Disclaimer: Don't own anyone recognizable.
Spoilers: None, AU past Nesting Dolls
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Later that night, Sara poured herself a cup of coffee in the break room, contemplating how much things had changed in the last twelve hours. She had called a realtor and put her condo up on the market and requested a four-bedroom house close to the lab, the St. Christopher School, and Grace House, and she would like to move in within four weeks. The realtor had scoffed but had been determined, "We'll try. No promises. You're picky," Sara didn't much like the woman, but she had a reputation for getting things done. She'd called later, with four selections. Sara made an appointment to look at them the next day.
Sara absentmindedly stirred a sugar packet into the sludgy coffee for taste and tried to remember meeting the girls, or any memory with Lilly in it. She knew she had met the girls once, when they were staying with Nathan and Maggie for a week while Lilly was at a conference and Nathan had brought them down to Chinatown to meet Sara. Sara had been twenty-two at the time, the girls were kindergartners. They were big-eyed and wispy-haired and very quiet. Jules, who was called Julie then, had been extremely wiry, no extra fat on her at all; Grace was shorter and had a softer, rounded shape. Grace had barely eaten the Chinese food and they both ate a lot of dessert. Before that, she remembered a baptism notice; Sara had been about seventeen. Sara had been at school in Boston and Uncle Nathan graciously paid for a plane ticket so she could come visit for a three-day weekend. She remembered Leslie's funeral a year before their birth, and Lilly's wedding. Sara had been fifteen when this happened; she was living with the Macallisters and dreaming about Harvard.
She remembered when she was very small and her parents, who had been too young when Troy was born and hadn't matured since, would leave her with Stable Uncle Nathan and His Family, all weekend. Sara would follow Lilly, the cool mature high schooler, around all day, and watch her get ready for her dates at night. The year she was nine, she and Troy, who had been fifteen at the time, moved in since they had nowhere to go. The social worker, named Michael or something, was thrilled to find such an easy solution to the problem. Uncle Nathan was a good man, unlike his brother-in-law, but the family was very poor, with a desperately ill child. He knew, however, how twisted and complicated it would be, but it was there and convenient and Troy wanted to and Troy was sort of scary, so Michael let him have his way.
There weren't enough bedrooms, Leslie and all her equipment had to be on the first floor, and so did Uncle Nathan and Aunt Maggie, in case something happened to her. In order to make that happen, they had converted the dining room downstairs into bedrooms, and they put a rec room upstairs, leaving two bedrooms. The boys all shared a room on the second floor and Lilly cleaned everything out of her bedroom and stacked it neatly in boxes precisely labeled with their contents against one wall so that Sara could have enough room to put her things. Sara had been fascinated with the boxes and she started to carefully snoop through them—her start as a CSI. She was thrilled to be surrounded by all of Lilly's things, even though Lilly was at college, at Berkley, and rarely came home. She found lacy lingerie and funny-shaped objects that she now knew were sex toys that even at that young age she knew her aunt didn't know about, she found diaries that she devoured, she used the dictionary but still couldn't grasp the meaning of the word 'sex' until Aunt Maggie taught her the birds and the bees—then she wondered for two years why Lilly had not gotten pregnant.
Still, her innate ability to know when to keep her mouth shut did not apply to the boys' things. Snooping and finding out secrets was addicting; she knew about Doug's girlfriend Diana's abortion and the times everyone came home right before curfew and snuck back out. Still, she never found anything of the boys'; if she had, she would have kept it and asked what it was. This happened, fatefully, one day. When she was snooping in Troy, Dan, and Doug's room for Christmas presents, she found a package of white powder underneath the bed Troy used. She had shown it to Uncle Nathan. He threw a fit and called Social Services; they took Troy away. Sara could remember the fight clearly—it was a memory she tried to suppress. Troy had rarely talked to her since. They had last spoken over ten years ago, when she found him to try and create a relationship. He was married, a recovering coke addict and dealer, and lived in a trailer park outside LA. He told her he wanted nothing to do with his pretty Harvard-graduate sister. The way he said it made her feel dirty. She had gotten over it, or tried to, but it was still painful. Six months later, as Dan and Doug got to be more rebellious teenagers, and Leslie just got worse and more babylike, and the case came to trial and her mother was convicted, they had told Sara sadly they just couldn't handle it anymore. The same man who had handled their case in the first place, with whom Aunt Maggie had fought to keep Sara and Troy, came and put her in a home with the Nelsons.
Though Aunt Maggie and Uncle Nathan were very poor and often lived grittily, they were a family, and Sara and Troy had never been part of a family. Their hometown was a small town, but the Sidle name had been trash. Sara and Troy were pitied by the upstairs neighbor and their teachers and the grocer. They were tough and mean kids—Sara's earliest, and fondest, memories were of getting lollipops from the nurses at the hospital while their mother was being patched back together. They had lived a violent, hand-to-mouth existence with no thought of the future, of doing the right thing, of dreaming of something better. Living with Uncle Nathan, Troy was required to go to school every day. Sara had to be taught that smacking people and throwing things when you were mad wasn't right. She had always been curious and she became a voracious reader; a thrilled Aunt Maggie took her to the library every other afternoon. She behavior had been early—she dove obsessively into books as an escape the way her brother and mother used drugs and the way her father had used alcohol. Still, everything she had learned in her first eight years had to be erased. Aunt Maggie had tentatively talked about getting her 'help' but Sara steadfastly refused. She didn't need help, she insisted. Still, Aunt Maggie took her to a counselor, at the insistence of the court-appointed social worker. Sara hated it. The one good thing about leaving her aunt was that the next family forgot to keep making appointments. Nobody in the situation was wealthy; Sara slid easily through the cracks.
"Hey, Sara," Nick said, coming in to the lounge and knocking her out of her memories. "What's up?"
Though it had been several months, she still was not adjusted to not having Warrick and Nick—especially Nick though she was loath to admit it—around. She missed talking to them and their teasing. She missed bouncing ideas off of them and not being ashamed to have hypotheses, which she always was around Grissom. When she worked with Catherine and Grissom—Grissom especially—she always felt that was the junior, more inferior CSI, which made her feel awkward. With Grissom, she was always living up to some invisible, impossible expectations, and her therapist had told her how this always set her up for failure. She knew that she could never be that ideal. Her relationship with Greg was slightly maternal, which was sort of weird, but she was proud of him and proud of what she had taught him. She adored Greg; he was like a younger brother, but sometimes it was hard to deal with his naiveté and she always felt that she should be a model CSI, so that his wonderful idealistic innocence was maintained and he didn't screw up royally. When working with Sofia, she felt that she was Catherine in the early days of the Sara-and-Catherine relationship, before they had warmed up and respected each other—at least pre-Eddie. But with Nick and Warrick, she felt like equals. Paired with either of them worked extremely well, when they worked all three together she felt like they were the Three Musketeers or something equally cool. They would always get the case solved; they worked perfectly together. Sara had come to view those two as good friends. They still saw each other occasionally, sometimes worked a scene together. Those comments were often the only times that she could laugh at crime scenes, and always felt like a hidden guilty pleasure. But they no longer ate breakfasts together and only went out together to visit a club or watch movies when she had a night off and they got done with their shift. She missed it.
"A lot, actually." She took a breath. "My cousin—we were very close a long time ago, I lived with her family for a while—came into town. She's been diagnosed with pancreatic and liver cancer and is moving to Vegas for some treatments and wants me to take in her seventeen-year-old twin daughters and I've agreed. My condo isn't big enough so I'm house-hunting now too." She felt confused and fuzzy, almost like she had been drinking. The enormity of the situation was hitting, hard. She put her forehead on her palm and rolled her neck. She listened to each vertebrae slowly crack.
"God," Nick sat down next to her and peeled the lid off of a yogurt. "When did she hit you with this?"
"This morning. After shift." She stood up and stretched. She had come in early with a purpose: "I've got to go talk to Mia about the DNA from the breaking and entering I processed last night."
"Okay," Nick said, touching her elbow as she started to leave. "If you need help moving, or need someone to talk to, I'm here, you know."
"Yeah. Thanks." She said briefly and smiling lightly. "You're a good friend Nicky." He shook his head, blushing, and she headed towards DNA.
Before she got there, though, her cell rang. "Sidle." She said automatically.
"Hey, it's me." Lilly said, "Are you at work? I didn't know when your shift started."
"Well, yeah, I'm at work, but shift hasn't started." She cleared her throat.
"I was just calling to say that the principal at St. Chris's admitted Jules and Grace. They're packing as we speak—getting their rooms put away and everything. I was wondering—maybe you want to talk to them?"
"Yeah, I've got fifteen or twenty minutes." Sara glanced at the clock.
"Okay—um. Here's Jules," there were some scuffling and sharp words.
"Hi," Jules said. Her voice was guarded, almost grudging, but determined and nervous.
"Hey," Sara said in her too-bright voice—the one she hated. "Hi."
"I'm—Julia," she said, "How are you?"
"I'm--I'm good." Sara said, "I'm at work now—I work nights."
"Yeah. Mom mentioned that."
"Oh. What else has she told you?"
"You live in Vegas. I've heard the thing about your mom and dad and my grandparents. That's it. What's she said about me?"
"You like to—" Sara took a potshot because she couldn't remember which twin was which, "swim. You're good at it. You're a senior in a few weeks."
"Yeah," Jules said politely. "I'm training right now."
"Are you—going for a big meet or something?" Sara leaned against the wall.
"I don't know. I'm just…. training. I have to find a team in Las Vegas." She sounded disappointed.
"Well, it's a big city; there's going to be something. I can—check it out for you. Do you want me to?"
"Sure. That'd be nice." Jules seemed to pause, "So, you're forensics expert?"
"I'm a CSI—I collect evidence, and analyze it to solve crimes."
"Murders?" the way she said it sounded slightly distasteful.
"Usually."
"Is it gross?"
"You try not to let it be." Sara said.
"Do you see the dead bodies?"
"Yeah. A lot, actually, cause each murder there's evidence on the body." Sara realized she was probably coming off as a science freak.
"And you work nights?"
"Better pay." Sara said lamely. There wasn't any pay difference.
"You work every night?"
"Most nights. I get probably one night a week off."
"What times do you work?"
"11 PM—7 AM. I have to pull a lot of overtime, though, especially when a case is hot."
"Eight hours? Overnight?" she sounded skeptical. "That fun? I mean, do you like it?"
"I like it. It's like a puzzle, or a riddle, and I really like the science. And when I solve a case, it's just this awesome rush. I sort of feel that I'm helping out the best way I can. I just like it." Sara ended lamely. She almost volunteered to let her come to the lab sometime, but she decided that didn't sound like Jules' style. "So, what else do you like to do?"
Sara could almost hear the shrug. "I don't know. I honestly do a lot. I can't really think of anything." She paused. "I'm a lifeguard. I work a lot. And I guess I do volunteery type things, you know? Like, I volunteer at the hospital every Sunday. I've worked with the United Way on some stuff. I do a lot of schoolwork, too."
"Favorite subject?"
"History, Government, or English. I think you'll like Grace better. She likes physics and bio and anatomy and stuff. Not so much chemistry though."
"Do you guys know where you're going next year, or what you're studying?"
"Not really. I want to double-major in history and government and go to law school or grad school or something. Grace wants to be a pharmacist, psychologist or a nurse administrator. She did that at a career-exploration job-shadowing thing we went to and got really interested in it. She also wants to maybe be a biomedical engineer."
"Those are really diverse."
"Yeah, we're pretty different academically. But it's what we want to do."
"That…That's cool." Sara said.
There was some scuffling on the other end and then Jules said, "Sara, Mom wants to talk to you. So, I'll talk to you later, or something?"
"Yeah, sounds great." Jules quickly handed the phone over.
"I'm assuming that you need to start working soon, so I'm going to let you go. Listen, just call me when you've found a realtor, and I'll have my financial advisor contact you to start paying you for the house and things—"
Sara waved a hand in the air though she knew that her cousin wasn't standing there. "Lilly, don't worry about it. Just start packing and get everything ready; I'll call you as soon as I have a house, and you can start shipping your things and finding a moving company."
"Thank you again, Sara." Lilly said.
"Really, Lilly, please stop thanking me and apologizing."
"Right. Sorry" Lilly said and giggled. "I'll let you go. Have a fun evening at work."
"Thanks." Sara clicked off her phone.