The Currency of Heroes (Law and Order: SVU) by surreallis, 1/5
Title: The Currency of Heroes - 1/5
Author: surreallis (Now caviarandmeths sometimes.)
Fandom: Law and Order: SVU
Pairing/character: Elliot Stabler/Olivia Benson
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 47,000
Kink: Major = Restraints, angst, hand fixation, codependent cop partners. (Hey, it's a kink in the police procedural fandoms, trust me!) Mentions = Some power issues, topping from the bottom, wall sex, religious themes, tattoos.
Notes/Warnings: Graphic het sex, adult language, adult situations, mentions of rape and child abuse but nothing graphic.
Spoilers for SVU eps: Taken, Victims, Paranoia, Countdown, Scourge, Wrath.
Also, this contains the entirety of my short fic, Bound. I’ve always felt that fic deserved something bigger, and it was the building block I used to fuel this.
Thank you to lauridsen09 for reading and playing the beta, time and time again. You kept me sane and inspired, even when I wanted to chuck it all.
Summary: This job is her calling, it's her purpose in this world, and Elliot is the one who gave it to her. She's still having her beginning, and he's nearing his end, and his rage is dragging him down. She just wants to keep his head above water, before he drowns.
A season 2 and 3 rewrite AU in which Stabler is divorced before he and Benson become partners. Through one horrible year, they struggle with too much and fall into a sexual relationship in order to cope. In the end, it will either destroy them or give them salvation.
Artist: anr. Big smooches, bb! it's gorgeous and it re-energized me like you wouldn't believe, because I wanted this story to be worthy. ;)
Part One
[] [] []
She doesn’t want to do this.
She doesn’t want to stand in this funeral parlor and talk to her mother’s friends and colleagues and be the faithful daughter. She keeps thinking about the case and how, well, damn inconvenient this is. How incredibly selfish it was of her mother to die during an important case, and isn’t that just like her anyway?
And then she feels the deep, sharp pain of guilt.
It’s just that her mother’s death has been an impending doom on her shoulders for years now. The fact that it’s finally over is… a relief, really. And now she just wants to move forward.
“Look, Olivia,” Cragen finally said to her after she tried to go back to work yet again too early. “You might not think you need to mourn, but you do.”
And she has a responsibility, so she stands here and she greets people and she lets them tell her how amazing her mother was and how she’ll be missed, and all her old anger bottles up inside her throat and makes her eyes wet.
Elliot hovers. For once she doesn’t mind. In that freaky sixth sense they have of each other as partners, he knows when she’s losing it and she feels his hand, warm and firm, on her bare nape, or on her shoulder, or on the small of her back. He has powerful hands, hard. She’s spent a lot of time studying them over the years of their partnership. Over their desks as they do paperwork, on the steering wheel as he drives, around a perp’s throat as he threatens. They aren’t pretty or elegant or fine. They are scarred from his rage and muscled and veined, and sometimes he doesn’t know his own strength when he grabs her by the back of the neck. But then he always softens and his grip is warm and his thumb moves gently and he is soothing.
There is something about his hands that makes her shiver.
He says more with his hands than he realizes, and reading each other has become second nature now.
Her mother’s visitation feels torturous, and she lets him touch her as much as he wants, diverting her thoughts, making her feel like she still has someone in this world and she’s not, now, all alone.
She can murmur to him when they have moments to themselves, and he doesn’t care if she talks bad about her mother’s old drinking buddies, or if she’s sarcastic about her mother one minute and then desperate for her the next. He just says, “I know. I know.”
And he walks the funeral parlor, paces like a bodyguard, taking on the role of her significant other, and really he sort of is. She is not dating anyone, although she is talking to a man named Michael on the phone, set up by a friend who is worried about her. They keep trying to set up a date, but her schedule never works out. Dating for both she and Elliot tends to be a precarious thing, complicated by the job and by each other. It takes more understanding than they’re worth, she thinks.
It’s easier just to stick together.
She watches as he paces, talking to her relatives and her friends, and she’s grateful. Whenever she looks up she finds his blue eyes cemented on her. And it’s soothing in a weird way, even though he is wire-taut and hawkish in his guardianship.
She is relieved when it is over. The mourners leave and she talks to the director about the plans for burial the next day, and then she goes into the dimly lit visitation room and says goodbye to her mother. Alone.
[]
When she walks outside, Elliot is waiting for her. He is leaning against his car, relaxed and loose now, and she is always struck by the difference in him between those times they are alone and when they are mixing with the rest of the world.
“I’ll drive you home,” he says.
She hesitates. “You don’t have to,” she says. “The walk will do me good.”
He thinks about this for a moment, his eyes falling over her face. “I’ll drive you home,” he repeats, softly this time.
So, she goes, and he opens the car door for her, and she slides into the passenger seat and then she kind of collapses a bit.
He gets in and shuts the door, shutting the city noise out and the silence in, but he doesn’t start the car. And that’s okay. She feels comfortable with him, even if she doesn’t with herself.
“Okay?” he asks in that rasp he has.
She doesn’t know how to answer that. Her eyes are burning and her sinuses are filling and her throat is getting tighter, and the hot tears are going to start sliding down her face any second, and she cannot look at him. So she just shakes her head and then tucks her chin down and tries to cry as quietly as she can.
“Olivia,” he says, and then he seems to run out of words. His hand finds the back of her neck, and she squeezes her eyes shut and the darkness helps. Everything is so jumbled inside of her.
“Take me home,” she finally says, whispering so her voice doesn’t crack.
And he starts the car and drives.
[]
He’d worried her in the beginning, when she’d first transferred in. She was new and eager and desperate to make a difference, as if she could fight her own demons, and her mother’s, by putting every rapist she could behind bars. Her past would be erased and her life would be born again, and she would have happy memories instead of the weight of her mother’s alcoholism, her mother’s tragedy.
She’d known Elliot by reputation, both good (dedicated, intense, heroic) and bad (violent, whack job, psychopath). He’d been in the department for five years already by the time she’d arrived, and he was an intimidating force. Cragen had handed her off on day one and said, “You’re with Stabler now.” And maybe he’d known all along.
She and Elliot had sized each other up, and then they’d fallen in together like they’d come from the same blood.
“For better or worse,” Elliot always told her, wearing out that old metaphor that cops use, comparing partnership to marriage. His own had fallen by the wayside before she’d come along, the job taking its toll. She wonders sometimes how things would have been different if he’d still been married. She knows his kids, has met his ex, but he is the eye of the storm.
She trusts him more than maybe any other person on the planet. But that brings a whole slew of issues along with it. He has a lot of power over her. Power he doesn’t even realize he has. Feeling vulnerable is something she hates, and she does feel vulnerable around him, even with that trust. Even with all their history. Even when he begs her to tell him what’s on her mind.
There is a dark part inside of her. A part that grew up a survivor and fought for her own place in the world. A dark part that is still very angry at her mother. A part that knows she is different, even though she doesn’t want to be, and no one can really love her, because no one can really know her.
Elliot has that same darkness, and she has always felt it. On that first day of their partnership after visiting a victim, she sat beside him in the car and she felt that rage and that intensity simmering inside of him, just below the surface. She felt it charging the air between them, and it made her jumpy and nervous. She put her hand on his bare forearm and felt the hard muscle under his skin, felt it flex and tighten along with his anger, and she said, “Easy, Elliot.” Like she knew him.
And he hadn’t looked at her, but she’d heard him swallow, and his scarred hands had loosened on the steering wheel.
From that day forward, they’d been partners. And maybe something more that she’d always been afraid of, but never quite been able to resist.
[]
He doesn’t say anything when he parks on her street. He just gets out of the car and follows her to her apartment, so she doesn’t say anything either. In truth she’s a little afraid of being alone with her own brain tonight.
She kicks her shoes off as soon as they get in the door, and all she wants is to wipe her make-up off and shower away the perfume and the smell of the funeral parlor and the tangle of scents in her head that belong to her mother’s life.
There is a message from Michael on her machine that she ignores, and across the room Elliot clenches his teeth, the muscles in his jaw jumping. She ignores that too.
Elliot takes his jacket off and his tie and he unbuttons the top of his shirt and pushes his sleeves up, and then he pours a few fingers of Scotch into two tumblers and brings one out to her. He sits beside her and sips the Scotch and he exhales slowly.
She stares at the amber liquor in the glass, watching the way it shines and moves as she swirls it slowly. Without drinking it, she can imagine the way it tastes, the way it flows into her mouth and heats her blood. How it dulls the worst pain and allows escape. In that moment she sees why her mother succumbed.
“You wanna talk?” Elliot asks.
She frowns absently, captivated by the Scotch as it swirls, and then shakes her head. She doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t even know where to start. Elliot knows her mother was an alcoholic. He knows a few of the stories of her youth. He knows her biggest secret, which really isn’t a secret at all. Her mother was raped, and she is the product of that rape, but that is not what ruined her life. What ruined her life is the love affair her mother had with alcohol.
“Well, if you do…” Elliot says, quietly, and she knows. She knows. She loves him for that. His mother is still alive. His father is long dead. She knows enough to realize his father was hard and unforgiving, and that it didn’t matter. The complicated relationships between fathers and sons, mother and daughters, any child and their parent, is the mold that shapes them. Elliot’s rage comes from a place deep inside of him that was there long before she was. Put there by someone she never knew.
She quickly throws back the glass of Scotch and lets it burn all the way down her throat. She forces herself not to cough and her eyes water. Elliot takes the glass from her.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she says, and she doesn’t wait to hear any reply.
[]
The hot water is soothing and cleansing, and as the debris of the day is washed away, she feels lighter. As her mind clears, she gets tired. She puts on clean sleep pants and a soft T-shirt and when she goes out to the living room, Elliot is sprawled over her sofa and her coffee table, in his undershirt, with the TV on. He doesn’t have the news on; it’s some movie about the end of the world. There’s a lot of snow and good-looking young people in love, and it’s suitably distracting.
She sits on the sofa next to him, and he doesn’t tell her he’s staying and she doesn’t ask. She knows he is, and that he’ll take her silence on the matter as consent.
She falls asleep sometime during the last half hour of the movie.
[]
When she wakes, it is still dark.
The TV is off and her sofa blanket is wrapped around her. When she looks at the time, it is 4 a.m. She has a few hours to sleep yet before having to go to the burial.
Elliot is not there, but she sees his jacket and his dress shirt still draped over one of her armchairs. The sight of his clothes tossed so casually on her furniture is… an oddly warm feeling. She doesn’t always like to think about it, but she is aware that there is dangerous ground between them. That she finds him gut-wrenchingly attractive on many different levels, and their job and partnership has both intensified that, and raised the stakes between them to frightening levels. She knows, purely by instinct, that he feels the same, and it makes her feel like they’re trapped in a plane, doomed to crash, slowly and inevitably.
She gets up, keeping the blanket wrapped around her, and walks through the silent darkness of her apartment.
Elliot is lying on her bed, asleep, and she figures he hadn’t wanted to wake her, so he’d let her stretch out on the sofa and covered her.
He’s in his dark dress slacks and his white T-shirt and he’s on top of her blankets. He exudes heat like a bonfire, so she’s not surprised. He has one arm bent up over his head, and his biceps bulge, even in rest. She can see the dark smudge of his USMC tattoo on his forearm. He rests his other hand on his own chest, and she feels that shiver as she gazes at him.
He is simultaneously the least complicated relationship she’s ever had, and the most complicated. Partnerships can be intense. There is a bond you form with your partner when you face death down everyday that is unique and very heavy. The trust required can push you over the line. She knows this well, and yet can’t seem to rise above.
When she steps into the room, the floor creaks, and he wakes suddenly, his eyes opening and finding her in the darkness. He looks at her for a moment and shifts and asks in a sleepy rasp, “Okay?”
“Yeah,” she replies, quietly, and then she walks to the bed and curls up next him on her side, keeping the blanket wrapped warmly around her. He smells like her soap. He must have taken a shower while she was out cold.
He takes a long, deep breath and relaxes, eyes shut again, and says, “I can go with you this morning. Cap’ll be okay with it.”
His eyes are still closed, so she lets her gaze run over his hair-roughened jaw and down over his throat, over the scarred knuckles of the hand that rests on his chest. “No,” she says. “We’ve got a lot of work to do on this case, El. You go to work, and I’ll be there after lunch.”
He opens his eyes and glances at her. “Olivia…”
“I’m okay.”
He holds her gaze for a long time, and she tucks one elbow under her head and sighs.
“Okay,” he finally says.
They’re silent for a few long moments, and then she says, “I felt relief when Cragen told me she was dead.”
He stares up at the ceiling and she watches his chest move up and down with his breath. Then he turns on his side, facing her and says, “Tell me.”
“I’ve been waiting for her to die for a long time,” she says, quietly, and just saying the words brings the burn back to her eyes. “Since the first time she passed out on me when I was a kid, and I couldn’t wake her up. Now that it’s finally happened, I just…” She tries to breathe evenly.
He shifts, and he’s touching her suddenly, his hand on her head, sweeping the hair from her face. “What?”
“All I can think is, thank God. Now I can finally stop waiting and move on.” She swallows then, and closes her eyes because they’re too wet and it’s all piling up in her mind and making her head hurt, and she presses her fingers against her eyelids.
His thumb brushes her eyebrow, and then his fingertips smooth over the bridge of her nose and over her own fingertips, over her closed eyes. She freezes and her breath stops, the way it always does when he does something soft, something gentle that always seems so unlike him, and so very much in character at the same time. She doesn’t want to move, doesn’t want to look at him, afraid he’ll stop.
“When my dad died,” he says. “It was a weight off my shoulders.”
She drops her fingers and opens her eyes, and his hand slides to the side of her neck, his fingers curling warmly and resting against her nape. In the darkness she can still see the blue of his eyes.
“Not that I wasn’t sad,” he continues. “But it felt like a cord had been cut. Like I could walk away.” He frowns a bit, his eyes narrowing in that intense way he has, and she fights the urge to smooth down that deep crease between his eyes. “And like I was destroyed.” He pauses, his gaze distant. “I could never please him…” He trails away, still frowning.
She doesn’t know what to say, and she doesn’t think he’s expecting her to say anything anyway, so she just looks at him, and he looks back, and it goes on for a long time. Too long to just brush it away again.
When he moves closer, she doesn’t say anything. She just shifts to accommodate him and rests easily in his arms and with his hand dragging up and down her back, she slips into that nebulous area between sleep and consciousness. And she stays there until her alarm goes off and she has to get up and bury her mother.
[]
She goes back to work that afternoon, and she is melancholy. Watching the dirt pile up on top of her mother’s coffin has brought a weight down to bear. Something she had expected but hadn’t really felt until that moment. Serena wasn’t the greatest mother in the world, but she was all Olivia had. Her childhood hadn’t been ideal, but it could have been worse. So very much worse. That much has been driven home to her a hundredfold while working in SVU.
When she sees Elliot, he holds her gaze and she sees worry in his eyes, and then something else. Something that acknowledges that they slept in the same bed last night, even though they hadn’t had sex, and that it was over the line. And it’s now their secret. He doesn’t look guilty though, and he doesn’t look concerned. At least not about that.
He has to go into interrogation right away, and she doesn’t speak to him, but later he comes up behind her while she’s sitting in a nearly-empty squad room doing paperwork, and he puts his hand on the back of her neck.
“How’d it go?” he asks, quietly.
She nods against the pressure on her nape, feeling his skin rub against hers. His hand always feels huge there. Like he could snap her in two. “Okay,” she says. Then she shrugs, a bit more ambiguously. “You know,” she says. He buried his father. He knows.
“I know,” he agrees, and his fingers curl into the muscle at the base of her neck and tighten.
She nods, silently, and goes back to her paperwork, but she doesn’t shoo him away, and he stands there for several long minutes, hand on her neck, thumb rubbing gently over the point of bone there on her nape. She doesn’t really know what she’s writing until he finally gives her shoulder a squeeze and then walks away.
[]
They’re okay for a while, existing in that vexing in between, where she can meet his gaze and know there is more than partnership there, but that it will stay properly buried.
Really. If someone is not capable of compartmentalizing their feelings then they have no business in this job.
Their relationship has always been seasonal. They can rage at each other, cold like the darkest storm, and then ten minutes later the skies have cleared and the breeze is warm. One moment they are fire and sparks and violence and heat, and the next they are quiet and soft and slow and smooth.
“You two are like an old married couple,” Munch always says, and he shakes his head and smiles at them like he knows a secret they don’t.
They roll their eyes at him, but in truth she feels it. A connection that binds more tightly than rope.
In the twilight of winter, before the snow, Elliot cuts his hand while they’re on a case and then pulls a bleeding woman from a bathtub before she dies, his bandages soaked in her blood. In the hospital the doctor tells them she was HIV positive.
Olivia can barely process the information. When she glances at Elliot, his face is stone. Too still to be anything but a mask.
Oh shit, she thinks. And her heart pounds. There are risks they take, as detectives, as public servants. The obvious ones are always less startling than the less obvious. Elliot tries to save a woman’s life, and now he might pay for that with his own. Not the quick, brief pain of a bullet, but the long, slow knowledge that there is an end coming.
She knows him, and she knows trying to talk to him about it when it’s so new in his mind would be asking for trouble. She focuses on the case so he doesn’t have to, even though he seems to keep his head in the game pretty well.
He can’t get in to see his doctor for two days, and she and Cragen watch him fidget and lose his train of thought. She tries to take him for a drink after work, but he avoids her and she has no idea what he’s really feeling, and it hurts.
The doctor gives him anti-viral meds and tells him to come back in a month for testing. The chance he’s contracted the virus through his thick bandages is remote, but…
When she finally corners him and demands to know what he’s feeling, prepared for his fury, he gives her a faint smile and he shrugs. “We’ll see,” he says, as if it doesn’t bother him at all.
That alone scares her out of her wits.
[]
The meds make him sick.
She sits in the car and waits as Elliot empties his stomach in an alley, and it’s hard to see him like this. She doesn’t react except to ask him if he’s okay, and he brushes her off with embarrassment and anger, because he hates for anyone to see him this way and he’s scared, she knows.
He stays stony and hard, and it’s only in the small moments that she can see the toll the worry is taking on him. It’s only in the rare moments that she can even see the worry in his eyes. She doesn’t even know how to reassure him, if it’s even possible. He’s thinking about it more than he lets on, she’s sure of that, but he clearly doesn’t want to talk about it, and when she tries to just be with him, keep him from at least being alone, he walks away from her.
He’s preparing himself, she thinks, for the worst. She knows people who have HIV. She even knows people who have full blown AIDS. She has known people who have died. And humans can adjust to anything. People do what they have to do in order to live their life, no matter how long it might last. But she knows Elliot, and he will let this eat him up.
So, it’s no surprise when Rick, a bartender at a little dive bar down from the precinct, calls one night and tells her Elliot is there. It’s a place they go more often than not because it doesn’t fill up with cops after the day shift. She’s never stopped to really wonder why that’s something that attracts them.
“He don’t look right, Olivia,” the bartender says. “He’s worrying me a little. He’s been here every night for a week.”
She says she’ll come down and get him, and the bartender thanks her, relieved, and she sighs and puts her coat on and walks downstairs to get a cab.
[]
When she walks into the bar, the place is busy. The music is loud and the air is hot and smoky and there are too many bodies in front of the bar and crowded around the pool tables. She glances behind the bar and Rick points toward the corner.
Elliot is sitting in a booth by himself, a glass of something amber in front of him. There’s a bubble around him, where no one stands, and she can feel his desolation from across the room.
When she slides in the booth across from him, he doesn’t even register surprise.
“Did Rick call you?” He tilts the glass in his fingers, watching it intently.
“Yeah,” she says. “You drunk?”
He huffs out a short laugh at that. “Been trying,” he admits. “Threw it all up.”
She sighs.
They are very alike in some ways. For both of them the first instinct when trouble comes calling is to turn it inward and lock it inside, to not let anyone else see what they’re feeling and be affected.
“You’re going to be okay,” she says, finally. Quietly.
He looks at her, and starts to nod, starts to smile, humoring her. And then it all fades away and he is weary. She can see the weight on his soul and the misery in his eyes, and he sets his elbows on the table and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and she sees him swallow.
She reaches over then, to those scarred, rough hands and curls her fingers around his. “Come on,” she says, and she stands, tugging at him.
He gets up and follows her, lets her lead him outside into the cold and then into the depths of a warm taxi. He sits close to her, and they are silent, and she watches the neon reflections in the windshield as they pass by clubs and restaurants and streets where people are alive and unaware. Her thigh is pressed warmly against his, and she can hear him breathing and she feels so protective of him that she almost can’t stand it.
The taxi takes them to her place, and they walk up in the glaring lights of her hallway, to her door.
It’s a lot like the night before her mother’s funeral. He takes his coat off and sits on her sofa, and she sits beside him and they watch Leno.
“I’m tired,” he finally says as the credits roll. “And we’ve got court tomorrow.”
She nods and goes to wash her face and brush her teeth, and she changes into her sleep wear, and when she comes out he’s in his boxer briefs and the apartment is dark.
“You want me to sleep on the couch?” he asks. And it feels like all the air goes out of the room.
“Do you want to sleep on the couch?” she asks, because this thing between them scares her a bit. There’s so much weight there. So much potential injury.
He looks at her a moment and then says, “No.” And his voice is rough and low.
She bites her lip and studies him in the darkness. The shadows curve around his body and turn it to chiseled stone. His chest moves with his breath, and she thinks that he is so very alive right now.
“Okay,” she says, feeling a little like she’s just cheated on a test, and she walks into her bedroom and slips into bed. He slides in beside her and the light from the streetlamps filters in through her blinds and lays across them, lengthwise, in wide stripes. He turns toward her on his side, and she can see the curve of muscle in his arms, the tattoo of the crucifixion on his shoulder, the line of his jaw.
“In three months I’ll know for sure,” he says.
“You’re fine,” she says, vehemently.
“Fuck,” he swears.
She puts a hand on his neck, nestled right under that jaw line. “You’re fine,” she says again, gentler this time. “And even if you’re not…” She doesn’t want to finish that.
“The last time I was here,” he says softly, and she feels the vibration of his voice through her hand. “I should have…” he trails off, but she can see his eyes moving over her face, and the images of what exactly he should have done go slipping through her mind.
Hot, wet, fast, slow, hard, soft, good, good, good.
She wants to say that he will have that chance again, but the words stick in her throat. Everything is already so heavy between them. The world and the job and the case seem very far away.
She kisses him.
She curls her fingers around his nape and puts her mouth on his and she kisses him. She slides her tongue between his lips and she hears him inhale through his nose, and then, for a moment, his mouth opens and he is kissing her back. His mouth is hot and wet and strong with the whiskey he was drinking and his lips are soft and something flares up in her belly and burns hotly.
His hand slides over her throat, and then up to her chin, and then his fingers tighten and he pushes her away. “Olivia… fuck!”
She knows instantly what he’s worried about, and maybe that was half the reason she chose this moment to kiss him. “You’re fine,” she repeats. “And even if you aren’t, you don’t get HIV from kissing someone.”
“It’s not a given,” he growls. “You know that.”
She breathes deeply and rests her head on the pillow, looking at him in the darkness. “I’ll risk it.” She doesn’t think she’s really risking anything. He’s fine. She knows he is. He has to be.
“I won’t,” he warns. “I couldn’t live with myself if you…” He exhales hard, not able to complete his thought. “It’s hard enough thinking about myself,” he continues, and he’s angry, distraught. “I can’t… I just can’t… ”
She watches his jaw flex in his agitation, and she grabs him by the nape again. “Okay,” she says, vehemently. Acquiescing. “Elliot, okay.”
He stops talking but his breathing is still loud. His eyes are shadowed but intense.
She softens her voice, tries to calm him. “Okay.”
Under her touch he stills, but she feels how taut he is, how closed off he’s become, and restrained. She rubs small circles against the back of his neck and he closes his eyes briefly and swallows, affected.
She’s affected too, if she’s being honest, and maybe this is the year for honesty. His muscled curves are familiar, even in the darkness, and her attraction to him flashes bright.
She slides her hand from his nape to his jaw and slowly moves her fingers against the stubble on his chin, exploring. He takes a long, slow breath and his brows furrow and he shifts slightly, uneasily, but he doesn’t reach for her or protest, and she thinks he’s probably afraid to touch her. She drags her fingertips over his upper lip, following the shadow of his unshaven beard. She has stared at his face more times than she can count over the years, and she has never touched him quite like this.
God, she thinks. She can feel the desperation and the fear and the anger and the frustration rolling off of him, and he holds himself still under her touch, as restrained as if she’s tied him. She hasn’t, but the threat of the disease has, and she feels a warmth. She rarely fears his violence, even when she probably should, and yet having it so open to her now, so safe when he is the most on edge she has ever seen him, is… intoxicating. In that same rush of emotions, she wants to protect him and reassure him and she lays her palm against his cheek.
“Olivia,” he says, and he sounds confused and guarded.
“I promise,” she says, quietly. “I won’t go too far.”
He stares at her, jaw tight under her palm.
“Do you trust me?” she asks, and she knows he does, but having him admit it is something satisfying.
He looks at her for a long time, like he’s trying to read her. “Yes,” he says.
“Then trust me,” she says, and she slides her hand down over his throat, feeling the corded muscle there, the movement as he swallows again, the line where the stubble of his beard ends and the smooth skin begins.
It doesn’t seem like a big step, considering. But somewhere in the back of her mind she realizes that she is erasing a line that maybe shouldn’t be erased. And the worst part is that it feels organic. It feels natural and unforced, and that’s been the way of their partnership forever.
He shifts again, and in the silence of the room she hears him exhale slowly as she traces the straight edge of his collarbone.
For detectives who specialize in victims where consent is a big issue, she realizes the two of them have so many blurry lines that it’s almost ironic.
“You can say no,” she says softly, feeling very odd that she feels she has to. But between the two of them she is quite sure that it is she who is better at standing her ground. She has power over him too…
He doesn’t say no. He gets very quiet and very still and she can tell he’s clenching his jaw tight as he tries to breathe normally, but he doesn’t refuse or protest, and so she keeps going.
She slides the pads of her fingers over his shoulder. In the strip of light lying across them she can see the dark outline of his crucifixion tattoo, and she runs her fingertips along its edges. His relationship with religion has always fascinated her. In some ways she thinks he uses it as a comfort, as a justification that some things are out of his control. In other ways she thinks it’s much deeper and she will never truly understand it. He is a strange tangle of blatant sex and violence mixed with innocence and a desire for salvation. Religion has never been much of a presence in her life. Sometimes she envies him and his faith.
She can feel every beat of her own heart, and the warm surge outward as she touches him. Her gaze is tilted down and his breath is stirring the hair on the top of her head, and when she glances carefully up at his face, his eyes are closed.
His body is flexed and tense though. And he is very awake.
She smoothes her hand over the curve of his bicep, and the muscle is heavy and rock hard. Then the valley of his elbow and down over the hair-rough thickness of his forearms. She can feel each long, striated muscle there, down to his wrists, where she can feel the bulge and give of his veins.
She touches his hand briefly, barely brushing her fingertips over the ridge of scars on his knuckles before the warmth washes over her and she almost shivers, and she has to force her touch back up to safer territory.
She touches his chest then, and he takes a deep breath, until he’s pushing against her hand. She slowly slides her palm down through the sparse hair on his stomach, and she hears the click of saliva in his throat. She can see by dropping her gaze that he’s hard, the bulging curve of his erection evident through his boxer briefs. It makes the breath stop in her lungs for a moment.
She can feel the slight indentations between his abs, and he isn’t cut the way statues are cut, but he’s better. He’s warm and solid and tense with power, and he’s real. She feels the soft, thicker line of hair running down from his navel, and she follows it until her fingertips bump the waistband of his briefs.
His knuckles crack as he makes a fist.
She is risking a lot now, and he trusts her, but she’s not sure she trusts herself.
She hesitates, but then slides her fingers along the waistband to his hip and then she is slipping her fingers underneath the briefs, following the furrow between his hip and his groin, and she knows his butterfly tattoo is there, right at the top of his thigh. She imagines she can feel the edges, just barely raised, but it’s probably all in her mind. He showed it to her in the locker room once, back before any of this became dangerous. He’d pulled his sweatpants down over one hip and showed her the thick lines of an old tattoo that had been done by a cheap artist, and she’d smirked at the evidence of his youthful sexuality. As if putting an image next to his dick would have women dying to get in his pants. He’d grinned wolfishly at her and shrugged, and it’d been hard to tear her eyes away from the ink, and from the slightly thicker patch of hair he was flashing her with by showing her. And then she hadn’t been so sure he wasn’t on to something.
She stops on that tattoo, just resting her fingers there, and she can feel the heat of his skin and the rough scrape of the hair that starts just there, and the fabric of his briefs stretches up and away from her hand, proving just how aroused he really is, and she swallows.
“Liv,” he says, roughly and breathlessly, and she hears the restraint in his voice. “You have to stop now.”
She closes her eyes for a moment, the heat between her legs thrumming and her desire for him feeling like the heavy haze of an addictive drug. Maybe like the warm wash of alcohol that brought her mother down. She feels the temptation like a physical blow.
She could touch him. She could convince him, and he’d probably let her do it. She has no cuts on her hands or on her arm, and she could make him come and he’d enjoy it. And then… he’d never trust her again.
She carefully slides her hand back and rests it on his hip, benignly.
He exhales, hard, and his whole body slumps in relief.
She realizes she’d been holding her breath too, and she lets it out, feeling the weariness leak back into her muscles.
“I’m sorry,” she says, because she feels like she has to.
He makes a soft, dismissive sound, and then he suddenly moves close and wraps his arms around her, and she relaxes into him. His chest moves up and down against her, and she can still feel him, hard and arching, against her belly, and so she tries not to shift. She slides her arm over his waist and against his back.
They cannot ignore this, she realizes. And she doesn’t know if she really intended this or not.
He softens a bit against her, and his body jerks as he falls into sleep. She tightens her hold on him and closes her eyes.
[]
As winter wears out, the city is hit by a cold snap, their breath becoming white mist in the air. They start a long rotation of working nights, and that’s always been the preferred shift of rapists anyway.
He’s still stopping the car to throw up in alleys, still looking pale and haggard when the morning starts creeping up on them. He refuses to go home though, and she knows he just needs to keep himself busy so he doesn’t think about the HIV.
He falls asleep at her apartment a few mornings, when he’s too tired to go home, but he always sleeps on her couch, and he’s always gone when she wakes up. They aren’t ignoring what’s happened, so much, because she sees it clearly when their gazes meet. But he’s preoccupied, and she can’t blame him. She thinks that maybe they’re both waiting for the other to say something, but neither of them knows what to say.
Partners get attracted. They sleep together. Sometimes they fall in love, but she has no idea what this really is. And just thinking about changing the status quo now makes her feel a little panicky. This job is her calling. At the end of the day, it makes her feel as if her life is worth it. As if everything she went through as a child had a purpose. And she likes having Elliot as a partner.
So, she just keeps working, and while things have changed, they also stay the same, and that’s okay.
For a while it even feels like things might be okay.
They can work together during the day, and she only has to think about him in that other way at night, when she’s alone and he can’t see her face.
And then they find Karen Smythe, her mentor, raped and beaten in a stairwell, and there are cops involved, and they are both dealing with a world that is shifting beneath them. For a while, they are the way they used to be. Before.
[]
Karen is an interesting force in her life. Olivia’s career in the New York Police Department has been full of partners and rivals, mentors and friends. Karen has been all of them at one time or another.
Finding out Karen had been working for the IAB the entire time is… confusing. And sometimes it seems like Olivia’s whole life is full of complications. She feels resentful of the fact that Karen was lying to her-to everybody-since the beginning, but she understands the reasoning. And it’s not like she’s ever had anything to hide. She doesn’t like dirty cops, and she wants them ferreted out.
All the same, the IAB makes her stomach turn a bit.
When Karen’s case is finally over, she feels more settled. Like everything is in its place. She goes to Karen’s apartment to truly make peace, and they fall back into their old roles. Karen has always been the first, and most important, mentor. Elliot has taken on that role the past few years, and like Karen he’s also so much more.
She’s always been aware on some level that she and Elliot show too much, but she doesn’t realize how much until she hugs Karen and is on her way out, and Karen stops her with a hand on the arm. “Olivia,” she says, quietly. “Be careful.”
Olivia frowns, speechless, because it sounds more ominous than usual, and Karen says, “Sleeping with your partner isn’t the worst thing ever, believe me, but if someone wants to use it to knock you down, it’ll work.”
And Olivia freezes, feeling a rivulet of fear, because she and Elliot haven’t even had sex, and she knows there are rumors-how could there not be-but she’s always thought they were more… invisible.
“I’m not sleeping with Elliot,” she insists, just as quietly. She is suddenly uneasy with Karen.
Karen’s dark eyes stare into hers. “Fine. Just… be careful. There’s going to come a time when you’ll have to choose between him and your career.”
And then she lets Olivia go, and shuts the door.
[]
It’s almost anti-climactic when Elliot’s results come back negative and she finds him eating breakfast one morning at his favorite diner. Although Karen’s words of warning are still digging at her mind, her worldview feels solid again, and Elliot scarfing down an entire plate of eggs and bacon and pancakes is the best thing she’s seen in weeks. She steals his orange juice, and he grins at her, and she smiles back.
They walk back to the precinct, and she matches strides with him, and the morning crowds kind of step aside for them, and she can’t imagine being anywhere else but here, doing this job. With him.
And then, a few blocks from the station, he pulls her into an alley and she finds her back against a brick wall and his body against hers and he grabs her by the back of the neck and kisses her.
It’s one brief, open-mouthed kiss, and she has time to meet his gaze as they part, and then he’s kissing her again, and it’s serious. His mouth is hard against hers and almost bruising, and he uses his lips and his tongue like he wants to devour her. She can barely keep up.
When she can’t breathe any longer, she puts her palm on his cheek, sliding her thumb under his jaw, and she pulls her mouth away. “El…” she says, breathless. “God.”
His breath is faster and a little heavy, and he doesn’t back off. He stands right there, almost pushing her into the wall, his hand still on the back of her neck. “I’m not holding back anymore, Olivia,” he says, just as breathless.
And she knows he means the HIV and the night he spent in her bed with her hand on his skin, and she figures she has to grant him this. She nods silently, and pulls her hand from his jaw, and he still stands there for a while just looking at her. “I can’t forget about it,” he says, softly.
She can’t either, but she doesn’t want to tell him that. Doesn’t want to make this worse than it already is. Than she’s already made it. She holds his gaze for a moment, and then she grabs his hand, briefly, tugging him toward the mouth of the alley. “Come on,” she says, quietly. “We’re going to be late.”
He follows.
[]
It starts the way everything between them starts: suddenly and intensely.
One minute they seem the same as they’ve always been, friends and partners, the cases taking their toll, and the next they’ve charged over that thin blue line, running until their air is gone and their lungs ache.
Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe the day they met their paths were inexorably linked together. Sometimes it seems like the more they fight it, the more it settles more heavily onto their shoulders. The more it draws them together like a magnet and steel.
[]
It starts with a fight, in the middle of the squad room. A little girl escapes from a monster, and the monster finds a new little girl, and now they have 48 hours to find that new little girl. Or she dies.
It is chaos.
There are few leads and there is no rest, and they have to sleep in 30-minute shifts, and they have to imagine what is happening to that beautiful little girl right that minute. And the next minute. And the next.
She has to cancel on Michael again, and Elliot has to cancel on his kids, and things have been a little rough between them lately anyway, and she’s not sure why.
They all lose it a little bit, but she and Elliot lose it spectacularly.
At first just with everyone else, and then, finally, with each other, and he gets sarcastic and condescending, so she tells him, “Screw you.”
And he growls right back, “Screw you!” And he stalks right toward her, hardness in his eyes, so she gets ready for the fight, until Cragen separates them and sends her into the elevator to go down and get some air.
He catches up with her as she exits the stairs and bursts out into the garage. She’s not surprised he dodged Cragen and came for her, but she’s irritated. Can’t they have one fucking minute apart?
He walks up on her like a hunting lion, all angry eyes and hard body language, and they walk side-by-side while she tries to ignore him, knowing that, more than anything, pisses him off. Especially when she does it.
“What’s your fucking problem?” he growls.
“What’s yours?” she snaps back. They’re matching strides and her legs burn with the effort, and their voices echo off the pavement. He always parks on the lowest level where no one else parks, and it’s like they’re walking into a cave.
“If you’re gonna break down under a little pressure like this, then maybe you oughtta find a job where people’s lives aren’t on the line.”
A little pressure. Three days of no sleep and dead-ends and goddamn it, she knows he’s just trying to get to her, but she’s proved herself again and again and she doesn’t need to do it again. Especially not to him.
“Or maybe I just need a new partner,” she snarls. “One who’s not such an asshole.” She’s never threatened him with their partnership before, and in an abstract, detached part of her mind, she wonders how he’ll react. She knows, through some sixth sense, that it will hurt him in the way she wants to hurt him at that moment.
She feels his fingers grasping at her wrist, and she jerks away from him, casting him a cold glance as she walks. But he makes a frustrated sound and grabs her arm, and her momentum runs up against his iron strength and her whole body whips back around to face him.
His jaw is tight and he glares at her and she can feel the anger rolling off of him. He’s leaning forward and his fingers are tight around her forearm and between them both the sound of their breath is loud in the quiet garage. She holds his gaze and he always looks at her like he wants to bite when he’s angry. Like he wants to swallow her up.
“Maybe you do,” he says, in that low, tight voice he uses on suspects. His gaze doesn’t leave hers. “Maybe you can’t hack it anymore with me.”
She’s never wanted to punch him more in their entire partnership. “Fuck you,” she mutters.
He nods, mockingly. “Yeah. Fuck me.”
She’s swinging at him then, and she knows it will never land even before she starts, but it’s completely impulsive and completely out of her control and oh god, oh god, this isn’t her. Not at all.
He leans into it and knocks her blow down and then his arms are around her and she’s struggling because she just wants to get out of there now. Away from him and the case and her own weary mind. But he’s stronger than she is and she isn’t willing to hurt him in the way she has to in order to get free and in moments he has her facing up against the wall of the garage, his hands pressing her wrists to the rough, cold cement, the warmth of his chest behind her. And it hurts but not in the way he thinks when she winces and he eases up and then he says in her ear, “You wanna fight me, Liv?”
She does. And her anger keeps her up on a razor-thin edge, muscles tense and trembling, another fuck you on the tip of her tongue.
“Huh?” he demands again. Quietly.
And she doesn’t. Because there’s still a little girl missing and the exhaustion is in her bones and he might be an asshole but he’s still Elliot.
She gives in a bit, to the wall, leaning away from him as she rests her forehead against the cold cement. She closes her eyes against the burn of tiredness as her wrists slip from his grasp. He lets her go, sets his palms on the wall on either side of her. She brings her fists up to cushion her head from the wall, and then she rests. And hurts.
He breathes behind her for a while, not moving, and she can still feel his body heat and that weird energy between them that always flares in unexpected ways. Sometimes in dark ways. She’s not exactly turned-on, but she’s not exactly not turned-on either.
And then she hears him swallow, hears the rough sound of frustration he makes, and his palm is crowning her head, his forehead coming to rest above her ear. He’s warm and very close and his breath is hot against her neck and his voice is an ache. “Liv.”
She says nothing for a moment, because she doesn’t trust herself. They have an urgent, open case and he is all rage right now, and she is furious. But then she touches his hand where he has it splayed against the wall. She moves her fingers minutely until they skim over his knuckles, and she says, softly, “You’re such a prick, Elliot.” And she wants to laugh. Or cry.
Elliot’s mouth is on her nape then. His hands brushing her hair up and away, his lips wet and warm and opening so he can taste her. It’s like dropping from the sky without a parachute, sticking your hand in an open flame. It’s sharp and sudden and fairly intense and it makes her almost gasp with how good it feels. It’s something he shouldn’t know, how sensitive her nape is, how good it always feels. But he does, of course, and that’s why when he touches her his hand is always on her neck, isn’t it?
He scrapes his teeth over her skin, sucks slowly, maybe too hard, and she feels overwhelmed by her own body. She arches her neck and leans back into him, and he slips one arm around her waist.
She hears the saliva in her own throat as she swallows, and nothing about this is comfortable or right, and the only thing keeping them from possibly being seen is a concrete pillar sticking out from the wall next to them.
It’s still the anger and the frustration and maybe a little breakdown from the lack of sleep, but it’s something else too, obviously, and it’s something she’s known was there. And this is Elliot’s way of handling things. Not thinking, just doing, and that’s the whole crux of her problem with this case anyway. She’s hard-pressed to stop him.
She turns around, and his mouth drags over the line of her jaw until her lips brush his.
“You wanna leave me, Liv?” he asks, voice rough. He sounds furious. And hurt.
And, no, no, she doesn’t. And fuck him for asking that when he already knows the answer. And fuck her for not stopping him, because she has that power.
She shakes her head in the wake of his breath, the sugar from his coffee making it sweet, and then she kisses him, and he kisses back with an intensity that makes her head spin. With his overcoat on, his shoulders seem a mile wide, and she curls her fingers into his short hair, grabbing at the strands even though they won’t stay in her grasp.
His hands are digging under her coat, running everywhere like he owns a map, over her breasts, around her waist, grabbing at her hips. It’s cold and yet she’s hot with his heat all over her. He’s unbuttoning her jeans, shoving his hand down the front of them, curling his fingers between her legs, and fuck, she ‘s so wet. There’s no room between them for her own hands so she just circles his neck and slips her fingers under his collar. And she kisses him until her mouth aches.
When he slows a bit, grows softer, she tugs at his hair. She doesn’t want comfort, and she suspects he doesn’t either. She’s still mad at him, mad at the case, furious at the pedophile that caused this whole thing. Angry at herself for falling into this trap. And, God, she wants him. She just wants him.
There’s a small ledge next to them, where the empty parking spaces start, and he shoves her jeans down along with her underwear and then he grabs her and lifts her onto the ledge, crowding close between her knees so she doesn’t slip off. He’s working his belt and his badge is digging into her thigh, and for a moment she thinks Jesus Christ, what the hell are we doing?, and then he’s dragging her hips forward, leaning into her, and oh…
Fuck…
He’s inside her. And time stops for. One. Long. Moment.
He plants his hands on either side of her on the ledge and leans close, his breath loud, hard. He stares at her then, brows furrowed, eyes dark, and he swallows, and she knows, she knows, she knows. It can’t be this for them, and it can’t not be, and…
It happens, she thinks. It happens. It happens.
He moves then, hands sliding around her thighs, holding her against him while he rocks her against the wall. She grabs the back of his neck and presses her mouth to his collar and the only thing she can think about is the way he feels moving inside of her, the way he feels so big that it almost hurts and it’s been a while for her, she’s out of practice. It’s an unbearable ache, a heat that makes her feel weirdly charged. He’s panting now and his fingers are holding her so hard that the pain is mixing with the pleasure, and the sparks are firing behind her eyelids. She isn’t sure if she’s going to come hard or not at all.
He falters and she listens to his uneven breathing, and she knows he’s going to come and she isn’t. It feels too good, it’s too right, it’s too wrong, there’s just too much of him. He’s trying to slow down, and she knows why so she kisses him and steals some of his breath while she grabs his hips and pulls him deeper. He groans helplessly into her mouth, as submissive a sound as she’s ever, ever heard from him, and then he thrusts hard and comes.
She’s still feeling that weird charge as he rests against her, his cheek against her temple as his breath slows. His back stiffens a little under her hands, and she hears his mouth work just above her ear.
“Liv,” he says, and she hears it there, the apology. “You didn’t-“
“Don’t,” she says, quickly. God, don’t. “It’s okay.”
He steps back then, letting her slide down onto her feet, and she looks at him as she pulls her pants back up and buttons them. He’s looking at her like he doesn’t know who she is, and she has to resist the urge to snap at him. He tucks himself back in and buckles his belt, and she exhales slowly.
Jesus. She just had sex with her partner in the parking garage. She has Karen’s warning ringing in her ears, and a date with Michael scheduled for tomorrow night, and she’s just made things fifty times more complicated.
Before it can settle on her shoulders, her phone chirps, and it’s Fin. She and Elliot start toward the car, and he grabs her before she gets in, his fingers painful around her elbow.
“We’re not finished,” he says, and his gaze is hard.
She wants to protest, but she doesn’t. They aren’t finished. Clearly.
She holds his gaze in silent agreement, and she wears his semen inside as they slide in the car and save a child’s life.
[]
It is late by the time they have settled the case.
There is a crush of exhaustion after a bad case ends. The hours of not sleeping, the stress on their bodies and minds, all of it builds up and then comes crashing down once the worry and the intensity of their drive recedes.
He drives her home, late, and they have to get up early because there is still a lot of hard work to do, but they were silent the entire drive home, and now she sits quietly for a moment, waiting, as he shifts the car into park.
He doesn’t look at her. He looks at the dashboard in her general direction, and she’s never felt more awkward with him in her life.
“I could come up,” he says in that low, rough voice he uses when he’s trying to be careful around her.
She debates this in her head, because there is a part of her that really wants him to do just that. The other part that worries about her job is curiously quiet now. It happens, she reasons, and that’s exactly what he’d told her when she’d gotten close to Brian Cassidy and then had a one-night-stand. It’s the job, and sometimes it’s tough, and sometimes things happen, and you shouldn’t beat yourself up over it.
“It’s been a rough year,” she says, finally, thinking about her mother and Karen and his brush with HIV and this gut-wrenching case.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “Every year it seems to get worse.”
She swallows. “It’s late, El.”
She opens the door and starts to slide out, and his hand grabs at her shoulder suddenly, his fingers brushing her nape. “Olivia.”
She hesitates for a moment, but doesn’t glance back at him. It happens. It happens. It. Happens.
“Night, Elliot.”
And then she gets out and his hand slips away.
[]
Part Two
All parts:
Part One / Part Two / Part Three / Part Four / Part Five
Author: surreallis (Now caviarandmeths sometimes.)
Fandom: Law and Order: SVU
Pairing/character: Elliot Stabler/Olivia Benson
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 47,000
Kink: Major = Restraints, angst, hand fixation, codependent cop partners. (Hey, it's a kink in the police procedural fandoms, trust me!) Mentions = Some power issues, topping from the bottom, wall sex, religious themes, tattoos.
Notes/Warnings: Graphic het sex, adult language, adult situations, mentions of rape and child abuse but nothing graphic.
Spoilers for SVU eps: Taken, Victims, Paranoia, Countdown, Scourge, Wrath.
Also, this contains the entirety of my short fic, Bound. I’ve always felt that fic deserved something bigger, and it was the building block I used to fuel this.
Thank you to lauridsen09 for reading and playing the beta, time and time again. You kept me sane and inspired, even when I wanted to chuck it all.
Summary: This job is her calling, it's her purpose in this world, and Elliot is the one who gave it to her. She's still having her beginning, and he's nearing his end, and his rage is dragging him down. She just wants to keep his head above water, before he drowns.
A season 2 and 3 rewrite AU in which Stabler is divorced before he and Benson become partners. Through one horrible year, they struggle with too much and fall into a sexual relationship in order to cope. In the end, it will either destroy them or give them salvation.
Artist: anr. Big smooches, bb! it's gorgeous and it re-energized me like you wouldn't believe, because I wanted this story to be worthy. ;)
Part One
[] [] []
She doesn’t want to do this.
She doesn’t want to stand in this funeral parlor and talk to her mother’s friends and colleagues and be the faithful daughter. She keeps thinking about the case and how, well, damn inconvenient this is. How incredibly selfish it was of her mother to die during an important case, and isn’t that just like her anyway?
And then she feels the deep, sharp pain of guilt.
It’s just that her mother’s death has been an impending doom on her shoulders for years now. The fact that it’s finally over is… a relief, really. And now she just wants to move forward.
“Look, Olivia,” Cragen finally said to her after she tried to go back to work yet again too early. “You might not think you need to mourn, but you do.”
And she has a responsibility, so she stands here and she greets people and she lets them tell her how amazing her mother was and how she’ll be missed, and all her old anger bottles up inside her throat and makes her eyes wet.
Elliot hovers. For once she doesn’t mind. In that freaky sixth sense they have of each other as partners, he knows when she’s losing it and she feels his hand, warm and firm, on her bare nape, or on her shoulder, or on the small of her back. He has powerful hands, hard. She’s spent a lot of time studying them over the years of their partnership. Over their desks as they do paperwork, on the steering wheel as he drives, around a perp’s throat as he threatens. They aren’t pretty or elegant or fine. They are scarred from his rage and muscled and veined, and sometimes he doesn’t know his own strength when he grabs her by the back of the neck. But then he always softens and his grip is warm and his thumb moves gently and he is soothing.
There is something about his hands that makes her shiver.
He says more with his hands than he realizes, and reading each other has become second nature now.
Her mother’s visitation feels torturous, and she lets him touch her as much as he wants, diverting her thoughts, making her feel like she still has someone in this world and she’s not, now, all alone.
She can murmur to him when they have moments to themselves, and he doesn’t care if she talks bad about her mother’s old drinking buddies, or if she’s sarcastic about her mother one minute and then desperate for her the next. He just says, “I know. I know.”
And he walks the funeral parlor, paces like a bodyguard, taking on the role of her significant other, and really he sort of is. She is not dating anyone, although she is talking to a man named Michael on the phone, set up by a friend who is worried about her. They keep trying to set up a date, but her schedule never works out. Dating for both she and Elliot tends to be a precarious thing, complicated by the job and by each other. It takes more understanding than they’re worth, she thinks.
It’s easier just to stick together.
She watches as he paces, talking to her relatives and her friends, and she’s grateful. Whenever she looks up she finds his blue eyes cemented on her. And it’s soothing in a weird way, even though he is wire-taut and hawkish in his guardianship.
She is relieved when it is over. The mourners leave and she talks to the director about the plans for burial the next day, and then she goes into the dimly lit visitation room and says goodbye to her mother. Alone.
[]
When she walks outside, Elliot is waiting for her. He is leaning against his car, relaxed and loose now, and she is always struck by the difference in him between those times they are alone and when they are mixing with the rest of the world.
“I’ll drive you home,” he says.
She hesitates. “You don’t have to,” she says. “The walk will do me good.”
He thinks about this for a moment, his eyes falling over her face. “I’ll drive you home,” he repeats, softly this time.
So, she goes, and he opens the car door for her, and she slides into the passenger seat and then she kind of collapses a bit.
He gets in and shuts the door, shutting the city noise out and the silence in, but he doesn’t start the car. And that’s okay. She feels comfortable with him, even if she doesn’t with herself.
“Okay?” he asks in that rasp he has.
She doesn’t know how to answer that. Her eyes are burning and her sinuses are filling and her throat is getting tighter, and the hot tears are going to start sliding down her face any second, and she cannot look at him. So she just shakes her head and then tucks her chin down and tries to cry as quietly as she can.
“Olivia,” he says, and then he seems to run out of words. His hand finds the back of her neck, and she squeezes her eyes shut and the darkness helps. Everything is so jumbled inside of her.
“Take me home,” she finally says, whispering so her voice doesn’t crack.
And he starts the car and drives.
[]
He’d worried her in the beginning, when she’d first transferred in. She was new and eager and desperate to make a difference, as if she could fight her own demons, and her mother’s, by putting every rapist she could behind bars. Her past would be erased and her life would be born again, and she would have happy memories instead of the weight of her mother’s alcoholism, her mother’s tragedy.
She’d known Elliot by reputation, both good (dedicated, intense, heroic) and bad (violent, whack job, psychopath). He’d been in the department for five years already by the time she’d arrived, and he was an intimidating force. Cragen had handed her off on day one and said, “You’re with Stabler now.” And maybe he’d known all along.
She and Elliot had sized each other up, and then they’d fallen in together like they’d come from the same blood.
“For better or worse,” Elliot always told her, wearing out that old metaphor that cops use, comparing partnership to marriage. His own had fallen by the wayside before she’d come along, the job taking its toll. She wonders sometimes how things would have been different if he’d still been married. She knows his kids, has met his ex, but he is the eye of the storm.
She trusts him more than maybe any other person on the planet. But that brings a whole slew of issues along with it. He has a lot of power over her. Power he doesn’t even realize he has. Feeling vulnerable is something she hates, and she does feel vulnerable around him, even with that trust. Even with all their history. Even when he begs her to tell him what’s on her mind.
There is a dark part inside of her. A part that grew up a survivor and fought for her own place in the world. A dark part that is still very angry at her mother. A part that knows she is different, even though she doesn’t want to be, and no one can really love her, because no one can really know her.
Elliot has that same darkness, and she has always felt it. On that first day of their partnership after visiting a victim, she sat beside him in the car and she felt that rage and that intensity simmering inside of him, just below the surface. She felt it charging the air between them, and it made her jumpy and nervous. She put her hand on his bare forearm and felt the hard muscle under his skin, felt it flex and tighten along with his anger, and she said, “Easy, Elliot.” Like she knew him.
And he hadn’t looked at her, but she’d heard him swallow, and his scarred hands had loosened on the steering wheel.
From that day forward, they’d been partners. And maybe something more that she’d always been afraid of, but never quite been able to resist.
[]
He doesn’t say anything when he parks on her street. He just gets out of the car and follows her to her apartment, so she doesn’t say anything either. In truth she’s a little afraid of being alone with her own brain tonight.
She kicks her shoes off as soon as they get in the door, and all she wants is to wipe her make-up off and shower away the perfume and the smell of the funeral parlor and the tangle of scents in her head that belong to her mother’s life.
There is a message from Michael on her machine that she ignores, and across the room Elliot clenches his teeth, the muscles in his jaw jumping. She ignores that too.
Elliot takes his jacket off and his tie and he unbuttons the top of his shirt and pushes his sleeves up, and then he pours a few fingers of Scotch into two tumblers and brings one out to her. He sits beside her and sips the Scotch and he exhales slowly.
She stares at the amber liquor in the glass, watching the way it shines and moves as she swirls it slowly. Without drinking it, she can imagine the way it tastes, the way it flows into her mouth and heats her blood. How it dulls the worst pain and allows escape. In that moment she sees why her mother succumbed.
“You wanna talk?” Elliot asks.
She frowns absently, captivated by the Scotch as it swirls, and then shakes her head. She doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t even know where to start. Elliot knows her mother was an alcoholic. He knows a few of the stories of her youth. He knows her biggest secret, which really isn’t a secret at all. Her mother was raped, and she is the product of that rape, but that is not what ruined her life. What ruined her life is the love affair her mother had with alcohol.
“Well, if you do…” Elliot says, quietly, and she knows. She knows. She loves him for that. His mother is still alive. His father is long dead. She knows enough to realize his father was hard and unforgiving, and that it didn’t matter. The complicated relationships between fathers and sons, mother and daughters, any child and their parent, is the mold that shapes them. Elliot’s rage comes from a place deep inside of him that was there long before she was. Put there by someone she never knew.
She quickly throws back the glass of Scotch and lets it burn all the way down her throat. She forces herself not to cough and her eyes water. Elliot takes the glass from her.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she says, and she doesn’t wait to hear any reply.
[]
The hot water is soothing and cleansing, and as the debris of the day is washed away, she feels lighter. As her mind clears, she gets tired. She puts on clean sleep pants and a soft T-shirt and when she goes out to the living room, Elliot is sprawled over her sofa and her coffee table, in his undershirt, with the TV on. He doesn’t have the news on; it’s some movie about the end of the world. There’s a lot of snow and good-looking young people in love, and it’s suitably distracting.
She sits on the sofa next to him, and he doesn’t tell her he’s staying and she doesn’t ask. She knows he is, and that he’ll take her silence on the matter as consent.
She falls asleep sometime during the last half hour of the movie.
[]
When she wakes, it is still dark.
The TV is off and her sofa blanket is wrapped around her. When she looks at the time, it is 4 a.m. She has a few hours to sleep yet before having to go to the burial.
Elliot is not there, but she sees his jacket and his dress shirt still draped over one of her armchairs. The sight of his clothes tossed so casually on her furniture is… an oddly warm feeling. She doesn’t always like to think about it, but she is aware that there is dangerous ground between them. That she finds him gut-wrenchingly attractive on many different levels, and their job and partnership has both intensified that, and raised the stakes between them to frightening levels. She knows, purely by instinct, that he feels the same, and it makes her feel like they’re trapped in a plane, doomed to crash, slowly and inevitably.
She gets up, keeping the blanket wrapped around her, and walks through the silent darkness of her apartment.
Elliot is lying on her bed, asleep, and she figures he hadn’t wanted to wake her, so he’d let her stretch out on the sofa and covered her.
He’s in his dark dress slacks and his white T-shirt and he’s on top of her blankets. He exudes heat like a bonfire, so she’s not surprised. He has one arm bent up over his head, and his biceps bulge, even in rest. She can see the dark smudge of his USMC tattoo on his forearm. He rests his other hand on his own chest, and she feels that shiver as she gazes at him.
He is simultaneously the least complicated relationship she’s ever had, and the most complicated. Partnerships can be intense. There is a bond you form with your partner when you face death down everyday that is unique and very heavy. The trust required can push you over the line. She knows this well, and yet can’t seem to rise above.
When she steps into the room, the floor creaks, and he wakes suddenly, his eyes opening and finding her in the darkness. He looks at her for a moment and shifts and asks in a sleepy rasp, “Okay?”
“Yeah,” she replies, quietly, and then she walks to the bed and curls up next him on her side, keeping the blanket wrapped warmly around her. He smells like her soap. He must have taken a shower while she was out cold.
He takes a long, deep breath and relaxes, eyes shut again, and says, “I can go with you this morning. Cap’ll be okay with it.”
His eyes are still closed, so she lets her gaze run over his hair-roughened jaw and down over his throat, over the scarred knuckles of the hand that rests on his chest. “No,” she says. “We’ve got a lot of work to do on this case, El. You go to work, and I’ll be there after lunch.”
He opens his eyes and glances at her. “Olivia…”
“I’m okay.”
He holds her gaze for a long time, and she tucks one elbow under her head and sighs.
“Okay,” he finally says.
They’re silent for a few long moments, and then she says, “I felt relief when Cragen told me she was dead.”
He stares up at the ceiling and she watches his chest move up and down with his breath. Then he turns on his side, facing her and says, “Tell me.”
“I’ve been waiting for her to die for a long time,” she says, quietly, and just saying the words brings the burn back to her eyes. “Since the first time she passed out on me when I was a kid, and I couldn’t wake her up. Now that it’s finally happened, I just…” She tries to breathe evenly.
He shifts, and he’s touching her suddenly, his hand on her head, sweeping the hair from her face. “What?”
“All I can think is, thank God. Now I can finally stop waiting and move on.” She swallows then, and closes her eyes because they’re too wet and it’s all piling up in her mind and making her head hurt, and she presses her fingers against her eyelids.
His thumb brushes her eyebrow, and then his fingertips smooth over the bridge of her nose and over her own fingertips, over her closed eyes. She freezes and her breath stops, the way it always does when he does something soft, something gentle that always seems so unlike him, and so very much in character at the same time. She doesn’t want to move, doesn’t want to look at him, afraid he’ll stop.
“When my dad died,” he says. “It was a weight off my shoulders.”
She drops her fingers and opens her eyes, and his hand slides to the side of her neck, his fingers curling warmly and resting against her nape. In the darkness she can still see the blue of his eyes.
“Not that I wasn’t sad,” he continues. “But it felt like a cord had been cut. Like I could walk away.” He frowns a bit, his eyes narrowing in that intense way he has, and she fights the urge to smooth down that deep crease between his eyes. “And like I was destroyed.” He pauses, his gaze distant. “I could never please him…” He trails away, still frowning.
She doesn’t know what to say, and she doesn’t think he’s expecting her to say anything anyway, so she just looks at him, and he looks back, and it goes on for a long time. Too long to just brush it away again.
When he moves closer, she doesn’t say anything. She just shifts to accommodate him and rests easily in his arms and with his hand dragging up and down her back, she slips into that nebulous area between sleep and consciousness. And she stays there until her alarm goes off and she has to get up and bury her mother.
[]
She goes back to work that afternoon, and she is melancholy. Watching the dirt pile up on top of her mother’s coffin has brought a weight down to bear. Something she had expected but hadn’t really felt until that moment. Serena wasn’t the greatest mother in the world, but she was all Olivia had. Her childhood hadn’t been ideal, but it could have been worse. So very much worse. That much has been driven home to her a hundredfold while working in SVU.
When she sees Elliot, he holds her gaze and she sees worry in his eyes, and then something else. Something that acknowledges that they slept in the same bed last night, even though they hadn’t had sex, and that it was over the line. And it’s now their secret. He doesn’t look guilty though, and he doesn’t look concerned. At least not about that.
He has to go into interrogation right away, and she doesn’t speak to him, but later he comes up behind her while she’s sitting in a nearly-empty squad room doing paperwork, and he puts his hand on the back of her neck.
“How’d it go?” he asks, quietly.
She nods against the pressure on her nape, feeling his skin rub against hers. His hand always feels huge there. Like he could snap her in two. “Okay,” she says. Then she shrugs, a bit more ambiguously. “You know,” she says. He buried his father. He knows.
“I know,” he agrees, and his fingers curl into the muscle at the base of her neck and tighten.
She nods, silently, and goes back to her paperwork, but she doesn’t shoo him away, and he stands there for several long minutes, hand on her neck, thumb rubbing gently over the point of bone there on her nape. She doesn’t really know what she’s writing until he finally gives her shoulder a squeeze and then walks away.
[]
They’re okay for a while, existing in that vexing in between, where she can meet his gaze and know there is more than partnership there, but that it will stay properly buried.
Really. If someone is not capable of compartmentalizing their feelings then they have no business in this job.
Their relationship has always been seasonal. They can rage at each other, cold like the darkest storm, and then ten minutes later the skies have cleared and the breeze is warm. One moment they are fire and sparks and violence and heat, and the next they are quiet and soft and slow and smooth.
“You two are like an old married couple,” Munch always says, and he shakes his head and smiles at them like he knows a secret they don’t.
They roll their eyes at him, but in truth she feels it. A connection that binds more tightly than rope.
In the twilight of winter, before the snow, Elliot cuts his hand while they’re on a case and then pulls a bleeding woman from a bathtub before she dies, his bandages soaked in her blood. In the hospital the doctor tells them she was HIV positive.
Olivia can barely process the information. When she glances at Elliot, his face is stone. Too still to be anything but a mask.
Oh shit, she thinks. And her heart pounds. There are risks they take, as detectives, as public servants. The obvious ones are always less startling than the less obvious. Elliot tries to save a woman’s life, and now he might pay for that with his own. Not the quick, brief pain of a bullet, but the long, slow knowledge that there is an end coming.
She knows him, and she knows trying to talk to him about it when it’s so new in his mind would be asking for trouble. She focuses on the case so he doesn’t have to, even though he seems to keep his head in the game pretty well.
He can’t get in to see his doctor for two days, and she and Cragen watch him fidget and lose his train of thought. She tries to take him for a drink after work, but he avoids her and she has no idea what he’s really feeling, and it hurts.
The doctor gives him anti-viral meds and tells him to come back in a month for testing. The chance he’s contracted the virus through his thick bandages is remote, but…
When she finally corners him and demands to know what he’s feeling, prepared for his fury, he gives her a faint smile and he shrugs. “We’ll see,” he says, as if it doesn’t bother him at all.
That alone scares her out of her wits.
[]
The meds make him sick.
She sits in the car and waits as Elliot empties his stomach in an alley, and it’s hard to see him like this. She doesn’t react except to ask him if he’s okay, and he brushes her off with embarrassment and anger, because he hates for anyone to see him this way and he’s scared, she knows.
He stays stony and hard, and it’s only in the small moments that she can see the toll the worry is taking on him. It’s only in the rare moments that she can even see the worry in his eyes. She doesn’t even know how to reassure him, if it’s even possible. He’s thinking about it more than he lets on, she’s sure of that, but he clearly doesn’t want to talk about it, and when she tries to just be with him, keep him from at least being alone, he walks away from her.
He’s preparing himself, she thinks, for the worst. She knows people who have HIV. She even knows people who have full blown AIDS. She has known people who have died. And humans can adjust to anything. People do what they have to do in order to live their life, no matter how long it might last. But she knows Elliot, and he will let this eat him up.
So, it’s no surprise when Rick, a bartender at a little dive bar down from the precinct, calls one night and tells her Elliot is there. It’s a place they go more often than not because it doesn’t fill up with cops after the day shift. She’s never stopped to really wonder why that’s something that attracts them.
“He don’t look right, Olivia,” the bartender says. “He’s worrying me a little. He’s been here every night for a week.”
She says she’ll come down and get him, and the bartender thanks her, relieved, and she sighs and puts her coat on and walks downstairs to get a cab.
[]
When she walks into the bar, the place is busy. The music is loud and the air is hot and smoky and there are too many bodies in front of the bar and crowded around the pool tables. She glances behind the bar and Rick points toward the corner.
Elliot is sitting in a booth by himself, a glass of something amber in front of him. There’s a bubble around him, where no one stands, and she can feel his desolation from across the room.
When she slides in the booth across from him, he doesn’t even register surprise.
“Did Rick call you?” He tilts the glass in his fingers, watching it intently.
“Yeah,” she says. “You drunk?”
He huffs out a short laugh at that. “Been trying,” he admits. “Threw it all up.”
She sighs.
They are very alike in some ways. For both of them the first instinct when trouble comes calling is to turn it inward and lock it inside, to not let anyone else see what they’re feeling and be affected.
“You’re going to be okay,” she says, finally. Quietly.
He looks at her, and starts to nod, starts to smile, humoring her. And then it all fades away and he is weary. She can see the weight on his soul and the misery in his eyes, and he sets his elbows on the table and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and she sees him swallow.
She reaches over then, to those scarred, rough hands and curls her fingers around his. “Come on,” she says, and she stands, tugging at him.
He gets up and follows her, lets her lead him outside into the cold and then into the depths of a warm taxi. He sits close to her, and they are silent, and she watches the neon reflections in the windshield as they pass by clubs and restaurants and streets where people are alive and unaware. Her thigh is pressed warmly against his, and she can hear him breathing and she feels so protective of him that she almost can’t stand it.
The taxi takes them to her place, and they walk up in the glaring lights of her hallway, to her door.
It’s a lot like the night before her mother’s funeral. He takes his coat off and sits on her sofa, and she sits beside him and they watch Leno.
“I’m tired,” he finally says as the credits roll. “And we’ve got court tomorrow.”
She nods and goes to wash her face and brush her teeth, and she changes into her sleep wear, and when she comes out he’s in his boxer briefs and the apartment is dark.
“You want me to sleep on the couch?” he asks. And it feels like all the air goes out of the room.
“Do you want to sleep on the couch?” she asks, because this thing between them scares her a bit. There’s so much weight there. So much potential injury.
He looks at her a moment and then says, “No.” And his voice is rough and low.
She bites her lip and studies him in the darkness. The shadows curve around his body and turn it to chiseled stone. His chest moves with his breath, and she thinks that he is so very alive right now.
“Okay,” she says, feeling a little like she’s just cheated on a test, and she walks into her bedroom and slips into bed. He slides in beside her and the light from the streetlamps filters in through her blinds and lays across them, lengthwise, in wide stripes. He turns toward her on his side, and she can see the curve of muscle in his arms, the tattoo of the crucifixion on his shoulder, the line of his jaw.
“In three months I’ll know for sure,” he says.
“You’re fine,” she says, vehemently.
“Fuck,” he swears.
She puts a hand on his neck, nestled right under that jaw line. “You’re fine,” she says again, gentler this time. “And even if you’re not…” She doesn’t want to finish that.
“The last time I was here,” he says softly, and she feels the vibration of his voice through her hand. “I should have…” he trails off, but she can see his eyes moving over her face, and the images of what exactly he should have done go slipping through her mind.
Hot, wet, fast, slow, hard, soft, good, good, good.
She wants to say that he will have that chance again, but the words stick in her throat. Everything is already so heavy between them. The world and the job and the case seem very far away.
She kisses him.
She curls her fingers around his nape and puts her mouth on his and she kisses him. She slides her tongue between his lips and she hears him inhale through his nose, and then, for a moment, his mouth opens and he is kissing her back. His mouth is hot and wet and strong with the whiskey he was drinking and his lips are soft and something flares up in her belly and burns hotly.
His hand slides over her throat, and then up to her chin, and then his fingers tighten and he pushes her away. “Olivia… fuck!”
She knows instantly what he’s worried about, and maybe that was half the reason she chose this moment to kiss him. “You’re fine,” she repeats. “And even if you aren’t, you don’t get HIV from kissing someone.”
“It’s not a given,” he growls. “You know that.”
She breathes deeply and rests her head on the pillow, looking at him in the darkness. “I’ll risk it.” She doesn’t think she’s really risking anything. He’s fine. She knows he is. He has to be.
“I won’t,” he warns. “I couldn’t live with myself if you…” He exhales hard, not able to complete his thought. “It’s hard enough thinking about myself,” he continues, and he’s angry, distraught. “I can’t… I just can’t… ”
She watches his jaw flex in his agitation, and she grabs him by the nape again. “Okay,” she says, vehemently. Acquiescing. “Elliot, okay.”
He stops talking but his breathing is still loud. His eyes are shadowed but intense.
She softens her voice, tries to calm him. “Okay.”
Under her touch he stills, but she feels how taut he is, how closed off he’s become, and restrained. She rubs small circles against the back of his neck and he closes his eyes briefly and swallows, affected.
She’s affected too, if she’s being honest, and maybe this is the year for honesty. His muscled curves are familiar, even in the darkness, and her attraction to him flashes bright.
She slides her hand from his nape to his jaw and slowly moves her fingers against the stubble on his chin, exploring. He takes a long, slow breath and his brows furrow and he shifts slightly, uneasily, but he doesn’t reach for her or protest, and she thinks he’s probably afraid to touch her. She drags her fingertips over his upper lip, following the shadow of his unshaven beard. She has stared at his face more times than she can count over the years, and she has never touched him quite like this.
God, she thinks. She can feel the desperation and the fear and the anger and the frustration rolling off of him, and he holds himself still under her touch, as restrained as if she’s tied him. She hasn’t, but the threat of the disease has, and she feels a warmth. She rarely fears his violence, even when she probably should, and yet having it so open to her now, so safe when he is the most on edge she has ever seen him, is… intoxicating. In that same rush of emotions, she wants to protect him and reassure him and she lays her palm against his cheek.
“Olivia,” he says, and he sounds confused and guarded.
“I promise,” she says, quietly. “I won’t go too far.”
He stares at her, jaw tight under her palm.
“Do you trust me?” she asks, and she knows he does, but having him admit it is something satisfying.
He looks at her for a long time, like he’s trying to read her. “Yes,” he says.
“Then trust me,” she says, and she slides her hand down over his throat, feeling the corded muscle there, the movement as he swallows again, the line where the stubble of his beard ends and the smooth skin begins.
It doesn’t seem like a big step, considering. But somewhere in the back of her mind she realizes that she is erasing a line that maybe shouldn’t be erased. And the worst part is that it feels organic. It feels natural and unforced, and that’s been the way of their partnership forever.
He shifts again, and in the silence of the room she hears him exhale slowly as she traces the straight edge of his collarbone.
For detectives who specialize in victims where consent is a big issue, she realizes the two of them have so many blurry lines that it’s almost ironic.
“You can say no,” she says softly, feeling very odd that she feels she has to. But between the two of them she is quite sure that it is she who is better at standing her ground. She has power over him too…
He doesn’t say no. He gets very quiet and very still and she can tell he’s clenching his jaw tight as he tries to breathe normally, but he doesn’t refuse or protest, and so she keeps going.
She slides the pads of her fingers over his shoulder. In the strip of light lying across them she can see the dark outline of his crucifixion tattoo, and she runs her fingertips along its edges. His relationship with religion has always fascinated her. In some ways she thinks he uses it as a comfort, as a justification that some things are out of his control. In other ways she thinks it’s much deeper and she will never truly understand it. He is a strange tangle of blatant sex and violence mixed with innocence and a desire for salvation. Religion has never been much of a presence in her life. Sometimes she envies him and his faith.
She can feel every beat of her own heart, and the warm surge outward as she touches him. Her gaze is tilted down and his breath is stirring the hair on the top of her head, and when she glances carefully up at his face, his eyes are closed.
His body is flexed and tense though. And he is very awake.
She smoothes her hand over the curve of his bicep, and the muscle is heavy and rock hard. Then the valley of his elbow and down over the hair-rough thickness of his forearms. She can feel each long, striated muscle there, down to his wrists, where she can feel the bulge and give of his veins.
She touches his hand briefly, barely brushing her fingertips over the ridge of scars on his knuckles before the warmth washes over her and she almost shivers, and she has to force her touch back up to safer territory.
She touches his chest then, and he takes a deep breath, until he’s pushing against her hand. She slowly slides her palm down through the sparse hair on his stomach, and she hears the click of saliva in his throat. She can see by dropping her gaze that he’s hard, the bulging curve of his erection evident through his boxer briefs. It makes the breath stop in her lungs for a moment.
She can feel the slight indentations between his abs, and he isn’t cut the way statues are cut, but he’s better. He’s warm and solid and tense with power, and he’s real. She feels the soft, thicker line of hair running down from his navel, and she follows it until her fingertips bump the waistband of his briefs.
His knuckles crack as he makes a fist.
She is risking a lot now, and he trusts her, but she’s not sure she trusts herself.
She hesitates, but then slides her fingers along the waistband to his hip and then she is slipping her fingers underneath the briefs, following the furrow between his hip and his groin, and she knows his butterfly tattoo is there, right at the top of his thigh. She imagines she can feel the edges, just barely raised, but it’s probably all in her mind. He showed it to her in the locker room once, back before any of this became dangerous. He’d pulled his sweatpants down over one hip and showed her the thick lines of an old tattoo that had been done by a cheap artist, and she’d smirked at the evidence of his youthful sexuality. As if putting an image next to his dick would have women dying to get in his pants. He’d grinned wolfishly at her and shrugged, and it’d been hard to tear her eyes away from the ink, and from the slightly thicker patch of hair he was flashing her with by showing her. And then she hadn’t been so sure he wasn’t on to something.
She stops on that tattoo, just resting her fingers there, and she can feel the heat of his skin and the rough scrape of the hair that starts just there, and the fabric of his briefs stretches up and away from her hand, proving just how aroused he really is, and she swallows.
“Liv,” he says, roughly and breathlessly, and she hears the restraint in his voice. “You have to stop now.”
She closes her eyes for a moment, the heat between her legs thrumming and her desire for him feeling like the heavy haze of an addictive drug. Maybe like the warm wash of alcohol that brought her mother down. She feels the temptation like a physical blow.
She could touch him. She could convince him, and he’d probably let her do it. She has no cuts on her hands or on her arm, and she could make him come and he’d enjoy it. And then… he’d never trust her again.
She carefully slides her hand back and rests it on his hip, benignly.
He exhales, hard, and his whole body slumps in relief.
She realizes she’d been holding her breath too, and she lets it out, feeling the weariness leak back into her muscles.
“I’m sorry,” she says, because she feels like she has to.
He makes a soft, dismissive sound, and then he suddenly moves close and wraps his arms around her, and she relaxes into him. His chest moves up and down against her, and she can still feel him, hard and arching, against her belly, and so she tries not to shift. She slides her arm over his waist and against his back.
They cannot ignore this, she realizes. And she doesn’t know if she really intended this or not.
He softens a bit against her, and his body jerks as he falls into sleep. She tightens her hold on him and closes her eyes.
[]
As winter wears out, the city is hit by a cold snap, their breath becoming white mist in the air. They start a long rotation of working nights, and that’s always been the preferred shift of rapists anyway.
He’s still stopping the car to throw up in alleys, still looking pale and haggard when the morning starts creeping up on them. He refuses to go home though, and she knows he just needs to keep himself busy so he doesn’t think about the HIV.
He falls asleep at her apartment a few mornings, when he’s too tired to go home, but he always sleeps on her couch, and he’s always gone when she wakes up. They aren’t ignoring what’s happened, so much, because she sees it clearly when their gazes meet. But he’s preoccupied, and she can’t blame him. She thinks that maybe they’re both waiting for the other to say something, but neither of them knows what to say.
Partners get attracted. They sleep together. Sometimes they fall in love, but she has no idea what this really is. And just thinking about changing the status quo now makes her feel a little panicky. This job is her calling. At the end of the day, it makes her feel as if her life is worth it. As if everything she went through as a child had a purpose. And she likes having Elliot as a partner.
So, she just keeps working, and while things have changed, they also stay the same, and that’s okay.
For a while it even feels like things might be okay.
They can work together during the day, and she only has to think about him in that other way at night, when she’s alone and he can’t see her face.
And then they find Karen Smythe, her mentor, raped and beaten in a stairwell, and there are cops involved, and they are both dealing with a world that is shifting beneath them. For a while, they are the way they used to be. Before.
[]
Karen is an interesting force in her life. Olivia’s career in the New York Police Department has been full of partners and rivals, mentors and friends. Karen has been all of them at one time or another.
Finding out Karen had been working for the IAB the entire time is… confusing. And sometimes it seems like Olivia’s whole life is full of complications. She feels resentful of the fact that Karen was lying to her-to everybody-since the beginning, but she understands the reasoning. And it’s not like she’s ever had anything to hide. She doesn’t like dirty cops, and she wants them ferreted out.
All the same, the IAB makes her stomach turn a bit.
When Karen’s case is finally over, she feels more settled. Like everything is in its place. She goes to Karen’s apartment to truly make peace, and they fall back into their old roles. Karen has always been the first, and most important, mentor. Elliot has taken on that role the past few years, and like Karen he’s also so much more.
She’s always been aware on some level that she and Elliot show too much, but she doesn’t realize how much until she hugs Karen and is on her way out, and Karen stops her with a hand on the arm. “Olivia,” she says, quietly. “Be careful.”
Olivia frowns, speechless, because it sounds more ominous than usual, and Karen says, “Sleeping with your partner isn’t the worst thing ever, believe me, but if someone wants to use it to knock you down, it’ll work.”
And Olivia freezes, feeling a rivulet of fear, because she and Elliot haven’t even had sex, and she knows there are rumors-how could there not be-but she’s always thought they were more… invisible.
“I’m not sleeping with Elliot,” she insists, just as quietly. She is suddenly uneasy with Karen.
Karen’s dark eyes stare into hers. “Fine. Just… be careful. There’s going to come a time when you’ll have to choose between him and your career.”
And then she lets Olivia go, and shuts the door.
[]
It’s almost anti-climactic when Elliot’s results come back negative and she finds him eating breakfast one morning at his favorite diner. Although Karen’s words of warning are still digging at her mind, her worldview feels solid again, and Elliot scarfing down an entire plate of eggs and bacon and pancakes is the best thing she’s seen in weeks. She steals his orange juice, and he grins at her, and she smiles back.
They walk back to the precinct, and she matches strides with him, and the morning crowds kind of step aside for them, and she can’t imagine being anywhere else but here, doing this job. With him.
And then, a few blocks from the station, he pulls her into an alley and she finds her back against a brick wall and his body against hers and he grabs her by the back of the neck and kisses her.
It’s one brief, open-mouthed kiss, and she has time to meet his gaze as they part, and then he’s kissing her again, and it’s serious. His mouth is hard against hers and almost bruising, and he uses his lips and his tongue like he wants to devour her. She can barely keep up.
When she can’t breathe any longer, she puts her palm on his cheek, sliding her thumb under his jaw, and she pulls her mouth away. “El…” she says, breathless. “God.”
His breath is faster and a little heavy, and he doesn’t back off. He stands right there, almost pushing her into the wall, his hand still on the back of her neck. “I’m not holding back anymore, Olivia,” he says, just as breathless.
And she knows he means the HIV and the night he spent in her bed with her hand on his skin, and she figures she has to grant him this. She nods silently, and pulls her hand from his jaw, and he still stands there for a while just looking at her. “I can’t forget about it,” he says, softly.
She can’t either, but she doesn’t want to tell him that. Doesn’t want to make this worse than it already is. Than she’s already made it. She holds his gaze for a moment, and then she grabs his hand, briefly, tugging him toward the mouth of the alley. “Come on,” she says, quietly. “We’re going to be late.”
He follows.
[]
It starts the way everything between them starts: suddenly and intensely.
One minute they seem the same as they’ve always been, friends and partners, the cases taking their toll, and the next they’ve charged over that thin blue line, running until their air is gone and their lungs ache.
Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe the day they met their paths were inexorably linked together. Sometimes it seems like the more they fight it, the more it settles more heavily onto their shoulders. The more it draws them together like a magnet and steel.
[]
It starts with a fight, in the middle of the squad room. A little girl escapes from a monster, and the monster finds a new little girl, and now they have 48 hours to find that new little girl. Or she dies.
It is chaos.
There are few leads and there is no rest, and they have to sleep in 30-minute shifts, and they have to imagine what is happening to that beautiful little girl right that minute. And the next minute. And the next.
She has to cancel on Michael again, and Elliot has to cancel on his kids, and things have been a little rough between them lately anyway, and she’s not sure why.
They all lose it a little bit, but she and Elliot lose it spectacularly.
At first just with everyone else, and then, finally, with each other, and he gets sarcastic and condescending, so she tells him, “Screw you.”
And he growls right back, “Screw you!” And he stalks right toward her, hardness in his eyes, so she gets ready for the fight, until Cragen separates them and sends her into the elevator to go down and get some air.
He catches up with her as she exits the stairs and bursts out into the garage. She’s not surprised he dodged Cragen and came for her, but she’s irritated. Can’t they have one fucking minute apart?
He walks up on her like a hunting lion, all angry eyes and hard body language, and they walk side-by-side while she tries to ignore him, knowing that, more than anything, pisses him off. Especially when she does it.
“What’s your fucking problem?” he growls.
“What’s yours?” she snaps back. They’re matching strides and her legs burn with the effort, and their voices echo off the pavement. He always parks on the lowest level where no one else parks, and it’s like they’re walking into a cave.
“If you’re gonna break down under a little pressure like this, then maybe you oughtta find a job where people’s lives aren’t on the line.”
A little pressure. Three days of no sleep and dead-ends and goddamn it, she knows he’s just trying to get to her, but she’s proved herself again and again and she doesn’t need to do it again. Especially not to him.
“Or maybe I just need a new partner,” she snarls. “One who’s not such an asshole.” She’s never threatened him with their partnership before, and in an abstract, detached part of her mind, she wonders how he’ll react. She knows, through some sixth sense, that it will hurt him in the way she wants to hurt him at that moment.
She feels his fingers grasping at her wrist, and she jerks away from him, casting him a cold glance as she walks. But he makes a frustrated sound and grabs her arm, and her momentum runs up against his iron strength and her whole body whips back around to face him.
His jaw is tight and he glares at her and she can feel the anger rolling off of him. He’s leaning forward and his fingers are tight around her forearm and between them both the sound of their breath is loud in the quiet garage. She holds his gaze and he always looks at her like he wants to bite when he’s angry. Like he wants to swallow her up.
“Maybe you do,” he says, in that low, tight voice he uses on suspects. His gaze doesn’t leave hers. “Maybe you can’t hack it anymore with me.”
She’s never wanted to punch him more in their entire partnership. “Fuck you,” she mutters.
He nods, mockingly. “Yeah. Fuck me.”
She’s swinging at him then, and she knows it will never land even before she starts, but it’s completely impulsive and completely out of her control and oh god, oh god, this isn’t her. Not at all.
He leans into it and knocks her blow down and then his arms are around her and she’s struggling because she just wants to get out of there now. Away from him and the case and her own weary mind. But he’s stronger than she is and she isn’t willing to hurt him in the way she has to in order to get free and in moments he has her facing up against the wall of the garage, his hands pressing her wrists to the rough, cold cement, the warmth of his chest behind her. And it hurts but not in the way he thinks when she winces and he eases up and then he says in her ear, “You wanna fight me, Liv?”
She does. And her anger keeps her up on a razor-thin edge, muscles tense and trembling, another fuck you on the tip of her tongue.
“Huh?” he demands again. Quietly.
And she doesn’t. Because there’s still a little girl missing and the exhaustion is in her bones and he might be an asshole but he’s still Elliot.
She gives in a bit, to the wall, leaning away from him as she rests her forehead against the cold cement. She closes her eyes against the burn of tiredness as her wrists slip from his grasp. He lets her go, sets his palms on the wall on either side of her. She brings her fists up to cushion her head from the wall, and then she rests. And hurts.
He breathes behind her for a while, not moving, and she can still feel his body heat and that weird energy between them that always flares in unexpected ways. Sometimes in dark ways. She’s not exactly turned-on, but she’s not exactly not turned-on either.
And then she hears him swallow, hears the rough sound of frustration he makes, and his palm is crowning her head, his forehead coming to rest above her ear. He’s warm and very close and his breath is hot against her neck and his voice is an ache. “Liv.”
She says nothing for a moment, because she doesn’t trust herself. They have an urgent, open case and he is all rage right now, and she is furious. But then she touches his hand where he has it splayed against the wall. She moves her fingers minutely until they skim over his knuckles, and she says, softly, “You’re such a prick, Elliot.” And she wants to laugh. Or cry.
Elliot’s mouth is on her nape then. His hands brushing her hair up and away, his lips wet and warm and opening so he can taste her. It’s like dropping from the sky without a parachute, sticking your hand in an open flame. It’s sharp and sudden and fairly intense and it makes her almost gasp with how good it feels. It’s something he shouldn’t know, how sensitive her nape is, how good it always feels. But he does, of course, and that’s why when he touches her his hand is always on her neck, isn’t it?
He scrapes his teeth over her skin, sucks slowly, maybe too hard, and she feels overwhelmed by her own body. She arches her neck and leans back into him, and he slips one arm around her waist.
She hears the saliva in her own throat as she swallows, and nothing about this is comfortable or right, and the only thing keeping them from possibly being seen is a concrete pillar sticking out from the wall next to them.
It’s still the anger and the frustration and maybe a little breakdown from the lack of sleep, but it’s something else too, obviously, and it’s something she’s known was there. And this is Elliot’s way of handling things. Not thinking, just doing, and that’s the whole crux of her problem with this case anyway. She’s hard-pressed to stop him.
She turns around, and his mouth drags over the line of her jaw until her lips brush his.
“You wanna leave me, Liv?” he asks, voice rough. He sounds furious. And hurt.
And, no, no, she doesn’t. And fuck him for asking that when he already knows the answer. And fuck her for not stopping him, because she has that power.
She shakes her head in the wake of his breath, the sugar from his coffee making it sweet, and then she kisses him, and he kisses back with an intensity that makes her head spin. With his overcoat on, his shoulders seem a mile wide, and she curls her fingers into his short hair, grabbing at the strands even though they won’t stay in her grasp.
His hands are digging under her coat, running everywhere like he owns a map, over her breasts, around her waist, grabbing at her hips. It’s cold and yet she’s hot with his heat all over her. He’s unbuttoning her jeans, shoving his hand down the front of them, curling his fingers between her legs, and fuck, she ‘s so wet. There’s no room between them for her own hands so she just circles his neck and slips her fingers under his collar. And she kisses him until her mouth aches.
When he slows a bit, grows softer, she tugs at his hair. She doesn’t want comfort, and she suspects he doesn’t either. She’s still mad at him, mad at the case, furious at the pedophile that caused this whole thing. Angry at herself for falling into this trap. And, God, she wants him. She just wants him.
There’s a small ledge next to them, where the empty parking spaces start, and he shoves her jeans down along with her underwear and then he grabs her and lifts her onto the ledge, crowding close between her knees so she doesn’t slip off. He’s working his belt and his badge is digging into her thigh, and for a moment she thinks Jesus Christ, what the hell are we doing?, and then he’s dragging her hips forward, leaning into her, and oh…
Fuck…
He’s inside her. And time stops for. One. Long. Moment.
He plants his hands on either side of her on the ledge and leans close, his breath loud, hard. He stares at her then, brows furrowed, eyes dark, and he swallows, and she knows, she knows, she knows. It can’t be this for them, and it can’t not be, and…
It happens, she thinks. It happens. It happens.
He moves then, hands sliding around her thighs, holding her against him while he rocks her against the wall. She grabs the back of his neck and presses her mouth to his collar and the only thing she can think about is the way he feels moving inside of her, the way he feels so big that it almost hurts and it’s been a while for her, she’s out of practice. It’s an unbearable ache, a heat that makes her feel weirdly charged. He’s panting now and his fingers are holding her so hard that the pain is mixing with the pleasure, and the sparks are firing behind her eyelids. She isn’t sure if she’s going to come hard or not at all.
He falters and she listens to his uneven breathing, and she knows he’s going to come and she isn’t. It feels too good, it’s too right, it’s too wrong, there’s just too much of him. He’s trying to slow down, and she knows why so she kisses him and steals some of his breath while she grabs his hips and pulls him deeper. He groans helplessly into her mouth, as submissive a sound as she’s ever, ever heard from him, and then he thrusts hard and comes.
She’s still feeling that weird charge as he rests against her, his cheek against her temple as his breath slows. His back stiffens a little under her hands, and she hears his mouth work just above her ear.
“Liv,” he says, and she hears it there, the apology. “You didn’t-“
“Don’t,” she says, quickly. God, don’t. “It’s okay.”
He steps back then, letting her slide down onto her feet, and she looks at him as she pulls her pants back up and buttons them. He’s looking at her like he doesn’t know who she is, and she has to resist the urge to snap at him. He tucks himself back in and buckles his belt, and she exhales slowly.
Jesus. She just had sex with her partner in the parking garage. She has Karen’s warning ringing in her ears, and a date with Michael scheduled for tomorrow night, and she’s just made things fifty times more complicated.
Before it can settle on her shoulders, her phone chirps, and it’s Fin. She and Elliot start toward the car, and he grabs her before she gets in, his fingers painful around her elbow.
“We’re not finished,” he says, and his gaze is hard.
She wants to protest, but she doesn’t. They aren’t finished. Clearly.
She holds his gaze in silent agreement, and she wears his semen inside as they slide in the car and save a child’s life.
[]
It is late by the time they have settled the case.
There is a crush of exhaustion after a bad case ends. The hours of not sleeping, the stress on their bodies and minds, all of it builds up and then comes crashing down once the worry and the intensity of their drive recedes.
He drives her home, late, and they have to get up early because there is still a lot of hard work to do, but they were silent the entire drive home, and now she sits quietly for a moment, waiting, as he shifts the car into park.
He doesn’t look at her. He looks at the dashboard in her general direction, and she’s never felt more awkward with him in her life.
“I could come up,” he says in that low, rough voice he uses when he’s trying to be careful around her.
She debates this in her head, because there is a part of her that really wants him to do just that. The other part that worries about her job is curiously quiet now. It happens, she reasons, and that’s exactly what he’d told her when she’d gotten close to Brian Cassidy and then had a one-night-stand. It’s the job, and sometimes it’s tough, and sometimes things happen, and you shouldn’t beat yourself up over it.
“It’s been a rough year,” she says, finally, thinking about her mother and Karen and his brush with HIV and this gut-wrenching case.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “Every year it seems to get worse.”
She swallows. “It’s late, El.”
She opens the door and starts to slide out, and his hand grabs at her shoulder suddenly, his fingers brushing her nape. “Olivia.”
She hesitates for a moment, but doesn’t glance back at him. It happens. It happens. It. Happens.
“Night, Elliot.”
And then she gets out and his hand slips away.
[]
Part Two
All parts:
Part One / Part Two / Part Three / Part Four / Part Five