Spoiler Alert: Spoilers for Seasons 2 & 3, up to and including "Silent Night".

A/N: I love to hear from readers, and I promise to respond.

Disclaimer: No infringement of copyright is intended. All characters originated with CSI:NY; all song lyrics are from The Beatles.

It's A Long Journey Home

Chapter 1: She's Leaving Home

Something inside that was always denied for so many years.

Bye, bye.

Danny sat in the parking lot of the airport staring blankly at the planes soaring into the darkening sky. She'd gone. He had missed the plane, and she was gone, and he was damned if he was going to go running in there and try to catch up with her, like some pathetic schmuck in a bloody chick flick.

She'd left him a note. A goddamn fucking note. What was this – high school? A bloody made-for-TV movie on the W channel? It was as bad as her lame "It's not you" speech a few months ago. What kind of crap was that to pull on him?

And why, why was all his anger not enough to keep him from still caring?

He got it, he really did. Something had happened to her in Montana. From the bits and pieces her friends in New York had put together before she disappeared, it was something bad. You didn't just drop hints to trained investigators. It had taken Stella and him approximately ten minutes to find the news reports of the shooting at her high school nearly 13 years earlier. Four kids dead: all the kids in the science lab except for one 16-year-old Lindsay Monroe.

So many things came together as he read through the stories: her toughness; her determination to match up to expectations; then, over the past few months, her growing uncertainty at scenes. After being blown up twice in one year, after seeing Stella attacked in the one place she should have been safe, after seeing both Mac and Flack injured doing the jobs they were so experienced at, was it any wonder she had started to doubt herself?

But why hadn't she come to him? He'd offered; God knows he'd done everything but lie down in front of her to be walked over. He thought she trusted him; even if they weren't friends – and evidently she disagreed with him on that score – they were partners, for Chrissakes. If you didn't trust your partner, you were finished.

"Well," Danny thought bitterly, "I guess that's what we are. Finished." Before they'd even had a chance to start.

Stella had sent Lindsay home after her break-down in the morgue. "See you in the morning," she'd said, and Lindsay had nodded, given her that trembling smile that was the only one they'd seen for weeks now. But no one had seen Lindsay the next morning, or at all during the day. Calls to her home, to her cell, nothing had reached her.

Finally, just before her worried friends had sent out a search party, Mac had come into the lab and told them tersely that Lindsay was on leave, indefinitely. It was hard to tell whether this had been her decision or his. As usual, Mac gave nothing away; in fact, he had been more close-lipped than normal. Even when Stella followed him into his office, she came out with no additional information, at least none she was willing to share, no matter how much Danny begged.

After humiliating himself, he had slammed into the office he and Lindsay had shared. In the middle of her entirely too clean desk had been the envelope addressed simply to Messer in Lindsay's careful handwriting.

The night before, after Stella had told him about the incident in the morgue, Danny had read every story he could find on the Montana shooting. It was a case of the bullied taking revenge: a fifteen-year-old boy taking out the people he felt had rejected him. In this case, the perp had gone after the Science Club, saying in the suicide note he left in his bedroom that they should have been the ones to let him in. "They had no right to keep me out," the note had ended. The boy had been taken down by police – suicide by cop, kids called it – after walking into the school during final period and shooting up a science lab, casually searching out and fatally shooting every person in the room.

Except one. The shooter had looked right at Lindsay, according to one news report, pointed the rifle at her, and said, "Bang." Then he walked out the door into a barrage of gunfire. As it turned out, though, he hadn't died. He had been paralysed by a bullet which severed his spine. Danny couldn't find any further information on the shooter; he seemed to have disappeared.

"When asked, Monroe could give no explanation for the shooter's bizarre behaviour." The newspaper report had gone on, "Several of the parents asked the same question. 'Why was she spared?' one distraught mother asked. 'My son was all I had, and he is dead. Why is Lindsay Monroe not with him?' When she went on to suggest that Monroe had somehow been involved, friends and family hushed her and refused to allow reporters any further access."

And there was some explanation for why she "couldn't handle mothers." Danny shuddered. It was hard to imagine what damage that whole experience had done to a 16 year old. But she had fought back, hadn't she? Gone on to university, majored in bio-chemistry, joined the Montana State Police right after graduating with all kinds of honours, did her time on the street and in the lab. She was an experienced officer and criminal investigator, and one of the bravest people Danny had ever met.

He'd followed her to the airport when he figured out that she'd be on the evening flight direct to Bozeman, yelling his destination to Stella as he ran out of the building. He didn't know why she had run away. Now, what was he going to do about it?

He put his head down on the steering wheel and took a deep breath. Nothing. That was what he was going to do. Nothing. "How many ways she gotta tell you, Messer? No, thanks. She doesn't want your help, or anything to do with you. Just get on with your job."

He rubbed his eyes fiercely with the sleeve of his coat, lifted his head, and stared once more into the lit windows of the airport. As he had sat there, the sky had gone from dusk to black, and he could now see people through the airport windows like little puppets on a stage. He couldn't help searching for her, just one last sight of her, even though he knew her flight was probably now somewhere over the Great Lakes. For a moment, he thought he saw her, but when he blinked, the person he thought was Lindsay was gone.

He reached into his coat pocket and drew out the letter. He hadn't even read it when he picked it up, just glanced at the first line, then shoved it in a pocket and run for the car. His breath had frozen in his lungs at the sight of the envelope. He didn't even rate a Danny from her; the last words she wrote for him and she called him Messer. What more did he need to know?

He took a deep breath and held it as he carefully, painstakingly, opened the envelope. He needed to know more. The perils of being an investigator, he thought with a grimace: 'satiable curtiosity, like the Elephant's Child. He had to know everything he could, even if the knowledge brought him no peace, even if the knowledge brought him even more pain than he was in now. Leaving things alone was not an option.

Even as a kid, he'd always picked at scabs, sometimes just to see what would happen.

He steeled himself for the moment when he opened the letter, then quickly scanned it, as if reading it as fast as possible would lessen the hit.

I have to go home and deal with things there. I'm sure by now you and Stella have figured it all out. There's too much to explain. I don't even know where to start.

Please don't try to get in touch with me. If you ever cared about me at all, leave me alone.

Lindsay

Danny read the brief note again, then once more slowly. Nope. It didn't get any better read slow. His hands came together once, twice, three times, and the letter lay in shredded pieces at his feet.

Sort of like his heart.