Title: Lemon Girls.
Spoilers: Vague?
Rating: R for sex, death and swearing.
Disclaimer: I own zip.
Summary: Lindsey dies.
Author's notes: Quite dark actually. Be warned.
So as per usual I meant to write less than a thousand words but the story wouldn't have it. I'm not sure I nailed this piece because it has been quite an ambitions thing so far. I had so much fun trying to juggle all the characters and work them all in without going out of character for any of them. As I said, I tried.
Feed Back: I particularly want to know…
1. What lines you felt were most on character.
2. Which characters I nailed.
3. Which ones I really didn't.
4. I meant this to be a Catherine piece but she got shorted because I was enjoying seeing how the other characters could respond to her tragedy. Sara somehow ends up getting the most syllable time and I want to know if the story came off as unbalanced because of it. Thanks.
---
---
---
---
Lindsey dies.
---
Day one:
A body like a picked flower, cast onto the street and fifteen flashing red and blue light bulbs. Now Brass understands why people hate the cops. "If the grim fucking reaper had a thousand decibel siren attached to his ass."
There's a small red Honda parked in a 'No Parking' zone and when Brass asks the driver if he's had anything to drink the answer is a resounding, "No!" followed by dry heaving (any liquids are long gone- already soaked up by the thirsty Vegas lawn).
Despite the violent way the man's shoulders are shaking, he isn't drunk- brass knows that smell, like rotting pickles.
Brass, who has never understood the morbid curiosity of a Crime Scene Investigator, gets him self out of the way- walks three blocks to the nearest bar. He stands in front of it- small, one story building full of cigarettes and cue chalk. The words 'addictive personality' are staring him in the face.
Catherine is back at the lab, oblivious. "Well, I can't tell her the news if I'm drunk." decides Brass. He finally turns away from the tacky flickering neon, imagining a much less sober phone conversation than the one he's about to have:
"Itss your daughter… whass her name? Lindsey, yeah. Well, You uh- you sure don't have to worry bout a buncha porn-fer-brains boyfrienss anymore."
Brass hangs a right and ends up two blocks down, sitting on a wooden park bench with a sliver in his palm and his cell phone ringing in his ear. She answers after the second ring. He can hear the fax machine in the background. Can hear her busy heels punching the floor and Doc Robbin's voice. Trading one body for another.
"Catherine," says Brass, "it's Lindsey-" By the stillness on the other end of the line he thinks she probably already knows but he says a little more for good measure.
She chokes into the phone a moment before the line goes dead.
---
---
Day two:
Just one rusty Honda on the corner of 53rd and "Internal Bleeding" Avenue.
That's what 'Fredric the Insensitive Lab Tech' calls it when Catherine's out of the room. Warrick's in the room though and the look on his face leaves nothing to uncertainty. He balls the print out of his victim's tox screen into a wad and lets it skitter silently from his hand to the floor.
"What did you say?" asks Warrick.
---
---
When Nick manages to drag Warrick from the room it is with flailing limbs. Nick will have grip shaped bruises on his arms tomorrow.
"What's your problem?" yells the tech, tidying spilt papers into stacks. Fredric is new in the lab. It's his second shift and he's only met Catherine once- never met her daughter.
Never will.
"They're outsiders, Man," says Nick ten minutes later. Both men sit on the hood of Nick's car in the parking lot, feeling the last of the engine's warmth still seeping into the night air. "They've got no idea what this is about."
Warrick picks at the bubbling paint, doesn't apologize for the mess he's making of Nicks three hundred dollar hood. "If we could just do something-," says Warrick, "instead of standing around waiting for what? A funeral? That's crap."
Nick shakes his head. "It's not about forensics, 'Rick- you know that." And Warrick, digging his fingertips into his denim clad knees, spits, "Oh yeah? Then what is it about?"
Nick is the only man anyone has known to ever sleep with a prostitute out of the goodness of his heart (He'll say he was just thinking with his pants but Nick watched her breathing for five minutes before she kicked him out. He counted seven different colors of brunette on that girl's head.)
Mr. High School Dependable.
Of course it would be Nick who slips off the hood of the car, brushes his hands through his hair as thought trying to grip something he hasn't been able to, and says, "Well… maybe we just care more."
But ten minutes earlier…
Nick pulls Warrick out of the lab by sheer force of will alone. Catherine is in a room down the hall wearing pursed lips and eyeliner. She isn't planning on tears.
Warrick- needing to drown out the sound of his own grief- buries his face in the sweater fabric of Nick's shoulder and sobs, just for a moment. Archie sneaks out into the hall to identify the commotion- sees this open-mouthed desperation and ducks quietly away. "Men don't cry," says Nick, "we just sweat from our eyes." And both men manage to laugh tightly- head for the parking lot and the comfort of Vegas air at night.
---
---
Nick and Warrick joined the lab the year after Lindsey was born. By coincidence they both came by the lab the day before their first shift to get their bearing. Catherine was there, looking to get butterfly samples for the walls of her kitchen from Grissom. They met her first in the same parking lot they've taken refuge in tonight. She had a stroller gripped tightly in her hands.
Catherine was wearing a halter-top, yellow and green- Catherine's hair was pinned in a mess on top of her head, dashing into her face like the flares of a firework. Both Willows women were nearly silent, springtime pale and smelling of pablum.
Mother and daughter- they would look alike, walk alike, speak alike- their blue eyes staring upwards, seducing the sky.
---
---
Day three:
The coroner's report gets leaked out by the third day. It doesn't take much- another nosey lab tech and 68 hours worth of repressed curiosity. "People's professionalism is a weak front," thinks Grissom. He is more silent than usual, watching a tarantula in a glass case as though, for the first time he can see the ugliness in it.
Sara crosses her arms in front of her to block a shiver. Finally, she turns towards the door. She's in his office again without knowing why.
She's half way out before his voice catches up with her. These moments between them, breathless and underdeveloped- this is when she always feels like a dog on a choke chain, dashing away before realizing she's hung up somewhere further back along the line. "Sara-"
Grissom is more compulsive than usual. She's never seen him take on trivialities before and now the whole lab is nervous because of it. Sara blinks a moment, guesses her own heart rate, "125bpm" and turns back to face him.
Of all the useless things he could have said:
"Let me know if you'd like to take some time off."
"There's no such thing, Grissom."
Their relationship is compiled of, "time off," and, "time off without pay," and, "overtime," and, "Ecklie wants me to fire you." Sara shuts the door behind her when she goes. It's the first time he knows he loves her.
---
---
It only takes thee days before curiosity gets the better of someone. "It had to happen sooner or later," says Catherine blankly. She is eating her lunch with the TV on mute, and a pair of four-inch heels on her feet. "Hey Cat," says Greg from the coffee maker. "Y'know stiletto is a kind of knife?" beat. "Cuz, yikes." She regards him with a look in her eyes, unflinching. He thinks, "Now I know what it looks like to break down on a cellular level."
Catherine would tear herself apart from the inside out if she knew how. She smokes on her smoke breaks and wears shoes with angry names.
---
---
Sara is playing with a pair of left handed scissors when Hodges passes her the results of a fabric search and says, "Did you know it took Willows' daughter six minutes to drown in her own blood?" Hodges is incredulous. "The PD was practically there. If that idiot in the car had done the CPR she probably could have-"
Sara slaps the scissors down on the desk. They clatter and fall silent. She leaves before he can finish.
Greg finds Sara in the break room with shards of glass sparkling dangerously on the linoleum. She's broken the 6" by 6" mirror hung on her locker door. "You know, crying is less expensive." Says Greg, approaching her slowly ("Always maintain eye contact." Discovery channel trivia for seven-year-olds
She and he kneel close to each other and clean up the pieces. Small dusty slivers work their way into his fingertips but he doesn't feel them. He's watching her. When she sweeps her palm over the floor looking for stray shards he can see the blood and flecks of glass still glistening on her knuckles. His throat tightens until he isn't sure he can speak without shattering. "This is not part of the deal," thinks Greg. "I'm not going to love you if you're going to be breaking things." He takes her hand in his and gently brushes off the skin. "Come on," he wheedles, "don't make me do it for you."
"Do what?"
"Cry."
If he were Grissom, Sara would pull her hand away and quote some appropriate verse:
"'-a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way.' Jean Anouilh."
"Anouilh was referring to propaganda, Sara."
"I know… but I was referring to anger."
She would leave Grissom to his own desperate composure. She would shiver in the hall and feel his breath on her shoulder for hours.
---
---
Seven-year-old Greg Sanders wants Kool-Aid when he has root beer, wants root beer when he has Kool-Aid, wants Pepsi most of all but his mom never buys that kind. No one ever wants what they can get. It's a little bit tragic, perhaps, but who really likes comedy anyway?
Sara lets him slowly trace his fingertips along her bare skin. Because she allows it, Greg knows this doesn't mean much.
He finds it funny. Lindsey's death was surprisingly neat; there was almost no blood on the body- all the damage blooming post mortem, like clouds in an overcast sky. Two days later, it's Sara Sidle's blood on his own fingers, and on his face because he's kissing her wounds.
When her knuckles touch his lips he means it to be something else entirely- soft touch- gentle, gentle. All better now, Sara- but then his mouth is kinda open and she smells like grape bubble gum and the sound she makes when he touches her is low enough for him to feel the reverberations.
Her eyes are dry, his are glassy wet and he ends up licking the sticky moisture off of her skin in a rush. Sara watches him tongue the blood from her knuckles- holds her breath and bites back ten responses that are lies- a dozen more that are true.
"Oh god," she whispers when what she really means is, "Grissom," and then catches her breath and amends for both statements, "I don't believe in him any way."
When she leaves the room she wipes Greg's saliva from her knuckles. She has epithelials waiting.