Title: Torn Into Pieces
Fandom: Law & Order: SVU
Pairing: Olivia Benson/Elliot Stabler
Rating: NC-17
Length: 1400 words
Disclaimer: I am not Dick Wolf.
Summary: Takes place during "Ripped". Part of the SVU AU Season 7.
Torn Into Pieces
by
***
The house is dark and quiet when Cragen sends him home, the newspaper still strewn all over the kitchen table, his dishes from the last two days in the sink. He can't settle to anything, keeps moving from room to room. The yard needs to be raked - the twins helped him do it on their last weekend visiting (he had cleaned the whole house, even put up that wreath on the door for fall, like Kathy used to), but the leaves keep falling, and he's never here.
And he's just so tired. He doesn't know how he can be so tired. He wakes up a lot, he guesses.
As the afternoon fades, the house gets dark, and he doesn't think to turn on the lights until it's pitch black and he stubs his toe on a doorjamb, hard, and then nearly punches a hole in the wall.
When she rings the bell, he thinks about not answering the door. He already knows it's Olivia, and he knows she'll want to talk about it - that she'll be angry, or worse, worried about him, and fighting just seems like so much effort. They fight too much anyway, they're always fighting. Sometimes he wonders what would happen if they stopped, if there wouldn't be anything left.
Besides, fighting is risky. It takes them dangerous places.
If he were smart, he would've pretended not to be home, but he misses her - it seems like they haven't had a real conversation in weeks, avoiding each other, making sure their hands don't accidentally touch when they pass each other paperwork. She's his partner, always his partner, but now she makes him tired, angry. Even so when he opens the door and sees her standing there his stomach twists, pleasantly. He's so far gone.
She talks about the case. He just listens, and when she tells him not to tell Luke's dad about the steroids, he doesn't argue. He nods, and she lets herself out, and he doesn't watch the door shut behind her.
He counts to ten, and his clothes feel heavy on him, weighing down his arms, his shoulders, like his t-shirt is made of lead. The click of the door shutting had an empty finality, and he is alone in this big house, four empty bedrooms upstairs, dust on the furniture and leaves in the yard, the center of a crumbling universe. He's still standing there when the door opens again, when she doesn't even bother to knock, like she owns the place.
He turns around and she's just standing in the doorway, her feet on the threshold, looking at him the way she looks at him when he's interrogating a suspect and he goes too far, when he describes to a perp the way he must've been feeling when he molested his daughter, when he says a fifteen-year-old must've been a nice piece of ass, when he slams someone into table.
"Elliot," she says, and he hates himself a little bit more, because he wants to kiss her the way he wants to breathe. This is bad, this is very bad, and the way she's looking at him, the way she's looking at him.
The wind's picking up and rustling the trees outside, and cold air's blowing in through the open door. Olivia still stands there.
"You're letting in the cold," he says finally, and his voice doesn't sound like his own, it's muffled and quiet.
She watches his face for a long moment, then nods a little bit, her head tilting sideways in a small shrug. She closes the door behind her, and when she turns back around her face is drawn and unhappy, worried. "Are you okay?" she says, but it's like she doesn't really expect him to answer, like she has to ask but they both know it's pointless. She's still looking at him in that disconcerting way she has, and he can't think of a thing to say. He closes his eyes and breathes deeply through his nose and wishes he were already asleep.
He hears her footsteps coming towards him, slow and loud on the wood floor, in the empty house, and then her hand is on the back of his neck, cool on his skin, and he lets his head dip a little bit, his eyes still closed. She kisses him very deliberately, kisses his bottom lip, and his mouth falls open, and she tastes like she did before. His hands are still at his sides, heavy, like he can't move them, and her other hand has come up to his cheek, and he loves her.
She deepens the kiss and his breath catches and this must be why she came here, and the thought of her driving all the way out to Queens for this is something else. He can finally move his hands, slides them under her coat and around her waist, under her shirt and he's touching her skin, and he hadn't realized how much he had missed her. The back loneliness hits him in a wave. She makes a soft sound, and he feels unsteady, and he's kissing her.
He wants to take her upstairs, lay her in his bed, but that bed was his and Kathy's and this is bad enough without layering that onto it. He walks her back towards the couch, pushing her coat off her shoulders, pulling her shirt over her head, and her hands are on his belt, and he closes his eyes again, and it's like he's dreaming. He can smell her shampoo.
The house seems very quiet, their breathing loud and ragged in the silence, and past that he can hear the wind outside, and somewhere in the distance a car door slamming shut. He's kissing the dark skin of her nipples, her ribs sharp under his hands, her skin stretched tight over the bones, and their clothes are piling up on the floor. She rests her hand on the side of his head, her palm against his temple, and he leans into it, and wishes she wouldn't leave, wishes she would stay, and he pushes into her slowly, so slowly, and she makes a noise that might be his name.
He is horribly aware of time passing, of seconds clicking by, and he tries desperately to remember everything, the golden shade of her skin in this light, the ridge of her collarbone, the downy hairs on her arms, and he rocks into her as slowly as he can, dragging it out, until she grabs his hips and thrusts up, faster, faster.
He takes a long breath and reaches down for her clit, and for a moment they're looking each other in the eye, face to face, and her mascara is smudged a little, and her eyes are wide, and he wonders what she's thinking. He never seems to know, anymore.
She comes, so quietly he swears he can hear the refrigerator humming, and he follows a second after, and he's already lonely, she's already stopped looking at him.
Afterwards, he sits on the edge of the couch with his elbows on his knees and his head resting on his clasped hands, and she gets dressed. The zippers seem loud, and she turns her back to him to put her shirt back on.
Stay, he thinks. Stay.
"The arraignment's in the morning," she says, and he's memorizing the line of her back, the curve of her neck. She's not wearing her weapon. She puts her jacket back on, straightens it.
"Elliot," she says. "Did you hear me?' She turns around to look at him, all her clothes back in place, hardly even wrinkled, and he nods. Her face softens a little bit, and she tries to smile, but it doesn't really work out. "Okay," she says, and steps toward him, rests her hand on his head for a second. He closes his eyes. "Okay," she says again, and when she takes her hand away the place where it was is cold. He hears her walking away, the door shutting behind her, and he thinks, I'll see her tomorrow, it's not so bad. But it is, and he's falling apart, and he doesn't know why.
***
END