She didn't have a plan when she invited him to drinks. Half expecting him to say no she'd thrown out her shot in the dark, knowing she had somewhere to be, wondering wildly if he'd just follow her out of the squad room to their old haunts like he used to.
It didn't make sense, she'd accepted that. She'd given up on frantically searching for an answer in the little they had said to each other since he'd walked through her door.
It had always been about what they didn't say to each other, anyway.
The silences between them had never been quiet. Even now, the closer he stood to her, the louder it got. Before long, she couldn't even hear herself over the sound of him.
Her hand was still on his chest, and she was beginning to feel her pulse synchronize with his heartbeat. The sound of their breathing, once ragged and out of time was falling in with each other's, slowing with every moment they stood there drowning in the silence.
There had never been so little space between them for so long, she thought. She's never had this much time to study him, never let herself have the time to feel him, but here she was, standing in her office, her palm all but glued to his chest, his heartbeat twitching under her fingers.
She swallowed hard, trying to draw in a breath, but her lungs were so in step with his that she felt she had to wait, like she couldn't breathe without him.
If she waited any longer, she didn't know what she would do. Her body wasn't quite hers at the moment and she knew her mind wasn't far behind.
***elliot***
"I could use a drink."
It was almost casual, the way she asked him. For a second the look on her face made him think she might regret it, but before he could catch her eye she had pushed lightly against his chest.
The old Elliot would have backed off immediately, created distance, walled himself off. The old Elliot had carefully measured the spaces between them, ensuring there was always the right amount, never getting closer than necessary.
There were times the lines had blurred and the distance had closed but as much as he longed for proximity to her he never let it happen.
But now, here, he couldn't bring himself to remove himself from her. Imagining putting space back between them was like imagining removing a limb. He was finally here, caught in her orbit, after all those years of hurdling toward her.
He felt her push against his chest again, this time a little harder. She still wasn't looking at him, her eyes trained on her own fingers, her eyelashes fluttering ever so slightly.
The pressure on his chest told him she wanted space, but by refusing to look at him it was like she was daring him not to back away.
He wondered if he dared.
***olivia***
Once again, time had lost its meaning. She had no idea how long her hand had been on Elliot's chest, or how long it had been since she'd spoken, or how long the two of them had been standing there.
She knew they had to go, that at some point the both of them would have to part and go to the drink she'd just invited him to. The drink she'd just invited him to knowing that Barba was on his way over to discuss the briefing left abandoned on her desk.
Lightly, she pushed against his chest, hoping he'd have the will she couldn't find to back away. He didn't move. She'd known he wouldn't, but she hoped for both of their sake that he would.
Taking a shaky breath, she pushed again, this time a little harder. He shifted under her hand but didn't back away. She didn't look at him, prolonging the moment before the impact she knew was coming.
It was a game they never got to play. As much as both of them wanted it, the cat and mouse gambit was always a step too far. There were moments, when one of them would catch the others eye. A spark would ignite but within moments extinguish, leaving nothing but ashes behind.
But they were past the point of no return.
***elliot***
Elliot knew there was no going back, but at this point, after all these years, he didn't know if he wanted to. For the first time in years, almost a decade, he had everything he wanted, quite literally in his hands.
Without thinking any more, he leaned forward into her.
"We should go," he heard her say softly, turning her head a moment too soon. Her hand lingered on his chest then dragged down lightly as she stepped sideways out from between him and her desk. A crackle of electricity followed the path her fingers skimmed down his wool jacket, a tangible reminder of the spark he'd felt a moment ago.
Watching as she gathered her things, he noticed she continued to avoid his gaze, her eyes flicking almost nervously back and forth across her desk. It occurred to him that he'd never seen her nervous before. He wondered if it was him making her nervous.
She'd always been inexplicably calm in the face of danger, particularly when her own life was at stake, but he'd never known her to be as subtly unsettled, as delicately unhinged as she was now.
As she breezed past him, pausing only to hold her office door open, he realized she might not be the only one feeling a little on edge.
***olivia***
As she walked next to him, her steps so easily falling in line with his, her mind drifted back to her office. A moment before she'd turned her head she'd felt something, seen him leaning down in her peripheral vision.
Muscle memory was a cruel superpower. Her head had turned almost before she'd made the decision, fear of the unknown, fear of factors no longer in play overwhelming her. Moving before he could get too close. Running at the first sign of intimacy.
She wondered if she'd blown it. If there would be another moment tonight, or ever, where she'd be that close to him again. But they'd left he safety of her office and were now walking past the park with no real destination in mind. They'd put distance between themselves once they'd left the precinct, and she noticed that though their footsteps were perfectly in line she had fallen one behind him.
"Joes?" He asked her suddenly. She blinked, looking up and meeting his eyes for the first time in what felt like hours.
"Hmm?"
"Joes," he repeated. "His place still open?"
She nodded absentmindedly, her mind still 8 blocks behind her in her office.
"Sounds good," she said softly.
***elliot***
If someone had asked him that morning how he envisioned spending his evening, even in his wildest dreams he couldn't have imagined it. But here he was, seated at the far end of an old cop bar in Midtown, Olivia next to him.
"What can I get you two," the bartender asked before looking up at Olivia. "Captain, I'm sorry I almost didn't recognize you. The usual?"
He was already pulling a bottle of red out from below the bar when Olivia shook her head.
"Bourbon, please," she said quietly. Elliot opened his mouth to specify, but the bartender had already turned around. He chanced a glance at Olivia but she was staring straight ahead, her eyes unfocused.
Moments later the bartender turned around with two bourbons, sliding the glasses toward them.
"It's on the house." Olivia looked up in protest, but he shook his head. "Ed took care of a few in advance a couple months ago," he added quietly. "He said you'd need them."
Looking up, he noticed Olivia staring determinedly down at her drink. There was something in her eyes that he couldn't quite place; a sadness, but deeper, murkier.
"Ed Tucker," she said, answering his unasked questions and turning to face him for the first time since sitting down. "I'd forgotten we used to come here..."
Elliot's mind was racing. He'd heard about Tucker, everyone in the NYPD had. He'd felt bad for the guys family but he couldn't say he was too bothered about the death of the guy who'd tried more than once to put him behind bars.
"Why is the head of the rat squad buying your drinks?" He asked before he could stop himself. She turned to look at him for a long moment, her face unreadable, before looking down into his drink. He didn't know if he'd overstepped, but he could tell he'd said something that had gotten to her.
It occurred to him, not for the first time, that he had missed so much of her life. He went from knowing everything about her, down to her blood type, to being an incomplete stranger, a piece of someone she used to know. In an instant, he could feel the space between them, despite the proximity he'd always craved.
He realized It was going to take more than a bourbon to close that distance.
***olivia***
If she hadn't been so overwhelmed by the day, she would have laughed at his surprise. Twelve years ago she too would have balked at Ed Tucker buying her a drink, let alone her and her partner. A knot formed in her stomach as she realized his shock was just another reminder of the time they'd spent apart. She looked back at her drink, and took a long deep breath.
It was a minute or two before she spoke, deciding against answering his question. If there was anything she'd learned from the hours she'd spent with Dr. Lindstrom, it was that healing couldn't begin unless someone was willing to bear witness.
She just didn't think she'd be baring it all just yet. But there was something in the sincerity she'd seen that day, something in the space they'd shared that pushed her to talk to him, to want to talk to him. To weave him back into her world, however dark and twisted it had become after he left.
Not everything was his fault. Not everything was on him to fix. He'd left, that much was true, but as much as he'd left she'd shut the door on him, walling him off, refusing to feel anything for him.
Though it was impossible to explain, she knew implicitly that she still trusted him. Though the years had changed him, both of them, they were still the same people they had been all those years ago. The same people who had put their lives in each others hands, who had become so internally entwined with each other that she didn't know where his mind ended and hers began.
And, she thought, they had to start somewhere.
***elliot***
"I didn't know how angry I was until a few years after you left," she whispered. "I thought I had it under control. I thought I... I thought I could handle it on my own."
Despite everything in him wanting to reach out and pull her into him and never let her go, Elliot knew better than to interrupt. He'd never seen her like this, but he understood the gravity of her tone.
"When Lewis had me in that beach house... he'd been egging me on for days, talking about you, and me. It was like he knew how I felt about... like he was inside my head."
Elliot had no idea what she was talking about but there was something about her story that sounded familiar.
"I finally had him. He was down, he'd been subdued. He wasn't a threat."
Her voice faltered, but didn't quite break.
"I could have stopped. I didn't want to. I had that bar in my hands and I ..."
Pausing, she took a long sip from her glass, and set it down clumsily on the bar.
"They told me it was a miracle he survived. I thought it was the stress, the trauma, the panic. But later, before the trial, his attorney mentioned you. She tried to claim I used excessive force. Tried to claim I was taking out all of the rage I felt toward you on him. I couldn't argue. I didn't even try."
"I was so angry at you I almost killed him. Everything I'd sworn I could deal with. Everything I thought I was handling, I took it all out on him."
It clicked in a second. A phone call, eight years ago, from some attorney wanting to know about his history of anger issues. He'd assumed it was someone pushing a psych eval on him again, and all but told her to fuck off.
"Marron... something Marron," he said. She looked at him, her eyebrows knit together. "She was his attorney, right?"
"How'd you know that?"
"She called me. I didn't know, I mean I didn't even ask what it was about but she kept asking why I left and if I'd gone to treatment for my anger issues."
Olivia's eyes widened.
"What did you say?"
For the first time that night Elliot felt like he had done something right.
"I told her to go to hell."
His suspicions were confirmed when he saw her smile. It was small, and quick, but it lit up the bar.
"You probably saved my career," she said. He shrugged.
"It was the least I could do."
***olivia***
It didn't bother her, somehow, that he didn't know what happened to her. In fact, she realized it might have made her more at ease. The eggshells she'd walked on for the last seven years had started to wear on her; knowing that anytime someone mentioned Lewis, or kidnapping, that they'd turn to her with that look, that look that assumed she was still wounded, still broken.
She'd done a lot of work to get to where she was, work she was proud of. Work she'd always wondered how survivors managed to get through until she did it herself.
"It's okay to ask, you know," she said, sipping her drink. She saw him look down, the slightest flush creeping up his neck. "I saw your face when I mentioned Lewis. You had no idea what I was talking about."
"What happened?" He asked. So simple. She almost didn't want to tell him. To ruin the ease of their meeting.
But she did. How could she not? Through it all he was the one person she wanted to talk to the most, and the one person she couldn't.
It shocked her how easy it was to talk to him about it. What shocked her more was that for the first time she was telling the truth. The whole truth, all at once, not the bits and pieces she'd let slip here and there over the years. The entire story from start to finish. A release she never knew she needed.
As she finished her story she lifted her glass, motioning to the bartender for a refill. As Joe topped off her bourbon, she chanced a glance at Elliot.
His eyes were fixed on his drink, and to anyone else he would look calm, maybe indifferent. She knew better. His knuckles were white, and his jaw was set. This was the Stabler she knew, the angsty, fiery, brooding cop who wouldn't hesitate to get his knuckles bloody for her.
"You should have killed him," he said quietly, taking a long drink.
Regarding him for a moment, she smiled to herself. Everyone told her how she did the right thing, or how she was such a hero. All she'd ever wanted was for someone to know how she felt, to know what she'd wanted to do, and to not hold that against her.
And he'd done just that.
"I know," she whispered back. Their eyes met and he smirked, clinking his glass lightly against hers.
"That's my girl."
***elliot***
Elliot had imagined hurting perps before. The men who hurt his daughters, the man he'd named his son after. But he'd never wanted to kill someone before. To actually end someone's life had always been a step too far, the finality of death a punishment unearned by any crime.
And yet there wasn't a doubt in his mind that if William Lewis hadn't already been dead, he would have killed him himself. It wasn't until he heard her utter her agreement that he realized just how close to the edge that monster had pushed her.
And just how deep a pit she'd had to claw her way out of.
Elliot could feel the burden lifting. He knew it would take time, much more time than either of them had right now, but for the first time, he felt like things were moving in the right direction.
Watching her relax next to him was helping. Over the past hour he'd watched the tension flow out of her, watched her loosen up, watched her turn into a woman a decade younger.
He didn't deserve her forgiveness, but on some inexplicable level he knew she was giving it to him. That despite the damage he'd done she was open to reparations.
Second chances were hard to come by and he wasn't going to waste his.
***olivia***
The anger that had resided so comfortably in the hollow of her chest for all those years, the fury that bore his name, was seeping out of her, slipping through her fingers by the moment.
She always thought she'd miss it once it was gone. After all, the anger was familiar, it was safe, safer than the things she could let fill the hollow instead. Imagining losing that was like losing a part of her. To her surprise, the empty hollow was a welcome crevasse, not a hole she needed to fill, but an openness she'd never embraced before.
"Dr. Feinstein," Elliot said. She glanced at him, waiting for him to elaborate. They didn't need to dig through each other at this point. Everything had either bubbled to the surface or was about to break it.
"My shrink. He's the one who told me to come. Tonight I mean, to see you."
Elliot was in therapy. The poster child for rage, she'd called him. Unstable Stabler.
It hit her, hard, what he'd gone through over the last decade. She may have had her loneliness, and Lewis but he'd had his own demons.
"After Kathy..." he turned back to his drink, frowning. The muscle in his jaw twitched, and she reached out without thinking, resting her hand on his arm. An unexpected wave of emotion threatened to break her when he covered her hand with his and turned toward her, a look in his eye she couldn't place.
"After Kathy died, I didn't know what I was going to do," he whispered.
***elliot***
There it was. It was all on the table now. She'd shown him hers, it was time he unveiled his.
"After Kathy died, I didn't know what I was going to do."
Feeling Olivia's fingers flinch on his arm, he looked down. He didn't look at her. He couldn't. If he did he was sure the guilt was going to cripple him.
After all, the weight of it all had almost broken him before. There weren't words to explain the things that wound through his brain, weaving convoluted webs of thought.
For his entire adult life, he'd loved two women, in vastly different ways.
One, as the mother of his children, the teenage dream he'd married at 20 after his mother told him to "do the right thing." The woman he'd fallen into a life with, who stuck it out whether of obligation or allegiance he'd never know.
The other, his partner, the woman he shared his soul with, who bared her soul to him, who he fought with and for, who had broken him down and built him up over and over. The woman he loved so much he could never tell her, because the thought of anything other than reciprocation was enough to end him.
"When Kathy died..." he whispered. "I loved her, Olivia. I loved her because she was the mother of my children. She created the five most important things in my life, the things that I'm most proud of in this world."
But that hadn't been enough for her. He should have realized that earlier.
***olivia***
If it hadn't been firmly implanted in her chest, caged in by her ribs, she'd have carved her heart out and given it to him right there.
It had always been this way with him, with them. When one of their worlds shattered, the other was there to pick up the pieces. It was just that the pieces hadn't been quite this jagged before.
She's always known what he needed, but this time was different. Closeness, wrapping him in her arms, that was what she wanted. Instead, she settled for all she could bring herself to do, resting her hand on his arm.
A moment later he spoke again, his voice throaty, breaking ever so slightly.
"After the divorce things were finally good between us. Really good, for the first time maybe ever," he said. "And then she got sick."
He met her eyes and she noticed the lines around his had deepened.
"She knew, she always knew, but we never talked about it until then. I guess imminent death really puts things in perspective."
He turned, taking a long sip from his glass.
"She told me I'd made a mistake leaving, told me we'd made a mistake being so noble all those years ago, that we should have done the things that made us happy."
"Feinstein was her shrink before she died and I kind of kept seeing him after. At first it was out of obligation to her but then it started to feel good."
Olivia could barely believe what he was telling her. She didn't know if she wanted to. Somehow she knew where he was headed and wanted to both turn and run and beat him to it.
"A few weeks ago he told me something Kathy said before she died, something I never expected," he said. With every word his voice changed, softening into a tone she'd never heard him use.
If anyone asked her she'd blame the bourbons, but the truth was she had to know, and she would have done anything to hear him say it.
"What was it?" She asked. Elliots steely blue eyes met hers, and for the first time that night she let them bore into her, not a battle of wills, but a truce. A white flag on the battleground of the last 10 years.
"She wanted me to tell you," he said simply.
This was torture like she'd never known.
Waiting for him to whisper the words they'd never said, for those 8 letters that had run wild through their minds, their collective consciousness, to finally fall from his lips, as if leaving them unspoken all those years had justified everything they imagined in the dark.
"El," she heard herself whisper. His eyes flicked down to her lips.
"I love you, Olivia," he said simply. "I always have."