Alaskan Nights (A Law and Order: SVU fanfic)

Ch.22

"Oh St Jude, glorious apostle, faithful servant and friend in Jesus...Help me in my present and urgent petition...Please save Olivia Benson."

His soft whispers of prayer jolted her from her daydream and broke her heart when heard who he was praying too—St Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes.

It had been over twenty minutes since they got the call that threatened to shatter lives on this coast as well as on another one over five thousand miles away.

"I used to be Catholic," she says after some time, unable to stand the racket in her head any longer.

Elliot takes a moment and delivers the sign of the cross before glancing at her with a weak smile.

"Used to be?" he jokes, lifting his voice in an airy tone.

"Oh God," She whined, resting her head in her open palms. "You sound like my mother... what's that saying? Once a Catholic always a Catholic, right?"

"Something like that," He laughed, turning his face away from the morning sun that now peaked through the clouds. "When did you leave the faith?"

Rebecca ponders the question and grows serious in her answer, "It left me."

Elliot nods slowly and tips it in her direction, "I get it. At one point it left me, too." he pauses and lets the unspoken connections linger in the air. "In the end, I somehow I found my way back but it took some time."

"How'd you do it?"

He straightens his back to sit flush against the chair, "That's a question that I ask myself often...but I can never seem to come up with the right answer. The best that I've been able to come up with is that I stopped being mad at God."

Rebecca nods acceptingly and takes his restraint as an indication that it was too of a personal matter to delve deeply into. She couldn't possibly expect a man that she barely knew to bear his heart to her, "I stopped being mad years ago...but sometimes I think that frustration just replaced it."

She is so heavily burdened. He'd left New York thinking that there was no possible way that anyone else could love Olivia more than he did and he was pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong.

He'd learned only two things from that phone call in the car, the first being that Rebecca herself was a doctor and secondly that she protected Olivia's privacy as fiercely as she did her patients. And in doing so, she did not offer much following the call except reassurance that Olivia was 'fine'.  And while he couldn't blame her for her loyalty, he also couldn't help but simmer at the fact that even though he was here, having been let in from the dark, it was still glaringly apparent that he was still very much on the outside looking in. Instead, he was left to sit beside her for almost a half an hour now periodically taking her in as she chewed through her checks with the worry that was clearly written all over her face.

"I'm glad that she chose here." He says evenly, turning towards her slightly.

"Why's that?" She offers, readily accepting the distraction.

"If it were me having to do all of this on a daily basis I don't know if I could handle it."

"Sure you could," She replies in earnest. "You'd have found it within you....if I could have found it then you definitely would have."

He twists his lips into his mouth and locks eyes with her and says, "I didn't mean it like that...I meant watching her die."

Damn.

She hadn't expected him to say that. He was fishing and unapologetically so because he wanted insight into her condition. The situation conflicted her because while she wanted to give him the total view, she still felt bound to the agreement that they had made and didn't know how much she could reveal without betraying Olivia's trust. Their agreement was juvenile compared to the situation that they currently found themselves in, but she remained tight lipped even if this was the father of her child, the same one who Olivia and by extension she had kept in the dark.