Author's Notes: Just a little story that popped into my head and wouldn't go away. I hope you enjoy it!
The Ride
by Kristen Elizabeth
"We're never going to solve this one."
Grissom was surprised at the defeatist tone in Sara's voice. She stood on the opposite side of the Denali, stowing her crime scene kit next to his in the backseat, a blank look in her eyes. She needed to hear some reassuring words, and she needed to hear them from him. He wiped his hands on his dark pants and gave it his best shot.
"It's too soon to say that," he stated firmly.
Sara waited until he had seated himself in the driver's seat before opening the passenger's side door. The wind was picking up; silky strands of hair whipped across her mouth. "Grissom, we've been out here for two hours and all we've got is what we started with. A body." She indicated the dark desert around them. "Nothing more."
He hated to admit it, but she was right. A body in the desert with a single bullet to the back of the skull that would most likely be untraceable. "It was a hit," Grissom noted as Sara slid into the seat next to him and closed the door, blocking out the cold wind. "It's not automatically hopeless…"
"But 99.9 percent of the time, they are." She smoothed down her tangled hair more to calm herself than to fix her appearance; Sara wasn't given to displays of vanity. "Add in the fact that it's been raining off and on for the past three days which washed away any tracks or trace and I repeat…we're never going to solve this one."
He started the car and turned up the heat. "Let's just get back to the lab. Maybe the body will tell us something the scene can't."
They traveled in silence for a good twenty minutes. The location of the body had been so far out into the desert that it was nearly out of their jurisdiction. In the past, he might have used the time alone with Sara to chat. They used to be able to talk about anything. Books, the latest journal articles, old movies, current events, anecdotes from her days in San Francisco and his experiences on the seminar circuit.
All of that had changed. Their relationship had cooled into the distant professionalism of colleagues, and he had a sinking feeling he was responsible for it. He had no desire to rehash all of his past mistakes where Sara was concerned…he lived with them every day…but he did acknowledge that the latest was probably the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back.
It hadn't even occurred to him that asking Sofia to have dinner with him might mirror the invitation Sara had given him once upon a time. The one he had turned down. Even now, the memory still bit at him. It had been the timing, he'd told himself. He had been on the verge of losing one of his five senses, and she'd come to him, still bearing wounds from the explosion that had nearly cost him his lab and the people who made it work, and asked him to drop all of his barriers. And he hadn't been able to do it.
Dinner with Sofia hadn't threatened his emotional walls, because there was no emotion involved. It was a meal with a co-worker about work-related issues. It wasn't meant to be anything else. Unfortunately the same lab he loved like the child he'd never had worked much like a high school hallway. Once a piece of information got out, it was guaranteed to reach the ears of the one person who didn't need to know about it.
"Grissom," Sara interrupted his reverie. He blinked and glanced at her; she was pointing to the windshield. "Have you noticed that it's sort of pouring outside?" He hadn't. He felt her stare on him as he fumbled to turn on the wipers at full-speed. "Are you all right?"
"Of course," he replied. "I was just thinking. About the case."
She nodded, but it was an empty movement. She didn't believe him. Another few minutes of silence followed. Sara seemed unable to take it after awhile. Leaning forward enough so that if he'd let himself look, he could have seen a hint of cleavage at the scooped neck of her top, she flipped on the radio.
"Just no country," he said out of habit.
"Is my name Nicky Stokes?" Smiling…god, when was the last time he'd seen her smile…Sara searched for a good station. Finally, she found one that seemed to satisfy her.
"…National Weather Service has issued a flash flood warning for Vegas and all surrounding areas. This rain's not going to let up anytime soon, so take extra care on the roads. If you are out and about tonight, here's some more hit music to keep you awake and aware, courtesy of XWV, the voice of UNLV."
As soon as the music started, Sara inched up the volume. "I like this song," she explained.
Life, it's ever so strange
It's so full of change
Think that you've worked it out then, bang
Right out of the blue
Something happens to you
To throw you off course and then you
Break down, yeah, you break down
Don't you break down
Listen to me, because
It's just a ride, it's just a ride
No need to run, no need to hide
It's just a ride, it's just a ride
Don't be scared, don't hide your eyes
It may feel so real inside
But don't forget it's just a ride
Grissom was no fan of popular music. He'd given up on it back in the seventies when the Beatles broke up. As far as he was concerned, pop music had yet to be resurrected. But this song, he had to grudgingly admit, wasn't all that bad. And Sara seemed to be enjoying it, if her soft humming was any indication. She had a good voice. Untrained, but throaty. When had she stopped singing to herself in the lab when she thought no one was listening? Probably somewhere around the time she'd stopped smiling.
Slowly, oh so very slowly
Accept that there's no getting off
So live it, just gotta go with it
Cause this ride's never gonna stop
It was so strange, he thought, how songwriters could put such succinct thoughts to rhyme and rhythm. Lennon had said that all you needed was love. This singer was telling him that life was just a ride. Really, how could it get any more…
"Grissom, slow down!" Instinct compelled him to slam his foot down onto the brake pedal. "Look up ahead," Sara insisted.
Through the darkness, the rain, and the regular arcs of the wiper blades, he could just barely see a set of yellow emergency lights, blinking on and off.
"Someone's pulled over to the side of the road to wait out the storm," he said, easing his foot off the brakes. Adrenaline still rushed through his body, annoying him.
Sara shook her head. "They still might need help. If they're stuck out here, it could be hours before another car passes by."
The pessimist criminalist in him who had processed the bodies of far too many good Samaritans told him to keep driving. But one look in her expressive chocolate eyes was all it took to make him ease the Denali onto the shoulder and come to a stop several yards away from the parked car.
Don't forget, enjoy the ride
The song abruptly ended as he turned off the engine.
"Thanks," she said softly. Unbuckling her seat belt, Sara stepped out into the rain.
Well, at least she had her gun. Checking to make sure his own was securely in place, Grissom exited the car.
They were both soaked to the bone before they even reached the other vehicle. Without the light of the moon or the stars, their visibility was practically nonexistent; at almost the same time, they both reached for the tiny flashlights in their field vests.
Sara shined her light into the car's backseat, while he kept his trained on her face. What she saw in the car clearly shocked her. "Grissom," she shouted over the sound of the storm. "There's a woman!"
It said something about him that the first thing he could think to ask was, "Is she dead?"
"Not dead," Sara called back. "I think she's in labor!"
If only she'd had a camera to capture the look on Grissom's face. She could have sold the pictures for ten bucks a pop around the lab, Sara figured. Who wouldn't pay for an image of their pokerfaced boss with his jaw slack and his eyes bugged out? If not for the woman about to give birth in the backseat of her car on a deserted desert road, Sara would have cherished the moment. As it turned out, she would have to wait to hold it over his head.
"Call for a bus," she ordered Grissom as she opened the car's back door. "Ma'am," she addressed the laboring woman stretched out in front of her. "I'm Sara Sidle with the Las Vegas Crime Lab."
"Thank god!" the woman cried. "Help me…please. It started so fast…and I can't reach anyone."
"I'm going to, I promise." She shielded the woman's face from the rain with her body. "What's your name?"
"Brittany," the woman answered between deep breaths.
"Okay, Brittany. My partner's calling for help, but it might be awhile before it gets here." She glanced over the car to see Grissom approaching her, a grim look on his face. "Keep breathing, and I'll be right back."
"I can't get a signal out here," Grissom told her. "The company will be hearing from me in the morning."
"Shit." Sara wiped rainwater out of her eyes as she thought for a moment. "We're going to have to help her."
"Help her…"
"Give birth," Sara supplied, exasperated.
Grissom frowned. "Sara, we're not doctors." He paused. "Okay, yes, I am, but…"
"Between the two of us we have enough knowledge of human anatomy to do this, Grissom. Really, it's mostly common sense."
"And you say this with what authority?" Water dripped down the insides of his glasses. "How many births have you been present for?"
Sara licked her lips. "I had a hamster in college. It had two babies."
"Didn't you once tell me that hamster ate both of her babies?"
"Yes, but not because…there were circumstances…it wasn't my fault!" she protested. "Look, while we're arguing about whether or not we can do this, that poor woman's all alone and in a lot of pain." Sara searched his familiar face for signs of softening. "I can at least do some good tonight."
"Sara." She wasn't sure why he did it, but he reached out and touched her arm. "We'll have to move her to the Denali," Grissom continued, quickly pulling his hand back. "There's more room."
He left her standing between the two cars, her arm still tingling where he'd made brief contact.
Damn him. He hadn't even listened to that song, had he?
Somehow he had been chosen to be the one to actually help bring the baby into the world. He did hold a higher degree than Sara, but wasn't she more qualified by the default factor of being a woman and possessing all the parts involved? However she was the better person to comfort a woman in labor, he had to admit. Whatever breathing exercise Sara had the woman doing seemed to be working. He certainly wouldn't have known it.
With Brittany stretched out in the back of the Denali, he stood outside, the rear door offering him shelter from the rain. Sara knelt in the front passenger's seat, leaning over to be at the woman's head.
"You're doing great," Sara assured her. "Just relax."
Brittany peered over the huge mound of her stomach. "Does he know what he's doing?"
Sara's answer was spoken so softly that had he not been able to read her lips, he might not have caught it. "Brittany, I'd let him deliver my children."
Bolstered by her confidence in him, Grissom pulled on a pair of latex gloves from his field kit. He searched the far recesses of his mind for what to do next. "Um…I suppose I should…"
"Check to see if you can see the baby's head," Sara filled in.
He swallowed. Couldn't he just hold out his hands to catch whatever came out, and let nature do the rest? "Right." Grissom took a breath and looked. "Yes, I can see it."
"Really!" Brittany gasped. "So soon…my other two took hours." She gripped Sara's hand so tight Grissom thought she winced. "Need…to push…now!"
That sounded urgent. Grissom wiped sweat and leftover rain off his cheek with his shoulder. "Brittany, it's all right. You're going to get through this just fine. Go ahead and push." He looked up at Sara as he spoke. "It'll be all right."
What amazed her the most was his gentleness. She couldn't see much from her position, but she could see him guiding the baby out of Brittany's body with tender, patient attention. All the while, he calmed the laboring woman with soft assurances. This was a whole other side to Grissom. And like all of his sides, even the infuriating, frustrating ones, she loved it.
The baby was born less than an hour from the time they'd pulled over on the side of the road.
"It's a girl," Grissom announced. He frowned. "I think."
Sara couldn't help the tears that slipped down her cheeks as he held up the screaming, squirming newborn. "It is," she reassured him. He looked almost comfortable with the baby in his hands, like he'd done it a thousand times before. Her heart ached at the sight. If he held a stranger's child with such fatherly instinct, how much love would he put into holding his own child?
She cleared her throat and fumbled for her own pair of sterile gloves. When she looked back, Grissom had gently placed the baby on Brittany's stomach. Absentmindedly, but still carefully, she started clearing mucus out of the baby's mouth and nose.
"We can't cut the cord," he was explaining to her. "But I think it'll be okay if we don't for now. At least until we get to the nearest hospital."
"The books said not to if she's breathing okay," she whispered, exhausted. "She's my first girl, you know."
"Congratulations," Grissom told her warmly. "Sara, do we have a blanket or anything?"
She blinked to attention and groped underneath her seat until she came up with a plastic package that contained a single cotton blanket. She watched Grissom wrap it around the baby and its mother. Outside, the rain was letting up. Sara took a slow, deep breath. What a night.
Closing up the back of the Denali, Grissom rejoined her in the front. He pulled off his bloody gloves and placed them in the plastic evidence bag she held out for him. In the back, Brittany cooed to her new daughter.
"Desert Palm?" he asked her.
"And step on it."
Grissom scanned the pink and blue murals of furry animals on the walls, took in the corkboard completely covered with Polaroid pictures of beaming mothers and sleeping infants, and watched the nurses bustle back and forth with happy energy. The maternity ward. He'd only been in one once before, the day after Catherine had given birth to Lindsay. But that had been different.
The air still smelled of medicine and disinfectants, but there was also a more subtle scent, like the perfume of a woman he'd taken out in college. Baby powder. Sweet. Annoyingly sweet.
They hadn't dated very long.
Sara never smelled like any one thing in particular. On the increasingly more rare times he was close enough to catch her warm fragrance, all he smelled was clean skin, with a maybe a splash of citrus or a hint of jasmine. It was a good scent, a scent that spoke of a real woman with a hard job and little time for frivolities, who still managed to be intensely feminine. And incredibly appealing.
He smelled that scent now as she came around the corner, a bouquet of carnations from the gift shop in her hand.
"Were you waiting for me?" she asked him. "I told you to go ahead and go in."
Grissom pointed to the sign on the door to Brittany's room that read "Nursing Mother Please Knock."
"Then let's knock." Sara brushed past him and did just that.
"Come in," a male voice called out.
Sara entered first and he followed, tentatively, as though entering a crime scene that hadn't been cleared yet.
"Sara! Mr. Grissom! Come in!" Sitting up in the hospital bed, Brittany gestured to them with one arm. In her other arm lay her new baby, looking considerably better off now that it was cleaned up and filled out. A little pink cap covered most of its head. Brittany herself looked much better than when he'd last seen her, although not as good as Catherine had when he'd visited her and baby Lindsay. How his friend had done her makeup and her hair while juggling a newborn and an over-excited, slightly hung over husband he'd never know.
"It's just Gil." Suddenly uncomfortable, he looked at the man standing at Brittany's bedside. "You must be the baby's father. Congratulations."
"Matt," the man introduced himself. "Thank you both so very much. I really don't know what might have happened without your help. I don't even want to think about it." He held out his hand to Grissom. "We're in your debt."
Grissom shook it briefly. "We were just glad to be in the right place at the right time. Right, Sara?" He looked at her. "Sara?"
She wasn't ignoring him. She was simply too caught up in the sight of the tiny baby in the crook of Brittany's elbow. "She's beautiful," she said out loud. "Absolutely perfect."
"Would you like to hold her?"
He thought he saw Sara go pale, but before she could protest, Brittany was pushing the baby into her arms. Some female instinct took over his CSI. She took the infant like she held them every day, supporting the baby's head in her hand like an expert. It was amazing how women did that.
What was even more amazing was the sudden twinge in the center of his chest as he watched Sara with the newborn child. The morning sunlight filtered through the half-pulled blinds, catching the gold and red highlights in her hair and framing her in a celestial glow. Her eyes glistened with unshed tears as she traced the curve of the baby's cheek with one finger. The mother goddess, he thought, straight out of a book on mythology.
When she glanced up from the baby and met his stare, it hit him. He had surrounded his life with nothing but death, so much so that it took an event of such profound magnitude as the birth of a child to make him acknowledge life. The greatest and most exhilarating ride of all, better than any rollercoaster anyone could come up with.
But it wouldn't be a real life if it weren't with the woman standing in front of him. If anyone had the patience and determination to scale his walls, it was she. It always had been. It always would be. Sara was the one with whom he would take the ride.
Gil Grissom finally figured it out.
A week later, on their first official date, the song played again as they drove from the restaurant back to his townhouse. They both took it as a sign.
The next morning he woke up to the sound of Sara humming as she rummaged around in the kitchen, presumably for their breakfast. He laid in bed, his head resting in the impression hers had made in his pillow as she slept, until she re-entered the bedroom in nothing but one of his shirts. She carried a plate of eggs and toast.
"Hungry?" she asked him, smiling.
He let her set the plate down on the nightstand before he pulled her back into his bed.
"Starving."
The End
The song is "Just a Ride" by Jem and can be found on "The O.C." Soundtrack.