Title: Secret Keeper
Author: Jeanine (jeanine@iol.ie)
Rating: PG
Pairing: Sara/Warrick
Feedback: Makes my day
Disclaimer: If it was in the show, it's not mine.
Archive: At my site Checkmate () , Fanfiction.net; anywhere else, please ask.
Summary: Greg sees something that surprises him.
Notes: For the LiveJournal CSReports "Natural and Unnatural Disasters" challenge.
***
Greg is walking along the hall with Warrick, having just given him the results that he and Sara have been waiting on for the last hour. He's in the middle of a long explanation about why the tests took him so long, a sidebar about dayshift spillover making Warrick roll his eyes, but that doesn't bother Greg. He just keeps on talking, telling Warrick what he needs to know, following him to the break room in the hopes that he'll get a chance to also talk to Sara.
Not that he's still nursing a crush on Sara.
Well, maybe a little one, but he's long since accepted that nothing's going to happen, that they're destined to be just friends. Besides, by all appearances, Sara's into Grissom, not him, and he's not getting in the middle of that.
When they get to the break room, Sara's there, sitting on one of the comfortable chairs, her knees drawn up to her chin, staring at the television in the corner. One look at her chalk-white face has Greg and Warrick exchanging a worried glance, and even when Warrick says her name, she doesn't look around.
Greg's rooted to the spot, but he looks at the screen, sees images of mayhem and destruction there, gleans from the news ticker what's happened, and his mouth goes dry.
Warrick looks at the screen too, but he's able to move, able to go to Sara, stand behind her, say her name. It gets through to her, because Greg sees her swallow hard, and, still staring at the television, she finally speaks. "That's where I grew up," she says, her voice a whisper. "They've spoken to friends of my parents…people I went to school with…"
"Are your parents…?" Greg starts the question, but his voice dies when she shrugs.
"I can't get through…the phones are down." She props her right arm on her knees, raises her hand to her lips, and even from a distance, Greg can see that it's shaking.
He wishes that there was something he could do, something he could say, to help her, but Warrick beats him to it, and he does it without saying a word. Instead, he just stands behind her, his right hand dropping on to Sara's left shoulder, staying there.
Which surprises Greg a lot, but not as much as Sara reaching up with her left hand, gripping Warrick's fingers and holding them so tightly that Greg can see her knuckles turning white.
More surprising still is the aura of intimacy that's settled around them like a blanket, leaving Greg feeling like very much the outsider.
When he slips out of the room a couple of minutes later, they don't even notice that he's gone.
And when he talks to people later, who tell him about the earthquake, about Sara going home, he doesn't let on that he already knows, or what he saw.