The first thing Jackie noticed about Lindsey Duncan, née Olivia Benson, was the eyes.

It wasn't like Jackie didn't know what to expect; there was a photo of the woman in her file. There was a photo of the little boy, too, and information about the incident that had landed them both in WitSec, all the things Jackie would need to know in order to best protect them. The file had been useful while Jackie was setting up their new life here, making arrangements for all the things they'd need, decorating the nursery and stocking the fridge. It was an intimate thing, building a home for someone, and each of those items, carefully chosen and thoughtfully placed, had been selected with the woman and the child who would use it first in Jackie's mind. Not that she'd decorated the whole place herself, but the big stuff, the important stuff, the bedsheets and the toys and the books on the shelves, those things Jackie had selected herself, hoping that Lindsey and Gabe would like them. It was a story she'd been telling herself, a story about a family and a future, about love and about hope, but real life wasn't a story, and the woman in front of her wasn't a photograph; she was alive, and surprisingly beautiful, and there was so much pain in her eyes that Jackie flinched when she looked at her.

"Hi," Jackie said. Gotta start somewhere, she thought.

"You're the other Marshal?" Olivia - Lindsey, call her Lindsey, you know how this works. It's kind of sad, though. Olivia is such a pretty name - sounded tired, and it looked like she'd dropped her son's lunch in the sink, and now she didn't seem to know what to do with herself.

"Yeah." It was a given that Lindsey had met Elliot already; he'd gone stomping past Jackie as she finally walked into the kitchen, and now Lindsey and Jackie were alone, in a room that seemed to echo with whispered accusations, a thousand questions running through Jackie's mind.

Partner, Elliot'd said. I'm your partner, and that was a little weird, Jackie thought, on account of the fact that he was Jackie's partner. Partner, and him married to someone else, married to Kathy for a long, long time if what he'd said was true, and so what, exactly, did that make Olivia?

He'd been a cop, and Olivia had been a cop, and I've got some research to do, Jackie thought. It would be pretty easy to locate those records; hell, a Google search alone might tell her whether their names had ever appeared in print together, in some article about a case or something. She could do that tonight; first she needed to speak to her witness, and begin the long, arduous process of helping this woman turn into someone else.

"My name's Jackie," she said, and reached into her pocket. "That's my card, you put that somewhere you can find it. Call me any time."

Lindsey took the card, read it, frowned.

"This says you're a florist."

"I can't have you carrying around a card with US MARSHALS written on it in capital letters, can I? How would that look, if someone found it in your purse or something?"

"You're right." Lindsey sighed, and her eyes darted over the table where her son appeared to growing restless, wriggling in his seat, looking around like he was hungry and ready for his lunch.

"Something wrong with the macaroni?" Jackie asked. Pasta was splattered all over the sink, and it was probably too cold now to melt and turn that gross powdered mix into anything remotely resembling cheese. Maybe that was for the best.

"Slipped," Lindsey said shortly. "Listen, not that I'm not grateful, or anything, but I'm tired, and I want to be alone with my son. Can you…can you just go?"

"Soon," Jackie promised her. "We just have to go over a few things first. Rule number one -"

"Don't talk to anyone from my old life, don't log into any of my old accounts, don't create new ones, keep my head down, stay out of trouble. That about cover the rules?"

God help me, Jackie thought, because Stabler was stubborn and pugnacious enough on his own, and now it was starting to look like his Olivia was no better; she had a sharp tongue and seemed resentful of the predicament she found herself in, and she made no attempt at getting on Jackie's good side. The stubborn witnesses were the hardest one, and this witness came with complications all her own; Christ almighty, what have I stumbled into here?

"Kinda," Jackie said. "That's the big stuff. Here's the small stuff. Keep your eyes open. If your gut tells you someone is following you, trust it, and alert us. Your new life comes with a backstory but don't gush about it all the time. Don't make up a bunch of details you'll need to remember later. Keep it simple, don't make waves, and don't sit around in here and mope all day."

"Anything else?"

Don't start an affair with the Marshal in charge of keeping you safe. Or re-start an affair or whatever the fuck this is.

"One more thing," Jackie said. "This is a difficult time for you."

Olivia scoffed.

"You're alone. You're a stranger here and nothing is familiar. You don't have a job, you don't have a plan. I know it feels like you've got the weight of the whole world on your shoulders. I just want you to know that you don't have to carry that weight by yourself. If you're scared, if you're confused, if you feel like you're falling apart, you call us, ok?"

"What are you, my shrink?"

"If I need to be, yeah. Shrink, doctor, best friend, babysitter. We're here to protect you, whatever that means. So don't let it get too bad, ok? You need help, you reach out. Don't drown if you don't have to."

When Jackie first walked into this room Olivia's posture had been tense, the set of her mouth hard and uncompromising, her whole body bristling like a goddamn porcupine, those eyes so full of grief flashing in an uncomfortable, soul-searching kind of way, but as Jackie watched a little of the fight seemed to ease out of her; Stabler had left the woman on edge, but she deflated, just a little, without him there to get her back up, looked around her shiny new kitchen with a quiet despondency.

"Thanks," she said. "I'm sure I'll be grateful for that. Eventually."

"So for now we'll finish our sweep of the house, and then we'll get out of your hair, and you'll call if you need anything, right?"

"Right," Olivia agreed. "Will you be back tomorrow?"

"No." You're on your own, kid. "We won't hover. It'd be hard to explain why we were over all the time. For now I'm your friend Jackie the florist, and I'll only come when you need me."

"Ok, then. Thanks, Jackie."

"Don't mention it."

There really was work to do, and so Jackie turned away, and left her witness alone, staring at the scattered remains of her lunch with an expression like heartbreak on her face.

The thing Elliot couldn't stop thinking about was simply this: where the fuck had that kid come from? He walked through the house, checked the windows, saw the little boy's face in the darkness of his mind every time he blinked. Paused for a moment in the nursery, staring at the letters on the wall. Gabe. Almost certainly not the name his mother had given him.

What name had Olivia chosen for her son? How long had it taken her to decide? How many other names had she considered and cast aside? What was the significance of the name she had chosen? What did it mean to her, and how much did it hurt her knowing she had to let it go, knowing that she would have to spend the foreseeable calling her son by the wrong name, watching him learn who he was, when all he learned was a lie?

And who the fuck had gotten her pregnant? Who had touched her, loved her, earned her trust and been deemed worthy of that gift? What lucky son of a bitch -

"You check all the rooms up here?" Jackie asked, and Elliot nearly came out of his skin; he hadn't heard her approach, and now he was a little embarrassed at having been caught loitering in the nursery.

"This is the last one," he said, crossing to the window like that's what he'd been meaning to do all along. Jackie's eyes followed him in a way that made him feel nervy; she doesn't know, he thought there's no way she knows. If she heard you she'd have said something. She'd have taken your badge already.

"I feel bad for the kid," Jackie mused quietly.

"I don't," Elliot answered, then realized how awful that sounded and rushed to explain himself. "I just mean, the kid's got his mom. He's got the one person who makes him feel safe, who loves him most in the world, and he's still little. He's starting to process the world around him but in a few months he won't remember his life before this house. That kid's gonna be fine. It's her…it's her I feel for."

And what he felt was bad, and guilt; what he felt for her was need and calling and condemnation; what he felt for her was holy, and tainted black with sin; what he felt for her was filling his lungs with seawater, drowning him right there in the room where her son was meant to sleep. Her son, and the vision raced through his mind, the image of Olivia, pregnant, and his knees nearly buckled at the thought.

"Yeah, bad enough she lost the kid's dad, now she's lost everything."

"Do you know how that happened? The guy, I mean, do you know how he died?"

Jackie shrugged, tried to appear nonchalant, but he saw the corner of her mouth tick up like she was trying to suppress a smile, and he had no goddamn idea what she had to smile about right now and that made him nervous.

"Nah," she said. "Guess it wasn't relevant to the case that landed her here. That window locked, or what?"

"It's locked," he said, giving it a tug for good measure.

"Let's go, then."

They went out of the nursery together, Jackie in the lead, Elliot following, moving slower than he normally would have. It would be better to hurry, not to linger in a house where he wasn't wanted, to get back to his family; Kathy would want him to just come home already, Kathy -

Jesus, he thought. Kathy.

Kathy had no idea what he did for work, and his continued employment depended on her continued ignorance. Even if he could tell her, though, even if something happened that necessitated him revealing to her that he was working for WitSec, he absolutely could not tell her the identity of his witnesses. Olivia Benson had just exploded into the middle of his life like a goddamn grenade, and he was going to have to go home and pretend like everything was fine. He'd just seen Olivia's face for the first time in four years, and he absolutely could not tell his wife about it.

Shit, he thought. Shit.

Liv was waiting for them at the foot of the stairs with her son perched on her hip; the kid was munching on a cheese stick and Liv's eyes were focused on Elliot and he damn near lost his footing and tumbled down the stairs, too busy looking at her to pay attention to where he was going.

That's Liv, he thought faintly while Jackie stared at him like he'd grown a second head.

Four years he'd been missing her. Four years he'd been wondering if he'd made the right call, wondering what would happen if he just ripped the band-aid off, reached out to her. Wondering if she hated him, if she was happy. Four years he'd been praying, begging for forgiveness, for killing that girl, for abandoning Liv, for getting Kathy pregnant when he should have let her go instead, for ruining everything. Sometimes it felt as if that was all he ever did was ruin things, as if everything he ever touched must surely turn to ashes. Like he was cursed or some shit. Maybe he was.

"You've got my card," Jackie reminded Olivia. "He doesn't have any cards yet, we'll get you one as soon as you come in."

"You new on the job, or something?" Olivia asked him. She's still pissed, he thought; he could hear it in her voice.

"First case," he said. The first witness assigned to him, his first job right out of the gate, and it was her. What were the chances of that?

Curse or blessing? He wondered. Maybe a little bit of both; it was a blessing to see her again, to know where to find her, to be able to come back and speak to her here, if he wanted to - if he was careful - but it was a curse. Running was the only way he'd been able to let her go, the distance between them necessary in order for him to keep his promise, his promise to put his family first and let Olivia live her life in peace, a promise he could not keep when she was close, and now she was practically in his own backyard, and the knowledge of her proximity burned through him like acid corroding through metal. He felt himself drawn to her as a drunk to liquor, killing himself and hating himself and needing it, with everything he had.

His eyes fell upon her face, and she looked back, and as they looked it seemed to him that the pair of them had gone tumbling away into darkness, into a sea vast and tumultuous where there existed nothing and no one save for the two of them and all the pain he had caused her and all the grief she had endured and the weight of it was more than he could bear, and his mouth opened, on the verge of breathing her name, but she stopped him, then, with a dark look and a shake of her head.

"Right," Jackie said. "We're going. Take care of yourself, Lindsey."

"Yeah," Elliot murmured. "Take care of yourself, Lindsey."

"See you around, Stabler," Liv answered faintly.

Fucked, he thought. We are so fucked.