AN: Hey, sorry about the long time between updates on this. Real life and real writing on the diss got in the way of working on fun writing. And I've been working on breaking into another fandom, so I've been a bit busy.
xxx
Struggling to wake, Warrick tried to place what felt wrong about the house. Quiet, it's too quiet, he thought, shaking off the rest of the cobwebs, and I don't smell breakfast. Sara was usually up before him, cooking, banging pots, singing along, off-key, to some top 40 pop on the radio, or so she had been every afternoon for the last three weeks. Except for this morning. He swung his legs off the bed and pulled on a pair of worn sweat-pants, uneasy with what the silence portended. The bed in Sara's room looked like she had fought a hard-won battle with the covers and lost, retreating from the playing field in disgust, so Warrick assumed she had been in the house at some point. He continued down the hallway when a tiny murmur of sound tickled his ear and Warrick followed it until he came to closed bathroom door, knocking softly with one knuckle and calling, "Sara?"
When he got no response, he tried the doorknob. He had expected it to be locked, but instead it turned easily in his hand. Coltrane meowed a greeting as he pushed in the door, but Sara, curled into a ball against the bathtub, gave no sign that she heard him. Her hair and bedclothes were disheveled from sleep, or some attempts at sleep, and she clutched the kitten her hands, stroking the fur in a disjointed yet oddly rhythmic gesture as she stared intensely at a scene a million miles away from the bathroom cupboard in front of her.
Warrick crouched down beside her slight frame to lay a gentle hand on her shoulder. "Hey, Sara," he breathed just above a whisper, "You ok?"
Her voice was surprisingly strong considering the pained expression on her face, the broken look in her eyes. "Couldn't sleep," she replied, not looking at him.
He kept his voice gentle, a little unnerved by her demeanor. "Why not?" She didn't answer, just shrugged her shoulder under his hand, dropping her eyes to the kitten now rolling around on her knees as she stroked his belly. When she finally did speak again, even her voice sounded fatigued and tired, as weighted down as the expression on her face. "I should start breakfast."
Warrick expected her to elbow him when, instead of answering her, he pulled her into a tight hug, one arm wrapping around her slender waist and the other pulling her head to his chest. The anticipated physical violence didn't ensue; instead, Sara's body stayed tense against his for long moments, before she collapsed against him and he felt the warm wetness of her tears. Letting her cry herself out took longer than he expected; she had always had a moment, but a moment only, of weakness before she pulled herself together, but today appeared to be the exception to the rule. Warrick wasn't complaining as he held her tight, relishing the opportunity to hold the co-worker he was becoming perilously close to thinking as more than a friend.
He held her long after her sobs stopped, inhaling the sweet honeydew scent of her shampoo and cradling her body to his. When Sara slid a tentative arm around him and held him there, pulling him closer even, he smiled against her hair and pressed a soft kiss there. Then, finally, she began to speak. "I should have… helped, I should have gotten him out of there. He's dead and it's my fault."
Warrick hadn't been working the case with Sara, but he had heard about it. A young boy, left with his parents after their older son was killed in their home, had later turned up dead. Sara had suspected the parents the whole time, but nobody working the case had listened to her until it was too late. "Sara, you did everything you could," Warrick soothed, trying to reassure her, knowing it was in vain. Some cases stayed with you, he knew, regardless of the fact that you couldn't win them all, regardless of how rationally you looked at them. He knew how these cases ran through your head over and over again as you tried to figure out what you should have done to create a better outcome. He knew this would be one of those cases for Sara.
"I knew he was being abused, I knew it. I should have fought harder or called the abuse hotline or…" Or anything except what she did do, which was to let Grissom convince her she was being too emotional and to back off the abuse theory. Warrick had heard that he had even threatened to remove her from the case, and she had backed off, pursued other leads, until they were presented with glaring evidence, in the body of a little boy, that she had been right all along. Warrick had heard she hadn't talked to anyone for the rest of the shift, silently cataloguing evidence and filling out paperwork until she bolted from the lab with the first rays of daylight streaking the sky.
"Sara, honey, there's nothing you could have done." He didn't even notice that endearment had slipped out or how easily it had rolled off his tongue. "The police, the social workers, even Grissom, everyone was fooled by the façade. Everyone but you, and you were overruled and outgunned."
"I never wanted to be right, but I just knew." There was such bitterness in her voice that it gave Warrick pause, and, he glanced down at the top of her head curiously, hoping to catch sight of her eyes. "How did you know?" he asked quietly, carefully, hearing something underneath her words that made him cautious.
"I just knew," she repeated, like it was a mantra going on in her head. "You know, we're always going into people's houses and there are always those happy family pictures plastered everywhere, like they are there to cover all the cracks in the façade that you just know are there. The more pictures on the wall, the more twisted the family is. It's like an inverse proportion between outward displays of happiness and the rot beneath." She sighed then, and stopped talking, leaving Warrick to puzzle at her words.
Finally, she shifted her weight off of Warrick and unceremoniously dumped Coltrane, who had fallen asleep in her lap, to the floor. As she straightened to standing, Warrick saw her face slowly close off, all traced of vulnerability slowly erased from his sight. "I'm going to take a shower and then get started on breakfast, ok?" Sara said as she stretched the kinks out of her back and legs, studiously avoiding his gaze. He nodded, picking up Coltrane and rubbing him under the chin as he made his way out of the door.
xxx
"Sara, I was updating my files and I need your new address and phone number. I noticed you still have Warrick's address listed." Grissom's voice penetrated her sleep-deprived brain slowly. Since she had stopped racking up insane amounts of overtime, she found that the occasional double or, in this case, triple, tended to exhaust her, so she didn't react quickly to Grissom, leaving the door open for Nick to interject as well. "Hell yeah, Sara, we need to have a house-warming party soon and check out your new place," he said, to a chorus of agreement from Catherine and Greg. Warrick picked a good night to be off, Sara thought, as she glanced around the table at her co-workers expectant expressions.
"Um, well," Sara began, feeling very much on the spot, especially when she spied Grissom's pen poised above the sheet of paper, waiting to transcribe her new address. "There is no new address."
Nick was the first to get a word out. "What?"
"I'm still at Warrick's." Grissom's eyes narrowed at that, and he opened his mouth to speak but no words came, while Catherine's eyes got bright with speculation. "I'm looking for a house, not an apartment, and the real estate market is pretty tight right now for anything except new constructions," she explained, hoping that would pacify everyone's curiosity. "So Warrick and I are housemates right now and for the foreseeable future."
Before anyone could ask any more questions, Grissom said, "Ok, then, Catherine and Sara, DB at the Tangiers and Nick, jewel theft at the Monaco." He passed out the slips quickly, and amid the shuffle of chairs being pushed back, said, "Sara, could I see you in my office for a moment?" Surprised, Sara mumbled "I'll meet you at the truck," to Catherine before hurrying to catch up with her supervisor, whose odd gait seemed faster than usual. She caught him just outside the door, and he ushered her into the dimly lit office ahead of him, closing the door behind them.
He settled into his chair while Sara, who felt that she might need a strategic advantage, stayed standing just inside the doorway. She wasn't disappointed when Grissom spoke. "Are you and Warrick dating?"
"What? Are you kidding me? You… unh, I, I can't believe you just asked me that!" Outrage couldn't even begin to describe her reaction, and she was worried that her inability to articulate a coherent sentence wouldn't do her anger justice. And it didn't, if Grissom's placid expression was any indication.
"It's a simple question, Sara. Are you and Warrick dating?"
"Why are you asking me this?" Sara hoped the warning note in her voice would tell him to back off the topic, but he remained, as always, completely clueless.
"As your supervisor, I should know if two of my subordinates are dating. It could impact the lab and cause problems with Ecklie."
"So you are asking this in a professional capacity?" Sara asked, her voice deadly calm.
"Yes, of course," Grissom replied, as if the thought that he might be interested for an entirely different reason had never occurred to him.
"Then the answer is, none of your business." Grissom's mouth dropped open, but he didn't get a chance to speak. "There is no fraternization policy at the lab, so you have no right to ask me about my personal life in a professional capacity," she stated simply.
"You checked on a fraternization policy?" Finally, Grissom reacted with an edge of contempt in his voice, as if he had just gotten the answer to his question.
"Yes." Pause. "Right before I asked you out." She let the silence stretch as realization slowly dawned on him, his dumbfounded expression almost enough to give her satisfaction for all the times he had left her stunned. "Anything else, Grissom?" When he didn't answer, she turned to leave. He stopped her just as she was about to pull the door open.
"And if I was asking in a personal capacity?" This time, there was no mistaking the tone in his voice: hopefully and expectant, like she was going to fall back into the same holding pattern she had been in for the last four, almost five, years, just because he was showing the slightest bit of interest.
Her hand tightened on the doorknob almost painfully, and she sighed, looking down briefly before straightening. "Then the answer is the same: none of your business." And then she was gone.
Catherine let her mutter under her breath for a few minutes as they drove to the crime scene before asking, "So what did our fearless leader do this time?"
Sara shook her head, the short, angry motions slowly working off the outrage. "He asked… " She exhaled forcibly, feeling some of the anger leave her body, "he asked if Warrick and I are dating."
"Are you?" Catherine asked, curiously.
"No. We're friend and housemates, like I said. He's just, helping, you know? This whole thing, I just, I'm not up to facing the task of restocking an apartment. Rick understands that and he's giving me the breathing room to find a, a home. I need that and the perfect place is not going to materialize overnight in this housing market."
"So if you aren't dating Warrick, what's the problem with Gil asking you about it?"
Sara sighed, releasing some of the pent-up frustration in her shoulders as she exhaled. "Because he has no right to ask that question. He tried to pretend he was asking 'for the good of the lab,' but you know and I know that's bullshit. He was asking because he was jealous… like I'm going to play another round of pull-me-close and push-me-away with him."
"So what did you tell him?"
"That it was none of his business."
Catherine chuckled as she imagined the look on Grissom's face. "Good girl," she said approvingly.
Later that evening, she was much less approving as she stormed into Grissom's office, closing the door behind her as she let an ominous silence build in the tiny, cluttered office. "Can I help you, Catherine?" Grissom asked.
"Me, no," she shook her head. "I just thought I'd take one last look at the office before I can redecorate it." Grissom fixed her with his patented glance over the top of his glasses, raising an eyebrow to tell her to continue. "Gil, what were you thinking? Are you trying to get served with a sexual harassment lawsuit?"
"I have to protect the integrity of this lab, Catherine," he said sternly, trying to end the conversation quickly.
"Did you even think to check if the integrity of the lab would be in question if Warrick and Sara are dating?" She didn't wait for him to answer, "No, of course you didn't. Because you know and I know that the integrity of the lab was never the point. And worse, Sara knows that too."
When he opened his mouth in protest, Catherine shook her head in disbelief. "Nobody here is stupid, Gil. Or blind. We watched the two of you dance around each other for years. There was even a betting pool on how and when you would get together. I won, if case you are wondering." His eyes widened in shock, but Catherine didn't notice, just kept talking, "because I knew you would never risk your comfortable existence for a chance at actual happiness." Catherine gazed at her oldest friend with sadness in her eyes. "I'm sorry. I never wanted to be right. But you have to let go now, Gil. I don't know when, I don't know how, but Sara's over it, and the jealous act will only get you in trouble."
Grissom nodded wordlessly and he picked up his paperwork again before asking, "Are they dating?"
Catherine stifled another outburst at how clueless he was, keeping her back to him as she rolled her eyes. "I don't know," she answered before making her escape.
The next night, Warrick endured the ribbing from Nick and Greg about being roommates with Sara, or as Greg liked to characterize it, keeping Sara all to himself, taking it in stride after Sara's phone call alerted him that their living arrangement was the hot topic of conversation in the lab. Hodges, however, was insufferable, wearing a knowing smirk every time Warrick stepped into his lab, and Warrick was grateful that Sara had the night off, hoping that the talk would die down before she came back to work.
Near the end of shift, Grissom called Warrick into his office. Ten minutes later, Catherine found him in the locker room, his green eyes blazing, one of the lockers nearby sporting a fresh dent. They really should pad these things, she thought, as she asked Warrick what happened, afraid that she already knew.
"He asked me if Sara and I are dating. Can you believe that?"
Catherine resisted the urge to go strangle their supervisor herself as she watched Warrick pace. "So what did you tell him?"
"I told him it was none of his damn business, that's what I told him!"
"Really? That's exactly what Sara told him."
"He what!" Warrick thundered before getting better control of his emotions, "He asked Sara too?" Warrick questioned, an incredulous note to his voice.
"Yeah. Sara didn't tell you?"
He sank down onto the bench, frowning in obvious consternation. "No. But that might explain why she seemed upset yesterday and took an hour-long run this morning. Damn that guy. Why can't he just let it go? Sara's finally dragging herself out of the funk from the apartment explosion and he has to go and do this?"
Catherine sat down beside him, watching his facial expressions carefully. "Do you think Sara's still interested in him?"
"No!" He rolled his eyes at the thought of Sara chasing their oblivious boss any longer. "No, but she's probably worried that his jealousy will make her workplace a living hell, like when she was dating that asshole Hank." Warrick's jaw tightened in resolution as he glanced at Catherine. "I swear, if he tries anything…" He left the threat open, but Catherine could tell it wasn't an empty threat from the look in his eyes. As he slammed his locker shut and muttered a quick "Bye," Catherine allowed herself a small smile as she watched Sara's protector leave the locker room.