Chapter Text
In the early days, which Olivia considers the entire first decade that she knows Elliot, they are consummate professionals. She’s proud of how long they’ve been partners. “Longer than anyone else,” she starts saying at some point, because she’s always had a competitive streak. She thinks it’s because they know each other exactly as well as they’re supposed to, and no more. Even in the earliest of the early days, she relies on that.
The first time he gives her a gift, it’s 1999 and they’ve been partners long enough that she knows it's a joke, but not long enough that she isn’t still a little surprised.
Her gun is already in hand and raised to her locker when she sees the box with the red bow. It was always against protocol to tell anyone the combo, and she told Elliot that right before she told him the number, and then reminded him every four months after that, and then never quite got around to changing it. She inspects the box of cheap pens and throws away the bow to avoid any awkward questions.
She and Elliot have never gotten each other Christmas presents. He asked her for the first time this past December if they should, and it made her hands go clammy—it's just that it was an alarming thing for Elliot Stabler to ask out of the blue. She'd looked at him accordingly, until he held up his hands and said, “Or not.” Then she’d felt a little bad about it, and changed her mind with the stipulation: “Two dollar budget.”
She decides on three different granola bars and a pack of gum from the vending machine, which she leaves loose on his desk on Christmas Eve. He doesn’t get her anything, and she doesn’t think anything of it. He can barely remember to cover his family, and the team catches case after case in a grueling winter, and she never even wanted a present, anyway.
Elliot saunters in right after she’s tossed the box on her desk, his shirt sleeves rolled up to mid-bicep in that stupid, high-schooler-in-detention sort of way. She points at the box in question, and he arches his eyebrows.
“Merry Christmas,” he yawns, and sinks in the chair opposite.
“It’s February.”
She pulls on her jacket and frees her hair from under her scarf. The gift doesn’t make any sense, but they spend their days and nights trying to figure out the worst kinds of things that don’t make sense, and she has no curiosity left for a box of pens. She wonders, sometimes, whether she and Elliot would like each other more, or less, if they’d ever had the energy for pleasantries.
They catch a particularly spiny case the next week, one that makes her twitch all through the night because the pieces line up a little too closely to the circumstances of her own life. She pushes the victim to testify, and the victim commits suicide instead. Olivia paces by the whiteboard and thinks, ‘If I had a dollar.’ Then she thinks that she’s a terrible person for thinking something like that.
Her fingers curl, rubbing into her palms, as Cragen says something infuriatingly dense about how this isn’t her fault, when clearly, clearly, it is. She’s just about to scream at everyone to stop wasting time on placations—even turns around, mouth open—when she catches Elliot’s eye. Elliot, who has spent this whole case watching her warily and asking her if she’s good—not like, “are you okay, Olivia?” but more like, “Are you sane enough to keep your job and not get us both arrested?” He gives the slightest shake of the head.
He’s telling her to shut her mouth—Elliot, of all people—but she does it, anyway. She knows the strange, specific warning signs, like how if Elliot won’t look at her, she should ask him a question again. Now, she watches him shake his head and considers she might not be thinking straight.
Cragen looks between them, and tells everyone to take five. Elliot comes to her slowly, chin up and eyes appraising, and she opens her mouth again. She feels the barbs loading: You would feel the same way, and I’m not crazy here, El, and Don’t you dare tell me to calm down. Before she can pick one, she feels his hand close over hers at her side. She blinks, anger shifting to utter surprise, hot and prickly on the skin at the back of her hand.
He lifts his other hand, too, and uncurls her aching fingers. He holds up the mangled pen, marked by her teeth and bent by the relentless picking of her thumb.
“You gotta pace yourself, Liv,” he says, too earnestly, and for all her loaded insults, she draws a sudden blank. The lack of angry ridges under her fingers makes her take a breath.
Elliot walks to his desk, throws away the chewed-up plastic, and tosses her a new one.
Before she told Elliot her locker combination, she’d never found anything good in a locker. As a teenager, she’d grown used to mean notes and piles of shaving cream. As a detective, she learned to expect something gruesome when they were called to a school, which ranged anywhere from dead animals to a disembodied hand. Muscle memory makes her flinch every time there’s something new, never mind that the things he leaves aren’t mean, or sentimental, or notable at all, like the name of that restaurant she asked about, or the scarf she left in his car.
Elliot changes his locker combination every couple months, which he says is because of protocol, and Olivia knows is because of mild paranoia. He writes down the new combination and hands it to her behind the desk, or in the car, and she rolls her eyes at him every time.
“I don’t need to know. I’ve never even opened it.”
Each time, he shrugs and says, “If something happens, you know.”
Sometimes she mutters, “Nothing’s going to happen,” but other times it feels like one of those false placations she hates so much. In their line of work, of course something will happen, someday. Those times, she nods and memorizes it, then rips it up like she knows he wants.
He changes his combination two weeks after he gives her the pens, and slips her a note while they’re changing shifts. She doesn’t take it.
“What’s the problem?” he says, annoyed.
“Will you stop doing that?” She settles in her chair, opens a file, and he stares with his arm outstretched. “There's no need for this whole ‘nuclear codes’ routine.”
“Okay. So what’s really the problem?” He says it like he’s joking, but it comes out to quick, and the glint in his eye gives him away. His cheeks are starting to redden under the blast of the heater, his coat already on and buttoned.
She tightens her arms across her chest.
“How are you so sure something terrible is going to happen to you?”
“I'm not,” he says slowly, squaring up. “I’m just being smart. You’re my partner; you should be able to get into my locker.”
“What could you possibly keep in there that you’d need me to get in case of an emergency, Elliot? Your badge and gun? It’s not a safety deposit box—half the department could get it open if they needed to.”
He drops the note on her desk, then, and steps back. He shoves his hands in his pockets and looks at her, long and scrutinizing. She sets her jaw and stares back.
“You’re right,” he says finally, nodding. He rocks on his feet, and shoots her a half-shrug. “Don’t look at it, then.”
Once he’s gone, she drops it unceremoniously into the trash and turns back to the case file.
She reads the first sentence, then reads it again. She shifts her weight to her left side, then right. She rolls her neck.
“Idiot,” she mutters, and reaches into the trash.
In the fall, she stops protesting the over-the-top secrecy, and resorts to the occasional remark that he’s treating his sweaty gym clothes like the arc of the covenant. He doesn’t leave things in her locker anymore, and he doesn’t ever ask if she’s changed the code. She wonders if it’s because he assumes she has, or if he knows she hasn’t. She hasn’t in three years. She has to remember too much as a product of her job—GPS coordinates, addresses, phone numbers, badge numbers, serial numbers. That’s what she’ll say if someone asks.
She almost wonders if he’s forgotten the combo altogether, until the week she cuts off all her hair. He looks at her when she walks in, then away, then back in an embarrassingly obvious double take. Olivia has spent the last ten years needing to notice who speaks and who doesn’t, and what’s said and what isn’t. She’s never been able to turn off all that noticing when it doesn’t matter, like when Cassidy would put her forks in the drawer where the spoons were supposed to go. Or, when she chops off all her hair and walks into a squad room full of men.
Fin says she looks like Halle Berry, and Munch says no, she looks more like Dorothy Dandridge, and Olivia looks at Elliot. She hears Fin say, “No, man, you’re thinking of Halle Berry, she played her in the movie,” and then even Cragen says it suits her. Through all of it, Elliot stares at a folder.
Olivia doesn’t care about what a man thinks of her haircut, but Detective Olivia Benson is a Noticer, and at the moment, she’s noticing how Detective Elliot Stabler is opinionless for the first time in his life. She feels his sheepish eyes on the back of her neck, sneaking looks when he thinks she’s not looking. But she’s always looking, because it’s her job to always be looking, and she breaks on hour three of a stakeout.
“You got a problem with my hair?” she says finally, and it comes out sharper than she means it. He blinks at her and frowns.
“No, why would I—what?”
“What, you think it makes me look too ‘butch cop?’ Don’t tell me you can’t handle a woman without a princess ponytail.”
“Of course not,” he says, and he’s annoyed, now, too. “I got a wife and three daughters, Olivia. I learned a long time ago not to say anything about anyone’s hair unless they specifically ask.”
“Well, that’s—” She feels stupid, then, because it’s almost sweet. She blinks down at her coffee. “That’s probably a good idea for you, actually.”
She feels him looking at her sideways, and stares stubbornly ahead, trying to hide the embarrassment hot on her cheeks.
“Are you asking?” he says finally. She can hear the smirk, like he’s caught her being a schoolgirl. She thinks about dumping his coffee all over him.
“No,” she says. “Shut up.”
They sit in silence for a few minutes after that, and then he clears his throat, and says, “Looks good on you. You’ve got—” he clears his throat again, “—nice ears. And you can see ‘em, now, you know. Without all the hair in the way.”
She bites her lip to keep from laughing. She struggles with it for a good minute, takes a sip of her coffee. Then, unable to help it: “I have nice ears?”
“Oh, forget it.”
She laughs, then, despite herself, because tough guy ex-marine Elliot Stabler is blushing, and thinks she has nice ears.
The next day, she finds a beanie in her locker when she goes to get her gun. It’s been so long, she almost thinks he put his own hat in there by accident. She thinks she even recognizes it, vaguely.
She's suddenly alarmed that he could accidentally open her locker as if it was his own, and thinks it’s really time for her to change the combination. But then she would have to tell him the new one and see his shit-eating grin, or not tell him the new one, and he’d find out when he tried to leave her something nice. Both options make her feel vaguely sick, and she’s still holding the hat and staring at the lock when he walks by.
“My old one,” he says. “It’s getting cold out. Your ears are gonna freeze.”
She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do with that, because why is he worrying about her ears getting cold, and telling her they look nice, and thinking about them at all, and what the living fuck is she supposed to do with that?
“No way this fits,” she calls back. “You know how big your head is?”
He grins over his shoulder, and she stuffs it in her pocket anyway. She figures she’ll change the lock another time, when he hasn’t just used it. And when they’re not already on their way out. And when it’s not December because that’s too close to Christmas, and not February because that’s when he remembers to celebrate Christmas, and not in the fall in case she gets another haircut. Summer, maybe, she thinks, and follows Elliot to the car.
She doesn’t ever get him anything else, besides those vending machine granola bars, for four years. She doesn’t even get him coffee unless they’re on a stakeout. He never brings it up again, and she’s terrible at presents, anyway, so she figures, we tried.
Sometimes she sees something on a case that she thinks his kids would like—a game boy for Dickie, or a cream scarf for Maureen, because she has a serious boyfriend now, and Elliot comes to work in a thunderous mood every time she’s home from college and he’s caught sight of a hickey. Olivia has been a teenage girl in love and thinks it would save them both the mortification and sour mood if Maureen had an easy excuse to cover it up. But all she says is, “that color would look great on Maureen,” at a department store crime scene, and he says, “Huh. Really?” and looks at it for a minute before kneeling next to the body.
She thinks about buying the scarf herself. There was a time where Maureen called her any time she was afraid of what her parents would think, and Olivia loves that little girl who is no longer so little. She reaches up to touch the scarf before remembering that she’s wearing gloves.
Olivia watches Elliot peering at the victim’s bent limbs and wonders if it’s strange that she’s been to his kids’ birthday parties but never over for dinner. She’s never gone with them to a movie, or seen their full table at Thanksgiving, or picked up a bottle of red on the way. She’s never eaten Kathy’s cooking, never played with the kids and offered to open the wine while the pasta sauce simmered. She looks at the cream scarf next to the dead body, and knows that buying it is a little closer to inviting herself over for dinner than blowing out candles in someone's backyard.
She finally calls Maureen on Elliot’s birthday. She calls her because Elliot is utterly losing it, and it feels good to be the one calling after all the times it had been the other way around—“Olivia, what do I do during seven minutes in heaven?” “Well, honey, what do you want to do?” and a couple years later, “I dented the car, Liv, he’s gonna flip.” “He’s not going to flip. It’ll be fine.” (But they never do get a chance to know if he’s going to flip, because of course, he notices it right away, and of course, Olivia says, “I dinged it on the gate. You can bill me.”)
This time, Maureen says, “Thank you for calling, Liv,” in that grown-up voice of hers. She sounds so much like her mother that Olivia feels automatically guilty, the way she used to when Kathy would come looking for Elliot after too many nights of work in a row.
Olivia feels suddenly out of place, watching the kids hug Elliot by his desk, in front of the chocolate cake from JJ’s bakery down the street.
“Don’t ever let my partner buy me a cake, JJ,” she’d told him this time, while watching him frost at lightning speed. The entire precinct gets their last-minute birthday cakes from JJ for cheap, and the discount is offset by the unsolicited retired-cop advice.
“That’s what cops always say,” he mumbles, focusing too hard for a cake that costs seven dollars. “But I’m staying in business, aren’t I? What does that tell you?”
“That we’ll pay good money to not feel so guilty all the time.”
He holds the sides of the box for a second so that she’s forced to wait. “It means that at the end of the day, you want your cake and candles just like everybody else.”
She can’t help but smile a little, because it’s a nice thing to say even if she thinks her reason is much closer to the truth. She thinks about it until the cake is on Elliot’s desk with the candles lit, and then watches from across the room. She knows Elliot recognizes the shoddy frosting job as soon as he sees it, and he makes a joke about the candles but he looks right at her.
For a second she thinks he’s going to do something awful, like invite her into the group hug, and her hands start to curl into themselves preventatively. This feels more like a dinner table, too, even with the cake and candles and the fact that it’s actually someone’s birthday. She gets her jacket as quietly as possible.
Elliot calls, “Wait, you don’t want any of JJ’s cake?” The man who paced and cried outside a house earlier that evening has turned into someone soft and playful at the drop of a hat. She looks at him smiling, Lizzie hanging onto his arm, and Kathleen holds out a big slice on a napkin.
“Just one,” Olivia relents, perching atop her desk and raising her eyebrows at the twins. “You know I’ve got to stay in shape to keep your dad out of trouble. He tripped over a damn crack in the sidewalk yesterday.”
The kids laugh and point at him, and Elliot covers Lizzie’s ears. “Yeah, yeah, watch your language.”
“Watch where you’re going,” she shoots back, mouth full, and his kids run with it for nearly twenty minutes.
“Happy Birthday,” she mouths when she’s done and has pulled on her jacket again. He smiles at her over Dickie’s rambling.
“See you tomorrow,” he calls, and Maureen waves. Olivia feels her throat tighten unexpectedly as the kids tilt their faces to her. She suddenly wishes she’d bought Maureen that cream scarf, and she wishes she’d been invited over for dinner in the days where they all still sat at the table together. She wishes she’d gone to school plays and recitals, not just birthdays. She wishes she’d bought Elliot something better than granola bars and seven-dollar cake. She wishes he had invited her into the group hug.
She nods at Elliot, then nods again awkwardly at the kids, and walks four blocks to the subway. It’s February and she’s known Elliot for ten years. Her ears are cold, and she thinks that maybe it’s time to grow out her hair.
In the early days, which Olivia has established is the first full decade she knows Elliot Stabler, they are consummate professionals. It’s the kind of partnership the academy would put in a textbook. Except for when they yell at each other in front of everybody, or make each other cry, or show up at each others’ doorstep.
They are close, but not questionably so. They stand next to each other twenty hours a day and they’ve never hugged. They’d die for each other, but she’s never been over for dinner.
If she had to name it, the first time she thinks there’s been some big mistake, the first time she feels the cracks start to show, is when Elliot won’t stop carrying Rebecca Hendrix around like a shiny new toy. Olivia accuses him of being unprofessional, on the rebound, and as soon as the words leave her mouth she knows there’s nothing more unprofessional than what she’s just said.
They never talk about that. In ten years, she’d never asked him how he’d most recently wined and dined his wife, and he’d never asked her the details of her various dates with men that came and went. She only says it now because she wants to cut him, because he’s driving her up the wall and she doesn’t know what else will make him think rationally again besides getting knocked down four pegs. He doesn’t say anything, which makes it worse. He looks at her like he’s surprised. He looks at her like she’s right. Of course I’m right, she thinks loudly, so that she doesn’t have to figure out how exactly she might be wrong.
She feels it again soon after, that itch under skin like biting flies, the week that Casey is attacked. Her hands are freezing, and she holds on to Casey’s ankle over the emergency blanket anyway. She catches Elliot’s eye from the back of the ambulance, wide and questioning in the flood lights, and she knows they’re both thinking: Alex.
They go out for a drink after the case is wrapped and Casey has taken a turn for the better, at the same bar where Olivia had told Casey about her mother. They go out because this is the second time an ADA is almost dead at their hands, and they don’t like those odds. Olivia orders the same beer as that night she’d been here with Casey, and drinks half. Elliot downs a couple bottles of something cheaper, and puts his head in his hands.
“You good?” she asks, but this time it does mean, “Are you okay, Elliot?”
“Yeah,” he mumbles, and rubs at his eyes. “I know we see victims all the time, all kinds of beat up, but man. I just can’t get her face out of my head.”
“Yeah, me too.” Olivia looks at him, head still in his hands, and then adds without thinking, “I know you really liked her.”
He picks his head up and looks at her strangely, and she only realizes then that it was a strange thing to say.
“She’s not dead.”
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
“Okay,” he says, squinting. “Of course I like her. I thought we both liked her.”
“Yeah, but you—” she takes a sip of her beer and it tastes bitter. She wonders if it could have gone bad in forty minutes. She swallows, and something ugly twists in her chest. “You guys have, like, a thing, I don’t know.”
He stares at her, and she rolls her eyes.
“Don’t be dramatic, Elliot. I get it, she’s— she’s Casey, and you’re you.”
“We do not have a thing, Olivia.”
“Call it like I see it.”
He downs the rest of his beer and slides the bottle forward. “She’s our friend, and our friend almost died. I mean, God forbid I need a minute.”
She lets it go then, and says she’s sorry, although she’s not, really.
“I swear I just stepped out for a minute,” she says instead. It’s not the first time she’s said it tonight, but guilt is far more familiar territory than whatever else she really wants to say. Forty minutes and half a beer and she suddenly wants to say something closer to:
“Casey cried at the hospital and I didn’t know how to help,” and “I’m supposed to know how to help,” and—
“What would you do if someone did that to me,” and—
“What would you do if I cried?” and—
“Don’t start this again,” he mutters.
“It’s not my fault, yeah, I know.” She pushes the glass away and grabs her bag. He’s right, and they’re both sad and too tired to have a conversation without fighting, and that’s another warning sign she’s well aware of. Maybe she’s still thinking about her mother, and the kinds of people who hurt other people, and maybe she’s still thinking of herself as one of them.
“I’m gonna head home.”
“Liv.” His arm shoots out just as she stands, and he’s aiming for her elbow, but now he’s holding onto her hip. His fingers splay automatically, index brushing under the hem of her shirt. She jerks at the cold of his fingers against the skin of her waist. They both freeze, and he looks like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. His fingers tighten for a split second. Reflex, she thinks, although Warner told them during a case once that the palmar reflex disappears after infancy, when babies no longer need to hold onto their mother. Maybe there’s another kind of reflex that explains this.
Elliot drops his hand and scratches the back of his neck. He turns forward.
“Stay,” he says lightly, still not looking at her. “Have another drink. Or don’t, but don’t go home like this. Angry.”
This is it, when she starts to know that something might be wrong. This is when she starts to know, somehow, that the second ten years will be more difficult than the first. She’s always had a competitive streak, after all.
Her shirt is still rucked on the side from where he pushed it up on accident, and when she pulls it down, and his eyes flick down to watch. It’s hot and prickly on the skin of her hand, like deer flies biting and his eyes on the back of her neck. It feels different all of a sudden, and she doesn’t know why now, why exactly this moment is when everything turns inside out, but she looks at him on his barstool, his gaze trained on the bar napkin.
The thought slams into her, and she thinks about how many beers she’s had, and god, it’s only half of one, which means there is something else terrible at play here. She thinks, ‘I’ve had half of one beer,’ and 'I should have said no to Christmas gifts in 1999,' and ‘I want Elliot Stabler to touch me again.'
She knows it now—want, big and hot and familiar on the heels of anger, like the way her mother bought her ice cream after every bender until blows to the head started tasting like Rocky Road. The shame of it rises hot in her throat, her mouth suddenly dry. The skin of her waist burns.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says. She's out the door before he can answer.