Part Four: All Fall Down
We all began with good intent, love was raw and young
We believed that we could change ourselves, our pasts could be undone
But we carry on our backs the burdens time always reveal
It's the lonely light of morning and the wound that would not heal
It's the bitter taste of losing everything that I held so dear
- - Sara McLachlan, "Fallen"
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Chapter Forty-one: Closing the Circle (GRISSOM)
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The morning Gil Grissom went to Greg's funeral, he watched the little girl who lived across his street jumping rope.
She wasn't chanting a rhyme, and that was the first thing he noticed. Her silence seemed to make her part of the funeral procession that would soon begin for everyone else and had already started for him. She gazed solemnly at him, never missing a skip as the rope swished underneath her feet and around the tops of her scuffed sneakers. He was glad to slide into the car and away from the strange, evaluating look in her eyes - - young as she was, had she seen the news bulletins that had lit up across Las Vegas? Had she known who he was and what he was responsible for? Had she known that he was why Nick killed, why Sara suffered, why Greg died? He wasn't significantly versed in human nature to read blame in her eyes when he thought there might only be complacency.
He was getting used to the looks by now. The slightly dazed looks from the people who would make him a celebrity; the slightly frightened looks from the people who were not quite sure that Flowers was dead and so stayed far away from him, not wanting to be harmed; and the slightly interested looks of the people who were biting their tongues to chop off questions that they desperately wanted to ask.
At the funeral, everyone looked resigned. Some of them - - mostly people that he didn't know - - looked sincerely grief-stricken. But where it counted, Grissom checked faces and only saw a kind of bewildered acceptance, because everyone that had really loved Greg knew by now that he was dead along with everything else worth loving. He stayed on the fringes for as long as possible, circulating among friends and acquaintances who, after the initial spike of recognition shone in their eyes, offered him only accusatory gazes mixed occasionally with compassion. No one tried to comfort him, because no one was sure whether or not he deserved to be comforted. He didn't know himself. He had been Greg's boss, after all, and these people probably had more of a right to be grieving than he did. But he couldn't explain to them why Greg had been important - - he didn't know how to put into words the feeling that Greg had been their mascot: a kind of golden child that they alternately chided and nurtured, but always loved for his brilliance, his joy, and his need.
After another moment's hesitation, he plunged into the trenches and prepared to face all of his dead, whether they were still alive or not.
It was Catherine he saw first. She was holding Lindsey's hand and looking very composed in her black dress and string of pearls, but she was staring directly at the coffin as if she couldn't make herself see anything else. Her hand rubbed absently at her cheek before she dropped it down to her side to clench tightly around her silk-covered purse. She uncurled her fingers from it with some obvious difficulty - - he could see her chest rising and falling in her effort to calm herself - - and made a fist, each finger drifting down towards her palm and locking there. He took a step towards Catherine, but he didn't know what he was going to say to her, and he didn't have a clue of what to say to Lindsey, who looked as pale and composed as a second version of her mother, so he edged back over the grass.
He didn't just see Warrick, Warrick came for him. He envied Warrick, who could walk like he had a purpose and a specific point. Warrick grabbed his hand when he saw him, and at first, Grissom was so confused by the gesture that he thought Warrick was going to tug him in some other direction - - perhaps to see Nick, who had made bail the day before and had, apparently, been practicing his eulogy ever since - - or to see Sara, the only one of them to officially be labeled as a victim, which Grissom thought was a shame. But Warrick was actually clinging to his hand and then shaking it. Grissom identified with the sentiment and shook back.
"People keep talking about us," Warrick said, nodding towards the crowd on the outskirts. "Saying that Greg's job got him killed, and we shouldn't even be here. They're good friends. I knew he had them, but I never knew where he kept them, or how he found the time, but he must have. I've been wondering if this many people would show up if I bit the dust tomorrow."
At least he'd said "if". Grissom wouldn't have wanted to be the one to try and talk Warrick out of suicide if he had said "when I bite the dust tomorrow". At this point, he felt like the least qualified person in the world to try and talk someone out of killing themselves - - Kevorkian would probably do a better job.
"I'd have a small funeral," Grissom said absently.
"Have you seen Nick yet?"
"No. I haven't been looking."
"He's not waiting for you, if you thought he was. I think he's about done being part of the team - - he just needs to wrap this up first. If Greg wasn't dead, I doubt he would have even tried to scrape up the bail money - - but if Greg wasn't dead, I guess a lot of things would have turned out differently, right?"
Grissom didn't know, couldn't say. Didn't want to think about it. What stuck with him most and bit hard through his defenses like a thorn was, He's not waiting for you, if you thought he was. It probably hurt the most because he hadn't seen Nick since he had been arrested - - he had meant to visit, but, given the circumstances, Nick had made bail quickly and then the funeral had been looming before them. He should have visited. He realized that now. He should have tried to see Nick, and made a scene if he couldn't. He should have thrown enough furniture around the room to wake up the whole damn prison to make sure that Nick knew that he had tried, but Grissom had never been the type to throw furniture or make assurances, and he guessed that Nick was no longer the type who waited for someone to start.
"What do you mean, he's about done being part of the team?"
Warrick raised his hands. "No one's standing together but us. And I didn't have to walk over here."
Grissom thought he understood. When his mind had drifted to a funeral before - - and it had always been with a guilty feeling of horror - - he had imagined all of them as the core of grief, tightly knit, never crumbling. Here, they were splintered - - together for Greg's sake but not really together at all. Sam Braun and Matthew Flowers had taken care of that with a few efficient, deadly blows.
"Nick's almost finished," Warrick continued, "and I'm getting close to the end, too. I think I'll stick around for the trial, but that's it. Either way - - win or lose - - I have to get out of here. Maybe get some place where things won't fall apart."
"I never thought you'd be the one to run away," Grissom said, before he could stop himself. One more sentence he could never take back, and if it were Warrick in the coffin in front of him, still gleaming in the light, would he regret it? Would he want to breathe it back in between his lips and swallow that bitterness before it could escape?
Warrick looked over his shoulder. "Never thought I would be, either. I used to think I'd grow old here - -and who wants to grow old in Vegas, right? Must be crazy. But I thought that I'd work it out anyway. Have job security. Get married. Have some kids."
Warrick looked at Catherine and Lindsey for a long time and Grissom was pretty sure he understood that, too. He had had a suspicion once that Warrick and Catherine would finally end up together at the end of the tracks, but if Warrick was taking off, than that attraction was just another casualty of war. He tried to not to look for Sara, because he didn't want to think about his own casualties. He had too many of them, anyway - - too many to count, let alone name.
"Where are you going to go?"
Warrick shrugged. "I was thinking New York, actually. I've never seen a real winter."
"I wish you'd stay," Grissom said. His lips were numb. "We could always get you a vacation in Alaska, see all the snow you want. If you stayed - -"
"If I stayed," Warrick said gently, "it wouldn't change anything. You really think we're just going to snap back into position because you solved the case? Nick killed someone, Greg's dead, Sara's - - been assaulted, and if the three of us didn't actually get hit, we had to watch, and that's bad enough."
"And your solution is leaving? Should I take off, too?"
"Yeah," Warrick said, and he didn't sound like he was joking. "If I were you, I'd go somewhere warm."
"Warmer than the desert?"
"South," Warrick clarified. "I'd like to see you on the Gulf of Mexico. Get your feet wet for a change. You could go to Mardi Gras every year if you lived close enough. I think that would be nice, don't you? All those carnival gold doubloons and beautiful women with strings of beads?" He shook his head. "But you wouldn't go. You'd think about it, maybe toss the idea around a couple times - - hell, maybe you'd even go as far as order a ticket. But you'd cancel your flight . . . or miss it and tell yourself that missing it was an accident, even when it wasn't."
"Why do you think I wouldn't go?"
"You don't change well. And this much change is enough for anyone, without throwing in a move. Besides, you'll stay because Sara's here. If Sara leaves - - I don't know. Then you might actually catch that flight. Call me if you do. I'll throw you a party." His smile softened the blow a little, but not enough. And all the smiles in the world couldn't change the fact that Warrick was right, and both of them knew it.
"If I move, I'll call you."
Warrick reached forward again and squeezed his hand.
"I'll leave my answering machine on."
They pulled apart as Nick approached the coffin, his hands tucked in the pockets of his black suit-jacket, and cleared his throat. Everyone gave him a wide berth - - Grissom wasn't sure if it were out of respect or out of fear: everyone knew that Nick was obviously the principal mourner, if he were giving the eulogy, but just as many people knew that he was the man who had punched two bullet-holes in Matthew Flowers's chest and then blithely confessed. Still, whatever the reason, people parted away from him and cleared a decent space so that the full force of Nick's grief had room to circulate.
Nick said:
"Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay."
Grissom whispered to Warrick, "Robert Frost."
"That sums up a lot about how I feel about Greg, right now. It sums up a lot about how I feel about my life, right now. Greg would probably have thrown a fit if he knew that I was going to be reciting poetry at his funeral, probably would've said, 'Come on, Nick, a poem? Why not something by Manson?'"
For a split second, Nick's voice became Greg's - - and Grissom actually flinched, as if Greg were standing there, blended in with Nick's, but then the resemblance faded as Nick chuckled, and continued.
"I remember Greg and Grissom fought for two hours once over whether popular music counted as art."
Nick looked up, connected his eyes with Grissom's.
"Greg won, I think.
"Warrick and I used to have bets on the new lab techs - - how long they'd last, whether they'd leave in nervous breakdowns because of all the work or quit after a killing spree . . . stuff like that. We had three new DNA techs before Greg came along, and there Warrick and I were, pocketing the money and making all the jokes. Then we hear this rumor that this kid's coming in, top of his class at Stanford, and we all expect a child prodigy or something - - dead serious, no sense of humor, and definitely likely to crack under the first day stress. And Greg shows up in a concert t-shirt with his hair sticking up absolutely everywhere, and we stare at him for a while, and Warrick says - - but he sounds impressed - - 'I give him a day, man. Look at him.'
"I was a little more optimistic. I said, 'Nah, it'll be a week, at least.' Greg stayed for five years, so I guess I won that one." Nick looked at Warrick. "Pay up."
The crowd broke out in some extremely nervous laughter, and Nick gave everyone a very genuine, very unrehearsed smile. Grissom thought that some of them must be forgiving Nick already, because they pushed closer to him, maybe wanting to share in the grief they had been scorning, or maybe just wanting to get a little nearer to someone who was able to shape feelings into words beside his friend's coffin.
"I keep thinking that I don't know how I'm supposed to live without him. Sappy, but true. I'll wake up in the middle of the night and stare at my pillow, or my wall, and then I'll lie there in the dark and wait for him to be alive again. Like he's just going to come back someday, you know, stroll into the lab, steal one of my donuts, spit out a mouthful of bad coffee, and start making his own. Like he's going to show up on my doorstep with his collection of Monty Python movies and talk all the way through them in the worst British accent you ever heard. Like he's just going to walk here - - right now - - and say, 'Well, Nick, the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated,' and then look at Grissom until Grissom tells everyone who said that, and when, and why.
"But that's not going to happen.
"There are days when all I can think about is the last conversation I had with Greg. We had a fight, and we'd never done that before. Arguments, sure, but never anything serious. It was hard to fight with Greg - - you could get annoyed as hell at him but then he'd make you laugh. You couldn't hate him, and he made you not even want to try."
Nick grazed a hand across his face.
"He wouldn't like me crying. He wouldn't have liked all of you wearing black, and he wouldn't have liked all this crying. It's too traditional. I guess having a really proper, black-clothed funeral is how we get back at him for dying. For having the nerve to die.
"I mean, what was he thinking? How are we supposed to do this without him?
"But the thing is, we will. We'll do it because we loved him, and he'd hate so much for us to lose our souls over him losing his life. We keep going on because we know that, when we die, Greg's going to twist our wings off in heaven if he thinks that we didn't give life a decent shot after he was gone. We loved him, so we're going to try and live without him, as hard as that sounds. Or that's what I'm going to try and do."
A fleeting grin, shining through tears.
"I think that's how he'd want it."
In a second, with no other conclusion, Nick had become part of the crowd. Grissom wiped his own eyes and found that they were dry, resistant to sentiment. He couldn't remember the last time he'd cried at a funeral, not even when his own father was being buried. Not even as a child. He looked at Warrick, and saw dampness on his face, and felt that twist of envy in his stomach again. Was Warrick going to get everything he couldn't have? Confidence, an escape, release? Was everyone winning but him?
Warrick looked like he knew everything Grissom was thinking, and excused him for it.
"Remember your promise, okay? Call me if you move - - call me if you ever need me."
And Warrick walked away before Grissom could say, I need you now. Stay.
He briefly considered running after Warrick, who hadn't gone far, but the idea was ridiculous. Even if he caught up with him, he would never say what he wanted to say. Knowing that Warrick would stay if he only asked made the words all that more difficult. Warrick was gone - - lost to a crowd or to New York or just to fate, and Grissom was left in the center, stranded.
He found Nick, instead.
"He would have liked that," he said.
Nick just looked at him. "No, he would have hated it, the same way he would have hated having a funeral, and the same way he would have hated being dead. Being dead probably just makes him mad. And I don't blame him."
"I should have come to see you."
Nick shrugged. "I'm still alive, aren't I? Don't worry about it."
"Warrick's leaving."
"Haven't even put him in the ground yet."
"No, leaving us. Going to New York. After - - after your trial."
"I know when he's leaving," Nick said, sighing. "It was funeral humor. Probably in bad taste, too, but I'm not in the mood for anything better. Yeah, he told me. Can't blame him for that, either, can I? If it wouldn't make me a fugitive, I'd take off, too. Go home."
Grissom wondered when everyone else had started calling a different place their home.
Nick smiled. "He told me that you wouldn't leave. Bet me on it."
"I hope you didn't wager too much, because I'm staying."
"I wouldn't bet him at all. I know you too well." The clouds were starting to streak across the sky, and Nick looked up at them with a frown. "I heard you arrested Braun. Wish I could have seen that one. Catherine says that you almost lost your temper - - but you wouldn't have, would you?"
Grissom fought to say what he should have said days ago, when Nick was still holding his gun, and before Nick had gotten stamped with this elusive look of sorrow-anger.
"I never thanked you."
"For killing Flowers?"
"For stopping me from killing him. Both times." He made himself say it because he wanted Nick to know that, whether Grissom liked it or not, Nick had saved him. "You did what I couldn't do."
"No," Nick said simply, "I just did it first."
He kept losing the people he loved. He thought that Greg was probably the most visible symptom of a greater disease. Nick smiled at him with a kind of sweet, kind weariness, and then was tugged away again by someone who wanted to thank him for a heartfelt eulogy. Grissom could feel the people around him forgiving and being forgiven - - Nick talking to an elderly woman who had been Greg's landlady, Warrick encircled by a few young men and reminiscing about Greg's talents with a pool table, Catherine winning sympathy because of the presence of her daughter and slowly kneeling down to talk with other mothers who were there out of some distant connection Grissom couldn't place. The only person he couldn't see now was Sara, but he knew that he had lost her too - - he had lost her simply because she was the one person he had held on to for so long with such need that when she was finally ripped away, she had torn away part of him with her and left the two of them incapable of fitting back together. Even loving her wasn't going to solve his problems.
He found her surrounded by no one, being comforted by a particularly cool breeze. She had her eyes closed and was beautiful. He couldn't touch her because he was too afraid she would break.
She was quiet, true, but she was alive. He looked at her a long time before speaking, taking in the flush in her cheeks that he thought had been sapped out and turned milky white forever, looking at the curve of her mouth - - the only part of her he'd truly been allowed, even for a short time - - and the way she hadn't lost enough weight to make her black dress look unsuitable. The way she had survived caught in his throat and turned simple observation into prayer.
"I wish you wouldn't," she said, without opening her eyes. "People keep staring at me. I never thought that you'd be doing it, too."
"I can't help it. You're here."
"Here as in at Greg's funeral, or here as in alive?"
Neither. Both. What he had almost meant was that she was there as in still in love with him, and there as in still able to receive love from him. It was too complicated to explain, so he stopped the words somewhere between his mind and his mouth, and just shrugged.
"Nick gave a good eulogy, I thought."
"It was good," he said.
They were starting to lower the coffin into the ground, and there were the tears that he had been missing for the whole day. He scrubbed frantically at his eyes, not wanting to embarrass himself in front of her by finally losing control of the situation. Besides, the rubbing created expanding black spots that ate up his vision and vanished the sight of the last bit of Greg being swallowed by earth. She put her hand on his elbow, and, not saying a word, passed him a tissue. It had been folded into a tiny square so tightly that, as he unfolded it, the softest pieces crumbled under his fingers. He wiped his eyes, and crushed the tissue in his hand.
"It's not your fault," she said.
Whether it was his fault or not didn't matter. Fault implied blame implied will, and Grissom had certainly never willed this on anyone, although he'd woken up mornings with his face pressed screaming into his pillow, horrorstruck by the thought that it had been his remarks to Nick that had driven Nick to kill, and his blithe dismissal of Greg's suspicions that had made Greg vulnerable. But even that only meant cause, which didn't imply intention.
Sure. It wasn't his fault.
But he was the cause - - he was the reason. What mattered was that he had forgotten what had been trained into him by his parents and the earliest years of his life - - he had forgotten that he wasn't supposed to have the arrogance to love. He hadn't meant to love any of them - - it hadn't been on purpose - - but somehow he had, anyway.
He'd met Catherine, and Catherine had been strong and determined and intense, and he had started loving her accidentally. And loving her had opened up too many doors to loving other people, and then there had been Warrick, who had reminded him of a slightly more outgoing version of himself; Nick, and without love, he would have dismissed Nick's intelligence because of all the wanting and needing Nick seemed to do, but love made it poignant; Sara, and loving Sara had been falling in love with Sara, slippery and dangerous and like nothing he had done before; and Greg, whose odd blend of cockiness and insecurity would have written him off as too complicated in years before and had, instead, made him worthy of study, interest, and love.
What he had forgotten was that too much love softened you and made you easier to hurt, and if he had been cold to them, or apathetic to them, or - - hell, even simply just pleasant with them, the way he was with everyone else - - all surface civility and no real emotion - - they would have been safe.
"You don't understand," he said, and touched her cheek.
Her skin was warm. She went on without him - - kept existing in spite of his love, but how much of that had been luck? How much longer could she survive with him loving her?
He looked at Warrick. How would Warrick like winters in New York? Would he freeze to the bone or revel in the snow before it grew slushy and muddy? Would he be happy there, away from everyone who had ever loved him? He looked away from Warrick, because he wanted to stop thinking about exile and the way people tended to be sent out of Eden.
There was Nick, too, Nick who had to stand trial soon, and Nick who couldn't really afford a decent lawyer because he'd spent most of his money trying to make bail just so he could attend a funeral and give a eulogy that, within twenty-four hours, everyone would forget. He should pay Nick's legal fees, and thought that he would. Maybe it was like slapping a Band-Aid to try and fix internal bleeding, but it was the best he could do. He didn't want to stare at Nick, either, not when Nick was a walking embodiment of his own worst and best impulses.
And he didn't want to look at Catherine, who was still holding her daughter's hand because her daughter was all she had left of a family - - biological or not - - that had collapsed under its own weight.
And if he couldn't look at them, he certainly couldn't look at Sara.
But he kept his hand on her cheek and his thumb brushed against the softness of her lips, but it was just like touching Flowers, and he wondered why it wasn't the same for her. He wondered why he was the one flinching away from the touch of his own hand.
"He hurt you because of me," he said, and, wanting her to understand, "I'm the reason all of you were hurt."
Nothing left to say.
He left her and began to walk away alone.