A/N: I was sick yesterday and I was also watching an SVU marathon and so this popped into my head. Please review. I know it may not seem very interesting now but it'll get better I promise (: Please review if you read, just tell me if you liked it or any suggestions. It'll eventually be EO.
This is set where the episode Rescue leaves off (that's the episode where Calvin gets taken from Liv).
Detective Olivia Benson sat in her car for a moment, letting the day's events sink in. Stabler had insisted she stay with him at the precinct for a couple more hours; he didn't want her doing anything stupid in this state of mind.
"Elliot. I'll be okay. I just need to think things through," she had insisted. "Really."
After a long silence, Stabler'd finally dropped it, hugging her one last time before she went out to the parking lot.
Now, sitting in her car, she wondered what the hell she was going to do the rest of the night. It was only 9. She rarely went to bed before 10:30. She had been trying to lead by example and at least lay down in her room by 10; she didn't want Calvin to be tired before school.
Calvin.
She tried to shoo that name out of her head, erase it like he'd never existed. That was the only way to relieve the pain, to forget.
She clutched the leather seat beneath her, knowing that she would never be able to forget. She'd fallen hard for the young boy and now she was paying the consequences.
She felt a tear stream down her face as she remembered the last time she'd ever see him, which had been almost forty five minutes ago. She knew that the image of Calvin being pulled away from her embrace by his mother and the lawyer, Calvin fighting against their grasps, Calvin screaming her name... that scene would be etched into her mind for as long as she lived.
Olivia shook her head in an attempt to rid those thoughts and cranked the ignition. It was the past now. There was nothing she could do. All she had been doing was being the temporary legal guardian for this boy after his mother had abandoned him at the station. It was nothing more.
"You still playing mom, Olivia?"
She felt more tears threaten to spill. She knew Stabler hadn't really meant any harm by his comment, but it had left an impacting sting on her. He may as well have slapped her.
"Shit," Olivia muttered, fiddling with her radio knob. Every station was on commercial break, forcing the detective to be patient until a song came on.
Olivia Benson chuckled humorlessly at the irony of it. She was supposed to be the patient one while Elliot was blessed with the anger-issues persona, and now she was about to start banging her head on the steering wheel over a few radio commercials.
"Are you interested in drawing as a career? If you have a passion for painting, sketching, or sculpting, we'd like to take the time to give you this special offer! The Art Institutes will be hosting a free informational meeting-"
Olivia was on the verge of tears and shut the radio off. It was funny how everything was reminding her of the little boy. The boy who'd been taken from her. Her little boy.
No, she thought, shaking her head violently. You know as good as anyone else that he was not yours. He was Vivian Arliss's. You were not his mother. Legal guardian and mom are not the same thing.
Her memories were already starting to eat her alive. She had a clear image of her apartment before she had left to take Calvin to school that morning. She had just hung up Calvin's drawing of her on the fridge. Her brain was torturing her, making her think of that. She mentally scanned down the poster in her mind until she remembered what the boy had scribbled on the bottom. Yes, he'd signed it, like any young child would, playing make believe that they were an artist. Except, there was something special about his signature. He had not signed his artwork Calvin Arliss. He'd written Calvin Benson.
Calvin Benson.
Olivia turned right a little jerkier than she should have, hoping to jolt it out of her like electroshock therapy. But once she was driving smoothly again she realized the pain was still there. The fresh wound was still bleeding.
She would never see that little boy again.
At this point, Detective Benson was sobbing hard. She tried to turn on the radio but each station was still clogged with advertisements for stupid restaurants she'd never been to. Olivia gave up on the radio once and for all, turning the dial to OFF.
Maybe it was fate that had put those commercials on those stations.
The eery silence inside her car made the detective feel chills. She was still stopped at a red light; however, because she was in a generally residential area, she was one of the only cars in her lane at the intersection.
All of the sudden, Detective Benson heard a small, shrill sound. It was barely audible, almost muffled, but she could tell that it was not just another sound of the city. She waited several seconds and then started to shrug it off; it was most likely a bird or the wind against a metal stop sign.
The light turned green and Olivia started to turn, but then she heard the noise again. Now she could pinpoint it's location: it was coming from behind a deserted-looking, run-down office building. It sounded like a muffled scream.
She knew it was against her best judgement to stop and check it out, but for some reason she pulled over to the side of the empty road anyway. Olivia felt for her gun inside its holster as she got out of the car and walked around to the office building.
She was beginning to consider walking back to her car, and then she heard the noise again.
Detective Benson looked back at her car. She knew that she was probably walking into nothing anyways. She could turn back, right now, and drive back to her apartment safely. She could still feel the hollow emptiness deep within her core, and the last thing she wanted to be doing was scoping out a deserted building's premises for the source of a sound that could have easily been the wind blowing against a piece of metal.
Olivia looked back at her car one last time and then shook her head, pressing forward once more to the side of the building. What was she going to do at home, anyways? Stare at Calvin's picture of her, crying and eating ice cream? Olivia knew she was only going forward with this to put off going back to her lonely dwelling, but who wouldn't blame her?
She heard the noise again, but this time it felt closer to her. It was definitely a person; Detective Benson had no doubts about it as she rounded the corner into the alleyway behind the building. Olivia almost smirked at how cliche this was turning out: finding someone in an alleyway that needed her help. How many times had this happened before?
The alleyway was empty except for a dumpster pushed up against the left wall some twenty yards away from her. Olivia heard the noise again; it was more frequently occurring now, a muffled scream every ten to fifteen seconds. It was dark, and she had forgotten her flashlight in the car, so the detective was guided to the dumpster by the light of her cell phone. She dodged aluminum cans that littered the ground, not wanting to scare away whoever was making noises of distress behind the dumpster.
She tried not to gasp when she saw a teenage girl lying on the ground, curled in a ball, with blood shining on her right leg in the moonlight and mascara running down her cheeks.
In no time, Olivia began to hear sirens in the distance. She hung up her cell phone and cautiously sat on the wall next to the teenager.
"Sweetie, what happened?" Olivia asked.
"Wh-who are you?" she asked shakily, scooting away from the detective. Olivia could make out a nasty green bruise forming under the girl's eye.
"My name's Detective Olivia Benson," Olivia explained in the soothing voice she used when working with victims. However, she was still trying to figure out exactly what this girl was a victim of. "I'm here to help you."
The girl said nothing, curling herself tighter into a ball. Her leg, Olivia found, was cut open and bleeding, but it had clotted some and slowed down. The ME's will be here soon, Olivia reminded herself, trying to stay calm.
There was a slight breeze in the nighttime air, blowing a bag of Doritos around the floor of the alley. Doritos had been Calvin's favorite...
"I'm not going to hurt you," Olivia promised suddenly in an attempt to clear her mind of the day's events. "I'm going to help you. But I can only do that if you tell me what happened."
The girl shook her head, staring up into the smoggy Manhattan sky.
"Okay. Can you tell me anything at all?"
Again, the girl shook her head, refusing to look at Olivia. She was curled up in a dark green sweatshirt that read Brentwood Prep Varsity Volleyball on the front.
"You play volleyball?" Olivia asked, desperate to make the girl feel as comfortable as possible. The teenager looked up in confusion, but let out her breath when Olivia nodded towards the sweatshirt.
"Mmhmm," she answered, nodding.
"Brentwood Prep, I've never heard of that before. School in New York?"
The girl shook her head, looking away once again. Olivia could hear police sirens and prayed that the ambulances came soon. She could see the teenager wincing in pain from her bleeding leg wound.
"Tennessee," she answered stiffly, shifting uncomfortably and letting out a cry of pain that matched the one Olivia had heard while she was searching for her.
"Sweetie, you're going to be okay, there are ambulances coming soon. We'll get you feeling better and then we can talk."
"There's nothing to talk about," the girl insisted abruptly. Olivia desperately wanted Elliot to be with her. He had teenage daughters, he knew how to relate to them better than she did.
"Tell me about volleyball," Olivia asked, changing the subject. It was the only thing she knew she could get the girl to somewhat speak about. Besides, she also wanted to distract her from whatever she was feeling.
"Don't play it anymore," she answered after several moments. "My new school doesn't have a team."
Olivia pursed her lips, trying to think of something else to say. "You any good?"
The girl shrugged. "Maybe."
"Your sweatshirt says you played varsity, so I'm guessing it's a yes."
She shrugged once more, still not saying a word. Finally, police sirens and ambulance sirens wailed nearby and came to a stop in front of the building.
Olivia saw Fin, Munch, and Cragen appear from around the corner, Munch and Fin holding flashlights. She breathed a sigh of relief and stood up to go greet them.
"Where are you going?" the teenager asked curiously.
"I'm going to introduce you to my colleagues in a minute, hang on," Olivia said, walking over to the group of men. A few paramedics with a gurney rushed past them.
"What are you doing?" the teenager questioned. "D-don't touch me."
Olivia ran back over to the distraught teenager. "Sweetie, it's okay, they're taking you to the hospital. I'll meet you there, I promise."
"I don't care. I just want Holly. Where's Holly?"
Olivia looked back at her coworkers, who were standing right behind her. She turned to the girl. "Who's Holly?"
"Tell Holly to come to the hospital. Just Holly, don't get my parents. Please don't get my parents," she pleaded, finally allowing the paramedics to place her on the gurney.
"I don't know who Holly is," Olivia countered.
"Holly Wall Michaels," the girl yelled from the gurney as they rolled her to the ambulance. "Please find her and call her!"
Olivia nodded, storing the name in her memory for future reference. She turned back to her colleagues.
"Liv, what the hell is even going on?" Cragen asked. "You didn't explain much in your phone call. I thought I sent you home for the night."
"Ran into this situation on the way there, Cap'n," Olivia promised. "Teenage girl, I'm guessing about fifteen or sixteen. She has a black eye and a cut open leg. All signs point to assault of some kind. She wouldn't barely talk to me."
"You found her here?" Fin asked, pointing to the spot where the girl had been laying. Detective Benson nodded.
Munch cleared his throat. "Well, it's good you found her, Liv, we've got it from here."
Olivia wasn't sure if she'd heard right. She put her hands on her hips. "Now wait just a minute, I'm not just going to go home, I want to go to the hospital with all of you and get a follow up from the doctors, get her to talk a bit more-"
"Olivia," Cragen said sternly. "You are in no emotional state to be handling cases at this time of night. What you need is some rest after what happened today. I'm putting Munch and Fin on this case."
"I'm the only one she trusts, Captain," Olivia pleaded. She couldn't go home; she wasn't ready to face reality yet.
Captain Cragen sighed slowly, his wrinkled eyes thinking deeply. "Alright," he finally agreed. "Call Stabler, tell him to meet you at the hospital. I'll put you two on the case for now."
A/N: Like it? Hate it? Please review and tell me what you think. Thanks!