Chapter Text
On a Saturday night in late September, Sonny Carisi found himself holed up inside a police van with his partner Amanda Rollins, staking out a fertility clinic in Rockland County, thirty or forty miles north of the city. The clinic was run by two doctors, Jonathan and Rachel Lampeter, who’d allegedly implanted a rape victim with an embryo while she was recovering from surgery in a downtown Manhattan hospital. Carisi wasn’t one to bust balls (he was), but he nevertheless asked Lieutenant Benson why the hell the case hadn’t been sent up to the feds yet. Benson’s answer: “We’ll send it to the feds when it crosses state lines. For now, it’s ours. We focus on our victim, we get justice for her.”
Benson’s intentions were good. She was revered in some circles as a patron saint of justice. But that didn’t change the fact that Carisi was in a police van on a Saturday night, on a stakeout for a case that was almost certainly broad enough in scope to warrant federal attention.
“What, you had a date tonight?” Rollins teased, observing Carisi’s leg bouncing up and down, his mouth twitching in frustration.
“No. Just would rather not be here on my night off.”
“You did have a date tonight.” Rollins smirked in Carisi’s direction before turning her eyes back to the monitor. “They’ll understand, I’m sure.”
Carisi cleared his throat.
They sat in silence for a few minutes, waiting for either Dr. Jonathan or Dr. Rachel Lampeter to show up on camera and reveal that they were illegally keeping patients at the clinic overnight or conducting shady medical experiments.
Rollins sighed loudly. “Sonny,” she said, reaching out a hand to steady her partner’s bouncing leg, “look, what you do with your free time is none of my business —”
“Jesus, Rollins, you sound like my sister Teresa.”
“As it was rolling off my tongue I heard my mother,” she said with a shudder. “What I mean is, I don’t overstep and I don’t coddle, but —”
“Unlike me,” he said, catching the irony in her statement.
“You and Barba, how long?”
Carisi raised an eyebrow. “That’s overstepping. Nobody knows overstepping better than me.”
“‘Cause you do it all the time.”
“Yeah. My fatal flaw.”
“I saw you and Barba leave the bar together after Dodds’s funeral.”
“Doesn’t mean anything.”
“Not to someone who’s not a detective. I’m looking out for you because I’ve made this mistake before, and more than once. My involvement with Nick fucked up more than one case since the defense attorneys were so eager to bring it up when one of us was on the stand. I have a daughter with a commanding officer who can’t claim her as his own because of his undercover work. And before you came to SVU, there was another fling that caused a lot of heartbreak on my part.”
Carisi shook his head and kept his eyes fixed on the monitor.
“Liv,” Rollins said, and Carisi flinched. “It was Liv.”
“When?” he couldn’t help asking.
“A few months after I transferred. I sort of idolized her from her workshops, and she didn’t like me. It was hot.”
Carisi laughed. “The lieutenant wouldn’t sleep with someone she didn’t like.”
“Yeah, I know. She must’ve started to like me a few months in. But, oh, Sonny, the crush I had on her when we were first working together, damn it.”
“You’re telling me this because —”
“So you know about all my relationships that defense attorneys might use to tear down my testimony in court.”
“Sure,” Carisi said, “that’s why you’re telling me.” He squinted at the screen. “That looks like Rachel Lampeter,” he commented.
“Who’s with her?”
“Not Jonathan. I don’t recognize him.”
“There’s another. Two guys in lab coats. Fin wasn’t kidding, it really does look like they’re running some kind of mad scientist lab in there.”
Rachel and the two men moved out of frame and Rollins and Carisi grumbled to themselves. “Hey,” Rollins said after a few more minutes of waiting in silence, “all I’m saying is, getting involved with someone at work, especially in this business, leads to heartbreak at best and IAB at worst. Or the other way around.”
“IAB,” Carisi said with an affected snort.
Rollins’s eyes fluttered closed. “I didn’t see it coming either. And Liv broke it off with me because she was being promoted to sergeant, and was worried about how it’d affect our cases. Meanwhile —”
“Yeah,” Carisi said, puffing out his cheeks.
“When I helped Declan bust the gambling ring, when he saved my life, Liv and Nick thought I’d gone rogue — corrupt — and were furious. Nick forgave me, but it took Liv a lot longer to come around, y’know. So what I’m saying is, if you need a pair of ears, I’m here.”
“Thanks.” Carisi clapped his hands together and leaned in towards the monitor. “Between you and me, I had a thing for him, but like what you’re saying you had for Liv when you first started working for her, a crush. I needed — something — after what happened with Dodds. You know it shoulda been me on that call, we have a lot of experience with DV unlawful imprisonment in the outer boroughs, you know that. But Barba, he’s a lot more — not that this is anybody’s goddamn business — more experienced than me in a lot of ways, and it was good, and it was — it’s been — what I needed.”
“The sex?”
“What the hell else d’you think I’m talking about?”
“Comfort.”
Carisi rolled his eyes. “Yeah, comfort, whatever. I feel bad, to be honest with you, that I’m not a hundred percent on board with figuring out where this goes now.”
“This is why I’m warning you to learn from my mistakes.”
“Looking back, do you really see them entirely as mistakes?”
“No,” Rollins admitted.
“I’ve got to work this out somehow, for myself. Hey — hey look.”
“Shit,” Rollins said through her teeth.
The two men in lab coats were leading a woman in a hospital gown past the first camera, the one that TARU had installed in the main lab. The woman was stumbling. Each man held one arm as if to simultaneously steady her and prevent her from breaking free.
“The lieu’s not gonna like this, but we’ve got to radio the staties for backup,” Carisi said. “We’re witnessing an assault, no matter how you look at it.”
Rollins called for backup. “You’re right. We’ve got to get her out there. This isn’t a hospital, and whatever it is, it’s fucked up.”
A second camera revealed the woman struggling as the men threw her onto a gurney. “We have to go in,” Rollins said.
“We’re going in,” Carisi said into his radio. “Potential vic in imminent danger, rush that backup, friends.”
The leapt out of the van and found that the heavy iron front door to the building was locked. “If we break that window, the alarms’ll go off,” Rollins warned.
“Looked like they were wheeling her into the surgical room — the one they told us was for outpatient procedures — all the way in the back. I’ll rush in and you hold down the main exit here until backup comes.”
Rollins, with her gun in her right hand, picked up her baton with her left hand, smashed the window, and climbed inside. She helped Carisi in after her, and both looked at each other wide-eyed when no alarms rang out.
The unusual lack of security alarms made the situation a hundred times more terrifying for the detectives.
“Reminds me of some of the horror movie-level shit Munch told me was going on with a group of doctors in Baltimore a few years ago,” Rollins whispered.
They stuck to their plan. Carisi ran for the surgical room in the back while Rollins secured the front of the building.
“Drop it, let the lady go!” she heard Carisi shout, his voice echoing through the empty hallways.
Just as sirens began to wail outside, Rollins heard the crash of metal against metal, two gunshots, and then nothing.
The woman they’d seen on camera came stumbling out from the back of the office. She fell into Rollins’s arms just after Rollins unlocked the front door for a state special operations team.
“My partner’s in the back,” Rollins said. “I’m not getting anything from him on my radio, heard two shots, you’ve got to get to him.”
The special ops team headed down the hall and Rollins radioed for an ambulance. “Hey,” she said to the woman in her arms, “can you tell me what happened?”
“My doctor referred me,” she sobbed, “and I thought it was safe, ‘cause my doctor referred me.”
“Okay, well, you’re safe now, help is coming very soon. Can you tell me your name and whatever you remember about what happened?”
Rollins heard another gunshot and “officer down!” and “he’s not here!” over her radio so she decided that, despite her fears for Carisi, she could best protect the woman in the hospital gown by leading her outside to wait for the ambulance.
Terror that the “officer down” was Carisi crept into Rollins’s heart. Worse, however, was the “he’s not here.”
“My name’s Ariela Dashkin,” the woman said as Rollins helped her outside. “My doctor — um, Gerald Nord on the Upper West Side — he sent me to the Lampeters because the regular fertility treatments weren’t working for me. I agreed at first to what they wanted me to try —”
“Breathe, okay?’ Rollins said, attempting to comfort Ariela while getting the full story out of her.
Ariela nodded, and more tears ran down her cheeks. “They’re horrible people. I thought I was just going to tell them that adoption was a better route for me, and, uh —”
“My name’s Amanda,” she said gently.
“They’re absolutely nuts, those doctors. They were going to implant an artificial second uterus in me, made it sound like it was an experimental procedure in all the medical journals. When I found out what they were doing had never gone through the FDA or any medical boards, I was suspicious. When I told them I changed my mind, they locked me in here.”
“I’ll come see you at the hospital and get your full statement.” Rollins jotted down Ariela’s name and a few notes as the paramedics helped her to an ambulance. At the top of her notes: ARTIFICIAL 2ND UTERUS???
She wasn’t sure whether to hope the feds took the case away from SVU or hope the feds left it with them.
Lieutenant Talia Ramirez, a commanding officer with the state police, approached Rollins. “There’s secret rooms and probably a hidden cellar in there,” she said. “We need all the layout maps you have.”
Rollins took Ramirez back to the police van she’d been sitting in with Carisi less than an hour earlier. “We can’t locate Detective Carisi,” the lieutenant admitted, “which is why we’re looking for an entrance to a hidden cellar. Carisi’s radio and gun were left in the surgical room.”
“Break open the floors.”
“We’ll get there,” Ramirez said.
“You’ve got to let me go back in with you. I can’t leave my partner behind.”
“Your lieutenant isn’t going to want to —”
“Lose both of us, right,” Rollins said, a slight eye-roll masking her intense worry.
An hour in, the state sent a second team to determine how to safely access the hidden cellar from the building or the street. An hour after that, a federal team showed up to assist them. And, just before sunrise, Olivia Benson arrived on the scene.
Rollins first saw her at a distance, being briefed by Lieutenant Ramirez. Benson then moved in closer, examining the exterior of the building and then approaching Rollins, patting her on the back.
“He’s tough,” Benson assured her. “Take the squad car. Go home, be with Jesse, get some rest.”
Rollins bit her lip. “They’ll need my statement when they find him.”
“You already gave it.”
“I know, but if —” She trailed off, pushing the worst case scenario from her mind. “All right. I’ll head home.”
“You can’t think like that, Amanda,” Benson said, her own voice breaking as her concerned frown belied her attempts at reassurance. She raised her arms slightly, inviting Rollins into a hug. “He’ll be fine. We’ll have him home by the end of the day.”
Rollins allowed herself to rest her head on Benson’s shoulder for a split second, then broke the embrace. “Ever since Dodds, I —”
“I know,” Benson said, “same here.”
They heard a loud crash from inside the building and then saw officers scrambling to get through the front door. Benson and Rollins followed slowly behind them, weapons up, one foot in front of the other. A gunshot rang out somewhere below them.
“I need medics!” they heard Ramirez shout. “And I need the other doctor alive, I need you to take her alive. If they’re both gone we’ve got nothing.”
Ramirez climbed up a ladder from a trapdoor of sorts in the hallway floor and rushed towards Benson and Rollins. “They were stitching your detective up when we got in there,” she told them. “He’s unconscious, looks like he’d been under anesthesia, all —” She brushed a hand across her stomach to indicate where they’d apparently “operated” on Carisi. “I don’t know what the hell they did to him, I don’t know what’s going on.”
“Whatever hospital they take him to,” Rollins said, “you’ve got to make sure they run checks on everybody who works on him. Listen to me, listen, okay, that woman they had in there, Ariela, she said her doctor in Manhattan sent her to these people. That means there’s ordinary run-of-the-mill gynecologists out there sending their patients —”
She stopped when she saw the medics carry Carisi out on a stretcher. “Sonny,” she whispered, moving closer to him.
The medics told her to back off. Benson placed her hands on Rollins’s shoulders. “He’s tough,” Benson reminded her.
“Yeah,” Rollins said, squeezing her eyes shut.
“I’m going to call Ed and make sure everything’s all right at home. Can you see if you can get another briefing on where we are? If Manhattan doctors are involved, so are we.”
Another “yeah” from Rollins, weaker this time.
Ramirez told Rollins that a state officer had shot Jonathan Lampeter dead on sight when they entered the makeshift OR in the building’s cellar; the feds told the staties to stand down and took Rachel alive, which was what Ramirez had wanted in the first place. The two doctors were the only people with Carisi in the OR. Two lab assistants were dead, but it was unclear whether they’d been shot by the staties, the feds, or the Lampeters.
When Rollins filled Benson in, Benson said she’d make sure SVU stayed involved in the investigation. “Something’s going on with this Upper West Side doctor who sent Ariela — the woman we went in there for — to these people,” Rollins said. “So I’ll talk to Ariela, and we’ll go after this guy. Nobody’s getting away with being involved with these doctors who did God knows what to Sonny.”
“I’ll call Carisi’s sister,” Benson said. “I still have her number in my phone from when we worked her husband’s rape case.” Taking a shallow breath, she walked off towards the SUV she’d driven up in.
Rollins walked two blocks in the other direction and called a different number.
“Barba,” came the quick reply on the other end.
“Hey, um, Barba, I forgot if we had a meeting today about the Ames case.”
“I pleaded that out,” Barba said, half-annoyed, half-bragging.
“Oh, right,” Rollins said. “I completely forgot. Was going to —”
“Okay, then, talk to you —”
“Wait,” Rollins said, a little too loudly. “I was going to call you to cancel our meeting because I’m still upstate. Carisi was taken hostage. State police and feds got him out but he’s in bad shape.” She pushed the words out as quickly as she could.
“Wh — what?” Barba stammered.
“It’s not relevant to our cases, at least not to any cases on your desk yet —”
“Tell me what happened to Carisi.”
“I can’t fill you in until Liv and the feds clear —”
“The feds. What the fuck did Liv send him into?”
Rollins struggled to cover the strangled sobs in her throat. “We were on a stakeout. Had to do with the Madeira case, the one where our victim was “accidentally” implanted with an embryo while she was in the hospital recovering from a brutal attack.”
“My God,” Barba said on the other end, his voice somewhere between a whisper and a gasp.
“They found him getting stitched up in a makeshift OR in the basement of this place, and —”
“What hospital did they take him to?”
“I don’t know yet. You want me to send you a text when I find out?”
“Please,” Barba said, and that was the end of their conversation.
Benson, meanwhile, had to return to the city in order to get her own people mobilized. She offered to bring Jesse to her place if Rollins wanted to stay.
“All right,” Rollins said, “just until Sonny’s family gets here. And I have to fill the feds in on Ariela, you know that.”
“I do,” Benson said. Then with a hint of wistfulness, “Thank you for looking out for Carisi.”
—
In the bar after Dodds’s funeral, Barba found himself in that sort of self-destructive mood you get into when the best friend you’ve been in love with for a year but won’t ask to pursue something more because of a serious conflict of interest falls head-over-heals for the head of IAB, when you’re getting death threats by phone and in elevators, when the sergeant you’ve been mocking for months is murdered by a rapist and domestic abuser.
To keep his spirits up, or to keep himself from indulging in a third glass of whiskey, Barba flirted with Carisi, who he knew had a crush on him. He also guessed that Carisi was still parsing his own sexuality at 36, and Barba didn’t have time for the sort of relationship he might have had time or patience for a decade ago.
But he was in a pleasantly self-destructive mood.
“Share a cab?” he asked Carisi.
“Sure,” Carisi said.
They wound up together at Barba’s place, making out against a living room wall before Barba removed his lips and tongue from Carisi’s neck, tugged on his belt and asked him if he wanted to move to the bedroom. “Yeah,” Carisi said, reaching down to palm Barba through his suit pants, “that’s what I want, Rafael.”
He could still hear the sound of Carisi’s moans as he sucked the detective off on top of the comforter.
“Hey,” Carisi said afterwards, and Barba couldn’t help but run a hand through the detective’s dirty-blonde but graying hair, mussed and flattened by sweat, “let me —”
“It’s okay, Sonny,” Barba said, and Carisi laughed at the sound of his own name on Barba’s lips. “You don’t have to do anything.”
“What do I look like,” Carisi said, lifting his head to kiss Barba, “a —”
“This is neither the appropriate time nor place nor decade for that kind of talk,” Barba teased.
“How about let me show you what I can do with my mouth on your balls, how’s that for appropriate?”
“Better,” Barba said, raising an eyebrow.
At three in the morning, Carisi started to rise out of bed. “Don’t go,” Barba said accidentally, sleepily.
Carisi stopped in his tracks, paused for a moment, and then laid back down. “You all right, Rafael?”
“I’m fine. You’re not.”
“We, uh, can’t let people know about this or defense attorneys will tear apart all your cases from the last two years, even though this is the only time we —”
“Sonny.”
Carisi moved in closer. “So all I had to do to convince you to call me Sonny was get you off? Wish I’d known that a couple months ago.”
In the dark, Barba smirked. “Come here, Carisi.”
“What, no more Sonny?”
“Sonny,” he said, drawing out the two syllables and drawing Carisi into his arms, then moving in for a kiss. “Sonny.” One more kiss — deep, desperate, passionate and lingering this time — and one more “Sonny.”
He could feel the cool, wet tears staining Carisi’s cheeks. “I’m sorry,” Carisi said. “Can’t get it out of my head that it should have been me on that call, shoulda been me and my experience with DV.”
“Shh,” Barba said, holding Carisi tighter, an overwhelming need to comfort the man who’d been an enthusiastic-but-smart thorn in his side for almost two years washing over him. “There’s nothing any of us could have done. Nothing. Sleep, Sonny, sleep in a while and in the morning we can go on with our lives and not create a defense attorney field day at the DA’s office.”
For the rest of May, Barba couldn’t stop thinking about the night he and Carisi had spent together, about how Carisi had needed comfort just as much as he did.
In early June, he and Carisi had dinner at his place and talked about psychic sore spots that neither of them had touched for years. They wound up in bed before dessert.
By July, Carisi was enthusiastically talking about what he wanted to do to Barba and what he wanted Barba to do to him. Barba was in the sort of relationship he didn’t think he had time for, and he didn’t mind at all, because even though they were mismatched experience-wise, and even though the potential for conflicts of interest was horrendous, the sparring and laughter and companionship and sex were exactly what Barba needed when Carisi was on the other side of all those things. He worried that Carisi’s self-doubt extended well beyond what defense attorneys might do to the DA’s office, but when they were together, he sensed none of that.
The bitter part of him saw the conflict of interest as revenge.
The kinder part of him was falling a little bit in love with Sonny Carisi.
When he rushed into Cortlandt Hospital just before noon he was slightly relieved that neither Liv nor Tucker nor anybody from IAB was there to see him looking upset and disheveled. He nodded at Bella Carisi and went over to Rollins, who led him into the hallway outside the waiting room.
“His parents are visiting him now in recovery,” Rollins said, “and I’’ve got to get home to Jesse, but this case is a goddamn mess, and what happened to Sonny might be a lot worse than any of us thought, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“Go home,” Barba told her. “The case, the original case, will have to go to federal prosecutors anyway.”
Rollins tilted her head to the side, feigning confusion.
“Obviously you called me for a reason. I’m surprised he said anything to you.” His face fell. “What happened?”
“Those doctors implanted something in — or outside of — Sonny’s stomach and the surgeons here couldn’t remove it because there’s explosive devices attached to either side.”
“Has a bomb squad been called?”
“Of course. They’re in with the surgeons now. The surgeons might have to open Sonny up again before the end of the day. Liv and the state lieutenant are questioning one of the doctors who did this to him. But nobody’s told Sonny yet. We’re not telling him until the surgeons and the explosives experts know for sure what’s going on. This is way outside everyone’s experience.”
“I should head back down to the city and —”
“You know you’re of more use here than down there.”
“What am I supposed to do? He’s only out to Bella, and even she doesn’t know about us.”
“You can’t be involved in the —” Rollins bit her lip and cut herself off.
“What?” Barba prompted.
“I need to talk to a surgeon.”
“Rollins,” Barba pleaded, “tell me.”
“Those doctors, the Lampeters, are fucking mad scientists if that’s even really a thing. I hope Rachel — she’s the one of the two they took alive — talks, she’d better talk. The woman Carisi and I rescued last night, Ariela, said they were trying to implant an artificial uterus in her.”
Barba’s eyes bugged out of his head.
“Yeah,” Rollins said slowly, seeing that they were on the same page.
“That can’t —”
“There’s a lot of things I thought couldn’t happen before I came to Manhattan SVU.”
By two o’clock, Rollins and Barba were in a conference room with two surgeons and Bella Carisi. “I’ve got to get home to my baby,” Rollins said, threading her fingers through her hair, “and one of you folks gets to tell Sonny he’s pregnant with an embryo and two small explosive devices.”