August 17, 2021
"No," Jet gasped, laughing.
"Yes," Elliot insisted, and he was grinning, smiling widely, smiling for what felt like the first time in months. "Hand to God," he said. "There was a monkey in the basketball. You should've seen it, the way it crawled out and latched onto my Cap. It was love at first sight. We thought the old man was gonna ask to take it home."
It was one of those rare moments when life seemed good, for once, okay, for once. Things were quiet; their UC was busy with the Albanians and they'd laid their plans for the next phase of the operation but there wasn't a lot to do in the daylight, and Elliot was regaling Jet with some of the stories from the good old days. The nice stories, the funny stories; the story about Cragen and the monkey, and not the story about Elliot bleeding out on the sidewalk with a bullet in his shoulder while Olivia's face swam before his slowly darkening eyes. Some things Elliot didn't want to remember, not here, not now. Not on a sunny day while the city was slowly baking in the summer heat and Jet was laughing. Better to remember the nice stories.
Bell had been with them, for a bit, but she'd had to take a phone call in her office and left the pair of them to their own devices, and while Jet's laughter faded and her gaze drifted back towards the bank of monitors in front of her Elliot allowed his own eyes to wander to the Sergeant's office. He could see Bell through the glass; she was standing, leaning with her hands flat on the desktop and her head hung between on her shoulders, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and back while she talked to whoever it was on speaker.
Elliot frowned. It didn't bode well, he thought, her posture. The way she was standing, the unsteady rhythm of her movements, it spoke of agitation. Not now, he thought, hoped, prayed. It's been such a nice day. Things had been going well, for once; the team had found their groove at work and his kids were talking to him again and Liv was talking to him again and he had done some research on liver transplants and what made a donor compatible with a recipient and he was gonna call her, at the weekend, was gonna call her after she'd had a chance to recover from the week and they were gonna talk and now was not the time, he thought, for trouble. Hadn't there been enough trouble already?
Inside the office Bell hung up the phone, and Elliot watched her, watched her draw in a slow, deep breath, watched her straighten up until she was standing at her full height, until she was looking right at him through the glass with something like dread on her face.
"Jet," Elliot said softly, already moving towards the office even as Bell began to walk out of it. "Something's coming."
Behind him Jet heeded his warning and rose to her feet, but he wasn't paying attention to her, anymore. All of his attention was focused on his Sergeant.
"Elliot," Ayanna said as they drew level with one another. "I just got an all hands call from 1PP."
Holy Mary mother of God, Elliot thought. There was nothing more dire than that, really, no more dramatic action the brass could have taken than to mobilize the entire force, everybody not currently working on emergencies, the full might of the NYPD brought to bear on a single case. It had to be something big, and it had to be something bad.
Ayanna didn't make him ask what it was.
"Someone's taken Benson's kid."
Elliot spun back in shock, ran his hand over the back of his head reflexively while Jet drew in a sharp, unsteady breath, so fierce he heard it, even from a distance. Adrenaline flooded through him, fast as a lightning strike, his whole body suddenly trembling, his heart beating so fast it was a wonder it didn't burst right out of his chest, blood roaring in his ears like thunder. Fear and rage came for him in equal measure; he wanted to run, to take off and run as fast as he could to Liv, wherever she was, to find her, to comfort her, to save her from this nightmare, and he wanted to break something, and he wanted to scream, and he wanted to do it all at the same time, and he felt his body suddenly in danger of flying apart at the seams, torn in too many directions all at once.
"Which one?" he demanded breathlessly, wheeling on Ayanna, who looked at him in confusion.
"Uh," she said. "I didn't know she had more than one. The Chief I talked to said it was her daughter."
"Son of a bitch!" It came out too loud, and even Ayanna flinched at the sudden vitriol of his tone, but he wasn't looking at her; he was racing for his desk, for the top drawer where his keys were waiting.
Someone had taken Mia. That precious little girl who looked so like her mother, that tiny spitfire with her million questions and her wary eyes, Mia who was Liv's very heart, Mia who was sick, and fragile because of it, more fragile than she should have been, she was gone, and God only knew where and God only knew why and Elliot wasn't a doctor but he knew enough. If they didn't find her, and find her fast…Christ, he didn't want to think about it.
"Stabler!" Ayanna barked, putting herself between him and his path to the door.
"You really don't wanna get between me and my partner right now, Sarge," Elliot ground out from behind clenched teeth, breathing like a bellows. He would plow through any obstacle, break any rule, break bones, do whatever it took, just to get to her. He kept thinking about it, how scared she must be right now, how devastated she must be, how much it must have hurt, to have her child taken from her, and he kept thinking about how this was happening to Olivia, Olivia who took care of everybody else, Olivia who carried the weight of the entire world on her shoulders and had confessed to him just a few days ago how lonely it was carrying that burden on her own. Right now what Olivia needed was her goddamn partner, and he was coming for her.
"You don't even know where she is," Ayanna pointed out - rightly so, even if Elliot didn't want to admit that. "And you won't do her any good if you get yourself killed on the way there. Give me the keys."
He hesitated, loath to turn over even that small piece of control in this moment when he felt as if he had none at all.
"Give me the goddamn keys, Stabler."
He did.
"Jet," Ayanna barked. "Call TARU. See what the techies are doing to help and see if you can do it better."
"Yes, Sarge," Jet answered at once, and Elliot could already hear her fingers clacking on the keys. "Tell Captain Benson we're with her."
That meant a lot to Elliot. Liv had helped the team out a time or two and they all seemed to like her, seemed to respect her - how could they not? - and knowing that his new team was willing to throw their support and their manpower behind his old team, knowing that they were willing to help, knowing that they cared…that was the first time OCCB felt like home, to him.
But there was no time to think about it how grateful he was; he and Ayanna were already racing for the door. They were on the road in under a minute, Ayanna's GPS already programmed and feeding her directions as she sped through the streets with the lights on her dashboard blazing.
For the first few minutes Elliot didn't speak. Couldn't speak, couldn't unlock his jaw, couldn't translate the noise in his head into words. It was just noise, loud, maddening, fragments of memories - Liv's face, Mia's little pout, the flash as the car exploded with Kathy inside it, the heat of the fire on his face - a torrent of emotions so tangled up he could hardly parse them out, could hardly tell one from the other. It was Ayanna who made sense of it, in the end, Ayanna who gave him something to do, gave him a purpose, when all he could do on his own was freefall.
"Bring me up to speed," she said. "Benson's got more than one kid?"
"Two," Elliot croaked. His throat had grown dry as sandpaper; all the moisture in his body was currently sweating out through his clammy palms. "Noah and Mia."
"Ok. No one said anything about the boy so he must be safe."
Please, God, let him be safe.
"You know how this goes, Elliot," Ayanna said. "Most of the time when a kid's taken it was a family member who did it. What do you know about Mia's father?"
"I know he didn't steal his fucking kid," Elliot growled. The very idea that Cassidy might be a suspect was offensive to him, but he tried to take a deep breath; Bell was just gathering intel. Just interviewing a witness. She didn't know anything yet; it was his job to tell her.
"The kid's have different dads. I got no idea about Noah's dad." It hurt to admit that, but every detail mattered, right now. "Mia's dad's ex-NYPD. He's good people. He sees the kids all the time, he's very involved. And he would never, ever hurt Liv."
"You can't know-"
"I know."
Brian Cassidy had changed a lot in the years since Elliot had last seen him, but he knew that much. The kid Cassidy once had been was still lurking inside the man he had become, and that kid had been kind, had possessed a tender heart, and that kid was still cooking Liv dinner, looking after her when she needed it, and besides -
"Mia's sick." The words spilled out of him before he could stop them.
"They mentioned that on the call," Ayanna told him. "What is it, diabetes or something?"
"Her liver's failing."
"Jesus."
"We gotta find her, Ayanna," Elliot said seriously. "This'll..this'll kill Liv. If she loses her baby…"
His very soul recoiled in horror at the thought. The family Olivia had built was beautiful, and it was everything to her, and he knew it. There had been too many times, over the years, when the dream of family had been within her grasp, only to be cruelly ripped away at the last second; there was that baby girl whose mother had passed her into Olivia's care, only for the baby to die on the operating table. Christ, there was Calvin, Calvin Olivia had been willing to risk her career, her freedom, her future for, Calvin who had been torn from her arms, screaming, while Elliot had to hold her back, had to watch her dream as it was dragged away from her, had to feel her collapse slowly in on herself as the closest thing she'd ever had to a child of her own was taken from her by brute force, and Elliot couldn't stop it, had to hold her back, because there was no other way, because he cared about her too much to watch her destroy herself when the cause was already lost. There was Simon, Simon who Olivia loved so much she'd been willing to help him skip bail when she had every reason to believe he was a rapist, Simon who had died in some hotsheet shithole and left her all alone. Every time, she got her heart broke every time, and how many times could a heart shatter before it remained that way, unable to knit itself back together once more?
"She won't," Ayanna told him fiercely. "We're gonna find Mia."
And that, Elliot thought, was just further proof that Ayanna had never been SVU. An SVU cop would know better than to make such a promise, no matter how fiercely they intended to keep it. An SVU cop would've known just how bad things could get, and just how often those promises were broken. Elliot was SVU, still, always would be, and Elliot knew.
