He stood in her doorway, as imposing as ever but smaller, somehow, than he used to seem.
His face was weathered, and bearded, something she'd never seen him as before. Though the lines around them had deepened, his eyes hadn't changed at all. They still had that mischievous glint that had ruined her all those years ago.
She wondered briefly if he thought age had been as kind to her. Her hand was in her hair, rearranging the tresses before she could stop herself. Smoothing the front of her jacket she stood up a little straighter, and walked around to the other side of her desk, sliding her glasses onto her face.
"That's what I did 'while you were gone'," she said. It wasn't short, or snippy, it was just a fact. "I got over you."
***elliot***
He watched her through the window, hovering just beyond her line of sight.
Her hair was longer, different, but he liked it. She was reading something, obviously invested because she was absentmindedly tracing her lip with the arm of her glasses. Before she did it he knew she was about to bite the end of the arm, the same way she used to bite her pen 100 years ago at the desk he was leaning against now.
Lost in thought was how he liked her best. It was the only time she was completely unaware of the world around her. Her brows knit together and the lines on her face deepened, and he noticed for the first time that time had passed. He hoped it had been as kind to him as it had to her.
When he'd left she was a detective, second grade, the world in front of her. Now there she was in Cragen's office, the world at her feet and the pride of the NYPD at her command.
He took a deep breath and adjusted his cufflinks. He smirked. Cufflinks. She was going to laugh him out of her office.
***olivia***
The knock at the door brought her out of her fog and back to reality. Standing, she dropped Barba's briefing on the desk and threw her glasses on top of it, motioning for their former ADA to come in without looking up.
The door opened and she turned, preparing an explanation for why she hadn't gotten back to him yet, when she realized it wasn't Barba.
It wasn't his face she recognized first, but his scent. She wouldn't have believed it was him unless that familiar mix of laundry soap and Irish Spring hadn't wafted in with the opening door. She'd made fun of him for years, the Irishman using Irish Spring.
It wasn't so funny now. The scent brought back things she'd filed away neatly, things she'd worked hard and long to file away under "need not open again."
And now here he was, and here she was and there those things were, fluttering uselessly around her.
***elliot***
"Hi."
He'd spent the last 6 months imagining this moment, ever since he'd rejoined the force and found out he'd be working with her again, and the best he could come up with was 'Hi.'
Her eyes widened as she froze, obviously caught off guard. It suddenly occurred to him that when she'd motioned him inside she'd been expecting someone else.
"Elliot."
Her voice. His name. It was over for him the second he walked into that office, he just didn't know it until then. He was the captain of his own unit, a unit dedicated to taking down organized crime, he was respected in the NYPD again but in that moment, at the sound of his name leaving her lips, he was nothing.
***olivia***
"Olivia"
There was something about the way he said her name, there always had been. The way it sounded like home, and comfort, and all the things she'd been missing since he left.
Words were failing her. There were dozens of things she wanted to say to him. Things she'd practiced but never said, things she'd written in letters she never mailed. But as he stood in front of her, real and solid, and nothing like she imagined, all she could think about was how glad she was to see him.
Her rage had been practiced, planned.
But she knew what they said about the best laid plans.
***elliot***
The silence between them was deafening. He'd heard people say that but he'd never really felt it. Now, looking at her leaning against her desk for support, support he wanted to give her, he heard everything but what he wanted.
The clock on her wall, the phones ringing in the bullpen behind him. His own heartbeat, getting more rapid by the minute.
He was a trained Marine, he could survive for hours under extreme pressure but 5 minutes in her presence was enough to send his nervous system into overdrive.
"What, uh..." he cleared his throat, looking around the office, anywhere but at her. "What did you get up to while I was gone?"
He was going for casual, almost playful, but he regretted it the second he said it. It had been a decade since he'd walked out on her. He didn't deserve casual.
***olivia***
It was his audacity that broke her.
What had she been up to? Up to? Seriously?
She couldn't believe him. How dare he. How dare he walk out on her and then waltz back in a decade later and act like nothing had changed. Like he'd left for coffee and gotten stuck in traffic and been gone just a little longer than he'd planned.
Everything she'd opened up to, everything she'd finally let herself feel over the past 10 years, was crashing down on her and she was starting to panic.
Haden. Cassidy. Lewis. Noah. Barba. Dodds. Tucker.
And punctuating them all, Elliot. Elliot. Elliot. Elliot.
If she thought she'd been through it with him, it was nothing compared to what she'd been through without him. Somehow it was worse without him, and somehow, he hung over her even more after he left.
For the past 10 years, she'd worked to untangle herself from his web, extradited herself from his borders, and closed the door on him, them, forever.
"I got over you."
***elliot***
She got over him. She was over him. He didn't know she'd ever been under him.
The thumping in his chest was all he could hear now. Focusing on getting air into and out of his lungs was his goal, followed by unclenching his fists. It had taken ten years to finally get his rage under control and here, now, in one singular moment, he could feel it all unraveling.
His therapist had told him it was the job that had spurred his fury, that it had been good, healthy even, to take a step back from the rapists and child abusers. And it had been. A year after he'd left he'd started sleeping through the night. Six months after that he'd lost the urge to solve problems with his fists. It was 3 years before the tightness in his chest had finally lifted.
Until this very moment he'd believed it was the job.
But now, in this office, he considered the fact that it could have been something else. Something else causing his blood pressure to skyrocket, and his fists to itch for a wall to punch.
He considered for the first time that it was her.
And that scared him more than anything.
***olivia***
Though she'd spent the past decade doing everything in her power not to think about him, she could still read him like a book.
She could see his rage hadn't subsided, though she'd heard through the grapevine that he'd finally submitted to the psych eval he'd rejected all those years ago.
It obviously hadn't done anything. Her eyes flicked to his fists and she almost smirked at his white knuckles.
"Really?" She heard herself say. "You're angry with me?"
It was more cruel than she'd planned, but she didn't really care. What right did he have to be angry with her? What had she done? Called him too much after he abandoned her? Left him too many messages begging for him to return just one of them?
Angry. She could have laughed. He didn't know angry.
***elliot***
The smartest thing to do would have been to leave. No, he thought, the smartest thing would have been not coming at all.
But it was too late, he was here now. He might as well lay it all out. Deep down, they both knew it already.
"You know what Liv, I am angry," he growled. "I am so god damn angry."
He closed his eyes, the memory bringing back guilt and shame with it.
If there were words he'd never found them. How do you explain to someone you never dreamed of breaking that they'd broken you first? That the very thing he feared, they feared, the most, had happened before either of them knew it, and for the very reason he swore it wouldn't?
***olivia***
There was something about his tone that made her very aware of herself. Of her heartbeat, of her breathing, as if both were about to stop and she was counting down to the last ones.
Something about him was different, she knew that, she'd known it as soon as he walked in. She thought it was the same thing that was different about her; time, age, experience.
But something else was creeping through. Nothing about him had ever scared her, but the way he was looking at her was like someone had dragged an ice cube down her spine and lit a fire deep in her belly all at once.
"You think you're angry?" she whispered. She could show him angry. Anger like she'd felt those first few months after he'd left her. Anger like she'd shown Lewis.
"You left me."
It was then that she realized it was that simple. It always had been. He was there and then he wasn't, in an instant dividing her life into the before and the after with such cruel finality that it had almost divided her too.
***elliot***
If she only knew why.
It was true. He had left her. He had been there one day and then without another word he had been gone.
All because he was supposed to hate her, supposed to resent her, but all he could do was love her.
He could still hear Kathy's eerily calm voice that night when he'd come home shaken after killing a teenager, a victim's daughter. Refusing to admit why he'd done it. That it wasn't the thought of his own life, or his kids or his wife, that made him pull the trigger but the thought of his partner's lifeless body bleeding out on the concrete squad room floor.
"It's me or her. I'm not doing this for another dozen years. I can't compete with her. I never could. I'm leaving. You decide if you want to come along."
There was only one answer. There always had been.
***olivia***
She could tell he was holding back. She almost wished he wouldn't.
How much of her life had been spent not saying how she felt? Spent hiding behind walls and wishes and wives. How many times didn't she say what she wanted?
Where did that get her? What did she have to lose now?
"You left me," she said, louder this time. Every word she never said had suddenly found its way to the tip of her tongue, and was threatening to break free.
"You left me."
For the first time she tore her eyes from his, looking just over his shoulder into the bullpen. It had emptied substantially and she briefly wondered how long he'd been standing there. It could have been an hour or five minutes, she had no way of knowing.
Steeling herself, she met his gaze again.
"And then you lost me."
***elliot***
That, he knew.
He'd lost more than his job that day. Kathy had taken his silence as the affirmation she'd never asked for that she'd always been second, and she'd never looked back.
Then Olivia started calling him. For weeks he couldn't bear the thought of facing her. Of hearing her voice, pleading for him, begging for him.
What was he going to say? That he couldn't answer because despite the fact that she'd torn him apart, that if she was anyone else he would despise her, but he couldn't? That he couldn't answer because he was trying to hate her? That he needed to hate her? That he needed the space between them to use as a punishment? That he'd chosen her but he couldn't bring himself to go through with it? That Kathy had finally had enough. That he was alone. That he was broken. That he was a coward.
The truth was he didn't hate her. What had she done? It wasn't her fault that he'd fallen for her the moment he met her. That he'd been living a lie for 12 years. That he'd brought yet another kid into this world with a woman he didn't love.
That he could have put them all out of their misery years ago if he'd just been man enough to admit what everyone already knew?
No, he didn't hate her. He hated himself.
"I couldn't say goodbye to you, because I needed to hate you. I needed to hate you because that was easier than admitting that I couldn't look at myself in the mirror anymore."
***olivia***
It was never hatred that she felt toward him. To be perfectly honest she didn't think she could hate him. Anger yes, resentment, yes. Hatred, never.
But he'd hated her. He just admitted it. She felt the fire extinguish within her, felt herself crumbling to ashes. In every scenario she'd imagined it had never been hatred of her that had driven him away. Wildly she'd even thought maybe he'd felt the same thing she did, that magnetic pull, that sixth sense that drew her to him, that was bigger and more complicated than either of them could explain.
Years ago she'd settled on the idea that maybe she'd turned one thing into another. That she'd been embellishing the touches and glances that had built up over the years, and blown them out of proportion. That there had been nothing there to begin with.
And yet that Elliot intuition was telling her he wasn't done yet. There was more to his story, he just hadn't gotten there yet.
For the first time it occurred to her that he could have had as hard a time as she did. That there was another side to the story, and that maybe he was here to tell it.
***elliot***
Even ten years later he could feel her emotions almost before she could. Though she'd been a closed book, a heavily padlocked vault to everyone else, he'd cracked her exterior and figured her out.
She'd always been more composed than he had, but her temper still flared like a flash flood; quick, destructive and over before you knew it. Her eyes gave her away then and he almost smiled when he noticed they still did. Against his will he felt the tension easing in his shoulders.
If she was angry that was good, it meant she still felt something. And he would do anything to make sure she kept feeling something.
"Being angry at you, hating you... It was easier than admitting the truth," he said, his voice cracking. He stepped toward her, the door falling closed behind him.
She stood as he moved toward her and he froze, lifting his hands ever so slightly, a mock surrender.
"The truth, that I didn't think about me, or my kids, or my wife when I pulled that trigger that day. The only thing I could see was you."
Another step toward her and he'd be close enough to touch her. He didn't know if he dared to chance that.
But what more did he have to lose?
"The only thing I ever saw was you."
***olivia***
If she hadn't felt his fingers graze her arm she wouldn't have believed any of it had happened.
It was surreal, she thought, the feeling when everything you ever imagined comes to life. Like she'd just realized she was dreaming, and was now waiting to wake up.
They'd been here before. They'd been right here once before, and she hadn't liked the ending then anymore than she did now.
And suddenly she realized that she'd been wrong all those years. She'd always said she couldn't imagine something bad enough to force him out like that, but the truth had just hit her like a train.
He ran just like she had.
In an instant, she understood it all. She was there again, lying on the floor of Penn Station, his hand on her neck as Gitano got away.
There, in that warehouse, pointing a gun at the man she... knowing the one thing she had to do was the one thing she couldn't.
Not thinking about his kids or his wife, only imagining his lifeless body bleeding out on the floor, leaving her alone.
Jumping at an undercover assignment on an environmental terrorism case she had no business taking, 4 time zones away just so she didn't have to confront him about their feelings.
Empathy only she could feel for him rushed through her.
Some might call it forgiveness.
Still feeling his hand on her arm, she looked down. She'd always liked his hands. The pattern of scars that wove across them gave away the fact that while he was well dressed, there was an intensity under the button down that couldn't be tamed.
A split second later and she might not have noticed it. Her eyes had been tracing a scar on the back of his hand that wound its way between his middle and fourth finger when she saw it. Or rather, it's absence.
Gone was the thin gold band, the line that separated them for all those years, the clear symbol of commitment. In its place just a slightly paler line of skin, almost unnoticeable to anyone but her, to anyone who hadn't spent 12 years of her life acutely aware of its presence.
The band was gone but even in death, its ghost haunted her still.
***elliot***
Part of him wanted her to see it, but the other part regretted it the moment she did.
This was a mistake. He shouldn't have come. He should have let them meet in the field, where they were surrounded by colleagues, or dealing with a body, and they could stuff everything deep down where it belonged.
It was a moment before he realized he was still holding her arm. She hadn't shrugged him off, which he considered a good sign.
There was so much more he wanted to say but he barely knew where to begin. Her silence wasn't helping but the fact that he was still letting him touch her was encouraging.
Taking a deep breath, he squeezed her arm before moving to pull his hand away.
To his surprise, she caught it before he could.
***olivia***
As she tore her eyes from his fingers she noticed he'd traded one piece of gold for another. Cufflinks glinted at his wrists, keeping together the cuffs of a starched white shirt, barely hiding the Rolex that peeked out from underneath.
To her surprise, the first thing to cross her mind wasn't the obvious sign of his marital dissolution, but that he'd never dress like this on purpose.
Torn between the urge to ask and the urge to laugh at the thought of Elliot Stabler wearing starched shirts, let alone cufflinks, but before she could she heard him sigh and felt herself fall back into reality.
She felt him squeeze her arm and knew he was going to pull away. She caught him before he could, she didn't know why. It was mind over matter at that point. The matter was she should have kicked him out the second he got here. The voice in the back of her mind was telling her their proximity was dangerous.
Dangerous. Her entire life was filled with danger. Part of her job was to put herself in the line of fire and she did it so often she barely noticed anymore.
But nothing had ever felt more dangerous to her than he did. Than their proximity did. That gold band was more than a ring around his finger, it was a wall around him. For 12 years she'd walked in circles around the wall, waved a white flag over it, even been body slammed into it. Parts had crumbled but she'd never imagined that one day it would be torn down.
She never imagined it would fall, but she always knew that if it did she'd find herself clawing through the wreckage to get to him.
***elliot***
For years he'd imagined this moment, but everything he'd ever imagined was wrong.
Every scenario possible had been played out in his head; the one where she'd jumped at the chance to see him again, the one where he'd told her he was sorry and she bared her soul right back. He'd even imagined her screaming or slamming a door in his face.
Silence — complete, heavy, palpable silence — was never what he'd imagined.
It was comforting and disquieting all at once. He longed to fill it, but he'd said all he could. There was more explanation needed, of course, if he didn't think she'd cut him off he'd tell her everything that had happened to him in the last 10 years down to the minute.
But he had to know she wanted to hear it.
"Olivia."
His voice was raspy, betraying the restraint he was depending on. It was now or never, he was going to tell her everything.
Before he could she stood up straight, the top of her head level with his eyes, just as it always had been. She was dangerously close to him now, so close he could smell her perfume. The corners of his mouth threatened a smile as he realized it was the same one he'd bought her years ago for Christmas.
It was a sign, he thought. A sign that maybe, just maybe, she hadn't stopped thinking about him.
***olivia***
She stood up before she meant to, not realizing he was as close as he was. Mere inches separated them, and it occurred to her that the old Elliot would have backed up immediately, putting space between them.
But this Elliot remained within inches, unbothered by the distance. In fact, she could have sworn she felt him move closer.
Lifting her hand she hesitated before resting it lightly on his chest, her fingers grazing the buttons on his shirt.
It was probably her imagination, but she would have put money on the fact that she could feel his heart beat. Or maybe it was her own body tingling from the way he said her name, his voice husky and deep.
Swallowing hard, she steadied herself with a breath.
"You wanna go get a drink?"