Author's Note: This will probably be a short multi-chapter story covering...well, everything that has been unveiled by the new episodes of SVU and OC. These two have a lot of talking to do.

Spoilers through 23x03 and 2x03, nothing after.

Elliot sits by the edge of the water, by the little camper van that he – Eddie, whoever – calls home, and tosses a particularly juicy bread crumb to the ducks on the water. It's a quiet afternoon, not that he gets many of those, but everything Albi wants with him is tomorrow, and tomorrow's another day.

He knows what his mom would say about the bread crumbs, but fuck, right now, if the ducks are anything like him, they could use all the junk food.

The damn ducks don't care, ma. All the ducks care about is feeding, fighting, fleeing and fucking, and I'm helping them with that first one. The other three are up to them.

He isn't sure what kind of problems ducks could have, like, could Drake have stolen Mallard's hen? Is there a duck form of cocaine they could get hooked on and ruin their feathers? Egg-napping?

He thinks he's beginning to crack up a little, probably something his therapist could discuss in greater detail, but there's not exactly a lot of opportunities for someone trying to infiltrate the highest levels of an Albanian drug family to take time out for sitting on a couch for an hour and telling someone how he feels. So the ducks are his free therapy.

Animals understand where humans don't.

Because animals don't give a shit, and that's the problem with humans, because they give too many shits, and about all the wrong things.

He sighs, throws another handful of crumbs in the air like scattered confetti, scrubs his hands across his face and looks up at the sky.

He feels the other presence before he sees what – or who, considering only one thing in the universe can make him feel like that, and it's a person – causes it, and he closes his eyes. Not because he doesn't want to see them, but because he does, far too much.

A calm voice breaks the silence. "Nice weather for feeding ducks you got here," the female voice says, before she kneels down not too far from him: far enough back that if he reacts poorly, she can make a getaway, close enough to where he can see her if he looks out of the corner of his eye. "Mind if I join you?"

"It's a public place," he says, and while that's true, they're also dangerously close to his home, a place that Albi and the family know a little too well by now. "Can't stop you if I wanted to."

She laughs, a snort through her nose, and moves closer to him. She's wearing a baggy gray hoodie about three sizes too large for her – in fact, it looks closer to his own size – and blue jeans, and sneakers, and it's the most dressed down he's seen her in far too long. "Heard from a friend you like to come by here."

"Would that friend happen to be Bell?" He lowers his head and takes a good look at her. She looks tired, worn out, like the job is sapping all of her strength and worrying about him is taking its own toll. Because she can deny it all she wants, but the thing with Olivia always has been how much she cares about everyone else and puts into everyone else, and no one has ever bothered to reciprocate properly.

She clears her throat, opens her tote bag. Inside is a large container of Quaker Oats, and she scoops a large, heaping handful into her palm. "In a manner of speaking." The ducks come waddling over to her; even the ducks want to be close to her. And he can't blame them, because that's all he wants, too. To be close to her.

"We're safe here." He wants her to know that this place is safe, that she doesn't have to worry about the ducks quacking their secrets. In her casual clothes, and he can see she has her long hair tied back in a loose ponytail, she could pass as almost any other woman around her age who likes to feed the ducks on a sunny autumn afternoon in New York.

Almost, because there's no one like her. He's spent enough time in enough other countries to know that there's no one who compares to Olivia, no one who makes his heart race the way she does.

She nods, takes another handful of oats and scatters them on the ground for the ducks to peck at, and then she turns to look at him. "I'm glad you're okay," she says, "I was worried about you the other night."

"Were you?"

Silence, and a bird caws from somewhere overhead. "Of course I was," she says, finally, "I've only ever wanted you to be happy, Elliot, you know that."

He wants to pick apart her statement and find the truth buried inside, but she didn't have to come here, and she wouldn't have come all this way just to lie to his face. "Funny thing about that," he says, and he sets the bag of two-day-old bread on the ground and turns to face her now, "I haven't been happy for a long time."

"Huh. Could have fooled me." She sets the container of oats on the ground, and fixes her gaze on him. It's not a smile, but it's not a grimace, she seems to be set in a state of neutrality. Her sunglasses are perched on her forehead, and she takes the hood down to reveal the ponytail. "When have you been truly happy, Elliot?"

Since the kids were born, it's been you.

"Been a while," he says, exhaling sharply through his mouth. "Had some good times in Italy, but I don't know if I was truly happy, whatever the fuck that means."

"It means whatever you want it to mean," she says, cocking her head to look at him again.

In an instant, he's back in the old squad room – the one before the pipes burst, the one where he met her – and she's a rookie SVU detective and he's the experienced partner assigned to her, and Munch is off cracking a conspiracy theory about JFK and the aliens in the corner with Jeffries rolling her eyes but politely listening. And as he's looking at his new partner, with her soft smile and a heart the size of all the rest of theirs put together and then some, he's realizing what all those anonymous people meant when they talked about looking at someone and knowing that they're the one.

That look of hers is the same one she gave him then, the one that says I don't know why I put up with you, but God help me, I do.

I don't know why you do either, Liv, but I'm the luckiest bastard in the world that you give me that chance.

And then it hits him.

"The wedding," he says, "Fin's wedding, that night, talking to you, dancing with you, until you got that call about your case breaking wide open and you had to leave."

"And you still insisted on two more dances and walking me to my car," she says, the first teases of a smile brushing across her face, as if she's remembering the night much the same way he is. "I didn't want the night to end."

"I didn't either." If he could have frozen any moment in time, perfectly preserving it, that would have been the one. "And then you called me as soon as you pulled away."

"I really didn't want the night to end." Her smile is slightly sheepish, and she nudges a lock of hair that fell out of her ponytail over her ear. "It – it was the first time in a long time I'd been truly happy, too."

He wants, so badly, to believe what she's saying. It's a burning desire that has worked its way up from his gut to spread through his entire body. But the thing with burning things – and this is something he's gotten to learn firsthand, through his time as Eddie – is that a controlled burn is almost impossible to maintain for very long.

He wants to believe that the woman he loves, cherishes, dreamt of every night they were apart for ten years – he wants to believe that he makes her even an iota as happy as she makes him.

He can want a lot of things, doesn't make any of them true.

"If you hadn't gotten that call –" Their whole partnership has been a cataclysm of poorly-timed phone calls, people intruding at the wrong moment, missteps that lead to them falling down the mountain. I would have asked you to come home with me. I would have held you for as long as you'd let me.

"If I hadn't gotten that call, who knows where we'd be?"

There's been so many falls down the mountain, and every path back up would have been in a different parallel universe, and he doesn't like to think about the number of parallel universes they've created, and how this is likely the only one of those miserable universes where they aren't currently together and happy. In some of those, they would have been together from the word go, practically.

That phone call is responsible for the creation of yet another, and the possibilities of it all are strangling him.

"I probably still would have had to go under," he says, and he hates himself for saying it, but he can't see a world in which both the phone call and the strongly-worded demand from Bell to go under a short time later don't exist.

She looks over at him, and she idly tosses a handful of oats on the ground for a duck to come for. "I know, but maybe we would have been in a different place before you had to leave," she says. Her voice cracks slightly, and the duck quacks, and Olivia looks at it. "I know you like those oats."

"You sound like my mom," he says. "She always hated that people fed bread to ducks, insisted grapes were a lot better for them."

"I've always used oats myself," she says. "Buy a nice big container of them, whatever the ducks don't eat can become oatmeal, keeps a lot longer than bread too."

She's always thought a few steps ahead of him. She's the overthinker, the one who rationalizes out every decision before she has to make it, and he's the one who jumps into situations half-cocked and catches up somewhere along the way, if he ever does. It even reflects in their food of choice for their feathered friends.

They've sat out there a while, and the sun begins to dip low in the west, behind the buildings. "Do you have to go?" he asks. The Albanians are more active at night, but they don't have him for tonight. Tomorrow, yes, he'll see how dirty they want him to get and go as far as he's willing to go. But tonight, tonight – if they try to pull him away from the woman in front of him, they'll see his true fire and rage, and not the pretend form he puts on show.

"Not now," she says, pulling the hoodie around her a little tighter, and he longs to hold her despite it all, "Noah had an all-day field trip to the Museum of Natural History today and then one of his friends' moms was going to have a group of them over to their place for ice cream and Pixar movies."

"Brave woman."

"I saw a deli up on the corner," she says. "I'll go grab us sandwiches, my treat. You still like your usual?"

"Always." The fact she remembers, even after all this time, what he would consider his usual, almost makes him a little misty-eyed.

She grins at him, before taking off on a brisk walk up the slope toward the street.

As she fades from his line of sight, he stares back at the ducks, splashing in the water, and he can't help but feel a smile cross his face. It's always been a long and winding road between them, and the conversations he knows they need to have aren't going to be the easiest, but she's worth it.

Besides, if she stops listening to him, maybe the ducks will pay him some attention. They don't seem to mind what he says, as long as he keeps tossing them food and not ruffling their feathers.

Maybe, in a sense, that's what Olivia is doing to him: tossing him food, in his case, a deli sandwich, and speaking her mind.

Funny, how that'd be enough for him, just as it is for the ducks.

-to be continued-