Time Lapse Photos

Title: Time Lapse Photos
Author: scullyseviltwin
Category: Angst/Fluff
Rating: Mature
Thanks: To ckofshadows for her beta skillllz. Any other mistakes are totally mine, I went back and added things. :)
Notes: Just a quick warning... there are LOTSA italics in here, like a mofo'in ton, they denote a flashback. Most of the story IS flashback, so yeah.
Summary: "Do you want to know what it feels like to fall in love?" Just sumfin a little silly and sappy I wrote to cheer me up on this dreary day.


She was a thief, plain and simple, no other way of putting it.

Sara Sidle had stolen from him and while he'd come to terms with that fact, he was still upset about it. See, she'd taken something vital from him-his heart-before he was ready to give it. Scooped it up with eager hands, she'd carried it away and kept it, never relinquishing her grip.

He could even remember exactly when it had happened.

[September 16, 1995]

Bounding down the stairs at the end of his lecture, he watched as her long legs-accentuated by oddly-erotically knobby knees-took each step in stride before her feet came to rest inches from his. "You asked for anyone who wasn't on the roster to come down at the end?"

Hair askew, sunglasses being used as a sort of hair band, she tapped her foot nearly impatiently and waited for him to respond. For a moment, he was flustered; she spoke with such adamancy and speed that he had to wonder for a moment if he should be intimidated or insulted... or both. Once he regained the power of speech, he said the one thing that came to mind, "You were late."

"Yeah, sorry, I forgot what a bitch it is to get from P.D., downtown at this hour," she blew out a harsh breath and tossed her head, flinging and errant flap of hair out of her eyes.

Grissom fumbled with his papers, attempting to find the roster. "You work with the department?"

"Continuing education course," she said by way of explanation and nothing else.

He blinked at her and attempted a smile, failing miserably. This, in turn, made her grin and she jutted her chin out, motioning to the papers he had in his hand. "That the roster?"

"Oh, yes, right... name?"

"Sidle."

He flipped through the pages until he came to the correct class and scanned down the list until he came to the S's. "Saddle, Sampson, Silva... you don't appear to be on here. First name?"

"Sara, no h."

"Sara... Sara... there's a Sara Saddle. No Sara Sidle."

"Damnit," she cursed, "Not again. Someone, every year..." Reaching over, she snatched the sheaf of papers out of his hand and bent to retrieve his red dry erase marker. Slashing her name with a streak of red, she then reached for the black pen lying on the desk, took the cap off with her teeth and scrawled her name in next to the mistake. "There."

Shoving it back into his hand, she stood back and regarded the man before her. Sara hadn't thought about it much during his talk, but he was odd, both in demeanor and speech. Handsome, but not terribly overly; he moved with a fluidity and patience that she hadn't seen before. It intrigued her and so, she made an attempt to prolong the conversation. "Did I miss anything important from the beginning?"

He was busy shoving things into his briefcase and took a moment's pause to tell her, "No, we went over the syllabus and that was it."

Sara nodded, remembering that she didn't receive a syllabus after she came in. "Can I actually get one of those?"

Grissom straightened and let his briefcase fall to his side. "Well, you could have asked me that before I packed everything away." Her face went blank and she stared at him, waiting for something to happen.
Eventually, a soft smile broke across his face. "How do you take your coffee?"

Sara blinked, but said without hesitation, "Black, three sugars."

Grissom took off in front of her, "Ah, a girl after my own heart, come on, I'll buy you a cup."

And there it was, after a brief meeting, he was to look the other way as she snatched up his heart greedily and with guile as they sat sipping lukewarm coffee and eating stale scones.

But they were different people back then. He'd been willing to go out on a limb, and she'd been too ready to accept him for everything that he was. Neither of them were too world-weary, nothing like they were now, some ten years later.

[January 13, 2002]

“Is that how you make friends?” she asked him, humor laced into the edge of her voice as she pored over a t-shirt in search of debris.

Grissom, head in a microscope, didn’t even bother looking up, “Excuse me?”

Sara smiled and tweezed a hair off of the expensive cotton, “Always asking people out for coffee… making friends?”

“Associates, gaining associates.”

Her face fell then, at the implication that she was simply another co-worker, an associate. “Well then-“

“And as I recall,” he added, “I never asked you; I made a suggestion and you accepted, no questioning involved.”

Placing the tweezers down on the desk, she shifted to jot a few notes down on her notepad. “So being forced into coffee results in your friendship? You shouldn’t have.”

Much to her delight, he chuckled, “I never forced you.”

Sara responded with an indignant laugh, “How is a poor, overworked graduate student supposed to react to free caffeine?”

“Point taken,” Grissom said, good-naturedly and they shared a secret smile over the lab equipment.

That was when pieces of his soul began to come unglued, fragment off and spiral into open space where she would snatch them and place them into her patchwork of him.

[May 22, 2005]

“Do you want to know what it feels like to fall in love?” she asked him, perhaps having had too much to drink. Placing the plastic cup, still half-full with good merlot, she stood and walked over to where he was seated.

Grissom blinked, “Sara…” he chided, cheeks flaring pink as he shifted in his seat nervously. There were people outside; as if their absence wasn’t already conspicuous, she was closing in on him.

Catherine had assembled an impromptu ‘Welcome Back’ dinner for Nick at one of Sam’s restaurants. “He needs to get the meat back on his bones,” the woman had claimed and booked a small section of the large establishment, complete with private deck that overlooked the lights of the Strip.

There was enough food and wine to put meat on anyone’s bones and after they’d had their fill, the group had meandered onto the solid stone overhang with a few bottles of wine to wax upon how beautiful the lights looked from so high.

Hands hanging at her side and color high in her cheeks and nose, she waited for him to protest again. Grissom did nothing but blink and swallow and she took one more step forward, placing her hands gently on his shoulders. They shared a long moment holding one another’s gaze until Sara brought her thumbs up to his eyelids.

Sliding them down slowly, she waited for his breathing to even out and proceeded to drag either pointer and middle finger down his ribs lightly, passing over his belly before crossing to tip-toe up his arms.

Eyes still closed, he sighed and relaxed under her fingers. Smiling sadly, Sara continued until her fingers were twined behind his neck; pulling them apart, she scratched her fingers over the tough skin there and then diverted into his hair where she scratched his scalp.

Finally, as her fingertips massaged his temples and his own fingers dug into his slacks, she leaned in and placed a kiss to his forehead, pulling back quickly and whispering “That’s almost what it feels like to fall in love with you, almost…”

When he opened his eyes, she was out with the others, putting on a show, laughing and joking, drinking wine.

There was no possibility of him forgetting that anything had happened that night. There was no possibility that he wouldn’t think about it whenever he saw her. When he did see her, she would smile just as she always did, seemingly unaffected by her admission.

He couldn’t take it, could no longer take looking at the curve of her mouth, wondering how it tasted.

[July 2, 2005]

He showed up on her stoop, rain clinging to his skin, hair.

She wanted to laugh at how poetic it was.

“What are you doing…” For rain, Vegas rain was unusually cruel, cruel to the point of bruising. His hair was matted to his forehead rather unattractively and his normally-baggy slacks were sticking to his thighs in what looked like an uncomfortable manner.

Holding her hand out, she invited him in and he came, bringing the moisture with him. Little pools formed at his feet as she shut the door and stood back to size him up. “Grissom, what…”

“It started raining when I got out of my car and… I’m sorry, I should go.” He was stuttering and twisting his hands but never dropped his eye contact with her.

Sara blinked and then shook her head, “No, no-no. You need to dry off, let me get you a-“

“Sara, it’s fine, I don’t know why I came just-“

She was already disappearing to the back of her apartment, voice trailing off as she got further away, “One second!”

Upon her return, she handed him the terry cloth and stood back as he toweled off his hair, watching her all the while. She fidgeted and glanced down at the floor, biting her lip.

It was one of those stark moments of realization; his feet had moved into her view and when she looked up to see why he had stepped forward, his lips were on hers and his hands were pressed hard into the small of her back and he was plying her mouth open with an eager tongue.

When they separated, the front of her shirt was saturated with the water from his. Sara blinked and tilted her head, a shy smile on her face. “I got you all wet,” he mumbled, eyes wide, looking just a little lost but not afraid.

They looked at each other for a long while until she began peeling her cardigan back, dropping the wet garment onto the floor with a wet ‘plop’ revealing a damp tank top. Sara’s smile grew and she stepped right up to him, grasping the hem of his shirt, “We can talk later, right?” He nodded dumbly. “Good, well, let’s get you out of these wet clothes.”

The cool darkness was still and staticy and if it wasn’t for the numbing hum of the air conditioner blanketing them with frosty air, the bedroom would have been completely silent.

Sara was on her side, hands curled beneath her chin, legs tucked up as far into her chest as they would go; she liked this time, when she could bundle under the covers and pretend that it was winter that she’d awake to freshly fallen snow that would surely need shoveling. Her hair warmed the back of her neck and she could smell it, the day-old musky smell that was something akin to dried leaves mixed with maple sugar.

He was laying across from her on his back, the comforter pulled tightly to his chin as he stared blankly at the textured whiteness of the ceiling. Chest periodically rising and falling, she watched it and listened to the AC hum, fracturing the sound into short bursts of sound that coincided with his breaths.

When Sara was small, she thought she could alter time and space, make things sound differently if she tried hard enough. Sometimes, when her mother would turn the heat on to combat the crisp chill of the ocean air, she would lie awake in bed and make her ears hear the furnace heating up, but making the sound roll as if it were waves crashing into her ears instead of the gentle, old growl of a machine that needed replacing.

In, out, roll, hum, she listened and waited for him to say something, knowing well enough that he would if she continued to gaze at him. One hand slid out of the ball she had curled it into and pressed into the soft blue of the no man’s land between them. The movement registered with his ears, she could see it in his eyes as they darted back and forth just once before returning to their previous position, to stare.

There was really no reason that she should have expected otherwise; their first coupling had been sloppy and hasty, filled with slip ups and words too-soon-spoken. And now he was back in the bed where it had all started after an awkward and stutter-filled dinner. They’d tried, woken up in the morning tousled and sore and had chatted aimlessly as he located his clothes. Somehow amongst all the broken sentences and shy glances he’d agreed to come back to her place after shift and have dinner.

His words cut through the crisp darkness, the sort of silence that only surrounds pillow talk. “Last night was all wrong,” he finally said, not bothering to lower his voice to an appropriate tone for the atmosphere.

Sara licked her lips as her stomach bottomed out, as she began to shiver, as she attempted to train her eyes not to blink. This was the never-ending nothing that she had been waiting for, that other shoe that had been taunting her for twenty-four hours with its pause in a freefall. “Why?” her voice was more suitable for the atmosphere, a raspy little whisper that was almost dominated by the cold gust being spewed from the wall unit.

“We’re doing all of this completely backwards, falling into bed and then…”

Sara uncurled just slightly and nodded against the pillow, “We do need to talk and we should have before we had dinner… and probably before, well now but…”

He turned his head to her, face a blank mask; his mouth seemed to move in slow motion. “I like being in bed with you.”

Sara blinked and smiled shyly, “I like being in bed with you, too.”

There was a thick silence that hung in the air for a few moments before he shifted and the rustling of the sheets dulled the hum; he was on his side, sliding his hand-beneath the covers-over the curve of her hip. “And I like touching you,” came his happy whisper, watching on as her eyes slid closed.

“I like touching you too… and being touched by you,” Sara sighed contentedly and parted her thighs when his fingers snuck lower.

Grissom began teasing her slowly, listening with wonder as she puffed out staccato breaths. “And I think I might be in love with you,” he said, sliding a finger inside of her as her eyes slid languidly open.

Sara smiled, bright and warm, “Now that, that I know.”