Mirage
Fleeterberry
Spoilers: set after season 23x08/OC 02x08
Disclaimer: I don't own them.
AN: Not a happy story, consider yourself warned!
Mirage(definition from google): something that appears real or possible but is not in fact so
Bernie calls her from Kathleen's phone and begs her in a hysterical, panicked whisper to come help them. Olivia knows better and has been trying to keep some sort of distance between herself the black hole of a family the Stabler clan represents while she tries to figure out just what the fuck is going on or is about to go on or almost went on or whatever regarding her relationship with Elliot. As long as he was married to Kathy, Olivia had refused to think about it and spent twenty years in utter denial, but now she's gone and he's back and Olivia doesn't know what to think except that she is scared and that tells her she needs to be extremely fucking careful because, at this point in her life, nothing fucking scares her.
She knows Bernie is not particularly well and any inroads to sanity she makes are tenuous and fleeting and even so there's something amusingly devious about half of Bernie's actions that remind Olivia of an impish ten-year-old. And still, what legitimately sounds like fear in the woman's voice and Olivia's responsibility as a woman and a police officer and an NYPD captain combine to deny her of the basic human instinct to protect herself. She tries to pull more information from Bernie, asking for details about the sort of help she's requesting. With Bernie's judgement, it's equally likely they need ESU intervention or another person at the dinner table to make the number of guests even. But Bernie hangs up following a raspy statement to hurry.
Olivia knows. She fucking knows. But she can't deny the what-ifs and she dutifully drops Noah with a neighbor and collects her badge and weapon and runs her dash light as she speeds to Elliot's apartment. The dread building in her stomach is a sixth sense and she knows it and she has felt it since she got out of bed and now she knows why she's been nervous and anxious and out of sorts all day, but the problem with a reliable gut feeling is that the feeling is only a foreshadowing, simply a warning, and much like she's watching a movie, there's no way for her to change the outcome. At least the foreboding prevented her from eating anything so there's a little bit less nausea as she's hurrying to what she already knows is a fucking disaster.
She wishes she had some idea what the dread signified, some way to prepare herself for what she's about to face, but she only knows she's not going to be the same by the end of it and all of a sudden, her current situation looks pretty fucking great compared to the unknown that is rapidly approaching.
She turns off the light as she makes a right onto his street, telling herself that police lights always make crazy people crazier and she's unprepared to face that without backup. There is nothing out of the ordinary that she can see from the street and so she parks, glances at her phone while she considers calling, thinks maybe if Kathleen answers she'll get something to go on, and then reminds herself that, if the situation is dangerous, a ringing phone could push things from bad to worse.
She moves swiftly from her car to the garden, carefully working open the latch, easing the squeaky gate wide enough that she can squeeze through it. Part of her mind tells her she should demand Elliot install a better lock because his ground floor place is far too easily accessed, but the sick feeling in her stomach tells her it's not going to be a problem after tonight, at least not for her. She doesn't have the luxury to consider the certainty with which that idea forms in her mind and she blinks back the tears that form in response. The knowledge that the physical safety of the Stabler family will no longer mean anything to her following tonight is frightening on a level that would paralyze her if she let it, so she doesn't.
She squats behind a thoroughly dead rose bush and her knees crack loudly in protest. She freezes, her hand on her weapon as she tells herself that the unbearably loud sound was likely unnoticed by anyone but her. Stil, she doesn't dare move, staring at her watch for a solid minute while she waits for a response. When no one comes to investigate after sixty seconds, she pokes her head up, moving slowly, trying to process the scene, hoping like hell she's wrong and that Bernie was calling her, as she had the last time, because she couldn't remember if she'd already put an egg in the batter she was preparing.
The twins are the first people she sees, sitting together on the loveseat, and Olivia takes a moment to ruminate on what it might be like to have a twin, another soul with whom she is always connected, and for a beat she thinks she has that with Elliot, or at least she did, and then she reminds herself that the pair of twenty-somethings before her would absolutely not go a decade without speaking and have likely never inflicted, deliberately or otherwise, the sort of pain on each other than she and Elliot have. Something about their expressions catches her attention and brings her mind back to the matter at hand and makes the hair on the back of her neck stand up.
Her eyes scan the room, finding Kathleen and Bernie on the couch. Unlike the twins, this pair is obviously huddled together, their four hands in a nervous, twisting pile on Bernie's lap. Their faces are frozen in fear, and Olivia glances back to the twins, trying to assess the difference, and now the twins have grabbed hands too and their faces are scared and she absolutely knows that whatever was going on when she arrived has just gone straight downhill and she still has no idea what the fuck it is.
And then she sees Elliot, her heart leaping as it always does when she sees him, but her initial, ingrained response is stifled by her own fear at Elliot's carefully neutral face and his raised hands. She doesn't need to see anymore to know he's being held at gunpoint, she's unfortunately been in this sort of situation far too many times and she knows the blank stare he gets when he expects he's about to die.
Her insides twist at the familiarity of the situation, wishing she could fucking love a man who doesn't flirt with death more than he flirts with her. Her heart beats a little faster, her adrenaline response building. She should call for backup, but she won't. There is nothing going on in that room that a NYPD hostage negotiator won't make worse and she ponders if protecting Elliot's dysfunctional family is worth losing her shield and she chokes on the dread that this fucking night is going to end in such a way that she will look fondly on this moment when there's still a fucking chance for something to be ok in the morning.
She reaches for her phone, her finger hovering over the emergency call button and she fucking wants to, but then Elliot backs up another step and she can see the reflection in the mirror, the reason for the fear and the dread and the dead look in Elliot's eyes.
Eli.
Jesus fucking Christ.
She really wonders where the fuck Elliot got off having so fucking many children when he knew full well crazy was as common as the name Stabler in his gene pool.
The boy is crying and shouting and waving Elliot's gun around in a manner that makes Olivia very disappointed with Elliot's approach to home gun safety. She can't hear what the kid is saying, but he's obviously completely distraught and it's probably not helped by Elliot's stock answer to anyone who is distraught, which is to be complete detached and emotionless and Olivia herself has been tempted to shoot the bastard on more than one occasion just to get some fucking emotion from him.
She shoves away her annoyance with Elliot and focuses on the very real, very dangerous situation. Eli is a moody teenager who has been under a great deal of stress and has lost a parent and has another emotionally distant parent and is sharing a house with two medicated, but somewhat unstable family members, in a country he doesn't even remember living in before a year ago. Keeping her eyes on Elliot's face, she holds out her phone, angling it to catch the street light, hoping like hell he'll see the reflection.
The thought barely forms before his eyes lock on hers, the instant connection sending her already racing heart rate skyrocketing, and somehow she's already mourning it because she can feel it deep in her bones that the number of times she'll lock eyes with him is severely limited. She watches as he nods, one deliberate, subtle movement that she knows no one else watching would catch. His path shifts, instead of walking parallel to the windows, he's now backing up at an angle, his body turned to the glass, forcing Eli to turn away from the door as he passes it. The living room is only so big and there's not a lot of space for a man who is over six feet tall to step before he hits a wall and the speed with which she has to make a decision is not at all comfortable and she wants to draw her weapon to defend the innocent people in that room, including the one who had the sense to call for help and knew to call her instead of 911 because armed domestic disputes rarely end without bloodshed and she is likely their best chance of everyone walking away alive and that means something to her even though she knows someone or something isn't surviving the night.
She has no intention of shooting anyone and will shoot herself as soon as hold a weapon on the child she literally helped bring into the world, but she pulls her gun anyway, leaving the safety on and scooting over towards the door. She can see Elliot is only a step from the wall and she wants more time to think, but there is no time and if only Elliot were beside her right now she would have no second thoughts about what she's doing.
Her knees issue another protest as she rises from the squat she's held too long and she doesn't care if anyone hears it because she's pulling on the door and only thinking as it resists her pull that shit the door might be locked and then she'll have lost the element of surprise and let everyone down and there's a surge of anger at herself that allows her to pull a bit harder and the door unhappily complies with her request to move and she remembers that she wanted to mention to Elliot that he's really quite unsafe with the house unsecured and his weapon unsecured and moody teens and often unmedicated adults all living under the same roof and her gut reminds her that it's not going to be her problem much longer and she wonders, while she rushes into the room with her gun drawn and aimed at the floor because she's not going to shoot anyone, if that means she's going to wind up bleeding out on Elliot's living room floor and she somehow knows she will, but not quite in a predictable way and she knows there won't be any blood spilled, but she'll be dead just the same.
As she enters the room, she hears the angry, accusing question, completely out of context and it doesn't help her understand a damn thing.
"What's his name?" Eli is so wrapped up in waiting for a response that he doesn't notice Olivia's arrival.
Elliot's eyes are trained on Eli, but he still steals a glance at her, his eyes flickering to her for a millisecond before returning to his armed son. "I don't know."
Her voice sounds unfamiliar to her own ears as she demands quietly and calmly that Eli drop the weapon. She sees the faces of the audience - and that's how her mind sees them, as people watching from afar as something intimate unfolds and she wishes she weren't aware of them - turn to her in shock and hope and sudden interest and while she's glad they're not scared anymore, she also wonders how this level of insanity has somehow become routine to them because she's seen a lot of crazy in her career and her life and she's freaked out right now but apparently this is not abnormal in this household and she's suddenly very glad she never accepted any of Elliot's invitations to join his family for holidays.
Eli turns to her, the gun lowered to his side, but his face and body still too unstable to make her feel any better despite the fact that Elliot's life is no longer being actively threatened. The boy's face twists in anguish and tears spill down his cheeks and he's pleading with her even though he doesn't know her at all.
"Did you know?" He sniffles, wiping at his nose with his sleeve. "Were you in on it too?"
It's an instinct that she doesn't even notice, her eyes darting to Elliot, but Eli sees it and steps into her line of vision. "Don't look at him. Tell me the truth."
She suspects, as she as always suspected, that the Stabler children have a very different understanding of her relationship with their father and, after having read that fucking letter, she knows exactly where they got their jacked up version of events. She defaults into captain mode, spreading her arms wide. "I'm putting my gun away, Eli. How about you do the same?" She's moving slowly because she doesn't want to push him and even though she knows she's not going to shoot anyone, she still feels better with her gun in her hand because it's her fucking security blanket and being in a room with this family at this moment makes her desperately want some kind of security because she feels that fucking threatened.
"Did you know?"
She has no idea what he's talking about and she's pretty damn sure she doesn't know anyway, but she wonders why the hell he cares what she knows because they are effectively strangers. "Know what?"
Elliot speaks up, his talent for throwing gas on a fire undeniable. "Leave her out of this, Eli."
Eli turns back to his father, the gun unintentionally pointed at four different people as he spins. "Why? What's she doing here? Did you call her?"
Elliot shakes his head and Olivia can see the truth written across his face that he doesn't care how she wound up there but he's so fucking relieved she's there because they know how to deal with a crisis when they're together, but obviously shit goes very wrong when they're apart. "I didn't call her, Eli, because she has nothing to do with this."
Bernie speaks up, probably because she knows her son and she knows as well as Olivia does that Elliot won't placate anyone even when they're holding a fucking gun on him. "I called her, Eli."
And then the gun is aimed at Bernie, but Kathleen is trying to lean in front of her grandmother and Olivia cannot watch as this continues because there are so many roads it can take and none of them are good.
"Eli, look at me." There's a presence in her tone, a command, an expectation to be obeyed and she can see Elliot turning to her out of the corner of her eye and she can feel the weight of the twins' stare and Bernie and Kathleen are looking too and even Eli gives into the suggestion and turns to her, but he turns with his whole body, gun included and she's staring down Elliot's department issue and she's fucking furious that a goddamned child has access to a fucking NYPD weapon and she'd like to write him up for it but her gut tells her that she's not even going to care enough to bother when she gets back to the office and that this fucking shitshow is the finale of their whole fucking relationship and she'd relish the opportunity to consider that thought and process it and come to terms with it, except a Stabler is having a crisis and therefore Olivia's emotional wellbeing is meaningless.
"I don't know what happened, Eli, but why don't we talk about it?" She thinks the boy is listening to her, but she can feel the moment slipping out of control and she sees Elliot step forward to insinuate himself into the conversation.
"Get that fucking gun off of her, Eli." He's moving too quickly and although Olivia has long since stopped believing any show of force from him when directed at someone he cares about, she doubts the kid understands and so she's glaring at him and having to ignore the gun that's still pointed at her chest.
"Back off, detective." Her eyes are icy as she tries to rip him a new one for whatever the fuck stupid shit he did that resulted in this fucking mess. She sees the surprise in his face, not at her words, but at the distance between them, at the utter detachment she has when she looks at him and she knows he's realizing what her gut has been telling her all day and she almost feels bad at the pain in his eyes because he's looking for his partner and he's finally realized they haven't been partners for eleven years now.
Satisfied that Elliot has been stunned into silence, she turns back to Eli. "Please put the gun down, Eli. This is just a misunderstanding and we can work it out."
Eli's face which had been tending toward anger turns sharply toward hurt and his chin trembles. "There's nothing to work out."
She has no idea what's going on and she wonders if it's just unbridled teen angst or mental illness or grief and it doesn't matter in the long run because she responds the same way she always does when someone is hurting so badly in front of her. She steps forward, wanting to soothe him. "It's ok, Eli, we can fix it. Nothing has happened here that we can't fix."
And despite the fact that she hardly knows this kid, that as far as he remembers she only came into his life when his mother died, he responds the way most people do because she has a gift and sometimes she resents that her one fucking talent is to take other people's pain and absorb it as her own, but it's a fucking superpower and the boy is lowering the gun and moving forward and he barely even notices when Elliot takes the weapon from his hand because he's collapsing into Olivia's arms and the two of them are suddenly on the floor with Eli sobbing against her chest.
She's rubbing his back and glaring at Elliot because she's certain he is not without blame for whatever happened, even if taking people hostage was not the proper response. "Eli, what's the matter?"
He's sobbing and sniffling and Olivia is watching Bernie as she pulls the twins and Kathleen into a bedroom and Olivia is deliberately not looking at Elliot because her instincts for self-preservation are very loudly telling her that this is going to fucking hurt and she wants to be detached like she was a minute earlier, but she's going to be mad because she's mad at herself for letting him suck her back in when she knew all along it was only going to end in pain and she already suffered through the pain of losing him once and she doesn't fucking feel like experiencing it again and she knows it's coming anyway.
Eli's sobs die back, but he's still hiccuping and sniffling and Olivia tells herself that even if she's going to be destroyed by something happening tonight, at least she can help this child who has evidently been hurt by Elliot Stabler and if there's one fucking thing she understands in life, it's the absolutely crushing pain caused by that man.
Eventually he's not crying any longer and Elliot is sitting on the floor across the room, his arms resting on his knees, alternately staring at Olivia and the floor. Olivia's attention is caught by Bernie who is trying to sneak unseen from the bedroom toward the kitchen, but it's impossible to be unseen crossing a room that is so deathly still. She grabs a bottle of water from the kitchen counter and turns back the way she came, but pauses and holds the bottle out toward Olivia, who shakes her head. A moment later and Bernie is gone again, huddled in the bedroom with three adults who are probably all still more aware of what the fuck is going on than Olivia.
Eli slowly sits back, his red eyes looking far too tired and broken for a kid his age. "I'm taking a biology class this semester."
And somehow, she knows exactly where this is going, the bottom dropping out of her stomach and her lungs seizing. She was raised by a literature professor and only took enough science courses to graduate, and yet she recalls those labs she couldn't avoid and she wants to be sick when she looks at this boy and sees, not for the first time, not even the vaguest hint of Elliot Stabler. All of the kids carry some of his qualities, physical or emotional, but she's always looked at them and immediately identified what came from their father and what must have come from their mother. But Eli, she honestly sees neither of them in him, although she can admit now that she never knew Kathy all that well.
She swallows hard and tries to avoid looking at Elliot because she already fucking knows why he's sitting there quietly for the first time in his motherfucking life. She grips Eli's hand and she's not sure if it's to support him or her. "Eli-"
"I kept thinking I didn't understand the material because both of my parents have blue eyes, but then today we had this lab to test our blood types and I'm type B and my mom was type O and-" Eli motions behind himself like he can't say the word anymore, "he's type-"
And he doesn't need to finish and she already knows because they'd promised to give each other a kidney since they apparently have more in common than Elliot does with his son.
She draws in a breath and refuses to acknowledge that she sees it now, the path that this is all taking, the way this fucking innocuous day that started out normal except for her gut telling her it was the end of normal as she knew it, and the future is a fucking unfamiliar nightmare and it's going to fucking kill her because she only just starting thinking she could trust him again when he shaved of his beard and told her he was home. Again.
"Eli, that's not important. It's a high school lab, it's hardly a sterile environment, things could have been contaminated." And she knows it's bullshit, but it's not her place to demand this child face reality and she's kind of mad that high school science teachers are still doing that same stupid lab because it's probably been the beginning of no end of shit like this and has likely destroyed many a family.
Eli looks up at her, his eyes wide and full of pain. "My mom is gone and he doesn't even know who my father is."
Olivia's heart, already tattered and torn and duct taped back together so many times, breaks again both for Eli and for Elliot. Obviously Eli had no idea, how would he, and Elliot must have, based on the way the man is glaring at the floor and fisting his hands together so hard she's expecting one of them to break, but she still knows it cuts him deeply to hear his son, the boy he's raised, calling someone else his father.
And she's torn herself, because biology doesn't make a family, and she knows Eli can understand that if she brings up Noah, but she's never even discussed Noah with Elliot, not really, and she has no idea if Elliot knows that Noah is adopted and she really wants to keep that secret to herself a little while longer.
As always, she gives more of herself than she wants, because she has no choice, because she can help someone, because she can't live with herself if she doesn't. "Elliot is your father, Eli, no matter what the science book says." Her voice cracks and her chin trembles and the tears spill down her face. "I adopted my son when he was a very little baby and he's never known any other family than me, but he doesn't have my DNA." She refuses to see the way Elliot's head shoots up at her words and focuses instead on the way Eli is staring at her as though he's never heard of such a thing as adoption. "Noah is my son, he's my baby boy and I'm his mom and that's what matters." She's almost choking on her words, feeling a desperate urge to crush her baby to her chest and squeeze him tight, settling instead on gripping Eli's hand. "Elliot is your father. He loves you. He always has."
Eli is clinging to his anger much the way he's clinging to Olivia's hand and his skinny fingers are clawing at her as he shakes his head. "No, if he loved me, he would have told me."
"Knowing him, he was trying to protect you." There's more truth to her statement than she even realizes when it falls out of her mouth. "Your mom too." And that just twists the knife a little deeper because while she'd always though she and Kathy had been friends of a sort in a way that two people with nothing in common besides a man they both loved desperately enough to refuse to give up eventually begin to tolerate each other and then respect each other when in fact Kathy clearly fucking hated her and rather than just letting Kathy die and Olivia keep her delusion about her friend, the bastard had decided to give her that letter knowing full well she'd never be able to resist reading what he had to say to her after ten goddamned years and then, even after the emotional blow of those words, he'd doubled down and confessed the truth and taken away any illusions Olivia'd ever had about being welcome in their world.
She reaches up, tucking a piece of Eli's hair behind his ear and trying not to blame the messenger. "I was there when you were born, Eli. The paramedics handed you to me the moment you took your first breath because they were trying to save your mom. Your parents loved you before you were born, honey, and nothing is ever going to change that."
Eli looks confused and she realizes that whatever he was told about the circumstances surrounding his birth, her fucking name had never come up, and this time she dares to let her glance fall on Elliot, trying to read him and seeing the way he won't meet her eyes and how he clenches his jaw until the veins stick out in his neck, and she knows that while he had every right to walk away and protect his family that son of a bitch had no right to fucking erase her from history.
The boy looks too and Elliot doesn't try to avoid his eyes, nodding instead, and assuring his son that Olivia had spoken the truth. In that moment, Eli's anger dissipates, as though he is reassured by the tears in Elliot's eyes and Olivia feels the hand suddenly loosen from hers as Eli crawls away to his father's side where the two lock each other in a fierce embrace.
The room is still tense, possibly more than before, and Olivia desperately wants to be anywhere else, but she really has no choice because her gut tells her this isn't over, at least not for her. She sits quietly in the middle of the living room floor and wishes she could run away before the rest of this unfolds.
She's so lost in the haze of disbelief and confusion waning adrenaline that she has lost all track of time. It might have been minutes. It might have been hours. She vaguely remembers the twins leaving and Kathleen talking at one point and now Bernie is in the kitchen wiping down the same patch of countertop over and over again while she hums "When Irish Eyes are Smiling" and Eli and Elliot sit on the floor shoulder to shoulder and she sits alone in the middle of the room more or less completely ignored by the family she's just saved again.
As awkward and awful and uncomfortable and out of place as she feels, she wonders why she doesn't feel completely at ease with the situation she's been in the entire time she's known the family. She's always been at best tangentially involved with their family, and apparently, even that connection was heavily disputed and she finds herself wishing she'd stayed out of it and let Elliot tend to his family instead of stepping in and trying to fix what he was always fucking up. He was a grown man and he probably would have figured it out on his own and Olivia resents the energy she spent taking care of him when he never wasted a damn second on taking care of her.
The quiet is interrupted by Elliot's voice, but he's speaking softly and Olivia knows his words are for Eli's benefit and she knows when Eli stands up and hugs his grandmother and then ducks into his bedroom that she's next, it's her cue to leave, to disappear back into the night, because she fixed what she was needed to fix and now there's no place for her here and the dread is rising back up and chasing away the fatigue from having dealt with such an emotionally charged scene and that damn dread tells her the real pain hasn't even happened yet and she wishes she didn't already know how this was going to go because she'd like to be able to imagine going home and climbing in bed and sleeping like a fucking baby because she's earned that much dammit.
Elliot climbs to his feet and covers the space between them in two strides and she wants to stand up because she'll feel more his equal than she does crumpled on the floor but she knows, she fucking knows, that what's coming is going to negate her ability to stand and so it's probably safer for her to already be on the ground when it happens.
It's a moment later, somehow too soon and too long simultaneously, that Elliot takes the hint and sits down beside her, his breathing loud and heavy and exhausted while he tries to figure out what the fuck to say. And there's really nothing he can say because there's nothing she wants to hear because whatever he's going to say or not say or allude to or deny is what's going to eviscerate her and she's not in the mood to listen to him beat around the bush and she just wants it fucking over with already so she can hurry up to the healing part except she knows it's going to hurt so fucking much that she'd almost rather wait in this excruciating limbo of not knowing where something between her and the man she has fucking loved more than her own fucking life for all these years remains sacred and true and unblemished by the reality she knows is coming.
He sits there and opens and closes his mouth over and over again as he tries to find some way to say what he has to say without making a bigger mess of things than they're already in and really, that's saying a lot, because his mother just called her to come intercede while his son was holding them all at gunpoint over something Elliot probably should have told the kid and Olivia wonders why it is that Elliot always protects his family by not saying things and destroys her by not saying things and when is the man ever going to learn that he should just tell the fucking truth because at least it's the truth and doesn't hurt like the fucking dishonesty does except now the brutal fucking honesty is coming at her and she doesn't really want it after all.
She breaks the silence because she doesn't have ten more years to wait for Elliot to do it. "You knew." Her words are a statement, not a question, not quite an accusation, but almost.
He's holding his breath and not exploding in anger the way he always has when he's backed into a corner and she suspects that's because he knows the same way as she does that whatever is coming tonight is the fucking end of them and then she realizes that he does know, but not the way she does, but because he fucking knew all along and she realizes that he didn't tell her because he knew it was going to hurt and she begins to put it all together without him having to say a goddamned word because she's always had to read between the lines since he's never, ever told her what she needed to know.
She swallows hard and it washes over her, the truth, the understanding, the fact that he hurt her so much more than she'd even realized. She can't even cry, can't quite grasp the concept, but she knows and she's thankful for her instincts that felt this coming because at least she's a little detached and numb and she wants to hear him say it.
"How long have you known?"
He sighs this time, probably understanding that this fifteen year old decision is coming back to haunt him, probably realizing that this is the one thing she'll never be able to forgive him for because she loved him, really fucking loved him, and he knew it and clearly didn't reciprocate, but he let her believe he did anyway because it fucking suited him. Still he doesn't speak. Because he knows and she wants him to say it and he won't even give her that because he's never given her anything besides fodder for her imagination and she wishes she could still have that because believing they were star-crossed lovers was better than this miserable unrequited bullshit.
Her voice raises loud enough to stop the incessant humming coming from the kitchen. "How fucking long, Elliot?"
Every second he doesn't answer tells her more and she remembers those days, when he was getting divorced and they were flirting all the time and their lingering stares were so fucking obvious that people actually got tired of teasing them and there was at least one moment every single fucking day when she was sure it was finally time and one of them was going to make a move and they were going to kiss and shred each other's clothes as they made their way to a bed to demonstrate physically what they had always known mentally and she'd been so in love with him that she wasn't even trying to hide it and she'd thought he was in love with her and then suddenly there was his fucking announcement that Kathy was fucking pregnant again and she remembers the moment like it was yesterday and she knows, she fucking knows, and she doesn't want to hear him say it anymore because it's worse than her gut had fucking warned her about and she feels the tears pricking her eyes and she stares at the floor and her finger traces one of the knots in the wood over and over and over and she can only concentrate on that fucking irregular swirl because she is fucking dying and if she just keeps tracing it maybe she won't feel the pain that is so immense she cannot fucking breathe.
"She was over forty, so they did genetic testing right away." It's so detached and clinical and full of bullshit to distract her from the truth she already knows and she fucking hates that he can't even just say it like a fucking man and instead keeps stabbing her in the back.
She can't speak for a moment and she concentrates on breathing and on the rough feeling of the edge of the knot under her fingers because she can't hear him, she can't listen to him, she can't let him tell her that he knew Eli wasn't his before he even fucking told her Kathy was pregnant while she was waiting for him to confess how much he loved her.
In an effort to not scream, she's holding her breath and it's making her chest hurt but her chest is going to hurt anyway so she may as well pretend the pain is of her own making and so she keeps waiting, hoping to pass out so she'll have the mercy of a few seconds of unconsciousness. She hears footsteps, a decidedly adolescent shuffling, and she waits, thankful for the interruption at the same time she resents the kid's fucking existance because he fucking ruined everything except he didn't ruin anything, it was all Elliot and it's hard for her to blame Elliot for something unforgivable because she wants to go back to fucking loving him so damn much but the feeling is changing, is shifting because even she can't keep loving someone who so obviously doesn't love her, never loved her, never even gave her the respect of an honest brush off.
"Can I still call you dad?"
A silent sob rips through her, shaking her shoulders as she listens to Elliot assure the boy he is still dad and she feels the tears start to spill down her cheeks and she knows it will be several days before they stop because it's over. It's finally over. The great love affair of her life really was an illusion all along that only existed in her mind and it's hard to have something so fundamental ripped away from her when she never even got to experience it.
"I love you, Eli."
And maybe that's why this hurts so much. Because Elliot had always loved Eli. He'd chosen Eli. He'd chosen some stranger's baby and a marriage that had already failed over her. Anyone, anything, but her.
This is what her instincts have been trying to warn her about all day and she's furious because talking a boy down from holding his father at gunpoint, seeing Elliot being held at gunpoint, having to counsel Eli from a devastating blow, any of those things separately would have been enough to qualify this as a shitty day. But now, no, this is different, this is rewriting her history, this changes things on a level she can't quite grasp and won't grasp for a long time and she's not sure she'll live long enough to re-catalog every damn memory in her head and she still fucking hopes she's wrong even though she knows she's not because it all makes sense now, why it didn't happen when he was single fifteen years ago and why it hasn't happen since he's been single this past year and she feels like such a fucking idiot for thinking there was more to it than infatuation on her part and disinterest on his.
And somehow, she forces out words, a quiet whisper, because she does know the answer but she needs to hear him say it, she fucking deserves that from him, because he fucking strung her along for fucking decades and used everything he could possibly get from her and now he at least owes her the fucking acknowledgement of what he's done.
"How long did you know?" It takes almost all of her strength to speak and she feels like she is looking down on herself, like she is floating in the air above the room, watching as she finally succumbs to the fatal injury she sustained tonight that was inflicted fifteen years ago.
"Before I moved back home." She can barely hear him and she doesn't know if that's because she's floating off into space or because his voice is so quiet, but she feels when his hand covers hers, stilling the continuous tracing of the pattern on the floor.
She jerks her hand away and somehow finds the strength to stand up, mostly because he doesn't deserve to see how devastated she is to discover how fucking little he thinks of her and of them and of what she'd thought was some magical, fairytale bond between them, and she wishes she could stop crying but she can't because she's fucking human and humans fucking cry when they're hurting and he's hurt her more than she ever imagined possible.
He's saying something, following her, and then Bernie is there, saying something about her not being ok to drive, and she'll fucking die if she has to stay in that house one second longer because she has a home of her own and a son who loves her and friends who care about her and tried to warn her not to trust the son of a bitch who can't seem to resist trying new ways to fucking destroy her.
She turns at the threshold of the door, feeling the contrast of the cool night air against the overheated living room, and she ignores the concerned woman and instead meets the eyes of the man she expects she'll never see again.
She no longer feels like she's floating, she feels solid and grounded and heavy as everything shifts into focus, the world harsher and sharper and clearer than it has ever been, and yet comforting, because it is real. Her voice is strong as she suddenly agrees with what he'd tried to tell her, what Kathy had put into words, what had been true all along, what she is finally able to face. "What we were to each other was never real."
And then she walks away, knowing he's not going to follow.