Trepidation
Elliot goes into work every day and sees the scum of the world. He can be as unemotional and detached as he needs to be on the job, but as soon as he gets a mile out of the station he starts to shudder and shake, his eyes firmly set on the yellow dashed line and his hands clamped on the wheel.
Half the time he doesn't know why he took the fucking job. He wished he'd gone anywhere but the Special Victims Unit, because, man. As hard as he tries, he can't help but bring that shit home. And it's not cool to be sitting at the dinner table, listening to his kids tell him about their day and suddenly overlay today's posed rape-and-assault vic over the chicken piccata.
He never had this problem before. He could always drop it, forget about it. But somehow in the past year everything gets to him. For chrissakes, he's got two beautiful baby girls. Only they're not babies anymore. Which might be the problem.
The older they get, the more he imprints every fucking horrible thing he sees done to women on the job over their innocent, young faces. It's a shitty world out there, and he wants to protect them as best as he can.
Before they turned six, he made the girls learn all the emergency numbers: 911, their grandparents' number, Elliot's cell, their mom's work. They were just excited to use the phone, and after the hundredth time of hearing them recite number after number he was satisfied.
But now they're ten. Ten, the age of the incest vic from a month ago. Despite his wife's concerns about money and time and after-school activities, he enrolled the girls in a self-defense martial arts course and made sure they went every week.
When they're sixteen, he's taking them to the shooting range.
When they're eighteen, he's buying them each a knife and making sure they know how to do hand-to-hand combat.
Maybe he's going a little bit overboard, but when he goes into work tomorrow there'll be a stack of files with the "especially heinous" cases, and there will probably be a phone call that comes in early afternoon saying that someone found a body, or that there's a rape vic that needs talking to, or one of a hundred different ways the SVU gets called in and he has to see the scum of the world displayed like a penny show just for him, all over again. And then he doesn't feel like he's being overprotective. Then he feels like he's still somehow not doing enough to ensure that his baby girls are going safe.
Five miles out of the station and almost into the suburbs, with traffic moving slow, he scrubs his face and turns the radio off because the chatter has moved to the news, and his life is pretty much the news, so he's heard it all before.
When he gets home, out of the city and out of this hell of traffic, he's going to sit on the couch with the twins on either side while his wife puts dinner on the table--or is it his turn? shit--and listen to every moment of their day with the greatest interest, and try not to think about how even beautiful baby girls grow up where there's that unforeseen variable of psycho that their dad can't protect them from.