Take Anything

Disclaimer: Not mine.

Rating: R

Feedback: Yes; this is my first CSI story (that I've posted)

Random: Yesterday, Kay gave me a song, which led to this. I figure the story is hers.

Summary: Grissom is fascinated with bugs, but mostly just Sara.

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01. prologue: in the background of a restless world.

I.

She spent his lecture: chiding herself for being giddy over the placement of her seat, cursing because she forgot to take out the garbage when she left, watching him walk across the room while she wondered how old he was, taking notes and notes and notes, wanting to lick salt off of his forearms, spotting the soft bulge of his genitals; he dressed to the right, she noticed, and not caring if his eyes were as blue as they seemed because his intelligence was setting her on fire.

He spent his lecture: talking, walking, telling a joke about moths (it did not go over well), guessing as to what type of drugs the brunette sitting in the front was abusing because she was asking question after question after—oh, discovering said brunette had light freckles across her nose, and at the end of his lecture, upon learning her name was Sara, promptly left the room, unknowingly leaving all his material behind.

They: in the parking lot, met at his car, and awkwardly laughed as she mentioned his forgotten belongings. Her age? he asks himself, but frowns when he realizes it was said out loud. She answers him, possibly to fill her need to reply to every question, whether asked or not.

He is uncomfortable around people and she is distrustful of all men, but they manage a terse conversation; it is filled with fact, mostly science, something on which they've both learned to heavily rely. She mentions Physics and he nods: matter, energy, and interaction. It occurs to him, suddenly, at some point he will end while she stretches on forever; he finds it cold that human nature dictates that no two people will ever follow the same path.

She smiles and he's reminded of baseball.

II.

It is dangerous, the way he is very slowly engulfing her. He's pressing against her with his hands, his body, with his teeth biting her shoulder through the thin fabric of her shirt. And she's sure he has no idea he can do this—and, oh God, she groans—that he's doing it right now. She slips one of her fingers into the front of his pants along his waistband, silently thanking her mother for those long slim digits, and is encouraged by the heat of his skin and the tensing of his abdominal muscles. Before she can move her hand any further down his fingers wrap around her wrist, gently, as if checking her pulse. He sighs loudly, tilts his head and pulls her hand away from his pants; his fingertips trail along her forearm as he lets it drop slowly to her side. Then he purses his lips and fixes his gaze on the slight arch of her neck in an effort to control his breathing.

He takes a deep breath, thinking he's safe, but then she kisses him, and there's something in the way her tongue runs over his lips that tells him he was wrong.

Later, it's not when they're in his hotel room or when his hand has her wrists pinned to the headboard, the other frantically digging through sheets searching for the curve of her hip. It is only as her heels dig into his lower back, trying to get him closerclosercloser, she gives him something, he decides, and as she comes he presses a kiss to the palm of her hand in a half-hearted attempt to give it back.

III.

His flight is early the next day. He's running late, so she says goodbye to him through the bathroom door, and turns to leave. He opens the door quickly, wearing nothing but a pair of fogged up glasses, and gives her a receipt, his phone number written on the back, and a cassette labeled 'random'. The latter confuses her, so he explains. The night before he leaves he makes a soundtrack for each lecture he's ever given. Her knuckles are white around the cassette when she leaves.

Led Zeppelin accompanies her during the drive home, she pulls into her driveway with Mozart, undresses with, of all things, Gilbert and Sullivan, and falls asleep in the bathtub with Pink Floyd. She wakes to freezing bathwater and his cassette having been eaten by her stereo.

02. one: the blue-eyed man who knows.

I.

He knows that she moved there for the chance to work at one of the best labs in the country. It's what he tells himself, because now it's him and her, 'them' having occurred long enough ago, only once, and he can believe if it's easy. He knows that she smells of coffee and books, overstresses her sibilants when she's defensive, and that it will never be easy.

II.

He considers that it may never be enough to just simply know her. They work well together, as he suspected they would, but he has these impulses to ask her odd personal questions (What was her favorite childhood memory?) and for the freedom to touch her, though not inappropriately. He'd like to touch the ends of her hair or bury his face in the crook of her shoulder when it's been one of those days, as though he's spent the last week just trying to catch his breath and keep his eyes open.

Other times he watches her. There is something tragic about her, or at least the way he sees her, and it's appealing to him. He's positive she only knows love with pain and spends more time in the pursuit of the happiness than actually experiencing it. At times she appears almost disillusioned, and that's when he wonders what exactly has made her who she is because he realizes he doesn't have a fucking clue.

III.

A baby dies—always the death in her or the death in him, which by turns keeps them both together and apart—and that's when it's easiest to tell himself why she's in Las Vegas; there is no question because she is so good at what she does. There's the baby, she's standing really close to him, and it'd be completely innocent (oh, they've had so many of these) but she had to go and lean forward. She still smells of coffee and books; he smiles, maybe he's been hiding too long, and he thinks, no, he's thinking: Shakespeare and Confucius, he wants to tell her: I wear my lab coat now constantly, I think, maybe, I can feel you there. Instead he smiles, though, and her eyes are wide like open windows.

After he gets home he works on a crossword puzzle until he falls asleep. He dreams about what it would be like to kiss her. How it would feel or where they would be when it happens. A place separate from both him and her, from reality and repercussions, a place so far away that it's beyond focus; he'd put his hands on either side of her face and kiss her cheeks and the corners of her mouth. He'd feel her scalp underneath his fingertips. Those imaginary places are theirs. And the only ones they have.

03. two: evil or good as the case may be.

I.

Cue a scuba diver who followed an impossible trajectory.

His pulse is beating hard and directly between his eyes. He is frustrated and tired. She is just tired. They speak for a little bit and when his eyes close she places her hand on the side of his face and for a moment it's everything—her breath warm against his eyelids and her thumb resting under his cheek. Places belonging to them and floating just out of reach, emotion genuine until it's communicated, and there must be some other way to lose me in you echoing for those few seconds along with his heartbeat.

Time passes in the form of corpses and in the end it's large amounts of paperwork that separate the living from the dead.

II.

She doesn't eat meat and he should know this. He does know that her hair is always parted slightly off center. She hasn't eaten meat for a long while and he should know this. He does know she is double jointed and as a result of all those loose ligaments she visits the chiropractor whenever she can. She doesn't know that he respects her. It's about time she finds out. He makes a phone call while Catherine flutters around his townhouse, drinking all his good vodka.

"The sentiment?" he asks. "Oh, oh, on the card. Yeah. Um—I want to fall asleep holding you and I'll dream of absolutely nothing because I won't have to—uh … have it say … have it say, uh … from Grissom."

III.

They are standing underneath an overpass and staring at a billboard, which proudly displays the smile of a dead woman. She completes his thoughts, but not all of them, and he knows then that he wants too much because he just fell in love with her all over again.

04. three: the limitations of a painter's art.

I.

She is dating someone named Hank. He is an EMT and definitely isn't knowledgeable about insects or bullet striations and given to quoting 'Waiting For Godot' or several poet-laureates. Initially after finding out about Hank, he panics, but assumes she will get tired of Hank and they will separate. Then she'll be back to the both of them and this thing they don't have. He is wrong on one count.

II.

Things are changing between them and it's for the worse. They do not work together much anymore because he very well can't keep her to himself. There are no more sly remarks leading to conversations that carry on way too long. She stares at him like he's a book and she just wants to skip to the last chapter.

He thinks about endings, about his and theirs, or if they will ever have a beginning for that matter. There's something there, which he can't wrap his mind around, and he loves it.

III.

He is going deaf. It is not surprising. He felt like an idiot for letting his condition worsen to the point that his hearing could permanently suffer. He couldn't do his job if he wasn't able to hear, the thought made him feel sick, but it wasn't until he knew if he stopped working there'd be no more Sara that he vomits in the sink in the doctor's office. He shakes it off later as shock, but he makes a point to not eat lunch with her until his surgery is deemed successful. He can't stand that look in her eye, the one that tells him she could feel him slipping away from her in every way that mattered.

05. idle: intermission(s)

Ever since the first fire burned: long, long ago—even before that, there have been secrets. People will always have secrets; there's a primitive urge (no matter how advanced our technology becomes, what kind of fuel our automobiles require, how well we sleep at night) to keep part of ourselves away from everyone and everything; keep it clean and safe, it begins and ends with us. It may be a person or a tragedy, but the world spins on and—their secret?

They help each other live and they help each other die.

06. four: meanwhile, the day becomes two hours older.

I.

He is no closer to telling her exactly how he feels, but he's got her pinned to a wall, and while it is part of a murder investigation, there is nothing remotely work related about the position in which they find themselves. If it were, he wouldn't be counting her breaths or remembering the last time he held her wrists. He is intimately aware that the length of her spine is one giant erogenous zone. Even so, he manages to resist the urge to force her face first against the wall, arms splayed, while she feels his breath on the back of her neck and his fingers walking down her spine, counting each vertebrae out loud.

II.

The most personal conversation he's ever had with Sara occurs not with her but a stranger and through the large window of an interrogation room. He pours his soul out to a murderer but won't say more then ten words to her at a time. After Lurie leaves as a free man, Grissom sits resigned in his seat. He damned her when he gave that lecture years ago, condemned her to this, to him, to their stasis, and he knows she can't use his distance to keep her warm.

She watches him through the window; between his defeated posture and the colors of the room the entire scene seems like a washed out still-life, or at the very least, a blue period that's gone on entirely too long. It is the first time since their not-quite beginning that she sees him and feels nothing. She wants to know what he feels when he looks at her, or if he looks at all.

III.

He comes to take her home. Her hand is cold and firm in his; if defeat, the kind where you fall so slow and long into nothing, had a mascot it would be Sara Sidle. He does take her home; he can't break any promises where she is concerned since he's broken so many to himself.

She heads straight to the refrigerator when they get to her place and for a second he wants to say something, but he doesn't, and when she sits down on her couch with a glass of milk, he's relieved and sits down next to her. They don't speak, which is familiar territory, for about then minutes. Then she takes off her shoes, they drop on the floor with a thud, and tucks her feet underneath her. He nervously drums his fingers on his knee in a vague take off of 'The William Tell Overture'. Before the repeat recitation, she is leaning on his right side, warm and delightfully solid. He is so lost as to what to do he fears he'll never make it back home. After mentally panicking for a moment, he's very glad to realize she's asleep. He moves slightly, testing out the waters, and she doesn't stir. A heavy sleeper, he tucks it away for later.

He carries her to bed, despite the protests of various joints, and leaves a glass of water on her nightstand. Propped against the glass is a note: If you need time, take it, and (a few erased words). Grissom.

07. five: as the sky falls down onto their regrets.

I.

He will never be an expert on her, but when she tells him about her mother and father, spattered blood and palpable hate, he wants to know everything. She sits in a chair, tucked into herself like a child, gripping his hand tight enough to break bones. He almost wishes she would because he'll take pain over this disgusted feeling that currently has him anchored to his seat. Her crying eventually tapers off to slight noises and he once again takes her to bed. He doesn't leave a note because he has no idea what to write.

During the drive home he wonders if it'll always be him who tucks her in after a horrifying day; he'll take it over nothing, but he'd rather be there to wake her up before the horrible day starts.

II.

She was close to getting her throat slit weeks ago, him as a witness, and he still can't bring himself to look at her neck. Ecklie can go screw himself with the hair he doesn't have because there are things Grissom is willing to be without, but she isn't one of them. Whatever happens, the lab can take it one step at a time, just like they will—if she'll still have him.

Two days later Nick is buried alive and he forgets about nearly everything, including her, for two days.

III.

Nick has recovered enough to be released from the hospital; he's taking some time off and, with his family in tow, is going home. It's time for Grissom to do the same. The next day he smiles at Sara in the break room and there is no mistake about where he wants it to lead.

08. epilogue: and we stagger forward.

I.

Everything was so ridiculously simple for them, in the end, that he almost found it funny. Almost.

After a fairly straightforward case (murder can be such a bore, sometimes) they drink bitter coffee in his office and as she rises to leave she sways. He stands with outstretched arms and it is painful when he steadies her—after all this time, she falls to him so easily. They leave the remaining coffee to its own devices and drive to his home, where they shrug off any pretense or intrusions from the world outside, and go to sleep.

II.

It is noon the next day when they both wake up, tangled in each other more so than sheets; Grissom brushes hair away from her face and tells her about the strange urge he has to down three shots and read the last two chapters of Pride and Prejudice. She kisses him until she has him believing it's a sin.

Breakfast is eaten in relative silence, though he frowns more than once at the nutritional value of her two cups of coffee and half-eaten apple. She claims the apple is rotten and he needs to find a new place to buy fruit. He takes her hand and runs his thumb over the scar she has from the lab explosion. Two minutes later, she is kneeling, him in her mouth, salty and searing and sliding down the back of her throat like a snake. She tilts her head and wraps her arms around him, hugging the backs of this thighs; it's about time for someone to devour him.