It occurred to me that I had never posted these here, which is odd. They're REALLY OLD and sort of embarrassing, but that's okay.

Title: This
Fandom/Pairing: SVU, Elliot/Olivia
Word Count: 2158
Rating: T
Summary: "What if I took another undercover?"



1. This is how he tells her:

They are standing at their lockers, getting ready to go. She's got her head buried in hers, muttering about a lost glove, and he can't see her face which he supposes is cheating but he just blurts it out. "So I'm moving back in."

"Huh?" She bends backwards a little bit, peering at him around the locker door. "What'd you say?"

"I'm moving back into the house."

"Really." For one second she gets that expression she gets when he has completely disappointed her, eyes widening and lip curling a little bit like that day in the hospital after the Gitano thing when he suggested she would have offed him, given enough time. What about me? Then she blinks and it's gone. "Wow. Congratulations." She looks away, rummages in her locker some more, pulls the missing glove out--mitten, actually, this hideous crocheted number she brought back with her from Oregon--and slams the door. He thinks he probably imagines that it's louder than usual. He thinks he probably imagines that they both flinch.

2. This is what she does when she leaves:

She goes home. Really, what else is she going to do? Munch calls goodnight as she bangs through the door of the bullpen and she thinks she replies, but by the time gets downstairs she doesn't remember. She decides to walk but regrets it within a block--it's February, and fucking freezing, with the kind of stinging wind that slaps you in the face--and when she gets to her building the insides of her ears are aching from the cold.

She sits on the stoop and thinks about leaving again. She wants to. She wants to pick up and go without telling him, to hurt his feelings on purpose this time. She thinks of the marshmallow-filled heart she tossed on his desk last week, the day after Valentine's when everything was half-price at Duane Reade, and wishes she had chucked it at the back of his skull instead. She's got a pretty good arm, actually.

She thinks about calling Casey.

She thinks about getting a couple of cats and being done with it.

She thinks about crying, but she doesn't want to do that, so she sits on the steps for awhile longer, and then she goes inside.

3. This is what he notices the next day:

Nothing is different, except that when she gets up for another cup of tea she doesn’t grab his mug on her way. Which could be a fluke. Caffeine’s been making him jittery, anyway. It’s quiet. They go through paperwork all morning, and they don’t talk. His chair squeaks loudly every time he shifts his weight. For awhile there they were doing this weird foot-bumping thing every once in awhile, but that’s over now.

He tells himself he’s doing the right thing.

Because he is.

He meets Kathy for dinner at an Italian place in Long Island City. She’s lost a lot of weight, which he thinks is a shame. Olivia has gained some in a way that makes him think of summer, of things gone ripe and tangy, but now is not the time to ruminate on that. He is very hungry, all of a sudden.

“So when are we doing this?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” Kathy replies. “I guess soon.”

4. This is what she wants to know:

What kind of fucked-up person signs his divorce papers and then changes his mind?

Not that it’s any of her business.

But Jesus. What the hell? What was that awkward business in the park with Kathy? A waste of a perfectly good lunch hour, is what. She could have gotten a damn manicure. Seems like a whole lot of unnecessary drama, is all. Gnashing of teeth and punching of lockers and thinking that maybe now that she was back from Oregon and the papers were notarized and things were starting to settle down again—

Maybe what, exactly?

She takes a lot of showers. She wants to pumice off the top layer of her skin.

5. This is what he keeps forgetting to do:

He hasn’t given notice to his landlord yet. He keeps meaning to, but it always slips his mind and then it’s too late in the day or he runs out of time before he has to be at work. He writes “APARTMENT” on a Post-It note and sticks it to the monitor of his computer, next to the last known address of a witness they’re trying to track down.

If he’s going to make this work, he’s got to be a hundred percent committed.

He knows that.

Which is why he’s trying to put all the rest of it out of his mind.

At six-thirty, when he goes upstairs to get his coat, she’s sitting on one of the cots changing from her boots into a pair of high heels with some kind of animal print and toes so pointy you could take somebody’s eye out. “What are those?” he can’t help asking.

She rolls her eyes. “Shoes.”

“I’ll say.”

“Shut up.”

He does for a moment, watching as she maneuvers her foot inside the leather deathtraps, pointing her toes. The nails are painted a dark red, which surprises him, and he remembers suddenly an exchange they had probably seven or eight years ago, about her living like a monk. He remembers staring at her, just for one second, and feeling profoundly uncomfortable. “Got a date?” he asks, when she stands up.

“What if I fucking do?” she fires back immediately, and he thinks she’s surprised by how much heat there is behind it. They both blink. “Sorry,” she mutters, shaking her head. “Yes. A date.”

He wants to ask if he knows the guy, but thinks better of it. “Well, have fun,” he says quietly, and it’s not until right before he goes to bed that night that he realizes he forgot the landlord again.

6. This is why she should keep her mouth shut:

“Did Kathy call you?” she asks, when the curiosity has begun to itch in a truly unbearable way, poison ivy or chicken pox. They are sitting in the sedan on a side street in Soho, waiting for their guy to show. They haven’t talked in twenty-three minutes. “Is that what happened? She called you during the IAB thing?”

He glances at her, then back out the windshield. “I went to the house.”

Oh. “Oh.”

They lapse into silence again. A couple years into their partnership, the twins got him Mad Libs for Father’s Day and all summer they used it to pass the time on stakeouts. Verb. Adjective. Ejaculation. They both got a kick out of that one, as it were. For a long time the book was still in the glove compartment, but she hasn’t checked in awhile. Somebody might have thrown it out.

“Can I ask you a question?” she says, a few minutes later.

“Go ahead.”

“What if I took another undercover?”

It hangs there for a moment like something with physical weight. Noun. Person, place or thing; animal, vegetable, mineral. Stone. Iron. Blood.

“I don’t know,” he says quietly. “I guess it wouldn’t shock me.”

She raises her eyebrows. “What does that mean?”

“I mean, it shocked me the first two times you left. The third time, maybe not so much.”

He’s got a point there. “Would you be angry?”

“Are you going to do it?” This comes fast.

“I’m talking hypothetically.”

“Hypothetically…” he trails off. “I don’t know what the hell I’d be.”


7. This is what he remembers from the first day they were partners:

He stopped at the shoe-shine guy on his way in. He was nervous—he’d never had a woman partner before. It seemed like a delicate thing. He was very careful to keep his eyes on her face. “How long you been married?” she asked, on the way to their first crime scene, and when he told her fourteen years it seemed to please her.

He thought she smiled too much.

Seems absurd, now.

When he saw Maureen for lunch the other day she told him about this art history class she’s taking, and how for a long time after the Renaissance it was almost impossible for Italian artists to make anything. All that history there already, they figured. What was the point?


8. This is what shouldn’t surprise her, but does:

Eleven-thirty on Tuesday and he knocks on her door. She flips the deadbolt and swings it open without looking because she already knows who it is and if by some chance she was wrong, well, she packs a nine-mil on her belt. “You’re being an unfair bastard,” she says, instead of hello, but she turns and goes into the kitchen anyway, expecting he’ll follow, and he does.

“I brought beer.”

“Good.” She plucks a bottle from the six-pack and twists off the cap, then hops up on the counter that separates her kitchen from her living room. He shrugs out of his coat; it smells like wet wool, the beginning of March. “What if I was sleeping?” she asks, kicking her heels at the cabinets.

“You weren’t.”

“What if I was?”

“You’ve still got your holster on.”

“Sometimes I have to shoot intruders.” She sighs. “You want to save your damn marriage, Elliot? Get out of my apartment.”

He licks his bottom lip, bites it a little. “I can’t.”

Motherfucker. Where does he get off? There is nobody else in the world she would take this shit from. She tries to swallow; it feels like there’s something phlegmy caught in her throat. “Well then that’s a problem, isn’t it.”

“I think so.”

9. This is what happens when Kathy comes over to help him pack:

“Since when do you drink Dogfish Head?” she calls into the living room. She is tossing out the rotten stuff in his fridge, which is basically everything. Kathy is fastidious about expiration dates. “Huh?”

He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t drink Dogfish Head. Olivia does, though, and he got it like a month ago in case she came over, which she did once, but nothing happened, and so there’s no reason he couldn’t tell Kathy except that he doesn’t want to, but he doesn’t want to lie, either. So he doesn’t say anything. After a moment she comes in and perches on the arm of the couch, and she watches him set the four DVDs he owns into a cardboard box before she speaks.

“Are you coming back because you want to, or are you coming back because you think it’s the right thing to do to make your life how it used to be?”

Huh.

He does not know how to answer that question.

She looks at him for awhile, and he looks back up at her. She is wearing a Hudson University sweatshirt. He remembers that he fell in love with her partly because of her ability, even as a teenage girl, to cut through the bullshit. He remembers that she has mothered his children.

“I just…I want to be good,” he says eventually, and he just means in general, in the grand scheme of life, but he thinks that must be the wrong thing to say because Kathy starts to cry. He scrambles onto the couch and pulls her off the arm and she lets him hold her for awhile, and the crying shakes her whole body and he thinks again how small she is.

“I’m sorry,” he says, over and over. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

10. This is what she thinks about when she thinks about her first year at SVU:

She was tired all the time. She slept without dreaming. She was always hungry, and she lost fifteen pounds. She dressed like a man until she realized she didn’t actually have to, that she could be a cop and a woman and that he wasn’t going to spook on her. He was her hero, that first year; she had in her head the vague notion that there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do, that he was the kind of man who could snatch fireflies, or bullets, right out of the air.

She felt superhuman when they were together.

Not anymore.

She lets it alone until around Saint Patrick’s Day; she crawls inside herself like a hermit crab. But it is starting to get warmer, and when they get a call right after lunch she leaves her scarf in the bullpen. “Thanks,” she says, when he holds the door for her; then, and she hopes it sounds like she just remembered, she asks. “Hey,” she begins, “when’s the big move?”

He shakes his head just a little. “False alarm,” he says, and she nods, and they get into the car.




Title: Meantime
Fandom/Pairing: SVU, Elliot/Olivia, Olivia/Lake (SEE? OLD)
Word Count: 3972
Rating: R-ish
Summary: “Could have waited,” he says eventually.

“For you to be done at the OB/GYN?” She doesn’t even think about it, it just comes right out, and she wonders what it is about Elliot these days that everything she knows about him could fit in a paper cup and the mean thing to say is always on the tip of her tongue.




Elliot's wife is pregnant so he's gone all the time. He comes in late. He leaves early. He ducks out of interviews to answer his cell phone, which Olivia knows both of them have been doing for nine years but still there's something about it that irritates the shit out of her lately. It's rude.

That's the only thing, though. For the most part she doesn't mind. She spent all summer on her own, and it’s not like she can’t work a case without him. It’s just different, is all. It’s fine.

Kathy's got a doctor's appointment on Thursday morning and so when the call comes in for a student on student sexual assault in a dorm at Hudson, Olivia rides with Lake. She’s been riding with Lake a lot lately and at first she thought he was a total ass, but as the days go by she finds she actually likes him a reasonable amount, his easy affability and the way he doesn’t push too hard. They listen to NPR in the sedan and chat about Joe Torre leaving the Yankees, how much the commute from Greenpoint sucks. Normal shit. Nice to know she can sit in the car and make small talk with a man and not be constantly scratching for what’s beneath the surface until her nails are bloody and raw.


He’s good with the victim, too, pulls a chair up to her hospital bed and asks her where home is, what she’s studying. He uses her name. There’s nothing intimidating about him but his voice is rock-steady like Gibraltar and when he promises they’ll get the bastard, no problem, Olivia completely believes him.

He’s right, as it turns out. They’ve got the kid booked by noon; Lake signs his name to the file in big blocky print and hands it off to her, then pulls a half-eaten bag of Swedish Fish out of her pen cup and helps himself. “So where’s good to eat around here?” he asks, when he’s swallowed. “I mean, not that these aren’t both delicious and nutritious.”

“Clearly.” She smiles. Usually she only lets one other person at her food, but what the hell? They solved their case today. “There’s a Chinese place on sixty-second that we order from a lot. And the deli delivers, which is nice.”

Lake cocks his head to the side, shakes it a little. “No, I mean, like…when you’re not eating at your desk.”

“Oh. Sorry. Uh…wow.” She is drawing such a blank. “That’s a good question. You know, I don’t even remember that last time I ate out.” She’s aware even as she says it that she sounds boring, that she sounds old, and even though both of those things are true these days it’s not necessarily something she tries to advertise.

“Really?” he asks.

“Really,” she affirms. The bullpen rustles and hums; a filing cabinet slams. It smells like coffee and newsprint. “Job just kind of takes over, you know?”

“Uh-huh.” He is perched on the edge of her desk with his arms crossed, looking at her like he thinks it’s a bullshit excuse, and it riles her a little.

“What, you don’t think so?” she asks.

It comes out bitchier than she means, but Lake just shrugs. “I mean, sure.”

“Sure?”

“Just…” He digs in the bag for a minute before coming up with another fish, chewing thoughtfully. “Only if you let it.”

Huh.

“Well,” she says, glancing around the squadroom. Munch and Fin are catching, and the Captain is in meetings all day. Elliot is who the fuck knows where. “Then. Let’s go to lunch.”

Lake smiles a little. “Let’s.”

They try an Ethiopian place on forty-seventh with food so spicy she goes through four glasses of water and gets up to pee twice. It feels like cutting school. She wants to check her watch, but doesn’t.

“What’d you do when you were suspended?” Lake asks, over lamb with lentils and split peas. His water glass is still half-full. “Three months is a long time.”

Three months is a very long time.

Truth is she walked a lot. All over the city. Up to Harlem. Across the Brooklyn Bridge to Williamsburg. Down to the seaport where it still reeked of fish in the heat, even though the market has been up in the Bronx for years now. Ghost smells.

Her sneakers wore out. The soles of her feet peeled off in two big blisters which was absolutely disgusting and hurt like a motherfucker but felt good, too, made her think of snakes shedding their skins and mechanisms outliving their usefulness. She’s been waiting for Elliot to ask so that she could tell him that part, but so far Elliot hasn’t asked, so.

“Saw a lot of movies,” she says, and when Lake makes a face she shrugs. “Why, what would you have done?”

He looks right at her. “I woulda gone to the zoo.”

Olivia bursts out laughing.

“What?” Lake asks, and he looks very honest. “I like the giraffes.”

*

It’s raining by the time they get back to the precinct, and the nape of her neck is cold. In July she cut all her hair off because she felt like it but she’s not entirely used to it yet, is always reaching back to touch something that isn’t there.

Elliot is sitting at his desk, wading through some paperwork she knows was due yesterday. “Hey,” she says, draping her jacket over the back of her chair. “How’d it go?”

“Fine.” He glances up at her. “Got a call?”

“Yeah, with Lake.”

“How’d that work out?” he asks, in this voice like he thinks she’s going to say not well. There’s something about Lake that annoys Elliot, but she doesn’t know exactly what.

“Fine,” she says. “Why?”

Elliot shrugs, consults the folder, and types. “He’s young.”

She laughs. “So were you, a hundred years ago.”

“No shit. Did you eat?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh.”

Don’t even start, she thinks, but bites anyway. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay.” She opens her department email and deletes the garbage. Munch and Fin are arguing. The rain slaps at the windows.

“Could have waited,” he says eventually.

“For you to be done at the OB/GYN?” She doesn’t even think about it, it just comes right out, and she wonders what it is about Elliot these days that everything she knows about him could fit in a paper cup and the mean thing to say is always on the tip of her tongue. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

They cease fire. The afternoon passes. He eats a turkey sandwich at his desk. Back when they were first partnered, on days when it was slow like this he used to scour the Internet for weird-ass news stories and read them aloud to her: Guy found dead in his apartment with seventy-nine stolen parking meters, for example. Woman's life saved when pet iguana dials 911. Used to amuse the hell out of him. One more, Liv. Listen to this one.

Anyway. She cleans up the desktop on her computer, fixes herself another cup of tea. She wishes the phone would ring. When she finally lets herself look over at him there are deep lines in his forehead as he fills out the forms in his laborious Catholic-school cursive. He looks so different than he used to. “You want help with those?” she asks finally. “I’m not doing anything.”

He looks genuinely surprised, which makes her feel kind of shitty. “Yeah, actually.” He smiles a little as he hands her a folder. “Thanks.”

This is how it is with them, now: up and down, light and dark. I’d give you a kidney—of course I would, of course--but I’d let you bleed a little first. She wishes it could all be bad, so she could cut and run already. She wishes he would be the one to end it. She does not want to be around when that baby is born.

Wow.

Now there’s a thought she hadn’t planned on articulating.

For the first time in weeks, Olivia goes home first.

*

The next morning when she opens her desk drawer, it contains a pack of Swedish Fish and a copy of this year’s Zagat Survey. You pick next time, the Post-It says in Lake’s big, methodical hand. Olivia grins; she can’t help it.

“What?” Elliot asks.

“Nothing,” she replies.

That’s how it starts: Swedish Fish in her desk, a Reese’s Cup in her coat pocket. He’s discreet, she has to hand him that. He’s a good detective. It feels silly but she kind of likes it, she’s not going to lie. Nobody’s had a crush on her in years.

She calls him on it the following week, Tuesday night when they’re the only two left in the pen. Fin had Knicks tickets. Elliot is home with his family. It reminds her of high school, of staying after with a cute boy. They’ve got the radio on. She runs up to the crib to get a sweater—heat hasn’t kicked on yet—and on her way back down the stairs she catches him walking away from her desk, which now holds a pack of peanut butter M&Ms.

“Trying to fatten me up, Lake?” She doesn’t call him Chester, because it is a ridiculous name.

“Trying to get you sweet on me," he fires back. He’s got his shoulder holster on over a white-tshirt. He has very nice skin.

“Aha.”

“How’my doing?” He stands at the bottom of the staircase so that when she stops on the last step, they’re right at eye level. He’s looking at her straight on and there’s nothing painful about it, nothing to make her worry about misunderstanding or saying the wrong thing or breaking to smithereens right in front of everyone.

“Not bad,” she admits.

Lake smiles. He’s young, that’s for sure. She thinks of Cassidy, who's married now, who had such narrow hips. She does not think of Elliot.

“You know we work together,” she says.

“I heard a rumor, yeah.”

“So this is a bad idea.”

“Why? I like you.” He’s so fucking direct. It feels completely foreign to her, this bluntness. It feels like fucking Chinese.

“Okay then,” she says. “Okay.”

*

On Saturday he takes her to see the giraffes in Central Park, buys her an ice cream with chocolate and vanilla soft-serve swirled together in a flaky flat-bottomed cone. The leaves are changing. She’s wearing a scarf. “This time last year I was hatching plans to free the animals at the Portland Zoo,” she confesses as they walk past the monkey house. “I was going to be in charge of creating the diversion.”

“I’ll bet,” he says, smirking a little. “This was when you were undercover with Save the Whales?”

“Hey, now,” she chides, and she tells him about Oregon, sort of. The highlights. The wheatgrass and the jail time and the pure cold air burning her lungs. She leaves out the humiliating parts, the crying, the thing in the hospital after she got clocked, but still she hasn’t talked about it since she first got back and it’s a relief to get it out there. To remember that it happened.

“Wow.” Lake shakes his head when she’s finished. “I gotta tell you, Olivia, I respect the hell out of you for doing that. It must have been a total mindfuck.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” she says, although it was, but not for the reason he thinks. The park smells like dirt and fall and animal. Lake takes her hand as they leave, and she lets him.

*

The sex is fine. Olivia hasn’t done it in awhile and she doesn’t come the first time, but he doesn’t give up on her, which she thinks is nice of him. She tries to keep her mind on the task at hand.

“You are one good-looking cop, you know that?” he asks, when it’s over. They’re in his bed in his apartment in Brooklyn; his walls are painted a dark rusty color and there is a Modigliani print above his dresser. His window overlooks a Chinese restaurant winking yellow light across the floor. “Seriously.”

Olivia laughs. She’s been laughing a lot, the last couple of weeks, and she wants to ask Elliot if that’s what it was like with Dani Beck, just—not taxing. But the whole point of this thing with Lake is she doesn’t talk to Elliot about it, so. New plan.

The second time they do it he leaves a hickey on her neck. “Sorry,” he tells her, in a voice like he actually isn’t. She hasn’t had a hickey since she was seventeen. It makes her a little annoyed but then he nudges her legs apart with his knee and she thinks, what the hell. Maybe it’s time for her to be the kind of woman who isn’t always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

She covers it with a thick layer of pancake makeup (almost dried up at the back of the drawer in the bathroom) but the next day they catch a case that keeps them up for thirty-six hours and Elliot notices around hour twenty-three. “What’d you do to your…oh,” he says, and it’s the sound he makes when he takes a bite of something he doesn’t like. “Jesus.”

“Look,” she begins, hand flying to her neck before she can quell the impulse. “Can you just—“

“Yeah.” His voice drops, reminds her of tires on gravel, demolition. “That’s a nice way to come to work, Liv.”

He is such a goddamn unfair sonofabitch sometimes. She could scream. “Fuck you.”

“Is it Lake?”

“Can you please not?” She doesn’t mean for it to sound like begging, but there it is. There is no limit to the depth of how much she did not want this to happen. “Please?”

“I’m just asking.”

“Why?”

He sighs, turns away from her a little. They are standing on a street corner on the Upper East Side, the six broad feet of him looming. “I don’t know,” he says finally, rubbing a hand over the stubble on his face. “Forget it.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

They do their interview, find their suspect. Elliot throws him against the wall in the apartment once, twice, three times, and she almost tells him to cut it the fuck out but in the end she just lets him do it. She understands the impulse.

He calls Kathy from the car. “I’ll get out of here as soon as I can,” he tells her.

You and me both, Olivia thinks.

*

So she’s dating Lake now, she supposes. They go out for dinner. They kiss. He takes her to the Modernism exhibit at the Whitney, and one afternoon at the end of October she runs into Macy’s and buys eighty bucks worth of new underwear. She feels embarrassed and out of place in the middle of all that satin—she’s got a gun on her hip, for God’s sake—but everything she owns that isn’t grungy is of the beige cotton variety, and she’s trying to get into the part.

Elliot calls as she’s walking out of the store. He needs her at a scene and so she ditches the shopping bag in a trashcan at the corner of 57th, shoving a handful of lingerie into her purse.

“Where are you?” he asks, static crackling.

“On my way,” she replies.

Elliot hates art museums, for what it’s worth. They give him the creeps.

Lake appreciates the effort. He makes that much abundantly clear to her in the half-light of his apartment three days before Halloween. Olivia concentrates. She is trying to prove something, here.

“You can stay, you know,” he tells her, every time she gets up and pulls her clothes on, and she does know, but she doesn’t sleep so well in new places. And although it is not the kind of thing you say to men you have just begun to see, the truth is that she’s only spent the night in the same room with another person—opposite sides of the crib, Munch and Fin were spelling them for a couple of hours, it was absolutely one hundred percent not a big deal—once in the last three or four years.

She just likes her space, is all. Pandas sleep alone their whole lives. She knows this. She looked it up.

Komodo Dragons, too.

It’s good, though. It’s fine. It’s good, except that—God, God, she is so completely and terminally fucked up—he just, he likes her too much. Lake does. He calls her sweetheart and it makes her nervous. He mentions Thanksgiving and it makes her flinch. She wants to warn him, to tell him to slow down, but they’re already having sex four times a week and she’s promised herself she’s not going to push another man away for the simple fact that he is who he is and not who he isn’t. But one morning in November they drive into town together and Elliot catches them getting out of the car.

“Morning,” he says, and he is the very theology of indifference but still she is so fucking embarrassed she legitimately almost turns around and speeds off toward the Triborough Bridge.

“Coffee,” she mutters, and heads for the cart on the corner.

*

“You and Stabler ever sleep together?” Lake asks that night.

Olivia almost chokes on her beer. They are eating nachos at a bar in Park Slope; the tone of his voice isn’t even weird. He could be asking for the score. “What? No. Jesus.”

“Okay.” He shrugs. “I’m only asking because he fucking grilled me in the elevator on the way upstairs this morning.”

“He did?” she asks, and it sounds too fast in her head.

“Yeah.” Lake takes another pull of his cider. “Guy’s kind of a dick.”

She laughs once, hard, like the bark of a dog. “Kind of,” she agrees.

*

Thursday night and Elliot’s putting his coat on to leave when they get a call, rape-homicide up in Harlem. He swears under his breath.

“Go ahead,” Olivia tells him. “I can work it with—“

“I’ll do it.”

It's crappy out; the wind is coming in off the river and the whole city smells damp and briny. His phone rings as they climb into the sedan, a ridiculous jaunty tune. ”Gonna get that?” she asks after a moment.

“Not right now.”

Okay then.

Body not withstanding, there’s not a whole lot to see at the scene, but they land a tip from one of the neighbors that has her running down a side street off 125th a couple of hours later, adrenaline singing through her veins. Elliot’s right beside her. Their guy is half a block ahead. They haven’t done one of these in awhile, and it feels weirdly good. She runs faster.

Elliot splits off at the corner—“Around, Liv, around." She does what he tells her--she is very careful about listening since that night in the park last winter--but still they somehow lose their perp, who disappears into a crowd coming out of a club near the train station, escaping his chains like Houdini.

She catches up with Elliot a moment later. “Do you—“ she gasps out. Her heart is a fist on a door inside her chest.

“Gone.”

They search for awhile longer, call in the APB, but the guy has evaporated, and the girl is dead. Elliot's frustration is palpable, rising off his skin.

As they are walking back to the sedan his phone rings again, once, twice. She watches he wrenches it out of his pocket, gives it a perfunctory glance, and chucks it as hard as he can into the street, battery popping off on contact and skittering across the pavement. He is breathing hard. “Fuck,” he says, loud. “God fucking damnit.”

Olivia blinks. She wants to tell him something reassuring, but she doesn't know what. “We’ll get him,” she says finally, bending down to retrieve the pieces. “We’ll sit on his house. It’s fine.”

“No!” He catches himself, lowers his voice. “Just. This isn’t working.”

“What’s not?” She’s afraid to look at him.

He shakes his head, bangs into the driver’s seat. “Forget it.”

“No,” she says, surprising herself, thinking as she shuts the car door of all the forgets its and never minds she has let go over the past nine years. “Tell me."

“You’re not supposed to throw your phone when your wife calls,” he mutters, and she almost laughs, but he is on the verge of something and so she doesn’t. “Just, any of it.” He is looking out the windshield. “None of it is working.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Me either.”

“What, the Boy Wonder is disappointing you already?”

“Jesus Christ!” she explodes. Eleven years with the NYPD and she does not know enough obscenities. “See, right there. Why do you have to do that? Why do you have to make it so hard for me? Jesus, like it’s not hard enough anyway.”

"I'm sorry."

"Go screw, Elliot." She is so tired of this. It’s so unhealthy, and it makes her feel so enormously bad.

"I'm sorry. Please." He swallows audibly. "Why is it hard?”

She crosses her arms. “It just is.”

I don’t like it,” he says. “You with him. I just, I think about it, and I don’t-I don’t like it.”

“Well, that’s just too damn bad, isn’t it?” she blurts nastily, before realizing what he's just said, that it might be the only honest thing he's told her in three years. She thinks of the word blammo. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I mean. I half-know. But it’s not—”

“It’s not going to help us.”

“Probably not.” He waits. “Do you like him?”

"I mean, sure." It's cold outside, and the windows are fogging a little. She thinks of writing her name in the condensation. Olivia was here. “He took me to the zoo.”

“Really? I would have thought you hated the zoo. Animal rights and whatnot.”

She shrugs. “I’m a hypocrite.”

“Yeah, me too.”

They sit there. They breathe. Up ahead a traffic light flicks to green, then yellow. Caution. Sometimes she wonders if Victor Paul Gitano, in all his fucked up mania, had any idea what he was calling to the surface; a warehouse and a gun and a decade of words bitten back, I’m sorry. She doesn’t usually let herself think about that day and the memory tastes like pennies in her mouth, like copper.

“Your wife is pregnant,” she says finally.

Elliot looks at her with some interest. “No kidding.”

“Well." As long as they're airing their grievances. "I don’t like that.”

“Do you know why?” he asks. He says it so quiet like a bastard and it does that thing to her chest cavity, hiding beneath her ribs.

“I half-know why.”

He laughs. “So we’re even, then, is what you’re saying?”

“I wouldn’t call it even, exactly.”

“No,” he says. “I guess not.”

The other day Olivia was thinking about weird news, so she searched it on Google and came up with a story about a tortoise in Australia who’s the last member of his entire species.

One more, Elliot. Listen to this.

She opens her mouth, then closes it again.

"Hey," she says finally. "Did you hear that some lady in Brooklyn found a python in her toilet?"

"Really?"

"Really." She picks up his phone, clicks the battery back into place, and hands it to him. “Do you have to get home?” she asks.

"Nah," he says after a moment. "No hurry."