"Everything falls apart and you can count on that
Like you can count on bad bad weather"
-Everything Falls Apart, Dog's Eye View

Wednesday, June 14th
Afternoon

It's the second funeral in twenty-four hours and she doesn't want to be here because she's still fucking terrified something else will go wrong with Elliot's condition while she's gone. She's not over the shock from yesterday that he was going for another emergency surgery and she wants to be there, to see him, to be able to verify with her own eyes that he's still breathing because it feels like it's going to be one unexpected emergency after another until his body gives up.

But she has to be here, in her full dress uniform, stone-faced and stoic, standing beside Ayanna and Jet as the second member of their team is laid in the ground, just as they stood yesterday to watch the same for Detective Evans. Olivia doesn't know anything about Detective Whelan, had never even heard the name Evans, but she's here nonetheless, to stand in Elliot's place, to bear witness to his fallen teammates since he can't. She's here for her own reason as well, a reason she'll keep to herself, but she's here to thank them. She knows neither of them made the choice, but she recognizes their sacrifices all the same. Elliot is still alive because Evans and Whelan are not.

From what she's heard, Evans was a fresh, young detective who'd been eager to prove himself to his new coworkers, men he'd only known for two days, and he was closest to the door and dead before he hit the ground. When back up had finally arrived, Whelan was gone too, his body providing a second shield of Elliot's from the bullets. Evans hadn't had a chance to draw his weapon, Whelan's holster had been unfastened, and Elliot was the only one who'd had the chance or the speed to draw, but his gun was lost either from the impact of the bullets that shattered his right arm or quite possibly in response to the fall from the porch flat onto his back with Whelan's weight doubling the impact.

These men saved Elliot's life and she's sorry that they paid such a price, still she can't help but be thankful it's not Elliot's funeral because she wouldn't be standing here choking back the tears at the sound of the bagpipes because she'd at best be a sobbing hysterical mess collapsed on the ground and more probably an inpatient in a padded cell or most likely dead in the coffin beside him.

She's desperate to get back to the hospital, desperate to check the phone she's kept on silent out of respect, and she wants to offer Ayanna and Jet the standard promise of anything she can do to help, but she's got a fucking juggling act going on now, with Noah not feeling well, and Elliot fresh out of surgery, and Bernie and the rest of the Stablers and shit Olivia has been alone most of her life and she's not used to a whole herd of adults looking to her for guidance in a personal setting and she's still trying to placate McGrath and blaming Noah's flu for her continued absence at work and she can't help but wonder if she should be in uniform because McGrath may well have fired her by this point.

She stays longer than she wants to, mostly because she sees the brass and their narrowed eyes from across the cemetery and she knows they're circling like vultures for Ayanna and while Olivia has a very limited idea about what was even going on and until Elliot is awake to say anything else, no one really has any idea what went down because of course the shooter says he was acting in self defense, she knows the brass is going to want to hang someone and Elliot is four surgeries deep in the ICU so it's going to be Ayanna.

By the time she gets back to her car - the wine bottle still riding shotgun as a testament to her colossally bad decision last week - she's scared as hell to check her phone. There are two messages from the babysitter, one to report Noah was able to eat some toast, a second to report his temperature was back over a hundred. She's starting her truck and planning to race home to take care of her son, but something tells her to check the group chat because none of the Stablers have called her which is weird.

There must be fifty messages and she's reading them backwards as she tries to find where she last read and she's realizing someone is at Mercy in the ER and her heart about stops when she sees the first note from six this morning when Liv had been busy getting dressed for a funeral and still trying to pick paint out of her hair and giving instructions to the babysitter about how to use Noah's nebulizer where Kathleen says she's in an ambulance with Bernie because she found her grandmother passed out on the floor with an empty bottle of pills next to her and her mind is reeling from that when she sees another one from Maureen a few minutes later saying that Dr Rossi had called to talk about a change in Elliot's condition.

She really doesn't know where to go. She's torn between the three different very sick people vying for her attention and she feels like she's going to fucking snap from the pressure. She has to prioritize her family first and she feels guilty even thinking it, but the fact is Elliot and Bernie both have multiple adults looking out for them and Noah just has her.

The babysitter is obviously relieved when she gets home, her nervous feet inching closer to the door as she gives Liv a detailed breakdown of her son's symptoms throughout the day. Noah has been sick with "a virus" since Saturday and though he tested negative for the flu and covid, Olivia is still scared out of her mind and the pediatrician doesn't seem nearly worried enough. She'd spent days thinking, fearing, that she had been the one to introduce the germs that threatened Elliot's life and she'd only just started to breathe a sigh of relief when they determined it was an infection in the hardware in his arm and not from the family members as that one doctor had originally suggested.

But now Elliot's arm has been re-repaired, hopefully germ-free this time, and she has no idea of his current status because all of the kids are either at work or at a different hospital with Bernie and Liv is still dealing with a very sick kid regardless of the doctor's assurance that Noah will be fine. Noah doesn't want to eat anything and he's wheezing and he's so congested she's afraid of how painful his coughs sound and he's living on Tylenol, apple juice, and ice cream even though the ice cream makes the cough that much worse.

She lets Noah sleep for a while when she gets home because he hasn't been able to sleep and she's pulled his baby monitor out of the closet so she can make sure his breathing isn't getting worse and she's ducking into the shower because she's barely had a chance to bathe in days with all the chaos and she gets clean and pulls on jeans and a sweatshirt to relax after the miserable confines of her dress uniform of the last two days and sits down to try to deal with some of McGrath's bullshit but it's half-hearted and she's midway through an apology email explaining how it's hard to be a single parent of a sick kid and leaving out the fact that she was glued to Elliot's side before Noah got sick and then she hears Noah's coughing get worse and he's groaning and his wheezing is getting louder and he's asking for the inhaler that makes him shake and she abandons her phone and computer and everything except her keys in her haste.

She's in her truck and racing to Mercy and running into the ER with Noah in her arms like he's two and not eleven and she doesn't even know if she sent the email and she doesn't care because her son is struggling to breathe and McGrath can fuck all the way off and time passes by so damn slowly when she's panicking.

"Liv, I'm so glad you're here!"

She looks up from her nervous pacing outside the door where the staff insisted they be allowed to examine her son without her and for a moment, she'd forgotten entirely about the Stabler family, until she's looking at a teary-eyed Kathleen and she realizes she never got back to any of them in the chat because she doesn't have her phone and she suddenly remembers that Bernie is in this same emergency room and Maureen had mentioned a call from Elliot's doctor and Olivia has no way of knowing why Kathleen is crying, but either way, it's not good.

She doesn't want to know. She doesn't. But she has to ask because she knows Kathleen is looking to her help and she has never been able to resist a crying Stabler. "Kathleen, what happened?"

The young woman crumbles into her arms, her sobbed answer almost unnecessary except for the pronoun. "She's gone."

The doctor reappears before Olivia can even answer, informing her that he's ordering a chest x-ray to be sure, but he suspects pneumonia and, given Noah's asthma and his current oxygen sat which he doesn't bother to report, he's going to suggest Noah be admitted for treatment. She's so overwhelmed, thinking about the last time she saw Bernie, when the older woman had been clinging to her hand and talking about not wanting to live without her son and Olivia realizes that she's in the exact same position because she doesn't want to live without her sweet boy. And there's more than a little guilt that she's relieved it's Bernie who's gone and not Elliot because she doesn't want to live without Bernie's sweet boy either.

Kathleen is still holding onto her as she watches the portable x-ray machine get wheeled into her son's room and she knows she's not allowed in there for this part, but fuck she just wants to get back in the room and hold her son and instead she clings to Kathleen while she waits.

Kathleen pulls away slowly, her arms retreating until just her hand is in contact with Olivia, their fingers folded together. "She was so upset last night, she kept saying she was terrified about something happening to Buster. I didn't know what she was talking about so I ignored it, but maybe I should have brought her here last night and they might have helped her."

Olivia says nothing because she understands it was nothing Kathleen did, it was Elliot's health that sent Bernie completely over the edge, and she fears that when if Elliot wakes up, he'll be devastated at the loss of his mother.

"She left a note that said she couldn't say goodbye to Buster. We don't even know who Buster is."

Olivia tightens her fingers around Kathleen's. "When your dad was little, four or five, I think, he wanted a dog, but his father always said no." She finds her chin trembling at the recollection of the story Elliot had told her, which seemed funny at the time, years before she knew about Joe's abuse and Bernie's illness, the story she now finds crushingly sad. "So Bernie and your dad made up an imaginary dog and Bernie used to draw pictures of his adventures and your dad named him Buster."

Kathleen's shoulders droop as fresh tears escape. "She killed herself over an imaginary dog."

"Buster was real to them."

She fights back the urge to cry herself, thinking of Elliot's childhood with a sick mother and a bastard for a father and his imaginary dog and how he got out of there as fast as he could and created a new family and how he has always been looking for happiness and she doesn't think he's ever found it, not really. She gives into the tears as she thinks about Elliot lying there on the ground injured and in pain and scared and probably thinking he was dying and undoubtedly thinking about his life because that's what a person does when they think they're dying and she's sure he thought of her and how she'd slapped him the night before and told him to stay away from her and she hates that it might be the last memory of her he had and she has no idea what his current status is nor why the doctor had called Maureen that morning and she doesn't have the chance to ask because the resident is back, telling her the x-ray was positive and that they're transferring Noah to the PICU and she's shaking free of Kathleen to hold Noah's hand as he's wheeled toward the elevator. She doesn't have time to explain to Kathleen. She has to stay with her son.