TITLE: Grissom's Great Discovery
AUTHOR: Chauncey10 aka MSCSIFANGSR
RATING: Mature, but no graphic sex
SUMMARY: The story of a boy named Gilbert. GSR near the end. Written for the Geekfiction Food Fight Ficathon.
DISCLAIMER: I'm just playing with them.
SPOILERS: Every show aired in the U.S. to date.
PROMPT(S): Cabbage, Black bean soup, and Ben & Jerry's Phish food ice cream. I even threw in a food fight for good measure, but it's not really relevant to the over-all story.
BETA(S): Wander52 for taming some of my Faulknerseque run-on sentences and JellyBeanChiChi for the title and for putting up with my annoying self. All errors are my own.
Once upon a time there was a shy handsome, skinny, young boy with curly brown hair and gloriously curious, piercing blue eyes who generally preferred insects, amphibians, and any animal or sea life over normal human interaction. He loved his parents, of course, without question; however, it was others of the human species that tended to intimidate him.
His mother had named him Gilbert Arthur after her favorite composers of comedic operas: William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. She tended to hum, a lot. Mostly the songs were from her favorite opera, *Pirates of Penzance*. She unfortunately tended to hum off key because her auditory function was slowly deteriorating, so a person was never sure if the song was *I am the very model of a modern Major-General* or *Away, Away, My Heart's on Fire*. His mother whose given name is unimportant to the telling of this story had visions of having two sons and calling for them out the backdoor of the screened-in porch, "Gilbert! Sullivan! Come to dinner," but another mother, Mother Nature had denied her the opportunity for another child.
Gilbert's parents could not conceive again after his birth due to a genetic anomaly unheard of in 1964, when this story curiously begins, when Gilbert was eight. However it had not been for the lack of trying on either of his parent's parts. He knew: a thin clapboard wall separated his and their bedrooms. Gilbert knew because he watched animals; he knew what they were doing in their bed. It didn't bother him that his mother and father's bed banged loudly against his headboard, making his own bed shake; their actions tended to lull him to sleep most nights. He knew that their love would bring about his oft talked about sibling William Sullivan and he, himself, carried on numerous conversations with his imaginary brother, in his head, it was not something that he had ever shared with anyone else, merely Gilbert's overactive imagination. Sullivan was real to Gilbert, but he did know the difference between what was real and what was fantasy. Sullivan was everything Gilbert wasn't.
Sullivan, of course, was popular in school, demonstrated no social awkwardness, had many friends, but wasn't quite as handsome as he, Gilbert, was. Gilbert was not popular in school, because he tended to keep his nose glued in whatever book that had captured his attention for the moment. Once after a particularly interesting food fight in the cafeteria amongst his classmates, Gilbert unknowingly went about his daily activities with some boiled cabbage lodged in his brown curls. The other children starting calling him 'Cabbage Head' behind his back, but he was unconcerned, mainly because he never heard their taunts to infuriate him, not because he couldn't hear them, (after all, he was subject to the genetic hearing disorder his mother suffered, but it wouldn't be for another 38 years before he suffered from that particular affliction) but because he was too preoccupied with his studies to notice the his classmates.
Other kids, mostly little girls with brunette hair, because the blonde ones never paid any attention to him at all, occasionally tried to pull him out of himself with promises of fun, swings, and 'ring around the roses', but Gilbert ignored them, and soon they ignored him. They found his antisocial behavior vaguely rebellious, but not in that cool James Dean kind of way. One little girl in particular found him very handsome and had a crush on him for a long time, but her crush ended when she was elected science club president over him and she had more important things to do other than moon over a boy who was apparently not interested in her. He was interested; he just didn't know what to do about her. When faced with group activities with his classmates, he tended to clam up and shrink from view, becoming a ghost, who's presence was noted, but ignored for the most part.
In the playground, while the others played games like chase or war, Gilbert would watch as ants built their tremendous mounds and watched carrion beetles ingest dead insects. The girls from his class always thought he was "nasty" because his arch enemy, the class bully, told all of them that Gilbert had stared at that dead stray dog out on Old Stage Road for hours, watching bugs crawl over the carcass of the animal, instead of riding bikes with the other boys.
Gilbert,he wasn't called 'Gil' by anyone, ever, did well in school; too well in the opinion of some of his teachers, because they were constantly challenged by his intelligence. Most, if not all, of the elementary school teachers in that day in age, where unable to rise to his level. He imaged walking in the footsteps of Galileo; with Socrates and Plato; with Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr or Isaac Newton, as they made their distinct scientific discoveries. He longed to make his own discoveries.
His father, whose surname was Grissom, taught high school botany so his father was the only one to challenge the boy's intelligence, but he knew he was going to lose that particular battle soon. It wasn't the fact the man was stupid, because he was not, but his son's mind made connections much faster and more accurate than the majority of the population. If he had only known his child was a genius, he may have attempted to make further resources available to the boy, but the elder Grissom was a sex addict, although that disorder was not known in the early portion of the 1960s.
Mrs. Grissom thought her husband was committed to making her dreams of two sons a reality, but his highly sexual nature brought about many challenges in itself. Mr. Grissom was known through-out their community as a 'good man'. However most of the women of the area knew him as a 'Lothario', a man who enjoyed seducing and betraying all women. As discussed earlier, he didn't suffer from lack of desire with his wife. She, in fact, engulfed him with a carnal love much to his delight, but it didn't stop his addiction, merely fueled it. He was addicted to sex and if the disorder would have been recognized in that time, our story might possibly have had a different outcome. And fortunately, the genetic disorder that prevented the conception of Gilbert's brother also prevented Gilbert from having any step brothers or sisters. Gilbert was his father's only child.
His father had taught him well: when Gilbert asked endless questions, if the man could not answer them, he showed the boy where to locate the answers in the local library. Gilbert tended to go off on his on excursions, exploring his world on his own. The natural world fascinated him. The wonder of unraveling a mystery, unlocking a puzzle, finding order in chaos became his preoccupation. People however were complicated. People didn't act rationally or even within a prescribed manner. And that fact complicated his life to no couldn't understand why the little girl with brunette hair had withheld her affections for him; after all, he'd voted for her in the election. He couldn't understand why his teachers lost their patience with him when he interrupted them after they presented wrong information in the lesson they were trying to teach. He couldn't understand why his mother couldn't hear him sometimes. He couldn't understand why his father would slip off with the librarian and come back with red lipstick adorning his crisp white shirts. He just didn't understand people, so, he gave up.
Gilbert and his imaginary brother roamed the woods surrounding the Grissom home. Sometimes they ventured down to the shore of the Pacific ocean searching for interesting things. Once, Gilbert found a dead 400-pound baby whale washed up on the shore. His brain struggled for a while over the fact the "baby" weighed approximately seven times his own weight.
Luckily, he had the pocketknife his father had given him for his last birthday when he decided he should open up the whale to see if he could determine why the whale had died. When he got home that night covered in bloody, whale innards, Gilbert was deliriously happy that he had performed his first autopsy. He was crushed when he was punished by his father for ruining his school clothes. The strap across his buttocks was a reminder to keep an extra set of old clothes in the shed behind their house. The old pair of blue jeans that he'd cut off with his mother's sewing scissors and an old white t-shirt became his 'operation' attire.
He performed autopsies on all formerly living things, except humans. He longed for the day he could go off to college and take human anatomy and physiology so he would have access to a dead human. It was his sole ambition in life at that time in his life.
But life had other plans for the curious boy.
It was then that he discovered baseball. His father's brother coached the Little League World Series championship team from La Puente. The uncle was obsessed with baseball and found his nephew was very handy with a baseball bat. Soon, the boy and his father spent their days happily pitching a ball back and forth in the hope the young Grissom would play the game the next year. Baseball became a beautiful distraction for Gilbert and, soon, he could throw a fast ball faster than any other kid his age and amazingly could hit any ball that was thrown toward him. He was looking forward to being part of a team, it was his sole ambition, then.
But life again had other plans for the talented boy.
His mother had cooked a pot of black bean soup for supper that night. Mr. Grissom told Gilbert that he was tired that evening after school, and could they have a game of pitch tomorrow afternoon. Gilbert agreed and took off for the beach to see if anything had washed up on shore of interest. Gilbert had found nothing and hurried back home to eat the soup. It was his favorite, especially when his mother splurged at the grocery store and bought sour cream to top the chili-flavored beans. He rushed into the living room, and decided to watch a bit of television as his father slept on the couch. Only, he wasn't sleep.
Soon, Gilbert's life became a silent world, speaking with gestures to his mother and rarely to anyone else. He resumed his exploration of the natural world, soon earning praise from the local police when he determined the cause of death in crimes involving animals. He kept to himself and finally graduated summa cum laude from high school and won a prestigious scholarship to his favorite college, UCLA. He studied hard and almost never noticed he was missing the social and sexual revolution of the 1970s, but not without a few interesting encounters of the sexual nature.
Gilbert was 19 when he first had sex with a girl, a sophomore studying biology. What better way to understand biology than to perform an experiment with his lab partner? She was also 19, from La Puente. Her brother played on the Little League World Series team Gilbert's uncle coached. She, (and we should give her a name, because it was an important encounter in his life, let's say Diane) called him "Gil" and he found he loved the way his name rolled off her lips when he entered her and brought the two of them to a mutual climax. "Gil" and Diane had sex on a daily basis and soon he discovered that sex was something he never wanted to live without. Sex became his sole ambiton in life.
Then, suddenly, one day in their senior year, things changed and life had other plans for the horny, young man.
Diane announced she was getting married to another man. He would never forget his name, but it is not relevant to this story, and although Gil never met the man, he had a big impact on his life. It had never occurred to him that maybe if he would have realized if he'd asked Diane to marry him, then she never left him for someone else, then he'd never been crushed by love.
He did however keep one thing from his relationship with Diane, and it was the shortened version of his name. He missed sex, but soon he graduated with honors in biology and was accepted into graduate school, while he worked as an assistant coroner for Los Angeles County and studying his true passion in life, entomology. His other passion became playing poker, in order to finance his autopsy studies. His uncle had taught him to play the game shortly after his father's death in order to help keep the boy focused on something other than death. Gil began making trips on a monthly basis to Las Vegas, where he made a lot of money, very quickly. In fact, in several of the casinos, the name Gil Grissom inspired a close watch by sercurity details, but no one could ever find evidence of cheating on the young man's part. He was that good.
One of his professors, his mentor challenged him to use his doctorate degree fighting crime and soon, Gil was living in Minnesota, solving puzzles. He loved his life there and had a few flings with women; the urge to have sex was, after all, a strong one. There was no woman in particular who captured his attention and soon, his need for meaningless sex morphed into a need for a real relationship. But there was no one who shared his passions, so Gil decided to give up. His stay in Minnesota was not a long one, but during that time, his shrewd analysis of crime scenes and his high solve rate made him well-known on the lecture circuit. He still made monthly trips to Las Vegas to play poker.
Even after the Las Vegas Metro Police Department offered him a job, which was ideal for poker and forensics, he continued with his lectures to college students, police forces, or for continuing education purposes. Before he knew it, it was 34 years to the day his father had passed away from an apparent heart attack. He wasn't sure, because after all this time, it was still a mystery to him.
Gil's name had morphed again into just Grissom. He was called that by everyone who knew him: co-workers, bosses, police detectives, beat cops, students, criminals, whoever. It didn't matter.
Then one day the shy, handsome, not so young, and not so skinny, man with curly, slightly-graying hair and gloriously curious, piercing blue eyes was scheduled to give a lecture on a case he'd solved involving a double murder in a garage to a group of potential crime scene investigators, when he saw the brunette for the first time. She had her hair up in a ponytail and she reminded him of himself constantly when he had asked his father questions when he'd been a boy. She was smart. Smarter than most women, her curiosity, and hell, her long, tanned legs held him enthralled. They kept a steady stream of correspondence for several years. Until he suddenly was thrust into a supervisory position for which he cared nothing. Then he found he really needed the young brunette, Sara Sidle, to come help him discover the many 'whys' that had affected his new position. The one 'why' he never explored was Sara Sidle herself, who had more demons and ghosts in her life than anyone ever imagined.
For years nothing really major happened to him.
But then his old mentor had betrayed his trust.
His mother passed quietly without fanfare in California to cancer.
He played poker in a back-alley dive, with some of the founding fathers of Las Vegas at least weekly, depending on the crimes people commited.
He almost bedded a strong, dominating brunette who was a suspect in a case he investigated. His strong attraction to the woman was out of sheer loneliness on his part, but he came to his senses before anything happened except a long, interesting conversation and one shared, passionate kiss.
And his Sara, as he thought of her, was dating another man.
But life had other plans for him and the beautiful, intelligent Sara.
The man Sara was dating betrayed her. They barely spoke to one another until mental patient held a knife to Sara's neck. Then their teammate was buried alive by a madman upset with the Nevada justice system and sex with Sara Sidle became his reality, his diversion, his new role in life. The sex was so good and they spent all their time away from work having orgasm after orgasm over and over again, and before too long it became necessary because of the sheer amount of sex they shared for the two of them to move in together into a loft in downtown Las Vegas.
Their bed rattled against the wall, most days and some nights and he found himself becoming addicted to her. Sex soon was replaced with making love and he loved watching her devour a container of yogurt before she retired for the evening, winding down from whatever horrors they'd witnessed in their pursuit of justice for the dead who could not speak for themselves. Luckily they didn't have neighbors in the loft, because he was sure someone would have called to complain against the sheer amount of noise that emanated from bedroom. The bed banging against the wall, Sara's screams of pleasure and his wildly loud shouts of "Oh, yes!"
One night, after Grissom made it home after his weekly poker match, he found Sara was sitting in the Lotus position in their bed, wearing a black nightgown, eating a pint of Ben & Jerry's Phish food ice cream, while the television screen was filled with images of men playing America's great pastime. The Chicago Cubs were battling the Los Angeles Dodgers. Gil, Gilbert, or Grissom, depending on Sara's mood, was curled up on the bed watching the spoon dip into the container, then dip into her mouth. He was becoming more than aroused. He realized he was addicted to her and to no one else.
"Maybe we should get married," he stated, remembering the time he didn't ask that particular question to the woman in his life.
"Maybe next time you suggest that, I might say yes," was her immediate response.
Bruno, the large boxer that also shared their home life, who Grissom saved from a crime scene, jumped unceremoniously onto the bed, the spoon clanging to the floor. Bruno attempted to lick the bit of ice cream from Sara's cheek, but Gil stopped him, not pushing him off the bed, but capturing Sara's face between his hands.
"I don't think I've ever loved anyone until you."
"I know, Gilbert."Gil captured her lips with his. He loved the way his name rolled off her lips, especially when she screamed it loudly upon climax. He loved the way his name sounded when she answered her cell phone. Anyway, anytime she said his name, he became aroused. He wasn't going to let any man come between them. Or any dog for that matter. Bruno jumped off their bed, the couple never noticed because they were wrapped in each other's arms, seeking and giving affection known only to those who have truly been in love.
Their calm life together continued until life had other plans for them.
Sara was kidnapped and injured. But she finally said, "Yes" when he offered his somewhat skewed proposal again. But the demons and ghosts she'd battled all her life took her away from him and he was almost happy for a time, going back to his old ways of solitude and science then she came back for the funeral of a team member who'd been killed. He asked her to stay, but she was unable, leaving him again.
His life became unbearable. He couldn't perform normal experiments that he used to be able to perform in his sleep.
He couldn't sleep.
He couldn't eat.
He couldn't pretend anymore.
He really needed her in his life. But she was gone. He wasn't ready to leave his career until he realized that in order move forward, he needed to make a change, he needed her more than anything else. The job didn't matter anymore.
And finally after so much wasted time, he was able to walk in the same footsteps as had his childhood heroes, because he made the greatest discovery of all: without the one he loves, without his Sara, he could never truly discover what life had to offer. Why should he retreat within himself, when he could move forward hand-in-hand with a such brilliant, sexy, vibrant woman?
And soon, his once upon a time, finally became a happily ever after.
THE END
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