Time Marches On
Author: LadyLuminol
Rating: T
Disclaimer: Unfortunately I don't even own a TV, let alone rights to the greatest show ever (it's the truth, folks – TVs don't plug into our igloos here in Canada).
Summary: The only thing that stays the same is that everything changes… (GSR)
A/N: This has been sitting in my 'to-do' file for a long, long time. This is AU, both for events, and for the fact that I have no clue how this fits into the shift-split timeline. Title and summary shamelessly stolen from Tim McGraw's 'Time Marches On'.
.oOo.
Sometimes I like to sit in my recliner and stretch it out all the way. I'll put my feet up, and kick off the pinchy shoes I've been wearing all day through all sorts of unspeakable muck. I tilt my head back, resting it against the cushy velveteen headrest and contemplate whether it would be easier to see my way through this mess of a life I've created with a 9mm hole in my head.
Usually, the answer is no. Usually.
And when it's not, I know I can make the answer go the other way by talking it over with my best friend, one Mr. Jack Daniels. We sit together all day right at my recliner and we have long discussions on the merits of getting totally and unequivocally drunk.
I haven't won yet, and not from lack of trying.
And so Mr. Daniels and I 'talk' all day. Conversation doesn't exactly flow like it did with him, but the only thing I'm in it for is to put a little less blood into my alcohol system. And when I wake up after he has left, he re-acquaints me with another old friend, the Porcelain God. Another long conversation there, albeit not nearly as intellectually stimulating. Hard to hold a good debate when your vocabulary may as well be six words, three or four of which will never see the light of Webster's Dictionary.
Then I go to work. Some days I wonder if they'd notice if I just didn't show up; Grissom probably would, just because he'd have to find some one else to act icy to, and no one else but me would take half the shit he gives me for no logical reason. So I drag myself out to the car, drive to a building I've come to loathe, and collar criminals while mentally cataloguing all the creative ways I could solve all my problems in one fell swoop. I'll sit at the GC/mass spec and contemplate poisons. In trace, it's hanging. The morgue automatically calls to mind sitting in my bathtub and pulling the toaster in after me. The places change but the thoughts stay the same.
Come home, and it's the same routine, Me, JD, and the Porcelain God. No variance, no interruptions, not even the standard deviance that makes every forensic scientist hedge their bets with the innocuous and hated 'not inconsistent with' or 'similar to'. Words that imply confidence. Words that are really telling you that you know as much as they do, but they're just better at bullshitting their way through the system.
Welcome to my pitiable life. I am the complaint department, and I've been talking to myself for a long, long time.
.oOo.
One of these days, I will learn something from the Canadians.
Years ago, or at least what passes for years ago, when I lived for the Minnesota State Crime Lab in Minneapolis, there was an expatriate Canadian on the team. Farm blood, and about as Great White North as they get without a beaver and hockey stick surgically attached. Great man; he taught me everything I've ever needed to know about tracking subjects in the snow and about how to get out of drinking games when it's clear you're going to lose, although that one was a practical experience lesson. He also taught me about the Canadian method of fixing everything, and I quote, "If it moves and it shouldn't, duct tape. If it doesn't move and it should, WD-40," end quote.
Odd methods, to be certain, but in my forty-eight or so years, I don't think I've ever received better advice. After all, that's how I fixed my Denali — the hinges wouldn't move, so I slathered it in WD-40 and saved the City of Las Vegas fifty bucks. And my screen door — duct taped the edge of the glass pane that kept cutting me every time I went to open it.
The only thing I can't make it work on is me.
My heart moves; I don't want it to. I want to be as detached and unemotional as she accuses me of being. I don't want to feel pain when I have to process a child's body. I don't want to feel grief when I go to a cemetery and put flowers on the grave of someone I never met because no one knows who they were in the first place. And I don't want to feel my heart lighten whenever she walks into a room. But I can't stop it. I can't even try anymore.
And they haven't made duct tape for a broken heart.
.oOo.
"Assignments in five, everyone." A flurry of activity.
Warrick hands over the Monopoly money he and Nick bet with after Grissom sat them down and make them figure out how many paycheques they'd lost to each other. And then I handed them the money from an old board game of Lindsey's. They now are only betting in Mr. Moneybucks (or whatever the rich guy's name is), and I am beginning to miss all the money I won off both of them.
Greg hits 'pause' on his CD player just as Grissom rounds the corner. As much as Grissom appreciates music, I don't think the eclectic combination of Nine Inch Nails and Phish is quite up to his exacting standards. Greg grabs a micropipette and tries to look busy, but we've all caught him at it so many times before that we don't believe him anyway.
And then there's Sara. Already in the break room, and looking into her coffee as if it holds the secrets to world peace and the government. I wish. She's had three nights off in the past month, and hasn't taken any of them. I'm worried, but not enough to do much about it — what could I do anyway? Go to her identical twin Grissom? As if. It'd be easier and more productive to lecture a wall on how to paint itself.
Assignments come, and I am somewhat pleasantly surprised. And not because I get to work with Warrick. Actually, Grissom assigned Sara with him, and Greg gets to go too. That ought to make Greg happy — he's been hounding after Grissom to let him in the field since he was old enough to understand what 'pay decrease' meant.
I hope it will give Griss and Sara the reason they need to talk. Too much in the air between them, and standing in the middle is like being caught in a pheromone crossfire without a shield. I don't know what happened in Sara's past, same as Grissom is ridiculously reticent himself. And I sure as hell don't know what was between them before Sara came to Vegas, although I'm sure there was something, and I'm just as sure it's something neither of them will ever share. All I want is for them to have a knock-em-down, drag-em-out screaming match; at least then they'd be speaking to each other, instead of this odd dance with words no one hears and steps no one gets, least of all them.
But the glances at the floor instead of at the other aren't promising, and I put my hopes up on the shelf with my invisible unicorn again.
.oOo.
I'm a little nervous right now.
Actually, I'm a lot nervous. And not because it's my first time in the field. It's more to do with the two people sitting in the front seats. Independently, they make me nervous enough for me to have to plan out what I'm going to say in front of them. Together, they make me want to wet my pants and run screaming back to California for mommy.
I catch all the 'hidden' glances they send at each other. Actually, I'm rather surprised that hey haven't messed up their impeccable timing and glance at each other at the same time–
Wait, I take that back. They did screw up, and now I'm three times as nervous. Once for the field, once for the people in front of me, and once for the fact that the heat they're sending off is enough to melt the buttons on my green and purple shirt. Meep.
The scene is normal enough, as far as normal goes in Las Vegas; a murder-suicide in the 'burbs. I have a gut feeling the minute I walk in that this case will be as straightforward as it looks, but I know better than to say anything in front of either of them. Anything that unscientific would end up with me doing the next dozen Dumpster-dives. Which I'll be doing anyway, but still… It's the principle of the matter.
Oops. They touched. Sara brushed Grissom's hand passing him the bindle he hadn't asked for yet. Honestly, I don't get why they don't notice what the hell's going on between them. I mean, come on; even Hodges noticed, and most days he's thicker than two short planks and six feet of concrete stacked together. But nooo. Can't let poor Greggo win the pool on when our resident geeks will get their heads out of the trace evidence. I'm sure they have no idea how irritating this is.
We finish up, and Grissom asks if I wouldn't mind catching a ride back to the station with Brass. Trust me, no problems there; anything to help me win the pool. But then I catch the glances, and the snippy comments, and I mentally wave goodbye to the new stereo system I could've bought with the cash. Grissom screwed up again, and now we were all going to pay the price.
I sense the need for a lot more comfort coffee in the break room pot when everyone finds out.
.oOo.
I was rather surprised at the sheer masses of people. I mean, geez, for two people whose social skills were most politely described as nonexistent, they sure as hell should've had a bunch of practise.
Random observation No. 217 — there are three hundred and sixty-eight individual flowers decorating the front of the church. I don't want to even have to think of all the thank you notes their families would have to write. If they had any family left, of course.
Unfortunately, Gilbert Grissom and Sara Sidle had spent so much time wrapped up in their semi-sane crusade for truth, justice, and the forensic scientist's way that the only real family either of them had was us. A motley bunch of scientists, cops, and some politicians that were the familial equivalent of 'that cousin of yours'. Not exactly the nicest family tree in the world, but we were their family. And we were sitting in the front pew of the church.
Actually, I take that back. The only real family they had was each other, not us. We deluded ourselves into thinking that they were as close as blood to us; they didn't have to delude themselves because they were closer than blood. Sure, they had cold snaps that could last for a few months. So does Canada. They had moments where the attraction between them was so intense you wanted to watch out for flying bits of metal, too. Greg compared it to this comic flick he'd gone to see with the girlfriend of the week, Spiderman 2. The movie, not the girlfriend. Apparently at the end of it, some warehouse was being pulled into a second sun the evil guy had created in the middle of Manhattan, or some such. That's what it felt like.
They were the suns, and we were just passing bits of metal. Helpful, but in the long run overwhelmed by the bond between them.
And so we are all sitting here together, one large, deluded family. I mentally classify everyone; Cousin David from Trace, Uncle Albert from the morgue, little brother Greg from God-knows-where. A quasi-nepotistic crime lab with either no fashion sense or attending a funeral. Or in Greg's case, both.
You have no clue how much I wish this was 'What Not To Wear'.
The priest at the front of the chapel began to chant something in Latin that I had no clue what it meant. I felt out of place and uncomfortable as I watched Father Bèrnin's flowing robe and the flickering candle scant inches from each other, and mentally calculated the amount of pressure directed the wrong way it would take for the fire to jump the gap and catch the trailing sleeves. A very Sara thing to do, and something we found ourselves doing more and more of in the last week. Just the other day, the first day back since the accident, we were trying to figure out the terminal velocity for a 20lb cat, because the entire case rested on this cat being dead as it hit the ground. Nick told us to just go find Sara, and then burst into very un-Nick-like sobs and fled the room to Grissom's office.
We've all been spending a lot of time in Grissom's office. Curled up on the couch to nap, sitting in his big leather desk chair that we all contemplated stealing at one time or another, or just staring at the bugs. Hell, the other day we found Warrick sitting by the fridge with chocolate-covered grasshoppers in his hand. He claimed he was looking for some of the leftover experiments we'd all come to expect. And you know what the funny thing was? We didn't even question why he was looking for rotting blood, just pitched in and searched all the other fridges we could find.
Everyone has their coping methods. So what if ours were calculating flashover points and looking for decomps in the fridge? We needed it, and we were sure as hell gonna take what we needed away from this. A phone call in the middle of shift isn't pleasant; when all work has ground to a halt because no one can find the resident workaholics to give them orders, it's even worse. And that wasn't even the punchline.
No, the sheriff couldn't even come down here to tell us in person. He had to call and broadcast it over the speakerphone where everyone could see Catherine collapse. Where everyone could watch David run as fast and far as he could from the break room. Where no one could even process it, let alone begin to grieve. Bastard.
I guarantee that this entire crime lab will have him voted out of power within three months. Even Warrick wouldn't bet against me there.
They're moving the caskets to the hearses waiting outside now. I think about going with them all the way to Tennessee, where Grissom and Sara wanted their bodies to end up, but I don't know if I can stomach seeing my best friend and his fiancée ending up as just another pair of donations to the body farm. I picture the reactions of the students there when they realize the subjects for their next experiment will be the man that visited them at least once a semester, and probably taught them everything they know about entomology and the woman that was glued to his side.
I think I'm just going to go home and see how many shots of Jack Daniels it takes to numb the remnants of the heart I thought I lost over 25 years of being Lucifer in Jersey and Watson in Vegas. Watching the hearses roll away, I am reminded of a paradox that Sara liked to remind us about called Shroëdinger's Cat. All I remember is that it had something to do with putting a cat inside a box and sending it to the far side of the universe, and that probability dictated that the cat was both alive and dead at the same time until you opened the box and ended the experiment.
I feel like that cat. And I'm sure as hell the lid ain't off.