My thanks to the wonderful John Milton for the inspiration for the title. It comes from his poem "paradise lost" and the original line goes "Yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness visible." I apologize for any mistakes I might make in the whole CSI lingo...it's not so much in this chapter, but in the chapters coming up...I'll try to make it as close to the show as possible...
But enough out of me, I'll let you read now...I would really appreciate some feed back on this...let me know if I'm doing it right and if you like it or not!
CHAPTER ONE
The sound of the floor falling away beneath him was the last thing he could remember. The horrible crunching and splintering that swallowed him into the dark void beneath him.
It had all happened so fast. As he lay there now, he remembered it as a jumble of colours and light and wood, all falling the wrong way, falling toward him. And now he was buried by it. He had clawed his way back to awareness from the black oblivion of his unconscious mind, only to find himself in another world of darkness, a world where he was physically trapped and could not escape by simply opening his eyes.
He tried futilely again to move, to free an arm or a leg, but it was no use. Piles of debris from the furniture that had gone down with him immobilized his body. It had thankfully left his head clear, which in turn only made him focus more on the weight on his chest. Each breath had become a challenge, and as air came to him in slow, wheezing gasps, he thought about what he was going to do to save himself.
When the answer came to him, he realized he had known it all along. There was nothing he could do to save himself. He felt his heart wrench when he thought about how he had let Grissom down-how he had messed up yet again. A simple task. That's all it was. A small job to help out Grissom, to help out the team, and he screwed it up. Of course he did. Didn't he always? His mental berating frustrated himself and he felt his breath catch in his throat and burn as he choked it back down. For one panicked moment he felt no air enter him, and his chest seize up.
"I'm going to die." The words were a deafening whisper in his head, and he struggled against them as he fought for air. "No.....no, please!...I don't want to die here...please...I don't want to die..." And then he hear the voice in his head, calm and controlled,
"Breathe...just breathe Greg..." Ever changing, beginning as Grissom, changing to Sara, then Catherine, then Nick and Warrick, with a whisper of his mother, it murmured comfort and reason into his ears. "...all you have to do it breathe...you're all right...breathe..." and he did, hot tears running out of the corners of his eyes and down his temples into his ears, he gasped for every painful breath until he felt his chest relax.
He stared up and willed the burning pain to subside as the air came back to him, still restricted, but enough to live on. He saw a shaft of light had broken through from above, reaching its soft yellow fingers down to him in the darkness. As he lay and watched small specks of dust dance in the illumination, he felt hope. It wouldn't be long until they found him, they knew where he was, and that police officer was outside questioning the neighbors...
Something moved to his left, a shifting of broken furniture, someone pushing through the rubble. He turned his head as far left as he could manage and peered into the darkness. A sound cut through the shadows, an ecstatic whisper, a woman's voice:
"It worked!?" She moved closer to where he was, slowly crawling over the debris,
and now he could almost see her outline, her body silhouetted by the shaft of
light. As the sounds of her approach grew louder, he was caught between wanting
her to see him, and trying to become as invisible as possible. Something was
telling him that this was not right, that he should try and get away from her-
but even if he could move, there was no where to go. So he lay still and waited,
a strengthening chill running over his body.
She suddenly stopped her advancement, and Greg heard a sharp intake of breath. "We caught something..." she whispered and he knew he had been seen. His heart leapt and his mind screamed at him to get away, but he couldn't move. So he waited to see what would happen next.
She began to move again, faster, pushing and throwing items out of her way in her excitement to get to him. The sudden speed of her progression created a sick feeling within his stomach, which only deepened when her voice reached his ears again, "What do we have, what do we have here, what do we have..." she half sang, half whispered to herself. And then suddenly, too soon, she was there next to him. And Greg could do nothing but stare up at her, a halo of light sharply defining her outer edge, but shadowing her face.
She sat above him for a moment, and he squirmed. Though he was not able to see her face, his crawling skin told him that she was staring at him intently. Finally she spoke. "We caught a pretty one....yes I did..." she reached out and gently ran her fingers down his cheek. He tried to jerk his head away, but found he was frozen, his eyes locked into the black void that hid her face. "I told you he would have brown eyes...yes I did..." Her voice had lowered to a soft whisper, almost childlike, though the timber of her voice told him she was at least in her late 20's. "I caught him...so now he's mine...perfect...I told you..."
The surreal nature of his situation suddenly washed over him and he gasped out the first words that came to mind,
"Help me..." It was not what he had expected to say, and his voice sounded distant and strange-too rough and too helpless. But once it was said, he could only hope that she would free him, and give him a chance to get away. He caught a glimmer in the dark shadow of her face, her teeth as she smiled, and she leaned down close to him and whispered in his ear,
"We're going to help each other...always...forever..." She gave a small laugh as she sat back up and clapped her hands together gleefully. Her moment of joy and his of confusion were interrupted by an unseen door banging open from above them. They both froze and Greg felt his heart leap with a surge of hope. A voice rang out in the darkness, shattering the bizarrely dreamlike moment that had thickened the air around them a few seconds before.
"What the hell!?!" Greg recognized it as the voice of the police officer that had greeted him as he had arrived on the site, Jack Thompson. The woman suddenly scrambled away, out of the light from the upper floor and back into the shadows of the basement. Greg heard hesitant footsteps from above him and then the light was blocked out again, this time by Thompson's head. "Jesus Christ! Sanders? Sanders! Can you hear me!?" Greg tried to speak but found he didn't have enough air to project any sound at all. Instead he nodded stiffly, trying to make it visible enough for Thompson to see. "Ok, hold on kid, ok?" Greg saw him move to sit down on the floor with his legs hanging over the edge of the hole, and then slowly turn himself over so that he could lower himself down until he was hanging by his hands from the floor above, his feet swinging a little ways above the rubble below. He let himself drop to the ground, and caught his balance as the broken wood and glass and other debris shifted underneath him.
And all this time Greg was trying to call out to him to not come down. To warn him that the woman was somewhere in there with them. But when he did manage to hoarsely squeeze out a cautionary word, Thompson spoke into his radio on his shoulder as he moved across the floor to him. "This is Jack Thompson requesting emergency medical assistance at 420 west-" he froze suddenly, his eyes wide and locked into Greg's panic stricken ones. And then he suddenly dropped to his knees revealing the woman standing behind him, calmly clasping her hands in front of her. Greg looked from her back to Thompson as he felt forward onto his face, the long shard of glass protruding from his back glinting in the dim light. Greg looked back to the woman in horror, and her eyes flicked upwards from the dead police officer on the floor to meet his.
"He wasn't the first person I've killed so that we could be together."
And she smiled and walked toward him.
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Haha, not too bad of a cliffhanger, eh? Alrighty, review and let me know what you think...if enough people are interested, then I'll keep writing and updating...and you'll find out what I have in store for our little Greg...MUAHAHA...ha...ok, I'll stop rambling now...REVIEW! (please)