Title: Visible Man
BY: Wirrrn
DISTRIBUTION: Anywhere the boyz give each other private anatomy tuition!
ARCHIVE: All Signs Point to Yes
FANDOM: CSI: Vegas
PAIRING: Nick/Greg. Grissom fans: move along, there's nothing to see here, move along...*g*
RATING: R. Homosexuality, Entomology, Forensic ickies.
DISCLAIMER: All belong to CBS. But I let 'em loose in the lab to play hide the test tube. The Body Farm belongs to the US Government, however many times I wish it was mine...
SPOILERS: It's a Cook-Book! It's a Cook-Book!
FEEDBACK: Wirrrn@yahoo.com. This is my first time with the Sleek Geeks, folks, so cut me some slack or I break out the Skull Keys and Bot Flies!
SPECIAL NOTE: This one's a belated birthday fic for Caroline Crane, the Rareslash Goddess who got me into CSI, BWOC and DeCoteau in the first place. Greg's thing about scorpion cuticles is true (No, I don't drink gin either!)

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Nick strode into the Pathology Lab, a bottle in either hand. Both bottles contained alcohol, but only one was drinkable. He made a quick scan of the room, and was about to turn on his heel when he caught movement over by one of the Clean Benches. Nick pulled himself up higher and could just make out a feral spray of hair nearly lost amongst the array of texts, flasks and insect drawers that the desks groaned beneath.

"Greg!" Nick grinned at the younger man as he looked up, then proffered the bottles at him. "You ask for a wet specimen?!"

He crossed over to Greg's desk, noting that his lover had several Arachnology texts splayed open all about him. The younger man had clearly been having no luck whatsoever with the Entomological Cabinets he'd requested from a Museum Curator friend of Grissom's however. Nick was silently glad he'd been off playing Sounding Board to Grissom's Whacko Theory Du Jour when the cabinets had arrived for Greg, or else he'd have felt honour-bound to do the Gallant Boyfriend thing and carry them up the stairs to the Labs- and the Cabinets were awkward, surgical-steel reinforced and infamously heavy. Once, out at the Body Farm, he'd been shifting a similar cabinet when a drawer of Dermestid Beetles came loose, slid out and dropped on his thigh. The resultant bruise had been gigantic and lurid and Greg's usually deft, sensual touches had drawn yelps of pain from Nick every night in bed afterwards for nearly a month.

The standing man juggled bottles and plonked the glass-stoppered one down on the desk, freeing a hand to gently caress the nape of his boyfriend's neck at the point where that wild hair met a pale expanse of skin.

(As always, he made a point of deliberately tracing the three thick, ruddy, keloid scars that snaked out like macabre tree roots from just beneath the collar to an inch below the hairline.)

-Greg arched up into the touch, moaning, without removing his eyes from the viewing port of the microscope he was using. "-Hey, Gil."

Nick laughed and swatted him gently. "You wish. Hey, G..." He glanced at the open texts. "Loxosceles? Then what are you giving the techs permanent back deformities lugging Bug Cabinets around for? Dried spiders are useless."

-As he'd thought, the remark got Greg's eyes off the scope and onto his own. Glaring a bit, true, but he just loved the sensation of that slightly witchy gaze moving on his skin.

"-I *know* that, Stokes. I was looking up prey items, seeing why a spider would bother being on our corpse. I thought maybe it was feeding on the insects attracted to it by the putrefaction."

Nick nodded, impressed. "Good thought. But no, Loxosceles prefers quiet little corners indoors, where it can build webs and catch moths. You won't find it in a forest habitat hunting on the ground." He turned the wet preserved specimen around in its phial so that it caught the light.

The oddly crab-like body of the spider gleamed under the fluorescent bulbs in the room, highlighting the violin-shaped marking on the head that lent it its popular name, "Fiddle-Back." The spider shifted and settled in the ethanol in which it floated, six pinprick eyes still seeming to coldly appraise the lovers, even in death.

"Brown Recluse are never found in that kind of environment" Nick continued. "If one was on our juror's body, it was put there."

Greg shuffled papers. "-Then taken with the lesions and the Toxicology detecting Kidney damage, we can attribute the cause of death to Renal failure due to Spider Envenomation. The *spider* was the murder weapon, Nick! This rocks!"

"Yeah it is something of an odd case but-"

"-Well, yeah, there's that, but now Sara owes me Fifty bucks! She was betting it'd be Scalded Skin Syndrome."

"You and Sara were gambling over Autopsy results?"

"-Well yeah; don't worry, I didn't include Warwick, so he hasn't gotten the Slot Machine Monkey on his back again."

"G...! Grissom would personally strap you down and give you a Y-Incision if he knew that you were making money off of-"

"-Alright, alright, Stokes, I get the message! Hey, What's say I used the money to take you out to dinner someplace nice?"

Nick's expression softened. "I...suppose that would solve everyone's problems."

"-Cool." Greg was idly tilting the flask and watching the spider slosh around in its ethanol tomb. Nick watches his lover fiddle with the fiddleback for a moment, then lets his professional face slide off the bone and smiles again. "The CDC people will be pleased to hear it wasn't Scalded Skin. Catherine and Grissom have been tag-team nagging at them all day. I think the CDC folks have been *looking* for an excuse to Quarantine them both. Preferably together."

Greg chuckled, then spun around in his swivel chair and wrapped both arms around the other man's waist, leaning his head in to rub his face against rock-hard stomach muscles, each of which he could name in both English and Latin. A few moments of mindless affection later and he notices the other bottle his lover is holding.

"-I only requisitioned one Wet Specimen, Nick."

"I know." The other man grinned, put the other bottle on the desk. "This one's for us. G n'T. One of the CDC people brought it for Grissom, but she gave it to me instead when he started giving them a collective conniption. You got anything we can use for glasses without having to autoclave first?"

Greg leaned back in his chair. "-You seriously expect me to be able to drink that after being in this job?"

Nick arched an eyebrow. "Come again?"

"-You've gotten as far as you have without knowing about the Gin Thing? I'm shocked!!" But the smile on Greg's face was teasing.

The older man spread his arms wide. "Okay then, enlighten me."

Greg nodded and grinned manically with the same odd, tic-like lurch that also propelled him from his chair. "-Aha! Exactly! That's exactly what I'll do- enlighte you, yeah!" He began rummaging through desks and pigeonholes.

Nick watched his lover ransack drawers and open textbooks with a baffled but fond expression, until finally he can't watch the human-shaped tornado in his office silently anymore.

"Um, G? Is this the result of some Head Trauma Thing I should know about?!"

"-Your faith in my mental faculties is duly noted for a later, inappropriate time" muttered the pile of medical and forensic ephemera that used to be Greg, "-If I-aha! I knew 'd seen one around here once."

Greg sprang out of the clutter at a different exit point than the one Nick had been expecting, holding another, clearly older, specimen jar, and grinning. "-Come over here and I'll...enlighten you."

Nick kept his expression stoic, though it threatened to melt into something warmer as his lover took him by the hand and led him over to the wall of Light Boxes.

Greg flicked switches until he found a Light Box that was set to Ultra Violet. With a flourish, he unsealed the amber-coloured specimen jar he'd retrieved and pulled a very large scorpion out into the air. The specimen was very old- the dead arachnid dripped cloudy, ancient-smelling ethanol and partially liquefied chitin from its claws and tarsi onto the floor and Greg's sneakers- but he didn't seem to care. "-You know about scorpion cuticle and its reaction to UV light, don'tcha?!"

Nick leaned forward to look, arms folded over his chest, resting his backside against the nearest Clean Bench. "Wow; I've heard about it, but I've never seen it in the field. I've never had to collect them." He paused, thinking. "I did have to set some CO2 traps to catch West Nile Mosquitoes in Hell's Kitchen, once, but never scorpions. Not even in this great big gaudy sandbox we call home. That's pretty neat!"

Greg smiled. Suspended by the caudal tip of its sting over the UV light, the dead arachnid was glowing a bright, ethereal, neon blue."-I've done it in the field once or twice. Makes the little nippers really easy to spot at night, though you hafta be careful if you're collecting here, I mean in a desert environment. The UV lamps attract Rattlers like nobody's business."

He put the arachnid down and opened his arms with a showy theatrical flourish entirely appropriate for Vegas. "Okay babe, give me the gin, now."

Nick sloshed half the contents of the flask into an unused beaker and passed it to his lover. The pads of their fingers touched as the beaker, slick with condensation, was transferred. A bolt of...something passed between them and the two men shivered in their skins.

Greg took the alcohol and slid it next to the large scorpion, using the edge of the beaker to nudge the arachnid slightly to one side so that both items had room on the surface of the Light Box. He beamed a dazzling expression straight out of Lewis Carroll in Nick's direction, then toggled the UV lamp back on.

-And the small phial of gin fluoresced the same cold, deep-sea blue as the scorpion beside it.

Nick's jaw dropped. "You're kidding; the bug and the booze reflect at the same wavelength?"

"-Mhhmm. Intense, hunh?" Greg winked at his friend. "-By the way, never use the word "bug" when you're talking about arachnids if Grissom's around. I did it once and it's lucky he wasn't holding a bone-saw."

Nick laughs, still shaking his head in amazement at the Light Box. "I hope you realize it'll take me *days* to get over this."

"-Tell me about it. Now you know why I don't touch the stuff. God knows what they put in it."

Nick has gone quiet and Greg looks up to see a look of wonder on his lover's beautiful face, a tremor in his hand as he reaches out to gently stroke a line down the side of the younger man's jaw.

"All the things I've taught you..." Nick murmurs. From the tone, Greg doesn't think the other man knows he's vocalizing. "...All these years... and you can still teach *me*..."

Greg turned his head into Nick's cupping palm and kissed his way down the wrist. The older man's eyes fluttered closed even as he sank his fingers into the unkempt mop of Greg's hair and pulled him forward. He doesn't even need to see his lover to guide him to his lips. Both of them know each other so well, their relationship often reminded them of the grooves oft-used facial muscles carved into the bones of the skull over time.

Nick and Greg were each other's muscle memory.

Finally, the kiss broke, eternal seconds later. Greg's eyes have swollen to become the corona of a solar eclipse- his pupils are so dilated with emotion they have all but swallowed his irises whole. "-Get the lights, baby."

Nick disentangled himself from his lover and went to the bank of wall switches. In his peripheral vision, he sees Greg heading for the bottle of gin. "I thought you never drank the stuff, G." He toggled the lights off.

Greg's lust-rasped reply seems to suddenly echo in the now darkned lab as the overhead lights flicker and die. "I don't plan on *drinking* any."

Nick turned- and had to physically clench around his muscles to actually stop himself from coming on the spot.

Greg has stripped and poured the entire bottle of gin all over his naked body, rubbing it into the skin in places, before turning all the Light Boxes on, all set to emit UV light. Nick gasped at the sight of his lover nude and glowing an ethereal, bioluminescent blue. Coupled with the total lack of another light source in the lab, Nick felt as though he has suddenly been transported to the bottom of the ocean and is gazing upon some new and exquistely beautiful form of life. Certainly the pressure on his heart and cock could have been made by tonnes of black water above him.

Naked, glowing and smiling, Greg Sanders is the most erotic thing Nick has ever seen in his life. Greg beckoned like some neon Siren, and the older man stumbled on suddenly numb legs over to his embrace, to his mouth, sparing only a passing thought that he was glad they were alone in the building for the next few hours.

And that the scorpion was his new favourite animal.

-----end-----