Title: Outside Looking In

Author: Jeanine (jeanine@iol.ie)

Rating: PG

Pairing: Sara/Warrick, Grissom/Sara

Spoilers: Sex, Lies and Larvae, Too Tough to Die

Feedback: Makes my day

Disclaimer: If it was in the show, it's not mine.

Archive: At my site Checkmate (http://helsinkibaby.topcities.com/csi/csific.htm) , Fanfiction.net; anywhere else, please ask.

Summary: Grissom finds out what it's like to be on the outside looking in.

***

Grissom stood at the door, not moving, not speaking, just watching. The object of his scrutiny was, as usual, unaware of his gaze, entranced as she was by the computer screen in front of her. From his position, he could see the screen filled with fingerprints, flickering by at a dizzying rate. Her fingers kept up a steady drumbeat against the table, and there was no possible way that she could be noticing anything that was on the screen; they were going by too quickly for that, but still, her gaze didn't move, fixed, unblinking. He felt his eyes beginning to water just looking at her.

Still silent, Grissom took a couple of steps into the room, frowning when she didn't react to his footsteps, the frown only deepening when he got close enough to actually see her. She was still wearing the same clothes that she'd been wearing since the shift started; not this shift, but the one before it. Her shoulders were hunched, and while some might have put it down to hours of hunching over the computer screen, he could see the tension in them. To her left was a Styrofoam cup, half full of coffee, and four more, empty, neatly stacked one inside the other. Ripped open sugar packets littered the surface of the table, and while he watched, she reached out and raised the cup to her lips, wincing as she tasted the coffee; cold then.

"Sara."

One word had her turning around to face him, a quick glance before she looked back to the computer screen, but it was enough for him to see the pallor of her face, the redness of her eyes, and the dark circles underneath them. She had all the appearances of someone who should have, by rights, collapsed from exhaustion hours ago, and just looking at her was enough to make Grissom's eyes feel gritty with tiredness, to unleash the first stirrings of a headache somewhere deep dark down in his brain.

"Hey," was all her lips said, but her body language said plenty; chief among them an order to leave her alone.

"Any luck?" he asked, a redundant question, because if she had found something, she would have told him by now, and she wouldn't be sitting here, looking like death warmed up.

She shook her head, not looking at him. "There were almost a hundred different prints in that hotel room," she told him, but he'd known that. He'd examined the crime scene with her, taken the hair and fibre samples back to the lab, leaving her to print the place. The job had taken her most of the shift, and now she was spending her time here, running the prints through the computer, trying to come up with a match. "This is a needle in a haystack," she muttered, disgusted, and he shrugged.

"You should go home," he told her. "Get some rest."

"I'm fine," she replied, the only change on her face coming from flickering light from the computer screen as the fingerprints flashed by. "Greg's running DNA tests on what we brought back from the room. So far, he's got the vic's, and not much else. He said he'll let me know if he finds anything."

Having passed Greg stumbling towards the car park, mumbling something about bed and food, Grissom doubted that any such call would be forthcoming in the near future. "You've been on this for over twenty-four hours straight," he tried again.

An eyebrow lifted, but she showed no other outward sign of emotion. "Is that how late it is?"

Grissom looked around him, finding another stool and pulling it up beside her, watching the prints flicker for a few seconds, judging his next words carefully. He knew from experience that there was very little that could get through to Sara when she was in this kind of mood, and he also knew that he had to tread carefully. He was just about to open his mouth to talk when she beat him to it.

"I know what you're trying to say."

He blinked, slightly taken aback. "You do."

"You're trying to come up with a way of reminding me that I shouldn't take these cases so personally. That I should trust that the evidence will reveal its story to me in due time, and that there's not much I can do to help hurry it along." She glanced over out of the corner of her eye. "Am I close?"

He took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. "Burning the midnight oil won't bring her back," he reminded her, and there was a huff of disgust at his words.

"But it might stop this guy from doing it again." Her voice rose on the words, two pale spots of colour burning on her cheeks. "This girl was beaten and strangled, and we don't have a thing on the guy who did it. It's like he's a ghost." She grabbed a pen off the table and began tapping it against the table restlessly. "She was alone, here for three days on business, her next of kin hasn't even been notified yet, and we've got nothing to tell them when they are-" She broke off, as if hearing the sound of her own voice, tilting her head back so that she was staring at the ceiling. The movement had her hissing suddenly, her hand going to the back of her neck, kneading the stiff muscles there.

Grissom's hand itched with the impulse to reach over and begin to work out the knots, an urge he quelled firmly. In the CSI lab, where anyone could walk in, that would be the wrong thing to do. He settled for leaning closer to her, dropping his voice. "It's not going to do any good if you make yourself sick."

She closed her eyes, sighing deeply. "I'm fine Grissom," she said again.

"I've talked to you about this before," he reminded her. "You can't take every case personally. You'll burn out that way." She didn't look too far from it now actually; with her eyes closed, he could see even more clearly the strain on her face, the set of her jaw as she struggled to keep her control. He'd seen that expression a lot over the last twenty-four hours as she'd surveyed the crime scene, seen the body in the morgue. For that matter, he'd had a hard time keeping his own sangfroid intact - the woman they'd found had been in her early thirties, around Sara's height and build, her dark hair slightly longer and thicker than Sara's, but still, there was a marked likeness between the two women. For once in his life, he'd had to repress the onslaught of nausea at a crime scene as his imagination had transposed the face of Sara Sidle onto the dead body of Maria Collins, and even now, that recollection was all it took to turn his stomach inside out.

"I just want to finish running these prints," she said finally, and he took that as some kind of accomplishment on his part. "I'll sleep then. That ok with you?" Grissom quirked an eyebrow, waiting for her to look at him, and when she did, his expression made a shadow of a smile ghost across her face. "I promise," she added.

Grissom shrugged, standing up and moving the stool back to where he'd found it. "I'll be checking the sign-out sheets," he told her, his tone the only part of him that was joking.

She might have said something else to him were it not for a third voice joining the conversation. "Am I interrupting?" Grissom turned his upper body towards the door, to see Warrick leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed over his chest. The younger man looked almost as tired as Sara, and Grissom wondered when the last time he got some sleep was.

"Hey Warrick." Sara turned slowly on the stool so that she could nod at him, and Grissom didn't miss the frown that creased Warrick's face when he saw her. Sara might have noticed it too, because she turned back to the computer a great deal more quickly. Warrick's gaze didn't move for a long moment, then it swung to Grissom in silent question.

Grissom's answer was a simple shrug, and Warrick's lips pursed in acknowledgement of the words that he hadn't spoken. He stepped into the room, coming closer to the computer, squinting at the screen. "Anything so far?"

"Not a thing." Sara's voice was flat, but her body was like a coiled spring, ready to snap at any moment.

Warrick shot Grissom another quick look, then looked down at his watch. "Time to go home Sara."

He was standing beside her by now, Grissom having moved around to the opposite side of the desk, the better to observe the interplay. Sara looked up at Warrick with barely contained irritation. "I'll go as soon as this is done," she said, using the same line that she'd just used with Grissom, clearly expecting it to have the same effect.

It didn't though, because Warrick shook his head. "Nothing doing," he replied, in a voice that brooked no argument. "You need food, sleep and a shower…" He paused deliberately, giving her time to look up at him before continuing. "…And not necessarily in that order."

A tired, but genuine smile lit up Sara's face as she looked up at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"That you should listen to someone who knows what's good for you," was Warrick's ready response as he reached around, taking her gently by the shoulders and spinning the stool around, swivelling her so that she faced him. His hands lingered on her shoulders for a second before going up to her cheeks, pushing back the strands of hair that were falling down across her face. He stood like that, looking down at her for a long moment before he spoke again. "Come home," was all he said, and his voice was so low that Grissom, standing forgotten on the other side of the table, could barely hear him.

Sara didn't answer him, not in words anyway. What she did do was take in a huge breath of air, shoulders rising with the action, before slumping forward, her head resting in the middle of his chest, her arms slipping around his waist; his hands moving from her cheeks to her back, resting there lightly. "I need to keep an eye on the prints," she told him after a minute, her voice muffled in his shirt, and he shook his head, disbelief warring with long-suffering amusement on his face.

"They'll still be here in a couple of hours," he chided her.

"I'll stay." Grissom's voice made them both jump, and when they sprang apart, he realised, with startled amusement, that they really had forgotten he was there. Warrick's eyes were narrowed, Sara's pallor had given way to cheeks flushed pink with embarrassment, and Grissom gave them both a quick grin. "You two head out. I'll finish up here."

"You don't have to-" Sara began.

At the same time, Warrick was saying, "If you're sure…"

They stopped talking, glaring at one another, giving Grissom a chance to jump in. "I'm sure. I'll see you two later."

"You're really sure?" Sara asked, still doubtful, and Warrick didn't give her a chance to ask again.

"C'mon," he said, not so much helping her up from the stool as lifting her off it, arms on her elbows to steady her as she found her balance. "Let's get you home." He threw a nod back over his shoulder to Grissom. "See you Gris."

"Night Grissom," Sara called back.

"Night." He watched them walk out of the room, wondering if either of them realised that they were walking down the halls of the crime lab hand in hand. Sitting down in front of the computer screen, his eyes might have been on the fingerprints scanning through, but his mind was firmly on the sight that he'd seen only minutes before. It had been a rare moment, no doubt about that. Sara and Warrick were both notoriously guarded with their emotions, to the point that when they'd come clean and admitted that they were seeing each other, the main talking point among those in the know wasn't how they'd managed to hide it for as long as they did, but rather how they got to that point in the first place.

Still it was easy to know why no-one had realised it; after all, neither of them were the kind to go for public displays of affection, like holding one another in the lab, especially in front of him, or walking out through the hallways hand in hand. Moreover, although Grissom had told them that he didn't mind them being involved with one another and working together, certain other sectors, most notably Conrad Ecklie, were making noise about how it wasn't a good idea, and that Grissom shouldn't be allowing it. Thus, Warrick and Sara were extra careful to keep things professional while in the lab, and Grissom took it as a measure of how drained Sara was by this case, and how worried Warrick was about her that they'd ignored those rules tonight. He also saw it as a measure of how their relationship worked. A sign that Warrick was good for her, that he could get through to Sara, even when he, Grissom, couldn't.

That last thought had him frowning, as had the sudden twist of jealousy in his stomach. Once upon a time it had been him that Sara had sought out to talk about cases, about things that were troubling her. The conversations they'd had over Kaye Shelton and Pamela Adler came to mind, when he'd done his best to help her work through whatever had been eating at her. His efforts had been futile, but at least he'd tried. At least she'd let him try.

Now she pushed him away, and pulled Warrick closer to her.

The tug of the headache he'd first noticed earlier was burgeoning into a distinct throb, and the flickering of the computer screen was doing nothing to help him, and he found himself standing, heading for the door, down the corridor to the break room. Perhaps the change of scenery, the physical act of walking, would rid him of those thoughts, because it wasn't his place to be there for Sara like that, any more than it was his place to feel jealous because she was with Warrick.

There was nothing between them; never had been.

They were just friends.

At least, that's what he'd told himself. He'd never admitted that feelings had run any deeper than that, had never realised it himself until it was too late. It had taken Catherine to point it out to him, a couple of days after Sara and Warrick had asked him for a meeting, had sat side by side in his office, told him that they were in a relationship, that they had been for months, and that it wasn't going to go away. He'd been surprised; for a man who prided himself on his powers of observation, he hadn't noticed a thing, but he'd noticed that Catherine had been markedly less shocked, and had talked to her about it, over coffee in the break room. She'd been surprised that he hadn't known something was in the air, lifting an eyebrow when she said, "C'mon Grissom, you didn't notice the vibe that they were giving off?"

"There was a vibe?" he'd said, blinking, and she'd given him one of her patented "you've got to be kidding me" looks. "I'm just…I didn't expect anything to happen between them."

She'd snorted at that. "Well, you didn't think she was going to wait around for you forever, did you?" His gaze had swung around to her, shocked, and her eyes had widened when she realised that he really didn't know what she was talking about. She'd opened her mouth, but no words had come out, and if he'd been doing anything other than trying to process what she'd said, he would have taken great delight in seeing Catherine Willows totally and utterly speechless.

"You thought that-"

Catherine had been flustered, her hands turning circles in mid-air as she waved her arms, as if trying to summon her thoughts through some sort of mystical divination. "Can you blame me?" she'd challenged him finally. "You two have this whole symbiotic, two peas in a pod, mind reading thing, not to mention the fact that Sara looks at you like you hung the moon…"

"She does not," Grissom had protested, and Catherine had nodded, allowing him that.

"Not now," she pointed out. "Which is what tipped me off to something. Warrick, now that surprised me." She'd shrugged. "But, as long as they're happy…"

"Yeah," Grissom had echoed, standing, throwing the rest of his coffee into the sink, heading back to his office.

He was walking the exact same route in reverse now, Catherine's words echoing in his mind. "You didn't think she was going to wait around for you forever, did you?"

She mightn't have believed him, but he'd never actually thought about it. Once she'd said those words to him however, it was all he could think about, and he thought about it now as he saw the door to the locker room open, Warrick and Sara walking out, carrying on towards the exit, backs to him, oblivious to his stare.

The answer was that he'd never expected her to wait around for him, but he wouldn't have minded it if she had. Any more than he'd mind being the one who was walking down the halls of the CSI lab hand in hand with her, heedless of the stares of anybody else. Any more than he'd mind being the one that she smiled up at like that, tired eyes shining at something that he'd said. The one who held the door open for her, let her pass ahead of him, saying something else that made her turn back to him, eyes narrowed in a glare, but lips still smiling, all thoughts of the case banished for the moment.

He'd told her once that she needed a diversion, something outside of work, something to stop her burning out. He'd never expected that she'd find it so close to work, never expected that it would work so well for her. Never expected that, for a man whose job it was to observe the minutiae of other people's lives, that he'd suddenly find it so hard to be on the outside looking in.