Disclaimer: CSI is not mine. You can tell because Sara is gone. Ah, but this is the world of fanfiction, and I will BRING HER BACK!

Author's note: If anyone's wondering what song by The Who I would choose as the theme for CSI: San Francisco, it's "I Don't Even Know Myself." (Though "Borris the Spider" was tempting.)

Xenolith

Chapter 1: Hic et Ubique

San Francisco's famed fog cloaked the morning in blue satin. The beach seemed dull brown in its light. The waves rolling over the shore sounded strangely distorted and loud, like they were the only sound in the entire lonely world.

Lisandra Wong jogged along this dull brown beach this blue-grey San Francisco morning. "Come on, Artemis, keep up!"

Her dog, a small, curly-haired mutt, barked and scampered to her side.

"Ten more minutes," Lisandra promised herself as much as her dog.

A break in the fog afforded a view of the ocean. She gazed at it as she ran. Then she tripped.

"Ow!" She sat down and rubbed her knee where it had connected with the sand. She noticed a black smudge on her ankle, and the smells of smoke and gasoline mingling with the damp air. She looked at what she'd tripped over. "This is weird." She poked at the pile of greasy black ashes. She had no idea what it was, until she a blackened bone protruding from it. Then Lisandra screamed.

The phone on Gilbert Grissom's desk rang, interrupting his paperwork. He hoped, as he always did when the phone rang, that it would be her. But rationally he knew it wasn't. She hadn't called in weeks. He braced himself for the inevitable disappointment before checking the caller ID. What he read there perplexed him. San Francisco CSI Director? Why? He picked up the phone. "Grissom," he said.

"Dr. Grissom. It's been a long time." The voice was soft, yet forceful, and sweetly accented. Exactly as he remembered it.

"Dr. Murphy...what can I do for you?"

"Eight years ago you borrowed something from me and never gave it back. I'd like her returned for a little while."

The words felt like ice water flowing over him. He decided to avoid telling her he'd lost the precious thing he'd stolen from the San Francisco CSI lab. "Why?" he asked.

"MEC is back."

"MEC?"

"Just tell her that. Sara will know what it means."

He couldn't avoid telling her. "Sara...doesn't work here anymore."

There was a brief silence on the other end of the line. "What?"

"She...left."

"Where can I reach her now?"

Grissom sighed. "I don't know. I haven't been in touch with her for a while." For seven weeks, one day, and 19 hours, to be specific.

"So you took my Sara away from me and now you've lost her? What happened?"

"I'm sorry. I'm more upset about this than you are."

"Does this have to do with the Miniature Killer?"

He closed his eyes. He should have known Murphy knew about that. From everything he'd heard about her, she had a knack for knowing about the lives of her subordinates. "The short answer is yes," he replied.

"I'm sorry to hear that. Sara was like a daughter to me. I'm sure you feel about the same."

"Pretty much." He was glad that the woman couldn't see the anguish that contorted his face at the thought of what exactly Sara was to him.

"If you hear from her, have her contact me."

"Okay," he said before hanging up.

In the dim silence of his office, Grissom sighed as he moved some of the clutter on his desk to reveal a small framed photograph of Sara.

Ever since she'd stopped calling him, there had been a lurking, nauseating fear in the back of his mind that something had happened to her. As someone who worked with death every day, he knew intimately what a dangerous place the world was, and how many terrible ways there were for someone to die. But he couldn't let himself consider that. He'd been so terrified of losing her when she was kidnapped by the Miniature Killer. The terror of that time threatened to seep into him again.

He pulled out his cellphone, and dialed her number. It had been days since the last time he'd tried.

The phone rang once. His heart jumped.

"We're sorry. The number you have dialed has been disconnected..."

Grissom's eyes widened in sudden fear. What had happened? Sara was gone. A sick, empty despair crept up his chest to his head and his eyes. He fought against an impulse to sob. He had to hold himself together, had to believe there was some other explanation for this. Maybe she'd realized she didn't love him anymore, and decided that cutting off communication with him would be easier than admitting that. Or maybe she'd lost her cellphone and decided not to get a new one. Maybe she was traveling in a foreign country and decided to have some time to herself. Anything, anything but that she was dead.

Rain rippled down the window of a cafe in New York City. A woman with dark hair and pale skin watched it. She had the kind of face that could be plain one moment, but was only a smile or a shift of light away from being stunningly beautiful. She didn't look beautiful now. She looked tired, weary, with a haunted sadness in her eyes.

She turned back to her computer screen. Her eyes widened and the sadness flew away as she read a brief paragraph in the San Francisco news section:

"Charred remains found on beach. Police have no comment on whether the woman was victim of the MEC Killer, who murdered four in the area in 1999."

The woman looked back at the window. San Francisco. Was she ready to go back there, so soon after confronting her mother, and her past?

There were more memories for her in San Francisco than that.

That was a long time ago. And wasn't she trying to get away from it all, to distance herself from everything in her former life? She was trying to bury her ghosts, and that case was definitely one of her ghosts. On the other hand, it wasn't like running away seemed to be helping. She hadn't counted on how alone she would feel. It was like the Latin proverb: caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt. Running away changes your scenery, not your soul.

She was attempting to sort things out. What she really wanted to do with her life, if she could ever be a CSI again, why her life had taken the course it had, and her feelings for Grissom. She knew she loved him more than anything else in the world, and she had an acolyte's devotion to him as a boss; she just needed to figure out where one ended and the other began. She had been so obsessed with him for so long that she was afraid she didn't know who she was without him. That was why she had been putting off calling him. One of the reasons.

This wasn't the first time she'd left everything behind to begin anew, but it was different. When she went to college, there was nothing she cared about to leave behind, and she'd been surrounded by people who had all suddenly transitioned from the familiar to a new world. Somehow, it helped that they were all in the same boat. It was an adventure, not a sacrifice. When she'd started her job in San Francisco, she had been nervous, and once again she was surrounded by strangers, but she quickly learned the ropes and gained the respect of her colleagues. When she'd moved to Vegas, she already knew someone there, and so she wasn't as completely and totally alone as she had been with the earlier transitions of her life, or the one now. In fact, there was only one time she could remember when she'd felt this totally alone and lost, and that had been when she went into foster care after her father's murder. That had been worse. Much worse.

Maybe running away wasn't a good idea. She'd been running away her entire life. Why did she think it would help her deal with her issues to get away from the real people in her life, the people who cared about her?

Maybe it was time to try something new: instead of running away, going back.

She glanced at the paper again. She was still bothered by the memory of MEC, and her failure to catch him.

A determination began to burn inside her: she no longer cared about burying her ghosts; she wanted to bury him.