8

I'm still not cleared for field duty, but I'm back at work. I can't sit at home and do nothing. I'd rather do paperwork than that. I might as well do something productive with my time.

So I spend my time doing some of my own paperwork and everyone else's. I'm going to be owed a hell of a lot of favors, after this.

I could have taken the paid leave, but there wouldn't be a point. I'd be going crazy, shut in that apartment. I'm well enough to be bored and going insane, so I might as well be working.

"That's not all yours, is it?" Cragen emerges from his office sanctuary, as I slave away. The boss knows my work habits. Unlike most of the guys, I don't sit on my paperwork for weeks. I don't wait to be yelled at, before I do it. I do it and get it out of the way.

"No," I reply, stacking one file on top of the others. "I'm doing it because it's something to do."

"You don't have to be here," Cragen tells me, for the fifth time. He tried to convince me to go home. He knows I hate desk duty just as much as anyone else.

"I know. But if I stay at home, you're gonna find me locked in a rubber room at Bellevue." I push my hair back and pick up another folder from the pile in front of me. "I need something to do."

The Captain shakes his head and passes me a fresh cup of coffee, as he walks back into his office, again.

Elliot returns to the squad, and joins me at our desks, as I work. "You under there, Liv?" He questions.

"Funny, smartass. Most of this is yours," I retort, as he steals a pen from the holder on my desk and begins to chew on the end. I can't break him of that habit, yet.

"You asked for it," he answers, his words distorted by the plastic.

"I know. And because I'm saving you from getting your ass kicked and from a month's worth of all-nighters, you owe me for this."

"I'll buy you dinner tonight," he replies.

"You think that's going to make up for it? We're not talking about dinner at that diner around the corner," I tell him, stretching. "That's not gonna work."

"I'll cook for you."

I shake my head. I'll admit it - he is the better cook, out of the two of us. The only thing I seem to be good at is burning things and breaking the occasional plate. "Yeah - that'll do."

He shakes his head and tosses the ruined pen into the trash. "I don't get it, Liv. I'm supposed to be the one that can't cook."

"I know. But you've had practice. When I cooked, I was just cooking for me. And just because I'm female doesn't mean that I was born with some skill in the kitchen. A friend of mine from college couldn't even make a box of macaroni and cheese - she always burned it."

Whatever reply he might have made is cut off by another voice. "She can't cook, but I doubt you're marrying her for the food."

I turn around, looking at the woman standing behind me. "Dana - what the hell?" I blink at my old friend from childhood, Dana Libretti.

She frees her long black hair from it's usual ponytail and lets it fall around her face and over her shoulders. She's shorter than I am, with a solid build. Her skin has this gold hue, inherited from her Latino mother.

"Aren't you supposed to working?" I question. My old friend, who's been more like a sister to me, is a paramedic. And normally, if I remember right, she'd be working right now.

"Nah. Mike and I swapped shifts with Montgomery and Corey. We put it in to the boss months ago, but it took him till now to get around to switching the rosters. I gotta spend more time with the kids. They're growing up too damned fast."

I nod. I'm not a parent, but her two kids do seem to be growing up faster than I thought was possible.

"So, congratulations, you." Dana pokes me in the shoulder. "I was wondering when you were ever gonna get married."

I shrug. "I was waiting for the right guy."

"Mm. Have I ever told you that I used to think you had no taste in men at all?"

I laugh, quietly. "No."

"Well, you didn't. I was wondering when the hell you were going to find someone that I could actually see you with. Lemme see the rock," she extends one hand, palm up.

I show her my left hand and she blinks, seeing the ring. "That's Lily's, right?"

"Yeah," I reply, drawing my hand back and rearranging a few things.

"You know, I called home, after you called me," Dana tells me, getting herself a chair. "I don't know how Dad took it - you know him. He doesn't talk much. But Mom - Jesus. She's happy, 'cause she gets to play mother-of-the-bride all over again."

My friend's mother often tried to fill the gaps for me. Tried to do things that my own mother should have been doing, as I was growing up. With a family of her own and a job, she still had time for me. I could always get a bed on their couch, a hug and a tissue, or a good meal.

"She doesn't have to," I protest.

"She wants to. I'm the only girl, remember? She wants to be the mother of the bride again. She didn't have a church wedding, when she and Dad got married. Couldn't afford their rings, never mind a real wedding. I know it ain't the same thing as having Serena here, but you gotta let her in on it."

"How could I say no?" I question. "Your parents are probably the only reason I'm not more screwed up than I already am."

"Screwed up? You? Nah. You got it all wrong. But I do think you're nuts, right now."

"Why?"

"You're here. Working. And it hasn't even been two weeks."

I shake my head. "I'm fine. I was going to go crazy at home. I needed something to do."

Dana rolls her eyes. "There's gotta be something wrong with you, if you're here to do paperwork. I hear all about how much you guys hate paperwork. I've been hearing it for the last fifteen years of my life."

I blink, startled. Having set my friend up with her husband, who had been a new transfer into my precinct, I knew they'd been married for a while, but hearing the number . . . I shake my head. "Are you just trying to make me feel old or has it really been that long?"

Dana shakes her head. "Yeah. I found out I was pregnant with Amy six months after we got married. She was born the year after, right? We got nothing on Mom and Dad, though. Forty-five years, last year."

"Yeah. I know. Your mother invited me to the party, just like I was family, remember?"

"With the amount of time you spent running around with me and the boys, you are family, to her," Dana informs me. "Or she could have been so damned busy back then that she just mixed you up with the rest of us." She grins.

I shift stacks of files around on my desk, to make a little more room. There's lingering worry in my friend's expressive black eyes. They always give away what's going on in her mind, even if she doesn't want them to. "What's up?" I question, quietly.

She shakes her head. "Amy's growing up so damned fast. She's hardly ever at home, now. I think about the kind of shit you and I did when we were her age and it scares the hell outta me that she might go out and do the same stuff."

"She's a smart kid," I protest. My goddaughter is a smart girl. Who seems to be an old soul at heart. She's mature. More so than most of the kids her age.

"You weren't?" Dana fixes me with sharp eyes. "You seemed to be pretty smart yourself and you were still out running around. Crawling back up the fire escape at three in the morning. I was either with you or covering your ass for you, remember? I know. This city hasn't gotten any safer since we were kids."

"The brass keeps saying it has," I reply.

"That's bull. A week ago, I worked a night shift, 'cause the boss needed someone to cover. We got a call for a fifteen-year-old girl - out of it, not breathing. She OD'd on something at a party - we didn't even know what the hell she was on. She crashed in the bus and we couldn't get her back. The doctor pronounced her - DOA. I was talking to one of the nurses on the floor, after that - the cops finally tracked down the parents, three hours later. They had no idea what the hell was going on in her life. No idea where she'd been." There's frustration in my paramedic friend's voice.

And I understand where it comes from. I see parents like that a lot. Who think they're doing a fine job raising their kids. Think they're raising good kids. But who can't be bothered to get involved with their own children's lives. Who can't be bothered to get to know their kids' friends.

Dana props her forehead on the palm of her hand, sighs, and looks at me. "What the hell was I thinking, bringing kids into the world here? I watched the news. I knew what I saw, every day on the street, before I threw out the birth control. If I was thinking straight, I wouldn't have done it." She shakes her head. "I know Amy's a smart kid, but she's still a kid. You seemed to be a smart one and you did some stupid things. I don't wanna see my kid running around with a guy in his thirties when she's seventeen."

I comb my fingers through my hair. "She's jailbait. Definite jailbait." I sigh.

"Yeah. I know the law. I'm married to one of you. Related by marriage to four of you. But messing with you could've landed your 'boyfriend' in jail, back then, but it didn't happen, did it?" Dana raises an eyebrow.

"No. But there's a difference between the kid I was and the kid your daughter is. She has two things that I didn't, called 'parents.' I didn't have to crawl out the window and down the fire escape to sneak out - I could've just walked right out the door. I could've gotten away with anything. There was no one around to notice what I did."

"I can't watch her every single minute," Dana protests.

"You try. My mother didn't give a damn. She wasn't with it enough to notice when I was gone, half the time. If your kid was out all night, you'd notice. You'd wait up. Give her hell and ground her ass when she walked in the door. Amy's got a father who's one hell of a shot, too," I reply.

What I did when I was young scares me, now. Wandering around Manhattan at two or three o'clock in the morning, anything could have happened to me. I could have easily been one of the girls I see. It scares the hell out of me, to know what could have happened to me, because of my stupidity.

"An older guy can win a girl over, easy. I watched it happen to you. A young kid - it doesn't take much."

"Amy's a hell of a lot smarter than I was when I was her age. Besides that, any older guy who messes with your little girl might as well just put himself on the next bus to Rikers. She's got a father, three uncles and an aunt on the force, a grandfather who's a retired cop with more friends than he can count and an uncle who's an Assistant District Attorney. Trust me - any older guy who wanders into the picture is as good as screwed, especially if he happens to meet me. You know I'd do anything for her."

"Spoil her is what you do," Dana grumbles, giving me a mock dirty look. "Wish you had a kid I could spoil and send home for you to deal with. Get 'em all worked up on sugar and send 'em home. Then maybe you'd stop it. Mom and Dad and Joe and Maggie spoil her enough as it is."

"They're grandparents. That's what they do, remember?" I raise an eyebrow. "That's the whole point of a kid having grandparents."

"Yeah? What's your excuse?"

"Do I need one?"

Dana fixes me with sharp eyes, impatiently. "I wanna know why you spend more money on my kid than you do on yourself. You've got hands that most women would die for and you won't go get your nails done, but you'll shell out for front row seats at some rock concert, just because you wanted to try and destroy my daughter's hearing. I don't get it."

"And getting my nails done would be a waste of time and money. I'd chip 'em in about three seconds," I answer. "That's why I keep 'em short. If I was on permanent ass duty, maybe. But when I'm on the street, there's no point. And I wasn't trying to deafen Amy. She wanted to go."

Dana shrugs. "Even Dad wouldn't pay for that. She's his first grandchild, too and he wouldn't."

"I didn't get to do things like that, when I was a kid, remember? Maybe I want someone else to have what I didn't. My shrink could probably come up with some theory as to why, but I know what it's like to miss out on things. Beg and plead for concert tickets and not get them and then hear everyone else around you talking about it the next day."

"I need to talk to your shrink," the stocky paramedic sitting beside me pushes back her hair. "But do me a favor? Have your own kidand spoil it to death, instead of mine, okay?"

"With what I've got for history? Nah. I don't think so."

Dana rolls her eyes at me, in exasperation. "Not that again. I thought I beat that outta you. I know there are some crazy people going around saying that violence is inherited and all that crap - I don't buy any of it. I'm not a doctor, but I know what I see, out there." She jerks her head back, toward the windows at the front of the room. Do you honestly think you're gonna create some monster of a kid or something?"

"I don't know. It's not that, anymore. Not so much. But alcoholism - they've been saying for a couple of years that it can run in families."

"A predisposition to bury yourself in the bottom of the bottle can be inherited," Dana replies, "but you're not gonna tell me you're gonna sit there and let some medical study that they're not even sure of stop you. You're not gonna sit there and worry about the genes the rest of your life, are you?"

I look up, startled. "Where the hell did that come from? I never would have expected you to tell me that."

"I read some of the medical journals and a few of the studies, now and then, so some kid resident that's only a few years older than my daughter and fresh outta med school can't make me look like an idiot," she answers, seeing my confusion, "not that all of it makes a hell of a lot of sense, but I'm not letting some kid who calls himself a doctor think he's smarter than me. You know, the new batch of kids they've got in the ER at Mercy - the residents, the interns, the new attending - they hate us almost as much as you guys do. I never thought I'd be around to see that happen."

I roll my eyes. It's been a few years since I walked a beat. So I almost forgot about the on-going war between the Police Department and the Fire Department. It's been that way for decades. "It's not you guys we've got an issue with. Not the medics. It's the bucket boys."

"Ah, whatever."

"So it hasn't stopped yet up there? I thought one of the bosses, from either side was gonna step in. Call a truce."

"Nah. Half the time the bosses don't know what's going on. And it's you guys who usually start the shit, anyway, " Dana replies.

I shake my head. My old precinct, where my friend still works, was a nuthouse. There was always some plan to pull a practical joke on the guys in the firehouse, sometimes in revenge. "Not always. Remember that time when two or three of you swiped the keys to Morales' squad and swapped 'em with the keys to Henderson's?"

Dana grins at me, revealing her teeth. "I was in on that one, you know?"

I roll my eyes. "Yeah. That started the war of the month. You had two guys who couldn't get in their cars. I would've thought you knew - don't get between a man and his car."

"Well, it didn't take you guys long to come back, 'cause you had every single car around the house towed the next morning. Even the Lieutenant's car. And, man, was he pissed. Leaving us to deal with a pissed-off boss for the next month - you guys are evil." She leans back and crosses her legs, looking at me.

"Hey, I had to listen to my partner curse me out in Spanish for half an hour while we waited for someone to find the spare keys. He thought I had something to do with it. What the hell did I do to you to deserve that, huh?"

Dana winces. "Sorry. I forgot you were riding with Morales. We just thought it might be funny to see him pissed."

"Oh, it was real funny. Want me to call him and tell him you were in on it? Then you can see it for yourself."

"No. But he must have run outta words after the first ten minutes or so. He woulda eventually started to sound just like a stuck record, just like my uncle Manny used to, when he got pissed."

I shake my head. "I'm glad that I got out of that crap. Practical jokes, now and then - fine. But that was like all out war."

"War? Nah." Dana shakes her head. "It was fun. Nothing different than what I grew up in. Pins and stupid little joke things all over the house. Bucket of water above the door - Bobby got Dad with that, once. Jimmy used to scare the hell out of Mom with rubber spiders and things like that. I like it."

"But we had to work together, right, on the street? And it just got in the way." I remember the bitterness. The time I spent seeing two guys in different uniforms shooting each other dirty looks and avoiding each other, each one plotting something.

"It was fun, though. You gotta admit." She's grinning again.

"It would've been, if they didn't take it so seriously."

"This is a bunch of men we're talking about, honey. Mess with 'em, it bothers their ego. I oughta know. Pull one over on them, they feel stupid. And pride makes 'em take it seriously." Dana sits forward again. "When are you going dress-shopping, huh?"