TITLE: REPUTATION
E-MAIL: adrienne_miranda@yahoo.com
FANDOM: Law and Order SVU
PAIRING: Alex Cabot / Olivia Benson
COMPLETION DATE: 07/10/2004
RATING: PG If same-sex relationships bother you, you might want to read something else. Otherwise, ENJOY!!!!!!!!!
LEGAL STUFF: Copyrighted 2004 by Adrienne Lee and Miranda Rafferty. Non-original characters, if applicable, are used without permission under "Fair Use" doctrine. The authors reserve all rights attached to all original aspects of this work. This is a work of fiction; any similarity to characters or persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
SPOILER: Post "Loss". There also might be other bits and pieces from various episodes.
SUMMARY FOR STORY: Olivia’s reputation put on the table…
AUTHOR'S NOTE: We got smacked in the head by a severe case of Abbie-hate. Caveat emptor.
FEEDBACK: Yes, please, please, please feed us!!
On one idyllic weekend morning, sounds of Dusty Springfield was in the air…
“You do have to say you love me, and be close at hand. You do have to stay forever,
I will tie you down…” Olivia sang along quietly, as she did most of the tunes that came through the oldies station. Suddenly, she felt something amiss. “Alex?”
“Huh?” The blonde looked up from her section of the Sunday paper. “What is it?”
“That was my question for you.”
“Oh.” She hesitated for a moment, then closed the newsprint. “I was just thinking.”
“About what?” Olivia folded hers too, and scooted closer.
“The song.”
“Hey, I could tie you up, too, if you want.”
She backhanded her lover on the arm. “I’m sure that would make you happy.”
“Why the sudden mood change?” The brunette asked, concerned. “I mean, um… Why the sudden, sudden mood change?” Her question ended in a squeaky high note.
Alex ignored the insinuation. “I don’t know where that came from.” She first replied, wondering silently if her lover was right. Then, it occurred to her. “Oh, yeah, I know. The song was playing on Hank’s radio when Abbie stopped by to say goodbye to him.”
At the mention of the name, Olivia’s pulse quickened. “And why did that upset you?” She tried to appear nonchalant. **Breath in. Breath out.**
“How did you know I’m upset?”
“I felt a disturbance in the force?” She answered meekly, latching onto the small smile still lingering on the blonde’s face.
“Very funny, smart ass.”
**Breath in. Breath out. Swallow.** Her request still sounded helium high, “So tell me?”
“Abbie didn’t like me very much.” Alex answered softly, pulling the string off her tea bag and twisting it around her fingers.
**Swallow. Lower your voice.** She told herself, her eyes glued to the small movement. Any minute now, her lover would try to strangle her with that stretch of cotton. “Abbie Carmichael?”
“Did you screw another Abbie?”
“How did you know? I never told you about her. We never told anybody about us. She didn’t want anyone to know about us. Something about us being bad for her career. Actually, there was no us. Never ever was there an us.” Olivia rambled, wondering if she would have to get a construction permit for the deep hole she was digging. **Eeeeeep.**
“Ah, not according to her. At least that’s what she told me. It’s amazing she didn’t bring in visual aids.”
“But… she was just…” The brunette was flabbergasted and perplexed. **EEEK!** The former tea bag string just snapped in two. “Why would she say that? And why would she tell you that? She was nothing but… Um… She didn’t mean anything to me! Not at all! Honest!”
“I imagine she told me for the same reason why everybody else you ever screwed felt inclined to tell me.” Alex replied evenly, picking up the table knife and slicing into the newspaper. “In intimate and exquisite detail how very good you were. And how thoroughly pissed off they were at me that I took the best lay in town off the market.” She paused, then added quietly, “Well, except for Serena. She was the only person you slept with who wasn’t bitchy to me.”
At this point, Olivia’s jaw was on the floor, out the window, and down on the corner waiting for a bus, and their house wasn’t even on a bus route. “Sweetheart, I had no idea.” She took the blunt utensil away, and started to put her arms around her lover.
“I’m sure you don’t.” Alex closed her eyes and twisted her lips. “Please don’t touch me.” Expelling a long breath, she tried another version of a smile. “But now you know why I never wanted details. I didn’t need you to rehash it all for me.”
“Alex, I’m so sorry, I never knew my past would come back to hurt you.” She pulled her lover’s chair towards her own, and gathered her in her arms anyway.
“When we were at Serena and Casey’s babyshower, Abbie…”
“Abbie?” Olivia’s jaw just flagged down the proverbial cab. She didn’t even recall seeing the woman there.
“She was there only to drop off a gift, then she left. But that didn’t stop her from telling me I was nothing but a fly-by-night replacement hussy.” Alex closed her eyes momentarily, then looked up, and conjured a tiny smile. “Well, at least she didn’t recognize me. And that’s good, right?”
Her heart sank at the pain that faded her lover’s eyes. “I doubt it will, but if it’d make you feel any better, I slept with Abbie purely to try and get you out of my head, and my heart.”
“You were in love with me then?” The blonde asked in a small voice, not quite wanting to believe, and scolding herself for being some gullible school girl.
“I was in love with you from the moment I saw you.” Olivia could remember even then how Alex made her catch her breath, giddy and tongue-tied, nauseous and self-conscious. Which she had at the time racked up to a case of indigestion from the greasy burger she had for breakfast.
“You’re making it up.”
**I wish I were. I felt like an absolute and complete fool.** The brunette thought to herself, and shook her head, turning the grimace into a crooked smile. “Can I tell you a secret?”
“I thought you stopped hiding things from me.” Alex accused suspiciously. She picked up the fork to emphasis her point, “Whatever you come up with had better be good.”
“Well, this wasn’t intentional.” Olivia explained in a hurry, holding up her teaspoon playfully, and hoping it would work as a shield. “I didn’t realize that was you then, until Hank told me when I talked to him last week.”
“It was me when?”
“When I first saw you.”
“Okay…” Alex smiled hesitantly.
“The Olive Oyl picture of me. Imagine my hair mid-back length, and not in a bun.”
“Okay…”
“I knew it. You don’t remember me.” Olivia pouted, looking dejected. “And here I am, pining over you for all those years.”
“Wait, you just said you didn’t know that it was me.” She cross-examined her witness, still quite not believing her.
“Well, I didn’t.” Olivia defended herself valiantly. **Going pro se was a stupid, stupid idea, Benson. You’re so getting your ass wiped. Where’s a good defense attorney when you need one.** And continued without thinking, “But you were the one who started my random blonde streak.” Why did she think blaming the prosecution was going to help her case any.
“When did Abbie bleach her hair?” Alex asked, then added, “Oh wait, I forgot she was a natural blond at heart.” She wondered innocently, **Hmm… Did that sound catty?**
**MReow. HISS. Swat. Low growl. Cat fight!** Olivia heard in her head. “Abbie didn’t count,” she justified. Before Alex could protest, the brunette pressed on, “Anyway, I ran into you at Hank’s office. Actually, I kinda bopped in for about two seconds. Then I left because you were there.”
“You mean barged.” Suddenly, recognition dawned on the blonde. “You didn’t even knock.”
“I never knocked on Hank’s door.” She remembered being chewed up, spit out and found completely lacking in the span of one short glance. “Anyway, you were a friggin’ iceberg.”
“Meanwhile, you were a flake. You were almost as blond as Abbie.” Alex laughed at the memory. “All giggly and hysterical. And rude. Let’s not forget rude. You didn’t even kiss my hand and say ‘how d’you do’. Yes, definitely rude.”
“You know? Maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up.” On a roped bridge with one side gone and the other side being cut out from under her, Olivia sighed, as she stared at the imaginary chasm below. “Forget I said anything.”
“Oh, no, too late. You started it. Dish.” Alex ordered, with a fork pressing against her lover’s nose. It was potentially too good a story to let her get out of now. “So, what about that day?”
“I had a crush on you then. Weren’t you listening to me?” Did Alex ever really listen to her? The brunette pondered for a brief moment.
“Waitaminute! That was like, like, years ago.” She did a quick mental calculation, “Over a fucking decade!” She provided, astonished.
“Yep.”
“What about Andy, and your random whatever-you-call-them-flings?”
“Replacement fucks… Um, screws?” Olivia clarified, recalling the emptiness she felt at that point in her life. “I thought I couldn’t possibly have you, so I tried to forget you.” She really didn’t know it was Alex she was looking for, but she was looking for something. Something to fill her besides her work.
“You’re making it up. Tell me you’re making it up.” She had no idea.
“I was in love with random blond dream. It was my damnation.” Olivia sighed, and rested her head on her lover’s shoulder. “Finding the answer in you was my salvation.”
“You mean I was a random blonde to the random blonde streak caused by me?” **What I said didn’t make any sense even to me.** She thought, confused. “That’s sounds positively absurd.”
“It never made any sense, I never could explain it. That’s just what happened.” Closing her eyes, she fought the blur of the nights of mindless sex with virtual strangers, trying to find whatever it was she was yearning for.
“And Hank knew about this? You mean to tell me, all this time, he was holding out on me?” Alex demanded, fire coming out of blue fury.
“Apparently.” Olivia replied gleefully, happy somebody else was in the hot seat. **Oh boy, he’s gonna get it.**
“I guess our timing was kind of off back then.” Reflectively, the blonde reasoned. Perhaps things happened the way they did for a reason.
**That’s certainly an understatement.** She wasn’t prepared for the abrupt change in Alex’s tone and demeanor. “Yeah. Besides, he said he wanted to be sure about me for you. And you for me.”
“You know?” Turning to Olivia and taking her hand in hers, Alex admitted, “I could have taken you off the market so much sooner…”
“Oh?”
She shook her head, and leaned back against her lover. “We’ve certainly wasted a lot of time.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I wanted to be the mother of your children that same day.”
“Now who’s making stuff up?” She beamed and stroked the slight swell of her lover’s belly, “Hello, in there, little one,” and made unintelligible cooing noises.
Alex ruffled Olivia’s hair, and lifted her chin back up to eye level. “I thought you were Hank’s rebound girlfriend after Rachel broke up with him that time.”
“Funny I thought the same about you.” Olivia leaned over, the hand on the tummy slowly inched towards the delightfully full breast. “Didn’t you just call me rude and flaky?”
Kissing her softly, and smiling, Alex reminded, “And you said I was an iceberg.”
“Snooty bun-o-matic iceberg,” she teased. **Oh, good one, Benson! When are you gonna stop shooting yourself in the foot?** Then quickly added, googley-eyed, “But there was something about you…”
“And I had something for loopy bad girls.” Alex kissed her lover on the nose, deciding to conveniently forget how much she wanted Olivia to do her on Hank’s desk that day. And how she wanted those hands… and those lips… On her… Everywhere. **Like they’re going to be soon…**
“Girls? Plural?” Olivia appealed, blind-sided smack in the face by a wave of jealousy and insecurity. “Was there more than one? Was I somehow second choice?”
“All right. One, in particular.” Alex confessed shyly. Swallowing a breath, she decided to ask, “So, was there any factual basis to your alleged reputation?”
“...”
“What was that?”
“Y…”
“I’m sorry, Olivia, I still didn’t hear you.”
**Hmm… No nicknames. Oh, boy.** Dreading the verdict and coming storm, she quickly answered the court without mumbling, “Yes.”
“Not all five hundred and ninety-nine of us, I hope.” If that was true, Alex wasn’t sure if she really wanted to know.
“Jesus, of course not!” Somebody was going to have to die. Slow, and painfully. And if it were Abbie, all the better. “Who told you that?”
“Nobody, just checking.”
“You don’t seriously think I was that promiscuous, did you?” Hoping Alex wouldn’t ask for a head-count, and making certain her titanium steel cajones were still attached, she crossed her arms, looked away and sulked. “’Cuz if you did, I’m not sure why you hooked up with me.”
“The world needs balance?” Alex smiled lightly. Seeing the scared little girl, and choosing not to call her bluff, she took Olivia’s hands and brought them to her chest. “Anyway, you’re doing it again.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re wasting time.”
The brunette released a silent sigh of relief, grateful that her lover decided to lay the past to rest. “We can’t have that now, can we?” She grinned and helped Alex climb into her lap, immediately burying her face in the luscious cleavage.
“Oh, god.”
That didn’t sound like an ‘oh god’ of pleasure. Olivia muttered around a mouthful of pale flesh, “Yes, sweetheart?”
“Please don’t tell me I’ve vicariously slept with Jack McCoy.”
“Did he and Abbie…?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Christ.”
“Can we disinfect you or something? And me, too?”