Disclaimer – Characters remain the property of the creators of Law and Order: SVU, I'm just playing with them for a bit of fun.

Author note – This is set around the season 3 episode 'Guilt' but has spoilers for other season 3 episodes as well. Picks up mid way through the episode right after Sam Cavanaugh overdoses, when Elliot stops Linda Cavanaugh from attacking Alex and Olivia runs to protect her.

(I had said the next thing I wrote would be a Jane/Maura, Rizzoli/Isles fic … but this just wanted to be written …)

Rating might go to M later, I'm not sure yet.

That night …

Apartment of Alexandra Cabot, ADA

It was the way her fingers trembled, as she rummaged through the ridiculously large set of keys, searching for the one to unlock the door to her apartment that first told me things between us were different somehow.

I took them from her, and she glanced up, a fleeting look of something I'd seen before but only rarely. She was scared, and yet she wasn't scared to let me see that.

"Liv, the door?"

I found the right one and we both went inside, one hand still focused against the small of her back but the other one free to push aside the door to her West 78th Street apartment. Not wrapped around her body anymore like it was in the hospital, shielding her from Sam Cavanaugh's mother and her grief stricken rage.

She looks lost.

At any time during the past – is it nearly two years? – that we've worked together, I've watched her do angry, insolent, enraged and even contrite but never lost. Something about this case is eating her alive and the worst thing about it is now I really know that's not what I want to see happen to her. I'm trying to figure out when it was she took a place in my heart as someone I would take the time for.

"You want some tea?" She asks softly, breaking away from my contact and towards the sink to fill the kettle and place it despondently back on the stove. "Or something stronger?" She offers, "I think I have a bottle of scotch I save for my run-ins with Arthur hanging around here somewhere …"

Her boss's name rolls off her tongue like they went through kindergarten together, and I'm immediately reminded of how she's afraid of no one, and how I always liked that about her.

Until now, that is. Now I think she's afraid of herself.

"Tea's fine."

She's smaller, and with her arms wrapped around her body like that I realise how fragile she could seem to anyone who doesn't know her. Lately all I've noticed is how much more like me she's become, it made me warm to her, I realised she reminded me – of me.

She stopped being afraid of me, I think that's when I noticed her, when I realised she wasn't afraid to call me on my bullshit like everyone else.

So I started calling her on hers.

"Alex, it's not your fault."

She laughs; it's daring and almost comes with a snarl. I know that if I was her and she tried that line with me, I'd be hurling something breakable at her head right now so I'm surprised at my own surprise when a non-descript but no doubt expensive china mug goes flying in the direction of the apartment door, shattering into a million tiny shards.

I can't help but jump, I'm a little bit cautious around her. Not because I think either one of us is in any danger, but because I'm excited to discover that she can be this way.

"Fuck you Liv." She mumbles quietly, before taking out another mug and returning to make the tea.

There's evidence of how she ran out of here the second she took the call, the pyjama pants over the back of the sofa, the slippers by the front door – now covered in fragments of china.

"Sorry." She mutters, picking things up in an effort to tidy. "I left in a bit of a hurry, although who knows why?"

I think this is the first victim I've ever seen her lose herself over, and watching it happen to someone else I'm not so sure that I'm the one to help her.

I remember the first time it happened to me, over an eight year old girl called Jessie. I also remember Elliot with his hands firmly encircling my upper arms in order to stop me from punching the guy's lights out as he calmly walked away from a series of rape charges. I wanted to kill Elliot because I couldn't get the justice I wanted for Jessie. I can still remember the way that need for revenge engulfed me, I wouldn't stop until I had what I wanted so I kicked Elliot's shins until they bled and he released me, then I turned and slapped him hard across the face.

Something about the way this evening is headed leads me to believe there's a good chance Cabot could be giving me my slap anytime soon.

Right now though, she's still languishing in her own self-pity, so I'm safe for a while.

She gestures to the couch, but as has become customary whenever we have a serious discussion of any kind we separate – she takes the couch and I take the well loved armchair. I'd like to think it's about us allowing each other the necessary personal space but in reality it prevents us from doing something we each think we probably ought not.

If we're just hanging out, shooting the breeze after a weekend brunch or a late night Chinese to celebrate light case loads and rare evenings off, then I've no problem sharing a couch with her. It's when her eyes are clouded with emotion and her hands are wrung together too tightly in her lap that I know I can't trust this growing urge inside me to wrap her in my arms and gently soothe the world away.

Right now she looks a little like she could commit murder and I'm fairly sure any attempt on my behalf to soothe anything would be met with a reasonable stab at the death penalty.

"Why do you think he did it?" She asks, without really directing her words towards me – it's more rhetorical so I don't answer. "I suppose we'll never know …" She hypothesises, hugging the mug of tea that little bit tighter. "Unless he wakes up that is …" She glances over at me. "Do you think he'll wake up Liv?"

I shrug. I really don't know.

She looks up at me, and for the briefest second before the shutters go down and the hard steel exterior of Alexandra Cabot, ADA, returns I see her. She's pale because she's appalled by the growing weight of all the depravity she's seen. Her eyes circled with dark lines, evidence of the unsettling dreams she has in which she takes responsibility for things that aren't hers to take. Her slight fingers try to wrap around something tangible, something she can touch and taste and enjoy the slight burn of as the liquid travels down her throat. It's then I can see that she's slipping.

"Alex," Before I know it I've broken every rule and I'm beside her on the couch, my hand resting on her knee as I urge her to hear me. "This isn't your fault."

Just for effect I think I'll say it again. "It's not your fault Alex …"

She looks up at me; pale blue orbits pooled with yet unshed tears. "Isn't it?"

Her voice waivers but she doesn't push me away, the walls stay down and if anything I realise she's been waiting for me to be this close to her ever since she threw the damn cup.

"I'm not good at this Liv." She whispers softly. "A teenage boy asked me why he can't forget the memories he has of the sometimes good, sometimes innocent times he enjoyed with his rapist." Her hand comes to rest on mine, like some admission of guilt. "In our last conversation I told him that Roy Barnett pretended to like him all those times so Sam would do what he wanted, talk about sticking the knife in …"

"Alex."

She wont let me finish. She knows I'd defend her against herself until all the breath ran out of my body but she wont allow it, doesn't want to hear it. She simply squeezes my hand beneath hers to let me know. And I respect that. I respect her.

It's the middle of the night and we're sat holding hands, drinking tea. It's not the first time either, I know I should urge her to go to bed and then leave, but a part of me doesn't want this to end.

Again.

The first time it happened, this thing between us, she came to my apartment the night I shot Eric Plummer at point blank range as he held an unloaded gun to an innocent woman's head.

Those were her eloquent words she put out there as she stood in my kitchen and grumbled over my lack of non-caffeinated teas.

I think I only let her in that night because I was impressed by her tenacity. Elliot came, and went, Don called and left a fatherly message on my answerphone acknowledging my lack of responsibility to how I should feel but Cabot showed up and shouted that declaration through my door. I couldn't help be a touch impressed at her bravery.

She said we were more alike than I thought. She also admitted to thinking I hated her until I relented and opened my door. She stood in my kitchen fixing us out of date Jasmine tea and looking for cookies as she dragged up words of reassurance and I thought I heard her voice falter for a brief moment as she tried out my shortened name for the first time.

"Liv … look,"

She handed me the tea and made a motion to suggest we take a seat on my couch, but of course I let her take the couch and took the chair opposite – in front of the window.

"I can't even begin to imagine how you felt, faced with the choice between Plummer – who you already know went down for a crime he didn't commit but has since murdered four more, and that innocent woman who did nothing wrong except mistakenly open her door. Liv …"

She looked imploringly at me again.

"Really … what choice did you really have?"

And there it was.

In all the months we'd been whining and moaning about the intrusion into our lives of the new ADA, bitching about the silver spoon in her mouth and the big illuminated Trust Fund sign flashing above her head as if she were a character in a video game. I never once realised that over the course of that first year she'd come to understand me better than any of the men in that squad ever had. I didn't know if it was simply because she was also a woman, or because our famous fights became so heated I felt like she knew me more intimately than any recent lover.

I got up, because I was trying to avoid her moving from the couch and coming over to comfort me as she watched tears slip slowly down my face. Instead I paced along the floor behind her – asking the questions that became part of our little game of rhetoric.

"I put an innocent man in prison …" I whispered softly, coming to a standstill behind her. "Maybe not alone, but still, I had a hand in that and I also said things to him … and things happened to him whilst he was there and for that …"

I remember that she turned then, and stopped me with her hand upon mine, gently pulling me round to sit beside her on the couch. It felt dangerous, like uncharted waters in which we both might drown.

"Just because you said something you wouldn't say now, didn't give him the right to make you a target and use you as an excuse to hurt other people."

I remember her words just as clearly as I remember the softness of her hands as she held mine in the space between us.

"Everything we do changes us Liv, every case, every perp and every victim." She paused, her features graced with the most abject look of honesty I'd ever seen. "I think I'm finally starting to get that now." She admitted.

And I laughed.

"Alex Cabot, don't tell me the Special Victims Unit is actually starting to win you over?"

A small part of me hoped that maybe I was winning her over too.

And because it is an unspoken agreement that we have between us, I choose to use this moment to speak her words back to her, in the way that only I can.

"Alex, every case … remember?"

A single tear falls down her cheek, her eyes flooded with relief as she whispers the continuance, "Every perp, every victim …"

"Everything we do changes us." It's my turn to hold her hands in mine. "Alex." I urge her to look at me, dipping my head so I can hopefully catch her eyes, her gaze. I know I shouldn't do it, and I know it marks the most significant change in our relationship to date but I cant help the urge I have to lie to her now. "Maybe he'll be alright?" I whisper, our foreheads already so close they're almost touching. "Maybe if you just try and get some sleep everything will work out."

It's the first time I've ever not been straight with her. There's nothing about this case with Sam Cavanaugh that's going to 'work out'.

She falls exhausted against the back of the couch, her eyes searching mine for something else.

"You really think so?"

I nod. "I really hope so Alex, but whatever happens, I know you need to sleep."

"I know it's nearly morning, but will you stay?"

Her voice is small and still and I simply nod and watch as she gets up from the couch, pausing uncertainly in the door to the hallway that leads to the bedrooms and bathroom beyond. We have a ritual and it isn't this.

She doesn't want to be alone.

TBC

Comments/reviews much appreciated :D