Somebody That I Used to Know
He's watching her. That's for damn sure. Tonight he can see nobody but her, for tomorrow she'll be nothing more substantial than somebody that he used to know.
"And then El and I," Olivia pauses, shoots him a smile, her laughter barely contained. "Then El and I arrive on scene and there are all these hookers and Johns standing around, and three rookies that look like they just stepped into the Twilight Zone."
Fin, Munch, Casey and Cragen all chuckle with anticipation. Liv's a masterful story teller and she knows it. The overcrowded bar is noiseless without her voice. It's the only thing of any importance. It's never been particularly tinny and feminine, but its soft, enigmatic tones will remain with Elliot even when he's abandoned everything else.
"So I ask the rookies what's going on and one comes up to me stuttering 'ma'am this, and ma'am that,' when one of the hookers comes over. Her name was uh, uhm…" Olivia snaps her fingers, perfecting the art of delay.
"Her name was Sandi" Elliot offers quietly. He prefers to think he can exists on the outskirts of tonight, the quieter he is the less noticeable his departure will be.
"No, no. Candi" Liv says, gently grazing his chest with the back of her hand. "With an 'I.'" She scoots closer to him in the booth made for four, but accommodating six. He obligingly moves his arm so her shoulder can settle against his side. Her perfume overwhelms him and he swallows. It was that smell that surrounded him after he became someone he wishes he only used to know.
"Candi with an 'I'" Casey says, "God, sometimes I miss SVU. Never a boring day."
Elliot realizes that Casey's sadness, that glimmer hiding beneath the veneer of a successful job in Jersey, is what will inhabit his eyes for the rest of his years. It pricks at his heart, but he knows it's better this way. He's better being somebody that they used to know.
"So this Candi" Olivia begins again.
"With an 'I'" Munch adds.
Olivia graciously allows the story to tell itself. She won't beg for attention, to demand all eyes on her, she doesn't need to it. It's as natural to her as air. It's the entirety of these nuances about her that Elliot will miss desperately. Sometimes, when things aren't so impossible, he wonders if he couldn't hold onto everything that used to be.
"…So Candi comes up in the middle of this rookie's sad stuttering and is in full on diva mode. I'm talking snaps in a circle and lips so sparkly Nicki Minaj would be envious…"
Liv knows when to pause to let the scene settle on her audience. Sure enough, the others are enthralled waiting for the hilarity sure to follow. Elliot turns his head from her for a minute, just allowing himself to test how awful it's going to feel when he creates distance. He's never felt so lonely in her company before, and yet, the idea of deserting it is nothing short of horrific.
"Candi comes up to the rookie says 'squeeze me, who the hell are you calling ma'am? This is a miss, and ain't she fine'" Olivia says, giggling in anticipation of the punch line.
Elliot remembers a time when she didn't giggle, didn't smile. She came to SVU to bury herself in depravity to prove a demented point created out of loneliness. He likes to think he proved her mission invalid, that he tempered her self-loathing with peace. He likes to think that everything they used to be is what made them who they are today.
"Then, if the rookie wasn't thoroughly embarrassed, Candi says that she'll 'go willing into the hands of the less fashionably challenged.' She then sticks her hands out, offers me her pink handcuffs and says 'please, silver clashes with my shoes.'"
The table laughs just as their booze arrives. Three beers, a seltzer, a water and a bourbon. Fin, Munch and Casey reach for their Heinekens, Cragen reaches for the seltzer and Elliot accepts the bourbon. Olivia stirs the ice in her water.
"Water Liv, come on. It's your birthday weekend" Munch says, "You have to celebrate being over the hill before the hill's out of sight"
"Over the hill my ass, I'm 42" Olivia says, settling deeper into Elliot as a group of frat boys let in the early May wind. "But I have an early day tomorrow. Right Elliot?"
"Y-yeah" Elliot stutters out before taking another sip of his bourbon. Ever since he's known Liv, the Saturday before her birthday he's spent the day with her. Dawn until dusk. Whatever she wanted to do. Whether it was paperwork, go down to Rockaway, stare at the ceiling or run the length of Manhattan, he's been there. It's a tradition, something he wants to continue, but can barely imagine executing. He needs their life together to be something he used to know. There's a visceral need to beg her to collect her life and remove it from his.
"What are you two going to do?" Cragen asks, reminiscent of memories he's known them to make. Days when Elliot and Olivia chased perps until eleven fifty-nine and ended the day with 7-11 brownies, or nights when Elliot filled the cribs with balloons and told Liv she had to pop them all in five minutes, no guns allowed. He envies their partnership sometimes, wishing he too could find someone with whom he would always make sense.
"I don't have anything special in mind" Liv says languidly. She pulled a double the day before and its catching up to her. "When you're 42, you can't be picky"
"Bullshit," Casey says, sipping her beer. Her rings flash, her wardrobe has become the single sign that Jersey is rubbing off on her. When they exiled her from Manhattan, she found solace in something that wasn't quite her, but she conformed. Elliot's worst fear is that he'll gain the courage to leave only to arrive somewhere he'll never adapt to. "You, Olivia, will be picky until the day you die"
Olivia laughs at her friend, missing their time together. "Yeah, but seeing how quickly Elliot's downing the bourbon, we may spend the whole day nursing the hair of the dog"
Olivia nudges Elliot with her shoulder, making it a joke the table can chuckle at, but he knows she's worried. He's never been a big drinker, and he always shied away from hard liquor when he was with Olivia. They both thought he knew better. But it's one of those nights. It's the end of something he will only be allowed to call a 'used to,' after this.
"I have to make up for you" Elliot says, nudging her water. "And don't pretend that two years ago you weren't doing the same thing."
"What happened two years ago?" Cragen asks innocently.
"Nothing Cap" Fin says, waving him off.
Everyone laughs to themselves at the memory of Olivia's fortieth birthday. She and Elliot had broken into Cragen's secret stash and drank until they couldn't see. In a drunken haze they'd rearranged all the letters on the keyboards and name plates on the lockers, and then drunk dialed Casey in Jersey with some pressing warrant for Elliot's son's stuffed bear. Everyone remembers it as a great practical joke, a sign Benson and Stabler were finally 'fixed.' Olivia remembers it a bit differently. She remembers it as two weeks past when Elliot nearly bled to death from a smuggler's bullet; and a year out from her exile in Oregon. What the others considered harmless antics was the only way to keep her transfer request off Cragen's desk. Watching Elliot drown in the bourbon, Olivia is hesitant to assume that he isn't exactly where she was exactly two years ago. If she can only have one wish this birthday, it's that no pink sheets break up the only thing she knows well enough to call her own.
"That was a good night" Olivia concedes quietly, wrapping her hands around her cup.
Elliot notices the melancholy in her eyes then and he wishes he hadn't put it there. That year had been hard for her, and yet little does she know how difficult this next year could prove to be. She has no idea she's enjoying a life that she will soon have to say she only used to live.
"But not as good as tonight," Fin cheers, "To Liv!"
"To Liv!" the table echoes, glasses clinking.
Elliot forces a smile, wishing he didn't have to cut himself out. But he knows it's a lot easier to be somebody they used to know then somebody they wished they'd never known.