Title: Questions (Un)Answered
By: amazonqueenkate
Fandom: CSI: Vegas
Character: Nick Stokes
Prompt: #10: time
Rating: PG-13.
Summary: It's thirty-seven years before it can be talked about.
Author's Notes: I have reason to believe that subluxate betaed this, but I really do not remember.

When Nicky is five and his baby brother is born, he studies him through the glass and tries to understand what his sisters and big brother are saying behind him: that Timmy's pale, that Timmy's weak, that Timmy shouldn't have been born so soon, that Mommy is sick and now Timmy is, too. The baby looks like some sort of alien out of Saturday morning cartoons, all white and wriggly-looking with arms and legs that move funny and not like the other babies.

Three days later, when he's at kindergarten at learning to count to one hundred, his teacher pulls him out of the class and takes him down to the office, where his dad is sitting and looking very tired. And very sad, he thinks when his dad looks up and turns those tired eyes at him, sad not like when Lucy fell down the basement stairs and cracked her head last year, but sad like when Grandma went to heaven. Nicky rides in the back of the car with Christy and Heather, quietly watching Daddy just try to drive, and it's only after they all get home that their dad explains, very quietly, that Timmy's gone to heaven with grandma.

Christy looks confused and asks if Mommy went to heaven, too. Daddy says no, that Mommy will come home in a few days.

Heather asks if the dog that got hit by a car when Nicky was a baby was in heaven with Timmy and Grandma. Daddy just looks sad.

Nicky doesn't ask or say anything, but stands next to the couch and listens to Daddy answer the girls' questions.

After all the crying and the black clothes, after the flowers and the little white box that Daddy carried around with Uncle Rick, Nicky thinks of a question about Timmy and heaven. But when he tries to ask it, his father just shakes his head and says in a very stern voice, "We're not going to talk about that."

==

When Nick-the-Brick is seventeen and his baby nephew is born, he arrives at the hospital still sweaty from football practice and listens to his mother gush about the baby into the payphone: that he's the perfect Stokes boy, that he's strong as an ox, that Lucy's doing well after the birth, that the rest of the family would be there too. Through the window into Lucy's room, he can see his other sisters and his older brother poking at the infant, his blue hat sticking up in the crook of Lucy's elbow. He's allowed to hold little Tyler for a brief period of time, and Tyler opens a sleepy eye and regards him with a groggy contentment before closing it again.

Three months later, when he's in the middle of a difficult history exam he hadn't really studied for, the intercom calls him down to the main office immediately, where his older brother is sitting and looking very confused. And very desperate, he thinks when Kevin rises from the chair and straightens his business clothes, not desperate like when he lost his job two years earlier and had to start fresh, but desperate like when his fiance left him at the altar without any warning. Nick climbs into the car and listens to the radio, and it's only after the third Alabama song in a row that Kevin dares to tell hem that there's been an "accident."

Alice frowns when they arrive at the house and starts rambling out terms Nick's only ever heard in psychology, like "psychosis" and "post-partum depression". Kevin brushes her off, says he doesn't know.

Penny recalls that this never happened with any of her children, the three little girls playing with dolls in the corner. Kevin shrugs and goes to the kitchen for a beer.

After all the frustration and the funeral, the state-sanctioned visitation and the court case that had to be tried in another jurisdiction to avoid prejudice, Nick thinks back to his baby brother, the only other little boy born into the Stokes family since himself. But when he tries to translate his silent thoughts into words, Kevin just glares at him from across the room and says in a clipped tone, "We're not going to talk about that."

==

When CSI Level Three Stokes is thirty-nine and his baby son is born, he leaves no less than forty messages on a variety of cell phones, citing information no one really needed to know: that he weighs almost nine pounds, that he measures twenty inches, that he somehow has Nick's nose, that anyone who wanted to could see him in the morning. He hangs up the bedside phone and, even though he doesn't have to, sits with his son's birth mother, a tired teenage girl with no support from her family or friends and little hope of finishing high school, let alone raising a baby. She holds her son tenderly, though, before allowing Nick to take him, and he thanks her quietly.

Three years later, when he's watching his son stack up blocks on the coffee table only to knock them down again, the doorbell chimes loudly and he opens the door, where his parents are waiting outside and looking very uncertain. And very guilty, he thinks as he watches them file past and step into the living room, not guilty like when they couldn't raise the money to fund his ransom years ago, but regretful in a way for which he has no comparison. They stand together say very little, and it's only after another clatter of blocks that anyone tries to put words to the silence.

His mother says that the child has his personality if not his looks. Nick laughs and blames whatever's in the water.

His father says he'd never guessed a single father could provide so well. Nick admits with a smile that he's had help.

After all the rounds of hugs and kisses, the introduction of Grandma and Grandpa and round of sodas and juice boxes, Nick mentions the fact that his son is only the third male born into the family in thirty years, counting everything. They all look at Timmy as he knocks down another tower of blocks, and before his father can open his mouth to protest, his mother says, "There are worse things to talk about."