This is for Marlou... I ask her what she wanted me to write for her and she somehow ended up asking me to challenge myself and write some more angst with a positive outcome... with a beginning chapter of a few thousand words. So here it is, this is for her, since she betas pretty much every damned thing I write. Oh, and if at all possible, please be patient for more chapters, I'm busy writing for the geekfiction ficathon. Don't know what geekfiction is? Head over to livejournal and find out. (Thanks to Laura Katharine and Lauren as well.)

He was the pain, the thing that wrenched her gut. He was the thing that had her sobbing at night, truly wondering why Hollywood couldn't come up with a more palpable love story for her to latch onto. Where was that happily ever after that she was supposed to get after some supposedly insurmountable period of time? Where was that perfection that everyone else seemed to be able to find? He was it but he wasn't ready to give.

Wasn't ten years enough already?

Sara Sidle was a strong woman but he was her one true weak point, the promise she would go back on, day after day. It irked her how fallible when it came to him. He was a lesson she would never really learn... though she supposed she was never really signed up to take that lesson in the first place. She didn't want to know a world where she didn't love him.

Wringing her hands in her lap she wondered why he continued to play on her heart strings so forcefully, even after she attempted to stave from him. Surely after such a time being turned away she should become jaded but her longing for him was as strong and sure as ever. It burned within her, burned in actuality, like acid on her heart, stinging in the most wonderful ways. It was sick, it was twisted, it was why she breathed… and she hated that he had so much of her heart all to himself.

The small portion of her organ that still beat was withering away, pumping futilely with hope for him. She wanted it to stop, needed it to stop. But there was no use, she was far too deep in love, and the beginning of the tunnel she'd entered was just as far gone as the end of it was. It was amazing, the subconscious desires the heart could take hold of without making the body take notice.

He'd do things to her.

He smiled at her; she cracked.

She cracked from a smile, a tiny ghost of a thing, something he might have given Warrick or Greg. In her hands she dissolved into sobs, still the same strong woman she was, just missing a large piece of herself. Deliriously smart, sure, she was... but then again, there was common sense and she lacked that in abundance. A glutton for punishment, she just couldn't get enough. She didn't want to get enough; the sweet suffering was part of her life now.

Not knowing where to stop, when to call it quits... that was a drawback she'd always seemed to be able to afford herself.

So, with a startling change of heart, she quit.

It was nearly seven in the morning when the first cardboard box had been assembled, its flaps and corners pushed into alignment by shaky hands. As strange as it seemed, and as much as it pained her, this was the right thing to do. A fat, black magic marker demarked the first box L.R., short for living room.

Sara began stacking books into the four corners, beginning a new hollow crate when she'd filled the first. Her life's contents went into the boxes, most of them books, not cared for enough to be placed down with intent. Sara pulled down a leather-bound book detailing obscure insect species and threw it in the garbage.

She didn't feel any better after doing it but then again, she didn't feel any worse.

Her bedroom was dismal; she tossed all of her little knick-knacks, not bothering to fold any of her clothes, tossing them haphazardly into one of many packing boxes. Many of her home goods from the living room and kitchen were thrown away; most of her supposed keepsakes met the same fate. She didn't care, starting over meant starting over meant starting over.

She was placing plates into a large box with something like care when she accidentally dropped one. Watching it shatter across the floor, flecks of porcelain separating themselves from the greater whole, she decimated two more, just for the hell of it. It felt nice, but not that nice so she stopped and packed the rest away. She'd be the only one eating from them anyway.

There were pictures she decided to keep; there was one of her brother with his dog, of a friend smiling at the camera. She took the one of Grissom and herself and pressed it inside of an obscure book she would never pick up again; she just couldn't bear to throw it away, not with how she was looking at him, not with how he was actually smiling, grinning at the camera. Maybe he was grinning at who was behind the camera, or at something someone had said, she couldn't remember. She could pretend, as she folded it in between pages 232 and 233 that his grin was for her alone.

He'd mentioned once, way back when, way, way back that chemical reactions could be mistaken for emotions. He'd said it in passing, bridging the gap from one concept to another, but it had stayed with her. Sara thought if maybe she could refute the feelings that were welling within her with science that it would all make sense, that it would all go away. But no matter how hard she tried, how many excuses she made, it continued to grow. Damn, it grew until it was out of her hands, making her fly to Las Vegas on nothing but a blind hope.

Blind before, but now she saw what was there; desolation was her future unless she jumped ship and started over.

She didn't need to find love wherever she was going, she just needed to escape the black hole of perpetual pining that was Las Vegas.

Only when she was through scrubbing down the bathroom and ridding her refrigerator of most food did she think of typing up her letter of resignation. Sara had never been one to give up but she thought that maybe this once, raising the off-white flag wouldn't be so bad. She didn't know where she was going, had no destination in mind, but that didn't matter.

Laptop perched atop her desk, she began to type, inserting words like 'regretfully' and 'sincerely' though she was neither sincere nor did she regret the words she cast upon the screen. All a farce, somewhat like the years she'd spent in the hollow, desert oasis.

Her pinky held over the 'enter' button, ready to click print, there was a knock at the door. And even though he'd knocked on her door only once, she knew it was him, coming to beg something from her without begging at all.

This time, her feet were bare as were her shoulders, but she was still shrouded in dark cloth, a testament to her dying farewell of her old life. There was no brief repose before the peephole, just a casting open of her door to him.

Grissom's eyes were worried but still held the hungry fire that they had when she first muttered a 'hello' and offered him her hand. Now she was taking it back, her eyes flicking out, the coals no longer able to be stoked by his careful breath.

"Nick said you were abnormally upset," Grissom said when his gaze met hers, noticing the shift there. His were worried, painfully so; hers were dead. Abnormally, she supposed, was her becoming heated at a subject that had nothing to do with rape or children or, or, or crime. She'd been mad from the onset, from the moment she stepped foot in the locker room to the second she'd clocked out.

She shrugged, stepping back, giving him the choice to enter or withdraw once more; she didn't really care either way. If he touched her then, right then, soft and sure she might have turned around but he didn't. "Why are you here?" the first words she spoke even though she'd made her way to the other side of the room, leaving him in the doorway.

A step, or maybe two, she wasn't counting, but he made his way into her almost-home, eyes drawn on nothing but the floor and all the boxes. Still couldn't meet her eyes, even after all those years. "You were upset," he spoke, almost asked, but turned the inflection away from questioning at the last possible second.

Bright, amazing, handsome... he was still the sun. But now she didn't shy away from his glare, stared into it, meeting him head on, unafraid of how she was in the reflected light, of how she was shadowed. "I was. I am. It doesn't matter," Sara said, flippancy invading her tone to such a degree that she wondered if it was really her that had spoken the words.

His lips, heavy with unspoken words and the tiny sheen of sweat twitched upward a bit, his eyes finally lifting from the faded floorboards. "It does matter," his tone was low and forgiving. No, he wasn't allowed to say that. His voice wasn't allowed to sound like that.

"You said that before," she responded immediately, finding the conversation too redundant to think her words through. She was sad; god, she would have given everything to cry right then.

"I replied before, we moved on," she continued, inserting an eye roll on her part. "We always move on." She blinked. "I'm moving on."

"I don't understand," uttered from his lips, words falling, tripping over themselves. But of course he wouldn't; he wouldn't because deep down, he didn't really want to.

A lie. "You do, don't play dumb." Dumb, as if he could ever really be. "You've withheld for years. Either way I'm gone tonight." Just saying the words, saying them help cement the idea in her head.

His face twisted, her words seemingly ludicrous to him. "Two weeks notice," he shot back, blue gaze flicking to hers, the brown nearly black.

Sarcasm gripped the smile that slid up on her cheeks. "Fire me," she stated, bored. "I don't care."

She was the mess he had made, the thing he had to rectify.

Honestly, she wasn't trying to be abrasive, but years of emotional abstinence began to seep over with him being too close to seeing her on the verge of her exit. Closure was necessary, she supposed, and couldn't be taken care of over a phone line, miles away. "Tell me why," he muttered leaning his palms on her kitchen counter, feet crackling over the porcelain of her once-dinnerware.

Sara sat at her desk, bringing her feet up beneath her. "Do you know any idea how many days I wanted to show up at your door?" Rhetorical. "And if I had, I would have been gone before now." And before he could ask why, "Because your rejection there, then, that way would have been enough to make me go."

She knew he wouldn't refute that, it was the truth. The one thing Gil Grissom had never done was lie to her, not with his words.

He shook his head, cheeks pink and so kissable that she nearly fell for him again. He licked his lips and damned if still, still, after all of her rationalization, she didn't want to kiss him. "I don't accept that."

"I don't care."

"I do!" Vehemence in his tone and in the way he slammed his hands down on the counter. She saw herself smashing the plates in her head, wondering what he was feeling as he slapped his skin against the cool linoleum. Nothing, perhaps.

It was Sara's turn to shake her head. "Doesn't matter."

He circled around into her living room but she made no move to get up. "Why now? What happened? What did I do? What didn't I do?" Her eyes flickered at that last comment, maybe he was finally understanding...

"You can stand here, ask me why I stay, why I leave, why I am the way I am but you can't bear to ask me why I love you because you know the answer won't be enough." He flinched.

She could stand and bleed before him, stand and be naked and nothing would leave her so stripped and alive than the endlessness, the infinity of him that she kept locked away in her eyes.

He was the equivalent of jazz, stroking her strong and low, under her watchful gaze even if he didn't know he was doing it. His voice, hurtful and confused still licked over the chords of her mind, stimulating her to reconsider again. It was pure insanity, the way second-guessing had become second nature for her.

Scientists didn't second-guess, they experimented.

Maybe she wasn't a scientist anymore, not really; maybe she was done experimenting with love. Again with maybe, and again with again... "We'll never understand each other," and with that, she swallowed the thick lump in her throat. There were the tears, there they were making a fashionably late entrance to the party.

She felt full, weighty, bogged down by grief that until now she hadn't even begun to consider as an emotion.

Something in his voice, a catch, caught her attention. "Make me understand, please," he pleaded, moving towards her.

Sara regarded him for a moment; true, he was broken, not as broken as she was, though.

As she stood and moved to sit on the couch, she took his hand in hers, her eyes still cold, distant, scientific. He moved with her, followed her… for once. "Note the fact that this is the first time I've touched you, the first time today you've become close to me," and she pressed his hand open so that it was palm up.

Transfixed, yet knowing that what she was doing was strange he shook his head and half-heartedly tried to pull his hand out of her grasp. She caught it at the last second. "Note you've been here for little over ten minutes and have looked me in the eye all of three times," Sara continued on, her voice dropping down to nearly a whisper. "You've spoken, we've both said some things... and now..."

She pressed his palm flat against her chest, allowing him to feel her. "Feel how fast it's beating, just because you're sitting here?" Then she dropped his hand and glanced away.

"Is it because you don't know what love means," her voice cracked, tears brimming in her eyes like they were in his, "Or is it because you don't want to love me?"

And the stalemate was lingering there between them, crackling in the early morning air.

"Either way, I lose you tonight, don't I?"

His response was like a slap across the face; she'd expected him to walk away, guppy a pseudo-response that would keep her guessing, again. But instead he posed her with a straight forward question; a question she would have to answer in order to get her own answer. "Yes."

"Then it doesn't matter," he said, pretending he wasn't about to lose it.

"It does."

"And here we are again." God, he was so angry; she was the one who was supposed to be upset and yet, she was sad, choking on hard words that she knew she wanted to speak.

A dull ticking registered towards her back, rain pattering off of the air conditioning unit, tapping off the seconds of silence. "Here we are," it was a stall tactic, because she wouldn't come full circle this time. It just wasn't in the cards.

Grissom moved his hand to the space between them, fingers testing the surface of the leather. "And we'll just be here until..."

"Until you can tell me what the hell is going on in your head," she surprised him by saying.

Grissom's hands, strong and sure, dug into his knees as he ran through all the things he could say. "You want some assurance that I feel something for you," he began slowly, turning to meet her gaze. "I don't know what I could do to prove that." He paused, looked at the ceiling. "And if you're just going to... leave me, then I don't see what the point is."

"Not the point," Sara said, clipped, gritting her teeth. Grissom simply blinked. "I love you, and the thought of you going through the rest of your life like this, closed up... is sad. It's..."

There were no words to complete her sentence and his hand slid over to grasp hers, tighter than she had dared hold his. "I don't know how to love you."

Sara shook her head; there was no real way to sort through this, she doubted there ever was. "I don't know what to say to that. I don't know how to love you either," she mumbled, "But I'm doing it."

And for the first time since he'd walked into her apartment, he smiled. "You make it seem easy."

"It's not, it's the hardest thing I've ever done," she whispered. "Getting up every day, to love you. But I can't stop…"

Grissom sat back and really regarded her, filtered her words through his mind. "We can't resolve this right here, right now," he concluded.

"We'll have to," she huffed, almost in amusement. "There won't be any other time."

"How about this," Grissom began, folding his hands in his lap, staring her down almost painfully. "Tonight," and she began to speak but he held up his hand to still her words. "Tonight you give me your two weeks notice..." he waited to gauge her reaction; she was watching him, emotionless." And you and I try and work this out... slowly."

Her only response was to bite her lip and look away. Damn, she wanted to cry. Here she was considering him. She thought of all the things she'd thrown out, all of the packing she had done. "But," she gurgled out, seemingly lost once more, "But I packed."

"You can just as easily unpack," he reasoned, actually allowing his hand to stray to hers. She let it linger for a moment before she took it back.

Her head came back around slowly and she watched him for a moment. His eyes met hers and their gaze held, the deal hanging in the air between them. "Two weeks?"

Grissom nodded, "And if you're not happy with the resolution, you can leave." He paused. "And I don't want you to leave."

She watched him get up from her couch and cross the room. He deliberately made his way to the garbage can by her door. He bent down, reached in and retrieved the book that he had given her the year previous for Christmas.

Grissom placed the book down on the divider between the kitchen and the living room. "And don't throw this out, it's a first edition."

And with that, he was gone, leaving Sara to wonder how he'd reeled her back once again.