Shelter
Summary: When she feels his arms around her, she finally feels safe.
I'd never felt safe before. Life had never been safe; my childhood was… at times it was like a nightmare, at others like a fairy tale, but there was never any predictability. One minute I would be my father's princess; the next moment, I would be running to a closet to try and stay away from the flying fists as my parents fought about something I could never understand. Things didn't get much better after my mother killed my father.
Foster care was a dangerous place; I wasn't the first person to find that out. But after what I had come from, I expected it. For a long time, I even thought that the fights and abuse were my fault. College and grad school weren't that scary compared to the other things I had seen, but I still didn't feel safe. Every guy I dated seemed like he would end up being just like every other man in my life, and so I didn't let them get too close.
But then he came around, and all of that changed. He was a guest speaker at the university, a CSI, and I had to get in continuing education hours to keep my job with the coroner. I didn't expect it to be interesting, or even expect to care about the topic enough to remember much of what was said. I also didn't expect to meet the first man I would ever learn to trust: Gil Grissom.
His arms were the first place I ever felt safe; I still remember that night, after the seminar was over. We had gone out to eat, mainly so we could talk about cases. By the time he left town a week later, he had managed to find his way through the walls I had spent my entire life building and reinforcing. He had gained my trust, something no man had ever managed before. Something not many people had managed before.
It was seven years later before anything else happened. Long after I had moved to Las Vegas and began working with him. But for five years he refused to let anything happen between us, at least not anything more than what had happened in San Francisco. Not until the week following Nick's kidnapping and rescue.
I was safe in his arms. That was something I had never expected to feel, not even with him. The better things got, the more I kept waiting for the other foot to fall. But it never did. He never did anything to hurt me, at least not physically. His relationship with Lady Heather hurt, but I understood.
After what happened with Natalie, I felt even more vulnerable than I had before. Our relationship was out in the open, and emotionally I was back to being the closed-off, scared little girl I had been before we met. But before I was even out of the hospital, he was there, trying to help me piece things back together. He never left, except to go to work. I would always wake up in the morning with his arms around me, exactly the way I had gone to sleep. In his arms, I finally felt truly safe.