hiya! so sorry for the uber long wait; school's been a pain, but now that that's done, you've got roughly two months of me & CaRWash stories! yay! haha :)

i hope this doesn't get too confusing as the chapters come along, mostly because it'll be jumping back & forth on the timeline. but it made sense in my brain so i'm just trying to relay it in words & hope it'll make sense in your brains too.

thanks a bunch for the reviews; keep 'em coming, cause they're like Red Bull, only non-caffeinated & way better.

haha enjoy!


If there was one thing Calleigh Duquesne knew about Ryan Wolfe, it was that he loved to run. His several-mile runs were actually the only thing she definitely knew about him.

She was aware he was a stickler for everything; one experience on his first day and endless tales from Eric didn't really make it clear-cut, so she chose not to count it. And that personal experience had only occurred because her father was involved in the case – if it was some other drunk, she'd have probably never intentionally decided to hang around him.

Rookie Ryan Wolfe joined the team when Tim Speedle (practically a veteran) met his fate in a jewelry store while on a case. Calleigh would never understand the ulterior motive behind Horatio's hiring of the former patrol officer, and though she felt that she was close to accepting the event, she knew she would never appreciate it. Or be nice to it.

Naturally, she and Eric Delko, and at times, their motherly medical examiner Alexx Woods, teamed up against the newbie. Only Horatio Caine seemed not to be holding a vendetta against the guy, but Calleigh liked to think it was because he was the boss; he had to look as if he cared.

And Ryan, without anyone else to turn to, grabbed it and held onto it as tightly as he could, even if it was just pretend.

A CSI's job was to be consistent in everything, and that was just what Calleigh was in every aspect of her life. She'd been consistent in her torment of the new kid, constantly ignoring him, interrupting him, taking seniority over him. She even left him at a scene by himself once, without him noticing. It was his fault, she remembered thinking, for not paying attention.

At first Ryan had taken it all in, kept quiet and reminded himself that he was there for the victims, not the people he worked with. He didn't want to be fired for acting out either – this was probably what they wanted to happen. But eventually they started to get on his nerves. He knew they didn't particularly like him for replacing their friend, but wouldn't it have been much easier if they didn't keep reminding him? How was he supposed to work efficiently and be completely focused if they kept on demonstrating their evident resentment over him?

So Ryan became defensive. Calleigh watched as he built a wall around himself, as if she could visibly see and feel the hard stone he was using to make shelter in a place that was supposed to be his second home. She didn't do anything about it, except maybe aggravate and catalyze the construction. With time it got easier to get mad at him, because he learned to be just as rude and inconsiderate with them as they were with him. He fought fire with fire, instead of just letting himself get burnt.

For every mistake she had or anything that had gone wrong, she found herself connecting it to Ryan somehow and blaming him for it. Unconsciously she knew it was wrong, but an opposing voice inside her head always told her that if it wasn't for him, none of it would have happened. Calleigh also realized that the two of them – sometimes with Eric – got into countless heated discussions because of her accusations, but she ended up stubbornly putting him at fault each time.

Toward the end of one such quarrel she said something about how she knows that he knew better than to slip up, and he angrily replied that she had no right to say that, since aside from his first and last names there was nothing else she knew about him (he also claimed that she never looks at him unless they were fighting, and she wouldn't even have registered his appearance then because of all the adrenaline from their shouting matches). He'd stormed off that day, and she didn't see him for weeks after that.

But now she knew about his running.

Admittedly, it wasn't even voluntarily learned. Calleigh had absolutely no intention in finding out about his daily jogs; it was just a big accident. It had happened after their last fight, when she'd assumed that Ryan must have asked Horatio to work solo cases because she never once caught him at work at the time.

The break from him had been good for her – she calmed down more. Enough, actually, to even consider that maybe she was too harsh towards him. After all, it wasn't his fault Speed got shot. Then again, he was too easy of a target to put the blame on, and because she did not properly mourn over her close friend, her grief took a wrong turn somewhere.

It got her thinking to all the past occurrences, when she brushed him off and kept walking down the hallway, when she purposely hung up on him to reduce having to talk to him, when she pressed the elevator button to close even though she saw him running to try and make it. Sure, they were small things, but then she remembered how many times she'd done them, and realized that they must have piled up to an unimaginable height. Add that to the hostility of Eric and Alexx (though Alexx softened after a while), and a newfound admiration for him emerged. If she was in his place, she would probably have already had a nervous breakdown, after blowing up at everybody, of course. She didn't know how he managed to still be sane, but undeniably wouldn't wish to know firsthand.

Her mind brought her back to the day of their last argument.


so this chapter is exceptionally mean, i think, but there's some resolution at the end & some niceness. i don't know whether i sold it right, in terms of fluidity & the realness of it. but that's what reviews are for. so please leave one. or two. =P