Archive of Our Own

The first call he answers in three days is from Devine Awaziem.

Rafael has spent those three days dozing on his mother’s couch, only moving when she would haul him up by his ear to sit at her chipped dining room table and eat. He’s pretty sure that his phone is only still working in the first place because she’d dug his charger out of his briefcase herself, since he’s been very deliberately ignoring the sound of it vibrating over and over against the end table. But when he sees Devine’s name on the screen, he presses the accept call button without thought.

“I think you should come stay with me.”

“What?” he asks, trying to shake off three days of sleep on top of weeks of utter exhaustion and grief but pretty sure that’s not how a person is supposed to start a phone call.

“I think you should come and stay with me for a while. I’ve got a job and a room.”

“Congratulations?” Rafael says, still trying to figure out exactly what is happening. He can hear his mother in the kitchen, starting dinner. Maybe after he finds out what Devine wants he’ll go help her. Maybe he’ll check his messages. Maybe he’ll just go back to sleep.

“I meant for you, Rafael. My organization is looking to hire someone to consult with us for a few months, and while it probably pays like a paper route compared to what you’re used to, that won’t be a big deal because you can stay in my guest room for free.”

“Your guest room in Phoenix?”

“Outside of Phoenix, thank you very much,” Devine replies, and then his voice goes soft in a way that Rafael can hear, even over the phone, “I think you need to get away from that place for a little while.”

“This place is home.”

Silence for a few seconds, and then-

“Rafa, we both know home isn’t always a place you can stay.”

Devine Awaziem is the son of Nigerian immigrants who moved to a small town near Lincoln, Nebraska a few years before he was born. Rafael can never remember the name of it, or really anything about it at all, except for the fact that there is, according to Devine, an enormous pink barn that houses a strip club on the edge of town as you come in along the highway.

The two of them had met at Harvard, both very far from home in very different ways and pushed together by alphabetical seating charts and group project assignments, and at some point they’d decided to stick together for the duration, through undergraduate and law school and the mentorship of Rita Calhoun. When they’d graduated, Rafael had gone back to New York and Devine had moved out to Arizona to work with an organization that specialized in legal aid to immigrants, and they mostly kept in contact through texts every few months about inconsequential things that reminded them of each other, in the way that you can only get away with when it comes to the people who are important to you.

The people you don’t need to speak to or see all the time to know that the moment you needed them, they would be there.

Maybe that was why it was Devine’s name appearing on the caller ID that had convinced him to finally pick up his phone. Devine is maybe the only person who has ever really been truly important to him who is not all tied up in the knots of New York City.

“Let me think about it.”

“Of course, Rafa. But if you won’t do it for your own sake, or for mine, do it for my mother’s. She’ll be ecstatic that I finally have a nice man in the house to cook all her recipes for.”

It startles a laugh out of him, and the ache in his chest eases just a little.

When he hangs up after promising to call back tomorrow or the next day, Rafael looks at all the notifications on his phone for a few seconds and then sets it facedown on the end table. He wanders into the kitchen, and his mother’s smile when she notices him standing in the doorway makes him feel simultaneously guilty and overjoyed.

“Rafi, good. Come help me with this.”

“Of course, Mami.”

-------------

He’d told his mother, and Rita, and Olivia. There wasn’t anybody else who really needed to know anymore. He’d quit his job, given up his apartment, put most of his possessions in storage, and he figured that anyone who cared enough to find out where he was would know who to ask.

Rafael thinks of Whitman as the plane taxis into place along the runway. Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road. All the past we leave behind. He doesn’t laugh, mostly because it isn’t really all that funny, but it’s a close thing.

The February cold makes the scar across his lower back stiff and sore, and as the plane reaches cruising altitude, he leans his head against the window and dreams of Arizona heat.

--------------

Alex was a buzzing, incandescent presence of heartfelt charisma in the scope of Rafael’s youth, and Eddie was loyalty incarnate, a patron saint in black eyes and bloody knuckles and a heavy arm around his shoulders, and Yelina was-- well, all these years later, he still doesn’t know how he could possibly begin to define Yelina.

There’s a memory that he’s pretty sure isn’t an actual memory, is just something his brain has jumbled together from a thousand pieces of other moments. They’re walking down Jerome Avenue, Eddie with his arm slung over Rafael’s shoulders, laughing at something Alex is saying, shaking his head. Alex is a few yards ahead of them, obscured by the glare of the sun, so it’s just the dark shape of him and the sound of his voice. Yelina is even further ahead, shouting that they had better hurry up or she’ll leave them all behind.

Alex’s voice, Eddie’s laugh, Yelina’s impatience, the warm familiarity of walking through the South Bronx with the sun shining. It could be any of a few thousand days from his childhood.

He’s jolted out of the dream by the ding of the seatbelt sign, and he watches the lights of Phoenix as the plane descends, trying not to think about anything. It’s been more than four years since he’s spoken to Alex or Yelina.

Devine is waiting for him just past the security gate. Rafael had told him he could take a cab, but he’d known he wouldn’t listen.

“Hey,” he greets him, glad to see him despite the circumstances, and he tries to smile, relax his shoulders.

“Hey.” Judging by the expression on Devine’s face, he must look pretty pathetic, either in the attempt or just in general, but all the other man says is, “Let’s get home.”

He waits until they’ve gotten out of the traffic near the airport before he asks the question he’s had since Devine called.

“How’d you know?”

He’s not asking about the trial. Devine had been texting him all throughout, and he was one of the only people that he’d actually bothered texting back when he could manage it. It’s the three days later that he wants to know about.

“Rita called me. She’s pretty pissed at you.”

“Rita’s always pissed at me. Except when she’s just gotten the best of me in court, then she’s just gloating.”

“She’s worried about you, Rafa.”

“Well, I’m here now.” Still here I carry my old delicious burdens. “It’s warm here.”

“Mmmm,” Devine hums, glancing over at him, but he apparently decides to let him get away with the redirection for now, “I miss proper seasons sometimes, but it’s hard to argue with sixties in the depths of February.”

“Yeah.” He tilts his head against the window, face towards the sun, and closes his eyes as Devine merges onto the highway.

---------------

He reads a lot, things he pulls off of Devine’s various overstuffed bookshelves, and he sleeps even more, the windows in his room thrown open to let in a breeze. A few times a week, he rides into the city with Devine for work, which gives him something to concentrate on outside of his own head and lets him help people, which fills in some of the hollows in his chest a little. Occasionally, he lets his new co-workers convince him to go out to dinner or drinks with them, sits in the corner with his shoulder pressed against Devine’s and nurses a single scotch throughout the whole evening. Mostly he and Devine take turns making their mothers’ recipes for each other, and Devine rolls his eyes every time Rafael insists on paying for groceries.

In the beginning, he’d thought it would probably be best if he cut himself off from New York and everything that was tangled up there as much as possible. Time and space were why he’d walked away from Olivia at the courthouse, why he’d holed up at his mother’s house for three days, why he’d come out here in the first place, and if it was really going to help he’d thought he should fully commit to it.

And then, two days after he’d arrived, Olivia had sent him a picture of a drawing, obviously Noah’s handiwork, of what he realized after a few seconds was a rough outline of Arizona, with a green blob of a cactus and some kind of bird drawn inside it and the words for Uncle Rafa written underneath. The accompanying message read: He’s got a book about the states. Read all about Arizona when I told him where you were. Said he didn’t want you to forget us while you were gone. The idea of completely cutting himself off lasted exactly as long as it took to type out his reply.

Tell him that I love it, and that I promise I won’t, and that I miss him. And a few seconds later: I miss you both.

Feel better, Rafa is what came back.

Once a week, he calls his mother, usually on speakerphone while they’re driving home, so she can talk to Devine as well, make sure that he’s taking care of her son and that Rafael is behaving himself as Devine’s guest. He texts Rita, although mostly it’s just pictures of Devine making faces at the camera. She mostly sends back pictures of her flipping off the camera in various locales. Devine has dubbed it the world’s weirdest proof of life, but it works for them.

And he and Olivia text a lot. She sends him updates on Noah and sometimes on the squad, complaints about the weather. He responds with pictures of sunsets and sunrises and various wildlife that he thinks Noah will like. Occasionally they talk about how he’s feeling. They never, ever talk about work. Every single time a notification from her pops up on his phone he wants to call her, and every single time he stops himself; he’s not sure of much right now, but he knows that the second he hears her voice he’ll go back, and he can’t do that yet, not until he’s picked up a few more pieces and figured out how they fit into him now.

There are still more bad days than good, and more bad nights beyond that, and just because he’s sleeping a lot doesn’t mean much of it is necessarily all that restful. Rafael isn’t sure if it’s better or worse that there’s variety to his nightmares-- his father, Alex and Yelina, Mike Dodds, the death threats, the Householders, a dozen perps, and dozens more victims. The worst are when the memories all tangle together-- Aaron Householder threatening to dash his brains out on the courthouse steps, Alex standing at the top of the stairwell in the building they’d grown up in on Jerome Avenue as Rafael tries to pull his scattered thoughts back together at the bottom, threatening notes written in handwriting he recognizes but can’t place.

Those are the nights he ends up sitting out on the little brick patio in the backyard, looking out over Phoenix all lit up and thinking about what a ridiculous place this is for a city. Some nights Devine joins him, and they talk about Harvard, or their lives before that, or cases they’ve had since, and every once and a while they talk about the things that are keeping them up in the first place.

Overall, Rafael is pretty sure he’s glad he came.

------------

“So, tell me about Olivia.”

Neither of them had felt like cooking, so they’d grabbed a pizza on the way home from work. They’re standing at the island in the kitchen, eating straight out of the box, and outside it’s raining softly, the first sign of any real weather that Rafael has seen since he got here. Devine has thrown open the patio doors and the windows, and the entire house is filled with petrichor.

“I’ve told you plenty about Olivia,” Rafael replies, which is true. There are parts of the past six years he hasn’t talked about much in the last month, but he can’t talk about those years without talking about Olivia Benson. Almost all the best and worst and most important parts of the past half decade or so of his life are caught up in her, and even if he could talk about it without mentioning her, he wouldn’t want to. She’s his best friend.

“Yes, you have, and those stories have only confirmed the two main things that Rita has told me about her already, which is that she is good at her job and that you’re in love.”

Rafael fights the blush he can feel in his cheeks. “It isn’t like that.”

“I didn’t say it was. At best, I implied that you wanted it to be like that.”

“It’s complicated,” he says, which feels unbearably juvenile, “She’s important to me. Liv’s my best friend.”

He really doesn’t know how to express all of the rest of it in words, the simplistic immensity of how he loves her, the way it feels seared into him. The way they work together, the way they fit with each other, the way they understand each other. How honored he is that she loves him too, and how terrified he is that he’s going to screw it all up by saying too much or too little or with a particularly vulnerable facial expression at the wrong moment. How he’s absolutely scared shitless that he’s already done it by walking away from her at the courthouse and then running off to Arizona.

We open windows to each other, but we live alone in the house of the heart.

“She’s my best friend,” Rafael repeats, wincing at the way his voice shakes. Devine rests a warm hand between his shoulder blades.

“Wow,” he says after a few seconds, “Rita is right. You’ve got it bad.”

It shouldn’t make anything better or easier, it shouldn’t pull a laugh out of his chest and twist something free with it.

It does.

----------------

It hadn’t taken him all that long to figure out that Olivia Benson was a lot of the reason he ended up at Manhattan SVU.

All he’d known when he’d put in for the lateral transfer was that Manhattan SVU had a reputation for bringing their ADAs tricky cases, but cases that were winnable if you were willing to work hard enough, if you were clever enough, if you believed that you could win them. Exactly the sorts of cases that Rafael had begun working with SVU units for in the first place.

It’s only later that he realizes that Olivia Benson is the beating heart of that reputation, even before the squad belongs to her, before she’s ever a sergeant or lieutenant, and it only takes him a little bit longer to understand just how much trouble he’s in. She’s sharp and bright and beautiful, and she cares, and she believes in justice, capital-J Justice, like it is something she can reach out and just about touch with her fingers. And she believes that they, him and her and her squad, can achieve that justice, if not in the victory then in the fight.

All that faith and all that belief and the sheer force of her, directed at him and them and the things they can do together? The fierce way she looks at him when they’re arguing and the soft way she looks at him when he tells her he’ll try his best and the way she is always right there when he turns in the courtroom to find her eyes with his?

Yeah, he was pretty much fucked from the start, and he thinks he deserves a little more credit from the universe for recognizing that.

---------------

He shouldn’t have called her.

For one thing, it’s almost 9:30 where he is, which means it’s almost 11:30 in New York, and she’s almost certainly sleeping or working or doing something else that he absolutely shouldn’t be interrupting. For another, he still isn’t entirely sure he won’t immediately drop everything in Arizona and fly home as soon as possible the moment he hears her voice. Just selecting her name from his contacts had made his heart race.

He jumps when his phone buzzes in his hand, and he hesitates for a moment, which is ridiculous, since he was the one who called her in the first place. If he doesn’t pick up now, she’ll probably worry that something has happened to him, so he taps the accept call button and presses the phone against his ear. Silence for a few seconds and then-

“Rafael?”

He wonders if she can hear the way his breath shudders out of him at that. “Hey, Liv.”

“Everything alright?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Sorry for calling so late. I didn’t even think-”

“It’s fine, I just got home. I was checking on Noah and left my phone in the kitchen. That’s why I missed your call.”

“Oh. How is he?”

“Good. Sleeping. Excited to start summer vacation in a few weeks.”

Summer vacation. Right. Because he’s been in Arizona for a little over two months now, which means that summer will be here soon, and that he hasn’t seen his best friend or her son in more than two months. It takes him a bit to realize that he’s zoned out at the realization and that she’s trying to get his attention.

“Rafa? You still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Did you- was there a reason you called?”

“Oh. Yes.” It feels stupid now, but not telling her would be even stupider, especially since he can’t think up another excuse that isn’t I wanted to hear your voice. “I, uh, borrowed Devine’s car and drove out into the desert a bit, away from all the light pollution around Phoenix. And now I’m just sitting on the hood, looking up at the sky. I’ve never seen this many stars in person, and I suppose I just wanted to… tell someone.” I wanted to tell you, because it’s you that my brain defaults to. Because I wanted to hear your voice so badly that I think I would have used any excuse at all.

Olivia laughs, and some of the tension in his gut loosens for the first time in a very, very long time. “You’re such a city kid, Rafa.”

“At heart? Always. But I suppose the desert has a few things to recommend it.” He relaxes back against the hood, propped up on his elbows, staring up at the vast dark sky above him and its thousands of stars.

“Yeah,” she says, and there’s something brittle in that one word that makes him sit back up in alarm.

“Liv,” he starts, a flood of words caught in his throat. I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them. “Liv, I’m coming back.”

It’s always been true, since the moment his plane took off two months ago, but this is the first time he’s actually said it to anyone, or even so much as thought it in those exact words. Of course he was coming back, coming home, but it had been so obvious to him even in his worst and most pained moments that he hadn’t bothered to make sure that everyone else-- Rita, his mother, Olivia-- knew it as well.

“I know.” Her voice still sounds fragile and he hates himself for being the cause of it, for calling her, for leaving, for anything he’s ever done that has made her sound like that.

He wants to tell her he’s sorry. He wants to tell her he’s coming home, right now, right this moment, if she wants, all she has to do is say the word. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I’d tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it.

“Liv, I-”

“It’s okay, Rafa.” She cuts him off, and her voice sounds almost normal again, but the almost has him wondering exactly how upset Devine would be if he just took his car and drove to the airport right now. “Just… come back when you’re ready, and I’ll see you then.”

“Soon, I promise. You’ll see me soon,” he says, knowing it’s a terrible promise, because both of them know that at this point soon is just as likely to mean three months as three days.

“I’ll see you then,” she repeats, and then, “So, I’m just as much of a city kid as you are. Tell me about these stars.”

It’s good to talk to her for a half hour or so, to hear her voice, even if he’s sure he hasn’t done the view the sort of justice it deserves. Maybe someday he’ll come back and bring her with him, her and Noah, to meet Devine and enjoy the desert heat in winter and see the stars. For the first time in a while, he lets himself think that maybe that is something he could have.

------------

The thing is, as much as he still feels at least half made of broken pieces and sharp edges, he knows that he is important to Olivia just like she is important to him. He’s not so deep inside his own head that he doesn’t know that she loves him, that he’s not alone in thinking of them as best friends, that while he hasn’t changed her like she’s changed him, he knows that he did change her life by being in it, made it different and maybe even better, most of the time.

It’s a bit like cats, if he had to pick a metaphor. The nature of their work meant that the things they brought each other were inherently messy and often dark, but it was the thought that counted, that mattered in the way they fit into each other and understood one another. She brought him tricky cases and more evidence when he asked for it whenever she could manage it and all the heavy, bright, indestructible faith she could bring to bear at his back. In return he brought her convictions, and justice of some kind, whenever he could manage it, and the fight even when he couldn’t, and he knew her well enough to know that’s what really mattered to her, that she had someone on her side that was willing to fight like she was once she’d done her part.

And there were other things too, things separate from their jobs. She brought him coffee and candy and she kept scotch at her apartment even though she rarely drank it, and he bought her nicer red wine than she ever got for herself and books for Noah, ones he remembers liking as a kid or that catch his attention when he’s buying things for himself.

More than any of that, they understood each other, and both of them are old enough, have known enough people, have had enough friends and lost enough too, to know that what they had between them wasn’t something that stumbled into your life very often.

And yes, there’s nothing at all that sounds better to Rafael than the idea of spending the rest of his life being able to kiss Olivia Benson, if that’s what she wants, if she ever wanted that. But if she doesn’t, if she never does, her presence in his life is enough. More than enough, and it has been since that first day in his office when he pushed and she pushed back and all the important bits of him lit up with recognition that there was something there between them. It’s held them together and pulled them back together and survived a hell of a lot, even these past few months.

She has always been and will always be enough. It’s him he’s less sure about, and he’s never been less sure than right now.

--------------

“So I’ve been thinking,” Devine says, settling into the chair next to Rafael on the patio, stretching his long legs out across the bricks.

“First time for everything,” Rafael responds, glancing over at him. His shirt has neon green zig zags across it, bright enough that they almost glow in the dark.

Devine laughs. “Figured I would give it a try. Anyway, I was thinking that you’re not ready for an Arizona summer.”

“I’m not?” he says, even as he feels his shoulders tense at what he knows Devine is implying, “We do have summers in New York, you know. Pretty hot ones.”

“Not like the ones here, you don’t.” He knows Devine has seen right through him even before he continues, “Maybe it’s time for you to head back. Can’t hide here forever, so you might as well get out before we start hitting one-oh-six.”

“I’m not hiding.”

“You weren’t at first. You are now.”

“You were the one who told me to come out here in the first place.”

“And now I’m telling you to go back. I think we can both agree that I was right when I said that you needed to get away from New York, and Phoenix has been good for you, but there’s only so much healing you can do here. You’ve got some shit that can only be sorted out inside New York City limits.”

“I’ve got a lot of shit that I’m not sure can be sorted out anywhere, Dev.”

“Never know until you try, but I don’t think you’re nearly as bad off as you think you are.” He stares out over Phoenix for a few moments before he continues. “We are not unspectacular things. We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?” Rafael looks up at him in surprise, then at the book on the table in front of him, and Devine laughs again. “You’ve been pulling from my bookshelf, remember?”

He runs a finger along the spine of the book. “I’m not sure I’ve… I’m different now than I was a year ago. Six years ago.”

“Yeah. You’re different from the guy I met at Harvard too. And he was different than the guy I graduated with. And I’m different from the guy you met back then. Everybody’s different than they used to be. That’s the whole point of the passage of time, good and bad, ugly and transcendent. But you have to go home eventually, Rafa, if only because you’ve got people waiting for you. Rita, your mother, your friends. Olivia,” he says, smiling when Rafael glares at the emphasis he places on the last name, “I’m not kicking you out or anything, but you aren’t sleeping fourteen hours a day anymore and you’ve eaten all the snacks in my house, even that gross fruit leather my mother sent, so…”

Rafael sighs, looking up at the dark sky. They’re too close to the city to see very many stars, but he remembers them, and Olivia’s voice through his phone, and Soon, I promise. You’ll see me soon. For we cannot tarry here, he thinks, and sighs again, turning to Devine.

“Give me a few days to figure things out?”

“Of course. Again, I’m not forcing you to leave, Rafa. Just making a suggestion. Although Rita did call me the other day and say that you could stay with her for a bit when you finally dragged your sorry ass back to New York.”

“The truth comes out. I’m being conspired against.”

“It must be just awful to have people who care about you and want to help you out.”

“It’s terrible,” he says, but he’s smiling, and Devine reaches a warm hand out to clap him on the shoulder.

----------------

The only piece of decoration in Rita’s entire apartment that isn’t sleek and modern or incomprehensibly abstract art is a wooden sign hanging over her kitchen sink that reads First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. It had hung on the door of the apartment they’d shared during Rafael’s second year in law school and Rita’s third, which her parents had helped her pay for and thus had been about five times nicer than anywhere Rafael had lived previously. For the week that he’s been waking up on Rita’s couch, it’s been one of the first things he sees every morning, and he appreciates the flash of warm nostalgia it invokes.

Rita’s couch is insanely comfortable. When he’d told her that after his second night of sleeping there, she’d said that she hadn’t made all that money just so she could buy a couch made of hemp and bamboo or whatever it was that they made ‘cool’ furniture out of these days.

The view out over the city is almost as spectacular as the couch, and as Rita hands him his coffee he recites, “When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers.”

“Ugh. You’re really insufferably pretentious when you’re depressed,” Rita says, sitting on the coffee table in front of him, “Put us all out of our misery and just go talk to Benson, would you?”

“It’s not that easy. I left, and that’s- she’s- it’s not that easy.”

“Bullshit. It is that easy, when it’s you and her. Whatever complicated and ridiculous knots you manage to tie yourself into concerning all your gross and gooey feelings for her, this particular thing between the two of you is easy. Go to her apartment, tell her you’re back. Maybe hug or something. She’ll be glad to see you, I promise.”

“You can’t possibly know that.”

“By now, one would really think you’d have figured out that I know everything. Go, talk, be happy.”

“I lef-”

“Oh for God’s sakes. Let me put it in a way you’ll understand. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. ”

Rafael stares. He thinks nobody gets out of it having to swim through the fires to stay in this world. He thinks mostly, I want to be kind. He says, “You don’t even like poetry.”

“Everyone likes Mary Oliver. I’m cultural, Barba, deal with it,” she says, standing and pulling her bag up onto her shoulder. “Now, please stop being so fucking pathetic on my couch and go let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

“You make that sound so much dirtier than it ever does in the poem.”

“It’s one of my many talents. Go talk to her, or I’m revoking your couch privileges. You’ll be glad, as usual, that you listened to me.”

That’s what he appreciates about Rita Calhoun, her nostalgic Shakespeare signs and her ridiculously comfortable couch and her no nonsense approach to his love life, poetry or no poetry. He finishes his coffee slowly, fighting the churning in his gut by reminding himself that she’s probably right, and that Olivia herself had told him multiple times that she wanted to see him when he got back, whenever that happened to be.

Also I wanted to love. And we all know how that one goes, don’t we? Slowly.

Rafael leaves his empty mug in the sink, taking a moment to study the sign hanging above it for a reminder of what it had felt like to be young and invincible, and heads out to tell his best friend that he’s home.

----------------

When Olivia opens her door, the first thought that crosses his mind is I give you myself before preaching or law, and he has to clench his jaw to keep from actually saying it.

“Hey,” is what he goes with instead, wordsmith that he is, and his breath catches when she smiles.

“Rafa-” she starts, but that’s as far as she gets before she’s interrupted by a shout of “Uncle Rafa!” from Noah, who comes running towards the door and throws his arms around his waist.

And for just a second, it’s like the world has finally tilted back onto the correct axis, Noah’s head pressed against his stomach and Olivia smiling at him as he stands in her doorway. The doubts batter their way back in quickly, but they’re not as bad as before, and lessened even more when Olivia steps forward to hug him too, tucking her face in against his neck so he can feel the way she lets out a deep breath and her shoulders relax.

He’s going to have to tell Rita she was right, but the usual sting of that is significantly dulled by Noah tugging on his hand to lead him further into the apartment.

“Uncle Rafa, you have to come look at all my new books!” He can hear Olivia laughing at him as her son pulls him towards his room so he can show him the stack of books sitting next to his bed.

“Wow, amigo, you’ve really expanded your collection.”

“You’ve been gone a long time,” Noah says with a shrug. There’s absolutely no malice in his voice but it still feels like someone has hit Rafael right in the solar plexus, and he gasps, trying to get his breath back so he can apologize or explain or say anything at all, but Noah is already moving on. “Momma says you helped pick some of them out. Will you read them to me?”

“Of course.”

They go through four different books, Noah handing them to him one after another as they sit side by side on his small bed, until he gets bored and drags Rafael out to play Legos in the living room. Olivia seems highly amused by the way he’s letting Noah pull him around the apartment, or maybe she’s just glad to see him. Either way, every time he catches sight of her smile it’s a little easier to breathe.

“I’m sorry about interrupting your day with him,” he says, when she tells Noah to go wash his hands for lunch and they’re finally alone, standing in her kitchen.

She surprises him by hugging him again, face tipped down against his shoulder. “Worth it,” she says into his shirt, and he has no chance at hiding from her the way his breath shakes out of him at that. “I let the squad know you’re back, by the way, and now Carisi’s insisting on making dinner for all of us tonight to welcome you home. Should I call him off?”

“I…” He hadn’t expected them to care, is the thing, so he’s not quite sure how to answer. Carisi, maybe, but he knows when she says all of us she means the whole squad. “That’s fine, if they want. I don’t want to put anybody out.”

Olivia rolls her eyes. “They want to see you. Carisi asked how you were pretty much every day after he realized we were texting. Rollins managed to restrain herself to about once a week.”

He opens his mouth to answer, although he still isn’t sure what to say, but Noah saves him the trouble by coming out of the bathroom and immediately throwing his arms around Rafael’s waist. Rafael doesn’t think he’ll ever get tired of the Bensons hugging him.

“Are you staying for lunch?” Noah’s chin digs into his hip as he looks up at him hopefully.

“If your mom says it’s okay.”

Olivia rolls her eyes at him again. “I already ordered for you.”

They spend most of the afternoon at the park, where Noah continues to pull Rafael around by the hand and Rafael continues to let him until Olivia finally takes pity on him by convincing Noah to allow the two adults to sit on the bench nearest the sandbox while he plays there. For the first five minutes or so, he keeps glancing over like he’s checking that his Uncle Rafa hasn’t disappeared in a puff of smoke, and Rafael swallows hard against the way that feels like someone has shoved his heart up into his throat.

“I’m out of practice,” he jokes, relaxing back against the bench once Noah seems to have finally accepted that he’s staying put.

“You’re just fine,” Olivia responds, shoulder pressed against his, “And even if you weren’t, I think he’d get you back up to speed pretty quickly. He has about a thousand questions to ask you about Arizona.”

“I’m looking forward to at least the first six hundred of them or so.”

Olivia laughs and leans her head on his shoulder for a few moments.

At dinner, the whole squad does seem genuinely happy to see him, and they do a decent job of not talking about work too much, even after Rafael tells them it’s fine. Carisi and Noah carry most of the conversation, and everyone, not just Noah, has plenty of questions about Arizona and the past few months.

“Uncle Rafa,” Noah says at one point, hanging onto his elbow as Carisi dishes out dessert, “I’m glad you came back.”

He manages not to actually cry in front of the whole squad, but it’s a close run thing.

Once everyone has left and Noah has been tucked in-- he’d gotten two stories from Rafael and would have gotten a third if he hadn’t fallen asleep before he’d even been able to open the book Noah had chosen--, Rafael ends up on the couch with Olivia, who pulls her feet up under her so she can lean against his side, both arms wrapped around the one of his that’s closer to her. He thinks of Noah tugging him around by the hand for most of the day and has to swallow hard a few times before he can speak.

“You all are exhausting.” She laughs, tilting her head against his shoulder like she had earlier on the park bench, although this time she leaves it there. “I’m sorry for just- I should have called or-” It’s just that Rita Calhoun recited poetry at me and there wasn’t really anything else I could do after that.

“You’re welcome here anytime, Rafa, you know that.” She shifts so she can press her nose against his shirt and inhale deeply, and her grip on his arm tightens. “I’m just glad you’re home.”

She keeps using that word-- home -- and it makes his chest ache in the best possible way every time.

They sit and talk until both of them are having trouble keeping their eyes open, and when he finally leaves she makes him promise to come over again the next day for dinner. Rita is waiting for him when he gets back to her apartment, and he lets her gloat as much as she wants. She was right, after all.

--------------

Ever since you got that Ivy League scholarship, you’ve been hooked on their teat.

When he’d gotten his acceptance letter from Harvard, Alex had taken it and shown it off all over the neighborhood, to everyone he ran into in their building, everyone in every restaurant and bodega in a three-block radius.

“Did you hear about our Rafi? Rafael Barba? He’s going to Harvard. He’s going to be un abogado.”

He’d told anyone who would listen and more than a few who wouldn’t, and Rafael had trailed in his wake, flushed and grinning. After his mother and his grandmother, no one had been prouder of him than Alex, and when he’d gotten to Harvard he’d started out as a pre-law political science major, because he’d had this idea that someday, after he’d made a name for himself as a prosecutor, maybe he’d go back, to Alex and Yelina and the Bronx, to help him achieve the greatness that his own mother had forecasted when they were seven.

The irony of all the things that actually happened isn’t lost on him in the slightest.

Just tell me one thing. Is this in any way about us?

Yelina had asked him to marry her once. They were eighteen, lying on his bed on a hot August afternoon three days before he was set to leave for Harvard, and she’d asked him to stay instead. To marry her, and get a little apartment near Fordham, start their futures and a family together. To stay with her, and Alex and Eddie, and the Bronx, and his past.

He doesn’t remember much of the actual conversation, only her voice saying Marry me, Rafi and lying there in his bed with her for hours, even after he’d turned her down, until his mother came home and started dinner. She’d gone home then, and he’d gone to Harvard three days later, and when he’d come home for Thanksgiving he’d run into her and Alex on the stairs of their building, holding hands, and that had been that.

She’d chosen Alex and the Bronx, and they had chosen her back, and he’d chosen Harvard and Manhattan and everything that came along with that, and everyone had gotten what they’d wanted, really, when it came right down to it.

He thinks a lot about the line of his life, of his relationship with Yelina, from those long moments lying in his bed together after he’d refused her offer of a life together to those last soft moments in his office before she’d said Papi, don’t ruin his chances and they were, for the first time in their lives, suddenly and irrevocably on opposite sides.

It still throws him off balance sometimes, when he remembers that he is on one side of what happened, and Alex and Yelina are on the other. There’s a part of him that still instinctively reacts against the thought, a pull in his gut that insists that’s not how it’s supposed to be. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s supposed to do with that feeling except to clench his jaw and wait until it passes.

I see you brought el juez. To what do I owe the honor?

He’ll never be a judge now, not after the Householders, and Ashtonja Abreu and her mother before them. He isn’t sure he ever really wanted to be one, with the robe and the gavel and everything else. It's the bright and shining end game of his chosen profession, but it had very little to do with why he’d chosen to be a lawyer in the first place, why he’d wanted to be a prosecutor specifically. He liked the fight, and he especially liked winning the fight, and being on the right side of it. Which he supposes is why he and Olivia fit so well together, because she valued the fight, the real and heavy work of it, and he loved it, the spark and the push and pull of it, and together they’d wrung as much justice out of that as they could manage. His mother liked to tell him that he’d become a lawyer because it meant he could pick all the fights he wanted and nobody could punch him for it.

Rafael thinks his grandmother probably did mean it in the real sense, with all the pomp and circumstance of it, but that it had also been bigger than only that. His abuelita had wanted her grandson to be a good man, and a kind man, and a just man.

He’ll never be a judge, whether he ever really wanted it or not, but he can keep working on that part.

--------------

Ending up in his grandmother’s apartment wasn’t some grand plan. It just sort of happened, one thing after another falling into place until he was sitting in that same apartment he’d insisted she move out of a few years before.

The day after he’d gone over to Olivia’s to tell her he was back, he’d started looking for a place of his own with little luck. He couldn’t stay on Rita Calhoun’s couch forever, comfortable as it was, but the idea of making any place a real home, a real and solid fixture of his life, when that life still felt stilted and full of jagged edges, sat edgewise in his gut. He would have to find a real place and a real job, start to think of a solid future, or even just a solid present, eventually, but for now he’s content to consult for a few organizations that Devine had referred him to and a couple that Olivia points in his direction, and let the people he loves be the only solid fixture in his life.

So Rafael needed somewhere he could be that fell somewhere between Devine Awaziem’s guest room and his former Manhattan apartment, and when his mother mentioned over brunch one morning that the tenants who had taken over his abuelita’s walk-up had moved out, it had seemed right, somehow. That this place he’d run once before when he’d felt shattered would become available at this moment where he needed it, with fewer physical scars this time but a lot more in general that he felt the need to escape from-- however terrible and complicated his relationship with his father was, however large he looms in his nightmares, he had only been one man. Finding someplace safe from his own sharp edges and deep, dark hollows is trickier, but he thinks 64A is as good a place to try it as there is.

His mother understands, he thinks. She hugs him for a long time after he tells her his plan, and promises to come over after he’s moved in and make him whatever he wants for dinner, talks about his grandmother’s recipes for the rest of the evening. She does not mention his father, or the stairwell, or the seven months. We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson.

Olivia understands too, if not the specificity of it, then the general idea of it. She’d texted him Feel better, Rafa when he’d run off to the middle of the Arizona desert, and her soft understanding now feels the same way. At least this way, she can make him come over for dinner or excursions with Noah or just to sit on her coach and watch movies. He does, after all, have a lot more free time than he used to, and he’s more than happy to spend it with her.

Rita doesn’t understand-- “Oh for God’s sake, Barba, nobody can wallow in their own guilt like you can”--, but she helps him move anyway. She doesn’t actually do any moving herself, but she hires someone to do it for him, and she brings over pizza and wine after they’re done. Sits on his couch and makes fun of him for how many books he has. FaceTimes Devine so she can give him a slightly tipsy tour, which includes a lot more mocking of Rafael and of Devine himself, who accepts it in good humor. It all makes Rafael feel warm and settled, like Devine’s books and his little brick patio had, like Olivia’s smile and Noah’s laugh do. When he tells her this, she tells him to stop being so sappy and then offers to buy him a really comfortable couch if he wants one. He’s only a little tempted.

--------------

His mother had been disappointed in him, in his decision and the trial, his resignation and even in his flight to Arizona, and Rafael had been worried that at some point she’d finally decide enough was enough and stop taking his calls, freeze him out. But that hadn’t happened, probably because Lucia Barba had many unimpeachable beliefs, and among those was the belief that disappointment was something you did face-to-face.

And almost certainly because, for almost two decades, being on each other’s side was a survival mechanism, and even if they wanted to give that up, which neither of them do, it’s not a habit that’s easy to break.

So they get brunch on Saturdays, and she comes over for dinner once a week or so. Sometimes she makes his abuelita’s recipes and sometimes he does, or he makes one of the recipes Devine showed him while Rafael was staying with him, or sometimes they just get Chinese. She hassels him about not having a stable job yet, asks after his friends and the work he is doing, and he listens to her stories about the school’s summer programs, the fight for funding and resources for next year.

“You look better, Rafi,” she says, one evening while she’s serving their food. He’s been home for a little over a month. Last time she’d come over she had made him call Devine so she could check in on him, continue conversations they’d started when Rafael had been in Arizona while she cooked. It was a far cry from how their relationship had started, when Rafael had come home for Christmas break freshman year talking about his new friend and his mother had assumed he’d befriended a stripper calling herself Divine.

“I feel better, Ma. Not-” Not the same, and in some ways that’s better, and in a lot of ways it’s worse, but I’m working on it. I’m better than I was. So much held in a heart in a lifetime. “I’m working on it.”

For a moment it looks like she’s going to say something else, but instead she settles for “Good,” and then “I’m proud of you, Rafi,” before pressing a full plate into his hands and a kiss against his cheek. He knows she means in this specifically and also something bigger, and her words settle with a warm weight in his chest as he sits down next to her to eat.

-------------

“You know I have a dishwasher.”

“It’s ridiculous to run the dishwasher for three plates and a casserole dish,” he says, scrubbing at a particularly stubborn bit of baked-on cheese, “I don’t mind.”

“To each their own,” she replies, pushing away from the counter next to him. He can hear her behind him, putting leftovers away. “You just really like pruney fingers?”

He almost just goes along with her joke, but because it’s Olivia he feels like he can actually tell her. “It was one of my chores as a kid, washing up after dinner. A few minutes a day where I didn’t have to do anything or be with anyone or work for anything. Sometimes Mami helped. It was nice.”

Olivia doesn’t say anything, but he’s pretty sure she understands. Rafael had worried sometimes, sitting in Devine’s guest room, that maybe he’d always been wrong when he thought that the way they understood each other extended a long way beyond their work, that now that he’d bowed out of the fight and left her there, something in the way they were with each other would be fractured. But they’re still them, and he still feels more like himself with her than he does at any other time. They’ve even gotten to the point where they can talk about her work sometimes, not like before but still good. It’s almost enough to convince him that he should use his words and tell her how he feels, if he can ever figure out how to apologize for falling apart and bailing on her for a guest room outside of Phoenix.

“Liv, I-” he starts, without actually knowing what he’s going to say, but she stuns him into silence by sliding her arms around his waist, her forehead resting against the back of his neck.

“I’m glad you’re home,” she says, softly, “I know it was good for you to get away for awhile, but I’m happy that you’re here, now. In my kitchen, with us, washing my dishes.”

He wants to make some crack about how she just likes having someone around to do chores in an attempt to make the moment feel less charged and heavy, but he knows that she trusts him to understand what she’s really saying in the same way he trusts her.

Rafael lifts one hand, still covered in soapy dishwater, and presses it over hers on his stomach. “There’s nowhere I’d rather be.”

He would be perfectly happy with this, just this, forever, and he tells himself that that’s why he doesn’t say anything.

--------------

His life isn’t as simple as it was when he was living in Devine’s guest room, but he does his best. He’s got Olivia and Noah and her squad, and his mother, and Rita and Devine. He even occasionally meets Eddie for a drink or two, after his mother had made sure his old friend knew he was back in the neighborhood again. It’s a little awkward, with so much they can’t talk about and so much they no longer have in common, but Eddie is his oldest remaining friend and there’s comfort in that, even if it’s mostly in sitting across from each other in silence.

So he has friends, and a place to live, and a reasonable if not necessarily very stable income from working with the organizations that Olivia and Devine had recommended him to. It bears little resemblance to his life before everything except for the people in it, but it’s considerably fuller than the one he’d managed in Phoenix, and if he squints it almost resembles something that could one day be a real life. It’s a good first step, he tells himself, edging out of the fractured limbo he’d felt stuck in, while he also acknowledges that his life right now is probably just as full as he wants or needs it to be. New things can wait until he feels further away from that point in his life when so much of everything came apart in his hands.

Three weeks after he moves in, there’s a cat on the stairs leading up from his landing. He’s coming back from Olivia’s, which means it’s late because he’d stayed to read Noah a story and have one last drink with Olivia, and he doesn’t actually notice it until it meows at him. It’s six or seven steps up, small but round, black fur dappled with gold patches, and it watches him turn his key with yellow eyes. He figures it escaped from someone’s apartment, or maybe it’s a stray that snuck into the building, and he forgets about it for a couple days until he’s leaving one morning and spots it sitting on the stairs again, cleaning itself.

It’s there the next day, and the next, and by the third day it’s worked its way down to the bottom step.

“You should go home,” he says, and then quickly glances around the landing to make sure no one heard him. The cat just meows a couple times and stretches, still watching him.

The next day he opens his door and then returns his keys to the opposite pocket of the one that contains the can of Fancy Feast that he’d bought in a moment of insanity from the bodega a couple blocks away. It’s that same temporary insanity that he blames for leaving his door cracked just a little, and for opening the can and leaving it on the floor in front of his coffee table. He sits down on his couch and works on something for the next day as he watches the cat eat, feeling nervous and ridiculous and vaguely fond.

He tries to push that last bit down, but it’s really a lost cause once the cat jumps up onto the table and then to the couch. It watches him as he holds out one hand, palm up, trying not to startle it, and then licks at his fingers a few times before allowing him to rub his fingertips against the fine fur between its ears. For about thirty minutes, it curls up next to him as he works, which really means he gets five or six sentences typed in between glancing at the cat and scolding himself for thinking that maybe it needs a name, and then it stands up, butts its head against his hip before rubbing the length of its body along his leg and hopping off the couch. When it slips out the door, Rafael very firmly tells himself that he’s not allowed to be disappointed, because taking in a stray cat definitely qualifies as something new.

When he gets back from work the next day, its lying outside his door, and there’s another cat with it this time. This one is skinnier, the color of grey dust, and when Rafael sees them he stops short.

“You brought a friend?” he says, and then for the second time in three days finds himself furtively glancing around the landing to see if any of his neighbors have witnessed him talking to the cat. He sighs, rubbing at his jaw, and then holds up a finger towards the two cats.

Fifteen minutes later he’s back with two cans of Fancy Feast, and both cats follow him into the apartment. Rafael sets up like he had the night before, and once they’ve finished eating, the black one curls up next to him while the grey one sniffs around the apartment. Once it’s apparently satisfied, it jumps up on the opposite side of him and nudges at his hand until he pets it. After about an hour, he gets up and shuts his door, an action which neither of the cats seem to care all that much about. He makes himself dinner, then spends the next few hours researching cat ownership and making vet appointments.

When Olivia and Noah stop by a week later, Noah is immediately delighted and Olivia laughs at him.

“They just sort of showed up.”

“And what, forced their way into your apartment with their food dishes and their litter box?”

“They’re nature’s perfect predators, Liv,” he defends himself, and she laughs again.

“That one’s practically spherical, Rafa,” she says, pointing at the darker cat, who, to be fair, is quite round, although the vet had assured him several times that both of them were undernourished but otherwise healthy.

“Juez,” he says, and then points at the grey cat that Noah has squatted down to pet, “and Arabella.”

“Bella!” Noah crows joyously, and something about Olivia’s smile has gone almost unbearably soft.

He shrugs. “They help with the nightmares a bit.” Rafael knows that he doesn’t actually need to justify himself to Olivia, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Coming shockingly, suddenly awake out of whatever nightmare isn’t quite as bad when Juez is curled up on his stomach or Arabella is sprawled out along his side, one paw pressed into the curve of his hand.

Olivia squats down next to her son to pet Juez, who has come over to demand his share of the attention, and Rafael feels so terribly fond of all of them in that moment that it’s a little hard to breathe. Before, he’d never had time for pets, to take care of something like that, but now he’s finding out it is pretty nice to come home to something that loves you just for that, for coming home and feeding them and scratching behind their ears. It turns out that maybe there are some new things he can handle, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us.

-----------------

It’s not that he ignores his neighbors. He knows all of them and has introduced himself, says hello when he happens to run into any of them on the landing or at the door, helps Mr. Nunez and Mrs. Rivera one floor down with their groceries if he’s home. Anything more than that feels like too much, feels like he will inevitably fuck it up. Cats are one thing and people are entirely another, especially because he’s not really sure that right now he’s all that great of a friend to the friends he already has, much less any new ones he might try to make. So he’s polite and helpful and keeps to himself, and is in no way prepared for Tommy Zhang.

The Zhangs have both the apartments across the landing from him, mother and father and four kids. Mr. Zhang runs the bodega a few blocks over, and Rafael thinks Mrs. Zhang is a teacher. Tommy is the oldest, a high schooler, he’s pretty sure, sixteen or seventeen, and he works in his father’s store and runs errands for a lot of the neighbors. One morning in the middle of July, he’s locking his door when Rafael emerges from his apartment, and the boy’s face lights up.

“You’re Ms. Diaz’s grandson, right, Mr. Barba?”

“Umm, yes,” he answers, not at all sure where the conversation could possibly be headed. A lot of the tenants on the surrounding floors had known his grandmother-- Mrs. Rivera, for one, had hugged him for almost an entire minute when he’d moved in-- but he hadn’t realized that the Zhangs had lived there that long.

“She was nice. She bragged about you a lot, you know. You’re, uh, a lawyer? A prosecutor?” he asks, leaning against his door jamb, and Rafael is sharply reminded of Carisi for some reason. After a second, he realizes why.

“I was. I mean- I am, and I was. Let me guess, that’s what you want to be when you grow up?” he asks, and he thinks that most people would bristle at his tone, even if he tilts more towards straight sarcasm than anything actually biting, but Tommy just beams a grin at him.

“Maybe I just want to wear fancy suits,” he says, but he can’t carry the joke for more than a few seconds before he pulls himself up to his full height, “Yeah, that’s my plan. And I’ve read about some of your cases, when your grandma would mention them or I’d see your name in the paper, and I wondered if I could ask you a few questions about some of them.”

“I- um, I have a meeting I need to get to now.”

“Oh, yeah! I meant maybe this evening or some other time that works for you, I know you’re busy,” he says, still grinning, and Rafael thinks of himself at sixteen, standing pretty much exactly where Tommy Zhang is standing right now, and sighs.

“I, uh, I’ll be home around six tonight, probably, if you want to talk then.”

Somehow, Tommy’s grin gets even wider. “Thanks, Mr. Barba. I’ll see you then!” he calls over his shoulder, because he’s already bounding down the stairs, taking them three at a time. Rafael feels kind of exhausted just looking at him.

Tommy is waiting for him on the stairs when he gets back that evening, sitting with a neatly folded sheet of paper in his hands. Rafael can’t help thinking of Juez, and he’s smiling to himself at the comparison when he says, “So you have a few questions?”

“Yeah. Actually, it’s a lot of questions, but I wanted to pick a good one to start with just in case you find me completely annoying and never want to talk to me again,” he says, holding out the paper. Rafael is surprised to see that it’s a printout of a newspaper page, and that the article on it is nearly seventeen years old, from back when he was in Brooklyn and still trying to get the higher-ups to give him the cases he really wanted more often.

“Where’d you even find this?”

Tommy shrugs, looking nervous for the first time. “I did some research. Like I said, I wanted to pick a good case if I was only going to get one shot at this, and one where it would be most valuable to get insight straight from the source because there was a limited amount of information available to the general public. The library has a lot of the papers archived on microfilm.”

“I didn’t realize kids knew how to use microfilm machines anymore.”

His grin comes back full force. “I’m special.”

So after he drops his briefcase in his apartment and feeds the cats, they go down to the little cafe on the corner, which has three tables and smells incredibly of strong coffee. Rafael answers all the questions Tommy has about the case he’d shown him, and the three others he has in a folder in his backpack, “just in case.” He’ll be a senior in the fall, but most of the questions he asks are good, and he doesn’t seem bothered in the slightest by Rafael’s sarcasm. Rafael thinks, wildly and horribly, that he should introduce him to Carisi, and he blames him and Olivia and sixteen-year-old Rafael Barba when he tells him that he has Tuesday off and no plans until the evening, if he had more questions.

It’s not anything new, he tells himself, and it’s not really a friendship either. It’s just… a mentorship, because Tommy had asked and he was a nice kid and Rafael has the free time. It’s pretty much the same thing he had with Carisi, and yeah, okay, Carisi brings him lasagna and stays to talk to his mother sometimes when his visits coincide with when she’s over for dinner and occasionally sits on his couch with him and drinks scotch, Arabella curled up on his lap. So that’s probably not the best example, especially since sometimes he and Tommy get through all his questions and his printouts and talk instead about their families and books and growing up in the Bronx. Sometimes instead of going down to sit in the cafe, they stay in his apartment instead, the doors of both of their apartments left open so Tommy can keep an eye on his younger siblings across the landing.

This works pretty well for about two weeks, until one day Tommy yells down two flights of stairs as he’s walking up, leaning over the banisters with a grin.

“Hey, lǜshī.”

“What, more questions?”

“Not tonight. Mom’s invited you to dinner.”

Rafael stops for a moment, but he thinks he recovers from his surprise very nicely. “What if I have plans?”

It’s not a ridiculous response. He has dinner with Rita sometimes, and his mother more often, and most often with Olivia and Noah, or Olivia and her squad, and occasionally it’s nice to just sit on his couch with his cats and do his work for the next day. He’s not a shut-in by any means, and given that just a few months ago he was in Arizona and regularly sleeping until noon, he thinks he deserves more credit than Tommy’s expression is currently giving him.

“Well, first off, when I say that mom has invited you to dinner, it doesn’t so much mean that she’s invited you to dinner tonight as that you have a standing invitation to dinner whenever you do happen to be free until the end of time, and beyond that, I suppose, depending on how the good Lord feels about moo shu pork. And secondly, do you?” His expression must say all Tommy needs to know as he rounds the corner to the base of the stairs up to their landing. “Come on then, lǜshī.”

He hesitates for a second, and then follows Tommy into the apartment. So maybe they’re friends. Maybe it’s time he let himself have new things.

-------------

Normal still feels like the wrong word to describe the life he’s settled back into, but it’s something approximating that, which is the excuse he uses for why he doesn’t tell anyone about the threats starting up again. It’s just that they’d all immediately gone to the far end of the scale the last time they’d found out, and he knows that it was a combination of a lot of things that time-- the escalation, the fact that he hadn’t told them for months, the Munson case, Mike Dodds’ death-- but still. It isn’t something he wants to go through again, not when he’s content in his life, when he’s figuring things out and starting to feel like himself again.

Aside from Heredio’s two appearances, the threats had never escalated beyond hang-ups and notes, and Carisi and Rollins’ investigation had never turned up any solid leads, so everyone worrying about him even more than they already are isn’t something he wants to deal with. All that the resumption of the threats means is that whoever was sending them knew he was back in the city, which wasn’t in any way a secret, and whatever peace of mind he might gain from telling someone isn’t worth the added stress, his own or anyone else’s.

Even as the back of his skull bounces off the wall, his first thought is Thank God Liv isn’t here with Noah. Or Tommy. Or God forbid, my mother. It’s still just my problem. He’d assumed it was Tommy knocking on the door, wanting to ask a few questions before heading to school, or maybe sent by Mrs. Zhang to make sure Rafael had something other than just coffee for breakfast, which is why the man outside his apartment had been able to catch him so off guard.

Two men, he thinks, as he tries to stagger away from the wall and the hands that have ahold of him, but someone shoves at his back, sending him sprawling. His head cracks against the ground this time, and he’s having trouble focusing, on getting his hands underneath him to push himself up as a boot connects with his side, and then another, and another. It goes on for a long time, or at least it seems to, and when the blows finally stop, he senses one of his attackers squatting down, tilting his head to meet Rafael’s eyes. He tries to concentrate on his face, because that’s important for some reason that he can’t remember at the moment, but he’s having trouble focusing his eyes.

“We could kill you, abogado,” the man says, and Rafael flinches away and immediately feels a surge of anger at himself, because he knows better than that, knows that showing weakness like that only makes men who want to hurt him angrier, and yes, there’s another kick against his back, “But then we wouldn’t get the chance to do this again. Until next time, Rafael.”

He hears the door close behind them, manages to roll over and fumble his phone out of his pocket, but then he can’t remember what it’s for. His thoughts feel slippery, keep sliding away from him, and he tries to concentrate on just one: he needs help. He is hurt, and he needs help, so he needs to call… someone.

He should just bang on the floor, and then Mrs. Rivera would know he needed help. He should call the police, and an ambulance. Should go to check on his Mami, because when his father hurt him like this he was usually mad enough to hit her too, or he had hit her first and Rafi had gotten between them. He tries to look up the stairs at his father, but there’s only the ceiling, and there’s no blood, no open wound when he twists painfully to press his fingers against his lower back, only the old scar.

Right.

He manages to unlock his phone, should call the police, or an ambulance, or he should bang on the floor. Instead-

“Rafa?”

“Liv,” he says, his own voice soft and sounding far away, but hers grounds him, reminds him what he’s supposed to be doing, “Liv, I’m hurt. I need help.”

“What? Rafa, what happened?”

“I- I can’t- my father,” he says, his thoughts fuzzy again, and he knows that’s wrong even before Olivia says, “Rafael, your father is dead. He’s been dead for years.”

“Right. Right. I know. I just- I’m hurt, Liv, and my head…”

“Okay, Barba. I need you to tell me where you are.”

“Mi abuelita’s.”

“You’re at home?” And yes, that’s right. It’s his apartment now. Missing me one place search another.

“Yeah,” he says, when he realizes he hasn’t actually answered. I stop somewhere waiting for you.

“Alright. Help is on the way, but, Barba, I need you to stay awake and keep talking to me, understood?” He wants to make some crack about how he’s not one of her detectives and she can’t just give him orders, but he can’t get the words from his brain to his mouth. “Barba!”

“I’m here, Lieutenant. No need to yell.”

“If you keep talking, Counselor, I won’t yell.”

That seems to be asking a lot, what with the way his chest aches-- broken ribs, he’s sure, it’s a familiar feeling, even three decades removed-- and how much his head hurts. But he would do much more difficult things for Olivia Benson if she asked them of him, so he tilts his head closer to the phone.

“Whatever you want, Liv.” And would not just assume foolishly you know it.

“Tell me what happened.”

He does his best, and Olivia doesn’t get frustrated with him, just prompts him to keep going every time he trails off, loses the train of his thought. She stays on the phone with him until the paramedics arrive, and then promises to meet them at the hospital. Rafael doesn’t remember much from the ambulance, or their arrival at the hospital, just how hard he had to work to stay awake because Olivia had told him to and the gnawing feeling of familiar dread concerning his father’s anger.

The next thing he’s really, solidly aware of is the doctor standing at the foot of his hospital bed. She explains that he has three broken ribs and a lot of bruising in addition to a bad concussion. They were keeping him overnight for observation, and he was allowed to sleep but they would be waking him up every two hours or so to monitor his symptoms and make sure the concussion didn’t develop into anything worse. He understands most of what she says, but is really just glad for whatever pain medication they’re giving him and that they’re going to let him sleep.

--------------

The first time he wakes up, his mother is sitting next to his bed, holding one of his hands in both of hers, rosary tangled between their fingers.

“Rafi, you have to stop doing things like this to me,” she says, after the nurse has checked him over and left.

“I’m sorry, Mami. I’m alright though.” It’s the mantra of his youth, for both of them. Yes, they were hurt, yes, it was bad, and unfair, and a whole host of other things, but I’m alright though.

She scoffs, and then untangles one hand to run it over his hair, smoothing it down, like she used to do when he was young.

“Mijo. My brave and brilliant boy.”

Rafael closes his eyes and lets the light pressure of her hand at his crown lull him back to sleep.

--------------

The next time, it’s a detective he doesn’t know, who takes his statement and assures him they’re investigating both the attack itself and the threats that had preceded it. The time after that, it’s Rita, sitting next to his bed and thumbing through a months old magazine.

“I should kick your ass for being such an idiot again, but,” she says, gesturing around the room, and then she goes back to her magazine, ignoring him completely to really drive home her irritation with him. It’s still nice to have her there, and before she leaves she wakes him up again and promises to call Devine to update him. He manages to mumble his thanks, and he can’t be sure because he’s still having trouble focusing, but he thinks that maybe her face goes just a bit soft for half a second.

It’s Carisi the next time, slouching in the chair with his legs thrown out in front of him. It reminds Barba of how Devine usually sits, like both men have a little bit more limb than they really know what to do with.

“Evening, Counselor. How you feeling?”

“Fabulous.”

“That’s good. Uh, there’s a kid in the waiting room, and, uh, his mom too, actually, who’ve been asking about you. Tommy, he said his name was. You know him?”

“He’s my neighbor. He wants to be a prosecutor,” he says, and immediately regrets it when Carisi’s face lights up. He can’t quite remember the reasons why he hadn’t wanted to tell Carisi about Tommy, but he’s pretty sure they were good ones. Or annoying ones, at least.

“That’s cool. Anyway, he offered to feed your cats while you’re gone, so do you have a spare key I can get for him? We’ve got your keys.”

“In the dish in the kitchen,” he says, even though he’s not sure why Tommy would need his own key just to feed Juez and Arabella for one night, “And Carisi? Don’t,” he adds, not sure what he means but very much feeling the need to say it.

The detective laughs like he knows exactly what he’s saying and is disregarding it immediately anyway, but Rafael is too tired to say anything else about it.

--------------

“Isn’t it after visiting hours?” He has no idea what time it actually is, but it seems like it must be pretty late.

“Yeah,” Eddie says, sitting up a little straighter in his seat, “But your mom’s getting something to eat and Lieutenant Benson had to go into the precinct for a bit, and they wanted someone to sit with you. I think the lieutenant told them I’m DOC and here for your protection. And also she might have threatened them a little bit, I’m not really sure.”

Rafael laughs, which hurts just about everywhere, and Eddie’s face does something complicated at his wince.

“Too bad I wasn’t there to look out for you this time, hermano.”

“Not your fault. It’s mine.”

“Same old Rafi,” Eddie says, and then they’re silent for a while, because Rafael doesn’t know how to respond to that, how to bridge the gap between them. There’s so much there-- their mutual betrayal of Alex and their different paths in life pushing against them, Alex’s betrayal of them both and what they thought he was and could be and all those warm, young years of friendship holding them together.

Eddie clears his throat. “So, uh, José has a soccer game next week, on Thursday evening, and my mom is making dinner afterwards. And I, uh, thought you might want to come.”

“I can’t,” he says, before he really thinks it through, and Eddie just manages to keep a straight face, nodding.

“Yeah, you’re busy, I get it, I just thought-”

“No!” Rafael cuts him off, too loudly, both his head and his chest throbbing, and it takes a second to compose himself, to wrestle with the pain and work through what his brain needs his mouth to say. “I just mean that- with these threats, and now this,” he says, gesturing down his body, “I don’t want to take any chances that I might put your family in danger. Once they catch these guys, once everything is sorted out, I’d love to. I miss your mom’s cooking.”

“She was always proud of you, you know?” Eddie says, smiling now, “Used to keep the papers so she could show me the articles about you. She said she’d pray for you.”

“Tell her gracias for me.”

They’re silent again after that until Rafael falls asleep again, but it’s more comfortable than it has been in a long time.

---------------

He knows it’s late the next time he wakes up, but Olivia is sitting next to the bed. She’s holding his hand, fingers twined with his, thumb rubbing back and forth against his.

“Hey,” he says, after the nurse leaves, dimming the lights a bit on his way out. He thinks of that first day at her door, and I give you my love more precious than money.

She stares at their hands for a few seconds before she says, “You should have told me.”

If I knew this is the last time I see you. He knows she’s talking about the threats, but his own thoughts and the concussion and the fact that it is so often bubbling dangerously close to the surface these days is almost enough to get him to say something that he definitely should not right in this moment, if ever. After he wrestles with himself for a few moments, he says instead, “I know. I didn’t want you to worry.”

“Well, you did a spectacularly bad job of that.”

“I know.”

“Hmmm.” She is still holding his hand. “As punishment, you’re going to have to stay with me for awhile.”

Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me? and fuck, he really needs to stop thinking about Whitman right now, and about how good her hand feels in his. He shakes his head, which is a terrible decision but actually helps because he has to concentrate all his currently available faculties on seeing straight and not throwing up.

“What?”

“We haven’t caught these guys, or whoever put them up to it, and until we do, you need a protection detail. You’re also going to need someone to help you out until you’ve had some time to heal, especially with the concussion. The easiest way to accomplish both those things at the same time is for you to stay with me.”

“Liv, I can’t put you out like that.”

“Oh, no, Barba, this isn’t an offer, it’s an order. And everyone, including your mother, is on my side. So you’re coming home with me tomorrow when they release you. Carisi and your friend Tommy have already packed up some stuff for you, and Tommy has agreed to feed Juez and Arabella while you’re gone.”

“Liv,” he starts, fully prepared to make an argument that he knows he won’t end up winning because that’s what they do, but she surprises him by lifting the hand not holding his and running it through his hair. Rafael can’t stop himself from leaning into the feeling, or the shuddering breath he lets out. It’s almost lulled him back to sleep when Olivia speaks.

“When you called me,” she says, and he already knows where this is going, wants to stop it now, right now, but he’s struggling to fight his way back awake enough to get his mouth to work. “When you called, you said something about your father. And when the doctors asked about your medical history, about any prior injuries you had that might be relevant, your mother said-”

“I can’t- I don’t want to talk about it right now,” he whispers, horrified to find that he’s near tears, and for a second he thinks Olivia is going to push anyway.

But then she just tightens her grip on his hand and resumes running her other one through his hair. It feels immensely intimate, with the dim lighting and her fingers occasionally dropping from his hair so she can run them along the shell of his ear, but it’s also comfortable, because it’s Olivia, and his last thought before he falls asleep again is when it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers.

---------------

Noah and Lucy are on the couch when Rafael and Olivia arrive at her apartment the next afternoon, and Rafael assumes that his mother had warned the boy about his injuries, because instead of rushing over to hug him, he just smiles at him from his spot.

“Hey, Uncle Rafa. Momma says you don’t feel good.”

“She’s right, buddy,” he says, sinking down onto the couch next to him while Lucy and Olivia talk in the kitchen.

“She says you’re going to stay with us for awhile.”

“Yeah. That okay with you?” Noah nods, then jumps off the couch to go into his room. Lucy asks if Olivia needs anything, and tells Rafael she hopes he feels better soon on the way out the door, and then it’s just the two of them. He’s about to try arguing with her again when Noah returns from his room with a stack of books and his stomach drops.

Rafael has never turned down a request from Noah to read to him, but there’s no way his head is going to let him concentrate on anything for that long. Olivia must see the look on his face, because she puts her hand on Noah’s shoulder.

“Sweet boy, remember I said that Uncle Rafa’s head is really bothering him. I don’t think-”

“I know,” Noah says, shrugging her hand off and hopping back up onto the couch next to Rafael, “I’m going to read to him, to help him feel better.”

“Oh. Okay. If that’s alright with him?”

“I think I can handle it,” he says, shifting in an attempt to get more comfortable with his ribs. Olivia disappears into the kitchen again as Noah opens the top book in his stack, and she comes back with a glass of water and his Percocet.

It’s nice to sit and listen to Noah, even if he sometimes has trouble with the words and instead just describes what is happening based on the pictures. When he goes to get a couple more books after he’s worked through the first stack of three he’d brought out, Rafael risks spending a few minutes checking his text messages, and finds a new group text with Rita and Devine.

DA: I let you go back to the big bad city and you immediately get your ass kicked?

RC: He’s been back for months.

RC: Also calling it the ‘big bad city’ isn’t nearly as country bumpkin charming as you think it is.

DA: It’s exactly as country bumpkin charming as I think it is. Sorry that not all of us grew up in the Big Apple.

RC: ‘The Big Apple’ is also not charming.

RC: Not all of us grew up in cornfields.

He puts it away when Noah comes back, in part because the words are starting to blur in front of his eyes again. At some point between books five and six, he must doze off, because the next he’s aware it’s dark and Olivia is shaking his shoulder gently.

“I fell asleep?” he asks, trying to shake off some of the sleepiness and immediately regretting it. Olivia keeps her hand on his shoulder to steady him.

“You woke up enough for a bit to eat a slice of pizza and take another dose of painkillers, but other than that you’ve been out.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to spend the whole day asleep. I’ll apologize to Noah tomorrow.”

Olivia laughs. “He’s not mad, Rafa. He falls asleep all the time when you’re reading to him, remember? Come on, you should get to bed.”

“Yeah,” he says, and it takes his sluggish brain a few seconds to realize that she’s holding out her hand to help him up, and what exactly that means, “No, Liv, that’s- I’m fine on the couch.”

“Barba, I made you come stay with me. I’m not letting you sleep on the couch. Plus you’re hurt, and sleeping out here won’t help.”

“It’s too much. I’m not kicking you out of your own bed.” He feels ridiculous that he has to fight a blush at that, but it is what it is.

“I’m offering.”

“I’m not accepting.”

Olivia sighs, and then levels a look at him that has him fighting a shiver of something.

“Fine. We’ll share.” His response is a deeply embarrassing choking sound, and she rolls her eyes. “It’s a big bed, Barba. Plenty of room for both of us.”

“I-” He really should say no, should dig in and remain sitting on the couch until she gives up. But he really is extraordinarily tired, and while Olivia’s couch is comfortable, it’s not a bed, and, despite the nerves twisting in his stomach, he wants to, wants to curl up in Olivia’s warm bed that undoubtedly smells like her and sleep until he doesn’t feel so terrible. Just for one night, and then he’ll spend tomorrow convincing her to let him sleep on the couch or go back to his own apartment or some other plan he’ll think of later when his sides aren’t aching so badly.

He sighs and lets her help him to his feet. They take turns in the bathroom, and then he lets her climb into the bed first before he settles on the other side, making sure to leave a decent gap between them. Even then, it’s exactly as nice as he thought it would be and thus exactly as dangerous too, but he chooses not to think about that right now.

Before he falls asleep, he sends a response to Devine and Rita before he can think about it too much: I love you guys. Devine responds with two heart emojis and Rita just sends back Gross. Rafael knows them well enough to know that they convey the same sentiment.

---------------

He wakes up to Olivia pressing a kiss against his temple.

“Hey, you can go back to sleep if you want, but you should probably get up and eat something, take your painkillers. I’m walking Noah to meet Lucy so they can go to the museum, and then I’ve got to go into the precinct for a few hours, but we’ll be back this afternoon, okay?”

“Are you on my case?”

“Not my jurisdiction. Plus,” she says, brushing his hair away from his face, and he leans into her hand with the excuse that he’s half-asleep, “They don’t want me anywhere near that case.”

He doesn’t really know what she means by that, but he’s not going to figure it out right now, so he just nods and pulls the blankets back up to his chin. Rafael spends most of the day sleeping, only occasionally getting up to eat a banana and take his pills, and when Olivia climbs into bed next to him that night, he tells himself that an argument would be more trouble than it’s worth and that one more night won’t hurt anything.

----------------

By the afternoon of the third day, his head has stopped bothering him quite as much, which means that after Lucy brings Noah home from school and he checks to make sure it’s alright with Olivia, he sits out in the living room and keeps an eye on him while he does his homework. He can stand to look at his phone for fifteen minute bursts or so, so he’s catching up on emails and chuckling at the fight Devine and Rita are having over what to call the group text. Its current name is Fuck You And Also The Entire Great Plains.

When the light from the screen starts to make his headache worse again, he slips the phone into his pocket and looks over at Noah, who he’s surprised to find is watching him.

“What’s up, buddy?”

“‘M fine,” he says, turning back to his homework, and Rafael pushes himself into a sitting position and then leans forward as much as he can so he’s closer to Noah’s level where he’s sitting on the floor, papers spread across the coffee table.

“You know you can tell me if something is wrong, yeah? Did something happen at school?”

Noah considers whatever it is that’s bothering him for a bit, takes a deep breath, and then puts down his pencil and turns to look at Rafael.

“Are you going to leave again?”

The question sends a frisson of pain up his ribs as he loses his breath, although he’s not sure why he’s all that surprised. He had, after all, left once before.

“Why do you think that?”

Noah shrugs. “Something bad happened to you. Momma said that you left last time because something bad happened and you needed space to think.” He tilts his head. “Is Arizona a good place to think?”

Rafael tries to force the lump out of his throat and takes a deep breath. “It is, but I mostly went there because a friend of mine-”

“Mr. Awazoom?” Noah asks, and Rafael smiles at his mispronunciation.

“Yes, my friend Devine, he offered to help me out, and your mom is right, I did need space. But that’s not what I need this time. This time I need you guys, you and your mom and my other friends. That sound alright?”

Noah nods hard enough that it shakes his whole body. “So you’re not leaving?”

“No,” he says, then takes a second to consider his words before he continues, “Next time I go to Arizona, how about I take you and your mom with me? You can meet my friend, and I can show you all the things I sent you pictures of.”

“That sounds cool. Can I read to you again? Momma got me a book about the states and I read all about Arizona.”

“Finish your homework first, and then you can.”

By the time Olivia gets home, Noah has finished his homework and they’re all the way to Tennessee in his book, Rafael helping him sound out the longer words. He looks up when he hears her set her keys down on the entryway table, and she smiles at the two of them, but there’s a wistfulness to her expression that twists at something in his chest. Does she think I’m going to leave again too?

He feels unsettled for the rest of the night, his ribs aching as he tries to wean himself off the Percocet a bit, because it makes him feel not entirely present. Curling up under Olivia’s comforter again, listening to her soft and even breathing as she falls asleep, he tells himself he’ll definitely talk to her tomorrow, when he feels less disjointed and exposed.

---------------

He wakes up gasping, twisting around to try and reach his back despite how much it hurts his ribs, fingers finding scar tissue instead of blood, and it was a dream, it was a dream, and he knew this because it hadn’t been cold that day, it had been the middle of summer, and he barely stops himself from flinging himself off the bed when someone touches his shoulder. It’s Olivia, of course it is, it’s Olivia touching his shoulder and turning on the lamp beside the bed, and his father is dead, and it had been the middle of summer.

“Rafa, what-? You’re shaking. You’re shivering,” she says, and he knows she must have seen the goosebumps along his forearms, but he can’t stop the way he clutches at the blanket when she pulls it up around his shoulders. He relaxes as much as he can, buries his face in his pillow so she can’t see his expression.

“I’m fine,” he says after a few minutes, when she still hasn’t shut off the light and he can feel her watching him, “Just a nightmare.”

“You don’t seem fine. Do you want to-”

“No. I just want to go back to sleep.”

“Rafael-”

“Liv. Please,” he says, finally turning his face to look at her and willing her to understand.

“This can’t be good for you.”

“I’m not very good at doing what’s good for me.” As clearly evidenced by the fact that I’m lying here in your bed for the third night in a row even though I keep telling myself I’ll stop. He blames the late hour and the cold still shuddering through him for the slip-up.

She doesn’t say anything more, just reaches over and shuts the light off, but as he drifts back to sleep, he can tell she’s still lying awake.

---------------

“What the hell did you do?”

He manages to roll over and look at Olivia, who is staring down at him from over the edge of the bed. It’s about ten seconds before he can get his breath back enough to talk. The impact with the floor had been pretty brutal, but he doesn’t think he’s hurt any worse than he already was.

“Rolled out of the bed.”

“How?”

“I was trying to give you room.” Because I’ve now spent four nights in your bed, being a coward. Because you have work in the morning and I didn’t want to wake you up if I had another nightmare.

Rafael expects her to give him the look she always does when she thinks he’s being stupid, but the expression on her face is much softer, and sadder, and he reaches up a hand like he can do anything at all to make her stop looking at him like that.

“Do you need help?” she asks, and he shakes his head, pushing himself up onto his elbows, into a sitting position, and finally back up to the bed. He swallows one of the Percocets he’d left on the bedside table that was meant for the morning, and lays back down along the far edge of the bed.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Barba,” Olivia says, and then she reaches over to grab a handful of his t-shirt and tries to haul him bodily across the bed towards her. She pulls hard enough that Rafael doesn’t have much choice except to shuffle closer towards her until he’s almost in the center of the bed, Olivia’s fingers still twisted into his shirt. “I’m not going to let you end up in the hospital again because you’re being stupid.”

“Liv,” he says, but she’s already lying down next to him again, much closer this time and still holding onto him, clearly uninterested in whatever arguments he might have, so he gives in for now.

When he wakes up next, it’s still dark, and his ribs hurt but not as much as he thought they would, probably thanks to the Percocet, and Olivia has pressed herself tightly against his back, one ankle hooked over both of his and her arm wrapped around his waist, fingers tangled with his, like she had anticipated him trying to move away again during the night and was having none of it.

Half-asleep and exhausted, his brain registers that he’ll probably freak out about this in some capacity come morning, but that seems like a problem for the morning. For now, he squeezes her fingers between his and leans back into her body, just a little, and thinks shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

---------------

It’s definitely a problem in the morning. Olivia is moving around the kitchen, cleaning up from Noah’s breakfast, and he’s leaning against the counter, watching her and eating a handful of plantains. He’s loopy on bad sleep and good sleep and either too much or too little Percocet, he’s not sure, but if he doesn’t say something else soon, he’s absolutely going to say something about how it felt to have all of her pressed against his back, how nice it was to have her hand in his, and ruin everything.

What his brain decides on is, “I miss my cats.”

Olivia turns to look at him, and he’s glad to see that she’s smiling, because she’s been quiet and withdrawn with him all morning.

“What?”

“I miss Juez and Arabella. I know it’s only been a few days, but,” he shrugs, “I guess I’ve gotten used to them being around.” He shrugs again, then finishes off his plantains. “I think I’m going to go back to bed for a bit.”

Rafael tries to get back to sleep in bed, but finds that it’s impossible without Olivia there next to him. He has better luck on the couch, after he checks his emails and catches up with the group message, now titled Rita Calhoun’s Never Eaten A Real Vegetable In Her Life. When he wakes up, Juez is curled up on his chest, and he meows at Rafael when he shifts.

“Look, Uncle Rafa!” Noah says, sitting at the coffee table with his homework, petting Arabella, “Your friend brought Bella and Juez over.”

“I see that. Liv?” he calls, scooping Juez off of his chest and holding him as he goes into the kitchen, where Olivia is making dinner. “My cats are here?”

“Yeah, I had Tommy drop them off. He’s a nice kid, by the way, I invited him for dinner,” she asks, looking over her shoulder at him, “The building allows pets, and it’s not like they take up a lot of space.” She sets down the knife she’s chopping vegetables with, turns, and reaches out to rub at the fur between Juez’s ears with her thumb. The cat presses up into her hand, purring. “You said they help with your nightmares, and you won’t talk to me, so.” She shrugs.

“Olivia, it’s not-” he starts, but there’s a knock at the door, and she steps past him to go anwer it.

“That’s probably Tommy. You should go get dressed for company.”

Dinner with Tommy is nice. He brings Rafael well wishes and news from their building, and he talks about books and what he’s learning about in school with Noah. Before he leaves, he tells Rafael that his mother expects him at dinner as soon as he’s able, and invites the Bensons as well.

After they’ve cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher, Rafael’s head is feeling good enough that he manages to read Noah one short book before he heads to bed himself. Arabella stays in Noah’s room, sniffing his toys and books, but Juez curls up next to him on the bed while he waits for Olivia.

“Liv,” he says softly, once she’s sitting on her side of the bed. He waits until she looks at him before he continues, “Thank you. I mean it. You didn’t have to do this.”

“It’s not a problem, Rafa,” she responds, switching off the lamp next to her bed.

He startles a bit when he feels her scoot over closer to him, one ankle hooking over both of his.

“Only way to make sure you don’t do anything stupid,” she says, nestling her cheek against his shoulder and resting her hand against the lump that his crucifix makes under his shirt, careful of his bruises, and he thinks it’s meant to be teasing, but there’s something in her voice that sounds terribly like her son’s Are you going to leave again? He tries to get a look at her face, but can’t tilt his chin down far enough to get the angle with her crowded into his side like she is.

“Liv, I’m-” he starts, but she shakes her head.

“Don’t. Just… stay. No talking. No leaving. Just staying.”

“Ok, Liv,” he says, shifting so he can wrap his arm around her properly. He presses a kiss against her hair. “I’m here.”

---------------

“That scar on your back is pretty big,” Olivia says, and Rafael lets his head drop forward with a sigh. He should have seen this coming.

Of course she’s seen the scar, he’s been sleeping in her bed for a week. And everything had felt so settled the last few days, and today in particular. He’d felt well enough all day that he’d been able to make dinner, and afterwards the three of them had all sat on the couch and watched a movie, and then he and Olivia had sat side by side on her bed while she looked over reports and he sent Rita and Devine pictures of Juez and Arabella in the group message, which now just has a string of knife emojis as the name.

He takes two more deep breaths, to finish his prescribed nightly routine so that he doesn’t develop pneumonia on top of the broken ribs and the concussion, and turns to look at her over his shoulder. She’s sitting on her side of the bed, folder of reports open on her lap, looking at him over her glasses.

“Olivia.”

“Rafael.”

He sighs, turning back so he can stare at the wall instead of looking at her.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t want to.”

“That’s not a very good reason.”

“I wasn’t aware I needed a good reason to feel the way I feel about my own scars.”

“You don’t. I just think… Maybe if you talked ab-”

“I don’t want to talk about it!” he says, too loud, because Noah is sleeping down the hall, and because he knows she’s just trying to help, trying to be his best friend, but she knows, she knows that he does not want to talk about this, that he hasn’t wanted to talk about this for days and weeks and months, and she keeps pushing anyway. He clenches his fists, lets his nails dig into his palms for a second, forces himself to take another breath.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” He stands, glances sideways at her. “I’m going to- I’ll be out on the couch,” he says, grabbing the pillow he’s been using from the head of the bed and leaving the room before she can say anything.

Juez curls up on his chest almost as soon as he lays down, and he has to reluctantly move him onto the couch beside him because his ribs hurt too much. The cat meows reproachfully at him once, but then settles and is soon purring softly as Rafael runs his hand along his back. He gets out his phone, considers calling Devine because it’s not that late in Arizona, or Rita, who would be pissed at him for calling so late but wouldn’t hang up on him, and he also stupidly wants to call Olivia, because that’s who he would normally talk to in this situation. After scrolling back and forth through his contacts for a couple minutes, he drops his phone onto his chest and closes his eyes, even though he knows he won’t be able to fall asleep any time soon.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been lying there when he hears footsteps, and opens his eyes to find Olivia leaning against the wall at the far end of the couch.

“Sorry,” she says, and he shakes his head, pushing himself into a sitting position with a wince. Olivia joins him on the couch.

“Don’t apologize. I just- I can’t.” The last part is a whisper, and he scrubs at his face with both hands as he repeats it. “I can’t.”

“It’s okay,” she says, and when he drops his hands to glance sideways at her, she reaches over and wraps her fingers around his wrist, rubs her thumb softly and slowly across the bones there, “Come back to bed?”

It’s so achingly domestic that it makes his head spin, and he’d be absolutely powerless to refuse even if he wanted to. He feels a little ridiculous, trudging back into the bedroom with his pillow tucked under his arm after storming out of it in the first place not that long ago, but that goes away pretty quickly once Olivia is settled warmly against his side.

Rafael doesn’t miss the way that her fingers twist tightly into his t-shirt.

-----------

He’s been at Olivia’s for eleven days when he walks out of her bedroom to find her, his mother, and Rita Calhoun standing in her kitchen. Arabella is sitting on the counter, Rita scratching beneath her chin, and his mother appears to be giving Olivia instructions about the tin foil covered casserole dishes sitting on the stove.

His first thought is the absurdity of love. His second thought is there is not one single way this ends well for me.

“Morning, Rafi. And what sort of time do you call this?” his mother says, and he crosses the kitchen to kiss her cheek.

“I’m recovering, Mami. What are you doing here?”

“I came to drop off some food, to thank Lieutenant Benson for her hospitality.”

“And Rita came to talk to you, but since you’re not allowed to leave the apartment, I’m taking your mother out for coffee so that you two can chat. Noah’s still asleep, but if he wakes up, tell him I’ll be back soon with breakfast, yeah?” Olivia says, closing the fridge after she’s stashed the food in there. Rafael tries not to look as overwhelmed as he feels by the trust she places in him, leaving him to look out for her sleeping son.

Rita waits until the door has closed behind them before she speaks.

“Just exactly what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Excuse me?” he says, because as far as he can tell he’s not actually doing anything except trying not to stare at the fact that Rita Calhoun is using just the tips of her fingers to rub the back of Arabella’s neck softly.

“Barba, I literally just saw what room you stumbled out of. And don’t try to give me any lines about how Olivia’s sleeping on the couch.”

His face flares red immediately, he can feel the heat of it, and he stoops to pick up Juez from where he’s rubbing against his shins to give himself a few seconds to compose himself.

“It’s not- we’re not-”

“Yeah, that’s exactly the problem, and why Dev and I decided it was time for an intervention. Since he lives in Arizona, it would have been a lot more dramatic for him to come up here, but also much more inconvenient. Plus I’ve always been better at yelling at you. He lets you get away with that kicked puppy dog look you can do way too easily.”

Rafael carefully schools his face. “I don’t need an intervention.”

“You sure as shit do. This is a whole new level of ridiculousness, even for you and even about this. I’ve seen you tie yourself into some very twisty knots about this thing between you and Benson, but Jesus, Rafael.”

He sighs. “Rita-”

“Oh, no. You don’t get to do the thing where you sigh and say ‘Rita’ like that’s an actual argument. Not this time.”

“It’s my life. My… feelings.”

“Not this time, it’s not.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think by now both of us are well aware that you’re practically a professional at doing things that will make yourself miserable, but you usually cut that shit out when it comes to Olivia, especially when it doesn’t have anything to do with your jobs.”

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re sleeping in her fucking bed, Rafael. And knowing the two of you, you’re not keeping to seperate sides of the mattress. So what happens when your concussion resolves, and your prescription runs out, and they catch these bastards? What happens when all your excuses for letting yourself-- and her-- have this dry up? Are you just going to bolt, try to act like it didn’t happen? Like it didn’t mean anything? ‘Sorry, Liv, I know we’ve been cuddling for weeks now, but I think I’ll just head on home?’ Are you going to act like it isn’t exactly what both of you want?

“I know you can’t really see it, not like the rest of us can, because you’re too close, and you’ve felt this way for so long, and because she’s important to you. I know how important she is to you, Rafael, and I know that’s a lot of the reason you’re so ridiculous about all of this. But I also know how important you are to her, what you mean to her, and if you don’t start being honest, you are going to break her heart. For real this time.”

“That’s…” he starts, but he can’t think of anything to say because all he can hear is Olivia saying just staying. Olivia saying come back to bed.

I give you myself before preaching or law. Also I wanted to love. Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Will you give me yourself?

Rita looks smug, but he’s saved from having to deal with that on top of everything else by the sound of footsteps in the hallway. Noah comes into the kitchen, rubbing at his eyes and still wearing his pajamas, and stops at the sight of the two adults.

“Uncle Rafa?”

“Hey, amigo. This is my friend, Ms. Rita.”

“Good morning, Ms. Rita.”

“Good morning, Noah. I was just on my way out. You,” she says, poking Rafael lightly in the chest for emphasis, “Stop being an idiot, and use your words. Some people think you’re good at them. Have a nice day, Noah. And tell your mom thank you for me.”

“Bye, Ms. Rita.” Noah watches her leave, then turns to Rafael and glances towards where Arabella is still sitting. Rafael sighs but dutifully lifts him up onto the counter, even though he’s sure the kid is way outside of his weight restrictions, and then leans next to him.

“What’s up, buddy?”

“You said Ms. Rita is your friend, but she called you a mean name,” he says, gathering Arabella into his lap.

“Um,” Rafael says, wondering how he can possibly explain his decades long friendship with Rita Calhoun to a six year old. “Sometimes, when grown ups have been friends for a long time-- and Ms. Rita and I have been friends for a really, really long time--, sometimes they’re mean to each other but they don’t really mean it. It’s kind of a joke, like how your mom and I tease each other sometimes. And, uh,” he continues, not sure exactly why he feels the need to explain this part to Noah, “Sometimes if they think their friend is being dumb, they’ll tell them that to help them out.

“And,” he says, leaning in close, “The most important thing to know about Ms. Rita is that she’s never, ever been mean to me when I really, really needed her to be nice, and that’s how you know who your real friends are.”

Noah considers all of this. “Grown ups are weird.”

Rafael laughs. “Got it in one, kid. So you should probably just be nice to your friends, as a rule. Less complicated.”

“Where’s Momma?”

“She’s out getting coffee with my Mami. She’ll be back with breakfast for us soon.”

“Okay. Can we play blocks until she gets back?”

“Of course.”

He settles onto the couch as Noah digs his blocks out of the toy box, and his phone buzzes with a notification that the name of the group text has been changed to What Did You Ever Do To Deserve Friends Like Us.

Rafael almost texts back Something terrible. Almost.

-------------

Olivia gets home late enough that not only has he already gotten Noah into bed and read to him, he’s in bed himself, thankful that his concussion has cleared up for the most part and he can read something more complex than The Fifty Nifty United States.

“Hey,” he says, when she finally walks into the bedroom a little after ten. She returns his smile with a tight one of her own, but he waits until she’s slid in next to him before asking, “Bad case?”

“No, actually. Good one,” she answers. He raises his eyebrows, and she scoots over so she can rest her head on his shoulder and find the shape of his crucifix with her fingers before she continues, very softly, “They caught the men who attacked you. And they gave up who put them up to it. They’ll need you to go in to look at a lineup tomorrow morning.”

“Oh.” He isn’t sure what else to say. The detectives working the case had called a few times to give him updates, but in the warm bubble of Olivia’s apartment, the threats really hadn’t felt like the most pressing issue. “Who?” he finally asks, after he realizes that Olivia hadn’t told him.

“Officer Donlan has two older brothers who are on the force. One of them was a corrections officer before he joined NYPD.”

“That’s why…”

“Yeah. I suppose they figured that they’d kill two birds with one stone there. It seems like they really did just want to scare you, make your life difficult, at least at first. Who knows why they escalated to actually having someone go after you. Maybe because you ignored them. These sorts of things aren’t usually all that logical.”

“Mmmm. I guess this means that I can go home.” He says it without much thought but regrets it immediately, especially when Olivia goes rigid against his side, fingers curling around his crucifix.

“Let’s talk about it in the morning.”

“Liv, I’ve been here for two weeks. That’s more hospitality tha-”

“Please, Rafa. Just… let’s wait until morning. I’m tired.”

He almost pushes, but there’s a note of genuine desperation in her voice that stops him short. It’s late, and she’s been at work all day, and maybe she really is just tired and not trying to avoid this conversation for reasons he really doesn’t want to think about.

“Of course, Liv. We’ll talk in the morning,” he says, and turns to press a kiss against her hair, trying not to read too much into the way she relaxes against him.

----------------

They do not talk about it in the morning.

“Uncle Rafa, can you walk me to school?” Noah asks the moment he steps out of Olivia’s bedroom, “Momma says they caught the bad guys and that you can leave the apartment now. Please?”

He’d asked a couple of times the first few days Rafael had been staying with them, and Olivia had had to explain as best she could about what had happened and why he couldn’t, and he had promised that he’d do it as soon as it was safe. When he looks at Olivia though, she can’t meet his eyes, and he gets the distinct feeling that he’s being set up.

But it’s not like he can accuse a six year old of conspiring with his mother to keep her from having to talk to her best friend, so he just smiles and helps Noah put his backpack on.

“Of course. We’ll talk when I get back?” he says, directing the last part towards Olivia, who nods without looking up from her phone.

Noah chatters the entire way to school, and Rafael pays as much attention as he can while also trying to figure out exactly what he wants to say to Olivia. He can’t deny that it’s nice to be outside and walking around again, and Noah’s excitement about his Uncle Rafa taking him to school is contagious.

When he gets back to the apartment, however, all that’s waiting for him is a note telling him that the detectives on his case were sending a squad car to pick him up at ten to come in for the lineup.

For a few hours, he’s genuinely angry, that his best friend won’t talk to him about this mundane thing, that they can’t figure this out like adults. All he’s doing is going back to his apartment, which was always the plan anyway, and the Bronx is a lot closer than Arizona. He’s going back to his life, not running away from it, and she won’t even talk to him so he can explain that. Even Noah had talked to him when he was worried about him leaving again.

The ride to the Bronx precinct and the lineup was a welcome distraction, but even then he wished Olivia was with him. He made it through the actual lineups alright, but afterwards he’d had to find a quiet corner to sit in for a few minutes and force himself to take deep breaths. After he calls his mother and texts Devine and Rita to let them know what’s happening, he goes out for lunch, because he can do that now, and then back to the apartment.

By the time he gets there, the anger has completely drained away, and he just feels lost. All that time in Arizona spent worrying that the distance would fracture what was between them, and it turns out that proximity was somehow worse. The lost feeling had been worse in Arizona, the cracked open sound of her voice that night he called her about the stars, because both of them had known he could not and was not going to come running back to her, not before he felt ready, not before he felt less like everything he touched crumbled to pieces in his hands. But he’s here, now, and he knows he can fix this if she’ll just talk to him.

He doesn’t want to corner her though, not when she’s trying so hard to avoid the conversation, so he waits until after they’ve gotten Noah into bed that night, and he comes out into the living room to find her sitting at one end of the couch with a glass of wine. Rafael settles on the other end with his own drink, and waits a few minutes to see if she’s going to say something first.

“The detectives gave me the all clear,” he starts, after it becomes obvious she isn’t going to, “So my cats and I can go back to my apartment any time.”

He thinks that maybe she’ll give some excuse, that he should wait awhile to make sure that it’s really safe, maybe until after the trial, if there is one, or come up with something else. What she actually says slices right through him.

“You don’t have to go.”

“Liv.” He pushes himself up from the couch, walks towards the television. “I should get out of your hair. And Noah’s. I’m sure you guys are looking forward to the apartment being less crowded.”

Liv shrugs, and repeats herself. “You don’t have to go.” She takes a long drink of her wine, then sets the glass on the table. “Never knew you to run from a fight, Barba.”

Rafael wants to ask her exactly what fight they’re having right now, and he also wants to point out that while he doesn’t run from fights-- he’d been a skinny smartass as a kid, which meant he’d learned quickly that if you ran from every fight you got into you never stopped running, and he was too stubborn for that--, he’s run from the people he loves plenty. He’d done it with the Bronx, Alex and Eddie, Yelina and his mother, and he’d done it with her, in front of the courthouse in the February cold. But it’s not what he’s doing now, it absolutely is not, and he almost tells her all of that.

Except that she’s gone very still, except for where she has her fingers pressed against her lips. Her hand is shaking, and he’s pretty sure she’s trying not to cry. He takes a step forward, unsure what to do, and when she speaks she sounds so exactly like she did on the phone that night in Arizona that for a moment he swears he can see the stars again.

“If you go, the bed will still smell like you, but you won’t be here.”

It’s a stunningly vulnerable thing to say, and she can’t just say things like that, not when he’s this gone on her and has been for so long, not when he’s trying so hard to keep his heart in his chest and not in a pulpy mess at her feet.

“Liv…” He takes a step closer, and she looks up at him.

“I just… I don’t want to have this fight right now.”

For fear of a constantly harrowed heart.

If you don’t start being honest, you are going to break her heart. For real this time.

Rafael crosses the space between them in two long strides and squats down in front of her, wrapping his arms around her and letting her lean into him, her face pressed against the side of his neck.

“Okay. Okay, we don’t have to talk about it tonight. I’ll stay, for a few more days. I’m here, Liv.” He shifts so he can rest one hand against her hair as gently as he can manage, and feels her twist the fingers of both hands into the back of his shirt.

He can stay for a few days, even though he thinks that might actually make things worse instead of better. It’ll give him a chance to figure things out, to pack up two weeks of living and get Juez and Arabella resituated, and maybe even give them a chance to really talk. He can do a few more days, but for right now he’s just going to hold his best friend for as long as his knees will hold out.

--------------

It’s been two days, and he hasn’t really made any plans at all. Rafael would be upset with himself, but it’s pretty hard to be upset about anything when Olivia is curled against his side in the corner of the couch, his arm around her shoulders and hers across his waist. He doesn’t want to disturb the bubble they’ve made for themselves, especially because he thinks Olivia is half-asleep, but one of the reasons he’d stayed was so that they could talk.

“Liv?” he says, and she hmms in recognition, “About… February. And the courthouse, and Arizona, and leaving. I’m-”

“Don’t,” she says, and he huffs, half in amusement and half in frustration.

“Are you ever going to let me apologize for this?”

“There’s nothing to apologize for.”

“I blew up most of my life, and at least some of yours, and then I ran away to Arizona for a few months.”

“You did what you needed to. To… pull yourself back together. I understand that.” She shifts, leaning away enough that she can meet his eyes. “You told me where you were going and you did it before you left. You kept in touch. And you came back. You came back. If there was anything to forgive,” she says, with something in her tone that is enough to tell him that there was at some point, and he almost tries to apologize again, but Olivia gets to decide what she does and does not feel the need to forgive, “Then it was forgiven a long time ago.”

“Okay,” he says, smiling, and she’s studying his face, scooting away just enough to put a little distance between them, “What?”

“Nothing. Just- I was talking to Fin today. About us.”

“You and Fin?”

“You and me.”

“Ah,” he says, considering this. “Fin doesn’t even like me.”

“He likes you just fine.” He raises his eyebrows. “He thinks you’re kind of an ass, but Fin likes plenty of people who are way bigger assholes than you are.”

Rafael laughs. “You were talking about us?”

“Yeah. About how we… fit,” she says, the last word very soft, and something about her tone shoots straight up his spine, his whole body suddenly aware that something is happening here. His fingers curl over the armrest as he tries to keep his breathing steady. “How we worked, right from the very beginning, even when we butted heads more often than not. And today, Fin said something about it that I’d never- I’d never thought of it like this.”

“Oh?” he says, reduced absolutely to that one sound and the terrible, wonderful thought of and we all know how that one goes, don’t we? Slowly.

“He said that it was important, how we fit and how quickly we did because… because we made each other better at something that was good, and right, and important. And the work was all of those things, and we did a lot of good work together, Rafa.” She pauses, takes a deep breath, and he nods, both agreeing with her and encouraging her to continue. “We understood each other, in a big and important way, and that made the work better, and our friendship better, and that was enough. It was enough, so it didn’t matter as much that-” She pauses, biting at her bottom lip, and he swears that his heart actually stops beating in his chest for a few seconds before she continues, “-It didn’t matter as much that there wasn’t… wasn’t sex or-or-or romance or whatever. The connection, the fit, that was enough, in and of itself. To just be you and me and the way we understood each other. It was enough. We’re enough.”

Rafael is pretty sure that’s a confession right there, of some kind, that single word was and the way she says it. He’s pretty sure she is trusting him right now to understand what she is saying, the whole of it, the enough and the more of it all. He’s pretty sure that now he has to match her, because that’s what they do, because she keeps looking at him and away again, like she’s touching something hot but can’t help herself.

They are, after all, enough.

He unslacks his jaw and turns on the couch, drawing one knee up so he can face her, almost reaches out to touch her but then doesn’t, because if he touches her he won’t be able to say what he needs to say and he owes her.

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road.

“Do you remember the Walter Briggs case? And the day my grandmother died? When we were in your office that day?”

It takes her a moment, but then she smiles and tilts her head. “When you asked what I thought I would be doing when I was 85 and I said squabbling with you.”

“And I said ‘Wouldn’t that be nice?’.”

“I remember.”

“I meant it,” he says in a rush, determined not to let the words stick in his throat like they have so many times before, “When I said it would be nice, I meant it. Even then, I knew. I don’t think I’d even actually recognized it yet, not all of it, but I still knew.”

“And now?”

“And now I know that there couldn’t be anything better than spending my life with Olivia Benson. Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?”

She laughs, and it’s so bright that it almost cracks his chest wide open. Scooting closer, she pulls her leg up too, so they’re facing each other, knees touching.

“That last part sounds almost familiar.”

“It’s Whitman.”

Olivia considers it for a moment. “O Pioneers?”

“Song of the Open Road.”

“Don’t think I know that one.”

“I’ll read it to you sometime.” I give you my love more precious than money. I give you myself before preaching or law. Will you give me yourself?

And somehow thinking that closes off his throat with panic, which he knows is ridiculous, because she’d been the one who started all this, and she’s smiling at him in a way that is a little hard to look directly at because it genuinely seems to be giving off light, but he has wanted this for so long and he’s so desperate to think that it’s finally true that he worries that maybe he’s just hearing what he wants to hear.

“Liv, I don’t- You shouldn’t feel like- I’m not trying-”

“Counselor,” she interrupts, still smiling, and she pushes up onto the knee she has on the coach, shuffles even closer, so that he has to bend his neck to look up at her, “Sometimes, you really do talk too much.”

Rafael has a witty rejoinder for that, he does, except then she leans down and kisses him, and it and also every other thought he has ever had leaves his brain. He presses up against her mouth after one second of absolutely stunned stillness, and it is so good to kiss her, with the curve of her waist under his hand and her fingers in his hair. He thinks he could do it forever, just stay right here like this, and then she shifts again, lifts one knee over his lap and settles it next to his opposite hip so she’s straddling him, tongue pressing against his bottom lip.

If anything in his life has ever felt as good as her warm weight on his lap, he doesn’t remember it. The hand in his hair has shifted to the back of his head, fingertips pressing just a little, keeping him close as she moves her mouth to his jawline, like he really plans on going anywhere. Her other hand skims down his arm, then slides around his side, and she shifts her knee a bit-- which has the added benefit of pressing her even closer, hips and chest against his-- so that she can get her hand around his back and underneath the hem of his t-shirt.

Her fingers graze the scar on his back, and he can’t stop the gasp that escapes him, or the way his spine straightens at the feeling of it, sensation then numbness then sensation again.

She pulls back, already apologizing, but the look on his face must give him away, because she quickly switches to “Rafa, you don’t have to tell me.”

“I know,” he says, and it’s a little funny, how they’ve suddenly switched sides on that. Maybe they both had things they needed to work through before they could get to this place. We open windows to each other, but we live alone in the house of the heart. Time to open some windows then. There are tigers above and below. Let us love one another and let go.

“I want to.”

Olivia hesitates, then leans forward and kisses him once, very softly, before settling back on his knees. The hand in his hair moves to caress his cheek and run down along his neck, coming to rest on his heart, thumb finding the chain of his crucifix.

“I was fourteen, summer before I started high school.” He closes his eyes and he can see the stairwell, so he opens them and meets hers instead. “Mami and I were late coming back with the groceries. I don’t remember why, or even if we really were or if he was just…”

“Just looking for an excuse?” He nods, and steels himself by leaning forward to press his mouth against the hollow of her throat for a few moments.

“He was waiting on the landing outside our apartment, and he got in Mami’s face, yelling and cursing, and I… It wasn’t the first time I got between them, or the last, but something just… snapped, and he shoved me.

“I got a hand on the railing, almost caught myself. But he’d pushed me hard enough that my head smashed into the wall, and there was this… part of the railing had gotten bent somehow, and I probably never would’ve noticed it if it hadn’t-” He shifts, remembering, and forces himself to take several deep breaths. This is harder than he thought it would be, and easier too. “So I lost my grip, fell down the stairs, hit my head again for good measure. Severe concussion, five broken ribs, twenty-three stitches from the railing slicing into my back as I fell, and I was lucky it wasn’t worse.”

“At the hospital, when your mother- when they asked about previous injuries…”

“Yeah. There was another concussion when I was sixteen or seventeen, I don’t remember exactly, and… a lot of broken ribs. Sometimes we didn’t even bother-” Now that he’s started, he’s not sure he can stop. “I moved in with mi abuelita for a while after that. Seven months, didn’t go back to that apartment until after Christmas, after school had started again in January. And he was never- he never- never did anything like that again, but he didn’t stop either. That always bothered me, because I knew it had scared him, I’d seen his face when I was lying at the bottom of the stairs, I’d seen how scared he was of what had just happened, but it wasn’t enough to make him stop.

“That’s what I dream about. I’m on the ground, bleeding, everything hurts, I can’t get my thoughts straight, and he’s standing at the top of the stairs, looking terrified. It’s not the only nightmare, but it’s the one I have most often. Sometimes it’s different people, or different times, but it’s always me on the ground at the bottom of the stairs. And so when I got attacked, I guess… it felt so similar, and with the concussion, my brain just twisted the two things together.”

He has to turn away finally, because he can no longer bear the look on her face, soft and sympathetic and not at all pitying, and it’s too much, the way she loves him and the way she is looking at him. She gives him a minute before she lifts a hand to his face, fingertips pressed against his cheekbone, and tilts his head back towards her.

Rafael wants to be happy. He is happy, and it had been important to tell her, but now he just wants to be happy. I want to listen to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

“Rafa,” she starts, unbelievably soft, except he would always believe it of her, in her softness and her brightness and her fierceness, but he shakes his head.

“It’s-” He stops himself, because he can’t say it’s okay, because it isn’t and they both know that, so he searches for a few seconds for something he can say. “I survived. Mami survived. And we’re good. And it is… it is so good to be here with you, Liv. With you and Noah and-and-” Arabella meows from somewhere in the kitchen, and they both laugh.

“And your cats?”

“And my cats. And everyone else. It is so good to be here with you in this moment, Olivia Benson.” He slides both hands around her waist so he can pull her close again, and she comes easily. Rafael stretches up until he can feel her breath on his lips and then stops, waits until she opens her eyes again and looks at him. “I love you, Liv,” he breathes into the very small space between them, and they’re close enough that he can feel her grin.

He leans up to close the gap, but the slightest pressure of her hand against his chest stops him. When he opens his eyes, he realizes what she’s going to say just before she says it, and his entire existence lights up in that moment. We are not unspectacular things. You only need to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

“I love you too.”

---------------

He’s woken up in Olivia’s bed with her beside him every morning for two weeks now, but that was nothing compared to waking up in Olivia’s bed with her, their legs tangled together, one of her hands pushed up the back of his shirt so that her curled fingers rest warmly against his skin. Rafael drops his face down into her hair and thinks it is a serious thing to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world.

“Morning,” Olivia says, pressing a kiss against the hollow of his throat before burrowing in against his shoulder, “Can we just stay here?”

“I should probably make some calls, let people know I can work again.”

“I am looking forward to you styling your hair again, since you’re leaving the apartment,” she says, tilting her face up towards him.

“You like it that much?”

“I like the idea of being the one to mess it up,” she says, and it’s his turn to bury his face against her shoulder.

“I’ve changed my mind, we should just stay here.”

“I’d love to, but the kid is going to be up soon, craving attention. And cereal.”

“Sounds perfect,” he says, and feels Olivia draw in a shaky breath above him. He shifts to meet her eyes, and she smiles softly at him.

“Yeah?” she asks, and he realizes exactly what he said. He hadn’t done it intentionally, but he had meant it.

“Yeah,” he echoes, kissing her softly, and then he grins, “I also like attention and cereal.”

She almost shoves him out of the bed.

-------------

Either Noah is extremely perceptive for a six year old or Olivia says something to him while Rafael is out that day visiting his mother and checking on his apartment, because when she kisses him while they’re making dinner, Noah doesn’t seem surprised. He just asks if he can feed Arabella and Juez, and if Rafael will walk him to school the next morning. Rafael decides that Noah is a smart kid, and if he has questions he’ll ask them, and he shouldn’t worry too much.

He gets the cat food down for him and kisses Olivia again.

-------------

“You look relaxed,” Rita says as he sits down across from her, and he sighs.

“I don’t understand why you immediately have to say something crass every time.”

“First of all, you and I both know I could have said something much crasser, and have. Second, you’re just so pretty when you blush.”

Rafael shakes his head. “I don’t remember why we’re friends.”

“It’s because I like Mary Oliver.”

“Everyone likes Mary Oliver.”

“Then I guess it’s just habit by now. I’m just glad you finally got your shit together.”

He sighs again. “I- We’re working on it. It’s a process.”

“I’m just glad you’ve gotten beyond the desperate pining part of the process. Rafael,” she says, putting her hand on his for a second, and he looks up from the menu he’s just been handed, “I really am glad. After this last year, you deserve nice things. And you and Benson, you deserve each other. What?” she asks, because he’s grinning by now.

“Nothing.” He pulls his phone out of his jacket. “Could you say it again though? I don’t think Devine will believe me without video evidence.”

“I’ll break that phone, Barba.”

“Love you too, Rita.”

It’s her turn to grin, all sharp edges.

“Think Olivia would let me be a bridesmaid?”

-----------

Devine texts him later that afternoon, just between the two of them instead of in the group message-- which has changed names rapidly from Rita Calhoun Is A Marshmallow to We’re Not Even In the Right Age Bracket For That Show to Everyone Is the Right Age For Veronica Mars.

DA: Congratulations on it being officially like that.

DA: I’ll definitely have to come out soon now, so I can meet Olivia before the wedding.

RB: Please don’t be pulled into Rita’s foolishness.

DA: I’ve been in Rita’s foolishness for three decades now, it’s too late to save me.

DA: My mother wants to come to the wedding also, she’ll have the chicken.

RB: We’re not engaged!

DA: I’ll send you the dates for my flight once I’ve got them booked.

He changes the name of the group text to I’m Getting All New Friends. Within five minutes it’s been replaced with Then Who Will Stand Up With You At the Wedding???.

---------------

His mother seems to know without being told. One night while they’re making dinner, she turns to him and asks “Estàs feliz, Rafi?”

He looks over at Olivia and Noah, sitting at the table and working on his homework, and he can feel her watching him.

“Sí, Mami. Estoy muy feliz.”

“Bien,” she says with a nod, handing him a dish, “Let’s go be very happy then.”

----------------

“Mom says you have to bring Olivia and Noah over for dinner soon so she can meet them. Now that you’re dating.”

Rafael looks up from his laptop. “How do you know that?”

Tommy shrugs. “You’ve been way less sarcastic lately, and I don’t think it’s the head injury that caused that. Plus, I’ve read like seventy-five percent of the articles about you and your cases by this point, and sometimes there’s pictures, so I figured it was just a matter of time.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, I’ve seen you and Olivia with each other, and I’ve seen a lot of pictures of the two of you together. If you know to look for it, you’re both kind of obvious.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. So Mom says you have to bring them over for dinner. She’ll make Peking Duck.”

“Your mother has become very invested in my life in a very short amount of time.”

“That's Mom. Plus, it’s kind of because of your grandmother.”

“My grandmother?”

“When Mom and Dad had just moved here after Dad took over the bodega, and he was working all the time, and Mom was subbing all day and then doing whatever needed to be done in the bodega in the evenings to make ends meet, she would watch me and Mary for free. And Lily too, after she was born. She’d feed us and let us watch tv, and we used to play this game where I’d teach her a word in Mandarin and she’d teach me one in Spanish. That’s when she used to talk about you a lot. You were like my hero-- good, and smart, and you were helping people, that’s what she always said. That’s when I decided I wanted to be a lawyer.”

“I, uh, I didn’t know that.”

“That’s okay. She was a good lady. Always put up with my questions, just like you do. So anyway, Mom sees looking after you as paying her back, or that our two families are connected, or some mom thing. You know how mothers are.”

“I do.”

“And if you don’t bring the Bensons over soon, she will absolutely go up to Manhattan and show up uninvited one night with her rice cooker.”

“I’ll talk to Olivia, I’m sure we can figure something out.” Rafael feels tremendously happy and impossibly fond, and he has to take several drinks of his coffee before he can find his voice again. “Did you have any actual questions for me, or are you just here to do your mother’s bidding?”

“Oh, yeah. I already talked to Detective Carisi about the Bellwood case, but I wanted to ask you about some of the pre-trial motions.”

-------------

The squad finds out at dinner about three weeks after Olivia had kissed him for the first time on her couch. She stops behind him on the way back to her seat from the kitchen, puts her hands on his shoulders, and leans down to kiss him, softly but not all that chastely. He responds without thinking, leans into her a little, and there’s silence for one, two, three seconds, and then all three of them start cheering and whooping. They’re all children, he thinks, rolling his eyes at them all. He used to work with a bunch of children, an assessment that’s further driven home by the fact that Noah, who by now has seen his mother and Rafael kiss multiple times, has joined in with the whooping and giggling.

He’s pretty sure that Olivia can see on his face how grateful he is to still have all of them in his life after everything, but she doesn’t tease him about it until later.

--------------

“I think your son is trying to steal my cats' affection away from me,” he says, watching Noah scoop out food for Arabella and Juez while he collects their breakfast dishes from the counter. Olivia stops him from turning to the sink by wrapping her arms around his waist from behind, chin propped on his shoulder.

“It’s for sale, cheap, and he wants it. Don’t worry though, Rafa, nobody could ever really replace you in their hearts. They know a kindred spirit when they see one.”

“Very funny,” he says, and she’s grinning when she presses a kiss against his shoulder blade as she lets go of him.

“What’s your day like?”

“Two meetings in the morning, and then courthouse observation in the Bronx all afternoon. Tommy and Carisi are meeting me for lunch, and I’m hoping they’ll be so busy talking to each other that I’ll be able to get some work done.”

“It’s always good to have dreams.”

The offer from McCoy to work as a consultant with the DAs office, advising them on how to improve communication between DAs and the detectives they work with, had been unexpected, and Rafael is pretty sure it’s some sort of weird apology thing. He’d tried to point out that he wasn’t really cut out for this sort of thing, if only because fall irrevocably in love with one of the officers you’re working with wasn’t the sort of generally applicable advice they were probably looking for, but McCoy had just laughed and told him he had the job for at least six months. It hasn’t been as bad as he thought it was going to be, and some days he even likes it.

There are a lot of rumors about the offer, and about future openings in the DAs office, and even the occasional one about Stone looking to move on to greener pastures sooner rather than later. There are also rumors about an opening for a criminal law professor at Fordham, which Carisi reminds him about every time he sees him. Several of the organizations he’d worked with when he’d first come back to the city have offered him more permanent positions. At the moment he has more options than he really knows what to do with, and certainly more than he ever expected to have again.

He’ll have to talk to Olivia. They’ve talked about a lot of things, marriage and adoption and at what point my cats become our cats. His abuelita’s ring is hidden in a box behind three copies of Leaves of Grass in his apartment, which he hasn’t actually really lived in in three months. They’re figuring things out.

“You’re smiling, Barba,” Olivia says, and he turns off the water so he can turn and pull her close.

“I’m happy.”

“Yeah? That’s good to hear.”

“What about you?”

“Me? I’m happy. How about you, Noah?” she calls into the living room, and her son looks up from petting the cats, “Are you happy?”

“Of course, Momma.” He leans down for a second, then grins. “Juez and Bella are happy too.”

“Look at that. Five for five.”

He laughs against her mouth as she leans up to kiss him, and thinks a return to the continuous idea of living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Rafael only pulls away from her once his phone starts to vibrate in his pocket.

“It’s Devine,” he says, glancing at the caller ID, and Olivia looks at her watch.

“It’s awful early in Arizona, you had better see what he wants. I’ll finish getting Noah ready.”

“Rafa!” Devine says the second he picks up, and he can hear the grin in his voice.

“Dev, isn’t it five in the morning where you are?”

“I couldn’t wait to tell you the news. Guess who has vacation days coming up and is headed to the Big Apple?”

“I’m telling Rita you said that again.”

“I’ll tell her myself, I’m looking forward to her facial expression. So, got a guest room I can stay in?”

Rafael laughs, watching Olivia help Noah get his shoes tied and remembering Devine’s words from all those months ago: Rafa, we both know home isn’t always a place you can stay. He’d been right then, but maybe that also meant that home was a place you could come back to when you really needed it, if you were lucky, and he’s never felt luckier in his whole life than right in this moment.

“Yeah, I think we could work something out.”