Chapter Three

"How're we doing?' Olivia asked, walking back down the hallway towards her partner and Holly, who were standing outside of Rachel Wall's door in the emergency room. Holly was sitting in the chair that Olivia had been in not too much earlier, her head in her hands.

"Holly tried to talk to Rachel, but it didn't go as we planned," Elliot sighed.

"You know, I just don't get it," Holly said, her words rushed as she ran her fingers through her red ponytail. "She has always talked to me about everything. Everything. But in there she hugged me and then wouldn't budge. She didn't tell me anything. We used to be so close, I just don't understand..."

Olivia looked at the young woman in front of her. She could see a lot of herself in Holly's eyes. She could recognize the dark circles that came with the stress of being a guardian without any warning prior. She knew the stress of having something happen that turned your world upside down. She knew, because she was living through it at that very moment.

And yet, Olivia hesitated to reassure Holly that she understood how she felt. The last time she had shared personal information with someone in an attempt to soothe them was when she told Vivian Arliss that she too was the outcome of a rape, just as Vivian had found out about herself minutes before.

And look where that had gotten her.

"I'm sure you two had a very strong relationship," Olivia chose to say instead, crouching down next to Holly. "Victims of assault tend to introvert for a period of time after the incident; it's actually very common. The best thing you can do is be whatever she needs right now, whether it be her sister, her friend, or just someone that will sit beside her."

"I don't even know what happened to her, she won't tell me, she's just sitting there...what do I do? How do I help her?" Holly asked Olivia, looking into her eyes.

"You're her legal guardian, Holly," Elliot spoke up. "You can choose to have a rape kit done if she's not talking."

Olivia could see tear well up in Holly's eyes at the mention of the word. "Should...should I? I've never had to deal with this before..."

"And you shouldn't have ever had to," Olivia said calmly. "But all signs point to assault; the best way to help her is to order the rape kit."

"It'll take at least two hours, since we don't know exactly what happened to her. If it were my daughter I'd go ahead and order it," Elliot insisted.

Holly exhaled heavily and stared at the tile floor for about a minute. Elliot and Olivia patiently awaited her decision as IV poles and doctors whizzed past them in the emergency room. Finally, the twenty five year old nodded slightly.

"That's a yes?" Elliot verified.

"Yeah," she said. "God, I just hope she's okay."

"She will be," Olivia promised. "Because we're going to bring justice to whoever hurt her. I promise."

All of the sudden, Olivia remembered the last time she'd promised someone something. She'd promised Calvin that she would take him to see the new Spiderman movie that weekend.

All of the remembering, all the memories...she knew she had to stop.

But what if she didn't know how to?

Detective Benson heard the chair on the other side of the cafeteria table screech against the white tile floor and saw someone familiar sit down in it out of the corner of her eye.

"Hey, partner," she said nonchalantly, stirring the coffee in her Styrofoam cup with a black stirrer.

Elliot sat his matching cup on the table, and they both watched the steam from each of their drinks curl together in the air. Around other people, he always kept a lid on his coffee because he didn't want anyone to know that he liked to put a lot of creamer in it. He told people he drank it black. But he had no secrets from Olivia.

"Hey," he said, shifting uncomfortably. Olivia blinked out of her deep thoughts and looked up at him.

"You okay?" she asked. She could read him like a book, and he knew it. She didn't bother with sounding concerned; he would know that she was, because she wouldn't ask him about it if she weren't. She was also too mentally exhausted to express emotion.

He stirred his coffee too. "NO," he finally said.

She didn't have to press him on. She knew he'd continue when he felt like it.

"Is it bad that I'm kind of...relieved we have a case to deal with this late at night? That Cragen wants us to do the rape kit and interviewing immediately instead of in the morning? We aren't going to be home till at least three or four in the morning."

Olivia chuckled. "I'm not sure, but we're definitely in the same boat."

Elliot smiled, looking down at the table. They both knew that Olivia wanted to avoid going home to an empty apartment, but what did he not want to go home to?

"Kathy?" Olivia finally asked. Elliot nodded immediately.

"We've been having problems," he answered. Olivia didn't press him for details, because she didn't want them. It was his business, he could tell her if he wanted to.

He must have seen her revert back to her dark thoughts as she stared off into the distance, because he finally spoke up. "You know, at first I didn't know if you were ready to take on a case so quickly, but I actually think this could be really good for you. To get you mind off of things. A distraction."

The ends of Olivia's lips curled upwards. A distraction. That was exactly what she needed. She couldn't even bear to think about Calvin anymore: it was too painful. Having him ripped away from her by his druggie mother wasn't something she could relive without feeling like crying.

At that moment, Olivia Benson decided that she was going to delve her entire being into this case. She was going to eat, sleep, and breathe the case of Rachel Wall and completely block anything involving the Arliss's from her mind. Vivian? Who was Vivian? She sure didn't know one. Calvin who? She'd never met a Calvin in her life.

As she and Elliot stood up to check on how Rachel's rape kit was going, Olivia continued to run a white-out wand over everything that had happened in the past few months. She promised herself that the dysfunctional Arliss family would not cross her mind so long as this case was still open. And when it was closed? She figured that by the time she returned to those thoughts, they would be...duller. More distant. They would still hurt, but not as badly as they had when the wounds were fresh. They'd be scabbed over. She would be able to handle it.

She tried to focus on following Elliot through the hallways and into the elevator to the emergency room from the cafeteria in the basement, but found her thoughts still consuming her.

The reasonable, detective side of her knew that it wasn't going to be as simple as that. But she shooed those thoughts away. She couldn't afford to think like that.

For her sanity's sake, she couldn't.

A/N: Hey, sorry it was so late. I wrote this and then my computer got a virus and I lost everything. I've been so down about that that I didn't have the heart to rewrite it until today. Also, today's my birthday :D Sorry if there's any typos, didn't reread it before I posted, just did a quick spellcheck run. Please please PLEASE review, like it or love it or hate it? Thanks!