Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, locations, and events are property of Jerry Bruckheimer and CBS. No copyright infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only. Grace Sanders is property of La Guera (c) 2005.

A/N: Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to review, and Happy Halloween.

"Greg."

He had always liked the sound of his name-well, the shortened version by which he went in all matters save legality. In the eyes of the law and the state of Nevada, he was Gregory Christopher Sanders, but no one had ever called him that except teachers calling roll and the justice of the peace in California who had asked if he would and did take Grace to be his lawfully wedded wife. Even his parents had forsaken the name they'd given him in favor of that cheerful, clipped syllable, though his mother still brandished it when he had fallen out favor, an ominous whipcrack of maternal disapproval.

"Gregory" was ponderous and somnolent, fraught with gravitas and the promise of a life weighted with onerous responsibility. It was the name of doctors and lawyers and saints, and of monks with bad haircuts and throttled libidos who spent their lives with folded hands and bowed heads and the heavy tread of those who were forever treading the upward path and lugging their blue balls behind them.

Grace calls you that now and again.

But it was not so grave coming from her lips. It was often light and teasing and laced with a sultry burr that made his pulse quicken and his mouth go dry. It was poetry and invitation, an impossibly liquid sound for so harsh a word, all tongue and throat and erotic enticement. When he heard it, all other concerns evaporated in a surge of lust and a race to the bedroom.

An image arose in his mind of Grace tangled in the sheets and in his arms, face flushed and beads of perspiration in her hair. Fingernails down his back and sharp, white teeth nipping at his earlobe. Breath harsh and ragged amid the creak of bedsprings and the heated smack of conjoined flesh. Underwear dangling daintily from one small, flat-arched foot with toes that fanned and curled in time to his motion.

Ah, Gregory, whispered the Grace of couplings past, the words a moist tickle against the shell of his ear. It was amused and sly and beseeching, and heat rose in his neck and behind his ears.

But that magic, that right was hers alone. "Greg" was the name invoked by everyone else, a brisk, jovial name as buoyant and gregarious-pun worthy of Grissom damn well intended, please and thank you-as "Gregory" was dreary and stolid. It exuded ebullience and optimism. It was California sunshine and spiked hair and the mischievous, snaggle-toothed smile of a boy who had once spent his summers clambering over rocks and splashing in tide pools and reveling in the feeling of a boogie board beneath his tanned stomach.

And so, when it reached his ears from the doorway of the lab as he bent over a microscope he had long since ceased to see, he could not understand why it was so mournful, as though it were the name of someone dead, not alive and crackling with nervous energy. Bewildered, he straightened with a creak of popping vertebrae, rubbed his eyes, and turned to see Grissom in the doorway.

"Oh, hey, Grissom. What's up? I hope you don't mind, but I was helping Sara with that triple." He gestured unnecessarily to the microscope behind him with one latexed thumb.

Grissom made no reply. He simply stood in the doorway and stared at him, manila folder clutched in one hand. His face was pinched and wan, and the bruised pouches beneath his eyes were almost black. He opened his mouth to speak and closed it with a snap. Instead, he tucked the manila folder beneath his arm, removed his glasses, and began to polish them on his shirt.

Never seen him do that before, Greg thought uneasily. He's a Kleenex man. "You all right, Gris? You don't look so hot."

Grissom studied the languid circuit of his thumb as it guided his shirt hem around the perimeter of his lens. "Yes, she mentioned that," he said quietly. "She also mentioned that you seemed distracted."

Ah, so that was it. "Yeah. Sorry… It's just that I had an important phone call, but don't worry. I got Brass on an errand for me, and I'm sure it's all good." He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his lab coat and bounced jerkily on the balls of his feet.

Grissom grimaced at the mention of Brass' name, and the cold finger of unease just below Greg's navel sharpened. The garrulous captain was one of the few cops with whom Grissom got along.

Curioser and curioser, he thought. Was there another administrative dustup between the brains and the brawn?

What if it's over your little errand? prodded a malicious voice inside his head. Brass has hardly been a department favorite. In fact, he's been riding a desk since Holly Gribbs made her ignominious exit from the team in a body bag. Maybe his little jaunt on your behalf gave them more ammo.

"He's not in trouble, is he?" he asked anxiously. "I mean, I just figured-,"

"Sit down, Greg." It was soft and oddly tender, but it was also an undeniable command. Grissom was still cleaning his glasses with the fabric of his shirt, but his eyes were now on the clock mounted on the antiseptic, tile wall.

Whatever he's going to tell me, I don't want to hear it. He's going to tell me that the monsters have come out of the dark, and if I see them, I won't be able to unsee them. Not for love or money or all the booze in Vegas. It'll be like that burn victim we found at the bottom of the ravine, burned beyond all recognition, a grinning skull with wide, living eyes. Sophia told me I would forget in time, that a cold beer and a night on the town would expunge the mental record, but she was wrong. I still see those eyes peering at me from that blackened face now and then. When I'm under stress, I dream of them and wake up with my heart lodged in my throat and one hand groping for the reassuring solidity of Grace on her side of the bed. No, I don't want to hear this.

But Grissom had asked him to sit, and the need to please Grissom was as ingrained as the need to breathe, and his feet obligingly carried him to a nearby wheeled stool. He lowered himself onto it.

He shrugged and interlaced his fingers. "What's on your mind?" His feet began to tap a rapid tattoo against the linoleum, and he forced them to stop.

Grissom shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and the soles of his shoes gave a demure squeak. His eyes were still fixed on the clock. "I got a call from Brass a few minutes ago." Diffident and prised from between teeth unwilling to set the words loose.

I'm not going to ask, he told himself resolutely. I'm not going to set these grim wheels in motion, because if I do, there is no telling where they will lead me before they stop. If I don't start, there can never be a finish. I'm just going to sit here and wait until whatever monster he has found shambles into the shadows again. It can't hurt me if I don't believe. That's the way the magic works.

"And?" he heard himself say. It was faint and far away.

"Grace is not in the apartment, and the door was ajar."

"That's impossible," he answered conversationally. "Grace doesn't like to drive; she has a license to drive a modified car, but she's afraid she'll have an accident. If she goes out, I take her, or she calls a cab." He offered Grissom an earnest, so-you-see-she-can't-possibly-have-gone gaze.

This is not happening, declared a voice inside his head with the fragile composure of the condemned. It's not. She's just in the bedroom or in the bathroom. Maybe she lost a pen under the bed and crawled after it.

And stayed under it even after Brass came inside with gun drawn and loud proclamations of civil authority? Grace is a prankster and an occasional goof, not an idiot, countered the ruthless logic that had once made the cold absolutes and algorithms of science poetry to his ears.

Now Grissom did look at him, and what he saw in those normally inscrutable eyes made him recoil on the stool. They were bleak and clouded with a pitying anguish that he had never seen in them before. The crows' feet around them had deepened in the hours since he had wandered into the lab to preach the parable of Pursuing All Avenues and Keeping An Open Mind, and even as they stared at one another across a gulf of inches, he could see Grissom fighting the urge to look anywhere else.

Stop. Just stop, Greg thought desperately. Go away and take your bleak, unsettling eyes with you.

But Grissom did not go away. He said, "There were signs of a struggle. There was blood."

An involuntary moan escaped him. Blood he understood. Blood was life and death and his livelihood. Blood tinted the colors of his world-red and crimson and maroon. It was in the sunrise and the sunset and in the light behind his eyes as he slept, and before the Norplant device had nestled beneath the skin of Grace's left arm, it had appeared in the bathroom wastebasket and on panties hanging over the towel rack like a merry streamer six days out of every month. It announced both life and death in a gaudy smear, and beneath his microscope, it teemed with slow-killing toxins and diseases.

It was the alpha and the omega, the first and the last to God and science, but for all its variety and versatility, there was one inviolate law: to lose it was to lose life.

Grissom was watching him warily over the rims of his glasses. He clearly expected him to leap from the stool in a paroxysm of teeth-gnashing grief or fall upon him with bellows of outraged denial, and Greg didn't blame him.

But sitting beneath the bright lights of the lab and the cautious, miserable gaze of his supervisor with the reality of Grace's disappearance lodged in his gut like a broken blade, he was dismayed to discover that all the strength in his arms and legs had deserted him. They were boneless and impossibly heavy, as if blood had been replaced with mercury. He was sure that if he tried to leap from the stool, his legs would buckle and he would simply fold in on himself and puddle on the floor, a rag doll whose child-master had wearied of him in mid-play.

Not a doll. A sloughed skin. Yes, that's better. Grissom likes snakes, too, right? Not as much as bugs, no, or bodies, but well enough. I'm a sloughed skin, and in a minute, I'm going to slither from this stool and lie here until someone comes along to sweep me up. So long, Greggo. Out with the old, in with the new.

He closed his eyes against a sudden wave of vertigo and groped for the edge of the stool with trembling hands. "How much?" His tongue was a stunned vole on the floor of his mouth, and the words emerged in a drunken slur.

Grissom's breath in the excruciating silence that pressed his chest in a rancid poultice. Then, "We don't know. Brass doesn't think it's enough to be lethal."

Oh, there's a comfort, he thought hysterically, and he fought the compulsion to cram his knuckles into his mouth and scream.

"Can I get you anything?" Grissom took a tentative step closer.

A brittle titter escaped him. "My wife would be nice." He ran his hand through his hair and swallowed with an audible click. "Oh, God," he said thickly. His stomach was slaloming in its moorings. He wanted to be sick, but pride would not allow him to splatter Grissom's shoes with the BLT he'd eaten for breakfast.

Glad to see my priorities are in order, he thought morbidly, and took a deep, shuddering breath to quash the hot, greasy ball of nausea that threatened to overwhelm him.

"We'll get her back, Greg," Grissom assured him, and strode into the room. He snatched the wastebasket from the corner and carried to where Greg battled his gorge. "Here." He thrust it beneath his chin.

Greg accepted it in silence with logy, clumsy fingers. It was mercifully empty. If he'd looked down to find a bloody wad of cotton batting, he'd have heaved his lunch, pride or not. Even the doughy smell of fresh liner made him queasy.

He grunted in inarticulate acknowledgement, and when he was certain that the parting of his teeth would not unleash a deluge of bile and partially digested bacon and tomato, he asked, "You're taking the case?"

A single, brusque nod. "Yes. I've already cleared it with Ecklie."

"Bet that was fun," he muttered. "I'll get my kit."

He tried to rise, but Grissom placed a restraining hand on his shoulder. "No, Greg."

He sank onto the stool again and swayed dangerously for a moment, clutching the metal rim of the wastebasket in a convulsive grip. "Why not?" Mulish and dazed.

"You're in no condition to be out in the field," came the maddeningly reasonable response, and the gentle pressure on his shoulder tightened.

It was true. His breath was choking, rancid gristle in his too-small throat, and his eyes were raw and throbbing in sockets that had suddenly grown a size too small. He blinked to bring the world into focus, and his eyelids scoured his corneas like sandpaper. He had lost all sensation from the knees down. He gave an experimental kick and watched in glazed stupefaction as his foot shot out in a sluggish arc and narrowly missed barking Grissom's shin with the toe of his sneaker.

Yep, still mine, he mused stupidly. "I don't care," he heard himself say. "She's my wife." The blunt blade buried just below his navel and winnowing deeper with every breath twisted savagely at the word wife, and the wastebasket rattled in his fingers.

"I know, and that's why you can't be anywhere near this case. Any evidence you collected would be tainted. I'm sorry, but it's a conflict of interest."

The quiet pity in Grissom's voice scalded him like acid. "Hey, Grissom?"

"Yes, Greg?"

"Did you ever notice what a bloodless fucking phrase that is?"

The hand on his shoulder disappeared, and there was an interminable silence. "Get some rest. There isn't anything you can do here. Go ho-,"

The word died in mid-syllable, and Greg looked up to see Grissom staring at him in stricken mortification. He closed his mouth with a snap and inspected the floor beneath his feet as if he expected it to open up and swallow him whole. Indeed, Greg suspected he would have happily welcomed it. It would have been funny if the world hadn't gone so irrevocably mad.

Oh, but Grissom, I can't go home. Home is where my heart is, or was, before the darkness fell, and home is where I'd love to be, but it's your crime scene now, and I am forbidden to enter. Adam has been expelled from Eden, and Eve has fallen prey to the serpent. I can't work, either, because to work is to poison the fruits of your toil. I am nomad.

He offered Grissom a bleak, tight-lipped smile and slipped gingerly from the stool, lest his treasonous equilibrium fail him. The floor was oddly malleable beneath his feet, treacle and melting blacktop, but he maintained his balance and tottered forward.

"Here," he croaked, and thrust the wastebasket blindly at Grissom's chest.

He left him standing in the lab, holding the empty wastebasket in bewildered, fumbling hands, and shambled into the hallway on knees the consistency of warm tallow. His feet were wooden stumps on the ends of his stiff, scissoring legs, and his hip joints were loose ball bearings inside his pants. He felt ungainly and disarticulated, as though a curious but inept child had taken him apart and put him carelessly together again.

I'm just like Pinocchio, he thought with lunatic clarity. Only my Gipetto went on a Bacardi bender and played the quarter slots all night instead of boning up on the instruction manual. Hot damn.

The light in the hallway was too bright, God's flashlight in his naked face, and he squinted against it. The vitality had been leached from his bones, and each shuffling step was as the shifting of mountains. He felt impossibly old, and he was seized with the compulsion to sit where he stood and curl up like a lost and weary child.

The CSI labs had always been cozy to him despite the fluorescent lights and sterile walls, a comfortable warren that was as familiar to him as his own skin. On slow nights as a DNA tech, when the PCR machine had been whirring in its secret, arcane language and the room had been too warm for comfortable habitation, he had often roamed the halls with his eyes closed and let his feet take him where they would, drifting to the discordant strains of Sigur Os inside his head.

Now, as he plodded aimlessly down the corridor, legs numb as stilts, the welcoming labyrinth had become a nightmare landscape of hallways and doors he could not remember, though experience told him he should. His feet carried him down paths he had taken a thousand times before, and yet there was no familiar groove where his feet should have gone, no memory of footsteps taken. It was as alien as the surface of the moon, and as he passed the DNA lab, the cramped cubbyhole in which he had spent six years, he stared at it as though he had never seen it before. Inside, Mina stood with a pipette in one gloved hand, squirting DNA samples into the proper testing slots.

She spared him a cursory glance as he approached, and then returned her attention to her delicate task. "Hello, Greg," she murmured. She did a double-take and set the testing kit on the table with a graceless flop. "Are you all right? What happened?"

Nope, not all right, Mina. Not by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I think I left myself back in the evidence lab with Grissom. He's got the trashcan, too, but I don't think he knows what to do with it. You might want to give him a hand. As for me, I'm just Hansel with no breadcrumbs, wandering in a deep, dark wood and trying to find the way home.

He knew he should say something, but his tongue was still insensate and stupid in his mouth, and his mind had temporarily forgotten the rules of proper social discourse. Besides, he didn't want to talk, to give voice to the terrible tidings lodged in his chest and brain like the furtive, insidious nuclei of tumors. He wanted to find a place to hide and sort the muddle of his mind into a semblance of order.

"You're dripping," he mumbled, and pointed at the pipette she held. In her worry, she had forgotten it entirely, and it dribbled its contents onto the counter.

She started with an oath. "Dammit! Greg, hang on."

But he was already retreating, slipping down the hall and beyond her reach. He walked without a clear destination, moving only to outpace the slow, asphyxiating coil of confusion and frozen grief massed in his chest like a cramp. His eyes burned, and he was overcome with the need cough or retch and expel the bitter clot of emotion in his throat.

Eventually, he found himself in the break room, staring numbly at the gelatinous, oil-slick sludge in the coffeepot and the cheap table where, on better, saner days, he had flirted with Sara and cadged Warrick's potato chips when he wasn't looking. He thought that now would be a good time to howl, scream, stomp his feet, and rend his clothes in a convulsion of grief like they did on those overwrought TV shows on Lifetime. Lord knew the grief was there, avid and ravenous and burrowing into his soft places with jagged, gleeful claws, but he could not, would not give it voice. He was drained and hollow, and even shuffling to a chair and plopping into it required more energy than he possessed. He swayed on his feet and stared bleakly at a chair that was three feet and ten thousand miles away.

"Get a hold of yourself," he rasped and scrubbed his face with his hands. "Everything is fine. It's-she just hurt herself and crawled outside to get help. Maybe Rufus found her when he showed up and took her to the hospital."

Why hasn't he called to tell you, then?

Yes, Greg, you do need to get a hold of yourself, agreed the voice of Papa Olaf. You need to accept the fact that something bad happened in what should have been the safest place in the world. You're too smart to play dumb, my boy, and you've been at this job too long to pretend you don't know the evils that men do. You do know, and it plagues your dreams more than you care to admit. If your girl isn't in that apartment, it's because somebody took her from it, somebody who didn't care whether or not they hurt her. In fact, hurting her was probably exactly what they wanted.

Greg shook his head in time to his pounding heart. "No. Uh-uh. No way." He licked lips dry as parchment. "This is ridiculous. I'm not listening."

He stalked to the cupboards over the counter, jerked open a door, and groped among the shelves and assorted boxes of cereal and bags of chips until his gloved hand fell upon the coffee canister. Blue Hawaiian it wasn't, but anything to distract him from the dreadful, pragmatic voices in his head.

You have to listen, insisted Papa Olaf, hard as bedrock beneath the compassion. Denying the truth won't make it any less so. Brass and the others are going to come back, and they're going to ask questions and tell truths that will rub rock salt into wounds that have no bottom. You have to be ready, Greg, or it will tear you apart. A man can lose his mind living in denial.

He shook his head more violently still, an animal whine of fear and furious intractability in his throat. His hands trembled as they fumbled with the plastic lid on the canister.

You knew this would happen, didn't you? whispered a scabrous, accusatory voice, hard and grating as the rolling of bones. That's why you kept her so private, secreted away in your cramped apartment like priceless treasure. You were afraid that the shadow that fell over the diseased minds of the criminals you brought to justice would stretch forth its weightless, tireless fingers and seek her out. Sometimes when you sat on the witness stand in a wool suit that chafed your skin and clogged your nostrils with the smell of respectability and mothballs, you looked into the eyes of a man who had butchered his wife and three children with a hacksaw and saw the malignancy there, a sly, cunning darkness that made your flesh crawl. You saw it and thought of Grace, defenseless in spite of all her bravado and independence. You swore that evil like that would never find her.

And so, you made sure she never came within a thousand miles of what you did. She never waited for you outside the courtroom when you testified, never dropped by the lab to chat or bring the dress socks you left on the dresser. You took great pains to ensure that no predator confined within your plexiglass cages ever had the chance to mark her as prey because you knew that there were worse fates than fracturing your skull and breaking your leg in the shower.

But someone slipped through your defenses.

"N-n-," he began, but just then, the plastic lid slipped off the coffee canister, and the smell of coffee struck his nose.

It was coffee and nothing more-earthy and rich, turned earth and spring rain-but he recoiled, stumbling away from the counter on unsteady legs.

Not coffee, gibbered his shocked mind. Graveyard dirt. Won't it feel nice sifting through your fingers as it patters over Grace's coffin?

His knees unhinged abruptly, and he sat down on the floor with a teeth-rattling thump.

"Oh, Gracie," he moaned, and buried his face in his hands.