Disclaimer: I don't own CSI, etc.

A/N: Okay, so for now internet is working, but I wanted to update while it is. I'm putting up two chapters, because this one is short, and because I don't know when I'll be able to put up another one, but it would make my day if you'd still review both. :)

For people who asked about timeline, I'm sorry if I wasn't clear about it in past chapters. They'd last seen each other Christmas 1998. It's in the end of 1999 that Catherine and Gil fight, and in Feb. 2000 that Sara tries to go see her mother. So we're really only a few months away...

Also, some commented on the dream--that was one of my favorite parts, I worked really hard on it, and I feel like it's our first glimpse into what Sara doesn't openly let herself think about--the things she runs from, and exactly what they all mean to her, as a whole... how they all connect. I like her subconscious, it's scary. :)


Chapter 25: Desperate

April 2000. Amber's seventeen. Seventeen. She has a year left of high school… she might already be thinking about which college she would attend. I wonder vaguely if the money I'd been saving would be enough—she was smart enough to go to any school she wanted to, really.

Pretty soon, the account would be taken out of my name, and that would be it. The end of my last vestiges of fatherhood. The end of everything.

…Maybe I'd open a savings account, to put my Amber-money in, just in case I saw her again someday. It could help pay for a wedding, or a house, or… something. Whatever she needed.

It seemed that about the time I realized that I was losing the only thing I had left, I starting getting migraines. God, I'd never had a headache like that in my life. I was sensitive to sound and light and it took hours to go away. I even called in sick, the first time it happened, because it had been so intense and unbearable.

Over time though, they became kind of routine. I would deal with them as long as I could, and then retreat to my office, close the blinds and turn off the lights, and wait for it to pass.

At first, light and sound deprivation helped a lot. Within a month or so, I broke down and went to a doctor to get medication for it, because they were quite literally keeping me from functioning. Now, if I took meds right when I felt one coming on, it was usually reduced to a dull and thoroughly tolerable ache. On rare occasions I was reduced to my dark and quiet retreats, but those were few and far between.

I had been asked to speak at the upcoming Forensic Academy Conference—it was in the first week of June, this year, and in Seattle. I doubt I would have gone if it had been in the immediate area, but I knew that Sara wasn't much of a traveler, and also didn't have much expendable income. I figured she probably wouldn't be there, so I agreed.

It would be a nice change, to get away… I was nearly desperate enough to start racing cockroaches. I was running out of random Google searches… as if such a thing were possible. I was even considering digging out the terrarium and getting the tarantula I'd always wanted, but in truth, it was too painful. I couldn't do it.

And in the meantime, I subscribed to just about every forensic magazine worth the paper it was printed on, and tried to pick up other hobbies. I had always loved baseball, but I needed more than that. I watched poker on TV, but couldn't bring myself to haunt casino basements and run-down bars to play anymore. Now that I lived in Vegas, it seemed even seedier than it had before I had an intimate knowledge of exactly what happened in those places when no one was around.

It was then that I decided I needed to date. Yes. I would date. …It was decided.

Good.

Good.

I would date.

…Maybe I'd have to learn a new language and read the complete works of Shakespeare in it… that ought to take up some of my time. German… French maybe… Portuguese…? That was bound to be unusual... maybe even Greek.

…Maybe I'd just never get the women who haunted me out of my mind, no matter how busy I kept myself.

Maybe this was what life was going to be like, from now on…

Sara had come into my life and somehow tricked my heart into hoping, once again, for all the things that I had given up on. That had been my mistake. I had gotten my hopes up, put too much of myself into those hopes… and when they were dashed, I found myself even lower than I had been before she came along.