#do I just want to think about Raul Esparza in leather shorts

[request-remand]

I wrote this down in the middle of the night and I fear it’s becoming a full fic with completely out and proud Rafael and Carisi bumping into each other at a gay club in slutty little outfits

[lovemesomerafael]

It’s Complicated                             Chapter 7:  Playing By The Rules

Source: @all-things-raul-esparza

Chapters 1-5  Chapter 6   Story on AO3

Rafael Barba made the best huevos rancheros in the world.  The solar system, even.  He was fully aware of that and unafraid to acknowledge it to anyone who would listen. Frankie mocked his conceit about it, but her biting sarcasm was belied by the fact that she was on her third helping.

Beneath the playful ribbing, Rafael’s eyes kept sliding to the stack of luggage next to his door.  She had packed her things as he’d made breakfast, despite his repeated assurances that he was just as happy for her to stay.  He didn’t say he wanted her to stay, preferred her to stay, although they both knew that was what he’d meant.  

But Frankie needed to go home to her apartment.  Rafe’s plane had left at an ungodly hour that morning, and Amanda had taken him to Kennedy, so she didn’t need to rush in order to see her brother off, but she needed as much normalcy as she could find.  Alan was dead, and that was a good thing, however it had happened, and she could now resume her normal life without fear.  But it wasn’t that easy and, as a psychiatrist, she knew that.  

And then there was Barba.  Frankie needed a lot of things right now, and space was at the top of the list.  She was in love with Barba.  She’d told him that.  Twice. And she knew it was true.  But she also knew that she was a mess.  Having just come through a traumatic experience that had threatened every aspect of her life, and been welcomed into the arms of a man who was everything she had ever wanted, she knew as a psychiatrist that what she felt could very easily have been deep gratitude and a need for security being mistaken for love.  She needed to do the adult thing and reclaim her life.  When she had her feet back under her, solid and balanced, that would be the time to see how things stood with Barba.

The other benefit of that strategy was that it would give Barba space and time, too.  Frankie had fallen for him completely.  And he was being as supportive as she could ever hope for at this moment.  But that didn’t mean he felt anything for her.  It could easily just mean he was a good man who liked women.  She remembered what Amanda had said.  He dated, but he didn’t get involved.  If she wanted him to feel what she felt – and holy shit did she want that - she needed to give him time to get there.

“I ordered a lot of groceries when I knew you were coming here, but maybe I should have ordered more.”

“I do not apologize for my appetite.  Besides, I haven’t really eaten in days.”

“I can make more toast.”

“No, thank you.  More coffee would be good, though.”  

Rafael stood touching her as much as possible as he filled her mug with his excellent coffee.  When he was done pouring, he kissed her cheek before stepping away to replace the pot in the machine.  

“Francisca…”

“You can call me Frankie, you know. You’ve seen me naked.”

“Your name is beautiful.  I’m not about to desecrate it with that preposterous nickname.”

As she looked at him over the rim of her coffee cup, her eyes sparkled with the smile he couldn’t see.  It actually gave her a little thrill every time he said her name.  Not only did he pronounce it beautifully, but the slight roll on the “r” made her think about his tongue.  Every time. She even liked it when he called her “fresa”, although she would take that secret to her grave.  

“When are you planning to return to work?”  He asked, returning to the subject he’d been about to raise.

“As soon as possible. Tomorrow.  I want my life back.”

“I can understand that. ��We’ll be glad to have you back.  This whole thing…  I don’t care what you had to do, I’m just glad it’s over.”

“What does that mean, ‘what I had to do’?”

He blinked.  Why had he said that to her?  It didn’t matter.  That was the decision he’d made; he would never let it matter.

“I don’t mean anything.  Just that I’m glad it’s over.”

“You’re a terrible liar, Barba. What did you mean by that?”  

“I misspoke, that’s all.  Let it go.”

Frankie set down her coffee cup on his kitchen table.  “Barba, this is important.  You’re… We’re…  If you have questions, or misgivings, you need to ask.  Or maybe…”

“Maybe what?”

Frankie ran a hand through her hair, looking around the room as if for help.  “Look, I mean…  We started out badly, and then things got intense fast, and…  I know you see a lot of women, and why wouldn’t you, you’re…”

“Rico?”  His mocking expression was a little forced.

“And if that’s what this is… was… then fine.  But I feel, um…  Well, that’s just it.  I feel. For you.  And I don’t need you to return that, I’m a grown-up, but if you wanted us to see each other, then you should know that.  And I would need to know that you didn’t think I’m a murderer or… whatever it was you were just suggesting.”

Rafael didn’t respond for a moment. Which of those things was he supposed to deal with first?  He turned and refilled his own coffee cup to give himself some time to gather his thoughts. “You really know how to pack a lot into a few nearly incoherent sentences.”

She stood and began to clear the dishes from the table.  “You don’t have to respond.  I need to get going, anyway.  Sorry if I dumped a lot on you.  I think too much about things.  Occupational hazard.”

“Stop it.  Don’t do that.”  He turned to her, leaning against his counter.  “I assume you were speaking your mind.  Now let me speak mine.”

She turned from the sink and unconsciously mirrored his position, leaning against the counter a few feet from him.

“You said I date a lot of women.  I don’t know what ‘a lot’ means, but I don’t suppose it matters.  That’s apparently something someone thought you should know, and there’s not much I can say about it.  It is what it is.  But I really don’t like you making yourself a notch on my bedpost.  That’s not what happened.”

“I apologize.”

“So do I, if that’s how I made you feel.”

“It isn’t.  Of course it isn’t.”

“Then there’s this whole idea that I think you killed Canady.  I don’t know how many ways to tell you that is not what I think.”

“But you think I did something to get the charges dropped.”

“I think…”  He frowned.  “We’re being honest with each other here.  I don’t know what I think.  It happened pretty fast, Francisca.  Out of nowhere, there’s this ‘anonymous tip’ about a guy who wouldn’t give us the time of day before, and suddenly he’s spinning the exact same story you are…”

“Spinning?  Story?”  

“Here we go…”

“Words are critically important, Barba.  You say a lot simply with your word choices.”

“Don’t try this at home, folks, she is a psychiatrist…”  He muttered unhappily into his mug.

“You say you don’t think I’m a murderer.  But I’m ‘spinning a story’ about what really happened, and apparently I somehow got to Jefferson from Riker’s so he would ‘spin’ the same ‘story’.”

“Francisca, I don’t care.  That’s my point.  You can parse my language any way you want, but you can’t tell me what I believe.  I know you didn’t kill Canady.  And I don’t give a flying fuck why some tweaker backed you up when there was no evidence we could use to help you…”

“FUCK!  You think I did it!”

“For the ten billionth time, I do not think you did it.”

“You think I got to Jefferson.”

“I think… something happened. And Francisca, I do.not.care.”

“I care!  Don’t you get that?  I care!  He told the truth!  What he said, that’s exactly what happened.  And if you don’t believe that, if you think he ‘spun a story’ to help me, then you think I’m no better than he is.”

“I really need you to stop telling me what I think.”  

They stood, side by side leaning against Barba’s kitchen counter, heads turned so that they were scowling at one another.  

“And I need to live with myself. I did not do what you think I did. Whatever that is.”  She kept a tight rein on herself as she spoke quietly and pushed up from the counter.  “I’m just gonna hail a cab outside.”

“Francisca, don’t leave like this. You’ve been through enough.”

She didn’t respond as she pulled on a short, fitted leather jacket over her soft grey tank top.  When she’d collected her luggage, she turned to him as she stood just inside the open door.  

“Thanks, Barba.  I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, more than I can say.”

“I’m not a monster.”

“Neither am I.”

“I know that.  That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“And that’s the problem.  I’m one of the good guys, Barba.  I can’t feel the way I feel about you and have you doubt that.  Even if you don’t care.”

“What does that even mean?!” He shouted.

“It means I hear you.  You know I didn’t kill Alan but you think I did something to get the charges dropped, and you don’t care about that because all’s well that ends well.”

“Yes.  Exactly.”

“For you, that doesn’t make me a monster.  For me, it does.”

“You’re young, Francisca.”

“OK, that’s my cue.  When your argument starts being my age, we’ve said everything there is to say.”

For the rest of the afternoon, both Barba and Frankie muttered to themselves all the things they wished they’d said.

 *****************

“Amanda, stop!  I cannot hear that stuff.”

“I wasn’t telling you sex stuff!  I couldn’t, could I, when I’ve been back from Austin for a month?  It’s just that Rafe’s amazing, and we had the best time together, and why didn’t you tell me he was such a studmuffin?”

“Ugh.  Stop.”

“Well, he likes you.”

“I like him, too.  We’re close.  Just…  tell someone else.  Tell Carisi.”

“Carisi doesn’t want to hear about how hot your brother is.”

“Carisi is right.”

“OK, well, Barba’s here, so you get a reprieve for now.  But seriously, Frankie, he is just…”

“Briefing time.”

Around the table, the team provided the information they had about their latest case, making sure everyone had all the data they would need during the questioning to come.  Frankie’s role would be a passive one; she didn’t need to take part in the interview unless something unexpected happened.  What they needed was her read on the suspect.  

It was awkward standing next to Barba in his sublime suit, even though the past two months had been surprisingly normal.  Rafael and Frankie had even found their way into several arguments.  It was awkward because he’d hung his jacket over the back of his chair at the conference table and rolled up his sleeves.  His hands and forearms were beautiful and kept drawing Frankie’s attention.  Not only that, he kept making astute observations and asking piercing questions that were helping Frankie to zero in on this suspect’s psyche.  They were a good team.  

During the past months, blessedly full of routine and ordinariness, Frankie had recovered her sense of herself. It had been healing to be in her own apartment, waking up and going to work in her own office, in charge and control of her life.  She didn’t see any reason to replace her burned-out car; she liked the freedom of not having to deal with it.  Her colleagues at the FBI and in SVU had been wonderfully supportive.  She hadn’t had the opportunity to see Porter since she’d been released from prison, which was a little odd given what they’d been through with Canady, but he’d called.  Olivia assured her she’d see him soon.  

The problem was that, the more she recovered and settled permanently into her New York life, the more head space she had for Barba.  Her feelings for him were not lessening with time.  Worse, they had both been terribly adult about the whole thing, which told her that she was going to need to get over it.  She was the only one who had been foolish enough to fall in love in such an irrationally short time.  She didn’t blame herself – trauma could do that to a person, she’d seen it a million times on the job.  She just needed to shake it off.  But it made her very sad, and the more she grew into her role at SVU, the worse it got. Barba was so very attractive, so brilliant, so damn great at his job, she would really have liked to build something with him.  It was not going to happen.  He was a serial dater, and she’d just been the latest woman on his agenda.  He’d made her feel attractive and special, and had been exactly what she’d needed when she needed him.  But that was apparently just the reason he was so attractive to so many women.  He didn’t feel what she did.

“How old is this guy?”  She asked Barba as they stood, a discreet distance apart, watching the interrogation.

“Sixty-eight.”

“Yeah.  That fits.”

“What are you thinking?”

“He’s not faking this.”

“You’re saying the entire building and everything in it really has been replaced by exact duplicates?”

Rafael’s heart skipped a beat when she gave him the familiar scornful side-eye he sometimes said things specifically to elicit.  Like now.

“I’m saying that idea is a real symptom of a real problem.  It’s called ‘reduplicative amnesia’ and there’s an easy way to find out.” She knocked quietly on the door and walked into the box.  

“Mr. Wilson, I’m Dr. Rojas.  I apologize for the interruption, but I wonder if I might ask a couple of questions. It will only take a moment.”  

Rafael watched as she asked a number of questions about where the suspect believed himself to be, and was surprised when he informed her that this building was in Detroit. It was an exact replica of an actual police station in New York, but this wasn’t the original.  It was a fake copy, designed to trick him.  He could see “Aha!” written all over her.  

Barba appreciated the chance to simply watch her for a while.  He was fascinated by the way she made her simple shirtdress seem so elegant, and the way the different sections of her braid shone with slightly varied colors in the overhead lights.  He found her dazzling.  And watching her use her talent and insight was fascinating no matter how many times he saw it.  He even enjoyed the hell out of their verbal sparring.  But he was at an absolute loss as to what to do with his feelings for her, and it was starting to be a problem.

Rafael didn’t understand what had happened.  He’d thought that Frankie had asked him to be honest about what he thought of the information Juwon Jefferson had given them.  He had been, but apparently that wasn’t what she really wanted.  What she wanted Barba to do was tell her that he believed everything Juwon Jefferson had said.  She wanted him to lie.

Rafael might have been right about her in the first place.  Francisca Rojas might be a woman who required the people in her life to believe she was perfect, or at least to tell her that she was.  He couldn’t do that.  He’d told her what he believed.  He’d even told her that he didn’t care if she or someone else had done something that might not be entirely admirable, since it had kept her from going to prison for a crime she didn’t commit.  That was the best he could do.  But, apparently, that wasn’t good enough.  And, worse, what passed for “love” in her mind was far short of what he was looking for.  She’d said she loved him the night she came home from Riker’s, and although she hadn’t repeated it the next morning, she had at least confirmed that she had feelings for him.  Yet since the moment he’d blundered into suggesting that someone might have influenced Juwon Jefferson to give a statement corroborating hers, it was as though she’d turned it off.  Rafael needed a woman whose love was indestructible.  Francisca Rojas’s was apparently about as durable as smoke.  

“He needs a CT, and probably an MRI, as well,” Frankie was saying to Olivia, who had been in the interrogation but was now leaving with her and Fin, apparently having abandoned it.  “There are several things that can cause this: tumors, dementia, brain injury, other psychiatric disorders...  He needs a workup.  Because we need to know his mental state before we can go one step further.”

“Wait, wait, wait…” Barba cried, stopping them as they passed him on their way to Olivia’s office.  “What’s going on?”

“Wilson may not be competent to stand trial,” Frankie said.

“Bullshit. So he thinks he’s in Detroit.  He still knows rape is wrong, and he still tried to avoid being arrested.  Voila! Competent.”

“Oh, brother. Get over yourself, Barba.  Nobody’s that good.  Any expert psychiatrist as sane as Wilson is could make hay out of this.  We need a workup.”

“Not today, we don’t.  I’m charging him.  If it gets to the point where there’s a need for a workup-“

“Ni siquiera te importa si él es [1]–“

“Esto no se trata de [2]-“

“Ding! Ding!”  Olivia called.  “Fighters to your corners.  There’s no one in your room right now.  Let me know who wins.”

Rafael and Frankie expressed their displeasure, but both trudged into the least-used interrogation room at SVU, which had begun to be affectionately known as “their room”, because it had become routine for them to have heated disagreements that apparently could only be solved through half an hour of high-volume Spanish discourse.  

“Explain to me why you don’t want to know the truth here?”

“Explain to me why I need to explain anything to you?”

“I’m not here to be decorative, Barba.  This guy’s got a pathology going on, and it could mean he’s not legally responsible for what he did.  How is it that doesn’t matter to you?”

“Because even he thinks he’s legally responsible.  He ran away, remember?”

“Even you don’t believe what you’re saying.”

“Aaaaaaaaaaaand, we’re back to you telling me what I believe.”

Frankie was taken aback for a second.  Was he still talking about the case?  “I don’t think you really want to just stick your head in the sand on this.  Do you?”

“You call it sticking my head in the sand.  I call it looking at the world the way it really is.  You oughtta try it sometime.  It’s very refreshing.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”  He was talking about them.  She was sure of it now.

Rafael sighed. “Nothing.  It means…  Francisca, not everything is black and white.  This job, you gotta get a little more comfortable with gray.”

“Well, thank you for the career advice, but in this particular situation, there’s a fairly simple way to determine whether this man has organic brain damage that might-“

“So what if he does?  He still raped a woman and beat her bloody.  He still deserves the punishment for that.  I really don’t give fuck one if ‘the tumor made him do it’.  He’s still guilty, and he should still pay the price.”

“Even if that means breaking a whole shitload of rules.”

“Sometimes, to make things come out right, you have to break the rules.  You can do that and still be one of the good guys.  And that, mi fresa, is a lesson you have yet to learn.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m a child.”

“Then stop acting like one.  The world is an imperfect place.  The sooner you get comfortable with that, the better off we’ll all be.  I’m instructing Liv to charge him.”  Rafael turned his back on Frankie and strode from the room. Although he’d won this argument, he’d lost what mattered.  

Olivia Benson constantly accused Barba of having too much respect for the rules, of being too bound by them.  In that moment, he realized that he had lost Francisca, a woman he could have loved, because she didn’t think he respected rules enough. It was the ugliest kind of irony.  And it was enough.  Time for Barba to stop living like a monk waiting for a woman who was never coming back.

 **************

One of Frankie’s favorite things to do had become Friday night drinks with Sonny, Amanda, and Fin.  They were so much fun, had so many great stories, and she really enjoyed the chemistry between them.  On rare occasions, they were joined by Olivia and Porter, but when the two of them had a night off together, they were much more likely to want to spend it alone together, or just the two of them with Noah.  Tonight was an “alone together” night while Noah stayed with a friend, which received its fair share of jokes in questionable taste around the table at Folini’s.  

Amanda and Sonny were now trying to get Fin to reveal details about the date he had planned for the next night.  Fin was enjoying their attempts, but was giving nothing away.  Apparently, Amanda and Sonny shared Frankie’s opinion that it was kind of cute how excited he was about the date, because they would not let it go.  They were well into their second drink before the subject finally changed.

“I don’t know why you won’t tell us about her,” Amanda said to Fin.  “We tell you everything.”

“Did it ever occur to you that might be why I don’t tell you anything?  You overshare.  Both of you.”

Sonny’s offended look was hilarious.  “I do not overshare,” he insisted.

“You so overshare,” Amanda laughed.  

“Oh, Partner, you do not get to go there with me.  I should not know how many condoms you went through when you visited Frankie’s brother in Austin.”

“Ewwwww! Stop right there!  I do not want to be in therapy for the rest of my life,” Frankie shouted.  

“Hey, look, we were celebrating!  He’d just got the splint off his hand so we were finally able to-“

“Wait, what? What splint?”  

“Hmmmm?” Amanda asked, with a false confusion Frankie saw through instantly.  

“What happened to Rafe’s hand?”  

Amanda looked around the table, each of the other faces as blank as she was trying to make hers.

“Oh, you must have heard about it.  He got… hurt on the ranch.”

“How?  What happened?”

“Oh, I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t remember the details.  I just know he was doing something with a steer, and his fingers got caught in a rope somehow.”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“They probably thought they’d be accused of oversharing!”  Amanda laughed and began to tease Sonny about his own lack of discretion.

Something about the exchange bothered Frankie.  Amanda was clearly lying, and Amanda had done enough undercover work to be a very good actress when called upon.  But that was when she was prepared.  She had clearly said something she shouldn’t have.  There was something about Rafe’s hand injury Amanda, or Rafe, didn’t want Frankie to know.  But that made no sense.  What could be secret about a hand injury?

She was temporarily distracted from her thoughts when something across the street caught her eye; a familiar profile in a well-made suit walking in front of a Chinese restaurant the team never went to because it was far too expensive.  Rafael was holding the door open for a striking blonde woman in a pantsuit Frankie had been drooling over the previous week at Barney’s.  As she walked past him into the restaurant, the woman gave Rafael an unmistakable pat on the butt, which made him laugh in a way that made it clear the touch was quite welcome.  

[1] You don’t even care if he’s-

[2] This is not about -