Her Greatest Fear
part the first: alex
She wakes up in the morning as herself. Staring into the mirror, styling unfamiliar chocolate brown hair and painting pale blue eyes, she repeats to herself the facts of her old life. Name, birthday, career. All the things that had once defined Alexandra Cabot.
Her greatest fear is being forgotten.
She dresses so unlike she used to anymore. Casual jeans, t-shirt. Nice, professional, but … small town. Small woman.
As soon as she leaves the bedroom, she transforms. An entire lifetime, forgotten. They say that it should get easier over time, but for her, it gets harder.
It used to be she had to leave the house; the whole thing was her sanctuary. But as time wore on, the old life faded and the new expanded. Alex retreated, back and back, surrendering one by one the living room, the den, the bathrooms, the stairway, until she ensconced herself into the master bedroom. Alex lives there, and it shows in the paint and hardwood floors. The Other Self dominates the rest of the house, which is warm and homey in its own way, but is completely foreign to Alex. It is a lonely existence, on both accounts.
Her greatest fear is that one day she will wake up and her first thought won't be "My name is Alexandra Cabot, and I am going home."
She thought about home a lot, at first. The baby grand piano in her living room, the cello in its stand next to it. She has a piano now, but Faith Anderson plays an entirely different type of music than Alex does, and the result is that neither plays much at all anymore. She has a cello, too, which stays in the bedroom so it can cry so Alex doesn't have to.
She thinks of New York's busy streets when she is sure that the quiet of this small town will drive her mad. She thinks of her office with its big bookshelves and intimidating chair. And she thinks of SVU, of the detectives she still refers to as "hers."
Her greatest fear is being replaced.
She remembers the first time she heard her replacement's name. Casey Novak. She knows the face that goes with the name, and she is not impressed. Casey's career dreams end in Major Cases, while Alex had dreamed herself all the way into the DA's chair. Somehow, that makes a difference.
She remembers the first time she saw Casey Novak in action, purely by accident. She flipped on the television, and CourtTV was airing a particularly gruesome casefrom New York. A complete slam dunk for the People, but still Casey asked too many wrong questions and ignored too many obvious ones. Yet, there was potential in her, rough around the edges as she was. SVU would smooth her out, Alex was sure, and maybe someday she'd end up in Major Cases thanks to them.
Casey hadn't really replaced her, Alex knows, but she worries anyway.
Her greatest fear is forgetting.
She watches CourtTV daily just so she won't lose her touch. She devourslaw books and old cases and trials. She even goes so far as to make up her own cases and tries them. It's unwise, the knows, but she keeps some of her better closing statements in a locked drawer in her desk in her bedroom; the place she keeps the few things she'd been allowed to keep. With any luck, she'll need them some day.
Her greatest fear is being lost.
She thinks of Olivia constantly, even after it became too painful for her to think of New York itself. Olivia and her olive skin, her rich brown eyes and brilliant smile. Olivia, who makes Alex think of gypsies and adventure, who smelled like cinnamon and tasted like anise. Olivia, whom Alex still loves and worships above all else, more and more each day, and whom she misses so badly that it manifests in an acute pain in her chest that she carries with her always.
Sometimes she thinks of Olivia with someone else. She wouldn't blame her, of course, if she did move on. It would be silly for her to wait for someone she couldn't be sure she'd ever see again, though that's what Alex herself was doing almost instinctively. But all the same, when those thoughts come and she can hear Olivia crying out someone else's name, Alex cries lakes and sometimes, very rarely, she even drinks herself into oblivion. She has this idea that if Olivia lets her go, she can never come home.
Her greatest fear is being forgotten.
.end part one.
part the second: olivia
She wakes up in the morning and the first thing she notices is that she's alone. She half expects it all to have been a dream, some horror her mind cooked up to torment her. In that brief second between consciousness and opening her eyes, she forgets everything that happened and imagines that Alex is there next to her. And in that split second between opening her eyes and remembering, she is confused by the lack of the warm press of Alex's body against hers.
Her greatest fear is being forgotten.
She gets dressed repeating the facts of their life together. Lazy weekend mornings spent basking like cats in the rays of sunlight scattered across their bed. Stolen kisses in Alex's office, brief moments of tenderness in the stationhouse.
She leaves those memories, as much as she can, at home. It gets harder each time. She half way wishes that she was among those who thought Alex to be dead, but then she remembers the way Alex had of smiling with her eyes and she can't imagine living a life where even the most vague of hopes that she might one day see Alex again didn't exist. So she lives with the memories and lets them encroach upon her mind like waves eating away at a cliff. She can focus, always, on every day actions, but Alex is always there, hovering just at the corner of her eye.
Her greatest fear is that someday she'll lose hope. That she'll wake up one day, get dressed and go to work to lose herself in a big case. And somewhere into the night she'll realize that it's been all day and she hasn't thought of Alex once. And that's when she'll realize that she doesn't think Alex is coming home.
She thinks about Alex a lot. All the time, really. She wonders where she is, what she's doing. She occasionally tries to picture what kind of career she's been dumped into, but she can't do it. Being a lawyer was so much a part of who Alex was that it is impossible to see her doing anything but that.
Her mind works in funny ways when she tries to place Alex in a town. She can see Alex working in a garden, but she can't see Alex living in a place where she might have room to plant a garden. She hopes that Alex still plays her music, because sometimes she imagines that she's a concert pianist or cellist.
Her greatest fear is being replaced.
She remembers the first time she realized Alex might not be totally unresponsive if she tried to pursue a relationship. In fact, Alex had thrown herself headlong into their relationship with such willingness that Olivia had been taken aback. She'd never learned to feel so strongly about any one person so quickly. Sometimes she wonders if Alex has someone new. She knows from personal experience that it is not difficult at all to fall in love with Alex, and it's not unlikely that someone else has done just that. She doesn't want Alex to be unhappy, of course, but it hurts like hell to think that she might not be the one making her happy anymore.
Her greatest fear is forgetting.
She knows how it goes, when you don't see someone for a very long time. The details start to fade, like how she can't remember the lines of her mother's face or the way she cut her hair. She doesn't want Alex to fade like that, so slowly that she doesn't even notice it happening, so she's framed every single picture of Alex she owns and has them sitting in her apartment, on tabletops and mounted on walls. And she reviews what she remembers every day, because not only does she want to remember, she wants the memories to be so fresh that she remembers exactly the way Alex's hair felt and exactly the way her voice pitched low when she first woke up in the morning.
She keeps a picture of Alex by her bed, so she's still the first thing Olivia sees when she opens her eyes in the morning and the last thing she sees when she closes them at night. She also carries a Polaroid she thinks Munch snapped wherever she goes. It was taken at one of those summer barbeques that Elliot's wife makes SVU come to every year. This particular shot was at Alex's second, and final, outing with the whole group, Elliot's kids included. In the picture, Alex's shirt matches the sky and her eyes twinkle as she rests her head on Olivia's shoulder, staring demurely into the camera. Olivia is oblivious to the impending flash, but she is smiling anyway, a full-tilt smile that Alex loved so much, and one of her hands is playing with a lock of pale blonde hair. It is one of her favorite pictures in the world.
Her greatest fear is losing.
She's so scared that someday Velez will be killed or extradited or otherwise dealt with and Alex won't want to come home. She'll have made a new life and new friends and maybe she'll have a new love, and she won't want New York anymore. She won't want the DA's chair or SVU; she won't want the law or the People. She won't want her old life, and she won't want Olivia. And that terrifies Olivia more than anything else in the entire world.
Her greatest fear is being forgotten.
.end part two.
.finis.