A/N: I'm so deeply sorry this has taken so long. Life things. I hope everyone is hanging in there with everything going on. I want to shout out my brilliant beta for finding the things I do not see. And Brynn (my HumanWhip), for every push, support and the incredible vision board you made for me so I can stay on track with this fic. I'll share the link to it on Twitter for everyone, it's amazing. Also I write to a single song on repeat for every chapter. I'll share for whomever wants to read to the sound of it. This chapter is owed to this song.

And finally, this chapter is dedicated to my newfound amazing friend eotopia...Happiest of Birthdays love. I'm sorry you're not here, but as we know life has a plan. You're such a sweet, pure soul and I adore you. This one is all you. 3

Song: All We Do – Oh Wonder

The rain has started again, but inside Chauncey's there are few reminders of the outside world.

The bar has been here for over forty years, and it holds the remnants of case victory celebrations and too many shots of burning whiskey after losses. One thick door leads in and out, and there are barely any windows that reveal its contents to the world. The wait staff who serve the few wooden booths know the regulars. The bartenders stay for decades, the memories are either gone by morning or they last a lifetime.

The air is soaked with the stench of spilled liquor, as if they've walked into the caverns of a worn oak barrel.

They have been coming here since the beginning of their partnership, but by the curious look their waitress is giving them today, even she knows that Olivia hasn't been here with Elliot since anyone can remember.

Olivia doesn't know if he brought her here to shake the memories loose or because with a target on his back, he knows it's the only place she will feel even marginally safe in public. He'd chosen one of the booths where they both have a line of sight to the door, and they had slid in wordlessly. Faced with her obstinate silence, he had ordered her something she would have chosen to eat a decade ago and she didn't correct him because she refused to speak and tell him things aren't the same.

You leave me alone.

The memory of her biting command is sharp, and it bounces around inside the hollows of her.

It's been twenty years, but she still remembers the way she'd turned her fury on him. She'd been the target of a psychopath who had killed innocent people to get back at her. She'd taken leave and tracked him herself. In the civilian's apartment where they'd been facing off, she had shot Plummer three times before Elliot had walked in. Her hands had been shaking and her gun still warm when Elliot had placed his hand over her wrist to steady her.

He'd always been the squad ViCAP liaison for the FBI, and he'd gone behind her back and put a federal protective detail on her during that case. She'd confronted him, rebelled, twisted beneath his stifling protectiveness.

You leave me alone.

An order. She'd hissed the words at him before she'd walked out of that apartment. Only he hadn't listened. Hours later he'd showed up at her place. He'd banged on her door. He'd called her.

It was only when she'd seen him standing outside – still stubbornly waiting beneath her apartment windows in the rain -that she'd put on her coat and taken the stairs down to him. She had never been able to shut him out for long. She'd been crying and it hadn't mattered. The drenching rain was an excuse for her wet eyes, and he wouldn't have believed her lies had she even tried to use them.

He'd brought her here late that night.

In his mind, every man is guilty of the good he did not do.

She'd looked up at Elliot as he'd bent the Voltaire quote to suit his intent. He'd been part hero, part foe in that moment. He'd been steady, so sure of himself when she had been completely gutted. She'd latched onto the lock of his eyes as the whiskey had appeared in front of them both. He should have been home with his family that night, his kids had been mere babies and his wife still in love. But here he'd sat - in a dark fortress of a bar off 26th street - letting the amber heat slide down his throat as he smiled at her softly with just his eyes.

Their deaths were at his hand, not yours. Don't lose sight of the line.

The whiskey had been cheap, they were young and it hadn't mattered. She had downed her shot. What if I can't find it, El?

Then I'll find it for you. Just like you'll find it for me.

The pain inside of her now is so thick that she feels like it's slowing her blood to the point of paralysis. She had needed her squad today; she'd been desperate for the ability to hunt Moore herself.

Another madman, another round of victims. Endlessly the cycle turns. Only this time the victims are her history, her circle, hers.

Elliot removed her choices today, and she's chafing beneath the way he keeps imposing his will.

So much has been taken away from her that the dichotomy of Elliot's return grates on her. She wants to go back to the way it was weeks ago, months ago. The upheaval is too much on every front.

It's too much to assimilate.

"Olivia-"

"Leave me alone." It comes out of her mouth in a familiar, quiet warning before she can stop it, but at this point she doesn't really care what she says or does. She's been telling him for twenty years it seems, and he doesn't listen. She doesn't even know if it's a directive or an accusation anymore. He just keeps coming at her, treating her life like it's a snow globe he can shake up at will. "Just. Stop. Talking."

She doesn't even look at him. His presence in her life after all these years can't happen. She can't touch him, lean on him, rely on him. In a few days when this is over, they will go back to how it was.

She can't forget that.

They will go back to being strangers and these moments will just be an aberration.

Mercifully her food comes then, and she uses the distraction it provides to avoid meeting his gaze. She glances disinterestedly at her lightly toasted turkey on rye, the fries, the side of fruit. She's both exhausted and angry, and the emotions are at war within her for which feeling gets to go first.

His food comes, too. A burger with sharp cheddar, no onions. Fries. Pickle. She finds herself irrationally mentally reaching for the pickle and she stops herself because she will not pretend the unimaginable gap of the last nine years does not exist.

The waitress leaves and despite the plate in front of her, she isn't hungry. She hasn't had an appetite for days.

Her hands sit at her side. The front door opens and her eyes are on the movement, because that's the reason they are here after all. He's a target. He's made himself the bait.

It's just a woman, alone. She wears yesterday's clothes and she heads straight for the bar.

"Olivia. You can still silently damn me to hell while chewing." His voice is a low rumble. An undisguised demand. "Eat something. Please."

That's when she looks up at him and it's an ongoing gut-punch to see him so close to her. She takes in the slight tilt of his head, the deeper lines on his face. His forearms rest on the table and even out of the corner of her eye she can see the length of his thick fingers, the lack of a ring. His shoulders seem harder, there's an underlying danger to him that is sharper now.

But his eyes, they are the same in this moment. Soft, seeing too much.

Her lips don't move. Her chest is too weighted, and there is a fog enveloping her. A low beat starts from the digital jukebox, and absently Olivia realizes the woman who had just walked in has started this thrumming song.

She has to detach herself from the familiarity of him. Of this place. These are memories, this is not the present nor the future.

This is a temporary hold.

She has a job to do. So does he.

He shifts in front of her, setting down his burger and wiping his mouth. He's picking up the pickle and setting it on her plate as she watches, and it's the wrong move on every level.

He has a complete lack of boundaries. He is either too little space or too much, it's never painless with him.

"I don't want it," she says quietly, and even she can hear the warning in her whisper.

He doesn't even look up. "Olivia, eat."

He overrides her so easily and effortlessly that the haze within her starts to simmer, gaining heat. He's enjoying his lunch, not even looking at her. "Take it off my plate, Elliot. Now."

He must hear her brittle tone. He has to know there is nothing inside of her that is calm. He has to know enough to recognize the escalation, even if she isn't any louder.

He takes another big bite of his burger, wiping his mouth again and then easing back into his side of the booth. He cracks his neck, sprawling enough that his knee brushes hers and she gasps, jerking back on her own side.

Elliot is watching her now through hooded eyelids. He swallows his food, takes a slow sip of his soda. "You think you're in any shape to run point today? That it?"

She can feel the oxygen seeping back into her veins. He's going to give her the fight she needs, and by God, she will rip this ill-found confidence of his to shreds. She wants this release, there is too much inside of her to contain it anymore.

"It's my squad. Not your call." She leans over the table, careful to avoid her untouched plate. "You like ratting out other cops, Elliot?"

The corner of his mouth lifts, and the smile doesn't touch his eyes. He doesn't look at all afraid of her, and that pisses her off even more.

"Not as much as your boyfriend did." He shifts forward too, so that he is mere inches from her across the table. "So how does that work, Liv? Guy tries to ruin both of our careers a dozen times. Throws you in jail despite whatever the fuck happened in Sealview. Questions every damned move you make, harasses you, and that's who you date?"

The heat is back everywhere within her. It's a blue-hot burn beneath her skin, and she will end this now. He has no right to be back, to be here. He'd left, dammit.

"He was a good man, Elliot." Her voice is rising, and she doesn't care. Between the music and the high walls of their booth, it will take a hell of a lot to draw an audience. "You and I messed up, that's what we did. We bent the rules. He had a job to do and he did it. You do not get to talk about him."

He gives her a humorless huff of laughter as he shakes his head, seconds before he picks up his food again. "That sonofabitch jammed me up so bad I would have been a beat cop if I'd tried to come back." He takes another bite as if he hasn't just dropped a bomb between them.

Olivia ignores the dread that slides down her spine at what he's saying. She had always assumed there would have been hoops for Elliot to jump through after the shooting, but she'd always believed there had been a path back to Detective First Grade. To SVU. To them. To her. "And yet you're back, so it seems it worked out fine." Her voice is shakier now than she had expected.

He slams his burger down and washes the bite down with his drink. "Do you even know what he did, Olivia? I was cleared on the shooting. Even if I didn't clear myself, the brass said it was a good shoot, whatever the hell that means." He is coiled now, his jaw jumping as he narrows his eyes. "Tucker opened up a secondary investigation. He used a scalpel to carve up my jacket. He interviewed my wife. He interviewed Richard because I grabbed my kid in the squad room in the middle of a nightmare. History of violence, he told my kid. Did you know that?"

All of it knocks her breath away, but she can't let him have this. If he's trying to crack her veneer of civility, he's doing a good job. Ed is gone, he lost whatever time he had left because of her and she won't make excuses or absorb any more blame right now. Ed had been just as broken as the rest of them. "How could I know that when you never fucking picked up the phone?"

Everything on the table had bounced just a little bit as she retaliated, and she realizes a second too late it's because she had slammed her hand down on the table hard. Her palm stings and her eyes burn and her chest is on fire.

When Olivia finally looks at him again, she realizes they are both a little shell-shocked, somehow absorbing the parrying verbal blows.

It's Elliot who manages to find his voice first, although it's a thick, stilted rasp. "I woulda never been paired with you again."

"What? Why?" Her eyes are pricking with tears, but she doesn't care. There's no one else here to see too much.

Elliot shoves his plate to the end of the table, tossing his napkin on top of whatever is left. "Leave it alone, Olivia."

"No. No. I've left it alone for years, and not…not anymore. Tell me."

His lip curls, and whatever delicate balance he'd been dancing on dissipates. "Your boyfriend told me straight out that I might find my way back to my pay grade one last time, but he'd come for me. Said if I came back to the unit I'd be gambling your career, too. Told me it was a terrible shame, because you actually had a bright future with the department. If I'd told you that, what would you have done, Liv?"

She hadn't known. In all the months with Ed, he had never once spoken of Elliot. She'd taught Brian and Ed that there were just some things – people - she would never discuss. One was a man she hated; one was a man she…

The truth he's asking for isn't even a question.

She knows what she would have done. They both do. The answer is so deeply entrenched in who she is – who they were – that it is absolute. "I'd have told them we were a package deal. You go, I go."

It's the way he looks at her that makes her press her lips together. His eyes are stark, as if he's lifted the shade to show her the ravaged, guilt-ridden things within for a moment. "Exactly."

Her nose feels like it's going to run. Her eyes are wet again, and she doesn't care as much as she should about how this looks. She focuses on the woman alone at the bar again, trying to will back the years and years of agony that simmer. "I would have had your back, Elliot," she says quietly.

He reaches across the table then and encircles her wrist. She whips her head back to face him again, feeling the pressure of his fingers on her. She can't explain why she doesn't recoil. Why she wants to turn her hand towards his, palm to palm, and watch his fingers slide between hers. Need hits her, and she doesn't even know what the need is demanding. "I know that. But you wouldn't have had your own. And in that position I was in no place to protect you."

She hasn't been this cracked in years. Or maybe the truth is she has never dealt with all the fault lines in the first place. "You cut the cord," she says flatly. He'd said that last night. He admitted he had made a conscious choice to sever them.

His choice. She had just lived with the consequences.

His thumb starts slow circles on her skin. It takes her breath away as she watches him do it, ignoring the goose flesh his touch incites. He's gentle now. His voice is rough, the emotion spilling over enough for both of them. "If one person is trapped in a sinking vehicle, but you can cut another free, allow one to rise to the surface. Breathe. Do you make the cut, or let them both go down so no one grieves the other?"

Her agony is sharp, maybe because he's showing her his. She wants to scream at him, to hit him, to launch at him and tell him that she had breathed, but she hasn't lived for an incredibly long time. She wants to tell him that she didn't sleep for months after he left, that the rejection was so eviscerating she didn't allow herself to even think about him again until she'd been close to dying.

She'd only brought him back then. When she'd been him in a beach house of horrors on Long Island.

Her lashes are wet and her throat closes. "What if I didn't rise?"

It's the first real smile he's given her in hours. "You're the only person I've ever really had faith in, Olivia."

She breaks a little at that moment. It's insane that she has a need for him like this, that her body has not been able to stay away from his touch in the last twenty-four hours. It's as if she's physically seeking heat, light, relief. She turns her face again, the woman at the bar orders a shot and all Olivia can remember is her and Elliot sitting in that spot nineteen years ago.

She'd felt strong then. Tough. She was going to change Manhattan with him. Fearlessness has always been her mantra, but the word morphed over the years. Sometimes it was borne of strength, sometimes it sprung from the numbness. Sometimes the fearlessness had been the result of simply having nothing left to lose.

The memory is so strong she can almost see them sitting there. Her navy velour track suit had been unimaginably soft and her hair brutally short, his khaki overcoat had been a size too big and slung over the barstool to his left. She'd been drinking to erase the feeling of her gun firing. He'd been drinking to erase the feeling of her disappearing on him.

"You know," she says now, so lost to the vision of them that she doesn't even turn to face him. "I never let anyone talk about you. Not good. Not bad. I never talked about you with the squad. With Nick or David or Brian or Ed. You'd earned your right to walk away from the job. You'd earned your peace."

"You think I found peace, Liv?"

A small sob nearly escapes her and she swallows it by chewing on her lower lip as she looks at him. But her eyes are full, and there's no way to hide the oppressive weight of everything.

That's when she realizes he's unnaturally still. His finger has stopped moving on her. The haunt in him is visible.

She can't breathe. She wants his fingers to crawl higher on her arm, over her skin. She needs the comfort of his touch on her elbow, her upper arm. He's here, the incongruity of it hits her again and again in the most unexpected of moments.

Olivia remains silent.

"You know the pain of being left, Olivia. But you have no idea what it does to someone to leave you." He forms words but nothing comes out. His nostrils flare, then he mirrors her, tugging his lower lip into his mouth. He glances at the ghosts of them, sitting at the bar. He's watching them too. "Walking away was the last thing I could do protect you. And you'd think that over time…over time the memories would fade. I'd be able to get you out of my head. I kept thinking that one day, I'd be able to move on."

She takes in every detail of him now, and she wants to tell the young detectives at the bar that one day it would come to this. Between them would exist a pain so deep, a chasm so wide that every instinct would scream at them to run. She wants to tell them that no one would ever hurt them the way they would hurt each other. And that they should do it all anyway.

His eyes are back on her, unguarded and raw. "One day never came, Olivia."

He'd paid for their drinks that long-ago night. Twice as many for her as for him. He'd been sober still and able to drive her home. They'd sat in comfortable silence outside of her apartment for endless minutes, as she'd stared at the curb where one of the victims had been left for her to find. The safety she'd felt inside of the car with him wasn't something she had ever been in a hurry to leave.

After he'd left, she's never really found it again.

"So now what?" she whispers.

"We're going to have to go through it. Walk into the wasteland of the last nine years. Diffuse it. See who we are on the other side of it. You tell me all of it. I tell you. Or we won't come through."

He's had time to think about it. To decide.

"And what's on the other side?" She's so quiet she wonders if he can even hear her.

He does. "I don't know. I just know…that I will never leave you again unless you tell me to walk away. Okay?"

She closes her eyes, and his hand slips a few inches further up her arm before he lets go.

The ghosts of them say goodbye outside her old apartment a lifetime ago, assured they will see each other tomorrow.

Another moment they had survived both then and now, but always another unpredictable game of chance that remained ahead.

She nods.

-o0o-