He has stopped counting how many calls she's left unanswered when he sees her for the first time in half a year. She's almost unrecognizable: her long hair in sun-kissed waves, her feet in sandals instead of boots, her curves clad in soft green tones. She's airy and earthy, and his need to just watch her overwhelms him, keeps him quiet and stunned still until it's too late to call out her name. She slips into an old Subaru, shutting the door and starting the engine before he can take a single breath, let alone a single step in her direction.
He gives no thoughts to what will happen when he catches up to her; he only knows that he has to go wherever the hell she is going. He hasn't seen a sign of life from this woman in six months, and now suddenly she's in his eye line. He'll decide what to do next while keeping her in it.
She drives and drives, and it's no wonder he hasn't crossed paths with her in all this time, because she's already 50 miles outside of the city by the time his patience runs out.
Her break lights flash momentarily when his arm slips out the window to slap the police light onto the hood of his car: she's been watching him, waiting for him to make a move.
His siren blares, the familiar red and blue bringing his slow chase to a halt on the side of a suburban road. He pulls just past her car, parking his own diagonally across the shoulder to block an easy escape. She has no qualms about running from him; he's learned this the hard way.
He watches the road as he approaches her, not looking through the glass of her windshield where he can feel her eyes burning him.
"Are you fucking kidding me?" he hears her frustrated sigh just before he locks his eyes onto hers. His hands grip onto the space where her window still peaks above the door, and the way it digs into his palms is reassuring. This doesn't feel like the nightmares where he only gets one instant of relief at finding her before she begins to bleed, to drown, to fall, to disappear as he's running toward her. The seconds tick on, and she's still here in front of him, real this time, and as impenetrable as when he last saw her.
"You're out of your jurisdiction," she says curtly, as though he were not aware. The corner of his mouth twitches at the victory of this and the familiarity of her: he has always outlasted Olivia in a silent stare down.
"Extenuating circumstances." he tells her, "missing persons case." She rolls her eyes, but the nonchalance is an act, and a more unconvincing one than he's used to. He can see how she shifts under his gaze, how she crosses and uncrosses her arms, how she purses her lips and swallows and waits for him to be done watching her. He's never seen her this put off by his presence, but it matches his own unease after seven years together before six months apart.
"What do you want, Elliot?" she rushes, and it makes him more angry with her than he's been this whole time since she'd evaporated. He takes a moment to unclench his jaw and scoff before he answers.
"An explanation seems fair."
"I can't-I don't have one." Her eyes make no attempts to avoid his; in fact, they draw him in — they leave no room for his to wander. He can tell she doesn't want to waste another second on his intrusions, his demands for answers, but it's more than a demand this time. It's a need. He can't take another night of wavering between hating himself and hating her. He can't let her go without knowing exactly how he'd fucked it all up.
"License and registration then," he settles on, but she knows exactly what information he'll gain from that, and she groans in obvious irritation.
"No," she decides, offering no further excuse as she wraps her hands around the bottom of the steering wheel.
"Maybe you forgot how this works." The chuckle he lets out is meant to antagonize her as he leans in closer, "I'm a cop. You're a civilian."
"That doesn't give you the right—"
"I observed you operating your vehicle in an unsafe way," he interrupts, shrugging his shoulders in the way they'd always done at one another while coming up with grounds for detaining a suspect — purposely letting that suspect know they didn't even need to hide the deceit, that they could conjure whatever justification they wanted. In their past, he'd see a gleam in her eye at the tactic, but now it pisses her off, and he wonders if she regrets teaching him exactly how to use that power play.
Her jaw is set, and she shakes her head with an angry smirk, not budging to reach for the required items.
"Alright, get out of the car."
The way she swallows and tightens her hold on the steering wheel unsettles him, compels him to wonder if he's somehow forgotten what he'd done to make her afraid of him. Maybe that's the missing piece — the reason she didn't even leave a note for him in her emptied desk. He has racked his brain so many times in search of all the reasons she might hate him and found enough of them to realize he's a fucking asshole, but still he'd never come up with any explanation for this .
When had he given her a reason to fear him? Through everything, her safety, her security had been his number one priority — to a fault. His inability to let her take risks had almost cost him their partnership on more than one occasion. Even at his worst, shouting at her while her neck still bled from a knife wound, it was her recklessness that had fueled his rage, her lack of care for her own safety. She knows that, and still she'd never apologized for having put him through the hell of thinking he was about to watch her bleed out. She'd just casually walked up the stairs holding her neck as if he hadn't realized, 60 seconds earlier, that she was more important to him than everything else in his whole goddamned world.
He would never hurt her, never give her reason to think he would. She knows that. He doesn't deserve whatever this is from her of all people.
"Get out of the car." It's just above a whisper this time, but the command is much stronger in his piercing eyes. He's barely given her a moment to react when he reaches inside and wrenches the handle up, despite the way she grabs at his fingers and clings onto the door. She lets go easily when he yanks it open, wringing her hands in her lap for far too many seconds before finally she surrenders. Her expression is confident stoicism as she steps out of the car, but it's in her eyes, fixed intently on his, that he can see she's panicking.
He hates the "what's wrong?" that almost comes out of his mouth, the reassuring palm that almost reaches out to her shoulder. He narrows his eyes in search of answers, and she narrows hers back at him — angry, defensive.
"Turn around," he demands before she's even closed the door behind her. He knows it's an excuse to touch her after so many nights of reaching out for her ghost. He needs to feel that she's still flesh and bone.
She doesn't argue. She turns away and flattens her palms against the rusted hood of the car with no more effort from him. As he steps forward to slide his hands over her hips, he sees the subtle tremble of her arms, feels it in her legs as he runs his palms down her thighs over the hem of her soft cotton dress and onto her bare calves. The dusty green fabric lifts a little as he moves back up just past her knees — slowly, buying himself more time to figure out how the hell to justify what he's doing. He returns to her hips, letting her dress fall back in place and leaving the skin between her thighs unsearched. His hands tuck under her jean jacket and slide up her back, taking note of the tension in every muscle. The cotton fabric ends in the middle of her back, and above it, he can feel the beads of sweat that have run down her spine.
She is still and silent, her breaths shallow as he rakes back down her ribs. When his fingers change direction, moving to search around her waist, her arms suddenly tighten against her sides, trapping his hands there as she arches away from him.
"That's enough," she barks, elbowing him off of her and yanking her jacket back into place. She doesn't turn around to glare her disapproval at him like he expects, and his body decodes her behavior before his mind does.
He reaches out for one of her arms and spins her around with enough force that her palms find the car behind her for balance. She makes her best attempt at holding his focus to her frantic eyes, but it only works for an instant. His police scan of her body immediately clocks it.
He's a father of four, after all; he certainly knows what a pregnant woman looks like. Even at just 3 or 4 months along, it's unmistakable in the way her dress clings to her subtle, newly-rounded stomach. He stares at it, his hand dropping from her arm as he takes a step back to get a more complete view. She stands up straighter and pulls her jacket forward, hiding her stomach behind it as his gaze trails up over her full cleavage and into her guilt-stricken eyes.
She shouldn't be feeling guilt any more than he should be feeling betrayal right now, he thinks. He should have let her be. He had no right to corner her this way. He has no right to ask for answers from this woman who has finally moved on from his broken promises. He has no right to know where she's been, to wonder with whom. He's pathetic. Entitled. An idiot. And he's so fucking sorry, but he doesn't say it as he turns and makes it back to their old sedan in a haze.
He prays for a do-over, plans it out in his mind, what he'd do if God finally granted him one: he'd let her drive away this time, and he wouldn't try to find her. At least not for another year, because even if she's someone else's, he can't bear the thought of never knowing her again, but he could spare himself from seeing her like that, from letting the jealousy rip through his chest like he knows it will every time he thinks of it from now on: his partner — his Olivia with someone else's baby inside her.
As many times as he'd pictured her pregnant, he'd never given a thought to it being with anyone but himself. He'd been so sure he'd have the chance, the courage to swoop in if she ever got far enough with another man to threaten his own hold on her. He'd been letting his marriage grow stale in the meantime, waiting for it to spontaneously implode. Waiting and waiting and waiting like the goddamn fool he is.
It feels like a decade, but it was only a year ago that he'd been unwilling to rock any boats. Things with Kathy were too simple and too peaceful to disrupt. Things with Olivia were too easy but too fragile to risk. They'd gotten through too much, and somehow — after Gitano, after she'd left him, after he'd heard her say she wasn't planning on ever coming back — on the other side of it all, there she had been on the other side of their desk. Somehow, there they had been: intact, in sync.
And then they'd both thrown it all away.
He's almost sure it wasn't just him who'd gotten them to their breaking point. It wasn't just him who'd drank too much one night, who'd pushed too hard at the other's defenses.
But it was him who'd tried to save them, who'd pretended to forget, who'd offered an escape from the darkness they'd invited.
And it was her who'd pushed all his buttons the next day, who'd worked their case into the night, who'd chosen the crib beds instead of her own. It was Olivia who'd paused at the locker room door, who'd turned to say something but stayed silent instead, the momentary look in her eyes stronger than any siren's song.
It was her he'd followed into the dark where they'd crashed into each other, again. Sober, destructive, unforgettable.
Unstoppable, right up until the second time he'd found her desk empty. He had fallen asleep with her skin under his fingertips just hours earlier, but by the time he'd woken up, she'd just disappeared.
And since that day, he's been there waiting and waiting and waiting for her to come back, like the goddamn fool he is.
Her vision is darkening around the edges as he gets further away, and she grips the side mirror of her car so she doesn't fall when it all goes black. She pads her way back into the driver's seat while the sound of his tires squealing across the road tells her that he's whipped around and sped off in the direction he came from.
Fifteen minutes later, her hands finally stop shaking enough to shift the car into drive, though everything inside her still twists, churns, kicks. She is glad for the hours it will take her to get back to North Petersburg; she needs the time to forget about Elliot Stabler and Olivia Benson — time to remember that the baby in her belly belongs to Persephone James and the married man she calls out for in her sleep.