Title: You Don't Have To Move Forward To Save Yourself
Author: pinn2480
Rating: PG-13
Warning: Post 'Grave Danger'.
Fandom and Pairing: CSI. Nick/Greg.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not claiming otherwise. Also, lyrics belong to U2.
A/N: The lyrics are from 'City Of Blinding Lights'. It always seems like the shorter a piece is, the more reassurance I need that I'm on the right track. This was no different. algernon_mouse and shoshannagold provided all the necessary handholding, grammar picking, and sentence fixing. Really, they did all the hard work.
Summary: Nick still wakes up in the middle of the day, almost a year later, scratching his arms, turning on all the lights in the house, and pacing the living room until he can breathe again.

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I've seen you walk unafraid

Nick still wakes up in the middle of the day, almost a year later, scratching his arms, turning on all the lights in the house, and pacing the living room until he can breathe again.

He hates it. He hates how he'll have good weeks, weeks where he sleeps almost eight hours and wakes up peacefully, Greg snoring softly besides him. And then something will happen, some trigger that he doesn't even recognize will cut through his dreams and replace them with nightmares.

Every time he gets up from a bad dream, Greg wakes up too and it's just one more thing that Nick hates. He hates disrupting Greg's schedule, and he hates giving Greg reasons to leave him.

Deep down, Nick knows that he's wrong to think Greg would leave him because of any of this. Not only has Greg repeatedly told him that, but he also knows that he wouldn't be with Greg in the first place if he were the type to leave when things got tough. That's not the kind of people they are.

Years ago, before he’d gathered enough courage to ask Greg out, he used to watch Greg when he was working in the lab and thought no one was around. Nick had never really understood what it meant to see someone in their natural environment until he met Greg.

Greg would dance around the lab, singing along with the radio as he transferred samples from one machine to another, and Nick admired his easy grace. Occasionally Greg would stumble and hit the bench but he always bounced right back and he never once dropped anything.

Nick envies that grace right now, especially when he's trying not to scream.

He just wants to be easy in his skin again.


I've seen you in the clothes you made.

Greg's not oblivious, he knows Nick's frustrated because he's still recovering and he just wants to be done with it. He knows that Nick's afraid, afraid that he's going to scare Greg away if he lets it all out, even though they both know that's bullshit.

Greg knows he has to be patient and that he can't push Nick anymore than he wants to be pushed.

But sometimes, when Nicks stands in the middle of the kitchen, panting, and tells him to forget it, he wants to snap. He wants to rip his shirt off and force Nick to look at his back. He wants to scream about how he got thrown through a glass wall in the explosion and couldn't sleep on his back for three months. He wants to remind Nick of how he cried at every physical therapy session that first awful month.

Most importantly, Greg wants to remind Nick that he was injured on the job too and he knows what it's like to fear the job but to keep going because there's nowhere else you can imagine being. Greg won't ever understand what Nick went through, no one can, but he knows some of those feelings churning inside of Nick.

He doesn't say any of those things. Instead, he bites his tongue, sits down at the kitchen table, and says, "I'm here when you're ready."


Oh, you look so beautiful tonight

When it's all said and done, they don't get to flash-forward five years. They don't get to skip ahead to the part where Nick hasn't had a panic attack in over a year and Greg's learned how to talk about what's bothering him, and they're starting to seriously consider adoption.

And things don't get steadily better either. It's all uphill. There are fights and angry words, quiet declarations of love mixed in with threats to move out but it's all part of building a new life. They can't go back to what they were, and they can't pretend like nothing ever happened.

They just have to start new.

There is therapy, joint and separate, and slowly things are less of a struggle. They backslide all the time, but each time it's a little less and it's never as big as the move forward has been.

Because what it all comes down to, and what Nick reminds Greg of every time he can, is that this isn't how they're meant to end. They'll end when they're old and gray, and Nick is still reminding Greg to put away his cereal and Greg is still calling Nick an old nag. It's just the type of people they are.

***