A/N: this is a continuation of my story I'll Follow You (Into the Dark). Read that one first.
"Sir," the voice bellowed urgently from somewhere above him. "I need you to tell me how many people are down there with you and what condition they're in, ok?"
"There's two of us," Elliot shouted back. "Me and my partner."
What condition are we in? The thought flitted wildly through his mind. If he had to guess he'd said his condition was pretty good - he was halfway to panic, caught between elation and terror, and his head was pounding and he had to piss but he was standing on his own two feet. Liv though; Jesus. She was just lying there, dirt and blood crusted around her face, her hand caught weakly in his own, everything below her tits caught beneath a pile of rock and rubble, and no way to know what horror lurked beneath it.
"I'm fine," he yelled back. "I'm not hurt. My partner's pinned, though."
Partner; the word drummed through his head like a heartbeat, a talisman to ward off the terrors of the dark. She was his partner, not on the job, not any more, but his partner, still, the other half of him, the one he had chosen to walk beside for all the rest of his days - if she'd let him, and based on the way she'd kissed him she was pretty sure she'd let him. If she lived long enough to make the decision.
Anything could happen when the rescue team got to her. Maybe they could move the rocks, but maybe they couldn't. Maybe she was fine underneath all that debris, or maybe she was doomed. Maybe she'd lose a leg, or both, or worse. Maybe she'd walk out on her own two feet or maybe she'd never walk again and Jesus. Christ. Fuck.
"All right, just sit tight," the voice called out. "You're gonna hear some machinery. Just stay put and I'll check back in with you in a minute."
"Elliot," Olivia whispered his name into the darkness, her fingers still curled gently between his.
"Right here," he reminded her. "We're ok, we're gonna be ok."
"What if we're not?" she asked plaintively. "What if I'm dead already?"
If you're dead, then so am I, he thought. Where she went, he would follow, always.
Overhead the machines the rescue crew were using kicked into gear, and anything else she might have said was swallowed up by the almighty roar of their salvation reverberating through the walls of their concrete tomb. Dust fell light as a spring rain around his shoulders, and the whole world seemed to shake like a carnival ride, and he couldn't hear Olivia's voice, could barely see, could do nothing more than kneel where he was, holding her hand, ignoring the protests of his too-old knees and trying to will her to survive, for his sake.
It was selfish, he knew it was; she had so much to live for. A child who needed her, and she deserved the chance to watch him grow, to see the man her boy would become; friends who adored her; a career, a goddamn calling, a purpose, greater than any he had ever known. Sunrises and heirloom tomatoes and laughter, she had everything to live for, but in that moment he did not want her to live for her own sake, or not only for her own sake; he wanted her to live for him. He wanted her to live because he didn't want to lose her, didn't want to lose the chance they had been given, this one last, precious opportunity to see what they could be together. They'd wasted so much goddamn time and he'd cut off his own right arm for just a little bit more of it. The rescue crew was hard at work and Elliot desperately wanted them to just finish already, to help her, to save her, but part of him didn't want to see them, didn't want time to keep passing, didn't want to face the uncertainty that lay ahead. In that moment, he would have chosen eternity in the dark over the risk of freedom; crawling out of the rubble might mean the start of a new life or the end of everything, and the certainty of entrapment seemed preferable to the gamble of escape.
It wasn't up to him, though.
"Sir!" the voice called out again. "How we doing down there?"
"No change!" Elliot yelled back. Whatever they were doing it hadn't set rocks to tumbling down on his head, hadn't seemed to disturb the integrity of their perilous cage. That was a risk, he knew; once they started moving and breaking the concrete and steel that stood between Elliot and Olivia and the outside world the whole fucking thing might come tumbling down.
"They know what they're doing," he muttered.
"Who're you trying to convince?" Olivia asked him, her voice thin as if from exhaustion; Christ, what if she was bleeding out under all that rock? "You or me?"
"Me, I think," he said, and then the machines started up again.
It went on like that for a while; how long he could not say. But as he waited, and warred with himself, and prayed for Olivia's deliverance, a crack appeared in the vault overhead, and light began to stream in. The smallest of sunbeams, at first, not the sun he knew but the lights the rescue crew had brought with them, that thin stream of light flowed down to land on Olivia, and he watched a smile spread slowly across her face, watched her eyes flutter closed, felt her hand go limp in his grasp.
"Liv!" he bellowed over the fighter-jet roar of the drilling. "Don't you go!" he lunged forward, hung his face low down over hers, cradle her neck in his free hand and searched desperately for her pulse. "Don't you leave me!"
" 'm here," she murmured. "But I'm cold."
Lord have mercy, he prayed wildly. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy. Christ -
"Ok!" the voice thundered, a voice that might as well have belonged to God himself. "We're gonna send someone down to you now! Just stay where you are."
That he could do, and gladly; he did not wish to move, did not want to drift away from her side, even for a moment.
The opening in the ceiling must have been bigger than he thought; he titled his head back and watched in wonder as a body slowly sank down, a diver swimming through nothing. They'd wrapped a rope around him, were lowering him the same way they'd lower a rescue swimmer from a chopper, and Elliot held his breath, waiting for the rope to break, waiting for the man to fall, waiting for some catastrophe that never came. The man's feet touched the ground, and he tugged the rope, and his comrades gave him enough slack to begin to move around the room.
"Ok, what's your name, sir?" the man asked, making a beeline for the two detectives in the center of the room.
"Detective Elliot Stabler," he said, "this is my partner, Captain Olivia Benson."
"All right, I'm Tony. How you doing down there, Captain?" as the man talked he bent down to look Olivia over, started to reach for her pulse himself, but he'd have to move Elliot to get to it, and there was no way Elliot was gonna let her go.
" 'm fine," she said dreamily, her eyes still closed.
Tony shot Elliot a worried look over her head.
She's lying, Elliot thought, willing the man to understand. She's lying.
"Here's what we're gonna do," Tony said firmly. It helped, having someone take charge, someone who seemed to have a plan, because Elliot didn't have the first fucking idea of how to fix this. "We're gonna need to get some more men and some equipment down here but there's not a lot of space to work. We're gonna take you up first -"
"The fuck you are," Elliot snarled. "I'm not leaving her behind."
We came down here together, we're coming out together, he thought. Where you go, I will go, he remembered the words from his childhood priest; where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.
"Look at me," Tony said, and Elliot did, looked into the face of his rescuer, and saw the eyes of the most determined man he'd ever met. "If you stay here, she dies. You want to help her? You gotta get the fuck out of the way."
There was no arguing with that.
"El," Olivia called his name. "I'm fine. I'll be fine. You go. You go."
No, he thought, no; every piece of him rebelled against it, his heart full of shame at the idea of leaving her behind, seizing his own bid for freedom while Liv languished in the dark. But Tony's words caught hold of his heart; if he did not leave her, she would die. The only way to save her was to shatter his own heart, and go.
We've been here before, Elliot thought. She'd forgiven him for leaving her the last time; maybe she'd forgive him for this, too.
"I'll be waiting for you," he promised her, holding her hand tight. "I'll be waiting right outside for you, Liv. I'm not gonna go far."
"Promise?"
"I promise."
"Ok," she said.
"We gotta move," Tony interrupted them, cutting any further goodbyes short. He put his hands on Elliot's shoulders, starting to drag him away from Olivia, but Elliot resisted just long enough to press a kiss to Olivia's dirty forehead, and then he let Tony lead him directly under the hole overhead.
"I'm gonna strap you in," Tony said, tugging on the ropes. Elliot wasn't listening, wasn't paying attention as Tony pushed and prodded at him; Elliot's eyes were focused on Olivia, her dark hair spilling out behind her head like a halo, her face beatific in the feeble light splashing down from above, the concrete that shielded the rest of her from view as permanent, as immovable as a tombstone.
Tony must have finished his work; he tugged on the rope again and then they were rising, rising, and Elliot closed his eyes, and waited for it all to be over. Which didn't take too long; a few breaths, and then there were hands pulling on him, tugging him through the opening in the ceiling, and then they freed him from Tony's ropes, and then another stranger took hold of him, began to drag him back out through the escape hatch they'd dug in the rubble. Elliot's ears were ringing, and his whole body had gone numb; even his brain was silent, no thought forming there, his arms and legs following the directions of his rescuer instinctively, until they burst forth into daylight.
It was a thin, wan daylight; the sun had begun to set and bathed the world in a gentle orange glow but even that was too harsh after the darkness below. Elliot covered his eyes for a moment, overwhelmed by the way the world rushed in, the lights and the noise and the ocean of people crawling all over the ruins building like ants on a forgotten picnic basket. The man with him didn't give him much of a break; only a second or two, and then hands were pulling at him again, guiding him down off the mountain of rubble until his feet hit the sidewalk and just like that he came sharply back to his body, and he turned to the side and promptly puked, spilling the contents of his stomach all over the asphalt.
"Jesus," he heard somebody mutter.
"Let's go get you checked out," the man with him said. "There's an ambulance here, they're gonna take you-"
"I'm not going anywhere," Elliot gasped, rubbing at his mouth. "I'll sign any fucking thing you want but I'm not going anywhere until she's out."
"Sir-"
"I promised," Elliot said frantically, his heart beginning to race, something like hysteria roiling inside him. "I promised her. I'm not going. I won't go. You can't fucking make me -"
"I get it, I get it," the man said. "Will you at least sit down for me? Jesus, man, you gotta take it easy."
"I'll sit," Elliot said. "I'll sit."
That seemed to satisfy his new babysitter; the man led him to the nearest ambulance, and drew one of the medics aside for a quiet, grim conversation while the other helped Elloit to sit just inside the open doors of the bus, his eyes fixed on the building, on the spot where he himself had so recently emerged.
That's where she'll be, he told himself while the medic fussed over him. When she comes out, that's where she'll be, and I'll be right there. When she come out I'll be right there with her.
It became a mantra, the words looping round and round his mind, the only comfort he could find. It was killing him, being so far from her, with no idea what was happening, what had become of her. What if the unstable pile of rubble gave way and crushed Liv and the rescuers both? What if they couldn't get her out; would they just leave her there to die? All alone, in a strange place, without Elliot to hold her hand? What if they did free her, but she was too far gone to save; what if it was only her body they brought out, and not Liv herself, her soul departed before he got the chance to say goodbye? If she died down there he'd kill that fucker Tony for rushing him out so fast. Not that it would make much of a difference.
A long, long wait lay ahead for him, and as each second passed, his terror only grew.
