Some of the characters and situations in this story belong to Alliance Atlantis, CBS, Anthony Zuicker and other entities, and I do not have permission to borrow them. Others strongly resemble characters that sort of belong to ABC, though I seriously doubt anyone cares at this point. The rest belong to me, and if you want to play with them, you have to ask me first. No infringement is intended in any way, and this story is not for profit. Any errors are mine, all mine, no you can't have any.

Spoilers: general fifth season through "Unbearable"

Note: this is a sequel to "Rollercoaster", which really should be read first. It is an AU futurefic that includes a number of original characters.

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To Grissom, the summer seemed to fly past. Time had never usually weighed heavy on his hands before, except on certain occasions when he was waiting for lab results, but he'd gotten to the point where he rarely sensed the passage of days. Now he found himself savoring each one, and occasionally wishing he could slow time down a bit; there was always a small secret fear that their present happiness couldn't last. Not that he thought Sara was just going to pack up and leave him, not now, but he knew better than most the tragedies that can strike out of nowhere.

Their friends found out about their engagement, of course; neither Grissom nor Sara actually mentioned it to anyone else, but they met Catherine, Nick and Warrick for drinks the Saturday after their trip to the pet store, and Catherine spotted the ring about three seconds after they'd all sat down. Sara patiently endured the squealing; Warrick raised his brows at Grissom, who smirked back. He just couldn't help feeling a little smug.

Catherine insisted on bestowing a hug on Sara and a kiss on Grissom's cheek, which Sara took in good part and Grissom allowed; Nick and Warrick contented themselves with congratulations after Sara's glare dissuaded them from kissing her. "You two are such rats," Catherine said cheerfully, settling back in her seat next to Warrick. "How long, and you didn't tell anyone?"

"Just over a week," Sara protested good-naturedly, and Grissom put his hand on her leg under the table to reassure her. "We didn't want it all over the landscape right away."

"Well, now that we know we'll have to throw you a party--"

"No party," Grissom and Sara chorused in union, making Nick laugh.

"Be good or we won't invite you to the wedding, Cath," Grissom added. Catherine snorted but subsided.

Warrick put his arm over the back of Catherine's seat. "Why don't you tell them your news?"

Nick snickered, and Catherine gave Warrick a harmless glare. "My news?"

Warrick shrugged easily. "Okay, our news."

Sara looked speculative. Grissom cocked his head and regarded his old friend. "What's this, Catherine?"

She pretended to pout, but a smile defeated her. "Warrick and I are engaged too."

Grissom blinked, truly surprised. Sara leaned over and thwapped Warrick lightly on the arm. "Talk about keeping secrets! It's Catherine you're engaged to?"

Warrick took Catherine's hand in his. "Yep. We're keeping it under the radar for the moment; the only other two people who know are Nick and Greg. And Linds, of course."

"Warrick's due a promotion soon," Catherine explained. "When we're on the same level, we'll get married."

"You're still going to keep the supervisor position, though, right Cath?" Nick asked, leaning back in his chair.

"Damn straight," she said, grinning. "The Sheriff may give me a little trouble, but we're not breaking any rules, and our solve rate has Isabeau on our side."

Grissom shook his head. "I wouldn't bet against you. Congratulations, both of you."

As the five of them sipped drinks and chatted, he wondered a little at how Warrick and Catherine had managed to keep their secret. Warrick's discretion he didn't doubt, but being engaged seemed like something the more expressive Catherine would have trouble concealing. Still, they managed it, he conceded. I'm not the only one who's learned over the years.

And in the end he was happy for them. They both deserve it. And…it's been a long time coming.

Almost as long as he and Sara, in fact. As if she guessed the tenor of his thoughts, Sara's hand slid into his, though she didn't turn away from her cheerful argument with Nick, and Grissom held it tightly and gloried in his blessings.

xxxx

Early in August, as they were washing dishes on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, Sara spoke up. "Ed and company are headed out to L.A. next week. They want us to come visit soon after that."

Once, Grissom might have questioned the "us", but no longer. "For how long? I've got a few days of vacation."

"I'm thinking a long weekend," Sara said, taking a pot lid from him and drying it. "That'll give us time to mess around with the kids, and time to visit your mom too."

"She'll be delighted." Grissom rinsed a pot. "Want to introduce the kids to her? We could all go out to lunch."

Sara blinked. "Are you sure? They can get pretty rambunctious. As you know."

Grissom shrugged. "She won't mind, she likes children. And it'll give Grace and your brother a little time alone together."

She snickered. "Sold! Joey'll be excited to try out his ASL." Kimmy's interest in the language had faded after a couple of lessons, but Joseph had been fascinated, and Grissom had made an effort to teach him a little when they had time. "Do you want to drive, or fly?"

Grissom considered. "Let's fly this time. It takes about the same amount of time total, but if we're only going to be there a few days, we'll have more energy." He unplugged the sink and rinsed his hands.

Sara dried the pot and put it away. "Sounds good. Let me know your schedule and I'll make the reservations." She hung the dishtowel neatly on its rack. "Okay, we finished everything on the list for today, right? Where is it?"

Grissom picked up the scrap of paper lying on the breakfast bar, to which he had added something when she wasn't looking. "Not quite, there's one thing left."

She frowned, and angled her head for a look at it. "What is it?"

As she read, Grissom assumed an innocent expression, but it dissolved into a smirk the moment she started laughing. "You really think we can do that?"

"We'll never know unless we try," Grissom pointed out cheerfully.

Sara put her hands on her hips and looked at him consideringly, then pursed her lips, merry-eyed. "Why not."

Delighted, Grissom decided to surprise her, and crouched so that he could lift her up over his shoulder in a piratical carry. Sara shrieked and then laughed, trying not to kick. "Gil!"

"No time like the present," he pointed out, and carried off his prize to the bedroom.

xxxx

Sara was almost sure that Grissom was going to miss the flight, but he came striding into the gate waiting area right at the first boarding call, frowning with irritation. Sara smiled with relief and handed him his ticket and carry-on, and they joined the boarding line.

"At least it was fresh," Sara said in a low voice, referring to the last-minute dead body on the south side of town. "You don't reek."

Grissom snorted, still annoyed with Brass to judge by his grumbling, but she could tell he was beginning to relax. "What was he going to do?" Sara asked. "Night was tapped out and Nick said that half of Days had court this morning."

"I know, I know," Grissom muttered, his rancor easing. "But next time he can process the body himself."

Sara snickered, and Grissom smiled reluctantly back. She knew quite well that he would never walk away from a case where he was truly needed, but he had to vent a little steam. "I'm just glad we packed yesterday," he added.

"It did make things easier," Sara agreed as they handed in their tickets. Grissom had even gotten a few hours of sleep before Brass' call had woken them both.

They found their seats and stowed their bags; Grissom smothered a yawn as the plane began backing away from the gate. "D'you mind if I take a nap?"

Sara refrained from rolling her eyes. "Of course not. I'll wake you when we start descending."

Grissom gave her one of the sweet smiles that always made her breath catch, wadded up his jacket as a pillow between his head and the window, and took her hand in his. "Just until I fall asleep," he muttered, and closed his eyes.

Sara swallowed, and resisted the urge to kiss him. Grissom toyed with the ring on her finger for a moment before his muscles relaxed, and though the latest issue of the Environmental Forensics Journal waited for her in her bag, she couldn't bring herself to pull her hand free until long after the plane had reached cruising altitude.

The flight wasn't long; Sara shook Grissom awake as the plane started down, and he rubbed his eyes until she handed him a bottle of water from her bag. "Feel better?"

"A little," he conceded. "Greg keeps going on about power naps, but he also drinks those energy concoctions."

Sara rolled her eyes. "Greg's going to blow out like an overinflated tire one of these days."

The landing was smooth. As promised, Ed was waiting for them as they emerged from behind the security barriers; knowing what was coming, Sara braced for the rush, and found her arms full of joyfully shrieking niece. Out of the corner of her eye she watched Grissom's startled expression with amusement when Joseph gave him a similar full-frontal assault-hug, and grinned when he returned the embrace; a moment later Kimmy gave way to her brother, but turned suddenly shy and didn't offer Grissom a hug. He took this in calm stride, just giving her a warm nod.

Ed, who had let his offspring take the lead, came up to shake Grissom's hand and hug his sister enthusiastically. "It's good to see you," he said in Sara's ear, and she laughed and shoved at his shoulders.

"It's good to see you too, but I kinda like breathing, you know." Ed released her with a smirk, and slapped Grissom's shoulder lightly.

"C'mon. There's burgers and potato salad waiting at home, and yes I got veggie burgers."

Sara, whose hands had been claimed by her small relations, laughed again. "I never doubted you, Ed."

The trip to the house was fraught with traffic, but to Sara's assessing eye Grissom seemed quite comfortable. He took the minivan's front passenger seat and almost immediately became embroiled in discussion with Ed, while Sara sat in the back seat so Joseph and Kimmy could tell her all about the move and their new neighborhood.

It felt very good to be back among her family. Sara immersed herself in tales of palm trees, big bugs, new rooms, new neighbors, horses, trucks, planes, and school plans. Kimmy asked to see the ring, and Sara let her examine it without removing it; of course Joey had to follow suit, but he wasn't really interested. Kimmy pronounced it "neeeeat," though, which pleased Sara for no good reason.

The house was, as promised, close to the Whitney campus, in a neighborhood that looked very Midwestern except for the palm trees. It was a little smaller than Ed's place in Virginia; but, Sara admitted, the family no longer needed a studio-cum-extra bedroom. As soon as she was out of the car, Kimmy had her hand. "You gotta see my new room!"

"I have to--" Sara began, pointing towards the rear of the minivan, but Ed waved her on.

"I got it, sis, you go ahead."

Joseph grabbed Grissom's hand and towed him along towards the house, thwarting his similar move towards the luggage, and Sara gave in and let herself be pulled indoors.

The house was all on one level, and Sara noted that the open living room was pleasantly cluttered even though it still had a few boxes piled on one side. Then it was down a short hall, Joey and Grissom not far behind, and into a sunny yellow room that still smelled a little like fresh paint. Everything was in place; Sara oohed and admired as Kimmy proudly showed off all the aspects, including the ever-so-slightly crooked curtains that Grace had helped her sew. The wide window looked out onto a back yard with a somewhat shaggy lawn; from that, Sara deduced that Ed had about as much time as she'd predicted to spend on yard work--that is to say, none.

"Daddy even let me paint the closet," Kimmy added, opening the door for inspection. Sara peered in, and pronounced it good. The room was relatively tidy, everything with its own place, and Sara noticed that Ed had finally given in and bought Kimmy the canopy bed she'd been begging for.

Joseph's room, when Sara got that far, also had a fresh coat of paint, and also showed the design of a room consciously set up rather than grown into. It was much messier than Kimmy's, with Legos, cars, and whatnot scattered all over the carpet, but that was Joey; he too had curtains, dinosaur ones, that were much more crooked than Kimmy's but that he proudly declared he had sewn as well.

Eventually she and Grissom were released to see the rest of the house. Ed's bedroom was chaos; the guest bedroom lacked fresh paint but was otherwise ready. They found Ed in the kitchen, which was also ready for use; Sara admired the stove set in the island and the elbow room in general.

"You hungry?" Ed asked, his voice slightly muffled, as he was bent over to peer into the refrigerator. "'Cause I can start up the grill any time."

Sara glanced at Grissom, who cocked his head to indicate his willingness to follow her lead and then put his arm around her waist. "Sure, that sounds good," Sara replied, relaxing against Grissom.

Ed straightened, hands full of packages, and grinned at them. "Da--man, you two look good together."

Grissom chuckled at Ed's near-slip. "I take it the frog bank moved with you?"

Ed rolled his eyes and dumped the packages on the counter. "Oh yeah--can't do without ice cream, you know. Though the kids have discovered gelato." He shuddered ostentatiously. "They don't make Rocky Road gelato."

"Poor you, raising a couple of budding Angelinos," Sara teased. "Hey, what can we do to help with lunch?"

The meal was a merry affair on the back sun porch, both kids still full of stories and Ed giving hilarious character sketches of his new colleagues when his children flagged. Kimmy pestered Sara with questions about Las Vegas, and Joey wanted to hear all about the new tarantula, whom Grissom had eventually named Araña.

"So what's the plan again?" Ed asked as Kimmy cleared the table and Joseph pored over a book about treehouses.

Sara and Grissom exchanged glances. "Well, tomorrow you're going to show me Whitney, and Gil's going to go see his mom and take her out to lunch," Sara answered.

"And on Sunday we were thinking that maybe the kids would like to have dinner with her," Grissom added.

At Ed's slightly surprised expression, Sara poked him gently with one foot. "We'd be abandoning you and Gracie, of course, but I'm sure you'll be able to find something to do."

Ed's ears pinkened slightly, but he just snorted. "We might, at that."

After lunch Sara was inveigled into a lengthy game of Monopoly, leaving Grissom and Ed free to talk in low voices at the other end of the big living room. "Isn't Joseph a little young for that game?" Grissom asked, curious, as he watched the three of them set up the board.

Ed shrugged. "He says he's old enough. We usually skip the bidding and mortgaging bits to make it a little simpler, stuff like that; it saves arguments."

"I always liked the shoe best," Grissom murmured, remembering a few games decades before.

Ed laughed. "You could join them."

Grissom shook his head, not wanting to divert Sara's attention from the children. "No thanks. Playing with Sara is an educational experience--I prefer Trivial Pursuit, as I'm less likely to have my…ah…backside handed to me."

"Ohhh yeah." Ed leaned back in his chair, his face lit with memory and mischief as he regarded his little sister. "Yeah, 'competitive' is too weak a word for Sara once she gets going."

Remembering certain recent incidents, Grissom agreed. He hadn't realized that there was such a thing as strip Scrabble, for instance…nor that it could be so much fun to lose.

The players were choosing their game pieces, and Grissom's attention was suddenly caught by Kimmy, whose expression of concentration was so like her aunt's that Grissom felt slightly displaced, as though he were in a dream. Then she selected the thimble, and the expression dissolved; but Grissom stared at her, transfixed, until Ed waved a lean hand in front of his eyes. "Hey?"

"Sorry." Grissom turned back to the younger man, a little dazed. "I just--for a second, I saw Sara in her face."

Ed chuckled. "Weird, isn't it? Most of the time Kimmy looks just like her mom, but every once in a while it's like looking at Sara when she was little."

"What was she like?" Grissom asked, curious. Sara had never said much about her childhood, and even then any stories she told were by necessity from her viewpoint.

Ed shrugged again, an easy gesture. "Pretty much the way she is now--curious, serious, and driven as all heck." He rolled his eyes at the substituted word. "She always had to find out how, where, why, didn't matter what it was. She took apart my pocket transistor radio when she was nine--and put it back together again, believe it or not."

"Oh, I believe it," Grissom said, amused. "Did it still work?"

"If I held it upside down, sure," Ed said with a wry grin. "She spent a summer raising a whole garden, once. I even caught her out there one night trying to stake seedlings after Dad…after it got run over." The flicker of his eyes was not towards Sara but his children, and with a pang Grissom realized that Ed was probably censoring the story so that Joey and Kimmy would not hear about their grandfather's behavior. "She put all her time into that thing, and then the next summer she didn't look at the garden once. She'd found out all she wanted to know."

That didn't quite match the Sara that Grissom knew, but he reflected that a child might easily believe that there were limits to knowledge. "Usually the only way I could get her to take time off was to attend some kind of class or seminar."

"Bingo." Ed snapped his fingers. "She got through high school in three years and read practically everything the library had to offer in the sciences, not that there was a whole lot. I sometimes think that if she'd been just a year or two younger, she'd have been the next Bill Gates. But computer classes didn't hit our schools until we'd already graduated."

Grissom shook his head. "I sometimes wonder what the science of physics missed when she went into criminalistics instead."

"Who knows?" Ed regarded her with a fond smile as she rolled dice and moved her token. "But she loves what she does, that's the important part."

x

"So am I bunking with Kimmy, or what?" Sara asked her brother after dinner, helping him wash the dishes and listening to the shouts of the kids, Grace, and Grissom tossing a Frisbee around the backyard. Grace had joined them for dinner, which she did more often than not, according to Kimmy.

He gave her a slightly offended look. "Noooo. You guys get the guest room. It's got a double bed."

Sara raised her brows at him. "Yeah? What happened to appearances?"

Ed shrugged. "You're engaged."

"And that makes it okay? What if we decide to break it?"

He rolled his eyes. "Like that's going to happen. Look, do you really want to bed down on Kimmy's floor? She still talks in her sleep."

"Nah, that's okay. So does that mean that you and Gracie get to share a room when she comes over?"

"No, we're…I haven't asked her yet, and keep your voice down," Ed hissed, half-annoyed, half amused at her teasing.

"Better do it soon," Sara admonished.

"Or what?"

"Or I'll tell her about the time you proposed to Miranda Helgasdottir in fourth grade," Sara threatened with a grin.

Ed's eyes narrowed. "You wouldn't dare."

"Would too."

Ed cupped his hands in the dishwater and threw some at her, but Sara dodged the splash, laughing, and snapped him smartly on the rear with her dishtowel. Ed's howl of mock rage filled the kitchen. "Oh, you're in for it now!"

Sara shrieked for effect and fled through the house, Ed in hot pursuit. She made it to the backyard, but the resultant tickle fight ended up involving both kids, with Grissom and Gracie applauding from the sidelines. Finally all the combatants collapsed in the grass, panting and giggling. Gracie and Grissom exchanged glances, and without discussion came to lie down too.

They all watched the sky as the light gradually faded and the blue overhead deepened and grew luminous with sunset. Eventually Ed spoke lazily, making his son giggle since Joey's head was on his abdomen and bounced with each word. "It's getting too dark for Frisbee."

"I saw a luminous one for sale once," Grissom replied, equally lazy. He had taken Sara's hand in his, and she felt extremely peaceful, cradled in the grass with her lover and her family. "But I'm not sure how one is supposed to see one's target in the dark."

"Glow-in-the-dark T-shirts?" Gracie suggested from the other side of Ed.

This prompted a range of ideas from the practical--glowing necklaces--to the silly--making beeping noises to track by. Finally, as the stars emerged, Ed stretched and yawned.

"I don't know about you guys, but there's some cookies in the house calling my name."

Joey and Kimmy bounced to their feet and ran inside. Gracie gave a theatrically groaning Ed a hand up from the ground, and they followed, but when Sara went to sit up Grissom rolled over and held her gently down.

"Are you really that hungry for dessert?" he whispered, smirking a little.

Sara chuckled, and slid her arms up over his shoulders, pulling him down. "Depends on what's on the menu."

His lips found hers with a murmur of pleasure. They shared long slow soft kisses in the dark for a while, just enjoying each other. Faintly Sara heard Kimmy asking where she was, and Gracie's reply--"She's still out with Doctor G. They need some alone time."

Thanks, Grace. Such simple bliss it was, Sara found, and yet it had been impossible for so long. She shivered under the touch of Grissom's mouth, and he lifted his head, concerned. "Are you cold?"

"Nah."

Nonetheless, he shifted to his back next to her, putting one arm under her head, and they watched the stars' glory above them, simply and blissfully content.

See Chapter 37