Disclaimer: Not my characters, and I'm just having fun with them.
Rating: PG-13 (violence but nothing steamy)
Pairing: H/C of course.
Spoilers: Anything so far.
****
Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
William Blake
****
Rosalind Caine looked up from her seat at the table and smiled at her oldest son as he slipped into his place. "Coffee? Breakfast isn't ready yet.
"I'll get it," said Horatio. His teenage frame was gangly, not yet filled out, but he moved with a smooth grace that always reminded her of watching a well-correographed swim team. He returned to the table with his cup, and the two of them sat in companionable silence for a moment. Horatio always got up 30 minutes early for these times alone with his mother. And she always did likewise to have 30 minutes to spare. Rosalind was only medium sized - Horatio already towered over her at 17 - and solidly built, with direct hazel eyes and medium brown hair. The hair was her most striking feature, a perfect milk chocolate color, smooth, shining, beautiful. Her oldest son was as unlike her in appearance as he was like her in character. Tall, thin, with thick red hair, Horatio at 17 looked like a work in progress, a puzzle only partly completed. But as the two of them shared the coffee and the silence, there was a similarity between them. Something in the set of the jaw, the forthrightness of the eyes. Two crusaders who would be passionate for the right cause. Two people who had had responsibility thrust on them too young. For Rosalind, it had been her mother's death in a car accident, leaving her to raise her younger siblings. Then the death of her husband came years ago, when Horatio was 7 and Raymond was 3. Rosalind tried to protect her sons, especially Horatio, from the crushing responsibility that had settled over her own childhood. For years, she had thought she was succeeding, but Horatio's eyes, meeting hers across the table, were old beyond his years.
"Is Ray up yet?"
"No." Horatio looked away for a moment, a dead giveaway to someone as direct and perceptive as his mother. He heard the unspoken question and looked back. "He was hanging out with those boys again yesterday."
Rosalind sighed. "I'll talk to him again. He's got a wild streak, Ray has, but as long as he lives under this roof, he will live by my rules." She smiled wistfully. "You know, Horatio, once I thought life was like a story. My father named me out of Shakespeare, and I named both of you after writers: Horatio Alger and Raymond Chandler. It took me a long time to learn that life isn't a story. It's too real. But I want you to know that I wouldn't change either of you or anything in my life for one moment of a fairy tale."
Raymond Caine stumbled into the room, still half asleep, and stopped short as his mother and brother connected eyes across the table. "Talking about me behind my back again?"
"Ray," his mother started, and Horatio interrupted her, very unusual for him. "Ray, if we were talking about you, it's because we're concerned. You're getting in with the wrong kind of friends."
"How would you know, Mr. Perfect. You haven't been close enough to the wrong crowd to know it."
"Both of you, sit down and eat your breakfast. And Ray, if I hear of you hanging around that gang again, you're grounded for a week. Next time, it doubles, two weeks, then four weeks, so on. At 12, you don't make the rules."
The remainder of breakfast was eaten in silence, but as the boys went out the door to school, Rosalind reached up to put one hand on Horatio's shoulder. "I did mean what I said. I wouldn't change anything for you." He smiled at her, then headed out the door, steeling himself for the increasingly hard task of looking out for his little brother. His father wasn't around to do it, and his mother couldn't do everything. It was up to him.
****
"Mom, I'm home." Horatio stepped into the house and stopped cold. Silence, emptiness, the feel of a house without its heart. Something was wrong. Badly wrong. He did not call her again but started searching. He found her in the kitchen. The table was turned over, the trash can on its side, the entire room in a shambles. And his mother. Rosalind's face had been beaten so severely it was hardly recognizable. Her hands were clenched, nails extended, showing that she had gone down fighting to the last. And swirling around her bloody face was her beautiful chocolate hair. Horatio stood in the doorway in paralyzing shock. He did not go to her; the emptiness of the room already proclaimed that her spirit wasn't there anymore. In the stiffling silence, his own heartbeat echoed in his ears like the slamming of a door shutting off forever the last vestiges of his childhood. Then the silence shattered. "NO!!!!!!!!"
****
Horatio Caine sat bolt upright in bed, nearly falling out of it. The sheets were drenched in sweat, and his heartbeat drummed loudly in his ears, calling back the kitchen tableau with every thump. He sucked in deep breaths, trying to calm himself. Just a dream, he said, but he knew otherwise. It wasn't a dream, and it wasn't a tale of fiction, like his mother had once wanted. It was only too real. April 3. 28 years ago today, his mother had been killed. The dream came back yearly, at least on that occasion if not others, but it never lost its impact on Horatio. He stood up, slightly shaky on his feet, and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. Gulping it down, he looked at the clock. 3:30. Still, he knew that he would never get back to sleep this night. Rather than sitting around with ghosts in the dark, he started to get dressed.
****
"Hey, you're early today." Calleigh Dusquesne sailed into the lab with her long blonde hair flowing out behind in the speed of her passage. Calleigh rarely did anything at any less than full speed ahead. Except for one thing, that is. For two years, she had fought an increasingly difficult battle with her feelings for her boss. Sometimes she tried to avoid him, but that was even worse. Lack of him was almost a physical hurt, and she would find herself lost in thought, wondering what he was doing. So she relied on a front of easy banter. Contact, but not too personal or revealing. More and more, though, it wasn't enough.
"Yeah, I came in to run some tests." Now that Calleigh got closer, she could see that Horatio looked either like something was really bothering him or like he had not slept at all. He was positively haggard. The teasing front fell away from Calleigh instantly, replaced by sharp concern. "Horatio, are you alright?"
He straightened slightly from the equipment and rubbed his weary eyes. "Fine." It was so obvious a lie that she didn't even challenge it, letting it fall flat of its own accord. "I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep, so I came in to finish off some of this backlog."
"Why don't we have some coffee? We could go to the break room and sit there for a while at the table. It will be a half hour or so before everyone gets in." She saw him pull back instantly, almost reacting with horror to her idea. What the hell was going on here? The idea of shared coffee and conversation had never put him off before.
Horatio's cell phone rang, breaking the moment. "Horatio." Even edged with tiredness and tension, his voice gave her chills. "All right, we'll be there ASAP." He put up the phone and almost visibly pulled himself together, becoming her supervisor right before her eyes. "A woman was murdered over on Parker Street. Let's go."
****
Horatio stepped out of the Hummer and reached back in for his field kit. Calleigh already had hers and was heading for the crime scene, neatly taped off with yellow police tape. Detective Hagan was waiting for them. "Early morning jogger found her in an alley. No sounds or signs of the killer still around. Probably long gone." The radio in his police car crackled, and he moved toward it, unblocking their view. Poor woman, Calleigh thought. She lay in a pitiful crumpled heap at the side of the alley, head turned away from them, long chocolate brown hair spilling over her shoulders. Calleigh opened her field kit and put on latex gloves, then turned back to look at Horatio when she realized that he wasn't doing the same. He stood there with an expression in his eyes so stunned, so lost, that she forgot the woman in the alley and went to him instead. "Horatio." She touched his arm gently with one gloved hand. She tried to avoid touching him usually, but she wasn't sure her voice alone would reach him. He drew in a shuddering breath and turned to look at her. "Horatio, what's wrong? Did you know her?"
His eyes dropped, and he said softly, "Um, no. Never saw her in my life. I'm fine, just tired. Like I said, I didn't get much sleep last night." He started across to the victim, all of his usual grace lost, moving like his feet were wooden. He crossed around her and knelt on the other side, looking directly at her face. Something in him relaxed slightly, the knot eased, and he opened his own kit and snapped on the gloves. "No visible injuries. She must have been ambushed. It was quick, anyway."
"Or she trusted whoever killed her." Calleigh's own brain began to function, or at least half of it did. The other half was still focused on Horatio. He was the picture of professionalism now, but to someone who had studied him as much as she had, he looked slightly tightened, as if some God-like puppetmaster had taken up all of his strings a few notches.
"What a way to start a morning." Alexx Woods arrived at the scene, going straight to the body. "Poor woman, this wasn't how you expected to start the day, either." She knelt next to Horatio, glanced at him once, then took a second longer look. He stood up, breaking the closeness. Alexx accepted his silent no-tresspassing sign and started to examine the body. "Neck snapped, possibly. Look at the bruising around her throat. Where's Delko?"
"He and Speed are on another case. I'll take the pictures." Horatio took the camera out of his kit, focused, and started snapping. He usually tried to personalize his victims rather than distance himself from them, but right now, he was glad of the perspective the lens gave him. Calleigh, meanwhile, was walking carefully arround the alley, looking for anything that might be significant.
"Horatio!" He was at her side instantly. "Look at this handkerchief. Maybe the killed dropped it."
"Good job, Calleigh." The warmth of his praise melted her. "Let's bag it, tag it, and get it back to the lab. Stay here and cover the scene a few more times, would you? I'll go with Alexx. Are you ready to move, Alexx?"
"Not much I can do here," the beautiful woman said, stepping back from the victim to let the ME's staff zip the body into a bag. She spoke to the body warmly, as if it could still hear. "Let's get you back to the lab and see what you can tell us. Maybe you can help us catch those people."
****
It was long past quitting time before Calleigh straightened up from the lab equipment. Hours at the crime scene had paid off that day when she had found a gun behind a dumpster. Not that it was definitely connected to the murder, unfortunately. The woman had died of a snapped neck, as Alexx had surmised. Still, it could have been used to threaten, or as a backup plan for the killer. The number had been filed off, and she had spent much of the day trying to reconstruct it. Time for a break, she thought. She hated leaving a job unfinished, but she realized that she was getting too tired to be at her best. Time to step back for a while, then come at it anew. She started down the hall to the break room, then spotted the light on in Horatio's office at the end of the hall. CSI was nearly deserted at this hour, and she stalked down the hall with an urgency she would never have wanted her colleagues to see. If poor Horatio was still here, slaving away even when he was so tired, she would escort him home personally. She herself was exhausted from the day, and she wasn't the one who had looked like death warmed over that morning.
Calleigh opened the office door and froze. Horatio was at his desk, his shoulders slumped, his head on his arms. She closed the door much more quietly than she had opened it, but he did not stir. Sound asleep, poor guy, she thought. She stood there for a moment just enjoying the opportunity to watch him when he wasn't aware of her. Thick red hair, a slim yet powerful frame. The most captivating part, the eyes, were hidden. Still, it was not Horatio's physical attributes she admired. The pure soul of the man shone out like a lighthouse. Loyalty, intelligence, absolute dedication. She never tired of watching him at work, piecing the puzzles together, bringing justice to the victims of the city. The rest of them all had their specialties, but Horatio's specialty was fitting it all together. He saw more, and in more ways, than the rest of them. She longed again for the opportunity to do more than just watch him work. She wanted to love him, most of all to hold him, be there for him like he was there for so many people. Horatio spent his life giving to everyone else; Calleigh dreamed of giving to him. But his wall of control would not allow it. Everyone who knew him admired him, but no one was allowed to get close.
Calleigh walked around his desk, trying to move silently, but his sleep was so deep that he never stirred. There was a small picture on the other side of his desk in a silver frame, and it occurred to her that she had never seen it, only the back of it from the visitor's chair. Who would someone so self-sufficient have a picture of on his desk? She picked it up softly, resisting the urge to touch Horatio's shoulders which were so near her hand. The poor guy needed his rest. The picture was of a woman and two boys. She recognized Horatio instantly, a much younger Horatio, but the other two she had never seen. The second boy could only be Ray, a smaller, softer version of his brother, less strength of character in the face, less direct honesty in the eyes. It was the woman who took Calleigh's breath away, though. Her eyes were not blue, but the expression was pure Horatio. Her hair was the most beautiful shade of chocolate, exactly the shade of that morning's victim. In that instant, Calleigh had a glimpse of what had disturbed Horatio so much that morning. Fortunately for Horatio, the resemblance ended at the hair. Once he had seen the face, she remembered, he had shaken off the past and settled to work. Still, something had been bothering him before he ever saw the body.
Horatio shifted slightly, and Calleigh stepped back, afraid she was disturbing him. She quickly realized that she wasn't the one disturbing him, though. His head jerked slightly to the side, and his breathing became uneven. She hesitated. Should she wake him up? He answered that question himself, moaning slightly. His head had turned, and she could see that there was sweat standing on his forehead. Horatio never broke a sweat in the 90 degree Miami heat, but he was sweating now. Calleigh stepped forward and slid one hand across his shoulder in a comforting way. "Horatio," she said softly. "Wake up. It's just a dream."
"NO!!!!!" Calleigh had never heard his voice raised, but the one word was absolutely a scream, torn from deep within him. Horatio leaped bolt upright from his chair, crashed into the corner of the desk, and actually fell over. Calleigh stood stunned for a second; she had never seen him clumsy. Then she moved instantly, going to him as he picked himself up from the floor.
"Horatio, are you alright? It was just a dream." His eyes were fully lucid now, but the pain behind them hurt her more than a gunshot would. He hesitated for a moment, then replied, realizing that a lie would never pass here. He knew he had screamed; she saw it in his eyes. And whatever he had screamed at, he could almost still see it.
"No." The voice was his usual soft tone but with a broken edge that broke her heart. She had never heard him say he wasn't alright. Not to her. Not to anyone. "No, I'm not alright, Calleigh. And it wasn't just a dream." She realized suddenly that she was gripping him by both arms; in fact, she was half holding him up.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
He took a deep breath. "No. Not now. Let's talk about something else. Anything else."
Once her heart would have leapt at the opportunity, but she was too consumed with worry for him to give way to her own feelings. Never in a thousand years would she take advantage of whatever nightmare he was living for her own selfish reasons. "Okay," she said, smiling at him. "Let's go get coffee, okay? And we'll talk about something else."
He gave her a wan smile. "Thanks, Calleigh." They left the office together and turned out the light.
Rating: PG-13 (violence but nothing steamy)
Pairing: H/C of course.
Spoilers: Anything so far.
****
Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
William Blake
****
Rosalind Caine looked up from her seat at the table and smiled at her oldest son as he slipped into his place. "Coffee? Breakfast isn't ready yet.
"I'll get it," said Horatio. His teenage frame was gangly, not yet filled out, but he moved with a smooth grace that always reminded her of watching a well-correographed swim team. He returned to the table with his cup, and the two of them sat in companionable silence for a moment. Horatio always got up 30 minutes early for these times alone with his mother. And she always did likewise to have 30 minutes to spare. Rosalind was only medium sized - Horatio already towered over her at 17 - and solidly built, with direct hazel eyes and medium brown hair. The hair was her most striking feature, a perfect milk chocolate color, smooth, shining, beautiful. Her oldest son was as unlike her in appearance as he was like her in character. Tall, thin, with thick red hair, Horatio at 17 looked like a work in progress, a puzzle only partly completed. But as the two of them shared the coffee and the silence, there was a similarity between them. Something in the set of the jaw, the forthrightness of the eyes. Two crusaders who would be passionate for the right cause. Two people who had had responsibility thrust on them too young. For Rosalind, it had been her mother's death in a car accident, leaving her to raise her younger siblings. Then the death of her husband came years ago, when Horatio was 7 and Raymond was 3. Rosalind tried to protect her sons, especially Horatio, from the crushing responsibility that had settled over her own childhood. For years, she had thought she was succeeding, but Horatio's eyes, meeting hers across the table, were old beyond his years.
"Is Ray up yet?"
"No." Horatio looked away for a moment, a dead giveaway to someone as direct and perceptive as his mother. He heard the unspoken question and looked back. "He was hanging out with those boys again yesterday."
Rosalind sighed. "I'll talk to him again. He's got a wild streak, Ray has, but as long as he lives under this roof, he will live by my rules." She smiled wistfully. "You know, Horatio, once I thought life was like a story. My father named me out of Shakespeare, and I named both of you after writers: Horatio Alger and Raymond Chandler. It took me a long time to learn that life isn't a story. It's too real. But I want you to know that I wouldn't change either of you or anything in my life for one moment of a fairy tale."
Raymond Caine stumbled into the room, still half asleep, and stopped short as his mother and brother connected eyes across the table. "Talking about me behind my back again?"
"Ray," his mother started, and Horatio interrupted her, very unusual for him. "Ray, if we were talking about you, it's because we're concerned. You're getting in with the wrong kind of friends."
"How would you know, Mr. Perfect. You haven't been close enough to the wrong crowd to know it."
"Both of you, sit down and eat your breakfast. And Ray, if I hear of you hanging around that gang again, you're grounded for a week. Next time, it doubles, two weeks, then four weeks, so on. At 12, you don't make the rules."
The remainder of breakfast was eaten in silence, but as the boys went out the door to school, Rosalind reached up to put one hand on Horatio's shoulder. "I did mean what I said. I wouldn't change anything for you." He smiled at her, then headed out the door, steeling himself for the increasingly hard task of looking out for his little brother. His father wasn't around to do it, and his mother couldn't do everything. It was up to him.
****
"Mom, I'm home." Horatio stepped into the house and stopped cold. Silence, emptiness, the feel of a house without its heart. Something was wrong. Badly wrong. He did not call her again but started searching. He found her in the kitchen. The table was turned over, the trash can on its side, the entire room in a shambles. And his mother. Rosalind's face had been beaten so severely it was hardly recognizable. Her hands were clenched, nails extended, showing that she had gone down fighting to the last. And swirling around her bloody face was her beautiful chocolate hair. Horatio stood in the doorway in paralyzing shock. He did not go to her; the emptiness of the room already proclaimed that her spirit wasn't there anymore. In the stiffling silence, his own heartbeat echoed in his ears like the slamming of a door shutting off forever the last vestiges of his childhood. Then the silence shattered. "NO!!!!!!!!"
****
Horatio Caine sat bolt upright in bed, nearly falling out of it. The sheets were drenched in sweat, and his heartbeat drummed loudly in his ears, calling back the kitchen tableau with every thump. He sucked in deep breaths, trying to calm himself. Just a dream, he said, but he knew otherwise. It wasn't a dream, and it wasn't a tale of fiction, like his mother had once wanted. It was only too real. April 3. 28 years ago today, his mother had been killed. The dream came back yearly, at least on that occasion if not others, but it never lost its impact on Horatio. He stood up, slightly shaky on his feet, and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. Gulping it down, he looked at the clock. 3:30. Still, he knew that he would never get back to sleep this night. Rather than sitting around with ghosts in the dark, he started to get dressed.
****
"Hey, you're early today." Calleigh Dusquesne sailed into the lab with her long blonde hair flowing out behind in the speed of her passage. Calleigh rarely did anything at any less than full speed ahead. Except for one thing, that is. For two years, she had fought an increasingly difficult battle with her feelings for her boss. Sometimes she tried to avoid him, but that was even worse. Lack of him was almost a physical hurt, and she would find herself lost in thought, wondering what he was doing. So she relied on a front of easy banter. Contact, but not too personal or revealing. More and more, though, it wasn't enough.
"Yeah, I came in to run some tests." Now that Calleigh got closer, she could see that Horatio looked either like something was really bothering him or like he had not slept at all. He was positively haggard. The teasing front fell away from Calleigh instantly, replaced by sharp concern. "Horatio, are you alright?"
He straightened slightly from the equipment and rubbed his weary eyes. "Fine." It was so obvious a lie that she didn't even challenge it, letting it fall flat of its own accord. "I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep, so I came in to finish off some of this backlog."
"Why don't we have some coffee? We could go to the break room and sit there for a while at the table. It will be a half hour or so before everyone gets in." She saw him pull back instantly, almost reacting with horror to her idea. What the hell was going on here? The idea of shared coffee and conversation had never put him off before.
Horatio's cell phone rang, breaking the moment. "Horatio." Even edged with tiredness and tension, his voice gave her chills. "All right, we'll be there ASAP." He put up the phone and almost visibly pulled himself together, becoming her supervisor right before her eyes. "A woman was murdered over on Parker Street. Let's go."
****
Horatio stepped out of the Hummer and reached back in for his field kit. Calleigh already had hers and was heading for the crime scene, neatly taped off with yellow police tape. Detective Hagan was waiting for them. "Early morning jogger found her in an alley. No sounds or signs of the killer still around. Probably long gone." The radio in his police car crackled, and he moved toward it, unblocking their view. Poor woman, Calleigh thought. She lay in a pitiful crumpled heap at the side of the alley, head turned away from them, long chocolate brown hair spilling over her shoulders. Calleigh opened her field kit and put on latex gloves, then turned back to look at Horatio when she realized that he wasn't doing the same. He stood there with an expression in his eyes so stunned, so lost, that she forgot the woman in the alley and went to him instead. "Horatio." She touched his arm gently with one gloved hand. She tried to avoid touching him usually, but she wasn't sure her voice alone would reach him. He drew in a shuddering breath and turned to look at her. "Horatio, what's wrong? Did you know her?"
His eyes dropped, and he said softly, "Um, no. Never saw her in my life. I'm fine, just tired. Like I said, I didn't get much sleep last night." He started across to the victim, all of his usual grace lost, moving like his feet were wooden. He crossed around her and knelt on the other side, looking directly at her face. Something in him relaxed slightly, the knot eased, and he opened his own kit and snapped on the gloves. "No visible injuries. She must have been ambushed. It was quick, anyway."
"Or she trusted whoever killed her." Calleigh's own brain began to function, or at least half of it did. The other half was still focused on Horatio. He was the picture of professionalism now, but to someone who had studied him as much as she had, he looked slightly tightened, as if some God-like puppetmaster had taken up all of his strings a few notches.
"What a way to start a morning." Alexx Woods arrived at the scene, going straight to the body. "Poor woman, this wasn't how you expected to start the day, either." She knelt next to Horatio, glanced at him once, then took a second longer look. He stood up, breaking the closeness. Alexx accepted his silent no-tresspassing sign and started to examine the body. "Neck snapped, possibly. Look at the bruising around her throat. Where's Delko?"
"He and Speed are on another case. I'll take the pictures." Horatio took the camera out of his kit, focused, and started snapping. He usually tried to personalize his victims rather than distance himself from them, but right now, he was glad of the perspective the lens gave him. Calleigh, meanwhile, was walking carefully arround the alley, looking for anything that might be significant.
"Horatio!" He was at her side instantly. "Look at this handkerchief. Maybe the killed dropped it."
"Good job, Calleigh." The warmth of his praise melted her. "Let's bag it, tag it, and get it back to the lab. Stay here and cover the scene a few more times, would you? I'll go with Alexx. Are you ready to move, Alexx?"
"Not much I can do here," the beautiful woman said, stepping back from the victim to let the ME's staff zip the body into a bag. She spoke to the body warmly, as if it could still hear. "Let's get you back to the lab and see what you can tell us. Maybe you can help us catch those people."
****
It was long past quitting time before Calleigh straightened up from the lab equipment. Hours at the crime scene had paid off that day when she had found a gun behind a dumpster. Not that it was definitely connected to the murder, unfortunately. The woman had died of a snapped neck, as Alexx had surmised. Still, it could have been used to threaten, or as a backup plan for the killer. The number had been filed off, and she had spent much of the day trying to reconstruct it. Time for a break, she thought. She hated leaving a job unfinished, but she realized that she was getting too tired to be at her best. Time to step back for a while, then come at it anew. She started down the hall to the break room, then spotted the light on in Horatio's office at the end of the hall. CSI was nearly deserted at this hour, and she stalked down the hall with an urgency she would never have wanted her colleagues to see. If poor Horatio was still here, slaving away even when he was so tired, she would escort him home personally. She herself was exhausted from the day, and she wasn't the one who had looked like death warmed over that morning.
Calleigh opened the office door and froze. Horatio was at his desk, his shoulders slumped, his head on his arms. She closed the door much more quietly than she had opened it, but he did not stir. Sound asleep, poor guy, she thought. She stood there for a moment just enjoying the opportunity to watch him when he wasn't aware of her. Thick red hair, a slim yet powerful frame. The most captivating part, the eyes, were hidden. Still, it was not Horatio's physical attributes she admired. The pure soul of the man shone out like a lighthouse. Loyalty, intelligence, absolute dedication. She never tired of watching him at work, piecing the puzzles together, bringing justice to the victims of the city. The rest of them all had their specialties, but Horatio's specialty was fitting it all together. He saw more, and in more ways, than the rest of them. She longed again for the opportunity to do more than just watch him work. She wanted to love him, most of all to hold him, be there for him like he was there for so many people. Horatio spent his life giving to everyone else; Calleigh dreamed of giving to him. But his wall of control would not allow it. Everyone who knew him admired him, but no one was allowed to get close.
Calleigh walked around his desk, trying to move silently, but his sleep was so deep that he never stirred. There was a small picture on the other side of his desk in a silver frame, and it occurred to her that she had never seen it, only the back of it from the visitor's chair. Who would someone so self-sufficient have a picture of on his desk? She picked it up softly, resisting the urge to touch Horatio's shoulders which were so near her hand. The poor guy needed his rest. The picture was of a woman and two boys. She recognized Horatio instantly, a much younger Horatio, but the other two she had never seen. The second boy could only be Ray, a smaller, softer version of his brother, less strength of character in the face, less direct honesty in the eyes. It was the woman who took Calleigh's breath away, though. Her eyes were not blue, but the expression was pure Horatio. Her hair was the most beautiful shade of chocolate, exactly the shade of that morning's victim. In that instant, Calleigh had a glimpse of what had disturbed Horatio so much that morning. Fortunately for Horatio, the resemblance ended at the hair. Once he had seen the face, she remembered, he had shaken off the past and settled to work. Still, something had been bothering him before he ever saw the body.
Horatio shifted slightly, and Calleigh stepped back, afraid she was disturbing him. She quickly realized that she wasn't the one disturbing him, though. His head jerked slightly to the side, and his breathing became uneven. She hesitated. Should she wake him up? He answered that question himself, moaning slightly. His head had turned, and she could see that there was sweat standing on his forehead. Horatio never broke a sweat in the 90 degree Miami heat, but he was sweating now. Calleigh stepped forward and slid one hand across his shoulder in a comforting way. "Horatio," she said softly. "Wake up. It's just a dream."
"NO!!!!!" Calleigh had never heard his voice raised, but the one word was absolutely a scream, torn from deep within him. Horatio leaped bolt upright from his chair, crashed into the corner of the desk, and actually fell over. Calleigh stood stunned for a second; she had never seen him clumsy. Then she moved instantly, going to him as he picked himself up from the floor.
"Horatio, are you alright? It was just a dream." His eyes were fully lucid now, but the pain behind them hurt her more than a gunshot would. He hesitated for a moment, then replied, realizing that a lie would never pass here. He knew he had screamed; she saw it in his eyes. And whatever he had screamed at, he could almost still see it.
"No." The voice was his usual soft tone but with a broken edge that broke her heart. She had never heard him say he wasn't alright. Not to her. Not to anyone. "No, I'm not alright, Calleigh. And it wasn't just a dream." She realized suddenly that she was gripping him by both arms; in fact, she was half holding him up.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
He took a deep breath. "No. Not now. Let's talk about something else. Anything else."
Once her heart would have leapt at the opportunity, but she was too consumed with worry for him to give way to her own feelings. Never in a thousand years would she take advantage of whatever nightmare he was living for her own selfish reasons. "Okay," she said, smiling at him. "Let's go get coffee, okay? And we'll talk about something else."
He gave her a wan smile. "Thanks, Calleigh." They left the office together and turned out the light.
