Olivia Benson grew-up in the heart of Manhattan. She took her first steps in a city as known for creating individuals as for swallowing them whole. From birth she made her mark in the city—in blood, in tears, in smiles, in firsts and in farewells. She was conceived on its streets and was branded a New Yorker.
Being a New Yorker means you understand the city. You walk like you're famous, even if your own mother has forgotten your name. You buy your groceries on the street next to where you buy your books, and you never, ever doubt the quality of a cup of coffee from a cart that also sells falafel. It's the city, and it's what you do. It is what Olivia Benson does. She challenges the grit and grime every day, coming out dusty yet undefeated. She's defiant, disobedient and a die-hard citizen of a city that disregards the laws of mercy. Olivia, however, never asked for mercy in the first place.
But she needed it. She needed mercy for a lifetime of forgotten existence. For a city boasting almost 8 million people, it has a loneliness that is crippling. It disabled Olivia at birth. It grew cantankerous in the numerous birthdays even time forgot, in the evenings spent pretending to fall in love, in the mornings when cereal was poured for one or coffee grew stale in an apartment crowded with solidarity. An indefatigable individual by default, she learned to cope with her disability. It would kill her eventually, but she lived like she was dying anyway.
Then she fell headfirst into SVU, an unintentional life support. No longer was nighttime a moment of restless solitude, but instead an 8 hour shift spent with Munch's caustic humor. Breakfast was whatever doughnut had chocolate because Fin was allergic to anything she claimed as a favorite. Her Friday nights transformed into bar blazes with Casey, too many bottles of wine with Alex or a rough session with the rock wall and Monique. Cragen lit a cigar with her every time a birthday snuck up on her, and she'll never forget the sight of her apartment crowded with Cassidy's unwelcome, yet necessary, warmth. She had defied loneliness. She had beaten the city before it consumed her the way she used to think it was destined to.
That is, until she met Elliot Stabler. Despite what has become legend, Elliot and Olivia existed as singles. There was Stabler and Alfonse and Benson and Munch long before there was anything so iconic as Benson and Stabler. New York is a city where change is inevitable though, and the only variant is whether it is facilitated with a tantrum or a smile. When fat old Alfonse decided to abandon the city that had given him so much for the sunny beaches of Florida, Stabler met Benson. Without so much as a warning, Olivia lost the ability to defy loneliness. Things changed, and the city had never seen so many tantrums.
Stabler wasn't a New Yorker. Sure he had the accent and the love of the streets and he grew up in Long Island, but he wasn't a New Yorker. He had too many family photos, too much pink laundry and shared memories to be a New Yorker the way Olivia was a New Yorker. He walked fast, but didn't always seem to know where he was going. Olivia hated it. Stabler hated her.
There was a period of time when Benson and Stabler didn't work. They were too different. He had too much he didn't want, and she wanted too much she didn't have. Their only commonality was that odd New York loneliness that was longer than the most unendurable city block. In fact, it was on one of those city blocks that Olivia lost her ability to defy loneliness and Elliot realized he wasn't so good either.
Caught in the August swelter, hungry yet refusing to acknowledge it, Olivia noticed the blackout first. It was almost eight, or perhaps just past nine—memory fades—and suddenly the city was dark. Sweating and headachy from a long day chasing their tails, Elliot doesn't stop arguing when his partner stops walking.
"Elliot."
"There's no difference between being lonely and being alone, Olivia. He's a suspect either way"
"Elliot…"
"It's too damn hot to be around people anyway. He probably knows that and thinks we're stupid enough to think it's too hot to be a rapist too—"
"Elliot!"
"What!" He was keying open the car door, impatient and anxious, when he swiveled around to shout at his partner. If one were to judge a book by its cover, they'd assume Elliot Stabler was a screamer—and they'd be completely right. "Did you forget how to walk? Let's go!"
"There's a blackout" she says, the exact same way one might remark that the supermarket closes at eleven. "Streetlights are out. No walk signals, traffic isn't moving."
Like a confused tourist, Elliot disgusted Olivia as he consulted the streets with fevered misdirection. New York cringed and Olivia sneered. "It's just this street" he asserts.
"The lights are out from here to Harlem, Elliot. There's no way it's just this street. We're stuck."
Elliot didn't know if it was fear at the idea of being stuck anywhere, or outrage at the fact that he was stuck with Olivia Benson that knotted his stomach.
"Get in the car Benson. A few down streetlights don't matter."
"I'm not going anywhere. It's getting dark. Police presence will be needed soon. Plus, there's no air anywhere in the city. What are we going back to, a hot precinct that smells like Munch's coffee tastes?"
Elliot stared at her, frustrated she was right and yet glad she was never wrong. He turned, sat on a sizzling stoop and groaned as his stomach growled and his head pounded. "I hate New York."
"Trust me, it hates you too." Olivia threw the response out like it meant nothing. Elliot took it like it meant everything. Olivia is New York, and Elliot refused to have something hate him—even in metaphor.
"It's wasting it's time then" he grouches, wiping sweat from his brown as he leaned back against the sticky steps. She hadn't sat down yet, but instead was watching the people across the street throw open windows to let the hot air circulate with the hotter air.
"You shouldn't judge it so harshly. Why do you care what it does with its time anyway?" she replies, and felt like this metaphor started accidentally. For the daughter of an English professor, this was delightfully bizarre.
"If it affects me, then I care" he says, and swallowed on a sandpaper throat. "I don't want to waste my time trying to change something that has been that way forever."
Olivia was too exhausted to continue the metaphor standing up, so she slouched against the car. The world spun a bit and she realized just how hungry she was. "New York doesn't start out hating anyone. It can't. It won't. It wasn't designed for that."
He watched her fade, her hunger and her desire to please him taking her down slowly, slowly, slowly until she was slouched on the step next to him. She put her head in her hands, licked parched lips and slowly closed her eyes against the world.
"How do you know what the city was designed for?" he asks. He was challenging her because it was hot, people were about to start looting and he was so thirsty he was seeing stars too. He didn't know whose masochism was winning, but they were both losing. "It's a little arrogant to assume what an entire city was born to do"
She wasn't interested in continuing the metaphor anymore. If he wanted to know things about her, he should have just asked. But, she spoke anyway, if only to chase the heat away with her puny decibels.
"I was conceived on these streets" she says as she dug in her pocket for a handkerchief. She brought it to her temple, dabbed and then let the damp fabric crumple to the ground. "I know that the city doesn't hate anyone who didn't hate it first"
Elliot felt the metaphor growing malicious, too personal for a relationship steeped in the ambivalent. He swallowed then, and when he spoke he cut all ties. "What do you want Olivia?" he asks, and didn't elaborate.
She was taken aback by his question. What does she want? No one had ever asked her that. She was baffled by the question, discomforted by her inability to answer. "I want to live with New York, not just survive in it." She didn't know why she said any of that. It was true and somehow saying it out loud sounded like a betrayal for which all she stood, or perhaps, fell.
"We want the same things then" he says. There was a clack of thunder somewhere, he remembered because she had jumped and at the time he'd blamed it on the noise.
"We just want it to work out" she says, and he scooted over on the stoop. She didn't take the invitation. This wasn't finished. Little did she know it never would be. "All of it."
He never would figure out what 'it' was, but he would later admit to not thinking too hard about it. 'It' was a feeling, a sense of being. He was never alone when they had 'it.' New York City was full of people looking for and loosing 'it.' "Everything is going to be okay then."
She heard those words and that was when she stopped defying loneliness. It settled into her heart and transformed into something of inexorable significance. She'd later realize it was greater than love, stronger than hate and bigger than either she or Elliot. She never named it, and could never explain it. "Is that even possible?" she questions. "It's a lot to ask for even a little bit to be okay, let alone everything."
He stood up then, took her by the hand and guided her down the darkened street. She'd followed, possessed and consumed and yet never overcome by so much free will in her life. "It's New York Olivia. The only possibility is everything."
She'd smiled then and he'd laughed at how profound he wasn't. Then they carried on forwards, beating against the crowded New York streets until they were adrift in the crowd. Mixing with the myriad individuals, they faced hate and love and greed and gratitude until they would eventually part ways 14 years later. Heartbroken, pissed and better for it, they let go of each other. But they never forgot that they were one of the few the city selected as the chosen ones, the only individuals to know what it felt like to truly have everything. They were, and always would be, New Yorkers.