A/N: We want to thank everyone who is reading this story. It brings us immense joy to see people still taking delight in reading GSR stories. We know everyone is eager to see what is going with Sara so we are posting two chapters back to back (today and tomorrow) so you will know what's going on by tomorrow. Not much longer to wait we promise! As always please leave us a review if you can because it makes our day :) Happy International Women's Day to all the lovely women reading our work!
Shifting her gaze out of the taxi window, Sara felt like almost begging for someone to turn the lights off. It never dawned on her before how much it bothered her, this relentless, 24-hour blinding glow of a million electrified glass tubes as it did now, as they passed by the neon soaked Vegas Strip. The brightest spot on earth, as they say, but she'd rather be back on the Ishmael, watching the starry sky with Gil's arms wrapped around her and the faint whisper of the ocean lulling her into blissful dreams. Dreams that were shattered again after a phone call that was more like a prank that some twisted part of the universe decided to pull at their expense just when they'd thought they'd caught their final chance to a happily ever after.
So now they were both back in the dark. A blinding darkness more alike, as their driver rushed them through the dazzling lights of the city that never sleeps, to a meeting that could possibly change everything once again. Letting her forehead rest upon the coolness of the glass and shutting her eyes,Sara's mind went back to all the times she'd left Vegas thinking that she'd never come back and all the times she did come back again, almost running, like a moth drawn to the flame.
The very first time she was eager to be with one Gil Grissom, after he offhandedly called her one night inviting her to his lab. She was so young then, so full of hope and already helplessly in love with the man that would carve her path in life for all the years to come. 'I need you here' he had said and it was as good to her as if he'd said I love you. The first-person pronoun shifted soon to the third-person as in 'the lab needs you, Sara' and her heart was broken over and over countless times as he waffled back and forth between his feelings for her and his reluctance to let them change his way of life. But she never left, never made good on her threat to leave him and go live a life away from the man she loved.
Only when he finally did change, when Gilbert Grissom took a leap of faith and opened his heart to her, shadows of her past came back to haunt her and chase her away from Vegas, indifferent to the damage inflicted to their raw feelings and gentle hearts. For a long time after her date with the devil in the desert, where Natalie had left her to die, it was as if someone kept pulling at the threads of their love cocoon. They had both struggled to weave it, layer after layer for so long but not even the promise of marriage could keep it together anymore. When she finally snapped and ran away without explanation or warning other than a love letter that probably confused him more than comforted him, the Strip lights were blurred to some expressionist painting from the tears that kept welling up in her eyes as she rode the taxi to the airport flying back to the city where everything had started so long ago.
She came back for Warrick and for Grissom and his broken heart but her need to flee remained untamed. Still to this very day, she couldn't tell what dark instinct drove her away, what made her almost gamble with the love of her life and their future. Was it her fear to believe that she could actually be happy and have a family of her own? Or was she subconsciously trying to push him to prove to her that his love for her was greater than his love of the lab?
Whichever it was, she won the bet and Gil came running to her and they got married and they were happy, oh yes they really were and she knew now that it scared the hell out of them both. It almost felt like she didn't deserve such happiness and he acted like she deserved more than he could offer. And then of course she decided to give Vegas one more chance and he ran from one project to the next thinking he could catch up with the all too scary passing of time if he moved around the globe, flying back to Vegas at intervals to meet with a wife busy proving herself to the world. Their love was strong, the lights were bright and they thought they could make it work where others have failed and oh, they were both so wrong.
When she came back to the lab, to the team she'd missed more than she wanted to admit, she never believed that in a couple of years she would revisit the feelings of that day after her DUI when she tried to drown her sorrow in the empty bottom of a beer bottle. She had thought that she had buried those shameful feelings long ago but alas! they soon came rushing in again and this time Grissom wasn't there to slip her hand in his and take her home and he wasn't there to wipe her tears away. He was a lost whale and she was lost without him but neither dared to admit how much they needed each other. Whenever she took a cab after those lonely drinking nights she watched the lights flicker past her again, wondering where it all went so wrong.
And now that everything seemed to be so right between them again, no fears or illusions blinding them anymore, something again was so very wrong. Except that something was now out of their control, typed in some medical report soon to be handed down to them. If only that phone call came one week earlier, only one week, she would never have dared to disrupt his life again, to burden him with her worries and drag him into this vortex of swirling emotions once again. The only constant belief she had all these years was that she loved him and she wanted him to be happy. The trouble was that maybe it was the one thing she couldn't give him right now, no matter how much she wanted to.
As a tear ran down her cheek, she felt her hand squeezed by his and turning to him she saw him holding his other hand out, thumb, index and pinkie finger pointing out the 'I love you' sign to her while his lips mouthed the words and she couldn't help but smile, tasting the tears that spilled out unhindered. He was there with her again, he could slip her hand inside his again, let his calm presence warm her to her core and they could face the world together. Light or dark, it was her home, where she always belonged.
