A/N: "Girls don't play sports," the boy says to Reina as he crumples up his sandwich tin-foil into a firm, silver ball. "Except for Olivia." - Olivia Gatwood (The Only Thing I Brought From America)

DISCLAIMER: I do not own the characters as written on the TV show, but this version of them? All mine.

"You're not telling us anything we haven't already figured out on our own," Elliot fumed. One hand was on the hood of the patrol car, clutching at the base of the antenna, the other was wrapped around Olivia's waist. "Start giving us some real answers, here."

Cragen bit his lip as he drummed his fingers along the hood of the cruiser. "Your father is on a case we've been trying to crack for a year. The last insider got himself…" he looked at Elliot, then at Olivia, and he couldn't say it. Not out loud. "Anyway, your father got close, got himself brought into it, and the guys he's messing with don't play fair. Joe knew that they'd test him, that they'd go after his family to get him to prove his loyalty." He held up both hands. "We were never gonna let anything happen to you, okay? We had the place covered, so as soon as the bastard made a move…"

"Your guys would start drawing and shooting," Elliot spat. "With Liv and DJ in the path of flying fucking bullets," he scoffed, looked around at the campus greenway, and stared down the path as DJ's class was ushered back into its classroom. "We're not far enough away, that's the damn problem. I mean, what else is it gonna take, huh?" He knitted his brow and bit his lip. "We left everything we've ever known behind, fucking got married to keep her mother away and she still found us, now my father is throwing us to the lions, too!" He pulled Olivia closer to him, the wind kicking up the leaves around them, and he moved his hand off the car to cradle her head. "Does my mother know about this?"

"Please, I'd have to sedate her if she did," Cragen griped. "To answer your questions," the man sighed, and he looked at Olivia again, the last two years playing like movie trailers on the widescreen of his mind. She'd already been through so much, her childhood had been nonexistent and now she was married and living on her own, sacrificing whatever was left of it for a chance at life; this is not what she needed to be handed right now and he hated to be the delivery man. "I drove up here last night, we gave your father a couple of…"

"We know," Elliot nearly growled. "Good luck tracking them now." He narrowed his eyes. "So you were in on it, this was, what some kind of…"

"Sting operation," Abby Carmichael pointed at Cragen with wide eyes, clearly excited about being in the middle of an episode of NYPD Blue. She clapped her hands and grunted. "I knew it," she grunted as she did a victorious dance through a pile of leaves.

Elliot looked at her with amused eyes and a half-smile. "Yeah, uh, good job, Abs," he quipped. He rolled his eyes back toward Cragen. "You tell my father to figure something else out. Security here is…"

"Why do you think all of this happened, Kid?" Cragen waved a hand around. "We didn't send in the calvary because some punk pulled the alarm to get out of a pop quiz." He cleared his throat, leaned closer to them, and said, "He was here, right in that building, and the alarm went off because he chose the wrong fucking staircase to climb."

Olivia's eyes darted to the linguistics building, where she and Elliot had been for their last two classes, where they would have been for another hour if the alarm hadn't gone off, and the fear struck her like lightning. "How did you know?" she asked, tilting her head. "Elliot threw that damn cross into the middle of the damn road, it's probably wrapped around the front rim of an eighteen-wheeler by now! How did..." It hit her suddenly, the way Cragen's eyes flashed from her to Elliot and back again, and she recognized the look. "You're tracking him, too, aren't you?"

Nodding with a heavy sigh, Cragen said, "Yeah, we are." He scratched the length of his neck. "We know where he went, but we can't do anything until we have something solid to nail him on. We need to…"

"Catch him in the act?" Elliot snapped, then his head dropped, he looked down at Olivia, cupped her chin, and kissed her once. Taking a deep breath, he let the words Simone Bryce said to him ring in his ears. "I don't know what these sons of bitches are up to, but you tell my father that…" he shook his head and looked up at Cragen. "If he would have warned us or just asked, we would have helped. But this?" he winced. "Man, if he could use us to bait the bastards, knowing what Liv has gone through, knowing what she's already had to face...risking DJ's life...and mine, then he's not the man I thought he was." He closed his eyes, remembering the yelling, the hitting, the drinking. Opening them, he gritted his teeth. "He's so much fucking worse."

"Hey, go easy on him, he's a damn good cop and he's just doing his job!" Cragen didn't mean to yell, and he immediately regretted it.

"A good cop?" Elliot slammed a balled fist down on the hood of the patrol car. "This is how a good cop runs things? This is the kind of protecting and serving you do?" He let out a bitter laugh. "I used to think I wanted to be a cop like my father, like you, but ya know what? Me and Liv?" He smirked, the devil in his eyes, "We're gonna be nothing like either of you," he huffs, "Thank God."

"Fair," Cragen said, the cop in him fighting to win over the man who'd grown to love these kids. "So I'm asking you now, if I can guarantee that no one is going to even get close enough to…"

"He already got close enough," Elliot said with a waver in his voice. Shutting his eyes again, he moved his lips across Olivia's forehead. "We were standing right in front of the emergency stairs." He heard Cragen's breath hitch, slowly turned his head, and as he noticed the cops and firefighters packing up and getting back into their cars, he asked, "What's this all about? What does my father have to do to prove his loyalty to these guys? What makes them think he won't do it unless they have us?"

Cragen walked with a huff around to the side of the car and gritted his teeth. "Will you lower your damn voice?" he demanded as he looked around. "You wanna cause the whole damn school to panic, here?" He shook his head and exhaled. "They need your father to…"

Again, Carmichael spoke up, her prime-time vocabulary coming in handy. "Whack a rat!" she aimed her fingers like guns and narrowed her eyes.

Cragen shot her an annoyed look then glared at Elliot. "Who the hell is that?"

"A friend," Elliot chuckled. Then he ran his teeth over his lip. "She right? They ask my dad to kill someone?" His arms worked tighter around Olivia, his chin rested on the top of her head, and he waited for Cragen's answer.

The breeze blew harder, cracking leaves swirled around them like gold and red butterflies. The chill in the air grew more icy, sinister, and the bell from the chapel tower started to chime.

Ave Maria…gratia plena…

"Yeah," Cragen finally answered, and then there was more silence.

...Ave, Ave Dominus...Dominus Tecum...Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus...

Elliot stared the man down, waiting for the answer to his other question. A harsh wind rushed through the trees, taking with it leaves that were not yet ready to let go of their branches.

...et benedictus fructus ventris...ventris tui, Jesus...Ave Maria...

"They know he won't do it unless he has no choice," Cragen admitted, "Unless he had to, to save you." He felt the chill surround him, then watched Elliot try like hell to wrap Olivia up even tighter. "They know, because…" he didn't know how to say it.

...Sancta Maria, Mater Dei...

"Because?" Elliot pulled one hand away from Olivia and rolled his wrist at Cragen, asking him to finish the thought, to give him the answer he needed.

...ora, ora pro nobis peccatoribus…

Cragen took a deep breath, clutched the lapels of his wool peacoat closed a little tighter, and exhaled. "Because it's me."

...Nunc et in hora mortis, in hora mortis nostrae...Ave Maria

The bell quieted and Elliot and Olivia looked at each other. Simone Bryce had been wrong. Choosing Olivia over his father was the easiest choice he'd ever had to make. He'd choose her over anyone. But this one? This one was hard. Now he had to face being the reason someone was killed. The choice between saving a life or not. He exhaled again, his breath in white clouds in front of him, and he gave Cragen a sideways glance. "Okay," he heard himself say. Then he looked down into Olivia's wide, shocked eyes. "On one condition."

A/N: Thanks for reading.