Title: I Wonder Who Will Walk With Me
Fandom: CSI/Highlander
Pairing: Sara Sidle/Sam (OMC), Sara/Grissom
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1496
Prompt: 30 Death
It’s been thirty-three years since she last
set foot in
She’s seen a million faces, been a million places, but somewhere in the back of her mind, she always knew she’d find herself here one day.
She’d avoided Vegas for a reason – too many people who knew her, too many explanations to be given should anyone recognise her. Many of the people she knew are gone now, but a few still remain, and that’s why she’s being careful.
Besides, there’s only one person she wants to see, and that’s why she’s here.
The retirement home – and why it’s called that when such a place has never seemed like home to her – is deserted in the middle of the night, and while there are security guards on the door, it’s an easy matter for someone of her experience to slip past them. She makes her way down the dimly lit hallways like the ghost that she is, finds the room she’s looking for and slips inside.
Once there, she stands at the closed door for a moment, wonders about the wisdom of just walking right out again and pretending she was never here. Warnings heard and dismissed echo through her mind, but in the end, she decides to play the hand she’s been dealt, the same one she’s been playing since she was last in Vegas.
When she turns, looks across the room, she’s wondering if she’s made the right decision.
It was never easy for her to walk away, never easy but necessary. Just like it was never easy to hear reports about the lives of people she used to know, used to care about, but it was necessary for her. Sam might have shaken his head, mightn’t have agreed with it, but he never stopped her contact with Doc Robbins, and later his son, because he knew how much the Watchers’ reports meant to her. He’d had centuries of Immortality to get used to letting people go, but for better or worse, the people at the Las Vegas Crime Lab had been the first family she’d had in a long time, and she couldn’t let them go so easily.
Well, not some of them.
Not this one in particular.
She knows how long she’s been gone from Vegas, has seen the changes that time has brought about in the world, but this is the first time that she’s seen the changes that time has brought about in a person. He’s always stayed the same in her memories, and when she thinks of him, he’s usually in the lab, blue coat on, blue eyes narrowed behind his glasses, pursed lips mostly hidden by his beard. Or he’s in the middle of some deep and detailed explanation of science that’s going to break the case, same blue eyes electric with knowing and resolution and satisfaction, lips turned up in a smile fit to break her heart.
In her memories, he is as he always was.
In reality, the form underneath the bedcovers is thinner than she remembers; the grey curls are faded completely to white, as is the salt-and-pepper beard. The glasses are gone entirely as he sleeps, but there’s no getting away from it.
Gil Grissom is an old man now, and by all accounts isn’t much longer for this world. And while she knows it’s risky, while she knows she can’t be seen by anyone, while she accepts that she didn’t do this for Doc Robbins, or Brass, this is different.
This is Grissom, and she knew she had to see him just one more time.
But now she’s here, and she doesn’t know what to do, what to say? Should she talk to him? Should she go up to the bed, sit down beside him? Should she turn around and leave?
She remains at the door, frozen by indecision – some things, she reflects with an ironic smile, never change – and suddenly, the decision is taken out of her hands.
Because she hears an intake of breath from the bed, and when her eyes move to Grissom’s, they are open, the same bright blue as she’s remembered for so long. She can’t move, can’t speak, so it’s something of a relief when Grissom speaks first.
“I hoped you’d come,” he murmurs, a soft smile edging his lips, and only by concentrating on that smile can she try to forget that that old-man voice belongs to Grissom. “I wanted to see you again…” For a second, she thinks that Doc Robbins must have been telling tales out of school, but then Grissom continues, with a sigh, “Even if this is only a dream…”
Emboldened, she takes a step in his direction, then another. “Hello Grissom,” she says, keeping her voice low – no sense in alerting any support staff who may be wandering the halls.
The closer she comes, the more his smile grows. “You look exactly the same…” he breathes. “So beautiful…”
Sara’s cheeks flame red, and she looks down. “I think you need your glasses,” she tells him, and he shakes his head.
“I should have told you that years ago… there are so many things I should have told you…”
Grissom’s voice catches, and Sara’s shocked, horrified, to see tears in his eyes. “I knew Grissom,” she tells him, because it’s not a lie. Even without hearing his conversation with Doctor Lurie all those years ago, she’d known. “I always knew.”
“When you… when we lost you… that was all I could think about… so much left unsaid… so many unanswered whys… I blamed myself… if I hadn’t brought you to Vegas… sent you to that scene…”
“That wasn’t your fault… and it wasn’t Greg’s fault… it was just something that happened. Grissom, I never wanted you to feel like that…”
“I know… but that didn’t help. Not when I just wanted you back.”
It’s a simple admission, said so plaintively that this time it doesn’t take a smile to break her heart. “I didn’t want to go,” she tells him, not trying to keep her tears back. “But I couldn’t stay.”
“Will I see you again?”
The question comes after a long silence spent staring into one another’s eyes, thirty years of pain and more spilling down both their faces, and her knowledge of the answer makes the tears fall more quickly.
“I don’t think so,” she whispers. “I just came to say…”
“Don’t.” It’s Grissom’s voice this time, the one that she remembers, and it halts her in her tracks as easily as it ever did when she was a CSI under his command. “I don’t use that word anymore… never liked it…”
She nods, wipes at her eyes quickly with the back of one hand. Sucking in a deep breath, she brings herself under control with some difficulty, even managing a shaky smile. “I just came because… I wanted to see you once more too.”
Her words are rewarded with another Grissom half-smile. “That’s my girl.”
Another silence, and this time, she breaks it, because she knows she can’t stay much longer; between the risk of discovery and the risk of Grissom’s famous mind kicking in, she’s already stayed too long. “I need to go now.”
Grissom nods, leaning back against his pillows, making himself comfortable. “Thank you,” he whispers, and Sara nods, making her way backwards towards the door. She’s there, has just turned to fumble with the handle, when another whisper reaches her. “I love you.”
She bites her lip to stifle a sob, so hard that she can taste blood. A quick count to ten, and she manages to whisper back, “I love you too.”
Then, before she can turn around, she pushes open the door, makes her way just as quietly, just as quickly, down the corridors to the back exit and out into the night. The cold air hits her straight away, along with a buzzing in her ears and her gasp turns into a sob, which only intensifies when she sees a familiar figure standing at the edge of the woods. He is waiting for her, just like he said he would be, and she runs into his arms, throws her own around his neck, and cries into his shoulder.
>*<*>*<
Five days later, Sara gets the phone call she’s been expecting, and she cries in Sam’s arms again.
Three days after that, the night that they bury Gil Grissom, a single red rose is placed by the graveside.
No-one sees how it got there, but those who are old enough to remember the events of thirty-three years previous think of Sara, and wonder.