A/N: This hurt to write a bit. My heart aches for raw, vulnerable Liv. The song throughout is "Old Gods" by Emily Scott Robinson. I don't own the song, characters, or even some of the dialogue. Just here for fun. Don't sue me.
Carry my prayers on the ocean
Carry my prayers on the sea
"Elliot put his papers in."
She knows she heard the words. She watches Cragen say them and sees his lips move. But they don't sound right falling from his lips.
Because he shouldn't be the one telling her. He shouldn't be saying them at all.
She's taken a minute alone in the interrogation room. She tries to stifle the guttural sobs that rack their way up her throat. Clings to her own arms and shoulders as she slides down the wall.
"Everybody leaves," Serena said.
It was her mantra, one Olivia always believed would be true, until after she came back from Oregon. When she found Elliot was still there, waiting for her. They had their fights and their disagreements, but they were partners for life. He was her family. Really, outside of her mother, he was the first family she'd ever known.
And he was gone. And he didn't even have the balls to tell her himself.
"What am I going to do now?" she whispers, and she peels herself up off the floor, checking her eye makeup in the interrogation room window before pulling it together, and stepping back into the squad room to follow up on their next lead.
And if you are meant to be my love
One day you'll come home to me
Losing Elliot feels like losing a limb, especially out in the field.
Nick is new, he's green. He never seems to be where she expects him to be or doing what she expects him to do. She never realized how much communication she and Elliot didn't have to expel on a day-to-day basis because they knew each other's moves instinctually.
But with Nick, it's glaringly obvious that those days are over. It isn't his fault, not really. And it isn't like she's never partnered with Fin, or Munch, or even Cassidy way back when and things are just a little off from her usual expectations.
It's more the fact that Cragen expects her to train and mentor Nick.
All she wants to do is scream in the Captain's face, "how can you expect me to teach this guy, impart any kind of wisdom here when I'm coming more and more unglued every day?"
But she can't say that. Not after she'd gotten the stern, disapproving father look and tone when he told her to clean up Elliot's desk because they couldn't leave it as a shrine.
And why not? It might as well say a shrine. Elliot isn't dead, but he is as good as six feet under. He disappeared with no contact, and she isn't ready to be done mourning yet. She isn't ready to pack his things in a box and shove them in a corner and act like he never existed. That won't fill the giant hole in her life or the one in her heart.
Olivia finds it hard to have hope most days anymore.
Until a little bit of hope arrives in a manilla envelope at the end of another long week. Tucked inside is a mini badge and a medallion, and a note that simply reads "Semper Fi."
It isn't much. It isn't an explanation. Maybe it isn't even exactly what she needs. But these things, this sentiment are hers to keep. She'll wear the medallion when she needs strength, and she'll attach the mini badge to the butt of her gun to touch for luck in the field when she needs it.
And maybe, someday, if things change, they'll wind up together again.
Just like fate.
But are you a trick of the memory
That the old gods are playing on me?
Carry my prayers on the ocean
Carry my prayers on the sea
There are times she lies awake thinking about him when she should be thinking about David, the man sleeping next to her.
She lays on her back, one arm thrown over her forehead, wondering if what they had was ever real. Did she imagine it? The friendship, the care, dare she say the love she felt, had that been real or did she dream it up in her head?
She shouldn't still be thinking about this, about him, so many months later. Not when there's a man she thinks maybe she could love sleeping next to her. But there's too much noise and too many what-ifs rattling around in her brain to let her sleep.
"Please, just let me move on," she whispers.
No sooner have the words left her mouth than David rolls to his side and tosses an arm across her hip. And she sighs, but it isn't one of relief.
Your blue eyes are there when I close mine
I see your sweet face when I dream
The dreams start coming after Cragen is wrongly accused of murder and after Cassidy falls back into her life.
Until now, she's been able to keep her thoughts about Elliot to the waking hours, or the ones where she should be sleeping, but can't. But after she almost loses Cragen to jail, and Brian swoops back in, it reminds her of the good 'ole days.
The days when sleeping with Brian was a mistake, and her partner told her he had her back, for better or worse, and he couldn't blame Cassidy for wanting to see her again.
He is always the first face she sees when she closes her eyes now, his piercing blues lit up with mischief, amusement, and sometimes concern. His face makes recurrences in nearly every dream. It doesn't matter what they're about.
When Serena chases her down a long, dark corridor with a vodka bottle, screaming at her, a hand reaches from the darkness and pulls her away. She looks up at the person who saved her, and it's always Elliot.
"I've got you," he says. "She can't hurt you as long as I'm here."
These nights, more often than others, she wakes up with a start, sitting bolt upright in bed.
It never bothers Brian. He sleeps like the dead.
Thankfully, that means she never has to explain that it's not her mother's violent rage that wakes her up from the nightmare in tears.
My heart is all ragged in piecеs
Bleeding at every seam
It gets harder and harder to go to work every day. Outwardly, to the people around her, she seems to have moved on.
But she hasn't.
The cases keep getting harder and harder, and she misses the days when Elliot could tell where she was too frayed to go on. The nights when she didn't want to go home alone. He would do everything he could to make it up to her. He'd force food on her, or make an impromptu suggestion to head to the bar. He'd drive her home, or on rare occasions where things were really, really bad, he'd invite her out to Queens and let her snuggle Eli.
But none of that is an option anymore. More kids are kidnapped, assaulted, raped, and murdered and they collar many people who have no right to be parents. All while she sits by, her biological clock nearly out of sand, with his words echoing in her ears.
"You'd be a great Mom," he'd said. "They're wrong."
He said he'd support her having a child in any way she wanted.
Unfortunately, he never promised to support her when the weight of realizing she'd never get to be a mother became too much to bear.
And arе you a trick of the memory
That the old gods are playing on me?
Carry my prayers on the ocean
Carry my prayers on the sea
The Dana Lewis case leaves her rattled and missing him even more.
He would have a lot to say about it. Her ex-boyfriend, the abortion, the way she lied. Elliot probably would get a little bit of glee from putting Dana in handcuffs, simply because of all the times she'd gotten him shot, blown up, or otherwise injured.
He always thought she was bad luck, and maybe he hadn't been entirely wrong about it.
She thinks back on her time in Oregon, which had all been Dana's last-minute doing anyway. She thought of how she woke up in the hospital calling Elliot's name, how she'd hung up on him on the phone.
Back then, she wouldn't let herself admit what was truly going on.
She wouldn't let herself admit that she'd fallen in love with her partner, her married-but-almost-divorced partner.
But now, it's pointless for her to deny that that's exactly what happened. And it's exactly why she'd been so eager to jump on a plane when Dana asked her to do it. They'd gotten too close, and she thought the only way things would end between them was in destruction.
Turns out she was right, it just happened years later.
"God, I miss you," she whispers as she splashes cold water on her face, not quite ready to leave the precinct bathroom and escort Dana to arraignment.
He'll never hear her, and he'll never know. But it doesn't stop her from talking to him anyway, as if he can.
I'm down on my knees at a crossing
Wondering which way to go
This is going to be her worst fear and the end of her life all rolled into one.
It's been four days, and she's losing the will to fight. She's been branded, drugged, and assaulted. She watched Lewis kill an old man, rape an old woman, and heard him kill a rookie cop with her gun.
What does she have to live for anyway?
After this, there is no way Brian is going to want to stay with her. He can't handle victims. It's why he left SVU in the first place. She doesn't have any children and doesn't have a family. Rapists will keep raping, and the NYPD can go on without her.
She isn't at a crossroads the same way she was days ago when she was bound to the chair in her apartment. All that's left is rape and death, and Lewis is reaching for his belt buckle, ready to seal her fate.
Until there's a knock at the door, and he pauses for a second to go answer it.
This is her last chance. It's the last opportunity and sliver of hope that she's going to get. But she doesn't know if she has the strength to make it happen.
Slowly, she tests the bars of the bed frame. They feel loose.
"You're okay," her mind whispers.
It's Elliot's voice. The same words he spoke as he'd pulled her into a hug outside Kathy's hospital room the day Eli was born. She remembers that feeling, how someone cared about her too. That he cared that she'd been in that car accident also and he could have lost her.
She wrenches her arm once, twice, and feels a splintering pain through her wrist. But the bar breaks free, and she knows what she has to do.
But all roads are dark through the valley
And I'll learn to walk them alone
She has him now, handcuffed to the very bed she'd been cuffed to minutes ago. Lewis is unconscious from the way she hit him in the head with the metal bar, with a sickening crack.
She still feels woozy, lost. She's gotten rid of the maid and her daughter, hopefully sending them to safety. There are no roads out of this beach house that lead to salvation. But at this moment, she's not so sure that she cares.
William Lewis is the devil himself. And if he's going to take her to hell, she's going to put up a fight first.
But for now, he's unconscious. He's at her mercy. And she knows she should call 9-1-1. She knows she should have sent a message with the maid to take back to the local PD. But she doesn't. She doesn't know what she wants at the moment. Maybe she's still drugged or detoxing. It's possible she's hallucinating because if she squints, she thinks she can see Elliot standing in the corner of the room.
"I think I want you to suffer first," she says. "See, you'd know what to do. Your whole life, you know what you want, and you just do it. What I want to do… I want to shoot you in the head right now, watch you bleed out."
She thinks about this. Thinks about whether she'll care what happens to her soul if she shoots this man in cold blood. It goes against her oath and her badge. It goes against everything she believes.
But if Lewis had somehow taken Elliot. If she were defending him, she wouldn't think twice.
"My old partner, he'd know what to do," she says. "He wouldn't question himself after what you've done.
From the corner, Elliot's ghost nods.
"He would kick your teeth in, break your legs, break your arms, break your back, break your face," she says, listing all the ways Elliot would make him pay and suffer, and the apparition silently agrees with her.
"Maybe I should call him," she says, although somewhere in her haze she knows that probably wouldn't work. He didn't pick up the last hundred times, so why would he do it now?
Ghost Elliot is standing in a batter's stance now, and she remembers the bar in her hands.
"Maybe I should get him to use that metal bar on you… huh?" she says, and ghost Elliot nods vigorously. "And make you beg for your life."
She doesn't expect him to respond, and yelps when he growls at her.
"Then do it. Do something," Lewis yells. "Please, God, that speech… that's the saddest thing I ever heard in my life."
Ghost Elliot is shaking his head.
"That old partner of yours, well, he sounds very macho, doesn't he?" Lewis asks. "It must have been tough for you, all those long nights alone in the car."
Olivia tries not to think too hard about it, how those were some of the best nights of her life. They laughed and shared secrets and stories. They split crappy bodega sandwiches and drank out of the same cup of stale coffee. Sometimes they'd sing along to the radio or make bets they never intended to cash.
There was nothing passionate, romantic, or sexual about any of it, and yet those were the times she remembered feeling most loved. When Elliot was around, she felt what it was truly like to be loved and cared for.
And Lewis isn't going to taint that.
"You don't get to talk about him," she says, and ghost Elliot smiles.
"Did he ever do you?" Lewis asks.
She falters. It's not the first time a perp's ever asked her that question, but hearing it come from Lewis' mouth still shocks her. He takes the pause as an admission, even though it's not.
"He did, didn't he?" Lewis asks with a laugh. "You still want him. I can hear it in your voice. You're all bottled up."
Of course, she wants him. These may be her final hours on earth and all she wants is to see his face one more time, just like Lewis said a few days (or was it hours) ago. Ghost Elliot seems to be fading fast as Lewis starts screaming at her to shoot him, taunting that she doesn't have the balls.
And when ghost Elliot vanishes from his corner, she hears a piercing, agonizing scream.
It's not until later, when the drugs finally wear off, that she realizes she's the one who made that sound.
The entire time she's in the hospital, and even the first two weeks when she moves into Brian's apartment and starts going to therapy, she expects to see him or hear from him. A call. A text message. Knocking on Brian's door at four in the morning.
Olivia Benson has never needed anyone in her life, but right now she needs her partner.
And he never comes.
It's 3:15 on any other Tuesday when she realizes he's really never coming back. Somehow, she's going to have to learn how to walk the road to recovery alone.
For the first time in her life, the word "alone" doesn't sound like freedom. It sounds like a death sentence.
But are you a trick of the memory
That the old gods are playing on me?
Carry my prayers on the ocean
Carry my prayers on the sea
It's not often that cases wreck her anymore. Her first few back after Lewis sent her PTSD spiraling hard. But now, if she's honest, Olivia doesn't feel much of anything anymore. Just like a hollow, empty shell of a person.
But this case was special. This case involved partners who were too close.
She almost wants to laugh, because Tucker is finally going to get what he wants: to bring down a pair of partners. They're just not the partners he expected.
Olivia takes the girl. She wants this collar and this confession, and she knows exactly how to get it. She's been on the receiving end of this kind of interrogation and evaluation more than once, so she knows exactly which buttons to press.
"He's in there right now ratting you out," Olivia says, and Quinn denies it.
"He has my back, he always has," Quinn says, and Olivia wants to laugh at how naive this woman is. "You don't know him."
"Like you do?" Olivia pushes.
"Well, five years, you know, riding around in a car together, you get close," Quinn says.
"You guys were involved?" Olivia asks like she doesn't already know the answers.
"It wasn't like that," Quinn says. "He's married, has a kid."
"So you banged him a few times, and now you're trying to prove that you're cool with him doing other chicks?" she asks, hating how much she sounds like Tucker at this moment.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Quinn says.
Olivia knows that Quinn knows exactly what she's talking about.
"Let me ask you a question," Olivia says. "When's the last time you had a boyfriend? Or even went on a date. What, you gotta be 40, right? Little more? Probably wondering if you'll ever have a family or if riding around with him for the next ten years will be enough for you."
She's speaking from experience. It was something she had to come to terms with after she got turned down for adoption over and over. Would riding around with Elliot for another 10 years, guns blazing through the streets of New York be enough? At the time, it felt like enough. Even now, if he'd stayed, she knows it would be too.
"He looked out for me," Quinn says, and Olivia's heard that before.
She's said that before.
Quinn gives a song and dance about how he helped her cover up a drug problem in her early time on the force.
"And you think that means that he loves you?" Olivia asks. "He was holding that against you. He knew that you felt that way about him and he was using that too."
That's the moment where she sees something inside Quinn break, and she can't help but feel just a little sorry for the woman, no matter what she's done or covered up.
How many things had Olivia herself helped Elliot out with? It wasn't rape and drug deals, but it was enough. He helped her out too, with Simon. Came running back to her with Sonya. And all the little things Olivia always thought showed that he cared, maybe they hadn't meant anything at all.
"I mean, what did you think? That he was going to leave his wife and kid for you?" she asks. "You spent the last five years sitting in that car, hoping that one day he'd look over at you and suddenly realize that you were the woman that he couldn't live without."
She's glad Nick steps in for the next part because she doesn't know if she can keep going. It's too raw, too real, too close to home.
"What was it he told Cassidy?" Nick asks. "Girls like Quinny, you throw them a couple crumbs. They're so grateful, they'll do anything."
Quinn can't believe it. Olivia almost can't believe it herself.
Because that night when she's back at home, Brian's asleep in bed and she's nursing a glass of red on the couch, she wonders if that's how Elliot felt about her.
Is she just the pathetic little rapist's daughter trying to prove herself? And if Elliot threw her enough crumbs, she'd do whatever he wanted?
Her head feels fuzzy and her heart hurts. She thinks her mind might be playing tricks on her, but she can't decide which side is the trick.
Did Elliot ever care for her, or was she just as gullible as Quinn?
No wine and no song can soothe me
I'm pierced by the arrows of pain
Brian moves his things out before the end of February. There's no point in staying together when he doesn't want a family.
It's almost ironic, Olivia thinks, how even when she finally has the means, the resources, the two-parent home for a child to enter, all the things she didn't have before that the adoption agencies claimed made her an unfit mother, she still cannot have a child, biologically or otherwise.
She drinks more now than she ever did before, and tonight it's because she's still picturing little Baby Doe from the child porn ring bust a few months ago. His sweet little face, his bright blue eyes. They were eyes she swears she's seen before, and she knows where she's seen them.
Baby Doe has Stabler's eyes. He also has a Benson nose and dark brown hair like Elliot and Olivia. He looks like he could be their child, and the fact that he's not, the fact that he'll never even be hers, stabs like an arrow through the heart.
She's overthinking. She's drowning in pain. And the only way to solve it is with another glass of wine.
Serena was an unfit mother, and yet the state never bothered to take Olivia away.
Like mother, like daughter, she muses, and the bottle is empty.
I'll lay in the grass by the mountain
And summon the wind and the rain
Olivia still isn't quite sure what just happened, not sure what she's agreed to do.
Her entire life is about to change thanks to a "judge's hunch."
Being a mother is the only thing Olivia has ever wanted, and now that it's happening, even temporarily, she's terrified.
Judge Linden tells her it'll be about an hour before they can get the paperwork drawn up and that if Olivia needs to go make any arrangements to bring Noah home with her, she should do it now.
That's how she finds herself in the courthouse courtyard, her breathing shallow, her chest constricting, tears pooling in the corners of her eyes.
She's not ready for this. She's wanted it forever and she's not ready.
She doesn't know how to be a mother. She never had the right role model for that. What if she screws up? What if they take him away the same way they took Calvin away?
"Why aren't you here," she whispers.
Some passerby, someone who doesn't know her so well might think she was cursing her own mother for not being around in her time of need. The time when she craves parental advice.
But to someone who knows her well, they'd know she was really talking to the one parental figure in her life who always seemed to know what to do and say when she had doubts about what she was capable of.
Elliot said he'd support her having a child in any way she wanted. And some small part of her hopes that wherever he is today, he still feels the same way, because even from afar, she's going to need it.
But are you a trick of the memory
That the old gods are playing on me?
Carry my prayers on the ocean
Carry my prayers on the sea
Of course tonight of all nights she gets called in on a 10-13.
In route to the ceremony no less.
Not an officer down call, but an officer in need of assistance, thankfully. Sometimes, when you're the captain, people ask for "assistance" a bit too liberally. She gets it, really, with most of the public distrusting cops these days, many of those lower down the ranks are afraid to make mistakes. But she isn't in the mood to play Ms. Mentor tonight.
She wonders if she can flash her badge quickly, give whoever called her in a pep talk that they can and will handle the situation, and still get to her event in plenty of time. She's already had to contend with road closures for protests and she knows there's a myriad of COVID protocols waiting for her at the venue, because in the last year the entire world has gone insane.
She's mentally trying to calculate how fast she has to get in and out of this crime scene, hopefully with her hairstyle still intact, when she catches the face of the person on the stretcher getting loaded into the back of the ambulance.
No. It can't be. Not tonight of all nights. Not after 10 years.
She's imagining things again. Her mind has been playing tricks on her since 2011, and she's imagining things.
"Liv," she hears someone call into the night.
She's not imagining things.
He's here.
And as they take strides toward one another, pulled together like magnets with no choice but to attract, she wonders if this is the start of all her nightmares or if it's the answer to the prayers she'd long given up saying.
Olivia isn't completely sure she's ready to find out.
But that's the funny thing about time and fate. They march on whether we're ready or not.
Carry my prayers on the ocean
Carry my prayers on the sea