Part 1-Birds That Fly With Weightless Souls:
When did you and Supervisor Grissom begin your relationship?"
"We've always had a relationship..."
Chapter 1:
To Frisco With Bugs...
1999 Forensic Academy Conference-San Francisco.
"Hey Sara, you coming out with us?" a voice called to her from the other side of the lockers.
"No, I can't." She threw back; pulling the hair tie from her wrist as she hastily scraped back her wild curls.
"Oh come on! It's not like you to pass on a night out!" the owner of the voice, a young twenty-something with thick, dense blonde hair and mischievous blue eyes came round the corner and in to view, leaning against the lockers and chewing at the large wad of bubblegum that was permanently super-glued to her teeth when she wasn't working, "What's up?"
"I told you last week! At the end of your class." Sara laughed lightly, closing over the lockers door as she pulled on a jacket, "I've got that anthropology seminar to go to." In response to the other woman's blank stare she widened her eyes and said, "The Forensic Academy...Doctor Gilbert Grissom if I remember, ringing any bells?"
"Oh yeah, now I remember." She chuckled teasingly, "I don't know why your bothering Sara, you should just come out with us instead. Marco said he fell asleep fifteen minutes in to a seminar by your genius 'Doctor Grissom'."
"Yeah well, Marco would fall asleep at crime scenes." Sara pointed out with a laugh, "I'm going." She added, firmly.
"God I'd forgotten how damn stubborn you were sometimes Sara Sidle!" she sighed playfully, drawing a signature smile from the brunette.
She opened her mouth to reply when a voice calling from the door interrupted them,
"Hey Candy! You coming or what?"
"Wilson?" Sara asked, recognising the voice and raising a mildly impressed eyebrow.
"Yeah..." she shrugged defensively, flushing as they moved towards the door, before, jabbing Sara lightly in the ribs and saying, "If you're jealous I'm sure we could find you a friend..."
"I've already said no!" Sara laughed, "You're persistent if nothing else, I'll give you that, but no means no."
She paused, glancing over her shoulder as Doug, who was slouching easily in against the door frame and smirked over her shoulder as she slipped past, winking, "Besides, he's not really my type."
"We've yet to find your 'type' Sara!" she tossed back, hanging in the doorway with a rather shell shocked looking Doug, grinning.
She turned back to them and called, "Hey, who knows? Maybe Doctor Grissom is my type!"
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She smiled as she ducked into the little run-down car waiting faithfully for her in the car park. As always, she said a little prayer as she jammed the key into the ignition that the thing would actually start.
It was a great little car but it had dragged her to mechanical Hell and forced her to drag it back from the brink several times over and it had developed a knack for picking exceptionally inappropriate times to break down.
Stranding her to the mercy of the empty car park feeling like a sitting duck with Doug and Candy banging on the window seemed a little too much up its street for her to start taking chances.
She had been about to fish her toolbox that she had installed in the boot when she had become tired of relying on mechanics and breakdown companies, from the back when the little engine finally, mercifully choked into life, just as Candy and Doug sauntered from the lab, his arm around her waist.
She threw them a cheerful little wave before gratefully pulling out of the car park.
This city held so many demons and nightmares within its walls and yet this, this would keep her here. It would take her something exceptional to draw her away from this place after everything that had already happened could not tear her away from it.
She was far too early for the conference and so, with some luck and a strong tailwind, she coaxed the little car up one of the winding cliff paths.
Once at the top she could sit with the beautiful backdrop of bright city lights behind her and the great, rolling black ocean in front of her, the only light coming from where the pale moon gently kissed the glassy surface. The strange dancing fires of civilisation on the beach below, merrily tossing its golden sparks in high columns, like offerings to the stars swallowing them into the blackness. It seemed to bridge the gap between the two worlds, the rough, raw wild ocean and the towering concrete wilderness of the tamed city.
With one last glance out at the view and a fright as she checked her watch, she then hastily forced the little car back into life as she set off back towards civilisation.
She needn't have worried. When she arrived at the university she found that she had her times mixed up and was over an hour early.
She decided to take up the offer of going to sit in the cool auditorium while she waited. It, unlike the car she had thrown into a hasty space outside, had air conditioning.
She smiled quietly to herself as she entered the capacious, echoing auditorium and quietly traced her way down to the front row, her fingers running absently over the threaded backs of the chairs as she did so, savouring the soothing, isolation and quiet.
She picked her way along the front row to a seat directly opposite the podium.
"You're early." A voice observed from the shadows making her jump.
She smiled slightly at her notebooks, flushing and pushing a dense, runaway curl behind her ear as she told her knees,
"Yeah, I got my times mixed up."
"And here was me thinking that you were eager." The voice said with a hint of teasing dancing amongst its many layers.
"Maybe I am." She replied smoothly, "It's the reason I left work early today."`
She raised her large brown eyes and found them instantly connecting with her mystery voice whose owner had just stepped from the shadows as they were magnetically drawn to one another.
The eyes she now found herself drawn to and drowning in were an intense an electric blue and seemed to contain a faint veil of lust and warmth hidden in the depths of the cold raw knowledge that lay heavy on them.
She found herself smiling nervously and blushing slightly for reasons she could not quite place in herself as he answered,
"This is very true." He spoke softly, his eyes never leaving her, constantly studying her and rediscovering her, giving her the feeling that he could tell everything about her from that simple look.
"You're here for the anthropology lecture? With Doctor Grissom?"
She paused a moment, finding herself to be strangely tongue-tied as she said haltingly, "What-Oh, I mean yes, yes I am..."
He smiled, leaning easily against the stage, seeming to become calmer the more composure she lost as he asked,
"Have you seen him speak before?"
"Oh, ah, no, I haven't. This is my first, I'm a Grissom virgin you might say." She told him, flushing furiously at this. Why are you over-talking around him?
"Not for much longer." He replied with a small enigmatic smile, beneath twinkling eyes.
"No." She agreed, still blushing and avoiding his gaze as she added, "I know people who've seen him before though..."
"Really?" he said, amusement tugging at the corners of his lips, "And what did these 'people' have to say about him?" he asked curiously.
"I don't know." She laughed lightly in an off-hand voice, "They ah, they said they felt he was a little dull as a speaker, but..."
He laughed at this as well, the glimmer in his eye continuing to dance within its enigmatic depths "Then why did you come?"
She shrugged, scraping the hair that had escaped from its ponytail behind her ears before holding his gaze and saying, softly,
"I like to make my own mind up about things, particularly people; I don't want other people's opinions forced on me. Don't judge a book by its cover or another person on a name given to them by someone else.
His lips twitched into the first warm, genuine smile she had seen upon them before he nodded approvingly and said,
"You'll enjoy the lecture, I think." He told her softly,
"Well what makes you so sure about that?" she called as he began to walk away along the edge of the stage.
"The topic. It's about that very thing. The issues of taking things at face value, the dangers of first blush."
He turned when he reached the door at the corner of the stage and said,
"I don't think I got your name..."
"Sara." She told him, smiling, "Sara Sidle." She waited, and when he made to leave without sharing his own she called, "I didn't get yours either!"
"You will." the enigmatic, slightly flirtatious, disembodied voice told her from the corridor beyond, making her smile into her notepad as she shook her head.
As it turned out however, she did indeed get his, in a way she could never have expected or predicted. When the esteemed Doctor Grissom took his place on the platform, placed his notes on the podium and glanced out at the sea of faces, instantly finding hers, she felt her stomach drop and a heat creep up her neck as a shiver of electricity ran up her spine.
She had his name now alright.
Their eyes met again before he began, his filled with quiet merriment, registering how mortified hers were and acknowledging this with a smile and what she would have sworn was a wink before he began.
He did not start as she had expected however, by shuffling his papers and simply talking at them. Instead, he stepped out from behind the podium, leaning against it and abandoning the safety of his notes, his eyes sweeping his students before he asked simply, without preamble,
"As criminalists processing a scene, what is one of the biggest mistakes we can make with our evidence?"
"Contaminating it?" someone towards the back of the hall suggested,
"Missing it?" another voice offered, before someone else added on the back of this, "Overlook it?"
Grissom smiled and shook his head saying,
"No. You will do all of those things many times over the course of your career. They are inherent in being a criminalist and also in being human, they are honest mistakes. Nine times out of ten they can be fixed. I'm asking for something that we as humans want to do with every aspect of our lives and our work and that we should never consciously do with our evidence..." his eyes rested on hers as he spoke, eyebrows raised, inviting her to answer.
She obliged,
"Judging it too quickly."
"Yes." He said smiling and looking satisfied, "Very good."
He set off walking across the stage, drawing the eyes of everyone in the room as he continued, building upon her answer,
"Judging. Prejudice. Snap decisions. Each and every person in this room is guilty of at least one of those things because everyone in this room is a human being. We are all taught not to judge a book by its cover or another person on a name given to them by someone else, but we all do. It's human nature. We see something and make an instant assumption based on what we have seen, rather than on what we know. In our line of work, this can have unpredictable, and often irrevocable, consequences; overlooking key evidence, rejecting viable theories because of a biased focus, chasing endless rabbits to dead ends and being unable to find the path you should have followed. At the end of the day, there is only ever one thing we can rely on. The evidence. Not inferences and implications or hunches and gut instinct or past ghosts or prejudice. Only the evidence; because the evidence never lies."
She sat, entranced for the rest of the lecture, feeding off of his words and his passion. By the end of it, she was decided; Gil Grissom was definitely 'her type'. She spent the last twenty or so minutes of the lecture only half-listening, attempting to find an acceptable way of asking him to dinner.
The session ended as abruptly as it had began and it took her a few seconds to register that everyone was moving around her.
She hastily gathered up her stuff and made her way to the front of the hall to talk to him, heart in her mouth, breath catching in her throat.
"Doctor Grissom?" she said, slowly, as he turned around she smiled and blushed before saying, hurriedly, "Hi, ah, we, ah, we met before the lecture?"
"Yes, we did." He smiled, "Come to tell me I was, what was it now, 'a little dull as a speaker'?" he teased, eyes flashing
"No." She said, returning the smile, "I think I've changed my mind about that..."
"Oh really? And why would that be?" he asked lightly,
"The evidence changed." She said with a shrug, "So did my theory. After all, the evidence never lies."
"No, it does not." He replied easily, "Glad to see you've taken something from today."
"Well I would like to take a little more." She replied without thinking, something stirring in her deep eyes, "I mean, I would like to go somewhere with you just now." He raised an eyebrow at her as she panicked, just hearing what she had said, "To talk, about the lecture I mean. Unless of course..."
"No. I have time." He replied with a small smile, "The bodies will keep in Vegas...In the meantime, is there anywhere in San Francisco that sells any decent coffee?" he asked, already moving off towards the door leaving her suspended in the middle of the room, a little wrong-footed.
"What? Oh, oh yes, there is...Just, ah..."
She gave herself a little shake and hurried off after him, already planning their conversation that would now be taking place over coffee...
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He watched her curiously as they sat down outside in the little cafe she had pointed to when they had left the university building as she emptied several sachets of sugar into the black coffee that was simmering beneath her. He raised his own to his lips and kept it held in his hands as he said,
"So, you wanted to talk to me about the lecture?" he asked, watching her carefully, "You have some questions for me?"
"If you don't mind." She replied, flashing him a warm smile.
"I think it's a little late for that now don't you think." He said, gesturing around at their surroundings.
She laughed lightly at this, flushing slightly and burying herself in her coffee after murmuring, "That's very true..."
He watched her carefully, taking in every movement, every detail of her. It was strange. He did not know why he had agreed to this little coffee break, or rather why he himself had volunteered it. If it had been any other lecture, any other student, he would not have been sitting in a cafe in the pleasant San Francisco sunshine sipping coffee with them, he would have been in a taxi on the way to the airport to get back Vegas. But apparently for her, the bodies would keep...
That fact alone fascinated him. Why was he drawn to her? Of all of the women, of all of the people on this planet, why did she draw him to her in this way?
She interrupted his musings here as she said,
"Yes, ah, well obviously, the point of the lecture was that we shouldn't always rely on our first opinions at a crime scene, or really anywhere in life, but aren't first opinions essential in some way? If we didn't act upon them initially, we would never do anything, be that going looking for evidence we think we know is there, or approaching another person because our first impressions have drawn us to them?"
He considered her question thoughtfully for a moment, considering the irony of her last statement in the midst of his own internal thoughts before saying simply,
"First opinions are crucial, but if the evidence changes so must the theory." He watched her reaction for a moment and when she neither jumped in to support or refute this, he continued, "You were right, spot on in fact, initially we must act upon them, for how else will we know that that evidence wasn't there for us all along, or that that person wasn't someone we would get on with? Initially is the crucial point there, initially we must follow our instincts and our assumptions but we must also be willing to change them, to abandon them, to look elsewhere in response to the newest piece of evidence."
"And if that evidence never presents itself to us?" she asked quietly, "If all we ever have is our first opinions, what then?"
"All evidence found is treated in the same way. Whether we find it in the first few minutes at a crime scene or whether it comes months after our initial discovery. All evidence is impartial, unbiased, with no prejudice or judgement attached. All of that comes from those that process it. People have a tendency to latch on, to become too attached, to start stubbornly down one path and fence themselves in with their determination and refuse to even consider walking another. That is when first impressions lead to problems. When your first impression is that of empathy, for the victim, for their situation, then you lose sight of what's important."
"Why did you take this job?" she asked softly, "Why do you keep doing it?" her eyes burned brightly with something he could not quite place.
As thrown as he was by this sudden question, he answered her quietly and honestly, regardless of where it took them next,
"Because the dead can't speak for themselves. We are the victim's last voice."
"Then how can you deny that the victims are important?" she breathed, "We search for the truth, we search for justice, for them."
"Of course, in that context they are important. But in terms of our job, of our evidence, they are not." He said quietly, watching her keenly. Part of this was what he actually believed; part of it was an attempt to draw from her what she believed.
"Not all evidence needs to be blood and fingerprints and fibres." She countered, shaking her head, "What someone says, how they say it, can sometimes be more telling than the things you can see on the surface. For example, someone might say that saying 'I love you' is evidence of that person's feelings, but by looking deeper in to how they are saying it and the look in their eyes, I could tell that they were lying and therefore completely change the meaning of that evidence. Without a victim, without a context blood and fibres, that's all they are, blood and fibres, they don't mean much of anything on their own. The victim gives the truth meaning."
He considered her over his coffee mug for a moment. She seemed almost embarrassed at the passion with which she had spoken, as though she feared she had revealed too much of herself.
"You're stumbling into the part of forensics where science meets faith. Philosophy begins to intertwine with fact."
She shook her head slowly, "I don't think so. I think it's where forensics meets humanity."
They talked for several more hours, and became so lost in the other's company that he only called an abrupt halt to their meeting when he realised that if he did not leave her soon, he would miss the last flight back to Vegas.
He stood, apologising and paused a moment, sensing that there was something else she wanted to say, something she had been trying to say since they first sat down together. Still, all she did was offer him her hand and say,
"Thank you for your time Doctor Grissom."
"You're very welcome." He said, a little thrown by this. This reserved quietness he was observing after the strong heat and passion she had placed on her words before this as he had talked to her about everything from anthropology to entomology, truth to lies, science to philosophy and saw that she had argued her case well for all of the strong opinions that she held. "Here." He said, impulsively, scrawling down his phone number and email address on the napkin at their table, "In case you have any more questions about anthropology." He told her lightly.
"Thank you..." she murmured, after he had already crossed the street and flagged down a taxi.
In truth, he had given her his details, and had given her a call and a job offer that she had accepted several months later because of reasons wholly separate from forensics. It was her. She had drawn him in and instead of boring him, or causing him to lose interest in her, she had renewed it. He wanted to explore every inch of this strange and beautiful creature. She was captivating and intriguing and he was loathe to lose something like that, to leave a puzzle unsolved.
A/N: Just a little prologue chapter based on my take on their first meeting. I'll probably go through each season, taking a couple of chapters for each and picking out my favourite episodes, if anyone has any particular thoughts or requests about this my ears are always open! :) Thanks for reading! What did you think?