Summary: A significantly aged and dying Horatio Caine tells his granddaughter the story of how he met her grandmother, and the events leading up to their marriage. Pairing: H/OC

Hey, I had an original idea (or so I thought) so I decided to run with it. So sue me. Speaking of suing, I own nothing except Horatio's wife. Things inside asterisks are thought.

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December 29th, 2047

The locket. Always playing with the locket. Just as her mother, and her grandmother before that, had done when they were in deep thought. Or nervous. Or just about anything else. Zipping it around on the fine gold chain or absentmindedly rubbing a thumb over the polished surface, every woman who had worn it had performed those exact movements while wearing the locket. All of their names, for 106 years, had been engraved into that necklace. A quarter-sized piece of history. And now it looked to be around the neck of its final wearer.

"What does the doctor say?"

"It won't be long, Grandpa. Two, maybe three days at most."

"Good." The intense blue eyes closed for a long moment, and for one second of extreme panic, the young woman sitting beside Horatio Caine feared he had already gone.

"Grandpa?" One eye cracked open, followed by a sly smile.

"Gotcha, sweetheart." Caine settled back into the hospice bed. *Damned uncomfortable things. Make a person wish they were dead already.* He smiled at his own joke. Death. That was one thing he'd seen way too much of.

"So, what do you want to know, Jessica? I have all the time in the world. Well, not really, but who cares..." Jessica's hands immediately went back to the locket, seeing that her grandfather wasn't about to go yet.

"A couple things." She studied her grandfather carefully. She'd seen pictures of him from his days as a CSI, and thought him quite handsome. But time had not cared for the beauty of youth, and had slowly but surely turned the thick blonde hair pure white, transformed hands into quivering balls of flesh, instead of the almost inhumanly accurate machines they'd been. But his mind was as sharp as ever. And he had the same intense, intelligent blue eyes, the same wry smile. But otherwise, Horatio Caine was a completely different person than he'd been. And if there was one thing that Jessica Turner was sure of, it was that she wanted to know that person.

"How did you meet Grandma? I was thinking the other day, and I realized that, for some reason, no one had told me the story. I know that you were both working for the Miami Police, but that's it."

"Actually, in the first nine months or so that we knew each other, she was an FBI agent, and I was head of Crime Scene Investigation."

"Oh." Jessica opened the locket and glanced at the names inside. Five generations of women had worn this locket. Deanna Holland, 1/28/1936. Rachel Daniels, 7/16/1955. Meghan Carter, 6/27/1969. Sarah Caine, 3/29/2004. And then there was her. Jessica Turner, 5/8/2031. The locket was given to a daughter on the day of her birth. While the first two names meant nothing to her, the two directly before her did. Sarah Caine, her mother. Meghan Carter, her grandmother.

"Would you like to hear the whole story, from the beginning?" Jessica nodded slowly. Her grandfather sat back again, as he always did when recounting stories of times past.

"June twentieth, 2003. A week before your grandmother turned thirty-four. I was Lieutenant Caine back then, head of the CSI department in the Miami- Dade police force. There had been a serial killer going around the country, and he'd recently settled on the Miami area. As much as I hated to admit it, we needed help from the FBI. They sent us Meghan Carter, one of the leading profilers and criminal psychologists in the country. I was standing outside the front door of the station..."

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Hope you like it! First CSI fic, so please be nice. Reviews are more than welcome!