Title: There Are No Monsters Here
By: angstytimelord
Pairing: Greg Sanders/Gil Grissom
Fandom: CSI: Vegas
Rating: PG-13
Table: Charloft prompt challenge, tv_universe
Prompt: Monster
Disclaimer: This is entirely a product of my own imagination, and I make no profit from it. I do not own the lovely Greg Sanders or Gil Grissom, unfortunately, just borrowing them for a while. Please do not sue.

***

Greg raised his head from his work, frowning as he glanced around the DNA lab. He could have sworn that he felt a malevolent presence, one that he had thought never to feel again, one that had dominated his life for far too long.

Shane couldn't be here. Not in the lab. He wouldn't be let in here; everybody knew what he looked like, and they knew what he'd done to Greg. He wouldn't make it two feet into the place before he'd be grabbed and hauled away like the criminal he was.

There was no way that Shane could be here. He didn't have to be afraid that his ex-boyfriend could manage to whisk him away from the crime lab as he had from the hospital; there were too many people here watching out for him.

Shane wouldn't be able to slip through the cracks again. But it was still hard to believe that he was always safe here; Shane had visited him in the crime lab before, and what if someone was at the front desk who didn't know what had happened?

No, that was ridiculous, Greg scolded himself. Every person here, even the receptionists who only worked part-time, knew not to let Shane through. No one was going to make a mistake, not about something so important. He didn't have to be scared any more.

But that was more easily said than done, he thought with a sigh. Even here, at work, surrounded by people who wanted to protect him, he still didn't feel as though he was one hundred percent safe. There was always a chance that Shane could find a way to get to him.

It wasn't likely, but that didn't mean it couldn't happen. Shane had a way of insinuating himself into places that he shouldn't be; Greg had seen him do it before. At the time, it had seemed like an amazing ability, but now, it was a terrifying one.

Still, he shouldn't be thinking about Shane, and about the past. He was looking to the future now, a future he was sharing with Nick. The experience with Shane had been months ago; he really should be past that by now, shouldn't he?

Again, that was more easily said than done. He'd been seeing a shrink, and he was dealing with the post-rape trauma as best he could. But the nightmares still came; no matter how he tried to forget them and push them away, they still lingered.

The monsters in his dreams were the same ones that chased him in his waking hours; that was what made them so frightening. Well, only one monster, really. The monster who he had at one time thought he had been in love with.

He had given his body to that monster, and thought he had given his heart. It turned out that he'd been holding part of himself back all along, and that part of him had been given wholeheartedly to Nick. The part of him that Nick had always owned.

He'd always wanted Nick, always loved him. Now all of him belonged to Nick, instead of just one part that he held back and kept hidden from the world. He could love Nick openly, be with him, and have no qualms about what people would think.

But the monsters were still there, hiding in the back of his mind, behind the closed and locked doors of his dreams, just waiting to leap out at him with teeth and claws extended to rend him to pieces. He was afraid of those monsters, afraid of what they could do to him.

Shane was a monster that would never go away, not until he caught and put behind bars. He would always be there, a dark shadow on the edges of Greg's life. There was no way to get rid of that monster until he had closure for the past.

There were no monsters here, Greg told himself firmly, glancing around the lab. He was alone here at the moment, but there were other people outside the lab, in other labs, in offices, walking down the corridors, only a few feet away.

Help was here, if he needed it. But he wouldn't need it, he reiterated, keeping his inner voice firm and strong. He needed to stop jumping at every shadow, being unnerved by every noise, feeling as though there was danger lurking around every corner.

He wasn't going to give in to his fears. There were no monsters here, not in the place where he worked. He was safe here. It was outside these walls when he had to be careful, to look over his shoulder and be on his guard for the unexpected.

He had to stop letting Shane, and the past, control his present -- and therefore his future. He had to put it all behind him, though that wasn't going to be easy to do until he knew that Shane was safely behind bars and wouldn't hurt him, or anyone else, ever again.

Battling those monsters was the hardest thing he'd ever done; they attacked him in his dreams, and even in his thoughts during his waking hours. But he would manage to vanquish them somehow. He wasn't going to let them control him. Not any more.

Squaring his shoulders, Greg looked around the lab one last time, then down at the work that was piling up on his desk. It was time to get down to business, to push the monsters away, and hope that he could keep them at bay for the rest of his working day.

***