In my lonesome aberration
It won′t settle with a crowd
You're a beast that I was raising
That surrounds you like a crown
Sacramento sun was just as fierce and blinding as the one back in Miami. It shone relentlessly as if trying to boil their skin off of the bones. The bare breeze couldn't wipe the sweat off their brows even though the humidity wasn't nearly as drenching as back home.
The two relatives stood outside the CBI building and tried to pretend there was no apparent reason for either of them to be there so far away from home that it somehow made it feel like another planet entirely.
Michelle was Ryan's 'cousin-slash-sister' and currently she'd started her way up the ladder side by side with her beloved 'brother-slash-cousin'. Yet he tried to keep a bit of a distance in their sibling ways.
Being honest Ryan could easily admit she was the sister he always hoped for and just like that one day after his parent's passing she was standing there like a fresh snow from the Rockies also lost her parents, so he'd deduced they all had been traveling together.
She's been always the one to recover the first and to fight until the end.
Her harsh upbringing gave her faculties Ryan didn't possess so he'd taken her as a role model of how to fight for important things in his life. How wrong and right he'd been about that...
Her best friend Samanta turned out to be one of the CBI agents and that one had survived something of her own.
Ryan felt slightly out of his league with these two, overly confident strong women.
Yet they still called him their little brother and seemingly Sam also had adopted him without even the slightest bat of that eyelash of hers.
Her older brother who was there only for his own reasons didn't seem to neither agree or disagree, the man's grief only burning brighter than Ryan's own.
They'd once started out at different places now united into one parking lot across the country.
Mich had been at the Las Vegas university where she'd met Sam and they both started out as CSIs for the local Crime Lab. Two years later Mich suffered in a Lab explosion loosing hearing in her left ear and having to live with a ringing right ear for the next eternity to come.
Sam had been struck by a piece of wall that caused worrisome back injury and possible nerve damage to her right hand.
For Ryan it had been just as shocking as his own mishaps at the first steps out on the wicked streets of Miami after becoming a cop. And not even his team knew that the too had been touched by fate in a rough way.
Luckily Michelle had been one to spring back to life faster than any of them. And while her hearing loss was something to learn to live with Ryan had never seen anyone with more brightness in their soul than her. She'd even reached as far as to help one of her supervisors to face his own hearing issue and just like that this bright-as-sunshine ball of rough strength had come to Miami with a bewildered Sam nearly in a collar and leash in her wake Ryan felt that he actually had family just like everyone else.
So with that entirely unashamed display of pure love and affection and disastrous disregard for personal space the younger female had been accepted by the team after transferring. Sam had only been trying to exist in shadows as her ability to face her issues was tainted by few less admirable things she only stayed until her hand started to respond to a new therapy and pure brightness of the sun.
