Between Hope and Fear - Part One (CSI fic)
My first foray into CSI fic. This will be two parts. Second part should be up tomorrow, or possibly late tonight. Hope you enjoy!
Between Hope and Fear
I. Nightmares
You have always been able to wake yourself from nightmares, even from a very young age. At seven, when you had visions of your ants escaping and crawling across your bed you willed your eyes open, rolled over and saw the glass-encased colony still contained on your bookshelf. In high school, during the usual dream of arriving at a class in time for a test you hadn’t studied for, you blinked a few times and woke to moonlight cutting across your room and landing on the pile of textbooks you’d all but memorized. Later, much later, when crime scenes started to invade your subconscious, you were able to wake yourself before the knife came down or the gun fired or the building exploded. When you dreamt that Sara was the one trapped inside the coffin which had held Nick, you forced your eyes open before you had to watch her mouth her goodbyes.
It’s natural then, that you keep trying to wake up from the nightmare of Sara trapped beneath a car. Your fists tighten until your nails cut little half-moons into your palms and you clench your jaw and squeeze your eyes closed, shouting at yourself to wake up. You want to wake up and reach over and touch the soft, worn cotton of the tank tops she always sleeps in. She will be lying there beside you, safe and warm and alive. Alive. All you have to do was wake up. The words are a mantra in your head.
Wake up! Wake up! Wake up for God’s sake!
Then your eyes open and you find yourself still in the lab, still searching for any clue that will lead you to her, still praying that it’s really just a nightmare.
II. Water
Brass is talking to you, trying to keep you calm, although you think you’re already doing a good job of it. You haven’t thrown anything or shouted or smashed that damn miniature into a thousand pieces. He explains everything that’s being done and you know it was all that could be done. That doesn’t make it enough.
When the weather report catches your eye, you just stare at it for a minute, taking in every word. You say nothing as you fill a beaker with water. You don’t know what you are going to prove. Even Natalie hasn’t used sand that’s to scale in the miniature. Even she couldn’t have modeled something that so exactly matches the terrain that it could be used for geological flood pattern predictions. But you pour the water anyway. You watch it fill the area under the car, just the way you knew it would, and you watch the tiny waxen arm stop its fitful clutching.
You tell yourself that it is just a model, a mechanical model that naturally shorts out when water is applied. You repeat that basic fact to yourself over and over as you look out the window at the rain pouring down, and try not to picture her struggling to breathe beneath a crushed car. You think of the way she touched your face years before you’d been strong enough to allow a relationship to form.
The images of all the different times she touched you in the past, are part of what is keeping you calm.
Warrick is trying to convince you that she might not actually be under the full-size version of the red mustang, but you know better than to cling to that false hope. Natalie is insane, but you’d seen into her eyes. You know she’d succeeded in her mission. Partially succeeded. Partially, you repeat to yourself. She wanted Sara to die, but that wasn’t going to happen. It couldn’t.
III. Searching
Everyone is working on overdrive, frantic to find Sara before any more time passes. You keep yourself rigid, methodical, practical. An outsider would think that she was more important to just about anyone but you. Catherine, alone, seems to sense what is right below the surface. She knows that even touching your arm will make you break, and you can’t afford that. Coffee is pressed into your hand, and you look over and see her standing there staring at the same maps you’ve been studying.
The helicopters have been directed to the west and Hodges has narrowed it down even further, but it isn’t enough. There are miles of desert to search, and no more clues. The sun is rising and you rub your eyes. Catherine has left without you even noticing, and her voice calling from the hallway makes you jerk your head in her direction. Nick’s lead on the car panned out and Brass has called in the location. Icebox Canyon. They know where she is.
It’s less than thirty minutes away. All this time, and she’s been less than thirty minutes away.
Nick drives and you let him. It feels like you are going in slow motion although there are sirens blaring in front of you and behind you as a small army of police speeds towards the location of their fallen sister. You want to be there already, but you are also terrified of what you’ll find.
For twelve hours you’ve unsuccessfully attempted to shut off your feelings, push them aside in favor of cool logic and leadership. That was what would find Sara, not your feelings. They were nothing but a liability. To her… and to you. The pain that seems to fill every inch of your chest now is exactly why you rejected her again and again. You can selfishly admit that now.
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all. [1]
Damn your mind and its uncontrollable urge to spit out quotations to fit any situation. It won’t be better to have loved her if you lose her. Tennyson was a damn liar. That’s what you keep telling yourself. You don’t want to acknowledge that one day of loving her is worth anything. Any pain. Admitting that would be like admitting that she’s dead, and you aren’t ready to do that.
I will not mourn, although my heart is torn,
Oh, love forever lost! I will not mourn.[2]
But you will mourn. Forever.
You scrub you hand across your face, and Nick glances in your direction but said nothing. He’s been quiet on the drive which isn’t like him. You got the distinct impression that he wants to say something though. He and Sara have always been close. Early on you’d actually thought that he’d be better for her than you and the jealousy had nearly killed you and had made you push her away even harder. His foot is pressed to the floor, and he has his eyes set on the distance and his hands tight around the steering wheel. He blames you.
That is what you are sure he wants to say. You aren’t sure he’s wrong. Natalie took Sara because of you. You’ve seen crimes of revenge before and have comforted the loved ones left behind with rational words of absolution. Those words mean nothing to you now.
“It’s not her day,” you hear Nick murmur beside you.
You ask him what he means because for a second you’re irrationally angry at the idea that he’s making light and saying that today is just not Sara’s lucky day. He corrects your assumption immediately.
“It’s not her day to die,” he says, and his voice sounds tight and strained.
More strained than yours, and you’re the one who’s supposed to love her.
You don’t answer him, but instead crane your neck to get a better look at the helicopter that’s circling not far away. The radio crackles to life and the only words you really take note of are the ones that say the car has been spotted. Nick picks up even more speed and steers the SUV off the bumpy dirt access road you’ve been traveling on and into the desert.
IV. Vest
Your door is open before the SUV has even fully stopped, and you’re running as soon as your left foot hits sand. Nick is right behind you, and other cars are pulling up behind yours but you’re the first person to scramble over the scrub-topped dune and see the car. See the sand.
In that instant you want time to stand still. You are desperate to find her, but when your brain takes in the sight of the overturned car, half buried in the sand, you suddenly don’t want to take another step closer. There’s no question what you will find and you don’t want this nightmare to become reality.
You don’t want to find her body, cold, grey and lifeless. You don’t want to see her lips, pallid and unmoving, her hair matted with sand, her eyes closed forever. Until this moment there was still hope, and now that hope is dying within your own breast. As long as she was just missing, she was still alive. Once you find her, there will be nothing more to do.
Apparently your body isn’t listening to your mind. It’s still moving, down on its knees, fingers scraping, digging, tearing at the shifting earth. Your voice is shouting her name and now you hear the strain and desperation that you’d missed earlier.
Nick is beside you again, digging, digging, feeling for something in the sand. You see him pulling something out, and you stop, your heart feeling like it’s stopping too, and watch him brushing sand off of her vest.
Sidle.
You see her name stitched in white. You’ve seen it hundreds of times, maybe thousands, but it’s never brought this mix of emotions to your soul. You want to vomit. You want to scream. You want to tear the vest from Nick’s hands and hug it to your body. He shouldn’t be touching it, it should be you. Is this relief? Her vest is here and she’s not in it, but the rush of pure terror and adrenaline at the vision of her buried in the sand, is still coursing through your body. It will be a few minutes before it spikes again and then drains, like how it did when you were driving out to Lake Mead with her and were almost sideswiped by a semi.
But it won’t be pure relief this time, because even if she isn’t under the car, she’s still not in your arms.
V. Survivor
Clever. Smart. Brilliant.
Self-sufficient.
That’s it. It isn’t just her intelligence, it’s her self-sufficiency that led her to walk away from the wreck and the flood, that moved her hand to place stones for you to follow, that is keeping her walking.
Her past is known to you now, or at least enough for you to know where the self-sufficiency comes from. You’re carrying the smallest topmost rock from the first pile she left, and it’s in your pocket where you can feel it banging against your hip. It’s a slight pain but a sliver of your consciousness is accepting it as partial payment for everything you’ve done in the past to keep “self-sufficient” as one of the top ten descriptors for CSI Sara Sidle.
Although now that attribute seems to be working in her favor, so maybe you will be able to forgive yourself a little - she already has - when you find her.
When you find her.
You scan the horizon again with your binoculars. Catherine is with you now, and Nick has gone off to drive all the roads in the area with Sofia. You shouldn’t be thinking about anything personal now, much less your feelings, because you should be concentrating one hundred percent of your energy on finding Sara - and you are - but you are also aware of the fact that you’re glad you have Catherine beside you now and not Nick. She won’t look at you accusingly.
If you really thought about it, you’d know that Nick wouldn’t do that either. You just feel like he should.
More than once, Catherine has commented on Sara being a “smart girl” to leave those stone markers. She does it again and you want to say that Sara isn’t a “girl”, she’s a woman, and a damned intelligent one. An amazing one. One who deserves more respect than she gets. You don’t say anything because you think that Catherine is already feeling some twinges of guilt over all of the petty arguments that she and Sara have gotten into over the years. You also don’t want her to turn it around on you, because she definitely could. No one disrespected Sara the way you did for five years. You made it into an art form.
You aren’t seeing any more stone markers and you feel your jaw tightening as you put down your binoculars. That’s when you see the boot.
“Oh no,” is the only thing that comes from your mouth as you start to run. A mind under stress can’t be expected to be eloquent.
Down in the sand, it’s the car all over again, but this time there’s an actual body. It’s already stiff beneath the thin covering of sand. It. It. You still can’t think of it as her, and then a heartbeat later you don’t have to, because Catherine is telling you that it isn’t. You’re relieved and without remorse at the fact that you are thanking the God you aren’t sure about, that some other person has died instead of her.
Because she is alive. She is. You just have to find her.
Catherine comes up behind you as you stand looking off into the distance.
“Where is she, Cath? She’s been out there all day. It’s a hundred and ten degrees. She’s disoriented, dehydrated…”
“She’s a survivor,” Catherine tells you.
But you already know that. You know how much she’s already survived in her life. You don’t want to hear that she’s a survivor, you want to hear that she has survived.
Again.
VI. Finding
Two more stone markers have been found, but it’s been ten minutes now and you’ve circled an ever winding perimeter and haven’t spotted another one. Your fingers are beginning to tingle from the nervous energy you’re forcing yourself to keep contained. If you didn’t, you’d just be shouting her name at the top of your lungs.
You hear a female voice behind you and it isn’t Catherine. It’s Sofia, her words coming through the radio in Catherine’s hand.
They’ve found her.
You close your eyes for just a second, controlling heartbeat, pulse and respirations, which all threaten to rage out of control.
They’ve found her and they’re calling for a medevac. As you run back to the nearest car, you convince yourself that they wouldn’t be calling for a chopper if she wasn’t alive. By car, you’re less than five minutes from their location. They feel like years.
The chopper has already landed and you bolt out of the car and run to where a small group of people is surrounding a small, still body. Her body. They’re putting on an oxygen mask and you listen to them calling her name and trying to get her to respond. You’ve never felt more helpless in your life and you press your hand across your mouth and push your thumb and index finger against your eyes. You’re not going to break down now. If all you can do is watch, then that’s what you’ll do.
In only a few seconds your quick mind, so adept at cataloging a crime scene, has memorized each scrape on her face. Arm - broken. Head - bruised, possible concussion. Forehead - lacerated above right eye, near hairline, requiring stitches. Skin - pale, bloodless. Respirations - shallow. Every time you see the oxygen mask fog up from her breath, you take a breath yourself.
No one wastes any time in getting her onto a backboard and ready for transport. You can’t do a thing except be there, and you are. Flashes of interactions are playing inside your head as you stare at her face, willing each breath, each heartbeat. Her asking you to dinner. Her almost leaving. Her draping a blanket over your shoulders. Her sitting stiff and silent in the locker room after you all found Nick. You driving her home, and everything that followed. You wiping away her tears - some of the few you’d ever seen her shed. You telling her that she makes you happy.
You’re beside her head as they load her into the helicopter. The blades are spinning and the noise is intense. Nick is hanging back, just watching, arms to his sides. For less than a second, you are jealous that he’s the one who found her, but the thought doesn’t even have time to fully form in your mind. You look at her face and she’s still breathing. Still living. Catherine is asking where they’re taking her, but you aren’t even listening. You don’t need to know. You’re going with her.
Notes:
1. Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson
2. Heinrich Heine
Between Hope and Fear
I. Nightmares
You have always been able to wake yourself from nightmares, even from a very young age. At seven, when you had visions of your ants escaping and crawling across your bed you willed your eyes open, rolled over and saw the glass-encased colony still contained on your bookshelf. In high school, during the usual dream of arriving at a class in time for a test you hadn’t studied for, you blinked a few times and woke to moonlight cutting across your room and landing on the pile of textbooks you’d all but memorized. Later, much later, when crime scenes started to invade your subconscious, you were able to wake yourself before the knife came down or the gun fired or the building exploded. When you dreamt that Sara was the one trapped inside the coffin which had held Nick, you forced your eyes open before you had to watch her mouth her goodbyes.
It’s natural then, that you keep trying to wake up from the nightmare of Sara trapped beneath a car. Your fists tighten until your nails cut little half-moons into your palms and you clench your jaw and squeeze your eyes closed, shouting at yourself to wake up. You want to wake up and reach over and touch the soft, worn cotton of the tank tops she always sleeps in. She will be lying there beside you, safe and warm and alive. Alive. All you have to do was wake up. The words are a mantra in your head.
Wake up! Wake up! Wake up for God’s sake!
Then your eyes open and you find yourself still in the lab, still searching for any clue that will lead you to her, still praying that it’s really just a nightmare.
II. Water
Brass is talking to you, trying to keep you calm, although you think you’re already doing a good job of it. You haven’t thrown anything or shouted or smashed that damn miniature into a thousand pieces. He explains everything that’s being done and you know it was all that could be done. That doesn’t make it enough.
When the weather report catches your eye, you just stare at it for a minute, taking in every word. You say nothing as you fill a beaker with water. You don’t know what you are going to prove. Even Natalie hasn’t used sand that’s to scale in the miniature. Even she couldn’t have modeled something that so exactly matches the terrain that it could be used for geological flood pattern predictions. But you pour the water anyway. You watch it fill the area under the car, just the way you knew it would, and you watch the tiny waxen arm stop its fitful clutching.
You tell yourself that it is just a model, a mechanical model that naturally shorts out when water is applied. You repeat that basic fact to yourself over and over as you look out the window at the rain pouring down, and try not to picture her struggling to breathe beneath a crushed car. You think of the way she touched your face years before you’d been strong enough to allow a relationship to form.
The images of all the different times she touched you in the past, are part of what is keeping you calm.
Warrick is trying to convince you that she might not actually be under the full-size version of the red mustang, but you know better than to cling to that false hope. Natalie is insane, but you’d seen into her eyes. You know she’d succeeded in her mission. Partially succeeded. Partially, you repeat to yourself. She wanted Sara to die, but that wasn’t going to happen. It couldn’t.
III. Searching
Everyone is working on overdrive, frantic to find Sara before any more time passes. You keep yourself rigid, methodical, practical. An outsider would think that she was more important to just about anyone but you. Catherine, alone, seems to sense what is right below the surface. She knows that even touching your arm will make you break, and you can’t afford that. Coffee is pressed into your hand, and you look over and see her standing there staring at the same maps you’ve been studying.
The helicopters have been directed to the west and Hodges has narrowed it down even further, but it isn’t enough. There are miles of desert to search, and no more clues. The sun is rising and you rub your eyes. Catherine has left without you even noticing, and her voice calling from the hallway makes you jerk your head in her direction. Nick’s lead on the car panned out and Brass has called in the location. Icebox Canyon. They know where she is.
It’s less than thirty minutes away. All this time, and she’s been less than thirty minutes away.
Nick drives and you let him. It feels like you are going in slow motion although there are sirens blaring in front of you and behind you as a small army of police speeds towards the location of their fallen sister. You want to be there already, but you are also terrified of what you’ll find.
For twelve hours you’ve unsuccessfully attempted to shut off your feelings, push them aside in favor of cool logic and leadership. That was what would find Sara, not your feelings. They were nothing but a liability. To her… and to you. The pain that seems to fill every inch of your chest now is exactly why you rejected her again and again. You can selfishly admit that now.
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all. [1]
Damn your mind and its uncontrollable urge to spit out quotations to fit any situation. It won’t be better to have loved her if you lose her. Tennyson was a damn liar. That’s what you keep telling yourself. You don’t want to acknowledge that one day of loving her is worth anything. Any pain. Admitting that would be like admitting that she’s dead, and you aren’t ready to do that.
I will not mourn, although my heart is torn,
Oh, love forever lost! I will not mourn.[2]
But you will mourn. Forever.
You scrub you hand across your face, and Nick glances in your direction but said nothing. He’s been quiet on the drive which isn’t like him. You got the distinct impression that he wants to say something though. He and Sara have always been close. Early on you’d actually thought that he’d be better for her than you and the jealousy had nearly killed you and had made you push her away even harder. His foot is pressed to the floor, and he has his eyes set on the distance and his hands tight around the steering wheel. He blames you.
That is what you are sure he wants to say. You aren’t sure he’s wrong. Natalie took Sara because of you. You’ve seen crimes of revenge before and have comforted the loved ones left behind with rational words of absolution. Those words mean nothing to you now.
“It’s not her day,” you hear Nick murmur beside you.
You ask him what he means because for a second you’re irrationally angry at the idea that he’s making light and saying that today is just not Sara’s lucky day. He corrects your assumption immediately.
“It’s not her day to die,” he says, and his voice sounds tight and strained.
More strained than yours, and you’re the one who’s supposed to love her.
You don’t answer him, but instead crane your neck to get a better look at the helicopter that’s circling not far away. The radio crackles to life and the only words you really take note of are the ones that say the car has been spotted. Nick picks up even more speed and steers the SUV off the bumpy dirt access road you’ve been traveling on and into the desert.
IV. Vest
Your door is open before the SUV has even fully stopped, and you’re running as soon as your left foot hits sand. Nick is right behind you, and other cars are pulling up behind yours but you’re the first person to scramble over the scrub-topped dune and see the car. See the sand.
In that instant you want time to stand still. You are desperate to find her, but when your brain takes in the sight of the overturned car, half buried in the sand, you suddenly don’t want to take another step closer. There’s no question what you will find and you don’t want this nightmare to become reality.
You don’t want to find her body, cold, grey and lifeless. You don’t want to see her lips, pallid and unmoving, her hair matted with sand, her eyes closed forever. Until this moment there was still hope, and now that hope is dying within your own breast. As long as she was just missing, she was still alive. Once you find her, there will be nothing more to do.
Apparently your body isn’t listening to your mind. It’s still moving, down on its knees, fingers scraping, digging, tearing at the shifting earth. Your voice is shouting her name and now you hear the strain and desperation that you’d missed earlier.
Nick is beside you again, digging, digging, feeling for something in the sand. You see him pulling something out, and you stop, your heart feeling like it’s stopping too, and watch him brushing sand off of her vest.
Sidle.
You see her name stitched in white. You’ve seen it hundreds of times, maybe thousands, but it’s never brought this mix of emotions to your soul. You want to vomit. You want to scream. You want to tear the vest from Nick’s hands and hug it to your body. He shouldn’t be touching it, it should be you. Is this relief? Her vest is here and she’s not in it, but the rush of pure terror and adrenaline at the vision of her buried in the sand, is still coursing through your body. It will be a few minutes before it spikes again and then drains, like how it did when you were driving out to Lake Mead with her and were almost sideswiped by a semi.
But it won’t be pure relief this time, because even if she isn’t under the car, she’s still not in your arms.
V. Survivor
Clever. Smart. Brilliant.
Self-sufficient.
That’s it. It isn’t just her intelligence, it’s her self-sufficiency that led her to walk away from the wreck and the flood, that moved her hand to place stones for you to follow, that is keeping her walking.
Her past is known to you now, or at least enough for you to know where the self-sufficiency comes from. You’re carrying the smallest topmost rock from the first pile she left, and it’s in your pocket where you can feel it banging against your hip. It’s a slight pain but a sliver of your consciousness is accepting it as partial payment for everything you’ve done in the past to keep “self-sufficient” as one of the top ten descriptors for CSI Sara Sidle.
Although now that attribute seems to be working in her favor, so maybe you will be able to forgive yourself a little - she already has - when you find her.
When you find her.
You scan the horizon again with your binoculars. Catherine is with you now, and Nick has gone off to drive all the roads in the area with Sofia. You shouldn’t be thinking about anything personal now, much less your feelings, because you should be concentrating one hundred percent of your energy on finding Sara - and you are - but you are also aware of the fact that you’re glad you have Catherine beside you now and not Nick. She won’t look at you accusingly.
If you really thought about it, you’d know that Nick wouldn’t do that either. You just feel like he should.
More than once, Catherine has commented on Sara being a “smart girl” to leave those stone markers. She does it again and you want to say that Sara isn’t a “girl”, she’s a woman, and a damned intelligent one. An amazing one. One who deserves more respect than she gets. You don’t say anything because you think that Catherine is already feeling some twinges of guilt over all of the petty arguments that she and Sara have gotten into over the years. You also don’t want her to turn it around on you, because she definitely could. No one disrespected Sara the way you did for five years. You made it into an art form.
You aren’t seeing any more stone markers and you feel your jaw tightening as you put down your binoculars. That’s when you see the boot.
“Oh no,” is the only thing that comes from your mouth as you start to run. A mind under stress can’t be expected to be eloquent.
Down in the sand, it’s the car all over again, but this time there’s an actual body. It’s already stiff beneath the thin covering of sand. It. It. You still can’t think of it as her, and then a heartbeat later you don’t have to, because Catherine is telling you that it isn’t. You’re relieved and without remorse at the fact that you are thanking the God you aren’t sure about, that some other person has died instead of her.
Because she is alive. She is. You just have to find her.
Catherine comes up behind you as you stand looking off into the distance.
“Where is she, Cath? She’s been out there all day. It’s a hundred and ten degrees. She’s disoriented, dehydrated…”
“She’s a survivor,” Catherine tells you.
But you already know that. You know how much she’s already survived in her life. You don’t want to hear that she’s a survivor, you want to hear that she has survived.
Again.
VI. Finding
Two more stone markers have been found, but it’s been ten minutes now and you’ve circled an ever winding perimeter and haven’t spotted another one. Your fingers are beginning to tingle from the nervous energy you’re forcing yourself to keep contained. If you didn’t, you’d just be shouting her name at the top of your lungs.
You hear a female voice behind you and it isn’t Catherine. It’s Sofia, her words coming through the radio in Catherine’s hand.
They’ve found her.
You close your eyes for just a second, controlling heartbeat, pulse and respirations, which all threaten to rage out of control.
They’ve found her and they’re calling for a medevac. As you run back to the nearest car, you convince yourself that they wouldn’t be calling for a chopper if she wasn’t alive. By car, you’re less than five minutes from their location. They feel like years.
The chopper has already landed and you bolt out of the car and run to where a small group of people is surrounding a small, still body. Her body. They’re putting on an oxygen mask and you listen to them calling her name and trying to get her to respond. You’ve never felt more helpless in your life and you press your hand across your mouth and push your thumb and index finger against your eyes. You’re not going to break down now. If all you can do is watch, then that’s what you’ll do.
In only a few seconds your quick mind, so adept at cataloging a crime scene, has memorized each scrape on her face. Arm - broken. Head - bruised, possible concussion. Forehead - lacerated above right eye, near hairline, requiring stitches. Skin - pale, bloodless. Respirations - shallow. Every time you see the oxygen mask fog up from her breath, you take a breath yourself.
No one wastes any time in getting her onto a backboard and ready for transport. You can’t do a thing except be there, and you are. Flashes of interactions are playing inside your head as you stare at her face, willing each breath, each heartbeat. Her asking you to dinner. Her almost leaving. Her draping a blanket over your shoulders. Her sitting stiff and silent in the locker room after you all found Nick. You driving her home, and everything that followed. You wiping away her tears - some of the few you’d ever seen her shed. You telling her that she makes you happy.
You’re beside her head as they load her into the helicopter. The blades are spinning and the noise is intense. Nick is hanging back, just watching, arms to his sides. For less than a second, you are jealous that he’s the one who found her, but the thought doesn’t even have time to fully form in your mind. You look at her face and she’s still breathing. Still living. Catherine is asking where they’re taking her, but you aren’t even listening. You don’t need to know. You’re going with her.
Notes:
1. Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson
2. Heinrich Heine