Laaaaaaate.

Title: The Plan
Author: Heaven Sends or Sarah
Disclaimer: I don't own CSI, but no one minds, right?
Rating: I would say Mature... for violence and "mature themes".
Spoilers: Up to 8x08 I guess, although it was written before 8x07.
Pairing: GSR
Summary: Angst. A lot of memories and angst, and I have never written angst before. Weird.
A/N: This is a very late 80s Ficathon entry because real life got in the way. I wasn't even going to post it except that there was that last call thing. It is totally unbetaed, although I actually tried this time, and this is only my second story ever so... if it sucks don't blame me. Blame the media.


"They were spending the night on the sofa, watching a movie. It's... it's just wrong."

It was something she and Grissom had done so many times before. And were doing again now. It was supposed to be safe! It had always felt so safe, her mind screamed at her even as she was sitting curled up against him on the couch.

Lately everything was like this, so amazing, so perfect, and yet something to her seemed so horribly, horribly off. She felt physically ill half of the time now.

A while ago she realized that she, Sara Sidle, practically lived for death, something that had never really bothered her until now. She used to think of it as being the victim's last voice, and she still did in a way, but now it was overshadowed by elements of her past that she had never really succeeded in suppressing anyway.

He had picked the movie today, E.T., the extraterrestrial. It was a good one, and actually they'd watched it together before. It had been a favourite of hers when she was young, but today was one of those days where that wasn't helping. Instead it just reminded her of the childhood she didn't really have. Too many things were doing that these days. She tried to focus on the movie, on the present, on the warmth of the wonderful man next to her on the couch, but somehow the past still exercised its usual hold on her and her mind wandered even as Elliott began to leave his fortuitous candy trail.

First, she thought of Hank, what a lovely place to start right? Not the dog, but the person, although if she had to talk to one of them she would even have preferred it to be the one whose poop she scooped. He'd stopped her outside of a crime scene the other day, and she thought he was going to hand over some piece of evidence or some victim information, but no, it was to talk.

"Hey, Sara," he half-barked at her, grabbing her arm as she exited the taped off house. "I'm sorry about what happened and everything, but it's in the past. I'm not like that. You can't keep avoiding me all of the time." So he had noticed? Well, she may have underestimated his intelligence after all. On second thought, though... not likely.

She silently removed his hand from her arm, and tossed him a glare before making her escape. He called after her, after first loudly, saying, "You know, Sara, you have to give people a chance... living ones. I bet you know the names of more dead people than alive ones, Sara." He continued like that for a while. And then it was softer, she could just make out her name, and it was all the more sickening as it rang in her ears during the drive back to the lab.

She considered the last thing he said. She thought it was strange, she thought it was incongruous, and the more she thought about it, she thought it was true. Wise? Hank? She almost laughed at the idea; that would have been if she weren't closer to crying instead. Sure, it had been a long time like he said, years in fact, but he was a reminder of how weak she'd been, of how weak she'd never let herself be again. She wanted to say to him that yes, it was in the past, a long time ago, but as long as she still had the scars it wasn't long enough.

She hated herself for that, for him. It was so cliched but she had really thought he would be "different". Not that she kidded herself into thinking that she loved him or ever would, she just thought that maybe he would be nice and benign, a slow, harmless segue back into the dating world.

Yeah right. It didn't take a shrink to figure out the "root cause" of her relationship problems. Her mother killed her father, her alcoholic, abusive, but-still-her-father father. If that wasn't every psychologist's fantasy, what was?

Once upon a time, she had told Grissom that she sought out emotionally unavailable men, but compared to her other tendencies that was the least of her worries. Sara Sidle had a long history of abusive relationships. A parting gift it seemed from a childhood she thought she had escaped. For a time she thought it was normal, maybe even right.

And if Sara was really truthful with herself she'd admit that in fact what she hated most about her relationship with Hank was not even Hank himself. It was the fact that some small part of her might actually have been relieved when he started hitting her.

It didn't feel good, and it didn't even really feel right anymore, but it did feel like herself. For the longest time it seemed, Sara Sidle had been lost. I had been somewhere nice to be sure, but she had been out of her element all the same. And it was like suddenly with one glancing, drunken, slightly off-target blow she was herself again. It was screwed up and miserable and full of regrets, but it was her. She reasoned that it was almost better "knowing", whatever that meant, because she felt before that maybe she had been holding her breath and waiting for what had proved to be inevitable; and now there was no more waiting, now she knew.

It had taken her such a long time to try to break it off, too, and in the end Fate or God or circumstance had intervened and done it for her. There had been a sort of irony about it, though, that after beating her and treating her like shit for the better part of their relationship, Hank had for some reason assumed that finding out he was cheating on her would be what it took to drive her away. As if he thought he could degrade her any more.

Yet she still wished she had been the one to let him go, he shouldn't get that right. She wanted to at least have had that strength, but he even had to take that away from her. The bastard. Oh, well, she thought, there'd always be others. That she was certain of. After all, she, Sara Sidle, had a type, a history.

And it always came up again. If she had learned anything it was that life was circular. As soon as she was remembering less and less, and living more and more, the past reared its ugly head another time. Just maybe one more time. But at this point in her life that's all it took. Here it was in the middle of her perfect life with her perfect husband. The last thing she wanted to do was drive Grissom away. She had wanted this, chased after this for so long, and yet the past still pulled her back. She had grown and changed since her father, and Hank, and the others, or so she wanted to think. The violence that was once home was no longer familiar or comfortable, but now for the first time she was afraid it might find her here, too.

Grissom wasn't like that. He knew about her past, and he'd never lay a hand on her. He'd been so gentle when he first saw the scars, and so reverent when she'd finally let him touch her. So no, he wasn't like that at all, and she would have done anything to keep from hurting him. Unfortunately, the past does not trade in "anythings" or "would haves" or some such drivel. It is for the most part cold-hearted and cruel. It cannot be ignored, only overcome. And so she was pulled back. She mulled over these thoughts for a while, never being able to put some distance between them and herself.

Slowly, then, amidst her own internal musings, reality exerted its own momentarily stronger tug, and she was brought back to present by the feeling of Grissom's broad palm stroking up and down her spine. He was completely absorbed by what was going on onscreen, and she looked up, too, in time to see the alien who looked as out of place as she felt, make his famous request to "phone home".

In an instant she knew what she needed to do to break this hold that her memories seemed to have on her. She would go to San Francisco, to Tamales Bay, to Harvard, to Berkeley, to somewhere. As she watched the character waste away in a strange place, she understood more than she knew. She had to stop this cycle of destruction. She would do it tomorrow she decided, but unlike E.T. when she was done, she'd come back here maybe collect Grissom, and then they would go home. Together. Not to Vegas, or to San Francisco those weren't home, but anywhere else that felt right, and that would be okay.

She dreaded telling Grissom, and she realized how he must have felt trying to tell her about his sabbatical. She forgave him. She forgave him a thousand times over. And then armed with a plan, a painful, terrible plan, but the best she could do, she fell into a sound sleep for the first time in weeks. All this before E.T. could get in his parting words. She'd never much liked that part anyways; it wasn't much comfort to have someone in your heart when you knew they'd chosen to be a million miles away. That's why she knew she'd come back.

P.S. Thanks for reading.