Chapter Text
1998
Olivia Benson hates first days.
Hates the awkwardness, the stilted introductions, the “getting to know each other” phase, hates all of it. Hates the feeling that she doesn’t quite belong. She’d much rather skip to the second day, or the third, when she knows her way around a place, has figured out the lay of the land well enough to blend in.
But first days are inescapable — like rain or taxes — so she takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders, and steps through the doorway into the bustling bullpen of the one-six. Phones are ringing, papers shuffling, someone’s yelling from a holding cell and she watches a group of unis make their way over to the cage to see what’s the matter. It’s a familiar kind of hustle and bustle, one she’s used to from her time at the five-five, but it’s different, too.
Different because this is SVU, and she’s finally made it, and there’s a gold shield of responsibility weighing heavy at her hip and God, she doesn’t want to fuck this up.
Olivia’s in the squadroom half an hour before her shift is due to start, dressed in a new grey suit and sensible shoes her mother had wrinkled her nose at when she picked them up at Saks. Plain, is what Serena had called them, but Olivia had told her that didn’t matter half as much as the fact that they had a good sole with tread and were less clunky than the shoes she’d been issued with her blues as a beat cop, and eventually Serena had let that subject drop and led her daughter over to the jewellery case instead, where she’d eyed a string of pearls like a magpie as Olivia fought an eye roll. Her mother still refuses to accept that her daughter is a cop, of all things, and that the dress code for a precinct is markedly different from what Serena wears in the vaulted lecture halls at Columbia.
The pearls now sit neatly coiled in a little box on top of Olivia’s dresser, and she’ll dutifully wear them for her mother’s birthday, but that’s neither here nor there.
Olivia takes one more deep breath for good measure and then heads over to the captain’s office, raps on the door and waits to be ushered in. “Ah, you must be Detective Benson,” the captain says when she steps inside, and Olivia nods.
It still feels odd, her name and the title in combination, but she plasters a smile on her face and shakes her new boss’ hand and tries to feel a little less like a kid playing dress-up in their parents’ clothes.
“Welcome to SVU,” Cragen says, after he’s introduced himself. “You come highly recommended, and I’m excited to have you on the team.”
“Thank you, sir,” Olivia replies, and Cragen smiles, motioning for her to sit down in the chair opposite his desk. He runs her through the basics, shift assignments and protocols and little quirks about the one-six, and Olivia listens dutifully, lets the words sink in and wonders when any of this will start to feel real.
That she’s finally in SVU, finally a detective, finally working the job that feels like it was made for her. After college, she’d hopped around offices for a year and change, had tried — mostly for her mother’s sake — to find herself a “respectable” job, but she’d felt the pull of the force all the same. So after the sixth temp gig went awry, Olivia said screw it and signed up for the Academy, ignoring Serena’s protests left and right.
And now, with years of beat cop training under her belt and a mentor who’d discovered her knack for connecting with vics, Olivia has arrived in the place where she’s always felt like she could belong. A unit where she can make a difference, where she can provide the kind of help and support to victims that her mother never had. Where she can prevent people like her fa— her mother’s rapist from hurting others.
Where she — and this Olivia steadfastly refuses to examine too closely — can ensure there are fewer people living on this earth with a fate like her own.
“Your partner should be here in a few,” Cragen says then. “He’ll show you the ropes, get you settled in.”
Olivia nods, gets up from the chair and follows Cragen back into the bullpen. She wonders what this guy will be like, her new partner. Patrick back at the five-five was nice, had her back when she was a rookie. Karen was the best mentor Olivia could ask for, helped her get to SVU, gave her all the necessary advice for how to survive the old boys’ club.
There’s about a fifty-fifty chance this guy’ll be a prick, but Olivia’s worked with enough of them to know how to hold her own. And besides, he might surprise her. There’s hope, still.
“And here’s your partner,” Cragen says, after Olivia has dumped her purse on her desk and taken a minute to survey her new view of the squad room. She turns toward the doors and sees a guy walk in, with close-cropped hair and piercing blue eyes and oh, fuck, this cannot possibly be happening.
She’s dreaming, she has to be. Hallucinating, or feverish. Maybe there was something weird in the falafel she had for dinner the night before. In a minute, she’ll wake up and she’ll laugh at herself, shake her head and have some water and take an aspirin before she goes in to work, because this cannot be real.
He can’t be here. He just can’t.
But the seconds tick on and the guy steps closer and doesn’t disappear into thin air and Olivia thinks she might throw up. He hasn’t noticed her, not yet, but then he spots Cragen waving him over and he looks straight at her and Jesus, nothing could have prepared her for this.
She watches his features morph into shock for a split-second, before he schools them back to indifference and walks up to her and Cragen. Their eyes meet, then, brown locked on blue, and for a moment there, Olivia is pretty sure she forgets how to breathe. She’s about to open her mouth and say… something, but he beats her to it.
“Elliot Stabler,” he says, keeping his expression carefully neutral. “Nice to meet you,” he adds, as he holds his hand out for her to shake.
Olivia finds herself taking his hand as if on autopilot, managing a, “Nice to meet you too,” that hopefully doesn’t sound as shell-shocked as she feels. It takes all of her concentration not to let the whole thing slip.
It’s like there’s a live wire crackling between them when she takes his hand, and Olivia tries desperately not to think about the last thing she remembers that hand doing — gripping her hip as he thrust up inside her, filling her to the hilt, drawing mindless patterns across the smooth skin of her back after she shattered, calling out his name.
Shit.
/
1987
She’s in her second year of undergrad, it’s the week before midterms and all Olivia wants to do is get drunk, maybe make out with someone, and definitely forget about the existence of Oliver Cromwell and the Rump Parliament until the inevitable headache catches up with her the next morning.
There’s a frat party at Delta Chi, and while Olivia isn’t usually one to voluntarily spend her Friday nights in a sticky basement with warm beer and terrible music, she’d let a group of her sisters drag her along, and right now she’s glad for the distraction.
She bypasses the bowl of punch on one of the card tables — she wants to get drunk, not sick — and pops open the tab on a can of beer from the adjacent table before settling into a corner and casting her eyes across the room.
She’s content to lean against a wall and just observe, fading into the background of people. Their voices overlap into a hum of chatter, with an occasional enthusiastic shout when someone takes a shot. The room is comfortably warm; put enough people in a tight space together and it doesn’t matter that the rainstorm outside is turning to sleet, and the temperature is dropping close to freezing.
She takes a sip of her beer and winces. It’s warm, as expected, and the carbonation makes her nose tickle.
Half an hour and another beer later, Olivia feels pleasantly buzzed. She’s idly swaying along to R.E.M., contemplating whether or not to join the sweaty throng that’s dancing in the middle of the room. Really, she’s just happy to stand in this corner and occasionally take a few minutes to talk with someone — a mix of hellos and drunken compliments from kids she recognizes from lecture or other parties.
But a tall boy with a mop of blonde hair has been eyeing her for most of the night, and, after taking a healthy swig of liquid courage, Olivia approaches her mark. (She doesn’t know what it says about her that she’s in this for a night and nothing more. Sometimes she wonders what Serena would think, about her daughter’s choice to leave Manhattan for Buffalo of all places, to go to a state school, to rush a sorority. And sometimes, she really doesn’t care.)
She’s gotten good at this — playing the nice girl, the sweet girl — and she kind of hates it. Men look at her and see brunette and leggy and not much else. She reaches his side of the room and bats her eyelashes, relishing in the attention of his eyes raking up and down her curves.
“Hey,” he says, and she thinks he’s trying to be suave. It’s not really working.
It turns out the guy — his name is David, she learns at one point, but Olivia thinks she’ll have forgotten it again by morning — is a half-decent kisser, at least when he’s got a hand in her hair and the other on her ass and she’s wedged in the corner of a frat house hallway.
He’s by far not the best she’s encountered, but there’s enough heat between them that she just lets herself feel for a few minutes, lets herself sink into it and forget all about midterms and British monarchs. It’s almost nice.
Olivia’s got a hand on his bicep and she can feel him pressing into her leg as she’s mentally weighing the options of leaving him out to dry or following him home tonight. Suddenly, he pulls back, pupils blown. “You like that, yeah?” he rasps out, voice purposefully low.
It takes all of Olivia’s willpower not to roll her eyes.
He unceremoniously slides a hand under her t-shirt, climbing up to her chest, and Olivia instinctively pulls back. It’s one thing to drunkenly make out with a guy at a party; she’s not about to publicly go to third base with one.
She would laugh at the way his eyes go owlish at the loss of contact, but he’s already affronted. “Don’t be a prude,” he says, and she feels the heat rising in her cheeks. It’s not like she should have expected any better.
“I’m going to go now,” she says, placing a hand on his torso to try and un-pin herself from the wall. She hates this, hates getting caught in places and situations she cannot control. She hates that a little part of her brain is already starting to blame herself for ending up here.
He catches her wrist with his hand, and she yanks her arm away.
“I said, ‘I’m going to go now.’”
The guy lets out a snort, raising his hands in the air in mock-surrender. He doesn’t think he did anything wrong, she knows this, and it makes her blood boil.
Olivia’s about to turn on her heel and get the hell out of this hallway when a voice pipes up from behind her. “Get away from her, Dave,” the voice says, tone brooking no argument, and Olivia turns to find another guy there. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, with a sharp jaw, close-cropped hair and piercing blue eyes.
There’s a furrow in his brow and his facial expression alone seems to make the first guy shrink back into himself, mutter a “fuck off” and scamper down the corridor, back toward the basement.
Olivia rolls her eyes. “I had it under control,” she says to the stranger. She doesn’t need some guy protecting her, like she’s a damsel in distress. She does just fine on her own, thank you very much.
Surprisingly, the guy doesn’t protest, just shrugs his shoulders. “I know,” he says. “Doesn’t mean he didn’t deserve to hear it.”
She cocks a brow, leans back against the wall and crosses her arms over her chest. “Well, thanks, I guess,” she says, giving the guy a once-over. She takes in his faded jeans and sweatshirt, the way the fabric is tight over his upper arms. No wonder Dave had gotten the hell out of dodge. “I’m gonna—” she gestures over at the door, takes a half-step forward.
“I’m Elliot, by the way,” the guy says then, and Olivia stops in her tracks. God, she doesn’t want to trade one weird frat house hookup for another, not tonight.
“Olivia,” she says, hoping he’ll take the hint and get out of her way.
“I’m sorry, about Dave,” the guy — Elliot, she reminds herself — says then, and what?
“What?”
“He was outta line, and I’m sorry.”
Olivia snorts. “Not your fault.”
“Nah,” Elliot says, voice surprisingly serious. “Shit like that doesn’t fly here, usually.”
“What, frat boys being frat boys?” she asks, sarcastic. “I mean, no offence,” she adds, holding up a hand toward him.
Elliot sighs, scrubs his thumb along his jaw. “Fuck, sorry.”
Olivia lets out a chuckle. “That’s new.”
“What?”
“A guy apologizing for another guy’s fuck up. That’s a novelty.”
“Jesus,” he says, like he’s serious about it. Olivia shrugs, leans back against the wall.
“You Delta Chi?” she asks. Has to be, if he knows Dave, knows how things usually are, here.
Elliot nods. “Yeah, a senior.”
“Sophomore, Chi O. I think all my sisters have ditched me by now. Can’t really blame them,” she says, with a twinkle in her eye. “Sorry, but the beer here is—”
“Like piss?” Elliot volunteers, and Olivia laughs.
“Somethin’ like that.”
“My buddy’s got some of the good stuff in the fridge, cold and everything. You want one?”
Olivia should say no. She should get out of this frat house and go back to her room and get a good night’s sleep and try and forget all about Dave and getting groped in hallways. She should follow her own advice and stay far away from guys who seem nice and considerate — because they usually end up anything but — and say goodbye to Elliot.
But there’s something about him that she can’t quite place. Something she wants to understand. So against her better judgement, she says, “Sure,” pushes herself off the wall and follows him to the frat house kitchen.
/
1998
It’s a full hour before Olivia has a chance to talk to Elliot in private. A full, excruciating sixty minutes she spends pretending she doesn’t know who he is, that they’ve just met for the very first time and are nothing to each other but colleagues, partners… professionals.
Elliot introduces her to the other members of the unit — Munch, Jeffries and Cassidy — and catches her up on their open cases, and she tries to magically forget that there was a past life where they meant something to one another, where she harboured the foolish hope that maybe, just maybe, they could mean everything to one another someday.
An hour where she keeps staring at the gold band on Elliot’s ring finger and wondering if she didn’t dream the whole thing up.
Olivia breathes out a sigh of relief when Cragen sends them out to track down a vic’s boyfriend, and they walk out of the precinct in mutually agreed-upon silence, footsteps heavy on the pavement as they head for the sedan. As soon as Olivia shuts the passenger side door and Elliot sticks the key into the ignition, she whips her head around to face him.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” she bites out.
Elliot’s looking at her with disbelief written all over his face. “I work here. Better question: what the fuck are you doing here?”
Olivia huffs. “Well, apparently, I work here too.”
They’re quiet, then, for an endless minute, both staring at each other, locked in some kind of stand-off. She’s not going to be the first one who breaks.
In the end, it’s Elliot who gives in. His shoulders slump and he lets out a breath and Olivia feels herself sag back into the passenger seat, almost involuntary. “Shit, I’m sorry, Liv,” he mutters, then, and it’s the first time he’s said her name in almost a decade and fuck, if it doesn’t still do something funny to her insides, hearing it pass his lips.
“It’s… God, Elliot, I just never expected to see you, ever again. After that spring—”
“Yeah.” There’s a resignation to his tone, a melancholy kind of feeling that she understands far too well. “Thought I was hallucinating, when I saw you standing there next to Cragen.”
“Me too.”
They fall into an uncomfortable silence again as Elliot finally starts the car and pulls out into the Manhattan traffic. The air inside the sedan is thick with tension, and Olivia doesn’t know what to say next. How do you talk to someone you haven’t seen in a decade, someone who disappeared without a trace?
“How’ve you been?” he finally asks, and Olivia raises a brow and scoffs.
“Jesus.” How has she been?
“That came out wrong, I—”
“Yeah.” Olivia shakes her head. “It’s been, well. It’s been a long time, Elliot.”
“I know.”
“Didn’t expect you to join the force, after…” She leaves it hanging in the silence between them, unspoken. Joe Stabler, and everything he stood for. Everything Elliot wanted never to become.
“Me too.” He shrugs, hands gripping the steering wheel tight. “Got home on leave and I, ah, reconnected with a girl from high school. Next thing I know, we’ve got a baby on the way and a shotgun wedding and…”
His wedding ring glints in the midday sunlight and Olivia lets out a breath. “Wow.”
“Yeah.” A little smile lights up his face, then, when he starts telling her about his kids. “Maureen, she’s our oldest, she’s about to start middle school. Kathleen’s in elementary, and the twins are in their last year of preschool.”
“They’re lucky to have you as their dad,” she says, and Elliot turns toward her again, eyes soft in a way that hits her square in the chest. It’s surreal, she thinks, to imagine him with children, let alone four. Surreal, but somehow right, too.
“Thanks, Liv,” he replies, and she swallows down a lump in her throat, a vague what-if that she won’t let herself think about, not now. “But tell me about you? How’s everything with…”
“My mother?” Olivia lets out a dry chuckle. “Same as she’s always been.”
“‘m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Other than that… I graduated, tried office jobs, hated all of them,” and here, Elliot lets out a laugh, deep and booming, because yeah, that one was obvious, and she can’t help the little smile that blooms on her own face, too, “and eventually signed up for the Academy.”
“And now you’re here.”
“Yeah, now I’m here.”
“Listen, is this—” Elliot gestures with his free hand, all-encompassing “—I don’t wanna make this awkward, or complicated, or…”
She sighs. This is what she’d been afraid of. It’s one thing to see Elliot again, after ten years; it’s a whole different ball game to be his partner, now. She knows she should really ask for a reassignment, a different partner, or something, but Olivia also knows the chance that she’ll be sent somewhere other than SVU is high, and at the end of the day, she’s worked too damn hard to get here.
She’s not letting it slip through her fingers. Not now, not because of this.
“I’m okay with it,” she finally says, hoping that her expression can convey how important this is to her. “I don’t wanna get transferred out, not after it took this long to get here. I mean, only if you are…”
Elliot glances over at her again, nods once. “Yeah, I… yeah.”
“Okay.”
“I just…”
“Don’t think we should tell anyone we used to date in college?”
Elliot barks out a laugh. “Yeah. Might be better if they didn’t know that.”
“Would look weird after we ‘met’ this morning,” Olivia quips, and oh, this is nice — finding that ease between them again, the rhythm they used to share.
Elliot puts on the signal and eases them into a turn lane. “Well, then it’s nice to meet you, Olivia Benson,” he says, faux-earnestness in his tone. He reaches his right hand across the centre console, and Olivia grins as she clasps it in her own.
“It’s nice to meet you, too, Elliot Stabler.”
Elliot puts his hand on the steering wheel again and makes the left turn, and Olivia settles back into the passenger seat. The air in the sedan feels lighter, now, even though she still has so many questions left to ask, so many worries niggling at her brain.
But Elliot wants to be her partner, wants to start with a clean slate, and maybe, maybe this can work out. Olivia sighs, turns her head to look out the window and watches the buildings zip by.
Maybe their past doesn’t have to matter, after all.