Rating: PG
Author: Trekker
Pairing: Oz/Grissom
Fandom: Buffy/CSI
Sheena was a pack-mate. It wasn’t all as primal as it sounded, really. They had a house in the suburbs, the five of them, and they had a peaceful kind of life, given what they were.
Not really the life Oz had quite pictured for himself: living in Vegas, practically domestic. It’s just not his thing. But here he is.
Here, actually, is the Las Vegas Police Department at the moment.
Because suburban life... suddenly wasn’t quite so quiet as it was supposed to be. And Sheena was dead. Shot with silver and skinned. And, hey, he’s her next of kin, or at least, he’s the closest thing she’s got. Closest thing she had. He props his elbows on the table and steeples his fingers, leans in so his lips touch the tips of index and middle.
He hurts for her.
He should be with the others now. Howling at the moon or something. He understands now why wolves can sound so mournful.
The door opens, and a man walks in. Middle-aged, tall, silvery hair and beard, and the first thing Oz thinks when he sees him is “Giles.”
“I’m Gil Grissom,” the man says, “Daniel Osbourne?”
Oz takes the offered hand, but neither of them shake. They clasp briefly and release and Grissom sits down across from him. Grissom’s hand’s warm and slightly damp, and Oz can smell death on him. The morgue. The crime scene.
“Oz,” Oz says.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Grissom replies.
Oz feels his lips tighten. Sheena was younger, she was beautiful. He didn’t have feelings for her, not like that. She was a little sister, shining and golden and with a quirky, understated humor to her. So many people missed that. So many only saw her silence, her stillness, and missed how blazing *alive* she was.
Wasn’t now.
“Were you related?” Grissom asks. “Her paperwork didn’t specify.”
Oz moves his head slightly to the side and back.
“Girlfriend?”
Again he shakes his head. He turns his eyes up and sees that Grissom has mirror his posture, elbows resting on the table, leaning forward.
“Housemate,” Oz says.
“Did she have any enemies that you know of? Did anyone make any threats?”
Werewolves have many enemies. This is pointless.
“No,” Oz says, because he wants the guy, detective, whatever he is, to really get that. He’s not helping. There’s no reason. Even if he did try, it would only drag him into a whole new world, with vampires and demons and werewolf poachers. Only get him killed.
“I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you know,” Grissom says, and Oz thinks, yeah, that’s the point. It does startle Oz, just slightly. He decides it’s probably what he always says. Still, it makes him take a second look.
Big mistake.
Cause the guy’s eyes, his gaze, is wicked powerful. Strong as a laser, as staring into the sun, all those things they tell you not to do. Oz feels, for a moment, that he’s gotten a glimpse behind the scenes, that he’s seeing the inner workings. Watching this guy take him apart with just his eyes.
Not in a bad way. Grissom’s watching him. Disassembling him with the same care Oz used to use when he was a kid to take apart old radios and TVs and stereos. Gently plucking out each piece, holding it with his fingertips, examining it, wondering at its purpose and then setting it neatly aside, so that once the whole mechanism was laid out around him, he could go turn around and put it all back together again, turn it on and see it still working.
He sees Grissom’s eyes narrow, just one small millimeter, visible less in his eyes themselves than in the slight tension between his brows and in the corners.
Hears him take a breath, hold it for a second, and then let it back out, unused, like a fisherman gently setting a too-small catch back in a stream. A flash of silver, whisper of scales, and it’s gone.
They watch each other, and Oz wonders about him.
Not so different, really, than a Scooby. Faces evil, death, every day. The human variety, though. In the end, it’s not so different, Oz supposes, because Grissom does look just like them. Like Giles, like Buffy. Lines of tension across his face that say he fights a battle, every day, a hopeless war.
Oz guesses he works long hours. Overtime. Doesn’t take vacations. Because he knows, he knows that they’re all caught in this current, constantly sweeping them back. The bodies pile up, the evil forces multiply, and every time they rest, they are rushed backwards so quickly. Have to fight it, always, or you lose so much ground it becomes meaningless.
They are motionless for a long time, although there is activity out in the hallway, an annoyance at the edges of Oz’s vision. They even seem to be breathing in sync.
When Grissom speaks, it is like an unexpected thunderclap, and Oz flinches.
“Where were you last night, at nine o’ clock?”
Him a suspect, now? He wonders what Grissom found inside of him. Wonders if he somehow saw the wolf.
“I want to clear you as a suspect, so you’ll be free to go,” Grissom says then, and Oz thinks he hears a hint of apology in his tone.
“Working,” Oz says. “I bus at Stella’s diner on Pine Street.”
“Witnesses?”
“Kitchen staff. Boss. Customers.”
At nine. He was washing dishes. He glanced at the clock then, so he knows. Paula was singing along with Garth Brooks on the stereo.
Someone was pulling a trigger that fired a bullet that ripped Sheena’s heart to shreds.
He breathes in, needing air, and looks down at the table.
“I can’t tell you anything,” he says, because it’s the truth. “Can I go?”
He ID’d the body, he filled out paperwork. A numbness is beginning to creep down his limbs, and nausea is curling in his gut.
Grissom nods. Oz goes.
***
A week passes. The body is released. They scrape together enough money for a small funeral, and the four of them who remain stand over her grave and then go home, pack her stuff in boxes and take it to Goodwill.
Another week, and then, as he’s walking out of the diner one night into dry desert heat, someone steps away from the outside wall. Oz’s hand slides into his pocket for the stake, but the voice stops him.
“Mr. Osbourne. Oz. Can I have a moment?”
He relaxes, a little. Nods once.
“Bench back around there,” he says, tilting his head towards the alley where the employees go when they need a smoke or a moment away from the smells and the grease and the kitchen heat.
They walk around and sit down in silence. Stare across the alley at gritty bricks. Grissom is a foot or so away from him, but he can almost feel his presence.
“I just want to know,” Grissom says, finally. “Off the record.”
Oz has to smile a bit. Guessed that the guy was pretty sharp. Even if Las Vegas was no Sunnydale, it had a few vamps, and, hey, at least one pack of werewolves. But Grissom didn’t know anything yet. Not for sure. And knowing changed everything.
“There’s no going back,” Oz says.
“I’m ok with that.”
So Oz tells him. Feels like Giles giving his beloved one-girl-in-all-the-world speech. Except, hey, he’s heard that isn’t true anymore. Grissom listens without comment. His only question at the end is, “And you?”
“Werewolf.”
“The silver bullet,” Grissom says.
Oz dips his head in a small nod, and is looking at the bricks again. The emotional wound is knitting closed, slowly, but the pain is still sharp when touched.
“Pelts,” Oz says, “Black market.”
One might think Grissom hadn’t reacted, but when Oz looks at him in the silence that follows, he can see pain. Anger. Helplessness. A good man, feeling guilty for having failed to eradicate evil.
Oz lets him think for awhile, but not too long. Long enough to begin to process, but not so long the depression sets in. Then, he says, “Hey. Buy you a drink?”
The End