DISCLAIMER – you know they're not mine. You know if they were Sara would NEVER wear those huge bug glasses (you know the ones) and San Francisco would remain just another city and not the bane of our lives.
Lyrics are from 'Fallen' and belong to Sarah McLachlan.
But we carry on our backs the
burden
Time always reveals
The lonely light of morning
The
wound that would not heal
It's the bitter taste of losing
everything
That I have held so dear.
Keeping up that appearance meant socialising, too, when the moment arose, and so Sara smiled not altogether unhappily at Catherine when she called across the parking lot to her that morning, and told her that she would go. She got into her car and called Greg, asking if they could go together. Sara had learned in school that the surest way to avoid attention was to stick with someone who demanded more than their share of it. Easy to fade into the background, be the afterthought, ride in on the coat tails of someone else's far more comprehensive social skills.
Shutting her cell, Sara pushed her key into the ignition and glanced up to see the lab doors open. Grissom pushed through the doors and strode out into the parking lot, phone held to one ear, kit in the other. He moved with purpose, reaching his car in seconds and loading the trunk. Sara could tell he had been called out, and she was faintly jealous that he had a hot case to attend to rather than an empty apartment to go home to. True, she could have continued with her own case, but it was going nowhere fast. Besides, it was a B&E. Sara hated those. She felt they were wasted on them. Why couldn't they teach the better cops how to take prints, for cases like those? Save the criminalists for the weightier matters.
Grissom looked around him, scanning the lot. He didn't see her, and she took the opportunity to watch him for a moment. Her phone rang, jolting her into action, and she flipped it open as her breathing slowed, feeling caught out. As though someone knew she was there, just watching him, when she should have been getting on with her life.
"Sidle."
"Hey, did you leave already?" Grissom's voice came through the line, bold and unfettered from just a few metres away, via some satellite somewhere. She liked the image. It summed them up. Unable to really communicate to one another without mediation.
"Uh, no. Not exactly. What's up?"
"I've got a 419, and dayshift can't take it. They're two down so far, and they've got a backlog bigger than ours." Sara smiled, knowing what was coming. It seemed everyone had a backlog today. Everyone but her.
"You want me to go with?" From her observation point she watched him slide into the driver's seat of the Denali.
"Yeah, if you can. Everyone else has gone." Ouch. That stung, that she was the last one he'd called, but she would take what she could get, as she always did where Grissom was concerned.
"I can, although technically I'm still on our B&E."
"Nick can handle that. Meet me in the parking lot in five." Sara smiled to herself. She got to work overtime, and with Grissom, and she got to hand off her less-than-inspiring case, all at the same time. To hell with sleep, this was better.
"I, uh, won't be that long." She replied, and clicked her phone shut. She reached into the backseat and pulled on her jacket, slid her sunglasses down from her hair onto her face and took one last deep breath.
She got out of her car, walked the eight short metres to his, and got in. His eyebrows rose in surprise.
"That was fast." He said. She nodded. "I'm impressed," he added. Tip of the iceberg, she thought, concealing a smirk. You should see my bedroom walls.
Sara struggled all morning, more so than usual. Grissom was pressing all the right buttons. He was paying close attention to her theories, giving weight to her ideas when even she was sceptical of her science. He said something funny. He admitted he was tired. He did not, as would often happen, send her off to do one thing while he did another. They did everything in tandem, unison, teamwork.
She put it down to the large amount of time they had spent together the night before. When they worked doubles and triples, it often all began to bleed into one, and she knew that with circumstances as intense as the ones in which they operated, things were bound to feel loaded.
Still, as the morning wore on, she couldn't shake the feeling that something was different. Then she reminded herself that she had been his last thought. Everyone else has gone. The sting in the tail of that truth set her momentarily straight. Long enough to begin to feel tired herself.
The scene didn't take as long as some. They were back in the Denali within three hours, and Sara was searching for conversation to stifle her yawns.
"Did you know tomorrow is Catherine's birthday?" Grissom looked at her from the driver's seat, and she felt stupid. "Of course you do. Sorry, I know you've known her a long time, I just didn't think you kept track of things like that." Stop talking, she told herself.
"Actually, thank you for reminding me."
She laughed. "I take it you haven't been corralled into going to dinner, then?" Grissom's mouth twitched in interest.
"No, have you?" He said it with surprise, with incredulity, as though the thought of her socialising was, somehow..wrong. It hurt.
"Yes, I have." Her voice was almost haughty, she realised, too late. He didn't react. There was a moment's awkward silence, before Sara steamrollered on, thinking as she did that one of these days she would really have to learn to shut up.
"I guess you have the ultimate get out of jail free card, being the boss."
"Sara, I'm not abstaining. I just haven't been invited." Oh.
"Oh." It took her a moment to see he was smiling, and she felt her cheeks colour just a shade.
They were silent for the rest of the journey, a return to the familiar antisocial sociability that was the two of them together. On a good day, as Sara had begun to think this one was, they were alight with science and sass. On a downturn, they were black, Sara tending towards overcompensation and oversensitivity, Grissom towards silence and ice cool professionalism.
As they pulled up in the lab parking lot, Sara turned to him as she unbuckled her seat belt.
"If you were invited, would you be going?" She tried to keep it light. Tried to keep the tone neutral, the wait for his response casual. She hopped out of the car as he unbuckled his own belt.
"I.. uh." He paused, wrinkled his brow, looking at her over the passenger seat. "I don't like to mix business with pleasure." She smiled, the wide, false, sarcastic smile she reserved for acrid moments like this.
"And don't I just know it." She slammed the door, setting her gaze on the lab and stalking in that direction before he could make head nor tail of what had just happened. So fire me, she thought, in defiance, knowing full well that he would do nothing, for doing anything would involve discussing what had prompted her words, and, she thought bitterly, God forbid he had to do that.
So much for something being different. As Sara opened the door to her very empty home an hour later the nothingness therein reminded her with a low blow just how normal this was.
That night, Greg was excitable. Perhaps because Sara had given him permission to pick her up, even to come over a bit early, if he brought a few cold beers with him. Maybe because he deep down missed his family, and this group dinner made him feel like part of a community. Or maybe because he thought there was a faint chance of Sara wearing something he'd like and engaging in some innocent banter outside of work. Whatever it was, an hour into their shift, Sara was ready to do him an injury.
"I don't think Grissom's going, you know." Greg leaned against the layout table beside her, their heads bowed over crime scene photographs, the magnifier, a notepad and some small, sealed evidence bags nearby, awaiting their turn.
"I know." Sara barely paused in what she was doing.
"Really? Did he actually say he wasn't going?"
"Uh.. he said he hadn't been invited."
"Really? Curious indeed, my dear Watson."
Sara shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "Yeah, whatever, Greg. Can we get on?"
"Someone's cranky cos they've got to wear a dress," Greg teased, elbowing her. Sara stood up straight, giving momentary relief to her back while she admonished him. Two birds, one stone.
"Greg, the only dress I own is my address, and I'm beginning to regret even allowing you to see that."
Greg held up his hand, gleeful, boyish.
"I'll be good, I swear. No dresses. Nothing girly. Nothing that might make you feel like you're feminine or indeed at all having a good time. Got it." She had to smile.
Sara didn't see Grissom until the early hours of the shift. When she had arrived that night she had enlisted Greg to help her process the evidence they had collected that morning, and knew that Grissom was out with PD interviewing a possible suspect. He returned as she was pulling her pager from her belt, the coroner wanting to talk to her about Toxicology results. She stood, half in and half out of the layout room, and filled him in, quickly, efficiently, taking care not to imbue her account with any unnecessary details or dithering. She was the consummate professional, not the petulant girl who had slammed the door in his face eight hours earlier. Alright, so she was a little of both, but she was damned if she was going to let him know that.
Grissom listened diligently.
"Thank you," he said, simply, and began to walk away from her towards his office.
"Uh., Grissom?" He turned.
"Aren't you going to fill me in?" He thought about this for a moment.
"Oh, right. Right." He did, then, but Sara was barely listening as she fought the sinking feeling spreading through her chest, the feeling that she was being left behind. He told her about the suspect who had turned out to have a possible alibi and about the remainder of the morning's evidence he wanted to return to. He was perfunctory, polite, and she hated it.
"Are you coming with me to talk to Robbins?" She asked, trying to keep her voice level.
"No. You can handle it." Once this would have filled her with pride and drive. Not today.
"Right. You want me to call you, when I'm done there?" He shrugged.
"Sure."
Her stomach was sinking faster than ever before. Behind them, Catherine and Warrick left the break room and sauntered down the hall towards the outside world, deep in conversation, an open file held between them.
"I'm sorry about earlier," she said, finally, with a sigh, lowering her voice slightly.
"Sorry for what?"
"I was.. you know. I shouldn't have slammed the door." Grissom shrugged.
"Did you?" He said, innocently.
Sara gaped at him. "Did I?" She felt her temperature rise a notch. "Are you kidding?" He shook his head.
"What?" He was open faced, oblivious.
She held up both hands, turned to go. "Never mind."
She was gone before he could make it any worse.
She reached the locker room and ducked inside quickly, opening her little cubby to collect her jacket and keys. She shut the door a little harder than she needed to and turned quickly to find Grissom blocking her escape. He took one step towards her and bent his head, lowering his voice to a near-whisper.
"Look, I know that you're pissed off, Sara. Of course I noticed that you slammed the door earlier, and I'm sure I said something to warrant it, but I'm damned if I'm going to stand in a high traffic hallway of the lab and discuss it with you!" He was indignant, voice high even as he kept it low.
"You're sure you said something to warrant it? You have no idea what that was?" Sara shot back, incredulous.
"I can guess."
She nodded, her eyes trained on anything that wasn't him. "And you think that's okay? I only asked if you were going. I thought it was pretty simple."
He looked at her as though she'd just fallen through the ceiling. "Of course I'm not going. I'm not going to put myself in a situation like that with you surrounded by everyone we work with. Or full stop, for that matter? Isn't this hard enough? Don't you make this hard enough?"
Sara's eyes were hard. She dared a tear to form, her anger threatening to burn it up before it was born. A moment she had always thought she would treasure, the admission of something, anything between them, marred by the tirade of buck-passing.
"Actually, right now it seems pretty easy," she said, and slipped her jacket on. He pinched the bridge of his nose. When he spoke his voice had softened.
"Sara.. if I go.. if we both go..." He looked at her, demanding that she make the leap on her own, as though she should know exactly what he was trying to say. " I can't allow that to happen. For both our sakes."
Sara paused with one hand on the door. She did know, of course, but she wasn't going to make it any easier for him. "Can't? Or won't?".
"Sara.." She bowed her head, nodding as she flexed her fingers around the handle. As if she didn't know.
"I'm sorry, I didn't realise being in my presence was so unpleasant for you. You know Catherine much better than I do, if you want to go, just say the word, and I'll make an excuse. She'd expect that from me anyway…" She opened the door, as he tried to interject.
"I don't want to – "
But she cut him off, determined to have the last word. "And don't insult me by pretending you're doing any of this for my sake," she finished, and was gone.