AN: This is another one of my 'how did they..' stories. I really believe I will write these until…well, until they are all told. And there are many.
I didn't mean to write this – I was actually in the middle of a sequel to 'Three Months and I'm Still Breathing' as a lot of people asked if I was going to write more of that and I said no but then promptly found myself compelled to do so. So I went into the kitchen to do the laundry and ended up doing the washing up (Americans – that's 'doing the dishes'- the English apparently have to wash in one particular direction).
So here it is. And I really hope you like it. And the aforementioned other piece will be along shortly…
DISCLAIMER – you know they're not mine. You know if they were Sara would NEVER wear those huge bug glasses (you know the ones) and San Francisco would remain just another city and not the bane of our lives.
Lyrics are from 'Fallen' and belong to Sarah McLachlan.
We all begin with good intent
Love was raw and young
We believed that we could change
ourselves
The past could be undone
Sara was officially doing two things at once. Her hands were processing evidence, turning over the pages of a file that lay, innocently manilla, on the table before her. Her eyes were scanning the pages, pupils moving diligently in just the direction they were supposed to. But her mind, oh her mind was elsewhere, sliding her deliciously in and out of a beautiful fantasy in which there were a lot of open doors.
Now and again she wondered if other people did this, let their minds take them to other, better, more intoxicating places while they were working. She refused to narrow that field to wonder if he did this. Somehow she couldn't imagine him thinking about her at all.
But she was thinking about him. She had been but three feet away from him for the most part of her shift, and was just now recovering. This was how it went. Saturation, irritation, imagination. They would spend altogether too much time together, he would say nothing to give her any kind of clue as to what he was thinking or feeling, and she would be irked. Later, after she cooled off, she would slip into her imagination and play it out a little differently, experiment with one or two other endings, put words into his mouth and thoughts into his mind. She liked the power.
Right now she was going back over the things he had said to her tonight. Can you turn on the ALS? I'm going around back to process. I'll drive. Maybe her husband came home. She wanted to take all of these words and mix them up, re-arrange them so that what he might tell her would mean something, anything at all beyond the sinking reiteration of his entirely professional courtesy.
I'll drive you home. Hmm, that could be constructed out of his crime scene small talk, and that, she decided, would be her starting point. It was where she always started, if she dared to allow herself to imagine how it might happen. If it weren't impossible. If it weren't a bad joke. If it weren't an impossibly bad joke that was her life.
Sara rolled her neck, pressing hard fingertips into knotted muscles at the nape, closing her now-beginning-to-ache eyes for a moment's respite. She inhaled deeply, her eyes snapping open happily as she smelled the coffee. Excellent. She knew it was usually only a waiting game until some one with more time to spare than her put some on. She flipped the file shut on the desk in front of her, tucked it under her arm and flicked the switch on the layout table. The light blinked off, leaving a white haze around the edges of her vision. She hated to admit it, but she needed a break.
Nick was struggling with the temperamental coffee machine. None of them were quite brave enough to really fight with it, nervous as they were of ever having their caffeine supply completely cut off. Today he was pressing all of the buttons, one after another, hard.
"Can't get it to stop." He held up his hands as Sara approached. She dropped the folder onto the table and headed for the fridge, nonchalantly giving the machine a controlled thump on her way past. It stopped abruptly, and Nick shook his head.
"Woman's touch," she teased, taking out milk and beginning the search for a clean mug.
"Police brutality, more like it." Sara smiled. She could always count on Nick to make her smile. He was just a genuinely good person.
"Did you get any results yet?"
"No," she said, indicating the folder on the table. "Nothing jumping out at me. And Trace is on a go slow. Well, back log, they call it, but whatever. What'd you get?"
"Nada, so far. Few partials."
"Maybe tomorrow will be better," Sara sighed, tired.
"That's not like you. Right around this time you're normally logging in for overtime." He was right.
"I'm tired," she said, truthfully. She was, and the seven hours processing evidence with Grissom had only worn her out all the more. It was still, even after the better part of five years in this lab, both exhilarating and devastating being in close proximity to him. It reminded her of all the things about him she found truly amazing. And all the reasons why she would only ever be admiring those things from a distance.
At first, she had approached the enigma of Grissom as a beautiful challenge. He was a mountain, she used to think, and my God was she going to move him. Their obvious connection had made her feel alive in a way she knew she hadn't since she discovered this profession. The moment she had set foot in the San Francisco lab and begun her first full day at work, she had known she was making utterly the right choice. Meeting him had felt the same way. It made so much sense, lucidity crashing down around her ears as she, inexplicably, knew exactly how she felt about him. A clarity she couldn't find with regard to her mother, or brother, or several guys she had gone to Grad school with who had tried, admirably, to fix her but left her just numb.
When she had moved to Vegas, she had never allowed herself to believe she was there because he had feelings for her. He respected her professionally, and that was enough. It was as sexy, easily, as the looks they shared in those early days. But as the months and years wore on, she felt something open up between them, a progression from their early chemistry to a deeper, more private bond. He said some things that told her everything – that he did, in essence, feel for her, but that he couldn't, in actuality, really feel for anyone. That she coped with, for a time. Until the power of what was between them rose up, obscuring all else, and she knew, she knew that he felt it too. But where she embraced it, prepared for the first time in her life to really deal with herself, he just beat it down.
He had to be the one. She thought this still. Daily, she reminded herself in her characteristic self preservation lecture, that there could be no one. But she didn't believe it at all. There was one. One and only.
He was the only person to ever make Sara Sidle want to choose life over work. But when the moment for him to choose came, he still chose work.
Nick poured coffee into her mug before his own, another reason why she liked him. Such simple courtesy.
"You know its Catherine's birthday tomorrow?" He said, leaning back on the counter.
"No?" Sara didn't think Catherine had birthdays. She thought she was ageless.
"Yep. 35. At least, that's her story and she's sticking to it."
"I see." She smiled, shaking her head slightly about that kind of female vanity she really had no experience or understanding of. Nick sipped his coffee.
"She mentioned something about an early dinner. Would you be up for that?"
She supposed she probably had to. There were plenty of social occasions she could slip out of. Catherine's birthday probably was not one of them. Uneasy at the impending hours of exposure, the slightly uncomfortable but not altogether unpleasant time spent with almost-friends, Sara resigned herself to giving up a night of quiet, looming alone time. As much as she was embittered that she lived and breathed her own company, she sometimes hated to relinquish it.
She never felt truly alone anymore, anyway. He was always there. The ghost in the room, who wouldn't let her sleep but fitfully, wouldn't let her shower or dress without a slight flush of self-consciousness, wouldn't let her pick a tv program without considering whether, to his eyes, it would make her seem intelligent/interesting/obsessive/quirky. In her mind she came up with brilliant reasons for her decision to watch certain forensics shows she knew he hated, including research, fault-finding and keeping an eye on just how detached from reality the world of the media had become.
Actually, she was just fascinated by the dramatisation of what she called everyday. Of what made her get up in the morning. Privately, it made her feel connected to an outside world. To others who were like she was. In reality it was all as make believe as the inner dialogue she shared with him, the things she ached to tell and teach him, the things she wanted him to want to share with her, and Sara knew that part of the reason she functioned at all in society was the presence in her life of a tiny streak that erred on the side of fantasy.
She wanted to know what he thought about everything. She imagined how he might receive the canvases that hung in her bedroom, the colour of the walls, the way she thought the room reflected what she wanted to be rather than what she was. It's accents and compliments were just a whisper too well fitting to be truly her – and she knew that in her mind when she had chosen them, when she had finally decided to decorate that room (last of all) after living there for a year, she had thought of him then, too.
Not because she was confident he would ever see inside of it. She wasn't sure at all, but, oh, she wanted him to, and having the perfect bedroom, one that she thought he would find a surprisingly complex representation of a woman he could do worse than fall for, was part of her defence against his reticence. Part of knowing that, really, there was nothing of substance that he would find wanting if he ever gave in. Part of knowing that she could play with the big kids, act like she wouldn't be content to live in someone else's basement for all she really cared about material things.
No, she would be functional, even in the privacy of her own home, and damn him if he never got to see that she was.