Author's note: See Chapter 8 (also posted 5.16.06).

A/N 2: Bring on the angst. And comforting Grissom. A long-ish chapter, but hopefully worth the read.


Chapter 9

C'mon, honey. Let's get you home.

The words distantly register in some remote corner of my brain, but dimly and muffled, as if traveling through water. I allow Grissom to direct me like a stringed marionette. He opens the passenger door and guides me into the seat, with a gentle hand across my lower back. In an automatic, ingrained habit, I unconsciously attach the seatbelt across my waist, but all I can see are her haunted eyes. The invisible bruising, the hidden scars. The torment swimming buried in the depths of her gaze.

My mind flickers to another memory, of another girl, this one blond, but with the identical haunted look on her face. I dig deeper still, and suddenly I'm confronted with a memory of myself, bearing that same haunted look, my white-knuckled grasp on the hand of a faceless, nameless woman the only thing separating me from the suffocating darkness.

I think of all of the children's faces I've seen over the years, that have borne that look. So many. Too many.

That look of lost. Not of 'loss,' but of 'lost.' Lost hope. Lost happiness. Lost faith. Just lost.

Lost to the world.

Lost world.

My memory flickers through each and every one of the faces, flipping through them like snapshots in my mind, a whirring microfiche. Whirring faster and faster, the faces blurring together, but the eyes… the eyes never change.

Unblinking.

The expression they hold remains an invariable constant, across the spectrum of faces, the spectrum of time.

Whirring, whirring.

Rewinding through time at an accelerated pace.

When, suddenly, it stops. As if an unseen hand pressed 'pause,' had slapped an open-fisted palm against the tabletop, as if to say, "That's it. That's the one I was searching for."

The face in the photograph is mine.


I'm unaware of how much time has passed or where we are, when I curtly command Grissom to pull over. I fumble ineptly with my seatbelt, finally releasing the catch. It flails wildly as it retracts, the buckle bouncing solidly against my shoulder. I'm certain there will be a bruise tomorrow. I grapple blindly for the door handle, unable to coordinate the muscles of my hand with my eyes. As panic adds to my virulently roiling stomach, Grissom leans over and competently unlatches the door in a fluid motion. I stumble from the vehicle, landing on my knees in the packed dirt of the highway shoulder. The acidic bile burns my throat, and I wish that I could expunge the violent memories attacking my consciousness along with the contents of my stomach. Spatter them in the hard-packed Nevada soil.
I unlock the front door and walk unerringly through my heavily-shadowed apartment to the bathroom, my sole objective to wash away the invisible layer of tainted memories that coats my skin, more insidious than the suffocating stench of a decomp. However, there are no lemons to remove this film, for this defilement lies under my epidermis.

It blankets my soul.


I patter out of the bathroom in sweats and a t-shirt, furiously toweling my hair before resignedly tossing the towel behind me to lie in a sodden heap. I pause when I detect a soft glow emanating from the living room. I don't remember much about my entrance into the apartment, in my all-consuming haste to reach the shower, but I certainly don't recall stopping to switch on a lamp.

I cautiously duck my head through my bedroom doorway, and am astonished to see Grissom, perched rigidly on the edge of my sofa, apparently mesmerized by the contents of my coffeetable.

Laughing inwardly, I realize that I've unconsciously adopted my trademark pose – arms crossed, shoulder and hip resting against the doorframe. The coffeetable serves as a substitute for Grissom's desk, the obligatory physical barrier metaphorically symbolizing the emotional one.

All that's missing, I wryly think, Are the entomological displays.

I offer a self-conscious cough, to alert him to my presence, before dryly commenting, "I never thought Cosmo Teen would ever warrant such a concentrated perusal."

But, when my cough penetrates the silence, something different happens. Grissom springs to his feet, his gaze fastening relentlessly on mine. And it isn't the guarded, hesitant gaze of his office. It's… more open, concern clearly etched in the lucid pools of his eyes. Concern and… that other emotion. From earlier this morning. The one that eluded my identification. So transiently visible, that I suspect that I am only glimpsing the silhouette of the sentiment, rather than the sentiment itself; that I only witness the evidence of its passage, not the passage itself.

Considering that even this ephemeral glimpse effects me with the force of a roundhouse kick to the solar plexus, I wonder if I would survive the emotion unadulterated, pure. Like an eclipse, only safe to view through a protective medium, secondhand. Staring at it directly would sear my corneas, blind me with its intensity.

But, as before, the elusive emotion streaks across his gaze with the permanence of a meteor, flaring before being instantaneously buried once again behind his fortified walls. Leaving me gazing into twin shimmering pools of concern.

Apparently, humor isn't going to get me out of this conversation. And, as I'm currently in my apartment, and my car is occupying a space in the lab parking lot, escape isn't a viable option either.

Under the penetrating, discerning force of his gaze, my eyes falter, attempt to flee. Knowing that, if the visual contact remains unbroken, he'll peer into my hidden depths, my hidden dungeons, and see the demons lurking below.

"Sara…" he begins, softly, tentatively, asking, "How are you?"

"I'm okay, Grissom," comes my automatic response.

He merely blinks, implacably. Clearly unconvinced.

"I'll be okay," I amend.

He continues to pierce my soul with his eyes. A mute, What happened? floating on their stormy surfaces.

Haltingly, involuntarily, inexplicably relieved, I commence, "The scene… at the hospital… the little girl…" I flounder for words. "She's being forgotten, Grissom. Erased, right in front of our eyes. Disappearing, to a world, where touch doesn't exist; an existence devoid of contact. And her mother! Her mother just…" I shake my head, struggle for comprehension. "Hell, she's the one holding the eraser. She can barely even look at her daughter, let alone touch her. She just idly stands by, as her daughter fades away."

"Well," Grissom suggests, in an impossibly soft tone, "Grief afflicts us all in different ways."

"I just… don't understand, how people can be so… deliberately cruel… can have such capacity…" I trickle off.

Idly hoping that this emotional outburst will suffice to appease Grissom's baffling need to console.

But… no. He has resumed his perch on my couch. Stolid. Undeterred. Hell, he's growing a damn taproot into my couch, like some kind of invasive plant.

And those eyes. Those damn eyes. Lancing my soul. Unlocking the prison gates of my buried demons.

Struggling to gather the tattered shreds of my façade around me, my mantle of invisibility. To disguise my pain.

But, as I gather them together, Grissom's hands, his eyes, are there, relentlessly pulling them away, not allowing me my retreat into myself.

The feeling of being trapped, caged by my apartment walls, that tormented me yesterday afternoon, resurfaces. I feel awkward. Uncomfortable. Exposed.

And, conundrically – safe. I may be trapped, by my past, by my demons. But someone is trapped alongside me.

No, not 'someone.'

Grissom.

The awkwardness returns, but with a different cause.

I feel the need to do something, to act, to move. Normally, following an emotionally-laden shift like this one, I'd grab a beer, put on an angst-ridden CD, and drown the pain and anguish in poetry.

But alcohol would only compound my torment today – sleep will not be a haven, as the nightmares lie in wait. And the smell of beer would only trigger memories, would summon demons already too close to the surface of my consciousness.

Words, distantly familiar, trickle through the strata of my mind, reordering, rearranging, into a recognizable pattern:

A power is growing on me, an old tenacity.
I am breaking apart like the world. There is this blackness,
This ram of blackness. I fold my hands on a mountain.
The air is thick. It is thick with this working.
I am used. I am drummed into use.
My eyes are squeezed by this blackness.
I see nothing.
(#)

Yeah, poetry is definitely not a safe avenue either.

So, instead, I pace. Prowling my apartment. Seeking some weakness in the prison walls, penning me in the darkened corridors of my past.

Grissom's eyes silently tracking my movements.

I think of how, not 24 hours ago, I mentally replayed this very scene, the reopening of old scars, Grissom, sitting on my couch, excavating my past. Hell, I've been reliving it, on an endless loop, since arriving at the Hudson crime scene. Since looking into Mandy's eyes.

Can such innocence kill and kill? It milks my life. (#)

But, I survived that encounter with the demons of my past. Not 'unscathed.' No, I acquired a myriad of bruises and scrapes. But, I emerged with thicker prison walls, fortified steel in the gates. My scars a little more resilient, a little less visible.

And now, Grissom is once again plundering my soul, exposing my buried demons, releasing their prison gates. And yet, he stands there with me, beside me, defending me against those very demons; he bandages the wounds he reopens, he rebuilds the prisons he tears down. And, the scars that form will be even more durable, the prisons even more secure.

I'll never banish the demons; they will forever reside in my soul.

But maybe, one day, they will never be able to roam free.

Someday, perhaps, they will never escape again.


I wonder where to start. How to start. How does one voluntarily eviscerate one's soul? Splay oneself open without disguise?

Well, I sardonically muse, Last time I just walked up to the cliff and threw myself over the edge. A 'leap of faith.'

And Grissom was there, to shoulder the fall.

And so, I dive headlong from the cliff, once again. Knowing that Grissom will unerringly find my demons, relentlessly track them, no matter what words I use. Throwing out a sentence, a random revelation, as if we were in the middle of a conversation, rather than the outset of one:

"My mother was diagnosed bipolar. When she was committed. After my father died."

Grissom remains silent, allowing me to pace my confession.

"She self-medicated with alcohol…

"My father medicated with his fists."

"And you?" comes the soft inquiry.

"Me?"

"How did you… medicate?" he gently inquires.

"My medication was books. They provided me an escape, a means to assume a different life, to live in a different world. Books were my sanctuary."

Continuing, "Books, I could trust. Because they never change. They never lie. The outcome, the ending, it's always the same, no matter how many times you read it.

"Books, I could trust," I repeat, staring with sightless eyes out my apartment window, absorbed by the steely grey of the overcast skies. "It was just easier not to trust people. Less pain. Less chance of getting hurt."

"'It is impossible to go through life without trust. That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all: oneself.'" Grissom gently breaks the silence, identifying the author, "Grahame Greene."

Whirling around to face him, I furiously expel the words, "You think trust is a concept that comes easily to me? Christ, Grissom! I grew up in a house where my father vacillated between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde based on the performance of his damn baseball team. And my mother's emotional gauge centered on how many open beer bottles littered the breakfast table in the morning."

Tempest passed, I collapse bonelessly on the couch.

Wearily, I continue, "Trust," I scoff. "I never had a stable adult presence in my youth. Hell, I never had a stable anything in my youth. My teenage years, I was passed around, from foster home to foster home, like a discarded trinket, the leftovers that nobody wanted to scrape onto their plate. I sought refuge in books, escape in the worlds of the written word. But even that only served to differentiate me further from everyone.

"It wasn't until college, until Harvard, that I began to piece myself to together again. And it wasn't until I discovered the world of forensics that I regained my equilibrium, my stability, that I located the cornerstone of a foundation upon which I could rebuild my life, my self."

Continuing softly, "You gave me that, Grissom. You gave me this world. This purpose. This voice, that I didn't know I had. The voice to speak for those who have lost theirs, until they can rediscover them."

"Like Mandy Hudson?"

I nod in silence.

"Like the teenage Sara Sidle?"


The tears, when they come, arrive in an unstoppable torrent, the anguish a physical pain in my chest. I resort to the defenses of my childhood, adopting the mannerisms of my adolescence – seeking invisibility, curling inward, retreating into myself, physically and psychologically, attempting to make myself as small as possible. Drawing my knees to my chest. Hugging them tighter. Pulling my mantle of invisibility around me.

Except that Grissom is there, stealing it away.

I can't hide from him.

Somehow, his arm has replaced my protective cloak, snaking around my shoulders. Pulling me to him, in an unspeakably awkward embrace.

I've never felt so safe.

My nose nestled in the juncture of his arm and shoulder, I breathe in the scent that is indefinably Grissom. I don't allow myself to think of the infinite awkwardness that will descend upon us, upon our relationship, tomorrow. I just breathe in and out, letting the tears fall unchecked, letting my soul bleed its torment and anguish.


An indefinite period of time later, emotionally spent, I feel the heavy weight of leaden eyelids, from the cathartic release of stockpiled tears, accruing interest for over two decades.

Sleep claims me, and with it the blissful absence of sensation.


In the gauzy transition that exists between dreams and waking, I feel my body being shifted, my head being gently guided to the feathery cushion of a pillow, and I struggle to surface through the strata of consciousness. Before I exit the realm of slumber, however, a soft, indecipherable murmuring sounds in my ear, easing me back into sleep's embrace. A cocoon of cotton blankets me, capturing warmth against my chilled soul, and a semi-conscious corner of my brain idly notes the competent hands tucking my cottony chrysalis around me.

I'm reasonably confident that I only imagined the gentle brush of fingertips through my hair.

And I'm certain that the soft press of lips to my forehead was woven from the fabric of my dreams.


(#) Excerpts from the poem Three Women, by Sylvia Plath, 1962.

A/N: This was a tough chapter to write, trying to convey all the emotion yet still keeping things realistic. As I mentioned, I'll be internet-less for a few days, but hopefully will be able to post again by the weekend. I'd love to hear your feedback on the last couple of chapters!