Imperfections: Las Vegas Part 2
Still playing around with time. At this point, it's so folded up it's not even circular, it's pretzel-shaped. Just...ignore it. Really. That's best for everyone.
Still no money. I don't own any of it.
Oh! And this is both het and gen. Surprise.
Sara poked her head into Grissom's office. "You wanted to see me?"
Grissom shut the file he was working on and laid it aside. "If you have a few minutes. Shut the door." He looked serious. Also, he was giving her his full, focused attention. Curious, she took the chair across from him. "I need a favor," he said cautiously.
Sara shrugged. "Sure. Anything."
Grissom smiled thinly. "Don't make any promises yet. It's not a trivial favor."
"Oh." She tried to match his seriousness, tried to quash the little voice at the back of her head that was so, so pleased that he would ask her for something. "Okay. What is it?"
He passed a flier across the desk. Sara glanced down. An entomology conference in Seattle. "It's this Friday," Grissom said. "I'd like to go, but I need a guide."
He was watching her expectantly. It almost seemed as though he was asking her, but that didn't make any sense. Grissom didn't take a guide with him when he traveled. He didn't need any help. And even if he did, his current guide wouldn't refuse to go along. Cory, like every guide that passed through Grissom's life, adored him. Sara winced, "Do I want to ask what he did?"
He blinked at her in puzzlement. "What who did?"
"Cory." She hefted the flier. "Why isn't he--?"
"This isn't about Cory. This is about me." He hesitated. "Cory is a very good student." He glanced away. "I need a guide."
"For a trip to a professional conference." She was careful not to sound disbelieving, but she was confused. It couldn't be that simple. On the job, Grissom went (practically alone, since you couldn't really believe that his students were any help at all) places most other sentinels wouldn't even consider: rank places, poisoned places, blindingly chaotic places.... He wouldn't ask for a guide at a bug conference.
"I'll be flying. I don't usually. It's...a problem."
Admitting even that much weakness seemed difficult. Sara offered a gentle out: "Well, that's fairly common."
He ignored the reassurance and continued briskly, "You're not scheduled to work this weekend, so you're free for Friday and Saturday, and I can shuffle things so that someone takes your shift on Sunday night."
Oh, boy. This was weird. Or, rather, not weird if it were anyone else, but way out of character for Gil Grissom. Sara ran her teeth over her lower lip. "You know--you know I'm happy to do it, right? I mean you have only to ask--"
"But?"
Sara winced and said in one breath, "I can't take on this kind of responsibility without legal authority. You're talking about going out of state. If something bad happens it won't be Desert Palms where they know us. And if you *were* to get into trouble--"
He stopped the stream of words with a raised hand and passed her a laminated card the size of a drivers' license. On one side was Sara's picture, name, and professional affiliation. It was just like the cards she had for Warrick, Catherine, Nick, Greg, and Anna, the intern. This one had Grissom's picture and signature on the back. "Oh. You've given this some thought."
He produced a folder from the desk drawer. His medical file. Sara had worked with sentinels half his age with files twice as thick. "You'll need this, too."
She took the file in both hands, but didn't open it. "Are you sure about this?"
He tried very hard to smile. "I *have* given this some thought. If I'm going to travel..." he trailed off, and glanced away, his eyes focusing on the wall behind her. "Sudden changes in pressure and altitude are very difficult for me. I can manage the symptoms, but now while, ah, not while...."
"Dealing with everything else?" she offered.
"Yes," he said, but his voice was unsteady. "But also. Recently. I've been having trouble hearing. I don't pretend this is news. I supervise five sentinels, I assume they've noticed."
Slowly, her eyes drifted down to the file in her lap. Grissom said nothing. Sara flipped it open. At the top was a hearing test less than a week old. Nothing registered below eighteen thousand kilohertz. At any volume. Her breath froze.
"It comes and goes," Grissom said. "It isn't always that bad."
"We had no idea it was..." Sara tromped down on her horror and cleared her throat. "What are the characteristics of the lacunae?"
For just a moment his eyes shown with approval before his expression returned to neutral. "I'm functionally deaf about thirty percent of the time. But I don't think I've been much past the normal human auditory range in...at least a month."
"I see." Grissom's file was, naturally, organized according to protocol. Every page was in place. She had no trouble finding the diagnosis. "Isn't this treatable?" she asked.
"A local anesthetic is out of the question, and there are certain...liability issues with using a general on a sentinel."
She started to rise. "Oh, I'll give them liability--"
"It's all right. My lawyer is working on it. Thank you."
She snapped the file closed. "Sorry," she said. "I got off track. Is there anything else I need to know? Before I travel with you? You said you got airsick?"
"I can handle the symptoms. You just have to make sure I get on the right planes." He smiled, his unguarded gratitude making Sara feel slightly guilty that he had doubted her willingness to go. But it was never that. She couldn't even consider refusing him.
"Right." She shrugged. "Piece of cake. All in a day's work."
"I appreciate this, Sara."
"No problem." She smiled brightly. "So. Seattle."
"With a brief side-trip to Cascade."
Oh. "The Brackett case."
"I have some more questions," he said casually. "Since we'll be in the neighborhood anyway, it seemed an efficient use of time." If she hadn't known him very well, it would have seemed like a detached, professional interest.
"It's an unusual case," she said, trying for casual as well. Grissom didn't respond, and after a few moments she added, "With good reason. I mean, not just anybody can go to guide school. They just don't graduate that many psychos." He didn't answer that either, so she said, "Not that all guides are perfect...."
Finally, finally, he said, "Arguably, there's a difference between being a little controlling and deliberately exposing your partner to a life-threatening chemical trigger." He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "What must it be like, to know your partner would do that?"
"I don't know. I don't get it." She said sadly. "Of course, I don't get a lot of stuff that passes through here. Some of the things I *know* people have done just...turns my stomach. Although....Technically, they weren't partnered at the time. From what I could tell, Brackett was negligent but not abusive before he was fired."
His eyes snapped up. "How long would you have to be separated from Nick or Warrick before you'd poison one of them?" he asked softly. "How angry would you have to be? To take what you knew about their weaknesses and turn it against them?"
"Never. You know that--" She shoved down raw memories of ambulance rides with Warrick. Three in the last two years. "Never." But while Grissom looked upset, he didn't look upset with her. She reran his last statement in her mind and took her best guess. "Gerard disagreed with you. And, yeah, he sold out. But that doesn't mean it was personal."
His eyes iced over. "You think I have a problem because Phillip disagreed with me?" His voice had iced over, too. Sara had missed something important.
"I know you have a problem," she backtracked. "I don't know what it is."
"It seems an odd coincidence," he said, "That Haviland's lawyer knew to speak very softly and look just enough to the side that I couldn't read his lips."
Sara had been there. And, oh, yes something had been wrong. Not just to Sara's guide's eyes, but to Catherine and Nick too. Both of them had been bristling, nearly hissing with wariness. Their gaze had ranged the courtroom, searching for the threat they couldn't identify. When it was over, she'd been distracted by the victory, and in the months since she'd forgotten. But now, looking back, she could see that something this nasty could easily have been going on, right under their noses.
"This is where you're supposed to ask me if I have any evidence, or if this is all just paranoid supposition," Grissom prompted.
Will that make you feel better? She thought. But even if it would, she wasn't sure denying this truth would be good for him. Whatever the truth actually was. "You spoke with Gerard several times. You went to dinner. Was there any sign--?"
Grissom sighed. "I knew he was angry. I knew he was unhappy with his career. I knew he was resentful. I didn't know it was directed at me."
Sara had never had to call Grissom on lying to himself before. Possibly, nobody had had to do that in years. Probably, even. She wasn't willing to go that far now. But she couldn't just leave it unquestioned at all. "You're the best interrogator I've ever seen. How can you not know?"
"Sara, when I have a witness or a suspect across the table from me, he has only one thing on his mind. Usually, it's the case, and on the rare occasions that it's not...it doesn't take long to sort things out. What they're hiding, what they did, what they know--getting to that is difficult, but not complicated. But when I'm having a conversation with someone," he shrugged helplessly. "People don't have one thing on their minds. They have dozens. In casual conversations, people say things they don't mean. They tell white lies. They talk without thinking things through. They worry about their kids or their oil leak or the health of their Aunt Hattie. If I though every person who was angry *near* me was angry *at* me, I would be the most paranoid person you could possibly imagine."
"You knew he was unhappy. You had no idea he'd use your weaknesses to try to obscure the truth and publicly humiliate you."
"Yes," he breathed. He collected himself. "Never mind. You'll be relieved to know I've already decided not to do that."
She smiled. "What? Sell out? Hate to burst your bubble, but nobody was worried about that."
"No. Not to hate you when you surpass me."
And what did you say to that? "Thank you. Er."
"You're already a better guide than I am, Sara. You actually are patient, where I just fake patience."
"Patience is a behavior, not an attitude," she said automatically.
"I teach that because I don't have the attitude, and being in the wrong frame of mind is no excuse for not giving things the time they need. But. You...are very gifted. And your greatest skills aren't ones you learned from me. Someday, you'll be a better teacher, too."
She wanted to say something humble. She knew he wouldn't respect that. And, anyway, it would be a lie. She said, "Well, I'm going to try." And, yes, that was the right answer. He smiled, and she changed the subject before she said something stupid and lost all the ground she'd just gained. "So. Do we have an appointment in Cascade?"
"Friday afternoon. We'll fly in to Cascade, meet with Detective Ellison, and head to the conference Friday evening."
"Directly from the plane to the meeting?" Sara asked. "And from there to the first round of sessions, with a commute in between? You know, I have four vacation days I have to use before the end of next month or lose them. And I bet you have more than that. We could take Thursday night off and fly up early. Take some time to actually sleep."
"I can *do* it, Sara." He flicked a finger at the file in her lap. "I'm not fragile."
Sara scooted to the edge of the chair and leaned across the desk. "Yeah. See. Just because I *could* work you until you drop from exhaustion doesn't mean I have to. And, you know. I have this whole professional ethics thing going."
He was hesitating. She almost had him. And she needed to win this one, because there was no way she wanted to work with Grissom exhausted and sick and in some strange city. "Besides which, my supervisor has recently expressed great confidence in my ability. I don't want to blow this. Particularly since he'll be watching my performance very closely."
"Okay," he said, smiling slightly. "No promises, but I'll see what I can do with the schedule."
Whew. "Great. Let me know when we're traveling, and I'll call for the tickets." She stood up, trying for brisk and efficient. She might make a graceful exit here. Usually, with Grissom, she didn't.
He wasn't ready for professional just yet. He looked up at her solemnly and said, "Thank you. I appreciate this."
"You're kidding, right? I would love to hear this story first hand--" But, no. It was no good pretending this was no big deal or just a matter of professional curiosity. "We'll be okay," she promised, coming around the desk so that he could clearly smell her, pick up her body heat. Grissom had asked for a guide. He was senior to her and much more experienced, but it was about to be her job to reassure and protect him. "It'll be fine."
"Thank you for that, too," he said.
Sara withdrew, thinking that she would have to check the weather and make plans for packing. They were going to Washington.
~end
Still no money. I don't own any of it.
Oh! And this is both het and gen. Surprise.
Sara poked her head into Grissom's office. "You wanted to see me?"
Grissom shut the file he was working on and laid it aside. "If you have a few minutes. Shut the door." He looked serious. Also, he was giving her his full, focused attention. Curious, she took the chair across from him. "I need a favor," he said cautiously.
Sara shrugged. "Sure. Anything."
Grissom smiled thinly. "Don't make any promises yet. It's not a trivial favor."
"Oh." She tried to match his seriousness, tried to quash the little voice at the back of her head that was so, so pleased that he would ask her for something. "Okay. What is it?"
He passed a flier across the desk. Sara glanced down. An entomology conference in Seattle. "It's this Friday," Grissom said. "I'd like to go, but I need a guide."
He was watching her expectantly. It almost seemed as though he was asking her, but that didn't make any sense. Grissom didn't take a guide with him when he traveled. He didn't need any help. And even if he did, his current guide wouldn't refuse to go along. Cory, like every guide that passed through Grissom's life, adored him. Sara winced, "Do I want to ask what he did?"
He blinked at her in puzzlement. "What who did?"
"Cory." She hefted the flier. "Why isn't he--?"
"This isn't about Cory. This is about me." He hesitated. "Cory is a very good student." He glanced away. "I need a guide."
"For a trip to a professional conference." She was careful not to sound disbelieving, but she was confused. It couldn't be that simple. On the job, Grissom went (practically alone, since you couldn't really believe that his students were any help at all) places most other sentinels wouldn't even consider: rank places, poisoned places, blindingly chaotic places.... He wouldn't ask for a guide at a bug conference.
"I'll be flying. I don't usually. It's...a problem."
Admitting even that much weakness seemed difficult. Sara offered a gentle out: "Well, that's fairly common."
He ignored the reassurance and continued briskly, "You're not scheduled to work this weekend, so you're free for Friday and Saturday, and I can shuffle things so that someone takes your shift on Sunday night."
Oh, boy. This was weird. Or, rather, not weird if it were anyone else, but way out of character for Gil Grissom. Sara ran her teeth over her lower lip. "You know--you know I'm happy to do it, right? I mean you have only to ask--"
"But?"
Sara winced and said in one breath, "I can't take on this kind of responsibility without legal authority. You're talking about going out of state. If something bad happens it won't be Desert Palms where they know us. And if you *were* to get into trouble--"
He stopped the stream of words with a raised hand and passed her a laminated card the size of a drivers' license. On one side was Sara's picture, name, and professional affiliation. It was just like the cards she had for Warrick, Catherine, Nick, Greg, and Anna, the intern. This one had Grissom's picture and signature on the back. "Oh. You've given this some thought."
He produced a folder from the desk drawer. His medical file. Sara had worked with sentinels half his age with files twice as thick. "You'll need this, too."
She took the file in both hands, but didn't open it. "Are you sure about this?"
He tried very hard to smile. "I *have* given this some thought. If I'm going to travel..." he trailed off, and glanced away, his eyes focusing on the wall behind her. "Sudden changes in pressure and altitude are very difficult for me. I can manage the symptoms, but now while, ah, not while...."
"Dealing with everything else?" she offered.
"Yes," he said, but his voice was unsteady. "But also. Recently. I've been having trouble hearing. I don't pretend this is news. I supervise five sentinels, I assume they've noticed."
Slowly, her eyes drifted down to the file in her lap. Grissom said nothing. Sara flipped it open. At the top was a hearing test less than a week old. Nothing registered below eighteen thousand kilohertz. At any volume. Her breath froze.
"It comes and goes," Grissom said. "It isn't always that bad."
"We had no idea it was..." Sara tromped down on her horror and cleared her throat. "What are the characteristics of the lacunae?"
For just a moment his eyes shown with approval before his expression returned to neutral. "I'm functionally deaf about thirty percent of the time. But I don't think I've been much past the normal human auditory range in...at least a month."
"I see." Grissom's file was, naturally, organized according to protocol. Every page was in place. She had no trouble finding the diagnosis. "Isn't this treatable?" she asked.
"A local anesthetic is out of the question, and there are certain...liability issues with using a general on a sentinel."
She started to rise. "Oh, I'll give them liability--"
"It's all right. My lawyer is working on it. Thank you."
She snapped the file closed. "Sorry," she said. "I got off track. Is there anything else I need to know? Before I travel with you? You said you got airsick?"
"I can handle the symptoms. You just have to make sure I get on the right planes." He smiled, his unguarded gratitude making Sara feel slightly guilty that he had doubted her willingness to go. But it was never that. She couldn't even consider refusing him.
"Right." She shrugged. "Piece of cake. All in a day's work."
"I appreciate this, Sara."
"No problem." She smiled brightly. "So. Seattle."
"With a brief side-trip to Cascade."
Oh. "The Brackett case."
"I have some more questions," he said casually. "Since we'll be in the neighborhood anyway, it seemed an efficient use of time." If she hadn't known him very well, it would have seemed like a detached, professional interest.
"It's an unusual case," she said, trying for casual as well. Grissom didn't respond, and after a few moments she added, "With good reason. I mean, not just anybody can go to guide school. They just don't graduate that many psychos." He didn't answer that either, so she said, "Not that all guides are perfect...."
Finally, finally, he said, "Arguably, there's a difference between being a little controlling and deliberately exposing your partner to a life-threatening chemical trigger." He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "What must it be like, to know your partner would do that?"
"I don't know. I don't get it." She said sadly. "Of course, I don't get a lot of stuff that passes through here. Some of the things I *know* people have done just...turns my stomach. Although....Technically, they weren't partnered at the time. From what I could tell, Brackett was negligent but not abusive before he was fired."
His eyes snapped up. "How long would you have to be separated from Nick or Warrick before you'd poison one of them?" he asked softly. "How angry would you have to be? To take what you knew about their weaknesses and turn it against them?"
"Never. You know that--" She shoved down raw memories of ambulance rides with Warrick. Three in the last two years. "Never." But while Grissom looked upset, he didn't look upset with her. She reran his last statement in her mind and took her best guess. "Gerard disagreed with you. And, yeah, he sold out. But that doesn't mean it was personal."
His eyes iced over. "You think I have a problem because Phillip disagreed with me?" His voice had iced over, too. Sara had missed something important.
"I know you have a problem," she backtracked. "I don't know what it is."
"It seems an odd coincidence," he said, "That Haviland's lawyer knew to speak very softly and look just enough to the side that I couldn't read his lips."
Sara had been there. And, oh, yes something had been wrong. Not just to Sara's guide's eyes, but to Catherine and Nick too. Both of them had been bristling, nearly hissing with wariness. Their gaze had ranged the courtroom, searching for the threat they couldn't identify. When it was over, she'd been distracted by the victory, and in the months since she'd forgotten. But now, looking back, she could see that something this nasty could easily have been going on, right under their noses.
"This is where you're supposed to ask me if I have any evidence, or if this is all just paranoid supposition," Grissom prompted.
Will that make you feel better? She thought. But even if it would, she wasn't sure denying this truth would be good for him. Whatever the truth actually was. "You spoke with Gerard several times. You went to dinner. Was there any sign--?"
Grissom sighed. "I knew he was angry. I knew he was unhappy with his career. I knew he was resentful. I didn't know it was directed at me."
Sara had never had to call Grissom on lying to himself before. Possibly, nobody had had to do that in years. Probably, even. She wasn't willing to go that far now. But she couldn't just leave it unquestioned at all. "You're the best interrogator I've ever seen. How can you not know?"
"Sara, when I have a witness or a suspect across the table from me, he has only one thing on his mind. Usually, it's the case, and on the rare occasions that it's not...it doesn't take long to sort things out. What they're hiding, what they did, what they know--getting to that is difficult, but not complicated. But when I'm having a conversation with someone," he shrugged helplessly. "People don't have one thing on their minds. They have dozens. In casual conversations, people say things they don't mean. They tell white lies. They talk without thinking things through. They worry about their kids or their oil leak or the health of their Aunt Hattie. If I though every person who was angry *near* me was angry *at* me, I would be the most paranoid person you could possibly imagine."
"You knew he was unhappy. You had no idea he'd use your weaknesses to try to obscure the truth and publicly humiliate you."
"Yes," he breathed. He collected himself. "Never mind. You'll be relieved to know I've already decided not to do that."
She smiled. "What? Sell out? Hate to burst your bubble, but nobody was worried about that."
"No. Not to hate you when you surpass me."
And what did you say to that? "Thank you. Er."
"You're already a better guide than I am, Sara. You actually are patient, where I just fake patience."
"Patience is a behavior, not an attitude," she said automatically.
"I teach that because I don't have the attitude, and being in the wrong frame of mind is no excuse for not giving things the time they need. But. You...are very gifted. And your greatest skills aren't ones you learned from me. Someday, you'll be a better teacher, too."
She wanted to say something humble. She knew he wouldn't respect that. And, anyway, it would be a lie. She said, "Well, I'm going to try." And, yes, that was the right answer. He smiled, and she changed the subject before she said something stupid and lost all the ground she'd just gained. "So. Do we have an appointment in Cascade?"
"Friday afternoon. We'll fly in to Cascade, meet with Detective Ellison, and head to the conference Friday evening."
"Directly from the plane to the meeting?" Sara asked. "And from there to the first round of sessions, with a commute in between? You know, I have four vacation days I have to use before the end of next month or lose them. And I bet you have more than that. We could take Thursday night off and fly up early. Take some time to actually sleep."
"I can *do* it, Sara." He flicked a finger at the file in her lap. "I'm not fragile."
Sara scooted to the edge of the chair and leaned across the desk. "Yeah. See. Just because I *could* work you until you drop from exhaustion doesn't mean I have to. And, you know. I have this whole professional ethics thing going."
He was hesitating. She almost had him. And she needed to win this one, because there was no way she wanted to work with Grissom exhausted and sick and in some strange city. "Besides which, my supervisor has recently expressed great confidence in my ability. I don't want to blow this. Particularly since he'll be watching my performance very closely."
"Okay," he said, smiling slightly. "No promises, but I'll see what I can do with the schedule."
Whew. "Great. Let me know when we're traveling, and I'll call for the tickets." She stood up, trying for brisk and efficient. She might make a graceful exit here. Usually, with Grissom, she didn't.
He wasn't ready for professional just yet. He looked up at her solemnly and said, "Thank you. I appreciate this."
"You're kidding, right? I would love to hear this story first hand--" But, no. It was no good pretending this was no big deal or just a matter of professional curiosity. "We'll be okay," she promised, coming around the desk so that he could clearly smell her, pick up her body heat. Grissom had asked for a guide. He was senior to her and much more experienced, but it was about to be her job to reassure and protect him. "It'll be fine."
"Thank you for that, too," he said.
Sara withdrew, thinking that she would have to check the weather and make plans for packing. They were going to Washington.
~end