Title: Who am I to blow against the wind?
Pairings: None
Rating: G
A/N: this is an introspective look of Grissom at the end of 105 "Friends and Lovers". many thanks to the ever lovely ms. drakien69 for the beta.
There's not much of a line as Grissom nears the rollercoaster and he's thankful for that. He hands over a bill like a desperate man tucking one under a thong, paying for this ride like any other in Vegas. He looks out at the smaller lights as the car clicks its way up the tracks. The small lights attract his attention as the illuminated billboards don't; the rainfall of color lacks sparkle in the periphery of his vision. It's the small lights – the cars down the alley, a light on a support beam, the squares miles away – that he watches. For a city so full of light, Las Vegas manages to be awfully dark.
Some would say he's come to expect the night, the darkness that comes from more than the absence of a ball of gas ninety million miles from the earth. Grissom knows that he just has better walls than most, though they create their own darkness. "Away," he murmurs his answer to Warrick to himself again. One day he will go away – away from his coworkers (now "his" team), from the job that encompassed the last fifteen years of his life. Grissom wonders if he goes away, who will come back? Who will return to his spartan townhouse, his furniture, his skin?
His eyes track movements of life continuing around him, ebbing and flowing like the ocean Nevada will never know, that he once knew. He can feel the padding of the brace across his shoulders, pressing down on his chest. The weight is familiar not just to this rollercoaster, not just to any rollercoaster; it is with him wherever he is. It's good to feel a physical presence now – the pounds of force from air velocity and gravity.
His head cast back, the ride moves him – nothing about his body is his own. It belongs to the rollercoaster, just as his stomach trades places with his heart – a foreign exchange program for his organs. Everything in him is moving, being swept away by the wind blowing through him. But always there is the weight – after twenty-odd years of work, after this city, after his father.
His teeth are bared as he makes the last drop and he feels something a little like release, issues something a little like a moan. He slows and stops, lifts the brace above his head. He goes home, shoulders squared and mincing steps.