Living
Disclaimer: Grissom, Cath and their merry band of men belong to CBS, Bruckheimer Productions, et al. I claim no credit for them, and fanfic is pretty much a not-for-profit business.
I am angry nearly every day of my life, but I have learned not to show it;
and I still try to hope not to feel it, though it may take me another forty
years to do it.
--Louisa May Alcott
Sara remembers her mother as a bitter, angry, desperate woman, though she isn’t
sure if that’s really her memory, or if it’s revisionist history, adding what
she knows now to what she remembers then. Still, the only good memory she has of
her mother is from age five. At school her teacher—a young, glittering woman
with pale blonde hair that touched the middle of her back—taught her class about
primary colors and mixing two colors together to create another. To Sara, this
was magic.
She told her mother all about it, and the next day her mother came home from
work early with tubes of paint and a giant piece of poster board. She put
newspaper over the kitchen table, laid the poster board on top, and covered one
half of it with blue paint, and the other half with yellow paint. Sara watched
while kneeling on a chair, and then they both dipped their hands in and mixed
until their skin and the poster board turned green.
When they’d finished, her mother covered Sara’s small hand with one of her
own—thin with long fingers and chipped red nail polish—and helped Sara etch her
name into the paint with the tip of her index finger, as if writing in sand. To
this day, anytime Sara signs something, she thinks, “Green.”
At a scene as she and Greg sit in the truck waiting for David to arrive and
pronounce the body, she tells him this story.
He smiles in delight and, after a minute, responds, “I bet you were a cute kid.
I can picture you with one of those miniature paint sets, your big brown eyes
and your hair down to here,” he motions to the top of his thigh. “You probably
painted masterpieces for your parents, and your teachers and your stuffed
animals, didn’t you?”
Sara wants to tell him that he’s wrong. That her father wouldn’t have bothered
with anything she made for him. That she didn’t have any stuffed animals. That
the only possession she took with her from foster home to foster home was a
battered copy of Little Women she had checked out from her first
elementary school’s library right before Child Services pulled her out of
school. She wants to tell him that though her hair had been long once, Susan,
her second foster mother, cut it to right below her ears because it clogged the
drain in the bathtub. She wants to tell him that while he blares his music and
drums on the dashboard along with it, she can hear whole songs in her head and
sings along to them quietly under her breath, because her fourth foster father,
Roy, the one she’d stayed with until the day she turned eighteen, wouldn’t let
her play her radio in the house.
Instead, she leans over and steals the other half of his tuna club. He makes a
sound of protest and she smirks while taking the first bite. Sara doesn’t tell
him these things, because she likes his version of her life better than her own.
For one inconceivable second, though, she wants to tell him all of it.
***
There are times when Sara wants nothing more than to slap her hand over Greg’s
mouth in order to end his incessant chattering. She thought that getting him out
of the lab and into the field would end his need to keep up a steady stream of
esoteric babble whenever there’s a lull in the conversation. She misses being
paired with Grissom and Warrick, who work in near-uninterrupted quiet.
Right now they’re waiting for Trace results, and he’s talking about the
mechanics of sailing. Sara thinks that the only person more annoyed with him is
Hodges.
“Sanders, no one cares,” Hodges says, cutting off Greg’s story about sailing in
the Pacific Ocean.
“Well, maybe you don’t…” Greg begins.
“Of course I don’t,” Hodges replies, “but neither does Sara, and I have
work to do. There’s a line of people behind you.”
Greg cranes his neck and pretends to search the empty Trace lab. “Where?”
“Metaphorical people, Sanders. Grissom counts on me to get things done in a
timely fashion.”
Greg waves his hand as if to brush the comment away. “I did your job for five
years, and I know that there’s always time to talk with your co-workers.”
Hodges snorts. “Maybe the way that you did it.”
“Quickly?” Greg asks. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Sara puts a hand over her mouth to stifle her grin.
A beep sounds in the room, and Hodges raises his eyes up to the ceiling. “Thank
you.” He pulls the results out of the machine and passes them to Sara, pointedly
ignoring Greg’s outstretched hand. “Your unknown fiber.”
“Great,” Sara says and glances at the components on the sheet, putting them
together. “Silk.”
“Red silk?” Greg repeats. “Maybe Mrs. Ponce de Leon had a surprise for her
husband when he went below deck?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Sara agrees.
She and Greg fall into step together as they make their way to Mia in the DNA
lab across the hall.
“Were you interested in my sailing story?” he asks.
“No.”
“I’m going to take you sailing,” he declares, undeterred.
Sara rolls her eyes. “Please, I won’t drive with you in a car, what makes
you think I will sail with you in a boat?”
“You have some very inaccurate assumptions about my driving abilities.”
“You can barely navigate the hallways…”
“Guys?” Mia interrupts, giving a little wave in their direction. “Do you have a
second, or…?”
Sara shuts her mouth, abashed. Greg always manages to get her off-track. “Sorry
Mia, what have you got?”
“A match to the three stray hairs found on the vic’s body.”
“Tell me it’s the wife,” Greg begs, moving to look under the microscope.
“It’s not,” Mia says, looking unapologetic.
“Then who?” Sara asks.
Mia picks up a file and reads, “Marie Goodwin.”
Greg’s head snaps up. “Are you kidding? The woman that takes care of the boat?”
“Explains the lack of physical evidence,” Sara muses. “She cleans rooms
professionally.”
“She cleaned the room,” Mia agrees, “but not the body.”
Taking out a disinfectant wipe from inside one of the drawers, she sanitizes the
microscope Greg used.
“What are you doing?” he asks, looking offended.
“You were sick,” Mia answers simply.
“Last week,” he counters.
“Do I have to give you a lesson on the basic biology of germs?”
“Forget it,” Greg says and looks at Sara. “Let’s go see if Marie’s got any silky
red numbers hidden away in her closet.”
***
Sara’s second foster home was by far the worst. The woman, Susan, cut Sara’s
hair two weeks after she arrived, like something out of Flowers in the Attic.
That wasn’t the worst part though. The worst part was Susan’s husband, Frank.
Eight-year-old Sara learned early on that she was merely a useful distraction
for Frank’s temper. Frank’d come home from work—on those rare occasions when he
had a job—and Susan would leave Sara with no defense against his angry
outbursts.
Anything Sara did became a provocation, from hiding to running to sitting very,
very still. He’d always start with grabbing her by her freshly shorn hair and
smacking her against the wall. Susan stayed in the bedroom until it was over.
Sara remembers this now while revisiting the scene of her latest case, because
her body’s pressed against a stucco wall, the little spikes digging into her
lower back where her tank top rides up. Her nails claw desperately at the two
hands wrapped around her neck. She can’t breathe, she really can’t breathe. The
hysteria and lack of air getting to her brain make everything fuzzy around the
edges. Her mouth opens in a soundless scream and her hands lose their strength.
And then suddenly she’s free, gasping and coughing and sliding down the wall.
While she slips down, the shirt tugs up, and the stucco rips against her naked
back, but she barely feels it. All she cares about is breathing and wiping away
the tears coursing down her face, brought on by the intensity of her coughs.
“Sara, SARA!” She looks to her right, and there on the floor in a heap is Greg,
his knee digging into her attacker’s back, a gun in his hand. A gun, where did
he get a gun? And then she realizes. It’s her gun. She has a gun, and she
didn’t even use it. All that training, and she didn’t even use it.
“SARA!”
She meets Greg’s concerned gaze, and he says, “I need your handcuffs.”
She nods and drags herself the five feet to the kit she’d dropped during the
struggle. Opening it, she grabs her handcuffs
and tosses them to Greg. He secures her attacker’s hands and then pulls the man
to his feet.
Taking out his cell phone, he calls in the situation and rolls his eyes at Sara
when she tries to protest the need for an ambulance.
***
Greg suggests they enlist Archie’s help on a case involving a dead computer
hacker working at a Fortune 500 company. They drive to the scene together, and
Sara has to sit through a forty-minute argument over whether Willow or Anya is
better for Xander. It ends when Sara points out that Willow’s a lesbian. Archie
and Greg fill the next fifteen minutes with speculation about how Sara knows
that information and if she’s really a closet fan.
She doesn’t give the game away by explaining that some basic cable channel shows
reruns of it every morning from ten to twelve, and when she can’t sleep after
shift she watches it in bed. Instead, she lets them talk about how many seasons
she owns on DVD, and if she likes Spike better before or after receiving his
soul.
They arrive at the forty-floor high rise a little after two in the morning on
the third day of the investigation, and the place is filled with police officers
and camera crews. One of the cops monitoring the area recognizes Sara and sends
her through. In the rearview mirror, she notes that Archie looks impressed by
this. She wonders when the novelty of her job wore off for her.
She parks in a lot behind the building, and they only stop to grab their kits
from the trunk before trekking with their heads down past the reporters shouting
questions and snapping pictures.
Greg holds the police tape up for them to walk under, and Archie gives a low
whistle as he crosses.
“Man, this is so cool,” he enthuses, looking back at the yellow tape barring the
media and bystanders from entrance.
Greg shares a smile with him and nods. “I know what you mean.”
Sometimes she forgets that Greg’s so new at this. He’s still a year and about
fifty cases away from becoming a level two, but she can’t believe that ten
months ago he worked full-time in the lab and fumbled along with them at scenes
whenever Grissom felt inclined to invite him. She realizes that she no longer
even thinks of him as a lab tech.
“It’s on the sixteenth floor,” she tells Archie while pressing the elevator
button. It opens immediately.
“Should be easy enough to decrypt his hard drive,” he replies.
Greg hits the button for the sixteenth floor and says, “I don’t know. The DB was
a hardcore hacker. It might be tougher than it looks.”
“What Greg means is that he couldn’t figure it out,” Sara supplies, smirking at
the memory of his attempts to access the vic’s computer on the first day.
“I didn’t see you try,” Greg shoots back. “It kept mocking me.”
“Mocking you?” Archie asks with a raised eyebrow.
“Every time I tried to log in, this hideous, It-like clown appeared on
the screen, pointing and laughing sinisterly,” Greg clarifies.
The elevator doors open and they stepped out onto the empty floor. “Which one is
it?” Archie asks, gesturing at the numerous cubicles.
Sara leads the way to the back cubicle and comments over her shoulder, “That
clown was funny, actually.”
“As if you were any help,” Greg grumbles, “just standing over my shoulder
laughing the whole time.”
“It was funny,” Sara repeats as Archie sits down in front of the computer
with her and Greg watching over his shoulders.
“Let’s take a look at this,” Archie says, mostly to himself. His first attempt
calls up the mocking clown, and Sara cuts her eyes sideways to see Greg smirking
at her.
“Hmm…I think I see what he did here…” Archie mumbles.
A few clicks of the keyboard and the clown morphs into a blonde, pixilated
underwear model smiling and beckoning them to enter. Sara matches Greg’s now
diminished smirk with one of her own.
“Nice,” Archie says appreciatively at the image of the nearly nude, smiling
blonde.
“That took, what, two minutes?” Sara asks Greg.
“I don’t claim to be a computer genius,” Greg says. “I’d like to see Archie
identify a suspect’s DNA using a follicular sample.”
“Ahhh…no,” Archie chimes in.
“As a matter of fact,” Greg continues, pointing at Sara. “I’d like to see you
try to do that.”
“If I had the proper training, I’m sure that I could…”
“Look at this,” Archie interrupts, and everyone’s back to business.
“Ok, what is it?” Sara asks.
“It’s encrypted, so it’ll take me a while to make sense of, but I think I might
have found you guys a motive.”
“Good job, Archie,” Greg says, slapping his shoulder. “I’m gonna call Grissom.”
He walks further down the hall, his cell phone to his ear. Sara watches him a
moment and then looks down to see Archie watching her with a small smile on his
face.
“What?” she demands, defensive.
“Nothing,” he answers with a snicker. “Just…it’s lucky that neither one of you
two has pigtails, and that’s all I’ll say.”
Sara crosses her arms over her chest and pretends not to understand what he
means. “Keep working,” she responds gruffly.
***
It’s nearly ten at night and Sara’s come off of working a double. She sits
crouched in the grass outside of the Crime Lab, a Marlboro Light burning slowly
between her fingers. She takes a drag and then ashes it beside her with a quick
flick of her thumbnail.
When she was fifteen years old, her third foster parents, the ones she’d liked
the best, returned her to the system because they said she was a sullen, angry
child. Elaine, the wife, had caught her smoking one night, and that had been the
last straw.
She hasn’t smoked in almost six years, but after this last case, she needs it.
Grissom, Greg and she went to one of the seedier parts of Vegas for a case
involving a woman beaten to death inside her own home. All signs pointed to
domestic abuse, but the worst part by far was when Sara opened the closet door
and found three children huddled together, hungry and terrified. Their mother
had told them to hide and not to come out until she returned. Nearly forty-eight
hours later, Sara found them.
They each had a look in their eyes, one she recognized from pictures of herself
at that age: scared, world-weary and defeated.
After one last drag of the cigarette, she crushes the cherry in the dirt and
roots around for another one.
The sound of gravel crunching under feet hits her ears as she ignites the
lighter. She glances up and sees Greg. He sits on the ground next to her, their
shoulders touching.
“Can I bum one?” he asks.
“You don’t smoke.” But she still offers him the pack.
He plucks out a cigarette and places it between his lips. “Neither do you,” he
counters, the cigarette dangling precariously as he speaks.
She concedes the point and flicks the lighter on, bringing it to the tip. Greg
takes a drag, and she expects some comical coughing and hacking from him, at
least. Instead, he surprises her by closing his eyes as he inhales, like he’s
savoring the sensation, and then letting the smoke run languidly from his mouth.
He opens his eyes again and looks at her. “You did good work today, you know.”
“Yeah, I know,” she says, holding the cigarette vertically and watching the
cherry burn lower and lower, hypnotized.
“You saved them.”
Sara shakes out of her stupor and ashes the cigarette. “I’ve doomed them to a
life of moving from one place to another, never belonging, never happy. They’ll
probably be split up.” She’d seen it happen countless times, siblings ripped
away from each other, one more tie severed.
“At least they’re alive,” Greg reasons.
“At the very least.”
“That’s not the end for them,” he argues softly. “It may be rough, but they can
still do it. They can overcome it.” He pauses for a minute, and
then continues, “You did.”
Sara can’t guess if he’s always known about her past, or if he’s just realized
it, but either way, it doesn’t matter. She graduated from Harvard University
with a degree in Physics, and she’s a CSI level three in the second best Crime
Lab in the country. She knows that she’s been unbelievably successful, but she
thinks maybe she just needed to hear someone say it.
She pitches her cigarette onto the sidewalk, turns around and kisses Greg hard
on the mouth. He tastes like ashes, but so does she. His hand sinks into her hair,
holding her to him for a long moment.
When they both break away panting, she expects some declaration of love or
desire to talk on his part, but he surprises her again.
“Last one to that tree,” he points down the block, “has to buy dinner.”
He takes off before she can even get to her feet, and she’s left yelling and
stumbling behind him.
“Cheater!” she cries as she touches the bark of the tree seconds after him.
He wraps his arm around her shoulder and they both laugh.