Chapter Text
Noah Porter Benson had learned a lot of secrets about himself throughout his life. Well, ok, maybe not secrets exactly, but unknowns that became known that had at times been hidden from him. Some sprang internal, like his sexual identity, which he then held the burden of revealing. Most, however, were about his past, the earliest time in his life, his birth parents.
Finding out about his father had felt like a true secret. He still regretted how that had happened, his snooping that broke his mother's trust and revealed a particularly heartbreaking secret about her as well. Before his discovery of that box, he had never really questioned the origin of the marks on her chest that he would sometimes trace with his fingers when he was little while she was rocking him to sleep. The truth of them was heartbreaking, haunting, and even though he promised he wouldn't any further after the first time, he used Google to find out more. He was repaid for that disobedience with vivid nightmares of his mother being burned alive, ripped apart, and he was unable to even seek her comfort when they came.
He used Google to find out more about his father, too. There wasn't as much to find on the notorious-to-him Johnny D, just that he was a bad man who killed people, including his birth mother. A sex trafficker, one article said. That was enough. It was more than enough to make him shudder and question every bad thought, every angry reaction, that crossed his mind. Was that Johnny lingering in there, playing on his worst instincts? Would he cross the lines his father did one day, end up really hurting people? He didn't think so. He had no desire to, but he imagined that Johnny Drake was also a young man at some point in his life who wouldn't have dreamed of hurting people the way he did.
On Ellie, his birth mother, there was nearly nothing to find online. Being the victim of a sex trafficker, a hooker, as his friends would say (his mother had taught him better) didn't attract the media attention that a trial that ended with a cop, his uncle Nick in this case, shooting a notorious criminal kingpin who stole a bailiff's gun and shot the judge did. Ellie Porter’s murder didn't make the front page. It wasn't even a byline in the crime section, as far as Noah could tell, and the thing was, he wanted to know more about her. It was like knowing that one side of his genes came from pure evil made it all the more important to know about the other side. What was holding the balance, keeping him from sliding down the hole to the same fate as his father?
That was what brought him here, to Central State Criminal Hospital, where the one person who could really shed light on who his birth mother was as a person resided. He remembered Grandma Sheila, a little bit. He remembered missing her so much when she first went away. As he grew in age and maturity, that changed. The growth of his mind allowed him to understand how he had been manipulated, lied to, and taken from the mother he had always known. What if she had never found him? Where would he be? Sheila was in a psychiatric hospital, after all; a criminal psychiatric facility. That didn't bode well for the idea that she would have actually taken care of him. Neither did the fact that Ellie had run away from her, cut her off, and had ultimately been murdered down the line from that separation. If she was a good mother, why did her daughter run away?
So, he held no love for the grandma he was here to see, he didn't think, but he did hold need for her. He needed her to help him make the connections between who he was and who she was, his birth mother. He felt he had to understand Ellie in order to understand himself.
He hadn't told his mother he was coming here. He hadn't wanted to upset her. He had said things throughout the years, made comments that he knew upset her. He once told her that his brother, Conner, was his only real family. He saw the hurt on her face and didn't know how to take it back. It wasn't what he meant, but it hurt her deeply. He didn't want to make that mistake again by asking the questions that riddled his brain, or expressing a desire to see Sheila. He couldn't take the idea that his mother might for a moment think that he wanted Sheila over her in any way. He couldn't see Sheila as anything other than the bitch who kidnapped him and broke his mother's heart anymore. That, and, he supposed, the one person alive able to tell him about Ellie.
This was a hair brained plan, but one long in the making. His mom thought that he was with his friend Guillermo, and he had looked up credentialing to be able to visit with an inmate/patient. All it seemed to require was a valid adult ID, which… was a problem initially, but it was one easily solved by the tenth graders notorious for supplying beer at parties. It had cost three months' allowance, but Noah thought his fake ID was pretty convincing. He wouldn't use it to buy a vape at the corner bodega. No, it had only one purpose, to serve as the conduit to getting the answers he needed about himself.
As he excited the bus that had taken him ninety miles outside the city to the stop in front of Central State, he braced himself. It was now or never, and never wasn't an option. He had to know who she was. He had to know who he was.
—-----------------------------
Olivia Benson hated when she had to work on Saturday, but the case her squad was working finally wrapped up, and it was still early. All she wanted to do was spend time with her son. She usually never interrupted a play date, but Noah had said that the plan was to spend the day with Guillermo studying, anyway. She rationalized that picking him up early was really giving him a break. She'd take him on a mother/son date to his favorite pizza place and then see if they could catch an off Broadway show. He'd love that, and she'd just love being with him. He was growing up so fast, changing so much, becoming his own person and a young man. She didn't want to miss any more of it than she absolutely had to because of her job.
So, she approached the Gomez apartment hopeful that her early pick-up would be well received, and willing to offer bribery if it wasn’t. Guillermo was a good kid, on the shy side, but always willing to help Noah with his science homework. The fact that they lived only blocks away from her and Noah was a cherry on top. She also liked Guillermo’s mother, Rosa. She was another single parent, and so sometimes the women arranged play dates strategically around work or personal needs.
It took a moment for Rosa to come to the door when Olivia knocked, and when she did, she appeared surprised.
“Olivia!” She said in greeting. “I wasn’t expecting to see you today. Is everything ok? Do you need me to watch Noah?”
Olivia was so taken aback that she didn’t know what to say for a moment. When she did reply, she stuttered, “Uh - I, uh… Isn’t Noah here?”
“No,” Rosa replied, her eyebrows raising up towards her forehead.
“Guille!” She called back into the apartment for her son. “Come out here right now, please!”
Guillermo came in response to his mother’s call, and when he saw Olivia, he looked confused.
“Did you make plans with Noah today?” Rosa asked Guillermo.
“No,” Guillermo replied quickly. “He told me he was going out of town this weekend.”
“Out of town?” Olivia asked, voiced strained. “Did he say where he was going?”
“No,” Guillermo said, answering slowly, confused. “I mean, I assumed you’d be going with him.”
Olivia felt her heart pounding in her chest and a nausea rise in her stomach. Noah had lied to her. Noah wasn’t here. He said he was going out of town. Where the fuck was he?
“Olivia, do you want to come in? Sit down?” Rosa asked, placing a hand on Olivia’s upper arm. “Should we call the police?”
“I am the police!” Olivia snapped, then intentionally calmed herself after she noticed Rosa flinch. “I’m sorry - I… I’m just surprised,” Olivia stammered. “I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding, but I have to go. I need to go find him.”
“Ok,” Rosa said, her face creased in concern. “Please let me know if you need anything, Olivia, if I can help. Noah is a good kid. I’m sure he’s fine, but please also let me know when he is home.”
“Ok,” Olivia agreed, hastily turning away and leaving the Gomez’s building. Outside, Olivia leaned against the building for a moment, trying to calm herself. She was trained for these situations. She knew what to do. She just had to remember. The problem was, half of her mind was traveling to the past, remembering the call from Sheila that Noah had disappeared from the mall. She almost lost him then. Her panic was increasing so quickly that she was dizzy.
On instinct, she pulled out her phone and dialed Noah’s number. It went straight to voicemail. She quickly pulled up the app she used to track him, but his phone was off line.
“Goddamnit!” She yelled, startling a woman walking by, who jumped and then crossed the street. “Goddamnit!”
Taking intentionally deep breaths, she tried to slow her thinking, guide her mind away from the worst case scenarios playing out that threatened to overwhelm her. She was a detective at heart. She had to follow the fucking evidence! Guillermo had said that Noah mentioned going out of town. Maybe he decided to take an impromptu trip to visit with Conner?
Olivia quickly dialed the McCann’s number on her phone, and Mrs. McCann answered immediately, her voice breezy and happy, as always.
“Olivia!” she gushed upon answering. “We were just talking about you! How are you all doing?”
“Is Noah there?” Olivia asked, bypassing any pleasantries. “Is he with Conner?”
“What?” Mrs. McCann asked. “No. Conner’s at baseball practice and then he has a game later today, but Noah is not here, Olivia. Is everything ok?”
“I’m sorry,” Olivia answered quickly. “I can’t explain right now. I have to go.”
After hanging up the phone that time, Olivia began panting. The urge to vomit was becoming overwhelming. She didn’t know what to do. Her brain just couldn’t get there. She had to call it in. She had to call her team, but the next number she called wasn’t 911. It wasn’t her team. Like with Mrs. McCann, with the next call, the phone rang once and was then answered.
“Hey Liv, what’s up?” A deep voice greeted her from the other end, nearly as familiar to her as her own.
“Elliot,” Olivia said, panic clear in her voice, tears now streaming down her face. “Noah’s missing. He's missing. He ran away, or, or something, and I don't know where he is. He lied to me, and he could be anywhere!”
“Olivia,” Elliot said loudly and sternly from the other end of the phone. “I hear you. I'm coming to get you. Ok? Tell me where you are.”
Olivia somehow got herself together enough to tell Elliot the Gomez’s address, and then waited for him, trying to convince herself that Noah was just as likely to be fine as he was for any of the worst case scenarios in her head to be playing out. That was what Maddie's father thought too, though, at first. She saw the bad so often that it seemed more likely to come to pass than the good.
—------------------------
Elliot maneuvered his Lincoln Navigator through Manhattan traffic as though it were the only vehicle on the road, despite its utterly ridiculous size for a city with some roads barely as wide as the vehicle itself. He was spurred on by panic, however. Panic was a good driver. He hadn't heard Olivia sound as freaked out as she did on that phone call since a terrible mishap during a shared undercover operation several long months back. His sole focus was reaching her, and finding Noah.
When Elliot pulled up to the Gomez’s apartment building, he saw Olivia’s form sitting hunched over in front of the building. He parked directly in front of her and rushed over to her, leaving his car running with the flashers on. A couple of cars honked despite the blinking lights indicating an emergency, but fuck ‘em. Annoyed Manhattan drivers were the absolute least of his concerns at the moment
“I'm here, Liv,” Elliot said, bending down in front of her and lightly grasping her upper arms. “I've got you. Let's get in the car. Let's figure this out.”
“Ok,” Olivia said, still feeling her heart pound in her chest and taking in long drags of air. She sat next to Elliot in his vehicle and he navigated the streets not even asking where they should go. It only took minutes to pull up in front of her own building since the Gomez's lived so close.
“What are we doing here?” She asked when she saw where they were.
“We're going to check Noah's room, try to get an idea of where he's gone,” Elliot said, unbuckling Olivia's seatbelt for her and beginning to lead her inside.
“Should we call it in?” Olivia asked in a small voice as they rushed into the apartment she had called home for several years. Her initial shock was wearing off, but she still felt confused and depleted. She still felt desperate. Noah was approaching manhood, and she had stopped relying on a nanny for assistance years ago. She knew she had to allow him to grow up, but every single ounce of independence he gained scared her. He didn't understand that he was still a kid, still needed protection. He had never tested her like this before, and beyond her initial blind panic to the situation at hand, she had no idea how to handle this.
As soon as they got into the apartment, Elliot began searching Noah's room. Olivia followed him. He asked, “Can you tell me exactly what happened, Liv?”
She did so, relaying the story about having to work on a Saturday and Noah's plans to study with a trusted friend. She explained her plan to pick him up early and surprise him by taking him to a show, and her horror at learning that he was not where he said he'd be.
“We can call it in,” Elliot eventually said, still rummaging through Noah's belongings, “but I have to say this isn't completely out of the realm of the expected with a teenager. I think I went through it at least once with each of my kids, a few times with Kathleen.”
“And Kathleen wasn't ok,” Olivia said softly, wiping at her cheeks, surprised to find them wet with tears. “You know her arrest after breaking into that house was terrible, but if that happened today, she'd likely be shot. It's not the same world it was.”
The thought alone made Elliot shudder, and he stopped his search of Noah's room to draw Olivia into his arms.
“Hey,” he said softly into her hair before pressing a kiss onto her temple. Despite the tenseness of the situation, he loved being able to finally show that kind of affection to her, particularly when she needed comfort. They'd been dating for nearly a year. It had been a long road of heartbreaking revelations and frightening situations, but they were solid. “It's gonna be ok. We're going to find him. He isn't Kathleen. He's not bipolar. He's probably just doing something he thought you wouldn't like. All teenagers push boundaries.”
“He's never done anything like this,” Olivia argued, “and honestly, I don't know what he may be predisposed to - substance abuse, from the maternal side, sociopathy from paternal… Serious mental illness? Who the hell knows, Elliot. He could be bipolar.”
“It doesn't work like that, Liv. There are signs before a major episode. With Kathleen, I didn't want to see them, didn't want her to be like Bernie, and work gave me a good excuse to ignore them. You don't miss a damn thing about Noah,” Elliot asserted.
“Well, obviously I did,” Olivia replied.
“Look,” Elliot suggested. “Let's finish searching his room. We can call it in if we don't find anything.”
“Ok,” Olivia sighed. Her limbs were still shaking from stress, but she was glad to have a task to undertake, an angle to work. She started with his drawers. Elliot looked through the closet and then under the bed.
“What's this?” He asked, pulling a box out from under Noah's bed.
Olivia gasped when she saw it, face paling. “One of my boxes,” she said softly. “I keep personal information in it, up in the closet. He's found it once before, told me he wouldn't take it again.”
“What's in it?” Elliot asked, reluctant to open it given Olivia's description.
“Some information, articles… About Lewis, and Johnny Drake, Noah's biological father. There's a picture of Ellie Porter, too, his biological mother, and information about Sheila, his kidnapping. My god. I didn't even notice it was gone. I wonder how long he's had it,” Olivia breathed.
“There's this, too,” Elliot said, withdrawing what looked like a standard composition notebook, but it was clearly well used, full, and on the front, in bold letters, it read Noah Porter Benson’s Journal.
Olivia felt sick looking at it, and took it from Elliot's hands reluctantly. She flipped through it, seeing that nearly all of the pages were filled with the scrawling penmanship she recognized as belonging to her son. She didn't even know he journaled. She flipped open the cover. The first page read Property of Noah Porter Benson. Private!!! DO NOT READ.
It was so classically adolescent that it made her chest hurt. She remembered keeping diaries as a young girl, and journaling at Lindstrom’s recommendation after Lewis. The things she wrote were so deeply personal that she couldn't even read them herself sometimes. She remembered Serena reading her diary once, the overwhelming sense of betrayal. She never really forgave her mother for that invasion, and she stopped journaling for a long time after that. She started just holding everything in until she found another person she thought she could confide in, someone she thought understood her. It took her long into her adulthood to realize how deeply that person had betrayed her, used her. It was a stretch, but she wondered now whether if she hadn't lost her original outlet, she wouldn't have been so easily blinded by Burton’s interest.
“You gonna read it?” Elliot asked, breaking Olivia's strayed concentration and making her jump.
“I don't,” Olivia hesitated. “I'm not sure I want to violate his privacy like that.”
“We're considering putting a BOLO out on him, Liv,” Elliot said seriously. “I understand your hesitance, but unfortunately, he gave up his right to privacy when he decided to go off to god-knows-where on his own, without his phone.”
Elliot’s parenting style was more traditional than Olivia's. She usually preferred to talk things out, coach Noah through his emotions rather than relying on things like punishment and asserting parental control, but she had to admit he was right here. Noah probably felt like an adult, but he was still a child. He needed her protection, and in that moment, that included violating his privacy.
“Ok,” Olivia sighed, and she sat next to Elliot on the bed and began reading the journal from the end, trying to get answers through reading as few entries as possible.
—------------------------
It felt like hours since Noah had been waiting in the waiting room at Central State hospital. It was creepy. The chairs were heavy and rounded plastic, like the type of chairs you'd expect to see in a kindergarten classroom blown up to adult size. They were bolted to the floor even in the entry way. The glass on the limited windows in the hospital was tinted and thick, but he could still see out, and the patients he saw being led around all wore shackles. It surprised him. He expected it to look more like a hospital, but it felt more like a prison to him. He hoped they called him soon. He only had a couple of hours until he had to catch the last bus back to the city that would bring him in time to beat his mom home. Making that was essential.
He shifted in the uncomfortable plastic chair. He had noticed staff glancing at him several times as he waited, and he was getting more and more nervous. He was beginning to rethink this idea. Maybe he should have just sent letters to Sheila. Maybe he should have actually talked to his mom about this. She'd told him about her father. Maybe she would understand, but he was here now. No time like the present and all that.
“Noah Porter Benson,” a staff member finally called. Noah sighed in relief as he followed a tall, severe looking woman in a suit with red hair back to a small office.
She smiled at him, but it looked more like a grimace and gestured to a chair across from her desk.
“So,” she said to the otherwise silent room, not even introducing herself. “I think you need to go ahead and tell me who you really are.”
Noah shook in his seat and asked, “What - what do you mean? I'm Noah Porter Benson. I gave you my ID.”
“This is a criminal facility, young man,” the woman said to him. “We verify all visitors, and even if we couldn't identify a fake ID, I have to tell you there's no way you'd pass for twenty two.”
Noah hadn't even considered that he wouldn't make it in when he bought the fake ID. He wasn't the type of kid to get in trouble, so he had no experience to lean on to get him out of it. The stress of the situation hit him in waves, and to his utter shame, he found himself crying. He just wanted to know who he was!
“Ok, kid, calm down,” the woman across from him said, shoving a box of tissues at him, seemingly ill equipped to handle a crying teenager. Noah hoped she wasn't a therapist here.
After crying into a few tissues, the woman pushed the phone on the desk over to him, saying, “I think you'd better go ahead and call your parents. Dial nine for an outside line.”
Fearful of legal consequences and unable to muster any other plan, Noah did as he was told, dialing his mother's cell phone, which he knew by heart. He could barely hear the ringing over the pounding of his heart.