Shades of Dawn
by Camilla Sandman
Disclaimer: Not mine. CSI is CBS's and this is merely written for fun and no profit.
Author's Note: This is set sometime in a not-too-far-off, undetermined future. Some references to at least the first five seasons will occur.
Prologue
II
Gil Grissom nearly died on a Tuesday morning.
It had been a long Monday night, just as it had been a long Sunday night and a long Friday before that. He was getting used to the long nights, perhaps too used to them. Perhaps too used to the bubble that was his life and the dangers within to consider the dangers outside.
He never even saw the car. He remembered only vaguely the heat of his own blood against his skin before falling to the earth almost as rain. Strange that it should be so warm and he should feel so cold, even with the first rays of the sun sliding across his eyelids and into his eyes. It also strangely occurred to him that he never even saw the shades of dawn any more, not sleeping through it, but working through it.
Then there was darkness and stillness and forgetting. Sometimes, he was vaguely aware of voices just at the edge of consciousness, sometimes speaking his name. Anchors beckoning him to shore, but he felt comfortable adrift in the sea of blankness. Quiet there, as the silence he sometimes even envied his mother for. The world roared and noise was pain.
Pain.
"Don't you dare leave me like this, you bastard," pain said, pain in Catherine's voice.
He stayed a while then, even opening his eyes to her, wishing her hair was another colour and her voice of another tilt. What had her name been again? She had been...
Blankness and then her name. Sara. She had been Sara. He remembered the name and the feeling that went with it, but her face felt lost in the roar that had claimed most of his mind and he drifted away from. Not quite himself, but the awareness of self awaiting behind the wall pain had erected. He would have to suffer to be Grissom again and for now, he wanted to be painless.
Time drifted too and the skin against his darkened, becoming Warrick's. Warrick, and Catherine asleep in a corner, lines of fear on her face even in the grip of dreams.
"You're going to live," Warrick promised, ordered, demanded. Grissom found himself nodding, even as he felt a desire to let go and be stillness where no pain could ever touch. Desires could be overcome. Somewhere within himself, he knew he was very good at that.
"Yes."
The voice didn't sound like his, but it had to be, for it wasn't Warrick's. And it did hold all the pain he felt crawling up and into him, like ants coming to their lair. The blankness invited, but he resisted it, feeling a desire to see one particular image before it was all dark again and the sense of self didn't matter.
"Want... to see... Sara."
"What?"
"Sara," he insisted, feeling the pain pulsate in his body with his heart beat, pumping more and more anxiety into him. "Need to…"
"Grissom…" Warrick sounded slightly perturbed. "Sara left three years ago."
Memories then. Sara's hand, never quite firm in his grasp, sliding loose. Her back as she had walked, and all the words he could never say battering against it. And ever since, always working long nights. Always, until now.
She had been Sara.
Gil Grissom nearly died on a Tuesday morning, three years after his life had walked away from him, and it was a start.