TITLE: It's Only Rain
AUTHOR: Luna (lunavudu@aol.com)
ARCHIVE: Ask me, please.
CATEGORY: Gil/Catherine, post-season two, rated R.
NOTES: Title/lyrics from "Playing to the Firmament" by Dar Williams. Part of the Green Project. Thanks at the end.
SUMMARY: "when did sex get so mean? when did crime get so clean? you know, I just can't seem to find the soul in this striving."
Drizzle is falling on the desert, a wayward little storm system rearing up just like the Strip rises out of the sand. The dampness brushes Catherine's face as she slides out of the Tahoe. She switches her flashlight on before the heels of her boots hit the dirt. "What've we got here?" she calls, because it's always the first thing they say.
"Dead body," Grissom says, from somewhere a few yards ahead of her, down the ridge.
She trains the light on the back of his neck, the atlas and axis vertebrae. "Tell me something I don't know."
"It's a kid." This from one of the cops, in a voice grayer than rain.
Catherine stops for a moment on the slope. These are the hardest for her: the party girls still in their teens or trying to be, girls that have fallen in with the wrong men or the wrong drugs, girls that could be herself or her daughter. She isn't the type to take things personally when they're not personal, so she keeps walking, calm on her face and only a little tension in her throat. And it's somewhat shameful that she feels vaguely relieved to see the corpse of an adolescent boy.
Grissom traces the shape of the body with his flashlight, in a sweep that leaves an afterimage like a chalk outline inside Catherine's eyelids. "About seventeen," he says.
She moves her own light slowly up from the battered torso. "I thought younger."
"I was estimating the number of body blows," he explains gently, and she nods her head.
Three small bruises are almost hidden in the shadows on the throat. The square of the jaw flecked by peach fuzz, a defined chin, a nose crooked slightly by an old break. She watches the heavyset cop pinch the bridge of his nose between callused fingers and decides someone needs to say something funny. She nudges Grissom's arm with her elbow. "I know a couple of girls who'd kill to have those cheekbones."
"And I know a couple of girls who could throw that kind of a punch," he says. But there's no humor in the words, and he edges away from her as if contact has contaminated him.
One of the boy's eyes is puffed purple and shut; the other is half open and stares up at the dark sky. Mist is beading on the iris, blurring the blue. A bruise spiders over his left temple. Blood radiates a few inches from his head, a negative halo seeping into the sand. "Head wound," Catherine says. "Did he get knocked down, or did the killer pack something more than a punch?"
"Knocked down, I think. We'll know when we can roll him." Grissom frowns back toward the highway. "Where's the M.E.?"
The skinny cop shrugs and reaches into his pocket for a pack of Camels. "We called in and they said someone was coming. You want to try them again, call yourself."
"They'll only take longer if you do that," Catherine points out.
"Somebody probably answered the phone, rolled over and went back to sleep on a gurney. They're punishing us for interrupting their REM." Grissom shakes his head. "Didn't one of them get fired for keeping booze in an empty freeze locker?"
"I think that's an urban legend," she says. After four in the morning, she thinks everyone deserves to relax. Even in the M.E.'s office. Even out here.
Grissom drops to one knee next to the body. He holds his flashlight close and looks into the half-open eye, into the corners of the mouth, into the throat. Looking for insects, Catherine supposes, still glad he covers that particular facet of the job. "Maybe three hours," he says. "Not much more."
"You guys just spotted the body on a drive-by?" Catherine asks the cops.
"Yeah. Heading back in from a DV call." Skinny clamps his cigarette between his teeth and cups his hand around the lighter. His first breath of smoke spools in and out of the flashlight beams. "Gotta be a dump job, right?"
"Hard to say. If you were planning to kill someone with your bare hands, wouldn't you rather do it out here in the middle of nowhere?" Catherine tucks a wisp of hair behind her ear, crouches next to Grissom to study the hands. There are red scrapes, ragged fingernails. Defensive wounds. "In Vegas," she says, "no one can hear you scream."
Grissom shoots her a look that almost makes her shiver. "We'll check his clothes for fibers back at the lab. From the upholstery of a car, for starters. If he got beaten this badly indoors, there ought to be carpet fibers in the head wound, wood splinters from a piece of furniture, something like that. Of course, if the M.E. never gets here we'll never know." He pushes himself to his feet with a muted grunt that sounds like a curse. "And this bizarre weather isn't exactly preserving the scene."
She cranes her head, watching him over her shoulder. "Gil, it's barely even raining."
"This isn't Seattle," he says. "The average rainfall for this month is only about fifty-five hundredths of an inch."
"It's amazing they didn't hire Willard Scott to do your job," she says lightly. He ignores her.
The heavy cop snickers. "So who should we look for first? A stepfather? Or a john?"
"You taking bets?" Catherine asks, twirling her flashlight as she stands up. She runs her hands over the sleeves of her jacket to wipe the moisture off the leather.
"Hey, now." Skinny sucks down the rest of his cigarette and drops it. "Don't you remember sensitivity training? You ain't supposed to assume it's a man."
"Ze mother," Catherine intones. Her fake German accent is dreadful. "Very often ve look to ze mother."
Both of the cops laugh, but Grissom jerks his head up and takes a backward step. "I'm going to see if there are skid marks. Look around for footprints, would you?" His voice is oddly flat, and he stamps his feet hard on the way up to the road. Catherine stays with the body for a little longer, noting the pattern of bruises, the fresh fracture in the ulna, the possibility of tissue beneath the fingernails. Grissom doesn't return, so she goes after him.
He's leaning on the Tahoe, skimming light over the pavement, picking up sparkles in the black surface. There is something uncharacteristically aimless about the movement, an unusual lack of focus in his eyes. She waves her own flashlight to get his attention and comes to stand beside him. "What's with you?"
A long silence, and then he turns his head toward her, yawning. "What?"
"You heard me." She crosses her arms. "You're acting weird. And humorless."
"I'm always humorless at this unholy hour. And as for weird..."
"Weird even for you," she says. "You want to tell me about it?"
He tilts his head, looking down the dim tracks of lane lines to the horizon. Her gaze follows his. A sodium yellow glow signifies the presence of streetlights and neon, the cheap casinos and decrepit bars that fringe the real city and its real power. He looks back at her, a line appearing and deepening on his forehead. "No," he says.
She nods. "It's not this case, is it?"
"No, it's not this case."
Of course it's not, because something was wrong before this case, and anyway this isn't the kind of case he would get worked up about. As far as she knows, it shouldn't stir anything beyond his cerebral attention, his clinical sense of justice. She thinks of Nick, and feels sad. "Sometimes it gets to everyone," she says. "Things like this, this kid. Or just the buildup of victim after victim. Body after--"
"I get it," he says. "Very uplifting. Fortunately, I already love my job. I'm even looking forward to the overtime we'll put in on this one."
"The M.E. will be here any minute."
"Yeah."
It's quiet for a little while, before a fast food delivery truck rolls by. Too close for comfort. Catherine draws an invisible line on the pavement with her toe, turns it into an invisible square. Three squares and four trucks later, she says, "I don't know what to do with you when you're like this."
Grissom holds his flashlight under his chin like a kid at camp, turning his face into a mask. "I submit to you that I'm not 'like' something out of the ordinary. And that you have no responsibility to do anything with me."
She breathes in deeply, her face turned up to look at the blank space where stars should be. Even when she's not looking at him, she senses how clenched his muscles are, pulled into his spine, retreating. She exhales slowly. "Is it about Sara?"
"What are you talking about?"
"She means a lot to you," Catherine continues. "And she should. She's a great girl." She bites the inside of her cheek. "Woman, I mean."
He tips his head back and thuds it against the top of the Tahoe. "I'm not upset. And if I was, it wouldn't be about Sara."
"You might need a little insight into the feminine mystique," she says, making herself sound playful. "You know I'm here for you, right?"
This makes him turn to her, directing all the intensity of his eyes into hers. He looks older than he should, she thinks, though she can't make out fine lines and details in the dark. "Catherine. Do me a favor." He stops and swallows. "Shut the hell up."
For once in her life, the quick retort doesn't rise to her lips; her smart mouth fails her. They're standing there, the drizzle smudging what light there is and turning the earth to quicksand beneath their feet. She turns away. Or she means to turn away, but suddenly his hand is on her bicep. A tight grip against the slickness of the leather. She opens her mouth to point out that this isn't like him at all, and he's kissing her before she's said a word.
It isn't her he's reaching for; that wouldn't happen this way. It isn't Sara, either. Catherine knows desperation, and fear, and she recognizes them in the metallic taste of his tongue. She will allow this to be abrupt. She won't ask him any more questions. While his hands are traveling up under her shirt, she's the one who has the presence of mind to open the back door of the Tahoe and ease them inside. His hands on her shoulders, her name in his mouth. She barely needs to be asked to slide to her knees in the narrow space between the seats.
He'll feel guilty afterwards, so this ought to be worthwhile. Memorable. She remembers every trick she's ever learned, and his fingers tense in her curling hair. She knows the name of every joint, runs through them in her mind, hums a bar of "Dem Bones." It makes him shudder. He squeezes her shoulder, too hard. There will be a bruise on her collarbone, and she almost stops to remind him that she knows what she's doing. A muscle jumps in her thigh, not altogether unpleasant. Her holster is pressed uncomfortably into her hip. She ignores it, concentrating on him. Soon it's over, and he lets her go.
She scrambles up next to him on the backseat, thinking of bumming a cigarette from the skinny cop to change the taste in her mouth. His breathing skips and evens out again. As he fixes his clothes, she wraps her jacket tighter around her chest. "You must have been right about the M.E. sleeping on the job," she says.
He snorts and doesn't quite look at her. "We, uh, really shouldn't--"
"I know," she says quickly, to spare them both the scolding.
A hesitation. "Yeah. You do. Okay."
He shuts his eyes and rubs his forehead with the side of his hand. She lowers her chin. Her own hands are the blue-white of an x-ray; she leans down to pick up one of the flashlights from where it's rolled under the seat.
"Is it still raining?"
Steam has clouded the inside of the car windows. Catherine folds the cuff of her jacket over her knuckles and clears a circle to squint through. "Not really, I think. But it's hard to tell."
"Oh, the humidity," Grissom quips. He doesn't sound so angry now, but his eyes stay shut, still as sleep. "You think it could actually have been a parent? Angry enough to beat a kid's brains out, indifferent enough to dump the remains out here?"
She wishes she could give him an unqualified no. It's not the most likely scenario, but it's far from impossible. She rolls the flashlight in her fingers. "Follow the evidence. That's your mantra, right?"
"Of course," he says, nodding slightly. "I don't really have personal experience with the way a parent thinks."
She considers pointing out that he is like a parent sometimes, most of all with Nick or Warrick. Like a father struggling to turn his children into independent people, proud of their success, hurt by their failure. Instead she just shrugs. "You have parents."
"Yeah." His eyebrows jump a little; his eyes open, but they're almost as blank as a statue's, or a dead man's. "You know I was six years old when my mother lost her hearing?"
"I did know that." She scoots nearer to him, her jeans rasping against the fabric on the seat. Their legs are almost touching. He doesn't seem to notice that she's still there.
"I remember it, but I don't believe I understood it. At the time it was just something to adapt to. The significance came later. Losing something that central to living life, to observing the world--I wasn't aware of what that was like for her."
He falls silent. A chill crawls vertebra by vertebra up her spine. "She learned to live a full life without it, didn't she?"
"Dominant progressive hearing loss," he murmurs, blinking.
As if he didn't hear her.
She places a hand on his knee and leans sideways to try and study his face. Her hair sways in front of her eyes. "Gil? How old was she?"
It takes a few seconds for him to react. He shakes his head, almost speaks, closes his mouth and changes his mind. "We ought to get back to our crime scene," he says at last.
"You're right." She doesn't pull her hand away.
He presses a button on his watch to light the digital numbers up in blue. Catherine glimpses the time and sees that not much of it has passed. Although he's right. Every second counts. She squeezes his knee and draws back, combing her hair into place with her fingers. Her faint reflection in the window still looks mussed, but it's not so bad that she can't blame it on the strange weather. An alibi. He won't have thought about that, she realizes. As thorough as Grissom is, sometimes she knows things he doesn't.
"You okay?"
His voice startles her, and she turns her head. "Yeah, I'm fine."
Unexpectedly, he strokes her arm with two fingers. A gentle gesture, and so quick it might never have happened. "You shouldn't worry about Sara," he says, in the casual way he might point out a stray bloodstain.
Her eyes widen, and she slaps his knee lightly. "You shouldn't worry." she says. "Period."
"Well, I think we both know that's unlikely."
"Honestly? It doesn't suit you." She tosses her head, smiling now. "When did you start worrying about all these things that are out of your control?." He sighs, and she waves a hand toward the front of the car. The sky is silver, distorted by the beads of moisture on the glass. "Look, it's starting to clear. There's a crime scene down there, Gil. DNA samples. Insects. Putrefaction all over the place."
The corners of his mouth quirk slowly upward, so subtly she almost misses it. He lets his eyes meet hers. She catches something in them, not a twinkle, but the next best thing. "Is it my birthday already?" he says.
"The sun'll be up soon," she tells him. "So lighten up."
He holds her gaze for a long moment, saying nothing at all. Then he finds his flashlight on the floor of the Tahoe, opens his door and gets out, and comes around to open her door. She doesn't take his hand as she climbs out, landing solidly on her feet. The wet sand lies in strange patterns along the rise and fall of the desert, like the rain has left wounds on the earth. But they have already begun to heal, and when morning comes Catherine knows the air will burn dry.
His hand ghosts against her back. "Look who decided to come to the party."
The M.E.'s van has appeared on the road at last, its headlights a friendly blaze approaching through the murky morning. "Give them the benefit of the doubt," she says. "Maybe they're the ones who had the sense to stay out of the rain."
"Well, Laurel and Hardy down there aren't exactly overburdened with caution." He tilts his head toward the cops. They aren't doing much, just standing there surveying the scene. Heavy is talking and making expansive hand gestures that make Catherine guess he's talking about sports. Skinny seems to be ignoring him, mostly, and smoking. She licks her teeth, remembering that she wants a cigarette. "So there might not be much left to work with," Grissom continues. His voice is warmer than the words.
Sunrise really is coming quickly; Catherine can see golden breaks in the clouds toward the east. She sets her hands on her hips, bounces onto her toes and places a chaste, if sticky, kiss squarely on the back of his neck. Skin above the bone. Atlas and axis, she thinks; one bears the weight and the other helps it turn.
He stands still in front of her, so close that when she breathes their bodies touch, just watching the white van cruise toward them, trying to find their crime scene. Looking for a signal.
"Let's do what we do," she says. And they send their flashlights beaming toward the sky.
*
end. thanks to Jessica, Lydia, Meghan, Ria.
feedback would be delightful.
--luna
AUTHOR: Luna (lunavudu@aol.com)
ARCHIVE: Ask me, please.
CATEGORY: Gil/Catherine, post-season two, rated R.
NOTES: Title/lyrics from "Playing to the Firmament" by Dar Williams. Part of the Green Project. Thanks at the end.
SUMMARY: "when did sex get so mean? when did crime get so clean? you know, I just can't seem to find the soul in this striving."
Drizzle is falling on the desert, a wayward little storm system rearing up just like the Strip rises out of the sand. The dampness brushes Catherine's face as she slides out of the Tahoe. She switches her flashlight on before the heels of her boots hit the dirt. "What've we got here?" she calls, because it's always the first thing they say.
"Dead body," Grissom says, from somewhere a few yards ahead of her, down the ridge.
She trains the light on the back of his neck, the atlas and axis vertebrae. "Tell me something I don't know."
"It's a kid." This from one of the cops, in a voice grayer than rain.
Catherine stops for a moment on the slope. These are the hardest for her: the party girls still in their teens or trying to be, girls that have fallen in with the wrong men or the wrong drugs, girls that could be herself or her daughter. She isn't the type to take things personally when they're not personal, so she keeps walking, calm on her face and only a little tension in her throat. And it's somewhat shameful that she feels vaguely relieved to see the corpse of an adolescent boy.
Grissom traces the shape of the body with his flashlight, in a sweep that leaves an afterimage like a chalk outline inside Catherine's eyelids. "About seventeen," he says.
She moves her own light slowly up from the battered torso. "I thought younger."
"I was estimating the number of body blows," he explains gently, and she nods her head.
Three small bruises are almost hidden in the shadows on the throat. The square of the jaw flecked by peach fuzz, a defined chin, a nose crooked slightly by an old break. She watches the heavyset cop pinch the bridge of his nose between callused fingers and decides someone needs to say something funny. She nudges Grissom's arm with her elbow. "I know a couple of girls who'd kill to have those cheekbones."
"And I know a couple of girls who could throw that kind of a punch," he says. But there's no humor in the words, and he edges away from her as if contact has contaminated him.
One of the boy's eyes is puffed purple and shut; the other is half open and stares up at the dark sky. Mist is beading on the iris, blurring the blue. A bruise spiders over his left temple. Blood radiates a few inches from his head, a negative halo seeping into the sand. "Head wound," Catherine says. "Did he get knocked down, or did the killer pack something more than a punch?"
"Knocked down, I think. We'll know when we can roll him." Grissom frowns back toward the highway. "Where's the M.E.?"
The skinny cop shrugs and reaches into his pocket for a pack of Camels. "We called in and they said someone was coming. You want to try them again, call yourself."
"They'll only take longer if you do that," Catherine points out.
"Somebody probably answered the phone, rolled over and went back to sleep on a gurney. They're punishing us for interrupting their REM." Grissom shakes his head. "Didn't one of them get fired for keeping booze in an empty freeze locker?"
"I think that's an urban legend," she says. After four in the morning, she thinks everyone deserves to relax. Even in the M.E.'s office. Even out here.
Grissom drops to one knee next to the body. He holds his flashlight close and looks into the half-open eye, into the corners of the mouth, into the throat. Looking for insects, Catherine supposes, still glad he covers that particular facet of the job. "Maybe three hours," he says. "Not much more."
"You guys just spotted the body on a drive-by?" Catherine asks the cops.
"Yeah. Heading back in from a DV call." Skinny clamps his cigarette between his teeth and cups his hand around the lighter. His first breath of smoke spools in and out of the flashlight beams. "Gotta be a dump job, right?"
"Hard to say. If you were planning to kill someone with your bare hands, wouldn't you rather do it out here in the middle of nowhere?" Catherine tucks a wisp of hair behind her ear, crouches next to Grissom to study the hands. There are red scrapes, ragged fingernails. Defensive wounds. "In Vegas," she says, "no one can hear you scream."
Grissom shoots her a look that almost makes her shiver. "We'll check his clothes for fibers back at the lab. From the upholstery of a car, for starters. If he got beaten this badly indoors, there ought to be carpet fibers in the head wound, wood splinters from a piece of furniture, something like that. Of course, if the M.E. never gets here we'll never know." He pushes himself to his feet with a muted grunt that sounds like a curse. "And this bizarre weather isn't exactly preserving the scene."
She cranes her head, watching him over her shoulder. "Gil, it's barely even raining."
"This isn't Seattle," he says. "The average rainfall for this month is only about fifty-five hundredths of an inch."
"It's amazing they didn't hire Willard Scott to do your job," she says lightly. He ignores her.
The heavy cop snickers. "So who should we look for first? A stepfather? Or a john?"
"You taking bets?" Catherine asks, twirling her flashlight as she stands up. She runs her hands over the sleeves of her jacket to wipe the moisture off the leather.
"Hey, now." Skinny sucks down the rest of his cigarette and drops it. "Don't you remember sensitivity training? You ain't supposed to assume it's a man."
"Ze mother," Catherine intones. Her fake German accent is dreadful. "Very often ve look to ze mother."
Both of the cops laugh, but Grissom jerks his head up and takes a backward step. "I'm going to see if there are skid marks. Look around for footprints, would you?" His voice is oddly flat, and he stamps his feet hard on the way up to the road. Catherine stays with the body for a little longer, noting the pattern of bruises, the fresh fracture in the ulna, the possibility of tissue beneath the fingernails. Grissom doesn't return, so she goes after him.
He's leaning on the Tahoe, skimming light over the pavement, picking up sparkles in the black surface. There is something uncharacteristically aimless about the movement, an unusual lack of focus in his eyes. She waves her own flashlight to get his attention and comes to stand beside him. "What's with you?"
A long silence, and then he turns his head toward her, yawning. "What?"
"You heard me." She crosses her arms. "You're acting weird. And humorless."
"I'm always humorless at this unholy hour. And as for weird..."
"Weird even for you," she says. "You want to tell me about it?"
He tilts his head, looking down the dim tracks of lane lines to the horizon. Her gaze follows his. A sodium yellow glow signifies the presence of streetlights and neon, the cheap casinos and decrepit bars that fringe the real city and its real power. He looks back at her, a line appearing and deepening on his forehead. "No," he says.
She nods. "It's not this case, is it?"
"No, it's not this case."
Of course it's not, because something was wrong before this case, and anyway this isn't the kind of case he would get worked up about. As far as she knows, it shouldn't stir anything beyond his cerebral attention, his clinical sense of justice. She thinks of Nick, and feels sad. "Sometimes it gets to everyone," she says. "Things like this, this kid. Or just the buildup of victim after victim. Body after--"
"I get it," he says. "Very uplifting. Fortunately, I already love my job. I'm even looking forward to the overtime we'll put in on this one."
"The M.E. will be here any minute."
"Yeah."
It's quiet for a little while, before a fast food delivery truck rolls by. Too close for comfort. Catherine draws an invisible line on the pavement with her toe, turns it into an invisible square. Three squares and four trucks later, she says, "I don't know what to do with you when you're like this."
Grissom holds his flashlight under his chin like a kid at camp, turning his face into a mask. "I submit to you that I'm not 'like' something out of the ordinary. And that you have no responsibility to do anything with me."
She breathes in deeply, her face turned up to look at the blank space where stars should be. Even when she's not looking at him, she senses how clenched his muscles are, pulled into his spine, retreating. She exhales slowly. "Is it about Sara?"
"What are you talking about?"
"She means a lot to you," Catherine continues. "And she should. She's a great girl." She bites the inside of her cheek. "Woman, I mean."
He tips his head back and thuds it against the top of the Tahoe. "I'm not upset. And if I was, it wouldn't be about Sara."
"You might need a little insight into the feminine mystique," she says, making herself sound playful. "You know I'm here for you, right?"
This makes him turn to her, directing all the intensity of his eyes into hers. He looks older than he should, she thinks, though she can't make out fine lines and details in the dark. "Catherine. Do me a favor." He stops and swallows. "Shut the hell up."
For once in her life, the quick retort doesn't rise to her lips; her smart mouth fails her. They're standing there, the drizzle smudging what light there is and turning the earth to quicksand beneath their feet. She turns away. Or she means to turn away, but suddenly his hand is on her bicep. A tight grip against the slickness of the leather. She opens her mouth to point out that this isn't like him at all, and he's kissing her before she's said a word.
It isn't her he's reaching for; that wouldn't happen this way. It isn't Sara, either. Catherine knows desperation, and fear, and she recognizes them in the metallic taste of his tongue. She will allow this to be abrupt. She won't ask him any more questions. While his hands are traveling up under her shirt, she's the one who has the presence of mind to open the back door of the Tahoe and ease them inside. His hands on her shoulders, her name in his mouth. She barely needs to be asked to slide to her knees in the narrow space between the seats.
He'll feel guilty afterwards, so this ought to be worthwhile. Memorable. She remembers every trick she's ever learned, and his fingers tense in her curling hair. She knows the name of every joint, runs through them in her mind, hums a bar of "Dem Bones." It makes him shudder. He squeezes her shoulder, too hard. There will be a bruise on her collarbone, and she almost stops to remind him that she knows what she's doing. A muscle jumps in her thigh, not altogether unpleasant. Her holster is pressed uncomfortably into her hip. She ignores it, concentrating on him. Soon it's over, and he lets her go.
She scrambles up next to him on the backseat, thinking of bumming a cigarette from the skinny cop to change the taste in her mouth. His breathing skips and evens out again. As he fixes his clothes, she wraps her jacket tighter around her chest. "You must have been right about the M.E. sleeping on the job," she says.
He snorts and doesn't quite look at her. "We, uh, really shouldn't--"
"I know," she says quickly, to spare them both the scolding.
A hesitation. "Yeah. You do. Okay."
He shuts his eyes and rubs his forehead with the side of his hand. She lowers her chin. Her own hands are the blue-white of an x-ray; she leans down to pick up one of the flashlights from where it's rolled under the seat.
"Is it still raining?"
Steam has clouded the inside of the car windows. Catherine folds the cuff of her jacket over her knuckles and clears a circle to squint through. "Not really, I think. But it's hard to tell."
"Oh, the humidity," Grissom quips. He doesn't sound so angry now, but his eyes stay shut, still as sleep. "You think it could actually have been a parent? Angry enough to beat a kid's brains out, indifferent enough to dump the remains out here?"
She wishes she could give him an unqualified no. It's not the most likely scenario, but it's far from impossible. She rolls the flashlight in her fingers. "Follow the evidence. That's your mantra, right?"
"Of course," he says, nodding slightly. "I don't really have personal experience with the way a parent thinks."
She considers pointing out that he is like a parent sometimes, most of all with Nick or Warrick. Like a father struggling to turn his children into independent people, proud of their success, hurt by their failure. Instead she just shrugs. "You have parents."
"Yeah." His eyebrows jump a little; his eyes open, but they're almost as blank as a statue's, or a dead man's. "You know I was six years old when my mother lost her hearing?"
"I did know that." She scoots nearer to him, her jeans rasping against the fabric on the seat. Their legs are almost touching. He doesn't seem to notice that she's still there.
"I remember it, but I don't believe I understood it. At the time it was just something to adapt to. The significance came later. Losing something that central to living life, to observing the world--I wasn't aware of what that was like for her."
He falls silent. A chill crawls vertebra by vertebra up her spine. "She learned to live a full life without it, didn't she?"
"Dominant progressive hearing loss," he murmurs, blinking.
As if he didn't hear her.
She places a hand on his knee and leans sideways to try and study his face. Her hair sways in front of her eyes. "Gil? How old was she?"
It takes a few seconds for him to react. He shakes his head, almost speaks, closes his mouth and changes his mind. "We ought to get back to our crime scene," he says at last.
"You're right." She doesn't pull her hand away.
He presses a button on his watch to light the digital numbers up in blue. Catherine glimpses the time and sees that not much of it has passed. Although he's right. Every second counts. She squeezes his knee and draws back, combing her hair into place with her fingers. Her faint reflection in the window still looks mussed, but it's not so bad that she can't blame it on the strange weather. An alibi. He won't have thought about that, she realizes. As thorough as Grissom is, sometimes she knows things he doesn't.
"You okay?"
His voice startles her, and she turns her head. "Yeah, I'm fine."
Unexpectedly, he strokes her arm with two fingers. A gentle gesture, and so quick it might never have happened. "You shouldn't worry about Sara," he says, in the casual way he might point out a stray bloodstain.
Her eyes widen, and she slaps his knee lightly. "You shouldn't worry." she says. "Period."
"Well, I think we both know that's unlikely."
"Honestly? It doesn't suit you." She tosses her head, smiling now. "When did you start worrying about all these things that are out of your control?." He sighs, and she waves a hand toward the front of the car. The sky is silver, distorted by the beads of moisture on the glass. "Look, it's starting to clear. There's a crime scene down there, Gil. DNA samples. Insects. Putrefaction all over the place."
The corners of his mouth quirk slowly upward, so subtly she almost misses it. He lets his eyes meet hers. She catches something in them, not a twinkle, but the next best thing. "Is it my birthday already?" he says.
"The sun'll be up soon," she tells him. "So lighten up."
He holds her gaze for a long moment, saying nothing at all. Then he finds his flashlight on the floor of the Tahoe, opens his door and gets out, and comes around to open her door. She doesn't take his hand as she climbs out, landing solidly on her feet. The wet sand lies in strange patterns along the rise and fall of the desert, like the rain has left wounds on the earth. But they have already begun to heal, and when morning comes Catherine knows the air will burn dry.
His hand ghosts against her back. "Look who decided to come to the party."
The M.E.'s van has appeared on the road at last, its headlights a friendly blaze approaching through the murky morning. "Give them the benefit of the doubt," she says. "Maybe they're the ones who had the sense to stay out of the rain."
"Well, Laurel and Hardy down there aren't exactly overburdened with caution." He tilts his head toward the cops. They aren't doing much, just standing there surveying the scene. Heavy is talking and making expansive hand gestures that make Catherine guess he's talking about sports. Skinny seems to be ignoring him, mostly, and smoking. She licks her teeth, remembering that she wants a cigarette. "So there might not be much left to work with," Grissom continues. His voice is warmer than the words.
Sunrise really is coming quickly; Catherine can see golden breaks in the clouds toward the east. She sets her hands on her hips, bounces onto her toes and places a chaste, if sticky, kiss squarely on the back of his neck. Skin above the bone. Atlas and axis, she thinks; one bears the weight and the other helps it turn.
He stands still in front of her, so close that when she breathes their bodies touch, just watching the white van cruise toward them, trying to find their crime scene. Looking for a signal.
"Let's do what we do," she says. And they send their flashlights beaming toward the sky.
*
end. thanks to Jessica, Lydia, Meghan, Ria.
feedback would be delightful.
--luna