"Here," she said. "Take this."

This was a small crystal glass with about three fingers worth of bourbon in it, and Elliot accepted it gladly, took one long slow sip and then cradled the glass in both his hands, his elbows resting loosely on his knees. He'd loosened the knot in his tie on the drive over and it hung low and crooked beneath the open buttons at his collar, and while Liv had been busy putting her shirt back on and pouring him a drink he'd taken the opportunity to roll his sleeves back, and try to bring his heart rate under control. He hadn't much luck; he hoped the bourbon would help.

After Olivia's cataclysmic revelation in the entryway by her front door Elliot had drug himself to his feet and found safe quarter on one end of her sofa, and now that she'd brought him his drink she curled herself into the armchair opposite him, tucked her legs up under her body, looking somehow small and scared, when usually Olivia was neither of those things. She'd seemed to tower over him when they stood by the door, with her brilliant wings spread out behind her in all their glory, but now she seemed to have shrunken in on herself, and there was an expression like heartbreak in her big dark eyes.

For a moment he just looked at her, feeling the bourbon burning its way down his throat and into his belly. Just looked at her, his best friend, his partner, this beautiful woman he'd walked through life with for more than a dozen years now, and tried to reconcile what he'd just learned with everything he thought he knew. Tried, and failed, because there was no reconciling it. How could there be? How could any sane man, sound of mind and practical and well aware of the grim reality of life on earth, just accept that his best friend was an angel? Or part angel, or whatever? But he had seen the wings for himself; he had seen Jenna shoot Olivia, and he saw her now, utterly unhurt. His eyes could see what his mind stubbornly refused to believe, and his heart was caught in the middle.

"Say something," Olivia prompted him in a voice just this side of desperate. Usually she didn't mind the quiet, and usually he didn't, either; they knew each other well enough to fill the silence without words. Only that silence was full of accusations now, and it seemed like that was bothering her, as much as it bothered him.

"I'm kinda having a hard time with this, Liv," he said. Say something, she'd said, and she hadn't said what she wanted him to say, so he settled on the truth.

"I know," she told him heavily.

"So what, you're…you…I mean…" he stumbled over his words, finding it impossible to give voice to the thoughts that filled his head. She was an angel, right? That's what she had been trying to tell him, right? That she was immortal, or something? Immortal was not a word Elliot Stabler could say with a straight face.

"My father was an angel," Olivia said slowly. "My mother was a human. Back then -"

"Back when?"

She shot him a dark look.

"If I say before the flood, are you gonna laugh at me?"

"The flood? Like Noah and the arc, that flood?"

Jesus, he thought, and wished he hadn't, because this conversation sounded too much like Sunday School already; Noah and the flood, all those old stories, they were just stories, weren't they? He'd always thought so. Thought they were just stories, just a way to teach kids to be nice to each other and do what their parents said. The people in those stories, they hadn't been real, had they? The whole world hadn't been drowned in water, the only living creatures those that found shelter on Noah's boat; it was an impossibility. It was just a story.

"Yeah," Olivia said, and Elliot gulped. "Look, it wasn't…it wasn't the whole world," she said, like she could read his mind. "But back then there wasn't a lot of long distance travel, you know? It took a long time to get from Damascus to Shanghai. People didn't really know anything about what was happening in other places. It felt like the whole world drowned, when it came, because everything we'd ever known was underwater. Can you accept that much?"

Elliot nodded, and took another drink.

"Back then," she said. "Things were different. Angels walked on earth. Not a lot of them, not everywhere, but they did. But some of them went rogue."

"Can they even do that?" Elliot asked before he could stop himself. Was he really entertaining this? Did he really believe her? How could he not? Wasn't her very existence proof that what she said was true?

"Where do you think the demons came from?" she asked sadly. "The point is, there were angels here. And some of them married human women. Some of the women consented, some of them didn't. Whether they did or not, pretty much everybody agreed their offspring were abominations. My mother was cast out of her family home when she came up pregnant with a monster."

"You're not a monster," Elliot said softly, but she just kept talking like she never even heard him.

"It's hard to hide a nephilim baby," she said. "I can retract my wings now, but I didn't learn how to do that until I was five or six, and it's not like my mother knew how to teach me. If I get hurt, my body heals that hurt fast. I wasn't supposed to be born but I can't really die, either. I mean there are ways. People figured that out fast."

She didn't elaborate and he wasn't about to ask.

"I can change my appearance-"

"Does that mean this isn't actually your real face?"

That thought troubled him. She was telling him that she was the child of an angel and she couldn't really die but what bothered him most was the thought that he didn't actually know what she looked like. Thirteen years might have been a blip on the radar to her but it mattered to him, and it hurt, thinking that she'd hidden herself from him.

"No, it is," she assured him at once. "More or less. I've made a couple changes over the years, people might notice if I looked twenty-five forever."

She didn't really look forty, either, he thought; there had always been a timelessness to her, and now he supposed he knew the reason why.

"Anyway. The angels were here, they started to cause trouble, and the rules changed. That's what the flood was about, partially, was wiping out the angels who didn't come home when they were called, and their offspring, too. There weren't very many of us, and we were all in the same general area. It was just supposed to be one big disaster, wipe the slate clean."

"Did they drown, the others?" The ones who were like you?

"Most of them. It took a while. Sometimes a body that refuses to die isn't a mercy."

It was a chilling story. She hadn't said God did it, but Elliot kinda figured that was implied, and that was something else for him to struggle with, the idea that God himself had tried to kill Olivia Benson. She was still standing, though, and maybe it was wrong but Elliot was fiercely proud of her for that.

"Wait," he said as a thought occurred to him. "What about Simon?"

He'd met the man, Olivia's brother, recalled Simon's face, his voice, all the tragic details of the unraveling of Simon's life.

"He's a nephilim, too," Olivia explained. "That makes him my brother, in a way. There's maybe six of us in the States, as far as I know. After the flood we had to start over. There was no place for us with the humans, they blamed us for everything they'd lost, but we didn't want to stick together. We didn't want to draw attention. Men hunted us. Most of my brothers were killed by men, or by their own hands. It meant a lot, finding Simon. I…I wanted that connection, so badly."

And it had all turned to shit. That part of the story remained the same; angel or woman, Olivia was lonely and without family, and the one piece of family she'd found had brought her no comfort, and Elliot's heart ached for her then.

"The world forgot about us, mostly. There are some people out there who know about us, who want to capture us or kill us, but there's so few of us left and we know how to keep ourselves hidden."

Yeah you do, Elliot thought.

"So, that's it really-"

"No, it's not," Elliot said, and she looked up at him sharply, confused.

"Come on, Liv. How…how old are you, exactly?"

"I don't really know," she confessed. "Look, the way people keep track of time has changed a bit since I was a kid. I'm about…I guess…maybe five thousand and change. It's not like I keep count."

"Five thousand," Elliot choked. "You're five thousand years old? What the fuck have you been doing all that time? How the fuck did you end up being a cop? I mean…Olivia's not even your real name, is it?"

There was so much he didn't know, so much he needed to know; all thoughts of his own troubles had faded away, forgotten for the moment, because Elliot Stabler was a cop first and foremost, and he was now in the midst of the most interesting interrogation he'd ever been a part of before, and he would have his answers.

"Ok," Olivia said slowly. "Look, I'm not gonna…I'm not gonna tell you everything because that'll take a long ass time and you're struggling with this already-"

"And you're not?" he demanded pugnaciously. She frowned at him, and carried on.

"No, Olivia is not the name my mother gave me. But I chose that name about thirty years ago and I like it, ok?"

He nodded, wanting to protest but wanting to hear her speak more.

"I've moved around a lot. I'm not…I'm not supposed to be here, Elliot. I'm not supposed to be anywhere. If I die, there's no place for me in heaven. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?"

"Yes." And Christ, but he wished he didn't. If there was no place for her heaven, that really only left one alternative, and it was an ugly one. Elliot's thoughts shrunk back from it, touched the edges of the word hell and retreated. Sure, part of him believed in all that, heaven and hell, but he believed it the way he believed in black holes and supernovas; those things were real, but he was never really gonna understand them, and he was never, ever going to touch them, and he didn't spend too much time really thinking about them, because what good was it gonna do him to worry about it now? Only now Olivia was talking about heaven the way somebody might talk about Vegas, like it was a real place, one a person could get to it, and the reality of it was so overwhelming he'd rather turn away from it than think about it too long.

"I decided a long time ago that I was gonna keep on living. And if I'm gonna live, I want to make that life mean something. So, I try to help people. I've done all kinds of things. I've been a midwife and a teacher but the one thing I was best at was being a soldier. I hated it, though. All these stupid wars, men killing each other over stupid shit, over who owned a piece of land when nobody has an inherent right to any of it, if you ask me, all that…it wore me down. I came here back when the US was still the Colonies. I lived on the prairie for a while. Kept my head down, kept to myself. But I'm a shit farmer and it felt selfish, just hiding out. I helped a Marshal out of a jam in Oklahoma, and I guess that's how I got started being a cop. It changed over time. I moved about every thirty years. Some places they let me wear a badge and some places all they'd let me do was make coffee and talk to crying women, but at least it was something. I've worked in Texas and Michigan, I was in LA before I came to New York. The idea of SVU was just getting off the ground around the time I left California, and I wanted to be part of it. I wanted to help women like my mother. I wanted to make a difference. Is that enough?"

There was so much she hadn't told him. The specifics, that was scratching at his brain; he wanted to know everything, every name she'd ever had and every place she'd ever lived and every friend she'd ever had, every person she'd ever let care about her the way he did, if there had been anyone at all. He wanted to know every name she'd ever chosen for herself and how she'd done it, kept all those identities straight, how she handled her money, who forged her papers, whether it was getting harder to fake her records now than it had been in the fucking Wild West. Helped a Marshal out of a jam; Jesus, it was like something from a movie. No, it was not enough.

But it was enough, because she'd just told him the only things that really mattered. She'd told him that she was who he had always thought she was, a woman who was compassionate and brave and strong and stubborn, a survivor, a champion for those who could not stand up for themselves. Whatever her name, however old she was, she was, at her core, precisely the woman he'd always believed her to be. She was good, and she was lonesome, and she had the heart of a fighter, just like him.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, that's enough for me."

"You don't think I'm crazy?"

"I might be crazy, but no, I don't think you are. I saw the damn wings. I saw…I saw you get shot, and recover like it was nothing. I don't think you're lying."

"What are you gonna do?"

"What do you mean what am I gonna do?" he asked, confused.

"Elliot, what I've just told you…I understand if it's too much. I understand if you wanna-"

"If I wanna what?"

"Leave."

All he could do was stare at her; she thought that after she'd shared her biggest secret with him, a secret that had gotten untold scores of her brothers killed, that he was just gonna leave her? Just gonna walk away from his best friend because she was something more miraculous than he'd ever imagined?

"No," he said firmly. "I'm not…I don't know what's gonna happen next, Liv. Tucker took my badge and my gun, I'm on administrative leave for God only knows how long. They might not ever let me back. But I'm not gonna walk away from you now. Not 'cause of this."

"Ok," she said, her shoulders slowly relaxing, some of the tension leaving her now that she knew Elliot wasn't about to turn his back on her. "It's late, I'm sure you've gotta get home to Kathy-"

Shit. Kathy. He'd forgotten.

"She kicked me out," he confessed, and Olivia's eyes went wide in shock. "It's been a long time coming, tonight just kinda brought everything to a head."

He chose to leave out the part where Kathy had said if you don't come home now, don't come home at all; he left out the part where his wife told him that if he really loved her it was her he'd seek comfort from, not his partner. He left out the part where he'd chosen Olivia over his family. Somehow he didn't think either of them were ready to face that truth just now.

"So I can't go home, and I'm not allowed in the precinct, so…can I crash on your couch?"

It was a remarkably mundane question, after all of the batshit crazy things Olivia had just told him, and the whole thing struck him as sorta funny, just then. He was asking a fucking angel if he could sleep on her couch, and she was watching him ruefully from her armchair, and he knew before she spoke that she was gonna tell him yes. They were partners, and that meant they took care of each other. No matter what.

"Yeah," she said. "I'll get you a blanket."

She unfolded herself slowly from the chair, and Elliot watched her, the graceful swing of her hips in those soft pants, the comfortable, easy way she moved around her apartment, her home. The story she'd told him, the story of her life, it was extraordinary, but then she had always been that, extraordinary. She had always been larger than life, somehow, beautiful, and fierce. And whatever name she chose for herself, whatever face she wore, she was, at her heart, Olivia, and there was no one he trusted more than Olivia. Things would be different, after tonight, there was no denying that, but the central truth remained. Liv was Liv, and she had made a place for him when he had nowhere else to go; he would do the same for her.