Author's Note: Wow, guys, really. I wasn't expecting much new feedback a second time around! I think I love you guys grins.
Yep, this was written before Nesting Dolls aired, and I won't be changing any plot points because hello, I am lazy, so obviously some things are going to seem inaccurate against the current explanation of Sara's backstory. I'm going to have to ask you to wipe that episode from your memory (yeah, like that's gonna happen). Heh, I am the queen of cliched summaries, aren't I?

Heroes and Villains: Chapter two

Grissom blinked at Nick with a slowness that belied his usual intelligence. Catherine's mouth fell open.

"What?"

"Excuse me?"

Nick stared back at them unwaveringly. "Yeah".

"Are you… sure?" Catherine enquired incredulously. "Her name was really Laura Sidle? As in… I mean…"

"I checked", Nick said bluntly. "She's Sara's mother".

Catherine clutched at her armrests, spinning around to look at Grissom wildly. "I don't believe this. Does Sara know about this? I mean that her mother is… involved?"

Grissom remembered her abrupt standstill at the sight of their suspects. Her sudden reluctance to stay at the scene suddenly made sense.

"Yeah", he realised quietly, mouth dry. "She knows".

Catherine blinked, struggling to comprehend what he was saying. "Well, I don't understand", she huffed harshly. "Why wouldn't she say anything? She can't just compromise a case like this. Any evidence that she touched will automatically be discounted".

"There's something else", Nick said, slightly annoyed by Catherine's disparaging comments, and he bit his lip slowly. "On her background check? She has a record. Laura Sidle… was in prison for the last 20 years. She was convicted of second-degree murder."

Grissom and Catherine stared at him.

Catherine abruptly shot to her feet, snatching the file from Nick's hands tersely. "Let me see that!"

Grissom sank back in his chair, staring at Nick with dawning apprehension. Suddenly every little uneasy concern he had ever had about Sara made a sense he didn't want them to. Her sensitivity with some cases, her blind drive for justice, her tendencies for depression.

Who… did her mother murder?

"This is…. There is no way… " Catherine's face blanched as she flipped rapidly through each page of the file, and Grissom decided he had no desire to know what it was she found so appalling.

Nick looked deeply angry with himself for not realising this sooner as he stood beside Catherine, silently watching her process everything he had just seen.

Movement in the doorway suddenly caught his attention, and he glanced up as the object of his jumbled anxieties strode into the room. His heart hammered in his chest at the sight of her.

"Doc Robbins has an ID on the two victims", she informed them easily. She stopped, glancing up from the papers in her hand as she realised they were all staring at her in horror.

"What?" she asked, suddenly paranoid.

Nick took a step closer to her, earnest brown eyes boring into hers. "Why didn't you tell us… about your Mom, Sara?" he asked softly.

The papers slid from Sara's hand and scattered all over the floor at his startling, personal question. She stared at him, body suddenly stiff with tension. "Excuse me?" she whispered disbelievingly.

Nick wasn't to be deterred by her sudden coldness. "Did you think we wouldn't find out, Sar?" he said gently. "That we wouldn't figure it out?"

She was suddenly blinking wildly, and she whirled towards the door, which he had managed to block with his broad frame.

"Get out of the way, Nick", she said through clenched teeth, struggling to move around him.

He held his arms out, unwilling to let her pass. "Sara—"

"GET OUT OF THE WAY!"

He jumped aside at her shrill scream, and her heels clicked rapidly on the floor as she shoved past him and disappeared around the door.

Nick's mouth fell open as she fled, and he turned back to Grissom and Catherine slowly, disbelieving that such a simple, innocent question had evoked such a reaction.

Catherine slowly dropped the file on a nearby table, watching as Nick swallowed hoarsely, sagging against one of the nearby shelves housing Grissom's various specimens.

"I… can't believe we didn't know this".

Grissom slowly straightened behind his desk, glaring accusingly at Nick. "That was not how I would have handled that situation", he said darkly.

Nick looked back at him in disbelief, unwilling to take the fault his old boss suddenly directed his way. "Right," he muttered bluntly. "How would you have handled it?"

Catherine sighed, looking contrite on Nick's behalf, since he was suddenly so vehemently opposed to the idea. "Gil, Nick was just surprised, he didn't think—"

"No, he didn't", the nightshift supervisor cut in curtly. "Sara did not need a group intervention. You both saw what was in that file, and I'm sure its more than enough to upset her, as we so evidently saw."

"Well what the hell would you have done?" Nick spat suddenly, speaking to him with more brazen audacity than he ever would have when he was his supervisor. "Ignore it? Or maybe just talk to her about it in a few months, when you thought she had cooled down just enough so you didn't have to face the real problem?"

"Nick!" Catherine hissed warningly.

Nick ignored her. "You're supposed to be her supervisor and you didn't even see that there was something wrong with her! There's been something up with her for months, man, at least I noticed it!"

"Nick, you have no idea what you're talking about."

"Don't I? I know a lot more than you think I do, Grissom, and it's about damn time somebody faced up to it—"

"HEY!" Catherine interrupted loudly, stopping the two of them short. "I'm sorry to interrupt your sudden pissing contest, but we have something a little more important to deal with right now!"

Nick avoided her gaze, clenching his jaw as he ran his hands over his buzz cut tensely, and they plunged into awkward silence.

"You don't uh, think she could do anything stupid… do you?" he asked after a while, stumbling over the words.

"I don't know, Nick", she said quietly, unwilling to consider such a possibility.

"Nick, go see Doc Robbins", Grissom ordered abruptly, sounding very tired. "Find out what he got on the autopsy, and who our two victims are."

Nick stared at him like he was crazy. "What? But—"

"Just do it, Nick!" Grissom snapped loudly.

Nick glared at him, but he looked suitably cowed after Catherine's reprimand, and left without another word, muttering something decidedly uncivilised under his breath.

Grissom didn't look like he cared. He glared at Catherine pointedly. "Don't you have work to get back to?"

She wasn't going to be intimidated by him. "What are you going to do?"

He sighed, clipping his pager briskly to his belt. "I don't know. I'll see if I can find her."

She hesitated, knowing that emotional confrontations were hardly her old boss's forte. "Grissom… I know we don't have the full story here, but I think you should tread very lightly."

He met her gaze solidly. "I know, Catherine".

She glanced down, turning down her jaw grimly as she nodded. "I'll clean this up", she added, gesturing to the floor. "Before I… get back to work".

He nodded again, ignoring the curious, hushed gazes from several lab techs as he strode abruptly down the hall. He knew he had been a little too terse with Nick before, but there was no other way to deal with it.

He had known there was something going on with Sara for a long time now. He should have approached her about it, but he was hardly socially apt as it was, without including his tendency to say the wrong thing around her.

Sara's mother was convicted of murderhe thought uneasily. And that makes her a more than viable suspect in our case.

He quickened his pace down the hall, unsure what he was going to do even if he did find her.

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Sara stared down at the dried blood caking the otherwise flawless carpet, the shattered lamp that looked like it was worth more than her living room lounge-set alone.

She crouched on the floor, staring at the void where the younger victim's head had been crushed hollowly.

So. This was her home now.

It was certainly a level or two up from Sara's childhood home. The stained carpets, the dusty cabinets and sparse, second-hand furniture. The B & B had suffered severely after her father's death. It was only months until it was out of business.

She ducked her head, shining her torch vaguely over the surrounding floor.

How long had she been out of prison? She had been sentenced for 20 years, but Sara knew she had been eligible for parole before that.

How long has she lived in Vegas?

To think, they could have lived in the same city for months, and she never knew about it. She could have rounded an aisle in the supermarket, or bumped into her on the street, but the cosmos had decide in a cruel twist of fate that this was the way they would reintroduce her back into Sara's life.

She scoffed, leaning back on her haunches disbelievingly.

'Why didn't you tell us…. about your Mom?'

As if that wasn't bad enough. She knew it had been stupid to assume Grissom couldn't possibly figure it out, when her avoidance of the crime scene had been so blatantly obvious. She'd never thought that she would be stupid enough to underestimate his intelligence, but it looked like there was yet another mistake she had allowed herself to make around him. She'd hoped she could at least delay their discovery, until she was sufficiently prepared for the outcome.

Too late now. She didn't know what they knew, but the horror; the utter shock in their stares had spoken volumes.

They already know way too much.

She could see the yellow light on the floor shuddering unsteadily, and she glanced down at her hand, realising that she was shaking.

She shouldn't have come here. Now that she knew, her mere presence was everywhere, in every contour and cornice, manifesting in a vivid flurry of scents and sounds that sunk at Sara's chest, made her feel like she was twelve years old again, and nothing had changed. She wasn't a Harvard graduate, a successful CSI, she was completely vulnerable and afraid and inferior and inexperienced.

Alone.

She straightened swiftly to her feet, dropping her flashlight on the floor. She cursed, running a hand over her face, forcing herself to calm as she bent to retrieve it. She started to straighten again, and stopped.

On the mantel was a small, silver framed picture. In it was her mother, standing next to the broad figure of the man she assumed to be Clark Jenson, and below them was a child, playing with a dog. She swallowed, staring at it with an immense burning in her throat. She knew they didn't have children. It was probably a neighbour's child, or a friend or relatives, but it didn't make the sight any easier.

Abruptly, she turned, swinging the torchlight with her, and came face to face with the darkened form of Gil Grissom.

She let out a surprised cry, jumping backwards in fright. She closed her eyes, clenching the flashlight tightly to her chest, where she could feel her heart thundering wildly.

"God, Grissom!"

He looked apologetic and unsure, and he eyed her over uncertainly. "Sorry".

She blew out a breath irritably, moving around him, starting out the front door, switching off her torch. She felt him striding behind her.

"What are you doing here, Sara?"

She stopped on the concrete driveway, whirling to look at him in the dim surrounding streetlight. Why did he have to be here? How had he ever found her here?

"What does it look like, Grissom?"

He looked at her disapprovingly. "Well, to begin with, it looks like you came to a scene by yourself, without telling anyone, when you could have been attacked or worse."

She rolled her eyes, feeling unusually brash since her secret had been revealed. "You know what? I don't really care".

He narrowed his eyes, unsettled by her declaration. "And second, you know that you can't be working this crime scene, because I have to take you off the case."

She blinked at him unthinkingly, shaking her head slowly. "You really think that I care about this stupid case?"

Grissom frowned. He looked completely uncomfortable with the entire situation and for the first time she could remember, she didn't really care. She was surprised he had even come looking for her. Her reaction in his office hadn't exactly instilled stability, and he didn't usually seek out emotional confrontations with her.

"Why didn't you tell me… that she was your mother?"

She stared at him, insides churning with conflict. Her counsellor had encouraged her to tell him. She had tried. She usually just ended up babbling about their relationship, which was really better suited to an entirely separate conversation.

"Just because we come from the same genepool… does not make her my mother", she murmured quietly, turning towards her car.

Grissom stopped her with a hand on her arm, and she snapped away from him like he had burned her. She didn't need his pity. She had never hated anything more than the way he was looking at her.

"Sara…"

"You didn't read the file, did you?" she asked him softly, forcing herself to lift her head, meeting his quietly forceful stare stubbornly. "Because if you did, then you wouldn't be asking me that question."

She had seen many a suspect quiver with fear and trepidation under his intimidating stare in an interrogation, but she forced herself to stand tall and ignore the penetration in his gaze that pressured her to spill all of her secrets.

"No, I didn't".

She lifted an eyebrow sagely. "Why not? I'm sure you were curious. It's just another titbit to add to your limitless curiously about the human condition, right?"

He narrowed his eyes slightly, and she thought he was annoyed. Good. She was getting to him. It was about time.

"I wanted to hear it from you".

She just shook her head, brown locks falling messily around her face. She stepped away from him, still clutching her flashlight like a weapon.

"Since when have you wanted to hear anything I have to say?" she muttered unexpectedly.

He sighed deeply, looking down. "Sara…"

"Have you seen it in there?" she asked seriously, waving at the immaculate house they had just departed. "Brass was right when he said they must have some unusual finances. If you want the key to your case, I suggest looking there."

He pursed his lips. "Why were you here, Sara?" he asked, again, earnestly.

Sara swallowed, feeling her lower lip waver dangerously. It was definitely time to get out of there. "I wanted to see… I just needed to see it", she admitted at last. "Knowing she lived here".

His eyes crinkled with a sympathy that she couldn't bear to see, because he couldn't possibly understand. "Sara… you're going to have to be prepared for things to come out in this investigation", he said slowly, voice low and gentle. "Things about your past. Things… that you might not want other people to know."

"She'll know", Sara said suddenly, in a voice so small and lost she saw him flinch in surprise. "Won't she? She'll know that I'm here".

He shifted awkwardly. "Sara…"

She really wished he would stop saying her name like that. She straightened rigidly. "Forget it. I'm going home, okay? I can't… talk about this right now."

Grissom hesitated. "Okay".

She glanced at him haltingly, letting her arms fall helplessly by her sides. "Grissom? Look I… I don't want you to read the file", she said softly. "Just… not yet, okay?"

He met her gaze, and for a long moment they just stared at each other in the darkness. She didn't want him to read an impersonal account like just another case file. If the others had seen it, then she could deal with that, but she didn't want Grissom to be able to look at it objectively. She wanted him to care.

He met her plea with a silent nod. "I won't", he said quietly, after a pause.

She nodded, taking another step towards her car. "Thanks".

She refused to glance back at him as she climbed into the driver's seat, and started the ignition. She had no idea what he was thinking about this entire situation. But he had abided by her request, and for now, that was enough for her.

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