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English
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Published:
2017-11-18
Completed:
2017-12-29
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19,105
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10/10
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to get back home

Chapter 5

Notes:

like the last chapter this is kinda introspective just with a change in perspective! i should be back to the main plot next chapter

Chapter Text

It’s sixteen days after the first night Rose spends at his apartment that Rafael receives the phone call. It also coincides with the first night Carisi doesn't visit his apartment at all, and the ring is so piercingly loud in the empty room that he’s surprised Rose isn’t immediately woken.

He answers it as quickly as possible.

“Hello?” he says.

“Rafi!” It’s Lucas. He hasn’t heard his voice in years, but it’s distinctly him, and Rafael finds himself instantly irritated like it's some Pavlovian response.

“Lucas,” he greets coldly. “Where are you?”

“Buenos Aires, qué onda, buddy?” Lucas is far too cheery for Rafael. “I hear you have something of mine.”

Lucas has always rubbed Rafael up the wrong way, and it’s unsurprising that nothing has changed. He doesn’t think Lucas is particularly referring to Rose either, more the insurance money.

“I have your dead girlfriend’s seven-month-old daughter, if that’s what you’re asking about,” he replies.

“Tomato tomahto,” he says. “Look, I can probably be in New York in a couple of weeks.”

He’s angling for an invitation, and Rafael is loath to give him one, although he knows he has to.

“Fine,” he says as he retrieves his planner from where it sits on his coffee table. He opens it to look at his schedule. “Friday 23rd work for you?”

“Are you looking at your calendar?” Lucas derides.

“No,” he lies.

Over the phone, Lucas huffs a laugh. “Yeah, I can do the 23rd. Hell, I’ll bring something to eat. We can make an evening of it. I haven’t seen you in so long.”

For good reason, Rafael thinks. Lucas was – and likely still is, seeing as he’s been uncontactable in South America for at least three weeks – a deadbeat. Lucas was a few years younger in both age and conduct, unprofessional and jockish. He was also the last person who had punched Rafael, 8 years ago at Lucas’ mother’s wake. He doesn’t really remember why it happened, but he doesn’t think he deserved the broken nose.

“I look forward to it,” he says through a fake-smile.

“No you don’t,” Lucas comments, and hangs up.

Rafael feels a little dejected that he didn’t hang up first.

Before he can recognise what he’s doing, he’s pouring himself a glass of bourbon and his sat at his kitchen table. He takes a long sip and puts it down before he realises what he’s doing and frowns.

In his childhood, his abuelita always told him, when he had run away from his home and straight to her apartment when his parents were fighting or his father was too angry for him to feel safe, that age would harden him up.

To an extent, she was right. Throughout his late-twenties, his thirties and his early-forties, he had toughened, crafted his persona of suaveness, cynicism and bitterness, and kept the bare minimum of sentimentality buried deep inside.

And yet, there he sat, drinking over his impending loss of a child he hadn’t even been guardian of for a month.

Christ, age was getting to him.

He can probably blame his newfound sentimentality on the SVU team, who for some godforsaken reason actually seem to consider him a friend, and he them. Real friends too, not just remnants from his childhood, or status symbols, or rivals he occasionally grabs a drink with.

He’d blame Liv first and foremost. Liv, who will take his call at any time of the night, who trusts him with her son, and who he’d be prepared to share almost anything with. Liv, who’s smart, and kind, and strong. Liv, who he loves and is not in love with except maybe he is a little bit, in a friendly and affable way. It works for their dynamic, and he’s pretty sure it’s mutual, as is the knowledge that it is never going to go anywhere.

Rafael remembers reading somewhere that falling in love wasn’t a choice, but staying in love was. Falling in love was irrational, uncontrollable. Staying in love was tough and messy and needed a lot of work, but enduring, persistent.

Rafael has fallen in love a grand total of three times. Yelina, beautiful, tempestuous, overwhelming, and Alex, head-strong, fiercely loyal, passionate. Both were whirlwinds, rapid and consuming and left destruction in their wakes, and didn’t last long enough for Rafael to have any choice at all.

The third was different.

Rafael has stayed in love once. He fell in love as he did the others, but this time, it lasted. He loved and was loved, and when that first love faded, they worked on it, and fell in love all over again. He had choice after choice, and he chose to stay in love, until one day he didn’t. Until one day, he was offered a far better job in Manhattan and had to move, until one day, they fell out of love and never fell back in.

Sometimes, when he’s lying alone at night, and the other side of the bed is cold and empty, he regrets that.

As Rafael mulls over his whiskey and his thoughts, he has what he believes is generally referred to as an oh shit moment.

The feelings that launched him into love each time, the underlying glow and sense of connection weaving itself into his being, they’re there again. For the first time in years, his heart is foolishly and stupidly disobeying his common sense.

He is suddenly very glad Sonny– Carisi, he mentally corrects, isn’t there tonight, because Christ, wouldn’t the look on his face be fun to explain?

He pours another drink.

*

Rafael jolts awake a few hours later, head having been resting on his arm on the table, to the sound of wailing. It is with great effort that he gets up, very aware of how much everything hurt, both unhappy at being woken, and grateful that he hadn’t been allowed to sleep the whole night in his clothes on his kitchen table.

He heads to the guestroom and picks Rose out of her crib, laying her head on his shoulder and bouncing from the knees as Sonny had done so many times.

“What is it?” he soothes quietly. She quietens slightly with his movement, and he hushes her.

Sonny has some sort of magical ability to – nine times out of ten – quieten a baby just by swaying them gently. Rafael has yet to work out how he manages it (as has, he realises, both Amanda and Liv), so he’s worked out another method.

Rafael’s abuelita used to sing to him throughout his childhood. She sang in Spanish and in English, sometimes even in French or Italian if she’d loved the song, and she was wonderful. He loved music growing up, not least because he could drown out his parents fighting - that is, after all, what a record player is for - but he could never sing at home, his father writing it off as something boys shouldn’t be interested in. He sang in church and he sang alone, but most importantly, he sang with his abuelita.

Whenever he was upset, or angry, or hurt, he would go to her, and she would cook him dinner and turn up the radio to a song he’d never heard, and she’d sing it to him and teach him the words. Rafael was pretty sure he would never have had a calm moment if it wasn’t for her.

So he sings for Rose, quietly, under-his-breath, not for anyone else to hear but her.

By the time he finishes the song, she’s asleep, and he lays her back down. He leaves, goes to his room, and undresses to get into his own bed. He lays there for a while, staring up at the ceiling, before he gives in and grabs his phone from the bedside table and scrolls through his contacts to find Carisi.

‘December 23rd – Lucas coming over. You’re welcome at dinner.’

He stares at it longer than he’d like to admit before he sends it.

The reply comes quickly, and Rafael is taken aback, seeing as it is two in the morning.

‘sounds good’, is the response.

‘moral support?’ comes a few seconds later, and Rafael smiles to himself.

‘You could say that.’

Sonny doesn’t say anything in response to that, and Rafael can’t help but ask, ‘Why are you awake?’

He watches the three dots start and stop several times, before Carisi settles on, ‘couldn’t sleep’. ‘You?’ arrives soon after.

Rafael hopes the sarcasm lands when he replies, ‘Take a wild guess.’

‘coping without me ;)?’

Unusually, he isn’t annoyed at the emoticon.

‘We’re both still alive and only one of us has cried, so yes.’

‘what do you have to cry about?’

He snorts, before looking at the time.

‘Goodnight, Carisi.’ He ignores the fact that his predictive text suggests a kiss after he types Sonny’s name.

He has already locked his phone when ‘night counselor’ pops up, and he stares at it until the phone screen turns back to black.