A/N: This is my first attempt. Constructive criticism is always welcome, as I would like to improve my writing in any way possible. Destructive criticism just bites. :)

Spoilers: A small one for "Too Tough to Die" in this chapter. But I've seen all four seasons, so any episode is fair game for future chapters.

Disclaimer: Believe me, I wish I owned CSI. Because, if I did, Grissom and Sara would be living the American dream with their 2.3 kids and ¾ of a dog. Or maybe Grissom would be living with me and Sara would be on the outside looking in. Or maybe... oh, never mind. I don't own them, OK? Never have, never will. But it sure is fun to play with them, isn't it? :)

A Sense of Balance

Chapter 1

Sara had a tenuous grip on an armload of gear as she approached the SUV. A stack of cold case files was carefully balanced under her left arm, a duffel bag was slung haphazardly over her right shoulder, and her kit was grasped tightly in her right hand, along with her keys. The balance may have been precarious, but it worked... that is, until she moved the kit to her other hand to allow herself room to maneuver the key into the driver's door. She felt the files begin to shift dangerously and instinctively moved her left leg in a desperate attempt to regain her equilibrium. Unfortunately, she didn't take into account the weight of the duffel bag, which followed her movements and knocked her slightly off balance, causing the files to drop unceremoniously to the ground.

"Crap!" she muttered, her gaze falling on the scattered mess of files at her feet. She stooped toward the ground with a sigh. It would take hours to get everything back into its rightful place. "This is so not my night..."

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Grissom had never seen the need for much time away from work. For the most part, he loved his job too much to stay away from it. But there were times when he was only too happy to take a night off. This was one of those times.

Only too eager to forget where he worked, he'd done his best to take off the day's stresses with his attire the minute he had set foot in his townhouse, shucking his shoes immediately before going to work on the upper part of his body. Removing uncomfortable slacks in favor of a far more relaxing pair of knee-length gym shorts, he'd then succumbed to laziness and contented himself with merely unbuttoning his shirt and rolling its sleeves up above his elbows rather than changing it altogether.

Not caring what he looked like at that point, he'd crawled into bed and done his best to sleep, but the slumber had been fitful and dream-filled. They weren't restful dreams, either. He did have those sometimes. Dreams of a childhood with a loving mother who had doted upon her highly intelligent, if slightly odd, son. Dreams of a young adulthood filled with constant learning and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Dreams of sharing a future with a tall brunette who occupied more than her fair share of his thoughts, both waking and subconscious.

But at least those were pleasant dreams. Even if he awoke with a sense of yearning for that which he could not have, the dreams themselves had been happy. The ones he'd had today had been anything but, which explained why he was now lying on his sofa idly flipping through television stations. He was bone tired, and he knew that the one thing he needed above all else was rest. But he did not want to deal with the dreams. So he searched among the 70-some-odd channels for something to occupy his mind until exhaustion could take its toll and numb him into a dreamless oblivion.

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With a sense of accomplishment, Sara finally sat back to survey her handiwork – the newly reorganized case files. At least she'd had a productive night. The files were in better shape now than they had been when she'd taken them, with every piece of evidence now catalogued in an orderly fashion. Unfortunately, in her exhaustive look at all of the evidence in each case, she'd still turned up nothing that would get them any closer to catching the people who had committed these crimes. But, hey, at least the files look better, she thought with a small smile.

She had no idea how long she'd been in the same position until she tried to move her stiff muscles. Her hands involuntarily moved to the small of her back to knead the aching tissue, and she carefully swiveled her neck in a 360-degree angle to eliminate the soreness. Glancing up at the clock, she was shocked to find that it was almost 3 a.m. – she'd been in here for nearly five hours! Seeing Sara's distraught look upon her arrival at the lab, Catherine had been nice enough to give her some uninterrupted time to straighten out the disheveled files, and she was certainly grateful. But she was equally certain Cath had never expected her to spend five hours on what essentially amounted to grunt work when there were real cases to be solved. She found herself feeling especially glad that Grissom had the night off. No way he would have been quite so understanding, she thought.

Heaving a sigh as the image of her disapproving supervisor crossed her mind, she grabbed up the stack of files and headed for his office. He'd told her she could take them home as long as she brought them back the next night. Her grip on the files tightened as she neared his office door, not wanting to repeat the same mistake twice. There was no way she was going to spend another five hours rearranging these files. Making sure they were secure in her left hand, she opened the door with her right and entered the dimly lit room. Knowing his office by heart, she didn't bother with the light, instead walking confidently to a corner on the left side of the room where she deposited the files atop several others.

Putting them down bothered her more than she expected. Of course, it always drove her crazy to leave cases unsolved, but this was something more than that. She couldn't quite put her finger on it. She was missing something, some clue that would shed some light on one of them. It nagged at her, this sort of fuzzy specter at the edge of her mind. She could see it in her peripheral vision but, as soon as she turned to look at it directly, it escaped her view. What really disturbed her was that she knew she had seen it in the files and just couldn't place it. She continued to stare at the pile, as though it would somehow magically clarify her muddled thoughts.

The insistent ring of her cell phone startled her out of her reverie. Her mind still somewhat preoccupied, she absently unclipped the phone from her belt and, flipping it open, brought it to her ear. "Sidle."

"Hey, it's Brass. Got a DB for ya. Cath said you were the only one not tied up at the moment. She'll come help out as soon as she and Nicky finish up at the Bellagio." Sara grimaced at the mention of the high-profile burglary at the upscale hotel. She was only too happy to have been left out of that one.

"Yeah, I'm free. Where are you?" Sara replied, the elusive clue all but forgotten as she reached for a stack of Post-It notes on Grissom's desk. She quickly jotted down the address and tore off the top sheet. "OK," she responded. "Be there in 20."

"'K," Brass replied. "See ya."

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Grissom finally settled on a PBS rendition of A Midsummer Night's Dream for his sleep-inducing fare. The Shakespearean comedy was lighthearted enough to take his mind off the last case he'd worked, and the production itself was quite good. He found himself grinning at Puck's antics and more than a little impressed at the actor's portrayal. There was even a time or two when he laughed aloud.

He was completely engrossed in the program, so much so that he didn't even notice as fatigue overcame him. His eyelids grew heavier, and his blinks became longer. When the show ended at 3:00 am, one utterly exhausted entomologist lay asleep on the couch, the remote control hanging loosely from a right hand draped over the side of the sofa and his left arm thrown carelessly above his head. In sleep, he looked substantially less like a brilliant scientist and considerably more like an innocent boy, but there was no one nearby to make such an observation or to theorize on the implications of such evidence. It simply was what it was.

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"Thank God...," Sara muttered, opening the door to her Denali. Her kit lay in the passenger seat, right next to the duffel bag. Now that she wasn't quite so panicked at the thought of losing it, she could remember what had happened. Upon her arrival at the lab, not wanting to risk a repeat performance of the "Scattered Files Show," she had left the kit and bag in the SUV, with every intention of making a second trip outside to retrieve them. Once she'd gotten inside, though, work had consumed her thoughts, as it had so many other nights, and the kit and bag had been forgotten until this very moment.

The thought of losing her field kit had caused her heart to sink in her chest – she'd spent years accumulating the tools of her trade, and everything therein was just as she wanted it. And that didn't even take into account the sentimental value of a few of the contents. Climbing into the Denali's cab, she started the engine before giving in to the absurd urge to inspect the contents of the silver box. Knowing full well she was being paranoid, that no one except her could have any possible use for what was encased in its metallic innards, she nevertheless allowed herself to unlatch it. Running her fingers lightly over a few of the more precious elements inside, she sighed as a wave of relief washed over her. Everything was present and accounted for. Whew.

As she put the truck into gear and pulled out of the lab's parking lot, a wistful smile took up residence on her face, and she allowed her thoughts to drift to the memories invoked by the items she had just touched. Hanging from the metallic lid was a small silver pendant on a beaded chain. The pendant bore the image of St. Catherine, a scientist who lived in the Middle Ages, a woman who was not afraid to fight – and die – for what she believed in. The jewelry had once belonged to a woman who had been a victim of a violent crime committed by a juvenile offender, and it had been given to Sara by the woman's husband following her death nearly two years after the assault. Pam had been a fighter, but her death had come a year too late for any real justice to be meted out. Sara still remembered what the husband had said as he handed her the necklace: "Pam would have wanted you to have this. You're belligerent, just like she was. She would have liked you." Sara took that as a compliment. A huge one. That pendant reminded her of exactly why she did this job, especially on the days when the pressure and the stress and the injustice and the inhumanity threatened to overwhelm her. She was belligerent, and Pam would have liked her. It always brought a smile to her face. She would have liked Pam, too.

As she exited I-15 and drove along meandering residential streets, she allowed her mind to drift to the gyroscope bolted into the back of her field kit. Its small glass cylinder held an interior plastic tube that contained an iron and mercury compound, and the entire device was suspended in a plastic frame. The metallic mixture, much like a compass, was sensitive to magnetic forces, rocking gently in a perpetual motion induced by the earth itself. She felt a warmth flood through her soul at the memory of her mother's gentle smile as she handed Sara the physics anomaly that had been a gift for her college graduation. The elder Sidle had fairly beamed with pride as Sara strode towards her decked out in cap and gown and had reverently fingered the gold lettering on the crimson diploma cover, whispering, "I only wish your father had lived to see this." Sara could only give her a bittersweet smile in response – she wished that, too.

Then, suddenly remembering the gift, her mother had looked over her shoulder at her older brother David, who held the package with its attached card out to Sara. "Sweetheart," said her mom. "You know I'm not smart, but I do know a thing or two about life. I'm so very proud of you and all that you've become. And I know that you'll always be successful in all that you do."

Even more so than the gift that meant so much to her, the card had taken Sara's breath away. She'd long since committed it to memory, recalling its words whenever she needed advice. "Sara Elizabeth," it began. "On this day in which you end one chapter in your life and begin a new one, I couldn't imagine any better gift to bestow upon you than a sense of what is important in life. So look at this instrument as your sense of balance. Your life, like this gyroscope, is composed of two vastly different elements that must complement each other for that balance to be achieved."

"The iron is a strong solid metal, but malleable to a variety of outside forces and easily moved in whatever direction those forces choose to pull it. But it's not substantial enough to move the cylinder on its own. It represents your career, your vocation, your job, your work, whether that's solving mathematical equations or raising children. It's important, and it can control your life if you let it. But it can't cause motion by itself."

"Which brings us to the mercury. A heavy liquid metal that molds itself around the iron, allowing it to move. It is, in and of itself, not susceptible to the outside forces that bring motion. But, when it envelops the iron, it allows your life to live and breathe – and move. The mercury represents the personal side of your life – the relationships you develop with other people, the friendships, the romance, the substance. It's vital but can weigh you down and keep you stagnant if you allow it to do so. And there's no motion with mercury alone."

"So, honey, I'm sure you know which metal you seem to have an overabundance of at the present. Since you have so much iron, please try to get as much mercury as you can, even though you don't seem to have a great desire for it at the moment. In the years ahead, you will begin to realize that you need them both. I love you so much and look forward to watching your life in perpetual motion for many years to come. Love, Mom."

Her mom had been right about one thing. She did know a thing or two about life. She was, without a doubt, the single wisest person Sara knew. But she'd been wrong about something else. It wasn't that Sara hadn't wanted more mercury in her life, just that she had never known how to get it.

She blinked away a sudden mistiness as she veered onto a tree-lined cul-de-sac nestled in a suburban neighborhood that looked too peaceful to ever be affected by violence. Only the flashing red-and-blue lights of Las Vegas' finest served to mar a landscape that had been painted on a canvas of gentle serenity. She came to a stop behind Brass' unmarked vehicle and, grabbing the kit, got out of the truck.

TBC....