Archive of Our Own ^beta

Captain Cragen had asked her, softly and with concern, whether she wanted to work on Valentine’s Day. When he asked, Olivia stared back and said nothing. She had no idea which idea was worse: a day at work with the second-string shift, or a day at home in the emptiness that was all she had left.

In the end, making the choice or not hadn’t been an issue. They’d been in the middle of a case; one of those cases that threatened to break you, threatened to remove any shred of faith in humanity that had escaped all the cases that had come before. They worked long into the night, and her main thought was that at least she didn’t have to be at home, in bed, asleep.

She no longer liked to sleep, because she would wake up and reach across the bed for Alex, who wasn’t there. Everything in her apartment reminded her of Alex, as did everything at work, and Casey Novak most particularly. There were days when it felt as though everything in New York reminded her of Alex -- the street vendors from whom they’d once bought coffee, the newspaper guy who grew so used to them that he still sometimes gave Olivia the magazines he knew Alex liked. The first time he did that, Olivia handed them back, and his face fell and he spent the next week apologising to her. Now she simply paid for the magazines and took them home. The pile in the corner of her main room grew. He gave her another one when she bought herself a paper on the way home, and she folded the paper and the magazines together and climbed the stairs to her apartment. She left them on the table and went to bed, tired enough that she could sleep without dreams.

Sometime later in the day she dragged herself out of bed and made a cup of coffee. She sat on the sofa in a singlet top and pyjama trousers and curled her legs up underneath her.

The silence pressed in on her, the way it always did, and so she reached for the remote and turned on the television. And what she saw there sent her across the room to grab the newspaper. Sometime while she’d been buried at work, thinking only of the latest case, San Francisco had begun issuing marriage licences to same-sex couples, and the lines around City Hall were front page news. On the television they showed a lesbian couple being married. One of the women wore white -- a plain dress, the sort you could wear to work in an office -- and over it, she wore a rainbow shawl. Olivia scanned the newspaper articles and flicked through the news channels, and then began to surf the internet. There were pictures and stories and so much happiness. It was perfect for Valentine’s Day; perfect for everyone else.

There had been one night, after a few too many glasses of wine and in the glow of a night spent alone with Alex, when things had been said in jest. About commitment ceremonies and weddings and running away to Canada. It always began with ‘if only’ -- if only they didn’t have careers in professions that barely tolerated women, let alone lesbians; if only Alex didn’t have political ambitions. If only they were courageous and didn’t worry about what other people thought. The discussion ended in kisses and wandering hands, but the next night when Olivia came home, there was a box on the table in amongst the dinner Alex was setting out on fine china plates she’d brought from her own apartment. The box held a white gold ring and when Olivia raised her eyes from it to Alex, she saw an identical one on Alex’s right hand.

‘What would you wear, if we could get married one day?’ Olivia had asked Alex over dinner.

Alex had smiled. ‘I saw a rainbow pashmina once in a store in upstate New York. It would be one of those days when I’d want to look pretty,’ she said shyly.

‘You are always pretty,’ Olivia had replied, and she had picked up the ring and slid it onto the ring finger on her right hand. Later she had worn it on a chain, until Alex had died and she had started wearing it on her right hand again.

Now she watched the couple on the television hug and kiss in front of the celebrant, and for just a moment, Olivia slid the ring from her right hand to her left.

She stared at it, and twisted it around her finger, and the tears slid down her cheeks.