The Missing Piece, by chibiness87
Genre: angst
Pairing: GSR (kinda)
Length: 1500-ish
Prompt: "Houston, we have a problem!"
Spoilers: Up to 5.21 Committed
Disclaimer: The story is mine, the characters are not.

A/N: So this started out humor. Seriously. Then, well, this happened instead. sigh And yes, it's another 'how they got together' fic… but not. Anyway. A great many thanks be due to mingsmommy for her help and 'awww, shucks' feedback on this.

Grissom was worried about Sara.

No, not worried, concerned. Since she had returned from her time off after he had picked her up from the PD, there had been something... off about her. And he wasn't the only one to have noticed her shift in mood. He had noticed the boys on his team giving her lingering glances as she walked past. When in the past they had been 'admiring' (and he used that word as loosely as possible), they were now filled with worry. Jim had been in his office just the other day, telling him he knew about the call into PD, and was concerned about her, while Catherine had been the most direct; cornering him one day in the hall as Sara passed, she had flat out told him to, "Fix it!" The problem was, he wasn't sure if he was allowed to try to help.

Sara had been back at work now for a couple of weeks, and except for an interrupted conversation on her first night back, and a comment about being concerned over a bloody (and he meant that in the literal sense) door, he had only seen her at the start of shift when he was handing out assignments. While that was not out of the ordinary, at least for the past few months, he was now appreciating the change in her behavior since she had first moved to Vegas to work for him.

And it had him concerned.

And then, later that month, he got a call from a slightly scared Nick, and concerned sped past worried straight into scared. Do not pass GO, do not collect 200.

The wood of the support beam of the deck they had been processing had been weaker than they thought, apparently. When reaching over to her kit for a bindle, the beam had cracked, and the deck collapsed, bringing Sara down with it, apparently. Sara was in the hospital, with a 'mild' concussion, broken tibia, a 'slightly' punctured lung along with a couple of broken ribs, and a possibly fractured wrist (they were x-raying it when Nick had called). Fact.

When obeying all speed limits and road laws, and no traffic, the trip from the crime lab to Desert Palm hospital takes on average 20 minutes. Grissom made it in 10.

Sara looked, when he had been allowed to see her (finally) exactly like he thought she would. Bandages and casts and IVs; and yet he didn't see any of that, only the woman he was now finally, (finally) realizing he would walk through fire for, lying in a hospital bed, so very, very pale, and as beautiful as ever. It was right then, in that moment, standing halfway in and halfway out of her doorway, he admitted, only to himself, he loved her.

And that thought stopped him cold. Minutes passed while he stood in the doorway, and he only moved when a nurse approached the room, and ordered with a pointed stare, "In or out, you are not a doorstop." With a guilty look in her direction, he had moved into the almost silent room. Letting the rhythmic 'beep, beep' of the heart monitor wash over him, Grissom slowly began to breathe again.

Sara woke to find him leaning against the wall of her room, head bowed, and if it wasn't for the faint crease she could see in his posture, she would have thought he had fallen asleep like that. But walls were never the easiest thing to fall asleep against, not standing up, and then his face had risen slightly, and just for a moment she saw (what she would later come to know as) love in his eyes. Thankfully, for him at least, the drugs pulled her back under seconds later.

The second time she woke, he had progressed to the chair by her bed, book propped on his chest as his glasses threatened to fall of his nose while his head bobbed in sleep. 'This,' she thought to herself, 'this is odd.' But still, Sara reached for the book and his glasses, only to stop when her ribs informed her, quite succinctly, that she wasn't about to be moving like that any time soon, thank you very much. It was a startled yelp of pain that woke him immediately, and she watched in veiled amusement as he oriented himself. When his eyes fell on her, she watched as his back straightened, and his eyes took on a concerned look once more.

Sara was getting so damned tired of that look.

The third time she woke, he was just entering the room, coffee a la hospital in one hand, book in the other. He had smiled his hello, and she had waved back. Her wrist support (it had only been sprained, it turned out) was off, and Sara bit back a small cry of pain when the movement jarred the sore joint slightly. And then her attention had fallen to the items in his hand, and she knew he was intending on staying with her again. Joys of joys.

It wasn't like she was against the company, not really. After all, lying in a hospital bed was never exactly fun, but Sara wanted, needed, a break from all the concerned (and worried and even scared) looks from her visitors.

Grissom, never one to miss the small things, noticed the 'oh, not again' look, and asked if there was anything he could do to help. She had tried to fob him off, told him to go with promises to call if she thought of anything she needed, but really, she was ok. Really. Someone (a neighbor, he thought she said) was coming by later, she would be ok if he went back to the lab. And he would have believed her, maybe, except for one thing that made him stop; she hadn't met his eyes.

So instead, he walked over to the visitors chair, pulled it up to her bedside, and set in for the long haul. Setting himself back into the uncomfortable, worn leather with a creek, he inhaled the slightly bitter aroma of the coffee, mingled now with the sterile tang that always accompanied hospital rooms. Taking a sip of the lukewarm java, he propped open his book, letting her dictate the way the visit would go.

Sara had huffed, had puffed, threatened and tried cajoling him into leaving, but he had stayed put, even after a nurse had walked in brandishing a sedative, mentioning something about sleep and rest therapy as she plunged the syringe into the IV. About an hour into watching her sleep, an older lady approached with a duffle bag he knew to be Sara's, having seen it a couple of times at work. Grace, she said her name was, asking if Sara was ok, and could she do anything else? So maybe, maybe Sara had meant when she said she would be OK. But he had turned his back on her enough, and wasn't about to let this become another 'Grissom screw up' when it came to her.

So the visits continued, and slowly, (slowly) their once lost friendship began to poke its head out of the hole it had bunked down in, waiting for the right moment to reappear. They talked for hours, sometimes about nothing, sometimes about cases; sometimes she talked and he listened, sometimes it was the other way around. And yet, despite all their talks, anecdotes he told her, reminiscing of their time spent in San Francisco, she still didn't seem… right.

And for the life of him, he couldn't work out what it was he was missing, until the day he found Greg visiting her in her room. Somehow, the lab rat turned CSI had smuggled chocolate in (the signature smell permeating through the tang of antiseptics), and he stood in the doorway as children in adult bodies developed a sugar-high (though, in fairness, Greg was just being… more-so than usual; it was Sara who seemed to be effected the most).

Grissom watched in stifled amusement as Greg reached for the bag of 'fun size' chocolates that was set on the bed between the two of them, and picked up the last remaining Mars bar. Proclaiming in a mock-serious voice, "Houston, we have a problem," he proceeded to pop the treat (whole) into his mouth, chewed furiously, swallowed and finished, "Mars has disappeared!" Sara, in the middle of her own mouthful of chocolate, had laughed, choked, then, with tears streaming from her eyes, had laughed some more.

And then, as if sensing his presence in the doorway, she had turned that smiling face to him, and his breath caught. The Sara he used to know, the one he had been looking for all these months was back, peeking out from behind her mask, and he knew, right then in that moment, she had never looked more beautiful.

Something, he thought, something is going to happen.

And then, after a bad, bad, (bad) case at a mental institution where he had almost had to watch her die, something did.

The beginning