The Currency of Heroes (Law and Order: SVU) by surreallis, 5/5
Title: The Currency of Heroes - 5/5
Author: surreallis
Fandom: Law and Order: SVU
Pairing/character: Elliot Stabler/Olivia Benson
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 47,000
Kink: Major = Restraints, angst, hand fixation, codependent cop partners. (Hey, it's a kink in the police procedural fandoms, trust me!) Mentions = Some power issues, topping from the bottom, wall sex, religious themes, tattoos.
Notes/Warnings: Graphic het sex, adult language, adult situations, mentions of rape and child abuse but nothing graphic.
Spoilers for SVU eps: Taken, Victims, Paranoia, Countdown, Scourge, Wrath.
Also, this contains the entirety of my short fic, Bound. I’ve always felt that fic deserved something bigger, and it was the building block I used to fuel this.
Thank you to lauridsen09 for reading and playing the beta, time and time again. You kept me sane and inspired, even when I wanted to chuck it all.
Summary: This job is her calling, it's her purpose in this world, and Elliot is the one who gave it to her. She's still having her beginning, and he's nearing his end, and his rage is dragging him down. She just wants to keep his head above water, before he drowns.
A season 2 and 3 rewrite AU in which Stabler is divorced before he and Benson become partners. Through one horrible year, they struggle with too much and fall into a sexual relationship in order to cope. In the end, it will either destroy them or give them salvation.
Artist: anr. Big smooches, bb! it's gorgeous and it re-energized me like you wouldn't believe, because I wanted this story to be worthy. ;)
Part Four
Part 5
[]
Elliot asks for time off the week before and over Christmas, and both she and Cragen breathe a sigh of relief. He needs time with his kids, and maybe Olivia needs a little time to herself too. Cragen has her run down peripheral information for Munch and Fin, and sometimes he sends her to scenes if they’ve been secured, so no one shoots her in the back as she investigates alone. And still, he asks her from time to time about Elliot, and she keeps telling him Elliot is fine, but he’s becoming less and less convinced.
She doesn’t want that pressure on her head, ending Elliot’s career in SVU. He can transfer, yes, but he’s stayed as long as he has for a reason, the same way she intends to stay as long as she can, and she doesn’t want to take that away from him. Maybe she also doesn’t want to lose him, and if they aren’t partners anymore, then what else would they be? You could date, her inner voice tones, and she knows it’s the logical move. And still she can’t place him in that same category as Michael and Brian and all the other men she’s dated and discarded. Or who have found her too trying and have walked away.
She fucks up just before Christmas. Maybe her head is just too mixed up, or maybe the pressure is getting to her, she doesn’t know. But she works a rape case with Fin and her senses are off. The woman’s exam comes back inconclusive, and her affect is off, and Olivia decides it’s a false report. Fin argues with her, but when she goes into interrogation, she rips the woman up one side and down the other, and Cragen finally comes in and pulls her out. She is just angry, because they have so many other bad cases, and this woman is wasting their time. Time that Justine Foster could be spending in agony, or maybe in the cold, cold ground already dead.
Then Fin nabs the rapist, and he confesses, and his story matches the victim’s to a T.
She almost throws her dinner up in the middle of the squad room.
She apologizes, and at least it was caught before they’d gone further with the case, but she knows that’s cold comfort to the victim. She just made the worst day of a woman’s life even more terrible, and that’s not something she just bounces back from.
It’s all too much. She doesn’t want to make another decision again for as long as she lives. She doesn’t want to have peoples’ fates in her hands anymore.
“It’s part of the job, Olivia,” Cragen tells her, and there’s an edge to his voice. She thinks he must be very tired of dealing with her and Elliot this year. But then he gets softer. “You’re on call tomorrow. I won’t call you in unless it’s absolutely necessary. Enjoy Christmas day for once and relax. Come back feeling stronger.”
For the first time she wants to tell him to forget it, to transfer her out, to make sure she can’t mess up anymore lives. And he sees it on her face.
“If you didn’t feel that way, then I’d have you out of here in a heartbeat. But I’m not letting you go now. You go home and you do whatever you have to do to deal with this, and then you come back and you work again, and you start saving people.”
And, really, what can she say to that? Logically she knows that she’ll feel better in a day or two, and Cragen’s faith in her is reassuring, even if she still feels like shit.
She sits in the crib and stares at the floor because she can’t stand to talk to anyone else that night. And she can’t stand to hear the holiday carols and see the lights. The guilt makes her sleepless and fidgety and she scrubs at her face with shaking hands until she can’t stand it anymore. She calls Elliot.
She doesn’t expect him to be home, so when he answers she is surprised into silence for a moment. “Hey,” she finally says. “I thought you’d be with your kids tonight. Christmas Eve.”
“I spent all day with them,” he says. “Kathy’s taking them to her mother’s for the rest of the holiday.”
“Oh. I’m sorry,” she says.
“It’s okay. It was a good week.”
“Good.”
“I’ve been trying to call your cell all evening,” he says. “You catch a case?”
She swallows then. “Yeah. Sorry. It’s on silent and I haven’t checked in a while.”
He’s quiet for a moment and then he says, “Liv, what is it?”
And she sags a bit, because he notices. Because she wants to tell him exactly what happened, and at the same time she doesn’t want him to know at all. She swallows again, feeling wetness against her eyelids. “I, uh… didn’t have my finest hour today.”
“Are you okay?”
She hestitates, not knowing quite how to answer that.
“I mean, did you get hurt?” he clarifies, and his voice is almost militant.
“No,” she says. “Not me. I… I thought a victim was lying about her rape.”
He breathes, and she listens to him.
“It’s okay,” he says. “It happens.”
She wants to laugh at that. At how often they use that nonsensical phrase to hand wave their own faults. It happens. It just happens. As if they have no control over themselves.
“Come over,” he says.
“I don’t think I’d be good company,” she says.
“You don’t have to be. I’ll be good enough for both of us.”
She does laugh at that, because he’s not always very funny.
“C’mon,” he says. “It’s Christmas Eve, Liv. You should be here.”
And she nods, even though he can’t hear her. “Okay.”
[]
She wonders at the way they seem to run to each other. When he’s bad off, he comes to her place. When she’s suffering, she goes to his. Coincidence? Or some strange power balance that shifts between them endlessly.
When she walks through his door, she stops in surprise. She hasn’t been here in a few weeks, and he has lights up and a tree, and of course he would, because his kids were visiting. But it still feels strange to her.
”Hey,” he says, brows furrowed, as he walks up to her. He’s in jeans and a sweatshirt, and she feels like she hasn’t seen him in years.
“Hey,” she says, roughly.
He puts an arm around her neck and kisses her and pulls her coat off, and then they sit on his sofa and she says, “I fucked up.”
“Yeah,” he agrees. His voice is even, and she’s just glad he isn’t trying to tell her that it isn’t her fault. “So you learn from this and next time you fuck up a little less.”
She takes a long, slow breath. “Maybe there shouldn’t be a next time.”
“Bullshit,” he says, sharply. “There will be a next time, and one after that, and probably one after that too. That’s the way it goes, Olivia, and you know it. We’re human. We fuck up.”
God, do they.
She bends over a bit, bracing her elbows on her knees and burying her face in her hands. “God. That’s what Cragen said too. He told me to suck it up and move on.”
“You can’t change the past,” Elliot says. “Only the future.”
She asks, “Can I take a shower?”
He nods. Then, “You…want me to come with you?”
She smiles faintly at that. “No. I just… I think I could use the time.”
He lets her go, and she goes into his bedroom and then she gets into his shower and turns it as hot as she can stand. It helps, standing under the hard wash of the hot spray, still feeling like a hundred pounds of weight is on her shoulders, but realizing that those closest to her don’t think she’s a total asshole. Not that it helps the victim…
She dries off and sits on his bed, and she feels strangely apathetic. He has a pile of clean clothes stacked there, and she grabs one of his flannel shirts from the top and slips it on, and then she goes and stands in the doorway and looks out at him as he sits in the living room watching TV. He looks up.
“I don’t want to… make any more decisions tonight,” she says, softly. “I just… don’t want to think about anything.”
He holds her gaze for a moment and then he switches off the TV and stands, and she feels her mouth run dry. She’s not really sure what she’s doing, but she hears Tanya King’s voice in her mind saying, “… however you got here, you’re here now, and it’s okay.”
He comes toward her, slowly, and then he puts his hands on her head and he leans down close and he says, “What do you want?” Like he did before.
And she shakes her head, because he’s not getting it. “I want to not decide,” she says. “I want… I want to be…” And then the words just stop coming, and she has no idea what to say. She wants to have all decisions made for her. She wants to have no responsibilities. She wants to just feel like someone is taking care of her. And she doesn’t know how to even tell him that, or what he’d even do about it. She doesn’t want to be tied up, although she’d do it if he asked, because she’s pretty sure that’s not really her thing so much. But she wants something, and she doesn’t know what.
He’s tilting her head up so he can look in her eyes, and then he leans down and he presses his lips to hers, and she opens her mouth for him. He kisses her for a while, and then he looks at her again, and his gaze is piercing, and it makes her heart speed up because he’s seeing something in her eyes and she has no idea what it is. “Stay here,” he says.
And then he goes into his kitchen and she hears him pouring a drink. When he comes back, he has a finger of amber liquid in a glass, and he hands it to her. “Drink it,” he orders.
She takes it but doesn’t drink.
“Drink it,” he says, quietly. “You’re too wound up.”
She drinks. Her blood warms up immediately. It’s enough take the edge off her nerves, but not even close to enough to get her buzzed. He takes the glass from her again, and sets it on a bookshelf, and then he says, “Get in the bedroom, Olivia.”
She blinks at him, and he steps close to her, pressing his lips to her forehead and then looking down at her. “You want this?” he asks. “You want to give up the power tonight?”
It clicks then, and she swallows. She feels suddenly very warm and excited and ridiculous and turned on. Is this what he feels when she puts the handcuffs on him, she wonders. She nods slowly.
“Then get. In. The bedroom. Olivia.” He enunciates each word.
And she goes.
It’s about flowing then. It’s letting herself go and trusting herself in his hands, and it is like all the weight melts off of her and leaves her bare and spinning and a little euphoric.
“Stop,” he says, when she starts to take his shirt off. “Leave it.” And all she can feel are his hands and his breath, and he says, “Put your palms on the wall.” And she does. And he takes her that way, so close to that first time in the parking garage, but without that desperate edge of rage. He strips off and leans against her back, and she feels drunk even though she barely had a shot. His hands cover hers and press them hard against the wall as he moves inside of her, and it takes a while. He tells her what he wants her to do and he sucks at her nape, and it’s like she’s being consumed by everything. Pleasure, pain, him, herself, the whole fucking world. She does nothing but rest her forehead against the wall, listen to their breathing, and feel him. When she comes she feels like she’s not even part of reality anymore. He must come too, because she feels it between her legs, but she is still so wired and weary at the same time that she doesn’t really know. She is weak afterwards, and he grabs her up and she feels his sheets and his mattress beneath her, and she just sinks down into the relief and the warmth and her own, dark sleep.
[]
When she wakes, the daylight is flooding into the room and Elliot is lying next to her, looking at her. She stares back for a moment, blankly, until the night comes back to her, and then she feels her skin heat up. She doesn’t know what to say. To him or to herself.
“Olivia,” he says, voice sleep-rough.
She swallows thickly and meets his gaze.
“Go make me breakfast,” he orders.
She blinks at him and then furrows her brows. “Bite me.”
He laughs then, grinning, and turns over onto his back, and she rolls her eyes.
“I knew my luck would never hold until this morning,” he says. “You’d be right back to the same old Olivia.”
“Oh, screw you,” she says, shoving at him in irritation, but she’s starting to smile now because he hasn’t been this cheerful in months, and it’s a welcome sight.
He leans over and kisses her, briefly but deep, and says, “We have all day for that.” And then he slides out of bed and heads toward the bathroom.
She snorts in pretended scorn, but smiles when he shuts the door behind him. It’s Christmas day, she realizes. She wonders if he’ll want to go to church. Will he want her to go with him? Should she? And what about gifts? They agreed in their first year to never buy each other gifts. They go out for drinks on holidays or they spring for their favorite Thai food, but they don’t buy each other wallets or scarves or jewelry. But they weren’t sleeping together before either. She feels suddenly awkward and apprehensive about how to spend the day with him.
Jesus. Suck it up, Olivia.
And this is what she hates about relationships. The way you have to do things and you’re supposed to know what to do and when to do it, and it’s all just a gigantic puzzle to her.
She throws the blankets off and pulls on some underwear and Elliot’s shirt she was wearing the night before. God, it’s so cliché, but she doesn’t care. Sometimes cliches are cliches for a reason. Because they work.
She puts the coffee on in the kitchen, and then she opens his refrigerator, and he has so much food that her eyes widen. And, of course, he would have since his kids had been there that week, but he has eggs and bacon and milk and cheese and ham slices and fresh produce and about eight different plastic containers of leftovers that are unidentifiable but look delicious.
She has not had a good omelet in forever, so she pulls out the eggs and ham and cheese and onion and spreads them over the counter and starts working. When she catches the Christmas tree out of the corner of her eye, it feels festive, not lonely. And she thinks, Shit. I’m really fucked now.
Elliot comes into the kitchen in shorts and a T-shirt, and he smells like soap, and he blinks at her and then grins and wraps his arms around her and says, “This day is getting better and better!”
“Don’t get used to it,” she warns.
He leans against the counter and pulls her between his legs and against him while she watches the huge omelet she made cook in a pan, and he says, “Merry Christmas, Liv.”
She bites her lip and says, “Merry Christmas.”
And for one whole day, she feels like all the Christmas carols are true stories.
[]
There are some crimes that stun her with their complexity. Most of their cases are impulse crimes. People find themselves with an unusual opportunity. People get angry. People do horrible things when they have a broken heart. People take drugs and drink and their nasty natures come out to play.
But sometimes people plan things. Sometimes they spend years working out each little detail and it is their entire life’s work. Sometimes they put so much time and energy into their plans that when she finally sees the entire map, she is stunned by the scope of it all. You never really know when that is going to happen. You start seeing the results, the effects, and it is just the tip of the iceberg, but you don’t know that it is only the tip. You think it’s just another chunk of ice. Until suddenly it’s not.
That’s how Eric Plummer works.
When some of her former victims show up dead, together, laid out in a display on a body farm, she is spooked. It is absolutely too much of a coincidence, no matter how high risk some of them were. And seeing Clayton Derricks among them, the boy she’d put so much hard work and effort into, breaks her heart. Clayton was one of her first, and she had really seen then how she could affect someone else’s life. She had really seen how life could be unfair. She is angry and she is hurting and she is confused.
Elliot sprints into protective mode, and while she can’t blame him, she begins to find it really annoying. He’s never not been protective, and so she can’t fairly blame it on the fact that they’re sleeping together now, but it doesn’t help either. She feels vulnerable and exposed and like her life is out of her control, and she hates that. She fights with him over the case, and then over her old cases, and when he tells her he’s worried about her, she has to grit her teeth to keep from snapping at him. There is another murder, another old case, and they are all her failures, piling up. All her inner fears and her worries that she is not good enough. They are a spotlight on her ineptitude, and she’s starting to feel like an idiot.
The local FBI offers a protective detail, and she refuses, because she is not going to let this get to her any more than it already does. She does not need protection on top of her mistakes. Elliot argues with her, and she shuts him down, and for a few hours all she wants is to get away from him. He doesn’t get how she’s had to struggle for this job. He sees maybe more than most men, but he doesn’t know. How, despite all the advancements, the NYPD is still a man’s world and she has to work harder to gain the same respect he commands instantly by simply being male. Watching the worst of her work being paraded around is devastating.
“He is freeing them!” George waxes on enthusiastically, trying to profile their perpetrator.
“From what?” she demands, already weary.
“From the miserable existence you’ve left them in.”
And that’s about it, isn’t it? That’s pretty much what it’s about. She fucked up, and for some victims it doesn’t get better. And someone who might have good reason to hate her has decided to clean up after her, and he wants her to know about it. He wants her to see. He wants her to know her own weakness and be afraid.
And she is.
[]
She doesn’t want to let Elliot in when he knocks that night. She doesn’t want to talk about it to anyone. She just wants to sit down and think. She does let him in though, because in some ways she is glad she has him at her back, even if he’s seeing the worst of her, and because if she doesn’t let him in he will stand out there and knock all night. He’s that stubborn.
“I want you to reconsider the protective detail,” he says, when she’s locked the door behind him.
She turns and gives him a sidelong glance as she walks into her kitchen. “No.”
“Olivia,” he says, angrily, as she opens the refrigerator and takes out a bottle of beer. “This guy isn’t kidding around.”
She clenches her jaw. What does he think, that she’s having fun with this? She twists open the beer, takes a swallow, and then slams it down on the counter in front of him. It slides toward his arm and splashes him with foam, and he swears and grabs it, and she walks past. “Neither am I,” she retorts.
She walks as far away from him as the room will allow, and she leans against her wall and stares out her window, and he is quiet for a while and she feels him watching her.
“I’m worried about you,” he says, finally, in a low voice.
“I know,” she says.
She hears the quiet thunk as he sets the beer bottle down, and then the creak of her floor as he walks toward her, and then he’s right there, standing in her personal space, his hands on the wall behind her. She is affected by him, still, even in her anger, but for the first time she also feels a little trapped. Stifled.
“I couldn’t take it if something happened to you,” he says softly. His hand slides onto the back of her neck, his knuckles cushioning her from the wall.
She keeps her eyes on the space between the slats on her blinds. The blinking of tail lights in the street below. “Something could happen to me any day. I’m a cop. You going to keep a protective detail on me the rest of my career?”
He sighs. “Olivia…”
“You need to back off,” she warns him, and she pushes against his chest, forcing him to let her go and step back.
He stares at her, but he backs off a step, maybe two. No more. She takes a breath. “This is why I didn’t want to sleep with you at first.”
His brows furrow. “Why? Because I might actually care about you?”
“Because it would interfere with me doing my job!”
“Bullshit!” He steps closer again. “Fucking or not, Olivia, I care about my partner being hurt or killed!”
She runs a hand through her hair tiredly. “He’s killing my mistakes, Elliot. He’s hurting people because of me. I am not going to run away and hide behind a line of FBI agents and leave them out there all alone.”
“No one’s telling you to do that.”
“This is my responsibility.”
He moves in close again, suddenly, and she’s caught between him and the wall. She can smell his soap and his leather jacket and him, and she turns her head away, but he leans down close. “Look. I’m not going to pretend that my feelings for you have no bearing on this, but you’re being too single-minded, Olivia. We want to keep you safe because we care about you. We want to help you solve this case. You always want to run off and do these things alone, and you don’t have to!”
“I don’t have much of a choice this time, do I?” She pushes past him, and he lets her go. She walks to the center of the living room and looks back at him. “I don’t want a protective detail, Elliot. I’ll take the help, but this is my case. I knew this guy. Somewhere in my past, I knew this guy, and you need to trust me to work this out and take care of myself.”
He stares at her for a long time before he finally, slowly, nods, but he doesn’t speak and he doesn’t smile.
She lets him out a few minutes later, and he doesn’t spend the night.
[]
Plummer’s name comes up on a list of her former busts with a grudge. Even before she worked SVU, she put him away for rape only to have him found innocent when DNA evidence cleared him. It had been a hard pill to swallow, knowing she’d put an innocent man away for seven years before he’d been freed, but she had swallowed it, because it hadn’t been about her. It had been about Plummer, and he’d had the hard part. He’d been the one who’d had to serve time. She’d apologized and he’d looked at her as if he’d wanted to spit in her face, and she hadn’t blamed him. She’d offered no excuses. As a cop she knows it happens, but it’s just not an excuse. She’d simply walked away and tried to shove all the doubt about her own abilities aside. It didn’t completely work. She still can’t think about Eric Plummer without feeling a deep chasm of guilt. It’s like an old wound that has never healed correctly. It rips open again each time her mind settles on him.
That he might be behind the murders is… overwhelming.
Elliot walks on eggshells around her, and she knows she is being as unbearable as he is most of the time. She is slower to anger, but she’s never been less than an equal force, and sometimes they all forget that. She might be acting more on principle than she is on logic, and she knows that. She just can’t seem to help herself. Can’t bear to strip herself down for them. She will take this guy down, whether it’s Plummer or someone else from her past.
For a while, Elliot’s temper is nonexistent. He runs interference for her, but he is painfully obvious in his attempts at support, and it borders on patronizing and rubs her the wrong way. She has to wonder if she’d be feeling the same way if they weren’t involved, and it’s a hard question to answer because they’ve always been close. She’s wavering on the cusp of talking to him about it, just opening up, when he does the unforgivable.
He’s in a late meeting with the FBI and Cragen, and she goes for a beer with Munch and Fin. They do their duty and try to convince her that none of this is her fault, but she knows damn well that if it had been one of them they’d be thinking just like she is. All the same, they help. Be a detective long enough and you’ll make a big mistake. It’s inevitable, and that fact was driven home to her in spades during her Christmas fuck-up. You do the best you can, but no one is infallible. The pitcher of beer they share doesn’t even make a dent in her mood, so she finally packs it in and leaves them there.
In the darkness of winter, she walks along the street toward her apartment and tries to clear her mind. When the footsteps echo behind her, she is instantly aware. When they continue on with her, she draws her Sig. When she whirls on him, it is not Plummer, but another man, unfamiliar, who throws his hands up in alarm as she shouts at him to freeze. The words he shouts back don’t make sense for a moment as a car screeches to a halt next to them, and men start jumping out. She is distracted, but not by them. By the lone figure across the street, hesitating in a street light as he watches her.
Eric Plummer.
The man under her gun is still shouting though, and his words finally get through. “I’m FBI! I’m FBI!”
She looks at him in confusion, and when she looks back, Plummer is gone.
The chill he leaves behind settles deep in her bones.
[]
She makes them drive her to Elliot’s flat. The agents don’t ask questions but shoot her furtive looks, and she bristles under their scrutiny. She is so angry that he has ordered the protective detail anyway-against her wishes-after he stood there and nodded after she asked him to trust her, that she doesn’t even care if they see her yell at him.
He answers the door in sweatpants and a T-shirt, sleep still in his eyes, and he steps outside barefoot, his gaze drawn warily-and knowingly-to the car of agents behind her.
She just wants him to explain himself, and he is stone. “This guy is killing people, Olivia, and he’s after you.” He says it as if it’s the most logical thing in the world, and she can’t quite grasp the situation.
She doesn’t even know what to say. She wants to put a fist into his jaw. He is carefully schooling his expression as the agents look on, and so she just says, “If you can’t trust your partner, Elliot, it’s time to get a new one.” And then she walks away.
[]
It all falls quickly after that. She doesn’t talk to him the next day, and he won’t apologize, so they just avoid each other. And she tells Cragen about Plummer, and while he believes her, he does not rush to action. The system moves slowly, and she is feeling a little battered now. Like blood in the water.
She takes some vacation time then. Because everyone keeps trying to tell her how she should be feeling, and she has a partner she can’t trust any longer, and a man who has hurt her, and what she really wants to do is work this out herself. She knows, realistically, that it won’t happen, that Cragen can’t let it happen, and so she does the one thing she feels she can do. She stops the ride and gets off.
She just needs to think.
She doesn’t get time to think long. She goes looking for Plummer and she finds him. She realizes then, as she steps into the apartment where he holds a woman hostage, his gun to her head, that this is the culmination of a plan that has taken seven years to work out. Seven years of false imprisonment and resentment-hatred-toward her. She is long past that tip of the iceberg, and so far everything has fallen into place just the way Plummer has planned it.
He points his gun at the innocent victim, and Olivia points her gun at him, and she begs him not to do this, and he is both furious and giddy. Furious at her, giddy that his plan is nearly complete.
“There are no bullets in my gun,” he tells her, softly, gleefully. He wants her to shoot him. He wants to die, because he will belong to her then. He will be her greatest failure of all, and his blood will be on her hands, and she will rethink this and rethink this until she drives herself crazy.
And. She shoots him.
She can’t do anything else. She can’t trust his words that he has no bullets when he starts to squeeze the trigger and shoot the victim. She can’t hesitate. She shoots him, and he dies, and the police rush in behind her, and there really are no bullets in Plummer’s gun.
The culmination of his plan is complete, and there had been no way to avoid it. He is dead, but he still wins.
She is numb.
Elliot is there then, his hands on hers. He pushes her gun down and he takes it from her hands, and he speaks quietly to her, like he really cares about her, and she answers him because she is on autopilot now. But when he tries to lead her away, she cannot bear it. “You,” she orders. “Leave me alone.”
And she walks away from him.
He tries. That night, after she gives her statement and she sits at home, the rain pouring down outside. She sits in the darkness and she thinks about Eric Plummer’s plan and how it all evolved. How she played into it. She thinks about how she could have done things differently, in his original criminal case, in all of her old cases, in the situation with the hostage. Elliot knocks on her door, and he calls, and he yells at her to let him in, and she doesn’t move. Because she can be the same stone that he is.
Eventually, he gives up.
And that’s when she lets herself break.
[]
She doesn't take any more time off. She goes back because she can't think of anything else to do. Cragen talks to her, and tries to get a sense of her sanity, she thinks, but she doesn't have much to say. To him or to Elliot.
Department procedure dictates she take desk duty while her shooting is investigated. She and Elliot catch up on paperwork, and he stares at her over their desks and his leg jitters a million miles an hour underneath, and she is unaffected by all of it.
"Would you talk to me?" he asks, in a rough whisper, when there is a lull in the action around them.
She stops working for a moment, staring down at the papers on her desk. She feels useless and helpless and utterly alone. She wants to slide her arms around him and let him take her pain away, but just looking at him makes her hurt all over again. He didn't trust her. He went behind her back and did something she explicitly told him not to do. She can't even think about it, because it makes her eyes sting with her emotion. When he was struggling with the job and his temper, Cragen asked her to roll over on him, and she didn't. She had his back, and she trusted him when he said he was okay. And he repays her... with this?
She doesn't answer him. Or look at him. And he finally gets up and walks away.
[]
He's sitting on her front steps when she gets home that night. She hesitates in the middle of the street, when she sees him there, half wanting to turn around before he sees her and escape. But she can't run away from him forever, and she knows she's going to have to deal with this eventually. I knew it, she thinks as she walks toward him. I knew this would happen. It always happens. It never lasts.
"Hey," he says, softly, standing as she approaches.
She doesn't say anything at first. She just stands in front of him and waits.
He licks his lips nervously and looks into her eyes and asks, "You going to be okay?"
She holds his gaze for a moment, and then finally answers, "Yeah."
He exhales slowly. "I can't apologize, Liv. I'd do it again. I'd do whatever it takes to keep you safe."
She swallows, and her hurt flares again. "You didn't trust me."
"I trusted you," he insists. "I didn't trust Plummer. I didn't trust myself to keep you out of his sights."
She stares at him and shakes her head. "It wasn't up to you, Elliot. It was my decision."
"You're so stubborn," he argues, but with no venom in his voice.
She wants to laugh at that. At him calling her stubborn, when she's backed him up again and again, covering for him with Cragen whenever he grabbed a hold of a case and wouldn't let go, even when ordered to. Sometimes they are more alike than different.
He bows his head for a moment and then he looks at her, and his jaw is tight and his eyes are hurt and angry and everything in between. "I couldn't let him get at you. Not when I could prevent it. I'd rather have you hate me than have you dead, Olivia."
She stares at him for a long time, trying to swallow her hurt. "I don't hate you," she admits, because even at her angriest she could never tell him that. "But how do you expect me to trust you now?"
He still looks both angry and hurt, and she feels frustrated that he doesn't seem to understand her point of view.
"Can we get by this?" he asks, quietly.
She answers honestly, because she can't imagine being otherwise with him. "I don't know," she says, and she can hear the pain in her own voice.
She walks past him then, and into her apartment foyer, and he doesn't follow.
[]
It's a quiet week after that.
They still talk, but it tends to stay focused on their work. He is quiet and serious and distant, and she only notices half the time, when she isn't still remembering Eric Plummer's voice telling her there are no bullets in his gun. She looks up sometimes, and catches Elliot watching her. He doesn't look away immediately when she catches him, he only presses his lips together in a faint, grim sort of smile, and then he gradually looks away. It makes her feel curiously afraid, not of him, but for him. For herself. Six months ago he’d have cornered her somewhere and forced the issue. Not always her favorite way of handling things, but it was something she’d understood about him. Now, he is closed off and still.
She is still mad at him, but it battles with her affection and her loyalty. She holds onto the anger during the day, but she wakes in the night feeling his mouth on her skin and smelling him on her sheets, and she cannot stop the drop of her stomach when she realizes he is not there.
Surprisingly, they still have some remnant of their partnership left. Maybe they've learned it so well that they can now do it in their sleep. When she is finally cleared of fault in Plummer's shooting case, and Cragen lets her back out on the street, she and Elliot still work okay. It is quiet and there are things there between them that cannot be put away again, but they can talk in the neutral terms of their job, and they can get each other's back without thinking about it.
All the same, it is not something that can last, and she knows it. He is waiting for her for now, and she has to decide.
[]
She isn't sure at the end if he means to take the decision out of her hands or not. Maybe he doesn't even know himself. He's been falling for a long time now, and she's been treading water with him, trying to keep his head above the waves. But now he sinks, and though she is not with him, there is still a thread that binds them together. She can follow him down or she can cut the cord, and neither option, in the end, appeals to her.
Two weeks after Eric Plummer dies, she is starting to wake up from her dream. Spring is heavy in the air, and instead of being the season of birth, it is the time that everything ends.
Cragen calls her on a Sunday morning and tells her to come in, he'll meet her at the precinct. When she gets there, he is waiting, and he tells her that Bronx police found Justine Foster's body in an alley early that morning. She's already been identified by her parents. Her heart drops into her stomach.
"Shit," she swears, and Cragen only nods.
"When Elliot gets here, you two get out there and see what you can find," he says, and she feels her heart drop even lower because Elliot doesn't know yet.
“I’ll tell him,” she says, meeting Cragen’s gaze.
He looks skeptical. “Maybe it’s better if it comes from me, Olivia. He hasn’t been himself lately.”
She just fixes him with an unyielding stare and he sighs.
When Elliot comes in, still in his church clothes, she follows him into the locker room. He glances at her as she stands apart from him, and starts taking his shirt off without missing a beat. “What do we got?”
She takes a breath, watching as he hangs his shirt on a hook and grabs another. “They found Justine Foster this morning.”
He freezes for a long moment, and she gives it to him, watching as he tilts his head down and swallows and prepares himself. Then he grabs the door of his locker and stares into it, carefully not looking at her, and she watches the muscles in his bare back flex a bit as he breathes. He knows what’s coming. “And?” he asks, voice rough.
“She’s dead, El.”
He keeps himself carefully turned away from her, and he stands there, still and silent, for a long minute. And then he nods, slowly, but she hears his breathing getting louder, and he moves, restlessly, from foot to foot and he glances around and she hears a wet sound in his throat, once, and then… Then he is only a blur of motion. She hears the startling, loud BANG of his fist hitting the locker, once, then again and again, and she thinks at first that he is hitting the metal so hard he is stripping the paint off, but then she realizes that it is blood. And she’s stepping forward and grabbing his shoulder, grabbing his arms, and he tries to shake her off, but she crowds him into the corner, and then he finally stops and he still won’t look at her. He turns his head to the side and closes his eyes and grits his teeth, and she doesn’t know what to do, because they are broken now. So she rests her forehead against his shoulder and keeps his wrists tightly in her fingers, and they both just breathe for a little while.
[]
“I should have taken that bastard out,” Elliot growls as she drives them to the scene. “Fuck the job. I should have grabbed David Jordan by the ankles and dangled him off the roof and told him if he didn’t tell us where Roger was, he could splash all over the street below.”
“Elliot,” she says, firmly now, because he’s past the point of responding to softness. “We had nothing on him. There was nothing. We still aren’t even one hundred percent sure it was Roger who abducted her!”
“You know goddamned well it was them,” he retorts. “ Both of them! You have the same sixth sense I do. You know that asshole knew something!”
She’s trying to be logical about this, but he’s right. She had been just as sure as he was. “You can’t be a vigilante. We have to follow the rules.”
“The rules don’t work when kids are still dying!”
“And breaking the rules doesn’t work when innocent people are put away,” she responds.
He just shakes his head and clenches his fists and his jaw, and she can feel that dark, violent energy rolling off of him, and for the first time in maybe their entire partnership, she feels unsure of him. She feels apprehensive and a little uneasy.
He’s okay at the scene. Justine’s body is already at the morgue, where it had already been identified, and the Bronx detectives are working it. She talks to them while Elliot walks the scene. It’s a dump job, not the scene of death, and they’re willing to hand the case over. She calls it in, and Cragen says he’ll get Munch and Fin over to the appropriate Bronx precinct to pick up the evidence. So she and Elliot head to the morgue.
Justine’s parents are still there, sitting in the waiting area, clinging to each other, crying, and when they look up at her and Elliot, there is accusation in their eyes. You didn’t find her. You failed us. You could have saved her and you didn’t.
And they are right. She and Elliot did the best they could, but in the end it hadn’t been enough. The only thing they can do now is catch the perpetrator and give the Fosters someone to truly focus their rage on. In time they may or may not be okay with the SVU unit, but that was the price they all paid in this job. All of them.
Elliot grows eerily silent as they view Justine’s body. The M.E. gives them a preliminary rundown, but says he’ll transfer the body to Manhattan so Melinda can do the autopsy. He gives them a little plastic inhaler in an evidence bag. “This was in her pocket.”
It is the strongest evidence yet, and Olivia signs for it, and then they talk to Justine’s parents. She apologizes, Elliot apologizes, and there is no give in the Fosters. They are grieving parents, and she thinks that the best thing to do is leave them alone and work the case. Elliot follows her as she walks away.
She tries to talk on the drive back to the one six, but he doesn’t answer her. He sits silent and tense and very, very still in the passenger seat, and when she glances at his hands, his knuckles are bleeding again, the red smeared across his fingers and the back of his hand. She wants to stop and get the first aid kit out of the trunk and take care of him, but he is still rolling in that barely restrained rage that is making her uneasy. She is afraid to touch him. She is outside of that bubble of safety that used to grant her safe passage. Before, whenever he’d gotten angry, he’d been mad at the world, and she was part of him, part of the inner circle that he would defend to the death. And now she feels what it is like to be outside of that, and it is scarily ominous.
“Elliot,” she finally says, as she parks at the one six and turns the car off. “Please don’t do anything impulsive. We will get this guy.”
He sits still for a moment in the silence, before looking at her, and he has managed to turn himself to stone again, but not before she sees the glint of emotion in his eyes. He turns to climb out, and she wants to call to him and say, ”We’ll work this out, El. I can’t just let you go. You mean too much.” But she is not at all sure that he will even understand her words, so she bites her lip and follows him in.
[]
The techs go to work on the inhaler, and in just a few hours they figure out that it was not sold in any pharmacy in New York. That it was probably bought online through a Canadian pharmacy. Cragen takes over from there, and eventually they have a name and an address. The address is just a post office box; the name is most likely an alias. It will take a stakeout of the box to see if Roger Jordan will reveal himself.
“That’s too late,” Elliot warns Cragen, darkly. “He could grab someone else by then, and maybe he’ll never come back to that box.”
“It’s the best lead we have right now,” Cragen says.
Elliot just says nothing then, and she glances at him uneasily.
Cragen sends Elliot down to talk to Melinda, and keeps Olivia in his office and puts her in charge of the stakeout. He takes a breath before asking, “How’s he doing with this?”
She starts to lie again, and then she stops, because she is suddenly really worried. Maybe not for the first time, but certainly her strongest feeling yet, she feels like something bad might happen to Elliot, and it makes every nerve ending in her body feel wire-taut and almost painful. If this is how he felt when he put that protective detail on her, against her will or not… Jesus.
“I don’t know,” she answers.
“Find out,” Cragen orders.
She nods and goes out to start organizing the stakeout. But less than an hour later, Melinda calls and wants to know when Elliot is going to get there. She has a meeting in 20 minutes and can’t wait around all day.
Her breath stops in her lungs. She has a sinking feeling that she knows where Elliot has gone, and in his state of mind, she is truly frightened. She tells Warner that someone else will be down, and then she asks Munch to run down and do it. He starts to ask the question, and then he stops when he sees her expression. “Maybe you should tell Cragen,” he says.
“I can’t,” she says. “Not yet. Let me take care of it.”
He only nods and walks out of the room, trying to look casual. She hits Cragen’s office and tells him she’s going out for a while, and he looks up absently and then nods, and she manages to walk until she reaches the parking garage, and then she runs.
[]
David Jordan’s townhouse is quiet on a late Sunday afternoon. Elliot’s car is parked outside, and just seeing it causes her spirits to sink. Jordan had a maid and a few assistants she remembered from their first visit, but Sundays are probably their day off, and when she rings the bell, no one answers. When she tries the doorknob, it swings open, and she rests her hand on her gun, but doesn’t draw it. She creeps inside.
It is silent at first, and then she hears the deep undertones of Elliot’s voice, so she heads toward him. This is potentially career-ending for him, and there is another first in her mind as she thinks that maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad idea. She doesn’t care now if he’s her partner or not, if he’s in SVU or not. She just wants him to be alive and free and well. She can be partners with someone else, and Elliot can still be in her life, and at least he will be living. He will not eat his gun and he will not end up in prison and he will not be shot because he is being reckless and impulsive and unable to control his rage.
She turns a corner into a small hallway behind the main staircase, and they are there. Jordan breathing hard, face against the wall, a look of terror on his face, and Elliot with one hand on Jordan’s neck, keeping him pinned, the other holding his gun and pressing the barrel hard against Jordan’s skull.
Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck.
“That’s bullshit, David,” Elliot growls. “And we both know it. You know exactly where he is, and you’re going to tell me, right fucking now.”
“I swear I don’t know,” David pleads. “He makes sure not to tell me where he is, so I can’t tell!”
“Yeah?” Elliot digs the metal barrel in deeper and David grimaces. “Then that’s too bad.”
“Elliot!” She steps out, and he doesn’t even glance at her.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he says. “Turn around now and leave, and no one will know.”
She walks toward him, unafraid because it’s still Elliot, and he is scaring her but she still can’t quite believe he’d kill a suspect deliberately. “You know I won’t,” she says, softly.
“He knows where that asshole is,” Elliot says.
“I don’t!” David insists, and Elliot pushes him harder against the wall.
She walks slowly, approaching them, and Elliot finally glances at her, his eyes into hers, and she can see the pain and it cuts her. Sharply. Way too much, she thinks. And way too long. His time here is finished. Cragen had been right. He would never admit that he’d had enough. His point of view was skewed, and he hadn’t wanted to leave her. She hadn’t wanted him to leave her. She shouldn’t have trusted his word. She should have trusted her own desire to keep him safe.
“El,” she says. “You’ve got to stop now.”
“All he has to do is tell me where Roger is.”
“We know where Roger is,” she says. “Or, at least, we know where he will be. We can find him now.”
Elliot says nothing, but she can see the weariness in his face.
“This isn’t you,” she says, very softly, because she hates that Jordan gets to listen in. “Enough.”
He looks at her now, holds her gaze directly, his blue eyes resentful. “You think I’m a whack job now?” He’s sarcastic.
“No.”
He stares at her, and then he’s lifting the barrel of his gun, his hand still pressing Jordan into the wall. “Maybe you should,” he says, and then he’s gone, walking past her, leaving her and David Jordan standing in the hallway staring at each other.
[]
He doesn’t come in the next day, and when she calls his cell he doesn’t answer. David Jordan doesn’t call in and complain, and that more than anything convinces her that when they find Roger, they will find out a lot more about David than he wants them to know. Cragen asks her about Elliot, and she tells him he’s taking the case hard and she doesn’t know where he is, but he needs the time off. And then she sits and worries and does her shift on the stakeout.
They catch Roger the next morning. He tries to sneak into the post office at 4 a.m. when he thinks no one will be there. When Fin nabs him, he has the key to the box and a picture of Justine in his pocket. She lets Fin handle the interrogation, and Roger breaks quickly, easily giving up David in his bid for leniency. He knows how the system works. David helped pick out the victim, gave Roger money and instructions, and they shared the bounty. She tries to call Elliot, but he still doesn’t answer, so she and Cragen go to pick David up. She doesn’t know then, if he’ll spill about Elliot or not, but there’s nothing she can do.
He squawks a little bit about police brutality, but mostly just tries to blame it all on Roger, and Cragen doesn’t even ask her if it’s true.
“He has so many charges right now that I can make that go away,” he tells her. “I’ve done worse. Don’t tell me anything else.”
She realizes that Elliot will probably be safe. At least from that charge. She also realizes what she has to do, should have already done. And Cragen beats her to it.
“Tell me the truth, Olivia,” he says, quietly. And she sighs.
“He’s done,” she tells him, softly.
Cragen nods, and his shoulders seem to sag a bit in relief. “I know it’s hard,” he says.
She thinks that she really hates irony. And if she could have that moment back again, she’d ask for the goddamn protective detail herself, so he wouldn’t have to. She rubs tiredly at her forehead. “He’d do anything for these victims, Captain. He doesn’t deserve this.”
“He deserves to be happy,” Cragen says, vehemently. “Before you transferred in, he was the best detective I had. Now you’re the best detective I have, and don’t think for a moment that I don’t credit Elliot with that. He did exactly what he needed to do. He made you better than he is.”
She swallows and stays silent.
“I’ll do what I can for him, okay?” he says.
She nods, absently, and then says, “Can you give me a day or two to find him first? Let me talk to him. If he puts in for a transfer himself…”
“Do it,” Cragen says immediately. “I can play off vacation days for him until then, but you’re going to have to find him fast.”
She nods and he dismisses her, and she calls Elliot’s cell phone again and leaves another message when he doesn’t answer. She’s grabbing her coat to drive to his place, when the phone on her desk rings, startling her.
She answers it. “Detective Benson.”
“Olivia, this is Kathy Stabler.” And her breath stops in her lungs for a moment.
“Oh,” she says, her heart pounding. “Hi.” She has met Elliot’s ex-wife a few times, knows that she kept his name for the sake of the kids. But she can’t imagine any reason why Kathy would call her unless it was about Elliot, and that scares her.
“I, um…” Kathy sighs. “I think you’re the right person to call about this. The way he talks about you…” She takes another moment, and Olivia swallows. “You care about him.”
“Kathy, what…”
“Do you know where he is?” Kathy asks suddenly.
Olivia hesitates, unsure for a moment whether she needs to cover Elliot’s ass or admit the truth. “No,” she finally says. “I don’t.”
“I do.”
Her heart speeds up. “Where is he, Kathy? It’s been… It’s been a difficult few months.”
“I just want you to know, I’d do it myself, I really would. I don’t hate him at all. I just… we got divorced for a reason, okay? And running around trying to pick up all his pieces is something I can’t do anymore. I couldn’t even do it when we were married, and I really do not want to start again now. Not if there’s someone else.”
“Kathy, where is he?” Olivia demands, her tone a little more impatient now.
“He’s at Holy Family.”
“Your church?”
“Yes. Father Jacobs called me. I guess he didn’t know who else to call. Elliot’s been there all afternoon, for hours, and he won’t talk to anyone. The Father is worried about him.”
Olivia stares over at his empty desk and takes a breath. He’s slipping beyond her grasp. Has slipped already, maybe too far. She feels lead in her stomach. This has to end, for his own good. As much as it will hurt. “Okay,” she says, quietly.
“You’ll go talk to him?”
“Yes.”
“You know where the church is?”
“Yeah.”
It’s silent for a moment and then Kathy says, “Thanks, Olivia. Like I said, I’d do it, but I think you know him better than I do these days. And the two of you…”
“It’s okay,” Olivia interjects, not wanting to get into a discussion of their relationship with his ex. “I’m going to go now, Kathy, okay?”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“Yeah.” Olivia hangs up and then sits for a moment, just breathing.
[]
She doesn’t attend church as a rule. Not since she was a kid, and even then her mother was sporadic about it, depending on her state of sobriety at the moment.
She is assailed by the deeply ingrained scent of incense as she walks through the doors. The high ceilings and the cavernous hall cause the silence to seem big and almost alive. She feels too aware of herself in churches. Too alone inside her own head.
Elliot is sitting in the front, halfway down the third pew. There are a few other patrons sitting and praying, but they are scattered around and silent. The priest-she assumes it is Father Jacob-is standing off to the side, and when he makes eye contact with her, it is with relief. He motions toward Elliot, and she nods.
She pauses just behind Elliot’s pew, watching him. He is staring at the crucifix over the altar, but his posture tells her he is a million miles away.
She sits down next to him. His eyes shift toward her and then back again, and he says nothing.
“We got Roger,” she says. “And David.”
His shoulders rise and fall as he breathes.
“I don’t think the thing with David is going to hurt you,” she tells him.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says, and his voice sounds scratchy and unused. It makes all her fear for him, all her affection boil up inside of her, and she aches.
God, she thinks, or maybe she’s praying since they’re inside a church. Let him be all right.
They are silent for a while, and she listens to the church, the way she can seem to hear the air move. “You worried me,” she says, quietly.
“I love you,” he rasps.
She stops breathing for a moment, overwhelmed. And she wonders about his confession, if it’s somehow consecrated by this place. She still cannot breathe, and her heart is breaking, she realizes. She can feel it splintering. “I love you too.” It feels like everything is spilling out of her when she says it out loud.
He closes his eyes.
“It’s time, Elliot,” she finally says.
He doesn’t even ask what she means. He just suddenly exhales, slowly, and then his shoulders slump. “Don’t give up on me, Olivia,” he whispers.
His hand is resting on his knee, and she slides her hand underneath his, palm up so she can lace her fingers with his. “I couldn’t even if I tried.”
His fingers close around hers. “I can’t leave you alone doing this job.”
“So, don’t,” she says. “Leave the job, El. Don’t leave me.”
His hand tightens around hers. “Is that an option?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says, and it feels like the weight of the world slips off of her as she says it. “Yes,” she repeats, because it is what she wants. What’s she’s always wanted. She just needed to find her own way to it.
He breathes deeply, and then he nods.
She takes his hand and presses his knuckles to her lips for one brief moment, the scars overridden with new scabs. Then she stands and tugs. “Come on.”
He stands, and she leads him out to the main aisle, and they walk slowly toward the door. “Where are we going?” he asks.
She pushes the big wooden doors open and they walk outside into the bright spring sunshine, and she thinks of the one word that will always be tied up between them.
“Home,” she says.
[]
fin
Part One / Part Two / Part Three / Part Four / Part Five
Author: surreallis
Fandom: Law and Order: SVU
Pairing/character: Elliot Stabler/Olivia Benson
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 47,000
Kink: Major = Restraints, angst, hand fixation, codependent cop partners. (Hey, it's a kink in the police procedural fandoms, trust me!) Mentions = Some power issues, topping from the bottom, wall sex, religious themes, tattoos.
Notes/Warnings: Graphic het sex, adult language, adult situations, mentions of rape and child abuse but nothing graphic.
Spoilers for SVU eps: Taken, Victims, Paranoia, Countdown, Scourge, Wrath.
Also, this contains the entirety of my short fic, Bound. I’ve always felt that fic deserved something bigger, and it was the building block I used to fuel this.
Thank you to lauridsen09 for reading and playing the beta, time and time again. You kept me sane and inspired, even when I wanted to chuck it all.
Summary: This job is her calling, it's her purpose in this world, and Elliot is the one who gave it to her. She's still having her beginning, and he's nearing his end, and his rage is dragging him down. She just wants to keep his head above water, before he drowns.
A season 2 and 3 rewrite AU in which Stabler is divorced before he and Benson become partners. Through one horrible year, they struggle with too much and fall into a sexual relationship in order to cope. In the end, it will either destroy them or give them salvation.
Artist: anr. Big smooches, bb! it's gorgeous and it re-energized me like you wouldn't believe, because I wanted this story to be worthy. ;)
Part Four
Part 5
[]
Elliot asks for time off the week before and over Christmas, and both she and Cragen breathe a sigh of relief. He needs time with his kids, and maybe Olivia needs a little time to herself too. Cragen has her run down peripheral information for Munch and Fin, and sometimes he sends her to scenes if they’ve been secured, so no one shoots her in the back as she investigates alone. And still, he asks her from time to time about Elliot, and she keeps telling him Elliot is fine, but he’s becoming less and less convinced.
She doesn’t want that pressure on her head, ending Elliot’s career in SVU. He can transfer, yes, but he’s stayed as long as he has for a reason, the same way she intends to stay as long as she can, and she doesn’t want to take that away from him. Maybe she also doesn’t want to lose him, and if they aren’t partners anymore, then what else would they be? You could date, her inner voice tones, and she knows it’s the logical move. And still she can’t place him in that same category as Michael and Brian and all the other men she’s dated and discarded. Or who have found her too trying and have walked away.
She fucks up just before Christmas. Maybe her head is just too mixed up, or maybe the pressure is getting to her, she doesn’t know. But she works a rape case with Fin and her senses are off. The woman’s exam comes back inconclusive, and her affect is off, and Olivia decides it’s a false report. Fin argues with her, but when she goes into interrogation, she rips the woman up one side and down the other, and Cragen finally comes in and pulls her out. She is just angry, because they have so many other bad cases, and this woman is wasting their time. Time that Justine Foster could be spending in agony, or maybe in the cold, cold ground already dead.
Then Fin nabs the rapist, and he confesses, and his story matches the victim’s to a T.
She almost throws her dinner up in the middle of the squad room.
She apologizes, and at least it was caught before they’d gone further with the case, but she knows that’s cold comfort to the victim. She just made the worst day of a woman’s life even more terrible, and that’s not something she just bounces back from.
It’s all too much. She doesn’t want to make another decision again for as long as she lives. She doesn’t want to have peoples’ fates in her hands anymore.
“It’s part of the job, Olivia,” Cragen tells her, and there’s an edge to his voice. She thinks he must be very tired of dealing with her and Elliot this year. But then he gets softer. “You’re on call tomorrow. I won’t call you in unless it’s absolutely necessary. Enjoy Christmas day for once and relax. Come back feeling stronger.”
For the first time she wants to tell him to forget it, to transfer her out, to make sure she can’t mess up anymore lives. And he sees it on her face.
“If you didn’t feel that way, then I’d have you out of here in a heartbeat. But I’m not letting you go now. You go home and you do whatever you have to do to deal with this, and then you come back and you work again, and you start saving people.”
And, really, what can she say to that? Logically she knows that she’ll feel better in a day or two, and Cragen’s faith in her is reassuring, even if she still feels like shit.
She sits in the crib and stares at the floor because she can’t stand to talk to anyone else that night. And she can’t stand to hear the holiday carols and see the lights. The guilt makes her sleepless and fidgety and she scrubs at her face with shaking hands until she can’t stand it anymore. She calls Elliot.
She doesn’t expect him to be home, so when he answers she is surprised into silence for a moment. “Hey,” she finally says. “I thought you’d be with your kids tonight. Christmas Eve.”
“I spent all day with them,” he says. “Kathy’s taking them to her mother’s for the rest of the holiday.”
“Oh. I’m sorry,” she says.
“It’s okay. It was a good week.”
“Good.”
“I’ve been trying to call your cell all evening,” he says. “You catch a case?”
She swallows then. “Yeah. Sorry. It’s on silent and I haven’t checked in a while.”
He’s quiet for a moment and then he says, “Liv, what is it?”
And she sags a bit, because he notices. Because she wants to tell him exactly what happened, and at the same time she doesn’t want him to know at all. She swallows again, feeling wetness against her eyelids. “I, uh… didn’t have my finest hour today.”
“Are you okay?”
She hestitates, not knowing quite how to answer that.
“I mean, did you get hurt?” he clarifies, and his voice is almost militant.
“No,” she says. “Not me. I… I thought a victim was lying about her rape.”
He breathes, and she listens to him.
“It’s okay,” he says. “It happens.”
She wants to laugh at that. At how often they use that nonsensical phrase to hand wave their own faults. It happens. It just happens. As if they have no control over themselves.
“Come over,” he says.
“I don’t think I’d be good company,” she says.
“You don’t have to be. I’ll be good enough for both of us.”
She does laugh at that, because he’s not always very funny.
“C’mon,” he says. “It’s Christmas Eve, Liv. You should be here.”
And she nods, even though he can’t hear her. “Okay.”
[]
She wonders at the way they seem to run to each other. When he’s bad off, he comes to her place. When she’s suffering, she goes to his. Coincidence? Or some strange power balance that shifts between them endlessly.
When she walks through his door, she stops in surprise. She hasn’t been here in a few weeks, and he has lights up and a tree, and of course he would, because his kids were visiting. But it still feels strange to her.
”Hey,” he says, brows furrowed, as he walks up to her. He’s in jeans and a sweatshirt, and she feels like she hasn’t seen him in years.
“Hey,” she says, roughly.
He puts an arm around her neck and kisses her and pulls her coat off, and then they sit on his sofa and she says, “I fucked up.”
“Yeah,” he agrees. His voice is even, and she’s just glad he isn’t trying to tell her that it isn’t her fault. “So you learn from this and next time you fuck up a little less.”
She takes a long, slow breath. “Maybe there shouldn’t be a next time.”
“Bullshit,” he says, sharply. “There will be a next time, and one after that, and probably one after that too. That’s the way it goes, Olivia, and you know it. We’re human. We fuck up.”
God, do they.
She bends over a bit, bracing her elbows on her knees and burying her face in her hands. “God. That’s what Cragen said too. He told me to suck it up and move on.”
“You can’t change the past,” Elliot says. “Only the future.”
She asks, “Can I take a shower?”
He nods. Then, “You…want me to come with you?”
She smiles faintly at that. “No. I just… I think I could use the time.”
He lets her go, and she goes into his bedroom and then she gets into his shower and turns it as hot as she can stand. It helps, standing under the hard wash of the hot spray, still feeling like a hundred pounds of weight is on her shoulders, but realizing that those closest to her don’t think she’s a total asshole. Not that it helps the victim…
She dries off and sits on his bed, and she feels strangely apathetic. He has a pile of clean clothes stacked there, and she grabs one of his flannel shirts from the top and slips it on, and then she goes and stands in the doorway and looks out at him as he sits in the living room watching TV. He looks up.
“I don’t want to… make any more decisions tonight,” she says, softly. “I just… don’t want to think about anything.”
He holds her gaze for a moment and then he switches off the TV and stands, and she feels her mouth run dry. She’s not really sure what she’s doing, but she hears Tanya King’s voice in her mind saying, “… however you got here, you’re here now, and it’s okay.”
He comes toward her, slowly, and then he puts his hands on her head and he leans down close and he says, “What do you want?” Like he did before.
And she shakes her head, because he’s not getting it. “I want to not decide,” she says. “I want… I want to be…” And then the words just stop coming, and she has no idea what to say. She wants to have all decisions made for her. She wants to have no responsibilities. She wants to just feel like someone is taking care of her. And she doesn’t know how to even tell him that, or what he’d even do about it. She doesn’t want to be tied up, although she’d do it if he asked, because she’s pretty sure that’s not really her thing so much. But she wants something, and she doesn’t know what.
He’s tilting her head up so he can look in her eyes, and then he leans down and he presses his lips to hers, and she opens her mouth for him. He kisses her for a while, and then he looks at her again, and his gaze is piercing, and it makes her heart speed up because he’s seeing something in her eyes and she has no idea what it is. “Stay here,” he says.
And then he goes into his kitchen and she hears him pouring a drink. When he comes back, he has a finger of amber liquid in a glass, and he hands it to her. “Drink it,” he orders.
She takes it but doesn’t drink.
“Drink it,” he says, quietly. “You’re too wound up.”
She drinks. Her blood warms up immediately. It’s enough take the edge off her nerves, but not even close to enough to get her buzzed. He takes the glass from her again, and sets it on a bookshelf, and then he says, “Get in the bedroom, Olivia.”
She blinks at him, and he steps close to her, pressing his lips to her forehead and then looking down at her. “You want this?” he asks. “You want to give up the power tonight?”
It clicks then, and she swallows. She feels suddenly very warm and excited and ridiculous and turned on. Is this what he feels when she puts the handcuffs on him, she wonders. She nods slowly.
“Then get. In. The bedroom. Olivia.” He enunciates each word.
And she goes.
It’s about flowing then. It’s letting herself go and trusting herself in his hands, and it is like all the weight melts off of her and leaves her bare and spinning and a little euphoric.
“Stop,” he says, when she starts to take his shirt off. “Leave it.” And all she can feel are his hands and his breath, and he says, “Put your palms on the wall.” And she does. And he takes her that way, so close to that first time in the parking garage, but without that desperate edge of rage. He strips off and leans against her back, and she feels drunk even though she barely had a shot. His hands cover hers and press them hard against the wall as he moves inside of her, and it takes a while. He tells her what he wants her to do and he sucks at her nape, and it’s like she’s being consumed by everything. Pleasure, pain, him, herself, the whole fucking world. She does nothing but rest her forehead against the wall, listen to their breathing, and feel him. When she comes she feels like she’s not even part of reality anymore. He must come too, because she feels it between her legs, but she is still so wired and weary at the same time that she doesn’t really know. She is weak afterwards, and he grabs her up and she feels his sheets and his mattress beneath her, and she just sinks down into the relief and the warmth and her own, dark sleep.
[]
When she wakes, the daylight is flooding into the room and Elliot is lying next to her, looking at her. She stares back for a moment, blankly, until the night comes back to her, and then she feels her skin heat up. She doesn’t know what to say. To him or to herself.
“Olivia,” he says, voice sleep-rough.
She swallows thickly and meets his gaze.
“Go make me breakfast,” he orders.
She blinks at him and then furrows her brows. “Bite me.”
He laughs then, grinning, and turns over onto his back, and she rolls her eyes.
“I knew my luck would never hold until this morning,” he says. “You’d be right back to the same old Olivia.”
“Oh, screw you,” she says, shoving at him in irritation, but she’s starting to smile now because he hasn’t been this cheerful in months, and it’s a welcome sight.
He leans over and kisses her, briefly but deep, and says, “We have all day for that.” And then he slides out of bed and heads toward the bathroom.
She snorts in pretended scorn, but smiles when he shuts the door behind him. It’s Christmas day, she realizes. She wonders if he’ll want to go to church. Will he want her to go with him? Should she? And what about gifts? They agreed in their first year to never buy each other gifts. They go out for drinks on holidays or they spring for their favorite Thai food, but they don’t buy each other wallets or scarves or jewelry. But they weren’t sleeping together before either. She feels suddenly awkward and apprehensive about how to spend the day with him.
Jesus. Suck it up, Olivia.
And this is what she hates about relationships. The way you have to do things and you’re supposed to know what to do and when to do it, and it’s all just a gigantic puzzle to her.
She throws the blankets off and pulls on some underwear and Elliot’s shirt she was wearing the night before. God, it’s so cliché, but she doesn’t care. Sometimes cliches are cliches for a reason. Because they work.
She puts the coffee on in the kitchen, and then she opens his refrigerator, and he has so much food that her eyes widen. And, of course, he would have since his kids had been there that week, but he has eggs and bacon and milk and cheese and ham slices and fresh produce and about eight different plastic containers of leftovers that are unidentifiable but look delicious.
She has not had a good omelet in forever, so she pulls out the eggs and ham and cheese and onion and spreads them over the counter and starts working. When she catches the Christmas tree out of the corner of her eye, it feels festive, not lonely. And she thinks, Shit. I’m really fucked now.
Elliot comes into the kitchen in shorts and a T-shirt, and he smells like soap, and he blinks at her and then grins and wraps his arms around her and says, “This day is getting better and better!”
“Don’t get used to it,” she warns.
He leans against the counter and pulls her between his legs and against him while she watches the huge omelet she made cook in a pan, and he says, “Merry Christmas, Liv.”
She bites her lip and says, “Merry Christmas.”
And for one whole day, she feels like all the Christmas carols are true stories.
[]
There are some crimes that stun her with their complexity. Most of their cases are impulse crimes. People find themselves with an unusual opportunity. People get angry. People do horrible things when they have a broken heart. People take drugs and drink and their nasty natures come out to play.
But sometimes people plan things. Sometimes they spend years working out each little detail and it is their entire life’s work. Sometimes they put so much time and energy into their plans that when she finally sees the entire map, she is stunned by the scope of it all. You never really know when that is going to happen. You start seeing the results, the effects, and it is just the tip of the iceberg, but you don’t know that it is only the tip. You think it’s just another chunk of ice. Until suddenly it’s not.
That’s how Eric Plummer works.
When some of her former victims show up dead, together, laid out in a display on a body farm, she is spooked. It is absolutely too much of a coincidence, no matter how high risk some of them were. And seeing Clayton Derricks among them, the boy she’d put so much hard work and effort into, breaks her heart. Clayton was one of her first, and she had really seen then how she could affect someone else’s life. She had really seen how life could be unfair. She is angry and she is hurting and she is confused.
Elliot sprints into protective mode, and while she can’t blame him, she begins to find it really annoying. He’s never not been protective, and so she can’t fairly blame it on the fact that they’re sleeping together now, but it doesn’t help either. She feels vulnerable and exposed and like her life is out of her control, and she hates that. She fights with him over the case, and then over her old cases, and when he tells her he’s worried about her, she has to grit her teeth to keep from snapping at him. There is another murder, another old case, and they are all her failures, piling up. All her inner fears and her worries that she is not good enough. They are a spotlight on her ineptitude, and she’s starting to feel like an idiot.
The local FBI offers a protective detail, and she refuses, because she is not going to let this get to her any more than it already does. She does not need protection on top of her mistakes. Elliot argues with her, and she shuts him down, and for a few hours all she wants is to get away from him. He doesn’t get how she’s had to struggle for this job. He sees maybe more than most men, but he doesn’t know. How, despite all the advancements, the NYPD is still a man’s world and she has to work harder to gain the same respect he commands instantly by simply being male. Watching the worst of her work being paraded around is devastating.
“He is freeing them!” George waxes on enthusiastically, trying to profile their perpetrator.
“From what?” she demands, already weary.
“From the miserable existence you’ve left them in.”
And that’s about it, isn’t it? That’s pretty much what it’s about. She fucked up, and for some victims it doesn’t get better. And someone who might have good reason to hate her has decided to clean up after her, and he wants her to know about it. He wants her to see. He wants her to know her own weakness and be afraid.
And she is.
[]
She doesn’t want to let Elliot in when he knocks that night. She doesn’t want to talk about it to anyone. She just wants to sit down and think. She does let him in though, because in some ways she is glad she has him at her back, even if he’s seeing the worst of her, and because if she doesn’t let him in he will stand out there and knock all night. He’s that stubborn.
“I want you to reconsider the protective detail,” he says, when she’s locked the door behind him.
She turns and gives him a sidelong glance as she walks into her kitchen. “No.”
“Olivia,” he says, angrily, as she opens the refrigerator and takes out a bottle of beer. “This guy isn’t kidding around.”
She clenches her jaw. What does he think, that she’s having fun with this? She twists open the beer, takes a swallow, and then slams it down on the counter in front of him. It slides toward his arm and splashes him with foam, and he swears and grabs it, and she walks past. “Neither am I,” she retorts.
She walks as far away from him as the room will allow, and she leans against her wall and stares out her window, and he is quiet for a while and she feels him watching her.
“I’m worried about you,” he says, finally, in a low voice.
“I know,” she says.
She hears the quiet thunk as he sets the beer bottle down, and then the creak of her floor as he walks toward her, and then he’s right there, standing in her personal space, his hands on the wall behind her. She is affected by him, still, even in her anger, but for the first time she also feels a little trapped. Stifled.
“I couldn’t take it if something happened to you,” he says softly. His hand slides onto the back of her neck, his knuckles cushioning her from the wall.
She keeps her eyes on the space between the slats on her blinds. The blinking of tail lights in the street below. “Something could happen to me any day. I’m a cop. You going to keep a protective detail on me the rest of my career?”
He sighs. “Olivia…”
“You need to back off,” she warns him, and she pushes against his chest, forcing him to let her go and step back.
He stares at her, but he backs off a step, maybe two. No more. She takes a breath. “This is why I didn’t want to sleep with you at first.”
His brows furrow. “Why? Because I might actually care about you?”
“Because it would interfere with me doing my job!”
“Bullshit!” He steps closer again. “Fucking or not, Olivia, I care about my partner being hurt or killed!”
She runs a hand through her hair tiredly. “He’s killing my mistakes, Elliot. He’s hurting people because of me. I am not going to run away and hide behind a line of FBI agents and leave them out there all alone.”
“No one’s telling you to do that.”
“This is my responsibility.”
He moves in close again, suddenly, and she’s caught between him and the wall. She can smell his soap and his leather jacket and him, and she turns her head away, but he leans down close. “Look. I’m not going to pretend that my feelings for you have no bearing on this, but you’re being too single-minded, Olivia. We want to keep you safe because we care about you. We want to help you solve this case. You always want to run off and do these things alone, and you don’t have to!”
“I don’t have much of a choice this time, do I?” She pushes past him, and he lets her go. She walks to the center of the living room and looks back at him. “I don’t want a protective detail, Elliot. I’ll take the help, but this is my case. I knew this guy. Somewhere in my past, I knew this guy, and you need to trust me to work this out and take care of myself.”
He stares at her for a long time before he finally, slowly, nods, but he doesn’t speak and he doesn’t smile.
She lets him out a few minutes later, and he doesn’t spend the night.
[]
Plummer’s name comes up on a list of her former busts with a grudge. Even before she worked SVU, she put him away for rape only to have him found innocent when DNA evidence cleared him. It had been a hard pill to swallow, knowing she’d put an innocent man away for seven years before he’d been freed, but she had swallowed it, because it hadn’t been about her. It had been about Plummer, and he’d had the hard part. He’d been the one who’d had to serve time. She’d apologized and he’d looked at her as if he’d wanted to spit in her face, and she hadn’t blamed him. She’d offered no excuses. As a cop she knows it happens, but it’s just not an excuse. She’d simply walked away and tried to shove all the doubt about her own abilities aside. It didn’t completely work. She still can’t think about Eric Plummer without feeling a deep chasm of guilt. It’s like an old wound that has never healed correctly. It rips open again each time her mind settles on him.
That he might be behind the murders is… overwhelming.
Elliot walks on eggshells around her, and she knows she is being as unbearable as he is most of the time. She is slower to anger, but she’s never been less than an equal force, and sometimes they all forget that. She might be acting more on principle than she is on logic, and she knows that. She just can’t seem to help herself. Can’t bear to strip herself down for them. She will take this guy down, whether it’s Plummer or someone else from her past.
For a while, Elliot’s temper is nonexistent. He runs interference for her, but he is painfully obvious in his attempts at support, and it borders on patronizing and rubs her the wrong way. She has to wonder if she’d be feeling the same way if they weren’t involved, and it’s a hard question to answer because they’ve always been close. She’s wavering on the cusp of talking to him about it, just opening up, when he does the unforgivable.
He’s in a late meeting with the FBI and Cragen, and she goes for a beer with Munch and Fin. They do their duty and try to convince her that none of this is her fault, but she knows damn well that if it had been one of them they’d be thinking just like she is. All the same, they help. Be a detective long enough and you’ll make a big mistake. It’s inevitable, and that fact was driven home to her in spades during her Christmas fuck-up. You do the best you can, but no one is infallible. The pitcher of beer they share doesn’t even make a dent in her mood, so she finally packs it in and leaves them there.
In the darkness of winter, she walks along the street toward her apartment and tries to clear her mind. When the footsteps echo behind her, she is instantly aware. When they continue on with her, she draws her Sig. When she whirls on him, it is not Plummer, but another man, unfamiliar, who throws his hands up in alarm as she shouts at him to freeze. The words he shouts back don’t make sense for a moment as a car screeches to a halt next to them, and men start jumping out. She is distracted, but not by them. By the lone figure across the street, hesitating in a street light as he watches her.
Eric Plummer.
The man under her gun is still shouting though, and his words finally get through. “I’m FBI! I’m FBI!”
She looks at him in confusion, and when she looks back, Plummer is gone.
The chill he leaves behind settles deep in her bones.
[]
She makes them drive her to Elliot’s flat. The agents don’t ask questions but shoot her furtive looks, and she bristles under their scrutiny. She is so angry that he has ordered the protective detail anyway-against her wishes-after he stood there and nodded after she asked him to trust her, that she doesn’t even care if they see her yell at him.
He answers the door in sweatpants and a T-shirt, sleep still in his eyes, and he steps outside barefoot, his gaze drawn warily-and knowingly-to the car of agents behind her.
She just wants him to explain himself, and he is stone. “This guy is killing people, Olivia, and he’s after you.” He says it as if it’s the most logical thing in the world, and she can’t quite grasp the situation.
She doesn’t even know what to say. She wants to put a fist into his jaw. He is carefully schooling his expression as the agents look on, and so she just says, “If you can’t trust your partner, Elliot, it’s time to get a new one.” And then she walks away.
[]
It all falls quickly after that. She doesn’t talk to him the next day, and he won’t apologize, so they just avoid each other. And she tells Cragen about Plummer, and while he believes her, he does not rush to action. The system moves slowly, and she is feeling a little battered now. Like blood in the water.
She takes some vacation time then. Because everyone keeps trying to tell her how she should be feeling, and she has a partner she can’t trust any longer, and a man who has hurt her, and what she really wants to do is work this out herself. She knows, realistically, that it won’t happen, that Cragen can’t let it happen, and so she does the one thing she feels she can do. She stops the ride and gets off.
She just needs to think.
She doesn’t get time to think long. She goes looking for Plummer and she finds him. She realizes then, as she steps into the apartment where he holds a woman hostage, his gun to her head, that this is the culmination of a plan that has taken seven years to work out. Seven years of false imprisonment and resentment-hatred-toward her. She is long past that tip of the iceberg, and so far everything has fallen into place just the way Plummer has planned it.
He points his gun at the innocent victim, and Olivia points her gun at him, and she begs him not to do this, and he is both furious and giddy. Furious at her, giddy that his plan is nearly complete.
“There are no bullets in my gun,” he tells her, softly, gleefully. He wants her to shoot him. He wants to die, because he will belong to her then. He will be her greatest failure of all, and his blood will be on her hands, and she will rethink this and rethink this until she drives herself crazy.
And. She shoots him.
She can’t do anything else. She can’t trust his words that he has no bullets when he starts to squeeze the trigger and shoot the victim. She can’t hesitate. She shoots him, and he dies, and the police rush in behind her, and there really are no bullets in Plummer’s gun.
The culmination of his plan is complete, and there had been no way to avoid it. He is dead, but he still wins.
She is numb.
Elliot is there then, his hands on hers. He pushes her gun down and he takes it from her hands, and he speaks quietly to her, like he really cares about her, and she answers him because she is on autopilot now. But when he tries to lead her away, she cannot bear it. “You,” she orders. “Leave me alone.”
And she walks away from him.
He tries. That night, after she gives her statement and she sits at home, the rain pouring down outside. She sits in the darkness and she thinks about Eric Plummer’s plan and how it all evolved. How she played into it. She thinks about how she could have done things differently, in his original criminal case, in all of her old cases, in the situation with the hostage. Elliot knocks on her door, and he calls, and he yells at her to let him in, and she doesn’t move. Because she can be the same stone that he is.
Eventually, he gives up.
And that’s when she lets herself break.
[]
She doesn't take any more time off. She goes back because she can't think of anything else to do. Cragen talks to her, and tries to get a sense of her sanity, she thinks, but she doesn't have much to say. To him or to Elliot.
Department procedure dictates she take desk duty while her shooting is investigated. She and Elliot catch up on paperwork, and he stares at her over their desks and his leg jitters a million miles an hour underneath, and she is unaffected by all of it.
"Would you talk to me?" he asks, in a rough whisper, when there is a lull in the action around them.
She stops working for a moment, staring down at the papers on her desk. She feels useless and helpless and utterly alone. She wants to slide her arms around him and let him take her pain away, but just looking at him makes her hurt all over again. He didn't trust her. He went behind her back and did something she explicitly told him not to do. She can't even think about it, because it makes her eyes sting with her emotion. When he was struggling with the job and his temper, Cragen asked her to roll over on him, and she didn't. She had his back, and she trusted him when he said he was okay. And he repays her... with this?
She doesn't answer him. Or look at him. And he finally gets up and walks away.
[]
He's sitting on her front steps when she gets home that night. She hesitates in the middle of the street, when she sees him there, half wanting to turn around before he sees her and escape. But she can't run away from him forever, and she knows she's going to have to deal with this eventually. I knew it, she thinks as she walks toward him. I knew this would happen. It always happens. It never lasts.
"Hey," he says, softly, standing as she approaches.
She doesn't say anything at first. She just stands in front of him and waits.
He licks his lips nervously and looks into her eyes and asks, "You going to be okay?"
She holds his gaze for a moment, and then finally answers, "Yeah."
He exhales slowly. "I can't apologize, Liv. I'd do it again. I'd do whatever it takes to keep you safe."
She swallows, and her hurt flares again. "You didn't trust me."
"I trusted you," he insists. "I didn't trust Plummer. I didn't trust myself to keep you out of his sights."
She stares at him and shakes her head. "It wasn't up to you, Elliot. It was my decision."
"You're so stubborn," he argues, but with no venom in his voice.
She wants to laugh at that. At him calling her stubborn, when she's backed him up again and again, covering for him with Cragen whenever he grabbed a hold of a case and wouldn't let go, even when ordered to. Sometimes they are more alike than different.
He bows his head for a moment and then he looks at her, and his jaw is tight and his eyes are hurt and angry and everything in between. "I couldn't let him get at you. Not when I could prevent it. I'd rather have you hate me than have you dead, Olivia."
She stares at him for a long time, trying to swallow her hurt. "I don't hate you," she admits, because even at her angriest she could never tell him that. "But how do you expect me to trust you now?"
He still looks both angry and hurt, and she feels frustrated that he doesn't seem to understand her point of view.
"Can we get by this?" he asks, quietly.
She answers honestly, because she can't imagine being otherwise with him. "I don't know," she says, and she can hear the pain in her own voice.
She walks past him then, and into her apartment foyer, and he doesn't follow.
[]
It's a quiet week after that.
They still talk, but it tends to stay focused on their work. He is quiet and serious and distant, and she only notices half the time, when she isn't still remembering Eric Plummer's voice telling her there are no bullets in his gun. She looks up sometimes, and catches Elliot watching her. He doesn't look away immediately when she catches him, he only presses his lips together in a faint, grim sort of smile, and then he gradually looks away. It makes her feel curiously afraid, not of him, but for him. For herself. Six months ago he’d have cornered her somewhere and forced the issue. Not always her favorite way of handling things, but it was something she’d understood about him. Now, he is closed off and still.
She is still mad at him, but it battles with her affection and her loyalty. She holds onto the anger during the day, but she wakes in the night feeling his mouth on her skin and smelling him on her sheets, and she cannot stop the drop of her stomach when she realizes he is not there.
Surprisingly, they still have some remnant of their partnership left. Maybe they've learned it so well that they can now do it in their sleep. When she is finally cleared of fault in Plummer's shooting case, and Cragen lets her back out on the street, she and Elliot still work okay. It is quiet and there are things there between them that cannot be put away again, but they can talk in the neutral terms of their job, and they can get each other's back without thinking about it.
All the same, it is not something that can last, and she knows it. He is waiting for her for now, and she has to decide.
[]
She isn't sure at the end if he means to take the decision out of her hands or not. Maybe he doesn't even know himself. He's been falling for a long time now, and she's been treading water with him, trying to keep his head above the waves. But now he sinks, and though she is not with him, there is still a thread that binds them together. She can follow him down or she can cut the cord, and neither option, in the end, appeals to her.
Two weeks after Eric Plummer dies, she is starting to wake up from her dream. Spring is heavy in the air, and instead of being the season of birth, it is the time that everything ends.
Cragen calls her on a Sunday morning and tells her to come in, he'll meet her at the precinct. When she gets there, he is waiting, and he tells her that Bronx police found Justine Foster's body in an alley early that morning. She's already been identified by her parents. Her heart drops into her stomach.
"Shit," she swears, and Cragen only nods.
"When Elliot gets here, you two get out there and see what you can find," he says, and she feels her heart drop even lower because Elliot doesn't know yet.
“I’ll tell him,” she says, meeting Cragen’s gaze.
He looks skeptical. “Maybe it’s better if it comes from me, Olivia. He hasn’t been himself lately.”
She just fixes him with an unyielding stare and he sighs.
When Elliot comes in, still in his church clothes, she follows him into the locker room. He glances at her as she stands apart from him, and starts taking his shirt off without missing a beat. “What do we got?”
She takes a breath, watching as he hangs his shirt on a hook and grabs another. “They found Justine Foster this morning.”
He freezes for a long moment, and she gives it to him, watching as he tilts his head down and swallows and prepares himself. Then he grabs the door of his locker and stares into it, carefully not looking at her, and she watches the muscles in his bare back flex a bit as he breathes. He knows what’s coming. “And?” he asks, voice rough.
“She’s dead, El.”
He keeps himself carefully turned away from her, and he stands there, still and silent, for a long minute. And then he nods, slowly, but she hears his breathing getting louder, and he moves, restlessly, from foot to foot and he glances around and she hears a wet sound in his throat, once, and then… Then he is only a blur of motion. She hears the startling, loud BANG of his fist hitting the locker, once, then again and again, and she thinks at first that he is hitting the metal so hard he is stripping the paint off, but then she realizes that it is blood. And she’s stepping forward and grabbing his shoulder, grabbing his arms, and he tries to shake her off, but she crowds him into the corner, and then he finally stops and he still won’t look at her. He turns his head to the side and closes his eyes and grits his teeth, and she doesn’t know what to do, because they are broken now. So she rests her forehead against his shoulder and keeps his wrists tightly in her fingers, and they both just breathe for a little while.
[]
“I should have taken that bastard out,” Elliot growls as she drives them to the scene. “Fuck the job. I should have grabbed David Jordan by the ankles and dangled him off the roof and told him if he didn’t tell us where Roger was, he could splash all over the street below.”
“Elliot,” she says, firmly now, because he’s past the point of responding to softness. “We had nothing on him. There was nothing. We still aren’t even one hundred percent sure it was Roger who abducted her!”
“You know goddamned well it was them,” he retorts. “ Both of them! You have the same sixth sense I do. You know that asshole knew something!”
She’s trying to be logical about this, but he’s right. She had been just as sure as he was. “You can’t be a vigilante. We have to follow the rules.”
“The rules don’t work when kids are still dying!”
“And breaking the rules doesn’t work when innocent people are put away,” she responds.
He just shakes his head and clenches his fists and his jaw, and she can feel that dark, violent energy rolling off of him, and for the first time in maybe their entire partnership, she feels unsure of him. She feels apprehensive and a little uneasy.
He’s okay at the scene. Justine’s body is already at the morgue, where it had already been identified, and the Bronx detectives are working it. She talks to them while Elliot walks the scene. It’s a dump job, not the scene of death, and they’re willing to hand the case over. She calls it in, and Cragen says he’ll get Munch and Fin over to the appropriate Bronx precinct to pick up the evidence. So she and Elliot head to the morgue.
Justine’s parents are still there, sitting in the waiting area, clinging to each other, crying, and when they look up at her and Elliot, there is accusation in their eyes. You didn’t find her. You failed us. You could have saved her and you didn’t.
And they are right. She and Elliot did the best they could, but in the end it hadn’t been enough. The only thing they can do now is catch the perpetrator and give the Fosters someone to truly focus their rage on. In time they may or may not be okay with the SVU unit, but that was the price they all paid in this job. All of them.
Elliot grows eerily silent as they view Justine’s body. The M.E. gives them a preliminary rundown, but says he’ll transfer the body to Manhattan so Melinda can do the autopsy. He gives them a little plastic inhaler in an evidence bag. “This was in her pocket.”
It is the strongest evidence yet, and Olivia signs for it, and then they talk to Justine’s parents. She apologizes, Elliot apologizes, and there is no give in the Fosters. They are grieving parents, and she thinks that the best thing to do is leave them alone and work the case. Elliot follows her as she walks away.
She tries to talk on the drive back to the one six, but he doesn’t answer her. He sits silent and tense and very, very still in the passenger seat, and when she glances at his hands, his knuckles are bleeding again, the red smeared across his fingers and the back of his hand. She wants to stop and get the first aid kit out of the trunk and take care of him, but he is still rolling in that barely restrained rage that is making her uneasy. She is afraid to touch him. She is outside of that bubble of safety that used to grant her safe passage. Before, whenever he’d gotten angry, he’d been mad at the world, and she was part of him, part of the inner circle that he would defend to the death. And now she feels what it is like to be outside of that, and it is scarily ominous.
“Elliot,” she finally says, as she parks at the one six and turns the car off. “Please don’t do anything impulsive. We will get this guy.”
He sits still for a moment in the silence, before looking at her, and he has managed to turn himself to stone again, but not before she sees the glint of emotion in his eyes. He turns to climb out, and she wants to call to him and say, ”We’ll work this out, El. I can’t just let you go. You mean too much.” But she is not at all sure that he will even understand her words, so she bites her lip and follows him in.
[]
The techs go to work on the inhaler, and in just a few hours they figure out that it was not sold in any pharmacy in New York. That it was probably bought online through a Canadian pharmacy. Cragen takes over from there, and eventually they have a name and an address. The address is just a post office box; the name is most likely an alias. It will take a stakeout of the box to see if Roger Jordan will reveal himself.
“That’s too late,” Elliot warns Cragen, darkly. “He could grab someone else by then, and maybe he’ll never come back to that box.”
“It’s the best lead we have right now,” Cragen says.
Elliot just says nothing then, and she glances at him uneasily.
Cragen sends Elliot down to talk to Melinda, and keeps Olivia in his office and puts her in charge of the stakeout. He takes a breath before asking, “How’s he doing with this?”
She starts to lie again, and then she stops, because she is suddenly really worried. Maybe not for the first time, but certainly her strongest feeling yet, she feels like something bad might happen to Elliot, and it makes every nerve ending in her body feel wire-taut and almost painful. If this is how he felt when he put that protective detail on her, against her will or not… Jesus.
“I don’t know,” she answers.
“Find out,” Cragen orders.
She nods and goes out to start organizing the stakeout. But less than an hour later, Melinda calls and wants to know when Elliot is going to get there. She has a meeting in 20 minutes and can’t wait around all day.
Her breath stops in her lungs. She has a sinking feeling that she knows where Elliot has gone, and in his state of mind, she is truly frightened. She tells Warner that someone else will be down, and then she asks Munch to run down and do it. He starts to ask the question, and then he stops when he sees her expression. “Maybe you should tell Cragen,” he says.
“I can’t,” she says. “Not yet. Let me take care of it.”
He only nods and walks out of the room, trying to look casual. She hits Cragen’s office and tells him she’s going out for a while, and he looks up absently and then nods, and she manages to walk until she reaches the parking garage, and then she runs.
[]
David Jordan’s townhouse is quiet on a late Sunday afternoon. Elliot’s car is parked outside, and just seeing it causes her spirits to sink. Jordan had a maid and a few assistants she remembered from their first visit, but Sundays are probably their day off, and when she rings the bell, no one answers. When she tries the doorknob, it swings open, and she rests her hand on her gun, but doesn’t draw it. She creeps inside.
It is silent at first, and then she hears the deep undertones of Elliot’s voice, so she heads toward him. This is potentially career-ending for him, and there is another first in her mind as she thinks that maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad idea. She doesn’t care now if he’s her partner or not, if he’s in SVU or not. She just wants him to be alive and free and well. She can be partners with someone else, and Elliot can still be in her life, and at least he will be living. He will not eat his gun and he will not end up in prison and he will not be shot because he is being reckless and impulsive and unable to control his rage.
She turns a corner into a small hallway behind the main staircase, and they are there. Jordan breathing hard, face against the wall, a look of terror on his face, and Elliot with one hand on Jordan’s neck, keeping him pinned, the other holding his gun and pressing the barrel hard against Jordan’s skull.
Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck.
“That’s bullshit, David,” Elliot growls. “And we both know it. You know exactly where he is, and you’re going to tell me, right fucking now.”
“I swear I don’t know,” David pleads. “He makes sure not to tell me where he is, so I can’t tell!”
“Yeah?” Elliot digs the metal barrel in deeper and David grimaces. “Then that’s too bad.”
“Elliot!” She steps out, and he doesn’t even glance at her.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he says. “Turn around now and leave, and no one will know.”
She walks toward him, unafraid because it’s still Elliot, and he is scaring her but she still can’t quite believe he’d kill a suspect deliberately. “You know I won’t,” she says, softly.
“He knows where that asshole is,” Elliot says.
“I don’t!” David insists, and Elliot pushes him harder against the wall.
She walks slowly, approaching them, and Elliot finally glances at her, his eyes into hers, and she can see the pain and it cuts her. Sharply. Way too much, she thinks. And way too long. His time here is finished. Cragen had been right. He would never admit that he’d had enough. His point of view was skewed, and he hadn’t wanted to leave her. She hadn’t wanted him to leave her. She shouldn’t have trusted his word. She should have trusted her own desire to keep him safe.
“El,” she says. “You’ve got to stop now.”
“All he has to do is tell me where Roger is.”
“We know where Roger is,” she says. “Or, at least, we know where he will be. We can find him now.”
Elliot says nothing, but she can see the weariness in his face.
“This isn’t you,” she says, very softly, because she hates that Jordan gets to listen in. “Enough.”
He looks at her now, holds her gaze directly, his blue eyes resentful. “You think I’m a whack job now?” He’s sarcastic.
“No.”
He stares at her, and then he’s lifting the barrel of his gun, his hand still pressing Jordan into the wall. “Maybe you should,” he says, and then he’s gone, walking past her, leaving her and David Jordan standing in the hallway staring at each other.
[]
He doesn’t come in the next day, and when she calls his cell he doesn’t answer. David Jordan doesn’t call in and complain, and that more than anything convinces her that when they find Roger, they will find out a lot more about David than he wants them to know. Cragen asks her about Elliot, and she tells him he’s taking the case hard and she doesn’t know where he is, but he needs the time off. And then she sits and worries and does her shift on the stakeout.
They catch Roger the next morning. He tries to sneak into the post office at 4 a.m. when he thinks no one will be there. When Fin nabs him, he has the key to the box and a picture of Justine in his pocket. She lets Fin handle the interrogation, and Roger breaks quickly, easily giving up David in his bid for leniency. He knows how the system works. David helped pick out the victim, gave Roger money and instructions, and they shared the bounty. She tries to call Elliot, but he still doesn’t answer, so she and Cragen go to pick David up. She doesn’t know then, if he’ll spill about Elliot or not, but there’s nothing she can do.
He squawks a little bit about police brutality, but mostly just tries to blame it all on Roger, and Cragen doesn’t even ask her if it’s true.
“He has so many charges right now that I can make that go away,” he tells her. “I’ve done worse. Don’t tell me anything else.”
She realizes that Elliot will probably be safe. At least from that charge. She also realizes what she has to do, should have already done. And Cragen beats her to it.
“Tell me the truth, Olivia,” he says, quietly. And she sighs.
“He’s done,” she tells him, softly.
Cragen nods, and his shoulders seem to sag a bit in relief. “I know it’s hard,” he says.
She thinks that she really hates irony. And if she could have that moment back again, she’d ask for the goddamn protective detail herself, so he wouldn’t have to. She rubs tiredly at her forehead. “He’d do anything for these victims, Captain. He doesn’t deserve this.”
“He deserves to be happy,” Cragen says, vehemently. “Before you transferred in, he was the best detective I had. Now you’re the best detective I have, and don’t think for a moment that I don’t credit Elliot with that. He did exactly what he needed to do. He made you better than he is.”
She swallows and stays silent.
“I’ll do what I can for him, okay?” he says.
She nods, absently, and then says, “Can you give me a day or two to find him first? Let me talk to him. If he puts in for a transfer himself…”
“Do it,” Cragen says immediately. “I can play off vacation days for him until then, but you’re going to have to find him fast.”
She nods and he dismisses her, and she calls Elliot’s cell phone again and leaves another message when he doesn’t answer. She’s grabbing her coat to drive to his place, when the phone on her desk rings, startling her.
She answers it. “Detective Benson.”
“Olivia, this is Kathy Stabler.” And her breath stops in her lungs for a moment.
“Oh,” she says, her heart pounding. “Hi.” She has met Elliot’s ex-wife a few times, knows that she kept his name for the sake of the kids. But she can’t imagine any reason why Kathy would call her unless it was about Elliot, and that scares her.
“I, um…” Kathy sighs. “I think you’re the right person to call about this. The way he talks about you…” She takes another moment, and Olivia swallows. “You care about him.”
“Kathy, what…”
“Do you know where he is?” Kathy asks suddenly.
Olivia hesitates, unsure for a moment whether she needs to cover Elliot’s ass or admit the truth. “No,” she finally says. “I don’t.”
“I do.”
Her heart speeds up. “Where is he, Kathy? It’s been… It’s been a difficult few months.”
“I just want you to know, I’d do it myself, I really would. I don’t hate him at all. I just… we got divorced for a reason, okay? And running around trying to pick up all his pieces is something I can’t do anymore. I couldn’t even do it when we were married, and I really do not want to start again now. Not if there’s someone else.”
“Kathy, where is he?” Olivia demands, her tone a little more impatient now.
“He’s at Holy Family.”
“Your church?”
“Yes. Father Jacobs called me. I guess he didn’t know who else to call. Elliot’s been there all afternoon, for hours, and he won’t talk to anyone. The Father is worried about him.”
Olivia stares over at his empty desk and takes a breath. He’s slipping beyond her grasp. Has slipped already, maybe too far. She feels lead in her stomach. This has to end, for his own good. As much as it will hurt. “Okay,” she says, quietly.
“You’ll go talk to him?”
“Yes.”
“You know where the church is?”
“Yeah.”
It’s silent for a moment and then Kathy says, “Thanks, Olivia. Like I said, I’d do it, but I think you know him better than I do these days. And the two of you…”
“It’s okay,” Olivia interjects, not wanting to get into a discussion of their relationship with his ex. “I’m going to go now, Kathy, okay?”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“Yeah.” Olivia hangs up and then sits for a moment, just breathing.
[]
She doesn’t attend church as a rule. Not since she was a kid, and even then her mother was sporadic about it, depending on her state of sobriety at the moment.
She is assailed by the deeply ingrained scent of incense as she walks through the doors. The high ceilings and the cavernous hall cause the silence to seem big and almost alive. She feels too aware of herself in churches. Too alone inside her own head.
Elliot is sitting in the front, halfway down the third pew. There are a few other patrons sitting and praying, but they are scattered around and silent. The priest-she assumes it is Father Jacob-is standing off to the side, and when he makes eye contact with her, it is with relief. He motions toward Elliot, and she nods.
She pauses just behind Elliot’s pew, watching him. He is staring at the crucifix over the altar, but his posture tells her he is a million miles away.
She sits down next to him. His eyes shift toward her and then back again, and he says nothing.
“We got Roger,” she says. “And David.”
His shoulders rise and fall as he breathes.
“I don’t think the thing with David is going to hurt you,” she tells him.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says, and his voice sounds scratchy and unused. It makes all her fear for him, all her affection boil up inside of her, and she aches.
God, she thinks, or maybe she’s praying since they’re inside a church. Let him be all right.
They are silent for a while, and she listens to the church, the way she can seem to hear the air move. “You worried me,” she says, quietly.
“I love you,” he rasps.
She stops breathing for a moment, overwhelmed. And she wonders about his confession, if it’s somehow consecrated by this place. She still cannot breathe, and her heart is breaking, she realizes. She can feel it splintering. “I love you too.” It feels like everything is spilling out of her when she says it out loud.
He closes his eyes.
“It’s time, Elliot,” she finally says.
He doesn’t even ask what she means. He just suddenly exhales, slowly, and then his shoulders slump. “Don’t give up on me, Olivia,” he whispers.
His hand is resting on his knee, and she slides her hand underneath his, palm up so she can lace her fingers with his. “I couldn’t even if I tried.”
His fingers close around hers. “I can’t leave you alone doing this job.”
“So, don’t,” she says. “Leave the job, El. Don’t leave me.”
His hand tightens around hers. “Is that an option?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says, and it feels like the weight of the world slips off of her as she says it. “Yes,” she repeats, because it is what she wants. What’s she’s always wanted. She just needed to find her own way to it.
He breathes deeply, and then he nods.
She takes his hand and presses his knuckles to her lips for one brief moment, the scars overridden with new scabs. Then she stands and tugs. “Come on.”
He stands, and she leads him out to the main aisle, and they walk slowly toward the door. “Where are we going?” he asks.
She pushes the big wooden doors open and they walk outside into the bright spring sunshine, and she thinks of the one word that will always be tied up between them.
“Home,” she says.
[]
fin
Part One / Part Two / Part Three / Part Four / Part Five