DISCLAIMER: Law & Order: Trial By Jury & Law & Order and all their characters are
property of NBC and Dick Wolf.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: First and last lines of all the ficlets written by the ever brilliant flying_peanuts. My eternal thanks. These are all of the vignettes of Serena Southerlyn and Tracey Kibre that I wrote for even_angels_. They are little glimpses of an ongoing life, set in between, or after, or at the same time as my Between Bombay series featuring the same two. Take your pick. Except Breathe Me, which really should be part of the series, say as part number six, but gets ahead of itself. Oh, well. Enjoy. I don't know that anyone will even care to read these, but I was encouraged by racethewind10 and since I have nagged and threatened her all week, it seemed only fair.
ARCHIVING: Only with the permission of the author.
Attention to Detail
By Fewthistle
Seven floors, a thousand steps: everything in life is merely a matter of perspective. Serena knew this. She knew that life is measured in moments, in minutes, in miles. Dolled out with childrens' sticky hands, with the dry, aged skin of a grandmother's cheek, with the blood-boiling touch of a lover's caress. Love in all of its comical, vaguely grotesque forms. We just have to learn to alter our perspective sometimes, in order to see it.
Serena knew that Tracey truly cared for her. Tracey had shown it in a thousand small gestures; in a morning cup of coffee, waiting for Serena on the bathroom counter as she climbed groggily out of the shower.
In a shared tub of popcorn, slathered with what the movie theaters euphemistically called "butter", despite Tracey's disdain for the "artery clogging wonder that is hydrogenated oil".
In the last piece of the Entenmann's raspberry danish that Tracey had been saving for a midnight snack, tucked safely in a baggie in Serena's coat pocket.
Tracey had shown her feelings in a hundred everyday looks, smiles, caresses. But never in three little words. The three little words.
For months, Serena had craved those three words, felt the need for them of a dying man in the desert for a drop of water. She had looked for them so hard, her vision narrowed on one spot, that she had almost been blinded to the hundreds of other things that spoke Tracey's love. The forest for the trees.
Seven floors. A thousand steps. They really were the same thing.
Sitting at her desk, Serena heard a snatch of conversation and the low, melodic tones of Tracey's voice from Branch's office, and smiled.
Love is walking past.
The End