Lullaby and Goodnight

Summary: A post-ep for the seventh season finale, in which Sara dies. Dark and depressing, full of Nick angst.

Rating: Teen for themes

Warning: Major character death. Also, there’s some anti-GSR in here but it’s mild, really, since I don’t believe in bashing.

I’m so tired of being here

Suppressed by all my childish fears

And if you have to leave

I wish that you would just leave

‘Cause your presence still lingers here

And it won’t leave me alone

The house is dark. It normally was these days. Light meant life and there is no way that Nick was living, not anymore. So he keeps the lights off and the house dark. The blinds are always shut tightly. He has hung curtains over those blinds to make doubly-sure that the sun couldn’t penetrate his inner sanctuary. Only his house isn’t really a sanctuary because a sanctuary meant protection. His house is no sanctuary, not anymore.

Memories cling to every surface. Memories of group gatherings where they had shared beers and pizzas and good conversation. Memories of monthly poker games where laughter was the dominant sound. Memories of just the two of them, when she would come over and they would sit on his couch and watch movies together. Sometimes they would just talk, sharing tidbits from their childhoods, good things and things that they would have preferred to forget. So many memories.

Her presence is even more profound at work. She has coated every inch of the lab. He is always expecting her to just appear. She never does, at least not as how he remembers her. A ghostly apparition often seems to haunt the halls but there are only hints of this. He can never place his finger on it but it was like she won’t leave him alone.

Her presence lingers and there is no escaping it. He has never felt more alone, except that he really isn’t alone. Her memories are like another, invisible, person. A person he cannot escape.

But he’s not sure he wants to escape, to be completely honest.

There wounds won’t seem to heal

This pain is just too real

There’s just too much that time cannot erase

She has been gone for three months now but that doesn’t seem to make a difference.

Her funeral is still vivid in his mind. Vivid in the way that he can remember it moment for moment. But the colors of that day have become blurred, a murky watercolor that remains in his mind. Faces come and go. Some are out-of-focus while others are in stark relief. It is almost like his memory of the funeral is a museum, with various kinds of artwork styles decorating the walls.

Funerals are meant to be things of closure. Everyone expects them to be. The funeral comes and goes and suddenly the person is just supposed to be permanently erased from the mind. Everything is supposed to go back to normal and it does, to some extent. To the extent that everyone else seems to be back to normal, back to like they were before she died. He can’t be like that, isn’t like that.

The funeral was supposed to signal the end of the pain but it doesn’t, at least not for him. The pain is an everyday thing, a living entity in so many ways.

Time doesn’t erase the pain. He wants the pain gone, or at there are times when he thinks he does. He’s always wanted so many things. When he was a child, he would wish on shooting stars. Now he just hopes, on occasion, that he’ll forget. Forget and no longer feel the mind-numbing pain that lingers despite the constant elapsing of time.

He only wants to forget half of the time. The other half of the time, the notion of forgetting frightens him so much that he trembles. Because if he forgets then that means she’s truly gone.

He’s not sure that he’s ready for her to be gone. While he hates the pain, he’s not sure what he’ll do if it disappears.

So sometimes he hopes to forget, for the pain to go away like the funeral said it would, but other times he clings to the pain and the memories because that’s what remains. And he doesn’t want to lose those remains, not yet.

He’s not really ready for closure.

I’m so tired of being here

Suppressed by all my childish fears

And if you have to leave

I wish that you would just leave

‘Cause your presence still lingers here

And it won’t leave me alone

The lab often seems too empty.

When they meet in the break room table before shift, her seat is always vacant. It is a void that is just there, a constant reminder each shift that someone once occupied this seat but will never ever again sit in it again.

Half the time he expects to run into her. He’ll think he hears her laughter and he’ll look up, expecting to see her smiling face. She’s never there; his mind is merely playing tricks on him. Amputees have talked of phantom pain. He never really understood the concept until he lost her. Now he knows exactly what phantom pain is. It’s expecting something to be there, believing that it is, only to discover moments later that it isn’t there. It was all an illusion.

He’ll shake his head, hoping to clear his mind. Sometimes it will work. Sometimes he’ll be able to go back to work and pretend that everything is all right. But other times, he’ll have to set down what he’s working on and retreat to the men’s washroom down the hall. Into the stall he will go and tears will pour down his face, a waterfall he cannot stop.

He’ll cry silently as her ghost fills the stall, pressing down on him until he feels nearly suffocated. It’s a horrible reminder of how her presence lingers.

He’ll cry and afterwards he’ll feel drained and empty of everything. He always promises himself that this time will be the last time.

It’s a lie. He knows it. He knows that tomorrow or the next day it’ll happen again. Because her ghost won’t leave him alone and, worse than that, he’s beginning to cling to her ghost.

He’s slowly losing himself but he can’t stop what he’s doing.

When you cried I’d wipe away all of your tears

When you’d scream I’d fight away all of your fears

And I held your hand through all of these years

But you still have

All of me

He remembers the times, after difficult cases, that they’d go to the bar, trying to find redemption in the bottom of a bottle.

She always had problems with abuse cases. Spousal abuse always particularly affected her. She was always stubborn and hard-headed but when there was a possible spousal case she was worse. All rational thought would leave her mind it seemed at times. She’d suspect the husband or the boyfriend, and her suspicions were often based on a feeling, not on evidence. In all other cases she insisted on evidence but not these cases. She had a personal bias that always clouded her judgement.

Yet she was still handed those cases. He wondered why many times, figuring it was luck of the draw. He isn’t so sure anymore. Maybe it was Grissom’s way of forcing her to deal with whatever issues she had. If it was, he was sure that it never worked.

He has his own demons. Cases with children are his burden to bear. Cases where there is possible child abuse, especially child abuse, are likely to send him to his own personal hell. Sometimes he can hide behind a façade but sometimes that’s impossible. When that is the case, he’ll do stupid things like hit the wall with his fist or physically threaten a suspect. But those are rare events. He’s better at hiding than she ever was.

Still, there were times when they had a difficult case and one of them would suggest a bar and they met up later and get drunk. Or sometimes neither would suggest anything but they had a regular bar and they’d both show up. When that occurred, they’d give each other a small smile before settling down at a booth and drinking away the night hours.

Once they were drunk and no closer to redemption, they’d head to one of their homes, usually to whatever address the person who was more sober could remember. They’d collapse on the couch when they arrived and sometimes they cried. Sometimes she cried and he held her. Sometimes he was the one crying and she was the one crying. Sometimes they were both crying, clinging to one another desperately.

They never shared what their demons were. They’d drink and cry hungry tears but they never talked about what lay hidden beneath the surface.

Usually he regrets this. On rare occasions he’s thankful he never knew just what her demons were. It might be simpler to not know.

But he often thinks about those nights and wishes that he had asked the question that was always on the tip of his tongue. He wonders what would have happened if he had asked. He’ll wonder but that gets too painful because his ponderings always lead him to the same conclusion, that she might still be alive.

Usually when his thoughts go off in that direction, he drinks. Only now he doesn’t drink to find redemption.

He drinks alone and remembers and the pain grows until the alcohol numbs everything. In the morning, he’ll think that she wouldn’t like the direction he’s going in. And then he’ll promise that he won’t do it again.

It’ll be months before he actually keeps that promise.

You used to captivate me

By your resonating light

Now I’m bound by the life you left behind

You face it haunts

My once pleasant dreams

Your voice it chased away

All the sanity in me

His dreams are filled with her.

He dreams of memories. He dreams of the time she held up a black piece of lingerie and said kinky. He dreams of her fighting with a towel rack that she was determined to take down by herself. He dreams of her asking for his hands while holding yet another piece of lingerie, this time something white. Those are the dreams of direct memories, the ones that aren’t too bad.

He dreams of the time a pastor in a wedding chapel told them that she was going to get him. The dream spirals from there. He dreams of a wedding. The guests are blurry, as is the pastor, but she’s crystal-clear, dressed in a white simple gown and smiling beautifully at him. But then the dream shifts and it’s no longer pleasant. The pastor announces them married and when he goes to lift up her veil, he discovers that he’s married a ghost.

He prefers the dreams that are just memories. He can handle reliving events. He hates the dreams that start out nice and then turn awful. He hates those dreams because usually they just serve to remind him that she’s gone and he’s still on this earth, alive but not really living.

He tells all this to a doctor. The doctor prescribes sleeping pills and he takes them dutifully at first but then he misses her too much. The dreams are a link and he learns he’s not willing to sacrifice even the flimsiest of links to her. It’s probably not healthy but, then again, nothing he does these days is too healthy.

He thinks he should care but he doesn’t. For whether the dream is beautiful or a nightmare it’s something. Something that reminds him of her and that has become all important.

That’s just the way he lives now.

These wounds won’t seem to heal

This pain is jus too real

There’s just too much that time cannot erase

Despite his friends’ protests, he has a weekly appointment that he always keeps.

His appointment is with her grave. Each week he goes out there, bringing fresh flowers and cleaning supplies. Graves fall into disrepair too often and he refuses to allow that to happen to her grave. So he brings flowers and cleaning supplies despite the fact that the weather has turned chilly. He goes despite his friends who plead with him to let her go.

He can’t let her go. She was something and she deserves more than an unkempt, unvisited grave. So he must visit, every week, for that is what she deserves.

His friends want him to forget. They are delirious for it. In their view, visiting her grave just prevents him from moving on. They never seem to understand that he couldn’t just forget her. The pain never leaves and time doesn’t heal all wounds.

So he visits her grave each week and clings to the memories, to the pain, to the wounds that fester afresh each time he visits.

He can’t forget and he won’t let himself forget. Somewhere along the line the two became interchangeable. His friends’ pleas fall on deaf ears because, in the end, he needs her more than he needs to forget.

Even after no one else visits her grave, he still visits weekly. He never forgets.

I’m so tired of being here

Suppressed by all my childish fears

And if you have to leave

I wish that you would just leave

‘Cause your presence still lingers here

And it won’t leave me alone

He’s been told that he needs to let her go. His friends, his co-workers, his family all have the same message on their tongues.

Eventually he becomes to pretend that he has moved on. Like always, everyone just accepts this façade. It’s a farce but everyone wants to believe that he’s normal. They accept the mask he wears to cover the truth.

He does this because he knows they don’t understand. They don’t understand why he can’t move on. Her ghost isn’t haunting them is how he explains it to himself. But even if her ghost was haunting them, he doesn’t think they’d let the ghost win.

He lets the ghost win. He ignores the curious glances he gets when he mentions her grave. They’ll worry for a split-second before deciding to let it go. As long as he continues to act normally in every other aspect of his life they can rationalize anything regarding her away. It’s easier that way for them. It’s far easier to pretend. He’s good at pretending. Sometimes it even feels real.

They’d never understand, though, why she haunts him. They’d never understand why he lets her haunt him. He doesn’t have the words to explain. There are no words to explain.

She haunts him and he, in the end, welcomes her with open arms.

I’ve tried so hard to tell myself that you’re gone

But though you’re still with me

I’ve been alone all along

He never really had had her. Dreamed of her, was friends with her, worked with her. But he never had her.

Of course, he doesn’t like the word ‘had’. It makes her sound like a possession and Sara was many things but she was never a possession. She was someone to love, someone to cherish, someone to desire, but she was never something to capture.

He isn’t sure that Grissom didn’t view her as something that he ultimately captured. Like a butterfly, like all those butterflies and spiders and every other bug that Grissom has ever captured and placed inside his office. Grissom collects live insects and displays them for all to see, a proud capturer.

He could never capture live animals. Despite his love of birds, he has never owned one. The reason is simple. He doesn’t believe that birds should be caged, locked up in an unnatural habit. Birds should be free, just like all those insects that Grissom displays in his office.

She was like a bird, he often thought. She should have been free and able to fly but there was always something holding her back. She was caged is what he believed now. Caged by Grissom who had loved from a distance before finally taking possession of her.

When he thinks about it now, he can remember all the changes she underwent in the last few years. He remembers that she used to only read crime novels but then that changed and all she read were the classics. He remembers earlier on in their friendship when she told him that she hated poetry, hated classical writers. Those writers were out-of-date and people should read things that actually resemble modern life, she had argued.

But Grissom loved poetry and classical writers and at some point she became an expert in these things, quoting like Grissom did. It was scary, unnerving at times to him. It frightened him because he liked her old personality better, when she wasn’t so desperate to find a way in with Grissom.

Ultimately Grissom captured her and she was never the same.

He never wanted to capture her. He wanted to be with her, share his life with her, but he never wanted her to be a mirror image of himself. He just wanted her, despite her at times brusque manner and single-mindedness. He wanted her as she was.

Instead, she chose the man who moulded her into what he thought beautiful.

He can’t help but hate Grissom at times. Afterall, it was that man’s fault that she was gone. Gone like a bird released free.

Only her way of flying away had been horrible, and he can’t escape that. But he can’t but feel that she had already been lost, even before that. So he hates his boss because Grissom took her away long before Natalie ever did.

I’m so tired of being here

Suppressed by all my childish fears

And if you have to leave

I wish that you would just leave

‘Cause your presence still lingers here

And it won’t leave me alone

Eventually everyone leaves, much like she did. Only they don’t die. They merely leave for greener pastures.

Grissom was the first to leave. And, like he had said numerous times before, when he left there was no fanfare. There was an empty office, a note to Catherine that nightshift was hers, and that was it. There were no goodbye notes, nothing to suggest that they had meant anything to the man they had worked with for years. That hurt. Despite Grissom’s insistence that no one would miss him when he left, they missed him.

His leaving is the start of the end.

Greg was the next to leave. He received a job offer from San Francisco and Greg left. He knew that it wasn’t an easy decision for Greg but he also knew that Greg had been unhappy for months before the younger CSI finally left. Thus he doesn’t begrudge Greg, not the way he can still be mad at Grissom for not even saying goodbye.

Warrick left, not because of some great job offer, but because he had no other option.

Even before Sara’s death, they had all begun to drift away. After her death, the strings that had connected them seem forever severed. No longer did they go out for breakfast as a team. They had, once, but it had been so awkward, so uncomfortable that they had never done it again. They went to work and saw each other there but that was all. Whatever friendship they had existed before were gone, vanished.

Warrick fell back into gambling. He believes that Warrick went back to gambling because the taller man couldn’t handle his failed marriage and his failed work friendships. Warrick had tried to hide his addiction for so long but it had reared his ugly head up on a high profile case and there had been no going back. The undersheriff insisted that Warrick be fired and Catherine had never been like Grissom. She followed protocol to the tee and Warrick was fired before the start of shift.

He never heard again from his former friend. But that wasn’t surprising. Sometimes he hears from Greg, usually an email at Christmas but that’s all.

He doesn’t hear from Catherine, either.

Catherine had tried valiantly to fill Grissom’s shoes but she could never be Grissom, and she began to resent the expectation that she should be like her former mentor. She hated the comparisons, hated feeling inadequate. She hated the ghost of Grissom that she couldn’t seem to escape.

She left when Lindsay decided that she wanted to go to university in another state. Catherine resigned, packed her bags, and she was gone before the September start of school. She had hugged him before she left, whispering that she was sorry.

He never asked her what she was sorry for. It didn’t matter. He said it didn’t matter anymore to her and that had seemed sufficient for his co-worker.

Now he’s the only left of the original gang in Las Vegas. He can’t leave, despite pleas from his family to come to Dallas. He says he loves his job, that he can’t imagine leaving Las Vegas because it’s home.

But, really, the reason he can’t leave was the memories. He can’t leave the place where he could still feel her. He can’t abandon her ghost, not like everyone else has.

She was never his but he’s the only one who can’t leave. He doesn’t know if he should hate her for that.

He thinks he hates himself.

But he still can’t leave. Leaving won’t solve anything. It won’t make him less of a ghost. It’s too late for that. The pain and the memories are what give him something to live for. Without those things he’d just be lost. A true ghost, just like she is.

He can’t remember when he lost himself but he did and now there’s only her ghost and the pain and the memories. He never left and he’ll never be able to.

He should hate his current life but he loves her so he can’t hate her and what she’s done to him. But, really, she didn’t do anything so how can he hate her?

He did it to himself.

THE END