Work Text:
the loneliness never left me
i always took it with me
Her mother’s funeral had been a quiet affair.
She remembers it, still. Remembers the concerned looks, the curious glances, the quiet condolences. Most by people she’d barely even known, some by a few she’d invited herself. Not that her colleagues had ever actually met her mother; none but Elliot, at least, though Olivia likes to imagine the drunken run-in had never happened, and he’s always been kind enough to let her.
She hadn’t cried. Not really, not until later. There had been teary eyes, sure. A lump in her throat. She thinks she might’ve choked on the eulogy, but it might’ve been on the lies: the speech she gave carefully constructed to omit the worst of Serena Benson. The people there hadn’t deserved to know, she’d thought, and she didn’t owe it to anyone, anyway.
She listens to Alicia Harding give her own eulogy, Sonya’s battle with the bottle buried beneath praise, and thinks that maybe they’re more alike than she’d first thought.
There are no tears here, either.
-
Noise filters in from the neighbouring apartment: laughter, light and pleasant, the low murmur of flowing conversation. A gathering, she guesses. Friendly and carefree. It shoots a spike of anger up her spine.
Olivia sighs and gets out of bed, refuses to think too hard as she moves toward the kitchen. The wine she picks is a shimmery pink, the bitterness covered by something sickly sweet. She usually drinks red, if only because the type her mother preferred was white. Tonight, though, crimson seems like a bad idea, like a stepping stone to images of Sonya’s bloody body playing on loop in her mind’s eye.
As if it won’t happen anyway.
Her couch is soft, the throw blanket warm. She wraps it around herself and settles in front of the television, the show she picks a mindless decision: unfamiliar but loud enough to drown out the people next door.
Occasionally she finds herself missing her old apartment, which is a simple way of saying that she misses its thicker walls, the way the layout kept her bedroom far from the couple next door. Which is a complicated way of saying that she is lonely.
-
“What a shit show,” Elliot says, stepping into the bathroom behind her. It’s quiet enough that she almost doesn’t hear it over the running water, her bloodied hands bright red and burning under the too-hot spray.
She doesn’t respond, but he probably hadn’t expected her to. He steps forward slowly, shuts the door behind him. The shower room here is bigger than at the old precinct, a large sink jammed in the corner. Their bodies are close as he settles beside her, his actions careful as he shrugs off his coat and rolls his sleeves; his hands joining hers a moment after, fingers slipping around her wrists to stop the harsh, hurried way she’d been scrubbing at the skin.
“You’re hurting yourself,” he says, and it’s in that low, gentle tone. The one he uses when he’s trying to be comforting. The one that often reminds her that he isn’t all hard edges and repressed rage; that there’s a softer side to him, too.
She exhales, the sigh caught between her teeth. His hands slip down, take over, soapy fingers working their way across her skin, washing away the blood with practiced ease. She has no desire to fight him, and so she doesn’t.
Wouldn’t have the energy to even if she did.
-
She had held it together. When her mother had died, she’d held it together. Had told herself she was holding it together.
I’m fine, she remembers saying. I knew it was coming. I just need to work. Fill her days with other people’s problems; hope that fixing them could fix her own, too.
She’d fooled herself for a while.
Had been better at that, back then.
-
“My mother’s buried here.”
Her voice is strange to her own ears, her gaze looking past the provisional arrangement of Sonya Paxton’s tombstone and out across the sea of others; all of them replicas of each other.
“I know,” Elliot answers, simple, and Olivia thinks, he would. After all, he’d played the part of family because she’d had none others left. Had been the one to finally see her crack. The one to catch her when she had, his body a warm and solid weight; unwavering even as she’d started to sob.
He’d hugged her again, she remembers, a month later, when she’d had the same breakdown only with bigger consequences: Ashley Austin Black hitting a little too close to home. She remembers hating him for it.
“Ryan, too,” he adds, almost like an afterthought, and Olivia feels the sigh press at her teeth, watches as it escapes in a rush of white fog. She wants to ask if he’s as sick of losing people as she is, but she already knows the answer.
I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, she thinks, and then wonders if maybe they really do spend too much time together.
-
She’s always been lonely.
She doesn’t see it as a tragic thing. It’s just a fact, something she got used to when she was younger. That will happen, she reasons, when what you’ve got is a negligent mother and nothing else. The thought is only slightly bitter.
No. The loneliness isn’t new.
It’s the lack of hope that gets to her.
-
Sonya’s funeral is another quiet affair.
Olivia can’t imagine it any other way, doesn’t think she would have approved of anything else. She’s almost surprised when Elliot shows, only she isn’t. Not at all.
He’s doing it for her. She’s not stupid. There is no love lost between him and Sonya, and while he isn’t pleased about it, she knows that the death of their ADA isn’t the real reason he’s here.
He sits beside her, his arm curled around the back of her seat, close and comforting. It’s the way he’d been at her mother’s funeral, too. Close and comforting. Concerned. His instinct to protect her innate.
Years ago, she would’ve found it annoying. This hesitant damage control; the way he looks at her as if he’s waiting for the floodgates to open and the water to come rushing out. Like he’s expecting it.
Now, she’s not sure what she’d be doing without it.
-
I’m really glad you’re back.
She doesn’t think as she says it, the words ripped from her throat by a mix of shock and relief. She doesn’t think as she grabs hold of him either.
I should have come back sooner.
Thought comes later.
-
Elliot’s a tactile person when he’s concerned. Or maybe it’s just his fear that weakens his control and makes him slip, because he’s always so careful not to touch her otherwise.
It almost makes her want to get hurt more often.
She can feel his breath on her cheek as he shuts off the water, replaces it with rough paper towel, his hands still covering hers as he dries them clean. She should tell him not to, should snap that she’s a grown woman, for God’s sakes, she can do it herself. But the words never come; the only thing at the back of her throat a growing lump.
“It’s okay,” Elliot tells her, because he’s never really learnt what else to say, and because she hasn’t been told it enough, anyway. “Liv. Liv, it’s okay.”
She realises that she must be crying, or that she must be about to, because he wouldn’t be saying it otherwise. Because he definitely wouldn’t be shushing her. She takes a deep breath and feels the tears on her cheeks, takes another and feels his hand on her elbow, an arm around her waist.
He hugs her for the second time in one day, and as her face presses against the soft fabric of his shirt, she thinks that if he does it again she’ll no longer be able to count them on one hand.
-
“Take care of my little girl,” her mother had slurred, one arm wrapped around Elliot’s shoulders as she stumbled in the doorway of Olivia’s apartment, her other hand slapping against the side of his cheek. “You know what men are like.”
Elliot had looked between them, wide-eyed, and Olivia had watched with some sort of horror as her mother stumbled again, Elliot’s hands reaching for her waist just in time to catch her.
He’d come up to use her bathroom; a pit-stop before he headed home after working a thirty-hour shift. They hadn’t expected to find Serena in the hallway.
“Sorry,” she remembers saying, voice low as they talked in her doorway, her mother passed out on the couch. “She doesn’t usually—”
“It’s fine,” he’d assured her, and she’d been relived to realise he meant it. That was what she’d loved the most about him, back then. The easy acceptance. The way he took everything about her as simple fact and worked with it.
It’s what she loves about him now, too.
-
“Lizzie’s gotten really into astrology,” Elliot tells her, his voice coming through the phone like a wave of warm water. It washes over her and leaves comfort in its wake, and Olivia allows her eyes to shut as she settles against the couch, her wine held securely against her chest.
Her TV is muted, now, some late-night talk show flashing across the screen. It’s the only source of light, one of the few sources of life, the flashes of colour mixing with the music her neighbours have started to play.
“You’re an Aquarius, you know? Apparently that means you’re independent.” He pauses in a way that makes her think he’s reading off of something, then adds, “And good at helping others.” Another pause, longer this time; accompanied by a rustle and Elizabeth’s muffled voice. “Now she’s yelling at me to tell you that we’re compatible.”
A laugh bubbles in her chest, quiet but true. It’s the best she’s felt all day. “Are we?” she answers, and carefully doesn’t ask why he’s sleeping on the spare bed in his daughter’s room, or why he’d called her at near-midnight to talk about things she knows he doesn’t believe in.
“Mmhm. We’re good at trust,” he says. It’s like he’s joking. Voice tainted with mirth. In the pause after his words, Olivia can hear Elizabeth yell, He’s a Libra! across the room, Elliot shushing her a second later. “Not great at communication,” he reads, and the joke is obvious, now. She shakes her head.
“Didn’t need the stars to tell me that one, El,” she says, and the way he laughs makes her want to be there with him in person, the desire so strong it’s startling.
She takes another sip of wine.
-
She wraps up the case because it’s what’s expected, because there’s really no other option. Because everyone who works in their unit knows damn well that the world doesn’t stop spinning just because you want it to.
If Alicia Harding doesn’t meet her eye at Rikers Island, and if she doesn’t meet them, still, at the memorial service… Well.
She should have saw that coming.
-
He’s waiting for her when she gets home, sitting at the steps of her apartment, body hunched and jacket pulled tight around his torso. It’s utterly ridiculous, she thinks, because he has her spare key. He could’ve used it.
“Playing truant?” she asks, trying for light-hearted. It gets her a small smile in response.
“Technically,” Elliot says, “I’m supposed to be at Quantico.” He stands, hands slipping inside his pockets as he steps toward her. “You drinking?” he asks, and tilts his head towards the bottle enclosed in brown. Her fingers tighten around the paper bag as her shoulders lift, a small shrug.
“Tradition,” she jokes, but it doesn’t land. The single word leaving a bitter taste in her mouth.
They’re on her couch not ten minutes later, the bottle unopened and tucked away at the back of her cabinet, her hands warmed by a cup of tea as the screen of her television plays some black-and-white film from the 1950s.
“I don’t know how you like these,” Elliot says, but he watches it with her anyway.
-
Take the day, Cragen tells her after the burial, and Olivia thinks she must be slipping, because she’d only taken half when Serena had passed and they all bloody know it.
She accepts the offer anyway.
-
“I don’t know why I’m this upset,” she admits later, as her apartment darkens with the sky outside. It’s true, she thinks. She’d barely even liked Sonya half the time, and yet here she is, feeling as if she’s on the brink of a breakdown over things she can’t begin to explain.
It’ll pass. She knows it will—it always does. But it’s harder to shake the feeling, lately, and she’s having trouble pinpointing why.
“You don’t need to justify it,” Elliot tells her, and Olivia exhales: slow and shaky. It could almost be a laugh. Simple fact, she thinks, and her chest tightens involuntarily.
He reaches out, then. His hand curling around the back of her neck, squeezing the dip of her shoulder. His hands are cold against her skin, but that’s not what makes her breath hitch: the contact an unexpected gesture that makes her body still and then melt, the tension easing out of her bit by bit.
Sometimes she thinks she’s touch-starved. Other times, she’s simply not thinking about it.
Elliot watches her. She can feel it: careful and contemplative. He doesn’t move his hand, the calloused edge of his thumb drawing small, soothing circles against the side of her neck as she fights the urge to lean into it.
“Come here,” Elliot says, softly, like he knows what she wants, and really, she wouldn’t be surprised if he did.
She goes with little prompting.
-
Often, she finds herself thinking of this thing between them as a landslide waiting to happen: the collapse of boundaries, rules, restrictions a foreseeable development in their future. Inevitable. Propelled by their own actions or inactions.
She wonders if her mother would have approved of the metaphor.
-
They wind up in her bed somehow—somehow. She’s not even sure she’ll remember it tomorrow. His arms are around her, still, her body pressed against his side, head tucked against the solid weight of his chest: the steady rise and fall of his breathing more of a comfort than she’d ever care to admit.
It’s the most he’s touched her in years, and she has no fucking clue how they’re ever going to turn back, now. Has to dispel the hopeful murmur of, maybe you won’t, before the thought can fully develop.
“You know, another thing about Aquarius,” Elliot starts, one hand stroking down her back and catching on the hem of her shirt, his fingers slipping beneath the fabric to press against the dip of skin, “is that—”
“Shut up about astrology,” she tells him, but there’s no heat behind it, her mouth curved in a small, secretive smile that she hides against his side. He laughs, and she feels the ripple of it beneath her cheek; the warmth that transfers to her body from his.
It’s as close to content as she’s been in a while.
but i can put it down
in the pleasure of your company