Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

1998

Olivia Benson hates first days.

Hates the awkwardness, the stilted introductions, the “getting to know each other” phase, hates all of it. Hates the feeling that she doesn’t quite belong. She’d much rather skip to the second day, or the third, when she knows her way around a place, has figured out the lay of the land well enough to blend in. 

But first days are inescapable — like rain or taxes — so she takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders, and steps through the doorway into the bustling bullpen of the one-six. Phones are ringing, papers shuffling, someone’s yelling from a holding cell and she watches a group of unis make their way over to the cage to see what’s the matter. It’s a familiar kind of hustle and bustle, one she’s used to from her time at the five-five, but it’s different, too.

Different because this is SVU, and she’s finally made it, and there’s a gold shield of responsibility weighing heavy at her hip and God, she doesn’t want to fuck this up. 

Olivia’s in the squadroom half an hour before her shift is due to start, dressed in a new grey suit and sensible shoes her mother had wrinkled her nose at when she picked them up at Saks. Plain, is what Serena had called them, but Olivia had told her that didn’t matter half as much as the fact that they had a good sole with tread and were less clunky than the shoes she’d been issued with her blues as a beat cop, and eventually Serena had let that subject drop and led her daughter over to the jewellery case instead, where she’d eyed a string of pearls like a magpie as Olivia fought an eye roll. Her mother still refuses to accept that her daughter is a cop, of all things, and that the dress code for a precinct is markedly different from what Serena wears in the vaulted lecture halls at Columbia. 

The pearls now sit neatly coiled in a little box on top of Olivia’s dresser, and she’ll dutifully wear them for her mother’s birthday, but that’s neither here nor there.

Olivia takes one more deep breath for good measure and then heads over to the captain’s office, raps on the door and waits to be ushered in. “Ah, you must be Detective Benson,” the captain says when she steps inside, and Olivia nods. 

It still feels odd, her name and the title in combination, but she plasters a smile on her face and shakes her new boss’ hand and tries to feel a little less like a kid playing dress-up in their parents’ clothes. 

“Welcome to SVU,” Cragen says, after he’s introduced himself. “You come highly recommended, and I’m excited to have you on the team.”

“Thank you, sir,” Olivia replies, and Cragen smiles, motioning for her to sit down in the chair opposite his desk. He runs her through the basics, shift assignments and protocols and little quirks about the one-six, and Olivia listens dutifully, lets the words sink in and wonders when any of this will start to feel real.

That she’s finally in SVU, finally a detective, finally working the job that feels like it was made for her. After college, she’d hopped around offices for a year and change, had tried — mostly for her mother’s sake — to find herself a “respectable” job, but she’d felt the pull of the force all the same. So after the sixth temp gig went awry, Olivia said screw it and signed up for the Academy, ignoring Serena’s protests left and right. 

And now, with years of beat cop training under her belt and a mentor who’d discovered her knack for connecting with vics, Olivia has arrived in the place where she’s always felt like she could belong. A unit where she can make a difference, where she can provide the kind of help and support to victims that her mother never had. Where she can prevent people like her fa— her mother’s rapist from hurting others. 

Where she — and this Olivia steadfastly refuses to examine too closely — can ensure there are fewer people living on this earth with a fate like her own.

“Your partner should be here in a few,” Cragen says then. “He’ll show you the ropes, get you settled in.”

Olivia nods, gets up from the chair and follows Cragen back into the bullpen. She wonders what this guy will be like, her new partner. Patrick back at the five-five was nice, had her back when she was a rookie. Karen was the best mentor Olivia could ask for, helped her get to SVU, gave her all the necessary advice for how to survive the old boys’ club. 

There’s about a fifty-fifty chance this guy’ll be a prick, but Olivia’s worked with enough of them to know how to hold her own. And besides, he might surprise her. There’s hope, still. 

“And here’s your partner,” Cragen says, after Olivia has dumped her purse on her desk and taken a minute to survey her new view of the squad room. She turns toward the doors and sees a guy walk in, with close-cropped hair and piercing blue eyes and oh, fuck, this cannot possibly be happening. 

She’s dreaming, she has to be. Hallucinating, or feverish. Maybe there was something weird in the falafel she had for dinner the night before. In a minute, she’ll wake up and she’ll laugh at herself, shake her head and have some water and take an aspirin before she goes in to work, because this cannot be real. 

He can’t be here. He just can’t.

But the seconds tick on and the guy steps closer and doesn’t disappear into thin air and Olivia thinks she might throw up. He hasn’t noticed her, not yet, but then he spots Cragen waving him over and he looks straight at her and Jesus, nothing could have prepared her for this. 

She watches his features morph into shock for a split-second, before he schools them back to indifference and walks up to her and Cragen. Their eyes meet, then, brown locked on blue, and for a moment there, Olivia is pretty sure she forgets how to breathe. She’s about to open her mouth and say… something, but he beats her to it.

“Elliot Stabler,” he says, keeping his expression carefully neutral. “Nice to meet you,” he adds, as he holds his hand out for her to shake.

Olivia finds herself taking his hand as if on autopilot, managing a, “Nice to meet you too,” that hopefully doesn’t sound as shell-shocked as she feels. It takes all of her concentration not to let the whole thing slip.

It’s like there’s a live wire crackling between them when she takes his hand, and Olivia tries desperately not to think about the last thing she remembers that hand doing — gripping her hip as he thrust up inside her, filling her to the hilt, drawing mindless patterns across the smooth skin of her back after she shattered, calling out his name.

Shit.

/

1987

She’s in her second year of undergrad, it’s the week before midterms and all Olivia wants to do is get drunk, maybe make out with someone, and definitely forget about the existence of Oliver Cromwell and the Rump Parliament until the inevitable headache catches up with her the next morning. 

There’s a frat party at Delta Chi, and while Olivia isn’t usually one to voluntarily spend her Friday nights in a sticky basement with warm beer and terrible music, she’d let a group of her sisters drag her along, and right now she’s glad for the distraction.

She bypasses the bowl of punch on one of the card tables — she wants to get drunk, not sick — and pops open the tab on a can of beer from the adjacent table before settling into a corner and casting her eyes across the room. 

She’s content to lean against a wall and just observe, fading into the background of people. Their voices overlap into a hum of chatter, with an occasional enthusiastic shout when someone takes a shot. The room is comfortably warm; put enough people in a tight space together and it doesn’t matter that the rainstorm outside is turning to sleet, and the temperature is dropping close to freezing. 

She takes a sip of her beer and winces. It’s warm, as expected, and the carbonation makes her nose tickle. 

Half an hour and another beer later, Olivia feels pleasantly buzzed. She’s idly swaying along to R.E.M., contemplating whether or not to join the sweaty throng that’s dancing in the middle of the room. Really, she’s just happy to stand in this corner and occasionally take a few minutes to talk with someone — a mix of hellos and drunken compliments from kids she recognizes from lecture or other parties.

But a tall boy with a mop of blonde hair has been eyeing her for most of the night, and, after taking a healthy swig of liquid courage, Olivia approaches her mark. (She doesn’t know what it says about her that she’s in this for a night and nothing more. Sometimes she wonders what Serena would think, about her daughter’s choice to leave Manhattan for Buffalo of all places, to go to a state school, to rush a sorority. And sometimes, she really doesn’t care.)

She’s gotten good at this — playing the nice girl, the sweet girl — and she kind of hates it. Men look at her and see brunette and leggy and not much else. She reaches his side of the room and bats her eyelashes, relishing in the attention of his eyes raking up and down her curves. 

“Hey,” he says, and she thinks he’s trying to be suave. It’s not really working. 

It turns out the guy — his name is David, she learns at one point, but Olivia thinks she’ll have forgotten it again by morning — is a half-decent kisser, at least when he’s got a hand in her hair and the other on her ass and she’s wedged in the corner of a frat house hallway. 

He’s by far not the best she’s encountered, but there’s enough heat between them that she just lets herself feel for a few minutes, lets herself sink into it and forget all about midterms and British monarchs. It’s almost nice.

Olivia’s got a hand on his bicep and she can feel him pressing into her leg as she’s mentally weighing the options of leaving him out to dry or following him home tonight. Suddenly, he pulls back, pupils blown. “You like that, yeah?” he rasps out, voice purposefully low. 

It takes all of Olivia’s willpower not to roll her eyes. 

He unceremoniously slides a hand under her t-shirt, climbing up to her chest, and Olivia instinctively pulls back. It’s one thing to drunkenly make out with a guy at a party; she’s not about to publicly go to third base with one. 

She would laugh at the way his eyes go owlish at the loss of contact, but he’s already affronted. “Don’t be a prude,” he says, and she feels the heat rising in her cheeks. It’s not like she should have expected any better.

“I’m going to go now,” she says, placing a hand on his torso to try and un-pin herself from the wall. She hates this, hates getting caught in places and situations she cannot control. She hates that a little part of her brain is already starting to blame herself for ending up here. 

He catches her wrist with his hand, and she yanks her arm away. 

“I said, ‘I’m going to go now.’”

The guy lets out a snort, raising his hands in the air in mock-surrender. He doesn’t think he did anything wrong, she knows this, and it makes her blood boil.

Olivia’s about to turn on her heel and get the hell out of this hallway when a voice pipes up from behind her. “Get away from her, Dave,” the voice says, tone brooking no argument, and Olivia turns to find another guy there. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, with a sharp jaw, close-cropped hair and piercing blue eyes.

There’s a furrow in his brow and his facial expression alone seems to make the first guy shrink back into himself, mutter a “fuck off” and scamper down the corridor, back toward the basement. 

Olivia rolls her eyes. “I had it under control,” she says to the stranger. She doesn’t need some guy protecting her, like she’s a damsel in distress. She does just fine on her own, thank you very much. 

Surprisingly, the guy doesn’t protest, just shrugs his shoulders. “I know,” he says. “Doesn’t mean he didn’t deserve to hear it.” 

She cocks a brow, leans back against the wall and crosses her arms over her chest. “Well, thanks, I guess,” she says, giving the guy a once-over. She takes in his faded jeans and sweatshirt, the way the fabric is tight over his upper arms. No wonder Dave had gotten the hell out of dodge. “I’m gonna—” she gestures over at the door, takes a half-step forward. 

“I’m Elliot, by the way,” the guy says then, and Olivia stops in her tracks. God, she doesn’t want to trade one weird frat house hookup for another, not tonight. 

“Olivia,” she says, hoping he’ll take the hint and get out of her way. 

“I’m sorry, about Dave,” the guy — Elliot, she reminds herself — says then, and what?  

“What?” 

“He was outta line, and I’m sorry.”

Olivia snorts. “Not your fault.”

“Nah,” Elliot says, voice surprisingly serious. “Shit like that doesn’t fly here, usually.” 

“What, frat boys being frat boys?” she asks, sarcastic. “I mean, no offence,” she adds, holding up a hand toward him. 

Elliot sighs, scrubs his thumb along his jaw. “Fuck, sorry.” 

Olivia lets out a chuckle. “That’s new.”

“What?”

“A guy apologizing for another guy’s fuck up. That’s a novelty.” 

“Jesus,” he says, like he’s serious about it. Olivia shrugs, leans back against the wall. 

“You Delta Chi?” she asks. Has to be, if he knows Dave, knows how things usually are, here. 

Elliot nods. “Yeah, a senior.”

“Sophomore, Chi O. I think all my sisters have ditched me by now. Can’t really blame them,” she says, with a twinkle in her eye. “Sorry, but the beer here is—”

“Like piss?” Elliot volunteers, and Olivia laughs. 

“Somethin’ like that.”

“My buddy’s got some of the good stuff in the fridge, cold and everything. You want one?” 

Olivia should say no. She should get out of this frat house and go back to her room and get a good night’s sleep and try and forget all about Dave and getting groped in hallways. She should follow her own advice and stay far away from guys who seem nice and considerate — because they usually end up anything but — and say goodbye to Elliot. 

But there’s something about him that she can’t quite place. Something she wants to understand. So against her better judgement, she says, “Sure,” pushes herself off the wall and follows him to the frat house kitchen.

/

1998

It’s a full hour before Olivia has a chance to talk to Elliot in private. A full, excruciating sixty minutes she spends pretending she doesn’t know who he is, that they’ve just met for the very first time and are nothing to each other but colleagues, partners… professionals.

Elliot introduces her to the other members of the unit — Munch, Jeffries and Cassidy — and catches her up on their open cases, and she tries to magically forget that there was a past life where they meant something to one another, where she harboured the foolish hope that maybe, just maybe, they could mean everything to one another someday.

An hour where she keeps staring at the gold band on Elliot’s ring finger and wondering if she didn’t dream the whole thing up. 

Olivia breathes out a sigh of relief when Cragen sends them out to track down a vic’s boyfriend, and they walk out of the precinct in mutually agreed-upon silence, footsteps heavy on the pavement as they head for the sedan. As soon as Olivia shuts the passenger side door and Elliot sticks the key into the ignition, she whips her head around to face him. 

“What the fuck are you doing here?” she bites out.

Elliot’s looking at her with disbelief written all over his face. “I work here. Better question: what the fuck are you doing here?” 

Olivia huffs. “Well, apparently, I work here too.” 

They’re quiet, then, for an endless minute, both staring at each other, locked in some kind of stand-off. She’s not going to be the first one who breaks. 

In the end, it’s Elliot who gives in. His shoulders slump and he lets out a breath and Olivia feels herself sag back into the passenger seat, almost involuntary. “Shit, I’m sorry, Liv,” he mutters, then, and it’s the first time he’s said her name in almost a decade and fuck, if it doesn’t still do something funny to her insides, hearing it pass his lips. 

“It’s… God, Elliot, I just never expected to see you, ever again. After that spring—”

“Yeah.” There’s a resignation to his tone, a melancholy kind of feeling that she understands far too well. “Thought I was hallucinating, when I saw you standing there next to Cragen.”

“Me too.”

They fall into an uncomfortable silence again as Elliot finally starts the car and pulls out into the Manhattan traffic. The air inside the sedan is thick with tension, and Olivia doesn’t know what to say next. How do you talk to someone you haven’t seen in a decade, someone who disappeared without a trace? 

“How’ve you been?” he finally asks, and Olivia raises a brow and scoffs. 

“Jesus.” How has she been?  

“That came out wrong, I—” 

“Yeah.” Olivia shakes her head. “It’s been, well. It’s been a long time, Elliot.” 

“I know.”

“Didn’t expect you to join the force, after…” She leaves it hanging in the silence between them, unspoken. Joe Stabler, and everything he stood for. Everything Elliot wanted never to become. 

“Me too.” He shrugs, hands gripping the steering wheel tight. “Got home on leave and I, ah, reconnected with a girl from high school. Next thing I know, we’ve got a baby on the way and a shotgun wedding and…”

His wedding ring glints in the midday sunlight and Olivia lets out a breath. “Wow.” 

“Yeah.” A little smile lights up his face, then, when he starts telling her about his kids. “Maureen, she’s our oldest, she’s about to start middle school. Kathleen’s in elementary, and the twins are in their last year of preschool.” 

“They’re lucky to have you as their dad,” she says, and Elliot turns toward her again, eyes soft in a way that hits her square in the chest. It’s surreal, she thinks, to imagine him with children, let alone four. Surreal, but somehow right, too. 

“Thanks, Liv,” he replies, and she swallows down a lump in her throat, a vague what-if that she won’t let herself think about, not now. “But tell me about you? How’s everything with…”

“My mother?” Olivia lets out a dry chuckle. “Same as she’s always been.” 

“‘m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Other than that… I graduated, tried office jobs, hated all of them,” and here, Elliot lets out a laugh, deep and booming, because yeah, that one was obvious, and she can’t help the little smile that blooms on her own face, too, “and eventually signed up for the Academy.”

“And now you’re here.”

“Yeah, now I’m here.” 

“Listen, is this—” Elliot gestures with his free hand, all-encompassing “—I don’t wanna make this awkward, or complicated, or…”

She sighs. This is what she’d been afraid of. It’s one thing to see Elliot again, after ten years; it’s a whole different ball game to be his partner, now. She knows she should really ask for a reassignment, a different partner, or something, but Olivia also knows the chance that she’ll be sent somewhere other than SVU is high, and at the end of the day, she’s worked too damn hard to get here. 

She’s not letting it slip through her fingers. Not now, not because of this. 

“I’m okay with it,” she finally says, hoping that her expression can convey how important this is to her. “I don’t wanna get transferred out, not after it took this long to get here. I mean, only if you are…”

Elliot glances over at her again, nods once. “Yeah, I… yeah.” 

“Okay.”

“I just…”

“Don’t think we should tell anyone we used to date in college?” 

Elliot barks out a laugh. “Yeah. Might be better if they didn’t know that.”

“Would look weird after we ‘met’ this morning,” Olivia quips, and oh, this is nice — finding that ease between them again, the rhythm they used to share. 

Elliot puts on the signal and eases them into a turn lane. “Well, then it’s nice to meet you, Olivia Benson,” he says, faux-earnestness in his tone. He reaches his right hand across the centre console, and Olivia grins as she clasps it in her own. 

“It’s nice to meet you, too, Elliot Stabler.”

Elliot puts his hand on the steering wheel again and makes the left turn, and Olivia settles back into the passenger seat. The air in the sedan feels lighter, now, even though she still has so many questions left to ask, so many worries niggling at her brain. 

But Elliot wants to be her partner, wants to start with a clean slate, and maybe, maybe this can work out. Olivia sighs, turns her head to look out the window and watches the buildings zip by. 

Maybe their past doesn’t have to matter, after all. 

Chapter Text

1998

Some sort of unspoken understanding passes between Olivia and Elliot in that squad car on her first day, because when they come back to the precinct, there’s a new kind of lightness between them, an agreement that this job, this partnership, will be a fresh start for them both. 

They silently agree to table any more discussions of their past, of the eight months they’d known each other — the eight months spent together — and everything that followed. Truth be told, Olivia doesn’t think she quite wants to know what Elliot’s version of that spring looks like, anyway. 

So they don’t talk about it. 

They do their jobs, and try not to tip off their squad to the fact that they know more about each other than colleagues ought to, and Olivia works hard to learn as much as she can, about SVU, about how to work these cases, so that she can earn her place in the unit. 

It’s good, Olivia thinks: this job, these people (her colleagues all have quirks but she’s learning to appreciate them, learning her place in the squad, the way she fits here, like she’s never really fit in anywhere before) the work they get to do, the ways they’re able to help. 

And working with Elliot, too. Sitting across from him at their desks, next to him in the sedan, running interrogations together, chasing down perps. She never thought she’d get to know him like this, on the job, with a weapon at his hip. He was ROTC when they met, but it felt like a faraway thing, back then, to think about the war he would inevitably fight in — the violence half a world away.

Now, it’s right on their doorstep, insidious. And Olivia’s not naive, especially when it comes to this kind of cruelty; she knows it far too well. But it’s still a shock, still jarring, to see Elliot here. To think of him in this context. 

She wants to ask him how he ended up at SVU, what made him choose the unit. In her weaker moments, she lets herself think that maybe she had a little bit to do with it, if only subconsciously — that Elliot remembered her, and Serena, when he made the choice. And then she shakes herself out of it, because it’s absurd, that he would still be thinking about her, years later; after all, wasn’t he the one who left?

“Hey, Olivia,” Munch says then, and she tears her eyes away from the file spread out before her. “Morgue called, they want you and Stabler down there.”

“Thanks, John.”

They’ve been working a serial, Olivia’s first; it’s been all hands on deck for three days straight, no time to go home and sleep. Cragen sent Elliot up to the cribs half an hour ago to get some shut-eye, and that’s where Olivia heads now. She stops at the door, peering into the dim room and taking a minute to observe Elliot, asleep on a low bunk by the far wall. 

He’s on his back, one hand splayed out over the pillow above his head, the other slung across his torso. His head is tilted to the side, and Olivia watches his chest move up and down to the even rhythm of his breathing. He looks peaceful, relaxed, and he still sleeps like she remembers — like the twenty-one-year-old she met, all those years ago.

It hits her square in the chest, then, the history they shared. Some days it’s easy to ignore, easy to focus on the work and the newness of being in the unit, easy to tune out all the little things Elliot does that she remembered all too well. Those little quirks she never quite managed to forget. 

But other times, it’s like a lightning bolt, and Olivia finds herself stunned all over. She never expected to see Elliot again, after that spring, and now she’s with him more hours a week than she can count, practically chained at the hip. She has him back, but not in a way she’d ever expected. 

Sleep smooths out the crease in Elliot’s brow, eases the clench of his jaw, the stiffness of his shoulders, and Olivia would like nothing more than to let him lie there a little longer, let him rest and take a step away from the horrors outside the precinct walls. But they’re needed at the morgue, and they’ve got to find their killer, so Olivia reluctantly pushes herself away from the doorframe and heads toward the cot, bending down to place a hand on Elliot’s upper arm.

“Wake up, we gotta go,” she says, quiet, as she gives his bicep a squeeze. “Morgue called.”

Elliot stirs, scrunching his face up before he opens his eyes, and then he’s peering up at her, pupils wide in the low light. “They found something?” he rasps out, voice still thick with sleep, and Olivia fights a grimace. 

“Yeah. Sorry to wake you.”

Elliot shakes his head, pushes himself up on the cot and scrubs a hand over his skull before peering up at her with a tired little smile. “Just, give me thirty seconds and I’ll be down.”

Olivia nods, heading back over to the doorway. “I’ll grab the keys, El.”

The first time his nickname slipped out, a week into their new partnership, Olivia remembers Elliot’s eyes going wide. She’d frozen, too, for a split second, unable to keep the memories at bay — the feeling of his lips on hers, his hands in her hair, their bodies pressed together — but then his face had broken into a slow smile, and she’d found herself letting out a little exhale of relief. 

Now, it’s become second nature again, to call him El, to fall into the same kind of rhythm and banter they started out sharing, all those years ago. In some ways, it feels like they’re right back at the beginning, where they’d started off when they’d met at eighteen and twenty-one, except this time, well.

This time he’s married and they’re partners, and that’s something Olivia can’t ever let herself forget.

/

1987

Olivia declines when Elliot says he can drive her home from the Delta Chi house at the end of the night. It’s a nice offer, but she doesn’t need a babysitter, she can get back to her dorm just fine. Elliot doesn’t protest when she says it, as she’s perched on the kitchen counter with a bottle of beer in her hand, just shrugs his shoulders and tells her to watch out for icy spots. 

She scoffs. “What are you, the den mom?”

Elliot laughs. “Somethin’ like that.”

Olivia takes another pull of her beer and leans her head against a cabinet, gives Elliot a once-over. He’s got the same little smile plastered on his face that he was sporting when he asked her if she wanted a drink; a little bit disarming and a whole lot cocky, but sincere, too. She can tell by the softness around his eyes, the way the blue almost sparkles. 

He pushed up the sleeves of his sweatshirt at one point, and Olivia had fought the urge to gulp when he exposed his forearms. Jesus, she’s not normally that kind of girl, but Elliot’s… well. There’s no way he doesn’t spend half his time in the gym, but the haircut…

“You’re ROTC, aren’t you?” she asks, and Elliot nods. 

“Yeah, for the Marines.” Olivia doesn’t quite know what to say to that — the fact that he’s preparing to ship off and fight in a war, someday. Elliot must sense it, because he shrugs, like it’s no big deal. “And an econ major, in my spare time,” he deadpans, and Olivia lets out a laugh. 

“I’m studying history,” she offers, taking another sip of her beer. 

They fall into easy conversation after that. It turns out they’re both from the city; Elliot’s from Queens and she’s from Manhattan and it’s not like the outer boroughs and the Upper West Side have that much in common, but it’s comforting, she thinks, that he understands what she left behind — what she ran from.

Pretty soon, an hour and a half has passed and Olivia spares a glance at her wristwatch, wincing at the time. She tells Elliot she has to catch the bus to get back to north campus, thanks him for the beer and makes her way toward the front door. 

She’s halfway down the hallway when she hears him call out: “See you around?” 

Olivia turns on her heel and cocks a brow, fighting a smile. “You just might.” 

Three days later, she passes him on her way back from Park Hall and her Early Modern English History lecture, almost bumping into him as she rounds a corner. “Shit, sorry,” she mutters before she looks up and realizes it’s Elliot. “Oh, hi.”

“Hey,” he says, and there’s a smile blooming on his face that really shouldn’t make her insides go warm and fuzzy. He’s got a backpack slung over one shoulder and he’s wearing a shearling jean jacket, and damn it, it has no right looking that good on him. No right at all. “You done for the day?”

“Yeah,” Olivia says. 

“Me too. Listen, I’ve got the afternoon off and…” Here Elliot hesitates for a second, and she sees the air of self-assurance slip, “...now that we did end up seeing each other around…”

“Oh wow.” Olivia lets out a laugh when Elliot looks at her, head tilted and a little bashful. “You’re really going for that, aren’t you?”

She’s surprised, honestly; for all his intimidation when it came to Dave in the hallway, the Elliot she talked to in the kitchen afterward was honestly a sweet guy. A little bit cocky, yeah, but kind and respectful, and it had been a welcome change of pace, after too many encounters with guys like Dave. 

Olivia hadn’t expected to see Elliot again. After all, campus isn’t exactly small, but a little part of her had been hoping they might run into one another — the part that hasn’t been able to forget the blue of his eyes or the way his smile lights up his whole face.

It’s Elliot’s turn to chuckle, now, and he scratches awkwardly at the back of his neck. Olivia lets him flounder for half a second before her lips turn up in a smile and she puts a hand on his forearm, reassuring. 

“Wanna get a coffee?” she asks, because she’s feeling bold, and her smile grows wider when Elliot nods. 

They end up in the Student Union building, at a little table tucked into a corner, two steaming cups of coffee between them. Olivia snagged a muffin, too, and she’s picking the blueberries off of the streusel topping one-by-one as Elliot watches her with an amused look on his face. 

“What’s so funny?” she asks, and bites down on a blueberry.

He laughs. “Just never seen someone eat a muffin quite like that, is all.” 

Olivia blushes and nudges his calf with her foot under the table, but Elliot just grins wider, leaning forward to break off a corner of her muffin — blueberries, cake and all — and pop it into his mouth. 

“Hey!” she yelps, mock-affronted, but Elliot shrugs and leans back in his chair, a self-satisfied smirk on his face. 

“Gotta hand it to ya,” he says when he’s done chewing. “It’s a good muffin.”

“Asshole,” Olivia mutters, but there’s no heat behind it. “Should’ve gotten your own when you had the chance.”

“Think of it as repayment for the beer,” he quips.

Now, Olivia really kicks him in the shin. 

/

1998

Four months in, and they’re solid.

They’ve slipped right back into their old familiar shorthand; they have whole conversations without words, just eyes and eyebrows and sideways glances. They’re a good team — when have they ever not been — and Olivia finds herself glad, most days, that she ended up partnered with Elliot, and not some random cop she’d never met before. 

She trusts him implicitly, to have her six and back her play and not look at her the wrong way, no prying eyes like so many guys on the force have when it comes to their female colleagues. And he trusts her, too. 

Sure, he’s been at SVU for a couple of years and she’s got a lot to learn from him when it comes to the job, but he never treats her as less than an equal, and she’s grateful for it. 

There are moments where their partnership feels a bit too good to be true, too easy, but Olivia doesn’t dwell on those, focuses on the work and the cases instead. 

She’s grateful, too, for the fact that Elliot knows. About Serena, about Olivia’s connection to this kind of violence. He doesn’t make a big deal of it, but she catches him looking at her sometimes, out of the corner of her eye, silently checking in. She appreciates it more than he’ll ever know. 

The first time they work a case with a kid, it’s Olivia’s turn to provide support. There’s a six-year-old boy facedown in a ditch at the crime scene, his little body gone cold and still, and it’s the most heartbreaking thing she’s ever seen. Beside her, Elliot’s whole frame is stiff with tension, and she watches as he clenches his jaw and balls his fists and tries his hardest not to scream.

She knows he’s seeing his own kids’ faces in his mind’s eye, their childhoods flashing through his memories in little technicolour snatches, all cut short by some horror too unspeakable to name. 

“El,” she says, startling him out of his thoughts. “ME’s heading over.”

Sure enough, the coroner is walking their way, and Elliot takes his eyes off the little boy for a second, swallows and squares his shoulders. “Yeah, yeah. Okay.”

They drive back to the precinct in silence, and Olivia doesn’t comment on the fact that he’s gripping the sedan’s steering wheel so hard his knuckles are turning white. It’s only when he hasn’t spoken for a full half hour — spent at their desks doing paperwork as they wait for the morgue and lab to send preliminary results in — that she gets seriously concerned.

“You okay?” she asks, and it’s a stupid question, because obviously he’s not, but it’s a place to start. 

Elliot freezes in the middle of filling out a form and lets his pen drop onto the paper with a clatter. He leans back in his chair and lets out a breath, runs a hand through his hair. “‘m fine.”

Olivia scoffs. “Not buying that.”

He shrugs his shoulders. “Nothing we can do til…”

“Yeah.” Doesn’t mean they’re not all going half-crazy with it, waiting for some kind of ID on the kid. She pauses, thinking. “Hey, nothing’s gonna change here for at least an hour. Call Kathy, see if she’ll put one of the kids on. Go to the roof, get some air. I’ll finish these,” she says, indicating toward the paperwork. 

Elliot furrows his brow like he’s pretending to consider her offer, but Olivia knows he’s been itching to speak to his kids ever since they got the call for the case. They’re both aware it’s irrational, that all four of his kids are fine, but she gets it, the need to be sure. 

He tilts his head to the side, as if to ask, You’re okay with me disappearing for a minute? and Olivia just nods. “Go, El. Take half an hour.”

The sound of chair wheels scraping against concrete is all the answer she needs, and Olivia drops her head back down to her own paper as Elliot gets up and makes his way out of the squad room. Later, she’ll ask him about what the kids said, if Kathy managed to get them on the telephone, and it’ll hopefully distract him enough that he won’t get bogged down in his own head again. 

And when the next assault victim shows up at their doors, with a story that’s just a little too similar to Serena’s, Elliot will regale Olivia with funny stories of his own to take her mind off of that. 

It’s a partnership. It works. 

She’s halfway through a DD5 when Munch rolls his desk chair toward her and Olivia tilts her head up. “Anything you need, John?” she asks. 

Munch has grown on her over the past few months; sure, his conspiracy theories are enough to make her want to rip her hair out twice a week, but he’s sweet and sincere and he cares. 

“You’re good for him, Olivia,” he says, and oh, what the fuck? She must be giving Munch a look because his lips turn up into a smile and he continues. “Stabler. The whole unit.”

She lets out a little huff, surely…

“Don’t sell yourself short. You’re a good detective, and a good partner. He needs someone like you to keep him in line — otherwise he gets tetchy.” Munch is grinning now, talking about Elliot like he’s one of his grandmother’s cats, and Olivia can’t help herself from smiling, too. 

“Thanks,” she says, ducking her head and pushing a strand of hair behind her ear. 

Munch puts a hand on her shoulder, squeezes gently, before rolling back to his own desk. 

“You know, Olivia,” he muses, “if I didn’t know better, I’d say you two have known each other for years, with the way you’ve figured each other out already. It’s impressive.”

Olivia fights a blush and a grimace, hoping that John doesn’t spy the way she’s going red.

“Guess sometimes you get lucky,” she deflects.

Munch nods, sighing. “One can only hope for such connection,” he says, ever-dramatic, gesturing toward Cassidy with one hand. His partner is hunched over a stack of files and eating a jelly doughnut, cherry jam stuck to his thumb. “Some of us have to actually teach our partners.”

There’s a muffled huh from Cassidy’s general direction, and Munch lets out a long-suffering groan. 

Olivia musters up a weak little laugh, turning back to her paperwork.

Oh John, she thinks. If only you knew.

/

1987

She keeps seeing Elliot around campus in the weeks after they grab coffee. 

If she didn’t know any better, she’d think he might’ve started stalking her. But no, she just keeps running into him after her lecture, and it turns out he’s heading back from Fronczak as she leaves Park and they meet somewhere in the middle on her path to her room. 

The fourth time it happens, she’s coming to realize it’s inescapable, and she can either find a new way back from class or give in to the inevitable. 

And, well, the guy’s ass does look fucking great in jeans. 

They strike up a friendship, grabbing coffees after class on Thursdays and just talking — about their lives, their friends, Elliot’s ROTC, Olivia’s sorority sisters. It’s nice, she thinks, talking with him. It’s surprisingly easy. 

On the surface, they have nothing in common: Elliot’s an econ jock gunning for the Marines, Olivia’s trying for departmental honours in history, if only to appease Serena. He’s not the type of guy she normally goes for — not bookish, or intellectual, or weirdly aloof — but he’s kind and whip-smart and funny, and Olivia can’t help but feel like he gets her, in ways few other people can. 

Coffee after class turns into grabbing dinner at the dining hall, with Olivia laughing as Elliot complains that the food hasn’t gotten any better since he moved off-campus. Olivia shrugs and says it’s his loss, that he’s the one with a pickup truck and his own kitchen.

The next Thursday, Elliot puts the truck in question to use and saves them both from questionable-looking sloppy joe’s by driving them into town for dinner, where they split a pizza, tucked into a booth in the corner of a place that’s popular with students and locals alike. 

Olivia’s picking a piece of pepperoni off her slice when she notices Elliot’s been watching her, and she averts her eyes and tries to fight the flush creeping up her cheeks. 

“So, you just take apart all your food, that’s it?” he teases, and Olivia can’t help but laugh. “That’s your fun fact at parties. ‘Hey, I’m Liv, and I eat all my toppings first.’” 

She rolls her eyes. “Smartass.”

Elliot shrugs. “Keeps me on my toes.”

“What, so you can figure out how to strategically steal my food while it’s still intact?”

“Somethin’ like that.”

She lets out a laugh at that, shaking her head. This is too easy, she can’t help but think. Too comfortable, too safe. There’s gotta be a hitch. 

“I can hear you thinking from over here, Benson,” Elliot says then.

“Funny,” she deadpans. “Real funny.”

This time, Olivia does let Elliot drive her back to her dorm. It’s freezing out, and she doesn’t particularly want to take the bus back to campus in this weather, not if she can help it. 

She bundles up in her coat and scarf and slips into the passenger seat of Elliot’s pickup, letting out an appreciative groan when he cranks up the heat all the way. Elliot chuckles and fiddles with the radio, and pretty soon they’ve got Fleetwood Mac coming out of the tinny speakers as he pulls onto the main road. Olivia turns her head so she can look out the window, watching houses and shops zip by.

“Sometimes, I miss the subway,” she muses, and Elliot snorts from the driver’s seat. 

“Such a city girl,” he quips, and Olivia whips her head around, mock-affronted. “Don’t even try to fight it.”

“Fine,” she retorts. “Suburb boy.”

He parks his truck by Wilkeson and insists on walking her to the door. At Olivia’s eye roll, Elliot just shrugs and gets out of the pickup, leaving her no option but to let him follow her. Secretly, she has to admit she likes it — that he’s attentive, that he cares. 

It’s cold out, fall dipping into the first signs of winter, and Olivia watches her breath puff out in front of her in little white clouds. The ground under her boots crunches from the frost. 

They’re quiet as they walk back to her dorm, and, not for the first time, Olivia thinks about how easy it would be, to reach her hand over and find his, to lace their fingers together. It’s silly and childish and she’s not a high schooler with a crush, but goddamn, if there aren’t butterflies low in her belly every time she’s around Elliot. Every time he gives her one of those disarming looks, the ones where his eyes sparkle and his lips turn up in a smirk and she wonder what it’d feel like to kiss that grin right off his stupid face. 

But she’s wary, too. Wary of men who seem too good to be true. Of commitment. Getting hurt. And this, this friendship with Elliot? It’s become precious to her, these past few weeks. She doesn’t want to fuck it up.

“This is me,” she says, when they get to the entrance of her building, stopping by the door so she can glance back at Elliot, standing there with his hands in his jacket pockets. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Anytime,” he says, and there’s a soft expression on his face, almost fond. “I should…” he says, “Got an early start tomorrow.”

Olivia nods. “Yeah.” 

She half-expected him to use walking her back as some kind of excuse to ask if she’d let him up, if he could kiss her, if— Well. She’s not really used to the chivalry routine. 

But Elliot just gives her a little wave as he heads back to his pickup and Olivia is left standing there, wondering how the fuck this boy dropped into her life.

It takes a week for her to cross paths with him again, and this time, this time she’s got a plan. She’s gonna take this situation into her own hands, and if it backfires… She's got an alternate route back from Park mapped out just in case. 

“Hey Liv,” she hears him call from their usual spot, and she brightens at the sound of his voice, heading around the corner to meet him. 

“Coffee?” she asks, and Elliot nods, and they head over to the Student Union in lockstep. 

The coffee there’s relatively mediocre, but it’s become something of a tradition for them, to sit down and grab a cup and then decide if they’ve got enough time for dinner, or if either of them are busy that night. It’s an unspoken thing, between them, but today, with her plan fresh on her mind, Olivia can’t shake the feeling that what they’ve been doing these past few weeks comes awfully close to dating. Huh. 

“Elliot…” she starts off when she’s halfway through her muffin. 

“Yeah?”

“Forget it.” She wants to ask him what he thinks they’re doing but the words won’t come out. 

“You sure?” She gives him a little smile and deflects, breaking off a piece of her muffin and handing it over to him. “Thanks,” Elliot says, popping the pastry in his mouth. 

They’re walking past the Student Union building toward the dorms when Elliot turns toward her. “Hey, so I was thinking, a few buddies of mine are getting beers down at Cole’s tonight, would you wanna come with—”

“Are we dating?” The words slip out before she can even register them, and Olivia immediately feels her face flush and her heart hammer in her ears when she realizes she said that out loud. Oh fuck. She’s gotta… oh God…

Next to her, Elliot looks shocked for a split-second, but now his face is breaking into one of those grins, and Olivia’s not sure what the fuck any of it means. 

“Do you wanna be, Benson?” Elliot asks, eyes sparkling, and Olivia feels her throat run dry. 

“I—” she starts, and freezes when he reaches out and takes her hand in his, squeezing once, reassuring. 

“‘Cause I’m pretty sure if you take the same girl out to dinner this much, it’s gotta count for something.” 

Olivia lets out a little relieved laugh at that. Leave it to Elliot to know how to diffuse a situation, how to make them both more comfortable. She pretends to consider him for a second. “It definitely counts for something,” she says eventually. 

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.” 

When she kisses him, he tastes like blueberries and mint.

Chapter Text

1988

“I should really get going,” Olivia mutters, but the words are half-hearted, muffled as she burrows further into the solid bulk of Elliot’s chest. She’s feeling warm and languid and drowsy, with her head tucked into the crook of his neck as he traces mindless patterns across the smooth skin of her back with his thumb. “Got a 9 am with Whitman, ‘s way too early.”

Elliot chuckles, and she feels the reverberation of it in her torso; it sends a little shiver up her spine. Or maybe that’s because she’s naked in his bed, only half-covered by a sheet, and there’s a thin sheen of sweat rapidly cooling on her skin. 

They’ve been dating — officially — ever since that afternoon in November, when Elliot had asked her to come to Cole’s with him and his friends, and Olivia kissed him on the little path by the lake. It’s been easy, so far, light and fun, and a little part of Olivia’s brain keeps wondering when the other shoe will drop, but mostly, she’s just so damn happy.  

He’s sweet and funny and a damn good kisser, and honestly, she’s determined to just enjoy this — being with Elliot, being happy — and try not to overthink it (too much). They’d parted ways for winter break with promises to call each other, but the holidays and, well, Serena, meant Olivia didn’t get to phone him nearly as much as she would have liked. 

She’d missed him when she was in Manhattan, and she’s been back on campus for a few days now, ever since the dorms opened back up. Olivia left the city as soon as she could, desperate to spend as little time at her mother’s apartment as possible.

Spring semester starts tomorrow, and Elliot got back to campus that morning after making the drive from Queens. They’d agreed to meet at the off-campus house where he lives with two of his brothers that afternoon and now… well. The clock on Elliot’s bedside table reads quarter past nine and Olivia is loath to move. She sighs again, and Elliot hauls her closer, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. 

“Y’know,” he says, picking up a strand of her hair and twisting it in between his fingers, “you could just stay.”

She peers up at him from under her lashes, raising a brow. “I don’t have any of my stuff.”

“And I don’t have to be back at training until the day after tomorrow, so I can drive you to your room in the morning.”

“Hmm,” Olivia hums, pretending to consider his offer. “You make good points, Stabler.”

He laughs. “So’s that a yes?”

Olivia leans up and presses her lips to the corner of his mouth. “Maybe,” she teases, as she kisses her way along Elliot’s jawline and snakes her hand in between their bodies. “Could use a little bit more convincing, though.”

“Oh, really?” he drawls, voice like gravel, and Olivia’s breath hitches. There’s a glint in his eye and oh, she asked for it, didn’t she? Not one to wait, Olivia runs her hand over his length once, experimental, her touch feather-light. She watches with satisfaction as Elliot shudders, practically growling into her ear as he rolls them both on his crappy double bed. They untangle themselves from the sheets and then he’s hovering above her, elbows braced on either side of her shoulders. 

Elliot dips down to kiss her, slow and dirty, and Olivia rakes her fingernails over the smooth skin of his back, tracing the ripples of muscle. He preens at her touch, and Olivia’s about to comment on it, to mutter something like asshole under her breath, but then he’s got a hand on her breast and his mouth on her clavicle and any coherent thought she had flies straight out the window. 

“Jesus,” she stutters out, and she can feel Elliot grinning against the hollow above her collarbone, the bastard, but she doesn’t have it in her to care. Not when he’s nipping at her skin like that, and his hand is moving further down her torso, lower, lower, lower, until—

“Hey Stabler, you want a beer?”

The shout from the hallway is accompanied by a knock on the door, and Elliot collapses on top of Olivia with a groan, while she stifles a giggle in the crook of his neck. 

“Fuck off, Miller!” Elliot yells when he’s rolled off her, holding up his right hand so he can flip off the doorway. 

A booming laugh echoes through the wall, followed by a “Hey, Liv!” 

“Hi, Matt!” she calls back, pushing herself up into a sitting position. Elliot sighs dramatically, and Olivia pats his shoulder before she swings her legs over the edge of the mattress and stretches her arms up over her head. That earns her another groan from Elliot, and she chuckles as she gets up and goes in search of her clothes, which ended up scattered haphazardly throughout his room. 

She finds her underwear and bra, and nicks the sweatshirt Elliot had been wearing earlier from the back of his desk chair. The heating is spotty in the creaky old house, so Olivia puts on her socks and swipes a pair of his sweatpants, too, flipping over the waistband so they sit properly on her hips. 

“We couldn’t have pretended he wasn’t there?” Elliot grouses as he opens his dresser drawer to pull out another sweatshirt and slides on his jeans. 

She laughs. “Nah, and besides, I could do with a beer.” 

“So that means you’re staying?” Elliot asks, and the hopefulness in his tone is entirely too endearing. 

Olivia walks over to him and wraps her arms around his neck, leaning up for a kiss. “Yeah. But only if we go pick up coffee in the morning, too. The stuff Matt makes tastes like shit.” 

Elliot barks out a laugh and dips down to kiss her again. “Deal.” 

/

1999

Compartmentalization makes for an excellent avoidance tactic… right up to the point where the thing you’re trying to avoid slaps you straight across the face and becomes entirely un-avoidable. 

In Olivia’s case, that thing turns out to be an eleven-year-old with honey blonde hair and a gap between her front teeth who bears a striking resemblance to her father. 

Maureen is sitting in Elliot’s desk chair when Olivia walks into the squad room one afternoon, and she instinctively recognizes the girl as his eldest. She’s seen plenty of photos of his kids; he’s got a few lined up neatly on his desk and there are candids taped on the inside of his locker door, but it’s a different thing entirely to meet one of them in person. 

Olivia and Elliot have been partners for going on a year and change now, and they trust one another implicitly. Always have, probably always will. They’re a great team; Cragen’s praised them for their closure rate more than once, and Olivia is astounded sometimes by how well they play off each other in interrogations. 

She can still read Elliot like a book, and he can read her in return, and she’s got a sneaking suspicion that he knows her better than she knows herself, some days. 

But there are definitely things they don’t talk about. Their past, for one, which she’s grateful for, and also — crucially — details about what exactly happened in the decade they spent apart. Sure, they filled each other in on the basics, at the beginning of their partnership. And sure, Elliot mentions Kathy and the kids in passing, just as Olivia sometimes talks about Serena. 

Beyond that, though? They’re keeping the boundaries very clear, and Olivia likes it that way. Likes pretending that Elliot only exists within the confines of the one-six, that she doesn’t have to waste time thinking too hard about what it means, that she’s working this closely with her ex, the one she spent… an embarrassingly long amount of time trying to get over. 

(In her weaker moments, Olivia can admit to the fact that she hasn’t been entirely successful.)

It works, for the two of them. Well, at least until she stumbles upon Maureen sitting at her dad’s desk and her stomach lurches.

The girl doesn’t notice her at first, and Olivia has half a mind to sneak back out of the squad room and avoid this whole situation, but there’s a file on her desk she needs to grab for Abbie, and it really can’t wait. So Olivia takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders, and walks up to Maureen. 

“Hey,” she says, and Maureen looks up from the book in her lap, studying Olivia with a curious expression. “I’m Olivia, your dad’s partner.”

“Hi Olivia, I’m Maureen.” She holds her hand out, then, and Olivia can’t help but smile at the gesture. The girl’s got Stabler manners, through and through. 

“Your dad’s told me a lot about you,” Olivia says, and it’s… sort of true. She knows bits and pieces, from conversations and overheard phone calls and afternoons where Elliot ducked out for recitals and volleyball games. “It’s so nice to meet you.”

They talk for a few minutes, Olivia and Maureen, about school and sports and it’s amazing, to see how Elliot’s daughter is so much like him, but her own person, too. It hits her like a freight train; he’s a father, and a damn good one. 

As if on cue, Elliot walks into the bullpen, and Olivia catches his eye as he takes in the sight of his partner and his daughter, chatting like it’s the most normal thing in the world. “Mo, I see you’ve met Liv?” he asks when he heads over to their desks, and Maureen nods her head. 

“Yeah,” she says. “She’s cool, dad.” 

Olivia finds herself blushing at that, the coveted stamp of approval from a middle school girl, and Elliot grins. “You’re right, Liv’s the coolest. Now, come on, grab your stuff, I gotta drive you to volleyball.” 

That night, Olivia grabs drinks with Cassidy, takes him back to her apartment and fucks him until she’s sure he’s seen stars. 

He’s been asking her out for weeks, and he’s sweet, if a little bit clumsy, and well, Olivia hasn’t had sex in a while. It feels nice, to be wanted, to have a fun evening out and feel like a woman, to kiss a guy after one too many shots of tequila and bring him home for a night. 

It’s good sex, and he’s a nice guy, and that’s all there is to it, she swears. (It has nothing at all to do with the fact that the reality of Elliot’s marriage, of his children and his whole new life is inescapable, now.) So she keeps telling herself it’s a meaningless fuck as she’s standing in front of her bathroom mirror, looking at her mussed hair and swollen lips, and eventually she thinks she might actually believe it.

Besides, it’s not like it’s ever going to happen again.

Cassidy doesn’t seem to get that memo, though, because he starts asking if they’ll see each other again (not outside of work, she says, adamant), and starts telling her that he felt a connection between them. Olivia brushes him off, tries to avoid the subject. Workplace hookups aren’t her thing, and she made that clear to him, told him she was in this for a night and nothing more.

When Elliot corners her at the lockers, asks her how long she’s been sleeping with Brian, Olivia feels her heart drop straight into her gut. She tries to deflect, but it’s Elliot, and he always could see straight through her.

“Is it that obvious?” she asks instead, ducks her head and stares determinedly at a spot on the floor. 

Elliot shrugs a shoulder. “I’m your partner,” he says, as if that explains everything. As if he’s trying his hardest to ignore the fact that he definitely knows exactly what she’s like the day after she’s had sex. (And before, during and immediately after, too. But Olivia’s steadfastly ignoring that.) “For better or worse.” And then, tacked on for good measure, “Everybody knows too much about everybody else in this office, anyway.”

Olivia sighs, tells Elliot she broke a personal rule, that Brian keeps asking to see her again. 

“Can you blame him?” 

Jesus Christ. Olivia’s brows shoot up to her hairline, but Elliot doesn’t blink. She wonders what he’s thinking right now, if any of his old cocky jealousy is still hiding there under the surface. Then again, he’s got a wife and kids, so… 

“I can’t do this right now,” she says, “I didn’t mean for this... I mean, I guess you never do.”

“Sometimes you do,” he replies, and what the fuck is she supposed to do with that? Is he talking about… No, he can’t be, because she’s determined to pretend that whatever the hell they once shared happened in… a parallel universe, or something. “Be nice to him... maybe even over-nice. He’ll be cold, but he’ll get over it. It happens.” 

“Really?” Somehow, she’s skeptical about that.

“Really.”

/

1988

“I hate this,” Elliot announces to the world at large, leaning back in his chair and glaring at the textbook and notes spread out in front of him. 

Across the table, Olivia looks up from her book and smirks. “Wanna trade?”

He snorts. “Not in a million years.”

“Thought so,” she says, turning back to her reading. 

They’re in the library — at Olivia’s behest, because she has to do research for a paper, and Elliot’s been complaining that they’re both so busy, they barely get to see one another. She’d said he was welcome to tag along to the stacks if he wanted, and Elliot had let out a sigh, but eventually admitted he had a few problem sets for his Game Theory class due at the end of the week. 

She’s halfway through a chapter on the Ming Dynasty, busy writing down quotes to use for her paper, when she hears Elliot groan, again. 

“You good over there?” she teases, and Elliot scrubs a hand over his jaw. 

“I swear Harrison makes these harder than they gotta be on purpose,” he grumbles. “Her curve is fucking brutal.”

“Gross.”

“Take five minutes?” he asks, face breaking out into a hopeful little smile, and oh, they really shouldn’t, but Elliot’s got an infuriatingly impressive set of puppy dog eyes when he wants to, and Olivia is quickly learning that she’s not as immune to them as she’d like to be.

“Fine.” 

There’s a glint in his eye as he gets up from his chair and holds out a hand for Olivia, and she stifles a laugh as he leads them back into the stacks. She can still see their table out of the corner of her eye, but Elliot’s found them a secluded corner, away from prying eyes. 

“Mmmpf,” she mutters when his lips find hers, laughing as he backs her into the wall and starts trailing kisses along her jawline. “This is… not what I had in mind when I said we could take a break.”

Elliot chuckles as he cards his fingers through her hair, moving his hand to the back of her head so he can cradle her skull. “You complaining?”

She really should. They’re in the library, for fuck’s sake, and if someone walks up to them, well… Olivia doesn’t even want to go down that road. But Elliot’s right, it has been too long since they’ve had any sort of time together. 

“No groping,” she hisses, narrowing her eyes. She’ll make out with him, but she’s not about to publicly go to third base with him in the library of all places. 

Elliot chuckles. “Copy that,” he says, and gives her a stupid little salute that makes her laugh before he leans in again. He puts his whole body into it, teeth and tongue and all he’s got, and Olivia feels herself going boneless against the wall, mind foggy from the way he’s scraping his teeth along the column of her neck and then soothing the delicate skin with the flat of his tongue. 

Olivia scrabbles for purchase in the fabric of his sweatshirt, and Elliot smiles against her mouth, clearly proud of his handiwork. 

“Jesus,” she whispers when they break apart for air, glancing over to their table and the other end of the stacks to make sure no one caught them. They’re still alone, thank goodness, and Olivia leans her head against the wall and touches the back of her hand to her lips. “I think that was more than five minutes.” 

Elliot shrugs. “What can I say? You can’t rush perfection.” There’s a shit-eating smirk plastered on his face and Olivia rolls her eyes.

“Oh, fuck you,” she mutters, but there’s no heat behind it, and he leans forward to peck her cheek. “‘M gonna have to stop studying with you. I’m not getting anything done.”

Elliot lets out a little chuckle, but then it’s like a shadow creeps across his features, and he trains his eyes on a spot on the floor. 

“What?” she asks, stepping forward into his space. “Did I say something…?”

He shakes his head. “No. I just… it’s my last semester and then I ship off and I guess it just hit me. You’ve got two more years after this, and…”

“Hey,” she says, wrapping her arms around his neck and leaning in close. Elliot’s hands come to rest on her back, and Olivia sighs into the embrace, letting her weight drop onto his chest and trusting him to keep her upright. “We’ll deal with that when the time comes. Graduation isn’t for months, you have plenty of time to distract me in libraries until then.”

That earns her a weak little chuckle, and she takes it as a win, leaning up to trail her lips along his jaw. 

“I really have to get this paper done, though,” she says, taking a half-step toward their table. Elliot lets out a sigh, faux-dramatic, and she laughs. 

/

2000

Their conversation by the lockers haunts her for months. Elliot’s “Can you blame him?” plays on a loop in her head, a mocking little refrain that reminds her of all the things she could have had that remain steadfastly out of reach. 

Cassidy leaves SVU not long after that night; in the end, he couldn’t hack it, and Olivia doesn’t blame him. What they see every day, the violence they’re confronted with — it’s not a job for everyone. But Olivia’s happy, here, in this unit with these people. Cragen’s kind but firm, Munch is always there to lend an ear and Jeffries understands. She gets what it’s like to be a woman on the force, single and childless and working hard to hold her own among the old boys’ club. 

It’s just that she can’t get Elliot’s words out of her mind, can't shake the image Elliot’s face as he leaned toward her by the lockers, the soft expression colouring his features that — if Olivia didn’t know for certain that he’s happy with his wife, with his kids — she could have imagined was one of wistfulness, of longing.

But it wasn’t, so Olivia tries her hardest to shove that moment to the back of her mind, to forget all about it and get back to the safety of the status quo they’d created between them. 

It works — sort of. 

During the day, she can focus on the job, on the cases, on the victims who walk through their doors. There’s always something to do, and even if there isn’t, she can work through the stacks of paperwork that accumulate on their desks, and neither Elliot nor the rest of the squad will question her for it. 

It’s a whole different story when she gets home. 

Years of living alone have made her skilled at distraction, anything so she doesn’t have to sit alone with her own thoughts. But in the past few months, even her tried and true methods have stopped working.

She’s started and given up on more books than she can count, there’s an unfortunate-looking tangle of yarn in a basket in her hall closet from the time she thought she could teach herself how to knit, and the sitcom reruns that play late at night are starting to get boring. 

One evening, Olivia goes to the fancy supermarket six blocks from her apartment and hauls three bags of groceries home, leafy greens and chicken breast and butternut squash. She pulls an ancient cookbook Serena had bought her once off a high shelf, and starts chopping. Hours later, her kitchen looks like something out of a disaster movie, and Olivia stands in front of her stove, glaring at the simmering pot of soup like it has personally wronged her. 

Now, after the third day of trying to unwind with a bubble bath and a crappy romance novel, Olivia has had enough. 

She gets out of the tub, dries off and slips into pyjama bottoms and a NYPD sweatshirt before heading to her bedroom. Maybe she just has to face it, once and for all. Maybe she’ll get over it that way. 

The box is on the highest shelf of her closet, tucked away out of eyesight, and she has to get on a stepladder to pull it down. It’s heavy and dusty, and Olivia drops it unceremoniously on her bedroom floor with a thud, settling down cross-legged next to it. 

Here goes nothing. 

The first thing she sees when she flips open the lid is her old graduation cap and tassel, along with the two sets of honour cords, and sets them gently on the floor. Next are old notebooks, a stray journal she’s sure she didn’t fill out past the tenth page, a few framed photographs of her and her sorority sisters.

They all look so young, so carefree, and Olivia runs her thumb over the glass, wiping away the dust smudged across her old self’s face.

It’s more of the same as she digs further through the box, random college trinkets, old photos she didn’t bother to put up in this apartment. 

What she’s looking for, though, is tucked at the very bottom. 

She lifts it out with careful hands, sets it on her lap and runs her fingers across the faded fabric. It’s the grey crewneck sweatshirt with the UB logo she stole from Elliot the first time that night when he got back from winter break. They’d passed it back and forth from that night onward, until he handed it to her a week before graduation and told her to keep it, that it looked better on her anyway. 

She’d worn it to death in the weeks after, until she’d finally accepted he was gone for good and shoved it into a box in the back of her closet. 

Olivia hasn’t taken it out since. 

Now, she lifts it to her nose and takes a deep breath. It mostly smells like moth balls and dust, but underneath that is the faintest whiff of Elliot. Fuck.  

She wears it to bed that night. 

Three days later, he corners her in the locker room. 

“What’s up with you?” Elliot asks, voice all care and concern, and Olivia wants to smack him. 

She doesn’t though, just takes a deep breath and shakes her head. “‘S nothing.”

“C’mon, Olivia,” he says, leans close enough that she can feel his breath on her skin. “Don’t pretend like I haven’t noticed. Is it Serena… is something—”

“No.” She’s quick to shake her head and reassure him; her mother is… well, fine’s not the word she’d use but nothing’s happened, either. “Listen, Elliot, it’s just… this job is stressful, and I haven’t gotten much sleep lately, but I’m fine, really.” 

She turns away from him, then, to walk away from the lockers, away from him, but Elliot’s faster, and he’s got a hand on her bicep before she can so much as blink. He spins her around, and then she’s facing him properly, and God, it’s all too much. 

His eyes are so blue, and his thumb is tracing soothing patterns on her upper arm, and he’s got that soft look on his face that used to make her weak in the knees and who the fuck is she kidding at this point, it still does. 

“You can talk to me, Liv,” he says, low and soft, and she can’t deal with this right now, can’t deal with any of it. “I’m your partner, you can trust me.”

But that’s the whole problem, isn’t it? He’s her partner, and she does trust him, but he also broke her goddamn heart and he’s standing across from her with his lips less than an inch from hers and it would be so easy, to press up on her tiptoes and cross that last distance between them. He’s so close, and it feels like a thousand moments she’s tried to tuck into the furthest corners of her mind, lock them up and throw away the key. 

She’s pushed away sheepish little smiles across coffee mugs and the taste of blueberries on his tongue and they way he got loose after three beers and kissed her with abandon. She’s worked hard to ignore that she remembers a night they sat in the bed of his pickup every time he pulls out a piece of gum because he’d tasted minty when he’d kissed her as they laid there and looked up at the stars. 

There’s a lot of things about Elliot Stabler she’s tried valiantly to forget, but the way he looks when he’s about to kiss her isn’t one of them. She’ll always be able to picture the way his eyes flit up and down her face as if he’s asking for permission, the way his breath hitches. But it’s ten years later and they don’t do that anymore, and Jesus, Olivia has got to get a grip, has got to stop imagining things that clearly aren’t happening, and… is he… leaning down?

Oh God, he is, she realizes with a startling clarity when his eyes go dark and hooded and suddenly she can feel the hot puffs of his breath on her skin and there’s less than a hair’s breadth separating them and—

“Elliot.” His name from her lips is a bucket of cold water hitting them both at the same instant, and Olivia pushes him back with a hand on his chest. “We can’t—”

“Fuck,” he stammers, face flushed and pupils blown, staggering back until there are a few feet of distance between them. “Fuck, I’m sorry, I—”

“Don’t, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

“No, it’s…”

Olivia nods, helpless. “Yeah.”

What the fuck did they just (almost) do?

Chapter Text

2000

In an ideal world, Olivia would run out of the station house the second after she almost kisses Elliot without looking back, and make sure — by writing a detailed list of all the places she could possibly bump into him in the future and then steadfastly avoiding every single one of them for perpetuity — that she never sees him again. 

But that’s in an ideal world. 

In reality, she has to face him again bright and early on Monday morning, and work with him like nothing’s changed, like the monumental, possibly life-altering, fundamentally stupid thing they almost did in the locker room on Friday afternoon just… didn’t happen. 

And she has no fucking clue how she’s going to pull that off. 

She does end up running out of the locker room right after their… close call, grabbing her coat and hightailing it for the exit. It’s almost the end of their shift, anyway, and with nothing pressing on her docket, Olivia is pretty sure no one will miss her if she ducks out twenty minutes early. 

Elliot can stay and finish any remaining paperwork, she thinks as she grabs her bag from the bottom drawer of her desk and pushes in her chair. It’s the least he can do. 

Rationally, Olivia knows they’re both equally to blame for what happened (or, almost happened) by the lockers, that they were both entirely too close to letting themselves cross that line. But really, Elliot is the one with the wife and the kids and the house with the yard and the white picket fence, so shouldn’t he be shouldering the guilt here, for the two of them?

Or, at minimum, the stack of unfinished DD5s.

Olivia doesn’t look back once as she leaves the station, slipping into the crowded Manhattan street and making her way toward the subway. She appreciates the throng of commuters during moments like this, when she needs to forget about everything and just focus on getting from point A to point B, and New York City at rush hour makes for the best kind of distraction. 

But even that doesn’t last. 

Eventually, Olivia makes it back to her apartment, and as soon as she hears the deadbolt latch into place, she lets out a shuddering exhale and staggers toward the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water, downing it in huge gulps. She leans back against her cabinets and scrubs a hand over her face as she lets the reality of what just happened finally sink in. 

The fact that she almost kissed Elliot. The fact that he’d leaned in. The fact that even though he’s married, there had clearly been something sparking between them, some gravitational pull that they’d almost been too weak to stop. 

But he’s married, and they’re partners, and he’s got four freaking kids who depend on their father and Jesus, somehow she has to wrap her head around what happened today and then steadfastly ignore it somewhere in the next forty-eight hours or she won’t be able to go into work on Monday. 

She knows all about the post-breakup haircut, when women make the big chop just to forget whatever shit the man in question put them through and move on to a new stage of their lives. This isn’t quite that, she reminds herself, but she still feels the need to do something, to draw a line in the sand and make it abundantly clear that they’re partners now, friends. Nothing more.

Enter Suzy from the salon four blocks down the street, a trip to Saks that makes Olivia’s wallet ache, and a return of Elliot’s sweatshirt to the box in the very furthest corner of the high shelf of her hall closet. 

Desperate times, Olivia thinks, as she’s filing away her receipts on Sunday afternoon and trying not to wince at the totals, call for desperate measures. 

Munch is the only one in the precinct on Monday morning, and Olivia breathes a sigh of relief as she settles down at her desk. She needs a little while to gather herself before Elliot comes in, before she has to face the inevitable.

“Very French,” he says as he passes her desk with a fresh cup of coffee. 

Olivia looks up from a file. “What?”

John holds up his free hand, gesturing. “The new look. I like it, it has a certain je ne sais quoi.”  

“Oh, thanks,” she manages, but it must come out a little half-hearted, because Munch’s brow immediately furrows in concern. 

“Everything alright, Olivia?”

“Yeah.” She’s quick to nod, to reassure. The last thing she needs is the station’s resident conspiracy theorist getting ideas. “Just felt like a change, is all.”

“Well, it suits you,” he says, and seems to leave it at that, heading back to his own desk and stack of paperwork. 

Olivia’s blessed silence lasts for another half-hour, until Elliot walks into the squadroom, steps heavy on the linoleum floor. She can practically feel the tension radiating off him in waves. 

“We got a call,” he says without preamble, not bothering to even look her in the eye as he holds up the keys to the Crown Vic. “Cragen wants us at the scene.”

She follows him out of the precinct in silence, and it feels eerily reminiscent of her first day at the unit, when they’d been unable to talk in private until they were in the car and could finally acknowledge the elephant in the room. 

Except then, the overwhelming feeling had been shock and disbelief, and today Olivia can’t even bring herself to look at Elliot, to think about what they almost did, and how it’s very likely going to break them. 

“Liv—” he says, when he starts the ignition and pulls out into the busy street, right at the same time that she whispers, “Elliot—” and then they’re fumbling, each trying to let the other speak first. 

“I’m sorry,” she manages, “I didn’t mean to… I mean, you’re married, and you’ve got kids and I shouldn’t have even… and now everything’s fucked up and—”

“Olivia, take a breath.”

“El—”

“Don’t. We both almost did something really stupid, but we stopped ourselves. Nothing happened.”

She heaves out a sigh. “Yeah.”

“And it won’t happen again.”

“It won’t.” That, she’s sure of.

“So let’s not make it a bigger deal than it has to be.” Elliot shrugs, but she can tell the nonchalance is forced, that this is as awkward and difficult for him as it is for her, even though they’re both trying valiantly to brush it off. 

“Just pretend it didn’t happen?” 

“Yeah. Partners, right?”

“There’s not too much water under the thing, or whatever?” Olivia asks. 

She really hopes there isn’t, because the thing is, Elliot’s got a point. Pretending nothing happened is the only way forward, short of doing something altogether drastic, like asking to be transferred out, or finally sitting down and acknowledging the pang she gets in her chest every time she thinks about Elliot going home to Kathy at night, or… cutting off all her hair. 

And, well… 

“Okay,” she says eventually. “Okay.”

Elliot’s shoulders relax just a fraction, and he lets out a breath. 

“Good.” He’s quiet for a minute, like he’s gathering his thoughts. “Working with you, I… I don’t wanna lose that Liv.”

“I don’t either.” 

“We make a good team.”

“We do.”

“And I don’t…” he starts, “I’m really glad we… I—”

“I’m glad we’re friends again, too,” she says, putting him out of his misery. 

“Can I ask you a question?” Elliot sounds lighter now, like he’s trying to steer them back to safer waters. Olivia’s glad for it. “As your friend?”

She manages a little smile. “Shoot.”

“What happened to your hair?”

/

1988

“Have I mentioned that I’m really glad Becky’s cutting class to go to that concert?” 

Olivia hums. “Maybe once or twice,” she teases, poking Elliot in the ribs with her foot and letting out a yelp when he captures it with one hand and drags his index finger along the sole. She’s ticklish there, and he knows it, the bastard. 

Her roommate, Becky, had gone to the city with a friend to see Duran Duran play Madison Square Garden, leaving Olivia’s double blessedly empty for a few days. While Elliot has his own room in the house off-campus, he’s also got roommates. They’re nice and funny and generally make for good company, but privacy isn’t something they seem to value all that much. 

So it’s all the better that they’ve got her room to themselves for a few days, even if that does mean they have to squeeze onto her crappy twin bed together. Right now, Olivia has her head propped up against the pillows and her legs resting in Elliot’s lap, and he’s leaning against the wall, feet dangling off the edge of the mattress. 

She’s supposed to be doing her reading, and Elliot is supposed to be studying for a quiz, but neither of those things are actually happening right now. 

“D’you ever think about what you want to do, after your tour is over?” Olivia asks, and winces when Elliot stiffens at her words. It’s a topic they don’t broach often, because there are only so many months left until graduation, until he ships off and heads into a war zone, until they have to sit down and really think about their futures. 

“Sometimes,” he says after a minute. “I don’t think I wanna be a lifer. I’m committed to the corps and my bid, but beyond that…”

“Yeah.”

Elliot chuckles, but it’s a dry, hollow thing. “If it were up to my dad…” he trails off, shakes his head. Olivia sets her book down and pushes herself up, scooting over so she can sit next to him and let her legs dangle alongside his. They don’t talk much about their families, but there’s an unspoken understanding that neither of them has had it particularly easy at home. 

“If it were up to my mother, I’d be an English lit major at Columbia, still living at home where she could make sure nothing ever happened to me.” Olivia shrugs. “When I told her I wanted to go to state school, her eyes almost bugged out of her head.” 

“ROTC’s the only reason my parents didn’t stop me from going to UB. Figured if the army was paying, they couldn’t really complain about it.”

“I’m on scholarship and my mom still finds reasons to. It’s too far from Manhattan, and there are strange men on campus, and Columbia’s an Ivy, and as the daughter of a professor, shouldn’t I care about that?” She scoffs. “Not that she’s ever sober enough to give a shit about me when I am home.”

“‘m sorry, Liv,” Elliot says, wrapping an arm around her bicep and pulling her close. She lets her head drop to his shoulder and exhales, sinking into his embrace. “If it were up to my dad, I wouldn’t have gone to college at all, just straight from high school to the Academy like he did. He still thinks I’m gonna join when my tour’s up.”

“But you don’t want to?” 

Elliot shrugs, drops a kiss into her hair. “Dunno yet,” he says, lets out a little laugh. “My mama always said I’d make a good architect.”

“An architect?” Olivia lets the idea wash over her for a minute, Elliot designing buildings, and finds herself smiling at the picture. He’s analytical, and far sharper than he gives himself credit for. He could be good at it; he’s got a knack for visualizing structures and spaces. “I like the thought of that.” 

“And you?” 

“I don’t know yet. I’ve still got two years left… but I know I want to help people. Make a difference somehow.” Olivia takes a deep breath, looks down at her hands clasped on her lap and picks at her cuticle with her thumb. “People like… My mom, she… she was raped, whe she was in college. Nine months later, she had me, and it’s… I don’t think she was ever able to really process that.”

It’s not something she typically tells people about. How Serena Benson looks at her daughter and sees the living, breathing reminder of the worst day of her life. How Olivia knows her mother loves her, but also knows that most nights, she loves her books and bottles of Stolichnaya more. 

How she’s never been able to find a sense of safety, of security, in her mother’s arms. 

“Liv,” Elliot whispers, and she looks up into his eyes, bright and blue, and finds a sheen of tears collecting in their corners, mirroring her own. There’s no pity in his expression, just compassion and a deep kind of understanding, and she tucks herself further into his side. 

“I can’t imagine what it was like for her,” she says, “dealing with everything alone and having almost no support. There’s gotta be a better way.”

Elliot presses a kiss to her temple. “Have I ever told you you’re amazing, Olivia Benson? Because you are.”

She chances a look at him again, taking in his smile and the softness of his expression. “Well, I think you’re pretty great, too.”

/

2001

And in the end, it’s the vodka that takes her. 

Serena Benson: a fall-down drunk, who… well. There’s an irony to the situation that Olivia can’t yet let herself appreciate. 

It doesn’t surprise her, when Cragen tells her what happened. Her mother had been sober for a few months, but despite her best efforts, it never did last. So it’s not quite shock so much as a quiet sense of resignation that fills her when her captain delivers the news. 

When Olivia leaves Cragen’s office, she heads straight for the cribs, sinking down on one of the low bunks. She lets out a shuddering breath and drops her head in her hands. None of it feels real. 

The traffic cop told her Serena’s body should be released after the autopsy is completed, that it’s just a formality, that she’s free to start making funeral arrangements as soon as she wants to. Cragen had shot the poor guy a withering look when he’d started going into the logistics, and he’d wisely shut up after that. Her captain had asked if he could do something to help, if she wanted to go home, if, if, if… and Olivia’s head had already been spinning at that point, and she’d felt like she was going numb. 

So Cragen had told her to get some water, head to the cribs and take a minute to breathe. 

It turns out that’s harder than she thought it would be; her breath is coming in short little pants, and it feels like there’s a lump stuck somewhere in her throat. She doesn’t know what to do with the feeling. 

Serena was… Serena was Serena. Olivia knows she and her mother always had a complicated relationship, but in the last few years they’d mellowed out and both come to accept that certain subjects would always be tense between them. Serena’s drinking, Olivia’s job… and of course, the very matter of her existence.

But they’d managed to make it work, most of the time. Met for dinners and the odd lunch, checked up on one another. Olivia had accepted that the vodka would never go away, and Serena had begrudgingly come to terms with the fact that her daughter was set on her career as a detective. 

And now she’s gone, and Olivia feels like her whole world has tipped on its axis. 

She doesn’t notice there’s someone else in the cribs with her until she feels the dip and creak of the mattress beside her. Olivia removes her hands from her face and looks up, and of course it’s Elliot, concern and care etched into his features. 

“Liv,” he breathes, “Cragen told me. I am so sorry.” 

Olivia manages a shrug and a weak exhale. “It’s— I’m not surprised, honestly. She was drinking again.”

“Yeah.” Elliot gingerly places a hand on her knee and squeezes once; the heat of his touch bleeds through the fabric of her trousers, anchoring her to the moment, to him. “She fell?”

“Down the subway steps, 110th and Broadway. The entrance by the Velvet Room.”

“Shit,” he mutters. “That’s—”

Olivia lets out a laugh, dry and cracked and hollow. “Ironic, for a woman who always insisted on taking a cab? Yeah.”

“Liv, I wasn’t—”

“I know.” She sighs, rests her elbows on her knees and sags forward. “I just— the traffic cop who came in with the news started talking about funeral arrangements, and there’s her apartment and all the stuff collecting dust at her office and I—” 

The more she thinks about it, the more she gets overwhelmed, the more it feels like there’s an anvil pressing down on her chest and she can’t breathe. 

“Hey, hey, don’t worry about that right now,” Elliot says, voice low and soothing. He’s moved his hand up and between her shoulder blades and he’s drawing slow circles there, trying to calm her down. Against her better instincts, Olivia feels herself relaxing into his touch, and she takes in a shuddering breath, holds it and exhales. “You’re gonna get it all figured out, and you’re not gonna do it alone, okay?”

She looks up at him, then, eyes wide and probably bloodshot. 

“Anything you need, I’ll help.” He says it like it’s a given, like she couldn’t fight him about it if she tried. Truth be told, she’s not sure she even wants to. The prospect of dealing with everything alone… it’s daunting. 

“Thank you,” she says eventually, even managing a small smile. 

“‘Course, Olivia,” Elliot says. “D’you need a minute?”

The concern is evident in his eyes; they’re almost indigo in the half-dark of the cribs. Olivia nods, grateful. She needs to figure out how to pull herself together, and she can’t do that with him here. 

He pushes himself up off the crappy bed, smooths out a nonexistent wrinkle in his slacks, and gives her shoulder one last squeeze.

“I’ll be downstairs.”

/

1988

It’s Thursday night and Cole’s is packed. Music’s playing, there’s at least one TV on above the bar, and every five minutes, Olivia can hear a shout when a group downs a round of shots. 

Olivia leans back into the solid bulk of Elliot’s chest, smiling when he pulls her in closer with the arm he’s got loosely wrapped around her middle and presses a sloppy kiss to the crown of her hair. She’s two and a half beers in and feeling pleasantly buzzed, and the way his warm breath is tickling her cheek only adds to the feeling. 

“Man, the Jets haven’t had a good season in years,” Elliot’s roommate Matt is saying, gesturing with his bottle, his voice rising in both volume and pitch. “It’s a…” he stammers, searching for his words, “a fucking… futile endeavour! That’s what it fucking is!”

Olivia stifles a laugh and takes another sip from her bottle. Matt’s a Bills fan and won’t let you forget it, and every time he has even one shot of tequila, he starts going after the Jets.

“That’s a five-dollar word right there, Miller,” Olivia jokes. “Impressive.”

“You’re damn right it is!”

Olivia laughs and raises her bottle. “To futility!”

That earns her a series of whoops, glass clinking together with plastic cups, and she looks around their little group, grinning. Matt and Elliot’s other roommate, Keith, came out too, with his girlfriend Stacy. Olivia’s sorority sister Meghan brought her sometimes-boyfriend Ryan along. They’re all wedged into a corner between the short end of the bar and a jukebox; it’s cramped but Olivia doesn’t have it in her to care. 

She’s more focused on the conversation, on the fizz of her beer as it passes down her throat and the way Elliot’s hand has migrated from her middle to slip just under the hem of her top, where he’s started tracing patterns on the smooth skin of her midriff, leaving goosebumps in his wake. 

“El,” she hisses, when that wandering hand moves closer to the top of her jeans and he dips his pointer finger ever so slightly under her waistband. 

“Hmm,” he murmurs into her hair, all faux-innocence, and Olivia has half a mind to elbow him in the ribs. But his touch is feather-light and it’s setting all of her nerve endings on fire, and she really doesn’t want him to stop. 

“Did you hear that Charlotte from Tri Delt actually started hooking up with Daniel, even though she’d promised Lisa that she wouldn’t… or at least wait three months after the breakup?” Meghan’s voice startles Olivia out of her reverie, and she turns toward her friend. 

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, Cassie told me this morning, she lives down the hall from her. It’s gonna get ugly.”

“God, yeah.” Olivia shakes her head, thankful that she has absolutely no part in the train wreck that situation is bound to turn into. 

“Why would she—” Elliot starts, before he stops himself. “Never mind, I don’t think I actually wanna know.”

Olivia snickers. “Smart man.” 

It’s moments like these where she’s grateful for Elliot. Being with him is easy and comfortable, and she knows he wouldn’t ever pull her into a situation like the one Meghan is describing. He’s a good guy, and she counts her lucky stars that they met that night at the party, that she took a chance on him and followed him into that kitchen. 

Elliot’s humouring Matt and his latest football diatribe, and Olivia ducks out from under his arm to head to the bathroom, squeezing between throngs of people on her way to the women’s room. By the time she’s made it to the front of the line and then in and out of the bathroom, she’s so focused on getting back to their corner that she misses the hand that reaches out and grabs her arm. 

“What the—” 

Olivia whips around, lightning fast, but it’s Elliot, and she can only roll her eyes as he pulls her over to the staircase that leads up to the balcony seating, conveniently tucked away in a dim hallway. 

“You scared the shit out of me,” she mutters, but Elliot’s already apologizing to her as he guides them up three steps and pushes her gently against the wall. 

“I just had to…” he murmurs, leaning forward so he can capture her lips in a kiss, wet and hot and half-desperate. He tastes like beer and tequila, and Olivia’s hands instinctively wrap around his back as she lets him kiss her senseless in the stairwell, truly not giving a shit if anyone else decides to walk in. “Been wanting to do that all night,” he says, when they pull apart for air, both gasping. 

His face is flushed, pupils blown, and Olivia imagines she doesn’t look any better, not with the way her heart is hammering in her chest. She feels warm and fizzy, from the alcohol and from Elliot, and she grins up at him as she drags him down for another kiss. “That why you were trying to feel me up earlier?” she asks, and he lets out a growl as he trails kisses down her neck, toward her collarbone. 

“Mmm, maybe.” He nips and her clavicle and Olivia shivers. “Maybe I just like you in that damn shirt.”

It’s lower-cut than what she’d usually choose, and it hits about an inch above her jeans, and she’s definitely noticed that Elliot has been looking at her all night. 

She laughs. “Maybe that’s why I wore it.”

He groans at that, surging forward to kiss her again, and Olivia sinks into it, into the kind of weightlessness she only feels in Elliot’s arms. She doesn’t know how long they stay there, making out in the stairwell, but a wolf whistle from the bottom of the steps eventually breaks them apart, and Olivia flushes crimson. 

“We’re gonna, uh…” she starts, and Elliot lets out a sheepish little laugh as they duck their heads and return to the main area of the bar. 

If their friends noticed they disappeared for twenty minutes, they don’t comment on it, and for that Olivia’s grateful. They slip back into their spot in the corner and each order another beer, falling easily into the conversations around them. 

All of this, Olivia can’t help but think, is way too easy. Being with Elliot, being here with their friends, feeling this sense of belonging. It’s something she hasn’t experienced before, not like this, and as much as her first instinct is to run from it, it also makes her feel brave. 

She turns slightly against Elliot’s chest and leans up so she can look him in the eyes, can take in the way they sparkle when he laughs, the way they crinkle in the corners. “I think I’m falling in love with you,” she whispers into the cacophony of the bar, low and private so only he can hear, “and that scares the shit out of me.”

Elliot pulls her closer, smudges a kiss to her temple. “Good,” he whispers back, just as soft, “because I’m falling in love with you too.”

Chapter Text

1988

“If you want to guarantee yourself an F, please, by all means, go ahead,” Olivia says, leaning back in her chair and clutching her stomach as she tries to stifle her laughter. Across the table, Charlie shrugs his shoulders and lets out a laugh of his own. “I mean, Robinson’s gonna kill ya, but it’ll be fun for the rest of us to watch.”

“At least I’ll go down in a blaze of glory,” he announces, faux-dramatic, and Olivia snorts. 

“If by ‘blaze of glory’ you mean, ‘get sent to the Dean’s office,’ then sure.”

“Everyone’s a critic,” Charlie grumbles, and Olivia shakes her head, expression altogether too fond. 

“More like, some of us want to actually pass this class.”

Charlie is Olivia’s project partner for their History of the Americas seminar, and she’s currently trying valiantly to dissuade him from cutting out a picture of their professor’s head, pasting it atop the body of Robinson Crusoe and adding it to their posterboard. She has to admit, the mental image of their bald-headed professor’s face on Defoe’s seafaring hero is hilarious, but it’s not gonna go over well for either of them, and she really, really wants that A. 

“Killjoy,” Charlie mutters, but he’s smiling, and Oivia rolls her eyes. 

“I never said you couldn’t make it and pass it around after class.” 

Charlie’s ears perk up at that, and he immediately starts talking about how the student newspaper had run an article about Robinson last week with a photo that he thinks would be the perfect size. 

Olivia just leans back and lets his words wash over her, nodding and humming every once in a while as she flips through her textbook and notes to find the information they’ll actually need for their presentation. They’re sitting in the Student Union, stacks of papers and two cups of coffee between them, because Charlie was hungry (he’s already gotten through a muffin and a doughnut) and didn’t want to work in the stacks. 

She likes Charlie; he’s funny, and he’s always got a stupid story to tell or joke to make about every situation, and she’s happy they’ve been paired up for this particular project. Despite the evidence to the contrary, Charlie’s whip-smart — he just needs a gentle kick in the ass sometimes so that he actually focuses. 

Olivia’s about to go digging around her backpack for another pen when she spots Elliot out of the corner of her eye, standing on the other side of the common area. He’s got a furrow in his brow and he’s looking at Olivia and Charlie intently, but she doesn’t pay his expression much attention, waving him over instead. 

“Hey,” she says when he approaches their table, a bright smile on her face. “You get out early?” 

Elliot nods, but it’s half-hearted, and his hand is tense when she reaches for it. “Yeah.” 

“El, this is Charlie,” she says, when he leans back and gives Elliot a little wave. “We’re working on that presentation I was telling you about…”

“Mhmm,” Elliot murmurs, and Olivia’s brow raises. “Hey, man,” he says to Charlie, who nods and gives him a “Hi” in return before going back to his books. 

Olivia looks up at Elliot, sees the way his stance has gone rigid and his brow is furrowed, and God, he’s such an idiot sometimes. “Wanna sit?” she asks, sliding along the bench to make room. Elliot shakes his head, mutters something about having to grab something from one of his roommates. 

Well, if he wants to play it like that…

She shrugs a shoulder, turns back to her notes. “I’ll see you later, then,” she says brightly, because she’s sure as hell not letting him get to her. Sure enough, Elliot lets out a huff and mutters a goodbye before heading off, and Olivia rolls her eyes once he’s out of sight. 

“The fuck was that about?” Charlie asks from across the table. 

“Nothing,” Olivia says. “Hand me the paper about Argentina, will you?”

Elliot knocks on her door that night, at eight-thirty. Becky’s at a capella rehearsals, and Olivia sighs as she opens the door and wordlessly ushers him inside. 

“Charlie’s a guy,” is what he leads with, the son of a bitch, and Olivia lets out an exasperated snort. 

“You have eyes, congrats.”

“Yeah, and he’s…”

“What?” she challenges. “Say it.” 

Elliot raises his hands, defensive, and Olivia levels him with a look. “He’s…”

“He’s my project partner, you idiot,” she bites out. She really doesn’t have time for his bullshit.

“I know that,” Elliot retorts, taking a step closer. “But—”

“But you’re a possessive asshole?” Judging by the way Elliot flinches, Olivia’s pretty sure she hit the nail on the head. “Good to know. Maybe that’d comfort Charlie’s girlfriend,” she adds, and rolls her eyes as Elliot’s go wide. 

“Liv, I—”

“I know,” she says, stepping toward him so she can wind her arms around his neck. “But even if Charlie didn’t have a girlfriend… I can hold my own, you know?”

He sighs and pulls her close, burying his head in the crook of her neck. “‘course you can, Liv, I just—”

“Get irrationally jealous and then stand there, brooding?”

“You sure you’re not a psych major, Benson?” 

She lets out a laugh and drags her nails across Elliot’s neck, smiling into his shoulder as he shudders. “Nah, I just know you.”

“Yeah. ’m sorry, for being an ass,” he murmurs.

“Wanna make it up to me?” She leans back in his embrace and peers up at him through her lashes, revels in the way his eyes narrow and darken as he looks at her. He might be a possessive bastard, but he’s her possessive bastard, and she knows he means well. 

The way he surges forward to kiss her is answer enough, and Olivia sighs into his mouth, grinning as he backs them up toward her bed, his touch firm and sure. 

The last coherent thought she has before his warm hand slips underneath her shirt is, thank God for a capella rehearsals.

/

2002

The small hand of the clock on the precinct wall is creeping past ten-thirty, but the squad’s all still here, holed up at their desks and working through stacks of financials, hoping that something in their suspect’s records pops. Fin had the quite frankly brilliant idea to order food an hour ago, and now they’re doling out slices of pizza, thin and greasy, just like she likes them. 

Olivia settles down in her chair with a slice of pepperoni and— 

“Would you hand me the— thank you.” She grabs the little parmesan packet Elliot’s holding out for her already and flashes him a smile, tearing it open so she can sprinkle some over her pizza. 

She’s about to take a bite when Elliot pipes up from his seat across from her. “What, not gonna eat your pepperoni first?” he teases, and Olivia rolls her eyes, setting her slice back down on the paper plate. 

“That’s only for the little ones, the pepperoni that turns into cups when you bake it.” She shakes her head like it’s obvious. “This is the big kind; it’s too messy.”

Elliot barks out a laugh. “You’re somethin’ else, you know that, right?”

Olivia shoots him a look, balls up her napkin and throws it at his face. Elliot catches it easily, lets a shit-eating grin split his face in two. 

“Y’all confuse the shit outta me,” Fin mutters from his desk, and she and Elliot both turn their heads in his direction, watching as he rolls his eyes and takes a bite. 

“Don’t question it, my friend,” Munch says, ever-dramatic, before either of them have the chance to respond. “It’s the Benson-Stabler mystique. If I didn’t know better…”

“Oh, shut up, John.” Elliot’s glaring at him, now, and Munch heaves out a long-suffering sigh before taking another bite of his pizza. 

Olivia looks over at her partner, grateful. There’s no use dragging up the past, no use having to make up explanations, excuses.

Not when they’re settled now, not when they’re solid. Safe. 

That afternoon in the lockers and the conversation in the sedan were a watershed, a line in the sand. A firm agreement that they wouldn’t let themselves slip-slide back into their past. 

And they’ve succeeded, Olivia thinks. It’s been easier than she thought it would, but with both of them on the same page — and unwilling to risk the rock-solid partnership they built together — it’s become second nature, to excise a whole aspect of their history, to shove it into a little box in the furthest corner of her mind (and hall closet) and pay it no attention at all. 

Sure, Elliot doesn’t pretend not to know things about her: about her history, and Serena, and little quirks like the way she eats her food. She doesn’t play ignorant about his family, either, or his tours with the Marines (at least the parts she knows about) or the bits of his childhood he shared with her, all those years ago. 

But other than that, the eight months they spent together are a no-man's-land, a sea of memories and feelings neither of them are willing to venture into. And yeah, Olivia sometimes worries just how long they can exist in this weird sort of stasis, but it’s working right now, and she’s not about to question it. 

Fin and Munch, they don’t have to understand it. Understand them. Hell, Olivia doesn’t understand her and Elliot most days. But their closure rate is sky-high, and their friendship is solid, and she trusts him to have her back more than anyone else in the world, and that’s what matters, right? 

Everything else is just noise. 

Speaking of—

“Earth to Benson!” She snaps her head up and blinks at Munch, owlish, and scowls when Fin laughs to himself at the sight of her. 

“I hate you all,” she grumbles, but there’s no real heat behind her words, and everyone knows it. 

“Nah, you don’t,” Elliot declares, and she shoots him a glare. 

Olivia shrugs her shoulders, lets a slow smirk spread across her features. “Mmm, maybe I don’t. Maybe I just like Fin.”

“Ha!” He sounds positively triumphant, and she stifles a laugh. “Always knew I was the secret favourite. Stabler over there never stood a chance.”

“You wound me, Olivia,” Munch exclaims, leaning back in his chair and miming a dagger to the chest. 

Fin snorts. “She’d like you better if you didn’t talk her ear off with all your whack conspiracy shit.”

“Partner, I’ll have you know that there is absolutely no evidence to the contrary that the evidence in JFK’s assassination wasn’t irrevocably tampered with. I mean, look at the Zapruder film, it’s blatantly obvious that…”

“I swear I’d go nuts if I had to sit through a stakeout with him.” Olivia startles at Elliot’s voice, low and close to her ear, and turns in her chair to find him right next to her, having rolled over from his own desk sometime during Munch’s monologue. 

She stifles a chuckle. “You wouldn’t last an hour,” she says, confident.

Elliot laughs. “Oh, like you would.” 

“Eh, I like my odds. I’d buy him doughnuts and occupy him for a while.”

“So that’s your tactic, just ply him with food?”

She shrugs. “If it works.”

“And what about me—”

“Coffee,” she says, cutting him off. “Coffee and sports radio.”

Elliot leans back in his chair, lets a slow smile spread across his face. “Got me there.”

Olivia hums. “What can I say, I know you.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you do.”

They meet each other’s eyes, then, and it’s almost too much, too intense, the way he’s looking at her, the way he sees her. Shit, she can’t, they can’t—

“Besides, I’ve got enough on my plate actually keeping you awake during stakeouts,” she says, in hopes of breaking the tension that’s mounting between them, and it works, thank God, because Elliot’s eyes go comically wide and he lets out an affronted “Hey!” and then they’re laughing, slap happy and sleep deprived, until Cragen walks out of his office and toward their cluster of desks. 

“Benson, Stabler, the two-seven called,” he announces. “There’s another vic.”

The clock strikes eleven, and Olivia grabs her coat.

/

1988

“Oh, Elliot is gonna die when he sees you,” Meghan gushes, handing Olivia a second dangly earring that she carefully fastens in her right earlobe. “You look absolutely perfect.”

Olivia feels herself blushing at that, an involuntary thing that creeps all the way from her chest to the tips of her ears. The Chi O formal is tonight, Elliot’s due to pick her up in fifteen minutes, and Olivia really wasn’t expecting to be this nervous. It’s Elliot, and they’ve been dating for a few months now and they’re solid . But she’s still feeling fluttery and breathless at the thought of this, of both of them in formalwear, laughing and dancing and maybe sneaking off into a secluded little corner and…

Jesus, get a grip, Benson. The night hasn’t even started yet.

“Thanks.” Olivia tucks an errant curl behind her ear and gives Meghan a once-over. “I’m pretty sure Ryan’s gonna have a stroke, too.” 

“Really?” she asks, almost shy, and Olivia fights a laugh. Every time Ryan so much as looks at Meghan, he’s got the sappiest expression on his face, and still, she’s got doubts. 

“Really. Now, c’mon, we’ve gotta get going.”

The boys are meeting them at Olivia’s dorm, and then they’ll drive to the hotel where Chi Omega booked a ballroom for the night. Olivia hadn’t ever been one for school dances back in high school; she’d skipped out on Homecoming her sophomore and junior years, and only gone to prom because her then-best-friend had practically dragged her out of her apartment that night. 

But now, with the prospect of spending the night with her sisters, and with Elliot, all dressed up in a suit, she finds she’s actually looking forward to the whole thing. And if the way his eyes go wide and his face goes slack-jawed when she walks up to him outside her dorm is any indication for the night to come, Olivia is pretty sure she’s in for a good time. 

“You look incredible, Liv,” Elliot says as he lets his eyes rake over her dress. It’s dark green and strapless, made of ruched fabric that hits just above the knee. Olivia’s never been a particularly frilly girl, and the shiny satin had seemed like a good alternative to all the puffy sleeves and big shoulders she’d seen at the mall. Judging by the positively hungry way Elliot is looking at her right now, she thinks she’s made the right choice. 

“You don’t look half-bad yourself,” she says, smoothing out a nonexistent wrinkle in Elliot’s dress shirt. He’s in a black suit with a forest green tie — Meghan had insisted she inform him of her dress colour ahead of time so they could match — and she can’t believe she’s never seen him like this, dressed up and formal. She leans up to steal a kiss, careful not to smudge her lipstick (there’ll be plenty of time for that, later), and lets Elliot help her into the passenger seat of his truck. 

The ballroom is decked out in balloons and streamers, shiny things that send sparkles bouncing off the disco ball someone fastened on one of the rafters. Somehow, they’d managed to spring for a DJ in the budget for the formal, and he’s set up in a corner, opposite the drinks and appetizers. 

It’s half-packed already, couples milling around and a growing throng on the dance floor and Olivia grips Elliot’s hand tight, surveying the space and letting it all soak in. She waves to a group of her sisters who are huddled in a corner, gossiping, and Elliot nods at a buddy of his from ROTC. 

“So, Benson,” he drawls, spinning her around in his arms so they’re face-to-face. “Wanna dance?”

Olivia tilts her head and quirks a brow like she’s pretending to consider his offer. “Hmm, maybe,” she teases, and Elliot laughs. 

They end up on the dance floor just as the DJ switches over to a slow song, and Olivia chuckles. Of course. Elliot grins, wrapping his arm around her back as his hand finds hers, squeezing once, twice. She lets herself relax into it, and ends up stepping even closer to Elliot, tucking her head into his shoulder and resting her cheek against his suit jacket. 

He’s warm and solid and she sinks into the feeling, lets the music and the noise and the lights wash over her, fading into the background as she focuses on Elliot’s heartbeat thrumming steadily under her ear. He drops a kiss to the crown of her hair, and they sway gently, absorbed by the throng of people. 

“I’m really glad we’re here,” she murmurs into his ear, quiet so just he can hear it. She doesn’t just mean this formal, and by the way Elliot’s hand tightens on her back, she knows he doesn’t either.

“Me too, baby,” he says, and her stomach does a little flip at that. She’s not normally a fan of pet names, but every so often, she likes the comfort of it. Likes knowing she’s his.

The music speeds up, then, and Olivia laughs when Elliot tries to twirl her under his arm and they stumble, colliding with one another and garnering laughs from the couples next to them. “We’re not very good at this,” she says, and Elliot grins. 

“Nah, but we’re good at other things,” he retorts, eyebrows raised suggestively. 

She snorts, shaking her head at his antics, and lets him guide her over to a corner of the ballroom. They grab two glasses of punch on the way, and then settle against the far wall, content to just watch people for a little while. For all of Elliot’s cocky bravado, he appreciates quiet moments like this too, and it’s one of those things that makes her like him even more. 

Tucked into his side in their little bubble in the corner of a crowded ballroom, Olivia doesn’t think she’s ever felt more settled, more seen.

/

2003

They’ve both been pissy all day. Not exactly fighting, but irritated, and short with one another, so much so that Olivia had spotted Munch with hands raised in surrender a few hours ago when Elliot had grabbed a cup of coffee from the precinct percolator. 

She’s not even sure what started it, or if it’s just one of those days, but it didn’t help when Cragen sent them to stake out a suspect’s apartment. 

They’ve been sitting in the sedan for over two hours now, almost dead silent. The only sounds in the car are the crackle of the air conditioner and the low hum of some shitty top-40 radio station neither of them have bothered to change. 

Olivia shucked her blazer a few minutes ago and tossed it into the back, and now she’s fighting to get comfortable against the hot faux leather of the passenger seat. 

“Jesus, Liv, would you quit fidgeting?” Elliot hisses. It’s the first thing he’s said in hours. 

Olivia huffs and levels him with a look. “Says the guy who’s been chewing on his straw for the past twenty minutes.”

He at least has the decency not to deny it, instead letting out a groan as he leans back against the headrest. 

“This is pointless,” he announces to no one in particular, and Olivia rolls her eyes. “He’s not gonna show, and we’re just sitting here like idiots.”

“It’s only been two hours.”

“Two hours at ninety degrees.” 

“You’ll live.”

Elliot grunts.

“It’s not like we haven’t sat through worse,” she offers, but all she gets from Elliot is another huff. “Jesus, what the fuck is up with you?” she bites out, shaking her head. The whole brooding thing is really getting ridiculous. 

He snorts. “Me? That’s rich, coming from you.”

“Elliot—”

“Don’t pretend you haven’t been angry for no reason all day.”

“I haven’t—”

Elliot laughs, but it’s a harsh, mocking thing. “Cut the bullshit, Liv, just admit you’ve been pissed at something all morning.”

Her eyes go wide at that, and she feels the anger that’s been simmering in her stomach for hours now churn and bubble up to the surface. So he wants to be a needling bastard? Doesn’t mean she’s gotta sit there and just take it. 

“Yeah, maybe I’ve been pissed at you,” she grits out, turning her head to look out the passenger seat window. She knows she’s baiting him, but honestly, anything beats this weird silent fight they’ve fallen into.

“What the fuck did I do?” Elliot snaps, affronted, and it’s taking everything in her not to roll her eyes at him. 

“You’ve been snippy all day, and I don’t know what the hell happened, but Jesus, we’re not your sparring bag.”

“Oh, what, so I’m not allowed to have a bad day every once in a while? Good to know. ‘Cause it seems like you get a pass on those, Benson.”

“I don’t—”

“Don’t deny it.” Elliot turns in his seat so he’s facing her. “What, did the guy you were supposed to meet for dinner last night ditch you or something?”

Olivia gapes at him. It’s true; she did have a date last night, and the guy did cancel on her last-minute, but that has absolutely nothing to do with—

“Maybe he did, but I’m not moping around because of it.” She shoots Elliot a look. “Got plenty of experience with guys ditching me to know how to deal with it.” Olivia scoffs. “Thanks for that, by the way.”

She doesn’t register that the words have left her lips until they’re hanging in the air between them, heavy and loaded and dangerous. It suddenly feels like the sedan is about five degrees hotter, and she’s acutely aware of the sweat at her temples, and gathering in the nape of her neck. 

Elliot is staring at her with wide eyes, looking like she dumped a bucket of ice water on his head and shocked him to his very core. 

She doesn’t blame him; this is the part of their history they’ve steadfastly avoided talking about, for years now. They’ve never discussed exactly what happened that spring, when Elliot graduated and… left. She didn’t mean to bring it up, but now she has, and there’s no turning back time, no matter how much she wants to. 

They’ll just have to deal with this, she’ll have to deal with this, and hope they make it out in one piece. 

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Elliot bites, out, temper flaring, brow furrowed and jaw tight. 

Olivia scoffs. “Oh, don’t play innocent with me.”

“Olivia, I swear to God—”

“Okay, fine.” If he needs to have it spelled out for him, she’ll do it. “You left, Elliot. You graduated, and you left. That’s what I’m talking about.”

Olivia knows Elliot, knows his quirks and his preferences and the little ticks that make him, him. How he takes his coffee, and when he’s zeroing in on a perp during an interrogation and, once upon a time, how he liked to be kissed. 

So she thinks she knows where this is going, that they’re finally going to have this fight and he’s finally gonna give her whatever bullshit excuse he’s carried around with him for a decade to justify why he left her. 

But that doesn’t happen. 

No, Elliot just goes very still and turns white as a fucking sheet, and Olivia has no idea what the hell is happening. 

“Olivia,” he breathes out, voice low and hard and halfway wrecked. He’s starting to scare her a little. “What do you mean, I— I didn’t leave you,” he manages. “You left me.”

“What?”

Chapter Text

2003

“What do you mean, I left you?” Olivia stutters out, voice ragged.

She’s sitting in the Crown Vic, feeling like she can’t breathe, like all the air has been sucked from her lungs and she’s suffocating, right there on the faux leather seat with the radio playing some shitty pop song and Elliot staring at her like she’s just broken his whole universe. 

It was a stupid comment, about how his leaving gave her plenty of practice for dealing with guys who ditch her. A stupid comment that ripped into them like a knife and tore up every last bit of the delicate fabric that was holding them together, that was allowing them to be partners while ignoring their past. 

And now Elliot’s staring at her, white as a fucking sheet, and Olivia can’t breathe. “Liv,” he says, voice far too even, far too measured for the way his eyes have gone wide and stormy, almost indigo. For the iron grip he’s got on the steering wheel, white-knuckled and desperate, like he’s holding on for dear life. “You didn’t pick up the damn phone, and when I came back to Buffalo on leave that summer, I couldn’t find you anywhere,” he bites out. “It was pretty fucking clear to me that you didn’t want to see me.”

“You…” she trails off, struggling to form words, to wrap her head around the fact that he’d tried to get in contact, but somehow, he hadn’t been able to reach her. She feels lightheaded, almost woozy, and she blindly reaches for the button to lower the passenger seat window, in desperate need of air. “Elliot, I wrote to you,” she stutters out eventually. “I tried to call but it never went through and I—”

Elliot freezes at that, and she can see the shock of her words flash across his features. “I never got any letters…” he whispers. “Liv—”

“Did we just—?”

Miss each other? Pass by like ships in the night? Spend a decade thinking we’d left one another?

“You wrote to me?” Elliot asks, half-frantic, like he needs the confirmation more than he needs air. Olivia nods, swallowing around the lump in her throat. “Why did I never…” he starts, and then stops, scrubbing a hand over his jaw. “Fuck. Where did you send the letters?”

The question surprises her; he’d left her the address of the training base he was gonna be stationed at, and she sent everything there. She tells him as much, but…

“Jesus, the forwarding didn’t work.”

“What?”

“They transferred me, a few weeks in, from Parris Island to base camp in Lejeune. Fuck if I knew why, but I was there for a while before I got sent back.”

“And the letters…”

“…they didn’t get forwarded.”

“Elliot—” she breathes out, placing her hand over her chest to try to calm her racing heart. “I never—”

“I called, that summer,” he says. The summer after he graduated, the summer Olivia spent trying to get over him. “Soon as they let me. Dorm said you weren’t reachable there anymore.”

“They didn’t… they were supposed to give you Meghan’s number, for the apartment she was staying in over the summer.”

He shakes his head. “Never got it. Came back for a weekend in August, figured maybe someone could tell me where you were, but—”

“But I was back in Manhattan, with Serena.” She lets out a breath and flops back against the headrest, crumpling in her seat as the reality of it hits her. That Elliot didn’t leave her; far from it. And that he’d spent over a decade thinking she’d left him. “All these years, I thought you decided to move on…” Olivia shakes her head, still in shock.

“And I thought you disappeared.” His words come out in a whisper, and she turns so they’re looking at each other properly, both wide-eyed and stunned. There’s a sheen in the corners of Elliot’s eyes that she’s sure is matched in her own, and they sit there in silence for a minute, adjusting. 

It’s one thing, Olivia thinks, to have coped with the assumption that Elliot left her. Decided he was better off somewhere else, that their relationship — all eight months they’d spent together and grown closer than she ever expected they would — was a fleeting thing, a stepping stone on the road to something bigger, better. Something that looked like a handful of kids and a pretty wife and a house with a white picket fence. It hurt like hell, but she’d learned to live with it, to accept the finality and the rejection. 

And when she’d seen him again, with four children of his own, married to a girl he’d met on leave, she couldn’t even blame him for chasing that dream. 

But this?

Knowing it was circumstance that broke them, that fate intervened on their behalf and conspired to keep them apart even though neither of them wanted to leave? Knowing that somewhere out there, there’s a parallel universe where she got his calls and he read her letters and they never lost one another? Where she’s the one he goes home to every night and holds in his arms and they tuck their children in together?

It’s so much worse, and she wants to scream.

Because Elliot is married and Kathy is lovely, and his kids have two parents who adore them and each other. Because he’s faithful to a fault, and his family is everything to him. Because he’s gotten his dream and she spent fifteen years thinking she wasn’t enough for him. Because no matter what they’re realizing now — in this sticky squad car on the corner of 86th and Lex at a quarter after three — nothing is going to change. 

Olivia has always known that fate isn’t a kind card-dealer, but this feels like cruelty to an unnecessary degree; taking Elliot away from her, only to bring him back but keep him just out of reach. This is the only way she gets to have him now — next to her on stakeouts, across from her at their desks, side-by-side as they walk the streets in lockstep — forced to stand a foot away from everything she ever dreamed of, and knowing it’s not hers for the taking. 

/

1988

The soft thump startles Olivia enough that she tears her eyes from the journal article she’d been reading, tipping her face up toward the person who just dropped something on her blanket. She’s sitting outside on the grass, soaking up the sunshine as Buffalo welcomes the spring.

A smile creeps over her face as Elliot comes into view, wearing a ratty Marines sweatshirt with his backpack slung over one shoulder. He’s carrying a brown paper bag that’s identical to the one that now rests at her feet. 

“I brought you a sandwich,” he says by way of greeting. “Turkey club. Figured you’d’ve forgotten to eat.”

“Thank you.” She reaches inside to pull out the sandwich — her favourite, from a deli downtown — as Elliot sits down cross-legged on the grass next to her and presses a quick kiss to her lips. He takes out his own sandwich, a BLT from the looks of it, and then proceeds to neatly fold up the paper bag and lay two napkins on top of it. Olivia’s own bag is a ball next to her right knee.

“How was Robinson today?” Elliot asks between bites, and Olivia shrugs. She’s been regaling him with horror stories about her History of the Americas professor and his trainwreck of a seminar, and Elliot’s invested now, eager for weekly updates. 

“He only threw his chalk twice, which I think might be a record low for him.” She picks a chip out of the open bag he set down between them, salt and vinegar, the crinkly kind. 

“You should start keeping track,” he says around a mouthful of sandwich. Olivia laughs.

“Way ahead of you, El,” she replies with a smile. “Charlie’s got a whole graph; we update it weekly.”

If Elliot still harbours any lingering jealousy toward Charlie, it doesn’t show, and Olivia’s grateful for it, grateful that he just gives her a lopsided grin and twists open the cap on a bottle of water. They eat their lunch in a comfortable silence, splitting their sandwiches and sharing the chips, content to bask in the sunshine.

Eventually, the chip packet and butcher paper get crumpled up and stuffed into the paper bags, and Olivia makes room for Elliot on her little blanket, letting him lie down on the grass so she can rest her head on his chest and look up at the clouds. He’s propped up against his backpack, and he’s idly threading his fingers through the strands of her hair. It’s so relaxing that she could fall asleep from the feeling.

“I think,” she murmurs, squinting up at the sky, “this one looks like an elephant.”

Elliot laughs, and she feels the rumble of it under her cheek. “I was gonna go with a rhino, but sure.”

“What about that one?” She points up at a cloud to their right, an oblong shape that’s stretched out thin. 

“How PG are we keeping this?” Elliot asks, and she knows he’s smirking right now, not even trying to hide it. 

She groans. “Just say it. Get it out of your system.”

“Kinda looks like a dick,” Elliot says, matter-of-fact, and Olivia rolls her eyes, elbowing him gently. He catches her arm in his hand and starts tracing mindless patterns on her bicep through the fabric of her sweater. 

“I was gonna say it looks like a carrot, but I’m glad we know where your head’s at.” 

He hums. “I think my mom dressed me up as a carrot once, for a Thanksgiving pageant.”

“Oh my God.”

“I was ten, and it was this huge paper thing that went over my head. She made it herself.”

“Please tell me you have pictures.” The image of a little Elliot in a carrot costume is doing something to her insides, sending warmth all the way to the tips of her toes.

“If she still has them, I’m not asking for them,” he tells her, and Olivia lets out a disappointed little whine, which just makes him laugh and pinch her side. “I’m not giving you that kinda ammunition, Liv.”

“Mmm, that’s probably fair,” she concedes. “Though I’m sure you were cute as a carrot.”

“What can I say…” Elliot trails off, and Olivia rolls her eyes, shifting so she’s lying next to him on the grass, propped up on one elbow. She leans down to kiss him, effectively shutting him up, and he responds eagerly, cradling the back of her skull with his hand to pull her closer. 

She melts into the kiss, nipping at Elliot’s bottom lip and sighing as he traces the seam of her lips with his tongue. They’re in a private area by the lake on campus, a short distance away from other students sprawled out on blankets, so she sinks into it, into this moment with Elliot in the spring sunshine, with his hand in her hair and his lips on hers and a fluttery feeling spreading through her belly. 

She’s been doing it more, now that the end of the semester (and with that, graduation) are fast approaching: trying to be intentional about these moments they get to share, and wholly present. She wants to bottle them up and keep them forever, because the next few months and years are going to get complicated, once Elliot ships off and they have to go long-distance. 

They haven’t talked about the logistics yet, all too happy to stay in their little bubble, but she can feel May creep closer and closer, and until then, she’s savouring every second she gets. 

Like this quiet afternoon on the grass by the lake, with a few uninterrupted hours they can spend wrapped up in one another, looking at the clouds and making out by the water — both perfectly content just to be.  

/

2003

The squad piles into Mulligan’s after work on a Friday with a win under their belt: Alex got a conviction for their latest perp, and they’re feeling good. Beer is flowing, spirits are high and Olivia is happy they all get to let their guards down, at least for a little bit. 

“Here,” Elliot says, setting a bottle of beer down in front of her before he slides back into their booth. 

“Thanks.”

She shoots him a small smile, and he returns one, but it’s a little bit awkward, a little bit stilted. Ever since the revelation they had — on that afternoon in squad car two when both their universes were flipped on their axes — they’ve been careful around each other, tentative. She hates it, hates the uncertainty.

Olivia knows that nothing between them is going to change. It can’t. Elliot’s married; he loves his wife and his kids. And Olivia couldn’t bear to lose him all over again, not when she knows now that he never tried to leave her in the first place. Their partnership is sacred to her, and she refuses to put it in jeopardy. 

But still, they can’t help it, can’t help the feeling that something altogether fundamental has changed between them, even though neither of them wants to examine it too closely. 

Besides, tonight they’re supposed to be celebrating, toasting a hard-earned win. 

“Sláinte,” Munch proclaims, holding up a pint of Guinness, and Elliot barks out a laugh. 

“Since when have you been Irish, John?” 

Munch shrugs. “Ever since your people invented this particular ambrosia.”

Elliot shakes his head, but he can’t stop the grin that spreads across his face, and Olivia finds herself smiling too, more at the relief of it than anything else. “Works for me,” Elliot says, clinking his beer bottle with Munch’s glass and taking a long swig. 

“To the rarity of justice actually prevailing,” Alex announces before she takes a sip of her scotch. 

“Hear hear.”

Olivia lifts her own bottle to her lips and lets the atmosphere of the bar wash over her: the sticky wood of the tabletop, the faint din of the music mixing in with conversation, the occasional shout when someone takes a shot. It’s warm, but not uncomfortably so, and the bar smells like booze and stale peanuts, like one too many kinds of perfume and cologne. 

She gets the faintest whiff of Elliot’s every once in a while, when he shifts in the faux leather of their booth, and she has to fight the urge to inhale deeply, to lean closer to catch more of it, comforting and familiar. 

Instead, she turns toward Alex, sitting on a chair at the short end of the table, and Fin, who’s directly across, sharing his bench with Munch. They’re talking about cases and old friends and even older haunts, and Olivia starts telling them about the nights she’d spent at Cole’s in undergrad — before and after she’d gone with Elliot — and the stupid $5 drinks they served in little plastic cups with palm trees on them every time they hosted “Ladies’ Night.”

“Easiest way to get a free beer,” she says, leaning against the backrest of the booth and smiling at the memory. “As long as you got past the bouncer you were in the clear, and he didn’t ever check IDs. He had this tiny stool with rickety legs and we were convinced it was gonna crash under his weight at some point…” She shakes her head. “Can’t for the life of me remember his name…”

“Keith,” Elliot pipes up from beside her, and oh, shit. Shit shit shit. “Tall and balding, always wore a striped polo—” he says, before he cuts himself off and she watches his eyes go wide. 

Oh, Jesus Christ.

Alex and Fin are looking at them both with curious expressions on their faces, and even Munch has turned to see what all the fuss is about. Olivia can feel the heat rising in her cheeks; if she doesn’t save them, and fast, they’re gonna start asking questions, and fuck, they cannot let this slip.

Not after this many years. 

“Keith!” she exclaims, all faux-enthusiasm. “That’s it, thank you. Elliot’s heard the story one too many times.”

He lets out a little huff of a laugh, scratches at the back of his neck. “Nothin’ like a Benson special,” he says, and Jesus, when did he become this bad a liar? 

Olivia just shakes her head, and quickly moves the conversation along, exhaling a sigh of relief when Munch takes the bait and launches into a whole speech about the bar he used to own in Baltimore.

She manages to get him alone twenty minutes later, practically dragging him out of the booth with the excuse that they would get everyone another round. 

“What the fuck, Elliot?” she hisses once they’re out of earshot, grabbing him by the bicep and ducking behind a dividing wall that separates the main bar area from the hallway with the restrooms. “Keith? Really? Do you know how close that was?”

Elliot scrubs a hand over his face and looks at her with a grimace. “Fuck, I know, I’m sorry.”

“El— if we can’t, if people find out, years later, it’s gonna—”

“I know, Liv. I know. It won’t happen again, I promise.”

She sighs, pinches the bridge of her nose. “It better not.” 

She can count on one hand the number of people who know about their past, and two of them are standing right here. 

“I mean, even Kathy—”

“Still just thinks we went on a few dates.” Elliot told Olivia he couldn’t hide their past from his wife, and she’d agreed: they couldn’t keep this from Kathy, it wasn’t fair to lie to her. But Elliot hadn’t been willing to cop to the whole truth, to just how serious things had gotten between them; no need to make Kathy worry needlessly when they weren’t ever going down that path again. 

Now, she lets out a breath, leans her shoulder against the wood panelling. “Good,” she says. “We gotta be more careful.”

“I know.” He looks over at the bar, checks to make sure that none of the squad are standing too close, and gives Olivia’s forearm a squeeze. “C’mon, let’s get back out there. They’re waiting on their beers.”

/

1988

May rolls around quicker than either Elliot or Olivia could have expected, and pretty soon, she finds herself waking up on the morning of graduation day, waiting for the commencement ceremony to begin. 

Olivia hasn’t seen Elliot for a day; his family drove up from the city, and they don’t know who Olivia is to him yet. She knows she might cross paths with the Stablers, but they’ve both agreed that if she does, she’ll be introduced to them as just a friend.

Not because Elliot’s ashamed of her, not because they’re hiding, but because Joseph Stabler is a son of a bitch and neither of them want to deal with his judgement. It’s the same reason that Serena Benson doesn’t know her daughter has a boyfriend; it’s not a fight worth having right now — with either of them.

So Olivia gets out of bed that morning alone, taking off the faded grey sweatshirt she’d first stolen from Elliot all those months ago and changing into a sundress. Last week, he’d told her to keep it; something to remember him by, he’d said, for when he was shipped off and they wouldn’t see each other for months. 

He’s due to report for duty in just three days’ time, and it’s beginning to hit Olivia with a startling kind of clarity: that her boyfriend is shipping out, heading for a warzone half a world away.

But today is graduation day, and she’s determined that it’s going to be happy and celebratory, and Elliot’s imminent departure is going to be the last thing on either of their minds. At least that’s what she keeps telling herself. 

The student section at the venue is packed, and Olivia sits next to a few people she vaguely recognizes from classes and parties. The ceremony itself is long and drawn out, and she feels like she’s baking in the hot sun, but it’s all worth it for the moment she watches Elliot and his fellow graduates turn the tassels on their caps and realize they made it.

She finds him on the lawn a short while later, waiting by a copse of trees they decided to meet at when he got a chance to sneak away from his family. 

He’d been surprised that they were even planning on showing up, but someone had rallied the troops, so to speak, and now the Stablers have arrived in Buffalo to watch the prodigal son graduate and finally see the place he’s spent the past four years.

“El!” she calls out when she spots him, walking toward her with a broad grin on his face. “Congratulations!”

Olivia doesn’t have the chance to say much else, because he’s there, suddenly, gathering her into his arms and holding her tight, spinning them in a little circle as he whoops and Olivia lets out a laugh. When he sets her back down on the ground, she leans up to kiss him, still feeling a little bit dizzy, but his mouth is warm against hers and his hand is cradling the back of her skull and the summer sun is shining down on them and everything about this moment is perfect.  

“You did it, El,” she murmurs in between kisses, and he pulls back so he can look at her, eyes glassy and grin impossibly wide. “I’m so proud of you.”

“Thank you, baby,” he says, leaning down to kiss her again. 

Elliot can’t stay for long — he’s gotta meet his family for lunch, and then head to an ROTC ceremony — but he promises Olivia that she can come over to his place tonight, and they’ll celebrate.

Which is how she finds herself standing on the porch of the house Elliot lives in that night, wearing his grey sweatshirt over her dress and holding a bottle of cheap champagne. He grins when he lets her inside, and Olivia says hi to his roommates, sprawled out on the couch and pre-gaming some party they’re going to tonight. 

Just as well, Olivia thinks, because she and Elliot are actually gonna have some privacy for once, and no matter how much she’d vowed not to think about his leaving in three days, she can feel it in the back of her mind, creeping ever closer. 

She just wants to spend the time they have left with him, no interruptions, wants to make sure she’s got plenty of memories to tide her over until they can see each other again. 

Elliot snags two plastic cups from the kitchen on the way upstairs, and they uncork the bottle once they get into his room, laughing as the champagne fizzes over the rim. Olivia holds up her cup and clinks it with Elliot’s. “To graduation, and making it.”

“To us,” he says, voice soft and low. 

“To us.”

Later, when the sun is waning on the horizon and she’s sprawled across Elliot’s chest in his bed, skin-to-skin, and he’s drawing mindless patterns on her back with his fingertips that make her shiver, Olivia whispers, “I’m gonna miss you so much,” into the crook of his neck.

“Me too,” Elliot replies, pressing a kiss to her temple. “But we’re gonna make it work, Liv, you and me. We’re gonna call and write, and I’ll get up here when I’m on leave, and it’ll be good.”

“Yeah,” she says, burrowing further into his side. “I know. I just never… never expected to feel like this.”

“Me neither,” he admits. “Gonna miss the hell out of you.”

“You’re gonna be…” she starts, stops herself. “We’re gonna be okay, right?”

It’s a little bit pathetic, a little bit small, but she needs the reassurance, the security she feels when she’s in Elliot’s arms. Even though he’s the one going away, the one risking his life in a warzone and all she’s gotta do is deal with two more years of college. 

But she finds herself desperate for his confirmation, even though she knows he can’t predict what life will throw at them. But there’s a comfort in the low rumble of his voice and the strength of his conviction, that when he tells her it’s gonna be okay, he means it.

That he can make it true, just by saying it.

“‘Course we are,” Elliot says, confident, and she feels herself relaxing against him. He cups her cheek, drawing her in for a kiss. “Always.”

Chapter Text

1988

The last time she sees Elliot is the morning he leaves Buffalo for basic training, four days after graduation.

She’d stayed the night; they’d been up talking (and not talking) until three in the morning, wanting to savour every last second with one another. The summer stretches out before them, vast and endless, even though it's just three months. To Elliot and Olivia, it feels like an eternity. They don’t know when Elliot will be granted leave, how long he’ll stay in Parris Island, when or if he’ll be shipped off halfway across the world to fight in the desert.

They don’t know anything, not for certain, so they were chained at the hip, those few days. Olivia had packed up her things already, all but moved into Elliot’s room at the house where she’d stay until he left. Then she’d drop her boxes at Meghan’s apartment and head back to Manhattan for the summer.

She’d wanted to stay in Buffalo, get a job in a restaurant and take a few summer classes so she could avoid her mother, but Serena insisted she come home; she needed to see her daughter, she’d said, to make sure nothing terrible had happened to her while she was so far away.

So the four days spent with Elliot became even more precious to Olivia — a little bubble of time where nothing mattered other than the way they were together, not his bid or her mother or anything beyond one another. Nothing could touch them, not here in the four walls of Elliot’s room, or on the rickety porch swing attached to the house that creaked every time they moved even an inch, or in his truck when they drove into town with the radio on high. 

By the time they wake up the day he’s due to leave, they’re bleary eyed and weary. They get dressed in silence, and Olivia watches as Elliot packs up the last of his things into the standard-issue duffel he’s allowed on base. The rest of his stuff is going to the kid who’ll move into the place in a week’s time, or back to Queens to sit in his parents’ garage.

She pulls on the grey UB sweatshirt and a pair of shorts and peers over at Elliot, who’s folding a few more t-shirts and tucking them away in his bag. 

“You’ll call, yeah?” she asks, and she hates the way her voice has gone quiet and small, almost tentative. Hates the desperation that colours it, the way she’s already aching just thinking about him being gone. It’s silly and pathetic and she should know better, should be stronger than this, but damn it, she misses him and he hasn’t even left yet.

Elliot zips his bag shut and turns to face her. “As soon as I can,” he vows, solemn, and steps forward so he can wrap Olivia in a hug, burying his nose in her hair. “I promise, Liv.”

She pulls him closer and sinks into the embrace, into the solid warmth of his chest, inhaling deeply. “Good,” she murmurs. “I’ll have to come track you down if you don’t.”

He chuckles, and she can feel the reverberations of it all throughout her torso. “I’ll hold you to that.”

“C’mon,” she says, taking his hand and leading him out of the bedroom. “You gotta get going.”

There’s a breeze in the air when they step out onto the porch, and it makes Olivia shiver, sends goosebumps up her legs. She wraps her arms around herself, tucking her fingers into the too-long sleeves of Elliot’s sweatshirt. She watches him put his bag on the passenger seat and then he walks back up the steps toward Olivia, face crestfallen already. 

She hates this part. Hates goodbyes, however temporary. Hates the idea of people leaving. But this is Elliot, and he promised he’d call, and he’d tucked the number for the base into the pocket of her backpack, along with an address where she’ll write. 

They both don’t know how much time they’ll have to talk — or if they’ll mainly be sending letters — but the little scrap of paper with his contact information has become her lifeline these past few days. 

“Elliot—” she whispers when he steps toward her, and then he’s wrapping his arms around her again and kissing her like his life depends on it. One of his hands cradles her skull as the other settles on the small of her back, and Olivia has her own arms wrapped around his shoulders, holding him tight. 

He kisses her like he’s drowning, like she’s the only thing keeping him afloat, and she reciprocates in kind, chasing his kisses with her own, deep and hot and desperate. She wants to remember this feeling forever — being held by him, feeling his lips on her own, wants never to forget it for as long as she lives. 

She wants to have enough memories to tide her over until she can see him again.

When they finally break apart, foreheads resting together, they’re breathless, and she realizes belatedly that they’ve both started crying. She pulls back slightly to wipe a tear off Elliot’s cheek, and smiles up at him, watery and fond. 

“No tears, you promised,” she chides.

He laughs, and wipes away a tear of her own. “You did too.”

She can’t argue with that, so she surges upward to kiss him one more time instead. 

“I’m gonna miss you so much,” he says when they separate again, and all Olivia can do is nod furiously. “But we’ll see each other as soon as we can. I’ll drive up right when I get any leave, okay?”

She nods, blinking back tears. “Okay.”

“El, be safe, okay?” She fists her hand in his t-shirt, holds on tight. “I couldn’t… I just need you to be safe, alright?”

“I’ll do my best, baby.”

He presses one last kiss to her cheek and steps backward, turning toward his truck. They agreed not to say goodbye to one another — it felt like an omen, somehow, like they were chancing fate, so Olivia waves after Elliot and watches him get into the driver’s seat.

He turns over the engine and pulls out of the driveway, turning around in his seat so he can wave to her one last time. She watches the truck as he drives down the street, rounds a corner and disappears off into the distance. 

As she stands there on his porch with tears drying on her cheeks and a chill snaking up her spine, she can’t help but think that none of this feels real.

/

2004

He said. She said.

And no one can agree what version is true.

They’ve seen these cases countless times, but it’s never felt this fraught before. Never felt like they’re tiptoeing over proverbial landmines, extra-careful to make sure nothing explodes. They’re snippy, short with one another, and she can tell that people are noticing. 

They keep their distance, shoot them questioning looks. Benson and Stabler are back at it again, and everyone knows not to get in the crossfire. 

Casey rolls her eyes at both of them in the loft, and Olivia groans internally. She doesn’t want to be fighting with Elliot, but he’s been wound tight like a spring, and she’s been holding her breath, waiting for the moment he blows. 

It’s a defence attorney, of all people, who puts it out in the open, right there in Cragen’s office. Her words suck all the oxygen out of the room, and Olivia watches Elliot physically recoil, body stiffening like he’s been slapped.

Damn it. 

His wife filed for legal separation, the lawyer says, voice dripping with disdain, and Olivia can only stand there, stock-still, as he squares off with the woman. Elliot storms out of the office not a minute later, with Olivia hot on his heels. 

“Elliot,” she calls down the hall. “Elliot, stop! Hey! What's going on?” 

He whips around to face her, eyes stormy, jaw clenched, whole body tense and coiled.

“I touched her in an inappropriate manner,” he spits out. “Didn’t you hear?” 

“I don’t believe that,” she says, adamant. She’s not going to let him deflect. “Forget that. What’s going on at home?”

“Nothing.”

Olivia fights an eye roll. God, he’s stubborn. “Hey, would you talk to me?”

“Kathy left me,” Elliot tells her, and then he turns around, heading for the staircase.

Olivia shakes her head and follows him, ignoring his protests. She’ll give him space later; for now, she knows he needs to get it all out. 

They’re hit with a gust of wind when Elliot opens the heavy metal door that leads to the roof, and Olivia fights a shiver. Elliot doesn’t seem to notice the chill; he stalks across the concrete and braces his hands on the railing. 

Walking up behind him, Olivia can see the tension in his shoulders, the way he’s gripping the metal so tight his knuckles are turning white.

“Elliot,” she tries, sidling up next to him. He still won’t meet her eyes. “What…”

“She took the kids,” he bites out. “To her mother’s house. Said she needed space.”  

“God, El…”

He shakes his head. “Just decided one morning that she didn’t wanna do this anymore.”

Elliot lets out an exhale and pinches the bridge of his nose with his right hand; he’s staring out at the cityscape, squinting into the sun. It’s not like him to go quiet like this — she expects him to pace, or yell, or punch a wall, anything but this. He’s crumpling right in front of her, like a balloon that’s been pricked by a needle and deflated halfway. 

She feels it deep in her gut: the pain he’s going through, the way his whole world is turning on its head. Elliot has worked his whole life for this, to provide his family with the kind of safety and stability he never had growing up, to make sure his kids were happy and healthy and had two parents who loved them. 

It’s intrinsic to who he is, and she can’t imagine what it feels like to see it splinter and break.

“What happened?” she asks again, taking a tentative step forward and placing a hand on his shoulder. He’s radiating tension, but she can feel him lean into her touch and suck in a breath. 

Elliot shrugs. “The job makes me kind of hard to live with,” he says, trying to lighten the mood. He finally turns his head and cracks a sad little smile.

Olivia shakes her head and lets a wry grin of her own spread across her face. “She should try working with you,” she quips, and Elliot huffs out a chuckle. “But really… how are you doing?”

“I…” he starts, stops himself again. “I don’t…” Elliot scratches at the back of his neck and stutters out an exhale. “I just keep going over it in my head, trying to figure out when it went wrong. When she stopped wanting to fight for it.”

“El…”

“I know I’m not the best husband,” he manages. “I know I work shit hours, that I’m home late, that I miss soccer practice and recitals and PTO meetings. But fuck it, I’m trying here, Liv, and I just—”

“I know,” she says. She sees it every day, in the dedication he brings to this job. He does it for his kids, for all the kids who don’t have someone looking out for them, for all the women like his mother who have their own Joseph Stablers in their lives.

“Maybe she just needs some time, El,” Olivia says. “To clear her head.”

“By taking the kids and moving out?” He steps away from the railing and starts pacing across the roof, and Olivia tries not to chase after him. The whole point of coming up here was to make sure he didn’t work himself up, but now—

The squeaky metal hinges of the rooftop door cut through the silence and Elliot and Olivia turn around to see Munch poke his head out from behind it.

“Elliot,” he calls, motioning for him to walk closer. “Cragen wants to talk to you.” 

Elliot dismisses him with a wave. “I’ll be down in a minute, John.”

Next to him, Olivia heaves out a sigh.

/

1988

Manhattan is stifling in the summer, hot and sticky and cloying, and Olivia feels like she can’t breathe. 

Serena is only teaching one seminar over summer term, so Olivia has taken to sequestering herself in her bedroom when her mother is at the apartment, telling her she’s studying whenever she pokes her head in or shouts from the living room. It’s mostly true; in addition to her waitressing job, she’s taking a summer course at Columbia that Serena managed to get her enrolled in. 

Olivia would’ve rolled her eyes at the mere idea if it didn’t give her another way to avoid her mother, so she heads to a cultural anthropology lecture twice a week that is surprisingly interesting and tries her hardest to avoid going anywhere near the building that houses the English department.

Olivia had barely any friends in high school — a drunk, eccentric single mother ensured that — so there’s hardly anyone in the city for her to catch up with. She goes to work and to class and spends most of the rest of her time walking the streets and sitting in the park with a book, willing the weeks to pass by. 

She’s itching to go back to Buffalo, to finally move into the apartment she and Meghan are planning on sharing next year. But she’s stuck here until August, melting in the city’s muggy summer heat.

The person she misses most, though, is Elliot. She thinks about him all the time: what he’s doing in training, if he likes his fellow recruits, if his CO is tolerable. When he’ll get news about his deployment, if he’ll be scheduled for leave. Whether or not he thinks about her as much as she thinks about him, if missing her also feels like having lost a limb. 

It’s pathetic, really, how much he’d managed to worm his way under her skin in only a few short months, but she doesn’t have it in her to care. Not when she spends her days playing the last eight months back in her head like a movie, a zoetrope showing her snatches of happiness, of safety, of contentment. 

She misses the way he smiles when he sees her, his dimples prominent and eyes sparkling. Misses the silly jokes he makes, the way they rib each other and finish each other’s sentences. Misses the feeling of his arms wrapped around her, solid and secure, the goosebumps that break out on her skin every time he nuzzles his face into the crook of her neck. Misses the way he kisses and puts his whole body into it, makes her feel like she’s the only person in the whole world. Misses the way he feels when he moves inside her, how his embrace is the place she feels the most whole. 

She misses everything about him.

She writes to him, tells him she hopes he’s doing okay, keeps him apprised of the various antics at the restaurant where she works; tales of Brenda, her manager, and Sal, the line cook, and the obvious feelings they have for one another but are trying their hardest to ignore. She tells him about Serena, about her walks through the city, the gossip Meghan relays from campus when she calls once a week. 

Olivia puts it all into neat letters that she seals up and sends down to Parris Island, hoping they’ll give Elliot some sort of comfort. 

He told her before he left that his answers would be sporadic at best, or not come in for weeks, with training schedules and mail delivery issues, so she vowed not to get her hopes up every time she goes and checks the mailbox. 

But as the weeks go by and no letters appear, she gets increasingly frustrated. 

Elliot told her that calling the base would be a fool’s errand, that he had to place the calls from inside to have even a small chance of them going through, but she finds herself dialling the number anyway one Thursday afternoon. 

She’s greeted by a dispatcher who runs her around in circles for a good fifteen minutes before informing her he can’t connect her call, and Olivia slams the phone down onto the receiver with a groan.

It’s starting to feel like this is happening on purpose, that there’s more at play than irregular mail delivery and a lack of phone time. 

Elliot hasn’t called and hasn’t written, and it’s been weeks.

At this point… it feels deliberate. 

Olivia sinks down onto the couch in the living room and rests her head in her hands. She didn’t want to acknowledge it, didn’t want to give voice to that niggling feeling in the back of her mind, but it’s unavoidable now. 

He’s choosing not to answer her. Choosing not to reach out. 

Somewhere in between goodbyes on his front porch and six weeks of basic training, Elliot decided he was better off without her. Decided whatever they had back in Buffalo wasn’t enough, that he wanted more. More than Olivia.

And the mere thought of it is like a knife to the chest, but she can’t blame him, not really. Can’t fault him for wanting someone without her baggage, without her history. Some nice girl he can settle down with, have kids and a dog and a house with a white picket fence with. It’s all she wants for him, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t fucking hurt. 

Olivia had come to terms with not being wanted. 

By the universe, by her mother… the list goes on. But Elliot was supposed to be the exception, the person who understood her, the one who stayed. 

So to know he’s just like all the others? It breaks something deep inside her, some fundamental part of her that had finally allowed her to let someone in, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to put it back together again. 

When Serena stumbles home that night, tripping over her own two feet and slurring her words as she makes her way to the kitchen, she calls out for her daughter. Olivia’s been holed up in her room for days, hiding under the covers and stifling her sobs. 

“Everything alright in there?” Serena drawls, and Olivia sighs. 

“Just a stomach flu,” she lies.

Serena makes a tutting noise, somewhere between acceptance and derision, and Olivia hears the telltale clink of a bottle catching on the edge of the glass coffee table.

She turns so she’s facing the wall, squeezes her eyes shut and chokes back tears.

/

2005

“That the last one?” Elliot asks from the doorway, and Olivia nods before realizing he can’t actually see her.

“Yeah,” she calls out, crouching down so she can slice through the tape on one of the boxes with her key. She opens the flaps and peers inside, sees plates and glasses and a few tangled cords and shoves the box in the direction of the kitchen. 

Elliot latches the apartment door behind him and walks toward her, places a hand on her shoulder and gives it a gentle squeeze.

“Thank you,” he says. Olivia looks up and smiles. “Seriously, Liv. You’re a lifesaver.”

She shrugs her shoulders. “It’s no big deal, and besides, you promised me takeout and beer.”

Elliot throws his head back on a laugh, and Olivia can’t help but grin. “Oh I see how it is, Benson.”

“Shut up,” she says, laughing too, before she balls up the packing tape she just pulled off the box and throws it in the general direction of his face. 

Elliot catches it easily and smirks at her, and Olivia feels a fluttery sensation spread from her chest all the way to the tips of her toes. It’s been harder to tamp down lately, ever since Kathy left and Elliot has technically been single. With another barrier now gone between them, she feels a little less guilty when she lets her gaze linger on his forearms, his lips, the chiselled jut of his jawline — when she thinks back to the way they’d been together. 

Still. 

It’s not like anything’s going to change between them. They’re partners, first and foremost, and she won’t risk that for anything. 

Especially since there’s a big chance this is all temporary. The separation, the little apartment she’s helping Elliot move into right now, all of it. Just a rough patch, a breather he and Kathy need before they realize they’re meant to be together, to raise their kids together under one roof. He might not be wearing a ring right now, but Olivia is pretty sure it’ll reappear in the next few months, and Elliot will cancel the short-term lease he just signed and move back home. 

So she’s going to support him in the interim, be his partner and best friend, and tamp down whatever lingering feelings are bubbling to the surface. 

Elliot has been rummaging around in a box in the living area, and she perks up when she hears him let out a triumphant shout. “Got it,” he announces, holding the TV remote up like it’s a prize.

Olivia stifles a snort. “You’ve got your priorities figured out, I see,” she teases. 

“Talk to me in half an hour when the food’s here and you want me to put the game on,” Elliot fires back, and Olivia can’t argue with that.

“Touché,” she says, and Elliot laughs. 

They unpack more of his boxes in comfortable silence; he fills his shelves and Olivia stacks dishes and pots in the kitchen cupboards. They take a break when the food comes, sprawling out on his new couch with cartons of lo mein and two bottles of beer sweating on the coffee table. 

Sure enough, Elliot turns on the TV and lets the Mets game play on low in the background, and Olivia shakes her head, taking a sip of her beer. 

“This place is nice,” she says eventually, and Elliot hums.

The apartment is small but gets good light, and there’s an extra bedroom that one or two of his kids can stay in if they want to spend the night. It’s sparse right now, but she thinks it could be cozy, once he adds some decor. Though she doubts he will, since all of this is temporary. 

It’s not something she can let herself forget.

“‘S weird,” he says. “Haven’t ever lived alone before this.”

It surprises her, but he’s right. Elliot had roommates in college, bunkmates when he was deployed. And from what he’s told her, she knows he got Kathy pregnant pretty quick when he was on leave, and they moved in together once he got back home. 

For all intents and purposes, Elliot’s never been a bachelor until now. 

“You’ll have the kids visiting you in no time,” she reassures him, placing a comforting hand on his forearm. “And if nothing else, you can invite me over and buy me more takeout,” she tacks on, to try and lighten the mood.

Elliot chuckles, scrubbing a hand over his jaw.

“Between you and the twins begging for ice cream every time I see them, I’m gonna go flat broke.”

She laughs. “I’ll throw in a cup of coffee and a beer every once in a while, my treat.”

Elliot shifts so his elbow sits bent against the back of the couch, cheek held up by his palm. The fondness in his expression shoots right to her heart, and she forces herself to focus on the TV so she doesn’t get lost in the deep blue of his eyes, sparkling in the waning sunlight that filters in through the windows. 

“Thank you, Liv,” he says again, voice soft and low. “Don’t think I tell you that enough.”

She turns to face him and musters up a smile. 

“‘Course, El,” she says, shrugging. “That’s what partners are for.”

He nods, and it feels like he wants to say something else, has the words waiting on the tip of his tongue, but he swallows them down and turns toward the screen, watching the pitcher step up to the mound.

Olivia breathes a sigh of relief and reaches for her beer, taking another sip. This, she can deal with. Sitting next to her best friend and partner, watching a ballgame while they eat Chinese takeout and drink beers. 

And it’s all she can let herself hope for, so she settles into the comfort of being in Elliot’s presence, and forces it to be enough. 

She almost makes herself believe it. 

Chapter Text

2005

The days when Cragen’s at CompStat from sunup to dusk feel a little bit like being back in high school.

Like when the teacher was out and everyone in class would go eerily quiet, eyes flicking back and forth as people figured out just how much unsupervised time they’d gained, just how much stupid shit they could get away with before the sub or another teacher showed up again. A liminal kind of space, where the rules didn’t apply and everyone was treading carefully, hoping their bubble wouldn’t burst. 

At least that’s what Elliot tells Olivia from across their desks; he’s leaning back in his chair with his hands crossed at his head and his feet resting on the tabletop. There’s a shit-eating grin spread across his features, and Olivia can’t help but chuckle. 

“I’ll take it you were one of the kids who spent the whole month waiting for the ten minutes where your teacher had to go make copies?”

Elliot smirks, looking far too pleased with himself. “You can do a lot in ten minutes, Liv,” he says, voice low and deep, and she has to fight an eye roll.

From one desk over, Fin snorts. “Ten minutes, huh, Stabler? Dunno if you heard, but speed isn’t always a good thing, if you know what I mean.”

“Who said anything about speed, Tutuola?” Elliot shoots back, and Fin shrugs. 

“I’m jus’ sayin’, altar boys…”

“Don’t underestimate them,” Olivia mutters under her breath, low enough that she hopes Fin doesn’t hear. Thankfully, Munch chooses this moment to join in the conversation with a story about one of his ex-wives, so she’s off the hook — almost.

Of course, Elliot perked up at her words, and there’s a smug look on his face as he glances over at her, and Olivia can’t help it, she blushes. 

Fuck.

Elliot’s been single (well, separated, temporarily) from Kathy for months now, and it’s not a big deal, it’s really not. It doesn’t change anything between them, in their partnership, their friendship. So it shouldn’t be affecting Olivia at all, shouldn’t make her eyes linger just that little bit longer on the muscles in Elliot’s forearms, on the jut of his jaw, or the shape of his lips when he takes a sip of his coffee.

It shouldn’t be reminding her of how, despite being an altar boy through and through, Elliot’s hands and tongue were very much capable of performing miracles of their very own. It shouldn’t make her play back the highlight reel of their relationship—

“Yeah, I played ball in high school,” Olivia hears Elliot tell Munch and Fin, and she snaps her head up, willing herself to shake out of her thoughts. “Was talking to recruiters for college, but it didn’t pan out, ended up going ROTC.”

“Nice,” Fin says. “I joined up right after school, knew college ain’t gonna be it for me. You ever..?”

“Nah,” Elliot says, shaking his head. “Those four years were…” He trails off, looks over at Olivia and lets a wistful little smile spread across his features, “... Learned a lot, had fun, met some great people. Wouldn’t trade ‘em for the world.”

It makes something clench in her chest, hearing the fondness in his voice, the gentle way he holds their time together in his memories. Makes her think of what-ifs, and could have beens, and all sorts of things that she shouldn’t allow herself to entertain. 

It makes her reckless, and unthinking, so much so that she blurts out, “Oh yeah, learned a lot drinking beer at Cole’s when you shoulda been studying for Parker’s midterms,” and doesn’t even realize she’s said it until the whole room goes quiet. 

“What?”  

Munch is the first to break the silence, looking between Elliot and Olivia like she’s seeing them both for the very first time. Olivia feels her face flush crimson, feels heat creeping up her neck, and she fists her hands in the fabric of her slacks, involuntarily holding her breath.

Elliot isn’t faring much better: his eyes have gone wide, and he’s looking back and forth between Olivia and Munch like one of them might magically tell him what to say next. 

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

This is all Olivia’s fault, and there’s no turning back now. 

“Elliot and I, we, ah,” she says, haltingly, looking over at him for permission to continue. He shrugs his shoulders, and she gives him what she hopes is the most apologetic look she can muster. “We overlapped in college for two years. It was a big campus, but we… well…”

“What Liv is trying to say,” Elliot jumps in, and Olivia breathes out a sigh of relief, “is that we knew each other, back then. We went out for a little bit, stopped seeing each other when I graduated.”

It’s not untrue, but she feels a little pang in her heart every time she or Elliot have to minimize what they were to one another to explain it to other people: to Kathy, and now to the squad.

“Jesus,” Fin mutters, eyes wide. He and Munch are looking at them like they’re seeing them for the very first time, and Olivia can’t blame them. 

“We fell out of touch,” she adds on, “until my first day in the unit. Figured the brass wouldn’t approve of us being partnered up, and…”

“Eight years,” Munch says. “Damn.”

Elliot shakes his head. “We didn’t want to lie to you, we just—”

Fin scoffs. “Yeah. You just pretended to be strangers for almost a decade.”

“Look, man—”

“Fin, Munch,” Olivia says, stepping forward. “We’re sorry, we really are. We weren’t trying to keep this from you, but—”

“The more people you tell, the likelier the boss is to catch on,” Munch finishes, and Olivia exhales a sigh of relief.

“Yeah,” she says. 

“Still fucked up,” Fin bites out, and Olivia nods. 

“We know.”

“And now—?” Munch is the one to broach the elephant in the room. They’re exes, and Elliot is single, and they’re closer than your typical partners, and…

“We’re just friends,” Elliot says, adamant, tone brooking no argument. Olivia nods, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. “It was in the past. Listen, we know keeping it a secret was—”

“Stupid?” Fin supplies.

“—sure. And we’re not expecting you or John to gloss over it, but the cap—”

“Won’t know a thing,” Munch reassures, and both Elliot and Olivia let out twin sighs of relief.

/

2005

It’s weird, now that people know.

Munch and Fin kept their word; Cragen hasn’t heard a peep. But Casey found out, and so did Melinda. Olivia has been avoiding both their calls and texts for days, scowling down at her phone every time it pings. 

It’s not like she’s talked to Elliot about it either — they’re dancing on eggshells with one another, all over again. 

It helped, in some odd way, to have to keep their past a secret for so many hours each day. Tricked them into almost believing their own lies of omission, gave them a reason to pretend there was nothing there to complicate their partnership, no history that would set them in a wholly different light.

But now it’s cracked wide open, and Olivia can’t stop wondering — in some sick, twisted way she wants her brain to desperately stop — if their colleagues, their friends, are looking at them differently now. Assuming things. Guessing. Gossiping.

Wondering what they were like back then, when they were together. When it wasn’t Benson and Stabler, but Liv and El, two kids with the world’s possibilities spread out before them. 

It’s weird, and it doesn’t stop being weird when Casey all but bodily drags her from the precinct one Friday night. What Olivia needs is a drink, Casey informs her matter-of-factly, and to talk to someone (specifically her, and Melinda) and to stop moping around pretending everything’s fine.

Olivia’s half-hearted “But it is fine, Casey,” doesn’t do a thing to appease her friend, and pretty soon, she’s sitting in a cramped corner booth, squished between Casey and Melinda and nursing a martini.

“Okay, spill,” Casey gushes over the rim of her cosmo, and Olivia fights an eye roll. “Seriously. You and Stabler were together all those years ago, and then you, what, just ended up partners at SVU?”

“That pretty much covers it,” Olivia says, taking a sip of her drink. She does not want to be having this conversation, not one bit.

“Was it weird?” Casey asks. “You know, seeing him again, all those years later? Married, with kids?” She pauses, shakes her head. “Well I guess he’s not married, now, and oh, Liv…”

“Let her breathe for a second,” Melinda interjects, and Olivia shoots her a grateful look. Casey’s questions are incessant, and if Olivia didn’t know better, she’d think they’d teleported to a courtroom and her friend was going through a bulletproof question tree. 

“It was… yeah, weird’s a good word for it,” Olivia says eventually, rolling the stem of her glass in between her fingers. “Elliot and I—” She chuckles wryly. “Long story short, he thought I ditched him after graduation and I thought he went radio silent on me. Turns out neither was true and we just… missed each other.”

“Oh my God.” Casey’s eyes have gone wide, and she’s leaning across the table, forearms braced on either side of Olivia’s. “This is so much better than all the romcoms.”

“Casey…” she groans. “We’re friends, it was in the past, it’s over and done with. Besides, he’s got kids, and a wife—”

“Technically,” Melinda pipes up, “that last one’s not gonna be true much longer.”

Olivia shoots her a withering look. “He’s not divorced yet, so let’s not jump to anything here—”

“But you want to, Liv. Jump him, that is.” There’s a conspiratorial glint in Casey’s eyes that has Olivia downing the rest of her drink in one gulp and signalling for a waiter. She’s definitely going to need more alcohol for this. 

“I…” she starts, and must pause for a beat too long, because now Casey and Melinda are both looking at her, matching smirks blooming on their faces.

“Oh she absolutely does,” Melinda says, grinning. “Can’t blame her, when the man looks like that.”

“Melinda—” she hisses, and her friend just laughs.

“I’m just sayin’, you could do a lot worse.”

Olivia presses the heel of her hand to her face and exhales, sinking back into the faux leather of the booth. “It’s… Elliot’s going to get back together with Kathy, and this whole thing is just temporary, and we’re gonna go back to how things always were, and…”

“Oh, honey, you don’t actually believe that, do you?” Melinda shakes her head and makes a tutting noise. “Liv, have you seen how that man looks at you?” 

“We all had bets going for when he’d make a move before we knew you had a past,” Casey chimes in, and what now?

“What?”

Casey laughs. “Olivia, the only two people in the world who don’t see how you and Elliot look at each other are you and Elliot.”

Olivia groans. 

“Case, it’s—”

“Don’t say complicated, Liv.”

“But it is. We’re partners, and he’s got kids, and…”

“And that doesn’t change anything about how you still feel about him, doesn’t it?”

Olivia sighs, because the thing is, Casey’s right. It’s getting harder and harder to convince herself that she’s okay with this — with sitting in limbo, waiting for Elliot to go back to his wife, for everything to go back to normal — that she doesn’t want something different, something more.

That she can’t stop thinking about what would happen if she and Elliot decided that maybe the universe was wrong when it broke them apart. That there’s a part of her that lies awake at night and thinks about the could have beens.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says eventually. “Nothing is going to change, nothing can change.”

“So you’re just resigning yourself to being miserable?” Melinda places a hand on Olivia’s forearm, squeezing gently. “Liv—”

“I— I’m being realistic,” she reasons. “Isn’t that better than waiting for something to happen that never will?”

Across the booth, both Casey and Melinda let out long-suffering sighs and Olivia catches them fighting matching eye rolls. 

“Whatever you say, Liv,” Casey tells her. “It’s got to be your choice. But since we’re here…” she starts, a conspiratorial look in her eye, “…you have to tell us what Stabler was like in college, come on!”

“God,” Olivia says, groaning. “I’m gonna need more alcohol for this.”

/

2006

At this point, Olivia thinks wryly, they’ve perfected the post-dramatic revelation rebalancing act pretty damn well. 

There was the reunion on her first day at SVU, the mess with Brian Cassidy, that one time Elliot almost kissed her, right by the lockers. The realization that they didn’t actually leave one another. Kathy and Elliot’s separation. And now, the aftermath of the squad finding out all about their past. 

There’s the initial awkwardness, the days or even weeks where they don’t really talk and just go through the motions with one another. Eventually, they enter into a truce of sorts, finding each other in the squad car, or the crib, and admitting that they just want to go back to how things were. 

And then it’s tentative, hesitant, until they find their rhythm again. 

At least that’s how it’s always been.

For some reason, this time is different. 

Olivia doesn’t know why, doesn’t know if she can chalk it up to Elliot being temporarily single or the “girl talk” Casey and Melinda subjected her to at the bar. All she knows is that something’s different, this time around, and she doesn’t know if she wants to make it stop.

It’s subtle — or at least she hopes it is.

Lingering glances, almost-brushes of Elliot’s hand against the small of her back. Tuesday night beers at the dive bar around the corner from her apartment, takeout and baseball games at his. 

A new kind of openness between them, now that he isn’t going home to his wife every night, the woman with whom he’s raising his children, who should be his touchstone, his confidant. Instead, he talks to her, about how it feels to have his kids visiting him now, about their cases, and sometimes — on nights when they’re two beers deep and the sunlight is waning in the distance — about who they used to be. 

About studying in the library and sneaking off into the stacks, about drives in his old pickup truck, evenings at Cole’s and nights spent in the rickety bed in his old room. 

One Wednesday night at his place, Olivia watches Elliot peel the label off his beer bottle with his thumb, shredding it onto the surface of his coffee table. His Adam’s apple bobs when he swallows, and he lets out an exhale. 

“D’you ever—” he starts, and then stops himself, shaking his head. “Never mind.”

“Do I ever what?”

She thinks she knows where he’s going with this, but she’s not sure if she actually wants him to say it out loud — to make it real.

“Sometimes,” Elliot says, looking down at his hands, at the callouses on his knuckles and the way his fingers curl around the bottle, squeezing tight. “Sometimes I wonder if there’s a parallel universe out there…”

“Me too,” she whispers. 

“Yeah.”

A parallel universe where they were meant to be. 

“Liv, I—”

It’s at that moment that his phone starts to ring; the sound is shrill and jarring in the quiet of his apartment. Olivia lets out a breath. 

“Fuck, it’s Cragen,” Elliot huffs out, hitting the call button with a groan. “Yeah, Cap?” he says into the receiver, shooting Olivia a pointed look as he listens to their boss on the other end of the line. She’s already getting up from the couch, gathering their takeout boxes and bottles and walking toward the kitchen to dump them in the sink. “Yeah, I’ll swing by Liv’s place, pick her up along the way.”

The lie slips off his tongue with practised ease, and Olivia doesn’t even blink, just reaches over to grab both their coats off the rack by his door, along with Elliot’s keys. 

“Case?” she asks when he’s hung up, and Elliot nods.

“Upper East Side, back alley, unis say she’s gotta be under eighteen.”

“Shit,” she mutters. 

“Yeah.”

This part? This part is second-nature. 

Holstering their guns and tying their laces and piling into the car to head to a scene. Splitting up the work instinctually — one of them gets the rundown from the unis, the other heads toward the body, then they switch so they can interview any passerby and potential witnesses — and comparing notes on the drive to the morgue. 

Eight years in, they could do it in their sleep, one step after another, perfectly in sync.

It’s yet another reason, Olivia thinks as she’s standing over the body — a sixteen-year-old, it turns out, according to her student ID — that they shouldn’t rock the boat. That Cragen’s call had been a sign, of sorts, that whatever parallel universe Elliot was thinking of shouldn’t ever cross over into this one.

Or at least that’s what she’s trying to make herself believe.

But the thought lingers, festers in the back of her mind until she’s finally lying in her bed, forty-eight hours after catching the case, bone-tired and unable to sleep.

Olivia tosses and turns, thinks of parallel universes and what it would be like to rewrite the past eighteen years. What they would’ve made of their lives if they got to live them side-by-side, as partners in a wholly different sense of the word.

She thinks of the feeling of Elliot’s lips on her own, the way she’ll never be able to forget the ghost of his touch, the way it consumed her and lit her up from the inside out. 

She stares up at the ceiling, watches the way the shadows play across the white, slipping in and out of the still blades of her fan as cars pass by on the street below. Her bedsheets have pooled low at her hips, and she tugs them up toward her torso, turns and buries her head in her pillow, willing sleep to come. 

It doesn’t.

Her alarm goes off four hours later, and it takes everything in Olivia not to scream.

/ 

2006 

Years later, she’ll wonder how they got here. 

Olivia, flat on her back on the linoleum floor of a bus terminal, clutching her neck. Elliot, hovering above her, anguish and terror in his features, screaming for help. 

Ryan, sweet Ryan, bleeding out on the concrete as a crowd gathers around him, stunned and stupefied and grieving his death. 

The precinct hallway, and words that hit like barbs.

“I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be looking over my shoulder making sure you’re okay.”

and

“I need to know that you can do your job and not wait for me to come to the rescue.”

A warehouse, with tears brimming in the corners of their eyes, staring down the barrels of two guns. 

“It’s alright.”

and

“I’m sorry.”

A hospital sofa, and a declaration that shatters her heart.

“We both chose each other over the job. We can never let that happen again. Otherwise, we can’t be partners.”

and 

“You and this job are about the only things I’ve got anymore. I don’t want to wreck that.”

Every word out of his mouth hits her straight in the gut, makes something clench deep inside her, dark and cloying. Makes her want to run, to hide, to take the past eight years and forget they ever happened. If meeting him again, if being in Elliot’s orbit, means this?

She’s not so sure she wants the parallel universe after all.

Cragen tells her to sleep on it.

She walks into the captain’s office after everything is finished, after they’ve submitted their DD5s and crossed all the T’s with IAB, after she’s watched Elliot grab his coat and walk out of the precinct, casting one last furtive glance at their desks. He looks like he’s mourning something, and Olivia feels it like a stab to the chest. 

Cragen doesn’t look all too surprised when she says it, and Olivia wonders, not for the first time, what she and Elliot must look like from the outside. He doesn’t tell her no, doesn’t remind her of all the good she can be doing at this job, but he does tell her she’ll have a clearer head in the morning, that she shouldn’t be making decisions like this when she’s still wired and jittery.

“But Cap—” Olivia starts, and Cragen cuts her off with a look.

“Ask me again in the morning, Olivia,” he says, tone brooking no argument. “If you still want the transfer, I’ll file the paperwork with 1PP.”

All she can do is nod and head out of his office, closing the door tightly behind her. Rationally, she knows her captain has a point, but every bone in her body is screaming at her to run, as far as she possibly can. 

Her brain is telling her that Elliot doesn’t think she can do this job, that he thinks she’s compromised, somehow. That she’s letting their past and her feelings get in the way of their partnership, that they’re too close, that they can’t go on like this.

Because she knows that the next time they find themselves in a situation like this, faced with this choice, neither of them would make a different one. They’ll choose each other, over and over again, even if it eats them alive in the process.

So one of them has to be brave; one of them has to put an end to this.

At least that’s what she tells herself when she shuts the door to her apartment and leans back against her kitchen counter, grabbing a bottle of beer out of her fridge on autopilot. She twists the top off and downs half of it in one long drag, setting it down on the countertop beside her. Olivia exhales, sinks into herself, and finally lets the tears she’s been holding at bay all day flow freely. 

It’s pathetic, really, that she’s standing here in her kitchen, gun still holstered on her hip, crying. Hot, wet, ugly tears that smear her mascara down her face and won’t stop coming. She doesn’t know if she’s crying for herself, for Rebecca and Ryan, for Elliot, for their partnership, or for the weight of the world as a whole, pressing down on her shoulders and threatening to make her crumble. 

Eventually, she takes a deep, shuddering breath and pushes herself up, unclips her holster and takes off her coat. If Elliot could see her now—

Olivia banishes that thought as soon as she has it; it’s too painful, to think of him now. To picture the way he’d looked at her in that bus terminal, in that warehouse, sitting on that sofa. To conjure up the pain and the regret etched so clearly into his features.

Regret for his actions, or for them, she could never be sure. 

So it’s for the best, has to be for the best, that she’s doing the right thing, here, and saving them both. 

No matter how much it hurts, no matter how much it feels like someone has taken a knife to her chest and is cutting out her own heart, holding it up for the world to see. Look at her, they’d taunt, too weak to save a child when it mattered most. Too consumed with love to even think.

And Elliot’s right, it can’t happen again. Won’t happen again.

He needs this job, needs it for his kids and for the stability he craved for so long, and if she can give him one thing, it’s that. So she’ll go back to Cragen tomorrow (early so she doesn’t have to face Elliot) and get the transfer paperwork.

Olivia takes a deep breath, steels herself, and heads for her shower. She won’t sleep tonight, but she’ll feel better if she washes this case off of her, washes Elliot off of her, once and for all.

She makes it halfway to the bathroom door when she hears it. It’s hard and insistent, three sharp knocks in quick succession, and fuck, fuck, fuck.

There’s only one person who—

Three more raps, this time even faster, and she’s got half a mind to ignore it, to walk to her shower, head held high in defiance, but she knows he won’t quit until she opens the door. 

When she sees him standing in her hallway, he looks wrecked.

Eyes rimmed red, cheeks blotchy, hair sticking up at all angles like he’s run his hands through it a million times. He’s panting, holding onto the door frame with one hand. 

“Olivia—” he rasps out when she opens the door, voice cracked and broken. 

“Elliot, what—”

She doesn’t get to finish her question because suddenly, he’s surging forward, frantic, cupping her skull with one hand and slotting her mouth to his.

Chapter Text

2006

Elliot is kissing her.

Elliot is kissing her, right there in the entryway of her apartment, deep and desperate, cradling her face like it’s something precious, like he’s scared she’ll crumble to pieces right in front of him. He’s hot and insistent as he presses up against her, catching her bottom lip between his own and tugging gently, moulding his whole body to hers. 

It’s instinct, the way she responds.

Fisting her hands in his hoodie, slipping her tongue past his lips, pulling him closer, closer, closer. She doesn’t think, just lets herself feel, lets herself be swept away by the sensations and backed into her kitchen. It’s like something out of a dream, kissing him, something out of the late-night fantasies she doesn’t admit to having, where every single thing she’s secretly been wishing for for the past eight years finally comes true.

Only when her back hits the edge of a counter does Olivia startle, does she stop dead in her tracks and push on Elliot’s chest, causing him to take a step backward. She’s panting when they break apart, face flushed and breath heavy, and Elliot looks much the same.

His pupils are blown, cheeks red, hair in disarray. 

“What the fuck, Elliot—” Olivia stammers out, raising a hand to her lips. Jesus Christ, what have they done?

“Liv,” he rasps out, taking a step toward her. He raises his hand to meet hers but she pulls away, eyes wide and frantic as she tries to wrap her head around what just happened. 

“El, don’t, I can’t—” Her heart is hammering in her chest and she can hear the blood rush in her ears, and oh, God, this isn’t supposed to happen. They aren’t supposed to fuck up like this. “We can’t just— what about Kathy, what about your kids?”

“Olivia,” he repeats, lower this time, with more purpose. He gets close to her again, gently, like he’s trying not to spook her. “You almost…” He shakes his head, sucks in a breath. “You almost died.”

“It was nothing—” She’s quick to deflect; it was a shallow cut, she’s fine, there’s no reason to—

“Jesus Christ, don’t you—” Elliot’s voice is harsh, and he scrubs a hand over the back of his head. “I thought you were gonna die, ‘Livia, and I couldn’t, I can’t— I wouldn’t have survived that—”

“Elliot—”

“—no, you gotta hear me out here,” he pleads, eyes wide and desperate. “You were layin’ on that floor and I felt like we’d lost… I felt like I’d lost the chance to tell you that I love you.”

“You…?”

“I love you, Liv,” he says, voice barely above a whisper. “Have since I was twenty-one years old. And havin’ you back in my life — even if that’s just as partners — shit, that’s the best thing. But you gotta know that I never; I never stopped loving you. It never stopped being you and I, for me.”

Olivia doesn’t know which of them started crying first, but it doesn’t really matter, now. They’ve both got tears pooling in the corners of their eyes and she reaches up to gently wipe one off Elliot’s cheek with her thumb. He shivers at the contact, and she sways forward into his space, letting her eyes slip halfway shut when he cups her jaw and tips her chin up so she’s looking at him. 

“Elliot,” she whispers, fighting every instinct in her body that’s screaming at her to just lean forward and kiss him again, to lose herself in it, in him. “You can’t just—”

“Yes I can.” He’s adamant, beseeching. “I’m done fighting this, I’m done pretending I haven’t been dreaming about this since that first day you showed up at the station house. I missed you every damn day for ten years, Benson, and this case…”

“You said we can’t be partners,” she says, thinks back to the words he’d said on that hospital sofa, the ones that cut her, down to the bone. “You said if we keep choosing each other, we can’t…”

“I was scared. I was fucking terrified and I said stuff that I— shit, Liv, I’m sorry, I’m sorry if I ever… I love you. I’m gonna go back to that. I love you and I’ve been wanting to say it for months now, but the time was never right, and…”

“And now it is?”

He laughs, and it’s a raw, cracked thing. “You’re alive, Olivia, and we’re both here and I love you, and—”

This time she’s the one to kiss him, hard and insistent, swallowing the last few words into her mouth. She pulls him closer, one hand clutching his hoodie, the other wrapped around the back of his neck. Elliot lets out a moan, a wrecked sound that escapes the back of his throat, and Olivia whines when he tangles his fingers into her hair. 

He’s got her pushed fully against the cabinets, now, and the countertop is digging into her ass, but she can’t bring herself to care, not when his hand has started skimming up and down her torso, settling right below the swell of her breast.

She shudders under his touch, feels herself melting and turning into a puddle, right there in her kitchen, but this is all so sudden, so fast, so—

“Do you mean it?” she rasps out, and she hates the way her voice wavers, the way it’s gone small and meek. Elliot looks down at her, his face full of so much awe and love that her heart could burst with it. “When you said you’ve been in love with me ever since college.”

“I’ve been in love with you since the day I met you,” he says, with so much sincerity it makes her breath hitch, and Olivia shakes her head.

“You couldn’t have known—”

“Yes, I could. You’re it for me, Benson. It’ll always be you and I.”

“You and me,” she chokes out around a laugh, and Elliot raises an eyebrow. “It’s ‘you and me,’ because it’s the object of the sentence, and—”

“Liv, just shut up and kiss me.” Elliot groans when he interrupts her, half-exasperated, and she’s only too happy to comply.

/

2006

The only coherent thought in Olivia’s mind when Elliot finally, finally sinks into her, arms braced on either side of her torso, mouth covering her own, is that this feels like home.  

Being here with him makes her feel safe and protected like she’s never been anywhere else. The memories start flooding her — all the times when he held her like this, moved inside her like this, all those years ago — and she loses herself to the sensation. To the nonsensical things he’s rumbling into her ear, the I love yous and So goods and You’re so beautifuls that make her heart flutter. 

She feels it in every part of her, from the tips of her fingers all the way down to her toes. The heat is ratcheting up, building low in her belly and spreading throughout her chest, and nothing, nothing has ever felt like this. “El—” she breathes out, swallowing a moan as she presses their lips together, “I’m gonna—”

“Me too,” he groans, and then they’re flying, one after another, careening off the edge and collapsing into the sheets. 

Olivia feels boneless, like she’s floating somewhere outside of her body, and she lets out a little whine when Elliot rolls off her. He chuckles and pulls her close, dropping a kiss to her temple. 

“Fuck,” she mutters, “that was…”

“Yeah.” He presses another sloppy kiss to her neck, and she squirms at the feeling. Elliot laughs and slings an arm across her torso, letting his fingertips dance across her skin. “I can’t believe we’re here, Liv.”

“Me neither.” She’s trying hard not to get choked up again, but after everything, this still feels too surreal. She shakes her head and tucks herself further into Elliot’s side. “Tell me this isn’t a dream?”

“It’s real,” he reassures her, carding his hand through her hair and tucking a strand behind her ear. “It’s real and I love you.”

“I love you too,” she replies, lips turning up in a smile when she sees his eyes go wide. He clearly didn’t expect her to say it back so soon — truth be told, she hadn’t either — but everything about the past few days has put things into perspective for Olivia, and at this point? At this point she’s not willing to risk this, risk any of it. 

Elliot cups her cheek and pulls her in for one more kiss, slow and soft, and she reluctantly breaks away after a few minutes, laughing when he lets out what can only be described as a whine. 

“I have to pee,” she says, and he flops back onto the pillows with a groan as she walks over to her bathroom, telling him, “There’s an old pair of basketball shorts in the second drawer.”

When she steps back out into the bedroom, Elliot’s standing in front of her dresser in just his boxers, staring down at a folded up piece of fabric in his hands. 

Her breath hitches when she realizes what it is — the threadbare UB sweatshirt he gave her, all those years ago, that she hid in a box until a few months back when he and Kathy separated and she wanted him close. 

“You kept it?” he asks, disbelieving.

Olivia nods. “Couldn’t bear to let it go.” 

“God, Liv… how much time did we miss, how much…?”

“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t think like that. You’ve got your kids, El, and we’ve both changed. There’s no use wondering.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. He sets the sweatshirt on top of the dresser and steps toward her, wrapping his arms around her waist and settling his hands on the top of her ass. He nuzzles his face into the crook of her neck and breathes in deep; Olivia winds her own arms around his neck and sways into his touch. “We’re here now.”

“We are.”

There’s an unspoken understanding that Elliot will be staying, tonight, that they’re going to worry about the real world — about their jobs and his kids and his ex-wife — tomorrow morning. Right now, they’re in their own little bubble, sealed up tight.

“Still sleep on the left side?” 

She nods when she pulls back the comforter, slipping under the sheets. Elliot grins and sets his phone down on the right bedside table before sliding in himself. He immediately opens his arms and Olivia settles herself onto his chest with a contented little sigh. 

This is what she’d missed.

Sure, she’d missed the kissing, and the sex, and everything in between, but the moments after — where they lay together, soft and quiet and drowsy, not a care in the world — those were always her favourite. 

She exhales when Elliot slings an arm around her ribcage and drops a kiss to her crown, burrowing further into his side. “I missed you,” she confesses, voice barely above a whisper, and feels him tighten his grip on her in response. 

“I missed you too, Liv. So fucking much.”

“D’you still snore?”

Elliot snorts. “Snore? When did I snore?”

“All the time, El.”

“I did not—” Elliot gasps, faux-offended, and Olivia laughs.

“Yes, you did. I woke up some nights and wondered who’d grabbed the saw.”

He reaches out to tickle her ribcage in retaliation, and Olivia shrieks, wriggling away from him as Elliot breaks out into laughter. It’s the lightest she’s felt in years, lying here with him (even with the memory of Gitano and Ryan looming over them in the darkness) and she relishes it, relishes them. 

When they’ve called a truce, of sorts, they settle on their sides, facing one another, heads resting on the pillows. In the half-dark of her bedroom, Olivia lets her eyes roam over his face, his jaw, the slope of his shoulders. 

She’s recommitting this Elliot to memory, making snapshots of every dip and swell of him, just in case this all turns out to be a dream.

“It’s real,” he whispers into the darkness, like he’s reading her mind. “Sleep, Liv. I’ll be here in the morning.”

She nods, letting her eyes drift shut as she reaches for his hand in the dark.

/

2008

If Olivia had told herself three, four — hell, eighteen years ago — that one day, her life would look like this? She’d’ve laughed at herself, called herself crazy.

She’s sitting on the couch in her apartment (or at least it will be for two more weeks), leaning back against the armrest and reading a book. It’s one of those rare Saturdays where she’s got absolutely nowhere to be and nothing to do. 

Elliot’s spending the morning with Dickie and Lizzie, playing basketball in a park close to Kathy’s house. The twins have a school trip that leaves Monday morning, so they’re at their mother’s for the weekend, but Kathy and Elliot have found a rhythm these days, and Olivia is beyond grateful for it.

Grateful that, with the ink long-dried on the divorce papers and a new lease in the works for a three-bedroom apartment in Long Island City, the three of them have sorted out any lingering tension between them, that Elliot and his ex-wife can genuinely call one another friends and the kids get to spend time with both their parents and never feel left out.

And Olivia? 

Well, she might never be best friends with Kathy, but she and Elliot’s ex have reached an understanding of their own, especially since—

She looks down at the growing swell of her stomach and smiles. 

No wonder Elliot had four kids that quick. They’d barely started trying, and she’d ended up with a positive test within weeks after waking up queasy three days in a row.

Now, six months later, she can feel their little peanut moving around and making their presence known more and more, and it still floors her, every single time.

That she gets to have this — gets to be a mom, gets to be someone’s partner (in every sense of the word) — and do it with Elliot at her side. Elliot, who volunteered to leave the unit when they disclosed; he’s working Homicide now, from a squad room close to the one-six. 

The job, he’d told her, was her calling, not his. Not in the same way. 

She’d teared up when he’d told her he volunteered for the unit because of what she’d told him about Serena, back in Buffalo. That he’d thought about Olivia and her mother and knew that wanted to help, wanted to make sure others didn’t have to face the same pain. 

But he did his run in sex crimes, was ready for something new. And knew that, as much as it would hurt not to have her six in the squad every day, SVU is her place, her home (when she’s not with him).

Cragen hadn’t been surprised in the slightest when they’d told him, had just smiled and shaken his head and told Olivia he never expected her to put the transfer papers in, after Gitano. She’d given her captain a watery smile and thanked him for making her think it over, because who knows how long it would’ve taken them to figure things out, if not for that night.

Maybe they’d still be orbiting one another, never getting too close. 

But they did, and now it’s Saturday morning and she’s got nothing to do, except sit here and try to read a book she’s been meaning to get to for weeks. She wonders if Elliot will pick up those bagels she loves from the place on the corner, with extra garlic and herb cream cheese.

Sure enough, she hears his key turn in the lock right on cue. Olivia sets the book down on the coffee table, smiling as Elliot walks in and kicks off his shoes by the door. 

“Got us bagels,” he says, by way of greeting, dropping the paper bag on the kitchen counter, “and that cream cheese you can’t get enough of.”

Olivia grins when he walks over to her, leaning down to press a kiss to her lips. “Mmm, hi,” she murmurs, “How were the twins?”

“Hi yourself,” Elliot replies, letting his hand brush over her stomach. “I think Lizzie’s gonna try out for the team in the fall. Kid’s got aim.”

“That’s great, tell her I can’t wait to come cheer at her games.”

Elliot smiles softly at that, squeezing her forearm. “Pinch me,” he tells her, “if I ever for one second forget how goddamn lucky I am. Or slap me, for all I care. Just don’t let me ever take it for granted.”

Olivia lets out a little chuckle, eyes crinkling. “Noted, Stabler. Now, I was promised a bagel.”

Elliot laughs, deep and full-bodied, and she grins. “Comin’ right up. But first—” He heads back to the kitchen, pulling a plastic bag out from behind the one that holds the bagels and schmear. “I was walkin’ down the street, and I saw one of those stupid souvenir shops on the corner, but I couldn’t help myself, and—”

He holds up the item when he’s walked over to the couch, and Olivia’s eyes go wide. It’s a little grey onesie, perfect for a newborn, with an orange and blue UB logo stitched on the front.

“El—” she whispers, reaching out for the garment. Elliot hands it over and sits down on the couch, placing a hand on her thigh.

“Thought the peanut should have something to commemorate where their parents met,” he says, shrugging. “The place where everything began.”

“It matches our sweatshirt.”

The faded grey one that still lives in Olivia’s dresser drawer, the one Elliot insists still looks better on her than it ever did on him.

“‘Course it does.”

“I love you,” Olivia rasps out, reaching over to cup Elliot’s jaw and pull him in for a kiss. “So much.”

“Love you too, Liv.”

“Pinch me too,” she tells him, “if I ever forget how happy we are.”

“I’ll do you one better,” Elliot replies, and leans in to kiss her again.