Author's Note: Inspired by a tweet from drdelamico, who said: "if they actually did a flashback of elliot as a child i would LOVE if they had him meet olivia back then not knowing it was her." And...this happened.

Title comes from "In Another Life" by Vienna Teng.

Sometimes, when Elliot's mom was in one of her moods, she'd take whichever kids were around, hers or not, pile them in the Stabler family station wagon, and start driving: destination unknown, and the only timeline was her own flights of fancy.

Elliot had learned not to ask too many questions on these outings – he'd watch out the window as Queens became Brooklyn became who-knows-where, following the routes that only his mom's mind could begin to trace. His younger brother Larry was kicking the back of his seat, and he turned around to glare. "Stop it," he said, from between gritted teeth. "You don't wanna distract Mama right now. Not when she's driving."

Larry grinned and stuck a lint-covered grape-flavored lollipop between his teeth. "Make me," he said.

He sighed and looked out the window. They were in a part of the city he wasn't familiar with, but something seemed to have caught his mom's eye, because she was slowing down.

"Ooh, there's a park! Kids, do you want to go play?" Before any of them had a chance to react, she was already navigating the car into a newly-open parallel parking spot along the park's perimeter. Somehow, they were never given a choice, even when one was seemingly offered; this was life with his parents, but at least his mom wasn't malicious about it like his dad could be.

If his dad knew about these outings – well, it was a good thing he didn't. Elliot didn't like hearing his parents argue, which would cause his mom to start crying, which only seemed to add fuel to their arguments, and those usually ended with slammed doors and things only talked about in hushed whispers.

His parents didn't know he knew about their arguments, but he couldn't help hearing them sometimes, especially when they got loud. After all, he was the oldest boy and second-oldest child – if his dad wasn't around, he was the man of the house, and had to protect and look out for his siblings and his mom. And their house wasn't that big.

As the Stabler siblings bounded out of the car, Elliot decided he wasn't in the mood to play, even as he saw his older sister Teresa make a beeline for the jungle gym, her brand-new copy of The Double Jinx Mystery tucked under her arm. Instead, he started to wander around the winding paths.

The sounds of the city trickled in around him, and he heard far-off laughter, probably from his siblings and them making new friends over on the playground. Friends were a hard thing for him to come by sometimes, and while he had his friends on his Little League team, it wasn't the same.

Oh well. In a big family like his, he was never truly alone, anyway. He always had his brothers and sisters.

Eventually, he saw a young girl sitting on a bench by herself, reading a well-worn, beaten copy of The Ghost of Blackwood Hall. She had her long brown hair up in a messy ponytail, and she looked like she was a year or two younger than him. "Hey," he said, smiling at the girl. "Can I sit here?"

She looked up at him with wide, glassy, brown eyes that seemed to radiate sadness. "Uh, sure, yeah, I guess," she said, returning his smile with a shy one of her own.

"My sister loves those books," Elliot said, gesturing to the book in her hand. "I think she has the entire series."

"I want to be like Nancy when I grow up," the girl said. "Solving mysteries with my best friends sounds like a lot of fun."

"That does sound like fun," he replied. He'd always thought of himself as being a fighter pilot like his Uncle Joe had done during the Korean War, or maybe a baseball player like Fred Stanley, his favorite player on the Yankees. But solving mysteries could be cool too, especially if he could rope in a friend or two, though he saw himself as more Hardy Boys and less Nancy Drew. "I'm Elliot, by the way," he said.

"I'm Olivia. Everyone calls me Olivia, but I like Liv." She pushed her ponytail back over her shoulder and smiled at him again. "I live right over there," and she motioned to a building somewhere behind them. "When my mom falls asleep on the couch with her juice, I come down here to the park to read so I don't wake her up. She doesn't like when I wake her up." Her smile turned into a frown, and Elliot instinctively knew that he didn't want to see this Olivia – Liv – frown. Not when she could smile, instead.

"Yeah, my dad's the same way when he's been drinking, especially if the Yankees or Giants are losing," he said. He could picture in his mind's eye his dad, passed out on the couch, surrounded by empty beer bottles after slurring obscenities directed at his favorite sports teams.

"Sounds like we have a lot in common," Olivia said. She looked over at Elliot, as if she was studying his face, and he hoped he didn't have any leftover jelly from his lunch smeared on his face. "Hey, wanna go play on the swings? They're my favorite thing to do here."

Playing hadn't sounded so appealing when his mom proposed the idea, but now that Olivia was suggesting the same thing, it sounded like a fabulous idea. "Sure," he said, extending his hand out and offering to hold hers. Normally, if it was his siblings or teammates, he would have raced them – and won, except if his younger sister Maureen was in the race – but he wanted to understand this quiet, shy girl, for reasons that escaped him.

She took his hand and smiled up at him as they started walking toward the playground, while she held her book in her other hand. Her small fingers were warm against his palm.

At least Greg DiDonato had insisted he get his cooties booster shot earlier that week.

When they got to the swings, there was only one available, on the very end. Elliot could see his mom talking animatedly to a woman on a nearby bench, her hands waving in the air as she explained – well, with his mom, it could be almost anything, from something about one of her kids to a debate on how clear clear actually was. He waved to her. "I guess we can't swing," he said, looking forlornly at the other kids as they pumped their legs.

She set her book on the ground next to the support pole, hopped on the swing and grinned. "Push me, Elliot," she said. "You push me, and then I'll push you. We'll take turns, 'kay?"

"Okay!"

She let out a little high-pitched squeal as he gently pushed her enough that she could begin to get some altitude on her swings back and forth. "Higher, Elliot! Higher!"

He'd heard all the playground urban legends about what happened when someone flew too high on the swings – flipping over the bars would transport them into another dimension, or it meant certain death – but he would never let her fall. He couldn't. Not her, not anyone.

She looked like a small bird flying through the sky, with her silhouette framed against the sun, and the joy of her laugh pierced through the lazy late afternoon haze.

As she let her feet drift back down to Earth, she grasped onto the chains and turned her head back to look at Elliot, a look of wonder in her eyes. "I don't think I've ever gone that high before," she said, catching her breath. "C'mon, Elliot, your turn!"

He'd never been one for the swings – like Teresa, he liked the jungle gym best of all, because he could climb to the top of it and feel like he was the king of the world, if even for the 30 seconds before one of his pals would climb up next to him and usurp his throne. But, as her hands met his back, pushing with all of her strength – and she had a lot of it for a girl her size, she was stronger than she looked – he could see the appeal of flying.

There was nothing holding him to this Earth in this moment besides the thin strip of rubber under him, the chains and support pole that held the rubber, and her hands providing the occasional pulse moving him forward. He could be anywhere, in this moment, but he felt free for the first time in as long as he could remember.

And it was all thanks to –

"Olivia Margaret Benson!" a shrill voice called out. "You get your ass back in here, young lady! Don't you know that you scared me when I woke up and you weren't there?" He followed the sound of the voice as he came down from his flying high, and saw a disheveled blonde lady in a bathrobe waving her hands in the air and storming over toward them.

"Sorry," Olivia said, as he got off the swing. "I – thanks, Elliot. I had fun. Bye?" She offered him a tiny wave as her mom dragged her off, down the path, back toward their home.

"Bye, Liv," he said, waving at her sadly. He noticed that even as they walked, and he could hear her mom admonishing her for running off and talking to a strange boy and some other things he couldn't decipher, Olivia kept sneaking looks back at him, until they turned the corner and were out of sight.

His own mom came up to him. "Your little friend seemed so nice and you were having so much fun together, Elliot, why couldn't she stick around? I'd have taken us all for ice cream!"

He shrugged his shoulders and gazed off in the distance that Olivia and her mom had walked in. "Dunno."

Of course, since this was a part of the city he never got to, he'd most likely never see her again. He knew there were a lot of people living here – as his dad liked to grouse over dinner, "seven million people in this city and most of them just want to blow each other's heads off." The odds that he'd ever run into Olivia again would be so slim that he didn't think even Teresa's ridiculous owl calculator could figure out the answer.

As they walked out of the park, he noticed Olivia never picked up her book. He didn't want her not to have it, but he didn't want to leave it behind either, and there were too many buildings surrounding them to narrow down where she might live to take it back to her. Besides, Olivia's mom didn't seem too friendly; he didn't want to risk getting slapped.

He'd take the book, and if he ever ran into her again, he could give it back. Hopefully she wouldn't miss it too much – maybe she had the rest of the series too.

Many years passed.

Olivia's book – carefully signed with Liv B. in a childish penciled scrawl – eventually found its way into Teresa and Maureen's book collection, before being packed away in a heap of forgotten memories, much like where that day in the park had drifted to in the corners of Elliot's mind.

He innately craved the feeling of flying, of deep brown eyes locking with his own blue in an innocent game of trust – how high can I fly? And will you be there when I come down?

If only he could remember anything else about the day.

Oof.

Olivia dropped a box next to Elliot and wiped her hand across her brow. "I don't know why your mom wants us sorting all this stuff out," she said. "I'd have thought when she moved into the beach house, that she would have gotten rid of everything she didn't want from her old life."

"Nah," Elliot said, looking up from a stack of unsorted old photos. "She wanted to keep everything about us kids. Every last painting and macaroni art piece. I think somewhere she probably has all of our baby teeth and locks of our hair."

She shuddered. "I mean, that's sweet, but – I doubt my mom would have ever kept any of that stuff," she said. "She didn't exactly have a sentimental bone in her body."

"Don't worry, my mom more than made up for that." He held up a photo of him and two of his brothers all dressed as various sizes of Luke Skywalker, standing on the porch of his childhood home. On the back, in her loopy handwriting, were the words Elliot, Larry & Tommy, Halloween 1977. "Neither of my sisters would agree to be Leia, even though we all went to see it constantly that summer. Maybe they would have changed their minds if we'd known Luke and Leia were siblings, and not lovers." He traced his finger over his younger self's face. He'd spent so many years pushing down his childhood that now that he was confronted with the memories of it, he was overwhelmed with how many small, positive ones there were.

"Yeah, I can see where that might have been awkward, but none of you were Han, so, it's okay." She winked at him and brushed a light kiss against his sweaty cheek. "Hey, what's that picture?" There was a picture sticking out askew from the pile, a little way's down; all that could be seen without pulling it out was a young boy on a swing.

Elliot took it out. "Oh. Wow. I've never seen this picture before," he said, rubbing his eyes to look at it with more clarity. "I didn't know my mom had a camera with her that day, even." It didn't surprise him, though, because his mom was always so big on documenting every part of their lives.

It was a picture of him swinging high through the air, and a small brunette girl, her hair tied back in a ponytail, standing behind him on the ground, prepared to push him forward. She wore a bright yellow sundress with little daisies on it. He looked at peace, and she had the biggest grin on her face; they both looked happy.

"I don't know who the girl was," he said. "I only ever met her that day, but we had a lot of fun talking and playing on the swings until her mom came and dragged her home."

Her breath was ragged, and she rested her hand on his shoulder. "I know who she is," she managed to choke out. "That's me, Elliot. One of my mom's friends hand-sewed me that dress from a McCall's pattern."

"You mean –" This meant he'd met Olivia long before they'd been assigned as partners at SVU. He'd met her even before he met Kathy, who went to a different elementary school and didn't cross his path for the first time until Mr. Dill's 8th grade American History class. He'd met her before he even knew anything about the person he was destined to become.

And somehow, they'd found each other again. And again. Because there was something out there that drew them together, even in a city of seven million people – or eight, as it was now.

Elliot wasn't inclined to believe in fate, but he could be convinced to make an exception when it came to Olivia.

Brown eyes, no longer sad, locked onto blue, no longer scared.

"Nancy Drew," he said, breaking the silence with two words. "You had a Nancy Drew book with you that day."

"I always read above my age level," she said, blowing her hair back from her face. "I mean, my mom would have preferred I was trying my hand at Dickens or Steinbeck, someone she considered more accessible, but I was only six, anyway. The Nancy Drew books were fun, and I always wanted to solve mysteries."

"I guess you did do just that, Captain Benson."

She grinned, and it was the same grin he'd first seen all those years before on a distant playground lost to time and memory. "I guess you're right. And I did end up doing it with my best friend, after all." She slit the tape on the top of her box with the box cutter, folding back the flaps to reveal stacks of yellow-bound books. "And look, here's the girl detective herself making an appearance."

For a moment, he watched as Olivia lost herself to the memory of the stories of Nancy, Bess, George and Ned and their adventures that had helped her get through a difficult childhood. She skimmed her hand over the covers and turned the books over in her hands; some were water-damaged by an old water heater, while others were in decent condition. Her eyes focused on one in particular, that had been clearly loved quite a bit in its time, but wasn't damaged. "The Ghost of Blackwood Hall," she murmured. "I lost my copy of that book and my mom never would buy me another one since I was irresponsible enough to lose it in the first place. But it was my very favorite."

She picked it up and began thumbing through it, but her focus faltered when she reached the endpapers and saw the name inscribed.

"You kept my book for me," she said; her voice was barely more than an awed whisper. "All these years."

There it was, as distinct as it ever was, clear as day: Liv B.

"What's lost can always be found, Liv," he said, pulling her into a tight embrace and kissing her gently. "Even after all these years."

-fini-