An: Nope, not mine...
Sara Sidle slept with ghosts. In fact, when she counted back, she realized that she had slept with more ghosts than people. They were not always in the bed with her. Sometimes it was her brother breathing quietly in the next room or another foster child tossing and turning on the bunk below or above her. They were so real that until she opened her eyes and remembered that she was in her thirties and living in Nevada, she almost believed that they were all still children in California who wanted desperately to grow up and escape.
None of them however were as real as the ghost of Grissom. Perhaps it was because his was the only one that she tried to keep from flitting away, the only one that she could almost feel next to her while she was still awake. It was pathetic really. On the worst nights, after she had been in Vegas for a few years, she would actually cry when her alarm woke her for work and banished him because while he was there, he was hers, and she wanted never to wake up.
Years later, when he went on sabbatical, his ghost stayed behind, more real than ever before. On the rare occasions when she did sleep during that time, she would forget that he had gone. She hesitated to admit it to him, but toward the end of his absence, he confessed her that just before he would wake up, it would seem as if she was there with him. They talked well into the morning, and she eventually came up with a theory that they inhabited another dimension during sleep where they were always together.
It was ironic that after all of her words to him about putting her ghosts to rest, his got up and followed her out of Nevada. She found herself caught between, as if in a spider's web, but the silken strands were every ghost she had ever known. However hard she fled in one direction, there was always a ghost pulling just as hard the other way, and Grissom, always Grissom, wrapped tightly around her heart. Unceasingly present and unbearably intangible, he pulled hardest of all. It was unsustainable. It was tearing her apart.
So she cut them. Deliberately and methodically, she cut every last strand, save one. Perversely, the more she tried to steal herself up to cutting it, the more tightly she felt herself holding on. She wondered if the would both fade away until only their ghosts remained, together forever, but not quite real, all because neither one could bear to let go.
That turned out to be it, what she had been missing. She couldn't cut him away, but she could let him go, if she had to, if he needed her to. So she did, letting the last of the line between Grissom and herself slip through her fingers, just a tail of ones and zeroes. She found herself too empty to cry. The vacuum within her was too great to allow any tears to escape. For the first time in ten years she slept without Grissom or his ghost. The last of them all, she had finally laid to rest and when she woke, for the first time in her life, she was completely, utterly alone.
5/31/10: This was an attempt to depict Sara's state of mind immediately after she sent the video and a possible lead-up to that. I realize that I am leaving her in a very unhappy place, but whatever happened later (and whatever she told Grissom at the time) Sara was not happy at this point. Therefore, the happy ending to this story is the continuation in the show. I will not write it here as I feel that doing so would detract from the story I was trying to tell.