Spoiler Alert: Spoilers for Seasons 2 & 3, up to and including "Silent Night".

A/N: Thanks to the reviewers and the readers - I love to hear your favourite lines and the things which make you laugh or cry.

Disclaimer: No infringement of copyright is intended. All characters originated with CSI:NY; all song lyrics are from The Beatles.

Chapter 6: You Were Only Waiting

Blackbird singing in the dead of night

Take these sunken eyes and learn to see.

All your life

You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

She was taken gently off the plane, bundled into a wheelchair, and handed over to a First Aid attendant, who checked her out, diagnosing exhaustion and malnutrition.

"You need to go home – be somewhere they'll take care of you, feed you up a bit," he said as he wound up the blood pressure cuff.

Lindsay stared at him blankly, hearing Danny's voice, "Mac don't want us to starve." Ever since she'd met him, he was always trying to feed her. Maybe it was an Italian thing.

"There's no one to do that," she said quietly, "Not in Montana."

That wasn't true. In fact, it was the exact opposite of true; her mother would take care of her. She would take care of her forever. If Lindsay showed up sick, she might just as well give up her job, her lease on her apartment, everything she had built in New York. A pair of blue eyes filled her mind, but she blinked them away.

"What about New York? That's where you were coming from, isn't it? Anyone there who could look after you a few days?" The attendant was being professionally kind – Lindsay recognized the tone of voice. She'd used it herself with relatives and victims: "Is there anyone we can call for you? Anyone you can stay with?"

She started to shake her head, but an overwhelming wave of homesickness washed over her. She wanted to go home, and, it turned out, home was New York.

"I'll think about it," she mumbled to the attendant, who nodded casually and handed her an envelope with five sleeping pills in it. "You need to sleep and eat. Take care of yourself a little." He grinned down at her. "You look like you're worth it."

She smiled back, but the automatic response didn't reach her eyes. She took the envelope, thanked him, and threw it in the nearest garbage can when she walked into the concourse.

Her phone vibrated against her hip. She had turned it back on as she had left the plane, as automatic a gesture as hitching her knapsack over one shoulder, or pushing her hair behind her ears. Dully, she unclipped it from her belt and looked at the text message which came through:

Montana, U OK?

Danny. One thing you could say for Danny Messer, he was persistent. Either he hadn't got her letter, or he had refused to read it, or he was just choosing to ignore it. Anger burned through her foggy brain. Dammit. Dammit! Why couldn't he, just ONCE, respect her requests?

She welcomed and held on to the feeling of anger for a moment, though. It was the most feeling she'd had for hours, since she had run from a scene, chipped off at her supervisor, and freaked out in the morgue. Great day at the office. If she'd been a rank rookie, there would have been some way back into Stella and Mac's good graces, but this. There was no acceptable excuse for this.

Stella had sort of forgiven her, true. But that was before she failed to show up at work. And Mac? No way would he want someone so ineffective on his team. He had given her nothing when she phoned to ask for an indefinite leave: asked no questions, probed no further than to tell her to report when she arrived in Montana, and to let him know when she was coming back. The conversation hadn't taken ten minutes; that was all it took to wipe her out of the lab, evidently.

She swallowed hard, trying to forget the note she left on her desk for Danny. She couldn't. She had written him dozens of letters, one ten pages long, in which she tried to explain everything that had happened, every move she had made for the past thirteen years. They had been uniformly terrible: selfish, whinging little pieces of self-justification that made her flush hot when she thought of them. She had torn them to pieces before she burned them and then flushed the ashes down the toilet. There had to be some advantages to being a CSI – no one would re-construct those damning documents.

Without a plan, she wandered into the sports bar near the First Aid office, and ordered hot tea. Some game was on the large-screen TVs in every corner of the bar, and she stared mindlessly, willing herself into oblivion.

Suddenly, the picture changed, showing a serious looking newscaster. The slug under her said, "Plane down in Rockies – 150 feared lost."

"Hey, Jason, turn up the volume, would you?" a server said.

"To recap: a plane leaving New York City and headed to Bozeman, Montana, has been lost in the Rocky Mountains in the north of the state. Reports say that radio contact was lost about half an hour before the flight was scheduled to land. Montana State Police are searching for the airplane, and have a tentative location. Some reports are been filed saying that the plane has in fact been found, and that there are some survivors; however, this has not yet been confirmed by officials in Montana. For now, we'll return you to the game, and will bring updates as we receive more information."

Lindsay sat in the bar, as conversation bloomed around her: twenty, thirty, more voices exclaiming, wondering, questioning, mourning. She was frozen in place. That was the plane she had planned to be on. She had got to the airport in time to board, but the plane had been sold out. She should have been on that plane.

Danny. Her heart clutched as she thought back to his text message. He hadn't been ignoring her note; he had been trying to find her. He thought – he must think – she was on that plane too.

She didn't even think, just grabbed her phone and hit speed dial #3. The text message had been sent well over an hour ago. Danny, all her friends in the lab, had been thinking she was dead – lost, at least – for that long, maybe longer depending on when the first reports of the missing plane had come in.

No one answered. It rang four, five times, and she hung up before it went to voice mail. She was outside the bar now, crying so hard she couldn't have left a coherent message. She could barely keep herself standing, leaning against the wall to keep on her feet.

Over the intercom, she heard the first call for the next flight to New York. Without even realizing what she was doing, she began to move towards the gate called. She had no ticket, and no real hope of getting on the plane, but she had to try.

A few steps later, her phone rang in her hand. She nearly dropped it – Danny had got her back for her prank with his phone by programming "New York, New York" as his ringtone. She stopped and answered the phone, still crying, saying his name.

It took her a minute to realize that it was Stella on the phone, Stella who was talking over her sobs, yelling at her, asking where she was.

"Stella, I'm in Denver. My flight had a lay over, and I got off the plane." Lindsay didn't bother to explain she had been taken off the flight in a wheelchair; it was too embarrassing. "I'm sorry I worried you. Yes, I'm in Denver." She shook her head in frustration. "I don't know where to go. I was going to Bozeman, but I doubt those flights will be running now."

She listened another minute. "Yeah, a flight has just been called for New York. I could try to book on that one. It would be at least four hours before I get to New York."

She was moving now as she spoke, "Are you sure, Stella? No, I'll be there, or I'll call if something goes wrong. Stella, I'm sorry. Tell … everyone … that I'm sorry."

She took Stella's "It's okay, honey," as absolution, but was afraid there was one person who would not be as quick to offer forgiveness.

By the time she got to the desk at the gate, she was focused again. She pulled out her badge as well as her ID and bullied her way into a ticket on the plane, using her NYPD status shamelessly when her sweetest, most patient smile failed. Luckily, there had been an empty seat on the plane, and Lindsay was rushed through boarding. Her credit card was groaning, but she would worry about that later. Now, she needed to get back to New York.

She sat on the plane, willing it to go faster. Again, she was in a middle seat, this time between a young man traveling to New York on his first ever trip alone and was listening and humming along to excruciatingly loud Broadway tunes on his iPod, and an older man who had immediately pulled out his computer and started working. Lindsay stared at the in-flight movie blindly, counting the minutes to landing. She didn't eat.

This time, when the plane landed, she was on her feet and squirming her way to the front of the plane before the docking mechanism had been engaged. She stood impatiently at the door, waiting for the all clear, and took off down the skyway the minute everything was secure. She glanced around to figure out which way to go to get to the Arrivals lounge. This was the New York airport, and she had a long way to walk yet. She moved with determination, in what she thought of as her "New York attitude" walk.

Finally, she cleared the last security doors like a bullet from a gun, then stopped dead. She saw Sheldon Hawkes out of the corner of her eye, but it was Danny who filled her vision, Danny whose arms opened when he saw her, Danny whose heart she felt pounding when she flung herself at him.

Home, it appeared, wasn't New York. Home was Danny Messer.