Disclaimers – As before!

A/N – Thanks for the reviews, I think they spur me to write faster!

Apartment of Alexandra Cabot

Same night …

I'm desperate to say to her, that I understand the need to not be on her own tonight, but the simple fact is we both started something and now we're too addicted to quit.

Ever since that first night she came to my apartment, after Plummer, she just kept showing up, daring to go where others wouldn't when in the past I'd retreat and lock the door. After a while I stopped hiding out in the crib just in case she chose the end of that particular case to drop in on me. Maybe because like tonight, part of me realised she needed my comfort and company as much as I needed hers.

It was sneaky, the way that she did it. She told me her fears and in return – I let her see mine.

She sat beside me on the couch in my apartment and whispered, "Sometimes I feel like this job is going to eat me alive."

Her honesty rocked me.

"And then sometimes I wonder if that's why I chose SVU in the first place … because it's the one job guaranteed not to leave you feeling lonely at night … even if it's not company in a good way." She chuckled, resentfully.

I laughed, a choked, surreal noise coming from my throat. "I suppose I'll be having the pleasure of Plummer's face in 'my' dreams for a while."

We sat in silence so long after that, the next thing I knew she was kicking off her shoes and pulling me towards the bedroom, never once pausing to look back. We slept in our clothes on top of the bed and at some point in the middle of the night I heard her get up to fetch the blanket from the couch. It was the only time she let go of my hand. She lay the blanket back over us both and gave a soft sigh, before slipping her fingers back into mine and holding on tight.

After that we stopped fighting so much.

The fight over me getting a warrant for Plummer had been the final nail in the coffin, or so she told me over coffee the following morning before we each went our separate ways, her to her apartment to change clothes and me to work. She said I needed to know she had believed me, even if there wasn't a thing she could have done about it.

I told her I believed her then, just like I believed her every time after that when she said we needed more evidence, that what we had was circumstantial, that a Jury would find reasonable doubt and so let them walk.

And bit-by-bit I learned to understand and speak her language, where I'd never really been bothered before.

So one time, after I'd accurately run down Elliot in the squad room when we were coming up cold on a rape-homicide and he asked why we simply couldn't just 'haul the guy's ass in', she laughed, and asked me if I wanted to get dinner, which of course I did.

Elliot rolled his eyes as we left together, debating Thai, Italian or Sushi. I think he felt me slipping away from him, towards Cabot, and into her world.

Occasional dinners soon turned into there being a movie on we both happened to want to see, even if it might take three weeks before we both finished work in time to catch a reasonable showing we both could make to see it.

I took her to a Knicks game, she took me to a Broadway show – and cried so quietly in the seat next to me I almost didn't notice. It was the only time I was asked to stay with her following what could only be described as a 'good' day.

And unlike tonight, she stepped silently out of her bedroom – holding up a set of extra sleepwear as she stood aside with a smile, offering me the bathroom to wash and change.

Yet tonight she hovers in the doorframe, nervously shuffling her feet, which are cold because she shattered bits of porcelain into her slippers. She kicked her sneakers off some time after we got back, and I never noticed until now how her toenails are painted cherry red.

"Liv?"

I'm trying to remember how this happened, she has a two bedroom apartment and yet any time she asks me to stay we sleep together on top of the covers in her guest bedroom – surrounded by case files and with window blinds that are just too short so in the morning the city greets me too harshly before I am ready.

She holds out her hand, like there'd ever be a possibility I might refuse.

I think it's because like the night she came to me, I came to her.

I'd just got through talking with Huang about my 'father' after the Darrell Guan case. All along I'd been hoping some rare, private moment would present itself where I'd have the opportunity to tell Cabot why my face kept betraying my inner turmoil in a way she couldn't understand.

Elliot tried getting me to talk about it, and I pushed him away. I resented his concern because he wasn't her and as I sat spilling my guts to Huang I realised I couldn't have the FBI Profiler, nice as he was, knowing more personal and private things about me than she did. She meant more to me than that.

So I wound up at her door, the first time for me uninvited.

She opened the door and looked at me like she'd been waiting for my appearance since this whole case began to unravel. She stepped aside, and willingly I stepped in, knowing that in doing so I might come out the other side a different person.

"Can I get you a drink?"

She appeared business-like, still dressed from court, only without her expensive shoes on.

She poured us both a glass of wine, Merlot I think, and took a long sip from her own glass, running her elegant fingers through tired strands of hair.

"This was a tough one." She stated, assuming I think, that she didn't know the half of it. "I can't believe Nelson tried to compare cystic fibrosis to a child inheriting a 'rape' gene from their father."

"Alex …" I tried to stop her before she went any further down a road she'd be clawing her way back out of in a few minutes, once I had the chance to say what I'd come to say.

She ploughed on still.

"Can you imagine if Guan had actually got off on that defence plea? The genetic defence that somehow we're none of us responsible for the badness within if it's put there by our parents?"

I'm not sure when she realised I was crying, but it stopped her anyway.

"Olivia?" Within seconds she was by my side, arms holding mine and gently guiding me to the couch, only she sat in the armchair first that time. "Liv …" She coaxed me softly, "Olivia, what's wrong, please … did something happen?"

Her beautiful face, so full of care and understanding, I never wanted anyone to care about me before her, not even Elliot. So I just told her, knowing that if I fell, she'd be there to catch me.

The words sound alien every time I say them. I think that's something which will never change.

"My father raped my mother …" I whispered softly, "and she had me … so I'm finding it a bit difficult to swallow the notion that the defence just argued, unsuccessfully, that being a rapist is somehow genetic."

I think I blinked and in that instant she was beside me on the couch, my face in her hands, blue eyes holding my gaze so intently I daren't look away.

"Olivia Benson." She spoke, and I'll never forget her words. "Don't you ever, ever try and convince me that I should believe there is anything wrong with you."

She never said anything more than that and I knew better than to argue with her.

She was nervous when she told me I'd drunk too much to drive and followed quickly by stating it was the wrong time of night to try and hail a cab in this part of the city. She had a perfectly comfortable guest room, and like all the other times after that she disappeared into her own bedroom to change before providing me with something suitable to wear and standing clear as I used the bathroom. Then she mumbled something about the window blinds in the guest room not closing properly and before I knew it I was laid on her guest bed watching her wrestle at the window, amused how the evidence of her job being her life was strewn about everywhere I looked.

"Sorry." She mumbled, finally giving up on the shutters in favour of clearing some case notes off the bed. "Sometimes I crash in here when I'm working late, I promised myself I wouldn't take files into the bedroom so instead I end up sleeping in here … defeats the purpose I guess." She carried on, answering her own judgement.

It did make me wonder though, whether I was really going to be sleeping in her 'actual' bed.

She perched at the foot of the bed, looking timid.

"Perhaps you often sleep in here for the same reason I sleep in the crib?" I suggested.

She shook her head and bit her bottom lip slowly, once again choosing to be the braver out of the two of us.

"I thought if I kept the case notes out of my bedroom then somehow I'd be able to keep the victims out of my dreams." She whispered honestly.

"It didn't work?"

Again she showed her answer through her eyes, glassy blue pearls peering back at me under the ethereal glow of the moonlight.

"Sometimes I feel like this job owns me …" She said softly, into nothing, her regular unburdening of guilt to me. "Sometimes I wonder why I stay, when I can see that at times it's doing nothing but bad things for me …" She paused, looking beyond me and through my gaze. "What is it, or rather who is it, that has the power to keep me here?"

I realised then that she was talking about me.

My stomach gave a little knot, as in the darkness she admitted to me that she'd rather we both did our jobs, and have what we had, than for her to choose to take an easier path and risk giving up on me.

She climbed up the bed and lay down by my side, her body turned away from me – almost daring me to comfort her. So I did. I lay down beside her and held her and as I wrapped my arm around her body I felt a soft sigh leave her lips more than I heard it.

I've never really had any female friends before Alex. I've spent far too long in a male dominated world to remember how to relate to them in any other way than how I do my job.

But Alex is no victim; she's headstrong, autonomous, courageous and forthright. I've watched her chew up many a perp on the stand, have their defence attorney for lunch and sometimes even the Judge for a light afternoon snack. I've watched her put her career on the chopping block a number of times before this, and seen her come up smelling of roses on the other side with barely a hair out of place.

I thought she knew, like I do, firmly where the line is and how to avoid crossing it. Until Sam Cavanaugh, when everything changed.

So once again she takes my hand and leads me down the hallway to her guest room-come-office. She spends a moment fiddling with the blind before I try, and then she mumbles something incoherent about having meant to get it fixed. We play this elegant dance of getting on the bed, she shuffles up beside me and I see how broken she looks with the cut to the right side of her forehead, no longer covered by a cute plaster for court. The simple mark a reminder of how much we both long to put Roy Barnett away.

She catches me looking and her fingers go up, tracing the bumpy outline. "Oh, that … Liv, it's nothing … I'm fine."

I know that, physically, but I still trace my thumb across the bruised flesh anyway.

"Go to sleep." I whisper, so she drops to the bed and turns immediately away from me so I can hold her.

As I slide my body in close behind hers I can feel the knots of tension as they leave her back and shoulders, she sighs again – silently and I cant help myself as I pull her close to me and savour a deep breath of the way her hair smells like lemons and her skin like vanilla.

Good enough to taste.

Within minutes I feel her body go heavy against mine and I feel sad, knowing that in the morning Alexandra Cabot, my ADA will be back.

Only this time things have been different, she's stayed lost longer than ever before, her eyes telling me everything her tired mind couldn't. Like some unspoken promise, she's made me see that she needs me this time 'before' the end, that perhaps she even needed me in the beginning?

Her heartbeat slows as sleep pulls her in, but not before the truth will out. "Liv …?" She mumbles, a sweet, shy voice in my ear.

"Uh huh?" I know she's really asleep, she does this sometimes.

"I love you Liv …"

No thunderbolts or lightening crash, it's not that kind of love in the way that she says it – it's the kind of love you have for a cat that curls into your lap every night in a resolute way and purrs all the evil out of the world, just for a short time.

I know she cant hear me, I know sleep took her the second those words left her lips but I still need her to know.

"I love you too Alex."

Like Romeo loved Juliet, like spring rain and children playing, cardboard boxes full of kittens and dogs licking ice-cream from the sidewalk on a hot summer's day. I love her like my breath leaves my body when I'm around her, my skin tingles in excitement and red hot pokers dance through my insides. I love her without question, without remorse and without reservation. I know I would happily give my life for her and at the same time that wonderful thought fills me with an equal measure of dread that I might one day be called to do so, that one day someone would set to harm her and I would lose her, and then I would be broken and my wounded heart might never recover.

Because I love her, and it makes me feel guilty for being here if that's not what she needs.

TBC

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