let her come back to work after her own trial proceedings began, even if it was just arraignment, how he would order her to use her off days and threaten her with ass duty if she didn't comply. Maybe with more. Maybe nobody knows how to tease her at all these days because she's a victim, because she's got a case and everybody knows about it this time. It can't be like what happened with Lowell Harris because that was only one report, one that he didn't get to see until the paperwork for Risa Tyler's murder got processed weeks and weeks later.
Criminal sexual acts. Assault.
They hadn't ever talked about it, and now he wants to. Now he's got so many words sluicing around in mouth that his jaw feels heavy, and he's terrified that as soon as she opens the door—if she does, if he doesn't have to break it down, or use his key, or call a neighbor, or wait for her to come back—the only ones that will be able to squeeze out will be I and need and you. But more than needing her, he needs her to be okay. He isn't selfish, really he isn't, not when he's passing what he assumes is her overstuffed PO box in the building's miniscule lobby and taking her stairs three at a time.
4E stares him in the face and he almost doesn't want to raise his fist and knock, he almost doesn't want to give himself away, because it could be nothing. In truth, maybe he doesn't want to know that she doesn't recognize the way his fist pounds the wood anymore. Maybe he's scared to see that her life's gone on without him in it and that now it's so far gone without anyone that there isn't anything he can do to bring her back. God. He just needs her to be in his arms, physically, because they're getting heavy like his jaw. He wants to grab at things but the only thing in front of him is bluish grey and looming, and maybe leading to her. He tries to breathe and it makes him nauseous.
"Olivia." He doesn't know where his voice escaped from, but he follows it with a knock. "Liv." The nickname feels foreign on his tongue, like it belongs in another man's mouth, and he cringes.
"Please, Bri... I just. I told you I needed some time." The voice is quiet and muffled by all the molecules between them, but it's her.
"S'not Brian," he thinks he says, and he thinks that he's an asshole, and that he'd been right. She doesn't need him here.
There's movement inside the apartment, like she's getting up and maybe she's getting closer, but then it stops. Silence again. It's all white noise between them and he wonders if they've ever been able to discern the message from the static. Get your paperwork off my desk. You're buying. You put the coffee on? What about me? You're the longest relationship I've ever had with a man. S'that the last cup? What if I can't? Not the Beatles, Olivia, my God. You gonna eat that? I'm really glad you're back. You should stop ordering salad if you never want it when it comes. Look how great you turned out.
He wants to think she didn't sound broken and his key is in the lock before he can ration out a reason not to do it. The door opens and she jumps, visibly, as it does. She almost drops the wine bottle in her hand as it hits against her chest and her eyes are closed in a long blink, lips parted. "Jesus Christ, Elliot," she says, almost out of habit, before she realizes what's happening. That he's here, standing like a loaf in her doorway, completely clueless.
Most of the lights in her apartment are off, save for the one above the kitchen sink, and the blinds are drawn. She's still wearing her work blouse but her slacks have been traded in for grey pajama bottoms. Her arm, as Maureen had said, is wrapped in something weird and gauzy. There's a cut along her forehead glued together with butterfly stitches and her hair is tied back in some attempted ponytail. The knuckles of her right hand are white where they grip the back of a chair from her breakfast bar, those of her left white around the glass neck of store-brand, acidic chardonnay. Her eyes are bloodshot and the circles beneath them are deep and purple, and when she looks at him, flicks her gaze across his face, they stay empty. They don't fill. It's like she can't be surprised or healed or hurt anymore and she sighs before giving up and lowering herself to sit on the ground where she stands. There aren't formalities. There isn't a manual for this.
The silence is like quicksand and it piles between them, addicting and unrelenting and oppressive.
"How'd you know?" It's a croak at best. Her voice is hollow and it terrifies him.
He swallows, lets his eyes slip closed. This isn't real. "Maureen. She's a legal rep at one of St. Luke's halfways. Had a hearing today. Saw you."
"Shit," she says, and the laugh that follows is bitter. "She's what, thirty now? Twenty-nine?"
"She'll be thirty in October."
"You're old."
"So are you." He starts to lower himself to the ground. Her back is pressed to the wall adjacent to her counter, the top of her head just brushing the bottom of a green piece of wood that reads Homemade Pies. He wants to laugh at her choice of decorations because he'd almost forgotten about them, and that thought alone makes the wood of the door harder behind his spine. He's going to be sick.
"I haven't seen you in two years, Elliot."
"I know."
"I don't know what you want from me." She raises the bottle to her lips, takes a swig.
"Why the gauze?"
She shrugs. "Cigarette burns, coupla nasty ones. Got me with the hanger too."
Bile rises in his throat. He motions to his own forehead as if this will prompt her to explain. "Scissors," she offers, running a hand over the stitches. The entire Atlantic is probably between them, trapping him, drowning him against her hard wood floor.
"I'm sor—"
"You know what's funny, Elliot?" her voice is wry as it interrupts him. Sardonic, almost. "Even after... shit. It's been two fucking years, it's been more than that. And I'm fine. I've been fine. I... my life, it's moved on, Elliot. I'm not fixed on you, and I've learned not to need you, I'm not pathetic anymore, I don't... I was stupid. And I wasted twelve years thinking stupid things and believing in them. But I was—before he got me, I was okay. I was really okay. I was happy."
Her eyes are shameful when they raise to his and she isn't crying. He wonders how deep down the emptiness goes and if she is already gone.
"I've got a new partner," she offers, and he doesn't really know what she's talking about, but she's talking and hell if he's going to stop her. "Nick. He's a good kid, El, he's a kid, and he's got... he's got a daughter and he just found out he has a son and I'm doing it again, I'm covering for him all the damn time so he can take them out to see the fucking Yankees or the Giants or whatever—God. I'm fucking partner of the year just because I don't want him to end up like you and me."
She stops for a moment to gauge his reaction, and he is unflinching, and that probes her to keep going. If she's desperate to hurt him than maybe she'll crack in the process, and that will be enough. He just wants the death in her eyes to go away; he doesn't even have to chase it out with light. "Drink," he says softly, and she does.
"He's good. He makes me talk, he knows how to make my coffee, he doesn't... when he sees Brian, if he meets us out someplace, he doesn't try to beat him up. Doesn't let himself get crazy. He did, in the beginning he was just like you, but now he's..." she trails off, and Elliot wonders when the beginning was. "Sometimes it's weird to know that I've gotta partner who isn't trying to throw my boyfriend up against a wall. Who wants me to be happy, who doesn't care who I need and how much I need them."
It stings but it's better than silence, it's better than nothing, and his voice is gruff as he chokes out an answer. "Yeah?"
She nods. "Yeah. Not like you. Not like my mother." She is trying to hurt him, and he deserves it, and she's broken and doesn't know how to stop the words from coming. "She said she didn't want anybody else to have me because she needed me to love her so bad. She wanted to feel like she was holding me up somehow and I—I think you were the same way. I didn't want to believe it, but that's how it was. You loved it when I needed you. When I was weak, you loved it."
"That's not true, Olivia, and you know it." Finally there's fight in him, and for her or against her, it's there.
She shakes her head once. "I don't know anything anymore, El. I don't... I don't know if I'm gonna get to keep my badge when this is all over. I don't know if I'm ever gonna go back to what I had, if I..." she quiets. "I told Brian to leave me, Elliot."
"He won't." If it's Cassidy, he'll always love her.
"He will," she says woodenly. "I'll make him. He deserves somebody that's in love with him. Everybody deserves somebody that's in love with them."
He can't move. "You're not?" The words fall from his mouth before he can stop them.
She looks at him like a child would look at something interesting they found on the ground, eyes wide and quizzical and head cocked over to one side. He sees her force her jaw closed, force herself to swallow. "Can't be," she tells him. "Not when—God. Out of anybody you don't deserve to hear this."
"It's not about giving me the satisfaction, Liv. Whatever it is."
Maybe they'll always be together in their darkness, coiled permanently together by the shit that fills their heads.
"I didn't pull my gun."
"Huh?"
The air leaves his lungs.
"I didn't. I... I came home, I opened the door, walked in, went to the kitchen. And I knew." Her voice wobbles and he steels himself against what's coming. "A part of me from God knows where thought, he's here. And it was... it was dangerous, it was tempting, almost. Like this is the out I'd been looking for, because I wasn't supposed to be living. I'd been dead on my feet since the day Jenna died, I'd... I've got nothing, Elliot. I had so much nothing for so long and I wasn't dying but God, I wasn't living and everything was—" a sob bubbles into her throat "—everything was changing. T-this... these past few months I didn't wake up and think about going to bed anymore. I was happy, and I was in love with being happy. I... I went on walks. I looked at art. But I was standing there at my counter and for a second you were all I could think about, and I knew he was coming, and who was I to raise my gun when after all this time and all these... gifts, after all this change, who was I to raise a weapon when the only person I could think about was you? That's... that's not a life, Elliot." Her face crumples. "That's not a life!"
He knows he shouldn't go to her, not when his head is pounding and his stomach is churning and she's blaming herself like this, for trusting him, for trusting anyone, for trying to hold on just a little when he hasn't been able to let go at all. He's kneeling in front of her, and he's taking the half-empty bottle and setting it aside because her hands are shaking and her palms are torn, and she's squirming away as he holds her wrists. "He raped me, Elliot."
No. He can't tell if he's said it out loud or if the booming is still trapped in his head. He wants to be drunk, he wants to be angry like she is—all fire. "He raped me, and h-he... it was torture. It was awful, and horrifying, and all I could think about, no matter what had been going through my head before he got me—" she wrenches her fists away from him "—was how much I wanted you. I wanted you to come get me." She's breaking. Broken, really. Already gone. The admission is wet and cracked as it slips from her lips and he knows that everything in her is black with humiliation.
He wants to hold her but he keeps his position; he's terrified to move his legs from where they're glued onto the outsides of hers. "And I'm guilty," she tells him, darkly, and her words dance like the victims' do. "But I'm guilty for needing you most."
Her eyes bore into his and his hands find her upper arms, her shoulders. He runs his palms along her muscles. He doesn't have any words to give her; he doesn't really have much of anything. I'm sorry, he thinks. I'm so, so sorry. It isn't until after she's shushed him that he realizes he's said it aloud.
"Don't... it's not you, Elliot. There wasn't anything you could have done. It was... it was my fault. Mine. Alone. Don't you dare—" his forehead drops against hers, and he realizes that she still has no idea.
"Olivia." His voice is scratchy, weak and cracked and scabbed over. "Olivia, look at me." He was right before. He's cheap. The words he'd wanted to say don't come when he needs them, the two years of silence are still in between their bodies, squished between their ribs, making her shake like she's shaking now. She looks so much older when her eyes meet his and he thinks it's funny, at least a little bit, because she's never looked more like a child. He's never felt more protective of her. He's never wanted to be her everything the way he does now, her anything, her father, her partner, her brother, her person. He needs to be in her life because he needs her in his, because they're both suffocating, because she can't think that this—whatever it was, whatever it still is—comes at a price.
"I've loved you," he tells her. His hands find her face, his thumbs move over her cheekbones. She can't speak so she doesn't. "I've loved you, I still love you, I will never not love you. And you can't—you don't have to forget that you've needed me too. Loved me too. You don't have to do that to move on. It's not a trade."
"I never said I loved you," she manages, but she isn't indignant. Her lips wobbles with the force of the lie. "I don't want to. I don't want to want you, and when... I felt like it was Sealview all over again. I was in the basement all over again, and nobody was going to save me this time, but dammnit I still wanted my pa..." she trails off. He isn't her partner. "It was still you. I could live another million years and kid myself into falling in love with life over and over again and it'd still be you, and you still wouldn't come. And that made me want to die."
"Don't let it."
"Everything I build, you ruin."
"Because I love you?"
"Because you never tell me anything. And then it's too late."
"It's not," he whispers. "It's... I wanted you to be better, Liv. I wanted you to go to the park. I wanted you to look at art, to have a partner who looks up to you so much that he's gotta protect you right. I wasn't... I wasn't doing it right."
"Oh, El." It's watery the way it tumbles from her lips, and for a moment her eyes slip shut as if they're swollen that way. "Look at me. I'm... I'm a vic, Elliot. Nobody's doing it right."
He wants to hold her. God, he wants to. He wants to grab her up on his lap and never let go, he wants to catch fistfuls of her shirt between his fingers, he wants to know everything so he can take it out of her head and put it elsewhere. Maybe in his own. Her hair is short and her breath catches when a piece of it falls from her makeshift updo and tickles her chin. She reminds him of a little girl and suddenly he wants to be lying in the crib again on the cot across from hers, counting her snores. He wants to hold her but he moves to sit beside her instead, because maybe all the strength she needs will come from the pressure of his shoulder bumping against hers. His left leg stretches out beside her right one and somewhere in the minimal space between them, their hands tangle on the floor.
He squeezes, just to make sure she's alive in there. A tear falls off of her chin as she squeezes back.
She had been raped. Olivia Benson had been raped. It is perverse and horrifying and tragic, and he knows that if he had been there it would have been different. He can't change it, he can't change the way he'd gone, the way he'd shot Jenna Fox and given the brass his badge and thought that he'd given her a chance at something great, something free from all the anchors that came with him. "Maybe," he says, "Maybe s'not about protection." His words run together like always, like New York, and if she wasn't shaking so badly her head would tip onto his shoulder.
"No?"
"I just... maybe we don't need anybody to build up any more walls. S'that's all it is, protection. Just building some walls." She wants to listen to him talk, she wants to listen to the way his consonants crash together, she wants to hear the ways he can save her because he isn't asking for anything.
"Keep going," she whispers. "Please."
"I don't know how to make it sound right, Liv."
"Try." She squeezes her eyes shut.
"Maybe we're better off open than we are closed. Because... saving somebody—I want to do it for the same reason I left, for the same reason you kept comin' back. It's never gonna be pretty, or right, or fit into anything. It's always..." he can't choke. "It's always gonna be love. And it's always gonna be ugly."
"Yeah?" Keep going.
It would always be strange, it would never fit, it would never make sense. It would be big and ambiguous and terrifying or a Sunday afternoon finally visiting the rain room across from the MoMA. But it would always be a reason to fight instead of a reason to concede.
Please keep talking, Elliot.
"But we always gotta raise our guns for it."