A/N: TW for mentions of Lewis.

He stumbled through her bedroom door, half asleep and crazed at the thought of any harm befalling her, reaching for a gun he did not carry anymore, a gun he couldn't have carried, considering he'd been fast asleep on her couch wearing nothing more than a pair of Brian Cassidy's old boxers when he leapt into action.

"Liv!" he called her name desperately, so scared that he forgot, just for a moment, that Olivia wasn't Liv, spurned on by the bone deep ache of his own Liv's death, the memory of how he'd felt in that moment with her blood seeping warm and wet and doomed between his fingers. Not again, a terrified voice seemed to scream in the back of his mind. I can't lose her again.

That fear was laid to rest as he skidded to a halt next to her bed, saw for himself that Olivia was alone, that whatever tormented her wasn't likely to kill her. It was likely to break his heart, though.

She was still asleep. Eyes closed, breathing ragged, she was twisted in the blanket he'd laid over her, trapped by her own thrashing, and as he watched her and tried to catch his breath she kept muttering no no no over again in a terrible, little-girl voice, more frightened than he had ever heard her - ever heard either of them - in waking life. That earnest plea was rising to a crescendo and he felt certain she was working herself up to screaming again. He had to wake her, sooner rather than later; whatever demon had taken hold of her heart he wanted it gone, before it did any more damage.

"Olivia," he said her name harshly, sternly, reaching for her, but the second his hand made contact with her shoulder she whipped herself into a full blown panic, kicking and screaming.

"Get off, get off!" she cried, fists swinging so wildly they almost connected with his face. "Not again!"

That word chilled him to the bone; again. Was she dreaming of him, Elliot wondered, of Lewis, of the man who'd raped her, tortured her, left scars all over her perfect tits? Was she dreaming of that moment, of Lewis on top of her…Christ, he couldn't even think about it, couldn't let himself go there. That was a hole he knew he'd never crawl out of. The moment he let himself imagine the exact details of what happened to her was the moment he would be lost, cursing himself forever and half mad with grief.

"Olivia!" he barked her name again, and this time he didn't flinch away when she struck out at him; he planted one knee on the edge of the bed, caught his hand at the back of her head, tangled his fingers in her hair and pulled her face up close to his.

"Look at me," he demanded, shaking her just a little. "Open your eyes, Olivia, goddamn it, open your eyes."

She did, though he wasn't fool enough to think she'd done it because he told her to. It was the way his hands jostled her around that must have done it, the heat of his body and the way the mattress dipped under his weight. Those pretty eyes of hers fluttered open and she slapped him once across the face, hard, before the light of understanding seemed to dawn within her and the fight went out of her all at once, her body falling limp beneath him. He kept his hands on her though, one on her thigh to keep her from kicking him, the other still cradling the back of her head, and tried to ignore the sting in his cheek.

"I'm sorry," she said, refusing to meet his gaze while a single tear coursed bitterly down her cheek.

"Don't be," he answered gruffly. "Tell me, Olivia."

It would help, he knew, if she told him the truth. If she confessed the nature of her nightmare, exorcized it from her body through the vehicle of her soft mouth. Holding it in would kill her, he thought, might have been killing her already because it had been over a decade since Lewis and she was still having nightmares about the guy and she needed somebody, he thought. Somebody to listen, to take this burden from her shoulders, to guard her as she slept. She needed somebody, and he needed to hear what she had to say. Penance, maybe, for the things he'd done that he couldn't take back.

"No," she said, her eyes flickering to his face a moment, a familiar defiance shining there before she pulled herself out of his grip. Olivia was retreating, burying her troubles deep within the cavern of her chest, and he couldn't allow that to happen, couldn't allow her to hide herself from him.

"Yes," he said, and began to move, crossing to the other side of the bed as he spoke. "You gotta talk to somebody, Olivia," he insisted, and stretched himself out next to her on top of the sheets, his back against the headboard and his hands folded in his lap. "You can't keep all this shit bottled up inside." He'd learned that to his sorrow in the days after Kathy's death, when he'd retreated from everyone, his kids and Liv included, and found himself worse off than ever because of it. How different might things have been, he wondered, if he'd let Liv love him then the way she wanted to, if he'd loved her back? Everything might have changed, if only he'd let her in just a little sooner.

"I'm not going anywhere until you tell me what this is about," he continued.

"You're really just gonna sit there until I talk to you, aren't you, you stubborn son of a bitch?" she said ruefully.

Liv had said the same thing to him once, sitting in the squad car in front of her building a lifetime ago.

"Yeah, I am," he said now as he had said then.

"Fine." She sat up a little straighter, mirroring his posture with her back against the headboard, her long legs stretched out in front of her. It was good she was beside him, because she was still wearing that damn tank top, still damn near spilling out of it, and he wanted to be a good man but he wasn't a fucking saint and it would've been hard to look at anything but her body if she'd been directly in front of him.

"It's the same thing it always is," she said.

Lewis, he thought.

"Lewis," she said. "I can still smell him, I can still feel him on my skin." She shuddered all over and he clenched his hands into fists so tight he feared his fingers might break. It was wrong, that anyone should ever put their hands on her, that a man had touched her in hate and pain, that she carried the memories still, but he swore he would be brave for her, swore to himself he wouldn't fuck things up this time.

"His fucking eyes," she said in a small, faraway voice. "Like there was just this…evil, shining out of him."

It would've taken evil, he thought, real evil, to bring Olivia Benson so low.

"It's not really a dream," she said. "It's…a memory. It's the same every time. It's like I'm right back there and my hands are cuffed and I can't get the bastard off me and…"

There was a world of horror contained in that word and.

"How far did he get this time?" Elliot asked her, wishing he'd woken her sooner, wishing he could've stopped it, somehow, even in dreams.

"He didn't…not this time. You stopped him, this time."

If only it were that easy, he thought.

"He took so much from me," she confessed. "He made me scared. I'd never really been scared of anything before him." That probably wasn't true, Elliot thought, because the Liv he knew had been scared of plenty in the early days. She just didn't like to let people see it. But she'd let him see it; this Olviia never had an Elliot by her side, and he couldn't help but wonder if she'd never opened up to anyone at all. Maybe Olivia had been hiding her fear so long she'd started to believe it didn't exist.

"And he made me angry," her voice was harsh and bitter as she spoke. "I'd always been able to control it, but after him…I lost myself. For a long, long time."

"What brought you back?"

Did you ever come back, he wondered, because when he met her she'd been lonesome and hard and drinking too much, still living in this same god awful apartment where Lewis had taken her hostage, where her husband had died.

"Ed did," she said simply, and Elliot couldn't help but turn to stare at her, caught off guard by the tenderness in her voice when she spoke Tucker's name.

Ed, he thought. Fucking Ed. Tucker, that mean son of a bitch, how had he ever become the kind of man she could speak about so fondly, the kind of man she could love? From where Elliot was sitting there wasn't anything loveable about that prick at all.

"I couldn't…Jesus, I really don't want to tell you this but maybe you're right. Maybe I gotta get it out."

"Whatever it is, you can tell me," he said. "I worked SVU fifteen years, I heard it all. You're not gonna shock me."

"I might," she said drily. "But, fine. After Lewis, I couldn't have sex. Brian wouldn't touch me, like he thought I was gonna break, and I didn't want him to and we kinda fell apart after that. I went years without it. I…fuck it, I like sex, Elliot."

"I do, too, you don't gotta explain yourself to me."

It was gonna haunt him, though, her confession. The sound of her voice, talking about sex, about how she felt about sex; that was a line he and Liv never crossed. Came close to it, a few times, and he knew about the endless string of guys she fucked in their younger days even if he didn't know their names, even if she'd never shared any details, but still. He didn't know what Liv liked in bed, what it would've been like to hold her, and he was never gonna know, now. But Olivia could tell him all the things Liv never did. Olivia was still talking.

"But after Lewis I lost that part of myself. I was scared and angry and I wouldn't let anyone touch me and it felt like he was still controlling me, you know? He was still controlling my body even after he died."

After you killed him.

"But then Ed and I started to get to know each other, really get to know each other, and I…I wanted to have sex again. I wanted to take my control back. And I did. He showed me how. And we were…we were so happy."

Until he killed himself.

"And I haven't…since he died I haven't really been with anyone else."

Not even Cassidy, Elliot knew, because she'd gone years not talking to the guy. How long had she been like this, he wondered, lonesome and cold and feeling out of control?

"I want that back," she said fiercely. "I want someone to touch me, and I don't want to think about Lewis. I…I just want to fuck, you know? I want to feel like me."

This is dangerous, the thought floated through his mind, because she was so fucking sexy and he wanted her so bad he ached with it, but the things she was telling him made him think now was not the time for that. Maybe she wanted to fuck right now, wanted to regain some control, and maybe she deserved that but it couldn't come from him. That couldn't be how he touched her the first time, in some messy, misguided attempt to forget the man who'd raped her, Lewis's name still burning on her tongue. Right now she was raw, and reeling, and she needed someone to care for her, not take from her. If she asked him outright, though, he wasn't sure he could say no, because it was killing him to see her hurt, because he wanted her whole, and maybe it made him selfish but he wanted to be the one who made her that way.

"I just want to fuck," she said again, and then before he could stop her, before he could even being to react, she was crawling over him, and his body froze in shock as she straddled his hips, her cunt settling over the limp bulge of his cock and her breasts suddenly, tantalizingly close to his face.

"Make me forget, Elliot," she breathed, reaching for him.

God help me, he thought.