Title: Nicky
By: Evan Nicholas
Summary: Nothing is ever that simple with him.
Characters: Gil Grissom, Nick Stokes
Genres: Angst, Character Study, Drama
Warnings: None
Challenges: None

NOTES:
1) This story might not be to everyone's liking; don't say I didn't warn you.
2) Thanks to Franky of the incontinent cat and new job who STILL beta'd for me on short notice, and for Em who kept me fed and watered throughout.

======

It's only their second date, but Gil Grissom knows something is wrong.

Maybe it's the way Nick is playing with his salad, or the way he's not really meeting his eye for more than a second at a time, or the simmering way he doesn't seem to want to be there.

Gil endures their failed conversation until the main course has been dealt with, and then he sets his napkin down next to his plate and says, "Nick, please tell me what's wrong."

There's a rapid succession of expressions that flit across Nick Stokes' face, and Gil tries to catalogue them: he looks guilty, then embarrassed, then angry and then back to guilty, and then he starts to blush. Really, furiously blush, something Gil hasn't actually seen before, not like this.

"Nick?" he says again.

"It's nothing," Nick says quickly, "sorry." He flashes Gil a smile, and looks back down at the linen.

"What is it?" Gil asks, because he wants to know. He wants to know why, after three years of skirting around each other and one spectacular date that he thought they'd both enjoyed, this is proving to be such a disaster.

"Nothing," Nick says, and there's a wheedling quality to his voice that's new, too. "Please, just - never mind."

He really doesn't want to never mind, but Nick looks so miserable and desperate to let it go that he doesn't have the heart to pursue it. "Okay," he says, knowing that he doesn't sound happy about it.

He gets a smile for that, a shade more lifelike than Nick's previous offering, and Nick says, "So - dessert?"

He wants to say yes, but he doesn't have the energy for another half hour of this. "Maybe next time," he says, and tries a fake smile of his own.

Nick's eyes almost well up - it happens so quickly and is so fleeting that Gil is only seventy-five percent sure he saw it at all - and then he blinks and nods. "Sure," he says gamely. "Next time." Another painful smile.

Gil looks at him for a moment, completely confused. He's been on bad dates, certainly - more than his fair share, he thinks - but never one that deteriorated so spectacularly. It started out well, laughter and anticipation that he is sure was mutual, and a wonderfully light feeling of possibility. And then.... Gil isn't sure what happened, but he's fairly certain that it (whatever 'it' is) happened between the parking lot and the restaurant. It was as though a switch was thrown, and the Nick Stokes who had finally screwed up the courage to ask him out was gone, to be replaced by this shell of a man.

And he really, really wants to know why.

"I'll get this," Gil says when the waiter angles towards them discreetly.

"No," Nick says, "let me. I mean, I ruined tonight, I should... I should pay for it."

The waiter gets within hailing distance, and Gil asks him for the bill. The young man smiles and inclines his head obsequiously before retreating, and the brief interruption gives Gil a moment to regroup.

By the time he turns back, Nick has taken his wallet out, and there's a stubborn look in his eyes. That at least, Gil thinks, is something that he recognises, something that is the real Nick. The Nick he knows and fell for years ago.

"Nick," he says, "you got it last time, let me get it tonight."

For a moment, it looks like Nick is going to argue, and Gil is surprised when he doesn't, when he ducks his head instead, and pushes his chair back. "I'm just going to hit the washroom," he says, and excuses himself.

Gil watches him weave through the tables and disappear around the corner at the back of the room. He frowns. Maybe, he thinks, Nick is sick. Maybe that's the underlying cause for his unhappiness tonight.

Yeah, right, he thinks. Like anything has ever been that simple between them.

***

There's a guy washing his hands in the bathroom, and Nick fusses with his hair in front of the mirror until he goes away. He scopes out the stalls quickly - empty, all of them - and then leans against the counter and lets his shoulders sag.

He's getting really sick of this. It used to be once in a while, a couple times a year maybe at most, and he could just bear down and deal. Push it to the side when he's at work, and crawl into bed and feel sorry for himself when he's at home. Not a great way to live, but it isn't really living, then. It's coping.

But this is getting ridiculous. It's so close to the surface all the time now, and it's getting harder and harder to just ignore it. Sure, he can push it aside just like he always does, but it's - it's like it's getting bigger or something, because pushing it to the side doesn't move it far enough away anymore. The stupidest little things can set him off now, can drag the monster right back to the forefront and plant it in his way.

He forces himself to look at his reflection, and it makes him wince. But he's getting used to that, too, and he pushes through it. Because that what he has to learn to do, obviously: push through it and just keep going.

He studies the line of his jaw, which he used to kind of like and which these days makes him feel sick to his stomach. Then his eyes slide down to his Adam's apple, and that knot of misery in his stomach tightens again. He closes his eyes and makes himself take a deep breath, and he knows that it's only going to get worse when he opens them again so he turns away from the mirror.

Only then he's looking at the wall of urinals, and that's pretty much the last damn thing he wants to see, either. So he pushes away from the row of sinks completely, and locks himself in one of the stalls. That's one nice thing about a classy restaurant, he thinks: the stalls in here aren't disgusting. He can close the lid and sit down and ignore the thousand little messages his body is sending, and he can-

He can stop pretending, at least for a bit.

He closes his eyes and digs the heels of his hands into the sockets, pushes back as though it's going to stop the tears from coming, even though he knows it's not. It never does. So he rides them out, tries to keep them short and not too overwhelming, and after about twenty seconds of choking sobs, he gulps up three deep breaths in a row and snaps some shade of control back into his life.

When he faces himself in the mirror again, he manages to keep his focus on one thing only and to ignore the rest of his face: he concentrates on how obvious it is that he's been crying. He examines the swelling under his eyes, and the redness, and lets out an unhappy breath. Dammit.

He does the best he can with a paper towel and some cold water, a trick his sister taught him when she was dumped in high school, and re-examines himself afterwards. Not too bad, he thinks; the best he can do under the circumstances. He splashes a little more cold water on his face, and he's just patting his chin dry when the door opens and a man in a nice suit comes in.

They eye each other for less than a heartbeat, then the stranger slips effortlessly into the ignore-everyone mindset of men in public washrooms. Nick sighs, finishes drying his face and then his hands, and steps out into the restaurant again.

He keeps his eyes away from the seductive door to the women's washroom, especially when it opens and a middle-aged woman comes out in a little cloud of perfume. Nick lets himself enjoy the lingering scent despite the punch in the gut it delivers to him, and he forces his feet to carry him away from the dark corner, back towards the table where Gil is waiting.

He puts on a smile that he knows Gil isn't going to buy, but they've only been out twice now and Nick is pretty sure that Gil's not going to get nosy.

"I'm sorry," he says, sliding back into his seat and turning the Texan charm up another notch. "Not feeling a hundred percent."

"Anything I can do?" Gil asks, and Nick knows that tone of voice. It's the one where Gil knows he's supposed to do something, but is aware that he's hopelessly out of his depth.

"I think I should just turn in for the night," he hears himself say.

There's a little moment and then Gil nods. "I've already paid," he says, and stands up. "I can take you home right away."

Nick nods, and gets back to his feet. "Thanks," he says. "Really. I - I'll make it up to you later, okay?"

The look Gil is giving him is less than convinced, but he keeps his mouth shut. "I'll get the car," he mumbles as they walk towards the door.

So Nick stands under the awning and watches the rain fall around him. When he's alone like this it's not so bad, he thinks. He's always liked the sound of cars driving through puddles, and the long reflections of streetlights on slick pavement remind him distantly of Christmas, make him feel like a kid again. When the world was rife with possibilities, before the iron bars of reality went up around him.

A dark SUV pulls up and he steps out towards it, before he realises it's not Gil's. It's someone else's, and the passenger door opens and an elegant woman gets out. They stand facing each other for a moment, and then he feels himself smiling sheepishly like he always does around beautiful women, and she smiles back at him.

"Sorry," he says and steps back. "Thought it was - thought it was my car."

She laughs at him, and pushes a long strand of hair behind her ear. "In this light," she says, "I'm not surprised." She turns and waves at the driver, who waggles his fingers at her and pulls away as she closes the door.

Nick can't help admiring her. She's fit but not thin, and the dress she's wearing is classy but not ostentatious, and her shoes are sensible but nice, and her smile is like everything that Nick has always longed for.

"Have a nice evening, ma'am," he says and pulls the door open for her.

"Thanks," she says. "You too."

He isn't staring, not really, as she disappears into the restaurant, but he's not exactly keeping his eyes to himself. She's just... he sighs. Tall women have always made him weak at the knees, and she's almost as tall as he is. He watches the way she walks, the way her arms almost-swing at her sides and her hips almost-sway as her feet move, and when she pushes another strand of hair out of the way, he's rendered speechless by the simple elegance of her wrist.

Then a short bleat from a car horn makes him startle away from the door, and he finds himself face-to-car with Gil.

"Sorry," he mumbles as he gets in. "Just got distracted."

"I saw," Gil says, and the way he inflects his voice tells Nick that yup, he saw. He saw him scoping out a gorgeous woman in the middle of their date, and there's no way that's a good thing.

He sighs and pulls the seatbelt across his lap. "It's not-"

"Nick." A beat. "It's okay."

"No," he says, because he likes Gil, a lot - he spent too damn long trying to work up the guts to do this, to ask him out - and he's not going to let it to go hell on a misunderstanding. Well... not this particular misunderstanding, at any rate.

But Gil just shakes his head as he pulls away from the curb. "I understand, Nick," he says in that flat, dead voice of his. "She was very attractive."

Oh fuck... Nick lets his eyes close, feels a new surge of tears well up behind his lashes. He wants to try to explain it, to find some collection of words to put this into perspective, but he can't. There's no way he can find the words now, because he's never done that, not even in the privacy of his own head. This is a thing that exists without words, because it's the only way he knows how to keep going, day after day.

So he doesn't say anything all the way back to his condo, and they sit for a little while with the engine idling before Nick turns to Gil, tears in his eyes for real now. "I'm so sorry," he says.

Gil looks torn between anger and exhaustion. Exhaustion seems to win out. "So am I, Nick," he says.

Nick nods, knows that he's about fifteen seconds from a total meltdown, and gets out into the wet night. He doesn't look back on his way up the path, doesn't let himself turn to watch him drive away when he hears the sound of tires against water. Doesn't even let himself think about his evening until he's folded into the bathtub with bubbles up around his chin, and then he lets it come.

All of it: from that initial, momentary glimpse of a woman straightening her stockings that set this whole meltdown into motion, to the bone-deep frustration of facing someone else in the mirror, and the maddening settled wrongness of everything in between.

God, he thinks, wiping uselessly at his face, this has to end. Something has to give and make this stop, because this is getting to be too much. It's all the time, it seems, and he's-

He's just not that strong.

***

Gil watches the clock for the better part of the first hour, then he sighs and rubs his face. Just great, he thinks. Just fucking great.

Catherine pokes her head around the edge of his door. "You coming?" she asks.

He looks up at her. "Go ahead without me," he says. "I need to take care of Nick."

She looks at him shrewdly. "I'm sure there's a good reason he's not here," she says. "He's probably stuck in traffic or something."

If only, Gil thinks. "I'm going to follow up anyway," he tells her. "You know, the responsible supervisor thing I keep getting memos about?"

She winks at him. "Got it," she says. "I'll consider you out of commission for the rest of the shift." She waves cheekily, then leaves.

He waits until he's sure she's actually gone, and then he lets his head fall into his hands. There's a damn good reason that office romances never work out, he tells himself. You knew that and yet here you are. Nick is playing hooky because of you, and you really really need to do something about this before it becomes habitual.

He feels good that he's got Catherine covering for him, at least that's one less thing he'll need to worry about. He pulls his jacket off the hook inside his door, finds his car keys in the pocket, goes back to his desk for the other set of keys, and runs out of excuses.

The drive across town to Nick's place is surprisingly short, so there goes another delay tactic. He sees Nick's truck in the driveway, and he knows he was right. He sits in his car for a bit, entertaining the notion that maybe he really is sick, maybe he's in bed with a raging fever and a bucket next to his head.

Yeah, right.

He sighs, gets out and walks up to the door. He presses the doorbell, counts to fifteen, does it again, counts to fifteen again, then leans against it long and hard. Then he fishes the other keys out of his pocket, flips through them until he comes to Nick's and lets himself in.

"Nick?" he calls as soon as he's inside. No answer, but the house doesn't feel particularly empty. He takes a couple steps in, lets the door swing shut behind him, and he tries again. "Nick? It's Grissom."

He starts downstairs, in the living room and then the kitchen, before moving slowly up the stairs. "Nick? I'm coming up," he calls out, not because he expects an answer but because otherwise he feels like a cat burglar.

He finds Nick in the first room he tries, and for a moment it looks like he's just sleeping. He stands in the doorway and watches him for a moment, counting his breaths and deciding that he's doing all right. Maybe he actually IS sick, he thinks, and takes a step into the room.

That's when he notices the bottle of pills, and the empty glass of water, and he gets an uncomfortably bad feeling about this. He grabs the bottle and reads the label - over the counter sleeping pill - then looks down at Nick.

"Hey," he says, and lays a hand on his shoulder. "Nick, wake up."

No movement. He shakes him gently, then again, and again with more force.

Nick has all the pliant resistance of a rag doll, and Gil feels his heart thump a little faster. He takes Nick's pulse, decides it's a little slow but steady, and tries to wake him again.

Shit. He looks down at the bottle again, reads the recommended dosage and the do-not-exceed warning, and then down at Nick again. He wonders how many he took, and whether he expected to wake up again from it.

He doesn't think Nick is trying to kill himself, not really - granted he was upset last night, and maybe Gil's own reactions didn't help matters much, but he's sure that's what this is. Some kind of overblown, adolescent reaction to their disaster date, and he wouldn't have taken enough to do any harm.

He watches him sleep for a while longer, utterly motionless except for the shallow rising and falling of his chest. He doesn't like the feeling in his own chest at what he's seeing.

He twists the top off the bottle and empties it into his hand. He doesn't even need to count them to know they're almost all there, and that alone makes him breathe a little easier. Assuming the bottle was full before Nick did his thing (he rereads the label and eyes the handful of pills he has) there's no way he took more than, say, eight.

He phones the operator on his cell phone, and asks for local poison control. "My friend is unconscious," he says to the officious woman who takes his call. "I think he took too many sleeping pills." He recites Nick's pulse and breathing, and answers a couple questions, performs a few basic tests at her request to determine his state of unconsciousness, and holds his breath while she consults with whatever references she has at her disposal.

She comes back and tells him to keep an eye on him, and if he's not awake in a few hours to bring him in to a hospital. She also tells him to take him to a counsellor when he wakes up, and Gil thanks her. He closes his phone and stares at Nick's body again.

He phones Catherine. "Nick is sick," he says when she picks up. "I'm going to stay with him tonight. You're in charge."

"I've been in charge since shift started," she tells him, but he can hear the concern in the spaces between her words. "Call me if you need anything."

"I will," Gil says, and hangs up again.

Then he pulls a chair across the room, and sits where he can see Nick's face, and he settles down to wait.

***

When he opens his eyes, Nick's headache gets exponentially worse, so he closes them again immediately.

"Nick?"

He keeps them closed, but frowns. That sounded an awful lot like-

"Nick? I know you're awake - open your eyes."

He does, but only one and only partway. Yep, there's a Gil-shaped blurry thing sitting there, watching him. Damn. "Time?" he mumbles mostly into his pillow.

"Almost four," the Gil-shape says and leans forward. "How do you feel?"

Four? Oh shit. He forces his eyes open, and pushes himself up to his knees, ignoring the stabbing going on right behind his eyes. "I'm fine," he lies, and tries to find the edge of the mattress without using his ocular muscles. "Sorry, guess I slept in-"

"We need to talk, Nick," Gil interrupts.

"I'm fine-"

There's a rattling sound, and Gil seems to be holding something out to him. "What were you thinking?"

It takes his brain a moment or two to work that one out, and then he tries valiantly not to wince. "Guess I wasn't," he says lamely, and lowers one foot carefully to the floor. He's never been stoned before, and the sense of everything being stretched and tilted is incredibly disorienting.

"Nick, I..." Gil shrugs. "Please tell me what's going on."

He ponders for a moment. "Going to throw up instead," he says, and lurches towards what he thinks is probably is the bathroom.

Before he knows it there are strong hands helping him, and he settles gratefully onto the cold tile next to the toilet. He hears Gil move around him some, and then perch on the edge of the bathtub.

"Nick," Gil says again, and Nick is getting pretty sick of hearing him start sentences and then not finish them. "What happened last night-"

Nick rests his head on the edge of the seat and tries to bring Gil into focus. "Forget about it," he says.

"I was going to," Gil says, "but now I don't think I can. What happened?"

"Bad night," Nick says, and wonders if maybe throwing up would make him feel better. He contemplates shoving his fingers down his throat, and then decides not to. It's a plan of last resort.

"So bad you overdosed on sleeping pills?"

Ouch. "Didn't overdose," Nick says, "just took a couple too many. It's nothing."

"It's not nothing," Gil counters, and there's an edge to his voice that Nick doesn't want to hear. It's not the 'Nick you fucked up again' edge, which he figures he deserves; it's the 'this is my fault and I don't know how' edge.

"Honest," Nick says, "just - let it go. I'm fine."

"You're not fine," Gil says, "and I'm not going to let it go."

They reach a kind of a stalemate then, because clearly Gil isn't going to spontaneously go away, and Nick is feeling way too miserable to pick a fight. So he sighs, and closes his eyes. "Do me a favour?" he asks after a longish silence.

"Of course," Gil says.

"You used to call me Nicky," he says, and he can't quite get rid of the wistful smile on his face. "I liked that."

There's another longish silence, and while part of Nick is tempted to open his eyes, the rest of him wins out and he concentrates instead on the sound of Gil breathing.

"You want me to call you Nicky?" Gil says, and Nick recognises that tone of voice, too, the one where he knows he's missing something but is determined to work it out for himself. "Instead of Nick?"

"Yeah," Nick says. "I'd - really like that."

Another silence, almost as long as the first two. "Okay," Gil says eventually. "Nicky."

There's that dopey smile again, Nick thinks, and lets out a little sigh. "Thanks."

***

Eventually he gets up, and Gil makes him walk around the house for a bit, following behind him and promising he'll feel better when the blood starts circulating again. He submits to it, because he can't think of what else to do. After the fifth lap of his living room, though, he grinds to a halt and tries to work out where the kitchen is.

"What do you need?" Gil asks, following him through the doorway into the narrow cooking space.

"Water," Nick says, and he props himself up against the counter and watches as Gil rifles through his cupboards for a glass and then takes it to the sink. "Thanks."

Gil is still watching him, still with that concerned-meets-confused look on his face.

"I'm sorry," Nick says when his glass is empty. "I didn't mean to scare you."

"Then what did you mean?" Gil asks, his arms folded across his chest.

Nick manages a smile. "Just wanted to sleep, man," he says with a half-shrug. "Didn't want to have any dreams, just - sleep."

"Is this about last night?"

"No," Nick says, even though it sort of is. It's not about what Gil thinks it's about, he knows that much for sure, and he doesn't want to get into it anyway.

Gil sighs, pinches the bridge of his nose. "Nick, I'm sorry," he says. "It's okay to be confused about who you are, and I shouldn't have - withdrawn like that when you admired her."

He laughs at that. Confused about who he is, he thinks humourlessly. What a wonderful understatement. He kind of misses the days when he could kid himself that that was the problem, liking both girls and guys and not knowing what to make of it.

"I'm not confused," he says, because he isn't, not really. He knows who he is, even if he doesn't like it, even if he hasn't found the courage to say it out loud. Maybe one day, he thinks; just not today.

"Well," Gil says, "it's okay to be bisexual too, Nick. I shouldn't have been so cold to you."

"What about you?" Nick asks. "Are you bi? Or just gay? I mean, are women something you're attracted to, at all, or...?"

Gil shrugs. "Sometimes," he says. "Some women. Mostly men, though."

Nick nods. Pretty much what he'd figured. He looks down at his empty water glass. "You were going to call me Nicky," he says softly.

Another silence. "Right," Gil finally says, and Nick looks up to see him scratching at his ear absently. "Look, Nicky - you should probably take a shower and go back to bed, sleep off the last of the drugs."

He nods. "Okay," he says. "I'll be fine. I'll come in early tomorrow to catch up, I swear."

"Don't worry about it," Gil says. "Just - get yourself well, okay?"

Nick knows how to read that particular brand of worry, and he smiles in what he hopes is a reassuring way. "Got it, boss," he says.

Gil holds out the bottle of pills. "I'm taking these with me," he says. "I don't want you taking anything else, either."

"I won't."

Gil smiles at him then. It's a kind of forced smile but there is some genuine affection there, too, which is a pleasant surprise. "If you need tomorrow off, too," he says, "just call me to let me know. I hate using my supervisor keys, but I'll do it again if I have to."

"Won't happen again," Nick promises. "And I really am sorry."

"Just - be careful, Nick."

"Nicky."

Another ghost of a smile. "Nicky."

***

True to his word, the next night Nick shows up on time, looking a little tired maybe but that's okay. He spends a couple minutes in the men's room, making sure he doesn't look like he spent the better part of yesterday in bed sleeping off an accidental overdose, and then presents himself at the assignment meeting looking as collected as he can, under the circumstances.

Gil won't quite meet his eye, but that's okay too, because he sort of deserves that. He knows he's responsible for ruining not one of Gil's nights but two of them, so he can take whatever variant of the cold shoulder he wants to give him.

The case he draws is a missing person that within two hours has turned into a kidnap and sexual assault, and Gil and Catherine crawl all over it. Part of him is miffed that they're taking it away from him, but another part of him is kind of glad, because these cases are getting harder to deal with. He wonders if that's on account of his unspoken problem - and he knows that Gil thinks he empathises too much victims even on a good day - or if it's just disgust at what people are capable of. Someone killed in the heat of an argument, that's terrible but at least he can comprehend it. But to cold-bloodedly kidnap and rape someone... he can't quite bend his mind around that.

At any rate, their kidnapper proves to be stupider than toast, and before the sun comes up they've collared the guy and badgered him into telling them where the woman is stashed. Nick invites himself to join the secondary-scene team by getting into Gil's truck and refusing to be moved.

Gil looks at him for a moment, then wordlessly starts the engine and pulls out of the precinct parking lot. The drive is only twenty minutes, and Nick is happy to pass it in silence, although he can feel that Gil wants to say something but doesn't quite know how to start. Under different circumstances, Nick might be inclined to toss him a bone, but not tonight. Tonight he just wants to get there and collect every scrap of evidence that's going to put this bastard behind bars.

The secondary scene is in a construction site in what is sure to become the hot suburb in a year or two. For the time being it's a muddy flat filled with wooden frames, and there's already a circle of patrol cars at the house in question. When they get nearer they can see the yellow tape that's been stretched around the support beams, and a handful of cops milling about looking busy.

The officer in charge of the scene sees them coming and meets them halfway down the drive. "Victim's already at the hospital," she reports, falling into step beside them. "She was in shock but seemed basically okay."

Nick lets out a sigh of relief, which he knows Gil hears because he sends him a strange look. He doesn't care right now: she's safe, this woman, and that's what counts.

"No one's been inside except for me, one other officer and the two paramedics," the officer continues, "and I got them to leave boot prints before they took off."

Gil raises an eyebrow in something approaching respect.

She holds out a clipboard. "It's not very official," she tells him, "but their boots were muddy anyway. I can get them back out here if you need the real deal."

Gil takes the clipboard and looks down at the sloppy boot impressions on the top eight sheets of paper, one boot per page. "You're very resourceful," he says. "I'll eventually need 'the real deal', but for preliminary analysis, these will do fine."

She smiles, and lifts the tape as they pass under it. "She was found down in the basement, under a tarp, just like the report said."

"Thank you," Gil says. "We'll take it from here."

Nick smiles at her as they pass, and she smiles back before heading towards the line of tape again. He watches her go, and feels a thin tendril of envy curl out of his stomach at the natural ease of her movements, how fluid she is when she ducks under the tape and straightens again on the other side.

When he turns back all of two seconds later, it's to find Gil practically scowling at him. "Waiting for an engraved invitation?" Gil asks mildly.

Nick feels a blush creep up the sides of his neck, but he hopes the chill of the morning air will keep it invisible. "Waiting on you, boss," he says, laying on the okey-dokey Texan cow-poke routine just a little; he's found it useful in the past. "It's your case, remember?"

Again, Gil looks like he wants to say something, but he keeps his mouth shut and makes his way down the stairs. Nick follows behind him.

There isn't much to collect: a few hairs, some fingerprints on the tarp, three distinct semen stains, some blood. They work the scene in silence, and now Nick thinks that maybe they should have had that conversation in the car after all because whatever it is, is crackling between them like an accusation, and he's not really sure what it is.

He's methodically dusting a disturbed pile of re-bars in one corner and trying to think of what he's done recently - professionally, anyway - that could account for this tension, when he hears another Tahoe pull up (funny how he can recognise that one engine from about a block away).

A few seconds later Catherine makes her way down the stairs and stands well clear of the evidence zones with a flashlight in one hand and her kit in the other. She surveys the scene and says, "Looks like you don't need me."

Gil turns to her. "Finish up at the primary scene?" he asks.

"Yeah," she says with a grim shake of her head. "What a mess. DNA lab's going to busy all night with it. Can I do anything to help you here?"

Gil shakes his head. "You might as well head over to the hospital," he says. "The officer upstairs can tell you which one. Collect the SAE kit and anything else that might be useful."

"Okay," she says, and sweeps the cone of her flashlight over the floor again. "I'll call in when I get back to the lab."

"Take Nick with you," Gil adds as though it's an afterthought, and turns back to the tarp.

There's a stretch of silence during which Nick alternates his gaze between Gil's shoulders and Catherine's puzzled look. "Uh, Grissom," he says after a moment, "I'm not quite done with these bars-"

"I can finish up," Gil says, still not turning around. "Get back to the lab, get started on what we have."

And that's all there is to it. Nick knows by his tone of voice that Gil has made up his mind, so he packs up his kit and leaves his evidence envelopes in a stack next to Gil's open kit, and follows Catherine back up the stairs.

"What was that about?" she asks when they're finally in the car.

"I have no idea," Nick says, even though he's beginning to think he does. Gil has put him on some kind of probation after his behaviour the other night. He's making it unofficial, which means it'll never make it into his paperwork anywhere, but it still burns.

Catherine glances at him sideways while she drives. "Nick, you okay?" she asks.

He shrugs, hopes he doesn't look anywhere near as crushed as he feels. "Sure," he says.

She doesn't seem convinced, but she opts not to drag it out of him. He feels a surge of affection well up in his chest, thinks about how lucky he is to have her as a co-supervisor. She's a lot sharper than Gil in a lot of ways, and there are so many little things that Nick wants to learn from her.

"Hey, Catherine?" he asks after about three minutes.

"Mm?"

"Can I ask you a favour?"

"Shoot."

"Could you call me Nicky again?"

She gives him another sideways look. "Okay," she says, pitching her voice towards mild incomprehension. "Can I ask why?"

He shrugs. "I like it," he says simply. "A lot more than I like Nick."

Another kind of strange look, but then she shrugs. "All right," she says. "Nicky it is."

He smiles. "Thanks."

***

He comes in with her to the hospital, and while she's interrogating the duty nurse, Nick finds his way to the victim's room to check up on her. He runs into her father in the hall outside her door, and when he sees Nick coming he gets to his feet and sticks out his hand.

"How is she doing?" Nick asks when he gets close.

"She's awake," he tells him, "she's alive, she's safe. Thank you."

Nick smiles as best as he can. "I'm very glad to hear that," he says.

He lets the father shake his hand a bit more and then clap him on the shoulder, because he understands that this is something the man needs, some kind of contact that can communicate the things he can't articulate. It's a part of the job, Nick thinks, as the voice of victims to listen to the living, too.

"Is she able to see anyone yet?" Nick asks.

The man shakes his head tightly. "Not yet," he says. "But I'm going to be right here when they open that door."

"Good," Nick says. "I'm sure she'll want to see you as soon as possible."

Catherine comes storming around the corner just then, mumbling under her breath. "They're idiots," she seethes when Nick turns to her, "they forgot to take half the samples they're supposed to."

Nick glances from her to the father and back again. "Uh, Catherine, you remember Mr Foxleigh, right?"

"Of course," she says, and as though by a flick of a switch, her bad mood is gone. "I'm sorry about my outburst, Mr Foxleigh," she says, "it's been one of those nights."

"What samples?" the father asks. "She's been through enough already-"

"Finger nail scrapings," Catherine assures him, "skin transfers. Nothing invasive, I assure you."

A nurse appears behind her, looking slightly nervous. "Ms Willows?"

She turns and gives the nurse one of her more predatory smiles. "Yes?"

"Doctor Rajid authorised you to take those samples-"

"Good," she says, and takes the box she's holding out.

Nick watches Catherine reach for the doorknob. "Need a hand?" he asks.

She looks back at him. "No," she says, "that's fine."

***

He spends the few minutes waiting with Mr Foxleigh on the bench in the hall, trying by osmosis to ease some of his misery.

He promises him that Catherine has a very gentle touch, that if anyone can make this less traumatic for his daughter then she's it, that she's done this a hundred times before. This lets them commiserate on the sad state of the world these days for about a minute, and then the door opens and Catherine re-emerges with the kit in hand.

"I'm so sorry about this, Mr Foxleigh," she says, and shakes his hand. "For what it's worth, I'm confident that we have enough to nail this guy."

He smiles gratefully at her, and then extends that gratitude to include Nick, as well. "Thank you," he says.

"We'll be in touch," Catherine says, and tugs at Nick's sleeve. "Come on," she says. "We need to get these to the lab."

***

They're almost back at the lab when Nick finally says, "I could have done that."

"Done what?" she asks, pulling away from the stop line as the flow of traffic changes around her.

"Taken those samples," he says. "I just - I really wanted to see her with my own eyes, you know? Make sure she's really going to be okay."

She sighs. "I appreciate that," she says, "I do. But you've got to remember what she's been through. It's just one of those situations where it's better for a woman to do it."

He nods and keeps his eyes turned away from her, watching the line of parked cars on his side whiz by. He knows that, he understands that, he sympathises with that. And it's not as though he wouldn't feel the same way in her shoes, he thinks, it's just... that's why he needed to do it, too.

"Nicky?"

He turns to look at her, and realises almost immediately that he's on the edge of tears. Oh fuck, he thinks, not now.

They're at another stop light, and she's looking at him full-on. "Are you okay?"

He knows his bottom lip is about to start wobbling on him, so he bits down on the inside of his mouth and wipes at his eyes with his thumb. "Sure," he says, and turns back to his window. Just what he needs, he thinks: not only has Gil seen me be supremely stupid, now Catherine gets to see the show, too.

Her hand settles on his arm. "Nick, what happened?"

He shakes his head but can't make himself turn to face her again, not while his eyes are still watering and his damn lip is still twitching.

He hears her let out a deep breath. "Nicky. Something's wrong, and you need to tell someone what it is. Is it your family? Has something happened...?"

"No," he says, and he hates that warble at the edge of his voice. God, he thinks, this is stupid. And more to the point, this is nothing new, either. He's getting mighty tired of being overwhelmed by this thing. "It's - it's just something personal."

He catches the sob before it really goes anywhere, but he knows that she heard it because the hand on his arm squeezes him reassuringly. Which doesn't actually make him feel any better, because there's this black pit of misery in his chest from the mere act of admitting that there's a problem. Sure, everyone might know there's a problem, but that's not the same thing as him admitting it, out loud, in front of someone...

The car starts to move and Catherine's hand disappears from his arm, and Nick is silently grateful for the reprieve. He wipes at his face and presses against the skin under his eyes, which his mother swears stops tears but has never worked for him, and he's just getting his breathing under control again when he realises that they're pulling into a parking lot, and it's not the lab's.

He hears the car shift into park, and then the engine dies, and then he can feel the weight of Catherine's gaze on his back. And that just eats up whatever progress he might have been making in the war against embarrassing himself, because here come the waterworks again.

It really is embarrassing, because he has no defendable reason to feel hurt by what happened at the hospital. He knows that. But this thing doesn't respond to logic, it doesn't listen to reason, it just reacts. Usually hysterically. And more and more frequently. Leaving him with less and less control.

"Nicky, please look at me."

He hates the desperate need to be helpful that he hears in her voice, hates that he put it there. He takes a shaky breath and tries to rein in some kind of control over his involuntary muscles, and forces himself to turn around.

There's a lot of emotion in her eyes when she looks at him, and somehow that only makes it worse and he can't figure out why. Maybe it's because he's always wanted to able to pull that off, that infinitely comforting aura of unconditional love that she's projecting. Even if it is an act, it's a hell of a good one, and he knows that if he ever tried it on someone they'd punch him in the face and accuse him of trying to get them into bed.

She touches the side of his face, and he turns his cheek into her hand, because it feels cool against the heat of his skin. "Nicky, honey, please let me help you."

"You can't," he says, and that's another admission he doesn't want to make. He doesn't want anyone to know how desperately he needs help with this, because that's even worse than them just knowing that there's anything wrong.

"Let me try," she asks, "please."

He shakes his head, and brings his hands up to his face, mostly to push his tears off to the sides but also partly to hide behind. "You can't," he says again, and hopes he doesn't sound anywhere near as broken as he thinks he does.

Catherine pulls his hands away from his face and makes him look at her. "Isn't there anything I can do?"

He starts to shake his head and then stops himself, because maybe, must maybe... He swallows. "I could really use... hug," he mumbles and blushes even harder. He feels like a moron asking it, but she doesn't seem to think it's a stupid request because she gets rid of their seat belts and leans across towards him and pulls him in close.

She doesn't comment when he wraps his arms around her and clings to her like a possum, or when his carefully contained misery erupts into full-fledged anguish, or when he's sure that her shirt is soaked through with his tears and snot and drool. She keeps murmuring things he doesn't quite hear, and running a hand through his hair and down his neck, and something feels so right about it that he hangs on a little longer than he has to.

"Feel a little better?" she asks him when he finally disentangles himself.

He wipes at his face again, then looks at his hands and dries them on the legs of his jeans. "Shit," he says, "I'm sorry-"

She ruffles his hair. "It's okay, Nicky," she says. "I just wish I could do something more."

He manages a smile of sorts. "So do I," he says and looks away.

***

When they get back to the lab, Catherine turns the engine off again and they sit not looking at each other. After a while she says, "Nicky, maybe you should clock out for the night."

"Can't," he says. "Grissom'll-"

"I'll clear it with Grissom," she tells him, and turns to look at him sideways. "Honest, Nicky, you look like shit."

He barks a laugh at that. "Gee," he says, "thanks."

She laughs, too, and takes his hand. "Go home. Get some sleep."

He sighs. "Okay."

"And if I can do anything," she says, "if any of us can, you know we will."

He would probably start to tear up again, except he hasn't got any water left in his body. "I know," he says, and finds himself for the first time actually thinking that it might be true.

***

Nick's still got that wadded-cotton feeling in his head when he gets home, but that goes beautifully with the numb feeling everywhere else so he doesn't really mind it. He drinks two full glasses of water at the kitchen sink, then thinks he should take something for his incipient migraine, and on his way to the bathroom he realises he's going to need something to take the edge off if he's going to get even a bit of sleep today. It takes him almost thirty seconds of staring at the empty space in his medicine cabinet to remember that Gil took his sleeping pills away. Crap.

He slams the door of the little wall case, only now he's looking at a reflection of himself, and that is pretty much not what he needs right now.

For one thing, Catherine was right: he looks like shit. His eyes are bloodshot, the skin around his eyes is red and swollen, his nose looks raw, his lips are starting to chap, and in this muted light he can actually see the trails where he'd wiped his tears across his face.

He tries to turn away from the image of himself, but can't quite get his legs to co-operate. Some part of him really wants to examine this schism, wants to drag it kicking and screaming into the light, wants to have it fully acknowledged for what it is.

He's always just thought of it as his problem. No need to articulate it further than that, because Nick understands about words, about the power of naming things: once you give something a name, it develops a mind of its own. Words want to be spoken, and maybe more than that, they want to be heard. So by keeping it swaddled in euphemism, he's denied it a voice. That's the only way he's ever known how to deal with it.

Except that the old plan doesn't work anymore, does it? Somewhere along the line, his problem named itself while he was ignoring it, while he pushed it down and out of sight. It named itself, and now it wants to be spoken. He knows that somehow he's going to let it slip, and he's not going to see it coming. He can imagine himself talking with Warrick about football and then out of blue, Hey Warrick, I'm a-

The sudden way that everything stops feels like being punched in the stomach.

-woman.

***

After a long time Nick makes himself uncurl from his protective huddle against the floor and stand in front of the mirror without flinching away from what he sees. His face is flushed red again with new tears, and his hands are shaking violently and he's almost hyperventilating, but somehow his eyes are steady through his shock. He's able to meet his own gaze, and a silent understanding passes between them, between the body inside the glass and the one he's wearing.

He looks himself in the eye and says, "I'm a woman."

That triggers another stress-tremor, but he grips the edges of the sink and rides it out, and he flicks the tears away when they get so thick he can't see himself anymore. He says it again: "I'm a woman."

The words are garbled this time because a sob bursts up through his chest, and he endures this cascade, too, because every fibre of his being knows that he's saying true things. Even if he's never been able to put a word to it; even if he's never been able to read about it and say, That's me; even if this is the most gutting thing he's ever done to himself; it's the truth, and that's why it hurts so much.

"You're not me," he whispers to the man in front of him when he can coordinate speech again, "you can't be me 'cause everything is wrong-"

His face. That obscene jaw, the strong chin, the upright angle of his forehead, his eyebrows. His hair and his ears and his cheekbones - all of it. It's all wrong.

His Adam's apple - he never asked for that. The line of stubble over his upper lip, the line of his nose, his teeth. He's been house-sitting for someone else his whole life, waiting for them to come home so he can pack up and leave, go back to - to where? What has he ever had, except this?

He strips off his shirt and wipes away the next wave of tears. The span of his shoulders. The muscles across his collarbone, the definition of his ribs. His obscene chest, his sickening, puny nipples in the middle of - what? What do you call those monstrosities? They're not breasts, that's for sure. Pecs, he supposes, and what the fuck good is that? Raisins on an ironing board, he remembers his sister bitching about her delayed puberty, and he touches the hard plane of muscle that feels foreign to him. When he closes his eyes, there's more there: there are curves in the right places, and softness where it belongs - not this travesty of biology.

His ribs, and straight down to his waist: another plane he hates, another stretch of skin that fails to comply because Nick knows - he knows it to the core of his being - that there should be hips there. This blocky disaster is all wrong and it's a wrongness that extends the full three-hundred and sixty degrees because his back is too muscular and his stomach is too flat, there should be a curve there, too, just a bit - a hint of roundness between the sharp angle of his hipbones, softer to the touch than this is and that hair, that line of coarseness creeping down his abdomen into the top of his jeans-

He wipes at his tears again and fumbles with his belt, fights the zipper and pushes everything out of the way. Shimmies it down his thighs and steps out of the fabric pooled at his feet, and takes a step back from the sink so he can see more of himself in the mirror.

His legs he could live with, he thinks, if it weren't for the hair. His knees are too knobby, though, and the shape of his calves is wrong - he's strong in all the wrong places, dammit, he never asked for any of this shit.

And that thing, too - he grabs a hold of himself and wonders whose sick joke it was to issue him one of these on his way out of the uterus. A penis. It's alien to him, a parasite latched onto his body, syphoning blood and brain cells on occasion, and for what? To do a shitty job pleasuring some girl because he never really knew what to do with it? That's not his fault, that was never his fault - he did his best, he always did, he could do wicked things with his fingers and his tongue and he'd never had any complaints until he gave in to their demands for penetration and then everything went to hell. It had never felt right, none of it: he'd always had to play a mental shell-game until he tricked himself into coming and it was always miserable and the girls knew it too, only most of them were too polite to say anything. Funny how they'd never gone out with him again after that, how they'd always found an excuse not to be put in that awkward position again of being fucked by someone whose attention was by necessity somewhere else-

It's given him nothing but grief, the rod and tackle and associated plumbing, and he hates it. He hates all of it, hates how when he plays his fingers between his legs it's like mapping a strange country by Braille; things that feel shockingly good physically without triggering anything in his head, and an emotional hunger for something that just isn't there, that his fingers will never find even though he knows they're in the right place. It's not-

-fair.

It's not right, it's not possible that the world has given him something this unjust and then made damn sure that he's known it, too; no pulling the wool over Nicky's eyes oh no, he's going to fully fucking aware of every thing wrong with this body because that's the good Catholic Texas frat-boy way to do it, right? Suffer and be grateful for the pain.

He brings the body in the mirror into focus again and thinks, This is it.

He knows that the do-not-cross line is somewhere behind him now, and while that feels mostly like a life sentence, there's a fatalistic overtone of optimism. He thinks, once you've hit rock bottom, there's one direction to go, right?

Only he can't do this. He literally cannot do this.

His legs seem to agree, because they gradually unlock and allow him to turn away from the mirror, from the pile of clothes next to the toilet and the wreck of his life.

He thinks of what Catherine said, about how any one of them would do anything for him, and he wonders if that's true. They might lend him money if he needed it, they might buy him a beer and listen to his life story, they'd probably drive him to the airport for his mother's funeral. But would they do this?

He realises he doesn't even know what this entails, not really. Hormones, surgery, years and years of having his head examined by professionals... there's got to be more to it than that. Not that that doesn't scare the hell out of him as it is, but still: it seems too - simple.

Except - that is the simple part, isn't it? The hard part is the rest of it: the friends and the family and the coworkers and the job, oh hell the job - the cops and the suspects and the grieving families and court appearances, who'd listen to evidence from someone like him? Who'd believe an expert witness with budding breasts and a five o'clock shadow?

And who'd want to work with that freak, either? Side by side, processing evidence in a tight space sometimes, sharing a locker room - hell, sharing showers after a really bad night... Nick sighs. No, he figures; there are limits to friendship, and this has to be way on the other side of those limits. This feels like a damn good way to lose friends.

He's standing in his bedroom, still naked and starting to get cold, when that thought occurs to him, and he sits on the end of his bed to wrap his mind around it. This thing could end his career, he thinks with a hollow feeling in his chest. No, scratch that: this thing will end his career, one way or another. Either he'll keep pretending it doesn't exist and he'll end up a basketcase, or he'll face up to what the future holds and lose it all that way.

Shit.

***

Nick puts on his faded yellow bathrobe when the chill of his bedroom gets to him, and while he's standing in front of his closet looking at his rows and rows of shirts and jackets, he happens to glance up above his tie rack and sees the box on the shelf, half-hidden by a sloppily folded sweater.

He'd forgotten about that box, he realises, and after a long moment he reaches up and pulls it down.

The last time he opened it he'd been drunk, and feeling morbid, and he had taken everything out and looked at it and then cried himself to sleep on the floor. The next day he'd pretended he hadn't really done it, and he'd put the damn thing back into its hiding place, gone to work and endured the jokes about his hangover.

Today, though, he knows in some utterly terrifying way that if he opens it, he's not going to close it again. It's not going to live in the back of his closet anymore, it's not going to be that thing he pretends isn't there. It's going to stay down here, amid the ruins of his life, and he's going to have to look at it every day from now on.

He sits back on the end of his bed, holds his breath and lifts the lid off.

If there were any poetry in the universe, Nick thinks as he lets out his breath and sets the lid down next to him, there would have been thunder, or some kind of crescendo; not just the shick of cardboard sliding against cardboard. There would have been something to make this moment a capital-M moment, because that's what this is: a turning point in his life. From here, he thinks, there is no going back.

He sits there with the open box in front of him for a while, letting himself adjust to his decision, before he lets his hands wander into the jumble.

The biggest thing in there by far is the book, which he stole from one of his sisters in the chaos of her moving out to go to college. He takes it out and looks at it, feels his heart speed up just a little bit. Our Bodies, Our Selves had been his most prized possession for a long time, even before he knew why he had taken it, or why he had been so disgustingly glad to have it in a bag in a box under his bed behind his comic books. It's been - he counts quickly in head - almost a decade since he's even looked at it.

Under the book is a thin collection of photos. An early shot of him playing dressup with one of his older sisters, and he's wearing a princess dress and tiara while she's wearing a tinfoil suit of armour. He brushes his thumb along the lines of the dress and tries to remember the rest of that day. It's gone from his memory, though, completely overrun by the memories of that dress.

A shot of his youngest sister in her confirmation dress looking mighty cheesed off at the world in general. Nick has held on to this one because her face is almost identical to his at that age. Paperclipped behind it is a photo of him at his confirmation, in a child-sized three-piece suit, for corroboration. He holds them up side by side and studies them. He thinks, Either one could be me.

A postcard of Marlene Deitrich in a tuxedo, which he has held onto for reasons he can't quite put his finger on, but which he's inexplicably fond of still.

A picture of his brother and him and his cousins at a lake somewhere when they were young, a gaggle of prepubescent boys in swim trunks and towels. He's kept this one because a trick of the light - shadows from a tree, Nick thinks - makes him look a lot less masculine than he actually did at the time.

A random, amazing photo of himself asleep on the porch at home with a blanket pulled up under his chin, his head flopped to one side and his hair - the only time in his life he'd had the guts to grow it down as far as his shoulders - fallen across one side of his face. There's nothing in this photo that overtly screams "female" but he loves it anyway, because there is nothing that overtly screams "male" either, and it was taken in his late teens so he looks more or less like he does now. His face is already chiselled in the picture, a little rounder than it is now maybe but close enough, and this picture always makes him feel good. This is the person he should be all the time, he thinks, and feels his eyes tear up again. This is how he sees himself, this is how he wishes everyone could see him.

There's a desiccated corsage in the box, too, given to him by his brief and disastrous boyfriend in college as a joke. They'd had a fight about it, because at that point in his life - devoutly closeted football jock - there was no way in hell he was going to let anybody imply that he was "the girl".

He's kept the flower, though. He remembers drying it in his room, and making up a story about the girl who got away when one of his frat brothers had asked him about it. It had earned him a reputation as a sad romantic loser, but that was okay. That he could deal with.

There's an unlabelled cassette, which Nick knows is filled with girl music. He remembers compiling it over the course of a long winter by carefully pawing through his sisters' collections when they weren't around to notice. He can't think immediately of what any of the songs are, but he has no difficulty recalling the sheer ecstatic thrill he'd felt that whole summer every time he played the tape. He'd traded a baseball mitt for his brother's walkman, and had spent most of that summer down by the creek, alone, listening to music and imagining that he could play the guitar.

He kind of smiles at the memory of that summer. He'd been - he thinks about it for a moment, tries to remember when his third sister had gone to college and when his fourth had dropped out and moved back home - fourteen then? That sounds about right.

At fourteen, the world had been so open. There had been nothing he couldn't do, eventually; his dad had started teaching him to drive that summer, and he remembers the smell of hay and alfalfa pouring in the open windows on Saturday afternoons when they'd get out of town and Nick would drive up and down the back roads while his dad hummed along to the radio.

And he remembers the uproar at home when that happened, because none of his sisters had been allowed to drive until they were sixteen and why did he get all of this special treatment anyway? That fight had soured the whole adventure for Nick, had made it less fun and exciting because he'd hated having his sisters mad at him; but he and his father had kept doing it every other weekend, though, because it had meant too much to the old man.

He swallows, and sets the tape back in the box along with the corsage and the photos. Even his happy memories are tainted, he thinks. He picks up the box and heads downstairs with it.

What he needs, he decides, is the kind of perspective that comes in a corked bottle.

***

Gil doesn't even look up when Catherine fills his doorway. He just glances over at the clock on his desk and says, "That took longer than I expected."

"Had to retake some of the samples," she tells him and leans against the door frame. "Then I took them down to DNA."

Gil makes a little noise, the one that people interpret as impatience, and turns over the form he's filling out. There's a whole other side and he almost groans. He's been staring at paperwork on and off for a week now, and he's pretty sure it's multiplying when his back is turned.

He knows that Catherine is still standing there, still watching him, and he looks up at her for the first time. "Yes?"

She takes a step inside his office and wedges her hands in her jacket pockets. "I sent Nicky home," she says.

He raises an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"He, uh - he wasn't feeling well."

That fills the space between them for a moment, then Gil takes his glasses off and rests them on the desk. "I see," he says carefully. "Is this by any chance the same bug he had yesterday?"

Catherine is studying his face the way she does when's about to make a shrewd guess. "Quite possibly," she says, choosing her words with equal care.

He sighs, and rubs his forehead. "Should I be worried about this?" he asks.

"I am."

Gil closes his eyes briefly. "I don't know what to do," he says.

"I don't either," Catherine says, "but that doesn't mean I'm not worried."

That's not really what he wants to hear. "Is this going to become my problem," he asks, "or yours?"

She smiles. "I'd flip you for it," she says, "but you're his supervisor."

Dammit. "All right," he says, "I'll - do something."

She winks at him. "Good man," she says on her way out.

***

It's not that he's stalling, exactly: he's just being thorough.

Gil checks in with Sara before he leaves, and runs Warrick down to make sure he's on top of his own case, and sticks his head in the DNA lab to see how Greg's doing on the Foxleigh rape. Then he sees Catherine bearing down the hall towards him and he thinks, Now is a good time to leave. He locks up his office and gets into his car and drives towards Nick's house, again.

He doesn't know exactly how he's supposed to be feeling about the Nick thing, and that bothers him. Two weeks ago Nick had shyly asked him if he'd like to get dinner sometime, and it had been wonderful. They'd eaten, they'd gone for a walk, Gil had coaxed Nick onto a rollercoaster with him, they'd laughed about inconsequential things that he can't even remember anymore; it had been - fun.

Then two nights ago their promising second date had dissolved into something intangibly unpleasant, and as a (direct?) result, Nick had done something unutterably stupid, and everything has been off-kilter since.

Is it his fault? Should he have politely declined the first invitation, the way he's always done with Sara? Some kind of aptitude at separating his personal feelings from his professional ones wouldn't be amiss; occupational romances never end well, a fact he knows to the very core of his being. He's seen too many workplaces torn in half in the aftermath of a bitter breakup, and he's seen work get sloppy and fall apart by distraction, he's seen every flavour of betrayal played out in office politics. And never mind the murky overtones of supervisor-subordinate, because he doesn't have the emotional energy to deal with right now.

He doesn't know why he believed he would be the exception to the rule, why he thought his love life could mesh perfectly with his professional one. He knows he can keep things in separate compartments, but Nick? Nick has never managed to compartmentalise one thing in his life, so why he should be expected to start now-

He reaches Nick's street, and turns.

If it were anyone other that Nick who was having an emotional meltdown, he thinks, he could handle it. If Warrick went over the edge, no problem. He'd be there in a heartbeat, staying with him and supporting him and doing whatever he needed to pull through it.

But somehow, the fact that it's Nick means that everything is disjointed. He doesn't trust his judgement anymore, he doesn't know how to be friend and coworker without also being something more. Nick doesn't need that kind of complication. Whatever the problem is, he's going to need someone with the gift of objectivity.

He pulls in behind Nick's truck and thinks, Catherine should be doing this instead of me.

Except he is his supervisor, right? And his friend, allegedly. So it's his responsibility to be here, his duty.

He sighs, gets out of the car and makes his way up the walk, the master set of employee keys heavy in his hand.

He's more surprised than he would have figured when Nick opens the door after the second time he leans on the bell. They look at each other for a few seconds, then Nick steps aside to let him in wordlessly.

He looks at Nick while his eyes adjust to the relative darkness of the entranceway. He's obviously been crying, he thinks, noting the state of his eyes and his face and the general set of his shoulders. But he's conscious, which is a definite improvement over the last time he was here, and he's wearing a bathrobe, so maybe he really was in bed.

Maybe, he thinks with baseless optimism, he really is sick. Physically.

But the way Nick is moving around in his own house suggests otherwise, because Gil has studied this man enough to recognise his tells.

He chews on his lip for a moment. "Nick," he says finally, following him into the living room, "what's going on?"

Nick drops himself onto a couch and curls his legs up beside him, tugging the hem of the robe down over his ankles. "That's a hard question to answer," he says carefully.

Gil sits in the chair opposite him and considers him. There's something slightly off about the image, and he can't put his finger on what it is. Maybe it's the white wine, which he's never really seen Nick drink before - in Gil's mind, Nick is a beer and tequila kind of guy. The halfway decent bottle of sauvignon blanc on the coffee table seems like a prop from a play, along with the glass stemware standing next to it.

"Pick somewhere," Gil says, "and start there."

Nick drops his gaze to the table between them, and Gil thinks that maybe the sense of wrongness is the robe. The last time he'd seen Nick in his lounging around clothes, he'd been wearing old sweats and a University of Texas tee shirt with holes along the seams. And although Gil has a bathrobe at home, too, he never sits around in it just for fun.

"I, uh," Nick says, and Gil notes that his eyes are tearing up. He wipes at the tears irritably and shrugs. "I don't know how," he says.

"Try," Gil prompts. "Even it's the wrong thing to say, Nick, just say it. At least it's a place to start."

Nick quirks a sad smile at that, and then he says, "I think - I think maybe I need a new line of work," he says.

That is not what Gil is expecting. "What?" he asks. "Why?"

Another tragic smile. "Call it a hunch," he says. "I'm so sorry, Gil..."

"You're not making any sense, Nick. I don't - why do you need a new line of work?"

"I'm having personal problems," Nick says and wipes at his eyes again. "And I don't think I can do this anymore."

Gil watches helplessly as Nick starts to cry for real, not just discreet tears but the shaky, hiding-behind-hands variety instead. "Nick," he says, feeling useless, not knowing if he should try to comfort him or just let him play it out.

He sniffles loudly, and drags the sleeve of his robe across his eyes roughly, and he fixes Gil with a strangely defiant look. "Why can't you call me Nicky?" he asks.

Gil blinks, lost again in a conversation that he doesn't understand. "I - it's habit, I guess," he says. "It's just a name."

"It's not just a name," Nick says in a strangely small voice. "It's my name."

"I'm sorry-"

"I thought maybe we were friends." His eyes are downcast again, and he tugs at the hem of his bathrobe again, pulling it down to cover his feet completely, and that's when it hits Gil.

That's what's wrong with this picture, he thinks: Nick's body language is all wrong. He's seen him draw into himself before, he's seen him retreat almost fully into the fury of his emotions, but this - this is something new. This is how Catherine sits when she's had too much to drink, this is how Sara sits when she's letting herself feel feminine: feet to the side but mostly under her, back curled against a carefully angled pillow, torso turned to face awkwardly forward. Gil has never believed that it could possibly be a comfortable way to sit, but Nick doesn't seem unhappy about it.

In fact, Gil realises with a start, this is the most relaxed and unguarded that he's seen Nick in several days, and that feels like something he should analyse a bit more.

But right now Nick is looking at him, and he thinks that maybe he's missed part of the conversation. "What?" he says.

"I mean, I get it that we can't date, but - I thought we were at least still friends."

"We are, Nick - Nicky. I just... I don't know what to do about this."

"Yeah," Nick says sadly, "me neither."

"So you're just going to quit?" he asks, because the main part of his brain is still stuck at that part of Nick's broken confession.

"I think it's probably the best thing," Nick says. His eyes settle on the wine glass and without looking up he says, "I forgot to offer you a drink."

"I'm fine," Gil says, watching as Nick leans forward just enough to grab the glass and bring it back to the couch with him. He holds it against his chest and resumes the half-listing posture that continues to nag at Gil's mind.

"I don't think you should quit," he says when the silence stretches on a bit.

"I think I should," Nick counters with a humourless smile. Stalemate.

Gil sighs. "Why?" he asks. "I thought you liked being a CSI."

"I do," Nick says, "I love it, but."

"But?"

He takes a shaky breath and says, "I'm becoming a liability to the lab," he says, and Gil can see how much it costs him to say that.

"How?" Gil asks. "Are you in some kind of trouble? Did you hurt someone? Are you doing drugs? Nicky, help me out here. I'm trying to understand-"

"No," Nick says. "None of that. I just - I need to make some changes in my life, and this... is one of them."

Gil leans back in his seat and watches Nick play with his wine glass, and then bring it to his lips. There's something almost feline about the way Nick is sitting, he thinks vaguely. Feline is not a word that he's previously associated with Nick, and he wonders if it's something he's just missed, or something new.

He's half-tempted to ask about drugs again, because that is fast becoming the simplest possible solution to this inexplicable mess.

"Is it this case, today?" Gil asks, even though he knows it isn't. "The rape, is that it?"

Nick shakes his head. "No," he says, and Gil can't tell if he's lying or not.

"Then what, Nicky? You can't just declare that you're quitting, and not expect me to want to know why."

Nick glances at the cushion next to his on the sofa, and Gil follows his gaze. There's a cardboard box there, open but angled so that Gil can't quite make out the contents, and whatever it is it seems to hold a lot of the answers for Nick. He turns his attention back to Nick's face, and he takes note of the careful indecision written across his features.

Then Nick closes the lid of the box and turns tear-heavy eyes back to Gil. "Just because," he says, his voice heavy with resigned silence.

Gil has no idea what he's expected to say. At some point, he thinks, friends stop pushing; they respect your need for privacy and they try to let you know that they'll be there if you need them.

He clears his throat. "Nicky, I don't know what's going on, and I wish I did. I wish I could help you deal with this, whatever this is."

"Me too," Nick says, or that's what Gil thinks he says because his voice is barely above a whisper.

"I can't - I don't know what to do. If you can't talk to me, talk to someone else."

"I can't," Nick almost-says.

He thinks for a long moment, staggered by the weight of Nick's eyes on him, of the expectation of - of what? An expectation of something, and Gil is lost once more in the nuances of what they're saying, and what they're not saying. "You know there's a psychiatrist on staff," he says eventually.

Nick looks at him as though he hasn't thought of that, and Gil feels a kind of redemption because maybe he's actually managed to contribute something positive after all.

"He's there a couple times a week," Gil continues, "I can get his schedule for you if you need it - he's a good man, Nicky; I've talked to him a couple times myself."

It's a testament to Nick's state of mind just then that he doesn't even react to this bit of personal Grissom news, which Gil knows has more trade-in value than sexual scandals when it comes to gossip at the lab.

He sighs, and stands up. "Please," he says, "just - don't run off and quit without talking to someone first. Whatever this is might not be as bad as you think."

Nick untucks his legs and stands, and Gil watches the movement closely. It's still too graceful, almost, to be Nick, except that it so plainly is.

"Okay," Nick says, and again, Gil can't tell if he's lying or not.

"Promise me," Gil says firmly.

A lopsided half-smile. "I'll think about it," Nick says, and Gil can tell it's the best he's going to get.

They walk to the door. When they get there, Gil stops and says, "If there's anything you need, Nick, anything at all - let me know, okay?"

"Just call me Nicky," he says. "That'll be enough."

Shit. "Nicky. I'm sorry. I'll - it'll take me a couple of days to get used to that again."

"Please?"

"I'll do my best."

***

Catherine comes into his office about five minutes before the beginning-of-shift meeting, and closes the door behind her. "So?" she says.

Gil looks up and sighs, tosses his pen onto the stack of paperwork on his desk. "I don't know," he says. "I have no idea, Catherine."

She echoes his sigh. "How was he this morning?"

"Awake," Gil says, "drinking wine, I don't know. He's - he's thinking about quitting."

Her eyes go big at that. "What?" she asks, takes another step forwards. "That's - what the hell is going on?"

"I wish I knew, Catherine," he says, knowing he sounds exhausted. "Really I do."

"Is he coming in tonight?"

That's a good question, Gil thinks. He hasn't let himself consider it too deeply, although he knows his subconscious has been turning it over all day and all evening and has come up with a few lame excuses to throw around if he fails to show up for assignments.

"I hope so," he says.

Catherine lets her eyes flutter closed for a moment. "Poor Nicky," she says. "I just wish I knew what was happening."

"Welcome to the club."

***

Nick skips the lockers and goes straight to the conference room. He managed to get a little sleep this afternoon, but not much: the wine helped to mellow him out, but it wasn't enough. So he stopped at the drug store on the way into work, and there's a new bottle of pills in the dash of his truck. He knows he's going to need it come morning, assuming he actually makes it that long.

He's still in pretty rough shape. He had to hang a towel over the mirror in the bathroom before he could bring himself to shower. He shaved with his electric razor because he couldn't stand the thought of watching his own morning ablutions. The contents of his closet almost made him cry; he settled for a pair of black slacks and a blue shirt. His appetite had been shot to hell so he'd skipped what passed for breakfast in his life.

It's exactly like he knew it would be: he can't put the genie back in the bottle. Everything seems wrong, like it's phase-shifted ninety degrees and nothing lines up anymore. All the mannerisms he's taught himself over the years, all the little tricks of maleness he's picked up and made his own - tonight they feel forced and awkward.

Even the way he walks feels wrong. He makes it into the building with his usual saunter, but it's strangely exhausting all of a sudden. So he stops trying. He lets his legs find their own rhythm, his hips take up just enough sway to move fluidly, and he feels his shoulders settle into a new posture. It feels - good.

It feels right. It feels like it's always supposed to have felt, and never has.

Warrick is the first to notice him when he comes through the door and settles into a chair at the table. "Feeling better?" he asks in his usual friendly way.

"Hope so," he says.

Catherine and Gil do abrupt about-faces from their respective preoccupations, and Nick feels himself start to blush. It's not like he didn't know they would be anxious about him - well, Gil anyway, but he was pretty sure that they would have talked behind his back - but the odd mixture of concern and frustration written on their faces is something he's not sure what to do with.

He tries to smile at them, and wriggles in his chair to find a good way to sit. That's the genie again, he thinks, and settles on sitting forward with his feet planted on the floor in front of him. It's not exactly comfortable, but it's better than his usual lean-back-and-sprawl approach.

"Just so long as you're not contagious," Warrick continues, oblivious to what's passing between Gil and Catherine and Nick. "I can't afford to get sick right now."

"Banking your sick days?" Sara asks innocently from her corner of the table.

Nick meets Gil's eyes and manages to hold them for a few seconds, which he's pretty proud of. Gil is doing his mental-interrogation thing, where he tries to understand a situation by sheer observation alone. Sometimes it works in cases, but Nick is pretty sure it's not going to work here, because there is no way that the truth would occur to him on his own.

Nick kind of wishes it would, so he would be spared the inevitable conversation they're going to have about it. He doesn't know when Gil will end up cornering him and wrangling the truth from him, but he knows it'll happen eventually. His inner coward is already thinking of clues he can drop meaningfully in hopes of avoiding the interrogation altogether.

Sara clears her throat meaningfully. "All right," she says, "that's enough telepathy from you two - do I have a new assignment tonight, or can I finish up the Desalvo case?"

For just an instant Gil seems disoriented, then he snaps his attention back to the call-in sheets in his hand, and he reads through them quickly. "Well," he says, "it's a pretty slow night so far, so go ahead and stick with Desalvo. But you're on call if anything big comes up."

He fans out the three cases he has and it looks like he's doing some fast mental arithmetic, and Nick realises that Gil didn't honestly expect to see him tonight. But now he's here, and Gil has to do some rapid reassignment of the work.

"Warrick," he says after the briefest of hesitations, "suspicious circumstances at a high school, possible missing person."

Warrick takes the sheet from him. "I'm on it," he says, scanning the tiny form.

Down to two, and Gil seems to be balancing them against each other. Nick glances at Sara, who is too immersed in her own case to be paying any attention, and then at Warrick, who has his own call-in held between his front teeth while he shrugs on his jacket. Catherine, though, seems as focused on Gil as Nick is, and the slight narrowing of her eyes reassures him that he's not imagining what he's seeing.

Gil comes to some kind of decision, though, because he passes one of the sheets to Catherine and says, "Suspected Arson in North Vegas. Take Nick."

"What's the last case?" Catherine asks, folding the slip of paper in half without looking at it.

"Body dump in the desert," Gil says. "I'll take care of it."

Maybe it's a good thing that Sara and Warrick are too wrapped up in their own cases to notice the division of the rest of the work, because he's sure Sara at least would have a thing or two to say about sending two CSIs out on an arson, and only one to a body.

Nick has a decent idea why, though, and even though it makes sense, it still sucks. He hates sifting through ashes.

Catherine sighs. "Come on, Nicky," she says, "let's see if we can get there while the embers are still warm."

"Yeah," he says without enthusiasm, "I'll meet you out at the car, okay?"

***

When she's gone, Nick and Gil eye each other awkwardly for a moment, then Nick says, "You don't want to work with me."

Gil doesn't say anything for a long time, and won't quite meet his eye, and that confirms it for Nick. Because, really: Catherine should be working the arson solo, and Nick should be driving out into the desert with Gil.

"Fine," Nick eventually says. "I guess you have my answer, then." He turns to leave.

"Nick," Gil says just as he reaches the doorway. "It's not that. It's - I don't know that you're not going to get 'sick' again tonight, so I can't send you out solo. And I assume you'd appreciate a measure of discretion, so I can't send you out with Sara or Warrick. And I - I don't know what to do, Nick."

"Nicky," he corrects without turning to face him, and dammit he is not going to start to cry about this.

"Shit," Gil says, "Nicky." He takes a breath. "I don't know what to do. I don't know if I can work with you tonight, because I'd be too distracted, and I can't afford that when I'm on a case."

"And Catherine can."

"Catherine - Catherine is better at this emotional stuff than I am, Nick. Nicky. I know it sounds like a trite cliche, but this time it's true: it's not you, it's me."

"You're right," Nick says and resumes his course out the door. "That sounds like a cliche."

***

He runs into Catherine outside the locker room, and he can tell by the expression on her face when their eyes meet that he's not looking all that steady. "You okay?" she asks.

"I will be," he says, because halfway down the hall from the conference room, he made up his mind that he's not going to let Gil Grissom ruin his life. He may still be in love with the bastard, but given enough time he can harden himself to that.

Catherine follows him into the locker room and leans against the wall while he pulls out his jacket and puts it on. "I hear you're thinking of leaving us," she says conversationally.

Fuck. "Maybe," he says, and pulls his field kit out of his locker. He knows it's fully stocked and properly cleaned, but he still sits down on the bench with it between his feet and makes a show of going through it. He just wants to suspend this moment in time long enough to pull himself together. Just a few seconds, he thinks, a minute at the outside.

"How come?"

He lets his eyes close briefly. If only she didn't sound so worried about him. "Just - I think maybe it's time I moved on."

"What happened?" she asks, pushing herself away from the wall to sit next to him. "Is it - is it Grissom?"

He turns to her sharply at that, and he knows he can't keep his face neutral enough not to give himself away. "What-"

She smiles at him, and touches the side of his face in such a gentle gesture that it makes his heart break. "Nicky, you've been dancing around each other forever, and then suddenly the day after your mutual night off, you're both walking on air? Come on, I'm a professional investigator. Give me a little credit."

He forces his eyes back to his kit and wills himself not to start crying. "It's not that," he says, frustrated at how rough his voice has become. He swallows. "It's - something else."

He can tell by her silence that she's not buying it.

"I mean, yes," Nick continues even though he knows he shouldn't, "I am mad at him. But not - not enough to quit my job. I'll get over it."

"What did he do?" she asks.

"He-" He sighs, and pushes his face into his hands. How can he explain the sum of the thousand ways hates himself right now, and how Gil has done nothing wrong in any of this, and how that still means he's mad at him?

"Nicky?" she prompts.

There's an answer he can give her, he thinks. "He won't call me Nicky." He pulls his hands away and realises, to his surprise, that they're still dry. Wow.

"He won't call you Nicky...?"

He snaps his case shut and stands. "It's stupid," he says, "I know that. And it's got nothing to do with anything but - it would mean a lot to me and he can't do it."

She's still considering him carefully, and he knows he should have kept his mouth shut instead of actually tell her anything.

He sighs. "Look," he says, "those embers aren't getting any warmer. Let's hit the road." He knows there's an edge of desperation in his voice, and maybe that's what eventually prompts her to nod and push herself off the bench.

"Let's do it," she says, and heads for the door.

And Nick is pretty proud of himself for not staring too longingly at her easy gait.

***

Gil's phone rings a couple of hours later, while he's working the grid around his body in the desert. It was a young woman, bound and gagged and by the looks of it, brutally raped. He'd waited patiently for the coroner to take her away and then gotten to work on what little evidence there was at hand, doubly glad he hadn't brought Nick out here with him. Something tells him that he wouldn't have handled it well.

He's in the seventh of twelve squares when he sits back on his heels and pulls his phone out of his pocket. He recognises the number as Catherine's, and he feels an apprehensive knot tying itself in his stomach.

"Grissom," he says tonelessly.

"It's me," she says. "How's your scene?"

"Secondary," he reports, "and not particularly helpful. How's Nick?"

"He's doing all right," she says after a slight hesitation, "but I thought you should know he's mad at you."

He closes his eyes. "Oh?" he asks, and hopes he manages to sound neutral about it.

"Yeah," she says. "He's picking through the back yard debris right now, he'd kill me if he knew I was telling you this."

"Then maybe you shouldn't," he says.

"Well," she tells him, "I wouldn't if I didn't think you could actually do something about it."

"Oh?"

"You've got to start calling him Nicky," she says, and her tone of voice suggests that she agrees that it's a little odd, but it's a lead and she's following it.

He frowns out over the desert. "He - what? He's mad at me about that?"

"Don't ask me why," she says, "but it's really bugging him. I'm not going to tell you how to deal with your subordinates, Gil, and I'm not going to give you the don't-date-them lecture, either-"

"Catherine, I'm not-"

"Whatever, Gil. I'm just saying, this is a stupid, small thing you can do that is going to make an actual difference. You can figure the rest out on your own, but for crying out loud, Gil, you could at least make an effort to call him Nicky."

He listens to her breathing for a few seconds. "I don't understand that," he admits haltingly.

"Neither do I," she says, "but look: Shakespeare isn't always right, okay? A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but maybe that's not what the rose thinks is important."

He sighs. Part of him hates it when she tries to relate to him through quotations, and other times - hell. "I'll try," he says.

"You'll have to do better than that," she tells him evenly. "I'm serious about this, Gil. Write it on the inside of your wrist or something. Just don't keep calling him Nick. He hates it."

"Okay," he says, "I'll - think of something."

"Good," she says, and she takes a breath as though she has another accusation to level at him, but instead she says, "I've got to go. I'll talk to you later." And she hangs up.

He stares at his silent phone for a moment, then closes it and stuffs it back into his pocket. It takes him a moment to remember where he is in his search grid, and then he bends low over the sand again and resumes his careful survey.

***

Maybe, Nick admits later that night when they find the two bodies under the collapsed roof of their gutted house, Gil was right in sending two people out on this job.

Catherine stands next to him and looks down at the charred, twisted remains that Nick almost missed altogether because they don't really look like people. "Damn," she says, shining her flashlight down at the feet of one of them. "Does that look like rope?"

He follows her beam of light with his eyes, and squats down next to the legs in question. "I think so," he says, examining the twisted line of ash and distorted wire that seems to loop around the ankle.

"Well," she says, "I guess that rules out an accidental fire."

Nick nods, and then forces his eyes away from the bodies. "If the fire was to cover up the bodies," he says, "then this is probably where it started."

"I'll call the coroner," she says, pulling her phone out of her jacket. "Take another look around inside, see if there are any more bodies."

He nods and heads back into what used to be the living room, before the upstairs floors fell through the ceiling.

One of his least favourite things about arsons is the strange pattern of things that burn and things that don't. The row of photographs on the mantelpiece, for instance. He aims his light in that direction, and eyes the line of twisted metal frames with melted glass and incinerated pictures. Those are gone forever, there's no way they can be resurrected unless the owners of the house stashed the negatives some place fireproof. Those are probably family photos, moments that everyone has chosen to remember together, the communal chest of recorded history. Gone.

He picks his way to what was once a couch, and he toes the mess of half-burnt offerings from the room upstairs. He unearths a slightly warped Barbie doll, wearing a charred dress and with singed hair, but still basically a Barbie doll. This survives the devastation, but the things that matter most? It's like they'd never existed.

He stares for a bit longer at the doll, and then a sick feeling starts to form in his gut, and he goes back out to the bodies.

Catherine is taking notes and looks up when he appears over her. "Find another one?"

"Not yet," he says, and tries to gauge the height of both bodies. "Either of these look like kids?" he asks.

"No," she says, "unless they're early-blooming adolescents."

"Were there any kids that got out of the house alive?" he asks.

"I don't think so," she says, "but check with the fire marshal. Why?"

"There was at least one kid, a little girl, living in this house." He feels his throat close up. "I have to find her."

She shines her flashlight up on his chest, high enough to illuminate his face but low enough not to blind him. "Are you okay?" she asks.

"Just need to find this girl," he says, and goes back into the house.

***

He does find a small body in the dining room, curled under the shattered table. He also finds a toy airplane, twisted but recognisable, and a puddle of ex-GI Joe, and he stays with the body until David loads it into his van.

"I can't tell if it's male or female," he explains to Catherine when she finds him standing by the curb. "There was a little boy in the house, too, and I don't know-"

She settles a hand on his shoulder. "Why don't you go back to the lab," she says, "and make sure they send DNA samples to Greg." She pushes a box of bagged evidence into his hands, and he looks down at it: toothbrushes, hairbrushes, a tube of lipstick that somehow managed to survive the fire. "See if he can get a match on anything. We're going to have a hell of a time IDing those bodies."

He nods, and tries to give her a smile. "How'll you get back to the lab?" he asks.

"I'll bum a ride," she says. "Those young cops are always eager to chauffeur me." She winks and hands him the keys. "Go."

***

Nick takes his samples directly to Greg's lab, and offers to help him prep them. Greg eyes him warily but agrees, and moves a pile of textbooks out of the way for him.

"I heard you're sick," Greg says, just shy of accusation.

"It's not catching," Nick tells him, and lifts a bagged hairbrush out of the evidence box.

"I hope not," Greg mutters. "I'm going out this weekend and I don't want to become a plague dog."

"You won't."

They work in relative silence for a while, Nick pulling hairs out of bristles and swabbing toothbrushes and passing them off to Greg. It's an amiable silence, though, and Greg even asks him what he wants to listen to when the first cd ends.

"Nothing too loud," Nick says, "I've kind of got a headache."

"Okay," Greg says, and flips through the cd jacket on his desk. "Rock okay?"

He wants to say, You listen to rock? But he doesn't. "Sure," he says.

It isn't until the second song that he realises that the voice he's hearing is coming from a girl, and once that registers he can't quite stop himself from peering at Greg quizzically.

"What?" Greg says defensively when he notices. "I happen to like girls who rock, okay? Nothing wrong with that."

"No," Nick agrees, "I just - I'm surprised, that's all."

Greg humphs and holds out his hand for the next follicle.

"I mean," Nick says, because he feels like he has to say something, "not a lot of guys listen to girls, is all."

"Well, I do."

"Cool," Nick says, and he means it. "Who is it?"

Greg narrows his eyes again, as though that is going to help him see the sarcastic remark before it hits him. "Tegan and Sara," he says guardedly. "They're from Vancouver."

"Oh." Nick listens to a few bars of the song. "I like it."

"You do?"

"Yeah," Nick says. "I haven't heard of them before but, but they're good."

Greg blinks, then takes the hair sample that Nick is offering him. "I saw them in Seattle a couple years ago," he says. "They blew me away."

"No kidding," Nick says, because he's not sure what the appropriate response to that is. He likes music himself, and has always listened to it, but always covertly. He's not used to having conversations about it. Music is something that happens in his family without any discussion, and no sharing: people have their likes and dislikes, and no one is ever expected to talk about it. Which has always suited Nick fine, because his clandestine music collection has only grown since that first mixed tape he made when he was fourteen. He'd die of shame if his brother or any of his sisters knew about the Women & Song cds he owns.

He studies the profile of Greg working at a rack of test tubes and wonders if the world is going to open up and swallow him whole if he tries to have a conversation about music.

"How, uh, how do you feel about Dido?" he asks, trying to pitch his voice into something casual.

Greg looks over his shoulder with a half-scowl. "Are you making fun of me?" he asks.

"No," Nick says hurriedly, and knows he's blushing. "I, uh, kind of like her first cd, is all. You know, more than I like her second."

Greg continues to look at him for what feels like a long time, then turns around to face him completely. He leans against the counter behind him and crosses his arms on his chest. "She's not really my thing," he says, still clearly waiting for the other shoe to drop. "I mean, I know 'Hunter', but who doesn't?"

Nick nods. "I like that one," he says.

"Oh yeah?"

He realises the ball is in his court, that Greg is waiting for him to prove this isn't some elaborate prank. He tries to think of something meaningful he can say. "I, uh, I like how it's about not being tied down to anything, about staying true to yourself."

Greg looks contemplative. "Okay," he says at length, "how about Aimee Mann?"

"She's great," Nick says with a nod, and he's slightly ashamed at how good it feels to be able to say that out loud. "Her voice is so perfect, and her songs are amazing and they're so simple but they're so right..." He trails off because he really doesn't have the vocabulary to talk about music. Not yet, anyway.

There's a look approaching respect in Greg's eyes now, and he says, "How about Tracy Chapman?"

"Love her," Nick says immediately. "She just - wow. Especially her older stuff, you know. Just her and a guitar?"

"Evanescence?"

He hesitates. He doesn't dislike them, exactly, but he doesn't actually listen to them, either. "Um," he says, "not really my thing, I guess."

Greg lets his head fall slightly to one side. "Okay," he says, "who do you like? What is your 'thing'?"

He thinks about that. "Uh," he says, wondering what a safe answer might be. "The Indigo Girls?"

Greg looks blankly at him for a moment. "The Indigo Girls?!" he asks.

Nick feels himself start to blush again, just slightly, and he wills it to stop. "No?"

Greg starts to laugh then, not in a cruel way but in a deeply amused way nonetheless. "Wow, Nick," he says, "I know you like the ladies and all, but I didn't have you pegged as a dyke."

He can feel the incandescent line of heat flash up the side of his face and crawl back along his scalp. He's sure his entire head is glowing and he turns away as quickly as he can, focuses his attention on the hairbrush in front of him. Shit: has he already taken a hair from this one, or is it the next one up? Fuck.

He's peripherally aware of Greg watching him, not laughing anymore, but he can't make himself turn to face him. He should have just kept his mouth shut, he thinks, shouldn't have said anything about the damn music, maybe he can get that letter of resignation written tonight before he goes home-

"Nicky?"

He whirls around at that, because that's Gil's voice coming from the doorway. The hairbrush he was screwing around with goes skittering off the lab bench and Nick tries to pretend he doesn't notice it on the floor.

Gil is looking at him carefully, his eyes glancing down at the piece of evidence and then over at Greg and then back to Nick's face, where Nick is absolutely sure he's making note of the exact shade of fuchsia that he's displaying.

"Is this a bad time?" Gil asks tactfully.

"No," Nick says, because any distraction is a good distraction at this point. "It's fine."

Gil clearly isn't convinced, but he takes a small step forward anyway, and holds out a plain white envelope. "Here's that information I said I'd get for you, Nicky," he says, putting maybe a little too much emphasis on his name, but Nick thinks he's heard worse things.

"What information?" he asks.

"That thing we talked about this morning," Gil replies. "You seemed - interested."

Nick frowns and opens the envelope, and pulls out a folded sheet of paper. He unfolds it, and reads the top line, and creases it again. "Oh," he says, because he had kind of perked up at the mention of the staff psychiatrist, hadn't he? "Um, thanks."

Gil nods, then glances back at Greg, and says, "I'll let you get back to work, then."

After he leaves, Nick is distracted enough by the schedule Gil has just given him and the fact that he managed to throw a piece of evidence halfway across the room that he forgets about Greg's offhand remark.

Until Greg says, "Nick, that was just a joke. It's not like you really are a dyke, right?"

He knows that's meant as a joke, too, but Nick can't find it in himself to muster so much as a fake smile. He scoops up the hairbrush and drops it back on the counter, and pushes past Greg out into the hallway.

***

He manages to avoid Greg the rest of the shift, although he knows he's being hunted through the building. Warrick is the first to let him know that Greg is trying to find him, and he thanks him and sidles off to the garage where he has no case-related reason to be so he hopes no one will come looking for him.

He turns on a light in the corner of the garage, and unfolds the paper again. Doctor Matthews is in the building on Tuesdays and Fridays, he reads, in the early afternoon. It doesn't say anything about making appointments, but Nick figures that's probably understood. Right? He's never been to a psychiatrist before, or a psychologist, or even the guidance counsellor in high school. He has no idea what he's supposed to do.

There's a phone number at the bottom of the sheet, and Nick takes out his cell phone and stares at the paper. Should he call? Should he actually tell someone about this? It's one thing to tell his own reflection, that makes it real but not concrete; but to sit down with a shrink and actually say, Hey doc I'm a -- I'm a-

He feels his eyes tear up and he folds the paper up and stuffs it into his pocket. He's not ready for that yet, he thinks. Maybe he never will be, but he sure as hell isn't now.

The door across the room bangs open, and Nick drops his phone.

"There you are," Catherine calls out, her voice echoing in the empty space. "Greg's been looking for you."

"Has he?" he squeaks, and retrieves his phone.

Her footsteps tap across the garage towards him. "He's got a DNA map of the family," she says, and hands him a folder. "As soon as Doc Robbins extracts a useable sample from the bodies, we can fill in the blanks on who's missing."

He opens the folder and tries to force his mind back to the case. "Great," he says, scanning the diagram that Greg produced. One male, one female, and three kids who share DNA from both of them: one girl, two boys.

Catherine is still looking at him oddly. "You know," she says, "shift ended about twenty minutes ago. Robbins won't have the samples ready for another couple of hours, you might as well go home. We'll keep working this tomorrow."

He smiles weakly at her. "You sure?" he asks.

"Hell yes," she says. "I'm not waiting around - I'm going home to see Lindsay." She touches his shoulder. "You're not wimping out if you clock out now, Nicky," she adds in a softer voice.

His smile wavers a bit, and the tremble in his lower lip is achingly familiar. "Thanks, Catherine," he says.

She hugs him suddenly, and releases him quickly. "You had a good night," she says, "working a tough case. Whatever it is, Nicky, you can deal with it."

"Right."

He wishes he had her conviction.

***

He's sitting in his car with Doctor Matthew's phone number in front of him, wondering if he'll ever have the guts to say this thing out loud to another living person, when without warning the passenger door opens and Greg deposits himself in the front seat.

They look at each other for a long time. Nick knows that the look on his face must be close to panic, but he can't quite figure out Greg's expression.

"Greg," he finally says, "I'm going home now. You can get out."

"Nick, I'm sorry - I didn't mean to embarrass you like that," Greg says, ignoring his invitation to leave.

Here comes another whopper of a blush, Nick thinks, and grabs the steering wheel just to keep from hiding his face behind his hands. "It's nothing," he says.

"No, Nick," Greg says, "it is something. It's - shit, that was a terrible thing to say to you."

"It's fine-"

"It's not fine, Nick."

He can feel Greg's tension even from the driver's seat, and he tightens his grip on the steering wheel until his knuckles turn white. He thinks absently how funny that must look to Greg: totally white hands under a totally red face.

"Nick, I - don't get mad at me, okay? Like, don't punch me in the face or kick me in the nuts or push me out of your car once it starts moving, okay? Please?"

Nick says nothing but holds his breath, because he's got a strong feeling that he's not going to enjoy this.

"Nick," Greg says, picking his words carefully now, "are you a lesbian?"

There's an incredible roar in his ears for a moment, and he knows it's the sound of fear, but he can't unlock his fingers from their death grip on the wheel and he can't unclench his jaw and he can't make his lungs take in any more air and he can't even make himself be scared of that.

"Jesus, Nick-" Greg's hand comes out of nowhere and covers Nick's white knuckles. "Nick, it's okay. You just - take a breath, please, before you pass out."

It's the touch that does it, the calm heat of Greg's fingers covering his own. Something unlocks in his chest and he takes a shuddering breath, and lets it out in a sob that sounds pathetic, even to him, and he's getting used to hearing that noise now.

Greg prises Nick's hand off the wheel and tugs it towards him, and laces his fingers through Nick's, and Nick is pretty sure he's saying something only he can't make it out because he's crying now, loudly and completely and all he can do is clutch stupidly at Greg's hand.

It takes him about two minutes to find enough self-control to pull his hand free of Greg's and to wipe at his face. It feels hot to the touch, and he presses the pads of his fingers into his eyes until he starts to see black spots inside his eyelids. Please, he begs silently, please let me open my eyes and not have Greg sitting there, watching this.

The hand that lands on his shoulder destroys that thin hope. Fuck. He's going to have to deal with this, isn't he. Fuck. He hopes he doesn't throw up.

"Nick, it's okay," Greg says, and something tells him that Greg has been saying this for a while now. "It's all right."

He pulls his hands away from his face and makes himself look at Greg. "It's not okay," he says.

Greg says nothing for a moment, but doesn't take his hand away either. "All right," he says eventually, "it's not okay. What do you need to make it okay?"

He can't quite comprehend what Greg is asking him. "Greg, it's not okay, it's not going to be okay, it's never going to be okay-"

"Why not?" Greg asks, and squeezes Nick's shoulder. "I - is this a new thing, Nick? I mean, have you ever...?"

As impossible as it seems, Nick can feel his face get even hotter. "Please get out of my truck, Greg," he says in what he hopes is a fairly even voice.

Greg takes a deep breath. "Okay," he says, "all right, I'll get out. But listen to me, Nick: you're probably shit-scared right now and that's understandable, but you don't have to deal with this alone, okay? I'm here if you need me. You have my number." He reaches for the door handle.

"What the fuck do you know about it?" Nick demands without thinking, his voice inflected towards an anger that doesn't really feel.

Greg's hand stops, and he turns back to him. "I have a couple friends from college," he says. "They went the other way - female to male - but I remember what they went through. One of them didn't go all the way, he found a midpoint he was happy with. I don't know as much as they do, but I know more than most people. I know you can't do this alone, whatever you decide to do."

They look at each other for a long moment, then Nick feels a new surge of tears trying to get out. "I don't know how-" he says and then stops. He shrugs helplessly.

Greg reaches one-handed for him and pulls him in for a rough hug. "Talk about it," he says when Nick's arms go around his back. "To me, to a shrink, to anyone who'll listen."

"I can't," Nick mumbles into his shoulder and pulls himself away, wiping at his eyes again. "Not yet, I mean, I still - I can't-"

"Okay," Greg says, and takes his hand again. "It's not a race, Nick. And I'm not going anywhere."

Nick sniffles, and nods. He guesses he probably still looks pathetic, but he feels maybe a little bit less so. "Okay," he mumbles with another shaky breath.

"Okay," Greg says, and squeezes his hand. "Look, I told Grissom I'd stay late today and get some work done on his backlog - otherwise I'd come home with you and make sure you're really okay... Are you going to be all right?"

He nods again. "I've been all right all these years," he says with a humourless smile and feels another tug of tears. He wipes them away.

"Okay then," Greg says, and he opens the door without getting out. "I mean it, though. Call me. I'll come running, as soon as I can get away from Grissom."

He winces. "Shit, look Greg, don't - I mean, I've never told anyone-"

"Your secret is safe with me," Greg assures him with an actual smile. "Don't worry about it, Nick. I'm good at keeping my mouth shut, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary."

Nick watches him get out. "Call me Nicky," he says just before the door closes.

Greg catches it before it latches, and pulls it open again. "What was that?" he asks, leaning in.

He swallows. "Call me Nicky," he asks, feeling shy all of a sudden. "I'd - I'd like that."

Another smile from Greg. "I can do that," he says and winks. "Nicky."

"Thanks."

"See you tomorrow?"

He nods, and after Greg closes the door and starts to walk away, Nick stays where he is and watches his progress across the parking lot until he's out of sight.

He tries to probe his feelings about what just happened, and realises he doesn't have any yet. He's still in shock, and he's got a feeling the shock is going to keep hold of him for the better part of the day.

He puts the truck carefully into gear, triple-checks his mirrors and his blind spots, and backs out of the parking spot at just above idle.

***

Something changes in the shower, and it's not easy to put a name to it. Nick hangs a towel over the mirror again, and strips down and steps in behind the curtain, and does his usual soap-and-shampoo routine, and when he gets out-

It's strange. One foot in the tub and the other on the bathmat something slides inside his head and he feels - he can't find a word for it, but it's definitely something distinct. He wraps one towel around his waist and snags another to tousle his hair, and at some point a word falls out of nowhere and plants itself on the tip of his tongue:

Woman.

He stands there with a towel draped over his head and lets the word roll around his mouth for a bit. Woman woman woman. Then he tries out the other word that's tapping at the inside of his head: Nicky Nicky Nicky Nicky.

He's kind of grinning when he lets the towel fall to his shoulders, and in a moment of bravery he lifts a corner of the mirror cover and peers at himself.

"Nicky," he says to the slice of person he sees, "Nicky, you are one fucked up woman."

He rearranges the towel around his neck so that it covers most of his chest, and peels away the rest of the mirror-towel. The glass fogs up almost immediately, but that kind of helps with the illusion.

The blurry woman in the mirror brings her hands up to her head and runs her fingers through her hair. "Too short, Nicky," she says. "Gotta grow that out a bit."

Then she pulls the towel across her chest open a bit in the middle, just enough to show a clear line of skin down to her navel. She runs a hand down that swathe and then back up, stopping at her collarbone. "Not too bad," she says, "at least you don't have to wax." She winces at the thought.

She slides a hand down the outside of the towel at her waist, down one hip and tentatively across to her crotch and back up. She stops when her fingers encounter a shape she doesn't like, and pokes it out of the way. Parting her legs a little helps, gives her a space to shove it, and then she closes her legs tight again to keep it there. She runs her hand over her crotch again, and the smile she's wearing is evident even through the fog of the mirror.

Nick smiles back, and it hits him then in a very real way that he is the woman in the mirror, that Nick is Nicky, that he's the woman with the family jewels clenched between her thighs and a towel strategically covering her flat chest.

I'm a she, he thinks, and feels his heart rate pick up a little. Partly terror, partly excitement, mostly adrenaline, and he drops his own hand below his waist. He likes what he feels, that flatness, that absence of external plumbing. It makes him feel closer to female, even if he knows it's just a trick. It's a good trick.

He makes his way to his bedroom and discovers that he really can't walk with his sensitive bits trapped between his legs. He wonders if there's something he can do to get them to stay there without consciously keeping his thighs that close together, and he stands in front of his closet and examines what he has.

A handful of painful experiments later, he decides that the best he can manage is two pairs of tight jockeys with a great deal of judicious rearranging after they're on. He stands sideways and surveys his profile: not nearly as good as he'd like, but better than nothing.

He pulls on his yellow bathrobe again, because he likes it. He likes wearing it, likes the way it feels on him, likes the way it makes him feel having it wrapped around him like a hug. He ties it - right over left, like his mother does - and looks at himself in the mirror again, and finds a ghost of the woman from the bathroom peering back at him.

"Well, Nicky?" he asks her. "Will it do?"

He wonders if it makes him mentally unstable that he imagines she replies, "So-so."

***

He discovers that he has to sit kind of sideways on one butt cheek with his legs crossed if he's going avoid pinching discomfort, so he props himself up at the table with one elbow, and flips through the newspaper while he eats his frozen entree. There was a time when he cooked, he thinks; and then it got to be so that was a pain in the neck, just another thing he had to schedule into his life, and now he subsists mostly on pre-packaged microwavable pablum.

He drags a fork through his curry and wonders if he can make time again to cook. Of course, it's not just the cooking: it's the planning and the shopping and the cooking and the cleaning, whereas this is just the shopping and the cleaning.

But he misses cooking. He misses the patient rhythms of chopping, he misses the hiss of sauteeing vegetables, he misses the feeling of incredible synchronicity when the timing is perfect and everything comes together at the same time. Not to mention the ability to make whatever he wants, not merely whatever they had at the grocery store that week.

He remembers cooking for his girlfriends, back in the day. That had felt communal in a way that nothing else had: the act of preparing a meal together, even if he was doing most of the actual preparing. Just having her in the kitchen, halfheartedly chopping cucumbers for a salad, drinking wine and laughing with him about whatever it was they had thought was funny at the time.

He wants to cook for Gil, he realises, despite his absolute determination to get over the man.

He sighs, and pushes the newspaper away. He'd had his panic-attack about Greg knowing his secret in the car coming home from the lab, and he'd had to pull over and put on his four-way flashers before he killed someone.

It terrifies him that someone knows, that he actually admitted to someone what's going on, that there's another person on the planet now that can look at him and put a word to his life. But the sky hasn't fallen and he hasn't been hit by a stray bolt of lightning, so that has to be a good thing.

Only, it's... it's Greg, Nick thinks, and then feels bad for thinking it with such despair. It's not that he doesn't like Greg, it's not that he's not relieved that he didn't get laughed at to his face, or insulted or beaten up. It's just...

He wants Gil to figure it out. He wants Gil to understand what went wrong on their date, he wants Gil to piece it together and-

Well, he wants Gil to be okay with it. He wants Gil to tell him that it doesn't matter, that it's not going to get in the way, that they can still be together and that he'll be there for him when he needs him, when he's ready to deal with this head-on, when he's ready to start the process professionally, when he emerges on the other side as - what? As a woman? As Nicky?

Yeah, right. Gil prefers men, he said so himself. Sure, he doesn't object on principle to dating women, but what does that actually mean? That he checks out the pretty girls he passes on the street? Great. What it doesn't do is translate to dating men who are women that look like men but wish they didn't.

And when he puts it that way, he thinks, I wouldn't date me, either.

But the thing is, he reminds himself, Gil is not most people. He generally doesn't react to weirdness, at least not when he's working, and although Nick has never seen him deal with weirdness outside of work, he doesn't really have a reason to think that he would react any differently. Right?

So... the only way to find out is to actually - well, find out. To go on another date, and if he doesn't manage to fuck that one up irreparably, another one after that. And maybe, eventually, work up the courage to explain it to him. Or, alternatively, start dropping really obvious clues and wait for the Grissom-genius to do the hard work himself.

Nick looks down at his half-eaten curry and wonders if he has the backbone to do it.

And then he thinks of Greg, how he didn't do anything but haul him in and hug the stuffing out of him, and he thinks, You can't know in advance what someone is going to do.

Which is maybe not the most rousing endorsement he's ever come up with, but at least it's a start, and a direction, and something he can repeat to himself when his feet get cold later on. A placebo for courage, he thinks.

***

Work goes crazy for a few days. There's another arson in the same neighbourhood and it's all hands on deck for the duration. Greg identifies the child's body they found as being one of the sons, and the daughter turns up staying with a friend across town, which is such a load off of Nick's mind that he knows there's a bit of a bounce in his step that Catherine must notice, but doesn't comment on beyond a knowing smile.

Greg is the same as he always is. Nick's not sure what he was expecting, some kind of overcompensating melodrama maybe, but he's pleasantly surprised to discover that the only change is a seamless transition to Nicky.

There is one moment towards the end of the first night of their manic workload, when Greg sidles up to him in the break room when no one else is around. He begins the solemn ritual of coffee that Nick has learned determines the boundaries of his nights, and he says, "How are you doing, Nicky?"

"Busy," Nick says.

Greg peers at him. "Busy good," he asks, "or busy bad?"

"Busy all right," he replies, and gives him a small smile. "It's - work is pretty consuming right now, you know?"

"I know," Greg says and returns his smile, "most of it ends up on my desk, after all. But when this is all over, you know, when we get the bad guy and Grissom spontaneously gives us four days off to recuperate-"

Nick laughs.

"-we should go get a drink or something."

Nick looks sideways at him, knows that Greg is just being friendly and probably wouldn't push for any particular conversation - not in public, anyway - but he's not sure he's up to the prospect of a Greg-interrogation.

"Maybe," he says. "I'm, uh, trying to put something else together, actually, and, uh-"

Greg grins. "I get it," he says. "Hot date?"

Dammit, he's blushing. "Sort of," he mumbles, because there's no point now in making something else up.

"Can't compete with that," Greg says, and picks up his coffee cup. "Give me a call after, though, okay?"

"Okay," he says, and stays at the coffee machine until well after Greg is gone.

And it turns out that Greg is not only calling him Nicky to his face, but when he's talking about him in the third person, too. He overhears him filling Gil in on the progress they're making, and when Gil asks where the latest lab results are, Greg says, "I gave 'em to Nicky about five minutes ago."

There's a stilted silence for a moment, and although Nick is around the corner and out of sight, he can picture the frown of incomprehension that Gil is aiming at Greg.

For three days, they work and do nothing else: Nick comes in early and leaves late, and he's not the only one. It's officially still Catherine's case, but since all of night shift is pitching in it's really a team effort, and Catherine delegates most of the logistical nonsense to Nick.

It's not his favourite part of the job, not by a long shot, but he takes it as a kind of vote of confidence from her, even if it means he spends most of his time in the lab and not in the field. She wouldn't have handed it all over to him if she didn't think he could take it, which tells him he's doing a decent job of holding his life together, at least at work.

Outside of work he pretty much goes home, showers, eats and goes to bed, and gets up in time to shower again, eat and go to work. He's just too damn busy to worry about his personal crisis - there aren't enough hours in the day.

Halfway through the second night, Greg inhales a small volume of something nasty and Gil sends him to the hospital, and although Nick knows it's not serious, just having him away from the lab makes him a little bit anxious. Catherine picks up on it, and she rats him out to Gil, and Nick spends the rest of the night knowing he's under constant if removed surveillance. He knows that they're worried he's going to have another breakdown, and if he weren't so busy maybe he might.

Greg's absence over half of one shift is enough to make him appreciate that even though they don't talk about it - ever - some of the pressure that Nick feels is lessened by having him around. Having someone there who calls him Nicky without having to think about it, who maliciously plays Ani deFranco and Dar Williams in the lab whenever he's around, who just knows the truth without making an issue out of it...

Nick is slightly embarrassed at how quickly he's become dependent on that silent solidarity.

***

Greg is back the next night, with a bit of a cough and a long-winded story about the nurse at the hospital that he unleashes on everyone who asks him how he's doing, and Nick feels everything inside him settle down again. He's sure that Catherine makes the connection even if Gil doesn't, but aside from a delicately arched eyebrow, she doesn't say anything.

And he hopes she doesn't say anything to Gil, either, because at just past ten in the morning on the third long shift, they catch a guy sneaking around the neighbourhood in a utility coverall with an aerosol accelerant in his toolbox. Nick sticks around the precinct until noon when the cops patiently deconstruct all of his lies and corner him into telling the truth, and then he catches up with Gil in the parking lot.

"You, uh, got a minute?" he asks, shading his eyes against the rising sun.

Gil stops next to his car, one hand on the driver's side door, and peers at him. "Okay," he says. "Do you need a ride back to the lab?"

"Actually, yeah," Nick says, and climbs into the cab of Gil's SUV.

They drive in silence for the first minute or so, then Gil glances over at him when they're stopped at a traffic light and says, "You handled this case well, Nicky."

He almost blushes, but not quite. He likes how much easier that name seems to roll off Gil's tongue now. "You want to go out again?"

Gil is silent another few seconds. "Is that a good idea?" he asks carefully.

"I don't know," Nick admits, "but I'd like to try. What happened last time - I don't know what to say about that."

"Can you tell me what it was?" Gil asks and slides the car out into traffic.

"No," Nick says, "not yet. I want to, but I can't, not yet. It's - really complicated, Gil, and I... I need time."

"Okay," Gil says guardedly as he slows down to make a turn. "I can respect that. And I'd like to try going out again, too. I had fun the first time."

"Me too," Nick says, "and I can't make any promises but I'm going to try to make sure our second date doesn't happen again."

There's a stretch of silence that lasts several blocks, and then Gil says, "When?"

Nick hides his grin. "Tomorrow?" he says. "After work?"

Another couple of blocks slide past Nick's window before Gil says, "Okay."

***

Maybe, Gil thinks as he gets out of his car, this was a bad idea.

In the car on the way back from the lab they had agreed to have a mid-morning dinner, details left up to Nick to work out; and what he had decided on, in the end, was a home-cooked meal at Nick's condo. Gil wasn't sure what to make of the invitation when it was made, and he's still not sure what to make of it.

Whatever is eating at him, Nick is the only one who knows what it is and what to do about it, and maybe dinner with just the two of them is the safest thing. For Nick, anyway.

Which is not an entirely comfortable thought, as far as Gil is concerned. If Nick is - what's the word for this, reticent? If Nick is reticent about dating a man, then Gil needs to know it now before he gets any deeper into this than he already is. He can certainly appreciate the need for keeping a low profile, but there's discretion and then there's denial. And he's not going to get involved with someone who's still in the closet: it's just too much of a headache. He learned that a long time ago.

But he doesn't want to make any assumptions until he knows all the facts, and he certainly doesn't know anywhere near all the facts in this.

So he takes his bottle of wine up to the door, and rings the bell. It feels a little odd to be standing here without a gnawing worry in his chest, but he can learn to live with that. Assuming this date isn't going to self-destruct and leave its own fallout crater. He makes a mental note to make sure not to call him Nick: Nicky Nicky Nicky.

The door opens, and Nick - Nicky smiles at him. He's wearing a deep red shirt that hangs loosely from his shoulders, and black slacks that fit closely.

"You're a little early," Nicky says by way of greeting, and he steps aside to invite him in. "I'm still chopping."

"Anything I can do to help?" Gil asks, because that's the sort of thing one is supposed to ask in these situations, right?

"You can keep me company," Nicky says, and takes the wine that Gil hands him. He reads the label and smiles at him. "Very nice," he says. "Come on in."

Gil follows him down the short hallway, and something in the way Nick is moving nags at him. It's the same kind of nag he had the last time he was here, and the word "feline" makes another appearance in his lexicon. It's not so much that he's swaying when he walks, although he is and it strikes Gil as a slightly odd affectation; it's more that his shoulders seem more fluid, as though he's walking with his entire torso rather than just his legs.

Beethoven's violin concerto is playing in the kitchen, and the table has been set with candles and a pale tablecloth, and Nick (Nicky!) settles in at one section of the counter where a pile of julienned vegetables and an untouched green pepper are waiting for him.

"Hope you don't mind eating in here," Nicky says. "I have an actual dining table out there-" He points over his shoulder with the knife. "-but I never use it, and there's so much junk piled up on it that it hardly seemed worth it."

"I don't mind at all," Gil says.

"There are glasses over there," Nicky says, and points again with his knife. "I'd get them, but I think my hands are going to smell like onion for the rest of the night, so you might as well look after the wine."

He retrieves the glasses and finds a corkscrew, and pours two glasses of wine and when Nick tells him there's nothing else that needs doing, he sits at the table and watches him work.

He's working at a bend in the counter, leaning one hip against a row of low cupboards and working in front of him. Gil takes in the way his legs are crossed where he's standing, and the bare feet below the cuffs of his slacks, and the slight angle to his shoulders the way he's leaning, and his impressions from before come filtering back to him.

He's seen Catherine stand this way in her kitchen, too, although the layout of the rooms are different. It's a casual posture, graceful in a strangely domestic way, although Gil once again finds himself wondering how it can possibly be comfortable after more than a few minutes. He thinks of the aches it would give him all the length of his back, to have his spine curved to the side by even that slight degree, and he thinks that this is another one of those things he should make note of, to be fitted into the puzzle at a later date.

"I guess this probably isn't what you had in mind," Nick says after a comfortable few seconds of silence. He doesn't look up from the cutting board when he speaks, but he says it lightly and Gil assumes he's concentrating on not amputating a finger, as opposed to sidestepping some bigger issue.

"Not really," Gil concedes, "but I'm not complaining."

"It's not-" Nick glances over at him. "It's not that I don't want to be seen in public with you, Gil," he says with a nervous kind of smile. "I want you to know that. I just - I want to avoid what happened last time, and I thought being alone would help me do that."

He's not sure if that's an invitation to ask again or not, but he's not going to let it slip through his fingers. "Can you talk about that yet?" he asks.

Another nervous twitch of smile and Nick turns his attention back to the vegetables he's decimating. "No," he says, and his voice is a little less light now. Gil makes note of that.

"Can you at least tell me why you can't tell me?" he tries.

"Not really," Nick says. "I mean, it's - it's complicated. I just, I want you to know that it's nothing to do with you. This problem is something I have to deal with, that's all. It's separate from this thing with you, and I just hope that I can remember that."

This time Gil is fairly confident that Nick is lying to him, which is another little clue he should squirrel away somewhere. He's not sure which part of his last statement was a lie, but something was less than totally honest.

He wishes he knew more about what was going on, wishes he knew if he should be worried that they're starting off on a fabricated foundation, or if the lie actually has to do with something else, the something that Nick is singularly unwilling to talk about but to which he keeps alluding.

"Are you still thinking of quitting?" he asks, sipping as his wine.

The knife hesitates for the briefest of seconds, and if Gil hadn't been looking for it he probably would have missed it. "Yes," Nick says, makes one last chop and pushes the green pepper off the cutting board onto the counter.

Gil frowns. "Why?" he asks. "The last couple of days-"

"-were insane," Nick finishes, and turns his attentions to the stove. "I didn't have the luxury of having a nervous breakdown, so I didn't. But it can't always be like that, and if it were we'd all burn out in a matter of months anyway."

"Nervous breakdown?" he asks. "Is that what this is?"

From where he's sitting, Gil can see the line of tension take up residence in Nick's shoulders. "No," Nick says, "not - exactly."

"Have you talked to Doctor Matthews?"

"No."

Gil watches him roll his shoulders a couple of times to force some of the tension out of his muscles. "Can I ask why?"

Nick sighs. "Been too busy," he says, and they both know that one is a bald-faced lie. He sighs. "I'm scared."

"Of what?" Gil asks. "Nicky, there's no shame in seeing a psychiatrist."

"It's not that."

"Then what?" Gil asks. Some little part of him is warning him to let it go, but he doesn't want to do that yet. He might actually get some kind of answer out of this, and even if everything blows up afterwards, it will have been worth it if he understands Nick's problem to a greater degree.

"I'm not - ready," Nick says, his back still to the table where Gil is sitting. "To talk about it yet."

"Not with anyone?" Gil asks lightly.

"Not yet," Nick says.

"Not even Greg?"

For a moment Gil thinks he's gone too far, pushed too much and he's not only going to trigger another disaster but he's also not going to learn anything new.

Then Nick sighs and his head sags down over his chest. "Greg is - different," he says, and turns around looking crushed. "You saw that, huh?" He holds Gil's gaze for a moment, then wipes at his eyes and turns back to the stove. "He just - he figured it out on his own and he caught me at a bad time, and just... it's different."

Gil frowns. Whatever Nick is talking about, it's not the conversation in the break room that Gil caught the end of.

"Okay," he says, but what he's thinking is, Greg figured it out? Greg put it together and he can't?

He doesn't want to be jealous about that, but he can't quite stop the wedge of envy that drives up into him. He wants to know what Greg learned that he didn't, what little twist of significance he was able to correctly apply to which piece of evidence to stumble over the truth. It's-

It's professionally infuriating and personally distasteful.

Nick has turned around again, and is looking at him balefully. "Don't do this," he begs.

"Do what?" Gil asks as lightly as he can.

"That," Nick says. "You're thinking about Greg. Don't."

He sighs. "I'm sorry," he says, "I'll try not to."

Nick doesn't look convinced, but he turns back to the stove. "Thank you." Something sizzles and snaps, and the delicious smell of frying onions fills the kitchen.

Gil watches Nick cook for a while longer, listens to the music of hiss and sizzle change as each ingredient is added. "That smells wonderful," he says awkwardly after a bit.

"Hope so," Nick says and gives him a feeble smile over his shoulder.

***

They somehow survive dinner, talking about Warrick and Catherine and insects and sports, and Gil compliments Nick on the excellent alfredo prima vera he produced, and they avoid anything that might actually have emotional connotations.

When Gil offers to help with the dishes, Nick swats him away from the sink and tells him to make himself at home in the living room. He waits until he hears him moving around the other room, stopping at the squeaky board in front of his bookcase, and then he lets out the lungful of air he's been holding.

This was a bad idea, he thinks as he clears the table and stacks the dishes in the sink. It had seemed like a romantic gesture when he had suggested it, and he certainly enjoyed aspects of it, but the godawful truth is, neither of them is ready to spend so much time one-on-one.

There's the spectre of Greg, for one thing. He knows that Gil is trying to be adult about it, but there's some measure of injured pride between them now because Greg - lab rat Greg - has managed to fill in the Nick-crossword puzzle before Gil has even finished sharpening his pencil.

Then, Nick thinks with a quick glance over his shoulder towards the living before he rearranges the disaster between his legs, there's Nicky. Because she's been driving most of the night, directing the conversation to safely neutral topics that will not force either of them to burst into tears. She was comfortable jabbering about the upcoming baseball season, because she's always liked baseball and it turns out that Gil does, too; and she was out of her depth when it came to insects but most people are anyway, and Gil managed to fill in the vacant gaps with an easy kind of humour.

She faded into the background a few times, like their aborted conversation while Nick was still cooking, or when Gil not-too-subtly tried to find out if Catherine was in on the secret, but by and large she took the reins and Nick is kind of surprised how good she is at flirting.

Nick grins as he rinses thick creme sauce from a handful of utensils. Gil had responded to Nicky's flirting without even realising it, and then when he had realised he was flirting back, there had been a moment of such absolute confusion on his face that Nicky had beat a hasty retreat for several minutes, until Gil got his metaphorical feet back under himself.

Nicky's flirting is a much quieter kind of interaction than Nick's, and Nick's is the only kind - until now - that Gil has ever encountered from him. Nicky's is based much more heavily on nonverbal cues and inclined towards coyness rather than come-hitherness, and given how strange it felt knowing that he was the one doing it, he can only imagine the head-whammy at Gil's end upon receiving it.

But Gil had regained his footing and started flirting back in his own way, which drew Nicky back to the forefront and she had egged him on, going so far as to nudge his foot under the table at one point. That time, though, when Gil had frozen and glanced at her sharply, she hadn't deserted the situation: she had blinked at him innocently while wiggling her toes against Gil's anklebone.

And then she had disappeared, leaving Nick to deal with an interested Gil and a low-down simmering kind of interest of his own.

"I'll make some coffee," Nick had said, and turned his back on the situation under the guise of starting to clean up.

So now Gil is in the living room, not only expecting coffee but presumably some further exploration on the theme of footsie, and Nick isn't sure what he should do about that.

His coffee machine stops percolating, and he tries to ignore the feeling of doom as he loads up a tray to take into the next room.

***

He needn't have worried, though, because as soon as he walks through the archway and sees Gil relaxed on the sofa with a coffee-table book about the rain forest open across his knees and his glasses perched on his nose, looking sexier than sex, Nicky reasserts herself aggressively.

"It's hazelnut," she declares, coming in to sit next to Gil, close enough to be friendly without actually climbing into his lap. The coffee tray lands indelicately on the table.

"It smells delicious," Gil says, and deposits the book back on the table between copies of Sports Illustrated and Harper's.

"Well, you know," Nicky says, leaning back and tucking her legs under herself, "I spent an awfully long time roasting those hazelnuts."

Gil looks at her for a moment before half-chuckling. "I'm sure you did an excellent job," he says.

"I usually do."

She wishes she had significantly longer hair so she could tuck a strand of it behind her ear, something to do with her hands while Gil studies her carefully.

"And the coffee beans themselves?" he asks. "Do you maintain your own plantation?"

"Out on the patio," Nicky replies easily. "I'll show it to you later, if you like."

"It can't be a particularly big plantation."

"I don't drink a lot of coffee."

"Ah," Gil says, "I see. So should I infer from this sudden infusion of caffeine into the situation that I'm boring you?"

Nicky extends her arm along the back of the couch, letting her fingers rest on the leather just behind Gil's collar. "Another interpretation might be that I'm going to need a reserve of energy later on."

Definite sparkage of some variety in Gil's eyes at that, and one of his eyebrow arches slightly. "Oh?" he says, and lets one of his hands skim over her knee closest to him.

She inches that knee a little nearer to him and follows it with the rest of her. "Could be," she says.

He studies her for another second or two, and she knows that he's trying to pin down what's changed, what makes this person different from the one he met earlier this morning; but his baser instincts win out, because he leans in close enough to kiss her.

It's a light kiss in and of itself, but that lightness doesn't last long. Nicky kisses back, and brings a hand to the back of his neck to pull him closer at about the same time that he starts to tug at her waist. They meet halfway, her body pressed tight with his and their mouths moving hungrily against each other and someone is making a keening noise and Nicky suspects it's her.

At some point between her needy little sound and Gil's hands finding an invitation to skin between shirt and slacks, Nicky crawls as close as she can get to him, and feels a strange rush of excitement to find herself straddling his waist, leaning down to devour his lips and tongue.

After a breathless interval of mindless intimacy, Gil pulls his head back just enough to break contact, and rests his forehead against her chin. "Slow down," he murmurs.

"Don't want to," she whispers back, and kisses along the line of his jaw towards his ear.

This time the greedy noise comes from him, and he brings both his hands around her back and pulls her in even closer. He shifts under her enough that she can feel his growing interest below the waist, and she puts a little pressure on it.

He hisses and latches his lips onto the side of her neck, and slides both hands under the fabric of her shirt to trace hurried lines across the skin of her back, and she arches into his fingers with a drawn-out gasp. He does it again and so does she, and even though she can feel an ache of constriction between her legs she angles their groins a touch closer together.

Gil mutters something largely incoherent against her neck, and the fluttery feel of his breath on her skin coupled with the quick movement of his fingers along her spine makes her lean back enough to fumble at the buttons of her shirt.

He helps her with them when he notices what she's doing, and the sight of his hands working into the fabric at her chest elicits another groan from her. She needs this so badly it's embarrassing. When his hands slide the shirt down off her shoulders she leans in to kiss him again, and sucks on his lower lip before guiding him down to her chest.

The first touch of his mouth to her nipple is electric, and her eyes flutter shut when his tongue brushes against her. She runs her fingers through the loose curls of his hair and lets out another hedonistic sound, and when he turns his attention to the other side of her chest she gasps again and squirms against him.

One of his hands moves around to her stomach and begins to slide down, and she stops it before it gets anywhere. She may be drowning in his touch, but she can still remember why his hand down there is a bad idea, why it would ruin everything about this achingly perfect moment.

They kiss again, and she moves against him in exactly the right way to make him shiver, and his hand makes another move below her waist and she stops it again. He stills for a moment, pulls his head back and says, "What is it?"

She kisses him and lets their heads rest together again. "Nothing," she says, "just..."

He turns into her neck and murmurs, "Just what, Nick?"

***

It's certainly one of the least graceful exits in the history of the universe. Nick extricates himself from Gil's arms in record time, and disappears before Gil really has a clue what's going on.

Then it hits him: Nick. He called him Nick, not Nicky. Shit.

He sits for a bit on the couch trying to gather up the pieces of his mind, and then pushes himself to his feet and heads upstairs. He has no idea what he's going to find, and only the vaguest thought that Nick (Nicky! dammit!) even wants to see him.

The bedroom is empty, but the bathroom door is closed. He knocks on it and says, "Nicky? Are you in there?"

There's definite movement inside, and when he tries the door he's surprised to find it unlocked. He turns the handle and opens it just enough to fit his head in. "Nicky?"

He's sitting on the edge of the tub with his head in his hands and his back heaving with metered breaths. He doesn't look up when Gil comes in and looks around, sees the candles beside the bathtub, sees the potted plant balanced next to the window, and the mirror-

The mirror is shattered, the sink beneath it full of shards. There's a smear of blood along the edge of one of them, and Gil turns his attention back to Nick - back to Nicky and notices the hand towel wrapped clumsily around his right fist.

"Shit, Nicky," Gil says and reaches for the badly bandaged hand. "What happened?"

He looks up then, and Gil is shocked at the mix of misery and tear-soaked rage written across his features. "It's nothing," Nick says, tugs his hand away from Gil's. "Just - go home, Gil."

"I can't leave you here like this," he says. "You're distraught, you're injured-"

"Distraught?" Nick says, sounding a little too close to the edge of hysteria. He laughs harshly. "Go home."

"Where's your first aid kit?" Gil asks. "At least let me look at your hand."

Nick peels back the edge of the towel, and even from where Gil is standing he can see a bead of blood swell against the back of his hand. Nick clamps the towel down again and wipes at his face with his other hand. "Cabinet."

Gil uses the sleeve of his shirt to dislodge a few shards of glass clinging to the edge of the cabinet door, and he pulls it open. There's a box of bandaids, some antiseptic ointment a tensor bandage. "This is it?" he asks, rummaging.

"Just go home."

"This is fine," he mumbles, and grabs the bandaids and the ointment. He's about to turn back when something catches his eye, and he nudges a can of shaving cream aside and pulls out a familiar bottle of pills.

Nick is back to holding his head and staring at the floor when Gil turns around, and without thinking about it he pockets the sleeping pills and sits next to him with the bandaids in his lap.

"Let me see it," he says, and tugs at the towel.

"It's not deep," Nick says bitterly.

"Good," Gil says and unwraps the towel to inspect the cut. "I won't have to take you to the hospital."

At that, Nick tries to pluck his hand out of Gil's grasp, but he isn't quite fast enough. Gil's fingers tighten around his wrist and he dabs at the blood with the towel. It's not deep, although what it lacks in depth it makes up for in length, creeping over the line of his knuckles from one side of his hand to the other.

"What did you do, punch the glass?" he asks, looking at the assortment of odd-sized bandaids and trying to plan his approach.

"You know what?" Nick asks, grabbing the bandaids and making a lunge with his good hand for the tube of ointment. "I can do this myself. Get out."

"Nicky-"

"Go. Away. I'll be fine."

There's a firmness to Nick's voice that Gil decides not to fight. "Okay," he says, "I'll go."

A flicker of couched disbelief flickers across Nick's face. "Thank you."

"But I'm not going to leave you alone," Gil continues, and there's a flash of I-knew-it in Nick's eyes. "Who do you want me to call?"

Nick gets up and pushes past him. "Just go home," he says, and disappears into the bedroom with a slam.

Gil counts to ten to calm himself down, then takes out his phone and dials with his thumb.

***

He knows that Gil comes into the bedroom once but doesn't bother him beyond staring at his back for a few seconds. Then he hears Gil go downstairs, and move around the living room and into the kitchen, and eventually answer the door. The conversation is too quiet and too far away for him to make out, and a minute or so later the front door opens and closes again.

He's staring at the line of blood clotting along the back of his hand when he hears footsteps working their way upstairs and down the hall towards the bedroom. He holds his breath when the edge of the bed dips down and someone settles next to him, close enough to touch without actually touching. Then nothing.

"So what did he tell you?" he asks when the weight of silence gets to him.

"Not much," Greg says. "He seemed pretty upset."

He humphs.

Greg shifts next to him, and Nick can feel him turning to face his back. "Was this your big date?" he asks.

"Yup."

"Want to tell me what happened?"

"Nope."

"Want a drink?"

He rolls towards Greg, and his shoulder brushes against him. He turns to find himself nose-to-nose with one of Greg's kinder, more knowing smiles.

"You know what?" he says. "I'd love a drink."

***

Greg has gone through his music collection and his stash of booze, and chosen Janis Joplin and a bottle of scotch. They're waiting for him in the living room when he comes downstairs, wearing a pair of sweats and his bathrobe. His dangly bits are killing him and he has never been so glad to go commando as he is now.

"So," Greg says, looking up when he comes downstairs, "Grissom, huh?"

"Yeah," he says, lowering himself onto one end of the couch and trying not to think of what happened an hour earlier exactly where Greg is sitting.

"That's - wow." He hands him a large glass half-full of amber liquid and leans back into the over-stuffed cushions again. "Guess you're not technically a lesbian, then."

"Only technically?" Nick asks with a half-hearted chuckle. He feels equally like crying and laughing and he's not sure which is going to win.

"You, uh, you are a girl, though, right?"

Nick is impressed that Greg can look him in the eye when he asks that, as though it's not an impossible question, as though it's something anyone would ask under the circumstances.

He stares down into his glass and says, "Yeah." His voice is pretty gravelly in that one syllable, and it looks like crying is going to win out. Again.

"Okay," Greg says, "so I was half right."

Nick knows he's trying to be light, trying to put him at ease, and somehow it only makes him feel worse. He leaves his drink on the table next to the tepid coffee from earlier, and lets his head fall into his hands. Again. He's spending more and more time hunched over himself these days, it's a wonder it doesn't feel more like home.

The cushions around him shift as Greg moves closer, and when Nick feels an arm work around him and tug him in close, he leans into the embrace and feels desperately pathetic for doing it.

"You want to tell me what went wrong?" Greg asks into his hair.

"No."

"Okay," he says, "I get that. I guess I'm just curious about why Grissom said something about suicide when he was leaving."

Shit. Double shit. "I'm not going to-"

"Good," Greg says and hugs him in a little closer. "I suck at suicide watches."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," Greg says, and he doesn't sound happy about it. "It happened in college. Eric, one of my friends I told you about? He hit a pretty rough patch. We didn't leave him alone for a couple of weeks."

Nick is silent for a while, wondering if that's going to be him before too long. He doesn't want to think about that, doesn't want to think about the handful of pills he'd taken after his terrible date last week. He'd known at the time that he was taking too many, but - he hadn't seriously thought he would - had he?

"Nicky?"

"I just - it's so impossible," he hears himself say, and his shoulders sob once. Jesus: does this never end?

"Tell me," Greg says, and Nick feels him take up a kind of rocking motion that shouldn't be anywhere near as soothing as it is.

He doesn't want to. Everything he's said out loud has proven disastrous, he doesn't want to make it any worse.

"Come on," Greg murmurs, "this is me, right? You'll feel better for saying it loud."

Will he? He takes a deep breath. Greg is right, he knows - he can't keep it inside forever because that hasn't helped him worth a damn so far in his life, has it. "It's like - my whole life there's been this echo, you know? I do what I know I'm supposed to, I do all the right things and it's - it's not me. There's Nick, who was a cop and who had the right girlfriends and was supposed to go to law school but didn't, and then there's - there's me."

"When did it start?" Greg asks. "The echo."

"Growing up, I guess," Nick says, and tries to remember how long he's been pushing this down and out of sight. "Can I show you something?"

"Is it porn?" Greg asks innocently.

Nick elbows him, and worms free of Greg's arms. His box of mementoes is under the coffee table, a handful of magazines on top of it. Maybe it's not much better than being in the back of his closet, but he thinks of it as a baby step.

"Here," he says, and sets it on the couch between them. He knows his hands are shaking when he lifts the lid up.

Greg reaches out and takes his hand, gives it a gentle squeeze. "It's okay, Nicky," he says. "You don't have to."

"Yes," he replies and wipes at his face. It's not so much that he's crying as he's leaking. The sobbing has ended but his eyes are still tearing up. "Yes, I do." He drops the lid to the floor, and takes out his photos. "This is me when I was seventeen," he says, and hands the porch-sleeper picture to Greg. "I love that picture."

Greg examines it carefully. "You're so pretty here," he says, and the way that he says it makes Nick think he means it.

He feels his face flush. "Yeah?" he asks, even though he knows he sounds pathetic.

"Yeah," Greg says, and looks up at him. "When did you get so gaunt?"

"Gaunt?" Nick asks.

"Not, you know, cadaverous," Greg says, and touches the side of Nick's face. "Just - you're thinner. Makes you look more masculine."

"Really?" Nick asks, and prods at his cheekbones.

"Sort of. I mean, you've got a really strong jaw anyway, but - I don't know." He tilts his head to one side, narrows his eyes in assessment. "If you grew your hair out, though..."

Nick's not sure why his heart speeds up, but it does. "If I grew my hair out?" he prompts.

"Like in the photo," Greg says, and holds it up for Nick to see. "Not down to the middle of your back or anything, just - down around your ears, you know? It might soften your angles."

He looks at the photo again, and smiles sadly. "You think I look pretty?" he asks.

"Yeah," Greg says, and holds out his hands for the other photos. "Let's see what else you've got."

***

Greg goes through all of them, lingering at each one and letting Nick explain what he's looking at and why he's held onto it, and before he knows it they're listening to his staticky tape and Greg is flipping through Our Bodies, Our Selves.

"You know," he says, "my mom had this book and I never looked at it?"

"No?" Nick asks. By this point they've more than half emptied the bottle of scotch and neither feels like moving from their respective slumps on the sofa.

"No," Greg says. "I mean, I was pretty desperately horny when I was fifteen, you know? And it never occurred to me to look at this book, which is all about women."

"It's not exactly racy," Nick points out. He's watching Greg work his way through the book, skimming over the text and glancing at the pictures.

"I wasn't exactly discriminating," Greg counters. "Oooh, this looks promising."

"What?" Nick asks, craning his neck.

Greg angles the book so he can see. "It's all about lesbians," he says with a slightly lopsided grin. "I can't believe this was sitting in my living room all through my adolescence, and I never bothered to open it up."

Nick lets out a soft chuff of laughter, and leans his head back into the cushions. "That damn book raised more questions than it answered," he says and lets his eyes close.

"Oh yeah?"

There's the quiet sound of pages turning. It sets up a pleasant rhythm and Nick lets the sound wash over him. "Yeah," he says. "I kept waiting - no, maybe not. I kept hoping for all that stuff, even when I knew it wouldn't come."

"You wanted to menstruate?" Greg asks with a heavy dose of disbelief.

Nick blushes, but his eyes are shut so he can pretend he's not. "Sort of," he says. "I mean, I just - I wanted everything that my sisters had, you know? I wanted my mom to bring me ginger ale and a hot water bottle and tell me how I was turning into a young woman. I wanted to be part of that girl-thing they had going, all of them. Instead I was just on the sidelines, trying to find a way in but always getting chased away."

"How many sisters do you have?"

"Five."

"Wow... Do any of them know? About you, I mean? About Nicky?"

"No." That's an easy one to answer. "Fuck no. They'd - I don't know. Freak out. Tell my parents, my dad would kill me, my mom would disown me, or maybe that's the other way around."

Greg is silent for a while, but the pages keep turning. "Not everyone is going to do that," he says. "I mean yeah, you're going to lose some people. But the people who love you, Nicky... things are going to be rough but when it gets right down to it, they won't abandon you."

"You don't know my parents," Nick says with a sad smile.

"I bet they love you," Greg tells him. "I bet they'd do anything for you."

"That's not really the same, though, is it?" He lolls his head to the side and opens his eyes so he's looking at Greg, who's looking back. He swallows. "I mean, I don't need them to do anything. I just need them to - to put up with something. That's a lot harder than actually doing something."

Greg takes his hand. "They don't have to the first people to know," he says. "Tell people you trust, people you know aren't going to flip out on you. Then tell your parents, and when they succeed in making you feel like shit, you've already got someone to catch you on the way down."

"You're an anomaly," Nick says. "Who else isn't going to care about this? Warrick? 'Hey, dude, that guy you've been hanging around with all these years wants to start wearing a bra'. Yeah, that'll be a fun conversation."

"What about Grissom?" Greg asks. "He never so much as - what? What did I say?"

His eyes close, and they start to tear up. Again. He lets the salt water gather behind his eyelids and spill out on its own. "Nothing."

"Nicky." The hand that Greg's holding gets another squeeze. "What happened? Why do you think Grissom couldn't handle this?"

"He-" It sounds stupid, even to him; a study in lameness. No way is he turning it into an issue.

"You're going to make me guess?" Greg asks, a teasing edge to his voice.

"He can't call me Nicky," he says, and yup, it sounds every bit as ridiculous as he knew it would.

"He can't?"

"Or he won't," Nick amends, "I don't know. I mean, he tries - you can see him concentrating on it. But as soon as he stops, as soon as he gets distracted or involved in something else, he totally forgets. It's back to 'Nick' and he doesn't get why that hurts so much."

"Maybe that's the problem," Greg says carefully. "He doesn't get it."

Nick pries his fingers free and pushes them against his eyes. "If he can't even handle calling me Nicky," he says, and knows that he sounds petulant, "how's he going to take the rest of it?"

"I don't know Grissom as well as you do," Greg says, "and believe me, I don't think I ever want to - 'Grissom' and 'sex' just don't coexist naturally in the same sentence - but he strikes me as a context guy."

Nick peels away one hand and opens his eye. "Context guy?"

"Yeah," Greg says. "I mean, just out of the blue calling you Nicky probably seems pretty random to him. It's arbitrary. But if he knew why you wanted him to call you Nicky, he'd remember. Because every time he'd look at you-"

"-he'd see a total headcase," Nick finishes. "Fuck."

"No," Greg says, "I don't think so. Why would he?"

"Because I've been a total headcase all along," Nick says.

There's a beat of silence. "What happened?"

"I freaked out," Nick says. "In a restaurant. I just - there was this woman doing this totally natural woman thing and it - it hurt that I couldn't do it, too. And then I sulked all night and Gil brought me home and then I took too many sleeping pills and missed work and he had to stay up with me all day and - and then I ended up crying all over Catherine so of course she told Gil about it and he pawned me off on her all night, and then I invited him over for dinner because I was actually feeling good for a change and he called me 'Nick' and I shut down on him, I ran away and hid until he had to call you-"

"Busy few days," Greg says after Nick grinds to a halt with a shaky, indrawn breath.

"No shit."

"Are you - is this thing with Grissom a flirting thing?" Greg asks. "A crush or something like that, or are you serious about him?"

"I think I'm serious about him," Nick says, "which makes it that much worse."

"Is he serious about you?"

"I don't know."

"Ah."

Nick squeezes his eyes shut as tight as he can, because he doesn't really doesn't want to think about whether Gil is serious about him or not. Whether Gil thinks he's worth all the trouble he's causing, or if he's just going to wash his hands of him once and for all. He wouldn't blame him, hell it's probably the only sane thing to do, because who wants to date a basketcase like Nick Call-Me-Nicky Stokes?

"I think you need to find that out," Greg says. "That would change everything."

"I know," Nick says.

"If he's serious about you," Greg goes on, "then he'll just have to accept Nicky as part of the package and take it as it comes."

"But what if he's not serious?" Nick asks, and hates the pleading tone in his voice. "What if it's just a - a fling for him?"

"I don't know," Greg says honestly. "But Grissom - as far as I can tell and again, it's not like I've spent a lot of time thinking about this - he doesn't strike me as a fling kind of guy."

Nick knows that, he's always known that, that's one of the things he fell in love with way back when. Gil doesn't do things lightly, so when he does something, he does it with all his heart. And Nick wants some of that, he wants to have that kind of attention - that kind of devotion - lavished on him, and he knows that makes him weak and pathetic. And he knows that Gil could never be attracted to weak and pathetic, it's not something that he responds to, except with pity and maybe contempt. Gil wants someone who can stand on his own two feet, who's self-sufficient enough not to need constant attention and gratification.

That used to be him. That used to be Nick. He's not so sure about Nicky.

"I don't-" he starts, but doesn't want to finish the sentence.

Greg is suddenly sitting really close to him, pressing his shoulder against his upper arm and just being there in some impossibly good way. "You don't what?"

"I don't think he'd like me," Nick says in a tiny voice.

"What?" Greg squirms and gets an arm around him again. "Why wouldn't he like you?"

"Look at me," Nick says. "I'm a mess, I'm a disaster, I can't even go a whole day without bursting into tears - I'm high fucking maintenance and there's no way he's got that kind of patience."

"Nicky," Greg says, "this isn't you. This person, this high fucking maintenance crybaby? That's not you. You're strong and funny and I know Grissom's given you a tongue lashing more than once but he's never broken you, you keep bouncing back. You're smart and you're compassionate and you know how to look after yourself, and there's nothing about you that Grissom wouldn't love."

"So what," Nick asks, "we just pretend that this shit isn't happening?"

"You're in crisis, Nicky," Greg points out gently. "That's not the real you. You're going to get through this, though, and come out the other side stronger and happier than you are now."

"Crisis," Nick says softly. "Shit - that's me in a nutshell, isn't it?"

"Yeah," Greg says, "but that's okay. Crises aren't fun, but sometimes they're constructive."

"How?" Nick wants to know. He wants to know how this misery and emotional hell are constructive, how they're going to shape him into a better person.

"Because you need this," Greg tells him gently. "You need this to give yourself permission to do what you have to do."

"And what's that?"

"Start talking to people. See a doctor. Start making the changes that you need to keep going forward."

Nick pushes his face into Greg's chest and hides there for a bit, and Greg gets his other arm around him and hugs him in tight.

"You need other people to see this, too," Greg continues in his soft voice. "When they see that this is killing you, that it's eating you up from the inside, they'll do whatever it takes. Even if that means doing nothing. They'll do it because they love you and they don't want to have to sit suicide watches with you. And if that means calling you Nicky and trying not to stare at you when you sprout breasts, that's what they'll do. Trust me."

It's sounds so easy when Greg says it like that, when he lays it out one thing after another like a game of dominoes, like it's the simplest, most straightforward thing in the world. But that's what he can't do, right? He can't admit to everyone that he needs help, that he's in crisis - crisis for god's sake, how's he supposed to admit to that? I'm Nicky Stokes and I can't handle my life?

At some point he starts crying again, hard, and at some point Greg starts rocking again, softly; and when he feels Greg's lips press against the side of his head he just lets go of everything he's been trying to hold on to. He lets it uncoil from around his spine and from around his heart and ebb out of him, because right now, with Greg holding onto him and murmuring random things into his hair, he feels safe enough, protected enough, to start to forgive.

***

Another evening of watching the clock. Gil gets a little of his backlog cleared, works through about a week's worth of paperwork that Ecklie's been harassing him about, and at five to midnight he looks up to find Catherine watching him.

"Meeting time?" he asks, glancing at his clock.

"Still got a couple minutes," she tells him. "Nicky didn't show up at arraignment this afternoon."

Shit. "Did they need him?" he asks as evenly as he can.

"No," she says, "I just thought he'd be there. This was that rape case, the one he got so, uh, worked up over?"

"Oh." Gil looks down at his paperwork, knows he has enough time to plow through another form or two, then he caps his pen and leans back.

Catherine arches her eyebrow at him. "That sounded - loaded," she says cautiously.

He sighs. "You want to close that door?" he asks.

She comes in and nudges it shut with her foot, and settles into the chair across from him. "I'm listening."

"He, uh - I don't know that he'll be in tonight."

She narrows her eyes. "Oh?" she says, echoing his earlier evasive response.

"We had dinner," he says, "and before you get into it, Catherine, I know it was a bad idea."

"Okay."

"But it - never mind. It ended abruptly and Nick was not in good shape when I left."

Her jaw drops open. "You left him when he was a mess?"

"He kicked me out," Gil defends, "and I didn't leave him alone. I got Greg to come over and take care of him."

"Shit," Catherine says. "What's going on?"

"I don't know," Gil confesses. "He won't talk to me about it, he hasn't talked to Doctor Matthews yet, and I don't think he's going to - I don't know what to do."

They stare at each other for a bit, and Gil is surprised at the depth of compassion in her eyes. Not the compassion she feels for Nick, he expects to see that; it's the compassion she feels for Gil Grissom that catches him off guard.

"I need a road map," he says, and spreads his hands in useless resignation. "I want to help him, but I don't know where to start."

She sighs, then leans back in her seat. "Why Greg?" she finally asks.

"What?"

"You said you called Greg," she reminds him. "Why him?"

He feels a slight blush creep up the sides of his neck, and he resists the temptation to fiddle with his collar because that will only draw attention to it. "He knows what's going on."

One eyebrow arches delicately. "Greg?" she asks. "Nicky actually spat it out to someone?"

"Not exactly," Gil says, and makes an effort not to clench his teeth around this confession. "Apparently, Greg figured it out on his own, and Nick didn't deny it."

Catherine blinks slowly. "Well," she says, "at least he's got someone who's in the know." She doesn't sound entirely confident in the fact that it's Greg, but doesn't put it into words; Gil can see it written plain as day in the line between her eyebrows.

"I'm trying to look at it that way," Gil tells her, and knows he doesn't sound anywhere near as magnanimous as he'd hoped.

"So... does Greg know about you and Nicky?"

He almost winces. "If he didn't before today," he says, "I'm sure he does by now."

"So if we wanted to pump somebody for information," Catherine says slowly, "Greg would be the obvious candidate."

They consider each other for a few beats.

"That's not really ethical," Gil points out.

"Fuck ethical," Catherine counters. "We need to know what's going on in Nicky's life. When Greg gets in tonight-"

"It's his night off," Gil says.

"Oh." She drums her fingers on the plastic arm of the chair. "Tomorrow?"

"Ideally," Gil says, "but since I'm not really expecting Nick in tonight, it might not be fair to assume that Greg will be in tomorrow."

"There's only so long we can cover for him," Catherine says, and she doesn't have to point out that she's not talking about Greg. "Eventually people are going to notice that he's not actually coming in to work anymore."

"I know," Gil says. "I've been hoping this would blow over before it comes to that."

"Blow over?" Catherine asks. "Dammit Gil, this is not going to blow over. Nicky does not randomly burst into tears. This is serious."

"I know that," Gil snaps, and it's a good indication of how upset she is that she doesn't snap right back at him. He sighs, and pinches the bridge of his nose. "I know that," he says again, much more reasonably. "I just don't know what else to do."

"You corner Greg the first chance you get," Catherine instructs, "and you get a straight answer from him. Beat him into submission if that's what it takes, but you don't let this slide any further."

"Nick is an adult," Gil says. "We can't take away his right to privacy just because we find it frustrating-"

"This is beyond frustrating, Gil," Catherine says. "I don't know what you saw, but I saw someone standing way too close to the edge of the mother of all cliffs. I don't want him to fall over the side because we were too timid about grabbing onto him."

He really doesn't like her analogy, and he likes it even less because it sounds hauntingly close to truth. "So that's it?" he asks. "Interrogate Greg and then - what?"

"Well, that depends on what Greg has to say," Catherine says. "But come on: you know as well as I do that Nicky obviously can't handle this on his own. Maybe Greg alone can tip the balance in his favour, but I doubt it. So you find out what's going on, and then we come up with a plan from there."

Gil sighs. "How do you do that?" he asks after a pause.

"Do what?"

"You call him Nicky," he says. "Effortlessly."

She gives him a dry smile. "Maybe it's a kid thing," she says. "One week Lindsay wants to be called Lin, the next it's back to Lindsay, and then she decides everyone should call her Vivian - don't ask where that came from..." She shrugs. "I'm used to a state of flux when it comes to names."

Gil looks down at his pen. "I'm not," he says.

She obviously notices the awkward hesitation in his voice, because while she doesn't actually lean forward, she certainly perks up around the edges. "What did you do?" she asks.

"I called him Nick," he says.

"Gil-"

"I know," he says, too quick to snap again but she doesn't comment on it, just tightens the line of her lips and hardens her eyes. "It just - I can't do it. I can't go back to calling him the nickname he had three years ago. He's grown out of it. It's - ridiculous."

"What happened?"

He doesn't want to draw her a diagram. "It set him off," he says carefully. "One minute we were - doing all right, and then it just, it just slipped out and he had barricaded himself in the bathroom before I knew what was going on-"

"You've got to stop doing that," she tells him in the exasperated voice of a single mother. "I don't know what else to say, but Jesus, Gil."

"I-" He falters, because he doesn't really have an excuse, does he? "He's not the same man he was then, things have changed. Life has changed him, and he's not that, that kid anymore."

"Maybe it's not about being that kid," Catherine says. "Maybe it's something else."

"What?" Gil asks. "What else could it be? Why else does he want to hear Nicky so badly?"

"Maybe... maybe something else was going on then, too," she says, "and we didn't see it, because he was a kid. A big, smart kid who knows how to hide his problems."

"So why now?" Gil demands. "What's so different now?"

"I don't know," she tells him, "but that doesn't mean you get to arbitrarily decide he's wrong, that he doesn't get to be called whatever he wants to be called. It's - what people call us has a lot of power, Gil. When I was dancing, I used to tell the men my name was Tawny."

Gil raises an eyebrow. "Tawny?"

"I didn't want them to know my real name," she says. "It separated what I did for a living from who I was. It made the job just that, a job, something I could walk away from at the end of the night. It made everything at work just a game, it meant I never had to interact with them. That was all Tawny. Not Catherine."

Gil frowns. "So... he's trying to separate himself from work?"

"Maybe." She shrugs. "Maybe that's why he wants to quit."

He leans back in his chair. "What could be triggering this disassociation?" he wonders out loud.

"I bet Greg knows," Catherine says.

There's a scritching at the door, and it opens to admit Sara from the neck up. "Hey," she says, "are we having a meeting, or what?"

He blinks at her.

"You know," she says, "meeting? Assignments? Solving crimes?"

"Oh," he says, "right. I'll be in in just a minute."

"We could all go home for the night," Sara offers gallantly.

"I'll be right there," he says, and ignores her little wink as she withdraws.

Catherine is looking at him with something like pity. "And that's another thing you need to deal with," she says.

"I know," he sighs, and digs through is paperwork for the call-ins for the night.

Catherine watches him, and adds dryly, "Somehow I don't think Greg can help you with that one."

***

He gives Sara a hit-and-run that looks deliberate, sends Catherine out to a body in a hotel room, and tells Warrick that they're working together tonight on a seriously decomposed body found in the wall of a house being renovated.

"Nice," Sara says with envy. "How come I never get cases like that?"

"I know how much you like processing cars," Gil tells her without paying her much attention.

It's almost quarter past midnight when he hands out the assignments, and he meets Catherine's eyes: Nick's not coming in tonight. Time to start thinking up excuses that management will buy, at least until they're able to get to the bottom of this.

Sara packs up and disappears with her call-in report clutched in one hand, and Catherine beats a strategic retreat when she notices the tactfully curious look on Warrick's face.

Gil watches her go and thinks, Sure, stick me with this why don't you. He schools his face into an impassivity he doesn't think Warrick is going to buy, and sets out towards the locker room.

"So," Warrick says conversationally, falling into step beside him. "Is Nick taking his vacation or something?"

"Or something," Gil says. He doesn't want to get into it, not now, not at the beginning of the shift when he can't possibly have any answers and he has too much work to do to allow himself the luxury of speculation.

"Is he sick again?"

"I'm - not sure."

"Man," Warrick says, "I hope it's nothing serious. I mean, he said it wasn't catching - but that doesn't mean much. Most serious things aren't catching, you know?"

Dammit. He does not need to spend the entire shift coming up with a list of all the things that Nick could be dying of at this very moment. Fuck. "I'm sure he's fine," he says, and knows it sounds stiff.

He catches a dubious look from Warrick, but the other man keeps his mouth shut until they're out of the hall and in the relative quiet of the locker room. "He's been acting a little strange lately, to tell you the truth," he says casually as he begins the process of extracting his kit from his locker, which is slightly too small to accommodate it gracefully.

Gil blinks at Warrick's shoulders. "Oh?" he says, hoping he sounds professionally disinterested. "Strange how?"

"You know," Warrick says, "little things. He was walking kind of funny a couple days ago, he can't seem to sit still anymore, it always seems like he's on the verge of - I don't know. Crying, I guess, but Nick doesn't cry. Not like that."

Of course not, Gil thinks, but he catalogues these new clues about Nick's mannerisms, because he's been making a few of those observations himself. Half-curled on the couch with a glass of wine, leaning against a counter with a chopping board in front of him. Little things that Gil's instincts insist are vital, are the key to the whole puzzle, if only he can find the right way to make them fit together.

And then he thinks of Greg, who somehow managed to cut through the misdirection with a disgusting ease, who homed in on the problem and cornered Nick and, what? Would Nick have tried to lie his way out of it, or would he have admitted it right off the bat? More likely, he thinks, Nick's reactions would have given him away. He's never been any good at deception.

"Hey Griss?'

"Hm?"

Warrick is standing in front of him, kit in hand and jacket tucked under one arm. His eyebrows are raised ever-so-slightly, Warrick's indulgent way of letting people know he's on to them. "We doing this thing, or what?"

"Yes," Gil says, and digs through his pocket for the keys. "I've got the address. You drive."

He knows that Warrick is probably starting his own list of strange Griss-isms, but he doesn't care. He absolutely wasn't going to think about Nick during the shift, and he already knows he's going to be next to useless all night.

Dammit.

***

Midnight comes and goes, and at some point Greg insists on coffee instead of more alcohol and they end up doing the dishes from dinner together with the second side of Nick's tape playing in the living room.

"I didn't know you could cook," Greg says, scouring a frying pan and handing it to Nick.

"My dad taught me to barbecue," Nick says, "and I picked up a few things here and there."

"Your mom never taught you?"

"Nope." He pulls the pan out of the sink and starts to dry it halfheartedly. "Men don't belong in the Stokes kitchen."

"That's too bad," Greg says. "My parents tried to get me to do everything - they said it was for my own good, but personally I think they just wanted a live-in maid. None of it really stuck."

"I should cook for you sometime," Nick says absently. He's stacking the clean dishes on the table, although the whole point of him drying while Greg washed was that he could put things away.

"I'd like that," Greg says. "Maybe we can double-date. Me and Lisa, you and Grissom - no, okay, scratch that." He shakes his head as though to dislodge an unhappy thought. "That would be too scary for words."

Nick takes the handful of cutlery Greg passes him. "He's not that bad."

"Ha," Greg says. "Maybe not if you're in love with him, but if you're just the dorky lab guy who talks too much and has emotionally-troubled hair, it's pretty daunting."

"Guess so," Nick says.

Greg looks at him. "Weren't you ever scared of him?" he asks. "I don't mean terrified of him, just - when you were new, didn't he intimidate you?"

Nick starts to blush. "Not really," he says. "I, uh, kinda crushed on him from the start."

Greg gapes at him. "You're kidding, right?"

"No."

"And you've waited this long to - hang on, you haven't been dating him in secret for years or something, have you?"

"No," Nick says, and lets the cutlery fall into a damp pile on the tablecloth. "Just three dates now. And two of them sucked."

"So you've been drooling over him since you first got here," Greg says, "and you waited until now to do something about it?"

Nick shrugs. "He was my boss," he says. "He was older than me, and sexier than me, and he was all over half the women in the lab anyway - why would I have said anything?"

There's a splashy pause. "So why now?"

"I guess... this is going to sound crazy."

"Try me," Greg says.

"I, uh - Nicky couldn't stand it any more."

He looks up to see Greg's lips moving around that sentence again. "O-kay," he says after a bit. "Nicky couldn't stand it but you - could?"

He sighs. "It's like - there's me, right? And I'm just me, I've always been me, whatever. But then there's this woman, too, and she - she really likes Gil. A lot. A lot a lot."

Greg is eyeing him thoughtfully. "So you and Nicky aren't, what - fully integrated?"

"I don't know," Nick says, and wishes he hadn't had quite so much to drink that he brought this up at all. "It's like - it's like she's always been there sort of, but she's getting louder and I just, I want to be her so much it hurts. I mean, I am her but - I want her to be me I guess, more than the other way around. I want - I am Nicky on the inside, but now I'm starting to be Nicky on the outside, too."

He looks hopefully at Greg, who seems to have gotten the gist of it, more or less. "That's got to be a headache and a half," he says after a moment of reflection.

"You have no idea," Nick says. "She, uh - she was really big on this cook-dinner-for-Gil thing, and then when we were - well anyway, he called me Nick at the wrong time and it just - it was like a bucket of ice water dumped on me. I was Nicky and I was really into it, and he - wasn't."

Greg looks like he doesn't want to contemplate the implications of that image, but he puts on a game face anyway. "He wasn't into it?" he asks with a game expression. "Like, not at all?"

"He was into it," Nick says clearly, "with Nick. Not Nicky. He - it felt like he was making out with a substitute me."

There's another pause, and then Greg says, "Shit. That sucks, Nicky."

He doesn't know why it feels so good to have someone else tell him that, to validate his wounded soul on this one point, but it does feel good and he's too drunk to chase the feeling down any further.

"Yeah," he says simply, and looks at the disorganised stacks of clean dishes and flatware on the table. "What were we looking for?" he asks.

"Huh?"

"There was a reason we did the dishes," Nick says. "I know there was."

Greg joins him next to the table. "Coffee, wasn't it?"

"Right." Nick lifts the coffee pot out of the center of the table and looks at it. "Do you, uh, still want some?"

"That's a tricky question," Greg says, "because there was only one time in my life that I turned down a coffee and that was because my doctor said no liquid for twelve hours."

"But?"

"Right now," Greg continues with some hesitation, "I'm not totally married to the idea."

"Me neither," Nick says. They continue to look balefully at the pot.

"At least," Greg says, "we got the dishes done. That's a good thing, right?"

"Yeah," Nick says, and finds himself yawning. "Shit."

"What?"

"It's, like, eleven in the morning my time," he says. "Why am I tired?"

"Because you got home from work this morning and started making dinner?" Greg hazards. "And you haven't hit the sheets yet?"

He thinks about it. "I haven't, have I?" he asks, watching Greg almost crack his jaw with a gaping yawn.

"Nope," Greg says. "And I was just getting to bed when Grissom called."

Nick turns to him and feels a rush of warmth in his chest. "I'm sorry," he says. "I dragged you out of bed, fuck. I'm so sorry-"

"Don't sweat it," Greg tells him. "That's what friends are for, right? To take the blame squarely when I fall asleep at work. That was a joke, Nicky."

He's moving his mouth with a stunned look on his face. "Work," he says eventually. "Holy shit, I forgot all about it-"

"Don't sweat that, either," Greg says. "If Grissom made you cry, he'll probably cut you some slack. Can I crash here?"

"What? Of course you can - I, uh, don't really have a guest room."

Greg shrugs. "I've slept on worse floors than yours," he says.

That little blossom of affection nags at Nick again. "No," he says, "I mean, my bed is big enough for two - if you don't mind, I mean-"

"You sure?"

"Yeah," Nick says. "I mean, only if you don't mind, though."

"Why would I mind?" Greg asks, then narrows his eyes suspiciously. "You don't kick in your sleep or something, do you?"

"No," Nick says, "I just meant with Nicky and everything..."

Greg blinks at him a couple of times. "Why would I - never mind. I'm too drunk to try to figure that out. Let's go to bed."

***

Nick finds an unused toothbrush in his bathroom and makes a clumsy attempt to clean the broken glass out of the sink, and while Greg is doing his thing he goes into the bedroom and tries to decide what he should wear to bed. He usually sleeps in his shorts, but with someone else in bed with him - someone who isn't Gil - he thinks he should cover up a bit more.

He settles for a pair of plaid flannel pjs his mother gave him about four years ago, and an old tee shirt. He hopes he doesn't seem like too much of a prude but he just - Nicky's been simmering close to the surface since dinner and she doesn't want to be the kind of girl who crawls into bed topless with just anyone.

Greg comes in and peels his shirt off, and when his hands are on his belt he thinks to look over at Nick. "Shorts okay?" he asks, eyeing Nick's ankle-to-neck coverage.

"Yeah," Nick says. "I just - you know. Nicky."

Greg blinks, then nods and half-smiles. "Got it," he says. "Just so you don't think I'm hitting on you."

"I don't," Nick says, and hikes his thumb at the bathroom. "I'll, uh, be right back."

He splashes water on his face and brushes his teeth hunched over the bathtub and avoids looking at the shattered mirror fragments all over his counter. He can't really remember doing it, but he remembers staring in shock at the blood and the broken shards and listening to his pulse pound through his ears. That had been Nicky, he thinks. Nicky who's aggressive, Nicky who started flirting with Gil and then tried to seduce him, and then put her fist through a piece of glass when things blew up under her.

Which is a little odd, because he's never really been aggressive, and he doesn't think Nicky is, either. She just - she's had enough of being invisible, of non-existence, and she's better at venting her frustrations than Nick is. Plain and simple. Maybe she's better-equipped to deal with the real world, he thinks. Maybe it's about time she got a shot at the big league.

He finishes up and plods back into the bedroom, where Greg is flopped across the bedspread, staring at the ceiling and singing to himself softly.

Nick stops in the doorway and looks at him for a moment, then feels a smile creep onto his face. "What is that?" he asks.

Greg lifts his head. "Guns 'n Roses," he says sheepishly, and rolls onto his feet at the foot of the bed. "I didn't know which side is yours."

"I like this side," Nick says.

"Cool," Greg says, and lifts the covers up at the other side. He slides in and his eyes close over a look of bliss. "Ohh... I think I'm in love with this bed," he declares and wriggles his head into a pillow.

Nick smiles again, and climbs under the sheet at his side. They lie side by side for a bit in silence, then he says, "Greg, thank you."

"For what?" Greg mumbles, already halfway to unconsciousness.

"Just - for being you, I guess. For being okay with this. With me."

Greg's eyes struggle to open and he looks at Nick. "How could I not be okay with it?" he asks. "I've always liked you, you know. You make me laugh. I'd do anything for you. ...well, almost anything," he corrects with a smirk. "Anything you'd be likely to ask of me."

"Well," Nick says, "anyway - thanks."

Greg continues to look at him for a bit, then with a great effort he rolls onto his side to face him. "I mean that," he says seriously. "I would. Do anything, I mean. You - I know you don't believe me right now, Nicky, but people love you. Everyone loves you. I love you."

Nick blinks away an almost-tear. "You don't have to say that, Greg," he says.

"Jesus," Greg says and rolls his eyes. "I love you, Nicky. I love a lot of people and you're one of them. Now shut up and go to sleep before I get violent."

Nick smiles, then rolls over to turn out the light. "Thanks anyway," he says when his back is turned.

There's a flurry of movement behind him, then he feels Greg pressed against him and an arm snakes its way around his waist. "Are you ever going to believe me when I say that?" he asks.

Nick swallows hard. It's been so long since he shared a bed with anyone, since he's had someone's arms around him in anything like this. "I don't know," he says, his eyes wide open in the darkness.

"Then I'll have to keep saying it," Greg yawns against his shoulder. "Is this okay?" he asks when he has his jaw muscles under control again. "I mean, I know most people don't snuggle like puppies but..." A shrug that feels apologetic. "You've got me all mushy."

Nick swallows again. "It's okay," he says, because somehow this is exactly what he needs and Greg - again - is doing it without needing to be asked.

"Cool," Greg says, and Nick can tell by the edges of his words that he's falling fast. "Night," he mumbles. "Love you."

Nick waits until he's pretty sure that Greg is asleep. "You too," he whispers into the silence of the room, then closes his eyes and reaches for sleep.

***

Thanks to Warrick's friendly speculation, by four in the morning Gil has quite an evolved list of calamities that Nick might be trying to hide. He thinks of cancer, he thinks of AIDS, he thinks of all the ways internal organs can fail slowly. Then he thinks of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and the rare but verified accounts of early-onset Alzheimer's. He thinks of his own brush with deafness and of his uncle's loss of sight, and then he thinks of the thousand ways a person can die without really dying.

His mind is everywhere but on the case, and finally just as he's packing up his kit in the disassembled living room, Warrick turns to him and says, "I get it. This is a test, right?"

What? He forces his mind back to the present, to the lingering smell of decomposition and the plaster dust heavy in the air. "Everything is a test," he says, because he has no idea what Warrick is talking about.

"I knew it," Warrick says, and pulls a new pair of gloves out of his pocket.

Gil watches in hedged bewilderment as he makes his way around the periphery of the room, tapping at each section of wall. He's half-muttering to himself, and the snatches where Gil can read his lips look like he's berating himself.

"Warrick?" Gil says.

"I know, I know," Warrick grumbles, "I should have done this earlier. Dammit."

Gil watches him make a circuit of the room, checking for the hollow spaces in the wall that sound less than hollow, and after he returns to his starting point, he looks balefully at the stairs.

"Upstairs too, huh?" he asks.

Gil gives him a tempered look that sends him muttering up the creaky stairs. "You could help," he grouses from the midway landing.

"I could," Gil agrees without moving. "Let me know what you find."

That at least gives him a few minutes to paw through the evidence he's collected, to see if he's missed anything major. The problem with bodies entombed in walls is that there usually isn't a lot of evidence left over by the time they're found: often a decade or more of living has gone on in the meantime, and obscured whatever traces might have been there to begin with. These are generally dogged-perseverance cases, or as Gil likes to think of them, cop cases. Let someone else do the digging to find out who lived here when, and who is now unaccounted for, and when did they disappear, and could that be the victim, and who had a beef with them back then...

But still. He double-checks the meager collection he has, and decides he's probably not missing anything crucial. Besides, the contractors have stopped working until the yellow tape comes down, so they can always come back later. Whatever evidence is left isn't going to be time-sensitive.

Eventually Warrick comes down the stairs again, shaking his head. "We can't be totally sure," he says, "obviously, unless we take down all the walls, but it seems clear."

"Good," Gil says authoritatively. "We can come back and dismantle later if we have to. Are we forgetting anything else?"

As Warrick wracks his brain for the right answer, Gil allows himself to relax a bit. Warrick is an excellent CSI, he thinks; and if I had missed anything, he would have caught it. Not that it's ever a good time to blank out at a scene, but if it had to happen, at least it happened while Warrick was there with him.

"...no?" Warrick eventually says, in a tone of voice that says this is probably a trick question.

"Okay," Gil says, and picks up his kit. "Let's take this back to the lab."

Warrick narrows his eyes, and Gil can't quite help himself. "Everything will still be here tomorrow," he points out, and goes out to the car.

He lets Warrick drive again, because his attention is in and out and he keeps coming up with new diseases, new conditions that Nick could be suffering through in silence. Parkinson's disease, he thinks. ALS.

The list is depressingly long.

***

Nicky opens her eyes in something like panic, because it's dark and that means she should be at work and not lounging around in bed. And certainly not with - who is that, anyway?

She tries to look over her shoulder but the action is hampered by someone's arm, and she reaches out to the bedside table to shed some light on the situation. Even though she steels herself for the sudden brightness, it makes her wince, and it takes a moment for her to pry her eyes open and look.

That has to be Greg, she thinks when she sees the hair. She lifts up a corner of the blanket and verifies the face underneath the hair. When the light sneaks in under the covers, Greg flinches away from it even in his sleep, and disentangles himself sluggishly from her and rolls away to the far side of the bed.

Nicky sits up and looks at his back and shoulders, and some of the previous night - and day, fuck, what a disaster - filter through to her. She remembers wine with Gil, and almost having sex; and then she remembers scotch with Greg and a rush of stilted confessions; and then she remembers feeling pleasantly hammered and crawling into bed.

She remembers Greg telling her that he loved her, and the way it felt to sleep with someone else wrapped around her.

She turns out the light and follows Greg across the mattress, settling her head against his spine and letting the sounds of him breathing lull her back into sleep. She has never felt so blessed with friendship as she does right now.

***

For the first time in a long time, Gil is the first of his shift to leave the building. He's used to beating Sara out the door, but Catherine and Warrick are usually gone long before he is.

Of course, Warrick is in the lab double-checking everything they did all night because he still thinks that Gil is deliberately leaving something for him to find, as proof that he can do the job or something, but Gil can't quite bring himself to feel bad about that. He knows the guilt will come later, when he sees how tired Warrick is tomorrow, but for now he'll take his increased vigilance as a sign that he can afford to leave on time, and he's out of his office by two minutes past eight.

Catherine falls into step with him on the way to the lobby. "You're in an awful hurry," she says.

He looks at her, sees the folder she's carrying. "Do you need me?" he asks, trying to remember the particulars of her case and only able to recall that it was a young man in a hotel. Or was it an old woman?

"It's not pressing," she says slowly. "Why? Where are you going?"

He holds out the ring of supervisor keys. "I'm worried about Nick," he says.

"Nicky," she corrects automatically, then says, "I thought Greg was with him."

"He was," Gil says, "last night. But that's not what I'm worried about."

Although now he is. What if Greg isn't still there? What if he left at some point, gone back to his own life? But no, he thinks; he saw the look of serious understanding on his face when Gil had mentioned the possibility of suicide. Greg will still be there.

"What is it?" Catherine asks, narrowing her eyes.

"I don't know," Gil says, "just a bad feeling." They reach the lobby, and he stops. "Do you need me to stay?" he offers. He may have been entirely useless tonight, but he can make himself stay a while longer if she needs him.

"No," she says, "I'll handle it. Go check on Nicky. Call me if - if anything. Just call me."

"I will."

***

He isn't entirely sure what to make of what he sees: Nick is sprawled on his back in the centre of the mattress, his arms flung out to the sides, his jaw slack with sleep. And draped over his torso is Greg, snoring softly into his sternum.

Gil feels a spike of jealousy slice through him, a streak of possessiveness he wouldn't have credited himself with having. It passes fairly quickly, though, because something about the tableau is indefinably non-sexual. He watches them, trying to put his finger on it. Partly it's that Nick is fully clothed, partly it's that there's something very child-like about the way they're sleeping, some elusive innocence that he can't pin down. Then it hits him: the room smells of sleep. Sleep and alcohol, and that's it.

No sex. No lingering muskiness, none of that pheromonal intoxicant he had caught earlier, when Nick had crawled into his lap and tried to map his tonsils. No heady rush of sated need, no lingering trace of two bodies pushed to the edge and then over.

This is just two men sharing a bed, snuggled against each other in an act of youthful affection. Drunken youthful affection, no doubt, and Gil finds himself wondering if they're going to be awkward about it when they wake up. He hopes they won't.

Now that his jealousy has been abated, he just feels a desperate sense of outsideness, of looking in on something that he can't touch for some intractable reason. Nick looks - content, almost, in a way that Gil would not have thought possible a few hours ago. Maybe this is exactly what he needs right now, this uncomplicated friendship. Maybe Gil should just go home and leave them to it.

He's about to take that thought into the hallway and down the stairs and out into the heat of the morning, when Nick starts to stir, and with him, Greg. Gil stays where he is, unsure of what would be more damning: to be caught staring, or to be caught in mid-retreat.

It's interesting to watch them move together, the way that Nick pushes lethargically at Greg, who slopes off him onto the mattress and begins to inch away from him. The way that Nick rolls after him and follows him across the width of the bed, and they settle in a new configuration: Greg curled at the far edge of the mattress and Nick spooned up behind him.

Gil waits until he's fairly confident that they're not about to open their eyes and catch the look of longing he's wearing before he makes his way to the bedroom door.

It would have been a flawless escape if it weren't for Greg's jeans on the floor in the way, or for the keys and coins in the pocket that Gil ends up kicking. It's not a loud sound by any objective measure, but in the expansive silence of the room it sounds like thunder.

Gil flinches and turns back to the bed, to find Greg's head raised and his eyes open just enough to take in Gil, halfway to the door.

They look at each other in silence for a bit, then the fuzziness of Greg's expression clears up and he sits up carefully, displacing Nick's arm with a gentleness that surprises Gil more than it should.

Greg nods his chin at the door and Gil steps out into the hall. Part of him wants to leave now before they have whatever conversation Greg thinks they should have, but the rest of him - the part that needs to know what's going on in Nick's life, the same part that can still hear Catherine's firm advice in his ear - decides to stay. To find out, once and for all.

There's another jangle of metal on metal, and a moment later Greg comes out of the bedroom in mid-zip. His shirt is clenched between his jaw and his chest, and he almost walks into Gil where he's standing at the head of the stairs.

Gil knows in the instant that Greg draws up short and glances at him, letting his shirt fall to the floor, that Greg is not only hung over, he's also still a little bit drunk, which is a combination that Gil has only seen once before in his life.

"It's not what it looks like," Greg mumbles, crouching down to snag his shirt and working his arms into the right holes.

"I know," Gil says.

Greg glances at him with a sharply inquisitive look, but whatever he's going to say never makes it to his lips because a moment of nausea creeps over him. It only lasts a second, and then Gil watches colour slowly return to the sleepy lines of his face.

"You know what?" Greg says. "I need about a gallon of water." He pushes past Gil and heads for the stairs.

Gil pokes his head into the bedroom again and verifies that Nick is still asleep, curled around nothing now but still peaceful in his rest, and then he pulls the door shut and makes his way downstairs.

Greg is leaning against the counter in the kitchen when he gets there. He's draining the dregs from a glass of water, and he turns and refills it from the running faucet. Gil stops in the doorway and watches him empty the second glass as well, and turn the tap off when the glass is filled again.

They face each other off for a moment, then Greg lowers himself into a chair and pushes his head into his hands. It's not a gesture of defeat, or of shame or of some other emotional minefield that Gil is getting used to encountering in this house. This is the head-cradled posture of someone with an ungodly headache, and Gil feels a little twinge of sympathy. It's been a long time since he drunk himself into this kind of misery, but he's certainly no stranger to migraines.

He pulls out a chair across from Greg and sits down, moving a haphazard stack of clean plates out of the way. "I'd ask how you're feeling," he says, "but I think that's self-evident."

Greg lifts his head enough to prop his elbows on the edge of the table, then he returns his hands to his temples and looks dolefully the length of the table. "What time is it?"

"Eight-thirty," Gil says, "give or take."

"Huh." Greg reaches for his glass of water and chugs half of it. "Feels more like six."

Gil watches his finger massage at the roots of his hair. "What time did you get to sleep?" he asks.

"Three?" Greg says uncertainly. "Four? I don't know. I don't remember."

Gil gives him another few seconds to get his headache under control, then he clears his throat as quietly as he can and says, "So what's going on?"

"We talked," Greg reports dutifully, "and we drank, and we talked and we did the dishes and we drank, and at some point we went to bed."

"That's not what I meant."

"I know." Greg pulls himself up straighter and tries to make it look like he's not half-dead. "I just - this is Nicky's thing, and I can't spill his beans. You know?"

"Greg-"

"Look," he says with a sudden confidence, "I know that you're worried. About Nicky. And that's good - that's what he needs, he needs to know that someone besides me cares enough to lose sleep."

That's an interesting statement, Gil thinks. "Everyone cares about him," he says, trying not to sound too defensive.

"I know that," Greg says, "and you know that, but Nicky doesn't know that."

"Why?" Gil asks. "What's going on?"

The weighted look of consideration that Greg gives him lasts a few seconds, and Gil gets the distinct impression that the conversation is about to delve into territory that neither of them wants to dredge through.

"I'm only asking this," Greg says by way of disclaimer, "because I have to. Because it's the key to the whole thing, okay? This is what it boils down to. That doesn't mean I want details. Right?"

Gil nods once, a slight drop of his chin coupled with a grim look on his face.

Greg sighs and rubs at his eyes. "Is this thing for real?"

There's a pause. "Which thing?" Gil asks carefully.

"This thing with Nicky," Greg says, his fingers still pressed against his eye sockets. "With both of you. Is it for real, or is it casual?"

He's tempted not to answer, because he's never been comfortable discussing his relationships with anyone let alone a subordinate, and the bottom line is that it's none of Greg's business. Except for the part where maybe it is, because one way or another Greg has become part of this mess, part of Nick's crisis, and if that means that he's in the loop, then so be it.

"It's real," he says at length. "To me, anyway. I don't do casual."

"Good," Greg says, and reaches for his water again. Two big swallows and it's empty, and he stares down into the depths of the glass darkly.

Gil sighs, takes the glass from Greg's hands and brings it to the sink. He fills it and hands it back, and takes the opportunity to stand over him with his arms crossed. "So?" he says. "Was that the right answer?"

"Yes."

There's a beat. "Do I get a prize?" he asks, dryly but not actually rudely.

"See," Greg says looking up at him with a trace of nervousness around his eyes and his mouth, "the thing is, I still can't tell you."

He clenches his hands into fists where they're out of sight, and breathes in and out evenly five times before he trusts himself to speak. "Do you know," he says, "that Catherine told me, and I quote, to beat you into submission to find out what's going on?"

A brief battle between fear and hungover unhappiness works its way across Greg's face. The hangover wins. "That's so sweet," he says, and looks back at the table.

Gil takes a sharp breath. "Greg," he begins.

Greg pushes himself to his feet. "Make some coffee," he suggests. "I'll go see if I can get Nicky to come down and talk to you." He drains the glass again, pushes it into Gil's hands, and walks out of the kitchen without looking back.

***

"Nicky. Nick-eeeee...."

Someone is shaking her shoulder and she tries to ignore it, to roll away from it. She reaches towards where Greg should be but isn't, and some part of her registers that the voice she's hearing is Greg's.

She opens her eyes and regrets it. Greg is kneeling on the edge of the bed, leaning over her, one hand on her shoulder and the other braced on the mattress beside her. "What?" she asks, and regrets making noise, too.

"You've got to get up," Greg says, his eyes full of sympathy.

"Why?" she asks. "Is the house on fire?"

"No," he says, "but get up anyway."

"Go away," she says pleasantly, and flops over onto her stomach, burying her head under a pillow.

The hand shaking her starts up again. "Nicky, you have to get up."

"Why?" she whines from her hiding place. It's nice and dark under here, she thinks, enjoying that aspect above all others.

"Because Grissom is downstairs."

She freezes for a moment, then pulls her head back into daylight with some reluctance. "What?" she asks.

Greg drops from his knees to sit beside her. "He's downstairs, waiting for you."

"I - what? Why? He's just - oh fuck." She lurches up and Greg, in a moment of stunning clairvoyancy, propels her forward and they make it into the bathroom before she throws up. Fuck. She vows to never drink again, ever, not as long as she lives.

Greg hands her a damp facecloth from somewhere, and she sits back at the toilet and peers up at him.

"Why?" she asks.

"He wants to know what's going on."

"Ha," she says. "I bet he does." She makes eyes at him. "Could you just - make him go away?"

"No," Greg says. "For one thing, he'd kill me and they'd probably never find the body. For another, he's serious about it. He's really worried about you, and that worry is starting to turn into anger."

"Great," Nicky says and closes her eyes. "Just what I need when I've got a five-star hangover: an angry Grissom prowling in my kitchen."

"For what it's worth," Greg says, "I don't think he's mad at you."

She humphs.

There's a longish silence, and Nicky knows that Greg is watching her, assessing her non-movement and the look of nauseated misery she knows she's radiating.

He says, "He's serious about you."

She cracks one eye open. "How do you know?"

"I asked him," he says simply.

Her other eye opens of its own accord. "You what?"

"Yeah," Greg says with a grin, "that's about as well as it went down, too. Look: he's downstairs, he's worried, he's angry, he's serious about you - Nicky, he's not going anywhere."

"Not yet," she says gloomily. "Just give him a minute or two."

Greg sighs, and looks at her evenly for a long time, before saying, "This is it, Nicky. This is - don't ask me how, but this a now-or-never time. I know you feel like shit, because I feel like shit and you drank more than me, but just - trust me. Speak now, or forever hold your peace."

"Holding my peace doesn't sound too bad," she says.

He glowers at her. "Nicky. You love him. He loves you. But his patience is eventually going to wear thin, and you do not want to wait for that to happen. You want to have another date that ends up like yesterday?"

She winces at the memory.

"So get your ass downstairs," Greg tells her, "and talk to him. He's not going to bite."

"It's not getting bit that worries me," she says.

He sighs. "He's not going to walk away from you, either," he says gently, and touches her hair in such a loving way it makes her breath catch.

"You're not leaving," she asks suddenly, "are you?"

He looks at her for another long moment. "No," he says finally. "I can't drive like this, not if I want to make it home. I'm going back to bed."

"You said - you said you loved me."

"I do," Greg says. "So does Grissom. That's why you have to go talk to him."

She doesn't want to cry, but how can she not? She wipes at her face with the cool cloth she's holding. "I don't want to," she says.

"You do," he counters, and slides from the edge of the bathtub to the floor, to sit facing her, their knees touching in the middle. "I know you do, you said so. You're just scared, but that's okay. This is scary. But - he's safe, Nicky. I wouldn't be sitting here, freezing my ass off on this fucking cold floor if I didn't think this was right."

She feels warm tears spill down her cheeks. "What if you're wrong?" she asks.

"I'm not," he says.

"But what if you are?"

He sighs. "Then you come upstairs and you kill me with your bare hands," he says. "You know where I'll be. If - and I say if because I know it won't - if it blows up, Nicky, I'll fix it. I'll find a way. I promise."

She closes her eyes.

One of his hands finds hers, and squeezes. "I know," he says carefully, "that I said you didn't have to do this alone, and you don't. But some of it you have to do by yourself."

She brings her free hand up to her face and tries to hide behind it.

"But that's not the same as doing it alone," Greg continues, "because I'll be there. Not, you know, standing next to you, but - you're not alone. Here." His hand disappears from hers and there's a lot of activity across from her, and she opens her eyes to find him peeling off his shirt.

He hands it to her. "Wear this," he says. "It's a Greg-by-proxy. Or like a hug that you can wear a sweater over." He grins, a thin wavering smile that seems to reach into her heart and pat it reassuringly. "I promise," he says again, "it'll be okay. I'll be here, remember?"

***

She changes into Greg's shirt and pulls her bathrobe on over top, and Greg gives her a rib-crushing hug and nudges her into motion.

"Just get it over with," he whispers in her ear, his arms loose around her stomach and his chin resting on her shoulder as she eyes the flight of stairs dubiously.

"Or not," she whispers back.

"You'll feel a thousand times better when he knows," he says, and walks her towards the banister. "And I promise I won't eavesdrop, but if you need me to come and punch him in the nose or something, just holler."

She quirks a small smile at that, and he propels her forward at exactly the right moment so she has to concentrate on not falling downstairs and forgets to be terrified about what's waiting for her at the bottom. She glances back to find Greg has barricaded the top step with his body, and his eyes are urging her on.

She sighs, and takes another step, and then another, and then another. She wishes it didn't feel quite so much like walking towards a firing squad.

At the halfway point she smells coffee, and her stomach takes up the gentle cheering squad that so far has been Greg's domain. She makes it down the rest of the stairs and comes into the living room-

Where Gil is sitting on the couch in same place as yesterday, only instead of the book about the rainforest, he's flipping through Our Bodies, Our Selves. Nicky stares for a horror-stricken moment of deja vu, and disappears.

Leaving Nick to deal with the panic, which he knows he's not very good at.

Gil looks up then and sees him and sets the book aside, next to the photos and the pathetic corsage that Nick belatedly remembers he never put away last night.

At least, Nick thinks as he fights down a sick feeling of naked fear, Gil's not trying to be cheerful about this. He stands up and takes a couple steps forward, stopping abruptly and probably noticing the terror in Nick's eyes for the first time.

They stare at each other and Nick has to remind himself to breathe.

"I want to say that it's going to be okay," Gil says hesitantly after a few seconds, "but I don't really know that, so maybe I won't. But there is coffee, if you want any."

He nods quickly, and tugs his yellow robe around himself a little tighter. It's not that he's afraid Gil will recognise Greg's shirt - well, not entirely - but the action pulls him out of his state of shock, and allows him to take a few halting steps into the room.

He drops into a chair while Gil is busy with the pot of coffee, and when he takes the proffered cup it's more so he has something to do with his hands than so he can drink it. His stomach is still roiling at him, torn between the allure of coffee and the twist of fear.

Gil retreats to the couch, to what he probably thinks is a safe distance, but doesn't lean back. He stays forward, his elbows angled on his knees and his fingertips steepled in front of him. He lets the silence stretch for a long time, but when Nick makes it abundantly clear that he's not going to start talking any time soon, Gil says, "Nicky, please talk to me."

"I don't-" he says before he chokes, and he swallows and tries again. "I don't know how."

"Try," Gil says, "please tell me what's going on, why it's so important to you to be called Nicky, why you're destroying yourself like this. I don't - I want to help you, but I don't know how. Is it - are you sick? Are you terminally ill and this is, I don't know, some kind of coping mechanism?"

Dying? Nick wonders about that. Maybe some part of him is, but that's not what Gil is asking. He shakes his head. "No," he says, and his voice is choking again and his eyes are tearing up. Again. He sets his coffee cup, untouched, on a nearby table and braces himself as best he can for what is sure to be unpleasant.

"Then what, Nicky?" Gil asks. "I don't want to lose you to this, whatever it is, but - that's what's happening. It's like you're getting farther and farther away from me and - and I don't know how to get you back."

Nick blinks back real tears this time. "Maybe it's better," he hears himself say, "if you just let me drift away."

"No," Gil says, and he says it with enough force to surprise Nick. "I'm not going to do that. Nicky, please - tell me what's going on."

He wants to. All of a sudden he has an overwhelming need to pour his heart out to him, to bring an end of sorts to the pain that he can see in Gil's eyes. He wants to, and he doesn't know how.

"I'm-" he begins, and loses his voice. He tries again. "I'm a-"

Fuck. He can't do it.

"You're a what, Nicky?" Gil says, leaning impossibly forward even more, straining almost out of the sofa altogether. "Tell me."

"I just-" He hiccups into a sob, and pushes his face into his hands. He thinks of what Greg said upstairs, that this is a now-or-never moment and it's probably the last he'll get.

"I'm a woman," he says in a rush, and lets his body give into the tremor that snakes through him.

There's a long silence, and Nick can't bring himself to look at Gil. He can imagine what's going on, how he's reacting to this, but right now he needs to concentrate on things like breathing and unclenching his fists from his hair, before he tears out a handful.

Then Gil says, "What?" It's not inflected towards malice or disgust, just bewilderment. "I don't - Nicky, tell me - I don't know what that means."

He regains some kind of control over his lungs, because he manages to suck in a breath of air and from there he can force his hands down to the arms of his chair and make his eyes open. Gil is distorted through the tears but he can make him out anyway, puzzled and desperate to understand.

"This isn't me," Nick says with a fury he isn't expecting. "This person, this body - it's not me. I'm a woman. I don't know what this is but it's not me."

He's pretty proud of himself for holding Gil's gaze and not hiding behind his hands again, or for not going back upstairs to hide under the covers. He thinks of how lucky he was to avoid this conversation entirely with Greg, what a precious gift his understanding was.

He sees Gil fit the missing piece into the puzzle and take a deep breath. He slides back into the cushions a bit, leans back enough to communicate his surprise, and says, "Tell me everything, Nicky."

That line is delivered neutrally, so evenly that Nick almost wishes he really were angry. Anger he could deal with, a tirade of misplaced morality he could handle better than he can this, this non-response.

Nick pushes back into the chair and says, "I've always been this way, Gil. Always been a fucking freak, always felt wrong, like I was wearing someone else's clothes. Okay? Happy? My whole life has been wrong and now I can't deal with it anymore."

Gil's face is still schooled into impassivity, but there's a flicker of something in his eyes that Nick almost misses because of his tears. He wipes at them furiously, knows that he's close to provoking some kind of response from Gil and damned if he's not going to be able to see it when it happens.

"I can't be Nick anymore, okay?" he snarls, but the admission doesn't fire him up like he thought it would. Instead it saps him, leaches out his angry energy and leaves him feeling deflated.

"I just can't," he says again, and it comes out sounding like a plea for leniency. "It hurts, Gil, it actually hurts to keep trying. To go through the motions and have everyone see the wrong person - I can't do it. It hurts too much. They see this person, this body, this man and it's not me and it's tearing me in two, Gil, do you understand? I love you but I can't be Nick for you. It's not who I am and I really need to be me, I need to be Nicky in such a strong way that I don't think I can even put it into words, Gil. I want to but I don't know how."

He stops to wipe his face again, and to take a gulp of air because his lungs are burning, and he chokes back another sob. "I have to do this," he continues, "because it's getting to the point where I can't just keep going on, I've been doing that my whole life and it's killing me, I can't face the thought of another year of this shit never mind another decade - and if I don't... fuck. I don't want to - kill myself, Gil, but it'll come to that if I don't stop it now, if I don't start being honest about this. I just - I know that if I push it away any more it's going to get bad, and I'm not going to be able to stop myself from doing something stupid. So I have to stop myself now while I can, while there's still some part of myself that I like - I have to act before it's too late, I have to become Nicky on the outside like I'm already Nicky on the inside."

Gil is moving, he's up out of the sofa and moving towards him but fuck, he still can't really see what's going on because of his goddamn tears and this isn't exactly how it's supposed to go, is it?

"I love you, Gil," he says randomly as the blurry shape of Gil gets closer, "I always have and I don't want you to hate me because of this, it's just something that I have to do-"

He gets no further in his pleading because Gil reaches him then, and grabs his shoulders and pulls him forwards into a fierce embrace. Warm hands find their way onto the back of his neck and hold him close, tight against Gil's stomach where he's standing before him.

"Oh, Nicky," Gil says, and maybe Nick isn't hearing quite right but it sounds an awful lot like Gil's voice is broken, too.

A hand creeps up into Nick's hair and strokes along the curve of his skull, front to back and down his neck again, a mindless rhythm that doesn't soothe so much as compel as another wave of tears crashes against Nick's body. He wraps both arms around Gil's midsection and clings.

"Nicky," Gil whispers again and again and holds onto him through the worst of it, through the shaking and the coughing and the sobbing and the wracking gasps for air.

***

Eventually she pulls herself together enough to register her burning shame, and she untangles himself from the comfort of Gil's arms and brings her hands up to her face. Bad enough that Gil knows now, she thinks; worse that he had to witness this total meltdown.

Gil is kneeling in front of her, in the space between her knees where they extend out from the chair, and Nicky feels his hands come up to her wrists. "Don't hide, Nicky," he says, his voice still raw. "Please, don't hide like this."

"Why not?" she asks into the muffling wall of fingers. One of her hands is pried away, and then the other, and there's nowhere to cower but behind her eyelids.

"I'm not - did you think I would be angry?" Gil asks softly. "Did you think I would reject you because of this? Oh, Nicky... I'm so, so sorry."

"Not your fault," she manages to get out. "It's my fault, fuck I'm sorry I keep messing up-"

"Nicky," Gil says, pushing into her apology, "it's not your fault, it's nobody's fault, I'm just sorry I didn't know this sooner, I would have-"

"What?" Nicky asks, and gets her eyes open again. Gil is alarmingly close to her, and Nicky is uncharitably gratified to see wet tracks down his face, too. "You would have done what, exactly?"

Gil pauses. "I don't know," he admits, "but I would have been more - careful."

Oh, there's a romantic word, Nicky thinks. "Careful," she says. "Terrific."

"Nicky, I - give me a little time to adjust to this, okay? I don't know what to say, it's going to take me a bit to figure it out."

"Yeah," Nicky says and hopes she doesn't sound too bitter. She wipes at her eyes with her thumbs and tries to push Gil away enough to stand up.

Gil rises to his feet and steps back for her, but once she's standing he lets his hands settle at her waist. "I'm not done with you," he says kindly, leaning in to touch his forehead to Nicky's. "I don't want you to think that - that it's over. It's not. I just... I need to think about it, that's all."

Nicky nods, extracts herself gracelessly. "I understand," she says, because really, this is the best she could have hoped for, right? For Gil to not hate her on the spot, and maybe to break things off gently.

"Nicky." Gil catches her elbow as she tries to squeeze past. "I can't walk away from you, Nicky: you stole my heart a long time ago and I can't imagine any other way of living. I mean it, I'm not - I'm not leaving. I'm just - going. For a bit then I'll be back."

He tries to kiss her, but Nicky turns her head away and endures the touch of Gil's lips to her face.

"So go," she says.

She's pulled into another hug, and though she wants to she can't quite stop himself from leaning into the touch. "Don't worry about work tonight, Nicky," Gil says. "Take whatever time you need, and tell Greg to stay here with you. Okay? I don't want you to be alone. I'll come back tomorrow morning and by then I'll know what's going on."

Nicky closes her eyes and presses her face against the angle of Gil's neck. This is the place she's always wanted to be, the only place she's ever felt like she really belonged - and she's about to lose it. She feels new tears spring up behind her clenched eyes and spill against Gil's skin.

"Nicky," Gil says softly, pulling her in tight. "I love you. I'm not going to stop loving you because of this."

She wants to believe that... She lets her arms come up around Gil's back.

"I can't think of anything that you could do that would make me stop loving you," Gil continues, "but I need to think about this. I still don't understand it, I only know that it's hurting you and I want to make it stop. I'm not leaving you, I couldn't even if I wanted to. But you need to sleep and I need to think, and I promise I'll be back tomorrow."

Nicky feels Gil's facial muscles move and she suspects there's a smile above her somewhere.

"Someone has to show up for work tonight," Gil says lightly, and squeezes her. "And I need to eat and sleep and shower and do some research before then."

Nicky feels a reluctant smile tug at her own face. "Research?" she asks.

"I'm a scientist," Gil says and kisses the side of her head. "Research is my default mode. I promise you, Nicky: you're not going to lose me."

Nicky thinks of how nice it would be if that were true, and fixes what she hopes is a brave expression on her face. "Okay," she says.

He studies her critically. "I mean it," he repeats solemnly. "You're not going to lose me."

She lets herself be pulled into his arms again.

***

Gil takes Nicky upstairs and helps him shrug off the robe, and by this time Greg is awake again and he watches them warily from the far side of the bed.

"Everything okay?" he asks carefully.

Nicky shrugs and crawls under the covers, his back angled towards Gil. Gil sighs, and sits on the edge of the mattress. He wishes he could soothe away all of his ills with one word, but he doesn't have that word. Not yet, anyway; he doesn't even really know where to start looking for it. But it's a challenge, that's all - a Nicky-shaped challenge, and he's always loved challenges.

Greg props himself up on one elbow and looks from Nicky to Gil and back again. "Is this the part where I make a tactical retreat?" he asks.

"No," Gil says, and lets his hand settle on Nicky's shoulder. "I'd like you to stay here for a while, Greg," he says.

Greg blinks, and nods. "Okay."

"I'm coming back tomorrow morning," he says, "after work. I would consider it a personal favour if you were still here then."

Greg catches his eye and arches an eyebrow. "Sure," he says after a pause. "Maybe you could put in a word with my boss...?"

Gil allows himself a smile, and traces out a small circle on Nicky's shoulder. Another word he needs, he realises, is something to tell Greg how grateful he is for - well, for everything. Another word he doesn't have, not yet. He lets his eyes settle on the shell of Nicky's ear. "I'll see you soon, okay?" he says.

Nicky humphs and tries to roll away from his touch. Gil lets him go, and sits watching him for a second or so before standing up.

"I'll see you two later, then," he says.

Greg sits up. "Gotta hit the john," he says to Nicky, and follows Gil out into the hallway.

They stand facing each other again, and for a moment Gil isn't sure if he feels better or worse than he did an hour ago, the last time they faced off like this. Then he thinks, Nicky is safe and healthy, and the rest is peripheral. Of course this is better.

Greg stands with his arms crossed on his naked chest. "Are you okay?" he asks, eyeing Gil thoughtfully.

He smiles. "I'm fine," he says, knowing full well that he's been crying and it shows. "Just - keep Nicky safe, okay?"

"I will," Greg says. "Are you all right to drive?"

"Yes. Go back to bed, Greg. I'll let myself out." He smiles at him, then turns away and heads down the stairs.

It's not the hardest thing he's done in his life, but it's pretty close. The better part of him wants to kick Greg out the front door and crawl into bed with Nicky and hold him until he was centered again, but the smaller, much saner part of him knows that it would be a mistake. They both need a little breathing room, and he really does need to get his feet under him on this.

Research isn't just a defence mechanism. It's the core of existence, the drive to understand. That he's in love with his subject is... not irrelevant, certainly; but it's distinct. Separate and apart. It just means he's going to have to be that much more thorough once he gets started.

***

Gil doesn't get a lot of sleep that afternoon, but he still feels fairly rested when he gets up at sunset. It's strange how not-unbalanced he is upon waking about Nicky's confession, and that alone is probably the most unnerving part of the situation.

It's not that Nicky has ever been effeminate, and it's not that Gil equates empathy with femininity; but something about Nicky must have lodged itself subconsciously in Gil's mind, because Nicky-as-woman is not the Earth-shattering revelation that it should, by all rights, be.

Which is - odd. Odd but maybe... not so unspeakably odd after all. A lot of little things are falling into place, like he knew they would; although not, he admits, in this particular configuration. His instinctive comparison of Nicky with Sara and Catherine, and the impossible-to-pin-down way he's been holding himself lately, walking and sitting and -

And everything. In a way, he feels stupid not to have put it together earlier. He wonders again what Greg saw that he didn't, what in his personality enabled him to make the cognitive leap. What Gil himself is lacking.

So he makes an omelette and eats it in his office upstairs, scrolling through pages of websites for anything that looks authentic and useful. He browses a couple of academic sites, a handful of medical ones, and spends the rest of his evening reading on-line diaries and first-person accounts of transition. He gets sidetracked into a discussion forum on drugs and hormone therapies, and when he brings his dishes back to the kitchen he looks at the clock and almost drops his plate.

He lost almost four hours sitting in front of his computer, he realises. He leaves his dishes in the sink to be dealt with later, showers and dresses quickly and arrives at work at two minutes to midnight.

Catherine is loitering conspicuously outside his office, and straightens up when she sees him coming down the hall. "You decided to show," she says brightly.

"Of course I did," he says, and looks at his watch. "I'm not technically late yet, you know."

She watches him pull the call-ins from his inbox, and stops him before he gets back out the door. "You going to tell me?" she asks.

He blinks at her. "Nicky's going to be all right," he says, "I hope."

"Is he coming in?"

"Tonight? No." He tries to step around her but she blocks him. He sighs. "It's - it's complicated, Catherine, but I think maybe we don't need to worry about it so much."

"About what?" she asks.

"This - thing."

She narrows her eyes. "Which 'thing' is that?" she asks.

He sighs. "When he's ready for you to know," he says, "he'll tell you."

Her eyes are so narrow they're almost closed at this point, and her lips are pursed and her hands are on her hips. "You seem awfully chipper about it," she accuses eventually, "whatever 'it' is."

He shrugs. "I don't feel so helpless anymore," he says.

"You want to share your secret?"

"No." He holds up the call-ins. "They're waiting on us," he says.

***

There are three cases on the go that night, and Gil gives one to each of them.

"What about you?" Sara asks, arching an eyebrow.

"I've got paperwork waiting for me," he says, "and some research to look into. Page me if you need a consult." In other words, leave me alone.

He watches them leave, and he refuses to be intimidated by the evil eye that Catherine is giving him. Once they've scattered, he settles in at his desk with his computer on and a random selection of forms spread out in front of him. He feels vaguely like he's back in high school again, with The Merchant of Venice open in front of him, and Scientific American propped up in his lap. It's not an altogether bad feeling.

***

The third time that Nick clobbers Greg at Tekken, Greg throws his controller across the living room and declares a truce.

"That's an interesting word for it," Nick grouses, and goes to untangle the cables from the fronds of his spider plant.

"What," Greg asks, getting up and stretching, "truce?"

"I think 'surrender' is somewhat more fitting, under the circumstances."

The sofa cushion that Greg lobs bounces harmlessly off the back of Nick's head. "Got any more ice cream?" he asks, wandering into the kitchen.

Nick grins where he knows Greg can't see him.

It's been an interesting day; they'd slept until about four in the afternoon, when Greg had dragged them out on a ridiculous hike through the suburbs that had ended in a gluttonous frenzy at the Dairy Queen about a mile from Nick's place. It's been easy since they got up, and he's been drifting in and out of Nicky for hours.

It was Nick who had dared Greg to climb the tree in the park but Nicky who had scrambled up after him; Nicky who had hauled Greg into the video store but Nick who had made them stop for food on the way back. Nicky had won the first two rounds on the X-box, but Nick has taken the last.

He's not entirely sure how he feels about that overlap, but he's having a good day for the first time in a long time - a good day that does not revolve around finding out who killed some poor kid who never did anything wrong - and that's got to count for something, right?

Greg wanders in again with a pint of ice cream in his hand and a spoon hanging out of his mouth.

"You're going to puke your guts up," Nick tells him, crawling back to their pile of pillows in front of the tv. "You know that, right?"

"You may be officially home sick," Greg says, tossing another spoon at Nick, "but I'm playing hooky, and damned if I'm not going to make the most of it."

Nick retrieves the spoon from under the coffee table, and waits for Greg to sit next to him again before inspecting the ice cream. "Is it really hooky if you have permission?" he asks. He eyes the bite-sized ribbon of ice cream he's scooped out and wonders how much sugar he can consume in one day without going into diabetic shock.

"This is my Ferris Bueler's Day Off," Greg says around the spoon in his mouth, "so don't spoil it for me."

Nick laughs. "Greg Sanders' Night Off, don't you mean?" he says.

"So it's geek-style," Greg concedes, and leans back against the couch. "But we did leave the house and we saw the sun for a couple of hours, so that's something, right?"

Nick sticks his spoon in his mouth and regrets it almost instantly. "I guess so," he says, and considers the ice cream tub again.

Greg watches him. "Rounding out our face, are we?" he asks pleasantly.

Nick elbows him in the stomach and snatches the ice cream from him. "You're eating more than I am," he points out.

"I have a curiously fast metabolism," Greg replies serenely.

Spoon in mouth, Nick hands the ice cream back to Greg and leans back. "I feel sick," he says.

Greg cackles. "Good," he says. "It's karmic retribution for humiliating me at my own game. How are you doing?" He's not talking about the ice cream.

Nick thinks about the question. "Okay," he says, and looks at Greg in something like wonder. He doesn't know what he's done to deserve a friend like this, who popped up out of nowhere when he needed him most. They've been buddies at work for years, but it would have honestly never occurred to him to spill all his troubles out on Greg's shoulder had it not been for that damned cd they'd been listening to and the aftermath of that conversation.

"Thank you, Greg," he says.

Greg turns from the ice cream container balanced on his stomach and grins at Nick. "For what?" he asks.

"For - being you, I guess," Nick says. "For knowing exactly what I need and when I need it, and for just... being there."

His grin turns a bit quiet, and he drops his eyes back to the ice cream. "I'm an only child," he says, "and I grew up in a house with my parents and my grandparents. I always wanted a brother, you know? Or a sister. Just someone to face the world of adults with. And then I went to college and everyone was facing down adults everywhere, and that was kind of cool. Then I came here, to Vegas, to CSI, and it was like - whump. Back in grade school, you know? Living with a billion adults and no co-conspirators." He glances up shyly at Nick. "Except for you."

Nick's not sure what to say to that, so he settles for catching Greg's hand, which is cold to the touch from the ice cream, and squeezing it. "I guess we're both selfish assholes, then," he says.

"I prefer the term 'enlightened self-interest'," Greg says with another quirk of smile. "But honestly, Nicky. Whatever you need, I'm here. It's you and me against the world."

"Thank you for that," Nick says. "I don't know what I'd do without you."

"Well, good," Greg says, "because you're stuck with me. If you think I'm not planning on crashing regularly in that bed, you're nuts."

"With a little luck," Nick says, "that bed won't be empty all the time."

Greg thinks about that, and then flinches. "Gah - in bed with you and Grissom. I'll pass on that, thanks."

"Wuss."

***

He's not entirely sure at what point he started believing Greg's adamancy that Gil hasn't dumped him, that he's coming back after work to deal with this for real. Greg's been nagging at him all day and through most of the night, and maybe it's just that he wants to believe it so badly that he's given in to Greg's persistence.

There's the sound of a car in the driveway and they both look at the clock on the vcr.

"He made good time," Greg says.

"Think that's a good sign?" Nick says, and knows the ice cream in his stomach is going to solidify and be a nice focus for all of his nervous tension. He just hopes he doesn't succumb to his own prophesies and throw up.

"Sure it is," Greg says, and straggles to his feet again. "I guess I'll be making myself scarce about now."

Nick gets to his feet next to him. "Do you have to go?" he asks.

"Of course I do," Greg says. "You and Grissom are going to get all lovey-dovey, he's going to tell you how much he loves you and that he's going to stand by you through everything, and you do not want me hiding in the next room for the bit that comes after."

He starts to blush. "It's not going to be like that," he mumbles.

Greg laughs. "Yes it is," he says, and when the doorbell rings he starts towards the front hall.

Nick stays where he is, standing in the middle of the living room looking at the mess he and Greg made and not knowing if he should make an effort to clean it up, or if he should just leave it.

A moment later Gil appears in the archway with Greg behind him, hands in his pockets.

"Hey, Nicky," Gil says, carefully but with warmth.

Over his shoulder, Greg gives him a thumbs up and a cheeky grin, then cocks his head towards the door. Nick looks from Greg to Gil and back again, and says to Gil, "Give me a minute."

He catches Greg at the door where he's pulling on his jacket, and gives him a stilted hug. "Thank you," he whispers again.

"No problem," Greg whispers back. "And call me, okay? I want details." He starts to pull back, then grabs hold again. "Only not, you know, details details," he adds as an afterthought.

Nick sort of giggles, and hugs him tight this time. "Love you," he breathes.

He feels a quick brush of lips against the side of his head. "You too," Greg says, and takes a step back. "Well, I mean not, you know, love love-"

"Go home, Greg," he says.

A wink, and Greg steps out into the morning.

***

Nick turns back to see that Gil has been watching their exchange, and he tries to stop his blush before it consumes his entire head. "It's not what you-" he begins.

"I know," Gil says, and takes a step forward. "It's - good to know that you've got Greg."

"It's good to have Greg," Nick says, and knows that sinking feeling of panic is starting to creep back. "You, uh, have a good shift?"

Gil shrugs with one shoulder. "It was slow," he said, "but I was distracted, so it evened out. How was your day?"

He allows himself a smile, and brings his arms up to hug himself. "I had a good day," he says. He doesn't want to stand in the hallway making small talk, but he doesn't really want to have the real conversation, either. As long as they avoid it, he can pretend that it's going to be okay.

"Good," Gil says. "You deserve to have more good days."

Huh. "You, uh, want something to drink? Coffee, or tea, or, uh, juice, maybe?"

"I'd love some," Gil says.

He moves into the kitchen and knows that Gil is following him. "Was that coffee?" he asks. "Or tea?"

"Whichever," Gil says, only now it sounds he's standing really close to him, not hugging the wall like he should be.

Nick turns around and yup, Gil is standing right there, close enough to touch but without touching. He swallows. "You, uh-"

"Nicky." His hands come up to grip his forearms and he smiles. "It's okay."

He blinks vacantly at him. "It is?"

"Yes," Gil says and pulls him into an embrace. They settle with their chins over each others' shoulders. "I did a lot of reading," he says, "and I'm closer to understanding now."

Nick swallows again. "And?"

He feels Gil shrug. "And nothing," he says. "I'm here, you're here, and the rest - we'll take it as it comes." Gil pulls back enough to see his face. "Okay?"

Nick blinks, and then Nicky smiles shyly at Gil. "I guess so," she says, and folds into his arms again.

"Good."

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