Title: The older you get... (Gil's POV)
Pairing: Gil Grissom/Nick Stokes
Author: podga
Rating: PG
Warnings: None and no spoilers either (or at least very very vague)
Disclaimer: Neither making nor hope to make money from this. CSI, characters on it names etc are not my property (atlhough I wouldn't mind owning a big ole Denali!)

The older you get, the shorter a year becomes.

Maybe it has to do with each year, becoming an ever-decreasing fraction of your total life. If you think about it, when you're 5 years old, one year is 20% of your life (more if you just count the part you remember), but when you're pushing 50, well, a year is not all that long, relatively speaking.

Maybe it has to do with the fact that you don't want to make the effort any more. You know who you are. You know what you've accomplished. You also know that people don't understand you and many feel off-balance around you. Sometimes you enjoy that, other times it hurts you. Especially when you hear a variation of the "I wish I was you, unfeeling, unemotional" theme from people that should know you better, like Catherine or Sara. You want to lash out at them, ask them if what they just said to you is proof of their noble feelings and emotions, the ones that you apparently don't possess. But mostly you make a joke, or tell them you agree with them, or say nothing. You don't understand why people think it's preferable to have no emotions, no connections to life or to others, even if it's under extreme circumstances. You especially don't understand why people think you're that way. But if you haven't been able to get the message of who you are across in over 45 years, doesn't it make sense to just stop trying?

Maybe it has to do with the fact that there's nothing new or different happening to you. There are no new subjects to learn, no new lands to discover, no new friends to make. Sure, there are surprises along the way and you continue to see and hear things that you never imagined and that intrigue you, but you start to realize that by and large, they don't really change anything for you; you're still the same guy going through the same motions day after day. Even if you get promoted or demoted, even if you write a new paper or discover a new insect species (pretty unlikely in Las Vegas anyway), you're still going to be the same guy.

But you don't want to wake up one morning realizing that you let something that might be wonderful speed by you without trying to slow it down or even stop it. You know that if you make the effort, if you manage to connect with the world around you and become open to its possibilities again, it will make a year last as long as it did when you were five. So you keep on telling people what you believe in, you keep on trying to support them and help them when they need it, you try to remain true to your internal compass and when it all gets to be too much, you go ride a rollercoaster and lose yourself in that ride.

And sometimes, you see something in yourself that you didn't know you had (or maybe had forgotten you had) and that stretches out the year as well. You think you're self-sufficient and strong, until you're waiting to go into surgery and Catherine shows up for you (even if you tried not to show how much it meant to you and you later wonder why you did that). You think you live according to your rules, until Sara points out that you're getting too attached to a case, when you advised her against the same thing. You think you make decisions based on evidence and not on personal feelings, until you decide to give Warrick one more chance, even though you know the recidivism percentages for addicts, especially in Las Vegas. You think you can remain focused and at peak performance no matter what the circumstances, until it's Nick you are trying to save - and luckily this time you're right, even though you thought you wouldn't be.

After that time, you realize that sometimes both the years gone by and the years that will follow are all at a perfect pace for you, or maybe they all magically compress, and you feel like you're living in an endless present.

You wonder how Nick can be so unafraid, how he overcomes every difficulty thrown at him and continues to be strong and positive. You admire how he leaves his emotions so unguarded, when, without even noticing, you've built a fortress around yours. You cannot understand why he seems to want your approval so much, because when you compare the kind of person he is to the kind of person you are, there's no comparison.

You see Nick bending over some evidence, his face serious and concentrated, and you feel your heart hesitate and then jumpstart again. You've seen him do it a thousand times before and each time your heart did the same thing, even if you can't remember when it first started doing so. And you'll see him do it a thousand times in the future, and you know your heart will do exactly the same thing each time.

You hear Nick down the hallway laughing with Greg or with Warrick about something, and if you join them, they'll draw you in with them. It's happened hundreds of time and it will happen again, and the jokes might be different, but you know that the warmth of Nick's smile will make your heart feel like its too large for your chest each time, and his laughter will make you want to laugh as well each time (even if sometimes you don't or you just smirk).

You feel when he's upset or angry or frustrated or happy and his emotions find an echo and resonate somewhere inside you. Again, you don't really know when it started, but you know that from now on, it will always be the same.

And you realize that new things can happen to you and can change you, even if they creep up on you and you change so slowly that you think there's nothing different at all. And you want to make the effort, you want to push things along a bit, because you don't want to lose another minute, because every lost minute makes the years shorter again.

So when you're driving back to the lab with Nick unusually silent and pensive next to you, staring out the window into the blurry darkness, you want to challenge the passing time, not accept it as you normally do. He seems relaxed next to you, his elbow on the armrest between you, his hands loosely clasped in his lap, but you sense he's far away and you don't want that, you want him next to you, reacting to you.

So you want to talk to him about something personal, not the case you left behind, but even though you've changed, you're still you, so you talk to him about your cockroaches. You talk to Nick about races in which they triumphed and others in which they seemed to doze off at the starting line. You know he can't possibly care about all this, that this isn't the topic or the way to engage him, but you move onto the roaches' training schedules, because you can't think of anything else, at least not something you'd have the courage to say.

And finally, finally, he snorts and you look at him and he's grinning. And your heart does that thing it always does and you realize that units of time don't really matter at all, as long as you're using them right.