The air by the lab was a lot less stiff than the air in the warehouse she had just come from. With steady hands, she gratefully rolled up the window in the GMC she was climbing out of, and all but flung herself out into the parking lot to take a deeper breath. And she let it out... taking in the scenery that she was always also grateful to have another chance to see after a case like her last one. Brushes with death were nothing new, but they still never quite felt commonplace. And for that, she was also grateful, even if for different reasons...

She reached into the GMC and grabbed what remained of her investigations kit and jacket up off the back of the driver's seat to hang over her arm. In the squad car that was just pulling up a few parking spaces away, she saw Brass getting out as eagerly as she had. He brushed the front of his suit off, and handed the keys to his squad member with hushed words that Sara couldn't hear. So, as the young cop took off for the building with the keys in hand, she turned to go for the lab next door.

"Hey!" she suddenly heard.

She turned, and her automatic reaction to the sight of Brass running up to her with surprising speed was to smile from behind the sunglasses she had just put on. For what reason, she didn't know; the sun was setting, and it would be low enough to darken the world around long before it would go beyond the horizon entirely.

But still she smiled, and did not remove them. "Hi," she replied almost as automatically. "Feeling better?"

"Oh, please," he teased. "I just saved your ass, who are you talking about?"

She laughed. "I suppose so, but, really... How are you feeling?"

"I'm okay. I'm okay..." he answered. Almost as if he was just going through the motions... "But that happens more often for me and my side, huh? You've only been there every once in a while, yourself. So how are YOU doing?"

In the old days, she would have been annoyed. And she was at least 90% sure he was thinking of a time past where she had burst in during the scene suspect clearing with her gun and caught a man climbing out of his apartment window. It had been embarrassing, when she'd thought about it later on. Perhaps in part because of Nick's later faux-annoyance...

But tonight, she was too shaken up to bother. At least, to bother too much... "I'm... going to be fine," she tried.

He didn't seem much more convinced than she was. He lowered his head and looked at her over a pair of glasses she could easily imagine him wearing, anyway...

"I just need the time recover, you know?" she tried again. "It's not as bad as waking up under a car in a desert. I've had worse."

He laughed humorlessly at that, but shrugged his shoulders, just the same. "Like I said once before, I'm just lookin' out for ya."

"Thanks," she answered with a less formal smile. "But I really am fine."

She turned to go at the same time he did. But then his voice again stopped her.

"If I could give you any advice, Sidle..." he called across the lot to her, "...I'd find myself a safe place for the night. Sometimes, you just don't want to go home. Especially not in this job..."

Or with this marital status, she finished in her thoughts. But what she said was, "Alright. Maybe I'll stay in a nice hotel, or something. I'll call it my recovery fund."

"Somethin' like that. Whatever works for ya. Make a call, line it up. Go for it."

She nodded once, formal smile back in place, and turned for the lab before he could add anything else. As she reached the front door, her hands had begun to shake. She'd hoped to keep that down long enough to clock out and get home. And she was sure everyone else would hear about it by tomorrow, so she wanted to get going before the sympathy – even if much-appreciated – began; she just didn't think she could do it, at the moment...

With another steadying deep breath, she flung the door back and went into the lab. Right by the desk, the key collection box was mercifully unattended, so she didn't have to endure the usual questioning from the receptionists about what was up with current case. She deposited the keys to the department GMC, and slid around the desk with the speed of a woman who hadn't worn heels. And thank God for that one, as well...

It didn't seem to be too busy that night. Oddly enough, it was more day shift than night workers that she saw... with the only exceptions being Hodges and a rather amused-looking Morgan going over something by the materials lab. She offered a brief wave in their direction when they looked up, but kept her brisk pace all the way to the locker room. Where she could get her reports from her locker, and write in her clock-out time for what she would call an emergency exit, to be delivered to Russell in the morning...

It was only her luck that someone else's voice was coming out of it. They didn't talk loudly enough for her to make out what they were saying, whoever they were, but they sounded busily engrossed. Probably someone on the phone... But that seemed like an acceptable enough distraction for her to slide in and get what she was getting without drawing too much attention to herself. Because standing just outside the door was making her nervous; her leg was beginning to bounce up and down, and sometimes breathing didn't work in the lab. There were times when the air felt too sterile and uncomfortable, and this was one of them...

But giving one palm a punch with her other hand did wonders, so she crossed the corner to reach her locker – the one closest to the door on the night shift's side – and practiced a reassuring grin in case it was someone who needed one.

And the someone she found there would. A much better one than what she was wearing, probably, and she would have to be luckier than she seemed to have recently been if it was going to work with him at all. He was already standing facing the door, leaning against the lockers on the day shift side, eyes directly on her. In his other hand, he was just hanging up the phone call he had been talking over.

"Nick."

She said it more as a statement of fact than of greeting, and her grin became so falsely wide that she felt busted immediately.

He didn't look convinced, but if he knew anything was up, he didn't let on. "Hey, there, sunshine."

"Are you just starting, or getting off?" she asked.

"Don't say 'getting off'," he almost begged. "I had the grossest day..."

She had crossed to her locker and begun to root around in it. More for the stability of someone else's case than anything, she decided to press it.

"Why? Something dirty on your mind?"

"Oh, always. As soon as I see you," he pretended to confess.

It took no work to flash him her next grin from around the locker door.

"But, even such a beautiful sight couldn't turn me on right now. This last victim was killed by a compulsive masturbator. I've never collected so many sperm samples in my life. That was NOT in my contract..."

"There was no contract," she reminded him playfully.

She slammed the door, and went to lean on it like him, but realized just shy of making shoulder contact with it that she had forgotten her reports.

He looked at her funny as she flung it open with frustration and seized them in their folders. "I suppose not," he said awkwardly. "And I can always be grateful I didn't have to do the processing. We had us a lab team today. What a concept, idn't it?"

She bit her lip against the giggling that sometimes wanted to come out of her when he used that southern speech of his. "I couldn't disagree if I tried."

"And you couldn't try if you really wanted to."

"Exactly."

She gave her head a small shake, and scratched across the box on the report paper that said "SOLVED". A small sigh of relief escaped her lips...

"Glad to be done, too?"

She looked up at his question, and, after staring at him for a few moments, nodded. "Yeah. It wasn't a pleasant one."

She must have shown more than she felt, because he came up to her and put a hand on her shoulder at once.

"I'm sorry," he said in a voice both low and husky with sympathy.

"It isn't your fault." She relaxed her head down on top of his hand and closed her eyes for a moment.

"I know. But I wish it wasn't so hard on all of us, all the time," he offered. "You do wear it well, but..."

Her eyes popped open, and her head righted itself. "I wear it well?" she asked almost incredulously.

"False modesty is unattractive, Sara," he replied without missing a beat. "You have to know that you do, at least a little."

She leaned her head back and gave it a little shake. But the grin that remained had likely undermined her intention a little. "If you say so, Tricky Nicky."

They exchanged warm looks... but then she decided she must be off. He looked a little anxious, too. He'd probably been setting up a date, or something along those lines, before she'd come in. So she turned and left the locker room with the reports.

The halls were still busy, but not enough that no one would notice her purposeful stride. She was fortunate enough to see Russell pouring over the details of someone else's case with them. She didn't know who it was, but she figured she'd be better off if she didn't have to sit through his ritualistic third degree. So she slid the reports onto his desk and headed out. She was just ahead of Finn, too... who seemed to pay a lot more attention than anyone else had in the halls, and called after her.

"I'm fine!" Sara yelled back over her shoulder. "Just fine!"

She thought she heard Finn say something about not having asked that, but she didn't stay to find out.

She was almost running when she came out into the parking lot. It was darker out, and she reached her own car with a fervent gratitude. As she slid into the driver's seat and shut the door behind her, she leaned back on the headrest and tried to look up at the ceiling without closing her eyes.

That morning, she had gotten the call that a girl's body had been found tangled in some fallen live wires. They knew it was possibly not an accident because of the gun lying right beside her, and Russell had pulled Sara's name for the case. It had been kind of a grueling one. The girl had been left there after a rather vicious rape, if the trauma David had found was any indication, and as best as she could tell, the live wires had fallen afterwards. But it was the boot prints that led them to the criminal; the electric shock had dried up all of his own DNA. Thanks to a quick tip from Greg, she had learned that the boot prints were ordered special for the warehouse that the killer worked in, and that was what got her there.

He'd been totally crazy, though. Beneath his press, he had kept a rather large shotgun. She did close her eyes to chase away the sight of the barrel right at her chest, but it wasn't working much more than her hope that she would open her eyes to the interior of her car roof instead of the image that her mind kept. She had thought Brass was dead, for a moment, because a reflection in the window had given off the illusion that he'd been shot by an accomplice. That was when she had been fairly sure she would not be coming home from that investigation. With no element of surprise and a loaded shotgun at her chest, reaching for her own weapon would never have worked.

But Brass hadn't been dead. The accomplice was, thanks to the good work of the rookie who had taken the keys to the squad car from Brass when they'd first got back. It had been over in a flash: Brass' weapon had fired at the exact moment Sara had blinked, and when she opened her eyes, the killer was on the floor, blood pooling out of his head. Best they could tell from an earlier look into his computer, he'd taken the girl because he'd found her sleeping in his company's warehouse. And the large amount of money they'd found hidden under his press, in a code-locked safe etched into the floor, suggested he'd been worried that she would find and take it. His therapist HAD deemed him paranoid... Perhaps not quite enough to have done what he did, however... and it had been a surprise to all involved that he'd gone so crazy, so suddenly...

She sat up and sniffled away a tear that had started to go rolling down her cheek. It had been bad enough that the girl was obviously homeless, but to be raped and murdered by a cash thief from a desert warehouse...? The injustice of such things had always bothered her, particularly when it was a girl who was involved...

"How sexist of you," she could just hear Nick saying.

It wasn't much... In fact, it hadn't even been said, but it was enough for her to smile again. So she turned her key to start her car and get heading back home.

Best she could tell when she thought about it later, the sound of the ignition must have hidden the click of the pistol that she felt against her temple in the next second.