Author's Note: Based on the promo (especially the last couple seconds) for Organized Crime next week. References to the premiere episodes.

Title comes from "Someday We'll Know," originally by New Radicals, though the Mandy Moore & Jon Foreman version is the one I listened to while writing this.

At one time, this city had been as much his as it was hers, and they'd owned it together.

Sometime over the last ten years, it's been ceded to her, and he feels her very essence surrounding him, reminding him: this is my city. But oddly, it's a comfort, not a strangulation.

He's an interloper on her streets; he's invading her privacy by even being here, though by rights, he has as much right as she does.

Somewhere in the darkness, beneath the grit and the streetlights and the streets that are never what anyone would consider quiet, he knows she rests, and that's where he's running tonight. Because he's been running away for too long, and now it's time to run toward, because time is fleeting and precious and so is she.

He finds her building – one amongst many, but he remembers what it looks like, from the idyllic time between Fin's attempt at a wedding and when he'd been forced to go under, when they could spend time together at their leisure, and begin to think about where this new road they were on could lead.

Together. Leisure.

Two words that have been lacking in the three months he's been under.

He follows one of her neighbors in, holding the door for her as if to give some sort of an excuse, before letting his instincts take over.

Wherever she is, whatever she's doing, his instincts always point him directly toward her. She's his guiding light, his North Star, leading him to a port that is safe and true.

He's at her door in an instant; he knows her son is likely somewhere behind the door, likely tucked in his bed asleep, given the hour. What she's doing is anyone's guess, but he has to see her, because by any sort of available measure, the conversation he yearns to have with her is long-overdue.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Three knocks – not soft, but not particularly loud either, he's not here to cause a disturbance – and Olivia is at the door, her face looking at him as if she's seeing a ghost. And maybe she is, because for so long, the only place he's been able to see her is in the edges of dreams and faded memories. "Elliot." His name never sounds the same when she says it, versus anyone else. "What are you doing here?" she asks.

"Can I come in?" Finding the right words right now is hard, but a simple question isn't above his ability.

She squints at him, cocks her head slowly to the left, but opens the door wider, as if to allow him inside.

He can hear the low sound of a movie playing on the television, and he can see case files spread out on her coffee table. "Cragen never mentioned how many hours he had to work from home," Olivia says, pinching her nose. "All those years, I thought he'd give me a heads-up."

He nods. There's not much he can say about letting the job consume their lives, considering he's existing in two radically different worlds without living in either. "I could never do that part of it," he says, tucking the papers into a manila file folder and setting it at the end of her coffee table. "You know me and paperwork."

"Elliot." Her voice quavers slightly as she speaks. "What are you doing here?"

He should have been here three months ago, or ten years ago, at a different apartment. He should have been here after that fucker Gitano, after she got back from Oregon, any of the times when one of them needed the other. And yet.

He's a runner, but so is she; he runs, because his father never told him that it was okay for boys to cry or have emotions – that the only acceptable way to work out stress was through throttling something – if not someone. And that's not the man he wants to be, not really; he's been working to find his words, for her, if nobody else.

"The letter."

When he says those two words, it's like a sucker-punch to Olivia's gut, because she looks as though all the wind has been taken out of her. "What about the letter?"

"I want to talk." He'd pushed her away before when she wanted to talk about it, so he half-expects that she'll do the same now; it's their old game of push and pull, except the stakes are higher now, now that all their old barriers have been lost to time and consequence.

She shakes her head. "I have nothing to say." She gnaws on the corner of her lip and looks at him. "You told me that you had to go under. I understood that, Elliot, I did. Do. But three months of nothing from you?"

"I thought I was protecting you," he says, and his voice is suddenly hoarse.

"Believe me when I say, I can protect myself," she says, and she wraps her loose cardigan around her tighter, fidgeting with the end of a loose thread. "What was it you said to me all those years ago, that you needed to be able to know I could do my job without you watching out for me? Because I can. I have. Even when I didn't have it in me, I somehow did."

He doesn't want to know how she knows she can protect herself, except, he also does, because he wants to understand her in a way that he's never wanted to understand anyone before, not even Kathy.

"I didn't – not like that – "

"Then like what, Elliot?" She looks at him, looks at him with those deep, dark brown eyes that almost look like bottomless pits that one could lose themselves in forever, and he thinks he's already hopelessly lost. "I wanted to talk about the letter months ago, when you gave it to me, but you rejected me then."

He honestly doesn't remember this conversation, but so much of that first week or two after the explosion is a blur in his memory, he'd believe almost anything. "Didn't reject you."

"Sure felt like it." Her eyebrow arches dangerously at him, and he swallows past a newly-formed lump in his throat. Something tells him she has things to say, daggers to throw, and he's the perfect target for them all. "Did you mean it?"

"Every word." At least he remembers that, sitting at the beautiful antique chestnut writing desk in his apartment in Rome, pouring out everything he'd ever wished he'd said to her onto sheets of paper. He's not a writer, but he thinks he could write a novel about Olivia. "Including the 'if you see this and burn it without reading, I completely understand,' line."

"I'm not going to say I wasn't tempted," she says, and she leans against the armrest of the couch; she's moving back toward him, at her own speed. "But." She exhales, and looks at him. "But, Elliot, I could never do that to you."

"Except you did," he says, "because you went off to Oregon without a word to me otherwise, after I'd just gotten you back from Computer Crimes."

She squeezes her eyes closed, and when they open again, there's tears forming at their corners. "I never meant."

"I didn't either." He reaches out for her, wanting nothing more than to brush those tears away with his own hands, but he only manages to fall forward onto his knees, casting glances upward at her. "You gotta believe me, I never meant for it to be ten years before we saw each other again."

"And yet, it happened." Her voice is wet and crackling with those same tears, and he wants nothing more than to bring her down to his level, hold her in his arms and never let her go.

The thing about running – to Computer Crimes, to Oregon, across the ocean to Rome – is that they're on a giant sphere and there's always another horizon ahead; the course isn't closed, there's no edge of the Earth to fall off of. Somehow, given enough time, they'd always find their way back to where they'd started from.

"Tell me what you need," she says, trying to find the strength in her voice. It's a bizarre echo of the intervention, except this time his kids aren't in the audience to judge his reaction.

He doesn't have to think about it – it's the same thing that Richard Wheatley somehow found out and tried to use against him, and the same thing Reggie's mother apparently saw in his coffee grounds, and his own mother indicated when she'd seen him earlier that day, and that Kathy had feared until her very last breath – there's only one thing he needs, and she's standing right there in front of him. Everyone else has always been able to see it so clearly, and somehow, he never could let himself see it until it'd be too late.

"I need you."

He reaches for her again, and this time, he manages to grab hold of her and press his face against her; she's warm and alive under his touch, and he could almost cry, himself, out of relief.

"I've always needed you." He remembers writing something similar in the letter: I don't know when it happened, exactly, but there came a point early on where I realized I needed you, Olivia. You were never only my partner, you've always been my best friend and the person who understood me the most, even when I didn't understand myself. I needed you, and it wasn't fair to ask that of you.

"And you think I didn't? When I needed you most, when I was crying out for you, you were nowhere to be found."

It's not that he's never considered her needs, but that she's never truly allowed him to before, and he looks at her with a puzzled look on his face, before it morphs into one of pure, stricken horror.

"Liv –"

"It's okay, though, isn't it? Because I was able to protect myself, do my job, and make it out of there without you having to watch over my shoulder? Twice? Ten years is a long time, Elliot. Three months is long enough. What if Wheatley had come after me again? If I'm his target, he's not going to stop just because you're off playing Albanian drug lord or whatever it is you said you were doing."

"Close enough," he mutters. Every word of hers is a fresh dagger; every thought, a dash of salt in his open wounds.

His reach finally extends far enough to brush against her face, feel the softness of her hair under his touch, and it's everything he's ever wanted for the two of them, but it's so incredibly distorted that it doesn't feel real. For all the times he's ever pictured being in a similar position to this with her, he's never imagined it coming quite like this. He tucks an errant hair back, exposing her soft lips to him, but he can't bring himself to cross the distance between them.

She looks down at him with a glance – a mixture of emotions cross across her beautiful face, and he can't pinpoint one in particular – and he's just so tired, tired of the pain and sorrow, tired of fighting against everything that has come his way. Misfortune has plagued his life – he's not sure how anyone, let alone a woman he'd only barely met, could see that – but it's too true.

All he wants to do is to find rest and respite in the city that once was theirs, but now is hers; he wants to find his place in her life again, whatever it comes to be.

He's better with her, after all, than he ever has been apart.

"I don't want anyone to hurt you. Not then, not now, not ever again." He sighs, bows his head to rest against her, exhales slowly. "I don't know who's all hurt you, but I promise you, Olivia. I promise." His words are coming out as desperate pleas, but he doesn't care – right now, he wants her to hear him. "I need you, and that's the truest thing I know."

There's a flicker of something in her eyes, and she runs her thumb along his jaw and caresses the side of his beard.

"You have a really terrible way of showing you care," she finally says.

"I completely agree."

She laughs, and that little glimpse of her smile is one of the most intoxicating sights he's seen in three months. "Self-awareness looks good on you."

"Are we okay?"

She inhales sharply, before exhaling gradually, maintaining her focus on his face the entire time. "Are we? I'm the one who's stayed."

It almost feels like a trick question, but he knows it's not. "I want us to be."

"Then we are." She holds him against her, and their silence fills the room; this is the closest they've ever been, and yet, it feels like there's still so much distance left to cover. "Then we definitely are."

And somehow, that reassurance is enough, for him, for now. He knows there will be conversations to be had, but as long as they're running toward each other and not away, they'll make it, in the end.

And isn't that what really matters?

-fini-