Sara stepped out of the steam filled shower and reached to grab her towel off the rack, knocking her hairbrush to the floor in the process. As she towel dried herself off, she reached down to pick it up and walked over to the mirror. Reaching out she wiped the steam condensation from the mirror, reveling her reflection staring back at her. Through the streaks crossing the mirror where her hand had wiped it clean she saw a woman. Pretty, she supposed, in a girl-next-door sort of way. Though her hair was rather straight and sometimes lifeless, and she almost never wore makeup. In fact, the only makeup she even owned she bought five years ago when she went to the wedding of a professor that she had worked for as a teaching assistant back in graduate school. Investigating crime scenes for a living didn't really necessitate dressing up on a daily basis. It was hard to worry about your mascara when you were trekking through a garbage dump.
Thinking about work brought her thoughts back to Grissom. She smiled to herself as she reached for her hair dryer. Still, she didn't yet know what his being awake would mean to her. Would this brush with death be the push that they needed to take their relationship to the next level? Or would he simply thank her for bringing him the latest issue of "Forensic Science Today" and ask her how her cases had been going while he was in the hospital? Was it going to be business as usual, or a whole new frontier? Truthfully, she didn't know. And really, the whole prospect was rather frightening. Despite the fact that she knew she wanted something more from him than she was getting, thinking about it actually happening was scary. It would mean so many changes for both of them. At work, in their personal lives. Could two totally independent workaholic people really come together as something more than friends?
'I'm getting ahead of myself,' she thought as she began to comb out her hair. 'I don't even know what his condition will be after his stint in the coma.' Truth be told, Grissom waking up brought more questions than answers. What kind of injuries did he have? What kind of physical therapy would he need? Would he still be able to work? Even putting aside the physical injuries, what it must feel like to wake up weeks after an accident? Was being in a coma like sleeping? Or did he have some memory of being in the hospital?
She broke from her worrying about Grissom to look in the mirror and assess herself. She sighed and bent down to dig around in the cabinet under her sink. She emerged shortly with an old curling iron in her hand. 'What the hell,' she thought. 'It's not every day someone wakes up from a coma, maybe I'll curl my hair today.'
As she left the curling iron to heat up, she walked to her bedroom, tossing her towel over the back of a chair on the way. As she stood in front of her closet, she contemplated the plethora of t-shirt and jeans combos that she owned. She pulled out one of her favorites, red v-neck t-shirt, and grabbed a pair of jeans and tossed them on the bed. Over by her dresser she paused to gaze at the orchid that sat atop the dresser. An old card was still attached to the little plastic prongs stuck in the dirt. She read the simple words on the card just as she had so many days before, "From Grissom."
Putting on her clothes she glanced at the clock sitting on the bedside table, 3pm. In a little less than an hour she would meet the rest of nightshift at the hospital, and she would get to see Grissom, awake. She stood and walked into the bathroom to curl her hair and finish getting ready. It was time to move forward.
***
Pulling into the parking lot at the hospital thirty minutes later, Sara was just about vibrating with excitement. As she walked into the familiar corridors she felt the butterflies in her stomach take flight. She was terrified. Thanks to Bobby she had gotten good at talking to Grissom when he was unconscious, but what would she do now that he was awake? Would she freeze? She hoped not. She wanted the new Sara to be more confident than that, more honest.
Sara floated down the hall towards Grissom's room, barely noticing the flurry of activity around her. All the time she had spent in this hospital over the last few weeks had taught her to ignore the constant code blues, code reds, and all the rest of them. As she rounded the corner to the hall where Grissom was, she was rehearsing what she would say to him when she walked into his room and saw him awake. But just a few steps down the hall, her heart stopped short. The flurry of doctors and nurses responding to a code-some-color-or-other that she had been ignoring were running into a room just twenty yards in front of her. They were all running into Grissom's room.