Disclaimer: I do not own these characters or anything from CSI. I'm just taking them out to play.
AN: In this story I'm ignoring anything that happened between Grissom and Sara after they were officially together. In fact I'm pretending they were never actually together. The Miniature Killer still happened but Sara and Grissom were never in a relationship. Lets just call it creative license. Enjoy!
EDIT: Sorry for the mistake! A paragraph that had gotten cut just wouldn't die and tacked itself onto the end there. My apologies!
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There were plenty of reasons she had nightmares. Her childhood fueled them often enough. Blurring memories of hands striking out against her, the ominous clink of liquor bottles, the smell of the occasional emergency room. Sometimes her nightmares were of the lab exploding. She would be walking down the hall, and then in slow motion she would see the windows breaking, her body being tossed across the hall by the blast, the glass shards everywhere. They were flying through the air, littering the ground, propelling themselves into her skin. Or she'd be on her knees, on the cold tile floor contrasting the hot panic that flooded through her. A piece of ceramic pressed to her throat, Afraid she was going to die at any moment.
The worst were from the car though. Feeling the rain, the wet, the mud all around her. Knowing that she's been kidnapped and trapped. And then the walking and the heat and the desert and the knowledge that this might even be worse than just staying under that car and accepting her fate. Sometimes in her dreams she dies.
Sometimes she wakes up screaming. Tears streaming down her face, her sobs echoing around her room as her pulse beats a thousand miles a minute in her throat. Her sweat drenches her sheets causing them to stick to her clammy skin. Her body shakes with tremors that won't stop for hours.
Sometimes she doesn't wake up. Sometimes her body is so desperate for sleep that not even her night terrors can rip her from its grasp. On those nights after the demons have had their fill of her the dreams change. It is on those nights that she remembers him. Moments that she refuses to acknowledge ever existed during the day steal into her mind as if to soothe her. His voice in her ear "honey this doesn't look good" as his hands, ever so gentle, inspect her palm. Sometimes it's his face, panicked and in shock and fear as he presses himself against the window, hoping he isn't going to see her throat cut. Other times it's the way his eyes would look at her when he thought she wouldn't notice. Just a light touch, a moments linger. Like a butterfly gently resting for the briefest moment.
The lack of sleep doesn't affect her job though. She's a professor of criminology at a small college in Maine. The change suits her. She is awake during the day; attempts to sleep at night and all of her interactions are with the living. The air is crisper here; the snow that lays thick on the ground is soothing to her. If she tried really hard she could almost forget a lot of things. Almost.
She rented a small house at the edge of a small lake that had been frozen over for a month. Her furniture filled it nicely ad she was glad she'd paid to ship it out there. Having her familiar furniture around her helped it feel homier. Especially since all her years worth of knickknacks from Vegas were still packed away in boxes in her attic. Some things hurt too much.
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Grissom hadn't been the same since Sara left. She had planned it well. She requested off a three day weekend and everyone on the team was happy she was finally dipping into her vacation time and taking some days for herself. Unbeknownst to everyone however she had given her notice two weeks earlier to the higher ups and asked them to keep it quiet. Given her recent experiences with Natalie they quickly agreed. They probably would have agreed to anything. Everyone walked on eggshells around her now. Monday night rolled around and Sara never showed up for work. Worried, Grissom drove over to her apartment but no one answered his knocks. He showed his ID to the building manager and made up open the door to her apartment. Inside he found her apartment empty. Her furniture was gone, the fridge was empty. He stood in her bedroom, a room he has never been in before despite his cravings for her and he realized she was really and truly gone. When he got back to his office he found that someone had placed Sara's resignation forms in his desk.