Title: Grand Façade Burning

Author: Jeanine (jeanine@iol.ie)

Rating: PG

Pairing: Grissom/Sara, Sara/Warrick

Spoilers: Major for Burden of Proof; mild for everything up to that.

Feedback: Makes my day

Disclaimer: If it was in the show, it's not mine.

Archive: At my site Checkmate () , Fanfiction.net; anywhere else, please ask.

Summary: Warrick talks to Sara about her feelings for Grissom.

***

He shifted his stance on the front doorstep, reaching up to ring the bell, steeling himself as he did to face whatever he might be subjected to, because he was reasonably sure that she wasn't expecting company. He also knew that, contrary to what she might think when she opened the door and saw him there, he hadn't planned this. Nick had gone home for the night, Catherine was off for dinner with Grissom, and he'd stayed at the office, putting the finishing touches to some paperwork. He knew that Sara had clocked off earlier in the day; for once, the girl wasn't putting in obscene amounts of overtime, and knowing her as he did, that worried him somewhat. Still, he'd been sure that she would have said something if she wanted to talk; she would have sought him out, would have called him if she needed him. But she hadn't done that, so he was going to respect that, give her some space.

He really was.

Until he was walking out of the CSI building and he saw a delivery guy with a plant standing at reception, telling the girl there that he had a delivery for Sara Sidle. The receptionist had begun to page her, but Warrick had stepped in before he even realised what he was doing, telling her that Sara had left for the day, but that he'd sign for it and drop it off to her. The delivery guy had been cautious, but a twenty had eased his conscience, and thus it was that he found himself standing in Sara Sidle's doorway, plant mostly obscuring his face, waiting for her to answer.

When the door opened, he could just see half of her face, and he didn't miss the look of faint impatience, which gave way to confusion and finally to mild laughter when she saw who was behind the plant. "Moonlighting?" she asked, stepping aside to let him in, and when he was over the threshold, standing beside her, he offered the plant to her.

"Something like that," he told her, going into her living room and dropping down on the couch. "Guy came by CSI with that for you. I thought I'd bring it over, let you get a head start on killing it dead."

She raised an eyebrow as she sat down at the far end of the couch, placing the plant on the coffee table, pushing aside a dog-eared crime book and a glass of wine to make space for it. "I'll have you know, Warrick Brown," she informed him, "That I have an excellent green thumb." She tilted her head slightly, a vague grimace on her face. "Just not a lot of time to cultivate it."

He tried not to notice how bitter she sounded at that, how the temperature in the room seemed to have dropped a notch or two. Instead he watched closely as she picked the card out of the leafy foliage, slid a nail underneath the seal and took out the card. Her face tightened as she read it, and she seemed to stare at it for a long time without speaking.

"Secret admirer?" he asked, but it wasn't a joke, and when she closed the card and looked up at him, it was with an expression that managed to combine anger, amazement, and plain old confusion.

"Grissom," she spat, with the same tone she'd use if a particular piece of evidence wasn't telling her what she wanted to hear. Which, Warrick reflected, might just be the case.

"Sending you flowers," he observed. "Something you want to tell me?"

It was a dangerous question from anyone, more so from him, and he knew it. But he wanted to provoke a reaction, and provoke it he did. "Jealous?" came her response, and while in another place and time she might have been teasing him, he was left in no doubt that she was doing anything but now.

"Defensive?" he countered, and she dropped the card on the table, flicking it from her fingers like so much cigarette ash. "You're looking to leave us?"

The rapid change of subject threw her off guard; he'd planned as much. She stared at him for a moment, confusion in her big brown eyes before she thought she'd worked it out. "CSI grapevine," she postulated. "Grissom to Catherine, Catherine to you."

"Not quite." His quiet rebuttal silenced her. "Saw it for myself." He took a beat to see if she knew what he was talking about, and when she evidently didn't, he continued, "You were filling in the leave form when I told you about nail polish being the accelerant."

Another bitter smile twisted her features, and she swallowed hard, wrapping her arms around herself. "Pretty observant." She'd covered the paper up so that he couldn't see it, but he'd been quicker than that.

"It's my job," he shrugged, shifting slightly on the couch so that he was sitting closer to her, nearer to the edge, elbows on his knees, hands joined in between. "Any particular reason?"

She didn't look at him, looked straight ahead, eyes locked on the clock on the mantel as she shook her head. "I just can't work like that anymore."

He frowned, an image of her walking down the hall with Catherine, joking about the body farm, coming into the break room and shooting the breeze with Nick over the state of the fridge coming to mind. And a couple of weeks ago, the teasing that she'd taken over her date with Hank, jokes about Catherine giving her the finger and, from Nick, about how she might want to change her perfume. He'd known that she'd had a hard time settling in; he'd seen it with his own eyes, and besides, she'd admitted as much to him. He'd thought that she was long past that. "Like what?" he asked, mystified.

"In a place where no-one respects me." Her voice was sharp, pained.

"We respect you," he protested. "Sara, everyone respects you."

She shook her head again. "Not everyone."

"Everyone." He tried again. "You've more than proved yourself the last year…"

"I know that." She interrupted him, her voice betraying her frustration. "I know that, ok? I worked my ass off, proving to everyone here that I wasn't just Grissom's pet, that I didn't get this job just because I know him, that I deserve to be here. I know I've done my bit. It's just…" She stopped herself, closing her eyes and taking several deep breaths.

"Just that Grissom doesn't show it," Warrick surmised, with slight emphasis on Grissom's name, and she dropped her head into her hands.

"I can't believe I'm acting like this," she muttered, and he got the feeling that it was more to herself that to him. "I swore that I'd never let myself be defined by what someone thought of me, that I'd never give anyone that much power…and here I am."

"He does respect you Sara. We all do."

He'd said it before, but in the absence of any further inspiration, repeating it couldn't do any harm. Nor did it, for she turned her head towards him, a slow smile spreading across her face. "Of all the people I ever thought would be saying something like that to me…"

He grinned at her, reaching over and taking one of her hands in his. "We've come a long way," he agreed, recalling their first meeting, her yanking him out of a seedy casino, their first conversation, sitting at the counter of some dive of a diner across the street. He hadn't trusted her, she sure as hell hadn't trusted him, and for the first few weeks of their working together, he had the distinct impression that he was right up there with cockroaches and dentists on her list of favourite things.

It had taken the second time she'd investigated him, finding tape of him going into a casino to change things between them. It looked as if it was going to send them hurtling backwards, but once she'd seen Jason, once he'd told her the whole story, she'd come to him at the end of that shift to apologise. She'd offered to buy him breakfast to make up for it, and he'd let her. What neither of them had foreseen happening though was that breakfast would lead to something else, something that neither of them had planned, but that both of them had enjoyed. Something that they'd sworn up and down that no-one else needed to know about because it was never going to happen again.

He hadn't planned on appearing at her door when, thanks to a case involving a dead gambler and a mob hit in the Glass Elevator, he'd finally realised just how much of a gambling problem he had. He'd just appeared there, ostensibly to talk, and one thing had led to another. Just as it had a couple of weeks later when he'd walked into her in the locker room, tracks of tears on her face, and she'd told him about a woman who was too tough to die and a system that protected her attacker.

By the time they were standing in his shower together, trying to warm themselves up and clean themselves off after spending hours in the freezing cold torching a dead pig, they'd stopped trying to excuse it, stopped trying to explain it. They just accepted that it was something that happened between them every now and again, and left it as that, nothing more.

And it was something that kept on happening, even after Nick had begun teasing her about flirting with an EMT over a DB, even after Catherine had told him that Greg Sanders had a crush on Sara.

Even after he'd realised that while Sara might, every so often, fall into his arms and into his bed, he wasn't the one that she was in love with.

"I know you respect me Warrick. But you act like it." Her voice was very low as she studied their joined hands. "He treats me like a child. Like I'm still that college student he met at a seminar. He doesn't see me. He didn't even know that I'm a vegetarian for God's sake!"

"That's Gris; you know what he's like. You can't take it personally-"

"But I do! I do Warrick, and I don't know how to stop that. And I just thought that if I could get away, get some distance from it all that I'd remember who I was…who I was when I didn't care about any of that stuff."

He sighed, folding his other hand over hers. "What did he say when you told him?"

She rolled her eyes. "Belittled it. Pointed out that we had the best crime lab in the country. Reduced everything I'd said to 'that hamburger thing'. Then he told me that the lab needs me."

Warrick's voice was quiet, but firm. "We do."

He heard her soft intake of breath, heard the tears in her voice when she whispered, "That's not enough."

He held her gaze for a long moment, looked right into her eyes, and he shook his head. "That's not it though," he said with sudden insight. A panicked look flashed across her face, but he continued, not letting her speak. "I spent most of this case in front of a computer, working on one of those pictures…spent a whole night trying to enhance the reflection in Jody Bradley's eye. It was Grissom's idea; he said something about the eyes being the windows to the soul. My Grams used to tell me that all the time; granted, she usually did it when I was lying through my teeth, and she'd caught me." The anecdote was told to relax her, to make her smile, and it did its job. "But I was looking into that girl's eyes, and all I could see in there was fear. I spent the night looking at that; I know what it looks like. And that's the same look I'm seeing in your eyes right now."

She tried to smile, failed dismally. "I don't know what you're-"

"Yeah you do. It was in your eyes when you saw that card, saw who sent you that plant. You think he'd do that for Cath? For me or Nick or Sanders?"

Fear had mostly fled, to be replaced by doubt, and the tiniest, tiniest spark of hope. "What do you mean?"

"What are you afraid of Sara?" He chose to ignore her question completely. "That Gris doesn't feel the same way? Or that he does?"

She shook her head. "Warrick…"

"Stay," he said. "Give him a chance." Another long pause. "We do need you Sara." Another pause. "I need you."

She lifted her head to heaven, a single tear rolling down her face. "I don't know what to do," she whispered, and he sighed, letting go of one of her hands, reaching over to pull her into his embrace.

"C'mere," he breathed, mildly surprised when she resisted him.

"Not tonight Warrick…I can't…"

Part of him was mildly affronted at what she thought. A larger part of him realised that she wouldn't have thought that if she weren't so upset, so he didn't let her go, held her tightly. "It's not about that," he told her quickly. "It's not about that...just c'mere..."

She stopped struggling when his words got through, and with a great sigh, collapsed against him, arms slipping around his waist, head buried in his chest. "I was so mad at him," she mumbled. "I really wanted to hate him…then he gives me a plant. A plant."

Warrick's lips twitched, and he was glad that she couldn't see his face. "Yeah, it's rough," he commiserated, proud of the fact that he was keeping his amusement out of his voice. "You gave him your heart and he gave you a plant."

He didn't move, waiting for her to make the connection: to a different day, months ago, where they'd arrived here together, dropped down on this very couch and watched Say Anything. That had been the day that he'd learned about her John Cusack fixation, the reason behind his purchase of Grosse Point Blank and High Fidelity on DVD for her for her birthday this year.

She didn't say anything at first, then a snort of laughter escaped her, and he could feel her body shake as she fought her giggles. "Don't make me laugh," she ordered as she straightened up, swatting at his chest, and losing the battle against her mirth. "I mean it."

"Nothing doing," he said, not bothering to stem his own amusement any longer. "You think I'm going to leave you in this bad mood all night?"

"I was hoping," she giggled.

"Should've known better."

"Yes, I should," she murmured, taking a deep breath, and slowly letting it out. "But you're a good friend. Thank you."

He shrugged with one shoulder, drawing her back into his arms, leaning back against the couch and taking her with him. "I'm not telling you what you should do. And I hate seeing you in pain, you know that. But think about it. For me?"

He felt, rather than saw her nod, and she relaxed in his arms, settling herself against him. "I'll think about it." Her words were a sigh, and she moved her head restlessly, trying to make herself comfortable.

"That's all I need to hear." He shifted too, swinging his feet up onto the table, not caring that she usually didn't allow him to do that; he had a feeling that she had other things on her mind. He was all too aware of the fact that she hadn't committed to staying in town, that Pandora's box might just have been opened, never to be closed again. Sara had done an excellent job of hiding her feelings thus far; as had Grissom, but it looked to him as if the façade was crumbling on both their parts, and he didn't know if things were going to work out for them, or what he could do to help. All he could do was be there for his friend; talk to her, hold her, make her laugh.

So that's what he did.

***

Author's Notes

So, I was kind of iffy about this whole Grissom/Sara thing. I could take it or leave it, see it or not see it. And then I saw Burden of Proof, and spent five minutes after the last scene trying to pick my jaw up off the floor. I really wanted to know how Warrick would react to this, since I'm a W/S shipper myself, and for some unknown reason, the line from Warrick where he quoted Say Anything popped into my head, and that was it for me, I had to write the fic!

The title comes from the song In Your Eyes by Peter Gabriel, used to great effect in the film.