Author: Winter Wolf 1993

Disclaimer: Nope, I don't own CSI. Don't own, don't sue. Deal?

Summery: I didn't believe the woman then, and this girl doesn't believe me now.

Seen it before, but not like this.

Been there before but not like this.

Never before have I ever seen it this bad.

She's just a woman.

Never Again.

" It's going to be okay," I whisper to the young girl who's clutching at my hand as if it's her lifeline. Maybe it is.

Her mother is on her way to a psych ward, her father's dead and her older brother is so high on drink and drugs that I doubt that he knows what's going on. He probably think that the red and blue lights are pretty.

She looks up at me and I know what she's thinking.

You're not my mother, you don't know what happened in that house. You don't know me. You're wrong.

A mirror into the past and I can see myself in her eyes.

Ten years old, blood spatter on the walls of my parents bedroom and me standing in the doorway watching in shock.

The blood stains everything around it and it stained my mind.

The knife seems to move in slow motion and he yells when it first pierces his skin, but after the fifth time he is silent.

Silent and dead and I feel cold because I want to believe what my mom's saying.

" It's over, Sara, it's over. He'll never hurt us again. Never again,"

I don't know that she's lying, because I just want to feel safe.

But she's lying.

" She told me it was over," The girl whispers and I look at her and very nearly trip over a step. I stop and crouch down to her level before she continues to talk. "She told me it was going to be okay, she told me her was never going to hurt me again. She told me... that I'm going to be okay. Will I?"

I feel sick because I can tell her what is going to happen, the name calling, the whispers and the rumours when this all gets out and the case is in every newspaper in the city.

I feel sick because I can tell her what is coming, but I know that it will come out as a warning.

I swallow and I say that I don't know.

It's safer to lie when it's a child's sanity on the line.

It's not until I lie on my bed late at night that I remember.

My mother said that he'd never hurt me again.

She never said that I was saved.

(I'm not)

Author's Note: Please review!