Author: Frumpy

Rating: K

Disclaimer: I don't own CSI or its characters as much as I wish I did.

A/N: Just a short drabble to try and get me into the writing mood again which seems to have left me completely.

It hurt him to hurt her. He wasn't doing it on purpose, at least not with the intent to hurt her. Yet it was the only way he knew how. How to not hurt her even more.

It wasn't the pushing away, the ignoring on purpose or his put on obliviousness. It was the moments when he was weak, when he let her close. A small smile. A touch - fleeting and subtle, yet burned into his memory forever. The little double entendre that he caught himself making when he just couldn't go on. Couldn't fight it anymore and needed to feel... something.

It was cruel. The little moments when he gave her... hope. Because after all this time, after all his attempts to convince himself that he was happy with his life the way it was, he himself hadn't given up completely. And in the moments he let himself hope, when he was just too tired and worn out, when he managed to delude himself enough to let down his walls and imagine what it would be like to let someone in, he only ended up hurting her worse, because his fears finally caught up with him again. Inevitably. With a precise regularity that otherwise would have given him comfort within his rational and logical mind.

Only this wasn't logical. Not what he was doing to himself nor what he was doing to her.

The moments her hopeful and open smile vanished and he saw a hardness in her eyes that betrayed the hurt she felt. How her lips would curl up in that other smile, the one she used to hide behind. The one she had gotten way too good at around him. Not her Sidle smile, but the cruel twin of it that only he seemed to bring out in her. It was those moments when he felt her hurt stab him like a knife in his gut.

And again and again he swore to himself that this would be the last time. He wouldn't let himself hope anymore. Just accept things. Move on. As she should have done a lifetime ago. Only she hadn't. For some inexplicable reason she just hadn't.

Maybe that meant that she just knew him better than he thought she did.

And that painful hope reared its ugly head again, whispering the wonderful and cruelwhat ifs and if only that led to more hurtful behavior on his part. It's ironic how such a positive feeling could bring out the worst in a person. But Grissom had never been good with emotions, so maybe it made sense in a perverse way.

He couldn't suppress it anmore. He felt himself grow weaker every day. Every time he walked into the breakroom and would see her raise her gaze to him. The moments they worked a crime scene together and she seemed to instinctively know what he thought and they'd share that revelation with shy little smiles, gone as fast as they had snuck up on them. Leaving him empty and numb in the wake of the short burst of pure joy. The realization that he was indeed a weak man was not a surprising one for him. He'd known it all along, he'd only never admitted it to himself for fear that it would lead him to admit it to others. But he was tired. It was chipping away at his defenses, crumbling his walls.

And maybe the key was to not clutch at the last remaning shreds of his impenetrable wall. Maybe he had to let go of everything first in order to gain what he deemed unattainable.

It was a scary thought. But to see her smile her real smile again made it not as scary for some reason. After all, when you've lost everything you thought you had, hope really was the last thing that remained. And maybe, just maybe, it could bring out something good in him too. And he knew she could be strong for the both of them.