Chapter Text
Liv brings her son Noah to the wedding.
Monique and Connie have already discussed and dismissed the potential of kids—neither of them are planning on motherhood. And while Connie’s nevertheless a natural with kids (like Liv, Monique sometimes thinks), Monique herself is awkward when it comes to children. Sure, they’re cute, and back when she was in SVU she could interview them easy enough when needed, but she doesn’t quite get them.
That doesn’t stop her from loving Noah. Part of it, she thinks, is how happy he makes Liv. Because unlike Monique, Liv has always wanted to be a mom. Always wanted to build a family.
If she had to pull out some pop psychology about it, Monique would probably say it has something to do with Liv’s current lack of a stable family—her mother long gone, her other relations estranged to the point that they functionally don’t exist. Noah was a lifeline in the near aftermath of Lewis; he’s Liv’s son. He’s Liv’s family.
So Monique has gotten used to him—even babysat once or twice, when Liv needed it. Out of all the kids she’s met, Monique gets along with him on the better-to-best scale.
Once, when he was staying over with her and Connie, Monique was perched on the couch, working on an article, while Noah slept. She noticed after a while that Noah was awake; he’d been watching her intently, as if her fingers moving across the keys were the most fascinating thing in the world.
She gave him a nod. “Cool, huh?”
He gurgled.
“Yeah, I’m a big shot writer now,” she said playfully. “Before this, though, I used to work with your mom. She’s a badass.” She winced, realizing you probably weren’t supposed to swear around babies. Noah wasn’t talking—yet—but she didn’t want his first words to his mom to contain any indication that he’d been picking up bad habits from the Jeffries-Kim household.
Noah was nonplussed. He grabbed his foot and made an attempt at stuffing it in his mouth, not breaking eye contact with Monique.
“I can tell you’re impressed,” Monique said, closing her laptop. She’d been getting tired of her article edits, anyways. “You should be. If every cop was Olivia Benson, we’d be living in a better world. And we’d need a lot fewer cops, period. Your mom and I did a good job watching each other’s backs, when we were on the force together. We clicked.”
More than clicked—Monique realized with a start that she hadn’t thought about Lavender Blue in years. A memory drifted through her head—just her and Olivia, tucked in that back corner, sharing laughter and conversation and building to something more.
She’d told Connie about that one-night stand with Olivia, way back when she and Connie had first started dating. The… third date, maybe, if she was remembering right, though she hadn’t named names, not wanting to out Olivia as… well… anything, to someone she was still getting to know. She’d just called Olivia “a detective,” and left it at that.
“We’re still in touch,” Monique had said, “but as friends.”
Connie laughed, snorting a little. “And you think I’d be bothered by that? Honey, half my friends are also my exes. That’s just what you get with lesbians.”
Monique raised an eyebrow. “So if that stereotype’s true, does that mean we’re gonna move in together next time I see you?”
Connie winked. “You wish you were that lucky. You’re going to have to wait a little longer, honey. So, this detective… do I know her?”
Monique pursed her lips. “Maybe, but she’s… look, whatever she is, she hasn’t figured it out yet. I think I might’ve been her first time with a woman. It was—is, I think—a part of herself she ignores. In denial might be too strong? Or maybe not.” Monique shrugged. “We don’t talk about that night.”
“Even less of a need for me to worry, then,” Connie said matter-of-factly. “Now listen up. Speaking of denial, I’m going to spill some real drama about my high school ex and the terrible, no good, very bad first kiss…”
Monique shook herself out of the memory, looking back to Noah. He had stopped with the foot-in-mouth attempt and was staring at her solemnly.
“Anyways,” she said to him candidly, “your mom is one of my closest friends, and for her I would do a hell of a lot. Including watch your tiny baby butt when her sitter’s sick and she’s working a ticking-clock case.”
Noah gurgled again.
“Yeah,” Monique said, “you heard me right. I’m doing you a favor here, kid.”
She knew he wasn’t Olivia’s biological son, but Noah leveled a gaze at her so like one of Olivia’s—a little playfulness hidden behind a serious mask—that Monique couldn’t help but crack a grin. “You’re okay, kid,” she said. “I think we’re cool, don’t you?”
Noah held her gaze for a moment longer. And then she could’ve sworn he nodded.
So yeah, Monique and Noah are cool.
Liv’s got him all dressed up for the wedding, tiny suspenders included. Monique and Connie hired daycare for the wedding, so their friends with children can let loose a little, and even the on-call babysitters coo over Noah’s outfit.
Liv looks tired. (She usually looks tired, so really Monique should say she looks normal.) But she’s thrown on a nice dress for the wedding, and she’s obviously so happy for Monique and Connie that it overrides any lingering exhaustion.
Both Monique and Connie have gone for suits, Monique in white and Connie in black. The ceremony is short and sweet, the vows much the same. Monique can’t stop looking at Connie, at her dark hair woven into a crown, at her sparkling eyes, at her smile.
She can’t stop loving Connie, either.
So in front of the people closest to her, Monique slides a ring on Connie’s finger. Then she kisses the bride, and Connie does, too.
#
Life happens. Monique gets used to being married. She and Connie adopt a pair of dalmatians. They name the dogs Melon and Ringo. Melon is always eyeing his moms suspiciously—maybe because he’s on a medication and hates it when they successfully sneak pills into his treats—and Monique later has a strange, vivid dream about John Munch and Melon engaged in a deep conversation about the dangers of food tampering.
She tells Connie, who snort-laughs (and god, Monique loves her.) She tells Liv, too, the next time they see each other (it’s few and far between, these days, but when it happens, they slip back into the same old patterns like no time has passed at all.) They’re eating lunch near the precinct, something Liv can squeeze into her packed schedule. Liv laughs so hard when she hears about the Melon-Munch dream that she almost chokes on her own spit.
“Oh my god,” Liv says, when she finally gets herself under control. “Sorry, sorry, I’m disgusting. Wow. Sometimes I really miss those days with that squad. Cragen, Munch, Stabler.” She glances up at Monique. “You.”
“Not Cassidy?”
Liv grins. “Jesus. In SVU? Not really.”
“I still can’t believe you got with him later on.”
Liv’s eyes light up, like she’s just thought of something. “Hey,” she says, “back in SVU, did you notice when he and I…” she trails off meaningfully.
“The one-night stand? Yeah,” Monique says. It’s a long-ago memory, but she has a vague sense of it. “But that was because of how he acted. You played it cool. I mostly remember because he was being an ass about it.”
“No one noticed after ours,” Liv says, gesturing nonchalantly between herself and Monique. Monique’s actually caught off-guard for a moment. It’s the first time Liv’s been so direct about that night. The first time she’s referenced it so obviously.
Monique keeps her voice even. “No,” she says. “I don’t think anyone knew to look. For ours.”
Liv grins. “You played it a lot cooler than Cassidy, anyways.”
“Because I know how to keep my work out of my bedroom and vice versa,” Monique says, rolling her eyes. “Like I wanted to do when that jerk of a shrink broke my confidentiality.”
“Bitch of a situation,” Liv says sympathetically. Monique isn’t sure which of them came up with that succinct phrase, but they default to it now, when they’re talking about something difficult in either of their pasts. Monique’s transfer out of SVU? Bitch of a situation. Stabler abandoning Liv without a word to this day? Bitch of a situation. Monique’s blacklisting when she left the force? Bitch of a situation. William Lewis? That one has the dubious honor of being a goddamn bitch of a situation.
Liv’s got a few more bitches of situations than Monique under her belt. Monique figures that if she’d stayed in SVU, she’d probably have racked up more herself. That unit’s detectives go through it. Back when she was in Vice, it used to be a bit of a joke that the personal lives of SVU’s squad were cursed. Nothing concrete—just that if someone was out there pulling the strings, they were pulling the SVU detectives’ strings a little harder than everyone else’s.
She and Liv spend the rest of lunch reminiscing before Liv gets a text. “Gotta go handle this,” she says apologetically. “I’ll get the check. It was great to see you—tell Connie I say hi.”
“Only if you give Noah a hug for me.”
Olivia smiles. “We’ll have to get him over to your place one of these days for a sleepover. He can’t stop talking about last time.”
Monique hopes Noah hasn’t been too candid about last time, given that she and Connie let him stay up ‘til midnight and didn’t realize he’d eaten a whole pint of ice cream at some point in the night until they’d found the empty carton the next morning. At least they didn’t teach him any new swear words. As far as she remembers.
“Yeah,” she says with a grin. “Sure. You’re raising a good kid, Liv. Always knew you’d be a great mom.”
She wasn’t intending the comment to hit hard—wasn’t really thinking about it, even—but she sees the words hit Liv and sink in. Sees Liv’s lower lip quiver before she catches it. Liv opens her mouth; closes it. “Sorry,” she says, waving a hand as if to dismiss her own feelings. She’s tearing up, a little. Not looking Monique in the eye. “I’m just… I’m tired, and that’s kind of you to say.”
“Liv,” Monique says, a little gentler this time, “I’m not just being nice. You are a great mom. You love your son and he loves you.”
“I don’t deserve him,” Liv says. “It’s just an accident, that he’s mine.”
“Not an accident now,” Monique says. “You’ve given him a home. You are his home. You’re his mom.” She reaches out and sets a hand on Liv’s. “That’s the reality, Olivia Benson. Believe it. Noah’s your son, and you’re never going to walk away from that.”
Because that’s what Olivia needs to hear, right now. That she won’t leave Noah the way she was left—by Serena, drunk and crumpled at the bottom of the subway stairs; by Stabler, off with his wife and kids somewhere neither of them knows.
She won’t do to Noah what was done to her. Monique knows it, with a certainty that she thinks Olivia can feel, channeled from one former detective to another. (Olivia’s promotions mean it’s been a long time since she wore that rank.)
Olivia leans forward, and Monique does, too, until their foreheads are pressed together. Just a moment of comfort. Of the years they’ve known each other, all that history, connecting them in an invisible chain.
“Monique Jeffries, thank god you exist,” Olivia says. “I don’t know where I’d be in a world without you in it.”
“I’ll tell you where,” Monique says. “In one goddamn bitch of a situation.”
And Olivia laughs, tears still standing out in her eyes, and when they hug each other goodbye it’s with the knowledge that they’ll see each other again, and again, and again. This bond they have, strengthened by time and honesty, will not be broken. Monique will not leave. Liv will not be left.
#
Monique goes home to Connie and tells her hi from Olivia.
She knows Olivia goes home to Noah, and gives him a hug for her.
#
Monique writes a piece that night.
It’s not for anyone’s eyes but her own. A sort of ode, to Monique Jeffries and Olivia Benson; to the way they’ve influenced each other, the way they’ve been both spectators and participants in the biggest moments of each other’s lives.
Monique’s figured out in her time working in journalism that she likes to ground her sense of a piece in metaphor. It’s a strange habit, and not one she talks to most people about—Connie, yes, but other than that she keeps it to herself, doesn’t let it bleed through into the articles themselves. But it helps her. To think of one storyline as a river, maybe, wending and weaving through the details. Or a particular person of interest as a knife, sharp and clean; or another as a quilt, warm and welcoming.
What she comes back to for her and Olivia, as if on instinct, are paired images, paired themes: fire and ash.
Monique’s tied most clearly to fire from the start, after the car bomb that set her and Olivia on their current path. The appetite for risk she’d felt roar to life in her, the willingness to be bold, to let the words Lavender Blue first fall from her lips. She’d been forged in fire at NYPD long before the car bomb, but it had marked a shift, that she knew. Touched by it, almost; changed by it, certainly. (She remembers, now, that when she’d first learned the shrink had broken confidentiality, she’d felt the same shock as when the car had gone up in flames; the same terrifying certainty that she was about to be burned.)
Fire for Monique, yet she’d come out stronger, used the heat to set herself on her current path. Towards Connie; towards journalism. Towards love; towards justice.
And Olivia, tied to ash. A woman built on a legacy of aftermaths, her core relationships like burned-out buildings. The ash of disaster marking her at every turn, dusting her eyelashes, greying her hair, the taste of it in her mouth. (The image returns to Monique as she writes—that once, very late, long ago, Olivia had told her that William Lewis had threatened to put a cigarette out on her tongue if she didn’t drink, the second day. That he’d nearly done it. So the taste of ash there, too.)
Ash for Olivia, yet she’d picked through it to find gleaming threads of loyalty and joy, fought against what life threw at her to reach for the job, the family, she had now. Towards survivors; towards Noah. Towards justice; towards love.
Monique types, and types, and she realizes it’s not so clean cut. Because she’s ash, too—ash in the worst days, when she’d just quit NYPD, when she felt like the career she’d spent so many years building had burned to nothing, the match struck by her own hand. In all the years spent hiding who she was and who she loved, the taste of lies and omissions like ash on her lips when she couldn’t say a thing about Connie without risking her job and her reputation. Or she’s ash when she went into shock at the hospital after the car bomb (she’s never told anyone about that, not even Connie), or ash when she got her first article rejection, or ash when she thinks of every unfairness that has blanketed her, covered her, threatened to choke her if she doesn’t get up each morning and push her way back out.
And Olivia is also fire. A banked flame, a steady burning holding over ‘til morning. She couldn’t have lasted so long in SVU without it. If she hadn’t been forced out of SVU, even Monique acknowledges she wouldn’t have stayed so long as Olivia Benson. Or Olivia is fire in the spark when she kissed Monique, all those years ago; or fire when she got herself free of the goddamn bitch of a situation; or fire when she gets up each morning and gives everything she has for people she doesn’t even know.
Monique types, and types, and she writes their story.
When she’s done, she stares at the blinking cursor at the top of the page. It hovers, waiting. She’s exhausted, so tired all she wants to do is sleep. But it feels like she should give this piece, messy and heartfelt and full of secrets, something to be known by, even if only for herself.
Saint of Fire, Saint of Ash, Monique finally titles the document, not quite sure, between her and Olivia, who is supposed to be which. It’s nearly four in the morning, though, and she’s sure she’s not thinking straight, so she’ll forgive herself a little titular creativity, a little over-dramatization (because really, Monique, saints?).
The title’s not right, not yet, but she saves the doc anyways, in a folder tucked in a folder, not meant for anyone but herself to see. A history of her and Olivia, snippets of what they are to each other; what they mean to each other.
She doesn’t think she’s done it justice, done them justice, but she’s still new to this writing thing, still learning. And typing up the piece has done what she wanted it to: helped her to understand.
I’m not worth anything, Olivia had once said, but she’s wrong, and the proof is here in black and white. She’s worth this, to Monique, and Monique is worth this, to her. Traumas and triumphs and so many years stacked like casefiles on a precinct desk.
A dear friend, Monique thinks, her brain stealing some flowery language from letter-writers of old. It fits. A dearest friend.
Monique’s brushing her teeth, preparing to slip into bed and apologize to Connie if she wakes her wife at this ungodly hour, when a better title comes to her. She spits, flosses, and turns to her laptop, just one more time. One last title change for the story of Jeffries and Benson, Benson and Jeffries. A working title, because the piece is unfinished. They’re still waiting on the next chapter.
Touch of Fire, Taste of Ash, Monique renames the file.
Her sleep is calm. She does not dream.
#
Lunch again next Wednesday? Olivia texts a week or so later. Think I can fit you in :)
You bet your ass, Monique writes back. This time, my treat.