Alaskan Nights (A Law and Order: SVU fanfic)

Ch.30

A/N: Trigger Warning: suicide is mentioned in two lines of dialogue I indicated the with a '---s---' if you'd like to skip it.

"You wanna what?"

"Go to the Mountain Lodge. I overheard Rebecca telling Paul that you'd offered to take me up there," she replies.

"Oh," he sighs as for a moment there he thought that she'd somehow overheard his and Rebecca's conversation the night before. "Yeah, I did. But Rebecca shut it down pretty quickly...so I—."

"Well, I wanna do it. I need to do it." she declares.

Elliot narrows his eyes at her insistence. Truth is, he had in fact intended to bring it up to her privately because he did feel like it would be easier to convince her to get the surgery if she was away from the comfortability that Sitka offered her. Because in the time that he had spent in their daily bubble, it had begun to wear on him, so much so that he wondered if the environment itself had somehow influenced her decision. It was chaotic and cosy; wild but comforting. He needed to get her to face reality and as much as he would have liked to put all three of them on the next plane to JFK airport, Anchorage had to do for now. It was safe but not too safe.

So while yes, he wanted this and he wanted her to want to go, it felt too easy, "Need to? Why are you so eager to go up there?" It wasn't for the same reasons that he wanted to, he knew that for sure because she was comfortable here, she had her way here. No one pushed her here, they were either on board with her plan, too tired or too caught up in themselves to give an effort. It was he who wanted to pluck her from what was comfortable.

When she doesn't respond after a minute and instead folds her arms across her chest he continues, "Why would someone be so eager to fly 600 miles away to a random place that they'd been to only once before? Why not somewhere local?"

She turns to face him and knits her brows together at his response, "600 miles? So you've given it some more thought, then."

Busted.

She turns back towards the bannister with a smirk. He'd lost his trump card and revealed that he had considered it further even though Rebecca had shot him down. "So, what do you say?"

"Olivia..." He didn't want to be used as a ploy in her agenda. He'd brought up the idea to save her and now he feared that it would be used for self-sabotage.

"I want to get away from here, just like I know that you do. I feel it too, you know, the suffocation of it all. But it was all I had. They were all that I had. They took care of me." she offers seriously.

He wants to correct her and say that it wasn't all that she had, that she had him but he knows what she meant and he doesn't wish to minimise the role that they'd all played in her life. Even in her deception, she needed a family and they were it.

"I want to spend some time with Quinn away from here just a few days. That's all."

"Then why not somewhere closer? Surely there are similar places between here and Anchorage. Why that place?" He believed her reasoning... at least partially because while he still couldn't digest that in 5 months she was supposed to be no more, that didn't stop her from being well aware of her own mortality and what she wanted to do before then. Maybe this had always been a part of the plan which of course doesn't make him feel any better because of what was on his mind.

"You're the one that brought it up," she laughs attempting to lighten the mood. "Yes, I've been there only once, but I liked it and so did Quinn and it's only a 3-hour flight away."

He is still unconvinced, as he should be because despite the separation and the changes between them, he still knew her and he had to know that she was holding back something so she decides to placate him, "I'll get the LVAD."