Titel: We Never Close (Season 3 Reloaded)
Teil: 1/24
Autor: Ayu & Ihu
Email:
Rating: PG-16
Pairing: -
Genre: Crime, Drama, Dark, Romantic, Comedy
Warning: AU!
Disclaimer: This literary work is a piece of fan fiction. CSI: Miami, and all associated content (whether trademarked, copyrighted or otherwise protected by U.S. or international law) are property of CBS and Jerry Bruckheimer and/or their registered trademark and copyright holders.

AUTHORS' NOTE:

"We Never Close" began as a simple RPG the two of us (Ayu and Ihu) used to play online, but we liked the idea of presenting our alternative storyline to all of you as a fanfiction, so we started to go through the story again and rewrote some of the paragraphs. The first chapter began to take shape, but we decided that 'Troubleshooting' will not be the end of it. The whole fanfiction is now planned as a complete alternative season with – at least – 24 episodes.
Later on, there'll be several crossovers with CSI and CSI:NY (between Episodes 10-15) and – after a long time of discussion – we've decided on a pairing, but we dare not telling you g
Concerning Updates:
Since we're still writing this whole story as an RPG (because it's fun!), it may take some time 'til we are able to finish a chapter. This is not only because of the lenght of every single chapter. Another important factor is that after writing it, we are reviewing the story twice. If you want to know when a new chaper should be published or how far we are in writing/editing it, you may look at our homepage or livejournal.
Warning:
The story is read over and over again by the authors themselves, but there'll definitely be some mistakes left (It's a tough thing to find a native-speaking and relieable beta-reader). So, if you find any mistakes in grammar or orthography and spelling or logical sense, feel free to keep them ;)! We deeply apologize, but we're just two young German women and have never been to the United States by now (although we're planning on a trip in 2008). Our knownledge of the English language is just as lacking – we learned it in school for 9 years, but we still need to improve a lot! We hope, you'll enjoy this stuff, though!

Ayu & Ihu

Ayu & Ihu Productions
CSI: MIAMI
"We Never Close"
SEASON 3: RELOADED

Episode 1
Troubleshooting

The scent of red and gold flowers in early bloom filled the air where it mingled with the joyous songs of the birds that praised the arrival of spring. The first rays of sunlight peeked through the leaves of the threes illuminating the park with a gentle golden light, showing lightgreen grass which was soaked with dark blood.
The peaceful silence was disturbed by the angry dark colors and a small crowd of passengers had gathered around the yellow tape, which had been bared around the crime scene by police officers. None of them cared about the flowers and trees awakening from their winter's sleep or the sun burning down on Miami. All they wanted was getting a glimpse on the two corpses found in the middle of the park that particular morning.
Alexx Woods stared down at the two 16-year-old girls lying side by side and holding each others hands, while Eric Delko walked around them and took several pictures of their dead bodies.
One girl - her name was Julie McMiller - had been a beautiful and very feminine young woman with golden hair and red lips. Her white shirt was ripped open and showed three small holes where the projectiles had penetrated her fragile body.
The bullets had obviously been shot by an automatic 9mm handgun. Alexx knew, because the other girl named Viviane McMiller had her right hand clutched tightly around the handle of the gun. Horatio Caine - who had checked on the girls' IDs earlier - had told her that they were twin sisters, but from the outside they didn't seem to have much in common. Viviane was - unlike her sister - the sportive and tomboyish type with black-colored hair and muscular arms. She was rather masculine, but her lids were covered with dark eyeshadow and some sort of liquid eyeliner and a giant tattoo of an exotic Chinese character showed on her neck.
Alexx kneeled down knowing Horatio was following her every move with his eyes.
Carefully tracing the bloodstains on Viviane's face, she tried to reconstruct the event.
"Both have defentionmarks on their arms and shoulders. Looks like they were fighting each other. See these hematoma? You get those when you're beaten up by someone."
She pointed at a lightblue swelling in Viviane's face waiting for her colleague to say something, but Horatio remained silent.
"This one here", Alexx nodded toward Julie, "was killed by three projectiles hitting the abdomen, the left shoulder and her chest. The bullets penetrated her lungs and uterus, causing several internal bleedings. The scapula broke from the impact of the third projectile."
Eric who although listened to Alexx, kept taking pictures with that familiar snap of the camera. He felt like something was out of place. Maybe it was the fact that Viviane held her sister's hand with her left while the fingers of her right hand were wrapped around the trigger. The fact that they were still holding hands was a sign that they seemed to be very close, but if they where, what could have made them this desperate they would kill themselves or each other? But still, both girls had this peaceful expression on their faces as if they were sleeping. Only their gray complexion and bloodstained skin told the CSI they were dead.
"What about Viviane?" he asked Alexx thoughtfully. "What caused her to die?"
"I was just coming to that," she answered. "Viviane was wounded by a single shot into her heart. She must have had a few seconds left after that, otherwise she couldn't have laid down beside her sister all by herself."
Alexx gazed up at Horatio.
"So, what does this look like to you?"
"It occurs Viviane shot her darling sister before she committed suicide, but let's wait what the evidence will tell us." That was all he said, before he turned around and looked at Calleigh Duquesne, who was collecting the shell casings and the bullet that had been a through and through to Julie's body. Calleigh packed the shell casings into different bags and labeled them. After that she started her search for the missing bullet which lay just a few foot away from the two bodies. Carefully she lifted it up and took a good look at it. "What a beauty," Calleigh muttered to herself.
Horatio shook his head slightly, a small smile tugging on his lips, before he returned his attention back towards Alexx.
"Don't you think it's really odd that someone who wants to commit suicide kills himself with a bullet to the chest? How could she know in which way she had to shoot to make sure she would die? Why didn't she choose another way? Something easier?" Horatio asked her.
It was a shame that those two girls died before their time and he was really curious what had caused this. If he was honest to himself, he couldn't believe that Viviane killed herself, even if it may look like it. He couldn't grasp what was wrong, but evidence did not lie, so they would find out. Horatio glimpsed at Ryan Wolfe who shot several pictures of the nearby evidence to secure a proper and complete sketch of the scenery.
"You go ahead," he shouted at Calleigh, who had asked the young CSI something Horatio didn't catch. Calleigh let out a long sigh, stood up and walked over to Alexx, who was still examinating the bodies. She kneeled down beside Viviane and removed the gun in order to take it to the lab. With a few words she told Horatio were he might find her if she was needed. For the time being, all she could do was testing the gun.
After he finished taking pictures, Ryan started taking samples of the blood spatter that where visible on the grass. He had to admit that he was confused how they got this way. As far as he knew you had to shoot from a far distance for the droplets to fall so they created this image. Making a mental note to ask Horatio or Calleigh about this - he couldn't ask them right now because Horatio, Calleigh and Alexx had just taken off toward the lab - he decided not to make any further guesses about this.
Eric packed the camera equipment and stored his toolcase in the back of his car, before returning to the crime scene. He slipped through the near-by passengers and saw Ryan kneeling down and bending deeply over the ground. Eric didn't know, what his colleague was up to, but he thought that their job was done here. All the evidence was photographed, labeled and properly cataloged. What good was this digging the earth?
He shook his head. There was only one thing left to do.
He took off the gloves and walked over to Detective Monroe. The stocky man in his fifties acted as the substitute of Frank Tripp who had left on vacation with his family the previous week. Eric had first met Monroe more than one year ago, but he still didn't like him too much.
The detective was struggling to calm down the woman who called 911, but he obviously did not succeed. The woman was shaking all over and stared down onto the grass. Her lips trembled. Must have been quite a shock for her! Eric thought. Monroe nodded as he caught sight of Eric and retreated obviously relieved to be free of this task, so he stepped up to the woman as her dazzled gaze finally fixed on him.
"I..I...," she stuttered.
"Miss Delfino? My name is Eric Delko," he introduced himself in a calm voice, "I'm an investigator of the CSI squad working on the case of Julie and Viviane McMiller."
"So... that are... the girls' names?" she asked in shock.
"The detective told me, you found the dead bodies at 9:14 a.m. this morning. Did you notice anything unusual until you got here?"
"No," she said, her lips were still trembling terribly. "I was just jogging... enjoyed the fresh breeze... I always do that on Wednesdays... and then..."
She stopped and her eyes filled with tears.
"Have you seen'em before? Or did you know'em?" Eric asked.
"No!" she repeated, almost screaming now. "Why are we going through this again? I told the officer everything I know!"
Okay, seems we're not going to progress here too much right now.
"I know, Miss Delfino. I just wanted to make sure, there's anything you couldn't say in front of Detective Monroe. He can be a little... rude sometimes," Eric admitted. A sardonic smile appeared on his lips. "Yeah, he is..." she agreed, tightening her grip. "He's not the kind of man one can trust too easily."
Eric slowly drew a little card from the inside of his jacket and presented it to her. "This is my name and number. Feel free to call me, if you've got more useful information for CSI."
In order to reassure her, Eric exchanged some more words of comfort with Miss Delfino before he could send her home again.
At last he turned around and saw Ryan, who was still watching the stains on the grass. From his face Eric could tell that he was concentrating on something.
"Ey, boy," he shouted as he closed up to him and interrupted his thoughts, "Let's grab our things and follow Horatio to the lab. We're done here!"
Taking a deep breath and stopping himself from shooting a glare at the other CSI for this addressing Ryan nodded and started packing his things. He was still trying to reconstruct the original event, but no matter what, he couldn't come up with a reasonable explanation for some of the things they'd found. At first sight this case seemed to be pretty easy: Twin sisters having a fight and one shooting the other before committing suicide. But he had this indefinite feeling that the more they got to know the less they seemed to know at all.

She made sure the digital connection up to Horatio's vantage point in the theater was clear, so he could watch the autopsy of Viviane McMiller without any unpleasant complications.
It took sometime to remove her strong, dark makeup, but finally Alexx was done and looked down on her pale face, combed back her black hair and thus took a probe of her DNA.
"Alright, sweetheart", she said tenderly although she knew the girl would never respond, "let's see what happened to you"
She tightened her grip on the scalpel and slowly sliced Vivane's epidermis open. Just as she'd predicted, the bullet had splattered her heartmuscles, causing an almost sudden death. At least, she didn't suffer for long, Alexx thought. Nevertheless, something made Alexx feel uneasy. She had the feeling that things weren't quite the way they seemed to be and she was determined to do whatever she could to make sure they found out what happened to those two girls.
She told Horatio what she saw, although he watched closely and searched the screen for anything particular interesting or unusual.
"A 9mm projectile, stuck in the right heart ventricle. She must have done competitive sports, her muscles are in great shape. That would explain why her heart could stop a bullet, fired from such a short distance."
Her fingers found Viviane's right hand. They had the colour of cold ashes.
Alexx pulled out a small cotton Q-tip and retained a sample of the powdery residue.
"Here's some gunshot residue left on the hand with which she'd fired the shot, but there's nothing whether on her skin around the wound or on her inner organs."
H nodded and looked at the screen. "Alexx, is there any chance you can give us the closest distance she could have been shooted from? And can you tell me something about the TOD?"
Alexx took a bottle out and grabbed her scalpel again to open up the girl's stomach.
"Stomach contents... small pieces of pizza as far as I can tell. Probably the rests of her final supper, but to make sure she hasn't consumed any drugs or chemical material, I'll send this bottle to Eric."
Alexx returned back to Viviane's riven heart.
"From the consequences of the impact", she said slowly while she examined the organ, "I can tell you that..."
She stopped dead in her tracks and looked even harder...
This couldn't be!

After Calleigh got back to the institute she directly took off toward the ballistics research to check on the gun. Beginning her work she extracted all fingerprints she could find on the gun and send those to the DNA lab. As soon as she had finished with checking for samples, she started to disassemble the gun for further examinations. The first thing she actually saw was that just one bullet was missing from the magazine. A thing that just didn't fit into the image of the scene. It shouldn't be right. After all there had been at least four shots and if only one shot was fired out of this gun, which one was it? And even more important, where was the other gun? There had been no traces of another shooter, when they got to the scene so they just assumed that Viviane killed them both. But with what she knew now this could hardly be true.
Making notes on this she checked the rest of the gun before she reassembled it.
"So, let's go ballistic", she said joyfully and put on her safety glasses and earlaps. She fired a single shot to compare the bullet and its residue with the one found near their latest victims. She was only slightly surprised to find out that the bullets didn't match. "So, looks like I found the first bullet of your missing gun. Now let's see which one was shot from this one"
Making a few last notes she made her way towards the autopsy theater.

Horatio raised an eyebrow as Alexx stopped her explanations suddenly. He turned to the screen and tried to figure out what bothered her.
"Alexx?" he asked, waiting for her to continue.
"I'm sorry..."
Sighing deeply she laid down the scalpel, removed the projectile and pointed at the wound caused by the bullet. "You were right. She couldn't have shot herself, otherwise her chest and organs would be far more disrupted and tattered. From the cracks around the wound I'd say she was shot from a distance of 5-10 meters. TOD probably twelve or fifteen hours ago. Makes it approximately 8 to 9 p.m. the previous night."
She gazed up to the window and saw Horatio concentrating on the screen.
"So, no suicide, hm?" Horatio said in a concerned voice "Well then, I'm going to see what Calleigh found out about the gun. Keep me posted."

Eric didn't even bother talking to Ryan as they made it back to their workplaces and Ryan himself didn't try to pull up some sort of non-intellectual conversation such as Smalltalk. Eric wouldn't want to talk to him - that sure was fine with him! He slipped out of the lift and separated from Eric as fast as he could. On his way to the photolab in order to develop the negatives and sketch the crime scene, Ryan finally enjoyed a moment of solitude. Doing things like that wasn't the best way to deal with a problem, but he was glad to be on his own for a while.
He sighed deeply as he let himself fall into a chair which stood in front of a massive desk. The different chemicals to envelope the negatives where all right before him so he took on his gloves and started his work, while his mind wandered.
Ryan knew perfectly well that everyone looked at him comparing him to Timothy Speedle. Even though he never even met Speedle in person, he had come to know a lot details by coincidently overhearing conversations between Eric, Calleigh and Alexx. Skimming through his memories Ryan could recall a chat of Eric and Calleigh between two cups of coffee, as Horatio had just returned from the Miami-Dade Memorial Hospital. Somehow Speedle had got himself into serious trouble as his weapon had malfunctioned. He was shot down by the agitator, the bullet stuck in his chest. "How many times did I tell him, he should clean out his gun?" Ryan could hear Calleigh say in a unfamiliar voice of concern. In Ryan's opinion Speedle must either have got some guts or he was just unbelievable stupid and had been very lucky to have survived that shot. Personally he thought it was the last one, but either way both choices were stupid. But Ryan had always kept that to himself, locking up his thoughts and buried them deep down inside. He knew it was better that way then creating more problems as he already had.
When Ryan had had his first day in the laboratory, he could almost grab the tension that was crackling through the air like a high-voltage lightning. By that time, Speedle's state of health had grown even more serious as he suffered under a sepsis that absorbed most of his strength. It took almost two more months until Horatio informed his squad that Speedle was on the way of recovery. So, it was only a matter of time until he would be back in office claiming his old position.
Nevertheless, everyone treated Ryan like he wanted to take Speedle's place. Sometimes he even had the feeling, they thought he shot him personally. Couldn't they see that all he wanted to do was doing his job as a criminalist? He felt no desire to replace Speedle; Occasionally he never even tried to. But that obviously didn't matter to anyone.
As a matter of fact he was still wondering what would happen once Speedle was back. Would Horatio keep him at his lab or would he decide Ryan was no longer of any use to him? He couldn't tell, but then again he was the only CSI in his squad that Horatio called by his last name.
In times like these, when his thoughts wouldn't let him rest, he really wished he had someone to talk to, but he didn't want to burden his uncle with such stupid fears. He had to do this on his own and even if every little part of his being protested, he would just stand by and watch, as long as it wasn't clear that he could do anything. What else could he do anyway?
Realizing that he had finished Ryan collected the photographs and made his way toward the layout room, where he arranged the pictures until his OCD was fully satisfied and started sketching the scene. While doing this he tried to push his thoughts aside, brooding wouldn't get him anywhere and it certainly would not solve the case, so it was time to concentrate on work...