i. how does it feel?
The worst part of it was, they kept asking him questions.
Everyone wanted to know what it felt like to be a survivor. Or, in more accurate terms, what it felt like to be the only survivor of a slaughter that he never could have prevented. They wanted to know if he had seen the footage of the deaths, and of course he had, because the images were everywhere. They wanted to know if he had any thoughts on whether or not they had died like heroes, because that was what the media was heralding them as, these days. Heroes.
After all, the best heroes were the dead ones, and his team was certainly that. Dead. Every last one of them.
They wanted to know what it felt like. Wanted to hear, from the lips of Gil Grissom himself, what it felt like to lose every single person he cared about.
Grissom just wants to be left alone.
**
ii. rewind, play (nick)
Nick's face is so sweetly concerned when he asks Grissom if he's sure he wants to stay behind.
"Big case," he reminds, like Grissom's somehow forgotten. "Not meaning to be rude, but I think the sheriff would chew you a new one if he heard the supervisor was sitting on the sidelines for the biggest case of the year."
Grissom's sure that seventeen dead is a big case for any year. What he's not sure about is whether he wants to see the bodies, splayed out in their own blood spatter, in some warehouse. Call it a crisis of faith, an upset stomach, or fate, but he doesn't want to go anywhere near the biggest case of the year this time around. It's a bigger fish than he wants.
Besides, he knows that they can handle it. Nothing's ever happened that they couldn't handle.
"Yeah, I'm sure," he says, and smiles at Nick. He's sure that Nick will never understand that things that keep Grissom awake at night.
Nick smiles back, and when he sees Nick dead three hours later, his mouth will be torn well into his cheek, making that same smile wide and bewitching, like a jack-o-lantern.
**
iii. move on
Covallo would like him to leave, and Grissom knows it. He stays in the lab out of spite. He knows he's capable, but he doesn't find the work engaging anymore. The new hires are all hardworking and capable, but he finds himself forgetting their names. He certainly can't remember what they like for breakfast.
On the other hand, he still knows the flavor of jam that Sara liked on her toast.
He knows that, if they were still alive, they'd want him to move on, too. They were always telling him that even when they were alive, always after him to get a life.
Now, he's the only one who has one.
He stays out of spite for them, too, because they had absolutely no right to die and leave him all alone like this.
**
iv. rewind, play (sara)
Sara works well in squalor, even though Grissom always, secretly, thinks that she looks out of place in the dust and refuse. She's lovelier than that, better than that, but he doesn't know how to tell her and he doesn't she'll listen, even if he did not know how. He doesn't know how to tell her, so he settles for holding the image of her in his mind. His Venus. He watches her stride through the parking lot and into the waiting Tahoe, where Warrick is settled into the driver's seat.
He wonders, sometimes, if the image of her driving away is metaphorical.
Before she gets in, he catches the shapes of words on her lips, and holds those snapshots of speech dearly, too. She's beautiful, and she's radiant when she has a good crime scene to work.
He used to think she was unstoppable.
Turns out, he was wrong about that.
**
v. dream a little dream
In the beginning, he dreamed that they were alive, but as time went by, he dreamed only of their deaths.
He would fall asleep around three in the morning, and wake up at four with creases in his face from the pillow seams. He would drink some Scotch and stare in the mirror at his bloodshot eyes and the new wrinkles surrounding them. Somewhere, reflected in his eyes, would be the vision of fallen idols and fallen teammates - - Catherine's honey-blonde hair, fallen around her face as her head had tilted forward with the force of the gunshot, Nick's eyes, dark and full of pain, the blood on Sara's fingers from where she'd tried to cover her wound, Warrick, his hand on his gun, residue plastered like a burn over his cheek, and Greg's limp body, broken on the concrete like a fallen toy.
When the FBI investigated, they called it a massacre.
Grissom calls it a dream. He goes through each day hoping and hoping to wake up, but somehow, he never does, and after three straight months of nightmares, he starts sleeping with his lights on.
**
vi. rewind, play (greg)
It's hard to deny the boy anything, especially when he's so enthusiastic, so when Greg shows up at his office door, tentatively bouncing on the balls of his feet and begging, like a younger sibling, to be allowed to go with the rest of the team to the warehouse, Grissom can't help but say yes, even though he really thinks that Greg has no business being around dead things when he's so damn cheerful and alive all the time. Sometimes, he resents Greg for that joie de vivre, but today, it doesn't seem to matter.
"Go ahead," he says, acquiescing. "I'm sure they could use an extra pair of hands."
Greg's hands, later, will be broken in his vain efforts to stop his own fall. Grissom will watch Dr. Robbins piece together shattered bones, and he will marvel again at the delicacy of the human body.
He'll tell the good doctor that Greg should never have been there, and Robbins, full of a dark and eerie intensity that Grissom was unused to seeing, will slide the thin blade of a scalpel down the center of Greg's chest, and agree.
It's Grissom's heart that will seem to be cut out.
**
vii. substitution
One Sunday, he goes out. Leave his hermetically-sealed townhouse and goes to a bad part of town, which, in Vegas, is most parts of the town. He meets a girl that looks like Sara, and he takes her to his car, his skin pressed against the slick leather. Somewhere near the end, he whispers her name, like he's trying to raise the dead, and the girl squirms away, like she's touched something nasty - - some man who makes love to her for all the wrong reasons.
When Grissom goes home again, he cleans the back of his car, thinking of all the solvents that would light up their encounter. He mixes a drink in his kitchen.
"Communion," he says to himself.
After that, he goes out most Sundays, looking for the rest of himself.
**
viii. rewind, play (warrick)
It's Warrick who's with him when he first hears about the case. They're in the break room, lunching on stale turkey sandwiches and stolen cups of Greg's coffee, when Brass tells them everything he can about the massacre - - seventeen dead, warehouse, and no readily available suspects. Warrick crushes his paper coffee cup in his hand, and the muscles in his face go tight with strain.
"I hate this kind of a case," Warrick says softly. "Chances are, we might never find the guy."
He almost whispers it, as if he's hoping that his pessimism won't reach the
hallway, where wide-eyed lab techs are watching the new images of the crime
scene blaze across the television set.
Turns out, they really will never find the guy, or guys, or whoever - - who were in the warehouse. They will know only that the suspect(s) returned to the scene, and left behind a tapestry of death - - four dead cops, and five dead criminalists.
From Warrick's mouth to God's ears, apparently.
**
ix. memory loss
He's shuffling paperwork across his desk when he realizes that he can't remember what color Greg's eyes were. He spends the rest of the day going through old files until he finds statistics, and learns, to his relief, that they were brown. That was, after all, what he thought - - he just wasn't sure, and it was that uncertainty that rocked him the most. He memorizes Greg's stats until he can rattle them off at the drop of some metaphorical hat, and sleeps almost soundly that night.
The next day, he forgets the scent of Sara's shampoo, and that's not in any file.
He goes to the drugstore after work and buys every single bottle on the market, and does whiff-tests at home until he's absolutely sure that it's the peach-scented. It's like her, too. Subtle. Natural.
When he loses the shape of Nick's hands, the sound of Warrick's voice, and the dangerous glint of Catherine's smile, he can no longer think of a way to retrieve them.
**
x. rewind, play (catherine)
Turns out, Lindsey will live with Catherine's sister. Catherine made the necessary amendments to her will a long time ago, and Grissom won't know whether to be relieved or ashamed that he never considered anything like that while she was alive.
Catherine is the last one he talks to before - - It - - and she, like Nick, is clearly a little uncomfortable with the fact that Grissom won't be with them.
"Is it your hearing again?" she asks cautiously.
"No, that's fine." He tries to reassure her with empty words, but Catherine has always been type of woman who could tell when he was bullshitting her, and he knows from her grin that she doesn't buy a word of what he's saying.
"Yeah, yeah," she says, blowing a strand of hair back from her face with a quick rush of breath. It's a childish gesture, and he finds that he can almost imagine a young Catherine in overalls and pigtails, sucking on a piece of candy, her knees scabbed over. "Tell me when you think up a real reason."
When he stands over her grave two weeks later, he will.
"I think, somehow, that I must have known. And that scares the hell out of me, Catherine, because if I knew, and I only saved myself, what kind of person does that make me?"
xi. all in good company
If only this could be a tragedy. Something Shakespearean, or ancient Greek. He's always understood how tragedies are supposed to end. There's always only one exit left for the hero at the end of the play, and these days, it's an exit he'd only be too glad to take.
There's a gun in his dresser drawer. Standard issue. It would do the job, but he never thinks about using it, not at all.
He tells himself that every day.
**
xii. fast-forward, play
The case is officially declared cold, and it is. Cold as the Arctic, and just as bare. No clues; no hope. Grissom takes a week off with this announcement and spends a lot of time in his townhouse, watching baseball, and drinking ice-water. He's fresh out of options and fresh out of hope. He goes back two days early and throws himself into cases that mean absolutely nothing to him, and works himself to the bone, because the lab is dramatically short-changed.
They died.
He lived.
It's hard to live with that.
Some days, he doesn't even feel like trying.