By November Tuesday
SUMMARY: Sara mourns for something she never had.
The pain blooming low in her belly is clockwork loss. She is steel, an assembly of hard things which she has welded and forged. During her life she has created a self with sheer force of will alone, bringing forth an iron self from the void as if she were God.
Only her insides bleed. Every twenty-nine days, a chance bleeds from her metal body, never to be recovered.
.
It is cold. So damn cold, despite the warmth of the breakroom. A week before Christmas and cookies are set out, fake pine garland lining the doorway. Mia and Nick are discussing a baby shower for Catherine. A big surprise, at her age, a little sibling for Lindsay.
He comes in, hair and eyes like steel, and she wonders how much of the metal self which she has fashioned takes after him. He once told her to detach. Has she swallowed his advice whole? Is that why she feels as if her bones are not bone and her blood is not blood?
It is December, and the others talk about having a surprise shower in April. They assume she won't care much about logistics and cake and such, and they are right, but for the wrong reasons. They think she is all career, focused emotionless intellect, without care for little fingers, little toes, the clinging warmth of a small child's need.
They are wrong about that.
She bites her lip and stares into space, distracted only when she notices that Grissom is looking at her.
Get a diversion, he once told her. She has one for moments like this, wondering what he thinks she is thinking. Sometimes the results are quite amusing. She amuses herself with ideas about how wrong he probably is. He has that Concerned Look and he probably wonders if she's drinking. Oh, who the hell knows what Grissom is thinking? God himself probably doesn't know.
Like all diversions, wondering what Grissom thinks has its limits.
Cramps are climbing slowly through her belly. She pulls out her kit and removes a bottle of Ibuprofen, swallows three, all the while feeling his eyes on her. Why does he always watch? Why can't he let her be?
But she knows she wouldn't want that. She wants his eyes on her. She wants his gaze, his poorly concealed desire, his speculation, because it is all she will ever have. And she knows that is pathetic.
He is a wire corraling her heart, and every time she moves, it tugs.
.
November seemed like a different month. It wasn't so cold then. Then came a horrible case with eight children locked in a room. They would never have found them, had she not stumbled across a crawlspace.
The little boy was brown with filth, thin as air, but his eyes were so bright, so bright. A part of herself that she never knew scooped him up in her arms before she even knew what she was doing.
And when he clung to her, dirty face pressed into the silk of her hair, she felt another tug, this one in a different place. And she changed forever.
.
In September she turned thirty-four. At the time her mind wasn't so complicated. Two things occupied it: The first was work, and how to get ahead. The second was Grissom, and how to live with the fact that he didn't care enough to take the chance.
The first was simple. She just kept doing what she had been for years. Working constantly, demanding perfection of herself. It was practically habitual.
The second part was so much harder.
She felt his neutral regard like the oppression of stale air. He cared for her, that much was evident. He wanted her, that much was clear. She felt his eyes on her like a slight vibration, a tingling frequency at the base of her spine.
He cared just enough so that she didn't pack everything up and leave Vegas for good. He cared little enough that she cried when she was alone, falling asleep with salt drying on her cheeks.
She still reels with the emptiness of it. There is nothing in the world.
He looks at her, and says "I haven't seen you around much lately."
"You see me every day," she says.
She knows he is lying. But it hurts just as much as if it were true.
As time passes the damage inside her seems to grow and bloom, like a bullet that widens once in flesh, leaving it devastated. She feels the stellate pain of his rejection unfolding more and more as time passes and this doesn't make sense to her.
She knows he is not the only man on earth. She knows there are men who are sweeter and more open and younger and even more handsome. Men who aren't tongue-tied and brutal in their indifference. She has tried a million ways to stop loving him, all of which burn and crash to the ground. She is frustrated by her inability to move on.
She sees the jaded self she has become. She sees how she has lost some vital spark necessary to life. Old music reminds her of being younger, at Harvard, finally delivered into adult life, on the brink of the world, and the person she is now feels so different.
Not the only man on earth, but he is it for her. She knows it as surely as she knows she needs to breathe. She supposes that everyone has their breaking point, and that moment in Interrogation Room B was hers.
She knows herself on a truer level every month, learns a bittersweet, unfolding secret about herself she didn't see before. She has worked all her life to forge something hard and immutable, something to withstand the buffetting of the world's storms. Only to find that what she really desires is to give softness. That she is a mother without a child.
Sometimes, through her numbness, is alarm at how thoroughly she has been broken. It is like a disaster siren, but heard from a long long distance.
.
In January her brother and his wife visit Vegas with her niece. She is just shy of one and a half, and has brown curls with big blue eyes. Sara looks at her and wonders. If those brown curls were hers, and if those blue eyes...
Emilia falls softly to sleep on her breast and she sits there, prisoner to the warm peace of it, unable to keep her arms from holding the soft weight of her, to keep her hands from stroking the sweet curls, and she hates herself for indulging in the momentary fantasy that the child is hers, not Ray's. Hers and-
This is where the needle scratches across the record, bringing reality back in a harsh scratch of vinyl.
.
In February she sees her gynecologist, who unsubtly mentions that she's not getting any younger. The next day, she calls her HMO to get a new gynecologist.
.
Later that month her cell rings at a murder scene at the Tropicana. Warrick. Something is wrong with the baby, can she take over?
If nothing else they are a team, a family. She leaves her things with Greg and rushes over to Warrick's scene.
He did not expect fatherhood to arise from an ill-advised affair with a co-worker, but he has grown to embrace it. He is impossibly pale. "Go," she tells him, laying a warm hand on his shoulder.
.
Later, after shift, she wanders Desert Palm before going to see Cath, wandering through sterile halls. For months she has been thick with her own grief, and is in no particular hurry to bear another's.
There is an honesty there in the randomness. She is a nomad. And no one asks her where she should be.
She finds them all in a hushed dim room. Catherine is sleeping, angelic in the first quiet light, golden and peaceful. Grissom is there, and Warrick, and Nick.
Grissom's eyes flick to hers and she looks away. Warrick is lost, his eyes red-rimmed, trying to catch his breath. She clearly lost the baby.
Sara meets his eyes briefly, giving him condolence in a look, but none of them speaks.
She steps close to Catherine's bed and reaches out to gently trace back a strand of hair. She feels the surprised eyes of the others on her.
She doesn't feel guilty for having hated Catherine, but she isn't glad, either. Her relationship with the woman has been adversarial, competitive, friendly, and secretly, violently jealous when the talk of baby clothes and baby names came about.
But now they have something in common. Blood sisters. The loss of something falling from where it should be.
She knows they are all looking as she sadly strokes the sleeping woman's hair. She feels his eyes, hungry on her.
Yes, dammit, I have compassion and love. This is what I could give you. I could stroke you this way when you hurt or are afraid. But you won't let me.
She pulls her shaking hand away, and without a word to anyone, leaves the room.
.
There is a funeral. She never knew there were funerals for unborn babies. The whole thing is like a dream. Catherine with red eyes, and Warrick, and Lindsay, all wearing black. People float quietly from room to room like fish in a morphine dream, speaking in tones that grow more hushed the nearer they are to Catherine.
She and Warrick cling together and Sara watches them from the back of the room with tears rising in her eyes. Cold comfort, she is sure, and though she knows it will barely touch their pain, she is jealous. Jealous of the way they lean toward each other like trees grown together, jealous of the way she touches him constantly.
She signs the guest book. There are rituals for the grieving, when the grieving have something tangible to mourn. Everyone saw Cath's swollen belly and glowing skin, and heard her bitchy mood swings. Tangible. Her pain is there for all to see, and people have come from far and wide to support her.
Sara feels rise of a familiar visceral ache, and closes her eyes against the bad timing, and brutal fucking irony her body is inflicting on her.
From within, she feels a loss begin to bleed. Something microscopic breaks free and decides to leave the world. Unseen and unheralded. Unfinished because it has never begun.
She feels eyes and her gaze shifts to see Grissom watching her watch them.
She doesn't move her eyes away, this time. And he doesn't waver either. She feels angry, tense. She knows he is wondering what she is thinking, and she wonders how he likes it, to be on the other end of the wondering game. Because she never has.
Greg and his girlfriend pass by, holding hands, and something high in her chest snaps. She turns, and walks very slowly, almost gingerly, from the funeral home, as if she were walking on a tightrope.
Outside there is a courtyard, a little faux freedom for mourners to smoke or look at the sky, and she takes it. An overgrown willow half-hides a bench and she sits on it. It is quiet here, the false quiet of white noise, tucked somewhere under the flight path to McCarran, traffic whooshing by a few streets away. The willow's protection is illusory but the illusion is strong enough. It is all she needs to just break, to let it go.
She is wearing a charcoal-colored dress with tights. She has left her coat inside in her hurry to be out of there. Not caring that she is in a dress and pumps, she curls into a fetal ball against the edge of the bench and sobs. The bench is white and she knows that if she doesn't do something about her period soon she will bleed through to it, but she can't care now. The heaving of her body is almost violent, the fatigued sensation of her stomach muscles mingles with the heightening cramps.
She sobs for all of it. For the lump in her throat the entire five months she was in her first foster home. For the hopeful spark she had owned at Harvard, now dead and gone as the baby Catherine cried for. For Jared Jacobs, who told her that he loved her but he just didn't find her attractive, that she was not enough, and could never be enough. For the murder the simple naive faith she brought here into the desert. For the searing rejection of every conversation forced to exist in emotionless limbo for months and months, for the disconnect she feels like a gaping maw. She cries for the emptiness in her heart and soul and bed and womb. And yes, a little for Catherine, because their bond is a strange one, but it is a bond.
She cries with anger, anger at the hand life has dealt her, angry at Grissom for not loving her enough. She is angry for the way he looks at her but never really sees her when they are talking, and for the way he sees right through to her soul when he thinks she isn't looking. Most of all, she is angry at herself for not having a life, for still going through the motions, and for still being here.
She is angry that they live in a world where Catherine is held in a net of warm sympathy for something she once had, while she is out in the cold morning something that never was.
She clutches her long arms around her legs tightly, clenching her fingers together as if they were a vise that keeps her from flying apart. She hears herself in the cool morning air, resounding sobs, and is simultaneously terrified and impressed at their loudness.
She hasn't cried like this in years and it feels obscenely good to let it go. She doesn't care who sees her. Well, she does, but hell, she's at a funeral, right?
Her laughter gets lost in the rictus of pain and the cadence of sobs. Only then does she feel warmth descending down over her.
A coat. Grissom. She looks up long enough to recognize who it is, and then she curls up even tighter on herself. His coat. It is soft, downy.
He seems to sit down with a little hesitation, and she feels his eyes and concentration on her and it makes her sob all the harder. She isn't sure what would hurt worse, this gentle regard, or his complete indifference.
"Sara..."
She bites back the urge to say something hateful. It sends her into a spiral of sobs. So many things she fears he will say. That he will tell her she shouldn't take things so personally. Or that he will simply take her hand, and offer to take her home, as if she were a child with no judgment of her own. But he doesn't say anything, and that is so typical of him.
She is surprised when she feels a warm arm go around her, and him pulling her, hard, into his side. She sees goosebumps on his neck and realizes that he is cold. Her eyes dart up to his and when she sees the sweet concern in his unsure eyes it sends her back into sobs again. She feels shame and presses her face down into the airless dark void between her chest and knees. But he holds her, unexpectedly strong against him, not as if she were a child, but as if she is a woman he longs to comfort.
They go on like that for some time. She is surprised by the way his hand moves steady and warm over her arm, still holding her close against him. He doesn't talk, but he isn't uncomfortable. For someone who doesn't know what to do about things his touch is so perfect, so sweet, and knowing that she will never really have it feeds the harsh spasms of tears.
He just waits, and holds her.
She hates him for giving her exactly what she needs in this moment. She hates him far more for not being able to give her what she needs in general.
She knows she should give him his coat back, but she can't quite do it. Her cold fingers curl around the collar, pulling it inward and around her. She can't face him so she buries her face in his shoulder. Slowly, she becomes empty, hollowed out, and her sobs calm and her breathing slows. She still quakes with a tremor every few seconds, but she has stopped sobbing. Still his arm moves, and she can feel his breath on her ear. He is so close, and the feel and smell of him, a promise of what she can never have, sends her into another round of sobs.
He holds her tighter, and he is like a different person, a person she knows will be there now but later disappear forever. Another loss to mourn, albeit a sweet and warm one. She shivers, but is not cold.
He squeezes her close against the cold, presses his lips to her hair. "Honey, how can I help?" he murmurs, and after shock takes a second to fill her, the tears return.
You can father my children, she thinks. You can reach out and pull me from this jaded shell I've withdrawn into, because I don't have the strength to reach out to the world anymore, not to you or to anyone. You can be everything I need. You already are, but you could give yourself to me. You could take a risk. You could love me enough to do that.
Instead, she just cries.
"Sweetheart, you're alarming me," he says, slipping his big hand into hers.
"I'm not your sweetheart!" she spits. "And I don't care."
If he is hurt he doesn't indicate it. She doesn't pull away but he still holds her. For a minute his hand slows its calming strokes on her arm, a bird unsure of where to land. Then he begins again, slowly.
"I know you have every right to be angry at me. And I don't expect you to worry about me. But despite how badly I've damaged things I care for you, and I can't stand to see you cry."
She laughs bitterly, but it sounds like a sob. She still doesn't emerge from the protective curtain of her hair. He can't resist the urge to tuck a bit of hair back behind her ear.
"You've made me cry more times than I care to think about." The bitterness and anger are all gone, she is hollowed and empty. It is a mere statement of fact.
"And I don't know how to undo it. I would if I could, in a heartbeat."
"You can't. I heard you say it."
"What?"
She looks up at him. The sun has darted behind a cloud. He is confused, unsure what she means.
"I know I'm not enough for you to risk everything. I accept that. Besides, this isn't about you."
"Well, then, can you tell me as a friend, if nothing else, what is upsetting you?"
"It's none of your business," she whispers softly, without malice, into the teary warmth of her knees.
"I know," he says, and for a long time he is just quiet. She wants to reach out, but her burden right now, the burdens of so many contingent what-ifs, is so heavy, and she can't deal with that kind of hope.
He keeps holding her, and she lets him. And for the moment they are in limbo, a warm limbo. And for just that second she is held warm in his coat, in his arms, in the hushed womb of the willow, under the cold spring sky.
RATING: NC-17
PAIRING: None.
SPOILERS/WARNINGS: Through early Season Five.
DISCLAIMER: I don't own squat. Don't sue me please.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Thanks to Cinco for courageous and truthful beta.