Work Text:
Christmas 1999
Elliot was determined to give his partner some good Christmas memories she wouldn’t forget. Last year, her first year at the 1-6, Olivia, as the newbie, pulled Christmas Eve and Christmas Day duty with Munch, who claimed that holidays were a bureaucratic cash grab anyway.
“Got any big plans for the 26th?” Elliot had asked before leaving for the night on December 23rd.
“No,” Olivia said, slipping on her coat and scarf.
“Not even dinner with your Mom?” Elliot asked.
“She’s not big on holidays,” Olivia said. “She and another professor friend went to Malibu during the winter break at the college.”
“So you’re going to be all alone for Christmas?” he asked.
“No,” Olivia said again. “I’ll be with John.”
Later, he’d found out about Olivia’s paternity and her childhood with Serena and realized why she didn’t have the same attachment to Christmas that he did. Nobody had ever bothered to make it special for her.
That was all going to change this year.
He walked into the squad room five days before Christmas with a box tucked under his arm, filled with glass ornaments that belonged to his grandmother that Kathy thought were too ugly and too fragile to put on their tree at home.
Elliot had put a plan in motion before Thanksgiving when the holiday timesheets came out and Liv was on Christmas duty again. If she wasn’t going to celebrate Christmas on her own, he’d bring it to her. And he’d roped the entire squad into helping him out. Everybody except Cragen.
“We don’t decorate the house,” Cragen said. “Have you ever seen a drunk pedophile wrap himself up in tinsel? It’s not pretty.”
But Elliot didn’t care if they had the Captain’s blessing. Cassidy was bringing a tree, Monique had lights, and John volunteered to pick up cheap stockings for each of them filled with Christmas candy.
Elliot was in charge of the ornaments and taking Liv out to an extended lunch so that his elves could decorate the bullpen while they were out.
“Where have you been?” Liv asked him, slightly annoyed when he walked in and dropped the box of ornaments on his chair.
“I didn’t think I was late?” Elliot said.
Olivia looked down at her watch and huffed.
“Only a few minutes, but we have a vic at Mercy and they don’t know how long she’s going to hold on,” Olivia said. “We need to go now.”
“Alright, alright,” Elliot said, fishing the Crown Vic keys out of his jacket pocket and following her out to the elevators, giving a look over his shoulder at Munch, Jefferies, and Cassidy. Brian gave him a thumbs up and Monique winked, so he was pretty sure when he and Liv got back from their hospital visit the place would look like a winter wonderland, just like he wanted.
It was a good thing too because they lost their vic right in the middle of the interview and Olivia had looked shellshocked ever since.
At least until she walked back into the squad room and saw everything decorated from top to bottom. They’d strung lights around the desks and up the banister. Munch had hung the full stockings on everyone’s gun lockers, and they’d set up the tabletop tree on the filing cabinet.
“The place didn’t look like this when we left,” Olivia said
“Hmm, Santa’s elves must have been here while we were out,” Elliot said.
“Why did you guys do this?” Olivia asked, a smile creeping across her face as she fingered the end of her stocking.
“It was Stabler’s idea,” Cassidy said. “He told us you couldn’t work another dreary Christmas in this dump without some holiday cheer.”
Olivia’s gaze swung to him and her eyes went soft.
“I did the tree,” Cassidy said, trying to get Liv to look back his way.
But her eyes were stuck on Elliot. And he couldn’t help but feel a little bit of pride swell in his chest. Especially because he knew she and Brian had a fling back in November. He had been able to spot that from a mile away.
Elliot hung his coat on the rack and walked back to his chair to sit down and watch his partner wander around the room and look at all the decorations. She was like a kid seeing her very first Christmas window display, leaning in close and inspecting everything.
And if Elliot had been paying more attention, he might have realized the one thing Cassidy forgot to do when he was putting up the tree.
Elliot plopped down hard in his desk chair, and it was at that moment that he realized Cassidy hadn’t put up any of the ornaments Elliot had brought from home.
He shot up out of his chair like he was on fire and started hopping around by his desk.
“Ornaments, ornaments, ornaments!” Elliot shouted, doing a painful dance to try to shake the glass shards loose from his behind.
He could vaguely hear everyone in the room bursting into laughter, but Olivia’s voice carried above the noise. She was at his side in a second, pulling at the leg of his pants and leaning down to try to inspect the damage.
“You’ve got an antler up your butt,” Olivia said, bursting out into another peal of giggles.
“It feels like it,” he yelled, still bouncing from foot to foot.
“And this,” Cragen said, coming out of his office and shaking his head, “is why we don’t decorate the squad for the holidays.”
“El you’re getting glass everywhere,” Olivia said, trying to get him to stop bouncing.
“Yeah, I’m trying to get it out of my ass,” he said.
“C’mon,” Olivia said, tugging him up the steps to the cribs. “You can’t leave all that in there, you’re going to get an infection.”
Because of the pain, he didn’t really register what she was planning to do until they got upstairs.
“I have a first aid kit in my locker,” she said. “Lay down on your stomach on one of the cots and I’ll help you get it all out.”
“You mean you’re gonna…” Elliot started. “On my…”
“It’s not like you can sit down to ride to the ER, El,” Liv said. “Unless you want to lay here and you want me to call Kathy to come into the city to pull shards of glass out of your ass.”
Elliot let out an angry huff.
“That’s what I thought,” Olivia said, slamming her locker shut.
He felt the bed dip as she settled behind him and started to pluck little shards out and drop them into an old Altoids container.
“Why’d you do all this, El?” she asked after a few minutes.
He sighed.
“I just wanted you to have a nice Christmas memory,” he said. “If you were going to spend so much time here over the holidays I wanted it to be… magical.”
He couldn’t see her face, but he could hear the emotion in her voice.
“That’s really sweet of you,” she said. “Nobody’s ever done something like that for me.”
“What are partners for?” Elliot asked.
“I guess they’re for pulling glass out of your butt,” Olivia said, giving a hard yank. “You really got the business side of the reindeer. But I think it’s all out now.”
She leaned around him so he could see the huge chunk of antler she had caught between the tweezers.
“You gonna save that?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’ll treasure it always.”
Christmas 2024
“Mom, what’s this ornament?” Noah asked, pulling one of the last ones out of the Rubbermaid container and holding it out to Olivia. “I know where most of them came from but not this one.”
Olivia took the glass bulb from Noah and rolled it over in her hands. The bulb itself was simple, something she’d picked up at the craft store. But inside there was a long, red, stick-like object that rattled around.
“Yeah, Liv,” Elliot said, coming into her living room with a tray of hot chocolate and sugar cookies. He deposited it on the coffee table before leaning over her shoulder to look at the object in her hands. “What the heck is that?”
“You don’t recognize it?” she asked with a smirk.
“Should I?” Elliot asked.
“You don’t remember getting this antler stuck up your butt the second year of our partnership?” Olivia asked.
“Elliot had an antler up his butt?” Noah asked.
“You kept that?” Elliot asked. “And you actually hang it on your tree?”
“Every year,” she said. “I told you I’d treasure it forever.”
“Guys, you can’t talk about antlers and butts and then not tell me the story!” Noah whined.
“It’s one of my best Christmas memories,” she said. “The year Elliot tried to make Christmas magical for me and instead he almost needed stitches.”
“I didn’t need any stitches,” he grumbled.
“Because I cleaned you up in the nick of time,” she said.
Elliot motioned for her to hand over the ornament as she joined Noah on the couch to tell him all about the infamous reindeer incident. He hung the bauble on the tree right next to another red ornament, a little wooden sign that read Liv, Love, Laugh.
He looked at the two side by side, Christmas past and Christmas present. Then Elliot looked to the couch where Olivia and her son were splitting a cookie and laughing at his expense.
Christmas future.
He could already picture it. More memories like this every Christmas to come.
And he wouldn’t change it for the world. Even if getting there had been a little painful.