Take a Number

If everything's under control, you're going too slow. - Mario Andretti

 
Millie looked around the half-put-together nursery.  The crib had been installed upon delivery, but the mattress and linens weren’t on yet.  The changing table needed to be assembled, there were curtains for hanging and toys that needed a toy chest to go in.  The only part that looked ready-for-baby was the rocking chair.  She wasn’t too worried – she still had a couple of months left to go.  The last couple of days running around the City trying to furnish the room had been tiresome and she was looking forward to the end of her pregnancy.

Taking a moment to catch her breath, Millie sat down in the rocking chair.  It faced the large window overlooking the city, where, even though it was barely nightfall, she could see the lights of the Village begin to glow. She felt a sense of calm.  As she rocked slowly back and forth, a hand to her belly, she realized it was the first time since the trip to the hospital that she’d really slowed down.

Everything was going so fast.  She kept reassuring herself that it would be okay – that she and Mike would be fine, that the baby would be fine…It’s not that she didn’t trust herself or Mike.  Separately – yes.  Together?...they were still getting to know each other.  It had been a little less than a year since they began going out.  In some ways, she felt he knew her better than anybody.  In other ways…she didn’t have a clue what was running through his head.  And now they were having a baby.  It scared her – she wanted this to work, she wanted a life with him – but what if…

What if he left?  It was the quiet, but persistent thought that kept running through her mind since the day that he’d suggested such a thing might be “for the best”.  She persuaded him that day that he was wrong, that they loved each other and even if they didn’t know everything about each other, it could be enough.  They could be enough – for each other. 

What if she couldn’t persuade him next time? What if—he went? They didn’t have all the answers figured out yet.  Millie hardly felt in control of her life. There were still questions without answers – things she hadn’t learned about him.  One thing she did know for sure, however, was that she needed him.   

 

[note: Mike Logan referred to is detmike_logan.  Munch and Fin are non-muse specific.]

“Hey, hey, hey, easy does it,” Millie barked at the two crime scene technicians who were flipping over a king-size mattress that was at the sight of a bloody double-homicide.

The two detectives, both junior to her in rank, rolled their eyes. 

“You got a problem?”  Millie walked over, fingerprint brush in hand.  “Let me tell you something.  Don’t mess with a pregnant lady during the August heat, in the middle of a sleazy motel in Red Hook.”

“I’m so scared,” Sergeant John Munch smirked as he walked by.

“Hey, I’m from the hood,” Millie called after him, “I will cut you.”

“Yeah, but you can’t outrun me,” Munch motioned to her belly. 

“Wanna test that theory?” She jokingly pointed the blunt edge of the print brush in his direction.

“…why does everyone always try to injure me?” Munch wanted to know.

“Maybe because you’re good at pissin’ people off.”   His partner, Fin Tutuola, was blunt.

“Among other reasons,” Millie said, snapping on a pair of gloves.

“You’ve been hanging around Logan too long,” Munch said. 

“Oooh, you wanna start?” Millie grinned. “Go there, go there and see how long it takes me to process evidence for you next time.”

“No, wait,” Munch said,  “He’s a whiny bitch. You’re just a…”

Fin elbowed his partner before Munch could finish.  “Man, when you gonna learn how to shut the hell up?”

 A second later, the fingerprint brush hit the older detective’s glasses, narrowly missing his eye. 

“HEY! Hey, you could have killed me!” Munch exclaimed. 

Millie grinned. “I may be a bitch, but I’ve got good aim.”

Roleplay a scene where your muse is trying on clothes. It can be shopping, wedding gown, closet cleaning out, trying on a new style…whatever.

Late May 2008

Millie stood in front of the mirror, pushing the babydoll-style t-shirt over her stomach.  It didn't look bad on her. It was just...snug. 

"I'm faaat," she moaned.  "This doesn't fit me any more. Neither does that one," she motioned to another shirt. "Or those ones." She pushed the mound of clothes at Mike as if to indicate, this is all your fault. 

[detmike_logan used with gracious permission]

Wise men say
only fools rush in,
but I can’t help
falling in love with you.

[Early April]

Millie sat in the lab, her gloves off for a change, and admired the antique engagement ring on her left hand.  She still couldn’t believe it.  Of course, they weren’t officially engaged.  She’d been asking him questions—had he ever thought about marriage, if he loved her couldn’t he see himself with her—marrying her?  She knew the questions scared him.  She didn’t know a lot about his family history but she knew enough to know that his parents’ marriage had been bad enough to make him anxious at thinking about it for himself. He didn’t want to turn out like they had. 

She tried to tell him that he was different.  He wasn’t a drunk, for one thing, nor was he abusive.  He seemed to think that if he got married, or worse, if he had kids, that some sort of switch would flip and he’d turn into a monster.  She tried to explain that it didn’t work like that.

There was part of him that wanted desperately to believe her. 

Mike Logan sat at his desk, cracking his knuckles absently and thinking about the tech on the ninth floor.  Her face had been so hopeful when she approached him about the talk.

He’d had the talk before with other women.  The talk about the future.  Usually, it ended there and the relationship became the past.  But this was different.  He’d never felt this way. The one time he had thought he was feeling this way, it’d turned out to be a mistake.  But not this.  When she smiled at him, he couldn’t say no.  When she started to talk about wanting to be with him, about needing him, he believed her.  He knew from watching his parents that love was never enough. Even people who loved each other could hate each other, hate their children.  And then she was talking marriage, children—and before he knew it, maybe it was the head injury he’d sustained the day before, he was giving her his grandmother’s ring. 

 

She’d looked at him with wide eyes.  She kept doing that.

Even now, in the lab, Millie’s expression while staring at the platinum-and-diamond band was one of wonder.  

What he’d said was “Why don’t you wear this?”  It wasn’t a proposal.  It was…she still wasn’t sure.  She did know that they were both diving in head-first, perhaps foolishly, with no regard for their individual issues…or maybe because of them.  But as she watched the ring sparkle in the fluorescent light, she didn’t care.

Like a river flows, surely to the sea
Darlin' so it goes, some things are meant to be..

Take my hand, take my whole life too, for I can't help
falling in love with you.


word count: 420 [not including lyrics]

Truthfully, I’m not that great of a cook. My mom always cooked but I was never the sit-in-the-kitchen-watching-patiently kind of girl. I was the tomboy chasing my little brother out in the yard kind of girl. I’d run in to hurriedly chow down on the sopon de pollo con arroz or the frijoles negros, sopping it all up with huge flour tortillas, but I never thought about trying to cook it all myself (despite my mami’s insistence that I should know how).

I’m sort of learning as I go, rather belatedly, now that I’ve been all grown up and on my own for awhile. With my job, however, it’s easier to grab takeout or my favorite staple, the microwave dinner. The one thing I did learn how to cook—actually, asked my mother to teach me to make—was one of my favorite dishes, arroz con dulce, or Puerto Rican rice pudding.

( Recipe Under the Cut )

“Millie…”

She looked across the bed to meet his eyes.  His were bloodshot, hair flopping over his brow.  He looked a little rough and she knew that she didn’t look much better.  It had been a long week, an even longer month—months.  The months were starting to blur and she still couldn’t believe that the last two years had passed like they had.  It had been a daze—until she’d met him that week. 

When you live your life trying to blend in, it surprises you when someone takes notice. She hadn’t always been like that. She used to be loud, the life of the party, the mischievous one.  These days, she was just trying to get through the day.  But he noticed her in a way that no one had in a long time.

More than that, he saw her—really, truly saw her.  When she’d stormed in the diner the day before, overwhelmed with frustration, with an anger that no one had ever seemed to understand – he knew.  He knew what it was like for people to tune you out, for people to try to categorize you, pretend like they gave a damn.

“C’mere.”

He motioned across the bed, across the space in between them.  It was closer to dawn than to midnight and they’d spent the early hours of the morning talking, complaining of bosses and aching backs, or in her case, the pulled hamstring that had led to him gently massaging her leg.

Neither of them was in any shape for fooling around – they’d talked about it at the diner on Thursday and had made plans for Saturday. That’s what it had all started out as. The need for sex, plain and simple.

But it was Friday.  Between work and the pains, literal and figurative, that dotted their lives, they were still on the couch, talking the dark night away.  She could barely walk with her pulled muscle and he was exhausted from a hellish week involving work and an ex-girlfriend. 

By the end of the night, after he’d carried her to her bedroom (as her leg was still in pain), she knew that it was more than sexual attraction.  She knew that she could want more with him.  It scared her, though, and so she pushed it back.  That someone could know her, see into her soul, could want to protect her and be there for her – it was almost too much to believe. 

He got ready to leave and she invited him to stay. And so he did, carefully taking off his clothes, till he was down to his boxers and undershirt, glancing at her as he did so, making sure it was okay, before getting in on the other side of the bed.

When they were both settled, her on the left side and she on the right, with room in between them, is when he gestured to her.

“Millie…c’mere.”

She moved over, nearer to him, closing in the space between them.  He put his hand to the side of her face, gently cupping her cheek, drawing her closer.  Tilting her head up, she waited until his lips met hers, before kissing him back.

Moments later, back on her side of the bed, but maybe not so far apart from him, she began to drift off to sleep.  Their first kiss was still fresh in her mind and she felt, for the first time in a long time, not so alone.

 

As of now, this journal follows two timelines -- one takes place at realmof_themuse, and all entries that fall in that universe will be tagged as such. The other timeline, for couples_therapy, follows the timeline begun at the RPG lawandorder_siu, and will be tagged accordingly as well.

...why, yes, I AM ecstatic. I found Paula Garces' MySpace page, and on it was a video of a couple of her important scenes from the SVU episode "Name" -- if you've seen the original episode, you can tell that the scenes are longer than what the final episode was pared down to. Anyway, because Millie's such a "small" character in the L&O verse, I thought I'd post it here and share with all of you.

( MILLIEEEEE )

Roleplay Prompt: You are acting alone, and someone comes around while you are committing the theft.

OOC: Open to anyone on Millie's f-list.

The elevator dings and Millie gets out at the eleventh floor of One Police Plaza. 

She rarely has the time to come up from the crime lab on days like this – days when even after being put on ‘light duty’ by Roger Henley, she ends up doing double the work she normally would.  But today, she takes the time to go on her break.  Today, she needs a few minutes to herself.  Chewing on a Pixy Stick, she gets off the elevator.  She heads toward Mike Logan’s desk, hoping he’s not there.

Glancing around to make sure no one is there (or at least, she thinks no one is there), Millie grabs a post-it and writes a note, leaving it on the legal pad on Logan’s desk.  When she’s done, for no reason she can think of, she pockets the Bic pen that she’d picked up from his desk to write the note.

Word Count: 153

OOC:...which  takes place soon after this entry.

Millie walked into the familiar bar which usually housed cops or lawyers going to and from work, court dates, meetings with the brass.  The bartender had seen customers with their share of bad days, so she knew she could blend in.  It was still early--maybe 5:00, so there were seats to choose from.  She sat down at the bar and ordered a shot of tequila...

It always amazed Millie what you could find in a single drop of blood.  If you lost a drop of blood, it was too insignificant to cause damage physically.  But a single drop of blood could mean life or death for a person on trial for murder.  It could mean justice or heartbreak for victims and their families.

Millie was always careful when gathering evidence or processing it.  She’d worked in labs for nearly ten years.  Her father had been a fingerprint analyst in the days before computer recognition software—in short, she had long ago learned the value of precision, the importance of caution.

She was more than shocked when (in Henley’s absence) the Chief of Detectives called her up to his office from the lab at One Police Plaza.

“Vizcarrondo,” the short, bald-headed man barked, not bothering to stand up. 

“Chief,” her voice was even, though she wore a frown.  “Is there a problem?”

“If you call damaging crucial evidence in a high-profile case ‘a problem’ then yes,” the Chief snapped, “We have a problem.”

Millie stepped forward, arms crossed.  “What’s going on?  What happened??”

“You were in charge of the CSU squad dispatched to the Perelli place, weren’t you?” he asked.

“Yes—Henley’s out this week and—“

He interrupted.  “And one of your guys—under your direct supervision screwed up!  Carter and Brown said they expressly asked YOU to lift the fingerprint from the blood on the door pane!”

Suddenly she felt ill.  “Chief, I—“

“You outsourced!” he snapped, “And the putz who did it didn’t wait till the blood dried!  The print smeared-it’s useless! So are you and the whole damn lab if you can’t even do your job right!”

She tried to be calm but felt the anger rising.  “It was a madhouse! There was blood everywhere.”  Her eyes fluttered briefly at the sickening remembrance.  “—everywhere, we’re short-staffed because your department can’t be bothered to hire more technicians!  I asked Rickert to watch the door, make sure nothing happened to the print—that I had to take care of a few things and that I’d be back to lift it when it dried.”  She paused, catching her breath.  “I was trying to organize everything.  I came back later, Rickert was gone and someone else said it had already been taken care of.  We got another call, I had to go.” Her face was red and indignant, her words falling on top of each other.

“Remaining on top of things under pressure is what leaders do, Vizcarrondo.” The chief was unrelenting. “If you can’t handle that, stay the hell out of a supervisory position.”

“I—I’m sorry.”  She should have yelled, went on, but his words were like a punch to the gut.

“Yeah, tell that to the Perelli family,” the chief grunted.  “You can bet that Henley will hear about this.  Now get out of here.”

Trying to keep her composure, Millie backed up, hurried out of his office.

word count: 497

 

 

“You can’t make me go get your coffee,” Josh Simmons whines.
I arch an eyebrow, giving him a look.
“Alright, alright.” The junior lab tech knows what was coming next and hurriedly gets up to fetch a cup of Folgers from the break room.

Smiling to myself, I continue with the schedule I’d begun to construct. The head of the lab, Roger Henley, is out for the next week and he’s left me in charge of my shifts at the lab.

Now I’m a goof and a joker when I want to be, even at work. But I take my responsibilities seriously, particularly when someone leaves me in charge.

Which is of course, why I’m currently sitting here rocking out to my iPod blasting in those nice little speakers while making a schedule that involves mostly work for Josh and Ira…

Whaaat? I’m supervising.

word count: 144

[[OOC: Locked, but feel free to leave OOC comments/feedback!]]

I’ve spent my life thinking things through.

I planned and I prayed and I was going to have this life.

I grew up visiting Puerto Rico. Every year we’d go and the magic that was in the ocean, in the white sand, would somehow find its’ way into myself, into my soul. The shimmering moon on the water at night, the warm beat of musica floating from down the beach, the smell of the ocean. It was mine. The world was mine. 

When you sit beside the ocean and you are young, you tell the ocean things.  Sometimes she speaks back to you.  Other times…you get no answer.  I had my answer long ago. 

Or so I thought. 

The plans I shared with the ocean under the tropical, heady light of the moon fell through. 

I planned and I built castles in the sky and they fell down.

I prayed and was met with disappointment.

I stopped believing in anything.

And now I have nothing to lose.

So why shouldn’t I give this a chance? 

Word Count: 175

 

 

 

OOC: This post is LOCKED, however please feel free to leave OOC comments.

She’d been metaphorically kicking herself since last Wednesday.  How she’d gone from the bodega to running into Mike Logan to Chinese food with him to…his apartment…She knew why. It was easier to pretend the whole thing had been an anomaly, an out-of-character incident…

But it wasn’t.  She may have tried to convince herself it was, may have already convinced him that she was long gone…but she couldn’t get him out of her head.   

When he talked to her—it was like he knew her. She couldn’t quite explain it.  The flirting in the lab was usual—she’d grown accustomed to it—working with cops who thought they could charm their way into faster lab results. But he wasn’t arrogant or demanding or teenage-boyish. He was different. When she looked into his eyes, she saw the same storminess, deep-set, even when joking, that often clouded her own.    

There was something honest about him, something unfiltered and almost…vulnerable.  She wondered if anyone else saw it.

She’d been trained in the Reserves and in the lab to look beyond the surface. She was surrounded by detectives and forensic personnel who were trained to the exact same thing.  Was she the first to see that there was more to him than he wanted people to think?  More than that, she thought to herself, he was the first person, of all the people since she’d returned, to see that there was more to her—more than the lab, more than her looks. 

For the first time in a long time…she felt beyond the surface. She was more than superficial. 

 

Word Count: 264

Letter #1:

To Whoever Took My Lemonade From the Lab Fridge and Replaced It With a Urine Sample:

I am going to find you. I have an entire lab at my disposal. I have dusted for fingerprints, I have done a Lumalite scan, I have found several fibers which are now being processed and it will NOT be long until I know who you are. You will be sorry. Very, very sorry. Have I mentioned the fact that I work in forensics and I’m fairly versed in what not to do when creating a crime scene?

Yes, I’ll kick your ass,
Millie


Letter #2:

To Everyone Who Read My Previous Letter:

I’m sorry. Doc Henley, the head of CSU, has requested that I apologize for the rude manner in which I threatened all of you. Rest assured, I will get you, you bastard am very sorry.

Always on the look out for you,

Millie


[154 words]

The flame on her Bunsen burner distracted Millie and instead of looking at the chemical reactions going on inside of the beaker, she stared at the orange and blue hues dancing under the glass. 

 She closed her eyes, growing warm in her lab coat as if the small flames were a furnace heating up the room. She didn’t have to think hard to feel the flames licking at her feet, to hear the shouts of the men in fatigues, dressed just like her, as they ran. 

No. She opened her eyes. She wouldn’t do this. Not here at work.   She poured another chemical into the beaker to see how it would react, see if it would help the detectives at the 1-4 solve their case.  She tried to think of something else, something to distract herself.  As the liquid in the beaker bubbled over, she remembered a day back in college, before everything had gotten so messed up, when things were a lot simpler.

Chem 101.  Hellerman Lab, or ‘the hell lab’ to all of the Criminal Justice majors.  She and Jackie had been stuck re-doing an assignment.  One wrong measurement on her part and setting the burner too high on Jackie’s part had led to a fire that had caused their Chem class to be cancelled for a week.  She laughed at the memory, a little sadly. 

It had been three years since she’d been back.  Three years and she still couldn’t pick up the phone and say ‘hello’ –talk to the best friend who had been there for her through college, three years and she couldn’t face the families of the boys who had been beside her, died beside her. 

Millie watched the flame again, wishing it could cleanse her, wishing it would redeem her.