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A robotic trill rings out, reaching down into the fogginess of sleep and rouses Olivia Benson with a start.
It’s nothing new for her to be startled awake in a cold sweat, but now, there’s a different spike of adrenaline. Noah was at his first sleepover and she’s been good about it, barely hovering when she’d dropped him off, but in the split second it takes her to answer the phone, a thousand terrifying thoughts race through her mind.
What if he’s hurt? What if, what if, what if.
“Hey.”
Blood rushes in her ears and her breath stutters and kicks, her body suddenly thrumming with expectancy. It’s the first word she’s heard from him in three years, and for a moment Olivia thinks she’s dreaming, still floating in the murky recesses of sleep, clinging to a spectre. Because he can’t possibly be calling her. Why would he be?
But her voice remembers how to respond before she can even think about it, before she can hang up, before she can tear into him for anything and everything, because there are words that she’s needed to say to him, since before.
Since the beginning.
“El?” The syllable feels thick and heavy in her mouth.
“Yeah, uh, sorry it’s, fuck it’s late…” It’s right around three, the time when he’d normally call her up, see if she wanted to grab a coffee, or a bite, or go for a walk somewhere, just to get out of the house. She’s nursed countless cups of coffee on an endless parade of front stoops with him.
Maybe it’s muscle memory, maybe it’s because she always picked up, even when she was dead tired and desperately craving slumber, or in the middle of a date, or out to dinner with a colleague. Maybe she’s a doormat who can’t help but be there when he needs her. Maybe a lot of things.
And maybe she can’t be here, not now. Maybe she can’t take his call, not this late in the game.
Years late, she wants to say. Years late and how dare you and what the hell do you even think you’re doing?
But she doesn’t ask why he’s calling, because she knows; if she were to blindly pick up the phone in the middle of the night, her fingers would begin dialing his number, out of habit.
She can’t fault him for that. But he doesn’t get to call her after a thousand days of silence and pretend like everything is okay.
They breathe, together, for a moment.
“Was ah, wondering if you want to grab a coffee? Tea? Whatever the hell you’re drinking nowadays?” His words are a punch to the chest, and she falls back into the pillows, shutting her eyes tight, wishing she could say no. Three years; three goddamned years and he’s acting as if it’s old times, all the same.
Tongue pressed tightly to the back of her teeth, eyes squeezed shut, she wills herself to say no. She wants to tell him to go to hell, that he can’t cold call her after so much time and pretend that nothing’s different. But it doesn’t happen, of course it doesn’t, she can’t fool herself. “Where?”
“Montbello’s? Half an hour?”
“Their coffee is terrible,” she breathes, and desperately struggles with the urge not to fall back into old habits. But his voice, the sound of his breath, the sounds of him that tethered her in so many ways for so long are there, and she can’t.
She can’t.
Elliot laughs, and it feels like accumulated dust being blown away. “Yeah. It is terrible.”
“Forty-five, gotta shower.” She only knows it’s different, only feels those long days of missing him because he doesn’t retort that she doesn’t need a shower, that it’s just him, and who is she trying to impress, anyway?
“Great, see you then. And.” Olivia can hear his throat work, hear as he swallows against words that shouldn’t be said over the phone. “Bring pictures, I wanna see the kid.”
---
“You look like hell,” Olivia says. He doesn’t, it’s just what she says. It’s safe.
Elliot stands, the sense of chivalry in him not allowing himself to remain seated. It’s a moment when old friends might hug, but they don’t. His eyes scan her up, down, and then back, and something in him shifts. His shoulders sag, his hands unclench. “Good to see you, too.”
Elliot looks like he’s been taking care of himself, like he’s keeping the demons at bay with something other than alcohol and rage. She’s happy for him, just as she hates him for it, because nothing is ever cut and dried with Elliot Stabler. Because part of moving on is learning to cope, and why the fuck couldn’t he have learned that when he was around.
Two paper cups of coffee sit on the chipped laminate table and she slides into the booth bench opposite the one he’d vacated, immediately wrapping her palms around the cup. It doesn’t matter that she tries to shy away from the stuff, now. It’s a comfort, the scent and the feel of the paper and the person across from her. She takes a sip, and it’s acrid like motor oil, the taste bringing back decades of memories.
Old habits.
He takes a seat, swigs from his cup.“So,” he begins.
She’s surprised when he eyebrows jumped, indignity and outrage outpacing her conscious thought. It’s an expression that might spur someone on, but he knows her well, and he lets her sit with the silence for a long moment.
“Where the hell have you been, El.” It comes out tight, unspooling messily between them.
His fingers twitch, pick at the soggy rim of his cup. “Queens. You know. The house, and now… not.”
All pretense of the coffee abandoned, she leans forward over the table, resting on her forearms. “And why now? Hm? Don’t call, don’t email, why now?”
She’s giving him the upper hand, and she doesn’t care. A decade ago she might have given a damn about their power dynamics, but she misses him like a limb, and she doesn’t have it in her anymore to hide. Elliot Stabler was her best friend, her partner, everything that filled up the crude holes inside of her.
She wants to hate him, but couldn’t if she tried. There’s too much history there, weaving them together.
“Who else do I call, Liv?” And it’s a helpless thing that escapes him; she watches him cave in on himself.
“You knew that after…Kathy didn’t want me to…” He trails off, and she knows neither one of them needs it said; thirteen years had been enough to leave it plainly on both of their faces. Olivia doesn’t begrudge Kathy; what wife would stand for that kind of relationship?
Before, she’d felt as though it had been inescapable, a juggernaut bowling them over, regardless of their own desires. It’d been stupid, feckless, to think that neither of them had played an active role in what they’d morphed into. It was unfortunate when one person fell in love and the other didn’t; it was downright devastating when two people did and couldn’t do a damned thing about it.
There’s a gruff sound as he clears his throat, and then he sucks in a breath, sitting up taller.
“She’s moving to Portland. Maine,” he adds. “Not the good one.” His lips form a hard line as his hands threaten to crush the cup that rests between them. “And I’m not.”
There’s snarky retort on the tip of her tongue, though the admission takes her by surprise. The silence that falls between them is wholly unrecognizable and she’s off-kilter, floundering with too many competing thoughts. There’s an inevitability barrelling down on them, and she doesn’t want to face it, can’t bear to ignore it. In the past, she might have placated him, fed him some lines about how important it was to try, and try, and try.
That had all been a front for something else, and she doesn’t have words to fight against how this makes her feel, now.
She has to close her eyes against it, can’t look at him for fear she’ll get lost. Her head bumps against the back of the booth and she reminds herself to breathe. “Why, why are you telling me this?”
His voice is almost a whisper. “Who else do I call?”
She was always too invested in his personal life, too eager to get him to call Kathy when they were on a case. She frowned when he shirked his fatherly duties to stay late at the squad. She knows now why that was; Olivia had never even wanted to give the impression that she was the other woman. Didn’t want to think of it as a possibility.
And yet, the entire time. The entire time…
She didn’t know back then what it was—amorphous and slippery enough to rationalize away—but she knows now, has known for quite some time.
“This isn’t how… this works.” The words manage to come out, fairly strangled and somehow entirely desperate. “El, you can’t just do this. Now.”
She catches a glimspe of his old self, the fire in his eyes, it hurts to look at. “Why not? Why not?” The coffee sloshes out of the cup, meanders across the table towards her. She watches it come, does nothing to stop it.
Inevitability.
It was a cliche: the two of them hunting monsters together, only glancing at what was happening between them in the quiet moments. They were a cliche, still are, she knows. And acknowledging what she sees in him now comes easy in an unstoppable sort of way, because it’s written all over her, in her DNA, to know him.
It’s pointless, now, any attempt at subterfuge. They’re too old, have seen too much, know one another too well.
“When did you know?” she asks, watching as the coffee slows its advance, clinging to the lip of the table.
He swallows thickly.
“Tell me Elliot, how long before you left. How long did you know what you meant to me? What I meant to you? Really meant, El. How long?” It feels incredible, incandescent and awful, letting it all go, finally speaking it.
He reacts as though he’s been slapped, and watching him react gives her a bit of perverse pleasure.
It takes him a moment, but she lets him regain his composure; he threads his fingers together atop the table and meets her gaze, tongue passing over his lips as he sucks in a breath, and then another. She’s not sure he knows at all how he intended to handle the situation now, but she’s damned sure it wasn’t like this.
“Liv—”
She can’t stop the torrent of words she’s kept pent, “How long, Elliot? I want you to tell me, because you didn’t even give me a, a fucking warning. You just went.” There’s anger creeping into her, a hot thing that she can’t resist. “So how long did you know that I was in love with you before you left?”
Elliot has never been forthcoming, has never said the right thing when she’s wanted to hear it, and lobbing the question at him already feels like a victory. She wants to let him flounder, let him hate himself a little.
But Elliot just closes his eyes, lets his head fall back against the booth, too. “Can you honestly remember a time when you didn’t? Because, Jesus Liv, I really, really can’t.”
She’s pissed at him for surprising her; she’s pissed at him for naming it so plainly, for returning her volley expertly...and now she has no idea what to do.
Olivia feels bone-weary, as though everything has been wrung out of her. Her “Fuck you,” is uttered with absolutely no heat.
“Yeah,” Elliot says, peeking his eyes open, resigned. “Yeah.”
The silence is too much, pressing in at her from all angles.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she says, shaking her head at herself, rubbing the palms of her hands against her jeans. “What do I say? This was never…”
Everything stalls; her words, her breath, her thoughts. It’s nearly dawn, and she’s sitting in a coffee shop in Manhattan with a man she would have once given her life for, and she can’t move.
And she still fucking loves him.
Clean shaven, and well-dressed, looking like he’s been eating and sleeping properly, Elliot just stares at her. She wonders if it’s occurred to him that they might not be able to fix this thing between them, wonders if he wants to try, wonders what his skin feels like and his breath tastes like and wants so much to hold him.
“Hey,” he says softly, and she lifts her eyes to his. “I didn’t mean to... “ He falls silent again, glancing out the window. When he speaks again it’s in a rush, and to the windowpane, not to her.
“Before, before I… it was easy to write it off, like, because we were together every day, because I had your back, and because you had mine. I made…excuses. Because I had to. Because if I didn’t...”
“Yeah.” She knows exactly what she’s agreeing to: their culpability. The blame they each carry, that they share.
“Jesus Christ Olivia, you think I left because…I left because if I hadn’t, I’d have fucked it all up. Everything between us, I’d have…” And she watches the fight drain from him, inch by inch.
He shakes his head, glances down at the table, and drags his palms down over his face. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have…brought it up. Maybe it should have gone on like it was, but.” He shrugs. “Who else do I call? At three in the morning, when I can’t fucking breathe because I miss you so much?”
Her mouth moves without sound, and she looks everywhere but at his eyes; eventually, her gaze settles on her lap. “El,” she says, for lack of anything else to say. “I just…you have to know I didn’t want this. Not like this.” This pain, this suffering, all of these years still tethered but apart. She can only imagine the torture he’s put himself through over the years, rectifying his feelings with his religion, with the vows he made, with his military-strict rigidity. She can only imagine how much he’s put himself through to get to this, for the man who never gave himself a break to finally cave.
But she can; because she’s put herself through it, too.
“You know, when you were gone, when you went dark in Oregon, I thought it would be good, somehow. I thought…I thought I could work it out,” he says quickly. “I…thought I hated you, and it killed me, thinking that that was it.” He begins layering napkins onto the table, the liquid slowly disappearing into the paper. “But, you know, if I hated you, I’d…”
She meets his gaze and refuses to look away.
Elliot sighs, shrugs and slumps back into the booth. “Thought something’d happen, like I’d just…fall out of love with you.”
The words sound insane coming out of his mouth, something he would have tiptoed around, before. But he’s resigned, a rag doll imitation of Elliot Stabler. She’s seen him like this before, knows well that this isn’t a side of him that most have seen. Olivia has seen him sob, break down, freak out, scream and yell and rage. Olivia has witnessed him on the ledge, throwing in the towel, wanting to quit.
But not this.
“Didn’t work,” he continues, somehow ten years older, now. “Not even close.”
She sucks in a breath, feels like she’s going to break apart. It’s as though she’s out of her own body, experiencing something she never quite thought would happen. There’s static in her ears, the only thing she sees are his eyes. It’s grounding, that same blue that she’s looked to so many times for solace, for encouragement, for backup and support.
When she’d imagined a world in which she gave it all away, finally told him everything, that’s where it stopped. There was never any fantasizing about the future, never any thoughts about what would possibly happen if all of the cards were on the table.
“They warn you about this,” Olivia says, shocked to find that her voice sounds smooth, almost humorous. “Falling in love with your partner.”
“I remember that, almost first day, 101.” He swallows, staring hard at his hands. “You think it’s because we’re the only people that…understand it? What we see? Saw?”
“I…some of it’s that,” she agrees, and finally takes a long slug from her coffee. “But…it’s not. That’s not.” Her hands are still around the cup when she speaks. “Elliot. You have to know that wasn’t it. That’s not it.”
“What is it, then?” His voice is so soft.
Olivia blows out a breathy, incredulous laugh. “It’s…almost twenty years. You’re the only person I…even outside of it, you know that. That’s…it felt like we were falling into it. Like it was inevitable.” Sun peeks in, finally, finding its way between the buildings and slatting itself across the table. “I felt like it was out of my control. So I resented it. And then…I didn’t. I realized, El…” She takes a moment to sweep her hair back away from her face “We both knew it wasn’t right. You weren’t, you couldn’t. I felt like it was my fault that I felt it at all.”
His eyes flash to hers, and she finds herself reassuring him. “It wasn’t, I know it wasn’t, but it was…a way to distance myself from you. Because we were the worst and the best of each other.”
She takes a breath, looking out the window, watching as the first commuters of the day begin to filter by. “I hated myself for feeling any of it. Any of it. Even when I saw it in you.” She sucks in a shaky breath. “You have no idea how many times I just…too many times, too many, I nearly gave in. And I couldn’t do that to you.”
She swallows. “Because I knew how easy it would have been for you, too. And we would have hated ourselves, El. We would have hated ourselves.”
“Liv.” He reaches across the table, the cuff of his shirt touching the coffee; he doesn’t move away.
The tears come on before she knows it’s happening, “And I wanted to hate you,” she says,, tipping her head back, as though that will stave the tears. “I did,” she nods. “It would have been easier.”
“Woulda, yeah,” he agrees with a sigh, and as he’s about to pull away, she places her hands atop his.
Grainy, breathy, shaking her head, she manages, “I have a kid now, El. I have a kid. He’s…he’s great. He’s amazing. I…how do you do this?”
The bell attached to the door begins to ding steadily, regulars stopping in to grab quick cups of coffee or a bagel on their way into the city. It’s a distraction that they both allow, their eyes tracking the people that filter in and then out. There’s silence between them for a solid five minutes, Olivia finding the cadence of her breath again, organizing the buzzing thoughts in her head. They retreat into their own heads, allowing everything that’s happened to filter, shift, settle.
Sun paints the walls bright red, touching the tips of her fingers where they rest on the table, almost as though it’s meant to reanimate her.
“None of this…” Elliot begins, but then stops, his voice petering out. When she meets his gaze again, he sighs. “None of it’s fair, and maybe it was wrong of me to tell you all this now but.” He shrugs, a ghost of a smile touching his lips. “When have I ever known when to shut my mouth? When have I ever given up easily?”
It’s true enough, and it brings a smile to her lips, too. “You’re kind of a dick, that way.”
And god, she loves him just as fiercely, just as marrow-deep as she always has. Because he’s changed, but he hasn’t, not really. He still knows her by rote, called her at three in the morning because she’s the only voice he’d wanted to hear. It all means something, means too much, and she’s not sure what they’re doing here or how to handle it, but she can’t look away.
As if she ever could; those eyes are her home base.
“I am,” he agrees, with a chuckle and a shrug. “But you’re still here.”
It’s so large she can’t imagine coming away from this conversion the same, can’t imagine turning him away, can’t imagine not succumbing to all of this, finally. It’s more than the yearning, more than the knowledge of their bond, more than anything she’s ever known. Olivia doesn’t know how to set it right, but she knows she has to try, because if she doesn’t, she’ll have to live with that too, carry it with her like lead.
There has to be something more for them; this can’t be the end, not after everything they’ve weathered.
“I miss you so damned much,” she says, finally. It’s a truth and it’s almost there, halfway, her voice cracking on the words as he sags relieved into the booth.
It’s a start.
“I’m here,” he says, He reaches across the table, palm up, and when she fits her hand in his, he squeezes it, hard. “Maybe…I mean we can try, right?”
The hope in his voice winds its way around her heart, the warmth of his skin against hers. They can try, she’s sure of it. After everything, nearly twenty years, it seems like maybe an easy thing, something at the very least. They can try, and that’s all they can promise one another.
Olivia feels so tired, so completely wrecked from the past years, swimming upstream against everything she’s felt. It’s time to rest, to allow them both the time and space they need. It’s time to redirect their efforts. “Yeah,” she breathes. “We can try. I want to.”
His fingers loosen, peel away, the both of them pleased with the leap they’ve made, content to let it settle, wait for it to simmer again. For now, she can see it in him: the relief, the exhaustion at having battled something huge, and conquered it.
They have time, now.
It can wait.
And so they sit together, breathing silently, buoyed by a glimmer of hope.
Booths begin to fill; the city awakens properly.
“Got time for another?” Elliot gestures with his chin at her cup.
Olivia smiles slowly, her body sagging with the ebbing endorphins. “Tea, this time.”
He rolls his eyes, and suddenly she’s thirty-two again, her arm very nearly reaching across of its own accord to knock him in the shoulder. But she holds off, watching as he moves out of the booth, smoothing down the front of his shirt.
“Disgusting,” he mumbles, placing a warm hand on her shoulder. “But when I get back, I want to see pictures of your kid.”
He meanders to the counter and she watches him go. The way he pulls his wallet from his pocket, the way he greets the cashier, his movements are the same as always, and she’s glad for it.
A moment more and she retrieves her phone, opening it to an album of her son, and sets it down on the table. It’s a few hours before she’s expected to pick up Noah, so she has time.
When she looks back up, he’s walking towards her, two new cups in hand, a tenuous smile on his face. She returns it, and he relaxes, slides her the cup as he sits down.
“So,” he asks, reaching for the phone. She launches in, and he listens.
They clear some of the dust that’s settled, they rehash the past but don’t dare speculate about the future. There will be time enough for that, Olivia realizes. For now, this is where they have to pick up and try again.
It’s as close to a fresh start as they can get, and it’s enough.