A/N: Now, I'm talking a man who literally saved my life, like fuck it… - Toy Soldiers (Eminem)

DISCLAIMER: SVU and all related plot/characters originally belong to Dick Wolf. This story is allllllllllllllll mine. © TStabler

She's leaning against the wall near the window in her living room with a mug of coffee in one hand as the other manipulates and twirls the ring around her finger. Her eyes waffle between staring at the diamond and staring at the man sitting on her couch, and she hits the DVR in her mind, replaying memory after memory of the times he's saved her life. She bites her lip and tilts her head; she's seen him naked, she's seen him throw up, she's watched him bleed and break, she's watched him cry. She grins, then, as she remembers that she's also seen him laugh, she's heard him crack jokes and sing and tell stories. She's danced with him, with and without music, and she's pretty sure that she's so fully fucking in love with him.

He yawns as he drops his head back against the couch, closes his eyes, and says to her, "You gonna keep six feet between us all night?"

She chuckles and moves, slowly walking toward the sofa. She sits, drops her mug to the coffee table and sighs at the fact she's making another coffee-ring in the varnish. "We almost got ourselves into fucking trouble, tonight," she says, and she leans back with another sigh.

"Well, almost doesn't count, right?" He loops an arm around her and shifts his weight, closing the small gap that lives between them. "We covered our asses." His eyes are still closed; his voice is mellow, his fingers stroke through her hair, and he lets his head loll to drop against hers.

She doesn't move, she lets him make himself comfortable, but her words belied how she truly felt, letting her hesitation win. "What are you doing?"

"Falling asleep," he mumbles, and he nuzzles against her a bit. "We should go to bed."

She smiles, but she whispers. "No, I mean...what are you doing?" When his head moves, she turns to him, her eyes turn up and she offers him a slight grin as she slips her hand into his. "With me? You...you put this ring on my finger, you're wearing yours?" She lifts their clasped hands and she brings his platinum band eye-level. "You've got your wife at home trying to figure out how to get out of the mess she's made, get you to forgive her, but you…"

"There's no forgiving her," he speaks, and he squeezes her hand with his. "As for this? These rings…" he exhales and he licks his lips. His eyes narrow as his head cocks and he smiles again. "How many times you think we saved each other's lives?"

She chuckles. "I was just thinking about that," she admits, and she finds herself running her thumb along the side of his hand as it rests in hers. "I can't even count. I think I was with the unit, what, two weeks before the first time I saved your ass?"

He laughs and nods. "Literally, the bastard would've shot me in the ass." He quirks his head as he notices her finger grazing his skin. "My point," he says, "Is that putting this fucking ring on your finger three weeks ago...you saved my damn life again. It made everything so...so fucking clear." He shakes his head as he talks, as if he can't completely fathom his own words. The gravity of them. "I was lost, Liv," he says softly, his eyes now focused on their joined hands in his lap, and he sniffles as he contemplates. "I was existing in this...flatline of a life that, I can say this now, wasn't what I wanted anymore. I was always the guy who had to sacrifice, who owed up to his mistakes and paid the price, but at fucking thirty years old, I owe it to myself to start fucking living my life, don't I?"

She furrows her brow, feels his hand grip hers harder, and his ring digs into her skin. "I always thought you were…"

"Around you," he breaks in, and he tries to confirm what he's about to say by looking deeply into her brown eyes and he takes a breath. "I'm happy around you. I have always been able to put everything else aside because, with you, I don't feel the pain or the bullshit or the stress, I'm...me...when I'm with you." He shrugs. "You always assumed I was happy at home because I was never miserable...around you." He quiets, and the silence slowly destroys him as he breathes in the strength to finish his thought, the reason he started talking to begin with. "I admit, I'm battling a lot of demons, right now. I don't know how to deal with a divorce, I'm Catholic and it's just not...it's not okay, but I also know when God gives a gift, it must mean that He can overlook some things, right?"

She tries but fails to understand, and her eyes dart to the wall by the door, the patched-up drywall that he'd spent a weekend fixing because he was the one who had punched it in the first place, and she licks her lips. "Not following," she says with a one-shouldered shrug.

He slides forward, rises to his feet, and he pulls her up as he walks backward toward her bedroom. "Before Cragen hired you," he tells her, and he turns to face forward and pushes her bedroom door open, "I was planning on making one last effort to make my marriage something I wanted, really focus on that…" he scratches behind his ear and then clears his throat as he tugs Olivia over to her dresser. "I was gonna transfer to Queens SVU, take a mid-shift gig, become a PTA Dad," he chuckles.

She holds in the gasp that she so desperately wants to take as she watches him pull open one of her drawers, the exact one her longer, larger shirts are, and she feels her skin freeze when he lets go of her hand to pull one of the tees out for her.

"I had the papers signed, was heading into Cragen's office to turn them in," he turns to her, moves closer, and throws the shirt he's picked for her onto his shoulder as he grabs the hem of her sweater with both of his hands, "And you walked in...the exact moment I was about to quit." lifts and pulls at her sweater, and he stifles a moan as her toned stomach comes into view. He tosses the wool garment into the hamper near the bathroom door, presses his lips together, and slowly moves his hands around her back. Searching her eyes for permission, he waits with fingertips at the clasp of her bra.

"So you think," she pauses to nod once at him and holds her breath as he unhooks her bra and slips it away from her body. She blushes slightly as he stares at her, and she's stunned when he doesn't do anything other than unfurl her sleep shirt and roll it over her body for her. Trembling now, she speaks. "You think I was some sort of gift from God?"

"Well, you stopped me in my tracks, Cragen told me you were my new partner, we got to work on that date-rape case, and by the end of the night, I couldn't imagine being anywhere else, with anyone else," he told her in one breath, fast-talking as his hands remained pressed to her bare back under her shirt. He grinned then, moving his left hand downward. He shoves it into her pants pocket, grabbing her phone, and he tosses it onto the end table, reminding himself to plug it into one of the chargers. Then he grabs at the waist of her pants, unclips the button-fly, and shoves them over her hips, nonchalantly rolling her blue satin underwear down with them. "I never gave Cragen those papers, or any indication they even existed, and the last three years have been the most invigorating and exhilarating of my entire life. I'm better at my job, I'm a better father...because of who I am, when I'm with you, and that case upstate, fuck, it only gave me more fucking proof that I need to fucking do this!"

"Do what?" Her voice cracks, the nerves taking hold as she stands before him in nothing but a Bon Jovi tee shirt that she hopes he doesn't recognize. It's his. She feels slight wetness form between her legs, the look on his face and fire in his eyes is turning her on even though she's not sure what it means.

"This," he repeats, a dry-throated hiss, pulling her closer, holding her against him. He brushes his nose against hers, tilts his head slightly to the left, and kisses her. There's no hesitance, no tentative peck before diving off the cliff, it's a full-on, open-mouthed, tongue sweeping kiss from the start. Moans mix and land on their clicking teeth, fingernails begin to claw at skin and muscle, one bare leg hooks around a pant-sheathed one, and hips thrust and buck in a vain attempt to make more of this than either is ready for right now. He pulls himself away and mutters a rushed and breathless apology, but his head is pressed to hers, his hands are still on her back, her body is tangled around his. "Fuck," he spits on a chuckle.

"Well, it would've been," she teases, and her hands run down his back. She balls them into fists as they curl around his shirt, and she pulls the fabric out and up, leaving him bare-chested. She sees how red his skin is, and she knows from experience that he's just as aroused, just as desperate for her as she is for him. Her lip catches between her teeth as she runs her hands over his shoulders, down the front of his chest, to his belt. Suddenly, her eyes pop up to meet his, his hands now wound around her wrists.

"You do that," he tells her with a voice that sounds like sex and sandpaper, "and I won't be able to control myself." He kisses her softly this time and then backs up, letting go of her. He moves back to her dresser, the drawer still open, and as he undoes his belt with one hand he chuckles. "Half of these are mine," he says.

She gives him an innocent smile and a shrug, then watches as he closes the drawer and then moves to the side of the bed. He turns away from her, the temptation too strong and his self-control dwindling. He knows that if he looks at her while taking off his clothes, he will move too fast, go too far, and he wouldn't regret it at all. It's not himself that he's worried about. He drops his pants and kicks them off, sending them flying to the side of the room. He turns, then, if only to test his ability to keep a respectable distance, and he smirks as he crooks a finger at her.

She sighs as she moves, walking into his arms, and the feel of so much of his skin against hers is bringing back memories, ones she hopes she will be reliving. As he kisses the top of her head, her eyes close and she wonders when this is all going to crash down, when he's going to decide he's going back to Kathy because he feels nothing is worth losing his seat in Heaven.

He knows what she's thinking; he always does. He wraps his fingers around hers and slides his thumb over the diamond twice. "I called a lawyer," he whispers. "When you were talking to Tucker."

She eyes him, calming herself down before snapping at him. "You didn't tell me before because…" she raises one eyebrow, her hands slide up his back.

He moans at her touch and then he says, "Because we had a lot going on," and he gives her a slight nudge toward the bed. He waits for her to get in, then slowly crawls in beside her. He rolls onto his side, scoots as close to her as he can, and shoves his right arm underneath her as his right hand drags up and down her arm. "I didn't want to bring up my issues when we were in the middle of a rough case and had IAB hovering over the unit like a fucking helicopter." He kisses the end of her nose.

"Okay," she whispers. She looks into his eyes and she sees that he's staring at her the way he did when they were under, a mischievous twinkle and a crucible of emotions that she can't find words for, and she wonders, as he kisses her nose again, if he's always looked at her that way and it took sharing a bed and a life with him for two weeks to notice. "So what happened?"

"I have a meeting with him tomorrow," he says softly, and his head tilts, moves, and he kisses her lips once. "I'm requesting new papers, this isn't an amicable divorce anymore, and I'll be damned if I simply sign the ones she's been threatening me with for three fucking years when she's the one who destroyed our lives."

"She...hold on," her brows knit together and she leans herself up a bit on one elbow. "She's had divorce papers for…"

He stops her speaking by kissing her again, and he doesn't even offer the apologetic smile anymore. He no longer cares about decorum, he's going to kiss her when he wants. "She had them written up a month after I met you," he tells her, and the grin on his face is smug and self-righteous. "See, we both knew this was gonna happen." He winks, he presses his lips to her forehead, and he nestles closer to her and closes his eyes. His fingers slip across her skin, the contact and sensation are lulling them both to sleep even though there's so much more to talk about it, to understand and work through.

His hand stops moving, their breathing is synchronized in a slow and even tempo, and the bridges of their noses are touching. It's comfortable, and it's wonderful, but it's not as long lasting than either wish. Less than four hours after they'd fallen asleep, their cell phones blare loudly, his bleeping with the factory-installed default tone and hers playing the theme from Dragnet. Simultaneous groans of discomfort escape their mouths and land on the lips of the other, and blindly they shift and shuffle around on the bed.

She isn't used to someone else being in the way and she slaps him several times in an effort to reach the end table. He's doing the same, but only because he's still mostly asleep, and he's usually sleeping on the other side of the bed grasping for his phone on the right side table. He yawns as he sits up and rubs his eyes to full openness. "Shit," he growls, leaning to his left. He grabs both cells, hands one to her and hopes it's the right one, and then spits out a groggy sounding, "Stabler."

She listens to Cragen talk to her, the heel of her hand pressing into her right eye, and she says, "How? When?" as her body snaps awake.

Whoever is talking to Elliot has clearly said the same thing; he's fully conscious now and half out of the bed, grabbing at his discarded pants. He leans his head over, holding his phone with his ear as he bends to pull up the slacks. He looks around for his badge and gun but then remembers they're in the living room, on the coffee table. "Okay, yeah, we...we'll be right there. You said, three-fifty-three?"

Olivia is by his side, now, pulling clothes out of her closet and throwing them on as quickly as possible. "Thanks, Cap," she spits, and then she hangs up and looks at Elliot. "Son of bitch fucked up," she says, and then she adds, "Lucky for us."

"We're using the dash light and I'm hitting the gas," he tells her, buttoning up a new shirt that he's tugged off of a hanger. He doesn't pretend to know why she has his clothes in her closet and her drawers, but he doesn't mind since he's expecting to bring even more of his shit into her room. He rushes into the next room, picks up two guns, two badges, and slips his feet into his shoes. He'll worry about socks later since it's the one thing of his she doesn't have tucked away. "Think we'll make it?"

"God, I hope so," she says, combing her hair with her fingers and checking her breath with a cupped hand. She yelps as she feels herself being yanked backward and she moans as he kisses her once.

"You don't get morning breath, baby," he chuckles with a wink, and he leads her out of the apartment after grabbing their jackets. He uses his key to lock the door and as they jet down the hall, he looks down at his left hand. The right ring, the right woman, the right life, he thinks to himself, and he smiles in spite of heading to a hospital in hopes of talking to the first vic their perp has left alive.

It's a grim way to start the day, but for some reason, he's the happiest he's ever been. He's been unstable, on shaky ground for so long, but he feels like he's finding footing now. He knows why, and he needs to find a way to convince Olivia that, even though he's been trying so hard not to do it, moving too fast might be the only thing that will keep him from falling.

A/N: Is their victim alive? Are they heading into dangerous territory? A conversation with Kathy and full disclosure on their op...next.