It came as a relief when Muncy opened the door and said Cap, I think you're gonna wanna see this; this guy - Stabler, whoever - was creeping her out.

He didn't look creepy; he was tall and broad and strong, sexy in a Mr. Clean kind of way, and his blue eyes seemed warm, but the beseeching way he stared at her, his insistence that he knew her when he was a complete stranger to her, the things he'd said, the things he knew…that was creepy. The guy was too clean and his clothes too well tended for him to be homeless like she'd first thought when Fin told her he'd caught some guy passed out in interrogation, and he was so laser focused on her there was no way he'd just stumbled into the precinct at random looking for a place to rest. He knew things, things he had no way to know, and that scared her. Olivia Benson didn't scare easily, and she didn't handle it well.

"You ok?" Muncy asked her as they walked together from interrogation back to Muncy's desk. Fin was still watching through the glass in her office, keeping an eye on their suspect - she didn't know yet what crime the guy had committed, but she felt in her bones he had to have done something - and Muncy had been running the fingerprint search, and the prints must have returned a hit already, unlikely as it seemed. It never happened this fast, and that scared her, too.

"I'm fine," Oliva told her firmly.

"Those things he said…"

There was one thing in particular that was on Muncy's mind, and Olivia knew it. When you were sixteen you were in love with a much older man. Olivia could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who knew about Burton, and Muncy wasn't one of them, and neither was the guy in interrogation. Rollins, Nick, Fin, they were the only ones, and she couldn't imagine any of them sharing such private, painful information with anyone else. Well, Rollins might have told Carisi, but he wouldn't have blabbed about it. But this guy, Stabler, he knew, and now Muncy did, too, and there was something almost like pity in the girl's eyes when she looked at Olivia now. Olivia couldn't stand pity.

"Don't worry about it," Olivia told her. "What've we got?"

They'd reached Muncy's desk, and the girl reached over then, spun her computer monitor around so Olivia could see it better.

"Meet Elliot Stabler," Muncy said, and sure enough there was his picture on the screen, an official photograph accompanied by an NYPD record with that name attached. It was the same guy; he had hair in the picture, a little bit, dark and close cropped, but there was no denying the man in the interrogation room was identical to the photograph of Elliot Stabler in front of her.

"So he is a cop?" Olivia asked. She hadn't brought her readers and couldn't quite make out the words on the screen and she desperately did not want to admit that to Muncy.

"He is," Muncy said. "The dates the guy gave, that all checks out. It's weird, though. It's like…half of what he said is true, but half of it doesn't make any sense."

Olivia leveled a look at Muncy that could plainly said explain, and Muncy rushed to do just that.

"He married Kathy when he was seventeen. He made detective in '89. But he never worked SVU. He was homicide, worked out of the 1-7. He and Kathy had four kids, Maureen, Kathleen, Richard, and Elizabeth."

"Dickie and Lizzie," Olivia mused, remembering her notes.

"Yeah, but no Eli. Stabler didn't leave the force in 2011, and he never worked as the liaison in Rome. He started working OCCB after his wife left him, looks like he was doing a lot of UC. Kathy didn't die in 2021, they divorced in 2007 and it looks like she's still alive. File says he's got two tattoos, there's the Marine Corps symbol on his right forearm and a crucifix on his left bicep."

"He's got his sleeves rolled up, I saw the one on his forearm." So the prints matched, and the physical description matched, but she still wasn't convinced the guy they were holding was who he said he was. What if he just looked like Stabler? She'd worked a case like that once, identical twin brothers separated at birth, one a straight shooter and one a psychopath, and when the straight shooter got a tattoo the criminal got one to match, the better to help him to masquerade as his brother. What if this was something like that?

"But here's where it gets weird."

"You mean it's not weird already?" Olivia grumbled. From where she was standing the whole thing was pretty fucking weird; here was a stranger, claiming to be her best friend, a man she'd never seen who knew so many intimate details about her. A man who had rattled off his whole life story to her with confidence, and yet gotten half the details wrong. If he was faking, if he was impersonating someone else, surely he'd have studied a little harder, right? Surely he wouldn't have just invented a child who never existed, a car bombing that never happened. It didn't seem rational, but then again the sort of man who'd do something like this wouldn't be rational, would he?

"The thing is, Cap, Elliot Stabler died in an op in Ohio the day before yesterday."

Oh, what the fuck?

"Shootout in some diner. I've already put in a call to his CO, Sergeant Bell. She's on her way down here, she wants to see our guy for herself. She says she was with Stabler when he died, she's positive he's gone."

"How can he be sitting in our interrogation room if he'd been dead for two days?"

Olivia didn't really expect Muncy to answer the question, but someone had to ask it.

The man who called himself Stabler had already presented one possible explanation for this tangled web of inconsistencies, but though Olivia was a romantic at heart, though she knew she was possessed of something of an idealistic streak, she was too much a realist to even consider it. This guy, Stabler, he hadn't been transported into the 1-6 from some alternate universe. That shit about string theory, it was just that, a theory, something for physicists and sci-fi authors to argue about at parties, something to entertain Munch and his conspiracy theory pals. Alternative universes weren't real, and even if she did take leave of her senses long enough to entertain the possibility, she couldn't see how he would have ended up here. All those vibrating strings, maybe they crossed, here and there, splintered off in different directions, but how could a man trip from universe into another?

He's crazy, she told herself. Maybe he'd been stalking her and Stabler both, hacked her fucking phone or something. He could've found out about Burton and her taste in music that way. Hell, if he'd gotten into her phone he'd know her usual takeout order, too. But the phone wouldn't have told him the thing about the coffee, and she couldn't remember the last time she'd been on stakeout let alone the last time she'd talked to someone about the impact of coffee on her stomach. How the hell did he know that? Was he just making it up, had he just gotten lucky?

"Do we have any more info on his family in there?" she asked Muncy. "His parents, siblings?"

"He's the only child of Joseph and Bernadette Stabler. Father's deceased, mother's living in Jersey."

"Ok," Olivia said. "I'm gonna go back in there. While you wait for the Sergeant I want you to try to get ahold of the mother. We need to know if she had any other children. Push her hard, Muncy. If she gave a baby up for adoption she may not want to admit it right away but we need to know."

"You think he's Stabler's twin?"

"I think we need to rule it out."

And I need some goddamn answers, she thought. Now that she'd given Muncy her marching orders Olivia spun around and went straight back into the interrogation room, thinking hard. They'd caught the guy in a couple lies; maybe if she pushed him he'd break. Maybe if she confronted him with the truth he'd realize his time was up, and quit playing these fucking games.

As she stepped back into interrogation she found the man on his feet, pacing agitatedly by the window. He froze when he saw her, his eyes fixed unblinking on her face, and there was something in his gaze that looked like need. Like he needed her to believe him, needed her to be the person he thought she was, needed her to be his best friend. That was pretty fucking funny, in a bleak sort of way, the idea that he was her best friend. She'd never really had one of those; Fin came close, Fin who'd known her so long, who'd been by her side through so many trials and tribulations, who had her back, always, but she wouldn't have used those words to describe him and he wouldn't have, either. She wasn't really the type of person who had a best friend. She never had been.

"Your CO's on the way," Olivia told him.

"Bell?" he asked, looking suddenly hopeful, and that gave Olivia pause; if he was just pretending to be Stabler, wouldn't he be worried about meeting the man's boss? Surely Bell would know within minutes if she was talking to her detective, or to a stranger.

"Yeah," Olivia told him. "She had some interesting things to say on the phone."

"Like what?" he demanded, his eyes narrowing with mistrust.

"Like that Elliot Stabler died two days ago."

"Jesus," the guy said, running his hand over his face, and for a second she thought he was about to crumble, but an idea must have occurred to him because he looked up at her sharply, suddenly, began walking towards her with a frightening sort of determination. As much as she wanted to retreat she stood her ground, too proud to let him see that she was afraid. He stepped up close, too close, and looked down at her intently, and even as she watched him, on high alert, looking for some tell that he was about to get violent, she couldn't help but think he had a nice face. The kind of face she would have wanted to trust, if things had been different.

"Did he die in Ohio?" the guy asked urgently. "Your Stabler, did he get shot in a diner in Ohio?"

"Why do you ask?" she answered carefully. Conmen knew how to read people, how to wring as much as possible from even the simplest answers and manipulate their marks, and she didn't want to offer him any more information that was absolutely necessary.

"We were there," he said heavily. "You and me. We were investigating a murder-for-hire site on the darkweb. The guy behind it put a hit out on us, and we were attacked in the diner. But I didn't die there, Liv. You did."

"Sit down," she told him, mostly because she wanted to sit herself and couldn't while he was still standing. He fell into the chair on one side of the table and Olivia went around to the other, her thoughts tumbling chaotically through her mind. Maybe it was all part of his plan, his stupid little mindfuck, an attempt to shore up the alternate universe theory. In his universe she'd died, his Liv, and in this universe it was Elliot himself who was gone.

It's bullshit, she tried to tell herself. But the man across the table from her was shaking, and he looked sad, more than anything else. He looked like he was grieving.

"The guy gassed us, I couldn't see," he told her. "But you could. You aimed the gun and I pulled the trigger, and we took him down. You'd been shot, you couldn't walk, so I carried you out. You talked me through it, the whole way. You…you were my eyes. You always have been. Helped me see clearly, when I couldn't. But we got outside, and the bullet must have pierced your lung, you couldn't breathe. I…I felt you die, Liv."

There were honest to God tears in his eyes, and his voice was dripping with heartbreak, and for a single moment, she wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe that someone could care for her this much, so much that losing her ripped a hole right through the fabric of his reality. It would be nice, she thought, to know that someone could be so devoted to her.

But this guy was full of shit, and she was getting angrier by the second.

Fuck him, she thought. Fuck him, for manipulating her like this, for preying on her vulnerabilities, for fabricating this dream where she was loved, where she was not alone. Olivia knew the truth, and it wasn't this. She was on her own, now and always.