Sorry once again for making you wait between chapters, I'm afraid I can't promise it won't happen again… anyway this one's twice the length of the last two, so that's good right?
Thanks to everyone who's reviewed, and please do so again after you read this chapter :-) Constructive criticism is welcome as always.
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"Sidle?"
Sara looked up from the microscope she was peering through, to see Ecklie standing in the doorway. He was dressed smartly in a black suit, white shirt and dark green tie; most likely he had been in court that afternoon and hadn't bothered to change. Or perhaps he'd been to a formal dinner with the Mayor or some other such person.
"Ecklie," she responded, not overly keen to talk to him. What does he want now? I'd wonder if he was coming to tell me another of my superiors had been demoted and I was taking his place… except that at the moment, Ecklie's the one above me. Shame he won't demote himself, that would be nice.
"Sara…" Ecklie swallowed, nervously. He was well aware that Sara was not happy with her temporary promotion, and that her view was shared by the majority of the lab. He firmly believed he had done the right thing – if Grissom had been allowed to continue with his little 'experiments', eventually he - and the lab as a whole - could have been in serious trouble. Still, having everybody hate him – well, at least violently dislike him – was not something Ecklie enjoyed.
After a second he continued. "Sara, I'm… sorry to burden you with this, I know you're in the middle of a case, but there're some reports that are due in tomorrow morning, and well, Grissom… Anyway, could you check his office to see if he's done them… and if not..."
Sara sighed, knowing all too well what her supervisor's – well, usual supervisor's – attitude was to paperwork. In all likelihood he'd left it to the last minute, perhaps hoping that a last-minute case would be reasonable justification to delay still further; although he was too responsible to actually not do the reports, the chances of them having been completed before his meeting with Ecklie nearly twenty-eight hours previously was remote at best.
"Okay." She sighed, glancing at the evidence laid out on the table in front of her, then looking back at Ecklie. "Sofia can handle this for a while, anyway. I guess I can go write reports."
Ecklie studied her. "You've never written these before, and Catherine's just gone home. Need a hand?"
Sara blinked at him, unable to work out his motives. He had a point though. "Um, yeah. Please."
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Grissom's mind was on anything but the road as he drove toward the interstate that would take him to his crime scene. His hands seemed work by themselves as they turned the wheel to get into the correct lane; his foot automatically responded to the glowing red of a traffic light.
He was glad, really, that Sara had reassigned him. The double homicide meant working with Sofia, with Brass, with Sara herself. Right now it was easier to be alone, or with people he didn't really know. He was tired of the looks that seemed to come his way whenever he walked through the lab; tired of the people that wanted to talk to him about it, and of the people that didn't.
His thoughts turned, not unusually, to the brunette criminalist that had given him this chance to be alone. Forced it on him, actually, for which he was both grateful and annoyed. Then again, he'd often forced her to do things she disliked - for the sake of the case, or the lab, or herself. He couldn't really complain when she did the same to him.
He'd met her when he did a series of seminars, and she had been his star pupil. Afterwards they had kept in touch. He'd brought her here to Vegas, first to run an internal investigation for him, and then to join the team as a CSI. It was only recently that he'd learned why she'd made the move from San Francisco; previously, he had assumed that it was because the Las Vegas Crime Lab was the second best in the country, or perhaps because her salary was better here. Learning that she'd come here for him should have been a surprise to him… strangely, the surprise came more from realising that he wasn't surprised at all.
Shaking his head at such a confused sentence, he thought back over the past few years. At first he had been oblivious to her feelings for him; when they became too obvious to ignore, he had assumed that she simply had a crush on him. But he had gradually become conscious that her infatuation with him had not gone away, and seemed to be showing no signs of doing so. The real shock had come when he realised that he was beginning to return her feelings.
Did he love her? He didn't know, couldn't answer that question. Maybe love, romantic love at any rate, was something you had to work on; that came as a consequence of having a relationship, not the other way around. He knew he had feelings for her, strong ones, and maybe that meant that he had the potential for loving her, if only he could give into those feelings.
But giving into those feelings was something Gil Grissom had worked very hard to avoid.
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6.00am
Ecklie had been surprisingly helpful; not only in regard to the reports, but also in generally giving her advise in dealing with her new job. He'd stayed with her throughout most of the shift, despite it not being his usual working hours. He seemed to understand what she was going through, and despite herself she gave him a tiny smile when he left the room.
She left it herself just a few minutes later, intent on grabbing herself a cup of coffee. She had seen a jar of Greg's personal stash sitting in the break room, and took this to mean that the young CSI had shown his support for the team in his own personal way, namely sharing his treasure. Thanks Greg.
She slowed, frowning, as she realised that loud voices were coming from down the hall. After pausing for a second to listen to the words, she quickly sped up again, heading towards the sounds.
"You will not speak to me like that!"
Ecklie's face was red from anger as he glared at the group in front of him. Sara, arriving at his side, was unable to pinpoint exactly which person he was speaking to. Nick, Greg, Hodges, two other lab techs and someone she thought was probably the janitor were all possibilities as they were standing immediately before him; beyond them were a small group of people that had most likely just come to see what the commotion was about.
"What's going on?" Sara was not happy to have her day once again ruined, and she allowed this fact to be conveyed loudly through her tone, her stance, and her glare.
Ecklie turned to her. "Your team here seems to think insulting their superior is allowed in this lab."
Sara took this in, and then turned to Nick for an explanation. He was reluctant to comply, especially with the steadily increasing crowd gathering in the corridor.
Noticing this, Sara turned her head to these on-lookers, saying icily, "Don't you people have anywhere else to be?"
Most of the crowd seemed to instantly realise that they did, and moved away quickly. One or two tried to remain, but the look she sent their way speedily removed them from her sight.
"Okay," she said, turning her head back to the smaller group in front of her. "Now somebody better start talking."
Taking a deep breath, Nick began, keeping his eyes on anything but hers. "Um.. we were just talking and… Grissom came up. One of us" - he was not going to say who - "said something… uncomplimentary about Ecklie, and he was passing at the time, and then…"
Sara had pretty much got the jist. Great. That's just great. She remembered her fervent thanks to Greg just a minute or so before, and was glad that she had not said them aloud. You'd better not have been at fault here mister.
"I'll deal with it," she told Ecklie quietly. He opened his mouth to object, but she continued, "They're my people, right?"
He looked at her uncertainly, torn between the fact that she was in fact their supervisor – after all, hadn't he told her off for disrespecting Catherine's authority just a few months before? – and the knowledge that she was their friend, and probably agreed with their viewpoint. After a second he nodded and left.
Ecklie's departure complete, Sara turned her attention back to the six culprits. "In my office. Now." She turned and walked in its direction, without looking back to check that they were following.
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"What is wrong with you people!"
Sara's question was delivered with enough anger to make most of the men in front of her wince. "Grissom's demoted, I'm up to my eyeballs in his paperwork, we have more cases than we can handle, and you go and make things even worse?"
"Sara…"
"Shut up, Nick. Look, I don't care which of you started this, or who said what. Maybe some of you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time." She saw the possible-janitor start to fidget, and frowned at him. "Don't even try it. You should be thankful that I'm not actually your supervisor. I am however theirs for the moment – for the night in Nick's case – and I'm entirely tempted to suspend you all… or at least take out my temper on you for a bit. However, you have work to do and so do I so I'll limit it to just one thing which you will probably all hate: apologise to Ecklie."
The looks on their faces almost made her want to laugh, despite her anger. She looked at Greg, whose head was slightly bowed, and noticed the hangdog expression on his face.
Her voice now softer, she said quietly, "Look, Ecklie hasn't said yet when Grissom's going to get his job back. The better the mood he's in, the sooner it is likely to be. "
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"Hey, Sofia?"
She looked up to find Warrick standing in the doorway. "Yeah?"
"Have you seen Greg? He was meant to be processing evidence, but I can't find him."
Sofia lifted her eyebrows. "You mean you haven't heard?"
A frown crossed his dark, handsome face, and he came forward to stand beside her at the table. "Heard what?"
She shook her head. "You must be the only person in the lab who hasn't. He and Nick and a few others had a… confrontation with Ecklie. I don't know the specifics, but I know Sara was pretty mad. She's forcing them to apologise to him."
"She's…?" Warrick was stunned. Surely Nick and Greg would know better than to cross Ecklie at the moment. And Sara...
"They're probably lucky she was there. I'm pretty sure Ecklie would've suspended them, however short-staffed we are. I know he suspended Sara when she criticised Catherine in front of a few people, and that doesn't even compare to the today's scene. Apparently there was a pretty big crowd, 'till Sara got rid of them all."
Without knowing more, Warrick didn't really feel qualified to carry on the conversation, choosing instead to switch to a safer topic. "How's the double going?"
"Well it looks like the boys had a male visitor that night. A college freshman from two rooms down says he saw a guy around his own age enter the room together with the brothers, and there's a set of fingerprints at the scene that don't belong to anyone from that floor. So far no luck on identifying him though. How's your floater?"
Warrick shrugged. "Dead, unsurprisingly. Woman in her late thirties, no ID, multiple stab wounds. Thought at first it was a dump, until we got a phone call saying someone had spotted blood spatter in a boat not far from where the body washed up. Judging by the blood trail, she fell overboard." He was about to say more, when he happened to glance towards the open door, and saw Nick and Greg walking down the corridor.
Sofia followed the direction of his eyes, and studied the two men. "They look happy."
"Yeah, very," Warrick responded. "They look like their favourite pets just died." He suddenly remembered that he had in fact come into the room looking for one of them, and quickly said goodbye to Sofia and went to intercept Greg.
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By the time Grissom got back to the lab, dayshift was in, and nightshift had already disappeared. He had spent a long time at the desert crime scene, and then got caught up in the early morning traffic on his way back.
He logged in the bags of evidence he had collected, then went to the break room for a quick cup of coffee before heading home. His head hurt from a throbbing migraine, and he wanted to sleep, but first he was absolutely starving, having gone the entire shift without anything to eat.
Pouring the black liquid into his cup, he suddenly realised that there was a small box on the side of the table, his name in large letters on the top. Curious, he lifted the lid to find it contained a large piece of fruitcake. Obviously someone had anticipated his lack of eating. Catherine? But she'd have gone home a long time ago.
Seeing a small slip of paper stuck part way underneath the cake, he lifted it out, his eyes fixed on the two words contained there.
From Sara.
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A/NI couldn't bear to keep Ecklie as just 'the bad guy' so I made him a little bit more sympathetic in this chapter! Hope you enjoyed it.
