Fic: Mending Crumbling Bridges
If Elliot’s being honest with himself, he can admit that he’s never been so bone deep, soul weary exhausted in his entire life.
It’s been months since he railed against the Kathy in his head for leaving him and taking his kids away again. Months since he crossed the line with a perp or butted heads with Olivia or tested the limits of Cragen’s magnanimity.
It’s been months since a case really got to him, and that’s what should bother Elliot, but it doesn’t, and that should scare him, but it doesn’t.
When you’re so tired that every breath is a struggle you’re not sure is worth the effort, you simply don’t have anything left to spare for feeling.
Elliot’s not sure why he’s so tired. Why he’s so numb, or when he got that way. What he does know is that he should be pissed that no one has noticed he’s just been going through the motions lately. He should be, but he’s not.
The SVU squad used to be tight. Even though they were all private people who played things close to the vest, they used to be hypersensitive to one another’s moods. Bad days and bad weeks were allowed to slide without comment - most of the time - but when there were too many coming too close together, they had a mutual arrangement to step in and stop what could easily become a downward spiral.
They all knew the psychological and emotional toll their work could take on a person - especially in a group that had been at sex crimes for so long - and they watched out for one another. They watched out for one another even at times when they didn’t particularly like one another, because no one outside SVU could. Not really.
No one who hasn’t worked SVU cases over the long run can ever understand the sliding scale of horror and disgust that their cases are ranked on. Can ever understand that sometimes, the victim of statutory rape who chooses to have sex with her slightly older teenaged boyfriend really is more heartbreaking than the string of broken spirits a pedophile leaves in his wake.
It all depends on the day. On the cases they’ve closed recently, and the ones they haven’t.
But somewhere along the way, they’d stopped intervening for the sake of their squad mates’ sanities. And now Elliot can’t help but wonder how often he’s turned a blind eye to how the others are really faring because he’s just too wrapped up in his own whatever to notice. To care.
Elliot exhales harshly and throws down the file he’s holding. He watches as it skitters across his desk to land on Olivia’s, drawing her attention away from her computer monitor. She regards him with a raised eyebrow, silently asking what his problem is.
“I hate this,” he announces, but his voice lacks the heat of all the anger that never used to be far from the surface.
He hasn’t been angry in a long time.
“We all hate this, El.” And just like that she’s ready to get back to work. Because they don’t talk anymore, not unless they have to, and Elliot knows that should piss him off too, but it doesn’t.
“Not this case, Liv,” he corrects. He feels like maybe if he speaks up rather than waiting for someone to notice how far he’s fallen, they’ll realize he hasn’t been himself lately.
That’s another thing that’s changed: Elliot never used to reach out to the people around him for his own benefit.
“What…?”
“All of it. Everything,” he says.
Years ago, he’d be shouting this at her from across the room, audience be damned. But yelling would take energy he just doesn’t have anymore, so he speaks in a quiet, flat voice instead.
“I hate sitting here day in and day out, writing up the facts about another victim living a nightmare. And I hate chasing down perps because for every guy we catch, there’s another hundred out there molesting and raping and destroying lives. I hate that we don’t fight about cases anymore, and I hate that what we do will never be enough, and I fucking hate getting out of bed in the morning.”
He’s breathing like he just ran up and down every street in Manhattan, trying in vain to round up every abuser, pedophile, rapist and murderer in the city. But not once did his voice creep even one decibel higher, or take on the slightest outraged inflection.
Olivia blinks at him in surprise and Elliot doesn’t blame her. This is the most he’s said to her in six months. Maybe longer.
Elliot doesn’t share often, but when he does, he shares big.
He watches her in silence, waiting for something - he’s not sure what - and notices things he probably should have noticed sooner. The dark puffy half circles under her dull, lifeless eyes didn’t appear overnight. Her cheekbones are sharper than they used to be, and when taken with the way her jeans have started slipping down her slender hips when she pokes around crime scenes, it’s clear she’s been losing weight for a while.
Elliot realizes something else important in those long, silent heartbeats: maybe no one’s noticed him slipping into despair because they’ve all been tumbling in together.
The moment of clarity is shattered when Cragen throws open his office door and delivers the news that always makes Elliot hate his job.
“We’ve got a 13-year-old vic brought into Mercy by her parents. The girl says a teacher at her school raped her after classes let out for the day,” Cragen says.
He’s using his brash, unflappable voice, but Elliot can’t get over how old his captain looks. Can’t help but wonder when the other man started to age, and how he didn’t notice before now.
“Who’s catching today?”
“Elliot and Liv…” Fin says, and Elliot can hear relief in his voice.
They’ve all done this too many times before. Any day you’re not the one stuck catching new cases is a good one, relatively speaking.
“Munch and Fin are catching this afternoon,” Olivia interrupts. She shoots Fin a pointed look and he acquiesces under the weight of The Benson Stare.
Elliot knows better than to cross his partner by siding with Fin. It is their turn to catch, but he’s certainly not going to volunteer now that Olivia’s given him an out. These days, he’ll take any excuse he can find not deal with a new horror.
“Head down to the hospital ASAP and talk with the girl,” Cragen says to the room at large. He trusts his detectives to work things out on their own. He leaves as abruptly as he arrived, closing his office door quietly behind him.
Elliot can remember a time when Cragen’s door was always open, unless he was taking heat from One PP and trying to insulate his people from it. That door’s been closed a lot lately and Elliot knows that he hasn’t pissed off IAB in the last little while.
He’s been too tired to bother.
When Elliot’s attention returns to the squad room, he sees that Olivia has gotten her way. Fin and Munch are both on their feet, shrugging on their jackets to ward off the chilly autumn air. Both men move slowly, as if everything hurts, and Elliot sees weariness in every line of their bodies.
With a ragged breath, Elliot amends his earlier epiphany. No one’s noticed him slipping into despair because everyone else is already wading hip-deep through hell.
The guilt and pain and regret that well up inside him are the first things Elliot’s felt in a long time, and he wishes they’d go away. He’s not ready to feel them. Not yet.
Liv’s watching him again and he knows that she knows that something profound has just pieced itself together in his head. She’s confused, but she’s worried too and Elliot hates himself for dropping one more burden on her shoulders.
There’s already so much weighing on her that sometimes he can’t believe Olivia can stay upright.
He’d forgotten that for a while too; that his partner takes everything he dumps on her and rarely complains about it.
“Let’s go get some air, El.” Her voice is quiet, reserved, but it’s fearful too and he gets the first two labels, but he can’t fathom the third.
She rolls her chair back and stands. As she does, Olivia’s jeans slip down to ride a little lower on her hips, exposing a thin band of flesh and a set of hip bones that shouldn’t be so prominent.
Elliot’s been her partner for eleven years. Long enough to know that Olivia doesn’t diet, but she does stop eating altogether when cases really get to her.
“El,” she prods gently, snapping him out of his thoughts.
“Where?”
“Roof.”
Olivia’s hand lands on his shoulder briefly and she squeezes once, reassuringly. It’s meant to be comforting, but all the simple gesture does is remind Elliot how long it’s been since they have touched one another. Reached out to one another on any level.
He follows silently, climbing the stairs precisely three steps behind her. He’s watching carefully, looking her up and down, but not in a sexual way. He’s taking in the changes that his self-absorption have blinded him too.
Elliot resolves to take Olivia out for dinner tonight - dessert too, if he can swing it - because he can’t stand to see his strong, kick ass partner looking so fragile, so delicate. Olivia’s a lot of things, but fragile and delicate aren’t on the list.
He promises her then and there he’ll start taking better care of her, even if he does make the promise silently, to the back of her head. It’s the thought that counts, and besides, if Liv ever heard him imply that she needed to be taken care of, she’d kick his ass.
No matter how fragile she might look right now, Elliot knows Olivia can kick his ass any day of the week. He might be bigger and stronger, but she’s faster, more agile and, most importantly, not afraid to fight dirty when necessary.
Olivia reaches the top of the stairs and pushes the heavy metal door open. Cool air washes down the stairwell, rushing in to replace the heated, stale air that usually chokes the enclosed space. The goose bumps that break out across Elliot’s skin remind him that they’ve both forgotten their coats downstairs. Olivia braves the cold and steps out onto the roof, so he decides not to say a word and continues to follow in silence.
Their feet crunch across the gravel rooftop and Elliot can’t help but marvel at how much they’ve slowed down over the years. He’s not the only one who’s exhausted. That’s why Olivia slumps against the waist-high wall, like a puppet with cut strings.
“What’s going on with you, El?”
“I don’t…”
“How badly do you hate getting out of bed in the morning?”
He understands now why he hears fear in her voice, and he feels like he’s been punched in the gut. Of all the things Olivia has to worry about, this shouldn’t be one of them.
“I’m not suicidal, Liv.”
“A lot of suicidal people say that.” Her lips quirk wryly, but she’s not smiling. It’s a grimace more than anything, and he hates himself for putting it on her face.
“I swear to God, I swear on my children’s lives, I swear to you that I haven’t thought about killing myself,” he says firmly. It’s the truth. He’s been dragged out and worn down lately, but not that badly. Not yet, anyway.
On visibly shaking legs, Olivia lowers herself to the ground and leans her back against the cold brick wall. She combs long, nimble fingers through her hair, as though doing so might rake her thoughts into order.
“Talk to me, El.”
He looks out across the Manhattan skyline because looking at her forces him to acknowledge that he hasn’t been the only one slipping into darkness while everyone was watching by no one was seeing. He’s not ready to confront his own failings right now.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Just tell me what’s going on in your head?”
Elliot takes some time to just breathe. It feels foreign, like he hasn’t done it in a while. But it also feels good, and he isn’t sure if it’s the simple act of breathing, or being up here in the squad’s makeshift confessional that’s making him feel alive for the first time in God knows how long.
“None of it bothers me anymore,” he says quietly.
There isn’t another soul, living or otherwise, that he can say this to. He knows - just knows - that Olivia will understand rather than look at him like some sort of monster.
“Morally, I still think everything we see is despicable and disgusting,” Elliot elaborates, because he knows she’s waiting for it. “But I don’t feel it anymore. I don’t know when I stopped, but I did, and now I don’t feel any different about the job than a traffic cop who spends the day writing parking tickets.”
“Do you not feel it, or do you not let yourself feel it?”
He doesn’t rush to answer. Instead, he breathes and thinks. Her quiet voice fills the silence, giving him time to mull things over.
“I always thought it would be easier to work SVU cases if I didn’t feel them,” Liv says calmly. “And for a while, I didn’t. I feigned the empathy and compassion that everyone expected from me, but I didn’t feel the victims’ pain. I didn’t genuinely connect with them.”
His eyes are drawn down by that, because she’s confessing to him, baring her soul, and it feels wrong to let her without acknowledging how much it costs her.
“Did it make it easier?”
“No,” Liv says honestly. She meets his gaze and he forces himself to hold the look, to take in the tsunami of pain swirling in her eyes. “It made me feel so guilty that I couldn’t eat, sleep… Hell, I felt like I couldn’t breathe, Elliot.”
Finally, something he can relate too. But he doesn’t tell her that. Instead he asks, “And now?”
“Now I realize that feeling our cases is hard, but being numb to them is impossible.”
Numb. That magic word that fits him so perfectly right now.
“I didn’t make a conscious choice, Liv. I just… It’s like I woke up one morning and none of it got to me anymore. And it scares the hell out of me, because I don’t know what type of person can listen to Graham Barringer describe raping his four year old niece, or see the brutality behind Shauna Masterson’s murder and not be disgusted and horrified.”
Elliot allows himself one slow, deep breath, before saying the words that have been running through his mind with haunting persistence for months now.
“The only people I’ve ever met who aren’t bothered by our cases are the monsters we arrest.”
“You’re not a monster, Elliot.”
There’s conviction in her voice, and he wishes more than anything that he could share in it.
“Maybe not on the same level, but…”
“Not on any level at all.”
Somehow that’s enough to dispel his fear that the ugliness he deals with everyday has somehow tarnished his conscience, his morality, his soul. All that’s left behind is the nagging thought that’s dogged him since his first day on the force.
“Nothing we do is ever enough.” Elliot sighs as he crunches across the gravel. He drops down beside her because staying upright is just too much work anymore and having Olivia at his side has always made him feel better, even when he’s pissed at her.
“You knew that from day one,” she points out. She squirms on the uncomfortable surface, shifting to hug her knees to her chest.
Elliot stretches his legs out in front of him. As though he’s trying to prove to life that he won’t be intimidated, he fills as much space as possible when he’s upset.
Olivia likes to curl in on herself, assuming a self-protective huddle.
It’s one of many ways in which they’re like night and day.
“We used to win a lot more than we lost.” Elliot sighs again - it must he his millionth sigh of the day - and wishes he could expel all his hopelessness on his used up breaths. “Lately we just lose, Liv. And I don’t know how many more times I can look a victim in the eye and tell them their abuser is going to walk free because his rights matter more than theirs.”
Olivia regards him seriously. He can see his own frustrations mirrored in her tired eyes. “Do you want to leave SVU, El?”
It’s strange, but despite the depression he’s been drowning in lately, leaving hasn’t crossed his mind. “No. I hate it, and live victims are so hard so much of the time, but I don’t want to leave.”
“So what then?” Olivia asks.
Elliot pretends not to feel her relax beside him.
“I don’t know.”
Olivia breathes deeply and he can see where her shirt pulls across her ribcage. Can make out the lines of each individual rib. The sight pushes him to share the realization he came to today.
“I want us, the whole squad, to go back to the way we were before,” Elliot confesses quietly. “I want to go out and celebrate when we catch the bad guys, when we win a case, and I want us to go out and commiserate when things go wrong and the bad guys walk free.”
He has her undivided attention, probably because he never opens up like this, but he’s on a roll. Rather than clamming up like he usually would, Elliot forges ahead.
“I want us all to go back to looking out for one another so that Munch and Fin and Cragen never start to look so old and worn out all the time, and you don’t start disappearing right in front of us, and I can’t be so Goddamned mellow all the time without raising a couple of eyebrows!”
Olivia stares at him in silence, and he isn’t sure what to expect next. She could vehemently deny that there’s anything wrong with her just as easily as she could admit that things have been pretty awful lately. He searches her eyes for a hint of what she’s thinking, but for once her eyes don’t give anything away.
After long seconds that seem to stretch on and on, Olivia looks away. She studies the gravel piled besides her left knee and chews on the inside of her cheek thoughtfully.
He’s sure she’s shut down on him.
But then one side of her mouth quirks ever so slightly and in a quiet voice, she says, “You have been pretty Goddamned mellow lately.”
She deadpans it and it works. Elliot chuckles and he can’t remember the last time that happened. Can’t remember the last time he had something to laugh about.
She smiles warmly at him, glad to have been able to lighten him up a bit.
He knows she appreciates his intensity, but Olivia also likes his lighter side, and she hasn’t seen it in months.
“We haven’t been much of a team, have we? I mean, we’ve got each other’s backs, but none of us are really looking out for one another anymore.” Olivia leans away from him and cocks her head so she can study him better. “We all got so wrapped up in our own stuff that when we needed one another the most, we all ended up on our own, huh?”
“Yeah.” Elliot leans to brush their shoulders together, relishing the contact.
They used to bump shoulders all the time while roaming the city’s sidewalks, side by side. But then emotional distance had started to manifest itself as physical distance and they’d started taking up practically the whole sidewalk.
Elliot resolves to start walking a bit closer to his partner from now on.
“It used to make me crazy, having everybody breathing down my neck all the time, but now I realize I need it to keep me grounded.” He ducks his head, feeling awkward about admitting how much he depends on his squad.
“You still don’t talk about work with Kathy?” Olivia asks, although they both know she already knows the answer.
“No.”
Kathy’s gone again, but that’s a conversation for another time.
Olivia’s suddenly giving off a vibe of exasperation, but her voice is patient as she reminds, “Bottling it up doesn’t work for you, Elliot.”
“You had enough going on,” he says simply, and it’s true.
What he doesn’t say is that he’d been so worried about her that he hadn’t dared turn to her. She’d been so on edge for so long and the PTSD had pushed her closer to breaking than he’d ever seen before. He’d been afraid that she’d simply shatter under the added weight of his problems.
“Still, I would have… You know I’m here for you.”
“I never doubted that, Liv.” It’s his turn to reassure now, and Elliot’s glad to finally be able to give instead of just take, take, take. “But like you said, we were all wrapped up in our own stuff, and yours was… more than the rest of ours.”
He doesn’t ask how she’s doing because he hasn’t so far. Over a span of months, he’s pieced together what happened at Sealview. What happened after. He’s dropped hints to let her know that he knows, but they haven’t talked about it. He doubts they ever will, because Olivia is too damned stubborn and even though he talks about rape and assault everyday, it’s different when the victim is someone he cares about.
Different when ‘the victim’ was this close to being Liv.
Still, every once in a while - like right now - the question ‘how are you?’ hovers in the air between them. Elliot never fails to thank God when she answers, which isn’t as often as he’d like, but still more often than he really expects her to.
“I’m okay, Elliot.” She smiles reassuringly, and he marvels at the fact that even when he should be the one offering comfort, she goes out of her way to make him feel better. “My one-on-one sessions are over unless I start to feel like I need more, and I go to group to support the other members, not because I need the support myself.”
Elliot sends another heartfelt ‘thank you’ to God and breathes a sigh of relief. He’s seen victims - almost victims - destroyed by what happened - almost happened - to his partner, and Sealview was just the latest in a huge pile of crap life has dumped on Olivia.
Any one of those awful things could have broken her, but none of them have. A couple have bent her, but she hasn’t broken, regardless of what Olivia herself thinks sometimes.
“Bottling it up doesn’t work for you either, Liv.”
“It doesn’t work for any of us. Not really.” She tosses him a wry smirk, and he can’t help but smirk back. “That’s never stopped us from trying.”
“As different as we all are, we’re an awful lot alike in some ways, huh?”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
He does, but he’s not sure it is. They all get worn out and dragged down sometimes, but because they’re so alike in the ways that matter, the whole squad knows how to haul one another out of the darkness and back into daylight. That will never be a bad thing, Elliot realizes. Not even when they have to drag him from the darkness kicking and screaming.
“Liv?”
“Yeah?”
“Want to grab dinner tonight?” he asks, because he made her a promise this afternoon, even if it was only in the privacy of his head.
She grins playfully, somehow knowing he needs to indulge in the lighter side of their relationship right now. “Who’s buying?”
“I am.”
She clasps a hand to her chest in feigned shock because they both know he likes to pay, but he hardly ever offers. Usually he just pounces on the bill as soon as it arrives, grumbling good-naturedly about the cost of college tuition and his five kids while he pays. She learned a long time ago to just sit back and roll her eyes at his antics.
“What’s the occasion?”
Elliot can hear laughter in her voice for the first time in God knows how long and it sparks a frisson of warmth in his chest. Slipping back into the banter that once flowed so effortlessly between the two of them, he shoots back. “No occasion, just ‘cause you’re gettin’ scrawny.”
He grins because she’s scowling at him now and it’s so comfortable and familiar that he can forget that the last few months ever happened.
Except that they did happen, and Liv’s pulled him out of the darkness. Now he shares half of the responsibility for leading the rest of the squad out into the light.
“We should invite…”
“Yeah.”
Just like that, they’re on the same wavelength again. He can still feel tinges of the darkness lurking inside him, waiting for the chance to swallow him up again, but Elliot knows Olivia is seeing him now. She won’t let him surrender to the darkness.
And he’ll return the favour because he’s her partner and that’s his job.
It’s been months since he railed against the Kathy in his head for leaving him and taking his kids away again. Months since he crossed the line with a perp or butted heads with Olivia or tested the limits of Cragen’s magnanimity.
It’s been months since a case really got to him, and that’s what should bother Elliot, but it doesn’t, and that should scare him, but it doesn’t.
When you’re so tired that every breath is a struggle you’re not sure is worth the effort, you simply don’t have anything left to spare for feeling.
Elliot’s not sure why he’s so tired. Why he’s so numb, or when he got that way. What he does know is that he should be pissed that no one has noticed he’s just been going through the motions lately. He should be, but he’s not.
The SVU squad used to be tight. Even though they were all private people who played things close to the vest, they used to be hypersensitive to one another’s moods. Bad days and bad weeks were allowed to slide without comment - most of the time - but when there were too many coming too close together, they had a mutual arrangement to step in and stop what could easily become a downward spiral.
They all knew the psychological and emotional toll their work could take on a person - especially in a group that had been at sex crimes for so long - and they watched out for one another. They watched out for one another even at times when they didn’t particularly like one another, because no one outside SVU could. Not really.
No one who hasn’t worked SVU cases over the long run can ever understand the sliding scale of horror and disgust that their cases are ranked on. Can ever understand that sometimes, the victim of statutory rape who chooses to have sex with her slightly older teenaged boyfriend really is more heartbreaking than the string of broken spirits a pedophile leaves in his wake.
It all depends on the day. On the cases they’ve closed recently, and the ones they haven’t.
But somewhere along the way, they’d stopped intervening for the sake of their squad mates’ sanities. And now Elliot can’t help but wonder how often he’s turned a blind eye to how the others are really faring because he’s just too wrapped up in his own whatever to notice. To care.
Elliot exhales harshly and throws down the file he’s holding. He watches as it skitters across his desk to land on Olivia’s, drawing her attention away from her computer monitor. She regards him with a raised eyebrow, silently asking what his problem is.
“I hate this,” he announces, but his voice lacks the heat of all the anger that never used to be far from the surface.
He hasn’t been angry in a long time.
“We all hate this, El.” And just like that she’s ready to get back to work. Because they don’t talk anymore, not unless they have to, and Elliot knows that should piss him off too, but it doesn’t.
“Not this case, Liv,” he corrects. He feels like maybe if he speaks up rather than waiting for someone to notice how far he’s fallen, they’ll realize he hasn’t been himself lately.
That’s another thing that’s changed: Elliot never used to reach out to the people around him for his own benefit.
“What…?”
“All of it. Everything,” he says.
Years ago, he’d be shouting this at her from across the room, audience be damned. But yelling would take energy he just doesn’t have anymore, so he speaks in a quiet, flat voice instead.
“I hate sitting here day in and day out, writing up the facts about another victim living a nightmare. And I hate chasing down perps because for every guy we catch, there’s another hundred out there molesting and raping and destroying lives. I hate that we don’t fight about cases anymore, and I hate that what we do will never be enough, and I fucking hate getting out of bed in the morning.”
He’s breathing like he just ran up and down every street in Manhattan, trying in vain to round up every abuser, pedophile, rapist and murderer in the city. But not once did his voice creep even one decibel higher, or take on the slightest outraged inflection.
Olivia blinks at him in surprise and Elliot doesn’t blame her. This is the most he’s said to her in six months. Maybe longer.
Elliot doesn’t share often, but when he does, he shares big.
He watches her in silence, waiting for something - he’s not sure what - and notices things he probably should have noticed sooner. The dark puffy half circles under her dull, lifeless eyes didn’t appear overnight. Her cheekbones are sharper than they used to be, and when taken with the way her jeans have started slipping down her slender hips when she pokes around crime scenes, it’s clear she’s been losing weight for a while.
Elliot realizes something else important in those long, silent heartbeats: maybe no one’s noticed him slipping into despair because they’ve all been tumbling in together.
The moment of clarity is shattered when Cragen throws open his office door and delivers the news that always makes Elliot hate his job.
“We’ve got a 13-year-old vic brought into Mercy by her parents. The girl says a teacher at her school raped her after classes let out for the day,” Cragen says.
He’s using his brash, unflappable voice, but Elliot can’t get over how old his captain looks. Can’t help but wonder when the other man started to age, and how he didn’t notice before now.
“Who’s catching today?”
“Elliot and Liv…” Fin says, and Elliot can hear relief in his voice.
They’ve all done this too many times before. Any day you’re not the one stuck catching new cases is a good one, relatively speaking.
“Munch and Fin are catching this afternoon,” Olivia interrupts. She shoots Fin a pointed look and he acquiesces under the weight of The Benson Stare.
Elliot knows better than to cross his partner by siding with Fin. It is their turn to catch, but he’s certainly not going to volunteer now that Olivia’s given him an out. These days, he’ll take any excuse he can find not deal with a new horror.
“Head down to the hospital ASAP and talk with the girl,” Cragen says to the room at large. He trusts his detectives to work things out on their own. He leaves as abruptly as he arrived, closing his office door quietly behind him.
Elliot can remember a time when Cragen’s door was always open, unless he was taking heat from One PP and trying to insulate his people from it. That door’s been closed a lot lately and Elliot knows that he hasn’t pissed off IAB in the last little while.
He’s been too tired to bother.
When Elliot’s attention returns to the squad room, he sees that Olivia has gotten her way. Fin and Munch are both on their feet, shrugging on their jackets to ward off the chilly autumn air. Both men move slowly, as if everything hurts, and Elliot sees weariness in every line of their bodies.
With a ragged breath, Elliot amends his earlier epiphany. No one’s noticed him slipping into despair because everyone else is already wading hip-deep through hell.
The guilt and pain and regret that well up inside him are the first things Elliot’s felt in a long time, and he wishes they’d go away. He’s not ready to feel them. Not yet.
Liv’s watching him again and he knows that she knows that something profound has just pieced itself together in his head. She’s confused, but she’s worried too and Elliot hates himself for dropping one more burden on her shoulders.
There’s already so much weighing on her that sometimes he can’t believe Olivia can stay upright.
He’d forgotten that for a while too; that his partner takes everything he dumps on her and rarely complains about it.
“Let’s go get some air, El.” Her voice is quiet, reserved, but it’s fearful too and he gets the first two labels, but he can’t fathom the third.
She rolls her chair back and stands. As she does, Olivia’s jeans slip down to ride a little lower on her hips, exposing a thin band of flesh and a set of hip bones that shouldn’t be so prominent.
Elliot’s been her partner for eleven years. Long enough to know that Olivia doesn’t diet, but she does stop eating altogether when cases really get to her.
“El,” she prods gently, snapping him out of his thoughts.
“Where?”
“Roof.”
Olivia’s hand lands on his shoulder briefly and she squeezes once, reassuringly. It’s meant to be comforting, but all the simple gesture does is remind Elliot how long it’s been since they have touched one another. Reached out to one another on any level.
He follows silently, climbing the stairs precisely three steps behind her. He’s watching carefully, looking her up and down, but not in a sexual way. He’s taking in the changes that his self-absorption have blinded him too.
Elliot resolves to take Olivia out for dinner tonight - dessert too, if he can swing it - because he can’t stand to see his strong, kick ass partner looking so fragile, so delicate. Olivia’s a lot of things, but fragile and delicate aren’t on the list.
He promises her then and there he’ll start taking better care of her, even if he does make the promise silently, to the back of her head. It’s the thought that counts, and besides, if Liv ever heard him imply that she needed to be taken care of, she’d kick his ass.
No matter how fragile she might look right now, Elliot knows Olivia can kick his ass any day of the week. He might be bigger and stronger, but she’s faster, more agile and, most importantly, not afraid to fight dirty when necessary.
Olivia reaches the top of the stairs and pushes the heavy metal door open. Cool air washes down the stairwell, rushing in to replace the heated, stale air that usually chokes the enclosed space. The goose bumps that break out across Elliot’s skin remind him that they’ve both forgotten their coats downstairs. Olivia braves the cold and steps out onto the roof, so he decides not to say a word and continues to follow in silence.
Their feet crunch across the gravel rooftop and Elliot can’t help but marvel at how much they’ve slowed down over the years. He’s not the only one who’s exhausted. That’s why Olivia slumps against the waist-high wall, like a puppet with cut strings.
“What’s going on with you, El?”
“I don’t…”
“How badly do you hate getting out of bed in the morning?”
He understands now why he hears fear in her voice, and he feels like he’s been punched in the gut. Of all the things Olivia has to worry about, this shouldn’t be one of them.
“I’m not suicidal, Liv.”
“A lot of suicidal people say that.” Her lips quirk wryly, but she’s not smiling. It’s a grimace more than anything, and he hates himself for putting it on her face.
“I swear to God, I swear on my children’s lives, I swear to you that I haven’t thought about killing myself,” he says firmly. It’s the truth. He’s been dragged out and worn down lately, but not that badly. Not yet, anyway.
On visibly shaking legs, Olivia lowers herself to the ground and leans her back against the cold brick wall. She combs long, nimble fingers through her hair, as though doing so might rake her thoughts into order.
“Talk to me, El.”
He looks out across the Manhattan skyline because looking at her forces him to acknowledge that he hasn’t been the only one slipping into darkness while everyone was watching by no one was seeing. He’s not ready to confront his own failings right now.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Just tell me what’s going on in your head?”
Elliot takes some time to just breathe. It feels foreign, like he hasn’t done it in a while. But it also feels good, and he isn’t sure if it’s the simple act of breathing, or being up here in the squad’s makeshift confessional that’s making him feel alive for the first time in God knows how long.
“None of it bothers me anymore,” he says quietly.
There isn’t another soul, living or otherwise, that he can say this to. He knows - just knows - that Olivia will understand rather than look at him like some sort of monster.
“Morally, I still think everything we see is despicable and disgusting,” Elliot elaborates, because he knows she’s waiting for it. “But I don’t feel it anymore. I don’t know when I stopped, but I did, and now I don’t feel any different about the job than a traffic cop who spends the day writing parking tickets.”
“Do you not feel it, or do you not let yourself feel it?”
He doesn’t rush to answer. Instead, he breathes and thinks. Her quiet voice fills the silence, giving him time to mull things over.
“I always thought it would be easier to work SVU cases if I didn’t feel them,” Liv says calmly. “And for a while, I didn’t. I feigned the empathy and compassion that everyone expected from me, but I didn’t feel the victims’ pain. I didn’t genuinely connect with them.”
His eyes are drawn down by that, because she’s confessing to him, baring her soul, and it feels wrong to let her without acknowledging how much it costs her.
“Did it make it easier?”
“No,” Liv says honestly. She meets his gaze and he forces himself to hold the look, to take in the tsunami of pain swirling in her eyes. “It made me feel so guilty that I couldn’t eat, sleep… Hell, I felt like I couldn’t breathe, Elliot.”
Finally, something he can relate too. But he doesn’t tell her that. Instead he asks, “And now?”
“Now I realize that feeling our cases is hard, but being numb to them is impossible.”
Numb. That magic word that fits him so perfectly right now.
“I didn’t make a conscious choice, Liv. I just… It’s like I woke up one morning and none of it got to me anymore. And it scares the hell out of me, because I don’t know what type of person can listen to Graham Barringer describe raping his four year old niece, or see the brutality behind Shauna Masterson’s murder and not be disgusted and horrified.”
Elliot allows himself one slow, deep breath, before saying the words that have been running through his mind with haunting persistence for months now.
“The only people I’ve ever met who aren’t bothered by our cases are the monsters we arrest.”
“You’re not a monster, Elliot.”
There’s conviction in her voice, and he wishes more than anything that he could share in it.
“Maybe not on the same level, but…”
“Not on any level at all.”
Somehow that’s enough to dispel his fear that the ugliness he deals with everyday has somehow tarnished his conscience, his morality, his soul. All that’s left behind is the nagging thought that’s dogged him since his first day on the force.
“Nothing we do is ever enough.” Elliot sighs as he crunches across the gravel. He drops down beside her because staying upright is just too much work anymore and having Olivia at his side has always made him feel better, even when he’s pissed at her.
“You knew that from day one,” she points out. She squirms on the uncomfortable surface, shifting to hug her knees to her chest.
Elliot stretches his legs out in front of him. As though he’s trying to prove to life that he won’t be intimidated, he fills as much space as possible when he’s upset.
Olivia likes to curl in on herself, assuming a self-protective huddle.
It’s one of many ways in which they’re like night and day.
“We used to win a lot more than we lost.” Elliot sighs again - it must he his millionth sigh of the day - and wishes he could expel all his hopelessness on his used up breaths. “Lately we just lose, Liv. And I don’t know how many more times I can look a victim in the eye and tell them their abuser is going to walk free because his rights matter more than theirs.”
Olivia regards him seriously. He can see his own frustrations mirrored in her tired eyes. “Do you want to leave SVU, El?”
It’s strange, but despite the depression he’s been drowning in lately, leaving hasn’t crossed his mind. “No. I hate it, and live victims are so hard so much of the time, but I don’t want to leave.”
“So what then?” Olivia asks.
Elliot pretends not to feel her relax beside him.
“I don’t know.”
Olivia breathes deeply and he can see where her shirt pulls across her ribcage. Can make out the lines of each individual rib. The sight pushes him to share the realization he came to today.
“I want us, the whole squad, to go back to the way we were before,” Elliot confesses quietly. “I want to go out and celebrate when we catch the bad guys, when we win a case, and I want us to go out and commiserate when things go wrong and the bad guys walk free.”
He has her undivided attention, probably because he never opens up like this, but he’s on a roll. Rather than clamming up like he usually would, Elliot forges ahead.
“I want us all to go back to looking out for one another so that Munch and Fin and Cragen never start to look so old and worn out all the time, and you don’t start disappearing right in front of us, and I can’t be so Goddamned mellow all the time without raising a couple of eyebrows!”
Olivia stares at him in silence, and he isn’t sure what to expect next. She could vehemently deny that there’s anything wrong with her just as easily as she could admit that things have been pretty awful lately. He searches her eyes for a hint of what she’s thinking, but for once her eyes don’t give anything away.
After long seconds that seem to stretch on and on, Olivia looks away. She studies the gravel piled besides her left knee and chews on the inside of her cheek thoughtfully.
He’s sure she’s shut down on him.
But then one side of her mouth quirks ever so slightly and in a quiet voice, she says, “You have been pretty Goddamned mellow lately.”
She deadpans it and it works. Elliot chuckles and he can’t remember the last time that happened. Can’t remember the last time he had something to laugh about.
She smiles warmly at him, glad to have been able to lighten him up a bit.
He knows she appreciates his intensity, but Olivia also likes his lighter side, and she hasn’t seen it in months.
“We haven’t been much of a team, have we? I mean, we’ve got each other’s backs, but none of us are really looking out for one another anymore.” Olivia leans away from him and cocks her head so she can study him better. “We all got so wrapped up in our own stuff that when we needed one another the most, we all ended up on our own, huh?”
“Yeah.” Elliot leans to brush their shoulders together, relishing the contact.
They used to bump shoulders all the time while roaming the city’s sidewalks, side by side. But then emotional distance had started to manifest itself as physical distance and they’d started taking up practically the whole sidewalk.
Elliot resolves to start walking a bit closer to his partner from now on.
“It used to make me crazy, having everybody breathing down my neck all the time, but now I realize I need it to keep me grounded.” He ducks his head, feeling awkward about admitting how much he depends on his squad.
“You still don’t talk about work with Kathy?” Olivia asks, although they both know she already knows the answer.
“No.”
Kathy’s gone again, but that’s a conversation for another time.
Olivia’s suddenly giving off a vibe of exasperation, but her voice is patient as she reminds, “Bottling it up doesn’t work for you, Elliot.”
“You had enough going on,” he says simply, and it’s true.
What he doesn’t say is that he’d been so worried about her that he hadn’t dared turn to her. She’d been so on edge for so long and the PTSD had pushed her closer to breaking than he’d ever seen before. He’d been afraid that she’d simply shatter under the added weight of his problems.
“Still, I would have… You know I’m here for you.”
“I never doubted that, Liv.” It’s his turn to reassure now, and Elliot’s glad to finally be able to give instead of just take, take, take. “But like you said, we were all wrapped up in our own stuff, and yours was… more than the rest of ours.”
He doesn’t ask how she’s doing because he hasn’t so far. Over a span of months, he’s pieced together what happened at Sealview. What happened after. He’s dropped hints to let her know that he knows, but they haven’t talked about it. He doubts they ever will, because Olivia is too damned stubborn and even though he talks about rape and assault everyday, it’s different when the victim is someone he cares about.
Different when ‘the victim’ was this close to being Liv.
Still, every once in a while - like right now - the question ‘how are you?’ hovers in the air between them. Elliot never fails to thank God when she answers, which isn’t as often as he’d like, but still more often than he really expects her to.
“I’m okay, Elliot.” She smiles reassuringly, and he marvels at the fact that even when he should be the one offering comfort, she goes out of her way to make him feel better. “My one-on-one sessions are over unless I start to feel like I need more, and I go to group to support the other members, not because I need the support myself.”
Elliot sends another heartfelt ‘thank you’ to God and breathes a sigh of relief. He’s seen victims - almost victims - destroyed by what happened - almost happened - to his partner, and Sealview was just the latest in a huge pile of crap life has dumped on Olivia.
Any one of those awful things could have broken her, but none of them have. A couple have bent her, but she hasn’t broken, regardless of what Olivia herself thinks sometimes.
“Bottling it up doesn’t work for you either, Liv.”
“It doesn’t work for any of us. Not really.” She tosses him a wry smirk, and he can’t help but smirk back. “That’s never stopped us from trying.”
“As different as we all are, we’re an awful lot alike in some ways, huh?”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
He does, but he’s not sure it is. They all get worn out and dragged down sometimes, but because they’re so alike in the ways that matter, the whole squad knows how to haul one another out of the darkness and back into daylight. That will never be a bad thing, Elliot realizes. Not even when they have to drag him from the darkness kicking and screaming.
“Liv?”
“Yeah?”
“Want to grab dinner tonight?” he asks, because he made her a promise this afternoon, even if it was only in the privacy of his head.
She grins playfully, somehow knowing he needs to indulge in the lighter side of their relationship right now. “Who’s buying?”
“I am.”
She clasps a hand to her chest in feigned shock because they both know he likes to pay, but he hardly ever offers. Usually he just pounces on the bill as soon as it arrives, grumbling good-naturedly about the cost of college tuition and his five kids while he pays. She learned a long time ago to just sit back and roll her eyes at his antics.
“What’s the occasion?”
Elliot can hear laughter in her voice for the first time in God knows how long and it sparks a frisson of warmth in his chest. Slipping back into the banter that once flowed so effortlessly between the two of them, he shoots back. “No occasion, just ‘cause you’re gettin’ scrawny.”
He grins because she’s scowling at him now and it’s so comfortable and familiar that he can forget that the last few months ever happened.
Except that they did happen, and Liv’s pulled him out of the darkness. Now he shares half of the responsibility for leading the rest of the squad out into the light.
“We should invite…”
“Yeah.”
Just like that, they’re on the same wavelength again. He can still feel tinges of the darkness lurking inside him, waiting for the chance to swallow him up again, but Elliot knows Olivia is seeing him now. She won’t let him surrender to the darkness.
And he’ll return the favour because he’s her partner and that’s his job.