DISCLAIMER: Characters belong to Dick Wolf and NBC/Universal.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: First and last lines by flying_peanuts, who wrote them for a LiveJournal challenge.
ARCHIVING: Only with the permission of the author.
SPOILERS: "Loss" (5.4)
Storm Warning
By Mira
March sky, barefoot in blue: I could never do this in the city, the pavement dazzling and deadly with the shards of all the shattered things we tried to put back together. But it's warm here, for March, and the grass is soft under my feet padding back from the mailbox.
I'm always careful when I'm outside now, Olivia. You'd be proud of me, the way I stand at the door, sweeping the neighborhood. The cars parked in driveways, the rustlings in the hedges, the sight lines from the neighbors' windows. Or maybe you'd be sad that I know now to compromise. Mostly, I just wish I'd learned sooner.
To the west a bank of pewter clouds is rolling in, pregnant with snow. Ken Jennings on Channel 8, with his nasal accent and those rosy-appled cheeks I can't get used to around here, said: snowstorm. Said: blizzard, zero visibility. I don't mind, though; blindness is no punishment for a woman who doesn't exist.
It's just the blankness, the line between anchored and adrift: that's snow falling, that's life defined by not being dead. My heart doesn't pound much anymore when I get back inside; my scars are fading. I'm not unhappy, exactly. I just wish sometimes that somewhere in these magazine subscriptions, in these flyers for the Wisconsin State Fair, that I would see something. Something blank that smells of sandalwood, something that would remind me that your hand on my hip, your hair at my shoulder, that those were real. That you remember.
The clouds are moving in, and the whiteness, the oblivion; soon I won't remember anything, and your voice is a whisper of snow.
The End