Ugh. There are times when the chapters practically write themselves, and then there are the times when you really have to coax the words out of the back of your brain, hoping the sentences you force out won't make the pathetically small amount of readers you already have think you are some amateur wannabe writer, without any talent to speak of.

Sorry if this chapter is the latter, because I sure know it wasn't the former.

But, I'm also sorry if I'm griping for nothing, for all I know this chapter was actually all right. All you writers out there know that the author is always the worst at critiquing their own work.

And I just want to say, it's probably stupid how happy reviews make me, but they do make me (insanely) happy, thank you so much for the kind feedback. So as always, R&R please!

So read, review and (hopefully) enjoy!

Note: I am also sorry for the exquisitely short chappy. This is party due to my old friend writer's block, partly due to the fact that I loved the way I ended the scene and I couldn't work out a way to use it anywhere else.

(Again, thanks to LoAnne for Beta-ing, critiquing and threatening to call me and yell obscene things at me if I didn't get this posted. ;)

Disclaimer: If someone could please tell me the purpose of having these things every chapter, I would SO appreciate it. I don't own anything to do with CSI, kay???

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David Hodges had left Grissom's office at a fairly controlled pace, but by the time he had made his way down to the basement and into the morgue (not really caring who he knocked down or what he knocked out of their hands; he wasn't too terribly concerned what anyone decided to think about him at the moment), he was running too fast to avoid barreling into Super-Dave as he made his way out of the autopsy chamber.

"Whoa man, slow! I know the dead don't care much if they get knocked off their gurneys onto the floor, but me n' the Doc don't especially feel like hauling dead bodies up off their asses and back onto the tables!"

Hodges had managed to run into somewhere around 3 bodies (he wasn't keeping an exact tally) as he sprinted down the narrow hallway in addition to a very irritable Super-Dave.

Hodges shook his head with a breathless "sorry" and thought about how much effort that single headshake would have taken 10 minutes ago. After he got his wits back, he intended to write an article about how migraines were just a state of mind instead of a real illness, capable of being pushed to the back of your mind totally if the right circumstances arose.

"So, you going to just stand there with that deer-caught-in-the-headlights look on your face, or you going to tell me what that was all about?" Dave's eyes widened a little at the harsh tone of his own voice, but still didn't apologize. It had been a long day, and the Doc seemed to have adopted the petulant attitude that everyone had been sporting after that carry-on shift. Dave was usually a calm guy, fun to be around, but today was not the day to be screwing with him. Especially right in the middle of the autopsy of a young woman who had been dead so short a time that her liver temp had barely dropped.

Hodges opened his mouth to answer the question, and closed it again when he realized he had no idea what he was going to say. Why had he come racing down here so fast, almost out of his mind with worry? Based on very circumstantial evidence, that was why. He wasn't even sure if the woman in the picture was his…

He forced that train of thought out of his mind. It would only have made him start panicking again. His mind then tried to mull over what the fact that he refused to even think her name meant, what his sub conscious possibly already knew for fact… and squashed that thought faster even than the other.

He shook his head to clear it best as he could, and took a deep breath. Once he thought he could open his mouth without his voice cracking, he looked at Dave, who had been looking at him with a mixture of concern and detached annoyance, and began.

"I …uhh… I need to see the body of the vic from the Tropicana stabbing. Grissom wanted me to…collect some trace from her lips." He closed his eyes. It had sounded pathetic, even to him.

Dave evidently thought the same. He lifted his eyebrows and pursed his lips, poster boy for skepticism. "We got all the trace off her already. And you wouldn't have come barreling down here like you did for trace."

Without even realizing it, his patented 'oh really' smirk had crept onto Hodges' face as he got his cell phone out and said, " Okay. If you're so sure, I think Grissom would be delighted to hear you refused me access to the morgue because you already got everything. He's not in the best mood, a couple of back-to-back double shifts will do that to a person, but maybe you can turn it around. Here." He said, handing Dave the phone.

For one awful moment, Hodges thought Dave was actually going to take the phone and call Grissom, and what would he do then?

But Dave only gave Hodges a withering look and rolled his eyes, hand dropping back to his side. "Playing the Grissom card, huh? Whatever. Just come on. Hey, if you're here to collect trace, where's your equipment?"

Hodges was ready for this one. "I was on my way out when Grissom called, said they missed something," Which was half true, anyway. "I can just use some of the morgue's equipment. You guys have Q-tips, right?" Which, truthfully, was all you needed to collect trace. A clean Q-tip. Not ideal under other circumstances, but he didn't honestly plan on collecting trace this time around.

Dave took this as a rhetorical question, and led him into the morgue. As he watched Dave's back, Hodges wondered what he was going to do, to say to everyone, if this turned out to be nothing, if he didn't know the woman on the autopsy table. Truth was, he would gladly suffer through the questions, the odd looks, the whispers of a breakdown behind his back if God would only let her be safe and far away from Al Robbins' autopsy table.

He shook his head, all too aware that his breath was starting to hitch in this chest and his nose was starting to feel plugged up, and he would be damned if he was going to burst out in tears right in front (or behind, if you felt like being technical, he was still staring straight ahead of him) of David Phillips.

They were rounding the corner now, heading for the main autopsy chamber. David looked back at Hodges and, staying true to his kind and caring nature, double shift or not, immediately felt bad about his outburst earlier. Hodges may be a pain in the ass, a suck-up and have a serious superiority complex, but that wasn't all he was. He was a lot of redeeming things, but he chose to keep these qualities close and let them up to the surface sparsely, and usually when no one was looking. God knew why.

"You…ready?" Dave couldn't think of anything else to say. Hodges had an odd look on his face, it was a step below trepidation, and it looked like that was only because he was trying so hard to keep it in check. Not as if Dave believed for a minute that he was really down here to collect trace, but this look confirmed his misgivings. People didn't look like that because of trace.

"Why wouldn't I be? Come on, I want to get this evidence and go home." His heart was racing, but he told himself that was just because his sustenance of the past two days had consisted mostly of coffee.

But as soon as Dave opened the autopsy chamber's doors, Hodges knew he wasn't going home anytime soon.

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To be continued, I promise! And the next chapter won't be so crappily short, this I also promise.