A/N: The writing in italics is Olivia reading from the notes left in Amanda's personnel file.
Olivia watched as her youngest detective walked slowly towards her office. The elder woman could see the reluctance in Amanda's eyes. The blonde knew she messed up bad, and unlike the boys, Olivia knew the larger picture. The elder woman herself turned her back before Amanda entered the room, she wanted to try and reign in her emotions before talking to her and she couldn't risk speaking before the door was closed.
"Sergeant, I just want to say..." Amanda began to explain the moment she shut the door behind her.
"Save it" Olivia's harsh voice cut her off "you're going to listen to what I have to say" she added as she quickly turned around and gave her detective an angry glare. Olivia herself was surprised at how quickly her emotions went from worry and anxiety for Amanda to anger and resentment, even after knowing everything Amanda was put through during the UC operation.
"I honestly don't care about any excuses you have for yourself because they don't matter" Olivia began as she took a step forward and looked down on the younger woman. To Amanda's credit, she didn't flinch but simply stood still, ready to receive the verbal beating she knew she deserved. "The point is, you shouldn't have been in that club in the first place. None of this should have ever happened, but it did" Olivia continued, her eyes gazing over the dark bruise on Amanda's cheek.
The fact that Amanda was injured only fueled her anger further. None of this should have happened, Amanda's injury and Olivia's sleepless nights due to worry. Now the elder woman knew where her anger was coming from. Amanda caused everyone so much pain without a single care about others. It was this selfishness that the SVU Sergeant didn't want to deal with, she grew up with a selfish broken woman and she didn't need to be working with one now.
"Lieutenant Murphy may have gone to bat for you with 1PP but I won't. He may trust you and your skills, but you lost that with me. In fact, if we weren't so short staffed at the moment I would have you transferred within the day" Olivia said as she continued to berate the younger woman over her actions for the last few days. She could see the tears and the pain in Amanda's eyes, and for a moment she almost regretted her words, almost.
There was a larger truth behind them. Olivia had worked as an officer for years and she had seen many kinds of cops, morally good or bad, mediocre and superior. The mediocre cops can be taught, they mean well, but it was the morally corrupt cops that needed to be routed out. Trust is a must in their line of work, and when a cop's morals are put on the line, it isn't always clear who's back they have, and in the field that could cost lives.
Amanda may have passed Murphy's test and chose to give herself away before comprising the safety of a juror; but, it's only a matter of time before she screws up again and the next time she might not pass that test. The only fault of it all being Amanda's own weakness.
"I... I just want you to know..." Amanda took a shallow breath in an attempt to regain her composure. The younger woman didn't want to show how much those words had truly affected her "I will never stop trying to get back into your good graces" Amanda said honestly. Olivia showed no further emotion or acknowledgment of Amanda as the younger woman spoke and then left the room.
After Amanda left her office, Olivia sat back into her chair, suddenly exhausted from the day's events. "I'm going to need more coffee if I'm going to get through this horrible day with no sleep," she said as she shook her empty coffee cup from that morning, with a sigh she walked to get a new cup and returned to her chair. Olivia threw herself into her work once again to distance herself emotionally from the turmoil that was that UC operation.
Despite Olivia's words, the day flew by. Before the SVU Sergeant knew it, the day had ended and she was the only one left at the office. Tiredly she closed her laptop and rubbed her eyes. The only thing she wanted to do was cuddle up with her baby boy and take a long nap. As she thought about her son, her eyes caught the flash drive still sticking out of her computer. That single device brought back all of her negative emotions from that morning.
"Reckless" Olivia murmured disgruntledly "reckless, reckless, reckless" she repeated her anger growing with each word "what was she thinking?" she asked aloud as she got up and began to pace the room. "You know what, she wasn't thinking," she said in answering her own question "all she wanted to do was give in to her addiction, 'screw the consequences, screw my responsibility'" Olivia finished in a mock voice meant to be Amanda's.
At the end of her rant, Olivia stopped pacing and rested her hand on an old filing cabinet. A cabinet that had been in that room since it was Cragen's office, he kept every employee's personnel file there. "I should put this in her file myself, that way I can use plain language so her next boss will understand all of the circumstances involved," she said as she reached to open the old gray cabinet "if she even lasts much longer" Olivia added with a bitter tone.
The SVU Lieutenant knew that the UC operation was already in or in the process of being put in the blondes personnel file down at 1PP, a digital file that would follow her wherever she went. But Olivia felt like physically putting her own thoughts into the file that Cragen had, if only for the symbolic measure.
Olivia quickly looked through the various names on the dusty old files. The cabinet had not been opened since Cragen left. For starters, most of the files were already digitized and secondly when Olivia promoted she felt no need to look through the files of her team because she had already known them for years. She also felt a bit awkward about looking at their files as if it would be an invasion of their privacy, but that sentiment wasn't present in regards to Amanda, at least not in that moment.
Once Olivia had the file in her hands, she sat back at her desk and laid it open. At first glance, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Amanda had a spotless record as a uniformed officer down in Atlanta. She had a talent for laying honey traps, a talent that got her noticed by Deputy Chief Patton of SVU in the APD. She was pulled up to a detective by the chief and kept under his wing. It was at this point when Olivia paused "if she had it so good there, what happened?" she asked with no real compassion. "Why did she have to let her addiction ruin so much for her. At least my mom had an excuse for her addiction, a cause that was out of her control" the brunette said as she thought back to her mother's drinking problem and how it stemmed from her rape and pregnancy.
Olivia knew her mother's past was no excuse for the way she acted or how the woman treated her, but at least the Sergeant could understand the cause behind her actions. As Olivia saw it, Amanda had no reason to run to the card tables except to chase a thrill she couldn't find elsewhere. "She's throwing it all away for nothing" Olivia stated with a sense of finality before she resumed reading the file.
The file continued to talk about Amanda's successes as a detective until suddenly there was a mention at how she was becoming a distraction in the workplace. "That's code for she was sleeping with all the officers on the force" Olivia huffed out as she read that small complaint.
The elder woman couldn't say she was surprised, she saw the looks the blonde and her partner had shared in the past. The fact that Amaro is so protective of Amanda was proof enough, for her, that they had probably already slept together, but before then Olivia didn't think it was her business as long as it didn't interfere with their work. Now, Olivia wondered if she should keep them separate so Amanda couldn't take Amaro down with her.
Just after that page, Olivia started to see handwritten notes from Cragen. The brunette knew that her old Captain liked to add things into his files for his eyes only. She was surprised that he left these notes in there. She looked at the first one, it was a note he made to himself stating that his buddy from the APD had a good detective that was looking to get transferred and it would be doing him a favor if Cragen at least looked at her. "So she did have her hooks in someone to get this job" Olivia nearly smirked as she remembered what she asked Munch right after Amanda was hired.
Olivia moved on to the next one. It was about the interview itself. It stated that Cragen was very impressed with Amanda's performance and knowledge. "I see great potential in her and would not be surprised to see her rise in the ranks quickly" she read a sentence aloud and nearly scoffed. "Yeah, bet she tried to sleep her way to the top in Atlanta but it didn't work, and it definitely wouldn't work here, not with Cragen," Olivia said in response to that statement but instantly felt regret. "Okay, stop. I'm being immature. She's done enough wrong without me adding things that I've never seen with my own eyes" she said as she tried to reign in her anger again, she hated having her emotions take hold of her like that.
She continued to read Cragen's notes that seemed to do nothing but praise Amanda until she stopped suddenly. She had to reread the sentence to make sure she had seen it right "I have decided to hire detective Amanda Rollins on the spot. It only benefits my team to have her join, and in doing so I am also relieved that I can get her away from that dangerous situation back home with the revolting predator that is..." Olivia stopped reading as the note ended. She looked back through the file but the rest of it wasn't there.
"I'm definitely missing something," Olivia said getting frustrated at the situation. "What dangerous situation was Amanda in?" she wanted to know more than anything at that moment. The brunette wondered if she had gotten in gambling trouble back home, but she knew Cragen wouldn't have hired her if that was the case. She was also concerned with the phase 'revolting predator', she wanted to know what that meant and who was being referred.
Not willing to give up, Olivia stood and walked back over to the old filing cabinet. She opened the drawer and moved through all of the files hoping to find the missing note. She ended up finding two notes that fell from Amanda's file. The first one was a continuation of Captain Reynolds asking Cragen to give Amanda a chance. Olivia wasn't going to look at it at first, wanting to focus on the rest of that last sentence she was reading, but her eyes caught sight of two very troubling words that drew in her focus, "sexual assault".
Olivia was stunned for a moment, that was one phrase she wasn't expecting to find in Amanda's file, well technically Cragen's notes in her file. The elder woman read the remainder of that first note. It described how Amanda's old Captain had once found the Deputy Chief trying to put his hand down Amanda's blouse and then how a rumor started, by Patton himself, that the young blonde was sleeping with the man. Reynolds voiced his concerns that it was no condition a person should be working in but went on to explain that since Patton was so entrenched in the system, and the boy's club, he was nearly untouchable by Amanda's situation. She wasn't safe in Atlanta.
"Son of a bitch," Olivia said in anger "so since that Deputy Chief was in a position of power he got off scot free and Amanda was the one who needed to flee the state for her own safety". The SVU Sergeant was fuming once again, but this time it wasn't directed at Amanda it was directed at the man who had harassed her to the point she needed to run to New York City just to get away, and at the police force that let her down in Georgia.
"From the sound of this note, Amanda couldn't leave soon enough. Who knows how much longer until Patton would have tried to force himself on her" she said in disgust as she finally made it back to her chair to read the second note. She figured she would not be surprised by the rest after that last one, she was wrong.
Olivia began that last note by rereading the former statement on the previous page to completion "I am also relieved that I can get her away from that dangerous situation back home with the revolting predator that is the Deputy Chief of Atlanta APD. My disdain for that man and the APD as a whole can never be greater. Never before have I seen a police department fail one of their own in such a spectacular way". Olivia couldn't agree with Cragen more. The way the APD treated Amanda was wrong and she knew that one day the situation was going to bite that department in the butt, and when that day came she would have no problems in watching it burn.
"I had to ask about the allegations of her sleeping with her Deputy Chief during the interview, and her answer caused me to come to the conclusion that more than just a 'simple' sexual harassment happened" Olivia continued to read the note, her breath hitching in her throat. "She sat straight up and adamantly said that she would never willingly sleep with that man. Her conviction showed me that she was telling the truth, however, her body language and eyes when she said 'willingly' cause me to believe that the worst had already occurred"
Olivia sat in silence for several minutes after reading that last line. "The worst had already occurred" she repeated in a whisper. Her heart had dropped as she read those words and it only constricted tighter as she repeated them. "So she didn't make it out in time," the brunette said dejectedly as she could feel tears come to her eyes. Suddenly she felt extremely guilty about her earlier statements, she practically called the blonde a slut when in fact it was all due to Patton starting that rumor about her to cover up his own misdeeds.
"All these years she's lived without justice. Without anyone really knowing the truth of what happened." Olivia said dishearteningly, feeling pain on behalf of the younger woman. "How could she have done it, knowing that her rapist was still out there enjoying his high status in the APD" suddenly a thought hit Olivia like a ton of bricks. "She never even tried to deal," she said in realization. "She's pushed this down so far that the trauma finally started to manifest itself in the form of an addiction..." Olivia paused as she suddenly thought about the parallel she was drawing from earlier that day "just like my mother... she's using her addiction as a way to escape from what happened to her. It's her avoidance mechanism"
"I should have seen this..." Olivia said as she bit her lip "dammit, I should have seen this. There were so many signs, I've been doing this job for more than 15 years. She's just like my mother..." she sighed with a shaky breath. The SVU Sergeant was mentally beating herself up for never realizing the pattern Amanda was showing. "She reached out..." she thought instantly as she remembered one of the first cases she worked with the younger woman, "she told me about an assault that wasn't worth pursuing at the time... dammit she even said it was one of the reasons she left Atlanta. I should have seen that". Olivia rested her head in her hands as she felt the dizzying wave of guilt wash over her "she reached out but I ignored her because of my own issues with Elliot leaving. I never gave her a chance".
Olivia's emotions were starting to get out of control, and she could recognize that. She began to take deep breaths in order to clear her head and calm down. She knew that there was nothing she could do about the past, she could not stop Amanda from being raped, but she would try to change their interactions in the future. This thought brought her mind back to only a few hours ago, to when she yelled at the younger woman and said that she didn't trust or respect her. Olivia regretted those harsh words, especially given this recent discovery.
She thought about the video again, and it became even more tragic to Olivia. "Amanda was afraid in that video, but she was willing to get raped again to keep her job and to protect that juror from the illegal club owners. I don't want her in that situation again" Olivia said determined "I will not sit back and watch her ruin her life, she will not end up like my mother" she made a promise to herself and Amanda "I'm going to get her help, because right now she's not coping well with what was done to her, and I'm not going to let that man erase her future"
A/N: I wonder if I became too preachy in the end lol :) I hope I didn't make Olivia too mean and bitchy in the first part when she was basically calling Amanda a slut. She was meant to be upset and in a very angry place emotionally. Thanks to everyone who left a review on the first chapter, it really made me smile :) I realized how much I missed writing these last few weeks.