Disclaimer: No infringement of copyright is intended. All characters originated with CSI:NY. Poetry not otherwise referenced is original.

A/N: Can you feel it winding up? This story has been going on long enough, don't you think? Just a few loose ends to tie together!

Spoiler Alert: Spoilers for Seasons 2 & 3, up to and including "Silent Night".


A Simple Act of (un)Kindness

How could it be, that I could not love you?

I held you in my arms and felt

Nothing.

How could it be that I could not thrill to your touch,

Wonder at the sweet perfection of you?

How is it that I could look at you with indifference,

With something akin to horror rather than fear?

I am damned and cursed into Hell forever,

Like the monsters of old who became a byword for

Evil so great it could not be explained,

Only named for the perpetrator.

How could it be, that I could not love you,

When you were mine to care for and nurture?

And how can it be that even now,

I can live with the knowledge?

For I did not love you.

SMT2007


Chapter 54: Visiting Hours

On the way to the hospital, Lindsay was finding it hard to breathe. John and Hawkes, who were driving with her, both seemed to know that she needed time to think about what she was likely to be dealing with when she finally got there.

"Let's face it," Lindsay thought, struggling to keep from screaming at Hawkes to drive even faster, "He's already tried to step away from me for my own good. More than once. What am I going to do if his father dies? How am I going to face his mother? What will I do if he pushes me away again?"

Finally Hawkes, frustrated, hit the sirens and lights to get through a crowded intersection, and simply left them on to get to Queen of Mercy as fast as they could.

With Hawkes in the lead, the Monroes were directed to the Trauma room, but once they had reached it, a nurse came out to meet them.

"Detectives? I'll have to ask you to wait here, please."

"Mr. Messer? Is he going to be okay?" Lindsay pleaded, but the nurse's cool professionalism said it all; the patient was not expected to survive.

"His family is with him now. I'm very sorry, but you'll have to wait."

Lindsay turned away, her heart twisting bitterly. Not family. Of course not. She wasn't family.

John put a gentle arm around her. "Linds, I'm going to go get you something to eat, okay?'

Her heart twisted again, remembering her brothers sneaking food into her at the hospital in Bozeman as she waited by Danny's bed for him to wake up. When John shook her a little, she looked up and saw his eyes, compassionate and worried, on her face, so she smiled as best she could and said, "Thank you, John. Coffee, at least, would be good now."

The nurse spoke up, "There's a good coffee shop just across the street, sir. Most of us go there if we can spare a minute or two."

John looked at Lindsay, one eyebrow raised, taking in her nod. "I'll be back in a few minutes, okay?"

Hawkes stepped aside to speak to the nurse for a minute, coming back to take Lindsay's hands in his. "Linds, they are talking to the doctors about taking Mr. Messer off life support. It will be a while, I think."

She looked at him blankly a moment, then blinked, suddenly realizing where they were. "Sheldon, go to Nasreen. Find out what's happening."

He shook his head, "I'll stay with you. They'll page me if there are any changes."

She shook his hands from hers, "Please? Go see her. Come back and give me good news, okay?" Lindsay hadn't met Nasreen, but she had seen Hawkes' face when he talked about her, and that told her everything she needed to know.

He frowned, "I don't want to leave you here by yourself."

She smiled as much as she could through stiff lips, and said, "I'm going to go sit in the chapel for a few minutes anyway, Hawkes. I need to … I just need to …"

"It's okay." He nodded understandingly. "You'll feel better if you take a little time, Lindsay. I'll leave a message for your brother. You go on – it's just down the hall and to your right."

Once in the small "Inter-faith Reflection Space", Lindsay slipped into a pew in a dark corner and closed her eyes. She wasn't sure if the desperate thoughts swirling through her head could really be called prayers, but she hoped God or whoever was listening to her would be able to work out what she was trying to say.

Images came to her of Danny: in the field, where he could flip seamlessly between professionalism and teasing banter; in her apartment, where he had torn her heart in half and mended it within one kiss; in her hospital room, staring down at her after Ross Adams had tried to kill her with a morphine overdose; at the cabin, trudging out in the snow storm to bring in wood for the fire, puzzling over how to split the largest log with the knot in the centre.

Danny, blood pooling on the floor at his feet, but standing with his gun in hand ready to protect her.

Danny, crying out in Italian, waking from a dream that left him drained and shaking.

"Ma. Ma. Talk to me."

Lindsay opened her eyes, and shrunk into the corner at the sound of voices. She wiped the tears off her face; she was not ready to face anyone else.

"Ma. I'm sorry. I tried, Ma, I tried to get to him in time."

Lindsay looked up in shock as the voice reverberated through her. Danny was following a woman up the aisle of the small room, automatically crossing himself as they stopped at the first set of chairs, even though there was no cross in the room.

"I will not talk to you. First you kill your brother, and now your father. You are a curse, Daniel Messer, as you have been since before you were born." The woman's voice was calm and ice-cold, and Lindsay could see Danny's face grow bone-white.

He did not argue or step away from her, though, and Lindsay wondered with an ache in her heart how often he had heard similar statements from his mother.

"He was doing the right thing, Ma. I want you to know that. He was trying to protect a girl, a young girl who Uncle Gino involved in something she had nothing to do with. Dad was doing the right thing."

"And look at what it got him. Going against Gino. What was he thinking? Gino always gets what he wants. Always did. Your father learned that years ago. What made him think this would be any different?'"

Danny sat in a pew behind his mother, who was now kneeling, clutching something, Lindsay thought it was a rosary, in her hands, and speaking rapidly under her breath.

"Ma. What do you mean? Uncle Gino gets everything he wants?"

"Once it was me."

The words were so quiet, Lindsay wouldn't have known for sure she had heard correctly if Danny hadn't stiffened.

His mother went on as if he was not in the room. "Before Louie. He came to me, told me he loved me. Told me he'd have married me himself, but Angela was already pregnant again. So he took me." The woman shook her head, but her voice did not change. "I gave myself to him. He said he loved me."

Danny sat forward, his head bent, hands clasped before him as if in prayer.

"Then Louie came, and Gino told Antony. So Antony never knew for sure if Louie was his or Gino's."

There was silence for several moments. Lindsay, still shadowed in the corner, almost forgot to breathe again.

"When Louie was two, Antony decided he would be sure of the next one. He locked me in our room for two weeks. Never left me alone. Took me until he was sure I was breeding."

Now Maureen's head came up a little, but her voice remained calm and uninflected. "With you. His Daniel. His son."

Danny did not move, did not speak.

Maureen looked up at the symbol at the front of the room, a sort of flame rising to the roof, and her lip twisted resentfully. "When I fell, he sent for his mother to be my jailer. Make sure his son was born healthy."

Danny voice came out on a thread of agony, "Mommy? Did you … try to get rid of the baby – of me?"

Maureen shrugged indifferently. "I fell," she repeated.

"Did you ever love him? Did you ever love me?"

Silent tears tore through Lindsay at the sound of her proud and confident Danny begging abjectly, but Maureen merely shrugged again and put her head down on her hands, her lips moving in prayer as her fingers read the beads.

Danny stood and staggered towards the door. As his hand reached for the handle, Lindsay touched him, her eyes filled with tears and love and an anger that radiated off her like heat.

It was a risk; she knew it was. He was as likely to turn on her, or turn away, as to turn to her. But it was a risk she had to take: a risk she was prepared to gamble the rest of her life on.

And as they stepped through the door together, Danny collapsed into her arms, and she held his shuddering body close against hers and murmured soft words of love and comfort.

-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY

"Sheldon. Thank God!" Kathleen stood up from the chair beside Nasreen's bed, pushing her red curls out of her face. "She's been conscious off and on for the past few hours. The neurologist says it is a good sign; if she can stay awake for an hour or two at a time, they will discharge her to go home." Tears streaked down her cheeks in well-accustomed paths, Hawkes could see.

He put a hand on her shoulder. "Kathleen, you really need to go home and sleep. You had your own scare, you know, and it has been a terrible day."

She brushed an impatient hand over her face, and said, "I'm fine. If I could just keep her awake for a little longer, Sheldon. Miriam has gone to talk to the doctors and figure out what kind of care she would need, but if we can't keep her awake, she'll have to stay here, and I know she doesn't want to…"

"Kathleen."

The voice was scratchy and barely above a whisper, but it was undeniably Nasreen's soft French- Canadian accent and it stopped Kathleen cold.

"Oh darling, you're awake again. Please Reeni, stay awake for me. Just a little while. If you do, Miriam and I can take you home with us."

Nasreen lifted a heavy hand to brush against Kathleen's wet cheek.

"I'll stay awake if you go home and sleep, Kathleen. I'll be fine here overnight. If you'll sleep until morning prayers, I'll stay awake."

Kathleen giggled a little, and Hawkes knew he had missed an in-joke. He didn't care though; Kathleen looked slightly relieved, and Nasreen was lucid and calm.

Miriam came bustling into the room in time to hear Nasreen's words, and from the grin on her face, she understood the joke as well. "You scared the living daylights out of us, you know. I am so glad you are awake." She wrapped her arms around Nasreen carefully.

Hawkes stepped back to let the three women re-connect, and leaned against the wall by the window to simply stare at Nasreen. She was grey with exhaustion and pain, her eyes heavy with the drugs she was on. Her lips were pale and tight. Her hands twitched nervously, and he could see from the heart monitor that the beat was heavy and irregular. Her hair had been pulled back severely from her face, and bandages covered part of her forehead and jaw.

He thought she had never looked more fragile, or more lovely.

It seemed hours, but he knew it was minutes only before Miriam and Kathleen took their leave of her, promising to return in the morning to take her home, promising to stock the kitchen with all her favourite foods, and rent all her favourite chick-flicks. She smiled as she waved them out, then turned her head to look at Hawkes with a deep sigh.

"So, Doctor? Tell me you are here as a criminalist, and not as an ME."

The joke was the final straw. Hawkes put his head down on the bed beside Nasreen and finally let loose the control he had been holding onto for hours now, maybe days.

One hand was clasped in his, and the other stroked through his short hair as she murmured soft words of comfort. When he finally lifted his head, her eyes were full of tears, but her face was serene.

As always, he thought. Calm always. Did any of it touch her? Or had she left strong emotions, personal connections, behind her when Amir had been gunned down in front of her by people too cowardly to step up to his face?

"I'm sorry about the clinic, Nasreen." He spoke carefully, not sure what else to say.

"The children? They were safe? Unharmed?"

He went through the details of what had been destroyed, and who had been harmed, sent home with bandages and a Trauma bear. He was sure that both Miriam and Kathleen had told her already, but knew that she would want constant reassurance until she could see the children for herself.

"And do you know who did this, Sheldon? Can you tell me anything about why our clinic was destroyed?" Her eyes were begging him for answers, but he hesitated. Although he had not been told to keep the information secret, the investigation was not yet complete, and Nasreen was involved, if no longer either a specific target or a suspect.

He saw it before he heard the sigh: the utter despondency of the exile, one who believes she will always be 'other', always be kept on the outside.

"Perhaps I should not have asked."

He sat up on the bed beside her, resting a foot on the chair he had been sitting on a moment before, and took both her hands in his.

"It wasn't political, Nasreen. Not the way you are thinking – not the way we were all thinking. It was about drugs and control."

Quickly, he explained the barest facts about organized crime in the city, some of which Nasreen knew from her own experience and observation. Some of it seemed to her to be mere Hollywood hype, but Hawkes assured her it was all true.

"So, the clinic was in the centre of the present fight, and Gino Messer decided he had to deflect attention after Caitlin's death. One of his … associates, Joseph Reagan, is a high school science teacher. He convinced the boys to do the run-through and generally shake things up."

"But did that not simply focus the police on the clinic even more than before?" Nasreen may have taken a knock on the head, thought Hawkes, but it hadn't hurt her ability to see through a situation clearly.

"I would think so. Gino may not have been happy about that little game; we don't know, and he isn't talking. But Reagan had a plan, I think. Having captured the interest of Homeland Security, he decided to do something that would confirm their belief that everything had something to do with home-grown terrorists. As a chemistry teacher, he would certainly have been able to figure out a simple pipe bomb."

And used the Zoo Poo fertilizer from St Augustine's, he thought, thus tying everything back to the church, whether he had meant to or not. One more thing for Flack to work out with his friend Tony Reagan.

Nasreen was quiet for a moment, her fingers entwined with his. "So it had nothing to do with me? Nothing to do with us, the local Muslims? Nothing to do with us providing abortions?"

Hawkes shook his head. "Nothing at all. None of it, Nasreen. You were just easy targets in the centre of the area they wanted to control. That's all."

And now the calm Hawkes had thought to never see broken was swept away in an avalanche of fear, anger, and sorrow. As she cried against him, as he soothed and comforted and stroked her hair in his turn, he heard his mother singing in the depths of his mind:

All my trials, Lord, soon be over.