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Chapter Text

The argument didn’t surprise either of them. After tailing a lead in an underground money laundering circle, one that was churning shocking amounts of ill-gotten funds through a semi-illegal casino front and a couple of associated bars, they’d looped in Financial Crimes to keep things by the book. The next day, their lead witness revealed sexual assault and rape that was taking place, propagated and hidden by the higher-ups of the organization, and Bell couldn’t think of a single reason to avoid bringing in SVU other than to prevent this exact debate with her detective. He doesn’t disappoint.

“Look – we know they’re understaffed; I don’t want to put this on her.”

“It’s not asking a personal favor, Stabler, it’s a legitimate reason for OC and SVU to partner. I know that can sometimes be complicated for you –”

“Not complicated. But I’m trying to be aware –”

“And your ‘awareness’ of Captain Benson can’t be a reason that we don’t –”

“What’s that supposed to mean? I don’t have an ‘awareness’ –”

“Stabler, this is an asinine conversation, and I –”

“So you’re calling me an ass, now?”

“No! That is not what –” she pauses, noting the gleam in his eyes. “Kidding, huh?” He nods, smile widening. “Trying to distract me from your preoccupation with Captain Benson?” That slows him down. His grin fades, and he fidgets.

Ayanna takes sympathy on her second-in-command. He’s a good cop, and loyal to his bones. She knows that. She also knows that for all his bluster and the fact that he is built like a freaking gladiator, he is deeply motivated by a need to defend those he deems his. And, once that happens, he can be not only surprisingly kind, but oddly considerate. She counts herself lucky that she – and her squad – seem to have qualified for his possessive streak.

She is not, however, unaware that there is a hierarchy to the intensity and scale of Elliot Stabler’s rage-induced protective instincts. His children, of course, are the highest on that list. She knows she ranks high, and Jet does, as well. She thinks Jet probably reminds him of his daughters, falling within the range of the age span of his own children. But Jet triggers something else with him – a young, female, brunette detective who isn’t necessarily aware of the intellect and influence she wields. Which leads her to the individual that she’s sure ranks above her in Elliot Stabler’s scale… Captain Benson.

Ayanna can’t quite get a read on Olivia Benson. She’s beautiful, yes. But frankly, Ayanna’s often annoyed by the perception of her (mostly male) colleagues that as a lesbian, she only has an appreciation for the female gender. That’s not how it works. She can appreciate beauty, obvious or not, in a variety of forms. And honestly, she thinks everyone else can, too; it’s just an antiquated perspective anchored in the old guard of the NYPD that precludes speaking of it. She’d be willing to bet Captain Benson can appreciate beauty in a variety of forms. Not that she’d ever tell Stabler that; his eyes would do that weird, heightened intensity thing and then he’d be squirrely (and useless to her as her lead detective) for hours.

So, yes, Benson is an attractive woman. But Ayanna would venture to guess that it’s something deeper than pure looks, because there is something incredibly… compelling about the Captain. She wonders what Stabler saw in their years together, because much of what she finds so fascinating about Captain Benson is how much she’s overcome – a vicious abduction and assault accompanied by an NYPD manhunt that she herself had participated in as a rookie – and a rapid rise through the ranks with not only deep foundations of support from significant figures in the brass, but also an almost heroine-like worship from the New York media. Frankly, it’s unheard of on many levels: a sex crimes detective surviving sexual assault and effectively remaining on the job, a woman ascending in a male-dominated field and retaining her respect and power, and a cop maintaining a beloved status in New York City public opinion and the press.

Ayanna would be jealous if she weren’t so impressed. And curious.

The other interesting thing about Benson is the wild and unceasing effect that she has on Stabler. Ayanna has learned that it’s not the same each time – she’s seen Stabler avoid her, follow her at a distance like a shadow, watch her with admiration and pride, and trail after her like he needs her approval and affection. It’s like a “choose your own adventure” story each time she brings in SVU to see what persona Stabler chooses, but regardless, he is always highly invested – and cognizant of whatever Captain Benson does.

So, she thinks, they’re back in an avoidance stage. A bit inconvenient, considering she needs SVU in here now. Besides the fact that it’s the right thing to do, Benson will have her head if she realizes the context of this case and learns that Ayanna called in Financial Crimes for the money laundering and sanctions coverage but neglected SVU for the sexual assault. The implications of that favoritism are ugly, heavy, and not something that she’s willing to do, even with Stabler’s reticence.

“Elliot. We don’t have a choice here. We have to call her into this.” She gestures to the interview room, that doesn’t currently hold a suspect, but contains Jet, an abundance of donut options, and their informant (and victim). “I can’t get through to that girl. She’s been traumatized, and she’s not the only one. I know you have a background here, but you saw as well as I did that she won’t let a man near her. And she’s…”

“Combative. I know.”

He rubs at his jaw and narrows his eyes at her, ticking off a couple of his tells, but not all. That settles her a bit – he’s not the most easy going of men, but after nearly three years of working with him, she can usually tell when his anxiety and PTSD have ratcheted to the point that she should be concerned. Now… he just seems nervous.

She knows he went to retrieve Captain Benson’s son following the gang attack last month; she wonders if anything happened that would contribute to his uncertainty now. She might ask him about it after they close this – she thinks she might have achieved a status of being able to push him to reveal just a bit more about what’s feeling rather than shutting it off and hitting the gym. But not now. Now, she just needs him to know that Benson is joining them, and he’s got to hold himself together.

“Yeah, okay. Let me call her? I’ve been trying…”

“You’ve been trying?”

“I’m not always the best with communication, and –”

“Jesus, Stabler, talk about an understatement.”

“Well, come on, don’t kick me while I’m down. I just – you recommended the therapy, and there were some good… discussions.”

“I’m glad to hear that’s still going, Elliot.”

“Yeah, well. So that was going, and then Liv called and need help…”

“After BX9, after the Duarte hit.”

“Yeah, she took that… hard. She was still hurt, too. She’d sent Noah away to keep him safe – couple of hours drive, and asked me to go get him while she was tying it up.”

“Wow. That’s…”

“Yeah. You know. Kids are… well if you trust someone with your kid,” he trails off, brows furrowed.

“You trust someone with your child, you trust them implicitly. That’s a good thing, Stabler.”

The crease in his brow lessens, and he turns toward her. “Yeah. But I did… leave her. Neglect her. Might be talking about it some in that therapy.”

She smiles at the dismissive way he describes it but admits to it in one swoop. “Well, I think that’s a good thing.”

“Right. But when I left, and then when I came back at first. I wasn’t exactly consistent with communicating with her. So, I think she trusts me with her kid, but doesn’t trust me to… be there for her.”

“You can only change that with consistency and time.”

“Well, you sound like the therapist.”

“Your therapist,” she says, shaking her head at the stubbornness, even as he’s trying to ask for her advice in a roundabout manner.

“Yeah, okay.”

They settle for a minute, a minute they really don’t have with the case, but she senses he needs it. They side-eye each other and smile, and she’s struck by how much she appreciates her partnership and comradery with this man who is so, so unlike her. This man who she assumed she might hate in the beginning, despite feeling deeply compassionate for his circumstances. And she wonders, not for the first time, what he was like with Benson, his longest, most significant partner. She’s not sure if this case excites her or gives her pause, knowing that at minimum she has gained greater insight into the Benson and Stabler dynamic with every case they’ve jointly worked.

“So you think she has doubts, when it comes to you?”

“She deserves to think that. I’ve been trying to be more… there. You know, text her, call her. My therapist said to be available to her.”

“I think that’s sound advice.”

“Well, then. Let me be the one to call her on this?

Well, goddamnit. She doesn’t begrudge helping Elliot; really, under any circumstances. And they have been progressing towards a better place since her breakdown, bracketed by his arms, in her dimly lit kitchen. It had been a bit vindicating and humiliating all at once, but she thinks it was a catalyst she needed to start to trust him again. Her words hadn’t been a lie, though – she’s not ready. She needs to see stability, consistency, just… patterns of behavior. She’s spent her life pulling at the threads of inconsistent and unequal relationships, and while she doesn’t regret the course she has taken, she wants a more solid foundation for her son.

So she doesn’t mind helping Elliot, and assisting the OC is part of her actual job description when the case connections call for it. But she has literally no one to call upon. Fin and Bruno are strapped finishing the Bronx cases, and Velasco and Muncy are covering their Manhattan contingent. Muncy shows such promise but needs undivided support from Velasco in these earlier days. And Bruno isn’t new to the job, but he’s been burned – and she thinks that a solid partnership with Fin will convince him to stay (and she needs him to stay; she needs the headcount).

She’s exhausted, and she still feels the echo of bruises on her face and ribs. She still feels the sarcastic nature of Duarte instigating her, prodding at her side, and it’s still sometimes a surprise when she finds that it’s a phantom presence. He’s gone, and she feels a physical pang when the replay starts in her mind. It’s the same each time – a slightly flirty amends in a bar, an ask outside of a cab that would have changed everything, and then she pictures that machete over her head and thinks about the way his life was snuffed out with steel and blood on the floor of a bodega.

She heaves a sigh, trying to push it away. The weight of… everything lately feels like it’s pressing her down, and it’s more and more difficult to shoulder through it. She’s wary when she feels like this. When she’s anxiety-ridden, grieving – that’s when the memories she would just as soon not revisit are closest to the surface. And it’s the last thing she needs.

Fin appears in her doorway; she expected him after she doled out assignments and retreated for a moment.

“Okay, Cap?” Funny thing about Fin – she thinks he conveys more concern the fewer words he utters when he checks in on her. Two words. He must be really worried.

She gives him an eyeroll, which is practically a handshake between the two of them at this point. “Just tired. This is the right breakout, Fin. I can help OC on my own.”

“You help anyone on your own. I don’t like that you don’t have a partner heading over there.”

She smiles. “I’d prefer you with me. And I…”

“You miss Amanda.”

“Well,” she tilts her head at him. The usually avoid conversations like this. They know it’s there, know they’ll be there for each other, but they rarely actually talk about it. “Yes.”

“Me, too.”

They fall silent, and she can’t deny there is something soothing about checking off her more straightforward email requests while Fin fiddles on his phone in her office. She thinks maybe he knew she just needed some physical proximity and appreciates that he doesn’t make her talk about it or delve any further. He’s just… there.

“I like it better when you have one of us with you.”

She startles at that. He knows she can take care of herself; he’s defensive of her when the moment calls but he doesn’t usually attempt to be this overtly protective. For the first time, she considers that the BX9 attack and case might have triggered some underlying issues for him, too.

She gives a softer smile than she usually would, with that in mind. “I’ll be okay Fin. Stabler will be with me. I won’t be alone.”

He gives her a smirk that confuses her a bit – it’s more sad than sanctimonious. “Yeah. You’ll have your partner.”

Olivia packs up her things, knowing she’ll have to meet Bell and Elliot early, and she wants time for an unrushed dinner with Noah. But she pauses next to Fin on her way out, a light hand on his shoulder. “You’ve been my partner for years and you know it,” she whispers with a grin.

“We can’t thank you enough for helping out here, especially given the staffing issues of late,” Sergeant Bell says with a grateful smile, ushering Olivia past the industrial open space and into her office. Jet’s eyes track them – she’ll have to have a word with her with at least attempting to mask the curiosity. Stabler trails them, hovering behind, but in between the space their two bodies make.

“Thank you, Liv,” he says, and it sounds almost like a benediction. Ayanna adds another to-do to her list: talk to Jet but also tell Stabler to cool it and quit trying to convey his gratitude to her for their personal lives in a mundane “thanks for helping” at work. She shakes her head. Gen Z. And men.

“Absolutely. I’m happy to help. You said her name is Kate? And she refuses to speak to a male detective?”

Ayanna eyes her detective and the Captain. They’re not directly making eye contact with each other, but they are standing comically, unnecessarily close to each other. She wonders if they are even aware of it. “That’s right. She’s been violent, at times, and sometimes she’s pretty sedate.”

“That’s not uncommon,” Liv says, and Stabler nods assuredly. He picks up the thread.

“When we busted the casino, we thought it was a front for a crime ring that we’ve heard listed under the Lesewski family.”

“Gathering Storm.”

“Yeah, that was the name of the casino, and we’ve heard it referenced as the name of the ring itself.”

“Subtle.”

“Yeah, well. You should have seen the casino. Subtlety is not their nature. So we knew that they were laundering the money, using the casino along with some restaurants and bars as a front. Cleaning it through the cash-only overhead, and then funneling it within their legitimate returns.”

“That type of money laundering front would only last so long,” Liv muses.

“Exactly. There’s a cap to the sums that it could cover without tripping suspicious activity reporting. They wouldn’t have – we only took a closer look at them because of gang reporting around the Lesewski family… and then, Kate.”

“You think they’re going to go bigger.”

“If they haven’t already.”

“And Kate accused them of?”

“Multiple counts of rape, assault, and the threat of continued assault to keep her quiet. But she’s said she’s not the only one; she hasn’t told us details but enough that it sounds like they may be running a sex trafficking ring, as well.”

Ayanna leans forward. “She’s a victim, Liv, but she wasn’t trafficked. She’s a family friend – I don’t know if she saw more than she should or if she was involved criminally. But she absolutely knows more than what she told us. We want to bring them down on all fronts. Rape, trafficking, money laundering, gang recruitment.”

Olivia is reading the file while taking it all in, studiously avoiding eye contact with Elliot, which she breaks as Ayanna finishes speaking. They lock eyes, and she gives a slight nod.

“Okay. Let me talk to her. You two are going to observe, right?”

“We’ll be right there, Liv.” Ayanna watches as Stabler assists her from her chair, follows her with a hand at the small of her back, hovering, but not touching.

“Kate? Kate?” Olivia tilts her head, looking at the scowling young woman. Her arms are folded mutinously in front of her chest, and her blonde hair falls in slightly greasy waves over her shoulders. She’s tall, but has a slightly elfin appearance to her face, with delicate features that are belied by her mulish expression. She raises her greyish blue eyes, the only response Liv receives.

“I’m Captain Benson,” she says settling into the chair on the opposite side of the steel table. “I lead what we call the Special Victims Unit – do you know what that is?”

Kate nods affirmatively, surprising Olivia. Behind the glass, Elliot raises his eyebrows in question to his sergeant.

“You do? Do you want to – to tell me what it is? What you know about it?”

“You lead it, right? Isn’t it kind of a problem if you need me to do that?” Kate scoffs, scooting her chair backwards and crossing her ankles.

“Well, I know what it means. I’m more interested in your perception.”

“Cause you care and shit.”

“Yes, I do care. And shit.”

Kate rolls her eyes. There’s a light smile, as well, but it has an unkind glint to it. “Girls who got raped.”

Elliot sucks in a breath, and Ayanna wonders if the years away have softened him in some areas while they’ve hardened him in others. He had to have had these conversations every day, but now he seems devastated. She notices that his eyes are focused on Liv. She thinks about her own former partner; knows that for some partnerships, operating without the other is like cutting off a limb.

Olivia doesn’t miss a beat. “For anyone, of any gender, who is a victim of rape or sexual assault, yes. I know you’ve spoken to other detectives, Kate, but could you tell me what happened to you?”

Kate’s eyes seem to crystallize, harden. Olivia knows that Elliot and Bell can’t see closely enough to see that, but a dash of cold shoots down her spine and she can’t help but risk a glance over her shoulder. For the first time in years, she doesn’t want to be alone in an interrogation room, and it makes no sense – she’s sitting with the victim.

“Because you need it to take down the Lesewski’s.”

“Because we want to get justice for you, Kate. That is the priority.”

“Yeah? You promise?”

“I promise. You are what’s important to me.”

Elliot starts to pace behind the glass, warning signals that he can’t quite place sounding in his mind. He doesn’t trust himself all the time when it comes to the people he loves. He can fly off the handle and overreact in the name of protecting them, and he knows from both his children and Liv that it is – more often than not – unappreciated. But everything in his body tells him they have missed something here, and he sent Liv straight into it. Alone.

Ayanna turns to him. “What has you amped. What are you thinking?”

“She seem like a victim to you?”

“Admittedly, Stabler, you would know better than I. But Benson is holding steady.”

“Of course, she’ll hold steady. She’s working with a vic. She’s not gonna strong-arm her. But I don’t know… Ayanna, something feels off.” They both turn to the women on the other side of the glass, engaged in a bit of a stare-down.

“If anything goes sideways, we’re right here. She’s safe, Stabler.” His posture doesn’t ease.

“You are what’s important,” Olivia reiterates, and Elliot flexes his hands, resisting the urge to yank her out of there. He has no justification – he can’t say why his anxiety is flaring. Is it just a PTSD response? Seeing her back in the box with a vic? But he’s seen that before, with a suspect – which should be worse, right?

Olivia forges on, all soft voice and gentle, leading questions. “Can you just tell me what happened, Kate?”

“They raped me.”

“Who? Can you tell me who?”

“Does it matter. A bunch. Prokov told the crew to take what they wanted.”

“Prokov. He’s the Lesewskis' right hand man, right?”

“Yeah. Bastards, both of them.”

“Okay. I’m so sorry they hurt you, Kate. Can you tell me what happened to you?”

“A shit ton has happened to me.”

“Okay, Kate. Tell me, please. How did they hurt you?”

Kate recoils, like she was hypnotized and that was a trigger phrase. Her posture is no longer in repose, relaxed – she is tense, poised to attack. Elliot can tell Olivia senses it; she stiffens, moves herself out of striking distance, but keeps her gaze resolutely on Kate.

Elliot looks at Bell beseechingly. Something is wrong.

“Give her a minute, Stabler. We don’t know what this is.”

“Something is off and you know it – she shouldn’t be in there alone.”

“Kate is a victim, Elliot. And Benson can handle herself.” Elliot nods, but he’s prowling the viewing window back and forth, and Ayanna knows she has a short leash before he calls it; he’s itching to get in there.

Kate leans forward, looks Olivia up and down in an appraising way that has Ayanna touching the gun on her hip and second-guessing the words she just uttered. Liv doesn’t move, but Ayanna knows she’s had a lot of years to practice hiding the fear.

“You want to question me about what they did? To hurt me? To degrade me? While you record it, and have people watch behind that mirror? You want to humiliate me more?”

“I know this is difficult, Kate, but that’s not what this is.”

“You do know, don’t you?”

“I – I’m sorry?”

“That’s not lip service from you. You know. You know what I’m talking about.”

“I don’t, Kate, but I want to understand what you –”

“I know who you are. I know what happened to you. There’s a whole Wikipedia article on you – did you know that? You do know what I’m talking about.”

Olivia’s back goes ramrod straight, and Ayanna can’t decide if it’s a good or bad thing that they can’t see her face from behind the two-way mirror. Elliot has frozen, stiffened entirely, and is looking at the back of Olivia’s head like he can unlock her secrets through will alone.

Shit. She’s not sure exactly what Kate’s referencing – she’s checked it out a time or two and Liv’s Wikipedia page does not hold back; focuses significantly on both the Lewis abductions. Of course there’s also a smattering of hostage negotiations, the kidnapping of her son, and a whole lot of commendations and promotions with varying degrees of fanfare.

“What term do you guys use? Quid pro quo? Or is that just sleazy lawyers?” Kate continues. “Whatever. You want me so that you can take down the Lesewski’s, not because you want to help me. Stop it with the bleeding heart eyes. I’ll still tell you. But, you gotta work for it. You want to know what happened to me? You want me to sit here and tell you all the horrible shit that happened to me, every man that made me feel disgusting and worthless? You do it, too.” They both heave a horrified breath; Olivia doesn’t move.

Kate barrels on, revenge gleaming in her eyes like the hurt she’s inflicting here alleviates the hurt she received. “You want me to show you my scars? You show me yours first.”

Ayanna leans backward, like the blow of the ask was physical, and just as quickly feels a grip around her forearm. She looks up, and Stabler’s eyes are gut-wrenching. Bluer than usual, the tears elongate his pupils, but he doggedly shakes his head and glares at her. “Ayanna. What the fuck is she talking about?”

Chapter Text

Honestly, it shouldn’t be a surprise that her past and notoriety precede her; Olivia has long expected it. She’s known that it would begin to limit her efficacy as a detective even as it expands her clout and capability as a captain. With the press cavalcades, news junkets, and pleas for public cooperation that have had her front and center on most information services in New York, it has always only been a matter of time. Mix that with her dubious history, a broadcasted perjury confession that played over Times Square, and the fact that McGrath likes to put her in front of the camera more than any chief she’s ever had – well, this is not surprising.

What is surprising is the fact that the questioning is coming from a victim and not a perp, though she’s all too familiar with the rage that can bubble forth after an assault. She, too, has been guilty of lashing out at people who were only trying to help her, descending into a feral, self-preserving mode that does not differentiate between attacker and supporter – it only sees other. When a defensive mechanism like that is activated, anything that is other is a threat. She would usually chalk this up to a victim’s gut reaction, and assume it has nothing to do with her. But the way Kate is looking at her feels… personal.

Beyond that, she thinks, as she tamps down the unproductive bout of anger at Kate, is that of all the times this could happen, of course it doesn’t happen with Fin at her back. He’d be concerned for her, tell her that leading the interview is not worth it, that someone else could take it over for her, but no explanations would be needed. Their trust has spanned years now, and more trauma than she wants to recount.

But no. It’s fucking Elliot observing from beyond the glass, and she can only imagine what scenarios his brain has conjured. They’re finding a footing, settling into a friendship that includes the older, more experienced versions of themselves, and it’s starting to feel familiar in a good way – she’s starting to not feel a rush of surprise when he actually answers a text, or reaches out to her for reasons that aren’t tied to an ask for her to drop everything to help fix his problems. They’re rebuilding, and that was going to include the sharing of the worst parts of her years that he missed, but it was going to be on her terms. When she was ready. When she could dictate the pace, and detail, and depth.

She takes a deep breath, trying to buy time while her brain scrambles for the right approach, and she doesn’t dare look to the glass behind her a second time. Kate is observant, and while she is the victim, Olivia’s been doing this job for far too long to think that her victim status would preclude her being a danger or involved with the people who victimized her in the first place.

She doesn’t need this. It’s been too much lately, with BX9, and Duarte, and Elliot. None of the cases are ever straightforward or easy, but she needs a break, a case that doesn’t touch on her triggers. She needs the cases to resume being impersonal. Awful, and sad, but void of personal connections to her life.

“Kate.” She makes eye contact, holds it. “This isn’t about me. This is about you, and what happened to you, and how we – all of the detectives here – can help you. Help you escape this, and help you heal.”

“You would know a thing or two about escaping, huh? How well did you heal?” Kate doesn’t let up, and Liv notes the slightly manic tone to her voice. She seems almost gleeful, and it’s the most personality she’s shown since the interview began. It doesn’t bode well that she seems to be enjoying this, certainly more than the questions regarding her own reported abuse.

Behind the mirror, Elliot’s hand has not left Ayanna’s arm, and she feels his fingers tighten, increasing his grip at Kate’s next round of questions. He looks between Olivia and Kate, back to Ayanna, wanting to demand that she answer his question but not wanting to miss anything that’s being uttered and revealed in that room.

“The point is that healing is possible, Kate. You need to talk to me about what happened to you. So that we can help you get away from the Lesewski's. So that we can put them – and Prokov, and anyone else who has hurt you or been part of this – away.” The register of Olivia’s voice lowers slightly, and she’s coaxing, encouraging. It’s a technique that Elliot has seen her use a thousand times before, over a decade ago and in the recent years since he left and returned. It’s the gentlest side of her, other than the glimpses he’s gotten to see of her as a mother. It’s highly effective and comforting; he has certainly never been able to mimic it. It was a counterbalance to him, and part of why they saw so much case closure success as partners.

Closure rate aside, it is not working now. Kate seems to relish this new course she’s set them on, derailing Liv’s attempts to connect and steer the conversation.

“Get me away. Put them away. That didn’t matter so much for you, though – when he got put away. Is that supposed to be comforting? Supposed to make me want to talk to you?”

Ayanna feels a tug on her arm again and lifts her eyes back to Elliot’s. He’s still listening, only giving her quick glances away from his focus on the interrogation room.

“Tell me,” he hisses after he hears Kate reference a he, giving an embodiment to his accumulating fears. His voice is deathly quiet, like they aren’t divided by a soundproof barrier, like Captain Benson and Kate will be able to hear him and end their tense game of cat-and-mouse.

“It’s not my place, Stabler. She’s fine – she’s completely fine. She can handle this. Let her work.” She’s not sure the words are true, but she is uncomfortable with the sensation of his fingers trembling on her arm. There will be a fine line to walk here. She doesn’t feel like she can share Benson’s secrets, especially with her present but unable to hear what’s disclosed, but she also can’t have Stabler stampeding into the room, terrorizing their informant (and victim), and throwing the case into further chaos. And likely pissing off Benson to no end.

“We aren’t talking about me, Kate,” Benson reiterates. Ayanna respects her stoicism and patience – this is more than they should be asking of her. “We are here for you. I need you to focus on that. Can you do that for me? Can you tell me about your experience?”

“No, you’re wrong there. We are talking about you. You want to talk about me, we’re going to talk about you, too. That seems fair.”

“Nothing about any of this is fair, Kate. And I’m so sorry. But you need to focus –”

“NO!” the rebuttal erupts from Kate, her blue eyes flashing and livid as she slams her hands on the table and leans forward swiftly. “YOU need to stop telling me what to do. You’re not in control here,” she insists. Elliot releases Ayanna’s arms and places both hands on the glass, shooting her a pained look, pressing forward with the effort to remain calm, to stay where he is.

“Easy,” Ayanna whispers, moving her now freed arm to place a reassuring hand on his back. His muscles tense, his entire body rigid as they listen.

Olivia had leaned back at the explosion, the only indication of her discomfort. They watch as she leans back forward, never breaking eye contact with Kate, who looks almost unhinged at this point. “Okay, Kate. Alright. You’re in control.” Her tone is so, so even, and Ayanna feels a flash of admiration at her handling of the turn the interview has taken. She’s steady, and the care and concern she’s demonstrated remains unwavering, despite the personal assault.

“You’re in control,” she reiterates.

“Yes,” Kate agrees, settling some, but still coiled; the storm hasn’t passed. “And I said – if you want me to talk, to share, to expose myself. You gotta do the same thing. First.”

“This isn’t a game, Kate.”

“Who’s playing? This isn’t funny to me. You want something from me, then I get something from you. That’s the way the world works.”

“I’m sorry that has been your experience. I only want to know what happened so that I can help you,” Olivia insists, trying to break through to the girl, to avoid this. She doesn’t want to do whatever this is, wishes to God that Elliot hadn’t called her last night, that Amanda hadn’t left so that she could have sent her instead, that Wikipedia had never been invented, that nothing horrible and newsworthy had every happened to her in the first place.

“This is how you help me, Captain Benson.” They pause, each staring each other down and sizing each other up, gauging the stubbornness and will on either side. But Elliot knows that Olivia will be the one to break – she’s playing with a victim and she’ll sacrifice herself before she calls it. He sighs in frustration, the makings of a growl rumbling in his chest.

With the lull in conversation he spins to his sergeant. “Tell me, Ayanna. Please, I’m asking you. Tell me. I don’t have a full hand here. You know what she’s talking about, Liv does – she knows something about Liv, and I don’t know what’s going on here.” He’s begging, and her heart hurts for them both.

“Elliot,” she says firmly, and he bristles at the cajoling tone. He usually doesn’t mind her attempts to stabilize him, even likes them at times, but this – this precedes her and out-paces her and he needs her to understand that he should not be the one who is out of his depth when it comes to the inner workings of Olivia Benson. The gaps in his knowledge are infuriating to him, even as he knows he has only himself to blame. “I meant what I said – it is not my place –”

“For the case, I need to know for the case. Whether you want to tell me or –”

“Detective Stabler, stop,” she says, trying to pull rank. He’s having none of it. Not when it comes to this. He flicks his eyes back to Liv, takes the risk of being out of reach for a couple of seconds, and dashes away from the window to the viewing room entrance.

“Jet!” he bellows to their desks. Her head pops up from her computer fixation and he waves over, rushing back to his position standing sentinel.

Ayanna lifts her hands to her face in frustration, knowing what’s coming, as Jet’s slight frame appears in the door.

“Ah, yeah?”

“I need you to get me any and all information on Captain Benson that’s posted on Wikipedia.” Jet squints her eyes at him like he’s lost his mind, and Ayanna would be rolling her eyes if the situation weren’t so tense.

“No, Jet,” she says, trying again to assert her authority, keeping tabs on the low murmurs and continued negotiation that has recaptured Elliot’s attention from the interrogation room. “Don’t.”

“Not up for discussion,” Elliot says, eyes still on the room. He points an aggressive finger at Jet regardless. “Do it. Now.”

Ayanna knows Jet reciprocates Elliot’s soft spot for her. Well shit, maybe she’s not as good of a leader as she thought, because she’s clearly lost any semblance of control of her team. She knows that Jet’s going to do what Stabler asks despite orders.

“Okay, Stabler. But ah, you know you have a phone, right? You could just… pull up her Wikipedia page yourself?”

Elliot whips around, looking at Jet with wide eyes like she’s just discovered gravity, and immediately fumbles for his pocket. Oh, for goodness’ sake, Ayanna thinks, and she rapidly reaches out to pluck the phone out of his hand as soon as he’s got his phone screen open.

“No. Stabler, no,” and for the love of God, she is legitimately holding it behind her back as he reaches for it, an enraged noise emerging from him, but no words. This is ridiculous. “You need to know what they’re referencing – first, we need to get Captain Benson out of there for a minute. This is going too far. We are not making her do this.” She winces, watching the color recede from his cheeks as she presses on. Jet’s eyes bounce between the two of them, and based on her expression, Ayanna guesses she knows exactly why her mentor and friend might want to google his old partner. It occurs to her to clarify something. “You don’t know what they’re referencing, right? Why there would be a public record of it?”

His face is etched in grief and regret, and she regrets even asking the question. “No,” he says, low and drawn-out. She doesn’t doubt him.

“Okay. Then, you’re right. You do need to know – but you’re not going to do it like this. She’s okay now, Stabler – look at her.” She gestures to the room, where Liv and Kate seem to have brokered a tense stalemate. Any immediate danger seems to have passed, at least for the moment. “Benson would shoot me if I let you do this, Elliot. Stop,” he sags, rubs a hand down the side of his face, hard. His eyes are bloodshot and she thinks he’s fighting tears, just a bit.

“Uh… guys?” They both look to Jet, whose eyes are locked back on the interrogation room.

Elliot immediately resumes his previous position, hands on the glass on either side of his head, leaning in and staring before he drops his gaze to the floor, lightly pressing his forehead to the glass and releasing a faint, low, astonished “What?” on a gasp of breath.

Ayanna follow’s Jet’s gaze. Jesus Christ. In the interrogation room, Benson has rounded the table, moving her chair so that they are both facing the glass, perched next to her. Closer than Ayanna is comfortable with. This has gotten so out of hand so fast – she doesn’t know how to pull the edges of this case back together and regain even a modicum of order. And usually, if she had the benefit of the Captain in her squad room, she’d ask Benson for her guidance. But she can’t right now because Benson is turned slightly, back presented to their victim, pulling the neckline of her black silk top over to bare her shoulder. Which should be jarring enough, out of place with the setting and wildly atypical behavior from Benson herself.

But it clicks into place, and she sees the moment it registers for Stabler, too. Because what she’s revealed on her stripped shoulder is a clustering of scars, circles and semicircles, like a small constellation of stars dipping out of sight down her back and below what her shirt still covers. They are clearly visible, even from a distance, and to eyes trained like theirs, familiar with cataloguing injuries – it’s clear what they are. She knows Elliot knows they are likely cigarette burns, sees him rejecting the story that is unfolding in his mind as to the pain she must have endured, how she received scars of that nature, scars that did not mar her body when he left. His eyes look to hers, begging her to refute what’s laid in front of him now.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and it feels as futile as it sounds. He says nothing, just shakes his head at the glass in denial.

Kate tracks Benson’s movement, silent, like her demands have finally shocked even her. The captain gives her a sorrowful glance, validating that she’s seen and confirming that she’s evidently upheld her side of the deal – the deal that they hadn’t realized she’d committed to while they were battling over Stabler’s phone access – and pulls her blouse back over her shoulder, slowly buttoning it back in place.

“Oh, my God, no,” she hears Elliot murmur beside her. She reels a little from the raw pain in his voice at the next utterance, his voice breaking at the end.

“Olivia.”

Chapter Text

She shouldn’t have done that. Olivia feels herself flaying apart a bit, trying and failing to clutch at the edges of herself. She’s making choices she usually wouldn’t – would have thought of a better approach or way to with Kate, with any victim, without sacrificing pieces of herself in the process. She feels a little like she did when Burton reentered her life. Grasping at and holding onto those older pieces of herself that had been relegated to memory, now pushed back to the forefront and forced to coexist with the new version that survived, that overcame. It’s disorienting and it makes her want to push back, to proclaim to a god she doesn’t believe in that she’s reached her breaking point, that it’s finally become too much.

Maybe she’s just finally reached the bottom of her reserves. She wants to get out of here, even if that means acquiescing to Kate’s power play. She just wants this over, to pull back the Olivia she was before she agreed to this. The Olivia who was reconnecting with Elliot while keeping her secrets at bay, the Olivia who still held the cards, and the control.

She wants this over, and if Kate wants to see her scars to do it? Well. They aren’t all in intimate, sensitive places. She can bare her shoulders, get the information she needs, and get the fuck out of here.

And she immediately regrets it. It’s a revictimization of sorts, she knows this. She would never ask of it of another victim, and though she balks at the terminology, she actually does understand that she is one, when it comes to the torture Lewis had inflicted on her. It’s taken years and years of therapy, but she knows she should give herself grace, and she’s proven now that it’s possible to prevail as victim and as cop. She will never forget what happened to her, the sense of security that was taken from her, but she believes the words she’d spoken when she assured Kate that healing is possible. Though, she needs to confirm that Kate is a victim alone – she’s not sure she can speak to the healing if Kate had a hand in the victimization of others in support (and fear) of the Lesewski’s. And Kate has victimized her here. That may weigh heavy on her once her anger fades. Olivia doesn’t like to revisit her own guilt of who she pushed away in the immediate aftermath of Lewis, and this is so much worse.

She also isn’t sure what it will do to Elliot. This of course isn’t how she wants him to learn what happened to her, what was done to her when the steadfast protection of her partner was no longer a shield. He’s seemed better lately – more reliable, more consistent, more able to be there for her rather than only seeking her out when he needed to take. But he has always been unpredictable, even during his most stable years, when she was his partner and Kathy was his wife and his children were still young enough to be an innocent reminder of what he strove to protect. Even then, when the lines were clear and the interactions easy, his responses sometimes surprised her in his ferocity. She liked it then – it made her feel safe. It made her feel wanted in a way that she didn’t think was illicit or wrong, just the best enaction of partners in the NYPD that they could be. Now, she thinks it’s an aching reminder that he may need her to hold him together as a result of this knowledge, rather than standing in place as her ally, filling in her blind spots.

She suddenly wants her son, wants to hold him and remind herself that her life has expanded beyond just this, that she lives in service of another that is not specific to the job now. She wants Fin in an almost visceral way. If she weren’t still so angry at him, she thinks she’d want Rafa, too. She wants someone who knows her now, who knows how to help her and to check her, because she’s not sure she trusts herself (or Elliot) to do it at the moment.

She pushes out a breath of air, trying to bring the interview back to a place that makes sense. Bring it back to Kate, who looks more floored than Olivia had expected, given the brazenness of her demands. Maybe this had just been a delay tactic, and she hadn’t thought a police captain would truly cave. That’s the challenge with being fragmented into too many iterations of oneself – mother, captain, partner, friend, victim. She doesn’t always get to pick which one surges to the forefront if the situation touches on too many parts of her identity.

“Kate, it’s your turn. Can you tell me what happened to you?”

Kate’s eyes are still fixated on her, but on her upper torso, chest, shoulders – not her face. Like she can still see the damage done and the evidence left.

“Kate?”

“What?” she breathes, almost like she’s forgotten she’s not alone. “How did he do that?”

“No. That wasn’t the deal. I’m not recounting what happened to you. You have my Wikipedia page for that, right?” she says, not entirely unkindly. Stick to the facts.

Kate’s eyes finally land on her own. She nods slightly.

“The deal was for me to show you my scars. I upheld my end. You made me do that, Kate. Now I need you to do something for me.”

Kate nods, once. She’s coming back to herself a little, Olivia thinks. She prefers her this way. Sedate and at least a little compliant. The fight gone from her for a moment, but she has a feeling she’ll reinvigorate it with her line of questioning. There’s nothing to be done for it.

“Tell me what happened.”

“I’ve known David and Danny since I was in high school.”

“David and Danny Lesewski? David is the older brother?”

“Yeah. He’s a lot older than I am. Danny was closer to my age.”

“You were in school together?”

“Not that close in age. My old man used to work in one of the bars they ran, and when I was a sophomore, Danny got me a job there, too.”

“In a bar? You were what, fifteen?”

“I’m an old soul.” Some of the sarcastic, scoffing nature is returning, and Olivia steels herself against it, trying to keep her focus on the questions, on Kate’s answers.

“Okay. And do you still work there?”

“After a few years, David started to notice me a little more. Said it’s hard to find good help anymore. And asked if I wanted to some work in the casino, too.”

“So he… promoted you.”

“Yeah, the casino is way nicer. Better money. Guys aren’t quite as sleazy, at least most of the time.”

“What were you doing at the casino?”

“Bartending and waiting tables, mostly. Helping out wherever they need it, but I usually worked the pit.”

“The pit?”

“Where all the tables are. The tables with higher dollar entries get drinks on the house. My job was to take care of the patrons, make sure they had drinks. Keep ‘em happy.”

“Did you have to do anything besides serve drinks to keep them happy?”

“I’m not a prostitute.”

“I didn’t say you were, Kate. I’m just trying to understand what your responsibilities included.”

“Sometimes with big spenders, Danny would ask me to give ‘em a hand job. Maybe if someone had won big, a blow job. But I only slept with them if I wanted to. Danny was real nice about it.”

“Okay,” Olivia pushes past it. Whether Kate admits it or not, her family friend moved her from a low-brow bar to a casino front, and he did prostitute her to his customers. Kate’s twisting the narrative, but she’s also known the Lesewski brothers as protectors since she was a girl. It’s not their focus now, as awful as it is. “Okay. Did that ever change? You told Sergeant Bell, and you told me earlier, that you were raped.”

“Things got messed up once they brought on Prokov.”

“Aleek Prokov?”

“Yeah. He’s an asshole. Danny doesn’t like him, but said he gets results. He brought a lot more business to the casino, too. They created a new minimum buy-in set because his guys were high rollers.”

“So the people Prokov brought in, they spent more money. And that earned Prokov a seat at the table?”

“Yeah, Danny told me he bought in. He had a stake in the casino. Maybe some of the bars, too.”

“Did any of them ever ask you to handle the money, Kate?”

“Sometimes they’d have me make deposits. Said they couldn’t make it all at once. And I did the books,” she says, amost proudly.

“The books?”

“Yeah, payroll. I was good at math in school. So I did pay for everyone at Gathering Storm.”

“You cut the checks?”

“We did it all in cash, under the table. Taxes are bullshit. Just a way to keep the rest of us down while the rich get richer.”

“Kate,” Olivia pauses, not ready to break the tentative trust. “Did you understand what that meant? That the way the casino was operating wasn’t… legal?”

“It’s not that big of a deal. That’s what Danny said. David’s been running it like that for years.” So yes, she was complicit, but Olivia’s not entirely sure how aware she was that she was helping launder money – or where the money was coming from outside of the casino earnings and operational costs. She redirects, wanting to understand the nature of the abuse before Kate defaults and demands another trade. She wanders what Elliot and Bell are thinking behind the glass, feels a slight sense of surprise they’ve let her go on this long. But now that Kate is talking, she knows they’ll all remain on their respective side of the barrier.

“Kate, let’s talk about what you said. That Prokov hurt you. Can you tell me what happened?”

“Prokov tried to hit on me. More than once, started a couple of years ago. I told Danny, but he said just said of course he like me. That I’m pretty,” she’d suspected already, but the softness in her voice when she talks about Danny tells Olivia that she has feelings for him, even if they are one-sided. She’s viewing him through rose-colored glasses, considering how involved he is in the coverups and dubious dealings that have followed Gathering Storm and the subsidiary locations for years.

“I told him I wasn’t interested, but we were closing up together once, and we were the last two people there.”

“When was this?”

“Six months ago, right before we remodeled the pit.”

“Okay. And what did he do?”

“Cornered me behind the bar. Said that David and Danny told him he had access to any of the casino’s resources. Said that included me. I know Danny would never tell him that, though,” Kate continues, and Olivia winces. They’re going to break the hero-like worship she has of Danny Lesewski in this case, and she doesn’t look forward to the hardness and disillusionment that they will leave in her.

“I tried to run, but he grabbed the back of my belt and pulled me back, shoved me to the floor. We hadn’t cleaned yet, and it was sticky still from the spilled drinks.” Olivia cringes with the descriptive detail. She remembers the scratchiness of the sheets underneath her as she worked to break an iron bedframe. She schools herself; she can’t lose herself to flashbacks now.

Kate looks up suddenly, as if a thought had just occurred to her. “Did you try to run?”

“We’re not talking about me, Kate.”

“Yeah, but… we are.” The insistence is softer than before, like she’s looking for a true give-and-take versus the rage-filled mandate she’d been shouting before Olivia had bared her back, had shown her the scars. “Did you try to run?”

“He had a gun to my head as soon as I walked in my front door. I didn’t have a chance to run,” the words spring forth, almost unbidden. She’s fighting to stay in control but the emotions are so close to the surface, the memory feels like she’s dusted years off of it, like she’s back in that place where she’s so reliant on Brian, desperate to earn her job back, chopping off her hair to ward off the feeling of his hands running through it.

Kate nods. “Didn’t really matter for me even though I tried. He pinned me to the ground. Pulled down my pants. He had my wrists together, up above my head.” Her delicate features twist, making a macabre mask of her face. She’s a pretty girl, Olivia thinks, but there’s a current of cruelty, of sardonic disdain, that detracts from her beauty. She struggles to hang on to the sympathy, the empathy, even as she feels her unease increase.

“And then he raped me. Just left me on the floor when he was finished.”

“I’m so, so sorry, Kate. Can you tell me, has he hurt you since?”

“He did for a while. Every time we closed. I tried rearranging the schedule, but David told me that’s not my job.”

“Did you tell David or Danny?”

Kate looks to the side, studiously ignores the question.

“Kate, what happened next?”

“One day Prokov told me I deserved to be rewarded. He said it was a promotion.” The arrogance is back, and Kate flicks her hair behind her shoulder, a move that’s almost coquettish despite their setting.

“What did that promotion include?”

“He said I was responsible for hiring.”

Ayanna had heaved a sigh of relief when Kate started talking, when they focused on the history and the financials for a little while, taking a break from the heaviness of what they know has happened to Kate, gaining some distance from the visual of her scars in the starkly lit interrogation room.

Elliot is radiating frustrated energy next to her, and Jet looks like she’d prefer to be anywhere else. She stays though. Ayanna suspects she won’t leave Stabler’s side unless he asks her to, or she makes her. It’s not worth it at the moment. She’s willing to try any calming measure available to her to keep him steady and keep him still. They’re getting somewhere now with Kate, and while she hates what Benson had to do to build that rapport, she’s not going to allow it to be broken now.

“I need to be in that room, Ayanna,” he has settled a bit, and his voice is low and firm. He sounds resigned but certain.

“She’s doing fine on her own, Stabler.”

“She shouldn’t have to.”

“She’s doing her job.”

“This is not the job, and you know it.”

Well, he’s not wrong there. She knows Benson has long been associated with going above and beyond what the job entails, giving more of herself than maybe she should. But Stabler does the same thing. Maybe it’s only alright if they’re making the sacrifice together, ensuring the wellness of the other while they cut away parts of themselves for justice, for the victims. But then again, Ayanna is aware of the time gaps. He did leave her for a decade. Who did he think was in interrogation rooms with her then, when the cases got too personal, the victims too cutting, the perps too close?

“If you go in there now, Kate will shut down. I know this went farther than it should, but do you want to undo it now? She already showed –”

“Don’t.” She’s not used to hearing this tone from him. Maybe only when she was considering taking the promotion, disbanding the unit. When he recalled the death of his wife as the impetus for them coming together as a team, for giving him a purpose in the throes of grief. She hears the anger underneath the sadness, hears the disillusionment. She hates that it’s directed at her; has to remind herself that she is not the one at whom he’s actually angry. She’s standing in the way of him getting to his partner, but he’s angry at Lewis, at an unknown monster who hurt her and left the markings on her skin as a permanent reminder. He’s angry at himself, for leaving his partner to stand alone in the first place.

“Elliot –”

“Unless the next words out of your mouth are either telling me to go in there or explaining what those scars are from, what’s on that goddamn Wikipedia page, then I don’t want to hear it.”

She takes a calming breath, reminding herself that while he’s her subordinate they’ve often acted as more like equals, her leadership mixed with his instincts and years of experience. Reminding herself that he is distraught, that to him, Captain Benson is newly hurt, and he’s fighting the instinct to protect her. His psyche hasn’t processed that the danger has long since passed, that it’s the scars of the assault and the ache from abandonment that his former partner battles now.

She decides he might need some tougher love here.

“If you mess up this interrogation after what she did to get through to Kate, she’ll be justified to write you a rip. And if I tell you, Elliot, if you plow through this and don’t give her the opportunity to share her own past with you, she may never forgive you. You can’t bulldoze your way through this; there isn’t an easy fix. You can be mad at me all you want for that, but it won’t change a thing.”

He raises his eyes to hers now, and she takes a slight step back at the unmasked agony in them. The regret seeps off of him in waves. He nods.

“Can you just – Ayanna, I need,” he stops, like he registers that he’s talking about his needs in the wake of the awareness of pain Benson had endured. She can’t decide if it’s selfishness on his part or if they are still that closely intertwined. “Ayanna, can you please tell me. Just please tell me that… How bad was it?”

Jet stiffens, looks at her with a forlorn look, like she wants her to lie to him, to give him some comfort. And she wants to, as well, but she can’t clear her mind of the look in Olivia’s eyes when she pulled her shirt closed, recovered the evidence of her past.

“It was bad, Stabler. But she survived. Hold onto that. You can talk to her after the interview.”

When Olivia mentioned not being able to run, to having a gun on her as soon as she got home, he had turned his eyes to his sergeant, accusing and desperate at the same time. He feels similar now, as he tries to agree to her terms.

It seems wrong to leave Liv in there, to let her relive whatever had left her with puckered burn marks scattered down her shoulder, to lay bare her own pain so that Kate felt empowered to do the same. He wants to storm in there and throw himself at her mercy, to give Kate to any other cop in the city but to tell Liv it’s time for her to lay down her mantle, that she doesn’t have to do this. And that’s hollow, because he forced her to do it by herself for goddamn years when he walked away without a word.

Someone had attacked her. In her home, where she deserves to feel safe. Where she is supposed to feel safest. Someone had done things heinous enough that they made the news, that they were documented on some publicly available website, a handful of facts that will never convey the horror of coming home and realizing it’s been breached by someone who wants to hurt you. He saw those scars; they were in no way accidental. That scarring was evidence of someone who’d wanted to inflict maximum pain, to watch the battle to acclimate, and do it again. Because they could. For pleasure. He wants to be sick, but he can’t leave the interrogation room viewing window. His tether to Liv feels as strong as it has in years, as strong as when fucking Dean Porter had shot Rojas. When he watched her topple to the ground, his legs propelling him towards her before it was clear because she had fallen and tugged on him, too.

He tries to refocus, because Liv is still forging ahead, gathering the facts and pushing Kate to reveal more.

“Hiring?” she asks, and he closes his eyes for a moment, letting her voice wash over him. Something happened, she was hurt, but she is alive. “What positions were you hiring?”

“Other girls,” Kate says, and the sneer is back, and he’s not sure he’s ever wanted anything as much as to be on the other side of that glass, ready to pull Liv out of the way and force Kate to stay in her chair if she so much as makes a wrong move.

“To do what, Kate?”

“Shot girls, work the tables, some dancers. You name it.”

“Did they have to do anything else, Kate? Take care of the patrons, like you did?”

“Did you talk to him like you’re talking to me? Use that ‘I care about you’ voice? Try to bargain with him?”

He looks at Ayanna again, and he is so close to saying screw this, screw the job, because they’re making a collective mistake here by letting Olivia do this. He wonders how big of a mistake it is, if they’re cutting pieces away from her that they won’t be able to give back.

“Ayanna.”

“A few more minutes, Stabler. We need to know this. She’s close.” He feels insufficient, unmanned.

Olivia’s voice breaks their stare down. It terrifies him that she’s not even arguing with Kate anymore. She’s just answering the questions posed to her.

“Yes.”

“Did it work?”

“No. What else did the girls have to do, Kate?”

“They do whatever Prokov wants. He doesn’t bother me anymore. First thing I did – got him a new girl. And now I make sure the girls are assigned to the right tables. They distract the men; I watch the money.”

“That’s it,” Ayanna mutters. Their victim is also trafficking other victims, and he hates when cases get this convoluted, when the evil isn’t clearly distinct from the good. He knows Liv feels it, too.

“They never have to stay with the same mark for more than a night at a time, though,” Kate barrels on; he wonders if she understands what she just revealed, that she has incriminated herself even as she enumerated her own assault. “I couldn’t do it for more than a night,” she says, then leans forward to Olivia. That’s it, he can't stand aside any longer; Elliot’s own hand lands on the door handle as the space between Kate and Olivia shrinks.

“One night, and I wanted to rip my own skin off. How the hell did you stand four?”

Ayanna’s and Jet’s protests echo in his ears, but it doesn’t matter, and they don’t slow him. He throws the door open with a resounding clatter and thunders into the room.

Chapter Text

He’s in the room before he’s even had a chance to contemplate the reactions, or the repercussions. Ayanna is right on his heels, but he’s got a stride that outpaces hers by a long shot, and he’s by Olivia’s side at the table before his supervisor has breached the doorway. Liv’s eyes widen and shoot up to his, but he thinks the shock on her face and the tremor of her hands has more to do with Kate’s last question than his own outburst. He has a thousand of his own questions wreaking havoc in his head, but he wants her out of there even more than he wants them answered.

He's also shocked the hell out of Kate, who apparently thought she’d been given carte blanche to encroach on whatever painful memories she wanted without pushback. She pushes away from the table, her chair scooting loudly and echoing the clamor the door had made at his entrance. She gives a yelp of surprise that softens him, just a little. She looks younger when she’s not sneering or glaring, more like his daughters with her bluish eyes and faintly blonde hair. He shoves the comparison aside – recalling the damage she inflicted today and the crimes to which she somewhat unwittingly confessed.

“Elliot,” Liv gasps, just as Ayanna reaches his side.

“Stabler,” her voice is sharp in his ear, and he knows he’s overstepped the uncharacteristically lax lines she allows for him in the hierarchy of the NYPD; she’s still his commanding officer and he will be hearing about this later. He can’t quite bring himself to care now. He tries to dial it back a little, suppress his rage at Kate who is still a victim despite the other facets she’s revealed of herself. He recalls her outright refusal to be interviewed by a male detective, and feels a twinge of guilt at the revelation that it wasn’t an act. She’s moved her chair as far as she can get from him in the small, square room; clearly terrified. He takes a slight step back; refocuses on Olivia.

“Captain Benson,” he says, using her title to anchor her while also trying to give a more official reason for why the interview has gone to hell. “You’re needed outside.”

“Detective Stabler,” Ayanna repeats, grabbing at his arm to pull him back. He lets her shift him a little, but they both know she couldn’t if he didn’t allow it, and he’s not leaving the room without Liv in tow.

Olivia recovers herself quickly, and looks at them both suspiciously, but not altogether unsurprised. Damnit. They should have pulled her out of there earlier. He should have knocked on the glass minutes ago. He remembers doing just that over a decade prior, when Liv was ill and Tucker had her in interrogation as the perp, when he was choking in worry that she wasn’t seeing the threats to her that lived even within the precinct walls. He hadn’t hesitated then, when she felt so wholly like his, when he felt like he could rail at Cragen all day long in defense of her. Cragen had given her to his keeping, after all, when he introduced her as his partner.

Some of that’s changed, most of it hasn’t, despite years of reliance followed by years of neglect. She’s still Olivia, and his instinct to stand by her side my have been dormant in Italy, but it never truly left him. He’s not making those mistakes again, and he keeps his gaze on her while he repeats his ask.

“Outside. Sergeant Bell will stay with Kate, continue taking her statement.”

The fingertips on his arm dig and pinch at that, and he breathes a sigh of gratitude that Ayanna keeps her nails short. But she’s pissed, and he knows she has every right to be. She backs his play, though, and his gratitude shifts, broadens to include that.

“Captain Benson, would you go with Detective Stabler? There’s something that requires your attention,” Bell says vaguely, though her eyes are still narrowed on Elliot when she says it.

He’d all but forgotten about Kate, who seems to recover herself at the prospect of losing her emotional prey. His sympathy for her fades and all reminiscent ties to his blue-eyed, blonde-haired daughters disappear.

“I want Captain Benson to take my statement. All of it.”

“Kate, that’s not actually your call. Captain Benson –”

“Captain Benson and I have a deal.”

“You are not in a position to make deals,” Elliot can’t help but interject, rage boiling over, rising more the longer the four of them square off in the interrogation room. Kate blanches; she’s absolutely afraid of him, but she’s standing her ground. He doesn’t know whether the give-and-take of trauma sharing has actually made it easier to outline hers, if this is vindictive, or if the observation of the cruelty of the Lesewski brothers has bled into her as she victimized others, and this is just another opportunity to inflict hurt. He doesn’t care one way or the other.

“If she walks, I’m not telling you anything else. And there’s more – it’s not just the girls, I can tell you –”

“Threatening us is not in your best interest right now, believe me –”

“Detective Stabler, stand down. Kate, listen to me –”

“I told you no! You need me and I’m not –”

“OKAY!” bursts forth from Olivia, and Elliot feels like he is back in her interrogation room that first night he returned to New York, almost frenetic with anxiety, when Kathy was alive but broken, when his first action back was to strongarm his way into her squad and lie to her, reinforcing the mistrust his decade-long absence had already wrought. We are done here, he hears, her voice lower and more authoritative, so very effective. That is not how we do things anymore. They’re on the roof, where they had plenty of arguments but never like that, never with such a gulf between them and emotions so very near the surface. “That is enough,” and she drops the volume, raises the octave. Placating all of them, somehow, when she’s the one who deserves some solace.

She looks at him, once, conveying a sorrow he doesn’t want to examine the meaning behind, a silent ask for him to settle, to let her resume the lead.

“That’s enough. Kate,” she leans her head down, tilts forward in her chair – Kate is recalcitrant, obstinately avoiding her eyes. “Kate,” she says again, and the girl’s head comes back up. She’s blinking back tears, but she nods and scoots her chair towards the table again. “That’s better. Kate, I’m going to be here through this. There is more that you need to tell us, but I do have to step away for a moment.”

Kate immediately opens a pouting mouth to push back, but Olivia raises a hand and keeps talking in her low, soothing tone.

“I will still be the one to take your statement – your full statement. That has not changed. But we need a moment, Kate, and you deserve a moment, too. You’ve shared a lot, and we both know how hard that is.” The reminder of Kate’s pound of flesh lands heavily in the room. “Would you like something to drink?”

Kate’s demeanor has careened wildly the whole afternoon, and Elliot feels the whiplash again. Suddenly she is complacent, almost obedient. Soft.

“Yeah, a coke maybe?” she asks on a hopeful lilt.

“I’m sure we can do that,” Liv says, with a nod of confirmation from Ayanna. “Do you want to sit with Sergeant Bell while I’m gone? Or Detective Slootmaekers?”

Kate’s discerning eyes flash back and forth, and Elliot realizes that Jet has followed into the room behind him, standing just to his left, a show of support opposite Ayanna. He regrets it, but he also knows who she’ll choose when asked to tow the line between them both. He appreciates it, even as he worries for the implications to her career, images of a young, bright-eyed Olivia overlaying onto her. Olivia, following him into the Captain’s office whether she was asked or not. Olivia, putting a hand to his arm to still him when his anger was getting the best of him. Olivia, running headlong into an overcover operation to help him and yelling at whomever she thought warranted it if his wellbeing was at stake. He hadn’t deserved it then any more than he does now, from either woman.

“Okay,” she says, nodding to Jet. He wonders if Jet reminds her of the girls she worked with, the girls she ultimately pulled into her web and made them prey to the same men who had victimized her. The cycle of it all hits him for a moment, and he feels unbearably tired.

“Sure. We’ll have some sodas, take a breather,” Jet says, a silent nod to him as she moves forward to replace Olivia at the table. He thinks he would bear-hug her if he could.

“Thank you,” he says under his breath as she passes. He wants to grab Olivia’s arm, to physically pull her from this room and the memories their victim had forcibly evoked, but he knows from years of experience of assault survivors and the tendencies of Olivia herself that it would not be appreciated right now.

“I’ll be back soon, Kate,” Olivia assures; he hates the idea of her back in here, and they haven’t even left yet.

He avoids his Sergeant’s eyes while Olivia avoids his, and the three of them fall into a line by rank and exit the room.

Olivia immediately positions herself by the viewing window, taking over the spot where Elliot had just stood, battling his own frustration and worry in a futile exercise while he’d watched her. She’s quiet, and that does nothing to diminish his fears.

“We’re gonna talk about that later,” Ayanna whispers under her breath to him as she slides by him, standing next to Liv, speaking directly to her then. “I’m sorry we didn’t pull you sooner; she crossed a line and I should have –”

“No, you shouldn’t have. You did the right thing. She was talking. Believe it or not, it probably wouldn’t even count as my most unconventional interview technique.” Liv lets them off the hook, but his guilt still mounts, and she hasn’t turned away from the glass – eyes still on Kate as she talks quietly with Jet, asking her how she got to be a detective, telling her she liked her eye makeup. Elliot would have snorted at that had the situation been different.

“I assume there is no other matter that needs my attention?” Olivia asks, finally turning to them, like the lack of eye contact has allowed her to put her mask back in place. Her eyebrow is perfectly lifted as she turns; she looks confident and beautiful but his mind’s eye still sees the turn of her head, the tremble of her jawline, and the scars spotting her shoulder.

“It was beyond time for a break, Liv,” he says. She sighs at that, but she’s all business.

“Alright, then, it’s what we thought. She’s trafficking the girls for the casino, and she may be one of the runners for the money laundering. Financial Crimes has someone here, right? I need to get information on those girls; we need names, and we need their shift times; we have to get them out of there first, but I assume they might be able to help her cut a deal, yes?”

She rattles off the prescient points and next-step questions, and she’s not wrong, but she doesn’t give either of them a chance to respond, and he wants to make her stop, to beg her to breathe. He wants to hold her. He wants to hear what caused those scars, about the man that had hurt her, and he wants to learn nothing at all as though the not knowing could make it untrue. Could keep her safe.

“Olivia,” he says, lowly. He doesn’t want to push her here and he knows – he knows she outranks him by a mile and he owes her all the respect that comes with that. But his respect for her position doesn’t preclude care for the woman behind it, and that’s exactly what he wants to do. Take care of her. She is tunneling ahead with the case but he does still know her regardless of years lost and distance gained, and he knows she is unravelling at the edges. There was a time when he’d been the only one who could stitch her back together.

She ignores him; turns to Bell. “She doesn’t deserve full sentencing for this, Sergeant; it’s revictimization and I want you to get these guys for OC but we will do right by her first –”

Ayanna chances a quick glance at him, steps forward to her and puts on her best entreating look – that look has worked on him more than once. He sighs in relief at her response; she seems to know that Liv can’t take a challenge right now, that justice for Kate is now interconnected with the justice she must have once sought for herself.

“We brought you in for just that, Captain. This isn’t Navarro again. SVU, OC, Finance – we’ll process in that order, alright? The girls come first.”

Liv relaxes a little, nods. “Thank you.” It’s a testament to how fragile she’s feeling, because she would usually breeze past the agreement without gratitude but simple affirmation that her recommended approach was the right one.

Ayanna glances between the two of them. “I have to check on Reyes and the Finance guys, though. Let’s give Kate some time to settle down, and then pick it up. None of the shifts at the casino start before 3; we have a little time and we’ll get more from her if she feels safe.” The excuse is thinly veiled, but Liv seems to accept it and he will be buying Ayanna the drink of her choice in thanks when this is all done. She leaves quietly without a backward glance, the door closing behind her with a soft snick.

They’re quiet now, not quite facing off, but the air is tense between them. She knows that he doesn’t know where to start. She doesn’t either, which has been their problem for the past two and a half years. She knows if she stays quiet long enough, he will say something though. She wishes she had the pretense of looking for misplaced sugar as a distraction again.

“Liv,” and she’s back in her kitchen, Noah safe in his bed but bruise still on her cheek, and she can almost hear the next words before he utters them. Look at me. I care for you. But he doesn’t go there, and she’s grateful. It’s not what she needs now, and she desperately longs for an Elliot who knows what she needs without her having to guide him. Right now, she’s not sure herself, and she’d give half her pension for someone to just throw her a lifeline and tell her for once.

“Liv,” he says again, and he’s not pressing but he’s still standing there, looking at her with heartbreak in his eyes, and all she knows is that she cannot do this. Not here.

“Look. You don’t gotta tell me a thing,” she opens her mouth to say, no shit she doesn’t, but he anticipates it and doesn’t give her the chance. “But we are gonna take a second. Out of there. This – you don’t have to do this, Liv. I do know – I still know what this job means to you and why. Probably means even more now. But someone has to remind you that you don’t owe them yourself. You’ve put in more than enough. You have a squad, you have your son, you don’t have to leave all of yourself on the table today, okay?”

She wants to interrupt but for once Elliot fucking Stabler is saying the right things, and she feels the way she did when Fin sat in her office quietly but didn’t push her to talk just last night, when Amanda asked her if she was doing okay because she had taught her to check in when it got tough, when Rafa had held her when Noah was taken and showed up at her apartment after so that he could listen to whatever his friend needed to say. When Ed took her away from it all and showed her and her son Paris, when Brian just shut up and held her on the couch. When Munch told her he’d missed her the most, when Cragen proudly stated that’s my girl after she made Sergeant, when Nick smiled and told her hair would grow back after she’d desperately cut it herself. When Noah shyly presented a collage of them together and she thought she’d never be happier than in that moment. All the comforting, isolated instances – she didn’t have a family for so long, and she knows that there’s more, that people expect more consistency of their loved ones in the world – but she has these sweet, cherished moments and they mean everything to her.

And Elliot looking at her the way he is right now, saying words that are wrapped in care but not outright concern, like he knows she can still take care of herself. It’s like these moments are rolling into one and collecting around her, keeping her upright.

He stops, seemingly sensing that he’s gotten through somehow, then can’t help himself. “Olivia, I – I’m sorry and I just – god, four days?”

“Elliot, please.” She wants the moments back. “Please.”

She sees him nod, watches as he mentally puts his needs and wants aside. She sees him putting the bricks of his foundation back into place, pulling the reeling and shocked pieces of himself back to the center, to be what she needs.

It stuns her for a moment, and she gapes at him, unable to halt the tears that stream silently down her face. She’d normally be embarrassed by the show of emotion, but she’s feeling everything so much right now, and it’s the closest to home that she’s felt in a lifetime.

These tears are nothing – she wants to sob with the relief of it, thinks that she likely will, when this is all over. Suddenly he is strong, and present, and – maybe most importantly of all – undemanding in a way that she hasn’t seen since before he left. In a way that she hasn’t seen since before even that, since he was double mortgaging his house for her and running through hallways towards her and proclaiming that he should have come back sooner. Back when they took turns being the strong one, and sometimes it was him holding her steady instead of her dropping everything in support of him.

It's his turn now. She’s almost forgotten how reassuring it was to truly have a partner.

“Okay. Just. That’s alright. Just c’mere. Come here, Liv.” He holds his arms open to her but when she hesitates, he acts. He loosely grabs her wrist and lightly tugs her to him, and they enfold each other in a hug like they’ve been communicating that way their whole lives. He feels different and the same all at once and she knows it doesn’t really matter what he looks like, what iteration of himself he shows her. It doesn’t matter if he’s in cheap suits or jeans and sweatshirts, three-piece sets or henleys. All versions apparently amount to be her safe harbor.

They are different people now. And yet while that is undeniably true, they can still hold onto the trappings of who they were, and the echo of their partnership still sounds.

He doesn’t say that it will be okay; she knows he doesn’t even know what hurts he’d be consoling, that parts of what happened would never be remotely okay. But he holds her close, and she lets her weight go, relaxing against him and letting him pick up the slack. Their faces touch again, like they had in her kitchen when she couldn’t understand how he had helped her, retrieved her son, and then become yet another person asking more of her than she could summon. Her rubs his cheek against her temple, and his words ruffle her hair with his breath, and it’s so deeply, heart-wrenchingly comforting she thinks she can drop her armor, just for this embrace.

“I’ve got you, Olivia.”

Chapter Text

Elliot holds her, feels the give and acceptance in the way she’s gone lax and pliant against him, and he thinks even if this is as much as he ever has of her, he might be able to be grateful.

He’s always had a selfish streak. It’s been at its most visible with her. Selfishness has been easy for him to give into when it comes Olivia, for different reasons over the years. At first, she was so goddamn willing to be there for him, listening to his family-man stories with admiring doe eyes, stepping in to preserve his often-fracturing family for him even when he was ready to let the pieces fly apart. And then, when they’d stabilized, in their later and maybe their best years, when she was so steady and so effortlessly in-step beside him – it was a relationship that he didn’t have to work for, apply himself towards. There was something deeply reassuring about that, but now he looks back and sees his selfish choices like a jagged edge through the beauty of their partnership; she deserved more than his years-long assumption that she would be there for him no matter what he did, no matter how little he acknowledged that it meant something to him. Then, when he left her without a word, savagely ripping away the partnership that he knew was the most significant touchstone of her life. It may be the most selfish thing he’s ever done, something he rarely holds the mirror against because it’s the ugliest reflection of himself to date. And most recently, when he’s come back into her life with all the subtlety of a hand grenade, when he has returned to her but only demanded from her.

He doesn’t feel selfish now, he feels fucking honored at the trust that she’s showing in him, when he’s done everything in his power to demolish it. He sometimes misses his own bullish arrogance in the rightness of his choices because he second-guesses everything these days. In retrospect, he thinks he was wrong about so very much. He wants to be worthy of this, he wants to make sure he takes nothing from her in this moment. And he’s not quite sure how to do that because he also wants to drop to his knees and demand to be given the context, to know what happened to her, to know who he has to kill.

He feels her tears dampening his collar and closes his eyes as he feels her lightly nuzzle where is neck and shoulder meet. There has been a tenuous, unspoken agreement about touch the entirety of the time he’s known Olivia. At first they touched frequently, and then – when that felt fraught and carried with it more than it should for a married man – they silently stopped grabbing each other’s arms, patting each other’s shoulders. They stayed in each other’s space, like proximity was permissible but active touching was not. And only moments where it all became too much – one of them was hurt, one of them was broken, she’d saved the lives of his wife and son – only in those moments did their tacit commandment break.

But now, now it’s like they’ve stayed untouchable to each other for so long that they hardly know how to put their hands on each other, so they just push the proximity instead. They lean, they touch their foreheads together. Apparently, they nuzzle. He feels like he’s back in junior high, but it sends a rush through him each time the divide between them disappears.

Her shuddering is slowing; he thinks the tears might have stopped. Even now, she will only allow herself to demonstrate vulnerability for so long. He feels her putting her shields back in place, and he fights the urge to haul her over his shoulder and fireman-carry her out of here. Take her home, take her to his home, take her someplace warm. Take her to her son. All of the above. But he knows that’s not Olivia. He doesn’t like to compare them; sometimes his mind goes there despite his better judgment – Kathy would have appreciated the rescue, and he was sometimes grateful that she could see his good intent behind his aggression. But Olivia, she’s got her own aggression, and her own ability to defend herself, and she’s got a squad ready to lay down their lives for her if she needs it. He needs to remember that – what he offers her has to be different.

She’s given him some leniency here, let him help her just a little… but she will want, maybe even need to see this through. He can do this. He can handle that. They’ve always been their best at each other’s sides, anyways.

She pulls back, her temple sliding against his jawline as she puts space back between them. The urge to kiss her is familiar at this point, but he’s not sure it’s ever been quite this strong and he forces himself to slow down for her, to pull back his own intensity. He’s trying to hear her, to listen better – she’s not ready. And the day has already held so much.

“I’m fine,” she whispers, and the muscle memory is instantaneous; he’s running towards her, relief at the sight of her quelling the panic when he’d heard that one of theirs was lost, realizing it was Sonya and not her but that would break her in a different way. Taking in the sheer exhaustion and hurt on her face and being unable to suppress the instinctive need to pull her towards him even though they didn’t do that. The hell you are.

He's even more direct with her now. “You’re not, Liv. No one could be.”

She’s pulled away enough that she can meet his eyes, though his hands are still gliding up and down her forearms, comforting but not relinquishing the grip. She glares a little at his words, and he has to suppress a smile. He can admit now that he loves all versions of Olivia, but he’s always had a soft spot for the obstinate one. She’d probably punch him if she knew what he was thinking – and she’s got a mean right hook, he’s seen it in action more than once – but he’s long thought obstinate Olivia is… well, cute. Her brow furrows and her lip juts and her glare is somehow soft, like she knows she’s lost the battle but she’s going to convey her displeasure regardless. It makes him wonder if he’s getting a small glimpse into what she was like as a girl, before the weight of the job toughened her expressions.

“I – ah, I’m gonna be right here, okay?” he says, and he’s not sure if the words are right but she doesn’t pull away yet. He’ll take it.

The glare weakens a little, but he can see the lingering uncertainty. He’s given her no reason to believe that he will be there, even when they were partners, he knows sometimes his track record was spotty in the big moments – or he didn’t push her when he should have. But things are different now, they’re different now, and pushing her is not an option. He thinks about how his therapist to hold him to be available to her, how Ayanna told him she thought that was good advice; he just has to be steadfast.

“I know things got – I know that I let her dictate some of the interview.”

“Liv, you don’t have to –”

“No, I do, I just – I need you to know that I understood it. I knew I was giving her an upper hand but she’s just a kid and she needed to feel in control. She’ll probably wish she hadn’t done this eventually, but I know – I know right now she needed to feel in control.” Her unspoken words wash over him, that at one point she’d been hurt and her control had been taken, she’d been spinning out and had wanted to feel in control again, too. He can’t get comfortable with the parallels being drawn between Olivia and Kate, but he knows better than most that Liv has always tried to forge a connection with the victims they’ve helped.

“I know.”

“I want to help her, El.”

“I know that, too. We will.”

He thinks this is the longest they’ve maintained contact, and he doesn’t want to let go of her. He wants to touch her face, brush the strands of hair that have fallen a bit over her right eye, run his hand through the length of it. It used to amuse him that Liv has never been afraid to change her look, until he realized that he could gauge her trauma responses by transformative haircuts, that sometimes she uses the style to demonstrate an outward toughness if she needs to. He attributes it to her son, maybe her squad, that she’s let it grow so long now, the tips of it skimming her upper arms when she wears it down. She feels settled, at least in some ways, if she’s letting it grow unimpeded.

She’s slowly tensing again, and she leans back a little bit more. He wants to follow her, but he lets her pull free, his hands skimming down her arms and lingering at her fingertips as he lets her go.

“I should get back in there.”

“Liv, wait.” She turns, and he reminds himself that this Olivia is the same one from moments ago, who opened herself up and cried in front of him, who let him be her strength for a moment, who hasn’t told him what happened yet but who trusted him to hold her while she sorted through her painful past that has been dragged into that interrogation room. He doesn’t know how to ask without pushing her, demanding answers she’s not ready to give, but he is a PTSD minefield, too, and he at least needs to be sure he’s not going back in there wearing blinders. “Just – I’m your partner. I have your back here. What do I – is there anything that I need to know before we go back in?”

She considers him for a moment, head tilting, dark eyelashes swooping over the curve of her cheek as she closes her eyes for a second. He could spend days watching the contours of her face, thinks how she’s almost startingly beautiful but it’s not in an easy, straightforward way. It’s not even that she’s somewhat exotic-looking, with her darker complexion and coloring no matter how gray and gloomy New York days are. It’s that some of the angles of her face should be incongruous but aren’t when he looks at the whole of her – the fullness of her lips with the strength of her jawline, the directness of her gaze with the slant of her eyes. She’s a study in contradiction in personality as well as in form, and it’s one of his very favorite things about her.

She levels a stare – seems to make a decision. Those eyes lock on his and he braces himself.

“May, 2013. Perp got off on a technicality. He fixated – we should have seen it. Forced abduction, prolonged assault, involuntary witness to other criminal acts. No rape. It was – it lasted for four days.”

He swallows it down as a flood of regret and shame and fury rushes through him, leaving him shaky and nauseous in its wake. Jesus Christ, no. Please, no.

He would have been unreachable, on assignment in Europe, but someone should have gotten in touch with him; emergency protocol exists even undercover. At least one of his kids had to have been aware if a girl off the street knows what happened to her all these years later. She’s giving straight facts and he knows why, but fuck, she shouldn’t have to be describing this to him, and he wants to rail at the god to whom he’s committed his life because he knows those words don’t hold the horror of what those four days entailed. He thinks about her words – no rape. He knows she must have clung to that like a salve through the worst of the healing, that though it doesn’t lessen her suffering, it would have been a delineation from her mother.

He doesn’t know what to do here – he wants to rip something apart. He wants the blood and the violence, to feel like he’s helping with brute strength because that’s easier and a part of him has always liked the idea of inflicting pain back on the perps who doled it out to the weaker, the unsuspecting. He knows that makes him less evolved, maybe even means he’s not a good person. He doesn’t fucking care, especially now.

He wants to kill the man who did this, even though he knows he’s probably dead already. He hopes if it wasn’t Liv herself, that someone on the squad – Fin probably – refused to leave the sick bastard alive. Still, he wants it to be him, even after all this time. He wants it to hurt, and he wants it slow. He wants to make it last four days.

But she’s looking at him, she hasn’t taken her eyes from his face, hasn’t returned back to the interrogation room holding Kate and Jet, whiling away the time before they continue. It’s not quite a test, but she’s waiting to see what he does, and he realizes what she’s given him here, and how critical the next few moments are. He feels like he’s standing on a precipice, and he wants to leap off – but if he’s rash and impulsive, she won’t come with him.

And it’s been the simple, abiding truth of the majority of Elliot Stabler’s adult life: he wants her with him.

So he doesn’t storm and stomp against the injustice of it all and demand blood for blood. It’s too late for that anyway. He does the only thing he can – he prioritizes what matters to her.

He blinks his tears back, tries to steady his voice. “Olivia,” he sighs once, trying to convey all of his sorrow and support for her even as he shifts their direction forward. “Okay. Okay. Let’s make sure we get those girls out safe, and we’ll get Kate the best deal we can. Just – you’ve already gotten through to her, Liv. You don’t have barter with stories of what was done to you. And, I – I know I can’t be in there. But I don’t want you alone. Ayanna – can you bring Bell in? Or Jet can just stay – I think Kate likes her.”

It feels wrong for a moment, and he wonders if he’s fucked up and minimized the violence inflicted on her, if she wanted the rage in her defense, after all. He cannot make up for missing the worst thing that happened to her, and he wonders if she blames him for leaving her side, for not being there to protect her from the monsters. She’d be justified in doing so, he thinks. But tears make her dark eyes sparkle once more, and she raises a hand to his face, cupping his jaw. He realizes he’s been initiating all of the touching until now – even in her kitchen, when she told him she wasn’t ready, she leaned her face against his but he’d encroached, entered her space first. He stills, letting her set the pace, letting her be the one to take.

Then she smooths her hand over his cheek, and he leans his head into it, just slightly.

“El,” she whispers, and it feels like home. It feels like the laughter of his children and his certainty that they’re safe, it feels like Kathy’s smile when she was happy with the life he’d given her in spite of his shortcomings. It feels like sitting across the desk from a younger, less stoic Liv and smirking at her when Cragen’s voice rumbled over the squad room’s din to scold them for yet another reckless payoff, it feels like his mother’s sure voice when she’d told him he was a good man. “Elliot, thank you.”

He knows her words encompass so much more than the planned justice for Kate.

“I’m with you. Nothing to thank me for, partner.” He takes a risk, brings up his hand to put it on top of hers, and then both of their palms are held against his face. He can’t kiss her, can’t take her home and wrap her up, keep her safe - not yet. But he wonders if this is a step, if the freedom of contact is a sign of the closeness to come and the barriers they’re tearing down.

She twists her fingers to entwine with his, and their hands fall to their sides, nestled between them.

He wants to laugh, because he thinks it might be the most intimate moment of his entire life, and they’re standing in an interrogation viewing room in his precinct simply holding hands. They stay locked together as they move, only separating, twinging his heart a bit with the loss, when they reach the door. She’s turning her attention back to Kate, but she seems lighter, more present – and it occurs to him with a start that the edges of his own panic and desperation have receded.

“I’ll go get Sarge, and we’ll get this done.”

Chapter Text

Ayanna watches Benson resettle in the interrogation room, which seems less threatening with Jet’s continued presence balancing the Captain and Kate. She’s a bridge in age and dynamic, almost standing in as a friend for their defensive and unpredictable victim – and perp, though Ayanna tries to focus on the fact that her crimes probably would never have occurred had she not been harmed and exploited herself. Jet also somehow throws the parallels and similarities between Olivia and Kate into stark relief; they are eyeing each other a bit warily, each trying and failing to shake their defensive postures, like they’re afraid of where the other is going to strike next. It’s unnerving to see the Captain as anything but overwhelmingly in control, and Ayanna pushes away the regret that she brought her into this case in the first place.

Benson recovers first, her spine straightening, like she’s pulling at her own strands of control to reinstate herself, reclaim ownership of the interrogation. Kate’s eyes narrow, and Ayanna thinks she is smarter than she originally assumed; Kate knows that the power alignment has shifted once more, even with Jet as a human buffer in the room. Her gaze slants towards Stabler, who had retrieved her moments ago with quick steps and a brusque voice that made her wonder if he’d been crying. He was as wired and tense as Liv was subdued and quiet, and the atypical behavior from both of them has her nerves jangling in anticipation. She likes to know her people, to be able to rely on their consistency – Elliot Stabler has never been what she’d call predictable, but he has managed to be steady for her regardless, and she feels like right now they’re careening towards the edge of a fallout. She feels like she should take action, to do something to stop it, and she doesn’t even know what she would be preventing.

“Okay, Kate,” Liv says behind the glass, and Elliot stiffens even more beside her. She can feel the nervous energy pouring off him, and he shakes his head – once, quickly, like he’s trying to shake off his anxiety at Olivia being back in there. She knows he hates this, and she wonders if they were this attuned to each other as partners. How did he stand it – worrying to this degree? They would have frequently been in dangerous situations as a pair. And how did she stand it – the Benson that Ayanna has grown to know would have bucked off his concern every chance she got.

“We’re going to get started again, if that’s alright with you.”

“I’m not the one who needed a break, Captain,” Kate responds, and the title is elongated as a snarl. The hackles are back up, and Ayanna doesn’t understand the animosity – other than the fact that she is a victim and something about Liv being a victim as well seems to piss her right off.

“Well, we’re back now, and we’re going to keep going. Okay?”

“You’re the boss now, right? Cause I’m in trouble.”

“I’m not the boss. I’m here to help you,” Liv pushes past a sarcastic scoff from Kate’s pinched features, and Jet’s eyes ping between them both. “I am here to help you, Kate. I’m not going to lie to you – what you admitted to, with the money, and with the other girls. Those are crimes. And we have to talk about that. But crimes were also committed against you. I haven’t lost sight of that. We have to help those girls, and I want to help you. Do you understand?”

Ayanna’s not sure how Benson does it, but she’s at least disarmed the girl from nuclear to merely heightened. She sees Kate’s façade breaking, and she looks younger when that yearning look crosses her face, like she wants to believe Liv so badly and is afraid to do it. Maybe some of this needling about Benson’s own trauma has been a test as to how far she can push her and still rely on her protection. In her younger years, Ayanna was guilty of doing that in relationships, but it’s strange to watch it play out with victim and protector. She wonders how often Benson has created a connection like this over the years, wonder what it’s taken for her to support the victims even as they lash out when she tries to ease the pain. It makes her sympathize with Stabler a bit – it must be agonizing to want to protect someone who continually throws herself in the eye of the storm.

The object of her musings interjects as Olivia recaps what they’ve discussed so far with Kate, walking her back through her own admittances to progress forward.

“How much did you know?” he asks, his voice hoarse – he doesn’t sound angry, precisely, but his voice is less charitable than she’s used to hearing it when directed at her.

“Stabler, listen –”

“What did you know?” he interrupts her, the words running together, thick with emotion.

“Stabler. It is not my story to –”

“She told me the basics, and I’m never gonna make her do more than that, Ayanna. I –” he cuts off and shudders, a bit. She’d never sacrifice a victim – her whole life has been predicated on a pursuit for equality and justice, but she wishes in vain that she could undo this day. “I’m never gonna make her relive it. Not for me. She told me the basics and I should have fucking been there. What else – what did you know? Do the others know?” his eyes are a little wild, and they land on Jet.

“There was a state-wide manhunt, Elliot. Anyone who was in the NYPD ten years ago knows the basics. Most people who lived in New York City at the time – there was, well there was a lot of news coverage. And it,” she weighs her words, unsure how to say this. “It lasted.”

“For four days.”

“Yes. Well, the news cycle lasted longer. She… ah, she garnered some attention. But we didn’t find her for four days,” his head whips to her, blue eyes wide and brow furrowed. She lifts her hands, palms out, and shakes her head. “I wasn’t a part of the team that actually found her. We were on rotating shifts – working the regular caseload but deployed squads alternated shifts for the search once we knew she’d been taken, and who had done it.” She sees him trying to acclimate to the information, realizing that each word she’s uttered has depth and weight. It was bad enough that they launched a cross-squad search, that there was a lag before they knew she was gone, that the perp was known and feared. She continues because she thinks Liv probably didn’t relay this – and he needs to know. “Her squad found her. SVU. Because she called it in.”

He sucks in a breath. “She freed herself.”

“She saved herself. We – we hadn’t narrowed it down beyond a beach house in Long Island on the radio report, and a BOLO for a car he’d already abandoned. Based on his other victims, if she hadn’t gotten free, he would have raped and killed her.”

“Jesus Christ,” he whispers, and she doesn’t have to wonder this time. He’s not even trying to hide the tears. She wants to lay a hand on his arm in support, but she’s not sure how he’d react to that kind of gesture right now. She presses her side against him for a moment, leaning enough to touch in solidarity, to convey any comfort she can. She remembers being sickened when she was still a street cop and Benson was a detective, when she learned of William Lewis’s accused crimes and heard about the state of Benson’s vacant apartment. The overwhelming sense in the NYPD – outside of the SVU squad’s desperate hope – was that they were looking for a body, that they would search relentlessly because Detective Benson was one of their own and she didn’t deserve to rot in an unmarked grave. It was a grim, heartsick mission for everyone involved. She remembers her surprise, her commanding officer’s surprise, that the body carried out of that house was Lewis’s instead.

“What – who was he? What did he do? The scars – she said prolonged assault – those are burns. Those are burn marks and he had her for four days? What – where is he now?” The questions are pelted at her like hits, and she takes a step back, wracking her brain to find a way to calm him. He apparently held it together for whatever come to Jesus moment he shared alone with Liv, when she imparted bare bones facts, but he is fucking coming apart at the seams now that she can’t see him.

They should be listening to the interview, they need to be determining next steps for a raid on the casino, and his head is nowhere near this case. He is ten years ago and thirty miles from here, at a beach house where Olivia Benson emerged victorious but lost parts of herself to a psychopathic sadist, where she didn’t have her partner who’d dedicated over a decade to ensuring he was the one who bled when the job demanded it, not her. She knows – she’s heard the stories, and the rumors. Rumors and legend shroud Benson like a cloak, and she wears it well. But Ayanna knows there was a time that the rumors were more focused on her oft-unstable, gun-happy partner, their astronomically high closure rate, and the rampant debate as to whether or not they were sleeping with each other.

“Elliot,” she tries, but he’s not finished.

“Tell me he’s dead, Ayanna. Did she have to kill him? She said he didn’t –”

“Elliot, STOP. Stop this. It isn’t helping. You – you’re not helping her like this,” that gets to him, and his tirade ceases for a moment. They stare at each other and breathe, and she’s reminded of how he’s stepped in for her. How he stopped her from killing a man in cold blood out of revenge for her own partner’s murder, which feels a bit hypocritical because she’d stake her life on the fact that if William Lewis were still alive, Stabler would be walking out that door and burning the remnants of his storied career along with Lewis’s corpse. But she’s still grateful to him, and she wants to return the favor.

“He’s dead, Elliot.”

“Did she –”

“It’s a different situation. He killed himself.”

“When she got away from him? At that – you said it was a beach house?”

And, oh God. Damn it all, she does not want to be doing this. He’s relentless and she understands that the partner in him is looking for the damage inflicted so he can protect, while the detective is looking for the detail to fully understand. And maybe the man is just better looking to know and support Olivia, because witnessing his behavior right now, Ayanna has never been more certain that he is in love with her.

“Did she tell you about – she told you about the first time, the abduction?” and as soon as the words leave her mouth she knows that she has fucked up, that Benson certainly did not tell him that there was more than one attack, and he has gone still and lethal at her side.

“What do you mean, the first time?” the words do not come out like a question, but an accusation, and any calming that was done has entirely regressed. She hesitates, not sure how to tell him this and again feeling as though she’s relaying a story – a truth and an agony – that she has not earned the right to tell. “What do you mean?” he’s aggressive but the questioning lilt at the end has a tinge of begging, like he’s hoping she’ll admit this was all a cruel lie, and her heart aches on his behalf.

“This isn’t the time, Stabler, and I shouldn’t be the one who –”

“Ayanna, please,” he says, fumbling for his phone and pulling up his contact list, navigating to the “F’s” before she realizes what he’s doing and snatches the offending item from his grasp, yet again. “Stop doing that!” he barks, and it’s a relief to hear the forceful note in his tone again. There you are, she wants to say. Stay here.

“Calling Fin is maybe a good idea at some point, in light of what’s happening in that interrogation room. But not right now, and not to ask him this, Elliot.” They both take a breath in unison, and she knows she has to give him something.

“He escaped prison. Which – I know, sounds ridiculous. It was eerie, how many lucky breaks this guy got.” He grumbles something under his breath and she only makes out son of a bitch so she carries on.

“He escaped, took another victim – a kid – and lured her out.” He nods, like it isn’t the slightest bit surprising that Liv willingly offered herself back to her abuser in defense of another. A child. Knowing Captain Benson better now, she supposes it isn’t. “He had them both – I’m not going into the details into what he did while he had her; you and I both know that’s not fair to her. Her squad tracked them quickly this time and he’d had her – restrained,” he groans softly, and she plows forward to finish it.

“He pulled the trigger on himself. Did it so that there was some debate as to whether that was a cover story and if she actually killed him herself –”

“Why would that fucking matter? She should have.” He sounds defiant and disgruntled and honestly, it’s preferable to him falling apart at her side, so she ignores the blatant ignoring of the law they both uphold.

“The press was a bit hard on her after this, after the trial the first time. A grand jury was convened –”

“Fucking ridiculous.”

“And they found her innocent. It’s the biggest career turnaround I’ve ever seen, Elliot – you need to focus on that. She clawed her way back, reclaimed her position as CO of SVU –”

“She was already Captain?”

“Jesus, would you stop interrupting? They named her acting CO as Sergeant. And as a woman. It was a big deal at the time. Still is. She got promoted a couple more times – I’ve heard about a few hiccups here and there but well, we all have them. She’s one of the most senior-ranking and well-respected female officers in the NYPD, Stabler. She survived. She more than survived. She’s not bluffing in there when she’s telling Kate that there’s hope.” They both turn their attention back to the room, where she hopes to God that Jet’s attention span has been more focused than theirs.

They listen to the soft conversation – Olivia asks details about the girls, and Kate is monotone but communicative. She is sharing names, ages, and the timing with which they were brought onto the casino staff.

“And she has a family. She has a son.” His comment sounds awed, almost adoring, and she wonders just how much Elliot Stabler the partner knew about Olivia Benson the detective’s desire to be a mother. Wonders if that's something they discussed, if he supported her. She knows from her own experience that it can be difficult to bring that want and femininity into work as a cop – it’s fine for the men to be fathers; they get claps on the back and drinks toasted in their direction for their strength and virility. But the women get side-eyes and concern about the weakness pregnancy and early motherhood might bring, inappropriate questions about if and when they’ll actually come back to work, the deliberating looks that indicate they are now mothers and effectively softer. But Elliot doesn’t say it like he thinks it made her less strong, he says it like he’s just as proud of her status as mother than her title as Captain, if not more so. She feels a surge of affection towards him at that revelation; it isn’t typical of men his age.

She nods. “She has a son. She did good. She’s alright, Stabler. You can let her do this.” He scoffs a little at her words, and she reconsiders. Agrees. He isn’t in a position to let Liv do anything. But she thinks he knows what she intends. That he can stand aside and watch this play out without the crippling worry and urge to slay a decade-gone demon.

“With Jet or you in there. And I’m staying here. She doesn’t do it alone.” He’s been fixated on this since he pulled her back, saying Liv was ready to continue the interview. He waited until Benson walked into the room and closed the door before Jet could even react, shutting her in with them, effectively giving his ally to his former partner in his stead. I don’t want her alone again, he’d said, and Ayanna thought the sentiment was about far more than Liv's independent run of the first series of questions.

“You’re right. She doesn’t do it alone.”

They both turn and resume observation of the interview. Ayanna is grateful for the reprieve, but she begins to brace herself for what’s next.

Kate’s describing an upcoming hand-off led by David Lesewski and Aleek Prokov, and there’s no way they can let that money out of the casino knowing what they know. They’re talking trafficking and terrorist financing if that were to happen, which means only one thing. She looks at Elliot and hopes he can steel himself back into her stalwart and sure right-hand man, because they’re gearing up for a surprise raid. And if she’s learned anything in the past few couple of hours, she knows that it doesn’t matter what horrors of the past have been cast into the open in that interrogation room today.

Captain Benson will be in the thick of it with them.

Chapter Text

“You serious, man? And you’re just calling me now?” Fin’s frustrated voice rings out over the speaker of his cell phone as he navigates the streets of Manhattan. He weighs the relief that he’s in the car by himself to have this conversation with the frustration that Olivia had opted to ride separately from him. He knows it’s because she’d wanted to stay near Kate, who will be remaining behind the cavalcade of cars that have been quickly deployed for the hand-off observation and (hopefully) subsequent arrests. But he misses her more than he cares to admit, and it ratchets up his anxiety that he can’t look over and see her in his passenger seat, the way he was unfailingly able to do for so many years she spent at his side.

And he knows it’s hypocritical, because he’s the one who walked away, who left her without a word, ignoring the damage that would inevitably cause to her. He lets himself ponder the blow in his darkest moments – the damage it would have caused to her self-esteem, her sense of security, her feeling of purpose. Every time he looks too closely he feels like a fucking asshole, and he’s struck by the acknowledgement that he does not deserve a position in her life. But he craves it, that closeness, and – as predictable and disgusting as it makes him feel – he misses her reliance on him. The way they leaned on each other made him feel like they were interconnected. He knows – he does know that when he ran he pulled that supportive arm out from under her, a support system he’d pressed her to rely upon in the first place. And to miss it now – when she had to learn to stand without him – is despicable. It doesn’t seem to matter. He left but he never stopped missing her and he wants desperately to look at her and see the Olivia from a decade ago whose eyes bled loyalty each time they looked at him.

His relationship with Liv aside, hers has obviously changed with Fin over the years. He remembers the man being protective, knew he was needling him but also laying down the law when he briefly caught him up on Liv’s progress – and her son’s existence – when they’d met during those dark days of Kathy’s hospitalization. He knows Liv inspires a protective instinct even when it’s unwarranted. But he’s not met with Fin’s utter wrath before, and he’s floored by it.

“We’ve been in interrogation all morning, and you didn’t tell me –”

“I didn’t tell YOU? You left without a word and go AWOL on the rest of us like we didn’t work together for goddamn years. You didn’t tell her goodbye, Stabler, so I had her fucking back. I have her back. And I apparently should have her back today ‘cept you decided to wait til you’re cowboy-ing over to a fucking casino raid before you decide to clue me in. Sounds like we should have flipped the interrogation to Muncy hours ago. Where is she?”

“With the vic. Another car. Bell’s got ‘em – they’re right behind me.”

“And what exactly happened? She showed this girl her scars? Which – where?! You let that happen?” Elliot is sickened by the where in that question. She’d only bared a shoulder, a dip by her neck, the smooth skin of her clavicle. Where else had that bastard hurt her?

“She did. Kate – the vic – she’s also trafficked girls, Fin. She’s not – I know she’s a victim but she’s got an edge to her. And I don’t like Liv identifying with her, but she’s latched on; she wants to defend her. To help her – she’s already talking deals.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah. I don’t like that they’re together – it’s some kind of fucking emotional warfare that Kate’s waging and I don’t want Liv close to it.”

“Which is why you should have pulled her out of interrogation.”

“I tried! I did, at one point. That’s when she – when she told me. What had happened to her. And then she went right back in like it hadn’t happened and now we’re on our way to Gathering Storm, and I don’t know if her head’s in the game.”

“Cap’s head is always in the game. That’s why you should have called me, man. She’ll lay herself out for a vic but that wasn’t right.”

“I know. I – fuck, Fin, I’m running to catch up and – who the fuck was this guy?”

“He was bad. The worst. We can’t do this now, Stabler.”

“I know. I know that.” He slams his hand on the steering wheel, the frustration and impotence of it all building in him like a cresting wave. He doesn’t feel the come down, the relieving pull of the current. He’s at an all-time anxiety high and he knows, he knows that’s a recipe for disaster given what’s ahead of them. The irony of it all is that Liv was always the one who could bring him down from this kind of swell of anger, with the exception of the times she threw caution out the window and leaned into the fury with him. He misses his partner.

“That ain’t helping anyone, man,” he hears, and when the hell did Fin get so irritatingly rational? Is it too much to ask that one thing have remained constant in his absence?

“Bell gave me some background.”

“We’re not doing this now, Stabler.” The tone leaves no allowance for debate and he feels the strange, uncommon sensation of having pushed Fin too far. Fin’s so easy-going that it’s easy to assume there is no point of no return with him, but he’s done it once before, back when Lake was his partner and different lines were blurred. He remembers how somber Liv had been at the idea they’d lose them both, the realization that for him it irrevocably changed his work life, but for Olivia, losing both Fin and Chester in one fell swoop, seeing the disbanding of the squad – that was all she knew of a family life. He’d felt sick with regret at the time, and he wonders at his own actions. Wonders about how he could have left her when he knew that he was her only family.

“Okay.” He tries to calm. The elongated heightened sense of anxiety has permeated since he’d been prowling outside that interrogation window, since he originally realized that today was not like other days and that Kate presented an unforeseen threat. It’s like he’s been poised to do battle for hours and he doesn’t know how to calm himself. And he knows he has to; they’re headed into a dangerous situation and his anxiety does them no service.

“Okay,” he says again. “I’m calling you now, though. We can – we’ll talk about what happened later. But now, I just have a bad feeling, man. You know how it is.”

“Yeah. I know a thing or two about that. You’re all headed in now? No UC or reconnaissance?”

“We’ve cased it. Bell thought the best approach was an alarm raid so that we can keep the element of surprise. Lesewski has been squirrely for a bit – thought he or Prokov would guess if we tried to monitor longer. Plus there’s a drop. In an hour.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Okay – I’m on my way. I’m gonna bring Bruno – Muncy and Velasco caught a case so we’ll split up.”

“You got the address?”

“I know it. We’ll be there before go-time. You watch out for her, yeah?”

“Always.” The word manages to ring false and true all at once.

“I don’t need a babysitter.”

“I’m not saying you do, Kate.”

“Well assigning Detective Dipshit to watch me while you go play Special Agent kind of counts as babysitting.”

“Kate,” Olivia sighs, and she feels a maelstrom of emotion for this girl. Not excluding sympathy, anger at what she’s put her through today, a healthy dose of fear that Noah will possess even close amounts of snark as a teenager. Above all, she just wants to help her. “I’m just trying to keep you safe. We’re going to go in and make a mass arrest. Those can work because we surprise the perps. But they can be dangerous because some people might run. And it’s usually the leaders.”

“So, David and Aleek are gonna try to sell out everyone else and get out clean.” Olivia notices the way Kate omits Danny from that indictment, and a wish to prevent the onslaught of upcoming pain runs through her. Jail time or no, Danny Lesewski will break this girl’s heart. She wants to spare her but it’s better to increase her awareness now.

“David and Aleek. And Danny.” Kate’s eyes flash a vivid blue, but she has some degree of understanding. She runs her hands through her hair, mussing the greasy waves. She looks worn, and she somehow seems younger by the minute. Olivia wants to let her shower, to give her clothes without holes worn into the sleeves, that cover more of her body. She wants to take her away from here. She wants to be away from here, herself.

“They will try to run. You need to be prepared for that. And if that fails, it fits within the profile that they’d try to fight their way out.” That raises Kate’s hackles, and she grips both of Olivia’s arms in desperation. Her emotions are too close to the surface, her acknowledgement to Elliot of what had happened without the armor of his presence and partnership, the shame that she had allowed it to happen at all. She cants her head, annoyed even as she knows it’s a sign that she’s being triggered, that she’s trying to shove off human touch. She knows all too well that human touch can hurt just as easily as it can help or hinder.

It's poor timing that Elliot has just exited his SUV, seemingly ending a tense phone call from what she’d observed through his front windshield. His eyes had sought out her form immediately, and she wants to ignore the underlying rush of pleasure that had caused amidst all the tension. That he looks for her first. But now he’s looking at her, trying to shrug off their victim who is clinging to her like a burr and arguing at what will happen to the Lesewski brother for whom she cares.

While she’s not sure what to make of Elliot’s protective instincts following their discussion, and her disclosure, she can instantly tell that the sight of someone’s hands on her is too much for him. He rapidly pivots and heads in her direction, head already shaking in refute, like the gesture alone will compel Kate to let go. All of a sudden he’s running to her, and it brings back memories of years ago, each and every time he had stepped into an altercation on her behalf, or stopped her from causing the altercation in the first place. They’d both gone through their reckless, heedless years, an unspoken agreement to balance each other and retain their places on the force. She sometimes wonders where she’d be if they hadn’t been a fulcrum to the other. Hesitates to question if she would have left the NYPD altogether. She’s not sure who she’d be without it – and she hates the thought a little, but she’s not sure who she’d be without him.

It's okay, she mouths to him, but he must not give a damn because he sidles right next to her, sternly looks at Kate (at least he’s not glaring), and while he doesn’t touch their victim, he pulls one of Olivia’s arms from her grasp. It’s always just so much, the nerves and fear and anger dancing through her veins underneath her skin, when someone touches her after she’s vividly recalled what happened at Lewis’s hands. She likes to think his name need not ever enter her consciousness again, but of course at times it does, and each time she feels like been laid bare. It’s the sensation like when she’s almost received a paper cut – narrowly avoided it but she can see the thin layer of skin that has flayed away, not yet exposing the blood running beneath. But the threat is still so, so close. And it’s that feeling but it’s all over her body, like the slightest touch could cause her to fly apart.

Except, it seems, Elliot’s. His hands grip her arm to pull her away from Kate’s panicked grappling, and she doesn’t feel like he’s run the paper back over the near-cut, but that he’s the barrier preventing more damage. She can’t remember the last time someone’s touch felt like a balm other than her son, to whom she tries to give the comfort, not receive. She could yield into it right here, and the power this man has over her is terrifying in light of his decade-long self-imposed absence. She doesn’t know what to do – to shrug him away or to sink into him, so she stays still. She lets each of them touch her, and she wonders if that push-and-pull will cause her to fly apart, regardless.

“It’s okay,” she says aloud this time, and Elliot’s grip softens, slides to cup her elbow instead of gripping her arm. Kate’s shackling lessens, as well, and she heaves a breath of air. “Not a babysitter, Kate.”

“Or a detective,” the cop in question chimes in from behind her, and she gives him a rueful smile.

“Not today at least,” she says, and Elliot’s eyes crinkle in the corners at that. Like he’s remembering his own green detective years. Or hers.

“Yes, Captain,” he says, stepping to her side opposite Elliot. “I’m Officer Gallin, miss, and I’ll be sticking with you,” he tells Kate, and Liv wants to roll her eyes. Of course. She’d bet her pension that he’s Irish Catholic. She looks over and clocks Elliot’s smirk. It’s a relief of sorts, to be able to be on the same wavelength in a humorous capacity, even amidst the tension of the day.

“I’ll see you soon, Kate,” she says to the girl who started all of this, whose bluster is dissipating by the second.

“You’ll come back?”

“I will,” she promises, as Elliot utters an unflinching yes at her side.

“You’ll – will you bring Danny back?”

“I can’t promise that, Kate. We don’t want anyone to get hurt during this, but it’s a possibility.” Ayanna has joined them, standing a few feet away and she gives a bracing nod at the statement as she adjusts the vest she’s already armed.

“Will you try though? For me?” her voice hitches at the end and she sounds so innocent in this moment that Olivia wants to throw in the towel, to say maybe she can be a victims’ advocate but she cannot be a fucking police captain anymore because it requires violence with the empathy – and then she recalls how little empathy is really present within the brass’s confines and she knows she has to remain. The burden is relentless. Elliot must understand because his hand has not left her elbow and it squeezes now, as a reminder. “Please, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I made you talk about it. I hate thinking about it and I didn’t want to talk about it and I wouldn’t cry at all if you killed Prokov but please, Captain Benson –”

And then all of the tension and fear tied to being touched washes away and Olivia knows she can initiate the contact and comfort, and she steps out of Elliot’s grip and wraps her arms around Kate’s slim form, hands cupping the back of her head and smoothing the knots in her hair.

“It’s alright, Kate, it’s alright. I’m so sorry for what happened to you. I am so sorry, and we’re going to bring them down. And you don’t need to apologize, Kate. I’m right here. I’m just fine.” Kate is hiccupping against her neck, and she meets Elliot’s eyes, and it is so many fucking years of staring at each other over a victim’s head, the two of them standing guard not only against the perpetrator of the violence but also against the harm and hopelessness in its wake.

She wants to protest, to buck at this sense of returning home in his presence and understanding, but she recalls his behavior in the viewing room, how he put his anger and quest for detail aside for her, how he let her focus on Kate’s needs because the opportunity for addressing her own has long since past. Remembers how he uttered how he had her, that it was okay, how he cradled her head against his broad chest and how he didn’t force her to dredge up the skeletons of her own trauma. How he’d stood strong when she needed to crumple, despite it being the reverse (or no connection at all) for so very long.

Ayanna brings them back to earth – ready with direction and orders. It’s her squad, her take. Olivia will fall in line, but knows without asking that Elliot won’t let her go it alone.

Her thoughts follow the same path they always do when she’s entering a dangerous situation. Noah. Her reason for being and the sweetest soul she knows. Amanda and the girls. Her self-built family. Fin. Her second-in-command and brother-in-arms and unlikely best friend. There are others but these are her people, the ones who would be able to articulate who she was, who might have still needed her if she were gone, who could attest to when she tried to listen to her better impulses.

And lastly, in long past years, her thoughts would fall on her mother and Elliot. The anchors she’d tried to love and then tried to not love, at times. Elliot’s presence feels like both a haunting and a salvation, even now. So instead, she sends a silent apology to Serena – who, for all her faults, did not want a life of danger and bloodshed for her only child. And she stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Elliot before they walk into the fray.

His Sergeant is rattling off teams – one to enter head-on and one to flank the side-entrance, one to stay back as a second layer of defense. He checked out once he confirmed Liv was with him, though he kept an ear out to make sure Jet had coverage with Reyes and Whelan. He’s half-convinced she insisted on coming because he’s now all but assigned her to watch out for Olivia. And he appreciates it, but he’s far more comfortable with her hacking then hauling guns around. He winces, because both Liv and Jet would knee him in the balls for that line of thinking.

He knows Fin is trying get here at record-breaking speed with her squad’s support, and he pushes away the guilt that they’re going in first. The drop is scheduled to happen momentarily, and at least Liv will have their back-up in the aftermath.

He’s sweating already, and fuck if that isn’t inconvenient. He wipes his brow, leans over to Liv, who is tugging her vest into place. She’s paler than he’d like, but god, she’s so lovely and her warmth beckons him, even now.

“You with me?”

“With you, partner,” she says, and it’s soft, and he needs to get ahold of himself because there was a time that those words would have sent a shot of security and surety through him, but now they just make him want to brush her hair out of her right eye, kiss her, and take her the hell out of here.

She has experienced so much undue pain that he could rail at the world on her behalf. He is furious at a dead husk of a man who tormented her, but also at this job that sends her in front of the firing squad on a regular basis. At Kate, who needs their help but set them on a fucking ridiculous spiral of recollection and grief. At her mother, who raised her with nonchalance at best and cruelty at worst, whose own history directed her on this path of a career. At himself, who taught her to trust her partner and then left her to navigate a darkness of unrelenting monsters all on her own.

He puts it aside for now. They will have tonight, tomorrow, the rest of their lives. He will do whatever it takes – and even if she never wants more from him than lukewarm friendship, he will count himself a lucky bastard. He will be her friend, colleague, supporter, and he’ll beg for her to let him stay around even if she doesn’t want any more than that – just in case at some point she needs him again.

They wait at the side door for the radio alert from Bell, who’s entering up front. The casino’s offices are oddly located near the front entrance so the team is bifurcating, half of them heading straight behind closed doors where hey expect the hand-off to occur, and they assume they can apprehend David Lesewski and Aleek Prokov. The other half of that task force will fan out across the casino floors to cease the gambling activity and stop activity of the patrons and prevent any zealous gamblers.

Their team has planned to rush the side entrance as soon as the main office is breached. As much as Kate apparently loves Danny, she was not hesitant to provide a clear outlining of his activities, supervising back-of-house. Where she herself was assaulted.

It goes down fast – faster than he’d expected. Too fucking fast.

“Stabler, move – we have Prokov, in pursuit of Lesewski,” he hears over the radio and they’re in, storming the door, with the battering arm of officers behind them feathering down the various hallways, as they’d decided over blueprint reconnaissance. He follows Liv, battling the notion that he should be in front, as they proceed to the back-office, guns in hand and eyes alert.

The door explodes open just as Liv’s fingers reach the metal knob.

“Get the FUCK BACK,” a voice erupts, and he’s seen the pictures, he knows this is Danny Lesewski, and he knows at once this is a man past the point of desperation. He has the same dark wavy hair as his brother, with a leaner and rangier frame. His eyes are near black, and Elliot can’t tell if that’s because they are that dark or because drugs have dilated them. He can guess, though. The whites of his eyes are as diametrically vivid as his pupils, and he’s aiming his gun while side-stepping out the door. There’s no talking him down.

“Liv,” he hisses, just as she engages. Tears sting his eyes, and it’s unprofessional but he it’s because he knows how this plays out. He doesn’t want another Gitano. They can’t take it and they’ve earned the space beyond their worst fears, at this point. But she’s different than he is, and he hates it in this moment but loves her for those differences. She doesn’t believe in lost causes. And Kate’s begging, broken pleas still ring in both their ears.

“Danny, it’s over,” she says, in her most soothing, dulcet tone.

“Fuck you, bitch! You turn Kate?” the vitriolic rejoinder comes immediately, and Elliot is back at an airfield twelve years ago willing away the gun to Olivia’s head. No, no, I don’t think that, not at all. Let’s just calm down, he wants to soothe again. It’s an icy realization that he wasn’t the one who saved her life that day.

Lesewski’s gun bounces in aim between the two of them, and both of theirs are raised. No way all three are walking out alive and goddamnit he should have listened to Fin. He should have fought her, sent her back, locked her in his SUV, waited on Muncy or whomever Fin wanted to send instead. He should have talked Ayanna out of calling her in in the first place. He should have never left her to be traumatized and tortured a decade ago, he should have told her how he felt years ago. He should have hugged her without the threat of death or overwhelming emotion as the impetus. He should have told her he loved her – or fuck, even just that he liked her.

He should have told her that she’s the best person he knows and he’s part of the reason he believes in God because he’s thought since about year one of their partnership that she was his own personal angel in the flesh. Sometimes over the years he wondered if that was actually true, if that’s why she never got shot, why she seemed impervious to harm, because she wasn’t of this plane. She was above it all. He thinks about the revelations of the day, of the harm she has endured. He looks at Lesewski’s gun, and he’s never felt like more of a idiot.

“Kate doesn’t want you to get hurt, Danny. She cares about you. She loves you,” Olivia is saying, trying to connect with him, but they both realize it’s fool’s errand because this man does not care about Kate in turn.

“I warned that bitch what would happen if she talked. Doesn’t matter what happens here. She’s dead already.”

Olivia takes a different tack. “What about your brother, Danny? We have David. We have Prokov. There’s no way out. Think about this.”

His sneer increases and Elliot wants to scream because he knows that look. This doesn’t end well, this doesn’t end well. It ends in tears and blood and he doesn’t want them to be his or Liv’s.

“Think about this, Danny,” he’ll try their other option. Danny doesn’t care about anyone else, but maybe he has a sense of self-preservation. “There’s only one way you walk out of here and that doesn’t happen if you don’t put down that gun.”

“Put down the gun, Danny,” Olivia reiterates, softer. So in sync.

“You think you know me?”

“No, Danny,” he says, pressing the connection. “No. But I think we can help you get out of here alive.”

Danny’s grin widens as Elliot’s heart sinks. That was a fuck-up, this only ends in a hail of bullets, and he wants Liv at home, in his grey sweatshirt, cuddling her son. God, if he can get his imaginary wishes, he wants her scars erased, and he wants his presence over their lost years, and he wants both her and Noah to be his – and not only can that not happen, but he also doesn’t know if they have a future in this moment.

“Fuck that shit,” Danny says with an eerie calm, and his finger pulls on his gun.

It has escalated so, so quickly and it’s gone awry so fast. They messed up – they attributed the cruelty to David and not Danny, sent the brunt of back-up to the front and not the side, not the back-office, and they’re paying for it now. Olivia wonders if Kate knew, if she was leading them into a trap after she’d disclosed in some false sense of loyalty to Danny. She wonders how badly she’s been hurt by Danny – remembers that Kate mentioned she was raped by more than one person at first and then only attributed to Prokov, and if her senses hadn’t been battered by triggers from her own past, she would have seen that before now.

Because now, she knows clear as day that Kate’s affection for Danny is a Stockholm’s syndrome of sorts, and that he has raped her, too.

But suddenly those thoughts are far, far from her mind, because his gun is firing and Elliot’s coaxing voice has shifted to shouting, and they are both shooting, too.

One, two, three – four shots? The staccato sounds pound around her and from her, and she isn’t sure at first but then Danny is down, sliding against the office doorframe and clutching at his chest, and she kicks his gun away, pivoting as quickly as she can to seek out her partner.

Elliot is propped up against the wall, but there’s blood spatter around him and his eyes are a frighteningly clear blue amidst a pale, shaken face. He’s holding his arm and she leans and all but crashes into him rather than taking the few steps toward him. The panic is visceral, it clutches her chest as she realizes it’s not just drops but streams streaking down his upper arm to his elbow, and she tries to tamp the hysteria back so that she can help him first.

“Your arm –”

“Liv. Olivia.” He breathes, but she’s trying to see how bad the wound is while both his shirt and the blood are blocking it and she also remembers her own blood, Lewis fresh on her mind, thinks about how she thought each day with him was the day she’d die and she’d never see Elliot again.

“He shot you –”

“He’s down, right?”

“He’s down, but your arm –“

“I’m okay, it’s okay, Liv. Flesh wound. It's alright, baby,” he says softly as he flexes his arm so she can see. She’d roll her eyes under different circumstances at both the action and pet name but the easing in her chest is tangible and she hiccups over a sob instead.

“Stop that. You’ll make it worse.”

He snickers a little and relief is overwhelming; her legs feel unsteady as she tries to process that the stand-off is over, that they’ve survived, that they’re okay. That once again her partner is nursing a potentially unnecessary bullet wound but that they’ll make jokes about it one day rather than remember it as the day it all went to hell. She sucks in a breath, trying to normalize her heart rate, trying to reacclimate to a world in which Elliot knows, but in which Elliot is safe. And supportive.

“El,” she says on an exhale.

“I’m starting to think it might be okay to shoot first and ask questions later.”

She smiles, because didn’t he always kind of think that? He definitely thought it was alright to punch first and ask questions later. But then his face blurs a little and the smile shifts – he doesn’t look so soft towards her anymore and she wants to grumble at him for being inconsistent, for changing the game on her again. It’s not fair, after all these years.

She opens her mouth to tell him just that, but then the hallway around them wavers a bit.

“Liv,” her name is tense and terse from his mouth, and she can’t think why he’d be mad at her. “Olivia!”

And then the world just – feathers out from her, like abstract perspective overtaking the reality. The only constant is that his hands are on her now, and she wants to tell him that she likes that, but she can’t find the words. Pain is suddenly present, too, and she’s awash with it, wants to climb out of her skin and into his to get relief. She doesn’t understand what’s happened. But he sounds commanding, even if afraid, and so for this one time, she decides she’ll surrender. He told her, after all, back in the interrogation room. I’ve got you, Olivia.

The hallway tilts once more, and her recollection fragments further. All she hears is his agonized voice hoarsely repeating her name. She desperately tries to recall what happened and why he is so upset, grasp what year it is, what has caused the now receding pain. Tries to remember that it’s not a good thing that the pain feels less pointed and present. It's a futile effort; her shortness of breath increases, her thoughts lose their tenuous connection, and the world dissipates into dark.

Chapter Text

“No, no, no, no, no,” Elliot’s not sure how many times he has uttered the denial as he grips Olivia’s now limp form to him with his good arm and maneuvers her to the ground. This isn’t happening. It’s been a fucking mess of a day and he had a bad feeling about all of this when Ayanna told him they were bringing in SVU in the first place. It feels like a fever dream. All of their close calls and near misses effervesce in his mind; all the times he’d managed to protect her or the damage had been minimal or it had been him on the ground with her pleading voice overhead. He’d never thought before about the toll that must have taken on her, to be the sentry at his hospital bedside until she’d passed him into Kathy’s safe keeping. He’d never been on the other side – she’d always been so damn invincible even when it defied logic, she always remained standing.

And now, on the other side, he can unequivocally say that this is fucking awful. The worry and panic claws up his chest, at his throat, until he feels like he is choking on it. His hands shake and tears sting the back of his eyes and he wants to scream even as he wants to help her, because the thought of what might happen now is manifesting as physical pain. In his head, in his chest. And the therapy sessions he’s often dodged have told him that is possible – he remembers a similar sensation in a bus station terminal years ago when a flash of knife had swooped through the air towards Olivia’s throat, and his world had stopped, and even when it resumed, everything had been turned on its head.

He'd just called her baby and she’d only slightly glared at him, smiling instead with sheer relief and calling out his fragile masculinity as he tried to flex despite the graze Danny’s bullet had tunneled on the surface of his forearm. He’d just called her baby and she’d smiled, is what he can glean from that, and it’s not fucking fair because the secrets have wrenched from them in the worst way but this is supposed to be their path forward.

This is supposed to be their new start, the beginning of a parallel universe that had merged with their current through absence and car bombings and blood. And that’s not fair either but it’s the reality he accepts now and he’s learned he can be grateful for this chance even as he mourns his wife, because it turns out people are more complicated creatures than he’d ever given himself credit for being. And he knows now that he had more love to dole out than he’d realized in his younger, more arrogant years.

This is supposed to be a chance, and he’s supposed to take the burden away from her – the things she’s carried alone for so long are his to shoulder as well now, and he can’t fucking do that if she slips away because of some piece of shit like Danny Lesewski. Because of the hurtful, misguided actions of a victim who Olivia couldn’t help but want to protect. Because he had never been as good at the job without her as with her – because he called her into this instead of begging to take her on a date.

“Please, Liv, come on,” he murmurs, disrupting his own repetitive rejection of the scene at hand. There had been officers behind them before the shots; he turns behind him as he lays Olivia down, pushing down to staunch the blood from the bullet wound just below the indent of her vest and running a bloody hand to move the silky layers of her hair back from her face.

Moisture drips down from his cheek to hers, and he’s not sure if it’s his sweat or tears – they were so close to this being a sore rib for her and some stitches for him, and they could have gone home together tonight. Could have tried to communicate without the threats from Kate and the watchful eyes of Ayanna. She seemed to trust him back in that interrogation room, was grateful to him for not demanding the details, and he could have just taken her home and been there. Held her to remind himself that she survived and to show her that he can be what she needs now.

“We need paramedics here now – secure him!” he yells to the uniforms swarming him, nodding at Danny’s prone form.

“Was there another shooter?” he hears over his shoulder as he returns his focus to Liv.

“No, he got off two shots. I don’t know how the hell he managed it, we both hit him.”

“Yeah, one to the arm, one to the chest. He’s dead.”

“He hit her right side and my left arm. Fucking lucky shooting. I told you to call for –”

“Medics are on the way – the paramedics were at the scene; they’re heading here now,” another voice, and he sees what has to be a rookie cop kneeling next to him on Liv’s other side. The kid looks like he’s hardly older than Eli, and Jesus, they are too old to be doing this. They have earned a reprieve from this.

He’d thought the day couldn’t get worse when he was looking at Olivia’s scars through the viewing glass, realizing how much harm had been done to her in his absence, and now her life is slipping through his fingers and his hands keep sliding off her form, slick with blood, and it all feels so fucking futile. Pointless and unnecessary and wrong.

“Olivia, Olivia, please don’t,” he whispers. “Hang on for me; they’re coming. Please don’t go.” He can’t stop the mantra; just in case she can hear him, just in case she’s trying to fight, he wants her to know this time. He wants her to know that he’s here for her and she doesn’t have to fight by herself again.

“Her squad – they were coming. Sergeant Tutuola,” he says. He doesn’t know how Fin could help but he wants her to have all the people who make her feel safe around her now.

The uniform behind him rattles off their position over the radio, adding to the paramedics request but caveating that the immediate threat is over. They don’t actually know that, though, and Elliot whips around to glare at him.

“He’s down but the scene is not secure. You tell them to fan out – check the office,” he nods behind the form that used to be Danny and then towards the additional uniforms coming down the hall. “Clear it and confirm – you tell Sergeant Tutuola once it is. What about Bell? What’s happening up front?” The uniform shakes his head; it’s not his priority right now, anyways. He turns back to Liv.

He fiddles with her vest with his bad arm, but it’s ineffectual and the kid’s hands stop him. “Can you reach under to apply pressure?” he asks.

Elliot looks, realizes the bullet wound is low enough beneath the vest that he can try staunching the blood without removing it from her, but it didn’t help for shit, and he wants it off her. “Yeah. I – yeah, I can.”

“Keep it on. Let the paramedics remove it – was she hit more than once? It could be stabilizing her.”

It’s not, but it’s the right protocol and Elliot doesn’t have it in him to argue, and Liv would tell him to do this by the book, so he presses harder against her side, lowering his forehead to hers.

“Stay,” he whispers.

When she opens her eyes, she wakes to Elliot’s tear-stained face and god, the pain is back and it’s unrelenting. It’s centered in her abdomen, to the right side, but her whole body feels like it’s tensed to ward it off and she’s immediately exhausted – she wants to go back to the respite of unconsciousness. But her partner looks so worried, and he’s crying, and she doesn’t know what to do with that. He looked a little like that when Gitano nearly wrecked their partnership, when she held her hand to her neck thinking that the blood might be the remaining minutes of her life seeping away. But it wasn’t, and then Elliot wasn’t crying for her, he was furious with her, and they both made choices she wishes she could take back.

But now, he looks so sad and so concerned, and his hands are pushing on what she assumes is her bullet wound and godamnit she thought she was going to manage to retire without ever being shot. She’s not sure if she’s going to die and she feels like she should be more concerned about that, but everything seems slightly tinged by unreality and she can’t summon the wherewithal. She wants to see his eyes, though.

“El,” she rasps, and they shoot right to her face and then one of his hands is at her hairline. He’s trembling and a little erratic, and there’s blood all over his hands but he grips her skull regardless.

“Olivia. You’re – it’s gonna be okay. You hear me? You’re gonna be okay. Paramedics are coming and Fin is coming and you just gotta stay awake.” She smiles, just a little, her eyes closing. She’s so tired. “Liv! Liv!” and then he’s yelling and she just wants him to be a little softer. She wants to tell him he’s not very good at this. He’s being sweet and saying the right things but he’s a fucking mess and he’s rambling. And she gets it – she remembers doing this for him, remembers doing this for Fin. She wants to tell him he’s supposed to be the calmer one in this situation, wants to tease him.

She wants to tease him for other things - for his abundance of muscles and absence of hair, for his intensity and complete technological ineptitude. For his persnickety clothing preferences and his snobbish coffee requirements, for his utilitarian home and industrial design leanings. She wants them to have the lighter moments, the banter at which they excelled in their early years. She wants that lightness with the weight of the deeper affection she’s pretty sure lies between them now. She wants that lightness with the physical attraction she’s definitely sure lies between them now. It’s so unlike her, and it’s damned inconvenient that this is just occurring to her now, but she thinks she could let go of her abandonment issues if he could let go of his rage and resentment and they could be something wonderful together.

But she can’t have any of those things if she bleeds out on this floor and she wonders what she’s done to offend Elliot’s god because she’s fairly certain she’s paid a pound of flesh already.

He’s still trying to get her to open her eyes and he’s shouting her name now, and she raises her lids half-mast to glare at him because it hurts.

“I know,” he says. “I know, I’m sorry. Please, Liv. I know it hurts but please stay with me. Stay awake.”

“Trying,” she mumbles, but she finds it hard to lift her eyes open again after a blink, and he panics.

“Try harder,” he insists, and why is it that men react to being scared by lashing out and defaulting to anger? She thinks he should have evolved past that by now.

Her glare strengthens. “Asshole.”

He smiles then, and it feels wrong and alarming, because he looks brutal. She’s not sure if it’s her blood or his but he’s accidentally smeared it on his face at some point, wiping the sweat and tears away, and his eyes are wild  - she thinks he might be in shock, a little bit, because he looks feral. But she must have responded the way he wanted her to, because he nods as he grins.

“That’s right. I’m an asshole. You gotta stick around to tell me that, yeah? I’ll argue with you all day long, Liv, if it keeps you awake.”

So that’s his strategy. God forbid Elliot Stabler give her sweet words and reassurance. He’s going to fight with her to keep her alive and conscious. She can’t help but smirk a little; it’s so him. It’s them, really. All of a sudden, he feels more like the partner he was before he walked away from her than he has since he’s been back. She can’t help the tears that fill her eyes at that realization. He has no idea how just being her dumbass overprotective and emotionally stunted partner feels more like a homecoming than anything else she can recall.

“Shit, I’m sorry. It’s okay, Liv. Just keep your eyes open, ‘kay? Don’t cry, baby,” he’s murmuring now, and he misunderstood, but that’s alright. She thinks maybe she could be in her early forties again, running around New York with her best friend by her side, and while she wouldn’t trade her life with Noah for anything – it feels so reassuring. It feels right. For those years, that’s who she was supposed to be. That’s who he was supposed to be.

“We’re gonna have more than this, you hear me?” he says, and his accent is thicker with worry, and he looks younger as the tears haze her vision. She nods; he seems so certain. “We’re gonna figure our shit out and I know I'm skipping all the steps. I’ll wait til you’re ready, but there’s no one else for me, Liv. I want you. I want the everyday. I want to wake up with you, you know?”

Out of nowhere, it makes her think of Johnny Cash. She hears a strong twang and deep tones, and it's nonsensical but pervasive. She can’t seem to cling to a thought for long, but Serena flashes in front of her eyes. Her mother had decidedly not been a fan of country music. But she once admitted a couple of the artists of that genre – Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, maybe a handful of others – there were some who were colloquial poets of a sort. Whose style and dictation was not of her own but whose words had such meaning and depth. Serena told her once about how a reporter had asked Johnny Cash what he thought paradise was like. She’d never forgotten the response.

“Having coffee,” she mumbles, eyes drifting closed again.

“What? No, Liv, eyes open. Liv!”

But the pain has ebbed again, flowing away from her like the undercurrent of a wave. Dragging her to peaceful darkness that she knows she should resist but the undertow’s pull is strong, and the reprieve from the pain beckons.

This morning. With her. Having coffee, she thinks. That was Johnny Cash’s definition of paradise, the simple day-to-day living with the woman he loved. What that must be like, she wonders. He was talking about June Carter... the love of his life. Maybe it’s ironic, she ponders, trying to stay connected to the thought and respond to Elliot, but losing grasp with each passing moment. Maybe it’s ironic, because Johnny was a married man when he fell in love with June.

“Where the hell are the EMTs? It’s been too long – can they not get in? Clear it, godamnit!” She wants to shake her head at the shouting and demands rushing around her. Stop, she wants to say. Just keep talking to me. She’d been thinking about something soft and good.

The words of one of Elliot’s most oft-uttered prayers take precedence, pushing the love affair of others out of her mind, bringing her back to the chaos around her. Forgive us our trespasses. She’s never understood it more. She’s just about to relent to the darkness pulling her back when she hears another voice rising above the din.

“Stabler!”

“Fin – God, we got him. But he got off two shots. Hit us both when he went down. Close proximity, bullet to her right side, just under the vest. I – where are –”

“Jesus Christ. Move,” her sergeant shoves the young cop she hadn’t even noticed away from her other side. “They’re right behind me. Keep the pressure on,” he nods to Elliot.

“Hey Captain,” his voice is softer than she’s ever heard it, and that does nothing to stop the tears running unhindered from the corners of her eyes down her temples, into her hair, where Elliot’s hand periodically comes up to brush the crown of her head. Now Fin’s hand does the same. “Thought we’d talked about you running into scenes guns blazing without me.”

And god. These two men. These men, along with her son and a few select others, they collectively make up her corner of the world and all the good that she knows. Sometimes she wishes she had the fairy tale cookie cutter life, but most times she thinks she’s the lucky one when she considers the loyalty and devotion that they have given her, ten-year missteps aside. She knows that she’s hurt. That she’s losing blood, that the danger hasn’t passed, but she feels so much safer knowing that they are on either side of her, anchoring her to this reality. Her tethers feel less frayed, and she fights her way back to the surface.

“Won’ do it again,” she slurs a bit, grimaces, and grips Fin’s hand at her side.

“Better not,” he bites out, and he seems livid. But she knows it’s on her behalf, and he’s never been a man of many words. “Faster – come on! Over here!” he calls down the hall.

“Oh, thank God,” Elliot mutters, and then the hallway erupts into a flurry of action. He’s pushed to the side as EMTs bracket her, but she keeps a grip on his hand as long as she can, and then she keeps her eyes locked on his as an oxygen mask is fitted over her face, as she’s slid onto the backboard to be transported, sparking bursts of nauseating pain with every movement.

“I’m with you,” his voice is near her still, even as the pain starts to take over and a shroud falls over her vision. She’s fighting, because she wants to stay with them both, and she’d meant to tell Fin to take care of Noah but she knows – she knows that he knows. That he will. “You hang on, you’re gonna be okay, I’m going to stay with you.”

Suddenly the scenery shifts and they’re moving down the hallway but somehow, she’s sure she feels his lips on her forehead, or maybe that was before they started moving. It’s all blurring together now and her tethers loosen again. One more time for good measure, she hears, “Please, Olivia. Stay.”

And she hates it a little – the feminist, self-assured woman in her will never admit to it entirely, but these are words that she’s wanted from her mother, from anyone for her whole life. From him specifically for longer than she’d admit.

When she slips into the darkness this time, it doesn't feel like giving up, but like she’s giving him the reins for a while. Just so she can close her eyes and heal.

Chapter Text

Fin watches his Captain as she’s loaded into the back of the ambulance, her erstwhile partner shadowing her progress as he semi-effectually barks orders at the EMTs and doggedly ignores the blood streaming from his own wound. From what Fin can tell, it’s a graze versus a through-and-through, but it’s deep enough to warrant attention. Not that Stabler seems to care in the slightest.

He sighs, the weight of the day filling him, and tries to push it back. He’d had a bad feeling. He doesn’t believe in omens or shit like that, but when Liv had told him OC was calling her in, he’d looked around at how strapped for capacity their unit was, and his heart sank. Because he knew she’d have to go alone, and despite her protests of indifference, he knew she didn’t like that. He didn’t like it either.

Then he gets the most ridiculous, bullshit phone call of all time, with Stabler telling him Liv had gotten close to the vic (of course she had), that the vic had made her show her scars and compare horror stories before offering up a statement and a confession (what the fuck), and that they were on their way to the casino where the initial perps were holed up and planning a trade-off of laundered funds (again, what the fuck). And he’d told Elliot. He’d told him to wait, that some of the squad was on their way to help, but no. True to form, Elliot Stabler trusted his own wild impulses, used his own people, and made sure that he pulled Liv along with him every goddamn step of the way. Fin thinks it’s a lesson in the past and a prediction of the future all at the same time.

He leans over the back of the ambulance, holding both doors open on either side of him.

“Where are you taking her?”

“Mercy – it’s fastest. How long did you say it’s been since she was hit?”

“Over fifteen minutes. Seventeen, maybe eighteen,” Elliot cuts in. “Where the hell were you guys?” his voice sharpens in anger.

To his credit, the paramedic ignores him, just nods at the timestamp, and keeps his focus on Liv. Good for you, kid, Fin thinks. It doesn’t give him much comfort, though; she’s unconscious, but at some point while they carried her from that godforsaken casino hallway back outside, she coughed up blood, and it lightly circled her mouth then sloped down her jaw a little bit, creating a macabre mask. Christ, Liv, he wants to say. We can’t keep doing this.

Elliot seems to be intently ignoring the additional blood and what that might signify; he is singularly focused on getting Liv away from the crime scene and into a hospital as soon as possible.

He doesn’t want to argue with that approach. Olivia Benson has been indomitable since he met her, sometimes larger than life alongside her partner, sometimes lurking away from the attention in the shadows while still seeking truths, equally as awe-inspiring in her quest to see healing for victims as she is to see justice done to those who committed the violence. She can wildly veer from deeply empathic to soul-searching and introverted to furious and commanding, dependent on the circumstances. He doesn’t always know which way she’s going to go, but he knows what the options are, and he has deep affection for every version of Liv he’s ever met. He’s not one to examine his feelings, and he’s never thought much about it other than that – and it’s easy to default to blind loyalty regardless of emotion because now she is his Captain.

But. If he’s honest with himself, Liv is part of his family. And it’s not merely duty that would compel him to lay down his life for hers if the situation called for it. Nor her for him – though he’d never want her to do that.

They’ll probably never say it aloud, and he’s okay with that, but it’s been a nice certainty of the last decade or so of his life that he and Olivia will stick together and look out for each other. They belong to each other, in a somewhat arduous and definitely unspoken way.

Which is why watching her so still has him in motion, his hands trembling and his head jerking like he can shake this away. He’s not sure what he’d do without her. He’d walk straight out the doors of SVU, that’s for sure. Not because she makes him stay there, but because she inspires him to. He doesn’t want to do it without her.

And oh, god, Noah. He can’t even go there; he needs to call Rollins because she’ll know how to comfort the boy and for all he loves the kid like a nephew, he has no idea what to say to him in a moment like this.

He has a weird longing for Munch; misses his own former partner more than he has in years. John had a strange and endearing way of making everything seem like a joke or a conspiracy theory until things really mattered, and then he’d give soft, calm words of wisdom and guidance that Fin could fucking use right now. He’s willing to bet his mere presence would make Liv smile, and he’d give just about anything for that at the moment, as well.

“Fin!” he flinches at the desperation in Stabler’s voice. Just like Noah, it doesn’t bear considering what will happen to these people if Liv is snatched from their lives. He wonders if she knows just how much weight she carries, just how important she is to people. She likes to think herself a lone wolf and he likes to humor her in most things so he lets that carry on, but he could almost laugh at how wrong she is in that regard.

“You go to the hospital – you stay with her, man. I’ll finish up here.”

“Yes – I – thank you. You gotta find Bell, okay? Never got an update on the front-of-house takedown but I can’t stay –”

“Course you can’t stay. I’ll find her. I’ll tell her.”

The surprisingly even-keeled EMT goes to swing the door shut, but Stabler stops him with one more question.

“Noah? Fin – what do we tell –”

“I got that, too. We gotta know what to tell first. But I’ll call Amanda. Liv – she’d want her to know. She’d want her to be the one to talk to him. And when she wakes up, she’ll want her there, too.”

“When she wakes up.”

“Yeah, Stabler. When she wakes up.” That seems to help, and Elliot nods his head a little, though he still looks like an extra from a B-grade horror movie.

“Okay. I’ll find you at the hospital.”

“See you soon, man. Watch out for her.” And with that, the doors close, Olivia’s translucently pale face hidden behind them, and the ambulance peels away from the scene. Fin wants to be in there with her but knows the best way to be there for his Captain is to do what she would do when she can’t.

Still, the conversing with Stabler, the fact that all of them are in the field together, the sheer rush of it all – he can’t help but recall the years it was Benson and Stabler, Tutuola and Munch. Barely corralled by the perennially fed-up and harangued Captain Cragen. If you’d told him in those years that he would someday be nostalgic for the bickering and late hours, the bad coffee and poor lighting, the ancient computers and endless bureaucratic red tape, he would have laughed in your face. And he would have been wrong.

He shakes off the memories, compartmentalizes the worry for Liv, and goes off to find Stabler’s sergeant.

Elliot finds himself uselessly meandering about a hospital waiting room, yet again.

He’d held Olivia’s hand through the ambulance ride and thought about how that has become their preferred measure of physical contact since he’s been back in New York – and how strange it was that they never did that before he left. Which seems wrong in a sense. Friends, partners, comrades… they touch each other, don’t they? A clap on the back, an arm around the should, a pulsing squeeze of the hand to show solidarity and security. Their solidary and security had been threatened on a damn-near weekly basis over the years, and yet.

And yet, the closer they got, the less they touched.

He remembers realizing the issue early on, that they spent inordinate amounts of time fully in each other’s space. That he would grasp her fingers when a breakthrough idea occurred to him, that she would clutch his forearm to prevent or encourage his action, depending on the prompt. And then, there was – as there often was – a perp that changed it. And not a revolutionary one, just a run-of-the-mill asshole who could not fucking get over how pretty his partner was and talked about it incessantly. And he knew Liv was pretty. He did; he wasn’t blind. Plus, they encountered perps – and lawyers – who would refer to her as sweetheart or doll or honey all the goddamn time. He’d thought it was funny to watch her reaction. But this guy. This guy waxed poetic about how beautiful she was, and it just… landed. It registered that yes, his NYPD SVU complicated saint of a partner is also gorgeous.

And then it occurred to him how that might look from the perspective of his wife. When he was grabbing his partner’s hand and throwing an arm around her shoulder and standing in her space. And he had to pull back. So then he made a unilateral decision and he pulled all the way back, and there were so many times over the years that he just wished he could hold her hand – or offer any kind of small comfort. But he’d taken that away from her without even letting her know why. And he’d changed the rules, drawn lines with such certainty in the past that he couldn’t then cross them in the present.

Then he did the same damn thing in a much more visceral way when he evacuated her life years later.

So, when he held her hand in the ambulance – he thought about how small touches are one of the only things they do with any ease these days. She let him hang onto her hand as she turned away in a conversational goodbye, she gripped it when they were searching for his son, she leaned into his space in gratitude and agony, and she let him hold her in an interrogation room mere hours before now.

He counted the new changes and new realizations as he traced her palm. She has soft hands, long and graceful fingers, adorned by simple yet delicate rings. Groomed nailbeds and painted nails that speak to a feminine luxury that exists outside her role as Captain. Veins just under the skin tracking the beating of her heart and usually – a strong, decisive grip. He loves how her hands show what a dichotomy she is.

And then those hands were pried from his grip all too soon and unfeeling doctors forced him into a curtained corner while they took her away, and their assurances meant nothing because he wasn’t holding her hand anymore.

He’d been ushered into that separate section of the ER, forced to acquiesce, and sit while they took his vitals and stitched and bandaged his arm, while a very kind nurse who was probably younger than Kathleen read off a list of what not to do during the healing process, and then freed to wander while he waited. Waited for news on Olivia, waited for Fin, waited for his squad.

They’d whisked her off with speed and urgency, and their medical jargon-filled yelps at each other meant nothing to him other than she needed help, which he knew already. And so now he’s sitting alone and answerless, wishing he could hold her hand again.

He should be more concerned about what happened to David and Danny, if they got Prokov along with the brothers, if Kate fell into a panic after Olivia wasn’t able to keep her promise to come back, or if she even cared at all. He does have a corner of his mind dedicated to Bell and Jet and the others, wanting to ensure they did alright and they’re all walking out of that godforsaken casino in one piece. But the majority of his energy is focused right here, staying strong for Olivia in spirit until the doctor comes out to bring him to her, and he can be strong for Olivia in person.

He owes her no less. He owes her so much more.

He is trying to separate it – Jesus, he’d just found out what had happened to her in his years away, and he knew she wasn’t frozen in time waiting for it but fuck he’d hoped the changes that would occur in her life in his absence would be good ones. And that’s naïve and self-centered and he fucking knows it but he just wanted to have it all. He wanted to take his wife and son away, to preserve his marriage and his family’s happiness, and he wanted his wonderful, willful paragon of a partner to thrive without him because that let him get away with it all scot-free.

It was stupid and ignorant and unfair to both the women he loved, but he was trying to do the best with what he had. And when he came back, when she walked through the fog and his head was in shambles worried about Kathy – he just thought, god, she’s so beautiful. She’s so strong.

And then she was.

She was strong for him and his family. She was his rock and his friend. And she had a thousand promotions and commendations, she had a squad whose loyalty defied logic, she had a beautiful son and a home. A home she’d crafted and curated and made safe for her baby. And he’d missed it but she’d done it, so maybe at least a part of his wild-winged and selfish hypothesis was right.

But now he knows she accomplished all that after she was drug into the depths of hell by a sadistic madman, and that’s really all he knows. But his heart and his head are in alignment on this one, telling him that if he’d been here, maybe he wouldn’t have prevented it, but it sure as fuck would have played out differently.

And just as he’s trying to swallow that blame, that acidic self-hatred at his own choices that left her a lone soldier, she’s struck down working on a case for him. At his request. And he wants to cry, he wants to scream, he wants to unload the chamber of his gun into something because it feels like a cosmic joke that after all they’ve been through today, he’s in a hospital room waiting for news about her as someone other than her emergency contact.

He's not even sure that they will tell him when there is news.

And there’s no one to blame but himself, nowhere to cast the impact of his fury and the depth of his regret other than internally.

He sits, and he festers, and he worries, and tries to distract his brain from anything other than picturing the exact manner in which a monster would burn innocent flesh to cause the scarred constellation he saw. To distract his brain from conjuring up what else could have happened to constitute prolonged assault, what else might have happened over four days, what else he might have done after he lured her out for a goddamn second time.

He hardly registers when Bell and Jet and Fin trickle in, barely listens to the conversation about Rollins and Carisi taking care of Noah until they know more. Doesn’t clock it when others in Olivia’s squad come to stand watch – hears their names, maybe. Bruno and Velasco and the younger woman whose jacket reminds him of a decades past Olivia. Grace, she introduces herself, and he remembers briefly considering that name for his own girls; decides they could all use some grace at the moment.

They wait for hours. Maureen calls and Kathleen comes. The twins text him and Eli leaves a surprisingly frantic voicemail that he misses the one time he abandons his post to go to the bathroom. He talks his youngest down in a call back, registers how seamlessly Olivia reentered his life and offered her support to the other people he loves. He’s never properly thanked her for that.

Fin leaves multiple times to call (and answer calls from) Amanda, who is apparently fighting tooth and nail to leave Noah with her husband so that she can be there with the rest of them. Fin stands steadfast, and the argument of this is what Olivia would want is a tough one to beat. Still. Rollins calls every half hour without fail, despite the lack of news for several of those intervals.

Bell fills him in but seems to know any detailed updates are falling on deaf ears; two other cops were shot but no loss of life other than Danny Lesewski, who was apparently the mastermind behind his older brother. They’re holding Aleek Prokov and David, and Prokov seems to be the better connected of the two. Might flip on other traffickers, but he won’t get a solid deal. They have too much on him.

Kate is apparently back at the station, and if it weren’t for his current state of mind, Elliot would be concerned about who is keeping her company. She was attached to Olivia, but she’s also a significant part of why Olivia is lying open on an operating table, so he finds it hard to summon sympathy. They haven’t booked her yet, but Ayanna has kept her promise to help her; remembers that she promised Olivia they’d try to work out a deal.

He irrationally wishes that Noah was there. Not that he’d want to expose the boy to the precarious health of his mother, the isolated cold of the waiting room, the tension of the cops standing guard… but he wants to be able to touch a piece of Olivia. Thinks it might help to run his hand through Noah’s tousled curls, to see the smile and the head tilt that he knows Olivia has nurtured through the culmination of a calling she was always meant to answer.

He comforts himself instead replaying the happiest images he can call forth of her – realizes they are woefully sparing, and his neglect had something to do with that. So he just thinks of Noah, and then thinks of the early years. Her sweet, mocking smile, her catching the car keys the few times he let her drive, her knocking her knee into his on her stoop steps one of the many times they found their way back to each other. Lets those soft moments coalesce, so that’s all he sees instead of the anxious and sorrowful faces of those around him.

“Family of Olivia Benson?”

He’s never shot out of a chair so quickly in his life, and his eyes flick to Fin’s, because as much as it hurts to acknowledge this, he’s pretty sure he needs this man’s permission to hear the update.

“Here,” Fin says; turns out he moved just as quickly and they’re flanking the doctor, whose surgical mask has fallen around his jaw, cap pushed back. The rest of their respective squads hang back at a slight distance, all poised for the news. “How is she?”

“Captain Benson suffered from a gunshot wound on the right side of her abdomen, though it was a through-and through –”

“We know that for god’s sake –”

“Elliot, shut up and let him talk!”

The surgeon is his height, with a weathered, knowing face and kind dark eyes that swivel to meet his. They remind him ever so slightly of Olivia’s, and he relishes the connection even as he clamps his mouth shut.

“It’s alright. I should have said, I’m Dr. Hughes. I’m in charge of Captain Benson’s care.” Elliot appreciates the use of her title here. The repetition implies that she’ll live to continue to use it. “She was fortunate in that it was a low velocity injury so there was less damage along the missile path than if it had been a rifle or a shotgun.”

Small mercies, Elliot thinks.

“The bullet did clip her lowest vertebral rib – it entered in a downward slant between the eleventh and twelfth. So while there was no organ damage, we had to remove bone fragments that sharded with the impact.”

“So,” he can barely form the words; the near and possible relief is so close to his grasp and dizzying in its potential joy. “She’s going to be okay?”

“She’s got a recovery ahead of her. I want to monitor the broken rib as well as the sutures. She may not fully regain holistic mobility on the right side, but I’m hopeful it will be more of an inconvenience than an actual impediment, with the right physical therapy and treatment.”

The air whooshes from his chest and he drops his hands to his knees, lowering his head towards the ground as he hears Fin bark out a laugh that was definitely tinged by tears. Murmuring picks up behind him, and he knows the rest of the assemblage could hear the update, as well.

“Thank you,” he whispers, to every deity in the world and especially his own, to Fin, to the doctor, to the paramedics, to her. “Thank you.”

Dr. Hughes smiles and lets the solace waft over the gathered crowd for a moment. Then he touches Elliot on the shoulder; brings his attention back to the forefront.

“Would you like me to take you to see her now?”

Chapter Text

Elliot follows Dr. Hughes, trying to bring his heartbeat down to a normal rate. His mind is processing the fact that Olivia will recover, that this day hasn’t wildly changed the trajectory of their lives, at least not in the way he’d feared. But his body is another story, nerves jangling and the rush of blood still clattering through him, the feel of Olivia’s still and wilted body echoing through his arms and hands. He still feels the rush of action, the need to protect, the urge to inflict harm back to the man who caused it. He feels the painful anxiety that was truly fear, and everything feels too heightened, too bright, in the sterile hallway leading to Olivia’s room.

He's familiar with this feeling, wonders if it’s akin to how soldiers feel when they return from war and are asked to resume the rules of civilian life, when before they’d been required to lean into their most primal impulses and cast laws of man aside in battle. This feeling made it difficult to return to Kathy and the kids after the worse cases, after cases that required his own brutality surge to the surface to bring down a perp. That physicality and lawlessness was so foreign from the tranquility of his home life, where the only chaos was brought about by his young children’s antics and the periodic jealousy and anger of his wife. He knew Liv understood this feeling; even going home to an empty apartment sometimes wasn’t an option for her, and she’d default to the cribs until the combat impulses subsided and the violence cleaned away. It’s why sometimes he turned to her, talked to her, instead of his wife.

Fin walks in step beside him, and it strikes him anew the import of the position that his old coworker and sometimes friend now holds in Olivia’s life. The doctor told them that two people could come back to see her, and Fin was the first choice, granting Elliot the kindness of being able to come, as well. He holds no illusions that if Amanda Rollins were there instead of caring for Olivia’s greatest treasure, that he would still be in that waiting room trying to talk himself down from the anxiety high.

He doesn’t begrudge Fin and Rollins that, not really. He’d wanted that for Olivia, wanted people to be steady and available in her life; she deserved being able to rely on a family more than anyone else he’d ever met. But it’s a strange and conflicting feeling, to recall the position he once held and realize where he’s been delegated now, even though he still feels the entirety of himself react to Olivia whenever she is near. Mine, it seems to say. Even more than when he felt the similar whisperings of my partner and the knowledge that she would never, ever forsake him.

He knows he deserves this, and he should be grateful for the fact that Fin hasn’t told him to get lost. He suspects the man next to him has a healthy amount of resentment for his treatment of his friend and Captain, and he was certainly furious about the events of the day, but that was all softened a little bit by Dr. Hughes’ words just moments ago.

“You saved her life. If you hadn’t been there to apply pressure, if it had taken even minutes longer for the paramedics to get to her, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

He’s not sure the statement is technically true – he thinks Liv is alive because they took down Danny Lesewski so quickly and the rest of the unit cleared the scene to allow help through. He’s not sure which of their bullets killed Danny, his or Liv’s. As has been true more times than he can count, she might have saved herself.

“She’s in and out of consciousness; though she’s not on as high of sedation or pain management medications as I would typically recommend,” Dr. Hughes says quietly as they pause near a private room, the steady beeping of a heart monitor sounding from within, and the door drawn nearly closed. “So, you may be able to talk to her a bit, but if she does wake up, please let her know that she can call a nurse to adjust her dosage and administration rate.”

“What? Why wouldn’t you just –”

Fin is quick to interrupt the question. “She doesn’t like pain meds. She knows she can have more of ‘em if she wants. Leave it alone.”

Elliot’s heart sinks, because he knows without asking that this has something to do with the abduction and prolonged assault that the day – Christ, almost the previous day now – had revealed. What had she said? Forced witness to other criminal acts? He knows without being told that the bastard had to have drugged her. From what he can glean, she won out, but he’d bet his soul that the coward had kept Olivia effectively immobilized if he’d managed to hold her for four full days. The battle impulses tremor through him again. Every time a new piece of information falls into place, he wants to hurt something, like it will do anything to balance the pain that was inflicted years ago. It’s foolish and misplaced and he knows this.

“Yeah,” he mutters, rubbing a hand down the back of his scalp. It feels as inconsequential as it sounds; there’s nothing else to say.

And then they’re in the room, and she’s there, on the bed – motionless and pale, and she looks somehow younger in repose. Or maybe it’s that she looks peaceful, oddly sweet with her tousled hair and face washed free of makeup and blood.

The room is starkly clean but quiet, with a chair positioned on the far side of the bed.

“I’ll leave you two with her; I’ll be back in two hours for rounds,” the doctor says from behind him. He turns, but his white coat-adorned back is already receding from him, and Fin is nowhere to be seen.

“Fin – where –”

“That guy looks like he’s got a foot in the grave already,” Fin reappears from a nearby room, chair in tow. “Don’t think he’s gonna miss this.”

“Jesus, Fin.”

“Yeah, well. I’m not as young as I used to be, but I’m not leaving ‘til she wakes up. And I figured you probably aren’t going anywhere either. And you got shot today.”

“Grazed.”

“Semantics. Either way, Cap would have my ass when she wakes up if you were propped up against the wall after taking a bullet to the arm.”

They settle into the chairs, on either side of her. It’s haphazard and years coming, but they have collectively given new meaning to a squad and to the blue line of loyalty that ties them together. They are a fucked-up version of a family. Snarky disagreements, misdirected fury, desperate fear, and unrelenting hours aside, they know each other better than some of their respective significant others and blood-related family members ever will. Elliot looks to Liv’s calm, motionless face, clocks Fin’s eyes intent and focused on his Captain’s form.

It hits him – Liv and Fin, they’re essentially siblings. Twenty-five years give or take of standing at each other’s side, squabbling and relenting. He remembers Liv’s face after Fin had been shot, her muted depression when Fin had planned to leave the unit. There was a time he considered himself a sort of overprotective brother figure to Liv, the senior detective partnered with the promising green rookie to train her. Back when he would tease her about her past boyfriends and prospective dates, back when the affection had been simple and guilt-free. And then their relationship had become deeper and less clearly defined, and he knew the emotion behind it was somehow a betrayal of his wife, and he’d sought ways to put more space between them. He’d decidedly ignored the attraction he felt for her. And then he’d left and come back, and now he sure as hell doesn’t feel brotherly to her in the goddamn slightest.

He knows what to call it now – he loves her, and he wants her. But Fin – Fin is the brother she’d hoped Simon could be. And apparently, he loves her, too.

Shit. He sighs, lifts his good arm to harshly rub a hand down his face. He’s fucked all of this up in more ways than he even realized.

“Fin,” he starts. Clears his throat because as hard as it is to have these kinds of conversations with Olivia, he’s willing to bet Fin is going to make it ten times harder for him and enjoy every single minute of his discomfort. “Fin, I’m sorry.”

His colleague doesn’t lift his eyes from Liv’s face, barely acknowledges he heard him. “Not your fault. She was always gonna go in there with you. You took the guy down, got her out.”

“No, I mean – well, I’m sorry for that, too. I know I can’t keep laying my messes at her feet.”

Fin huffs out a brittle laugh. “I’ll believe that when I see it. Maybe if you could stop getting her shot at, getting her into car accidents. Beyond that, I don’t think she really minds it deep down. You gotta understand – you gotta know by now that she’ll always come running when you call. I’d appreciate if you could just think a little harder about what you call her into.”

“Yeah, well. That’s closer to why I was actually apologizing.”

Fin’s head snaps up at that, his measuring eyes narrow. “What do you mean?”

“I’m sorry for leaving her, for leaving all of you like that.”

“Damn, Stabler. We know why you did it, man.”

“But she didn’t.”

“She did. It’s not that she didn’t understand why. It was how. It’s that you hurt her.”

“Yeah, and you took care of her while I was gone.” Fin nods, his eyes falling back to Olivia’s frame.

“Didn’t always do the best job of that.” Silence reigns for a moment; they wage their respective mental wars, Fin evaluating in detail the hurt he knows was done to his friend and Captain, Elliot lifting the spare pieces of information he has now and determinedly putting them back on the shelf, trying not to fall prey to the horror of the unknown.

“I think you did a better job than I could have. But I shouldn’t have left that way. And I’m sorry. And I just want to say,” Elliot’s voice breaks and he rubs at the tears he’d rather ignore streaming from his eyes. “I just want to say thank you. For watching out for her. For being there for her.”

Fin is quiet for a beat, and Elliot is grateful for the moment to compose himself. “I didn’t do it for you,” he says at last. “But you’re welcome.”

They lapse into the steady sounds of the hospital again. Muttered conversations and the periodic sound of soft crying or medical jargon-filled debates, the rattle of wheeled beds moving from room to room and the steady repetition of monitors and machinery. It makes Elliot think of the monotonous steady sound of the squad room when they were in between cases – paperwork to fill but overarching moments of quiet amidst the violence and chaos.

God, this day. He thinks back to his trepidation when Ayanna had first told him they had to bring in SVU. He remembers Kate’s vulnerable cruelty, the slow realization that she was clawing at Olivia’s past trauma that he had missed, remembers the clustering of scarring he’d seen and the heart-sinking denial. He remembers Olivia letting him in just a little bit, letting him hold her when he pushed aside his own ego to be there for her instead. He flinches, recalling the panic before they were on scene, the false relief when Danny fell, and the quick horror that followed when Olivia did the same.

He remembers her blood on his hands and his name on her lips when he’d begged her to stay with him.

He reminds himself of the doctor’s words; that she has a recovery ahead of her but that there will be a recovery. He schools himself now. He won’t bully or bulldoze her, but he will help her through this. He has to be the kind of person she wants to help her through this. He can do that, for her.

Despite the hell of the day, a weight is lifting, and Elliot wonders if he’ll feel that same sense of newness when Olivia opens her eyes. He closes his own, ponders hers. Liv has always been able to convey a multitude of emotion through a glance alone, and he attributes it to those dark, sometimes baleful eyes. He wonders if they had the same depth of emotion in them as a child, thinks she probably did. Something about Olivia makes her seem like she’s always known the worst of what the world had to offer, had always chosen to be symbol of light instead.

“She ever asks – we never had this conversation.”

Elliot smiles at that, the grin stretching his face like he’s waking up dormant muscles. “Hell, no. She’d kick both our asses.”

The minutes tick by slowly but he doesn’t mind so much anymore, not like he did when he was counting down the seconds in the hours they waited for any news at all. Now, he just listens to her heart monitor, counting his own heartbeats and pacing his breathing to her so that they can be together in her rest, her recuperation.

Fin fiddles with his phone every so often, texting Amanda, he presumes. For the most part they remain hushed, the muted sounds of the hospital still sounding around them to fill the void.

“Remember when you guys went undercover at a swingers’ bar?” Surprisingly, it’s Fin to break and introduce some conversation. Elliot snorts, trying to breeze by the fact that he has never once forgotten what Olivia looked like dressed up for that case, how it felt to introduce her as his wife.

“God. Yeah. Cassandra and her… brother.”

“Twin-cest. I tell you, man, we have had some stupid crazy cases over the years but that is still one of the wildest I’ve seen.”

Elliot laughs out loud now, softly, tempering the discordant tones against the mood of the patients and personnel around them. “You and me both, Fin.”

They recall a few more anecdotes at the surface level before the conversation runs dry once more, but this time, it feels friendly, the memories of some of their better times called forward for them both.

Dr. Hughes has long since stopped in for his rounds and numerous quick nurse check-ins have come and gone before Olivia’s forehead finally scrunches. Her hand nearest to Elliot’s position at her bedside, the one without the IV attached to it, lifts in a weak attempt to touch her face like she’s batting away gnats.

He immediately stops the motion, catching her hand in his own larger one and leaning over her, holding her hand to his cheek.

“Liv. Olivia, can you hear me?”

Fin leans forward as well, jarred from his light dozing and alert enough that Elliot would be hard-pressed to believe he’d actually been asleep.

“Hey, Cap. Liv. You’re okay.”

She opens one eye first, and Elliot wonders if that’s how she wakes on a regular basis – one eye open first to gauge the day before she fully commits. He wants desperately to know the answer. He thinks back to her murmurings when she lay in that hallway, after he’d told her he wanted mornings and the everyday with her, while he fought and pleaded to keep her alive. He wonders if she’ll remember.

Her eyes both lift to his, and he has cried so fucking much today but he can’t help it, the tears fill his eyes as blissful gratitude spreads through him.

“Hi, baby,” he says. He doesn’t even care that Fin is sitting right there. She’s let him call her that two other times in under twenty-four hours without kicking him in the balls but without truly acknowledging it, and he likes his odds right now. Third time’s the charm.

“Oh, ow,” she drones out, but she doesn’t tell him to stop. Close enough.

“Yeah. I’m so sorry. Bullet clipped your ribs, but it was a through-and-through. I know it hurts, but you’re gonna be okay. You’re gonna be just fine.”

She smiles softly, her lips closed and her eyes sleepy, a bemused expression on her face and he wants badly to kiss her. He presses a kiss to the inside of the palm of her hand, the one he’s still holding, instead.

She lifts her eyelids again, and it’s at odds with the environment because really, she just looks like she’s had a glass of wine or two too many, and it’s adorable. She’s always been kind of a sweet drunk, divergent from her mother in that way. She doesn’t rage at the world when she’s impaired; she softens, let’s down her guard, laughs more easily. It sends a pang through him, makes him want to protect her all the more.

She tilts her head, shares that smile with Fin. He grins back, placing his right hand on her forearm and brushing back her hair with his left.

“You were right,” she murmurs, and Elliot doesn’t know what she’s talking about but Fin laughs.

“When are you gonna figure out that I usually am?” he asks. She laughs a little, winces.

“Today…” she falters, residual concern ringing in her sonorous voice. “Today might have been a start. Is it still today?”

“Not anymore. They made an exception to the visitor rule. You were in surgery – they had to remove bone fragments where the bullet hit. You’ve been out for about eight hours.”

She nods, but it seems like a struggle for her to disseminate the information. Too much, too fast. Her head turns back again. “Noah?”

Elliot swallows down the lump in his throat that she seems to have put her trust in the care for her son, the knowledge of his location and safety, in him. He nods over at Fin. “He’s alright, Liv. Knows you’re hurt, but we didn’t tell him much until we knew you were gonna be okay. He’s with Rollins.”

“Can’t wait to see you,” Fin adds. “Amanda can’t either.” That soft smile graces her face again, and she nods a little bit.

“Thank you.” Her eyes are back on Elliot, and he’s not sure if she’s talking about Noah any longer. He shifts her palm into his other hand, bringing the first to cup her cheek as Fin leans back a bit. “Thank you, El.”

Fin stands, running a hand over his eyes, pulling his sardonic, nonplussed demeanor back together. “I, ah… I’m glad you’re alive. So glad you’re gonna be alright, Liv.” He turns, pauses at the room’s entry without making eye contact, voice deepening slightly. “You gotta keep your promise. Please don’t do that to me again.”

She gives a soft hum of assent, and Elliot thinks it bodes well for her memory retention that she remembered making that assurance.

Fin nods at him, keeping his gaze carefully averted. “I’m going to update the others, call Rollins. I’ll give you two a minute.” And then he’s on the other side of the curtain in a flash, and Elliot wonders if he hadn’t wanted Liv to see him cry.

It’s only the two of them, then, and he looks back at her, rubbing his thumb back and forth over the crown of her head, smoothing the soft tendrils of hair. And then he can’t help it – maybe he should have followed Fin, but he’d vowed to be stronger and more and there for her. So he has to let the levy break, and he has to let her see it.

His face crumples, and he puts his head down on the bed, careful not to bump her side, to stay closer to her arm and shoulder so that he can feel her warmth – and the sobs wrack his body like they’ve been building all day. And they have been. They are filled with ire and angst at the pain he missed and the pain he witnessed today and the sheer fact that a woman who has the prettiest smile he’s ever seen has been given so many reasons not to use it.

He doesn’t feel it until the sobs and the shame subside a little, until the shock of the day and the fear of what might have been have been are wrung from him a bit. She’s still awake, stroking the back of his head and the top of his shoulder, back and forth, back and forth. She doesn’t speak until he quiets, and he knows that she wants him to hear it.

“It’s alright, Elliot,” she whispers. “It’s alright. I love you, too.”

Chapter Text

Olivia knows they need to call the nurse, the doctor, someone to check on her now that she’s regained consciousness. Or maybe it’s unnecessary; she knows her Sergeant, and it was probably Fin’s first action to send someone her way after he left the room. She’s not sure how to process the sadness and resignation that was stamped on his face as he told her that he was glad she was alive, as he asked her not to do this to him again. She’s not sure how to process Elliot’s complete undoing at her side, the sound of his broken sobs reverberating in the room as she tried to soothe him. She’s not sure how to process the memory of him completely beside himself as he urged her to stay awake when they waited for help in that hallway, or the devastation in his eyes when he held her hours before outside the interrogation room. She’s not sure how she’s going to mitigate the worry and fear she knows this has caused Noah. The past couple of days have held far too much and she feels like this may be the moment that pushes her beyond the limits of her own control.

Maybe that’s alright.

She’s held onto control like a tethered lifeline for years. More than she’d like to recount. She clung to it after foolish decisions and steep Subway steps stole her mother from her, after her stay at Sealview snatched away her sense of security and the belief that her status as a cop exempted her from victimhood, after the brutal exit from her life of the only man on whom she ever relied siphoned away her confidence and idea of found family. After a monster struck her with the base of her own gun, stripped her defenses bare, scarred her, and left her a husk her former self.

Now, despite the throbbing in her abdomen and the tears in her eyes, the storm has quieted and the waves around her are slow and rolling. She thinks it might be time to let the lifeline go.

It’s more than she can bear to contemplate right now, but this case – Kate, Danny, a single bullet – they have changed her course and altered her world. She tries not to give the thoughts weight, tries to deny them credence. It’s too soon to consider, and she needs to talk to Elliot about her declaration. She needs to see her son. She needs to discuss treatment and planning and repercussions with her doctor. But she does know already. It will take time to heal, she’s already past the age many cops retire, her battered body can only take so much damage, and recovery may not mean full restoration to what she was. And physically – while she knows she spends more time in the field than most NYPD captains, she has started to struggle to keep up with the cops and detectives twenty plus years her junior. Maybe today was evidence of that.

And she realizes she’s more at peace with that knowledge than she thought she would be, and maybe it’s because of a particular shade of blue that bond her partner and her son. She is alright with that because she can’t fathom seeing Noah’s eyes filled with the same grief and desperation that poured from Elliot’s today. Because she doesn’t want to see that lost expression on Elliot’s face ever again. Because he’s somehow looking at her right now like she’s both lit the world on fire and offered him his greatest salvation.

Because she’s tired of pretending like she’s not terrified of leaving this world before she knows what it feels like for Elliot Stabler to kiss her.

Fine, she wants to say to Elliot’s God. You’ve caught me. All it took was a lucky shot from an asshole perp in a gaudy casino of all places, but I’ll admit it. I love him, and I want him, and I don’t want to be alone anymore.

“You, ah – you,” Elliot stutters, lifting his head from her side and staring her with such intensity that she wants to turn her head away to slow the swell of love coursing through her.

Oh, right. Well, she might have jumped ahead a little bit and she’s likely given him a bit of emotional whiplash. In her defense, she thought she was dying only hours ago, and the regret hurt more deeply and viscerally than Elliot’s hands pressing on her wound, trying to hold her together. I’m allowed to be ready. I am ready now.

And maybe she’s read this all wrong, but she can remember his words begging her to stay with him and telling her that he wanted the every day with her, and she wants that, too. She wants to know what it feels like for Elliot to come up behind her as the sun rises, before work and school and the day’s activity begins, while she’s making Noah’s breakfast, to feel his lips on the back of her neck with a murmured good morning. She wants to know what pet names he’ll call her and how many of them she’ll hate. She wants to bicker with him over mundane things like where he puts his shoes when he enters her apartment, to blow it out of proportion until one of them stops it with a kiss. She wants to know how his presence in her life will make it better, will make her son’s better. She wants to know how good she can be for him, if she can still offer him stability all these years later.

She wants to know how he likes to be touched, if he likes soft and sweet or demanding and a little raunchy. She wants to know if he’s a talker when he makes love (she’s willing to bet he is).

She wants to put those muscles of his to good use.

She takes mercy on him now, because he’s still half-crying and looking at her like she’s thrown the world off-kilter. Maybe she has.

“I love you, El,” she says again, dropping the too. Technically he hasn’t said it yet, but she doesn’t feel presumptuous. She believes there were probably versions of her life where he never came back into it, where they never got this chance, and she feels a degree of guilt at some of the circumstances that brought them here and the people they’ve lost along the way. But she’s endured her own suffering and penance. She’s so fucking tired of being the martyr and she thinks her good deeds probably outweigh her bad ones, and the lives she’s saved hopefully make up for the damage her violent conception added to the cosmic scale of right and wrong.

They’ve wasted too much time already. She deserves this.

She smiles a little, committing his expression to memory, and goes for the kill. She’s come this far; why stop now?

“Always have, in some ways. I think I always will.”

And now she wants to commit his expression to memory because if the moment weren’t so significant, she would be laughing. The poor man looks absolutely gob-smacked.  

Welcome to the club, partner. It’s been a day of revelations.

And apparently her doctor managed to save her life but is not as skilled when it comes to good timing, because she hears the curtain pull back from her room and sees who she assumes to be her surgeon smiling at her, and she wants to say thank you, and also to get the hell out because this is one of the most pivotal moments of her existence.

“Captain Benson,” the man says, seemingly entirely oblivious to the life-changing conversation unfolding in front of him. “You’re awake. Welcome back.”

No shit, she thinks, and tries to force herself to be grateful. She’s pretty sure at this point Elliot’s not going anywhere and it’s thanks to this man that they’re able to have this conversation at all. She wonders if she should ask him to take a look at El after he gives her update because she’s not sure if it’s exaggeration to say that he’s in shock. His eyes careen wildly to the doctor, then back to her, his mouth dropping open and closed like a fish, like he’s trying to form words but can’t summon them.

She feels a surge of affection for him; she has always appreciated how he can command a room and retain conviction in his decisions, his identity, his faith. But Elliot at a loss of what to do is one of her favorite iterations of him. There’s something utterly endearing about him when he’s in over his head, and she wonders if it’s a glimpse of what Elliot was like before his father and the Marines and the NYPD hardened him.

“I’m Dr. Hughes. I’m your surgeon. This is Nurse Fremont,” he gestures to a young, unassuming woman beside him, whose tired expression and blonde hair make Olivia think of Kate. She wonders how she is, who is taking care of her – she’ll be distraught given Danny’s death. Not to mention that she herself had promised to come back after the raid. She cringes internally; she knows better than to make promises like that. She tries to focus on Dr. Hughes. There is so much to cover: Kate, Elliot, how long will she be laid up and when the hell can she go home? It all feels insurmountable for a moment, so she directs her attention on the doctor’s words and her own wellbeing.

First thing’s first. Can’t really fantasize about sex with Elliot until she’s able to sit up in bed without assistance.

“The bullet managed to avoid major organs but did create breakages in your ribs on you right side, causing fragments we had to operate to remove. We’ll talk about recovery timelines, physical therapy, and what you can expect in more detail, but first, how is your pain?” She appreciates his brevity and focus, thinks that the man has a kind face and a better bedside manner than she’s often seen from doctors, particularly surgeons.

She debates. It’s… bad. Bad enough that she feels nauseous and a little disjointed, like she’s coming in and out of herself. She can’t begin to comprehend what it would feel like to throw up with a legitimate hole in her side.

But she also wants nothing more than to talk to Elliot. And the memories of Lewis and the alcohol- and drug-induced haze he inflicted on her are still near to the surface of her mind, threatening to poke and prod at her, ready to pull her into a flashback of remembered pain. That would do the exact opposite of the intent of painkillers; she cannot take the pain of the past coupled with the pain of the present.

“I – I don’t take opioids. It should be in my file,” she tells him, dancing around the question. Elliot’s hand tightens over hers, and while he still hasn’t said a damn word, he looks stronger as he nods at her.

Thank goodness. He’s not going to push her on this now. She doesn’t know what was said while she was in surgery and unconscious, but she’s willing to bet she owes Fin a thank you for that.

“It is, Olivia. Is it okay if I call you Olivia?”

She nods.

“I understand that you don’t like the feeling of prescription painkillers. We can explore non-opioid pharmacotherapy, but for tonight, for your immediate healing, I recommend that we do administer some relief. Your body has undergone a trauma, and the continued pain and heightened anxiety concerns me.”

Fuck. It concerns her, too. She knows her response to painkillers and the gauzy feeling that accompanies them. They put her right back in a godforsaken beach house, in the inky dark of the trunk of a car, tied to a chair in her own apartment that has been trashed and dismantled with evil, cigarettes, and her own blood.

“Can I stay? For more than the whole night?” Elliot’s sudden interjection pulls her back from the clutches of the panic, and she turns to him, but his eyes are resolutely aimed at Dr. Hughes. “I know you’ve already made an exception that we were here this late. But I’d like to be here until she’s discharged. I can have clothes brought to me – and it makes my outpatient care easier.”

“Detective Stabler, that could be days –”

“I understand what I’m asking.”

Dr. Hughes eyes the two of them, gaze flicking back and forth as he seems to make a decision. She doesn’t doubt that the horrors outlined through the documented injuries in her file are a contributing factor, and while she hates being pitied, at this moment she’s just relieved. Elliot, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to give a shit what the doctor’s answer is – he seems to think it’s a foregone conclusion. Knowing him, she thinks, it probably is.

“Will that help?” he asks her now, and she wants to yell at the nurse and doctor to get out of her room. These should not be the first words he says to her after she’s told him that she loves him for the first time in almost twenty-five goddamn years. “I’ll be here the whole time.”

He doesn’t spell it out more than that, but she can see a pleading in his eyes. He wasn’t there to protect her before; he left her alone in the world after all but forcing her to depend on him. And while some of the best things in her life have happened since he left – the worst did, first.

He can’t go back in time and kill William Lewis, ask her to blink her lights, be the person in the world who checked on her when others didn’t. But he can defend her from the memory now, let her lay down her guard enough to accept some relief and stand guard while she’s incapacitated.

She’s not sure it will work, if the nightmares won’t still be triggered by the drugged dimness she knows is coming. But. If anything will work, it’s probably this.

A tear escapes her eye as she nods at him, pursing her lips to fight back the sob that wants to emerge.

“Okay. Given the exceptional circumstances here, I think we can make that happen.” Dr. Hughes nods at the nurse, and she scampers away, presumably to take care of the administrative requirements. Olivia dimly registers that a litany of updates about her condition, anticipated recovery timelines and permanent damage, and treatment considerations are shared, but she can’t take them in right now.

She just watches Elliot, looking at how his jaw tenses and jumps as the surgeon continues his diatribe. Looks at his brutal face and soft eyes and craggy expression. And Elliot watches Dr. Hughes, like he is the keeper of the world’s knowledge. She knows he’ll remember all of this and be able to remind her later. She lets him protect her like this, now.

She feels the safest she has in years.

It’s an hour later when the drugs are already starting to kick in and the fiery torment encompassing the right side of her body fades a little, when the bustle of nurses and Dr. Hughes around her in the room quiets. When she and Elliot are alone again. Fin had popped back in briefly, and he and Elliot had made the collective decision to wait through the night before she called Noah. A post-midnight phone call from a hospital bed would only serve to terrify him, but Amanda had been given the update on Olivia’s status and would bring him to see her tomorrow.

She wants to spare him the sight of her here, frail and hooked up to machines, washed out and clad only in a hospital dressing gown. But she misses her son desperately, and the pain of not being able to hold him in reassurance aches just as much as the wound in her side.

Elliot, true to his word, hasn’t left her side except briefly to change and clean up, erasing the remainder of her blood on his body. Fin kept vigil during his incredibly brief absence. She and her Sergeant hadn’t spoken then, but he’d held her hand, gripping hard while a new IV was administered. She thinks she’ll have to file that memory way back in the recesses of her mind and heart, because it’s going to make her cry each and every time she recalls it.

And then, just like before, Elliot was back at her bedside clutching the same hand Fin had relinquished, and it was the two of them alone again.

“Olivia,” he starts, like he has a speech prepared. It’s really not fair that he got a doctor’s visit reprieve to prepare, she thinks. She wants the dismantled, stunned, exposed Elliot back.

“I meant it.”

That shuts him up. He doesn’t look quite as floored as before. Close enough.

She laughs quietly, because she hates what has happened, really wishes she could have kept her title of being the only one from the original unit of decades past who’d never taken a bullet. But she feels like a completely unhindered version of herself, and now the possibility doesn’t feel paralyzing. It feels powerful and infinite and joyful.

And then he’s laughing with her, and they probably both look insane, but she doesn’t care.

“Only you,” he says. “You took my line there, Liv. Twice.” He turns her hand over, starts to trace the lines in her palm and she knows it’s a fucking cliché, but she’d swear she feels it in her soul.

“I care for you, Liv, and I admire you, and I miss you. And I meant what I said, in your kitchen. That you’re family. But it’s more than that. I love you. I’m in love with you.” He pauses, grimaces before he presses onwards. This won’t be painless.

“I loved my wife. I would never take back moments with Kathy, with our children, with my grandchildren. I loved you, too, and it felt like tearing myself in half when I left.”

There’s no fighting the tears now; they stream down her face with abandon, no doubt leaving silvery lines beneath the cool hospital light. But she can’t bring herself to pull her hand away from his grip to rub them away, and she’s far, far past being embarrassed by them.

“It’s not an excuse. And I know – I know I should have said goodbye, and it’s a shitty, selfish reason to say that I only didn't because then I wouldn’t have gone.” She’s outright crying now, and she wants this conversation over so they can move on, so he can hold her.

“I loved you before I understood what it really meant. I loved my wife and the family we built, but I’m an asshole because being your partner was the most important role in my life and there were times that I only felt like a whole when you were at my side. And I hated what that made me, Liv, but I didn’t hate it as much as I loved you.”

She’s shushing him and trying to turn over her hand to grip his in turn, and she thinks that might be the best analogy for the way they behave around each other; trying to deprive themselves of their own comfort in the effort to give it to the other, never pursuing it together.

“Elliot, stop, please,” but he doesn’t, they’ve ripped down all the boundaries and dismantled all the barriers now, and he barrels ahead.

“Maybe I’m going to hell because of it, maybe I’ll never be a good man. I know I was jealous and obnoxious, and I didn’t deserve what you gave me. I know I wasn’t as good of a partner to you as you were to me. And I didn’t cross those lines then. And Kathy was a good woman, a good wife – this shouldn’t have –”

He heaves a breath, and she knows this will be a struggle for them, overcoming the fact that they can seek this in each other now - but it's partly because his wife was killed. She grips his hand harder, trying to convey what she trusts he knows. She would never have wanted him at this cost. They are acting in the world around them and the circumstances they face today, but she never would have wished it this way.

“But we’re here now. And Olivia, I love you so fucking much. You – you’re why I’ve never lost my faith even when awful shit has happened to me, to us, to the victims. You’re why I could keep going even when we saw the worst the world has to offer. I believe in God all over again every time I look at you, Liv.”

She can’t stop herself at that, she raises her other hand and turns over to him, ripping a soft cry from her lips when her stitches pull. That spurs him into motion, and he’s up and out of his chair, lightly pushing her to lay back on the bed, to calm.

His hands wreathe her face, and hers come up to his chest to clutch at his shirt. He looks like he did outside the interrogation room when he’d held her, in the hallway when he’d pressed down on her. But there’s a happiness there now, and she’s never before seen quite that look in Elliot Stabler’s eyes.

“Don’t,” he whispers. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

Oh, what the hell. That’s never stopped her before.

She grips him tighter and brings his lips down to hers.

Chapter Text

When Elliot was in his late thirties, when Olivia was just entering his life, he had a few friends from the Marines that he kept up with, met in the city after shifts when Kathy gave him the green light to be home a bit late. Those green lights stopped coming as his familiarity with Liv increased and Kathy’s line of thought placed him at a bar with her rather than his old buddies. They stopped coming when the kid’s problems increased from grazed knees and monsters under the bed to surly teenage scowls and breakups and screaming matches. They stopped coming when his work hours increased so that he spent more time with Liv than anyone in his cohesive family unit, and there was no clearance to ask for more time away. And so he lost touch with men he’d called brothers. He still thinks of them from time to time.

But he remembers, back when those green lights still allowed for some raucous evenings and old-time buddy reminiscing, one of his friends recounting falling in love with his best friend. The guy had been single – as far as Elliot knew, with the exception of one-night stands and relationships without enough substance to take up conversation during guy night – his whole adult life. But he had a girl next door from his boyhood, a girl who’d lived in his neighborhood and been his companion, and study buddy, and all-around good girl in high school. Who’d then grown up to go to college, become a teacher, get married, and have a baby of her own as their mutual friend had joined the Marines and sowed his wild oats with proclamations that he didn’t want to settle down, ever.

He remembers that friend adamantly denying feelings for that girl, periodically mentioning how they still kept touch and she was so goddamn easy for him to talk to, then sleeping with whomever he found at the bar. She eventually got divorced, made due as a single working mom and continued as His Girl Friday, the girl next door to his friend. And then Elliot remembers one night where his Marines buddies got together, and his old friend looked like he’d won the lottery and an Olympic gold medal all in the same day.

“What the hell are you so happy for?” he remembers saying.

He can’t remember her name. But he recalls his friend lighting up in a heartbeat, saying her name with reverence, that they were together.

“I don’t know, man,” his friend had told him, his grin both rueful and joyous. “I think I felt that way longer than I even realized. I babysat her kid so she could go out on a date, and I was annoyed about it, but I didn’t really think much about why. And she gets home and instead of dragging in some suit and telling me thank you, she’s alone. And she kissed me.”

They’d ribbed him, for waxing poetic for a girl he’d known since they had gangly limbs and braces, for being wrong about having denied any possibility of feelings for her. And he was so happy that he hadn’t given a shit.

And this man, who had reveled in describing his sexual antics to them over many a drinking session, refused to tell them a goddamn detail. But he did say that it had been so different from any other kiss, that he knew right then and there that he was going to marry that girl.

“Come on, Stabler,” he’d told him. “You been married forever – you know what it’s like. You fall in love with your best friend, you kiss her – might have been the best moment in my life. Only bad part about it was that I don’t think it was our best kiss. I couldn’t stop fucking smiling.”

And Elliot had stopped teasing him then; bought him a drink instead. They’d had enough of the hard in life – even as a joke, he wasn’t going to mock a friend for being happy about being happy.

He’d woken Kathy up when he got home that night, pawing at her nightgown and kissing her neck.

“Elliot, it’s the middle of the night,” she’d said, laughing at him. “You’re handsome, but you’re drunk,” she insisted as she halfheartedly tried to dissuade him. But those were the solid years in their relationship back then, and it didn’t take him long to convince her a bit of fun was worth the loss in sleep, despite the early waking hours of their children slumbering down the hall. It had been good sex, great even.

But he remembers what he contemplated on his drive from Queens to the 1-6 the next day, a cup of coffee for his partner cooling in the cupholder.

He remembers wondering if Kathy was his best friend.

The memory flits through his mind along with a kaleidoscope of a hundred other moments when he’d wanted to kiss Olivia Benson, as she shocks the ever-living hell out of him and finally, finally kisses him for the first time.

So many moments, some falling during times when the thought should have never entered his head, when he wanted to do exactly this.

Olivia, staring at him wide-eyed, face framed by her dark brown hair tapering past her chin, wearing her oversized suits and false confidence, while he leans by their lockers and promises her for better or worse even as he confirms that she’s slept with Brian Cassidy.

Olivia, yelling at him for putting a protective detail on her without letting her know and insisting that he doesn’t trust her, the vulnerability and delicate prettiness of her face in stark contrast with the harsh new crop of her hair, her jaw stubbornly belying the tears in her eyes.

Olivia, with glowing skin and lighter, longer hair and a too-large-for-comfort bandage at her neck, sniffling at his side after the absolute wreckage Victor Gitano had caused, asking him how she could have expected her to end his life in tremulous tones.

Blasphemous as it might be – Olivia, covered in his wife’s blood, with bruises of her own forming, staring at him with a slightly dazed and maybe concussed look, after completely disregarding her own safety and wellbeing to ensure the successful entry of his youngest son to this world.

Olivia, with longer hair and silky waves glancing off her bare shoulders, dressed to the nines with her hand looped around his arm and a smile on her face, as they went undercover using their own names on one of their last cases Fin had just brought back from the recesses of his mind.

Olivia, as soft and feminine and beautiful as he’d ever seen her, standing in the OC office, and holding his hand, telling him that he looked better, letting him hang onto her hand as long as the increasing space between them allowed when she turned to leave him.

Olivia, sweet and shell-shocked, worried and battered in her own kitchen as he pushed her too far and demanded too much while she was still nursing the bruises that children with machetes had inflicted on her before threatening her son and killing her friend.

Christ. His adult life is filled to the brim with the vestiges of what feels like the dual lives he’s led. It’s filled with children and home repairs and open cases and dinners left cooling in the oven. It’s filled with Kathy’s smiles and Kathy’s disappointment and Kathy’s loyalty. It’s filled with too many perps and too many shootings to count. It’s filled with victims and tears and his partner’s kind, soothing voice. It’s filled with New York and Italy, with Manhattan endless nights and Roman sun-drenched days. It’s filled with moments he’d never take back and moments he’d sell his soul to undo.

He has known overwhelming joy and so much fucking tragedy.

But his life is filled with family and love and loss and Olivia, Olivia, Olivia.

He won’t enumerate the strides they took to get here because some of those stepping-stones were forged in violence and grief too deep and dark to name.

But he will contemplate the fact that it is Liv who is kissing him, that she loves him and that she wants him and that she’s not pushing him away any longer.

And that she kisses far too well and enthusiastically for someone who was very recently shot and who should be, in theory, under the influence of enough pain meds to stun a horse. His hands have moved from either side of her head on the pillow to caress her face, as he strokes a hand through her hair. She keeps her hands clutched in his borrowed hospital scrub shirt, not lifting them to encompass his neck given her injury but pulling him as close as she can.

He'd never explicitly wondered – in spite of the times he had thought about kissing her – never let himself wonder if they’d bumble the first time, or if their mouths would fit in together as though in time to music. He would have been happy either way. He would have grinned at the knowledge that the two of them together always like a challenge if it was a difficult transition, would have sighed into the knowledge that his suspicion of their compatibility was always right if their first time carried an ease. This, somehow, manages to be both. Sinking into the relief of finally putting their hands, their mouths on each other – and it does just click – while navigating the awkwardness of both their physical limitations in the wake of the case and revelation and injuries that brought them here.

Of course, they would manage to be both.

He thinks of his buddy from the Marines, and even with the forward knowledge, he can’t help it. Mid-kiss, he smiles.

He deepens the kiss, just a bit, his tongue lightly mingling with hers, his forehead nuzzling her temple as he alters the angle and tilts her chin further towards him. He knows already that this could feel so familiar, so quickly. Her lips could so swiftly be the first thing he tastes in the morning and the last in the evening, could be so ingrained into his routine that his day doesn’t function if she’s not there to kiss throughout it. It feels so right already, this could become muscle memory so fucking fast it almost makes his head spin. It should feel frightening; with anyone else it would, but this is Olivia.

He feels her lips smile against his, matching the movement he’d made moments earlier. She tilts her head against the pillow – Jesus, their first kiss was while she’s flat in a hospital bed – and squints up at him.

“El, are you laughing?”

“Smiling, Liv.” He kisses her again, quickly this time. “Stay still.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ve been shot, because you were just in emergency surgery, because the doctor told you to stay still and not to put pressure on your side.”

She scoffs at him, and if she weren’t all the things he’d just listed, he’d want to shake her and hug her at the same time. “No, not that,” now he wants to scoff. That is not how he’d brush off the fear and recalled trauma the last day has unleashed on them both, on the physical recovery that she will battle and the impacts that still worry him. “I mean, why are you smiling?”

He humors her anyways. “Because you’re alive. Because you mean everything to me. Because I was kissing you.”

She smiles. “Okay.” But the word slurs just a little, the first consonant replaced by a humming mmm. She needs to rest, and he needs to let her, but even now the sight of her eyes sliding shut sends him back to the casino hallway, remnants of latent terror and despair still shooting through him.

The other thing – the shadow that has been lurking behind the immediate fear for her safety – is also back, now that he knows she’s going to be alright. He’d thought guilt over his late wife, his decade-long radio silence, the complexity of their respective positions in the NYPD, and her fierce protective nature when it comes to her son would be their biggest hurdles if he could ever get up the courage to make a move and she could ever let down her guard enough to let him.

But he knows now that it’s more than that. That her wariness and dark looks, her long sleeves and defensive posture aren’t all to do with rank and maturity and command. They are also to shield her from awareness of the damage done to her, they are to deter it from happening again.

They are part of a victim response.

And he was with SVU long enough that he should have seen that long before two and half fucking years had passed; he should have seen that before a snarly waif of a girl dragged the dark past onto the stage.

He can’t ask her to talk about it now. But the barest of information from her, the unwitting disclosure from Ayanna (he somehow escaped goddamn prison?), the shut out but acknowledgement from Fin – they have all served to increase his desperation for what happened.

Maybe it’s that there was a time she’d told him he knew everything about her, even the parts she’d rather forget. Maybe it’s that it was a part of his identity – being the man who knew the shallows and depths of Olivia Benson. Maybe it’s that he’s felt adrift since his return to New York, even before that, and it’s not only the loss of his wife and the flocking away of his children. It’s that he wants to be that Elliot again. He wants to be her Elliot. If not her partner, he wants to be the Elliot Stabler that knows and defends and spars with Olivia Benson, because he has never felt more centered and certain than when she has been his counterbalance.

But now, her secrets have been pried from her, she’s been hurt, she’s been given medication that he knows is a trigger.

And now, they have both confessed to loving each other. And they have kissed.

Where the hell do they go from here?

“This would be easier if we could just fall into bed with each other now, huh?” she says, words slightly melding into each other.

And he can’t help it. The smile is back. “Olivia.”

“Am I wrong?”

“No. No, I’m not sure you’re ever wrong.” He’s smirking when he says it, and she doesn’t disappoint. The eyeroll is instantaneous.

“God. Now I know you were worried. If I could go back in time and tell us that twenty years ago – just, remind me you said that when I’m not on pain meds any longer.”

He’s back in his chair now, at her bedside, angled to fully face her. He hasn’t stopped touching her since she first opened her eyes, and they are playing a kind of romantic tug-of-war now, taking turns which one is doing the holding and the vein-tracing, the touching. It’s his turn now, and he holds her wrist with one hand and draws his index finger over the fine bone at her wrist, tilting her hand to hold his more fully.

“Will do, Captain,” he murmurs, and it’s so surprising easy, like they let down the forced restrictions between them. Like these unfettered versions of themselves have always known how to be together, have just been interminably waiting to be allowed to do so.

They quiet for a beat, and he appreciates the moment to listen to the sound of her heart monitor as a reassurance rather than as the ticking down of a timer, fearful of it running out of measures. He weighs her words, thinks about her concern he presumes had to do with flashbacks, considers how much more detail he wants about the man who hurt her and whether he should just ask Fin to pull the file.

“I want this to be real, Liv.”

She’s near to drifting now; he knows this conversation is probably one for tomorrow and if that’s the case, the story of what happened to her, the continuation of the case – these are absolutely better visited in the light of a new day. It’s well-past midnight but his eyes haven’t closed yet, and the whole day runs together in unrelenting anxiety and regret and dread culminated with jaw-dropping relief. He is not equipped for this conversation, either.

And, yet.

“I want to do this right. I want to talk about it all. My therapist told me I have to be present and communicate –”

Her eyebrows shoot up towards her hairline but then quickly drop in consideration. He sees her acclimating pieces of information, can almost feel her recalling how he backed down in the interrogation room. “You have a therapist? Good for you, El.”

But goddamnit, he is embarrassingly lurching through what he wants to say to her. He swears at one point in his life he was assured and commanding.

“Yeah, well. I want to be that. Present for you. I want to communicate with you.”

She has a wary look made softer by the drugs, and he knows, he knows he can’t have this conversation now. He leans forward and kisses her, instead. Her lips – once, but deep and lingering. Her cheekbone, the corner of her eye, her temple – quick and gentle.

“Not right now.”

“No, not right now,” she says. “I want this to be real, too, Elliot. Tell me something real.”

He swallows the lump in his throat at that. Remembers that he sobbed while clutching her just a couple of hours ago, that he frantically begged for more information from Fin and Ayanna. He thinks about the moment Kate first mentioned the comparison, that she should show her scars first and his heart just – stopped. It faltered a beat, letting him down, giving him the sickening feeling of being under water with no surface in sight, until he emerged with a sucking breath but the reality was that one of his worst fears had come to pass.

But he also remembers an aggregate of all the Olivia’s he ever wanted to kiss. All the Olivia’s he ever wanted to throttle, that he ever grinned at over cluttered desks, at whom he’d ever pushed a coffee cup and a commiserating glance. All the Olivia’s whose incredible compassion and righteous fury had inspired him and awed him in varying turns. All the Olivia’s for whom he’d worried, who he had wanted to protect, who he had wanted to keep at arm’s length for all their sakes.

He sees fluctuating lengths of golden and chocolate shades of hair, and always anchored by the same beautiful deep, dark eyes.

“Something real. Okay. Lemme think.” Another eye roll from her deepens the smile lines bookending his mouth, and she doesn’t pull her gaze from his. “I like your handwriting.”

“My handwriting?” she sounds so floored and simultaneously unimpressed that he can’t help the laugh.

“I used to think about it when you left post-its on my desk. You do loops in some of your vowels but it’s not the cursive that my kids had to learn in school. It was like it was girly and practical at the same time.”

“Elliot. For god’s sake. You can’t use the word girly about me. And that’s ridiculous.”

“You didn’t make rules about how important the something real had to be.”

“Thought it was implied. Let’s consider that rule added.”

“Okay. Something real and important. I used to talk to you about cases when I couldn’t process them.”

“I – I know that.”

“Yeah. But I never stopped. Kept talking to you, imagining conversations, what you would have said, advice you would have given me, even after I left. Even in Rome.” It’s a risk, to introduce his absence, but her hand doesn’t pull from him. “You were always good at it, even in my head.” That draws a sad smile.

“I did, that, too.”

He nods; there was never an alternative for either of them.

“Your turn. Tell me something real.”

“The Avery case. Afterwards. When you told me the genes don’t matter, when you said to look at how great I turned out. It was one of the best moments of my life,” her breath shudders, and she looks down at their interlocked hands, and he cannot believe how open she is being with him. He takes a mental step back. He’s grateful as fuck that she’s revealing this side of herself to him, but only weeks ago she was shying away from him in her own kitchen, cowering against her appliances as a means to increase the physical space between them.

He knows this is real. But so much truth and trauma has been eviscerated from Olivia today, and she can regret Kate and Danny and this case. Hell, for all he cares (even as he knows Liv will never allow it to happen), Kate can find herself a damn good therapist and attorney and steer clear of Olivia.

But he doesn’t want her to regret this transparency. She’s raw and likely feeling a new lease on life. He is, too, now that he knows she’ll still be a part of it. He hears his therapist’s words, hears Ayanna’s behind them. Be available to her. Well, I think that’s good advice.

“I was so goddamn relieved when you came back after Oregon, and it pissed me off. Acted like an asshole because I felt pathetic that all it took was for you to walk back into the precinct and my whole world felt like it was back on its axis. That night on the stoop. When you had the flower in your cup. I regretted not asking to kiss you then.”

Her eyes widen. They are throwing emotional grenades at each other and they’re real and good, but he doesn’t want to overdo it. He doesn’t want her to wake up, for the pain to recede and the pain medication to dissipate, and for her armor to restructure.

She doesn’t seem to have that concern.

“I cried after Picard hurt you, when we thought you might be blind. I cried for you but I also cried for me because I didn’t want to lose you as my partner and I didn’t know how I’d be in your life if we weren’t.” He nods, tightening his fingers around hers. He’d had the same fear.

“I never should have talked to you like that during, after the Gitano case. I was scared out of my goddamned mind, and I thought you were dying. And then I just – I was fucking angry at everything that brought us there because I realized how much I cared about you was not just a partner being protective.”

“El,” she whispers, and she’s truly sinking under, now.

“Yeah, baby?”

“Stop calling me that.” They both smile, her droopy eyes staying more closed than open now, and he leans forward, resting his chin on their hands clasped together at her side. “El, will this… will this be real tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow this will be real. Tomorrow you’ll be on the mend, and you’ll see Noah, and we’ll figure out the next steps in the case, and I’ll be here for all of it.” He takes a deep breath, wants to leave her on a lighter note, and if the drugs hadn’t taken over, he’d try his hand at kissing her senseless. “I have one more.”

“Hmm?”

“Something real. I have always, always known,” and he pauses for effect while she struggles to aim a curious look at him, “that you stole my gray hoodie,” he finishes with a grin and a flourish.

She snorts at that – no shame or repentance – and finally lets her eyes drift shut. He keeps her hand in his, lightly stroking her forearm as she falls asleep, and he follows her quickly, the sounds of what’s real still echoing in his ears.

Chapter Text

When she wakes again, sunlight must be streaming through a window down the hall that Olivia can’t see, because the crisp hospital light doesn’t feel quite as artificial. Elliot is sleeping in the cot next to her, a flimsy frame with a cushion barely two inches thick, obtained for him by a kind nurse who must have taken pity on his hunched over position at some point during the night. She can’t see his face; her head is raised higher than his and the guardrails are up, but she can see the toes of his socks lounged out before her, and she gives a soft sigh at the sense of comfort that comes with the sight. She closes her eyes once more and uses the moment of quiet to take stock.

The pain is dulled but present, a throbbing ache in her side that speaks not only to the brutality of the gunshot wound itself but the trauma that the surgery inflicted in its bid to heal. She wonders about the doctor’s assertions that she might not fully recover from this and that it may leave lasting limitations, but she’s still caught up in the sheer relief of not having died, so she puts it aside for now.

She’s a bit shock-y, and the unfocused feeling of the pain medication – along with the residual effects of the day prior – have left her feeling adrift. She hates this feeling, of not feeling quite in her body, like she could wake up and be back in that beach house with a maniacal, vicious grin taunting her. Like this could all have been a dream, pain and pleasure, and that she’d never made a life for herself beyond the terror.

And then, she just can’t help it. Fuck.

Her breath stutters, and the worst of it crests when she feels like she can’t move, like she’s immobilized – by handcuffs or tape or bruising hands or her own weakness. When her breath comes faster and faster but she can’t get any air and then she wonders if it’s because of a panic attack or if it’s actually because of his hands at her throat and she’s back there again but this time she is going to die and –

“Olivia,” the syllables of her name are enunciated, grated out as concern-filled blue eyes meet hers, and when the hell did he get off the cot? But the fleeting question that should remind her of where she actually is has no power over the panic that’s fully swept her away in its shadowy hold.

“Olivia,” the cadence of her name is slower this time, and she’s so far gone that it’s almost hard to remember his. The names of her protectors and allies flicker but don’t stay – Elliot, Cragen, Munch, Fin, Nick, Amanda, Brian, Rafa, Ed. Noah. Elliot. It’s Elliot, and his voice sounds again, steadying her.

“Liv. Breathe with me. I’m here, you’re safe. I promised I’d be here, remember? I’m here. Breathe.”

Elliot.

The flare of anxiety and fear starts to dim, and her surroundings begin to sharpen as she takes deep, sucking breaths alongside him.

“That’s right. You’ve got it,” he continues to mutter coaxing encouragement, and she remembers. She remembers that William Lewis can never put his hands on her again, that she survived, that her life expanded and grew to encompass her most precious dream. That behind even the joy Noah has brought her, she managed to turn the squad to which she dedicated her life into a ragtag band of misfits who became family to each other. That Elliot had ultimately come back, and that she now could claim a stake to Elliot in a way she never could before. Partners, once and now again. And he loves her.

It's more than she ever thought she’d have, enough that she could spend lifetimes being grateful.

And then her breathing slows almost entirely, and she’s left feeling drained but oddly at peace.

“I’m alright now. I’m sorry,” she whispers, lifting her eyes to his.

“Don’t, Liv. You don’t have anything to be sorry for.” He settles back in the chair, lifting the cot to lean against the wall vertically out of the way. He rubs a thumb against her hairline, and she hates that the last time she clearly remembers doing that she was fairly convinced she was going to bleed out on a casino hallway floor, but she loves it. She loves the intensity of the look in his eyes as he leans over her and the soothing motion of his roughened thumbpad against her forehead, the knowledge that her hair will be mussed but leave a physical reminder that he was there.

“How are you feeling?” he asks, eyes darting around the room like he can decipher the beeps and lights of the machinery that is monitoring her.

“Okay.” She doesn’t want to break the moment. And while she remembers the soft sweetness of their conversation the night prior, she wants to vet their truths once more in the light of day.

And damn it if he doesn’t spot it right away.

“Good, that’s good. If you weren’t in a hospital bed, how far outside state lines would you be right now?” he smirks as he asks, and she realizes this is new. The talking about their feelings bit was new, but the ability to acknowledge how well they still know each other’s base tendencies, the ability to tease about it – that’s completely new.

It feels… light. She’s still scared, a part of her feels like she could wake up tomorrow with the same feeling that bled from her when Cragen told her that he wasn’t coming back, but a bigger part trusts him. Has decided to trust him – she is realizing more and more that a part of it is a choice. A bigger part is so tired of denying all the things that the deepest parts of her want. Not just the mother and captain and friend, but the woman. And she has wanted this man – in an array of ways – for a long time.

She grins back at him.

“Probably a ways,” she admits. “But I would have come back.”

He nods, and his smirk gives way to a smile, teeth and all. His thumb runs across her forehead once more, tucks her hair behind her ear.

Which reminds her – her hair is greasy with sweat and sleep. She wants to be clean, and she wants to see her son, and she wants to home. Not necessarily in that order. She chooses the option she assumes can be addressed the most quickly.

“Noah?” She can’t help the tug she feels in her own heart at the way Elliot’s eyes go soft every time she says her son’s name. There’s always a look of disbelief and wonder, chased by joy. She wonders if the disbelief and wonder will ever fade, or if his looks will always mirror her own when she thinks of her boy. Like he’s a miracle come to pass.

“Amanda’s bringing him. Fin called awhile after you fell asleep; he talked to them. Said to tell you that your kid’s been relentless ‘bout seeing you.”

“Hmm,” is the only response she can muster to that, let’s both the worry for her son’s fear and warmth at his affection wash over her. It still takes her aback sometimes – the sheer significance of being intrinsic to the wellbeing of person.

“Soon?”

“Yeah, baby. They’ll be here soon.” And there it is again. Apparently, he has decided his pet name for her is baby and she doesn’t know what to make of that. She absolutely doesn’t know what to make of the fact that she fucking likes it, other than to promise the stronger versions of her former self – the ones with shorter hair and tight shirts and snarky comebacks – that she will never, ever admit to it.

She wants to tell him to knock it off but there is a soft, melting part of her that won’t allow her to, so she just rolls her eyes. Good enough.

And since she’s already way out of her depth, since she’s already shown him way more of her hand than she’d ever wanted but it hasn’t scared him off yet, she asks.

“El,” she drags a breath and bites on her lip. “Did you mean it?”

“Yeah, Liv. I absolutely knew you stole my sweatshirt. Among other things. For someone who knows the penal system forwards and backwards, you’re a pretty shitty thief.”

The smile spreads across her face unbidden. She wants him to answer the question, she wants to be sure, but she also wants this. They’ve always had an ability to draw the other out, to make each other smile, but even in during their years as partners, they’ve had so few times to enjoy the complementary humor of each other. To simply – enjoy the fact that they enjoy each other.

Years ago, when their partnership was nascent and she was still green, they’d been sitting in the car on a stakeout and he’d asked her a question she can’t recall, and she’d given a rejoinder she’s sure he doesn’t remember either. What she does remember is that he laughed so hard he snorted out some of the gulp of coffee he’d just taken, and she’d had a complete come apart. She’d all-out giggled, the kind of laughter where you can’t pull yourself back from the brink and you just have to ride the hilarity, until it fades to warmth, becomes a memory you smile over years down the road. She remembers looking over at him, almost feeling badly at how hard she’d laughed at his expense, and then she saw that soft, caring look on his face for the very first time.

It was the face she’d seen when he talked about Kathy, especially the early years. The look he wore when he talked about his children, when he came back from holding Eli for the first time, maybe even when he’d looked at Calvin during those brief weeks when it seemed he might have been hers. He looked at her that way, like the sight of her laughing and happy and guileless was something he wanted to preserve, to protect. Like the sight of her made him happy, too.

She didn’t see that look often, and in the later years of their partnership, anytime he exposed that depth of feeling he quickly followed it with an angry or dismissive rejoinder – yelling at her after begging her on the station floor with Gitano, hugging her but then all but ignoring her after the birth of his son, mortgaging his house for her but then hardly acknowledging that she’d been sick, imprisoned, attacked. And when she’s honest with herself, there were years in which she was fine with that balance. Years during which his affection or depth of emotion were the first things to set her off, to send her running. She’d spent a decade thinking that the difference was that she always came back.

But now he’s here, and since he’s been back, he almost exclusively looks at her that way. Even when he was avoiding her, ghosting her again, going undercover to elude his own grief – when their paths did cross the reverence in his eyes when he looked at her made her want to hike off to Oregon again.

What a pair, she thinks, but looks at the softness in his eyes once more. He’s not hiding it now. She doesn’t argue with him, just gives into it and lets the desperation creep across her own face. She stops fighting it, lets her lip tremble, and he knows.

His sleepy smile fades and he shakes his head, but the care and concern are still in his eyes. “I meant it, Olivia. Every word.”

“Okay.” She gives a short nod. “Do you think they’d let me have a sponge bath?”

The grin is back, rueful this time. “Ever the romantic, my partner.”

Turns out a sponge bath was a bit of an exaggeration as Nurse Fremont understood her desire to feel clean but kept her mostly immobilized. Still, she almost feels like her old self when her hair is lightly washed with a wet comb and brushed dry, and they’ve wiped off any remaining blood. She’d sell her soul to take a shower, but with the stitches on the front and back of her right side, she knows there are days before that’s even on the table.

She feels enough like herself that she doesn’t feel quite as guilty about traumatizing her son when Noah’s mop of curls appears around the corner, Amanda’s hand on his shoulder preventing him from barreling right at her.

“Remember what we talked about,” she hears, and her friend’s lilting drawl makes her want to weep, makes her want to beg Amanda to come back and stand by her side day in and day out again, selfish as it may be. “Your mama’s alright. Just be gentle.” And then her hand lifts from his shoulder, and he rushes in with a quick, questioning glance at Elliot, skidding to a stop by her bedside as tears fill his eyes.

Her eyes mimic his, and she blinks to halt the tears. There is no one she’s ever wanted to be strong for more. “It’s alright, sweet boy. I’m okay.”

And he doesn’t make a sound, just falls onto her side – thank god Elliot had the presence of mind to give him a subtle steer to the left – and sobs into her shoulder, his little fingers tangling in her hair.

It’s the most unselfish love she’s ever known, her love for her son, and her heart aches more than the bullet wound with the knowledge of the pain and fear this has caused him. Like the reminder of how fully she’ll bounce back from this physically, she puts the thought to the side, but she knows a day of reckoning and decision is coming. The facets of her have fought each other for a long time, and today the woman and the mother are far outweighing the cop and the captain. And she thinks, given a moment, she might be able to come to terms with that.

“Mom!” he sounds more high-pitched than usual, reminding of her of just how young he really is.

Focus. Noah.

Her thoughts still have the weight of butterflies, and they whisk around her mind, lightened by the pain meds, but she wants to be present for her son. She wants to reassure him. Her eyes fall on Elliot, and then Amanda, for help.

“Shh, baby,” she whispers. “I’m sorry I scared you. I’m alright.”

Elliot’s big hand falls over her son’s soft curls, and it’s almost funny to watch his dad mode activate so quickly. “Hey, buddy,” he says.

Of course he’d call him buddy. Champ or pal is probably next, she thinks with a small smile.

“Your mom is gonna be just fine. She did great, just like you’d expect. She was a hero, and she’s gotta be in the hospital for a little while ‘til her side heals up, but then she’s going back home with you.”

And usually Elliot’s fatherly tendencies do the trick, the intrinsic comfort in the low rumbling of his voice and the certainty in his assurances taking over, but Noah is hers, and while she hopes he comes to love Elliot, too – thinks he could so, so easily – he bears her slight mistrust and discernment for bullshit.

“She’s not just fine. She got shot,” her little boy fires back accusingly, and he somehow sounds younger and older than his years. It breaks her heart.

“Noah –”

“No, it’s okay, Liv,” Elliot stops her. “She did. And she was helping me, pal.”

There it is. Pal. Someday she’s going to tell him how predictable he is.

“She was helping me, and I was supposed to protect her, and –”

She coughs and glares. He doesn’t miss a beat. “We were supposed to protect each other. And we got the bad guy, Noah, but he did manage to hurt your mom. I’m so sorry. But she’s going to be just fine, and I’m going to be here to help take care of her. And you and I, we’re gonna take her home soon, okay?”

Olivia’s eyes meet Amanda’s amused ones above her son’s head. Elliot is oblivious, intently focused on Noah’s debating response, but Amanda has a beat on the situation and for all Liv can tell, is loving it.

We’re gonna take her home? She mouths, grin spreading wider.

She should be annoyed at the heavy handedness, but the truth is she’s hurt, and she’s tired, and she loves all three people in this room and she’s still alive to tell them so – and it’s hard to feel annoyance at anything at this moment. Shut up, she mouths back, but there’s no heat to it, and she knows exactly what her friend sees.

Bullet wounds notwithstanding, she’s happy.

“I love you, Noah,” she whispers, and his clear blue eyes, eyes that have felt like a cosmic joke or a divine reminder at varying times, meet hers straight on. “I’m alright. We’re alright.”

And her sweet boy can be snarly with the fangs of a pre-teen emerging, he can be a smart-aleck, he can be unwittingly unthinking and unmeaningly cruel like anyone else of his age. He can be self-absorbed and self-reflective. He can be so very kind, surprisingly thoughtful and deeply empathetic. He can be alarmingly observant. And most of all, he can see right to the truth of her.

The tears in his eyes don’t dry up but they gradually slow, and he rests his chin on her left shoulder, pressing a kiss to her cheek.

“I love you, too, Mom,” he says, and wraps his arm around her neck, Elliot hovering at her side to ensure it stays above her shoulder and not at her side.

Amanda waits outside the door, beckoning to Stabler for the third time to get his ass out of that curtained room and let mother and son have a moment to themselves. Since she’s known him, he’s always had a fixation on Liv, and it’s both amused and concerned her in equal measures, knowing what she does of their history.

But now it’s downright ridiculous, because every time he takes a few steps away it’s like an invisible string pulls at him, and he shuffles back across the white tiled floor to keep closer watch over the two coffee-colored heads that are pressed close to each other.

“Stabler,” she hisses, because really, this is enough. “Get over here.”

She’s quiet enough that neither Liv nor Noah hear, but she settles her best Southern “don’t mess with me” stare on him and he finally relents. For goodness’ sake, she wants to say, they’ll still be in line of sight.

And it grates her a little, needles her just a bit, because how can a man this concerned, this invested in the safekeeping of her former Captain and dearest friend – how could he have left her in the first place? How could he have ignored the trauma that fell on her shoulders like rain when it seems to physically pain him to leave her secure in a hospital room with her baby?

She otherwise would think it read as hypocritical, as hyperbole, but he seems so gosh darn earnest. It reminds her of her own mama, in a way – that she could love Amanda as she does but still leave her to fend for herself, still hurt her.

Which makes Amanda want to intervene on Liv’s behalf all the more. She’s seen so many iterations of her friend – teeth bared and angry, knowledgeable and witty but defensive and armed, savagely broken and beaten. She’s seen the wonder that was Liv learning what it was to have a family, to start to open her heart to her, to step in as some amorphous form of mother, sister, friend, partner to her as she embarked on having her own babies.

What she hasn’t seen is Olivia Benson before this man broke her heart and shattered her trust. And while it tugs on her heartstrings to see the way he looks at her friend now, the way he hovers over her like an over-muscled guard, she also can’t deny that every time she’s been around Elliot Stabler, she’s wanted to punch him in the face.

Fin told her to play nice, which is the only reason she’s decided she cannot do that today. That, and she’s trying to teach her daughters not to whack each other upside the head when one steals the others doll, so what kind of example would she be setting? Not to mention that for some reason, Sonny seems to actually like the guy. Go figure.

She momentarily misses the simplicity of the old days when it was just Frannie, and she could act out more freely – you can’t disappoint your dog and your dog can’t dispute your judgment.

Finally, Stabler seems to summon the strength to walk ten whole steps, and paused outside the curtain with her. Christ on a cracker.

“Give ‘em a minute,” she tells him, and he nods too many times. She knows that response. He’s spiraling and hell, Liv can’t see this.

“Get it together,” she tells him, and winces at the harshness in her own tone. “I mean – you did good. She’s okay. They need a moment – it’s always the two of them and Noah probably wants that right now. But, you can’t fall apart on her.”

Stabler turns his head and looks down on her, and goodness, he’s big as all get-out and his bald head only makes him more intense looking. She’s seen pictures of what he looked like before, back when he was Liv’s partner, and he wasn’t quite so imposing. Now, he’s a bit jarring at first glance.

But she does know he can be a good man, a good cop. She just doesn’t know if he can be good enough for her friend.

“I know that. Christ,” he takes a breath, swiping a hand across his face and blinking hard. “She scared me to death, Rollins.”

“Yeah. Those near misses – I know it. They can change everything.” He nods; he’s aware. Wasn’t too long ago that she had her own near miss, that hit changed her whole life perspective.

She wavers, hesitates. But she just feels like she has to get this off her chest, and this is her moment. Plus, Fin’s words, about what the victim did, how she made Liv revisit things, how it was a revelation to Stabler – she can’t let that go unchecked.

“You can’t check out on her, even if it did scare you.”

His head swivels, fast, those blue eyes lasered on her. “I wouldn’t.”

“You did.”

“Okay, we’re not doing this. I know you’re Liv’s friend, but you don’t know what you’re talking about –”

“I do.”

She says it forcefully, angrily. It’s meant to shut him down, and it does.

“I know exactly what I’m talking about. You didn’t see her after you left. But me? I started days later. And I thought she was the biggest bitch I’d ever met in my life. And I was this green female detective who wanted nothing more than to learn from a woman who wanted nothing to do with me. And it took a while, Stabler,” she drawls out the while, because honestly it was one step forward and two steps back for years, “before she looked at me and felt trust. And even after twelve years of being her coworker, her friend, the godmother to her child as she is to mine – after all that, her reaction was still anger and heartbreak when I left SVU. Because she went right back to you in her mind, and that meant I was leaving her.”

She heaves a breath; the more she talks, the more she realizes. She is furious with this man.

His eyes have gone misty, but he seems to have smartened up, because he clamps his jaw shut and lets her continue.

“She is the best person I know. And she has known more hurt than anyone I know.” She pauses, lets that sink in. She can’t help the vindictive thoughts. You deserve this, you deserve for the knowledge of what happened to her to rip you apart now. You left her open to this and you didn’t come back after it happened.

In Amanda’s mind, that’s the worst part. She can forgive his needing to run and his asshole lack of goodbye, but what kind of a monster ignores this type of brutality inflicted on someone who once defended them body and soul? She knows her own experience with partnership isn’t the same – but even if she weren’t in love with Sonny, she never could have abandoned him like that.

Tears are streaming silently down his cheeks now, and she tries to remind herself to balance her anger with the anger she knows Liv would feel if she doesn’t relent. But Liv’s an open, seeping, bleeding heart, and it makes Amanda’s own chest ache sometimes with how little armor her friend truly adorns for her self-protection.

For all she presents herself as a warrior, Olivia Benson walks into almost every situation with her own heart pried from her chest and held forth, a continuous bloody offering.

“I know that. You think I don’t know that?”

“I think you see you see how strong she is now, the family and squad and support that she has now. But you missed the years when she was the most hurt, and you missed the years when she was savaged.” He flinches, but she carries on; she’s almost finished.

“You know the Olivia Benson before. Not the Olivia after you and that bastard William Lewis tore her apart,” his eyes fly open at that and he leans into her space faster than she can blink. She raises a hand to his chest, and for the first time wonders if she’s gone too far.

“Stop and listen,” she tells, him, trying to calm him enough to truly hear her. “I am not comparing you to the monster that hurt Liv. But between your abandonment and his abduction, Stabler, the few years after you left broke her down completely. She rebuilt herself from the ashes, and you see the phoenix she became. Which is beautiful – she’s beautiful.”

He nods at that, pulls out of her space a little, face clearing slightly.

“But she’s not just the phoenix, Stabler. She’s also the detective she was with you at her side, and the girl she was before she was a cop. And the broken, frightened woman she was when her partner abandoned her and the worst of the worst came for her.”

She pauses, not sure how to tell him this without insulting her friend and alienating someone she thinks may be at her dinner table for family gatherings in the not-too-distant future. She decides to go for broke.

“I can’t let you be here if you’re only going to be here for when she’s alright on the other end of the trauma. Liv is who taught me that you have to do the work to get through it. So if this is too much for you, if you’re gonna hear the details about Lewis and fly off the handle, if you’re gonna hear that she’s not gonna fully be back to her previous abilities and cut and run ‘til she’s figured out a new plan, then –”

He stops her, then. Well, thank God.

“I’m not, Amanda. I’m in it. I’m here – I didn’t know what happened with that – with Lewis,” he says the name like he’s testing it out in his mouth, like it’s his new word for the devil. “I should have been here, and I can’t make up for that anymore, but I can be there for her now. I’m going to be there for her from here on out. Her and Noah.”

She gives a rueful grin; he’s got one thing going for him. Stabler definitely realizes that a mother and her child are a package deal. She looks past the curtain at Liv and Noah, smiling sweetly at each other with their foreheads still close. She lifts her eyes to Stabler, shaking her bangs to the side.

“You break that promise, and it’s not just me who’s coming after you,” she says.

Elliot’s eyes follow hers, landing on the pair as Liv cuddles Noah against her good side. “I wouldn’t want anything less for her.”

They lean against the wall together in silence after that, and Amanda thinks that maybe – just maybe – her friend has found home again.

Chapter Text

Olivia is by no means unfamiliar with the process of healing. She learned about it first from her mother, when she thought that healing from Serena’s assault and addiction was possible and that her mother would one day look at her brown-eyed daughter with dissimilar blue eyes that held no condemnation, no dread.

Olivia learned then that some healing cannot be.

She learned about healing when her would-be fiancé Burton left, pushed by her mother’s threats, and she thought the world would end with the anguish of the loss of this one, new person who seemed to love her, that there was no way the day-to-day motions could be expected of her when she felt so cold, like the metaphorical broken heart had caused physical blood loss.

She learned then that healing sneaks up on you, but it can shock you with the way it can ease the hurt that once felt like an impossibility to overcome.

She learned about it when the man she trusted most in the world, her dearest friend, her partner, turned on her when she got too close to a perp. When – even though the wound turned out to be superficial – Elliot laid the scars upon her before the skin had begun to repair. When he told her it was okay and begged her to end his life and swept the first true foundation she’d ever known out from under her. It had only taken hours; she’d fled.

She learned then that healing can be violent and angry, and that while two people who can cause each other harm, that was usually a sign that those same people cared enough for each other for the harm to matter.

She learned about healing when Harris cornered her, assaulted her. When she was a victim of her own choices and a deceitful man’s power, and she desperately second-guessed her own bullheaded decision to go undercover, when she realized that for all her training and strength – she could still be overpowered.

She learned then that therapy had value, and that Elliot Stabler wasn’t the only person she knew who made it his mission to ensure her safety.

She learned about it when Elliot abandoned her without a word, when she had to pack up his desk and the shards of her heart, when the structure of her world cracked and she was left to the elements of life’s cruelty without her partner.

She learned then that healing doesn’t mean forgetting, and it doesn’t preclude grief.

She learned about it when the monster that still haunts her dreams came for her, shredding and defiling not only the wholeness of her skin but the certainty of her own strength and purpose. When victimhood took on a new meaning and she worried at times that she might lose herself completely to the terror and the shame and the agony.

She learned then that healing is work, that it’s a continuous choice, and that she owes it to herself to commit to it. She also learned that some trauma is isolating, that part of the pain was that her friends and colleagues no longer understood the sheer fear behind some of her actions. She learned that there is healing in the reconciliation of the before and after versions of herself.

She learned about it again when Elliot was back, when she wanted nothing more than to comfort him and help him delve through his grief, while also wanting nothing more than to shield her son from the storm that could be Elliot Stabler’s presence in her life.

She learned then that healing doesn’t equate to clarity, and that she could still be lost in the minefields of her life even as she’d become better at acknowledging her emotional needs.

She’s learned so much – too much – over the years. Her relationship with healing has been fractious and longing, arduous and necessary. And yet, what she seems to have forgotten is that healing is in fact a process, and that processes more often that not take time.

The sheer frustration of her body’s limitations overwhelms her at moments, and she has spent days begging to be let out of this hospital bed. Days of worrying for the mental health of her sweet boy, days spent holding Elliot’s hand and hiding shy smiles at their newfound softness towards each other, days spent nagging Fin and Rollins to break her out of there and go home, days spent worrying about Kate.

Kate started this all, the moment she flipped on the Lesewski’s and walked into Ayanna’s office, and she’s also had her world ripped away from her. Olivia wonders about Kate’s healing, if she will seek it out on her own or if she’ll be like the Olivia’s of years gone by, retreating into a corner like an animal licking its wounds.

She has inquired about Kate’s response to Danny’s death in the days that have passed, asked to be released early so that she could speak with her. To which she was met with firm “absolutely not’s” from her Sergeant, from her doctor, from Elliot.

Speaking of Elliot… the days have been sweet, he has been courteous and supportive and present, but their foray into direct communication has been stalled. The flow of truth and transparency between her and Elliot, that steady rush that seemed to mimic the release of words, of knowledge, of blood that Kate had unleashed upon her – it’s slowed to a trickle.

Elliot is caring for her, but he’s not sharing with her. His protective tendencies have ratcheted to unprecedented extremes, and with the exception of Noah’s affectionate joy, he seems to have decided that she can’t be subjected to any kind of intense emotion in her current healing state.

She wants to box his reddened ears.

She wants to snap him out of it.

She wants to kiss him senseless.

She wants to get out of this damn hospital bed, and thankfully, that is happening today. And Elliot is holding tight to the promise he made her son, that they’d take her home and take care of her there together, because he is bordering on neurotic in orchestrating the details of her homecoming. He’s badgering – drilling, really – Nurse Fremont with details on her prescriptions administration like she won’t be back here in three days for a progress report.

“El,” she says, trying to grab his attention as she leans on her good side against the stack of pillows he’d assembled earlier. She would love to get out of her under her own steam but she’s a realist, and there’s no way in hell that’s happening. She’d hit the floor and embarrass herself.

“Will you come over here?” He jerks to attention.

And that’s maybe the biggest change in the past several days – she has been forced to ask for help, and somehow it no longer feels like such a vulnerability, while he is more responsive, more attentive than she’s ever known him to be.

He is unequivocally here.

His hand comes up to her jaw, and she can’t help it. She nuzzles her face a little into his palm, and ignores the fact that it feels like a decades-long want come to fruition.

“Quit yelling at the nurses,” she mumbles.

“I’m just trying to –”

“It’s all taken care of, El.”

She tries to soothe him but she registers that his anxiety levels are closer to what they’d been when he was begging her for information outside of the interrogation room, even closer to what they’d been when he was begging her to stay with him on a casino room floor, when he was attempting to soothe her as she lay in a hospital bed.

We just put it on the backburner, she thinks. Damnit.

She understands that they had to table the conversation that Kate had pulled them into, shackling them to her past trauma and ruthlessly drawing them toward its flame. She doesn’t blame Kate – she doesn’t. But she knows they’re surpassing the time to talk about it all and the only reason Elliot has let it go this long is because of his fear for her physical wellbeing. If she weren’t in a weakened state, he would have already confronted her like a battering ram.

“We’re going to be back in three days. I’ve got the medication timetable. Amanda and Noah are covering dinner. Please, El?” his face softens entirely, and she thinks she will never, never get tired of that look on his face while pointed at her. “Can we just go home?”

His hands are on her then, holding her on either side at the hip and eyeing the wheelchair that had already been brought into the room.

“Yeah, baby. Yeah. I’m sorry – let’s go, okay?” he is mumbling platitudes while he maneuvers her off the bed and she wants to say that she can walk.

She can walk. She can probably walk the two steps to the wheelchair, but she also doesn’t quite want to test that theory and she recognizes the need in him. She’s relying on self-soothing right now but he’s relying on his ability to take care of her to calm his frayed nerves.

I need to book us both time with Lindstrom, she thinks. She feels the heightened energy coming from Elliot like he might burst apart from the seams of his almost too-tight Henley’s and while the day of revelation has been drawing close the more alert she has become, she’s now worried about his mental state.

She doesn’t want to share all the learnings she’s had of healing. She knows that he’s had his own and she doesn’t want to add to his burden.

But that’s the thing about Elliot. He’s hard to sway once he’s made up his mind, and he seems determined to help shoulder the weight of her hurt.

“El, I got it,” she says, but her hands are gripping his forearms and she’s fairly busy ignoring the fact that his nickname drops from her lips without a thought in the days since the shooting, where before she made sure she called him Elliot and enunciated each syllable to ensure he knew.

“Sure, sure you do,” he says, and he’s grinning now, and she wants to roll her eyes because as irritating as it is, there is nothing better than a full-blown, soft-eyed smile from Elliot Stabler.

“Maybe you’ll still let me help, huh?” He asks, though it’s really more of a statement.

“Yeah. If it makes you feel better,” she answers, suppressing the smirk.

“It does.” His voice drops a bit, and her stomach follows it, the butterflies that have made her thoughts light and flighty with the impacts of medication now fluttering about her stomach with nerves and want. “Make me feel better,” he continues.

“Okay,” she murmurs, her mouth dry.

“Okay.” And then he hoists her into the wheelchair and honestly his physical fitness aside, she’s not sure how being bodily lifted into the wheelchair is any better than settling lightly into it herself, but the butterflies heighten in her stomach. She tries to remind herself that she is not this kind of woman but her defenses are down and it’s a futile argument.

Only moments later, they are leaving the hospital premises that she had entered under such duress, and she feels yet another weight of hurt fall away from her as Elliot pushes her across the asphalt to his car, to take her home.

“MOM!”

Noah’s voice reverberates through their newly decorated apartment and she is reminded how little the furnishings made it a home, how much his presence, his life growing within those walls gave it such meaning to her.

If she weren’t hurt, if the circumstances were different, she would drop to her knees and hug him hard. She’d give him one of those hugs that called back the days when he was a toddler and part of the purpose of a hug was to share her body, her warmth, her protection, all enfolded into an embrace. Lately, he’s developing self-awareness – and with it, self-conscious – more and more, and he doesn’t seek that from her. But right now, he’s abandoned his independence and is looking at her like she hung the moon set the stars, and she deeply wishes that her body was whole so that she could hold him the way she thinks they both want her to do.

“Noah,” she breathes, and his name feels like an oath. “Hi, sweet boy. I missed you.”

“I missed you, Mom!” she makes a note of his eagerness, his clinginess. It’s likely a response to the fear of losing her and he’ll find his equilibrium again. But she wants to monitor it – she can’t bear that her job, her decisions have left a lasting imprint on him, have affected how he treats her.

The specter of what is to come is back for a moment, and she hears the doctor’s words in her head once more. That she will have 80% mobility on her right side, in all likelihood (and with physical therapy). But she may never be exactly as she was, that her reflexes may be affected, and that the physical therapy itself will be extensive and ongoing.

She pushes it aside. It’s not a worry for today, and she’s determined to take the time alleviated from her squad and tunnel it into care for her boy. Maybe into cultivating whatever this is with Elliot, too.

She watches Amanda and Elliot engage while she holds Noah, and she realizes a breakthrough has been made there, too. She’s grateful for it, because as much as the remnants of her partnership and trust in Elliot run deep, Amanda has taken a role of family to her. A role she didn’t know existed before Elliot left. A role Amanda has proven is steady in the time since she has left SVU.

And then they’re all in the living room together, the mobile armchairs swirling this way and that, guided by Amanda’s and Elliot’s feet, as she and Noah sit and giggle on the couch, with her reclined on her good side, welcoming the comfort of her own home. The memories stir quickly, easily, and it’s something she doesn’t want to think on too long – that the ingredients of her first life seem to merge so deliciously with the flavors of her newer, established one.

“Mom, you really hid in a boy’s bathroom to spy on the suspects?!

Degrees of laughter rumble through the room, and Olivia tries to express her indignation through her expression alone given how immobilized she is on her side. The pain is starting to climb, and she doesn’t want the opioids prescribed to her but she knows something will need to take the edge off, but she’s so enjoying the shared delight of the people she loves taking place right in front of her.

She doesn’t want it to ever end, and she is hesitant to even pause it for a moment.

“Alright, y’all,” she hears, and smiles. Amanda does it for her. “I’ve gotta head out, but I’m going to be back tomorrow –”

“You don’t have to come back, Amanda –” but it falls on deaf ears.

“I’ll be back tomorrow. To check on you. C’mon, Liv,” she says, but the words are softened as she drops forward to share an awkward hug, as she’s still reclined. But it doesn’t matter, and Amanda touches their foreheads against one another.

“Glad to have you home, Liv. Love you.”

“Love you, too. And, Amanda?” She waits a beat. “Thank you.”

And then it’s a whirlwind of motion that she knows wouldn’t have fazed her without the pain medication. Amanda is gone and Elliot is steering Noah to bed, even as Noah is continually retreating back to hug her just one more time.

Finally, she has assured her sweet-natured son, and Elliot has put him to bed (and she’ll be unpacking the feelings that one action stirred in her for years), and she’s retreated to her bathroom to clean herself up as best she can without aggravating her stitches.

She stands in the bathroom, thinking of how much she’d loved the tile in her new shower and how fucking inconsequential things like that seem now, now that her secrets have been torn from her and tossed out into the open, now that Elliot seen the damages inflicted when he left her behind, now that Kate’s life is all but over, now that she’s been shot and almost died on a case.

She washes her face and softly applies moisturizer, taking comfort in the reclaiming of her routine. It reiterates the feeling of coming home, of being safe. She looks at herself in the mirror – and she thinks somehow looks both old and exhausted but more intrinsically refreshed, lighter than she’s seen herself in years.

And while it isn’t a task she relishes, she thinks about Elliot’s anxiety, his hovering, the way he begged her in that hallway when they thought their chance might have escaped them both. She’s not ready, she’ll never be ready to talk about the experiences that forged the new Olivia that her old Elliot had left behind.

But for the sake of the current versions of them both and the love she now knows that they share, in the spirit of supporting all the communication recommendations she gave to every victim who has ever darkened her door, she’s willing to try.

“Liv?” There’s a quick knock at the door and she can almost feel the tension through the painted wood. “It’s been a couple minutes; don’t want you on your feet too long.” He waits a beat, hardly enough time for her to formulate an answer. “You alright?”

She’s not. 

She wants the forward momentum anyways.

She opens the door and it is in stark opposition from weeks ago, when she cowered against her refrigerator. Instead, she throws open the door and barely waits for him to step into the room before she leans against him, presses her forehead against the indent of his neck. She lets him take her weight, and it’s not only because she is bone-achingly tired.

“El?”

“Yeah, baby?”

“I need to tell you some things.”

The butterflies in her stomach still as she realizes that she’s about to learn a whole new lesson in healing.

Chapter Text

They silently traverse the hallway, moving from the bathroom to Olivia’s bedroom, Elliot’s hand at the small of the back on her good side. The tips of his fingers graze the edges of her bandage – the feel of it both steadying him and reminding him of the fear, the circumstances that have brought them here. The weight of the impending conversation presses on him, the mountain of their collective trauma feels insurmountable, and he fights the urge to punch a hole through Liv’s wall.

She’s tense; they’re both walking on eggshells. He’s reminded of when she came back from Oregon, somehow even more beautiful than when she left. When she was back and he was so goddamn relieved, but then the interlock of their partnership didn’t seamlessly click back into place. Their edges were different, and they didn’t fit together like they had before, and he wanted to poke and prod, to argue, to fight with her – they’d always been as good at fighting with each other as they were defending each other – but he was terrified that she’d leave again. And he’s a hypocrite for that now.

He’s the one who left for a fucking decade, but a tenet of his life has been that Olivia Benson was his partner. That she turned to him first. And then after Oregon she didn’t anymore, and he was pissed that she’d changed the dynamics on him. When he finally walked away, the brutal precision with which he did it left her frozen in time for him, and he could pretend that truth – that Olivia Benson was his partner, his staunchest supporter – was still valid. The pretense was like a favorite sweater, well-worn and soft, that he could adorn and find comfort when the doubts crept back, when Kathy’s and Eli’s smiles and the Italian sun weren’t enough to warm him.

He's in her home now, she’s told him she loves him, and she’s letting him get to know her son, letting him take care of her – but somehow the sweater doesn’t fit the same way; he can’t find the comfort and he wants to burrow into her instead.

But first, he has to do this. They have to do this.

Olivia’s bedroom is feminine and soft, and it suits her, especially the version of her he sees before him now. In addition to the unfathomable loss of Kathy and the life he knew burning in the ashes of a car bomb, in addition to the crowded cobblestone streets of Rome giving way to the steel and structure of New York, in addition to a new job and new apartment and new relationship with his mother – the Olivia he’d returned to had somehow been both more commanding but also more womanly than he’d ever known her.

She’d always been beautiful, but sometimes – especially in the middle years of their partnership – her beauty had been almost aggressive, antagonistic, compiled of a strong jawline and angular lines and piercing eyes. And when he came back, he saw that the years had shifted her beauty. He was fascinated, because now it was made up of curves and soft lines, long waving hair and darkly lashed eyes that bled empathy and compassion. Like she’d solved the mystery of how to balance the force and power she needed to wield with the femininity and softness that were still a part of her.

She settles on the bed, and she’s still letting him touch her, and he braces himself, siphoning comfort in the closeness to rely upon when they are in the midst of it, when she shares her demons with him. He props her pillows so that she can lean on her left side. It seems wrong to get into the bed with her, and he doesn’t think he can have this conversation laying down, so he pulls the chair from her bedroom corner closer to the bedside and leans towards her, hands fisting and pushing against his knees.

It's a parallel to how he’d sat next to her hospital bed counting her heartbeats, sharing what was real to him, finally telling her how much he loved her – then and now.

He thinks she feels it, too, because she leans forward and he instinctively moves closer, not wanting her to pull at her side.

She puts her hand to his cheek, and his eyes close for a moment. “It will be alright, El. Maybe this – maybe this will be what makes it alright.”

Christ. He can’t fucking cry already; they haven’t even started. He just – he just loves her.

“I – Liv, I just wanna –” her hand falls away and he runs his past his nonexistent hair, chews on his lip. The problem is they’ve always been good at communicating without words, but never really excelled at putting a voice to their emotions. Near-death bedside declarations of love notwithstanding, he doesn’t know how to convey the depth of what he feels for her, the fact that his actions have so frequently belied the truth of his feelings over the years they’ve stood together. The years they were apart. He doesn’t know how to do this.

“I want you to know that you don’t owe me anything. You don’t have to –”

“For god’s sake, Elliot, I know I don’t owe you.” She looks incredulous, and he feels a familiar anger from her – anger and hesitancy that he hasn’t seen since before she walked into that interrogation room with Kate, and desperation claws at him. Panic over her physical safety has segued into panic over her emotional fortitude. He doesn’t want those walls to be erected again, he wants her to stay soft and open and with him.

“You owe me.”

Damn.

He’d almost forgotten that for all the ways Olivia can seem defensive and damaged by the rough turns that life has unfairly thrown her way, she’s also impossibly sure. Willfully confident. And when she’s at her strongest, she’s never had a problem stating what she wants. Never had a problem letting him know when’s being an ass. Or an idiot.

He nods. He is desperate to know what happened to her, to fill in the gaps that Kate started revealing, and he is simultaneously drowning in dread. The truth of it is that it is not ten years ago. He cannot rescue her or help her or ease her pain. This is to know her better, to know her now, to reclaim broken pieces of the connection they once had, but the damage has been done. She’s right – he owes her. Amanda Rollins’s words echo in his ears.

You know the Olivia Benson before and after you and that bastard William Lewis tore her apart… Between your abandonment and his abduction, Stabler, the few years after you left broke her down completely.

The dread and panic are live things now, scratching at his chest and making their way up his throat, choking him with fear. He’s going to fuck this up, say the wrong thing, he thinks. And she’s going to kick him out of her home because he is not her partner any longer, he’s the asshole who ran. He’s the coward who left her without a word. The memory of pacing in front of the interrogation room window while watching her resurfaces, but there are no calming words from Ayanna, no sympathetic glances from Jet here.

All he can do is try.

“I do. I – I do owe you, Olivia. I’ll listen to whatever you want to tell me.”

She nods, and he can’t tell if she’s appeased or not, but she fixes her gaze on the wall behind him, and he thinks she’s summoning strength to navigate this, to expose to him all the things she’d rather forget.

There was a time he knew those things implicitly.

Those warm brown eyes are distant now, and they don’t turn back to his when she begins to speak.

“Cragen had me pack up your desk.”

That’s… not where he thought she was going to start. He was braced for violence and blood spatter, for her to start with the monster. God, Rollins was right. William Lewis may have battered her, but he broke her first.

“Liv –”

“Just listen, Elliot,” her voice breaks on the request and he can’t help but touch her, smoothing a finger over the veins of her hand resting on the duvet cover. She flips her palm over and twines her fingers with his, and some of his anxiety tamps back down. This, this is the difference. They aren’t running from their feelings any longer, the lines of propriety and honor are no longer dividing them. He knows this conversation is going to hurt but as he looks their clasping hands, he’s once again on his old stoop with her knee knocking into his, telling him who else would put up with me aloud. Silently telling him she was going to stay.

He bends down and presses a kiss to her knuckles, rests his chin on their hands and looks up at her. Nods.

She takes a deep breath and shakes her head, clearing soft strands from her face.

“He told me you put your papers in, and you didn’t answer any of my calls. And then he made me pack up your desk. Told me we couldn’t keep it as a shrine. He gave me a new partner, and Elliot, I was so angry.”

It’s a physical struggle not to interrupt her, to tell her he’s so fucking sorry, to beg her to forgive him. He squeezes her hand and forces himself to listen. The panic isn’t so strong now – but it’s only because the shame has overtaken it.

“I don’t know… I don’t even know how to tell you what it was like. I couldn’t understand how you could do that to me. I – Elliot, I love you. I do. And I’m glad that you’re here now. I meant what I said in the hospital. But I’m trying to be honest, and…” her voice trails off, and when she meets his eyes it’s like a sucker punch. The air whooshes from his own chest at the stark hurt he sees there. “I couldn’t understand how you could do that to me. It was like the truest things I’d known were suddenly all wrong. I couldn’t understand. I still don’t.”

He can’t help but interrupt her now. He’ll listen and he’ll experience her pain because she was right at the start – he owes her. But he needs her to know the depth of his own sorrow, his own regret. That when he left it wasn’t an easy choice, and the leaving took a part of his soul.

“I’m so sorry, Olivia. I’m so sorry.” The battle to suppress tears has left his voice thick and heavy, and the words come out in a rush. He hates himself. The words accomplish nothing, and they both know it. She forges ahead, his strong, beautiful partner. He may hate himself but he admires her and it’s selfish, but he thinks maybe she can make him a better man, too.

If anyone can, it’s her.

“I don’t need you to apologize. I just – need you to know. What it – what you did.” Her eyes sharpen her voice takes on a more assertive note. “If you do it again, if you do it now, with Noah in the picture –”

“Liv, I’m not going any –”

“If you do, I will find you this time, and I will hurt you. I may not be a detective anymore, but I could do it and –”

“You’ll always be a detective. I’m not going anywhere. I’m standing right here, Captain.”

The moment alleviates some of the heaviness in the room, and they share a smile. It’s like coming up for air, and he takes in a breath of the lightness for a moment. He’s not going to tell her now, but it warms his heart seeing this side of her, the protective mother. It suits her.

But then the sadness creeps back across her face, and fuck, he wants to undo the past. He wants to shake Serena Benson for missing the good in her own daughter, he wants to prevent Jenna from bringing a gun to the precinct in the first place, he wants to never have left her. He wants to put a bullet in William Lewis’s head before he even had a chance to enter Olivia’s orbit.

“You were gone, and you’d been the person in my life that would realize, El. But you weren’t there.”

She’s struggling now, silent tears welling in her eyes, but he’s lost the connection. He’d thought she was going to tell him about William Lewis. He’d thought she was going to extrapolate on those concise words she’d given him days ago outside of the interrogation room, before they knew how much this case was going to change their relationship, their lives.

He remembers those words; they will never leave him. Forced abduction, prolonged assault, involuntary witness to other criminal acts. No rape. It was – it lasted for four days. He remembers Ayanna briefly describing the second time the son of a bitch had her. Her remembers Kate’s eyes gleaming with hurt and anticipation as she asked Liv how she’d withstood four days in hell.

He thought she was going to tell him about those days, to bear witness of the agony she’d survived in his absence, but instead she’s talking about them. About him. About that absence.

“Olivia,” he says it softly, slowly rolling out the syllables of her name. They’re both talking in hushed tones like the fact that they’re being this open with each other at all is illicit, is tempting fate. “Olivia, I don’t understand. Realize what?”

“I’m sorry, I’m not explaining this –”

“No, sweetheart, you’re alright.” The endearment tumbles from his lips and he suspects one day – when they’ve bared their wounds and they’ve healed together, when they are past this moment, when she looks at him with certainty again, that they will argue over his use of endearments and pet names. They’ve always come to him easily, he’s used them with victims, with his children, with his wife. He wants to inundate Liv with them, call her all the soft, sweet things until she takes it for granted – how much he cares for her.

But right now, he simply wants her to know he’s not criticizing, he’s only trying to follow her. He doesn’t want to make this any harder on her than it has to be.

“I’m – just,” she huffs a sigh of frustration, almost a growl, pulls her hand away and grips the bedspread on either side of her. Her hands form fists, and she pushed down on the bed like she’s steadying herself. Suddenly it clicks for him.

Oh.

She’s trying, she’s communicating, and she loves him.

But she’s also angry.

And her anger isn’t only towards William Lewis. She’s angry at him.

“You were the person who would have realized. I didn’t have many people, Elliot. But I had you. You were my partner, and you would have noticed.” Her brown eyes are glassy and wet, so dark they’re nearly black, and she looks haunted as she locks her gaze on his. “He was there when I got home. He was there and he had me – he knocked me out and when I woke up, I was tied to a chair. It was – he, he hurt me,” he’s frozen now, watching her cleave the memories from herself, give them to him instead because he should have been there to help her carry them all along. And she’s crying in earnest now, and he knew it would hurt to hear this but Jesus.

He feels like he’s being flayed.

Her voice climbs a little, taking on a more pleading tone. She’s nearly frantic but she doesn’t slow the words tumbling forth.

“I didn’t even know you could feel pain like that and stay conscious. He had me and I couldn’t do anything to stop him. The first two days he kept me in my apartment and then he took me – and I was in the trunk, and there was – he killed – he made me watch and the lawyer’s mother was –” she cuts off, gasping.

Her breath is coming in gulps now and he’s afraid to touch her, but he doesn’t want her to hyperventilate, and Christ, this was too much. She’s still healing, and they shouldn’t have tried to have this conversation now and he thinks he can add that to this never-ending list of all the ways he’s fucked up when it comes to Olivia.

“Shh, Liv, please,” he murmurs, reaches his hand back out to hers and touches the top of his fingertips to hers on the bed. He lets her make the move, and she does. She snatches his hand like a lifeline and grips it, steadying a little as she continues.

“You weren’t there. He didn’t take me out of my apartment for days and then it got – so much worse somehow and I thought… I knew I was going to die, once we’d left. No one – you weren’t there. You were the person who would have realized. No one even knew I was missing for two days.”

The mantle falls, and the realization is anguish. No one checked on her.

He would have.

Oh, God.

He can’t stop his own tears, and he doesn’t fucking know what to say. He’s not sure why she’s let him into her home, much less why she’s now holding his hand, stroking it in comfort and rubbing her thumb along the base of his to anchor him. He’s not sure she’s even aware she’s doing it because while her hands give comfort her eyes are spewing fury. And it’s warranted.

“And you – you’ve never been alone, El. Not really. You don’t know. You have no idea how important some of those little moments were to me, when you were just – my partner. My friend. You brushed past them and that was okay, because you were there. Because before you left, even when I think of my loneliest moments, I was never truly alone.

“You were always a phone call away, the face I saw across from me at our desks. In the seat next to me in the squad car. And then you weren’t – and the loneliest moments became... more. They started to scare me because it felt like I could just – I could just disappear.

“And then I fucking did. I did disappear and no one noticed for two whole days and those were days when I was being tortured, Elliot. And that’s another word that doesn’t convey the real meaning – it was… I wanted to die, I wanted it to be over, for it to stop hurting – I wanted you to come get me. Nobody came and he just kept – it made me question everything I thought I knew. Sometimes, I still do.”

She trails off then. He slid off the chair onto his knees as she spoke, relishing the pain as he slammed them on the floor while she described being tortured. He’s kneeling in supplication and he thinks maybe he’ll need to be there for the rest of his days. It still wouldn’t be enough.

“Olivia,” her name is a promise and a plea and a penance.

How do we come back from this? He wonders. How did she?

“Sometimes, I’m still so angry. And I’m tired of that. I don’t want to be angry anymore, El.”

Days ago, he’d put his head down and cried at her side, when he was finally sure that Danny Lesewski and a lucky shot hadn’t taken her from him. Now he’s doing the same, dampening her bedspread with her tears, and he wonders how she can bear to be near him at all. He’s failed her. Time and again.

“I’m so – I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Liv. I –”

“Elliot, look at me.” His chest his heaving, trying to minimize the sobs and the rage that wants to burst forth. He recognizes this side of himself – he wants to rip something, someone the fuck apart, he wants to wage war on her behalf to an enemy that’s already been vanquished, but the impulse is still there. And it contradicts the soft candlelight in her bedroom, his fury is in contrast with the oddly peaceful look on her face that he sees as he lifts his tearstained face.

“I should have been there. I should have. This was on me.”

“I got away. I… hurt him, then. And I told him you would have hurt him back.”

“You were right. Liv, you were right.”

She nods and sucks in a quavering breath, as though the knowledge that he would have avenged her was a certainty, but the words coming from him were a relief.

“I’m so sorry, Olivia. It shouldn’t have happened. I’m so glad – I’m so glad that you fought, that you lived, baby. You shouldn’t have had to do it by yourself and I…” the words taper off. He doesn’t know how to make her understand the burning desire to go back in time and find William Lewis, to prevent this, and to inflict the damage he did to her back to him. Tenfold. But there’s nothing…

He feels foolish. He feels impotent. He’s made so many wrong choices over the years. He stares at her, hopes she can see the longing because the words are failing him. But more than anyone else in the world, Olivia Benson has been able to read multitudes from his eyes alone.

She doesn’t disappoint now.

“Come up here.” He can’t deny her anything, and he gently slides her over so that she can lay on him instead of the pillows. He can’t see her face now, just the slope of her nose and the wetness of her eyelashes, but he can feel her breathing against him.

She sniffles, grips his shirt with her free hand. She’s still holding his with her other, their arms pressed in between them.

“I don’t want to – I can get you the files. I think maybe you should know the details if we’re going to – well, if we’re going to be together.” He wants to ask her how she could possibly want to be with him given what she’s revealed, what his absence cost her, but at his core he’s always known he’s greedy. He wants her desperately, even if he doesn’t deserve her. “But I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of reliving, relaying it. And I think maybe you just need the facts.”

“Whatever you want, however you want to share it, Liv.” He murmurs. He knows they’re both experiencing a bit of a comedown, and she sighs into him.

“I needed you to know, though – and it’s why. It’s why I’ve kept my distance since you’ve been back. It’s why I wasn’t ready.”

He presses a kiss to the crown of her head. He’s not sure he wants to know the answer, but he asks anyways.

“And you’re ready now?”

“Well, almost dying does put things into perspective.” He’s still too raw to smile, but he hums assent. She’s always been practical; leave it to Liv to drill down to the root of it all.

“I don’t – Olivia, I don’t understand why you’re not –”

“Yelling at you? Calling you a son of a bitch?”

He remembers those words hurled at him as she stormed down the hallways of the 1-6 after Gitano forced their closeness into the spotlight. “Ah… yes.”

“It’s like I said. I don’t want to be angry anymore.”

“And that’s a decision?”

“I think more is a decision, or a choice, than I realized. I’ve loved you for years, El. I think I’d like to… choose you, too.”

Elliot has had moments in his life when he’s been humbled, moments when he’s been grateful and awe-filled. Holding each of his babies for the first time, watching his children grow, seeing Kathy thrive in Italy, when he provided her a better life that he probably owed her all along. He’s never felt quite like this, though; hearing Olivia forgive him, choose him, open to him.

He feels blessed.

“You – ah, I’m know we talked about it. That I love you. That being your partner was – what it meant to me. But Liv, you gotta understand… you’re the best person I know.”

“Hmm. I’m not the best. But then, neither are you.”

He snorts out a laugh. “Thanks, baby.”

He feels the beginnings of a smile against his chest, and she shakes her head slightly. “I just mean, you’ve always been able to see me. Even the bad parts.”

“You don’t have any bad parts.” The smile widens, and she pulls away to look at him now. He wants to memorize the look on her face – she’s looking at him like she can’t help but love him.

“I do, and you do, too. But I love you still, and I think – it’s why we were good partners, El.”

“Our bad parts matched?”

“Our bad parts evened each other. I can be good on my own, El. I have to be now, for Noah. But I think I can be better with you.”

He kisses her then, and it’s light and slow – she’s exhausted and injured and they’re both still riding the wave of revisited trauma. This isn’t going any further tonight, but she hums in her throat at the softness of it and he feels that sigh in the echoes of who he has been with her. He thinks the Elliot of decades gone by – the one who promised her for better or worse – feels it, too.

“I don’t deserve it, but I have always been better with you,” he tells her. It’s a truth that even Kathy knew. The best versions of himself have had Olivia at his side.

He maneuvers them both so they’re lying down, not putting pressure on her side, and wraps an arm around her securing her to his side. She falls asleep first, the tears now dried on her cheeks, as he watches the candle burn down and the darkness chase into the room.

But now, the darkness is void of William Lewis and Danny Lesewski and any of the others that ever threatened them, hurt them. For now, the anger is gone, and the monsters are, too. It is – at last – just the two of them.

He falls asleep wondering at the wisdom of his God, who he has trusted, to whom he has prayed, who has allowed such great lengths of harm and healing.

Chapter Text

Olivia has spent an inordinate amount of time marveling at the transient nature of time itself. The way it trailed and dragged like a dying thing when she was in the clutches of a madman but lifted and flew with startling weightlessness when her son was first given to her care. The way it has shifted, changed its mind, flipped from fleeting to flailing when Elliot returned to her life and mixed up her mind as much as he altered how time passed.

And now, in the relative peace that has followed the chaos of Kate’s interrogation, the takedown of the casino front, the shooting and its revelations, time has once again shed its shackles and lifted in flight. She hears her mother’s voice in her ear more frequently these days. It’s a fickle thing, Olivia – the passage of time.

But she’ll take the days and nights passing more quickly, given how they’re now filled.

Elliot has been there. He wakes in her sheets, and he makes breakfast in her kitchen, and he scribbles doodles and completes homework assignments with her son. He smirks at her across the expanse of her couch while Noah sits between them in the evenings, and he places kisses on her shoulder in her bathroom when her robe slips as she applies her makeup. He talks to his mother, his children, from the comfort of her living room, swiveling in her armchairs until she swats his legs to make him stay still for a moment. He leaves during the day to go to work – after her initial hospital stay, Ayanna pulled him back to the squad to close the Lesewski case – but he returns to her apartment and eats dinner at her table.

He balked at that request, insisting that his time away would match the medical leave mandated for her, but caved at Liv’s insistence.

“I can’t be there yet, El, but I need to know that someone’s watching out for Kate. We promised her.” These days, it seems, he’s hard-pressed to deny her a thing.

He has been clingier than she’s ever seen him, shadowing her movements, clocking her mobility. His hands are on her more often than they’re not, and while that has been something that rankled with previous boyfriends, lovers, men who captured her interest without corresponding labels – with him it feels like a comfort, a reclaiming. Sometimes she thinks she feels most at home in her own skin when his fingers grip and trail along it.

His touch has been a necessity, at times, as she learns to live in a body that doesn’t have the same capabilities, the same strength as it did before the shooting. She can’t twist all the way on her right side, can’t spin to react from the kitchen counter when her boy comes bounding into the apartment. She can’t reach her right arm to grasp at the top shoeboxes stacked high in her bedroom closet, seeking stilettos she doesn’t wear anymore anyways or boxfuls of memories that she no longer requires the pictures and mementos to summon.

His touch was a necessity the first time she bared herself to him, sharing the physical scars a few days after she shared the emotional, when she wore him down and assured him that she was ready, she wanted it, she was healed enough, now.

He traced her scars just like he traced the softness of her hip, the line of her clavicle, the slope of her breast, her thin veins dark enough to be seen under the skin – the ones carrying blood he’d seen spilled from her as he promised her the everyday, the rest of their lives. He traced and touched until she was squirming with need, growling at him to quit teasing her, and he grinned wolfishly at the realization she was more focused on the anticipation and want than the remnants of the past that her body still mapped.

She learned a new shade of blue the first time he was inside her, his eyes locked on hers as they sought and found their rhythm. When he whispered her name reverently, knocking his cheek against hers then pulling back to take in her face, looking for all the world like he wanted to memorize her. She charted the way his pupils dilated and changed the shade of his eyes as he came, as he brought her to the edge more than once before following over it himself. She looks for that shade during the day now, when he watches her from across the room, the table, the car console. She wonders if she only can turn his eyes that shade when release rips through him, while her heels are tucked behind his thighs, or if there are other ways that she can draw it out of him.

She believes now that shade is specific to her.

“Not gonna break, El,” she whispers to him one night, nearly three weeks after the shooting.

“Never said you were,” he mutters back, kissing her temple and adjusting his pace, maneuvering his fingers between them in the way he’d learned very quickly leads her right to the precipice. But he holds his weight above her right side, and she sees that the deepness of the blue recede like shallowing water – he is thinking too much, thinking about how not to hurt her.

She stills then, lifting her hands from where they’d gripped his waist up to his face, lightly pushing against his furrowed brow before she moves them to cup his cheeks.

“Hey, hey – what are you–”

“Elliot. I’m a little sore still, but you don’t have to do that. I want you to fuck me.” He knocks his forehead into hers at that. One thing she’d learned very quickly was that her willingness to be vocal, to tell him exactly what she wanted, to instruct him a little, led him right to the precipice.

Who knew he was so willing to please, she thinks. Where the hell has that been all these years?

“I can’t – Liv, I’m glad you’re feeling better, but I can’t. I just wanna be careful.” The blue shifted again, lighter with a gleaming consideration, before he murmured a quick hang on and shocked the hell out of her by rolling, flipping their positions in one fell swoop, staying inside her the whole time.

Jesus Christ.

He traced her scars as she rode him, positioning his hand to give her right side additional support, smiling when she flops back onto his chest and sighs deeply.

“What if I don’t want you to be careful?” she breathes against his skin, reveling at the sensation of her sweat blending with his.

“You gotta let me get there, baby. I think – I just…”

“What is it?”

“It’s not that I think you’re gonna break, Liv. I know how strong you are. I know you won’t. It’s just that you are still healing. And being careful with you now – it’s the most I can do. The best I can do. Since I wasn’t there to take care of you then.”

She presses her face against his neck at that, trying to hide her tears.

“Is that okay? It’s still – this is still good for you, right?”

And the tears shift to a smile she still wants to hide; it seems to embarrass him, but she only sees this tentative, validation-seeking side of him when they are intimate, and it wasn’t a version of him she knew existed, much less expected to know so well. Sometimes she can’t believe how much of a schoolboy still resides inside Elliot Stabler.

Sometimes she can’t believe how much she loves that.

“Yeah, El. It’s good,” she’d all but slurred. “Better than good.”

That restores the swaggering confidence quickly enough. “That’s what I thought.”

His touch is a necessity, a guide, a reminder of armor, when she walks back into the OC interrogation rooms six weeks after the shooting, and finally lays eyes Kate again.

They spoke on the phone in the interim, while Olivia was still healing, and more frequently in the latter weeks when she’d begun to feel physically like herself again but was still benched from police work.

“Come on, Liv, you took another decade off my life with that stunt. I got it covered. Mostly. You can’t stay out of the squad room for another couple of weeks 'til you get the all-clear?” Fin asked her, maybe the sixth time she’d called for updates on current cases and bemoaned her homebound status.

“I’m fine. I’m ready to be back, Fin.”

“Yeah? Doesn’t Stabler have you chained to the bed by this point?”

“Odafin Tutuola!”

Her Sergeant’s laughter and mentions of a decades-long bet with Munch was his only response, and one she decided to ignore.

Her joy seems to have robbed her of some of her severity, some of the somber sway and control she used to believe she had over herself and others. She finds that she doesn’t miss it much.

But reencountering Kate reminds her of why she does it, reminds her of the dread that pooled in her stomach when she last sat in this interrogation room and bared her soul, her scars. Reminds her of how complex people are and that even the victims can wield weapons.

She wielded one herself, when she was a victim.

“Captain Benson!” Kate flings herself into her arms, eliciting a small grunt from her and an exclamation from Elliot. Hey, come on, take it easy!

“I’m fine, El,” she says, shifting her attention to Kate. “I’m fine. How are you?”

She looks better than Olivia has ever seen her. Younger, with her makeup less severe and her clothes less dingy, her hair clean and shiny beneath the cool squad room lights.

“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” she murmurs in her arms, and El backs off at that. He trusts her – everywhere, these days, but he has always trusted her with the victims.

“Kate, it’s alright.”

“It’s not. I was awful, and I made you talk about – and you were trying to help me. And Danny shot you!”

“Kate, I knew you weren’t trying to hurt me. Look, I know just as well as you that healing isn’t always soft and gentle. You were trying to find your way out – to stop letting this happen to other girls – and you did. And Kate, for what it’s worth, I am sorry about Danny. We tried.”

Elliot scoffs that that, bristling in the corner, but Ayanna has joined him at his side, and she elbows him at the sound.

“Leave it alone, Stabler.”

Olivia’s heart floods with warmth, and she thinks that time can be creative and wily, in addition to fickle. It can take something that would have broken your heart, destroyed your soul years prior, and turn it into something you want more than anything years later. There was a time that seeing someone who is so clearly Elliot’s partner would have crushed her. There was a time it did.

But seeing it now, seeing the bond between the man she loves and the Sergeant he supports – she wouldn’t want anything different for him. And she wants the role she claims in his life so much more.

“I know. I’m so sorry about what he did – that I didn’t tell you everything. I should have. I – after you were hurt, I gave Sergeant Bell everything. I told her about all the girls, how Danny hurt me, too. We got them out. I’m trying – I’m helping.”

“Kate has turned evidence against David and Prokov, and will probably just receive probation and community service, in addition to time served, for trafficking. Given her participation, and the fact that she was first trafficked herself, we’re not seeking more,” Ayanna offers from Elliot’s side.

Liv knew this, but seeing the relief and tentative pride chase across Kate’s face is worth it.

“Plus I helped Detective Slootmaekers with some computer shit.”

“She’s pretty good at research; we’ll work on low range hacking next,” Jet pipes in from her desk. She hadn’t joined the group when they arrived, but observed their reunion and subsequent conversation, and she shares a conspiratorial grin with them now.

“You absolutely will not,” Elliot contributes, and Olivia can’t stop the slow, wide smile that spreads across her face.

She doesn’t even try.

His touch has been a necessity, a saving grace, a sign of a different life – especially as she learned that she’ll never be as quick as she once was, that she can’t react to pull her gun the way she once could. They way she would need to if she’s ever going to be in the field again.

“But, with additional physical therapy, can’t she regain more movement, more range of motion?”

Elliot’s leg bounced next to hers in the well-appointed office, decked in diplomas and academic journals, publications of medical prowess just as her office is adorned in news clippings and medals of commendation. She winced; based on what they just heard, that won’t be her office for much longer.

She’s been back at work for nearly four weeks, and it’s been twelve weeks since the shooting. She and Elliot have discussed officially moving in together, which feels both entirely too soon and inevitable all at once.

“Do you live here now, El?” her son had asked her partner a few nights prior, causing her to choke on the glass of Italian wine Elliot had brought with pizzas and ice cream. A 2012 Barolo – it’s better than Nero D’Avola, you gotta trust me, he’d murmured softly in her ear as she doled out slices.

“Noah, we’re figuring things out. Let’s talk about that later, and I will answer any of your questions, okay?”

“Sure! But he’s here all the time. So, I think even if you don’t know yet, he lives here, Mom,” Noah said happily, mouth full of cheese and pepperoni.

“Okay, okay. Chew with your mouth closed, honey,” she said, taking another sip of wine, ignoring Elliot’s wide, unrepentant grin.

Damnit. The Barolo was better than her usual choice.

Now she’s trying to digest the news of what this will mean for her, what this will mean for her squad, for her career. Elliot is arguing with Dr. Hughes, trying to reason the ways she’ll be able to work her way back to what she was before a bullet ripped through her and brought him to his knees.

“In all likelihood, no. Continued physical therapy will help with residual pain, will continue to increase your movement ability and range. But full mobility will probably always be somewhat restricted by the remaining scar tissue.” She thinks back to the hospital, when she told Elliot she loved him, when they told each other what was real. Timing aside, she’d liked Dr. Hughes then, too.

This spells the end of what she has known. Time is bookmarking the chapters.

SVU is who she is, it’s her blood, it was her first true purpose. But – she thinks of pizza and ice cream and wine. She thinks of Noah’s accepting grins and Elliot’s knowing smirk.

She thinks of her sweet boy’s enthusiasm and growing excitement about how much more time she’s been able to spend with him, of how his initial fear and alarming desperation to keep her in his sight after the shooting has dissipated.

She thinks about how much time she has spent with Rollins in the past twelve weeks, with her helping at first, then later taking their kids on walks in Central Park to expend the youthful energy. She thinks about the fact that Fin has called, swung by the apartment to talk, to gossip about the squad’s antics and potential romantic interests but not the cases themselves, to pilfer Elliot’s beer.

She thinks of how she’s had lunch with Maureen and Kathleen, that Eli called her for help on a political science essay, that Bernie has sent Elliot over with numerous batches of varyingly burnt baked goods.

She thinks of how Rafa called her, distraught, desperate to know that she was going to recover, and that they’d made tentative steps to rebuilding a friendship that was supposed to last through their eighties.

She thinks of Eric Plummer and years and tears gone by, and decides maybe she doesn’t have to carry a gun at her hip any longer to continue the good, the protection, that has been her life’s work. The beginnings of a mission statement for nonprofit foundation form in her head, and she files the thoughts away for later.

She thinks of Elliot, Elliot, Elliot.

He asks her to marry him four times before she says yes.

The first time is while she’s swimming in her favorite shade of blue, while he’s still inside her, and she tells him in no uncertain terms that that proposal doesn’t count.

The second time, they are still curled up in each other’s limbs basking in the afterglow, and she has to give him more direct instructions that marriage proposals cannot be shared during or directly after sex (secretly she loves the fact that their intimacy inspires this in him, but she has always liked to push him to do better).

The third time, he is wired with his own latest case, driven by trauma and anxiety, mired in his own flashbacks and fears of failing her. And she knows that he loves her, but he seems to also want to keep her, and that is not what this is about. Not to her.

She has learned differently from her mother. Time does not always steal. She knows they belong to each other regardless, and she doesn’t want a proposal that is a reaction.

Her rejection pisses him off, but he comes around. He always does, now.

The fourth time they’re sitting on the deck at his mother’s beach house, watching a good number of their respective children (and his grandchildren) play in the surf, and she is grateful that beach houses can mean something different to her these days.  Like time, places are transient, too.

“Olivia?”

She starts a little, at that. He usually begins with Liv and builds to her full name as the emotion builds within him.

“Yeah?” she asks softly.

“When you were shot. When I thought you were dying –”

“El, we don’t have to talk about that –”

“No, I – you said something. I never asked you. In the hallway. We were waiting on the paramedics, and I was holding you and trying to get you to keep talking to me.” He rubs a rough hand down his face like the memory pains him, even now.

“I remember.”

“You said something – I said I was skipping steps or something like that, but that I wanted to be with you. That I wanted more with you.”

“The everyday. You said you wanted the everyday with me.” She reaches out and grips his hand in hers; the memories still ache with a dull throb, and the fear is pushed back by the security and the happiness now, but she can remember what it feels like.

“Yeah. I did. I do. You said something I didn’t understand. You – I think you asked for coffee?”

She laughs a little, wondering what the hell has him thinking of that now.

“No – I, it made me think of something. You know Johnny Cash?”

He laughs then, louder than she had, and she smiles at the freedom of it.

“Yeah, Liv, I’ve heard of the man in black. Might have heard a song or two by him seeing as how I didn’t grow up under a rock.”

“Shut up and let me talk, El,” she responds, but there’s no bite, and she squeezes her fingers around his.

“My mother liked his music. Not so much the music, but his lyrics. Said they were poetry – there because he’s a victim of the times. Anyways. There was this interview, years ago, and they asked him what he thought paradise was. And I guess I thought of it when you said you wanted the everyday.”

“He said something about June.”

“Yes. This morning, with her, having coffee. I don’t know, El, you said every day, and I was afraid I wasn’t going to have any more days. I wanted a chance for it.” She lets out a breath, because even after sharing about what his leaving did to her, what his being gone cost her – she sometimes still struggles with the vulnerability.

“Marry me.”

She stills – because this time, he’s got it right. This time, time stands still for her, and she’s never really been grateful to it before, but she takes a moment to acknowledge maybe time was right along. The timing was wrong for them when they were partners, and it stole him away from her for ten years, and then it wasn’t in their favor when they were trying to find their way back to each other. But time is right for them now.

He’s rambling, she realizes, trying to explain that he’s got a ring but it’s back at their place in the city; he was going to propose at a restaurant, next month, but this just felt right, and he is sorry that he didn’t do it like he planned but Liv, I love you –

“Yes.”

“I – oh,” he stills, realizing that he no longer has to make his case, and she thinks the smile making its way across his face would be worth waiting another twenty-five years. “Yes? Are you sure? Do you need to think about it? I talked to my kids, to Noah – do you wanna talk to them? Do you –”

She can’t help it; she stops the flow of words with a kiss, deepening it when he moans against her, twining his hands in her hair.

“Is this an interrogation, Detective?” she asks, giving him a smile of her own.

Time has not changed that; he is still who she has always known.

“No. I think I’ve got what I need.”