Sorry about the huge delay with this chapter, writers block, exams, lab reports are all to blame. But I have written the last chapter of this fic so I know where I am going with it.

This chapter contains description of self harm. If you do or have self harmed it could be a trigger and I urge you to skip the diary entry at the end. You will still follow the story if you miss that section, so please, if it may affect you don't read it.

As usual, I love reviews, please let me know what you think of it so that I can improve as a writer. The next chapter will be done as soon as possible but I have seven lab reports to do before the end of term and five exams after Easter to revise for so things are a bit hectic at the moment.

Thanks for the reviews for the last chapter and to all the people who have put me on their favourites and alert lists, it is very much appreciated. Appologies for any mistakes that I have missed, I really hate proof reading!

I own season one to eight on DVD and the CSI computer game but thats it. However it is my birthday next month (not going to be a teenager for much longer) so fingers crossed!

Any way on with the story...

Chapter 5 – Related Enemies

"The landlord didn't do it." Catherine said hanging up the phone. "His teeth didn't match the bite mark on Sara."

"So our only suspect is this guy on the CCTV?" Greg asked, yawning with exhaustion.

"Yeah, but if we can find him we can rule him in or out as the suspect." Catherine rested her head in her hands.

"Have we got any leads on him?" Nick said.

The team was exhausted. It was mid afternoon and they had been working for over seventeen hours. They hadn't stopped for a break and adrenaline was the only thing keeping them going. Emotions were running high making them all short tempered and miserable, leads were running out and they were beginning to think that they may not crack this case.

Forensic evidence was coming up short. Nothing, other that the bite mark, had given them the slightest lead. Even that needed a suspect to compare it too, there was no database of bite marks.

Throughout this they were trying to come to terms with the loss of a very close friend. The graveyard shift was unusually close and each felt like they were missing a limb. Conversations left unfinished, comments never said, plans never realised, they were feeling the loss dearly.

They were also struggling with the realisation that they knew much less about Sara than they thought they did. None could comprehend the knowledge of what Sara had suffered as a child, nor that she had been in a relationship with their boss for two years without them realising or even suspecting.

"We've got a description," Brass began recounting what the landlord had told him, "sixties, brown hair but slightly greying, unshaven, wearing a light blue shirt, carrying a dark bag. I've got the CCTV of the parking lot, it needs watching."

"I'll do that," Greg said suddenly, dropping the diary that he was reluctantly reading, "can't read much more of that."

Catherine nodded, she was finding it just a difficult to read through Sara's personal and often painful, traumatic thoughts as well, the things she had never imagined anyone reading.

"It's going to leave us no closer to identifying him though. And we still have no motive for it." She said sighing. "I've not found any motives in her diary yet."

The guys all nodded in agreement, they'd found nothing in the pages of Sara's diaries.

"I'm going to go and check on Gil." Jim said standing up and dropping the CCTV disc on the table in front of Greg.

Brass left the room and was followed by Greg who headed for the AV lab. Brass' phone rang just as he stopped outside Grissom's office.

"Brass."

"Its Doc Robbins, I thought you should know that Gil's here again. He doesn't want to leave Sara."

Brass looked through the door to Grissom's office, it was empty. "Thanks, I'll be there soon."

Greg slumped in the chair in the AV lab. He dropped the CCTV disc on the desk in front of him and dropped his head into his hands. He was very close to Sara, there was no denying that, his heart was breaking with grief for his friend and mentor. Without Sara he wouldn't be a CSI, she took him under her wing and taught him everything she knew, which was a lot.

He shook himself out of his reminiscing, there was still a murderer to catch. He slipped the disc into the machine and sat back.

"Gil?" Jim said gently. Grissom was sat by Sara's side, tenderly holding her hand.

"Sara's mother knows." He replied not looking up from Sara's face. "The doctor at the hospital said that Sara's uncle is coming to Vegas, he should be here this evening, he's going to go to the PD."

"Is there anything that I can get you?" Jim asked feeling useless.

"Unless you can bring her back to me, no." He continued staring at Sara for several more moments. "I fell in love with her the day I met her, when she was working in San Francisco."

"I know, we could all tell that there was something between the day you asked her to come to Vegas."

"I thought it was better for both of us if we didn't get involved, but it wasn't, when I finally plucked up the courage, it was like everything suddenly made sense."

"When did you two..."

"After Nick's abduction. I realised that life was too short, so after we finished that night I went over to hers, she'd fallen asleep on her couch, I woke her up and told her that I loved her. We chatted for a while and then the next night I took her out for dinner. Just took it from there. It wasn't easy, both obsessed with our jobs, working long hours and with not many communication skills but it all just seemed right, it worked. I don't know what to do without her, she's my world."

"You must have been good for her, she's seemed much happier recently." Brass said, he had noticed the change in Sara, he just hadn't known what or who had caused it.

"She was. She needed someone who she could trust, who understood her. Gave her a chance to start getting over her childhood. Things were just starting to look up for her and now . . . how could anyone do this to her?"

"I don't know but we'll catch the bastard."

After seeing everyone else's reactions to Sara's diaries, Warrick grimly opened the book that he had picked up.

January 27th, 1989

When I was tidying my room earlier I found my old diary from school – what a depressing read! I haven't written in it for years but I do remember how much it helped when things were tough. I've never been able to tell people how I feel, never had anyone to tell, and it's much easier telling someone who won't judge me or pity me, someone who already knows, who can't tell the entire school. I've decided to start a new diary but this one, rather than being about anger and pain, will be about recovery.

For years I could barely comprehend some of the things that happened when I was a child. I was well practiced at the art of hiding my emotions until it got to the stage where I could no longer feel my emotions.

I closed myself off from reality and refused to acknowledge what was happening to me. I locked the trauma away deep inside and allowed it to poison me. If I'm honest it still poisons me. It still makes me angry and anxious and scared.

I can admit it to myself now, even if I can admit it to no one else. I can accept that my father abused me, that he beat my mother and me, that he raped me. And I can also admit that my mother killed him because she didn't know how else to stop him. I know what she did was wrong, no matter what no one has the right to take another's life. And I can never understand why she wouldn't just walk away from him when she had the chance and take me with her. But she did it and whatever her excuse or justification for it, I had no control over it and I cannot change it. I didn't kill my father. She did and she's being punished for it.

I don't want it to take over my life. I hate who I am because of him. I hate that I feel so anxious all the time, that I don't trust people, that I don't understand them. I don't know who I would have been if I'd been born into a normal, loving home and I never will, but I think it's safe to say that life would have been easier.

Sometimes it threatens to overwhelm me and its time like that that I feel at my lowest, unable to cope with who I am. That's when I self destruct, when I drink too much, when I don't sleep or eat, when I self harm.

I know it's unhealthy but I cut my skin to cope with the feelings of anger, fear, anxiety or numbness. Sometimes it's better to feel pain that live with the monotony of feeling nothing. It's like a pressure valve inside me, when it all gets too much, when I just want to scream I cut myself and the tension just evaporates. I focus on the blood, I can't help staring at it, it is just so beautiful. I watch as the blood beads up through my skin, as it collects and the drips down. I imagine it is like taking a drug, the ecstasy that results from the simple action of sliding a blade along my skin can be matched by nothing else, nothing brings the same relief. When I'm focusing on the pain and the blood I can think of nothing else and that refreshes my mind, gives me time to relax without memories and fears crowding my thoughts, making them jumbled and confused. Then I can concentrate on caring for the wound that I have inflicted upon myself, I clean it, apply antiseptic cream and then a plaster. The next day, when I feel numb or confused I can run my finger over the scar and it gives me something physical to think about. As the pain from the wound subsides it takes a little of the emotional pain away as well and that is surely a good thing.

What my father did to me lives with me constantly. It pops into my mind at the most inappropriate places, in the middle of an exam, talking to my lecturer, trying to have a normal life. I won't let it stop me but it does make things hard. It's very difficult to be intimate with someone when your thinking about how your own father raped you. It quickly puts you out of the mood.

The secrecy is exhausting as well. I'm always hiding behind a mask. Pretending to be someone that I am not. Pretending to be normal. I hide my scars from the people around me, the physical and mental scars that will stay with me forever. It would just take one thoughtless slip, one scar to be seen and I would be branded insane, carted off to an psychiatric ward before people even have the chance to say "she's a self harmer."

Sometimes I get paranoid and become convinced that everyone knows, that they can read it on my face, that my body language is disobeying me and is screaming "I was abused." That's when I hide, when I lock myself in my room with only my thoughts. But that is a vicious spiral. The more time I spend alone, the more I think and the I think, the more I shy away from contact with the outside world.

I never told anyone what he did to me, at my mother's trial I stayed quiet. Maybe if I had told them what she was protecting me from she might have got a lighter sentence, instead she pleaded insanity to avoid the death sentence and will spend the rest of her life in a mental institution. I feel guilty that I didn't have the courage to tell the police officers and the social workers and the child psychologists who interviewed me during the investigation the truth. Then perhaps I would have spent the rest of my childhood in foster care.

When a child spends too long in foster care they become lost, nothing more than a statistic. Foster children are the kids that no one wants. People feel sorry for them, they pity them but they don't love them. A child needs love to grow and if they are denied care, gentle touch, loving hugs they don't develop normally.

Greg pressed pause as he saw a man lurking in front of the CCTV camera who matched the description. He printed off the best shot he could get and hurried out of the room to show Brass.

He stopped as he left the lab and saw Sofia leading the same man into an interview room.

"How did you find him?" Greg asked Brass.

"Who?" Brass replied looking confusedly at Greg.

"The guy that Sara's landlord saw."

"Greg what are you going on about?" Brass replied none the wiser.

"The guy with Sofia, look, " he help up the print out of the CCTV picture, "he's the same guy, the guy seen hanging around Sara's apartment block."

Brass glanced at the image in front of him. "But that's Sara's uncle, he's just flown in from California."