You will recognize one line in here from "Return of the Prodigal Son," as I can never top that beautiful hospital scene, which is how it should be.
She follows him into his apartment, fidgeting with her hands as she takes in the interior of his apartment. He's still got boxes everywhere — has barely unpacked — but it doesn't deter her from drifting away to the corners of the room while he unloads his groceries. He only allows his gaze to abandon her for a few seconds, afraid if he's gone too long she'll disappear in front of his eyes.
He's aware of the deep irony in that, but he's been starved of her for a decade, feels like an addict jonesing for his next fix — and now that he's back in New York, he doesn't think he can let her go again.
Assuming she'll ever be able to forgive him.
She's stunning today, dressed head to toe in the deepest of blues — a color he always loved on her. She's more put together since the morning at the cemetery, maybe even a little less haunted, he thinks. She's still wearing an outfit that could stand to fit her better, but she's scraped her hair back into a ponytail and it reminds him of the soft version of her that existed after she returned from Oregon — when things between them felt electric, ready to combust at any moment before he got scared, fucked it all up, and slept with his wife.
And while he could never regret what came of that night — his perfect son — he'll always regret not turning to Olivia that night.
Elliot shoves his reusable bags under the sink and clears his throat. "Do you want something to drink? Water or beer or somethin'?"
"Water would be good."
He retrieves two water bottles from the fridge, his gaze lingering on a wrinkled photo stuck haphazardly to the freezer door with two magnets — the photo paper too thick, the image too powerful to be held down by a single magnet.
Olivia and his youngest, taken about an hour after Elliot wrapped his arms around her in the hospital hallway, after they'd calmed their nerves with a walk to the cafeteria for some shitty decaffeinated coffee. A blinding smile that he'd only seen a handful of times in their years together was stretched across her mouth as she cradled his son for the second time that day while he looked on in awe and reverence. His wife, bless her, had quietly commanded him to snap a photo of the scene in front of them with the disposable camera he'd picked up in the hospital gift shop.
He has the original negative buried in a box somewhere, but this copy and the one in Eli's room are the only physical reminders he has of that perfect moment.
He swallows hard, shaking the memory away as he walks toward her in the living room. She's quiet, her head bent over something in her hands. Her spine stiffens and her reaction confuses him until he realizes —
"I can't believe you still have this," she says quietly. He steps around the coffee table, his gaze immediately drawn to the play of her hands, the way her fingertips reverently trace the framed photo she holds.
Apparently he wasn't the only one primed to fall down a well of memories today.
"It's always been my favorite," he says hoarsely. She nods, her eyes still locked on the candid shot of her taken 20 years ago when she was as green as a dollar bill, taking every victim and survivor under her wing, carrying the weight of all their stories and pain home with her every night. In the photo, though, she's weightless and free, leaning back in her desk chair with her arms behind her head and a pencil behind her ear, a smirk on her lips as she listens to something undoubtedly inane that he's telling her.
This photo, the fact that he has it, that he displays it, gives too much of him away (like so many other things in his apartment that remind him of her). He's barely in the snapshot himself, just a shot of the back of his head. The photo is pure Olivia Benson in her first year on the job at SVU, shiny shoulder-length hair and a face that socked him in the gut nearly every morning that he walked into the precinct.
They've both changed so much but he still sees so much of that woman in her now. She's still scared, still compassionate, still fiery, still a knockout — universal truths that will never change.
He watches the bob of her throat as she swallows roughly, replacing the photo on the shelf with hands that tremble slightly. She clears her throat, swiping a thumb across her brow, tics he recognizes as her way of pulling herself back together, shoving the pieces into place even if only for a few minutes while they talk. She won't allow herself to fall apart in front of him like she did at the funeral — at least not now. And maybe not ever.
God, he doesn't want to think about it.
He gives her a moment to get her bearings before he holds out a bottle of water, a peace offering and an invitation to talk wrapped in one.
She takes it from him, lifting her head to meet his eyes once more. "Thanks."
Elliot nods. "Do you...want to sit down?" He nudges his head toward the couch and her eyes flit over it, hesitating.
"I'll sit on the armchair," he offers, doesn't wait before he turns and plops down into the overstuffed chair. It's lumpy, and not terribly comfortable, but it was affordable and secondhand so he doesn't complain.
"Can I just start by saying how sorry I - "
She cuts him off with the sharp shake of her head as she settles down onto the edge of the couch. Still so alert, perched for a quick escape should she need it.
Still so much the same Olivia Benson he knows and loves.
"I can't hear that right now, Elliot," she cuts in. "Not...not yet."
The biting rasp of her voice catches him off guard, sends his stomach fluttering. At the funeral, he'd chalked it up to the emotion weighing down on her, but she's mostly composed now. He knows there's no way he's misremembered the timber of his old partner's voice —
Not when he tortures himself every few months by replaying the old voicemails she left on his phone when he disappeared on her.
No, this rich contralto dipped in dark chocolate is pure Olivia Benson aging like a fine wine.
"Okay. I understand."
"Tell me what happened," she commands. "Including Fin's involvement."
He licks his lips. "You know about that?"
She looks down at her hands, her nails digging into the bottle's wrapper as she begins to unravel it. "He thought you'd told me on Saturday."
Elliot rubs the back of his neck, sighing. He doesn't even know where to start. Nothing he can say will make this better and there's a good chance she'll end up hating him even more after he tells her the entire story.
"I needed some time after I left to try to put myself back together, figure out where my marriage stood. Figure out what you and I had, how we would fit together if I wasn't on the force anymore. If I would be able to live with myself knowing I'd given up watching your six," he croaks. "I spent months drowning before I started seeing a shrink. And then with nothing but time staring me in the face, Kathy and I pulled the plug and I filed for divorce."
She doesn't reply, still doesn't meet his eyes, but she stiffens at that. He's been wondering if she picked up on the fact that he doesn't wear his ring anymore.
Elliot hadn't regretted the decision for a second, but he'd anticipated the absence of his ring would've felt like a missing phantom limb.
But the only phantom limb he'd missed was Olivia.
"It'd been almost a year at that point but I hoped…" he hesitates. "I had hoped it wasn't too late to apologize to you, to tell you that I…" But he swallows it down as she tenses up, shoulders at her ear, knuckles white and hard. It's not the right time for those kinds of confessions, not when she isn't a place to hear them.
"I showed up at the precinct. You were out with your new partner, I think. I bumped into Fin and I think…" He shakes his head. "He just knew. Knew whatever I had to tell you would turn everything on its head. He told me you were happy now, had moved on with Cassidy. Said if I ever really cared about you, that I'd let you go." He swallows roughly. "I fought it at first, picked up the phone so many times in the weeks after, but ultimately... that's what I did."
She frowns. "You've been in New York this whole time?"
"No. I couldn't - " The emotion threatens to swallow him before he chokes it down. "I couldn't let you go and still walk the same streets as you, so I took a job with the Feds in Oklahoma two months later."
She nods slowly, her jaw set as she processes his words, his empty explanations. The only sound for minutes is the scrape of her nails against plastic and the slow tick of an absurdly large clock in the corner that Eli had gifted him for his last birthday after making a joke about Elliot getting older and needing large numbers to be able to see now.
He gives in to the temptation to break the stalemate. "Olivia, please say something."
She expels a humorless laugh. "You what I don't understand, Elliot? You spent years at the station butting heads with Fin. And me? You knew me better than anyone." She shakes her head, rubbing her chin. "And yet you let one comment from him dictate the last 9 years of our lives."
"I know," he chokes out, blinking back tears. "I know it's a shitty excuse, Olivia. But I knew I'd already caused you so much pain and I didn't want to keep hurting you if you were happy without me in your life."
"Fuck you, Elliot," she says harshly, meeting his eyes for the first time in minutes. Hurt and anger swirl in a maelstrom behind her eyes. "Fuck you and fuck Fin for making that decision for me, for not trusting me to make that decision for myself. You had no right," she hisses.
"You're right," he says. "You're right, Olivia. And I'm so sorry."
"You were the most - the single most - important person in my life," she starts, her voice thick with emotion. "And you just...disappeared."
Tears prick at her deep brown eyes and Christ, he's never wanted the earth to just swallow him up more. "And if you think that hurt went away just because you switched jobs and left the state with your tail between your legs and your head up your ass, then you're an even bigger idiot than I thought you were."
His eyes slam closed as he lets the darkness envelope him. She's right, of course she's right, but he realizes now that the voice he's spent the last 8 years fighting against, the one that told him he needed to come home —
It wasn't his voice at all.
It was hers.
"I can't do this with you, Elliot," she whispers brokenly. "But I need one more thing answered."
"Whatever you want, Olivia."
"You knew about Tucker. From Fin?"
Nausea swims uneasily in his stomach because he knows immediately where this conversation is headed and so fucking help him God, it's the one thing he will never forgive himself for. He would damn himself to hell and back if he could.
"Yes. We kept in touch every few months."
"So you could keep tabs on me?"
"Mostly," he admits. "So I knew you were okay."
"And what about when I wasn't?" she asks, her voice quaking. Oh, Liv. "How did you justify all the bullshit when you'd heard - " She breaks off, shaking her head as tears spill down her cheeks. "When you'd heard I'd been kidnapped - " Olivia chokes on her words, pressing her hand against her mouth. Fuck.
He swallows down the bile that's quickly rising. "Liv," he croaks.
She shakes her head, expels a gasp that he feels all the way down to his bones. "When you'd heard I'd been kidnapped, tortured, and sexually assaulted?"
"Liv," he repeats inanely.
"You know what I used to tell myself when I went to bed at night, Elliot? I'd tell myself that you must've lived under a goddamn rock somewhere, maybe happily tucked away in another country with your wife, because there was no way, no matter what had transpired between us, there was no way you wouldn't check on me yourself if you knew what he'd done to me."
Elliot's head falls into his hands as he lets out a pained noise. "I wanted to kill that bastard for what he did to you, Olivia."
She snorts, wiping her tears away. "You got a funny way of showing it."
He clenches his fists. "I didn't know how to face you, how to look you in the eye with the knowledge that if I'd never left, that son of a bitch would've never gotten his hands on you. I was a coward."
"Don't sell yourself short, Elliot." She gets up then, armor back in place, and he could wrap himself in a dozen fleece blankets and still feel the chill radiating off her and her steely gaze. "You're still a fucking coward."
When she slams the door behind her, he doubles over on a sob.
Our girl will slowly start to come around next chapter at the gentle prodding of someone else.
Love to hear from you!
Liv