Attention to Detail
By Fewthistle

Author's Note: Written for Challenge Two, Prompt Two at the Livejournal Community even_angels_. First and last lines written by flying_peanuts.

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.