Title: Nirvana Blue
By: nixa_jane
Pairing: Gil/Nick
Rating: R
Summary: There's something to be said for ending up where you started.

It’s quiet and peaceful in this emotional nirvana blue -- Hooverphonic


Okay, so maybe it wasn't his smartest idea, but he wasn't going to turn back now. You have to get back on the horse, you know, because that's what they always say and it seems reasonable enough. He adjusted his glider behind him with a deep breath, and when he stepped up to the edge of the cliff, he wondered briefly what it would feel like to fall without it. But then, he knew that already, in a way, didn't he? He'd had the glider, but it had been ripped, and he was sure he must have fallen almost as fast. A little higher from the ground when it had torn and he'd be a houseguest of good ole' Doc Robbins.

Best not to think about that, though. No reason to dwell on could haves. He was still alive.

He wasn't wearing the helmet. He did the first couple of times, of course, but figured by now there was no point. He'd seen the consequences of a paragliding accident, and a helmet would be about as effective as a tissue paper net beneath a tightrope. He didn't need some false sense of security to help push him to the edge, and really, he'd rather have the wind in his hair and all that, because, why not? Wasn't like he had a death wish or something, he was just practical was all.

Helmet wouldn't have helped him last time. If the metal rod that had pierced his lower back had aimed to crack his skull instead, he wondered if plastic and foam could have stopped it. Flesh and bone had been no barrier, but maybe he was being morbid. He would be the first to admit the hospital stay had induced a kind of depression within him that he had been fighting off for a long time. Getting a lecture about going gliding without telling anyone from Grissom, of all people, had not helped.

When did Grissom ever tell them anything? He had no right to pull their private lives into the open when he had no intention of letting it happen to his own. If he wanted to go paragliding he didn't need a chaperone, he didn't need permission. Part of him thought he was probably being juvenile, but it didn't stop him going through with it. Catherine thought he was home resting, for the rest of his two-week leave, but he'd left at six to come here. He didn't know what he was trying to prove, or to who, but there he was.

Nothing but miles and air beneath him, and a piercing ache in his back every time the wind shifted too suddenly. He let the wind steer him, and carry him wherever it wanted. He wasn't aiming for anything but the sky, and he didn't really care where he landed as long as it was on both feet. It wasn't like he was fearless, or something. He'd just gone numb—completely numb. Everything that had run through his head during his latest life-death situation had faded away to the background of his mental landscape, become nothing but whispers and faint recollections.

You see, he'd seen the white light in the glare off his Tahoe, and he'd come face to face with all of his regrets. He achieved that rare kind of clarity, the kind only the almost-dead could understand—and all of the things he'd change if he got a second chance, became suddenly clear. Vibrant, really, obvious as light bulbs hanging in the air in front of him, so easily understood he wondered what he had been thinking to ignore them until then.

He got his second chance, of course, or maybe his third, but whatever, he'd stopped counting and that wasn't the point, anyway. The point was, it turned out he wasn't living in a Hollywood movie, and it's not that simple. Not surprising really, because Grissom made everything complicated. Sure, to listen to him, you might not realize it at first—Grissom tried to paint everything black and white, including him, but he was cloaked head to toe in grey himself. A constant contradiction.

It had been fascinating at first, and he'd been drawn to him like everyone else, hanging off his words like he hung to his glider now, and there had never been dissent. It took him a riddle he understood better for not knowing the answer to realize that was his largest problem. Grissom wanted to be disagreed with, but he'd shoot you down when you tried, and he couldn't find the right middle ground. There was no place to stand that was out of the line of fire, and so he'd slid to the ground and stopped trying.

Best thing he'd ever done—stopped trying, that was, because it had worked when nothing else had. Even got him a promotion, to a job that no longer existed, though Grissom had never told him the reason and he'd never thought to ask. Things had simply spiraled downwards since then, but he couldn't seem to pin down the reason why, and by now he had stopped trying to.

The shift change was obvious, but he knew it was only an easy excuse. It had started falling apart before that, or if not, then there had been nothing there to begin with and he wasn't quite ready to believe that. Maybe he and Grissom had never been close friends, but he thought they at least were more than co-workers, and now Grissom seemed to believe they were less than even that. He never saw him, and while he sat around and missed him, he wondered if Grissom sometimes had trouble remembering his name.

That wasn't fair, and he knew it. He would be dead if not for Grissom, and he knew that, too. A phone call was all it took, and he still didn't know why Grissom had dialed his number, or how he had the strength to answer, but it was the only reason help had reached him in time. He probably should have said thank you. Then again, he hadn't seen Grissom since the time he first woke up, and he really hadn't been thinking clearly then.

Grissom called sometimes, naturally—he was still a concerned boss, even if he was working for Catherine now. He never called back. He didn't know why not, but he suspected it was because he was tired of trying to find things to say to fill the silence that had been built up in the air between them. He was tired of being the sociable one, and he was sick of fighting for something he wasn't ever going to have.

The wind was dying down, and he started guiding the glider to the ground. Dirt and sand smashed beneath his shoes when he landed, and his glider fell spent and lifeless behind him. He packed it up without thinking, started walking without checking his watch. He could have been flying for hours or only minutes; time didn't play out the same way up there and he'd long since stopped trying to keep track of it.

He had managed to land close to where he had started, and he would rather have walked two miles than feel like he'd flown some predictable circuit, but he was too tired to be ungrateful, and his back was throbbing as though it had been ripped open again. He didn't bother to check to see if it had, and when he reached his car, he couldn't remember the walk.

Grissom was leaning against his Tahoe when he stopped in front of the driver's side door, and he wasn't as surprised as he probably should have been. When he didn't say anything, Grissom sighed like he didn't understand him—and he knew, that really, that had been the problem all along. He didn't, he didn't understand any of it, because Grissom had his roller coasters; and he didn't like going in circles. When he flew he didn't want tracks.

Grissom asked him to join him for dinner, even though it was eight in the morning. He had almost forgotten what it was like to live life upside down, and he didn't answer right away. Part of him wanted to say no, if only because he had said yes so many damn times in his life that he was being buried alive underneath the weight of the words. They keep digging into his shoulders—slipping into the hole in his back and into his blood like some kind of disease.

But he was too tired to argue, and Grissom didn't look like he was going to let it go. He admitted to being somewhat curious to see just what Grissom might have to say, anyway, and so he followed him in his Tahoe, and almost to the restaurant. With one intersection left before they would reach the diner he felt suddenly as though he couldn't breathe. Dinner with one of his co-workers used to be such a simple thing, but just the thought terrified him then, and he didn't know why. He just knew he felt like he was flying. There was no glider behind him riding high on the air, there was no ground beneath his feet—and he couldn't afford to fall again.

He hit the right blinker while Grissom went straight, and the last thing he saw before he started down the adjacent road was the widening of Grissom's eyes in his rearview mirror.



Slide

What do you do when everything around you starts to fall apart?


Grissom is sitting on his porch when he parks in the driveway, and he supposes that’s what he gets for taking the long way around. There’s no way past him without speaking, and there’s no way out of explaining why he’d felt compelled to completely blow him off. He could still feel the wind spinning him around, making him dizzy, but driving away again, well, that would just prove Grissom right, wouldn’t it? He’d always believed he was too emotional, too undisciplined.

He pulled the keys out of the ignition and hit the lock once he’d closed the door. He smiled brightly at Grissom when he saw him, like nothing had happened at all, but Grissom’s frown would not be cancelled out and he could not hold the gaze. “I decided I wasn’t hungry,” he said, trying for casual, as though he drove off without a word on a regular basis and no one else had ever found it odd.

Grissom took this relatively well, all things considered, and simply nodded. “How are you feeling?”

He stepped around him, like he was some kind of obstacle, and opened his door. “I’m fine.” When he turned around Grissom was standing right behind him, making no move to give him the graceful out he’d rather been hoping for. “Would you like to come in?” he asked, because he was polite if he was anything, and ditching the guy was one thing—slamming the door in his face quite another.

“Yes,” Grissom said.

He turned before he winced, then took a deep breath and led the way in. He threw his keys on the coffee table and walked towards the kitchen. “Did you want something to drink?” he asked, because that was what you asked when you had someone over, and he needed the extra space to breathe, anyway.

Grissom glanced at the television before shifting to look at the bookshelf, his gaze taking inventory of all of his things—like this were all another one of his crime scenes, and he was trying to find the answer to the puzzle. “No,” Grissom said, when he finally spoke, and he should have known he wouldn’t make it easy.

He tossed his jacket on the counter, and winced when the ache in his back blazed up again. He stayed on course for the kitchen, though, because whether Grissom was thirsty or not he wasn’t staying in that room to be just another object beneath the weight of Grissom’s gaze. He grabbed a beer, he wasn’t taking his pain meds, anyway, so it wouldn’t hurt him. It could only help. He twisted off the cap and leaned against the counter. Grissom had wandered to the edge of tile, standing on the last threads of his living room carpet, watching him but not getting closer.

“I thought you were hungry,” he said, and Grissom’s gaze didn’t waver.

“I lost my appetite,” Grissom said gently. “I was kind of worried about you, actually.”

“I’m fine.” He grinned again, reassuringly, and he knew it wouldn’t give him away. He was too good at dissembling to be caught in a lie.

Grissom had always been uncannily good at seeing through facades like they weren’t there, however, and it didn’t usually matter how adept the person was at creating them—he could still look through them if he wanted to enough. “I didn’t think you would be paragliding again for awhile,” Grissom said, cautiously, like he was something you had to be careful with, like a harsh tone might break him.

That wasn’t the case at all. Grissom could say anything now and he wouldn’t flinch. “What do you do,” he asked, almost whimsically, “when everything around you starts to fall apart?”

Grissom’s eyes slid to the floor. “Usually, I go to the amusement park. Ride a roller coaster.”

He smiled, spinning the beer bottle in his hands, watching the bubbles dance. “That’s what I thought,” he said. It was one of the few things he knew about Grissom, and it was one of the few things about him, that however abstractly, he could almost relate to. He didn’t have to add anything else, Grissom knew where he was leading, and he could figure out the rest of it on his own.

He had his own ways of dealing—flying, and if Grissom wanted to think he was only out there to get over the accident, he would let him. It was a better explanation than the truth, simple even, and Grissom loved it when things came together to a definite conclusion.

There’s a sharp pain building in his back, as his bandages scrape against the counter, and vaguely he realizes he should move, take the pressure off of it. Grissom keeps staring at him, though, and he’s caught there, held beneath his gaze.

“You’ve been different,” Grissom said eventually, as though the thought had only just occurred to him.

He almost found it funny, but he thought that if he laughed, Grissom might ask him to explain that too and he wasn’t sure he could. He turned a little to set the bottle on the counter, and he noticed some of the white tiles were smeared with red. Distantly he realized that must mean he had ripped open the wound. He turned back around, placing his hands on the edges of the counter, hiding it from sight. Grissom didn’t miss much, and if he moved an inch either direction, there was very little chance he wouldn’t see the blood he’d been trained to notice.

“Everyone changes,” he said, and it was cliché but true, which incidentally, had become a cliché in and of itself. He almost smiled. He was losing it, he realized. Reality was floating away and it was leaving him behind. “You should go, Grissom,” he said.

He needed him to go, because if he stayed, he was pretty sure it was about to become very clear that he wasn’t anything like as fine as he would have everyone believe.

“I don’t think I should,” Grissom said slowly, drawing everything along in inches, as though he knew he just had to wait him out, stay there a bit longer, wait until he fell. “There’s something going on with you, Nick, and I want to know what it is.”

He could insist, of course, force Grissom to leave, but he wouldn’t be very convincing at it if he never moved, and if he moved it was over because Grissom wouldn’t be going anywhere. Things were starting to tilt a little crazily, and he almost thought he should tell Grissom about the blood, that maybe if he focused on that he’d stop looking for what was underneath.

He licked his lip, his fingers clenching around the counter as he shook his head. “I’m fine, why, ah, do you…” he trailed off, looking up to meet Grissom’s eyes, which were looking suddenly concerned. “There’s nothing wrong,” he said, pleased when his voice sounded stronger. Dissembling again. Nothing to worry about it. He was good at it.

“We used to talk, Nick,” Grissom said, and this time, he couldn’t hold in the laugh.

“Did we?” he asked, still smiling, and it was Grissom frozen now, held five feet away like he couldn’t move. He knew the feeling. “I remember talking,” he said. “A lot. Funny, though, because I don’t really remember you saying all that much.”

Grissom frowned, holding onto this new piece of information, filing it away. He could practically see the gears turning in the man’s mind, and he wondered distantly, how someone so brilliant couldn’t figure him out. It wasn’t all that complicated, really. How hard was it to notice when someone was in love with you? “Is that what this is about?” Grissom asked.

It wasn’t what it was about, but he was nodding anyway. “I really don’t want to do this,” he said. “I’m feeling kind of tired, I’m supposed to be resting.” He was probably transparent, but they both knew it was still true enough, and he hoped Grissom got the hint.

He obviously did, if the way he frowned again was any indication, but he wasn’t heading for the door. He was sure Grissom couldn’t have forgotten the way. “Why don’t we sit down then?” he asked.

His stomach dropped. Sitting down sounded nice, actually, but he didn’t really want to stain his couch with blood, and Grissom would be sure to notice. He was losing the choice in the matter, in any case, because he could feel himself being tugged down by something invisible. He slipped down the counter a bit, his shoes sliding along the linoleum before he caught his balance.

Grissom gave him a strange look, and he started counting idly in his mind, just starting back from one hundred, trying to keep from falling. He was always falling, and he was sick of it. “You look pale,” Grissom told him.

He could feel the blood running along his back now, streaming down in tendrils onto the waistband of his jeans, along the countertop. He wondered if Grissom could hear the dripping too, or if that was just him. Things were starting to blur, and his eyes flickered to the clock. He couldn’t read the numbers, they were too fragmented, but he recognized the position of its hands. It was only eight forty. Felt later, somehow.

“Nick?”

One of his hands slipped off the counter, jarring him back to awareness. He caught himself in time and tried to pull himself back up, but he noticed belatedly his palm was painted red with his blood, and he wasn’t the only one.

“Jesus—”

He was slipping again, falling. He wondered when the glider had ripped this time. He waited to hit the ground but something stopped him, arms had wrapped around his chest, careful of staying away from his back, and someone was lowering him to the ground. Grissom, he supposed, thinking it odd. Grissom rarely touched him anymore, but he didn’t imagine anyone else had been close enough to reach him in time.

“Nick, hey, talk to me…”

Definitely Grissom, but he sounded odd. Faraway. Not so surprising, really, Grissom had always been out of his reach. “I’m here,” he said, forcing himself to speak, because he always did what Grissom told him to. Hadn’t Sara said that to him once?

“I’m calling the hospital,” he said softly. “You’re going to be fine.” Grissom’s voice was shaking, but when he tried to turn and look at him Grissom held him where he was. “Stay still,” he said. “You must have ripped out the stitches.”

He heard Grissom reaching for the phone, pressing the buttons with frantic movements, explaining the situation with a calm that belied the way he was shaking. He thought he remembered feeling the blazing pain in his back when he’d landed with his glider. He’d been too distracted to think of it again. Pain was a funny thing, anyway, and sometimes it was possible to not notice it was there.

“You have to stop doing this to me,” Grissom whispered, sounding pained. “God, I can’t keep going through this, Nicky.”

He didn’t know what Grissom was talking about. He’d never done anything to him. He’d been the perfect employee and even that had not been enough. He found himself whispering that he was sorry, anyway, because if Grissom said so then he must have done something wrong.

“You know this is why, don’t you?” Grissom was asking. “This is why I always push you away.”

He shook his head, dizzy still, not comprehending. Grissom was speaking in riddles again, and as usual, he couldn’t see past the questions to the truth.

“I love you too much to risk losing you,” Grissom said, his voice so quiet he wondered if he wasn’t meant to hear, “but I’m losing you anyway.”

That didn’t make sense, because Grissom had never had him to begin with. He was having trouble breathing again, but he could hear Grissom’s heart beat behind him and it was keeping him awake.

“I do love you, Nicky, and I’ve always meant to tell you that.”

Nick felt the room spinning again, though he wasn’t sure whether or not this time it was blood loss. He was probably only delirious—he wouldn’t be that surprised, he’d seen that happen on crime scenes before, with victims that had remained somewhat alive. He kept saying it, though, Grissom was repeating it like a mantra, as though he were trying to make them both understand it.

He closed his eyes, surrendering to sleep with the sound of sirens and Grissom’s whispers echoing in his ears—he was falling again, but this time he would just have to trust Grissom not to let him fall too far.



Circles

There's something to be said for ending up where you started.


He was getting used to waking up in cold white rooms, and as awareness seeped through the haze a strange kind of resignation stole over him. His back was aching, but dully, and there was an IV inserted in the back of his hand that he was sure was responsible for muting it. He bit his lip and closed his eyes again, because resigned or not, there was still a large part of him that wanted to be anywhere but where he was.

He opened his eyes again when he heard someone breathing.

The sound was labored, hitched—like the sounds someone might make while they were trapped in the nightmares that often played behind closed eyes, and when he turned, he saw Grissom asleep in a chair next to the bed. Things filtered back then, and he remembered he had gone gliding, ripped open his back, and then collapsed right in front of the last person he wanted to see him as weak.

Well, as far as his life went, he supposed he'd had worse days. Hell, he could probably make a whole list of them, but he figured it probably wouldn't help. It wasn't quite as comforting as he wanted it to be.

He thought about waking Grissom up and telling him to go home and get some rest, but he was afraid if Grissom knew he was awake then he might want to talk. He didn't want to talk.

There were the echoes of something important bouncing around the back of his mind, intangible whispers he knew he should be focusing harder on, but he was too tired to deal with them. He couldn't even convince himself that if it had been real that it mattered, because even if Grissom had said those things he thought he remembered, and it wasn't some cruel trick played by his then fading mind, he doubted very much it meant he was going to get his movie ending scene—and he was far past hoping for it.

He still knew that, logically, either way, they would probably both be better off if they could simply let go—but Grissom had forgotten how and he'd done it one too many times already.

"Nicky?"

The voice was barely a whisper, but it in the still room it sounded loud enough. He rolled his eyes towards the voice, it was too late to pretend he wasn't awake. Grissom might let him get away with it, but even if he did, it wouldn't help. He reached up a hand to run it over his eyes, trying to push away the blurriness, and the needle pulled strangely at his skin as the IV tube was strained.

Grissom looked as uncertain as he had ever seen him, and he almost winced because it would have been nice if one of them at least knew what was going on between them. "Yeah?" he spoke finally, and the words scratched at his throat. He forced his eyes closed, and willed the pain away.

"How are you feeling? Should I get the doctor?"

He sounded uncertain too, like he was talking to a child or a glass figurine, and strangely he had the sudden urge to tell him to go to hell. He did wince then, because that wasn't like him, and Grissom didn't deserve his anger. Grissom had done nothing wrong. Grissom was never anything but professional.

He was the one with all of the problems.

"I'm fine," he said, and while neither of them believed it, just saying it made him feel a little better. Once he had said it a couple more times he'd start to think it was true, and then he could see about pulling all his pieces back together. No problem.

"You've said that before," Grissom told him, but without censure. "How are you really?"

"How are you doing, Gris?" he asked, instead of answering, and without meeting his eyes.

"Not so good, actually," Grissom said tightly. "Watching friends fall unconscious tends to have that affect on me."

He almost laughed—almost asked if Grissom actually believed they were friends, but he didn't. He didn't say anything at all.

He heard Grissom sigh, the same sigh he had given back at his Tahoe when they had stood half a mile from the edge of a cliff, and he hated that sigh. It was the same sound his father used to make whenever he had mentioned wanting to go into law enforcement. To call it patronizing would be kind, and he was tired of being condemned for not living up to unrealistic expectations.

"I'm trying to help you here, Nick," Grissom told him, and that crazy urge to laugh seemed to rise up again. He'd blame it on the drugs, only it had been happening a lot lately, and he hadn't been taking all of his prescriptions when he had been home.

"You can't help, Grissom," he said. He wanted to add that it was too late, but Grissom wouldn't understand. He wouldn't know what he was too late for, because unlike Sara, he had never warned him there was an expiration date on being madly in love with your boss. Though he suspected, now, that Grissom had figured some of it out for himself.

"I think you should come stay with me for a few days," Grissom told him, like he made those kinds of offers all the time, and he didn't know what to say to that—because he figured Grissom never had.

"Why?" he asked, and he hated how bewildered he sounded, because he was sick of losing his balance whenever Grissom was around.

"You're obviously not doing so well on your own," Grissom said, and he turned his eyes away to look at the ceiling instead.

The words 'fuck you' were on the tip of his tongue, but he held them expertly at bay. He could hear his mother's voice in the back of his mind like a mantra, 'if you don't have something nice to say don't say anything at all.' Words to live by. Or slowly die by, whatever, it worked. You made less enemies that way. "I don't want your charity," he said, civilly as he could manage. "I'll handle things better this time around. There's nothing to worry about."

"I do worry," Grissom said quickly, before he could say something else—before he could ask him to leave. "Probably more than I should."

Now that was funny, and he did laugh. Only Grissom would see concern as a fault. "So stop," he said. "We never see each other now, anyway, what's the difference? Who cares?" He was happy to see he didn't sound the least bit bitter, but Grissom still looked like he'd been struck. He couldn't bring himself to regret it.

"We're on different schedules, Nick—" Grissom started.

He rolled his eyes. Did Grissom honestly believe he hadn't noticed? "Whatever," he said, hoping to end the conversation with his obvious apathy, but Grissom was only looking more and more concerned.

"Do you know," Grissom said quietly, sounding oddly strained, "what it was like to see your hands covered in blood? To watch you start to fall when a second earlier I was sure you were fine?"
He shrugged. They saw worse things every day. He couldn’t really see the problem. Then again, Grissom did usually lose himself in the fine print. Or was that him?

"It was finding you in that car all over again, Nick. It was Amy Hendler, Nigel Crane, it was everything, all over again. Don't you understand?"

Grissom sounded strangely pleading now, which was also odd, because all of those things had only happened to him. "No," he said. He never understood Grissom, which was only fair, because Grissom didn't understand anything about him.

"I keep thinking I'm going to lose you," Grissom said, and he heard an echo follow the words. 'I love you too much to risk losing you, but I'm losing you anyway.'

His fingers clenched around the mattress and he willed all of the words away. He'd wanted to hear them forever, certainly, but not now. He didn't trust himself to understand them right now.

"Every time I think its over, and you're safe, it starts again. It doesn't end."

He was constantly going in circles. Every time he was ready to leave Grissom behind he appeared in front of him again, saying something to draw him back. He just couldn't figure out what Grissom talking about, or how it was making him hope again. He closed his eyes. He would be easily enough replaced. Rookies were lined up out the doors to work at their crime lab, and he was sure most of them were probably better suited to it than him.

"Would you look at me?" Grissom sounded odd again.

He turned his head and opened his eyes. Grissom's eyes caught the glare of the fluorescents, and they looked strangely clouded beneath the flecks of light.

"What I'm trying to say is, I keep waiting for it to be over, for it to be safe, for it to be a 'good time' and it never is."

He nodded supportively, as Grissom was apparently trying to work through some kind of problem, and he'd rather help him with his than figure out his own. Never mind that it was not exactly the best of times.

"Nick…I have to ask you something. Do you…I mean." Grissom paused, taking a deep breath. "Do you remember what I said?"

Oh, that. He nodded. Sure. Of course he remembered. Kind of hard to forget, actually, but he was sure Grissom had just been searching for the right thing to say. Grissom never knew what to say when someone needed comfort, the words never came out right. Grissom was probably trying to take them back.

And he would let him without a fight, because he had never really believed them anyway.

Grissom took another deep breath then, almost as though he were about to dive under water, and held his eyes on his. "Yes, well, I meant it, and I thought you should know."

He blinked, and material slipped between his fingers as his hands clenched tighter around the bright white blanket. It felt like the room was closing in around him, but he didn't have strength enough to move and get out in time. He would probably be crushed alive—but hey, he knew there were worse ways to go. He'd seen most of them.

"I don't understand," he said finally, because it was the best he could come up with to say. Grissom said look at the evidence, and when he did, he could see nothing to support the fact that Grissom loved him. He could find little to prove that he cared at all.

"I know," Grissom said quietly, resting his head briefly in the palms of his hands before pulling back up. "And that's my fault.

"What are you after here, Gris?" he asked, because he was too tired to puzzle through possible motives, and chances were that with Grissom he would never find the right one, anyway.

"To be blunt," Grissom said, with a small smile playing across his lips that held no real mirth behind it, "you."

The walls were moving again, and he hated that Grissom had this power over him in everything. He frowned, thought about saying that he didn't understand again, but decided against it because Grissom already thought he was dense enough. "Grissom, you like Sophia," he said, wondering all the time why Grissom needed this to be pointed out to him. It was obvious to everyone else.

The smile grew a little at that, and there was some secret hiding behind it now. He wasn't all that intrigued, he knew Grissom had secrets, and he'd stopped wondering what they were. "I like you, actually," Grissom said, "though I had to have Sophia point it out to me. She enjoys teasing me about it—though how she knew in five minutes what I couldn't figure out in five years, I'll never know."

He listened very carefully for the cliché music to begin and the credits to roll, so the fantasy could end and put him out of his misery. There was nothing, though, only Grissom's secret smile as he leaned back in the chair and the lights slid backwards along his eyes. "Would you like to go out sometime, Nick?" Grissom asked, and the uncertainty that had been there before was gone so completely he couldn't be sure it had ever been there at all.

He could almost hate him for it, for that confidence, and if he hadn't been too stunned to feel anything he might have. Grissom wasn't supposed to suddenly let go, he was the one that did that, Grissom was the one that held on until it was late. There was a routine to these things, and he didn't like having it all stripped away with a few well chosen words and a careless smile. Grissom was supposed to tell him he meant nothing by his words and break his heart.

It took him a moment to understand how ridiculous he was being. He had spent so much time expecting the worst it had actually reached the point he was disappointed not to get it, and from the look of Grissom, he knew exactly what was going through his mind as he waited calmly for it all to sink in.

"That would be…nice," he said, finally, when everything he had said began to coalesce.

"We'll be taking the same car, of course," Grissom told him, and he nodded, hoping it was only the morphine making him so speechless. Grissom reached out, and ran his thumb along the palm of his hand—he could easily blame the resulting shiver on the air conditioning.

"Can't have you driving off again and standing me up," Grissom continued wryly, and Nick finally smiled.

Grissom's fingers were still tracing the lines on his hand like he knew them by heart already, and with a shuddering breath he let the white room wash away until there was nothing left but the two of them.