AN: I do apologize for how long this has taken. I recently returned to work after 2 years off and it has totally sucked out all of my energy. This is getting close to the end, but it's not quite here yet!

Day Twenty-Seven, cont'd

There was a man standing at her door when she got home. For the briefest of moments, her heart soared at the thought that Elliot had raced after her and beat her home in his car. But reality hit her, telling her that the man before her was too short, too skinny, and wearing blue leather sneakers Elliot would sooner die than put on his feet. Not to mention the green nylon jacket that Olivia would kill him for trying to put on.

But as the man turned, Olivia immediately forgave him for his fashion transgressions. In his green nylon covered arms was a large glass vase with an arrangement of flowers so tall they obscured his face. It seemed the purple and blue flowers were speaking to her, a deep voice inquiring if she lived there.

She nodded as she put her key in the door, pushing it open and accepting the flowers.

Free of the cumbersome arrangement, the young man stepped back. "Have a good day, ma'am." Then he was gone before she finished wincing.

She understood that he was trying to be polite, but her mind still equated "ma'am" with shriveled old ladies with blue hair and pink dogs. She hated that, although she knew she looked good for her age, her face no longer earned the assumption that she was a "miss." Not that she had ever appreciated being called that either in her younger days when she'd longed for respect. Shaking her head at her own stupidity, she turned her attention back to the flowers.

She set them on the coffee table and sat back on the couch to admire them. There was no need to check the card. They were obviously from Elliot. It made her smile to think of how he must have scrambled to order them and get them delivered so quickly. She knew he had to have been on the phone before she even got out of the precinct.

Leaning forward, she inhaled the sweet, fragrant scent. He was good; she had to give him that. He hadn't gone for the obvious red roses or the cheesy pink ones. She had no clue what the beautiful blossoms were called, but she liked them. She plucked the card from its slot nestled among the blooms, wondering what he'd wanted to say that he'd been willing to tell the florist.

The note was simple and short, saying everything there was to say. I love you. That was it.

She was grinning as she reached for the phone. He picked up on the first ring, expecting her call, but unable to beat her to the first word. "I love you too. Thank you."

He was smiling, she could hear it in his voice. "What would you have done if Cragen had picked up my line?"

"Probably the same damn thing."

His chuckle rang through the line, their fight quickly dissipating. "Should I be jealous now or are you just in a much better mood than you were a few minutes ago?"

She laughed, wishing she could hug him for the undercurrent of honesty she heard in his joke of jealousy. "There's no reason to be jealous, El. I'm just indebted to the man who introduced us."

"Right, how could I forget something I'll be eternally grateful for? I should thank him for real."

"You might refrain from declaring your love for him though, because I'm not interested in having to get you discharged from Bellevue." She expected a quick, joking response. Instead, there was silence that lasted a beat longer than was comfortable. "El, what?"

"I don't know. Casey and Huang are in Cragen's office and they're all staring at me." His voice was changing, clear one moment, fading the next. Olivia could practically see the paranoid way he was glancing at them over his shoulder.

All of her instincts told her to comfort him, to brush off his suspicions, but, exactly as she'd denied so very many times to Huang, her time with Howie had changed her. Rather than assuring him that his coworkers would never keep something important from him, she found herself wishing she was there to assess the situation herself.

Before she could think of what to say, he broke the silence. "Cragen's waving me over. I'll call you right back." And then the call was disconnected, leaving Olivia to wonder just what the hell was about to drop.

She tried everything she could think of to distract herself. She mopped the kitchen floor. She did a load of laundry. She spent an hour channel surfing. She checked her phone half a dozen times to make sure she hadn't somehow missed his return call. And she spent far more time than she would have liked to admit staring at the array of flowers Elliot had sent her with a stupidly content smile covering her face.

At 4:15, she heard his key in the lock. Between the early hour and the fact that he'd never called her back, she knew that whatever had been going on in Cragen's office involved her as much as it involved Elliot. The smile disappeared as dread built up in her stomach. By the time he'd closed the door behind him she knew her insides resembled a reject from the balloon animal training class at clown college.

Elliot's eyes fell first on the bouquet of flowers, his lips curving upward as he appraised them. "So I did good, right?" But when his glance turned to Olivia, his smile disappeared as suddenly as hers. "What? What's wrong?" He moved quickly, taking her side on the couch, wrapping one arm around her shoulders, cupping her chin with the other hand. "Liv, what happened?"

She was so baffled by his unexpected concern and confusion that she couldn't reply fast enough. In the time it took her to open her mouth, he was up again, tearing through the apartment, shouting back at her.

"Did something happen? Did someone hurt you?"

Catching his frantic energy like a cold, she was up in a flash, following him, grabbing his arm halfway to her bedroom. "Elliot, calm down. What's wrong with you?"

He looked at her, his head ducking down as he double checked her body for any obvious damage. Then his hands were on her face, his own face scrunched up in worry. "Are you ok?"

"Yeah, I'm ok." She reached up, taking his hands from her face, squeezing them between hers. "I'm fine. Now it's your turn."

Assured by both her words and tone, he relaxed, his whole body sagging as the adrenaline waned. "When I walked in, you were just staring and you were pale as a sheet and you looked sick, so I-"

"So you panicked." With their hands still intertwined, she led him back to the couch.

He shook his head as he sat beside her once again, sighing. "You scared the shit out of me."

Olivia shook her head back. "You scared the shit out of yourself. I had nothing to do with it." One side of her mouth curved into a smile, waiting for him to mirror her expression. Satisfied, she spoke again. "I was just sitting here."

"Just sitting here looking like death warmed over."

"I've been sitting here for hours waiting for you to call me right back. And then you show up several hours early-"

His half smile turned into a whole one. "So you panicked."

Shrugging, she couldn't keep herself from grinning back. "My panic is just quieter and less physical than yours."

With another, longer sigh, Elliot sagged back against the couch, reaching his arm out in a silent invitation for Olivia to snuggle into his side. Not needing any more of an excuse, she leaned over, snaking her arm around his waist and dropping her head onto his chest. His heartbeat was like magic, able to calm her completely in moments. They sat there quietly, simply enjoying the comfort, physical and mental, of being together.

But after a few minutes, Elliot's arm tightened the slightest bit. "I came home early because there's something I need to tell you and I didn't want to do it over the phone."

In that instant, the worry overtook her again, negating the relaxing benefit of being in Elliot's arms. She sat up, feeling her heart start to pound. "What?" God only knew what he was about to drop on her, but she was terrified. She'd already been through one fucking hell of a month and she wasn't finished with therapy from it yet; she hardly felt like she was in a position to take another blow.

Pinching his lips into a thin line, Elliot stared at his hands as he twisted them in his lap. His obvious anxiety was giving way to anger. He shook his head again, grimacing as he did so. "I wish there was some easy way to say this. I wish I didn't have to say it at all. I wish it wasn't true."

Horror after horror started rolling through her head, her overactive imagination happy to fill in the details of all sorts of hideous secrets about to be spilled. And with each second that went by, her anxiety began to morph into anger at Elliot's newfound dramatic streak. "Just tell me, damn it! I've been sitting here, waiting for you to tell me whatever the hell it is for hours, Elliot! Whatever it is, it can't be as bad as the things I'm thinking up." Because she'd already decided it had to be worse than both of them getting fired and several of their friends and coworkers being killed, as well as something unimaginably awful involving his kids.

Instead of telling her the world as she knew it was ending, Elliot leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands together. "The bastard is trying to plead insanity."

Olivia took a moment, trying to make sense of the words. "What? Who?"

With an annoyed glare, Elliot practically growled the words at her. "Howie. Douglas. Whatever the fuck his name is." Unspent energy forced him to stand up and start pacing. "The bastard's lawyer is saying he's too fucking crazy to go to trial."

"Maybe he is." Sitting back, Olivia turned the information over in her mind. Howie hadn't seemed particularly sane to her, not with the way he called her Maggie and his brilliant plan of keeping her safe by holding her prisoner.

Elliot's fury, which by rights ought to have to been aimed at Howie, focused on Olivia instead. "What do you mean? He's not crazy. He's a sick son of a bitch, but he's not crazy."

Uninterested in having another fight with Elliot, Olivia merely shrugged. "Seemed like a psycho to me."

"He's not crazy. He's weird and he's clever and he's a hell of an actor but the man is hardly insane." His tirade paused long enough for him to glance at Olivia and determine that she didn't believe him. "That asshole led me and Fin all over the fucking city to lose us when we tried to follow him to where he was holding you. He lied about knowing you. I was going nuts trying to help you. You don't know what I went through trying to find you! He was busy playing word games with us while you were bound and gagged in his basement and completely at his mercy!"

And suddenly Elliot's fury was as contagious as his panic had been. Olivia was off the couch and in his face before she even thought to do so. "Don't you tell me what I went through. I know full well how he had me trapped in that hellhole! You don't know the half of it! I didn't tell you because you couldn't deal with it! You would have gotten pissed and hauled off and killed the man and I don't have the time to deal with calming you down right now!"

She knew even before Elliot's face turned an ashen white that she'd said the wrong thing. She knew exactly where Elliot's mind had gone, where she'd inadvertently directed it. She couldn't even stay mad at him for insinuating that he'd suffered more than she had at Howie's hands, not when she saw the pain, the shock, the guilt, written across Elliot's features. She'd been referring to the shame of wetting herself and the indignity of being cleaned by Howie's hands, the one thing, the only thing, she hadn't confessed about her time in captivity. Not to Huang, not to Elliot, not to anyone. And she had no intention of ever telling it. Admitting to it would simply refresh the humiliation all over again.

She couldn't think of what to say, how to deny what she knew he thought she'd just admitted. She hadn't meant it at all. She hadn't told him because she was humiliated, not because of how Elliot would react. Certainly he'd be furious at Howie for touching her, but she knew Elliot better than to think he'd blow up at her. Of course not. He'd be caring and supportive and gentle. And somehow, knowing how carefully he'd accept her admission, she knew it would just make her feel worse about it. She'd feel like a scared child. And she didn't want to feel like that all over again.

Elliot flopped back onto the couch, burying his face in his hands. "Jesus, Olivia, you said he-" His words were lost in a sob, his shoulders shaking as he cried.

Her anger was gone as quickly as it had flared, leaving her to feel terribly guilty in its wake. Lowering herself to the coffee table, she reached for his hands, pulling them away from his face in the hopes that he would look at her. "He didn't, El, that's not what I meant."

He looked up at her, unashamed of his tear-filled eyes. "Then what did you mean?" The way he was looking at her, the steady eye contact, the pure hope in his expression, it was too much for her.

Ducking her face away, she shook her head. "I was just angry. I didn't mean anything."

Although she was lying and she hated that she was, she knew it would be for the best if he never found out the truth. It was clear from looking at him, at the pathetic way he sought reassurance from her, that he'd truly suffered as much, if not more, at Howie's hands than she had. Or at least, he'd been affected by it more than she had been. Because the man sitting in front of her, unafraid to cry, unafraid to show her how desperately he needed her to be ok, wasn't the man he'd been a few weeks earlier.

She was still the same Olivia, albeit a bit more fearful for a short time, but still the same as before. Elliot could have been a complete stranger for all the differences she saw in him, differences she knew weren't due to the change in their relationship. He'd suffered while she was gone, felt a fear so deep that it rendered him a new man.

And it made her hate Howie even more.

She scooted forward, sliding off the table and insinuating herself onto Elliot's lap as she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and hugged him tight. "I hope they fry the son of a bitch." It didn't matter than the kidnapping was a far cry from a death penalty case. All that mattered was that Elliot knew they were on the same page. And that Howie suffered for all the pain he'd caused.