This fic contains massive spoilers for "Loss." DO NOT READ if you don't want want to be spoiled. Title a blatant perversion of the Beatles's "A Little Help From My Friends." Dedicated to all the Alex/Olivia 'shippers out there, who finally got their day.

You Get By

(~(~)~)

Alex is alive. Alex is alive.

The words thunder around Olivia's head, but if she hadn't seen Alex herself, pale and exhausted in the back of the Marshall's van, she wouldn't believe them. She's not entirely sure she believes them now.

She held together well during the funeral. She didn't speak; Alex's mother would never have thought of asking someone she knew only as a random detective her daughter sometimes worked with to eulogize her child. Olivia doesn't know that she could have faked it, anyway, standing up there talking about Alex's life while knowing that that life went on somewhere.

Somewhere. Somewhere Olivia might never see her again.

In some ways, it was easier when Olivia thought Alex was dead.

No. Olivia shakes her head fiercely. She can't think like that. Alex is alive. That has to be better.

"Until Velez is extradicted. Or...otherwise dealt with."

"How long?"

Alex hadn't been able answer. Olivia hadn't wanted her to. "Until Velez is dead. Or until I am." That would've been the only honest answer, and Olivia's glad she didn't have to hear it.

There's a hand on her arm. She jerks slightly, startled.

"Sorry," Elliot says, dropping his hand.

"It's okay," Olivia lies. "I was just...I was somewhere else."

He nods. "I know what you mean."

He doesn't, not really. He only has half the puzzle. But he means well. "What's up?"

"Kath and I have to take off. I wondered if you needed a ride home."

She tries out a smile. It fails. "Thanks, Elliot, but I'm riding with Munch and Fin." The ones with the other half of the puzzle.

"Okay." Elliot nods. "Are you okay? You're taking this pretty hard. I know you two were close, but this isn't like you. I mean, especially because she's--" He looks around quickly, lowers his voice. "You know."

"She's gone, Elliot," Olivia hisses, just as low and twice as intense. "She's as good as dead to us."

Elliot steps back, startled by her fierceness. "Okay. I'm sorry. I just thought--" He shakes his head, maybe deciding that, just this once, what he thought doesn't matter. "Does someone need to drive Mrs. Cabot back to her hotel?"

"Captain Cragen's taking care of her," Olivia says. The weariness is rushing in over her. She's held it at bay as long as she could - held on through the funeral, and the cemetary, and all the silences she has to keep - but now she's going to lose. Her legs sag, and Elliot catches her.

"Hang on, Liv. We'll get you home." He looks around for Munch and Fin. Spotting Fin talking to Huang in the corner, he leads Olivia to them. "You taking Olivia home?" he asks Fin.

Fin nods and takes Olivia's other arm.

She glares weakly at the two men. "I'll be fine. You don't have to prop me up."

"How are you feeling, Olivia?" Huang asks gently.

She grits her teeth. This is Alex's funeral, for God's sake. Can't he stop being a shrink for one goddamned afternoon? "I'm fine, George, thank you," she says stiffly.

He nods. "If you need anything..."

Fin catches the flash in her eyes and leads her away from Huang. "What she needs right now is to get home to her bed, right, Liv? Let's find that slack-assed partner a mine and get you outta here."

In the kitchen, Munch and the Captain are washing dishes and charming the socks off of Alex's mother. Fin jerks his head toward the outer door. Munch nods and wipes his hands on a dish towel. "It was very nice talking with you, Mrs. Cabot. I'm very sorry for your loss; Alex meant a lot all of us."

Olivia feels warm pride radiate off of Fin, and envy stabs her heart like an ice pick. When will she get to feel pride like that again?

"You're not leaving, Detective Munch?" Mrs. Cabot asks desperately.

He nods apologetically. "Yes, ma'am. Detective Tutuola and I are Detective Benson's ride." He looks Olivia over critically. "And she needs to get home."

Mrs. Cabot peers at Olivia through thick trifocals. "You're Olivia Benson?"

She nods. "Yes, ma'am."

"Hmmm. Alexandra was very fond of you. She spoke well of you. Often." Her face crumples. "She saw so much ugliness, but she always spoke so well of those close to her..." Sobs begin to wrack her body.

Munch looks helplessly at Cragen, who waves him toward the door. "Get Benson home. I'll take care of things here."

"Thank you, Captain." Munch touches Mrs. Cabot's arm gently before leaving the kitchen behind Fin and Olivia.

Fin and Munch are subdued, but it takes a lot to keep them down, and they're back in old married couple mode before the car hits the end of the block. In the back seat, Olivia leans her head against the window and tunes out the two men's words, letting the familiar rhythm of their bitching lull her to sleep.

"Liv?" Fin's hand on her leg wakes her. She blinks and lets him help her out of the car. She leans against him as they make their way up the stairs to her apartment. She's so numb, still. She's walking through this fog. Alex was dead. And then she wasn't. But she's still lost to Olivia. "I didn't get to kiss her good-bye," she whispers as Munch unlocks her apartment door. She starts to shake.

"Come inside, Olivia," Munch says. "Come on." Fin steers her into the apartment, and the click of the door behind her - knowing it's not Alex closing the door, that it probably will never be Alex again - shatters her.

"I didn't get to kiss her good-bye." Suddenly she's in the middle of a tag-team hug, her cheek pressed to Fin's chest, Munch's arms curling around hers from behind. She shakes so hard she's sure she's going to shake herself apart, and she's sure a hundred tiny pieces of herself lying on the floor are going to hurt a hundred times more than this one piece of her that's being lowered onto the couch. Munch and Fin bracket her, each taking one of her hands. She can't cry. She wills the tears to fall, but they're still too confused about the sight of Alex alive - alive - next to the van. She just keeps shaking, teeth clacking, heart pounding, shoulders jerking futilely. "We didn't protect her," she whimpers. "Elliot and I - some fucking great cops we are. Drug lord orders a hit on her, and we didn't - she was walking on the outside of the sidewalk, and we just..." She shakes her head, unable to fully vocalize the hundred thoughts and images bleeding in her brain. "I love her," she said. "And I didn't protect her. I was supposed to protect her."

"Olivia." Munch's voice, sharp, snares her. He turns her head to look at him; she can just make out his eyes behind the dark glass. "Alex would not want you blaming yourself for this. She made her choices. Nobody could've seen that it would end like this. And you can sit here and beat yourself up about it, or you can grieve for Alex and then get up and go back to the fight she was fighting."

"She was so sick of it." Olivia's gaze slides past Munch to the corner of the couch that Alex always gravitated to at the end of her long days, curling up with a stack of trial notes and a glass of chardonnay. For a minute, Alex's outline seems to hover just behind Munch, smiling gently at her. If she believed in ghosts--

If Alex were really dead--

"She'd been talking about quitting."

"So you fight twice as hard," Fin says. "Show her she was wrong."

"Show who?" Olivia whirls to face him. "Alex is gone, Fin."

Fin reaches out and presses his palm against Olivia's sternum. "Not in here, she's not."

And it's like he's touching the headwaters of her pain. There are the tears, pouring down her cheeks. Fin pulls her in; Munch's hand rests against her back, but all she feels are the tears on her face and the hollowness in her heart. How can she properly grieve? How can she grieve for a woman who isn't dead?

She cries until her eyes are red and swollen almost shut. She cries until she thinks she has no tears left. Fin tilts her head up. "When was the last time you ate?" he asks.

Suddenly Fin and Munch are in high domestic mode, charging around her tiny kitchen, getting in each other's ways and griping loudly about it. Olivia swallows several hysterical giggles. They're hurting, too, and they're not trying to distract her with humor. This is just the way they are, and she'd no more ask them to stop sniping at each other than she'd ask Elliot to stop loving his kids, or Alex to stop...loving her.

Wherever you are, Alex, don't stop loving me.

After dinner, Munch and Fin try to interest her in poker, but they're still in the first bet when she thinks of poker night at Fin's place, Alex trying to make up for her lack of natural skill in the game through elaborate double-bluffs. "This hand sucks," she says, and it turns out she has some tears left, after all. "Alex would've played it to the bitter end."

"And cleaned out all our asses." Fin tosses his cards onto the table.

They're back on the couch, watching darkness reclaim its city. Daylight in New York is the anomaly; this city belongs to the night. Olivia's head is on Munch's shoulder, her hand held in both of Fin's. Fin's head rests against the back of the couch, Munch's hand tangled in his hair. Olivia thinks she's never been this tired before, this drained, but every time she closes her eyes she sees Alex climbing into the back of that van. Over and over, she sees it: Alex apologizing for things that were never her fault; Alex staring into her eyes, begging for something...something Olivia can't quite understand--

"I should have gone with her," she gasps, sitting up. "I should have gone."

Fin and Munch draw away in horror. It takes Olivia a minute to realize. They aren't thinking of U.S. Marshalls, or a black van, or the Witness Protection Program. They're thinking of the sidewalk outside the bar, blood rushing out of Alex's body. They're thinking of death.

An indecipherable look passes between the two men, and Munch nods, standing. "We're staying here tonight."

Olivia stands, too. "No, you don't have to - John, I'm not - I don't need to be on suicide watch."

"We're staying," Fin says. "Full stop."

They pull out the couch, arguing about where to put the cushions in the meantime. Olivia brings pillows and linens and berates herself for speaking without thinking. Because she knows what she has to do, now, and she's afraid she won't be able to with her friends asleep in her living room.

She can tell they'd rather camp on her bedroom floor. She can tell they'd rather take away her gun and her kitchen knives and every pill bottle in her medicine cabinet. Instead, they give her one last hug and climb onto the fold-out, Fin warning Munch to 'keep your damned frozen feet to yourself.' Olivia goes into the bedroom and closes the door. She doesn't lock it; Munch and Fin are suspicious enough of her already.

She sits at her desk and pulls out the only framed photo she has of Alex. It's both of them, taken on a wholly unremarkable spring afternoon in Central Park. Olivia's arms are around Alex; Alex's hands are in the pockets of Olivia's jeans. They look happy. They were happy.

Olivia writes two letters. The first is for Captain Cragen, thanking him for everything he's done for her over the years, telling him what an honor it's been to work with him. The other is for Fin, Munch, and Elliot. She tells them she loves them all, that she's loved working with them - how much the SVU has meant to her - and that she's sorry to pull this shit on them. "But I can't do this without Alex," she writes. "And I don't have to." She tells them that Elliot knows the truth about what happened to Alex, and that Munch and Fin know the truth about what Alex meant to her, and that if they put their pieces together, they should be able to figure out what she's done.

She peeks out at the living room again before she goes to bed. Frozen feet or no, the other detectives are asleep, twined around each other. It's a perfectly unguarded moment, and Olivia knows she'll always cherish this last glimpse of them together. Smiling sincerely for the first time in four days, she crawls into bed and spends the next six hours staring at her ceiling, making plans.

When her guests wake up, she hasn't slept a minute, but she's feeling better than she has in weeks. Fin keeps staring at her; Munch circles her as carefully as he might a skittish colt. She wants to laugh but fears they'll take that as a sign that she's cracking. They have to go home, shower, change clothes - but they vow they're coming back in forty-five minutes to take her to work. "I'm fine," she insists, but they won't hear it. She closes the door behind them with an audible sigh.

She has to work fast.

There's a duffle bag packed in her bedroom closet, ready for the rare nights she stayed over at Alex's. Olivia shrugs into her jacket, picks up the bag, and flips open her cell phone, already moving down the hallway toward the elevators.

"Jack Hammond."

Olivia takes a deep breath and pushes the 'down' button. "Agent Hammond. This is Olivia Benson."

"Good morning, Detective." His voice is warmer than it's ever been in the past. "I was told I might hear from you."

The elevator doors close, and the car begins its descent toward the lobby. Olivia exhales in relief. She's on her way. She returns her attention to the call. "Tell me how we do this."

END

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