I've never seen you before in my life.

"That's bullshit," Elliot said before he could stop himself, terror and rage swirling through him in almost equal measure. It wasn't possible, he thought. It wasn't possible for her not to know him. He wasn't sure how long it had been since Ohio; a day at least, maybe two, not enough time for her to be walking around on her own two feet like nothing was amiss when he'd felt her fucking die beneath his hands, when he remembered Ayanna's voice softly saying she's gone, when he remembered the way he'd screamed. She should've been lying in a hospital bed stitched up somewhere but even if, even if she'd somehow survived after everybody at the hospital told him she hadn't, there was no explanation for this. For how he'd gotten to SVU, for Olivia fucking Benson looking at him like he was a stranger.

"Excuse me?" she snapped, eyes narrowing with unconcealed anger, but he just kept right on talking, confused and desperate.

"That's bullshit," he said again. "My name is Elliot Stabler and I was your partner for thirteen goddamn years. You know me, Liv. You're…Jesus, you're my best friend."

He was still sitting at the table and she was standing on the other side of it; she'd ceased her pacing and was now still as a stone, her arms crossed over her chest, no hint of compassion in her face.

"That's funny," she said, in a tone of voice that told him she didn't think it was funny at all. "You'd think I'd remember my best friend."

"Yeah," he answered heavily, "you would. I don't know what's going on here and I don't know what in the hell's gotten into you, but I know you, Liv. I was your first partner in SVU. I've known you for twenty-five fucking years."

Very slowly she uncrossed her arms, planted her palms on the table and leaned over it, the way she used to do when she was interrogating a perp, and his blood ran cold at the sight of it.

"My first partner at SVU was John Munch," she told him, her stare hard and uncompromising.

"Munch?" he repeated dumbly. "Munch? When you came on board Munch was riding with Cassidy."

"Brian Cassidy?" that seemed to surprise her; her brow furrowed in confusion, and Elliot found himself fighting an overwhelming urge to scream. How the fuck could she remember Munch, and Cassidy, and not him? What kind of selective amnesia was this? And where the hell was the rest of her team? She clearly wasn't in her right mind; why had they left her alone?

"Yeah," he said through clenched teeth. "Why don't you call him? You've still got his number."

She'd told him that over cartons of lo mein in her office before they went to Ohio. Before he bought her the necklace, before everything went to shit, they'd been sitting around eating takeout and she'd filled him in on the whereabouts of all their old friends, told him Cassidy had moved to Florida but still texted her, every now and then.

"I haven't talked to Brian Cassidy in three years," she told him grimly.

None of this is real, he thought. It felt real, though.

"Tell you what," she said. "I'll play along. You say you were a cop?"

"I am a cop."

"Then your prints will be in our system. Will you let us run them?"

He'd strip naked for her right there, if it helped him prove the truth to her. Yeah, they could run his prints, and call Bell, and call the fucking shrink to come take care of Liv, he had no problem with that. He did have questions, though, and he figured now was as good a time as any to try to leverage at least some answers out of her.

"I will if you tell me what's going on here," he said. "How did I get here?"

"I was hoping you'd tell me that," she said. "My Sargeant found you passed out in here when he came to work this morning. You don't remember how you got here?"

No, he didn't remember a goddamn thing, and he felt more insane than he ever had in his life.

"No," he said.

"Ok. Well, let's start with your prints."

She looked up at the two-way glass and snapped her fingers and the next thing he knew the dark haired girl from her squad, the one who reminded him so much of Liv when she was young, came scuttling in with an ink pad and a fingerprint grid. Liv was silent, while Muncy - that was her name, Muncy, he remembered on account of it sounded so like Munch - took his prints, and Muncy didn't stick up for him, either, didn't remind Liv that she'd seen him around the station just a few days before, didn't say anything but next, please as she pressed his fingers one by one into the pad, and then disappeared as quickly as she'd arrived.

There has to be some explanation, he thought. There had to be a reason why Liv didn't seem to know him, but remembered other people so well. Why she thought she'd been partnered with Munch, and not him. Why she thought she hadn't heard from Cassidy in years, when she'd told him it had only been a few months since they'd last spoken. Why Muncy didn't recognize him. A head injury sustained in the shootout in Ohio wouldn't explain Muncy's behavior, wouldn't explain why Elliot himself didn't remember how he got inside the interrogation room. There had to be some other explanation, and one was beginning to form in his mind, though he was too terrified to give it voice.

"While we wait," Liv said. "Why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself?"

She pulled the empty chair out from the table and settled herself into it easily, looked at him expectantly. He understood why she asked; she'd get one story from him now, and then once she'd run his prints and got a hit she'd compare what he told her to whatever information the NYPD had on file, and see if she could spot any inconsistencies. If he'd just been some schmuck making shit up he'd be caught in a lie pretty quick, but he knew who he was, and he was determined to tell her the truth.

"My name is Elliot Stabler." He figured it was best to start at the beginning. "I married my wife Kathy when we were seventeen. We have five children: Maureen, Kathleen, Dickie, Lizzie, and Eli. I joined the Marines out of high school, and then the NYPD. I made Detective in 89. I joined SVU in 92. You came along in 98. We worked together until I left the force in 2011. I took a few years off, did some private security work, eventually became the NYPD liaison in Rome. In March of 2021 Kathy and I were in the city when she was killed by a car bomb. You spearheaded the investigation. You and I have been in contact ever since."

And you're the best goddamn friend I ever had, he thought, looking at her. She was scribbling notes while she talked, an errant lock of hair tumbling across her brow, and not a damn word he said seemed to resonate with her; she looked like a kid listening to her algebra professor, her heart unswayed by anything she was hearing.

"That's a lot of detail," she said when she finished writing in her notebook. She looked up at him, finally, but her dark eyes were closed off from him, unreadable in a way she never was, not with him.

He had to find some way to get to her. Some way to convince her, to show her, that he was telling the truth. That he knew her, inside and out, that he wasn't an EDP stumbling in off the streets and messing up her plans for the day. What would be the best way to get to her? That was the question; what would prove he wasn't lying? She'd told him she wasn't in touch with Cassidy and that she'd worked with Munch, and that gave him pause. So many of the most catastrophic, life-altering moments they'd experienced together had come as the result of cases they'd worked - Gitano, Valerie Sennett, Jenna - and if her memories differed from his, maybe she wouldn't recognize those names at all. He needed something more fundamental, something that wouldn't change, no matter what.

"It's all true," he said. "I'm not making it up. You know me, and I know you, Liv."

Even if she didn't answer to that name, she was still his Liv.

"You really don't," she said, leaning back in her chair, away from him, crossing her arms again, and he snapped, then.

"You never drink coffee on stakeout 'cause you say it runs right through you," the words came tumbling out of him all in a rush. "Your favorite band is Fleetwood Mac. You always order General Tso's from Woo Hop and you sleep on your stomach and when you were sixteen you were in love with a much older man -"

"Stop," she snapped. "Just stop."

He'd rattled her, he could tell. Those things he'd said, none of that would be contained in her professional file. No one would have learned any of those things about her from newspaper clippings or an illicit trawl through the NYPD database. He'd tried to pick the most personal details he could, things that would prove he knew her, things even a stalker wouldn't be able to find out. She'd be wondering about that, he knew, wondering if the stranger in front of her had been reading up on her, following her; she'd be as unsettled as he was right now, and hearing all that from him probably wouldn't put her at ease but maybe it would plant the seed, somewhere in the back of her mind, make her wonder, if only for a moment, whether he was telling the truth.

"Explain this to me, then," she said. "How can you know so much about me, and I don't know anything about you?"

"I don't know," he answered honestly. "But you know Munch. Did he…" his voice trailed off; was he really gonna say this out loud? Once he spoke those words there'd be no taking it back and whether he was right or not she'd probably have him committed just for suggesting it but he had to try.

"Did he ever talk to you about string theory?"

She actually laughed, and for the first time in all the years he'd known her he didn't like the sound of it.

"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, he did, a little. Something about infinite parallel universes and a bunch of math that went straight over my head."

"That sounds like Munch. I don't really understand it, but it's something like…the foundation of everything is like strings, like vibrating strings, and every time two strings touch each other a new universe is formed. There's an infinite number of universes, almost like…almost like every choice we make creates a new one. You turn right, that's one universe, you turn left, that's another. You're my partner but you look at me like I don't exist. I don't know where I am or how I got here but I do know you. And I'm starting to wonder…I'm staring to wonder if one of us is in the wrong place."

In a parallel universe, it will always be you and I.

He'd written those words to her once. One night, whiskey drunk and maudlin after Kathy made him write that abomination of a letter, he'd been sitting on his balcony in Rome and reading some mind numbing article from the New York Times on his phone and thinking about string theory, and Munch, and the choices he'd made and the choices he didn't make, and it had all made sense to him, for one brief, mad moment. The universe he was living in, the universe where he hadn't seen Liv for ten long years, felt wrong. The idea that it wasn't the only one, that out there somewhere in the unfathomable cosmos was a version of him who'd thrown caution to the wind and reached for her with both hands, that had brought him comfort. He wanted to believe it, that somewhere out there was a version of him that got to love her, even if he never could.

When he was sober he'd roll his eyes if anyone else suggested it, and he wasn't sure what the church had to say about his little theory, but he believed it, still. And now here he sat, faced with a Liv who didn't know him, and what if, he asked himself, what if this is one of them? What if he had, somehow, stumbled into a universe where he'd fucked up so spectacularly that he never even met her?

He figured they'd find out when Muncy finished running his prints. Until then he was left alone with Olivia, Olivia who was looking at him like he was crazy. Not that he could blame her; he felt pretty fucking crazy.

We'll just see what happens next, he thought.