IV.
And hold me and help me understand,
Why on earth I have to be such a stupid man,
To live the way I do, dream the dreams I dream,
So far away from you.
- Three Days, Pat Green
---
Today she wanted his eyes to be blue.
Bright. Dull. Pale. Dark. Blue.
He smiled as he hopped down the stairs, taking them two at a time, and she stood at the bottom, holding his coat with a smile.
"Eric's not at his house?" Noah tilted his head sideways, and Olivia bent down to his eye level and kissed his forehead softly before running her hands back through his blonde hair.
Today she wanted his hair to be darker.
"We won't be there long, buddy, I promise." Olivia held up her pinky finger to Noah, and he nodded, holding his up to join hers. "Pinky swear." They both said at the same time, and Olivia noticed Noah's little finger linked in hers, his complexion the same olive tone as her own.
Today she wanted his complexion to be fair.
She swallowed her guilt, and it fell to her stomach, making her nauseous.
She loved Noah, each part of him, but she was still plagued by how much more he could have been. To love her son to hell, but to still wonder what could be different – that's the guilt she carried most days.
"Can we get chicken and a toy when it's done? Please?" He gave her a large smile as she put his coat on him and pulled his wool knit hat onto his head.
"If you're good." She nodded with a smile, and Noah sat down on the bottom step so that Olivia could put his shoes on for him.
"And 'Tective Stabler can come with us, okay?" He said innocently, and Olivia didn't think that her heart could survive this. She didn't answer him, but instead focused on his little Nike's as she slipped one onto his foot and tied it quickly. "Mommy." Noah reached for Olivia's chin and raised her face so that she could see him.
Her heart was breaking for her son, for what she remembered of Elliot, for herself. And it hurt. It ripped her in half, because she felt like she was losing everything now, losing things she didn't even know that she had.
"He likes the chicken, too. He gets the ones for grown ups, because he doesn't want the toy. Remember?" Noah's innocence pried Olivia open. "So he can come with us, okay?"
She was broken because Elliot had come back for three days, and this is how he left them, a mother looking for more in her son, more than would ever be there and more than he could ever possibly be, and a son, innocent and lost in his mother's tears.
"He went home, Noah." Another part of her lost, another part of her bruised at acknowledging that this was not his home.
"So, we can call him. I do it!" Noah exclaimed, throwing his hands in the air, and Olivia had to stop for a minute, take a deep breath, and then force herself to get up and take today for what it would be.
She had lived this day before, the day after Elliot had come through her life, the day after Elliot had left her, scarred from his words, scarred from the pieces of her life that had cut her as they came crashing down around her.
"Let's go, Noah. Mommy's going to be late." She smiled for him and reached down for his hand.
Regret.
Today she was choking on regret.
---
He felt like he was dying.
The airport was crowded and the people were hurried and loud and obnoxious, and he felt like he was dying.
He hopped that the people around him didn't see him laugh, because they may have thought he was crazy, a middle aged man, blue eyes trimmed in red, alone, laughing amongst the chaos.
It wasn't funny that he felt like he was dying, it was funny because he had processed the thought, funny because he had acknowledged the fact that he felt like he was dying, but really, he was already dead.
He was returning to nothing.
His kids were teenagers now, with no interest in movie nights or weekend lunches. They wanted allowance and rides to the movies, his credit card to use at the mall.
He was going to a hollowed out piece of what was once his life.
He was nomadic because he couldn't be with the one thing that he knew was home.
His chest was tightening, his jaw clenched, because he didn't know how to make everything right again.
He couldn't let himself process the previous night completely, because even the small rememberances of it that he left himself had displaced him from his core.
Atlas had shrugged, and his world was tilted, falling off towards oblivion.
He stopped amid the havoc of the people, stopped dead in the middle of the airport and had to remind himself to take another breath.
This is what it felt like to be dead, he noted.
Last night he left Olivia and the little boy he had wanted more than anything else.
Last night he had walked out on life.
Last night he gave up living.
Today he believed that you could go home again, but all the doors would be locked and you wouldn't be allowed in.
You could go home and stare at this locked up life and wish to be on the inside, but you could never get back inside.
That is what Elliot Stabler, the walking dead, believed today.
---
"I'm sorry, Captain, I just need to grab some reports and check in with Matthew and then I'll take him home. Eric wasn't able to watch him today, and I need to find a new preschool." She lied.
Eric was home, he would have watched Noah, but she didn't want him to. Olivia couldn't take him there today.
"Don't worry about it, Olivia." Cragen smiled to Noah, who was holding tight onto his toy cars.
"Morning Captain!" Noah greeted him loudly as Olivia set him down, and he immediately removed his hat and slipped out of his coat, turning and handing it to his mom.
"Good morning, Noah." Cragen smiled down at him.
"Hey Captain?" Noah was looking around the room, obviously trying to find something or someone.
"Yeah Pal?"
"Does 'tective Stabler work here?" He looked at Olivia first, and then back to Cragen.
Olivia didn't want to be weak, but she was. She fell back onto her chair and leaned her head back, closing her eyes tightly before running her hands over her face.
Four years ago he left her.
Yesterday he left her and Noah.
"Noah, buddy, why don't you sit down and play with your cars, okay? So mommy can get this done and we can go home?" She was guilty because she knew that their home wasn't the same anymore, she was broken by the fact that Elliot had come undone there, that she had to return to that place, to the shadows of him bleeding, torn, scarred, falling apart on her floor for what he thought that he had left there.
She couldn't let herself think of what he would have done if Noah had been his son. She didn't want to think that he would have stayed because he was noble, because he would have taken care of his responsibilities.
She never wanted to be one of his responsibilities.
He said he loved her, again, still, but it didn't seem to matter, because he was gone again.
"Does he work here?" Noah looked to Cragen with his brown eyes, large with question. He didn't understand why no one was answering his questions today.
"Hey, Noah, why don't you come and look at my prizes? You didn't finish last time." Cragen smiled with a nod, referring to the plaques and awards and pictures that were scattered about his office. Noah liked the pictures, he liked touching everything and asking where everything was from and listening to how Cragen had gotten it and why.
"Captain, he's fine, he can sit here and play. I'm sorry." She sighed, reaching for Noah, but he shook his head and ran to Cragen's office.
"I'll look at the prizes!" He giggled as he walked through the door, and Olivia went to say something, but Cragen shook his head and signaled for her to start working.
---
"Captain, it's Stabler." He didn't know why he called him. His flight left in 27 minutes.
27 minutes and he'd be on his way back to nothing.
Funny how it felt like he was already there, at some point during the previous night he had decided to abandon time. He felt like it would make him less pathetic, make it all seem better because he could mourn for life without abiding to time, without missing out on seconds, minutes, hours, days. He could collapse inside himself for as long as he wanted to without being a victim of time.
"Elliot. Is everything okay?" Cragen was standing behind his desk, Elliot was on speaker phone, and Noah had heard him, heard his voice and his greeting and he jumped down off of the chair that he was kneeling on to get a better look at one of Cragen's 'prizes', and ran over to the phone.
"'Tective Stabler!" Noah yelled into the phone, and Elliot's hand tightened around the cell phone, his other hand he placed over his face.
He wanted that life, Noah's life, to have come from him. To think that Olivia had breathed life into that little boy with someone else, even if he was some anonymous number from a clinic, killed him.
Atlas hadn't shrugged, he'd gotten so fucking annoyed with having the world on his shoulders that he let it fall off- Elliot's world wasn't simply off center, it was rolling away from him.
"You okay, Elliot?" Cragen asked when he didn't hear anything on the other end, and Elliot remained silent, robbed of words from hearing the life he'd walked away from.
"I, uh," He was stumbling again, but this time, when he was falling over words and thoughts in the dark of his mind, this time he didn't even have the energy to acknowledge the pain, because there was already so much.
Elliot Stabler was acclimating himself to being broken.
"We're getting chicken and a toy again today! And mom said you went home, but it's okay, you can come back, okay? We'll get you chicken and you can come back to my house." Noah was excitedly jumping up and down as he spoke into the phone.
He needed hope, he needed it to come from somewhere, and when he walked into Olivia's home and saw her and her son, he saw a picture he thought he had only painted in his mind. He saw the broken masterpiece that he had tucked away in the back of his mind, hidden behind his responsibilities and obligations and the conflicting ranking of everything that he needed in his life. But when he saw them he started to love them, because he wanted hope so badly, he wanted them to fit, all three of them, and he thought that they did – not because they had to, but because they truly did.
"I just wanted to say thank you, for everything." Elliot didn't direct his remark to neither Cragen nor Noah, but he hung up the phone immediately, he couldn't hear Noah's voice anymore, he couldn't think about how he was what they could have been.
This little boy with no resemblance to him, who was a constant reminder of everything that he had and had not left with Olivia.
He wanted to feel something.
He was feeling everything, every emotion, every loss, love, fear, that he had ever processessed in the past ten years, but there was so much that he was beyond overload, and so he was at that point at which he felt nothing.
When you're dead, you can't feel anything.
He thought of all the bodies he had found, the lifeless forms of people, hope, dreams, that he had had to return home - the shells of souls, spirits, emotions, that he had to carry back to families. He wondered who would know, by looking at him, that he was one of those people now, one of the victims lost in tragedy.
He wondered who would return him home.
If he could have felt, he would have felt the thunder roll though him, the tearing at his chest and the dissolution of hope when he realized that there was no one.
There was a flood pouring down around him now, drowning him and smothering him with it's weight. Noah's Ark was sinking, and he was going down with it, he was breathing the water in fear.
"We will now begin boarding United Flight 2654 to Raleigh-Durham. All passengers seated in rows 15 and higher are now welcome to board." The attendant announced over the loudspeaker, and Elliot got up from his seat and moved slowly.
Dead man walking.
---
She hurt tonite because she was stupid enough to preserve part of her hope, to place part of her hope into him, into thinking that he would have ever stayed.
"Can we watch the trucks on TV?" Noah didn't look at Olivia when he spoke, but instead focused on covering his chicken nugget in ketchup.
"Sure." Her voice was horse, her throat burned, her body ached.
"And mom," Noah reached out and patted Olivia's arm, and she winced, Noah hitting the bruises left by Elliot's hands from the night before, "we can call 'Tective Stabler, cause Captain knows his number, and he likes trucks, because he told me, and he will watch with us because he can come to our house because he's big and he can go out at night alone and so he can come." Noah nodded to finish his ramblings and then reached for another chicken nugget.
"Noah, no." She was calm, but uneasy. Steady, but shaking. She didn't want to be mad at him, for his innocence, for everything that he didn't know.
"Yeah mom, it's okay. We can call him, it's okay, I talked to him today with captain and-"
"Noah, no! No! He's not coming! Okay, Noah? He went home, he left. He's not coming back! He can't come over tonite, or tomorrow, or the day after that, okay? Okay, Noah? Do you understand?! He left!" She exploded, her eyes closed tightly, and she was breathing fast, taking short quick breaths, afraid to look at Noah, ashamed that she had let this affect him – let this affect them.
"I'm sorry." Noah replied softly in a scared, shallow voice. Olivia let out a deep sigh and ran her hands over her face.
"No," she was frustrated, she hated him for doing this to her, and she hated him more for now doing it to Noah. "Noah, no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to yell at you, I'm sorry." She got up from her seat at the table and moved around next to him. She kneeled down next to him and pulled his chair out from the table and turned it to her, turned it so that he was facing her. "I'm so sorry, buddy." She apologized for everything; for giving him life without a father, for not giving him Elliot, for both of them not taking equal parts in his life. She apologized for wanting him to be anything other than he was, for wanting him to resemble the man who could not stay for them.
Olivia leaned over and placed a kiss on Noah's cheek, and his chocolate eyes smiled.
Tonite she was happy that his eyes were brown.
---
He didn't turn the lights on when he got back to his apartment. He left them off, left everything to play in the darkness of absent light.
He didn't want to acknowledge the real reason he left the lights off. He didn't want to be that pathetic.
Elliot Stabler was alone.
He was in his apartment, his one bedroom, one bath apartment with minimal furnishings.
He didn't turn on the lights because it allowed him to hide and not see what this all was, where he was. The dark draped over all of his possessions, including himself, and without light he couldn't see that there was no one else there, that there wasn't a toddler's art work on the fridge, or kids movies piled up in front of his TV.
Without the lights on, in the dark, he couldn't see that they weren't there.
He was going to hold onto them in the masquerade of blinding darkness.
He wanted to close his eyes, but he couldn't. Even in the dark, he couldn't close his eyes, because then his memories would roll across his mind like movies, colored movies without sound that showed him what he had done.
An insomniac's dream.
He knew that he couldn't do this, each part of him knew that this was no way to live his life – that sitting in the dark, trying to blacken out everything that he needed would never last. It would never sustain him- he needed more.
He missed Olivia's eyes, so thick and deep that he was lost in them. He missed Olivia's smile, the one that she reserved only for him. He missed Olivia's heart, the way he could feel it when he was close to her, the way he could feel it's life when he pressed himself to her.
He needed to feel her breath.
Elliot needed to be close enough to her so that he could feel her breath.
---
"It's ringing!" Noah jumped up off of the couch and ran for the phone, his hair was wet from his bath, combed back off if his face, and he was wearing thermal pajamas, navy blue with animals on them.
"I'll get it Noah." Olivia got up off of the couch and walked into the kitchen, where Noah was standing, the phoned pressed to his ear and a smile on his face.
"He wants to talk to you." Noah shrugged and handed the phone to his mother before walking past her, out of the kitchen, and back to the couch and his movie.
"Hello?" She walked towards the living room so that she could keep an eye on Noah.
There was no answer on the other end of the phone.
"Hello?" She asked again, grabbing the bridge of her nose as she let out a soft sigh, but there was still no answer. "Noah," She called to her son at the absence of another voice, but just as she said his name the person on the other end responded.
"Liv. It's me, Liv. Olivia, it's me." Elliot found his voice, and Olivia swallowed hard.
"What do you want?" She wanted to be mad, but she didn't have the energy. She wanted to love him, but she wasn't sure she had the courage. She wanted to hate him, but she didn't have that ability.
"I want to ask you a question. I have to ask you a question, Olivia." His voice scared her.
"Elliot, we can't do this, don't you get that? This isn't just me anymore, this is me and Noah and these are our lives that you tore apart, so just stop, okay? Let's just stop this." Her tears were silent, and she was thankful, because she didn't want him to hear them.
"Olivia," he started.
"Elliot." She said his name as strongly as she could.
"Would you let me in?" Her body covered with chills, and she ran to the front door and threw it open, expecting to find him there, but she didn't. They city lights played on the empty black streets, and she didn't want to think that she wanted this. She didn't want to let him hurt her this way, too.
"Elliot, please." He could feel her tears, even though he couldn't hear them.
She wanted to tell him that he was wrong for thinking that she had a choice, that she had a choice about whether or not she could or would or did love him. It wasn't an option, it wasn't a choice, it was who she was.
Elliot needed to come back, but he needed her to let him, to let him come back to her and Noah and their broken home and try to find some piece of what they had before and fuse it to the pieces they had now and hope that they could mold into something.
"Would you let me in, Olivia?"