Disclaimer: I don't own.

A/N: Sorry for the looong delay in posting. It's been quite the week. My fiance had a cousin who passed away last weekend, and that's dominated a lot of the week. Plus, it was his birthday on Wednesday (the fiance, not the cousin) and Sprinkles was stressed from us being gone so long and wasn't eating or coming out of her cage hardly at all... So between family time, calls to the vet and shopping trips for special foods, and the one night of celebrating... it was hard to fit in much time to write.

Anyway, thanks for all the reviews and let me know what you think! I'll try to get another chapter posted tonight but I've just joined GSR Forever Online and I'm slightly distracted trying to set up my fan fiction page there. :)

Enjoy!

Chapter Eighty:

I don't know that I was even surprised. I mean, no, I wasn't expecting her to wriggle out from under me and run to the bathroom to cry seconds after we'd finished. But I had figured, once we came down and the afterglow wore off, that she would panic.

If I had given her what she wanted, we would probably be curled up asleep together, sweaty and sated. But I didn't want her to be untroubled by our encounter. I didn't want to be someone she used to get through her grief. …And I certainly didn't want to use her body myself.

So when she rushed off, I was not surprised, but I was hurt. I lay face down in her bed, the sheets slightly damp beneath me from the combined sweat of our bodies, marking where she had been only a moment before, still breathing heavily, listening to her wails through the wall. I waited for my breathing to slow and allowed myself a moment to contain my own grief, and then slowly sat up, getting to my feet and looking at the clothing that was spread across the floor. I turned on the light and quickly sorted them into two piles, depositing one outside the door of the bathroom and taking the other out into the living room. I emptied the duffle bag, pulled on clean underwear, and folded and replaced my dirty clothing in the bottom.

I had intended to go right back to bed, but… well, the idea of crawling back into either bed—Jace's, or Sara's, where I would only dwell on what had just happened… Instead, I picked my phone up, off the pile of clean clothing where it rested next to my toothbrush and migraine medication. I sat at the kitchen table, sighed, and called my voice mail, punching in the code and waiting.

"First New Message…" The voicemail recording told me, and I reached for my prescription bottle, sensing that I would quite shortly need it.

"Gil," It was Ecklie's voice. "Catherine said you had some kind of family emergency come up. Did you forget that you had a new CSI starting tonight? I don't care what bug convention called you last minute, you'd better get your ass in here ASAP."

Beep!

I rolled my eyes, opening the bottle, knowing that this was going to go on for a while… There was one from Catherine, telling me that Ecklie had gone off the deep end and maybe I should answer his phone calls… she said she hoped everything was alright, and that she'd keep trying to cover my ass, but she couldn't make any promises. There were several more of Ecklie spouting off, and then a gap of a few hours in which he had obviously gone home for the night. …The next message was from early that next morning. Strangely early. I frowned, waiting for the automated voice to finish, when Ayla started crying.

I frowned, glancing back at the bedroom. "Gil, Conrad again… Listen, this morning, at a scene—" The sound didn't stop, so I pulled the phone from my ear with a sigh, hanging up and moving back towards the room. The shower was now running in the bathroom, and I assumed Sara hadn't heard her. I moved more quickly, hurrying into the room and scooping her up, frowning at the tears slipping down her rounded cheeks. I wiped them away and rocked her gently back and forth, humming the only lullaby I knew—one my mother had sang to me, before she lost her hearing. I used to sing it to myself when I was younger, long after I knew she wouldn't anymore.

Ayla quieted quickly, her deep brown eyes locked on mine, watching me. I smiled wryly and sang the words instead, thinking that I knew firsthand how important it was. She wriggled in my arms until she was upright, her right arm around my neck and her head on my shoulder, my arm once again tucked in the crook of her knees. I swayed on my feet, singing for another moment, until her deep breathing and limp frame told me she was back to sleep. I felt a wave of pride course through me—it was the first time I had put her to sleep—and settled into the bed, laying down and gently scooting her body until her head was pressed to my chest instead.

I covered us both up, reflecting that this should be odd to me—sleeping with Jace's family in Jace's bed—but it wasn't. I understood Sara's emotions, but I was under no belief that I owed the man. Certainly I had wronged him in many ways, but he had also wronged me… If there was anything I had felt the night he died, it was that we were finally even… finally reaching a point in time where we might see eye to eye. And him asking me to take his place as Ayla's father… to never let her know what it was like to grow up missing a parent… I took it seriously. I had a greater understanding of Jace now.

His mother, I knew for a fact, had lived away from them for at least three years, possibly more, and apparently gone back to them after I no longer served her purpose. His desire to keep his 'family' together for the baby, especially when he truly loved Sara, was a response to having been a child in a broken home for a time and then going back to what he considered 'whole.' And his sense that offering ultimatums was natural and excusable when looking at the big picture… I knew Susan well enough to know exactly where he might have picked up that ideology. It was amazing that the man was not more controlling before I came along and threw their relationship into chaos.

And that desire to provide a complete home for the daughter he loved enough to die for had motivated him to ask the man he had hated—the man he had blamed for tearing his family apart twice over—to be the father she needed, because he knew I would love her like my own. …That I had already considered her mine, when she was only three months in the womb. It was a selfless act for his daughter, yes, but I understood something about Jace now… a tiny part of it was for him. He was able to die in peace, knowing that he wasn't leaving Ayla alone… even if it killed him to think that it would be me taking his place. The very best thing I could do to honor the man's memory was to fulfill his dying request and be certain Ayla had the family she deserved.

Whether Sara allowed me back into her heart or not, and I was under no disillusions that such a thing was inevitable, I had a little girl now. I wasn't backing away from it.

I stayed awake until she came back to bed. And she did come back. She had gone to change into new pajamas in her bedroom, and I had been certain as I listened to her move from bathroom to bedroom that she wouldn't return, but she did, hair a mass of wet curls around her shoulders. She paused in the doorway, peering into the darkness. She didn't speak to me, but she may have not seen that my eyes were open. She merely turned off the hall light, moved to the open side of the bed, and crawled in with us.

She was already up when I woke, and I found myself wondering if she had slept at all. Ayla was curled beside me and when I moved to get up, her eyes flickered open. I tried to get her back to sleep, but she was apparently up for the day… so I took her out to the main area of the house. Sara had coffee in front of her at the dining table and was already on the phone, so I took Ayla to the living room to change her. This time, I looked for a change of clothing in the diaper bag and found one. She had been in those pajamas all day yesterday.

I dressed her and moved to the kitchen, listening as Sara thanked someone over and over, tears now falling down her cheeks. There was already food out, as if Sara had been starting to make pancakes when something interrupted her. I slid Ayla into the highchair that had been left out from the previous day and picked up the bowl, stirring through it to determine which things still needed to be added to the boxed mix. It looked like she'd put everything in, so I set myself to stirring it while listening to Sara's words, trying to pick up what had her simultaneously so thankful and so emotional.

If I had to wager a guess, I'd say it was Jace's boss—the person Sara was now responsible for paying close to nine million back to. I had assumed as much—Ayla had become a media darling, despite Sara's best efforts to prevent it, and it wouldn't look good for a company that was so ingrained in the community to want to collect from a woman who clearly had no means to pay them back. Besides, from what I'd heard at the Crime Lab, they had enough influence in the city to get most of the money back, once it had been processed. Or, maybe the man really was just a nice guy.

Had he called her? Or would Sara have been so distracted with worry that she'd stop making food to go make a phone call? I checked the heat on the frying pan which had been left on, adjusted it slightly, and poured a medium dollop onto one side of the pan and two small dollops on the other, watching as they overlapped just slightly. My dad had always made me Mickey Mouse pancakes, too.

Sara hung up and glanced at me, a little awkwardly, before drinking too deeply from her coffee and coughing as she swallowed wrong. She wiped at her eyes and turned away from me while she finished coughing before getting up and moving into the kitchen, laying a kiss on Ayla's head again. "Listen, Gil—"

"Mama!" Ayla shouted. Sara's serious face turned into a bright smile as she beamed down at the little girl.

"Good Morning, Sweet Pea. Did you sleep well?"

"Dada?" She asked, ignoring her mother's question altogether, and Sara gasped and took a step backwards, the force of the simple, innocent question knocking her off balance.

I caught her, gently, afraid she was going to fall over, trying to offer some strength and reassurance… but she stiffened under the palms I laid on her shoulders and pulled away from me sharply, her eyes wide and almost wild. "Don't touch me." She said in a fervent, almost-whisper that had my heart breaking again.

"Sara—"

"Dada!" Ayla demanded with the pout of a child who was not used to being ignored. Sara trembled and her eyes filled again, so I moved forward, bending before Ayla's highchair and ignoring the protest my knees gave upon contact with the hard tile floor.

"…Ayla, sweetheart, Daddy went buh-bye."

Her little eyes narrowed in confusion. "Buh-bye?"

I nodded, in the back of my head thinking how impressed I was at how many words she already knew and seemed to fully understand. Then again, both of her parents had been impressively smart, and I knew for a fact that her grandmother, while twisted, had had more than her share of intelligence. "Yes, he went buh-bye to…" I hesitated, both wondering at Sara's reaction and Ayla's ability to understand, but I forged onward. "…to heaven."

Her lips puckered in obvious confusion and I sighed. "Daddy got bad owies, remember? He got bad owies and he had to go buh-bye."

"Dada buh-bye." She said, in a very small, very sad voice, and I felt tears in my eyes again. Even though I knew there was no way she could understand the permanence of my words, the sadness on her face as what she could only process as a temporary loss still tore me up. I knew that we would probably have this conversation many, many more times before it sunk in… and that she might never stop asking about it. I swallowed, trying to keep my own grief at bay—I had never truly witnessed death as it happened before Jace, and it was hard to think of, and harder still to convey to this innocent little girl.

"Gil." Sara said, and I glanced up at her. She sniffled, shaking her head. "I, uh…" She shook her head again and left the room, and I sighed, wondering what she had tried to say before she rushed off. The moment broken, however, I moved back to the stove, flipping the pancake that was a little too brown but thankfully still good, and glanced at Ayla who for once was very still. She did not bang on her tray or babble… she still had tight eyes and a definitive pout on her lips. I averted my eyes, trying to reassure myself that most things got harder before they got easier.