A/N: I want CSI: Miami back, CBS or whatever channel had it! Make a change and cancel CSI: NY and bring back Horatio and his team! I mean, CSI: NY is okay and all, but CSI: Miami isn't even on On Demand anymore. What the fuck's up with that? And I'm also very frustrated with the writers of CSI: Miami because they killed off Jesse and Speed. Just resurrect them like you did with Raymond Caine, you bastards! I have this theory that Jesse died because karma caught up. Tim Speedle was recommended for the job by Jesse Cardoza and he was eventually killed, so karma decided to be fair and kill Jesse. It makes me sad! And I don't even care if I sound like I'm whining because Watergirl from Fireboy and Watergirl is such a bitch! She won't listen to any of my commands and just keeps running into walls like a rebellious teen! And when she stops, Fireboy starts up! Roar! Moving on, this I'm not too happy with because the original got erased from Microsoft by Microsoft for no reason at all. It's still pretty good. It's a hurt/comfort story that was originally supposed to briefly brush over how Jesse and Sophie—my CSI: Miami OC who hasn't been introduced—knew each other before he rejoined the team, but I might change Sophie to a victim's relative of a personal case for Jesse. I didn't mean to make all of the above sound like a summary. Review! And this takes place after Jesse died, if you needed to know.
Disclaimer: As much as I'd like to say I'm content with only bringing joy to myself and others who read my stories that I make specially for them and it gives me even better joy to be paid in reviews, I would really like money more. But that never is going to happen.
Summary: He didn't mean to find her in the park that night. But when he did, he didn't really try to help her. He just let things be because that's all they could really do. Let things be and hope for the best. That's all he can do. That's all he got. No more, no less.
Flying Down To See You – Chapter 1
"Why are you here?"
Sneakered feet dangle into the green grass below her and next to her backpack almost lifelessly. She's not making an effort to do anything besides sit with her hands in her lap and her feet skimming just past the top of the grass covering the ground around them. The swing she sits on sways in the slight breeze, as if she's not even sitting in it at all, as if she isn't there at all.
Her head is down and he can't even see the words form on her lips. She's not looking at anything in particular—not him, not the twilight around her, not the fireflies dotting the air in front of her, not the cars passing in the streets around them—she's just staring at the ground. But it's more like she's looking through the short blades of grass than anything, like she's staring into the earth beneath her to search for answers, for reasons, for beginnings, for endings.
"I wanted to see if you were okay. It's been . . . a long day," he replies to her question after a pause. Words seem to jumble together and have almost no impact or meaning anymore. Not today they don't, not right now.
He watches her hands move from her lap and slide up the rusted metal chains that are rough under her calloused fingertips. She grips the chains tightly in her smaller hands, holding on for dear life because God knows she needs it more than anything right now.
Brown eyes meet brown eyes and the sudden motion of her head turning upwards towards him sends her long dark hair forwards, only to be thrown back behind her by the breeze that's picking up every minute they sit there together in silence.
Everything is displayed loud and clear in her eyes and he only has to dig a few layers deep to find how she's being affected by everything that's happened lately.
The physical pain of the day, anger at the world, determination to finish what everyone's started for her and weariness that shouldn't be there for a girl of her age is the cloak covering her true form.
A hurt and frightened little girl that's grown up far too young lurks beneath the mask she puts on every day to face the world, to fool people that she isn't fragile. All she wants to do is stop fighting a cause that's almost not worth it some days and settle down to start a family with a husband and kids. She wants to spend time with her family, not helping other families while putting her own in danger.
"How did you know I would be here?"
The words she questions him with now aren't as loud as they were before. They're smaller and lack the same hardness and force they had when she had the energy to face the day without hesitation. She's weakening from exhaustion, he can tell. She's barely holding herself up now as it is, but takes the risk and kicks her legs back and forth to find some form of happiness. They cut through the air quietly as she swings back and forth mutely.
Around them both, there's hardly anyone around. Stragglers walk on the sidewalk that traps them in their square of perfect green and perfect childhood, but no one looks over at them. They are invisible to the world. Finally, they can blend in with their bubble of discretion. No one stares at them like they aren't humans with feelings because they arrest people and occasionally kill people in order to protect the same people who alienate them, who divide them into two and label them off because they never took the chance to look any deeper.
"You used to come here as a kid when you got upset. I remember that," he tells her when he feels like they've sat in enough silence.
As soon as it comes out of his mouth and he sees her expression, he feels proud of himself for getting a bit of her old self back into her after so long of him missing her. She's been gone for so long, it's a relief to see her happiness come back to her, if it's only a little fraction of the real amount. But he almost regrets it because he knows this is going to lead to more suspicion and questions.
Once again, her expression shifts, this time from blank to confusion with just a hint of a smile tugging at her lips. She can't help it; she feels noticed in a better way than a criminal wanting to kill her or someone who's frightened by her for trying to help save their life.
Someone remembered something minor about her that she didn't have to scream from the rooftops to get it to finally drill into their heads. Someone cares about her not only enough to barely help her but to get to know her and understand her, including the deep layers that she guards carefully. No one—no one—in the world she was born into had ever tried before. Then it hits her like a ton of bricks.
Confusion lights her eyes up as she tries to figure it out before having to resort to asking him to give her an honest answer. Her eyebrows draw together in an expression that's familiar, but one he hasn't seen in a while. It used to show up when she got confused over a difficult question. She used to do brain puzzles a lot as a kid, he remembers, to get away from reality, to find order in the chaos.
"Why do you know that? You shouldn't know that."
The metal chains supporting his swing creak as they twist above his head when he uses his feet to angle himself towards her. Her eyes are wandering again, across the city buildings with their bright lights and over the branches whipping back and forth.
Her head faces the sky, watching the darkening clouds begin to block out the moon's rays. It was supposed to be a full moon. The visible craters stand out darkly against the paler than white complexion of the moon's face. As his eyes follow hers to locate what exactly she's staring at, they both briefly wonder what it would be like on the dark side of the moon—alone, cold, and with nowhere else to go.
"Just something I observed from the days you would come to visit Horatio." His voice is cool and calm and soothing, not unlike the salty water surrounding their little peninsula of land after another one of their long days. Days where they can't go home until everything is solved and every puzzle piece fits perfectly together into one final picture because loose ends are fake ends and they do not, should not, cannot exist in the world they live in.
She is tired, and so is he. They just want to rest, stop for a single moment and take a breath, take in everything surrounding them that they had never been able to see before, notice before. All they ever wanted was a place to call their home, where they could stop and appreciate the little things in their lives and not the little things at crime scenes they're ordered to arrive at. One could only tolerate so much death and still be the entire person they were before.
She turns away from the darkening sky and the rolling clouds and looks straight at him, straight through him, straight into him. Her eyes hold a sadness, a pity that he can't quite decide who it's directed at. The world, him, herself, it's too hard to read into it.
Her lips turn either up or down and he can't even tell because it's so small, so miniscule he can just barely make out the movement he was trained to see. Years of training in college, years of internships, years of with the Horatio Caine, and he can't even spot a movement twelve inches away from his face. Now he knows he's really got to stop working so hard and so much and obsessing so much and hurting so much and take some time for himself, to get himself back into shape.
"It won't help, you know." He's startled. She hasn't talked in so long and he's so used to reading her actions and not her words that her voice seems a heck of a lot more powerful and a heck of a lot more defeated than it really is.
"What do you mean? What won't help me?"
"Taking time to get back into shape. You can take as much time as you want here, but you know and I know it won't help." Certainty and a rare superior confidence line her voice, making it almost insulting to him that she believes there's no avoiding his aging skills.
He doesn't understand what she's talking about for a single moment until it finally dawns on him. She's responding—no, she's commenting, almost mocking—to his thought, a minor one he never thought much of.
"Why not? Some time off . . . it should help." She's being watched by his curious, demanding eyes that match his curious, demanding tone. It doesn't bother her. It makes her lips twitch into a ghost of a stretching smile that should almost frighten him. But it doesn't. It's almost reassuring; the memory of a solid feeling of reassurance that it's not only him who feels like everything's a ghost following him around.
Cause and effect. His life is full of dominoes and hers is full of them, too, but she never wants to admit to anyone that her insides are collapsing onto one another and everything's falling to Hell. Everyone relies on her, just like they do with him, and they cannot fail or else the guilty blood of everyone around them is on their responsible hands already full with a mop to erase the blood and a needle and thread to sew up the loose ends and open wounds, to create healing scars.
This, this is the last domino, the final one before everything comes to an abrupt end. They both know it somewhere deep inside; they just don't want to be the ones to accept it just yet because they know it has to be them and nobody else.
"You don't even realize it, do you? Or are you just denying it to yourself? There's nothing that can protect you for much longer." A long, thin finger that should belong to a long-dead corpse but is placed on her instead points up to the air above them.
Something is wrong with this Miami, he realizes all too late. Right now there are no cop cars and there are always cop cars with their flashing lights sending splashes of colors to the city that never stops moving.
He blinks and shakes his head, trying to clear the fog creating illusions out of his mind. A feeling of clarity come over him at last and a weight is lifted off his shoulders, so he follows the instructions he was given.
It's only then he notices just how bad things have gotten.
It's only then the final domino has been struck in slow motion.
Thick storm clouds have blocked out the sun's reflecting rays, the wind is fifty degrees below what it started at when he found her and not to mention fifty times stronger than that gentle, soothing breeze, branches are snapping and piling on the ground faster than he can see them all as a whole tree or even a partial tree, leaves have formed violent tornadoes of destruction, hardly a noise outside of the lion's roar can be distinguishable besides her voice, the grass beneath them and everything green around them has withered and turned ugly shades of dying breaths, and it's only affecting them.
All those pedestrians on the sidewalks around them are staring at them from their world of green and blue and neon signs. They are owls and vultures—vile, ugly, carnivorous, cannibalistic creatures. They are smiling wickedly at them from their perches above them and below them and next to them, waiting for the perfect time to tear them limb from limb after taunting them and torturing them until they're so out of touch with themselves, they'll be able to watch themselves die and never know it's them until the pain rips through their bodies after it's all over. They will go spiraling into the unknown oblivion, the black hole, the agonizing Hell.
A single, salt water, crystal forms at the edge of her eye. Her vision is blurry from all the crystalline jewels growing and forming there. These were never meant to be in her eyes. They were always meant for the others until now. Both of them, both of the prey, the victims, they know what's about to happen. And she doesn't know why it has to be her.
The domino is beginning to tilt just a little further than it should if it should stay upright. It is beginning its descent downwards.
"You see them, too?"
He swallows not nervously or uneasily—he swallows as if preparing himself for something bigger than he can handle right at that precise moment but knows he will eventually do it.
"Of course I do. I've seen them a thousand times before. I've seen them kill and mutate and taunt and send a thousand victims off the edge. But this . . . this is different."
"It's because this is your time."
"You are the one who's dying. Not me! I can't die! There's not an escape! No guns, no bullets, no clever thinking can get you out of their maze because they've covered every exit! They've thought of everything!"
Her heart beat rises in frustration, in denial. She hates the knowledge dawning on him reflecting in his eyes when he looks at her. He can't understand. She refuses to let him. This is her land, her turf, and no one knows what's going to happen better than her, so why is it him who pieces it together first?
"Look, I'm—" He tries to explain to her, but she doesn't want to hear his useless words of comfort. She snaps.
"You're what? You're sorry? I don't need the stupid script you gave all the other survivors or victims or whoever you used it on to comfort me! I'm not dying here. You are! This place I've made you, I've made it because it's the place everyone goes before they die. There's no way back. There's no way around it. You die and you don't go back. You can't hold on anymore."
It takes all his willpower not to just break down because some part of him he doesn't want to acknowledge knows she's right. There's too much of himself back there where he knew everyone and everything to leave it all behind. All those fake words of comfort and empathy, he knows that's why she made him this world. The reason was easy to grasp—to get him to see that he was wrong with thinking no one would notice it stopped being sincere and to let go, find a new self. But he can't accept he's gone yet, though he can act almost as well as she can see through him, so he pushes his doubtful thoughts behind him and goes on.
"I know. That's why I thought of something simple: Accept it. Let them take me. But you have to come with me."
The creatures are starting to inch a little closer every few words. He almost wants to slow down his speech to delay them a little longer but he knows, he knows, he knows that this moment was meant to happen and will happen no matter what.
"I can't die! I told you! I live through this Hell again and again for eternity!"
Glassy eyes connect with blurry figures she can barely make out through the tears gathering and threatening to break through her final wall she built up. There is hardly any resistance left in her body.
"Like I said, it's time for you to go with me. You're crying. A form of acceptance. Come with me."
And the truth is, she's not angry about his persistent ideas holding the truth of what will happen as soon as the final domino makes contact with the ground. She's scared of it. Life for her has been sickening and violent, but it has been consistent and honest. What lies beyond it once she pulls that trip wire and walks away from her fine line of living and dead, she doesn't know. She's never left home before.
And he can see that this girl isn't just a broken girl. She is the part of him that has been taken advantage of so many times he lost count and the part that has lost so much he can no longer remember it. She is the part that he has pushed down so far he forgot her because she showed weakness and vulnerability in a way he was afraid of and unfamiliar with. And he can see now that the only reason she's out of his deepest, darkest depths is because he's dead and there's no one to hide it from now that it's out and he really knows. He can be free.
She can see that he recognizes her and understands her like he never has before. So she lets go.
The delicate crystal formed by her body for the first time in her eternal life slips down her porcelain bones under her porcelain skin and falls thousands of feet to the earth below her that's spinning so fast she can no longer feel it, where it shatters into a million liquid shards that puncture her skin.
And as soon as they start, they can never stop no matter how much she wants them to. They form beautiful, perfect shapes and create magnificent pictures on the ground, outlining the story of how even the strongest can fall, how the trapped can be freed, and how the most troubled can find sanctuary.
She takes his outstretched hand in hers and looks up at his towering figure, already waiting to leave his world and her world and enter a new one. One where the winds blow free and the storms roam the plains when they please, where the sun can truly shine and there is no more death besides the way she's gripping his hand for protection from the scary beasts around them.
As they walk off, away from the place that's become her home for so long, she refuses to look back at the world she lived in, even as they begin to part to either side as some form of respect. She is the first to leave their land. She is the first to escape, the first to set an example that it is okay to abandon all the cruelty they've known to find a better place to get to know. Trust is a new concept for all of them.
Not twenty four hours ago, she had come to the realization that she had lived in that world for so many immortal years where she balanced between dead and alive that her family before it all had faded away. As hard as she tried she couldn't even remember her mother's face or voice just like he was beginning to forget and beginning to struggle to remember his dead wife's beautiful face and voice.
These beasts had stolen her past from her without a second thought while still having the nerve to believe they could rob her of her future. No, no they could not because she refuses to be fooled again, to be used again to entrap innocent people who didn't deserve this torture she was leaving behind.
Just because everyone she's watched die had a different world doesn't mean she doesn't know them all by heart. Every inch, every design she knows all work just the same. Magical paradises enchant them into staying until the birds emerge and slaughter them with everyone still believing they're in a heavenly world much different than the heavenly Hell they're really in. And all that dark magic, all those illusions, it's all thanks to her and her missing heart that's only now beginning to grow back and return and awaken again from its slumber in another place unbeknownst to her.
Jesse Cardoza was the first one to see the true Hell surrounding them, the first one to identify real Hell from this nameless Hell everyone crosses at one point or another in their death and life.
And she refuses to look back at the demons solemnly watching, silently stalking because she no longer needs them to be there, to tell her what must be done to survive.
They are dying and she doesn't have to save their feathers from graying and falling behind them in trails as they try to catch them both in last attempts at redemption that will make their leader proud. For all she cares, they can drag themselves miles after her and she will not once take pity on their bloodied, scraped forms because they caused her so much more pain than she ever deserved. Their skin isn't her responsibility to keep from burning off down to the bone and disappearing into the wind as they move and their bodies from thinning into crude, skeletal shapes.
She has found a friend for the end of the world. A kind of friend who tells her and shows her what she can do and what she is capable of doing during the falling of meteors and the eruption of stars. She knows that when everything from asteroids to planets collide into one moving mass, he will be there to make her brave.
Someone who prepares her for the time when her world and his world and their world closes the last words of the final chapter of its story and ends for the good of everyone in every other world and life in a grand finale worthy of any show.
For the time when cool rain showers everything in cleansing, holy water and starts anew with a flood where only they will survive and leave behind their demons and ghosts dwelling in the world.
It's time for a new one to emerge from the smoldering ashes of Hell burning to the ground.
And the final, most important domino in the twisted game has finally come tumbling down from its high perch to the ground.
A/N: And it is now on Netflix! Woo-hoo, yeah! I was so excited when I heard that I jumped in the air in the middle of a crowded hallway, fist-pumped, and screamed, "Yeah!" Granted, CSI: Miami has a whole bunch of messed up numbering on Netflix, but it's the episodes that count. Looking over this again, I realized this kind of turned into the Inception and The New 52 of CSI: Miami. I don't know how good this one is, but feedback is always greatly appreciated. I had a lot of trouble writing this one, so reviews are helpful. Like, really, if I could give you money for reviewing, I would. Maybe that would get me more reviews.