Inevitabilities, Other Eventualities
Inevitabilities, Other Eventualities, R
1300 words
Elliot/Olivia, SVU
Spoilers: Season 13. YES. THEY'RE ON 13! IDEK!?!
Thanks: lizwontcry, my favorite Gun and Roses fan, the lady that's always down to read something of mine, even if she has no idea what the hell is going on. NOW GO AND WRITE SOME GSR, PLEASE!
"When he sits next to her on the bench, it moves her."
She waits for him on a bench in Fort Tyron; she does not tell him where to find her. It’s a natural curiosity, to see if he’s still able to instinctively know where she is. That bond they used to have, it’s waned over the years, but she can still feel him.
She doesn’t want to believe that he can’t feel her.
There’s a latte in her hand and a black coffee on the worn wood beside her, both cold. Olivia doesn’t notice, just uses the repetition of bringing the cup to her mouth to keep her from pacing.
He’s late.
Elliot is never late.
It hadn’t even occurred to her that he wouldn’t show, that he would meet her simply because she had asked, though hadn’t explained why. But then, she’d never gotten confirmation that he was willing to see her at all in the first place, his voicemail asking her in polite, even, robotic English to “Please leave a message after the tone,” that “Elliot Stabler is not available.”
Not available...
He has children and a wife, all of whom could have capitalized his time today and rightly so. They have a familial claim on him, a bond she’s never had. It’s a devastating thing, to realize the one person you have left may not be around any longer, just like that.
The injustice of it all. The positive anger it stirs in her; she thought he knew, she really thought he knew what all of this meant. A fickle hope, she supposes, one she had clung to for far too long. She wishes that she were a stronger person, that she would stand, leave the bench, delete his phone number and forget his name. But she’s not strong and lying to herself is stealing too much of her soul away.
Olivia will never stop feeling this loss. She feels it in fifty years, she feels those fifty years right now. It’ll be as present and painful as it is in this very second. Something gnawing, clawing at her throat and heart; this feeling will never go away.
She sees him approaching out of the corner of her eye, walking through patches of late autumn sunset. It’s so poetically perfect that she hates him.
When he sits next to her on the bench, it moves her.
“Why here?” There’s the distant hum of cars across the bridge, a boat in the river and yet she hears his breath like it’s magnified a thousand times. ‘Why here?’ The first words she’s heard from him in ages. Ages and ages and far too damned long for friends to go without speaking.
He picks up the coffee without asking and she smiles (tries not to, but god, it’s been too long and her face needs it), knowing she still has a claim to him, that she will always have a claim to him, even this tenuous.
Olivia swallows from her cup, notices her hand shaking and balls it into a fist. “I moved, I didn’t tell you?”
“You didn’t.”
“Brooklyn was getting... I don’t know... and the air here is... good.” Olivia’s throat is tight and it feels as though she doesn’t know what to say to him anymore. Three weeks and their rapport is gone? That can’t be.
“The air is good?” he says it like he doesn’t believe the words have left her mouth. She doesn’t believe those words have left her mouth. God, is she glad he’s calling her on it.
“Yeah,” she shrugs.
Elliot waits a beat, studies the side of her face but she won’t dare look at him. After a few moments of silence broken only by joggers disrupting the crisp, newly-fallen leaves, he laughs. Elliot laughs a full laugh, a deep laugh that sweeps through her. “But is there any good Korean around? That’s what important.”
“I like Thai now,” she mutters like a petulant child.
“The fuck you do,” he returns and they sit in silence and finish their coffee.
---
They have sex.
Of course they do.
As if the chapter could end without them sleeping together.
It’s perfunctory. He barely comes, she doesn’t. It’s awkward and awful and yet afterward, he stays. His arms curled around her hard as she has a near panic attack, breaths coming too fast for tears to form. How she wants to cry, for everything, for the decade and then some, for it all, for how much she’s let herself get lost in him.
It’s not just fifteen years, it’s her entire development as an adult, really. Same for him, any problem with Kathy, he had a perpetual sounding board someone almost required to listen. Over terrible corner-store coffee and shit bagels they’d air their grievances about one another and the world and it was just fine. Peachy keen.
Close-to-healthy.
They took it and ran, because that’s what partners did. It was a good and bad, sickness and health, until death do us part sort of thing. The entire NYPD was really but the fact that they’d lasted as long and had still needed one another, well, no one had counted on that.
And she hadn’t counted on him cutting her out of his life completely.
Who would do that?
Elliot wouldn’t do that.
Except that he did. He has. It’s so surprisingly unsurprising that this is what it’s all boiled down to. She’s sticky and still wanting, feels empty without him but won’t admit that. Like hell she’ll admit that now.
“We shouldn’t have done this,” she says to him in what they’ve come to term as dead of night, two in the morning. “This was all wrong.” She still can’t seem to cry.
He knows she wants to though, and it’s enough. “I know,” he said, digging his chin into her shoulder. There’s an emptiness, a void waiting to be filled with his voice, with explanations. “I’m not coming back,” he adds, because it really does explain everything, doesn’t it? They couldn’t have left one another if they hadn’t know what one another had felt like; it was impossible.
It was always in their narrative.
No room for levity in their relationship if it wasn’t in the din of a bar, clouded with illegal cigarette smoke and enough cops that their impulses wouldn’t get the best of them. The impulses had been there from the beginning. The feelings came later, but they were doomed from the start.
It’s an hour, it’s minutes, it’s sometime later when his hand slackens around her waist and she rushes to come up with something to say, something that will keep him here a bit longer.
“Apparently it takes two people do replace you,” she says, when he slips from her bed and won’t look over at her. This isn’t how all of this was supposed to happen; she’s not exactly sure in what context any of this would have happened, but this isn’t it.
She doesn’t want to think of him as a mistake...
He sits on the side of her bed and she catches his back in the moonlight, a sight she’s always longed to see. “Replace me,” he says, almost beneath his breath.
Elliot stands, all muscle and anger, dresses with his back to her.
He’s not ashamed; he’s afraid he’ll stay.
There are no more words. He locates his wallet, slides it into his back pocket. Elliot stills, frame tensing and Olivia holds her breath.
He doesn’t turn to her, says nothing, quietly pads from her apartment.
The story couldn’t conclude until he’d hurt her, one last time; that was their m.o., and m.o.s rarely change.
Any detective could tell you that.