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Olivia lingers in the parking lot. A hotel room. Cassidy’s. Just one of too many terrible choices she’s had to make in the last five days.
A metal bar or death.
A rape kit or denial.
A hotel room or Cassidy’s.
“Liv? You coming?” She lifts her eyes to Brian’s and shakes her head. No. No, she’s not.
“Hey.” He approaches her, placing a hand on her shoulder and she instinctively takes a step back. “What is it?”
“Just… wanna be alone,” she tells him. “I’ll get a uni to drive me.”
“You sure?” Brian asks her, and the last thing she wants right now is to be questioned.
“Yeah, I’ll call you,” she says, turning and heading back inside.
~oOo~
Olivia double locks the hotel room door and bars the door with the back of the chair at the breakfast table.
She’s scared. No. Not scared. She’s fucking terrified.
She breaks, alone, for a while. Cries into a pillow, stains it with tears, with blood.
How does she begin to process the last five days? How does she get rid of the fucking pain in her heart, the phantom taste of vodka at the back of her throat. She knows she’s going to need to get supplies at some point. Mouth wash. A toothbrush. Shampoo. A hair brush.
It’s another 24 hours and it doesn’t get better, the anxiety, the fear, the shaking, the cold sweats, the nightmares. The nightmares. The shaking.
Her frazzled mind runs through the scene over and over. The sound of her own voice telling Lewis what Elliot would do. What she herself had tried to do, but ultimately, somehow , hadn’t accomplished.
A press tour or admitting guilt.
A hero or a coward.
A savior or a survivor.
All she knows is that, in this sea of choices, she needs him .
Olivia lays on the bed, bathrobe wrapped tightly around herself and she reaches for the hotel phone. She dials his number. She still knows it by heart.
Her eyes are swollen with violence and tears and they glimmer with desperation. Pick up. Pick up. Pick up. She digs her nails into the phone, into her palm.
~oOo~
“Stabler.”
“El…” She breathes out at the sound of his voice, the two letters wrapped in disbelief, anguish, and somewhere deep down, she thinks, relief.
“Liv?” She can tell by his tone that she just froze his world, whatever he’s made of it now.
“I need a kidney,” she whimpers weakly, sobbing.
“Where are you?” he asks, she hesitates. “Olivia, where are you?”
If she thought her voice had sounded desperate and pathetic, boy had he proven her wrong with his prayer for her location.
She tells him the name of the hotel between sobs, the room number.
“I’ll be there tonight,” he says and hangs up.
~oOo~
Olivia had counted eleven hours between the phone call and the knocks at her door.
She looks through the peephole, removes the chair and opens the door, throwing herself into his arms, her face buried in his chest, her soul engulfed in the familiar scent of his cologne, a long trip and anxiety, fear. Fear.
“Liv,” he breathes into her hair, his fingers buried in dark locks. “Fuck, Olivia. Fuck.”
She sobs and he lets her, gently gets them moving into the room, noting the chair beside the door.
She wants to tell him to lock the door, but then she thinks she doesn’t need locks, not when he’s here with her, his arms around her, her lungs finally able to take a full breath.
Nothing matters right now. Not that he’s been gone for two years. Not that he abandoned her without a word. Not their partnership, not his wife, or his children, or the feelings they fought for so long.
It’s just them in this dark hotel room now, sitting on an unkempt bed, his presence, his safety, his strength gathering her, holding her tight against him, his ever-present hand at the back of her head keeping her from suffocating.
Olivia cries and crawls into him, settling herself on his lap and lets him hold her, lets herself sob out the last five days of misery, there in his safety.
Not in a hotel room. Not at Cassidy’s.
At home.
~oOo~
It’s four in the morning, and they’re lying facing each other in bed when she’s finally able to start telling him what happened, ending the stoic retelling of her harrowing story at the precinct.
They stay quiet after, looking at each other.
She can see the regret in his eyes, the need to touch her in his twitching fingers.
“Hold me,” she whispers, because there’s no more room for misery, they’re both at the brink of a precipice she’s not sure either will be able to pull the other back from. Not tonight. Not after this.
He reaches for her, easily tugging her to his chest and gathers her again in his arms, pressing his nose softly against the terry cloth covering her shoulder. He tightens his arms, just so, because he knows she’s in fucking pain and he wants to take it away any way he can.
She presses her back against his chest and feels the tension slowly leaving her body, feels her eyes heavy with sleep for the first time in fuck knows how many hours.
“El?”
“Mh?” He hums against her hair.
“Lock the door?”
He releases her carefully and goes to lock the door.
“The chair, El,” she tells him softly, and he positions the chair back against the door knob.
“Medication?” he asks her, and she gestures to her bag at the joke of a table in the room.
He comes back to her with a couple of pills and a glass of water. She swallows the pills, drains the glass, and they settle again, her back against his chest, his arms around her.
Silence befalls them again. She sleeps, at last.
He cries against her hair.
~oOo~
Elliot takes a couple of punches before he’s awake, alert and watching all colors of fear marring Olivia’s pained features.
“Hey, hey, Liv, it’s me, it’s me,” Elliot says, backing up on the bed, just as she’s trying to get distance, and they both end up on their feet, watching each other’s next moves from opposite sides of the bed.
“Elliot?” Olivia shakes her head, rubbing her eyes, her chest rising and falling as she struggles to take a breath.
“Just me, Liv…” His voice softens and he steps around the bed, approaching her slowly. “Okay?” He tries to meet her gaze, and when brown eyes finally settle on his, stormy and cognizant, he takes the last few steps and brings her into his arms, presses his lips to his forehead. “You’re safe. I got you.”
“You didn’t,” she says before she can think to take it back.
The words cut him.
“I got you now…” His voice keeps that soft tone that takes the edge off, takes the adrenaline and fight right out of her. It drains her. He drains her.
She allows the hold, lets Elliot soothe her, right there by the window.
~oOo~
The hours and days all start to merge. They ignore phone calls until their devices lose battery, only to be remembered, plugged in, and ignored all over again.
He spends a lot of time holding her.
She spends a lot of time with her face buried in his chest, hiding from the carnage of her experiences.
He asks her for permission to message Cragen. She nods.
He lets Cragen know she’s safe.
The entire world seems to take a deep, fucking, breath, because her phone finally stops ringing constantly with phone calls from her captain, and Fin, and Amaro, and Barba and the casual ones from Rollins. Munch doesn’t call, and she loves him a little more for it.
Brian doesn’t stop calling though. He calls over and over.
“The fuck do you want, Cassidy,” Olivia hears him answer after a couple of days.
She can’t make out what Brian says, but she hears Elliot loud and clear.
“Took you two fucking days to figure out she was missing,” She hears him grind through his teeth, dismiss Cassidy with two thinly veiled threats and somehow manages to put order in her life.
Her phone finally, blessedly, stops ringing.
~oOo~
They touch a lot, late at night, when they’re in bed. He strokes her cheek, brushes her hair back behind her ear, presses his lips to her forehead, to her temple, sometimes her cheek, or right where her eye is healing.
He has a healing touch, she thinks, where there has been so much violence. She welcomes it.
In turn, she touches his calloused hands, studies them with her fingertips. She cups the side of his neck, sometimes the back of his head. Sometimes when he kisses her forehead close to her eyebrows, her lips touch his chin if she tilts her head up just a little, and she holds his cheek with her hand to keep him in place.
It’s all so grounding. His warmth, his skin, his scent. Neither of them has showered in the three days they’ve been locked away together, have barely eaten.
She still has nightmares when she falls asleep mid-afternoon, and he chases them away.
At times she’ll tell him she’s not hungry when he asks, so he orders a pizza and savors it slowly until her mouth waters, and she finally eats a few bites. But he never pushes. He never gives her two terrible choices. He just lets her be. He holds space for her, gives her room to swim away and swim back, take a big gush of air before she dives again.
~oOo~
She tells him what she needs, and he comes back not fifteen minutes later from the bodega down the street with several grocery bags that he probably filled in record time and blindly, just in case .
He runs a bath for her, tries to find anything else to help with.
“You got it?” he asks her, and she gives him a grateful nod, before she makes it in.
It’s only five minutes when he hears her calling.
“You alright, Liv?” he asks, his ear close to the door.
“I can’t shampoo my hair.”
He swallows. “You want me to help?”
“Yeah,” she says meekly.
She seems so small sitting there in the bathtub, her legs against her chest, her body hunched forward. He sits at the edge of the tub.
Olivia closes her eyes when she feels his fingers working in the shampoo, sighs softly into the water as he massages her scalp carefully.
“I feel like shit, El,” she confesses quietly.
“I know, baby…” he whispers back.
He leaves her after, and when she finally gets out of the tub and dries off, she can’t help but smile, just a bit, that he managed to get her size right. It’s a set of pajamas, just a tank top and a pair of comfortable pants, a packet of simple cotton panties, and two bras sized 36D.
~oOo~
The room is clean, and the bed freshly made by the time she comes out. He must have asked housekeeping for fresh linen, because the old sheets and duvet are in a plastic bag that he’s leaving outside the door. When he’s done, he promptly locks the door and sets the chair back against the doorknob.
She feels kind of silly now. All of this is so silly.
He’s got Icy Hot laid out on the bed, too, and he pats the spot next to him, uncaps the bottle and squeezes some cream onto his fingers. When she sits, he takes her wrist and starts rubbing the cream into her skin carefully.
“That’s nice,” she says after a moment and clears her throat, averting her gaze.
“Should help,” he nods, working her wrist with focused patience, until he feels her remove her wrist from his hold, her fingers slipping along his palm until their fingers are entwining.
Olivia gazes into his eyes, blue and calming and deep, and holds his fingers between her own, lifts her other hand to his cheek and pulls him in.
~oOo~
He’s fixed the cast on her arm securely again, and they’re side by side in bed, facing each other. She sighs against his lips and takes them again, slowly, savoring the moment, letting the Olivia that was born sometime in the last 8 days hold all of the pain for a while.
This other Olivia just born today finds her escape in Elliot’s lips.
She rests her cast arm over his side, her fingers stroking his shoulder lazily, and his hands move slowly over her back, sometimes tugging her a little closer, like he needs it to believe she’s really here, safe, with him.
They kiss and kiss, taste each other, breathe each other’s air. He swallows her air, and she sucks on his lower lip. It goes on forever until he breaks it softly, pressing a soft peck on her lips when she almost pouts.
“I made you an appointment,” he tells her softly, brushing some hair away from her face, passing a gentle thumb over her kiss-swollen bottom lip.
“With?”
“A therapist,” he tells her.
“When?”
“Tomorrow.” He strokes her cheek, presses his forehead against hers.
“I’d like to use someone I know,” she says quietly. “He’s someone I’ve worked with before.”
“Send me his contact information and I’ll give him a call.”
“Thanks…” she breathes out the word and makes a mental note for later.
They kiss again.
~oOo~
Sometime between her appointment and the drive back to the hotel, her rape kit comes back clean. He holds her healthy hand hard in his until he can find the first available spot to park and brings her into his arms.
She cries into his chest, and he, into her hair.
The regret doesn’t leave him, and the resentment doesn’t leave her either.
But that night when they find their way under the covers, their kisses are deeper, she presses to him just a little tighter, and his hand wanders to her hip, squeezes.
“Elliot…” she whispers, her hot breath heavy against his chin.
“What do you need, baby? Huh?” Elliot cups her cheek with a tenderness that makes her want to weep, their eyes lock. “Whatever you want. It’s yours.”
She has a thousand questions in her mind, about thirds in their relationship, and fourths and fifths, but this moment, she understands, is so intrinsically hers, theirs, that the questions die before they’re born at her lips.
“Take me home, El…” she whispers, before the tears spill again.
~oOo~
It’s almost noon when he’s handing her the keys to her own apartment. The sterile smell hits her before she even opens it, and when she does, her trained eye informs her that there are several things missing, but not a single thing is out of place.
She turns on her heel, right at the doorway, and clings to him with desperation, trembles in his arms.
He lets their bag slide off his shoulder until it’s on the floor and he gathers her again. It’s as if they’ve been doing this forever, as if that nook triangled right at his neck, shoulder and chest have been a home to her forehead always.
It takes her a few minutes, a few mantras from his lips and then she’s crossing the threshold, inspecting her home.
“You did this?” She states more than asks. “Had my place cleaned up?”
His stance is wide, filling , as he nods, and her chest swells.
She knows he won’t stay forever, understands he needs to get back to whatever took him a whole day to get to her a few days ago.
“Just a couple of days, El,” she tells him with big brown eyes that pierce him.
He nods, because she truly hasn’t quite figured out that he’s not leaving her side, that he will fight the very grim reaper before he loses sight of her again.
~oOo~
She’s got a guest bedroom, but it sits abandoned that night when they slip into bed after dinner. She’s eating more and more every day, the color is returning to her cheeks, slowly but surely. The bruises brighten and then start to fade, he traces them blindly in the dark, kisses them.
It takes two more nights of soft, quiet comfort, before she finally tells him.
“Elliot…” she breaks the midnight silence.
“Mh?” His fingers restart their stroke of her arm.
“When I was there,” she starts, and he knows exactly where there is, “I kept thinking about something…”
“Me?” He gives her a sided smile that she can only hear. She turns to face him again.
“You,” she admits. “But something else, too.”
“What was it?” he prods gently, wraps his fingers in her hair, tugs the covers up to warm her up.
“I kept thinking…” she says quietly, “…about how much I wanted to be a mother.”
“You deserve that, Liv. You’re gonna be a great mamma.” Elliot finds her timid gaze, and feels, more than sees, her nod.
“The other night you asked what I wanted,” she tells him in a whisper. “That’s what I want, El.”
He stays quiet, unsure if he should assume that she’s saying what he thinks she’s saying.
“Not right now,” she tells him. “Not until I get through… this. But when I’m ready—”
“I’ll be ready,” he tells her immediately, so that there’s no doubt.
She wraps her good arm around his neck and brings him into her tightly, presses her lips to his ear, in the middle of this moment that, she understands, is so intrinsically theirs, and whispers. “I want this with you. No one else.”
“Liv, I wanna stay,” he suddenly tells her. “Here. With you. In this apartment, or anywhere you want, when you’re ready.”
“Woah.” She cocks an eyebrow, her voice deeper than he’s heard it since she opened that hotel room door. “I just asked for a kidney.”
“Well, it’s attached to everything else, Liv, so… I guess you’re gonna have to take the rest with it.”
“Bummer,” she snorts softly as she eases into him again.
~oOo~
He stays. She doesn’t know the intricate details of the dissolution of his marriage, but she doesn’t ask, not quite yet. She tells him she will, soon, but for now she just needs to wait until everything else quiets down. He understands, but unburdening the information doesn’t really seem to be much of a priority to him.
He’s right there in the waiting room after every session with Doctor Lindstrom. He takes the scenic route to their new apartment when he knows it’s been a particularly tough one.
He grounds her, eventually, when she sits in the witness stand facing that demon, his eldest next to him, containing all that rage for her father, on her behalf.
They never talk about it again, but Olivia’s pregnant a year later. It just happens, much like everything else in their relationship, naturally. She tells him she loves him for the first time after their daughter is born. She’s pregnant for the second time when they bring Noah home.
~oOo~
One morning, Olivia wakes up to a quiet house, a note on her phone from Elliot letting her know he’s taken the kids out for breakfast so she can catch up on sleep, and then dropping them off at Maureen’s.
Olivia settles back into bed, hugs his pillow against her chest, ready to go back to sleep when she feels it, pulls her left hand out from under the pillow to find a diamond ring on her finger.
She rolls her eyes, sends him her answer via text, and crawls back under the covers, chasing that blessed extra hour of sleep.
All the choices she makes now are easy.
When they come home from work that night, he makes love to her. How this man manages to find literal hours just for them amidst the chaos that is their household is beyond her. They fuck eagerly. He asks her, this time with words, when he’s above her. She chooses to verbally confirm her answer while he has her bent over the bed and finds that really, really fucking good angle.
They get married that winter.