Sleeping Together part 1
Title: Sleeping Together (also, Nightmares)
Pairing: Alex Cabot and Olivia Benson
Rating: This part G, very eventually, NC-17
Spoilers: Nah
Summary: Love as the sweetest coping mechanism.
Disclaimer: Not mine, but how can you catch the sparrow?
Author's Notes: Part 1, others will come, as soon as tomorrow, perhaps.
They saw too much at the SVU, and sometimes, if you stopped and wondered how people could do the things that they arrested people for everyday - how could they want to? - Sometimes it kept you up. Long nights filled with cold bodies and the shadowed faces of perps they never caught.
Olivia had been up all night, case after case after case hitting her brain, spinning and spinning, mixing with her own memories until she felt the pain of each victim as her own. And there he was… bending over her… she couldn’t move, she… “NO!”
It was hard to lie alone, these nights. And even if she had someone to be there with her, who would understand? Hadn’t these same things torn Elliot’s marriage apart? Not that she had any hope to be married - not so long as she lived in America. Olivia wasn’t spending any nights sweetly dreaming about men.
But she did dream. It began just as a way to change the tide of her thoughts. And, not so surprisingly, it began with Alex, whose coy smile and square-framed ironic eyes seemed to leap into Olivia’s mind at all times of the day. They were the only images bright enough to wash away her night terrors. They left her with a longing, for each Alex filled thought left her wanting even more to make real the scenarios that she saw in her head.
She nearly picked up the phone some nights, before fear and sensibility took her. She certainly didn’t know how Alex would react to that sort of midnight phone call, only knew that she too spent these nights alone, and she would understand.
She could keep her fingers from dialing, but she couldn’t help her attitude towards Alex. Olivia began seeking her out, asking her opinions about cases, the news, and once, even the weather. She tried desperately to make her smile and laugh, to be near her as much as possible. It wasn’t very difficult - Olivia wasn’t sure - but it seemed that Alex was seeking her company more than she usually did as well.
-------------------------------------------------------------------