Even taking the stairs two at a time was too slow for Elliot. All he could think about was getting to Liv, and part of the back of his mind was hoping and praying she wouldn't be standing on the roof ledge or have already flung herself over the side by the time he made it up there.
When he burst through the door, he saw her sitting in the corner with her head between her knees. He could hear her breathing from where he stood and it sounded labored and ragged, like she was about to hyperventilate.
He didn't think, but instead took as big of strides toward her as his legs would allow and kneeled in front of her. He placed his hands on each of her knees to try to ground her.
"Liv, it's me," Elliot said. "Lift your head up, look at me."
She tried, and her face was streaked with tears. She was shaking her hands in front of her and trying to point towards her chest.
"You're having an anxiety attack," Elliot said. "It's okay, you're okay."
She shook her head no, still struggling to breathe, so Elliot moved from kneeling in front of her to sitting next to her. He tugged her head to his chest so she could listen to his breathing and his heart rate.
"You're going to breathe with me, okay, Liv?" Elliot said. "Follow what I do with a big breath in."
He narrated breathing for her until her shoulders began to shake less and her breaths became less erratic. Eventually she tipped her head up to look at him.
"Hi," he said, giving her a warm smile and brushing one of the longer pieces of hair growing back in behind her ear.
"Please tell me this whole day has been a dream," she said, backing away from his chest to lean against the back wall of the roof. "And that when I wake up, none of it really happened."
"I'd love to tell you that," Elliot said. "But then I'd be a liar."
Olivia just kept shaking her head, until she looked down at his hands. She picked up his left to inspect it.
"El, you're all scraped up," she said.
"It's fine," he told her, not pulling back from her touch.
"You need some peroxide," Olivia said. "Make sure you don't get an infection."
"I'm not going to get an infection," Elliot said, wrapping his hand around hers. "Cooties maybe since it was Mark that I punched. But not an infection."
Olivia let out a sad laugh before dropping his hand and looking away from him.
"How did I miss it," Olivia said. "How did I miss it twice. God, I was 18 when I met him so there's no statutory rape this time, but it's the same thing."
Elliot hadn't quite caught up to what she was saying, so he let her continue.
"How many others are there?" Olivia said. "How many women has he done this to, right under my nose? It was bad enough when I was 16, but I'm an SVU detective and I was married to that… Oh, God. I'm going to be sick."
She bolted up for the ashtray on the roof and dry heaved a few times overtop of it. Elliot followed her and rubbed her back as she did.
"It's okay," Elliot said. "Anybody could have missed it."
"You wouldn't have," Olivia said. "If you were married to a rapist you'd know it."
"You don't know that for sure," he said. "Mark's a manipulator. He knew how to get you to not see it. To doubt yourself."
"But why?," she said. "I should have been stronger than that. I should have learned my lesson after Burton."
Then it all clicked for Elliot. She felt like she had repeated the cycle, missing what these men did and who they really were.
"Olivia, you were 16 when you met Burton and 18 when you met Mark," Elliot said. "You were young. You didn't know what the real world was like."
"I knew plenty about the real world and chose to ignore it," Olivia said, spinning around to look at him. "I lived in the real world with every vodka bottle, every time I had to go pick up my mother drunk at a bar with my fake driver's license when I was 14. I lived in it every time she brought some man home who, upon realizing there was another man's child in the house, would call my mother a whore and call me a bastard and leave her to drink away her sorrows."
Elliot reached for her hands.
"Olivia, that's not the real world," Elliot said. "That was a nightmare. Yes, bad things happen in the real world, but you're supposed to have people to help you see it. To teach you how to handle people like Burton and Mark, and life in general. You didn't have that."
Her eyes looked up to the overcast sky and she shook her head again.
"I just wanted someone to love me," she said. "And I wanted to love them back."
"I know," Elliot said, wrapping her in a hug.
What he wanted to tell her was that he loved her, but it was too soon. It was the wrong time. Any declaration like that would seem insincere right now, or like damage control. She deserved to hear it when there was no way her mind could talk her out of it being true.
He thought about what she said, about wanting to love and be loved, and if the situation wasn't so messed up, he might have laughed. Because that's what he'd been looking for when he met Kathy, and their paths had followed ones similar to Olivia and Mark, only with much less sinister activity. He had wanted to love a woman the way his father didn't love his mother. He'd wanted that love to be returned so he felt like he was doing something right with his life. But all it got them was twenty some odd years later on the brink of divorce.
"What if he hurt Chelsea?" Olivia whispered against his chest.
Elliot hadn't considered that and he felt his blood pressure spike.
"I think she would have told you if something happened," Elliot said. "But if he so much as laid a finger on her, he will be dead and it will look like an accident or a suicide."
"Don't tell me too much so I don't have to lie under oath at your trial," she said.
"Right," Elliot said. "Couldn't plead the crime of passion if you knew the plan."
They were silent for another few minutes and he enjoyed the time of just being able to hold her.
"How could I miss it," she said. "But all of you saw it."
"All of us who?" Elliot said.
"You, your mother, Cragen," she said. "Fin, Munch, even Kathy. You could all tell what a horrible person Mark was, but I didn't see it."
"That's what a support system does, Liv," Elliot said. "That's what family does. They look out for you, even when you can't see something for yourself. They do things like, oh, I don't know, get your mother to take her medication and plead her own case to a judge."
Olivia looked up at him with a small smirk.
"Now where'd you hear that?" Olivia asked.
"A little birdie," Elliot said. "More like a little Bernie told me after she reached her status mark."
"She tried to warn me," Olivia said. "Twice."
"Who?" Elliot asked. "My mother?"
"No," Olivia said. "My mother. When Burton proposed she threatened to have him expelled and his scholarship revoked if he didn't leave me alone. She said 'I'll never let anyone else have you.' And then when she showed up at our apartment drunk after she fell off the wagon, she was screaming 'I'll never let you have them.' Elliot, she saw it and she was trying to protect me. But I didn't listen because she was drunk."
"You didn't know any better, Liv," he said. "She'd never been the most reliable source."
"She was a decent mother after she got sober," Olivia said. "And she was a wonderful grandmother. She and Chelsea should have had more time together. But that was all Mark's fault too."
"How?" Elliot asked.
"Mark found out that Chelsea wasn't his daughter right after I started at SVU," Olivia said, pulling back from his chest to tell her story. "She'd been having some dizzy spells and the doctor wanted to check her for diabetes."
Elliot's eyes shot open. Did Chelsea have diabetes? How could he have missed that in the last two years?
"She's fine," Olivia said. "Turned out she just had a lingering sinus infection that was messing with her inner ear and her balance. We got it cleared up. But they took a blood panel and she's A positive. Mark is B, and when her blood didn't come back AB…"
"He knew," Elliot said. "But what does that have to do with your mother?"
"After he figured that out he really started on his manipulation games," Olivia said. "We went to this wedding for one of my mother's friend's daughters, really one of the only people she stayed in touch with consistently in her life. Apparently when I went to the bathroom he brought her a vodka tonic and told her that she'd been doing so well with her sobriety that she deserved a reward. That she could have just one celebratory drink and it would be fine."
"That's…" Elliot trailed off. He didn't even have the words to adequately describe how despicable that was.
"I know," Olivia said. "And of course, she fell right off the wagon. And that's how she ended up at our front door, screaming. She knew what he did to her, she could see what he was doing to me, and that was the only way she knew to try to tell me. And I ignored her."
"She hadn't given you a reason to trust her," Elliot said.
"But she was my mother," Olivia said.
"Parents aren't perfect, Liv," he said. "We're just people. You know that."
"I don't want to become to Chelsea what my mother became to me," Olivia said. "A stranger who she can't trust. Someone she thinks doesn't love her."
"You won't," Elliot said. "I know you. You won't let that happen."
"I don't want Kathy to take the kids from you either," Olivia said.
"We talked about it a little bit," Elliot said. "She's not going to take them from me completely, but there will likely have to be an adjustment."
"I'm so sorry I offered you that ride that night and got you sucked into this mess," she said. "I don't regret Chelsea but without that your life would be simpler."
He looked at her for a minute, trying to gauge where she was in her headspace, to see how much he could volunteer without scaring her away. Thunder rumbled in the distance.
"I'm not sorry," Elliot said.
She tilted her head and rolled her eyes at him.
"Seriously, I'm not," he said, taking a step closer to her and putting his hands on her hips. "No ride means no punctured tire. No punctured tire means no motel. No motel means no Chelsea. No Chelsea maybe means no partnership, and no partnership means neither of you in my life, and I will never take back and never regret the events that made those things happen."
He could see her wheels turning as she took in what he said.
"You ever wonder if we were always supposed to meet," Olivia said. "Like no matter what situation or circumstances that happened in our lives, somewhere we were always supposed to meet one another?"
Elliot thought about it as thunder rolled again.
"Yeah," Elliot said. "I think we were always meant to meet, in any universe."
"Do you think in a different one maybe we would have chosen each other first?" she asked.
"Maybe," he said. "Or maybe we would have spent 23 years being just friends. Who really knows."
"Is there something inherently wrong with you that I should know about?" Olivia asked.
"What?" Elliot said, cocking his head at her. "What kind of question is that?"
"I'm not always the best judge of character, as we can clearly see," Olivia said, gesturing toward the door. "And I just want to know if maybe you're a serial killer or part of an international drug cartel before I get too invested."
Elliot was slowly registering what she was saying as the thunder rolled again. Holy crap. She was interested in him, and she thought there was something wrong with him because of it. But she was interested. She was choosing him.
"Not a serial killer, not part of an international drug cartel," he said, using his hands to sway her hips back and forth. "Made one kind of poor judgement call nine years ago, but I think in the end it worked out for the best. Kind of suck at dancing. Only things I really know how to cook go on the grill. Bottle up my emotions instead of telling people how I feel. Can't really carry much of a tune either."
"I think those are all things I can work with," she said, finally giving him a real Olivia smile.
Then, it started to rain.
Elliot was annoyed. Always popping up at the most inconvenient times, like he'd always said. But Olivia looked up at the sky and closed her eyes. She let the drops dance off her face and she smiled again.
"I love the rain," she said. "It has a healing quality about it. It can wash away all the dirt, and the grime, and the bad things in the world. It's my favorite type of weather."
Looking at her and the way she was basking in the drops, Elliot thought the rain could easily become his favorite kind of weather too. When she tipped her head back to earth she looked right at him with those brown eyes he thought he could drown in if he looked too long. His hands were still on her hips, and she raised her hand to cup his cheek, brushing away a few drops. Then he felt her rise up on her toes, and it happened.
She pressed her lips to his, on the roof of the precinct, where anyone could come up and see them. And he didn't care. He didn't even quite know what it meant, but it'd been over nine years since the night they spent together and he didn't realize he'd been waiting for her kiss again all this time.
"Thank you," she said, when she finally pulled back.
"For what?" he asked.
"For choosing not to give up on me," Olivia said. "On Chelsea. On both of us."
"You asked me if I needed a ride," Elliot said. "You asked to fill the vacant spot as my partner. You kissed me. I didn't choose you, you chose me."
He wanted her to know that with him, she would always have some control. She could call the shots if she wanted. What she wanted or needed mattered to him.
"Is that so?" Olivia said with a smirk.
"It is," Elliot said. "And I'm hopefully just the lucky son of a bitch who gets to thank God for it every day."
She squinted her eyes a little at him, but she was smiling.
"This doesn't complicate things?" she said.
"No more than anything else that happened today," he said. "But I'm pretty sure that no matter what happens, as long as we stick together there's nothing we can't figure out."
"Funny," she said. "I was thinking the same thing."
And in that moment, Elliot had a change of heart. Maybe the rain wasn't so bad after all.
A/N: After I wrote this chapter I was like "ooh, this would be a good place to end things." But I won't be that cruel. I promised, what, 7 more? So I'll keep my promise. That being said, if you can think of any unanswered questions (meaning stuff you've been wondering or that have actually been addressed in the story yet that we haven't cleared up) please drop those questions/concerns in the comments so I make sure I touch on them all in the end here! Reviews are always appreciated!
