Intervals in Broken Time
Chapter 6: Ignorance is kind, there's no comfort in truth, pain is all you'll find…
Spoilers, season 5: Snakes and others
In his mother's house he could hear seagulls. Somewhere in a foggy mid-world between sleep and wakefulness Gil Grissom listened to the birds and relished in the memory of salt-air against his skin. In a time before sadness and uncertainty had permeated his existence, when he had been much, much more open and trusting, and smaller, he had been entranced by the ocean. As small as he was he loved its smell, its color, its feel.
Things change. Stability crumbles to ambiguity; simple pleasures fade into lost memories. As the sand erodes the hardest stones over time, so too does pain and regret erode the spirit.
A wave of nostalgia washed over Gil, which was quickly overcome by guilt. The trouble he had caused…that he was causing…he lay in bed contemplating his current predicament. As a younger man he could have gotten a job locally, at a community college, or even at a local funeral home, but ambition had turned him away from his mother's house to Los Angeles, to big, glistening coroner's offices and crime labs. Now here he was hiding from everything he'd ever worked for.
He looked up at the ceiling in the room. It had water damage. His mother needed a new roof. As the seagulls screeched he thought about Las Vegas.
Gil would've been perfectly happy to live a life of annominity. A CSI in the Vegas crime lab, employee number 904601, he'd work as long as he could have before retiring, maybe then going to a university and spending the rest of his professional life as a professor, largely unremembered and unremarkable. That would be fine with him. Some men were born to lead, others preferred to follow. Gil just wanted to be. He wanted to work and to be, and not much more.
Jim Brass was a leader. Not in a heroic, grandiose way, but in a practical easy to trust way. He had deserved his position as supervisor, no matter what the conditions of his getting the job were, and he fit into the role well. Jim handed out assignments and made the tough calls, and that suited Gil just fine.
Then Holly Gribbs died.
Jim was demoted. Warrick was under investigation. Gil, as the senior-most CSI was promoted to supervisor. "I need you to decide on an outside investigator to go over Warrick Brown's involvement…pick someone and make your recommendation by tomorrow morning." The sheriff's voice had been staccato and efficient. Gil had stood, gaping, uncertain.
Under the circumstances, he should not have, but he did, he called Jim and asked him what to do. "You'll make the right call," Jim had sounded haunted, tired, "just follow your instincts." Instincts. Right. Those things Gil had spent most of his adult life suppressing in favor of logic and reason.
Sara Sidle. San Francisco Crime Lab. She was young, but had a remarkable record. She was consistently in the top five ranked CSIs in the country. She was a logical choice. She was also safe, familiar.
Five years later and Gil was really no happier with his position of power. Sara sat across from him; he was apologizing for making her cover for him, her boss, that word still seeming so wrong to him. And then she said it…
"You've always been more than just a boss to me. Why do you think I moved to Vegas?"
There it was. That "thing" they had. That thing that made her so safe and so very dangerous. He'd almost said it, right there in his office, with all his bugs as witnesses…
"Let's...let's…" have dinner…talk…spend the night…oh God Sara I'm sorry…
But she knew his silence too well and cut it off.
"You know what…it's okay…" It's too late. She's moved on.
There it was. She left. Gil went back to his paperwork. He had to document the conversation about her counseling for Ecklie. Just part of the burdens of command.
In Marina Del Ray Grissom closed his eyes and tried desperately to remember what salt-air felt like.
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Las Vegas Crime Lab.
Catherine's cell phone vibrated at her hip. Feeling a strange sense of de-ja-vous she answered while pouring coffee in the break-room.
"Willows."
"Hey, it's me."
The coffee mug shattered against the dirty linoleum floor.
"Gil! Jesus, where the hell have you been!"
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10 minutes later:
"California! What the hell is he doing in California!" Ecklie's voice echoed like breaking glass through the crime lab. Heads snapped around to see the lab supervisor waving his arms angrily in front of Catherine.
"He didn't explain. He just said that he was alright, he is in California, and he doesn't know when he'll be back. He didn't say, but I would guess it has something to do with his mother, maybe she's having health problems…" Catherine was gasping at straws to help Grissom out, and it was obvious. Ecklie interrupted.
"If he had a family emergency he still should have called." His face was flushed red with a blush of anger that started to creep up his bald head. "Did he call you from his cell phone?"
"Yes." Her phone had caller ID on it.
"I'm going to call him myself, and he had better give me one damn good reason not to fire his ass."
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Days Earlier, at the Hovenec house:
Gerald Mongiardi smiled at his son, his beautiful boy. He had been named well, he was an angel. The boy was still wiping tears away from his face as he sat on the edge of his bed, the bed where Gerald had just been, where he had expressed his love for that dear, darling boy.
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11 years ago, at Harvard University:
His thoughts floated through his mind, soggy as it was with multiple glasses of scotch. Sara. His Sara. She was beautiful in a cream-colored dress that was form fitting and flowing in the cool evening air. It was dangerous for them to be there, together. Even if he was only a guest lecturer, not a regular faculty member, even if this was an informal mixer off campus. She was still a student, and he was technically her professor, and both of their reputations would be shot to hell if people knew they were there together.
Well, together was relative, it wasn't like he was sleeping with her or anything. She wanted that, he knew, and God knew he wanted that, but it wasn't right, not like this, not under these circumstances.
The attraction had been almost instantaneous when he first heard her voice, of course she looked damn good too. Now, after a couple of days of flirting over coffee and making innuendoes over forensics discussions and his stay at Harvard was going to end tomorrow.
Sara smiled ruefully as their fingers brushed when he took his drink. He was drunk, she could tell. She really didn't mind, drunk she could handle, and he hid it well. He took his drink and sipped it slowly, running his eyes across the scattered crowd of students and professors. He was leaving tomorrow. Surely he would want her to stay with him tonight, she thought.
He drank more deeply from his glass the ice cubes clinking softly. His eyes glided down her curves, in his mind's eye he was seeing his own hands following those curves up her sides to the straps of her dress, pushing them lightly off her delicate shoulders… She was a vision. She was intelligent. He blinked. She was way damn too young. How old was she? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? He sighed as he realized his glass was empty. Sara saw it too.
"Boy that was fast. Do you want another?"
"N-no, I think I've had more than my limit."
"Yeah, I do too. You want to leave this bore-fest?"
Yes, he did, but not with her. If he left with her he would be tempted to touch her, to kiss her, to make her his…my girl….Christ Grissom why did you call her that, now she'll expect you to be there…
Sara mistook his silence as being a symptom of his inebriation and took him by the arm.
"Come on, I'll take you home."
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It was four and a half hour drive to Marina Del Ray from Las Vegas. She knew because she was on one of the lab computers looking it up on MapQuest. It was on the other side of Los Angeles, just south of Venice Beach, she could drive straight there, gas up the car on the way out of town and drive straight through.
And then what?
Sara looked at the driving directions on the computer screen. She'd looked up the name Grissom on the online yellow pages and found what she assumed was his mother's address. Now she had directions. She could go to him.
And then what?
I thought I was your girl?
She was at Harvard the first time she had heard Gil Grissom call her his girl. She liked it. She never liked possessive men before, but there was something chivalrous about Grissom, his use of possessive grammar marking an old-fashioned sensibility, not a need to control.
Her eyes focused beyond the top of the screen to the glass partition at the end of the room. Her own eyes reflected back to her. She was reminded of the mirror in her locker. The one she spoke to when no one else was around. The one she pretended had an open link to Grissom's brain when he seemed most distant.
"I don't have a drinking problem, I have me problem." Yeah. That sounds great. So neat, so rehearsed. He'll buy it, no doubt. But she never said it to him, only to a cold mirror.
Ecklie was yelling in the background. Grissom was likely going to be fired. She looked back down at the screen, the numbers floating like a mirage, tempting her closer. If she abandoned her job now, she'd likely be fired too.
And then what?
Grissom's cell phone was ringing. He'd looked at the caller ID. It was the crime lab. Which meant it was Conrad Ecklie. If it was Catherine she would have called from her cell phone, but Ecklie used the lab phones instead of eating up his cell minutes whenever he could.
Grissom didn't answer.
He sat on an empty dock on the marina hanging his feet over the cool water like he used to as a boy. There were too many boats in and out all day to fish here, but even as a child he liked to people-watch. He used to tell stories to himself making up names for the people he saw, making up adventures that they were going on, other people they were going to see.
Now he just sat, looking but not seeing as the sun set over the water.
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Last year:
It was way past the end of her shift and well into the dayshift now. She really had no reason to be at work, but she was, as usual, and now she sat in the empty locker room Even Grissom had gone home. She looked up at her mirror and saw herself looking back, expectantly, patiently, with an expression of understanding that she often longed to see on his face. She could say it, she was capable of saying it…to him. She knew she was. Her councilor had told her she was. Speaking quietly to the small room she recited the soliloquy she had played and replayed in her mind since coming back from her suspension…
Drunk and angry is no way to go through life, trust me, I know. And it's not that I don't still have issues, Jesus Christ, it's not that. It's just…well, shit…I don't know what it is. I feel like I'm talking in circles, like I make no sense when I'm around you. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that I sound that way, since I don't really understand myself when I'm around you. You have this way of turning me around, inside-out. I hate it, and sometimes I hate you for doing it. But only sometimes. This smacks of Hallmark kitsch, but the truth is, you've made me better. Perhaps not specifically what you've done or said, but your faith in me has made me better. Any other boss would have fired my ass a long time ago. All the complaints, and the insubordination…I know people in the lab thought I was some sort of psycho-bitch, and really they weren't completely wrong. Perhaps not firing me was to you no great sacrifice or gesture, but to me it was everything. Not just because I'm a workaholic who defines my personal self-worth via my professional accomplishments…issues, remember?...but because it meant that there was one person, who no matter how hard I pushed, no matter how savagely I turned against him, would be there, would not give up on me. You've been my rock…even more kitsch…even though you probably didn't even know you were.
The mirror was smudged and her whispered voice sounded flat in the cold room.
11 years ago, Harvard University.
Sara desperately tried to ignore the throbbing in her head. She was hung-over. This was not an uncommon condition for her, but she was internally berating herself for coming to class this way. She wouldn't be effective like this. Hangovers were distractions. This was only a lecture seminar, a four-hour presentation. Really all she had to do was show up, pretend to take notes, but she knew from experience that she was bad at faking it when she felt this wretched. So, there was really only one solution.
A strong dose of vodka in her bottle of Minute Made Orange Juice, she sipped conscious not to gulp, as she sat in the second row of the classroom.
The best cover for a hangover was not to get hung over, i.e., stay drunk. She could fake sober a lot better than she could fake not having a headache. This was something else she knew from experience.
This seminar was about criminalistics. It was elective for her, a physics major transfer from Berkeley. All she had to do was be there, pretend to care, and sip her drink.
Dr. Tallishey was at the podium giving an introduction.
"I am very happy to introduce our guest-lecturer for today. He is currently at the Las Vegas Crime Lab and previously served as the youngest coroner in L.A. county history…"
Great, Sara thought, a coroner, he sounds like a barrel of laughs.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, Dr. Gil Grissom."
The applause from the students was the definition of a smattering.
The eminent Dr. Grissom made an undramatic entrance from the back of the classroom where he'd been standing, largely unnoticed by the students. Sara watched the Doctor approach the podium.
At least he's cute, she thought sipping her drink, her headache dissipating and a slow warmth moved into her chest. He was dressed in black slacks with matching jacket over a deep blue shirt with no tie. Sara was just close enough to notice his eyes were the same color as his shirt. Yeah…coroner or not, he was definitely hot.
His lecture was about bugs and decomposition, he was actually a very good lecturer. He infused his factual presentation with a steady current of dry humor and tasteful sarcasm, a far cry from the monotonous recitations of Dr. Tallishey. Under it all was the clear communication of this man's intense passion. This wasn't just a job for this Dr. Grissom, this was his life. This was what he lived to do.
During the course of the discussion Sara noticed he wasn't wearing a wedding ring. That didn't mean he wasn't married, people in this field, she knew, often didn't wear jewelery for practical reasons.
A guy with this much passion, and that good looking, Sara thought as she finished her orange juice, he's gotta have someone. She found herself smiling at him furtively anyway as he gestured, describing the gestation of maggots. His eyes met hers for a fraction of a second. Sara, her headache now forgotten, decided right then she would find out where the eminent Doctor was staying.
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The gulls still screamed as the sun set over the marina, Gil's skin felt dry and he guessed that sitting in the sun for so many hours had probably left him sunburned. Out on the water an empty soda bottle bobbed in ripples that crashed against the pier. The bottle seemed to thrash, like a drowning man, fighting the sea.
There was a red butterfly in his mother's guestroom, a tiny, delicate creature he had caught when he was five years old. He learned how to preserve it and kept in his room, when he left his mother's house, he left it there, seeming to him like that was its home, where it belonged, and no matter where he went at least there would be a piece of him in that room.
As a child he talked to that butterfly, told it stories, and secrets. It was a small thing, a thing that a child could hold in his hands, a thing that could be cherished, a thing that could be crushed effortlessly. Sitting on the pier he took the butterfly out of his pocket and looked at it now.
Silently he traced the fragile wing with his finger. Seeing someone else in his mind's eye his thoughts led him into a mental conversation with the tiny, dead creature.
Do you ever feel like you're drowning? Do you ever feel like everyday is a constant struggle just to tread water, to keep your head above the waves? You're an ocean to me. You toss and shake and overwhelm me. I try to swim but I can't. I try to shout, but I'm too exhausted. I try to do anything to get away from you, to deny your ever-present power to envelop me. But it's like denying the sea, rail all you wish, it will never recede.
He heard the soft noise the butterfly made as it hit the water and slowly drifted before sinking below the surface.
It's like denying the sea.
The cell phone followed with a pronounced "ker-plop" sinking instantly.
It's like denying the sea.
I'm tired of swimming. I think I've come to hate the ocean.
TBC…..
Feedback please!
A/N: Chapter title from the Wham song: Careless Whispers.
