Title: In Limine
Summary: What if fanfic and reruns are the afterlife for dead TV characters? Claire Kincaid discovers that her life isn't what she assumed it to be. But is there anything she can do about it now?
Rating: T for coarse language and suggestive themes.
Disclaimer: I do not own "Law and Order", nor any of the characters therein. I am making no profit from this. None of the fan fictions referenced in this story are real stories.
Characters: Jack McCoy, Claire Kincaid, Lennie Briscoe, Mrs Kincaid, Mac Gellar, extras.
Spoilers: Everything through Season 16.
Thanks: plkphoto did an outstanding job betaing this story and it would be far weaker without her help. Any remaining mistakes or failures of judgement are entirely down to me.
In Limine
In limine (at the threshold)
Ab Initio
Ab initio - From the beginning
Claire Kincaid is dreaming.
She dreams of her life, not always in the order it happened. Courtrooms, conference rooms, Jack McCoy… more rarely, Ben Stone. It's so vivid that the carpet on the 10th Floor of One Hogan Place still smells of cigarette smoke from the days when ADAs could smoke in the office and almost all did. Adam Schiff is forever putting on his hat and saying something cynical. Jack is … Jack is Jack. Sometimes he makes her want to cry. Sometimes he makes her laugh. Sometimes he makes her want him so much she can barely stand up.
The dreams are always curiously abbreviated. She is at work, eating greasy Chinese food in the conference room over a case file. She is in a bar with Jack, white wine smooth in her mouth as she meets Jack's knowing gaze over the rim of his scotch glass. She is in court, heart pounding as she walks towards the witness stand, pretending a confidence she has only copied from Jack and Ben.
She is never brushing her teeth or in the shower.
From time to time she jogs in Central Park.
She doesn't like that dream. She tries to wake up when it happens.
Awake, she is in a huge cafeteria. It looks institutional. It might be a prison. It might be worse. Claire isn't sure and she's afraid to ask.
Sometime there are other people there. Sometimes Lennie Briscoe is there. Sometimes he isn't.
"I'm only dead sometimes, kiddo," he tells her, and before she can ask him what he means he's gone.
Very rarely, she dreams she is a medical examiner in Boston. Those dreams are the most confusing. Lennie explains to her that she is crossing over into someone else's TV show. That doesn't make sense to Claire, but it seems to make sense to Lennie.
Other dreams, hazy and vague, of a life she thinks she might have had, of a life she's certain she didn't have, of everything in between. She went to Harvard, Yale, NYU. She came first in her year. She barely passed.
She dreams, in a funny misty way, that she leaves Jack and he comes after her and they have an emotional reunion at the top of the Empire State Building.
She dreams that Jack leaves her in an act of heroic self-sacrifice and she finds out she'd pregnant, and eight months later confronts him in court before going into labour and delivering with the help of Danielle Melnick and Sally Bell.
In one dream she spends spent most of the time in the ladies cutting herself with a razor blade before taking an overdose.
Too weird. Next time she sees Lennie, she asks him what the hell is going on.
"Fanfic, honey," he says. "Can I have some of those cornflakes?"
"I don't like cornflakes," Claire tells him.
"You can't always have what you want," Lennie says. Claire looks around to see where the food came from, to see if she can get something more to her taste. When she looks back Lennie is gone.
She dreams she saves Jack's career by shredding Diana Hawthorne on the stand. That's a good dream.
She dreams her affair with Judge Thayer comes out and she has to look at the disappointment in Ben's eyes. That's not so good.
She dreams Jack takes her away on a Caribbean holiday and they have sex all day every day for a week, a kind of indistinct sex that doesn't seem to involve actual genitals. That's an extremely good dream, even without the genitals, although once Claire finds herself holding Jack's hand while he swims in the pool two hundred yards away. That kind of creeps her out.
"Fanfic, honey," Lennie tells her from the cabana.
She eats more cornflakes. She really hates cornflakes.
She dreams she and Jack get married and bring up his daughter together and have two kids of their own and she gives up law and stays home baking cookies. She wakes up from that one feeling as if she is covered with hives, thinking that cornflakes aren't so bad after all.
"Just be glad you're a woman," Lennie tells her. "If I have to 'comfort' the DA again I'll stick a spork in my eye."
Claire inhales a cornflake. When she finishes coughing Lennie is gone again.
"What do you mean, 'only dead sometimes'?" she asks him when he comes back. "Am I dead all the time?"
He sighs. "Honey, do you remember the accident?"
The accident. That's what comes after she goes jogging. Bright light – horn –
"It's okay, it's okay, kiddo, it's okay." Lennie's arms are around her and Claire realises she is sobbing hysterically. She makes herself take a deep breath and calm down. Think this through. If you learnt anything from Ben and Jack, it's to use your head and think things through.
"So I'm dead," Claire says. "Is this the afterlife? It doesn't feel like the afterlife. It feels like a lunchroom."
"It's kind of a green room. A green room for dead characters."
"Characters?"
Lennie sighs again. "Claire, honey, I don't know how to tell you this, but – you aren't real. Neither am I. We're characters in TV show, and the writers killed you off in a car accident when the actress who played you went on to do her own show."
"The actress who played me?" Claire asks, feeling hysteria threaten again. "I'm not real? I'm not a person? What about the dreams? I dream I'm real."
"Those are re-runs," Lennie says.
"And the other dreams? The fuzzy ones? The ones where I went to the wrong university? The ones about – about, you know?" Claire can't bring herself to say the dreams about all the sex to Lennie.
"Fanfic," Lennie says. "All those people who watched you in the show who don't want it to be over and write their own version of you, of your life off screen, of things that might have happened if you hadn't died."
"I'm dreaming other people's stories? Other people writing about me?"
"Well, they love you," Lennie says, but now Claire is having trouble getting her breath. "Claire honey, I'm sorry."
But it's too much. Too much. Claire closes her eyes and goes away.
.oOo.