Title: Still Life With Fruit. And Vegetables.
Author: Klee Wyck
Prompt: Geekfiction Summer Reading Ficathon — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Pairing: GSR
Rating: M
Spoilers: Pretty much everything
Disclaimer: These characters are not mine, nor are the quotations.
Summary: Even though every shred of evidence gathered together in her life so far led to the inevitability of hopelessness, she remained open to hope. She had to have hope.
Men are what their mothers made them.
His mother taught him to be kind. At all times.
She taught him to be curious, to be thoughtful, gentle and honest. She taught him to respect himself and others, always.
She taught him to use his fine mind and exceptional talents, and to go out into the world and help others when all help was exhausted and all hope seemed to be lost.
She taught him to speak, however difficult it was for him, when others could not.
She taught him to love, unconditionally, and to allow himself to be loved unconditionally in return.
It was in this one teaching he failed. Miserably.
It wasn't that he didn't try. Gil Grissom gave every assignment in his life one hundred percent, and he never wanted to disappoint his mother.
And yet.
People, from the beginning, proved difficult for Grissom.
He loved his mother. It was Other Women he found… difficult. She taught him to be patient, though, for one day, she said, he would meet the one that would finally, forever, bring him all the joy and happiness he deserved.
She was, from the beginning, preparing him to trust, deeply and intimately.
She was, unwittingly, preparing him for Sara.
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Her mother taught her to be on her guard. At all times.
She taught her to question the motives, not only of others, but of herself, too.
She taught her to not trust, not believe, not love. She taught her to be hard, closed up, closed in. She taught her that no matter how much you loved someone they would, in the end, let you down, disappoint you.
Leave you.
Her mother taught her to fear, to cower, to feel the sort of abject helplessness that only a child of abusive parents could feel.
"No one will ever love you as much as your mother," she told Sara one cold and rainy afternoon. Sara was 11. She'd just gotten her period for the first time and she lay, cramped, fetal, on the scratchy living room couch. Her mother also told her she was a woman now and to stay away from boys. "Boys!" she laughed. "Good for nothing scumbags, all of them. Not that you have to worry. You're not pretty enough to attract anyone half-way decent."
Two days later she killed Sara's father.
But despite all her early teachings, Sara remained a stubborn student, unreceptive to her mother's lessons. She knew, somehow, there had to be something more. She left herself open to opportunity, open to the possibility of good people, to the chance of loving someone, loving herself, and being loved in return.
Even though every shred of evidence gathered together in her life so far led to the inevitability of hopelessness, she remained open to hope.
She had to have hope.
Her mother spent her entire life preparing her daughter, unwittingly, for Grissom.
A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
She certainly startled him that day, in the lecture hall, all nervous energy and random questions that, in the end, weren't random at all. Other students glanced at her, at first with mild curiosity and raised eyebrows, then with casual, even amused, exasperation and finally with studied irritation.
She got on everyone's nerves. Everyone's nerves but the lecturer.
I'd like to get to know her, Grissom thought, which turned out to be easy enough because she hung around afterwards asking more questions and even pointing out a few inaccuracies.
Which, surprisingly, didn't irritate him at all.
Coffee, dinner, lunch, dinner. An offer to come up to her apartment, which he gracefully, reluctantly turned down.
A chaste kiss on the cheek, a promise to stay in touch.
At least professionally.
Just before he turned to leave, to walk back to the rental car and back to his professionally successful life, she threw her arms around him, hugged him, all sweet soap and breathless laughter, layers of clothes he suddenly wished gone, one hand on the back of her neck, beneath her hair. After what he perceived to be an acceptable amount of time, he moved to disengage but she held on. For one more beat.
Which startled him.
How much of human life is lost in waiting.
He never thought it would take so long to ask her out.
He knew, he knew the day she showed up in Vegas, at his request no less, that his resolve would gradually wear away.
There was only so long his granite facade could resist her insistent, steady, relentless flow.
Chinese water torture, he often thought when he looked at her.
Chip and dig and erode and chip and dig some more. Still, it was years and years, apparently, before he would give in. He was stronger than he realized.
Soon, he thought, when he sent her a plant instead of flowers and a note with no love.
Soon, he promised himself when he discovered she had a boyfriend. A boyfriend.
Soon, he told himself when he held her hand and called her honey without thinking because the word had been sitting there, all that time, waiting for a moment just like this one.
Soon, he said out loud, very quietly, when she asked him out and he said no and she warned him not to wait too long.
Soon, because he was realizing pretty much against his will that he loved her.
Very soon.
Real action is in silent moments.
She never thought it would take so long to tell him.
She'd never told anyone. She'd never had to, because her stupid, senseless violent history preceded her, everywhere she went. Each foster home, each foster brother and sister, mother and father, knew, or thought they did, before she stepped foot in each home, who she was and what she'd seen.
Everyone knew already, so she never had to say a word about any of it, even when the brave few dared ask.
Hey, they'd whisper from the lower bunk (she always took the upper, always, always, because down below she would smother, get crushed in the night, simply disappear beneath the rubble of wood and fabric when it collapsed, she was sure of this), Hey you. Sara. New girl. What was it like? Did you see it all? What about the blood? Was there a lot of blood?
Kids always asked about the blood. Always.
Occasionally she was sent for counseling, but the kind, well-meaning, clueless therapists could only do so much for a girl who had hardened herself just enough that no one could touch her.
Their sympathetic looks bounced right off her, again and again.
She left herself open to love, real love, when it came, and it would come. Of this she was certain.
But she would not leave herself open to pity.
Never to pity.
So, when Grissom asked her, hounded her, really, about her behaviour and what was going on and why was she so angry, she thought, What the hell? After all this time, why the hell not?
Putting words to her past, to what she'd seen and heard and felt, well, maybe it would help something. Somehow.
So she did.
And he listened and watched and took her hand and didn't say a word.
He didn't even ask about the blood, but she told him anyway.
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Pigs.
Pickles.
Bullets.
Hammers.
Knives.
Fire.
Spontaneous human combustion.
Date, with Sara.
The pig thing didn't go over too well.
The date thing was much better.
He decided he wanted to make another experiment with her, soon.
Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.
He wasn't good at the relationship thing at first. He shut her out sometimes, without even realizing he was doing it. He was used to being alone and sometimes, sometimes, he'd forget she was even in the room with him as he closed his eyes to listen to music, or selected a book and sat down to read, or simply tuned her out when she was talking.
He liked being alone and women, after all, were difficult.
One day after she'd asked him something three times she stood up and walked out, slamming the door behind her.
He chased her back to her apartment and had to knock for five minutes before she opened the door.
Sara was teaching him that men, too, could be very difficult.
To fill the hour — that is happiness.
"We don't have much time," she said, in her warning tone.
He kissed her, and again, softly, then more urgently.
"We have enough time."
She slid her hand around the back of his neck, pulled him closer, kissed him harder.
"We have…" She checked her watch. "…about an hour before we have to be at work."
He lifted her hips, eased her back, back onto the bed.
"Uh huh."
She shifted beneath him, pushed up into him as he pushed down. There was heat, and friction, and constriction.
"An hour, Grissom. Actually, less than an hour because we need to factor in driving time, and now, uh, grooming time—"
He pushed up the bottom of her shirt, kissed her skin, made her squirm, moved his way up, up, over her sweet swell of her breasts, skimmed the soft skin of her throat, the smooth line of her jaw.
"Grissom…did you hear me?"
"Sara," he whispered into her mouth. "Stop talking. You're wasting precious time."
She nodded. "Okay. Okay okay."
Up until now he'd never had sex with someone he was desperately in love with.
Up until now she'd never loved anyone she'd had sex with.
As soon as there is life there is danger.
And then she was gone.
Just, gone.
Taken.
Missing.
Vanished.
Not there.
She was gone and he was left without her, alone, completely and utterly bereft and without a single clue as to how to proceed without her.
He felt he was being punished for something, but couldn't figure out what he'd done to deserve feeling like he was going to die right along with her.
We walk alone in the world.
He found himself thinking a lot, not only of Sara in the bleak hours and hours before she was found and brought back to him, wounded and battered but alive, but of his mother, and the lessons she had imparted, with love and faith, so many years before.
To trust, intimately.
To love and be loved, unconditionally.
And like so many other unfortunate souls before him, he'd never really understood what those words meant until the moment he understood he may never see her again.
In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.
Life was short, she realized, in the days and weeks after. Life was short and she had no time to waste and she had to get moving.
Fast, fast, fast.
Move, move, move.
Sleep, always a rare occurrence, now was a fleeting fancy, and she was averaging three, maybe four hours at a time.
The rest she filled with tasks. There were things that Needed To Be Done, and she Needed To Do Them. Now.
She:
Completely rearranged her closet.
Completely rearranged Grissom's closet.
Cleaned the entire townhouse.
Cleaned it again.
Organized all their books, alphabetically.
And the CDs.
And the DVDs.
Grissom watched but said very little and when he couldn't find his socks she told him she'd moved them to the middle drawer because he needed more room for his T-shirts and besides, half his socks had holes in them anyway and she'd ended up throwing them out.
All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
She thought of all the things she wanted to do before she died. There were too many to keep straight in her head, so she made a list when Grissom was sleeping, written on the back of a phone bill in a scrawled, hurried script.
She was always in a hurry now.
She sat hunched at the kitchen table, pen tight between her fingers, bottom lip tight between her teeth.
Travel.
Singing lessons.
Writing.
Mountain climbing.
Deep sea diving.
Sky diving.
That one she crossed out after having second thoughts.
Children.
The last one she circled, three times, and drew a dark question mark next to it.
The next day she signed up for a painting class at the local college. The instructor was an older woman named Elena, who favoured soft purple dresses, ballet slippers and long necklaces. Sara sat in the front row of desks and took fastidious notes on the different techniques until Elena told her, gently, there were no tests in Art Techniques 101.
"It's all about feeling," she said, putting a hand over her own heart. "Art is emotion, not exams."
Sara threw herself into the class, embracing each lesson with a passion that quickly made her Elena's favourite. She loved the different mediums, the silky smoothness of the pastels, the soft vibrancy of the acrylics, the delicate bleeding of the watercolours. She disliked the oils, however: they took days and days to dry.
She didn't have that kind of time.
She needed to keep moving.
She brought home canvases of still life: apples, bananas, oranges, all in bright, artful arrangements on a table, or in a glass bowl. Grissom admired and encouraged and even took one to work where he hung it by his desk. Catherine commented on it one day.
"It's lovely, isn't it?" Grissom smiled.
"It's making me hungry, actually."
After painting came pottery, and a townhouse filled with a plethora of slightly lopsided, hand-molded…bowls.
"This is … interesting," Grissom said, turning one bowl back and forth on the table. She'd glazed it a sort of bilious green. "What is it?"
"An ashtray," she said.
"We don't smoke."
She thought of another thing to add to her list.
"Okay. Gum receptacle."
"Nice," he said.
He took it to work, too, and put it on his desk.
"What is that?" Catherine asked, eyeing the lumpy, uneven ceramic. "An ashtray?"
"It's a gum receptacle."
"Looks like an ashtray."
"I'm thinking of taking up smoking," he said lightly and she snorted. He ended up putting paper clips in it and it sat there for weeks before he accidentally knocked it to the floor one day, where it shattered into a thousand pieces.
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Cooking came next. She pulled out every cookbook she owned and went on a culinary rampage, buying new ingredients, attempting new recipes, each one a bit more challenging than the last.
Grissom sat on the couch, listening to the metallic bang of pots and pans, of frantic slicing and cutting, of vegetables being steamed and noodles being dumped into boiling water.
Then, a sharp intake of breath, followed by a, "Shit."
Silence.
"Shit, shit, shit."
"Sara?" he called. "Everything all right?"
Silence.
He rose, finally, and peered into the kitchen, fearing disaster of epic proportions.
He found Sara, her back to him, standing by the sink.
"Sara?"
"Yeah."
He glanced over her shoulder, saw the dishtowel wrapped around her hand, saw a red stain blooming, growing, red drops falling into the sink, plop, plop.
"How bad?" he said, his heart in his throat.
"Don't know. Pretty deep, I think." She leaned forward, trembling with adrenalin. "Shit. Stupid zucchini."
"You need to slow down, Sara. You're moving too fast."
"Thanks for the tip," she said.
He unwrapped the cloth carefully, saw immediately she'd need stitches on two fingers, and drove her to the hospital. He sat with her, held her good hand while they froze the skin, stitched her up, bandaged her and sent her home.
She was very quiet on the ride home and later, as she struggled to wash her face and brush her teeth with one hand. She slid into bed beside him and turned on her side to face him. She hadn't said a word in more than an hour and it wasn't until he lay down next to her and kissed her face that he saw she was crying. He licked the saltwater off his lips, kissed each eye, the tip of her nose, her chin, her mouth.
"I don't know what the hell I'm doing," she finally said.
He was confused.
"You're just living."
She sighed.
"Sometimes I don't think just living is enough."
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
The next day he helped her change the bandage. The cut was raw and red and angry, the black stitches stark against her skin.
She laughed a little as he applied ointment, wrapped it up.
"You must get tired of looking after me," she said.
"On the contrary," he said. "Make yourself necessary to somebody. This way you'll never get tired of me."
Because she didn't feel like crying in front of him again, she smirked and pulled her hand away.
"Guess I'll just have to keep getting hurt," she said.
"Please don't. I'll find some other way to be necessary."
"Yeah? Like what?"
He shrugged. "I give good backrubs, from what I've heard."
She nodded. "This is true." She looked down at her hand. "And what can I do for you?"
He looked at her and she saw then, really saw, how much he loved her. She thought he might tell her and for a second he was about to, but then he smiled.
"You can come to the rest home and push me around in my wheelchair. I'll need someone to look after me before long."
She grinned. "You'll have some hot, young nurse at your disposal."
He shook his head, touched her hair lightly. "I don't think you need to worry."
"Neither do you."
If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.
She loved the desert at night, dead bodies and all.
Flashlight sweep over dark, cold sands, footsteps swallowed up into the vastness of space and silence.
She crouched down beside him, opened her kit. Their shoulders rubbed, and their knees bumped together.
"What do you think?" she asked.
He glanced at her, spoke quietly in the still night air.
"I think I've been waiting for you my whole life."
He took her hand under cover of darkness and pressed it to his lips fleetingly.
She nodded.
"I think I know what you mean."
She'd never seen so many stars.
Fin.