Work Text:
The fallout didn’t come when he expected it. Not after he’d protected her son, not after they’d shared an embrace in her kitchen, balcony light streaming on her face as she’d cried. Pushed back against him in a way he can’t deny he deserved, but he’d long ago learned to take a mile when she gave an inch. A “not ready” instead of a cartoon-like dash in the opposite direction may as well have been a greenlight when it comes to Olivia Benson. He’s prepared to wait her out, when he couldn’t leave her that vulnerable and the conversation had at least, finally begun. It was the rawest that they had been in front of each other in years – maybe ever – and he wonders now if it just opened the floodgates. Because here they are, a week later, after negotiating on how to stay in each other’s lives in a way that isn’t too much for her, and landing on the fact that they should actually try and be present for each other.
One week in, and he can’t decide if she’s taking the opportunity to punish him as payback or if this is her way of communicating now. She never used to be so direct unless they were fighting, and her tone is soft and low, with a plaintive note that he’s not used to hearing. He flexes his fingers; he doesn’t want to examine what it means.
She’d wanted to have one conversation about how he left – he supposes that shouldn’t be surprising because a grief-stricken apology, a devastating and undermining letter, and then a drugged retraction of that same letter do not build the foundation of a successful reconnection. But he’s never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth and after last week’s almost embrace, he’d kind of hoped they could slide by it. He knows. He’s a selfish asshole. She continues, trying to articulate why she needs him to hear her – that it’s not about the fact that he left, it’s about how he left.
“But that – that’s the worst part, Elliot. And we haven’t talked about it, it’s not what you apologized for, and I –”
“I said that I was sorry, that if I’d heard your voice then I wouldn’t have been able to –”
“How do you think that makes this better? This, this is why I didn’t want to talk about this. I didn’t want to do this with you, Elliot. We don’t need to do this.”
“You are the one who said we needed to talk about this – that it was about the how!”
A growl sounds low in her throat and he has to suppress the urge to smile because it’s like a hit of nostalgia to see her show frustration with him while she’s still willing to engage. “I am talking about before. Why I didn’t want to let you back in. Now we said we would, but you have to listen to me, Elliot. Otherwise there’s no point in even trying.”
“Don’t tell me that. We absolutely need to do this. You want to keep up with your decades-old avoidance bullshit but I–” Damnit. He’s not sure where that came from because it’s the opposite of what he meant to do, and sure enough, her reaction is instantaneous.
“Screw you! You don’t get to speak about me like the patterns that you knew from before hold true today because they do NOT. You don’t know, you have no idea, you never even asked and you never stop before you act, and you want to talk about decades-old behavior – you’ve learned nothing. Don’t you ever stop to–”
“Liv, listen–”
“STOP interrupting me!”
“You interrupted me!”
“This is ridiculous. We’re better – I’m better than this, Elliot. I’ve put the work in to be better than this.”
“You implying I haven’t?”
“No. No, I’m not. I’m not talking about you, El. That’s…” A deep, calming breath that does nothing to alleviate the tension dancing across her skin, the skip of her heart that is slightly nauseating in its insistence. It’s hard to be around him when she can see him fighting his own impulses. She knows how wary he was of this conversation and how he was convinced they were lost to each other already. Frankly, had it not been for a near-death experience for her, yet again, she doesn’t think they would be here at all. Why can’t this be easier? Why is it always the push instead of the pull, when she finds it so easy to give of herself to others?
She heaves another gulp of air, shifting on her feet like she used to rock Noah when he was small. Like the movement will steady the air around them. “That’s the problem. Our default is to argue, and for so long that was fine. It was fine, Elliot, because we had each other’s back regardless, and I thought that’s what partnership meant – someone who would have your back even while you drove them insane, even if your disagreements were as common as saying hello in the morning. But, you leaving,” she pauses as his mouth tightens and he immediately moves into her space, as though his presence and physicality now can protest his actions of the past. She holds her hand out, spreads her fingers in warning while her other hand comes to her chest, the halting action reminiscent of the week prior. His intensity overwhelms now when before, it only ever made her feel safe. Pissed off sometimes, but cared for. His words don’t resonate like his actions used to. She fiddles with her necklace, even though the self-soothing has long left that gesture, when her favorite gold chains were reduced to a sign that she was still alive and broken in the trunk of a car rather than a symbol of empowerment, that she could still have some of the pretty things her womanhood afforded her in spite of the path she had chosen.
The movement reminds him of how she connected with the victims, how she talked down the monsters and sometimes found an inch of remorse in them. The earnestness in her eyes and that gesture of her hand reaching out while she spoke in soothing tones hypnotic enough to peel away the violence, if only for a moment. He remembers when she used that move on him, used it on Fin during the Lake fiasco, when Elliot had gone too far and nearly destroyed the team she called a family, years before he evacuated it entirely. It brings back memories of him stepping back in a stand-off – wanting to use brute force in a dangerous situation but knowing when her softness had taken the place of the cop Olivia, knowing that he had no possibility of emulating the connection should would forge with vic or perp. With no consideration to the pieces it would pull from her own soul.
He wonders what it’s pulling from her now, pieces that she is reluctantly giving to him in an effort to distance herself, pieces she’s willingly offered up in the names of Kathy and his children since he has been back. The weight of his own selfishness pounds, and it’s debilitating. He doesn’t know how to make it better and he doesn’t know how to let her go, and being on the outside of something she’s so clearly established – its successes marked in commendations and plaques even as there are whispers of darker secrets that he’s determinedly ignored – is infuriating to him. Because in spite of it all, she still feels like his. It’s muscle memory and he can’t push it away when they’re in each other’s space. She’s his partner and he can have any reaction he needs – fury, grief, panic. And she can take it and that has always been the support they afforded each other.
He knows that’s gone. He knows he crushed it under his heel as he walked away, with every unanswered text or call, with years of unacknowledged moments and milestones. But his leaving was a non-goodbye and that only contributes to the feeling that she stayed frozen in time, that she is still his, and his body reacts like it must be the truth whenever they’re together.
“Don’t,” she insists, the raised fingers lowering slowly, a gold ring glinting in the light. He’d always loved her hands, the way she spoke with them and moved them almost delicately. It was a dichotomy he’d thought about – perched on a barstool more than once with her after work, watching her peel a label off of a beer bottle or lightly swirl her wine, in those occasions they could be there for each other. She could move with such purpose and swagger, and he knew she’d learned that from years in a masculine-driven profession. She could brawl with the best of them, and she wore heels that added to her height while blazers served as armor. She could barrel into rooms and shove at him when he’d decided she got too heated and was just trying to keep her out of Cragen’s line of fire, or god forbid, that of a suspect she pushed too far. But it was all belied by how gentle her hands were, and she’d never been able to school away the feminine nature of how she touched her own hair, her own face, someone’s arm as she was trying to gentle them. He’d thought about it once in Italy – watching a woman dance with her partner in a lightly lit piazza to street musicians. He’d looked at the way the woman held her partner’s shoulder in the dip, then pushed his hair off his forehead as they resumed the turn, and had thought, completely unbidden – that’s how Liv touches everything. He’d taken a too-big sip of wine and readily agreed when Kathy assumed he was watching because he wanted to ask her to dance.
“Don’t,” she says again. “Your leaving forced me to learn what other relationships could be like. And Elliot, some of it was my fault. You were the only example of family that I had, and I was content to be on the periphery of one because it was the closest I’d ever been.” His head hangs in regret, jaw working like the effort to restrain his own words is physically painful. “After. After you left, I was angry, Elliot. But I was also so lost. And I didn’t – I didn’t know who to ask. I didn’t even know what to ask – how do I find a new best friend? Who do I tell when I have a problem? Who will care if something happens to me?” She can’t repress a tear sliding down her cheek at that, the memory of Lewis shoving into her psyche, thoughts of who will they tell when they find my body resurrecting themselves as she resolutely pushes them back down. That is not the point she is trying to make. She knows the difference now, the difference between accepting the minimum that is given and what it means for someone to truly consider you family. Fin, Rollins – even Rafa – they all shift in her mind, nebulous forms so that she can’t tell what age, what year, because they’d come to mean more than that. She still catalogues Elliot by year.
His fists bunch, but he thinks he’s starting to get it. This discussion, this revelation, will be painful for them both – but different. For her, it’s a release. Cathartic. He owes her that. He owes her that so many times over. But for him, it’s a penance. And the awareness will cut him to his depths. Those whispers again, those dark secrets. He’s not an idiot – he knows that it’s not just awe which colors how people speak about her. She’s alluded to it herself – that something happened. Something worse than being bloodied and beaten in front of her son, and the ramifications of that scaled comparison terrify him. He knows they’re coming to the reckoning. He must do penance not only for what he put her through, but what she survived in his absence. He must withstand the telling. He tries to hear her – it’s not about you, Elliot. These moments have never been his strong suit.
She determinedly pushes forward. Her hands shift over themselves now, fingers playing over the ring he had eyed and he wonders if she’s aware she’s doing it. He wonders if it was the one that belonged to Serena and he starts the self-flaying process with the fact that he can’t remember, he can’t be sure. “It took time. It took years, Elliot. I can’t even claim to have done it all on my own – there were… there were things that happened that forced me to lean on other people in a way I’m not sure I would have done. I wanted you there, but I can’t even say for sure if I would have come to you when it happened.” They’ll go into the what happened, he thinks, if she’ll let them, but for now the weight of the not knowing – and knowing that it had to have been brutal to force Olivia to lean on people and reexamine her relationships when she refused to lean on him, even after Sealview – that weight lays on his heart. He lets it. Penance, he reminds himself, and lets her forge forth.
“I realized that family isn’t supposed to be unilateral. That found family is just as real, and that means we make commitments to each other. Commitments to be there, and to listen, to support, and to push each other when we need to be checked. Fin – he does that in a way that sometimes I don’t even catch it.” She huffs out a laugh. “Rollins – Amanda – she, she took some time and we didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but she always checked on me and after a while I realized it doesn’t even make me mad anymore.” Her eyes lift and he can see his Liv, a soft eye-roll and a look of incredulity like she’s bemused by his behavior, except that she’s feeling that way about Rollins and he pushes the feelings of jealousy and ownership away. Penance.
“I miss her. And Nick – my partner after you.” The hits keep coming and he steels himself against the urge to rail back against her. He is her partner. His instinct is to argue and to rage but he is so, so sorry, and he’s only just started being honest with how his regrets have caught up with him. “I’m so angry with Barba right now, but he – well, Rafa told me he loved me, and I think that he meant it and I miss him, too, because they both taught me how family can show up and to expect more. That I don’t have to be on the periphery.” The name of Wheatley’s attorney stokes his anger into a flame that is just as quickly put out when he realizes what she’s saying to him. Others have loved her, others have let her be a part of their lives fully rather than half-measures. She expects that of people now (which thank god – she should, and he should have showed her that in their first year for god’s sake), and she misses her friend. Someone she loved and someone whose absence now is partly because of him.
“And then, Noah. He’s mine, but also I’m his. And I didn’t know, Elliot – what unconditional love like that could feel like, but I also realized that your arguments all those years were wrong. Just because I didn’t have kids, because I didn’t have that life, didn’t mean I couldn’t empathize with what it would mean in those cases.” His mouth moves to apologize, the urge to stop this flow of words because he’s not sure that he can take the reminders of how much of a jackass he was even before he was the bastard that left her, when those fingers flash up again, pushing softly of his chest and he focuses back on her eyes. He seals his jaw shut, determined to listen to what she has to say. This is the least he can offer her. And she’s right. He is more open now – the mellowing of age while his younger, different, challenging colleagues reinforce everything a more naive and bold Olivia told him all along. He nods but doesn’t resist the urge to wrap his fingers around hers, both of their hands laying softly against his chest. He takes a deeper breath so that he can feel the push against her hand, the movement of them together. Warmth spreads when she doesn’t pull away, and he has to remind himself that this isn’t over, that he is still atoning.
“What I was willing to accept – the fact that my partner was my only support system – I let that continue, Elliot. So part of that was my fault.” He shakes his head in a now familiar refusal to let her take ownership so she pushes on, she needs to get this out. It’s hard for her to make sense of the Elliot of now who is so willing to accept blame while the Elliot of the past would insist on his own rightness to the end. The only parallel is the underlying current of anger, but even that seems to have tempered, maybe dulled as grief becomes a part of day-to-day life instead of a steady onslaught. Her heart breaks a little for his own heartache, and while she doesn’t want to build up her walls again, she does want to make sure that she has enough defense around him. She doesn’t need to shut down completely, but he can’t try to kiss her when he hasn’t even let her process her latest trauma, much less the ones they created together. Letting him into interrogation rooms where he has no business being, ghosting in and out of her life – she has to hold him accountable to these things and ensure she won’t stumble and just allow him. These are my choices. I can choose to let him be a part of our lives and still be strong.
“That’s the point, Elliot. That’s the worst part.”
He thinks there are far worse things that he’s going to hear about his time away. He still wants to know who was there for her when she was hurt, he wants to know how she he was hurt. All he knows is that there’s a sense about her that he can read, that something devastated her in his absence. He wants to know that she wasn’t alone when Noah came into the world, can’t even bring himself to ask more questions as to how her son came to be. He’d spent the better part of two hours schooling himself to keep his eyes on the road and deliver her son safely when she’d asked, when all he wanted to do was gauge exactly how this boy’s mannerisms reflected those of his mother. The eyebrow lift, the nod, the rare but oh-so wide smile. He wants to know it all and he wants to know none of it because the mantle of guilt is already too great. The word penance echoes in his head once more, and he shakes his head, lowering his eyes to the ground, like he can evict it from his mind. All that aside, he’s still not quite certain what the worst part is.
“Olivia,” he whispers. His hand keeps hers entwined on his chest, and he keeps maneuvering her closer. She’s a little less resistant this time around, and he clocks the progress. The touch steadies him, and they breath each other in just a little before he asks. “You’ve got to give me a little more. I’m so sorry, Liv. I can’t make up for it. Selfishness, fear. They’re not reasons and I abandoned you and neglected you. I know that an apology doesn’t make up for it. I just want to be in your life. Any way you’ll have me, as much as you’ll have me. I’ll do what I can to make that happen. I’m…” he sighs, unsure of what he’s revealing but hell, he figures she already knows and how can he ask her to open up to him if he won’t do the same. And he owes it to her do to it first.
“I’m not a good man. I’m not even a particularly good father – and I gave up a lot in the attempt to what I thought I was supposed to be. I thought I understood what an honorable life demanded of me – God, country, family. And I didn’t think I was selfish for such a long time, but I was. I only saw through my perspective, and all the while I had support at home and support at work and I know you didn’t have either.” He gives into the urge and brushes her hair back from her face with his other hand, inching that much closer, taking comfort – just a little. She doesn’t argue with him, but when she pushes her temple slightly into his touch he sucks in a breath and keeps going.
“I am trying to be better. I’m not sure how well I’m doing there. But I think if I have any chance, it’s with you. And I’m not demanding or asking things of you – I’m through with that. But if you wanted to be here, I think maybe I could learn a thing or two from you, Captain.” His use of her title causes them both to lighten, both to grin, and she looks up at him through her eyelashes. It’s a rush of relief to realize that when they’re not so weighed down by getting past the grenade he threw into their partnership, the partnership itself is still there. He thinks it’s still going to take getting used to, that he can enjoy the ease of their interaction now, while choking on his own nerves when he lets himself actually think about how lovely she is. He thinks it’s a good thing all those years ago that he didn’t know that it wasn’t just her hands that retained all that femininity. She just hid her soft parts from him as consistently as he studiously ignored when he found glimpses of them. She’d probably shoot me if she knew what I was thinking.
“A little more, Liv. What was the worst part?”
Her eyes open and he feels like salt has been poured into all of his wounds – past and present, because the unshed tears in them speak to so much more than this. She’s just letting him see the surface.
The question doesn’t surprise her but the keeps her head against his hand, steadying. They don’t do this, they don’t touch like this, but they don’t communicate like this either until this last week, so who the hell knows.
“You knew more than anyone. What it would do,” she tells him, and then levels a look at him to wait for it to register. He nods, but she knows he’s not getting it. “I didn’t have a family, Elliot. You knew that was one thing for people to say, but for me – no grandparents, or uncles or aunts or siblings. I didn’t have the tethers that normal people do. Before we knew about Simon… it floored me that you were even surprised that I was desperate to know him but then we talked about it. You knew… I’d been alone my whole life. And truly alone – Elliot, you reconnected with your mother and I’m so happy for you but do you know what a luxury any of those connections, estranged or not, would be to someone who has no biological family?” She can see he’s absorbing the guilt and the pain and she feels latent remorse that maybe this is triggering for him, but fuck. It’s triggering for her, too.
“You were my partner, my best friend, my emergency contact, my next of kin. You knew the most about me in the world. You were the only one who knew all of my family history, Elliot, because you told me you could take that. That you would. I didn’t have a mother or a spouse or a sibling to cry to when you left. The person I went to with things was gone. And you, of all people, knew what it would do to me.
“That’s the hardest part. Not that you left, maybe not even so much how – but that you knew exactly how it would devastate me in a way no one else could have known, and you did it anyway. You couldn’t have heard my voice? Elliot, you had to have known that hearing yours – even as a goodbye – would have been the only thing that could have helped me.”
They still, staring at each other now. She’s more used to Elliot’s tears in this new iteration of himself, but she’s not used to the slight choking sounds he’s making, the active crying. It pulls at all of her protective instincts, she realizes. The maternal side of her can’t help but comfort, the partner side seeks to protect, and this new side – which she realizes more and more is romantic – wants to soothe. So, with the truth of the hurt out of her, and onto him, she gives credence to all the sides of herself.
She pulls him into an embrace and holds him, cradling his head a bit near her chest, careful that her own scars remain covered. She’s laid too much bare tonight already. That will come, but she lets herself take the warmth and ease she’d always rigidly denied herself when it came to offering comfort to anyone but her son. She feels pieces of herself stitch themself back together, and while she resents a little that she needed him for that, she acknowledges that it was her action and not his that provide the healing.
His broken apologies wash across her skin and the tension, the live wire that she felt earlier fades. “I’m so sorry, Olivia. I know. I’m so sorry.”
He doesn’t offer excuses now. There aren’t any to offer up, he realizes. He spent so much time defending a relationship to God that he’d forgotten that there were types of love, that maybe he wasn’t as sin-ridden as he thought and that maybe all along he should have been allowed to love her, too. He’ll examine that another day, but for now, he’ll only appreciate that she seems willing to offer him forgiveness. She’s more accepting of him now than when she reeled back from his advance in her kitchen, and he thinks it’s because she needed to exorcise her own grief just a little. Especially since his return he’s been flinging his emotional baggage in her direction at a moment’s notice. His penance is a new cloak, but he thinks it’s better than the thirst for revenge and guilt that have been flanking him these years. Better than the regret and loss that dogged his actions in Italy.
When he presses a kiss into her hair, her temple, her cheekbone, he waits for her acquiescing look each time, her nod to keep going. She doesn’t cower this time, though she’s reserved. He knows this will be a process, this is them creating a bridge to a new partnership. This wasn’t about punishment maybe, but at washing away and moving forward. It’s new for both of them, their movements unsure and the absence of their fraught emotions towards each other suddenly given way to soft smiles and tenuous trust.
When he finally speaks again, his words are sure.
“I promise to be yours, Olivia.”
He wraps his fingers around hers, looks at they way they’re dinged and damaged by fights with perps and lockers alike. She squeezes once, twice, and he smiles at the hopeful knowledge that even the delicate parts of her are strong.