Title: Music is Perpetual
Author: podga
Pairing: Gil/Nick
Rating: Adult
Disclaimer: CSI and its characters do not belong to me. I write and post for fun only.
A/N: The title comes from a Henry David Thoreau quote: “Music is perpetual and only the hearing is intermittent.”

This fic is in response to the Reader Participation Challenge angus_honey and I launched in our LJs. It’s inspired by an idea murgy31 provided about wanting to see a fic dealing with Gil’s deafness, although I’m afraid I may have veered off a bit!

“Gil! Gil! Jesus, do you know what time it is?”

Gil has his back turned towards me and doesn’t seem to hear me, which is no wonder. I hurry over to the amplifier and crank down the volume on the 1812 Overture, just in time to mute the sound of the first cannon boom, though probably too late to stop our neighbors from filing a complaint with the police about the asshole blasting his stereo at four in the morning.

The moment the music stops, Gil swings around, looking surprised.

“Do you know what time it is?” I repeat in a more normal tone of voice.

Gil stares at me, an oddly intense look on his face that’s making me a little uncomfortable. “What?”

“Forget it.” There’s no way you can get through to Gil when he’s distracted. Eventually he comes back, and you just have to wait it out.

 

In retrospect, it should have been obvious to me. I don’t know why my mind never went down that path. Maybe I was blocking, though if I was, it wasn’t conscious.

Most of the times, the difference in our ages wasn’t something I thought about, or, if I did, it was only to regret the fact that I hadn’t known him when he was younger, that we’d missed out on so many years together. Sometimes, though… I’m not proud of it, but sometimes I wondered what would happen later, especially since he does almost nothing to take care of himself. The concept of “in sickness” has never seemed particularly appealing or romantic to me. I didn’t want to imagine Gil and myself at the nursing home, chasing each other around with our zimmer frames, unable to get it up.

So the thought of something being wrong with Gil? I just couldn’t go there. Maybe for his sake, but also for mine, for who and what I’d always considered myself to be.

 

“Otosclerosis.”

“What your mother had?”

Gil nods. I don’t really know how I feel, mostly stunned, I guess, and it’s like my brain is sunk in molasses, slow and sticky.

“Is there anything we can do?”

“We?” Gil lifts an eyebrow. “No. Not really.”

“My God, Gil.” Not knowing what else to do, I start to reach for him, but he takes sort of a casual step back and crosses his arms. That’s when it hits me: This is not some hypothetical scenario about what might or might not happen in the future and how I might or might not react to it. This is happening. Now. And I’m almost relieved to realize that I won’t walk away from Gil when the going gets tough, that my feelings for him are not going to change. We’re together. Maybe not in the eyes of the church or of the State of Nevada, but we’re in this, in life, together.

Except that, judging from his posture and the set look in his face, he doesn’t seem to feel the same way.

“Gil, don’t shut me out.”

“This is my problem. Not yours.”

I want to protest, but in a fundamental way, he’s right. This isn’t my problem, or, if it is, it’s once removed. I can choose to walk away if I want to. He can’t.

“I know.” Insisting that we’re in this together, that he share, that he let me support him? I suspect the words sound a lot more comforting to me than they would to him. “I’m sorry.”

He looks at me, his expression softening. “I’m sorry too.” He lets me take him into my arms, then, and he drops his head against my shoulder with a small sigh.

“I love you,” I whisper into his ear, and he shivers a little but doesn’t respond, and I wonder if he heard me or just felt my breath.

 

I have no idea what to do. I try to take my lead from him, but I end up putting my foot in my mouth way too often. Like when I found out he was taking lip-reading lessons:

“Don’t you already know how to lip-read?”

“Why would I?”

“But… I mean, you know how to sign.”

He didn’t respond, just looked pissed off and buried himself in his book again, a clear signal that he didn’t want to continue the conversation. It struck me later that only deaf people and, maybe, CIA operatives need to lip-read. Learning to sign had been for his mother, not for himself.

I wonder if I should learn sign language and decide that I should, then wonder if I should let him know about it and decide that, for the time being, I shouldn’t.

I watch the fluid movements of my teacher’s hands, the accompanying expressions on her face, and I wonder how I’m ever going learn ASL well enough to communicate anything but the most simple thoughts and needs. I’m sleepy. It’s raining. I love you. I pray to God I’ll never need to use it.

 

Gil is starting to think about having an operation.

“What are the odds?”

“About fifty-fifty. And even if things turn out okay, it won’t mean it’s forever.”

“And there’s a chance you could go immediately deaf.”

He hesitates. “Yes.”

He already feels like he can’t do his job, and it’s not a matter of whether he’ll go completely deaf if he doesn’t have the operation, only of when. He’s sick and tired of the uncertainty and of weighing the options. For things to have even that fifty per cent chance of turning out well, he can’t put the surgery off much longer. But if he wakes up deaf after the anesthetic wears off, he knows he’ll wish that he’d waited for it to happen naturally, even if his hearing had only lasted for few more months.

I keep my head down because I don’t want him to see my face, but I don’t realize I’m crying until a tear plops down on our clasped hands.

“Aw, Nick, don’t be such a girl,” Gil says in a gentle voice, tightening his fingers around mine. Since I’ve given myself away anyway, I look up. He’s smiling slightly.

“You’d better not let Catherine hear you saying something like that,” I mutter, and I see how Gil’s eyes lock on my mouth, as they’ve been doing more and more lately when I’m speaking, and it’s all I can do not to start bawling like a baby.

 

I’m unpacking groceries, handing him the last stuff that needs to go into the refrigerator, when he tells me.

“Tuesday?” I repeat, trying to sound casual. I concentrate on folding the paper bag.

“Yes.”

Tuesday’s only three days away. I want to tell him that he doesn’t have to do this, that everything will be okay, all the stupid, empty things that people say, even mean, at times like this, but it would only add to his burden.

“I’m going to listen to some Charlie Parker,” he says in a challenging tone of voice, and I groan loudly, because I know I’m expected to, because not offering the smallest protest would mean that I think that after Tuesday he’s not going to ever play his collection of LPs again.

“In that case, I’m going to the gym,” I tell him and he smiles at me.

There’s one thing about worrying and not being able to show it: I’m in the best damn shape of my life.

 

I lie next to him as he twists and turns.

“Can’t sleep?”

“I’m hungry.”

He’s been told to fast for twelve hours prior to surgery, which doesn’t really work out well when you work graveyard. But it does offer him a convenient excuse, so that he can keep things light.

I roll over to lie on top of him, trapping his arms over his head against the mattress.

“Anything I can do to distract you?” I leer down at him.

He bucks his hips against mine. “I doubt it. I’m very hungry. But you can try,” he says accommodatingly.

Afterwards, he wonders out loud if swallowing counts as having eaten.

 

Of all the times to be trapped at a scene, this is definitely the worst. I try to work fast, but I’m too aware of the seconds ticking by, too distracted by calculating the exact moments when I know it becomes too late to pick him up from home and take him to the hospital, to sit with him during his pre-op check-up, to wait with him before surgery, to even wave at him from the door before he’s rolled off to the OR. All I can do is send him an SMS, wishing him luck and telling him that I love him.

“What are you doing here?” Catherine asks me when I walk into the waiting room of the surgical ward.

“I…” I have no idea what to answer. Gil and I used to discuss when and how we were going to let other people know about us, but over the past few months we no longer spoke about it. I guess Gil thought that things would work themselves out soon enough, once he needed to quit.

Luckily Catherine doesn’t wait for an answer. Instead she laughs. “Poor Gil. Thinking he can keep a secret around CSIs.”

I smile wanly. “You found out too, huh?”

“It’ll be okay,” she says firmly, and I know she needs the reassurance almost as much as me.

“What if it isn’t?”

Catherine is a hard realist and she rarely flinches from the truth. I guess it says a lot about how much she loves Gil that she does so now. “It’ll be okay,” she repeats.

We sit and wait together.

 

“Mr. Stokes?” the surgeon calls from the door, then he sees me and walks right to me, as if he knows who I am; which he does, because we met yesterday, when I accompanied Gil for his final tests.

I stand up and clear my throat. “Yes?” Despite my concern for Gil, I can feel Catherine’s eyes boring a hole in my back.

“We think it went well. We won’t know for sure until he wakes up and we’ll need to run a few more tests over the next month, but the prognosis is good.”

I take a deep breath. “Thank you. When can I— when can we see him?”

“He should be up and around in a little bit. And you can take him home after we complete the post-op tests, so you’ll probably be out of here by six o’clock. ”

“Thank you.”

When I turn around, Catherine is standing as well, and she’s looking at me in way that doesn’t bode well for my immediate future.

“So I’m thinking: if he’d just asked you for a ride from the hospital, you’d have come right out and said it when I asked you what you were doing here.”

I try to stare her down, but I can feel the color rising to my cheeks.

“And why would he ask you and not me? Or Warrick? Because we’ve known him a lot longer than you, and, besides, he always has that little wall up between you and him, doesn’t he?” Hands on her hips, she gives me that narrow-eyed look I’ve seen her use on Lindsey. “Okay, how long have you two been together?”

Resistance is futile. “Almost two years.”

Her expression doesn’t change, and I can’t tell what she’s thinking. “Two years, huh?” she says finally. “So it’s serious?”

I nod.

“I’m not sure what to say. I’m surprised, no, actually, make that shocked. I never thought I’d see Gil with anybody. But you know?” Suddenly she smiles. “Now that I think about it, it feels right. Almost inevitable. But I have to tell you, Nick, if I didn’t like you both so much, and if I didn’t see that Gil is trying so hard not to play favorites that he’s giving you a much harder time than you deserve at work, I’d be on my way to the Sheriff’s office right now. I mean, it’s not exactly within policy, is it?”

“Catherine,” I say, suddenly anxious. “We don’t want this out. Not yet.”

“Obviously,” she says dryly. She lets me stew a little longer. “Don’t worry about it. I won’t even let Gil know that you spilled the beans. But you need to get this sorted out.”

I trust her and I know she’ll never breathe a word in the lab, but I also know who’s going to be handling the dirtiest, smelliest, most disgusting tasks in any case we’re assigned to together from this moment and on into eternity.

The things I do for love, I think, and I grin at her.

 

He bends over the back of the couch, wraps his arms around me from behind, and nibbles at my earlobe.

“Can we change the channel?”

“No.”

I’m watching the CMT awards show on TV and he’s been in and out of the living room all evening, pestering me. He hates country music.

“Just for a little while. There’s something on the History Channel I want to see.”

“Tough. Go watch it in the kitchen. I need the big screen for this.”

“You’re supposed to be nice to me. I’ve only just come out of a very difficult period in my life.”

I reach up and curl my arm around his head, pulling him forward so I can reach and kiss the corner of his mouth.

“I’m always nice to you. Now go away.”

He straightens, but I can sense him hovering behind me, almost twitching with impatience. “That’s not really music, you know.”

“And yet, country was as popular as jazz once. And it’s more popular now.” I have no idea if it’s true or not, but it sounds about right. “Scram!”

Instead, he walks around and sits on the couch next to me.

“Who’s he?” he asks. “Very handsome. And you’re from Texas; why don’t you ever wear a cowboy hat?”

I sigh and turn off the TV. “Fine, but if I don’t get to watch this, you don’t get to watch your show. So what are you going to do now?”

He smiles at me, a slow, sexy smile that leaves me in no doubt regarding his intentions.

 

“When I was going deaf, I thought I could come to terms with everything else, but you know what I couldn’t imagine?” he whispers afterwards, when we’ve both gotten our breath back.

It’s been over a month since his operation, and this is the first time he’s volunteered any information about his feelings before it. I smooth my hand along his damp back, feeling the muscles move under his skin as he shifts position to lie more comfortably against me. “What?”

“Not hearing you. To have you in my mouth, or to be inside you, and not to hear you.”

“Hey, it’s not like I’m that noisy,” I say and it’s true. My first experiences were in dormitories with paper thin walls, and I didn’t want to advertise the fact that Dave (or Fred, or Barry, or Will) and I were engaged in activities considerably more entertaining than studying. I guess I got used to being quiet.

“I know. That’s why. Those little gasps and whimpers…” He takes my hand and wraps it around his cock, which is rapidly stiffening again. “You see? Even thinking about them.”

“I don’t whimper,” I say indignantly, but about five minutes later I realize that he’s right. I do.