Chapter Text
It’s a slow, steady rain outside of his window tonight.
It’s been going for hours now, just like this. No thunder, no lightning; no sudden downpours or gusts of wind. Just the monotonous patter of rain on his patio as Elliot stares at his ceiling.
“You sure you’ll be ok? You’ll be able to sleep?”
His oldest daughter had asked him tonight before she’d left, concern written into the deep furrow in her brow and the doubt in her eyes. She’d eyed the bottles of painkillers and antibiotics she’d lined up behind his sink for him; ever the dutiful daughter of her mother, bearing the burden now.
Him.
Elliot lied, and told her he‘d sleep just fine.
He turns now to watch the rain, grimacing at the way the stitches on his stomach pull.
He could blame that, he knows. The still healing wound on his side, or the soreness that still lingers all over. The headache that still hasn’t really abated. The rain, outside and its persistent pattering - he has reasons he could give.
He could blame each and every one of them for keeping him up tonight.
It’d be another lie though, even just to himself.
Elliot knows what it is.
It keeps coming back. That dream - him, in a hospital bed, hand reaching for no one, calling out to her disappearing frame; the sound of her heels fading fast on linoleum as she flees. He wakes up at the last possible moment, right before Olivia Benson vanishes.
It keeps coming back, and he’s terrified to get to the end.
—
Olivia wakes with a jolt, heart pounding in her chest as she sits straight up in her bed.
Sweat is gathered on the back of her neck; behind her knees and where the waistband of her pajama pants meets skin. Her comforter has been kicked down, her restless legs moving even in sleep. It’s bunched by her ankles, twisted where she’d thrown it off.
Olivia lifts a hand to her chest.
She can feel it; the wild beat of her heart at the base of her throat. She presses down with her fingertips, willing it to slow the fuck down, to stop the dive into panic her whole body seems to be intent on taking over the dream she just had.
It doesn’t work.
There is no haziness, no slowness to her mind’s recall. The memory of the dream plays vivid and intense in her mind even now - fully awake. Like a compulsion on the part of her unconscious and conscious self both; forcing the images again and again.
Olivia kicks the covers away, feet to the ground as she tries, though.
“Shit,” she breathes out in the dark. “Shit, shit, shit. ”
She squints into the dark. The clock next to her bed glows: 02:43 in soothing yellow; the brightness dimmed almost all the way down. It’s the same soothing yellow she saw in her dream, that soft, ambient light of hospitals. The same light she followed down a long, quiet hallway, heels echoing in the emptiness.
To the last room, at the very end.
She’d sat down in her dream, she remembers. She’d made it to the edge of the bed where Elliot laid, in his empty room. It had been so quiet as she’d sat down; as she’d reached for him. No monitors beeping, no heavy footed nurses in the background.
Nothing.
She remembers wondering where his family went - where his mother was, where his kids had run off too - as she reached for him. He’d been lying so, so still in that bed. She remembers her hand, sliding on top of his to wake him up again.
“El,” she’d said softly.
“Elliot,” a second time. A third time, her frantic voice louder, frenzied as she tried to shake him awake, and realized. “Elliot?”
She remembers —
Olivia breathes in sharply, audible in the quiet of her room.
Just a dream, she tells herself. He’s fine.
When she’d left him, he’d been asleep, but alive. She’d stared down at him - his bruised and cut face; his newest wound bandaged, his breathing steady and even - and told herself she could go. He’d call or text in a few days when things settled down.
He was alive.
He is alive.
It was just a dream, she reminds herself again, but she’s already moving.
She reaches blindly for her phone in the dark. Still attached to the magnetic charger; Olivia tugs it too hard, too roughly, and the cord comes with it. She curses, but she doesn’t stop. With a thumb on the screen, she slides up the photo of Noah, punching in her passcode as fast as she can.
She’s on to her recent call list before she can talk herself out of it, pressing down on Stabler and lifting the phone to her ear.
—
The water in the glass next to Elliot’s bed moves a split second before his phone starts to vibrate.
He’d turned at some point, away from the rain and the lights outside his window, and he sees it.
The surface of the glass of water he’d filled to drink with the painkillers he didn’t actually bother to take moves from the inside out. It ripples, shifting; seemingly unbidden, and he blinks, sure he is seeing things again. Sure that it’s another delusion, sure that he’s fallen half asleep and he’s stuck in between reality and not yet again.
A split second later, his phone buzzes loudly.
When he sees the name on the screen - when he sits up, and reaches for it, and he sees it; Olivia Benson, no contact photo at all, just her name lighting up his screen - he’s not sure he’s actually, truly awake.
The phone in his hand is solid though, and the glass under his thumb is cold, and when he slides it open and presses it to his ear, nothing goes hazy or fades.
“Hey, hi — ”
He hears her exhale, like she’d been holding her breath.
“Elliot?”
Her voice is quiet, hoarse with something much more than sleep. She sounds distinctly uncertain, like she hadn’t been the one to make the call and she’s surprised he was the one to answer his own phone. Muffled, far away. For a moment, his heart starts to race; the bright and vivid recall of his dream in his mind. Her back, fading into the light as she leaves.
He shakes his head, clearing it away.
“Yeah, Liv - yeah, it’s me. Are you - is everything okay?”
He doesn’t bother disguising his shock at her calling. Before he’d gone under this time, they’d been in an okay enough place. They’d been in touch. They’d texted, on and off and on again. They’d called - less frequently. Not enough for him, but he wasn’t going to push it.
He’d been waiting for something to change.
They’d been in touch, though.
They just hadn’t been in the sort of touch that wouldn’t make him shocked at a call at almost three in the morning.
“Liv?”
There’s no answer for a moment, only the sharp, quick intake of breath on the other end of the line.
“Sorry,” she murmurs. “I shouldn’t have called so late.”
He hears the creak of a mattress; the groan of box springs. He doesn’t know if she’s getting in or out of her bed.
“I - sorry, it’s late, Elliot,” she says. Like it wasn’t her that picked up the phone and called; like she’s second guessing herself already. “It’s late, you just got out of the hospital.”
“Early,” he corrects her. “It’s early.”
He shifts in his own bed, scooting back against the headboard. He grimaces silently at the pain in his side. He wants to cut right through this small talk, cut right to the chase like they can. Like they just did. Her in the car four days ago, eyes soft even as she’d asked him if he wanted her to apologize. Him, on the steps of a library almost two years ago, saying sorry for his judgment and timing. They’re good at getting right to the point, even after decades of silence.
He wants to say exactly that: It’s three in the morning and you called me first, so let’s stop dancing around.
“What?” she says.
She’s stalling, he thinks. He can hear a door open, the click of the latch as she moves. Busying herself as she holds the phone to her ear. Distracting herself, even though she’d reached out first.
“It’s early,” he repeats again. “It’s not late, Liv. It’s early.”
He falls silent, waiting. He listens to Olivia walk down her hall. Her breathing, her footsteps, the click of a light. He can feel her hesitation, palpable. Normally he’d wait her out, but maybe it’s the fortieth near fucking death experience that has him less willing to endure the push away after she’d been the one to make the call.
“I wasn’t sleeping anyway,” he admits. “Were you?”
He stops short of telling her why.
“No,” she answers quietly. He hears the rush of air as she sighs. “No, I –”
He closes his eyes as she breaks off.
He can picture her, he thinks. In her kitchen doing the exact same thing. Closing her eyes, breathing in deep. Her hand at the base of her throat, or low across her stomach. The soft yellow light over her kitchen table flooding the room in the dark of the early morning, as she tries to figure out just what to confess.
The question stays silent, lodged in his throat: Why weren’t you sleeping?
“I woke up,” she says softly. “I was asleep and I woke up.”
At some point, he’d closed his own eyes, and he opens them back up now. The rain is still coming down, shimmering in the lights from the street.
“Bad dream?” he asks. “Or just –”
“Something like that,” she tells him.
She clears her throat, the indication of a boundary that she’s not willing to cross; a piece of her she’s not willing to share. What woke her up isn’t his knowledge to have, not tonight.
This morning, he corrects himself.
It’s morning.
Water turns on, splashing, loud in the stainless steel of her sink for a moment before it’s adjusted.
“What about you?” Olivia asks quietly.
She sounds less hesitant now. Her voice is low, that deep raspy tone she has now. So much of her has changed - for the better - but the timbre; the smoky quality of her voice now always makes him take pause. It's so different. He likes it so much, when he gets to hear it. When she fully lets down her walls for him.
He has to try so hard not to sink into it.
When he doesn’t answer, she presses on.
“Bad dream?”
“Yeah,” he admits, shaking off the slight daze. The water shuts off on her end. “Yeah, I uh — ” Elliot breathes and shifts in the bed, wincing, grunting at the ache in his side. Breathless from the pain for a second as he finishes. “Bad dream.”
“You ok?” she asks.
It’s quick, right on the tip of her tongue. Her antenna, perpetually fucking raised for him. His pain, her burden. He breathes in, slow and steady through his nose.
“I’m - yeah,” he says. “I’m ok, Liv.”
“Good,” she says and then Olivia makes a sympathetic noise, low and quiet in the back of her throat. It makes him hate himself, for a moment; makes him want to gnash his teeth and protest. In the hospital, she’d asked him, held his face in her hands as she‘d tried: Why do you have to make everything so difficult?
He doesn’t know the answer.
He bites at his bottom lip, and looks out the window. The concrete outside is damp, washed clean.
“You need to get some sleep,” Olivia tells him, her voice placating. It’s the same voice she uses on victims, he realizes. When she’d called him tonight, her voice had been different. There’d been a need there, he thinks, when she’d reached out first. “You - Elliot, you’ve been through a lot.”
Now she’s back to distance, right down to the far away tone of her voice.
“I thought it didn’t scare you,” he blurts out.
It’s unfair, he knows to throw those words back at her; the words she’d told him when no one knew exactly how he was going to wake up. They were a pacification, and they both knew it, even then. Of course she was scared. He’s not a fucking idiot.
Olivia’s voice is a warning.
“Elliot — ”
Maybe he is a fucking idiot.
“Is that why you called? To remind me?”
“You almost died, Elliot. Twice,” she tells him.
He hears the way it dips, the way it wavers on the last word and its a stupid fucking thing to feel smug about, her being upset at his brush with death. It’s selfish, and shitty, for him to feel this way, to act this way. Nothing about this is her fault.
Still.
“I know what happened, Liv. I was there,” he says gruffly.
Another beat of time, then her stubborn answer comes.
“You need sleep, Elliot.”
Ignoring his words, like he’s not even part of the conversation. Like he is back on that hospital bed, half aware and half not, while his brother makes plans for goddamn brisket for two over his body.
“Maybe that’s why you called, Liv,” he mutters, stupidly frustrated, his bitterness clear. “To see if I was getting enough sleep?”
“You know what, Elliot — ”
She stops.
He hears the beep of a coffee machine, her low, frustrated sigh. He shakes his head, before he remembers she can’t see it. He doesn’t need sleep. His mind may be muddled, but he’s clear about this. He’s clear about her. It’s been clear to him since the moment he saw her again. Even when he’s gone, even when he’s so far undercover he can’t remember where Elliot stops and someone else begins, she’s always there.
Even if she doesn’t know it, he realizes.
Even if it’s so fucking unclear to her, because he hasn’t been able to stay in one place long enough to tell her.
His frustration drops away, leeched right out of him in an instant. “Liv, look — ” His apology is right on his next breath, right on the tip of his tongue.
Olivia doesn’t give him the chance.
“I’ll call you, Elliot, just — ” Her voice is already fading away, already half gone. “When things slow down again, I’ll call you.”
By the time he tells her he’ll answer even if they don’t, she’s already gone.
—
Olivia stares at her phone after she hangs up.
That changed nothing,
She knows exactly what happened, exactly what she did. She felt the inevitable pull, and she pushed. The same old dance, the same old song. She hates that it feels more comfortable than what she actually wants.
The coffee pot gurgles next to her, hissing when the first drops hit the inside of the carafe. She tears her gaze away from the phone screen to look. It was crazy, she thinks, to actually get out of bed. To come out here at almost three in the morning and make a goddamn pot of coffee.
She’ll go back to sleep.
She jams her finger on the glowing red button on the coffee pot, turning it back off mid brew.
She’s going back to sleep.
She makes it all the way back to her bedroom before her phone rings in her hand.
—
“I don’t want to end the call like that.”
He blurts it out as soon as he hears her pick up. Too rushed, no air in his lungs, he’s sure he sounds a little frantic but fuck it.
He is.
More than a little bit, actually. He’s more than a little bit frantic because he’s extremely sure of what will happen if they end the call like this.
He adjusts.
Elliot takes a breath and he drops his voice lower, and he starts, slowly this time.
“Liv, I don’t want to end the call like that, please,” he repeats. “Do you?”
On the other end of the line, she’s silent for a moment longer. It occurs to him that she hasn’t said a thing since she picked up. Just like his dream, silent as she listens to him, right before she leaves. A moment goes by and then another, and he shuts his eyes and opens his mouth, ready to plead again.
“No.”
Olivia’s voice is quiet, but not small.
“No?”
“No,” she repeats softly. She follows it with a low, quick laugh, and he keeps his eyes shut, trying not to move at all. He holds his breath as he waits for the rest. “No. Believe it or not, I don’t want that either.”
Elliot exhales, quiet and relieved, and opens his eyes.
“Ok,” he answers. “Good.”
They talk until he swears the sky lightens just a little, dark and rainy to a deep shade of gray.
—
It rains for the next four days in a row.
The nights, too.
“This is - Christ.” Carisi had shaken his head five minutes ago in his office, his eyes lifting out the window to the sky. Gray clouds, and steady rain, the whole city blanketed in that god awful continuous feeling.
Her hip hasn’t stopped aching in four days.
“This is dismal,” Carisi had finished, turning back, handing her the sought after file he hadn’t bothered returning to her. “You parked close?”
It had been right on the tip of her tongue to snap back at him, to correct him. The weather wasn’t dismal. The weather was weather. What was dismal was this case, and every case. What was dismal was the state of things lately; all these cases ending in mistrials or guilty pleas with too short sentences. What was dismal was Elliot texting her from back up north two nights ago, bedside at a motel two miles from a tiny cemetery where Bunny was laid to rest.
What was dismal had nothing to do with the fucking rain, not at all.
She’d pressed her lips together and nodded, instead.
“Yes,” she’d lied. “I’m right out back.”
Olivia ducks out the back door of the offices now, stopping to fumble with her jammed pocket umbrella. Not quite avoiding a huge, continuous drip of water that runs down the eaves of the small canopy. She curses as a huge, splattering drop lands at the crown of her hair.
Maybe Carisi was right.
This, she thinks, is a little fucking dismal.
This goddamn umbrella, not even a year old and already bent so badly it won’t open is slightly dismal. Her SUV, parked a block away because she’d been too slow when she’d seen an opening close by and reluctant to double park out front, despite the credentials to do so - maybe that is a tad goddamn dismal.
The state of her hair, after four days of damp, unrelenting rain, now that is —
“Liv?”
The first year after Elliot came back, she’d started to brace herself whenever she came to an exit. The courthouse, her office, this office too - Christ, even leaving her home some days, she’d gotten in the habit of scanning, just to make sure she didn’t need to prepare herself to meet a familiar set of blue eyes. It was just because of the shock of it, she’d told herself. As soon as they’re actually together, that feeling always settles, but she still hasn’t shaken the instinct to steel herself at every exit, just in case.
At the time, she was well aware of the irony of it.
For the better part of a decade, she’d searched the same places for him.
That pair of familiar blue eyes, set in a shaved clean face, stare back at her. The cuts and bruises she’d seen him with last linger, but they’re cleaned up, already fading. He’s back in a dress shirt, his tie carefully tucked in between a gap in the buttons to keep it dry. Elliot stares at her from underneath an oversized black umbrella, and all at once, she realizes the sudden ache in her chest is relief at seeing him - alive and well.
The same feeling she felt when he woke up, mid brisket flirt.
She blinks back at him as he puts it down.
“You’re back at work,” she says. “You’re here.”
It sounds like half a question and half a statement even to her own ears, like it’s confusing to her somehow that Detective Elliot Stabler of the NYPD would be found here at the District Attorney’s office, where she’s seen roughly half a dozen other officers on the steps and waiting for the elevator. Like this is somehow the last place she expected him to be.
Which, objectively, well.
She shouldn’t be shocked to see him standing here.
“I am,” he says. “I am, uh. Back at it. Got a meeting with Carisi in ten.”
Her thumb digs into the button on her own (still not functioning) umbrella’s handle. She can feel the place where the cheap plastic button has been jammed too far in; where the whole concept of a spring loaded release falls apart.
Olivia pushes in even harder, willing it to work.
“Should you be working? I mean — ”
Elliot’s sigh is loud, even in the pouring rain, even under a busy canopy in the middle of the day.
“They cleared me,” he says. Then, cutting right to it, not dancing around it at all, he goes on, using her own words from the phone two nights ago. “I know I almost died twice and all, but they still cleared me to come back. I’m fine.”
He shrugs, and eyes her, and adds more of her own words:
“Believe it or not.”
His eyes dance a little as he drags out the last word, even in the gray of the weather. Even set into a face full of healing wounds, the lines around them go soft.
She huffs, and shakes her head.
“I just - I do believe you, Elliot. But — ” She drops her gaze from his; a sidelong glance into the street. She gives up on her umbrella, lifting her thumb from the button and sighs. “But I was also there a week ago when you were pulling your own fucking IV out to get back to the case, so you can’t blame me for asking.”
When she turns back, Olivia sees the tiniest hint of a smile, like he’s not sure if he’s allowed.
“Yeah, well — ” he breaks off. Elliot nods, slowly, his upturned lips twisting to the side.“Yeah, that was - that happened.”
Her own mouth curves up, unbidden. She used to think she hated how easy it felt, sometimes.
“Yeah,” she echoes. “That happened.”
They stare at each other for a moment, before he nods, and inches forward.
“What about you?” he asks. “You sleeping any better since the other night?”
Olivia laughs, right away. “Well — ” She turns, waving a hand in the general direction of her SUV. God, it is so easy to fall right back into it, every time with him. “Well, there is a twenty ounce coffee in the front seat of my vehicle that I’m about to run through the rain to get to.”
“So, no.”
“So - no,” she confirms. “I’m just going to assume the same for you?”
Behind her, a small group of twenty-somethings races under the canopy, moving far too fast behind them. Automatically, Elliot’s free hand is on her elbow, scooting her closer to him, away from the rush of bodies.
She steps into his space just as easily as he offers it.
He cups his hand gently around her elbow, his eyes skimming over her face slowly. Too slow by far for this moment, this particular place.
“Safe assumption,” he says quietly.
They stay there for too long a moment, in that awkward silence, until a small gust of wind catches, blowing a strand of hair on her face. Olivia tucks it back as best she can, her other still half gripping a useless pocket umbrella.
The spell breaks as Elliot’s hand falls away.
She holds up the jammed, broken offending umbrella. “I should make a run for it,” she says, and that’s too much too. Too breathless, too low, too this has caught me off guard after nine months of incautious behavior. “This thing is useless, the button is — ”
“I’ll walk you.”
Elliot’s hand is already moving, his own umbrella popping up mockingly fast. It’s huge, one of those ones she curses tourists for buying when it rains on their trips. It’s too big for walking around the city.
They’ll take up the whole goddamn sidewalk under the thing.
“It’s really fine,” she says. She waves, dismissive, her eyes meeting his. “You’ve got a meeting.”
He shrugs.
“So I’ll be late,” he says easily. “It’s Carisi.”
Elliot moves out from under the canopy. The big drops that roll off the canopy plop onto the umbrella. It’s ridiculous, all of this. Last week he’d been close to death, refusing to not be the goddamn hero again. Last week he’d had a brain injury and a nail gun to the gut; and last night she’d had the same horrible dream she’s had over and over again.
Elliot, lifeless and gone.
She’d woken up with a racing heart, tangled in her comforter, cursing him.
And now, Elliot’s standing here in the rain grinning as he shakes his head and laughs. It’s that low, small familiar rumble as he shakes his head. For a moment she forgets it all, twenty six years of everything washed away just like the half crushed Pepsi can she’d watched drift in the gutter outside of her building this morning; caught in a tiny raging river of rainwater.
He’s still waiting, umbrella outstretched. “C’mon, Liv.”
The thing is - and she knows this, and that’s horribly unfortunate, really - is that she was never not going to take him up on his offer to walk her to the car in the rain. She was never not going to show up at his hospital bedside, either; or drive him to do something foolish and stupid and incredibly understandable when he should be healing. She tells herself nothing changes, and that’s as much a part of it too.
She was never not going to do this, if they’re both still here.
Olivia rolls her eyes, but she takes the step out from under the canopy, and into his space under the umbrella.
It’s easy to tuck herself right into his side.
“Do not — ”
He shifts the umbrella to his outside hand, so his hand can find the small of her back. Olivia feels a small hitch in her breath, stupidly dizzy at the intentionality of his touch as they start to move.
She breathes out.
“Do not blame me when you tell Carisi why you’re late,” she grumbles.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
They start to walk briskly through the rain, still easily in tandem, his hand still on her back. His body still has to ache, she thinks, but Elliot moves like it doesn’t at all. His umbrella takes up so much fucking space, and she laughs at the glares of the young professionals that have to move to the side.
His head twists to look at her. “What?”
Olivia looks skyward.
“Where did you get this? It’s huge.”
“I just bought it right now,” he admits. “The one I had — ” Elliot breaks off, steering them around a particularly deep puddle where part of the sidewalk has caved in. “Randall managed to break the one I kept in the truck sometime this summer. He blamed me.”
She raises her eyebrows.
“Said the one I kept in there was too dinky,” he grumbles. He lifts his own eyes to the underside of the umbrella quickly. “So — ”
“So you bought the biggest one you could find to prove a point?”
He grins, easy and familiar. The rain patters loudly on the nylon above them. It feels like the storm is picking up, like the stalemate of four days of steady, slow rain is finally breaking.
“Something like that,” Elliot answers. “Worked out though, didn’t it?”
She hasn’t felt one drop of rain since they started walking. Not even now, when it’s picked up, and everyone around them has started to run.
“It did,” she admits.
Half a block away now, and they both fall quiet as they walk through the downpour. Even walking at this speed and through her coat, she swears she can feel the heat of his hand on her back. She tilts her head when they’re close.
“I’m good here,” she says. “Go.”
She isn’t shocked when Elliot refuses. She isn’t shocked when he walks her all the way up to the driver's side door, shielding her from water splashing from the traffic on one side; holding the umbrella out so that not a drop of water touches her as she slides into her seat.
She isn’t shocked when he lingers, chewing his bottom lip in the pouring rain, or when he leans into her front seat.
“I did listen, you know,” he says, and Elliot’s voice is quiet, low. She can barely hear him over the rain pounding on her windshield even though he’s this close. It’s unleashing itself now; the rain wild and lashing down on the city. He’s going to get soaked on his walk back. “To what you and Randall said. About making it so…”
He sighs.
“Difficult.”
Olivia blinks once, twice, lips parting as she nods.
She wants so badly to believe it this time. She knows she’s part of this too. She wants so badly to believe that things will change. That he’ll stay put and she won’t balk and things won’t be so difficult.
“Ok,” she says finally. “Ok. Elliot - I — ”
A truck rushes by, close, and there’s no way he’s unscathed, no way he’s not soaked from the back of his knees to his feet. His shoes will make that awful noise as he walks through the halls of the DA’s office. They both used to laugh about it a million years ago, waterlogged after they’d had to park the squad car far enough away to get soaked every time.
“I’ll call you,” she finishes. “Or, you call me when things slow down.”
As she pulls away, she wonders how long he’ll wait.