Chapter Text
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sanguine / san•guine / (adj.) / optimistic or positive, especially in an apparently bad or difficult situation; blood-red
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Her first day of the new job falls on a Monday.
Naturally, it’s the first day of summer too. Summers in Napa - from what she learned by her brief Googling on the plane, anyway - differ from New York summers in that they coast into a comfortable heat, trickling in slowly, slowly, slowly. She thinks she’ll survive it, coming from where she comes from - where it’s all ablaze at once, in a blink.
She swallows thickly, two fingers pinching the lapel of her blazer - caramel brown, leather, fitted enough to where it looks like she isn’t trying too hard but poised enough to where she looks like she’s cut out enough for this. She shakes off the blazing trail of heat that creeps up along the nape of her neck and thinks about how she has to survive meeting the squad first before tying her hair back into a loose pony, saying, I mean business, I’m not here to look like her.
The Her she finds across the room with narrowed eyes is cute, undoubtedly. A little rough around the edges - more Manhattan than Wine Country, if you ask her. She’s young, eager-eyed. Her hair is pulled back with a claw clip - half-up, half-down, stopping just above her breasts. She’s chewing the tip of a pen between gritted-together teeth, and she’s the first person who looks up when Olivia enters the bullpen. She smiles silently, and then she ducks her head, starts to bite the pen in what looks like anxiousness again.
The second person she fixes her gaze on, she remembers from her interview over the video calls they’d conducted before she officially agreed to pack up her life and her possessions and her distaste for the West Coast. It’s Donald Cragen, and before she can blink, his fingers are curled gently around one of her shoulders.
“Was wondering when you were due here,” he says, his voice breaking the deafening silence. She swears she can hear the shuffling of her own shoes, the nervous hitch in her breathing. Cragen smiles - tight-lipped without it meeting the eyes, much like all captains of departments like these do.
“Flight just got in about…” She raises her left wrist into view, squints at her watch. “Two hours ago.”
“And you came right here.” It’s not a question, and she sees him nod. “Gotta admire the work ethic, Benson.”
“Well, not right here,” she starts to say, but then her words fade out. Donald Cragen doesn’t care that she’d missed two exits to the place she’s supposed to start calling home on her way. Donald Cragen doesn’t care that she had to leave her boy - barely five - with a woman named Lucy; doe-eyed and well-mannered and so, so gentle with her son from what she saw during the five times she FaceTimed her for their sessions of informal interviews all from their tiny New York apartment.
And then he says, “Benson, come on, let me show you around” in a gentle but hurried manner. Or, what he might think is hurried anyway. She reminds him she’s a New Yorker - cliché, maybe, but she’ll say it over and over if he keeps apologizing for the pacing of things around here, because they’re nothing like the swiftness of where she comes from. She almost even aches for it. Almost.
It’s not very long before she meets everyone - names she might forget in an hour, but faces she won’t.
She meets Muncy - the pen chewer, with a lot less years under her belt than Olivia. Velasco - another rookie, Muncy’s partner, who says nothing much to her aside from hello.
And then she meets Amaro - Nick, call me Nick, he insists. Amaro, Cragen says, will be her partner. He’s no Fin Tutuola, that much she knows from scanning the guy up and down for a hot second. He’s clean-cut, his tie coordinates almost too well with his dress shirt, and she catches a glimpse of his left hand and looping around the fourth finger is a thick gold wedding band. By his desk, there’s a picture of a smiling, brown-eyed girl in pigtails - three, maybe four at most.
“My daughter,” he says when he catches her staring. He doesn’t look shaken by it; just smiles politely and uses one of his hands to cradle the back of the frame. “Zara.”
“Cute,” Olivia says. “Looks about my son’s age.”
“Ah, Cap’t didn’t mention you had a kid.”
“I…might’ve forgotten to bring that up in my interview.”
“Doesn’t make you any less of a detective. Might make you better, actually.”
She hums wordlessly, and then she takes a seat across from him. Their desks aren’t pressed together the way she and Fin had to sit in New York. Maybe there’s more room in the budget here, more square footage or some shit. The walls are less dreary, a little more vibrant, but that doesn’t mean that the monsters they fight every day are any less brutal just because they’re somewhere a little prettier in the world.
Almost like the cruelest form of a jinx, it all happens pretty quickly after that. She’s just settling in at her station, thumbing through pictures of Noah from their last night in New York. It was somehow both this past Saturday and an entire lifetime ago, and they did all of the things they’d never done in his five years living there. Her phone locks on a picture of her five year old smiling an overjoyed, toothless grin as he pedals through Central Park on his bike - sans the training wheels, for only the second time ever.
“Sorry,” she apologizes, flipping her phone face down onto her desk with haste. She points at herself, and then juts her chin at her partner. “Us?”
Nick nods, standing up from his swiveling chair and pocketing his phone. “Welcome to Napa, Benson.”
+ + +
The first and only thing he understands about this investigation is that it’s fucking ridiculous.
If Elliot Stabler knows anything about this vineyard - and he does, every piece of this place is ingrained into every fiber of his soul - he knows they’ve got the wrong place. The wrong guy. The wrong crime.
The detective - about his height, raven-haired, squinting behind round-shaped Ray Bans so polarized Elliot can’t see his eyes for shit - introduces himself, a throaty, “Nick Amaro, Napa Special Victims Unit.”
“Special Victims. Ha. I see.” He stands up slowly from where he’s crouching, dropping the hedge trimmers he’s holding. His hands are calloused and dirty from thumbing through the overgrown leaves, patching the soil where it’d needed sprucing. He decides against shaking the guy’s hand, and Nick Amaro gets the hint, slipping his own back into his pocket. For the best. “The only thing special about Stabler Vineyards is our wine. Can I get you some on your way out?”
“We’re not leavin’, uh…” Nick pauses, letting his sunglasses slide down the bridge of his nose. “Stabler? You’re Stabler, I’m guessing.”
“Yeah, but you forgot to introduce me to your friend.” Elliot’s glancing intently at the woman behind Nick Amaro, both hands firm on her hips. She’s in a brown leather blazer, and he almost - almost - makes a comment about how she’s probably suffocating underneath there, but he doesn’t. Special Victims, and shit. He doesn’t need a kick to the groin from a lady cop today.
“Right, this is my partner, uh, Detective Olivia Benson.” She nods silently in lieu of a formal introduction, and Elliot nods back. “So you wanna tell Detective Benson and I everything you know about what happened here the other night?”
“My guys had nothing to do with whatever happened outside of this property line,” he says sternly, using the heel of his palm to swipe his sweat-ridden forehead. It’s nearing eighty-five, and it’s barely noon. He feels the fabric of his white t-shirt sticking to the small of his back, and god damn, how is the lady cop not dying in that fucking blazer?
“You so sure about that?”
Nick Amaro swiftly takes the lead, while the other one - Detective Benson - watches on. Elliot can see her lips part once, and then again, like she wants to intervene, but she skirts a very careful line. The harmony the two of them work in is practically non-existent, and Elliot only knows this because this place - his place - runs like a well-oiled machine. This investigation feels like anything but, his bias aside.
“Look, I feel sorry for the girl who was attacked—”
“Raped.”
Detective Benson’s voice echoes over the sounds of the California summer afternoon. It’s all bite, and it captures him instantly in all its quiet fury.
“Ah, so she speaks.”
“She does,” she says flatly, lifting her aviator sunglasses up from both sides until they are perfectly perched atop her crown. They mess up her hair, staticking it up a little, but she doesn’t seem to mind. “And she thinks that a girl was raped, right here, on your property.”
“Look, Detective, if you know how I run things around here—”
“I don’t.” He watches as her lips pout. They’re full, pink-glossed and a little dry from the sweltering summer. “I haven’t lived here for more than what, four hours?” She looks at her partner as she says this, and he just nods silently in confirmation. “But I do know a rape victim when I see one, and that girl was raped in your vineyard by someone, that much I know.”
“Wait, wait.” He’s not even being a dick, he just — How does he not circle back to the whole four hours thing? “W’do you mean, four hours?”
“I mean.” She huffs, doesn’t blink, and Elliot watches her partner level his hand out flatly in front of him as she speaks. “I boarded a flight at JFK early this morning. Then I landed here. Then I drove to my new job, I got briefed about this case in the car on the way over here, and now I’m meeting you. What a damn pleasure for both of us, right?”
“You’re not serious.”
She points her chin out, nose scrunched. “I’m as serious as the sweat stains on that shirt, Stabler.”
He ruffles the tail of it with one hand, but that doesn’t cool him down for shit.
+ + +
“Well, he was about as pleasant as the people I deal with in New York on a daily basis, so…off to a good start.”
“He’s just…defensive.” Nick smacks his lips together, and from the passenger seat she can see his frustration whittling. He’s more so trying to wrap his head around it all - the things Elliot Stabler might know, and the things Elliot Stabler could be absolutely blind to. “My research says it’s his family’s vineyard, so, you know, we come in and question everything he’s ever built an’ he’s bound to get a little pissy.”
“So what now?”
“C’mon, like you don’t know.” He smirks, shifting the car into gear. “You’re a New Yorker. I know you’ve got some persistence in you, Benson.”
They drive in comfortable enough silence back to the precinct, the sunroof on the Explorer cracked open halfway as Nick coasts with less urgency than he’d driven with to get them to the vineyard. And then, just before she clocks out, Cragen summons her and Nick into his office and they lay out the next phase of their investigation.
She gets home just after six o’clock. The nanny, Lucy, is sitting cross-legged in a wicker chair on the little patio of the two-bedroom house that’s now the Benson’s.
Noah, she sees from where she’s perched up against the front door, toeing off her shoes, is spinning around in circles with a blue butterfly net. She can hear the sound of his sweet giggles even from inside the house, no more than a little crack in the sliding patio doors so that they don’t let the bugs in.
“So…” She sits down beside Lucy, now bare footed but still in her work blazer. She hands her a glass of wine - the one drinkable thing she’s got in the fridge aside from Noah’s juice boxes. The ice she’d plopped onto the bottom of the glass is already starting to melt, but she can feel the humidity in the air dip around them as the day starts to near its end. “Catching butterflies?”
“He actually got one, before,” Lucy promises, and Olivia can see her tuck one hand underneath her chin, smiling at her son like she’s known him forever. It’s a good thing, putting him in such careful hands every morning before she leaves. “So, how was it?”
“Um, you know, typical first day: Meeting the squad, meeting my partner, working a vineyard rape.”
Lucy’s eyes widen, and she says, “A vineyard rape?”
“Yeah. You know anything about that?”
Lucy swallows down a sip of wine. Olivia can’t tell whether or not the ice makes it worse or better, but the fuck does she know — her wine is usually six dollars, overly and obnoxiously sweet, snagged from right by the register at Trader Joe’s ten minutes before closing time.
“I - I don’t know, I think I might’ve heard something in the news last week but I don’t—”
“It’s okay, Lucy. It’s okay.” Olivia takes a sip too, shuddering when the ice hits the front of her teeth. “It was kept pretty quiet, but I think a few news stations picked it up, or so my partner says. Guy was a real dick about it, though.”
“Do you think he did it?”
With more certainty and faith than she should harbor for a stranger, Olivia shakes her head, lips pressed together in a tight, skinny line. Her chin crinkles.
“You think he knows who did, then?”
“I don’t know, I just think —” She sighs, picking her feet up off of the floor and curling her knees into her chest with a long sigh. “I think no one in this world can be trusted until they show you exactly why you should. Trust them.”
“I get that.”
And then Noah suddenly stops chasing butterflies, shooting her an enormous grin when he realizes she’s home, sat in one of the patio chairs, slowly sipping wine next to his new nanny.
He drops his net onto the overgrown lawn and yells excitedly, “Mommy!” before he collides into her with his tiny body. She scoops him up in both of her arms, forgets about the cheap wine.
And then suddenly Detective Benson’s badge is hung for the evening, and she’s just Mom - knee-deep in boxes she’s dreading unpacking scattered across the empty hardwood living room floor; pasta noodles heating up in a too-tiny saucepan on the stove because it’s all they could get to in the Pots and Pans moving box for tonight. The TV works, though, and the news channel is on — something about the vineyard rapes being covered, if what she hears echoing faintly into the kitchen is right.
Straight away, she races into the living area and turns it off entirely, crouching down to kiss her son’s honey brown, unkempt curls as she hugs him tight against her body.
“You need a bath,” she says, pretending to sniff him. She scrunches her nose in feigned disgust as she peppers kisses all across his flushed cheeks, and Noah erupts into happy, hysteric giggles.
“You need a bath,” he parrots back, squirming underneath her touch.
“You know what, that’s not a bad idea. Mommy’s got a looong day tomorrow.”
+ + +
Jesus fucking Christ.
First, it’s the faint sound of boots sifting through the clipped grass. Perfectly manicured grass, because the men who work on his grounds are the best of the best.
And then in his peripheral are the swooshing sleeves of a blazer - cobalt blue, this time, but just as thick as yesterday’s. Still leather, must have cost her a pretty penny. The detective, from what he can tell, strolls up alone. Her gait is hurried; more hurried than anyone walks here. That’s the New York coming out. Her thumbs are tucked into both of the pockets of the sides of her dress pants. She’s wearing these boots that stop just at the ankles, and Christ, how this woman doesn’t have a single bead of sweat dripping along her cheek he’ll never quite grasp.
When she gets closer, there’s no one behind her, no second set of footsteps. Just like he thought.
“Where’s Rico Suave?” He smirks, spins the dial on the garden hose until the stream turns into only tiny water droplets. He still holds it in his hands, snaked between his calloused fingers.
“So, I see you’re still going with the Prick Approach today, hmm?”
“Nah, nah, I’m just —” He stands up straighter. It’s not even noon, this time, and it’s nearing ninety. June heat roars around them, and by tonight it’ll creep away and show itself out, the temperature trickling down just like the water from the hose he’s holding has. He drops it, freeing his hands. He doesn’t know what to do with them, though, because the detective is fixing her stare right on them. Guilty, guilty, guilty, she’s probably thinking. He cracks his knuckles too loudly, too nervously. “Listen, Detective…”
“Benson,” she sighs frustratedly.
“Sorry, Detective Benson,” he corrects himself. “Imagine you spend your entire life watchin’ someone you love build something from the ground up, right?”
She seems to humor him, nodding softly. “Mmm. Right.”
“And then - with no evidence at all - somethin’ comes in and shits on everything they’ve ever worked for. What do you do?”
She shrugs. “Flee the city and never look back, probably.”
He cocks a brow at her. “Is that what you did?”
She wedges her pointer finger into her own chest, says, “I ask the questions here, Stabler.”
“Look Detective Benson, with all due respect, I get it; you’ve got a job to do.”
“Congratulations. That take you all night to figure out?”
“Now you’re just bein’ mean, Detective.”
“I’m doing my job, Mr. Stabler.”
“You can just say Elliot. Mr. Stabler is, well - was - my father, and if you think I’m a prick…”
“I should’ve met him?” She finishes for him.
He smirks again, swiping two fingers across his parched lips. They don’t exactly conceal his smug grin. “Somethin’ like that.”
The detective is silent, circling around him in her boots until she’s closer. She’s so close that he can feel the heat of her body in his space, which is rare for the way it always feels out here. Everything is so vast, so endless, so alone.
Granted, his mom is back at the house in the guest cottage if he needs her, but he tries not to. He doesn’t disrupt the little pockets of peace she carves out within her days, and she knows he needs his very own - it was his one condition, when he agreed to take this place over.
“I’m not accusing you of raping anyone, Mr. —” She clears her throat, gaze floating to the ground. “Elliot.”
Her voice is soft now, and any lilt of an angry interrogation drops from the words she says the minute she gets within spitting distance of him. She’s very pretty up close; more than, really, but he’d be a fool to call a cop investigating his property fucking beautiful - even if she most certainly is and he’d be downright ignorant to pretend he doesn’t notice it.
“But …?” He squints, narrow-eyed. He doesn’t mean to be smug, but it comes out that way. He can hear his mother’s voice, and it’s saying: You smug son of a bitch, that’s why the girls never stuck around. And she’s half-kidding and half-delusional and also entirely serious.
“But something happened on this property, and it’s my job to figure out what. And why. And the rest.”
“And what about the tool with the Ray Bans? He gave up?”
“You mean Detective Amaro,” she says, rolling her eyes. “And he sent me solo. He’s on another job, and he just thought…”
“I’d talk to you over him?”
Mockingly, just the way he’d said before, she smirks and says, “Somethin’ like that.” Her eyes squint forward at him, her tongue clicks against her cheek. There’s a part of her in this moment that feels less like the woman who’d been sent over here to interrogate him and more like… A friend, some welcome company.
Her face loosens, and her eyes feel lighter when she catches his gaze in the sunlight for a second.
He shrugs off the entire thought as quickly as it came, tells her to follow him with one summoning hand.
+ + +
One minute she’s a New Yorker - all haste in her stride; sticky, stretched-out gum plastered onto the soles of her boots from the messy sidewalks; the sweat of the sweltering city staining the skin underneath her blazer.
And now…now she’s a passenger in a goddamn golf cart, arms folded across her chest in agony - because Jesus Christ, she would’ve put on a better bra this morning if she knew her afternoon would entail bouncing along a grassy trail with the owner of a vineyard just to pull some information out of him.
He’s silent as he drives, wrist slung across the wheel laxly. He sits back in the seat contentedly, and he looks beside him and to his right exactly twice during the ride, almost like he’s making sure she’s having a grand old time next to him.
She shakes her head incredulously, sunglasses sliding down her nose as her head bops up and down from the turbulent ride. She uses a finger to push them back up. “What?”
“What?”
“Why are you looking at me like that? If your question is, Is she enjoying herself? the answer is: Hell no.”
She can see the corners of his lips curl as the cart starts to steady in speed. He turns the wheel, parks it along a patch of grass that’s a little taller, a little more unkempt than the rest of the immaculate, green grounds.
“Come inside,” he says, stepping with one foot out, and then another.
“To…?”
“My house.” He juts his chin outward, toward a little brown ranch with dark green shutters and three small wooden steps leading up to the doorway. There’s a welcome mat, straw-made and wide enough to stretch the door’s surface, but she can’t tell what it says from where she’s standing. All she knows is this: It’s all so homey, and it’s cozy, and fuck, she’s absolutely not in Manhattan anymore.
She stays seated where she is, hands folded in her lap. “You live here?”
“No, I live in that dirt patch over where we met yesterday. This is just for show.”
“You’re not funny, Stabler.”
“Not tryin’ to be, Detective,” he says, and then he stretches one of his arms out, his palm splayed wide as he holds it out for her to grab onto. She dodges it immediately, pocketing both of her hands and stepping out with caution onto the untamed lawn, one scuffed, grass-brushed boot toe at a time. She wobbles on one foot, a little. “Or not.”
She wordlessly follows him into the house. She can feel the summer haze creep inside with them, seeping right through the flimsy door. If there’s even air conditioning here, it’s definitely not on, and he seems to take notice of the way she sighs in exasperation as she follows him into the narrow foyer.
“It’s not where you’re from,” is all he says, swiping his sweaty palms on the fabric of his cargo shorts.
“No, it’s certainly not a high-rise Manhattan apartment, Stabler,” she agrees, pinching two fingers at her collar and unsticking the fabric from her chest. “Jesus. It’s hot.”
“I’ll get you water. Uh, I’d — I’d offer you something better, but you’re on the clock.”
She takes two steps forward. Monotone and short, she says, “I don’t want your wine.”
“You say that now.”
She straightens her body, hands smoothing down the thighs of her pants. “I can’t have your wine, I should’ve said.”
“Right, right. C’mon, follow me.”
He pulls a wooden kitchen chair out with one hand for her and nods wordlessly, gesturing for her to sit down. He takes the seat across from her, but only after he pours her an ice water into a glass that’s really just a mason jar, and she laughs before she takes a long sip from it.
She sets it down, says, “Too fancy for plastic?”
“Yeah, well…” He levels a hand at her, never pouring himself his own drink despite the way his cheeks are reddened from the sun, the way she can hear the hoarseness in his voice from spending all of his days out in the brutal June humidity. “Look, I want to send you back with answers, Detective.”
“Lemme guess: You regretfully don’t have any for me.”
“I trust my guys. My staff. I hire only people I’d trust with my life, and I just don’t —” He shakes his head, squeezes his eyes shut. “I don’t see Jet, Jamie, Ayanna, even - even any of the groundsmen, they — None of ‘em are good for this, I know it in my gut.”
“Sometimes our gut is so, so horribly wrong, Elliot.”
“Are we still talking about this case, Olivia?”
She swallows down another sip of water, and then she sets the glass down again, shoving it away from herself this time. He called her Olivia, and she didn't even tell him he shouldn’t have.
Finally, she says, “Of course we are.”
She watches him slide one hand under his chin, curled fingers. “I like you, Detective.”
“Really? Because your eyes said Fuck off to me the minute we met.”
“Was more for your partner, but…” He cracks his knuckles, hands laced together atop the table now. “I wanna help you, make you look real good on your first official assignment with Napa Special Victims —”
“Screw you, Stabler.”
“No, no,” he laughs. “I’m serious. I know what it’s like when you’re dying to impress someone, y’know? Only in my case it’s my mom, but she’d hand my ass to me if I screwed something up with this place.”
“So it’s her pride and joy.”
“Well, not just hers. Mine too, now.”
“Why’d you take it over?”
He taps a finger onto the edge of her glass, shakes his head. It’s an intimate movement, to touch something he’d given to her. She thinks she hates it, how comfortable he is doing that. “That’s a story for another time, over wine.”
“I’m not coming back here for your wine.”
“Not even if I’m inviting you back myself?”
“Oh, well in that case.” She laughs, steals the glass back from where it’s orbiting in his space of the table. She takes another sip. “Especially not then.”