Author's Note: Thank you, Cindydaly, for the review last chapter! I hope you enjoy this intro to Cassidy. He's going to be around for a while.
The sheer amount of times I've now rewatched the Cragen murder episodes is now ridiculous. I swear I can quote entire sections at this point. Hopefully it's worth it! Let me know what you all think! Much love.
Chapter Four
Not long after, with the same lack of warning with which he'd left, Brian Cassidy walks his way back into their lives. Or, more accurately, he punches his way back into their lives.
Rollins and Amaro bring him into the station one night, dragging him alongside a small, paunchy man purported to be one of New York's most well-connected pimps. Amaro wears an expression rife with anger, and he sports the beginnings of a truly promising bruise along the left side of his jaw.
Within moments, Cragen has the pair separated, with Bart Ganzel in an interrogation room with Fin and Rollins, and with Cassidy in one with Elliot.
"Thanks, man," Cassidy says when Elliot tosses him an icepack. He sound as casual as if they often meet up to shoot the shit, and as if he hadn't just been arrested and brought back to the precinct he'd vacated some twelve years earlier. "Who's the new guy? He's got a decent right hook."
"That's Amaro, but—" It's hard, terribly hard, not to allow himself to get caught up in their relationship of the past. This Cassidy, Elliot reminds himself, is not the Cassidy he'd once worked beside. This Cassidy could be just another perp. "Cassidy, what the hell happened?"
He's not a perp. Thank god for small favors.
"Ganzel thinks he's got an ex-NYPD on the payroll," Cassidy explains. Standing beside the barred window, he presses the icepack to his eye, winces, and then trails towards a chair. "You can tell Amaro I'm sorry I got the better of him, but I had to make it look real."
Somehow, Elliot doubts Amaro would ever take kindly to such an apology. He himself certainly wouldn't.
"So you're undercover?" he asks. After Cassidy sits, he follows suit. "For who? Internal affairs?"
"It's need-to-know." To Cassidy's credit, the visible side of his face exhibits a brief flicker of regret, as if he would truly tell Elliot if he could. And he would, probably. They'd always gotten along just fine in their brief tenure together, at least until it had come to—
As if on cue, the door bursts open, and Olivia strolls in.
"Cassidy, you ass," she says, but without ire. No matter her words, a hint of amusement lingers around the corners of her mouth. "You punched my partner?"
My partner.
And Amaro is that, just as surely as Elliot is. She partners with him more frequently than anyone else in the squad, and they get along well—just as she gets along with everyone, just as Elliot tries to follow suit. And yet—
No matter who else he works with, 'partner' is a label he will forever ascribe to her and her alone.
Apparently she feels differently.
Cassidy catches it too. "Partner?" he repeats, and his jaw lifts in a subtle half-smile. "Well, if I'd known that—" He straightens in his chair, his eyes suddenly alight in a very different manner, and reaches his hand across the table. "It's nice to see you too, Olivia. It's been a long time." He grips her hand between both of his, his palms dwarfing hers, and his smile widens as his chin tips downwards. Slowly, with intent, he takes in the rest of her—glossy hair, black blouse, black jeans, tanned skin, smooth hips—and his gaze lingers on the latter. "You look good."
Just like that, Elliot knows that he and Cassidy will no longer get along just fine.
Cassidy is no longer the green, fresh-faced detective who had once roamed the precinct's halls. He's rougher now, rougher and tougher both, and life has transformed both his boyish good looks and his voice into something almost gruff. He no longer wears his hair slicked back straight or keeps his chin free from even a single hour's stubble. Now, his hair grows messily and gray strands thread the day-old beard that lines his jaw.
And it suits him. The gruffness, the attitude, the way he leans casually in his chair—it all suits him, as does a confidence he hadn't had a decade earlier. Back then, he'd pined after Olivia so blatantly that the entire office had noticed, to the point that Elliot had always suspected that his transfer had had at least a little something to do with her.
Based on the way Cassidy continues to smile at her, no matter the serious matter between them, Elliot stands by that assumption. And he knows, as he'd just known with Haden, what will follow.
Eventually, they have no choice but to let Ganzel go and to throw Cassidy into Rikers for the night. Nonetheless, it doesn't escape Elliot's notice that it's Olivia who leads Cassidy away—or that Cassidy insists on cracking a joke, as she twists his arm behind his back for show, about how she must like it rough.
Her eyes are wide when she returns, and she looks more than a little frazzled when she collapses at her desk. "Cassidy," she says, and she stares at Elliot as if for answers. "El, can you believe he's—"
"No. I can't believe he's wrapped up in this." A thousand questions flicker into the forefront of Elliot's mind, but he settles on a statement instead. "He said you look good."
She scoffs; her eyes roll towards the ceiling. "He's impossible."
"He's always liked you."
"I haven't seen the man in over ten years."
"And?"
She changes topics. "We need to see what Cragen wants us to do next, but I need to check on Nick first."
"Of course. He's your partner."
She hears the brittle edge to his voice, one not softened by his attempt at a smile, and her eyes roll again. "Jealousy doesn't become you," she tells him, but she smiles back as she says it. When she rises from her desk and passes him, she takes a moment to squeeze his shoulder—just a moment, and just a squeeze, but he feels her touch in every cell in his body. "Don't go getting territorial on me now, Stabler."
Now. As if he hasn't felt that way for years—and how can she not know that? How can she not know that he—
"I won't," he promises, and her lips press inwards in another smile swallowed before she disappears deeper into the precinct to look for Amaro.
Yet again, it's easier said than done.
xxx
In the end, Cassidy becomes the least of Elliot's worries. Soon, everything else in life becomes background noise, because Cragen gets set up for murder.
It's Olivia who calls him in the early morning hours; Olivia who explains it all in a rushed, hushed tone; and Olivia who greets him outside the captain's door. She wears a thick sweater and a look of abject worry, and the latter has aged her ten years overnight.
Still, she's beautiful. She's beautiful in her compassion and her concern, beautiful in the relieved slump of her shoulders when she spies Elliot jogging up the sidewalk, beautiful in her complete lack of hesitation as he reaches for her.
Elliot doesn't think. He embraces her automatically, fiercely, protectively, his arms the shield around her that she's rarely needed before.
Together, surrounded by curious spectators and officers hard at work, they cling to each other as CSU swarms in and out of Cragen's home.
And, despite it all—despite the horror and the unreality of the moment and all the days that will come—Elliot, too, is home.
"It's Carissa," she tells him, the words spoken into his chest. Her voice vibrates against his skin. "I saw her in his bed. It's Carissa."
"Someone set him up." Elliot would bet his very life on it. "Someone set him up to make it look—"
Her shoulders heave. "I know," she says, and her head tips back to look up at him. Further relief replaces some of her worry as she stares up at him with a look he could drown in. "I know that—and you know that—but they're already saying—"
"We'll figure it out. You and me—we'll figure it out and we'll clear his name." On that he'd also bet his life.
She swallows; her eyes shine. "I'm so glad you're here," she whispers, and the way she looks up at him—
He's suddenly twelve feet tall. He's on top of the world. He's unstoppable, and just because she looks at him like she believes all that about him too.
"We'll figure this out," he promises again. "You and me. We're in this together."
They're words he'd repeat for the rest of his life, if he could.
xxx
And they do figure it out, although it's no longer just the two of them against the world. Because it's Cragen, everyone in the squad comes together to help out. And, because it's Cragen, Elliot doesn't begrudge their presences a single bit. In fact, for the first time since his return, Elliot welcomes the new additions in their office—and he feels, for the first time, like they could perhaps form a single, solitary unit.
It's at Rollins' side that he discovers witness Iris Peterson dead in her bathtub, apparently by suicide, and he does his best to comfort her outside the poor woman's home as CSU swarms the scene.
"I'm fine," Rollins insists more than once, but she's lost all the color in her cheeks, her skin as pale as her hair. She has her hands pressed against her knees, her back bent in half, and her ponytail swings to obscure her face as she stares at the cracked sidewalk. "Seriously, Stabler, I'm not—"
"I know you're tough," he tells her, and she cranes her neck a little at that, just enough to shoot him a strange, sideways smile. Her lips are pale too. "That's not meant to patronize you or anything. I know you're tough."
She laughs, but without humor. "Right," she agrees. Roughly, she wipes her palms against the front of her slacks. "Sure. If you say so. Look, we need to get ahead of this. Maybe you can talk to Warner and see if you can get her to rule this inconclusive. We know it's not a suicide—there's no way—"
He agrees, if only to bring some hope back to her, although he doubts Melinda will bite.
She does, but it's a hard sell.
"Iris was a little depressed, she was anxious, but...she was not suicidal," Rollins insists in the cold, metallic chamber of the medical examiner's office. Before her, Iris lies on an examination table, her red hair stark against bloodless skin and her body covered with a blue sheet. "All she wanted was to be with her daughters."
Melinda Warner hugs her clipboard to her chest. "If force was used, the bruising would've shown post-mortem."
Rollins opens her mouth to argue, but Elliot gets there first. "Was her tox screen clean?"
"Alcohol and Xanax in her system, which she could've taken herself."
In a paranoid diatribe that rings of Munch, or at least Amaro, Rollins launches into a new theory. "Or somebody could've slipped it to her, waited for her to pass out, and, you know, slit her wrists. There'd be no signs of force."
It sounds crazy. She sounds crazy, and, under normal circumstances, Elliot wouldn't believe her.
Nothing about these circumstances are normal.
Yet Warner can't wrap her head around that. Not yet. "If you have reason to be paranoid," she agrees, and reluctantly. "That could be a possible scenario." Across the table, she levels Elliot with a look, one he reads clearly. This is insane.
If only he could agree with her.
"We have reason," he tells her quietly, and she lowers the clipboard a little. Just a little, but it's enough. "Melinda—I wouldn't tell you we did if we didn't, and you know we have reason. You know Cragen. You know what he's capable of and what he's accused of. If they can frame that—who's to say they can't frame this?"
She wavers. "I speak for the dead," she insists after a beat. "I can't tell you something that isn't there."
"Okay, so just don't rule it as suicide yet," Rollins urges. "Keep it open, pending investigation. Please."
Again, Warner wavers.
"Please, Melinda," Elliot repeats, and—
She capitulates, and he knows she does so for him, not Rollins.
Rollins knows it too. "Thanks," she says as they head back to the squad car. Gratitude sounds strange rolling off her tongue, and her slender shoulders shift as she speaks, as if it sits uncomfortably too. "For backing me up in there. Warner doesn't care much for me."
"You talk back too much." He tosses her the keys. "You drive."
This time, when she laughs, it sounds a little more natural. "Funny," she says. She waits until they're both seated, with seatbelts in place, before she speaks again. "To hear people talk around the precinct, you used to be the one who ran his mouth the most."
Normally, such an accusation—lobbed with humor or not—would irritate him. Perhaps it's the seriousness of the charges against Cragen, or the pallor that remains in Rollins' cheeks, but it doesn't bother him this time. "Who told you that? Fin?"
"Fin," she echoes as she turns the engine over, and he catches the fragments of a smile on her face as she cranks her neck to check traffic before she pulls away from the curb. "I wouldn't have guessed it when I first met him, but…the man loves to gossip."
He could have told her that easily. Yet, more to the point—
What else has Fin told her? About him, about Olivia, about the goings on of the squad in large—and, more importantly, does he even really want to know?
He doesn't ask. As Rollins navigates them through chaotic downtown traffic, he simply stares off in silence, and she lets him. Fortunately, it's a more comfortable silence than those they often share—although perhaps that, too, comes down to the seriousness of the charges against Cragen, which continue to hang heavily on his shoulders at all hours of the day.
When they have only a few meager blocks left to traverse, Rollins finally speaks. "Will you do me a favor?" she asks as the car crawls slowly underneath them. It's the first time she's ever spoken those words to him before, and it shows. They come out short, stilted, and thick with her Atlanta twang.
He glances towards her. "Didn't I just do you one with Warner?"
She doesn't look back. Instead, she turns to glance again over her shoulder, and she changes lanes. "That wasn't for me, but…this is. I mean, it kind of is." There, finally, she spares him the briefest of looks, and he catches something strange and worried in the slant of her brows. "Will you check on Nick?"
Elliot shifts in his seat, angling his torso to look at her better. "How is that for you?"
"Well—" She hesitates, licks her lips, and shifts lanes again. "It's not," she admits. "It's for him, but…I'm worried. I'm worried he's about to lose it. All this stuff with Carissa and with IAB looking into his conduct—he's wound too tight. If you could check on him—" She doesn't trail off; instead, her words halt abruptly. Then, again, she waits. She waits, as if he should somehow read her mind and know precisely what it is that she wants.
He can't read her mind, and he doesn't know what she wants. Instead, he stares at her openly, the hold of his jaw slack. "What do you think I can do about that?"
When they pull up to a red light, she finally turns to face him too. "Check on him," she repeats bluntly. "Just ask how he's doing. It'll mean more coming from you. Nick, he—you know he looks up to you, right?"
If pressed, he could swear in that moment that Rollins jests. She must, surely, because—
No. No, he'd had no idea that Amaro felt any type of way towards him—and, even after she lays it out clearly, he still doesn't fully believe her. How can Amaro—Amaro, who he interacts with sparingly by design; Amaro, who he does his best simply not to detest for his presence by Olivia's side—look up to him?
But Rollins doesn't jest. No part of her laughs or even smiles. She simply watches him, her mouth pulled thin and her blue eyes serious, until the light changes to green and she must again turn her attention towards the windshield.
"Sure," he agrees after several beats. "Sure, I'll check in with him."
She lets out a breath, one that sounds tightly held. "Thanks, Elliot," she says quietly, and—
In the near year since her transfer from Atlanta, she's never called him that before. And with the simple use of his name—
The space he feels between himself and the rest of the squad shrinks just a little.
xxx
That space shrinks further after a chat with Amaro. For that, too, Elliot must thank Rollins.
On their return to the precinct, Munch points him in the direction of the weight room. "He grabbed his gloves and took off that way," Munch explains, and he casts Elliot a look overtop his glasses that rings of warning. "Careful," he adds, as if he doesn't trust the expression alone to carry his thoughts. "I wouldn't want to get in between him and a target right now."
Sure enough, he finds Amaro hard at work at the heavy bag. Sweat runs freely from his hair, pours down his neck, and soaks the neckline of his undershirt as his fists connect repeatedly with the leather. Even in the dimly-lit gym, which smells sharply of perspiration and the same angst that has hung over the squad room since Cragen's arrest, the fury on Amaro's brow stands out with absolute clarity. A storm brews behind his eyes, in the tense hold of his jaw, and in the snapping motion of his biceps, and—
Who does he imagine in the place of the heavy bag that swings from the ceiling? Some unknown murderer who had placed Carissa in Cragen's bed? Carissa herself? Bart Ganzel? Or—
Brian Cassidy, who he's already had the pleasure of hitting once? Perhaps it's his own bias leaking through, but Elliot would place his money on the latter.
"Hey," he offers from the doorway. In the still, silent gym, vacant save for Amaro's shifting form, the greeting rises and falls lamely.
The fire in Amaro's eyes continues to burn a hole in the heavy bag. His form doesn't falter, and he lands another devastating combination of punches—two left jabs, one right hook, and a left uppercut—with deadly precision. "Hey." Each hit smacks dully. "Did Liv send you?"
"No." For lack of any better option, Elliot folds his arms across his chest and leans against the wall. "Rollins did."
Amaro snorts. It sounds humorless. "Of course she did," he mutters, the words nearly lost under another punch, and then another, and then another. "Can't escape even for twenty minutes, can I? What, is she worried I'll end up putting the moves on another hooker?"
Under any other circumstances, the sharpness of the question would serve as a deep enough warning for Elliot to back off. And yet—
Rollins had asked him to do this. Proud, tactless, reckless Rollins had asked him for a favor, no matter how much it had clearly pained her to do so, and he's never had an easy time telling women 'no.'
A bench runs along the wall. When Elliot moves towards it, Amaro casts him an uneasy glance that flickers for only the barest second. The hard plastic bites into the back of Elliot's legs as he takes a seat, and then he leans forward to rest his forearms against his knees. "No one thinks you did that."
Again, Amaro snorts, and more violently than before. "Yeah, sure. Tell that to IAB."
"No one here thinks you—"
"And Cassidy." Amaro spits the name with venom. "Go tell that to fucking Cassidy, why don't you, since he's so highly revered around here."
It's the first time he's ever heard Amaro—decent, Catholic, family-man Amaro—swear. For a moment, Elliot can only stare.
Breathing heavily, Amaro falls back from the bag. Veins bulge prominently as he rubs sweat from his brow with the back of his forearm; the scuffed black leather of his glove nearly matches the color of his hair. "He was fucking her," he continues. He speaks with absolute certainty. "Cassidy. Carissa. The way they interacted—the way he treated her and she treated him—there's no way he wasn't fucking her. I've been undercover. I've been deep. I've seen guys get in too far, and—Cassidy, he's in way too far. No matter what he says, I know that he was—"
Elliot's heart pounds strangely beneath his ribs. "Have you told anyone else this?" Olivia, he means, and—
If Amaro understands the subtext, he doesn't let on. Not at first. "I told Munch," he says. With his teeth, he pulls at the Velcro that encircles one wrist and slips a hand free. "Right before they called me in for the first time, I told Munch that there was something going on between Cassidy and Carissa. He said he'd look into it, but—" He flexes his knuckles, which have gone a bright, cherry red, and his expression sours further. "Next thing I know, he and Liv go to talk to Cassidy, and they come back trusting him entirely."
That sounds like Olivia. The people she trusts, she trusts entirely.
With a sharp yank, Amaro frees his other hand, and he drops both gloves to the ground. "I don't get it. I don't get this guy. He's out of SVU for over a decade, but he shows back up and everyone still buys his shit? Without question? I know he and Munch were partners, but—what kind of hold does he have over Liv that she'd go to bat for him like this?"
And there, for the first time, Amaro poses a question to Elliot about their shared partner. Tell me about Olivia, he requests as he never has before. I don't understand her like you do. Make her make sense to me.
It shouldn't affect him. Not at all. Not given the grand scheme of the investigation, and the seriousness of the situation, and the very lives on the line. And yet—
Elliot's shoulders straighten. His stomach unclenches. A little of the tension melts from the back of his neck, because this is the natural order of things, with Amaro coming to him for answers about Olivia and not the other way around. This is how it should be, without question, and he takes several breaths to simply relish in a fresh wave of seniority that far surpasses his superior experience and rank at SVU.
For the first time since Amaro's hire, he feels above the younger detective, because Amaro places him firmly where he belongs: at Olivia's side.
"She's—" Elliot's voice catches; he clears his throat with purpose. "She's loyal. If someone proves themselves to her—no matter how long ago—she doesn't go back on that easily."
Amaro bats that away. "Right, but—did she and Cassidy ever—were they—"
It clicks into place with a literal shock to his system.
Holy shit, he's not insane. Holy shit, Amaro sees it too.
"I watched your interrogation after he decked me," Amaro says. As if to simply occupy his hands, or perhaps to avoid looking at Elliot, he lifts the hem of his undershirt and mops at his face. He speaks there, his voice muffled by cotton. "I saw the way he looked at her—the way he talked to her—and—were they ever—"
A rare sense of comradery burns bright in Elliot's chest. Apparently, the very idea disgusts Amaro too much to put to words—and he can identify with that too easily. Far too easily.
"You'd…have to ask Liv that," he says, which answers the question as neatly as a simple yes.
Amaro reads it in just that way. Revulsion puckers his mouth inwards as he once again faces Elliot. "I will," he promises darkly, and—
What Elliot wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall in that situation.
Amaro sits, eventually, drawn to a spot not far from Elliot along the bench. He all but collapses there, his breathing still rough, and his posture dips down to copy Elliot's. With his forearms rested upon his thighs, he stares down towards the floor to share one blunt, piercing statement. "My marriage is fucked."
It hits a little too close to home for Elliot's comfort. Once again, with deep unease, he sees himself in the crumpled form of the younger detective, and he cares not for it at all.
Damn Rollins for making him do this.
But he does it anyway. Despite the discomfort, Elliot clears his throat, shifts his weight, and does his best to think of what his therapist might ask. "Because of all of this with Carissa?"
Amaro waves a hand that gestures to everything and nothing at once. "Because of that. Because of the job generally. Because Maria's overseas and we never have enough time together and my mom is basically raising Zara. It's all just too much, and this Carissa stuff—the allegations against me—how am I supposed to explain that? How am I supposed to call Maria up in the middle of a warzone and tell her that they're accusing me of improper conduct with a prostitute that our captain then supposedly murdered?"
The answer to that, Elliot knows, is above even his expert therapist's paygrade, let alone his own.
"Have you talked to her at all?" he asks, and Amaro huffs out a coarse, bitter laugh.
"Sure. Surface-level conversations. 'How are you?' 'How's Zara?' 'Staying alive?' That's all we get most days, because that's all that keeps us from fighting. I haven't told her any of this, because what is she going to believe? That this is all an elaborate set-up, or that I actually did what they're accusing me of?"
He makes a point, and a decent one. Elliot can only begin to imagine how he'd go about explaining such a situation to Kathy, or how she'd react if he had to try. It's a step—or several steps—too far for even his tolerant, understanding wife.
He chews on the thought for a moment, and quite literally, with the inside of his cheek pulled between his molars. He only speaks again once it begins to hurt. "Olivia could talk to her."
Amaro's chin twists sharply, snapping until it nearly rests upon his shoulder. There's incredulity in his tone. "What?"
"Olivia could—" Yet just repeating the notion isn't enough. Elliot knows that. And so, without further prompting, he launches into an old tale, one nearly four years back, that hasn't stopped plaguing his conscious or subconscious since. "Shortly after Eli was born, I went undercover and infiltrating this animal smuggling ring. And, Kathy, she—"
How can he even begin to explain Kathy's reaction? "She's worse than mad, and I can't say that I blame her," Olivia had explained tersely when she'd shown up at his cover house—Mike's house, his undercover alter ego—shortly after she'd left the Stabler abode in Queens. "You go undercover again and don't tell Kathy, you'll be safer here than home."
He'd believed her. Although he'd sworn to everyone—Cragen; Olivia; hell, himself—that he simply hadn't had time to inform Kathy of his sudden undercover position, he'd done so at least in part to avoid facing her disgust, her disappointment, her rage.
He'd left Olivia to deal with it all instead, and she had. Although she'd never said so—and neither had Kathy, whose upset had later vanished with the knowledge that he'd gotten shot in the line of duty—he'd known then, as he knows now, that she'd single-handedly talked Kathy off the ledge of leaving him. Again.
Amaro listens, and his jaw loosens as he does. By the time Elliot gets to the stickiest part of it all, of Olivia nearly blowing his cover and then promptly fixing it all by playing the part of a prostitute with scary accuracy, much of his blind anger has left. Slowly, a smile curves across his jaw; quietly, he begins to laugh. "Liv?" he repeats, his eyebrows high and slanted skeptically. "There's no way Liv could believably act like—I mean, Rollins, maybe, but—Liv? She's not—she's too—"
He doesn't finish, but he doesn't have to. Elliot understands the sentiment clearly enough, and it sparks a deep bit of his Catholic soul. Not Saint Olivia, Amaro might as well say, and—
He likes him all the better for seeing her that way, although he's never viewed her in that light, no matter the ring on his finger or the vows he'd made to his wife, from the very first day they'd shook hands in SVU's squad room fourteen years earlier.
Elliot's smile responds; in a moment, they're both laughing together, he and Amaro, sharing amusement between just the two of them for the first time that he can recall. "You'd be surprised," he tells him, and he forces himself past the memory it conjures—of Olivia clad in a flimsy black bra and jeans, fingers buried in her hair, her voice cast half of a pitch higher than usual. "Are you ready for me, Daddy?" she'd asked, sauntering from the bathroom of his shitty cover house, and—
It had unlocked something in him, something he'd tried to keep buried for a decade before that. The way she'd enfolded herself in his arms afterwards, joining the bare skin of his chest and stomach to hers and her arms wrapped around his back, hadn't helped matters. It's a sensation he still hasn't forgotten.
He pushes all of that to the very back of his mind, back to that Pandora's box with walls that grow weaker with every passing day—hour—minute.
"Talk to Olivia about Maria," he suggests again. "She'll help."
Amaro's amusement fades, but doesn't drop entirely. Instead, it skews wry, as does his reply. "Well, she can't hurt. I don't think anything can make it worse at this point."
"Don't tempt fate."
"Fair." Amaro stands. Despite the barrier of the boxing gloves still lying limply upon the floor, his knuckles remain reddened from the sheer force of his punches. He rubs them absently, first one hand and then the other, and goes to retrieve his discarded equipment. "Thanks, Stabler," he says towards the floor. "I…you know, I really appreciate this, man."
Elliot, too, rises to his feet. "Anytime," he says, and—
Strangely, he almost means it.