Author's Note: Sorry for the delay in updating this! My real life got busy in May and then I got wrapped up with some EO oneshots (you can find those on my profile if you haven't read them) and the finale...but here's the new chapter!

TW: This is the "Lewis chapter." I didn't go into great amounts of detail, but it's definitely talked about. You've been warned.

Ten years of silence had steeled her toward expecting nothing but that same eerie silence where Elliot was involved – so when she heard him pick up after the second ring, she breathed out a silent sigh of relief. Things had really changed; he was actually there, and she wasn't left to deal with the ghost of his voicemail message anymore. "You rang?" she asked, tapping her fingers against her steering wheel.

"Yeah, hey," he said. "I was hoping you'd get my message."

"What's going on?" It shouldn't be such a novelty to hear his voice again, and yet, here they were. Everything old really was new again.

"We got a lead on Wheatley today I think you should know about."

"Oh?"

"Look, Liv, this – this isn't really the kind of thing I want to talk about on the phone," he said, his breath catching on her name. "I'm at home now, if you want to swing by. Please." And then, almost as an afterthought, "I'll order us in dinner, anywhere you want, I just – I need to see you."

If she wanted to be petty, she could say that there were a thousand times she'd needed to see him, but he hadn't been there. Pettiness wasn't in her nature, though, and there was an undercurrent of tension she could hear in his voice that made her realize this was his plaintive cry for – if not the help he desperately needed, then something resembling her companionship.

"I'll let Lucy know I'll be late again tonight, and I'll be there as soon as I can. You can choose the food."

As they finished their call, and she turned her car around to head in Elliot's direction instead of her own home, she wondered when everything had become so convoluted in their lives. Probably about the time they'd shaken hands at the precinct as Cragen introduced her as his new partner, come to think of it.

She made what she felt was likely record time between her precinct and the place Elliot was calling his temporary home. "Come on in, you just missed the delivery guy," Elliot said, sweeping his hand in a welcoming gesture. "I hope chicken satay sounds good?"

"Sounds perfect," she said, taking off her jacket, and she could smell the delicious aroma of Thai spices simmering against the Styrofoam containers. Her stomach growled, and she remembered the half a stale bologna sandwich she'd wolfed down earlier in the day. "I thought you were having a day out with yourself."

"Yeah, well, I was at that pizzeria you suggested, and then Bell called me in," he said, spooning a mix of vegetables onto a paper plate and taking a couple skewers for himself. "Uh, you know how we've been investigating Richard Wheatley and his associates."

"You might have mentioned it." She speared a spring roll and savored the bite she took. "What does he have to do with SVU, though?"

"It's not about SVU." His eyes grew dark and etched lines crisscrossed his face. "Bell – we found out from our CI, uh, Kathy was the intended target. Not me."

"What?" It was one thing for Kathy to be the accidental martyr taking the damage meant for her husband, and it was another thing entirely for her to be the target. "A-are you sure?"

"I crossed a guy, I don't know. My work in Italy didn't exactly lend itself to making buddies with the organized crime families that run things over there, and maybe killing her was supposed to send me a message."

"Like a horse's head on your pillow, like from The Godfather."

"Something like that, anyway."

"But," she poked at her vegetables. Somehow, her hunger had abated slightly after hearing about Kathy being the target. "What does this have to do with SVU? Or if not SVU, then –" She couldn't find it in herself to complete her thought. None of the ways that sentence could end would be very pleasant, and she had to hear it from him.

He took her hand in his, and he squinted his eyes closed, as if he couldn't bear the thought of looking at her while he said whatever it was he was about to say, but needed that fragile moment of connection between them. "It's you. We – they – our CI overheard them mentioning you, that you need to be, oh, God, taken care of."

The image of Kathy hooked up to every possible life-saving measure in that cold, sterile hospital room flashed in her head, and in the end, even the greatest minds in medical science hadn't even been enough to save her, and she felt her stomach flip over. "Oh."

He squeezed her hand tightly and saw her stricken face contort as he spoke, as she absorbed the enormity of the information he was giving her. "It's not only you," he said, "it seems like they want to go after anyone remotely connected to me."

"Your kids. Eli – what about him?" She looked around the room; there wasn't evidence of a teenage boy there any longer, and she could have sworn she'd at least seen a half-empty bottle of Axe on the end table the last time she'd been there.

"Maureen came by a little while ago and took Eli to her boyfriend Carl's parents' place in Chappaqua." He let out a deep, pained sigh. "He seemed okay when I told him, and they have a dog and a big yard and it'll be good for him to spend a little time there." He worked his lower lip over with the edge of his teeth. "I – I want all of you with me, where I can protect you, but they managed to get to Kathy even when I was standing right there." He choked out a sob and rested his forehead against the cool edge of the table. "I was right there, Liv, and I couldn't do anything to save her."

For a moment, she fell silent, and he wondered if she'd gotten up and left him, until he felt her come around behind him, her arms looping over and down his shoulders as she embraced him. "You're doing all you can, El," she said, her quavering voice barely above a whisper, "you're doing the best that you can, and I'm proud of you for that."

"I already failed her. I can't fail any more of you."

"Why do you believe you failed her?" The tone of her question was soft and even, much like the tone he'd heard Huang take with a scared victim – and even with himself – more than a time or two.

"It should have been me. I was the one who brought this violence into our lives. She was a PTA room mom every year for over twenty years, for Christ's sake!" He felt a vein pulsing and throbbing in his forehead, and his fingers involuntarily twitched themselves into a loose fist. "They gave her a fucking certificate and a special ceremony for it and everything!"

"Why do you think they would target someone you describe as a PTA room mom?"

"To take out the people that make me vulnerable." He tilted his face up to look at her, and grasped one of her forearms with his hand. His lips were pressed together in a firm, tight line, not betraying the confusing array of sensations that echoed beneath his skin and in the corners of his mind. He wanted, more than anything, to lean into the softness of her touch and the allure of her assurances, but he couldn't allow himself to. "The kids – you – they've got options, since losing Kathy apparently didn't break me quite enough by their standards."

Her warm brown eyes met his gaze and held it evenly, even as he could see the glimmer of a tear poke at the corner of her eye. "You've got options too," she said. "You've got me. I'm your partner, for better or worse. And I think this qualifies as 'the worse.'"

"We haven't been partners for ten years now. I heard you had that Detective What's-His-Face after I left."

"Amaro. He was a great guy, a great partner, but he wasn't you, Elliot. There's no one like you. No one could replace you for me." The pad of her thumb ran along the seam of his shirt and he had to bite back a sigh of contentment. "If someone asks me who my partner was before my promotion, I think of you before anyone else. You're always my partner."

God, it was those times when she made such a simple declaration as if there was no other truth in the world but the one on her lips that made him want to hold her tightly against him and never let her go. "And you're always mine."

"Yeah?" She broke their contact and walked back to her plate, spearing a stalk of broccoli. Their food had grown a little cold with the passage of time. "Then, as partners, let me help you as much as you want to help me."

"I want to let you, but I can't risk losing you too." Losing you would break me entirely.

Her eyebrow arched in an impossibly high rise, and her voice grew quiet. Her already-wide eyes widened further, and her voice shook as she spoke. "You almost did, and you wouldn't have known until it was too late. Because you weren't here."

"Olivia – Liv – "

"If I tell you what happened, you're never going to look at me the same way again, okay? You're going to think I can't defend myself against Wheatley and his goon squad and whatever they might have planned for me. You're going to think I'm a porcelain doll that has to be put in a glass case and protected from everything." She squared her shoulders and looked him straight in the face without flinching, almost daring him to break away. "I can assure you, that's the last thing I am." Her forced laugh was haunted and empty; any joy had long ago been stripped from it. "But I have to make sure you're ready to hear it, because if I told you and you wanted to eat your gun over this, I'd never be able to live with myself."

"Tell me." He was insistent. If something – or someone – had laid a finger on even a single strand of her hair, he wanted to know. He should have known, because he should have been there, and never left her.

She took his hands in hers and dragged him over to the couch, their dinner momentarily forgotten. He sat on the couch, while she stood, clasping his hands with hers. Her eyes were vacant, as if the warmth and emotion that innately made up who she was had to be turned off to say the words she was about to say, and she inhaled deeply before she started to speak, "It all started with a guy named William Lewis flashing tourists in Central Park."

Every additional detail she provided, every step forward in the story, every sick action this Lewis individual inflicted upon Olivia was another rusty knife shoved in his gut and twisted without a prayer of mercy. It was almost macabre, the level of torture and sadism he'd sunk to in order to inflict misery on the woman standing before him baring her darkest days to him. The fact that she didn't only have the emotional scars, but physical ones to correspond to her memories, made him sick to his stomach. He couldn't see any of the scars - he didn't think he could, anyway - but if he ever did see them, he'd understand their morbid significance: this is from when she fought for her life and won.

"He taunted me, as if he knew who you were, as if he knew how much I would have given to see your face one last time," she said, choking back an onslaught of tears. "And you weren't there, no matter how much I wanted you to be. But I pretended like you were there beside me."

"If I'd known –" He tried to do the math to figure out where he'd been when this ordeal was going down, if there'd been any strange feelings of dread he'd felt around this time. It'd been while he was working private security, but he might have been in Prague then, or there was some time he'd spent in Bucharest. And then he remembered that unseasonably warm late-spring night when he'd been in Krakow, when he'd woken up in a cold sweat and couldn't get a wink of sleep for what seemed like endless days stretching on.

He'd never told anyone about it. His client at the time, some high-end businessman making scores of investment deals behind the former Iron Curtain, didn't seem to notice, but as long as things were secure, that client didn't tend to pay too close of attention to his security detail. A small blessing.

Now, he wondered if it had been whatever part of Olivia that had become woven into the very fibers of his being calling out for help.

"If I'd known, I'd have been there."

"That's the entire point though. You weren't here, so you couldn't have known, so you couldn't have been there with me. I knew what you'd do though, given half a chance, and I beat him to within an inch of his miserable life."

God, that's my Liv. "And then?" He knew that couldn't be the end. It was bad enough on its own, but he knew there had to be more.

She recounted more of the story, the anguish of the trial and his escape, what he did to his doctor and her family, the ordeal in the warehouse – "I couldn't let him hurt the girl, Elliot. I couldn't" – and ultimately, their escape and the sick self-absolution of Lewis's suicide staining everything that remained. The details were told with almost military-like precision, and he realized that she must have had to tell her story so many times between IAB and her therapist and whoever else had decided they had the right to hear about her traumas.

As she concluded, she sniffled and sat down next to him on the couch, but kept their hands connected. "I'm not evertelling that story again," she said. "One time. That's all I can do." Her shoulders sagged and she lurched forward slightly, but he tugged her so that her angle allowed him to fall against his shoulder.

"You're the bravest, strongest woman I know, Olivia Benson," he said, and he caressed his thumb along the curve of her palm. "You're a survivor. You're doing the best that you can, and I'm proud of you for it." He echoed her words from earlier that evening, and the significance of his repetition didn't escape her notice, as the corners of her mouth quirked into a sad, watery half-smile. "You protect me, like I think you want to, and I'll protect you, like I know I want to. We'll take on the Wheatleys. There's no one I'd rather have on my team, and no one can beat us when we work together."

"You mean it?"

"I mean it, partner."

-to be continued-