Chapter Text
In May of 1997, Elliot Stabler goes down to the building lobby for his new partner and comes back with a broken nose. He’s in a sour mood when he steps into the elevator, and this particular sour mood hasn’t let up for four weeks, since Jo left without saying goodbye. The elevator jostles on its way down to replace her, and Elliot says a very real prayer that he doesn’t get stuck with some old-timer like Munch. One geriatric conspiracy nut is enough, he thinks. Amen.
The quiet ding is followed by instant pandemonium.
“He’s out, he’s out,” the desk officer is shouting from the ground, and Elliot’s hand flies to his hip which he remembers too late is empty. He sweeps the room and spots a flower delivery woman at the front desk next to a brightly colored bouquet. The first thing Elliot thinks is that she is almost shockingly beautiful. He only thinks that outright because he’s assessing the situation. He sweeps his eyes across the room one more time, then, and on second thought, he might have noticed her either way.
He spots the perp barreling towards the woman, but Elliot gets to her faster. He pulls her quickly behind him, looking around for a weapon.
“Let go,” the woman says, and twists firmly out of his grasp.
“Are you crazy? I’m a cop.”
He punctuates the statement with a swift punch, and the man staggers.
“So am I,” the woman says, breathless, and lands a sharp kick to his knee. She blows a stray hair out of her face. “Olivia Benson. Nice hook.”
Elliot stares at her for one, unfortunate second. An elbow catches him in the nose.
He only has time to stumble back a couple steps before Olivia moves. She grabs for the flower vase, and in one fell swoop, smashes it over the man’s head.
Elliot blinks, and when the light stops spotting, Olivia is on the ground with a knee in the man’s back and his wrists held tight. She’s breathing a little hard, her sky blue shirt smattered with red, and she looks up at Elliot expectantly. His mind feels slow, nose already swelling and blood dripping through the cracks in his fingers.
“Well?” she says, impatient. “You got any cuffs?”
“You thought I was going to be a man, didn’t you?”
Olivia has somehow convinced the medic to let her perform the first aid, and Elliot doesn’t remember how that happened, or how they got up to the med station in the first place.
“I didn’t think anything,” he says, the metallic taste lingering, and he sneaks a glance at her. She seems more amused than anything.
“And for the record,” he adds, staring at a dirty spot on the wall, “I would have taken those guys down right away if you identified yourself immediately instead of standing around and watching the show.”
“I identified myself just fine.” She says it casually, like she knows she’s right, and switches up the saturated tissue for an ice pack. “I was hoping to myself, on the subway this morning, that I wasn’t going to get stuck with another sexist, arrogant asshole for a partner. In Special Victims, of all places.”
He scoffs, then winces when she presses too hard.
“Hey, my old partner was a woman.”
“And you still thought I was going to be a man?”
“You were—” He evens his voice. “You were standing next to the flowers.”
“Right. Excellent policework, Detective… ” She trails off and meets his gaze, her cheeks turning a distinct shade of pink.
“Stabler,” he mutters. “Elliot.”
He takes the ice pack, his fingers brushing the cold backs of hers, and she eyes his split knuckles.
“You box?”
“Marines.” He pauses. “What was that kick to the knee, like, jiu-jitsu? See, because you could definitely know jiu-jitsu, you know—even though you’re a woman.”
He lets her open her mouth with a wild look in her eye before he grins. She laughs on an exhale.
“Fuck off. No, it was just a kick. Regular-style.”
He tilts his head down a little and moves the ice pack to hide his smile. “Not bad.”
“For a woman,” she adds, and they both laugh then.
He watches her clear the trash and set things slowly back in order. He can tell she’s lingering, but he doesn’t mind it so much.
“Look,” she says, “Stabler—Elliot—I am sorry. About the nose.”
She steps back and gestures to her face, scrunching hers up a little as she starts down the hallway. “It’s a shame, you know. You had a pretty decent one.”
“Still do,” he calls.
She shoots him one last look over her shoulder, and then she’s gone. He blinks, wondering if he’s dreamed up this whole afternoon, and he’ll wake up to find his nose perfectly straight and Jo back at her desk. Then he wonders, for the first time in four weeks, if he would even want that.
He takes a deep breath through his mouth, and shuts his eyes against the sting.
Please, God, he thinks. Let this be the worst thing Olivia Benson will do.
“Honey, can you get that? Must be Liv.”
“Fuck.” Elliot drops the baking sheet of green beans on the stovetop. He shakes out his hand, then louder, “Yeah, got it.”
“Language,” Dickie says over his textbook, and Elliot runs his fingers under the tap.
“You. Smartass. Go get the door.”
“Mom asked you to.”
“I’ll get it, Dickhead,” Lizzie calls from the hallway.
“Are you going to let your daughter talk to me like that?”
“Only when she’s right.” Elliot grabs the headphones out of Dickie’s ears. “What’s the point of these things when you can hear everything, anyway? You can study tomorrow, it’s Thanksgiving.”
“It's November nineteenth.”
Kathy sidles behind him with Eli on her hip, and rests a hand on his head. “Use your imagination, then. Dad has to work next week, so let’s just all do our part, okay?”
Elliot looks up at the squealing from the door. Lizzie and Kathleen are predictably wrapped around Olivia, a pink box in her hand raised high above their heads.
“Sorry about the raving fans,” Kathy calls, and Olivia laughs.
“Oh, this is how I prefer to be greeted.”
She’s flushed from the cold, or the girls running her over—by the time she kisses Eli’s chubby cheeks hello, Elliot can see the sweat beading on her nose and upper lip. He cracks the kitchen window.
“It’s been a while since we’ve had you over for dinner, hasn’t it?” Kathy says. Elliot wonders if she’s lying, if it’s just one of those things that women say to be polite, or if she really doesn’t remember that they have never once asked Olivia over for dinner. He sees it in Olivia’s eyes right away, in the way she pauses, that she’s carefully assessing the same.
She says, “I’m happy to be here,” after a beat, and “Thank you for having me, really,” which aren’t actually answers to the question at all.
“Hey,” is all Olivia says to him, and he thinks there’s a kind of calculation there, too.
“Hey.” He takes the box out of her hands. “JJ’s?”
“Nothing else was open, sorry.” Olivia follows him to the kitchen, and he doesn’t tell her he knows she came from work. He knows because he saw her picture in the paper two days ago, next to a microphone and a photo of a dead boy and his missing sister. For a second, he considers pulling her back outside to ask.
Olivia eyes the textbook over Dickie’s shoulder. “‘Thermodynamics?’”
“Entropy,” Dickie mutters.
“Entropy,” Elliot repeats, inspecting the green beans with a fork. “That’s a type of surgery?”
Kathleen reads over his shoulder. “A closed system will irreversibly move towards disorder.”
“Like this household,” Dickie says, slamming the book shut next to Kathleen’s ear, and Elliot watches the dominoes fall. Kathleen hits Dickie in the shoulder, and Eli starts crying, and Lizzie bangs on the piano louder to rise above the noise. Kathy looks at him and mouths, “Can you—”
Elliot nods and raises his hands, one burnt green bean still pinched between his forefinger and thumb.
“Hey, animals—Lizzie, stop. Can we all be civil for one night? It’s Thanksgiving—” he catches Dickie’s open mouth, “—or, Not-Thanksgiving, fine, but Olivia is our guest tonight. She better walk out of here in one piece, alright?”
He’s using her as a buffer, plain and obvious, and she stifles a smile. He considers himself lucky that she’s not the kind of person who’d object to that.
“Entropy,” she says after a beat of sullen silence. “That’s like baking a cake, right?”
She taps the pink box, and Kathleen and Dickie look between her face and her finger, intrigued against their will.
“By the time you make the cake batter, and you’ve mixed all the ingredients together, it’s too late, you know—you can’t get back the sugar or the flour, or separate out the eggs.”
Elliot sees the looks of understanding dawn, even underneath the scowls, and he smiles. She’s using that slow, calming tone she saves for kids that are riled up and spiny, and it’s working just as well in his own kitchen. It’s not surprising, really—she’s always been better at this part.
He throws her a grateful look, but catches a shadow of something across her face instead. The straight line of her mouth reminds him, suddenly, of the dead boy with the still-missing sister.
“Case wrapped up?” he says quietly, as soon as the rest move out of earshot.
Olivia swirls her wine in her glass and takes a slow sip. She runs a hand through her hair, and then she sighs, long and low.
“Yeah,” she says, and he knows. He knows from the weight of the one word, and the shape of it in her mouth.
“She didn’t make it,” he says. “The girl.”
“Not right now, El, let’s—” she shakes her head, too quickly, then nods toward his family scattered around the living room. “Let me just be here, right now, okay?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
Elliot watches from the counter as Olivia hammers a choppy upper half of Heart and Soul next to Lizzie, the song dissolving into laughter with their tangling arms. Eli tugs on his ear with a gap-toothed smile, and Elliot tears his gaze away from the piano.
“You know,” Elliot says, in that voice that only comes when he’s talking to someone this small, “all your brothers and sisters had two people that brought them into the world. But you had what we call: ‘special circumstances.’”
He spins Eli on the counter to face Olivia, and Eli giggles, oblivious. Elliot forms his little hand into a point.
“That’s your extra, right there. You lucky little bastard.”
“Aren’t we all,” Kathy says, brushing past him. It was Kathy’s idea to have Olivia over tonight, and it’s only now that Elliot considers why. It’s the way her face twists a little when she says it, ‘Aren’t we all,’ like dinner is a ploy to pay back some kind of lingering karmic debt. He wants to tell Kathy it doesn’t work like that, when you’re in the business of saving lives—that it’s different, when you meet someone in a building lobby and know, within thirty seconds, not to bother keeping count.
He lifts Eli, his wiggling little body warm against his chest, and watches Kathy toss the salad. He’s doing her a kindness, he tells himself, to let her believe she could ever come close to settling that score.
On the second day of the worst flu of Elliot’s life, when he’s under the covers with a pillow over his head, Kathy leans in the door with the phone clutched to her chest.
“Hey, you awake?”
“My head feels like an iron.” He pulls the pillow tighter over his face, and wonders if he might just suffocate to death if he’s diligent enough. “Who’s asking?”
“Olivia.”
“Everything okay?” He tosses the pillow to the side and starts to sit up before the roll of pressure stops him. He grunts, half-laying and half-leaning on an elbow, blinking fully awake. Kathy doesn’t answer for a second, and he can’t quite place her expression through the pounding in his skull.
“Everything’s fine,” she says after a beat. “She’s just checking in. Here. Sorry about all the—”
She gestures vaguely at the door, where Dickie and Lizzie are still arguing over some ill-fated fruit tart, and he catches the phone against his chest.
“Matty got me that from the bakery,” he hears Lizzie yell in the shrill tone reserved only for her brother. “I know you ate it, you—”
“Oh yeah? How are you going to prove it—test my DNA? Oh, wait—”
He hears a shriek and the sound of something falling off the counter, and has just enough time to feel a little guilty before Kathy closes the door behind her.
The noise grows muffled again, and Elliot lays back, not bothering to prop himself up this time.
“This is what I get for keeping you out of jail?” he says, pinching his eyebrows, and hears her sorrowful laugh.
“I’m sorry, El. And it sounded like world war three when Kathy picked up. What’s going on?”
“They treat our kitchen like the break room fridge. And on top of that, my teenage son still thinks he and Lizzie have the same DNA.”
“Weren’t you the one that told him that?”
“Yeah, when they were five, I mean, come on. I just wanted them to stop fighting.”
“Mmm. Karma.”
He feels her low hum curl into his ear, and it’s the familiar warm rasp of a late shift, or a too-early one. His chest loosens, his neck sinking further into the pillow, and he waits.
“Speaking of Karma,” she says after a few seconds, “I just called to make sure you were alive. Wanted to return the favor. Can I do anything?”
Her voice feels far away. He lets his eyes close.
“Return the favor?” He wonders, insanely, if she means she wants to tuck him into bed and draw the blinds, and put a cool hand to his forehead.
“Yeah,” she says.
His head feels too heavy all of a sudden, the memory mixing with the shade of green drapes in his own bedroom until it’s a kind of half-dream: the lavender scent as she pulled the sheets back and he helped her in, the slick of her fever-hot neck against his palm, the way she shivered at the touch. He’d gone to get the peppermint tea and come back to find her asleep, so he’d scribbled her a note: ‘I’ll call when I have something. See a doctor.’
He breathes, and thinks of the steady hum of her heater, the familiar soft clang from the radiator. He thinks of the low hum of traffic out her closed window, and no kids yelling in the next room. The rise and fall of his chest slows to the sound of hers over the phone, until he thinks they must be going at the same time. In and out, again and again, over the faint sound of afternoon cabs and barking dogs.
“Yeah,” he mumbles. “That sounds good.”
“What sounds good?”
“What?”
He blinks awake again, and studies the green drapes. He rubs his face. “No, I meant, no. Liv, I’m fine.”
He counts the stripes on the drapes and makes it halfway across before he starts to wonder if she’s forgotten to hang up. He loses count, and a dog barks somewhere. He waits a minute for her to speak again—she always gets to it eventually, after all the twirling of styrofoam cups on a front stoop or the biting at her thumb.
Then he says “Hello?” at the same time as she starts, “Do you have enough—”
She stops then, and says, “Yeah, I’m here.”
“Oh. Thought I lost you for a sec.”
“Nope.”
He clears his throat, and starts counting the stripes again. “Enough what?”
Nine, ten, eleven, he counts.
“Enough blankets, or, I don’t know. Sick-person things.”
“Blankets,” he says slowly. He wonders if his fever is making him delirious, or if this is somehow the most insane conversation he’s ever had with Olivia Benson.
“Yeah, I have plenty of blankets, Liv.”
Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.
“Tylenol cocktail?”
“We don’t have red gatorade, so I’m shooting it straight—listen, Olivia, I’m okay. Really.”
“I know, I know, El, just— I can’t— “
She’s quiet again, and he hears the rush of traffic get louder, like she’s crossing from the park by her house back into the street, like she was walking around that tiny park on a random Wednesday afternoon, the same park she said she never goes to unless she needs to clear her head.
Twenty, twenty-one, twenty—
“Just call, you know,” she says lightly, “if there’s anything I can do.”
His heart is pounding, and he doesn’t know if it’s from the sick or because he knows exactly why she called. She’s trying to say, with her strange, halting questions about blankets and medicine while she walks aimlessly through the park, that they take care of each other. That it would make sense, on paper, for Olivia to show up at his door and put a hand to his head, the way he did for her.
“Yeah, I will.”
He tries to sound like he meant it, the way she’s trying to sound like she didn’t. He knows it would be nothing short of insane, if she came here to stand by the side of his bed.
The line is quiet now, and she must be back inside her building. He looks at the green drapes that Kathy picked out with the twenty-something stripes, and his house has fallen suddenly silent.
“I’ll call,” he says again.
“You caught this from Olivia?”
Kathy says it lightly, her leg brushing against his as she climbs into bed. He feels her hand on his forehead, first the palm, then the back.
“Yeah, I went to check on her a few days ago, and—” He rolls toward her and groans at the ache. “And then she got framed for murder, actually. It was a whole thing.”
“Wow, okay. Of course.” She traces the lines of his tattoo, the curve of a shin in blue ink, then the straight line of the cross.
“She doesn’t have anyone.” He cracks open one eye. “And you know how she is—she could die of the swine flu because she was too stubborn to go to the doctor, and no one would even know.”
“God, don’t—” Kathy slaps his chest. “Don’t say things like that. And I know. I know how lucky I am that you two look out for each other.”
He feels the unspoken “but—” as clearly as if she’d blurted it. He hates her a little bit right now, the way she’s ramped up to say this thing and won’t finish. If he doesn’t ask, she’ll lay there all night with her face turned toward him like a loaded gun.
He turns his head to look her in the eye. “What?”
She shrugs. “Just—did you do all this stuff for her? Like… tea, soup. I don’t know—did you take her temperature, too?”
He scoffs. “You think Olivia Benson would let me stick a thermometer in her mouth?”
He hopes, maybe foolishly, that it’ll get a laugh. She gives him a watery approximation of a smile, her eyes not quite meeting his. He doesn’t say that he had asked where Olivia kept her thermometers, and she’d told him to get out of her house, and that’s when he’d made the tea.
“You know she’s all by herself,” he says.
He underplays it, or overplays it, or something—what Olivia is. He did it at not-Thanksgiving, and he’s doing it now, with Kathy’s finger tracing the cross. There was a time where it wasn't on purpose—at least he hopes there was—because it’s despicable, what he’s doing: painting Olivia, of all people, as helpless, just because he can’t stomach the truth.
The truth is that he has to show up at her house, because he thinks he might be the only person on earth who knows to get her red gatorade. (“Because it matches the Tylenol, Elliot,” she’d said one year, like he was crazy). He knows to get the coconut-oil-infused tissues, or else her restless hands will rub her own nose raw, and she wants her hot water bottle boiling, even if it makes her whole place smell like burnt silicone. The truth is that he wants to be the only one who knows the exact size and shape of her bark and bite—that she will say she’s fine, she’s fine, until her shoulder finally gives under the push of his palm.
Olivia breaks the news to him in December, devastated, that JJ’s doors will shutter by January.
“This is our fault,” she says, completely serious, and he drops his coat on his chair, incredulous.
“How could this possibly be our fault?”
“He sold us cakes for pennies, El—we ran him into the ground. And I told you to stop taking that discount after his wife had to go to the hospital.”
“Liv.” He sits heavily in his chair. “We ordered two, maybe three cakes a year. And he shouldn’t have given a discount to anyone with a badge during a financial crisis. Maybe that was a bad business decision, you ever think of that?”
“I’m going to see what I can do,” she says, picking up the phone.
“Are you going to involve me in this?”
He already knows the answer, but he waits anyway.
“Hi, this is Detective Olivia Benson, NYPD." Her voice goes slow and sweet for the pleasantries. “Yes, I’ll hold.”
She closes a palm over the end and drops the honey-slick tone.
“How many chocolate cakes have you eaten since 1997?”
He bites back a smile, and picks up his phone.
By the time JJ’s doors finally close, the precinct is sick of cake and Olivia has bought half the store in a desperate attempt to save it. Elliot eyes the stacks of pink boxes lining the breakroom counter, shoving them to the side to reach the cabinet.
Olivia comes in when he’s drained the hot water from the instant noodles, and is halfway done picking out pieces of corn. She’s leaning against the frame, and she looks more tired than when he’d left her with their witness upstairs. He probably doesn’t look any better, not in the kitchen lights at three in the morning after talking down a scared twelve year-old whose mother’s in the hospital.
Olivia reaches for the set of stacking blocks on the table that someone’s forgotten to clean up. She tumbles the small ones in her hand, red and blue and back again, then sets them back down, and looks at him with the question in her eyes.
“She wanted mac n’ cheese” he says with a shrug. “Couldn’t find any, but I saw Munch put shredded cheese on his salad today.”
She retrieves it from the fridge without a word.
“Hand me that too?” he mutters over her shoulder. “The butter packet.”
“So,” she says, watching him mix. “Which one of your kids drove you to this little trick?”
“Kathleen. Most of her food ended up on the floor.”
“That makes sense for her,” Olivia smiles. She comes closer until they’re shoulder to shoulder at the counter, and he feels her talk through her yawn. “You never seemed like the spoiling type, though.”
“Trust me, when you have kids—”
He stops himself too late. If this was two years ago, or maybe even one year ago, he knows she’d hit back– “When I have kids?” or, on a worse day, “Tell me again, El, how I’ll suddenly know better after I’ve pushed a damn baby out.”
But it’s not two years ago, or one year ago, and she just looks at a spot on the wall. He thinks that is much, much worse.
“Liv, I didn’t—”
“I know.”
“I just meant, all the things I thought I was going to be as a parent went out the window when I met my kids.”
She’s quiet for a second.
“I get it. They’re their own people.”
“Yeah. Just have to try not to mess them up too bad. Still got a good shot with Eli, I think.”
Olivia taps his thigh twice, then pulls the drawer before he realizes and moves back. She takes a fork and digs into the bowl.
“You’re not going to mess him up, El.” She blows steam out from the too-hot bite. “God, I’m hungry. And I don’t usually like mac n’ cheese.”
Elliot grabs the fork from her and takes the second bite. It burns his tongue. “Everybody likes mac n’ cheese. You’ve just never had mine.”
She looks at the bowl and he rolls his eyes. “No, not this garbage,” he says. “Real breaded mac. With five kinds of cheese, and bacon.”
“When was the last time you made that?” she says dryly, and takes back the fork.
“Doesn’t matter—it’s like riding a bike. Come over, I’ll make it for you sometime. You’ll never go back.”
She arches a brow, and he feels his face heat. In thirteen years, the closest he’s come to cooking for her is tossing together leftover junk or fetching burnt coffee from a bodega. He tries to care about the fact that he’s blushing, because he just invited her over for dinner, this time with no mention of his family or pretext of an almost-holiday, and he knows she’s taking his red face for what it is. He tries to wish he didn’t mean it the exact way she’s thinking—that it sparks a low sort of simmer in his belly and all through his chest, when she eats the makeshift food he gives her at three in the morning. He tries to care enough to move things along in this decrepit kitchen, and tell her that maybe he shouldn’t have volunteered for protective custody tonight, after all.
Two years ago, he would have told her. One year ago, he would have gotten a second fork, at least.
They look at the bowl in tandem, already halfway empty.
“Here,” he says, pushing it towards her. “I’ll make more for the kid.”
He hasn’t even finished his sentence before the bowl is back in her hands and the fork in her mouth.
“We should just order some, El. This does not taste good.” She takes another bite, and continues, mouth full. “It’s, like—” She pauses to swallow. “It’s really bad.”
He just watches her, her eyelids heavy as she complains halfheartedly and scarfs down the rest of the makeshift meal. The lighter strands of her hair shimmer, gilded by the kitchen flourescents, and he turns to face her fully. He thinks, in this insane moment, that she looks beautiful.
He feels a little guilty for thinking Olivia is beautiful before the hundred other things she is, but he’d ruined his chances of objectivity from the start. He thought she was beautiful first, her hair tangled with yellow flower petals and shards of broken glass, and everything that came after piled right on top like stacking blocks.
He looks at her now, surrounded by her abandoned cakes, her hair askew from letting a scared twelve year-old try and braid it. His throat tightens suddenly and without warning, in the breakroom kitchen, with her still paying no mind. She still hasn’t bothered to sit down, and her sleeve has a fleck of cheese on the end, and he thinks it makes no sense at all, to be overwhelmed by this.
She pauses when she catches him staring. He waits for what he knows is coming, because with Olivia, something is always coming.
She lowers the bowl a little, and arches a brow.
“Can I help you with something?”
He shrugs, reaching to the side, and clears his throat.
“You know, her mom is in the hospital and she’s scared half to death.”
Her brow only furrows for a second before she glances at his fingers, drumming against the lid of the nearest pink box.
“Good point,” she says, her smile starting to stretch. “She probably needs something a little better than Elliot Stabler’s secondhand mac.”
Later, he’ll try to pinpoint when it all started to veer into something unsalvageable, and he won’t really be able to manage. Instead, it’ll come to him in a jumble—he’ll think of Not-Thanksgiving and the kitchen window and pink boxes of cakes. He’ll think of shooting Jenna, and drinking whiskey with Olivia in Cragen’s office, and looking at the view from the roof with Jo. Then he’ll wonder if distance and time have made him mix up the order of things, with no hope of separating them back to something like ‘Tuesday’ or ‘June.’ He will try, miles away on his solitary morning walks, but he will never remember the single moment when one foot in front of the other turned into one big, terrible thing on top of the last.
Somewhere during this time when he’s stopped being careful altogether, he gets blown up for the fourth time. He’s dazed and fighting the wave of nausea as he perches on his desk.
“You should be at the hospital with the other victim,” Olivia says for the third time, and then she must feel him tense, because she holds his head tighter, and mutters, “Stop it, don’t move.”
“Can’t do both, can I?”
He thinks it’s fair to be unpleasant after getting blown up, and she shoots him a look like she knows. She didn’t ask like everyone else had—”Did you check the perimeter?” or “Did you have eyes on the suspect?” or “Can you tell me every single way this is your fault?” She’d just met him out of the elevator as he stumbled, held him by the shoulders, and asked, “What happened?” which he knows just means, “How close did you get, this time?”
He shuts his eyes against the roll in his gut. “Before you say it, it wasn’t somehow miraculously your fault. Fuck—”
He clutches her forearm at the sting, and she winces.
“I’m sorry, El—just a little bit more, okay?”
Something small in her voice makes him still, something thick in her throat. He’s been thinking about every decision he could have made differently that didn’t involve his face on the pavement and a woman in the hospital, but he hasn’t been paying attention. Olivia’s hands have softened against his face, eyes trained on the cuts, but she’s blinking too fast.
He’s dizzy—from the bright lights or the head injury, or maybe from Olivia standing between his knees with her breath on his cheek. He tries to stare straight ahead, but straight ahead is Olivia—her eyes, her furrowed brow, her teeth worrying the inside of her cheek. Her clavicle, those two necklaces he sees every day but knows nothing about, except that they would be impossible for him to take off without breaking—which, yes, is something he’s considered more than he should, right alongside which colored wire to cut.
He’s still holding onto her arm, and he drops it. His knuckles brush the front of her thigh, and he feels her pause.
“You need a break?” she asks, and he starts to shake his head before he remembers.
“I need a vacation,” he mutters. “Got any recs?”
‘I’ve always wanted to go to the Bahamas." She moves to the nicks on his neck, her other hand still cupping his ear, and he swallows when her fingers press against his pulse.
“You have? Why?” He says it with genuine surprise.
“I do like vacations, too.” She presses near a cut for emphasis, light and teasing, and he lets out a muffled sound that’s mostly from the pain, and a little from the way she’s looking at him intently with her fingertips on his neck. He swallows, his mouth suddenly dry, and thinks that he needs to get off this desk and out of the room before he has a very real, very visible problem.
“I read this book in college, about women pirates,” she says, pressing the final bandaid. “In the Bahamas during the golden age of piracy. They left everything behind to be outlaws with Calico Jack.”
She steps back and he can’t decide whether he’s relieved or disappointed.
“Pirates,” he says, squinting.
“I was eighteen, and it was either going to be 1700’s feminist history or a major drug problem. And with everything with my mom—I don’t know, I just needed to believe it was possible to give up my whole life for a better one.”
He swallows, and stands. He brings a finger up to his wounds, and catches her eye. He steps forward until she’s forced to look up, and he wonders what she’d do if he returned the favor—put a hand on her jaw and held on.
“You know,” he tilts his head. “Most people say ‘the beaches.’”
“I’m not most people.”
“Stabler,” he hears, just as Olivia starts to smile. He turns to find Jo, her gaze flitting between them with an unreadable look.
“I’m going to—” Olivia mutters, holding up the dirty gauze, and gestures behind her so vaguely that Elliot almost wants to laugh. He looks back at Jo, and his stomach turns.
“You have a minute?”
She takes him to the roof. He wonders, on the ride up, how long she’d been standing there watching, and what exactly there was to see.
“Missed this view,” she says once they’ve walked the final flight of metal stairs and she’s thrown open the door. She goes right to the edge, and he remembers another piece of her suddenly.
“Stop,” he says, pulling her back by the elbow. “You’re the one who always told me not to tempt fate.”
She looks down, then back at him, that same strange look in her eye.
“Fate’s already had its way with me, Detective. I’m testing gravity.”
He looks at the hazy skyline, and he’s already starting to sweat under the collar. Jo starts to pace slow, her feet crunching in the gravel.
“You never told me,” he says. “When you got sick. Why didn’t you call me, you know? I would have—”
“You would have what, Elliot?” She pauses, and only looks a little amused when she says it. “You would have come with me to my breast cancer support group? You would have helped me feel sexy again after my husband couldn’t stand the thought of fucking me?”
“Jo—”
“You always did this, Elliot.” She steps forward, and she sounds a little exasperated now, and the flip in his stomach has grown to a roll.
She tilts his face toward her with one finger to the jaw. “You offered the cavalry, and the righteous anger, and it was great. God, it made me feel so—”
She stops, and exhales slow.
“But you never thought far enough ahead.”
He looks at her for a second, then over her shoulder, and squints against the sun. Sweat stings the cuts on his face.
“What do you want, Jo?”
She walks three more steps, and she hasn’t actually doubled back once she started walking. She’s going in a circle, not pacing, he realizes, and for some reason that sets his teeth on edge. Only Jo could find a way to cheat that, too.
“How’s that working out for you?” she says, nodding to the metal door. “You and Florence Nightingale? I’ll be honest, I didn’t think she was your type—a llittle straight-edged.”
What are you talking about? he should say. But it’s Jo, and Jo knew him in a way where she will always know him. He wipes the sweat off his forehead, careful to avoid Olivia’s work.
“If you think she’s straight-edged, you haven’t spent enough time with her.”
Her eyes widen a little.
“And it doesn’t matter,” he says, “I’m—”
“Married, yeah. Save it,” she says, like he expected of her all along. Then she throws him a dry smile, and adds, “That kind of thing doesn’t hurt my feelings anymore.”
He hadn’t really expected that part at all.
She’d kissed him once, undercover at a dirty bar. She’d shoved her tongue down his throat, taken his hands in hers, and planted them firmly on her ass. He’d tried his best, thirty and desperate to be faithful to both his wife and his job, when he hadn’t yet wondered if those kinds of faith were possible at the same time. Her tongue slid against his again and again, and she’d rocked him against the stained wood paneling, and it was Jo. He’d forgotten it all for a second, and dug his fingers in. Just for a second—for one sharper-than-normal exhale—but long enough for her to press her hips up again, and smirk into his mouth at what she found.
Now, she’s looking at him steadily, and he thinks it’s funny how she still stands right at the edge of the roof, even when everything else about her is different.
“She’s my partner,” he says.
“I was your partner. This is— You’re distracted, Elliot. You got blown up, for fuck’s sake.”
He shakes his head, then shakes it again. “That had nothing—”
“Cut the shit.” She points wildly at the door, and he can see wisps of her hair starting to curl in the warm wind. “I can see it, you can see it, everyone in this goddamn building can see it. If you don’t think that’s a liability, then—”
“That what this is about?” He grabs her arm, stopping her circling halfway. “It’s all about liability now, counselor?”
She steps back, smooths her hair, and lets out a defeated laugh. She looks at the bridge for a minute, and he sees her considering whether to keep pushing. He sees the moment she gives up on him, the sinking of her shoulders before she turns back.
“Fine, Elliot. Yeah, that's why I brought you up here. To tell you that you and Benson dying for each other in some sophomoric, line-of-duty, head-up-your-ass accident would be a huge liability.”
He hears the crunch of her steps behind him, then the clang of the door. He walks to the edge of the roof and looks down, and thinks that Jo doesn’t really know him anymore, anyway. He listens to the traffic and the rush of the wind, and scratches the thin white strip over his eyebrow. He feels it stretch, then split open under his thumb. He thinks it never really had a fair shot at holding, anyway.
He’s sitting in his car listening to Olivia with Erik Weber when he starts to think Jo was right. She’s not even flirting, really—he can hear her over the comms, trying to figure Erik out, whether he’s off-putting or just awkward. Elliot listens and stares out the window at 287 Broadway, that odd-looking building from the news that leans a few inches to the left. He wonders why he never noticed it before—if it had been built that way, or if one morning it had just started to go off-center. Then he hears the pour of wine, and he stops thinking about the building.
Logically, he knows there was a time where he didn’t feel like this at all. He would let a boring flake try his best to seduce Olivia, and he’d let his mind wander to what Kathy might be making for dinner—lasagna, hopefully, and maybe there were still a couple beers left in the fridge. But Jo had to go and give it a name, and Elliot can’t remember the last time he ate anything but cold leftovers, and he wants to smash Derek’s face in. Even now, before he knows that the man is a murderer, even when he’s just handing Olivia a glass of wine and leaning a few inches to the left.
The night Sonya dies, it’s too quiet. It’s always like this, after someone dies. Elliot knows everyone is at home making whatever earnest declarations to their loved ones will get them back here tomorrow: I’ll spend more time with the kids, and I’ll always call for backup, and Something Like This will never happen to me. Everyone is home except him and Olivia, having long run out of resolutions.
Olivia produces an unfamiliar key, and they lock themselves in Cragen’s office. He closes the blinds without thinking, just to be where no other unspeakable tragedies can find them for a few minutes at least, and Olivia reaches for the whiskey in the bottom drawer.
“I didn’t know you had a key,” Elliot says. He watches her fiddle with the cap.
“Supposed to be for emergencies. In case something happens.”
It’s the first thing he’s heard her say in an hour, and her voice is raw. It makes his chest hurt.
“Something happened,” he says, and takes the bottle out of her shaking hand.
“Yeah.” She wipes the hair out of her face, then wipes her mouth, and watches him pour.
He hands her a double, or at least what he’s approximated in a paper cup, and they tilt their heads back in unison as if they’re hiding out in the kitchen at a wake. If there’s anyone he’d want to hide with, he thinks.
She puts her cup down suddenly, and reaches for the top button of her collar. It’s buttoned all the way up today, and now she’s scrambling for it. She’d already taken off her belt in the car, and he’d shucked his holster and tie—he understands it, the need to tear off anything constricting in the face of something so uncontrollable.
“Can’t—-I can’t fucking breathe in this,” she says, and he watches her shaky fingers fumble.
He’s in front of her then, moving her hands gently away. He undoes the top button, and she takes a deep breath, then another.
“Better?”
“One more,” she says, shutting her eyes tight, and he undoes the second. His knuckles brush the gold of the necklace over the paper-worn soft of her chest, creased and crinkled before the curve. He pauses there, his thumb on the edge of the chain. She opens her eyes.
“One more,” she says again, low and bare. He moves his fingers to the third, and she’s still looking at him like that, and he thinks he’d keep going if she asked, all the way down her sternum and stomach to the very last.
She’s silent, after the third, and he steps back. The backs of his thighs hit the desk.
“Will it always be this hard?” he says after a minute. He rubs his eyes, dry and aching, and his throat burns with the whiskey. She looks at him, and he thinks the flash in her eyes is something like hurt. He watches her hands curl into themselves, and he knows there will be angry red indents on her palms, and that it will be his fault.
“I think it’s a little too late to be asking that.”
She reaches for the bottle behind him, and he puts a hand on her wrist to stop her. He lifts her hand away, and then he’s just holding it by their sides. She squeezes too tight, and he can’t stop the words from coming out. He tries to blame it on any number of things he’s used to reaching for, but he’s looking at her now, and coming up empty.
“It’s just so much. There’s too much, Liv, I don’t–” he feels his voice waver, his face twitching with the small muscles that are tired of holding taut. She steps into him, and then she’s turning her face into his neck, nose bumping his jaw just like she’d done in the hallway, except this time the door is shut and the blinds are closed.
“You don’t what?” she says, and it’s almost mean, the way she says it. He feels it against his skin, low and rasping and warm, and he can’t help the shudder that runs right through him.
His free hand is gripping the desk, because he knows if he touches the curve of her hip or the plane of her back, or the small hairs on the back of her neck, he will never stop.
He noses her temple, inhales, and shuts his eyes at the smell of sweat and day-old perfume and what he knows as Olivia. He smells the metal bite of blood from some spot on their clothes that one of them missed, and that’s familiar, too. He wonders when exactly it happened—when he stopped daydreaming about lasagna for dinner every time he walked into a room, and started searching for Olivia’s face instead.
“I don’t know how to do it,” he says. “Separate out the eggs.”
She stills against him, and lets out a breath. Then he feels the brush of her lips at his jaw. He thinks it had to be on purpose this time, and the thought of that—of Olivia kissing his jaw—pulls a sound from the back of his throat.
He knows she can feel him, hard and pressed against her, right at her waistband where she’d ripped off her belt and thrown it angrily in the backseat like it’d caused all of this.
“Olivia,” he says low in warning. She puts both hands flat on his chest, and leans back to look at him. He watches the dark, hollow gleam in her eyes, the red rims underneath, the way her tongue slips out to wet her lips.
“I’m tired, Elliot.” Her finger brushes the hollow of his throat. “Of all of it.”
She presses her hands in for a second, and then steps sideways, away from him. They stand there, not quite side by side or face to face, and he knows.
He knows it will always be this way, because it always has: their coffee only ever burned or cooled too fast. Calvin went back to his mother, and Sonya died. Someone knocked down the walls of the breakroom where he made mac n’ cheese for a scared girl, and later, that girl will turn fourteen, and die at his hand.
He takes in Olivia’s wet cheeks and mussed hair, tangled from the way she was nestled in his shoulder. She looks wrecked, and she is looking at him like she knows, she knows, that he has never, not once, loved someone like this.
He understands now, with the precinct gone funeral-quiet and the knowledge of her lips against his jaw, that this will never go away the way he always hoped it would. He looks it right in the eye for the first time, this great big love, and thinks there is only one way to stop all of it—the little girls dying, the buildings falling, and the dig of Olivia’s nails into her palm.
The day Elliot Stabler meets Olivia Benson, he comes back from the medic station and gives her a reluctant tour.
“Lockers,” he says, and hands her a slip of paper. “Here’s your combo.”
“Did you look at it?” She glances at him, and unfolds it. “You’re not supposed to.”
“Of course I didn’t.”
“13-4-56,” she reads. Then, at his look of surprise, adds, “You really didn’t look?”
“No, I just said I didn’t.”
“Well, good. I’ll change it, then.” She drums her fingers against the metal. “It all kind of reminds me of the first day of school, you know? Lockers, new people. That feeling like you’ve got the whole year ahead of you, and then another year, and another. It all just seems so…”
Her eyes wander, and he looks around with her—a woman in a chair talking to Munch, an officer with his head in his hands in front of a typewriter, the sheen of the laminated posters on the wall. He tries to see it the way she does, but it all just feels like static.
“Big,” she finishes. “It feels big.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself.” Elliot eyes her. “No one here has been partners longer than four years.”
“Why, what’s wrong with you?”
She says it quick, and he can’t help but grin, because, okay, that was funny. She’s funny. “Sex crimes is different. Most people can’t handle it.”
“I’m not most people.”
He crosses his arms, eyes her again. She’s barely moved, still leaning against the locker with her hair brushing her chin. Her eyes are dancing, like she already knows how to push his exact buttons, and fuck if it really does feel a little like the first day of school.
“Okay then.” He taps her locker. “Watch my back, I’ll watch yours, and maybe we make it to senior prom.”
Olivia follows him all the way back to his side of the desk before realizing hers is opposite and doubling back. She tests the give of the chair and adjusts the height. He watches her play with the file holder, move it to the other side, and straighten a piece of paper she hasn’t even looked at. She picks up a pen, her thumb bending back the tab.
“Those break easy, by the way.” He nods towards her hand.
“Caught a body in Central Park,” Cragen calls, and points at them. “You two, you’re up. Welcome to the unit, Benson.”
Olivia nods in his direction, and gathers her hair in a ponytail. It’s short enough that it’s already starting to fall back around her face by the time she jogs to catch up. Elliot glares when she steps on the back of his shoe.
“Sorry,” she mutters. “Hey—did you hear about that NYPD police horse that retired last week? Spent twenty-one years with the same officer.”
Elliot squints, wondering if he’s heard correctly. “Retirement on your mind already, Detective Benson?”
“I’m just saying you need to aim higher, Detective Stabler.”
She gets in first, and he steps in beside her. He looks at her in question, and her nose crinkles with the wide stretch of her smile.
“I say we make it to twenty-two.”
____
____
They don’t make it to twenty-two—best laid plans, Olivia thinks. They make it to fourteen, and even after that, she never quite stops counting. She counts by the ways the cabs look different and the streets get cleaner, the way the cars continue their slow change from boxy to sleek to quiet and electric, and back to boxy again. She counts in years and sometimes in days, depending on how sharply it hurts when she wakes up and looks at the twist of her ceiling fan. Sometimes three slow circles is all it takes before she knows: today is a day where he’s been gone 1825 days, not five years, because 5 is not a big enough number for the way it still needles.
She doesn’t keep anything to remember him by, because there is too much to remember him by everywhere, all the time—the wood paneling in the precinct he’d made fun of as soon as it was installed, and the letters he’d carved into the brand new desk drawer when he was bored and antsy that last year. She’s digging through Amaro’s desk for a paper clip one day when she finds the worn scratches in the wood. Elliot must have been carving his name and gotten interrupted, by a dead body or maybe by her telling him to stop it, and now she feels like she will be violently sick all over Amaro’s things, looking at the word STABLE carved into wood.
She keeps her apartment empty of photos entirely, until Noah comes along and cracks her open. By the time he can talk enough to interrogate, she has one full photo album, at least. They sit on the floor, her back against the couch. He points at the open page from 1999 and says, “Who ‘it’ that?” with his words that are barely words. He has enduring trouble with what seems like half the alphabet, which she should be thinking about, because speech therapists are expensive and she should be—
“Who?” he says again, and presses his finger into the page, over and over. She follows his finger and lets out a laugh of disbelief.
“That’s Mama. I know it was a little while ago, but— Look, that’s Mama. See?” She lifts the page up to her face and smiles in that same way, wide with her eyes shut, and hears his squeal of laughter.
“Tiddy Mama!”
“I am not being silly, you clown, that’s me!”
He bangs his fists on his lap, still laughing, and she puts a hand out to steady him so he doesn’t hit his head on the coffee table with all the misguided glee.
“Who ‘it’ that?” he asks again. He’s asked on every single page, for every single photo, and this time, it’s the photo she’s been waiting for.
It’s him, and she’s spent so long trying not to remember, and now she can’t help but stare. He’s wearing one of those dress shirts, the ones that were one size too big and the color of doctors’ office walls. The baggy sleeves and wide ties made him look like some sort of washed-up accountant at his desk, and she liked the secrecy of knowing he was coiled tight and unyielding under all those crisp, clean lines.
They’re laughing in the picture, and it shouldn’t feel like this because she’s seen it already. She’d looked through every single one in the front seat of her car, and held this one under the glow of the red cross in the drug store parking lot, the rest of the stack forgotten on the passenger seat.
He’s bent near in half, her hand on his back, and she’s perched on the side of that ugly old desk. She can still feel it when she looks, the way the metal desk bar bruised her legs in the same spot for a decade. She feels the warmth from his back bleeding through his layers. She doesn’t remember what they’re laughing at, or who took the picture, but she remembers the rumble of his laugh against her palm, and she still has the scars on her shins.
“That’s Detective Stabler,” she says to Noah, who has started to bore, playing with the ear of a nearby stuffed rabbit. The words feel sticky and unused. She clears her throat hard, and imagines the words ‘Detective Stabler’ rattling like pebbles in a rusty pipe. She tickles the back of Noah’s hand with her index finger to make him look, and thinks she wants someone to know. That in some way, from the moment Elliot had looked at her with wide eyes and blood running down his face, they were each other’s.
“That’s Elliot,” she enunciates. “El-li-ot. He, um. He was Mama’s… ”
“Eddiot,” Noah repeats, and Olivia can’t help but laugh. It bursts out, loud and real from somewhere deep, and she tugs a hand through his curls. She laughs and laughs, and feels a couple tears spring loose.
“Exactly,” she says, and wipes her eyes. “He was Mama’s idiot.”