Summary: Hell is truth seen too late. GSR, Angst
Disclaimer: CSI does not belong to me. If it did, every single episode would involve Nick and/or Warrick needing to dive in and retrieve a crucial piece of evidence from the bottom of a swimming pool.
A/N: I'm not sure where this came from. I'm supposed to be a Snicker. I just couldn't shake the plot bunny. Also, I've tossed the CSI timeline out the window. As far as I'm concerned, Play With Fire happened around New Year's. I know I'm wrong, but having it take place in May is inconvenient for me because I wrote the story before I bothered to check the date on the episode, so I changed the date, all May-December Sara-Grissom joking aside. Take that, TPTB.
Spoilers: Play With Fire, disregarding the canon CSI timeline.
"Hell is truth seen too late."
- Thomas Hobbes
"When you finally figure it out, you might be too late."
- Sara Sidle, to Gil Grissom
It took two bullets for Gil Grissom to realize he was in love with Sara Sidle.
Twelve bullets were actually fired: the entire contents of the still-unidentified shooter's clip. Twelve .38-caliber 100-grain truncated-cone bevel-based bullets. Three of them hit their intended target, the also-still-unidentified man who'd been crossing the street to avoid the crime scene tape spanning the sidewalk. Six of them lodged in the brick wall of the house that contained the crime scene he and Sara were investigating. One of them hit the ground, leaving a furrow in the formerly well-manicured lawn. The remaining two shattered the house's plate-glass window and hit Sara squarely in the chest, slamming her to the floor and changing Grissom's life forever.
He shook the bullets out of the envelope marked evidence and onto the palm of his hand. The dull metal appeared so innocuous against the pale white of his latex glove, and he marveled at the vagarious nature of life. He'd never seen it coming. Neither of them had.
Two Days Eariler
Sara pulled off her amber-hued filter glasses, annoyed.
"There's no spatter on the wall," she announced. Grissom glanced up from his dusting, and the look of vague disbelief on his face increased her annoyance tenfold. "Come and look for yourself, then."
Her snide tone wasn't lost on him, but he chose to ignore it, joining her and taking the proffered glasses. She pointed the ALS at the wall again, flexing her fingers to ward off the chill in the air as he checked for the elusive blood spatter. She'd been glad to get an indoor assignment tonight, since the temperature was nearing freezing outside, but when they'd arrived Brass had given them the unwelcome news that the victim's heater was broken. It was nearly as cold inside as it was outside. She'd kept her coat on, and she was beginning to wish she'd kept her hat and scarf on, too.
Grissom was still looking at the wall. She sighed in exasperation, not caring if he heard her, and turned to glance out the picture window on her left. Out on the lawn, Brass was giving instructions to a uniformed officer. As she watched, a county-issue vehicle pulled up to the curb and Warrick stepped out.
She wouldn't admit it out loud, but she was relieved he was there. Grissom had been unbearable to work with over the past few weeks, double-checking and second-guessing her at every opportunity. She was the only member of the night shift he was treating like a rookie on her first assignment. You're also the only one who made a pass at him, the little voice in her head reminded her, and she suppressed a sigh. Regardless of what she'd done on a personal level, there was no reason for him to act like she was an idiot professionally. He tended to lighten up on her when the others were around, so Warrick's presence might mean she could stop trying to prove that she knew how to do her job and start actually doing it.
A muted 'bang' from outside caught her attention and she rolled her eyes, wondering why so many people felt the need to continue their New Year's celebrations into mid-January. She'd nearly called 911 two nights ago in a fit of panic before realizing that the little explosions outside her apartment weren't gunshots, but her next-door neighbor's illegal firecrackers. She'd still been tempted to call the police, but if she'd waited for them to send a squad car, she would've been late for her shift.
The 'bang' was followed by another, and another, and another. She frowned when she saw Warrick duck out of sight behind his SUV, the cops around him drawing their guns and crouching to make themselves smaller targets. When she turned to look at Grissom, she saw her own dawning realization mirrored in his eyes. She'd been wrong to assume the noise was gunshots two nights ago, but this time, she was right.
"Someone's shooting –" she began to tell him, but before she could finish her sentence or move away from the window, there was the sound of breaking glass and something hard and heavy hit her in the chest. Twice.
The ALS slipped out of her hand, unnoticed, as the force of the combined impacts knocked her off her feet. Grissom watched, too stunned to react, as the scene seemed to play out in slow motion.
He'd heard the old adage about people's lives flashing before their eyes when they were about to die. He didn't know whether it was true for Sara, but in the half an instant between the window shattering and Sara hitting the floor, her life flashed before Gil Grissom's eyes. The parts of it he'd been around for, anyway.
Sara as a college coed, the insatiably curious wide-eyed ingénue who'd attended his guest lectures and asked more intelligent questions than he'd ever heard, even from his fellow forensic scientists. Sara showing him around San Francisco, her curly hair dancing in the bay breeze, pointing out all of the historical landmarks and never noticing that he was too busy admiring her to admire them. Sara in the lab and Sara in interrogation rooms and Sara at crime scenes, always with the same unconscious air about her, the unique combination of intelligence and curiosity and passion that was the very essence of Sara Sidle.
Beautiful, wonderful, brilliant Sara, who had stirred depths of emotion in him that he hadn't known he was capable of feeling. Admiration, envy, affection, consternation, reverence, passion, sympathy, awe – he'd known what they were, in an abstract sort of way, but he'd never really experienced them until he'd felt them about her.
And now she was lying on the floor, unnaturally still, shards of broken glass from the window shimmering in her hair and on her coat and on the expensive cherry-wood floor around her, blood starting to stream from a cut on her cheek where jagged glass had met bare skin, and he knew. As he dropped to his knees beside her, his fingers clumsy as they fumbled with the buttons of her coat, his eyes stinging with unshed tears when he saw the two neat holes in the thick gray fabric, he knew. He'd finally figured it out.
He loved her.
Gil Grissom loved Sara Sidle.
And it was too late.