Author's Note: I've had a bunch of real life drama the past few days that's taken me away from writing.
Olivia makes her way back down the slope to the clearing where Elliot's van is parked, carrying a bag with two sandwiches, two bags of potato chips, and a drink for each of them. While she was at the deli, waiting for their food, she'd texted Noah's friend's mom and asked if there was any way Noah could stay the night. She'd received a photo in reply, the two boys grinning at the camera with Toy Story on in the background.
Thankfully, everyone in her life thinks that when she has something come up abruptly, it's always about the job. It makes it easier to hide the truth of little personal emergencies, such as this.
Her stomach rumbles slightly, and she eagerly anticipates being able to sit down and eat.
They wouldn't have a place to eat outside, unless he has a folding table hidden somewhere she doesn't know about. She doesn't know what his camper situation looks like on the inside – from the outside, it looks like a classified ad special circa 2004 – or if she's even going to get to see the inside.
She's always been on the outside looking in when it comes to Elliot and his family – 23 years and counting, watching her best friend with the photogenic, all-American family live the life she never could. Minus those years when he was gone, but she still wondered about him, even in his absence. Especially.
That's never been the life she was meant to have, and that's fine. She's a big girl now, she's learned to accept the quirks of fate of her birth and upbringing, but she can still look at what the Stablers have – had, she corrects – and feel a shot of envy course through her.
Except, now, things are contorted and twisted, and what was up is now down.
The writing is on the wall for them, and it's in a language she can't hope to decipher on her own; she has a feeling Elliot can see the same writing, and that they each hold the crucial half of the other's personal Rosetta Stone. She only hopes that they can translate it before the flood comes to wash them all away and leave nothing behind but waterlogged memories.
When she gets back to the camper, she sees a blanket laying on the ground. "Thought we'd have a picnic," Elliot says, smoothing out a spot for her. "Figured it might be more comfortable than trying to squeeze in there."
She nods, sitting where he designates and watching as he sits next to her. The gesture is oddly intimate – I'm having a picnic with Elliot Stabler – but she smiles at the thoughtfulness behind it. "Got your usual," she says, opening the bag and handing him the one she knows is his, before spreading hers out in front of her. "Wasn't sure if you'd want barbecue or ruffled chips, so I got one of each."
With a grin, he pours both bags of chips onto the sandwich wrapper and divides them equally, half barbecue, half ruffled, and then takes half of her sandwich and swaps it with half of his. "There," he says, brushing his hands off and looking at the makeshift spread in front of them. "Just like we used to do it, right?"
Just like we used to do it.
It's been so long. Too long.
She twists open her tea and tosses him his root beer. She knows how much he likes regular beer, but right now, she's not in the mood for any mood-altering chemicals to get between him, her and the conversation they need to have.
Whatever is said tonight will be said dead sober, or it won't be said at all.
Captain's orders.
"That a flower on your bottle?" he asks, motioning as she takes a sip from it.
She glances down, unsure as to what he's talking about. Sure enough, there's a large reddish-orange hibiscus flower on her bottle. "Yeah, it's hibiscus-flavored tea," she says. "Nice change from the regular."
"I'll take your word for it," he says. "The last time I tried anything new, I ended up having an Albanian woman reading my coffee grounds. Did you know that was a thing?"
She chuckles under her breath, picturing an old lady very seriously looking at the dredges of their coffee cups and thinking she could figure out their lives from what was left behind. "No, but nothing surprises me anymore, Elliot. You should know that."
Not after you left me, didn't acknowledge my existence for ten years, and when you came back, I began to let you back into my life, began to trust you again – only for you to disappear again.
The bigger surprise would be if you actually stayed.
She looks at him, and he's looking at her with the same expression he's given her for years, the one where it looks like he's trying to memorize every angle of her face and commit it to memory. "Elliot," she says, more as a warning.
"Liv." Where she warned, he prays.
He's always been one for prayer, one who understood the sacred and the divine, even if he had to bring the retribution about with his own hands. And now, he looks to her, penitent, as if she's Mother Mary and his confessor all in one.
Except, she's not particularly worried about the catalog of how he perceives his sins tonight, not when they're written across his face and tucked in the nooks and crannies of almost every conversation they've had since the night of the explosion.
The food is good. It's food, and they have to eat, and their conversation is snatches of words here and there, as if their previous détente faded when she went to get the food. It's nice to share a meal with him, like we used to. If she squints, and lets the age lines and creaks in their bones fade away, and makes the blanket shift into their desks back at the old precinct, it's almost like they've never left the old days behind.
Except they have, long ago.
She chews the last bites of the sandwich – whether it was his or hers initially, doesn't matter, once it's divided, it's hers regardless, much like their pains and sorrows – and swallows, following with a gulp of tea. It's time to face the things she's wanted to say.
"I missed this," she says, and it's the closest that she's gotten to admitting certain things out loud that she's kept under wraps all these years. His face lights up slightly, and she continues talking, knowing that the light will dim sooner or later. "Do you know how much I missed this?"
"Getting sandwiches at the corner deli?"
"Don't play stupid, Stabler." She's annoyed, because he's either skirting around the very real issues, or he's oblivious, and she's not sure which one annoys her more, as she blows out a breath and fixes her glare on him. "I've stayed in this city for ten years without you. And yeah, it's the sandwiches, and the Chinese takeout, and not having anyone to split my spare egg roll with, and trying to find the greasiest New York pizza we can, because you say the grease adds flavor. It's all that, and it's long stakeouts on streets that we want to be quiet, but never are, and it's having someone who knows how to finish my sentences before I start them. It's losing my best friend, and not understanding why."
He nods, taking each thought in as it's said, and he runs his hands over his face to attempt to disguise the clearly-evident anguish that threatens to take him over. "Liv – "
"Oh, no, no, no, we're just getting started here." She gazes beyond him, watches as a duck submerges itself in the water head-first, and she sighs. "You might know how many times I called you, or texted you. But do you know how many times I wanted to?"
"I'm guessing a lot more than you actually did."
"Gold star for you." The sarcasm drips from her voice, and she folds her hands together and pulls her knee against her chest. "I'll never understand how you could just leave the way you did."
His voice is hoarse and scrapes against the wind as he speaks the one name that seems to act as the shorthanded explanation for everything that's gone wrong between them, "Kathy."
"Oh, fuck that. What did she make you do? You're a grown man, last time I checked, you're capable of making your own decisions."
"She'd – she'd been saying for months, that you were going to make me choose between her and the kids, or you, and I kept telling her that she was ridiculous, you'd never make me make that choice."
"You're right, I wouldn't have," she says, and she desperately wishes she'd bought a second bottle of that tea right now, because she could use it to wash away the bile that threatens to rise in her throat. "So, why did she make you think you had to?"
"After Jenna," he pauses for a moment. "After Jenna, she was convinced I'd made my choice, and that it was you, because I'd chosen you over a civilian, and put everything – my job, my pension, our family's stability – on the line for you."
"I never asked you to shoot Jenna."
"You didn't have to." Another pause, he clears his throat and looks her dead in the eye, his focus unwavering, unrelenting. "We'd proven before that we'd choose each other over a civilian."
"Did Kathy know that?" She doesn't like remembering the Gitano case – how close we came to losing each other – because the case was bad enough, and the aftermath and what it did to their relationship for far too long was even worse.
He shakes his head. "No. All she ever knew was that you and I worked that case, and that it was a particularly tough one. I never told her anything else."
"So when she found out about you shooting Jenna –"
"She thought it was the first time I'd done something like that, and to her, that was all the proof she needed that she was right." He smooths out the blanket under his touch, continues to look at her. "I was too far gone to argue. Much."
She knows about his father's alcoholism, much like her mother's, and how with a particularly brutal emotional shove, either of them could end up teetering on the precipice of the bottle, even now.
"But you had to leave me." It's not a question, it's a statement of fact: he had to leave, whether Kathy pushed him to or not, and since she was there, he had to leave her.
"I told you before, Liv, if I heard your voice, I wouldn't have been able to leave. I would have thrown it all away for you then, and you definitely wouldn't have asked me to do that."
"No, I wouldn't have." Olivia Benson is a lot of things, but the last thing she ever wanted to be is a homewrecker, for crying out loud, or the other woman. Not that it helped how people perceived her, necessarily, all they saw was how close her and Elliot were and naturally jumped to conclusions that weren't there, but at least they had the truth to back them up. Then.
Now, she's pretty sure Bell and Carisi and those feds all think they have something going on behind the scenes, and even though she's pretty sure Carisi's keeping a secret or two of his own from her, none of them can prove anything.
It's hard to prove a negative, because the absence of it in one place doesn't preclude it existing somewhere else – like in his precious parallel universes. Seriously, when did Elliot start reading sci-fi novels? Or was it something he'd picked up from one of Eli's comics?
"I never would have asked you to break up your marriage for me, and Kathy thinking that I would ever ask you to make that choice shows she never really knew me at all." She frowns, and mumbles under her breath, as if to emphasize how serious she is, "never."
"Would you?"
"Would I what?" and she doesn't really know if she wants him to finish this question, because there's not an ending to that sentence that she really wants to hear. Not from him, not now.
"If I'd chosen you," and her heart wants to sing at this fragment of a thought, before she realizes there's the sting of a but coming, because there's never a rise without a fall, "would you have let me?"
She wants to say yes. She wants to reach across this blanket and tell him yes, it would have always been you. But she's not the comparably dewy-eyed optimist that she was ten years ago; she's been hardened by time and circumstance, and he's had his contributions to that. She wants him to choose her, because no one's ever chosen her before.
But.
"You're not the one who makes the choices," she says, softly. "All your choices have been made for you, by other people. You wouldn't have ever chosen me, because you wouldn't have allowed yourself to be in that position."
"What do you mean?" He seems genuinely confused, and she shakes her head, feeling her ponytail graze against the soft gray fabric of her hoodie. Once upon a time, this had been his hoodie, and she'd taken possession of it, and it's soft and reminds her of days of comfort. It's small comfort at times like this, though.
"Your entire life has been defined by what other people decide for you. It's like you convinced yourself you could never have what you actually want, and you had to settle for what God or Kathy or whoever decided for you."
"You're one to talk." He looks over at her, and she sees a flash of heat and anger surge through his normally calm eyes. "You're so busy over there tripping over your own two feet making sure everyone else is happy, that you forget about what it is you actually want. Do you even know what that is, anymore?"
She stares at him, unblinking, unfeeling, though she can feel a tear prick the corner of her eye. Damn you. "I have Noah," she says. "And you know I've always wanted a family to call my own. He's my family, and I chose him, and I love him."
Something inside his mind clicks. "He's not –"
"Oh, fuck you." She spits the words out. "Even if he was some other guy's kid, what does it matter to you? We were never anything to each other besides partners, and your wife made sure of that, even if you didn't." She stands, brushes crumbs from her jeans and stares down at him. "Call me when you're ready to remember who you are, Elliot. Goodbye, Eddie, I hope I never have to see you again."
It takes all of her strength to walk away from him.
But she keeps walking, even when she hears him call out her name, and she doesn't stop walking until she's walked the more than six blocks back to the parking garage where she'd left her car that afternoon, and she rests her forehead against the steering wheel and sobs.
She sobs, for the people they were, and are, the choices that they've made – and didn't make – that have brought them to this point where she's found herself walking away from the one person she'd promised she'd never let out of her life again, if only his God would find the mercy in His heart to bring him back to her.
She sobs, because life has taken so much from all of them, and she's never been one to take more than she's given, and neither has Elliot, but now they're in a tenuous position where more is possible, for once, and she doesn't know what to do with it, and neither does he.
Ball's in your court, Stabler. Your move.
-to be continued-
