Security
Disclaimer: I am not, nor am I in any way affiliated with CBS, Anthony Zuiker, or anybody else involved in the production of CSI.
Summary: She'd always been sort of tempted to test the area around her heart for gunshot residue. Sara, Greg, and the death of GSR. One shot. Could be a prequel to "Beastie" but doesn't have to be.
Author's Note: This is more than a month old but was really very bad when it was originally written. It came about because it occurred to me (finally) why "GSR" as a ship name is ironicand others trying to follow the same patterndon't work as well. "NSR," for example. Just-- bad. "GSR" is clever, even if I can't really stomach the subject.
Security
There was a nagging sort of temptation, in a corner of her mind, one that tickled her awake at odd afternoon hours when she should have been dead to the world. One that would distract her from evidence collection or make her forget all about a drink date with someone tall, dark, and not Grissom. She felt short of breath sometimes, like her chest was collapsing in on itself. She wanted to get out her little bottles of chemicals, line them up on a shelf with their labels facing out. She wanted to get a swab and poke around inside the pericardium, get samples from around her heart. She had always been sort of tempted to test the area around her heart for gunshot residue, if only because she was young in the eighties and a soundtrack of Bon Jovi songs played through her head, quite unbidden, when she thought of all the awkward, stilted moments she had shared with Grissom.
Shot through the heart and you're to blame...
She supposed that the slugs must all be where they had lodged-- she'd never been autopsied. Not all the bullets came from the same gun, of course, and none had yet to actually kill her. There were a handful from old boyfriends and a whole magazine courtesy of her parents. Contrary to what Greg, who was too optimistic for his own good, said, she wasn't sure there could be much heart left. Come to think of it, she wasn't even sure there was much left of her sternum. Or her lungs. A swift kick to the chest or some other minor trauma would certainly break her ribcage, and all the soft organs inside would be crushed.
She would be lying if she claimed that her conversations topics with Greg weren't split between the cases and sexual banter.
Things changed that morning. They solved a case where an attractive thirtysomething woman finally snapped and murdered the cheating creep who'd strung her along for years. She left his genitals in a paper bag on his front porch for his wife to find and left his exsanguinated body in the hotel room where they always met. All she wanted was a normal life: the baby, the family, the piece of security... but he hadn't been interested in it with her. The woman hadn't cried for what she'd done, only for her young daughter.
Listening to her detail her crime, some little thing in Sara snapped, too. Maybe one of her old wounds finally clotted. Maybe she coughed up a shell casing. It didn't seem to matter quite so much.
She had laid awake in bed for hours, overanalyzing her situation and wondering how exactly she'd gotten there. The blinds in her bedroom didn't keep nearly enough light out, the edges smudged with illumination she was never quite in the mood for much-- not when her mood was so dark and she felt like such a terrible person for sucking all the happiness and warmth out of her surroundings. It made her feel so obvious, so conspicuous, and she hated knowing that she was desperate The plus was that the air conditioner attached to her window made enough noise to drown out Greg's breathing beside her and she could roll over and stare at her messy closet and pretend that she was wallowing all by herself.
Her eyes snapped open and she sat up, examining with her scientist's eye what exactly she had done. She'd ended up curled up in a ball with the whole sheet and he was sprawled, dorsal side up, over two thirds of her mattress with a foot hanging off the side and a hand under her pillow. She had pegged him correctly as a bed hog, but wrongly as a blanket burrito. But then, his skin was hot to the touch at any given time and she tended to run cold.
She pressed her palms into her eyeballs perhaps a little too hard while she tried to block it out. The joints in her fingers were stiff, protesting. She had a crick in her neck from falling asleep at a funny angle and parts she'd kind of forgotten she'd had ached.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
A sudden panic clawed its way up the inside of her throat. She'd contaminated the scene. Her evidence was tainted. She'd slept with Greg-- how could she hope to test those old Grissom samples now?
She scrambled out of the bed and into the bathroom without a backwards look, tightly wrapping the top sheet around herself. She didn't think she could handle glancing back and seeing what might be the future because she wasn't sure she knew how to let go of the past. There was some vestige of that teenage girl she'd been once upon a time, fighting her way for every morsel she could get, and not letting anything go if she could help it. She had devoted so much energy to the scar tissue remains in her chest and the man who pumped her full of lead, and she wasn't sure that the magical healing powers in the next room were exactly what she wanted.
When she flicked on the bathroom light, it cast a sort of skewed trapezoid across her bedroom floor, throwing light upon his bare feet where they hung off the edge of the bed.
In her mirror, there was the narrow, vaguely southward-sliding face of a woman upon whom middle age was starting to creep. And she looked scared. She turned on the tap and splashed herself with cold water, thinking that maybe it would help her see the illuminated path. A tiny, vain part of her hoped the cold would tighten up her loose skin, too, in case the younger man over there noticed. He probably wouldn't, and his blindness was endearing, although the realistic majority of her wanted him to just admit that he wanted somebody else. Somebody free and happy and young and probably blonde.
"Sar, wha-- aryawack?"
She froze, leaning over the sink basin, staring into her mirror eyes in something not unlike fear. There was a creaking of bedsprings and the soft tap-tap of footsteps crossing the room. He leaned against the doorjamb and squinted at her in the bright light, head cocked to one side. She felt a few cold drops fall to their deaths from her chin.
"I didn't mean to wake you up," she said softly. He smiled sleepily and stretched his arms over his head with a huge yawn. "I had a funny dream, I guess."
He closed the space between them and wrapped his monkey arms around her waist from behind and tucking his chin into the space between her neck and shoulder. She used the spare corner of the sheet to wipe away the remains of the water and she stared ahead at the reflection the two of them cast in the mirror. He was so pretty and young and silly looking, with his hair sticking up in a hundred revolutionary directions. He smiled in a genuinely happy sort of way at the reflection and she suddenly felt very cold and then she had to look away. She might have even shivered because he pulled her flush against him and murmured something comforting into her neck.
Those tests would have to wait. She was busy giving love a bad name.
The End.
Inspirations: "You Give Love a Bad Name" by Bon Jovi and "Shut Your Mouth" by Garbage.
Written August 20, 2005. Edited and posted September 29, 2005.