Author's Note: Directly follows Organized Crime 1x04 "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of" and references SVU 22x12 "In the Year We All Fell Down." A quick little one-shot to get out (some of) the emotions I was feeling after the episodes.

Title comes from "Falling Slowly" by Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová.

Somehow, even in the darkness of his lowest nights – it was her voice that he wanted to hear.

The kids were well-meaning, but their complaints were static when his own personal clarion bell stood next to them, and her mere presence alone could drown even the best of intentions in a swirling haze of confusion.

Besides, he had to thank Kathleen, he guessed, because without her – no, but Liv would have found a way to be there at the intervention anyway. No, Liv is a lot of things to a lot of people, especially him, but she's not psychic. Once, maybe, they could have completed each other's sentences, but that was before he went silent for so long.

Until Kathy, in her own twisted and contorted and completely unintentional way, helped him to find his voice again.

Now, to make Olivia hear what he had to say.

As he heard the rings on Olivia's phone click over to voicemail, he thought of all the things he could say – maybe should say – responses to the words they'd left hanging in the air that night between them. How he had finally said the three words – I love you - he'd somehow always wanted to tell her, ever since the day they met, but not in the way she should have been told.

It should have been on a lazy Sunday morning in bed, holding her bare in his arms. Or at one of their myriads of favorite restaurants that dotted the city. Or in the station, across the desks that they once shared; in another lifetime, they'd spent thousands of countless hours looking at each other across that expanse, you could live another lifetime retracing it. Or in her office, the physical manifestation of everything she's worked for.

Not in the middle of an intervention with his five children ringing the room as solemn witnesses to a moment none of them should have ever seen. The older kids would remember the kind of impact she'd had on them – on him – but Eli, no. The years with Eli had been some of the best of his and Kathy's years together. Eli wouldn't understand. Not like the others might. And not even his best – scratch that, worst – coverup could hide that, no matter what the intention.

He really did love all six of the people in the room with him. But five of them were genetic extensions of himself and of Kathy, some combination of their genes running through their veins. Loving them was a primal instinct clawing from his chest. He'd always be their greatest champion. The sixth – Olivia, his Liv – was something altogether different that defied any description. They'd known each other so, so long. If there wasn't some form of affection, they would have been driven apart years ago, even before he left. But it went far beyond mere affection. It was innate and engrained on his soul, and he felt it in every breath.

He couldn't remember when it started, only that it seemed to have stretched from before he even knew she existed. She was the beginning and the end of so many things for him, and always had been.

A bell, once rung, cannot be un-rung.

Words, once said, cannot be unsaid.

There was no way he was going to leave all that on her voicemail, especially not when he couldn't articulate half of it without stumbling over spots where words failed to adequately convey everything he meant. That was a conversation the two of them would need to have, one of these days, but not by playing a game of voicemail tag. They'd have it, just the two of them, alone. Like it should have been all along.

He'd been a cop for so long that he'd gotten used to his actions taking the place of words. Left in the absence of all else, he couldn't work his way around what he knew to be true beyond measure.

"Call me when you get this."

Two new voicemails.

Because of course, now that the veil of silence had been breached between them, now he wouldn't shut up. She fought back the first inklings of a smile and brushed her hair back over her head.

He could talk all he wanted, not that he usually did, but Olivia knew that he'd never listen. And that would always be his weakest point.

Except, he seemed to listen the night before – when it was the seven of them in one room, seven people with various levels of affection for each other between them. She was the odd one out, but sometimes, as he'd spoken, it was as if he was blind to everyone else in the room but her. The family, all together, except she wasn't family – except, maybe she always had been, on the periphery. She'd been perhaps the most important one, making sure that Elliot - their father, their husband – made it home to them more or less intact at the end of the night.

She couldn't even let herself remember the words he'd said in the heat of the moment. And yeah, he'd amended it, but not after the most awkward, excruciating silence she'd endured in what felt like forever. He couldn't mean them, not really. He wasn't in his right mind, like Vanessa had been in the café, except he wasn't the kind of person to lash out with knives and guns. Not that Vanessa had been, either, she knew that in her heart. Vanessa was a good woman who reached the end of what had been a very long, frayed rope, and still managed to avoid tumbling all the way into the inky abyss.

There was no way he could mean it, not truly, not in the way that most people meant it.

Granted, in their line of work, the way most people they encountered meant it was as a threat. I love you – but I'm going to hurt you in a thousand unimaginable ways anyway, because I'm a sadistic monster and because I love you, you'll let me. That wasn't Elliot – not the Elliot she thought she knew, anyway. Far too much time and distance spanned between the two versions of the man, but she knew they were fundamentally the same person. Just like, somewhere beneath the scar tissue inflicted by the same time and distance, she was still the woman he'd known. (Loved?)

He'd retreat – leave for ten years, sure – and leave a thousand unasked questions, and maybe the emotional torment hurt more than the equivalent physical cuts dancing across her skin would have done. She knew he would never take his service weapon and do untoward with it; she trusted him with every knife in her kitchen: butter, to knife, to the giant meat carving one she'd bought a year or two before when, on a whim, she'd thought she'd give Noah a taste of a picture book Thanksgiving. That was before she'd realized she had not the foggiest clue on how to roast a turkey and gave up, and then a day or two later, there'd been a serial rapist on the loose down at Hudson, and she barely got to have a lukewarm deli turkey sandwich on the day itself.

All her best intentions flew out the window when the men in her life were involved.

Noah – and Elliot, she added. Somehow, even though it'd never been the two of them in her life at the same time, it only felt natural to think of it that way. They were an integral part of who she was, outside of the badge.

Once, thinking beyond the badge would have been unfathomable. Lately, it was almost all she could do. With the world being in disarray, as if it were being shaken around like a snowglobe caught in a tornado, she had to find the little things, like the people who meant the most to her. Like Elliot.

If Elliot wanted to talk, she'd listen. She'd listen all night, until the first lazy rays of sun trickled over the horizon. She'd listen, but when she spoke, she could only hope he'd grant her the same courtesy.

She dashed off a quick text message and set out for her first cup of morning coffee. She couldn't bear to hear any voices but her own until that first wave of caffeine flooded through her system. Not even his. Not today.

"Yes, let's talk."

-fini-