Gethsemane
Fleeterberry
Spoilers: Anything through SVU 24x02/OC 3x02, specifically through SVU 23x09/OC 02x09
Disclaimer: I don't own them
Elliot is pissed. He'd started out grumpy because he'd been called into work at an ungodly hour for something that, in his opinion, did not constitute a valid reason to have skipped his morning coffee. He'd spent the morning running all over town chasing bullshit leads. And then, when one of them finally panned out, the son of a bitch ran for it - they always do - and stole a car that he eventually crashed and then made another run for it, tried to steal a bike and finally, finally Elliot was able to catch up to him, throw him into the nearest wall and drag him back to the office.
Of course, the bastard has nothing to say. He isn't rattled by the list of charges Elliot threatens, the crimes that Elliot himself had witnessed during the chase, which isn't entirely unexpected of a career criminal with ties to a criminal organization, but still, Elliot had hoped for a break.
His mood is thoroughly sour when he faces the guy in handcuffed to the table in interrogation, knowing he's on borrowed time before he loses his temper and Olivia is already going to be mad about the chaos he left behind during his chase because she always is and she's not there to keep him from beating the shit out of the asshole who has nothing to say, so he has to walk away. The only thing that would make his day, and thus his mood, worse would be Olivia getting angry and refusing to talk to him. They barely find time to talk as it is, so he really doesn't want their next contact to be her calling to say she's disappointed and then not speaking to him for however long it takes for her to forgive him, which generally takes longer than it should because she always gets busy and forgets he's still waiting for forgiveness.
He storms out of the interrogation room, sorely missing the refuge he used to find on the roof of the one-six, where he could pace and vent and glare at nothing until Olivia would come find him and talk him down. He could storm out here and pace around the parking lot, but Jet would be watching him on the camera feed and Bell would just shrug and wait for him to cool off on his own and never give him the satisfaction of asking for him to come back and talk to her.
He feels eyes on him and he's used to it, everyone knows either him or his reputation, they've seen the scars on his knuckles. And if they've worked with him for more than a week, they've probably seen him get pissed off. Jet and Bell don't stare long, knowing him well enough to know he's not that mad that any intercession is necessary. But Whelan and Reyes are too new to read him and they keep staring, surely aware of the rumors and waiting to witness their first full-on Stabler meltdown in real time.
He bites his lip at the idea that he's become entertainment for the children. He tries breathing slowly. He looks at the photo on his desk, where Kathy's picture used to be, the smiling faces of his children in the frame instead. But the picture was taken at Christmas, and instead of the happiness he should associate with his family he just remembers the pain of hearing about Wheatley's release and the disappointment when Olivia didn't show up even though she'd never actually agreed to come.
He presses his eyes closed and decides he's going to take away the picture. He's not married and his kids are grown and until there's a picture he can put up that will actually calm him it's just stupid. He feels himself starting to smile suddenly, thinking that someday there might be a picture of Olivia there, or the two of them together, and even though it doesn't exist yet, it already has the power to settle him down.
Whelan is the first to approach, his chair scraping noisily over the floor, his face wincing as everyone turns toward the sound. He's nervous, pretending not to be, and Elliot wonders if he was that green when he was a young detective. "Hey, uh, El, do you-"
Elliot lets his glare cut the man off, waiting until the voice dies out before he bothers to speak. "Elliot. Or Stabler." He waits a beat. "Not El."
"No offense, it's a nickname. I just thought -"
"Don't think. No one calls me El." He sees Jet's head whip up, the woman almost certainly about to correct him, but he turns to frown at her. He's been trying to help her become less socially awkward at her request and it's apparently time she learns that contradicting Elliot in public about his relationship with Olivia is not going to make things less awkward for anyone. Her eyes widen the slightest bit, unused to any sort of reproach from him, and then she turns away and nods to herself, probably trying to find the pattern of his behavior.
Whelan swallows so hard Elliot can hear it and Elliot turns back to the younger man who is still standing by the desk. "What, Whelan?"
He gestures toward the interrogation room. "Do you mind if Reyes and I take a crack at him? Maybe try a different approach?" His voice is nervous, his eyes hopeful, and Elliot decides he was never, ever that young.
He shrugs. "Knock yourselves out." He doubts they're going to get anywhere, but he has been on the job long enough to know sometimes a different approach works. He has seen all his posturing and aggressiveness fall flat while Olivia's soft, understanding tone pulls more information out of a suspect than anyone had even expected they knew.
But Whelan and Reyes aren't Olivia and as he watches them disappear, he mentally bets they're getting nowhere.
While he's waiting to see what, if anything, happens with the new guys, he starts turning over the chase in his mind. He's been in plenty of pursuits. This one stands out to him because this guy wasn't making random turns and doubling back and running in circles. He was going somewhere. Probably heading for someone he expected would help him.
He stands up, approaching Jet's desk, leaning on the railing. "Where was he going?"
Jet turns away from her computer screens and looks at Elliot. "Who?"
He nods at the interrogation room. "Mr. Talkative in there." He was so talkative they had only gotten a name from the ID in his pocket, the man hasn't even confirmed that much.
"Detective Whelan?" Jet looks confused and suspicious, as though she anticipates having missed something important. "He's questioning Parker."
Elliot grins and shakes his head. "No, Parker. Where was he going?"
Jet raises an eyebrow. "Besides away from the man trying to arrest him?"
"Felt like he was going somewhere specific." It really did, and the more he thinks about it, the more certain he becomes. "Get me a history on that location. Tell me if anything pops out."
Jet doesn't bother to hide her lack of enthusiasm. "An abandoned warehouse in Red Hook?"
He knows the list will be ridiculous, so he tries to limit the onerous task. "Skip the petty drug busts."
Jet rolls her eyes at him and turns back to her computer, but not before turning her stuffed octopus' frown to face him. He just shakes his head as he goes back to his desk, starting the requisite paperwork for the arrest, working on making his valid reason for chasing Parker seem even more valid so he doesn't have to defend it to Bell, which he knows is a waste of time because she's going to insist there was a faster, easier, less public way to get the suspect into custody. Elliot is hoping that Jet's search will reveal something and he can use that to defend the chase, praying that they can finally tie some of the threads of their current case together.
Whelan and Reyes return quietly, their lack of comments revealing that they got nowhere with Parker and as much as Elliot wishes for good intel, he's also mollified that they hadn't had better luck than he had. For almost an hour, the office is quietly occupied, everyone lost in their own work or thoughts, the background noise of typing creating a hypnotizing environment.
He notices the sudden change. Jet's ridiculous typing speed has long since been a standard source of noise and so it's the absence of that sound that catches his attention. She's always typing or clicking or computering. On the rare occasions that she's not, she's talking about what she found.
He looks up, thinking maybe the woman has stopped working for a moment to have a snack or use the restroom or do something on her phone, and he figures a quick glance in her direction will reassure him of the physical safety of a woman who reminds him of an odd combination of his daughters and his former partner which has earned her his unwavering protection and support.
But when he checks, he finds her eyes are on him. Not a casual, accidental meeting of the eyes. She's staring at him, her face anxious, her eyes wide deer in the headlights style. She knows better than to think he'll be angry if she hasn't found anything so he's thoroughly confused about her expression.
He smiles encouragingly. "Nothing?"
Her voice is soft, her normal, distinct tone lost in a quiet whisper. "Really nothing much besides petty drug busts, so I went back pretty far." She glances at the computer as though she's disappointed in it for allowing her to be thorough. "Ten years." She ducks her head down, muttering at her keyboard. "Really wish I hadn't."
Her behavior, her expression, her voice, her everything is full of tells, so he knows something is wrong, he just has no idea what and seeing this level of discomfort in a woman he sees as a daughter of sorts twists his stomach in knots. "Spit it out, what did you find?"
The conversation has now called the attention of the other detectives in the room and Elliot watches as Jet glances at them and then back at Elliot and her obvious reticence to answer makes the eavesdroppers even more curious.
"Nothing. I found nothing." Jet's face is no longer anxious or worried as she tries to avoid eye contact with everyone, instead appearing so carefully blank as to arouse suspicion. She glances at Whelan and Reyes. "What are you looking at? Stop staring at me."
With the new guys' attention unhappily directed anywhere but the young woman, Elliot climbs the steps leading to Jet's office of sorts. He leans on the edge of her desk, his eyes missing the monitors as he focuses on her. "What, Jet?"
She looks up at him, regret and sadness reflecting in her eyes. "I didn't realize that was where it happened." She's wincing as she's speaking, her shoulders rolling forward as she pulls her feet onto the edge of her seat, her arms wrapping around her calves, the fetal position demonstrating how desperately vulnerable she feels at the moment.
He's torn, wanting to comfort her, yet wanting to treat her as an equal, knowing that his behavior toward the woman will undoubtedly influence the slightly older, but still young detectives in the room. He thinks about Olivia for a moment, the way that even in her thirties she'd seemed so desperately young and innocent, and reminds himself that it was confidence, not comfort that was lacking in her and is most likely the problem here as well.
He speaks with a normal tone, but keeps his voice soft enough to reduce the odds of successful eavesdropping. "Where what happened?" He's searching his memory, trying to find something he might have forgotten, something dramatic and upsetting enough that Jet doesn't even want to mention it.
"The Red Hook Grainary?" She glances up, her eyes narrowing the slightest bit when Elliot doesn't respond.
The name means nothing to him and he's certain, if something of note happened there and involved him, it had to have been far longer than ten years because he doesn't have a single fucking clue what she's upset about.
But even as he's about to reassure her that he's over whatever it is, he notices the silence once again, feels the eyes on him, and when he turns this time, it's not just Whelan and Reyes staring at him like he's about to go off on someone, but Bell as well, frozen in place on the stairs. Whatever it is, it's clearly not something he ought to be over.
He swallows hard, and he wonders if maybe he's finally lost his mind. Everyone is still as death and he can't remember a damn thing at any fucking location that would have the entire office walking on eggshells, let alone this place he's not sure he's ever been to before in his life.
He squats down, catching Jet's eyes, lowering his voice. "I have no idea what's going on, so either tell me or I'll have to find it myself."
Jet nods, her eyes once again avoiding his. "Officer involved shooting? Possible homicide?" Her voice is timid and shy and he wonders whether she's afraid of him or of what she found.
He shakes his head, completely sure that they're all wrong because he remembers all of his shoots and all of the people who have died at his hands and he knows there was not one at that location. "No, that's not right."
"You're right, Elliot. IAB concluded it was suicide." Bell's voice is loud and strong and close enough to make Elliot jump because he hadn't even realized she moved from her position on the stairs where he'd seen her last.
His eyes turn to his boss as he stands, deciding that Bell is more likely to be of help as Jet is apparently only speaking in short phrases now. "What officer?"
Bell's eyes narrow as she searches his face and he feels like he's on the wrong side of an interrogation. Finally a look of surprise takes over as she lets out a breath. "You don't know, do you?"
"Obviously not. What the fuck is going on here? Who got shot?" He's almost certain that it can't involve anyone he knows because clearly, if it were something so upsetting from a decade earlier he would have heard about it by now. Then again, he was in Europe ten years ago and he hadn't been keeping up with the news in New York.
"William Lewis." Bell's eyes don't waver from his as she speaks the name and Elliot wonders what the fuck that name is supposed to mean to him and if maybe he has amnesia or dementia or a head injury because the name means absolutely nothing to him and he'd swear on his life that he's never even heard it before.
He shrugs, wondering if he's about to get a free trip to the hospital for a brain scan or something. "Is that supposed to mean something to me?" And then, just because of the disbelief on the women's faces, he goes back to his earlier question. "Who was the officer?"
Bell shakes her head and looks at Jet. "He really doesn't know."
Jet nods and mutters about how that's obvious and then writes the name on a sticky note as though Elliot will ever forget the name William Lewis with this level of scrutiny attached. She thrusts the yellow paper at Elliot, shoving it into his vest pocket when he doesn't reach for it. "Sergeant Benson."
It takes him a minute because the adrenaline has his heart pumping so hard he can hear it and he's used to Detective Benson or Captain Benson or Olivia Benson, but it's more of an effort to acknowledge that time passed between Detective and Captain and that there must have been a Sergeant in there somewhere and it makes sense that it was about ten years earlier.
But that's where the understanding stops because of the way everyone stopped and stared and knew the name and the location and expected he did as well, and he knows they couldn't name every shooting he's been involved in and he works with them every day and he can't name any shootings Olivia was involved in while he was gone because he hadn't done a fucking background check on her when he returned and he assumes she would have told him anything important and then her words are in his ears like she is standing in front of him.
You have not asked me one question about what has happened to me since you left.
He'd been shocked, wondering at the time why she'd think her tale of falling in love and having a baby was something he'd want to hear about at all, let alone while he was grieving for his murdered wife.
But now, shit, he feels like someone knocked his feet out from under him and he's reaching for the railing behind him to steady himself. No, she hadn't been pissed off that he hadn't asked for details of her love life, which he realizes now was why she'd been so damn shocked when he'd asked her a few days later about that exact thing simply because he thought she wanted him to and definitely not because he wanted to know. She'd been referring to something so horrific that even Jet - who'd been in high school at the time - knew about it.
The idea is turning over in his head and he's trying to figure it out because hell yeah shootings are tough and he's the first one to admit they can break a cop, but he can't imagine why the topic would be so meaningful to anyone besides Olivia and the dead man's family and maybe her squad, but to extend beyond that to members of the NYPD who hadn't even been members of the NYPD at the time isn't something he's even able to imagine.
He's going to have to work through this. Maybe talk to Bell. Maybe ask Jet's help anywhere but in their office. Maybe look into the matter so he knows how to open this can of worms when he finally asks Olivia about it, which he now realizes she's awaiting. She was mad a year earlier that he hadn't asked and he knows Olivia and he knows she's not less mad because another year has gone by without him asking about something that was evidently very, very important and also very, very well known.
He bites on his lip for a moment, trying to rein in his thoughts and remember he's at work and after the last five minutes, he can't just haul ass out of there and go talk to Olivia because he's not prepared to face her and everyone will know where he went and he's not prepared to let all of his coworkers see how upset he is that something awful happened to her that he doesn't know about.
It takes him a moment to put on his game face, but he does and nods at no one in particular. "So, nothing recent. We have no idea where Parker was heading?" He waits for everyone to realize that there's no reason for the awkwardness because he's working on proving himself to be an adult, at least now that most of his coworkers seem like children next to him. No one answers and he tries to tell himself that it's more because they're not used to him being the calmest one in the room than because the memories of what occurred are so shocking, but he knows, as he turns back to his desk, that there's some reason for the somber mood and he's well aware he's the only one in the place who doesn't know that reason.
He waits it out, goes back to his desk and returns to the damn forms that will likely be the death of him some day, and remembers how he was trying to plot a defense of his actions in chasing a man across the city so he doesn't get fired or written up. Whelan and Reyes quickly follow suit, eager to prove to the senior detective that they can read a damn room. Bell eventually returns to her office, but Elliot feels her eyes on him and he can practically hear her arguing with herself over whether or not to call him in, put him out of his misery and just fucking tell him.
But Jet, that's the thing that bothers him the most. The woman is usually a cross between innocently perky and depressively jaded, but she's usually so focused on her work, whatever her current project is, that she's not often still. She also never stares at anyone for long, because, as she confided in him once, she's always afraid they'll notice and assume it's an attempt to make contact and then start talking to her when she's just people-watching for research into a concept she doesn't quite understand.
She's still sitting there. Her feet once again on the floor, but she's just fucking staring at him and she looks so damn sad he's almost tempted to go over there and give her a hug, but he's trying to hold himself together. He ignores her for the better part of two hours, wanting her to stop looking at him so he can pull the paper she gave him out of his pocket and look at it which he doesn't want to do with a witness because he's trying to pretend everything is fine and he fucking knows it's not but he has no idea why it's not.
It seems like forever has come and gone before someone eventually arranges for unis to come escort Parker to central booking, assuming that Elliot isn't going to drop the matter, which he certainly isn't now that it has led to this mess. Reyes stands up and says he's heading out and asks if anyone wants to get a beer and Whelan eagerly agrees and they turn to Jet, who is still staring at Elliot like he's an exhibit in a damn zoo, and she shakes her head and then they turn to Elliot who also shakes his head and they invite Bell, who is a flurry of activity jogging down the steps and pulling on her coat and announcing she can't be late to pick up Jack or she'll lose her night with him and so doesn't hear them let alone respond. Reyes is shrugging at Whelan, as though to ask if they're still grabbing a drink or if they should cancel because no one else is interested, and then Jet is directing them to a bar a couple blocks away where they've all gone a few times to celebrate something good happening and the guys take it as a welcome to the club and an invitation to leave and Elliot is thankful that most of the office is empty now.
For a long time after that, Elliot is staring at nothing, pretending to still be working, just trying to wait out Jet. He's going to look into this bastard, into the association with Olivia, into whatever caused a pall like he's never seen outside a funeral to descend on the team, but he knows, absofuckinglutely knows he cannot possibly do it with Jet sitting there. But she doesn't seem to be in a hurry to leave, her continued scrutiny of Elliot's profile grating on his last fucking nerve.
It's almost an hour later when she finally stands up and he hears the noises he's heard before while she gathers her bag and her jacket and locks down her computers for the night and he almost asks her to leave them on because he knows searching anything on her machines will be much, much faster than his laptop, but he doesn't because he's still pretending everything is fine and that he's not going to spend the whole night learning about something everyone else already knows.
She stops at his desk, biting her lip while he waits, starting three different times before finally blurting out "she's the most amazing person I've ever met."
Elliot nods, recognizing the sentiment that everyone who has ever met Olivia has shared. "Me too."
She shuffles back and forth in front of his desk a few times, adjusting the straps on her bag and picking at her nails. "Maybe she didn't tell you for a reason."
And he recognizes there's probably some truth to that because even if Olivia were the type to freely share personal things and painful, personal things at that, she'd likely still withhold or at least consider withholding some of those things from a person who is going to share some of that pain.
But that's really not the case here and he feels the urge to defend Olivia's silence because she wasn't hiding anything.
He shakes his head and forces words past the lump he hadn't realized was in his throat. "She thinks I already know."
Jet is surprised, seeming to consider this insight from someone who knows Olivia far better than he does. "Even if she did, he deserved it." And then she's gone, leaving Elliot to contemplate the newest unexpected piece of information, that she thinks his upset is about Olivia maybe killing someone and not about whatever had led Olivia to be suspected of killing someone. He doesn't move for a while longer, listening to the now silent office and the muted sounds of the city outside and there's something surreal about this period, he's doing nothing, he's thinking of nothing, he's pretending he doesn't have a name on a post-it stuffed in his pocket that is about to change reality dramatically, information that is going to alter not just his world, but the way he thinks of Olivia and he's not sure he's ready for that.
She'd been frozen in his memory the way she'd been when he'd last seen her for the entire time he was away. When he returned, he'd been shocked at the ways she'd changed, at the very different woman she'd become, and at first he'd simply attributed it to time, to the same things that had changed him enough that he saw her struggling with the very same problem - the way she'd grin and turn to him only to realize it wasn't then it was now and her face would fall or the way she'd start to say something and suddenly stop and bumble over an uncomfortable segue into a completely unrelated topic. It had gotten easier, they'd begun to feel comfortable with the new people they were and recognize the changed versions as easily as they had the originals. It had been a lot of time, he'd rationalized, and so many things beyond mere aging had occurred to both of them.
But now he's wondering again if that wasn't wrong. As far as he knows, he's older, but the same damn Elliot Stabler he was when he walked away from her. Olivia has changed more, and while he'd attributed those changes to her career trajectory and her distrust of him which she'd flat out acknowledged to him a year ago in a conversation that is only now starting to make sense to him, he knows, absolutely knows, that what he finds is going to explain some of those differences.
It's the moment before a car accident, a drawn out version of that millisecond when there's nothing to do but understand that life is about to irrevocably change and desperately wish that wasn't the case.
His fingers fumble for his vest pocket, the paper catching on a hangnail and causing him to hiss in unexpected pain. He glances at his thumb, seeing the spot of blood forming at the tear, trying to will away the omen he knows it to be. His eyes fall on the paper, Jet's swirling letters forming a name he wishes would still mean nothing to him in the morning while knowing it will not, her writing much more precise with the numbers underneath. Two different casefiles.
That's worse. Much worse. It wasn't a one-off, some horrible case that went wrong and wound up with Olivia in the damn crosshairs of an IAB investigation. No, this man was a known entity, maybe starting as someone sympathetic who had been let down by the system, one of those awful SVU cases where there was no closure, no justice, no arrest or trial or idea that the police had helped at all, or maybe he was a repeat offender, some bastard she hadn't been able to convict the first time who came back to torment her.
He closes his eyes and feels a shiver roll through him, the hairs rising all over his body as goosebumps form. Instinct tells him it's closer to the latter than the former and something is telling him he really doesn't want to know because it's bad and as much as he knows he doesn't want to find out, he knows he has to.
If he wants any kind of relationship with Olivia, even this damn friendship of theirs, he has to understand what she endured and he can only find out if she tells him and she'll only tell him if he asks the right questions. It's for Olivia, he reminds himself, because her words indicated she wanted to tell him and so he has to hear it. He'll do anything for her, no matter how painful.
He places the paper next to his keyboard and carefully types in the first case number, one from almost a year before the second. His fingers hover over the enter key, every single part of him telling him not to do it, demanding he walk away from this in the interest of self-protection, whispering to him that it's not just Olivia he'll see differently, but himself too, and that nothing will be the same after this. He shakes his head and presses the button, trying not to hyperventilate while the computer searches for the file. It doesn't take that long, but long enough for him to wax melancholic over the blissful period when he was back and Olivia was speaking to him and he didn't know and things were ok enough.
The first thing he notices at the top of the page is the cross-link to several other cases and he clicks through them, knowing by the dates they're older and knowing Jet only gave him the ones that somehow involved Olivia which means the older ones are safe and even though he sees her name as the Detective investigating one of them, they're not the problem, but recognizing that Jet had already categorized them differently and that Olivia's name was already involved he knows, he fucking knows, it's so much worse than he even thought and he's wondering if it's not too late to walk away.
Maybe he can just ask her to tell him. Say the name came up. Get the toned-down, safe-for-work retelling of something he doesn't want to hear from someone who doesn't want to say it. Float the question out there just to clear the air, inform her he doesn't know without making either one of them cover the material.
It seems like the best idea ever and he's not even embarrassed to chicken out as he texts Olivia with a simple, but demanding "we need to talk."
His hand is shaking as he reaches for the touchpad and his palm is sweating and so he clicks on a link by mistake with the pointer halfway to the close tab and the screen flashes back to the original case and the panic is setting in because he's already decided he can't look and the computer is lagging and he can't seem to make his fingers work and his hand is jittery as he accidentally clicks multiple times while he tries to close the program a second time with much the same result, except rather than the beginning of the case write up with names and dates and arresting officers and the top quarter of a mug shot, he's somehow navigated to the evidence page and with his multiple panicked clicks during the lag, the first fucking photograph he sees is the fucking Marine Corps medalion he hadn't even been sure she'd received.
Evidently she had gotten it, she'd worn it, clung to the only gift he'd ever given her in their entire partnership and displayed it around her neck where someone undoubtedly would have seen it and asked her about her Marine. And fuck, it was there in front of him, attached to a broken gold chain that was tangled around the equally destroyed chain of other necklace, one he'd seen every fucking day for years because she never took it off, the word "FEARLESSNESS" shouting at him from the screen as the tears blur his eyes. He doesn't even want to look at it but he can't look away and he sees the clump of hair that twisted between the chains and the brown smears on the gold that he knows are dried blood.
It's the first time he jumps up from the desk to vomit that night.
But it's not the last.
When he returns to his desk the first time, he tries to center himself. He tells himself that she survived whatever happened to her, that she's alive, that however bad it was she still flirts with him and smiles and goes to work to tirelessly fight for victims and she seems so fucking happy he'd contemplating leaving her alone when he'd first returned and maybe however bad it was, it's not so bad that things won't stay the same. But he's already changed, the first moment of impact having happened, it doesn't really matter how many times the car rolls now that initial strike has occurred. He's stone-faced and numb as he looks at the screen, reading the notes on the photo that the necklaces were recovered from the trunk of a car, feeling nothing as he reads the words he can't allow to make any sense. He's already there, so he just keeps going, scrolling through the evidence, picture after picture of things that would horrify him if he allowed himself to consider that what he was looking at had anything at all to do with Olivia.
The second time he runs away to vomit is when he finds the lab report for the rape kit.
He isn't as numb as he'd thought, he realizes as he sobs over the toilet, deep, wracking sobs that feel like his heart is crushed and his lungs are turning inside out and he's suffocating on his own regret as he realizes the Detective in those reports was the woman he left behind and the Captain he knows now emerged after this fucking case.
It's like a knife stabbing through him and he honestly fears for his life in this moment, truly believing he's having a heart attack because it hurts so much. He left her. He left Olivia to face this hell. He left his fucking partner to her experience her worst fucking nightmare alone because he was a chickenshit who couldn't figure out what to do about the fact that he was in love with her while he was married to someone else.
He wants to die. He wants to feel the physical pain of his heart stopping because it's so much easier than the agony of recognizing what he did to her. He doesn't die though. He just sits on the floor, collapsed against the bathroom stall, sobbing and choking on his mistakes and sniffling like an asshole.
He deserves this pain, brought it on himself, and he will keep suffering because he'll always know what he did, how he abandoned her, how she had to survive the trauma without having her partner by her side. And fucking hell, that she deigns to label him a friend now, she's a goddamn saint.
He drags himself to his feet, his hands sliding along the walls and gripping the desks as he moves, barely able to stand, yet still returning to the torture of the open file because he earned this. He tried to sever their bond and so he must face the punishment for his crime. He has to sit here alone in hell and read about how she went through hell alone as well and he deserves the pain because she was innocent and he was guilty and he wishes he could trade places with her and take the pain himself because the idea of that perfect, amazing, empathetic woman suffering is proof that everything is wrong in the world.
He keeps looking through the evidence and the reports and the statements and he fucking hates that her squad, some of the very same bastards she still relies on and protects and loves to this day, didn't even notice she was gone, and he tells himself he would have done better, he would have known she was missing, he would have been there walking through her door with her and prevented the whole fucking thing except he wasn't there because he'd left her and he can't blame them for fucking up when the whole fucking thing was his fucking fault and burning in hell for all of eternity will be nothing compared to the pain he's feeling.
He reads the write up, the statements, and he remembers seeing the picture of her service weapon in the evidence list, but when he reads Olivia's statement about Lewis waiting for her inside her apartment, how he'd taken her weapon and used it to knock her out, he stops, clicks back to the gun photo, notices the badge this time, his mini-badge which he'd sent her with the pendant, the badge clipped to her gun, and the connections are forming in his head, the logical side of his brain still functioning like the detective he is and piecing together the badge on her gun and the report of her being knocked unconscious and the photograph of her with a bruise on her forehead and the scabbed wound in the middle of it and he realizes it was his fucking badge that left that damage on her face and he feels it like he hit her himself.
And he's running for the toilet again, nothing left but sorrow and guilt in his system, his body valiantly trying to expel them.
This time, he only returns to his desk long enough to retrieve his laptop and head back to the bathroom stall. It'll be easier, he figures, with less walking involved.
It's a fucking rabbit hole. A vortex. A nightmare. He's fallen into it and he can't wake himself up and he can't look away and he can't stand what he's reading and he hates what he's seeing, but he has to, he fucking has to because she fucking lived it and the least he can do after bringing this horror down on her is bear fucking witness to it.
It's nearly four in the morning when he's run out of new pieces of hellscape to view. He's read it all, the files and the statements and the court transcripts with the bastard cross-examining her and the way she'd tried to move on when the sonofabitch came back for her and he's so fucking glad the prick is dead but he really wishes he'd been able to strangle Lewis himself and fuck if even watching the man die hadn't just fucking doubled down on the trauma Olivia had experienced. He doesn't stop with the official record, he keeps at it, reading news articles he googles and he looks at all the pictures and sees all the evidence and he's obsessed now with the idea of knowing everyfuckingthing that everyfuckingone already knows and expects that he also already knows and he can't seem to stop because as bad as it is to look and absorb, it'll be worse to process and work through and remember and he knows the next time he's near her, all those images, both seen and imagined, will rise up and he'll just have to hope he's near an appropriate place to vomit because he sure it'll happen when he sees that beautiful woman and thinks of her battered and bruised and burned and fuck there's nothing left to throw up, but his stomach is still trying and he's starting to think it'll be a sad, but fitting end that someone finds him on the bathroom floor having died of remorse.
The cleaning staff comes in near five shocked to discover him there, offering to call for help even though no one else is in the office, and Elliot shrugs it off, mostly because there's nothing anyone can do to help him, but also because he doesn't deserve the mercy of help. He's physically sick, like he has a full-body hangover, and his emotions are worn the fuck out and he's exhausted but he knows he's not about to sleep. Hell, with the things he's seen and read about all night, he may never sleep again. He drags himself to his feet and staggers out of the office, leaving the confused janitor to shout after him that he's forgotten his computer.
He can't go home. He can't stay at work. He can't go to Olivia's. He can't even think. He's just tripping over his own feet down the sidewalks and making those random turns Parker hadn't and he finds himself outside that bar that the guys were headed the previous night. It's well past last call and too early for first call and he doesn't really care, as long as the door is unlocked and the room is dark and he can collapse into a table in the back. He imagines it's his badge that buys him some slack, or maybe the haggard man at the bar recognizes him, but Elliot finds a tumbler and bottle of whiskey on the table in front of him.
The barkeep shrugs. "You don't look like you're here for breakfast."
Elliot doesn't know what he's there for besides a place to sit because he's too sick to walk. He shrugs back and it's a miracle he can even keep up that much of a conversation because he's preoccupied with turning over every horrible thing he'd seen and read and his mind is running wild with all the things he knows were left out. At the moment, he's stuck on her necklaces, not just the one he'd given her, but the one she'd worn for years before that, both of them, noted as remaining in evidence unclaimed and the date, which was now not too long in the future, when they would be destroyed. It hurts, knowing that things which meant a great deal to her were so heavily associated with what happened that she couldn't or wouldn't claim them.
He's already sick from the information and the physical reaction to it and from not sleeping and not eating and he doesn't even intend to take the bartender up on the silent offer, but somehow the glass is in his hand the whiskey is burning its way down his throat and he's surprised he doesn't feel sicker with the alcohol in his belly except it would be impossible for him to feel worse than he already does.
He doesn't count. He doesn't care. But he knows he's had more than enough and his thoughts have moved on from her necklaces and he's instead remembering the way he'd shown up high in the middle of the night, pounding on her door and screaming her name and demanding that she let him in. He'd been plenty embarrassed the next day and it had taken weeks before he could meet her eyes, but he hadn't understood, not even when she'd called him out on it, that the discomfort hadn't simply been his own.
"You show up at my house in the middle of the night when my son is there asleep. That was hard for me, scary."
Now, shit, it makes sense. At the time he'd wanted to scoff and laugh at the idea that Olivia Benson would ever be scared of anything, let alone him. But now? Fucking hell, of course she'd been terrified. She'd been cornered and terrorized in her own home once and he imagines she'd been thinking it might happen again, with her son there, and though Elliot had always thought the trust between them had been instinctive from the beginning, now he actually gets that he'd destroyed it, a year after she'd flat out said she didn't trust him, but he actually understands it now. She was facing a man who was out of control and much stronger than her with a history of aggressive and violent behavior more or less forcing his way into her home. They'd shared a few drinks together when they'd been partners, but she'd never once seen him drunk and never high and she probably had no idea how much danger she was facing and only knew that she'd be helpless if he attacked.
There are more shots after that, while he tries to block out the idea that she doesn't trust him, that she's scared of him, that he can't even swear to her that he would never, ever hurt her because he did hurt her, he fucking left her, and he can never fix what he broke by doing that. He wonders if he should leave again, disappear, maybe tell her, maybe not, just get his sorry ass out of town, far enough that she'll never have to see or hear him again, maybe far enough that she'll never be reminded of him again. But he can't run far enough to make it right and even as he thinks about hiding, he thinks about her getting that damn charm and his stupid "semper fi" promise and putting the damn thing on a fucking chain around her neck and wearing it proudly like they were going steady as soon as he came back. He can't leave her again. He can't hurt her again.
The bar has gotten busier, the old man serving up coffees and fried egg sandwiches from a busted George Foreman grill he has set up on the bar to a stream of customers who started coming in before the sun came up and at some point one of those sandwiches appears in front of him and he's not hungry, but he finds himself eating it anyway, if only because he fears if he passes out and winds up in the hospital, someone will call Olivia because while he's got Bell listed as his first emergency contact he knows she's not going to answer when she's got Jack for a precious few hours and Olivia is next on the list.
The idea of someone calling her reminds him of the text he'd sent her, before he'd made that accidental click that had sent him tumbling off the cliff into this hellish nightmare that is unfathomably worse than having watched his wife be murdered in front of him and he supposes that grieving the loss of Olivia's trust more than his wife's death makes him a terrible person, but he's already established that he's an awful person. He pulls his phone from his pocket, trying to decide if he should text her again, say nevermind, explain that he knows now and he's fucking suicidal over it and much worse off mentally than when she'd tried to stage an intervention for him when he'd gone insane six breakdowns ago.
Maybe it's a good thing that the phone screen remains stubbornly black, the battery long dead, because he has no idea what he'd say and it doesn't matter because it would be wrong anyway and she probably never wants to hear from him again anyhow.
By the time the lunch crowd starts trickling in for burgers and fries, Elliot has only been sick once more, and he's not sure if it was the whiskey or the new reality, but he's happy to be left alone. He has deliberately tried not to think about the rape kit and the fact that Lewis seemed hellbent on getting Olivia to admit to something she denied and he knows the concept has been percolating in the back of his head even while he's been trying to ignore it because all of a sudden he thinks of Noah and that beautiful little boy that Olivia loves so damn much and Elliot doesn't even know how old he is because Olivia doesn't trust him enough to share information about her child and even so, Elliot has five kids and he's worked with kids his whole career and the boy must be around ten or so and he realizes the timing is close and he's too devastated by the idea to even be sick.
He keeps thinking about it and turning it over in his head and it takes him a long time to realize that would have made her very obviously pregnant when Lewis came after her again and he'd seen the footage of the press conference with her admitting to perjuring herself and she was definitely not pregnant. At least there's that, he thinks, that Noah must simply be tall for his age and younger than he appears, but Olivia is tall so that makes sense and he's happy for that one thing, that Olivia was able to find some love and happiness after the whole ordeal.
As much as he doesn't want it, one of those half-cooked burgers winds up on his table and eventually in his belly and he supposes the food is allowing him to stay awake and fuel the thoughts that are spinning out of control in his head. The grill disappears around the time the first arrivals appear for happy hour and Elliot knows he needs to leave because it's going to get loud and crowded and once people really start drinking he's going to think of Olivia held prisoner and having vodka and pills forced down her throat and instead of being sick, this time it's unrestrained tears that arise and he was able to sit there for hours and drink and eat without being bothered, but he knows the bartender isn't going to let him sit there and sob so he throws a wad of bills on the table and slips out onto the street.
He finds a park bench across the street and throws himself at it, unable to devote any energy to the process of walking. His brain is locked on the news articles, the archived reports of a missing NYPD detective, and he knows with Olivia's looks and her advocacy for victims, the fucking media would have jumped on the idea that she was missing and have plastered her picture everywhere for ratings and he finally knows how a teenaged Jet would have found out who Olivia Benson was. Because no one in New York wouldn't have recognized her. Because no one in the US would have been able to avoid learning of the disappearance of a beautiful woman. Because everyone would have been waiting for the ultimate resolution - like her body being recovered or a salacious tale of her running off with a perverted suspect and robbing banks.
He grips the bench as the nausea washes over him again, as he finally realizes what she probably considers the absolute worst part of the ordeal. She hadn't known when he left the country; she still doesn't know anything about the timeline of events. She thinks he knew. She thinks he was there, in the same damn city, watching the coverage of her abduction and not responding. She was probably waiting for him to show up, to be there for her after even if he'd abandoned her before, to offer superficial support, to ask if she needed anything. She thinks he just sat there, waiting along with everyone else, knowing her better than they did and that she had not simply run off, maybe not even wondering if she'd be found alive or dead, maybe not even caring. And after a fucking decade went by, he just reappeared in her life and didn't fucking ask about how she was, about what she went through, about how scared she'd been and how scarred she is and how all of the happiness in the world would never, ever erase the pain of him leaving her to that.
He hasn't tried to explain his departure, not really, not in any legitimate way. He never offered her any kind of real excuse because, even before he knew about Lewis, he knew his behavior wasn't justifiable. He'd been scared and stupid and he'd betrayed her.
He recalls her statements about the events in the grainary, the words falling over him like blows as he imagines her putting a gun to her head and pulling the trigger. The pain and fear and sorrow that must have washed over her in those moments. Not only had her partner not been there, he hasn't even asked.
It hits him as a cold chill from deep inside his soul that no matter what she says or how she pretends, she'll never really forgive him. He can't say he doesn't deserve it, he knows he does, he knows that as much as all of this hurts, as much as living the rest of his life with this pain will torture him, he'll never know the agony she felt when she needed her partner and he didn't come for her.
He thinks about his fervent wish to die on that bathroom floor in the wee hours of the morning and he wonders if maybe he did. Because this is hell, his life is hell forever now, and there is no hope that it will ever get better. This is burning in hell and eternal damnation and it doesn't matter how sorry he is because his actions were unforgivable. And even if Jesus were to appear beside him and offer forgiveness, he knows he doesn't deserve it. He doesn't want it.
He wants to suffer. He deserves to suffer. Like she did. Like she will.
Forever.