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“Absolutely not.”
The words are slung back at him just as rapidly as he voices the question, closely shadowing his bravery, punctuating his audacity.
He grins.
“Come on, Captain. You scared?”
“Absolutely not,” she repeats more emphatically, with an all-too familiar head tilt that sends chocolate strands of not-quite bangs into her eyes. They’re different than the last time he saw her, layers framing her face more closely in darker waves. Their shade reminds him of the Olivia of the earliest years of their partnership, the style calls to mind the Olivia who left him but didn’t stay gone. He likes them.
She shakes the hair out of her face, reiterating her refusal.
He savors it, thinks she does, too – the feint and parry. The new dance between them. Counter to her tone, an answering smile spreads across her face. It opens her expression with light and exuberance and he wishes he could throw himself into it, to never know the cold of her halting glare again. Never feel her shrugging out of his hold again.
He wants to make her smile like that all the time. He wants to send her eyes rolling in exasperation, with prolonged arousal. God. He thinks those things now.
He looks at her fully, drinks her in, now. Barriers of marriage and partnership and distrust don’t hold him back anymore. He feels his lower lip pull a little at the bottom, the way it always does when he thinks his jab, his joke has landed.
He feels so wonderfully warmed. And Christ. He’s hardly even touched her yet.
“I’ll go first,” he offers, a declaration of peace that – at last – doesn’t hold the weight of his past betrayal and evasion. They’re… playing. Relearning. He can’t stop smiling like a lunatic, can’t help the rightness that cloaks his home when she is in it. He sends up a halfhearted prayer that he doesn’t show the glistening of relieved tears he can feel heavily pressing against the backs of his eyes.
“I didn’t ask you to,” she responds, but that head tilt increases, deepening the angle. She somehow looks like she does after a few glasses of wine, or after someone has dismantled the stones of her barriers, laying them to rest on the soft, sodden ground. But they’re only on their first glass, standing in his kitchen while they tread lightly around each other, unloading boxes and cleaning away the dusty evidence of his months-long absence.
One that won’t be repeated.
She’s helping him unpack, in more ways than one perhaps, and he doesn’t take it lightly that she answered his infrequent, intermittent texts while he was out of New York and beyond her reach – I’m safe, how’s Noah doing, thinking about you, had any good mac and cheese lately? Doesn’t take it lightly that she answered when he called to tell her he was home, that she came to him.
Not because his life had imploded and he begged her, or because a case brought them back into each other’s orbits. He would swear it’s simply because she wanted to spend time with him.
He tilts his head back at her, a gentle mimicry, and his grin spreads even farther when her eyes do roll in exasperation, so much that it might hurt – a boundary pushed too far. But her smile lingers. It doesn’t cause any pain, and he wonders if anything will, anymore.
Objectively, he knows he will hurt again. He may even hurt her again, though he’ll safeguard her from the intent. They will face strife and probably even danger, like they have in the past. Things may not work out, as she feared. Things haven’t even started, if he’s being honest. But she is here, and she is free with her touches – a hand grazing down his arm, fingers brushing against his as they move about the kitchen, a leaning, full-bodied hug when she met him at the door – and he feels invincible.
God, it’s been so very long. He’d forgotten what it felt like.
Falling in love.
And while he could argue with himself that he has loved Olivia Benson for a long time – that he’s loved her in spite of his resentment, his fear, his absence – he also hasn’t known her for a long time.
It’s a breath of early morning, honeysuckle-sweet air to be able to learn her now, and realize that he loves her still.
Loves her more.
And he wants her to answer the question. So, he ventures first.
“The way you talk with your hands. How you kind of… hold them up, gesture with them,” he says, raising his own hands and waving them, pointing slightly, in a shade of imitation. His grin shapeshifts, ineffectually suppressing feigned shame as her indignation clearly rises, her mouth dropping open in surprise.
He moves toward her, just a little. He won’t corner her yet, he thinks. He has plans of pressing her against the corner of his countertops, the juncture where the walls join, where the cabinets below are useless and cluttered, and unlocking any remaining tension from her form. He has plans of turning her back and lifting her onto the stability of his standalone kitchen island, taking her there. Keeping her here. But he wants his answers, first.
“Are you – I – that,” she is stuttering, and he feels so goddamn good that he is – in this universe – permitted to drive her to incoherence, to tell her the things he likes about her. To shut her up with bafflement, pause her redirect with a smile. A line from one of his older girls’ high school literature homework flutters up to him, unbidden, a memory of children’s chatter and questions on Shakespeare about something that was “due tomorrow, Dad!”
Stop her mouth with a kiss.
“Elliot Stabler. That is not your answer. That better not be your answer.”
He crowds her, moving a tad closer and bringing his wine glass with him, setting it to the side, just next to hers. Together they cast wavering burgundy silhouettes on the white countertops, shadowed from the lights overhead. He watches as she backs against the counter, extending her arm so that they both hold the spindle-frail stems of their glasses, mere inches apart.
He isn’t ready to break the oddly comfortable, flirtatious truce between them; it’s taken so, so long to broker. He has plenty of answers that don’t reach the depths of their partnership, and yet hold undeniable truths of what they were to each other – without his late wife’s scribed misinterpretation – all the same. He wants to give them to her slowly, acclimate her to this new dynamic between them.
“The way you pulled me back, when I was angry. When I crossed the line.”
“Hmm,” she lifts her wine glass to her lips, and he tracks the way her tongue darts out slightly when she takes a sip of the blend, the way the red deepens the shade of her mouth to a soft plum. “I didn’t always do that. I don’t think that’s true, Detective.”
And she fucking knows – he believes she does down to the depths of him – what it does to him when she calls him that, when she pulls rank. It’s all so wonderful. That she’s a mother, a captain, a woman who now holds the things she wanted after eons of holding herself apart. That she’s willing to be here, that she’s not telling him let’s wait. That he is finally home from his latest UC stint and somehow it didn’t set them back another ten years. That she’s aware of the undertones and she’s leaning into them, nonetheless.
Is this supposed to lead me to something? He remembers her posing the question, how she tried to hide the telltale signs of coming tears – remembers feeling his own sorrow at the fact he had to leave just when they seemed to have rounded a corner. But now, he sees the glint of the gold chain around her neck, and he thinks they’re both leading each other.
He wants to give her a gift again. It would be easier if he could wrap this one in a brown paper bag like the last, when he tucked a little box holding universes of longing into a crumpled and unassuming outer package. To lessen the import, minimize the pressure. He can’t do that this time, but he’s come this far, and he doesn’t need to hide.
It's alright if it’s hard. He quoted that Tom Hanks baseball movie to her before, twenty-five years ago. Lifetimes upon lifetimes ago. A different line applies now. The other one – there’s no crying in baseball! – was never true, anyways.
The hard is what makes it great.
Tom Hanks may not have accomplished it in the end, in the film, but he plans to get the girl.
He strips away his pride and gives her his vulnerability, more precious than the compass now strung around her neck.
“The way anything, everything I ever did never felt more certain, never felt more right, than when you were doing it with me. The way the precinct felt like home when I sat across from you, when you were going on about whatever latest screwball theory Munch had told you, swiveling in your chair and stealing my coffee. The way you used to shift your files so I could sit next to you on your desk while Cragen gave us orders. The way I felt like I finally knew for sure that something in this world was fucking preordained because I somehow landed you as a partner.”
Her wineglass hits the granite of the counter with a glassy clink, an echo of how her Cabernet-hued bottom lip drops with a shocked, shaky gasp.
He holds his breath and thinks of the question he risked rage and wounded remembrances to pose to her only moments ago, when she first arrived.
C’mon. Tell me. What did you miss most about me?
When he called to tell her that he was coming back – after the rusty heat of August laid way to drifting leaves and her favorite crisp weather, after she prepared for the onslaught of another holiday season and all the spans of emotions it would hold – air punched out of her lungs on a violent exhale. Like she been struggling to take a deep breath since the day his back retreated from her office door. She tried to prepare herself for any possible outcome, any extenuating circumstance, any way the horizon blue eyes of Elliot Stabler could get under her skin, could bruise and break her from within. She recalled the last three years, and for a moment, she started to adorn her armor. She piled on the ways their interactions had gone awry to hide her soft spots.
I was scared. If I talked to you…
I love you. don’t want to talk about last night. Who’s telling you that?
‘Bout how many?
Hey, my friend, Olivia.
What if it works out?
Wish I could bottle this.
Me, too. Partner.
They are only words, she reminds herself, even as his latest flood over her and wash away her shields in the current – leaving her bare and exposed, but cleaner than she’s felt in years.
It was a real asshole move – to leave her to independence. To terror and isolation. For ten years. To return to her – amidst his own grief and chaos and desperation. To never give her a goddamn second to allow her to adjust, to settle back against the man who for so long was her only constant – and to try to kiss her when she was at her weakest. She still wants to smack him for it.
Then to act with her as one body to save both their lives, to carry her from a diner where he was left blinded and her blood stained the linoleum floor, to wrap his arms around her in relief in an Urgent Care, to give her a – inappropriately expensive – piece of jewelry that would hold her in place while he was away. Whether he intended it to or not.
And now, to sidle back against her, muscles hard and smile wide and eyes maddeningly blue. And ask her what she fucking missed about him.
She ought to punch him. More than that. Fin would probably help her cover it up if she shot him.
But – he called her preordained. Referencing them, their partnership; it doesn’t actually matter to her. What matters is the reality of being fated to someone. The fact that Elliot “I don’t believe in soulmates” Stabler believes that they are fated to each other.
“Elliot,” she murmurs, but he’s been moving steadily closer, and he leans just a little, so that his arms bracket around her and his chest enters her space, silencing her. He smells familiar, iterations of changing scents over the years. Increasingly expensive coffee, the addition of a cologne that fades throughout the day, the absence of the scent of baby formula and just-cut grass that was always present in the early years. He’s still the same, to her.
“I’m not saying any of this to make you feel like ya gotta give me anything back, Liv,” he tells her, voice gruff, thick with unspoken apologies that pinch and prod like semi-healed wounds between them. A muttered I’m sorry while his wife lay dying down the hall, pleading eyes asking her to join him while he searched for his son, the too-forward but charming asks to connect with her own beloved child. She avoided those, retreated to regroup after each interaction.
That is, until a machete’s swing and the triggering sight of her own face – battered and bruised in the mirror – forced her hand.
She doesn’t want to be forced here. She wants to choose this time.
She could keep prying at the bandages, insisting on unproven methods of healing, the long-ago error of calling in a surgeon – only to hear the recommendation of bleeding the already wounded as a treatment. Deciding to make it all the worse in a misguided attempt to make it all better.
Or she could rise from the ashes.
Hell. She’s going to have to give him an answer.
She takes a step forward first, enjoying the way his eyebrows rush together and his eyes widen at the contact of his thighs against hers. Jeans against slacks, denim rubbing against the thin material of the pants she hadn’t changed after work – telling herself on the drive over here that she was not going to go home and change for a get-together that is certainly not a date. Resolutely ignoring the potential strike of fate that Noah is sleeping over at a friend’s house tonight, before their early morning dance practice. A spiral of the lie she has told herself since she thought he might kiss her in Ohio, since he left her with diamonds as a parting gift.
It might be fun, she realizes, after all these years – to corrupt the Catholic schoolboy, the curious voyeur she suspects resides inside the man who held himself apart from her, but whose tread shortened to match hers for some of the best parts of her adult life. He’s changed, too, though – because he doesn’t back away, doesn’t cast his eyes down the way he used to as her partner. The way he used to evade if she caught the way his eyes raked down her, caught him staring at her for too long.
After the initial surprise, a welcoming expression of want wafts over his face.
She wants him like this, too. Smiling at her, teasing her, the way he did in her office before there was buckshot in her hip and a goodbye on his lips. She enjoys the hard-earned levity, but she’s also not quite ready to let him off the hook. For the first time, she thinks they can move forward in tandem. She can ask him to answer for his misdeeds – just as she has been made to answer for hers – while they explore the memories, the moments he told her he wanted to bottle.
“What did I miss about you, or what did I miss while you were gone? Cause there’s a lot. I missed my friend. I missed having a partner I trusted, in the early days. I missed your kids. I missed Eli growing up. I missed you – sort of – learning Italian. I missed who you became during a decade away. And maybe you did miss me like you say, Elliot. My hand gestures, our partnership. But you missed things that happened, too.”
His face falls – don’t worry, we need this, just as much, she wants to whisper. She needs him to be able to navigate the whole of their partnership with her, to recall the years their footsteps sounded as one, but give credence to when there was an ocean between their strides. To the decision that put it there. She pushes a little closer; they’re leaning against each other now – the dynamics of a hug without the holding.
They can do this.
She can do this.
“I know that,” he tells her solemnly, the playfulness put aside. The lines at his eyes deepen with a discerning squint, and she wonders how many of them were also eroded by stress, by regret, by grief. They’ve both paid for their sins in blood. They’ve overpaid – by her scales of justice.
They are owed.
“I know,” he continues, even as their bodies remain tethered, even as he lifts a hand and lets it hover over her face, not quite touching her. An observing bystander could just as easily mistake it for the beginning of a blow as the beginnings of a caress. They’ve never given themselves much leave to be gentle with each other. “I want to know, Liv.”
“You want to know how many people I was with while you were gone?”
He has the grace to look a little chagrinned at that, dropping his hand to his side. It didn’t actually bother her then, that question paired with his boyish expectation. It probably should have, but the tinge of unsuitable jealousy and possessiveness felt like home, even in the chilled setting of a hospital waiting room.
“I want to know everything.”
She nods. She didn’t want to tell others – Brian, Ed. Couldn’t tell them, even when she probably should have. Lindstrom, Fin. She has held onto truths that she has long needed her partner to know. During the in between, when she was sure their time had passed and she would never see him again, she spoke those truths to the smallest hours of night instead. Maybe it was praying, just a little bit. She would never call it that out loud. But she thought if it was close enough, perhaps Elliot’s all-powerful God would whisper her words to him, once they were both gone from this world.
It was as much as she thought she would ever have.
He’s here now, though, and she doesn’t have to pretend to pray to share her truths.
“Not all tonight. We don’t have to talk about it tonight – I don’t think I want to. There’s… good and bad, you know?”
“There always is.”
She shakes her head, and his hand is back, touching her this time, featherlight against her cheek. She lets her eyes drift shut, a little sleepy with the enormity of it all. A little wary of letting the last of her fortifications fall. She feels like she’s had more than one glass of wine, like she’s pleasantly tipsy, leaning into the roughness of the pads of his fingers.
“Not like this, Elliot,” she tells him, and the sadness holds, even if she’s able to keep the nightmares at bay. She has to give him warning; she cannot bombard him with her trauma the way he doused her in his. Hers will bring him self-recrimination and blame, and that’s not what she wants. She simply wants him to know all the parts of her, even the ones she’d rather forget, again. She wants to be known fully, once more.
His eyes darken, and she shakes her head against his hand, because the joy that was stoking in their depths has reduced to embers, and they deserve the fire. Even with their missteps, they’re ready for the flame. She brings her hands up, fingers trailing the muscled ropes of his arms, so that it’s truly an embrace.
She presses her forehead to his and smiles, watching the warmth build once more.
“Good and bad,” she whispers again, and presses her lips against his.
For a moment it is eager and frantic, and she’s drunker with it than she could ever possibly be from the wine. It’s a restoration, a claiming. She feels branded with the lush, dark sweeps as his tongue brushes against hers and she moans into it, reveling in the way her limbs loosen as his brace her. As she feels him everywhere, in every buried facet of her.
His hands are in her hair and his arms tighten around her, turning her and lifting her high to sit on the kitchen counter. She laughs into the kiss. They are far too old for this; her body already protests the abrupt movement. But her mind doesn’t feel that way, her heart doesn’t feel that way. He pushes against her, leaning her back as his hand slopes down her side to grip at her hip, and the other tightens firmly around the back of her neck. A nearly empty box clatters to the floor as she shifts, and neither of them care, they are both wondrously lost to this.
It dawns on her that he’s saying her name like a breath between kisses, over and over, imploring and soft. She adjusts the angle again so she can lope her arms around his shoulders and press her upper body closer to his, feel the way he breathes against her. She twines her legs around his waist to anchor him more closely, and then he’s the one to moan into her mouth, and she smiles around a kiss, gently closing her teeth as she pulls in his lower lip – the one she has seen him chew on, during fraught cases, when he worried for her, when he raged at her.
He’s beautiful, she thinks – only a little reluctantly, damn him – wondering what he would say if she told him she thinks so.
He’s beautiful. And hers.
It feels like the build of a lyrical bridge, the key change in a favorite song, everything heightening to make the things she already loved that much more wonderful. That much more memorable. She’ll sing this melody – his – as much as she can. She’ll sing him in this key, from now on.
Moments pass, and they breathe the same air, and the kiss alters. Calms. His tongue moves against hers, deep and slow, and it feels a little sad, all of a sudden.
“You broke my heart, when you left,” the words are faded, adrift in the kiss just like she is.
She’s not sure why they escaped, why now. Maybe she shouldn’t tell him. Maybe it’s foolish, misguided, but she’s reached the dregs of her reserves and he is warm and real against her, so she uncovers the whole of it.
“I didn’t know grief could hurt like that. That you could feel it so physically. That it could fade but never go away.”
It isn’t an admission of how much she may have felt for him back then, when he wasn’t hers to want or love, but it’s close enough. She grieved him. She always wondered how deeply he mourned her. If that was a betrayal of his wife, or is she the one he betrayed when he left her behind? She pities him – just for the span of a heartbeat between them. His partner and his wife. He was always going to hurt one of them.
He doesn’t flinch or shy away, leaving her to wonder if he felt it, too.
The silence sails on between them, as he locks eyes with hers, and she feels the familiar desire to pull the words back, to run. Maybe she would, if he didn’t have her pinned on his island, standing between her legs, his hand still fiddling with a lock of her hair. His eyes briefly fall, and he studies the strands between his thumb and forefinger with awe, like he’s holding spun gold.
“I want to know all the things you never told me before I left,” he says at last, meeting her gaze again. “I want to know all the things you became while I was gone. I want you to know that no matter what happens here, what you want to take or keep of me, I’m not gonna leave you again.”
He kisses the side of her cheek, the skin she knows is lined at the corner of her eye, signs of age that weren’t present the last time she felt this safe in his presence. His lips graze the temple he once watched a man hold a gun against in an airport storage lot.
She nods, knocking into him a bit, bringing that temple to rest against his. The one she watched a man hold a gun against in an abandoned warehouse.
For the first time in three years, she believes those ten years are in the past, and the future will be far more similar to the years when she thought he would always be her partner. The relief is dizzying, and while she doesn’t tell him she loves him – not yet – it is an aching release to admit to herself that she does.
That she always has.
She answers his question.
“Everything. I missed everything about you, El.”
And it’s his lips against her neck, his breath expelling against her, his stubble scratching against her cheek, and it draws her in – just as his self-certain smile and sparkling, kind-hearted eyes did a quarter century prior. She knows this is it, knows the promise of what’s to come, that they will never be at the starting point again.
They’re here to stay.
She knows it – and his words circle back to her, the ones that confused her all those years ago, the preamble to when he promised her for better or worse. Now justified in a way she’d never expected them to be.
Sometimes you do.