A/N: If it has aired it is fair game. This chapter also marginally contains spoilers for episode 713. I have no beta, all mistakes are mine.
Purple
December – 'Butterflies count not months but moments and still have time enough'
Anno 2006
Sara
rolled over on her stomach toward the warmth still contained between
the sheets, moaning silently as her meandering left hand found the
cool edge of the bed.
He was
not there. Instead she found herself face down in Teddy's plush
belly, an incomprehensible mumble escaping the bear's cottony
stuffing. Grissom could not decipher it, but that didn't really
matter much.
He was going to miss her mumbles. A lot.
"Honey?"
Reaching down he gathered her hair away from her face as she turned to eye him, slightly confused still from sleep. He briefly contemplated the diagonal indentation across the right side of her face, and whether or not his absence would make it a permanent line.
From sleep, not from worry…hopefully. The thought left him somber.
She normally slept either soundly on her back with her arm splayed somewhere across him or his side or, if she was restless, spooning up against him taking solace in his warm presence. The pillow crease mirrored on her face was usually a dead give-away of the latter.
Her voice had all but vanished in the dry indoor air, yet a raspy "What's wrong? Why are you …up?" escaped nonetheless.
Restless…still.
"I've been admiring you sleeping."
His forehand gently caressed her cheek before he pulled back to pick up the little stool he had placed next to her bedside table some five minutes earlier. Unable to sleep he had risen, put on a tee and a pair of boxers, before sitting down by her side. Yet somehow he had still felt terribly exposed...and distanced.
"Oh…"
A frown
distorted her pillow-perfect face.
Noticing
the slump in his shoulders as he disappeared into the bathroom she
pulled herself out of bed to follow him, grabbing her silky robe
before plopping down on the wooden seat.
"…okay?"
"I got a letter from Williams College yesterday." Gauging her reaction through the mirror he turned to her and continued face to face.
"They want me to teach a class there. This winter."
She looked as uncomfortable sitting on that stool now as he had felt before. Reaching out to her he was waiting for some reaction; some indication of what was going through her mind.
"It's only for a month honey, and…"
"—When?"
Her voice disappeared into his stomach as it had the bear earlier.
"I…will have to let them know something by the end of the week."
She pushed herself at arms length and looked up at him, seeing the doubt in his eyes.
"When…do you leave?" She had to ask, but knew it didn't really much matter.
She would miss him and it hurt. A lot.
Standing and brushing her thumb over his cheek, she turned and walked back to their bed. Curling up with her bear, she pulled the covers up and over her nose. What little of his warmth had remained there before was now completely gone.
She felt cold.
"I'll miss you."
And with that he was gone.
She knew there had been trying 'moments', several in fact, since the day they had officially consummated their relationship. More than a year had gone by, filled with moments of joy and happiness, uncertainty and disappointment. The occasional ponderous comment here, the silently questioning glance there.
However, nothing momentous had managed to damage their shared sanctuary; the cocoon of contentment they had spun together.
Until he did.
…
"Structurally a cocoon's weakness comes from the inside, nature's ingenious way of signaling the butterfly's readiness to spread its wings and fly…"
…
Back in San Fran that fateful day some eleven years ago, Grissom's statement had immediately demanded her attention. He had said it with such ardor, such an indescribable sense of…what, philosophical awe maybe? Who puts a philosophical spin on butterflies in a scientific connotation after all?
She had later noticed the same statement spelled out on the very first page of his entomology text, claiming it 'easier to understand a butterfly's morphism if going backward from winged maturity to formation of pupa'.
Yet, when it was her own life going backward…understanding why was certainly not easier. Not by Grissom's logic.
Why
did he have to tear a huge hole in their 'cocoon', no counsel,
when they were in it together?
To go
find his 'wings'?
She didn't even want to contemplate the irony of that…
…
His cab was here.
He knew he should leave.
"I'll see you when you get back."
They had agreed to disagree, had they not?
Her proximity nearly made him kiss her once more.
Eyes full with silent resignation left him second-guessing her.
…
Had he taken a few backward glances he would have seen her.
How could a man as smart as Grissom not think of that?
He would have seen the gaping hole he left behind.
Remaining inside was a wingless butterfly.
Alone and suddenly exposed.
Left in the dark…
…
"Colors, what do you think about colors Sara?"
"What do you think about when you think about certain colors?"
…
She was skipping along the colorful puddles exactly like a fish in water, a goldfish jumping from one to the next. For each color she passed through a smidge of pigment subsequently would transfer, leaving the one after it not quite as pure as before, but all the more unique. Giggling whole-heartedly she smacked her brush-like tail fins in the now purplish muck, shamelessly wiggling to rid herself of the muddy coating.
"Got a canvas for that, Miss…?" said a low voice behind her.
Flushed
she turned to the most gorgeous blue whale she had ever met.
All
she could mutter were a couple of bubbles.
Blop-blop.
"I…Sorry!" She thought she would drown as he released the geyser of a breath he had been holding, showering them both with equal amounts of wit and water.
"Okay
Miss 'I…Sorry', no need to flounder." His baleen smirk was
slightly crooked.
"Balaenoptera
musculus," the whale said by ways of introduction,
"care
to go for a swim?"
All she heard was 'musculus'…and that he was.
"Sidle…"
BLOP!
"…um, Sara" she invited.
"Balaenoptera" he accepted.
"Nice to meet you…musculus, a swim sounds good."
…
The shrill ring of her cell phone brought her out of her bizarre dream. One look at the caller ID and she hit the ignore button before dropping heavily back into the fiber-filled square, letting her eyelids again fall to. Shit.
He had called her at least every other hour when he knew she would be up, for the past week. He had been gone for two. Last week he had called a couple of times a day, probably trying to give her space.
A slippery slope.
…
Sometimes she wanted to scream.
Sometimes she wanted to ask him why.
Sometimes she wanted to ask how he was doing.
…
Always she wanted to hear his voice, yet never would she allow it.
As the adrenaline from the latest phone call slowly subsided, she found herself drifting off to a fitful sleep.
…
At some point they had swum head first into a spiraling current.
'Never swim against the current. Swim parallel to the beach until free of the current, then head for the shore.'
She had tried to swim free a time or two, but ultimately resigned herself to the familiar feeling of swimming in circles. It was mostly effortless and at least they were together. Her colorful puddles must have entered the current at one point too, because the once dark blue musculus had now become a mottled grey with a white splotch on his back. It actually made him look even better; he really was a killer of a whale.
However, the longer they swam, the murkier the waters became. All the colors from her palette that once had her skipping happily now bled together to create a vast black ocean. It left her restless. She needed him and turned to swim to him but he wasn't there, where was he? She turned the other way but it was simply too dark to see anything.
…
Frantic she stretched across to feel for him, but came up with nothing. "…Sometimes..a..dying..whale..is..just..a..dying..whale..."
The sound of her own voice woke her with a start and for a split second a feeling of sheer terror washed over her, ebbing before she could seize what had been. Sitting up her heaving chest felt heavy and she realized her forehead was clammy when her hair started sticking.
Nightmares were old news to her, but this one in particular didn't seem familiar. She felt the chill, even if she could remember very little and understand even less.
The sound of his own voice was all too familiar as the machine kicked in, prompting him to leave yet another message on his home phone. Talking to himself again, trying not to sound too worried…but failing miserably. She had said she would see him when he got back, at least her words were something tangible to hold on to; a good thing. At least he hoped seeing her again would be a good thing.
Their argument had been, for them, heated. He had felt a sudden chill, however, when he had agreed to disagree. What exactly he was disagreeing with he couldn't remember…not that much had been articulated really, of which he understood even less. Buthe had agreed to disagree, not wanting to leave on bad terms. He had been thinking of nothing else since.
If the cool Massachusetts air had cleared anything up over the past two weeks, it was his erroneous perception of the 'how' versus the 'what'. His decision of a sabbatical was not the real issue with her, rather, he suspected, was the way in which he had decided. The fact that he had decided without so much as discussing it with her. Why did that just now occur to him as something he should have done?
If he were going to be some 2,500 miles from home - alone, then, by way of deduction, so would she.
She hadn't asked to go, she hadn't said he couldn't go, she had simply said she didn't want him to go. Since when had Sara not wanting him to leave become a bad thing?
The new cell phone he had sent her, a peace offering begging desperately for her to communicate with him, had been turned off.He realized how him wanting to communicate now may have seemed a bit two-faced, but he had hoped reaching out would give him one more chance to explain his reasons for going away, on her terms and time. Just one chance to hear her say that she was okay. Even her cussing him out at this point; yelling, screaming, expressing her anger, would be a godsend. An angry Sara was an emotional Sara.
More likely she was hurt. He had managed to hurt her again, when it was the last thing he had meant to do. Life can be such a slippery slope.
The sound of absolute nothing when he dialed the number, followed by a recorded voice and a very distinct 'click' as he was disconnected, clearly said she was not okay. The phone was shut off and he shut out. Sara…shut down.
"The customer you are trying to reach is currently unavailable."
…
Truer words were never spoken.
Taking the purple pen out of his pocket and a pad out of his bag, he took a deep breath – he had a lot of grading to do...
Everything was magnified and intense, his senses on edge. The little pinhead hole in the 747's window now gave him a headache just trying to focus on it. He could not seem to focus on anything, where to begin? His last lecture of the week on Thursday nights were usually heavy with lighter fare, including illustrative charts and geographical surveys of the Walden Pond site, winter aiding little with on-site habitat studies. Luckily that had allowed him to get out of there fairly quickly, placing him back in Vegas before end of shift that Friday morning. He had stopped by the townhouse for a quick shower, only to find she had not been staying there. Surprised, no. Saddened?
Scared.
A few errands later he had pulled into Sara's apartment complex where he looked at her key for exactly one second before putting it away. He had not used it that weekend, he hadn't needed to. That in itself was a start, one he had not taken for granted. They had agreed to agree on his finishing the Williams commitment, her signaling she was alive at the end of each shift and, upon his return, their needing to jointly patch up the hole that had weakened their refuge. He had left her with the gift he had taken months to put together for Christmas, but not had a chance to give her. She had left him with a beautiful purple pen that she had meant to send him with. Supposedly the pens had been 'it' for correcting student papers the last couple of years where "color psychologists had stated the color purple embodies red's sense of authority but also blue's association with serenity, making it a less negative and more constructive color for corrections."
Hopeful.
A relieved expression formed on his face as the drone of the plane and the rapidly darkening skies signaled his passage eastward on a crisp January evening. Looking out through his window the stars were slowly starting to twinkle, at times contorted by the ice crystals forming around the tiny hole in the pane. Thinking back he realized that after all these years, he had yet to tell Sara his favorite constellation. That would be his first revelation when he got back home.
Moving the pen from the purple patchwork he had subconsciously doodled in the margin, he wrote in steady hand at the very top of the page; 'Gilbert Grissom, 08-17-56'. Then, after printing the number '1' on the next line down and to the left, he wrote down a prompt to tell Sara about seeing stars. Directly below it, again right next to the vertical line, he printed the number '2'.
He had a list of corrections to make.
"Often a purple patch or two is tacked on to a serious work of high promise, to give an effect of colour"
-Horace
END
A/N: Stay tuned for the epilogue to be posted within the next couple of days (yes…really!). I will also go back and clean up formatting and other issues for the story in its entirety shortly. Thanks so much to all of you who have hung in there, reviewed and inquired about updates.
-Ligaras