A/N: Sorry about the delay, I hope this update is worth the wait. Let me know!
9 - NEEDS
When Carisi arrived at the squad room in the morning, he was surprised to see Amanda already there, focused on her computer screen, sitting very still in her chair as if any movement could ruin all her work.
"Good morning, early bird," he said, calling her attention, a bit sorry to disturb her concentration. "What time did you get here?"
"Mornin'," she replied with an excited smile. "I just wanted to get a headstart on the traffic cam footage, and it paid off."
"Really? What do you got?" he hurriedly took his suit jacket off and rolled up his shirtsleeves as he moved right next to her.
"You remember our mystery man in black?" Amanda barely waited for him to get close enough. "Well, we'd only seen him go in then come out of the building, right?"
"Matching the timeline, but no sign of who he was." He leaned on her desk with one hand and approached the screen to get a better look. "Can you see his face in the new footage?"
"No, but we've got him getting into a car and driving away," she moved the video's progress bar to that specific point in the footage.
"Can you make out the license plate?" Carisi asked, getting closer and squinting his eyes.
"Just a 4 and a T, the rest is too fuzzy," she paused the video and zoomed in on the license plate, but it was indeed difficult to recognize the letters and numbers. "TARU's working on it."
"Well, that's great! Finally something concrete on this guy. We should tell the lieutenant." He took his phone out from his pocket. "She texted me earlier saying she would interview the wife herself."
"Oh, right," Amanda said distractedly as the mention of Olivia reminded her of what she had witnessed the night before.
Carisi frowned. "What was that?"
"What was what?" Amanda stood up and tried to escape towards the break room.
"That face. You know something?"
"What is there to know?" She couldn't help smiling, knowing how unconvincing she sounded. She poured some coffee for herself, avoiding his stare, but she knew he wouldn't give up.
"Does it have to do with Stabler?" She hesitated, trying to decide if she should say anything. "I'll take that as a yes. Come on, Amanda, tell me."
"Okay, but please keep your mouth shut, all right?" she stared intently into his eyes, raising her eyebrows.
"Of course, I'm not going to tell anyone." He couldn't help smiling at her attempt to sound threatening.
"Good. Well… Yesterday I walked in on them…" she paused, hesitant, her last chance to give up spilling it, but his look of anticipation was so amusing that she revelled on it and craved for his reaction to the news. This was Carisi, what bad could it do to tell him? "Kissing," she finally whispered.
His mouth dropped open, making her smile. "Shut up!" she said, laughing and lightly punching his arm.
"I didn't say anything!" he defended himself. "I knew there was something between them."
"I don't know," she shook her head. "It looked like it was a first kiss."
"No way…" he considered it for a minute. "Twelve years as partners? Can you imagine carrying a torch for someone you work with for so long?"
"Can't you?" Amanda teased. "I mean, four years isn't twelve, but… "
"W-what are you…" he stuttered, "...talking about?"
Now he was the one sounding unconvincing, and Amanda enjoyed every millisecond of the mixture of shock, embarrassment and panic in his features. Her phone beeped, and Carisi was thankful for the interruption. Her expression changed from a mocking smile into a triumphant one.
"We got it," she said, almost running back to her desk. When Carisi reached her, she was already on the computer running the license plate.
"Oh my God, look who's the owner," she pointed at the screen. They stared at each other for a moment, astonished. "I'll be damned."
"So, what have you been up to in these last seven years?" Olivia asked Elliot a few minutes after the waitress had left with their orders written down on her pad.
It was at the same time hard and easy being around each other. It wasn't like they hadn't spent thousands of mornings like that, sharing a meal while out in the field together; the problem was that they hadn't shared a meal with each other in too many years. While they had walked to a diner they always used to go to in the area without even discussing it and just as wordlessly picked their old booth, in a corner in the back, they also couldn't avoid the awkward silence as each tried to calculate the safest way to cross that seven-year gap. What do you talk about with the person you know best in the world, but whose life you no longer know anything about?
There was also the elephant in the room – the kiss. Olivia knew it would come up sooner or later, but she decided that it wasn't the best topic to end an awkward silence with, or start breakfast conversation with for that matter. She figured they had to start somewhere, and as pathetic as it may sound, there was no other way to ask about what he had been up to but to ask what he had been up to; they had already spent enough time discussing their past together. Elliot was relieved that she had initiated the conversation, but he had some trouble dealing with the ball once it was in his court.
"Well..." he hedged. He didn't know exactly where to start and how much information to disclose. He tried to balance how much of it was relevant to share with her now and how much of it he himself wanted to revisit, his only certainty being that he had to tell her what had happened to his marriage. "For the first three years or so I tried to focus on my family. Kathy and I moved, as you know. We moved to Jersey."
"Wow, Jersey," She rested her chin in her hand and looked away as if she was ashamed for him.
"Yeah, I know," he replied, smiling, indeed a bit embarrassed. "It was her idea…"
"Of course," Olivia chuckled, amused that he wanted her to know the idea hadn't been his.
"She said we needed a fresh start and it seemed to be in sync with everything else changing in my life, so I figured it was the best thing to do. We got a nice big house there, with bedrooms for all the kids, even though Eli was the only one still living with us at that point."
Olivia welcomed the old, familiar pain of hearing him talk about his marriage and it was just like before: she felt like a good friend for listening at the same time that she resented herself for doing so. He went on.
"It turns out that moving didn't help at all. I went through a rough patch after the shooting and my retirement, it took me a long time to adjust to not being a cop anymore… To leaving SVU. You know, when you work the long hours we did, you think that all you want is to have time for yourself again, but having all that time in my hands made me crazy."
Elliot left out the part about having a hard time adjusting to being away from Olivia, as well as the part about Kathy catching him mumbling her name in his sleep quite a few times. Olivia, in turn, was a bit surprised to hear that. Her resentment had made her believe he had been okay and even relieved after he left.
"All of that caused a lot of problems," he continued vaguely, "so at one point we tried counseling."
"Counseling? I never thought I'd hear that, Elliot Stabler in couples therapy!" Olivia regretted her mocking tone right after she said that, but he didn't seem to mind.
"Well, obviously it didn't work," he grinned, lifting his left, ringless hand to illustrate, then rested it on the table next to where Olivia's hand was, causing it to twitch slightly. "Only helped us realize it was over, had been for a long time."
"I'm sorry." Olivia's tone was softer, almost concerned, tempted to take his hand in hers, but refraining from it.
"Well… The truth is we never should have gotten back together. We did it for Eli… But it was never the same. When you've been married to someone for that long, you can never see them as not being family, but that's not the same thing as still being in love."
Olivia was surprised by that admission. She had suspected he felt that way at the time, but she had always thought he and Kathy must have figured it all out after his retirement. Meanwhile, his left and her right hand remained on the table right next to each other, frozen, and she wondered if he was as tempted to take her hand as she was to touch his.
"So you moved out?" she asked, keeping her hand completely still.
"Yeah, and we got divorced."
He emphasized the word divorced and stared deeply into Olivia's eyes then, which made her think that maybe he wanted to make it clear that he was available – without actually saying that because, as much as he might have worked on expressing his feelings (had that happened during couples therapy?), he was still Elliot Stabler and wouldn't come out with the truth or his intentions right off the bat. She decided not to dwell into it, though.
"And you've been living in your bachelor pad ever since." She smiled.
Elliot laughed a little. "It's not like that. It was hard in the beginning, you know? I had nothing. No family, no job, no…" He bit back a you that had been ready to follow, replacing it with something more appropriate. "... friends."
"That's when the cabin in the woods comes into the picture?"
"Yeah, pretty much… Started as a getaway place, I would take Eli there, sometimes my other kids when they weren't too busy. But I started enjoying spending time alone, I have a garden there…"
"And you chop wood." Her smile widened as she nodded at his formerly suspicious scratched arm. "You have hobbies."
"Old man stuff. I'm an old man now, Liv," he laughed.
And then Olivia felt it; his hand had timidly approached hers enough for their fingers to brush against each other, and after that first, electric contact, he went ahead and actually took her hand in his. She immediately felt protected and warm, as if his hand and his overall presence brought some sort of reassurance, some insight into a bigger, higher truth or purpose. She tried not to focus too much on that and simply returned the gentle squeeze he'd given her fingers as she circled them around his, and both turned their heads to watch their hands connecting.
Elliot started slowly tracing patterns around her knuckles with his thumb, experimenting with this newfound intimacy that, although not being encouraged, was no longer being restrained, not by any sense of prohibition or the concrete distance that had separated them for years. It felt so natural that it scared him, and he realized that was probably why he had always refrained so much from having any physical contact with her during their partnership years – maybe he knew that if that door was ever opened, nothing would be able to close it.
He had been just about ready to walk out of her life all over again the night before, and yet there he was, holding her hand and not being able to imagine ever being away from her again. He knew he wasn't very good at dealing with feelings, but he figured that even an expert wouldn't be able to untangle the confusion he felt right now.
Olivia was pressing her lips together, still looking at their hands, when she felt Elliot's eyes on her again, watching her every move. After a long pause, she spoke, changing the subject and not shying away from what she wanted to know while making an effort not to sound resentful.
"Why did you leave last night?" She looked up and stared deeply into his eyes.
He hesitated, looking for the right words. Then he sighed again, and finally spoke. "Look, I realized I was being a jerk all over again by coming back, invading your life, your space... You did well without me. Made lieutenant, commanding officer of the unit, you became a mother… I don't want to get in the way of any of that. I want you to be happy."
Olivia scoffed, then smiled, noticing her reaction confused him. "You can't help yourself, can you? Always deciding what's best for me without even asking me."
"Liv…" he started to protest, but Olivia waved her available hand dismissively and squeezed his with her other one so as to let him know it wasn't an accusation.
"I probably shouldn't be, but I'm glad to see something that hasn't changed about you," she said softly.
Their breakfast arrived then, and both welcomed the pause in conversation. They were forced to unwillingly break contact, and Olivia felt as if her body had instantly dropped a few degrees in temperature.
"So tell me about Noah," Elliot said with a soft smile after a few moments of eating in silence.
Olivia smiled wholeheartedly, all her teeth showing, and forced him to widen his smile as well. "You saw him at the station, didn't you?" she asked. "Before your little disappearing act."
"I did," Elliot chuckled. "He's a beautiful boy."
"He is, isn't he?" Olivia looked out the window, sighing, her eyes filled with love as she talked about her son. "He's my whole world. He's so smart, and so sweet. And a fighter too, he went through a lot. I adopted him as a baby, I actually found him during a case."
Elliot gave her a few moments to decide if she was going to say more about the case, but he noticed she didn't seem to want to get into that at the moment.
"Did it make the job more difficult?" He was thinking about the times he had told her she didn't understand something because she wasn't a mother. She remembered the same thing.
"Oh yeah," she nodded vehemently, smiling. "But also made it that much more important."
Elliot nodded, looking down. She was right. She usually was. And she was a better person than he was; she always had been, but being a mother made her an even better person, if that was even possible. Of course that would be her answer. He felt a whole new layer of admiration for her washing over him.
"I'm really happy for you, I know how much you wanted this," he said after a while, bringing her attention back from wherever she had been staring at out the window. "I'm sorry I wasn't there."
She closed her eyes for a moment, pressing her lips together. She was sorry about that too. She could have used his support throughout everything that had happened. But she had made it on her own, and that had been important, too.
"Maybe we needed this time apart," she considered. "You know… a lot happened to me. I didn't do as fine as it may seem. But I grew. I grew so much during this time away from you. I had to. I used to feel like I needed you for everything. At work, emotionally… Even to protect me, as much as I've always said I didn't need you to do that." She paused, smiling with pursed lips. "But after everything that happened in these seven years, everything I survived on my own… I found out that I didn't need you. That I didn't need anyone. That's the thing about being alone… You can't count on anyone, but you also don't depend on anyone. Being away from you reminded me of that."
A few moments of silence followed, and it was Elliot's turn to look out the window. He had never realized how much Olivia actually needed him; she had always acted like she didn't need anybody, and he had been stupid enough to buy it. The way his departure had forced her to realize she could indeed stand on her own wasn't that different from his realization, after his retirement and his divorce, that he could be alone and not be defined by his family, his job, or Olivia, but he couldn't help but feel sorry about what she'd had to go through without him.
What she may not have known was that he had a completely different perspective on his influence in her life. He faced her again and tried to explain it.
"I hate that you had to go through all that because of me, but I thought you'd be better off. You know, I always had this thought in the back of my head about how you would be happier if I disappeared from your life."
Olivia frowned. "How come?"
"To an extent I always knew I held you back," he started, hesitantly. He didn't want it to come out wrong. "I knew that you had issues opening up to people, and I knew that being so close to me wasn't helping with that at all. I always thought that being close to me kept you away from other people and that I was selfish for knowing that and still keeping you like that for myself."
He paused, watching her eyes flicker as she processed the information. He had imagined that she hadn't thought about it that way. He continued. "That's part of why I didn't stay in touch. It's like what you said about Jessica, I didn't want to keep you invested in a relationship that wasn't going anywhere, that wasn't even going to be the same. Even being right there next to you, I wasn't. Not in the way you deserved."
"Maybe not, but maybe it was convenient for me to just keep things the way they were," she admitted, maybe for the first time. He seemed puzzled now. "Well, being in love with someone unavailable was the perfect excuse to never let anyone get closer, wasn't it? I wouldn't fall for anyone else and you wouldn't be with me either. Nothing could be safer than that. Or why did you think I kept trying to save your marriage harder than you did?"
"I never thought about it like that." He grinned sadly, then bit his lower lip as he watched her closely. "And did you? I mean… Fall for someone else... After I left?"
"I let people get closer," she replied after a while, analyzing her most recent relationships as she went along. "Maybe not close enough, but much closer than ever before."
Elliot let it slide that she didn't answer his question directly, partly glad since at the same time he did and didn't want to know. She seemed to be balancing whether to reveal more.
"I really wanted to give it a shot, and I did, a few times..." she went on. "A shot at having a real relationship, that could turn into a family. And I got to experience happy relationships."
"But?" he stared at her expectantly.
She grinned, biting her lower lip, amused that he knew there was a but even before she did. "But those relationships taught me that I didn't need a happy relationship to be happy. I was trying to fill a void, find what I thought was missing in my life, but it wasn't those relationships. I realized that it wasn't about having a close relationship or forming a family, it was about finding someone you want to have those things with. And, to be honest, I never found that. Not in those relationships."
Elliot nodded, then looked down, moving what was left of his eggs around with his fork and trying to decide if it was okay to be glad she had never found someone she wanted a family with. When she continued, he looked up into her eyes again.
"For a long time, maybe because I didn't exactly have a family growing up, and maybe because I had the perfect happy American family right next to me every day…" Olivia smiled, hoping he would take that as a joke, which he seemed to do as he smiled lightly. "I thought this is what I needed, what I wanted. But looking at the most serious relationships I had, I couldn't see myself having a family with them. I tried to see it… Especially with Brian… But I just couldn't."
"Whoa, whoa, wait a minute," Elliot interrupted her urgently, dropping his fork noisily. "Brian? Not…"
"Cassidy, yes," she nodded, shutting her eyes tightly, regretting letting Brian's name slip but also amused by Elliot's reaction. He wasn't even trying to conceal his jealousy. "It's a really long story, but we even moved in together at one point."
"Wow…" he muttered, his voice weak, a bit louder than a whisper. "Son of a bitch…"
Olivia laughed. "Yeah, well. I knew the first time that he wasn't the one for me, as I remember telling you, but we tried a second time around and it was good for a while, you know? A long time had passed, we were both very different."
"But you were right the first time." He needed that confirmation.
"Yeah. But he's a good man. He tried his very best. They all did, and so did I. It just wasn't meant to be. Plus I got to have my family after all, and it's the happiest I've ever been."
Elliot smiled, and they both nodded. Then he looked away, trying to suppress the image of Cassidy and Olivia living together, the son of a bitch with his hands all over her, sharing a bed with her. But what right did he have to question any relationship Olivia might have had when he wasn't even around?
"Well, you could see the pathetic bastard with stupid stars in his eyes whenever he saw you," he let out, looking away, more to himself than to her, then looked at her again. "Not just him. Everyone was in love with you, I mean, everyone. If you knew how many guys offered me money for your phone number..."
"Wow, I never realized you were making money off my emotional unavailability."
"I wasn't. I told every single one of them to shove it." He paused as he saw her smile at that, then he became serious. "I thought about reaching out after I got divorced. I really did, more times than I can count." She didn't speak, but her eyes were asking why. "I figured you would have moved on, and you did. You were just saying you realized you don't need me."
"I don't." She was dead serious as well. "But needing someone isn't the only reason to have them in your life, is it?"
Reality interrupted them abruptly with a text message ring from Olivia's phone. She hesitantly checked it, and then her expression changed to complete confusion.
"What's wrong?" Elliot asked.
"The mystery man in the surveillance tape has a car," she said, leaving her mouth open.
"That's good news, right? Or is it another dead end?"
"Not quite," she replied, standing up and reaching for her wallet in her purse to leave some money on the table. "It belongs to Daniel Walters."
