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Peja's Wonderful World of Makebelieve Import
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Published:
2020-11-04
Words:
743
Chapters:
1/1
Kudos:
11
Hits:
1,056

Underneath It All

Summary:

Fandom: CSI
Pairing: none (yet, eventually Nick/Greg)
Rating: PG
Spoilers: none
Warnings: pre-slash
Summary: Greg isn't what Sara expected
A/N: So, I've been toying with the idea of writing from Sara's perspective. This first part doesn't even have Nick in it, but my plan is for it to be her observations on Greg and Nick and their relationship.

Work Text:

Underneath It All
by geekwriter

 

It's his face that catches her attention. He's quiet, and that's sure as hell a difference, and he's deferential to her, letting her boss him around, which is also not like him, but it's his face that's really different. Different than she's ever seen before. Different that she expected. He's not disgusted. He's not scared. He's sad. Down to the marrow type sad. And she doesn't know why, but that's not the reaction she expected to see from him, not on a case like this.

And, God, she could have killed Grissom. Didn't the man ever think? Not only sending him out on a case with her, but sending him out to a scene this bloody? Everybody in the lab knows Greg has a thing about blood, and in the case of a stabbing there's always a lot of blood.

But he doesn't freeze. He doesn't turn green. Instead he gazes at the body with sorrowful eyes, then looks up at her and asks, "Where do you want me?" and that surprises her, too, because she always thought if he said something like that it would be tinged with double meaning. But he's not flirting, he's not being suggestive, he just wants to know where to start. And then she thinks maybe he has frozen, because he's not moving, but when she looks up from her camera she sees that he's merely trying to find a way to get closer to the body without disturbing the surrounding pools of blood.

She notices other things that night as well. His kit is organized exactly like Warrick's, down to the swab. When she tells him to sketch the crime scene he first writes the date, the location, and his name in the lower left-hand corner. In the lower right corner he writes the word "legend" and underlines it, beneath that draws a "1" before even looking up at the scene to begin his sketch. In the upper right hand corner he draws compass points. He learned how to sketch from Nick, she knows, because that's the exact order and placement of details that Nick does before a rough sketch.

When she lifts a fiber from the victim's cheek he doesn't look at it for more than a second before saying, "Cat hair."

"Are you sure?" she asks as she drops the fiber into a small paper envelope.

He shrugs. "Could be seal. Maybe mink. I'll have to check under the scope to know for sure, but my money's on cat." He's not kidding, either, not being sarcastic. His three top suspects are cat, seal, and mink. It annoys her that she doesn't know why, doesn't know how he narrowed it down to those three.

She shows him how to remove evidence from beneath the victim's nails. He watches her closely, and when it's his turn to scrape under the nail he's careful, even gentle. She notices that he labels every envelope neatly and in precise detail.

But what she notices most are his eyes. Had they ever looked that deep brown before? That large? Somehow she thought his eyes wouldn't be capable of such bottomless sorrow.

It's partly her stomach but mostly his eyes that make her say, "You wanna grab lunch?" after they leave the scene.

He shrugs and says, "OK," and he's not excited about it, no matter how many times he'd pressed her to go out to lunch with him before. He's just lost in his own mind, in whatever thoughts he has that make his eyes look like they do.

"She was so young," he says softly over lunch.

"I know."

"She fought back hard."

She nods. "I know."

"I wonder how angry she was when she realized it wasn't enough."

And that throws her completely off guard, his saying that. She presses her lips together in a tight line as she looks down at her salad. "It's best," she says carefully, "not to think about things like that."

He doesn't argue with her. He just nods and pushes his gnocchi around on his plate and sighs, his eyes still sad but now also reflecting a determination she never knew he had.

 

end part 1