Chapter Text
Elliot’s halfway into his second glass of scotch when someone slides onto the barstool next to him, letting out a sigh as he waits for the barkeep to come back over to where they’re sitting. It’s dim, at nine-thirty in this dive bar in Sofia, with the worn bartop and the truly bizarre music selection — eighties pop one minute, Bulgarian folk in the next — and Elliot doesn’t bother turning to see who the newcomer is.
No, he’s perfectly content in his relative solitude, staring down into his glass like it contains the secrets to the universe. Maybe it does.
Besides, it’s not like he speaks Bulgarian anyway.
Elliot sighs, takes a sip of his scotch and watches the amber liquid swirl around in the tumbler as he sets it back down on the paper napkin in front of him. The smooth burn of the scotch helps ground him, stops him from getting too lost in his own thoughts.
Tomorrow, he has to pull himself together, get up in his crappy budget hotel room, put on a suit and go meet his next client. He’ll follow the bastard around for a month and a half, standing sentry for some rich sleazebag who owns half a dozen villas and three yachts for good measure, and then he’ll head back to Kathy and Eli for a few weeks.
The two of them are in London, in the little flat they’ve all called home for the past two years, after Elliot’s security gigs started looking far more lucrative overseas.
So they packed up all their things and said goodbye to the house in Queens, telling Eli they were going on an adventure. Kathy’s taken to it all like a fish to water; she loves exploring London with Eli in tow — just this afternoon, Elliot had gotten a series of texts from his wife, pictures of them both in Kensington Gardens, grinning as they looked at the swans.
He’d smiled, and tried his hardest to ignore the tightness in his chest at the sight.
God, he’s a fucking bastard.
It’s been three years since he left the one-six. Since he hung up his shield and put in his papers and admitted that the job was eating him up from the inside, hollowing him out day by day. It’s been three years since he told Cragen he couldn’t say goodbye.
It’s been three years since he’s heard Olivia’s voice.
And fuck, if he doesn’t miss it — doesn’t miss her — every goddamn day. He tries, he really tries, to live in the moment with Kathy, to be a good father to Eli (and he thinks he’s actually not doing too badly with the latter), to embrace this new chapter in their lives.
It was his choice, after all. To make a clean break and leave without a word, to set her free. To do the right thing, the honourable thing — to choose his family, and let Olivia live her life unburdened by him. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t fucking hurt, to know that Olivia is still back in New York, probably thriving without him. Or at least he keeps telling himself that. Anything else is unthinkable, to him.
Elliot’s train of thought is interrupted when the barkeep approaches his neighbour. “Bira molya,” the guy says, in what Elliot assumes is heavily accented Bulgarian. And then, in English for good measure, “Beer, please.”
“Dobre,” the barkeep replies, turning around to get a glass.
Elliot looks over at the newcomer, gives him a once over. Well, this he didn’t expect.
The guy is tall, broad-shouldered, greying with a salt and pepper beard. He’s taken off his coat and is left in a dress shirt and blazer. Not exactly the standard attire for this dump.
Elliot can’t help but wonder what the fuck an American is doing here, in a random corner of Sofia, off the beaten path.
“Blagodarya,” the guy says when the barkeep sets his beer down in front of him, raising his glass before he takes a sip. Thank you.
The guy doesn’t seem to have noticed Elliot, too busy scrolling on his phone, but the curiosity is getting the better of him, and quite frankly, it might be nice to speak with an American for a change. Commiserate over the lack of football — the real kind — and the way the burgers never taste quite right.
“Cheers,” Elliot says, when the guy lifts his beer to take another sip. The newcomer looks over, then, raising his glass to meet Elliot’s proffered one.
“Cheers,” he replies. “Didn’t expect to run into another American here.”
Elliot lets out a chuckle. “Me neither.”
“Declan,” the guy introduces himself, “Declan Murphy.”
“Elliot Stabler.”
Murphy sets his beer down and gives the bar a cursory glance, from the sticky wood of the bartop to the ancient dart board hanging in a corner. The place is dank, and the smell of cigarette smoke permeates the air, mixing in with stale beer and vodka. It’s really not the kind of joint Elliot wanted to find himself in on a Tuesday night, but, well.
Here he is.
“So what brings you to this dump?” Murphy asks, and Elliot huffs out a laugh.
“A shitty recommendation from a co-worker. I’m in private security, gig starts tomorrow.” Elliot gives a half-shrug. “Marginally better than sitting in a crappy hotel room all night.”
Murphy laughs. “Shitty’s one word for it,” he says, and then: “How’d you end up overseas?”
“Retired NYPD,” Elliot answers, and watches curiously as Murphy’s eyes widen. “Made the move when the gigs here started paying better.”
“No shit,” he says. “I’m liaising with JTTF and Narcotics, I go UC in three days.”
Jesus, Elliot thinks, what are the fucking odds?
“Small world,” he says eventually.
Murphy just nods, takes a swig of his beer. “How long you been off the force?”
“Three years.”
“Ah. Pretty sure I was UC at the time,” Murphy says. “Just came off a stint back in Manhattan, actually. Temporary CO for SVU.”
Shit, shit, shit.
Oh, this cannot be happening. At Murphy’s words, Elliot blanches, and he feels a cold sweat building on the back of his neck. What the fuck?
The perfect stranger sitting next to him in this dive bar in Bulgaria just happens to be SVU’s last commanding officer, and Elliot suddenly feels vaguely ill. Murphy was SVU, which means he knows Olivia, which means he knows how she’s doing — what her life is like, now.
He could give Elliot answers to all the questions he’s steadfastly refused to ask for three years. Elliot spent months convincing himself that a clean break was what he needed, that he would only be able to move forward if he cut Olivia out of his life entirely, but now, here with Murphy in this dingy bar in the middle of Eastern Europe, Elliot realizes his plan was really full of shit.
He feels like an addict being offered a hit, and it’s taking everything in Elliot’s power not to start asking questions immediately.
It’s only the thought of Kathy and Eli, happy back in London, who finally have a version of Elliot — the husband and the father — that they’ve so long deserved, that stops him. He knew it after he listened to the first two voicemails Olivia sent him after the shooting; if he so much as heard her voice one more time, he wouldn’t have been able to leave.
She’s his siren’s call in choppy seas; his anchor.
Without her, he’s adrift, trying his hardest to stay above water. Kathy and Eli, his kids in New York, they’re the only reason he hasn’t yet drowned.
Still.
Elliot can’t help himself, can’t fight the curiosity that’s burning him from the inside out. He’s always been powerless, when it comes to her.
“Manhattan SVU?” he asks, trying and probably failing to keep his cool. He’s gripping his glass like a vise. “Got an old buddy there, Fin Tutuola,” Elliot says.
It’s not a lie; once upon a time, he genuinely thinks he could have called Fin a friend. Not one he’d go to a ball game with, but still. Someone he trusted to have his back, just as Elliot had his.
It’s not the whole truth though, either, but Elliot doesn’t want to get into that. Not now. Not when Murphy’s mere existence still makes him feel like his whole world has tilted on its axis.
Something like recognition flashes in Murphy’s eyes, then. “Good police,” he says, nods his head approvingly. “Damn protective of his sergeant. Should be, after the hell she went through. It’s a miracle she made it out of it with her shield still intact. Bloody fucking mess that was.”
Elliot can see how Murphy shivers, shakes his head. Dread settles itself deep in Elliot’s gut, cold and impossibly heavy. There’s only one person Fin would be protective of like this, and Elliot thinks he might throw up.
“Benson?” he manages to croak out around the lump that’s formed in his throat. Murphy nods. Elliot can hear the blood roaring in his ears, and it’s taking all his willpower not to punch the nearest wall.
Olivia.
Something happened to Olivia.
Olivia went through hell, and Elliot wasn’t there for her.
Fuck.
“What happened?” Elliot stutters out, half-desperate. The dread pooling low in his belly spreads out through his veins like molasses, slow and cloying. He holds his breath as Murphy shakes his head, clearly remembering what happened. Elliot’s brain is working overdrive, coming up with worst-case scenarios, all of them more gruesome than the next.
Every one of them ends with Olivia, shaken and terrified in a hospital bed, and Elliot feels like his heart is shattering into a million pieces, right there in his chest.
“You didn’t hear?” Murphy asks. Elliot shakes his head no, and Murphy quirks his brow, clearly surprised. “Feels like everyone did. Kidnapped and tortured for four days by a sick bastard; he almost walked at trial. Ended up killing himself right in front of her face when he broke out of prison, tried to frame her for it. The sick fuck deserves to rot in hell, if you ask me.”
Kidnapped. Tortured. Four days.
Every horror Elliot has ever faced in his decade and a half in SVU is flashing across his mind, now, a zoetrope of cruelty in garish technicolour. Assaults, rapes, women drugged and beaten bloody. And it’s Olivia’s face on all their bodies, Olivia’s screams, Olivia’s whimpers of pain.
It’s sheer torture, going through his mental rolodex of depravity, and Elliot braces himself on the bartop, gripping the edge so hard his knuckles turn white.
He feels like he’s going to be sick.
“Liv—” he scrapes out, eventually, and he doesn’t recognize his own voice anymore; it’s a desperate, cracked thing.
Murphy looks over at Elliot, a question in his gaze. “You know her?”
Elliot swallows thickly. It's no use pretending, anymore. No use keeping the ruse intact.
“She was my partner for thirteen years,” he manages. “My best friend.”
“Jesus,” Murphy says.
“When?” Elliot chokes out, and he’s desperate now, frantic. Where the fuck was he, when this happened? How did he have no idea?
Murphy takes a second. “May of 2013,” he says eventually, and Elliot scrambles to do the math. A year ago and change… he’d been in Poland, cut off from everyone and everything, including Kathy and the kids.
“Fuck,” Elliot says. “I was under at the time.”
Murphy nods; Elliot is selfishly glad that he understands how these things go. “And you never heard anything, after?” he asks, and Elliot can only shake his head dumbly. Murphy motions for the bartender, then, and orders them both another round of scotch in broken Bulgarian. “Figured you could use another,” he says, and Elliot nods, grateful.
He takes a sip, winces.
“How did he—?”
“I wasn’t there the first time he had her,” and oh, Jesus, the first time? The urge to punch something is getting stronger by the minute. “He liked to flash women in the park, sick freak. Raped and tortured a witness; they couldn’t make the charges stick.”
Elliot listens to Murphy talk about the psychopath — Lewis, his name is Lewis — how he had Olivia, how they found her, beaten and bloody, in a beach house. When he says she almost beat the bastard to death with a pole from the bedframe, Elliot can’t stop the surge of pride in his chest.
Good girl, he thinks. Of course she fought like hell.
“No one noticed?” He’s stuck on that detail, can’t stop thinking of late-night texts and “blink your lights” and the fact that no one had heard from her in days, and it didn’t set off any alarm bells. Jesus Christ, he should have been there.
The guilt is slowly eating him alive.
“No, she’d been given a few days off,” Murphy says, shrugging.
“Fuck,” Elliot grits out. “I would’ve—”
Murphy claps a hand on Elliot’s back, then. “Don’t,” he says, voice sterner than he’s heard him all night. “Don’t go there. It won’t do anyone any good to play out the hypotheticals.”
Elliot knows Murphy is right, but that doesn’t mean his treacherous heart isn’t playing every single what-if , every single version of this story that ends with Olivia, alive and well and unharmed — and in his arms — on loop.
But: “You said that was the first time.” Fuck, Elliot doesn’t know much more of this he can take.
Murphy nods. “He broke out of prison a year later.”
The second time Lewis had her is just as bad as the first, and Elliot thinks no amount of scotch on this earth could numb the absolute horror of hearing about the Russian roulette in the granary, of Lewis deliberately orchestrating his death so that Olivia would fall under suspicion.
Elliot is damn grateful the bastard is rotting in an unmarked grave somewhere, but fuck, if he wouldn’t have gotten a sick sense of satisfaction from personally wringing his neck.
“Fuck,” Elliot mutters, when Murphy is finally done, and he tells him how close it was, in that grand jury. “Fuck. I know I have no right to ask this, no right at all, but did he—”
Murphy must see the absolute anguish in Elliot’s features, because his expression softens and he shakes his head. “No, he didn’t. Trial docs say he came close, but no.”
“Oh, thank God.”
Elliot sags into himself on the barstool, expelling a breath as the relief of it washes over him like a tidal wave. Small mercies, he thinks. It doesn’t erase a single second of the sheer horror Olivia has faced, but at least, Elliot thinks, at least she was spared this.
“How is she?” Elliot asks, suddenly remembering that Murphy referred to her as the sergeant, before.
Murphy smiles. “She’s gonna be okay. She’s the strongest person I’ve ever met.”
“Yeah, yeah she is.”
The surge of pride Elliot felt earlier is back in full force, as he thinks about Olivia in that beach house, in the courtroom, in that granary — looking the Devil in the face each time and not letting him break her. Olivia has always been a fighter, has always been stronger than Elliot. It’s a strength that was born from necessity, from a childhood filled with too much loneliness and pain and second-guessing, too many people who disappeared.
Elliot is one of them, and fuck, if he hasn’t regretted leaving her every single day since.
For all the justifications, all the lies he told himself, he knows he betrayed her. Knows he broke her heart. They were too close, at the end, too tied up in one another — both on the job and off — and once IAB had come calling, well.
He was not going to risk dragging her down with him.
But God, he’d undo it all in a heartbeat if it meant she never got hurt.
“You okay, man?” Murphy asks, and Elliot realizes he’s been staring off into space for the past few minutes, utterly lost in his own head. All he can think about is Olivia, and he knows Murphy said she’s okay, but God, he’s not going to be sure of it until he sees her with his own two eyes, alive and breathing in front of him.
This he knows with complete certainty.
Elliot shakes himself out of it. “Yeah, uh. I gotta—” he starts, and there’s a sudden urgency in his tone. Murphy gives him an understanding look.
“Go,” he says, as if he’s read Elliot’s mind. “I got the tab.”
“Thank you,” Elliot mutters, “thank you for…”
“I know.” Murphy gives him a clap on the back as Elliot reaches for his jacket, halfway on autopilot already. “Tell the squad I said hello.”
/
He makes three calls the minute he closes his hotel room door.
The first is to his boss, cancelling the gig and not even batting an eyelash as he gets chewed out from the other end of the line. He deserves it, he knows, but right now, he cannot bring himself to give a single shit about any of the consequences.
The second is to Kathy, and Jesus, it’s not at all what Elliot was expecting. He’s half-delirious with adrenaline and worry when he stutters out the whole mess — that Olivia got hurt, that he wasn’t there, that it’s eating him alive.
And Kathy, Kathy just tells him to get on a plane, that she’s surprised the three of them lasted for this long, away from New York. That their marriage really hasn’t been that much of a marriage in years; that it’s really more like friends who share a house and five children.
And shit, Elliot doesn’t have any time to unpack that, just manages to tell Kathy he loves her — and fuck, he does, just not like he should — and that he’ll be in touch once he lands.
“We’ll talk when you get there,” Kathy says, and Elliot lets out a breath.
The third call is for plane tickets — a one-way seat on the earliest flight out of Sofia, with a layover in Amsterdam before he gets to JFK. He hadn’t even unpacked his suitcase when he got to the city, so he just grabs it now and hails a cab, heading to the airport while he tries his best to drown out the thundering noise of his own blood rushing in his ears.
/
It’s midday when he lands in New York, wired and jittery and half-desperate already. He can’t remember the last time he ate. Elliot briefly thinks about going to Olivia’s apartment but then decides against it, letting the cab drive him to the precinct instead.
He hasn’t been at the one-six since he dropped off his papers, and he wonders what it’ll feel like, to step back into the room where he can still picture Jenna’s lifeless body on the ground, lying in a pool of her own blood, destruction in her wake.
Elliot shivers at the image, shakes himself out of it. None of that matters, now. All that’s important is that he sees Olivia.
It’s surreal, stepping into the elevator to go up to the squadroom, suitcase in tow. It feels achingly familiar but foreign all the same, and Elliot’s heart pounds in his chest as they get closer and closer to SVU.
He has no idea what’s going to happen when he sees Olivia. There’s a high chance she’ll punch him in the face, and quite honestly, he’d deserve it. But he cannot go a single second longer without making sure she’s okay — physically, at least. Mentally? That’s a whole different story.
The elevator doors open with a ding, and Elliot holds his breath. The din of the squadroom is just like he remembers, phones trilling and unis bustling around the space. They’ve moved some furniture around, but otherwise, it looks just like he left it three years ago.
“Stabler?” He hears Fin’s voice before he sees him, heading out of the captain’s office. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
Oh, fuck. He hadn’t even considered the possibility of seeing Fin again.
“Fin,” Elliot says, and watches as his former colleague squares his shoulders and narrows his eyes. “Is she—”
“Oh, you don’t wanna finish that question,” Fin bites out. “Three years, man. You disappeared for three years.”
Elliot scrubs a hand over his face. He’s tired, bone weary, but he deserves this, all of it. “I know. Fuck, I know.”
“Why are you here?” Fin asks again, and Elliot cringes.
“I ran into Murphy,” he says, and Fin’s eyes nearly bug out of his head. “Shitty bar in Bulgaria, we got to talking.”
“Jesus,” Fin mutters.
“Fin, I had no idea.” Elliot knows he sounds desperate, now, but he can’t help it. “I was undercover when it happened, I couldn’t call anyone for months. If I’d known—”
Fin eyes him, takes in his rumpled jacket and the bags under his eyes, the five-o’clock shadow on his face. “I know,” he says, and Elliot lets out the first breath of relief since he stepped foot in the city. “You fucked up bad when you left, man. But I know.”
“Thank you,” Elliot says. He doesn’t deserve any of his kindness, and God knows Fin hasn’t forgiven him for anything. Not that he should. But Elliot thinks he might tell him where Olivia is, and that’s all he cares about. “Listen, I know she’s probably not gonna want to see me, but is she—”
Elliot is cut off by the sound of a door opening, and he whips around to the captain’s office, stopping dead in his tracks at the sight that greets him.
Olivia, one hand on her hip and a furrow in her brow.
“Fin, you said—” She spots him then, from across the bullpen, and Elliot watches her eyes go wide, like she’s seen a ghost.
Fuck, all of this is his fault.
All the colour drains out of her face, and Elliot has to fight every part of his body that's screaming at him to run toward her and wrap her in his arms and never let go.
But even then, he doesn’t think he could, because it’s like his legs are lead and his feet have grown roots in the floor. Olivia, meanwhile, is gaping at him, utterly in shock.
“Elliot,” she finally manages, voice scarcely above a whisper.
His own voice is hoarser than he’s ever heard it before. “Liv.”