December 22, 1995

"Where have you been?" Elliot's voice echoed out from the bedroom as she stumbled through the doorway, and Olivia frowned. The world was swaying in a delightful sort of way, and there was a red felted Santa hat perched jauntily atop her head that swayed with it, and made her feel festive for the first time all month. But her husband's tone made his disapproval plain, and soured her mood, somewhat.

" 's Christmas," she called back, leaning heavily against the door while she tried to kick off her boots. She hadn't untied them first, though, and that complicated matters somewhat; she was dangerously close to toppling over. "Went out with the boys."

Everybody else went out for drinks after work on Fridays. Everybody else went down to McMurphy's and got shit faced and rowdy and told stories and laughed and stayed out as long as they pleased, nevermind who was at home waiting for them. Everybody else got to have fun, and Olivia just wanted to have fun, for once, and when her partner Patrick invited her to come along she said yes, this time, and she'd only meant to stay for one beer but the noise and the pall of smoke hanging in the air and the twinkly lights hung round the bar had made her feel good, for once, instead of just tired, just empty, and she hadn't wanted to leave. Surely, she thought petulantly, Elliot could understand that.

Then again maybe not; she blinked at him owlishly as he came stomping out of the bedroom, wearing nothing but a pair of boxers and a scowl.

"Christ, Liv," he said when he caught sight of her, her uniform half-unbuttoned and her boots still clinging stubbornly to her feet and that stupid fucking hat hanging off her head. "The fuck's gotten into you?"

" 's Christmas," she said again. As far as she was concerned, that ought to explain everything.

Christmas meant going to Elliot's parents' place in Jersey on Sunday night, sitting around with all his brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews, watching the kids running wild through the house, waiting on tenterhooks for the moment when the Stabler men got just drunk enough for old grievances to come to light, at which point Elliot and Olivia would make a quick escape. Christmas meant going to her mother's apartment on Monday afternoon and enduring an interminable late lunch during which the apartment would be almost pin-drop quiet and Elliot would try, painfully, to make small talk while her mother threw veiled barbs at them until Olivia's patience wore thin and he dragged her away. Christmas meant years worth of memories, memories of disappointment, of bitter regret. Christmas meant all the traditions they'd wanted to build for themselves and the child they were never gonna have. Yeah, Liv thought she'd earned a drink at Christmas.

"You're gonna hurt yourself," he said, approaching her warily. "Will you just untie the goddamn things before you break your ankle?"

She tried, she really did, to do as he'd asked her, but when she bent over to reach for her shoelaces her stomach rocketed up into her throat, and the pleasant, numbing buzz that had carried her through the night and into the apartment turned at once into a torrent of misery. She needed to make her way to solid ground, and so she leaned back against the door and slid slowly down it until she was sitting on her ass on the floor. At least that way she could lift up her foot and reach her boot without risking throwing up all over the floor.

"This isn't like you," Elliot said, crossing his arms over his chest. When he moved like that the crucifix on his arm moved with him, and it looked for one mad moment to Olivia as if the image of Christ had come to life and was about to walk himself down Elliot's arm and straight onto the floor to admonish her.

"You met me in a bar, remember?" Olivia pointed out. She'd managed to untie one of her boots, and she heaved a great sigh of relief when she managed to tug it off, cast it aside and listened to the satisfying thunk it made when it hit the floor. But she was out of breath from the effort it took to do even that, and decided to rest for a second before she attempted untying the other one.

"And you spent enough nights watching your mom pass out on the sofa to know better than to use booze to deal with your problems, baby."

"I'm not dealing with anything." It was a bald faced lie, and she knew it, and she figured he probably did, too, but still. "I just wanted to have fun."

"You can't have fun with me?" he asked, a little indignant, a little hurt.

They used to have fun together, Liv and El. She remembered that. She remembered what a bad dancer he was, and how he tried anyway, and how it made her laugh. She remembered riding in the passenger's seat of his truck on the way to Myrtle Beach, singing Darlington County at the top of their lungs - badly. She remembered fucking him in the bed of that truck, fucking him anywhere and everywhere she could just because she wanted him so bad, and he wanted her just as much. She remembered when things had been good.

And it wasn't that things were bad now; bad, to Olivia, was her mother screaming, coming at her with the broken edge of a bottle. Bad was being thirteen years old and left home alone for three days while Serena went off on some adventure and left her behind and Olivia had no idea when she was coming back. The apartment was warm and clean and there was food in the fridge and Elliot wouldn't dream of hitting her, and so things weren't bad, but they weren't really good, either, because all they did was talk about bills and how tired they were and he hadn't touched her for days. Not that she'd given him the chance, but drunken melancholy didn't leave any room for taking personal responsibility.

"No," she said. She hadn't meant to say it out loud and she looked up at him sharply, suddenly terrified. The last thing she wanted to do was hurt him but now she'd gone and done it; she could see the grief in his eyes. The anger, too.

"The fuck is that supposed to mean?" he asked. "What's gotten into you?"

"I…" she looked around the apartment helplessly. One boot on, one boot off, her shirt all wrinkled and tangled up. The Santa hat was starting to annoy her, so she reached up and tugged it off. It gave her something to do while she tried and failed to come up with a way to explain to Elliot that what she was feeling wasn't a lack of affection for him, but was instead an agonizing sense of failure that threatened to choke her every time she drew in a breath.

"I have tried to be patient with you, Liv, I swear to God I have, but if you won't fucking talk to me…"

Maybe he didn't mean it as a threat. He'd promised he'd never leave her, told her she was the one thing he couldn't stand to lose, and she'd just kept pushing him away and shit what if it was too late? What if she'd already lost the best thing that had ever happened to her? Olivia wanted to cry, but she also, desperately, did not want him to leave her. She felt lonely enough with him in the apartment, she couldn't bear the thought of how bleak it might be without him.

" 's all my fault," she confessed, miserably.

"What is?"

She gestured around vaguely. "Everything. I picked this fucking job and I'm working all the damn time and I'm tired when I get home and I'm the one who told you to go back to school and you're working all the damn time and you're tired when you get home and I promised you we could have a family and I can't give you a baby and you're stuck with me and I'm not ever gonna be what you need-"

"Easy, baby," Elliot said. She was getting all worked up, having a hard time catching her breath around the words that came stumbling out of her mouth, and he moved towards her, then, sat himself down on the floor beside her.

"We talked about this," he said, and she wanted him to reach out and take her hand, but he didn't. "I don't know how many more times I can tell you that I want you, Olivia. I've said it every way I know how to say it. But we aren't ever gonna be okay unless you believe it."

"I believe it," she told him in a small voice. "I just…what if I'm no good for you, El? What if you stay here with me and I can't make you happy and you waste your whole life-"

"What if the sky is falling, Chicken Little?" he said, nudging her with his shoulder, and she laughed, or tried to, but her throat was thick with tears.

"I'm serious, Elliot."

"So am I," he said. "It's only been a few months, and now's not a great time for us to have a baby, anyway. We got all our lives to figure that shit out, Liv. We could see doctors, we could adopt, we got choices. We can do anything, as long as we're on the same team. And I gotta tell you, Liv, lately, I don't feel like you're on my team."

"I'm sorry, coach," she said, reaching for his hand. He let her take it, let her wind their fingers together, and gave her hand a little squeeze.

"Not a coach yet," he reminded her gently, "but I'm gonna get there one day. You gonna be around to see it?"

"I wanna be." And she did, she really did. She wanted to be there when all his hard work finally paid off, when he was done with school and got a job doing what he wanted to do, instead of being a fucking mall cop. She wanted to sit on the sidelines on an autumn evening and cheer herself hoarse for her man and the boys he'd taken under his wing. She wanted to see all his dreams come true, and hers with them.

"Then be here," he said.

She was still wearing one of her boots and she'd drunk enough to make her limbs feel graceless and ungainly, but she knew what she wanted, then. She didn't want an escape from him; she just wanted him. It wasn't Elliot, who'd accused her of not being good enough. It wasn't Elliot, who told her they were gonna fall apart. It wasn't Elliot who made her feel like she'd failed before she'd even begun. That was all her - or maybe part of it was her, and part of it was her own mother's voice - but he was right. They were supposed to be partners, they were supposed to be doing this shit together, and she owed him more, she thought, than what she'd been giving him lately. And so she turned, and clambered clumsily over him, kicking him in the shin with her boot and making them both laugh until she was settled on his lap, looking down at him.

"I want you," she told him earnestly. "I want us. I don't want to feel…like this." Like she was carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, like she was just waiting for him to leave her. Maybe he was right; he kept promising her he wouldn't, and he never had, and maybe she had to fucking trust him.

"You don't have to," he told her. "I love you. Even if you are drunk right now. You think you're gonna remember any of this tomorrow?"

"I'll remember that you love me," she promised.

"Good," he said. " 'cause I swear to God, Liv, if this is gonna become a regular thing with you…I love you, baby, but I'm not gonna watch you do this to yourself."

By that he meant, she figured, he wasn't gonna hang around and watch her turn into her mother. If she was gonna use booze to numb her grief and turn bitter and mistrustful he wasn't gonna stick around, and she couldn't blame him for that, because she knew how miserable it was, living with someone so soaked in their own unhappiness. And Elliot was a lot of things, but patient wasn't one of them.

"I won't," she said. "I thought it would make me feel better and it did for a little while but then it just made everything worse. I just…I want to be with you. I want to make you happy."

And for the last few months every time she looked at him she wondered if she could, make him happy, if she did, if she ever would again. He seemed to think she had nothing to worry about; maybe it was time she listened to him.

"Was thinking," she said then. "You wanna go ice skating tomorrow?"

"You serious right now?" Elliot leaned his head back against the wall so he could stare down at her incredulously.

"Wanna have fun with you," she said. She was getting really fucking sleepy, but this seemed important. "Wanna go out with you somewhere. Wanna make you smile."

"You're drunk," he said, but it didn't sound like an accusation; he leaned in, and pressed his lips against her cheek. "And you're cute. If you're not too hungover to move tomorrow, I'll take you ice skating, princess."

"Promise?"

"Promise."