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They’ve talked a few times, since he’s been back.
She gets his voicemail; it takes her a couple of days to respond, but he’d expected as much, just from watching a rerun of McGrath’s presser on the news. She’d closed a year-old case, and pride swelled in his chest like a balloon at the sight of her, her picture beamed on his TV in high definition. He’d seen the compass, too, glinting from its perch on her chest, and that alone had made his heart swoop.
He hadn’t mentioned it in the voicemail, even though he’d wanted to. Wanted to pick up right where they left off on the day he gave her the necklace, and took Ginny McCann’s wooden ornament for himself, a little talisman he kept stuffed in the lining of the duffle bag he lugged around when he was under. But it’s not the time for that — not yet.
Elliot knows there’s another missing girl out there; knows Olivia won’t rest until she’s home, too. He doesn’t want to pull her focus. So he keeps his message focused on the important things: that he’s back, that he just wanted to hear the sound of her voice.
The rest of it can wait.
She does call back eventually, leaving a voicemail of her own, a thank you for checking in, and an I’m glad to hear your voice, too. Those seven words make him feel lighter than he has in weeks.
They end up playing phone tag, after that, trading texts and missed calls for thirty-six hours, until his phone pings on a Thursday night at a quarter to ten.
Is now a good time? the message reads, and it’s a little bit stilted, a little bit formal, like she’s trying to schedule a fucking doctor’s appointment. Elliot doesn’t even consider sending a text back, just hits the call button and waits for the line to connect.
“Hey.” She sounds muffled through the phone, a little weary, a little tired.
“Hey, partner,” he says, and he could swear he hears her smile.
/
They make plans to meet up at a diner close to her precinct on a Friday after work, when Antonia is scheduled to take care of Mama and Noah has dance til late. He looks forward to it for days, giddy like a little kid waiting for the class field trip. If Bell notices, she doesn’t say anything, but he catches her looking at him sometimes, some kind of knowing expression on her face he refuses to analyze further.
Jet and Reyes are too caught up in their own shit to pay him any mind, and Elliot knows there’s something going on there that he should probably dig into. Seniority, mentorship, and all that. Hell, even morale.
But he doesn’t know how to broach it with the memory of Whelan still fresh, stinging like a wound that’s only scabbed over halfway. The kid had potential, and Elliot saw himself helping him guide that future. Look where that got him. Maybe it’s better he stays a few steps back for a while, this time, observing. He’s got the AI guy to needle, besides.
/
It all goes to shit by degrees.
On Monday, Mama’s wandering the garden in the dark while Antonia’s out cold, some soap playing full-volume on the TV. He gets her inside and warm, and sits down on the sofa with a groan when Mama finally falls asleep. Elliot rubs a hand over his face, sighing. He’ll have to call Katie in the morning, ask her to work from his place for a few days, keep an eye on her grandmother.
Antonia, well. That clearly wasn’t gonna work out.
On Tuesday, they raid the lab, and Elliot gets a lungful of fent. So much for the fucking hazmat suit. Reyes has it worse, though, and Elliot gets him the Narcan before he can so much as think, and then everything goes dark. He opens his eyes and sees Ayanna sizing him up, expression caught somewhere between so very done with his shit and altogether too fond.
On Wednesday, he gives Tweaker’s father the little talisman that was supposed to keep his son safe. Yet another promise broken, yet another future cut too short.
On Thursday morning, his phone chimes with a text from Liv, and Elliot’s heart is in his throat.
Hey. I don’t want to have to do this, but could we try for next week?
He lets out an audible groan that has Bell asking if he’s alright from halfway across the bullpen, and he just nods, says it’s nothing. Elliot knows his Sergeant doesn’t believe him for a second, but that’s a problem for another day.
Sure, he texts back, ‘course we can.
/
Mama thinks he’s Randall, which is a new one. Usually she thinks he’s Dad, which is somehow easier to cope with, and that’s a psychological can of worms Elliot is not prepared to open. He’s going to have to call his brother now, though, and that may actually be the tougher pill to swallow.
Twenty years, it’s been since Randall got the hell out of dodge and left them for Florida. Some days, when Elliot takes stock of all the pill bottles, and informational packets about dementia, and flyers for assisted living communities he swears he doesn’t want to send his mother to that they’ve accumulated, he doesn’t blame him. Some days, he wants to grab his big brother by the shoulders and shake.
He settles for that phone call, instead, finds himself surprised when Randall agrees to fly out, just asks him to pick him up at JFK. Sure, Elliot thinks, he’ll add fucking airport traffic to his list of things to deal with before the end of this week. Before he finally, finally gets to that rescheduled dinner at the diner with Liv.
It’s probably a little bit pathetic, to admit just how much the prospect of seeing her again in person is keeping him going right now. How it’s stopping him from doing something stupid, like going off half-cocked trying to crack the Los Santos case, to get justice for the kid whose funeral had come far too early. How it’s stopping him from obsessing over his mother, and the fact that she’s less and less herself, these days, and more of a stranger who lives in his apartment and sometimes catches a flicker of familiarity in his face.
He missed so much time with Mama, back when he was hellbent on pretending he was better off without her. Back when he was in Italy, too, and hellbent on pretending he was better off without Liv. Even now, when he disappears for months on end, hoping against hope that everything in the city will just press pause while he’s away. It never does, no matter how much he wishes it would.
So Elliot takes her lucid moments where he gets them, and her not-so-lucid ones, too. He prays the rosary with his mother, because something about it makes her remember, makes something come loose, deep down in her brain. Elliot knows the doctor explained it to him at one point, how dementia patients have an easier time with older memories. Something about them being more firmly established. He’s sure Kathleen knows the precise answer; she went with them to all the appointments and sat next to him, diligently taking notes.
He’s not too proud to admit it, that it’s the thought of getting to see Liv again that keeps him going. That he finds himself fixating on the mental image of sitting across from her in that diner booth, all chestnut waves and gentle eyes, her face impossibly soft. She’ll be nursing a cup of decaf, he thinks, and stealing half of his fries — and wearing the compass necklace he gave her, shining bright under the harsh light of the fluorescents, a little winking sign.
A reminder, and a promise, and maybe a guidepost, too.
/
Sam Bashir comes to them with a hunch. A good one, at that. It’s instinct that has Elliot tracking him down, despite Bell’s orders to the contrary. He’ll apologize to her later; she’ll forgive him eventually. She’s used to his shit by now.
Elliot picks up Randall from the airport, and tries not to react when his brother tells him about the weekend he spent with Eli in Estes Park, going fishing. His older brother has always known exactly how to press his buttons, and Elliot tries to keep his face impassive, tries not to beat himself up for missing yet another thing, yet another family moment, because of this job.
Randall offers to help pay for long-term care for Mama, says his therapist suggested it. Elliot’s not sure which of those two things sounds more like a bad prank.
All his consideration of Randall’s sudden change in personality has to take a backseat as soon as Asher gets murdered, as soon as Elliot has to bodily throw Bell across a workbench, away from the explosion that rocks the grimy warehouse they’ve traced the phone to. This fucking job, he can’t help but think — over the ever-present ringing in his ears and the ache he feels, deep in his bones — is going to knock the wind clean out of him one day.
/
Olivia’s not faring much better. Elliot hears about the mob of teenages that storm the one-six, masked and streaming their chaos on the internet, for the whole world to see. No one’s hurt, thank God, but he can’t shake the feeling that all this tech — the phones and the livestreams and the fucking AI algorithms — are messing up something fundamental about how people interact.
Jet would call him a grandpa if he said it out loud, but Elliot doesn’t think he’d much care. He is a grandpa, and besides, it’s not tech that proved Sam’s hunch. No algorithm could’ve found that bullet lodged in the wall of the mosque: cold, hard evidence of a professional hit.
He texts Liv a few hours after the chaos at her precinct has subsided; he wants to give her enough time to recoup, to breathe.
Just wanted to check in, he writes, leaving the text thread open-ended.
Thanks, partner, she sends back, and it makes him grin.
/
“Where you headin’ out to?” Randall asks from his perch on the couch, picking up the remote so he can turn down the volume on the TV. He cranes his neck over to where Elliot stands in the kitchen, shrugging on his coat. The volume is a low din, now, mindful of Mama, and of Randall’s hearing that goes a little shot when there’s background noise. God, they’re getting old.
It’s Friday, finally. The one after their original, postponed… Elliot doesn’t want to call it a date, at the diner. Reunion feels too formal, too stilted. He doesn’t know if it still counts as dinner, if they’re only seeing each other at eight-thirty. Olivia’s meetings ran long.
Which meant he’d had time to come home and change, to check in on Mama, and on Randall, too, to overthink this whole thing just a little bit more than he already has, these past two weeks.
“None of your business,” is Elliot’s automatic reply when Randall asks, and he suddenly feels all of twelve years old again, defiant in the face of the older brother who couldn’t do wrong in their dad’s eyes. At least that’s what Elliot had thought, until Randall told him otherwise — years later, when everything was already crumbling, when their tempers were all on hair-triggers and they were barrelling toward the inevitable. All the Stablers, about to scatter and break apart.
He’s not twelve anymore, though, and his brother flew up from fucking Florida, and, well. If Randall gets to go to therapy and grow as a person, maybe Elliot should give it a shot, too.
“Ah, meetin’ an old friend,” he says, eventually. Not a lie, technically speaking.
“I know him?” Randall asks, and Elliot pauses.
“Her,” he corrects, because apparently it’s honesty hour tonight, and he’s gonna regret that in an instant, judging by the way Randall’s brows shoot up in interest. “D’ya ever meet my old partner, from back before I left?”
“Can’t say I ever had the pleasure,” Randall says. A beat, and then, slowly, his eyes go wide as recognition blooms on his features. “Wait. This the one that lasted a decade? The one you left behind when you fled the country?”
Elliot grits his teeth and nods. His brother’s never been one for sugar-coating things.
Randall lets out a low whistle. “Jeez, and she’s still willing to talk to your sorry ass?”
Elliot can’t even blame his brother; it’s still a miracle to him, most days, that Liv never shut him out when he came back. That slowly, but surely, she’s letting him back in.
Still. “She’ll be less willing to, if I’m late.”
Randall shakes his head, chuckling. “Don’t think I’m lettin’ you outta this that easy. Whole story, soon as you’re back.”
Elliot just rolls his eyes as he heads for the entryway. “In your dreams,” he calls over his shoulder, shutting the front door with a click.
/
She’s already sitting at the booth when he gets to the diner, looking intently at something on her phone. Elliot pauses for a moment, standing in the doorway, just drinking her in. Olivia’s hair is darker than it was before he left, framing her face as she angles it down toward the table, toward whatever she’s typing out. Even from the other side of the diner, she looks ethereal.
There’s a steaming cup of coffee sitting next to her on the table, and it makes him smile, knowing that some things don’t ever change. There’s a comfort to it, to a certain amount of predictability.
He takes one more second to commit the sight to memory — Olivia, absorbed in her phone, a soft smile playing across her features, looking as relaxed as he’s seen her in years — and then he walks over to her, grinning when her eyes light up as soon as she spots him. She gets up from the booth, and he can see it now: the compass, glinting in the light.
“El, hey,” she says, voice soft, halfway to tentative. It makes something clench, deep in his chest.
They stand there, for a second, on the precipice of awkward, and then somehow they’re moving, both coming together, arms wrapping around each other in a hug. Elliot inhales, face tucked in the crook of her neck, gets a lungful of perfume and shampoo and Olivia. Something settles inside him at the contact, like static dissipating into the quiet. Something clicks into place.
The hug lasts a moment longer than what’s probably appropriate for a Friday night in a public diner, but the place is half empty and no one pays them much attention. When they break apart, they’ve got matching shy smiles on their faces.
“I’m, I’m so glad we could do this—” Olivia says, when they’ve settled into the booth. There it is again, that mounting awkwardness, and God, that’s what Elliot was afraid of. Not that she wouldn’t let him in, this time, but that when they tried reconnecting, they’d flounder, right out of the gate. Elliot reaches for her hand across the formica tabletop, squeezes once, twice.
She calmed him down like this when they were headed to Fort Lee for Eli; he figures it’s high time he returned the favour. “Liv, ‘s just me.”
Olivia laughs at that, a breathy, sheepish little thing. “Yeah,” she says, tucking an errant strand of hair behind her ear. “I just… Thought about this a lot, these past few months.”
“Me too.” There’s no use denying it, not when the prospect of seeing her and his kids again was the only thing keeping him sane as he and Tweaker criss-crossed the region. Not that he’d even want to minimize it, not with her, so he says, “Been looking forward to this moment for a long time.”
Olivia smirks. “And you haven’t even ordered any fries yet.”
Elliot lets out a laugh at that, deep and low, eyes crinkling. “You just want me to get them so you can steal half, Benson.”
She shrugs, all put-on innocence, and sure enough, the waitress takes that moment to appear at their table, leaving Olivia stifling a giggle as Elliot orders the obligatory portion of fries. They get sandwiches, too, but he skips the coffee, and Olivia rolls her eyes, entirely too fond.
That near-awkwardness he was worried about is gone now, dissolved into the air, and Elliot’s glad for it. Glad for the steaming basket of fries the waitress sets down smack dab in the middle of the table, like she could tell they weren’t just his. Glad for the way Olivia launches into a story about Noah’s latest dance recital, eyes bright as she tells him about her kid.
He fills her in on his kids, too, until she confesses that she knows all of the updates already, because she and Kathleen get coffee once a month. Says she hopes that’s okay, and breathes out a sigh of relief when he tells her he’ll have to tag along one day.
He loves that even in his absence, Olivia was still a part of his family. Right where she belongs.
The clock on the far wall is creeping close to ten when he dares broach it: the compass, the one he’d told her he hoped would lead her to happiness. “You’re still wearing it.”
She nods. “Every day.”
“And is it, ah…” He clears his throat, suddenly hesitant. “Is it working, do you think? Leading you where you want to be?”
The corners of Olivia’s mouth turn up in a smile. “I think I’m not quite there yet,” she says, and his heart stutters wildly in his chest, “but I know I’m going in the right direction.”
“Yeah?”
Olivia reaches out across the table and takes his hand. “Positive.”