Title: Default

Author: ScullyAsTrinity

Rating: PG

Thanks: Joan, Mel, and Lauren. Kisses!

Gil Grissom could count on one hand the times he'd been truly impulsive in his life. "Come to Vegas." Three words that were both refreshing and damning to his ears. He hadn't really meant to sound authoritative, but he had. "Come to Vegas, I need you he-" He'd very nearly told her that he needed her there but rectified the situation by saying, "I need your help."

When he'd met her in Boston, she smelled of snow and old newspapers with a swirl of mistletoe, and she was clutching her book protectively to her chest; a treasure for her to guard. The glint in her eyes had gathered him quickly, sucking him into some ethereal realm where he didn't care that he was asking her to go with him for coffee.

Coffee and walks and pizza and lectures and lectures and lectures later, he had her phone number in his possession and his in hers and they parted ways feeling like they'd missed something large.

Sadness and longing and beauty all tugged at her mind as she moved on to San Francisco. Guilt, guilt and terror and peace all climbed into his skull as Vegas lulled him into a constant cycle of work and more work. Without her. Never needing to be with her, but really, just wanting to be with her.

Then she called him, and he needed, and wanted to be with her. Just her

It was exponentially easier to play it safe. It was his motto, it soothed him to sleep in the morning and kept him from touching her on those long nights. And he became her supervisor and not her friend, no longer her friend.

The fission formed and they broke off at the middle, two separate people, ignoring the fragile past they'd built, the yearning for something, anything more. It would have been perfect and so wonderfully aberrant, truly. There would be no in between, it'd be both at once and so confusing and fantastic.

She just looked at him and saw the man that she was supposed to write into her will, she saw the man, the person she was supposed to be with. They were two puzzle pieces... both missing from the box, still stuck together, left under the coffee table.

He'd been the ghost in high school, exceeding far beyond his peers academically, never having the chance to find a social life, or attempt to cultivate one. So when the beautiful, smart girl at the top of her class asked him out, twenty years later, he didn't know what to do.

And she was still here and he was still there and the two of them pretended like they hadn't lost something, like they didn't have something infinitely better to gain.

But he'd never give it the chance and she'd never stop hoping.

True, she loved him, but just for a moment, if only for a moment, she just wanted her friend back.

He was right in front of her and she missed him so much, she wanted to cry.