Title: Home
Pairing: Warrick/Sara
Rating: PG
Spoilers: None
Disclaimer: Not mine
Notes: For the LiveJournal CSReports "Scent" challenge.
***
When Sara thinks about home, she thinks of the smells of the family B&B on Tomales Bay. The scent of salt water that floats in through the bay windows, the smell of the wet sand at high tide. The smell of fresh-cut grass, of the flower beds and hanging baskets, Dad's pride and joy. The aroma of Mom's cooking wafting from basement to attic, the aroma alone enough to fill you up before you even ate a mouthful.
No matter the problems she might have had with her parents, no matter that they might not always have understood her. That place was always a haven for her, a place where nothing could touch her, and when she left home, was living in a Harvard dorm, those were the smells she would conjure up when she needed to relax.
They always did the trick.
She's not sure when she stopped equating those smells with home, when the anodyne smell of the lab, of the chemicals she used most frequently, became the most familiar smells to her.
She knows when she stopped though.
Those were the days when she literally used to live in the lab, when she had no friends, no social life to speak of. When her world revolved around work, around waiting for Gil Grissom to notice her, to look at her the way she looked at him.
Those days are in the past now, and when she looks back, she hardly knows who that woman was.
Nowadays, when she thinks of home, she thinks of the house she walks into after a long shift, a place that doesn't smell of flowers, or cooking, or of the sea, of antiseptic and chemicals. She thinks of throwing her keys on the hall table, of walking down the hall into the bedroom. Of crawling into bed, inhaling first the scent of the laundry detergent they use on the sheets, then the scent of him as she presses her body against him. His arms wrap around her, pulling her close, pressing a kiss to the top of her head, and she closes her eyes, letting his scent envelope her. Part soap, part cologne, part toothpaste and a whole lot of Warrick, she buries her head in his chest, breathes in deeply, lets herself get lost in him.
She does that now after every shift, and she doesn't know how she existed without it. This is everything that was ever missing in her life, and lying there with him like that, she smiles, because she knows she's home.