It’s Never Rained Like It Has Tonight

Disclaimer: I own nothing. CBS and a few dozen others have copyright.

Rating: PG

Summary: All she has are her dreams but even they aren’t really hers.

Spoilers: season 1 episodes

Author’s Note: the title of the story and the number titles come from the song “Rain” by Patty Griffin.

1. i just want another chance to live

Sometimes, at the end of the day, she wishes that she could stop forever putting her foot in her mouth. What sounds good in her mind never seems to come out right and it’s just not fair.

Why did she have to make that stupid quip about leather chaps? Why did she have to open her mouth and say something that made her seem like such an idiot?

Of course, it’s made worse by the fact that Horatio didn’t even crack a smile at her joke. He says that he knew that she was joking but something still feels off. The closeness that she felt was developing after the sniper case is disappearing and she’s trying to desperately to hold on.

She feels him pulling back and she hates it. She fears for the future because she has dreams that all depend on something that is slipping from her grasp. But she can’t help it. She wants Horatio and a romantic relationship and all that it entails.

But she can never seem to say the right thing and whatever she felt building up and after the sniper case is fast disappearing, and she so wants to hold on to it. So she says things, hoping to recapture earlier moments, but fails miserably.

She dreams of a future, with him.

She dreams, even as storm clouds move in.

2. it’s hard to listen to a hard hard heart

He begins to put distances between them, to separate them not only physically but emotionally, she knows.

He assigns her other cases, ostensibly because she’s a senior CSI and can work her own crime scenes without his help. Horatio doesn’t have to say the words but she knows what he’s doing. She resents him for it, hates that he’s deciding how to deal with a situation that involves two people.

Questions like ‘Why should he get to decide?’ pull on her heartstrings, but she has no answers. Only a building hurt as he refuses to deal with her. She wants to ask him out, wants to break the status quo, but she was never that brave.

Her dreams are no longer in brilliant Technicolor, fading slowly as the days go by and he stays on the sidelines.

3. sometimes a hurt is so deep deep deep

It’s not that she minds working with Eric. It’s just that she doesn’t like feeling shoved aside because Horatio can’t deal with her anymore. She misses their harmless flirting, and she misses his closeness. She misses him terribly for so many simple things and hates him all the more for that.

The tension between them escalates and she responds in her typically avoidance fashion. She allows Horatio to dictate their lives and gets a tattoo as her way of rebelling.

An iris tattoo because she wanted to get something symbolic but nothing really came to mind. Depressed, she ultimately chose the iris because one of its meanings is hope. But even her hope is fading, as time goes on and her dreams still seem far-away, near-impossible to reach now.

It rests on her low on her right hip, in a spot that no one will see.

The only one who knows is Speed, who accidentally bumped into her right after she got it down. Her skin was still tender and she hissed in pain. Amidst his apologies, she had blurted out that she got a tattoo. Speed pried but she didn’t reveal anything, save the name of the guy when Speed asked her later, for a case.

It doesn’t mean anything that she hopes Speed tells Horatio about her tattoo.

She can still dream, can’t she?

4. still alive underneath this shroud

A hummingbird on six cups of coffee; that declaration was really an understatement for what she feels like after she gets dosed.

She feels jittery and on-edge, even after the affect of the cocaine wears off. Her face heats up as she recalls talking to Horatio right after the positive drug test. Her words flying at 50 miles per hour, she’s pretty sure she said something that she shouldn’t have said. But the whole thing is pretty much a blur. Her mind couldn’t keep up and she’s still processing, hours and days later.

She sits at home, nervous, while she runs through everything twice. She’s at the edge of her chair, waiting for the call that she didn’t lose her job. She’s feeling unsettled and anxious but there’s nothing that she can do but go over what she said to others while high on cocaine and hope that she didn’t reveal too much.

When Horatio comes to her apartment to tell her that she didn’t lose her job and, in fact, helped crack the case, she’s relieved. Her smile is large and it hurts her face, especially as she can see something in Horatio’s eyes that he’s trying to desperately keep hidden. He’s successful for the most part, since she can’t quite put her finger on what she sees in his eyes. She just knows that it hurts.

When he leaves, telling her to take the week, she knows that she said something wrong to him yesterday. But she just can’t recall what and it nags on her until she thinks she’s going to go insane.

The distance between her and Horatio continues to grow, and she rarely dreams anymore.

5. strange how hard it rains now

Detective John Hagen pursues her but he’s not the one she wants.

She doesn’t like John’s attitude, and she especially doesn’t like the way he views Horatio. But even though she told him that she’s walking Horatio’s lonely road with him, she can feel it all slipping as everything becomes unhinged.

Horatio doesn’t want her on his road, it would seem.

John’s attention becomes nice, a welcoming diversion from all that is going on with Horatio. She still feels an emptiness, though, one that is born from having dreams not fulfilled, and she’s reluctant to give into John’s advances.

She will, though, because Horatio has made it clear that he doesn’t want her. She can read between the lines, knows that Horatio doesn’t desire the same things that she does.

So she lets Horatio build the distances between them. She doesn’t fight to build bridges because she has too much Southern pride to do that. She won’t chase after someone who doesn’t want her, even if it means that all her dreams firmly shatter, with no one there to pick up the pieces.

John will try to pick up the pieces but he won’t be able to. All of the king’s horses and all of the king’s men couldn’t put the pieces back together. The fragments of her dreams surround her and she’s learning to accept that, even if she hates it.

She doesn’t dream anymore.

The End