-1A/N: This is my first CSI Fic, so I hope you like how it's getting started off! It will probably focus more on the relationship than any CSI work, but I'll do my best to make it interesting. I'd appreciate feedback! Enjoy.

Ryan Wolfe entered the bar and took a relatively isolated seat. Today had been an especially hard day at the crime lab, and he just wanted to unwind. The waitress, knowing him as a regular by now, brought him a beer in the bottle. He gave her a small smile as a thank you, and took a large gulp.

"Rough day, Wolfe?" she asked.

"The worst. Thanks, Heather," Ryan replied.

"Let me know if you need anything else."

Ryan watched Heather walk away, then trained his focus on the empty seat across from him. The harsh pep talk he had received from Horatio Caine earlier in the day echoed in his mind; the last thing he wanted - or needed, really - was to have his career on the line. Although his mistake had been an honest one, it had nearly cost the entire team murder conviction. Considering his usual attention to detail, the mistake should never have been made in the first place. Still, he felt Horatio could have been less harsh about the situation. He swallowed down the rest of his beer, and told Heather to keep them coming; if he was lucky, he could drown away this day, then wake up to a clean slate tomorrow.

Several beers and maybe a couple of shots later, Ryan had moved away from his isolated table and joined the rest of the crowd at the bar. Heather had cut him off earlier in the night, but the alcohol was still doing its job. Many of the attendees that night seemed to recognize him from one media piece or another, and he found himself surrounded by beautiful women before he could ask for even one of them to join him.

"Take it easy, Wolfe," Heather cautioned. "Don't go telling war stories and spill more information than you should."

"Nah, no, for sure. No war stories, ladies. Top secret, all of it." He flashed them a smile, and this apparently was enough for his admirers to accept that they wouldn't be regaled with any of the CSI's adventures that evening. One woman excused herself to the ladies' room, leaving a gap for Ryan to see out into the bar. His eyes settled on a woman of maybe 23, sitting by herself just down the bar. Her dark hair and petite figure immediately drew him in, and he excused himself from the harem of groupies to approach her.

"Care to join us?" he asked, only slurring a little.

"And shake up that nice blonde-haired, big-bosomed trend you have going there? No, thanks." The woman turned her gaze back to the drink in front of her. Ryan looked her up and down, and couldn't help but feel a challenge. It wasn't too often he was turned down when approaching a woman.

"Do you know who I am?"

"I know exactly who you are. You're Ryan Wolfe, the cockiest CSI in Miami, quite possibly in the world."

"Do I know you from somewhere?" Her words had struck a chord with him, and she seemed very familiar now. His brain racked through a million memories at once, but he couldn't place her.

She seemed to balk at first, then regained her composure. "No, you don't. You're thinking of someone else."

"The confidence in your statement makes me think I do know you."

The young woman shook her head. "I'm very good at remembering people. We've never met."

"I would be better at this if I hadn't been drinking for the last couple of hours. I'm positive I know you from somewhere, though. This is what's going to happen: I am going to go home, right now, and sleep. I am going to wake up in the morning, stone sober. If I don't remember who you are at that point, I will figure it out by the end of the day. Then, I will find your name in the phonebook, call you, and ask you out to dinner." Ryan put on a smug smile, thinking he had her completely hooked.

"That's all very Trip Fontaine of you, Mr. Wolfe," she said, leaning in close to him, as if to whisper in his ear. "But my number's not listed."

With that, she shouldered her purse and hopped off the barstool, leaving Ryan completely dumbfounded.

-----

Ryan woke up the next morning to the sound of his unrelenting alarm. He reached over and shut it off without even opening his eyes. Making the transition from his stomach to his back, he ran his hands through his ears before finally opening his eyes. He silently thanked God for Heather; if she hadn't cut him off at a decent time, his head would be pounding, instead of having just that annoying little twinge at his temple.

The girl. While replaying the previous night's events in his mind, he remembered speaking with her. As he sat up and stretched, still trying to come to complete awareness, he could feel her identity on the tip of his tongue. He got up and padded to the bathroom. He turned on the shower, then ran the cold water from the sink faucet. The water felt refreshing on his face, and he tried to will the girl's identity to the front of his mind. In the two minutes that they had conversed, she had gone from a challenge to someone he was genuinely intrigued by. Just before undressing to step in to the shower, it hit him like a truck out of nowhere. He ran to the bedroom and phoned the crime lab.

"Yeah, this is Ryan Wolfe. I am going to be in the office in less than an hour, and I need everything we have on the Ellen Alexander murder on my desk when I get there."

-----

Ryan rushed in to the lab without a hello for anyone. He went straight to his desk, happy to see a box marked "Alexander, Ellen" in bold letters waiting for him. He slipped his keys into his pocket and removed the lid from the box. He sifted through the different folders of documents until he came upon the source list he was looking for on the case. He set it in front of him on the case and ran his finger down the list until he found the name he was looking for.

"When did you last see Travis Grey?" Ryan questioned the dark-haired young woman in front of him.

"I haven't seen or heard from Travis in . . . Maybe three weeks."

"He is your boyfriend, right? Why so long?" Horatio inquired.

"He was my boyfriend. I found a stack of pictures in his apartment of him with another girl, and they were all dated from the weekend before, when he told me he had been out of town on business."

"How do you know he wasn't?" Ryan asked.

"I helped him pick out everything in that apartment. I think I would recognize it."

"It was just a question."

"It was just an answer," she snapped back.

"Hey, I am the one with the badge here. So far the statements you're giving point to you being suspect in the murder of Ellen Alexander," Ryan told her, raising his voice a little. He slammed pictures of the victim laying on Alexx's exam table down in front of the girl being questioned, and she gasped at the sight, having to look away.

"All right, Wolfe, I don't think she was quite ready for that," Horatio warned.

"Wasn't ready for what? To see a girl her age beaten and battered and then having her throat slit so that she probably bled to death?" Ryan continued. "Did it make you angry when you saw those pictures? Did you kill Ellen Alexander because she was having an affair with your boyfriend?"

"No! I punched him, then I left. I don't stick around for that kind of thing. I will tell you this though. On the back of the pictures she was in, it had the date of her death in red ink. Go back to the apartment, you'll see it. Then you will find pictures of me with a date two weeks from today on the back in the same red ink."

"We need to take her into protective care. Get a place for her to stay lined up, contact her work, all of that. Make sure she is watched day and night until we get this guy," Horatio told Ryan.

"H, you can't be serious. Shouldn't we check out her story first?"

"If it's that much work, don't worry about it. I would rather have to wait for him to be caught than be under the protective care of the cockiest CSI in Miami."

Ryan replayed the scene in his mind over and over. She certainly was a firecracker. He checked and saw that she was, in fact, never put under any protective measures. Double checking his calendar, he realized today was two weeks from that day. The Alexander case had yet to catch Travis Grey so as to question their top suspect. Making way for his car, still without a word to any of his teammates, he phoned Calleigh.

"Ryan, what is with you?" she asked. "You seem so frantic."

"On the Alexander case, I need you to call a name on the source list on my desk. If she says she's not at home, get her to come in immediately. If she is at home, tell her to stay put. I am on my way."

"Why do you want me to call?"

"Because she doesn't like me."

"Fair enough. What's the name?"

"Berlyn Vera."

-----

Ryan kept his hand over his gun as he walked quietly buy quickly up the steps to the second floor of the apartment building. He found apartment 2C and, still keeping his gun within reach, knocked on the door. Calleigh had already called to inform him that she couldn't get Berlyn on her cell phone, and there was no home phone listed. Ryan knocked again, but there was still no answer. He saw the curtain move a bit behind the bay window at the front of the apartment, but couldn't make out a person. A loud thud from inside the apartment fired Ryan's instincts. He drew his gun out from it's holster and kicked the door open.

"Ryan Wolfe, I'm with the crime lab. I just need to take Ms. Vera in for some questioning," he yelled out, hoping this would go easy, but not expecting it to. He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket, and checked the caller ID before answering it.

"Calleigh, I need you to call me in back up to the Vera girl's apartment. She's here, and I think Travis Grey is here, too."

"Will do," Calleigh replied. Ryan flipped his phone shut and continued his way into the apartment. He cleared the living room, and then the kitchen. Going back through the living room, he was preparing to kick his way into the bedroom, same as he had to do with the front door, when he heard a small whimper from the bathroom.

"Travis? Come on out, Travis. You and me and Berlyn, we can go down to the lab and just talk. This doesn't have to be messy," Ryan offered.

"Get out of here, man, or I swear, I'll kill her," came the gruff reply.

"I'm going to open the bathroom door, just so we can see who we're talking to." Ryan slowly pushed the door back, exposing the sight of suspect and hostage. Travis was standing with Berlyn in front of him, in the bathtub, and had a gun to her temple.

"You need to leave," Travis warned. "I've already taken a couple good hits to her, it would be no problem to just pull this trigger."

Ryan took the chance to look Berlyn over. Travis wasn't lying; she had a laceration above her left eye, a bruise under the same eye, and another cut by her right eye. Her arms were covered in bruises, and she was struggling to stand.

"You don't want to do that," Ryan directed. "You shoot her, and I have to shoot you. My week's already been rough. See, I got in trouble at work yesterday, so I went to the bar to make myself feel better, you know, drown out the troubles. I met this beautiful girl, even had the same features as your girl there, and she turned me down. I told her I was going to call her tonight and ask her to dinner, but if I shoot you, I'll end up standing her up. You know how crazy women can get when you stand them up."

"That's why I'm going to take care of this one," Travis replied. "I knew she found those pictures of Ellen, and I was going to waste her for that. Then she had to go and hit me for cheating on her though, and that just pushed it. It could've been simple, a shot in the head while she slept. She never would've known the difference. She had to get violent though, and so did I."

"Look, Travis, I'd really like to be buddies with you, but you're making that hard to do. Give me the girl, let her go, and you and I can work the rest out." Ryan kept his gun focused on Travis, but if he did have to shoot, it would be hard to miss Berlyn. He couldn't pull his trigger on the suspect unless she was out of the way.

"She's not getting out of this alive," Travis told Ryan. "You can leave and not have her blood on your preppy little get up there, or you can stay and watch. I shoot her, you shoot me, fine. She'll be dead, and that's all that matters to me."

Ryan heard his back up officers coming through the door, and that's when he had his opportunity. Travis turned to the side to point his gun at the newly arrived officers, in and doing so, pulled Berlyn with him, out of the way. Ryan took that chance to fire a bullet into Travis's leg. The wound wasn't enough to do permanent damage, save for a nasty scar, but it did bring Travis Grey to the ground, releasing his hold on Berlyn. As other officers swooped in to handcuff Travis and take him into custody, Ryan holstered his gun and stepped in to pull Berlyn out of the tub. She was still struggling to stand, and was now looking like she would pass out at any minute. Worried about head wounds, Ryan picked her up and carried her out of the bathroom. Entering the living room, he saw Horatio Caine. From Horatio's side of the conversation, he knew his superior was calling for an ambulance.

"My head …" Berlyn muttered.

"I know," Ryan said, laying her down on the couch, then stroking her hair. "I know it hurts. The ambulance is on the way."