He did try.
He had always tried, tried to do the right thing, to be good, to be the man that his family needed him to be. Tried to be present, tried to be kind. Even tried to be patient, in his own way, though he'd never been particularly good at it and failed more often than not. For the sake of his wife, his children, for the sake of the ones he loved, the people who depended on him, he tried. God knew, he tried.
It didn't work; it never did. Kathy saw right through him, but mercifully waited until Eli was tucked safely in his room for the night before plucking the pin from the grenade.
"So," she began, sitting on the side of their bed, smoothing lotion over her legs while Elliot began unbuttoning his shirt. "Do you wanna talk about it?"
"Talk about what?" he demanded, a little more sharply than he meant to, immediately on the defensive because he knew exactly what she was getting at and no, he did not want to talk about it - could not talk about it, because if he did he might well lose the job he'd only just started and then where would they be? - because he was ashamed, ashamed for how poorly he'd hidden his distress after seeing Liv again, ashamed for just how distressed he was, ashamed for all the things he'd done and all the things he'd never do.
"I'm not stupid, Elliot," she said, very quietly. "Something's wrong. You've been…ever since you came home from work it's like you aren't here at all. I can see you but you're not there. You can talk to me about it."
When she divorced him, or tried to anyway, she'd cited communication as one of the major failures of their marriage. You never talk to me anymore, she'd told him. Maybe you never did. How many nights had he come home from work and plucked a beer from the fridge and sat on the couch, mute and frozen, ignoring her pleas that he just speak to her, his tongue glued to the roof of his mouth? He'd done it to protect her, to shield her and their children from the horror that ate away at his brain every minute of the day, but he'd done it to protect himself, too, refused to speak to his wife because he was terrified that if he told her the thoughts that were running through his head she'd leave him. And then she left him, anyway, because he never talked to her. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
"Everything's fine," he lied, and the lie was so spectacularly unconvincing he was a little embarrassed by it. "I can't - listen, one of the rules of the job is I can't tell you what I do all day. It's confidential."
"That's just perfect for you, isn't it?" He'd never heard her so bitter, never. "Now you don't have to come up with excuses not to talk to me, you can blame it all on regulations. Who am I gonna tell, Elliot? You dragged me away from our families, all our friends. I'm alone out here. You're all I've got, and you don't trust me."
Part of him wanted to be angry with her, wanted to say something spiteful about how she twisted everything around and made it all about herself, but part of him knew better. She was right, wasn't she? A good man would tell her. A good man would confess; a good man would go to his boss, and tell the truth, and take his punishment on the chin, and let Liv go. A good man would honor his wife, and a good man would honor Liv, would put aside his selfish desire to see her in favor of keeping her safe.
It was getting harder by the day to be a good man.
"That's the job," he said. "I have to support our family -" because Kathy had worked maybe five years of the last thirty, too busy raising his kids and keeping up his house, someone had keep the lights on and stay ahead of the student loan payments; that was the deal, the agreement they'd made when Maureen was born, when Kathleen followed not long after; they both had their jobs to do - "and this is the best way for me to do that."
It wasn't, actually. There was a lot more money to be made in the private sector; he'd only done the private security work for a few years, and he'd made a killing, but Kathy didn't like him being gone all the time and he missed his son and he was over whatever quasi-suicidal impulse had gripped him after he killed Jenna Fox, was ready to work a less dangerous job.
"You always do your duty, don't you?" She said it like an accusation, not a compliment. "If that's all we are to you -"
Of course his family was more than just a duty, of course it was, but the only reason he and Kathy were married right now was because she'd come up pregnant and told him she couldn't raise the baby on her own; the only reason they were married was that Elliot Stabler was not the kind of man who could turn away the woman he had loved for his entire adult life when she needed him. They'd made a mistake together, the two of them, and they were cleaning it up together, the same way they'd been doing since they were seventeen years old.
I love her, he thought. I do. I do.
"I love you," he said. "It's not -"
"I don't think you know what love is," she told him in a terrible voice, terrible because it was cold, not angry or vengeful, but horrifically calm. "Because it's not this, Elliot. It's not you walking away from me. It's not this silence, it's not dragging your family to Nebraska - "
"You agreed to come! You said you wanted to try!"
"Maybe I was wrong."
Fuck this, he thought. The walls of that awful house were closing in around him; with his shirt still half-unbuttoned he reached for his keys on the nightstand.
"Where are you going?"
"I don't know," he lied. "Just…I think we both need to cool down. I love you, Kath. I do."
"Elliot - "
His feet were already carrying him out the door, and she let him go, made no move to stop him. He found his shoes by the front door and maybe that should've slowed him down, but he was under a full head of steam. He just kept going, out to the car, out into the darkness of the Nebraska night, drove all the way across town until he finally brought his car to a stop at the end of a street in a sleepy little subdivision where all the houses looked the same.
For the first few nights new witnesses were kept under surveillance, and there was an exterminator's van parked in front of Olivia's new house that Elliot knew was full of Marshals. He couldn't go up to her door, couldn't bang on it until she let him in, couldn't stand there and let her shout at him, doling out his punishment for being such a shit husband, such a shit partner. If he did that he really would lose his job, and he'd lose Kathy and Liv both, and he knew it.
Being close to her helped, though. Keeping an eagle eye trained on the street, telling himself he was watching over her, it helped. For four years he'd spent his nights looking up at the sky, wondering where she was, what she was doing, and it helped, having the answers to those questions now. It helped, but not enough.
Christ, would anything ever be enough?
What would Kathy say, he wondered, if he went back home and told her that Olivia had exploded back into his life?
Did you talk to Olivia about it?
She used to blame him for that, in the old days, for talking to his partner but not his wife. Used to think that Liv got in the middle of their marriage, even when it was Liv who sent him home at the end of a long day, Liv who reminded him where he belonged. It was…hell, he couldn't even really call it jealousy, the way Kathy talked about Liv. Kathy was never jealous of Liv for having more of her husband than she did; Kathy had always been angry with him for giving himself away. That was right, he thought; the blame fell on him.
But what else was he supposed to do? Liv understood the work, understood him. Kathy was always trying to get him to be softer, more patient, less angry; Liv was as hard and as restless and as angry as he was, and never made him feel bad about it. He needed that, had forgotten, over the last few years, how badly he needed her steadfast understanding, but one look at her face had brought it all roaring back. And Liv, she needed it, too. Needed him, needed someone who knew her, someone to look out for her, because she was all alone, and he was the only person she had in the whole world, and what kind of man, what kind of partner would he have been if he abandoned her?
But of course he did abandon her, in the end.
The night was a long and sleepless one; he spent it behind the wheel of his car, his eyes glued to her house, keeping watch over Olivia while she slept, with nothing but his own regrets for company.
The second he walked into the office the next morning it was apparent to Jackie that Stabler had not slept a wink; he was still wearing yesterday's clothes and he had the bristle of a five o'clock shadow darkening his jawline, and one look at him was all she needed to make up her mind.
"Stabler!" she called out to him, got his attention before he even had the chance to make himself a cup of coffee. "Come here, would ya?"
The Omaha WitSec station was nothing to write home about. It was a little warren of rooms on the third floor of a nondescript office building. There were six agents, one station manager, and a receptionist, and everybody had their own office branching off from a sort of command center in the middle with the copy machine and the Keurig and all their office supplies in it. Jackie was standing in the doorway of her own office, and she waited until Stabler was inside to close the door.
"What's up?"
"Olivia Benson," she said, and watched his face turn pale, "was your partner in the NYPD for thirteen years."
"Shit," he grumbled, collapsing into the nearest chair and burying his face in his hands.
"Were you planning to tell me?"
She'd learned everything she needed to know the night before. The two of them weren't famous or anything, but there were newspaper articles, and a phone call to a discreet friend on the job in the city confirmed the duration of their partnership, and the rumors about the pair of them. Loose cannons, Jackie's friend had told her. Tendency to get a little violent. Everybody said they were fucking but I don't know if that's true. It was a long time ago.
"Look," Stabler said, "I needed some time to wrap my head around it. I didn't mean to lie to you."
Yes, you did.
"You know you can't guard a witness you have a prior relationship with."
Rule number one for the witnesses was and always had been no contact. They could not speak to anyone from their old lives. The Marshals in charge of their protection needed to be above reproach, and Stabler's relationship with their newest witness was a liability.
"Hang on," he said, a dark look overtaking his face. "How did you find out?"
"I Googled you two, you ass," she snapped before she could think better of it.
"On your phone? Your home computer?"
She cocked her head to the side, confused, and then it hit her like a ton of bricks.
Point, Stabler.
Jackie had run the search on her home computer instead of going through official channels, unsure of what she'd find and not wanting to raise any red flags until she knew what she was dealing with, and she'd gone and broken WitSec guidelines herself, same as Stabler.
"Everybody says you're gunning for David's job," Stabler said, and he was right about that, too; David was the station manager, and he was retiring next year, and Jackie had her eye on his chair and the pay bump that went with it. "They gonna give it to you when I tell them you put a witness in danger by looking her up at home?"
This is why you shouldn't have important conversations before you've had your coffee, she berated herself. It was just so stupid, showing him all her cards like that, giving him something he could hold over her head.
"What do you wanna do here, Stabler?"
What was it gonna cost, she wondered; what was she willing to sacrifice? Her one shot at promotion, or the witness's safety?
"The way I see it, everybody thinks Olivia Benson is dead," Stabler said. "The cartel isn't gonna waste the manpower monitoring internet searches for a dead woman, if they even have that capability in the first place."
Fair enough.
"As long as she stays out of sight, they think she's dead, they got no reason to come after her. And they got no reason to be looking at me. Before yesterday I hadn't seen or talked to Liv in four years, the cartel probably doesn't even know who I am. Even if they do it's not like I'm easy to find."
The Marshals who worked WitSec were almost as shrouded in secrecy as the witnesses; Stabler wasn't allowed any social media presence, wasn't allowed to talk to anyone about his work.
"That a gamble you're willing to take?"
"Your call," he said. "You can go to David right now, and tell him about me and Liv. And then I'll tell him about your little digging expedition."
"If you go down I'm going down, too."
He'd played his cards well, she had to give him that.
"You keep my secret, I'll keep yours. Partner."
It was an inauspicious start to their partnership, both of them breaking the rules, covering for each other not out of loyalty to their coworker but out of a desperate bid to save their own skin. She didn't like it, but she wasn't ready to give up her dream of making station manager, either. Before this moment she'd liked Stabler well enough; maybe their partnership could recover. He was probably right, anyway; there was no reason for the cartel to be looking for a woman whose funeral had made front page news.
"Let me ask you one question," she said. Before I decide to throw everything I believe in out the window. "Why do you want to be the one in charge of her case? You know she'd be safer somewhere else but you want to keep her here with you, and I wanna know why. Tell the truth."
"Because I owe it to her," he said, without hesitation. "I let her down, and I walked away from her, and I can't do that again." There was a fervent sort of righteousness in him, something that looked like need, something that looked like faith.
"Were you fucking her? When you were on the job?"
If he just wanted to rekindle an old affair, he could screw himself; she wasn't gonna risk her professional future for a jackass who was just trying to get laid. For a man who was devoted to an old friend, though...maybe she could rationalize devotion.
"Never," he said with such conviction she had no choice but to believe him. "What's it gonna be, Jackie?"
She thought about it for a grand total of five seconds.
"Everybody stays put," she decided. "For now."
God, I hope I'm not making the wrong choice. Please don't let me make the wrong choice.
