Okay. I don't know about you guys, but I loved the scene at the end of Know It All. I also hated it, because I wanted more. Anyway, this is my fleshed out version of that scene. I'm not sure how I feel about this piece, but it was my best attempt at glimpsing into Liv's brain during that scene.
He loved his job just as much as she loved hers. She was sure of that.
Their eyes met through the throng of people rushing across the Manhattan sidewalk, carrying on with their lives as if the world was still rotating, as if time had not slowed. The typical New York crowd did not bother her, was merely a moving backdrop as her stare held Barba's and didn't falter.
She saw the lines starting to set in at the corners of his mouth, the grays woven into his dark hair. Olivia tried to remember when he had started to age, to pick through her memory for the beginnings of change. Tried to reconcile the Barba she had met in a courtroom five years prior with the enervated man standing in front of her.
Perhaps the biggest change was his eyes. They used to be vivid and piercing and passionate—clear indicators of the wit and ambition that hid just beneath them. Now, they his eyes were still passionate, but they were darker. They were shrouded by five years of heinous crimes and victims that were denied justice and teetering on a fine line between right and wrong. Dimmed from living in a world of gray.
She understood him. Knew what it was like to give a piece of yourself to the job. To the victims. And every time, with every new victim, the job took a little bit more. It deepened the creases on her face, stole a little bit more of the light from his eyes.
And the darker their eyes became, the darker the world seemed—the bright colors tinged with gray. Things became less black and white. The right decision was not always the best decision. Sometimes good people had to do questionable things.
Olivia knew that she did not blame him, that she would have done the exact same thing had she been in his situation.
His face weakened for a second, briefly unmasking his fear. She thought back to what he had said earlier, that the two of them might have worked their last case together.
A burning sensation clasped at her chest. This morning, she could never have expected to have to say good-bye to him. Barba had told her, once, that he wanted to be squabbling with her when he was eighty-five, and she had every intention of granting him that wish, retirement be damned. Now, the fate of his job hung in the hands of the D.A. His life rested in the D.A.'s hands. Her life rested in the D.A.'s hands.
Barba was truly the only one that let SVU consume his life as much as she let it consume hers. It was that mutual devotion that held them so tightly together, and she was not prepared to let go.
SVU, for both of them, was more than just a profession. They had both fallen helplessly down the rabbit's hole, and they had no desire to find their way back up. It haunted them, day in and day out.
And, he was on the brink of losing it all.
She had been in his shoes before. Olivia knew what it was like to go with your gut against all other sense, to make a judgment call and pray that it was the best decision. She knew what it was like to put everything on the line just to have it nearly taken away, to hand over your heart to a case, to a victim, despite the potential repercussions.
She loved her job, and he did too.
And it was the ache—the ache for her job, for the difficult decisions, for the horrors of the SVU, and for him, that ripped through her breast. It was this throbbing pain that brought her hand over her heart, a motion to numb the pain in her chest as much as an act of reassurance and solidarity for him.
He nodded his head in that way that she had become so familiar with over the years, an action that said 'no matter how this ends, we gave it everything we had'. She watched as his eyes met with hers for a second longer.
Her eyes roamed his face, his body, trying to imprint him into her mind. Because, there was a chance that she might not recognize him later, that the D.A. had the power to strip her best friend of a piece of himself.
But this world was her life, too, and it had taken so much from the both of them. It had created a bond between them that she wasn't ready to relinquish yet. So she watched as a piece of her turned away, and walked into the building that held his future, leaving her with nothing else but to blankly stare after him and hope that Rafael Barba would not become just yet another thing that the job took from her.
Sorry for grammar errors, I wrote this with no editing because I just wanted to get it posted.
And, for all of you who hate me for not updating my other works… I am so, so sorry. I am doing my best, I promise you, but I suck at endings. I accept that this is my fatal flaw. I just can't quite engage all the way when I really need to. When it really matters, you know? (Psych reference). Anyway, really, I hate ending stories because I hate resolution. Writing tension and angst is soooo much easier. But I'm trying. Please don't hate me.