Ayanna Bell had a practical, no nonsense attitude and a pretty face that Olivia liked at once. The Sergeant's clothes were a little wrinkled and there was something haggard, something exhausted about her expression, which stood to reason, Olivia figured, since two days before Bell had been in Ohio, holding one of her detectives in her arms while the man died, and now she was standing in the 1-6, looking at a ghost through the two-way glass.

"Well," Bell said, her gaze fixed unerringly on the face of the man calling himself Elliot Stabler. "It certainly looks like him."

"But you're sure it isn't?" Olivia asked.

"I'll talk to him," Bell said dubiously. "But I'm telling you, Captain, I know my Stabler's gone. I saw the bullets hit him with my own two eyes. I felt him take his last breaths. I stayed with his dead body while they cleared the scene and I rode with him to the morgue and I was standing on the tarmac when they pulled his coffin out of the back of the plane. We caught our perp, they wouldn't need to take him into Witsec, and even if they had, even if someone is pulling the strings, faking his death, there's no way he'd be sitting upright now, not this soon after the shooting. He'd be laid up in hospital for weeks."

"So if he's not Stabler…"

"Like I said, I'll talk to him, and after that I think you and I should take a trip to the morgue. I called his ex-wife on my way over here, they haven't released his body yet."

It was a good idea, and one Olivia approved of. She needed to see Stabler's body for herself, just like she was sure the Sergeant needed to see it, needed that validation, that irrefutable proof that there was no way the man in the interview room was Elliot Stabler. But if he wasn't Stabler, who the fuck was he?

"I asked Kathy, and she's positive he never had a brother," Bell continued. "They met when they were kids, were married for damn near thirty years, she'd know if he did."

"His mom said the same thing," Muncy chimed in helpfully. "She swears she only ever had one child, and there's no record of another birth for her. This guy has the same prints as Stabler; they'd have to be twins to have matching prints, wouldn't they? The Stablers were married when Elliot was born, why would they keep one kid and not the other?"

Why, indeed. The case Olivia had worked before, the one with the identical twins, the boys had both been given up for adoption, and one had flourished while the other sank into ruin. It hadn't been a case of a married couple keeping one twin and giving the other way. Nothing about this case made sense.

"Why don't we see what he has to say to the Sergeant?" Olivia said.

Bell squared her shoulders like a soldier preparing for battle, and marched into the interview room without another word.

It was almost a relief, seeing Ayanna's face again. They'd left him alone for a little while, and he was getting antsy. He was hungry, and he desperately needed a piss - both good indicators, he thought, that he wasn't dreaming, as much as it might have felt as if he'd wandered into a nightmare - and Olivia told him she wasn't letting him out of that room until he talked to Bell. What she hoped to glean from this conversation Elliot couldn't say, but he'd submit to it without complaint. So far he'd learned a lot about this Olivia, about the ways in which she differed from the one he knew, and he wanted to know if Ayanna was different, too. Besides, Ayanna could tell him more about what this Stabler had been like; he'd filled Olivia in on her parallel self's life, but she couldn't do the same for him, couldn't tell him much about this Elliot at all, and what little she had told him left him worried. It seemed like this Stabler was a miserable son of a bitch. He wondered if this Ayanna would agree.

All of it was making his head spin, just a little.

"Sarge," he said to her as she sat herself down in the chair across the table from him. She was frowning, but that was nothing new; he made her frown a lot.

"Cut the shit," she said. "Elliot Stabler's lying on a slab in the morgue. So who the fuck are you?"

"Elliot Stabler," he said. "Just…a different version, I guess. Did Captain Benson tell you my theory?"

"I wanna hear it from you," she said. I'll take that as a no, he thought. Olivia didn't approve of his theory, probably didn't want to tell Ayanna and risk the Sergeant thinking she was crazy, too.

"I'm Elliot Stabler," he said. "But my memories, my…my life is different from what you know. Captain Benson is my oldest friend, and she tells me she's never met me before today. I saw her die in Ohio, now you say I'm the one that died. I think what we're dealing with here is…I know how it sounds, Sarge, but I think I've found myself in a parallel universe. I'm not supposed to be here."

"I'd agree with that," Bell said heavily. "You're not supposed to be here. But the rest of it…that's just not possible."

"It shouldn't be," Elliot allowed. "But it's the only thing that makes sense."

"You and I might have a difference of opinion on what makes sense," she said testily. "But you say you're Elliot Stabler. Prove it."

"I don't know how," he answered, trying not to let his frustration get the better of him. "Olivia - Captain Benson - she says I've worked with you sense 2007. But I only joined OCCB in 2021, after Kathy died."

"I talked to Kathy on the phone an hour ago," Bell said.

Jesus, he couldn't think about that too much. Couldn't think about Kathy, still alive and breathing, couldn't think about hearing her voice. Just a few days ago he'd seen her - what? Her ghost? Some vision of her - in the interview room at OCCB and it had ripped open the half-healed wound of losing her, put his wedding ring back on his finger and a melancholy yearning in his heart and he was trying to learn how to live with the loss of her, and now here he sat, listening to Ayanna insist that Kathy was alive. What would Kathy say to him, if they could speak now? Would she even want to hear from him, when they'd been separated for so many years, when she'd already been informed of his death? It was too much, too much.

"That's one of the things that's different," he said. "There's a lot of things that're different, here. My Ayanna, though, I can tell you about her. She's married to Denise - or she was, Denise took your son Jack and left I guess it's coming up on a year ago now. My Ayanna's been fighting for custody but it's not going great. I never liked Denise much, to tell you the truth, and the way she's been acting lately hasn't changed that."

"You don't get to talk about my wife," Ayanna said. She was visibly shaken by Elliot's words, and he couldn't help but wonder how Ayanna and Denise had managed to make it work in this universe, when back home they'd always seemed to be heading for disaster.

"This isn't gonna work," Ayanna grumbled, irritated. "You can just make shit up, tell me this is different or that's different and I have no way of confirming any of it. You could've looked me up, found the records of my marriage, my son's birth. That doesn't tell me anything."

"Ask me something else, then," Elliot said. "Something only Elliot Stabler would know."

She considered him for a long moment, silence stretching thick and uncomfortable between them. What would she ask, he wondered; she'd known her Elliot so much longer than he'd known his Ayanna, and he couldn't remember, really, what secrets he'd divulged to his Sarge, and he had no way to know which were still true in this unfamiliar world in which he found himself.

"About a year ago," she said slowly, "me and Elliot were at this shitty all-night diner. We'd had a hard day, and we were talking about the job, and why we do what we do. I'd known the man for fifteen years and I always thought he was a diehard, one of those guys who wanted to be a cop from the day he was born, made for the job. But he told me there was something else he wanted to do. Something else he wanted to be, but he never even got to try because Kathy got pregnant when they were kids and he had to step up. Tell me what it was. Tell me what Elliot Stabler dreamed about."

That was a question he could answer. It was an answer he carried buried deep within his heart, so deep he'd never even told Liv about it, hadn't wanted her to feel sorry for him, hadn't wanted her to know that he could be so weak. It was weakness, according to his father, to even consider such a path in life, and he thought it was weakness now, to admit that the life he led was not the one he'd wanted. It didn't surprise him, that it had taken this Elliot a decade and a half to admit the truth to Ayanna; he'd only just said it out loud for the first time himself about a year ago. Told fucking Frank, of all people. It wasn't his trust or affection for Frank that had led to that confession, though; that was a moment of honesty with himself. Kathy dead, the kids drifting away, Liv so distant he could hardly reach her, he'd been honest with himself, for once, about all the things he'd have done differently, if only he'd had the chance.

He wondered if somewhere out there was another universe, a universe where his dreams came true. He wondered what kind of man he'd be if they had.

"I wanted to be an architect," he said. "But my old man beat it out of me."

Ayanna leaned back in her chair, ran her hand over her face.

Was I right? He asked himself. Was that one of the things that hadn't changed, one of the immutable elements of his very being? What if it wasn't what she wanted to hear?

"There's no way you could know that," she said, but she sounded more confused than angry.

"You got a notebook? A pen?"

She nodded.

"Can I see them?"

He'd never told Liv he wanted to be an architect, but there was something he used to do all the time, something she'd seen him do, something he was pretty sure this Elliot had done for Ayanna, and maybe, he thought, maybe that would convince her. Ayanna passed her notebook and pen over to him, and he took them, flipped to a blank page, and began, very carefully, to draw. Not an elaborate building, not a fanciful skyscraper or sprawling mansion like he used to draw when he was a kid. The buildings hurt too much to draw, but he'd never been able to stop sketching entirely. He'd just shifted his focus, made little doodles in the margins of his paperwork, mocked up tattoos for some of the guys in his unit when he was in the Corps; he'd drawn both the tattoos on his body himself, first.

And what he drew now was something he'd drawn a thousand times, in his memo books, on the backs of napkins, in sticky booths at diners and on the dash of the car during endless stakeouts. He drew a pair of hands, folded together. He drew Olivia's hands. He knew them better than he knew his own.

When he was finished he passed the notebook back to Bell, and she took it slowly, and as she did he was surprised to find tears glistening in the corners of her eyes.

"That night," she said. "That night in the diner. He drew my hands on a blank page in my notebook."

Every detective carried a little notebook just like that one, for recording interviews, logging their movements, and probably she'd gone through two or three since the night her Elliot confessed the truth of his dreams. There were no hands in this notebook, nothing for him to use as reference; he'd taken a risk, and it looked, he thought, like he'd gotten through to her. Maybe.

"Parallel universes, huh?" she said.

"Yeah." It sounded crazy, but he couldn't deny the truth that was staring him in the face.

"I gotta say, your universe sounds pretty shitty."

It would to her, he thought, since he'd told her she was divorced, had lost custody of her son. But -

"There's a lot of good in it," he said, thinking about Liv. Thinking about stakeouts and shootings, laughter and sandwiches shared across their desks, her pretty smile and her sweet son. Home was where Olivia knew him, and he'd do anything to get back to her.

Only she wouldn't be there waiting for him if he ever did make it back, would she? She'd died. He'd felt her body go limp, felt her drift away from him, felt the complete, and utter shattering of his heart in her absence. Maybe he didn't want to go home. At least in this world she was still alive, even if she didn't know him, even if she'd never trust him.

"I gotta talk to the Captain," Bell said, and rose slowly to her feet.

"What's gonna happen to me, Sarge?"

He didn't have his wallet. He didn't have his badge, or his license, or a penny to his name, and even if he had Elliot Stabler was dead in this world. Where would he go from here? Would they release him, and if they did, how would he survive? What would they do with him if they didn't?

"Honestly," she said, "I got no fucking idea."

That makes two of us.