So I wrote a thing! This idea came to me last night and I wrote more or less continuously until I finished it, minus a couple of hours of sleep and that annoying work thing. Translation: this is not a masterpiece. It's the result of a sleep deprived brain with too many feels and very little editing so that I can get it out of my head and go back to what I'm supposed to doing, which is writing the next TG chapter.

This is a ONE SHOT. Really and truly. You don't have to have read any of my other fics to know what is going on. But if you *have* read any of them, especially TG, you'll notice a lot of little references and a few allusions to future chapters. There are also some minor details that I'm purposely vague about- can't spoil too much. Sorry.

A/N: this is emotional, but in a bittersweet way rather than being truly sad. Warning for minor character deaths and mentions of sexual assault and substance abuse. No sex, no violence. Title and quotes from in my life by the beatles...if you want to cry even more, listen to the song as you read!

Love and appreciation to all my readers :)

{I know I'll never lose affection
for people and things that came before
I know I'll often stop and think about them}

August 2034

"Thank God we're home," you groan, sitting down on your well-worn couch and putting your feet up in hopes of soothing your swollen ankles. "Sleeping on bricks would've been more comfortable than that hotel mattress."

"Hey, if it was up to me, we would've spent last night in our own bed. You're the one who insisted we couldn't leave until morning."

"El, you know what the doctor said. No more night driving for me."

Elliot scoffs, never looking up from his phone. "I could've driven."

"I'd rather be alive to see Lilly graduate," you say, fingering your new keychain that identifies you as a 'Syracuse University Class Of '38 Parent'. They had been given out to you yesterday as you arrived for new family orientation; Elliot had loudly complained that for what he was paying, that thing had better be solid platinum.

He had been in a gruff mood all day, and so it was out of concern for your fellow motorists that you insisted on staying overnight until you could drive the two of you home yourself. But despite the aloof way he was acting, you know he was full of emotion inside- the pride of seeing his seventh and final child off to college, and the bittersweet sadness of watching his youngest daughter fly the nest.

Three years ago, it was you who had been a wreck as Noah prepared to leave home. Elliot had been the one to reassure you, reminding you that he had done this five times before and whether you believed it or not, life would go on. And he was right; it did. You had the chance to give Lilly the 'only child treatment' that she had never gotten while her older brother was in the house, and you also got the joy of watching Noah grow and succeed beyond your expectations (even if it was from afar).

So having been through all that before, you thought it would be easier this time around. You knew what to expect. What you weren't expecting, though, was Elliot's reaction.

You suppose you should've seen it coming. Lilly had always been daddy's girl, after all. Father and daughter could fight like no other ("like her mother," Elliot would say), but it was that same intractable hardheaded nature they shared that bonded them together. They were both stubborn as hell and that earned them a strange sort of respect in each other's eyes, even if some days you swore that child was going to give her father a heart attack before she ever made it to college.

You've been hoping that once Lilly and Elliot weren't around to antagonize each other 24/7, Elliot might be able to reduce his blood pressure medication. Judging by the way he's angrily jabbing at his phone, though, you're beginning to think he might actually need to increase them. "Hon, come sit down with me. Please."

He does as told even if he still won't take his eyes off the screen. "The DG house was the first one her group visited."

"Did she like it?"

"Loved it, but she's worried because she doesn't think one of the senior girls was too impressed with her. How can- she doesn't even know Lilly! I said, did you tell her you're a legacy? Did-"

"You know, for someone who was adamant about her not signing up for sorority rush, you're getting awfully worked up about this," you point out.

"This is all your fault for putting the idea into her head in the first place." Although you hadn't been able to convince Lilly to attend your alma mater, she was fascinated by your stories of sorority life and knew she wanted to go Greek. This was just one of the many issues she and Elliot had disagreed on over the summer (although at this point, you think he would've had the same reaction if she'd announced she wanted to join a convent). "What if they reject her in the first round? She's gonna be crushed. She'll be-"

"Relax," you say, drawing the word out before placing a lingering kiss on his lips. "She will be okay. Whatever happens, she'll find her place. I'm not worried about that."

He huffs again and goes back to typing. "What if she gets a real asshole professor who gives her a hard time about recording lectures? What if she-"

"Then she'll talk to her advisor and they'll come up with a solution. She's old enough to learn to be an advocate for herself now. Stop worrying, and stop texting her. Come lie down for a while with me."

He follows you, but his phone still dings twice before you can make it to your bedroom. While it can be hard to get anything other than brief chats or one word messages out of Noah because he's too engrossed in studying and band practice to remember that he has parents, you suspect you'll have no problems keeping in touch with Lilly, especially now that you won't be able to sit down at the dinner table with her every evening as she breathlessly recounts her daily adventures.

It was one of the unexpected joys of motherhood, discovering just how amazing it was to watch your kids develop their own unique personalities as they grew. Noah had always been the more serious and reserved child; a boy who devoured all the books he could get his hands on when he wasn't taking things apart to see how they worked or composing his own songs on the guitar. Lilly was the one who was constantly on the go; who loved sports as much as she loved fashion and makeup and who adored being the center of attention and making others laugh.

Most importantly, they had grown into adults who you could genuinely describe as good people. Sure, they occasionally neglected their chores or stayed out past curfew or used your credit card to buy a $200 backpack without asking permission first. But your greatest fear, that they would succumb to the darker side of their DNA, never materialized. You're pleased that you managed to instill in them a drive to help others, and even more pleased that neither of them seem inclined to carry on the 'family business'. You had both retired before either of them were old enough to remember, of course, but they've both grown up with enough ex-cops in their lives to not have any misgivings about the nature of the job.

(Fortunately, none of their older step-siblings became cops either. But Nick may not be as lucky- his youngest, who's slightly younger than Lilly, has already started making noises about wanting to join the LAPD. Specifically, the explosives squad.)

For his part, Noah is pre-med but is considering grad school in something called 'medical physics,' a subject which he is passionate about and neither you nor his father understand. Lilly hasn't settled on a major, but she's already fluent in Spanish and ASL so you suspect she'll choose something to do with languages. Over the summer, she got the chance to shadow the woman who had been her childhood speech therapist and had deemed that a possible career- "if I don't go into acting like my brother," she cautioned.

The brother in question was Eli, who had struggled to find work for years until he recently got a gig starring in a series of popular car commercials. The timing was fortuitous seeing as how he and his wife were now expecting their first child. Eli is actually not a fan of his newfound fame and all that comes along with it, like being stopped on the street by strangers wanting to get a video with him singing the famous Canyonero jingle, but as Elliot had pointed out- there are much worse ways to pay your bills.

Elliot Stabler III isn't the only grandchild on the way. Elizabeth is pregnant again, and she should be giving birth to your newest granddaughter any day now. At 42, this pregnancy has been more difficult than her past five, so you and Elliot have spent a lot of time over the summer helping her and her husband with the kids while she's on bedrest.

Of course, she's practically a teen mom in your eyes. You still remember all the comments you got from total strangers when you were pregnant with Lilly at 48- not that they ever really went away. You're used to being told how wonderful you are to be raising your grandchildren or being asked if you're sad that you probably won't live long enough to see your kids reach some milestone or another. Truth is, your only regret about being an older mother is that you couldn't get pregnant a second time. Between Noah and Lilly and the stepkids and grandkids, you've got all the children you ever wanted, but you would've loved to have the experience of growing a little one inside you again.

"Still nothing," Elliot says, holding up his phone so you can see the message from Elizabeth that reads 'not in labor. Stop asking!'. "She says Kathy's gonna stay another night or two so they shouldn't need anything from us until it's time to leave for the hospital."

One of the perks of your unconventional family is that even with your kids gone, the nest is still not entirely empty. You won't have time to be sad about how quiet and still the apartment is...because it won't be, not when you're babysitting five of your grandchildren. You've never actually taken care of all of them on your own before, but you volunteered your services so that both Kathy and Elliot can be there with Elizabeth and her husband for the birth.

Getting along with Kathy is still a balancing act even after all these years. You don't think she's ever completely forgiven you for your role in her divorce, and you doubt she ever will. Even so, you learned to work together in raising Eli, and you know that she respects you as a fellow mother. You're friendly with each other at family events and Noah and Lilly consider her another auntie. Hell, you and Kathy have a better relationship than Elliot does with his son in law (i.e. Kathleen's husband. They've been married for 16 years and yet Elliot is still holding onto grudges from 2013 despite how many times you've told him to let it go. Yes, they're a weird couple. But they're happy together and they're our kids' favorite aunt and uncle so let. it. go.)

Kathy is not in great health as she approaches 70. She's had several surgeries in the past few years and privately Elliot worries that she won't be well enough to live alone for much longer. You thought you had a good grasp of your own mortality when you were younger, but it didn't prepare you for what it would be like to see people not much older than you succumb to illness and slip away one by one. Both Cragen and Fin had passed away within months of each other several years ago, and while Cragen's death wasn't surprising, Fin's sudden unexpected passing had left you shaken. It's why you never take for granted how you and Elliot are still relatively healthy for your age- blood pressure spikes aside- so that you can manage to keep up with all the kids and grandkids and still have some energy left over for work.

Of all the things you thought you'd do with your life, working with Elliot (for a second time) was definitely not one of them. You figured that you'd had a good run as partners, but you went your separate ways professionally for a reason. Even after you got pregnant, you both assumed that after your maternity leave you would go back to SVU and he would stay in semi-retirement, doing consulting jobs around the kids' schedules.

It didn't happen. And you're grateful it didn't, because being a full time stay at home mommy was unlike anything you'd ever done before. Having two young children with special medical needs was exhausting, at times even more draining than being a cop, but you look at how Noah and Lilly are thriving now and you're satisfied knowing that you did everything you could for them.

Eventually they were both in school all day, which meant that you now had this huge block of empty time that you were struggling to fill. Elliot's suggestion? "Come work for me."

That earned an emphatic NO.

"Come work with me. We'll be partners again."

"I'll think about it."

"That means no, Dad," six year old Lilly had helpfully translated.

But in this case, it ended up meaning 'yes'. You've been in business together ever since, sharing your combined knowledge with all sorts of organizations, and it's been rewarding to discover that you really can make a difference without personally being on the front lines. You're both in high demand as speakers and workshop facilitators, even more so after you've developed your own training materials, but being present for the kids has always been your first priority. It was the right decision for your family, and yet you're excited that now you'll have the opportunity to take on more projects and expand your reach (when you're not babysitting the grandkids, of course).

Beyond the work you do with Elliot, you have another project in the making- one that's much more personal. It was born out of a difficult time in your life a decade ago, one that began when a schoolbus bully informed a ten year old Noah that you had been lying to him about his adoption. He told him that you were actually his birth mom, that you had been raped and that's how you got pregnant with him, and that if Noah didn't believe him he should Google it for himself. A month went by with you at a loss to explain why your normally easygoing son had become so angry and sullen overnight. Everything finally exploded one evening when you asked if he finished his homework and you got a meltdown in return, Noah shouting in front of the whole family that he knew you were a liar and a slut and you got what you deserved.

Cue chaos. Elliot hardly ever raised his voice to Noah, let alone ever raised a hand to either of the kids, but if he ever had- that would've been the night. As it was, you ended up having to separate father and son for everyone's sake. Maureen took Noah back to her place to (hopefully) cool down, you kicked Elliot out so he could (hopefully) do the same thing, and then you called Nick and asked if they could keep the now-traumatized Lilly overnight. Then you started drinking.

Up to that point in your life, you had made two vows to yourself: the kids would never see you and Elliot fight and they'd never see you drunk. And save for a few incidents when they were too young to know what was happening anyway, you had kept those promises. Until then. Pandora's box had been ripped wide open thanks to some bratty sixth grader with unsupervised internet access.

It took a lot of time and tears and tough conversations, not to mention enough therapist visits between the four of you to make half a dozen shrinks into millionaires, but you all survived and healed in a way that you thought would be nearly impossible just months earlier. And it was during one of those low points, a night when you were all alone and losing the fight to keep yourself from picking up another bottle, when you poured all the liquid down the drain and reached for a pen instead. You wrote down memories that had never been committed to paper before, some of them things that you'd never even spoken aloud. You wrote not just about your past, but about your fears for the future, and then days later came the most terrifying part of all- you handed it over to Elliot and told him he had your blessing to read it.

He probably thought it was a set up, or at the very least something your psychiatrist was forcing you to do, but that didn't keep him from sitting down right away that Friday night and not moving until he had finished the very last page. After that, Kathleen (who, along with her husband, had gone above and beyond to support your family this entire time) volunteered to come over for the weekend and watch the kids so that you and Elliot could get away.

You drove down the coast until you found somewhere that looked like a good stopping point and checked into an unassuming little motel there, one that reminded you of the place where you had escaped to after Lewis's death all those years ago. You stayed up all night, both of you talking and crying and even laughing until you cried and then talking some more, and when you got back to the city you made an appointment for an intake interview at an outpatient rehab the next morning.

Ten years have passed since then. Ten years in which you can honestly say you haven't had a drink- not in front of your kids, not in private. None. You'd never thought before that total abstinence was necessary for you, not when you had managed to keep it in moderation for almost a decade, but this experience had taught you just how frighteningly easy it was for you to fall back on alcohol when you needed it as a crutch. It was better to eliminate it completely, to not have that worry about whether you were inching too close to the edge. You even let Cragen take you to a couple of AA meetings, something you swore you'd never do, and you still go occasionally when you need the reality check that introducing yourself as an alcoholic to a smoke-filled room of other ex-cops provides.

Besides sobriety, there was another unexpected new path that opened up to you. Not quite two years after finishing rehab, parts of your writings were published by a website in the form of a letter addressed to your younger self, a list of things you wish somebody would have told you a quarter century ago. (You acknowledge at the end that you were told some of them, multiple times and by multiple people, but you weren't listening). It went viral- a phrase your kids have assured you is long out of date- and from there it ended up as a chapter in a book of essays from you and a dozen other women. You don't consider yourself a Writer by any means, but you were encouraged by an editor to work on a longer memoir that could stand alone and the idea has always intrigued you. It's a project that's mostly been shelved throughout the years; sometimes because of your busy schedule and more often because it takes too much emotional energy that you'd rather spend on your family and your own self-care. You also worry about the impact it would have on your kids. You'd been published under a pseudonym before to protect their privacy and your professional reputation, but they were much younger then. It's harder to hide things from them now, and yet there's still so much you want to shield them from and so much you wouldn't want them to find out about through the pages of a book.

But you don't have to decide on any of that today. Right now the only thing you're going to do is enjoy a relaxing evening with your husband, congratulating yourself for surviving one child's big move while you wait for another child to let you know that your new granddaughter is on her way.

At that moment, both of your phones chirp simultaneously.

But it's not Elizabeth. It's a message from Noah in your family group chat: [hey so Ben and the guys and I are thinking of all pitching in to buy a van. it'll be easier that way to haul our gear to shows.]

Noah and his nephew, aka Maureen's son Benjamin, are lifelong best friends who are now roommates and bandmates. When they're not busy being future doctors, they're the guitarist and lead vocalist of a band appropriately named My Uncle Noah.

[uh-huh. buying a van. and this effects me how?] you type back skeptically.

[well I'm a little short on cash]

"And there it is," you say to Elliot, who's already started typing a reply.

[let me know how much you need. 200 max. But I wanna see this van to make sure it looks safe before you buy]

"Elliot!"

"What? He's a good kid, he works hard in school...he deserves it."

"Oookay. I hope you know what you're doing."

Not thirty seconds later, a new message: [Daddy, if you're giving Noah money for a van, then I need $150 to buy vintage Crocs. I'm the only girl in my rush group without them.]

"Crocs? Those things were ugly 20 years ago. How the hell did they come back in style?"

"Dunno," Elliot says. You don't even have to ask if he'll say yes to Lilly, but you do anyway. "Liv, she's the only girl without those shoes! They could make the difference between whether she gets a bid from DG or not."

You take the phone straight out of his hand and put it on silent, setting it on the other side of the bed before pulling him in close to you. "Sssh. We're relaxing now."

{in my life I love you more}