DISCLAIMER: I don't own the characters, and I also don't own any of the flashback dialogue that you recognise. The title comes from Friends and Lovers, season one, when Sara's talking to the mortician guy.
It should be a dark and stormy day. It isn't, and there's nothing remarkable about today at all, but the fact that today is the day he has to really say goodbye.
Nick's sitting cross-legged in the grass on the cliffs above Tamales Bay, California. In his hands is the small ceramic urn that is all that remains of Sara. Slowly, carefully, he eases the lid off, and marvels at how the human body can be reduced to just so much dust. Marvelling doesn't stop his heart from aching, though, and his hands shake as he dips into the jar and takes some of Sara's ashes. He holds them for a second, thinking.
"Nick Stokes, this is Sara Sidle."
"Hey."
The first thing he'd noticed about her were her eyes, and they were the first thing he'd kept noticing. They were standing outside a casino, surrounded by curious onlookers and the dummies Nick had just thrown from the roof. He noticed, vaguely, that he was still covered in roof dust. "Welcome to Las Vegas," he said, pretending not to know she was here to investigate Warrick.
"Thanks."
He opens his hand and lets the ashes blow away in the gentle sea breeze. Wondering why he doesn't just tip them out and be done with it, and knowing that it's because he's letting her go the only way he can, he takes some more.
Sara's voice, soon after she arrived in Las Vegas: "You're standing in my crime scene."
"Who'd Grissom handpick to work here?"
"Anyone touches that before it's dusted, I break their fingers."
Nick grinned to himself. She had an air of arrogance about her - she knew she was good at her job. He knew the type, though, and he knew there was probably more to her than she let on.
Nick lets those ashes go, watching them for the few seconds it takes them to disappear. How he can do this he doesn't know; how he can keep doing this he doesn't know. As it's the last tangible thing he can do for her, though, he keeps doing it, despite the fact that he thinks that it might just be killing him inside. He scoops out some more of Sara's ashes with a finger and curls his hand around them, just remembering.
He and Sara were standing outside the lab in the darkness waiting for a car to be delivered for processing, during a rush case of Warrick's several years ago. "Do you know what really pisses me off?" Sara asked.
"Lots of things," he answered, perhaps unwisely. Sara went off on a tangent about victims being unequal, to which he only half listened, then spouted out some stuff about washing the boss's car. He knew he was probably the only one she would say that to, and the only one who could have answered "Lots of things" without getting their head bitten off, and smiled to himself.
He thinks he should be crying, but maybe he's cried all the tears he has in the last few days. Outwardly he's calm, but inwardly he feels like he's being ripped into shreds, like he'll never be whole again. He opens his hand and lets the breeze take this bit of Sara, and wishes he knew where her ashes would end up, so he can think of her there. He doesn't like not knowing. If he can't have her by his side, he'd like to at least know where she is. He's avoiding thinking of how she isn't really anywhere anymore, so he takes some more of her ashes and cups them in his hand to protect them from the breeze. He's not sure how Sara can have been reduced to this.
He'd seen Sara reduced before. Reduced to misery and depression, with him able only to watch from a distance, desperate just to hold her, to make it all go away. Strangely enough it was that that had brought them together, when she'd needed a friend, but it hurt him at the time and it hurt him to remember it, that dark period of her life. "I don't care anymore, Nick," she'd said, and that was hardest thing, because Sara had always, always cared.
He lets these ashes go too and takes some more, remembering.
Their first kiss was on the sofa at his place. They'd been dodging the issue for weeks: her from fear, him from not wanting to push her. In the end she'd made the first move, reaching up to cup his cheek with her hand and kissing him. He still remembers the first wonderful shock of her lips on his and of the way she tasted. "Oh, Sara," was all he'd been able to say, resting his forehead against hers, watching the way her smile reached her eyes.
The wind takes those ashes, too. He's getting near the bottom of the jar now, getting to the end of what remains of Sara's physical body. He takes just a few: he's not ready to let her go yet.
After they moved in together, waking up with her every day seemed like heaven on earth, and going to bed was even better. She didn't sleep much but often she'd go to bed with him anyway, just because she thought that was important and, truth be told, so did he. Most times she'd cuddle up to him and rest her head on his shoulder, and he'd just hold her until he fell asleep. It was like an extended honeymoon period: two lonely people who understood each other had finally come together, and neither was willing to let the other go.
Until now.
Nick moves closer to the edge of the cliff without standing up and drops the ashes in his hand over the edge. He knows the wind will take them before they reach the sea, but he thinks Sara would appreciate the gesture. What she disliked most about Vegas was its distance from the sea. His fingers scrape the bottom of the jar now and he feels a real sense of finality. He clutches these ashes in both hands, because they're the last thing he has of that warm body he held in his sleep.
This isn't really a memory, because he's still living it. He doesn't want to remember, but he does.
Five nights ago, he was standing in the DNA lab with Greg waiting for proof that a cigarette found at the scene of a robbery belonged to their suspect when Catherine came in. She was unusually pale, and when she looked at Nick, looked almost helpless. Her arms rose slightly, as if for some futile gesture, then dropped back to her sides. "Nick," she said, and he could tell from her voice that something was terribly wrong, but he couldn't make his own voice work.
Greg said it for him, anxiety in his tone. "Cat? What's wrong?"
Catherine didn't jump on him for the nickname, just breathed out, a long slow breath, not a sigh but an attempt to control herself. "Warrick just called. Nick.... Sara's been shot. Warrick says - Warrick says it doesn't look good."
DNA forgotten, the three of them pushed their way through the corridors of the lab, garnering unusual looks as they ignored greetings. Nick clenched his fists. There'd been a mistake. Warrick was exaggerating. Sara would be all right. She had to be.
Catherine drove and probably broke every road rule there was, but Nick, sitting in the passenger's seat, could only think they were going too slowly. Greg was in the back and he was silent, and Nick wished desperately for some of his inconsequential chatter.
They parked illegally and all but ran into the emergency room where they were brought up short because nobody knew where Sara was. They were heading automatically for the duty nurse when they saw Warrick coming towards them with a doctor. Warrick, whose shirt was stained with blood. There were tears in his eyes and Nick had never, ever seen Warrick come close to crying, and that was when he knew. Catherine and the doctor between them manoeuvred him out of the public gaze and into a small room. Greg dropped into a chair, his head in his hand. Catherine hovered anxiously between Nick and Warrick, trying to comfort them both but unable to comfort either through her own grief. "She was dead when we reached the hospital," Warrick said, choking on his words. "I'm so sorry, man."
"What the hell happened?" Nick demanded, trying to comprehend it, that only a few hours ago he'd seen her and she was alive and smiling and now she was dead with her blood on Warrick's shirt.
"I don't know, man. She was processing the bedroom, I was in the bathroom - all I heard were the shots."
Nick punched the wall, once, twice, three times, hoping that the ache in his hand would override the chaos in his heart. It didn't. "Nick..." said Catherine, and he knew that she had nothing to say.
Greg took him home, while Catherine stayed to deal with Warrick and formalities. There was nothing to say on the ride home because all Nick could do was stare out the window and try to get his head around it all. Greg followed him inside without being invited, and Nick knew that the first thing he saw was the framed photo of Nick and Sara in the hallway that they'd put there the day she moved in. "Nick..." said Greg, hopeless, like Catherine.
"Don't!"
Nick went through into the living room, saw Sara's shirt where it had been... discarded... after their last shift, and somehow managed to be glad that they'd made it to the bedroom before removing anything else. He saw her books, her police scanner, the cup of coffee she'd left on the coffee table before work.
"Oh man, I shouldn't have brought you here. Look, Nick, come back to my place, you can't stay here."
"Greg. Go, just go." Nick could feel himself cracking up, losing it, and he didn't want to do it in public, even though Greg wasn't really 'public'.
"Nick, you can't - "
"Please. Just go." And he sounded like a child, a petulant, needy child, but it worked. Greg moved away.
"Nick, if you need anything - "
"I won't." Because, with Sara gone, there was nothing left to need.
"I'm so sorry, Nick," Greg half-whispered, and the pain in his voice was genuine, but Nick was beyond caring about anyone else. As soon as the door had closed behind his colleague Nick went into the bedroom. Their bedroom. They hadn't made the bed - they rarely did - and Nick knew their smell, his and Sara's, would linger on the sheets. The clothes they'd been wearing after their last shift were piled on the floor at the foot of the bed, and the laundry basket was overflowing. Nick remembered Sara saying she needed to do some laundry or she'd have no clean clothes, and he realised that that didn't matter any more. She'd never need clean clothes, and the thought was so final that he sat down, suddenly, on the bed.
How many nights had they slept there together? It was beyond count, beyond memory. It was theirs, their place, beyond any other, yet she'd never be there again.
He'd kissed her before shift, and told her he loved her like he always did, but he'd never said goodbye. He'd never said goodbye.
He rolled onto his stomach and lay there, his head buried in the pillows, unable to stop hoping that Sara would walk in at any moment and lie down with him and just hold him. Minutes, hours passed, and he ignored the phone which rang multiple times. People wanting to commiserate, no doubt. He couldn't bear to hear their words, however genuine.
Nick was overtaken by the need just to see her. He had to see her, had to know that she was really gone, no matter how much it hurt. Somewhere at the back of his mind he knew she'd have to be at the morgue: she hadn't been operated on at the hospital, and someone would have to remove the bullets for Ballistics. The lab, then. He didn't have his Denali, so he called a taxi, aware both of how obvious it was something was clearly wrong with him and of the fact that he probably shouldn't be driving anyway. The taxi driver, who had taken other mourners to the morgue, said nothing.
He kept his head down as he walked through the lab to the morgue. He could feel people's eyes on him but he couldn't bear to see their compassion or curiousity, not without breaking down. The morgue was quiet, sterile, as always: how often had he been here, under vastly different circumstances? He saw Dr Robbins, with a body on his table, and then realised that if Doc Robbins was here in daylight hours - because dawn had come and gone while Nick lay on his bed - there could only be one reason, one body. On limbs more unsteady than those of the doctor he made his way across the morgue.
"Oh, Nick. You shouldn't be here."
It was Sara's body. Nick gripped the table for support as he stared into the face he knew so well. She was too stiff and formal to be sleeping, no matter how much he wished she was. "I've got nowhere else to go," he said, and his voice cracked.
"You can't say goodbye in a morgue, Nick."
"I don't think I can say goodbye anywhere."
Nick saw two bullets, red with blood and body matter, in a dish on the other side of Sara. A question that suddenly seemed essential forced its way from his mouth. "Doc," he asked, and he sounded like a full blooded Texan cowboy now, "where did the bullets enter? From the front or the back?"
"From the front. I'm sorry, Nick."
Nick nodded, carefully removing one hand from the table and bringing it up to Sara's hair. If she'd been shot from the front she'd seen her attacker. She had probably known she was going to die.
She was so cold, and, he could tell, rigor mortis was setting in. Cold and stiff. Nick remembered her body warm, firm in all the right places, remembered the feel of her skin under hers, of how alive she'd been less than twenty four hours ago. She'd been so alive she'd probably left finger-shaped bruises on his back, and now she was lying on a cold metal table. "Oh God."
"I'm so sorry, Nick. I know - I know how much you cared about her. We'll all miss her."
"Yeah." Nick could barely manage to speak. All he wanted, all he longed to do, was to wake up with Sara in his arms and know that this had all been a horrible, terrible nightmare. The fact that it wasn't was a dull ache in his heart and his head.
Some helpful day shift coroner's assistant brought a chair over and left without speaking. Nick, grateful, collapsed into it. He reached under the sheet that covered Sara's body and took her hand - the rigor only just allowing him to do so. And for the first time since that moment in the hospital, he cried. He cried for everything they'd had, for all that they'd planned to have. Not a week ago they'd lain in bed and discussed the possibility of having children together one day, and Nick had ran his hand over Sara's stomach and imagined it swollen with their child. And now she was dead, she was gone, all that they had hoped for ended because of some maniac with a gun. All that Sara had been was ended now, and he couldn't handle that thought.
Doc Robbins had moved away, and taken the bullets with him. Nick knew without thinking that they would go to Bobby from the nightshift, who would keep them safe until he had something to match them to: he, like Doc Robbins, like so many others, doing the last thing he could for someone he had known for many years. Graveyard would not be allowed to work Sara's case, but the lab techs could, and would, and Nick was strangely grateful.
He stayed there, just holding her hand, ignoring everything else that went on, until Catherine and Doc Robbins came along and made him go home. He went with Catherine willingly, because he was half-dead inside and unable to think straight, and fell straight into bed with a load of Sara's clothes in his arms. When he woke up to reality, he wept.
Now he's crying, as he feels he ought to be, but he doesn't feel any better about it. As he lets the ashes go he feels more than ever that he's letting Sara go, and he doesn't feel like he can cope with that. All he can do now is the last of her ashes into his hand and hold them tight in hands that are pained from his grip on the last lot.
They had her funeral two days ago in a nice, simple chapel in the suburbs of Las Vegas. Pressed for some music choices by Sara's parents, Nick had asked for "Wind Beneath my Wings" and "I'm a Believer." When those songs had played, he'd cried. When Sara's brother had shared memories of her childhood, he'd cried. When Grissom had spoken, in a voice tense and flat, about Sara's professional and talent, Nick had cried.
Sara's parents had asked him to speak, and he'd wanted to do it, wanted to make sure everyone knew how much she meant to him. He got up to the sanctuary of the chapel and looked at them all, faces he knew, faces he didn't, his mother, crying because of Nick's grief, Lindsey Willows in a black dress, Doc Robbins and his wife... He had no words, and so he'd stuttered out something about Sara's smile. Then he'd said simply that he loved her, that it had changed his life just to be with her, and he heard Catherine stifle a sob. His voice cracking, now, desperate, he'd said, "Just - please - don't forget Sara. She was important to me - important to a lot of people - to all those victims, all those families. I - I don't want her to be forgotten."
He'd gone back to his seat between Catherine and Warrick and dropped his head into his eyes, knowing that they knew he was crying and why he was crying.
After the funeral, he waited with Sara's parents and her brother. When everyone had gone they said their last goodbyes, one at a time. Nick was last. The others had gathered on the far side of the chapel to give him some privacy. He kissed her forehead, for the last time, and whispered, hoping that wherever she was she'd hear him: "I love you, sweetheart. I'll always love you."
She was cremated that afternoon.
The ashes he has in his hand now really are all that remains of Sara as a physical being. To give them up will be to give her up, though they read her will yesterday and she's left him everything in their apartment, to do with as he wishes. He has her clothes, her books, her photos, her mementoes, he just doesn't have her. Slowly, forcing himself, he opens his hand again and lets the wind take this last reminder.
Dust in the wind, just as she'd always wanted.
He stands up, and just for a second stares down at the rocks below. He could just step off this cliff and fall and then he'd be with Sara again... wherever. The thought passes. He'll keep on living. He'll keep on solving crimes, because that was her life and finding answers for people was what kept her going, sometimes.
On shaking legs, Nick walks back to where her parents are waiting for him.
THE END