Title: Ashes to Ashes Author: amazonqueenkate
Pairing: Nick Stokes/Bobby Dawson
Fandom: CSI: Vegas
Theme: #13 an excessive chain
Warnings: nicotine; Jacqui Franco; meaningful absences; angst
Disclaimer: Not mine. The end.
Author's Notes: I've been an angst bucket lately; forgive me. Also, this one is dedicated to my mother, who was very confused when I called her about cigarettes until I told her I needed to know for a fanfic; then, she just went, "Ooooh" and told me all I needed to know. ;)

Nick's finger scraped twice over the wheel of the lighter before it sparked to life, the flame glowing in his mostly-darkened kitchen. He dipped his head, pressing the unlit cigarette into the heat and sucking in a deep breath. The bittersweet kiss of nicotine and smoke across his lips comforted him like a long-lost lover, and he tossed the lighter onto the table, watching as it skittered across the wood grain and stopped against the narrow cardboard carton of Marlboros that he'd picked up after work. He added his empty pack to the pile, three neat white boxes lined up in the early-morning light that sparkled through the slats in his window blinds.

The dark taste of smoke across his tongue warmed him, somehow, and Nick leaned back in his chair, staring out of the kitchen and at the living room. A few shelves were empty, now, and the ugly grayish-green throw blanket he'd never liked was absent from the back of the couch. He knew the stack of Field and Stream behind the armchair was gone, too, and that wasn't even counting the absences in other places, the ones he couldn't see.

He flicked his ashes into his empty beer bottle.

When they'd first met, Nick remembered, he'd still been a smoker. Not the two-packs-a-day addict he'd been on the force down in Dallas, but he'd still craved his crutch and snuck out the back door of the lab to grab a smoke every now and again. It was that one vice that introduced them, actually, because Jacqui Franco had dragged a handful of her techie friends out behind the dumpster to smoke with her, and very nearly smacked Nick in the nose with the door as she burst into the alley. She'd insisted he stay, have another, and he'd fidgeted under her lusty gaze as she discussed her search for the perfect man and the two men with her ... DNA and ballistics techs, Nick realized later ... rolled their eyes in failing attempts to not laugh.

"You're the new guy, right?" Jacqui had said after tirade number three, stepping on her cigarette. "Stoker?"

"Stokes," he'd corrected, smiling. "Just moved here from Dallas."

"So I heard." Her attention had waned from him to the other men, albeit briefly. "Meet Greg ... DNA ... and Bobby ... ballistics. Along with me, and our obnoxious comrade in documents ..."

"You're just mad ...cause he's trying to get you to quit," the DNA tech ... Greg ... had interrupted quickly.

" ... we're, like, your best friends here. You need us, Stokes."

He'd smiled, nodded, and then met Bobby's eyes in the darkness beside the dumpster. How true Jacqui's words had been.

Bobby'd complained, once, that kissing Nick while he was a smoker was like being forced to lick a human ashtray. Nick had rolled his eyes, told him he was wrong, but a week later, he'd quit anyway. He'd gathered up and then thrown out all his lighters, all his ashtrays, all his "thank you for being a Marlboro man" memorabilia in favor of going cold-turkey.

But now, Bobby had left, quitting Nick like a meaningless, destructive vice that would rot him from the inside out. He'd taken his things ... blanket, books, magazines, clothes, self ... and gone cold-turkey, as though it'd never mattered.

His cigarette came to its end, a stubby excuse for a nicotine high and escapism method. He caressed it briefly, still glowing like the embers in the bottom of a fire, a faint remnant of what had been.

Nick stubbed it out like the memory of a lost lover and reached for his lighter.