Let’s play a love game – Chapter 1 – parallelsoulmates

Chapter Text

“Why are you here?” Her own voice is sharp as a razor and her eyes cut him to the bone.

Why is he here truly? It’s Saturday night, he should be at the club, playing cards at the side room and smoking cigars. He should be getting business calls and giving orders to his men to cause accidental deaths. Instead, he’s anywhere but where he should be.

Olivia Benson. The bane of his existence, the woman with just as equal power as him. She’s hell in high heels, her beauty as lethal as her mouth. So many years, so many games between them. He doesn’t know when the hate started. Was it around the time she killed his wife and blamed it on his best friend? Or maybe around the time he killed her father. It’s decades of back and forth, a mountain of loathing and blame. He despises her, he hates her with the strength of a thousand suns.

But he also loves.

He desperately desires to the point the passion is spreading inside of him like wildfire, burning every inch of his body. He can’t stop thinking about her, can’t stop dreaming about her mouth and body. Thoughts of her come at the most inappropriate of times. Honestly, he had to kill a few people that wronged him in order to calm down, get a rain on his raging lust.

Today, was supposed to be another one of these days. He was facing his feelings by giving into his anger, giving orders and running the ruthless game of night. Olivia’s actions…. Olivia’s actions had a different outcome though and turned everything around. “I’m here to end this once and for all.”

The brunette woman raises a skeptical eyebrow. She always seems to mock him. God, he hates her or maybe he wishes he could fuck her again within an inch of their lives. It only happened twice. Once when they were in their twenties and another one on their forties. Two traumatic instances made them cause hell literally and figuratively on each other.

“My men know you’re here, Elliot.” She sneers all poison and heat.

He ignores her words, walking quickly towards her. She’s the red cape and he’s the bull, gunning for her death, racing towards her demise. “I don’t care, Olivia. Aren’t you tired? I sure as hell am. This has gone on long enough. It needs to end. I need it to end.”

The words are pointed, punctuated with darkness. He’s tethering to the edge of the abyss, slowly entering a labyrinth he can’t get out of. For once, he doesn’t care if he gets lost or he dies, at least he’ll be free of the hold she has on him. He raises his hand, the gun he’s carrying is there, aimed at her temple. Her brown warm eyes inspect him carefully, it’s the gaze of the devil calling him to walk the gates of the underworld and never turn back. She has it so very wrong. He already passed those doors decades ago right along with her.

“Come on then, do it. Kill me, Elliot. You know that mother of yours is in her nineties right? Oh, and you got that brother too. What was his name? Joe. He was running after you. It’d be a shame if they were to say….have a car accident?”

He can’t stop it, the blood is pumping in his veins and the thirst for the kill is there, his anger getting the best of him, he pushes her towards the wall jamming the gun in her carotid artery. “Try it.”

“I already made you a widower, don’t challenge me. Your kids still cry for their mommy and it’s been decades. You don’t want me to take more people from you.” She spits out.

It’s a slap in the face, the cruelty shining bright. He laughs bitterly. Seems like Olivia has forgotten she’s not the only dangerous one in this game, he did some damage too. Don Cragen was killed by his men. It was a hit below the belt, one Olivia never recovered from. Her mother was already dead and his move on her father left her all alone, orphaned in this world. He needed his own pound of flesh, that’s the law of the night. There’s only revenge, a wheel turning round and round. It’s chess, her move was almost roué mat for him, he had to hit a vital piece on her own board in order to be able to continue.

“And you don’t want me to kill your kids, do you?” He doesn’t know why he says it. They both agreed their offspring were off limits. It’s an oath sealed amongst scratches and passion in the dead of night, the second and last time they slept together. It was serious, it was them in their most vulnerable. They swore to never harm each other’s kids, his own five and her own two.

Her eyes flash, he sees the panic, the fear underneath. It’s the only time he ever had a glimpse of weakness from her. Usually, she’s the ruthless one. “You wouldn’t. We-”

“-swore?” He exclaims, grinning. “ We swore a lot of things to each other Olivia and yet….”

“You know it’s not the same!” Her voice is explosive, a release of the deepest kind, it comes deep from her gut. “I haven’t laid a finger on them Elliot, you know I could have but my word means something to me even if it’s to a person I hate.”

She’s so insufferable and yet so emotional. He can’t seem to make sense of her, he never could during all these years. It’s just his luck, that he’s in love with a woman like this, completely powerless to stop his heart but hating himself, his own skin for being enamored by her. She murdered Kathy for Christ’s sake and he wants to be close to her, wants to participate in this endless circle of lust and hate. What does that make him? A monster he believes, destroyed by a life in the dark, by fighting ghosts and killing people to satisfy his arrogance and prove his power.

Olivia and him are the same. Two leaders making all the moves, destroying own pieces of themselves to satiate their hunger for revenge and blood.

“Logically, I’d believe you Benson but….” He trails off lowering the gun slightly, removing it from her jugular.

“But what? I wasn’t the only one there that night. You made a vow too. You gave me something that night to seal it. Was it all a lie?”

His memories are a slow playing movie transferring him back to that night, thirteen years earlier. It plays before his blue eyes and his body is frozen but his mouth runs, voice tainted deep with melancholy.  “No. No, it wasn’t.”

***************************************************

Then

Their bodies are sated, the post orgasmic bliss of their union remaining like a sweet drug, keeping them captive in a bubble of affection, desire- and while they’ll never admit it- love.

“I hate myself.” She whispers, a tone full of malice and darkness. “I hate myself and I hate you, Elliot.”

He’s so conflicted. The hurt comes but also the agreement, the guilt. They are in a fable cycle, cursed to walk opposite paths in this war. He can’t deceive himself or Olivia, this is simply a moment of weakness. Tomorrow they’ll both plan their next moves, kill each other’s soldiers and sabotage their empires. It’s business, it’s how their lives had been for the last twenty plus years. This is their second strike and absolutely there’s not to be a third one.

“Trust me Liv, the feeling’s mutual.” It’s no lie, the loathing has seep deep into his pores, taken every corner of his life the exact moment he saw Kathy’s body laying on the ground. He may not have been in love but he did love his wife. She gave him five kids, stayed faithful till the end and she didn’t deserve to lose her life, for his babies to lose the only good parent they had like this. Fuck, because of the woman beside him, his kids stayed orphans.

Olivia’s hand trails upwards rubbing seductively his hairy chest, toying with the cross there. It’s his own relic, an accessory of his eternal penance. It’s unfair how Olivia gets to not carry a mark, he thinks. She has sins too but from what he knows she never cared one bit for redemption. She was bad to the bone. H e’s the one endlessly torturing himself.

“Business is business.” She whispers, the rough tone of her voice echoing inside his head.

“And when does this business stop killing people? You’re sitting here while my wife is under ground, rotting along with your father. I killed him Olivia. I may not be the one that pulled the trigger but I gave the command and he was gone the next second.”

The hiss comes along with the scratch on his flesh. She’s angry, for once he hit one of her most vulnerable nerves. “We’ve got a legacy to uphold, Stabler. You know how the streets are run. Power is addictive, we both fell victims to it time and time again. Killing people is…how it always was, it’s our own creation, our own masterpiece of pain. It’s an ugly creation of course but I don’t see the world with rose colored glasses. The same goes for you. We’ve got blood on our hands, a lot of it.”

“Willl a legacy exist if there’s no one to take the mantle after us? What will happen when our kids are on the ones being buried, what if it’s your daughter or my son?” He asks, intrigued to see the reply.

The wince comes along with the pulling back. She looks at him like he committed the ultimate sin. “You see…. it hurts you too when it’s your someone you created. How about we make a deal?”

“I’m hearing.”

“We have to protect some people during this tornado of ultimate destruction. The ones who will take over after us. Our children. Here’s the deal, everyone else is fair game. But not my five kids, not your own two.”

Two brown eyes are laser focused on him. His body is naked but his mind might as well be too under her gaze. She’s the only person who manages to do that to him. “How do I know you’ll be telling the truth?”

“I would swear on my life but I know that doesn’t mean much to you.” He throws back, a sarcastic grin on his face.

“It doesn’t.” She replies with equal irony.

“Then how about we each give each other something important, something meaningful in order to seal the deal? We both know we have stuff that are sentimental to us. And actions always counted more than words.”

“Okay.” It’s said simply without any flair for dramatics. He had learned in all these years from interacting with her that this is not Olivia Benson, this is Liv. This is a hint of softness and suspicious acceptance.

Turning around, he pulls his expensive Italian jacket from the floor, taking out the precious jewelry he’s carrying always with him. “Here, take this.”

Olivia’s hands grasp it gently. Her reaction is intriguing. She looks half mesmerized by it and he’s absolutely certain the other half wants to throw it across the wall. “A compass?”

He smiles. If she only knew the importance. “Not any compass. My mother gave it to me when I turned eighteen. It was given to her by her first love. Not my father, before you ask. It’s one of a kind. Never told anyone else about it, always kept it with me. It reminds me of the way home.”

“The gold is stunning.” she adds.

“It’s a beautiful piece. Extraordinary.”

Maybe for the first time there’s something else in Olivia’s brown eyes. An emotion he hasn’t been privy to. Is it compassion? Is it care? Or maybe there’s sadness for the home he took away from her. He doesn’t know the answer, she’s a puzzle, one he can’t solve, won’t ever be able to. There’s only one hope from this, to be able to reach a middle ground, an agreement for the most precious treasures they have. Their kids.

Putting the compass in the purse that was left on the nightstand, she reaches around her neck unclasping the necklace he had seen her wear time and time again. The silver chain hesitantly ends up on his palm.

The word written on it is not random. It’s Olivia’s identity, the one characteristic describing her as a person.

Fearlessness.

“This is-“

“-not expensive. I know. It’s precious to me.”

“What’s the story behind it?” He whispers with interest.

“My father gave it to me. The one that you killed.” She spits out, her tone full of sadness for the loss she’ll always grieve.

It comes as a stab of pain between his ribs, he rarely feels that emotion. Guilt. It was something he stopped caring about around the time his pop made him kill for the first time. After that, he learned there’s not time for the emotion. It becomes a weakness eating you from inside out. He turned it off. The only way to do that was think of the many ways they wronged him.

It’s unusual to combine it with Olivia but ultimately he did kill her father and he liked the man. Don Cragen had a past with his father, a nasty one but he was never rude to him. He never hit him below the belt. In fact Elliot and Cragen shared fondness and admiration for each other.

He didn’t want to hurt him but ultimately he was Olivia’s weakness and in the end that made all the difference. It’s what cost him his life.

Inspecting the necklace closely, his fingers map the word carved in the silver plaque. Fearlessness. Olivia’s voice is rough; the pain and the hate not being able to be hidden. “Other than my children, this is the only thing that’s valuable to me. The only object left to remember my father and what he represented.”

“What did he represent?” he’s interested to know if she’ll give him an answer, an honest one.

Her eyes don’t look at him when she whispers the answer but he can hear the tremble in her voice. “Honor, bravery, courage.. The little morality I had left.”

“Is it-“

She cuts him off, the steel of her voice returning. “It’s gone, it’s all gone now. There’s nothing left. He took it away when you killed him.”

Their losses will always stand between them like ghosts, entering their heads, travelling on every single corner of their brain and reminding them the weight they have to carry.

“I’ll keep it close to me. Thank you for trusting me with it.” He’s honest, won’t ever lie when a deal is being done. Especially, one that’s so important for their futures.

“So we got a deal?” she asks offering him her palm in a handshake.

“We got a deal.”

He doesn’t want to shake on it like that. He always liked his vows written with a taste of blood. Hurriedly, he grabs her by the neck as he smashes their lips together in a powerful kiss. The battle of tongues, the taste of poison, their broken hearts are some of the factors that always brought them to ruins.

His teeth find her bottom lip as he bites harshly. Soon,  blood trickles and it’s all he can taste. Few moments later, he feels a sting of pain and he could tell she took her own pound of flesh. The metallic taste and smell are filling his mouth but all he can hear are their combined moans as they succumb to their passion for the last time.

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