Personal canon... and fic?
I have no fiction, but I have a personal canon. Somewhere in the process of trying to write it down, it might have become fic. Or at least the promise of fic.
(Definitely not mine. Borrowing someone else's creations.)
Sara is not a victim.
She's seen the question in the eyes of the detectives during certain interrogations, in the eyes of the techs as she's waited impatiently for certain results. She knows that even Grissom wondered when she sat vigil with Pamela Adler, and it was still there, a pained curiosity he didn't dare give voice to, when she finally told him about her parents.
But Sara is not a victim. Not of that form of violence, at least. Her medical history may contain black eyes and cracked ribs and a broken clavicle that still aches when it's about to rain, but her father only ever hurt her with his fists. She's never stared into the lens of a UV camera, never seen the swabs from a SART that weren't part of a case.
The victim wasn't her best friend, or even a close friend, but her freshman year roommate. Sara knows that it was finals period and that she'd practically been living in the physics lab. She knows it wasn't her fault that her roommate, while leaving the library, accepted an offer from a guy in her econ class to walk her back to her dorm. She knows it wasn't her fault that her roommate offered the guy a drink - just to say thanks - and he read something completely different into the invitation.
And yet Sara, despite all she knows, cannot help but think that had she been in the room that night, maybe her roommate would have been safe.