Title: Spinning
Author: amazonqueenkate
Pairing: Nick Stokes/Bobby Dawson
Fandom: CSI: Vegas
Theme: #17 kHz (kilohertz)
Warnings: character death; It; stale candy and cheap coffee; deleted phone messages
Disclaimer: Once again, CSI does not belong to me. And sometimes, for good reasons.
Author's Notes: I am tempering the cute fic with the sad fic. And this one is sad. Very. Thanks to hawkeyecat for the idea (though why I am thanking her for this idea, I am not sure) and the preview.

He's spinning.

He tries to pretend that the world stays right-side-up, not up-side-down, but it never really works. He feels perpetually dizzy, even when he closes his eyes, and he grips a lot more tables than he used to.

He needs to keep grounded, needs to keep his feet steady. His pulse steady. His entire body steady.

No one says anything, or looks at him funny, anymore. They did the first few days, but now, they just smile.

Same old smiles, same old self.

No one suspects he's spinning.

==

He can't go in the garage anymore.

He's tried, a few times, when he's been given a case with a car. He's tried to follow Sara, in her blue jumpsuit and ponytail, to confront his fear and just do it. It's the garage. There is nothing threatening, nothing remotely scary about the garage. It's just another room in the lab.

Except, of course, the path into the garage.

The first time he tried, he couldn't even make it through the door. His stomach revolted, and he pushed past some befuddled, nameless intern in his rush to the bathroom. He heaved until there was nothing but tears left, and then slackened against the tile and porcelain and just waited.

No one said anything, of course.

Since then, he can make it a few steps in before his heart pounds so quickly in his chest that he worries it may explode. Explode like gunpowder with a spark, and splatter whatever is left inside him against the stupid glass walls.

He's not sure there's much left inside him, though, and he stands just outside the doorway sometimes, staring across the emptiness and towards the garage.

The shatterproof glass is still cracked.

He wonders how long it'll stay that way.

==

He comes home every morning and listens to the normal battery of messages. They're always the same – his shrink, his parents, Catherine, Greg – and he deletes them in the order they come.

"Nick," Greg always pleads, "call me back."

He doesn't, of course.

Instead, he goes through the motions: showering, eating, watching TV, collapsing into bed. Once he's there, though, he lays still, staring at the ceiling.

He finds it funny, when he lays there, that he's been molested, threatened at gun point, thrown out a window, threatened again at gun point, buried alive, and yet he's still here. Alive. His heart still beats, his eyes still blink, and he still breathes in the dry-hot Nevada air.

It doesn't seem fair that he's beaten a thousand odds for this.

A cold bed, a quiet apartment, a silent prayer that it should have been him.

Because by all logic, it really should have been him.

==

He goes to the hospital, sometimes, and stands in the waiting room.

He watches other people – husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, families, friends, strangers – mill around, not speaking as they drink cheap coffee and eat stale candy bars out of the vending machine. Some hug, some kiss, some cry, but they never look up. They don't know how to look up, to see a stranger, to find the humanity in another face. It's too much humanity, in those moments, to look up and see another suffering.

It's too much humanity, to look up and feel that much more alone.

He stands there, in the waiting room, and watches the doctors stride in and out of those swinging double doors. He remembers stale candy and cheap coffee and empty words.

"We're sorry."

He can look at these strangers now, and see the anticipation in their faces.

They're just waiting for someone to be sorry.

==

Alec Pekowski is young, a charming man with a great big smile and a warm handshake. Grissom introduces him as an afterthought, waving his hand thoughtlessly from above this week's file-of-interest. Greg laughs and Sara bats her eyelashes; Catherine pats him on the shoulder and Warrick gives him a high five. Jacqui flirts (poorly), Hodges tosses out a barb, and Archie rolls his eyes at the both of them.

They do what they always do. They pretend it means nothing.

He walks away from the group, away from Alec Pekowski and his bright-as-day smile, away from the break room and away from other people. He stands in the locker room and stares at the wall, a blank wall, and pretends that the pattern of white paint on cinderblock isn't blurring in his vision.

The first time Alec fires a gun, he pretends he can't hear the blast.

But he does, and the sound of it – echoing through the lab, a crack above the bustle – splits the poorly mended cracks all over again.

==

He's spinning.

He sits down on the couch to quell the dizziness, and picks It up. He calls It that – capital-I, lowercase-t – because he doesn't know what else to call It. He doesn't know what other name to give something so meaninglessly important.

To everyone else, though, it's just a newspaper clipping. If he were to die tomorrow, and his sisters or brother or mother or father came to clean out the apartment, they'd crumple it up and throw it away.

He wishes he had that willpower.

It's a short enough article, detailing an "unfortunate accident" at Clark County's "esteemed crime lab" in which a gun "jammed and then misfired." They're clinical terms, journalistic terms, terms without feeling. Terms written by a faceless stranger in front of a keyboard, hammering out details for a deadline.

"Thirty-nine-year-old Robert Dawson," he reads to himself, over and over again, "died in surgery a few hours later."

There's more to the article, he's sure of it, but he never makes it past that line.

So he closes his eyes and sits alone, instead, feeling the movement of the room and the beating of his heart, and waits for it to stop.