A/N – I hope you enjoy reading this, I really enjoyed writing it. Thank you so much Ashley for convincing me to write it and then for being my beta.
"Captain Olivia Benson, how very nice to meet you again," the tastefully dressed man says it with a snarl, a sadistic smirk; his confidence and pleasure in the entire situation, sickening.
Olivia keeps her steely composure, her unwavering stare. She stands tall and strong in an exhibition of behavioral defense that mimics that of a lioness and its quintessential symbol of female power, protecting her pride, her territory, her Lion.
"Is she usually this quiet?" he arrogantly laughs, pointing his gun at Elliot for the second time in the last four minutes.
"Yeah, when she's dealing with pricks like you, Wheatley." Elliot proudly grins before the pain in his thigh interrupts his moment of deserved petulance with a raw hiss.
"Oh, in a little pain are we Detective? Such a shame." The patronizing tone in his voice is increasingly becoming too much for Olivia to ignore.
"What is it you want Richard?" she asks, wrapping her arms across her chest, knowing perfectly well what his response will be. She's encountered men like him before, this same compensating display of superiority presenting itself as charm and phony chivalry.
"Well isn't it obvious?" He points the gun between Elliot and Olivia before continuing. "You, Captain Benson."
Olivia had known exactly what was coming, and when Elliot shifts in his position, slowly attempting to drag himself up from the floor, she immediately drops her hardened demeanor and rushes to his side.
"I'll kill you if you go near her," Elliot growls through the pain, his voice growing significantly in volume.
"El, don't," she softly whispers under her breath. Carefully taking his arm, she lifts it over her head and wraps it around her neck in a bid to steady his weight off the injured leg.
As Richard watches from the front of the locked hospital room, he grimaces in disgust at the affectionate sight occurring in front of him.
"False promises." He pauses, taking enjoyment in the enduring quiet the anticipation is causing. "After all, I hurt Kathy, didn't I Elliot?"
As he leaves his rhetorical question in the air of silence, he watches over every trace of reaction from Elliot, taking in the tense jaw, the sudden stiffness to his shoulders, the tightness around his eyes before continuing and gesturing his hands down his body. "And yet? I'm still here."
Rapidly injecting, Olivia moves quickly. "You're pathetic Richard, nothing but a coward."
She presses all of her weight between Elliot and the wall she's propped him against, not so much for stability, but more a way of restricting his movements during the escalating situation.
What she was saying rang true; Richard was a coward. He had lured them both here, and as Olivia had entered the hospital room, Richard had sent a surprise gunshot to Elliot's right thigh, made her surrender her gun, and then had the audacity to greet her as if they were friendly acquaintances. She hates the smug son-of-a-bitch.
"Oh, I'm the coward?" Richard teases. He has that self-satisfied glint in his eye as he looks between the two of them. "Elliot, isn't there something you have wanted to tell Olivia?" He changes his look into a sarcastic sad face to match the false sympathetic tone of his voice. "But you've been too afraid?"
The widened, flickering eyes between them tells him everything he needed to know. "Oh," Richard marvels. "You've already told her, haven't you Elliot?"
He continues to watch the awkward dispositions of the individuals in front of him.
"I seee." He draws out the final syllable of his word. "But she didn't say it back, did she?"
Feeling the instantaneous rush of complex panic, she grips firmly on Elliot's hand. He squeezes back, and that brief, subtle interaction gives her all the reassurance she needs to know that despite Richard's implications, they're in this together.
"Stop this insanity," Olivia scolds. "You need to let us out of here." She's direct, commanding, and authoritative.
"Oh, but you see Captain, I'm enjoying this so much." He laughs again, the noise becoming a persistent annoyance. "So tell me? You don't feel the same way as the detective here, do you?"
"You're going to regret this Wheatley!" Elliot shouts through the pain, lifting his chin in Richards's direction to enhance his powerful promise.
Lightly dismissing Elliot's threat with a shoulder shrug, Wheatley continues his emotional taunting. "Well... I suppose that would explain the very recent hotel jaunt with the crime writer, wouldn't it Olivia?"
Olivia's brain stutters, struggling in its attempt to interpret what was causing the most significant twist in her stomach, the new sickening awareness to Burton, the concern that Wheatley knew about it, or... more painfully that Elliot now knew.
She can feel their eyes; the delight in Richard's, the surprise but understanding in Elliot's.
"Ohh Olivia," Richard says, his words oozing with excitement. "I don't think Elliot knew about that one."
Alarmed at what Richard's next reveal could be, she attempts to deflect the conversation. "My team and Detective Stabler's will be here any minute and-"
Raising his hand in the air Richard boldly waves his disinterest, provoking Elliot into an aggressive burst of profanity.
"Don't be rude Detective. I was talking to our delightful Captain, but since you would like to take over...lets discuss your little balancing act."
"Richard," Elliot warns, and Olivia can hear the unease laced inside of his warning.
"My sources tell me." He grins, looking from Elliot's fury to Olivia's discomfort before continuing. "Elliot had one very interesting night with an Albanian redhead."
Olivia, the seasoned pro to the Elliot Stabler revelation poker face maintains her stoic composure. It wasn't exclusively a big reveal; she had suspected since that night at the gala, but receiving the underhanded official confirmation does send her to an internal wobble.
It is Elliot's turn to squeeze her hand now, to subliminally send her the 'I want to talk to you properly' message they were long overdue. So she turns to him, overlooks the hard line his mouth has set to, and forces a smile.
A smile he doesn't or can't reciprocate.
Elliot quickly looks away from her; the thought of that image burning away in her mind is killing him. He is lucky, as stomach-churning as it was that Olivia had looked for love and affection elsewhere while he was undercover, he doesn't have an image of this crime-writer in his head to provide much of a mental image. But Olivia, she'd seen Flutura, she could picture her hair and features, and the notion of her playing out that is even more nauseating.
He wants to tell her how he had hated every second of it, how his escapism into his undercover persona had gotten out of control. It was a stupid mistake, an irrelevant, unfeeling, careless shortcut for the case that filled him with crushing regret, but he can't tell her this now, not in front of Wheatley.
Richard draws his lips back into a rough snarl. "Also," he begins, hitching his voice to an authentic request for understanding. "You know what I never understood Elliot, why Angela?" he pauses, cocking his head to the side to look Olivia up and down. "When you have this vision you could have gone to instead?"
Elliot hates himself right now. Maybe Wheatley is right? He had been a coward, first when he ran to Angela after his revelation of feelings to Olivia, and then with Flutura when his life and conflictions became all too much to handle.
Olivia keeps up appearances. She knows she looks unaffected and unmoved on the outside; she also knows Elliot can see straight through her. The years of hiding her emotions and reactions in constant displays of being 'fine' had taught those closest to her to see the transparency in her behavior.
She could bury down the revelation of 'Flu-whoever'. There is part of her that questions if maybe she would have held back with Burton if she hadn't connected the dots between this woman and Elliot.
Angela though? She is burning with a flurry of questions. When did it happen? At what point? Did it happen because Elliot said I love you and she didn't reply? Did she cause him to run into the arms of someone else?
"There's a lot of silence in here and I'm growing bored," Richard announces as he taps the gun on the side of the hospital bed. "Let's answer the burning question we are all so desperate to have the answer to... Olivia, why don't you tell Elliot exactly how you feel?"
Olivia is silent; her pursed lips and lowered eyebrows intent on Richard as he persists with his interrogation.
"I'm not going to play you're silly little games Richard," she protests.
"Tick Tock," he whispers as he aims the gun at Elliot, the sound from the weapons preparation filling the room.
After a second of contemplation, Richard grows inpatient. "Olivia," he growls, placing a specific intensity on the O, the way her name falls from his mouth sends a shiver down a spine.
She can guess how this would go; she'll appease him, tell Elliot she loves him, and Richard will get a sick kick out of the whole scenario before he shoots her down in front of Elliot to enact on his vengeful plan. She already told him she wasn't playing.
Her face is deadpan as she turns from Richard to look towards Elliot.
"I don't love you," her voice says, filled with betrayal, not just to Elliot, but also to herself, to the decades of underlying, unspoken sentiment, to the exhilaration of hopes and dreams she longed for their future, and then to her heart, where no matter how much anyone tried, they were never able to fill to hole he left.
"I know," he thickly swallows, the raw feeling from every vulnerable, insecure thought he ever had trolling to the surface of his mind, but then she blinks and there's something in that natural reflex that brings him to ease, something in that motion revealed to him the inner sensitivity to her words. It's the same softness she had all those years ago when up against Gitano.
As the sirens ring out from below the surrounding area of the hospital, Richard concentrates his aim clearly on Olivia, carefully guarding his exit from their proximity as he slowly backs out of the door and disappears along the hallway.
Inhaling a deep breath, Olivia rests her tight grip on Elliot, reaches into her back pocket, and grabs her phone.
"I need to tell them where we are," she announces as she types up a quick text to Fin. When she finishes, she frantically looks around the room for medical supplies.
"Olivia. I-"he sighs through the pain, shuffling himself backwards and leaning his head against the wall.
"You don't have to say anything right now El," she sympathizes, almost pleads for him to relax and wait for help.
"Olivia." He winces, his thoughts racing through desperate attempts for a way to salvage this thing they have between them. "I need to explain."
Cupping her hands on his face, she looks directly into his shadowy, compassionate eyes.
"Look at me when I say this," she instructs before slowly and affectionately moving her gaze to watch her thumbs slowly trace across the fine, fresh stubble of his jaw line.
When she looks up through her eyelashes to meet his eyes, her voice is fueled with confidence, finally releasing her most cherished treasure of words.
"I love you Elliot."