Still Life
By Fewthistle

Author's Note: Written for Challenge Eight, Prompt Three at the Livejournal Community even_angels_. First and last lines written by flying_peanuts. Post-"Loss."

At night she sleeps, empty of dreams. The vodka helps. It's one of the things for which she is grateful these days. She wouldn't know what to do with dreams anyway. She can barely process the images from her days, much less the fun-house mirror phantoms of her unfettered psyche.

Besides, someone once told her that dreams are clotted like sour milk with all our fears, wishes, desires. She fears so many small, vast things. She wishes for what she knows she shouldn't want. She desires to possess only those transitory souls she can't have. One soul.

She can live without those particular beggars panhandling through her unconscious mind. Their empty Starbucks cup is nearly filled to the brim with spare change while she's awake; she sure as hell doesn't want to hand over the big bucks in her sleep.

Besides, if she dreams, it will be of her, and that won't do at all.

It's bad enough that today she is slipping the cuffs on a female suspect and is struck by how much the woman's hands resemble Alex's. Slender, delicate fingers long and narrow, the veins showing in base relief through translucent skin. Hands that she had held, fingers tucked neatly between her own. Hands she should have never let go.

It takes the perp's muttered, “Hurry the hell up, bitch. I ain't got all day,” to slap her back to reality.

Those weren't Alex's hands in hers. Chances are damn good that they never will be again.

Lately, she manages to get through an hour, sometimes two, before something will remind her, and she'll turn and there it is, that elephant of memory sitting, feet askew, in the corner of the squad room, right beside the coffee maker where she and Alex would stand and talk, mouths and eyes speaking in different tongues as they gazed in secret longing.

Or often, at night, she awakes to find Dumbo squished into the tiny bathroom of her apartment, its fat rump smack dab in the middle of the tub, right where she had once lain back against the cool porcelain, Alex warm and slippery and supple between her legs.

She doesn't need to dream.

On certain days, it feels like that is all that it ever was: a dream.

There is so little left of Alex in her life now. Three pictures, two of them with the guys from the squad at some bar, a celebration of some case she can't even remember now, the lights turning their skin yellow, demonic eyes matching the wide grins that split their faces.

She is standing next to Alex on the end, arms around each other's waists. If she closes her eyes she can almost smell the stale beer and wet clothing, for it had rained all that day, and feel the slip of one of Alex's fingers under the waistband of her pants, searing a path along the skin of her back.

She looks at the other picture only after the third or fourth shot of Stoli traces an icy river down her throat, numbing her mind. Her own personal Russian anesthetic.

It's a shot of her and Alex at Shakespeare in the Park. It was so hot that summer, and they had braved the madding crowd for the free show. By some miracle of fate, or as Alex informed her, simply knowing where to look, they had located a shady spot and laid a blanket down.

Leaning together, faces inches apart, she and Alex had posed for the last picture left on the disposable camera that Olivia had in her backpack. Olivia had held the camera as far away from their faces as her arm would reach. Still, there is a subtle curving to the photograph, a slight lack of perspective, as if only the two of them existed in all the world. That day, despite the crowd of thousands, it had been true.

In the photograph, Alex is laughing at something she had whispered in her ear, her head titled back into a pool of sunlight that flooded in just beyond their shady spot, and her hair's awash in gold and platinum, her eyes a truer blue than the summer sky behind them. Olivia is smiling, too, grinning madly in disbelief at the perfection of the moment and of the woman beside her, loving her.

When she looks at that picture, she doesn't need to dream.

She has all three photos framed, sitting on a shelf in her living room. When she sits on the couch she can see them, still lifes of lives rent beyond mending. She knows that she should put them away. Knows that she should pack them up in an old Chiquita banana box and place them carefully in the closet in her bedroom. She knows that until she does, she won't dream.

One night, a half-empty bottle of Stoli on the coffee table, Olivia stands unsteadily and stumbles to the hall closet. She returns with a box, dropping it with a muted thud on the table, nearly toppling the bottle. She doesn't notice. She makes another trek, this one to the kitchen, coming back with a hand full of paper towels.

She stands in front of the shelf, cheeks shiny with tears and slowly reaches out her hand. The same hand that used to gently hold Alex's. The same hand that made its caressing way down the length of smooth skin along the sloping curve of Alex's ass. The same hand that used to tangle in the fine, silken strands of blonde hair as Alex lay between her legs.

She picks up the pictures, wraps them in paper towels. She lingers only for an instant to run the tip of one finger along the glass above the flattened planes of Alex's cheek. Taking the wrapped photos, she places them silently in the box on the table. She'll put it away tomorrow. Clumsily grabbing the bottle, she heads blindly to the bedroom.

She prays that she won't dream.

On the empty shelf, dust is all that is left.