Here's another chapter. I'm thinking that this will be about 5 or 6 chapters long, with different perspectives. Click the pretty purple button and leave a review!
Thanks to Marish89 for betaing!
It shouldn't mean this much. It shouldn't hit him this hard, because he's supposed to be the strong one, the one that holds the whole team together. But he was never the one who held them up, Cragen learned. It was always her. Always her who calmed Elliot after he flew into one of his rage fits. Her who posed solutions to the problems that would be sensitive to the victim, when the men had just wanted to get the perp in jail as fast as possible. Her who made the world seem a little less screwed-up for everyone just by being there. Her, in all her passion, had always managed to be a bright spark and comfort those whose lives had been torn apart.
Cragen doesn't know how to fill that hole. He doesn't know how to tell his team that it will work out, that it will be OK, when he doesn't know that himself. So he tries to focus on just holding them together as a team.
He never realised it before, but his office has always been bare. It was like that when he became captain and it's like that now. He knows Elliot and Fin keep pictures of their kids on their desks, Munch keeps a picture of JFK on his desk, for reasons that never made sense to any of them. Casey even keeps a picture of her ex-fiancé in her desk. But on his desk he has no family photos, no personal pictures; just one of Marge and himself on their wedding day, both wearing huge, bright smiles. He prefers to think of Marge that way, as the woman who was always smiling, always laughing, and who believed there was good in anyone so vehemently that he sometimes found himself believing it too. He put it there right after she died, needing to see her face, needing to know that in some small way, she was still there. Now there is another lost loved one, and another photo on his desk, one of Olivia.
Her head is thrown back with laughter, her hair flying into her face, and wearing the same look of compassionate determination in her eyes that was always there. This is the way he likes to think of her. The picture is proudly displayed now, so everyone can see it, and sometimes he feels a little better just looking at it.
He hired Olivia's replacement not so long ago, despite the arguments that had taken place about him taking her place. The new guy, Detective Ken Adams, is solid in his position, but knows perfectly well that he is not part of the family that SVU has formed, straight from when he signed his contract and asked the captain if the dark-haired woman in the picture on his desk is his daughter. When the captain had asked him if the woman looked like him and Adams had said she did, he was shocked to look up and see tears pooling in the old man's eyes.
As Captain Donald Cragen looks again at the image of the woman that was his daughter in so many ways, he knows that it never should have meant this much to him.