A/N: As always, thank you for the reviews and feedback. I know everyone is waiting for the inevitable reunion between Sara and Grissom. It will happen *very* soon, I promise. :) Until then, I still love hearing your thoughts about the progression of the story.

Days blurred together for Grissom. He neither ate nor slept, the thought of food roiling his stomach nearly as much as the nightmares he endured whenever exhaustion managed to claim him.

In his dreams, Sara was always in front of him, tied to that chair, fighting not to scream as he did unspeakable things to her. And then, in the final moment which would catapult him back to consciousness, her muffled screams at the sight of the gun in his hand would ring clearly in his ears.

He occupied his hours with work for the first few days, packaging up his mother's old clothes and books to donate to charity. Periodically he missed his own house with his own possessions, but the thought of returning there, for any reason, still sickened him. When his cell phone rang, which it rarely did, he let the calls ring through to voicemail. Eventually, he turned it to silent and left it in a drawer until the battery could die.

After spending a week in the sweat pants and t-shirts he had found at his mother's house, he had retrieved his cell from the drawer and dialed Catherine. Thankfully, she was willing to take pity on him and brought a suitcase full of clothes and other personal effects from his townhouse.

"Thank you," he told her in person as he received the much-needed items, putting as much emotion into the statement as he could muster.

"How are you holding up?" She asked the question after squeezing past him through the front door, not bothering to wait for an invitation to enter which she knew would not be forthcoming.

"I'm… alive," he remarked, any other answer sounding wildly optimistic in his estimation.

"Have you been eating?" she asked, opening the fridge to reveal its bare shelves.

Grissom said nothing as she already had her answer.

"Sleeping?" she asked, turning to look at him

He remained silent in the face of that inquiry as well. After shaking her head at him in annoyance, Catherine deliberately looked him up and down with her usual appraising eye, and he could tell that she was ready to give him a scolding for not taking care of himself.

Hoping to avoid Catherine in full-on 'mom mode,' he inquired softly, "How is she?"

A name was not needed. They both knew he asked about Sara, and Catherine knew that news of her meant more to him than any sustenance food could provide.

"Maybe if you answered your phone once in a while," she muttered under her breath before providing a report. "She's recovering well. They'll probably let her out of the hospital to finish convalescing at home in the next few days. Until then, she's driving Greg and Nick crazy. They trade off going to sit with her. Sometimes Warrick or I fill in, but…"

Catherine trailed off, the rest of her statement not needing to be said aloud.

But she would rather you were there.

Ignoring her unspoken nudge, Grissom asked, "She's still under guard?"

Nodding, Catherine answered his next question before he could pose it. "And no sign of Brenda Waters. They're still looking, but she seems to have gone to ground for the time being."

Silence fell between them then, and Grissom wrapped himself in a cloak of numbness while she studied him carefully.

"What do you plan to do?" she asked finally.

Shrugging in indifference, he looked at her with haunted eyes. "I don't know. Nothing? I can't think of anything to do."

"Grissom…"

"My life is over, Catherine," he told her, realizing the truth of that statement even as it left his mouth. "There is nothing for me to do now."

"That isn't true," she insisted. "What about the lab? And Sara? She needs you. We all need you."

"I am the very last thing Sara needs," he stated pointedly, anger beginning to well up inside of him.

But the tender expression on his friend's face cooled his fury, and Grissom chastised himself anew for taking out his feelings on her.

"She still loves you," Catherine affirmed. "She asks about you every time I talk to her. She's worried."

His stomach twisted at the thought of Sara lying in a hospital bed, worrying about him.

"You should go," he said simply.

Ignoring his statement, she went on, "I'm worried, too. We all are. A lot of people care about you, you know."

Unable to meet her gaze, Grissom focused his eyes on the worn linoleum of his mother's kitchen floor. The thought of letting down everyone at the lab weighed heavily on him suddenly, and he realized he had betrayed not only Sara but everyone who had once looked up to him.

"I'm not going to kill myself, Catherine. I already made you that promise."

The assurance sounded dull and pathetic even to him.

"But you aren't planning to live, either. Are you?"

When he did not answer and did not look up at her, Catherine sighed.

"You have got to pull yourself out of this," she chided. "What are you going to do when they let Sara out of the hospital? Are you just going to keep ignoring her forever? Are you going to stay in this old house, staring at your mother's wallpaper, until your body gives out and releases you from that promise you made? Because slowly starving yourself is just another form of suicide, Gris. And even if you don't care about anything else, I know you still care about Sara. Seeing you like this, it would devastate her."

Her tirade earned her his eyes focused back on her face again, and slowly, Grissom formed a response.

"I don't intend to ever see Sara again. She doesn't need that reminder…"

Catherine shook her head and let out an irritated chuckle. "You are a piece of work, Gil Grissom."

The comment should have raised his ire, but he suddenly felt too tired and weak to argue.

"Did you know that Sara had a tattoo?"

Confused by the odd non-sequitur, Catherine paused before slowly shaking her head.

"A little one, on her ankle. About the size of a quarter. It was a beetle - a carpet beetle - but in rainbow colors. The last to arrive at a corpse. Not unlike crime scene investigators. That's why Sara got it, a few months after we started dating. She said it reminded her of me."

He segued quickly from the dispassionate tone of a lecturer into a more emotional resonance.

"And I do mean that she had a tattoo. I use the past tense because it is gone now. I took a filet knife and I… I..."

He took a deep breath before continuing, his voice cracking with the force of barely contained tears. "I cut the skin off her ankle."

The woman standing in front of him visibly shuddered at his words. But he pressed on, determined to make Catherine understand.

"Do you know what she did, how Sara reacted? She closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, and barely made a sound."

"My God, Gil…"

"She barely made a sound," he repeated, his words steeped in both awe and horror. He waited a long moment for the imagery he had just described to fully impact his friend in front of him before dismissing her. "Thank you again for the clothes, Catherine. You can let yourself out."

"Really, Greg, I can walk," Sara protested weakly even as her friend wheeled her through the hospital parking garage to his car. Two uniformed officers followed them slowly in a police cruiser, and Sara felt a fresh surge of embarrassment.

Her friend simply tsked at her patiently. "Sara, you were shot. There's no way I'm letting every cop in Vegas - courtesy of Heckle and Jeckle back there - think I'm not man enough to push you to the car." Besides, she heard him say through a forced grin, "It's not every day I get to be the hero. Usually that honor goes to Nick or Warrick or…"

Or Grissom.

His name froze on Greg's lips, and she wished he had not stopped himself from saying it. While the existence of Brenda Waters had washed away any doubt of Grissom's culpability in what had happened to her, Sara could sense the strange hesitation which still surrounded the members of their team. They almost seemed unwilling to voice their real opinions but to wait and accept however she felt about the experience, about Grissom's actions. And after being treated with kid gloves for so long in the hospital, the entire situation left Sara frustrated enough to scream.

Although, she was willing to give Greg a pass, all things considered.

"You are a hero. You're my hero," she reminded him. "You took a syringe full of antifreeze for me."

Glancing over her shoulder, she saw Greg shudder at the memory. Thankfully, he too had been given a clean bill of health, but his extended medical leave put him in the best position to take Sara home when the doctors had finally signed off on her release.

When they reached the car, Sara found herself grateful that Greg had brought his own small sedan to the hospital rather than one of the Tahoes from the office. Getting out of the low-floored car might be difficult later, but she sighed in relief as he helped her lower herself into the passenger seat. An abdominal injury was no joke, she acknowledged to herself, and it made any sort of tensing of those muscles extremely painful. Even coughing or laughing had been problematic.

He loaded her bag into the trunk before taking his position behind the wheel. Behind them, the officers in the squad car waited with rapidly dissipating patience for Greg to pull out of the space.

"You won't think I'm much of a hero when you see how messy my place is," he joked with her as he clicked on his seat belt. "But I've got clean sheets for the spare room and-"

"Greg," Sara interrupted, and he suddenly stopped.

"Am I talking too much?"

He flashed a nervous smile, but Sara shook her head in quiet endearment. "No, I just… I want you to take me somewhere else."

"Sara, you really shouldn't be trying to go up and down the stairs at your apartment building just yet-" he began, but she interrupted him again.

"No, not there."

"Then…" Greg's eyebrows shot up in sudden comprehension as he realized where she wanted to go.

"Catherine told me he's staying at his mother's house. I'll give you the directions…" she said.

Behind then, the squad car let out a honk, a reminder that they were still waiting on Greg to leave the hospital parking garage. He held his hand up over his head, waving politely at the officers even as he muttered some choice words under his breath.

"Sara, is that really such a good idea? I mean-"

"Greg, just drive," she told him succinctly, and as an afterthought added more gently, "Please?"

Grissom usually hated the banality of popular television, and broadcast entertainment during the daylight hours seemed even worse. Talk shows, game shows, soap operas… The utter mindlessness of it typically bored him beyond measure. But over the past few days, he had learned to appreciate the numbness such vapid distractions could provide.

When the doorbell rang, he sighed deeply as anxiety filled him. Catherine, he assumed. I should apologize for last time she came to check on me.

After all, she was the only one from the team to have visited him since his release from jail. The others had called, their concerns going to voicemail, but Catherine seemed to have been chosen as the team liaison with him, the others either too busy with work or with Sara to come to him.

They probably think they'd be unwelcome, Grissom reminded himself. He hadn't exactly been very communicative with anyone since... well, since. In point of fact, he dreaded the eventual confrontation with the other team members. Even if they followed Sara and Catherine's lead and absolved him of guilt for his crimes, they would still look at him differently. He was different. Gone was their mentor and leader, replaced by a husk of a man done in by acts of violence against another.

Pushing those thoughts aside, he allowed himself a moment to appreciate Catherine's presence even before opening the door. As his only link to the outside world, she deserved better than to be subjected to his bottomless pit of depression and recriminations. But as he pulled the door open with one smooth motion, Grissom froze.

"Sara."

Her name escaped his lips unbidden, and Grissom stared at her in shock.

TBC