Spoilers/References: mostly "Smoked"; "Swing," "Fault," "Beast's Obsession," and "Downloaded Child" to lesser degrees

Disclaimer: Consider these characters my "something borrowed."

"Something Old"

Music and laughter fill the warmly-lit hall. The dance floor is a sea of suits and sequins, slowly churning to the walking bass of the band's bluesy intro to their next song. Dinner is long over, the cake cut and the garter flung; the party should be winding down, but instead feels like it's gearing up. This is what happens when half the guests are Irish cops and there's an open bar.

The Stablers aren't naïve, though: the hall is rented for the night, the bar went cash at ten, the band is booked until one a.m., and coffee service stops at two.

Olivia, hugged in eggplant gabardine, settles her elbows more clumsily on the bar than she'd intended. She, like any wise wedding guest whose child was with an overnight sitter and whose duty phone had already been handed to her second-in-command, had taken full advantage of the free whiskey and wine when it was still available. But it seems that, in her older age, alcohol affects her differently than it once did. So she concentrates hard on steadying her fingers to unfold the bills she gives the bartender when he puts her beer in front of her. "Thank you," she offers huskily before turning again to face the party.

She is vaguely aware of the warm presence to her left. It nears, and her awareness grows with its proximity. The heat it radiates is unmistakable. She feels her skin flush a little, then go clammy.

"Nice party," she says, not even looking at him.

He hesitates before agreeing. "Yeah," is all he says. He almost sounds surprised.

"Must've set you back a pretty penny," she muses, careful and choppy with her words.

She senses him shifting next to her. She hasn't looked at him yet, so she can't exactly see it, and it's too noisy for her to have heard it, but still she knows it. It's instinctual. Always has been. "Yeah, well, Kathy's mom kinda... insisted."

At the mention of the name, Olivia turns to look at him. She had seen Kathy at the ceremony, sitting in the front row between Elliot and someone Olivia had never seen before. Then she had seen them at dinner, assigned to different tables, Kathy beside the stranger, Elliot with his brothers and their wives.

"On paying for it, I mean," Elliot clarifies flatly. He must have sensed her confusion, wondering why his apparent-ex-mother-in-law had any sway over his actions (or wallet) anymore.

Olivia nods.

"I didn't want her to invite you," he suddenly blurts.

The alcohol has slowed her response time, so before she can speak, he moves away from the bar and disappears into the crowd.

Cassidy finds her a little while later, in the same position, leaning back against the bar. "Hey, you okay?" he asks, and somehow it surprises her.

She groggily turns to look at him, squints a little in thought, and says, "I'm fine." She tilts her head to peer around him, and she can see a young wedding guest nervously straightening the skirt of her dress as she stands against the wall near the door. Olivia tiredly returns her gaze to him. "You heading out?" she asks.

He expels a catch-and-release sigh. There's obvious guilt in it, but no shame whatsoever. "If you're okay..." To his credit, his tone makes it perfectly clear that he'll stay if she needs him to—and the girl that he's obviously planning to take home is standing a respectable distance away, not clinging to his arm like a drunk floozy.

But Olivia had brought him as her plus one for this very reason: so she wouldn't have to face the Stabler clan alone, and she wouldn't have the urge to go home with him herself. She chuckles and rubs his back familiarly, "Thanks for coming. Be safe tonight, okay?"

Grinning, he gives her a quick peck on the cheek. "I kinda like these mutually beneficial social circumstances. We should do this again," he jokes, and then he spins on his heel and Olivia watches him offer his arm to the girl who'd been standing against the wall. They make it outside and Olivia turns back to the bartender.

"Two, please," she says, and it's a little clearer, a little more coherent. She doesn't concentrate as hard on her payment this time, and when she has the beers in hand, she melts away from the bar and out into the room.

She finds her target sitting again at his table, chatting with one of his brothers. She comes up easily behind him, trailing one hand across his shoulders as she leans her hip against the back of his chair. She holds both drinks in her other hand and now shows them to him, effectively interrupting his conversation by shoving a bottle in his face. He obliges and takes one from her. She immediately takes a swig of the one she has left as Elliot tries to make the introductions as smoothly as possible.

"My last partner, Olivia Benson," she hears him say.

"Hi," she says loudly to the brother whose name she did not catch, stretching to shake his hand. An impulse strikes her immediately after meeting Elliot's brother, and she hurries away and back, returning with her name card from her own table. She drops it next to Elliot's and immediately claims the open seat beside him.

Olivia is far from tuned-in to the conversation, instead closing her eyes and letting the music rock her shoulders as she sits there. She notices, however, when Elliot's chair shoots out from the table and he's suddenly hugging his brother goodbye. When Olivia opens her eyes, the brother's wife is there, and she is affectionately kissing Elliot's cheek in farewell. Olivia's eyes narrow of their own accord until the other woman releases him and then, despite not having met Olivia, says goodbye to her, too. Olivia raises her hand weakly and waggles her fingers at both the brother and wife then returns to the beer in front of her. Elliot sits down hastily.

They don't speak for a while, just drink. Finally Elliot quietly asks, "Where's Cassidy?"

This stirs Olivia's interest. "Gone," she says.

"I can't believe you brought that asshole."

"You didn't think I'd come alone, did you?"

"I didn't think you'd come at all!"

She doesn't respond; doesn't know what to say. If she hadn't had so much to drink, she probably would have ripped into him about something. As it is, she feels hurt, but she can't clear the fog enough to figure out exactly why.

"Kathy told her it was okay to invite you."

Olivia draws a ragged breath. "I will say I was surprised to get the invitation."

Elliot nods exaggeratedly.

"But I was so touched. Honored, really," she continues, and it immediately extinguishes his nonverbal offense. He cuts his eyes to her, and she explains as best she can, mumbling from the alcohol and that unnamed, embarrassed hurt she feels: "Your family has always meant the world to me. And Kathleen? Well, I'm just so happy to see her doing well." Her voice wavers, and she struggles not to cry in front of him. "And when I got that invitation, I thought—" she gasps "—'She feels I helped her get here.'" Olivia shakes her head and wipes her eyes dismissively. "It's stupid, I know." She sniffs and takes a pull from the bottle.

Elliot has been watching her intently, and now he reaches for the back of her chair. "No," he rasps, "that's exactly what she was thinking."

Olivia glances up at him then quickly away.

"I'm the jackass, you know? I was making it about me." She doesn't respond, so he continues, needing to fill the silence with an explanation. "I thought you were so pissed at me that you wouldn't come. I didn't want her to get her hopes up and..."

She shrugs and looks back at her drink. "If Brian hadn't come, I probably wouldn't have," she mumbles.

Elliot growls a little as he removes his hand from her chair.

"But I needed a buffer," she continues absently, almost to herself.

"For what?" Elliot nearly sneers.

"You."

He looks at her skeptically. "Well he's gone now."

"Why do you think I'm over here?"

"What do you want me to say, Liv? 'Sorry'?"

"It's a start."

He sighs and observes, "But it's not enough, is it."

She chuckles wryly. "You don't call, you don't write..."

"I know, Liv, I fucked up. Been doing that a lot lately."

"'Lately'! Try six years. Christ, El, your daughter reached out before you did."

Elliot takes a long pull from his bottle.

She's thinking hard, still trying to cut through her self-induced mental haze, trying to put together the pieces of this conversation and guess where it might be going. But she gets distracted by a memory and loses herself again in the mist. "I needed you," she murmurs, the same confused way she had reflected on their partnership in the hospital after Gitano. "You weren't there." She turns and looks at him, like he has betrayed her anew. Then she slides out of her chair and leaves the table, abandoning her drink behind her.

He finds her sipping coffee at one of the highboy tables along the wall. Approaching from behind and gently alerting her to his presence with a warm hand on her shoulder, he reaches around her to settle a glass of water in front of her.

"Coffee won't really sober you up," he reminds her softly. She doesn't look up from her coffee but he slides along the curved edge of the table until he's standing opposite her then folds his arms and leans forward on the tabletop. "I did see the press conference," he says quietly, as if it's a secret. She flinches—just slightly, but enough for him to notice. "Truth is," he continues only to stop. He takes a breath, licks his lips, looks out to the party still at full force, oblivious to them in their moment. "I've never been good at being wrong," he says. "And I was wrong. To leave you like I did." He takes a deeper breath, gazes into the distance. "So when all of that went down..." He shakes his head in wonder. "What could I do?"

His last comment sounded so genuinely helpless that Olivia is compelled to look at him. She is surprised to find him so utterly broken.

"I would've called or something then, but... after everything you'd been through..." He takes another rough breath, eyes still trained elsewhere. "I didn't want to make it worse," he whispers in a rush, embarrassed by his own admission.

She stares at him, and the fog lifts enough for her to remember that he had always protected her. Gone out of his way, in fact, to make sure she was safe. And so, though it's not the same logic she would have used had their roles been reversed, she finally understands what had kept him away: he was still guarding her. Only this time, for six years, he'd been both threat and savior. No wonder he looked so haggard.

There's a question burning in her mind, even stronger now that she has seen that Elliot and Kathy are, apparently, no longer together, and now that she understands Elliot's maddening reticence for the last few years. She doesn't know how to move forward from his emotional apology—it's not the kind of thing you could verbally accept and breeze past—so she blurts out the question instead: "Why do you think you and I never..."

"What?" he asks, finally looking at her. He is rightfully confused.

"You and me," is all she says in answer, lifting a shoulder to complete the thought. "We never..." She wrinkles her nose, shrugs a single shoulder again.

His eyes widen as his mouth drops open and an uncomfortable "aha" tumbles out as a half laugh.

But she's not laughing; she's waiting for an answer.

His alarm grows as he catches her eye. "You're serious?"

She stares him down, waiting.

"Where's this coming from?"

"You never thought about it?" she asks simply.

He stammers, ears turning a little red. "We're not those kinds of people, Liv."

"What 'kind' would that be?" she asks, challenging him by staring at him while she takes a sip of coffee. "Because—I'm not proud of it, but—we broke rules all the time."

"Yeah I'm not talking about rules," he replies automatically, still staring at her in horrified amazement.

"Then what, your marriage vows?" she asks innocently, taking another sip of coffee.

He swallows hard and looks around the room. Still, no one has noticed them.

"Because you were separated for a while," she continues. "And you never..." She shakes her head and burbles on: "Of course, your marriage was never stopping you anyway, not really—because there was Jo, right?"

"That was different," he insists tightly.

"Yeah, yeah, you were young and stupid, she seduced you, I've heard it before—"

"I never loved Jo."

"What does that have to do with anything?" she scoffs.

"You asked," he says, glancing out into the room again, trying to flag someone down for a coffee. He can't even get a server to look at him.

"Not about that."

"Do you love Cassidy?"

A long pause. She wants to go off on him, tell him it's none of his damn business. But she is more overwhelmed by the need to clear something up: "We're not together anymore."

This draws his attention immediately. He looks her over then asks, "Well, then: did you?"

Again she wants to go off, but since she didn't do it the first time he asked, she knows she doesn't have the right to do it now. And the longer she doesn't respond, the more the question feels rhetorical, his quiet tone proving a point rather than really inquiring. So she concedes. She doesn't know how he knows, but he's right. "No," she says at last. She feels defeated, but she's not remotely ashamed of the truth.

"See? That's the kind of people we're not," he says emphatically, triumphantly. "We don't have affairs with people we love. We keep a distance. Play it safe. So that way, when it ends, however it ends, we haven't lost every single thing we ever cared about."

She stares at him, desperately struggling to understand what he has just said, and he continues trying to catch the eye of a server. He finally does and turns back to her, glancing at her only long enough to note her confusion.

"I couldn't have taken losing you. I told you that," he adds quietly, as if to explain.

"Elliot," she protests softly, "you left."

"Hardest thing I ever did," he says, straightening and pulling back from the table to allow a server to set his coffee in front of him. He lifts the coffee then and sniffs at it, tilts it to his lips, draws the slightest bit into his mouth, swallows. She watches him carefully.

"So why'd you do it?" she asks impulsively. She understands now—or maybe understands—why he had kept his distance, but she needs him to tell her why he walked away in the first place. She thinks she knows, but she needs him to say it.

He looks up at her, eyes red-rimmed and wild. "I shot that girl for the wrong reason."

"You were doing your job, Elliot," she whispers.

He shakes his head faintly. "She just wouldn't put the gun down."

"IA said it was a good shoot," she whispers firmly, this time reaching for his hands on the table.

"I don't care; they weren't in my head. I wasn't thinking straight."

"She would've killed Skinner."

"Yeah, and he was a scumbag," Elliot chokes.

Olivia looks at their hands on the table. This is new for them; they rarely touched as partners. Maybe, she now thinks, it's because they wouldn't have been able to stop if they'd started. It is probably just because the remaining alcohol coursing through her system has left her barriers low and weak, but she now rotates his hand in hers, fascinated that he is permitting it. She presses her thumb into his palm, slowly smoothing a trough in the fold of his hand.

"I wasn't thinking about him, Liv," he admits quietly. "But she wouldn't put that gun down, and I kept thinking... what if she turns back to us?" He's been watching their hands, too, and his fingers now creakily close around her thumb, his own thumb starting a fluid exploration of her knuckles and the smooth skin on the back of her hand. "You barely had cover," he croaks. He glances up at her, and his thumb stills on her skin. "I shot a child because I was terrified I might lose you. How could I possibly do my job after that?"

At a loss for words, she squeezes his hand as tightly as she can. "It's in the past," she reassures him, and he squeezes her hand back.

Elliot releases her hand after just a moment. She responds in kind and tries not to let her disappointment show on her face. Then he's moving, and she briefly thinks he's abandoning her again. She opens her mouth to say something in protest, but then he's there, crowding her, breathing with her.

She is bewildered.

His eyes drop to her open mouth, and his jaw trembles. He blinks slowly and draws a deep, studied breath. As if pulled by his intake of air, Olivia drifts forward and Elliot meets her, securing his mouth to her bottom lip.

Her eyes flutter closed as he kisses her once more and then again. She feebly reaches out a hand for him, still disoriented, and her fingers find his ribs. She trails them down his side until they land on the waistband of his trousers. Three fingers slide in, and she pulls him ever so slightly closer.

He tastes just faintly of coffee. Almost exactly how she always imagined he would.

One of Elliot's hands is at Olivia's waist, thumb strumming up her side, dangerously close to her breast. He snakes the other to the back of her head, effectively tilting her jaw to allow himself more access. She accepts the new position with a soft moan and slides her other hand up his back to his shoulder to keep him in place.

They are interrupted by the sound of Elliot's name. Neither can say how many times it's been called, and neither can recognize the voice, but they both register the sound in the same instant. His lips still as her eyes open. It's fleeting, but she memorizes the way he looks in this moment, so very close to her, looking so contentedly half-asleep, before he opens his eyes and meets her gaze. He blinks and breathes against her, unable to speak.

"Elliot!" it comes again. He takes a small step back. "They're getting ready to leave."

Elliot pivots away from Olivia, revealing Kathy standing there, arms folded. Olivia twitches with the urge to blot her mouth with the back of her hand, but she doesn't want to draw excess attention to it. Instead, she pulls her lips between her teeth and holds them there. Her heart is thundering.

"Olivia," is all Kathy offers as a greeting.

Olivia releases her lips only long enough to say, "Hi. Lovely wedding."

"Uh-huh," Kathy grunts in response, eying Elliot. "Classy," she quips.

"So do we line up somewhere, or..." Elliot asks, diverting the conversation.

His ex sighs. "Yeah, over here. Come on." She begins leading Elliot away, and Olivia hears the band start something bright and peppy.

Suddenly Elliot turns back and reaches for Olivia's hand. "I'll be here," she tells him, trying to evade his grasp. It's as equally a warning as it is a promise, but it's also Olivia's own challenge to herself not to run.

A sly grin spreads across Elliot's face as he shakes his head at her. "Unh-uh. I'm not leaving you again."

There is a large part of her that is petrified by this sentiment, but she extends her hand anyway. He takes it in his, laces their fingers together, and leads her to the place where the family has gathered to bid his daughter and her husband good luck in their new life together.

-fin-