And I'm excited about posting this drabble because it has some source material Buffistas know...despite being inspired by a L&O book challenge. Picture the Princess Bride with a minor casting change...Lennie Briscoe playing the Falk part.

The Grandfather sits on the bed, relieved he’s left his gun at the precinct. “Hey, kiddo, heard you’re sick.”

“Yeah. My throat hurts and everything.”

“Tough break. Brought you something.”

The boy rips the paper off. The grandfather wonders if he’d ever been that excited by anything, sober.Nah, people drink for a reason, probably. He smiles fondly.

“It’s a book.” His face and voice fall.

“Well, don’t get too excited all at once. Your mother will kill me if you have a relapse.”

“What’s it *for*?”

“Well, Smart Guy, I’m going to read it to you. Cheer you up. Maybe.”

(curses self for not knowing all these damn crimeshows. stupid self.)

Just rewatched Heart of Gold and realised how much better I like it with my slash goggles in place.

Unexpected.

Love was quite the last thing that Inara had been looking for, but she found it just the same.

It was difficult to pinpoint the moment when she realised that she had given away her heart; perhaps when Nandy caught her eye during the tea ceremony and Inara felt her stomach muscles clench with a shared sense of the ridiculous that brought her right to the very brink of laughter; perhaps the first morning when she woke up in Nandy's empty bed and pressed her face deep into the pillow, seeking out the familiar sharp-sweet scent. Easy to say when she had felt the first feather of desire – Nandy's beauty was the least of her attractions, but Inara had still noticed her on the very first day, even in the midst of all the other girls and the handful of boys, everyone peacock-proud in their finery, flaunting their firm young bodies and smug in the knowledge that they had succeeded where so many had failed. Bright young things with beauty and wit and flexible flesh, but Nandy stood out like a falcon surrounded by songbirds, drawing Inara's eye wherever she went. It was something about the ways she moved, confident without seeming to care how others saw her. Or her mouth, perhaps – a deprecating quirk which said that you and you alone could appreciate the joke. Or the set of her jaw when she had a weapon in her hands. Nandy was passionate about everything she did, and honest to a fault. She followed nobody else's lead, took risks that left Inara reeling, and there was absolutely nothing she would not do for a friend. They were chalk and cheese, ice and flame, silence and sound; Inara found Nandy utterly irresistible. She spoke without thinking, and didn't give a damn about the consequences, where Inara thought without speaking, and was forever assessing the possible repercussions of her every word and action.

Oh, and the way she kissed – her kisses were addictive. They broke Inara's resolve and cut cleanly through all the careful layers of professionalism she was crafting. Lying with Nandy should have been simple, a matter of mutual pleasure and increasing their skills, no more meaningful than a duet or a duel - but instead Inara always forgot to think about what she should be learning, about cause and effect, about manipulating and pleasing one's clients. Lying with Nandy was the best thing in Inara's life, and between Nandy's sheets she forgot about her carefully planned future and her glittering career. She forgot everything but the wickedly laughing girl who had fallen into her arms and into her heart.

Lying to Nandy was something else again; Inara's smiles remained nothing more than friendly, her words simply affectionate, even as Nandy slowly but surely became the centre of her world.

So it was easy enough to pinpoint the moment when desire first blossomed, but the point at which it had altered horribly, immutably into love – now that was another question altogether.

Nandy utterly undid her, without ever really realising it.

She had always been too good an actress. Too good at hiding her heart, that was the crux of the problem, and now this was never going to change. In hindsight her innocence appalled her. She hadn't imagined for a single moment that Nandy would leave the Academy; their futures were mapped out and glittering – power, wealth, independence, success. Respect. Somewhere along the line Nandy had become indispensable.

Until the morning when she decided that she could dispense with the Academy, and with Inara. They announced her departure quite casually in target practice, and suddenly there was a hole in the 'verse and Inara's heart gently shattered in her chest. For once she couldn't shoot straight to save her life. She had actually thought – and afterwards she never knew quite why – that Nandy understood. That Nandy knew her. That Nandy saw through all the professional shine and the practiced reserve, heard the words she still couldn't shape with her smooth tongue, and loved her back.

But she didn't, or at least not enough. And with this realisation, all the joy leached out of Inara's world, and her ambitions were so much dust.

She had always planned to live and work in the core, building a network of clients and colleagues in safety and security. With Nandy gone, it all seemed oddly pointless. She graduated with flying colours and found herself drifting; she attracted excellent clients and was squired to the finest events, but she could neither taste the food nor appreciate the dancing. She felt like she was sleepwalking through her life.

And so she left her life.

It was Serenity that caught Inara's eye; the ship had an indefinable air of rightness to her. Nothing glamorous, to be sure – her colleagues would be appalled at her choice. And yet – it was a sturdy little vessel, and honest. And there was something about Mal Reynolds – perhaps something about the way he moved, with an unstudied air of competence and authority; perhaps the hint of a smile. She saw the danger to it at once, but knew herself equal to it. Thought herself equal to it. Gradually Inara found herself fascinated in a way she had not anticipated; Malcolm Reynolds was not like any man she had ever known, and this was both his charm and his irritation

She built a life for herself; and if it was not the life she had expected, still it was a life that gave her unexpected pleasure and a kind of freedom she had not known to want. And temptations that she did not want to know. But she was forgetting Nandy, or at least thinking of her far less frequently, and that was all to the good.

Until the distress signal came, and Inara realised that the 'verse was a surprisingly small place…

It's ok, Fay...I do forget that UnAms don't have 47,000 hours of L&O to draw on...I know Lennie Briscoe better than my extended family. That's only a little bit as sad as it sounds.I do sort of feel like "Oh. Uncle Lennie," about him. Lennie is an alcoholic. Murder police. He thinks most people are stupid, but that's funny. He always has a smart remark. He plays the ponies, but not as much as he used to. He's tired of getting partners that are twelve.He's been divorced twice and doesn't trust women any more than he trusts men, which isn't much. When he was young, he used Langston Hughes poems to pick up girls.(This is starting to sound like one of those "My(Character's Name) essays. Ok, I'll go with that. My Lennie Briscoe is still torn up that he got Claire in that accident that killed her. But it's something he'd never talk about outside an AA meeting. There may be a vibe between him and his lieutenant but now that he's sober, he'd never shit where he ate. My Lennie Briscoe believes forensics are no substitute for pounding the pavement, partially because he can barely make his mobile work.My Lennie Briscoe is still halfway waiting for this computer thing to pass.

Fay! You are the bestest! Now that will be Inara's backstory for me.

I wrote a couple for this week's Open on Sunday challenge, which is faith (or Faith):

Belief

She believes it.

Power, strength, the scythe, Willow' spell. She believes it.

She believes as she dances in the blood of a dozen turok-hans, believes as a Potential becomes a Slayer before her eyes, believes as Spike calls out something incomprehensible that becomes Buffy's name, as he channels sunlight itself, flooding the darkness, dissolving into shattering rivers of light.

Yet the greatest belief is yet to come: as she leaps for the door, she turns back, and locks eyes with Buffy, for just a moment, Slayer to Slayer, darkness and light. She can be herself, Faith.

Buffy's got her back.

Vignette #1

In the total darkness, she's blind.

Her other senses are heightened to an unbearable edge. She tastes, smells, the blood-drenched darkness, its coppery bite settling into sinus and throat. She can feel the even, rhythmic sussuration of whatever is breathing at the far end of blackness, molecules of danger against her flesh. But vision is absent.

She closes her eyes and concentrates. It's a matter of faith. Being the Slayer is defined by that: faith in herself, her strengths, her intuition.

Buffy aims the crossbow into oblivion. All five senses register satisfaction, the demon screaming as the bolt connects.

Just a something triggered by natural history

Animal Planet, or, Sometimes the Entire World is Twelve Years Old

Xander plugged his ears against Spike's complaints about the limitations of basic cable. "I don't care if Giles had BBC America! You'll watch basic and like it, or don't you remember that you're the one tied up in the chair?"

Spike ambidextrously flipped Xander off with his right hand while shuffling through the channels on the remote control in his left hand. "Sadist. Bondage fetishist. You learn that from the unemployed librarian, who just happened to have chains to hand?"

"Shut! Up!" Xander debated the pleasures of bouncing a full can of Coke off an undead skull, then decided it'd only fizz all over the place and get the floor sticky. "I'm going to change my clothes. You're going to sit there and watch TV, then we're going over to Giles' for a Scooby meeting, where you'll find some reason to justify our feeding you. Capice?"

"Ooo, Godfather imitations, so scary."

One more growl, then Xander grabbed his clothes and headed into the tiny bathroom to change. He heard Spike muttering in annoyance, calling the CNN anchorwoman a badly dressed cow, bad-mouthing the movie on Sci-Fi, sneering at Christopher Lowell--then silence.

Silence? From Spike?

Xander finished dressing, then, after a brief hesitation of wondering if monsters had eaten Spike, he opened the door.

Spike was still in his chair, still as undead as ever, but he was staring in disbelief at the TV screen. Martha Stewart? Barney? Xander hurried around to see. Animal Planet? Monkeys? The narrator's voice began making sense.

"It's not quite clear what the purpose of penis fencing is among the bonobo monkeys. It may be a means of establishing dominance, or it may simply be a form of mutual grooming or interaction."

On the screen, two monkeys hung by their hands from separate branches, facing each other, swinging back and forth and bumping into each other. Fencing. With their erect penises.

"Pleasure is apparently not the primary purpose for this behavior, because the two males do not continue to ejac--"

Xander yanked the remote from Spike's unresisting fingers and changed the channel. Headline News, death and destruction, much more soothing. He stared at the screen, then looking down at Spike. The vampire was still blinking in disbelief, then he looked up at Xander. They stared at each other, both unable to form words.

"Time for the meeting," Xander finally said.

"Yeah. The meeting."

Later, they blamed everything on Giles.

"Yes, it's a standard course of study when preparing to join the Council," he told Willow. He looked a bit smug as he adjusted his glasses. "I must say, I was always fairly good at fencing. Xander, are you all right?"

Xander managed to clear his throat. "Sorry. Potato chip, wrong pipe." He took a quick swig of his soda and made very sure not to look in Spike's direction.

Buffy came out of the kitchen. "When are you going to teach me fencing, Giles?" Spike, sitting on the stairs and staying out of trouble for once, began coughing. After a quick, suspicious look, Buffy ignored him. "I mean, how hard can it be? Spike, how can you be choking? You don't breathe."

Spike, keeping his head down, just waved her off.

Giles was considering Buffy's suggestion. "I suppose I can show you the basics. It is a useful skill to improve hand-eye coordination, but I can't think that fencing would ever be your primary means of-- Xander, are you sure you're all right."

"Yeah, I'm sure," Xander said in a tight voice. From the corner of his eye, he saw Spike was apparently chewing on his knuckle to stay quiet. "I'm--gonna go outside. Get some air."

Spike swung off the stairs. "Dark out. Whelp needs a chaperone."

No one commented as the door closed behind them.

They stood in the courtyard, studying everything other than each other. Spike took a deep breath.

"Don't!" Xander said quickly.

"Parry," Spike said anyway. "Thrust."

"Don't say thrust!"

Spike made an unambiguous hip roll. "En garde!"

Xander buried his face in his hands. "I do not need these things in my brain." He heard slow, booted footsteps coming towards him. "Spike, what can I do to keep you from coming up with some vile innuendo on this?"

"Innuendo? Are you implying there could be something sexual about the subject at hand?"

"Oh, god, the whole world is twelve years old all of a sudden."

"Might just be you," a sultry voice whispered into his ear.

Xander jerked his head up and glared at Spike, who smirked at him. "Aren't you supposed to be chained up somewhere?"

"Is that an offer?" Maybe it was the look of imminent brain implosion on Xander's face that made Spike dial down the lewdness generator. "S'pose we ought to go back in there. Listen to the Watcher and the Slayer chatter about fencing some more."

Xander looked at Giles' door with something less than enthusiasm. "Or we could pick up some beer, go home, and watch TV. Animal Planet is hysterical when you're drunk."

"Sounds like a plan."

dying of laughter... must... breathe...

muHA!

Connie, only one word in there doesn't work: that "ambidexterously" threw me. Also, not needed, since you describe in the same sentence that he's using both hands. So the word there sent me hunting down an unneeded visual.

Other than that? Giggling madly.

Connie - smooooooch! That is wonderful!

Bwah! With a side order of Bwah!