AN: This little devil just slipped into my mind and wouldn't vacate. It feels like the epilogue to everything we've seen, although I'm sure we all see it differently. It's not my usual style, but I hope you like. Please review.

Disclaimer: As ever, they aren't mine. They're yours, CBS, and I'll thank you for setting them on a similar course as this story, if you would be so kind. Lyrics are Kelly Clarkson's.

Grissom

Three months and I'm still breathing
Three months and I still remember it
Three months and I wake up

Life is suddenly good, in a new way. We are older, or so it seems, than we were.. before.. Before three months ago happened. And not to mention what happened before that.

Before, we were secretive, hiding, afraid even to look at one another in the hall, when we did sneak a glance so careful not to let it consume us. Now, we are private, and don't need to look, because the best is always yet to come, when the doors are closed.

The difference, I had not anticipated. I thought I would hate being exposed, and yet I find that I am simply known, and by people who, as it was wiping the very life out of me, transcended the boundary into friends, so subtly and so gracefully that when I looked back I realised that was what they always ought to have been.

It is only now that I can admit that I was devastated when Sara went. I read her letter with a feeling of utter dismay but with absolute understanding. Nothing teaches you about burn out faster than working amidst death and violence and a spiralling crime rate that shows no signs of abating.

I knew this, I had felt this, and for a week or so I was hurt that she hadn't shared with me what she was feeling. Until I remembered that for Sara, the death and destruction had begun long before her career had. And then I remembered that she hadn't spent a day out of town since she moved to Vegas. And then I remembered why she moved to Vegas.

Now, I didn't much care that she had been away. What mattered was that she was back, and that her smile, along with her hairbrush and pajamas, the signs of life that I had grown sore with missing, had made it back into our house.

She has been back at work for about a month now, and normality is slowly resurrecting itself around us, although we both carry a new and more delicate awareness of one another's needs. Sara is somehow regulated, calmed. She no longer forgets to eat, at least not often. She rolls into work with minutes, not hours, to spare, and exuding from her these days is just her professional brilliance. No anxiety, no unchecked emotions. She is becoming an old hand, and I am proud.

With Sara working Swing, all the pressure is taken out of the work situation. I no longer feel tense, or watch what I say or do at work. Some people know, well, if I'm honest, most people probably know, but I don't concern myself with things like that, and I find that I don't mind. I still feel respect from those I work with and who work for me, and now I can look forward to the moments in which my path may cross with Sara's in the lab without feeling like we are doing anything we shouldn't.

Us being together has become a part of the furniture of the lab in a way we always wished it could be. We were never the flaunting kind. We would never have taken advantage of our situation. We knew it was against policy but also knew that that policy existed to protect the lab's integrity from those people who would not naturally protect it, and that just isn't us. We just do our jobs and do them, I like to think, better than ever. Sara's objectivity has returned, sharper than ever. Mine has softened a little to let in the human now and again. We have learned. Natalie has taught us so many things.

It only struck me recently that Sara's was the only case in which I have had any real personal involvement. In twenty years. I was too close to it, and no-one took it from me, and I am grateful still to my team for that. They made an allowance, took a leap of faith, and trusted me to know my own bounds. By rights, I should have been sent home. But they knew, and I knew, that I had this case sewn into my mind, and that they weren't going to solve it without me.

When Nick was taken, I lead, and they looked to me for that. I took the worst things upon myself, partly through my own sense of wracking guilt, partly through the desire to spare them further anguish. I wanted it done right, but any one of them would have been as good as I that day. I was awash with fear for Nick, and only work could get me through it. And so I lead, standing shoulder to shoulder with Catherine as she faced Nick's parents, driving the car that bore us closer to Nick's location when finally, finally, Sara pointed it out on the map.

I carried that image with me that night as I drove home. Sara, rushing back into the layout room, her own desperation to get to him so well hidden but so damn obvious to me, breathless with knowing something, showing the expression so well versed by all of us, the sickening, satisfying, terrifying moment of making a connection that will lead you to the end, like it or not.

Usually, after a night like that, I would ride a rollercoaster, letting the wind and the rush cleanse me of the worst of it. That particular night, I stepped off the platform onto a different kind of ride altogether, one that had barely begun before that night. And it has had its ups and downs, as cherished as they are.

We were on a down when Sara disappeared. I found it so difficult to talk then, and although I had tried, repeatedly, to reach Sara and make her understand about Heather, things were not restful. She was trying, I could see, and I was trying, she knew. But the road was rough, and Sara was sore where I was sheepish, from the triangulation of that hospital room and Heather's gasping utterance of my name.

Now, I know that there was more to it. Catherine's ill timed but unwitting commentary, the lab's rumour mill that so quickly latched onto the idea that I'd spent the night there. I hadn't, really. I showed up late, after my shift, and stayed until dawn when Brass arrived. We didn't sleep, and we barely talked, Heather's depression bearing down on her as I tried to find out what was going on. I called Sara, twice, but she was working, and the voicemail I left was generic enough to allow for interception, something we were both constantly wary of. Cell phones, email accounts, all are lab property, and we knew better than most how easy it would be. I didn't see Sara outside of work for days.

When I watched the security footage of Sara being dragged across the parking lot a week later, I couldn't stop the barrage of thoughts that overtook me. If I never got to say it, again. I knew she knew I loved her, but in that moment I feared that she would doubt it more than she would believe it. If this was our parting, and she had been torn from me thinking that there was anyone, anything, in this world that I would put before her..

I tried to stop thinking about Sara, after that, and concentrate. Evidence, facts, events, time, space, truth. I focused on what I knew and what I could do, and the admission I made to the team was just that – evidence, something probative, that they needed to know. They were the investigators I would want on my case, and I couldn't let them go about it without all the information. That was why I chose those words, or those words chose me. It wasn't gushing, it wasn't tear-jerking. It wasn't If I lose her… because I couldn't let that get under my skin. It was cold, hard facts. I took away the only person she's ever loved. She's going to do the same to me.

They just took it on board. Like the professional thinkers they are. Every one of them stopped, drew back ever so slightly, and then got right back to work. They'd marvel or struggle over it later, I knew, but until she was safe, found, alive, they made no mention of it. And there was no leader. I barked orders, Catherine made calls, but there was no-one running the show. It meant something to everyone, and we were all just as terrified as one another. We were together in one thing. None of us had the answer, all of us had to fall back on the only thing we could trust – the science.

And we waited. For one of us to get that look, that Sara look, and make the connection.

Sara is here, now. She's coming down the hall, her figure blurring into focus for me as I lower my glasses, which I will replace as she comes closer. She is striding purposefully, and it sends a little thrill down my spine as I recall so many, many times we have strode these halls together, our purposes shared.

"Hey," she says, stopping just inside the door, a little sideways smile escaping her lips. "You mind if I raid your library?" She goes to my enormous bookcase, trails one finger along the spines, furrowing her brow.

"What are you looking for?"

"That book you had on… ahh." She finds what she is looking for, pulling out the large volume on corsetry. I remember when I last looked at it. She was here then, too, looking over my shoulder at the wasp waists and colour plates on the desk.

"Corsetry?" I ask, puzzled. Surely not another one.

"I know, what are the odds, huh?" She reads my mind, smiling at me. "We've got a female DB with an unusually small waist, seems consistent. I want to check this out though." She smirks. "Actually, I want to get Ronnie to check it out. She'll love this."

I smile, remembering all the times I have thought that about a younger, greener CSI. Ronnie Lake is as green as they come, but Sara speaks kindly of her, and I have a certain fondness by association. I like the reciprocity of Sara mentoring someone as Sara has been mentored.

Not that Sara had ever needed a mentor, not professionally, anyway. She had always been within a whisker of a hundred percent where accuracy and science were concerned. Only personally did she sometimes fall short – her emotions had, from time to time, gotten in her way. I smile, thinking that it is exactly that fact that made sure we did, eventually, end up together. She cocks one eyebrow at me, still thumbing through the book.

"What?" Her voice is soft, a little quieter than it would be in the company of other colleagues or the public. We each have a marginally softer tone we reserve for one another.

"Just thinking."

"About?"

"About you, dear."

She likes this, and steps a little closer to me, just the desk between us. She tucks the book under her arm.

"How's your day going?" She asks. I shrug, not unhappily.

"So far so good. I have to go to court later." Usually, this would focus me, occupy my entire day and night beforehand, preparing, but this time it is just a preliminary hearing, and I am one of two CSIs presenting, and I know my part will be small. I have now done this hundreds of times. Maybe thousands.

"Gonna be a long one?" She asks.

"I hope not," I smile, already thinking about coming home to her later. She smiles, dips her head toward the door.

"Okay," she says, heading out, "I'll see you later… baby." She murmurs the last word, so low that I almost miss it. I silently thank God for the successful surgery I had all those years ago, as though I had it for moments just such as this.

She has used the b word, because she knows I like it. She has toyed with it since we got together, at first saying it just now and again, in moments of extreme emotion when it seemed to just rush out of her in expression of comfort or joy. Lately, since, anyway, she has been saying it more. It feels… strange and beautiful.

I was always that person who thought they would never want or need to be called names. I balked at the very thought, seeing it as unnecessary, trite. Until the first time Sara spoke like that to me, and it was neither trite nor unnecessary. She is the only woman in fifty years to call me baby.