Chapter Text
Growing up, Olivia had always had mixed feelings about her birthday. Some years—very occasionally—they were good. Her mother would spend the day with her, take Olivia to brunch and then to a bookstore to pick out a handful of new things to read, or to the Natural History Museum to explore the dioramas. She’d get a cupcake with a candle in it, and a gift wrapped in pretty paper with a bow. Some years—more years than she’d like to remember—were terrible. She’d wake up to her mother already pouring the vodka, and anything—everything—Olivia did ran the risk of whipping up her mother’s temper. There were no gifts those years.
More often than not, though, her birthday just…was. It was a day, like any other day, mostly unremarked upon. She’d tiptoe out of her room, anxious to read the mood of this year’s birthday, and find a wrapped gift sitting outside of her door. It was almost always a book, with a crisp $10 bill tucked inside the cover, and usually wrapped in brown paper still creased from its original life as a grocery bag, her name written in her mother’s loopy script over the front of it. She’d retreat into her room to open the little present, perch herself on the edge of her bed and carefully peel back the Scotch tape and rough paper, curious to see what her mother had chosen this year.
Then she’d carry the book with her to the kitchen, give her mother a quiet “Thank you,” and pour herself a bowl of cereal, reading the first few pages of the book in silence while she ate. And that would be that.
If she’d wished for something else—something different, something like the new clothes, or cute fashion jewelry, or popular toys and gadgets her classmates got—she’d never have said anything about it. At least, not once she was old enough to know the truth about where she came from. Serena had loved books, had loved reading, and had wanted her daughter to do the same. Olivia had wanted desperately for her mother to look at her and see her child more than she saw the monster that had fathered her, so she’d thanked her for each and every book, and she’d read them all cover to cover, even the ones that weren’t that great—too young for her, or too dense for her, or just plain boring.
And then she’d take that $10 bill down to the bakery and buy her own damn cupcake.
.::.
She’d learned not to expect much and not to get much, so when her first year at SVU rolled into February, she hadn’t thought anything of it—not until she walked into work on the Monday after her birthday and found her partner already hard at work on a case with Munch instead of her.
“I didn’t want to call you in on your birthday,” Cragen had explained with a kind smile; Olivia had scowled. Her birthday had been on a Saturday that year, and she’d spent the day mostly alone, aside from the half hour she’d spent in a coffee shop with her mother. She’d sipped a latte and picked at a muffin while they’d caught up, a brown-paper-wrapped copy of Carl Sagan’s Billions & Billions passed from Serena to Olivia and tucked away in her purse. Their coffee date had ended in her mother scowling yet again over the fact that Olivia had chosen to transfer into SVU, something that had always been a sore spot but seemed to sour the mood especially on that day in particular.
Olivia would much rather have spent the weekend riding around the city chasing down leads with her new partner; at least then she wouldn’t have been alone.
But Cragen had meant it as a kind gesture, so she’d thanked him and settled in at her desk, catching sight of Elliot eyeing her from his own chair, his pencil taptaptap-ing against the case file he’d been looking over. It was something he did when he was thinking, she’d noticed—when he was formulating a theory, or trying to hammer out a piece of evidence.
Only this time, the evidence had been her.
Olivia’s brows had drawn together, and she’d asked him, bewildered and maybe a little defensive, “What?”
Elliot had leaned forward then, elbows settling on the papers strewn across his desk, closing some of the distance between them so he could drop his voice to something semi-private as he’d asked her, “Why didn’t you tell me your birthday was coming up?”
Olivia had frowned at that, shrugging her shoulders and admitting, “I didn’t think it was noteworthy.”
“Your birthday?” he questions, brows rising. “Seems like the sort of thing your partner should know. What if I wanted to get you something?”
Olivia had scoffed, shaking her head and teasing, “Well? Did you?”
And then his grin had gone wide the way that sometimes made her heart trip over itself, and he’d reached down into his desk drawer, coming back with a Bath and Body Works gift bag with a big white bow stuck just below the handles. He’d reached across their desks to offer it to her, left it dangling off his fingertips.
“Bath and Body Works? You tryin’ to tell me something, Stabler?” she’d asked, teasing, trying not to let on how touched she was that he’d found out it was her birthday and made the time to get her something—in the middle of working a case, no less.
Inside the bag, she’d found a bottle of Cucumber Melon lotion and a couple of tubes of Carmex lip balm.
“Figured you could keep ‘em in the sedan,” he’d told her. “So you can quit bitching about the cold drying your hands out and not being able to find your chapstick.”
She’d laughed at him, shaking her head as he’d added, “Happy birthday, Benson.”
When she’d thanked him, she’d meant it, wholeheartedly, and every time she’d pulled the lotion from their glove box, or fished a tube of Carmex from under a pile of deli napkins, she’d felt a little flush of warmth that he’d cared enough to get them for her.
After that, birthdays had improved considerably. Elliot, who was fairly terrible at remembering his own anniversary and his kids’ birthdays, always seemed to remember hers—especially once she’d finally admitted to him just why she’d thought it was so unimportant in the first place.
And it hadn’t only been him. Every year, she’d walk into the station house to find a box of cupcakes on her desk, and a couple of gifts or funny cards. It was never anything big, and a lot of times they were silly—Munch had gotten her a Rubik's cube one year, and Fin had gotten her a WORLD’S OKAYEST COP mug that had ended up on the coffee station and cycled its way through everybody’s desks.
Even after Elliot had left, the tradition had continued—and by then, it had spread. Everyone’s birthday came with cupcakes or donuts, and there was a bag of gift bows in Cragen’s desk drawer that dwindled every few months, slapped on everything from Silly Putty to Chapstick to novelty coasters and scented candles. One year, she’d even stuck a big blue one to a paper takeout bag from the good bagel place by her apartment and gifted Nick an everything bagel with scallion cream cheese.
But this year, well… This year, Amanda is freshly gone, and the rest of her team—Fin aside—is so new. Olivia doesn’t think she’ll be showing up to a desk covered in dollar store gag gifts this year.
The energy is different now, the camaraderie of years past buckling under the weight of everything that’s happened lately and leaving the squad feeling disjointed and fractured. Bruno is still trying to find his footing at SVU, and Muncy is still grieving Duarte, still pushing and pulling with Velasco—and Olivia’s still trying to figure out what’s going on there. How much truth there is to the confession she’d heard on Churlish’s tape, and how much it should matter if it is true.
Fin is Fin, as always. Steady, and invariably in her corner, and if anybody remembers it’s her birthday, she thinks it will be him.
Even so, she almost buys a dozen cupcakes herself—then decides that might look a little desperate. Besides, what if someone did remember? There aren’t enough bodies in the precinct right now to blow through twenty-four cupcakes, and there are only so many she’s willing to bring home to Noah. The last thing she wants to end her birthday with is a preteen hopped up on sugar.
So, no cupcakes.
No cupcakes, and probably no gifts, and maybe she shouldn’t care about those things at her age, but fifty-five seems like a little bit of a milestone year, and the last few weeks have been so fucking hard. So fucking lonely. She could use a little thoughtfulness, a little care. A little cake.
A little reassurance that the whole world isn’t moving on and leaving her behind.
So she’s sulking—internally—as she heads to the station.
She’d started fifty-five with an early morning CompStat meeting—a little birthday joke from the universe, she thinks—and if the brass were ever treating her with kid gloves over the BX9 ordeal, they aren’t anymore. She arrives at the precinct in a mood—one that isn’t helped much by the discovery that Muncy and Velasco are already out in the field, an empty cupcake wrapper crumpled on Muncy’s desk next to a half-empty WORLD’S OKAYEST COP mug that’s twenty years old and chipped on the lip now.
“Looks like you guys got started without me,” Olivia says to Fin, flipping up the corner of the Sprinkles Cupcakes box by the coffee maker in the bullpen to find two already missing.
“She didn’t know,” Fin tells her, swinging his feet down off his desk and pushing to his feet. “I walked away for five minutes and she was already into them.”
Olivia snorts, guessing, “One for her and one for Velasco?”
Fin nods, closing the distance between them as he says, “If it’s any consolation, she took that birthday cake one you hate.” Olivia wrinkles her nose—it is, actually. “And Bruno caught Velasco right before he bit into his, so it’s still on his desk.”
Olivia glances over to see that, sure enough, there’s a black-and-white cupcake resting on a napkin next to the blue bodega cup on Velasco’s desk. Bruno’s desk (she’s still struggling not to think of it as Amanda’s), has a travel coffee mug and his cell phone resting next to his keyboard, so he’s still around here somewhere.
Fin knocks his shoulder into hers lightly, then swings an arm around her, pulling her into a quick hug and telling her, “That’s from Phoebe.” As he pulls back, he nods toward the cupcakes and adds, “So are those, technically.”
Olivia grins. “Tell her thank you—for both.” She grabs one of the strawberry cupcakes and whispers conspiratorially, “I’m going to have one right now.”
“As you should, birthday girl,” Fin agrees, stepping away to fill himself a cup of coffee as Bruno comes wandering back, a bag of cashews from the vending machine in one hand.
“If they don’t fix that thing soon, I might just buy us a new one,” he grumbles (Fin snorts and says, “Please do”), and then he spies Olivia and perks up a little. “Happy birthday, Cap. Want us to sing for you?”
Olivia laughs at that, shaking her head. “You two? Definitely not.”
“Later,” Fin insists, heading back to his desk with a full mug. “When the kids are back. I got party hats and everything.”
“I’m not wearing a party hat,” Olivia insists, already on the move toward her own office, cupcake in hand.
.::.
The first thing she sees when she walks into her office is the bouquet. It’s big, and beautiful—peach roses, and lavender mums, and soft pink carnations, some small hot pink blooms she doesn’t recognize, and a bunch of greenery spilling out around them. It’s also way more extravagant than any office birthday gift she’s gotten in years. There’s a tall RBG prayer candle plopped next to it—that’s more like it, she thinks—and something small and plastic that’s pinned beneath a gift bow that’s even bigger than whatever the gift itself is.
Her first thought is that the flowers are Bruno sucking up to the new boss, blowing a small fraction of his millions on an overpriced birthday gift. (He had just offered to pay for a new vending machine, after all.) But then she rounds her desk and sees the Post-It stuck to the prayer candle: “HAPPY BDAY – Fin” written in familiar Sharpie, and scrawled hastily in ballpoint beneath it, “& Bruno.”
So, that rules that out.
She settles into her chair and sets her cupcake aside, grabbing the bow next. It’s not even stuck to the gift beneath it; she lifts it away to reveal a little Lego police woman sitting on another post-it, this one wishing her a happy birthday from the desk sergeant, a guy they’ve worked alongside for years but who has rarely left her a birthday gift. She smiles as she props it up next to the candle and makes a mental note to thank him later.
It’s only then that she notices the flowers are sitting on top of a plain white envelope. She frowns slightly as she lifts the vase and slides the envelope from beneath it, her heart giving a double-knock as she catches sight of her name in Elliot’s handwriting.
She hasn’t seen Elliot since that night in her kitchen two weeks ago. Since she’d felt his hands on her hips and his breath against her lips, the warmth of his brow, his cheek, pressed right against hers as her heart hammered and her lungs tightened and her brain backpedaled hard. They’d gotten so close to the moment—the one she’d fantasized about for longer than she’d ever admit, and the one that scares the hell out of her even now.
She’d spent an hour talking to her therapist about it over the weekend, and all she knows for certain is that she doesn’t know a damn thing for certain. She’s not ready for the way things could fall apart if they don’t work out, and she’s not ready for the way things could change if they do work out. And she’s dreading the regret she’ll feel if she stands still, paralyzed and indecisive, until the opportunity passes her by altogether and she’s left with only the agonizing familiarity of years of what-ifs.
After she’d pushed Elliot away that night, they’d stood there for a few long minutes—her leaning against the cool metal of her fridge feeling wrecked, him hovering by her kitchen island looking disappointed—and then he’d reached for her, beckoned her closer and pulled her into a hug that had been so solid and encompassing that it had made her want to cry.
“I hear you,” he’d said to her, and then, “Are we good?”
She’d told him, “I hope so,” and, “I want to be,” his stubble scratching against her brow as he’d nodded.
His voice had been soft and low when he’d told her, “I’m gonna go, get outta your hair. Unless you want me to stay a while…”
She had wanted him to stay a while, but she’d also wanted to bury her face in her pillow and scream about the whole thing, and in the end, her instinct to flee had won out.
She’d let him go.
She’s been a little worried that she’d screwed everything up with her rejection of him—again. That they won’t recover from this one. He’d texted her two days later, said his whole squad was doing a short undercover op so he might not be reachable for a little while, and she hadn’t been sure if she believed him. Still isn’t sure, to be honest.
But it’s her birthday, and he’d remembered, and there’s a bouquet of beautiful flowers on her desk.
And an envelope with her name on it.
She runs her finger beneath the flap to loosen it, and pulls out two pieces of paper from inside. One is the small card from the florist—a square of paper with the name of the florist and a scribbled message: P4L. Friends, for now?
Her lips curve softly as she reads it. They used to send that back and forth—P4L—partners for life—when they were working together and had been at each other’s throats for one reason or another. When one of them had hurt the other’s feelings, or they’d argued a little too hard over a case, or someone had just woken up on the wrong side of the bed and taken it out on the person stuck beside them in the sedan all day.
After a few hours, when they’d both had a chance to cool off, one of them would send the message, and the other would reply in kind. It had been apology, and forgiveness.
A way of assuring each other that they had each other’s backs even when things got rocky. That the partnership was stronger than the problems. That when they walked into work the next day, things would be fine again.
And then he’d been gone and, well…
She runs her thumb over the letters and blows out a slow breath. There’s still so much pain there, still so much baggage between them left unspoken. But he’s trying. He’s been trying.
She thinks of Lindstrom, of the way she’d lamented that there was still so much left unsaid between her and Elliot, still so much ground to cover from their years apart. Of the way her therapist had asked her gently if she's allowed them the time and opportunity to say those things since Elliot’s return. (She hasn’t.)
One of these days, she’ll have to, she supposes, if there’s ever any chance of them cleaning out the wound and letting it heal properly.
But not today. Not on her birthday, and not while he’s undercover, yet again.
She sets the little card aside and reaches for the paper beneath it. It’s a full sheet of yellow legal paper, like the notepads they stock in the precinct, folded neatly into thirds; he’s written something on the outside:
I’m sorry for the first letter. I never should have given it to you. This one’s all me.
Olivia’s heart ratchets up into her throat as she reads the words, Kathy’s letter is still a sore spot she tries not to press on too hard. Not when she wants to feel something for Elliot other than hurt and anger. At least he’s finally admitting he never should have handed it to her—never should have given her a letter full of words he didn’t mean, a letter he knew would hurt her.
He’d told her then that she could read it—or not—whatever she’d wanted, and she’d wished more than once that she’d been angry enough at him to just throw it away sight unseen. That she’d never read the words written on the page and never spent months believing he really did think that what they were to each other was never real.
For a split second she thinks of doing that now—tucking the letter back in its envelope and sticking it in a drawer, pretending all he’d given her was the little card with the promise that they were still partners in some way, that their friendship was still intact.
But she eyes that This one’s all me, and she wonders. Wonders what he’d written without Kathy looking over his shoulder. What he wants her to know now, with all these months behind them since his return.
She chews her lip for a minute, her fingertip tracing the same single inch of lined paper, back and forth, back and forth, and then she finally unfolds the paper and reads what he has to say.
Liv,
Every day on your birthday I thank God that you’re alive, and that He intended our paths to cross. I don’t want to ask you for more than you’re ready to give, but I can't stand the distance between us either. I won’t push for more—the next move is yours to make—but for now, I’m going to try to be a better friend to you than I have been since I’ve been back. I know there’s a lot of damage here and I know that’s my fault, but I want you to know that I consider our friendship one of my life’s greatest gifts. If you have any doubts about that, that’s on me, and I’m sorry. For your birthday this year, I want to give you the same gifts you’ve given me: friendship, compassion, honesty, loyalty, unconditional care, and unwavering partnership.
Will you let me?
Semper fi,
El
The words blur as her eyes well with sudden tears, and Olivia has to drop the letter back to her desk so she can lift both hands to swipe them away, careful not to smudge her mascara.
What is she supposed to do with that?
He’s offering her space, and time, and steady partnership, so she does the only thing that feels right in response: she gives him a chance.
Olivia fishes her phone from her bag and pulls up Elliot’s contact, typing a message that’s carefully vague just in case he’s on the job and someone catches a glimpse at his phone:
P4L. Coffee soon?
He answers almost immediately:
Definitely. I’ll call when I’m free. Happy bday.
He’s added the emoji with the party hat and the noisemaker, and Olivia shakes her head at it, grinning wide.
She reaches for her cupcake and sits back in her chair. As she peels the paper away, she admires Elliot’s bouquet, breathes deep and catches the scents of sweet roses and sugary buttercream.
As far as birthdays go, fifty-five isn’t so bad after all.
