Title: Scars
Type: drama
Rating: M (to be on the safe side), for serious discussions on self-injury, description of an act of self-injuring (does that count as violence?) and description of mild sexual activity
Summary: Let's see... (I'm not very good at these)...An issue of Sara's past causes her a moment of distress.
Spoilers: 4 x 4 (season 5)
AN: Been trying to figure out how to post fics for weeks. Lol. Well, turns out it's pretty simple. This story is very important to me, not only because it is my first fanfic, but also because it is a way for me to inform others on a subject that I find to be misunderstood by most people: self-injury. I also wish to warn self-injurers in recovery that (as mentioned in the rating section) an act of self-injury is described and could possibly be triggering. As for anyone who finds the subject of self-injury offensive, or who simply can't deal with it in a mature manner, I recommend that you go back and don't read this. I hope you all enjoy my first fanfic and that you all understand the theme a bit more. And don't forget the reviews, good or bad ; I can take it (and I want to improve). And I just reposted it because I realized I had posted my unreviewed version.
Scars
Sara Sidle awakes to the familiar sensation of someone softly kissing her lips.
Automatically, before even opening her eyes, she responds. After a few moments of passionate kissing, she opens her eyes to see a beaming Gilbert Grissom lying on his side of their bed, facing her. She smiles in return.
"Good morning", he says, gently running his finger down the edge of her face. "Mm Hmm", she replies, still slightly groggy with sleep, but satisfactorily.
"How are you feeling?"
"Better."
"I made pancakes."
She breathes in deeply and the aroma in the air confirms that he has, indeed, made her favorite breakfast. Her smile widens a bit at his thoughtfulness. He knows last night's case has rattled her a bit and is taking care of her. After shift, this morning, he ran her a lavender-scented bubble bath while she hung her coat in the closet and tossed her purse and keys on the kitchen counter. An hour later, when she came out of the bathroom and settled on her side of their bed, he pulled her to the middle and held her tightly in his arms until she fell asleep. And now, this afternoon, he let her sleep in while he prepared breakfast. At times like these, she feels like a child. And although a usually independent person, insulted by anyone's good intentions of helping her, she doesn't mind his taking care of her every now and then. After all, she hasn't exactly been much taken care of during her childhood.
She gets out of bed and rummages through her drawers for her favorite, most comfortable (and very worn out) pair of jeans and tee-shirt. He takes the opportunity to pull the comforter over her side of the bed.
When she turns around, having found her clothes, and sees the bed made, she grins. He clearly doesn't want her to have to do anything even mildly resembling housework today. He grins back and shrugs. He heads for the bedroom door with the intention of waiting for her at the kitchen table, but stops when he catches sight of her.
She is standing in front of the mirror, in her bra and panties (her black lacy ones, he notices; the ones he likes to take off her the most - but he feels guilty having lustful thoughtsat a time like this), looking at the numerous red marks on her stomach, sides and around her thighs with a haunted expression.
He knows she is reliving some of her most traumatic past memories, as often happens after a particularly disturbing case involving battered children. And he knows the reasons.
He goes to her and puts his arms around her. She jumps slightly at his touch. Too absorbed in her thoughts, she hasn't seen him coming. She looks up and finds his eyes in the mirror.
She has learned to live with her scars, to accept them as part of her past, part of her. Still, sometimes, they serve as a reminder of her worst childhood memories. At those times, she despises them and wants nothing more than to make them disappear. But she has tried, and has reduced them to their minimal. At this point, they're not gonna get any less visible.
She looks back at one particular scar on the outside of her right thigh. The first cut.
She is nine years old again, sitting in the closet of her bedroom, in the corner farthest from the door, in a foetal position. Even with her hands pressed firmly to her ears, she can hear her parents fighting downstairs again. Loudly, and violently. She can hear things crashing in the walls and glass shattering. And she can hear her mother's screams when her father starts on her. She knows where this is going to lead. She knows someone is going to end up in the hospital with some lame excuse for their broken bones, or cuts, or severe bruises on their abdomen. All she can do right now is try to keep out of the way so that person won't be her.
She desperately tries to think about something else. She closes her eyes and wills herself to visualize a safe environment, but nothing can block out the horrific screams, the crashes and dreadful shouts, and all she can see on the inside of her lids is her father's face contorted with insane rage as he hits her.
Deciding it is futile to try and escape her current situation, she opens her eyes to spot, through the partially opened closet door, a pair of scissors placed neatly, albeit upside down, in a jar on her desk. The blade seems to be winking at her, inviting her. She obediently moves toward the instrument and picks it up.
She opens the blade and tests its sharpness on the distal phalange of her index finger. She strokes the skin gently with the blade, every stroke slightly firmer, until a small drop of blood falls from her finger.
Satisfied, she lifts the edge of her shorts to expose her thigh. In one swift gesture, she inserts the blade into the skin there. Everything around her spins and temporarily ceases to exist. The only sounds she hears are the rushing of her blood, her ragged breathing and the pounding of her heart in her head. She takes a deep breath and lets this feeling sink in, realizing with satisfaction that she cannot recall what she was trying to forget.
When she recovers from this state, completely calmed, she does not know how much time has passed. She looks at her injured leg and knows she's in trouble. The blood is pouring from the deep gash, but she can't tell anyone. She decides she has to fix her own mess. She's been at the hospital for wounds of this type (albeit not self-inflicted) often enough to be confident that she knows what to do.
She remembers how she got the idea.
Sara is nearly nine years old. Only a few weeks left. But anyone who meets her assumes she is a few years older, partly because of her height, but mostly because of her advanced level of maturity and intellect. She is preparing her lunch for school. She's going to have vegetables today. Her mother went for groceries yesterday, and the fresh carrots, tomatoes, celery, cucumber and green pepper look quite more delicious than the canned food she normally has to eat. It isn't very often that her mom goes out for groceries, what with often having bruises that are impossible to cover, and often not being well enough to go. She hears her father's heavy footsteps down the stairs. Just by the sound of them, she knows he is in one of his frequent dreadful moods. Fortunately for her, he finds her mother straightening up the living room before he notices her. When her father begins to yell at her mother, she knows she needs to get out of here as soon as possible. As she rushes to finish cutting up her celery, the knife slips and the blade slides through her skin. The pain drowns her father's yell and her mother's screams as he beats her. A few minutes later, she cleans up her palm, packs her vegetables in her old lunch box, cleans up the counters and runs quickly but quietly out of the house. As usual, no one at school could guess that anything happened in the Sidle house this morning.
She looks at all the other scars and remembers the other cuts. What she remembers the most vividly is the feelingof great distressfollowed by a stab of pain, great relief, and the sight of blood. The pain comforted her by its familiarity. It reduced, or rid her completely of, her distress and chased away her anger. It could make her momentarily forget about the mess that was her life. Furthermore, self-injury was something she could turn to at times when it felt as if her life was zooming utterly out of her control. It was a form of pain she could control.
She remembers Grissom's reaction to the only trace of evidence left of her traumatic past. They have been officially going out for a few months now. They have made a mutual decision to take things slowly. But tonight seems to be the right night for both of them. The goodnight kiss at Sara's apartment door that has become routine becomes much more heated until it leads them inside the apartment and up to her bedroom.
Their hands begin their exploration of each other's bodies and, soon, their lips leave each other to cover other areas of the person in front of them. Grissom starts planting kisses on Sara's neck, descending to her shoulders and to the top of her chest. Having reached the top of the material of her shirt, he slides his hands under it, in the small of her back, intending to remove the piece of clothing hiding most of her torso from his sight, and acting as a barrier from her soft skin.
With her hands on his, she stops him, suddenly looking slightly panicked, and pulls away from him a bit.
Hiding his slight disappointment the best he can, he declares in a tone a bit too jovial and slightly higher than his usual voice: "It's okay if you're not ready to take this step. I can wait."
"No, no. That's not it at all. She's frantic, for a different reason, now. He gazes at her confused.
She is nearly tempted to withdraw from him emotionally, to protect him and herself by never letting him find out the awful truth, but she can't do that to him, or to herself. She loves him too much to hurt him like that. And she needs him in her life. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath before opening them again and finally breaking the silence.
"I just think I should tell you something before we do this."
She lowers her eyes and he can see this is difficult for her. He takes both her hands in one of his and lifts her chin up with the index finger of his other hand, encouraging her to look into his eyes. When she does, she finds them looking directly into her own tenderly. She gathers her courage and tells him another one of her biggest secrets, one only one other of her current close friends knows, and only because of a series of unfortunate and only slightly humorous (mostly embarrassing) circumstances.
"I just thought I should tell you before the sight shocks you," she finishes "but can we keep this conversation for later?" He looks at her curiously and sees the renewed arousal etched in her features. He knows she wants to resume their previous business. And, truth be told, he can't wait for this either, so he obliges.
He goes back to peeling shirt off, with exquisite gentleness. He knows what he will find underneath the material but the scars still shock him a bit by their intensity (those had to be nasty cuts to leave such remarkable scars, just over two decades later), and his heart breaks for this woman he loves, as a child and teenager, whose only outlet to an unbearable amount of emotional pain was intense physical pain. He decides he will erase all this pain and never let her hurt again. He runs his index over the most apparent scars before depositing a small kiss on each. It is his way of letting her know he accepts the scars as a part of her and that they do not change the way he feels about her. He follows the same routine with the scars he finds around her thighs when he removes her jeans, finishing with the ones on the inside of her right thigh before drifting higher with his tongue.
Later, after they have both recovered from the climax of their lovemaking, he raises the subject.
"How old were you when this started?"
They spend the remainder of the night talking about it. His ease with the subject makes her more comfortable than she ever imagined she could ever be with it. He isn't scared off by this, doesn't see her as a freak, and doesn't really pity her, as she almost expected. He understands that this, although it is a part of her, although it has, in a way, made her into who she is now, doesn't really change who she is presently.
She remembers the struggle her habit became in her teenaged years.
She remembers how difficult it was, nearly impossible, to stop. It had become a form of addiction to her. In case of conflict, the blood, pain and release it would offer her was the first thing she thought of. It had become an obsession to her. She thought of it during the day and dreamt of it during the night. She pondered the act itself, the wounds it left, how to cover them up...
It wasn't before her college years that she turned her stubbornness against self-injury and successfully dropped this most gruesome form of self-destruction.
She remembers how her fellow highschoolers reacted when they found out, after a girl had seen the edge of a cut sneaking passed the edge of her shorts in gym class, figured out what was going on, and informed anyone who would listen. She remembers becoming the freak of the school. She would get a comment aimed toward her or loud whispers and snickers behind her back at least daily. Even some of the teachers used double entendres to mock her. Other students began to fear her. (To this day, she doesn't understand why this inspired fear to them. Maybe it was just the fear of insanity - even though she had all her head, this might have made her seem less than sane to them - and the unknown in general.) The rest of the teenagers pitied her. And, although she knew they didn't mean to anger her, and realized that they at least tried to understand, that pissed her off just as much.
College had pretty much been the same when an ancient student at her school spread the word. Except for one guy who admitted he thought it was cool in a "freakish way"right after she had lost her virginity to him, and that he'd known all along. That was why, he had said, he had hooked up with her in the first place. She realizes today how ridiculous and crazy that relationship was. And how much of a mistake it had been not to end it immediately. But it was the best she could hope for, she had thought.
Her next lover had at least tried to understand and help. But he had made the mistake of making her promise to stop. "...or we won't be intimate again.", he had said. An ultimatum. Obviously, he had thought he was more important to her than the cutting. But he wasn't. She had been self-injuring for ages and it was a big part of her life now, it was the only thing she knew, whilst he was relatively new in her life. She had felt like she was being backed into a corner, and so she had promised never to deliberately hurt herself in any way again. But she had known she wouldn't stop. She had no intention of doing so. She persisted, and hid the evidence of her actions from him. Eventually, she withdrew so much from him emotionally that nothing could fix their relationship. It was sad because he really was a sweet guy. He just didn't know how to handle the situation.
Another lover she had, just after beginning to work for the San Fransico P.D., saw his eyes grew wide when he uncovered the scars for the first time, but said nothing. He had never mentioned them. Somehow, that made her feel even more ashamed, like it was something that should never be spoken of. He broke up with her a few days later, explaining to her that she wasn't his type. Sara thought she knew exactly what he meant by that.
After these miserably failed relationships, she has never had another lover and never told anyone about that most obscure part of her life, and no one has found out. Until the case with the dead body builder who was killed by mold growing on human tissue inside the walls of his house.
She is processing the scene, to try and find clues as to how death sank its claws into this young, tough and seemingly very healthy man, when a team in biohazard suits bursts in. They take both her and Greg to a tent set up just outside the house of the crime scene, explaining that they have a biohazard situation and that the two of them need to be decontaminated immediately. She panics when she understands what that means. As if being stripped naked with one of her coworkers isn't humiliating enough (especially seeing as this coworker is the particular one who has had a major crush on her for a long time, and who likes women just a little too much), Greg and the biohazard team are going to find out her secret.
Luckily, probably due to the masks, the biohazard team didn't seem to notice. If they did, they did a great job at concealing it. They didn't say anything and no evidence of realization was prominent on their faces. But Greg didn't miss it. When he noticed, he didn't say a word, but the way he looked at her told her he knew. On their way back to the lab, as she was driving, as usual, she assured him that, as he probably figured out already by the lack of fresh wounds, this was an issue of her past that was resolved a long time ago. Not really knowing what to say, he looked at her kindly and gave her a compassionate smile. She knew he just didn't know what to say, and that he wasn't really to blame for not responding well to a situation he had never been in before, but it was an uncomfortable moment. She was however thankful that he hadn't asked her any questions or pushed her to talk about her cutting. She would have had to shut him out if he had.
As she keeps looking at the scars, all the memories of her past flood back and she is caught in a whirl of them. She knows she should tear her eyes away from the cause of her distress, and she tries to, but finds that her body refuses to obey to her mind's commands and that, as a result, she cannot escape her pitiful state. She is losing it. But then Grissom strengthens his hold on her and breaks her gaze of her body by gently turning her around to face him.
It pains him deeply to see her this way. Sometimes, during periods of extreme stress, frustration or distress, he notices her clasping her hands firmly on her thighs, closing her eyes and taking deep breaths. He knows what is on her mind at those times. He knows, decades after having ended this behavior, she still has to beat urges to hurt herself when she is upset. He sees how self-injury, having been her only outlet for so many years, still tries to sink its now dull claws in her.
He lifts her chin up in a silent plea for her to look at him. He doesn't say anything. He knows, at times like these, no mere words can help her. On the other hand, at times like these, the volumes of love and promises spoken by his eyes do have the ability to pull her slowly out of her state.
Finally, she is grounded. Having regained her abilities, she reminds him, "The pancakes will be cold if we don't get to eating them now." He releases her shoulders to allow her to get dressed and heads for the door, for the second time, looking back at her. She smiles at him, a weak but honest smile, and murmurs "Thanks". As a reply, he shrugs and whispers, "Anytime". He heads for the door, but as an afterthought, adds, "I love you" before reaching it. The haunting pain nearly entirely gone now, she takes a moment to feel thankful for his comforting and loving presence in her life and to smile at how adorable he can be in his own Grissom-y way.