While the busker plays Volcanoes:

Two hours in their chairs, three cups of black Christmas Blend and she's getting jitters- turns them into shivers when she tries to hide them from him. He wants to touch her to feel the small vibrations. It could be innocent, he could make this innocent, he could just-

Contact.

He turns her hands over, chooses the one with "Grasshopper DNA?" careening along the thumb and wonders, "Why are they all questions?" He knows the answer but wants to hear it from her.

"I guess because knowledge isn't really achieved," she considers and with her hand still in his, her voice cracks like November-brittle birch trees when she commits: "Ever."

So it is to defuse the moment that he inquires: "Why didn't you bring any paper?" -such a simple question, he never would have guessed where this would lead…

And maybe it's the distraction he is providing, pushing his thumbs into her blue smudged palms (though that's really not where she's feeling him) but somehow she's saying, "You like my arms? You should see my legs." And because he wants to, it really is over now. He has a flight in the morning. Good luck with her profession. Goodbye.

Fifty seconds into the Air Line Attendant's safety protocol it occurs to him that he never got an answer. A girl with nothing but a Bic pen shoved into her messy ponytail comes dashing into a lecture hall. Why in the world didn't she bring paper?

He finds himself believing that this one missing piece could break the case. Clever of her not to answer; he never could resist a puzzle.

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Touch:

The word "No" is too heavy to support it's own weight. Grissom has read books about insects- their exoskeleton's too thin for their mass and they die of suffocation. In language however, many sentiments can be carried by their recipients. What a devastating testament of human nature that the most hurtful of the language's creations are often held onto the longest.

The damaged brunette in his doorway would never admit:

she carries every word she's ever heard him speak…

An explosion in the lab. Greg Sanders on a stretcher and far too many blaring lights. Grissom can smell it- the chemical responsible for this. He could name it if his ears weren't ringing. Then he sees her and for 90 seconds, he forgets what he is supposed to be doing.

She's sitting on the curb, knees up like some small child and he's thinking, "You've been blown apart before."

Amidst the red and blue lights, her face is DB white, wide eyed- she is reminiscent of a family member standing stark still and, "how could this have happened?"

He's seen so many of these. They both have.

"Sara, are you okay?"

When she sees him coming she sits up straighter, looking at Grissom and trying to focus before she even grasps what it is she's seeing- not that she isn't used to this routine with him.

"Yeah. I'm fine."

"Don't be so strong for me," he wants to tell her, "I won't know what to do with you." But instead he takes her hands in his, palms up and selects the one with a deep gash, almost down to the Pisiform, Scaphoid, Trapizoid.

This is Sara though, and he can't impersonalise with technical names; they both remember the last time they were here.

"Its touch is very gentle, it leaves no prints."

Grissom believes, then, without question, that if she could recall proper syntax she would wonder, "Why now? Why would you ever think that you could do this now?" and what she would mean would be, "Stop fucking with the evidence, you'll ruin it."

When she finds him later, she- whip lashed and believing she is indestructible- he's already decided; he has the words picked out…

Or rather, word.

19 hours until she approaches him again. Catharine is in a room with the sound of a heart monitor, crying into blankets that smell like Greg Sanders and medicine. Sara is in his office.

Now is the time to make amends.

She's standing in his doorway, mouth set in a line. If he asked her he bet she'd say it was the easiest shape to maintain (-it's not, the circle and the pyramid will top it) –but that isn't what she's interested in anyways.

"Have dinner with me."

He knew these words were coming, like handing an eight-year-old a gun with a bullet spun in the chamber and saying, "Have you ever played this game?" -the only question that remains to be answered? Of the two of them, who holds the gun and who has simply supplied it?

He could damage her now, with the wrong answer but does anyone ever know which one that is?

"No." he rejects her offer- decides this must the cruelest word he knows- and now she's flat backed against his door frame saying, "Lets see where this goes-"

She doesn't understand: if she's invincible he must be fragile- there is a balance to these things. That's really what Locard meant: exchange.

It isn't until she has left his doorway vacant that he considers…

A law is nearly always right but maybe this was an exception. If there is a force to bend probability, it has always been Sara Sidle- her body painted full of smudged reminders.

Tonight- Sunday, and the only night he gets- is not a 'Roller Coaster Night'. Instead he will get drunk on scotch and read "The Sun Also Rises" from cover to cover. When he wakes up at 6 AM on the living room floor, and after forcing a novel's worth of words into his mind it will be the first thing he thinks: I could have taken Charlotte's advice.

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Sound:

A faux Starbucks squeezed between a bookstore and, ironically, the thrift store where she bought her ruined shirt. A man playing covers of everybody else's songs sits outside the window and Sara swears the glass rattles when he plays the C.

"Poser coffee tastes better," she says as though its some explanation in it's self. Grissom waits a moment and reasons that it may be, if he treats it like one of his cases.

Don't try to analyze yet, just look.

"It must be sad-" she considers so that Grissom can't tell if it's for the first time or the fiftieth, "-never owning anything of your own."

"It is." He says and in the end, it's the eloquence of his cynicism that undoes her.

After two hours, the lyrics to a song they've both heard before by someone better, come rasping towards them through the windowpane, half degraded and beautiful still. A long December and there's reason to believe…

She turns to him and this time he's certain it's a brand new contemplation when she pulls her words together before his eyes. "I think sometimes there are so many reason's to believe, that when something falls apart it's only because no one knew which reason to choose." He doesn't want to be her 'no one'. He's very sorry it has worked out this way.

It is a Long December and Grissom is thinking, "-if you might come to California…"

The sun has set, white gold, refracting light, but he's still appreciating the bridge of her nose- the single loose lash that has yet to fall from her smudged mascara eye. And "Oh God," thinks Grissom- he shouldn't like it here.

So finally, once she finishes her third cup of coffee and her hand shakes alarmingly when she places it down, (though perhaps that isn't entirely from the caffeine) he enquires: "Sara… If Locard's theory turns out to be correct, what are you hoping to take away from this?"

He sees his error before he's finished his question but it is too late now and she is already on him with, that sharp mind pulling at any seams it can find. "I don't think it works that way. I don't think you always want what you get."

"I think we do," presses Grissom, curling a napkin around the edge of the table, "but do we always want what we should?"

She blinks, once, twice and instead of an answer, they lock eyes across their circular table- just a circumference of 7.85 feet between them both and when that loose eyelash drifts, soundlessly to Sara's cheek, Grissom knows for the first time, that art galleries have become obsolete.

"Well then what do you believe you will take away?" he plunges ahead. "Regardless of your original intention? What now?"

She sits quietly across from him, one song ending- the beginning chords of some other, like salt in a deep cut, but Grissom believes for a moment that clumsy notes may be all that's holding the moment together. He is certain neither of them could possibly be doing it.

He wants to write this fragile lyric- nervous cursive on her wrist where the blood is humming. He thinks nobody brilliant has even known how to follow instructions. He knows he sometimes idiotically breaks his own.

In a moment they will both be stumbling over goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

He finds it is the mundanity of the idea that hurts: when he returns to his hotel room he will brush his teeth and not be able to remember the exact color of her mouth.

Always the smallest things and, "so this is what tragedy feels like."

Don't build your world around, Volcanoes melt you down…

Grissom (accidentally) bites his tongue, spits blood into the bathroom sink with the coolness of mint- hoping, by chance, to find what he is looking for. The color is mercury dark and nothing like her lips.

"What are you going to take from this?" he asks back at the coffee shop posing, so unconvincingly as a Starbucks. He's just trying to keep the desperation out of his voice when he realizes that perhaps the question is more towards them both than her alone.

"45 ounces of Christmas Blend," Sara says at last and he knows before she does- what she means is, "It doesn't have a name right now."