A/N: I'm not really a fan of posting updates on Saturdays, but I couldn't resist the chance to post on Mariska's birthday. And I think it's a pretty fitting chapter for it. Happy birthday, Mariska! And happy Mariska's birthday to y'all. Enjoy. (Oh, and there's a reference in this chapter to another one-shot that hasn't been posted yet.)
CHAPTER 10: Star Light, Star Bright
. . .
"Dork. I love you."
"I love you back."
They were cuddled up together under Olivia's new, impossibly soft sherpa throw ("Peach from your peach," Amanda had said, of its frail blush color. "Gotta keep my lady warm"), watching the kids romp and giggle amid a wonderland of whirring, beeping toys reminiscent of the Whoville bacchanalia from How the Grinch Stole Christmas, when Amanda asked, "Think we should tell them now, before they wear themselves out too much to appreciate it?"
Olivia's hand rested at the undercurve of Amanda's bump, but it was her own belly that fluttered at the mention of the final gift they had set aside for the kids. She always got a little nervous when there was a chance of being rejected by someone she loved.
Then a faint quiver beneath her palm, no more tangible than a tiny, skimming fish, reminded her that some chances were worth taking. "Yeah, let's give them the good news," she said, patting Samantha a few more times before sitting up to grab the decorated gift box from the coffee table. Might as well save Amanda the trouble of trying to excavate herself from within the depths of the couch. She shook the box back and forth, checking that the envelopes were still inside, even though she'd put them there herself, and no one else had touched the present since.
Just breathe, Captain.
"Hey, you wily varmints," Amanda said to the kids, rescuing Olivia from being the one who pulled them away from their fun, "get your tails on over here. Mommy and I have something important to tell you. Come on, shake a leg. Your toys'll be there when we're done."
The kids groaned—except for Matilda, whose compliance and willingness to follow rules both pleased and concerned Olivia; the three-year-old happily took up her usual spot on Olivia's lap while the other two trudged over to the couch. Jesse got a laugh from her siblings and a roll of the eyes from Amanda when she hobbled up on one foot, the other leg, skinny and knobby as a string bean, shimmying wildly. It looked like she had a wet pant leg she was trying to flap dry.
"Jesse, what on earth are you doing, child?" Amanda asked.
"You said to shake a leg." The little blonde flashed a big, dimpled grin and seated herself next to Noah on the coffee table.
"Now you know what I've been dealing with for the past ten and a half years," Olivia teased when Amanda heaved a world-weary sigh and looked to her for backup.
"Oh, come on, I ain't that bad."
"Well . . . "
Amanda poked Olivia in the ribs, making her squirm and dodge from the touch, though she shielded Matilda more than herself. "Well, nothing. You were crazy about me from the moment you laid eyes on me, admit it. Thought I was the cutest thing you ever did see."
True, although to be honest, the cuteness had worked against Olivia's feelings about the little Southern belle, Detective Rollins, in the beginning. It was hard to take the accent, the youthful appearance, and the eager-beaver attitude seriously, especially after witnessing time and again how quickly SVU ate up such people and spat them back out.
At least Olivia had told herself that was the problem. Never mind that three years prior to Amanda's arrival at Manhattan SVU, Olivia had worked alongside FBI Agent Lauren Cooper, another cute, young, ponytailed blonde with a lot of ambition and a reckless streak. Worked alongside her, trusted her, opened up to her, then watched her blow her own brains out less than four feet away from where Olivia was standing. Never again on my watch, she'd promised herself after that horror show. Never.
Soon after, those feelings had gotten mixed up with the PTSD from being assaulted (raped, Amanda would no doubt interject) at Sealview, being stabbed in her own home, and delivering her partner's baby after a near-fatal car crash. A shit year all around. Then Elliot walked away like she was nothing.
It was a wonder she had ever let Amanda in at all. Only took me about eight years, she thought, smiling back at her impishly grinning wife. And look what I would have missed.
"Yeah, you were pretty cute, I'll give you that," Olivia said, then smoothed her hand over the support belt still enveloping the baby bump. "You have filled out a little since. No offense . . . "
In a perfect imitation of Amanda just seconds earlier, Jesse heaved a deep sigh, with every fiber of her six-year-old being. "Are you guys gonna have another baby or something?"
Olivia and Amanda snapped to attention at the same time, gazing at their daughter like she had announced her plans to drop out of first grade at Midtown West and spend a summer backpacking around Europe. "What?" they asked.
"Y'all are being weird again. And last time you made us sit down to talk, you said you were pregnanced—"
"Pregnant," Noah corrected.
"Yeah, that." Jesse pointed at her big brother, then turned the sharp little finger accusingly on Amanda's belly. "And that was a million years ago, but there's still no baby. And Mommy told us all about how them things are made. I think you and Mommy had sext—"
Noah turned roughly the same shade of red as the Santa hat he was wearing, and mumbled under his breath, "Sex."
"Yeah, you had it and now Mommy's pregnanced, too." With that grand conclusion, Jesse folded her arms firmly and stared down her mothers as if she had, in fact, caught them going at it that very moment.
Oh Lord, Olivia thought, before Amanda even said it.
"Oh Lord," Amanda said.
The "sext" talk had admittedly been vague and rushed, covering just the basics: penis, vagina, sperm, egg—tada, baby! And that happened months ago, only because Jesse would not stop asking questions about the lesson on body safety (and the subsequent anatomy discussion) Olivia had given the kids back in September, after the incident with Jesse's little school chum Jillian.
Olivia would have preferred to wait a few more years before teaching her children anything about sex—even though she'd kept the focus on reproduction and not recreation—but they were growing up so fast. Apparently Miss Jess was already an expert in the field.
"You have baby, Mommy?" Matilda asked, twisting around to gaze at Olivia with wide blue eyes. The contrast of her coppery red hair and ivory skin made them appear even wider and bluer. She reached down to pat Olivia's belly. "In there?"
"No, lovey." Olivia took the toddler's dainty hand and lifted it to her lips, kissing the back like Matilda was one of the Disney princesses she so dearly loved. "Mommy's not having a baby. Just Mama. Your big sissy is a bit confused."
"Hold on. If you're not pregnanced," Jesse said, waving that index finger in the air again, this time in Olivia's direction, "who is? Is Mama having the other baby too? Are they twins?"
Amanda groaned as if she had gone into premature labor, her head lolling on the back of the couch. "Jesse Eileen. No one is pregnanced— pregnant! I mean . . . I am, but there is no other baby. There's only one, and she's the same one who's been in me, eatin' my food and keepin' me awake all night, for the past seven months. Get that 'other baby' outta your head, girl."
"Well, if there is no other baby, why did you make us come over here?" Jesse flung her arms wide, then let them flump into her lap. Olivia would take credit for the pointing and the talking with her hands—habits she suspected were passed down from Serena, who had been an emphatic lecturer, in and out of the classroom—but that arm thing was all Rollins.
Hand over her face, Amanda gave a pitiful whimper that rivaled even Frannie begging for another Milk-Bone. "I can't. You deal with her, babe," she said, wagging her other hand limply from Olivia to Jesse. "She gets this from you, anyway."
Chuckling at her wife and eldest daughter's banter, which had become even more farcical since Jesse turned six-going-on-seventeen, Olivia tucked Amanda's errant hand against her thigh and brought forth the gift box to place in Matilda's tiny lap.
The present wasn't much larger than the 8x10 documents it contained, and too flat to be mistaken for any of the more outlandish requests on the kids' Christmas lists to Santa (Noah wanted a nutcracker, but only if it was life-sized like the one in The Nutcracker; an antique steamer trunk for Jesse, for God only knew what purpose; and darling Tilly still held out hope she might get her horsey, from last year's list). Nevertheless, it was better to avoid confusion, especially when Jesse was involved.
"So, guys, Mama and I have one last surprise for you," Olivia said, nervously smoothing her fingers along the Fair Isle printed box top. Her heart gave a small pang—a sweet sort of pain—when Matilda's hands came to rest on the backs of hers, calming the involuntary movement. "Now, it's not something to play with or draw on or anything like that—"
"Is it a book? It's not more socks, is it?"
"Jesse, your mommy is talking," Amanda warned lightly. She lay a hand on Olivia's back, buffing her fingernails side to side, up and down. Her back scratches always helped Olivia to relax, often to the point of putting her to sleep. Yeah, an after-dinner nap was definitely in order.
"Sorry, Mommy."
"It's okay, sweet girl. And no, it's not a book or socks. Actually . . . " Olivia cast a preparatory smile over at Amanda, took a deep breath, and removed the lid of the box. She gathered the envelopes from inside, each with one of their children's first names printed neatly in the corner, and passed them to their respective recipients. "It's a piece of paper, but a very special one. Go ahead and open them—try to be careful."
As she helped Matilda slide the document out of the envelope while the older children did the same with theirs, Olivia continued: "Remember when Mama and I took you three to talk to the judge about us adopting each other, so we would all have legal rights as a family and share the same last name?"
Three heads bobbed in unison, two of them bent over the complicated script and embossed seals on the thick linen paper, diligently reading; Matilda was still learning the alphabet, and simply puzzled over her copy. She pointed to the I, T, and A in "Certificate," letters that coincided with the ones in her name.
"Well, the court finally granted us permission earlier this month, so now it's official. We'll be legally recognized as a family now, and nobody can take that away from us."
Olivia felt like a bit of a heel for leaving out the part where the process had taken so long because Declan Murphy was nowhere to be found, after months of dead-end leads, out-of-service calls, and unanswered newspaper ads, and she'd finally agreed to requesting that his parental rights be terminated. Judge Linden was only too happy to oblige, after learning that Murphy had never been in contact with his daughter.
Olivia's daughter.
No one—not Murphy, not Sheila Porter, not even goddamn Beth Ann Rollins—could ever again say her children were not hers. They would have to go through Olivia Rollins-Benson first, and she had it on good authority that was a formidable task.
"Noah Porter Rollins-Benson," her son read aloud, experimentally. He held up his slip of paper like he was admiring a framed work of art, and gave it an approving smile.
"That's right," Olivia said, bolstered by the little boy's reaction. She looked hopefully to Jesse, still studying her gift with a critical blue eye. "They're your new birth certificates, and see? Now they have your full last names on them." She pointed to each of the names on the certificate she held, sounding them out for her youngest child. "Matilda Janice Rollins-Benson."
"Me?" Tilly asked, glancing up at Olivia. She beamed at the responding nod. "Me!"
"Well, Jess?" Amanda prompted after a long silence, during which the six-year-old frowned at her birth certificate as if it were covered in calculus equations. Amanda stretched out one of her legs, or "ham hocks," as she'd recently dubbed the thicker than usual limbs, and tapped Jesse's knee with her moccasined foot. "What do you think?"
The little girl stifled a sigh. "It's good, I guess."
"You guess?" Olivia heard the anxious note in her voice, and Amanda must have too—she resumed raking her nails gently over Olivia's back. "What's wrong, bug?"
"Well . . . I like the first part and last part, but I wanted it different in the middle. I don't like Eileen." Jesse wrinkled her pert little nose, a miniature but otherwise exact replica of Amanda's. "Nobody else has that name. Can we change it to Sally, like Charlie Brown's sister?"
The kids had been watching A Charlie Brown Christmas obsessively since the day after Thanksgiving, and lately Jesse requested the new (as in, sixteen years before her birth) Broadway cast recording of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown every time she got into the car. Specifically "My New Philosophy," performed by Kristin Chenoweth as Charlie's obstinate little sister, Sally, the role that won her a Tony. Olivia had seen the musical live in '99–adorable show, crap date—and even still had the Playbill with Chenoweth's signature on it . . . somewhere in her extensive collection. One day she would have to look it up and have it framed for her little musical buddy, Jesse.
In Chenoweth's show-stealing number, Sally Brown imagined a confrontation with her teacher, over a D grade on her homework; "Well, why are you telling me?" was the five-year-old's cheeky comeback. Among her other favorite "philosophies": No!, I can't stand it!, and Oh yeah? That's what you think!
Jesse Sally Rollins-Benson, indeed.
"Jesse Sally?" Amanda snorted, and nudged the little girl with her foot again. "Why don't we just change your last name to Raphael while we're at it? Get you some big red glasses and your own talk show?"
"Nah. I'll keep Rollins-Benson," Jesse said, with utter sincerity. She considered the name on her certificate for a few moments more, then popped up her head as enthusiastically as any exclamation point. "Does this mean I'm undopted like bubby and sissy now?"
"Uh-dopted," Noah corrected. At eight years old, he already had more patience with his irrepressible younger sister than anyone in the household. In fact, the two were nearly joined at the hip these days, their interests overlapping surprisingly well: Noah loved the dance sequences from Jesse's favorite musicals, and Jesse's scholastic aptitude—there was already talk of letting her skip a grade next year—put them on about the same par academically, especially in math and science.
Olivia hoped that the new baby would share the same close bond with Matilda that the older children had formed. They treated the toddler like the little princess she was, but a three-year-old couldn't quite keep up with a first and third grader. Olivia had spent most of her childhood surrounded by adults, and most of high school trying to compete with the college students her mother preferred to her company; that had drawn her into things she wasn't at all prepared for, emotionally or psychologically. She wanted Matilda to hold onto her innocence for as long as possible. She wanted that for all her children.
"Yeah, peanut, you're adopted by Mommy now, too," Amanda said to Jesse, peering towards the birth certificate as if she were reading Olivia's name from the second parental signature line. She made no attempt to sit forward from her cozy corner of the couch.
"And me and Tilly are adopted by you, Ma?" Noah asked, running a finger down his certificate until he located Amanda's name below Olivia's.
"Yeah, son, you are."
After a glance at her older brother's proud smile and posture, Jesse scooted to the edge of the coffee table and sat up straighter, flashing her own radiant grin. "Jesse Eileen Rollins-Benson," she proclaimed, with a nod of assent. "Okay, I'll keep Eileen, I reckon. Can I go play now?"
Amanda bopped the little girl on the bottom with her foot when she confirmed that the kids could return to their toys. "Listen to her. 'I reckon.' Lord. If I have to be stuck with Jo, she can make do with Eileen."
"I like Jo," Olivia said, sending a flirtatious wink over her shoulder as she gathered Noah's and Jesse's birth certificates from the coffee table, returning them to their envelopes. "And Eileen. At least they're better than Margaret. I used to pretend I didn't even have a middle name, because I hated mine so much. Too old-lady-sounding."
"Aww, Maggie." Amanda glanced sidelong at the kids, making sure they were preoccupied, then lowered her voice to a sultry purr that evoked vivid and enticing memories in Olivia: the sting of bourbon, the shadow of a fedora brim falling over one blue eye, the wicked feeling of total abandon standing outside the apartment door with nothing but a trench coat between her skin and the big bad city, riding her then-fiancée's thigh until she reached pure bliss. "No old lady could do to me the things that you do. Trust me, toots."
Oh yeah, Olivia liked Jo a whole lot.
She placed the kids' birth certificates—officially declaring them hers and Amanda's, forever—on the side table in a neat stack and settled back in beside her wife, content to stay there all day and leave dinner to perish in the oven. It was getting to be tradition, like the putting on of necklaces, and kisses on tattoo hearts. "Whatever you say, doll face," she murmured, snuggling up to Amanda's shoulder and the bump.
"You know what name no one ever complains about having?" Amanda asked, after a few tentative beats. Under the throw, she'd coiled her arm around Olivia's thighs, keeping them tucked snugly against her belly. She tightened her grip a little, as if she expected Olivia to suddenly spring up and run away. "Grace. You, uh, given any more thought to that one as a middle name?"
Olivia had thought about it extensively, one minute loving the idea, hating it the next. She'd turned it over in her mind until the name lost all meaning and didn't even sound like a real word anymore. She had pulled out old photo albums and stared, page after page, into her mother's solemn, fair-featured face, as if she might find the answer there. But Serena Grace remained closed off to her daughter's wants and needs, just as she always had.
"A little." Olivia shrugged
"And?"
"And . . . " Smoothing her hand over the slope of Amanda's belly, Olivia willed their daughter to interject a foot or an elbow, but Samantha already had a mind of her own. The little coconut slept on. "How about— how about we wait and meet her before we decide on that? Let's make sure she's a Samantha Grace before we commit to it, okay?"
Amanda turned her head and pecked Olivia on the temple. "Okay, darlin'. But I'm pretty sure she will be. And just think, her initials will be SGRB. How badass does that sound? Our own little Notori-SGRB. I know how much you love you some Ruth Bader Gins—"
"Aw, crap!" Jesse shot to her feet in the middle of her Christmas bounty, a dismayed expression on her china doll features. She looked like she'd just realized she was late for an important business meeting.
"What the heck, Jess?" Amanda asked, gazing at the girl in bewilderment. Olivia lifted her head from Amanda's shoulder enough to peer at the child too, only mildly surprised by the outburst. Jesse Eileen lived to be dramatic.
"J. E. R. B?" cried their daughter, her skinny arms outstretched in the manner of a destitute street urchin appealing for scraps. "My name spells jerb? You have got to be kidding me."
"Don't look at me." Olivia assumed the most blameless expression she could muster, while simultaneously throwing her pregnant wife under the bus; she twitched her head discreetly sideways, until Jesse's keen blue eyes met their mirror image, focusing solely on Amanda. "That was all her."
"Thanks a lot, Olivia Margaret."
. . .
