21 - BLOOD STAINS
He talked about her all week after that night. And he was right; she was stunning, smart, funny. You could tell just from a few minutes talking to her. He'd been expecting her to call him before he tried calling her. Somehow, without the alcohol, he didn't feel as bold to approach her, so he was hoping she'd be the one to take the initiative. She didn't. He tried her cell once, she didn't pick up, he didn't leave a message, she didn't return the call. End of story.
Eventually, he stopped talking about her, and life went on. We worked our cases, arrested perps, and I listened to his problems. He would listen to mine too, if I ever had any. I didn't. Life was simple for me. I was pretty good at my job, I had a way with the ladies, never letting them stay long enough to become a problem, I had no ex-wives, no custody battles, no unrequited crushes on beautiful detectives who wouldn't call me. I just moved on, never letting anything hit me. It was a good life.
Todd had gradually become my best friend. I didn't usually get close to people, not since Anna had left me, but Todd was my partner, and it was natural for us to develop a close relationship. But I had been right not wanting to get attached: if people didn't leave, they died. It was just the way it worked.
I'll never forget the sight of him lying on the ground, blood pooling around him, his eyes open but expressionless, lifeless. His funeral, people crying, the NYPD homage to him, the sun shining bright like nothing had happened. That day I went back to the precinct, because I had nowhere else to go. His empty desk was proof that he'd been there, that something was missing, but for how long? How long would people consider appropriate to wait before removing his stuff, filling his position? I sat down in his chair, trying to look at things like he used to, literally and figuratively.
Among his stuff, I recognized the napkin. I took it in my hand and contemplated Todd's handwriting, which would never be printed anywhere else ever again. It said Olivia Benson, on top of a phone number. That detective he had been so smitten with, but who had preferred to go back to her partner. Todd had given her his business card, with a phone number that would now lead to nobody. Did this bitch know that he had been a great man? Honest, hard-working, reliable? Did this bitch know anything about the guy she had so quickly dismissed? Did this bitch know that he had died in the street, shot down, like his life didn't matter?
I know that she had nothing to do with anything. I know that. But somehow, looking at that napkin, that's where it started. All this hatred started piling up, I couldn't take her dismissive eyes off my mind, the threatening look her idiot partner had thrown at us. Life wasn't fair, the fact that those morons were still alive while Todd was dead.
And her name, too. Olivia, like my mother. I intrinsically hated anyone with that name; it wasn't hard to let that little spark ignite and become a huge fire. I had all this hatred, all this hurt, all this injustice I needed to channel somewhere. Olivia, the entitled, dismissive little detective. Who did she think she was? Well, to me, she was the winner.
I folded the napkin carefully and put it away in my wallet.
His heartbeat. It was so tempting to focus on that, let it rule everything, set the rhythm for the world around her, block everything else, take her away from all the pain, the blood, the grief, transport her back to a place of safety, to a place where it was natural for her to hold him tight and listen to his heartbeat, to lie on his chest and fall asleep. But she couldn't block everything out, she could still hear the muffled sounds of voices, radios, and his whispers into her hair, almost more felt than heard, I'm sorry. It's okay.
Olivia clung to his sweater, afraid to let go, afraid that if she stopped listening to his heart, it might stop beating. She wasn't sure what had happened. All she knew was that the gun had gone off, Eric and Elliot had fallen to the floor and, for a moment, she didn't know if either of them was hurt. She had screamed, No!, and then she had been paralyzed, as though watching everything from outside of her body.
It all seemed to happen in slow motion. The door was violently broken down, officers started running into the room, surrounded both of them on the floor, secured the gun, someone radioed that a bus was needed immediately, but her view was blocked. Shock didn't allow her to move much, she only deflected the arms that tried to touch her, check on her, trying to move past the confusion, but before she was able to, Elliot emerged from the middle of it and pulled her into his arms. She could suddenly breathe again.
Elliot could hardly believe that it was all over and they were both safe. He squeezed Olivia against his chest, battling between the fear of hurting her already bruised enough body and the urge to keep her there forever, where he could make sure she would be safe from harm. She pulled away a moment later, tugging at his bloody clothes to try and check if he was wounded, but her hands didn't respond right, they shook too hard, she couldn't lift his sweater. He took her hand in his, squeezing gently, aware of what she was looking for.
"The blood's not mine," he assured her, and she relaxed back against his chest, but not for long.
When Olivia was able to gather the courage to pull away from his chest again, trusting his heart to continue beating on its own, she maintained a firm grip on his sweater, securing him as she tried to look past him. Again, he was able to read her.
"Don't look," he warned, driving her away with his body to stop her from trying. "He's gone."
Olivia wouldn't be able to explain what she felt if anybody asked but, upon hearing that, she started sobbing. Maybe it was mostly from relief that it was all over, but she could also detect a tinge of grief, she wasn't sure if it was due to the fact that he was dead or the way he'd died. She covered her mouth to contain the sounds, but there was nothing she could do for the violent heaving of her chest. Elliot held her again, resuming the I'm sorry whispers, the it's okay kisses on the top of her head, but she pushed him away, in a sudden urge to escape that room.
"Get me out of here," she managed to plead.
Elliot granted her wish immediately, keeping her close to his body as he started moving, shielding her out of the room. Lights illuminated the previously dark hallway as they passed towards the front door, through which he could see it was dark outside. He wondered what time it was, how much time had passed since he'd walked into the house, into the room, which had certainly felt like several hours – he estimated it must be the middle of the night. As they reached the outside of the house, among the blinking lights from the police cars and the ambulance, another ambulance arrived, and the paramedics had barely made it out of the vehicle when Elliot told them they needed to check on Olivia.
It was all still fuzzy as they walked out of the beach house. Olivia saw familiar faces, the team, the captain, they were smiling, and she knew they were happy to see her alive, but she couldn't smile back. She couldn't do much at all, she just let Elliot lead her, walking along, until she realized she was in the back of an ambulance being examined, Elliot close by, never breaking eye contact with her. A while later, the paramedic who had been checking on her and taking care of some of her wounds said something about going to the hospital for CT scans to rule out internal injuries and left, closing the doors behind him right before the bus started moving.
Elliot sat next to her, with his arm around her, now more focused on securing her than anything else. As the ambulance moved away, Olivia was slowly able to ground herself, to understand that it was all over, that she and Elliot were alive and out of the house, driving away, leaving Eric's dead body behind. She took a deep breath, the first conscious one since the beach house, and looked up at Elliot. He watched her, patiently, waiting for her. After a few moments of silence, he ran his eyes over her, taking inventory of the cuts and bruises covering her skin, guilt hitting him hard as he recognized the ones that had been caused by him.
"Liv…" he breathed, sadness in his eyes, a slight shake of his head. "I'm… I'm so sorry."
For a split second, Olivia wondered what he was apologizing for, but her doubt quickly vanished as flashbacks of him punching, slapping and kicking her flooded her mind all at once.
"I know you are," she said, her voice surprisingly strong, but she couldn't hold his gaze.
She didn't blame him for the bruises, she knew he had quite possibly saved her life with them, but she couldn't deny the pain, he had witnessed it, he was still witnessing it in every black and blue stain on her skin, every bright-red drop of her blood, the dark traces of what had once been mascara and eyeliner in the dried moisture around her eyes and down her cheeks. He waited until she looked up at him again to continue.
"Everything I had to do…" he said, struggling to keep his eyes on hers through the guilt and the shame he felt. "Everything I said… you need to know that…"
"I know," Olivia nodded, not so much because she knew, but mostly because she couldn't do this right now. It was all too much already, she couldn't talk about it too.
Elliot understood, he knew her too well; she wanted him to stop apologizing, at least for the moment. He respected it – he had something more urgent to ask her anyway. "Did he hurt you?" he asked. He knew he had hurt her, it was obvious, but he couldn't voice what he was actually trying to ask. "Did he…?"
She knew what he meant. "No," she rushed to say, her eyes moving away from his quickly, and he knew that wasn't entirely true. She looked back up at him and he stared at her until she explained further. She chewed on her bottom lip. "He almost did but… then he stopped."
He let out a long, relieved sigh. "It's over," he said, squeezing her reassuringly. "Now it's really over. We're just gonna get you checked out now."
Olivia nodded, circling his waist, hanging on to him to try and reconnect with reality, whatever it was now, out of that room, after everything. Now it's really over, Elliot had said, but he was still looking at her with those sad, regretful eyes, occasionally shaking his head, and she wished he would stop blaming himself. She knew whatever he'd had to do had the sole intention of saving her life. She knew it now, she had always known, even when he'd made her cry and bleed.
"I'm fine," she said, trying to sound reassuring, succeeding in bringing his eyes back to hers and off of her injuries.
"I failed you," he whispered, touching her face, now that he was allowed to, his thumb lightly soothing the cut on her cheekbone, then moving to caress her jawline. "In so many ways."
He looked away from her, shaking his head, and a moment of silence followed. She was the one to break it.
"He fooled us all," she said soothingly, bringing his eyes back to her face immediately. "Hurting me was his plan all along. It could have been a lot worse. You saved my life."
Elliot wondered if she was right. When push had come to shove, Downey had preferred to shoot himself instead of killing Olivia, and there was no way to tell if he'd had any impact on that decision. The answer to that question was splattered all over the wall of that room, written in Downey's blood, in a code no one would ever be able to read. Elliot would never know if he had really saved Olivia's life or just hurt her for no reason. And yet, there she was, speaking with her lip still swollen from his punch, trying to comfort him after everything he'd said and done. It was so much like her.
"I love you," he whispered, and he saw it as her eyes instantly widened, as her breath hitched.
Olivia's mouth moved, but nothing came out; she was too shocked to utter words, but she felt her heart racing and her stomach fluttering. She wondered if she had heard him right, maybe she had hallucinated it. Either way, it was way too much for her to deal with, so she just settled back against his chest, nuzzling her way into the crook of his neck as he secured her with both arms, supporting her in the limited space of the gurney.
If his apologizing for hurting her had been too much for her, it was obvious that his love declaration would be overwhelming, if she was even able to process it properly, but he'd had to tell her. While she was gone, he hadn't been able to stop blaming himself for never having told her, for the fact that she might die without knowing. Now, that she was going to live, he found out that letting her live a second longer without knowing was just as unfair, so he'd said it. He would find a better moment to say it again, when they could actually talk about it, and he would keep saying it until she understood. All he knew was she needed to know.
Digging his fingers into her hair, Elliot traced circular patterns on her scalp, the relaxing effects of his movements rippling throughout her body, making her muscles relax. A few moments later, he realized she had fallen asleep in his arms, her breathing even, her arms still around his waist, secured together by her interlaced fingers.
He kissed the top of her head once again. "It's okay," came out in a whisper as his lips moved against her hair.
"I didn't want him dead. If I wanted him dead for what he did to me… then how am I any better than him?"
She'd said that at some point. After the hospital, with the CT scans and the pain meds, the bandaging all over her body, the IV fluids for dehydration and the otherwise clean bill of health, patrol cars had taken her and Elliot separately back to the precinct so they would give their official statements. He had insisted he would only leave the hospital after she'd been released, he wanted to be there at all times, but they never got a chance to speak after riding together in the back of the ambulance. According to the officers, it was imperative that they gave their eyewitness statements immediately, so they were rushed into the patrol cars and into the precinct and into the interrogation rooms, and Olivia felt like there wasn't a single moment for her to just breathe.
Her captivity had ended, but she didn't feel free. She understood now how physically and mentally exhausted victims felt when, after their whole ordeal, instead of resting and nursing their wounds, they needed to sit all alone in a dark room, in an uncomfortable chair, talking to an officer or a detective they had never met who, empathetic as they might be, was clearly unhappy to be working in the middle of the night. Why couldn't they all go home and sleep and take care of all this in the morning? Would any of her wounds look any less evidently criminal? Would her words sound any less true, any more biased?
If anything, giving her statement now might taint it, Olivia thought; she wanted so badly to get away from there that she would say anything now. She might even say nothing had happened at all if that meant she could just leave, just be alone, take a long bath and lie in her bed, close her eyes and forget all about this for a minute. But she couldn't. She had to sit through endless questions, some of which didn't seem to make any sense, and as an interrogator herself, she figured she should be able to tell what the line of questioning was, but she couldn't. To her, it was all so simple: the crimes were all Eric's, and he had put an end to everything by putting a bullet through his head.
She didn't want him dead. Maybe she had wanted him dead at some point during the torturing sessions, maybe she had wanted to kill him herself, with her bare hands, but she didn't, really, want him dead, and she certainly wouldn't have wanted him to put an end to his life to spare hers. It placed a tremendous amount of guilt onto her shoulders that she didn't want to carry, but she felt like she had no choice.
By the end of the interview, even using the desk to support her arms as she tried to place the weight of her head on her hands, Olivia didn't feel like she could sustain the three tons of throbbing pain above her shoulders for much longer, but the worst was yet to come. Besides the regular statements, they had to speak to IAB, too. She should have known, she thought: this was a dirty cop they were talking about, of course they'd be involved at some point, but there was also the fact that this dirty cop had been shot to death and they needed to make sure that the way it had happened was thoroughly investigated and documented. Lieutenant Tucker interviewed her, the son of a bitch, and the first thing he did was try to pressure her into confessing she had killed Eric.
That's it: that's when she had said that thing about not wanting him dead. She'd said that to Tucker, and her eyes had welled up with tears, tears of guilt that the finger pulling the trigger hadn't been hers, but might as well have, relief that the god damned bullet they were having this over an hour-long conversation about had been far enough from her own head and Elliot's head and ended all the pain she'd been going through for she didn't even know how many days anymore, guilt for feeling relieved, and rage at this cold bastard who had gotten up from his warm bed this morning, taken his shower and put on his flawlessly pressed suit to come into the 1-6 to sit in front of her and accuse her of killing Eric, to try to make her confess Elliot, who had saved her life, had killed him instead.
When Tucker was done torturing her about Eric, he decided to question Elliot's actions during their captivity, claiming he knew her wounds hadn't all been inflicted by Eric and questioning Elliot's conduct; her voice failed and broke when she tried to scream in all her outrage that Tucker should go fuck himself and leave her and Elliot alone, and she worried about how Elliot would respond to those accusations, about whether he would lose his head and say or do something that gave Tucker the ammunition to screw him over – that was definitely another load of guilt she could not bear to carry.
So she was definitely worried when, after not having been allowed to watch Elliot's interview from outside, she eventually found him sitting on a bench in the locker room with bloody knuckles matching his blood-stained clothes.
"Elliot," she breathed, making him raise his head to look at her; he looked almost as exhausted as she felt. "What happened?"
"Nothing," he muttered, nodding towards his locker, already marred with several dents from previous rage attacks and which apparently had a brand new one.
Olivia sighed, relieved. "As long as it's not Tucker's face you hit, as much as he deserved it," she said. "What did you tell him?"
"The truth," Elliot replied dryly. "What else?"
"Did he try to pin Eric's death on you?" she asked, a little surprised at his almost nonchalance. "He tried to make me say you wanted him dead."
"And I did," he rasped, widening his eyes at her before looking away. "I wanted to kill him for what he did to you, for what he made me do to you."
"Elliot," Olivia pleaded, squatting down in front of him and taking his wounded hand in hers. "Tell me you didn't say that to Tucker."
Elliot swallowed, his eyes moving rapidly between hers, and Olivia knew that expression; he'd been so distraught during the interview that he probably didn't even remember what he'd said – that was what she feared. She squeezed his hand.
"You didn't anyway," she said reassuringly. "You tried to stop him from shooting himself, I told them about it."
"It was just a reflex," he muttered, looking away from her as if he was ashamed or something. "I should have helped him pull the trigger."
"You don't mean that," she countered impatiently, and when he insisted in avoiding her eyes, she used her free hand to touch his chin and direct his face towards hers. "You didn't have to kill him to prove you didn't mean to hurt me."
Elliot gazed at Olivia silently for a long time before looking away again, but she couldn't tell if she had relieved any of his guilt. She sighed with frustration as she stood up, but when she let go of his hand, he took hers, forcing her to stay put in front of him, and they stared at each other for another moment. Olivia was so tired that she didn't know what else to do or say; she didn't even know where they stood in their relationship, the boundaries between them too confusing after everything that had happened before and during her kidnapping.
But then he defined them again, and it was a harder blow than any of the physical ones he'd been forced to strike against her.
"I need to go home," were the words he said, and she immediately withdrew her hand from his, as if an eject button had been pushed. "Hey, I don't mean it like that," he amended immediately, but Olivia was already headed for the door and barely heard him.
"You don't have to explain anything to me," she said dismissively, turning into autopilot mode; at least she knew how to react to these boundaries. It was actually a relief. It really was. "Of course you need to go home, how many days have you been gone? Does Kathy even know…"
"Stop!" Elliot caught up with her and held her arm, but she kept her eyes on the door, unable to face him, unwilling to let him see the heartbreak in her eyes when she had no right to feel that way. "Kathy and I were supposed to talk the night you were taken," he explained, then paused for a moment. "About breaking up."
"Are you out of your mind?" Olivia snapped, yanking her arm free and turning to look at him with incredulity all over her face. "I'm not gonna let you ruin your life just because you're feeling guilty."
"What?" he barked back, visibly impatient. "Did you not hear what I said earlier?"
"I can't have that in my conscience," she countered, desperate, taking a step back from him and putting her hands together. She took a deep breath to try to hide the panic in her voice. "Elliot, we both need to go home and rest, please don't do anything stupid before you do that."
"Liv," he started to protest, but she was already rushing out, almost running.
"Please," she repeated.
Olivia ran away, hoping that the distance she put between her and Elliot would help relieve the guilt she felt. It was too much blood in her hands; the influence she might have had in Eric's decision to hurt his victims and in killing himself, the potential harm to Elliot's career depending on how IAB interpreted his actions, and now his marriage. It was too much damage connected to her, and it made her want to disappear. As she finally reached the street, hit on the face by the cold, biting wind, she wondered if the helplessness she felt now was similar to how Eric had last felt, how he'd felt the second he had decided to point the gun at his own head and pull the trigger.
"Basically, I think Olivia was a puzzle to him," Huang said. "And up until the very end, he couldn't figure her out."
"And you think that's why he didn't follow the M.O.?" Cragen asked. Or maybe it was Munch; Elliot wasn't paying close enough attention to tell.
He was half listening to Huang, Cragen, Munch and Fin wrapping up the case in the squadroom, half lost in thought, sitting in his chair with his feet on his desk and a lost stare. Way too many things were happening in his mind as he kept revisiting the talk with Kathy the night before, the moment he had parted ways with her, with his golden ring, with the life he knew. She had been relieved to see him well, to know Olivia was okay. She had already packed a bag for him for the first few weeks and told Elizabeth and Dickie he was moving out. There wasn't even a question, it was a done deal. He had apologized for the way things had turned out, she had let him stay that night, and he'd slept restlessly on the couch.
"That and his feelings for her," the doc replied to the question. "I think that, even though he was never convinced she reciprocated his feelings, she made him see and feel things he didn't think he could anymore, she gave him… hope... when he had spent so much time convincing himself there was none. He tested her, he even drugged her, assuming that would make her reveal something she might be concealing, some hidden side of her, a bad side, but she never gave him enough reason to confirm his hypothesis, she just kept surprising him."
Except that there was a hidden side to Olivia, Elliot thought. It wasn't an evil side, far from that: it was a vulnerable side, a really fragile side, where she kept, even from herself, all those traumatic feelings about her father, her mother and her fear of abandonment, her panic of depending on someone other than herself. He'd had a couple of glimpses into that side of her, like on the night they'd shared together in the cribs and during her last conversation with Downey, when she'd confessed she was afraid of getting attached to someone she might lose later.
"All right but I don't get it," Fin said. "Why did he decide to kill himself in the end?"
"In his mind, it was his life or hers, and he ultimately chose hers. According to Liv and Elliot's statements, right before shooting himself, he gave her one last test, one last chance to show him she was evil or that she could love him back. What he couldn't reconcile was that she didn't choose either side; she didn't show an evil side, even held captive and tortured, but she couldn't love him back either. In his mind, he had finally found the person he'd been looking for his whole life, only to find out he couldn't have her. His response to that was to hurt her, kill her, but he couldn't do it either. He saw no other way out but taking his own life."
Everybody's left me, she had said, in such a weak voice, with tears coming from somewhere deep within, and Elliot hadn't been able to forget that statement ever since. Elliot remembered how she had told Downey she held on to him because he'd never left her, because he was there, and he couldn't help feeling guilty. Maybe he hadn't left her, but had he really been there for her the way she'd needed him to? The way she deserved? He had always been so focused on his responsibility towards Kathy and his kids that he had never realized he had a responsibility towards Olivia as well.
It wasn't a responsibility bound by blood or by a contract or convention, but one created purely from love, originated from the importance they had gained in each other's lives. It occurred to him that she had fewer people she could count on than his wife or any of his children; if he was the most important person in her life, how was that not his responsibility? He had always been so focused on how wrong it would be to get closer to her that he had never realized how wrong it would be to turn away from her. And even deeper than that realization was the realization that she was also the most important person in his life, certainly the one he wanted and felt free to tell everything to, the one he needed to be around to keep sane, whose smile he needed to see in order to know everything would be all right.
"There's no way of knowing," Huang was saying, "but I believe that Liv made him doubt his convictions, the same ones that had led him to hate women so much, to kidnap, torture and kill three victims. I believe that, in that final moment, he was confronted with the realization that maybe he had been wrong, forcing him to face the atrocities he had committed in the name of those beliefs. He had convinced himself that women were incapable of love, that this made them intrinsically evil, deserving of what he did to them, but Liv defied that theory. She kept showing him she was, indeed, capable of love, only not capable of loving him."
"A psychopath with feelings," Munch laughed.
"That's the thing," Huang countered, "he wasn't a psychopath. Psychopaths have no feelings, no guilt, no empathy. Downey had feelings, he was just trying so hard not to."
Just like Elliot had tried hard not to as well, for so long. Everything in his mind was telling him he was crazy to move out, that he was doing everything wrong, that he should be feeling guilty over the end of his marriage, but, for the first time, his feelings were speaking louder; he realized denying Olivia the love she deserved was just as wrong as leaving his family, and that staying married to Kathy just to keep the family together was not fair to her either. He slid his thumb along his ring finger, still not used to not bumping into the metal around it.
That's when Olivia walked in, making everyone go suddenly quiet, watching her walk to her desk, wearing a hoodie under the leather jacket that she removed and placed on the back of her chair. Elliot observed her, trying to make out how she felt after the way she'd walked away from him the day before, but he couldn't see much; she seemed a little numb, she looked tired, like she hadn't been able to sleep much. She looked up, staring at each of the silent faces as if questioning why they'd stopped talking.
"We weren't expecting you to come in today," Cragen explained softly. "I thought I told you to take a few days."
Olivia sighed audibly. "I appreciate everyone's concern," she said, her voice definitive, "but I really, really need things to go back to normal."
She sent Elliot a quick, meaningful look then, and he knew what she meant; she was asking him to go back to normal around her, but he wondered if she had seen his suitcase in the locker room, his ringless hand – normal was a ship that had sailed long ago, and as much as he knew his marriage might not have lasted much longer anyway, he couldn't deny his expectations towards her, about finally being free to act on his feelings for her without restraint. He had wanted to rush to her place the minute he had walked out of the house, but he'd decided to wait; he wanted to give her the space to recover from what she'd been through, but he couldn't let her use that as a shield to protect herself from her fears, use it as an excuse to run away from him just because she was scared.
"What were you guys discussing?" she asked, sitting down and spinning in her chair towards the center of the room, where everyone but Elliot stood, and he reckoned she was probably eager to divert the attention being paid to her.
"We were just discussing the final details of the case," Fin said softly.
"Seems like a good time to talk forensics then," said Melinda Warner as she walked into the squadroom. "Here's my final report."
Cragen took the file and opened it. "And?" he asked, looking at the medical examiner instead of reading the report.
"Suicide, no doubt," Warner replied. "The angle of the shot is consistent with Downey pulling the trigger with his right hand, and gunshot residue on his hand and arm also shows he was the one holding the gun."
"That should get IAB off your backs," Cragen said, looking from Olivia to Elliot. "Thanks, Melinda, much appreciated."
Warner turned towards Olivia with a smile. "I'm glad you're back in one piece," she said affectionately, earning a small smile in response before leaving.
"Anything else, Dr. Huang?" the captain asked, his tone suggesting he wanted to quite literally close the case.
"I think that about does it," Huang said, smiling lightly. "I think we're all ready to move on from this one."
Cragen nodded at Huang, who turned to leave, stopping by Olivia's desk to give her a light squeeze on the shoulder and a smile.
"If you ever want to talk," he said, then turned to Elliot. "You both know where to find me."
"Thanks," Olivia said, with a smile that faded quickly as soon as the doc left, all the while carefully avoiding Elliot's stare.
When she turned back towards her desk and him, Elliot realized the captain had been standing right next to him, watching her too – and probably watching him as he watched her as well. He had a bad feeling.
"Can we talk for a minute in my office?" Cragen said, and Elliot felt a chill running down his spine as he remembered the pictures of him and Olivia at the bar; he'd almost forgotten the captain would have to do something about them.
Without even answering, he just sighed and stood up, waiting for Olivia to follow him. He shook his head, wishing he'd had a chance to have a decent conversation with her before they had to have this chat with Cragen, a chat that might change the course of their careers for good, as if their lives weren't already in upheaval. He wished he'd at least had the chance to give her a heads up about the pictures before she had to see them for the first time in Cragen's hands. The captain entered the room last and closed the door.
"Please, have a seat," he said, and Elliot hated how careful he was trying to be; this was not going to be good.
Elliot and Olivia sat down next to each other, watching it as Cragen got behind his desk and took the file from inside a drawer. Even though he wasn't surprised, Elliot still swallowed hard in anticipation, his sweaty hands turning into fists with tension. Without sitting down, the captain cleared his throat and unceremoniously opened the file, revealing the low-resolution picture of them kissing. Elliot didn't look at Olivia, but he felt her whole body tensing up at the sight, and he knew that she knew what was coming.
This was it. This was the last nail in the coffin of everything Elliot had ever considered to be his life.