Chapter Text
Elliot called Olivia shortly after the New Year, when the snow was still on the ground from the second storm they'd gotten in thirty days and she and Noah were preparing to leave their holiday schedules behind. They'd agreed to get together once Elliot had had a few days to check in with Ayanna, file his reports, and decompress with his family. From what Olivia could gather, he'd made it back from the op healthy and whole, no bullet holes or stab wounds or traumas to add to his mountain of PTSD symptoms. He'd mentioned to her that he had chosen not to grow the beard again.
Olivia was ever thankful for that.
As the days drew closer to her meet up with Elliot, she found herself texting Amaro more, looking for reassurance, validation, that what she had decided was okay, and that she had a right to want what she wanted without feeling guilty for it. Nick had affirmed her at every turn, whether it took a few seconds to answer her text or a few hours. She didn’t have the words to explain how grateful she was for him and the weekend they'd spent together. Olivia had no idea how much she'd needed intimacy until Nick had offered it to her, freely and unrestrained - unconditionally - and it meant more to her than she could possibly express afterwards, that he acted no differently towards her, that their weekend together was spent as friends who loved each other with the understanding that it would never be anything more than that. Nick would always have her love and devotion for it.
She'd even put in a call to Dr. Lindstrom after Christmas and unloaded everything that had happened since October onto his shoulders, wanting an objective third party to tell her that it wasn't crazy for her to be feeling the way she was.
"You're certainly not insane, Olivia," Lindstrom chuckled at her. "You're a human being with emotions and a huge heart who wants the people in her life to be happy, and there's nothing wrong with that. You just have to remember that you have the right to be happy, too."
"And for me to be happy, I have to hurt someone who means a lot to me," Olivia responded miserably.
"What do you think Elliot will say when you tell him?" Lindstrom recrossed his legs and steepled his fingers, observing her quietly.
"I know he’ll be upset," she cleared her throat. "I... I guess an outside observer could say that I've been leading him on."
"Do you feel you've led him on?"
"I feel like I gave him hope," Olivia rubbed her arms with the opposite hand. "There was a time where I thought we could've made that move in our relationship, but... I feel like if I haven't already, then what is there to move to? And over here there's Rafael, and he and I never had the chance to explore anything further between us because of our jobs, and we're talking again and it's been... good," she took a breath. "Very good."
Lindstrom hummed quietly. "And you and Elliot were never able to explore your relationship further because of his marriage."
Olivia nodded.
"You said things with Rafael have been improving - how so?"
"Well, I stopped shutting him out and actually listened to him, gave him the opportunity to tell me why he did what he did," she cleared her throat. "We've been texting since the gala, more and more over the weeks. We met for coffee a couple weeks back - it was supposed to be a half-hour, it wound up being two. It just... feels like we're getting back to the place we were in before everything with Richard Wheatley."
"And what was it that Rafael said to you when you heard him out that was different from any of the previous times?"
Olivia pursed her lips. She still felt sick to her stomach that someone had inferred there could be harm done to Noah for any reason. "He told me Wheatley had… inferred that if Rafael didn't do all he could as Wheatley's defense counsel that something might happen to me... or to my son."
“So… Rafael was protecting the most important person in the world to you.”
“Yes,” Olivia nodded. “He was afraid that if he’d tried to warn me or if he said anything about it to anyone that Wheatley would find out, that he would antagonize Wheatley into doing something to Noah, and I get that, but…”
“But?”
“I made him promise me that if, God forbid this ever happens again, that he finds a way to tell me.”
“And did he promise?”
She nodded.
“So, you and Rafael are on the mend then,” Lindstrom smiled. He seemed pleased. “What about you and Elliot? How has that relationship been going?”
“He um… well, he’s in a long-term undercover op at the moment, but it’s… you know. Baby steps.”
Now, as she stood outside Elliot's door, long wool coat buttoned up to her neck and a scarf covering the rest of her throat, hands in her pockets with the fingers of one dancing around a small box and the other clutching her phone, she looked at one of those affirming texts on her cell one more time to reassure herself that what she wanted for her life was okay. Olivia inhaled deeply once more and breathed out, watching the white wisps puff away from her face and knocked on Elliot's door.
Thankfully, he didn't make her wait long. "Get in here, it's freezing out there," Elliot ordered, ushering her in. "I don't know why you wouldn't let me come to you, Liv, you shouldn't be out in this stuff."
"I'm a born and raised New Yorker, El," she grinned at him, letting him take her coat and scarf. "I can handle a little snow." And that was true; she could handle the slick roads just fine and had no issue coming to him, but if this conversation went sideways, she also wanted him already home and in a place where he could process safely, not trying to navigate icy streets and his emotions at the same time.
Olivia Benson was nothing if not a meticulous planner.
Elliot got her a drink - hot tea for her, a beer for him since he hadn't been out in the frigid weather - and they settled at his kitchen island.
“Did you at least get to see the kids at all?”
“I got home in time to watch the ball drop, surprised them all the next day at the annual New Year’s brunch at Maureen’s.”
“I bet the little ones were happy to see grandpa.”
“Eh, the boys were fine. Kathleen’s still givin’ me the stink eye.”
Olivia winced. She knew Kathleen desperately wanted her father to retire, but Elliot was much like Olivia; he still had a lot to give. Though she supposed it was a little harder for Elliot considering that no matter how many criminals he arrested and took off the streets, it would never be enough to bring Kathy back.
“What about Eli?”
“Oh, he’s lovin’ college,” Elliot shook his head. “Told me he got into some fraternity.”
Olivia almost lifted her eyebrows clear off her head. “Eli? Eli Stabler pledged to a fraternity?”
“Yeah, I know,” Elliot shook his head. “He said it’s a good one. Lots of scholarship kids there. They do a weekend of community service once a month, stuff like that, so,” he swigged his beer, “they don’t sound like a complete bunch of lunatics.”
Olivia shook her head, looking at him quietly for a few seconds. “How long before you did back round on the frat?”
“I got a file together that night.”
She snorted into her tea before taking a sip. That sounded like the Elliot Stabler she knew.
"So, you're home,” Olivia smiled at him. “Does that mean you got your guy?"
"Guys, but yeah," Elliot shrugged. "We got 'em. Arrested them all a couple days ago. They definitely spent New Years having a different kind of party than what they thought they were gonna have. The DA's gonna have a solid case with everything we were able to give them. Speaking of the DA -" Stabler sipped from his bottle. "I heard a rumor that Barba was offered a job in the Manhattan office."
Olivia winced as she swallowed the tea, still hot, caught off guard by the comment. She licked her lips, clearing her throat and trying to ease the burn of it as she looked at Elliot, seemingly unfazed by her reaction.
Which was odd.
Shouldn’t he have at least looked up when she’d coughed? Asked if she was okay? It felt almost like he'd meant to spring it on her. "Uh, yeah, he was," she said.
"I heard he turned it down."
Olivia pinned him with a look. "You can call Hogan Place and get a roster of their attorneys if you’re looking for confirmation, Elliot." She’d meant it to come off sarcastically, but she heard the too defensive tone in her voice. He caught it, too, his crystal eyes crinkling, confused, assessing. She held up a hand, a wave of silent apology. This wasn't how she wanted to start this conversation.
But Elliot had always been like a dog with a bone when he sensed something was off or being hidden from him, and for all the improvements in his temperament, Olivia could still read him like a book, and she knew that he’d considered her apology and decided to forge ahead before the question even came.
"Did something happen with Barba while I was gone?" He asked softly. When she didn't answer, he pressed again. "What's going on, Liv?"
She took a breath. Lying had never worked in her favor, neither had beating around the bush. Avoidance had worked for a while, but she'd grown tired of the consequences of that which is why she was sitting here in Elliot's kitchen with her tea going cold and him looking at her with a kind of patient expectation of bad news, like he was steeling himself for it.
Olivia figured the easiest way to get this over with was just to say it, plainly. So, she did.
"I saw Barba at the Five Boroughs Ball a few months ago. We talked. I... heard him out, fully," she settled her hands in her lap, fingers wringing together between her legs. "We've been talking since then. He was offered a job in the DA's office - your unit's EADA, as a matter of fact." The look on Elliot's face told her he'd known that too, he'd just chosen not to share it. "He didn't take it because the DAs for that unit practically live with a security detail twenty-four-seven, but he also turned it down because he didn't want to cause a problem with you and your unit."
Elliot shook his head, like a puppy who didn’t understand why he was being told he couldn’t get up on the couch. Figured that Elliot Stabler couldn't care less about conflict. "You heard him out?"
Olivia sighed, the pricks of a headache beginning behind her eyes. "Yes, I heard him out."
"About?"
"About why he did what he did."
"And when you say 'why he did what he did', you mean why he defended Kathy's murderer-"
"Yes, Elliot, that's what I mean," she snapped at him.
“Alright,” Stabler leaned against the sink, each hand fisting the edge of the counter. “And what was the reason he gave you?”
Olivia opened her mouth to answer, then looked around, noticing the apartment was silent. “Where’s Bernie?”
“With Maureen through Epiphany,” he responded easily. “I felt better with her staying with family while I was gone.”
Right. That made sense. The ever-devout Stabler Catholicism, but Olivia found herself incredibly grateful it right now. Her stomach was twisting itself into knots as she watched him watching her, a mixture of trepidation and incredulity etched into his features before just a touch of relent flowed into his eyes. Olivia took a breath.
“What was the reason he gave you for defending Wheatley?” Elliot asked again, a little more quietly, slightly more reasonably.
“At first, it was about making sure that another defense attorney wouldn’t put me in a position where NYPD would have to throw me under the bus in a desperate attempt to save face,” Olivia drew a finger in non-descript patterns on the counter, as if her mind was following the path her digit was tracing. “As time and the case and the trial went on, as Wheatley watched our interactions…” She shrugged. If anyone had asked Olivia how she and Rafael had treated each other during that trial, she’d have told them that they’d both hardly spoke to one another, had barely looked at each other. “Barba told me that Wheatley had figured out Barba had gone easy on me during my testimony, figured out some other things, too.”
“What things?”
“That we’d worked together,” Olivia cleared her throat, looking up at Elliot. “That we were close. That I had a son.”
Elliot inhaled deeply, bringing his arms to cross over his chest. For a moment, just a second, he reminded Olivia so much of the Elliot from ten years ago, standing in a box, listening to a perp tell his story, wondering whether or not to believe it, which sentence to pick apart, which button to push. “You’re telling me that the whole reason Barba took Wheatley on as client was to protect you?”
“Yes,” Olivia nodded, “which at first, he did only do to protect my job, my reputation, everything I’ve built. It was during the trial that Wheatley… intimated that if Barba didn’t put his all into his defense that that might have some… consequences for me. For Noah.”
“Okay, so Wheatley threatened you and your kid and Barba, what – he just shuts up? Sits there and takes it? He doesn’t tell anybody?” Elliot was skeptical, as she knew he would be; Elliot would’ve been a walking, talking version of ‘Fuck around and find out’ if anyone had the guts to threaten any member of his family. She’d seen it enough times to know that for all his changes, that reaction to the possibility of his family being danger would never fade.
“He didn’t want to risk Wheatley finding out and forcing his hand,” Olivia responded calmly. “He did what we tell every civilian, every attorney, every court reporter, every everyone, to do when they or people they care about are faced with the possibility of harm – he complied.”
“He could’ve stopped you in the hall at the courthouse – ‘hey, Liv, thought you should know, the piece of shit I’m defending is threatening you and your kid’-“
“To be fair, he attempted numerous times to talk to me, but I wouldn’t hear him out, and, Elliot,” Olivia waited until Elliot looked at her, anger and disbelief radiating from him, “Barba had reason to be afraid that Wheatley would sniff out anything he told me, or told anyone else.”
“Oh, please –“
Olivia didn’t want to play this card, but Elliot was leaving her no choice. “You remember how he found out about Gina?”
“He had a camera in the wine cellar that recorded her putting the bug underneath the shelf!”
“And what else?” Olivia watched Elliot, who was now pacing the length of the kitchen island between them. “Her phone had been hacked. Her laptop at her apartment had been hacked – mics turned on, cameras recording; Elliot, this is a guy who was able to shut down the entire island of Manhattan with a computer chip, who was able to broadcast your confessions-“
“I got it.”
“-through an entire city, on the screen in Times Square-“
“I got it, I get it,” Elliot raised his voice to be heard over her. “I get it, Liv.” He continued to pace. Olivia continued to watch.
“Okay, so you and Barba are talking again, working things out.” He paused, looking at her. “For your sake, I’ll try not to shove him into a wall whenever I’m in the same room with him.”
“Baby steps,” Lindstrom nodded slowly. “What do baby steps look like?”
“Uhhhh…” Olivia laughed. It was a fair question. “Working cases together? Talking, here and there. He um, he got me this.” She dug the compass necklace out from underneath her sweater and held it up for Lindstrom to see. “Told me he hoped I used it to find happiness, right after he opened a Christmas gift from the previous year for me from the McCann’s.”
“Noah’s half-brother’s family?”
She nodded. “He told me I was afraid to open it, said that whatever was inside was too ‘normal’ for me and that I was terrified of it, scared of ‘normal’.”
“Do you think he was right?”
Much as she hated to admit it, Olivia let the necklace drop from her fingers and nodded. “Yeah,” she whispered. “I do.” The best example of that was Ed Tucker. Sweet Ed Tucker who chose to eat a bullet rather than wait for his cancer to take him out, Ed who offered her the world – stable home, a father for her son, all the love a person could want, devotion, loyalty, honesty… and she’d run from it.
“When we’ve talked about your relationship with Rafael and your relationship with Elliot in the past, one of the things I asked you was to think about why you reacted so intensely to Rafael’s apparent betrayal of you, and why you chose to align yourself with Elliot when he had hurt you just as, or possibly even more deeply, than Rafael had by leaving you the way he did for ten years.” Lindstrom didn’t speak again until Olivia looked up at him.
“Now, I want you to think about why you’ve been able to, fairly quickly, allow Rafael back into your life – speak with him, have coffee with him – but you haven’t yet been able to or have had the desire to do the same with Elliot.”
Olivia shifted in her seat. Lindstrom was doing what he did when he’d found something, a target to circle. She went for the best defense she could think of. “Well… like I said, Elliot’s been under cover for months. We haven’t really had the opportunity to spend much time together.”
“Sure,” Lindstrom conceded, “but he went under after you were shot, which was in May?”
Olivia nodded.
“Prior to that, the last time you’d seen Elliot – before the case you’d worked when you were injured – was January of last year, correct?”
“That’s right.”
“So, for five months, after the moment you and Elliot had in your apartment when he’d gone to pick up your son, you both had little to no contact with each other – no calls, no texts, no coffee dates…” Lindstrom had a twinkle in his eye that could be mistaken for teasing but Olivia had seen the man for years now, and she knew better.
“Out with it, Doc,” she demanded lightly.
“Olivia, is it possible that you were so angry with Rafael because you saw him as your chance for a happy, normal, stable life, and when he inserted himself into the mess with Wheatley, even though it was with every good intention, he threatened that possibility?”
“I-“
“And,” Lindstrom held up a hand, “your normal, default position, especially when you knew he was being wronged, was to align yourself with Elliot Stabler? To protect him, defend him, stick up for him; be his partner?”
“Is that what you wanted to catch me up on?” Elliot asked, not un-kindly, but Olivia was still wary of continuing this any further. Still. If she didn’t have this conversation with him now, the odds of him finding out in a far worse way increased considerably.
Ayanna hadn’t been lying about the NYPD rumor mill.
“Look, Elliot,” Olivia strained for several seconds to find the right pattern of words to string together.
“Liv.”
She looked up at warm blue eyes staring back at her. “Just tell me,” he implored quietly.
“…I don’t want to hurt you, El.”
He straightened a little at that, on his guard, inner-klaxons blaring. Olivia could see it plain as day on his face.
“This about you and Barba?”
She often wondered how she’d ever been able to play suspects in interrogation when her face was such an open book to those who knew her. She didn’t even have to tell him ‘yes’; he got it without a single word.
“When we worked together,” Olivia started, softly, “we were… a hell of a team. What started as a collegial relationship became a friendship, and a partnership, and if we’d have allowed it, it probably would’ve become something more. But we didn’t, because of our jobs, because of the sheer magnitude of cases and convictions that possibly would’ve been under review by Conviction Integrity. There’s so much that happened while you were gone that you don’t know about, El,” she swallowed down a lump in her throat. There was no reason to cry, and she refused to shame him for his absence – that wasn’t what she was here for.
“I’m not saying that to guilt you. But there were some… truly awful things that happened while you were away. And there were some wonderful things that happened too, like me adopting Noah. Life altering things that Rafael was here for, witnessed, experienced alongside me. Noah still calls him Uncle Rafa,” she laughed quietly to herself, “even when I wasn’t speaking to Rafael, Noah still asked about him. And then something… happened with Rafael, and he had to leave for a little while-“
“The Householder baby,” Elliot broke in, tone clipped. “I read about that.”
Olivia side-stepped that. It didn’t surprise her that Elliot had done a dive into Rafael. It would’ve shocked her if he hadn’t, to be honest. “What you read in the press isn’t even a quarter of the full story.”
“No? He killed a baby.”
“He released a brain-dead child who would never survive without machines breathing for him from his suffering when Drew’s mother couldn’t,” Olivia came back immediately, but kindly. “Was it his place; no, of course not, and Rafael knows that. There were… residual situations in Rafael’s life that factored into him doing for Drew what Drew’s own mother wanted to do herself but couldn’t; she was his mother. She couldn’t end her own child’s life, even if he was only being kept alive by machines.
“Anyway, he had to leave after that – McCoy told him he that he didn’t have to leave the DA’s office, but all of the exposure from the case, he got death threats, his mother’s school and apartment were vandalized… Rafael needed to leave to fix himself. And I got it. He kept in touch. And then he came back to the city two years ago and…”
Elliot prompted her when she trailed off, but his voice was all wrong. Olivia turned her gaze on him to see his head down, face towards his floor. Tears stung her eyes. She hoped he knew how much this was hurting her to tell him this, to watch him realize that all of his patience, all of his dreams for a them at the end of the day weren’t going to pan out the way he hoped. She slid off the stool and sidled around the kitchen island, slowly grazing her hands against his elbows. Olivia didn’t force him to look at her, not yet. He needed to get himself together.
“You told me a few months ago that my biggest fear was normalcy. That my fear of normal was why I hadn’t opened the Christmas present from the McCann’s for months on end, because it would’ve been such a simple, ordinary present, but what it would’ve represented would’ve been so much more than that.
“Rafael’s my normal, El.” Her thumbs rubbed what she hoped were soothing circles against the sides of his forearms. “I know what he did… for you, it’s something you’ll never be able to get over. I understand that. I know what Kathy meant to you. And I know that you’re still mourning her, still grieving, and I am so, so sorry that she’s not here anymore, that she’s gone.”
“Doesn’t mean I can’t love you, too,” Elliot muttered, barely lifting his head but enough for Olivia to catch his red eyes, see the tear tracks down his cheeks.
“No, it doesn’t,” she agreed. “And I love you too, El. So much. I always will. But I ran away from normal a long time ago because I was afraid. I made up excuses, I hid behind needing to focus on being a mother to Noah, instead of letting a really wonderful man just love me and be with me. I don’t want to do that again. And I don’t want to do that with Rafael.”
“I get it.” Elliot’s voice was garbled and tight. Olivia slid her hands up his arms to hold his face in her hands; she could feel the tear tracks on his cheeks under the skin of her thumbs.
“I’m so sorry, El,” Olivia shook her head. And she was, very much. She’d wanted to spare him this, but she couldn’t lie to herself anymore about what she wanted, and she refused to lie to Elliot, to lead him on. He’d lost his wife, his life and his kids lives had been turned upside down the past three years. He deserved the truth, to not be given false hope. “I know you gave me that necklace hoping that happiness would lead me to you. I brought it with me if… if you want it back. I’ll understand comple-“
“No,” Elliot’s head almost snapped up, eyes bright red but drying now, thankfully. “I mean, yes, I bought it for you, Liv, and yes, I wanted it to lead you to happiness, and yes, I hoped that was with me, but… but I bought it for you because I thought you’d like it. It’s yours, Liv,” he sniffed a little, clearing his nose and tracing her hair delicately with his fingers. “And if things don’t work out with Barba, I’ll be here.”
She nodded, finally letting her own tears fall. “I know you will.”