DISCLAIMER: I don't own them, and I don't think TPTB would like it if I did, somehow.
A/N: I wrote most of this a while ago and found it and finished it, so I hope you all enjoy it.
Sara hates their unsubtle competition. She knows they're fighting, and they see her affections as the ultimate prize. The battlefield is the lab and myriad crime scenes; their weapons their skill, their talents, carefully judged words.
When she manages to step back from the situation she sees it as absurd. Like a reporter in a war zone covering a half-understood battle she is both separated from and essential to the battle, the public perception of that battle, and the ending which must someday occur. As a scientist and as a woman she can only partly comprehend what's going on, but she does know she's not a prize.
By both their standards Nick is winning and Grissom is on a dangerously slippery downhill slope. Thus, Nick is becoming increasingly smug, and Grissom's attempts at maintaining or regaining ground are getting more obvious.
Last shift he asked her out for breakfast. He didn't echo her words about dinner from so long ago, but she knew that was what was on his mind. That he'd had his chance, turned it down. This was his most blatant attempt at reminding her of the past, of all that had happened, or almost-happened, between them, and there'd been a look of something she didn't quite want to understand in his eyes.
She'd said no. As politely as she could, pretending to be regretful like she didn't know they were fighting, and some urge - perhaps the urge put a helpless animal out of its misery - made her say she already had a date with Nick.
She didn't tell Nick, and she won't, ever. She has a modicum of pity for Grissom, for the fact that he's finally realised, well - either that he wanted her or he didn't want Nick to have her, or both. She doesn't need Nick to know he has won, outright, the biggest battle yet.
Sometimes it's easy to be amused by all this. Two grown men, both smarter than the average, making fools of themselves over a woman. Sara has to be amused, because that tempers the irritation, stops her from snapping at one or both about their behaviour. She began losing respect for Grissom long ago, and now he's almost making himself pathetic, but long-held resentment tinges her pity. He broke her heart, slowly and painfully, and more than once. Forgiving and forgetting has not been easy, especially not in this situation, not when Grissom is using his position to punish Nick. Maybe punish isn't the right word, and it's certainly not deliberate, but it seems to be the only way Grissom can deal with this. He has to feel that it's not over yet, that somehow he will get her. He doesn't realise that trying to make Nick look incompetent and foolish makes her more determined to press on with her fledging relationship with him.
Nick, for the first time, has something over Grissom. Grissom has years of experience in the field and the lab, but Nick is the better man when it comes to relationships. He knows it, but doesn't dare say anything about it to her. He knows, she thinks, that she's not impressed by either of them. She isn't territory, or property, or even a prize, and she won't be flaunted about as Nick's. What Nick wants is to get Grissom off her back - their backs - and, it seems, to get back at him for breaking her heart. It's twisted logic at best: had Grissom never broken her heart the depression she'd been fighting would never have escalated, but maybe if Grissom had never broken her heart she'd never have turned to Nick.
Grissom began to lose this fight a long time ago. He's putting in a good showing now, but it's too late. She once warned him of that, but shut up in his ivory tower of intellect he didn't understand it. Nick is imitating the Allies at the Versailles peace conference: trying to extract everything he can from his vanquished opponent in the name of reparations for more than one grudge. She wishes he wouldn't. It is demeaning, somehow.
In the end, she feels it's all her fault. She fell for Grissom, tried to extract something more than he could give, and let him darken her whole life. Then Nick just happened - Nick, who hugged her when she was upset, rather than quote scientific facts at her - and suddenly the two men were fighting an undeclared war. If she could live the last few years over again she would. She'd never have let it come to this.
She wishes she knew when this tension would end - Grissom's misery; Nick's forensic abilities constantly taking a battering; her embarrassment, her wish for life to go back to normal. She's heard the rumours in the lab and she hates them. She hates what she's done to Grissom, what he's doing to Nick, what this whole thing is doing to them all, but suspects that she cannot have both Nick and the lab, because her relationship with him has changed the landscape of the lab.
It's too soon for her and Nick to toss in their jobs here and leave. Their relationship is too young and fragile to put that sort of strain on it, and yet she wonders how it can ever really grow in this environment, how anything can flourish in hostility and tension and suspicion. Feeling like the rest of the team is on their side doesn't help, because as much as he's not a people person isolation isn't good for Grissom. Sometimes she wishes Catherine would just step in and force both of them into line, Nick and Grissom, like wilful, naughty children. They might listen to her, but Catherine isn't getting involved and Sara can't blame her.
And so they go on, she trying to build something with Nick while Grissom, like a drowning man, clings desperately to any sort of hope. She never wanted to break his heart, never wanted to drive this wedge between Nick and Grissom. She never wanted to be the wedge that drove Nick away from his mentor, but it's happened, all of it. She's made her choice and now she must live with the consequences.
THE END