DISCLAIMER: I don't own CSI, the characters, etc., etc. All that is owned by CBS, Alliance Atlantis, Jerry Bruckheimer and Anthony Zuicker. Trust me, if I did own it, I'd be sipping MaiTais in Bermuda, not writing fanfic on an ancient laptop.

Part 3: Knit Two Together

Christmas at the Las Vegas Crime Lab was, for the most part, like any other day. Their work couldn't stop for the holidays, so there was less pre-holiday rush, and less overt celebration. Decorations were limited to the break room. The main difference was the simple lack of staff. While the lab wasn't necessarily a noisy place, on Christmas, there was a decided hush about the place.

While Christmas night could seem like any other shift, there were small differences. Grissom always treated those working the night shift to dinner at a fairly nice restauraunt after shift, an invitation which included the lab techs as well as the CSIs. There was also some informal gift-giving. Generally people would place gifts on or under the small Christmas tree in the break room a few days before the holiday, and people could collect and open their gifts however they saw fit--either in the privacy of their own home, or in the public arena of the break room.

Sara arrived at work on the 25th an hour before start of shift, a package clutched in her hands. As she entered the hallways of the lab, she looked nervously around her, keeping an eye out. She didn't want the gift's recipient to catch her before she could place the gift where no one but him would find it.

She was lucky. Grissom's office was dark; obviously, he hadn't arrived for work yet. Quickly, she crept into his office and placed the parcel on his desk then hurried out, closing the door behind her. The coast was clear; apparently no one had seen her nip into his office. She hurried back to the locker room, ready to shed her coat and get down to work for the night.

As she opened her locker, she spotted something on the top shelf: a package, wrapped with mathematical precision in red tissue paper. She stopped for a moment, her coat half off, before she finished shedding her coat and grabbed the package. It was squashy, soft, with rounded edges. Not a book, then.

There was no tag, nothing identifying the giver. Taking a quick look around, she gently opened the tissue paper, taking care not to rip it. It was a challenge she'd enjoyed since she was a child--like trying to peel an apple in one long coil. She teased back the folds of tissue paper, slowly revealing its contents.

Folded inside the tissue paper was a long, slightly fuzzy scarf. Pulling it out, she could see it had been knitted in an undulating pattern of ridges and decorative eyelets, like waves on the shore. Looking at it carefully, she could see that pairs of stitches had been knitted together in between each eyelet, pulling the row into a scallop instead of a straight line. The yarn looked like one she had seen at Desert Purls: a watercolour blue, green and grey, the wool and mohair unbelieveably soft to the touch.

There was no tag inside, but she didn't need one now. There was, after all, only one person she knew of that knew how to knit. He must have worked on it at home, naturally never letting anyone else know that he knew how to do such a thing. She could hardly imagine what it must have looked like: Grissom sitting on his couch, watching baseball or some documentary on the Discovery Channel, delicate yarn and needles manipulated in an easy rhythm by his large hands. Making something just for her. She smiled and buried her face in the scarf, feeling the fibers tickle her skin.

She was sitting in the break room a half-hour later, reading a forensic journal when Grissom stuck his head in the room. "419 on Industrial. Get your stuff--I'm driving," he said, before disappearing again. Sara hurried to her locker, donning her coat and new scarf and grabbing her field kit.

Grissom met her just outside the main doors, directing them to his Denali without a word. As they passed under a lamppost, Sara looked over at him and saw a soft, charcoal-grey scarf peeping out from under his coat collar, one curve of a cable visible. Grissom glanced over at her, looked down at the scarf around her neck, and then looked up at her, a smile crossing his features. She smiled back, a coded response that neither needed to translate aloud.

The scarves said as much about their creators as their recipients, she thought, as she turned her attention back to the parking lot. Herself, who had made a wrong crossover somewhere, and who was now ripping back to that point, trying to start the pattern over smoothly again. And though no one else would notice, she would always see the spot where she had messed up and had to fix things. Grissom, who was so brilliant about some things but so stupid about others; who usually seemed so pulled together, yet, on closer inspection, was so full of holes.

They reached his SUV, and he was just climbing in the driver's seat when she turned to him, the words finding their way out of her mouth of their own volition. "Oh, by the way, Merry Christmas, Grissom."

He turned to her as he pulled on his seat belt, giving her another one of those too-rare but brilliant smiles. "Merry Christmas to you, too, Sara." They shared a moment of peaceful silence, in which she thought that perhaps they hadn't lost as much of their friendship as she'd once thought. After a moment, Grissom started the car and they headed off to their crime scene, the beginning of just another shift.