Title: Word Games
Author: Evan Nicholas
Summary: It's a game he started playing a long time ago.
Disclaimer: Does it look like CSI belongs to me? If it does, you need new glasses. Seriously.
Warnings: Angsty. Go figure.
Spoilers: End of season 3.
A/n: Maybe there is a word for this and I just couldn't find it; I'll freely admit that my search was half-assed at best. Consider this an exercise in willful suspension of disbelief, if that makes you feel any better.


The hospital room is quiet, which is a blessing. His back is killing him around the edges, where the pain meds either haven't penetrated or are already wearing off, and if he thinks really hard, he can feel the stitches up the side of his neck. The doctors have told him they won't be in long, they'll have them popped out (their words, and they're just cheery enough to make him feel ill) in a couple of days, but he can feel the little tug of skin where they climb up along his spine.

Or he thinks he can, anyway. He's not sure how much of it is real and how much is psychological. He kind of hopes it is real, because they can't give him a drug to soothe phantom pain.

The door swishes and he opens his eyes. It's the nurse, the friendly one who smiles at him and tilts her head to one side when she's talking to him so they're both looking at the world from the same angle.

"Hey, honey," she says, touching his IV drip and then running her fingers through his hair. "How are you doing?"

"Okay," he says, and doesn't really like the croak of his voice.

"Can I get you anything?"

He thinks about it. "A dictionary?" he eventually asks.

Her eyes crinkle in amusement, but only for a moment before she realises he's not joking. "A dictionary?"

"Yeah." He smiles, and if smiles had sounds, this one would sound a little croaky, too. He could ask for a glass of water to do something about the croak, but really, he wants the dictionary more than the water.

"Okay," she tells him with a puzzled smile, "I'll see what I can do."

"Thanks," he says, and the smile he manages this time isn't quite as wavery.





She comes back about ten minutes later with a battered dictionary, and she sets it on the table next to his head. "It's not a great dictionary," she says, "but it's all I could find on the floor."

"Thanks," he says. "I'm sure it's fine."

She touches his hair again and makes a note of some sort in the chart at the end of his bed, smiles at him and wishes him well, promises she'll be back to check on him before her shift is over, and then the door swishes shut behind her.

He looks at the dictionary. The nurse was right, it's a piece of shit dictionary, scuffed and stained and was probably last used to even out a wobbly table in the doctor's lounge. But it's something he can handle at any rate, something he can flip through listlessly, looking for the word that isn't there.

It's a game he started playing a long time ago, when he was thirteen or fourteen - he thinks about that for a moment; definitely fourteen, because that was when Bobby Major punched him in the face and called him a faggot and things got fuzzy for a bit. He doesn't play this game often anymore, because he's got his life under control. Mostly.

And maybe "game" isn't the right word for it, either. Maybe "compulsion" would be closer, although that makes him sound like a nutcase and even though he probably is a nutcase - almost definitely - he doesn't need to admit it like that. Not even to himself.

He reaches for the dictionary and lays it on the bed next to him so that he can study its cover. This is part of the game, too - the seduction of it, toying with the idea that he doesn't have to do this, that maybe he won't do it.

Of course he will. He always has, when things get fuzzy. The hard lines of the world start to blur, and he reaches for a dictionary.

This time, the blur is an explosion: maybe his fault, maybe not - he doesn't think so, but that probably doesn't count for a lot. The blur is a rush of air and then the forceful resistance of a plate glass window, and then lying in the wreckage in pain and in shock and thinking, Shit I hope that wasn't me.

He's not even worried about losing his job, assuming it was his fault. (Was it? He wishes he could tell for sure...) Jobs come and go. If he loses this one, he'll find another one and life will go on.

No, what he's worried about is this: if it turns out that the explosion was his fault, did he do it on purpose? Because that's the thing about playing this game with the dictionary: it only ever happens afterwards.

After he took too many Aspirin and chased them down with a glass of vodka, age fourteen. After he was knocked out surfing on a wave that he knew damned well was too big for him, age sixteen. After climbing behind the wheel of Sandra Burnstein's dad's Corvette with a sixpack of beer burbling inside him, age twenty-one. After deliberately not double-checking his gear when parasailing, age twenty-two. After standing up from a perfectly good hiding spot during a 7-Eleven holdup and getting involved, age twenty-four.

All stupid things. All things that he should have known better - no, things that he had known better. Even doing them, he'd had a little voice at the back of his head piping up that this is a bad idea, you idiot.

But he'd... he'd ignored that voice, and gotten hurt, almost gotten killed; spent too much time lying in beds - hospital beds, his own bed at home, in res - staring at the wall, flipping through a dictionary looking for a word that isn't there. Has never been there, probably never will be there.

Maybe he's the only one in the universe who needs this word. Maybe the responsibility is his to invent one. But where should he start?

Suicide: that's as good a place as any to start. Fear of suicide. Fear of committing suicide. Fear of not paying enough attention to his subconscious and accidentally-on-purpose committing suicide. Fear of not having enough control over his mind to stop it from happening. Fear of not even noticing that he's doing it until it's too late.





The dictionary is just as void of secret words as he'd known it would be, so he lets the cover fall shut and puts it back on the side table. He's not sure how long it's been since he started flipping through its pages, but he knows from past experience that time gets distorted once he starts playing this game. Hours can flit by in seconds, and minutes can stretch into eternities. Everything is relative and this only makes it more so.

He's just letting his eyelids settle comfortably closed when he hears the door again, and he looks up. It's the nurse again, wearing her jacket over her scrubs and smiling at him from that same cocked angle.

"Feeling any better?" she asks.

He manages a slight nod, feels the tug of stitches as he does and tries to ignore it. "Sure," he says.

"I'm heading home now, but I just wanted to stop in and say good night."

"Thanks."

"Can I get you anything else?"

"No," he says. "I'm finished with the dictionary, too."

"Okay," she says, and scoops it up. She glances down at it, and then at him again. "Did you find what you were looking for?"

He hesitates. Did he? "I found what I expected," he says.

"Sleep well, honey," she says, touches his hair again, and then pads silently out into the hallway again.

He closes his eyes, and tries not to think of the explosion.