Disclaimer: Don't own 'em.

Spoilers: Up until 8x07, I suppose.

Summary: What happens after Sara leaves. GSR.

Rating: I'm going to say M because I don't know how far I'll take this. This chapter is more of a K+, though, but M just to be safe.

A/N: I decided to include lyrics from the songs on my playlist, which is why there are some odd choices here. I'm so not cool, as is evidenced by my musical choices. Corny! This story will be told in two parts unless I break the second part up into two pieces, and then it will be three parts. Thanks to SBT who listens to me complain. I'm a big complainer.

Edited to say: I fixed the formatting. Sorry about that.

Shuffle

Part I

"Look at this stuff
Isn't it neat?
Wouldn't you think my collection's complete?
Wouldn't you think I'm the girl
The girl who has everything?"

--The Little Mermaid, Part of Your World

They had a comfy townhouse and a dog. They had HDTV. Their refrigerator had one of those ice dispensers that crushed your ice. She always wanted one of those. They had a king sized bed they used to curl up in together as they slept away the afternoons before their shift at work. Sara always wondered why they bothered with such a large bed, for they always lay stuck together, like magnets, in the middle, taking up no more space than a twin sized mattress. Now she slept alone at night. It was his idea.

"We each should sleep while the other is at work, that way when we're home together, we can spend our time awake in bed and not asleep in bed." He had smiled and rubbed her upper arms softly, attempting to cheer her up as she embarked on life as a CSI on swing shift. "Plus you won't have to listen to me snore anymore."

She gave him a half smile and sighed. "I liked your snoring."

"I feel like I've been blown apart
There are pieces here
I don't know where they go
(I don't know where they go)"

--Merril Bainbridge, Mouth

Control. She spent her life striving for it. Sara may not have been able to keep her father from beating her mother, nor her mother from killing her father, but she could control her own actions. And her own reactions.

Until now.

She was spinning. And every time she stopped, dizzy, to take a breath, the only thing in her line of sight was more horror she couldn't fix. Suddenly the sense of justice she used to feel when catching a killer didn't feel like justice anymore. The dead were still dead. Nothing was really solved. No one was brought back to life just because she managed to find DNA on a cigarette butt or isolate a grainy image on a surveillance tape. Nothing really changed. So one murderer was in jail. So what? Another would take his place soon enough. And another.

And another.

"This morning, I woke up with this feeling
I didn't know how to deal with
And so I just decided to myself
I'd hide it to myself
And never talk about it
And did not go and shout it
When you walked into my room"

--David Cassidy, I Think I Love You

She had to find…something. She had to fix everything. The life Sara had built with Grissom was so loving, so stable, but it rested on a wrecked foundation. She needed time. Why, oh why did she need time now? She had years to repair the damage that was her life while she waited for Grissom. But nothing could happen -- she was sure nothing could go forward until she went backward. It would've been easy to quit work and disappear into their cozy home, seeing only him, interacting with only him. It was very tempting, the idea of crawling under the covers of their big bed and spending her days there while he worked. No serial murderers, no child molesters, no spousal abusers.

He would come home, get into bed with her, and hold her until she fell asleep. Everything would seem fine. It wouldn't be fine, but it would seem fine.

So she left. She loved him, but she left. The last taste of his lips was a small slice of heaven to inoculate her against the hell she'd be facing once she left his side.

"Oh, I must stop these doubts, all these worries
If I don't I just know I'll turn back
I must dream of the things I am seeking
I am seeking the courage I lack"

--Julie Andrews, I Have Confidence

In college, she had seen a hot air balloon deflate after it landed in a field. It was a slow process. The hot air didn't leave its nylon captor the way air shot out of a rubber balloon, propelling it every which way around a room as people ducked its path. Sara remembered standing on the edge of the field for at least fifteen minutes, watching, as the once majestic balloon was packed away. It was almost sad. The half-full balloon lay on its side like a great, wounded bird. As the shiny material seemingly melted towards the ground, Sara could feel her chest grow tight.

Watching that balloon deflate had ranked as one of Sara's top ten worst memories, though she couldn't put her finger on why. She had more tragic memories, to be sure. Her life was rife with unhappy experiences. But the pathetic sadness of watching a glorious object fall to the floor and collapse seemed to encapsulate every dashed hope she had ever had, every shiny possibility that would eventually lay tattered at her feet.

She thought about the hot air balloon a lot after Grissom turned her down a few years back. She thought about it and cried. Damn hot air balloons always set her off. Her mother had been the same way with "An Affair to Remember." She'd quietly sniffle into a tissue whenever the old movie would air on television. Back then Sara didn't quite understand how the good kind of love could make you cry as much as the bad kind.

Oh, but she found out when Grissom said no to her dinner invitation.

Twin emotions of love and utter, utter sadness lived in her. They warred and often love cowered in the corner while sadness spread like a fog in her soul. Though she managed to function, it wasn't until Grissom reached out to her that the fog lifted. One sunny Sunday afternoon they kissed on her couch and her mind was clear. One sunny Sunday afternoon he took her to bed and she became whole.

Whole.

He made her whole.

She wanted desperately to run back to him. To leap into his arms and beg for things to go back to normal. To pretend there was no Natalie, there was no Hannah. There was no Mommy and there was no Daddy.

But she didn't run back to him.

Sara cried away the rest of November in the little cottage she had rented on Tomales Bay. A cold front swept over California, chasing away the last of the tourists south and she was able to get a decent deal and all the privacy she needed.

She drove up to the house and, keys in hand, got out of the car and circled around back to get a glimpse of the view. Bodega Bay sloshed up against the rocky shore. Her first thought was that Hank would've loved all the room to run around and play.

Moments later, Sara was hunched over, choked sobs wracking her body.

She might as well have seen a hot air balloon.

"Momma please stop cryin, I can't stand the sound
Your pain is painful and its tearin' me down"

--Pink, Family Portrait

She spent most of her time walking. Bundled up to ward off the chill, Sara traversed the town she grew up in on foot. Where she couldn't walk, she drove, got out of the car, and hiked. She passed the house her parents lived in as newlyweds -- a large, imposing structure that, as Sara understood it, they had to trade in for a much smaller model due to debt her father had accumulated after some bad business investments. She imagined what it must've been like for her mother to pack their belongings -- new things she'd only just acquired as a married woman -- under the disdainful eye of her father. Oh, he would've been hating himself for losing his house, which meant he would've hated his wife more.

Sara frowned as she stood at the far edge of the lawn, staring straight at the doorway. This is probably where it all began. They had a whirlwind courtship, that much she knew. Her mother liked to gush about the twelve weeks her father had wooed her in San Francisco. He probably didn't smack her around as he took her to candlelight dinners in Little Italy and brought flowers to her tiny apartment. Sara used to wonder in amazement that the man in her mother's stories who wrote love poems was the same man who could so carelessly slap her across the face for putting too much pepper on his eggs.

She wondered what, if anything, made him change. Did he slowly turn into a monster, or did he just fail to reveal his Mr. Hyde side to Laura, showing her only Dr. Jekyll until they took vows?

Or did something trigger it?

Stress?

Work?

A nervous breakdown?

Sara felt her stomach clench. She looked just like her mother. That was something that had disconcerted her for years. You're not your mother, she'd tell herself. You're not her. It became her mantra, and so focused on it was she that it took her by surprise when she began to realize the little characteristics of her father that had manifested in her, from the way she always chewed on pens – Sara had found it oddly endearing early on in their relationship to see Grissom sign Hodge's overtime sheet with a Bic pen she had mangled – to the way she cracked her knuckles right before going to sleep. She hadn't even noticed she was doing that until Grissom smiled at her from his spot on the bed and said, "My mom used to say that if you crack your knuckles too much, you'll get arthritis."

When she frowned, he quickly retracted his statement. "It's an old wives' tale, I think. I haven't seen any evidence that correlates knuckle cracking and arthritis."

Sara had plastered a smile on her face and just shook her head. "I'll stop anyway."

"I remember when
I had you and you had so much promise then
You promised me that you would never leave again
To be broken you were made Adelaide"

--Old 97's, Adelaide

She soon found her way to the next house, her first house. It was sweetly decorated now, with crisp paint and a well-manicured lawn, and though Sara didn't live in that house for very long, it was quite different than she remembered. More cheerful. Well cared for. She recalled parking her bicycle in the driveway one sunny summer day after her mother called her in for lunch. The remainder of the day had been spent watching cartoons, the bike long forgotten until the scrape and crunch of crushed metal could be heard through the open window in the living room. Endless curses streamed from the front door as Sara and her mother ran to see the commotion. Her bike lay, wrecked, under her father's car, and her father, seething with anger, locked eyes on her.

"Sara, go to your room," her mother had whispered, and she had done so without a word.

She left her mother alone with him to take the punishment. Her punishment. Was it wrong to feel guilty, some thirty years later? To feel guilty for something that wasn't her fault? Sara ached knowing so much violence had been allowed to exist when she was too young and helpless to do anything about it. At that age, she was only yet piecing together that what went on in her house wasn't the norm, that what went on in her house was wrong.

And, anyway, at the age of six there was really nothing she could do. She kept telling herself that.

It never made her feel better.

House three was a duplex far from the water. They rented the top floor from the older couple who lived downstairs. The thin walls did not suit her father and one too many visits from the police had them packing up and taking temporary residence at a motel while they searched for another, cheaper home. The three months they spent holed up in a single room with a semi-working television was sheer torture. A ten-year-old Sara was witness to every put down, every belittling remark that preceded the strike of her father's hand on her mother's flesh. It was at that point that Sara's keen sense of justice began to develop. She didn't have to know what a happy family was like to understand that she didn't have one.

The last house had been one county inland, and far from picturesque. Sara squinted as she took in her last home with her family. The area was desolate, and the police noncommittal. They didn't get called until it was time to take her father away in a body bag. What was left of her childhood died there that day, and Sara the adult was born.

In so many ways, she felt like she was still growing up. Forced to age much too young, Sara missed out on so much that one needed to be a fully functioning, healthy adult. She had to scrape together the fundamentals on the way, guessing what normal was and hoping she could pass for it.

"Well the weeks went by and
Spring turned to Summer
And Summer faded into Fall
And it turns out he was a missing person
who nobody missed at all"

-- Dixie Chicks, Goodbye Earl

He died on a Tuesday. Or murdered. He was murdered on a Tuesday. It struck Sara as odd that the man who prosecuted her mother seemed more outraged over her father's death than she did.

In the end, he wasn't a man who was missed. He was a man who did some damage and then died, having left the world more worse for the wear than when he entered it.

Sara was determined not to suffer the same fate. Should she die early, she didn't have to go down in history as a great woman, as a woman of change who inspired others to reach for the stars. No. She just wanted to repair the damage her father made. He had robbed the world of her mother's freedom and of her own childhood. Sara couldn't replace those things, but she could help to preserve those belonging to others.

And so she became a CSI.

And so she became Sara Sidle.

Sara Sidle was a strong woman, not a scared kid. Sara Sidle argued for the little guy. Sara Sidle stood up for what she believed in. Sara Sidle did everything she wished she could have done years earlier.

It had been exhilarating at first.

At first.

"Let me serenade the streets of L.A.
From Oakland to Sacktown
The Bay Area and back down
Cali is where they put they mack down
Give me love!"

--2Pac, California Love

Late December she took a drive down to San Francisco. She walked the sloping streets pensively, dodging the holiday crowd with the ease of a native. Her life began in California, technically, but it started in Boston the moment she set foot in college. It was there she could…be. She could be. The slate was wiped clean, the world was at her fingertips – all the goofy clichés applied. Life was good.

And yet the pull was there, the pull to come back. She had the beginnings of a life in Boston – some friends, some connections with the city's crime lab, and a free ride to attend grad school at Harvard. She didn't mind the cold weather and found the Boston accents on the local guys kind of charming. It was in its fetal stages, but it was a promising life. It had the makings of a great life, one of those "normal" lives.

Still, four successful years on the East Coast couldn't keep Sara from fleeing back to the Pacific, back to her ghosts, back from whatever possible perfection she was creating for herself.

She settled less than fifty miles from where her mother killed her father and she buckled down, learning everything she possibly could, attending every seminar she possibly could, and working every last scrap of overtime available to her. She was going to fix San Francisco. By the time Sara Sidle was done with the city, it would be a shiny beacon of peace.

And maybe, perhaps, she'd undo the wrongs that had happened years earlier.

Maybe if she put enough wife beaters in jail, it would negate her father's actions towards her mother. Maybe if she put enough murderers in jail, it would be like her mother never killed her father.

A forty-five second call from Grissom had her dropping everything and running once more. And for the first time, it was to someone. Had she examined her actions a few years earlier, she might've realized how deeply she was in love right from the start instead becoming aware of the sheer magnitude of her feelings slowly, painfully. She might've run back to California after Holly Gribbs murder was solved.

But she stayed.

For seven years, she stayed. And she stayed because of him. Nothing but true love could keep the ghosts at bay for so long.

TBC…