Waking The Dead

Summary: Nick and Sara become involved in proving that Greg's death-- declared accidental-- was in fact, murder. Until Brass steps in and tells them they have to stop, unless they want to get themselves killed. Sara/Nick friendship, Greg/Brass friendship. Smatterings of Grissom, Cath and Warrick.

Author's Note: I wanted to try something fresh, since everything else I have been writing felt so stale. No romance, not even undertones. All about the team, and a lot more Brass in this than normal (because I love him and I never use him, least of all in "Las Plagas" which turned out terribly, so here he is). Sara and Greg's roles were, in the beginning, switched, however, it made more sense for it to be this way. Began before viewing "For Gedda," which is irrelevant anyways, as it takes place before "Goodbye and Good Luck" (obviously). But I just wanted to let you know. I have considered writing a post-For Gedda fic. We will see. Updates will take place every htwo days. Maximum three.

"The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost." -- Arthur Schopenhauer

Sara Sidle had been a CSI for years, and had witnessed scenes far worse than the one that met her eyes, but none would compare to this. If she had chosen the highway for her route to Nick's scene, she would probably have avoided this encounter completely. But whimsy had chosen to lead her down this road, and her eyes caught sight of the flames, then the car, then the crime scene tape. She pulled over onto the shoulder and stepped out of the car, approaching the wreckage.

When she had first arrived, she had been unperturbed. She had only truly grasped the carnage of the image before her after speaking to Brass.

She saw the detective and waved him over. She tried to duck under the crime scene tape when a police officer she'd never seen before told her she couldn't cross.

"I'm CSI," Sara said, pointing to her vest. "I can show you my badge if this isn't enough."

"Captain Brass was clear that only authorized CSIs are allowed to pass," the officer told her in a monotone. He wore reflective sunglasses, which disturbed Sara, as she saw the flames from the wreck reflecting in his big, bug-like eyes.

It was then that Brass arrived, and she sighed with relief. "Tell him I can pass, Jim."

But Brass, his face stony, shook his head. "I'm afraid not this time, Sara."

She gaped. "What—?"

"What are you doing here anyway?" Brass snapped accusingly. "You weren't called to this scene."

He was unusually cool and she wasn't sure why. "I was on my way to meet Nick at the strip... there's a... a 419 and... and Brass, what's all this about?" She was baffled that she was being treated so coldly.

His eyes were haunted, but his face remained cold. "I can't tell you about it now, Sara."

"Why not?" she asked. "Who's on the case? Is Grissom here?"

"Grissom doesn't know about this yet," Brass told her.

"Who was in the wreck?" Sara asked. "Is it someone famous? A politician, an actor..." She saw a man wearing an FBI jacket pass behind Brass and her curiosity was piqued. "Brass? He is important, isn't he?"

Brass bowed his head. "He hasn't been identified yet."

His tone told Sara that he was lying. "But he was male."

Brass looked up and then sighed. "Go meet Nick at your scene, Sara, I'm sure he needs you."

"Brass, what the hell is going on here?!" she demanded. She tried to get a glimpse of the car, but it was engulfed in flames.

The FBI agent Sara had seen earlier approached Brass and nodded at Sara in greeting. "Is she with you, Jim?" he asked.

Sara was annoyed that he hadn't directed the question at her. "Yes, I am," she said sharply.

Brass muttered something to the agent under his breath, which Sara couldn't hear above the crackling fire. The agent's face changed, and then Sara heard him whisper, "Tell her," to Brass.

The detective sighed. He looked as if he was in great pain as he turned to Sara and ducked under the crime scene tape. He took her by the arm and led her away from the scene. She said nothing, knowing that he was going to answer all her questions now that he had the FBI's OK.

"Sara, do you remember a few months ago, when Greg and Nick's case became national?" he asked.

"Yeah..." Sara said slowly. "A death in California identical to the ones here, and then another in Oregon... What does this have to do with that?"

"The FBI enlisted Greg and Nick to help them out."

"I know that," Sara said. "But why are they here?"

Brass sighed. "A few weeks ago, Greg found the key piece of evidence to arrest a man from San Francisco for all five murders," Brass explained. "The... FBI offered him a job."

"A job?" Sara gasped. "He never mentioned it..."

"He wasn't supposed to," said Brass. "At least, not until he made his decision whether to take it or not." He chewed on his lip. "Last I heard, though nothing was ever official, he was thinking of taking it."

Sara's heart lurched at the thought of Greg moving away to work for the government. But she pushed that away and smiled, trying to be happy for him. "Well, good. That's a smart move, the FBI probably pays better..." There was a crumbling burst of flames from the burning car, and Sara remembered where they were. Suddenly, despite the heat radiating from the orange and yellow wreckage, she was very cold. "You still haven't told me why this is relevant."

"The FBI is here to..." Brass swallowed. "To investigate the mysterious death of one of their own."

He had worded it carefully enough that it almost seemed tragic, but detached, irrelevant to Sara's life, because she knew no one who worked for the FBI. Or at least, not until recently.

And now, in the face of the fire, she was shivering. "You're... you're not saying..."

He tried to touch her arm, but she pulled it out of his reach. "I'm sorry..." he whispered.

"No!" she said, quietly but forcefully. "That's not Greg's car."

"So far, it looks like it was an accident," Brass said. "It doesn't look like there was any foul play or anything. It looks like he just... he just veered off the road, and a spark from his—"

"Greg wouldn't..." She rubbed her arms to warm herself and then looked up at the sky, blinking fervently before looking back at Brass. "It couldn't have been an... an accident. There has to be someone, someone must have... Oh God..." She stifled a sob. Loosing Greg to the FBI had been bad enough, but losing him to a burning car felt infinitely worse. She swallowed. "There has to be someone to blame."

"Would that help?" Brass asked her. "I mean, seriously... would you feel any better if this was murder?"

"Yes!" Sara exclaimed ferociously through gritted teeth. "Yes, I would. Because it means that there is someone I can hit. It means there is someone I can pummel into a bloody pulp and light on fire, and it means that it wasn't..." She lost her train of thought, as well as her ferocity and she fell back into herself. She blinked a few more times, and then looked at Brass, her voice suddenly very small, like a child's. "An... an accident?" she asked.

Brass pursed his lips and nodded.

Sara shuddered and then ran a hand through her hair, looking around. "Um... I... Nick is waiting..." She backed away from Brass. "I should go meet him. Don't want to make him..." She paused, and then shook her head and took a few more steps to Brass. "No. No. I want to see him. I want to see the scene. Let me work it. Please, Jim."

He seized her by the shoulders, trying to calm her down with his grip. "The FBI already put in a request to process it personally. They have their own guys to work this scene. I'm only here as a liaison."

"Let me stay..." she begged. "At least let me stay and watch."

"Sara..." he said, his voice exhausted. "There's nothing left to see."

"His body," Sara insisted. "I want to see his body."

"No," Brass told her, shaking his head. "You really don't."

She didn't know what to do. She didn't know where to go. So she asked his opinion. "What... what do you want me to do?"

He smiled at her and pushed a strand of her hair behind her ear. "Go to your scene and talk to Nick. Or go back to the lab and talk to Grissom. Or go home and... and just do whatever you need to make you feel better."

She nodded. "Nick and the scene..." She forced a smile. "I'm on the clock. Can't let the victim down."

"Exactly," Brass said. "You do that. I'll call Grissom, and he can tell the others."

"I can't keep something like this from Nick," Sara told Brass.

"Of course you can't," Brass replied. "Now go."

She nodded and looked back at her car. She gave him one last smile before turning her back on him and the fire and walking to her car.

Nick was crouched over the victim in the middle of the road when he heard Sara's car finally pull up. He rolled his eyes as he got to his feet, ready to give her an earful. She stepped out of the car and closed the door, and he walked towards her with his arms out wide.

"Where the hell have you been?" he asked, half-frustrated, half-amused. "You said five minutes and I've been waiting more than half an hour!"

Her face was pale and she mumbled an apology.

He frowned, sensing something amiss. "What's the matter?"

She answered his question with her own. "What have we got here?"

Nick looked over his shoulder at the body. "Looks like a hit and run," he said, turning back to her. "He's got broken shins, looks like he was hit head on."

Sara walked past him and crouched over the body. Nick watched her curiously as she snapped on her gloves.

"COD?"

"Blunt force trauma to the head," Nick said. "Or, at least, that's what David determined."

The victim's glassy eyes stared up at the starry sky. Sara stared into them, as if searching for his story there. But dead eyes tell no tales. So like leather-bound twin tomes, she closed them with her fingers. She collected a piece of glass from his hair and bagged it. She took out a comb and carefully went through the rest of his hair, as if she was grooming him rather than searching for evidence. When she was done, she stroked his hair reverently, still staring at his face.

Nick was ill at ease. "I, uh... I did the wounds on his legs, collected what looks to be a shard of reflective glass, probably from a headlight or..."

Sara slowly rose to her feet and he trailed off. She handed him the evidence she had collected from his hair. "You've done the street around him it looks like," she whispered. "Didn't leave much for me to do, did you?" She tried to smile, but it looked uncomfortable.

He laughed, awkwardly. "Yeah... well, you were thirty minutes late... What happened to you?"

"Are you done here?" she asked.

"Yeah, probably," he replied. "Sara, what's wrong?"

"Take the evidence back to your car," she said quietly. "I'll drive back in mine."

Nick nodded. She was unusually placid, her voice soft and her manner peaceful. He had the eerie feeling that he was in the presence of a ghost. But he did what she said, and he watched her walk back to her own car. He placed the evidence in his kit in the back of his car and then closed the trunk. He looked over at her as she opened the door to her car, and then she hesitated, her back to Nick.

"Greg's dead," she said simply.

She might as well have shot him in the back. Nick stared at her incredulously as she climbed into her car and backed away before K-turning onto the road.

Nick felt the sweat collect under his palms as he gripped the wheel and stared at Sara's tail lights in front of him. His heart was pounding in his chest as her words reverberated in his skull. Greg's dead. Surely, she hadn't been literal. She must have added something else that he had missed. Maybe Greg's love life was dead. Or Greg's goldfish was dead. Or maybe he had misheard her entirely. Maybe she said Greg's red. Although what that meant, he wasn't sure.

He concluded that he needed to call her, and so, with one hand still gripping the wheel as if his life depended on it, he reached into his pocket for his cell phone and hit her speed dial button.

The phone rang a few times, and he saw her shadow move in the front seat of her car. He dared her to pick up.

Finally, she did. "Sidle." He voice was flat and official.

"What the fuck was that?" Nick snarled. "That was just cruel. Are you serious?"

"Greg is dead, Nick," she simply repeated. "He died in a... well, he just died."

"How come you know this?" Nick asked. "When did this happen? Who told you?"

"I stumbled on the scene on my way to meet you," Sara explained. "Brass was there. He told me."

Nick blanched. "How fucking dare you."

"It's not my fault," she told him. "It was... Brass said it was just an accident. Said he veered off the road, rolled into the ditch, something sparked a fire and then—"

"You don't tell someone like that," Nick interrupted angrily. "You don't just show up and act all strange and then as an afterthought just mention, 'Oh, yeah, by the way, your best friend is dead.'"

Sara was silent.

"What, no stoic defense?" he egged. "No 'That's just how I am,' or 'I didn't know how to tell you'?"

"I didn't know he was your best friend," Sara said in a whisper.

Nick looked into her car and tried to catch a glimpse of her, but failed. He, too, was suddenly dumbstruck. "I... I wasn't so sure either," he confessed. "I mean..." He closed his eyes, his stomach twisting inside of him, bile rising in his throat, and he closed his eyes for just a moment, gripping the wheel and his phone until his knuckles turned white and a bead of seat rolled down the side of his face. He tensed, momentarily forgetting that he was in a car at all, and his hand turned the wheel sharply, and there was a few rocky bumps that made him open his eyes as he slid off of the highway and into the guardrail.

"Nick!" he heard Sara exclaim just as the airbags exploded and his phone fell to the floor. He smacked his head against the door frame of his car and closed his eyes tightly to fight the pain. Bells were screaming in his ears and fireworks exploded behind his eyelids.

The next thing he knew, his door was thrown open.

"Oh my God..." he heard Sara breathe.

"I'm fine," he insisted, reaching to unbuckle his seatbelt. "Just... my head hurts."

"I oughta slap you!" Sara screeched, unusually shrill.

"Please don't," Nick begged, holding a hand to his head as he fought back the airbag. Sara reached in and stabbed it with a pocket knife, and the noise as it deflated hissed in his ears.

"I've already lost one friend to a car accident today, you won't be next," Sara said. And then, a thought occurred to her. "His phone..."

"Who's phone?" Nick asked, leaning back in his seat.

"Greg's phone," Sara clarified. "They should check it. See if anyone called him. I mean, something had to make him swerve off the road. Like you so eloquently just demonstrated."

She helped him out of the car and slammed the door. Nick leaned forward to look at the hood. He winced. "Aw, damn, they're gonna make me pay for that, aren't they?"

"I think we have bigger worries..." Sara breathed.

Nick covered his face with his hands and rubbed his eyes. "Oh my God..." he groaned, his voice muffled by his hands. "Oh my God, Greg..."

He fell to his knees, and Sara's grip on his shoulders slid away. The gravel cut into his knees, but he could have cared less. He heard Sara kneel down beside him as his hands slid up his face and ran through his hair. He had a furious wolverine inside his chest that was gnawing at his ribcage and clawing beneath his skin, desperate to get out. Greg was dead. Greg was really, really dead. His brown eyes stared unseeing at the ground as his still dizzily pounding head tried desperately to make sense of those words. Greg was dead. His stomach churned as the wolverine howled, and he knew he needed to expel the beast from inside of him.

In seconds, he was on all fours, and all of the acid and broken hopes poured from him as he gagged and wretched, making sure it was all out of him, making sure that he could feel safe again. He coughed and spluttered, and after a few more dry heaves, he became aware of something warm resting on his back. He closed his eyes, and looked to the side, where he saw Sara beside him, watching him with a straight face. He let out a curt, morose laugh, and then turned away from her again. Sara's hand moved up his spine and back and forth across his shoulders. He closed his eyes as he tried to concentrate on her touch, trying to imagine that she was warming him like the sun, melting the ice in his lungs that made it hard to breathe.

He slowly sat back on his knees again and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. His breath reeked, and he wished he had gum. He looked at Sara again, who was still with him, her hand still across his shoulders. And then he turned to her, his arms rising to envelope her as he rested his head on her shoulder. He did not cry, though his breathing seemed labored. He closed his eyes and stroked her hair, pretending that he was comforting her and not the other way around.

Her arms, which had risen to embrace him in turn, suddenly tightened without warning, and he felt her chest contract in short, staccato bursts. And he realized that he didn't have to pretend anymore.

Sara drove Nick back to the lab, after a quick visit to the hospital to make sure he was OK after his crash. He had a concussion, but the doctors had assured them that he would be fine within a few hours. In the meantime, he was very out of it, and he and Sara spoke very little.

They walked into the lab side by side, dragging their feet. They saw no one from their shift that they recognized. Sara vaguely wondered where they were. Almost unconsciously, their feet carried them to Grissom's office. The door was ajar and Sara pushed it open to see Grissom leaning over his desk with his fingers on his temples. He looked up upon hearing their entrance.

"Sara..." he began, then he saw Nick and rose to his feet immediately. "What happened?"

Nick blinked and looked at Sara, who answered for him.

"He just has a small concussion, that's all," Sara assured Grissom. "The bump looks worse than it is."

"I have a bump?" Nick groaned, and then his hand rose to feel it. He sighed and rubbed his eyes.

"How did it happen?" Grissom asked.

"Nick was upset," Sara explained. "He sort of... kind of... crashed into the guardrail of I-15."

Grissom slowly sat down again. "You finished with the 419?"

Sara nodded and Nick held up his kit.

"Good," Grissom said, absently. "You two can go home early today. Catherine and Warrick already took off."

Sara and Nick again both nodded. They didn't need to ask why. Just because no one had said his name didn't mean that any of them had forgotten.

"And what about you?" Sara inquired, curiously, tenderly. He didn't respond and she took a step towards his desk when he pushed his chair back.

"I have to finish up a few things..." he told her quietly, but he refused to look at her.

Sara understood that he wanted to be left alone so she withdrew and looked up at Nick. "Come on," she said to him. "I'll drive you home."

As they left, she glanced back at Grissom, whose hand was covering his eyes. She swallowed to get rid of the lump in her throat, and then exited with Nick.

Sara took it as a personal affront that there wasn't a cloud in the sky. She stared upwards and into the blue, beyond which she knew lay light-years of empty space. Science told her that it was an infinite expanse, but logic found this hard to believe. Similarly, religion, if she believed in religion, would tell her that beyond space, there was a place where the dead go to be at peace, but again, her logic found this even harder to believe. When you die, you're dead. There is nothing left. It's a harsh, frightening truth, especially since humans have this desire to live forever, to have had an impact on the world, to be remembered. But the facts of the matter always stared Sara right in the face, and she had always been clear on them. To her, it made the crime of murder even more heinous. A person has essentially erased another person from all existence, and to her that was unforgivable. But in fifty years, the ones that person had known would also cease to exist, and their effects on the world, their memories, their first kisses, their last dances, all of that would be lost on the rest of the planet. No one would ever know or care if they had been a saint or a sinner. There were the rare few that managed to leave their mark on history, to be remembered in some way, shape, or form, but even so, what made them the person that they were would never be really remembered.

And besides all that, Greg was unimportant to history. Most of the bodies she processed were unimportant to history. They lived in the punctuation of their death certificates. They lived in the numbers of statistics. Tragic, but altogether forgettable to anyone who did not know them personally. And try as folks might to erect memorials in order to preserve their names in history, without a face, it's just a name.

And after this funeral, she would have to erase Greg from her life. When that casket was committed to the earth and buried, she would have to bury him too.

Greg's family was protestant, and as they had orchestrated the funeral, the service had taken place in a church. But Sara knew that Greg wasn't really religious himself, so to her this whole affair held absolutely no meaning. Heaven is more of a comfort to the living than the dead. She had forgotten where she had heard that.

They had now moved to the cemetery where they sat in rows of folding chairs around Greg's grave. Beside her, Grissom grasped her hand and squeezed it tightly. On her other side, Catherine's hands were clasped between her knees and her head was bent. Sara wondered if she was praying. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that she didn't know the religious beliefs of her friends outside of Grissom. Catherine could very well be very religious, even though the woman never struck Sara as that type of person. But nevertheless, her shoulders were hunched forward and her back was slumped, almost as if she was trying to hide what she was doing, as if it was embarrassing to her, or... Or as if she was trying to shelter herself from the destruction of the explosion of Greg's death.

They would try to minimize the fallout. They wouldn't talk about him. Grissom would hire a new CSI. Wendy was interested, Sara knew that. But if she made the leap from DNA tech to CSI, she would no longer be accused of "pulling a Greg," because that word, that name, would be taboo in the lab. He would be pushed to the back of everyone's mind, a footnote in the story of their lives, and eventually, when they were gone, he wouldn't be remembered at all.

Warrick sat beside Catherine, his eyes trained on the priest who spoke about Greg, though Sara was nearly positive that the man had never met Greg Sanders in his life. Regardless, Warrick seemed to be hanging on every word, as if the priest could tell him something that he didn't know. As if the priest had the power to bring Greg back to life. But no one had the power to do that.

Nick wasn't there.

Neither was Brass.

She didn't know why.