Title: Him's
Rating: R, though rating won't kick in until later chapters.
Spoilers: Without A Trace: early season one, nothing specific. CSI: 215 Burden Of Proof
Timeline: pretend that Martin joined the team on WoAT a few months before BoP on CSI.
Summary: They both had their past him's that had left them broken. But the past is gone, and the future is what is at stake.
Note: I am a chronic insomniac and am intimately aware of how much worse insomnia gets when there's something pressing on your mind, which, in turn, only makes matters worse in the light of day, and the cycle continues until you reach meltdown or get whatever is bothering you off your chest. And that is what this story started out as, though it has since radiated out into someone completely different and completely unexpected.
Warning: I do not like Sara/Grissom, and Sam/Jack makes me queasy. These views will probably show in my writing. If you like either one of these relationships, turn back now.
Insomnia had plagued Samantha since she was a child. As far back as she could remember, her nights were filled with tossing and turning, as if she were guilty of something that was eating away at her soul and would not let her rest. Even now, years later, she still felt that oppressive presence in her chest, near but not quite at her heart, that gnawed away at her until the early hours of the morning when she would either collapse from exhaustion or get up early and start her day before ever really ending the previous one.
Sometimes she felt that it was right for the guilt to chow down on her when any sane person would be sleeping. Especially during her affair with Jack, Samantha had felt that not sleeping was a small price to pay for what she was doing, for the sins she was committing.
After things with Jack ended she had gotten better, only succumbing to insomnia when a case got to her or when she had been stuck on stakeouts and had pulled all-nighters that had messed with her sleep cycles that her doctor told her were all-important and should be strictly adhered to. Whenever the doctor said that Samantha had to fight the urge to laugh because she didn't know a single person who got the recommended daily number of hours of sleep, especially not in the FBI. There just weren't enough hours in the day for a job and all that sleep. And forget about a social life.
Things had been good lately, though. Samantha had seemed to hit a particularly good sleep cycle and she usually got five hours a night, which was about the average that a field agent in the FBI gets. She had even started getting back out into the dating world again, the wounded woman inside having taken evasive action after Jack decided to go back to his wife to make things right, retreating into a shell that made her life into night after night of rented movies, single glasses of wine, and skilled avoidance of any and all social events that could lead to her getting her heart broken again.
In the past few weeks the insomnia had returned, but the strange thing was that nothing was different. Work was going well—they hadn't ended up handing a case over to the homicide division in almost a month and less and less of their cases were going cold—and she had even started to make forays into an attempted social life, though the last guy she had dated had dumped her because she'd been called out in the middle of more enjoyable activities by her ex-lover—Jack had never been her boyfriend or anything as simple as that, he had been her lover, and, now, he was her greatest mistake—because of work. That was fine with Samantha, though, because she couldn't be with someone who didn't understand that her work was important to her, and to so many other people, and that she had to be ready to go without any notice no matter what time it was or what she was doing. He'd been a man she'd met at the gym, co-owner of a publishing house in the heart of Manhattan, but he couldn't understand her job or the fact that she worked for her ex, and Samantha had been relieved when she checked her messages one day after work and heard him telling her answering machine that it just wasn't working for him.
Samantha had talked to Danny about her insomnia, knowing he was stricken by the same insidious fiend from time to time, and he had suggested that she talk to someone, a professional, because he knew she wasn't religious and he had turned to his priest when things got bottled up inside of him. But Samantha had issues with shrinks, especially the FBI psychiatrist that she had been forced to see after a case, about two months into her assignment with Missing Persons, that had led her to find the body of a child that they had been searching for. So professional help was out, and Danny couldn't offer much himself, though not for a lack of trying, which left Samantha tossing and turning for the better part of the night, grabbing onto hours, sometimes only minutes of sleep whenever she could, and hoped it was just a phase that would pass.
Rolling onto to her side, Samantha chanced a look at the clock beside her bed. Six-oh-eight AM. Her alarm was set to go off at six thirty.
"Screw this," Samantha said, throwing back the covers and flipping the alarm to OFF before heading to the shower. She would stop at Starbucks on the way to work, order the triple shot of espresso that sent her heart into overdrive and would leave her ready to crash around midday which was fine because Martin had a habit of bringing treats for the team from a café that a friend of his owned and, if he would tell her where it was, Samantha was sure she could live on their food and coffee alone.
A shower and a head-start on her caffeine frenzy later, Samantha made sure that her briefcase was packed with the files she had taken home the night before to wrap up, and then she headed out the door, eager to get to the world that she understood and had control in, because it seemed that she had lost that power when she was in her home.
Leaving San Francisco was an easy decision to make. He needed her, he called her personally, and then he asked her to stay when her investigation was wrapped up and her findings, sound as they were, were ignored. She didn't have any attachments to the city, no emotional links or real friends that she felt sorry for leaving behind.
Plus, she was doing it for him. That made any sacrifice worth it.
Vegas was good for Sara in a lot of ways. She made friends with Nick and Warrick, had some laughs with Bobby Dawson, enjoyed the attention of Greg from DNA and the geeky coroner, David. She and Catherine never saw eye to eye, though she was pretty sure that was because she was the outsider brought in to investigate someone on Catherine's team—her family. The fact that Warrick never held her job against her didn't seem to matter to the red-head, nor did the fact that she never wanted to get anyone in trouble, that she was just doing her job the best way she knew how. But not getting along with Catherine was fine. They didn't work cases together too often and when they did they worked well together because they were both too professional to let personal differences get in the way of putting a criminal behind bars.
The only thing that sucked about Vegas was, ironically enough, him. The reason she came to the desert when she had always been more of a windy-beaches kind of girl.
It turns out fantasy really is better than reality.
He may have respected her work—though he never actually said so—but he didn't respect her. Which, at first, Sara thought she could live with, but when he started leaving experiments involving beef-bullets and god-knows-what-else next to her eggplant parmesan when he had shared over three hundred meals with her since she stopped being able to even look at meat, she knew that, like many people, she had idealized someone, elevated him to an almost God-like level in her mind, and, being the flawed—extremely flawed—human being that he is, there was no way for him to live up to her impossible standards.
So she took a leave of absence.
In response he sent her a potted plant with a card that said 'from Grissom' in handwriting that was clearly too female for him to have even bothered to go to a flower shop and pick the damn thing out himself.
It was an effort, Sara gave him that, but it was too little, and much too late, so she packed a bag and caught the first flight to the capitol because she had a friend who had been trying to woo her into the FBI since she was still a Level One. A week later she was in Virginia taking in courses at Quantico. A month after that she got her orders and was placing a call to Las Vegas asking Warrick and Nick if they would mind packing up the rest of her apartment and shipping her things to New York, care of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Sara wasn't going back to Las Vegas, maybe not ever again, and, the longer she sat in her hotel room in New York with that week's copy of the Rental Papers open on the bedspread in front of me, the less sad she was about the prospect of never seeing him again.
New challenges, new adventures, and, hopefully, a better life lay before her.
Now if she could just find an apartment.
Another day, another picture on the white-board, a school picture of a little girl, all pigtails and missing front teeth, beaming at the camera like she's just been told she's getting a pony and a trip to Disneyland and the new Barbie doll she's been eyeing in Toys-R-Us since she first saw the ad for it on TV. The girl had beautiful red hair that fell in ringlets outside the multicoloured-fabric scrunchies holding her pigtails in place high atop her head, and freckles much brighter than Samantha's own ever were splashed across the girl's cheeks.
Jack and Vivian were going over the mother's statement; Danny was speaking to the father on the phone. Samantha didn't know where the last member of the team, the new guy, Martin, had been with them for a while now and had long ago become an official member of the tight-nit group, had wandered off to, but she was sure that whatever he was doing was work related because he was so damned eager to prove his worth, not only to his team, his family, and the FBI at large, but also to himself, that he wouldn't be caught lollygagging when there was a eight year old girl who dropped her mother's hand on the subway on the way to school and had wound up with her face on the white-board in the Missing Person's Unit of the New York office of the FBI.
And Samantha was sitting at her desk, waiting for something to turn up that would give them a place to start, her eyes unable to leave the wide-eyed joy of the little girl whose school picture was taped to the white-board. It was easier when they were adults, Samantha had decided long ago. Adults can defend themselves, at least to a degree, and they have more ties to the world than children do so they are easier to track. Plus, when it's kids, everyone finds hidden emotions coming to the surface that they somehow manage to tramp down when it's a forty-something dissatisfied housewife that has gone missing.
Already Samantha knew that this was going to be one of the cases that hit her the hardest. She could already see herself curling up in a ball under the covers of her bed, sobs wracking her body as she relieved each and every moment of Sylvia Theresa Hunter's case. No matter how happy the ending, Sam knew that this little girl was going to be one of the ones that she would dream about years later, even after working hundreds, thousands, of other cases.
Her eyes drifted over to Jack, her once-lover, and, she realized, for maybe the first time ever that, no matter how pure her love for him may have been once-upon-a-time, she would never be anything more to him than an indiscretion. When men cheat on their wives it's always the 'other woman' who fills the role of the villain. But it was Jack who seduced Samantha, it was Jack who would ask her to join him for dinners that they never had, it was Jack who had left the comfort and warmth of his home and his wife and two beautiful daughters to spend stolen evenings in dirty motel rooms with a junior agent under his command. Samantha had been a young woman who fell in love with a strong, older, seemingly perfect man, and, when things ended between them, she had been the one to be hurt because her feelings for Jack were real while, to him, she was just a warm body to keep him sane between work and going home to his family.
She may have loved him at one time—she's almost sure that what she felt for him was love, though she had never experienced it before and had certainly never been witness to such a powerful emotion growing up in a home where anger and indifference were much more prevalent—but now she only cares about him as a friend, a co-worker, and as a part of her past that has helped shape the woman she has become.
Even though somewhere inside her there was a tiny bubble of naïve hope that kept chanting 'it will work out', Samantha is okay with the knowledge that she is meant to be with someone else—or maybe no one else—but that, no matter what her destiny is with regards to other men, she is not meant to be with Jack Malone. And that, as it turned out, was something Samantha could live with.
Now, if she could just find a lead on the little girl whose eyes are boring holes in Samantha's already tender heart.
What did you think? I've been toying around with this storyline for a while and finally decided to let someone slightly less biased than myself read it. Please be brutally honest.
More soon.
Mel
