Fracture

Disclaimer: I don't own CSI or any of its characters. This is being written purely for fun.

A/N: Despite some of its flaws, I fell madly in love with the new CSI:Vegas series and the new characters, especially Allie and Josh. I wrote this to clean up some dangling threads the show runners left and mostly to hold myself over until we see where they take us in Season 2.

Chapter 1

"So have you thought about it?"

Allie Rajan was proud of herself for not immediately answering. It was on the tip of her tongue to automatically ask 'thought about what?' to buy herself just a few more precious seconds of peace. Instead, she refrained from letting the question loose and took a deep, steadying breath to calm her nerves. She was practicing mindfulness, as her partner Josh called it. Wouldn't he be proud if he saw her now?

Mark wasn't one to be ignored, however. He had the gall to wave a hand between her face and the magazine she'd been reading. "Allie? Did you hear me?"

The obnoxious hand wave sent her tenuous grasp on mindfulness out of the window. She glanced up at her boyfriend with a mild frown. "I heard you. No, Mark."

Mark's shoulders slumped slightly. "Well…do you want to tell me why not?"

"Because there's nothing to think about. I already told you how I felt about your cousin's offer. My answer is no," Allie answered. She looked back down at the magazine even though she was too flustered to read it now. All she'd wanted was to enjoy her only day off reading about the latest bizarre autopsies and not have this conversation again.

"Allie, just think of the opportunity it could be for you. For us," Mark insisted. He was nothing if not persistent. Once, she'd thought it to be an endearing trait. She wondered when she'd started to find it to be an insufferable part of his personality. It was probably when he'd begun trying to make decisions on her behalf and plan her life without her input.

"This isn't up for discussion. I love what I do. Why can't you understand that?" Annoyed, Allie flipped the magazine shut and faced him. So much for a relaxing day off.

Mark looked exasperated. "You love…what, dead bodies and gore? Working multiple doubles and spending hours combing through muck and filth? You love talking to criminals?"

The way he phrased her job in those succinct, shallow sentences raised Allie's hackles immediately. "None of this is new. I've literally been doing all of those things since we met. Since before we met. Why are you suddenly so concerned about it?"

It was a dumb question. Allie knew that even as the words left her mouth. She knew that as clearly as she knew that this was all her fault. He'd never really commented on her job; she'd suspected that it had been mostly because he didn't really understand why anyone would want to be a Criminalist. Mark had only become obsessed with finding her a different line of work after she'd accidentally left a case file containing pictures of Tori and Jonah Tanner's burned corpses open during dinner one night. She'd been so caught up with her epiphany of how Tori's clavicle had sustained such a distinct wound that it hadn't occurred to her how the picture might affect Mark.

He doesn't see what you see, Al. Try to be more sensitive. Allie had to remind herself. Whenever they argued after she had to work late or had to rush off mid-date, she had to force herself to pause and remind herself that her job was a world Mark wasn't a part of. Thankfully so. There were things that he couldn't possibly understand no matter how she explained herself. It made her feel very alone on some days, if she was honest.

"Am I not allowed to be concerned now?" Mark looked away, frustration radiating from his body language.

"What…" Allie took a breath to steel herself. "What is that supposed to mean?"

With a huff, he slammed to his feet and started to leave the room. "Nevermind. It's nothing."

She followed him. "Well, clearly it is something. Don't start something and then run away, Mark. What did you mean by that?"

He ignored her and made a pretense of suddenly wanting to do laundry. He yanked open the door of the washer with unnecessary force and started stuffing clothes from the half-filled hamper into it. For some reason, this distraction irritated Allie more than anything else. She grabbed the handle before he could slam the door shut and held it firmly, making him look at her.

"Mark," she stated. "We're talking about this."

"I said it was nothing. Just drop it, Allie," Mark snapped and pried the door from her hand. The harsh clang of the metal door snapping shut was deafening in the narrow hallway. The crampedness was one of the things she'd automatically disliked about this house, but Mark had insisted that he preferred less space to clean and so would she eventually. She hadn't argued because at the time it wasn't like it was her house anyway.

"Why are you so upset?" Allie demanded. "You asked if I was interested and I said no. What do you want me to say? It's not like I asked you to go job hunting for me!"

"Is it really hard for you to understand that I'm worried? My girlfriend spends her days surrounded by death and dangerous lunatics. That's not normal, Allie!"

"Normal? What are you on about?"

Mark shoved past her and stomped into the kitchen, Allie hot on his heels. He whirled and jabbed a finger towards the magazine that she'd been reading before he'd interrupted her. "You see that? Who sits around on their off day reading about dead bodies? This is not healthy! What do you think our friends think when we're all exchanging office stories and you're talking about the latest serial killer or a floater you fished out of the Bellagio fountain?"

It was as if he'd dumped a bucket of ice water over her. She couldn't find the words to reply right away. Instead, she stared into his handsome face with her mouth slightly agape in utter disbelief for a long moment.

"What…I don't…" Allie finally sputtered but her mind was having trouble processing his words and the implications behind them. Then the anger came back in a rush. "Oh–what. You're embarrassed by me? Is that what you're saying?"

Mark at least had the decency to look guilty. But with the bandaid ripped off, he barrelled on. "I'm not saying that. I'm just…people get uncomfortable."

Allie, still in a mild state of shock, wasn't following. "Uncomfortable about what, Mark?"

She was genuinely baffled. It wasn't as if she went into any gory details whenever someone asked about her work. Just the thought made her scoff, imagining what a decent defense lawyer could do if they'd discovered that an investigator was casually talking about details of their clients' case to friends or family. Allie was careful not to cross that line; her work was too important to be undone by such rookie-level carelessness (the Tanner case flub notwithstanding). In the company of their friends–most of whom were Mark's from before they'd started dating–she had contented herself to give short, generic answers while in turn they regaled her with the latest office gossip and inside jokes about people she didn't even know.

When Mark didn't reply and instead gave her an increasingly frustrated frown, she went on the offensive. "First of all, I don't know where you get off saying I make anyone uncomfortable. You lot usually ask me for details. And I don't give them! Believe me, when I say you don't hear half of what you see on the news."

"Allie–"

"Secondly. I find it awfully suspicious for you to suddenly be concerned about the comfort level of our friends when it's you who saw that picture in that file I left open. And it's you who has been calling all of the state of Nevada trying to find me a job I didn't ask you to find!"

"Excuse me for being concerned about my future wife's welfare!"

Already angry and with so many buried feelings and unspoken words bubbling rapidly to the surface, the next words burst out of Allie before her years of well-practiced discretion could stop them. "Oh, so you've already made that decision for me as well, have you? What part of this conversation leads you to think that I want to be your future wife?"

Time ground to a halt. The anger that had twisted Mark's face into an uncharacteristically ugly expression crumpled in a way that made Allie's heart ache. She swallowed, her throat suddenly feeling tight. The words had been said, and she couldn't take them back. But…it also felt like a release. Like honesty.

Still, she couldn't stand the way his expression shuttered. She took a step forward, reaching out a hand. "Mark–"

He stepped back, retreating like a wounded animal. "No. Forget it. I knew I shouldn't have…nevermind. Just…just forget I said anything."

"Mark, please. I'm…" Allie tried again, desperate to make some sort of amends. The way he backed away and wouldn't even look at her was terrible. Anger she could work with, could navigate and meet with her own temper. The defeated, shell-shocked look wasn't something she'd been ready to deal with.

Deep down, she wondered if this very moment was what she'd been running from. Everything in their relationship had moved fast from the beginning, and she'd spent much of her time convincing herself that it was normal and what she should have in a relationship. After all, it had checked all the boxes of what she'd thought she wanted: predictable, comfortable, and entirely separate from her complicated professional life.

Her professional life was probably the worst possible thing that she could have thought of at that moment. Another face popped into her mind from another time, from a relationship that hadn't even had the chance to blossom despite how right it had felt. The hurt and disappointment in those dear blue eyes still haunted her. Juxtaposed with the present, with the devastated look reflected in Mark's eyes, Allie felt a wave of miserable anger directed at herself for doing this to someone again.

"Mark–"

"I want to be alone. You do whatever," he cut her off and disappeared into the bedroom. The click of the door closing was almost worst than if he'd slammed it shut.

Allie stared at the door. The tension that hung in the air was thick and charged in a most unpleasant way. She sank down in the seat she'd been sitting in and tipped her head back, lightly banging it against the stucco kitchen wall. Her eyes fell on her purse that sat innocently on the kitchen counter. Mark still didn't know about the burned, mangled key and seemingly hadn't thought anything of her using the hidden spare or her waiting for him to lock or unlock the door. She thought about Hugo's sage observation from a few months ago–about Josh.

She sighed and closed her eyes as the last ten minutes replayed in her head; it probably would be on loop for days to come. It made her skin feel itchy, uneasy. The silence was suddenly deafening, and the flimsy bedroom door suddenly looked like a terrifying barrier. She was itching to call someone to get another perspective before uncertainty convinced her that she'd made a terrible mistake that she needed to fix NOW.

When Allie picked up her phone and began to swipe almost on autopilot to her most frequent contact, a sudden thought made her stop. Her thumb hovered over the call button that was just a tempting few millimeters away. With a heavy exhale, she resisted the urge and turned the screen off. She had made a promise to be more professional; it was time to grow up and deal with the consequences of her actions on her own.

Curiously, Gil Grissom's playful voice was the one she heard that summed up what utter rot her day off had become. Another fine mess you've gotten us into, Allie.