A/N: 2 more years and I'm still on this fucking story. What with the shit-fest that was the William Lewis arc just put everything out of my head and I've had to wait a long time to make sure that I could write this story as I'd originally intended, as this being the worst Olivia would ever personally face, since I obviously had no way of knowing how just how badly Warren Leight would screw us over. Honestly, season 15 was so dark at times I couldn't watch the episodes for awhile, and that's never happened before. I know probably nobody's even reading this anymore, but we don't write for other people, do we? We write because there's no other way to get these characters out of our heads. Now the one character I WOULD like in my head is Elliot. Damn Elliot is the only one not talking to me for awhile, so unless anyone out there is by some miracle reading this and he's talking to you instead of me, review and/or message me with what the crap he's doing while Olivia's processing all of her shit? That'd be great. Really great.
~TangoSVU
"Olivia!" Alexandra shakes her hand. "Great to see you again. Come in, sit anywhere."
Not a minute in and she's already facing her first calamity, perfect. If she sits on the couch, she'll look too comfortable being here and doing this and she'll sink into the cushions and get stuck. If she sits in the chair, she's closer to the door to get out, but she'll look too rigid and aggressive. Do psychologists even analyze this kind of stuff or was she freaking out about nothing? More often than not, the psych debriefs were done at the precinct – her territory – so she'd never thought about it before and shit, has she been thinking instead of acting this whole time? Alexandra had sat at one of the chairs – the couch was closer to the desk – so she takes the other chair and starts wringing her hands. "I don't know what I'm doing here," she starts.
"That's okay. We can figure it out. Diana told me you used to be a police officer. LAPD?"
Whew. Okay. This she can do. Life before made sense, it's everything after that went gray. "No, uh, NYPD. I was a detective on the force for about eleven years in the sex crimes unit."
"Eleven years?" Alexandra gasps. It's funny. If they don't get distracted by the word sex, it's always the number that startles them. "Isn't that rare for that division?"
Olivia nods. "The average stint is two years. But all the detectives in my precinct were above average, more like a family."
For some reason, saying 'family' brings a lump into her throat that she can't swallow down. Cragen was the closest thing she'd ever had to a father. Munch was everyone's favorite uncle. Fin was like the good-natured brother, always giving you a hard time but the first one to back you up if you got into trouble. And, at least for the victims, she liked to think of herself kind of like a mom, protective and guiding, holding the pieces of their souls safe until they were strong enough to put them back together again. Which left Elliot, because Elliot is always the one left, fucking Elliot, whom she'd never been able to define in all his facets. It would be easy to make him the rage, the reactor, the one who made it safe to feel angry and to feel like you'd been handed the short stick, but he was so much more than that. All you had to do was look at the victims – the majority of them women so damaged by men – and yet not even the little girls were ever afraid of him. Elliot showed them time and time again that it was okay to trust; that not all men would hurt you; that some men could keep you safe. To her, that was worth more than redemption ever would.
"Seems like if you'd been in that long already, you never would've left." Alexandra muses. Olivia is taking in those detective details again. The woman's in her 60s but has no sign of graying hair – unless it was dyed – and she was well dressed – stately with her classic blouse, khaki pants and pearl studs – but not posh. Everything about her said business but in a casual manner, like I've-been-doing-this-for-so-long-I-don't-even-have-to-try, showing she knows she could command a room, but chooses not to, and that's the hidden power of it all. It's why, even though everyone at the hospital had called her Alex, Olivia can't bring herself to think of her as anything other than Alexandra. She fills up too much space for just four letters.
"Never say never," Olivia murmurs, but not soft enough that Alexandra lets it slide.
"So what happened?
"What happened…" she breathes. What happened indeed. "Things…got complicated. There were too many cases. We were always one step behind. Do you have any idea what it's like to always come into the situation just a little too late, after all of the damage is already done? They label us 'Detectives' like we're supposed to detect things as a preventive measure, but we don't thwart anything. Sometimes we're damn lucky just to manage to keep it from getting worse."
Alexandra sits there with her back so straight and yet her edges soften. "There's too many of them and not enough of you. All that matters is doing what you can, right?
The anger rushes to her head so fast she nearly stands up and begins pacing across the room. Instead, she pushes her fist into her right hand. "It's not enough. It's never fucking enough. Every time you think you've managed one crisis, five more arrive at your desk. There were weeks that I never even went home. You kill yourself to make something happen, and then it does, or it doesn't, but it's never over. There's always another victim, there's always another perp, so what the hell's the point?"
"Maybe there isn't a point," he says, there on the stoop next to her with his stupid grocery bags. "Maybe the cost is too high. But Olivia, no one's making you do this. The difference between you and the victims is that you can walk away." She'd told him she couldn't, back then. She's never believed she could. And yet that's exactly what she'd up and done just over a year ago, wasn't it? When Asher had shown her that she'd had no other choice but to walk away. And where had that left her? With Diana falling right into her lap. Yet another victim to deal with.
"Seems to me you're doing a forest for the trees thing. You've heard of that, right?"
She's too mad to answer. She'd tried to forget all this stuff. Elliot in her head will not help her anymore.
"What was your average caseload?"
Olivia thinks. "You're not supposed to have more than five active cases, but that only means we haven't found the perp yet. After that there's still all the evidence for the trial, not to mention the trial and various other elements that take months upon years to resolve," if they resolve at all, she considers, "So it's not unusual to have fifteen or twenty cases going at the same time. More if you count the other detectives in the precinct."
"Alright," Alexandra grabs something off her desk. "So let's say an average of one a week, does that sound fair?"
Olivia shrugs. She doesn't see the point in adding up the numbers of all the hours she'd slaved away just to end up here.
"There are fifty-two weeks in a year, and you said you worked in that unit for eleven years. Fifty-two times eleven is…" She clicks her nails on the calculator. "Five hundred and seventy two. That's five hundred and seventy two cases. Five hundred and seventy two victims, assuming there was only one per case, which I'm sure is not always the circumstance, meaning we could easily round up to six hundred if not more."
"So?"
Alexandra leans forward, resting an elbow on the edge of the chair for support. "Olivia, how many people do you know that have helped over six hundred people in just over a decade?"
But she won't give in. She can't rest on the positive when there's so much darkness left to fight.
"Okay," Alexandra lets out a tiny sigh. "Let's try it this way. Go with the first case you can think of,"
Faces flash in her mind so rapidly she almost can't recognize them. There's Harper Anderson who never got her closure, little Ashley with her fame-focused mom, Katie with down syndrome, Ernesto who had tried to help the younger Jose escape from their captor, Jennifer and her fetal alcohol syndrome denial, Mike Baxter who only wanted to clear his name, Patty Branson with her two mommies, Le Mei Wu desperate to reunite her family, pregnant Melanie whose life had been twisted by the cult of her upbringing, Myra Dempsey who just wanted to get her life back on track, Carrie Eldridge and her alcoholic mother, precious Maria whose voice she sometimes still hears on the other end of the phone, Nicki and Tasha who thought Hurricane Katrina was the worst card they'd been dealt, Nathan so desperate to avenge his mother, Rebecca and Ryan that should've both been saved, Haley and the subsequent excursion to Oregon, Valerie Sennet and the lies burned into her skin, Lauren desperate for love and tucked away in the cabin for so many years, Katie Nicholson with her charmingly unique Williams Syndrome, blonde Tommy with the nanny's blood on him, street kid Josie just looking for a family, Eva and her lost embryos, so many faces, Ashley and her incarcerated mother, so many stories, there's no way to choose. "There's too many of them," she puts her head in her hands. This is too much; she can't take this. She's knows they're all there, tucked away in that box of her memory for safe keeping, but that's why she leaves that damn box alone, because this flood hurts too much.
She shakes her head, desperate to snip the memory reel right off its track.
"I'm not asking you to get buried in six hundred faces." Alexandra tries to break through the reverie. "Stop on the person in your head right now and tell me about them."
Molly Stratton. "Ok." Olivia takes a deep breath and tries to stop her hands from shaking. How long have they been shaking? "I hadn't been her original case manager. It happened when she was six, but they didn't catch the guy. I had to re-interview her at eleven even though the statute of limitations had run out because the M.O. popped on a recent case. She had dark, long curls and a full face, but hadn't hit her growth spurt yet. She was playing tetherball in the backyard. The perp had lured her into a dressing room with the promise of a lollipop. Once there he put honey on his lollipop and made her lick it off before raping her. The honey had been left out of the original report, but it made the connection between the cases stick. It had been five years, and even though the memory still killed her, she was able to put the guy behind bars."
"How do you think that affected her?"
"How do you think? The mom sent me a card several months later and told me that she'd finally had a breakthrough in her anger management therapy, slept a full eight hours, and was finally about to visit a clothing store without throwing up. She could breathe again and move on with her life."
Alexandra smiled. "You made her feel safe again. You'd call that a success, right?"
She has to say yes based on results, but shouldn't the definition of success be that the damage was non-existent, erased?
"Olivia," Alexandra prods. "Would you say that she was better off having met you?"
Even though she nods, she still wants to fight it, because although she helps the people that end up in her care, she can't stop wondering how much better their lives would be if the event that brought them to her hadn't happened at all.
It's like the psychologist can read her mind. "The only people who can stop rape and sexual assault are the perpetrators. You know that. You are doing absolutely everything within your power and it's okay to say you've done well."
When Olivia doesn't answer, Alexandra shifts, arching back in her seat and thinking for a moment. "This isn't why you're here," she says finally, and Olivia looks up, startled. "If you really didn't think you were making a difference, you wouldn't have stayed in for eleven years."
"Yeah, well," Olivia holds back a smirk.
The memory hits like lightning. "I've been a cop for over 15 years," she said, "And I still love my job." Olivia's been working this beat for 11 now. That'd be 23 for Karen Smythe. Did she still love her job, even after all it had cost her? And then she realizes she's not sure who she's asking the question to. Then another one just as swiftly. "Second month on the job, responded to a two-year old, raped. I wanted to quit." "I'm surprised it took you that long. I was ready to go after a week." El said. "It was Karen who said I had talent for dealing with the victim. She said that I could turn a negative into a positive. So… here I am." And here she was, still. Only she wasn't, not really, because she's here in California, the total other side of the country, and what for? Suddenly the want, no, the need to return to New York, to return to the city, to her job, to her partner is so strong she actually stands up. "You're right," she tells the woman in front of her. "I wouldn't have. But I was meant to do that job. I got a little lost somewhere along the way, but it's time to go back." She's so resolute she's sure the conversation is over.
"Whoa now, we didn't resolve anything here. What's really going on?"
Dammit. She sits back down. Why is solving the surface problem not enough? If she just gets back to work she'll have something else to focus on, something else to push the rest of it back into the box where it belongs, hidden away from thought.
"What are you running from?"
Doubt, she thinks. "I went undercover in a women's prison, and one of the guards assaulted me." She thought it would get easier to form the words each time she said it, but the letters still jumbled out of order and twisted around her tongue like a python. "I was okay, at first, went straight back to work, got the guy convicted for the original case. But then I had trouble sleeping and things were affecting me differently, and I felt really jumpy and it hurt my performance. I did some things I'm not proud of." She still can't forgive herself for hurting Asher. She'd felt helpless, so she'd gone after the helpless. Misplaced anger at its best. "Those of us who fight monsters, should make damn sure we don't become them." The words slip out of her mouth before she can even process thinking them. All she hears is Cooper and there has to be another way as she reaches for the gun…
Alexandra interrupts. "What was that?"
Olivia hadn't even realized she'd spoken. Those weren't her words at all. "Sorry," she shakes her head, trying to clear it. "Just something a colleague once said to me."
"You know, you do that a lot," she gestures.
Olivia's confused. "Do what?"
"Get lost in your thoughts. Are they memories or nightmares?"
There's a difference?
But it's like Alexandra can tell that Olivia won't answer, and she continues, as if she'd never expected her to anyway. "And did she become one?" Olivia looks at her, eyebrows cocked. "Your colleague who said that to you. Did she become a monster?"
Did any of them? "She uh, shot herself."
"Was she alone?"
Yes. So utterly alone. "No, another cop and myself were there."
"That must've been hard for you," Alexandra started.
"It wasn't about me at all." Olivia was curt. She couldn't figure out why she was reacting so harshly to this woman. Maybe because she'd called her out on the constant onslaught of recollections. It wasn't her fault that Olivia's head was full of so many demons and angels that she couldn't tell who was who under all of the blood anymore.
Alexandra moved in such a way that Olivia could tell she was emotionally removing herself from the topic, and yet still trying to hit it from another direction. "And what do you think she meant by that?"
"I don't think she meant much of anything." Olivia denied. "It's just a favorite saying in the police training academies."
"She was paraphrasing, actually. It's a saying by Friedrich Nietzsche. The whole quote says, 'Those who fight monsters should take care that they never become one. For when you stand and look long into the abyss, the abyss looks into you.' A lot of cops start out doing wrong things with good intentions."
"Look, this isn't about me, okay?" Her voice is gruff, unforgiving. She can't get out any of the things actually bothering her and it's so damn frustrating. It's like an itch that you can't reach underneath a cast. "I'm not a dirty cop. The abyss doesn't have to look for me. I was born with the abyss inside me."
Alexandra just watches her, silently judging. Olivia's done enough of that herself.
"My mom was raped. She gave birth to me. I've known that practically my whole life. That's not what this is about." She waves dismissively.
"Then what is this about, do you think? I'm still just trying to figure out whatever this is."
All of her life, Olivia's been scared of who she was and who she could be. All those unknown entities that made up her DNA, all the anger genes her rapist of a father must've passed on to her. "Growing up, I could feel the anger rising inside me, boiling up and eating away at my soul because I just kept pushing it all back down. I trained to be a cop – in part – as a way to make sure I learned to control whatever genetics my rapist father gave me, wherever they were hidden and whenever they decided to show themselves."
"What's the odds that both the father and son turn out to be rapists?" Fin had asked that day in the squad room.
Wong answered him in his typical PhD tone. "You know, some geneticists theorize that violence is inherited."
"Oh, that's right" Olivia scoffed. "It's not my fault. I was just born to kill."
Wong looked taken aback at the vengeance in her voice. "It's a theory." He said, less aggressively but without backing down.
Olivia attacked again. "Well, it's ridiculous. It's another way for people not to take responsibility for their actions."
Cragen made himself the monkey in the middle without moving towards them at all. "Let's find the guy first. We can discuss the Human Genome Project later."
Wong hadn't known about her history then. He'd only been with them for a few cases. She went to his office afterwards, suspicion gnawing at her core. The jury had convicted the boy on all charges. They hadn't believed that his genetic make-up precluded him from responsibility. And that was what she'd wanted too, wasn't it? She told him that her history is what brought her to SVU; thinking that she could do some good. But her chosen profession as a cop, was that just an excuse to let all of that violence out? Was that just a way to foster that damn inherited gene into something socially acceptable? Did that boy even have a choice? Did she?
"You don't hurt people, Olivia." Wong had said, his voice tender and yet unyielding. He was leaving no room for uncertainty in his conviction. "You protect them. You're proof that we do have a choice."
"I looked each and every perp right in the eye just so that I could prove that I wouldn't find myself reflected back in their gaze. It's not that I'm trying to make up for the evil that my father inflicted on society. It's just that, fighting that evil is the only thing I'm good at. I've done it since I was born."
"Then what made you stop? You said something about going undercover. Was it the first time you'd put yourself at risk?"
She laughs, a pathetic laugh really, an incredulous gust of sound. "Not hardly." Olivia scratches absent-mindedly at the four-inch scar on the underside of her left forearm. "You work on the streets of any city for long enough, and you're going to experience a lot of life-threatening things." Exploding bombs, pointed guns – hell, she's had so many guns put to her temple sometimes she thinks there must be a permanent impression on the surface of her skin – much less those fired in her direction, crashed cars (metal eating metal, skull smashing glass, a baby crying, go back, go back) – she's even planted her feet before a moving vehicle with her gun raised, not thinking about the likelihood of her death in those situations, but seeing the child that needed Olivia to rescue her, to save that child's life was more important than her own – wielded knives.
Strange as it sounds, those are the tricky ones. Guns have a distinct shape and equally detectible sound to them. You can usually see a car coming from a ways away – or at least with enough distance to knock the wheel a bit or leap aside, give yourself a chance at avoiding it – and bombs, well, you just don't worry about those unless you're on a planned raid because by the time you see them (if at all) it'll probably be your last sight anyway. But knives, those are easily hidden, nearly silent, and effectively deadly. There's no time to pull a gun on those. That's why whenever a perp pulls one out of his sleeve or his shoe or hell even his breast pocket or maybe even just twists and you see it in his hands, you leap. There is no thinking – no time to. There's just reacting. You've got a very short window of opportunity to avoid this mishap and multiple lives besides your own are at stake. So you fling yourself upon the person with the weapon, doing the exact opposite thing your body was born to do in these situations, and grab for it. If you aim right (or maybe you're just lucky), instead of getting a gash across the palm you get the wrist and you can wrench it behind the guy's back and then squeeze and smash it against something until he lets the knife go.
She's done that before. The guy had blood all over him and they kept telling him to show them his hands and stand up slowly but all he did was spit out all these nonsensical phrases. Then he'd flung his left hand towards her and in the half-second that the knife first glinted she'd jumped, reacting even before Elliot had. She'd gotten lucky, and after Elliot had pulled the man away, she'd reached into her pockets for the latex gloves and picked the knife off the stairs.
But she hadn't always been lucky. Sometimes you don't see the glint, and suddenly it's already too late. (Gitano? HELLO!) This guy had come at her from behind as she was talking on the phone entering her apartment. All she could find beneath her fingers was the dark wood shelf where she placed her keys by the door so she yanked it over furiously, hoping to trap the perp. And then, blindingly fast, too fast, too inconceivable…there was pain. A searing pain that burned through her body like a raging poison and blackened her vision. She felt blood squirting from her arm and dripping down to her elbow but she couldn't let it stop her. She snatched the next closest thing she could reach – a thick book that she has no idea how it came into her possession – and smashed it over her head towards the general direction of the guy. She'd be dead if she hadn't because in that instant the knife pierced through the hard covers, stopping right before her face. If it hadn't been for that bit of resistance…she'd proceeded to ram the book into the man's head, and only when he'd lain still on the floor of her living room did she stop and look at her arm and the deep gash smarting there. She felt faint; stumbled a few steps. Even so, maybe she was lucky. It wasn't a fatal wound, and thanks to it being her non-dominant hand she wasn't restricted much from work. And on top of that, the stain actually came out of the carpet. But every time she sees that four inch scar now, her fingers twitch and her heart lurches: remembering what it's like to be that close to something so out of your control.
"I used to be afraid of turning into my dad, but now I think I've had it wrong. Maybe everyone has those anger genes, somewhere, just because, and there's no sense in trying to find a reason that isn't there. Maybe the thing wrong with my genetics wasn't passed down from my father after all. Maybe anger isn't even the infliction." Maybe it was fear. Maybe she'd had it all wrong, and instead of worrying about turning into her father, she should've been concerned about becoming her mother.
Without warning, Olivia's crying, but that doesn't explain what's happening to her. There's salt burning her lips, a vein throbbing in her forehead, an anchor of sadness in her chest, a tiredness turning her limbs numb. She puts her hands on her face but that doesn't keep in the words she's been running from her whole life: "Maybe it was a victim gene."
The flood rains down.
