A/N: took a lot of artistic liberties with this one. Quick little thought-piece that started out as trying to make sense of Serena's story arc, and ended with a bunch of stupid headcanons about the SVU girls too. Not based in canon (much).
I.
She's used to speaking in hypotheticals, in replacing 'my' with 'someone's', and being vague on details. Not because she's a lawyer - though it helps - but from years of practise, from before law school had even been implanted in her mind.
She's used to lying. Well, bending the truth, really. Changing a pronoun here, leaving out information there. She's not proud of it, but its started to feel natural at some point. It isn't that she doesn't think about it any more, that it isn't deliberate, that every day she doesn't have to worry she might accidentally trip up and the truth might spill from her mouth before she can stop it, but it's become easier.
Maybe 'easy' is the wrong word. There's nothing easy about lying to co-workers who you trust with your life, or living in fear of somebody finding out your dirty little secret (not Idirty/I but maybe damning all the same), your own discipline your only defence mechanism. Her skin prickles as she tells another tale, another quip about an ex-boyfriend who never existed, another tale of a friend who was too afraid to come out of the closet.
McCoy bristles when she brings that one up. In 2002 it's unheard of for people to not be comfortable with their sexuality, to be afraid of coming out - that's what he says. And it's easy for him to say it because he has nothing to hide, because the only skeletons in his closet are all the women who've had her desk before her who have found their ways into his bedroom. It should be comforting, she thinks, for him to have made it so clear that it isn't a problem to him, except that it's easier in theory than it is in practice. What's ok for a stranger - for a friend of a friend who doesn't exist - isn't necessarily ok for Serena and they both know it.
And in the next breath - (over a year later, but it may as well be no time at all, and now it's too late for her to tell him, she's kept the secret for too long) - he's against gay marriage if it will get him the conviction he wants, and they're back to square one, with her vowing never to tell, and him pushing her, and her unable to tell him why she's not going to end up another notch on his bedpost.
He thinks she's stubborn. Serena knows this. He also thinks that eventually she'll snap - that they all do, they all fall for him in the end because why wouldn't they? Its not arrogance when it's true. And she's incredibly fond of him, most of the time, rolls her eyes, but with a smile, as she thinks about him wondering what it is that stops her from being like all the others, never quite being able to put his finger on it - but the smile fades away whenever she thinks about telling him the truth.
She isn't an easily intimidated woman, isn't usually so afraid to stand up for what she believes in. Another time, she keeps telling herself, when she isn't so new and her career isn't so fragile. But it's always going to be that way.
It isn't anybody's business, she thinks, trying to paint it in a light that doesn't make her look like a coward. In truth, she knows that's exactly what she is. She should be advocating for those who cannot, not hiding herself away, speaking out only in riddles and hypotheticals and stories about people who don't exist. Feigning nonchalance in the face of cases that hit her like a knife to the gut, pretending it isn't personal.
Tomorrow, she thinks. Tomorrow, I'll tell them. And the next day, and the next day, and the next...
II.
It never starts out as a secret. She never makes a conscience decision not to tell anybody, because honestly? Who gives a damn whether she sleeps with men or women or both or neither anyway? It's irrelevant to how she does her job.
Her parents know early on, when she brings home a female date in between male dates, and though she knows her father wants to say something - about image, no doubt - he doesn't. They never give her their blessing, but they never outrightly disapprove. What happens behind closed doors is nobody's business, and besides, the Cabots are experts at keeping things hidden. You're only so good as your publicist makes you look.
So, she's not exactly screaming it at the top of her lungs, or attending gay pride marches. She covers her tracks with the women she sleeps with in the same way she does the men; it's. Nobody. Else's. Damn. Business.
Olivia is different, though. She knows because she sees the way Elliot Stabler looks at them, sometimes, a mixture of jealousy and curiosity - a man's primal instinct - even before anything's really going on between them. Alex is usually better at pretending, but not when it comes to Olivia.
She thinks that when she eventually settles down - if she ever settles down - it will be with a man because it's easier. She has to put her political career first, and she knows nobody's going to vote her into the DA's office if she's married to a woman. Not unless things change drastically. She doesn't want to be one of those people in power who is married but hiding affairs on the side, though. No, she'll go with something a lot cleaner, marry a man who she truly loves, and stay with him. That's what she decides, early on. As if it's a decision she can make. As if love is a business transaction.
When she goes into witness protection - when she dies - her ideas of the future change drastically and as she's piled into a black SUV, with a new name and a new identity and the promise that she'll never ever be able to come back - she realises how wrong she had been. After all, the only person she desperately wants to be with, the only person who she insists on being allowed to know she's alive... well, it's not a man, is it?
iii.
There had always been something different about her.
Even at middle school, when all her friends were talking about boys, lanky, awkward Casey had nothing to add. She'd always thought it would come with time, that she just wasn't as mature as her friends, that her brain might be wired differently.
Her siblings aren't like her. Her brothers pick up and dump girls with such frequency that she stops bothering to learn their names. Her older sister has been going steady with the same boy since junior high, and it's no surprise to anyone when they get engaged first year of college. To her parents' minds, Casey is the sensible one, the baby of the family, the most likely to succeed, more interested in school work than dating, and that's something to be proud of.
Until college. By college, her mom's beginning to question why she hasn't brought a boy home.
She only dates one man. A boy, really. And whether she loves him doesn't seem like a fair question to ask, because whatever it is she feels for him hurts almost as much as the broken ribs and the sprained wrists and the black eyes. If it isn't love, then it's a good imitation. And it takes a long long time for her to come to terms with the fact that it isn't her fault it didn't work.
After that, her disinterest in men begins to feel like a consequence. It's difficult to trust anyone enough to be intimate with them, difficult to not still feel like she'd be cheating on Charlie if she accepted any other man's advances. It's easy to pretend that this part of her that's been there, buried deep inside, is just another reaction to the abuse. Plenty of women become afraid of men after being assaulted by one.
Only, she isn't afraid of them. It isn't that simple. It's more like she's thirteen years old again and listening to her friends talk about Jimmy from their math class, and she can't fathom for a second why anybody would want to kiss a boy like Jimmy, but she's too afraid to say so in case it outs her as a freak.
She isn't gay though. That isn't even a possibility, because she was raised Catholic, and whilst she doesn't have any prejudice against the gay community, whilst she doesn't see anything wrong with people loving who they love, regardless of gender or race or anything else, she can't be one of them. It's just not a possibility she's willing to consider.