A/N: This is a darker fic in response to some of the more darker things CSI has turned out over the years. Be fairly warned though that this is a very dark piece depicting some of the horrors that children have to face in this world. This is a possible vision of Sara's childhood that may really shock or bother some poeple so please be prepared for some rather adult themes. Themes such as violence, abuse, and underage drinking.
Character: Sara Sidle.
Rating: Please keep in mind that this story does depict darker things and thus is rated a very heavy T.
Reviews: Reviews give fanfiction authors the drive and ability to better their writing. Please be kind enough to review with your thoughts about this particular piece.
Horrors
It was snowing and at eleven years old Sara Sidle couldn't possibly have hated the snow any more. She spent a lot of time outside and just because the snow was relentlessly falling as it covered the whole world in a chilling layer of ice that didn't mean that she was going to spend any more time in the house. There was the option, of course, to go in the house and sit there ignoring the fights as she watched tv the way her brother did. Absorbed in some rather juvenile shows which she dared to think he was a little too old for at thirteen, or sometimes he watched one of those daytime talk shows because he liked knowing that some families were just as messed up as theirs. But no, for Sara, the best escape was being outside and away from it all.
There was a small wooded area about two hundred yards from the back of the Bed and Breakfast that her parents, her family, ran. She'd taken to building sporadically placed forts out of logs and other forms of timber she'd find scattered amongst the trees. The one that had made her most proud she'd completed at the end of the last summer, it was an Indian style teepee. She didn't have canvas to cover it with, of course. So she'd taken one of the older sheets from the laundry room and used that covering it with a hefty layer of leaves, bark, and moss to keep out the elements. This teepee had become her sanctuary and she'd spent almost every hour of every day that wasn't taken up by school there since she'd built it. The snow, however, brought frozen winds which cut through the gaps beneath the sheet like daggers, chilling her to her core as she sat doing homework or reading. The thin blanket that her mother had allowed her to take out there with her didn't provide much comfort and she'd been far too afraid to ask for anything more substantial.
Snow was a rarity where she lived, however, so she wasn't forced to choose it as the lesser of two evils often, only one or two times a year. It was January though and the new year had brought a cold front with it and thus she sat crouched in the confines of a teepee deep within a frozen wood. She was half tempted to make the perilous journey back up to the house and to her bedroom hoping to be as unseen as she frequently went in the household, but logic and a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach both told her that wasn't a good idea at the time.
She'd seen her mother leave the house early in the morning with her long brown hair in a hap-hazzard bun on the top of her head wearing a worn out tee-shirt and a pair of heavily soiled and stained jeans. She usually put up a glamorous front for the public becoming the polar opposite of what she was at home and when she didn't bother to take care that she looked presentable it meant she had only one destination in mind. The fact that it was her mother going to the liquor store and not her father had been what tipped her off that they were all in for one hell of a day. When any person so dared to deny one of Laura Sidle's requests the defiance was always met with sure and violent retribution. Her father was no exception, then again neither was she and her brother Evan, rarely was either.
As her shivers picked up pace to match the howling gust of the snowy wind the little girl pulled the tattered blanket tighter around her shoulders and squinted her eyes at the book that sat in her lap. She was determined not to be frozen out of her security. At her core she was instilled with this deep sense of self preservation and that nearly always meant toughing it out in the elements rather than venturing too close to the house. There were factors she should weigh in though before she became too determined to stay put. At the rate the weather was going now she'd almost likely end up with some sort of severe chill and there was the possibility of dehydration if she continued shivering herself into a sweat as she was. But deep down to it, in the nitty gritty, all of the signs coming from home were pointing down a dark path and fear had an intoxicating power over most eleven year olds. A statistic that Sara, for once in her life, was not immune to.
She was reading "Jane Eyre" which was perhaps her favorite novel that she'd ever experienced but her heart was only half in it. Much of her was focused on her ears as she listened to the deafening silence coming from the house. That generally meant that her mother was well awake and in a mood so foul that nobody dared speak or relinquish and form of sound from his or her lips. On good days there was a steady clattering rhythm and hum of activity coming from the house. Today however, it was silence, deep and dark matching the weather around her. The sun had receded so far behind the heavy tumble of gray clouds she almost couldn't be sure if it was day or night. In the academically gifted reading class she was in she'd been taught that writers frequently used weather as a symbol of something much deeper and more prevalent to the story. Perhaps in the story of her today the weather meant something similar.
Having just given up on trying to read while she was so distracted by everything around her she decided to make the attempt at doing something a little more interactive with her time. She snapped the book closed on her lap and leaned forward to gather up her math materials. She still had about twenty problems left to complete and then she had a reading assignment to prepare for a science experiment in class the next day. Distractions, however, had encompassed her mind yet again. She heard the faint and far off sound of a twig breaking beneath someone's foot.
There was a rustling at the opening to her teepee and then she saw the solemn face of her older brother ducking in. "She's on the war path."
Though he found nearly as much solace in the small hut as she did he didn't spend nearly as much of his free time there. However, from time to time he'd come out bringing along a deck of cards and they'd pay for hours. Sara wouldn't ever admit it but she always felt the absolute safest when she was here with her older brother by her side. It wasn't an immense feeling of safety, but it was enough to calm the rapid pace of her heart and relieve much of the adrenaline that flowed through her veins. He sat down across from her and took her books folding them closed he put them out to form a type of card table. He removed a deck of cards from his pocket and started dealing them out.
"How much has she had?" Sara asked, afraid to hear his answer.
"She finished the boxed wine from the other night,"he told her and then sat silent for a moment thinking to make sure the list was complete. "Uh, she drank about two thirds of the other box, and most of that fifth she got this morning. She was polishing off the last of those three bottles of rum from Tuesday when I decided to leave."
"Damn," Sara winced. Then as if in a single fluid motion with her disdain, as though it was an elemental factor in her life, she cracked a half grin and dropped the cards in her hand face down on the pile of books in front of her brother. "Gin."
He shifted into his pocket and pulled out one of the smaller bottles of rum that their mother kept in one of her stashes, in case the family had decided to buckle down on her drinking problem that week. He twisted off the cap and took a deep swallow, "You got gin, but I've got the rum. You want any?"
She opened her mouth to protest but decided against it. Sometimes she liked the feeling of the buzz that she got from sneaking drinks with her brother, besides, if her night was going to be anything like she suspected she figured she might as well have a little fun. They didn't do it often really and when they did it was just a way of distracting themselves from the life around them. She was eleven but she knew very well that she shouldn't be doing what she was, but she didn't really care. Sara grabbed the bottle and poured it into her mouth gulping it down with a gusto that her brother would probably never be able to match in his life. She resisted the urge to shake her head and sigh out deeply when she stopped swallowing, she decided that if she was old enough to drink she'd be strong enough to take it like a woman.
The liquor spread over her body like a warm blanket reaching the furthest edges of her fingertips and toes. In an instant after she finished her drink from the bottle she felt warmed throughout and numbed to the howling cold of the weather outside. A fog clouded over her mind and sent her into this tingly feeling up and down her spine. She made sure that her brother had a good grip on the bottle that she just passed back to him and took up the deck of cards and passed out another hand to each of them.
"Think she'll pass out soon?" Sara asked matter-of-factly "It's kinda cold out here and I kinda wanna head back up to the house when the sun goes down."
Evan took a deep swig from the bottle of rum himself before responding. "She's pretty pissed off at Dad for not salting the walks last night."
"Well I guess it's not like I've never slept out here before," Sara said with a sigh and a half hearted laugh as she tried to pull the blanket around her shoulders just a little tighter.
"You're never going to learn to stick up for yourself you know," her older brother warned her. "If you don't face the music sometime. You can't just hide out here all the time. Besides when Momma figures out you're out here cuz of her she's gonna be pissed."
"Maybe she shouldn't be such a bitch." She picked up another card and shuffled it into her hand and then after another moment or two of thought she removed another card and put it down face up. She put her open and complete hand down on top of it, "gin."
In the distance they heard the sounds of doors slamming. Time slowed down to a grueling pace as Evan quickly pushed around the sheets and other materials they used to bed the floor of the fort and began digging violently in the dirt to conceal the liquor bottle they had. There was next to no chance that their mother was sober enough to even remember that she had children but in the off chance that she did she'd be a woman on a mission. They barely even breathed as both of them listened towards the house, looking for any sign that could tell them just exactly what their parents were up to.
More slamming meant that they were verbally fighting and things hadn't escalated to the physical aspects that they frequently did. Slamming was good. Slamming was sometimes like music in Sara and her brother's ears. The alternative would be shouting chorused with banging and crashing. In a rhythm of destruction and violence. Shout. Bang. Crash. Shout Bang. Crash. Shatter. Shout. Bang Crash.
"We don't have any guests tonight do we?" Sara asked her older brother as she slowly crawled towards the opening and crept there like a deer in the headlights. She was poised trying to find the faintest sound or sight from the house that would give her some sort of clue. Any clue.
"Yeah, the Weston's checked out yesterday," he ran his hands through his hair and crept up to sit next to her.
She turned up her face to meet him square in the eyes time still pattering along at as seamless pace, "shit."
"Yeah... nobody here means she'll be on the war path till God knows when," he said to her with a shrug as he sat back on his heels and then leaned back into a sitting position.
There was nothing left to do other than to wait. Wait until the state of suspended fear was cast away by some sort of event. Ideally, their father would come looking for them and tell them that she'd passed out for the rest of the night. Then he'd sit in the teepee with them and tell them stories of a better time, of a time they couldn't remember. Sometimes the stories were about his time in the army or when he was a child. Sometimes it was about when they were little children, how their mother almost seemed to glow when she was with them.
Not that they believed it. Both of their parents had been pushing them around since they were too small to really remember. Sara knew that her father did it though because he'd been around it for so long that he just didn't know anything else, and he was only ever really rough when their mother had made him so angry he didn't know what to do with himself. Besides, he hadn't laid a single hand on her since she was four years old and asked him never to hit her again. The amazing thing was that he'd actually listened. She knew that had she ever really dared ask such a thing of her mother she'd regret it.
The sounds of two more slamming doors came to their ears as they silently shushed each other. The howl of unintelligible yelling came to them in a pace that seemed to have been sped up by the slowing of time around them. It was a sensation they both felt frequently the speeding and slowing of time meshed into a dance of perpetual and looming doom. There was a crash and crackle that sounded oddly like a tumultuous thunder coming from the house and then everything stood still in the silence of the frozen day.
Finally Evan sprung to his feet and into action, he felt around and grabbed up a hefty but not overly heavy stick that he'd insisted his sister keep in the teepee at all times for her protection. A hand jutted out behind him as he crept out of the fort with a slow and quiet deliberation, "don't move. Stay here, okay?"
He hadn't waited for an answer and in this case, that was a mistake. Sara wasn't even going to consider letting her brother face whatever was going on at the house alone. She slid the blanket off from her shoulders and tucked her books all neatly beneath it in the way a little child would protect her dolly before she did something she was afraid of. They were her most prized possessions because they were her key, her ticket out of the hell she lived in. After being sure that everything in her private little home was secure as she could possibly make it she draped a hand across the front of the teepee and crept slowly away from it.
Evan pushed the front door to their little Inn open not a full three yards ahead of her thus she saw what lay on its other side with every ounce of graphic detail imaginable. Her mother stood over her father who was sitting stark upright in an armed chair in front of her. She had a gun in her hand and she had it pointed deliberately at her father's heart. She was slurring some sort of admonishing threat in his direction. Sara crept up behind her brother who by some fortunate graces hadn't yet been seen. She reached her hand up to drop it gently on his shoulder, to get his attention. Her hand grazed the bare skin of his neck and she felt that he was as cold as ice. She shook her hand away, not quite as paralyzed by the fear as he was.
She leaned forward and let her lips crouch as close as morally possible for a brother and sister as she whispered a question into his ear. "Who in the hell was stupid enough to give that woman a gun?"
Just as she finished speaking Sara felt this deep down feeling in the pit of her gut that told her in the next few moments something terrible was going to happen. The pace of time quickened rapidly as the wind picked up in a violent gust lurching both Sara and Evan forward as the fell through the front door and to their mother's feet.
The woman, in all of her drunken glory, didn't miss a beat. She held steadfast with the gun continuously pointing at their father's chest. "Get up right now, both of you, or I'll kill your father," she snarled at them.
Evan hadn't lost his grip on the stick he had in his hand when he had stumbled into the house. His sense of self preservation was just as strong as Sara's and instinctually he knew that beyond anything, he couldn't relinquish his weapon. He stood slowly, pulling Sara to her feet by her hand. They stood not knowing what to do, they had never seen the vision of their mother with a gun in her hand before and they were terrified that any one wrong move would end up with someone being killed.
"I knew there was a reason you were my favorite, Evan," Laura Sidle hissed violently. Gesturing with the end of the gun at her husband she continued, "you're always thinking ahead. Now we have a stick to beat him with."
"I don't want to..." he tried to argue but was overpowered by his mother snarl, this time to his sister. "Go find some rope and tie him to the chair."
Sara didn't move, she couldn't, it was like some unseen force had frozen her into the position she was in. It was her turn to be paralyzed with fear. It was that moment of total paralysis that told her that she couldn't ever let it happen to herself again. No matter what happened in her life and no matter how scared she decided she'd fight through whatever had her down and force her way back to the top. If she stayed standing and she stayed moving it would be like defying gravity and nothing would ever bring her down.
Like a tigress on the hunt she shifted her body weight so that she was poised and ready to sprint if the situation called for it. She was as ready as she'd ever get to handle whatever may come in the next few moments.
"Momma I don't want to," she protested in a much stronger, more adult, and more impressive voice than she was even aware she had in her.
"What?" The snarl was inhuman, the woman before her, the woman that used to be her mother had lost all traces of humanity when she began drinking that night. Now she was some sort of animal or monster scratching at the surface of Laura Sidle's mind trying to claw its way to freedom.
"I said that I don't want to, Momma," Sara repeated herself slowly. "We don't really wanna hurt him do we?"
"He has to be punished," her mother said. "To keep a man in line you have to punish him for what he did. Sara, you have to be the strong one in the relationship or the man's gonna walk all over you."
Another of her mother's little gems of wisdom that Sara was pretty confident wouldn't do her any good in real life. Somehow she doubted that being physically domineering over a man was really a turn on or an incentive to keep him around. Then again, it had worked for her mother for more than a decade so perhaps she didn't really know as much about such matters as she thought she did. Either way she decided that she'd wait for life experience to confirm or discredit her mother's teachings before she ever even considered putting them into practice. That wasn't to say that she'd let anyone control her either, because once she escaped from the hell hole she called her childhood home nobody would ever tell her what to do again. She'd make sure of it.
Sara didn't go get the rope. It was true that from time to time she was absolutely sure she hated both of her parents but she wouldn't enable her mother to ruin both of their lives. If she and Evan didn't protect their father and give him whatever edge they could in these situations they weren't sure that things would keep turning out okay in the end. So she didn't move she just let her mother's attention turn back to her father and the matter she felt was pressing at hand.
"Evan, hit him." The direction was as clear as it could be in the slurred sub-form of English that their mother was speaking.
There was a chilling silence as they watched their mother's finger slowly slide across the trigger of the gun. Evan stepped up and raised the stick over his father, tears streaming down his cheeks, "Now, or I'll kill all of you."
A thud like cracking sound was heard immediately following the vision of Evan slowly raising the stick over his head with his two hands and letting it descend in an angular motion onto the side of his father's arm.
"Again."
He repeated the action. Sara felt her heart beat in rapid pace with the tremors she saw in her brother's hands as he complied with his mother's orders.
"He deserves it. Harder."
Evan couldn't comply, he was physically unable. He was a child being told to batter a grown man. A young boy told to demolish his father. The sickness at the pit of his stomach welled up inside him as neurons and synapses went haywire in his mind. Sara could see it though, no matter how he felt he had to do this, the lesser of two evils, he just couldn't. She doubted she could either. The Sidle children weren't used to feeling completely incapable of something, especially not Sara. She had this habit of either succeeding at almost everything she tried, and usually excelling. Despite rarely ever having time to study or focus on her school work she hadn't pulled anything lower than an A in school in her entire life. When she was curious about how or why something worked, she taught herself. When she wanted to forget... she had an uncanny ability to pretend she was somewhere else.
Laura Sidle, however, had teetered over the edge of insanity a long time before that and she'd completely forgotten that the two tools she used to aid her in her games were in simply children. Her children. Her young, impressionable children, who couldn't help but love both of their parents very deeply. They were kids and didn't know how not to love the people who provided them with the basic essential of life, their parents.
"I said hit him."
Nothing happened.
"Now."
They heard the faint clicking sound as their mother cocked the gun in her fingers. This drove Sara into action as she stepped forward to her brother's side and gently allowed her hand to fall to the place where his met the stick. She tightened her grip around the wood and slowly pulled it from his fingers. Her eyes flashed to the brown of her mothers in a desperate attempt to decide if her mother would really do what it looked like she was about to. After deciding that her mother was more sincere than she'd seen her in a long time Sara turned and met eyes with her father. The man hadn't so much as made a sound since the whole episode had started. Not a grunt, groan, or wince of pain.
"Punish him or I will," their mother threatened. She straightened up her grip on the gun, thumb poised over the hammer. She shifted it so the barrel was aimed directly at his heart.
Sara raised the stick high over her head, whispered an 'I'm sorry' to her father, and brought it down as hard and fast as she could to his chest. She only hope that such an attack would appease her mother. This time he let out a howl of pain that flowed along with a hitched breath and the distinct sound of wood meeting flesh. Sara memorized the sound as she stared into her dad's chest. She envisioned the pattern that the bruise was already probably starting to form in beneath his chest. Surely it would depict the shape of the stick she'd used and with a careful eye she imagined that you'd even be able to see the fat knot that lay halfway to the end.
What Sara thought was a monumental indiscretion on her part wasn't enough to appease her mother's rage. There was another pregnant moment of stark silence and then the sound of gunpowder exploding crackled through the air. If time had slowed down earlier well now it had all but stopped. Sara felt aware that she was screaming but she couldn't hear the blood curdling shriek that she felt resonating form her vocal chords. Evan wasn't making a sound, all he'd done was shoot an arm up and put it in front of her, pushing her backwards. Their father lay face down on the hard wood of the floor they couldn't tell if he'd been shot or dove. Their mother dropped the gun and stepped backwards her hole body shaking with her hands as her face twisted in a look of utter confusion.
In the next instant life flowed back to normal speed, which given the circumstances seemed like warp time. Evan was on top of the gun before anyone else had the time to react and was running out of sight in moments. Their mother looked appalled at the whole display and slowly turned away and moved back towards the house. Soon she'd passed down the hall and through the door leading to the kitchen.. Sara was left standing there over her father, alone.
She didn't breathe as she slowly bent down to her father and stretched out her tiny eleven year old hand towards him and brushed her fingers gently across the back of his neck as she slowly readied herself to settle her fingers above the spot for a pulse. His skin was warm, and she felt his breath hot on her hand as she moved past his nostrils.
"Daddy?" She asked slowly as she allowed herself to rock back onto her heels and sit on the floor by her father's side. "Are you okay?"
Her father rolled over and shifted himself so that he too was sitting up, sending a feeling of such warmth and happiness coarsing through her veins she felt she could barely contain it. She couldn't resist the urge to throw her arms around her father's neck and hug him deeply before she shifted herself again, this time to her feet.
Her dad moved from his sitting position too and moved to sit himself back into the char he was on the ground next to. He started rubbing himself in the places where he'd been struck "I'm fine Sara," he said to her. "Just a little sore."
"Thank God," Sara said as her nerves began to settle.
"That woman's going to be the death of me one day," he said running his fingers through his hair. "She's psychotic."
"It's not like there's a single damn one of us that's anything close to normal in this family, Dad," Sara said as it was her turn to run her fingers through her hair. She flashed him those gapped teeth in a twisted sort of smile and breathed a sigh out deeply.
"Have you been drinking Sara?" The man's face changed into an interesting formation of concern as he smelled the sweet liquor breath flowing from his daughter's lips.
Sara made eye contact with Evan as he appeared in the front door and then turned her eyes back to her father, "I told ya we were all fucked up."
"I'm so sorry, Dad." Evan stepped forward quickly and wrapped his arms around his father's shoulders, being careful not to squeeze tightly enough to cause him any pain.
"You and your sister need to stop drinking like that," the man said with a pat on his son's shoulders. "It's genetic... I've told you that before."
"I'm gonna go get you some aspirin and a glass of water," Sara said to her father with a brave smile. She knew that for the next few hours her mother would be on her best behavior. She always was after an episode like this one.
On her way down the hall, right before she stepped into the kitchen, she heard her brother's voice "you gotta stop worrying so much about us dad. We're both gonna turn out okay."
When she got into the kitchen she saw her mother sitting at the table with her face in her hands. She could tell, without even looking, that the woman before her had been crying. Sara walked past her mother without speaking a single word to her and stepped into the open cooking area. She fidgeted through the cabinets and before she even grabbed a cup or the aspirin she took out the necessary materials and put a cup of instant coffee, as strong as she could make it, into the microwave. As she waited for the seconds to tick past she took out the aspirin bottle and removed two pills and filled a glass with ice water. Noticing that she still had thirty seconds left on the microwave timer she grabbed another glass from the cabinet and filled it tall with the last of the wine from the box that her mother had cast aside on the counter. She drank it in silent gulps and lowered the empty glass into the kitchen sink.
Gathering up the cup of coffee, water, and pills she slowly started to walk back out of the kitchen. This time, however, she stopped by her mother's side. "I made you coffee momma, you ought to drink it before it get's cold."
"Thanks Sara," the woman looked up and shifted gently. She reached over and grabbed Sara's hand and turned her child to look at her. "I'm so sorry baby. I don't deserve you. I just don't deserve you kids. I love you so much. I'm so sorry."
"You can't help it mom..." Sara didn't tell her that it was okay. It wasn't. But when her mother was sober she knew that she loved her very much, there wasn't a doubt in her mind that her mother was a very confused and conflicted person. Maybe someday she'd pick her family over the alcohol and make things get better. Sara was eleven, naive, more than a little lost, and somewhere deep down she held fast to the hope of that maybe. The hope that someday things really would get better and that all of the pains of her past would go away. She told herself, day after day, that the present was just an empty space between the good and the bad, it was too pointless to be sad.