Two Planets
It wasn't the dark.
Even though it was the kind of dark that nothing could penetrate. The type that turned all the blacker the more you tried to squint and focus. The one that turned you upside down and tumbled you with confusion as you lost your bearings. This was the dark that swirled around, rose up and laughed as you tripped and stumbled, hands out trying to feel your way like a drunk. The one that suffocated you in its murky depths.
But it wasn't the dark. Even as a kid, she had never really been that afraid of the dark.
It wasn't the cold either. She could handle the cold. Truth be told, this wasn't the kind of bone chilling, aching cold she expected from the desert at night. "Must be global warming" she thought grimly as she curled a little tighter into a ball more to relieve her discomfort than to chase away a chill.
The thing that was setting her teeth on edge, allowing just the corner of despair to start to enter her mind was the deafening quiet; the pure absence of sound. As much as she strained to hear, as much as she steadied herself and held her breath waiting for the faintest of sound, there was nothing. It was almost too much to bear.
How could she get a sense of where she was, figure out road marks, get indicators of to where to leave clues? How could she bring the team to her if she couldn't give them pieces of the puzzle to follow? In absence of her other senses, sound was the only way for her start collecting the evidence she so desperately needed to start working the case.
She willed herself to breath, told herself to calm down. This is a crime scene, start looking at the facts. Start bringing the elements together. You know the end, now start at the beginning. She began to think back allowing her mind to rewind to the place where this nefarious journey began as the silence echoed in her ears like a gunshot….
………………………………………………………………………………………………
BANG!
Her ears rang with the shot
"Damn, I must have put the ear protection on too fast and not secured them properly".
Rookie mistake, she thought.
And Catherine was not prone to making mistakes; rookie or otherwise.
What was with her today?
Oh come on, she knew what was with her.
Her shift had started out normal enough; a new case with new crime scene. But, instead of the officer she expected to find at the scene, it was Brass.
Not as if that way anything out of the ordinary, but she didn't realize how much she was looking forward to seeing him until he wasn't there to meet her and fill in the preliminary details in his usual subdued, almost soft way.
Their brief conversations and interactions had come to mean more to her than she had realized.
And later, back at the lab when she casually inquired about him, it was a bombshell to hear Brass say that he had transferred out last week. She absorbed the information like she absorbed a particular gruesome detail from a scene, with detachment and professionalism.
At least that is how she reacted on the outside, on the inside she swallowed down the bitter taste of another opportunity lost.
Only Grissom noticed the subtle change in her face as the three of them walked down the hallway summing up the details of the scene and parsing out information.
"You OK, Catherine?" asked Grissom studying her face with a little more intensity than usual.
"Oh, sure, just had a rough evening with Lindsey before coming to work. Teenagers, what do you do?" Catherine steadied her gaze to look back at him hoping he wouldn't see anything and delve any deeper.
"What do you do?" Grissom echoed after a slight pause and walked away.
Man, thought Catherine as she entered the lab. It's not like I'm loosing anything. What did we have? A professional relationship? A mutual respect for one another? A friendship? Well, if you call banter over the blood splatter from a triple homicide a friendship then sure, we had a friendship.
But there was something else that made Catherine ponder the idea she and Detective Tony Vartann might have the potential for something more.
The way he turned to her when she spoke, like he could absorb everything about her through her words. The way his hand found the small of her back to guide her through the doorway while entering an interrogation room. The looks he gave her when they were on a particular hard case; scanning her movements looking for any small cracks in her Tephlon armor.
Still, nothing had progressed from there. They had been like two planets in the same solar system. Revolving around the same sun, but never truly coming together.
A/N this is a collaborative effort let us know how you like it... then there will be more