K, well, this is just an idea that popped into my head while I was watching 'Lab Rats", and wouldn't leave me alone. I was just thinking how, for such a dynamic character with such possibilities, Hodges didn't get nearly enough screen time. That's what fan fiction's for, isn't it?
Just a Hodges angst story. I wanted to delve a little deeper into his personal life, and show a little of the man inside the annoying, smart – alecky, suck-upish outer shell.
Rated T just in case I need to get into some more mature themes later on. I have a feeling I might.
As this is my first ever fanfic, reviews and kind critisism are welcome and greatly appreciated. Flames are not. Enjoy!
Disclaimer- If I owned Hodges or any of the other CSIs, why do you think I would be wasting time writing fanfiction about them? Couldn't I just… devise my own plot lines?
(I don't own "Rehab", either.)
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Catherine looked down in annoyance at her pager, with which she had already had way too much interaction with this morning. Warrick had paged her at 5 30, requesting backup at a particularly messy crime scene. He requested her backup, that struck her overly tired and slightly spiteful mind as funny this early in the morning. Had she honestly had a choice in the matter? She couldn't very well just refuse to show up at a crime scene, no matter what time it was or how many shifts she had pulled the day before…
Amy Winehouse belting out "Rehab" on the radio shook her from her reverie, and she reached out a hand to shut it off. Way to early for that song.
She looked down at her already lukewarm coffee in the cupholder, and wondered what would happen if she simply didn't answer the page. Probably the same thing that would happen if you just didn't show up at the crime scene, the logical voice in the back of her mind said. She knew however annoying that voice could be at times, it was also almost infallibly right, and she reached for the pager.
Her brow furrowed in surprise as she looked at the page. She hung a sudden left toward the hospital as her pager informed her that her presence was no longer required at the crime scene, she was to skip right to the victim. She probably wouldn't be conscious anyway, not according to the skimpy information Dispatch had provided for her this morning. It had sounded vicious, 34 year old female, beaten and stabbed in the abdomen in her room at the Tropicana. Catherine wasn't looking forward to having to press this poor, half-dead woman for information on her attack, she couldn't help but empathize instead of sympathize with certain victims. She just had a feeling this was going to be one of those cases.
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The smell hit her as soon as she walked into the hospital. Antiseptic and sterile plastic, but to Catherine, it always smelled more like death.
She met Warrick and Brass outside the ICU, and hoped one of the men had gotten a chance to talk to the vic before she went into surgery. The vic. She should really get her name.
"Any luck?"
It was Warrick who spoke first. He looked as tired as she felt. "She was critical by the time the paramedics got there, she was rushed straight into surgery. Not much we can do but wait."
Brass added, " I've got the whole team working this one. Grissom, Sara and Greg were working a drunken B&E, but I thought this was a little more worthy of your superb talents. They're still working the scene." His voice got dry at the end, but Catherine knew he believed in their abilities just the same, even if the faith was masked by a layer of sarcasm.
Between them, the small group had had 10 coffees and two catnaps before the vic was out of surgery and coherent enough to speak. In the meantime, the two men brought Catherine up to speed on what they knew about the case so far. A woman, Megan Gilesby, had been stabbed in her bed at the Tropicana around 1 or 2 AM that morning, and she had quite nearly bled out. The manager of the hotel found her, when he came up to follow up on a noise complaint from the night before.
"CSI?" The doctor asked, clearly already knowing the answer but needing to make sure, "You can see her now. I don't know much help she'll be. We've got her on morphine, and she has been through quite an ordeal, you know." He was fairly young, maybe 30, and his tone implied that they would do her more harm than good to her, interviewing her.
Brass picked up on this, and said, " Sir, the first few hours in an assault case are crucial. We need to find out what she can remember about the attack, and if she saw her attackers face." Seeing the still dubious face of the doctor, he added, " We want to catch this guy."
This seemed to satisfy the man, and he led the group into Megan's room, saying, "We tried to preserve as much evidence as possible during the operation, but the tip of the knife was wedged deep into the pelvic bone, too deep to safely recover."
Great. Catherine thought. This was not turning into what looked like a promising case. This feeling intensified once she stepped into the woman's room. Seeing a human being lying helpless on a bed like that, hooked to more tubes and wires than you could count never failed to remind her of her own morality. She closed her eyes. It was still too early for all of this.
Megan groaned, and attempted to shift her position to get a better look at her visitors. Catherine and Warrick quickly went to her left side, Brass to her right. She would have been very pretty if she hadn't been so deathly pale. She parted her lips with a clear effort and made a noise that sounded like a dying mountain lion. Warrick handed her the glass of water on her bedside table, and she sipped before trying again.
"David?" She whispered.
"No, we're with the LVPD, Megan. We need to know if there's anything you can remember about the attack, anything at all? What your attacker's face looked like?" Megan shook her head, gasping as she did so. "The clothes he was wearing, if he said anything to you?"
Megan shook her head again and repeated, "David. I want to see David."
Catherine looked at Brass for assistance, who had put away his notebook, obviously deciding the real interview would have to wait, and then to Warrick, who looked just as puzzled and frustrated as she felt. No help there.
"Uhm… can you tell me who David is, so I could bring him here? Is he your husband, or a close family member?" She sighed inwardly. She was asking more questions than were being answered, and she couldn't stop looking at Megan's haunted, frightened eyes and her pained face, as if just holding onto life was a task quickly becoming too much to handle.
"Tell Dave… just tell him." The end of her sentence trailed off into oblivion, and she finally closed her eyes and gave in as sleep carried her away.
Catherine shook her head and looked at Warrick, who was doing the same. She didn't bother looking at Brass; she knew they wouldn't be getting any more answers from this woman, at least not yet.
"Well. That was quite possibly the least productive morning I've ever had. And that's including all the mornings I've spent booking last night's DUIs." Brass looked thoroughly vexed, and Catherine wondered if he was wondering the same thing she was: who exactly had had the bright idea to get her up in the wee hours of the morning (well, not exactly the wee hours, but close enough) only to wait 3 and a half hours in the hospital waiting room for a totally incoherent woman to tell them absolutely nothing useful. Except, maybe that wasn't completely true….
"We do have one thing we didn't have 3 hours ago." Catherine said, trying to boost morale. Brass and Warrick looked at her expectantly.
"We have Megan's DNA, and the name of someone who quite possibly could be a close relative. If we can locate David, he might be able to give us some information on Megan's life, and her associates.
"That's assuming David is even in CODIS, and we can track him down, and Megan is still alive by the time we get to him…What's up, 'Rick?
Warrick was staring blankly off into space, not absorbing anything they said. "Huh? Sorry, these triple shifts are murder." He managed to crack a crooked smile, more than Catherine herself felt capable of just then.
Brass's cell rang in his pocket, and after a few clipped sentences that didn't really count as a conversation, he turned to the CSIs.
"Grissom and his team are finished with the scene. He wants you back at the lab for a consultation. I'm gonna go see what I can pull up on Megan and our mystery-Dave."
"Call us when you find something?"
"Of course."
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Kay, sorry for the slow start, but I PROMISE it will get going next chapter. So stay with me here, pretty please?
