Chapter 5

"I, I don't know what to say Gil", Sara stuttered.

"You don't have to say anything Sara", Gil said, and with that he got up and left the house.

"Where are you going?" Sara said chasing after him. "You are going to drop that bombshell then leave? Really?"

"This isn't how it was supposed to be", Gil explained, "I wasn't supposed to tell you, you were never supposed to know, this isn't how…. I can't do this Sara", he finished and got into his car.

Sara stood and watched him backing out of her driveway, her head felt light from the impact of Gil's news, and her heart felt heavy that they hadn't been given the opportunity to talk about it properly. "But what would I have said anyway?" she thought to herself as she went back into her house.

In all the year's she had known Gil, she had never heard him express feelings of love for anything, not even the insects that fascinate him so much. In fact on more than one occasion Sara had thought that Gil was so devoid of feelings that perhaps he was incapable of loving.

She was ashamed at herself for having thought that way about him.

"How could I be so wrong? How could I be so stupid and blind?" she pondered. "And now I have totally blown it, my one chance to be with him and I acted in my usual cold, hard ass way, no wonder he left, good going Sara," she said aloud. "I'm talking to myself now as well, great!" she continued huffily.

She knew who would be able to make sense of this situation; she picked up her cell and dialed the number.

Nick Stokes was watching a basketball game which he had recorded earlier that day; it was his favourite team the Chicago Bulls v the Milwaukee Bucks. He had been eagerly awaiting the game all day, but when he actually sat down to watch it, he had gone off the idea completely. The problem was that he couldn't seem to get the image of little Megan's bruised and beaten body out of his mind.

Recently he was finding it increasingly difficult to switch off after work. More and more of his personal experiences were affecting his professionalism. He was continuously losing his objectivity, the one thing that a CSI needs to get through the harrowing images that they are faced with on a daily basis.

Nick was no longer basing his reports on cold facts and hard evidence; he was making assumptions about the suspects based on his own suspicions. Gil had pulled him up on it telling him to "stick to the facts presented to us and the actual evidence, don't fill in between the lines. It is through that level of bad judgement and sloppiness that innocent people are convicted of crimes they haven't committed." Gil had even gone as far to say that Nick's "reports of late had read like an editorial in a school paper and if Nick wanted to write fabricated propaganda that he should have been a journalist not a level III Crime Scene Investigator.

Nick had thought that Gil has been unusually harsh with him, but lately Gil had been irascible with all the team. He obviously had other things on his mind and didn't need the added stress of a CSI not doing his job properly.

He made a decision then and there to focus on the job in hand and to stop letting his personal life cloud his judgement. As with all things it had been easier said than done. Yes he had definitely brought his work back up to scratch and he had once again presented reports based solely on the facts, but work wasn't when the problem arose.

It was easy to work, to bury his head in the sand and to ignore the niggling thoughts and images at the back of his mind. The problem arose when the shift was over, when he had clocked out for the day and he was sitting alone in his apartment, desperately trying to unwind and find sleep so that he could start the process over the following day.

For he was never truly alone, when he had his demons to keep him company, and nothing else except the background noise of the television to block out their persistent whispering and jeering.

He switched off the game, "maybe a beer will do the trick", he thought crossing the room to the fridge. "No point going over the same shit again Nicky, you'll drive yourself mad", he said to himself.

Although he felt on some level he was already mad. "You have to be a little crazy to get a kick out of the work we do", Warrick had once said. Nick remembered thinking there was a lot of logic to that sentence.

He sipped absently at his beer and was just about to turn some music on when his phone rang.

"Come on Gil, even we deserve a little R&R time", he said in his Southern drawl.

"Stokes"