Title: Coming Home
By: Ericalynn
Fandom/Genre: CSI: Vegas/angst, character study, drama, sequel
Character(s): Nick-centric; graveyard team
Rating: R
Disclaimer: I don’t own them, just borrowing. No copyright infringement intended. And no money being made.
Warning: Multiple major season spoilers; mentions of non-con, adult themes, sex, alcohol; Sequel to “Another Life: The Story of Nick Stokes”
Summary: He’d done everything to cure it, to make it go away. Everything that is, except to admit that he was the victim. Nick-centric
A/N: Inspired by starbright73(my Nicky muse) and the following songs: Kenny Chesney’s “The Road and The Radio” and “Beer in Mexico”, Brandi Carlile’s “What Can I Say”, and Chris Daughtry’s “Home”.

Try to bury my troubles away

Drowns my sorrow the same way

Seems that no matter how hard I try

It feels like something’s just missing inside

-Brandi Carlile “What Can I Say”

 

 

 

The heavy afternoon sun hung lower in the sky than when he had arrived.  The oppressive heat went uncured by warm salt air wafting off every crystal blue breaking wave.  He sat there in faded, dirty jeans, bare toes tickling the golden sands of a Mexican beach with a freshly opened bottle of tequila in one hand and a smoldering cigarette in the other.  Three day old stubble, a direct result of nonstop touring of dusty little towns and sleeping in his car, covered the jaw of a now bronzed face.  Behind the sunglasses were darkly shadowed, haunted eyes.  His shirt, once fitting like a tailored glove now had the appearance of your favorite old tee, faded and slightly too big, stretched from ages of love and wear.

         

It had been a month.  38 days to be exact.  912 hours.  54,720 minutes.  3,283,200 seconds and counting since he’d left the lab, since he walked away from the only true family he had ever had without looking back.  He told them he need sometime to straighten things out, but what had he achieved?  A few new diversion tactics, a bad smoking habit, and a draining bank account.  His first thought was to go home, go back to Texas where life had always seemed simpler.  But who wanted to go crawling back home to mommy and daddy?  That would be admitting defeat, something Nick Stokes never did.  Maybe that was his way of slowly piecing himself back together, trying to regain footing on decidedly precarious grounds.  Or maybe he just didn’t want to go where he knew they would never understand.  There was only one place now that could ever be home, only one group of people that would ever understand.  Whatever the reason, it had gained him nothing but more trouble for his time.

 

Taking a drag on his dying cigarette, Nick looked out over the ocean again, listening to the gulls and the children laughing, and wondered when the last time was that he felt so . . . free.  When was the last time he didn’t have to plaster on a fake smile, biting back emotions, fighting back those skeletons in his closet just to be able to make it through one more day?  It had been quite a while, he knew that much.  So for now he was quite content to enjoy it.

 

The day he had left the lab he had gone back to his house to grab his duffle bag, a couple changes of clothes and the bare essentials crammed into the small space.  His walls and shelves were as bare as the day he had moved in, everything else had been packed away in storage the previous day.  Once he figured everything out, he would come back for it.  Then he had left with nothing but a full tank of gas, good music on the radio, and the endless stretch of road in front of him.

 

But he hadn’t gone back home as originally planned.  Instead he stopped off at a cheap motel and slept the night away, undisturbed for the first time in months.  The next morning he found himself at the crossroads.  Go left and go home.  Go right and go for freedom.  He chose right and ended up driving aimlessly through multiple states, hitting ATMs, mini-marts, and cheap hotels along the way.  If anyone wanted to follow him, cared enough to save him, all they had to do was follow his extensive paper trial that eventually ended in a small coastal town in Mexico near the American border.

 

Two weeks of travel and he had no progress to show for it, except for his drained bank account and gas tank, as he stepped out onto the beach that first night.  And since that night he had tried everything to be rid of his problem.  Drinking it away had ended in catastrophe and one hell of a hang over the next day.  Anger had only served to get him a black eye, the remnants still, but barely, visible on his cheek.  Ignorance led to more straying.  There was only one thing he hadn’t done, hadn’t allowed himself to do since it had all started.  And that was the problem.  He hadn’t accepted it.  He hadn’t cried over it.  He hadn’t accepted that this time, it was indeed him that was on the other side of the tape.  He hadn’t accepted that he was the victim.

 

A swig of tequila and a burning tear.  That’s how it would start.  But never how it ended.  Another swig and a few more tears.  His chest started to tighten, his hands trembling, his eyes welling, as he realized he had hit another crossroads.  Go left, with the tequila bottle, and end up who knows where.  Go right, with  the car keys, and end up where you ran away from to who knows what reception.  He glanced at the keys, then the bottle, and made his decision.  Dropping the still full bottle in the sand, Nick stood and trekked barefoot back to his car, wiping the tears from his eyes.  He would do it, but now was not the time.

 

 

He realized, as he turned the ignition over and pulled out into traffic, that he had never truly gotten past anything in his life.  His past was riddle with horrible moments of fear, frailty, shame, and sorrow, but that didn’t mean his future had to be the same way.  After his physical and forced isolation from the team, he’d put himself in self-imposed isolation.  He cut them off at the knees with fake smiles oozing Texan charm and half-assed excuses anytime they tried to get closer to him, to pull him out of this hell he’d fallen in.

 

“Not tonight Greg, it’s been a long shift.  I’m gonna hit the sack.  Maybe later?”

 

“Yeah, I’m fine Cath.  No, going underground didn’t freak me out.”

 

“We’ll catch next week’s game ‘Rick.  I was caught up at work.  You know how it is.”

 

But his most famous, and lamest, excuse came in front of everyone.

 

The desert air was scorching and everyone was dressed in minimal layers as they moved from grave to grave.  Nick walked the perimeter, trying to ignore the glances he was getting from his co-workers.  Four bodies, all dead at least five days judging by the bug life crawling about their flesh.  Maybe it was his fault for jumping at the first opportunity to get away from the bugs.  Instead he searched for treads or tracks, maybe a dropped weapon or the slightest clue as to had been out here before it become a killing field.

 

Spotting nothing, he headed back over where Grissom and Brass were standing over the nearest body.  Maybe they would have some evidence for him to take back to the lab to process.  As he approached, his attention was drawn to the only life out there besides them; the bugs.  It was morbidly captivating, watching as they scuttled along the body, feasting on the rotting fleshing as if only a few days ago it hadn’t been a living, breathing human.  He could feel the ghost of thousands of legs running over his skin as the ants came back, could feel the sting of hundreds of bites as they ate his living flesh.  He stood there, mesmerized, never hearing Grissom’s worried voice, never seeing the concerned glances he was getting from his fellow CSIs and police officers.

 

It wasn’t until the ghost legs became tangible, scuttling up his arm, that he tore his gaze away from the victim’s dead flesh to his own living tissue.  And there, crawling from his leg, over his gloved fingers up to his arm, was  a fat, mean looking bug.  He was paralyzed with fear and charged with adrenaline at the same time as he screamed.  He was trembling, shaking, hitting and scratching at his skin to get the bug off as he was placed back in that coffin.

 

He sobbed, little rivers of tears streaming down his cheeks as he blindly backed away from helping hands, caught in the grips of a living nightmare.  Sometime during his fit he had fallen to his knees, fingernails tearing into flesh, trying to rid himself of the feel of the beetle.  Strong hands gripped his shoulders, shaking him gently.  There were softer, smaller hands cupping his cheeks, wiping away the tears.  And there was a chorus of voices trying to bring him back out of that hell.

 

When he came to, he was panting, nearly hyperventilating.  He was on his knees, body curled over his bleeding arm, his forehead pressed into the desert sands, his tears watering the earth.  He could still feel their presence around him even though they’d backed a bit.

 

“Nicky?”

 

Grissom knelt down next to him, his hand coming to rest on the back of a sweaty neck.  And slowly Nick uncurled, his arm pulled tightly against his body, his head hanging down like a scolded child.  He never said a word, just stood up, shrugging off hands as he made his way to his Denali.  He leaned against the tail gate for a few minutes before his battle with his stomach ended with his lunch on the ground.  Once again Grissom was there with a water bottle and silent look.

 

“Let me see your arm, Nick.”  But instead of waiting for the request to be fulfilled, the injured limb was snatched away from his body.  After being poked, prodded, cleaned, and rudimentarily bandaged with some paper towels and duck tape, Grissom finally asked the dreaded question.

 

“Yeah, Grissom.  I’m fine.  Just-uh.  It was nothing.  Just a bug.”  Even the deaf could hear the resonant tremors of terror still lingering in his raspy voice.

 

“Just a bug?”  Warrick had protested when he heard the words.  “Nick, you almost tore your arm apart.  What’s going on, man?”

 

But the comment, just like everything else too emotion in his life, was shrugged off with a fake smile and some quirky remark.  He never told them how scared he had been.  He never talked about that period in his life.  Ever.  He cried when they found him, then woke up in the hospital the next day.  Two days later he was released and made his parents go back home.  Whenever someone brought it up when they had come to check on him, or make him dinner, it was either shot down or brushed off.  Two weeks later, he came back to work in dark long sleeves and a new attitude.  And he hadn’t been the same since.

 

But there had been times before that that had changed him drastically.  It’s just hard to see the invisible scars on a broken soul.