Back to You

Ch.23

A/N: Enjoy!

As soon as she was allowed, Olivia had left her doctor's office, making an appointment for the following week. After they had told her she was pregnant, everything was a blur. The parts she did remember involved her doctor throwing out words like high risk and options, and some type of testing. Her

doctor had given her papers and pamphlets on everything under the sun, and she would undoubtedly have to read later when she was in a better frame of mind. They wanted her to answer all sorts of questions and were asking her to make decisions, and the only thing she could think about, the only thing she needed, was Elliot.

                                                            

This was their baby, and he deserved to be there for these conversations and she wasn't going to cheat him out of a second of it. Our baby. It was still so new and foreign to her that she was almost in denial. Being pregnant was enough of a shock, but being pregnant with Elliot's child was something she had never dreamed of. That fact, in and of itself, was enough to completely overwhelm her.

All of her thoughts and emotions started at terrified and went the whole way through to excitement. At the age she was and the stage she was at in her life, being pregnant wasn't really on the top of her list of things to do, and honestly hadn't even crossed her mind as being a possibility. So much had changed in her life in less than six months, and all for the better. She had Noah, who was the greatest gift the world had ever given her, and to top it off, she had Elliot. There wasn't anything else she wanted or needed. Her life was complete.

Olivia needed to clear her head ... get some perspective. She walked through the streets for a while thinking about her life. The journey she had been on to get to this point, the ups and the downs, all she had overcome, and where she came from. Ever since she became a mother, she had been thinking about her mother more often, and with her recent news, it had bubbled to the surface.

Growing up with an abusive alcoholic mother had been horrible, something she didn't wish on anyone, but she was the person she was today, because of it. She could never understand how her mother, the woman who was supposed to love and protect her, could be the cause of so much pain. When she started working at SVU, she got to see the other side of the story and see the victims deal with pain they were going through. Several of them had done it the same way her mother had which had allowed her to see that she wasn't the only one who chose to cope the way she did. However, she still couldn't understand how someone could treat a child the way her mother had treated her. Unfortunately for her, not only did she have a firsthand account, but that also came with the job. Being with Noah, she couldn't for the life of her comprehend how someone could do such horrible things to a sweet, beautiful, innocent child.

Olivia made her way through the city, finally stopping at the 9/11 Memorial. Whenever she felt like she was drowning she would come here. It was a place that had held so much devastation and heartache for so many people and it was completely overwhelming and hard to process. The rubble that had been the site of such tragedy was now replaced with such beauty. She over one of the waterfalls and all of the names engraved on the ledge and it made her feel small. She was just one person in this huge world with simple problems compared to what most of the world faced on a day to day basis. Comparing her problems and worries to a bigger picture of the world, even one day such as 9/11, made her see how small her problems really were.

Taking a deep breath she took one more look around and started on her way home. She could handle anything that was thrown her way. Having a baby was one of the things she had always dreamed of and even though this wasn't the way she had planned, she was happy. She was carrying a life inside of her, a tiny little human that was part her and part Elliot and nothing would ever compare to creating a child out of love. She hoped Elliot was going to be happy and excited but she was also preparing herself for any other reaction he might have because she knew that this would be overwhelming and would probably bring on all sorts of emotions for him, just like it did for her.