Old habits, Elliot was learning, really did die hard. It had been nearly five weeks since that day in the bullpen, that day he'd shot and killed a teenager, a fucking child, that day Tucker took his badge and his gun and told him he was on suspension, that day Olivia had shown him her wings, that day when the whole fucking world seemed to have come to a stop. Five weeks, and he was still waking up every morning at 5:00 a.m. For the first couple of days he'd been busy; he'd gone to Kathy, just like Liv told him to, and Kathy had told him to go to hell - a little bit nicer than that, but still, the sentiment remained the same. She'd washed her hands of him, but Dickie and Lizzie still had a year of high school left and Eli was only little and Kath was gonna have to find a job and there was no point in bickering over who got the house. Let her keep it, he'd thought; she's earned that much. So Kath had the house and he had the sedan and nowhere to sleep, and it was kinda good, he'd though, in a bleak sort of way, kinda good that he had no job to go to, because apartment hunting in the city was a job unto itself. He'd found a place, though, and settled in, and now he had a routine, sorta.

Up every morning at five, to work out in the living room, squats and lunges and planks and push ups and pull ups on the bar he'd installed over the door to his bedroom, and then he'd have breakfast, and then he'd go for a jog, and then he'd spend the rest of the day on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace or whatever the fuck, trying to find cheap furniture to fill the apartment he called home now. It wasn't much, as far as a social calendar went, and certainly didn't require such an early start, but sleep wouldn't come easy, and he was tired of fighting it.

The same thing, every morning, and this morning was no different, and so he was just finishing up his last set of pushups when he heard the knock on his front door.

That was not part of the routine. Who the fuck would be knocking on his door this early in the morning? Who the fuck would want to see him, period? No one, really, no one but Liv. He'd seen her a handful of times since the shooting; it was hard for her to find time awake from work, but she was worried about him, and they'd had breakfast once, grabbed a beer once, eaten takeout sitting on the floor of his apartment once. It wasn't like her to just show up out of the blue this time of day, though, and he couldn't shake the sense of dread that settled in his gut as he popped up onto his feet. He was shirtless, wearing nothing but a pair of black basketball shorts slung low on his hips, and he was sweating like he'd just run a marathon, and Tucker had taken his service weapon and his personal pistol was locked up in a safe in the bedroom, and there was no time to go and grab it because whoever had come to visit him was knocking again.

He approached the door warily, peered through the peephole, and felt something like relief when he saw who had come to call on him, though his confusion redoubled. It was Olivia, and he was opening the door to her at once, but she wasn't alone. On her hip she cradled a child, a little girl three, maybe four years old, wrapped up in a pink bedsheet with her face pressed hard to the curve of Liv's neck.

"Hey," Elliot said quietly, pushing the door wide so Olivia could step through it.

"Hey," she answered. "I was gonna say sorry to wake you, but…"

She trailed off, made a valiant attempt at smiling, though she didn't quite succeed.

"Gonna introduce me to your friend?" Elliot asked, his eyes on the girl.

Whatever this was, he thought, it couldn't possibly be good. There were protocols in place; Liv couldn't just take a kid. Any child they found without a guardian was to be turned over to the care of DCS. Some exceptions were made, sometimes - there had been a little boy, once, when Kathy was pregnant with Eli, a little boy who had grown attached to Elliot, and DCS had let him take the kid home, but only after he'd been cleared by a social worker. Elliot and Kathy had a quiet, stable home, and experience raising kids, and they looked good on paper, a cop and his stay-at-home mom of a wife. There was no way, he thought, that DCS would've just handed a kid to Liv, because all those things Elliot and Kathy had - used to have - she'd never had. She'd been turned down by adoption agencies in the past, and her circumstances hadn't changed.

So how the fuck had she wound up at his door before dawn with a child in her arms?

"This is McKenna," she said, indicating the girl. "McKenna, this is my friend Elliot. Can you say hello?"

"Hi," McKenna said, very quietly.

"Hi, McKenna," Elliot answered, but his eyes flicked back up to Olivia, his heart still full of questions.

"McKenna, do you see that box over there in the corner?" Olivia said. "It's full of toys."

It was, in fact, full of a bunch of hot wheels and toy soldiers and Legos that Elliot had picked up from a Salvation Army and spent a whole weekend furiously disinfecting. Right now he was taking Eli every Friday to Sunday, and he had to have something for his son to play with when he came over, and McKenna didn't look that much older than Eli, and Olivia had figured out the best way to distract the girl while the grownups talked at once.

"Do you want to go and play?"

McKenna nodded vigorously, and so Olivia carefully set her down on her feet, and then began to slowly unravel the bedsheet from around her little shoulders. As she did a thousand more questions exploded into Elliot's mind, because that bedsheet had been hiding a pair of pretty white wings, wings just like Olivia's. McKenna appeared nonchalant about this revelation, standing perfectly still until she was free and then taking off like a shot, bound for the toy box, while Elliot just stared at Olivia, waiting for the explanation.

"We found her this morning," Olivia said, her voice low enough not to carry to McKenna in the corner. "Her mother was murdered in their apartment. I don't know what McKenna saw or what she heard, she's not talking. But the perp tore the place apart, and I think he was looking for her."

Another one, he kept thinking, how can there be another one? Liv had told him there were only maybe half a dozen of her kind in the States, but she hadn't said anything about kids, about whether nephilim could have kids, or if their kids had wings, too. There was a hell of a lot she hadn't said, and there was a roaring like a jet engine in Elliot's ears.

"You think, or you know?"

It was his job to ask the question; they were partners, and that meant they bounced ideas off one another, but it also meant they had to, from time to time, reel one another in, or offer a different perspective. Yeah, he figured chances were good that Liv was right, that but they needed to know, and knowing wasn't the same as a hunch.

"I don't know," Olivia allowed. "But come on, Elliot. Humans have been hunting my kind since the days when we were first made. And there hasn't been a nephilim child in…Elliot there can't be new nephilim. There hasn't been an angel on Earth for more than two thousand years."

"How can you be sure? You said that you all went your separate ways, maybe there's something out there-"

"I know this much," she said. "After the flood, the only angels allowed to come down here were sent on specific missions, and they weren't allowed to stay long. And they wouldn't be allowed back in if they'd violated the rule about sleeping with human women, and it's not like you can lie to God. Every visitation has been well documented, and there weren't that many of them. There's a nephilim in Rome, Antony, he sort of…keeps tabs on these things. Comings and goings. I've reached out to him, but it may be a little while before he gets back to me."

"You what, texted the angel group chat?"

She leveled a look at him like she wanted to ask how the fuck he knew what a group chat was, but she held her tongue, and he was kinda disappointed about that, because he wanted to tell her that Maureen had started one for him and the kids. He knew how these things worked, thank you very much. He could send emojis and everything.

"Pretty much, yeah."

"And while you wait to hear back from your friend you just stole a child?"

"What the fuck was I gonna do, Elliot? You really think she'd be safe in foster care?"

The thought of it compelled him to look at McKenna, and so he did, turned his head and looked at that little girl kneeling on the bare floor in his living room, studiously constructing a somewhat lopsided tower out of Legos while her wings shimmered and rustled quietly behind her. Really, she was a sweet little thing, with those big blue eyes, her perfect little Cupid's bow mouth, her nightgown with its pattern of flowers. Precious, that's how she looked, and no, he didn't think she'd be safe in foster care. How would that even go? What would DCS even say, when presented with a child who had wings? Who would they call? And what horror would come from it? Humans have hunted us, Olivia said. Hunted them, Olivia and her brothers and this little girl, too. No, he couldn't blame Olivia for taking her.

"Someone's gonna notice she's missing, Liv."

He didn't want to do that, didn't want to stand there and poke holes in Olivia's plan, stand there and tell Olivia she shouldn't have taken the kid when he felt the same urge to protect McKenna that Olivia did, but they had to think things through. They had to have a fucking plan, or else they might both end up unemployed for good, or worse.

"I can handle that," she said. "I told Fin I was gonna call a contact at the FBI-"

"There's someone who handles angel shit at the FBI?" Elliot asked incredulously.

"No," Liv said grimly. "We can't risk attracting too much attention. But what we do have is Marcus."

"The fuck is Marcus-"

"He's one of us," she explained impatiently. "He's always been good with money, and he's been interested in computers since the invention of the Analytical Engine."

Elliot didn't know what the fuck that was.

"He's got more money than you could possibly imagine and he's a grade A hacker. He can fake whatever documents we need, hack whatever systems we need, make it look like the FBI has taken responsibility for McKenna. With his help, I think we'll be able to keep her. We'll make it look like I'm working with the FBI to solve her mother's murder. Fin will be on board, once I explain everything to him. We can do this, El."

We can do this. We'll be able to keep her. The way Olivia was talking, it sounded like-

"Ok," he said. "Lemme see if I've got this straight. You want us to take care of a toddler and investigate her mother's murder, with a fake FBI agent for cover, while I'm on suspension. That about sum it up?"

It was insane. There was no possible way it was going to work. They were all gonna go to prison. If they didn't get themselves killed. And Elliot wanted to do it so much his hands were starting to shake.

"I know it's risky," Olivia allowed. "But if we're going to find out where she came from, I need to be able to investigate the murder. And if I'm gonna be working the case, someone else needs to look after her. And, well…"

Well, Elliot didn't exactly have a lot on his plate right now.

"You're so good with kids," she said, and he hadn't been expecting that, somehow. He'd thought she was gonna say something about how he didn't have anything else to do, but instead she was watching him with earnest, pleading eyes, telling him she'd chosen him for his skills, and not just his empty calendar.

"You've done this before," Olivia said. "You know how to keep her fed and play with her and do all that shit a parent is supposed to do, and I…I've never done that before. Not with a kid this little."

She'd done it for an older kid, once, for a little while. She'd had Calvin, once, had slept on the couch and let the kid have her bed and taken him to school every morning and loved him, fiercely, but Calvin had been old enough to shower on his own, wipe his own ass, go to sleep without a bedtime story. It hurt her to admit it, he knew, to admit that she didn't really know how to be a parent, that she'd never had the chance, but she was right. He did know what he was doing.

"You want me to keep her here?"

"I won't leave you alone with her," Olivia rushed to say. "Not all the time. I'll come back here at night, we can go over the case together, I can help out when I'm not working."

She wants me to be a fucking stay-at-home dad, he thought. She wanted him to do for her what Kathy had once done for him, to keep the home fires burning while she went out into the world, and wasn't it strange, he thought, how quickly things could change. Part of him was resistant to the idea - he was her partner, and they were supposed to investigate together - but he knew that she was right. While he was on suspension he couldn't talk to the ME or take statements that would hold up in court or carry a gun or any of that shit, and someone was gonna have to stay with McKenna. Liv and Fin and that fucking hacker could handle the policework, so that left him to do the domestic shit.

"Ok," he said, trying to think his way through it. "If someone is out to get her, you think she'll be safe here?"

"No one followed me," Olivia said. "I was careful about that. If someone knows I have her they could try to track my phone, but I don't think our perp was hanging around this morning, there was a heavy police presence in the apartment. If we're careful…yeah, I think she'll be safe here. At least as safe as we can make her right now."

There were so many ways her plan could go wrong. Maybe the perp had been watching, or maybe he would be now, keeping tabs on the nephilim, on Liv. Maybe Marcus wasn't as good as she thought he was, maybe the brass would find out the FBI didn't know the first damn thing about this case. Maybe they'd never find the guy, and months from now they would have to have a reckoning about the child they stole. Maybe they were all about to get themselves killed.

He couldn't say no, though. He couldn't say no, because he'd failed Jenna, and he wanted, desperately, to do right by McKenna. He couldn't say no, because Liv was watching him with those big dark eyes, begging him to be there for her when she needed him most. He couldn't say no, because he wanted it too damn bad, wanted to feel useful, wanted to fucking do something, wanted to know what it would feel like to have Liv come home to him every night.

We are so fucked, he thought.

"Hey, McKenna?" he said, and the little girl looked up at once, watching him curiously from across the room. "Are you hungry?"

She nodded vigorously, and Elliot smiled at her, completely charmed.

"There's a booster seat at the table," he told Olivia, "for Eli. Why don't you put McKenna in it, and I'll make us some breakfast, and we can get to know each other. When did you have to be back?"

"I can spare the time for breakfast," she assured him, and then she reached out, and squeezed his forearm once, gently, her eyes shining at him so brightly it almost made him blush.

"Thank you, Elliot," she said seriously.

"What are partners for?" he answered.

They were for this, he thought. Partners meant that her fight was his fight, too. Partners meant that where she went, he would follow. Partners meant that no matter how great the challenges ahead of her, he would not let her face them alone. They were partners, now and always.