Author's Note: Another repsonse to a CSI fan fiction challenge. One last time, I am back with Sara and Gilbert and haiku, in a story that could conceivably follow the others I wrote for the previous challenges.

But I hope not.

Oh, a haiku, some origami, and a bumper sticker that appear here are from my life, not Gilberts's.

Haiku from the Bottom of a Ravine.

Scent is the sense most closely tied to memory. What does that say about the evolution of our intellects? How far back into the reptile brainstem does that tendril go?

Grissom laid still, his eyes closed and his ears filled only with the beating of his heart, a relentless tympani solo drowning out anything else. He drew a careful breath, and there it was again. Head and Shoulders for dry hair, although hers wasn't. Something else, just underneath. Aluminum salts and perspiration, and powder like a newborn, yeasty and clean and wholesome, the metallic mixing with the organic.

The scent was on him and around him, and he remembered the first time he had smelled that combination. San Francisco, after the lecture, in his hotel room. The one time he had allowed himself to really feel… anything. The night he had started paying attention to beauty in the world and not just in his mind. The radio had meandered from Rachmaninoff to Barenaked Ladies to Enya, in the mazy motion of college radio in the cultural Petri dish that is San Francisco.

Grissom remembered laughing, watching her strip off her clothes, while she herself laughed to the radio. "I have a history of taking off my shirt," she'd sung along. She had, as he had laughed, taken off her shirt. He had reached up and pulled her down to him, and kissed her over her heart as she laughed.

Secret. That was the aluminum tang under the baby powder. Strong enough for a man, but made for a woman. He recalled once seeing that on the bumper of a lesbian colleague's car. Head and Shoulders and Secret, and something else. He took a careful breath, and processed the scents, the minutest particles, in the most homeopathic ratios, entered his nose and triggered responses deep in the base of his brain.

Eggs, fried eggs with cheese and some sort of bacon. They had stopped for breakfast, something quick to eat on the run, and the Jack-in-the-Box crew had ignored her request for no bacon. Hold the bacon. He had ceased so long ago to be surprised by the inability of most people to follow even the firmest of polite commands, but she had not yet given in. Instead she had railed and cursed the man at the Jack-in-the-Box, the inventor of the bacon, egg and cheese sandwich, and him for suggesting they drive through rather than go in to the counter where they could have seen her badge and gun before they screwed up her order. She had moved on to cursing all meat eaters as fascists and closet eugenicists as well, when he had pointed out that Hitler was a vegetarian.

She had shot him a deadly look and pointed out that Hitler was also as mass-murdering fuckhead, and did Grissom want to add anything else to the conversation? Grissom had declined.

Eggs and bacon, and cheese. With his eyes closed and his other senses tightly reined, Grissom could smell the sandwich she had not eaten, along with her shampoo and her deodorant.

Whenever she cursed, even when quoting, he knew she was past the limit. That's how she had been this morning, holding her offending sandwich and daring him to compare her again to Hitler. He'd taken the sandwich and given her a no-carb white tea with blueberry. It was something overpriced and without any redeeming nutrients he had bought while she filled the tank on the Tahoe, and he'd correctly guessed she'd like it.

He'd taken an exploratory bite of her breakfast, and she'd grown silent. He'd looked at her, one eyebrow raised as he chewed the cooling eggs thoughtfully. She'd shaken her head and put her attention back on the road.

"You have bacon crumbs in your beard, Gris." Soft, accusing, sad. "Just in case I needed incentives to not kiss you any time today."

"I hadn't realized it was a something you struggled with," he'd commented.

"Daily."

"I see."

He had very carefully wiped his mouth on a napkin, and stuffed the sandwich in a bag and leaned to put it on the back seat in the waste bag he kept in the truck. She had watched him without words, and they had ridden, bacon free, in silence for a good while.

"I'm thinking maybe someone needs to quit." Her voice, after the long stretch of tires humming along the hot asphalt, was jarring. He'd blinked several times and turned in his seat to face her as squarely as his seatbelt had allowed.

"At the lab?" His voice had sounded cold even in his own head.

"No, at the Daily Planet, Clark. Yes, at the lab. You. Me. Maybe Ecklie." She'd shaken her head and gripped the wheel tighter. "One of us, maybe all of us. I don't know. I just know that something needs to change."

"Don't leave. The lab needs you."

"Okay, convince Ecklie to go. It shouldn't be hard. He's a lousy CSI, a lousy leader, and miserable human being otherwise, so maybe you can prevail upon him to leave." She'd quirked her lips in something very much like a smile. He had been observing her lips, not speaking, and he realized finally she was waiting for him to speak.

"The lab needs you," he'd repeated at last, at a loss to explain his own needs, his thoughts, his fears. She'd looked at him, and he'd seen pity in her eyes behind the smile.

"We're here," she'd said softly. It took him a moment to realize she'd stopped the Tahoe. There was a highway patrol cruiser, lights flashing mutely, slightly behind them to one side, and a line of skid marks that veered over the median and into a ravine beside the desert roadway. The patrolman was laying out flares behind them

"Yes," Grissom had said, getting out his clipboard and releasing his seatbelt.

She'd sighed, and smacked the dashboard with her hand. A post-it with the mile marker information for their accident scene had fluttered to the floor like an autumn leaf. He had caught it from the corner of his eye as she got out of the vehicle, but he'd refrained from mentioning it. There were usually a small number of them stuck to various surfaces on the dash, the closest he came to clutter on the job other than the neglected paperwork on his desk.

Grissom, where he laid now, thought of that small piece of paper. What had happened to it, after? Was it still on the floorboard of the Tahoe? Thinking of paper, he again caught a scent, tenuous and subtle, earthy.

It was the origami beetle that Greg had given him the previous evening, made from a coffee filter. It was unique and special, thoughtful. Odd. Unable to express how touched he'd been, Grissom had tucked it carefully into his shirt pocket. Greg had blushed and tried to downplay how eager he still was to please Grissom. He'd said making the beetle was one of the twelve steps, right after admitting that he was powerless over X-Box and right before the one where he repaid all his college roommates for late night phone calls to Miss Cleo he'd billed on their 'emergency' credit cards.

They had all laughed. No one had any clue, as usual, what Greg had been talking about, but the beetle was actually quite striking, and Grissom had planned on putting it on his bedside table when he got home. Now it was here, nearby, and Grissom could smell it if he focused his attention with sufficient acuity.

He knew that if he opened his eyes, right now, and turned his head to the left, he'd see the beetle, flung from his pocket, crouching on the sandy ground between him and the wreckage of the Tahoe. It had landed, on its feet, wings caught in the act of opening, carapace spreading. It really was remarkable origami.

Of course, if he opened his eyes, and turned his head, he'd see the beetle. And the Tahoe. And one hand, long fingers outstretched. One shock of hair, and part of one shoulder.

She had not moved since the accident, since the tractor-trailer rig had knocked the patrol cruiser into the Tahoe. He had wanted so much for her to move, or to answer him, but she denied him.

For the first time in all the years she had known him, he called to her and she did not answer. He needed her and she did not come to him.

For a while he had called, or tried to move to her, but the sharp blackness had grabbed him each time and pulled him down. He knew he was broken, somewhere inside, and intellectually he knew he was going to die. He knew she was dead. He had not yet said goodbye.

He ignored the gasoline smell. Without a fire, the pooling gas would most likely evaporate quickly. No Hollywood Technicolor explosion, just a half a ton of twisted metal at the bottom of a ravine, and a broken man dying alone, two meters from the love of his life.

He closed his eyes and ignored the gasoline, and the copper tang of blood. Hers, his. He thought about their blood separately seeping into the sandy soil, and he hoped that the two streams might find each other, might merge, before the last moisture leached away. The ravine walls were high enough to shade them now that noon had finally passed, and perhaps they had some short time together here after all before he finally joined her.

What to say? He kept his eyes closed, and the drumbeat in his ears was his own pulse, softly pumping his life away into the sand. He thought about the beetle, about the delicate art of it, so out of place here in the desert, amid the blood and the gasoline.

And over the smell of gas and blood and his body rapidly dying, he caught again the smell of her hair, and of her deodorant, and he realized that she was as delicate and beautiful as any beetle, and any art. Scent is the sense most closely tied to memory, and he drank in the smell of her, and set his mind at ease.

The rules of haiku are simple and precise. Three lines, of five, seven and five syllables, recording a single moment, a sensation, usually with a natural or elemental theme, and a single action. Sometimes in English and other Western languages, the pattern was two, three, two to more accurately capture the spirit of Japanese haiku, but the classical form would suffice here.

He opened his eyes, and looked at the jagged swatch of blue visible from his spot on the floor of the ravine. He took a careful breath, for he had one more thing to do before the darkness claimed him and brought him, perhaps, to her at last.

Sand, stone, and copper

Our coffee beetle detects

Scents of my angel

He thought for a moment, wondering if there was anything he needed to add. She had waited so long for him reach for her again, and he had waited too long to explain why he dared not. He ignored the sound of insects discovering them, and of the gasoline dripping from the tank into the sandy soil. He saw nothing, heard nothing, and smelled only the fragrance of her hair, of her skin, of her.

Scent is the sense most closely tied to memory, and with his last breath he remembered her, all of her, always.

-fin