Rating: T, adult themes, some language and implied violence

Warning: Character death

Disclaimer: Not mine, Dick Wolf's and those folks at NBC etc. Lyrics are by Kate Miller-Heidke

Spoilers: for season 15 & 16

Pairing(s): Elliot/Olivia. Some Olivia/Nick and minor Olivia/Alex undertones.

Summary: This story will work so much better if you have no idea what's going on. So for now I'm just gonna say this and see if people read – Olivia. Elliot. Noah. William Lewis. Go.

A/N: I don't know why I did this and I apologise in advance. I was feeling dark.

It's the last day on earth
In my dreams, in my dreams
It's the end of the world
And you've come back to me…

i.

…nearly lost both mother and son…

The doctor's voice is low but not low enough that she doesn't hear.

His nearly bodes well.

Must mean she did her job. She's hazy on a lot of things but she's clear on that, at least. Her job is to serve and protect victims. Occasionally these victims are men. More often they're women, children. In this case, a mother and son.

Olivia keeps her eyes closed, not yet betraying the fact that she is floating close to consciousness. She wants to gather a few more clues on the case, on the mother and son and their status, on what exactly put her in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of her nose and going into her wrist. And with a massive, relentless throb where her brain should be.

The doctor standing on the threshold explains in a hushed, official tone that it wasn't the bullet that took her out. It scored her chest, lodging itself in the middle of her vest. Explains the pain beneath her breasts. Apparently she fell back on impact, cracking her head on the concrete and creating a bunch of words she's way too foggy to comprehend. They're probably words she's heard before but she can't remember them or what they mean. She can't even remember the case she was working, the names or the faces of the mother and child she was protecting.

She vaguely remembers plummeting to the floor. Then…just…nope.

Nothing.

A different voice says it's all the doing of one William Lewis. Or William Lucas. Lucas Williams? Or…Louis Williams? The name sounds slightly familiar but maybe it's just one of those generic names that sounds familiar when it actually isn't. Lewis is dead though – or so the voices say – and that confuses her. Because how…? The different voice, the one she recognizes as having the cadence of a cop, says it was his final revenge, perpetrated from beyond the grave. Lewis and his disciple had plenty of time to concoct a revenge plot while behind bars. Once released from prison, the disciple identified his mark, surveilled her while, figured out a close enough target— and that confuses her too. Surely the mother was the target…? Unless the disciple was enlisted to take out someone close to her…? Makes some sense.

He obviously hadn't succeeded though because they'd nearly lost both mother and son.

Nearly.

She's hanging on to that nearly.

Confident that she's gathered enough details to feign a basic understanding of what's going on, Olivia lets her eyes crack open. She's got a few niggling queries but she will drop them into the conversation at a later, seemingly casual point. Three men step somberly closer as she surfaces. A man in a white coat gives her an update on her condition but she's not really listening. She looks at the two men with badges – one of them tall, lanky and blond, the other shorter, solid and black.

"How're the mother and son?" she asks them, voice barely above a rasp.

They exchange a look and don't answer. The doctor ushers them out, saying she needs her rest. Olivia tries to lift her head from the pillow, tries to call the cops back. What she really needs is answers. And she won't be able to rest until she gets some.

Next time she opens her eyes, Elliot is there. Only he's younger. And he has way more hair than she remembers. And when she says his name, he replies that his name is Nick. Not Elliot. Nick. She frowns at him but skates right past this. She has questions she needs answered and Elliot will tell her. He's her partner. He has to tell her. Near brutal honesty is one of the greatest assets of their partnership.

When she asks again about the mother and son, Elliot hesitates before telling her, "The mother is recovering."

She presses him for details about the son but Elliot just tells her not to worry. He says everything's being taken care of. When she starts to say but he just smiles his smile and asks if she trusts him or not. She doesn't have to answer. He already knows the answer to that question.

Elliot sleeps by her bed that night, his jacket covering his bunched up body. She wakes once, telling him in the dark to go home to Kathy. Elliot shifts in his seat, answering after a moment:

"You mean Maria?"

Olivia lets the tube in her vein take her away from his question, from his voice, from the familiar blue eyes she can't see. She got one question answered at least – the mother is okay. Well…recovering. Odds are then, so is her son.

Next time she wakes, Elliot has long blonde hair and a slight Southern drawl. He brings her a hairbrush, some pyjamas and underwear from home. Slippers. A book. Her favorite tea. And a few photographs. A nurse immediately confiscates the photographs with a stern not yet. Elliot just smiles and asks how she's feeling.

No one asks how much she remembers. Except when they bring in a shrink. Clearly she still has her wits because she can recognize a head-shrinker a mile off. The first one gets nowhere with her. Olivia talks in circles and relishes it, playing games with the woman just to prove her competence. She's still got all her interrogation wiles, she remembers all the techniques she's gathered over the years.

The female shrink gives up and calls in another shrink. This one says they've met before, that they've had many productive sessions together, that they know each other from before. Before she can ask before what?, he tells her that he was the one who gave her the necklace she now wears.

Olivia fingers the necklace around her neck then asks why no one will tell her what happened to the little boy who was part of her case. The shrink doesn't answer her either. Instead, he asks if the name William Lewis means anything to her.

"Yes, he did it," she says, "he's responsible."

"He did what?"

"He's guilty," she adds, certain she's right.

"He's dead," her shrink says.

"I know," she retorts impatiently, "I killed him."

"You killed him?"

"I had to," she insists, "to save the mother and son. So if you're here for my badge—"

"I'm not here for your badge, Olivia."

She leans back in her bed.

The shrink pulls an A4 glossy photo from a file then sits on the edge of her bed. He takes a breath before handing it across to her. The kid is only a toddler with thin, straight, dark brown hair. Brown eyes. Chubby, ruddy cheeks. And a blue giraffe on his striped shirt.

"Is this him?" she asks.

"You don't remember?"

"No. I do. He just…he looks a lot younger here." She hands the photo back. "So how's he doing? I heard they nearly lost him."

Her shrink smiles, tucks the photo back in the file then rises. Before leaving, he tells her he'll come back and check on her in a few days.

The next time Elliot appears, he has grown bald and fat and she can't help laughing out loud. It's pretty funny, after all those years of ritualistic gym attendance, to see him turn into a greying old man. She stops laughing when she sees his eyes well with tears. Olivia apologizes and the shocked tears subside. He sits in the chair by her bed and talks about old times – drinks at McGinty's and Detective So-and-so whose face she can't quite place.

Every so often he looks up at her and asks, "Remember?"

He's acting like her grandpa or something and it's just kind of funny. He tells her to call him Don and that's even funnier. So she laughs and laughs and laughs. She laughs so hard that her chest aches for breath and her eyes start to water. She laughs so long that they escort Old Man Elliot out and stick a needle in her arm.

After that, nothing is funny.

Nothing is anything.

Everything is nothing.

It's dark when she re-surfaces and for a second she panics, not knowing where she is. Her steadily pulsing brain reminds her. She's gotten used to it, the constant beat, a comfortable level of agony. She lifts a hand, lets two fingers timidly trace the folds of bandage that securely strangle her skull.

The blonde Elliot comes back and brushes her hair. They watch infomercials together. People chopping fruit and vacuuming swatches of carpet. But he gets to leave when her cell phone rings. Olivia watches him stride to the door and shut it behind her. Then she switches off the TV.

The young Elliot with the thick head of hair and a perpetual five o'clock shadow sleeps by her bed each night. She tells him to go home but he ignores her. Like always. He doesn't say much. Like always. He just comes, sits and sleeps. They never did need very many words.

The bald Elliot returns and this time, she doesn't laugh. She talks about old times with him. About bars she doesn't remember and detectives that may or may not have existed. She makes up the names when she can't quite put her finger on the correct one. Bald Elliot seems fooled, relieved. He still loves her. She can see it in his eyes when he kisses her forehead before leaving.

Her shrink visits daily. Or it feels like daily. The days all blend into each other in hospital. She starts to question what's in the pills they give her each day. But again, she doesn't get any answers.

She wants to go home but every time she asks they reply tomorrow, like she's an annoying child who won't be able to recall the previous day's promise. Instead, she's transferred to another ward with pale blue walls and a pin pad locking the double doors.

In the common room, she regales her fellow inmates with tales from her job, most of them true. She changes some names to protect the innocent, can't recall others. But she's worked a lot of cases over the years. She teaches some basic self-defence to two female patients and unwittingly starts a brawl. The women use their new skills on a couple of men they don't like the look of, one of them a nurse. The nurse loses a tooth and Olivia is banished to her room for the rest of the afternoon.

She keeps asking the doctors, nurses, head-shrinkers when she can get back to work. Soon, they all say. Or when you're rested. Or just as soon as you're feeling better. After the twenty-fifth-hundredth time she spreads her arms and insists, "I'm fine!". She sees the look in their eyes and knows that their next move is to grab a needle. Olivia backs off, lets the topic drop.

The Elliots keep coming, bringing things. Flowers. Magazines. Candles she can't burn. The younger Elliots' smell is familiar. Each time, they bring with them the smell of stale coffee and dusty cardboard and sickeningly sweet antiseptic. But the scent leaves when they do, taking with it its strange sense of comfort.

The blonde Elliot brings some people by. She brings an Alex. A Casey. And a Calvin. Olivia can't keep their names straight and starts to feel like a circus exhibit.

At night, the young Elliot fills her in on a case he's working. He's trying to track down someone named Stabler. He talked to a Richard Stabler. And a Bernadette Stabler. But apparently these are not the right Stablers. The one he needs has left town.

He stops and looks at her. Asks if she has any leads he should follow up on.

Olivia rolls her eyes and crosses her legs on the bed. "Jeez, El, you can't run a simple trace without me lookin' over your shoulder?"

He just shrugs, smiling slightly. "Guess I just miss your input."

He's not allowed to sleep on the locked ward, the nurses throw him out at nine, two hours after visiting time has officially ended. Elliot squeezes her hand, tells her to sleep well then leaves.

She dreams. But the dreams don't make sense. They're only snatches of reality. A room in a warehouse but no people in it. Or people, but no context anchoring them anywhere. She can't work out which body belongs in which room or which face belongs on which body. She can't pin anything in time or work out the sequence of what she sees. And before she can figure it out— she wakes up.

She wakes to a watercolor each day. Of a mountain. She hates it.

Her life is back-to-back infomercials and she hates them too. Though not as much as she hates the food. Always swallowed to disguise the bitter aftertaste of her pills.

She's been banned from telling interrogation stories. Or crime scene stories. Or autopsy stories. Or pretty much any kind of stories, since all her stories are pretty gruesome.

She lifts a pair of scissors from the nurses' station and cuts off her hair. What's left of it. One half of her head is already shaved, decorated by a neatly curved row of surgery stitches. The other half…she doesn't know how it got so long. She just got it snipped into a pixie cut the week before. Easier for the job, for those early morning catches. Also, shorter hair equals less harassment.

One suspect has a particular hard-on for her. Literally. He likes to press it into her butt. The last time he did, she took him out with an elbow to the nose. Broke it. Got sedated again.

She asks her shrink to tell them to quit sedating her. She's not a fucking mental patient. He talks to them and they don't sedate her. Until the next time. But the loser tried to put a cigarette out on her. She put it out on him instead. Then she got cross-examined about where she got the damn cigarettes. Olivia just folded her arms and demanded a lawyer.

The Alex creature returns, floating through her door in a haze of perfume and perfection. Her hair looks glorious. Olivia wants to cut it only a nurse took the scissors. When she can't resist telling her so, blurting it out in the middle of the other woman's sentence, Alex takes a small crocodile skin case out of her purse. Out of that, she takes a pair of nail scissors. She cuts a thick, gold inch off the bottom of her hair and gives her the loose strands.

Olivia hides them in her pillowcase.

Alex takes a breath, shifts a little closer on the bed. Then she tells her that they tracked down Stabler.

"Elliot must be relieved," she replies. "He's been working that case non-stop."

"Yeah," Alex nods. "He has."

Olivia mirrors her nod. She wants to ask for more hair. But she refrains. Might come off as crazy.

Casey comes and watches a baseball game with her. Olivia has no idea who she is or what is happening in the game. She just waits for the Elliots to return.

Sometimes, Bald Elliot brings her twizzlers.

One time, Young Elliot and Blonde Elliot come together. She spots them talking in the corridor beyond the locked doors. The way they look at each other, the way they stand close but don't touch – she's pretty sure they're sleeping together. She's been a detective for… a lot of years. She knows the signs.

She gets shooed away from the doors but when the Elliots enter her room, she smiles and tells them it's okay. She gets how it can be between partners. The intimacy. The dependency. The never-ending time. They tell her they aren't partners, that they are not—

"Save it," she says, smile dying. "I always knew you'd go back to her." She waves a hand at Blonde Elliot. "Gentlemen prefer blondes and all that…"

Elliot takes a step forward. "Liv—"

But Kathy stops him with a hand on his arm. "Nick. Leave it."

"Yeah. Leave." Olivia tucks her feet under the covers, turning her back to them and lying down. "I'm tired."

That night, Elliot doesn't stay with her. The nurses don't have to tell him to go long after all the other visitors have left.

The chair by her bed feels empty. And silent. And the walls begin to close in on her.

TBC...