Chapter Five
Olivia rolled her shoulders and neck up from there hunched position as she heard the slow, cadenced fall of her partner's footsteps. She had only been at her desk for a few minutes after arriving back at the precinct, but she had felt anxious the whole time that they had been separated. She didn't like to let him too far away from her during cases when children were involved. They were his weak point, his Achilles heel, and she was his Ace support wrap. Not a permanent fix, not a cast that would keep him immobilized but allow him to fully heal; no, not that. Instead, she was a bandage that would allow him to move, allow him to feel and give him just enough support to get through the day.
Olivia looked up to see that he had made his way across the squad room to their area. She heard the wheels of his chair squeal in protest as he jerkily pulled it back from his desk.
"Any new developments?" he said, the words coming out more as an expulsion of breath than a calm, thought-out inquiry.
"No" Olivia replied, biting back the need to point that she had only been in the precinct for three minutes more than him. "Warner said she'd run fingerprints and try to get an I.D. as soon as she got back to the lab."
"Great" Elliot said, his volume raising with ever syllable. "The M.E.'s office is 15 minutes closer to the dumpsite than we are. What is she doing, painting her nails? How long does it take to run a couple of damn prints!"
"About 20 minutes to go through the New York database" she replied, not looking up. She didn't need to. She knew she would see darkly haunted eyes, a grinding jaw, and a hell of a lot of vivid frustration.
"That wasn't really a question" he grumbled. She sighed, relief seeping through her as she realized that her flippant remark had managed to bring him back from the crime scene imbedded in his mind to the present.
She looked at him (for the first time since he had entered the precinct) holding his gaze and said "I know, Elliot." He stared back at her and she could see his eyes becoming lighter, evening out as his frustration cooled. She did know, and for a second, as she always did, she let the layers of walls peel back from her eyes so that he could see that she did know. She knew the pain, the frustration, the hopelessness-she saw everything he did.
They were interrupted by the ringing of her phone. As she flipped it open and pressed the green answer key she walled her eyes up and forced the connection back down to where it belonged, buried so deep that it took a willful effort to bring it to the surface whenever she felt that he needed to see it, needed to hold on to it. She never let it out of its strongbox for very long.
"Benson" she said into the phone.
"Liv", Melinda Warner's melodious voice coerced it's way through the loudspeaker, "I've got an I.D., as well as some trace. You want the information over the phone or do you want to come down here?"
"We'll be right there" Olivia said. She flipped her phone back down and looked back at Elliot. "Melinda's got an ID for us" she explained.
"Alright" said Elliot. "Lets have head down- " he was interrupted by the ringing of his desk phone. "Stabler" he answered. He turned away from her then, away from their desks, but she could still inadvertently hear parts of his conversation. "Kathy" she heard him say, "I've only been at work for two hours….no I can't guarantee I'll be home on time tonight…..well fine, don't make me anything than….FINE !" he shouted as he slammed down the phone. Fin and Lake both looked up from their desks. Lake looked slightly puzzled and blushed slightly like he had overheard something she shouldn't. Fin just paused, shook his head, and went back to work.
Olivia had sat up and put on her coat while he was talking, trying to make enough noise to miss the conversation. She was curious, but she knew she shouldn't be, she had no right to know what was wrong with him and Kathy as long as it didn't affect him on the job. "Ready to go?" she asked.
"Yeah" he said looking down at the ground. She knew he was trying to compartmentalize, put whatever was disrupting his personal life away so that he could get his head back in the game. They began walking out through the corridor and into the parking lot. The sun had broken through the clouds and the entire atmosphere felt warmer. The only spot that didn't feel warm was the three inch space in between Olivia and Elliot as they walked in tandem. This was always the way it was when he was angry about his family-he gave off cold rage. Hot rage, the kind that seared through anyone less than two feet away from him, was reserved for crime. Cold rage equaled family problems.
She sighed as they got into the car. She was going to have to try to fix this in order to get him refocused on the case. She hated talking about Kathy. The idea always made her want to twitch. She didn't acknowledge the deeper reason that caused the twitch-she could feel it emanating from the connection that she had forced to the surface back in the squadroom. The other, more rational reason was that all of the conversations and links she and Kathy had ever had were uncomfortable-her buying Kathy's birthday present when Elliot had been at a loss, Kathy coming into the bullpen numerous times looking for Elliot and always appearing a bit peeved that Olivia seemed to have a sixth sense for where he was, the infamous divorce conversation, and worst of all….the car accident. She had been terrified for Kathy, terrified for someone she barely knew. And Kathy's turn to extreme gratefulness in the wake of the incident had been even more awkward. Well, she thought as she swallowed hard, nothing but to meet it head on. After all, she and Elliot were both battering rams, and that's just how rams communicated.
"What's wrong Elliot?" she demanded quietly.
He glanced her was and tensed his shoulders. She could tell he was about to pull out some secondary answer about the girl or the crime. She knew that he knew that she wasn't asking about that. He knew that she understood every emotion that had run through him when he looked into the large green eyes of their young witness. Olivia prepared herself to tell him not to try it when he suddenly deflated, his muscles imploding as he looked straight at her.
"Kathy wants me to cut back on my hours….maybe transfer to another unit. I told her that wasn't happening. She brought it up a couple of weeks ago and hasn't really let up on hinting that this won't work if I don't change." He looked back at the road.
Olivia stared at the window. She had had another mild conniption (much like what she felt in the immigration office with the "bombshell") when she heard the word transfer. She knew transferring would only make his problems worse. When she had gone to computer crimes she had felt so displaced, so frustrated. He would feel the same way-his anger would manifest itself even more frequently at home. She didn't want to come out and tell him that Kathy was wrong, that he couldn't transfer because he couldn't change-it would kill him. So instead she simply rolled her shoulders up so that she was sitting straight and asked a question that had already landed her in hot water with him once
"What are you going to do?"