Title: Karaoke Party
Author: podga
Pairing: Gil/Nick
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: CSI and its characters do not belong to me. I write and post for fun only.
A/N: There I was, sitting quietly and minding my own business, when angus_honey issued a challenge and I quote: “I have been thinking about your challenge and naturally (I'm afraid (for you)) it's got to be fluff and as OOC as you can possible make them, doing some activity that you wouldn't normally be caught dead writing about!! What about Mpreg...no, even I couldn't be that evil!!! No...I know...a karaoke evening...”

Despite the fact that I did nothing – I repeat: nothing! – to deserve this, I have podgafully picked up the gauntlet.

“Here you go.” Catherine handed Gil a rather grubby looking small envelope with crayon drawings of flowers on it. “And one for you, too,” she said, handing Nick a similar envelope, only the drawings on this one were little red hearts.

“What’s this?” Gil asked suspiciously, handling the envelope as he would a piece of evidence, his finger and thumb along the edges in order to make the least contact possible with the surface.

“Open it and see,” Catherine said. “I’m just warning you right now that you had better be available.”

Gil carefully lifted the flap and pulled out a card.

 


 

Dear Gil

Please come to my

Karaoke party ! !

Saturday, 4:30 pm

Love,

Lindsey

 


“Saturday? This Saturday?” Gil asked, desperately trying to think of a reason that Catherine would consider important enough for him to miss her daughter’s party. He was drawing a blank and Catherine’s glare wasn’t helping. Neither, for that matter, was Nick’s quiet snickering. “Uh, the thing is, Catherine, this Saturday I’m-”

“Coming to Lindsey’s party,” Catherine interrupted him.

“Yeah, but-”

“You’re her favorite ‘uncle’. I’m telling you, Gil, you’d better show up or there will be consequences!”

Catherine swung around to glower at Nick.

“Anything you’d like to say to me?” she asked aggressively. “No? Good. See you both Saturday, then.”

She swept out of the break room. The two men sat in silence for a while.

“I’m her favorite uncle,” Gil stated finally in a deadpan tone, as if that explained his cowardly capitulation.

“Yeah? Then how come I got the envelope with the hearts?” Nick asked, and they grinned at each other.

 


“Have you ever been to a karaoke party?” Gil asked as he stood with Nick at the front door of Catherine’s house. They’d already rung the doorbell twice, but so far nobody was responding.

“Sure. Who hasn’t?” Nick asked nonchalantly, then pressed the doorbell a third time.

“Maybe nobody’s home,” Gil said hopefully, despite the fact that it sounded like there were about five hundred children on the other side of the door.

“That’s what you’re gonna tell Catherine tomorrow night?” Nick grinned. “That you swung by, but nobody was home?” He shook his head. “Pathetic, man.”

“Maybe you could say I got an urgent call?”

“Nuh uh.” Nick rang the bell a fourth time and finally the door swung open.

“Thank God,” Warrick said, stepping out on the porch and pulling the door shut behind him after releasing the latch. “I was convinced I was the only idiot not to come up with a good excuse for this afternoon.” He bumped knuckles with Nick, then turned to look at Gil, his eyebrows raised.

“I’m Lindsey’s favorite uncle,” Gil explained humbly. Not that that meant he wasn’t also an idiot.

“Catherine pulled that one on you, too, huh?” Warrick said sympathetically. He squared his shoulders. “I guess we’d better go in.”

“Have you ever been to a karaoke party?” Gil asked as he reluctantly followed Warrick inside, propelled forward by Nick’s palm on the small of his back.

“Sure. Who hasn’t?”

 


“Who are you?”

“I’m Gil. Who are you?”

“Justin. Why are you hiding in here?”

“I’m not hiding. I was looking for a book.”

“Oh.” The little boy looked around the bedroom doubtfully. “The books are downstairs.” He reached out and tugged on Gil’s shirt, beckoning him to bend down. Gil disengaged the sticky fingers and squatted obligingly. “Some have really gross pictures in them. Of dead people and stuff,” Justin whispered. “I can show you, if you want.”

“I don’t think we should be looking at those books.”

“Are you scared?”

“Yes,” Gil answered solemnly.

Justin patted him on the shoulder. “It’s okay. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. Are you going to come downstairs and have some cake?”

“Maybe later. I still need to find that book.”

“Okay. See ya!”

Justin patted him on the shoulder again, then went to the door and opened it. “You’re sure you don’t want some cake? It’s really good! I can bring you some.”

“That’s very nice of you, Justin. I don’t want any, but thank you very much.”

 


“Why are you hiding in here?” Catherine asked, standing at the bedroom door with her hands on her hips.

Gil doubted the excuse of looking for a book would work a second time. “I just needed a break for a while.”

“Uh huh. Well, the karaoke’s about to start.”

“Okay.”

“So you need to come downstairs,” Catherine explained patiently.

“I do?”

“Yes. We’re having prizes and everything.” She reached out and looped her arm through his. “Come on, Gil. I’m sure you’ve faced worse than an audience of kids ranging from 5 to 9 years old.”

“Not that I can think of,” Gil mumbled.

 


“Okay, here’s how this works,” Catherine said, standing in the midst of what had finally turned out to be six children, rather than the five hundred Gil had originally envisaged. “You all pull a number out of this bowl, and that’s the order you sing in. When it’s your turn, I pull the name of a song out the hat Lindsey’s holding, and that’s what you sing. Clear?”

“Clear!” the peanut gallery yelled enthusiastically.

“Why don’t we pull the name of the song ourselves?” Warrick called out, obviously smelling the same rat that Gil did.

“It’s an age thing,” Catherine said a bit obscurely, but as the first singers came up, the mystery cleared.

Justin sang ‘On Top of Spaghetti’, while his sister and Lindsey’s best friend, nine years old going onto nineteen, sang Jewel’s ‘Standing Still.’ Warrick was next, and his performance of ‘Get This Party Started’ received enthusiastic applause.

Nick followed Warrick, and despite slipping off-key and singing the wrong words a couple of times, performed a credible, if a bit wooden, rendition of U2’s ‘Beautiful Day.’ At the end he smiled broadly at Lindsey and her friends, and Gil suspected that the ensuing cheers had absolutely nothing to do with the quality of Nick’s voice.

Gil’s heart sank deeper and deeper with every performance. He might have stood a half a chance right after Justin, but only humiliation lay ahead. He unrolled his piece of paper, which had grown damp in his palm, and confirmed that he was last. Why was he even doing this? Preoccupied in plotting revenge against Catherine, who’d invited him, and Nick, who hadn’t been willing to cover for him, he didn’t pay much attention to the next singers.

“Gil! You’re up!” Catherine said, startling him out of a happy reverie where he’d assigned her and Nick to find important – but minute – evidence in a very large landfill. She held out two pieces of paper, her blue eyes glinting wickedly. “Your choice.”

He took them and unfolded them, and suddenly it was alright. At least one member of the audience wouldn’t give a damn that Gil was tone deaf and couldn’t carry a tune to save his life.

He showed one title to Catherine, so that she could queue the disc player. As the first notes sounded out, he took a deep breath. He didn’t need to look at the screen for the lyrics. Instead he looked at Nick, who was leaning against the back wall next to Warrick, his hands in his pockets. Nick smiled across the room at him, his brown eyes warm. He recognized the song, as well.

“Close your sleepy eyes,

My little Buckaroo,

While the light of the western skies

Is shining down on you.”

 


“So do you think Catherine knows?” Nick asked much later, as he lay sideways on the bed, his head on Gil’s chest.

Gil lay with his eyes closed, one arm folded under his head, the other resting across Nick’s body.

“I think so.”

“What was the other song?”

“You are my Sunshine.”

“She knows,” Nick said, a note of resignation in his voice.

“She knows,” Gil confirmed and he smiled.