Title: 088. Lost
By: the-slash-hound
Fandom: CSI: Vegas
Pairing: gen
Character: Nick Stokes

***

The air still tastes like dirt, rich moist loamy tilth. Smells like certainty, like sweat and piss and fear and the beginning of the last three strangulating oxygen-denied minutes of your life.

As always, you wake, at almost the last minute, unable to breathe deeply enough to scream, flailing arms against walls that dissolve as you touch them, or reaching out to hands that melt away as you open your eyes. It's always the same, one or the other. An infinite variety of the same damn thing.

You wonder, suddenly, if one day you just won't wake up in time, and you'll dream yourself to death.

You pace the house, barefoot against the polished floors, and touch the paraphernalia of your life, skimming touches with your bite-roughened fingers, trying to reconnect yourself with reality.

This is my bookshelf. Ondaatje. Lorca. Doyle. Forensics. Biology. Birds.
This is my table. My bowl of fruit. Oranges, withering uneaten because you don't like the feel of the pith under your fingernails.

My couch. My chessboard.

My pinboard. Photos of your family. Your mother. Your father, smiling and stern at the same time. Sisters. Nieces and nephews. Holly, Andrew, Joseph, Chloe, Alexander, Michael, Kitty, Zack. Zack, who everyone says takes after you. You hope for his sake he has better luck.

Your brother, wearing some lame Dracula suit from a Halloween party, smiling with the urbane city lawyer version of your own face. In the mirror, the exhaustion dragging upon your own face makes you even more alike, the deeply etched lines and pallor all but obliterating the twelve-year age gap.

The others. Warrick Grissom Catherine Sara Greg. Some random shot at some party at Catherine's, all of them squinting into the sun. You can't look at that one for long, because it hurts, and you don't know why. Don't know why, but it's enough to send you off again. Pacing.

You walk a loop that winds through your apartment, and ends with you standing naked in the dark shelter of your open window. These are the accoutrements of your existence. It feels as though they belong to someone else. You're a ghost.

One night, about a week after you get home from the hospital, you recognise it for the ritual it is. It's a long farewell. Somehow, it just doesn't fit anymore, this life.

But that's wrong. It's a perfect life, populated by perfect people, and maybe you've never been the sharpest knife in the CSI kitchen, Jesus, far from it, ask anyone, but back then at least you knew how to feel, how to love them, all those faces that stare back at you from the wall. You think that maybe you let love go forever, the moment you surrendered hope, in that fatal instant when you raised the gun to your chin, under the ground. Damned yourself. Because why else would you still feel so alone? All alone in this dark house that isn't a home anymore. "Don't take it with you," you told the hard-faced girl in the prison. You wonder if she could see the walls still around you. The dirt still in your mouth. If she recognised the lie.

Outside it's a crisp, chill night in the desert, and Las Vegas is asleep, well, your nicer-than-average suburban street of it. It's so deceptively quiet. So safe. That makes you laugh, a strange barking sob of sad mirth, but then you realise you're crying, your forehead against the cold paintwork of the sill, because despite what everyone thinks, you're still lost.

You're not who you were, and you don't know who you are.

***