Fic: So She Can Sing (SVU, Olivia/Alex, Olivia/Casey, PG-13)

Title: So She Can Sing
Words: 1250
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Olivia/Alex, Olivia/Casey
Notes: Just a one-shot post-ep for 7x03, "911." Spoilers, etc. Olivia got sort of rambly and introspective. Title comes very vaguely from Philip Levine's poem "What Work Is."

So She Can Sing

Her hands are dirty as she cradles the girl's drooping head, smoothes a tear away from one sleepy eye. Her fingers leave a print of dirt on Maria's cheek, but it doesn't hide the early rainbow of purples and yellows ringing the child's cheekbone. Olivia cradles the girl and thinks how unfair it is that the pornography kept the bruises off her face, relegating them instead to the places beneath her clothes and inside her.

Maria is heavy in Olivia's arms as she scoops her out of the grave she and Fin have dug for themselves. The long Maglites cast cold shadows on her face as she squints, walking the girl toward the light.

She was supposed to go out tonight. His name was Stephen and he was thirty-five, a financial analyst with an apartment on the Upper East Side and tickets in the center section, ten rows back. When she was putting on pantyhose and dangling earrings earlier this evening, she wondered if she'd wake in the morning in an unfamiliar apartment, ripping open a brand-new toothbrush. Now she knows she'll wake unhappily, stiff and sore, fingernails grotty and stains of exhaustion on her face.

But it's worth it, as it always is, to feel the warmth of a child alive not dead against her chest.

There will probably be a message on her cell phone when she gets back to the precinct tonight. Or tomorrow, maybe he'll wait till tomorrow. His voice will be awkward and uncertain, and maybe he'll say they should try it again sometime. Or maybe he'll say that, look, he likes her but he understands about her work and yada yada yada, and Olivia will wonder, briefly, who he took with him to that center-section, tenth-row seat.

This is the problem with dating people who aren't on the job. On the job. Olivia laughs at herself as she packs Maria onto a stretcher and jumps in the back of the ambulance to ride along with them to Bellevue. It's a ridiculous phrase, one that comes from a movie, not her life. She's not on the job. She just is.

Maria's fingers twitch in Olivia's hand as the EMTs expertly fit a mask over her nose and mouth, needles under the skin of her arms. The siren blares, but its sound is strangely and peacefully muffled on the inside of the ambulance. The girl's eyelids flutter, and Olivia squeezes her hand. "I'm here, sweetie."

She leans back against a snaking assortment of wires and wonders what will happen to Maria in the morning, tomorrow, next week. She wonders if the girl will return to her mother in Honduras, or go to the father she thought she would meet in America. She wonders if they'll ever find the cousin, complacent in his safety and richer from the money he got by selling Maria, and then she decides it doesn't matter. Olivia's palms are streaked with dirt, and it doesn't matter.

It's never easy, afterward. People think it ends when the sirens go quiet and they turn out the precinct lights, but it doesn't. There are weeks of red tape and court orders and motions to go through. Maria will probably have to tell her story again for Casey, again for the grand jury, again at the trial. It doesn't end with Richard Dwyer. There are the people who sold him his electronic equipment, the people who helped him take the pictures, the people who helped sell them. The people who bought them. This could all go to hell and back for the sake of one small girl, who is breathing more easily in controlled air right now, who will live to dance and sing and blow out candles again.

Well, Olivia knows Casey won't mind. She'll throw herself into it, the way she enjoys crashing cocktail parties and judges' poker nights. The white-collar-collaring ADA has come a long way in two years, when she was cocky and insufferable and easily overwhelmed. Now she's determined and uncompromising and fiercely loyal to her SVU cases. There are still days when Olivia has to remind herself that Alex wasn't passionate and confident right away, either. And there are days when Olivia still wants to bean Casey with a softball bat.

But those things, too, are beginning to matter less as time goes on.

She glances at her watch, rotating her wrist as little as possible so her grip on Maria's hand never changes. It's after ten. It will probably be after midnight before she feels okay about leaving the hospital. She'll go to bed alone, arms wrapped around two pillows, and her alarm will scream her awake at six.

Sometimes Casey calls or leaves a message late at night, although she's as determined and uncompromising about that as she is about work. One of the problems with Casey, aside from her bad taste in hair dye and the way she still looks uncomfortable in heels, is the way she's determined to be as blasé about this as Olivia is. Last weekend, over dinner and a twenty-block walk because the Lexington subway station was closed, Olivia mentioned she had a date with Stephen. And Casey said, "Good," and "Tell me about him," and Olivia had felt that irresistible urge to hit her with something hard again.

Olivia has learned not to expect anything from Casey besides a dinner every couple weeks and calls that come like clockwork (granted, clockwork with several days in between, but clockwork nonetheless) and one orgasm under her hands and another under her tongue. Casey hates sushi. Casey doesn't think twice about having a drink after work. Casey knows very little about old English literature and had no interest in going to see Spamalot.

But then, Olivia doesn't want someone who's just like her, someone who eats unagi and can talk about Thomas Kyd. Alex arched an eyebrow the first time Olivia shoved her plate of roe across the table and swore up and down that she'd never seen Cats.

The comparisons between Alex and Casey are also beginning to matter less. Nothing about Casey makes Olivia feel the way Alex did. Nothing about Stephen or Andy or Harrison or Barker or Michael or any of the other men she's been out with on incidental dates with, who call and leave a polite message a few days later, makes Liv feel the way Alex did. But Alex is gone, again, and Olivia knows better than to hope. She knows that the best thing she can hope for is that Alex will never have to return to New York. She doesn't really hope for anything with Casey, whose hand on her shoulder tonight was equally parts comforting and frustrating. Comforting because Casey has this thing about work and not-work, and frustrating because Casey tries very hard to understand Olivia's work, and doesn't quite.

Work has remained consistent for Olivia over the past almost-eight years, and that's what she wants to remember, beyond dinners and opera tickets and dancing and buying food from the least sketchy vendor during a walk in Central Park.

Maria's stirring now, despite the EMT's carefully trained hands on her shoulder. Her eyelids flutter, and then her head turns on the thin hospital-issue sheet, and she looks scared and small and human under all that medical machinery. "Olivia?" she says, and her breath fogs up the inside of the plastic mask.

And because this is work, and hope, Olivia reaches over to touch the little girl's cheek, leaving another smear of dirt near her jaw. "It's okay, Maria. I'm here."

finis