He passed a long and sleepless night staring up at the ceiling in Olivia's living room. It was a profoundly boring ceiling; all smooth, not even a trace of popcorn to form an interesting shadow, just white, and blank. That ceiling provided no answers to the many questions that swirled around and around his mind, thoughts caught in the current of his consciousness like a log lobbed into a whirlpool, spinning and spinning and then disappearing into nothingness. He had killed a child, and likely lost his job, and ended his marriage, and Olivia was a goddamn angel. Kathy had kicked him out of the house and Tucker had taken his badge and Olivia had a pair of brilliant white wings hidden beneath the tan skin of her back. Angels were real, and Noah's flood had happened, and Liv had seen it, and he had no idea what he was gonna do with himself when the sun came up.

But the sun did come up, just like it always did, because the very fabric of reality seemed to have changed shape around him but some things remained immutable. The sun would rise, and Liv would go to work, and nothing, not even the horrors and revelations of the previous day, would change that. He listened to the water rushing through the pipes, imagined Olivia waking up, brushing her teeth, taking a shower, wondered to himself if she ever had to wash those wings, and then realized he'd spent more time than he was comfortable with thinking about Olivia naked and so vaulted to his feet and occupied himself for a moment with folding up the blanket she'd given to him the night before. That took almost no time at all, though, and she was still in the shower, so he wandered into the kitchen and set about starting a pot of coffee. He'd never stayed the night in Liv's place before but he knew where she kept the important things, the coffee grounds and the filters and the chipped NYPD academy mug she liked best. There was no milk or creamer in the fridge but he hadn't expected there to be; there was never anything in Liv's fridge except some ketchup and soy sauce and maybe a half-eaten container of leftover lo mein.

Do angels even need to eat? He wondered. She was only half angel, and he'd seen her eat often enough in the past; maybe the human part of her had won that battle, or maybe she only did it to blend in. It was a troublesome thought.

That was where she found him, eventually, standing in the kitchen staring, watching the coffee drip down into the pot, thinking about angels, and the end of life as he knew it. The sound of her footsteps was familiar to him, and he took note of her approach at once, turned to stare at her ruefully from the corner of her little kitchen. There was something wary about her eyes this morning, something uncertain, afraid; she'd seemed scared the night before, too, scared that he was gonna leave her now that he knew what she was. He didn't plan to, wasn't about to walk out on her just because she was something holy, something he'd never dreamed, but he did have to wonder, looking at her now, what the fuck was going to happen to them next. She was dressed for work in a white tank top and black slacks, her blazer draped over the back of the couch where she'd left it. Her gun was holstered on one hip and her badge was clipped to the other, and she was going to work, and Elliot wasn't allowed to go. How often was he gonna be able to see her, when she had to go to the office every day and he was just floating along, waiting for Tucker to decide his fate? No one knew better than Elliot how hard it was to maintain a relationship outside the job; the job demanded everything, and what was Liv gonna have leftover for him now?

"You're still here," she said, and sounded a little surprised.

"Where else would I be?"

"I thought you might have come to your senses, gone home to Kathy."

For a second he just looked at her, dumbfounded. It hadn't occurred to him until she said it that he could have tried to go home. Kathy had told him don't come home at all and he'd been so shell-shocked, so out of his mind, so confused, so angry, so horribly, miserably guilty that he'd taken her at her word. But she'd wanted him to come home. That was all she'd been trying to do, with that message, was make him come home, make him recognize what was important to him, make him choose it. And he'd chosen to stay away all night instead, and never told her where he went, and she knew, now. She knew that when she'd given him an ultimatum he'd found somewhere else to go rather than try to fight for her, and he hadn't told her he'd stayed with Olivia - hadn't told her anything at all - but she wasn't stupid. She'd know where he spent his night.

"Shit," he muttered.

"Are you gonna be ok?" Olivia asked him earnestly, taking a step towards him, worry written on every line of her face.

"Yeah," he said. No, he thought. No, he was not going to be ok. None of this was ok. Liv was about to leave and he was gonna have to go, too. But go where? Home, probably. Kathy would be there, with Eli, and he needed to talk to her. If she wouldn't let him talk he'd at least need to grab some of his stuff; he was still wearing yesterday's clothes, and he wasn't allowed at the station, couldn't go there for a shower and the fresh change of clothes in his locker. If Kathy was past the point of talking to him he'd have to figure out somewhere to stay; Liv's couch was pretty decent, as far as couches went, but it wasn't a long term solution. He couldn't expect her to just take him in; she would, if he asked, but it would wound his pride to have to ask, and Kathy…Jesus, Kathy would blow a gasket if she found out he was staying with Liv.

"There's coffee," he said, pointing to the mugs, because there were a million thoughts racing through his mind and he didn't want to share any of them with Olivia.

The look she gave him told him plainly that she knew he was deliberately trying to distract her, but she didn't call him out on it. Instead she just walked into the kitchen, just came to a stop shoulder-to-shoulder with him, just picked up her favorite mug and took a long sip while he stood there beside her, asking himself how the fuck he'd gotten into this mess.

"Maybe you can talk things out with Kathy," she said after a moment, though she did not look at him, just kept staring straight out the little window just above her sink. "Yesterday was…hard. She's gotta understand you weren't in your right mind last night."

Would Kathy understand, though? He wondered. Would Kathy understand what it had done to him, taking Jenna's life? Would Kathy understand what it had done to him, knowing he'd killed Jenna out of fear for Liv, knowing now that fear was unjustified? Did it matter?

"To tell you the truth, I'm tired of fighting it," he confessed. Liv turned to look at him sharply, and he hung his head, embarrassed at having admitted to such a thing. He'd never said it out loud before, hadn't meant to say it now. Elliot Stabler loved his family and he was not a quitter and he wasn't supposed to do this, wasn't supposed to let the marriage he'd worked so hard to save just fall apart, but he was tired. The first time Kathy left him, he'd dug his heels in, kept coming around, kept talking to her, kept taking her out to dinner until the night she asked him to fuck her, and he did, and after that he was kinda thinking that maybe he'd made a mistake and maybe she'd been right to go but then she was pregnant and what the fuck was he gonna do? Leave her to raise a baby on her own? When he had been the one pushing, the one clinging to their marriage with both hands? He'd gotten exactly what he wanted, had gotten her back, but it never felt the same. Before she'd left him the first time, he'd have said that when he thought of Kathy he thought of home. After Eli, she didn't feel like home, anymore. She didn't trust him and they didn't confide in each other and they were just going through the motions, really. What was the point, he asked himself now, of hanging on to a life where neither of them were happy?

"You can't make this decision right now, Elliot," Liv told him, a note of warning in her voice.

"Thank you for that divine wisdom," Elliot muttered.

"Don't be an asshole," Liv fired back. "You're not yourself right now, El. You…after everything that happened yesterday, you're not gonna make the best choices. Just go home, and talk to her, ok?"

There was no point in being petulant about it when he'd already decided to go home, but he felt a little waspish, just the same. Olivia was five thousand years old, but she was alone, too, and it frustrated him, hearing her giving him relationship advice. Not enough to take it out on her, though. Liv had been good to him, and she was his friend, and he didn't want to hurt her. He didn't want to hurt anyone else.

"Yeah, I'm gonna talk to her," he said. "What are you gonna do? Did Cragen bench you?"

"If Cragen benched everybody who was in the bullpen yesterday there'd be no one left to work," she told him grimly. "I already talked to him this morning. I've gotta go sit with IAB first thing, and then it'll be business as usual."

Except it wouldn't, because business as usual meant Liv and El, meant the two of them together, facing the day's problems as a team, and he wouldn't be there with her, this time. Probably she'd spend the day riding with Fin, and it drove him crazy to even think it but she probably wouldn't mind that. She'd always gotten along better with Fin than he did.

"I won't hold you up," Elliot said, beginning to make his way out of the kitchen. "Tell Tucker I said he can go fuck himself."

"Yeah, I'll do that," she answered drily.

He'd left his jacket and his tie on the back of the sofa, and she'd laid her blazer down right next to them, and he looked at them for a moment, those two black coats next to each other. His was bigger, the fabric rougher; Liv had never dressed flashy but she'd always dressed expensive and he'd always wondered about it, but she didn't have kids and apparently had the luxury of several millennia to build up her portfolio; probably she wasn't hurting for money. The jackets looked nice together, though.

"Hey, El?" she called gently, and he looked over his shoulder, watched her padding softly towards him with both her hands wrapped tight around that chipped coffee mug. "Call me tonight?"

Where would he be tonight? He wondered. Would he be at home, lying next to a wife who felt like a stranger, or alone in some hotel room across town? Where would she be tonight? Would work be kind to her, or would she catch a case? Would she be home in time for supper or would she and Fin pass the night sleeping in shifts in the cribs? There was no way to know, he thought, what this day might bring.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I'll call you."

"I just wanna know that you're ok."

Five thousand years; how many people had she known, in five thousand years? How many friends had she made, how many lovers, how many of them had she buried? How many times had her heart been broken? Five thousand years, and she ended up here, in this little one bedroom in New York City she never should have been able to afford on her salary, looking at him like she cared about him, like she was worried about him. Five thousand years, and he was the one she wanted to call her when the day was through.

"I promise," he said.

There wasn't a lot left to say, after that. They both shrugged into their jackets, stumbled into their shoes by the door, walked out of the apartment together, leaving behind two mostly full mugs of coffee and a pot she was gonna have to clean when she got home. They went down the stairs together, and parted at the curb; he went left, towards the garage where he'd left his car the night before, and she went right, towards the subway, and the distance between them grew with each step they took, left Elliot wondering when he was gonna see her again, and what the fuck he was gonna say to her when he did. It was going to be, he thought, a very long day.