Title: Streetlights and Skylines
Author: Sara and Lizzie
Rating: T for language, a little violence and little sex
Disclaimer: Dick Wolf is God, obviously, since he really does own Law and Order, but since he'd never stick this on at 10 pm Tuesdays, we took the liberty of doing it for him.
Summary: Four years ago, Elliot attended Olivia's funeral. Little did he know, the casket was empty, and Olivia was in a condo in Los Angeles, calling herself Lucy. But, when the man who forced her from her life dies, she comes back to New York, and the 1-6, to find her former partner and boyfriend, engaged.
"All this time, I wonder how I never got the burn, and if I'm ever gonna learn." –Matchbox 20
June 13, 2006.
She sighed heavily. The sun was just starting to set over the Los Angeles skyline. Slim, graceful hands ran through sun streaked brown hair, and chocalate eyes stared out the glass window of Los Angeles International Airport. Long slender legs bent and hit plastic. Olivia Benson sat on the hard plastic seats and thought. The call had come five hours ago.
One day shy of four years gone, and the call came. She was going home. Olivia picked the cell phone out of her lap and dialed the still familiar number. It was almost ten in New York City, but she knew Don Cragen would be awake.
"Cragen."
She paused, having not been ready for sounds of her old life.
"Hello?" he demanded.
She found her voice. "Hey cap."
Silence. She couldn't speak and neither could he.
"Olivia?"
"I'm coming home."
"Witness Protection?"
"Los Angeles."
They spoke in short phrases, seemingly unable to string sentences together. The story pieced together, and slowly the last four years became more than gaps in lives.
"When do you leave?" her former boss asked her.
"Any minute." She replied.
His emotion covered by the darkness that had recently settled over the city, Cragen wrestled with his decsions and his demons. He saw Elliot's hollow eyes, and made a choice. "I'll expect you at work as soon as possible."
Relief flooded Olivia. "There's a place for me?"
"Elliot went through 8 partners in four years. Your desk is empty."
"I'll come in tomorrow."
Cragen was silent, hovering between letting her come home to a false vision of how things would be, or leveling with her. She read something in the silence that ate up the airwaves.
"How is he, anyway?" she asked tentatively.
"Engaged." Cragen asnwered plainly. "I'll see you tomorrow Liv."
She disconnected, and turned back to the window. She stared out at the vastness that was Los Angeles, and followed the 405 with her eyes. Los Angeles. It was a lot like New York, a glitzy city with a dark underbelly. He was engaged. To someone else.
She looked up at the Hollywood Hills, and out to the shoreline in the distance. She never told him. Never insisted on a midnight meeting like Alex had. Never made a discreet but telling phone call. Never sent a truthful letter or email. Because she hadnt wanted him to put his life on hold for her. It could have taken decades for her to get cleared.
But she thought he would put his life on hold for her. It was startling to hear that there was someone else. Her eyes slid back to the window. She tried to gauge the towns that made up LA. She picked out Santa Monica, and Venice Beach, and Beverly Hills. It was picturesque, really, if you could get past the traffic and the smog.
The sun was always shining here. The palm trees always stood tall, the beautiful people were everywhere. To stay here would be easy. She could cancel the plane ticket, call Cragen, head back to her condo in Santa Monica and leave it behind for good.
To stay here, in this wonderland, would be easy. To convince herself she could love someone, someone she had never met, someone who wasn't Elliot would be easy. To fall out of love with him and into love with someone else would be easy.
But Olivia Benson had never really done easy. And she wasn't about to start now. She looked out over the city again. It was pretty. A fantasy. And it was easy. It lacked, she saw substance. It lacked the complexity of New York. It lacked Elliot. So he was engaged.
So he wasn't hers anymore. But Olivia was a fighter, and she decided, in the airport, that she would have to fight for him. She couldn't live with herself if she gave it anything less than a fight.
The phone rining at 4 am woke Elliot Stabler. He rolled out of bed, and pulled on some clothes. Another day, another dollar. He scoffed at the simplicity of the saying. More like, andother gutter, another girl.
He sighed. Four years. Four fucking years of total emptiness. Here's to you, Liv, he thought sadly, hating himself again for not being able to rewrite their past. Not their past. It was only his past now. She was gone.
He lived in an apartment in the city now. He drove five blocks out of his way every day, just so he wouldn't have to pass hers. The thought of someone else living there made him feel sick. Elliot turned to his window and watched the skyline. It illuminated his bedroom, and the lights seemed to stretch up to the sky.
Sometimes he dreamed of getting out. Away from the city where every he had covered what felt like every corner, every alley and every empty lot with her. Sometimes he imagined picking up and leaving this place that made him whisper olivia, and going somewhere with a little less substance. Somewhere sunny, where you werent so pensive, weren't so attached.
But there was Andrea now. They had started dating two years ago, when it became clear to Elliot that moving on was a fruitless effort and he might as well just start faking it.
So he pretended to be in love with her, because some days he believed it and it all hurt a little less. She kept him sane, and kept him here. Because he could never put her through what he went through.
He collected his keys, badge and gun, and left his apartment, emerging into the midst of warm summer night, in the city that refused to fall asleep.
The sun had been setting when she left Los Angeles, and it was just peeking up over the horizon when she got back to New York. She took a cab from JFK to her apartment. She marveled at the sights out the cab window, as if she had never seen them before.
"Pretty amazing, isn't it?" the cabbie asked her, mistaking her for a tourist.
"Nothing else like it." She agreed.
He smiled. "I'd be careful miss. Lot can happen in the big city."
"I'm betting on it."
The cab stopped in front of her building. She looked up at it, unchanged. She reached for the keys she had kept in her bag for four years, knowing that while her name would no longer be on the mailbox, the apartment was untouched.
"This the place?" the driver asked.
Olivia checked the fare, paid and tipped him. "This isn't the place. But it's my place." She sailed out the cab, and walked back into her old life.
Elliot shook his head. The sun was setting when he left this building, and now it was gaining elevation in the sky on his way back in. He sighed, tossed his stuff on his desk, and prepared to stomp into Cragen's office. Then it caught his eye. There was a cup of coffee on his desk, in the same cup that they gave at the place on the way to the station from Olivia's apartment.
No, Olivia's old apartment. He started to move and then stopped again. There was a stack of files and a thin sweater was draped over the arm of the chair. Elliot sighed again. Round nine. This time, he made it all the way to Cragen's office.
"Cap." He said, irritated. "Another one?"
Cragen shook his head, looking, as Elliot interpreted, overwhelmed.
"What is it?" the detective demanded.
Captain Cragen didn't know what to say. Olivia was wandering around the precinct, told to stay out of the squad room until Cragen had time to talk to Elliot, but IAB had just, wanting a full report on the whereabouts and reinstatement of Detective Benson.
"Elliot, head to the roof. I'll be there in ten minutes, I'll explain everything."
Olivia stood, marveling over the immense and expansive skyline. She looked up towards Harlem, and across the river to Brooklyn, mesmerized by the city.
She took it in, and felt the burning feeling she hadn't felt for years. She stared across Manhattan and let the determination and the anticipiation mix inside of her. She heard him come up the stairs and cross to the opposite side of the roof.
He didn't even look up. Elliot stormed up the stairs and to a corner of the roof without taking his eyes of off his feet. The sight of the sun rising over the city and making the rivers glitter was picteresque and pretty, and didn't match his mood at all.
She watched his back to her. He heart raced so fast she thought she might fall over. Four years. She bit her lip painfully hard, half expecting to wake up in a hospital bed and find she had been in a coma, and he was still married to Kathy.
She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again. Still on the roof. It seemed so silent up here, and she thought she heard him exhale. Her hands were shaking. She wanted to slink back down the stairs and wait forever. But that wasn't what she came back for.
"Elliot."