Finally, please know: I don't write fics to be obvious. If there were meanings you didn't get it's probably because I wanted it that way. I would also love to answer any questions about the fic. The feed back I like most is mention of favorite parts and least favorite parts (that could be changed). And questions... they prove you were listening. Thanks.
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Always secure the scene:
When the scripture on Sara's ring turns out to be identical to his own lost cause, he walks quietly from the room. The other band is in a zip lock on his fish board and suddenly, he wants to lock his fingers through Sara's to feel the weight of her there.
Very suddenly he is not entirely convinced that she isn't a girl at a party in wet chiffon.
He has been on the job too long and now he knows. He has heard that when cases link to cases link to personal troubles and personal lives and persons of interest to people who are pretending they are not interested on an extremely personal level then it may very well be time to go and this is something he cannot afford.
This net of remembrance.
Maria in diamonds, Tia offering him a half empty bottle, Catharine's hands. Catharine in ruby shoes, Maria on the closet floor and Sara's hands in all that clay.
And maybe he was always going to be ending up here. A simple enough conclusion: 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.
Too many fingers with too many actions and he wants to know where the past stops and the present is caught- the sound of arriving moments… beating blue wings in Sara's hair.
Supposed to have been a different girl.
A difficult interrogation:
She cuts herself once. She's in the public washroom at the San Fran Rotating Restaurant with an Exacto-knife in her hand and the metallic drip of her own blood in the stainless steel sink.
Outside the door is Dr. Henry Gilkrist who is waiting for her to come back to dinner so that he may continue rubbing his foot along the length of her leg beneath the table. Being a social psychology professor he is adamant that sexual teasing should not be confined to the use of women.
There is an attractive, intelligent man waiting for her.
There is a fifty-dollar steak waiting for her.
Sara does not know what to do.
When the phone call came she was irritated, having forgotten to turn her cell phone on to vibrate while in such a luxurious location. Gilkrist had watched her slipping from her seat with dexterity, had ordered for them as she pressed the "Talk" button, in search of a place more suitable for phone conversation.
Five months since a single January evening in a drafty coffee shop.
"Sara? It's Grissom."
She held the phone, touched her lips, fisted her other hand, realized that she was breathing hard into the receiver and he could probably hear her.
She hung up.
In a slowly rotating bathroom Sara remembered an article she had once read about self-infliction. She found the Exacto-knife she kept in her purse for cutting out magazine articles while the library attendants weren't watching. "Better than morphine," one of the sufferers said and she had always wondered if there was any truth to that.
She misses the sunset, apologizes through dessert and insists that she needs to get home to study. Then she takes the long way down through the city on foot, high heels and all. When she passes a jewelry store it occurs to her that no one has ever bought her anything involving Carats. There is something sad about this and she enters the shop with eyes already casting about for some clue as to why these things should not suit her.
She buys herself a single gold band that evening, pays the equivalent of a months food budget in one go and is suddenly glad to have kept just that one credit card. Back on the street, her feet are raw and her hands are oddly cold.
She'll go home- call Grissom back and with his voice static-y over the line she will force herself to pretend it belongs to Gilkrist. While they speak she will trace the long angry mark that runs deeply across her palm and she will not cry when the receiver is put down at four AM.
At least friends.
Five months since a single January evening. Five months less a day since he stood over her in an aisle, carpet burnt and clumsy and it was then that he had to ask, "Are you alright? Sara? Are you hurt?"
She finds it ironic. That may have been the only question he could have asked that she doesn't know how to answer.
Compartmentalize:
He never would have pictured Sara with a ring. Complicated Sara with no fingernails and no patience. Maybe she wears it all the time- it is an epiphany to Grissom, sometimes, that there are things he is terribly poor at observing.
That night he rides the roller coaster six times- is contemplating a seventh before it begins, significantly, to hail. He returns to the lab, only when Sara's double shift is safely over.
Tonight is not the first time it has flickered in his mind that she looks at all her cases exactly, exactly in the way she looks at him.
A moment on pavement made warm by the autumn sun. Observers emerge from The Monaco. Their shadows cut into the pale morning surfaces and he turns around to see her there; hips out, lips twisted up into an expression he will never place- by consequence, never forget. Her placid features and inside she's constantly thinking, "don't you dare get to me- don't you dare."
On every case, Grissom wears safety gloves. "I don't even have to turn around," he said and if he had to choose, he would say it was then he took them off.
A wise man once said to stay away from things that cannot be rationally explained. "Here there be monsters."
Grissom remembers this and so, before he walks from Sara's room of broken pottery shards, before he does a single thing he turns to face her and calmly asks, "Sara? Where did you get this inscribed?"
At the time, her hands are covered in clay and it's as good an excuse as any he's likely to get.
He doesn't even touch her.
He has paperwork on his desk. He'll get to that before he gets to her.
Blood drops:
Catharine's hair in his mouth and he is pushing inside of her- forgetting, trying to remember, trying to forget all the words, words, words that mean sex, fuck, orgasm, cum, vagina, love.
He is gasping into her neck, her perfume like the smell of roses and when he goes to whisper he is counting on the jets to drown him out.
"I don't think-" he stutters and when they turn off he is still speaking- still stumbling forwards. "I don't think I can afford you."
Later, when they are both pale, gasping on the rough concrete of her bathroom floor with her hand gripping the cuff of his boxer's absentmindedly, she says, "you know the first blow is free."
This, he finds, is murder tactics and oh, he's good here.
"What happens if one blow is enough?" he wonders, not touching her. Letting her touch him. Carefully She pulls herself onto her knees and her hands go between his legs, exposing her intentions. Licking her lips slowly.
"One blow usually is." and lowers her head, her perfect mouth so close... At the last moment she pauses, looks into his face a moment, "but if the killer doesn't know what he wants…"
She is kneeling over him now, needing to do this, and he can't help but wonder if she has simply been trying to find her way to her knees all along. If maybe this is praying, the only way either of them knows how.
He will finish her sentences for her. Besides, her tongue is too good for any of the words he knows.
"If the perpetrator doesn't know what he wants… then he usually keeps swinging." And it would be funny. It really should be funny.
Re-opening the case:
He's going deaf and his Vic was going crazy. Then she killed herself. Because she was so beautiful, he reasons, Grissom watches Catharine closely about the lab for three days straight, wondering whether she identifies-
On the morning of the third day Sara comes into his office looking for a fight. Her eyes are wide and her clothes are rumpled. Too much coffee and he knows the feeling.
She says, "I didn't want to look at the clock." And then again, "I never want to look at the clock." She raises her nails to her mouth, chewing at stubs, and discovers herself suddenly fighting a yawn.
He finds it tragic.
They are both white knuckled and there is no grace here.
He wants to taste her breath. He wants to spell the way she moves- moves around him, careful and achingly intent. This can't ever be friendship but it's all he can understand when she's bracing herself, right there in front of him with her masochistic tendencies on display.
"I cant-" she tries and then, "I need-" and then just those lilting lips and disenchantment in the eyes.
Two years in Las Vegas and he cant tell if she's in her box or his- if he's in his box or hers- if there's even ownership at all.
He has already caught her eye, her tongue; he has wrapped himself around her synapses. His cruelty is delicious, self-serving, irrational. Eighteen years old and standing by the poolside with a college student. Gil Grissom, directing the conversation to his own ends.
His favorite part of Sara exists on the inside and is not for the human eye to see. He finds it tragic.
Relationships repeat themselves, he supposes. Masochists are rarely without their share of sadism, and they will certainly never become the perfect specimen of a human heart.
Inferiority,
Superiority,
Minority,
Majority,
Conformity,
Always. Off. Balance. And. He's. So. Sorry.
He thinks now he knows what Frost felt, standing in the midst of his lovely woods. Because of course the poem was never about the forest at all- was always about the miles ahead.
When suspects repeat themselves it often means there's something important in the subtext. "The lady doth persist too much me thinks." A variant on Shakespeare.
And now they have this moment between them. Scrapbook cast offs to cling to.
Grissom wants to devour her name but cant.
He will make the wrong decision because at least it is defined. He will do laundry in his spare time and sleep on clean sheets with the bird weight of her determination on his mind.
And miles to go
And miles to go
And one day, maybe-
There is no room for hysteria here.
But before:
A night spent with Catharine. The residue of pale emotions and oil on his skin as the light arrives. He showers in his own apartment in the morning with the inexpensive shampoo he buys from the dollar store three blocks down.
She almost cries that day when her fingernail breaks and falls into the lap of a wealthy lawyer. "You love it," she purrs, ablaze. "A pussy with a broken nail…" and hands here, hands there.
He tips her a little extra when it's over.
Grissom's house seems small for a few days. Her eyes, big, the next time he sees her. Too much coke and a guy named Ed is waiting, so she really has to go. But he speaks quietly, under the music and the falling glitter and she hears him.
"If you'd like a job, we've got a place for you at the lab. You'd just have to test… I know you'd do well."
So now she wraps her expensive coat around her arms and holds a hand up to Ed in a distant acknowledgement and she drops her head a moment- the only time he's ever seen her look away.
"I wouldn't have to- I wouldn't… be able to dance would I?"
"No… which is why I need to know: Catharine, can you do this?"
She begins fumbling for her cigarettes in her coat pocket, finds a condom (laughs because it's cherry), a film canister, a dollar. Gives up and looks at Grissom again. Only one clipped sigh and she's smiling now.
"Well… yeah. I'll just have to learn to live outside the box." She says, "I think I can manage… but… you might have to teach me."
And with a smirk she turns away, looking for Eddie to take her home- Eddie to take her in the bathtub with no important revelations, with no pain of his own and no need for hers. No calculations or blisters or hands that smell like latex gloves. She turns away.
And that's when Grissom knows that they have one more revelation to share. To prop like a support beam amidst the high places they have found- and they have made.
"I do have a box," he says and he can tell when she doesn't turn around, that she has known this all along.
She leaves him there to contemplate the ways she'll come apart if this goes wrong.
Leaves him alone, calculating the perimeter of a crash in the shape of a human body.