A/N: I'm really excited for this chapter and the next one! This story has been a challenge, but I'm also really enjoying writing it. Hope you're enjoying reading; if so, let me know!

4 - EMPTY VESSEL

He raped my mother. Not he's my father, although the implication was painfully clear. Maybe that was all she was ready to put into words at this point, and Elliot was not about to be the one to push her.

"How can you be sure?" he asked, not because he doubted her, but because he wanted to understand how everything had changed so much in the mere minutes he'd left her alone with Paul.

"He knew details that…only she knew," Olivia replied, her eyes still haunted. "Trust me; I know her statement by heart. I can recite it."

"I know," was all he could say in the time they had before pushing open the doors to the Medical Examiner's office, his mind obsessing over the tape with her mother's voice playing in Olivia's head incessantly, mercilessly — the sound stuck inside her ears where she couldn't reach to pull it out.

"Cap said you wanted to see us," he said as soon as they were inside the room, forcing himself back into the task at hand. "What do we got?"

Melinda Warner straightened up from where she'd been leaning into a notepad, scribbling something down, and greeted them with a small nod as she approached the slabs where two bodies lay covered. "Cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head, both of them."

"Any signs of sexual violence?" Olivia asked, even though Elliot estimated less than fifty percent of her attention was actually on the matter at hand, despite her efforts.

"Yes, the male was sodomized," Melinda held up a bloody candlestick inside an evidence bag. "This seems to be the instrument our perp used."

Elliot grimaced at the sight. "What about the female?" he asked with guarded anticipation.

"No signs of sexual trauma," Melinda replied with an arched eyebrow that seemed to agree with the detectives' surprise. "It looks like the male was the real target of the sexual violence."

"That's not very common," Olivia muttered.

Elliot shrugged his uncertainty as theories started forming. "Maybe an ex-boyfriend, didn't accept she was seeing someone new, wanted to show him she was his?"

"Maybe," Olivia agreed, absentmindedly.

"I found puncture marks suggesting the perp injected the victims with something, probably a paralyzing agent. I'll know what exactly when the tox screen comes back."

Elliot was a bit annoyed that Melinda had summoned them before having all the results. "Great. Is that all you had for us?"

Melinda's focus changed to Olivia. "Actually, I wanted to see you about your other case."

Olivia's eyes lit up with such a complex combination of feelings that Elliot couldn't decipher it. "You got a match on the DNA?" she thought out loud.

"Not in CODIS, no," the doctor confirmed what they already knew, then her voice became softer. "But I decided to run it against the NYPD database."

Elliot could see Olivia's breathing becoming ragged. "He's a match to me, isn't he?" Still no father. It must be a difficult word for her to get out. He didn't blame her.

"Yes," Melinda confirmed, pursing her lips with a sympathetic expression.

Even though he knew Olivia had been expecting this, hearing the substantiation of her certainty out loud made her eyes water and the color leave her face. She nodded quickly, avoiding both of their stares. "Thanks, I…I need some air," she said before bolting.

With a quick nod of goodbye to the ME, Elliot walked out as well and found Olivia in the hallway. "Are you alright?"

"What do you think?" she scoffed through tears that she did her best to erase on the back of her hand.

He approached her, allowing a clearance of only a few inches so he could lower his voice and protect the information they'd just confirmed. "What are you planning to do? Are you gonna tell Cragen?"

"Do you think this changes anything?" Olivia countered in a frustrated attempt to keep her voice down as well, the words coming out on top of one another while her hand nervously, unintentionally untidied her hair. "My mom's case is too old to prosecute, just like all the other ones. And his DNA is not in CODIS, so we can't even tie him to any other rapes, recent or not. Not to mention that even if he had been in CODIS, we obtained the DNA illegally, since there was never anything to get us closer to getting a warrant. Officially, there's no case. There's nothing to tell."

"Take a breath," Elliot demanded with a few slow breaths that he hoped she would mirror. She eventually did, raising her eyes and peering at him through the messy strands on her forehead, her eyes speaking of fears she wasn't about to admit to having. "I think you should tell Cragen," he whispered when he felt she would be able to register it.

"I'm not so sure," she shook her head with pleading eyes, apparently oblivious to the fact that he would back her up whatever her decision was. "If I tell him, he'll think I'm not being objective."

His eyes flickered between hers as he smirked without smiling. "Are you?"

"That's beside the point," she said, her tone a confession as she let her head hang. "He'll want me on leave or something. He'll have me sit this one out, the new case. Maybe he can bring Dani Beck to stand in for me again."

"Liv…" he reached for her arm, the name of her failed replacement stinging like an accusation — a name he'd been seeing more often than he would have liked, usually overlooked and forgotten on the small screen of his cell phone, buried in his pocket where he didn't have to deal with it.

"I'm just kidding," Olivia flinched with a forced smile, her legs igniting into instant movement. "Let's go."

The driver's license pictures of the two victims were surrounded by crime scene photos in a morbid before-and-after configuration on the squad room board when Elliot and Olivia made it back, parking next to each other by her desk.

"Patricia and Geoffrey Hawthorne," Munch reported. "She was forty-one, and he was forty-five years old. They were found in their own bed, after being killed in their own home, which is above the bar where they worked as waitress and bartender. From our interviews so far, we gathered that they were married and had no other family that anyone knew of, besides each other."

"We searched anyway," Fin added, "but didn't come up with anything. Geoffrey's parents died in Texas, where he was from, and Patricia's mother apparently killed herself about ten years ago. Neither of them had siblings, and there's no father in Patricia's birth certificate."

"Does anyone stand out as having a motive?" Cragen asked while Elliot stole a glance in Olivia's direction in order to assess the damage that the empty father-related field in the victim's birth certificate had on her — she didn't even seem like she was listening though.

Fin shrugged with a sigh of frustration. "The people from the bar aren't exactly talking. I think something's going on there that has nothing to do with serving drinks."

"The bar's owner is trying to keep the murders under wraps and seems to be already looking for replacements for Patricia and Geoffrey," Munch said. "Looks like the guy's anxious to get back in business, and my guess is he's not telling the candidates the reason the jobs are suddenly available."

"This drug angle, is that all we've got?" Cragen insisted. "Do we even know anything about who's dealing and who they work for?"

"My guess is Geoffrey took care of the deals," Fin replied.

"It makes sense, Captain," Munch explained. "There must be something else keeping the bar going: it doesn't seem to be the hottest place in the neighborhood. But the bouncer did say something about a few customers being way too interested in Patricia."

"I think that's definitely a factor," Huang weighed in from where he'd been watching with his chin pinched between his thumb and index finger. "The violence of it all, the fact that the killer incapacitated both of them and only raped Geoffrey, possibly in front of Patricia. I think she's relevant to the motive even if it's drug-related."

Olivia raised her eyes for the first time from where she sat, leaning against her desk. "Maybe Patricia was cheating with a customer? Is there any way to get to these people, talk to them to see if anyone knew them personally or had a motive?" she asked.

"Not with the bar closed as it is right now," Fin countered.

Elliot sat immobile with his arms crossed. "Did anyone talk to the bar owner? Who is he, anyway?"

"No," Munch snickered. "His name is Alvin Hobbes, and he's been very effectively avoiding us."

Cragen shook his head. "We need to find out what's going on in that place."

With a long, exhausted sigh, Elliot lazily fished for the keys in his pocket. His cop instincts were too tired to notice her, so they gave him no fair warning before he looked up to find more than just his door standing there.

"What are you doing here?" he frowned.

Dani Beck cocked her head to the right with a sneer, her hands shoved deep into her faded blue hoodie's pockets. It was almost as if Olivia had conjured her by mentioning her name earlier.

"You haven't been returning my calls, my texts," she shrugged. "Why the silent treatment?"

He swallowed, his thumb and index finger clutching at the key he'd been looking forward to using, his hand and intention paused. "I just didn't…want either of us to get confused."

"There's nothing confusing about meeting for a drink or answering a booty call," Dani laughed, biting her lower lip suggestively.

That move had worked before, more than once, and all those times he had let her use him to numb whatever feelings she needed to numb, while he'd used her to forget about the fact that his divorce was now final, and that Kathy had decided to fight him on his request for joint custody of the kids. To forget about Olivia being gone, or being back but shutting him out. Their arguments. He had used Dani to smother his loneliness way too many times, but he had always known it to be nothing more than a temporary fix.

He considered opening the door, but that would look like an invitation, and he wasn't sure he was ready to make one. "I'm not the kinda guy to drag something like that along, I think you know that."

Dani scoffed. "Isn't that what you've been doing since that first night you kissed me? Dragging this thing along?" She took a decisive step in his direction. "She's back, isn't she?"

"Who?" he furrowed his brow to buy some time, but he knew who. And she knew the answer.

"Olivia?" she exaggerated on the O and L sounds and the rising intonation at the end, her eyes piercing his. "Is that why you're ignoring me?"

"I've been busy, that's all," he shook his head, raising a hand in surrender.

"You busy tonight?" she put a hand to his shoulder. "I mean…I'm already here."

Elliot smiled in defeat, finally moving his stationary, key-holding hand toward the lock.

The next day came, and Paul didn't. Olivia had barely slept, worrying about whether he would show up or not and trying to figure out what to do if he didn't, because part of her had known he'd been serious about his goodbye. She camouflaged her waiting as she participated but dedicated no attention to the early Friday morning workings on the double-murder case, and once her watch made it past the time Paul had originally arrived on Tuesday, she slipped out of the bullpen with a plan, taking advantage of Elliot's distraction after arriving a half hour late that morning.

Determined to find the old man whose real name she didn't know yet, Olivia took the license plate number of the cab he had left in after their first interview to TARU and had Ruben Morales help her pull the traffic cam images of that day to follow its path. It turned out the taxi had dropped him off at an oncology clinic not that far away, and she figured that was probably where he underwent chemotherapy.

Tuesdays and Fridays, he'd said, and her hope was that he'd be at the same place at around the same time today.

She thanked Morales for his work, which she had warned him beforehand hadn't exactly been sanctioned by the Captain, and left. She texted Elliot as she walked to her car, wondering if he had already noticed her absence — of course he had, she determined when she saw five missed calls from him on the screen.

I need to run an errand. Can you cover for me?

Olivia flipped her phone shut and didn't wait for a reply.

When she arrived at the clinic, she refrained from flashing her badge at the reception desk, well aware that no one would divulge the clinic's patient list without a warrant. Instead, she asked where the chemotherapy area was located, claiming she was supposed to meet her father there — not exactly a lie, she thought.

She approached the glass doors cautiously, taking in the room's layout: several armchairs were placed side by side, forming a circle around the room, most of them taken by people hooked up to IVs, reading books or magazines as different types and colors of medicine dripped from IV bags into their bloodstream.

Inspecting all chairs at a glance, Olivia didn't recognize anyone. A few women with their heads covered exchanged looks with her, and she did her best not to eye them with pity.

She noticed a corner where each patient's chart was hanging from a hook on the wall, distributed following the order of the patients seated in their chairs. She ran her eyes over the names, not recognizing anyone — not that she even knew the name she was supposed to be searching for.

Leaving the room, she saw a corridor with several doors for smaller rooms on both sides. On the outside of each door, there was a chart with a patient name as well. The doors weren't closed, and she was able to see that each of those small rooms contained one of those armchairs, a tv hanging from the wall and a chair for anyone accompanying the patient. Olivia saw those chairs filled in several rooms, but empty in others.

The door to one of the last few rooms was only cracked open, but something about the outstretched legs she saw through that narrow slit was instantly recognizable to her. Before he could notice her, she grabbed his chart from the hook on the door to check the information.

The name field was filled in with Edward Paul Morrison. The line below listed his condition as Multiple Myeloma, and the one below that specified the medication he was receiving, bortezomib. She committed it all to memory for posterior research while she hung the chart back as quietly as she could. As soon as she pushed the door open, however, his voice hit her square in the chest.

"Did you have trouble finding the place?" he turned his head with a smile as he kept his medicated arm still where it lay on the chair. "I'm nearly done. You almost missed me."

Olivia chuckled. "Of course you knew I was coming, you know everything."

"And now so do you, don't you?" He tilted his head towards the chair, motioning for her to take a seat next to him.

Her body hesitated, but her voice didn't. "Yes, Paul, I know everything," she rasped, then quickly corrected herself after purposefully getting his name wrong. "I'm sorry, I meant to say Edward, isn't that right?"

"That's right," Edward nodded impatiently, waving at the empty chair once again with his free hand. "Just come sit, will ya? My neck hurts from turning to look at you all the way over there."

Overlooking a thought that said she shouldn't care whether his neck hurt, Olivia silently granted his request, noting that his IV bag was still half full, contrary to his statement that she had nearly missed him. "It almost sounds like you were anxiously waiting for me," she teased.

"I wouldn't say anxiously," he snickered.

Olivia smiled — it wasn't planned. Nothing was. "So you admit you were waiting."

"As were you this morning, I assume, back at the precinct, wondering if I'd show up," he challenged smugly, but she didn't mind, amused that he just couldn't admit to something unless she did the same.

"Why didn't you?" she asked wholeheartedly, realizing she'd never had a plan on what to say to him once she found him, realizing he had a power to just get the truth out of her. She genuinely wanted the truth back. "To torture me? To punish me for letting Elliot interrupt us?"

Edward's only answer was a smile. "You know, this is the first time I've had company since I started treatment."

She noticed her voice slipped out sweeter than at all intended. "How come you don't sit outside with everyone?"

"My case is bad enough that I get to be alone," he explained. "Too fragile to be around other sick people. You know, this medicine kills your immune system."

She felt for him and hated herself for it. "Three years you've been in treatment?"

He nodded with big but slow movements as his eyes fixated on the muted tv. "Yes. Three long years."

Olivia waited for his glance to ricochet back at her. "Is it working?"

"Not really," he smiled sadly. "Just delaying death, and not even by that much."

A tear threatened to prickle from her left eye, but she held onto it. "So why do it?"

Edward nodded once. "I think about that a lot. I don't know. I guess as bad as it all is… I just don't wanna die."

Silence hung heavy in the air, and Olivia could hear the dripping sound of the IV ticking seconds away from their lives as they both looked at the tv and watched a cheerful man mixing something in a bowl for a recipe. She was able to make out a few words from reading the man's lips.

"Edward," she called when the quietness became unbearable, the intentional, conscious effort to snatch out truths from his insides with the use of his real name scratching at her throat while he slowly turned to face her again. "Will you finish telling me about my mother?"

For a moment, sadness colored his eyes in a way she'd never seen before, but she didn't rule out the possibility that she made it up in her head with the help of the offending, immune-system-killing medicine entering his body before her eyes. Maybe she just secretly wanted him to feel something too badly, badly enough to see remorse where it didn't belong.

"I told you everything," were his possibly-merciful words. "You don't need more details than that swimming in your head."

She meant to convince him, but her reply sounded like a question. "Maybe I do."

Maybe she just needed him to remind her he was her mother's rapist, not her father. She had no father.

He tipped his head sideways, the expression on his face looking a lot like a kind father's — not that either of them knew what a father actually looked like. "Now who's torturing you?"

Olivia smiled, and so did he, but she had to look away before her yearning heart tried to read feelings between blurred lines. Her empty vessel was anxious to fill with anything, but that didn't make the contents he was offering worth it.

A more pressing matter presented itself as she recalled Tuesday morning and his demand to see her. "How did you find me?"

She knew he hadn't read about her in the paper. Her name hadn't stuck with him.

The truth emerged more easily than she'd expected. "I kept tabs on your mother… on all of my girls really."

My girls. Not even the IV drip could blacken that truth out.

It was time for another one. "Then you must know that…"

"That I'm your father?" he finished matter-of-factly, and she barely had time to wrestle between the blasphemy of the f-word and the uninvited pain of his apparent indifference.

"Mr. Morrison, I think we're done for the day," said a foreign, cheerful voice invading the small room and removing Olivia from the trance induced by the offending word.

Father. She was only partially aware of the nurse checking on the IV bag, asking Edward Paul how he was feeling, removing the needle from his arm and helping him roll down his sleeve.

"I see you have company today," exclaimed the blond-haired, innocent-eyed nurse, who couldn't be older than twenty-five.

Her obvious ignorance about who the man she was treating so kindly was sent a shiver throughout Olivia's body.

"Oh yes, Nancy," said Edward, turning to Olivia with an affectionate, maybe even proud smile. "This beautiful young lady is my daughter."

"Really? You never mentioned you had a daughter," said the young nurse, turning to Olivia with the biggest grin across her face. "I can see it! You have the same eyes! I'm so glad you could make it, I can tell your company made a huge difference to your father today."

Olivia was speechless, watching the words father and daughter thrown at her like daggers, killing her with kindness while she agonized with the overwhelming, hateful truth. You have the same eyes.

"Oh, Olivia is very busy," Edward spoke in her place, attracting the nurse's curious look as she helped him stand up. "She's a cop! She catches bad guys. The worst kinds of criminals."

He eyed her with encoded innuendo as his voice continued to play his part. Olivia stood up as well and accepted Edward's hand that the nurse offered to her when she was done helping him up.

"You'll take me home, right, sweetheart?" he said, his fingers curling tightly around hers.

She knew everything now, which gave her clearance to know even more, so she was entrusted with Edward's address and with the task of driving him to his one-bedroom apartment. In the elevator, she regretted checking her phone and seeing more missed calls from Elliot: guilt immediately seared her. For disappearing, for not telling him what she was doing, for not knowing the exact reason she was keeping him out of this.

The place was quite small: the front door faced the kitchen, which was narrow like a hallway, only allowing for furniture and appliances on the left side so that the right side could accommodate movement. To the right, there was a small bathroom, the tiles tinged in recent, yellow paint. Further down the small hallway was the bedroom, only big enough for a bed and a medium-sized wardrobe. On the other extremity of the apartment, there was a living room the same size as the bedroom, containing only basic items of furniture and a little hint of personality — a few paintings on the wall, half a dozen items on a shelf, and a carefully arranged liquor cart with several half-full bottles and various types of miniature glasses.

"I stole those," Edward informed her as he sunk into a comfortable-looking armchair, visible fatigue taking over his features. Olivia looked at the small version of a wine glass that she held in her hand. "I guess you can add a little kleptomania to my list of sins."

"Seriously?" escaped her mouth with a snorted laugh, the first word out of her since they'd left the clinic. It even came out a little hoarse. She self-consciously cleared her throat.

"Yeah, I like salt and pepper shakers, too, but the glasses were my latest obsession," he explained. "Did you wanna keep that one?"

"Keep it?" Olivia mumbled as her eyes shifted from the small glass to his eyes and back.

"Yeah, I can tell you like it. I can tell you like wine, too. You can have some, if you want, I keep it in the kitchen."

How could he tell what she liked or didn't like? Was it some sort of genetic bond that ensured this inexplicable intuition about someone you've one way or another brought into the world? Maybe wine, as opposed to her mother's vodka, was a taste that came from him, she realized as she once again confronted the fact that this was her father, the other half of her that she had always wondered about. Maybe the wine, the brown eyes, and all the other inexplicable quirks came from him. Everything bad about her that she couldn't bring herself to blame her mother for.

"I shouldn't keep it…" she managed, her fingers inextricably wrapped around the small goblet.

"Nonsense!" he laughed. "It's yours."

He looked at her like he was waiting for her to confirm she accepted the gift, so she raised the little glass as if she were toasting. "Thanks, I really do like it."

I stole those. Maybe stealing from the thief made it okay, and two wrongs could make all of this alright. Olivia put away the miniature glass and her mixed feelings.

"What about that wine?" he asked. "Do fix me a drink while you're at it, would ya?"

"I can't drink," Olivia chuckled. "I need to go back to work. What are you having?"

"Scotch, neat, thank you, dear," he said with a grimace of pain as he used one foot to free the other from his shoe. "Why do you need to go back? Is Elliot waiting for you?"

She smiled at his emphasis on Elliot's name, realizing their mutual dislike for one another was amusing for some reason. Still, she didn't want to encourage it even further.

"They all are, I kind of disappeared to go see you," she amended, pouring the drink into a normal-sized tumbler she found on the cart, then walking toward the old man. Like in the clinic, there was a chair next to his armchair, as if he'd been expecting company. Maybe he had.

Olivia handed him the glass without taking a seat. "Here you go."

"Thank you, dear, thank you," he said in a rush, taking the glass to his lips as if it were the last drop of liquid in the desert.

Olivia spotted the picture of a dark-haired, green-eyed woman standing against a railing, glittery blue water behind her as her hair blew with the wind, her fingers trying to keep the strands from covering her face completely, her smile looking genuine as she laughed at her inability to resist nature's movement.

Maybe that's how Olivia felt, drawn here to this man, this horrible man. Nature's movement. Anything to deny her agency in it.

She walked to the shelf and took the frame in her hand. "Is this Elise?"

"Oh, yes," Edward Paul confirmed, wistful. "That's my Elise. Beautiful, wasn't she?"

"She was," Olivia replied, a part of her wishing that person he talked so fondly about was her mother, that he had loved her, not violated her. That he had adored her and photographed her as she smiled, her body and her soul still pure, unharmed, cheerful hair hiding a cheerful, sober smile. She struggled to keep the tears at bay, putting the frame back and trying to snap out of it.

"I should get going," she said, only turning to face him when she had her features satisfyingly under control.

"So soon?" Edward protested with a small smile. "Well, at least now you know where to find me."

Without any other goodbyes, Olivia left, trying to decide if knowing where to find this man was a good thing. While she found no answer, she did impulsively decide to leave her card next to his keys on the shelf.

Now he could find her, too.

"Glad that you decided to show up," said Cragen, his voice coming from behind her as she tried to inconspicuously make her way out of the elevator and into the squad room.

Olivia turned, pursing her lips with guilt. "I'm sorry, Captain," she shrugged. "I had something to take care of."

"I'm not sure I wanna know what you're up to," he jabbed. "What I need is for you to step into my office right now, we've been waiting for you."

Alarmed, she followed Cragen into his office through the side door, surprised to find Elliot and Huang already in there. "Hi," she said, hesitant, her stare not lingering on Elliot's for too long as it held a million questions and statements — they'd have time for those. "What's going on?" she asked, going from one face to the next for clues.

"We seem to have hit a wall with our case," the captain explained. "It doesn't sound like Patricia and Geoffrey knew many people outside of the bar's staff, but the people there are not talking."

"The evidence doesn't point to anyone either," Elliot added from where he sat, leaning back against the chair. "Hell, there is no evidence. We're stuck."

"We don't have anyone with a motive yet?" she asked. "The crime was pretty violent, it doesn't seem random at all."

"Oh, it's not," Dr. Huang smiled crookedly. "There's a lot we don't understand about the murders. It definitely looks personal, because the killer took his time to torture the victims before killing them."

She turned to Elliot again. "Where are we on the drug thing?"

"Nowhere, as you may have heard me say from the beginning," Cragen grated, clearly annoyed. "We haven't made any progress today. We need someone on the inside to see what the hell is going on at that bar. That's where you come in."

"Oh," Olivia said. "Someone inside? You mean…undercover?"

"The bar owner is desperately looking for replacements for Patricia and Geoffrey," Elliot shrugged, like he'd been cornered into this just as much as she was about to be.

"A couple with experience working at a bar together might be just what they need," Huang complemented. "Plus, no one there saw either of you, they were only questioned by Fin and Munch."

Olivia nodded slowly. "Okay, so…"

"We got you and Elliot an interview with the bar owner tonight," Cragen informed her. "Which is the first real contact we'll get to make with him, as he's been refusing to cooperate. Huang is gonna work with you both on your profiles."

Elliot stood up and walked to Olivia with a playful half-smile. "I'm gonna be Rob. Are you ready to become Susie?"