Ah, yes, finally!  I've been looking forward to this chapter for a while, since it's a major turning point for Grissom and the case.  We've reached the top, now it's all downhill.

Oh, and for RainbowsnStars, who asked, the title "Blood in the Water," is referring to how sharks swarm at the first hint of blood when something is swimming, so it clues them to attack.  It's kind of a double explanation for Melissa and Nathan - - striking at the first scent of weakness - - and a way of describing the teams reactions to protect Greg after his accident.

**

Chapter Fifteen: Deserving

**

They sat in the silence.  Grissom had, eventually, gotten so irritated by the crocheted cover that he had very calmly folded it and flung it against the wall.  It was the only action so far to generate a single spot of conversation from them.  Everything was set.  They had concealed officers waiting outside in civilian vehicles - - they had the right to take Trey to Las Vegas for questioning - - all that remained was to wait for him to show up.  Until then, they just had to hold onto their tempers - - and sanity.  Grissom had called Nick twice in the last hour alone, checking on Greg.  Nick always had the same answer.

No change.

"My mother," Catherine said, surprising him, "told me once that life wasn't always fair, but that, for the most part, people got what they deserved.  I think it was just her way of motivating me to not grow up to be a serial killer - - but I believed it.  Until now, I think."

"Why is that?"

"Why did I believe, or why did I stop believing?"

He smiled gently.  "I know why you believed.  I can understand that.  Why did you stop?"

She waved her hand, the gesture encompassing the Robertsons' house.  "All of this.  These people.  They're good parents.  They're trying to protect their child - - and he's a murderer.  A would-be murderer, anyway, and that's just as bad.  He tried to kill Greg, but they'd still do anything to save him, because they love him."

"And he doesn't deserve it?"

"No.  He doesn't."  She scowled.  "Don't tell me that you think he does."

"No, I agree with you.  But what else?"

"Nathan Sanders."

"Oh."

"If Trey Robertson gets wonderful parents who love him - - who would do anything for him - - and Greg gets Nathan, then people don't get what they deserve."

He felt obligated to agree with her.  Greg deserved a better family than the one he'd been given.  With a father like Nathan, it wouldn't have mattered much how his absent mother was.  Grissom had the unshakeable feeling that Nathan's presence alone would be enough to spoil a relationship, to seep through the good and eat away at it with insecurities and doubt.  He soured connections, made love first difficult, and then impossible.  With a pang of belated embarrassment, Grissom still remembered how flushed his team had been when they had broken the connection between them, standing over Greg's hospital bed, just at Nathan's snide word.

No.  Greg could never have deserved that.

"But Trey is going to get prison for this," he said slowly, working it out, trying to reach some conclusion that meant the universe was working in their favor.  "We've already got him for this, Catherine, you know that.  His parents won't be able to protect him."

"And do they deserve that?  To lose their son because of what he did?"

"They love each other," he said, feeling clumsy about the situation.  "They'll still have their marriage, and they deserve that."

"Right," Catherine said, bitter.  "We only get some of what we deserve.  Just like Melissa Sharpe gets off with a much lighter sentence because we needed to find Trey."

He found himself nodding.  It wasn't right, and it wasn't easy.  Who could say that it was?  Who could look at Trey and give him loving parents, look at Greg, so damned eager to please and so willing to work himself to dust if it meant an affectionate glance, and give him Nathan?  It was like a cosmic mistake, a sour punch-line.  Who could even look at Greg and choose Grissom as his defender?  That was as much a joke as anything else.  Grissom knew how to find Melissa and track down Trey, but he had missed a few basic lessons on the human involvement.  And no matter how much his hands had trembled as he cut Greg's hair, no matter how sick he had felt as he rehearsed the probable outcomes of Greg's coma in his head like the closing act of a tragedy, he still felt like he was missing some connection.  That Catherine knew how to love, as did Sara, Nick, Warrick, and certainly Greg, but that he was lacking.

"What about Greg?"

Catherine looked surprised to have the questioning suddenly flipped around to her, and it took a moment before she could gather herself to answer.  "I don't know.  He didn't deserve to have any of this happen to him, and God knows he didn't deserve Nathan, but he has us now."

But we don't deserve him.  At least, I don't.

"Do you think he'll make it?" he heard himself ask, and there was the same bitterness in his voice that he had heard a moment ago, in Catherine's.

Do you think we'll have a perfect, fairy-tale ending?  Do you think it'll be option number four, where he wakes up and everything's okay again?

"I - - I don't know.  I don't know what will happen.  What do you think?"

"I'm not the person to ask," he said, with a short chuckle.  After all, he couldn't even decide which ending he feared the most.

"I'm not asking you to be a psychic.  I'm just asking what you suspect."

He said, "Nathan gave us - - odds.  Three-in-five that Greg will die."

"Nathan's an ass," Catherine said fiercely.  "He doesn't have to be right.  He doesn't deserve to be right on this."

"But we've already established that people don't get what they deserve," Grissom said.

They had been sitting close to each other, having somehow gravitated that way in the course of the conversation, but Catherine flinched away from him now, and scooted further down the sofa, as if repulsed.  "You think he's going to be right.  You really think that Greg is going to die."

"I - - yes.  I don't think he'll make it."

The admission shocked him as much as it did her.  He hadn't confessed, not even to himself, that he believed in Nathan's odds.  Of all the nervous rehearsals he had played out in his mind, the one with the black clothes and the tears was the one that kept returning to him, mocking him with probability.  He had found himself thinking about inscriptions, and burial grounds.  Pallbearers.  Nathan Sanders's mocking smile as they lowered his son in the ground.  Interviewing DNA tech replacements and being upset and tired, because not only would he know that none of them were of Greg's caliber, but also because he'd know that he wouldn't give them a fair chance even if they were.

He had been a coroner before he became a criminalist.  He believed in death.

Catherine seemed as curious about his revelation as she was repulsed.  She asked, "Does it . . . make you mad?"

He didn't know how he felt.  He had almost lost his carefully-kept temper with Melissa.  He had fared no better with Nathan.  It was like a rollercoaster to him, only far more deviously designed.  The twists and turns were miracles and deaths, the tracks linked together with tenuous love and unshakeable science.  He felt unsteady.  The newly-found fury was eating him up from inside, and he realized that he'd been calling back to the Vegas for many reasons, not just to check on Greg.  It was a jerk reaction, a reflex.  He wanted to make sure that no one else was hurt.  That they hadn't been mistaken about Trey, that Nick wasn't waiting in the emergency room for anyone.

"It makes me mad," he said, the understatement of the century, and they kept waiting.

Almost another hour past before they heard the rolling sound of tires.  Catherine tensed and he felt it from across the sofa.  He steadied her, his hand on her arm.

"Wait," he whispered hoarsely.  "We can't be sure."

Their ID information on Trey Robertson said he was six-foot-one, muscular, and blonde.  If the man who came through the door met any of those requirements, he belonged to Las Vegas.

A key turning in a lock.  Grissom's hand was slippery on his gun.

It opened, and they had their first look at Trey.  All requirements met.  He was a beefy young man, around thirty-two, and his eyes showed nothing but panic at their presence in what he had thought would be his sanctuary.  He turned for the door, and Grissom let him run.  The cops were there.  They'd have him the second he fled.  Still, he had Catherine jumped to their feet and pursued, for questioning's sake, and sure enough, they heard the bright, clear whine of the sirens.

Trey was being subdued by three men when Grissom walked up to him.

All of his carefully prepared interrogation strategies vanished.

"Why?" was all he could think to say.

Trey's grin was wide.  "She asked."

It was the stupidity, the lack of a better motive, that left him slack-jawed.  It was the same uncontained anger he'd felt with Melissa.  She had been jealous.  Trey had been willing.  They were amoral, unwilling to have scruples.  She'd asked, and he'd done it, and if Grissom had to run a rape kit on Greg, if he had to snap photographs of boot-shaped bruises on his lab tech's stomach, then what did they care?

He wanted desperately to say, "We have you," but he couldn't.  He just let the officers pull Trey into the car.  He still couldn't afford to give up the hint that this was more than just business.  He couldn't break Trey's jaw and bloody his nose because Trey had had the absolute nerve to do the same to Greg.  He couldn't threaten Trey with an extended sentence because Trey had put a bullet through Greg's skull, right above an ear that had spent so many better hours been ruined by atrociously loud punk rock.  He couldn't.  It wasn't allowed.

He was aware that Catherine was holding his wrist.

"What?"

"For a second there, I thought you were going to kill him," she said.

"For a second there, I was."  He rubbed his head.  "Catherine, it's just all so pointless.  We found them - - we have them now - - but what were their reasons for doing it?  It's so stupid.  So ignorant and pointless."

"Greg wouldn't think so."

Currently, Greg wasn't thinking anything about the matter.  And Grissom was starting to believe that he would never have a chance to see what Greg actually would have thought.

"We'll meet them back at the station," he said.  "I'll drive."

He got into the car against her surprised look - - after the conversation they'd had in the house, and his revelation outside, after seeing Trey, she must not have expected him to be so brusque.  But he wasn't a sharing man by nature, and he didn't know how to tell her the truth: that he was losing hope, and that Greg had gotten nothing he'd deserved.

**

By the way, the next chapter is Grissom's second evaluation of the four possibilities (RainbowsnStars, you are my muse on this), the chapter after that has both Nathan and Trey, and the chapter after that has the ending.

Just so you know.  *wink*