Work Text:
And so his worst fear comes to pass.
Elliot Stabler, braced protectively in front of Liv. Between them. Physically now as his ghost has metaphorically been all these years.
Brown eyes and pinched lips looking disappointed over this strangers shoulder. This stranger whose shape is unfamiliar and expected all in one instance. Whose memory never truly faded. Who has existed as a shadow at their side through every moment of this past decade.
And in that instant, when his eyes flick to hers and she remains stoic and terse, he knows he’s lost her again to a cold blue gaze, to an unhealed absence, to the old mess of scars she carries each day in her chest.
She turns - a back, somehow less an invitation than it once was, now more a dismissal. And still he can’t help following her in, pleading for her to understand, to meet him half way as they always have.
He’s pleading for a glimmer of the woman that showed him colours and compassion and - dare he say it, love. But the Olivia Benson before him is not that woman any more. She’s steel walls and stormy eyes and a pain that refuses to be unpicked.
He hears the desperation slip through, the panicked bubble of concern that’s been churning in his gut for days. “You.” And there it is in one syllable, the reason he showed up in that cell to begin with. “They will eviscerate you. End your career.”
But he is a weapon between them, a barb on her tongue. They’re too close to the belly of this beast, any professional pretence lapsed in how she throws the words at his chest. “Or is this about Stabler?”
So she knows. So she has always known. And with that truth now laid bare, the “Rafa” on her lips almost breaks him.
Maybe if he’d known it to be the last time, it would have.