Something I Would Have Never Seen

Paved With Good Intentions

A/N: Buckle up buttercup, it's gonna get weird

One of the biggest, if a bit unexpected, lessons Lucy learned after being adopted by the Manhattan SVU precinct was don't trust reporters.

A story was more exciting the more drama it had, everyone knew that. Reporters had a habit of embellishing and pushing boundaries to land the juicy scoop. They had poked at Lucy more than once during her time in New York once it became clear she was close to the detectives and helped victims when she could.

At first Lucy had been good at brushing them off. A stern 'no comment' and not rising to the questions asked specifically to set her off. Munch had made sure she had the art of keeping her contempt limited to her glare down pat.

This proved to be much harder when the case at hand was about her, however. The first few months after The Incident had involved a lot of camera flashes blinding her and a lot of microphones shoved into her face. Claire and Marcia's families had been deviated by their deaths, and rightly so, but Casey and Lucy didn't have the answers they wanted. A man with twenty four personalities climbing the walls and tearing into young girls with his teeth was apparently difficult to believe.

In all fairness, Lucy didn't entirely believe it either, and she'd seen it happen.

The buzz from her story was just dying down as the short attention spans were caught up in the no shortage of brutal tragedies, when Lucy discovered there was something worse than reporters.

She had just put Noah down for a nap when a knock on the door of Olivia's apartment made Bruce perk up. Gesturing to the dog to stay put for now, Lucy approached the door and peered through the peephole.

The older woman was not one of the neighbors. She wasn't any of Olivia's coworkers that Lucy had met, but certainly all of those would know Olivia would be in her office at this hour.

Lucy was positive she'd never met this woman. So why did she seem so familiar?

The woman; blonde hair mixed with the grays to the point that you couldn't really tell which was which anymore, had her pink lipstick mouth open as if to say something, but she had clearly forgotten what. Instead, she was staring at Lucy in a sort of breathless surprise, looking as if she'd seen a ghost.

"Umm, can I help you?" Lucy asked, trying to be polite while still keeping the door between them as she'd been taught.

This seemed to snap the old woman out of her trance. "My God, I saw the pictures, but you really do look just like her..."

"I'm sorry?"

"It really is a sign! My daughter has been reborn and returned to us!"

******
If there was ever one fault to the close relationship Lucy had with Olivia and the Manhattan SVU squad, it was their tendency to keep things from her. They saw her as delicate, and would try to block things that would shatter her already fragile mental state.

They'd done it with her mother. Lucy hadn't spoken to them for weeks afterwards, and had indeed hit a low point. Though admittedly, the space between that and dealing with what she had thought happened to Kevin had helped.

There was no space in this instance. The curve ball had managed to get past the barrier they'd erected around her, though admittedly by sheer hapstinance.

The mixture of the woman calling through the door, Bruce barking at her -- and eventually Noah crying when he woke up from his nap and wasn't immediately attended to -- amounted to nothing but a ringing in Lucy's ears from where she was curled up hugging her knees against the door. This wasn't the case for the neighbors however, and the sound of a uni's voice eventually cut through the old woman's religious ramblings.

"God gave me a second chance! My daughter was sinful and doomed to damnation, but he clensed her and gave me you! Please, I just want to speak with you, I want to know the path the Lord has planned for us!"

The words bounced around in Lucy's head. She was overwhelmed, and still panicked from the woman trying to push her way into the apartment. She didn't put much stock in religion, no matter what Carisi said, but but the tumbling in her gut told her there was something more going on here. Too bad she didn't have the mental capacity to figure it out.

The uni must've eventually gotten the woman to leave, as her voice faded with Bruce's protective barking. A concerned wet nose poked Lucy in the cheek.

Blinking through a daze, she mechanically accepted the orange pill bottle her dog dropped in her hand. Lucy was very familiar with medication by now; what interacted with what, what supplemented this, and when things were meant to take effect.

She couldn't spell or pronounce the name on the bottle for the life of her, but she recognized it as her emergency anxiety medication. Good for slowing her heart rate and making the world stop spinning, but bad for solving anything long term.

Lucy hated this medication; it severed the connection between her body and her brain so that, while she was physically calm, her mind was still racing and confused as to why the signals it was sending weren't being received.

She knew it to be a necessary evil however, so she dutifully unscrewed the cap and selected a small tablet. These ones were purple, and some part of her found validation in the fact that they weren't orange like her daily medicine.

"....Good boy." She stroked Bruce's ears as the calming pill began to take effect. Lucy took a moment to get her bearings, standing with a tired huff and going towards Noah's room with the golden retriever following close behind her.

Trying to run through grounding techniques to appear calm, she scooped the boy up, holding him tighter to her chest than she might've otherwise.

"Oh, I know, I know. I'm sorry Pickle, I'm sorry." She cooed. "It's gonna be okay. You know you are so lucky, you have a great Momma to protect you and fight off all your monsters."

Once upon a time, Lucy had liked to imagine her own mother watching over her. It gave her someone to talk to that she couldn't attach bad memories to -- or any memories at all really. Lucy didn't even know what the woman had looked like.

It had been a way to work through her trauma after originally making it back to Colorado. While innocent enough, every therapist she'd had cautioned not to read too much into it. She already had a long rap sheet, no need to add schizophrenia to the list.

Right now though, Lucy could almost feel the comforting hand on her shoulder, the concerned stare burning into the back of her head.

"We got a lot of stuff to figure out, Mom." She sighed internally, while externally bouncing Noah on her hip.