Title: Complicated Relationships
Author: podga
Pairing: Gil Grissom/Nick Stokes
Rating: R
Warning: Spoiler for Season 5 "Nesting Dolls"
Disclaimer: Characters don't belong to me and I don't make money off of them
Summary: Established relationship. Nick gives Gil a gift.

The moment I find the 2nd body, I know this is a case Gil would love to handle. I have a short argument with myself. It's not Gil's case. It's ours. It's Catherine's. And anyway, Gil is probably still asleep. He'll find out about it soon enough. It would be completely unethical to tell him about it. And cruel, because he knows Catherine won't like it if he steps in and gets involved, so he won't.

Then I figure, what the hell. He's my boyfriend. People share really interesting things that happen to them at work with their partners, even with their friends. Unless there's a conflict of interest. Which in this case, there might be. Might. So I shouldn't really actively volunteer the information. But if he should happen to call me, I guess I could let it slip out.

'Are you awake? Thinking of you.' A text message is a nice compromise. If he's awake, he might call me. If not, no harm done.

For the next couple of hours I'm on pins and needles. He's not calling me. We're processing as much as we can, but we can't figure a way to get the bodies out of the tar without destroying any evidence. We're completely stumped. If we haven't solved this by the time he comes in, Catherine will probably ask him for help – better him and "our" team than someone from the days' shift. Hell, she might even decide to call him before he's due in. Which means that I won't get to tell him. So I go for a cup of coffee and I call him.

He sounds alert when he picks up, but it doesn't mean he wasn't sleeping. Unlike me, he's capable of waking up instantly.

"Hi Gil. I hope I didn't wake you."

"No problem," Gil responds, which means I did. Also unlike me (and most everybody I know), Gil never feels the need to assure the caller that the phone didn't wake him up if it did.

I tell him what we found. When I finish, there's a long silence. Then he hangs up on me. I gape at my phone, wondering for a second if the connection was lost, but the bars on the screen indicate that the signal is at full strength. He definitely hung up on me. Not the reaction I was expecting.

I go to the lab to try and convince David to bump up our soil samples in priority. If we can't get to the bodies, at least the samples might tell us something. I should know better. You can't get David to do something he doesn't see the need for. As far as he's concerned, the samples won't do a thing for us without the bodies.

"I'm backed up with cases where we actually know a crime has been committed, Nick," he tells me in a long-suffering tone. One of these days I'm going to beat the living daylight out of him. Snide bastard.

"We know a crime has been committed here too, David. Two bodies sealed in tar and buried in the middle of nowhere is not an accident or somebody trying to avoid the expense of a nice funeral." I'm wasting my breath, talking to his back. He's bent over a microscope, his ass a really tempting target for my foot. Nobody would blame me. Nobody.

Warrick wanders into the lab.

"Grissom's here," he says casually.

David straightens up, immediately interested, the kiss-ass weasel. "It's still a couple of hours before grave. What's he doing here?"

Warrick grins. "He heard about our case somehow. I haven't seen him this excited in a long time. He's down at the morgue right now."

I see David casually reach for the soil samples and I start laughing.

"What's up with you, man?" Warrick asks.

"Nothing," I say, but I can't stop smiling. "Nothing."

It doesn't end up being a double shift for us, but close enough. While the rest of us are off, Sara hits the emergency rooms in town, trying to find a name for "Flat Sally" as David dubbed her. I guess that's where the trouble starts, because Sara on a suspected domestic abuse case is always trouble. Gil told me she almost pulled a gun on a suspect once. This time she gets herself suspended.

"I don't get Catherine. She's really been on her high horse since she became a supervisor," Greg tells me. He's visibly upset. He's had a sweet spot for Sara for a long, long time. "How do you get along with her?"

I shrug. "She's alright. From what I hear, Sara was really out of line."

"Come on, Nick! She was just tired and upset. You know Grissom wouldn't have reacted the way Catherine did."

No, because Sara would have never behaved that way with Grissom, I think. "From what I hear, it wasn't Catherine who reacted, it was Ecklie. Anyway, gotta go. See you later, Greg."

"Yeah," he mutters. He's not a happy puppy.

The whole thing backfired. If I hadn't told Gil about the case, he wouldn't have come in, he wouldn't have broken Flat Sally's skull and he wouldn't have offered Sara to help us on the case. Shit. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as my grandma used to say.

"It's not supposed to be simple. Complicated is the whole point," Catherine says. The rest of the conversation between Catherine and Warrick pretty much goes over my head, but I keep on returning to Catherine's words. I wonder if she means that complicated relationships are somehow better or if she's just saying that that's life. Gil and I are complicated and I can't say I really like it. But then, when I wake up next to him or when we're hanging out together and I just watch him absorbed in a book, nothing feels simpler or clearer. Nothing.

"Did I ever thank you for letting me know about the case?"

"I don't think I did anybody any favors," I mutter.

It's a gray day outside and with the blinds drawn, the bedroom is dark, the outlines of furniture all fuzzy. I can barely make out his face. He's propped up on one elbow, looking down at me, but I don't think he can see much more than I can.

"Ah, Nick."

He lightly runs his knuckles along my cheek, down my neck and across my collarbone. Gil rarely touches others; if he's not actually doing something, he always seems to be holding something or he keeps his hands in his pockets. In all the years I've known him, I don't think I've even seen him shake hands more than five times.

When we first started going out, I was really careful to respect his space, and then of course we always had to watch ourselves around other people. It's kind of stuck with me and I still hesitate to reach out to him, even when we're alone. He's the opposite and I think that maybe what stuck with him is making the effort to touch and caress me, because he understood how it made me feel. Still makes me feel, because it's something that Gil gives to no-one else but me.

"Gil, what are you going to do about Sara?" I know Ecklie wanted her fired and I know that Gil basically told him to fuck off, because Catherine told Jim and he told me. Jim is concerned about Gil, because Gil is even worse at playing politics than Jim is. I'm not sure he knows about us, but he's not normally indiscreet with confidences, so I believe he does. Maybe he thinks I can somehow protect Gil. Or maybe he just thought that I knew about it anyway, that Gil tells me things. Which, of course, Gil doesn't.

"I don't want to talk about Sara right now," Gil says and leans over to kiss me. I block him gently.

"I don't either. But I want to talk about you. You're digging a hole for yourself and I don't think you're really helping her either, so it's all for nothing."

He sighs, a quiet puff of air I feel on my cheek.

"I feel responsible for her," he says. "I invited her here because I like her work. She's a good criminalist. But she's…" He trails off and I see him shrug.

"She has problems," he finally finishes and lies back.

"Can you help her?"

"Probably not. But I can at least be a friend to her."

The trouble is that he really believes what he's saying. I'm frustrated, because I know he won't listen to me if I tell him that he's the last person that can be a friend to Sara. Gil is accepting of people, whatever their hang ups, and he equates that to understanding them. Maybe he does. But I've been where Sara is. I know what Sara wants from Gil, and friendship is a poor second.

I roll over to face him, but I don't really know what to say. I wish I hadn't started this discussion and now I don't know how to end it. I close my eyes and feel for his hand. When I find it, he laces his fingers with mine. I slowly relax and start to drift into sleep.

"Hey," he murmurs.

"Hmm?"

"So, did I thank you?"

I can't be bothered to open my eyes. "No. As a matter of fact, when I told you, you hung up on me."

He chuckles. "Did I?"

"You'll have to make it up to me at some point."

I feel the bed shift as he turns towards me, then our laced hands are trapped under him and his free hand starts tracing a random pattern on my hip.

"How about now?"

"Now would be good," I mumble, as his warm hand moves closer to where I really want it. "For a start."