Author's Note: Originally written for Special Valentines Unit 2022, prompt: "Amanda decides to play Cupid so she meets Elliot to learn about his intentions and story before helping," and reposting it so it's on my account.

Contains Elliot/Olivia, Rollins/Carisi, Rollins&Olivia friendship.


For as long as Amanda's known Olivia, which has been over ten years now, she's seen her co-worker/boss/friend in all sorts of states. And yet, as she walks into her office one afternoon, armed with the paperwork from their most-recently closed case to give to her captain, she's not used to seeing her like this.

Olivia's looking at her phone, and she's smiling. And it's not the smile she has when Noah has done something cute and sent his hard-working mom a photo or video of what he's done – no, this reminds her of the smiles she has when Carisi sends her thinking of you texts when she's knee-deep in the middle of a hard case. Or when he sends her a picture of him and her girls working on making her a spaghetti dinner for when she gets home, and she sees the love that's reflected in his eyes that she knows is for all three of them.

(And of course, there's the occasional text that she only opens when she can get a private moment to herself, but those get a much stronger reaction from her than a simple smile.)

Olivia is in love.

Amanda knows it's not with Carisi, because one, he's very happily taken, and two, him and Olivia have more of a mother-son relationship than anything resembling romantic. And Fin's with Phoebe, and she can't imagine Olivia being remotely interested in either of Velasco or McGrath, and she hasn't mentioned meeting any new guys lately.

Which means there's only one person it could realistically be.

Only one person that has ever had that kind of impact on Olivia's emotions, for better or worse. Of course, it's the one person that Amanda does not trust at all, not with Olivia's heart; she's seen what kind of damage he can inflict with his absence, and if he's there – then, well, the damage could be so much worse.

"Amanda, you need something?" Olivia asks, as she takes off her reading glasses to look at her. "I have Velasco and Fin catching calls this afternoon, and it's been fairly quiet, so if you're done with your paperwork, you're free to go home a little early."

"No, I'm good. You get outta here too, when you can," Amanda says. "I'm sure you don't want to be chained up behind that desk all day, not when you could be with Noah." She pauses. "Or Elliot." She watches the expression on Olivia's face shift to a curious, unreadable one. "See ya, Liv."

She walks out of the office and grabs her things from her desk, before leaving for the day. She definitely has a lot to talk to Carisi about.


"Is it such a bad thing if Liv is happy?" Carisi asks, as they lay on her couch, half-watching one of her dating shows after the girls are in bed. It's not that she's stopped liking these shows, but that having someone like Carisi in her life – a good, genuine man who adores her and her girls, treats them like gold – makes seeing the drama and hysteria on these shows seem almost petty.

"You weren't there when he left." She leans against him and brushes her cheek against his Fordham Law hoodie, looking up at him. "You didn't see how broken and upset she was. It took her a long time to get over him leaving her, and if he could do that once –"

"'Manda, every guy is a coward when faced with telling the woman he loves how he feels." He pulls her closer. "I can't tell you how many times I wanted to tell you how I felt, but something stopped me."

West Virginia. Al's proposal, and Billie's birth. Bucci.

She's not sure, but she's positive Olivia and Elliot have to have a similar list of moments where the words were on the tips of their tongues, where something stopped them from taking that final step into the unknown. They were partners for so long, side-by-side, like how her and Carisi were – except, with the other two, there's more years, more cases, and Olivia has always been very reluctant to talk about her war stories that involve Elliot.

"Have you talked to him?" His question interrupts her line of thinking. "Elliot, I mean."

She pauses before she answers. She's seen him alright – thick hunk of muscle, very much the stereotypical cop that she'd think of. But she hasn't really spoken to him, beyond the passing greeting, and certainly doesn't know him, beyond the bare sketches of the basics she's gleaned over the years. "No, I can't say I have."

"Give the guy a chance. If Liv thinks so highly of him, there has to be a reason, right?" He flashes her one of his brilliant grins, one of those ones that she's always been weak to, even before they got together. "Liv deserves to be happy."

"She does," she murmurs, resting against him, watching as two girls get into a catfight over the same guy. Carisi's fingers card delicately through her hair, and she could fall asleep like this, curled into him. "She definitely, definitely does."


"I have to say, I was surprised when you called," Elliot says, stirring a pinch of sugar into his coffee a few mornings later. He eyes the blonde across the table – Amanda Rollins, one of Olivia's detectives. He doesn't know much about her, other than the fact that Olivia trusts her implicitly and considers her one of her best friends, as well as a valued member of the SVU team.

Her own glance suggests she's wary about this as well. "Yeah, well, I never pictured our first real conversation like this," she says, gesturing to the small café table and their two cups of coffee.

"How'd you picture it, then?" He eases back in his chair, observes her carefully.

"For one, I'd always pictured slapping you clean 'cross the face," she says, smirking at him. "But, uh, you offering to pay for my coffee like you did? Took a bit of the sting out of the idea. Then, I was going to yell at you for breaking Liv's heart all these years, and have you begging me for forgiveness." Her southern drawl is slightly more pronounced, and she's dropping her Gs on the ends of her words, and there's a fire in her eyes that speaks of hurt, and betrayal. Not his, specifically, more of a general hurt.

"Do it. I deserve -"

The face of her palm stings across his face, cutting off his sentence. Sharp, unexpected. "That's for breaking Liv's heart," Amanda mutters, before she shakes her hand out and prepares for another. "And that is for leaving all of us to pick up the pieces."

He blinks slowly and grins. "Anyone ever tell you, detective, you've got one hell of a slap? It's in the flick of the wrist."

"I try." She preens slightly, as she takes a sip of her coffee with a content sigh of relief. "I can't tell you how long I've wanted to do that."

"About as long as I've deserved it, I'm guessing." He furrows his brows, focuses his gaze on the feisty, devoted woman sitting across the table from him. "So, tell me why you asked me here. 'Cause, I gotta say, if it was just to slap some sense into me, I could have saved you a lot of trouble and stopped by the precinct. Get a whole lineup going."

"Nah, that's not it, though, if you're offering, who's a girl to say no to an offer like that?" she says, a cheeky grin making its way across her face. "It's Liv."

"Is she okay? Is Noah okay?" He feels the alarm beginning to surge through his body, as if the thought of something happening to either of them would be enough to send him into his protective mode. "I have to know, are they okay? Has something happened?"

"Y'know, Fin always said you were protective of her," she says, burying her grin behind the rim of her cup, as one of her well-manicured eyebrows arches upward. "Guess I'm seeing that now."

"Old habits die hard." He laughs slightly, if only to himself. "Ten years and a whole damn ocean couldn't break me of it, so I guess nothing ever will."

Something he's said has caught her attention, because she leans forward, fixing her gaze solely on him. "Ten years. A whole damn ocean. Your words, not mine. One word from me, Stabler. Why?"

He folds his hands over each other, and doesn't break the gaze. He can win a staring contest with a five-year-old – he's done it countless times with his own children, and now his grandsons too – but there's something unerring in her gaze, as if she's trying to decipher his very soul by simply looking at him. "You ever shoot someone on the job? Not just pull your gun on them, but shoot them."

She flinches, slightly, and he sees that his words have struck a nerve. "A few times, yeah."

"I never could feel clean enough after the last one," he says. "Nothing washes away the blood of a teenage girl. Someone we'd tried to help, but ultimately failed." He visualizes himself in the stupor after the Jenna shooting, the fugue state that didn't fully dissipate for days. "I did it to protect Liv, you know. I thought Jenna was going to shoot her. Wasn't going to let that happen. Couldn't let that happen."

He's clearly rattled her, a little, because her tongue darts out between her lips and wets the corner. "I get it," she says, slowly, softly, choosing her words with a measure of caution. "You made a choice."

"Maybe if I'd been a braver man, the kind of man Liv deserves, I wouldn't have run. But I did." He takes the packaging from the sugar packet, twists it between his fingers. Nervous habit he's picked up, since the PTSD – always has to have his hands moving, never stopping. Because if he stops moving, then he has time to think, and the thinking is what gets him. "There wasn't a day that passed while I was away that I didn't think of her."

"Why not reach out to her? Call her?" She places her palms on the table face-down and stares at him.

He twiddles his fingers together and sighs. "I wanted to. Every time I tried, I couldn't. Because nothing I could ever say to her would begin to justify what I'd done." Exhaling, he blinks his eyes closed and then open again, looking at his conversation partner's sharply inquisitive face. "I spent a lot of time overseas and out of reach. It let me get my head back on straight, and then when Tucker offered to facilitate the department liaison position in Rome for me – I knew I was finally finding my way back home."

Her face is stuck in an incredulous position of shock, her jaw nearly scraping the table. "Tucker got you that job? IAB Tucker?" She chortles in laughter, slapping the table with her palm. "Oh, Liv's gonna love that one."

"Only good thing he ever did for me," he says. "Why would Liv –"

"You need to talk to her about that." Her laughter is still coming out in bursts of hysterical giggles. "Not my story."

"You have to believe me," he continues, filing the comment about Tucker to the back of his mind to ask Olivia at a later time, "I know I hurt Liv. Badly. And you and everyone else have every right to hate me for that, but I want to make things right by her. I'm not going to do it again." I couldn't deal with breaking her heart again. The first time took almost everything I had. "She deserves better."

"She does; we can agree on that." Amanda's gaze shifts downward, where his fingers are wrapped around the handle of his coffee cup. "Do you love her?"

"Yeah. I do. Have for a long time." That's the whole thing about this that makes him alternately laugh and die inside, how his love for Olivia has never shifted through everything. And he isn't sure if Rollins is buying what he's saying, but he's laid every card on the table. "I'm not leaving again. I know now that I'm exactly where I belong."


A part of her still really wants to slap Elliot again. It felt good to do it, even though her palm is stinging something fierce in the aftermath. His face is like chiseled granite though, so slapping him hurts. She focuses back on their conversation, the tentative form of understanding they seem to be forming. While she still can't understand why exactly he left without a word, she gets it, too.

If circumstances had been different after she shot Esther – a young woman she'd gone above and beyond to help, only to have her short, sad life end at the tragic end of one of Amanda's bullets – maybe she would have run, too. But she had Jesse, then, and Jesse was her responsibility, and she knows Elliot has five kids, which she can't even imagine having that many, let alone twins. And maybe, he had to do what was right by them, even if it killed his very soul.

It's a parent thing. He sacrificed his own happiness for the sake of his children's stability, and she'd do the same thing for her girls over and over again. Thankfully, they love Dominick almost as much as she does.

She swallows the last dredges of her coffee. "I'm never going to be your biggest fan, Stabler. Probably won't ever be friends except for through Liv."

"I get it." The corners of his lips twitch upward into a smile. He does have a really nice smile, and he dresses quite well, with those three-piece suits that Carisi has said likely cost a pretty penny or two, especially if he brought them over from Europe. And he'd know, he's another sharp dresser. "I'm glad Liv had so many people on her side all these years. When I couldn't be there, at least she had you."

"I'm glad she had me too." She shakes her head, laughing. "She's also had a lot of other really good people. People who wouldn't think twice about defending her, then or now."

She doesn't know how much Olivia has told Elliot about the years he wasn't there for, about the horrors she faced and the triumphs she secured. She can't imagine it's much, considering he didn't understand why she'd find Tucker helping him get his job back so funny, though knowing what she knows now, she wonders if it was a dying man trying to make amends one last time.

But she looks at him, and she sees a look that can only be described as smitten every time Liv's name is mentioned, or she's discussed. It's similar to the one she occasionally catches Carisi looking at her with, the one where cartoon hearts dance in his eyes and every emotion is laid out in plain view.

Liv deserves to be happy. Carisi's words from their discussion come back to her. Is it such a bad thing if she's happy?

Olivia deserves someone who looks at her like that, who looks at her like she's the only woman in the world and his heart is wholly hers to possess and protect. And maybe, just maybe, now, Elliot can truly be that person for Olivia.

"I need to go interview my witness, so I didn't totally lie to Liv about where I've been for the last half hour," she says, breaking the tentative silence between the two of them. "I'll see you around?"

"See you around, Rollins," he says, shaking her hand with a firm, precise handshake. "It was nice. To get to talk, a bit."

"Yeah, it really was."

As she walks out of the café and heads back to her car, she sees him staring out the window, looking at the sidewalk of passing pedestrians, and she wonders what's on his mind.


"Got any plans for Valentine's Day?" Amanda asks, as she drops a stack of newly-completed DD5s on Olivia's desk the next day. If she's going to broach the subject of her boss's love life, she's going to at least sweeten the deal by completing her overdue paperwork first. "I was thinking about staying in, having a little Italian."

"Would Carisi happen to be the chef?" Olivia says, laughing under her breath as she takes the stack of paperwork and puts it with the rest that she's been working on. "Sorry to say, subtlety is not either of your strongest suits."

Amanda turns a faint shade of scarlet. "Uh, yeah, he might be."

"Don't worry. We can deal with your disclosure paperwork on the 15th. Bring in some half-price chocolate from Duane Reade, and it might sweeten the deal a little more." Olivia smiles at her, a real, genuine, soft smile. "I'm happy for you, Amanda. He's a really great guy, and it's been obvious for a long time how he feels about you."

Her blush only deepens, painting her cheeks in a rosy shade of crimson. "Thanks, Liv," she says. "What about you and Stabler, though? He might like sharing some of that chocolate with you."

Olivia sets down her pen on top of the paperwork and exhales softly. "He and I – I don't know what we are. Friends, yeah, but it's a lot – there's so much you don't know, about our history."

"I can imagine. Over twelve years being partners, that's a long time." And somewhere in those twelve years, they'd both unwittingly fallen for each other, unaware that their feelings were requited the entire time.

"I've known him a long time. He was one of the first people I ever met who didn't care about who my mother was, or why I didn't have a father, or that I was a woman in a male-dominated field. He saw me for me." There's a tentative crack of emotion in Olivia's voice, before she steels herself again. "And then, he was just – gone – and I didn't know what to do with myself, when he'd been there for me for so long." She accentuates her speech with a little flourish of her hands.

Amanda nods, taking in what Olivia's saying. "But you still care."

"Somehow, that's the one thing that's never changed." Olivia sighs, waving her hand in dismissal. "Shouldn't you be going back to work, instead of questioning me on my lack of a love life?"

Chagrined, Amanda walks to the door; before she walks out, she turns back to face Olivia. "You should call him, you know. Talk to him. Maybe you two are more similar right now than you realize."

The glower on Olivia's face is unmistakable.


She's not entirely sure how they swung it, but she's gotten Carisi to convince Elliot to come down to his office on Monday, something about reviewing some newly-discovered evidence that might help a case they'd been working on. And it's easy enough for her to make an excuse for her and Olivia to go down and visit. Even though he's working more homicide cases now, there's still a few old SVU cases that have languished in legal limbo for a while. All she has to do is say Martinez case and Olivia's ears perk up.

Except they won't be discussing the Martinez case, or any newly-discovered evidence – it's the best way her and Carisi could think of to get those two in the same room without showing all their cards. The fact that the meetings are coincidentally on Valentine's Day is something she hopes they don't pick up on, and she's also hoping they don't tell each other about both having meetings in Carisi's office at 12:30.

Her and Olivia are in the courthouse elevator, waiting for the doors to close, when she spies Stabler making his way over to the elevators. His confident stride is apparent, even from a distance, and he seems to cross the lobby in a matter of a few steps, with his wide stance. Olivia spots him, and looks to Amanda. "Did you know he was going to be here?" she asks, curiosity coloring her voice.

"Can't say I did," Amanda says, biting back the fit of laughter she feels bubbling up inside her, as Olivia holds the elevator doors open for Elliot to make his way in. She notices the tentative smiles between the two, the gazes alternately averted and then held for a fraction too long. It's as if they've played this game of back and forth for so long that they aren't sure how to move forward from it.

When they reach the floor with Carisi's office, she notices how they seem to take note of the fact they're headed in the same direction. "Going somewhere?" Elliot asks, as their footsteps fall in eerily precise synchrony.

"Yeah, Carisi wanted Amanda and I to meet him at his office to go over a case," Olivia says. "You going over to see someone?"

"Carisi said –" and then his face shifts in an instant, hearing his words juxtaposed against what Olivia's told him. "Rollins, did you have something to do with this?"

"I'm not answering any questions without my lawyer present." She has a lazy smirk across her face, and she can't help but stifle more laughter.

Olivia turns to Elliot and says, in a voice low enough for all three of them to hear, but not loud enough for anyone else, "lucky for us, her lawyer's Carisi, so we'll get our answers soon enough."

Elliot breathes out a laugh. "What do you think we can charge her with? Aiding and abetting? Entrapment?"

Carisi's office door swings open, and he's standing on the other side, looking at the three of them standing there. He's grinning, a slight slope of a smile that somehow illuminates his entire face, and it still sends butterflies fluttering through Amanda's stomach to see him look at her like that. And maybe the feeling she gets when Carisi looks at her is like the one Olivia gets when Elliot looks at her, with that sheer intensity in his eyes and a smile that seems to part his face in two. "Hey there," Carisi says, tentatively moving toward Amanda, as if he wants to wrap his arm around her waist.

She motions for them to get into the office and close the door, before she agrees, slipping her arm around Carisi's waist and smiling up at him. "They know," she says. "Or at least Liv does, she figured it out."

"You can disclose tomorrow." Olivia sets her bag down next to one of the chairs, and turns to glance at a photo of the four of them that they'd taken a couple weekends before, at the park, when they taught Billie how to sled. There were snowflakes on their noses and grins on their faces and she loves how happy they all look, crowded around the phone to make sure they were all in the frame. "I should have known sooner, though. You two have been glowing for months."

Amanda bites the corner of her lip, looks to Carisi, though if it's for confirmation or reassurance, she's not sure. "That's actually kind of why we pulled y'all in here today," she says, taking a deep breath in. Liv's happiness. That's what's important here. If Stabler makes her happy, let her go wild. "Carisi and I, we're real happy, yeah? I can't believe it's this good. Still have to pinch myself some mornings to make sure I'm not dreaming."

"You deserve that, Amanda. Both of you do." Liv's smile is genuine, as she looks at the couple, clearly enamored with each other; his arm is tucked protectively around her waist, and she's leaning against his shoulder, as if there's a certain comfort being drawn from his mere physical presence.

"And see, that's the thing, Liv. You deserve that too," Amanda says, motioning to Elliot. "And Stabler here, I don't totally trust him as far as I can throw him, which likely isn't far –" a comment that gets a burst of laughter from everyone in the room, "- but he makes you happy. And you make him happy, and you've done that for each other for a long time, far longer than I've known you. I might not get it, but somehow, y'all complete each other."

"Is that true, El?" Olivia turns to face Elliot, who looks at her with lovestruck devotion painted across every feature. "I make you happy?"

"Happier than I've ever been in my life," he says, his voice hoarse with untold emotions brimming over. "I didn't realize you felt it too. I thought all I ever did for you was cause tears."

"Because somehow, despite everything we've been through together," Olivia says, moving closer to Elliot, her hand lifting to his cheek in a silent form of reverence, "I love you enough that it doesn't matter, as long as we're here now."

Silence falls over the office, as they each process the impact of Olivia's inadvertent admission. Amanda and Carisi stand there, almost shell-shocked, exchanging glances of incredulity and surprise.

Olivia's the one who breaks the silence, saying, almost as if she's laughing at some inside joke that Amanda doesn't understand, "well, you said it in front of your kids, I guess that means I can say it in front of Rollins and Carisi."

"I did."

Suddenly, Amanda really wants the story of how a confession like that could come out in front of his children, but this isn't the time or place, and it's almost feeling like her and Carisi are intruding on what is quickly becoming a deeply personal moment for Olivia and Elliot.

"Uh, we'll give you two the room, if you need to talk, or whatever," Carisi says, angling Amanda toward the door, as if he can sense the same thing she is. "'Manda and I will be right back. Coffee run."

Their words may as well have gone unsaid and unheard, as Elliot and Olivia effortlessly glide in closer to each other, closing the space between them to nothing at all. It's as if the rest of the world has been put on pause, except for the two of them and the immensity of what's always been between them.

Elliot says something soft, something low, that Amanda can't quite hear, as Carisi edges her out the door, but as they close the door, they can see Elliot's hand sliding around to the back of Olivia's skull, pulling her close.

"Y'think I should call Fin and let him know Olivia's going to be out of the office the rest of the day?"

"Might need to tell him he's going to be down a detective, too, if I have anything to say about it..."

-fini-