ssribenson

[ssribenson]

@livbensonfinalgirl draft from burner 💓

It’s with tears in her eyes and his necklace between her fingers that Olivia says this last goodbye. Private, silent, prayer. A promise to try, to stay, with no mention of when he’ll come back around to her. Blinds drawn and door locked, it feels a little like she’s pressing on a bruise. It’s almost enough to distract from the soreness in her hip, until she moves or breathes or thinks about the look on Elliot’s face when he said he thought he lost her. She thought she was lying, saying she couldn’t imagine what it brought up. But he can still surprise her, stalking like a fawn and murmuring about this precious life.

She hates them both, most days. And then she doesn’t know where to put that hate when he’s in her space, calling her sweet names and speaking soft over gifts in little boxes. Trading her for a gift box just to take the pressure off, holding the ornament close to his chest like it’s worth the same as this compass.


“I’ll treasure it.”

He leaves the little wooden E on the edge of her desk. Like her own small treasure, she sweeps it quickly into the top drawer.

Not that it matters, now, but Olivia had no intention of falling in love with Elliot when they were partners. She had no intention of forgiving him if he ever came back, and she cannot begin to voice it, but still, somewhere small and warm and quiet she knows she forgave him a long time ago. As much as she could, anyway. It’s patience, or empathy, or loyalty, if anyone cared to ask. Really, she just never stopped caring for him. She never could. For the years Elliot was gone, she could pretend not to understand him, his betrayal, but even that denial was self-indulgent. Olivia understands why he ran, what scares her still is that he could do it again.

She always thought his dedication was genuine, even in the moments his anger seemed to erupt far beyond him. His family was charming, but distant. Unfamiliar, so unenviable. She didn’t know that a decade later she would be fucking wrecked not to be having his kids. Another decade and she would have to face his youngest son, with eyes even bigger and darker than her own, another strange and mocking mirror of her grief. She sometimes thinks of it as her slight payback for Noah having Elliot’s same crystal eyes; the first thing she noticed about Elliot when they met and her second favorite feature.

The real favorite is his smile, his mouth, the way he grins when he’s trying to be charming. In their first month as partners she made a joke about it, and he looked so happy to be seen through. Like nobody had observed him so closely in a while. He gave her a different smile, and for years she found herself trying to spark it again. Elliot had flashed his baby blues at her then, too. They still make her melt, and he knows, and it is mortifying.

They looked so bright and soft and green, holding back tears in her office. He was still the one leaving.

Olivia had bit her tongue. Don’t go? Don’t go. You would never go if I asked you to stay. You don’t actually want to leave me. You don’t actually want to leave. You don’t actually want me.

Elliot tells her to find happiness, to let his compass lead her, as he is halfway out the door again. She thinks of little badges and magnets being pulled apart. The last time he sent her chasing happiness so he could slip away. Mostly, she wonders when he will see the dilemma.

He called her partner on his way out, and there was that smile again. Jackass.

Elliot’s necklace is warm by the time it slides against her chest, the heat of her hand boring into it. She pulls her thick hair out from under the chain and swallows hard at the intrusion of a memory - his hands so gentle as he had untangled her hair, the big plastic clip knocking against a wall she tried to lean on in an urgent care waiting room. The blood was minimal and the nurses were moving fast, but every time there was a moment of stillness Elliot had found a way to rest a hand on her leg, squeeze her shoulder. If she thinks too long about him cooing in her ear and brushing the hair out of her face, she might split her side open entirely.

——

Her ache for him works in a strange sort of reverse this time. For the first couple of weeks without him, she’s mostly numb — sad in the way she’s learned to live with, a little sensitive in her suspension between longing and remembering. Elliot is gone again. Soon she will have worked alone longer than they were partners, ten years since sergeant. Ten years in her office, reshaping herself inside those walls. She always wanted to be unrecognizable to Elliot if she saw him again. He never acted like she was, even when Olivia felt like she deserved to be a stranger to him.

When a full month goes by with no news, she finds herself furiously wiping tears in the produce aisle. She nicks her leg shaving and swears at a volume she doesn’t even recognize. She feels unsteady. Untethered. Four more weeks and she puts a photo of them on her desk, in a little collage mat that’s mostly occupied by Noah, and she starts using a hand soap in her bathroom that she thinks smells a little like his cologne. Nothing is quite enough.

There are moments of rest, somewhere in August. When Noah goes back to school she can really fall back into her rhythms, letting cases blend the days together while the weather changes.

She wore the compass all summer, gold and shimmering against the soft tan of her chest, and she wonders still what made him pick the little pink stones. If he knew they would start to look exactly like the blush that used to run across his high cheekbones, the rough inside of his hands. She wonders if he’s close enough to see the same trees changing, far enough to feel the cold already.

Olivia secretly looks forward to the winter, the sharp feeling of the air and the way the sky matches the concrete, sun shining through clouds and reflecting off of big glass buildings. The streets are still busy, but the people move faster. The holidays are always strange for her, suppressing guilt she feels for every dinner that didn’t happen. Seated protective and close to Noah at the McCann’s, she is hit with a pang of sadness for the celebrations she won’t have with Simon, with her mother. Grateful for her baby, for her safety, for her job, for her sanity. No new year’s resolutions, just a tiny feeling blooming in her chest. Something like anticipation.

—-

When Maddie Flynn disappears, Olivia knows she has lost a piece of herself within the case before their first day of searching is over. She is exercising all of her strength trying to stay upright, the plummeting in her stomach never ever reaching an end.

She tells people it was a bad instinct, that she should have known better. What scares her more, so much more, is to think that she did. Too distracted, too tired, too disoriented. Traffic was thick and her eyes had not adjusted to the sunlight and Noah was asking her so many questions and she just could not focus on what she saw. She will turn it over in her mind for weeks after it starts, what it means for her, after all of these years, not to act on it. How little the rest of it matters now that she has let a girl go, how nothing saved changes what’s been lost. She thinks of stupid Elliot, breaking things just to tell her they can be fixed, breaking the moment just to make her smile. She hears Fin tell Velasco to shut his mouth and do what he’s told, “If this girl doesn’t come home, Liv is never gonna forgive herself.” She thinks he doesn’t know how right he is.

She makes it through her whole apartment, her and Noah’s goodnights, and the majority of her nighttime routine before she just lets it go. Hot tears fill her eyes and before she can get her breathing under control, she collapses on the edge of her bed, quietly inhaling through her cries. Blonde, 5’5, 15 years old. Energy drink van, front seat, Lincoln tunnel. Clutching her stomach, she chokes on a few hard inhales as she tries to steady, her head pounding. Maddie’s name floats around the room on a soft voice, something like a prayer that feels more like a plea.

The exhaustion is bottomless, lately. She misses being angry all the time. On edge. Passionate. She goes for long stretches not feeling like someone who cares about anything by the time she gets in bed, or she feels this, this searing pain. Olivia thinks of Muncy, of Kat, when she curls under her sheets and wonders what will finally make it all feel like enough. When she joined SVU she still felt like she had something to prove, something to fix. She can’t even access that sense of hope sometimes, often wonders if that’s what the feeling really was.

Olivia lies silent, eyes open in her dark room. The vibrating chirps of her phone startle her, but not nearly as much as the name flashing across the screen.

Elliot Stabler and the same picture as her desk, the only one they have taken since he’s been back (his sweet mother, with both of them halfway out the door, had just told them she wanted one and sentiment caught her by surprise. They both told Bernie it was okay, really, Olivia trying to hide and Elliot giving her an out. She shushed them both and they laughed quietly to each other, their faces inches apart when he bowed his head in defeat. He threw a big arm over her shoulders and squeezed, and her annoyance with him had evaporated with the briefest thought of teenagers on prom night).

She watches his name inch across her screen, flicking off the sound instead of ending the call. She can’t pick up, not with her breathing so ragged. Her hands are shaking, still, and this isn’t how she wants it to be for them. She isn’t prepared to talk to him or lie to him or for whatever he might be asking of her in the middle of the night. Then it hits her, and she feels like an asshole for the delay, but he could be in danger. He almost always is, in a way. She would have to run to him, or else just tell him she’s a lousy hero.

Thinking first that wallowing won’t save Maddie Flynn, then that Elliot would probably call his team in a real crisis, she lets the phone drop from her hands to her lap. The vibrating stops a few seconds later, the eventual buzz of a voicemail breaking the silence she was holding for another call.

Olivia rubs both hands over her face, sighing before hitting play on his message.

Hey Liv. It’s me. I just got back.

An old case of ours.

Maybe I just wanted to hear your voice.

Call me.

The comfort she finds in the smallest of Elliot’s mannerisms still surprises her, but she finds her heart fluttering just hearing his voice, the deep breaths while he chooses his words. She misses him so much of the time she almost can’t keep track of everything she misses about him, until moments like this. Moments when he seems so real and so close it feels like no time has passed, or like it didn’t pass with the two of them sliced in half. Olivia does resent him for it, what he can get away with just by still being this man that she loves, that she trusts. Her partner, exactly how she remembers him.

Part of her, the larger part, wants to call him back. Ask about his case, pick a fight, tell him to come over. She wants to know how he’s been, needs to know if he has any bruises, wants to hear about all of the things that make him think of her.

She wants him to help her find her missing girl. She can’t call him, she realizes, if not for that. She could, maybe, throw him into the case and he might tread lightly enough for it to work, but with the way her head is pounding right now she just can’t imagine keeping it together in front of him. And she wants to, wants to be strong and sturdy and ready, when she sees him again.

She doesn’t get much sleep, but she plays his voicemail a few more times.

—-

She actually doesn’t sleep most nights, for weeks on end. On a foggy morning run she finds herself chasing a green van, hearing Maddie’s name ripping from her throat. The guy calls her crazy, and she thinks about chasing him onto the highway. She almost grabs the arm of a girl walking out of Noah’s dance studio, long blonde hair and a baby blue hoodie making her jump before she catches herself.

Olivia has never been able to name the feeling of the city when she knows a child is missing inside it. it’s not just haunting, or vigilance, it’s a distortion. She sees Maddie everywhere because she is looking for her everywhere. She is so afraid of making the same mistake that she is suspicious of everyone. She’s distracted by the ever-changing scenes of the city, convinced everything will become the one thing she missed. Fin tells her, or she tells him what she knows he sees, that she has not been herself since Maddie was taken.

She can’t be, is the thing. She can feel this phantom ache, Maddie’s grip on her from God knows how far. Like she’s been ripped apart, a piece of her still tethered as it is taken away. The guilt is eating her alive, everyday, and when Eileen Flynn calls her from the hospital Olivia can barely breathe. She has to try to explain it, in the EMDR suite, what the sight of Peter’s belt in Maddie’s closet still does to her.

Olivia keeps trying to get around it, anything that she has to preface with “there was a case- a guy, ten years ago,” she would rather just not get into. She remembers the instinct to drop her necklace in the trunk of a car, and she already misses the feel of Maddie’s plastic beads on her wrist.

She never pictured a treatment she’d be more nauseous during than her first few weeks with Lindstrom, but when she walks out into the night after these sessions she still feels a little off balance. She tries to just trust it will help, which is harder than trusting herself to go — a small but welcome change.

—-

Curry tells her, first thing in the morning. They took Stabler’s badge. He hit a kid, or he hurt a kid, or they think he tried to kill a guy. Suspended, second time in four years. It’s not looking good for him, when and if he gets back to his desk.

Olivia knows him, knows Elliot is either tearing his place apart from agitation or physically beating himself up for whatever it is he did to hurt that boy. She simply tells Curry to keep her updated, if she can, and she manages not to ask if they need someone to vouch for him at his next hearing. She types and deletes the same message maybe ten times throughout the day. “Dinner soon? I think we have a lot to talk about.”

She feels worse for not calling him back now than she had to begin with. Ignoring him is as much a retaliation as it is another wound to salt, always making herself that much more miserable to teach Elliot a lesson about leaving. It’s sick, is what it is, and now a teenage boy is in the hospital and a teenage girl is still missing. She calls him that night while staking out Noah’s room from the kitchen, trying to ground herself with his presence without waking him. The call goes straight to voicemail and she hangs up.

She dreams of him in the passenger seat, younger and stubbly and deathly serious. She’s flying down the road, she doesn’t know which one, or what hour it is. Everything is orange and bright and hot and he’s giving her directions, clear and sure. She’s closing in on a van, neon green with skulls and Elliot has a big hand flat on the dash, loudly egging her on. The sun isn’t moving up or down the horizon but closer to them, the road seemingly widening so Olivia can circle the van, tire-to-tire with the front wheels. Still speeding in perfect tandem, both drivers face each other. Maddie grips the wheel, her hair whipping around her face, her eyes wild. Olivia screams her name, and Maddie looks back at the road. She feels cold, so cold, and the sky is getting redder as the metal of her side mirror screeches against the van’s. She tries again, the wail echoing, and when Maddie turns back to her there are bloody tear streaks on her cheeks. Olivia tries to scream, cut short by Elliot grabbing the wheel, jerking it hard and sending them spinning in front of the van. She wakes up panting, the sun barely starting to split between her blinds.

She at least waits for Noah to finish his breakfast before calling Elliot again, knowing if he is adhering to his suspension he should answer the landline. When that goes to voicemail she takes it a little harder.

“Call me back. I’m here.” It’s the kind of thing they used to say to each other constantly, and she wonders if the meaning ever changes. I need to be with you through this to know how you are. I know how you’re feeling more than anyone else in the world. You’re the only one that feels it this much too. I’m here. We don’t have to talk. I don’t want to talk. I want to hear you. See you. They also both used to be able to take a missed call on the chin, but it’s become a bit of a sore spot for her.

—-

Another dream, a waking one. Maddie’s voice, ringing in a dark, mildewy cabin. Her small frame in the center of the room, all of her wrapped in Olivia’s arms. Her hair is wrong and she looks sickly, terrified, but those are the eyes that glanced at Olivia from the front of an energy drink van. She’s certain of it, and Maddie holds onto her like she is too.

—-

It’s a chance thing, or more bad timing, when Olivia halfway hears from him again. She’s in the shower when he calls, and so she opens her phone to another voicemail. Laying out clothes and badges for commencement, she plays it on speaker.

His voice stops her in her tracks. It’s raspy, like he’s been up, or yelling, or crying. His words, too, make her freeze.

“Hey, hon. I uh- listen, I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you. It’s- um- it’s not exactly something I can- you know. I don’t wanna do it over the phone. I’m around though if you think, if you ever want to- to talk. I wanna see you. Call me if you can, Liv. bye.”

Her eyes dart unfocused over her dresser, her mind racing for a second before it slows again, stuck on hon, like the bastard was really going to call her his honey before he caught himself. Except it didn’t sound like he stopped himself. It sounded like he meant to say it, and maybe then he panicked, but something in his subconscious has resorted to pet names for her. The thought alone makes her weak.

Her finger hovers over his number, playing the voicemail back instead of returning the call. She watches her own face in the mirror, dark features softened and then tensed as he rambles. Olivia knows she’s going to have to call him again, that she might even keep calling until he answers. She pulls her damp hair around her neck and starts a loose braid.

—-

In the earliest days of sun and spring, Maddie turns sixteen. The celebration is sweet, if not a little too bright, a performance of levity for her, for her parents, for Olivia. Still, when she lays the golden chain over Eileen’s shoulders, she feels like she has given over something with an honest kind of power in it. She half expects to literally walk in the opposite direction of her car when she leaves the party. She finds herself driving back to the precinct.

—-

Olivia tries not to let on, how her heart skips a beat when she hears him pick up the phone. Elliot has his fun, taking his first opening for a joke before falling quiet at the tender change in her voice. She scrapes a nail over her thigh, feels the rough weave of denim as she speaks. She has so much she wants to say, but it only comes out in pieces and Elliot, somehow (she knows how), doesn’t ever need her to fill in the gaps.

“I knew you’d understand.”

“Oh, I understand. You lost the necklace and now you’re buying time.”

It makes her laugh, and she hopes she isn’t blushing but Christ, she misses him and her cheeks hurt. This time last year he was tossing a paper bag on her desk with that same necklace in it. Not long before that he had held her in his arms three different times on the same case. When he had hugged her goodbye she almost kissed him.

She told Carisi’s cousin the “L” stood for love. That she hadn’t found it yet. Maddie went missing that same day, and now Olivia’s compass hangs around Eileen’s neck. She thinks of healing properties, placebos, and time. She thinks of being guided to Maddie, of the lost girls she has pulled from the darkness this year, of becoming the needle in the pendant, moving with the heart of the wearer. She thinks she is telling him the truth, that it helped, or that she’s getting there.

She really does want the necklace back, eventually. She already misses the weight of it, habitually running a thumb over her (now bare) collarbone a few times in the past hour. Right now, though, Olivia thinks Eileen needs it more. Thinks she can find it by herself, or already has. Happiness, love, truth, steady ground. Just for a second, maybe, until things change again.

Right now, though. She’s got him on the phone and Elliot is laughing too, under his breath, at his own quip or her reaction and she knows exactly what his face looks like right now, does not try to stop herself from picturing his smile.

“I pawned it.” That earns her a nice scratchy laugh.

—-

Maddie Flynn doesn’t go to sleepaway camp that summer, but she learns how to drive and is coming back around to the idea of college outside the city. She sticks to EMDR treatment, but she changes doctors twice before she gets settled. She’s growing her hair long and piercing her ears behind her parents’ back. She doesn’t wake up screaming as much anymore, and she finishes all her meals.

Olivia learns all of this over coffee with Eileen, gently holding her arm as she promises over and over again that it is getting better, that Maddie will be at peace again one day, that all they can do right now is love her patiently. Eileen keeps smiling like she doesn’t quite believe her, but Olivia sees so much less panic in her eyes now.

Right before they part ways, Eileen gives her a crushing hug, launching into her like a kid.

“Keep looking,” she murmurs, quickly clasping the compass necklace behind Olivia’s head, “Look for love everywhere. Dig to the center of the earth, if you can.”

Olivia smiles at her, eyes crinkling under the late July sun. “I will.”

—-

One text, while she’s waiting for her car to cool off.

What are you doing tomorrow night?

His response is immediate, two messages in a row.

Hope I’m cooking you dinner.

Gonna try to earn my necklace cash back.

—-

It’s enough time to primp and preen and work herself up so much she won’t want to go at all. It’s short enough notice that they can both only panic so much. It’s a late dinner, her request, his pleasure, and while she gets ready very fast, she still needed an extra built-in hour to sit on her couch and breathe. Early that morning, Olivia had taken Noah upstate. She tapped her foot through lunch with the McCanns and lied every time they asked about her.

Olivia has wondered about this ridiculous idea of dressing up for Elliot, and where her brain knows he can’t be surprised by anything she does, she still wants him to be. Just a little bit. It’s been a long year. He has stared at her like a small dog when she was wearing t-shirts and suits that didn’t fit, pajamas, dresses meant for someone other than him. She wants to hold his gaze.

She had laid out a deep cherry red sweater and loose jeans. She stares at them now, standing by the foot of her bed with clenched fists at her hips.

It’s only dinner. It’s Elliot. They’re not very likely to leave his apartment.

Olivia turns back to her closet and grabs at a soft, plum-colored dress. She inspects the fabric for only a second before pulling the dress over her head, stretching it around her hips, her thighs. It’s fitted at her chest and falls loose and long over her legs. She cranes her neck and checks for lines, obvious straps or pieces of lace peeking through. She smooths her hands over the dress one more time, and finally settles on it with a slow exhale. She forces herself to do her fastest makeup, brushes and curls the thick strands of hair that fall around her cheekbones, her jawline. She doesn’t think very hard about jewelry, popping in wide gold hoops and recentering the singular necklace.

—-

She leaves ten minutes later than she should, and it relaxes her up until she starts closing in on his apartment. The traffic is reasonable, but she impatiently taps her wheel through it all the same.

Halfway up the stairs to his loft and Olivia remembers he gave her a key. He put it on her kitchen counter on his way out and didn’t say anything about it, just held her gaze for as long as she’d let him. The message was clear - it was there with or without a spare key - trust me, come home to me, be safe with me. And she wanted to, but she couldn’t, then.

Now, she stands right outside his door, lets her breathing even out for a moment, shifting her weight from heel to toe. When she knocks, it’s the quiet one they used to do at the precinct, and she thinks of skittish animals for a second. She’s about to lunge and press his buzzer when she hears clicking in his locks.

Elliot opens the door and just looks at her for a long time, his smile so soft, before he whispers a simple “Hi.”

She breathes out “Hey,” and neither of them move.

She looks him up and down and he lets her, and he looks good, looks like himself in a fading green t-shirt and slate gray sweatpants. She hopes he ate enough while he was under. He looks like he’s been sleeping, a lot, and she hopes that’s a good thing too. He waits for her move to push the door open a little more and she brushes against him on purpose when she walks into his apartment. She kicks her shoes off silently, unceremoniously as he locks the door behind them, and when she turns over her shoulder to peek at him again it doesn’t feel like he’s too close. It should, because she can feel her dress swishing and hitting him, but she lingers still. When Olivia faces him, he extends a hand to take her purse, nonreactive to the weight of it in his fingers. He places it on the bench in the hall, still staring at her. She lets him wrap a hand around her wrist and guide her towards his kitchen, his other hand resting on her waist in a way that makes her heart hammer.

She leans across his island, and Elliot slides her a glass of water that was already on the counter. He smiles shyly and pours himself a new one.

When he finally settles on the opposite side, he’s bent practically in half leaning towards her. He looks nervous, now.

“Wanted to see you when I got back but I- I needed to make sure my head was on straight. I was actually gonna bring you a coffee some-“

“Elliot.” She catches his eyes long enough for his shoulders to relax. He breathes in, slowly, and nods. And waits.

“It’s- I’m just glad you’re back.”

“Yeah,” he nods, “me too.” He flicks his chin up the slightest bit, “you’re wearing it.”

She almost laughs, biting back a grin as her hand flies up to touch it, feel it’s weight on her chest. “Everyday. You knew I would.”

His face softens, and instead of responding he just walks around the counter, hovering close to her.

“I mean you got it back.”

Olivia does laugh, then, “I mean, I couldn’t wait forever.”

Elliot makes a little sound at the back of his throat, but he doesn’t say anything. He’s close enough again that she can look up and tell when he last shaved, can smell his soap and his breath and his sweat.

She takes a breath in, cutting off sharply when he reaches up to touch the pendant.

A light brush of his fingertip, then the slightest pressure of his thumb over the face of the compass.

The back of Elliot’s hand is brushing, resting on Olivia’s chest and when he captures the necklace between the pads of his fingers she only wants to let him pull her in. He raises the pendant between them, the chain catching on the fine hairs at the back of her neck, and as she leans in he presses the side of the compass to his lips.

When he lowers it again, Olivia covers his hand with hers and flattens it over the compass at her neck. They hold each other there for what feels like forever. Elliot’s eyes are still that light shining blue, pupils massive and dark.

His lips are soft against hers when she tilts her head. She lets all of the air out of her lungs in the second he kisses her back, and she regains it with a gasp when his mouth moves against hers. Elliot’s hot palm stays on her chest, but now his other hand cups the back of her head, fingers tenderly threading in her hair and she would never let anyone hold her like this but Elliot’s hand is right over her thumping heart, and when she grabs his forearm he groans a little. He breaks away only to say her name, voice breaking, and Olivia strokes his cheeks, his jaw, patient and soft as ever.

He’s got thick fingers wrapped behind her neck, whispering Liv. Liv. Liv. His lips on hers, on her cheeks, her nose, her temple. She’s lost in it so completely, for a second she thinks she could cry at the warmth of him. Olivia grabs his arms again, one hand digging into his shoulder, and kisses Elliot until she knows they’re both dizzy.

His cheeks are a dark red now, and it still sounds impossible for him to get his breathing under control when he drops his hands to her hips.

“I fucking missed you so much, Liv, I-“ he’s kissing her again, teeth scraping over the side of her neck for just a second before he realizes, seemingly, that he can’t say any of it like this.

Elliot falls back a bit, but his nose against hers suddenly feels like the closest they have ever been. “I love you, you know I love you.”

She bites her lip, nodding vigorously, wordlessly. Olivia does know this, has almost always known this, has certainly heard him say it before. Here, though, she can take it, hold it close to her ribs and feel it settle.

She blinks away another rush of tears, smiling with her lips pressed tight together. “You’re just- you’re really gonna have to say it a lot, you know.” She wants so badly to laugh at all of this, but she still swallows hard at the look on Elliot’s face.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. I mean I want to. I-” he stops himself with a tiny shake of his head, just murmuring as he presses his cheek against hers, “I love you, Liv, I love you.”

—-

Elliot had pulled a huge pan of vegetables and an equally huge skillet of mac and cheese with bacon out of his oven about 30 seconds before Olivia had sweetly dragged him to bed by the strings on his pants, promising to inhale his carefully crafted meal later.

Hours later, she pulls on those pants and a big gray zip-up to sink into his couch and eat their reheated dinner, resting her legs on Elliot’s lap and thinking briefly about takeout and all-nighters.

“What are you smiling about?” He rests a hand on her leg, lightly stroking with his thumb.

“You already know.” Olivia raises one eyebrow at him, grin never fading.

“Yeah,” Elliot smiles wide, “yeah, I guess I do.”

*