NOTES:
1) This story might not be to everyone's liking; don't say I didn't warn you.
2) Thanks to Franky of the incontinent cat and new job who STILL beta'd for me on short notice, and for Em who kept me fed and watered throughout.
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It's only their second date, but Gil Grissom knows something is wrong.
Maybe it's the way Nick is playing with his salad, or the way he's not really meeting his eye for more than a second at a time, or the simmering way he doesn't seem to want to be there.
Gil endures their failed conversation until the main course has been dealt with, and then he sets his napkin down next to his plate and says, "Nick, please tell me what's wrong."
There's a rapid succession of expressions that flit across Nick Stokes' face, and Gil tries to catalogue them: he looks guilty, then embarrassed, then angry and then back to guilty, and then he starts to blush. Really, furiously blush, something Gil hasn't actually seen before, not like this.
"Nick?" he says again.
"It's nothing," Nick says quickly, "sorry." He flashes Gil a smile, and looks back down at the linen.
"What is it?" Gil asks, because he wants to know. He wants to know why, after three years of skirting around each other and one spectacular date that he thought they'd both enjoyed, this is proving to be such a disaster.
"Nothing," Nick says, and there's a wheedling quality to his voice that's new, too. "Please, just - never mind."
He really doesn't want to never mind, but Nick looks so miserable and desperate to let it go that he doesn't have the heart to pursue it. "Okay," he says, knowing that he doesn't sound happy about it.
He gets a smile for that, a shade more lifelike than Nick's previous offering, and Nick says, "So - dessert?"
He wants to say yes, but he doesn't have the energy for another half hour of this. "Maybe next time," he says, and tries a fake smile of his own.
Nick's eyes almost well up - it happens so quickly and is so fleeting that Gil is only seventy-five percent sure he saw it at all - and then he blinks and nods. "Sure," he says gamely. "Next time." Another painful smile.
Gil looks at him for a moment, completely confused. He's been on bad dates, certainly - more than his fair share, he thinks - but never one that deteriorated so spectacularly. It started out well, laughter and anticipation that he is sure was mutual, and a wonderfully light feeling of possibility. And then.... Gil isn't sure what happened, but he's fairly certain that it (whatever 'it' is) happened between the parking lot and the restaurant. It was as though a switch was thrown, and the Nick Stokes who had finally screwed up the courage to ask him out was gone, to be replaced by this shell of a man.
And he really, really wants to know why.
"I'll get this," Gil says when the waiter angles towards them discreetly.
"No," Nick says, "let me. I mean, I ruined tonight, I should... I should pay for it."
The waiter gets within hailing distance, and Gil asks him for the bill. The young man smiles and inclines his head obsequiously before retreating, and the brief interruption gives Gil a moment to regroup.
By the time he turns back, Nick has taken his wallet out, and there's a stubborn look in his eyes. That at least, Gil thinks, is something that he recognises, something that is the real Nick. The Nick he knows and fell for years ago.
"Nick," he says, "you got it last time, let me get it tonight."
For a moment, it looks like Nick is going to argue, and Gil is surprised when he doesn't, when he ducks his head instead, and pushes his chair back. "I'm just going to hit the washroom," he says, and excuses himself.
Gil watches him weave through the tables and disappear around the corner at the back of the room. He frowns. Maybe, he thinks, Nick is sick. Maybe that's the underlying cause for his unhappiness tonight.
Yeah, right, he thinks. Like anything has ever been that simple between them.
There's a guy washing his hands in the bathroom, and Nick fusses with his hair in front of the mirror until he goes away. He scopes out the stalls quickly - empty, all of them - and then leans against the counter and lets his shoulders sag.
He's getting really sick of this. It used to be once in a while, a couple times a year maybe at most, and he could just bear down and deal. Push it to the side when he's at work, and crawl into bed and feel sorry for himself when he's at home. Not a great way to live, but it isn't really living, then. It's coping.
But this is getting ridiculous. It's so close to the surface all the time now, and it's getting harder and harder to just ignore it. Sure, he can push it aside just like he always does, but it's - it's like it's getting bigger or something, because pushing it to the side doesn't move it far enough away anymore. The stupidest little things can set him off now, can drag the monster right back to the forefront and plant it in his way.
He forces himself to look at his reflection, and it makes him wince. But he's getting used to that, too, and he pushes through it. Because that what he has to learn to do, obviously: push through it and just keep going.
He studies the line of his jaw, which he used to kind of like and which these days makes him feel sick to his stomach. Then his eyes slide down to his Adam's apple, and that knot of misery in his stomach tightens again. He closes his eyes and makes himself take a deep breath, and he knows that it's only going to get worse when he opens them again so he turns away from the mirror.
Only then he's looking at the wall of urinals, and that's pretty much the last damn thing he wants to see, either. So he pushes away from the row of sinks completely, and locks himself in one of the stalls. That's one nice thing about a classy restaurant, he thinks: the stalls in here aren't disgusting. He can close the lid and sit down and ignore the thousand little messages his body is sending, and he can-
He can stop pretending, at least for a bit.
He closes his eyes and digs the heels of his hands into the sockets, pushes back as though it's going to stop the tears from coming, even though he knows it's not. It never does. So he rides them out, tries to keep them short and not too overwhelming, and after about twenty seconds of choking sobs, he gulps up three deep breaths in a row and snaps some shade of control back into his life.
When he faces himself in the mirror again, he manages to keep his focus on one thing only and to ignore the rest of his face: he concentrates on how obvious it is that he's been crying. He examines the swelling under his eyes, and the redness, and lets out an unhappy breath. Dammit.
He does the best he can with a paper towel and some cold water, a trick his sister taught him when she was dumped in high school, and re-examines himself afterwards. Not too bad, he thinks; the best he can do under the circumstances. He splashes a little more cold water on his face, and he's just patting his chin dry when the door opens and a man in a nice suit comes in.
They eye each other for less than a heartbeat, then the stranger slips effortlessly into the ignore-everyone mindset of men in public washrooms. Nick sighs, finishes drying his face and then his hands, and steps out into the restaurant again.
He keeps his eyes away from the seductive door to the women's washroom, especially when it opens and a middle-aged woman comes out in a little cloud of perfume. Nick lets himself enjoy the lingering scent despite the punch in the gut it delivers to him, and he forces his feet to carry him away from the dark corner, back towards the table where Gil is waiting.
He puts on a smile that he knows Gil isn't going to buy, but they've only been out twice now and Nick is pretty sure that Gil's not going to get nosy.
"I'm sorry," he says, sliding back into his seat and turning the Texan charm up another notch. "Not feeling a hundred percent."
"Anything I can do?" Gil asks, and Nick knows that tone of voice. It's the one where Gil knows he's supposed to do something, but is aware that he's hopelessly out of his depth.
"I think I should just turn in for the night," he hears himself say.
There's a little moment and then Gil nods. "I've already paid," he says, and stands up. "I can take you home right away."
Nick nods, and gets back to his feet. "Thanks," he says. "Really. I - I'll make it up to you later, okay?"
The look Gil is giving him is less than convinced, but he keeps his mouth shut. "I'll get the car," he mumbles as they walk towards the door.
So Nick stands under the awning and watches the rain fall around him. When he's alone like this it's not so bad, he thinks. He's always liked the sound of cars driving through puddles, and the long reflections of streetlights on slick pavement remind him distantly of Christmas, make him feel like a kid again. When the world was rife with possibilities, before the iron bars of reality went up around him.
A dark SUV pulls up and he steps out towards it, before he realises it's not Gil's. It's someone else's, and the passenger door opens and an elegant woman gets out. They stand facing each other for a moment, and then he feels himself smiling sheepishly like he always does around beautiful women, and she smiles back at him.
"Sorry," he says and steps back. "Thought it was - thought it was my car."
She laughs at him, and pushes a long strand of hair behind her ear. "In this light," she says, "I'm not surprised." She turns and waves at the driver, who waggles his fingers at her and pulls away as she closes the door.
Nick can't help admiring her. She's fit but not thin, and the dress she's wearing is classy but not ostentatious, and her shoes are sensible but nice, and her smile is like everything that Nick has always longed for.
"Have a nice evening, ma'am," he says and pulls the door open for her.
"Thanks," she says. "You too."
He isn't staring, not really, as she disappears into the restaurant, but he's not exactly keeping his eyes to himself. She's just... he sighs. Tall women have always made him weak at the knees, and she's almost as tall as he is. He watches the way she walks, the way her arms almost-swing at her sides and her hips almost-sway as her feet move, and when she pushes another strand of hair out of the way, he's rendered speechless by the simple elegance of her wrist.
Then a short bleat from a car horn makes him startle away from the door, and he finds himself face-to-car with Gil.
"Sorry," he mumbles as he gets in. "Just got distracted."
"I saw," Gil says, and the way he inflects his voice tells Nick that yup, he saw. He saw him scoping out a gorgeous woman in the middle of their date, and there's no way that's a good thing.
He sighs and pulls the seatbelt across his lap. "It's not-"
"Nick." A beat. "It's okay."
"No," he says, because he likes Gil, a lot - he spent too damn long trying to work up the guts to do this, to ask him out - and he's not going to let it to go hell on a misunderstanding. Well... not this particular misunderstanding, at any rate.
But Gil just shakes his head as he pulls away from the curb. "I understand, Nick," he says in that flat, dead voice of his. "She was very attractive."
Oh fuck... Nick lets his eyes close, feels a new surge of tears well up behind his lashes. He wants to try to explain it, to find some collection of words to put this into perspective, but he can't. There's no way he can find the words now, because he's never done that, not even in the privacy of his own head. This is a thing that exists without words, because it's the only way he knows how to keep going, day after day.
So he doesn't say anything all the way back to his condo, and they sit for a little while with the engine idling before Nick turns to Gil, tears in his eyes for real now. "I'm so sorry," he says.
Gil looks torn between anger and exhaustion. Exhaustion seems to win out. "So am I, Nick," he says.
Nick nods, knows that he's about fifteen seconds from a total meltdown, and gets out into the wet night. He doesn't look back on his way up the path, doesn't let himself turn to watch him drive away when he hears the sound of tires against water. Doesn't even let himself think about his evening until he's folded into the bathtub with bubbles up around his chin, and then he lets it come.
All of it: from that initial, momentary glimpse of a woman straightening her stockings that set this whole meltdown into motion, to the bone-deep frustration of facing someone else in the mirror, and the maddening settled wrongness of everything in between.
God, he thinks, wiping uselessly at his face, this has to end. Something has to give and make this stop, because this is getting to be too much. It's all the time, it seems, and he's-
He's just not that strong.
Gil watches the clock for the better part of the first hour, then he sighs and rubs his face. Just great, he thinks. Just fucking great.
Catherine pokes her head around the edge of his door. "You coming?" she asks.
He looks up at her. "Go ahead without me," he says. "I need to take care of Nick."
She looks at him shrewdly. "I'm sure there's a good reason he's not here," she says. "He's probably stuck in traffic or something."
If only, Gil thinks. "I'm going to follow up anyway," he tells her. "You know, the responsible supervisor thing I keep getting memos about?"
She winks at him. "Got it," she says. "I'll consider you out of commission for the rest of the shift." She waves cheekily, then leaves.
He waits until he's sure she's actually gone, and then he lets his head fall into his hands. There's a damn good reason that office romances never work out, he tells himself. You knew that and yet here you are. Nick is playing hooky because of you, and you really really need to do something about this before it becomes habitual.
He feels good that he's got Catherine covering for him, at least that's one less thing he'll need to worry about. He pulls his jacket off the hook inside his door, finds his car keys in the pocket, goes back to his desk for the other set of keys, and runs out of excuses.
The drive across town to Nick's place is surprisingly short, so there goes another delay tactic. He sees Nick's truck in the driveway, and he knows he was right. He sits in his car for a bit, entertaining the notion that maybe he really is sick, maybe he's in bed with a raging fever and a bucket next to his head.
Yeah, right.
He sighs, gets out and walks up to the door. He presses the doorbell, counts to fifteen, does it again, counts to fifteen again, then leans against it long and hard. Then he fishes the other keys out of his pocket, flips through them until he comes to Nick's and lets himself in.
"Nick?" he calls as soon as he's inside. No answer, but the house doesn't feel particularly empty. He takes a couple steps in, lets the door swing shut behind him, and he tries again. "Nick? It's Grissom."
He starts downstairs, in the living room and then the kitchen, before moving slowly up the stairs. "Nick? I'm coming up," he calls out, not because he expects an answer but because otherwise he feels like a cat burglar.
He finds Nick in the first room he tries, and for a moment it looks like he's just sleeping. He stands in the doorway and watches him for a moment, counting his breaths and deciding that he's doing all right. Maybe he actually IS sick, he thinks, and takes a step into the room.
That's when he notices the bottle of pills, and the empty glass of water, and he gets an uncomfortably bad feeling about this. He grabs the bottle and reads the label - over the counter sleeping pill - then looks down at Nick.
"Hey," he says, and lays a hand on his shoulder. "Nick, wake up."
No movement. He shakes him gently, then again, and again with more force.
Nick has all the pliant resistance of a rag doll, and Gil feels his heart thump a little faster. He takes Nick's pulse, decides it's a little slow but steady, and tries to wake him again.
Shit. He looks down at the bottle again, reads the recommended dosage and the do-not-exceed warning, and then down at Nick again. He wonders how many he took, and whether he expected to wake up again from it.
He doesn't think Nick is trying to kill himself, not really - granted he was upset last night, and maybe Gil's own reactions didn't help matters much, but he's sure that's what this is. Some kind of overblown, adolescent reaction to their disaster date, and he wouldn't have taken enough to do any harm.
He watches him sleep for a while longer, utterly motionless except for the shallow rising and falling of his chest. He doesn't like the feeling in his own chest at what he's seeing.
He twists the top off the bottle and empties it into his hand. He doesn't even need to count them to know they're almost all there, and that alone makes him breathe a little easier. Assuming the bottle was full before Nick did his thing (he rereads the label and eyes the handful of pills he has) there's no way he took more than, say, eight.
He phones the operator on his cell phone, and asks for local poison control. "My friend is unconscious," he says to the officious woman who takes his call. "I think he took too many sleeping pills." He recites Nick's pulse and breathing, and answers a couple questions, performs a few basic tests at her request to determine his state of unconsciousness, and holds his breath while she consults with whatever references she has at her disposal.
She comes back and tells him to keep an eye on him, and if he's not awake in a few hours to bring him in to a hospital. She also tells him to take him to a counsellor when he wakes up, and Gil thanks her. He closes his phone and stares at Nick's body again.
He phones Catherine. "Nick is sick," he says when she picks up. "I'm going to stay with him tonight. You're in charge."
"I've been in charge since shift started," she tells him, but he can hear the concern in the spaces between her words. "Call me if you need anything."
"I will," Gil says, and hangs up again.
Then he pulls a chair across the room, and sits where he can see Nick's face, and he settles down to wait.
When he opens his eyes, Nick's headache gets exponentially worse, so he closes them again immediately.
"Nick?"
He keeps them closed, but frowns. That sounded an awful lot like-
"Nick? I know you're awake - open your eyes."
He does, but only one and only partway. Yep, there's a Gil-shaped blurry thing sitting there, watching him. Damn. "Time?" he mumbles mostly into his pillow.
"Almost four," the Gil-shape says and leans forward. "How do you feel?"
Four? Oh shit. He forces his eyes open, and pushes himself up to his knees, ignoring the stabbing going on right behind his eyes. "I'm fine," he lies, and tries to find the edge of the mattress without using his ocular muscles. "Sorry, guess I slept in-"
"We need to talk, Nick," Gil interrupts.
"I'm fine-"
There's a rattling sound, and Gil seems to be holding something out to him. "What were you thinking?"
It takes his brain a moment or two to work that one out, and then he tries valiantly not to wince. "Guess I wasn't," he says lamely, and lowers one foot carefully to the floor. He's never been stoned before, and the sense of everything being stretched and tilted is incredibly disorienting.
"Nick, I..." Gil shrugs. "Please tell me what's going on."
He ponders for a moment. "Going to throw up instead," he says, and lurches towards what he thinks is probably is the bathroom.
Before he knows it there are strong hands helping him, and he settles gratefully onto the cold tile next to the toilet. He hears Gil move around him some, and then perch on the edge of the bathtub.
"Nick," Gil says again, and Nick is getting pretty sick of hearing him start sentences and then not finish them. "What happened last night-"
Nick rests his head on the edge of the seat and tries to bring Gil into focus. "Forget about it," he says.
"I was going to," Gil says, "but now I don't think I can. What happened?"
"Bad night," Nick says, and wonders if maybe throwing up would make him feel better. He contemplates shoving his fingers down his throat, and then decides not to. It's a plan of last resort.
"So bad you overdosed on sleeping pills?"
Ouch. "Didn't overdose," Nick says, "just took a couple too many. It's nothing."
"It's not nothing," Gil counters, and there's an edge to his voice that Nick doesn't want to hear. It's not the 'Nick you fucked up again' edge, which he figures he deserves; it's the 'this is my fault and I don't know how' edge.
"Honest," Nick says, "just - let it go. I'm fine."
"You're not fine," Gil says, "and I'm not going to let it go."
They reach a kind of a stalemate then, because clearly Gil isn't going to spontaneously go away, and Nick is feeling way too miserable to pick a fight. So he sighs, and closes his eyes. "Do me a favour?" he asks after a longish silence.
"Of course," Gil says.
"You used to call me Nicky," he says, and he can't quite get rid of the wistful smile on his face. "I liked that."
There's another longish silence, and while part of Nick is tempted to open his eyes, the rest of him wins out and he concentrates instead on the sound of Gil breathing.
"You want me to call you Nicky?" Gil says, and Nick recognises that tone of voice, too, the one where he knows he's missing something but is determined to work it out for himself. "Instead of Nick?"
"Yeah," Nick says. "I'd - really like that."
Another silence, almost as long as the first two. "Okay," Gil says eventually. "Nicky."
There's that dopey smile again, Nick thinks, and lets out a little sigh. "Thanks."
Eventually he gets up, and Gil makes him walk around the house for a bit, following behind him and promising he'll feel better when the blood starts circulating again. He submits to it, because he can't think of what else to do. After the fifth lap of his living room, though, he grinds to a halt and tries to work out where the kitchen is.
"What do you need?" Gil asks, following him through the doorway into the narrow cooking space.
"Water," Nick says, and he props himself up against the counter and watches as Gil rifles through his cupboards for a glass and then takes it to the sink. "Thanks."
Gil is still watching him, still with that concerned-meets-confused look on his face.
"I'm sorry," Nick says when his glass is empty. "I didn't mean to scare you."
"Then what did you mean?" Gil asks, his arms folded across his chest.
Nick manages a smile. "Just wanted to sleep, man," he says with a half-shrug. "Didn't want to have any dreams, just - sleep."
"Is this about last night?"
"No," Nick says, even though it sort of is. It's not about what Gil thinks it's about, he knows that much for sure, and he doesn't want to get into it anyway.
Gil sighs, pinches the bridge of his nose. "Nick, I'm sorry," he says. "It's okay to be confused about who you are, and I shouldn't have - withdrawn like that when you admired her."
He laughs at that. Confused about who he is, he thinks humourlessly. What a wonderful understatement. He kind of misses the days when he could kid himself that that was the problem, liking both girls and guys and not knowing what to make of it.
"I'm not confused," he says, because he isn't, not really. He knows who he is, even if he doesn't like it, even if he hasn't found the courage to say it out loud. Maybe one day, he thinks; just not today.
"Well," Gil says, "it's okay to be bisexual too, Nick. I shouldn't have been so cold to you."
"What about you?" Nick asks. "Are you bi? Or just gay? I mean, are women something you're attracted to, at all, or...?"
Gil shrugs. "Sometimes," he says. "Some women. Mostly men, though."
Nick nods. Pretty much what he'd figured. He looks down at his empty water glass. "You were going to call me Nicky," he says softly.
Another silence. "Right," Gil finally says, and Nick looks up to see him scratching at his ear absently. "Look, Nicky - you should probably take a shower and go back to bed, sleep off the last of the drugs."
He nods. "Okay," he says. "I'll be fine. I'll come in early tomorrow to catch up, I swear."
"Don't worry about it," Gil says. "Just - get yourself well, okay?"
Nick knows how to read that particular brand of worry, and he smiles in what he hopes is a reassuring way. "Got it, boss," he says.
Gil holds out the bottle of pills. "I'm taking these with me," he says. "I don't want you taking anything else, either."
"I won't."
Gil smiles at him then. It's a kind of forced smile but there is some genuine affection there, too, which is a pleasant surprise. "If you need tomorrow off, too," he says, "just call me to let me know. I hate using my supervisor keys, but I'll do it again if I have to."
"Won't happen again," Nick promises. "And I really am sorry."
CSI - General [341]
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