AN- I own nothing. Set early season six. No connection to Living/Dead Doll.

Part One
You don't want to be telling this story.

Memories can be like dreams, if you like. Write a dream down, you remember it; but if you let it fade, eventually it's gone.
Memories are the same.

Tell yourself it never happened, then maybe one day you might believe yourself.

You don't get to forget today.

Was the interrogation room always this grey?
Maybe it's the rain.

You're glad it's Brass, then again maybe you wish it wasn't. This would be easier for both of you if you were strangers.

You don't want to see his face when you tell him, don't want him to know. It can be your own private horror, and at least he won't look at you different.
He'll wish he could just read it on paper later, so then when it gets too much he can just put it down for a moment and remember to breathe.
Breathe.

Too bad for you both.

He's doing the paperwork, filling out the beginning of the witness statement, moving his pen slowly.
He's stalling.
You know it, he knows it, and he knows you know and—

He puts the pen down.
Your throat shuts off.

He clasps those of his hands together, looks at you with those terrible kind eyes.

God, this is going to be hard.

You want to look up, down, anywhere but him, but instead you meet his eyes.

"Start from the beginning, Sara. Take your time."

You wish he hadn't said your name.
Now you can't pretend it was someone else.

It was raining.

Then again, maybe it wasn't. Your mind might have added that in, to explain to itself why it never heard those footsteps or that heavy breath.

You think it was raining.

You're walking out of the labs towards your car. You look up, to a sky etched with lead and silver.
You stop, take in the smell of dampness.
What were you thinking?

Even in your head, you stand for too long.

Where did you go after that?

You don't know. To your car, maybe.

Do you remember?

Do you?

You remember the rain.
No.

No smell, no taste, no prickling on your spine.

Only that frozen moment.

Then…

You don't remember.

How can this happen?
How can you lose such chunks of time?

You think sometimes maybe if you remembered how, when, how this started, you could let this fade away. If only you knew the how.

Did you go home?

Did you?

Yes, you must have. They found open OJ on the counter. The fridge door was still open.

Do you remember going home?

No. You remember the sky, you remember the cold.

But then, there is nothing.

Do you remember grabbing at the door?

He shows you the pictures, the photos.
Scours in wood.

You can imagine yourself. Him, pretending to be a delivery guy. Or maybe he was waiting inside, watching as you opened the fridge.
Drugging you, you fighting.
Maybe.

But when you look down, there is nothing. They are only pictures.

Not memories.

Besides.
It doesn't matter anyway.

Because whatever happened, you never saw him coming.

What did he say?

She came to me.

Maybe you did.

What do you remember?

Cold.

You're cold; shaking.

You can't remember where you are, can't remember waking up. You can't see through the dark, and you can hear the drip of water as you shake and sweat on your side in the darkness.

And the smell.

Oh God, the Smell.

That you remember. Like formaldehyde, like sulphur. Some you don't forget.

You're sick and shaking, your muscles ache and you put a hand to the ground and find sticky, dirty softness.

A bed? No, mattress.

You want to sit but know if you move you'll be sick-

Oh, the smell-

You're sick anyway, and the smell is worse.

There's chloroform on your cheeks, its tacky in your hair. You smell it even through that stink as you try to sit, clinging to the walls, wishing the floor would stop twitching like a dying animal.

You close you're eyes and swallow bile, trying to think.

The floor convulses and shudders, and you nearly lose it again.

Think, think!

You know you're panicking, and you fight it down.

There's an angry hissing in your ears, and somehow you end up in a corner of the room (is it?) hands clawed around your head as you fight inside for control.

Whatever else it is wins, and you faint into a shivering darkness.

That you remember.

You've missed the prologue and skipped ahead to the first chapter. How are you supposed to understand?

You don't like this, it leaves you cold. Brass's expression is unreadable but you can hear those echoes in the other room.

Grissom left the door open outside, so you know he's there.

You still can't decide if this is better.

Just stop, if this is too hard. We will find something, look harder.
He said that to you, muttered it in your ear as Brass beckoned you forward.

You both know you can't do that, but you appreciated the thought.

There is nothing. Only you.

What do you remember?

The first time?

Why not second, third? The fifth stands out particularly well in your head, but then after that you cannot pick out the details.

You don't want to.

What do you remember?

The first, then.

Only flashes. Sounds, smells.
And you remember smelling blood in the air, knowing it was yours but not remembering where you were cut. There are images of cast-off, but they're from your fathers murder, not yours.
You were fighting for your life, and there was only that black terror and those thoughts you never wanted to think, boiling and screaming in a rage that left you bloodless, dry, drained.

If only he hadn't been so clean. If only you had left a deeper mark. If only the evidence was enough that you didn't have to do this.

You remember thinking you were going to die.

And glasses, flickering like candles as the light reflected.

But you've erased the details, and nothing in this world or hereafter will make you drag those minutes back. Though you think it was then he forced the ring onto your fingers, because you had it after.

What do you remember?

Nothing.
Nothing at all.

First days.

They are hard.

No time, and all the time in the world. You learn that he is not going to kill you yet, and you can hope. You rotate around the room, and you fight the door and claw for the metre long crack above your head that tells you this is a basement.

And that ring on your finger. It mocks you, and you can't understand how he got it on when you can get it off.

No matter.

You pressed your thumb over and over again on the walls; you ripped out hairs and hid them in a crack in the wood of the stairs.

There is no shortage of blood for you to paint the walls with.

But other ways; they were your backup. You broke your nails in the door, you index finger trying to force the hinges.

And him. Him.

Each time he comes, you embroidered a patchwork in you head. You memorised, catalogued him in your head, because you thought later you might need it.

Hoped you could use it.

How could you have had so much hope?

And such a monstrous patchwork.

You are dancing around what Brass wants to hear.

He knows, has been told, to be careful what he asks. You are delicate, breakable, fragile. You've heard these words when they didn't think you could listen.

Brass is being to soft on you, and you want to tell him that, if only he might listen.

A sound, you think, and you turn your head slightly.

There's a ghost watching you from the mirror, but you've grown used to her and can tolerate. It's what's behind you that worries you.
What does he think of you?

You've forgotten a darkness like this, like floating in a void. A smothering Abyss of nothing, the claustrophobia of empty spaces.

You can't stand the silence.

You could scream, if you wanted. You think you might have at the beginning, but it's too hard to remember.

When you think back all you see is darkness, with the memories of before just echoes. Some days you woke up and panicked because you couldn't remember the name of your neighbour, can't think of how old Lindsey is. Can't remember day or date.

You want to scream.

Shriek the walls down, rocks etched in soundwaves and echoes.

But you've tried, and the fact that there's only the quiet, before, after, always makes you curl under the stairs and go over it all in your mind.

For there must be a way. Logic has not let you down yet.

Tell me about what he did.

Brass is like a terrier with this question.

No.

You can tell about what you thought, saw, heard. You can describe the room, tell how there were twenty cracks on the ceiling, how nine branched and three were straight as rulers. You can tell about the smell of the stone, the taste of copper from the line of water that snakes its way down the left wall.

You looked at these. You described the walls, the shape of the crack that is like a half open gape mouth, the colour of the light as it faded.

You could list a thousand other things that seemed more important before you would ever come to what he did.

There is a sound, through the glass.

Brass stops, and scowls at his reflection.
You turn, and you don't know if you should laugh, or turn away in shame.

You wonder what the sound was; imagine him sitting and quietly listening, then not so quietly snapping something in half.
Suddenly, you don't want him to hear the next part. You know he will be hurt, but despite that you ask Brass to turn off the mike.

It's only later, after you've finished, that you remember you should've turned your back so he couldn't see your lips.

You were his mannequin, his living doll. A body he hung a face on.

You felt it in the way he looked at you, that vacant gaze.
You knew when he stated calling you by her name.

You wondered, once, in a haze, what you'd done for your body to be used like this.
You wondered who he hated so much

It was Grissom, who told you later, about her.

You saw her, when he faced court the first time. You looked away from him, and saw her looking. Her face was veiled, dark, and you knew it was from shame of him than for the fact you looked like her.

You focus through the veil, and her head lowers away from you.
You want something from her, but you don't know what. You never got the chance either, because she vanished the next day out of Las Vegas, and not even Brass can hunt her down.

You still don't know if she will get any of your blame.

What will you do, with all these ghosts?

These other women, lingering in the shadows and stains and random scratches on the walls. You wonder how many, who they were.

Someone scratched lines on the wall, and you think she might have realised how much a prisoner she was. You wonder at how there are only four lines, whether it was better if she simply gave up or it was something else that stopped her.

Maybe you should leave something on the walls, like they did. Handy hints on how to survive starvation, though you realise you wouldn't have a clue. You don't know how you're surviving.

You wonder if you'll be someone else's ghost.

There is a cross, right up the back of the hole beneath the stairs, so you know someone else hid here too.

You don't believe in God, you don't believe in believing. But someone prayed to be released, and if you sit close it might happen to you too.

Salvation by proxy.

You pray, and the words are half formed, half forgotten.

Thou art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name…

What did you do when they read this out in school? You thought about gravity, relativity, about the boy who sat next to you.

You can't remember his name, and it seems vitally important that you do.

For Thine is thy kingdom.

You think instead of the poem, and wonder at this whimper.

You think you'd have rather the bang.

In the end, you do leave something on the wall. You scratch his name, and though it takes you a day you still don't know why. You can't decide whether it is to remind yourself, or so that he might be able to find you after you've gone.
You scratch it, and all the while the ghosts are there, and you feel them watching.

Deliver us from evil.

Yes, it is an us now, because those ghosts are innumerable and one, and the weight of them is going to end you.

You hoped someone was looking.

They had to be.

You think of the lab, what they might be doing. Are they still looking for you? You wonder if you imagined it sometimes. Imagined that life.

You think you got out once. You have an image of darkness, you crouched beneath cavernous roots as he hunts you, but then again you could have dreamt it.

How much of this is real?

You have strange dreams, now.

Flashes, memories.

Doing work in the labs. Talking with people. Greg. Nick. Old crime scenes. Driving.
Boring, mundane things. Your brain sifting through its back files.

You miss them.

Faces, sounds.

They drift in and out, blurring into a smear of wanting.

You're spending time in your head now, and you live in old memories of San Francisco, old times, but they merge and leave you dizzy.

You're so tired even when you wake, and you're eyes always seem to ooze with wetness.

Yet almost fretfully, your mind keeps pulling the memories up, trying to take you home.
You wish it would stop.

Brass has stopped asking questions.

He sits, and listens as you talk.
Your voice is flat, and you stop it from shaking by not saying the things that will make it waver.

His face is blank, and the room behind the looking glass is silent.

Grey sky, grey sand, flat desert.
Empty space that stretches so far it seems you feel claustrophobic in the abyss. You're sitting, staring at the grey absence above your head.

Grissom is there.

He doesn't seem to find this odd, and you don't question.

He's turning his hand, watching as a spider crawls over and over as he turn and turns, and you both watch its little legs jerk.

"I wonder if he knows," he wonders idly, cupping his hands together.
"Knows what?" You watch the spider pause, legs probing uncertainly.
"About people. If he understands what we are."
"He?"

"Yes. He." He lifts it eye high. "Aren't you?"

The spider is still, and seems to watch him.

"You're not real."

You say this to Grissom, or the spider. You're not sure.
He puts his hand to the earth, and the spider leaps away and vanishes.

"Does it matter if I am or not?"

You don't know what to say to that.

In the distance, you think you hear thunder.
To have him so close but not have him at all makes you ache inside, and you can't look at him.

You look down, and he reaches and touches your hand with his.

You can't create the feeling of his fingers.

"Help me?"

Even in your dream, your voice cracks.
You watch him squeeze your hand.

"I'm trying."

You can't remember if he says that or that's what you want him to say.
You look up, and all you see are glasses that flicker like stars

This story of yours is fragmented.

You don't remember clearly; Brass would like you to remember days, which day, what time. You lost chunks of it, and you only have these small snatches.

You wonder how your mind did this, and you can only hope it won't find these forgotten files later. Living through it once was enough; you won't go through it again.
You don't want to be telling this story. You want to talk about how they found you, about Grissom's obsession, how Greg found the key, how Catherine found the ghosts.
You want to talk about the man whose death saved you.

You want to talk about something with a happy ending.

End Part One