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“You said you tried some things,” Chloe’s voice was soft, “did you go to therapy or see a family counsellor?”
The woman sitting slumped next to Chloe shook her head. “Jacob said he wouldn’t talk to a stranger about private things and he didn’t want me to either.”
Chloe pushed the box of tissues closer and their victim, Marlene, took one and nodded her thanks, dabbing at her eyes carefully as they were swollen from the hitting and the crying. “Did you go anyway? Is that what started this latest brawl?”
“I went away last Summer, I spent two months with my sister in Vermont. I work from home so I can do that anywhere, and I helped her with her kids. I came home again in September and things were fine at first. Then over the holidays things got tense again and I found out Jacob was having an affair. He broke it off when I came home.” Marlene sniffed, blew her nose and winced at the pain. “I wanted to go away again and he got more angry than usual, he started throwing things and then hit me, tried to lock me in the bedroom.” Marlene started crying again.
Chloe waited until she was calmer, then softly asked, “Is this the first time he’s hit you?” Marlene just shook her head and stayed quiet.
Olivia turned away from the window into the interview room, knowing she could read the report later after Chloe gave her the highlights. She stopped to watch at the interrogation room where Tommy had the husband at the table. The difference between what they called the interview room and the interrogation room they used to talk to actual suspects was stark. The interview room had real furniture, a couch and chairs, a window to the outside, pictures on the walls. The interrogation room had a table, straight back chairs with no padding, no windows, no pictures. It had a one-way mirror and a camera in the corner behind a cage. It was far from friendly.
Tommy had taken the cuffs off the husband, treated his scraped knuckles with antiseptic and wrapped gauze over them. He’d done his best ‘just us guys here’ routine to put Jacob at ease, to encourage him to talk. So far he hadn’t asked for a lawyer, though he had agreed he understood his right to have one, as well as the other rights afforded him by law. Olivia watched for only a moment. Tommy was listening patiently to Jacob blame his wife for all the ills of his life, his marriage, and his need to find solace in another woman’s arms. Olivia tried not to roll her eyes and went back to her office, secure that her team was doing what they needed to do to get truth and justice and apple pie for all. Well, no pie for Jacob, if SVU had anything to say about it.
*** *** ***
Olivia was on the floor, on her back, in a bus station or train station or somewhere that had an overhead speaker announcing departures. The sound was garbled, partially drowned out by rushing feet around her but also by the loud thump of her own pulse. She had her hands to her neck and couldn’t seem to speak. She raised her hands and they were covered in her own blood. Her inability to speak became an inability to breathe, and the panic crawling up her throat from her belly threatened to overwhelm her and her vision started to go dark at the edges. She woke with a gasp, sitting up and trying to catch her breath, trying to calm her nerves suddenly afire with fight, flight, or freeze.
Rafael sat up next to her, put his arm around her shoulders. “Bad one?” She only nodded. “Light or no?”
“Light, please.”
Rafael reached out and flicked the bedside lamp, it gave a soft glow, not enough to read by but enough to see the furniture and floor. “Cool cloth, or warm?”
“Cold please.”
Rafael gave her temple a soft kiss, then got out of bed and headed for their en suite. He returned with a washcloth, cold and wet. He handed it to her and she tipped her head back, laying the cloth across her whole face. He crawled back into bed, positioned himself behind her so he could lean his back against the headboard, bracketing her hips with his thighs, then pulled Olivia against him, supporting her as she tried to relax into him. After a few minutes she scrubbed her face with the damp cloth and he took it to lay it aside. “Bad one.”
“Yeah,” she said, her voice husky with sleep and leftover adrenaline. “A suspect tried to cut my throat open one time, didn’t get the job done. It didn’t even scar unless you know right where to look. I had a very competent ER doctor, he paid attention in his plastic surgery classes.”
Rafael held her tighter for a moment, nodding into her hair, letting her talk. She so rarely did about the past. He murmured an encouraging sound, so she’d continue.
“We were chasing a murderer, he killed the parents of a boy and girl, then kidnapped the kids. We had him cornered at a Western Union office, or almost did. He made us and we chased him, he used the kids as a shield. He sliced me, ran with the kids. He killed the boy and took the girl. We found him again and he tried to suicide by cop but I wouldn’t shoot my partner to get him even though my partner begged me to, ordered me to. A sniper got the suspect while we were at a standstill. We found the girl, now orphaned and brotherless. It was horrifying in all the ways it could be. I dreamed that I was on the floor and bleeding out and couldn’t call for help.”
Rafael wrapped his arms all the way around Olivia, pulling her back to his chest, tucking his chin to her shoulder, holding her tight to him. “I’m sorry, mi amor, that sounds horrific indeed, all of it, the incident and the dream.”
Olivia could feel the tension in her muscles refusing to release, despite the comfort she got from her husband surrounding her. She turned her head so she could place a kiss on his temple, all she could reach from that position, then tried again to relax, putting her arms over his so she could lace her fingers with his. Somehow it felt easier to talk about the distant past if she didn’t have to see the empathy and love in his eyes, always there when she needed him.
“I didn’t hear about a kidnapping today, was there something else that maybe fished this out of your subconscious?” Rafael asked. Maybe if they could pinpoint the trigger for the nightmare, they could avoid another.
“I don’t know. We had a couple in today, Mister beat the daylights out of Missus because he blames her for all the issues he refuses to deal with like a grown-ass-man. She wanted to try to make things better but he refused. She left for a while and came back to find he’d moved on. Then he beat her and tried to lock her in the bedroom when she wanted to leave again and let him have his girlfriend back.” Olivia shrugged. “I have no idea why any of that is making me relive ancient history of my own misery.”
“Why is that your misery? You didn’t kill those parents and you saved the girl.”
“My partner blamed me for the boy getting killed.” Rafael tried not to stiffen at her words, tried to keep holding her gently to him, but she felt it anyway. “He might not have been wrong.”
“I am certain he was dead fucking wrong. I’m pretty sure that your captain at the time and your therapist later have said something similar, with less cursing.”
That made Olivia chuckle despite the gravity of the subject, for which she was grateful. “Yeah, along those lines.” She thought a moment about that case, that time period of her career. “It was a difficult time right then. My very Catholic and married to his high school sweetheart partner was going through a divorce. He’d always had anger issues and they were worse during that bit. Oddly I think it was his anger that comforted our victims, like his anger was their assurance that we’d bring the bad guys to heel. And he was good with kids. He had a bunch of his own, though he didn’t see them much even when he was married, we worked all the hours that the gods sent. We spent more time together than we did with our families, when I had one. And then we didn’t. That case broke us.” She sighed at the memory, the pain they had both been in.
“El told me that we always chose each other over our job and everything else, that we couldn’t do that anymore. He said that the job and me were all he had left and he couldn’t lose either, but he already had. I asked for a new partner and got a transfer to computer crimes. That didn’t last of course. I came back to SVU because it was where I did my best work. I was the one who left but couldn’t stay away. Then I left again when the FBI needed an undercover job done. I came back again, and life went on like nothing had happened. He got back together with his wife, they had another kid, then, well,” Olivia stopped. “Then he left and didn’t look back, it took a year or two but he did it, finally.”
“I don’t see how that makes it your fault the boy died.”
“The perp knifed me, grabbed the kids and ran. Elliot stopped to check me and by the time he got to the platform, the boy had bled out. If he hadn’t stopped for me, he might have stopped the guy.”
“No, the guy would have killed both kids and gotten shot for it.”
Olivia only nodded. They sat in the quiet of the small hours of the city night, never really silent but subdued at this late hour, the city thriving beyond their windows even in the darkness.
“I was so hurt when he left, without a word. But it’s exactly what I did, twice. I left but never went far and always came back. I guess my hurt was that he didn’t, or that he could do what I couldn’t, stay the hell away from this job. But the truth is I love this job and I think we do good in the world, at least a little bit at a time.”
“You do great good for one person at a time, and it may seem like one grain of sand on the beach but added together you keep the tide of awful from a lot of lives, and you spread the good you do as far as you are able. That’s more than most can say.” Rafael kissed her temple again, pulling her tight again to his chest, wishing he could shield her from past hurts. “You have family again, so many people who love you and follow where you lead. If he’s found half as much happiness as you, he’s lucky. That he couldn’t find that happiness with you is his loss. Lucky for me.”
Olivia turned as much as she could, being held to him, “We weren’t, ever, more than work partners.”
“I am aware. I am also aware that you’ve always been gorgeous and loyal to a fault. If he’d had his head on straight, he wouldn’t have gone back to his wife. Maybe his anger issues were partly his conflict of interests.”
“You can’t judge him on my biased view of the situation.”
“I’m not. Fin sometimes talks when he’s had a few beers in him. He knows you never slept with Elliot, be he also thinks that things could have been very different if you hadn’t gone undercover with the Feebs, as he called them. He really has a very low opinion of the FBI.”
“That could be natural or it could be Munch’s influence,” Olivia laughed, settling back into Rafael’s arms, hugging him to her as best she could. “I think the situation in interrogation today must have set my nightmare off, that guy was so angry. He blamed everyone but himself for everything, and I guess my own guilt fed into it. Elliot used his anger as a tool, this guy just became a tool.”
Rafael chuckled at that, the rumble a soothing vibration on Olivia’s back.
“I’m glad I never could leave SVU. I’m happier than I can remember ever being. I’m glad you came to stay with us, all of us.”
“Me and my big brass,” Rafael paused, “ego?”
“Never has a temporary captain done so well for SVU as Harris did, bringing you in. We should send him flowers or something.”
“We invited him to the wedding, he had cake.”
“I suppose that will have to be thanks enough, then,” Olivia grinned.
“Do you want to try to sleep?”
Olivia turned so she could lay her head on Rafael’s chest, curled into him and wrapping her arms around him as he held her. “In a minute.”
Rafael hummed his assent and kissed the top of her head. “All my minutes are yours, mi amor.”