Chapter Text
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Saturday December 16, 2023
As the plane touched down on the runway, Olivia experienced a sudden and ill-timed ‘What the hell am I doing?’ moment.
It was her own fault. The invitation had been for two, but she’d kept that salient piece of information to herself. No-one knew the truth about this trip, so she only had herself to blame for the predicament that she was now in. Why had she thought this was a good idea, she wondered.
Taking a week of vacation time at one of the busiest times of the year was one thing, but she’d surpassed herself when she’d intentionally dispatched Noah off to stay with his half-brother’s family for the entire time. Not that her son had protested his banishment of course. It was the week before Christmas and the McCanns went all out for the holidays. There was even a local Christmas Eve Pageant that Ginny had arranged for Noah to take part in.
Her boy was beside himself with excitement at the prospect. He’d spent most of the previous week working on the choreography for the solo dance number he’d decided to perform. His only slight wobble had come when they’d arrived at the McCanns home in time for one of Ginny’s extravagant dinners. “You will be there, won’t you Mom?” he asked her anxiously as she shut off the engine and unclipped her seatbelt. “For the pageant, I mean.”
She reached out and affectionately ruffled his hair. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” she told him.
He beamed. “You’re not going to spend all your time working, are you?” he asked her in a critical tone as she retrieved his suitcase from the trunk. “It’s nearly Christmas. You’ve got to have some fun, Mom.”
She was somewhat offended at the inference that she was all work and no play, even if it wasn’t that far from the truth most of the time. This was different though. She had no intention of working for the entire week. Her flight to Canada left early the following morning. Noah had no idea that he could have come with her on this trip, but what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. She’d decided to put herself first for once.
Now she wished she’d brought him with her. His absence left her without her trusty shield, and she had the distinct feeling that her host would take full advantage of the opportunity.
A week alone in the mountains of Canada with Elliot Stabler? What on earth had possessed her to agree to that?
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The Arrivals board said that her flight had landed twenty minutes ago. There was no guarantee that she was on it, mind you. Work, Noah – he knew there were a million-and-one reasons that Olivia could come up with to cover her own insecurities. She was an expert at it. Ten years had changed a lot about his partner, but there were some things that stayed the same.
He’d been shocked that she’d agreed to come to be honest. He’d half been expecting another polite knock-back, but instead he’d been pleasantly surprised when she’d willingly accepted his invite. They’d not seen each other in person for over six months now, due to his out-of-state case, so he was on tenterhooks as he waited for her to come through security.
He’d made the effort to keep in contact this time around, not wanting to repeat the mistakes of the past. In the beginning, they’d exchanged semi-regular chatty emails, text messages, and phone-calls until one day in mid-July, Ayanna had handed him a thick envelope during one of their two-weekly debriefs.
“What’s this?” he asked, confused and a little perturbed by the grave expression on her face.
“Captain Benson asked me to give it to you,” his boss explained. “You’re supposed to read it, and then give it back to me. She doesn’t want you dwelling on the contents, and I’m ordered to stop you from punching any walls.”
The fact that Liv had deemed this warning necessary didn’t bode well. “You know what this is?” he enquired with some trepidation.
Ayanna inclined her head. “I have an idea,” she told him solemnly. “I’ll wait in the other room.”
Inside the envelope were several casefiles. He opened the first one and the evidence photo that greeted him almost made him lose his lunch. As he turned the pages, it only got worse.
He didn’t punch any walls, but he didn’t remember all that much of the next forty-eight hours either. He wasn’t as deep undercover as usual, but he still had a persona to maintain. As a precaution, he suddenly acquired himself a ‘niece’ who decided to move in to look after him while he was ‘sick.’
Jet’s methods were brutal but effective. Once the copious amounts of alcohol had been leached from his system, he finally picked up the phone to call his partner. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded when she answered.
The question came out more harshly than he intended, but he wasn’t feeling the best right now. A tiny little jackhammer was still making its presence felt behind his right temple.
“How much did you drink?” Olivia wanted to know in return.
“Too much,” he admitted, “But you’ll be glad to know I didn’t punch any walls.”
“Well, wonders will never cease,” she said sarcastically.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I didn’t tell you because you didn’t ask,” she told him simply.
The way she said it made him want to reach for the whiskey bottle again, but he knew that wasn’t the answer. “This is what you meant, isn’t it?” he said, guilt curling low in his belly. “At the courthouse? When you said I hadn’t asked you anything about what had happened to you since I’d been gone.”
“Yes, this is what I meant,” Olivia confirmed, refusing to sugarcoat it.
His heart squeezed. “I didn’t know.” It was important that she knew that.
“I know.” He relaxed a little at the conviction in her words.
“So why tell me now? It’s been two and a half years, Liv.”
There was a lengthy pause before she answered his question. “I don’t know - at first, I thought that maybe you didn’t need to know but then… Do you remember years ago when I told you that you knew everything about me even the parts I’d rather forget?”
He nodded, but immediately regretted it. “Yes, I remember,” he said, swallowing back the self-inflicted nausea.
“Well, that hasn’t been true for a long time now but…” She sighed. “I want that back, El.”
He brushed a weary hand over his face. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t need to say anything. It’s enough that you know.”
“But I… You…”
“I am okay, you know,” she reassured him. “Those events - they left a lasting impression on me, but they don’t dominate my life anymore.”
And that was that; the floodgates opened. That barrier that he’d known was there but didn’t fully understand was gone at long last. Their conversations became more meaningful. They shared real details of the decade they’d spent apart rather than skimming the surface to avoid the pain. They both knew that they couldn’t move forward until they’d gone back. They’d been in stasis for years now, but finally the wheels were in motion again.
They’d only spoken once more about the contents of those casefiles. Olivia hadn’t wanted to go over it, and Elliot respected that. Even though the details were new to him, she was years down the line in her healing process and he didn’t want to disrupt that. She’d brought it up herself during a late-night phone call following the conclusion of a particularly difficult case at SVU. He hadn’t asked, Olivia had just started talking. Something about her most recent case had obviously hit a nerve for her and he was thankful that she now felt comfortable enough to speak of it directly with him.
She’d talked, he’d listened. He hadn’t offered her platitudes. There was nothing he could say or do to change things. When she was done, the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle fell into place. What he’d unthinkingly shattered, they’d put back together, piece by piece until the picture was whole again.
He’d sent his own envelope via Ayanna a few weeks later. It contained two plane tickets, a picture of an A-frame mountain cabin, plus three simple words: ‘PLEASE SAY YES’
He hadn’t pushed her for an answer on their now almost daily phone-calls. He gave her the space to make her own decision. She eventually brought the subject up a couple of weeks after Ayanna had put his invitation into her hands.
“I don’t have to ski, do I?” she randomly dropped into the conversation one evening.
He laughed, immediately catching on to what she was referring to. “Not if you don’t want to.”
“No skiing,” she insisted.
“Understood.”
“Can you change the tickets?”
He frowned, “Change the tickets?” he queried, not sure what she meant.
His face split into a broad grin as she explained that Noah had been invited to the McCanns for the week so it would just be her joining him.
“Consider it done,” he said.
“You don’t mind?”
A week alone in the mountains of Canada with Olivia Benson? Mind? Why would he? It was one of his secret dreams come true.
He didn’t tell her that of course. He did have some brains. “No, I don’t mind,” he told her breezily. “Maybe Noah can join us another time, huh?”
“Maybe,” she agreed.
They hadn’t talked much about it since. He hadn’t wanted to scare her off. He wasn’t convinced he’d succeeded as he nervously waited for her in Arrivals. It was akin to coming home after his first tour of duty and looking for Kathy and baby Maureen amongst the milling crowd. The number of people coming through security had dwindled to a trickle, and Olivia still hadn’t appeared. He checked his phone. No messages. She’d have let him know if she’d decided to back out, wouldn’t she?
The automatic doors opened again and suddenly she was there, dressed in jeans, boots, and a deep purple, belted winter coat with a cream woollen bucket hat over her cascade of chestnut hair. She was pulling a wheeled suitcase behind her as her eyes searched for him amongst the crowd of people waiting for their own loved ones.
He lifted his hand in greeting and was gratified to see her face split into a wide, beautiful smile in response. Well, wasn’t she just a sight for sore eyes? He’d always known his partner was stunning, but dressed as she was and with that open expression of delight on her face, she looked as radiant as he’d ever seen her.
“Hey!” he said, reaching out to draw her into a brief hug. She smelled good, the perfume not one he recognised but laced with notes that he’d immediately associate with a more relaxed Olivia Benson.
“Hey!” She smiled a little shyly at him, a delicate blush colouring her cheeks.
He got it. This was new for them. For nearly thirteen years, they’d spent close to twelve hours a day with each other, but never like this. Work, the NYPD, all of that was a seven-hour flight away. This time together would be private and personal, and those moments had been few and far between during their lengthy partnership.
That wasn’t to say that they didn’t know each other, of course, but their social time together had been confined to snatched drinks after work, the occasional meal and sporadic family get-togethers. Knowing she was by herself after her mom died, he'd religiously invited her for Christmas every year, but she’d only accepted a few times in total, and two of those had been to stop him from drinking himself into a stupor while he and Kathy were separated.
“How was the flight?” he asked her.
“Uneventful.”
“Always a bonus,” he said as he reached for her suitcase. “Come on – the car’s outside.”
“You got a rental?”
He nodded. “We’re going to need something to get around. Don’t worry, I’m used to driving in the mountains.”
“I wasn’t worried.”
He laughed. “Liar!” he accused playfully.
She smiled. “I’m going to need to check your credentials,” she told him.
He shrugged. “I lived in Geneva for a while. It didn’t take too long to drive out into the Alps from there.”
“Geneva? In Switzerland? I thought you and Kathy lived in Italy.”
“We did. It was while I was on assignment.”
“For how long?” He’d made it sound like his sojourn in Geneva wasn’t short-term.
“Eight months,” he replied, confirming her suspicion.
“Doing what?”
“Umm… it’s classified, sorry.”
Anti-terrorism then, she surmised, but didn’t question him any further, understanding that she didn’t have the necessary clearance. “Kathy and Eli weren’t with you?” she queried.
He shook his head. “It wasn’t exactly a family-friendly mission,” he told her as they rode the elevator down to the airport’s underground parking lot. “The mountains were an escape really.”
“Is that why you decided on Canada for this trip?”
“One of the reasons, I suppose. It just seemed like a Christmas vacation kind of place.”
Olivia couldn’t say that visiting the Rockies in winter was on her bucket-list of places to go but as the car wound its way up into the mountains, she wondered why not. Warm weather and culture were more her vibe, but the snow-capped mountains, the luxuriant evergreens, and the large expanses of pristine white were majestic and awe inspiring.
“Breathtaking, huh?” Elliot said, noticing her spellbound expression.
“Yeah,” she agreed, unconsciously fiddling with the compass necklace nestled in the swell of her cleavage. “Nice choice, Detective.”
“Glad you approve, Captain.”
Twilight was beginning to set in by the time Elliot pulled their rental into a small picket-fenced parking lot a couple of hours later. Their breath steamed in the frigid air as they walked over to the log cabin that served as a Reception. The roof was a foot deep in snow and multicoloured fairy lights framed the gables. Two Christmas trees stood like sentinels either side of the cherry-red door.
“Welcome to Christmas Pines,” the woman behind the reception desk greeted them with a jaunty smile as they stepped out of the cold into the toasty warmth of the cabin. She was wearing a Santa hat over her rich auburn hair and crystal snowflake earrings dangled from each lobe. “My name is Holly. How may I help you today?”
Thankfully she wasn’t wearing an elf costume. Olivia wasn’t sure she could have taken it if she was. Was Holly really her name or was that some kind of cutesy affectation? Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the amused sidelong glance Elliot cast her way as if he knew exactly what she was thinking. She crossed her eyes at him, and he grinned back at her before giving their reservation details to the woman behind the desk.
After she had checked them in and given them directions to their lodge along with a keycard each, Holly smiled brightly at them. “Okay so now for the fun stuff – what do you want to do about your tree?”
“Our tree?” Olivia asked, confused.
“Your Christmas tree,” Holly clarified. “At this time of year, we offer a special service. Some guests like to go out into the forest and select their own tree, or we can provide the tree and you can decorate it, or we’re happy to select and decorate it for you if that’s what you prefer.”
“We’ll select our own,” Elliot decided before Olivia could ask for the complete opposite.
“Okay – cool. Just book a slot using the iPad in your lodge. The welcome pack details all the activities we offer, and you can book those through the iPad as well. Everything will be put on your final account, so you don’t need to worry about paying for things individually while you’re here. You can always come and ask me personally for advice too. Oh, and in the kitchen at your lodge, you’ll find a basket with everything you need to bake cookies or build a gingerbread house if you wish.”
“We’ll keep that in mind,” Elliot said with effortless charm, while Olivia tried to stop her mouth from dropping open at the saccharine overload.
“Well, I’m sure you’re tired from your journey and just want to get settled in your Lodge for the night so I’ll let you go. Just FaceTime Reception if you need anything. We’re always here to help. Have a nice evening.”
“We will,” Elliot assured their peppy host as he ushered his partner out of the door with a guiding hand in the small of her back.
Back in the car, Elliot grinned at Olivia’s shell-shocked expression as he fastened his seatbelt. “Come on, Liv, it’ll be fun,” he encouraged. “You said no skiing, and normal people do this kind of thing all the time.”
“This is not normal, El,” she told him critically. “It’s a goddamn Christmas Movie!”
He broke into gales of laughter at that. The sound was warm and infectious, and she found herself joining in despite her cynicism.
Oh God! What the hell had she let herself in for?
To be continued…