"Captain Benson, to what do I owe the pleasure?"

"Hey, Doc," Olivia said easily, taking the hand Melinda offered her and shaking it warmly.

"Sergeant Bell, Doctor Warner," she introduced the two ladies, watched them shake hands, too. Olivia had always liked Warner, and she was glad to see a familiar face at the morgue.

"We're here to see one of your patients," Olivia explained. "Elliot Stabler."

"I've already submitted my findings to IAB," Melinda said, but she was already leading them deeper into the morgue, towards the wall of freezers. "It's pretty cut and dried."

"Humor us," Bell said.

"You gonna tell me what this is about?" Melinda picked a drawer seemingly at random - seemingly, but Olivia knew better, knew Melinda knew that place like the back of her own hand, knew Melinda knew the location and disposition of every body kept there - and slid it slowly open.

"Let's just get a look at him first," Olivia answered carefully.

"Be my guest."

With the drawer fully extended there was nowhere else to look but at him, and so Olivia looked. Looked down at the motionless, colorless face of Elliot Stabler. His lower half was covered with a white sheet to protect his modesty but his broad chest was bare, the Y incision from the autopsy stark and grim. Apart from that, though, he was a dead ringer for the man in her interrogation room. They were identical, from the bald head to the soft wrinkles around the eyes, the tattoos, the muscles. She'd been wondering on the drive over if maybe, somehow, the Elliot Stabler in the morgue was a convincing fake, the real man whisked away somewhere else, but this body didn't look fake. It didn't smell it, either; Melinda kept a clean house, but Olivia was well acquainted with the scent of decay, and recognized it at once.

"Jesus," Bell said once, softly, a pained expression on her face. She had known the man in life, been by his side in death, and it must have been hard for her, seeing an old friend laid out in a morgue drawer like that. Olivia tried to imagine how it would feel if she was standing in Ayanna's shoes, if she were looking down at Fin instead, and her heart constricted with grief. As if on reflex Bell reached out, rested her hand gently on her old friend's shoulder, bowed her head for a moment as if in prayer, and Olivia looked away, feeling somehow ashamed for having borne witness to such a private moment.

"Captain," Melinda said slowly, "this wouldn't have anything to do with the fingerprint job Muncy sent over this morning, would it?"

"Yeah, it would, actually. Can you walk me through that?"

"Walk you through it?" Melinda repeated. "There's not much to walk through. Muncy sent in the prints, we ran them through the system, we got a hit, we sent it back."

"And there's no way it's a false positive?"

"Come with me," Melinda said. Ayanna had finished her mourning, for the moment, and so Melinda closed the drawer and then led them back through the morgue to a bank of computers. With the click of a few keys she pulled up the fingerprint results; the set Muncy had taken on the left, the set the NYPD had on file for Elliot Stabler on the right.

"When we compare prints, we look for points of commonality. A lot of the time we're working with partials, latent prints picked up at crime scenes, just one or two fingers. Muncy sent us all ten of your guy's prints, and they're all full prints, not partials. This match wasn't based on three or four points of commonality; the prints are identical. There's…look, fingerprint analysis isn't completely foolproof. A lot of the time there's a certain degree of judgment involved, and different techs can come to different conclusions. How the print was taken, environmental factors, all of that can play a role. But you brought me ten perfect prints taken under ideal circumstances, and I'm telling you, it's a match."

"But could it be faked? Someone faked my DNA, once."

"And you'll recall I did prove that sample was fake, eventually," Melinda said. She was still a bit testy about the whole thing, so many years later. "Muncy took these prints on an ink pad. We've seen perps make fake fingerprints and use them to trick biometric scanners, but I don't think that would work in this instance. Muncy would have noticed if the guy had glued silicone to the tips of his fingers, and it wouldn't have picked up the ink the same way skin does."

"What are the chances of two people having the same prints?" Bell asked. "Twins, or something?"

"Identical twins have the same DNA, but not the same fingerprints," Melinda said. "You don't even have the same print on every finger. There's never been a documented case of two people having the same prints, the odds are…astronomical."

There goes that theory, Olivia thought.

"We printed Detective Stabler when his body arrived at the morgue," Melinda said. "The body in my drawer has Detective Stabler's fingerprints, and so does the man Muncy printed this morning. Where did you find this guy?"

"He found us," Olivia grumbled.

"Have your people take a DNA swab, too," Melinda advised her. "We can run that, see what we find. Maybe there's some chance he faked the prints, but he can't fake an oral swab if you control the conditions."

"How long would it take to get the results back?"

"Longer than fingerprints. Couple of days, maybe."

"We'll do that, then. Thanks, Melinda."

"Happy to help."

They made their goodbyes, the three of them, and then Olivia and Ayanna retreated to Olivia's car to regroup.

"So, not twins," Ayanna said moodily, staring out the window.

"I guess not."

"Where does that leave us?"

Nowhere, Olivia thought. She'd take the DNA sample like Melinda said, but she had a sinking feeling that she knew already what the results would be. The man in the interview room, he was Elliot Stabler. He was, but he couldn't be.

"Is it possible he's the real Stabler?" Olivia mused. "Maybe he went to the Academy, got printed, and then decided to switch places with a guy who looked just like him?"

"The ME printed the body at the morgue, though. Both of them have the same prints. It doesn't work. I can't…I can't think of a single explanation that accounts for everything we've found out, everything we know."

"What do you think?" Olivia was driving, and so could not look at Ayanna directly and judge the woman's expression for herself, but she trusted the Sergeant to tell her the truth. "I mean…do you buy his story?"

"My wife says I'm superstitious," Bell said slowly. "I'm not religious, but I…I guess I believe there's more to this world than what we can see. I'm open to things. Ghosts, whatever. I mean who can say for sure what happens to us when we die? That man in your precinct, he's not a ghost, he's solid, he's real as you and me. What he says sounds crazy, but…what if he's telling the truth?"

What if he was? What if he was Elliot Stabler, from a parallel universe, a place where Olivia had a son and a friend who called her Liv? If he was telling the truth, then he was in the wrong place, the wrong time, with no means to take care of himself, no way to survive. If he was telling the truth, he'd need help, wouldn't he? If he was telling the truth, then he was her friend, and she had never been one to abandon a friend in need.

"What are you gonna do with him?" Bell asked when Olivia didn't answer.

"I haven't decided."

"You can't keep him at the station, he hasn't done anything wrong."

She was right about that; "being really fucking weird" wasn't a crime, and they'd held the man all damn day. Next steps would probably be to call for a psych consult, but the city's resources were stretched thin, and he seemed perfectly sane. She could send him to Sister Peg's shelter, help him find a bed and a meal for the night, but then what? What if she never saw him again?

That thought troubled her; she wanted him close, wanted to know where he was and what he was doing, and she couldn't say for certain why.

"I'll think of something," she said.

"That it?" he asked as Fin dropped the swab into a test tube.

"That's all I need," Fin said. "Rest is up to her." He nodded at Olivia and then walked away, left Elliot and Olivia alone in the interrogation room. Again.

It had been a long ass day. Elliot was tired, and hungry, and more than a little pissed, but he was scared, too. There wasn't anything else he could tell them, no further explanation he could give, and he knew it would be ages before the DNA results came back. He had no money, and no one to call - since Kathy and the kids thought he was dead and he wasn't wasn't willing to put them through this madness when they were already grieving - and nowhere to go. What would Olivia do with him? Put him in holding with the rapists? Send him to Bellevue for a psych eval? Kick him out on the street?

As much as he desperately wanted to leave that room, to walk around as a free man, he was scared to go. At least inside the 1-6 he had Olivia, had someone to talk to, had familiar faces, even if he wasn't familiar to them. What would become of him, out in the world? What would it do to him if Olivia just turned him away? But how could he expect her not to? She didn't know him. She'd never known him. That woman meant everything to him and he didn't mean a goddamn thing to her.

"You haven't committed a crime," Olivia said slowly. "Technically, you're free to go."

He'd been afraid of that. Maybe he could spend the night sleeping in the park; decades on the job had taught him the places to avoid, the places to seek shelter. But what the fuck was he gonna eat?

"Technically," he said, and wondered what it meant that she'd made that caveat.

"But we're gonna be waiting for the results of that DNA test for a few days. I don't want you disappearing on us."

How did she plan to keep tabs on him? He wondered. Was she about to throw him in lockup? It was a cop's worst nightmare, but at least he'd get something to eat there, and maybe he'd have time to think. Time to think about Liv dying at the diner, and everything this Olivia had told him. Time to mourn for his children, the ones he'd left behind and the ones who thought he was dead. Time to try to remember every conversation he'd ever had with Munch, and ask himself if there was any way out of this predicament. He'd fallen asleep at home and woken up here; maybe if he fell asleep here he'd wake up back at home, and all of this would be nothing more than a bad dream. He could only hope to be so lucky.

"Listen," she said. "The work day's over, it's time for my people to go home and the night shift is coming on. Are you…you wanna get something to eat?"

What the fuck?

He hadn't been expecting that, somehow. She had so far been distant, mistrusting, and he couldn't blame her for that - though he'd ask himself later what he'd do if he had been in her shoes, if someone had turned up claiming to be his oldest friend, claiming to know his most intimate secrets; would he have been welcoming to them? He didn't know - and he hadn't thought to look for kindness from her. Then again, as different as this world was to the one he knew she was still Olivia, and Olivia was kind.

Sometimes.

"Yeah," he said. "I'm starving."

Maybe she'd order them a pizza, he thought, and they could sit in the breakroom and eat it together, and then maybe -

"Let's go then," she said. "There's a Chinese place down the block that's good."

"Woo Hop," he said.

She looked at him strangely.

"Golden Dragon," she corrected him. "My treat, since you don't have a wallet."

"Thanks, Captain."

She didn't return his smile, but she did open the door for him, and he stepped through it, wondering what other surprises this day had in store.