A Pocket Full of Posies
Fandom: CSI
Pairing: Warrick/Sara
Rating: PG
Word Count: 690
Spoilers: No Human Involved post ep, Nesting Dolls
Notes: For the LiveJournal writer’s choice “verse” challenge
Summary: Sara can’t get a children’s song out of her head.
Ring-a-ring
a rosie,
A
pocket full of posies…
It’s a child’s tune, a sing-song rhyme that Sara can’t get it out of her head, even if it turns her stomach, makes gooseflesh creep across her skin. It’s been there ever since she talked to Glynnis Carson, the world’s oldest teenager – or at least, the oldest teenager there’s been since Sara herself looked in the mirror. It was being reminded of her own time in the system that put the verse into her head, because she remembers the young kids in the children’s home singing it, holding hands as they danced around in a circle. The sight used to comfort her, until she found out what the song was really about, death and disease and misery, all disguised in a catchy bundle of notes, designed to soothe the minds of scared young children who were watching people die of the Black Death.
It had never soothed Sara; after all, they didn’t write verses about the horrors that she’d seen.
“A-tissue,
a-tissue,
We
all fall down!”
Besides, when the children fell down, it reminded her too much of the way her father had fallen, the way his blood had looked on the gleaming surface of the knife.
Even now, in the dark of the locker room, the image makes her drop to the bench behind her, put her head in her hands, but no matter what she does, no matter how many times she recites the Periodic Table, no matter how many times she pictures a Lexis-Nexis screen, she can’t get that damn verse out of her head.
She starts out of her misery when she hears the scrape of metal on metal, a locker door opening. She’s ready to force a smile to her lips, but as she takes a deep breath, she gets a whiff of familiar cologne and, even though it’s a ghost of a smile that crosses her lips, it does so easily.
She doesn’t look up, nor does he speak, so childish chants still the only thing that she can hear. Then he closes his locker again, and she hears him turn to face her. There’s a long moment of silence, then he says her name, his voice carefully neutral.
“I’m ok,” she says, dragging her eyes up to meet his, her heart doing something strange in her chest at the worry she sees in that green gaze. “Really,” she adds weakly, compounding the lie.
She expects him to call her on it, to try to drag explanations from her, but she’s not really surprised when he just sighs, sits down beside her on the bench, close enough so that she can feel the heat of his body. He makes no moves to touch her though, and she misses the feel, the strength of him.
“Rough case,” is all he says, the understatement surprising a chuckle out of her.
“Those kids, Warrick,” she whispers, unable to look away from him. “Those poor kids…”
“I know baby,” he says softly. She expects him to say something, anything else, but he surprises her when instead he reaches out his hand to her. It’s a measure of how much she trusts him that she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t draw away, because after this case, this day, that’s what she would have expected to happen. But this is Warrick, the man who touches her with as much gentleness as her father did fury, and his hand settles on her back, whispers across to close over her shoulder, spreading gooseflesh – the good kind this time – in its wake.
Her eyes close involuntarily, and she lets herself partially fall, partially be pulled against his chest, and she doesn’t care that this is breaking all their rules, doesn’t care that they’re in the middle of the CSI lab.
All she cares about is that she can hear his heartbeat against her ear, a steady drumbeat that drowns out the childish singing.
For the first time since she saw Devon Malton’s body, she feels safe, and she doesn’t care that she’s the one who’s just fallen down.
Because she knows that he’s here to catch her.