FIC: The Hills Are Bare (Part 1/5)
Title: The Hills Are Bare (1/5)
Author: Knightmusic
Rating: PG
Pairing: eventual Gil/Greg
Summary: "Life is all about the people in it, and the ones you let into yours. You’re completely alone, Gil, and I know you didn’t learn this behavior from me." It's Christmas, and Gil is alone - and glad of it - but stronger forces are trying to change that.
Author's Note/Warnings: I had hoped to have this whole thing done for Christmas. Baring that, I'd hoped to have the first part done in time. So much for that. Anyway, here's hoping that the spirit of the season still makes this a timely story.
Disclaimer: If I owned CSI, I'd be much cooler than I am right now. Also, Mr. Dickens, I offer you my deepest admiration and apologies. Whichever you would prefer.
“So. Marley was dead to begin with?”
Gil Grissom leaned back in his chair and let his eyes wander idly over the report that Catherine had handed to him. She had begun the evening with an arson case; that it had turned into a murder investigation was merely the kind of random chance that was often part and parcel of her job.
“Dead as a doornail,” she answered.
Edward Marley had been dead long before the fire had begun: long before it had even been conceived of in the mind of his surviving partner, Robert Jacobsen. Had it not been for the can of gasoline, the lighter and the moment of desperation, Jacobsen would have found the note that Marley had left. He would have mourned the loss of his friend and partner, certainly, but would have benefited from the terms stipulated in Marley’s newly revised will.
“Suicide?” Grissom asked.
Catherine nodded. “Yep. Not many people tend to get their affairs in such impeccable order unless they know they’re about to die. And murder doesn’t give advance notice.”
Grissom dropped the report onto his desk. This was his copy; an official copy would go on file in the archives, and he had little concern over what happened to this one now that he’d gotten the information he needed. His desk drawers and file cabinets had hanging folders with organized labels - the results of an attempt to organize his professional life - but he had long since abandoned that pretense. Anything that might ever be of use to him stayed on the desk’s surface. Drawers were a place to forget about things that weren’t important.
“Good work, Catherine,” he said. She made a face and gesture that was part shrug, part laughter and mostly dismissive. It was the look she always wore when she received a compliment from him. It spoke of someone who was glad to receive the sentiment, but was wary of ever needing to hear it.
From down the hall came the sound of a tremendous ruckus. A sound that Grissom was reluctant to call singing made up most of it.
In a few seconds, the face of Greg Sanders poked into the doorway of his office. He was wearing some kind of ridiculous headwear - reindeer antlers, of course - and carrying a handful of candy canes.
“Yo, Grissom. Cath,” he said, sweeping around the doorframe and into the office. “It’s quittin’ time. You two heading out?”
“Just about to, yeah,” Catherine said, grinning broadly at Greg. “New hairstyle suits you.”
Greg bowed stiffly, like a poorly articulated animatronic, and, equally stiffly, stuck out an arm, offering her a candy cane. She accepted it, still smiling at him. “You plan on making it to the party, right?” she asked.
“Of course. 8 o’clock?” he asked. Catherine nodded. Greg turned to Grissom. “Any chance we’ll be seeing you there?” he asked.
Grissom considered it for an infinitesimal span of time before shaking his head. “I doubt it,” he said.
Catherine laid a look upon him, but Greg beat her to speaking. “What, you have better plans than hanging out with us?”
Grissom raised his eyebrows, looking over the tops of his glasses. The look was a warning, but Greg didn’t catch it. “I don’t care much for parties,” he said.
“Okay, fine,” Greg continued. “But even people who ‘don’t care for parties’ go to them at Christmas. Holiday spirit and all that.”
“Greg,” Grissom warned. His tone was becoming more direct and pointed.
But Greg ignored the warning signs and instead picked up the song he had been singing earlier in the hallway. It was something about how he “just went nuts at Christmas.” It was dramatically exaggerated, with an overdone Scandanavian lilt to the pronunciation, making “just” sound like “yust” and accompanied by expansive gestures of his arms.
“Greg,” Grissom said, interrupting him, and this time Greg could not ignore the tone. Grissom stared hard at him. “If you have some reason for still being here, some work to do or something, than go do it. If you don’t, go home.”
Greg stopped and looked appropriately cowed, but maintained his composure long enough to keep from slinking out of the office. Instead, he met Grissom’s hard look, dropped a candy cane into his pencil holder, spun around and left the office purposefully.
“Well, that was uncalled for,” Catherine said after Greg had left.
“Well, that’s Greg,” Grissom said, calming down a bit. Catherine shook her head.
“I wasn’t referring to Greg. I meant you. He just cares about you is all.”
Grissom sighed. “Then he should respect my decisions.” Catherine sighed back.
“You don’t always get that luxury with your friends,” she said, and stood up to leave. “For what it’s worth, I’m with him. It would do you good to socialize more, and we’d love it if you came by tonight.”
“Thanks, Catherine,” Grissom said, and a very small smile pulled at one corner of his mouth. “But I don’t think so.”
She shrugged. “Suit yourself. Merry Christmas, Gil.” With that, she left the office, and Grissom sat by himself without replying.
* * *
Traffic was maddening on his way home, but that was to be expected. Fortunately, his favorite café was relatively empty, and he was able to have something to eat in peace, away from the madness of holiday travel.
He left the cafe directly after finishing his dinner, returned to his Tahoe and sat there in confusion. The rear view mirror was out of place, which was perplexing as well as absurd. He was the only one, absolutely the only one, who ever drove this vehicle, and he knew for a fact that the mirror had been where it belonged when he parked in front of the cafe. He frowned and reached up to adjust it.
Just as he knew without any hesitation or question at all that he was the only one who ever drove this vehicle, ever touched these mirrors, ever sat in this driver’s seat, he also knew that the Tahoe had been locked for the entirety of his meal, was still locked when he had come back out, and had been unlocked by he, himself upon his return, and at no point had anyone been in his backseat.
He could not, therefore, satisfactorily explain how he saw, when he adjusted his mirror to the proper angle, the face of his mother, clear and distinct, reflected in it as though she were sitting right behind him.
It was not impossible to startle Gil Grissom, even if it was an exceedingly rare occurrence. The initial shock lasted only a moment or two. He turned immediately to look upon the face of his mother with his own eyes, only to find that she was not there, nor was there any sign that she ever had been there. He took a few breaths and decided that he must have imagined it.
Clearly no one was there, no one ever had been, and it was not unheard of for one to imagine things such as this. He put the Tahoe into gear and drove home, already forgetting about the incident.
He turned on his stereo automatically when he walked in, letting whatever was in the changer - it sounded like Sibelius- start playing and fill the room. He considered what he should do for the rest of the day, or his night off for that matter. He’d been honest when Greg and Catherine had pushed him about the party.
Grissom was well aquatinted with all the terms used by others to describe his lifestyle; sterile, isolated, impersonal and a host of others. Earlier in his life, he might have felt ill-used by these sentiments, and, in truth, he was not entirely immune to them now.
It was not isolation he craved, but security; both in his home and his mind.
His home was one of very few places he felt safe; where he could truly let his guard down. It always felt as though he was shedding several thousand pounds as he came in the door. It wasn’t that he disliked socializing, or that he didn’t feel comfortable with the members of his team. Other people exhausted him. In a bone-wearying, soul-taxing way.
So it was hardly any wonder that he protected the private spaces of his life as jealously as he did. Solitude was hard won and difficult to come by, and, to Gil Grissom, it was as necessary as oxygen.
He settled back on his couch and closed his eyes, taking in deep breaths of air and music. The sunlight coming in the window felt warm and comforting on his face. With so much of his time spent in the dark or under buzzing florescent tubes, he’d come to strongly favor natural light in his home. His few lamps and light fixtures remained mostly unused except for times of necessity.
And at eight o’clock in the morning, with dawn streaming in through open windows, this was hardly a time of necessity. But as his eyes happened to flick over one of his table lamps, it turned itself on and then off again.
He sat up, in puzzlement and it did it again. And again. And now the overhead light was flicking itself on and off. In fact, all the lights in his living room and kitchen were doing so in perfect tandem. He barely managed to consider some kind of strange power surge, no doubt brought on by his neighbors Christmas lights, before he realized that whatever was making the lights flicker did not seem to be affecting his stereo.
Nevertheless, he got up and went to take a look at his fuse box. A quick check confirmed his thoughts. Nothing had been tripped, nothing was overloaded. He returned to his living room…
…and what he saw there made him freeze in his tracks.
It would not be accurate to say that there was someone standing in his living room, as he could easily deduce, and this was all he managed at the moment, but there was certainly something. And what was perhaps more alarming than this already alarming fact, was that the something, being admirably human shaped, and female shaped at that, was immediately familiar to him. It wore a face he knew as well as his own, and had seen only a few minutes ago despite the fact that he had never thought to see it again in his lifetime.
The figure turned its gaze on Gil, and as it did, the bass on his stereo turned itself up to maximum and there was a loud, startling thump as his speakers tipped themselves over onto their faces. The gestures were so familiar to him, even if they belonged to a life and a time from long ago, and they seemed to scream inside his head; “It’s her! It’s her ghost!”
“Gil Grissom, just what do you think you’re doing?”
The fact that she was dead, had been for many years now, and that Gil knew this as well as he knew anything at all, didn’t keep him from feeling more than a bit like a child again. She was signing while she spoke, which she only rarely did, and then only when she was upset in some way. That action unsettled him far more than the appearance of the spectre of his mother in his living room.
She looked at him expectantly, and Gil knew that she meant for him to answer, but could not.
“What are you?” he asked instead, breathless more with fascination and wonder than fear.
“You’re the scientist,” she said, her hands slicing through the air. “What do your senses tell you?”
Gil considered this, now having been given permission to do an objective analysis of the sight before him. She looked equally as substantial as she did insubstantial. He could make out every detail of her face, hair and clothing, and he could also see, quite clearly, his couch behind her by looking through her.
And yet she must be solid, or certainly she would simply fall through his floor. Or perhaps float through his ceiling like a waft of smoke. Carefully, hesitantly, he reached out a hand to her.
His hand met her shoulder and was stopped by it. She was not cold to his touch, neither was she warm, but the smile that she turned on him melted all his apprehension. She lifted her hand to his face.
“Gil,” she said softly, stroking his cheek. “What are you doing with your life?”
He didn’t know how to answer this; he didn’t know what she was asking of him. Telling her about his job, as much as that was his life, didn’t seem to be what she wanted to hear about.
“I’m helping people,” he said.
His mother’s smile changed from warm affection to a more wry example of the genre. “And who helps you?” she asked.
Gil frowned in puzzlement. “I don’t need any help,” he said. She pulled her hand away from his face and stepped back, casting a discerning gaze over his home.
“Yes, you do, Gil. That’s why I’m here.” He cocked his head to one side, ready to listen and interested in what she was about to say.
“You’ve shut the world, and everyone in it, out. You’re missing the point of your life.”
“I’m not,” Gil answered.
“Yes, you are. Life is all about the people in it, and the ones you let into yours. You’re completely alone, Gil, and I know you didn’t learn this behavior from me.”
“You were very social. It worked for you. That’s not who I am.”
“We’re not talking about being social. That’s a preference.”
“How is it different?” Arguments with his mother quite often came down to semantics. They almost never got resolved, as neither one was likely to back down from their respective positions.
He waited for her answer, but instead she turned and walked over to one of his windows. It opened as she reached it, and she turned and beckoned him over.
It wasn’t much of a view from his townhouse, but he could see several blocks of suburban housing and the skyline of Las Vegas itself in the distance.
“Do you see them?” she asked as he looked out.
“See whom?”
“All of them,” she said. And he could. Not in the same way that he could see the houses and streetsigns, but in a way he had never experienced before. His eyes saw only what was right in front of him, but he was now aware of every one of his neighbors in their homes, and beyond that, of all the people - the locals, the tourists - in the city.
“Yes,” he said, wondering how what he was saying could possibly be true. “I see them.”
She moved to stand behind him and touched her hands to his ears. “Now,” she said, pulling them away. “Do you hear them?”
Gil had never heard such a sound in his life. He’d heard screams of fear and pain before, far more often than he would ever want to, but even the worst of those were nothing like this. The sound tore at all parts of him; his ears and heart alike until he was sure he must be bleeding out of sympathy for what he was hearing. It was the cry of loss, suffering, death and loneliness from a thousand voices, a thousand souls.
“Yes,” he said, his voice breaking as he said it. “I hear them.” His mother touched his ears again and the sound mercifully stopped.
“That is the sound of every lonely heart and soul in the city crying out in agony. It hurts you to hear it, doesn’t it?” Gil nodded.
His mother stood very still then, and Gil was moved with the need to make whatever caused the look of sadness on her face vanish. And more than that, to make it as though it had never been.
“I’m deaf, Gil,” she signed. “And I could hear them.” She put her hand on his chest, over heart. “Do you know how much louder your cry is than all of that?”
Gil put his own hand over hers, wishing he could say something, could offer some comfort, even as he wondered which one of them needed it more. She started to back away, but held onto his hand as she did so. He didn’t want her to go; not after what had just happened.
“Don’t be afraid, Gil. I’ve arranged some other guests. They’ll be here to help you, so stay awake.” She finally let go of his hand, and Gil perceived that she was starting to become less distinct; losing the definintion of her outline against the walls of his house, and fading into the light of dawn flooding through his window.
“Remember what I said, Gil. And remember that I love you.”
She was gone. And only then, could Gil say what had been stuck in his throat to say from the moment he had seen her face that evening,
“I love you, too.”