He was talking - or at least, she thought he was talking. His lips were moving, but he could have been yelling for all she knew. Her ears seemed to have short-circuited, leaving nothing but white noise to make it through to her brain, a roaring that made her dizzy and more than slightly nauseated.
Sara stammered her apologies to Megan and Thomas and turned, somehow managing not to trip as she very carefully put one foot in front of the other and walked back down the hall. Every step was a small victory, as she shed herself of the shock and collected her thoughts into coherent order. And with every step she grew angrier.
Carl. Carl and Thomas. She was going to kill them both. She could get away with it, too. Stupid, stupid mistake to piss off the lab's top CSI. Suicidal, really.
Sara jabbed the cell phone keypad with her finger, and was about to press send for speed dial when she stopped in the middle of the hallway and closed the phone back up.
God. Oh, God. Her anger suddenly evaporated, leaving her dizzy and sick again. She sagged against the wall, hitting her shoulder hard on the metal frame of the glass surrounding one of the labs, and pressed a shaking hand to her lips and then her forehead.
Get ahold of yourself, Sidle, she ordered herself firmly. The list of reasons she shouldn't fall apart just from seeing Gil Grissom was a long and persuasive one, topped by the fact that she had already dealt with this. Sara never went over the same ground twice. It was what had always made her such a good scientist. In Chem 101, first day of class, the professor had walked in and written a quote from Einstein on the white board in front of an ampitheater of several hundred terrified Harvard freshmen.
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results," he'd scrawled, and Sara had dutifully copied it down on the inside cover of her lab notebook. Later, she'd typed it out and stuck it to the corkboard that hung over her desk. Creativity was the root of scientific discovery. Try things that hadn't been done before, and you arrived at the answers that were exactly the ones you needed because you'd finally learned to ask the right questions.
Expect the unexpected.
Her thoughts completed the tangent and her mind finally achieved something approaching equilibrium.
Okay. This was unexpected. Out of left field. A radical departure from the normal operating parameters.
She could deal with it. First step - isolate the mutation. That meant not letting it control the rest of the equation, rejecting its influence and normalizing conditions.
Sara stood up straight again and ignored the twinge in pain from what would surely be a rather impressive bruise on her shoulder. Deep breath in, deep breath out. One foot in front of the other, all the way out to the parking garage and her car and her appartment and her bed and when she woke up there was the routine that would snap back in place. Beyond that, she could deal with anything.
"Sara."
No. No, no, no.
She kept walking.
"Sara."
Ignore the little huff of self-frustation that you know so well. Ignore the sixth sense that tells you exactly how he's standing, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, face blank, eyes reflecting the inner struggle as he tries to find just the right words even though he never does.
"She was my daughter too."
Sara stopped, every muscle in her body locking abruptly. No. No.
She started walking again, and didn't break into a run until she'd left the building.
~*~
The phone ringing shook her out of the nightmare, and Sara breathed heavily for a few minutes, sweat dampening the flannel sheets, before she squinted at the alarm clock and wondered why the hell anyone was calling her at two in the afternoon. She'd only been asleep for an hour.
For a long, irrational moment she didn't want to answer it. There was the chance it might be Grissom, and after the nightmare she'd just had, she wasn't in any shape to face him.
Then she realized how cowardly those thoughts sounded, and nearly knocked the phone off her nightstand as she slapped her hand down on it.
"Gr - Sidle," she snapped, not caring how groggy she sounded and blaming her abrupt wakening for the slip in answering.
"Sar?"
The voice on the other end of the line was one of the few guaranteed to make her smile instantly, given that Carl and Thomas were, knowingly or not, operating under death threats. "Nicky."
"Um, listen, I just wanted to warn you that - "
"I've already seen him," she sighed, untangling herself from the sweaty covers and sliding into a bathrobe. No way was she going to be able to sleep.
"Oh, God, Sar, I'm sorry, we didn't know, Cath was the only one who knew, and she didn't say anything until this morning when we were asking why he took a personal day, and..." His words jumbled together, coming out faster and faster until he finally ran out of explanation. "I'm so sorry."
She shrugged before realizing he couldn't see the gesture, and cleared her throat. "It's not your fault."
He would blame himself anyway. Nick Stokes had always played the role of her older brother, and over those months, he had given the word 'protective' new meaning. It had set him at odds with Catherine and Warrick, but he had never faltered, never failed her.
"Catherine didn't say anything," he reiterated, and now he was working himself into the kind of fury she well remembered. "She knew. She's known for a few days. I think she told Warrick. I don't get it. I don't know why he went."
Sara did. "A few days, like since the weekend?" She folded her legs underneath her as she nestled in the chair and looked out the window. Sometime since she'd gone to bed, snow had begun to fall, lazily, beautifully.
"Sure. I don't know." He paused, obviously going over the events of the past few days and picking out clues among words and events that had seemed innocuous at the time, using his investigator's mind to form a more complete picture. "Yeah. Since the weekend."
"I Fed-Exed the divorce papers this weekend. And my resignation," she added almost as an afterthought.
There was complete silence on the other end, and Sara focused on one flake at a time as they drifted down and settled in her window box, covering the frozen dirt.
Nick finally drew in a shuddering breath. "God."
"Yeah."
They sat in quiet for a few moments, and Sara closed her eyes, unwilling to be hypnotized by the snow. "It's not like it wasn't inevitable."
She could practically hear him struggling for words on the other end, and she knew if they weren't separated by three thousand miles and three hours of time difference, he would have pulled her into a tight hug. Knowing that made her smile, at least a little bit.
"Do you remember my last night in Vegas?" she asked him, opening her eyes to watch the snow again. It had picked up, falling thicker and faster, and her view of the Boston skyline was becoming blurry.
"Yeah," Nick confirmed, obviously unsure where she was leading with this line of questioning.
"You bought me ice cream," she reminisced, and the slight smile grew wider, "and we walked down the Strip. And we ended up in that little Italian place."
"Puccini's," he continued. "Wine and bread sticks."
"Do you remember what I asked you?" Her voice was almost dreamy. The snow had reached whiteout conditions, and she couldn't take her eyes off the swirling mass, interrupted only briefly by the dark of buildings and gray sky.
"You..." He cleared his throat. "You asked why we'd never ended up together."
"It wasn't a very fair thing to ask," Sara said absently, and the snow kept falling.
"You'd had...a little too much to drink." Nick sighed lightly. "You weren't yourself."
"I haven't been myself for months," she snapped back, more of an edge to her voice than she'd intended. "I'm...sorry. You didn't deserve that." Before he could tell her it was okay, she spoke again. "You never answered me, you know."
"No, I didn't."
"Well?"
"Sara..." His voice nearly trembled with emotion, gentle, upright Nick Stokes, the best man she knew. "It wouldn't have...you were always...I was..."
The snow was still coming down, and while the view from the window was one big blur, she knew she was crying when the frame of the window began to smudge and bleed into the white of the panorama beyond.
"Yeah. I know."