Title: Perimeter of a Crash.
Description: "The real question, I guess, is why dance?"
Disclaimer: nope.
Notes: always wanted to get up the courage to write a CSI fic. Deliciously intelligent characters make it quite the task. Figured I may as well start on a toughie and go with Grissom-centric. If I don't get reviews I probably won't bother with more fics because, damn this stuff takes time.
EXTRA SPECIAL IMPORTANT NOTES!
You maybe shouldn't try to follow the timeline first go. It works, I swear to you but I definitely recommend you read it twice for comprehension. It tends to… jump.
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And oh, he's seen it before. Women usually. Always arguing different forms of the same unreason.
And oh, he's loved this before.
The victim:
Grade twelve. Grissom sitting in the back row with a dull pencil and an unused eraser, waiting for the teacher to make a suggestion: "Gilbert, why don't you give Miss Cristine a hand?" And he stands, looks down to the front and wonders, "All right. What page?"
Maria Cristine is tall and gently blonde. She is loud with the boys and quiet with him and sometimes when he asks her, "Okay, so what did you get for number thirty eight?" she will grimace- drop her pencil, eraser first onto the page and declare in a rush, "Listen, I've got it, okay? I don't need this shit!"
Maria Cristine's hair falls out too much. There are columns of numbers jotted amidst the backs of all her pages. There are mysteries in her mind, perhaps. Nobody notices, but Grissom does.
Accomplice:
A woman kidnapped and an anxious, wealthy husband. Three hours in a chopper and when it lurches suddenly- catching slight turbulence, Sara is already leaning forward, searching for a flashlight in her kit. In the dark cab Grissom witnesses her forehead knock against the unforgiving dashboard- cringes invisibly at the sound it makes, doesn't move. When she looks across the cab at him, he identifies the look that flares in her eyes. Confusion.
Always the question with them: "Do you care?" and perhaps furthermore, "If so, what does that mean?"
Secretly, she makes him want to go a day without analyzing. Ironically, together they make this feat impossible. Neither of them allows any regard for the wounds or the wounded.
On the ground the entire world dissolves into shovels and rocky earth. Their Vic is screaming beneath their feet and Sara falls to her hands and knees, digging with her vulnerable hands before the shovels even arrive.
The woman is pulled, keening and dirty, from a box in the ground. She is whisked away and they are both left adrenalized to stand in the blaring chopper searchlights- wind whipped and suddenly… needy.
Sara is looking down, afraid to move least she forget her balance and move towards him instead.
Maybe it is because of what happened in the air, but rather than quoting Poe- "A Cask D'Amontilado" would be suiting- he reaches forward and touches her temple where a bruise is forming. He touches her there for the first time- asks her for the second time, "Sara, are you all right?" and when she shudders away he hears her words blown back to him in the violent wind, "It never fails to amaze me what people do to each other."
They return to the city, let down from an impossible high. They have a rush of words for the pilot, the PD, the investigators, yet towards each other they are mute- vulnerable in the post thrill; they may as well have taken separate rides.
And perhaps it is because he requested her to fill his lab in the place of a dead woman. And perhaps it is because she accepted his offer while she was still gulping coffee from a mug at his kitchen counter- but it doesn't come as a surprise when their Vic is lead away in handcuffs, an accomplice in her own burial.
"Perhaps," they both consider on the flight back that night, "it is equally amazing what people do to themselves."
The circumstances:
Maria has a difficult math question and Grissom had a spare all morning. He is calm and pensive because Mr. Nashie let him spend his free time in the electronics lab making wax prints of the metal equipment. Now his hands smell like the cinnamon scent of the wax he took from the arts room and his sweater is sharp navy blue and when Maria looks up at him she looks quickly back down again and whispers into the curve of her textbook, "I'm not sure I can ever get this enough."
Not, "right, " Grissom notices she says, "enough".
And now he gets it.
She is afraid to fail. In front of him. She has come into this class to struggle and as they both look on at this thing she can't do, she feels shame. He cannot fault her for this.
"You need more protein," he says, but quietly because Dwayne Andrews likes to eaves drop on her constantly. "It triggers the Protein Kinase C to make memory connections in your brain."
Grissom understands aptitude.
Human relation:
So he is patient and he is eloquent and when she raises her nails to her false sweet mouth to chew them down he watches her small hands and he says, "You're answer is right, you know."
And when they look in the back, it is.
And she smiles.
Development of a bias:
"Like lighter fluid in bulk," grimaces the frenzied brunette he does not yet know. They are spending the January evening pouring over lecture notes at a coffee shop in San Francisco. She is on her second cup of Americano, anticipating her third and explaining, now, that she drinks it black because-
But before she can check off the reasons on her fingers he is doing it for her, reciting, "The calcium will chemically react with the caffeine, actually causing bone density loss and synaptic shortages."
"Steps ahead of me," is her only response, her quick fingers displaying agitation and, if he's honest, some other sensation he will not acknowledge. He would know; he's feeling it too.
The coffee shop they've chosen to inhabit is tiny with even tinier tables of which they are taking up two. Over the process of three hours and- she leans against him to check his watch- fifteen minutes, they have carefully managed to find themselves allied on one side of their tables, pages of their eerily similar and equally illegible scrawl lain out while they converse and now, when their shoulders rub, creating an odd friction of their own accord she shivers and he has to say something to distract them both, immediately.
What he's thinking is Elliot- describing the bodies beneath the London Bridge, passing a friend in the crowd- but what he says instead is, "Why?"
She is confused (by more than his question, really) and begins dog-earing her pages manually, her eyes effectively averted. "Was that supposed to be a complete question? Because your syntax is… non-existent."
And now he smiles, spurred on by the slight chill of the winter sneaking in amongst arriving patrons. "Why do you want more coffee if the flavor is terrible?"
Tomorrow is his last seminar. She will have a question and he will have developed tunnel vision- staring down the center aisle, unable to speak her name. By the end of the afternoon she will be half diverted from him, hot headed and cool hearted and spun. And so it is that when she stands- intentionally interrupting his concluding speech for a dash to the washroom- she will trip, her heel caught on a loop hole in the carpet and with curling tendrils of skin on her palms and elbows, he will be the first one standing over her, forcing any tone from his voice, asking, "Are you all right? Sara? Are you hurt?"
Tomorrow, they both know, is his last seminar but neither of them have ever been very good with tense changes and so they sit and when her answer finally comes he nearly laughs, because it is nearly funny.
"Whenever anyone opens the door," she says, "the wind comes in. I need the cups to hold our papers down."
Never compromise (the case):
Tonight they will both go home. He, to travel sized cheep shampoos and she, to lie in bed, covers to her chin and skin that won't stay still. She will fist her sheets in her sleep and wake up thinking, "Don't you dare get to me."
For a moment in the buzzing lecture hall he will trace his fingers over the burnt red and sickly white of her palms and slip a tube of Polysporin into her pocket before he's gone.
In the cab to the depot the cabbie will try to make conversation. Grissom will concede eventually, in order to request they stop at "Java Shack". Twenty-four months ago he and Catharine lay on her expensive king size bed, discussing definition.
It is only much later, with the bitter taste of Americano burning his tongue that it will occur to him:
"…I need the cups to hold our papers down."
They were fundamentally the same conversation.
The crime scene:
A three-story house with two pools like reflections on opposite sides of a glass wall. The outdoor pool is full by the time they get there and the indoor pool is covered in floating blue plastic.
When he was eight, Grissom bought a square of that plastic to examine. He wanted to see how it was made.
"If someone doesn't help them roll it up…" says Grissom but Maria knows better and half laughing she says, "No one will. It's been ripped three times since May."
Her dress is short but with a high collar, which everyone speculates is to cover the bones edging their way around her neck- some brittle frame. Grissom listens for snatches of their names in other's conversations and when she makes her way to the liquor table he watches the tendons straining at the backs of her knees- the painful things inside of her, showing through.
The music is loud and both their eyes are much too wide for a place like this, amongst all the other half drunk bodies. Looking around he wonders at her ability to find her way out into the world at the end of each night.
One day he will understand: all type A's burn out too fast. Some of them find a way to use gravity. Many create their own methods by which to fall.
Circumstances:
Forty minutes later they are separated, watching each other across the steaming pool and sipping their drinks in time. Maria is surrounded by four boys with white teeth and two girls with hands that will attach to anyone if left alone for long.
Grissom has found a twenty three year old with a girlfriend whom the older boy hopes to impress. Grissom, struck by the urge to discuss psychological complexes, has baited their conversation along with simple words for complicated ideas. Too simple maybe, and some of the meaning is lost. The twenty three year old is calling it a "jo-rasta complex" and Grissom's mouth is open to correct him when he unexpectedly finds himself laughing.
Grissom notices his own statements have begun to smell like tequila.
Self medicate:
Two AM beneath an overpass. Sara is standing under a billboard mouthing words over the roar of traffic. He can't hear either. For just one moment she's as distant as the thirty by fifty foot poster of a dead woman, illuminated behind her.
There will need to come a moment in the future- some early hour, fragile as the flavor of shared chamomile tea- in which he will touch the shadowed notch in her neck, perhaps for luck and say, "I wanted to be the case you couldn't solve."
"To be known" is to surrender one's influence. Beneath the towering lampposts and amidst shopping carts pushed by manic junkies, Grissom is suddenly deaf. Of two initial responses, he chooses relief over panic and says nothing of either. He finds the abstraction of silence to be calming.
If he and Sara are evidence, then their case is compromised eighty times over and Grissom knows: there is no solving these kind.
When he was six he took the heavy dictionary from his father's shelf in the hall. His father died that afternoon so it was no surprise when Grissom never forgot: The Oxford Dictionary defined "Influence", in verb form, to mean manipulate.
Altered:
"My mother's best friend developed a Jorasta complex," says the twenty three year old- "weird shit." and Grissom doesn't bother to correct him. He's really more concerned with inferiority at the moment.
He has four drinks in him, icy and electric, when suddenly there is a commotion and he hears the splash and then he looks into the glowing water and sees Maria, swimming weightless in her billowing chiffon dress.
When she waves to him- opens her mouth beneath the surface and smiles, he forgets why it is that he never goes to these parties and he forgets why it is that he never drinks.
The twenty three year old is still talking about his mother's friend's dead husband when Grissom discards his shirt on the edge of the pool- unbuttons his pants. If he angles right he'll catch her foot in his hand.
He takes a breath and raises his arms above his head.
Post-traumatic:
Another body like pale plastocine. When Robins pulls glitter from between the toes there is nothing right to say.
"You go, Doc," says Catharine, reminding Grissom that she was once a girl on a stage with cocaine nosebleeds. He wonders if she will stay up till noon, watching cartoons with Lindsay. He wonders if she keeps a film canister at home. Some small amount of, "just in case I need-" and if she's ever fallen asleep, grasping it in tight fisted self-loathing.
Events triggering actions:
Half an hour, two ounces of swallowed pool water and three tequila shots after he makes the dive into Jason Jackson's pool, Grissom is shirtless and she is in a lacy black bra and baggy borrowed jeans. Without three too many drinks he would be troubled by the receding borders of their hem lines. Instead he is mesmerized by the odd ripple of her ribs beneath her skin and places a hand to her side, tracing the bones with words he's memorized from an anthropology text.
"This place has three floors," she slurs to which he considers and corrects, "Four if you count the basement."
"And five if you count the attic." Meanwhile, she is linking their shaky hands and getting the better of him in her own unnerving way.
Location:
The third floor of a house he has never been before and Grissom has her rattling against the hallway closet.
"You're enough," he wants to say but how can he when he can't accept this, even for himself? He has a "Guide to Physics" book on his dresser at home. He has vowed to read it by Saturday- has vowed to remember it on Sunday.
Knowledge is a weapon.
So instead he grabs her shoulders, holds on like she might fly apart and when the closet door bumps open a towel comes sliding down onto her tousled head and she chokes, stuttering on the downy smell. She is shaking, hands rough on his belt buckle, buzzing and desperate and, oh god, the only other time he's done this was- and he remembers it was-
She wraps one leg around him now and when he pushes their hips together he realizes that he's going to make this work for her.
"The last time I did this was with my mother's Otolaryngologist," he says. "I was ten." and when she nods she bites his lip and he feels better. Never having told anyone before, he feels better. Her thighs are on his hips.
It's in this way that they grasp and pull and when he mouths the Latin word for 'sex' against her clavicle he can taste chlorine. She has her hand jerking at him through the seam of his pants and she really shouldn't- she really shouldn't- and he thinks- but he wants- god, he needs. right. now.
Yet before she can get his pants quite down, he catches her wrist a moment and runs his tongue over the pale skin between fingers.
"X plus 4b equals you," Grissom whispers- this strange vindication. And later, when she comes, he whispers again, amended: "Everything equals you."
It's the closest thing he can find to what he means.