A/N: A big thank you to Shatterpath, who beta-ed this even though she's not a GSR person. :)
The queen, for her part, is the unifying force of the community; if she is removed from the hive, the workers very quickly sense her absence. After a few hours, or even less, they show unmistakable signs of queenlessness.
Man and Insects
Queenless
It was a strange and peculiar feeling. The feeling that something was about to happen, something was about to descend on them like a swarm of angry hornets and when he lay in bed at night, he couldn't go to sleep because he thought he could hear the hum of their wings in the dark.
Sara slept on next to him, curled around herself in that vulnerable, age-old position that made his heart clench. There was something wrong but he couldn't put his finger on it. And he had tried. Oh, had he ever tried. But whatever it was that made him feel this way eluded him, hummed in the night and hung above his head to mock him.
Weeks dragged by until a day in the middle of November, much too warm for the time of year, Sara rested against the doorframe of his office and twisted the thin wedding band on her ring finger while watching him.
When he finally looked up, she smiled wistfully, made two steps into the office and stopped, running a hand down her jean- clad thigh.
"I have to leave for a while." she stated, her eyes fixed on his with a tiny glimmer of something indescribable in them. Maybe she was hoping he wouldn't ask where she was going and, most of all, why.
Because she really didn't know.
"Why? Where are you going?" he sounded desperate, stared at her, at the ring on her finger as if she couldn't possibly leave while wearing it. Bound to him.
"I'm not breaking up with you." she evaded his question, watched as a sigh of relief escaped him.
"But… why? Where?" he asked again, got up and moved around her to shut the door. There wouldn't be yelling, there wouldn't be much of anything but the walls in the lab had ears and eyes and he didn't want to be the hot topic of discussion for the grapevine again.
"I just… I need to figure some things out. I don't know where I'm going yet, a bunch of stops on the road, I guess. But I need to go and I need you to know that I'll be back."
He came to stand in front of her, looking a little lost and a little scared.
"When? When will you be back?"
She shrugged then, realized that she hadn't really thought about that yet.
"Before Christmas." A little more than a month. Hopefully that would be enough to stop at all the stops, see everything she wanted to see and blow some of the cobwebs out of her head that had settled there.
She leaned up, kissed him and wrapped her arms around him tightly. He returned the hug and for a moment, they stood in the semi darkness of his office, holding on to each other as if they were drowning before Sara pulled back.
"I'll send you postcards but I probably won't call." she said, a little lost in thought.
Grissom didn't know what to think or say, looked at her and shrugged.
"Yeah, that's… fine. I just need to know you're okay. Just… let me know you're okay."
She nodded then, a small nod that was reassuring but also robbed him of a sense of time and place. All of a sudden he wasn't sure which day it was or if it was night or day. The sky might have fallen down on him then but he wouldn't have cared because she was leaving and that was the only thing that mattered.
When he came home later that night, she was already gone. Her car was gone, so was her toothbrush and some of her clothes and most of her underwear. Meticulously he went through every room and every drawer to see just how much of her life was still in this house and how much she had taken with her.
After a day without her, he grew anxious, paced the house and wished he knew where she was. Wished, suddenly and with all his heart, that he could call her and hear her voice. But her cell phone was on her nightstand and he didn't even know in which general direction she had gone.
"Anywhere the wind can blow, that's where I'm gonna go…" he whispered into the darkness at night, a line from a song he had heard a long time ago. The hornets were buzzing above him again, an angry buzz, so unlike the soft, high pitched hum of the bees.
After a week without her, he felt sick. As if he had just gotten over a bad case of the flu and wasn't yet ready to face the world. He was always tired and often snappy and buried himself in his work.
Her first postcard arrived on a Wednesday. Stamped in Alabama, he wondered what she was doing there. The card read that she was fine. A small stone crumbled from the rock he carried around his neck. She was fine and that was good.
As the nest week flew by, he found himself preoccupied with the global phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder. Like Sara's leaving him, could their own human interferance be the cause of the Colony Collapse? Like the vanishing bees, there was no easy answer.
He received three more cards, one from Massachusetts, one from Maryland and one from New Jersey. He had sort of expected her to go to California and this veer to the East Coast puzzled him.
Before he left for work every night he watched the news, maybe because he was scared that she would get into an accident somewhere on the road, would be lying in a big anonymous hospital somewhere and no one would know who she was.
It bothered him, robbed him of sleep and he was stunned how much he missed her. How much she was a part of him and his chest hurt as if her heart was tied to his and the further she moved away, the more something pulled at his chest.
He paced through the rooms of the townhouse and slept with one of her sweaters close to his face at night. Her scent clung to it, a faint trace of life that kept him believing that she would be back.
Maybe this was the way she had felt when he had left for Massachusetts. He'd been gone for a month, too but he had never ever thought about her being so worried and so hurt and so… lonely. He was positively lonely.
He was like a bee locked up in a jar for too long, crawling around the bottom of the glass, too disheartened to escape.
Close to Christmas, he grew restless, checked the mail three times a day and worried a path into the carpet. Bruno usually stayed out of his way, sad eyes and head resting on his paws.
One morning, when he came home from work, her car was in the driveway. It sat there as if it had never left, clean and sparkling in the pale winter sun. He burst into the house breathlessly, rounded the corner and walked into the living room, stopping short in front of the couch.
She was curled up on it, the dog resting on the floor in front of her, both of them asleep. Bruno cautiously cracked one eye open and looked at him, a silent warning that the woman on the couch was under his express protection. Grissom watched her for a moment, the deep, even rise and fall of her chest, her fingers curled around the knit blanket she was wrapped up in.
He carefully stepped over the dog, sat on the edge of the couch and ran a finger down her cheek. She sighed deeply, her eyes fluttering open and looking at him before she sat up, the blanket falling away from her and wrapped her arms around him with careless grace.
His arms tightened around her, held her in place for a very long time. He felt her tears against his shirt and when she finally looked up, she laughed a tiny, happy laugh and wiped at her eyes.
"I'm sorry." she said softly, her voice husky, drenched in tears and emotion.
"Don't be. I think I… understand." And he did. He understood.
He understood as much as he ever would that she had to get her head on straight and that wherever she went or he went, they would always be bound together. Not just by the vows they exchanged or the rings on their fingers but by something more profound, something that was hard to grasp.
Something that had been there way before he ever acknowledged it.