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Peja's Wonderful World of Makebelieve Import
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Published:
2020-11-04
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1,623
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1/1
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Defenestration

Summary:

Rating: PG
Disclaimer: All non-original material is the property of its rightful owners, and is used without permission, without profit, for the purposes of entertainment. All original concepts and other material is (c)2001 Brittany S. Frederick, including the characters of Tabitha Walker, Blair Moss, Justin Avariel, and anyone else, as well as anything new in the slightest. May be reposted with the author's permission. Comments of any sort, especially on what you do and don't like, craved... while flames will be ignored.
Thanks on this one go out to the extremely talented, cool and absolutely darling Christopher Meloni, who brings my favorite character to a vibrant life every week, and whose dare I say pathological hatred of TV-movies inspired me to write the SVU TV-movie "Special Victims Unit: Year Two," out of which came the characters and idea for this little fanfic. Thanks a lot, Chris. Without you, I'd be stuck watching "100 Centre Street," and that's not a fate I'd wish on anyone. Thanks for being a part of the best show on television today. :)
Submitted through the SpecialVictimsUnit mailing list. This list can no longer approve new members posts, please join us at LawAndOrder_SpecialVictimsUnit

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Work Text:

Defenestration
by Brittany S. Frederick

Calling your name
Can't you hear me call
Your name
Your name
Can't you hear me call
Calling your name
-Libra Presents Taylor, "Anomaly"

 

He looked down at his watch as he opened the front door. It was so incredibly dark he had to toggle the button that made the face glow so he could read the numbers, even with his fairly acute eyesight. The digital display read 1:47 AM. He took a deep breath - or was it a sigh of dissatisfaction? - as he quietly pushed open the door and stepped into his house, shutting the door behind him so that it made but a very faint click. Still shaking his head, he hung up his coat and holster, making doubly sure that the trigger lock was engaged on his service weapon before safely putting the gun back in its hiding place, leaving his badge folder, pager and cell phone on the foyer table.

The faint light coming from the living room made him squint when he finally looked up from the pitch blackness of the foyer (and, as it happened, the rest of the house, given the godforsaken hour on a Thursday on which he had chosen to come home). As soon as his eyes adjusted, they widened a bit, and he made no attempt to hide his surprise. He didn't think anyone would be bothering to wait up for him - they never did. They were accustomed to his late hours, unsteady work schedule, and general unavailability for just about everything (in the last month, he'd missed three parties, four family trips and some distant cousin's wedding). But he could hear the faint, yet persistent noise of paper moving on the living room table. Both intrigued and confused, Elliot Stabler did what any self-respecting detective would do - he pounced on the situation as a chance to investigate and interrogate, quietly walking up from behind the armchair in which whoever it was was sitting.

"Kath - ?" he started, then stopped as soon as he noticed who it really was.

The girl in the chair was shorter, smaller, and looked much different than his wife, considering they were perhaps two decades apart in age, that was understandable. Elliot stood there and regarded Tabitha with an inherent curiosity. Since she had come to reside as a permanent member of the Stabler household - three days ago - he had realized there was a lot he didn't know about Maureen's best friend. Like how, on a Thursday night with an economics exam in her future at 1:47 in the morning, she had chosen to sit there, straight brown strands of hair somewhat dangling in her light brown eyes, looking at things she should never have had to look at. But then again, he corrected himself as he watched her, still unsuspecting of his presence, brush the hair away from her eyes, she should never have had to look at the murdered bodies of her parents, either. But sometimes things in life happen that we don't plan.

"Tab?" he said quietly. "Tabitha, what're you doing up?"

She jumped slightly in the chair - she was prone to doing that - and looked slightly sheepishly at him. Ordinarily, that would have been funny. But since the fire had gone out of her three days ago, and the dead look in her eyes that tortured Elliot persisted, he found it only frightening, only serving to heighten his fears. "I was just going over," she started, but she couldn't find words for it. He looked down at the file photos from her parents' case, spread neatly across that part of the table in a grisly tableau, and wondered how she could stomach it all. Wondered, as he did so many times, how *he* could stomach it, too.

"Tab, you shouldn't - " he started, then stopped again. "Tab, it's just - you shouldn't have to see that kind of thing, not now, not ever."

She nodded, closing her eyes for that brief instant. "I just," she began, "I keep thinking, if I look hard enough, I'll find an answer." With a small chuckle the likes of which he hadn't heard from her in three days, and which brought a small smile to his face and hope to his heart, she continued, "Everyone says that's what I'm good at, and you know, I'd give it all if I could just find an answer, just this once - "

"That's what we're going to do," he assured her quietly.

Elliot sat on the arm of the couch, looking not at the photos which he'd seen a hundred times, that made him sick every time, but at her, this orphaned, dispossessed seventeen-year-old, who had been such a vibrant person - "had been" being the key terminology in that sentence. At that moment, he wished he could change the past. Knew he would give anything to give her back what was. And yet, it was out of his hands. And that was what killed him the most, sitting there, looking at her, young and innocent and fragile and hurting inside - was that he could only close the case, never solve it. Solve would imply setting everything right. And that was never possible.

"How long have you been up?" he asked her.

"I - God, I don't know," she confessed, shaking her head. "It's so easy to just - just slip away, sometimes."

"I know," he said gently.

He looked into her eyes, holding her questioning gaze for a heartbeat then, probing for anything he could do to make her feel better. She had called him first, that night, and he had made her the promise he would do everything he could to bring her parents' murderer to justice. Somehow, though, he knew, it would never be enough. Just looking into her eyes, seeing the numb storm of fear, pain, anguish - seeing all those emotions that were the constant of her last few days - he knew it would never be enough.

"C'mere," he offered quietly, and she did.

He held her in his arms, listening to her heartbeat, which always seemed to be running fast with the tension inside of her, feeling the ragged edge to her breathing, all the signs that spoke of all the things tearing her up inside. He didn't have to say anything, and maybe that was good, because it was hard for him to find words. No words would make anything better. So he held her, and once again she cried into his shoulder, first hesitantly as she battled to maintain self-control, and then completely, her body shuddering with the suffering, letting out a wellspring of emotions with the saline. He closed his eyes, listened to the sound, and held her, because it was the only thing which he could do. Truthfully, if you looked at the big picture at 1:47 AM on a Thursday, Elliot was powerless. But to Tabitha, he was the closest thing she had to a father. So he let her cry until she was finished, maybe five, six minutes, until the shuddering subsided, and then he let her go, kissing the top of her head, a gesture as if to say she was not alone, because she would never be as long as he was around, and that was something he wanted to make sure of.

"Go on," he prodded gently, "you've got that econ exam tomorrow."

"Yeah," she said weakly, looking at him with the sense of calm that followed all these moments, that seemed all too temporary. "G'night, Mr. Stabler."

"Night," he said, and she turned away.

He watched her go, quietly and determined, through the foyer and up the stairs. Only then did he start to collect the photos she had laid out, taking care not to look at them, not to think about that. And when they had been cleaned up and replaced, he turned out the light in the living room and made his way up the stairs. Maureen's bedroom door was slightly opened, and he looked inside to see that Tabitha hadn't even bothered, just curled up on the second bed and fallen into sleep. It was a picture of calm that brought a small smile, a sense of comfort, to him. But what he also knew as he made his way to the master bedroom was that it would not last. The night always brought the nightmares, and she would probably wake up in an hour, two, three, four if she was very lucky, in a cold sweat, in a thrall of fear, trying to hold her own against emotions she did not know caused by a predicament she did not understand. Once again, Tabitha Walker would get very little sleep, and once again, Elliot Stabler understood exactly why. Over time, with therapy and friends and a family, these things would lessen. But they would never go away. He knew, deep inside of him, as all detectives know, that the sting of these things never completely would go away. That was what hurt him the most, and that was what he tried not to think about as he tried to get another four hours of sleep before he would have to get up and face the symphony of pain that his occupation brought all over again.

Because he could never hope for a light at the end of the tunnel.

A detective never hopes for an end of the tunnel.

A detective only endures.

And yet, he would reflect on it again later, when all of this first wave of fear and pain and agony and mistrust and misconception and all of these other things had passed, and realize that he didn't know at all how hard that would be.

END PART ONE

Notes:

This orphaned work was originally on Pejas WWOMB posted by author Brittany S Frederick.
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