Author's Note: Love all the love everyone sent my way - here's the second chapter (finally, sorry for the delay!)! Enjoy.

As a reminder, this takes place after the first crossover (22x09/1x01), so nothing after that took place in this universe.

Not even in his most fevered dreams could he have imagined her as she was now standing in front of him, in his apartment – in his makeshift home. It was really her, flesh and blood, and not a figment of his delirious imagination tormenting him with fleeting memories.

Elliot shut the door behind her, while Olivia peeled off her coat and gloves and rested them on the chair by the door. The television played softly in the background, not loud enough to disturb Eli, she noticed. "It looks…cozy," she said, easing one of the chairs out from the dining table and sitting down. "How are you –"

He cut her off before she could finish her question. "What are you doing here, Liv? I didn't send out a fucking distress signal, so I don't know what kind of emergency you concocted for the sitter."

"I've been worried about you." She started running her hands along the cracked edge of the table and picking at it.

Simple, direct, and to the point, because what else could she be? He could have almost forgotten that his best friend – and whatever other descriptors someone wanted to use for her – was also a skilled interrogator who'd faced down some of the very worst people this world had to offer and still managed to somehow make it through each night and welcome the dawn of a new day.

Elliot let out a short bark of a laugh. "Join the club. You and the kids can bake cookies and braid each other's hair and talk all about how to save someone that I'm frankly not sure is worth saving." Even as he said it, he sat down in a chair that faced her.

"You know that's not how I feel." The corner of her lips flipped up into a small smile. "Some small part of me has spent ten years worrying about you. So why am I going to stop now, when I finally got a real reason to be?"

And he does know, because that's who she'd always been; once Olivia Benson cared about someone, it would take moving heaven and earth to pry her grip away. Even their time apart hadn't weakened the hold she had on him – the hold that captivated and inspired him with shocking clarity. She made sense, even when the rest of the world didn't.

It was only fitting that as the world he'd spent years constructing brick by brick for himself and his family stood smoldering in ruins, she was there beside him.

It couldn't have worked out any other way.

Olivia had laid awake in bed for hours. She'd counted enough sheep to have a lovely lamb roast for every member of NYPD and still came up blank when it came to finding the solace of sleep. It wasn't until she saw that she'd mentally superimposed Elliot's downcast face on the shepherd in her vision that she realized what was truly on her mind.

For once, it wasn't the ghosts of the past ten years that he had left her with to deal on her own that she was facing, but instead, it was the ghost she thought had left her behind.

Kathleen had discreetly given her a small scrap of paper at Kathy's funeral, with her dad's new address written on it in hasty, loopy script. "He might need you," Kathleen had said. "You know he's not going to admit it, but he will. One of these days." She'd shared a conspiratorial wink and walked off to rejoin her mourning family, and Olivia had slid the paper into her pocket for safe-keeping.

It was all too easy to get Lucy to come over. There'd been times when she'd contemplated asking Lucy to move in with them, save on the random calls at all hours of the day and night, but she couldn't ask someone to give up all semblance of their freedom for her – only some. And Lucy really did love Noah, so it worked out. She'd just slip a little bonus into her next payment.

"You're relentless, Liv." He breathed it out in a low gasp and stared intently at her. "My God."

"We used to know each other so well." This wasn't the conversation she'd exactly pictured the two of them having on her drive over. But she wasn't really sure what to expect anymore. Ten years had been enough to change both of them in ways beyond comprehension. She caught his stare and bit the corner of her lip. Maybe not everything had changed. "Look, Kathleen gave me your address, said I might be able to help you, and I don't know, call it women's intuition or whatever, but I had a weird feeling tonight you might be."

She couldn't think of what he could feel for her as need because that would imply he couldn't live without her, and he'd made it plainly visible that he could. Quite easily, at that. Reframing it as her being a devoted friend and former partner – and indicating that she wasn't the only person who worried about what thoughts could be running around in his mind – made more sense.

The room fell silent, except for a carpet cleaning commercial chirping in the background. He cleared his throat and words began to tumble from him. "I – you know – Liv, it's such bullshit. Everyone's lost someone this past year, and I managed to hold it together through all the profiles of all the people who died of COVID. And what gives me the right to be so upset about losing one person, when thousands of people have lost so much more?" He pounded his fist on the table, stood up, and walked over to the fridge. "You wanna beer? I'm parched."

She shook her head. "El –"

"I'm not done." He popped open the bottle and swallowed half of it in a hurried gulp. The words came faster, almost in a frenzy, haphazardly piling on top of each other. "I'd at least get it if COVID took her, you know? It's taken so much already, what's one more innocent person? We did everything fucking right, and she still couldn't make it to the other side of this." He downed the rest of the bottle and opened a second, identical one. "I don't know why I'm the one who's still here to pick up the pieces when she was always the one that did it so much better."

"You said it. You're still here, Elliot, and that's not by chance." She let out a small sigh and ran her hand through a loose lock of hair. Flashes of her life since Elliot's departure sparked through her head; images that she'd rather forget but were indelibly imprinted on her psyche, no matter what kind of mandated therapy she was put through. "We're both still here."

"Fuck, Liv. Why?"

"Hell if I know, but here we are." They'd faced down darkness every day of their professional lives and still found their way back to the light, time and again. The only difference now was, now the darkness was innately personal, and fighting their way toward the light would be so much harder than arresting a guy and throwing him behind bars for the rest of his life and moving onto the next case file.

He poured her a glass of water, as if by some sort of instinct – after all, he was used to caring for other people, not like her with Noah, that had been a series of trials and well-meaning errors – and placed it by her side, as he sat back down and faced her. She didn't pick it up to drink, but she traced the rim of the glass with her index finger.

"We hadn't been perfect, not in a long time, maybe not really ever." Her heart tugged and clawed at her chest as he spoke. "Kathy – you know things hadn't been great. But they were good, better than they'd been."

"I'm happy you two had that." And she was, because for as much as she wanted to scream and cry about ten years of silence, if it meant that maybe the last ten years of his marriage to the mother of his children had been better than the last several before that, then it was worth it. She'd always had to share Elliot with Kathy, and his family came first. It was a balancing act they'd never been particularly great at as a partnership, but they'd made it work. "You deserved that much."

"I never stopped missing you, Liv."

Somehow, he wasn't sure what had led him to that admission, and the waves of shock reflected at him from her warm brown eyes showed that she wasn't sure either. Grief has a way of stripping people stark and bare, leaving behind only the most important aspects to sort through, but he couldn't blame this on his grief over Kathy.

Missing Olivia was like breathing for him. For so long, they'd been the two halves of Benson-and-Stabler, two of NYPD's finest SVU detectives. To see one without the other would be like seeing peanut butter without jelly, or pepper without salt. He'd long thought the only way their partnership would end would be with a casket and a 21-gun salute: likely his, because he'd step in front of a bullet for her any day of the week, even though she'd never dream of asking him to.

She'd always had a way of saving him from the darkest parts of himself.

If Liv still has any of that old way about her, he thought, I'm gonna need it now more than ever before.

He reached out across the table and threaded his fingers through her hands. The ghastly chill that coursed through him soaked in her radiating warmth, and he drew in a sharp breath. If this was what holding her hand was like, he could only imagine what it would be to like to be wrapped in her embrace. She placed her other hand over his and squeezed gently.

"I need you," he said, his voice barely above a hoarse whisper.

"What do you need?"

"You." He swiped his tongue over the corner of his lips. "This, us talking, you being here with me. This is what I need. Kathleen was right. Fuck the rest of it."

She gave him another smile, one that reached the corners of her eyes, and squeezed their hands together again. "You got it, partner."

-to be continued-