Title: Circle Unbroken
Rating: PG
Pairing: Tim/Calleigh
Spoilers: None that I can think of.
Feedback: Makes my day
Disclaimer: If it was in the show, it's not mine.
Archive: At my site Checkmate ( ); anywhere else, please ask.
Summary: Calleigh confronts her past.
Author's Notes: I wrote this story a year ago, and am just getting around to putting it up here now… it did depend heavily on the CBS bio that was first put out for Calleigh, but then, with the introduction of Calleigh's dad on screen, and the subsequent excision of the relevant details from the newly updated CBS bio, this story can now be thoroughly considered AU!
***
Tim Speedle rubbed a hand over his forehead as he tramped through the halls of the crime lab, casting a glance at his watch, wondering if it was time to head home yet. His tired eyes hadn't managed to process the time when a snicker made him turn to the woman beside him, who seemed to be a lot more bright eyed and bushy tailed that he was. "What?" he asked, his question making her shake her head and laugh, her dark eyes dancing with mirth.
"You're dead on your feet Speed," Adele Sevilla told him frankly. "Go home."
He wished it was that simple, knew it wasn't. Yes, strictly speaking, he was on overtime, but what was new there? "I've got evidence to process…" he pointed out, and she waved her hand dismissively.
"H is gonna take most of that," she said. "And you're no good to anyone in this state."
"You're fine," he objected, wondering once again how that could be.
"I should be considering I'm working a split shift today." She craned her neck to look at the clock on the wall of the break room as they walked by, rolling her eyes. "I'm gonna be on till eight in the morning, and if I'm lucky I'll get a cat nap and a cup of coffee halfway through."
"Tough gig," Tim sympathised, finally reaching his destination, the layout room. He hadn't been kidding, he did have evidence to process, and he was playing a bargaining game with himself, wondering if it would wait for the morning, wondering if Horatio would kill him if he clocked off now. Maybe that wouldn't be so bad he realised; at least if he were dead, he could sleep.
His thoughts were interrupted when he heard Eric's voice, curious, shocked. "Speed, what are you doing here?"
Tim frowned, not liking the way that his friend was looking at him as if he was the last person he'd expected to see. Looking around the room pointedly, he held up the evidence he'd collected. "My job?" he suggested, and Eric shook his head.
"No man…didn't Calleigh call you?" Eric's demeanour had segued rapidly from shocked to concerned, and at the mention of Calleigh's name, Tim's heart skipped a beat. From the corner of his eye, he could see Sevilla take a step closer to him, her features shrouded in concern.
"Why would Calleigh call me?" he asked slowly, deliberately, wishing against all hope that he could ward off whatever was coming, because the one thing that he knew from the look on Eric's face was that it wasn't going to be good.
Eric shook his head. "Man, I'm sorry…if I'd known, I'd have called you myself…"
"Eric." Tim bit out the word, stopping the other man in his tracks. "What happened to Calleigh?"
"She got a phone call today," Eric told him after a long pause, or maybe time had just slowed down. "Speed, her father died."
Tim sucked in a sharp breath, feeling as if someone had punched him in the stomach, and the evidence bags fell to the table. "Shit," he breathed, running a hand through his hair, unsure what to do, what to say, what to think.
He felt Sevilla's hand on his elbow, looked down at her and felt momentarily reassured. Nothing ever seemed to phase the police detective, and while he could read worry clearly in her eyes, outwardly she was as calm as ever. "Tim, go," is all she said, and he looked at her, then at the evidence, then at Eric.
"Will you-"
He didn't even get the sentence finished. "I'll deal with it," Delko ordered. "Just go."
He didn't have to tell him twice.
***
She didn't know how long she'd been sitting there, nor did she care. She barely remembered getting home, all her memories blurring from the moment she answered her cell phone. It had been an ordinary day up to them, she and Eric working a case together, and they were discussing the evidence in the break room when it happened. She hadn't recognised the number that flashed up, just knew that it was from Louisiana, and that alone was enough to have her excusing herself, going out into the hallway, away from Eric's ever attentive ears, to take the call. He'd made some quip about not wanting to hear her talking dirty with Speed, and she'd done her best to give him a withering look, but it had been hard when her heart was hammering in her chest and her hands were shaking.
She relaxed momentarily when she heard the voice on the other end of the line, a friendly voice from her past, one of the few. She would later realise that that moment of relaxation had been a mistake, that it only allowed the news that would follow to hit her even harder, like being hit by a brick when you were expecting a pebble.
She'd listened to the words as they stole her breath away, felt the walls that she'd built up so high around her past crumbling into dust, and she'd sagged against the wall as the full horror unfolded in front of her. Years of police work meant that the details flashed into full colour in her mind, stereo sound included, and it had been all she could do to stay upright. The voice had asked her gently if she was all right, and she remembered him asking her that question so many years ago; a lifetime ago, back when she was a different person. She'd simply replied, "I'll take care of things," before hanging up the phone, taking several deep breaths before she went back to Eric.
She hadn't thought that she'd done too good a job at pulling herself together, but it must have been worse than she'd thought, because while Eric glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, making some joke about her keeping her private life out of the office, that little glance rapidly turned into a piercing stare, his ready smile turning into a frown of worried concern. "Jesus, what's wrong?" he'd asked. "Are you ok? Is it Speed?"
His questions had come thick and fast, confusing her, and she'd shaken her head, one hand kneading her forehead, the other going to her hip. "No," she'd told him. "No Eric, Tim's fine..."
"Then what-"
She'd narrowed her eyes, looking beyond him, seeing another man, a man she'd never see again. "My father died," she'd said simply, and his face had registered sympathy and dismay and a thousand other emotions all in a second.
"God Calleigh," he'd breathed, closing the distance between them, hand outstretched, heading right for her shoulder. "I'm so sorry…"
She'd seen the hand, had known what he was going to do, known that he meant well, but had also known that she couldn't let him. She'd stepped back, knowing that she hadn't kept the expression of pain off her face, purposely avoiding his hand, not able to bear the thought of him touching her. She'd seen the hurt in his eyes, the shock on his face, and she'd felt bad about it, but not bad enough to explain, to apologise.
Instead, she'd done what she'd said she'd do, she'd taken care of things, done what she needed to do. "I um…I think I need to…" She gestured over her shoulder, and Eric had nodded quickly.
"Go," he'd said. "I'll tell H." She'd nodded, had begun to move away when his voice calling her name had stopped her. She'd turned to look at her, her green eyes asking him silently what he wanted, and he'd shrugged. "If you need anything…"
His obvious concern was more threatening than his hand had been, and she'd just nodded, turning blindly and stumbling towards the door, pausing when she got there and taking another deep breath before making her way down the hall to the locker room.
From there on, it was a blur of road signs and phone calls and a soothing cup of herbal tea, and now here she was, sitting in her living room, perched on the edge of her couch, shoulders hunched, whole body wound tight as a spring. The setting sun shone directly in the windows, casting the room in a golden glow, the only source of light. The silence of the room was broken only by the ticking of the clock on the mantel and the beating of her heart, and she stared at the photograph that she was holding, her mind years away, trying to remember how things had been once upon a time, before everything had fallen apart.
The photograph was taken indoors, a handsome young man in a white T-shirt and blue jeans, his arm around a woman with long blonde hair and sparkling green eyes, a woman who was smiling up at him as if he'd hung the moon. The man was holding in his arms a little blonde haired girl, less than a year old, beaming at her, her cheeky smile for him alone. They were a young family clearly, but happy, looking as if they had the world in front of them, as if this picture was the first chapter in a long and happy family history.
This picture was one of the reasons why Calleigh was a good CSI. She'd known all her life how deceiving appearances could be.
She knew that the family here was never this happy again, maybe hadn't even been that happy then. That the mother, not yet twenty, was pregnant with her second child, that the father, the deputy sheriff of the town, older than his wife by a good ten years, was already starting to drink more than he should. The picture was taken reasonably close up; it didn't show the ragged state of the shotgun shack they were living in, didn't show how little money there was to spare.
This was one of the few pictures that Calleigh had of her childhood, because once the three boys had come along in quick succession, two years in between each of them, with the fourth and youngest brother coming along three years later, their mother hadn't been in state to care about recording her children's childhoods. Indeed, there were times when she barely seemed to remember that she had children at all. Her father meanwhile went from his job to the bar, only appearing at the house on sporadic occasions, even then reeking of liquor. Calleigh had thought that was normal, that everyone's mother and father were like hers. Then she went to school, and as she got older, she realised that that wasn't so. But she'd seen her parents hide what they were from the rest of the town, and always a quick study, she'd known what she'd had to do and had followed the family tradition like her daddy's good little girl. She learned that a quick mind, a ready smile and a good dash of Southern charm could go a long way with people, and when she reached her teenaged years, realised that a toss of her long blonde hair didn't hurt either, and no-one had ever seen the bruises, had ever questioned why she was as thin as she was, why she was allowed to stay out so late at night, why she kept a closer eye on her younger brothers than any other teenage girl ever would.
No-one ever had to tell her to cover up for her parents. She did it because she knew what would happen if she didn't, knew that she and her brothers would be taken from them. She didn't want that, neither did the boys. Because it didn't matter if Momma spun stories of the fabulous Duquesne family from one end of the day to the other, neglecting chores and cooking and basic hygiene. It didn't matter if Daddy came home drunk, didn't matter if he took the belt to one of the kids for some transgression, real or imagined. They were still her parents, still her family, and that meant something to her.
Besides, Daddy wasn't drunk all the time, and when he wasn't, he was the man in that photograph, the man who smiled at his little girl and worshipped the ground she walked on. He would help her with her homework, he would tell her about his work, and one of her favourite things to do as a child was to be allowed to clean his badge, dreaming of the day when she would wear one just like it. He'd taught her how to use a gun, how to respect it, praising her when she became a better shot than he was, beating the tar out of some guy who said that women shouldn't be let shoot a gun. She'd been appalled when he'd done that, but she'd told herself that it was because he was her father, and he was acting out of some old school Southern gentleman code of honour, protecting a lady's reputation and all that.
It had been weeks, months later when she'd remembered the colour of the man's skin, at the same time that a thousand other jigsaw pieces began slotting neatly into place.
It had been almost eleven years since she'd seen him, and they'd parted bitterly, Daddy's little girl a little girl no longer, and no longer Daddy's. He'd made that perfectly clear, and her last words had told anyone who broached the subject with her that she didn't care. She'd left that place, made a new life for herself, reinvented herself completely, and she'd never looked back. Not much anyhow.
Now she didn't have a choice.
The silence of the apartment was shattered by a key scraping in the lock, by the front door opening and a familiar voice calling out, "Calleigh? You here?"
She stood up slowly stiffly, noting the urgency in his voice, moving to the end of the couch, waiting for him to come into the room. She frowned when she saw him, her hand still clutching the picture, because he was carrying a holdall in his hand that he dropped by the door the second he saw her. "Are you ok?" was his first question as he came towards her, arms open, and she moved in the opposite direction, turning so that she wouldn't seen the same hurt in his face that she'd seen in Eric's.
"Who told you?" she asked flatly, going back to her perch on the couch, sinking into the same spot she'd left seconds earlier.
"Eric." His voice was gentler than she deserved, she knew that, and he stayed standing at the side of the couch, not making any moves towards her. "Sevilla and I got back to the lab, he met us in the layout room."
She frowned, something occurring to her for the first time. "I should've called you, shouldn't I?" she murmured, not looking at him. Because after all, he was her boyfriend, and he would have wanted to be there for her. Lord knows, she would have wanted to be there for him had the roles been reversed. "I'm sorry, I-"
"Hey, hey…" His soft chiding stopped her words, and he sounded a touch amused. But then, he often did when they were alone together and she was babbling on at a mile a minute. The moment was so normal that she almost wanted to scream, and nearly did. "Don't worry about that now." He took a step towards her, and when she didn't move, took one more. "What you got there?"
She looked down at the picture, a tiny smile appearing on her face despite herself. "Yesterday," she told him, tilting the picture in his direction, and he sat down beside her, the better to see it, leaving a good foot of space in between them.
"She looks like you," he observed in surprise, and she nodded, because she'd heard that every day for eighteen years.
"Strong Duquesne genes." He looked over at her sharply, her accent having deepened in unconscious mimicry of her mother, and she shrugged. "You know what families are like."
His lips quirked up in a bitter little smile. "Kind of," he told her, and she realised with a start that while she never spoke of her past, with good reason, nor did Tim. She wondered why that was, how they'd come to spend so much time together, become so much a part of one another's lives, without becoming a part of one another's yesterdays. The thought shocked her, and she almost missed him saying, "You were a beautiful baby."
She ducked her head, blushing, turning the photograph back towards her. "My parents' pride and joy," she said, unable to stop, "For a while at least," from coming out as well.
Tim frowned, and she could almost hear the thoughts, the questions, exploding in his head, but he didn't give voice to any of them. Instead he simply asked, "Want to talk about it?"
There was nothing she wanted to do more than to talk to him about it.
There was nothing she wanted to do less than talk to him about it.
She didn't know if she'd be able to handle eleven years of bottled up emotion, didn't know if she was that strong. Didn't know if he was. Didn't know if she could face finding out that she wasn't. Didn't know if she could face finding out that he wasn't either.
There didn't seem to be enough oxygen in the room suddenly, and she sucked in a shuddering breath, letting it out slowly, surprised to find that she was trembling from head to toe. She shook her head, barely able to meet his gaze, but trying. "Tim…" she managed to choke out. "I can't…I mean, I just…I…"
"Hey…babe, it's ok…" His arm stretched out across the back of the sofa behind her, but he didn't touch her, seeming to know instinctively that if he did, she'd shatter, and nothing and no-one would be able to put all the pieces back together again. "Whatever you need. OK? Whatever you need."
Her eyes flicked up to meet his, and she nodded once, slowly, closing her eyes before dropping her head, a sigh escaping her. "OK."