Chapter Text
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[olivia]
The day she runs is unremarkable. It's a day like any other day, except, of course, that everything goes horribly wrong. The sky is blue with a smattering of white clouds. The air is cool, but there is still the occasional warm wind that blows across the bay. People still walk the streets on their way to work. Coffee still sells. Kids are still abused behind closed doors where they can't be found.
And she is determined, finally, that one kid will not go back behind that door. Ever again.
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But first…
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She always takes care of other people. This seems to be A Thing with her. She's not sure why, really. Probably something to do with an alcoholic mother. She doesn't like to think too hard on it, because it's not something she thinks she can change.
Or maybe she doesn't want to.
Sometimes blindness can be a blessing. Sometimes it's about coping.
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It's a long, long winter. It's one gray day after another, and the cold never seems to leave her bones. The witnesses, the crimes, the court cases, in some ways even the vics, seem to run together. She goes through the motions, but in many ways she feels like she's hibernating.
If Elliot sees her falling behind, he doesn't say anything. His gaze has not been on her lately, but it hasn't been off of her either.
There are times she wishes she hadn't given him so much of herself.
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Their partnership is comfortable these days. In a way that kind of breaks her heart. The time has flown by so quickly that she didn't see it pass. They're past the days when they'd disagree and go at each other like the wind and the sea. Battering until they were both tired and moving in the same direction again.
Nowadays people have given up. They are a package deal. Oh, let them be.
They are considered unchangeable.
Even Cragen has thrown up his hands and lets them sit on that thin blue line.
There was a time that she would have considered this a victory. But now she feels left behind.
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[elliot]
It isn't that he doesn't notice. He does. It's just that the two of them are so… constant. A lot of things change on him and he doesn't notice until one day things have clicked too far that he can't not notice. And Olivia is the sort who won't tell him, won't tell anyone, until it's ripped out of her. To be honest, he doesn't feel particularly entitled to know about her personal life anymore, and he knows this is partially his fault.
The winter is a time of change, and he can feel the different channels of his life sliding past each other, one up, one down, but so very, very slowly. It isn't a quick fall, like the last time Kathy left him. (They'd both left him, once. They'd both come back as well.) It's a slow slipping down that he can't quite grasp.
Kathy doesn't get angry anymore and it doesn't bother him. They've been slowly letting go, and there's no freefall this time. He just walks away.
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[olivia]
"Would you do things differently?" Elliot asks her one day as they sit in the bar after court and have a beer. "If you could go back?"
She has a feeling he's thinking about something specific, but she can't decide which of the million mistakes they've made might be bothering him.
"Yes," she says, and leaves it at that.
"Me too," he says. And then he looks at her and won't look away, and there's something in his eyes that makes them look gray, like the winter sky.
The names go through her head like flashcards: Plummer, Gitano, Rickett, Schenkel, Sennet, Harris, Bushido. The moments in their lives, in their job, that have bound them together. They remember the moments with names now. With a dry throat and a quickening of the heart. With a fleeting second of eye contact that goes deeper than the ocean.
For a moment there's a spark there, like the old them, and her heart trips up.
And then Munch is clapping them both on the back, and Elliot is laughing, and they both switch to bourbon.
In the morning she's pretty sure she only imagined it.
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And then…
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She is not supposed to promise things. She knows this. Justice is never a done deal. But she is really tired of assholes like Troy Watson getting away with their shit. She is even more tired of treating it like a big game of Pin the Tail on the Abuser. (Will she pin it correctly? Will the Abuser go down? Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen…)
When Grace, 8 years old, sits at her interrogation table and cries and says, "I don't want to go home!" Olivia promises.
"You don't have to, Grace. Never again."
Elliot doesn't bat an eye.
Cragen tightens his jaw and holds her gaze as she walks out of the room.
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[elliot]
"The kid is lying," Troy insists. And even if Elliot was inclined to believe him-which he isn't-the smirk on his face makes Elliot want to punch it right off him.
"Why would she do that?"
"Because I make her follow the house rules, and her mother backs me up. She wants her mother to dump me."
"Do the 'house rules' include night-time visits to her bed for a little under-the-covers tag?"
Troy snorts. "Don't be ridiculous."
"I don't find sexual assault ridiculous at all, Troy."
Troy eyes him. "Well, then, I guess you'll just have to prove it." He smirks.
Olivia moves so fast that Elliot barely has time to react. All he registers is Troy's chair going backwards and Olivia's fingers around his neck, and she's swearing in a voice that means she's lost it, and Troy is laughing almost frighteningly hard, and Elliot almost has to hurt her to drag her off of him.
Cragen and Fin rush in to grab Troy, and Elliot drags Olivia through the doorway, and she fights him all the way.
"What the fuck?" he shouts as he hauls her up against the viewing room wall, and then his anger is spent, because he feels broad-sided and it's Olivia and she leans away from him and her hands are in fists and they both have their boiling points.
"He did it, Elliot," she says, and her voice is soft and scratchy and it scares him.
"I know," he says. "I know."
"She's not going back there," Olivia states. And now her voice is calm.
Elliot doesn't reply to that. He hopes not. "Olivia," he says, softly, and he leans close to her against the wall, so only she can hear him. "You can't do that again. What if we'd been filming that? He's going to milk that for as much as it's worth, and Fin and Cragen are going to have to witness." He says nothing about himself, because lying for her is a given in his mind.
She snorts at that, and she glances at him with a wry expression, and he isn't sure if she's just frustrated with the legal system or making some remark on the irony of getting behavior advice from him of all people.
"You ever feel," she asks, quietly. "As if nothing we do makes a difference?"
And that's when he really feels how far she's slipped.
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[olivia]
He tells her, as they stand outside the courthouse having coffee as the jury is being selected for the Watson case.
"I'm getting divorced."
She absorbs it through a haze, frowning, and then suddenly she wants to laugh. "What, again?" She snorts.
"No," he says, and his face is that intense sort of serious he does when everything feels too real to him. "This is it."
She stares at him. "Elliot!" she exclaims, and it's a protest of a sort.
He looks away from her and shifts on his feet. He stays silent.
"I, uh… I thought…" She doesn't know what to say. She doesn't even know what she feels. She's angry at him, but she's sympathetic. She's not surprised, but she's sad. And she hates that little spark of excitement that leaps up into her veins.
"We were right the first time. It should have happened then. I just… needed a slower separation I guess."
He always has, she thinks. Change is something he's rarely prepared for.
"Okay," she says, because she's as tired as he is of this particular fight. And this thing between them might have been complicated and not always innocent, but she can honestly tell herself she tried. She did the right thing. Whether he can tell himself the same thing she doesn't know.
"It's going to take a while, with the kids and all. I don't…" He stops and he sighs, and he looks tired but he doesn't look broken like the last time.
"You need anything?" she asks, because it feels corny to say 'I'll be here for you, buddy.' And she likes to think he knows already.
He looks up at her, and there's something there in his gaze that sends her stomach flipping, even though they've known each other for over a decade now.
"No," he says, shaking his head, and he gives her a smile that she would almost categorize as nervous. "Gotta do this myself, you know? I don't want you all…" He pauses, and she watches as he struggles for the right words. "I don't want you all messed up in this, Olivia. I need you to stay away from it."
She's hurt at first, until she realizes what he's doing. How he's drawing a line between himself and his old life, and he wants her firmly on this side of that line. She knows him well enough to know that he thinks of her as something that belongs to him. In a life where he has rarely done anything purely for himself, she is the one thing he considers solely his. Well… her and the job.
It's been disconcerting and attractive in turns over the years.
"Okay," she says. She loves his family as much as either they or she would allow, but her allegiance has always been clear.
"Okay." He nods.
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And now…
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The jury doesn't buy it. None of it. It was always going to be a hard case, but Grace's mom won't turn against Troy. They see it all the time, but it's always been hard to convince a jury. The child psychologist they use is usually on her game, but even to Olivia her testimony seems weak. They use every technicality they can, and they make Olivia sound like a harpy from the Inquisition.
Olivia sits in the galley and listens to the blood rush in her ears as the judge declares Troy free to go and Grace returned to her mother. She's numb with the disappointment, until she looks up in the melee of the courtroom to find Watson staring at her. In the rush of people he holds her gaze and smiles a chilling, triumphant smile. And then he wags his tongue at her in an obscene gesture.
And the anger jumps up inside of her like a bonfire.
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[elliot]
"He'll fuck up, Olivia," Elliot tells her, watching as she paces back and forth in the hallway. "We'll get him again."
She shakes her head at that, and she wrings her hands the way she always does. He doesn't even think she realizes she does it. "That's too late," she says. "That's way too late."
He feels it too, that desperate disappointment. That urgency because they are sure Watson is a pedophile fuckhead and they have to send Grace back to hell. She shouldn't have promised, he thinks. Goddamn it, Olivia, why did you promise?
She's not even listening to him. He wants to grab her by the back of the neck and drag her out of there and maybe buy her a drink and just talk to her, but there are parent-teacher conferences at the school tonight, and he's still adjusting to being Elliot Stabler, soon-to-be-divorced dad.
"Olivia," he finally says, and she glances at him. "Are you going to be okay?"
She hesitates at that. She furrows her brow, like he's speaking an unknown language. It chills him.
"Go, Elliot," she says, quietly. "Your kids need you."
So, he does. But with a pressure in his chest that won't dissipate, no matter how much he tries to forget.
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[olivia]
There was so much more she should have done. So much more she could have done. There had to be. There was no way an arrogant fuck like Watson didn't leave evidence behind somewhere, and she's furious with herself at her failure to find it.
Her outbreak in the interrogation room didn't help.
She doesn't sleep that night, thinking about Grace and the way she'll have to walk back into that house with Watson the next day. About how she'd promised the girl she'd never have to go back. About all the things she should have done in the investigation. About how it doesn't matter because they can't even try Watson again for this case. They have to wait until he commits a new crime in order to start over, and considering how this one went he might very well kill Grace next time to keep her quiet.
For the first time in a long time, she cries in the darkness in her bed. Silently, because she's learned to keep it in, but she's never been able to stop the tears.
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When she finally gets up the next morning, without waking because she'd never gone to sleep, she doesn't actually know she's going to do it. She just knows that Grace is being picked up at 9:00 a.m. by an officer of the court to be returned to her mother and Watson. And she thinks that she has to go and see Grace and explain things to her.
She has to apologize.
She has to make sure Grace has some way to talk to her if-when-it all starts happening again. And maybe, maybe, maybe Olivia can get there in time.
She doesn't bother calling Cragen. She figures he'll know she needs some time. He'll cut her some leeway, because he's always been good like that.
She drives and she looks at the blue sky and the white clouds and she rolls down the windows and feels the warmth of the sun and cool of the breeze, and the unremarkable nature of it all kind of pisses her off. Like this is all just par for the course.
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And this is how it happens…
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She gets there and the social worker is dealing with press and paperwork and phone calls, and she looks at Olivia, surprised, and says, "Detective Benson? I thought they'd send someone else to take Grace back, considering your history with Troy Watson."
And Olivia sees the opening and she does pause, just for a moment, suspended there at the top of the arc, her career and her life and her freedom still intact and hers alone.
And then she plunges.
"They thought it would be good departmental relations," she lies, and she shrugs.
The social worker shrugs back, and then checks her watch. "You're early. I don't have the paperwork finished yet." She points at a staircase. "Go ahead up and see Grace, and I'll finish up." And then she walks down a hallway and into another room.
So, Olivia goes.
She goes up and she smiles at Grace, and she tries to talk in her most soothing voice, and she takes Grace's backpack and they walk downstairs and no one is there. So, they walk outside, and there's still no one there, and she puts Grace in the backseat and puts a seatbelt on her, and then she climbs in the driver's side, and she pauses.
There is still time, she realizes. Still time to walk Grace back inside and let the system continue on its way. There is still time to save her career and her life and walk back into the precinct and sit across from Elliot and look into his blue eyes and share coffee with him and let him comfort her.
And part of her wants to do just that. But then Grace starts to cry, and she puts the key in the ignition, and she says, "It's okay."
She drives off before anyone notices, but she knows it won't be long. She does not have much time, and the first thing she has to do is ditch her car. And then she thinks about Elliot and she realizes that the car is the second thing she has to do.
She pulls out her phone at a red light and it's just long enough to tap out the words.
And then she does the third thing on her short, very sudden list.
She disappears.
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