As a Waking Dream

By: clio21000

Rating: PG-13 for a few naughty words

Disclaimer: Yeah, I'm really not making anything off of this. Believe me, I'd write much more often if I was.

Summary: Over the course of a week, Sara's insomnia surges until in nearly incapacitates her. GSR, with NickGreg underpinnings.

On the first day, Sara tried to go to sleep. She laid in her bed for hours, watching the pattern of light that slipped through the slats in the blinds as it moved across the blank white canvas of her ceiling. The sheets on her bed bunched in the center and then pulled loose from the sides altogether as she rolled over from her back to her side to her stomach to her other side. Though she was usually chilly, particularly as she slept, today her tossing about made sweat slick her body, and she pulled off her plaid pajama pants and her sweatshirt and then slipped back between the flannel sheets in just her cami and panties.

She closed her eyes for a while, then got tired of staring at the inside of her eyelids and opened them again. She memorized the pattern of the wood grain on the back of her bedroom door, and counted the number of patches on the quilt spread across her legs, then tried to work mathematical equations with the angles and lines and numbers.

Thoughts flooded her mind; old mistakes came back to haunt her. Grade school – being too tall, too awkward, too poor, too smart. Her parents, fighting with one another nightly while she and Peter cowered in his bedroom, playing I Spy and wishing they were only listening to each other's voices. The dark bulk of her father standing over her bed while she desperately pretended to sleep. The glint of moonlight on steel, the whistle of the blade coming down, the thwack and gasp and moan, and then the blood seeping out to pool around her mother's feet, so dark it looked black instead of red.

Sara squinched her eyes shut and flipped over again onto her stomach. She wasn't going to think about that right now – it certainly wasn't going to help her fall asleep. Think happy thoughts, she coached herself sternly. The full scholarship to Harvard. Graduating summa cum laude. The grad work at Berkley. The brilliant forensics seminar that had hooked her, pulled her out of graduate school and into the San Francisco coroner's office. She felt her muscles relax a bit. Grissom grinning at her over his dummies as she made lame jokes about Norman Fell. Becoming the youngest CSI III ever at the second-best crime lab in the nation. She thought about her coworkers, made herself categorize all their best qualities and her favorite moments with them.

Warrick, with his cool exterior and calm, weighted gazes. She pictured him crouching in a flowerbed, casting a shoeprint – he may have claimed to be an AV expert, but she knew it was his casting that was a real work of art. Catherine, so bristly, so determined to be the alpha female, the queen of the lab, yet offering her a wry smile and an invitation to get a beer. Greg, her protégé, so smart like her, so driven like her, so able to kick back, relax and really enjoy himself – not like her at all. She imagined him bopping around the lab with his apparently boundless energy, singing Aerosmith and The Clash, running fingers through his blonde spikes, flirting shamelessly with Nick. Nicky himself, with his polite down-home manners and his soft drawl, his slow smile and his cautious concern. Nicky, who made a point to make sure she got out of her apartment every once and a while, had tried to coach her on a nutritional diet so she'd get the appropriate vitamins and stop living on take-out.

Then she thought about Grissom, and the painful dance he had led her in during the last six years. He had called her to come to Vegas and she came; he had offered an invitation to dance and she slipped smoothly into his arms. For a few months, they danced like a long-married couple dances, anticipating each other's moves, speaking without words – a slight pressure on her arm and she knew to move left or right, a tightening of his fingers and she knew he was going to spin her. But then he released her hands and took a step back, not responding to any of her overtures or hints about their relationship, leaving her spinning by herself. He'd stepped away, keeping her at arm's length. There'd been little flirting, sure, like brief brushes of his fingers over forbidden parts of her body while they danced, but he never let her get close enough to make the touches last. Then he'd sent her the plant, and told her she was beautiful, and it was as if he had pulled her close, wrapped his arms around her, pressed his cheek against hers, and swayed slowly with her in time to the music. For the few days that the dance had lasted, she'd been blissfully happy. But he'd stepped back again, slipped once more out of her reach. And so it continued – a step forward, a few warm and teasing touches, a step back.

"Cha, cha, cha," she muttered bitterly, rolling over on to her back once more. Their relationship had always had that sexual tension underpinning, the delicious and delicate frustration that they kept brewing on the back burner. She'd been so sure that they'd get together when she moved to Vegas – for God's sake, why else had he asked her to stay there? Why had he encouraged her and then stepped away?

She turned it over and over again in her mind. She thought about it until she couldn't think about it anymore, couldn't think about anything anymore. Coherent thoughts finally escaped her, and she felt as empty as a shattered wine glass. She sighed a little, and drifted into a half-sleep, resting fitfully for about an hour and a half.