Author's Note:
This is an edited re-issue of a previously release story by the same name.
Although this fic is the second installment in my "And They All Fall Down" series, this story may be enjoyed separately.
To read the previous story go to "Unexpected."
Takes place shortly after the events of episode 521 "Committed," circa late April 2005.
Evidence of Life
When it Rains...
I should have just called, Gil Grissom thought as he continued to hover on her doorstep.
An act he had been engaged in for at least the last five minutes, despite the rain and the inexplicable inattentiveness that led him to leave his perfectly good umbrella in the car below.
But if she hadn't answered the phone he would have only become more worried.
Hearing the not quite cold, yet completely business-like, greeting of her answering service, would have only fed into the almost sheer panic that had plagued him ever since the night Adam Trent had taken Sara hostage and almost taken her life.
After they had wrapped up the case, something she had insisted on doing -- a decision he knew better than to argue with her about -- he had insisted she take a few paid days off. Sara hadn't been pleased by the suggestion (actually, it had been more of a dictate than a suggestion), but sometimes she, too, knew better than to argue with him about certain things.
So she had been absent from his life for four very long days now, four days that if he were honest with himself, had felt like forty, despite the mountains of paperwork and the unending stream of evidence needing to be processed.
He had pulled an extra double or two and might have even stayed through part of a triple if Catherine had not chased him out of the lab with the threat to rat him out to Ecklie if he didn't at least leave the lab for a few hours and get some sleep.
Ah, sleep.
That was the prime reasons he had been frequenting the lab even more often than usual.
To sleep per chance to dream -
The famous line floated across his mind and then its fellow -
Aye, there's the rub.
Sleeping meant risking dreaming, and dreaming, at least these past few days almost always meant yet another replay of nightmares.
Or at least of that singular nightmare that had haunted him since he saw that look in Adam's eyes as he pressed the pottery shard deeper into a struggling Sara's neck.
Of course that moment -- and the horror that his mind kept imaging happening afterwards -- did not need the diminished defenses of sleep to torment him.
The visions were there in the day time, too, just barely kept at bay by the work that was providing less and less comfort by the day.
After four days of living with the anxiety, the images, the dread, he knew he had to see her.
Physicallysee her, to know that the nightmares and all their daytime minions were but phantoms of fear, helplessness and guilt.
Over and over, he saw himself just standing there on the other side of the glass, unable to do anything but stare and beg over and over for the guard to open the door while Sara...
Sara --
Sara died.
No matter how many times he had told him she had not -- that she had escaped her imprisonment with Adam with little more physical harm inflicted upon her than a scratch -- he could still see her dying over and over again.
So he stood that afternoon on her doorstep, in the rain, fighting the fear, trying to summon up the courage to knock.