A/N: Shortish update today, guys, but hopefully still a good read. Sorry I left you hanging over the weekend. I honestly was not expecting it to be a cliffhanger myself, so I felt bad about that one. Here's hoping Meg's "excuse" is at least somewhat satisfactory (though nothing would ever really make it okay, I know). *group hug* Oh, and for those of you disturbed by Liv's willingness to overlook some of Amanda's behavior in order to keep her love... yeah. Don't worry, I'm aware it's problematic, and it's not written to exemplify a healthy outlook. It's one of Liv's issues that I just find fascinating, both in canon and the Devilishverse: excusing her abusers and the ability to stand up for everyone but herself.
6. Hard for a Living
. . .
"Babe, anything he did was stat rape, and it ain't on you," Amanda murmured, speaking as if Meg wouldn't hear. "You're looking kinda peaked, maybe you should take a breather or something, huh?"
"I'd like to respond to that first if I may." Meg nodded to Olivia, the sorrow in her eyes so deep, the shame so entrenched by years of silence and inaction, Olivia recognized it at once. It was like looking in the mirror.
How could she blame Meg for never standing up to Serena when she had never done it herself? How could she blame anyone but herself for being a constant source of pain, a daily trigger with a name and a face and needs, that her mother drank to cope with? Even if it wasn't through any fault of her own, the fact remained that she had harmed her mother just by being alive. Maybe she hadn't deserved for Meg or anyone to save her. Maybe she deserved exactly what she got.
"Okay," Amanda drawled cautiously, when Olivia failed to respond. Her muscles were tensed, as if she planned to leap into the fray, should Meg and Olivia decide to duke it out. She delivered compulsive squeezes to Olivia's knee under the table, like she was communicating through Morse code.
C, thought Olivia, H - U - R - C—
"I asked her to let me have you," Meg said. No embellishments, no preamble. Just facts. Serena had taught Olivia how to spot the liars and abusers, how to defend against attacks both physical and verbal, how to live alone and depend on no one; but it was Meg who had taught her to be upfront and honest, even if it hurt. "That's why I helped her get released from the hospital. I knew she had gotten out of control, that you were going to be seriously hurt or . . . I'd already contacted ACS, and they did nothing. The woman I spoke to on the phone told me they didn't open new cases for kids sixteen and over. And you were right at the cutoff."
"Well, that's some fresh bullshit. They have to file a report, it's literally their job." Amanda pinned her index finger to the table, adamantly making her point. She sounded as though she were about to demand the name and number of the ACS lady from 1983, so she could call her up and bitch her out. "They are required by law until a kid's eighteen."
"It was a long time ago, love." Olivia's voice sounded distant in her own ears, her hand far away and controlled by someone else when she put it on Amanda's thigh. She felt strange and otherworldly trying to process what Meg had said, as if everything that followed on the timeline was supposed to be someone else's life.
But she was the one who had lived it—the one Serena had tried to slice up with a broken bottle, the one Simone Bryce had advocated for, getting children's services involved. And she could corroborate Meg's story. The social workers hadn't cared about the sixteen-year-old girl who attended private school and had a professor for a mother. They thought she was a spoiled brat just getting back at mommy for scaring off her boyfriend. Never mind the bruises and the part where Olivia had all but stopped eating entirely, and dropped ten pounds from her already underweight frame. Makeup and baggy clothes did wonders for an abused and malnourished teen girl.
"Still. They shoulda done something." Amanda wilted a little in her seat, discouraged that Olivia was backing Meg's version of events.
"They should have," Meg agreed. She rotated her cup slowly in its saucer, her fingers on the outside of the brim, like she was twisting a lightbulb. "But I didn't know the system back then. She said teenage girls fought with their parents and lied about being abused all the time. I knew that wasn't what you were doing, but she made it sound like I was overreacting . . . And I didn't want to be the angry Black woman who caused trouble. She said I should call back if I saw anything else concerning. I never contacted them again."
Olivia felt like her heart was in a vise, the crank handle closing it tighter with each turn of Meg's cup. Her entire childhood she had dreamed of being rescued. But even an organization meant to protect children and advocate for them didn't consider her worthy of their services.
Briefly, she wondered if perhaps she had exaggerated some of her issues with Serena; it wasn't as if the beatings were an everyday occurrence, and when she got a little older, she was more than capable of buying the groceries and feeding herself—most of the time, she had just opted not to. The instances of sexual abuse were bad, but they were isolated and probably not sexual in Serena's mind. She'd had clothes, a warm bed to sleep in, and not one but two places of refuge: school and the library. That was a lot more than some kids got.
When she caught herself reasoning that she only remembered Serena choking her once or twice—not an inordinate number of times after eighteen years of living together—Olivia forced the thoughts away. Hormonal teenager or not, she hadn't exaggerated any of it. If anything, she had minimized the abuse to the point of doubting her own experience. Even now.
"I was afraid that if they committed her at the hospital, you'd end up in some group home or just . . . slip through the cracks." Meg put out her palm, upturned and empty, as if reaching for a hand that drifted away. "Maybe you wouldn't have been able to finish school. Or they might put you somewhere worse than with her. I thought being at home, being comfortable, she would be more amenable to my request."
A feeling of foreboding settled over Olivia, and she braced herself to hear the rest. She'd gotten really good at spotting the bad news before it came. She'd known her mother was dead the second Cragen mentioned her in his office. It was never good news with Serena. "What was your request?" she asked, probably looking as anemic as she sounded. Even the coffee cup was too heavy to lift just then. She felt like a weak and fragile child.
"I asked her for custody. I'd thought about it so many times before that, but she wasn't as unstable when you were really small—at least not that I saw." Meg gazed up anxiously for confirmation Olivia couldn't quite give. (How did you judge if the woman who left you alone for almost a week when you weren't tall enough to reach the phone on the kitchen wall was worse than the woman who actively tried to kill you with her bare hands?) "And my life wasn't . . . equipped to raise a young child. A single Black woman playing mommy to a little White girl in the seventies was unheard of, even in New York."
That was probably true, Olivia noted sadly. In spite of years of progress and some undeniably long strides toward equality, she and Amanda still got looks sometimes when they were out with their kids. Oh, you all are a family? And then the finger circling the air to indicate the two women, four children, and two dogs, as if Olivia didn't know who her own people were. As if they were set apart from everyone else, inside their own lesbian bubble.
"But then you were older and times had changed. Or so I thought." Meg shook her head and gave a short mirthless laugh so familiar even Olivia recognized it as matching her own wry style. She had never realized how much of Meg's personality, how many of her mannerisms, she had incorporated into herself. Serena had to have seen it too. "I told her I'd finish bringing you up, that she could be involved as much or as . . . well, as little as she wanted. I wouldn't ask for child support, food, clothes, anything. Just that she keep you enrolled at St. Winifred's until you graduated. I didn't want you to have to change schools on top of everything else."
At the mention of school, Olivia's eyes finally began to tear. Until she joined the force, school had been the single most important part of her life. Serena would have relished taking it away, if not for her insistence that any child of hers must have a decent education. Plus, it was the easiest way to get Olivia out of the house where Serena didn't have to look at her or be reminded that she existed.
How ironic that the one thing both she and her mother had agreed upon was probably the one thing that worked in Olivia's best interest. Of course, it helped that Olivia had gotten into St. Winifred's on a scholarship for promising students whose parents were Hudson faculty members. Excelling in school was never up for debate—she'd understood from her first day of preschool, when Serena stuck the lined green paper covered in her squiggly crayon alphabet to the fridge with a magnet, if she did well academically, she earned her mother's approval. At least for a little while. It wasn't the only thing that drove her to succeed, to be the best at everything, but it was up there.
She would have thrown it all away to be free of Serena and the iron fist she ruled with—and often swung. Hell, she'd been willing to run off with Daniel and get married, not giving any thought to what it meant for her high school career. If he had told her to drop out, she would have. If he had told her to crawl to him on all fours and mew like a kitten, she would have done that too. Anything to escape that dictator she called mother.
As though she were reading Olivia's mind, Meg frowned thoughtfully down at her coffee and said, "Then there was that student of hers. The one you were so crazy abou—" Biting her lip, she glanced at Amanda with wide, startled eyes. "Oh, I'm sorry, I shouldn't be bringing up things like that."
"It's okay." Olivia touched Amanda's arm lightly, the ghost of a smile on her lips. Tinged with love rather than humor. "She knows about him. Daniel."
"Ugh," said Amanda, into her cup. She made a face, like she'd poured sour milk in her coffee. "Yeah, I've met him. Total dirtbag. You were right to be worried about him. If that's where you were going with it, I mean."
"I was. That relationship made me . . . very uncomfortable. He had no business running around with a sophomore girl in high school. I could see what his intentions were, that was as plain as the nose on his face. He was much too charming and good-looking, yet he couldn't find a girl his own age to date?" Meg clucked her tongue, acting her full seventy-three years of age for the first time since the impromptu meetup at the cemetery. Lips pursed, head shaking in disapproval. "I thought if you were away from her, not spending so much time on that campus, I might be able to talk you out of seeing him again. I hoped I could get to you before he did."
Ridiculous as it was, all these years later, Olivia felt a wave of embarrassment wash over her at the prospect of Meg knowing that she'd had sex. Back then, her grownup friend was the only one she had wanted to consult with about losing her virginity and why Daniel liked certain (painful) sexual acts, and how to perform them. But Meg's fears had come true. Daniel got to Olivia first.
Folding her lips together, she dropped her gaze to the table and willed her cheeks to cool down, her color to return to neutral. She heard Meg sigh, and for a second she was worried the older woman was disappointed in her. Just another teenaged slut who put out for the first guy who paid her the slightest bit of attention. When Meg's hand came to rest on top of hers on the table, Olivia's breath caught and this time the wave that swept her up was one of relief.
"Oh, honey. Was he good to you, at least?" A pained expression crossed Meg's face, as if she were afraid to hear the answer, but she covered it quickly and patted the back of Olivia's hand several times. "Please tell me that charm wasn't wasted on some fool who went and broke your heart."
Olivia forced a tight-lipped smile and gave a noncommittal shrug of her shoulders and shake of her head. She wasn't going to lie, but she wouldn't tell Meg that Daniel had been her statutory rapist and that their first attempt at intimacy resulted in one of many sexual assaults, either. Some things were just better left unsaid, and some people lost the right to hear the full story when they had walked away. "It was a long time ago," she said, her attempt to sound light-hearted falling flat. "Serena . . . forced me to break it off with him."
Jagged vodka bottles and beatings and guilt over lashing out during a vicious attack tended to be persuasive that way. Under the table, Amanda's hand held the inside of Olivia's knee firmly, and just that small bit of reassurance made the memories triggered by the discussion a little less potent. She longed to steer the topic away from Daniel, though. Between therapy with Giacomo and coffee with Meg Hawthorne, she had given her ex-fiancé way too much of a foothold in her thoughts lately.
"So, how did she respond to your proposition?" Olivia asked, nudging the handle of her cup back and forth with her fingers. She already knew the answer, of course, otherwise they wouldn't be sitting across from each other in this diner right now, perfect strangers. "Not well, I take it. Since I don't think I ever saw you again after that."
"You didn't," Meg said quietly, eyes lowered. She took a long time sipping her coffee before she continued, the noise of the diner filling the uncomfortable silence. Just when it seemed she intended to finish the whole thing, she set down the cup and cleared her throat. "I was afraid to be in contact with you."
"What? Why?" Olivia stared, unable to comprehend someone like the Meg Hawthorne she remembered being afraid of anything or anyone, let alone a blowsy old drunk like Serena. Meg had been everything Serena wasn't—kind, funny, understanding, strong, beautiful inside and out. Surely she wasn't intimidated by a woman who couldn't make it through a workday (or any day, for that matter) without a thermos of vodka at her side. A woman who stumbled through life, quite literally, and who pissed herself on more than one occasion. A woman who sometimes had to have her underwear and bedding changed by an eleven-year-old girl.
"She threatened to . . . hurt you if I tried to take you away from her." Meg attempted to soften the statement with her voice, her hands, molding them, like a potter shaping clay, around some unseen and fragile thing. A human heart, a newborn. Vessels of love, so susceptible to breaking. "To hurt both of us. She said no one was getting their hands on her child. That she would rather see you dead than raised by some Black dyke bitch who would probably just try to—" She swallowed thickly, her hands sinking back to the table. "Well, she implied that my intentions were far from honorable. Or maternal."
"Good Lord," Amanda muttered, sounding ill.
"I think . . . I think she was jealous. Of how much I cared for you, and vice versa. But also that I was choosing you over her, in a way. I'd always had feelings for her, from the first day we met in high school. Oh, I wish you could have known her back then, sweetheart. So wickedly smart and funny. God, she made everyone laugh. Such a cutup.
"Anyhow. She knew I loved her . . . as more than a friend. I never believed she would use it against me, until that day. She threatened to out me at work if I ever contacted child services again. I would have lost everything, and I was already at a disadvantage. Black women were on the lowest rung in those days too, and gay ones were about ten layers of dirt beneath that.
"Still. I'm not proud of the way I handled it. I wish I could have been stronger and braver for you, Olivia, I really do. My only excuse is that I was young and afraid, and the look in her eye when she told me she had ways to keep anyone from taking you away . . . I thought if I stayed after that, with her being so jealous and knowing I wanted to protect you, I'd be endangering you more than helping. I was wrong. Please forgive me."
. . .