An unexpected fic (for me, at least)

[acroarcs.livejournal.com]

Title: The Box of Pasta
Author: acroarcs
Rating: More of the tame
Setting/Spoilers: post-Grave Danger
Disclaimer: I still don't own CSI or its characters.
Notes: Apparently once you write one, it's hard not to write more. Also, this isn't what I expected to write next, but I had to address why a scene I thought ought to be there was missing from the end of GD.


Greg froze when he heard the key in the door, his heart pounding. He hadn’t meant to come home, but he’d had to leave the hospital when the doctor had suggested that Nick needed rest. Greg had wanted to stay anyway, but the other CSIs were filing out and he couldn’t explain to Nick’s parents why he should be any different. As much as he needed to stay, he also knew that Nick needed to be the one to tell them, and that would have to be when Nick was ready for it.

Nick would come home and the pain would pass. But telling Nick’s parents about their son, about their son and his boyfriend - Nick might decide that was unforgivable, and that pain would never pass.

So Greg was nearly passed out at home, and there was a key in the door and it definitely couldn’t be Nick. And he was stuck, unmoving, on the couch as someone came in. Did Kelly Gordon have more relatives? It didn’t matter. Someone was coming in the front door, so they’d be between him and the gun.

But then he heard two voices talking, and knew he wouldn’t need the gun. Not yet. He sat up, startling Roger and Jillian Stokes. Mrs. Stokes put a hand over her heart, as if to calm it. “Greg,” she said. “Your name is Greg, right?”

Greg nodded slowly as he got up from the couch. “Yeah, we met at the hospital. Sorry for startling you. If it’s any consolation, you scared me pretty badly, too. I was almost asleep.”

“I’m sure you were, son,” Justice Stokes said. “But why are you in Nick’s house?”

Greg tried to come up with a reason, racked his brain for a reason. But he had nothing but the truth. “I live here,” he said.

“You and Nick are roommates?” Mrs. Stokes asked. “He never mentioned that.”

And thank God, she’d given him a way out. “Yeah,” he said. That was all he said. “Did Nick give you his keys?”

“We thought we’d surprise him and bring him some things from home,” she said. “So he’d feel better and recover faster.”

“That… sounds like a good idea,” Greg said. He wondered why he hadn’t thought to do that himself. “I can get a small box for you if you’d like.”

“That’d be wonderful,” Mrs. Stokes said, clasping her hands together. “We’ll just take a look around.”

Greg went into the kitchen and picked up a box from next to the trash, thinking about the trip to Costco the week before. The box had been full of smaller boxes of pasta then, and they’d playfully argued over whether or not to buy it. Greg had wanted it, Nick hadn’t, of course. So they'd bought it. He took it back to where Mrs. Stokes was looking over Nick’s pictures of his family in the living room, frustrated that this was yet another thing he couldn’t talk about in front of Nick’s parents.

“Thank you, sweetheart,” she said. She started putting a few pictures in. Nick eating ice cream with his mother, Nick playing baseball with his father, Nick and all of his siblings crammed onto a picnic table bench. Then she picked up another picture, and the puzzled look on her face told Greg exactly which picture it was.

Nick kissing Greg on the cheek during their trip to San Diego. They’d been at the zoo, watching the bonobos play, laughing with each other. And Nick had gotten caught up in the moment. They’d both gotten caught up in it, but it had been Nick who’d quickly given someone nearby his camera and asked her to snap a photo.

It was one of Greg’s favorites, but it was fairly obvious that Mrs. Stokes didn’t quite feel the same way. “Roger,” she said softly, handing the picture to her husband. He took it, looking over it with a frown. They both looked at Greg.

“You’re son’s in the hospital,” he said quietly. “Recovering from a day that almost killed him.”

Roger Stokes held the picture out to Greg. “You’re not really his roommate, are you?”

“I do live here,” Greg said, taking the picture. There was an uncomfortable silence. “Look, Nick is in…”

Nick’s parents both shouted, practically on top of each other, his mother saying, “Don’t say his name,” while his father was louder, saying, “Get out of Nick’s house.”

Greg’s eyes narrowed in anger, but he drew a breath and calmed himself for Nick. Nick would want that. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go. Go through his things, find what you want to take for him. I’ll come back later.” He checked his pockets to make sure he had his keys and walked out the door.

Standing on the front porch, he looked down at the picture in his hands. “I’m sorry they found out this way,” he said. A drop of water appeared on the glass. He got into his car and pulled out of the driveway, quashing the impulse to back into the Stokes’ rental car.

Fifteen minutes of aimless driving later, he came back. The Stokes’ car was gone. He went back inside and sighed. The pasta box was still on the living room table. “They’ll figure it out, Nick,” he said to the air. “And they’ll remember that they love you.”

He put the picture from San Diego in the box and picked up the whole thing. He had a hospital to get back to and pain to take care of, his and Nick’s.