Title: Time To Speak

Author: Jedi Buttercup

Disclaimer: The words are mine; the worlds are not. I claim nothing but the plot.

Rating: PG-13

Summary: B:tVS, CSI. Buffy had never been tempted to go look her actual birth father up. 500 words.

Spoilers: B:tVS post-"Chosen"; any season of CSI.

Notes: For beatriceotter, by request.

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: [...] a time to keep silence, and a time to speak"
--Ecclesiastes 3:1,7b (KJV)

Buffy knew long before her dad divorced her mom that Hank Summers might be the guy who had raised her, but he wasn't her father by blood.

Still, she'd never been tempted to go look her actual birth father up. According to her Mom, she'd been cheating on Hank with her biology tutor, a stuffy, introverted geek even less socialized than Willow or Giles at their worst. He'd played with bugs, worked on dead bodies, and had absolutely no interest in settling down, getting married, and having kids. Showing up out of the blue to tell him a no-strings roll in the sheets back in college had resulted in a daughter probably wouldn't inspire much of a paternal response; it would just disrupt both of their lives to no purpose. Especially given all the secrets she was carrying.

The unexpected arrival of Dawn, followed by her mother's death, had almost been enough to make her change her mind and pick up the phone, but things had spiraled out of control very quickly after that. Not until after Willow's psychotic episode did her life calm down enough to let her seriously consider the notion.

Of course, by then all she'd really have needed from him was money, and she was determined never to go there. The money from Giles had been a godsend, but one she'd never have asked for; she was not going to go begging for funds from a complete stranger just because she shared half her DNA with him.

Buffy decided after that to put him out of her mind entirely. She didn't even think of him consciously again until the day, years later, when she turned on the news and found herself confronted with his name, attached to the image of a guy in Las Vegas CSI gear outside a building fenced off with police tape. She froze the picture with her TiVo and stared at it for several minutes, taking in the grim, determined expression on his face, the careworn lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth, and the supportive hand one of his co-workers had settled on his arm.

That was her dad. Probably Dawn's too, biologically at least. He must have left the coroner job Joyce remembered a long time ago. He wasn't some vaguely creepy, bug-obsessed shadow in her mind anymore; he was a living, breathing person, one who worked to make the world safer for ordinary citizens, just like she did.

She studied the image awhile longer, checking for a ring on his left hand and memorizing the lines of his face, before she unfroze the image and let it run forward again. Her dad was a crime scene investigator, a cop, one of the people who dealt with the other kind of evil that went bump in the night. He was a person worth knowing, and he might understand her life better than she'd ever expected he would.

Maybe it was finally time to give Gil Grissom a call.

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© 2007 Jedi Buttercup.