He stood on top of the roof and looked down at the ground beneath him. It seemed to him that he was here too often, above and away from everyone, and thinking about how life had turned out. It wasn't what he expected. He supposed that was true for everyone. Still, he didn't think he'd be here now.
Once a gambler and always a gambler, and right now he was wondering about his gambling chances of surviving a fall to the ground below. It wasn't exactly depression as much as a sort of morbid curiousity. In this line of work, you think you've seen it all, and then something hits you with a slam. You think you've seen it all and then a little girl is shot in her room in a drive by. You think you've seen it all and then a little boy is dead when a kidnapping scheme for some cash goes wrong.. The truth is, you've never seen it all.
Sometimes it didn't feel like that though. He had always had a good grip on people's baser nature, or just human nature in general. Nick was idealistic and Sara was too hot tempered to be objective, but he had always seemed to understand the criminal as much as the victim. That worried him sometimes. It could have been very easy for him in this town to turn out the criminal instead of the criminalist. He still wondered if he could turn out like that.
After all, most murderers weren't all evil people. A lot of them were even likable people, but you throw in a few hundred factors that just includes everyday living, and normal, nice, happy people can turn into psychopaths. People could never be classified into good or evil. The world was just too grey for that.
He wondered, though, if people didn't at least lean to one side or the other on the big black versus white spectrum of life. He wondered if he wouldn't tilt a little to the evil side sometimes. He wasn't entirely sure why. He was a good person. He worked hard at his job, chilled on his few days off, and tried to insert a life somewhere between doing forensics and dodging casinos. He certainly wasn't evil. But maybe people could become evil, if they didn't have people to believe in them or they got pushed down all the time. Maybe you get pushed down so many times, you can't ever come back up.
He had been pushed down a lot in his life. Working that high school case a year or two ago had been weird because it seemed like a whole other life somewhere in the past, and he wasn't that old. But high school is it's own little world, and for him, it had been his own little nightmare. He was a geek, a short geek, pushed around and pulled around until he was basically human putty with big feet. Once again, he could relate to the murderers in cases where the bullied kids murder their bullies. When he was a kid and didn't know that life wasn't like high school out in the real world, he probably could have murdered some of his bullies. That life was all too strange.
He had been pushed down a lot, but he also had someone to believe in him. Grissom. He didn't really know why. But Grissom watched out for him when he was first getting out of the gambling world he had become immersed in, believed in him when no one else would, certainly not Sara, and certainly not himself. After Holly Gribbs died. . .the world just changed perspectives. No, that was a stupid statement to make; he changed perspective. He wanted to be the good person that his grandmother raised him to be, the person that Grissom believed he could be, the person he should be. He didn't want to disappoint Grissom, not after all of what Grissom did for him. He knew Nick felt a little of that; Nick was constantly worried about what others thought of him, especially Gris. He, himself, didn't used to care at all. . .but now, after Holly, he decided he did care about people's expectations of him. It was, after all, nice for people to have some good ones.
He didn't know why he was here, on the roof, thinking. He just knew that he had to come up her a lot, to keep that perspective that had changed his life. He hoped he was a good guy. He hoped he could stay that way. He hoped others could see that he tried. Sara changed her mind on him. She used to blame him and think he was a hopeless addict and now she was a friend. . .mostly, anyway. But if Sara could change her mind on something, anything could happen.
Maybe he really was a good guy after all.