Chapter 8

AN: Thank you all again for such great reviews! I'm really glad you're all enjoying this. However, I have to warn you that updates might become a good bit less frequent for the next little while. This is partly because I now have to connect two parts of the story and I'm not quite sure how that will happen just yet, and because I've also gotten a good idea for part of this that I need to play with a bit to figure out how it will work out. And it's also partly because I have to write much less fun and interesting things now because my school semester ends in three weeks. So bear with me, please. I think I've left you all with a mostly ok temporary stopping point, at least (i.e., not very cliffhanger-y)...
He woke up without a start for the first time in over a week. Disoriented, he laid still for a moment, trying to figure out how long he'd been asleep. The clock said 1:47. He vaguely remembered that it had been dinner time at the restaurant, and he thought it might still have been light out when Eric had gotten him home. His body still felt heavy with exhaustion as he shifted position to stare at the ceiling. One of the cats protested this move, and he reached out to stroke her as she settled against him in a new position. Another second cat had wrapped herself around his knee, doing a great impression of a heating pad. It felt good, and he wondered how the cat always knew when his knee hurt. But wondering about his knee took him too close to what he'd been avoiding.

You really can't avoid it forever.

I can try, he thought.

You won't succeed. Again, Timmy, it's been twelve years. Exactly how long do you plan to punish yourself for this?

I'm not punishing myself. I just…don't want to think about it.

None of it was your fault. You know that.

He sighed, and watched the curtains blow in the breeze. His house was close enough to the ocean to get a bit of the sea breeze at night, and it made the house pleasantly cool. He'd grown up without air conditioning. Syracuse summers were hot, but were only truly unpleasant for a week or two. They weren't nearly severe enough to really require air conditioning, and his parents hadn't wanted the expense. Not when they all spent 10 to 12 hours a day in the restaurant, which was air conditioned because of the kitchens. He hated air conditioning, and only ever turned it on when the temperatures climbed into the 90s. It was too cold and too artificial. Besides, he spent all his time in the lab, with its arctic temperatures year round. And people wondered why he wore long sleeves and layers all year. He got cold all too easily, and he hated being cold. Hated cold and snow and winter.

You didn't used to.

Shut up. It doesn't matter.

Twelve years is a long time to not go home, you know.

It's not home.

But somehow, it was, still, a little. His parents called every year in October and asked if he was going to come home for the holidays, and every year he said he wouldn't come. Not in the winter. Not with the snow and the memories. He hated the cold. But every year, he felt a little bit…homesick. Not enough to really even notice, but enough to remind him that he was not from Miami. He was not from the place of eternal warmth and no winters.

Fine. Go in the summer then.

I can't.

You can. You've got more vacation time saved up than anyone else in the lab. Including Horatio.

I know. I don't want to go anywhere.

You're scared to go anywhere.

True, he had to admit. He was scared to leave Miami. He hadn't been more than fifty miles away from the city in more than three years. Before that, Megan had bribed him with a fairly substantial gift certificate to his favorite bookstore to go to a conference in Memphis, and even then he'd only gone because Alexx had gone too. He'd been anxious and miserable the whole time, had just wanted to go back to Miami. Even when he went out driving, feeling like he needed to get away or he'd explode, he never really went too far. Miami was safe. There were things that tethered him here. He'd arrived with almost nothing. Just the car, the clothes he was wearing, and a laundry basket full of odds and ends (mostly books, to be honest). Everything he had here, he'd built for himself. There was something to be said for that, and it made it harder to abandon. Which was good.

He had responsibilities and he couldn't leave them. He couldn't just run away again.

There's a difference between visiting your parents and running away.

Enough. The case, the case. They had nothing but déjà vu, as he'd told Delko. It was immensely frustrating to have the answer in his head, but not being able to articulate it. He was sure it was there.

Don't you think you'd be able to figure out what it was you were missing if you weren't mired down in the past?

Stop it.

No one ever wanted this for you, you know.

He shivered and tugged the blanket closer around him. His head hurt. It was there, on the edge of his memory. The answer was there.

He blinked and found himself in the crime scene. With Megan. "Ok, Tim, you've told me what you see, now tell me what you don't see."

"What?" he asked, bewildered.

"What don't you see? Look around the entrance here," she said, pointing towards the entryway.

He looked, frowning. "There's nothing…the door isn't busted in?"

"Exactly. So what does that tell you?"

"That it was unlocked?" he asked.

"Right. What does that imply?" she asked, smiling a bit.

"I don't know," he admitted.

"Ok, think of it this way. You're in your apartment and for some reason you left the door unlocked. Someone you didn't invite in walks in the door. What do you do?" she asked.

"I make them get out," he said, nodding.

"And you do that by any means necessary, right? So what would your entryway look like?"

"It'd be a mess. And this isn't, so the victim probably let the attacker inside," he said, comprehending.

"Right! And we don't usually let strangers into our houses, right? So what else does that imply?" she asked, encouragingly.

"That it's a known assailant," he said, nodding.

"More than likely, yes. This is all implication, it's not something we know for a fact yet. But implication gives you somewhere to start hanging evidence on, understand?" she explained.

"Yeah. I see that."

"Good. Ok, so our attacker is in the house, and we know him. Our victim is in a pretty compromising position up there, isn't he?" Tim nodded as she continued. "What did the bedroom look like?"

"Like the living room and the hallway. No real sign of a struggle," he said, slowly.

"Exactly. So that probably means that the attacker is someone the victim felt pretty comfortable with, no? But, look at the living room. What's missing from this picture, if the attacker is someone that the victim would be comfortable enough to sleep with?" she asked.

He looked around the living room, nothing jumping out at him. "I don't know."

"All right, let's use you as an example again. You're home and you know Bridget is coming over, right?" She grinned at his suddenly red face. "What do you do before she gets there?"

He shook his head, flustered. "I don't…"

"Think about it, Tim. You're anticipating a nice romantic evening. What do you do to get ready?"

"You clean the place up, man," Frank Tripp said, leaning in the doorway, before walking out the front door, as Tim looked around helplessly.

"Right," Megan said, nodding agreement. "You clean up, maybe put some decent music on the stereo, get a bottle of wine out and some glasses, maybe some food. Does it look like any of that happened here?"

He shook his head. "No. There's only one of everything," he said, gesturing towards the dish and the can of beer sitting on the coffee table.

"Exactly," Megan replied. "Now, that might not mean anything- there's plenty of reasons for why you might not go all out when you know your significant other comes over- but it might mean that our victim wasn't expecting this encounter."

Tim nodded. "Or maybe that the attacker wasn't his significant other?"

"Maybe," Megan nodded. "It's hard to tell, since we don't know anything about the victim yet, but that's a possibility." She smiled. "Good job. See, I told you you could do this!"

"But…" he said, looking around again. "But, Megan, I knew all of that."

"Once I got it out of you, you did," she agreed.

"No…where are we? When are we?" he asked, frowning.

"Hialeah," she said, looking at him quizzically. "It's Tuesday."

"No, it's Thursday," he said, slowly. "This isn't…you're gone, but you're here."

"Of course. I'm always here, right now," she said, nodding.

"Because this is a dream. This is memory," he said, nodding. "This is…you're training me."

"Yes," she agreed.

"And I just passed Level One, right?"

"Right. Last month."

"Last month. And you're training me and we're in Hialeah, and this is… he looked around. "You and me and Frank. In Hialeah. And a known assailant. With a naked male corpse on a bed and anal penetration, it's this, isn't it. This is it!" he said, waking up with a start.

That was it. Megan and Frank and Hialeah. He was a Level One. It was there, all of it. He'd known it was. He rolled out of bed, ignoring the protesting cats and pulled on the first pieces of clothing he saw, jeans and a t-shirt, and a jacket. Moving quickly, he was out the door before he'd quite gotten his shoes on. He paused to put them on and tie them. It wasn't raining, was just getting to be sunrise, so he walked over to the bike and started it. He had to get to the lab; he knew what he was looking for now.