Author's Note: There is a small part of this that may look like it's referencing recent events in fandom. I promise, it was planned before the events happened, and you can find a hint to it back in chapter one.

It's raining when Elliot wakes up the next morning, sheets of water pounding against the window by his too-small bed.

He peers outside the window and sees the morning sky marbled in streaks and shades of gray, and he watches the raindrops race each other in torrents. It's hard to ignite the fire in him, not today, not when there's water pouring down from the sky and extinguishing all the fight inside him.

He groans, turns over, buries his face in his pillow. About the only things alive that could appreciate this damn weather would be the ducks, and they're probably having a swimmingly good time out there.

Goodbye, Eddie. I hope I never have to see you again.

Yes, when Olivia said it, she was referring to his undercover alias and not the whole person, but it still stung to hear – stings to think about, even now, more than twelve hours later. Olivia has been such a major part of his life, both in her presence and in her absence, that to think she doesn't want to hear from him right now turns his stomach.

He places a quick phone call, and then slams the pillow over his face.

Fuck.

It's the first chance Olivia's had to breathe since she got to work, between trying to coordinate a joint response team with Brooklyn SVU and McGrath breathing down her neck, and she groans and pinches the bridge of her nose between her fingers.

There's a knock at the door to her office, and she looks up. If it's Rollins with another half-hearted apology from the Brooklyn detectives, she's going to tell Rollins exactly which orifice of theirs she can shove it up. "Come in," she says, and she squares her shoulders.

"I have a delivery for a Captain Benson?" a young guy says, poking his head through the open door. He holds up a paper sack with the logo of her favorite Chinese restaurant on the side, by way of explanation, handing her a bottle of tea at the same time. "It's all been taken care of, ma'am, I hope you have a great day."

The only thing in the bag is a small takeout container and a fortune cookie. She opens the container to find egg rolls. Confused, she looks to the receipt stapled to the outside of the bag, and sees someone's handwriting scrawled across the bottom of the receipt.

Customer note: Have an extra egg roll on me, I'm coming back. Promise. - El

It's not Elliot's handwriting – likely, it's whoever put together her order at the restaurant – but it's funny, because it's his words, but not his writing, just like the letter was his writing, but not his words.

Her words from the night before, when she spilled her heart to him on that picnic blanket, come back to her in a rush. It's the sandwiches, and the Chinese takeout, and not having anyone to split my spare egg roll with.

She still doesn't have anyone to split her spare egg roll with – Fin would roll his eyes and ask why she couldn't eat it all herself, and Rollins tends to order the wontons instead – but she crunches into it and savors the bite. The tea is hibiscus rose, and she smiles, because he remembered what she'd drank the night before and found a way to put his own spin on it – his way of giving her a rose, perhaps? She's never thought of him as a romantic before, but maybe Italy's made him softer. The guy was also married for a long time, though, almost 37 years, and that doesn't happen by accident.

She's tempted to take out the cheap burner phone she'd picked up at Duane Reade the other night, the one that no one in the NYPD knows exists except for her, and use it to text him thank you for the egg rolls, it was very kind, but she steels herself.

It's a step in the right direction, two if she counts the tea, but the chasm between them is much larger than a single step.

He'll know when the time is right.

Her fortune cookie reads if you want the rainbow, you have to tolerate the rain.

She looks out the window, at the torrents of water hitting the sidewalks below, and sighs. The Biblical Noah – not to be mistaken with her own miracle – had to wait through 40 days of rain before the waters began to recede, and longer still before the rainbow cascaded across the sky.

She hopes her wait won't be near as long.

The line between Elliot and Eddie – reality and fantasy – is becoming more blurred by the day.

He looks in the mirror, doesn't recognize himself with the beard and the bald head; his own mother doesn't realize he's her own son until he opens his mouth, and even then, he's not sure how lucid she actually is.

It's not just his looks, because at the end of the day, it's hair, but it's also the things they're having him do – he's known that Organized Crime plays by a different set of rules than SVU, a little more whatever gets the job done. But there are things he's witnessed, and done, now that he's moved into being squarely at Albi's right hand, that he'll never forget if he lives a thousand lifetimes after this one.

He knows where the bodies are buried, if there's enough of them left to be buried. There are nights he lays awake, staring at the ceiling, hearing a cacophony of screams echoing inside his head. Some, he knows are victims of the Family's. One, he recognizes very clearly as Kathy's, from the night of the explosion. And others still are unrecognizable, shrill shrieks screaming into the void, begging for someone – anyone – to hear. To save them.

He swears one of them is Olivia's, but he can't place his finger on it.

I'll do anything, anything at all, as long as I can go to sleep at night.

Except, even now, that's becoming questionable, and his lack of sleep is leading his tenuous grasp on sanity to slacken even more.

She'd left her tote bag and the canister of oats behind, the last – only – time she'd visited, and he can't figure out if it was intentional or not, but he's taken to tossing out a few handfuls of oats to the ducks along with the bread. His visits to them have become fewer and further between, what with Albi and the Family escalating their actions, despite the fact the ducks are literally right outside his front door.

"Dad, we're worried about you," Kathleen says, and she looks so much like her mother with the concern radiating from her eyes. "We're all worried about you." He knows she talks to Olivia, or has talked to her in the past, and he doesn't know if she's included in the all, but knowing his daughter like he does, Olivia is the unspoken variable that will always be included.

He scoffs. "Don't worry about your old man, I'll get through this, and then, once this is over, we'll be a family again."

We'll be a family. What does that even look like? He'd given up so much of his children's childhoods to his career; Kathy was always the one who did the school runs and the homework help, chaperoning the field trips and baking cookies for the classroom holiday parties. He'd try to be at their games and their recitals, unless there was a case, and there were more cases than there weren't.

Even Eli, who'd probably gotten the most of him that any of them had since Kathleen was very young, still had to contend with his random, sudden jaunts across Italy, crisscrossing the peninsula from Rome to Naples to Venice and back again in a matter of a few days, sometimes.

We'll be a family. Except, his children's definition of their family and his own are two slightly different definitions, because his will always include Olivia, and by extension, Noah now too.

He lays awake more nights than he doesn't, staring at the water-stained ceiling above his bed; the memories of the past take their toll. He rolls over, thumbs through a worn copy of The Name of the Rose that he picked up at an English-language bookstore in Rome, picks up where he left off; he'd never figured himself for much of a great literature lover, but it gave him something to do on those long nights.

The fact that Olivia, the beleaguered daughter of a literature professor, could spout off references to Dickens or Tolstoy, Shakespeare or Dostoevsky, or almost anyone else in between, has absolutely nothing to do with it. Reading these books is in no way a way to try to stay connected to her, even in its most tenuous state.

Besides, he's not sure if she's ever read any of the works of Umberto Eco, but his boss in Rome had chided him for not knowing the Italian classics. "You sit here in our country, walk our streets, eat our food, breathe our air, but you do not know our culture!" he'd said, and Elliot had stared at him.

Of course, he knew the culture, or he thought he did; he'd taken all the walking tours on his days off, visited the historical sites, stood in awe at St. Peter's Basilica. He'd marveled at the Sistine Chapel, and spent so many hours looking at the statues and paintings in the Borghese that Kathy finally had to drag him away from the Caravaggios. There was something captivating about all of it, something he'd never allowed himself to fully realize before.

The hard part was, every step along the way, he knew Olivia would have loved it. She would have been right next to him gaping at the paintings, wondering how someone could do so much with a brush, paint and a matter of thousands of strokes. She would have soaked in the history of it, and not complained about the heel of her sandal coming off like Kathy had at the Colosseum.

People died violent deaths here, Kathy, and you really want to complain about your sandal right now?

He'd even gotten the courage, once, about two years ago, when he was passing through Venice, to write Olivia a brief postcard and mail it to the address he still knew to be hers. "Wish you were here. I'm coming home. Don't know when. But I will. See you then. Semper Fi, El." The picture on the other side was a beautiful view of Venice at sunset, the canals painted rich shades of purple and pink.

Of course, he'd never known if she'd gotten it or not, but considering she'd never mentioned receiving anything from him in all the time he'd been back, he didn't think she had.

He'd taken his boss's advice, though, once he realized it for what it was – it wasn't a condemnation of him, necessarily, but more about fully immersing himself in this once-in-a-lifetime experience of living in another country. Listen to their music, read their novels, watch their films; truly live.

I wonder if Olivia has read this book.

He shakes his head. Of course, even when he tries to distract himself with something completely unrelated, his thoughts always circle back around to her. But maybe, she's the truest part of who Elliot is. She doesn't want anything more to do with Eddie, because Eddie isn't someone she knows. Elliot, on the other hand – Elliot is her partner. Was. Is. He can't bear to think of them in the past tense, but he can't imagine that Captain Benson would entertain the notion of still having a partner, especially when he knows there had to be at least one after him.

He falls asleep like that, still holding the book in one hand, while his other hand drifts above his head, as if it's reaching for an invisible hand that isn't there.

Olivia uses her connections with Bell to make sure Elliot is still alive. "Believe me, Olivia, I would tell you if anything had happened to him," Bell says, shaking her head. "I know you're worried, but he's the most capable detective I've met in a long time. I trust him."

"He is, and I trust him too, Ayanna," Olivia says. "He's also a man who's mourning his wife's death, and his family needs him." I need him, but she doesn't dare admit that weakness out loud. She's never needed a man before, least of all Elliot, and she certainly doesn't need him now, but her want for him is so great that it feels like a need.

"As soon as we get all our ducks in a row and take them out, Detective Stabler will be back wearing his badge with us in no time," Bell says, and it's with a tone of voice that says question me on this, and you'll lose this last connection to him.

She smiles to herself, thinking of the ducks by his van. She wonders if he still feeds the ducks, or if that's something that has fallen by the wayside with the push toward resolving this case. It's been about a month and a half since that afternoon with the ducks, and she's held steadfast in not contacting him. If she really wanted him badly enough, she knows roughly where to find him – and she's not opposed to a little light undercover, if necessary, though nothing like his – but this is his decision.

They're not going to play games; they're not going to second-guess each other. Not anymore. All she wants right now is a clear, honest and open line of communication between him and her, with all the respect that she feels like they're both due.

And that's why she cut off Eddie and only wants to speak to Elliot. She's not here to play in parallel universes or fantasy; she wants the reality, the facts – and if the facts end up hurting, then at least it's true and not scribbled fallacies on a page that left her questioning her reality.

And so, she waits. She waits, but she continues to live her life – she watches as Rollins and Carisi fall all over themselves to not disclose what's so blatantly obvious, the unit arrests people and she makes sure the bad guys stay off the streets, she takes Noah to school and dance and watches as her little boy grows up, one day at a time.

That's all she can do.

His stomach is growling as he pulls himself out of bed, but he's not in the mood to go to the Little Albania Diner today, despite the fact that he's promised Rita he'd stop by; she seems frightened, though, of what, he's not entirely sure. She's a doe caught in headlights, and he suspects the people driving the car are the same people he's chasing too. He'll go by later; there's a boxing exhibition at the gym tonight that Albi's been planning for weeks, and he's pretty sure something's going to go down there.

There's almost no food in the van, except for the remainder of Olivia's oatmeal, and he pours himself a bowl of it. He's not going for taste, particularly, not today; he's going for the sensation of food in his stomach to power the first part of his day.

And then he sees it, a fluttering white piece of paper tucked between the oats. He unfolds it; it's a napkin, from someplace called Encore Diner, but that's not the part that sticks out to him. The part that catches his attention is the loopy black scrawl he'd recognize anywhere as Olivia's handwriting. "Call me, 332-555-0606. – Maggie" At the bottom there's a doodle of a heart.

He knows that's not Olivia's number; hers is a 212 area code, one that she's had forever, same as for work. He realizes it, as soon as he thinks about it though – this must be another number, her burner. A smile slides across his face, and he tucks the napkin in his pocket.

Maggie. Margaret. Olivia Margaret Benson. You're a clever one, Liv.

After eating, he goes outside and scatters the remainder of the oats on the ground, watching as the ducks come to have their breakfast meal. If there's a merciful God, like he's prayed to every Sunday since before he can remember, he won't have too many more mornings to feed these ducks, and he hopes someone else will take care of them. He lopes over by the banks of the water and eases his weary self onto the ground below, taking a pebble and skipping it across the water.

Six skips. Not bad, could do better. Another pebble, seven this time.

He skips pebbles until he's cleared a small patch of dirt, and then he stands, sighs, and looks at the camper and then down at himself. He thinks of the woman whose number he has in his pocket, who has full possession of his heart, even if she doesn't realize it, and who he knows is waiting for his call. He thinks of his family, and how they need their father and son.

Elliot may not have everything, but he has enough, which is more than he can say for his Eddie persona. It's taken his time away to realize how much he has to lose if he lets Elliot permanently fall by the wayside.

I'm ready to go back to being Elliot again. It's time for Eddie to go into the ashes, and for Elliot to rise like a phoenix from them.

-to be continued-