Work Text:
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters and acknowledge the legal rights of those who do. I will make no profit from this story.
Author's notes: This was inspired by the TelevisionWithoutPity.com recap of the season finale, in which Sobell asked why Gordon didn't try to break his daughter out of prison, or hire a lawyer and start an appeal. I thought I'd try to answer those questions.
***
The office smelt, he noticed. Ghosts of cigarettes past. He looked around. He had no papers, nothing in his hand to distract him. He could no longer read for pleasure. The purpose consuming his mind left no room for distractions. From the moment he got up to the moment he finally fell into an uneasy and painful rest, one thought had occupied his mind, had done so for the past two nightmarish years, and now continued to do so even though the trial was over and the rest of the world had moved on.
She was his daughter. His flesh and blood. The only achievement in his life still remaining. The machines he'd designed were now obsolete, his name forgotten and his old job taken by other, younger men. His wife had died three years ago. A victim of cancer, caused by her fondness for smoking. She had given up eventually, but too late. Cruel irony given what was now happening to him.
Methodically, he catalogued the bare office, the orderly mental habits of a lifetime evaluating the resources within it. A surprisingly bare room, nothing to make clients feel comfortable. A small halogen lamp on the desk, no pictures, no sounds in the background, the occasional creak from a small fan which had been installed as part of the window in a futile attempt to remove the evidence of St John's smoking. Perhaps that was deliberate. Marie St John, the lawyer he was waiting to see, was famous for defending the most difficult clients, and undoubtedly she wanted them to tell her everything, to bring home to them the horror of their situation, present herself as their saviour, he mused. He disliked the woman. She reminded him of nothing so much as a vulture, but if she could tell him how to mount a successful appeal against his daughter's conviction, he would pay her whatever she asked. She had been reviewing his daughter's case in detail, and now, he hoped, she would tell him how to get the conviction thrown out and his child restored to him.
Eventually, St John stalked into her office. A tall black woman in her late forties, she wore a navy blue suit, steel-rimmed glasses and stiletto heels. Her face was already lined by years of stressful work and smoking, but her eyes were alive, gleaming with vicious energy. St John enjoyed her work. Like so many in the field of law-enforcement and justice, he mused bitterly, she enjoyed feeling superior, smug in her security that she would never make that one mistake that could lead to her life being wrecked. She seated herself behind her desk, dropping the papers onto her desk with a dull thud. They did not exchange pleasantries.
"You mind if I smoke, Mr Gordon?" she asked, pulling an ashtray and cigarettes from her desk drawer.
"As it happens, yes I do." He tried hard to control it, but the thought of cigarette smoke brought on another of his coughing sessions, and it was some minutes before he could get it under control.
She shrugged and put the ashtray away again. "You quit yourself, I take it?"
"I never smoked." He had no reason to explain, but he found himself adding, "My wife did."
She nodded once and said nothing. He knew it was beginning to show on his face, the decay in his lungs entering its final stages. Showing more consideration than he'd have expected from her, she pulled a small cord behind her, starting up the fan set into the window and letting some slightly fresher air into the overheated office.
"So, Mr Gordon. What can I do for you? I would have preferred more time to review all the details before we had this meeting..."
Yes, undoubtedly she would prefer the time, but she did not need it, he knew. Typical lawyer, sucking the lifeblood from the desperate, inflating her hours, increasing her bills. He would not allow her to slow down his fight for justice. "Let me be blunt, Ms St John. I am not a poor man, but regrettably both my time and my money are precious to me and I'd prefer to spend as little of them as possible in this unpleasantly smelly office with you, paying your inflated fees. Please get to the point."
She raised an eyebrow. "Very well. Let me be frank, then. Your daughter has no chance at appeal. The evidence team were too good. She was an accessory to murder, the DNA on the coffee cup places her at the scene, and the circumstantial evidence indicates that she knew full well what her boyfriend was planning. She was, in my opinion, guilty, and the court shared that opinion. She is now paying her debt to society."
"She made a mistake."
"I should think that most people in prison would say that, Mr Gordon. Regrettably perhaps, the state of Nevada does not consider that an adequate defence."
He hated every word of his next sentence, and his hatred for Grissom grew with every word. "I have only a year left at the most."
"In that case, Mr Gordon, I'm sorry to tell you that - in my opinion of course - you will not live to see your daughter walk free. Even if you start the appeal today, it will take too long." She glanced at the clock. "I bill by the quarter-hour, Mr Gordon, so I will not be taking up any more of your precious money by repeating my previous point. To be blunt, don't waste your time and money on an appeal. It will fail and you will spend the final year of your life giving your time and energy to a hopeless cause. Spend it on a year-long vacation instead, and send your daughter some nice cheerful postcards."
"I presume you don't have children, Ms St John." You heartless bitch!
"No, I don't. I always felt I'd be too busy to give them sufficient time and attention." He could have throttled her, were he still strong enough to do so. He could see her thoughts, At least I knew I was incapable of being a good parent. Where did you go wrong?
"Thank you for your time, Ms St John."
"You're welcome. Helene will show you out and take your final payment." She pressed a button on her desk, and busied herself with her papers. He stood slowly and walked out of her office.
***
You will not live to see your daughter walk free.
He sat blindly in his car on the street outside, staring unseeingly at St John's office, seeing her busy with papers through the windows, partly occluded by the spinning fan in the window. He watched on autopilot, hating her. The tragedy of his life was her bread-and-butter, just another way of earning a living.
Earning a living... Was that how Grissom and his team saw it? He pictured them, smug in their self-righteousness. He imagined Grissom, methodically testing the cup, pictured him saying to someone This is it, this proves she was there. Smiling with the righteousness of his cause, seeing himself as the hunter, the avenger, never once sparing a thought for his child, for her life, now wrecked beyond all repair. The thought brought rage boiling through his veins. Were he still strong enough, he knew with frightening intensity, this rage would drive him to find Grissom, to physically inflict on him the pain that he had inflicted on Gordon's family. His strength was now gone, and soon, he would be too. His own impotence fed the rage and it boiled within him, seeking an outlet, the same outlet that Marie St John had just denied him.
What remained of his mind that was not consumed by his cause muttered in a near-inaudible whisper, Grissom is not responsible for the conditions in Nevada's prisons, and he did not force your daughter to go along with her boyfriend's plan.
He could not hear. All he could see was the horror being inflicted on his child. Grissom, he knew, had no children. He had known nothing of the man before the trial, but since then he had read all he could find on the Las Vegas CSI team, seeking to find some way, some way to discredit them, to have his daughter walk free. She was truly sorry, he knew that, and that was all that mattered. Was what was happening to her justice?
"Abused every week..." He knew the statistics. He'd seen it in her eyes, the horror slowly showing itself in her features. The face, once so young and pretty. The first time it happened to her, reflecting in the submerged screams in her face, the disbelief he'd seen during his second visit, the horror that it was happening to her, that she could do nothing. How was it, he had thought, numbly, that a bright, pretty young woman, top of her horticulture class, could in an instant be reduced to a thing, an object to be used for cheap gratification by the strong? And the horror went on, unending. The tattoos he'd seen, that she'd got 'to fit in'. The lines on her face. The resignation. The death of her spirit. The sexual abuse, over and over, unending. He'd stopped visiting, hating his weakness, but being unable to bear seeing it, trying to keep at least the memory of her as she had been alive.
Was this justice?
Grissom, the freak, the bug-man, could know nothing of what Gordon was feeling.
No... The idea bloomed slowly in his head, black petals unfolding. Grissom could know. He had no physical family. But, Gordon realised, Grissom's all-consuming passion was his work. And thus he had surrounded himself by a family of the mind. His colleagues. Didn't all the articles, the interviews, say the same thing? That anyone who spent time with them was struck by the rapport, the friendship even, between them? What had that article said? It had contained a quote from a young man, an ex-DNA technician who'd changed careers to become a CSI: "I couldn't have done it without the support of my colleagues, and especially my boss, Dr Grissom. He's been great, he always encouraged all of us to develop our careers, he's been really supportive, the best boss any of us could hope to have."
As he stared at St John's office window, the fan still slowly revolving in the sunlight, the idea took shape in his head, and for the first time in weeks, he smiled.
Grissom had methodically, rationally, dispassionately wrecked his family. And he, in turn, would take a revenge of the mind on Grissom. He would take Grissom's family from him.
You'll never live to see your daughter walk free, and you can do nothing to free her.
He would inflict that on Grissom and his colleagues. He would take one of their family from them, demonstrate their impotence to them, take away their smug self-confidence in their skills. He had nothing to lose, he realised. He would die soon anyway, and that made him unbeatable.
To die knowing that Grissom had lost that, that he had inflicted upon the man what Grissom had done to him ... that would be infinitely and utterly satisfying. And when his daughter heard of it, she would know that he'd done all he could for her. He could not give her justice, but he could give her revenge.
The fan continued to spin, light flickering off its blades.
He smiled.