On a Day Like Today

Rating: PG, Angst

Pairing:  Sara/OMC-ish

Feedback: Makes my day

Disclaimer: If it was in the show, it's not mine.

Archive: At my site Checkmate (http://helsinkibaby.ahkay.net) , Fanfiction.net; anywhere else, please ask.

Summary:  I thought that it would rain on a day like today

Notes: For the LiveJournal CSReports "Before the show" challenge. Title comes from the Wendy Matthews song The Day You Went Away.

 

It should be raining, but it isn’t. Instead, the summer sun shines down from a clear blue cloudless sky, and there’s not enough of a breeze to even ripple the waters of Tomales Bay, where Sara sits in her parents’ motorboat, imagining the activities going on ashore. Children are no doubt swimming, their parents looking on, occasionally helping, if not rescuing. High school and college kids are surfing, planning parties for later on that night. Tourists are sightseeing. Locals are working.

 

And Steve is dead.

 

The sun is warm, but she is cold, cold like the ceramic urn in her hands, cold like she’s been cold since that night last year that she opened her door to see Larkin and Hall, two detectives she often works with, considers friends. They were all business though, cool and professional and “Can we come in?” and she told them to say what they had to, to tell her right there on the doorstep.

 

When they did, she didn’t want to believe them, turned away from them and into the apartment, but they followed her, telling her that it was quick, a gunshot to the head, that he didn’t suffer, but they stopped talking when they saw the food ready to be served, the table set for two, candles all ready to be lit. The sight restored her tongue though, and she demanded details, hearing it all almost dispassionately, until, that is, Larkin held out an evidence bag, a small black box inside it; what Steve refused to give to the mugger, the object that led to his death.

 

Larkin and Hall were responsible for her elevation to tragic heroine around the crime lab, the woman whose boyfriend was killed the night he was to propose. They didn’t know what she did though; that he had proposed before dinner instead of after, because Steve, impulsive, romantic Steve, hadn’t been able to wait. They didn’t know that she’d said no, that she wasn’t sure if she was ready to get married, weren’t to know that they’d argued, that he’d stormed out, slamming the door behind him.

 

They weren’t to know that she decided that she didn’t want to live without him, resolved to tell him so when he came home.

 

But he never came home.

 

He never came home, and a year later, she takes a couple of days’ vacation time before an entomology conference, goes to Tomales Bay, commits his ashes to the lake’s water, just like he wanted. That done, she opens for the first time in a year that little box, slides the ring onto her finger, and with a year’s hindsight, wonders what on earth she was thinking, ponders how things could have been different.

 

“I finally figured it out babe,” she murmurs. “And it’s too late.”

 

Removing the ring, she holds it out over the side, its sparkle bright as the water, bright as his eyes, and her heart breaks all over again.

 

Then she lets it go.