Title: The Dead Alone Know Peace
Author: cinaed
Rating: PG
Prompt: 022. Death
Warnings: Character death
Pairings: Greg Sanders/David Hodges
Disclaimer: Not me, and the poems are both Japanese death haikus.
Summary: All they needed were a thousand paper cranes. That's all.
Spoiler: "Overload"
A/N: ...I don't know where this came from. Seriously. I apologize for the angst.

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(Fukaba fuke
Hana wa sunda zo
Aki no kaze

Blow if you will
Fall wind...the flowers
Have all faded.)

~Gansan

David hadn't even known that Greg knew how to fold paper cranes until he walked in on him after Greg's first round of chemo; the other man was sitting upright in the hospital bed, pale, with the first initial signs of strain just beginning to show around his pain-filled eyes, carefully folding a paper crane from a piece of paper one of the nurses had given him. David remembers, now, how he had raised an eyebrow and said, Paper cranes? in the most skeptical tone he could muster, and how Greg had just looked at him for a moment, and then managed a lopsided grin. He remembers the soft laugh, with just the barest undertones of pain from the chemotherapy, and Greg's vague explanation about some girl named Sadako and a thousand paper cranes and a wish.

The rest of that day blurs together -- in fact, most of the days start to blur together after that, and David cannot recall too many precise details, no matter how hard he tries.

What he does remember are various moments, like snapshots frozen in time. David remembers when he finally gets the full explanation about the thousand paper cranes -- it's after the third round of chemo that Greg studies his hands (they can both trace the blue veins now) and explains how if he gathers a thousand paper cranes, then his wish will come true, and David can still hear sometimes, when the silence grows thick and heavy and he thinks he's about to drown, the unspoken And then I'll get better and everything will be fine that hovered in the air that day. And then there is the time that he came into the hospital room to find Greg in a quiet, almost sullen mood; it takes several minutes of determined prodding before the man knuckles under and says that the nurse who's been giving him the paper for his paper cranes (thirty cranes clutter his bed-stand) is going on maternity leave. After one of the nurses shooes him from the room at the end of visiting hours, David remembers wandering through Las Vegas, searching for a craft store, and finally finding one just as the elderly man is locking the doors. Please, he remembers saying, standing there with his hands tucked into his pockets, do you have origami paper? And when the man just nods, shooting him a curious look, he remembers swallowing, feeling something like panic and grief choke him, and saying, I need paper for a thousand paper cranes. As many colors as you can. He -- he loves colors. And most of all, he remembers the look of understanding that crosses the elderly man's face at that, and how the man had let him come inside and buy the entire supply of origami paper and promised to let him know when the next shipment came in, and the look of absolute shock that shifted to joy on Greg's face when David dropped the various brightly colored sheets onto his bed and told him to have fun making rainbow cranes.

It was embarassing, David admits to himself, how his fingers, so slender and nimble when examining trace, could suddenly feel thick and clumsy when he first tried to fold a paper crane, about two months after Greg's first round of chemo, but it was well worth the embarassment to see the flush on Greg's cheeks and hear a deep-throated laugh as David helplessly mangles a piece of paper in a vain attempt to make a crane; he still remembers the sparkle in Greg's eyes as the other man laughed and stole the crumpled piece of paper, smoothing out the wrinkles before carefully folding it into a slightly rumpled crane, his voice light and still filled with mirth as he instructed David on how to not to completely botch his next attempt. (David's rumpled crane was nicknamed 'The Ugly Duckling' and given a place of honor on his bed-stand, set above the cranes that Bobby and Jacqui and Nick and Warrick later bring in.)

He remembers how, later on, when Greg would get so tired that he would fall asleep in the middle of a conversation, in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a word, his voice trailing off into a sigh and his eyes fluttering shut, how they made a game of David hiding from the nurses and trying to stay after visiting hours ended. The latest he managed to stay was one o'clock in the morning once, and he was only found out because the nurse checking in on Greg had tried to use the bathroom, which was where David was hiding, of course (she rolled her eyes at his curses and declarations that a nurse using a patient's bathroom had to be breaking a rule). He still sees Greg's expression of pure, devilish amusement from that night sometimes -- when he closes his eyes, Greg's mischievous face appears on the back of his eyelids, and he can feel his breath catch and a slightly wistful, mostly anguished smile touch his lips.

There is much that blurs together, and much he tries to remember and fails to, and much he tries to forget and fails to as well. He cannot remember what Greg told him that last night, because it wasn't supposed to be their last night and so David had no reason to realize the importance of those final sentences (he thinks it was something about sneaking some junk food in, but he is not, cannot, be certain). He does remember how towards the end, Greg's hands started trembling almost constantly, and that they had a silent, unspoken agreement to ignore the shakes, even as Greg fumbled with each unused brightly colored paper and coaxed it into the shape of a crane. He cannot remember if in one of their more serious moments Greg mentioned that he wanted lilies at the funeral (when someone -- he thinks it was the funeral director -- asked him, something bitter rose in his throat and lodged there, and he ended up huddled over a toilet, retching his guts out). He does remember the way Greg's skin started stretching tightly over his bones and the way his knuckles became as sharp as knives and almost bruised David's hands towards the end.

David thinks it's funny how people are actually nice to him now, when he doesn't care whether they're nice to him or not. The fact that everyone, even Grissom, calls him David now is meaningless, because Greg is not here to see them attempt to put up with him, but the one time he tried telling them that, Catherine ended up in tears and Nick cursed him in a long streak of Spanish profanity, and so he keeps those thoughts to himself. He also keeps back the comments that bubble up every time Grissom unsubtly suggests he sees the psychiatrist, mostly because he doesn't know what he'd do with the empty hours if he was fired.

Greg made three hundred and forty-seven cranes (the crime lab's contributions brought it to three hundred and fifty-two). They all fill David's house now, cluttering his tables and perching on his fireplace, and to this day David isn't certain whether they are beautiful memorials to the man or just painful reminders of what David's lost and can never get back. Somedays it seems more like the latter, but it is the days that he picks up one and remembers exactly when Greg made it and what he said as he folded the crane into existance that makes him leave the cranes where they are.

Gradually, too, the house is getting new cranes, fashioned by far less skillful hands than Greg's, cranes that always seem just the slightest bit rumpled, because David will never be a master of origami. They buried Greg on a Tuesday, and so it is every Tuesday that David visits his grave, running his hands over the name and dates on the tombstone like a lover's caress (and in so many ways it is a lover's caress). In front of the grave there is a glass box that only David has the key to, and inside the box is a paper crane. Every single week, David brings a new crane to replace last week's edition, and the former is carried back to his house and set on an available surface. (David is thirty-nine now. There are fifty-two weeks in a year. If he lives to be his grandfather's age, which was seventy-nine, he will have made two thousand and eighty paper cranes. That's two wishes. And if David believed in wishes, if he believed in anything at all, he would wish -- he would wish....)

If David was a man who believed in God, he would have stopped believing in him when the first handful of dirt hit Greg's coffin. If he was a man who believed in dreams, they would have turned to nightmares when he woke up, disoriented, to the phone ringing, and heard the soft, sympathetic voice of the doctor saying, Mr. Hodges? I'm afraid I have some bad news. If he was a man who believed in wishes, though, he would wish...he would wish that none of this had happened, that Greg's lips had never had to whisper brokenly, Cancer, David, it's cancer, that Greg was still here and that those damn cranes were never folded into existence. He would wish for Greg to be here, real, and strong and filled with fire.

And if he was a man who believed in life after death, he would die just to be with Greg again, because it is the dead alone who know peace.

(Kanete naki
Mi koso yasukere
Yuki no michi

Since time began
The dead alone know peace.
Life is but melting snow.)

~Nandai

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