AN: Sorry for the long time to update and for the short chapter. I've been writing more in the later chapters as some ideas came to me the last couple of weeks. Hopefully, this will make the time between updates on chapters 11-15 shorter. As always, thanks for reviews – I always appreciate the feedback. Cheers and enjoy the season premiere this week.

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Catherine straightened from her bent position to set yet another evidence bag beside her kit. They had collected a ton of trace from the college dorm room already and that didn't include going through the sheets and clothing collected from the scene. She glanced over at Grissom, who was looking around the room with a grimace. A rape and murder on a college campus was never good, but this one had been particularly brutal, and while they had collected massive amounts of trace evidence from the room, nothing stood out as probative, or even especially helpful. It was going to be a long rest of the shift, chasing clues that would mostly turn out to be dead ends, Catherine could tell.

"Catherine, why don't you take all of this back to the lab and start collecting the rest of the trace?" To her half-hearted sigh as she eyed the mound of linens, he replied, "Have Sara help."

She suppressed another sigh at the thought, but said, "Sara? How about Greg?" In response to Grissom's pointed look, she tried to backtrack, "I mean, you know how these kinds of cases get to Sara."

"She's a professional, she can handle it." Gil watched Catherine absorb his words for a moment, and then added, "And just because your relationship is strained is not a good reason to keep her off the case." He indicated the mound of evidence with his hand. "We don't have the time to train Greg on every case, and we could use her skills on this."

Catherine did sigh then, but then nodded to acknowledge his point. "Ok, I'll see you back at the lab."

She found Sara, not surprisingly, in the DNA lab with Greg, prepping swabs and samples. She was hunched over a table, handing Greg tubes at a furious pace as he filled the machine, and when he was slow, she would glance over her shoulder and smirk at him until he laughed. Catherine cleared her throat as she stood in the door to announce her presence and found herself facing a frigidly cold glare from Greg as Sara's smile vanished in a heartbeat.

"Hey," she began, nervously edging into the room, extending a handful of evidence bags toward Greg almost like a peace offering. "I think we'll have more, but Grissom wants you to get started on these." Greg took them from her wordlessly and turned his back to her as he started to lay out the bags. "Um, Sara..." Catherine faltered when the murky depths of Sara's dark eyes gazed up at her; the expression was nowhere near as cold or angry as Catherine expected, but hurt lurking in her eyes was far worse. Fighting a sudden urge to enfold the younger woman in her arms, Catherine took refuge in her work. "I need you to help me go through a ton of linens to collect trace." In another wordless response, Sara nodded to her, waved to Greg, and headed out the door toward the layout room, so quickly Catherine had to hurry to catch up with her.

They worked in silence for the next few hours, tirelessly collecting evidence, but with none of the usual talk and speculation that helped pass the time and advance the case. Sara, Catherine noted, was professional as they worked, but she might as well have been alone as much as she interacted with, or even looked at, Catherine. Knowing she deserved the cold shoulder didn't make it any easier for her.

Straightening at long last, Catherine noticed shift had already ended and she was going to be late picking up Lindsey if she didn't leave soon. There were another stack of evidence bags she needed to drop off to trace, the evidence to secure, and her jacket in her locker... damn. "I'll finish up here." After the long silence, Sara's quiet voice startled Catherine. "You go pick up Lindsey."

Catherine shook her head. "You should go, I can...."

The first direct look from Sara in hours was her trademarked angry stubborn face, not a good sign. "I just have a little more to finish up with this," she said, hoisting the pillowcase in her hands, "and then I'll clear out, ok?"

"Sara, you are recovering, you need to go."

Sara's expression grew more stormy. "Go pick up Lindsey," she said, the clipped tone closing off any thought Catherine had of arguing further, so she just said 'thanks' and headed out to get her jacket.

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Catherine went to the layout room where she and Sara had been working first thing that night, finding it cleared and sterile with no brunette hunched over the table. The locker room and break room did not yield her either, and Catherine was about to go make the rounds of the labs in what was becoming a habitual search when Gil caught her elbow. "Come on," he said without preliminaries, "Brass finally located the boyfriend."

"Well, good evening to you too," she quipped, and he managed to look a little abashed as he steered her toward the parking lot. "What else do we have?" she asked, shifting into work mode quickly.

"A foreign object was found deep in the vic's wound tract and the wound itself has an unusual tool pattern." He passed her a folder. "Sara took pictures."

Catherine tried to slow their headlong pace as she shuffled through the pictures. "Sara took these? When?"

"I don't know," Gil answered, holding the door open for her, frowning in irritation when she made no move to go through it.

"You don't know? Did Sara clock out at all today?"

"Oh, I'm sure she did. She's still recovering from her injury."

"Yes, because Sara always puts herself and her health before her work," Catherine replied, doing nothing to disguise the sarcasm in her voice. "Gil, I should go check on her."

"Catherine, I'm sure she's fine. We'll check on her, after we get done with this interview." Grissom's voice was forceful as he swept his hand forward, indicating the still-open door which Catherine reluctantly walked through.

The interview ended up being a bust since the boyfriend had been visiting his parents in Oregon over the weekend and Grissom had insisted on running back to the crime scene to look for any unusual objects that might have caused the jagged marks on the woman's throat, so shift was halfway over before she could search for Sara again. She wasn't in any of the usual labs, and Catherine was almost convinced she had gone home when she caught a the sound of power tools as she passed near the tool room. Sara's hunched form was perched on the edge of a high stool as she worked the tool, her black pants and green short-sleeve shirt the same as she had been wearing this morning when Catherine had left her. She tossed the tool down on the table with a snarl and reached for another, only to gasp in pain and pull her left arm back quickly, cradling in against her body and rubbing the muscles in her upper arm and shoulder for a moment before reaching for another tool—with her right hand.

"You need to go and send Sara home," Catherine announced as she walked into Grissom's office. "She's been here all day and she's overdoing it." Gil's half-cocked head indicated his puzzlement, so she explained, "Her shoulder is bothering her."

"So send her home," he replied, his tone indicating his puzzlement as to why he should interrupt his work when she was the one who was concerned.

"Me? Gil, you're the supervisor, remember?"

"Yes. So tell her I told you to send her home." Her exasperated sigh filled the room, to which Grissom only smiled his famous zen-master smile. "Catherine, just because Sara is upset with you doesn't mean that I should be the intermediary between the two of you. And you should probably drive her home if her shoulder is really bothering her," he called to her retreating back.

The tool room was quiet when Catherine came back; Sara was examining the results of a cut through a magnifying glass. "Sara?" Catherine spoke quietly, not wanting to startle her. When Sara swung the stool around to face her, her eyes rimmed with exhaustion were the first thing Catherine noticed.

"What, Cath?"

"Gil told me to send you home." The exhaustion on her face retreated a little as anger flared in her eyes, but she couldn't sustain the emotion for long. "Ok."

Catherine stepped up to the table where the remains of many slaughtered pig necks were littered across the surface. "What are you working on?"

"I'm trying to find the tool that was used."

"Where were you? I can finish up."

The weariness in Sara's voice intensified. "I'm done. I tried every tool I could think of and a few that were just laying around here. Nothing matches the marks on our vic." She shook her head in disgust as she surveyed the remains of the experiment. "Nothing."

"Yeah, we hit a dead end with the boyfriend too." Sara took in the rows of tools hanging on the wall and Catherine knew she was about to pick up something else and try again. Sara was nothing if not determined. "Come on, let's get you home," she said, catching Sara's right arm to try to lead her away from the table.

"Just let me clean up," Sara started, trying to pull away. Catherine tightened her grip. "No, I'll clean up. After I've driven you home." They were almost out the door, but Sara jerked her arm out of Catherine's grasp, not even bothering to hide the wince of pain that crossed her face. "I can drive myself home."

"Sara, your shoulder... I saw you try to pick up a tool with your left hand and you couldn't."

"What, you... you're spying on me?"

Catherine ignored the outlandish accusation, and focused on the argument that she hoped would sway Sara. "You have a standard and your shoulder is bothering you. If you re-injure it, it'll be even longer before you are back in the field." Catherine let her worry color her words. "And... I want to make sure you get home ok. Please?"

Catherine wasn't sure, but she thought that that last appeal was the one that worked as the tension seemed to drain from Sara's tall frame. "Ok," she relented, letting Catherine draw her away.

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The short drive to Sara's apartment was mostly done in silence, the muted jazz on the radio competing with the traffic noise to provide a soundtrack. Catherine noticed that Sara's eyes closed within a few seconds of them getting into the Tahoe, and Catherine knew it was a sign of just how tired the younger woman was to let her guard so far down. Circling around well-worn thoughts, Catherine wished there was something she could say or do to ease the strain between them. Sara was strictly professional and even courteous at work, which Catherine appreciated, but she found she missed the personal interactions with Sara she had gotten used to in the past few weeks. She pulled up to apartment building and cut the engine, startling Sara out of a half-doze. "Thanks," she mumbled as she started to open the door.

"Do you still have some of those pain meds?" Catherine asked out of the blue, suddenly wanting to keep Sara with her. "You should take one, it'll help you sleep."

Sara half-turned, outlined clearly by the streetlight outside the window, but her face in shadow. "Yeah, I was planning on doing that. My shoulder is killing me."

"I'll... um, have Nick swing by before shift and pick you up." Resisting the urge to volunteer herself, even though she wanted to, Catherine volunteered the colleague who lived closest.

"Oh, yeah, I forgot about my car. Thanks," she repeated, once again reaching for the door handle.

"Sara?" Catherine stopped her once again, laying her hand lightly on Sara's. "I just wanted to tell you I'm not going to stop trying to fix the damage I've done." The back lighting cast Sara's expression in deep shadow, and Catherine had no idea how her words were registering. She forged ahead anyway. "Your friendship is important to me, and I'm not going to go away. My actions were inexcusable, but I just hope I can prove to you how much I regret them. But I'm not going away."

Sara nodded her head slowly before climbing out of the SUV and heading up the stairs, feeling Catherine's eyes on her the whole time.