Kept myself up half the night thinking about our baby detective talking about parallel universes and the idea that this was a reoccurring convo they’d had for years.
It’s early in their partnership, maybe their first overnight stake out and they know each other well enough that they’re past small talk, but Olivia, looking for a way to keep alert, is trying to make conversation.
She asks Elliot, “What would you be doing if you weren’t here?”
And he snorts because it’s 2:34am and he’s a smart ass. “I’d be asleep,” he says with a chuckle.
But that’s not exactly what Olivia meant. “No I mean, if this wasn’t your life. If you weren’t a cop, what would you be doing?”
“Like some kind of parallel universe?” Elliot ask, mostly to stall for time. Because really he doesn’t have an answer. He became a cop like his old man. Joined the force after the Marines because what else was he going to do? He chose the path of least resistance when he was just a kid because it was the responsible thing to do. Kathy was pregnant and he had to provide for his family some how.
“Yeah, I guess,” Olivia says. “Do you ever think about that? How if you changed one thing, your whole life could be different.”
He does catch himself wondering what if things happened differently at times. But he’d never admit it and always feels guilty for it. It’s started to happen more since he and Olivia were partnered. And he already knows it’s dangerous to dwell for too long on why that might be.
Instead he says, “Maybe I’d be an astronaut—still up watching the city, but just from up there.” It’s a little outlandish, but it’s safe. A dream thousands of little boys shared growing up during the space race.
When he turns the question on her she tells him she’d still be right here. That this is where she was always going to be, her childhood being what it was, being born under the circumstances she was. “Except maybe I’d have some fresh coffee.”
He laughs and tells her that’s cop out even as he’s getting out of the car and tossing her the keys. He lets it got this time because he thinks she’s right.
Over time, it becomes a game they play. Sometimes it just to pass the time. Sometimes it’s to keep the darkness they’re constantly confronted with at bay. It’s silly. Mostly. But over time Elliot can’t help but think Olivia’s the through line in all of his universes. She’s the fixed point.
Friend I'm gonna eat my fucking phone
This is. So perfect for them.
They're sitting alone in the dark, radios on but no one can hear them as long as they don't hold down the button. Sipping on coffee, staring at the city slipping through the night around them.
"my mother wanted me to be an architect," he tells her. "she mistook an affinity for Legos for an actual skill."
"I could see it," Liv muses. "You've got a highly developed sense of spatial reasoning."
"what the fuck does that mean," he says, and they laugh, but it's a thought that lodges itself in his chest. He is never lost. He has a feel for buildings, the logic that made them, knows which turns to take, and Liv knows this. She's the only one, he thinks. The only one besides his flighty mother who's ever noticed he's got a skill that has nothing to do with his fists.
"you really never wanted to be anything else?" He asks her another night.
She hums; the shrink asked her that, in her second year. Where would you be if you weren't here? And she couldn't answer then, and she doesn't want to now.
"I didn't know what I wanted to do when I was a kid," she says, and the truth is she was rarely looking that far ahead; all she wanted was out. "There were other things I wanted though."
She looks at his blue eyes soft in the darkness, his hands wrapped around a paper cup of lukewarm bodega coffee. This is what she wanted, when she was young and dreaming; a man she trusted, a man who came, and saw her, and stayed, companionship, to never be lonely again, to never see love used as a weapon against her. He has given that to her, gives it to her every morning when she walks in the station and sees his face, but he takes it away every night when he leaves her.
"maybe in another life," he says. "Maybe I'm an architect and you're the one with four kids."
And she has to look away, bc in that universe she thinks those kids are his, too, and she can't look in his eyes while that thought floats through her mind.
So she doesn't see his eyes close, when he thinks of a little girl who looks as much like Olivia as Maureen looks like Kathy, and guilt and regret churn in his gut.
It's a long time before they play this game again.
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