Memory of a Dead Man
Author—LadyLuminol )
Disclaimer—All characters are the property of their respective owners. I just get to play with them.
Warning—Character death
Author Notes—Another angsty fic. This one's a little odd, but c'est la vie.
It wasn't supposed to be like this, Greg, I swear.
It wasn't supposed to be you that had to deal with this. It was supposed to be somebody else. Some other nameless, faceless, unknown CSI. Not you, my star pupil, my protégé, the one I trained to be the best. Never you.
I swore to myself that when I left, I'd go somewhere, anywhere, that no one knew me. That's how I ended up here, in the middle of Nowhere, Oregon. Wonderful place to study and consult from a distance, horrible place for your so-called 'friends' to visit. After all, how many people really enjoy a two-hour hike through the mountains to chat with your hermetic ex-boss who probably couldn't care less about the mosquitoes that must be starting a blood bank on your donations alone?
I didn't know you'd transferred here. If I had, I'd have left you to your peace. But I didn't, and now you see me like this. Like the broken old man I've become.
It's rather disconcerting to be watching like this, now that I have some sort of karmic access to everything I never wanted to know. I know that you moved out here just after I did. Just after Sara…well, you know. After she got killed. I couldn't handle it anymore, because her warning came true. I had figured it out, but it was too late. Just barely too late.
Sara died in my arms. I never told you guys that. I guess I couldn't share that one last memory I had of her. I went to the scene, to tell her I loved her, to tell her that I was so fucking stupid for not admitting it to myself. I heard the gunshot. I heard the scream. I told her not to leave me, I told her I loved her and I couldn't do it without her. I saw her smile. I heard her ragged voice tell me that she loved me too, and she couldn't hold on anymore. I heard her last breath, heard it shudder in the silence. And then I heard no more.
The gunman was still there, and stupidly, I hadn't cared until then. His next shot was so close to my head that it shattered my eardrums. Otosclerosis be damned; I let a gunman do to me what I wouldn't let nature. All through the trial, I had to have an interpreter there, and believe me, I would've been humiliated if I hadn't been blubbering on about how I was so stupid. Oh, I'm not saying I wasn't stupid, just that I shouldn't have been blubbering about it.
I thought the trial would go on forever. Some part of me wanted to get it over with, to put this behind me and forget everyone and everything I knew in Vegas. Hell, there were some nights I sat on my couch with a bottle of Jim Beam in one hand and my service weapon in the other, wondering if I could see her through a 9mm hole in my head. But the rest of me said that I had to be here, I had to see that bastard injected with enough chemicals to kill an elephant. I had to get justice, not only for her, but for everyone else I couldn't get it for.
So I kept at it. I funded the lab with almost all of my savings, just for the Sara Sidle Centre for Forensic Sciences. Yes, some private donor funded the Sidle Centre, but do you, the smartest investigator I ever trained, think that when I know something about a massive grant before the director does, that I just might have something to do with it?
I quit. I never told even Catherine, who apparently became supervisor after me, and who incidentally married Warrick all in the same year. Too bad I couldn't attend that wedding, but I happened to be on the far side of the globe. Actually, I left the way I always planned to. One day there, the next day Billy the Fish had a Post-It stuck to it telling Catherine how my filing system worked, and to remind her to order more slides because we were out.
I came here, to my little retreat from humanity. Sure, I travel, but I never went back to Vegas, not even on overlay flights on my way to Brazil or Egypt or wherever else happened to catch my fancy. I didn't think that I could handle being so close to all of you and not be able to say a word, and I still think so now. I mean, one last visit sounds so tempting. To be able to say that you're all doing a great job, to take it easy before burnout hits you as hard as it did me, to tell you to be careful so I don't have to make my last appearance in your life at your funeral. God only knows how bad I wanted to, and I only know all the reasons I couldn't. Right now, now that I have no chance of seeing you all again, those reasons seem moot points, but my worst flaw was always overanalyzing emotion.
I gave up yesterday. I realized that along with my hearing, my humanity had left. I felt absolutely nothing. I remember Sara telling me often enough that she wanted to be like me, so she didn't have to feel anything. It was like a punch in the face to realize I was the me she wanted to be. So I gave up. I sat in my armchair in front of the fire with my gun and I gave up. I know I told all of you that you couldn't understand the mind of someone with nothing left to live for. I was wrong. At that moment, I understood. The mind everyone tried to understand was mine, and after living with it for fifty years, I couldn't even do it. So I gave up. And now I have everything I wanted to die for.
It wasn't supposed to be like this, Greg, I swear.