LIFE IN GREY
Disclaimer: They aren't mine. Are you surprised?
Author's Note: This was written for the Thousand Whispers challenge - to write a fic based on lines from one of TS Eliot's poems. For some reason, ff.net won't let me post the address.
"And I wonder how they should have been together
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon's repose."
From "La Figlia Che Piange"
They say you don't know what you've got till it's gone.
It was true for me.
It was just any other crime scene, any other night, until an SUV hurtled around a corner onto the street where Sara and I were processing a gang related shooting. The SUV sped up, hit Sara with devastating force, sent her body flying through the air. There was nothing free about this flying, especially not when she hit the ground with a soft thump and was still and quiet and limp like a piece of wet paper.
Two seconds and the SUV was gone. Two more seconds and the officers were in their patrol car giving desperate chase and Brass was on the radio calling out every spare unit in Las Vegas with that dreaded call 'Officer Down'. A split second, and I was kneeling beside Sara feeling the cool concrete of the sidewalk through my trousers, searching her neck for a pulse and begging her to still be alive.
I found a faint pulse and it gave me the tiniest bit of hope. And there I sat with her and waited. Waited for an ambulance, waited for her to wake up, waited for her to die, I don't know. Just waiting.
I promised her the earth there on that sidewalk in a Las Vegas dawn. I promised her the earth, if only she'd wake up. I found the words I'd never been able to say before and told her I loved her, rolling the sound of the words around on my tongue as Brass kept the curious and frightened onlookers back.
The paramedics arrived and they and Sara and I in the back of the ambulance cut through the traffic swiftly, the deep ominous wail of the siren clearing our path. I clutched her hand as the attendant worked to keep her alive, and thought how much I loved her as I sat cramped and nervous isolated from the outside world, finally coming to wonder who would deliberately hit a CSI, knowing that it had been deliberate and it had something to do with the crime we'd been investigating.
It had been deliberate, someone had deliberately tried to kill Sara, to cause enough damage to her body that her brain and lungs and heart would just stop working and she'd pass into a twilight world and then into the deep eternity of death.
I felt I hated humanity, that seething mass of humanity that existed outside that ambulance, because humanity had produced someone who could even consider killing Sara who was so beautiful and smart and so disconcertingly affectingly vulnerable.
We came to the hospital and there they took her from me, rushing her away through institutionalised formalised always-the-same corridors in a swarm of doctors and nurses and people who could help her and I stood there in the emergency room and I was lost.
I called information and called her parents in California needing desperately to connect with people who understood what that SUV had done and who loved Sara and who would grieve or rejoice with me. And then I was alone again until they arrived. Brass had arrived but there was a gulf between him and me at that moment as he promised that his men and the day shift crew would do everything to catch the sick depraved species of person who had done this to Sara.
We heard nothing as we watched the tableau of life played out in the emergency room, not knowing if Sara was alive or dead or still somewhere in between. Catherine and Nick and Warrick arrived harrassed, Nick desperate, begging to see Sara, his face crumbling when I told her that I didn't even know where in this huge cruel hospital she was. He said he needed to see her but I didn't understand then how anyone could possibly think they ineeded/i to see her when my own need was like that of a starving empty person all alone in the deepest loneliest desert in the world.
A nurse came to tell us they were taking Sara into theatre, that she was bleeding internally and that no one could make any promises. And I thought of all the promises I had made Sara and felt that I alone of everyone in the world could promise. She led us like a herd of dejected sheep to a waiting room and I ignored the sight of Nick punching the wall even though I knew it had to hurt like hell.
We waited and we waited and an author or psychologist would have loved to have watched us wait, to see how we all coped, how Catherine had to try to comfort others to mask her own fear, how Warrick paced up and down up and down like a wild animal suddenly caged, how Brass sat stoic, how Nick sat alone not letting even Catherine near him alone in his own private hell but so desperately determined not to let us see. How I just sat and felt useless and helpless and unbelievably guilty for taking her to the scene, for not telling her I loved her so many many months ago and all because I was scared and now the fear I knew made that fear ridiculous.
A different efficient starched nurse brought Sara's parents in and I stood up to greet them, introduce myself, hoping so hard that I could take control of this situation. Mrs Sidle walked in determined like Sara and straight to Nick who was on his feet and embraced him as Nick's face crumpled like a small child's and he let out a sob like that of so many truly grieving men I have met over so many years. For a few brief seconds my confusion overwhelmed my fear for Sara until I realised Catherine was talking to Sara's father, introducing us all. He shook my hand, thanked me for calling, then shook hands with the others as well, all except Nick who was still hugging his wife.
Mrs Sidle let go of Nick and his face was red and he was wiping tears from his eyes frantically with the back of his hand. Mr Sidle shook hands with him too, managing some kind of a smile, and then we all sat and waited again because now was not the time for polite pointless social small talk.
Finally then a nurse came back, the first nurse who had brought us here, and said Sara was out of surgery and doing as well as could be expected, that she had some serious internal damage but they were confident she would be fine. And then it was like my own personal sunrise and I was so wonderfully relieved and free that I barely noticed the others rejoicing in their own unique ways.
The nurse said Sara could have one or two people to sit with her although she would not wake up for a while, and my heart hurt as I did what the others did and turned to her parents, knowing it should be them although I needed and wanted to see her and touch her and promise her all those things again. And Mr Sidle who was sitting next to Nick swallowed and looked at Nick and said, "You go with Helena, Nick. Sara will want you when she wakes up."
Nick looked just briefly at each of us but his eyes did not meet mine, then he shook Mr Sidle's hand and stood up and went with the nurse and Mrs Sidle and there was a deep deafening silence there in that waiting room. Catherine finally broke the silence and said perhaps we ought to go home and get some rest and what did Mr Sidle want to do. And I still remember Mr Sidle blithely saying that he'd go to Nick and Sara's if someone would give him a lift, he knew where the spare key was from last time he'd visited.
And the silence was a hundred thousand million excrutiating times more painful as suddenly everything began to make a horrible twisted sense to me and Catherine and Brass, as Warrick calmly offered to drive Mr Sidle and and Mr Sidle looked at us all and said oh, that tiny syllable that everyone says without thinking and that means so many different things. And this time it meant he'd remembered we weren't supposed to know about Nick and Sara being in love although it was too late now because Nick had gone with his wife, and it was then when he said oh that the bottom fell out of my world and life changed into so many different shades of grey.
No one said anything about it as Warrick left with Mr Sidle and then Brass said he'd take Catherine and me and we walked in silence and stepped out into the sunlight and I detested the sunlight. I sat in the back seat as Brass drove to my townhouse and tried not to think Nick and Sara, Nick and Sara, all this time and I never knew or Catherine or Brass but who knew about Warrick? And all my promises seemed so futile if Nick was making her dreams come true, if Nick had given her the earth instead of just promising it. I knew that over the last months she had seemed to have climbed back out of the pit of misery life and I had dug for her and I thought maybe that meant this time I could summon up the courage to love her, never dreaming that all the time Nick was loving her as she'd needed to be loved.;
My emotion at the time surprised me, especially when I put a name to it and knew that name was right. Betrayal. Betrayal of all my numberless fearless fanciful dreams that I'd never managed to force into words because words would constrain them. Betrayal of the hope that I had somehow managed to feel sometimes surprising even myself. I knew logically in the part of my head where things still worked in a certain step by step ABC 123 order that I had betrayed Sara so many times so long ago, but it was so much easier to believe that she and Nick had betrayed me.
I let Brass and Catherine leave me at the door and drive off into the distance knowing that right as soon as the door of the Tahoe had closed behind me they'd been talking about Sara and Nick and about me. Inside everything was the same as I knew but so very unchangably different, and I sank onto my sofa and thought of Nick at Sara's bedside, watching her wake up and return to life and consciousness. I wanted to wonder they could have ended up together, a too brightly friendly judge's son from Texas and an overachieving science nerd from California with more secrets than most people dreamed of. Their being together made sense on some other level, that I couldn't, wouldn't comprehend. I forced myself not to think of Nick saving Sara from herself and from me and fell asleep on the sofa dreaming for one last time that Sara would love me.
When I woke up the world was still in those shades of grey as I went into work, received condolences and queries from so many people and was informed by the receptionist that Nick Stokes wouldn't be in.
I took the assignment slips and sat down with Catherine and Warrick and tried to find somewhere in myself the ability to work as though nothing else had happened, as though a madman in an SUV hadn't been the catalyst for my whole safe comfortable world suddenly tipping and spinning like a ball rolling down a steep hill never to reach the bottom.
Four months later I am lonelier than ever before watching Nick and Sara together. She has finally returned to fieldwork and Nick watches her with a protective eye that sees more than her every move. She smiles for him when she won't smile for anyone else and more than once I have seen them quietly talking in the locker room or a corner of the break room and Sara has changed so much now.
Every spare minute of thought is devoted to her and him and trying to unravel it all. I don't have the answer to this mystery and that is so terrifyingly scary that sometimes I feel as though my ground of logical thought is buckling underneath me.
I live life in grey now while Sara lives hers in colour and know she was telling the truth the day she said "You might be too late."
THE END