Chapter Text
He’s still wearing his boots.
It’s the first thing she notes when she sees him. When her seeking gaze finally falls upon him, and she feels that familiar rush of certainty. After she has found him, because he didn’t answer when she arrived, nor when she called out a greeting while shucking the trappings of her day. Not as she discarded her status as Captain and the associated pressures and pains, progressing through the darkened apartment. She did so noisily, with intention – clumsily toeing off her shoes at the door, locking her gun and badge alongside his in the safe, dropping her purse on the counter (Elliot hates that), pulling her arms out of the starchy structure of her blazer and tossing it on the back of a kitchen stool at the island (he hates that, too) as she wandered towards the bedroom. The noise is as much for her as it is for him.
Maybe he isn’t triggered by an unexpected shadow appearing in what should be the untested safety of his own home, but she always will be.
Anyone would, she tells herself.
A quick text exchange earlier in the day established that they would spend the night at his place – a rare occurrence, but Noah is at a week-long dance camp, and the absence of her beloved son has disrupted the sometimes-tenuous cadence of their play at normal. Maybe even more so than the periodic presence of his own grown children.
His home is a dichotomy, dark as a graveyard in the evenings, absent of candles and lowlight and warmth. But brilliant and inviting – maybe even awe-inspiring – in the mornings, when tendrils of sunlight reach every corner, hearkening the day and what’s to come with encouragement rather than doubt.
It’s cool and shadowed now, quiet and just a bit eerie. She tries to ignore the hairs that raise at the back of her neck, the remembrance of an insidious whisper – welcome home, Detective Benson – that feels more possible in the inky darkness. She envies both Serena and Bernie for a brief, guilty moment. The varying possibilities of oblivion.
Sometimes she hates all she can remember.
Sometimes all she remembers is him.
She crosses the threshold, eyeing those boots, wondering if he ever did that in the years when they were partners. If he stumbled home, shell-shocked by the events of the day, steadfastly unwilling to admit the help he needed to navigate through it. If he ran his big hands over the heads of his tow-headed daughters and gripped the still-fragile slimness of his young son’s shoulder, if he kissed his pretty, seemingly uncomplicated wife and collapsed on the bed with his shoelaces still tied. Secure in the knowledge of family, that someone would take care of him.
She always took off her shoes at the door.
His wife wasn’t uncomplicated, she reminds herself. Kathy was a woman who consigned her life to all-encompassing roles as wife and mother when she was merely a child herself, who shared a husband with a consuming job and a decade-plus partner she wasn’t sure she trusted, who at times wanted to leave but repeated the same cycle that established the rules and regiments of her life in the first place. Kathy was a woman who was inconsistently loved and brutally killed, who deserved better.
She was a woman who wanted to hurt Olivia rather than see her husband reconnect with the person who for years guarded his back and held his secrets.
She was human, she was flawed. Someone with whom Olivia cannot help but feel affinity, now.
She hates that sometimes. There are days when she wants to tell Elliot, to make him carry it with her. But she remembers the wedding ring, how he used to see Kathy, after the bomb, after he’d seemingly pulled the fraying edges of himself back together. How shaken he was. How uncharacteristically open with her. So, she allows him to let Kathy go. His pretty, not-so-uncomplicated wife can haunt her, instead.
Olivia always wanted to take on his pain, to send him home in one piece, in the early years of their partnership.
It wasn’t until after he was gone that she realized she had too much pain of her own to carry the trauma for them both. Now, she thinks they’ve taken up each other’s respective burdens. She the keeper of his losses, he the guardian against her traumas.
She’s not certain it’s healthy. But she knows that neither of them gives a damn.
“Elliot,” she whispers, hovering at the doorframe. She wants to wake him – she wants those piercing blue eyes on her, pinning her to the here and now.
It hasn’t even been that bad of a day, in the grand scheme of things. She’s had darker days, more dangerous ones, so many times over the years. Enough times that she questions her own sanity in staying with the job, with the unit. But it’s the truest family she’s ever known. Even though she has Noah, now. Even though Fin is more brother than compatriot, at this point. Even though she thinks she has him.
The job is what brought them all to her.
It gives, she thinks, and it takes away.
She eyes him, his muscled form still fully clothed, the clenched jaw – even in sleep – now that he has finally shaved that beard. She liked it for a moment, she recalls. And told him so. But she likes him best like this, when she can see the version of him with more hair and less bulk shining through. The version of him who promised her things, who watched her back, who seemed to be the only constant she’d ever know. There are times that she can admit that she loves all versions of him, but she misses the version she believed would never, ever leave her.
She forgives him each and every day.
She’s never told him that, but she often wonders if he has to do the same for her. She hasn’t been brave enough to ask.
Like an echo of the apartment’s dissonance, a similar disconnect of emotion breaks over her as she stares at him. It’s familiar, the fury mixed with the fondness, overwhelming love and heartbreaking betrayal. Acceptance and denial. She creeps closer to the bed, abandoning the bid to wake him, wanting to gaze at him in an unobserved moment, instead.
Her breath catches a little when she sees the bruise, faint shadowing around his right eye, feathering into the five o’clock shadow that darkens his jawline. Her fingers trail a light path down his cheek, her heart clenching at the idea of someone hurting him, even as she considers all the more significant damage that they both have borne.
He’s not attractive in the vein of other men she’s known, some of whom have known her in return. He doesn’t have the debonair grin that David flashed at her for a fleeting moment in time, he doesn’t have the dark-eyed, boyish good looks that the partner who replaced him sported. He doesn’t have Brian’s easy smile, or Ed’s stoic self-certainty. His appeal careens from strong and in-control to wild and untamed in a heartbeat, and his rough-hewn face usually speaks more to brutality than charm.
But somehow that feels natural, another sign that where they are now is where they should be. She can dispassionately acknowledge her own beauty, even as she has navigated increasing maturity and age. But at the same time, it’s not an easy, straightforward beauty. Hers is not the symmetric perfection that she sees gracing the covers of magazines, that she sees on the tv shows she uses to lull herself to sleep at the end of the day. Hers is a question rather than a statement, discordant features that come together in a way that she knows – for better or worse – make people take a second look. Somehow his deviation from the standard seems to puzzle-piece fit with hers.
Besides that, she knows his features better than anyone else’s, particularly because her son’s sweetly handsome face seems to bring more evolution with every passing day.
Everything just… keeps changing. And then it changes again.
Time and tide wait for no man, she knows this. But she wishes she could compel them both to slow, just a little. She thinks after how they crept to lingering, unbearable eons each time she was in the hold of men or monsters who would hurt her, they owe her.
Her gaze stays on Elliot’s still form, a desire to act ratcheting through her. She wants to do something for him. Something that matters, something that makes this moment just as significant as all those gone by, more than all those that separated them. It’s embarrassing, really, but she wants to stake a claim.
She moves to the end of the bed and looks at those boots again, the ones that should have been kicked off the instant he walked in the door. The ones that carry the grime and grit of the day’s torments, that have stomped in desperation in the pursuit of perps, that have kicked in doors and in the name of justice.
Unlike Elliot and his unwavering faith, to her – God is an elusive entity, or maybe not an entity at all. A fiction or a hope to soften life’s realities. But in this moment understanding falls on her like a shroud, and she thinks she can taste just a note of the reverence he drinks to excess.
She kneels.
His hands clench slightly, and her eyes dart back to his – but they’re still closed, his face gentler in repose, his jaw slack and his limbs loose.
Her fingers twine with laces as she unties the double-knots, pulling them free even as they’re stiff with dirt and dust. A memory of Serena flickers in her mind, her mother’s cultured, convoluted tones discussing the threads of life, the fates who spun and measured and cut them.
“Atropos,” her mother told her once, her words slurring late in the evening, her hardened face lit only by the dim overhead light in the kitchen as Olivia wordlessly moved an empty vodka bottle from its haphazard side on the counter, placing it out of sight in the trashcan under the sink. “She held all the power. The inflexible one, they called her.”
Olivia thought that then that Clotho was more significant – wasn’t the one who created life the true power? But now she’s not so sure. There is a terrible beauty in the loss of what’s already been created, what’s already known.
The laces fall lax in her hands, impotent now that they are not bound together, and she ignores the parallel to hers and Elliot’s codependence. She is strong on her own, she stood alone for years. But she has always felt the strongest when something binds her life to his – a partnership, a courtesy badge, a compass. She gently lifts his legs, one at a time, and pulls the heavy boots from his feet, holding her breath as she moves him, letting him fall back against the bed freed from the armor of the day.
The bruise worries her a little now; to call him a light sleeper would be a decided understatement. She always believed she woke easily, only just beneath the cover of sleep, perpetually listening for the creak of an unfamiliar footstep as often as she listens for signs of Noah’s presence down the hall – his soft, sleepy tread to the bathroom in the middle of the night. But Elliot – he is attuned to her breath, her movement, her sighs when rest eludes her. He wakes no matter how quiet she tries to be, and it’s instinctive, his knowledge of how to help her. A hand on her back when her breath is stuck in her throat, caught and held as she fights to free herself from the threat of a nightmare. A grunt of acknowledgment when he leans to pull the sheets down from her sweat-glistened form if she overheats in the night. An arm around her waist pulling her closer if she shuffles and sighs because sleep will not come.
She rises, boots abandoned on the floor at the foot of the bed, and sits next to him, the mattress sinking beneath her and pressing his hip against hers. Ayanna would have forced him to get checked out if there was threat of a concussion, she reassures herself. She would do the same for any of her squad, if not herself. He’s fine, merely exhausted. They’re both fine. A bruise is simply another badge of honor, another reminder that their fights are not theoretical and the job that they do requires them to put their bodies at risk, their very lives as the barrier against the worst the world has to offer.
She doesn’t know how to be anything but a shield. He has always been more of a weapon. A spear can be used as a cane, she knows, but that doesn’t change what it was shaped to do.
Almost unbidden, her lips press featherweight against his marred profile, sighing into his cheek when she suddenly feels his hand gripping the back of her neck, tangling in the strands of her hair, holding her there.
“Liv.”
His voice sounds, low and gravelly in her ear. She feels it everywhere.
He holds her steady as she jerks in surprise. Irritation flashes – how long has he been awake? But the flare ebbs just as quickly, the feel of his fingers loosening, rubbing the nape of her neck as he laughs softly against her, as she feels the smile on his lips press into a kiss at her temple. He breathes like that for a moment, and she lets him. She would have wriggled out of another man’s arms, the sensation of being restrained too much for her. It should feel constraining, being held like this. But it doesn’t.
Not when it’s him.
“Jesus, Olivia,” he whispers, and she doesn’t know why. There are times she can read him so, so well. But when they’re like this in the dark, with boundaries crossed and barriers broken, he is more of an enigma than he ever was in all their years as partners. Even when he left her, she understood why. She hated him for it, for a while, but she knew why even when she denied the implications of what it all meant. That they were too close. What closer would look like.
Now that they’re… whatever they are, now that they’re together, sometimes it feels like his pages are written in a language she doesn’t know how to translate. It doesn’t scare her, though. She’s good with languages – she’ll learn this one, too.
She pulls his hand from her neck and presses it against her heart, maneuvering down the bed so that they’re both lying down. She curls slightly on her side, and he turns his head so that they’re facing each other, hands clasped and hovering over her own heartbeat.
“What happened to your face?” she asks, ignoring the thin thread of tension running through her. Something in the room feels heavy and important, his tone sounds so awed, and she thinks it might be her fault.
She should have let him take off his own damn boots.
“Got hit,” he answers, almost cheerfully. It makes her want to hit him again. She quirks an eyebrow, instead, thinking of her varying therapists over the years. Never let it be said that she hasn’t grown as a person.
He sighs, and scrubs his free hand down his face, turning back up to glare at the ceiling.
“Perp got loose when Reyes was cuffing him. His head hasn’t been in the game, but I got the guy on the ground. Subdued him. Took an elbow to the eye in the takedown.”
It reminds her of when something similar happened to her, years and years ago. They were partners then, in the truest sense. Trying to bring in someone for questioning, she can’t remember if he ended up being the perp or not. But he was amped up, and with the element of surprise on his side, he hit her square in the face. She remembers that it hurt like a bitch, and she had to blink away the instinctive tears that sprung to her eyes before anyone saw them. She remembers Elliot punched him right back.
She bristled back then – she didn’t need him to protect her. She used to pick up that memory, handle it suspiciously in the years he was gone, and recall how the surety of someone else’s protection felt. Acknowledge that her worst nightmare came to pass when that protection vanished. Then she’d shove it aside, locked away from view, and tell Lindstrom that she was stronger, she was healing. If she said it often enough, then it had to be true.
“Not as fast as you used to be,” she murmurs, letting herself sink into the sleepy softness surrounding them.
He smirks and kisses her – it’s at odds with the feeling in the room. It’s a little hard, a little rough. His fight instinct hasn’t fully settled, she realizes. He appears calm, but she knows that feeling. Adrenaline still vibrates in his veins.
“Yeah, I am.”
“Are you okay?” she can’t help but ask. It’s just a bruise, but she would have stepped in front of that elbow for him if she could have.
“Yeah,” he says again, looking back at her meaningfully. Wariness and warmth war within her, because while his language is difficult for her to decipher these days, hers must have come with a Rosetta Stone ready-made for him. “I am.”
You know everything about me. Even the parts I’d rather forget.
He settles her more closely against him, so that her head is tucked into the hollow of her neck, pulling their entwined hands from his chest and positioning them lower over his stomach. One hand comes up and idly plays with her hair, pulling at the carefully styled waves that have long since gone flat. Memorize the moment, she thinks. She feels protected, taken care of – and for once it doesn’t steal her breath with the fear of what she could lose, doesn’t abrade like sandpaper against her skin, doesn’t bring questions she will never pose to him to the forefront.
Did you hold Kathy like this? Do you ever wish it were still her? Are you going to regret me someday?
How do I know you won’t leave me again?
He seems to read her, anyways – jaw slanting down to meet her eyes, hand stilling in her hair. The blue of his eyes catches the shadows, nearly black in the darkness, as they scan her face. She wonders what he sees when he looks at her like this. She wonders if he finds the answers he so obviously seeks in her. Wonders why she can’t seem to find them, herself.
“Are you?”
He wakes to the sound of a thud, what he knows is her purse landing against the counter. He hung a little hook in the entryway so that she has a spot for it there, and he’s not sure why she steadfastly refuses to use it. He’s told her fifty times if he’s told her once – it irks him to no end to have her clutter left like evidence in a crime scene, a time-stamped trail of her arrival in his home.
But when he examines it further, maybe it’s not really him that it bothers. The rule is a legacy, a pervasive reminder of Kathy and her routines, her requirements. An often all-but single mom of five trying to keep some semblance of order in a chaotic home, constantly messy home.
“Off the counter!” his late wife’s lilting voice calls out in his mind, half-heartedly scolding their ever-busy teens as they run from school to practices to recitals to football games. “Lizzie, your backpack! Dickie, don’t you dare leave those muddy shoes on the table – what are you thinking?”
A decades younger Kathy tosses a wry smile over her shoulder at him in his mind’s eye, calling back their teenage years for a nostalgic, shimmering moment, followed by a rueful shake of her head. A soft thank you, honey to Maureen during the all-too frequent times their tender-hearted oldest daughter passed through the kitchen to clean up after her rogue younger siblings. A golden vision of easier times he knows he’s romanticized and preserved, now that they are eternally out of his reach.
He misses Kathy, even now. Misses the simplicity that was woven through their good times, the “rightness” that a traditional, cohesive family seemed to instill in his self-image. He used to view it like a safeguard, rely on it just as he did his badge and gun. Used to wear it the way his daughters simply had to have the latest trendy shoes, the most popular brands. A symbol of status, a symbol of certainty.
He’ll always miss Kathy, in some ways. But he yearns for what the world – what Liv – still has to offer him, if he can manage to hang on to her. He hears the confident, nearly swaggering tread of Olivia as she progresses through the apartment that he now calls home, so starkly different from the normalcy of the house in Queens, the old-world charm of the flat in Rome. He doesn’t want Liv to feel held against a standard that Kathy created, one that has no reason for existence anymore. Besides that, he doesn’t know how he would measure, if she held him to the standards other men set for her.
He heard from Fin about her partner after he left – he got an earful about a lot of things from the grizzly old gossip. He told Elliot about a younger, swarthier, more handsome man. A man who withstood her disdain as she grieved the partner who abandoned her without a word, to hear his former coworker and sometimes friend tell it. A new partner who had her back, saved her life more than once. Fin told him how that partner walked her out of the depths of hell twice, moments on which Olivia’s right hand wouldn’t elaborate. Moments he hears whispered about in the stunned squad rooms and divided hallways she leaves in her wake. Moments she only fleetingly described to him before their first time, before she boldly unbuttoned her shirt and informed him in no uncertain terms that she would tell him what happened to her on her own time, and if he needed to break something to deal with it – it sure as hell better not be something in her apartment.
Fin told him how she let that man – Nick Amaro, he thinks now, turning the syllables over in his mind, reveling in the justified guilt – move in with her when he fell on hard times himself. She gave everything she could of herself, down to the security of her home, when her partner needed her. Elliot hates it, but there are days he wonders who he is in her eyes. If he’s as significant as a twenty-five-year relationship – absences notwithstanding – would imply. Or if she’s codependent with anyone who watches her back, given what happened to it when he left it exposed.
He tries to push those musings away – they do him no good, and these are jealous, ugly thoughts. So little of what they have reclaimed together is ugly, anymore. So even if she thinks back and finds him lacking, he doesn’t want her to feel that there is ever a comparison between her and Kathy. He has loved them both, over the years. He cannot apologize for it anymore.
Not when Liv is finally here, dark and lush and beautiful. Inexplicably both stronger and softer than he knew her to be during the years of their partnership. Not when he is free to be with her, when she has made the impossibly brave decision to welcome him inside her home, her body, her life. It still shocks the hell out of him. It warms him from the inside out.
He’s not sure what prompts it as he lies there, eyes determinedly closed and cheek still throbbing from a perp’s lucky swing during a scuffle earlier in the day – but he swallows a smile and holds motionless when her throaty whisper floats over from the bedroom door. Elliot? He’s always loved the way his name sounds when she says it. She never elongates the first syllable in a whine, often ends the last with a decided snap. His name sounds sure, on her lips.
Soft footsteps pad over to the bed, and the weight of her scrutiny washes over him; lingering where he thinks her hooded gaze lands. God, does she stay with him, somehow. In every conceivable way. Her scent, her touch, the sound of her voice. It’s a goddamn test in self-deprivation that he was able to stay away from her so long. An intake of breath catches his attention – she’s seen the bruise. He’d wager it’s on its way to a full-fledged black eye, at this point. Fucking Reyes. He braces himself, expecting her to wake him, to demand an explanation, to scold him for his carelessness. If he’s lucky, maybe the lecture will end with her grabbing a pack of frozen peas from the kitchen, curling up alongside him, and holding it against his cheek. But her footsteps move away from him, and she says nothing, just continues to breathe a little unsteadily.
Concern ratchets through him – and he leans into it. That’s a new sensation, too. He has always worried about her. Even when she’s bolstered with a vest and a gun, she has brought his protective instincts to the surface in a way that wasn’t appropriate for their jobs or his marriage. He used to try to tamp it down, trust in her ability to protect herself, even when she shouldn’t have had to. Now, he can show that he worries. He can tell her. When she allows him, he can go so far as to help her. He opens his eyes, ready to give up the act and face the coming reprimand, to make sure that she’s alright.
Once his vision acclimates to the relative darkness of the bedroom, he realizes that she’s not watching him back, she’s not even at his side any longer. She’s standing stock-still at the end of the bed, fathomless brown eyes glued to his dirty boots. He opens his mouth, ready to apologize – it’s his apartment but they’re both sleeping in this bed tonight, if he has anything to say about it – but he freezes when she presses the back of her hand to her mouth, then drops from his view.
She fucking kneels.
Arousal shoots through him, a lit flame blazing to inferno; he feels it everywhere. Jesus Christ, he thinks, his hands clenching involuntarily at his sides. His body doesn’t feel like his own. It’s tight and tense, straining like it’s being pulled in all directions, called to action like it’s been summoned by some higher power. It’s all he can do to force himself to stay still, not to lean down and haul her against him, not to stand so that he can watch her kneeling before him.
He tries not to examine what that particular impulse says about him too closely. He’s always been a selfish asshole, has always erred on the more stringent side of religion when he could. But the sight of Olivia Benson on her knees is not one that has ever been afforded to him. She has a decided disinterest in sucking his cock, but she’s the most adventurous lover he’s ever had, outside of that. And he believes that assessment would stand, even if his experience was more varied. Besides, he knows why her preferences are so well-established. It may have been years, and she may have suffered worse torment since, but he remembers her heartsick confession over cheap beers in one of their frequented bars, months after he asked her to tell him what happened in the basement.
She’s on her knees now, though, and he has a split second to wonder what she’s doing before he feels the tug of his bootlaces, and the potent arousal shifts just as suddenly into some sweeter, something gentler. Something unbearably warm and distinctly more innocent than he thought he had the ability to acknowledge any longer.
Something that feels remarkably like love.
She’s on her knees. She’s removing his shoes for him. He swallows the lump in his throat, briefly closing his eyes again to hold back the tears, almost painfully smarting behind his eyelids. She must have returned to his side while he fought to get his emotions back under control, because he’s still battling them in the darkness when he feels the impossibly tender brush of her lips against his face.
He lets go.
He holds her to him by the nape of her neck, a place that has felt like his since long before it should have, his other arm shooting up to hold her in place as she starts and pushes against him. She relaxes just as quickly as she starts to fight him, and he chokes back a faint sob, smiling wryly at the sheer force of his own reaction and kissing her temple.
“Liv.”
The warmth of her body floods his senses; she says nothing but stills, reclining against him, atypically soft and pliant. He is fucking humbled sometimes, by the trust she has in him.
“Jesus, Olivia.” It’s not enough, not nearly enough, but he’s too overwhelmed. He doesn’t have any other words at his disposal.
Outside of his children’s – and her son’s, these are the only names that truly matter to him.
She lies down next to him, pulling his hand between the breasts he has spent hours worshipping, much to her breathless amusement. I gotta admit, I didn’t figure you for a breast man, El. He’d rolled his eyes at her, unrepentantly weighing each in his hands, dragging his mouth along the underside of one before catching her gaze. Bullshit.
The action is surprisingly chaste now, though the aftershocks of desire, of need still pulse through his body. He holds still, waiting quietly until he can feel the soft thump of her heartbeat against the back of his hand.
“What happened to your face?” she asks. His brow furrows – she looks more worried than she should. It’s just a bruise. They’ve both taken far worse. Likely still will, as much as he hopes it’s him and not her. Never her, again.
He tells her, relaying the events of the day when she scoffs at his simple explanation. It’s nothing. He doesn’t want her to stress. Doesn’t want to add to the weight she already carries day in and day out. He wants to know what she was thinking when she knelt, what lurks behind her darkly lashed eyes. Her makeup is soft today, her hair loose and waving around her shoulders. She’s beautiful no matter what, but he loves her like this. Loves how she can look both seasoned and strong, and more like the doe-eyed Olivia from the first year of their partnership than she has in all the years in between.
Some of the tension seeps from him when she teases him, questioning his speed and strength these days. He sure as hell is as fast as he used to be; it just requires more and more hours in the gym to maintain it. Hours he’ll happily spend to ensure he can still easily carry her out of shot-up diners to the promise of safety and into welcoming bedrooms with the promise of pleasure. To ensure she looks at him the way she does when he strips bare before her. A little awed, more than a little hungry.
He smirks and kisses her – harder than necessary. He wants her, and that unflagging desire battles with his equally pressing desire to know what prompted that little tableau with the kneeling, with the boots. They haven’t spoken the words yet, and more than ever he believes it to be true. He wants her to tell him she loves him.
“Are you okay?” she asks, and there’s an undercurrent there. Something he can’t quite interpret, yet. Olivia has always walked thin lines – partner and best friend, support system and lover, Captain and advocate. Victor and victim. It lends her an air of mystery that she rips to shreds when her emotions rise too close to the surface, when her dime-size pupils drive too much empathy, and she holds her heart to strangers in supplication. He wants to snatch it back when she gets like that, these days. The squad, the victims, the world – they can have pieces of her, he’d never begrudge her that. But her heart? It’s fucking his.
He pulls her to him, and tells her yeah, he is, running his fingers through her hair, thinking of all those times over the years when his fingers itched to do exactly this. The years when he stared at her across their desks and hated her, as little as he could, for how much he wanted to know what the silky strands would feel like under his roughened fingertips. He feels them now, spread like a soft waterfall on his hands, his chest. He thanks God all the time for Olivia’s inability to hold a grudge against him. He knows he doesn’t deserve it, but he’s not sure that’s ever been more okay.
The bedroom was lightly shaded by the gauzy curtains his mother had insisted softened the place when she lived with him, before she left. It’s dark now, the shadows having long since made their lengthening trek across the floor until the waning light diminished them completely. The dark walls increase the effect, like they could be anywhere in the dimness, like they’re maybe the only two people in the world.
Something is off. It shouldn’t be, not after the way she prostrated herself for him, even if she only did it while she believed him unaware. He wants to do the same for her, to throw himself on every sword every pointed towards her, to stand in the way of every harsh word. Even the ones that have come from him.
I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be looking over my shoulder, making sure you’re okay.
He was so very wrong, then. So bullheaded, unnecessarily cruel in his crusade against his own fear. He wants nothing more than to be sure she’s okay.
“Are you?”
She says nothing for a while, and the unease steals over him, building with each breath he feels her expel. He can’t lose her now, not after everything they’ve survived, all the ground they traversed to finally get here. He survived Kathy, just barely.
He’ll have to be the one to go first, because he knows he won’t survive losing Liv.
“Elliot,” she finally asks in the silence, her voice deep and hesitant, “did you ever think about me? While you were gone?”
Fuck.
There’s a term he learned at the Academy when he was young and arrogant, when the years hadn’t yet started to take things from him through death or loss or age. Something one of his instructors warned him about, in the handling of firearms. It was the name used in firing a bullet from a gun, called “hang fire”. The trigger is pulled, the firing pin hits the primer — but the cartridge doesn’t actually fire instantly. A loaded gun, waiting to go off, resisting the timer. It’s dangerous, unpredictable. He told his oldest son about it one fourth of July, because the phenomenon occurs with fireworks when the burning fuse fails to immediately ignite the explosive and it hangs fire for an uncertain, unknown amount of time. Nobody stands to win when a launch hangs fire.
He should have known this was coming. All this time, and his Olivia was hanging fire.
He would swear his heart stops beating.