DISCLAIMER: it's not mine. Which is a pity, really.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: My first attempt at first person POV for Sara, so any comments on how it worked would be greatly appreciated - be as brutally honest as you like.

The only words with which anyone can appropriately describe Las Vegas are Las Vegas. Some tales grow in the telling, but if the stories about Vegas have ever been enhanced beyond reality, reality has quickly caught up and even exceeded what has been said. Vegas simply is, glamourous and tacky, exciting and grotesque at once.

The first time I came to Vegas I was 19 and innocent. It was the end of my first year at Harvard and I was heading home with a friend from LA. We stopped in Vegas because we thought it was something everyone had to do, and we were all too aware of the gap between ourselves and everyone. We wandered up and down the Strip looking at the outrageous casinos, wondering what went on inside them, and feeling no compunction to visit. Even then, I was on the outside of Las Vegas.

Now, so many years later, driving down the Strip, I realised I knew so much of Las Vegas from the inside. I'd met the people, ordinary, hardworking people, who kept the casinos running, raking in the money for those elusive owners in their elaborate offices. I'd seen the backs of the casinos and hotels, the staff corridors, the ordinary boring areas which owed nothing to the glitz of the front. And I'd seen death all over the place. When death becomes commonplace, does life become ordinary, too, I wonder?

I hadn't wanted to be told to 'take a holiday', but driving down the Strip at one thirty am, knowing I didn't have to go to work and face... well, face things, face people - it was like a kind of freedom. I had three weeks in which to do whatever I wanted, and that scared me, because I didn't know what I wanted. If I knew, I told myself, knowing I was probably lying, maybe I wouldn't still be working in Las Vegas. I wasn't living there, just existing, and sometimes, I felt, not even that. I could have been robot on so many of those long nights, if it wasn't for the fact that robots don't feel.

I didn't know where I was going. I was just driving, a bag of hastily-packed clothes and half my bookshelf on the back seat of the Denali. Escaping like this wasn't what I did, but I'd realised, at about midnight, that I couldn't stay in Vegas for my three weeks of enforced vacation time. I couldn't read the paper every morning to find out what my colleagues had done the previous night, because that would make my absence from work all too real to me. So I left. Ran, escaped, broke free.

I tried to tell myself I didn't know where I was going, because there was excitement in maintaining the illusion that Sara Sidle was doing something wild and dangerous. After I passed the "Welcome to Tamales Bay" sign in a Californian dawn I had to stop lying to myself, because the overwhelming critical area of my brain kept pointing out that of all the roads I could've taken, it wasn't coincidence that I'd taken the roads that led home.

Turning down the road to the beach, I took off my shoes and left the Denali in the empty parking lot and walked down onto the sand. This was the beach where I'd run barefoot as a child, where I'd swam in the sea in the summer. There was no one here now, for which I was profoundly grateful as I walked down to the water's edge and let the cold water swirl around my feet, soaking the bottoms of my jeans in what felt like liquid ice.

I had to be honest with myself, because what else can you be when you're standing barefoot in the sea at quarter to seven in the morning? And what else can you be but honest when there's nothing you can do but accept that you've hit rock bottom? I'd come home because I had nowhere else to go. It was a simple, stark, bare fact, and I hated admitting it. I'd run home like a small child who needed her mother.

I began to walk, dragging my feet through the water, at once the present Sara Sidle and the Sara of days gone by. Work, Grissom, everything - it all seemed to be going against me. Here on the beach the world of Las Vegas seemed so far away, but no less real. With the clarity that the ocean had always brought me - the clarity, perhaps, of the cold sea water - I could see all the silly little errors I'd made. All the things which reminded me with excrutiating clarity of the behaviour I'd stayed far, far away from in high school. Sniping with Catherine, grudges against Nick, and trying so hard to get over Grissom but failing, time after time. Failing both to 'get' him, in whatever sense of the word, and to redeem myself in his eyes - in my own eyes. Loathing myself more and more each time it happened, each time I tried to say something that would reach him and he just looked back at me with a blank look on his face, as though I was nothing more than a particularly interesting bug.

I reached the end of the beach and clambered up on the rocks at the far end to where I'd sat so many times as a child. I'd kidded myself that this was my spot, my escape, but it had never been only mine. This time, though, I had the beach to myself, and no one to see if I succumbed to the tears I hated. Maybe it was being in my childhood refuge that enabled me to cry like a child.

More than two hours passed before I came down from my rocks and let my feet take themselves back into the sea. I stood there knee deep in water, wondering if this was what life was. If I could step back from Las Vegas, from forensics, from Grissom, from the half-empty bottles of vodka and Jack Daniels in the living room of my apartment and just... be... here among the waves and rocks and sand.

That sounded like something my mother would say; she had a habit of getting away from the B&B by going to the beach or sitting in the wild back corner of the garden and just communing with nature or whatever it was she did. I'd always seen it as a bit odd, but it didn't stop me from running off down to the beach when things got a little overwhelming. And now, when they'd got a lot overwhelming, I'd run straight back here.

Yes, there had to be more to life than the bright lights of Las Vegas - lights that concealed tackiness and something so sordid that most people wouldn't even believe it. But why, apart from the extremely cold water, was this life on the beach more real? Because it was my childhood, my teenage years? Because this was home?

I turned and walked back up the beach to where I'd left the Denali, sand coating my feet and jeans. Life may have been here, my past may have been here, but I still had to live in Las Vegas. I had to deal with Grissom, I had to deal with it all.

I just didn't know how.

I changed my mind and left the Denali in the parking lot, walking along to the general store on the little strip of shops. Having chocolate chip icecream for breakfast was probably better than beer.

I had three weeks. Three weeks to figure out what I was doing with my life. I thought chocolate chip icecream was a pretty damn good start.

THE END