Author's Note: I've been re-watching season 1 gradually, and getting inspired for some vintage early EO mutual pining goodness.

The episodes specifically referenced are 1x01 (Payback), 1x02 (A Single Life), 1x05 (Wanderlust) and 1x08 (Stalked), with scattered references to other early episodes (and some light foreshadowing for more recent episodes).

Title comes from "I Really Like You" by Carly Rae Jepsen.

"Ooh, did you spring for the extra egg rolls?" Olivia asks, as she digs through the takeout bag. They have piles of paperwork sitting around their desks. Munch and Cassidy are off questioning a witness to their latest case – or, more likely, Munch is pummeling the witness with questions (like he always does) and Cassidy is making an ill-timed quip (like he always does) - and Jeffries is testifying in court, and the look Cragen had given them when they came back from the morgue suggested don't even start with me this morning, so they hadn't.

So, it's just her and Elliot for lunch, and she's grown to like these days when it's her and him and a little zen moment caught in the insanity of their days.

"You know, I think I forgot," he says, and she sees the faintest hint of a joke flash in his blue eyes. "May want to check the whole bag, Benson."

She's sure there's a distinct possibility flying chopsticks would be considered a projectile weapon by IAB, but she takes the chance anyway.

He catches them and winks. "Can't get anything past me."

She passes him the Styrofoam container of General Tso's chicken with a mock glare. "I didn't expect you to catch those."

"Bayside Little League shortstop three years running when I was a boy," he says. "Every boy my age wanted to be Fred Stanley or Bud Harrelson, depending on which team their dad cheered for."

"And you?"

"Stanley, all the way. No way could I have been a fan of those upstart Mets, not with the Stabler men's long history of being Yankees fans. My grandpa saw Babe Ruth play, you know."

"Oh, did he now?" She savors the steamy bites of sweet and sour pork with each bite, and she looks over to her partner. They don't talk about their personal lives often, but every now and then she can catch him slip and reveal something about himself. "I always figured you for more of a football kid."

"That came later," he says, waving his chopsticks in the air at her, "once I realized I was never going to be fast enough 'round the bases to make the school's team, and Greg DiDonato was a better player anyway, and my dad –" His face clouds over, and he clears his throat, and he looks over at her, "so, did you ever find those egg rolls?"

"They were at the bottom of the bag, just like you said." She says with an easy smile, and she hands him one of the containers. She notices that Elliot doesn't talk about his father much; all she really knows is that he used to be a cop and that he's been dead for a while now – good riddance, was all Elliot would say on that.

She gets the whole parent thing, and knows he does too.

"You can't pick the victim," Cragen had told her.

If she couldn't pick the victim, then she at least didn't have to have sympathy for someone who had raped and murdered countless people in his time in the Serbian Army, before fleeing to the States and creating a new life for himself, where no one knew who he was or what he'd done before.

So maybe she was a little less likely to want to knock down every avenue of justice in search of his murderer – a hero, who should get a Medal of Valor, in her eyes - but Stabler at least needed to understand. She'd seen him with cases involving kids, how his face would go sheet-white, and she knew there were some cases he took more personal than others.

He'd understand.

"I know Cragen has questioned my objectivity on this case," she said, as they waited for the light to turn red. "I hope you know it's not because I can't handle it." She's not sure if she means the case or SVU, because both are in limbo right now; the fate of one relies on the other.

"I didn't think it was, Benson," he said. "I figured there was some reason this case made you react stronger."

"It's my mother," she said. "She was –" She paused and ran her hand along the seatbelt. "She was raped, before I was born. I – that's how she got pregnant with me, actually."

"I'm sorry," he said. "That's – shit, and I thought I had it bad with my parents."

"'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,'" she said. "My mother's a literature professor at Hudson. She loves Tolstoy. If she could teach her Russian literature seminar every semester, she'd die a happy woman."

"We're not going to find a lot of happy families in our line of work," he said. "Damn, that's rough, though, I don't know what to say."

"Say you won't tell Cragen to transfer me to Narcotics."

"You kidding? You're my partner, a damn good cop, and I trust you. I'm never going to sell you out to Cap, no matter how many of those Red Vines of his he tries to bribe me with."

"Thanks, Elliot," she said. "I trust you too."

"Just remember, like he said, you can't pick the vic."

She rolled her eyes and looked out the window at the pedestrians walking down the sidewalk, and a small smile crept across her face. Knowing her partner had her back would make doing this job so much easier.

She lobs a fortune cookie underhand to Elliot, and takes out her own. "What's yours say?" she says, cracking hers open and reading the tiny piece of paper inside.

"The love of your life is in front of your eyes," he says, reading his aloud. An indescribable look crosses his face, before he laughs. "Shit, I guess I better let Kathy and the kids know I'm leaving them for Munch."

"Did I hear a summons?" Munch asks, dropping his coat on his desk chair. "You know I love you, Stabler, but I could never ask you to leave your wife for me. Our love will forever have to remain forbidden and unrealized."

"Yeah, like he'd want your bony ass anyway," Cassidy says, as he barely suppresses a laugh behind his hand.

"I prefer scrawny, thank you very much. Or angular, if you're my physician."

Cassidy gives Elliot and Olivia a look like oh my God, what is this guy's deal and if she knew how to answer that, she already would have. She hasn't been in the unit much longer than Cassidy has, and they managed to inherit Munch from Baltimore in there somewhere. Maybe all the crabs down there went to his head long ago.

Olivia shrugs her shoulders and looks at her fortune. "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Start walking."

"Ah, Confucius," Munch says. "He was a wise man. Hated conspiracy and bureaucracy, which you know drove his government crazy. I can always appreciate someone who wants to throw a good wrench in the system."

"You would."

"Munch, Cassidy, did you get anything from our witness?" Cragen's voice booms out across the room and they snap to attention. Olivia looks over at Elliot, and he looks almost wistful, for a moment, before squaring his shoulders and turning to face Cragen himself.

She doesn't know what to make of it, if she even should at all, but she files it away in her mental catalog of things about Elliot Stabler, which is growing larger by the day.

The thing about partners is that none of them are ever perfect. There's always some flaw that makes them undesirable, and in all the time he's been in SVU – longer than most, already, he's the senior-most detective on the unit, and he's only been there six years, nothing in the grand scheme of a cop's career – he's made his way through a lot of partners. Some good, some bad, some he'd completely forgotten their names – most, he wouldn't be on their Christmas card list.

And then there's Olivia.

She may not be perfect, but she's the closest thing to perfection he's ever seen, so it's close enough for his purposes. She's passionate and driven, cares about the victims – maybe a little too much, sometimes, but that's not all bad – and she gets it in a way he's seen precious few others do.

If he hadn't met Kathy as teenagers and made her a solemn promise before their families and God, he doesn't know what he would do with Olivia as his partner. The temptation to do something would be real, and then he'd find the undesirable flaw, and he'd be stuck with some foul-tempered chain-smoker from Staten Island riding shotgun with him instead of Olivia.

"You ever go on vacation?" he asks, as he drives them through the congested streets of the city. Their current victim was a travel writer before he ended up dead, and they've been all enchanted with a sense of wanderlust reading through his writings, some more than others.

"Nah, I went to Miami with some friends in college, but that's the furthest I've ever been from New York," she says. "Spring Break is overrated, by the way. You didn't miss out."

The thought of a young, wild-haired Olivia drinking and partying on Spring Break sends shockwaves through his mind, and he looks over at her, anticipating the other pin to drop. There's always another pin with her.

"What about you?" she asks.

"Other than my overseas deployments on the government's dime, I've never left the country," he says, "and I don't count those. I've always wanted to go to Italy, though. Have spaghetti the way God intended for us to eat it."

"You'll get there one of these days," she says, and when she says it, he almost believes her. "Non ci piove."

"What does that mean?" Ever since the first time he heard her speaking in Spanish to a potential witness, he's been captivated by hearing her speak in other languages. Not that he doesn't love hearing her speak in English too, where he can at least understand her without translation, but there's something hauntingly beautiful about hearing her say things he'll never understand without her assistance. There's something about her voice that draws her ever closer to him; he can't explain it, except to say that now that he's heard her voice, he's not sure if he can live without hearing it.

"It means I don't doubt it. Not literally, but that's what it means." She sighs. "I taught myself other languages to pretend like I could escape from here. I'd dream about walking down the streets of Buenos Aires with a choripan in one hand, or along the Champs-Elysees with a jaunty beret like every French person had in the movies, with a man who's madly in love with me hanging off my arm."

Any man would be insanely lucky to be the man in her Parisian fantasy. Hell, he'd give his right arm to be able to hold her with his left without lingering guilt. "I want that for you," he says, barely resisting choking on his own words. "Non ci – whatever, you get it."

"Yeah, I do. Thanks, Elliot," she says, and when she smiles at him, another one of the minute barriers between them melts away in earnest. She's irresistible, and doesn't seem to realize it.

And when he goes home that night, and Kathy pecks him on the cheek, he doesn't explain why he's so distracted and detached, and she's given up asking by now. Because how could he explain to his (loving, incredibly devoted) wife that it's not the cases that haunt him as he lays in their bed at night? That instead, it's thoughts of him and Olivia laughing and sharing street food in cities that crisscross the globe? Watching the sunrise over the pyramids and the sunset in Fiji, and everywhere between?

(He'll pass on sushi in Tokyo, though he doesn't think Japanese is one of the languages Olivia speaks. She's full of surprises, so he wouldn't put anything past her.)

Olivia's cleaning up old paperwork on her desk, old case files that had gotten buried; she doesn't normally like to let things build up like this, but they've been running crazy with all these cases lately, and she got behind. "I'll take care of it before I go home tonight," she'd told Cragen, and he'd laughed at her – they both know how little of a social life she has outside of the job, her going home isn't particularly a relevant concern.

A sheet of paper falls out of a folder and drifts in front of her, and she picks it up. It's a copy of a fax – she remembers the case, from a few months before. What she remembers most of all is watching the victim's sister read the fax aloud to their father – their abuser, their molester – and rip him to shreds right there in the interrogation room.

He hadn't thrown her out the window, but he'd sent her down that path from an early age by robbing her of her entire sense of self.

The fax was her self-penned obituary, and it was one of the most emotionally moving pieces of testimony Olivia had ever read – from beyond the grave, Susan was finally brave enough to speak the words that never could come in life.

She reads over the transcript again, and she hears Ellie's – the victim's sister, another victim in her own right – voice in her head saying the words in choked sobs. "She is survived by her ex-boyfriend…who was perfect, except for the wife and four kids."

She knows someone else who would be perfect (for her) except for the wife and four kids, and yet, she can't fault him for any of that, because he's known his wife since they were high school sweethearts, and they only met last year.

She wonders how she'd describe Elliot in her obituary – "her former partner, who was perfect, except for the wife and four kids?" She's a young woman who lives on her own, with an alcoholic and distant mother, a "father" who might as well be dead, no siblings (that she knows of), and all of her friends are people she's met through the job in one form or another, or she's lost contact with them over the years. Her fellow detectives are the closest thing she has to family, or it feels that way.

And even then, Elliot's closer than most. Only him and Cragen know about her mother, know that's what drives her to continue her work in the unit, even though the cases can cut straight down to the bone sometimes. Hell, she's had to investigate the death of someone she could have one day considered a friend – poor Karen.

"Hey, you're still here?" Elliot asks, poking his head into the squad room. It's late, and she'd thought he'd gone home to Kathy and the kids hours before. "C'mon, I'll drive you home."

"You really don't have to do this," she says, but she grabs her bag and coat anyway. She can come in early tomorrow, beat Cragen to the precinct, make it appear as though she followed through. "I don't need a bodyguard. Richard White's behind bars, and you heard Abbie. He's not getting out anytime soon, if ever."

"Yeah, but I'm not taking any chances. Let's go."

"You're not going to let this go, are you?"

"Not a chance. You're stuck with me, remember? Partners." He opens the door to the squad room and they walk down the hall and into the chilly New York night.

She'll blink her lights when he drops her off and she gets back to her place safe and sound (as she always has, life hasn't failed her yet), because she knows it comforts him to know she's safe. And she'll rib him endlessly about it, but she's secretly pleased that at least one person seems to care about her and her safety.

And sometimes, all you need is one.

-fini -