Geekfiction Fic-a-thon challenge.
Written for: falena84
Pairing: GSR
Disclaimer: Unfortunately the contract saying I bought them got lost in the mail...
Thanks to Andy for reading, rambling and giving this thing a name!
One of the downsides of working graveyard shift was the fact that it was always dark. Sara nearly stumbled while getting out of her car and approaching the yellow tape. She had always have had a bit of trouble seeing in the dark, although she never told anyone. She was just grateful that CSI's used flashlights to find their way around a crime scene.
The officer who was keeping nosey onlookers at distance gave her a stern look. Sara smiled and discretely showed him her ID.
"Sara Sidle, Las Vegas Crime Lab," she stated.
The officer was obviously new. She didn't recognise him, and he didn't seem to recognise her. It should have been obvious to him what she was doing there, seeing she was carrying her kit and wearing her vest with the large white CSI letters on the back.
"I'm sorry ma'am, I need to take a closer look at your ID, everyone could say their from the Crime unit you know.
Sara sighed and stepped a little closer to the tall dark-haired officer whom -she suspected- was only trying to get a better look at her boobs, not her ID.
"She's with me, thank you."
Sara raised her look passed the officer and smiled at the man whose familiar voice had spoken those freeing words. With a small nod at the officer -Barnsbey, judging by his nametag- she ducked under the crime scene tape and walked towards Grissom.
"Hey, I got here as soon as I could, what have we got?"
Grissom started walking towards the small house stuck between an arcade and an Italian restaurant.
"Male, Caucasian, approximately forty years old. Multiple stab wounds in his abdomen and chest, defensive wounds to the right lower arm."
"Is he the owner of the house?"
"It seems likely but we haven't been able to positively ID him yet."
Grissom glanced sideways.
"Have a nice weekend?"
Sara smiled, "The usual."
Usual in this case meaning getting up at eight in the morning, running ten miles, taking a shower and spending the rest of the day watching sappy movies with a large bowl of microwave popcorn. The nights of course were much different. Every night she got into bed she spent at least two hours thinking about Grissom and what he would be like once she peeled down those layers. Her weekend nights were cut for the daydreaming. It gave her time to unwind and she could pull herself together enough to face him again on Tuesday.
This time however, he called her in on a Monday right in the middle of her thinking of him. And today of all days her thinking of him had turned into more than just thinking. She had been dreaming of their bodies in a rhythmic dance, his hands everywhere, his mouth on hers. And then her cell phone had rung. She had taken a little longer than usual to pick up, trying to catch her breath, but she still hadn't been sure if she had sounded like her usual self.
The smirk on his face told her he knew, or at least suspected, something had been going on when she had picked up the phone just an hour earlier.
They walked up the stairs and into the house where there was peace and quiet. The victim had already been taken down to the morgue and the scene was now cleared for evidence collection. A big pool of blood indicated where the victim had been.
"I've already taken pictures of the entire scene before you got here and I took samples of every spatter of blood I could find," Grissom told her.
Sara silently wondered why he called her while it seemed he was taking pretty good care of things by himself. It was moments like these that she was convinced there was more between the two of them than just two people working together. She quickly shoved those thoughts to the back of her mind and got to work.
"Grissom?" she asked after ten minutes of searching, "Is this our vic?"
She held up a drivers license that she found stuffed between the couch cushions. He walked up behind her and leaned over her to look at the piece of evidence she was holding.
"That's him."
"Levi Katz, age 42."
"Then he IS the owner of the house," Grissom said.
They both searched on for further evidence, but apart from a stack of cigarette butts and a gum wrap they found nothing.
"Can you give me a ride back to the lab?" Grissom asked, "I rode along with Brass, but he left early."
Sara smiled. Getting Grissom in a confined space with her was one of her favorite things to do. She unlocked her Denali and got in the driver's seat. They drove to the lab in silence, both in their own thoughts.
After they had spoken to Dr. Robbins they had learned a little more about the victims COD. He had been stabbed four times. Three of those had been in the area of his heart, the fourth had been in his lower abdomen. Ironically the latter caused his death, hitting his abdominal artery and bleeding him out. They also learned from the angle in which the victim was stabbed that his killer was probably left-handed.
All the blood came back as belonging to the vics, one of the cigarette butts didn't, but after running the DNA profile through CODIS it turned out to be a dead end.
Grissom, whose neck was starting to ache, indicating a migraine coming up, swallowed a Relpax with a glass of water.
"Are you all right?" Sara asked, with a hint of concern in her voice.
"About to have a migraine, I can feel it in my neck."
Sara stood up and moved behind him.
"My best friends used to have them. A massage is very useful," she said while slowly lowering her hands to his neck. She felt him shivering under her touch.
Grissom was paralysed with the feeling of her soft hands on his skin, rubbing the sore spot gently. His mind wandered to other parts of his body he would like to feel her touch.
"How does this feel?" Sara asked, ripping him out from his thoughts.
"Uh..."
He simply couldn't answer. Alarm bells were going off inside his head. She shouldn't touch him like this. Not here, not now, not where everyone could see what she did to him. He couldn't let her do this, they couldn't be, she should know that.
"Sara you really shouldn't..." he started.
She didn't obey and kept on rubbing his neck and shoulders, putting her thumbs right on the base of his skull and applying some pressure.
The pain it caused was a good one. The kind of pain that told you it would all be over soon. The pain you had to go through before all got better. And it did.
"Much better..." he finally admitted.
Sara released him and sat down next to him.
"I think we should go back there, maybe talk to the owners of the restaurant and the arcade again... I know PD didn't find anything, but maybe they'll open up to us," Sara said, switching her mind back to work with ease.
It was something she had become pretty good at over the last few years.
Grissom, still confused about the violation of his personal space stared at her with his mouth open.
Graveyard shift was over and Greg and Sofia bid their goodbyes while Sara and Grissom prepared to pull a double.
"Story of my life," Sara mumbled while stifling a yawn. She had now been up for almost 24 hours and it wasn't working for her that well.
"I need to get something to eat," she decided out loud, "Will you have breakfast with me at the diner across the street?"
Grissom stared at her.
"No!"
Sara, determined not to show how much he hurt her by yet another rejection, turned on her heels.
"Fine then, I'll go alone."
As she was headed for the door Grissom suddenly grabbed her arm.
"No, I mean... The diner is closed for renovation. We have to go somewhere else."
Sara smiled.
They found a small diner on the way to the crime scene. There were orange table cloths on the small round tables, corn-ears and sickles were decorating the walls.
"Interesting decoration style," Grissom said, one eyebrow raised.
"Lammas."
"Gesundheit!"
"No, Grissom. Lammas. I suspect the owner of this place is a witch. She decorates according to the time of year. At the moment it's closest to Lammas, or Loaf Mass, which was August the 1st. It celebrates the sacrifice of the wheat for the sake of humanity."
"I see. That would explain why there is lots of bread," Grissom stated as he studied the menu.
"It would."
She had expected him to ask how she knew all of this, but hey, this was Grissom. Knowledge was not a question to Grissom, it was just a fact. He wouldn't care where the information came from, he would just absorb the information and that was it.
Grissom inhaled deeply.
"How do you know all of this?"
Sara stared at him in amazement.
"I uh... I used to be into that stuff.." she stammered.
Grissom eyed her with a curious glance.
"Which craft, or Wicca, focuses on the good in the world. There weren't many good things in my life. You might say I felt... Unworthy."
She whispered the last word while staring down at her hands.
Grissom gently squeezed her hand in an encouragement to go on. Sara glanced at him briefly and then continued.
"Wicca taught me that everything you do will come back to you threefold. I learned to do the best I could so that I could receive... Better..."
A single tear rolled down her cheek.
"What made you give up Wicca?"
"You could say Wicca made me give up Wicca. I wanted to do good things for people so I decided to become a CSI. And then I was taught to look at the facts. Wicca isn't about facts. So it slowly faded until it was no longer a part of my life."
Grissom looked at her with a look of understanding and regret. It was him who had taught her that coincidence did not exist. It was him who had robbed her of her comfort zone.
Half an hour later they had finished their breakfast and were almost ready to leave for the crime scene.
"It's on me," Grissom said, "I enjoyed having breakfast with you in this strangely decorated diner."
"I bet if we come back in a few weeks, it will be decorated with pine cones and leaves and apples for Autumn Equinox," Sara said with a smile.
Grissom looked at her.
"I can't wait."
"He was strange but nice," Jack Michaels, the owner of the arcade told Grissom and Sara, "Didn't get out a lot. Wandered in every now and then. Usually played 'Ms. Packman' or air hockey.
"Who with?" Sara asked.
"Well, usually he would start out by himself and then I would go up to him and play along. Bastard beat me every time," he smirked.
"That 'bastard' is now dead," Grissom remarked.
Jack smiled sadly.
"I know... It's just what I used to call him. You know... In a friendly way?"
"Thank you... You'll here from us."
Grissom and Sara walked off, the latter shaking her head vigorously.
"Hey... What's wrong?" Grissom asked.
Sara sighed as she leaned against the outside wall of the arcade.
"I just can't believe people do that! Calling each other names just for the heck of it. My mother called my father a bastard, my father called my mother a bitch, both of them called me a tramp because I wanted to wear nail polish to school one day. That's not funny."
She drew shaky breaths while trying not to look Grissom in the eye, knowing she would start crying at the sight of pity in his eyes.
She felt his hand on her cheek, wiping away a lone tear she hadn't even noticed slipping from her eye. She couldn't resist looking up at him, but it was not pity she saw in his eyes. It was understanding. He understood how she felt, because he had felt the same way for years.
"My father used to call my mother names behind her back. Literally. She couldn't hear him, but I could. It hurts to be called names."
His hand was still on her cheek but he didn't seem to notice. All he did was gaze deeply into her brown pools. Sara on the other hand was very aware of his hand, burning the skin where he touched her. She flushed to a deep shade of red.
'I wish he'd never let go,' she thought. Grissom smiled at her shyly and slowly lowered his hand.
"Maybe we should both go home now and get some sleep. Start in early tonight."
"Yeah..." Sara let her gaze fall to the ground. "Maybe we should."
It was 6.34PM exact when Grissom picked her up in front of her apartment building, his eyes lingering on her wet curls that indicated she just got out of the shower.
"Hey," She smiled broadly when she got into his Denali, "I'm glad you made me go home. I feel so refreshed!"
"You look great, but then again, you always do."
The words were out of his mouth before he even realized it, resulting in an uncomfortable silence where Grissom turned pink and Sara started fidgeting with her watch.
"I don't really know what to do about this," Sara whispered.
"Why? What's wrong with it?" Grissom asked.
Sara realized he was talking about the watch in stead of them.
"I think I ran out of time."
Grissom stared at her and softly ran his hand through her hair.
"I'm sorry about all of this..."
"You don't know what to do. I did, but it's slipping away steadily."
Grissom recalled the conversation they had so many years ago. His hearing was getting worse by the day and just as he decided to do something about his most significant weakness she had asked him out. And he had declined.
He cupped her cheek and gently forced her to look at him.
"Let's have dinner," he said, "Let's see what happens..."
"Grissom..."
He looked at her with pleading eyes.
"I know I don't deserve a second chance..."
Silent tears streamed down Sara's face, creating small streams of salted water that ran over Grissom's hand.
"I'm sorry I hurt you," he whispered hoarsely.
He slowly pulled himself towards her and kissed her wettened cheek.
Sara rose his eyes up to his.
"Sure... Let's have dinner."
He tucked away a strand of hair behind her left ear before letting her go and starting the engine.
Seeing that they needed to talk to the owner of the Italian restaurant anyway they decided to have dinner at Benito's. The restaurant had a cosy ambiance. Old Chianti-bottles were now functioning as candle-holders on the middle of every table.
They walked in together, Grissom's hand loosely leaning upon Sara's hip, when suddenly Grissom stopped dead in his tracks and stared at a table on the left.
The brunette with blue eyes who was sitting on that table just a few feet away from them had recognized him too. Sara, who didn't understand what was going on, was merely startled by the fact that Grissom returned to his old self only half an hour since he finally made a move.
"Mr. Grissom," the brunette said with a lukewarm voice.
"Lady Heather."
"I haven't seen you since the time you apologized to me for screwing me over after spending a night at my dominion."
Alarm bells went off in Sara's head. She had known the name of Lady Heather sounded familiar from the start, but the fact that she was the dominatrix and that Grissom had spent a night at her dominion was just too much for her to handle.
She left the two alone and decided to get to work. Finally having dinner with him was just too good to be true. She asked for the restaurant manager and waited at the bar. Grissom soon joined her.
"Ready to have dinner?" he asked in an upbeat tone.
"We have to get to work Grissom. I just asked for the manager."
Before Grissom had time to respond the manager emerged from the two large doors that were leading to the kitchen. He was a big man with a huge moustache and curly hair. His stomach hung over the black pants he was wearing and it seemed like the only thing that kept it in place was his white shirt with stretched out buttons.
"Antonio Mombardi. How can I help you?" he said, while shaking both of their hands.
Grissom, who was still at a loss for words over Sara's change of mind, just stared from Sara to the Italian man standing in front of him.
"Sara Sidle, LVPD Crimelab, this is my colleague Gil Grissom." She went to great lengths to emphasize the word 'colleague', something that didn't go unnoticed by the object of speech.
"Mrs. Sidle, Mr. Grissom," Antonio nodded, "You must be here because of our neighbor... Tragedy. Tragedy."
"Actually it's MISS Sidle," Grissom interrupted, driven by some sort of territorial drift.
"Really?" The Italian guy raised an eyebrow. "I can't believe a beautiful woman like yourself is not somebody's wife."
Sara flushed.
"Mr. Mombardi," Grissom said, "did you know the victim personally?"
"No, not really. We've just opened last week. Listen, could we do this somewhere else? I don't want my restaurant to get bad publicity."
"A person got killed and you are worrying about publicity?" Sara snorted.
"This restaurant is my life!"
Grissom eyed him curiously.
"Why didn't you name this restaurant after yourself?"
"Does that really matter?" the manager asked nervously, "I never liked my name, so I named it after my uncle."
"Did you see or hear anything around the time of the murder?"
Antonio turned to Sara to answer her question.
"It was a very busy night, I don't even remember if I locked the door last night."
Grissom eyed him with great suspicion.
"We would like to question all of your employees."
They spent the whole evening questioning every bartender, waiter, host and cook in the restaurant. Since they didn't have a murder weapon yet and none of the people working at the restaurant seemed to have a motive, they left the restaurant at eleven to head back to the lab.
The silence in the Denali was awkward. Sara was staring out the window while Grissom was trying to focus on the road in stead of the questions that spun around in his head.
The tension got too much for him and he let out a deep sigh, which Sara ignored.
"Talk to me."
"There's nothing to talk about," she answered, still not really acknowledging his presence.
"We were supposed to have dinner. What happened?"
"Nothing happened, I just didn't feel like it anymore."
Grissom pulled over and shut off the engine.
"Do you really think I'm THAT gullible? You've wanted to go out with me for years! You don't just change your mind after all that time," Grissom said, with a hint of irritation in his voice, "unless you wanted to get back at me. I could understand..."
He stared out the front window at the street that was lying in front of him. Sara slowly turned in her seat and looked at him.
"I don't get BACK at people Grissom! Don't you know me? I told you! I told you what my parents did, I told you I can't stand it when people dominate... And you went to a dominion! You obviously slept with her. What? You like bossing people around so you take that fantasy and boss her around and get off on it? You can't do that to me! If that is what you want I don't want to be any part of it."
Grissom blinked at her in confusion. Than it dawned on him.
"Sara, look at me. I haven't slept with her! Yes, I spent a night there, but it was talking. I had a soft spot for her. She is so different from you, yet still the same. I told her about my life and she told me about hers. I could tell her. She understood, but she was far enough away for me to trust her. I did NOT sleep with her. I do NOT like to 'get off' on bossing people around."
Sara looked at him wearily.
"You didn't sleep with her?"
Grissom grabbed her hands.
"No, I didn't! I couldn't!"
"Why?"
"Because I don't think it's fair to sleep with one woman and think about the other at the same time. You were always on my mind Sara. You still are."
Tears -once again- streamed down Sara's face.
"I know I hurt you. But I'd never try to dominate you. I know about you, and how you feel... You and I... We're equal, nothing more, nothing less."
"If that is really true..." Sara's gaze pierced his, "then show me."
The night moved slowly. Grissom and Sara spent time running back and forth between trace, DNA and the morgue. They ran the victim's name through the database to check if he had committed any crimes or had ever reported someone.
"He filed a noise complaint against Benito's three weeks ago!" Grissom said when the information popped up.
"Well, that's strange. Who would file a noise complaint against a restaurant, while their other neighbor is an arcade? Someone who hates food?" Sara suggested.
Realization suddenly dawned on Grissom.
"Someone who hates Italians."
Mia told them once again that all of the cigarette butts were from the vic, except for one.
"I ran the sample of saliva through DNA, and it came back as being male. I ran it through CODIS, but no hit unfortunately."
"We can't be sure the cigarette belonged to our killer," Grissom reasoned.
"But there is a good chance it might be."
Sara smiled at him.
"Thanks, Mia."
They walked out of the DNA lab together and wandered off to trace. If Grissom hadn't stayed focussed he would have slipped his arm around the small of Sara's back once again. The comfort of it warmed his insides. The feel of the two of them belonging together, the feel of showing the world they chose each other.
The walk was all too short for his liking and the fact that Hodges was in a very good mood didn't make him very happy.
"Do you have any information on that piece of gum wrap we gave you?"
"For you? Always!" he said uncharacteristically while beaming at Sara.
Grissom grunted, "Just give us the information David."
"Well.. It's not an American brand, in fact it was imported from Europe."
Grissom and Sara exchanged glances.
"Italy."
"Mr. Mombardi," Grissom said to the manager of Benito's who was standing behind the bar in his establishment.
"Mr. Grissom, Miss Sidle," Antonio flashed them a wide grin.
"Why didn't you tell us about the noise complaint the victim made against you?"
"I didn't think it would matter that much," the manager shrugged.
"It does, it gives you a motive," Sara said, "You've just recently opened this restaurant, you can't use any negative publicity."
"I didn't kill the poor guy!"
"Maybe you didn't, maybe one of your employees did. We need DNA samples from all the men that work here."
"Why?"
"I think this place held a grudge against our vic," Grissom said.
The manager stared at him blankly.
"Mr. Katz was Jewish. His parents were tortured during the second World War in Italy. Do you realize that your restaurant's name is the first name of the Italian dictator Mussolini?"
Antonio went white.
"The victim moved to the US to get rid of the memories. And then, an Italian restaurant opens up next to his house and to make matters worse, it gets called Benito's. He must have given you a very hard time."
"The rat bastard kept threatening me to destroy my restaurant."
Grissom and Sara walked into the restaurant kitchen to prepare the employees for the DNA swabbing. People continued business as usual, chopping, grinding, grabbing plates.
Sara nudged Grissom in the ribs and discretely pointed at the sous-chef who was holding down a tomato with his right hand, while preparing to start slicing.
Grissom looked at Sara and nodded. They approached the man, who was now slicing and dicing the tomatoes at shutter speed.
"Excuse me sir. I couldn't help but notice you are a lefty," Sara said.
"So?" the sous-chef said with a hint of panic in his voice.
"We need your DNA for comparisson."
"Non comunicherò."
Grissom smiled, "Non dovete comunicare. La prova parla per se."
Grissom's hands were stroking the small of Sara's back, his mouth carefully sought hers. They had solved the case quite easily. The sous-chef was arrested for murder one, the manager was going to be prosecuted for being his accomplice and every single employee of the restaurant was charged with conspiracy after the fact.
"I feel so relaxed in your arms," Sara sighed.
Grissom kissed her once more.
"I love you.