Never Too Late
Apr. 7th, 2011 01:34 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
maddieamazing.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
nickngregTitle: Never Too Late
Chapter: 14
Rating: PG-13 for adult concepts
Author's Note: This little chapter here is a bit of harmless fluff, but it's been a part of the plot the whole time, I swear. The next chapter will probably be the conclusion of my humble little story here, and then I will probably be taking a plot break and just writing some really shameless smut. :) Thanks to all, and enjoy!
Nothing. There was nothing on TV. And not in the there’s-nothing-I-really-really-want-to-watch kind of way, there was literally nothing but infomercials for exercise equipment that didn’t work and fanatical priests telling him through the TV screen to find Jesus and change his life. That kind of nothing. Because it was late, just past three in the morning, and the fancy television channels assumed everyone would be asleep and no one would be watching anyway. Which should have been true. Only, that was the thing about working a graveyard shift; the body didn’t know that being away from work for a couple days meant it could keep a normal schedule. And since his body didn’t know that, Nick was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, fully clothed, restless, with nothing to watch on TV.
It was all just one more reason to despise the stupid conference he was at in the first place. The lack of good TV mixed with the lack of interesting attendees, which mixed with the lack of interesting speakers, which mixed with the fact that he was learning absolutely nothing, which all mixed in just perfectly with the fact that some brilliant minds decided to throw a conference in Licking, Missouri, a very, very small, very, very white town in the bowels of the Midwest. And yeah, okay, the biggest problem here might have been that the only thing Nick was interested in “licking” was his boyfriend. Who was at home. Fighting crime. And learning things. And not staring at the ceiling counting down days, hours, and minutes until he could return to civilization from an obligatory conference.
It had been seven months that he had been with Greg. Well, six months, three weeks, and four days, not that anyone was counting. Nick had officially been with Greg almost longer than he’d been with anyone else, almost, and he was a little enthralled and a little completely terrified that he was still as smitten with the blonde, younger CSI as he was…well, kind of since the day they met. It was gloriously horrifying to him, in so many ways. Simply, he was in love, head-over-heels or whatever. And Greg was too. There was subtle talk of moving in together, though it was all a little futile since Greg had practically been living at Nick’s place anyway, and subtle talk of futures with families and white picket fences and cliché things like that. And then there was less subtle talk about very serious things, like doctors visits and pills, and subjects that made Nick’s breath hitch a little in his throat. But all in all, things were going perfectly. There was surprisingly good health and happiness, and lots and lots of sex.
Nick was considering that last thing for a few moments, his mind wandering placidly to a distinctive smell and soft skin and thin limbs and open-mouthed kisses, and he wondered what Greg was doing right then. It was late where Nick was, which meant it was late where Greg was, which meant he would be at work. Oh yeah, work, where he was fighting crime and learning and not cooped up in a mildew-smelling hotel room. He could call anyway, of course, Greg would answer. Maybe just hearing his voice would do…something to make Nick feel less restless.
His phone, somehow reading his thoughts, began to shrill from the bedside table. He answered it on the first ring.
“Nicky, hey, how’s the conference?”
Nick felt slight disappointment. “It’s good, Cath. How’s everything going over there? And how’d you know I’d be up?”
Nick could almost hear Catherine shrugging. “I can never sleep when I’m away at conferences, especially ones held in…where are you? Ohio?”
Nick laughed. “Missouri. I’m about five miles outside of a town called If I Lived Here I’d Take a Gun to My Brain Stem.”
Catherine laughed as well. “I’ve heard it’s really pretty this time of year.”
“Yeah,” Nick answered sarcastically. “Anyway, what’s up?”
“Warrick’s looking for the prints you lifted from the suicide last week and can’t find them in the evidence box.”
Nick stood up and began pacing, deciding stretching his legs might help get him to sleep. Theoretically.
“Check with Mandy. I dropped them off with her but never put them in the evidence box; the case was closed before they were relevant, but she probably still has them.”
Nick heard Catherine relay the information to Warrick and wondered absentmindedly why Warrick couldn’t have just called Nick himself.
“Thanks, Nick. I’ll let you get back to trying to sleep.”
“Oh, wait, Catherine,” Nick said before she hung up. “Just wondering, is Greg in the field tonight?”
“Greg’s been out for a few days now, Nick. He hasn’t been feeling well.”
Nick stopped pacing, stopped moving. He merely choked out a “thank you” before hanging up, because in the times he’d talked to Greg since he’d been gone, Greg had never mentioned anything about being sick. And something didn’t feel right.
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Nick whistled as he worked. It was shamelessly cliché, but it just felt too natural not to. Housework was sort of a guilty pleasure for him, somehow. All those years of being told that men didn’t clean, their wives did, had an effect on him or something. Or maybe he just liked the way he knew he looked sexy with a feather duster and a bottle of Clorox and just loved showing it off to Michael, who would gawk and whistle and make obscene comments until finally Nick caved and they’d dirty Nick’s freshly cleaned kitchen all over again.
Today Michael was at work, a somewhat rare occurrence of late as Michael was becoming increasingly ill, but it gave Nick the chance to clean in peace and quiet. And it was an oddly satisfying experience, cleaning out the refrigerator of old, opened cans, putting dry items they were never going to use from their cabinets in a box to be donated. It felt like he was organizing his priorities in some way, cleaning out his life. Or maybe he was just making more space in the kitchen cabinets.
His whistling went up a few notes when he opened the cabinet that housed all unused and abandoned medications and supplements and he began shuffling through them, garbage bag in one hand. Dietary supplements of various kinds that Michael bought them during his two week health spree, several brands of unopened multivitamins, a couple unfinished rounds of antibiotics (Nick would have to remind Michael later that you’re supposed to take all of the pills in a round of antibiotics, not just the ones you take until you get bored), and then there was a lonely prescription pill bottle at the back of the cabinet, hiding behind the vitamins and antibiotics and supplements. Nick reached back to grab it and, confused, read the label.
“Michael Gutierrez,” The label read. “Take one tablet by mouth twice daily.” Nick’s eyes wondered up to read the name of the medication. “Zidovudine, 60 300mg tablets.” Michael’s drug, Michael’s dose, Nick knew that much. The drug that kept him alive, the drug that sustained him…the drug that had, for some reason been hidden in the back of the cabinet they never used. The drug that was prescribed nearly four months prior as a one month dose, and every single pill seemed to be left in the bottle.
Things suddenly fit into place perfectly. Michael’s declining health, his sudden insistence that he and Nick revise their wills and take a trip and call old friends…Michael was giving up. Michael had already given up. Michael was ready to die…and Nick wasn’t.
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Nick walked through his front door silently, dropped his luggage next to it, and made a zombie-like bee-line for his bathroom, catching a glimpse of a figure sleeping in his bed in his peripheral vision. He didn’t take the time to use the toilet or wash his hands, he just opened the medicine cabinet to the side of the vanity and found what he was looking for instantly.
Greg’s pills. The ones he’d decided to keep at Nick’s house, except for the few he always had on hand in case his shift ran late and he didn’t make it home in time to take the pills. The ones that had been in Nick’s medicine cabinet for two months without him thinking to check. The ones that were all, every last one of them, still in the orange-tinted bottle, the last refill date two months back.
No, was all Nick could think. No no no.
Greg twitched slightly as Nick’s firm hand made contact with his thigh, and he opened his left eye only, recognition taking only a moment.
“Nick, what are you doing home?”
“What the hell is this?” Nick’s tone was firm, but trembling. He held up the pill bottle so that the slightly open curtains casted a dim light through it. He shook it lightly a couple times for effect so that the many pills inside made a jingling sound.
“I…” Greg began, eyes both open now.
“What the hell is this, Greg?” A lonely tear fell from the corner of Nick’s eye, a tear he didn’t know was building.
Greg sat up in bed slowly, pushing himself to a sitting position with his arms. He buried his head in his hands for a moment before sighing and looking straight at Nick.
“Pills, Nick,” Greg said in an incredibly small voice.
Nick nodded heavily, a couple more tears falling at the insistent motion. “Yeah. Yeah, they are pills. They’re your pills, Greg. And they haven’t been taken in two fucking months.”
Nick threw the pill bottle onto the bed next to Greg so that it made a dramatic indent on the down comforter.
“Nick…” Greg tried to speak, but something like shame and embarrassment overtook him. He looked at Nick, and he couldn’t look away, even though he wanted to, because there was something behind moist eyes that was so, so hurt.
Nick shook his head, turned his back to Greg, put his hands to his face and walked away. Greg didn’t hear the front door open or close, and was too frozen to go looking for his somewhat devastated boyfriend before he heard the familiar drip of the coffee maker and smelt the familiar smell of coffee beans.
Greg stared at the pill bottle, looking sad and abandoned and lonely on the comforter next to him. Shame coursed through him, then anger, then regret, then sadness, and it wasn’t long before he found a pair of sweatpants he’d no doubt abandoned on the floor a few days ago and went into the kitchen to take whatever was coming to him.
Nick was hunched over, arms braced on the countertop, his right foot crossed casually over his left. He was completely frozen, not a muscle in him was moving, not a inch. His face, though statuesque as the rest of his body, conveyed a complete sense of overwhelmingness. He seemed lost somewhere in memory, or stuck in the current moment, or just completely at a loss that Greg didn’t fully explain.
He walked up next to Nick, turned and sat on the countertop mere inches from where Nick’s knuckles were white from clutching them so hard. Greg hung his head and swung his feet slightly, and neither of them spoke for several minutes.
“Is it just…the side effects, G?” Nick’s voice cracked, and it was still the only movement coming from him.
Greg let out a humorless laugh. “No. No, it has nothing to do with the side effects.”
There was another moment of silence and Nick shifted a little, tilted his head downward to stare at the floor before finally looking at Greg, eyes fixating on his.
“Then what?” Nick asked, as tears began to involuntarily fall again. “What is it?”
Greg broke the eye contact, taking his turn to stare at the floor. He didn’t want to answer, felt suddenly like a punished fourth grader talking to the principal, but he had to. For Nick, he had to.
Greg shook his head slowly, reflectively. “It’s the stigma.”
Their eyes froze on each other again, wet, darker brown to bloodshot, lighter brown.
“The stigma, G?”
Greg nodded, sighed, and dove in. “A couple months ago I was at a crime scene. This awful couple, the guy killed a twenty-two year old kid. Because he was gay. A friend of their son’s, Nick. And this guy, terrible guy, he had me pegged…I don’t know how, he knew I was gay. He said terrible things to me, Nicky, and all that I can handle, but then…then that damn alarm, and this guy is railing at me about being a homo and a faggot and ruining society, and I’m trying to get the hell out of there, and then he backs away and screams something about how he’d better be careful because I probably have AIDS and…and I don’t know. Something snapped, Nick. Something happened. I just…didn’t want to be his stereotype. But I am.”
Nick’s hand flew to Greg’s, needing to touch, needing to feel.
“No you aren’t, Greg,” Nick spoke with incredibly conviction. “No you aren’t, and you never have been, and you never will be. You’re a man – a person – with a disease, and that is it. An illness that you see doctors for, and have tests to monitor, and take medication for, Greg. That’s all, that’s all it is.”
Greg looked sheepishly at Nick, wanting to believe, but not convinced.
“It doesn’t feel like that sometimes, Nick.”
Nick nodded. “I know, I know it doesn’t. Sometimes it feels like you’re being punished or got something you deserved, sometimes it even feels like you deserve it. Right, G?”
Greg nodded.
“But you don’t. You don’t deserve it, and you aren’t being punished, and you haven’t done anything wrong.”
Greg took a slow breath through his nose, and tried to get Nick’s words through his head. Nick was right, of course Nick was right, and in time maybe Nick’s words were all that would matter.
“How did you know to look?” Greg asked moments later. “To see if I’d been taking the pills, I mean.”
“Catherine told me you were sick, G,” Nick relayed. “And yeah, people get sick, but you didn’t mention anything when we talked. You terrified me, G, I nearly attacked an flight attendant to put me on the next flight back to Vegas.”
“Michael,” Greg said, piecing things together. Nick nodded.
“You don’t have to be like him, Greg, this doesn’t have to end the way it did for him. You stay on track, you take your meds, and you’ll be fine. But right now,” Nick continued, pulling himself up to sit on the counter next to Greg. “Right now, when you aren’t doing that, and you aren’t taking those pills…right now you’re just sick, G. Right now the virus is just attacking every single cell it can with nothing to stop it, and that isn’t right, G. That isn’t how it has to go.”
Nick sighed and stroked the back of Greg’s neck with the pads of his fingers. “Look at me, G.”
Greg did, trying to keep his eyes from filling with the shame that had burrowed into them recently.
Nick’s eye contact was intense; he stared at Greg and into Greg and through Greg.
“Don’t give up. You can’t give up. Not now, not ever. You’re too important, and too many people depend on you. I depend on you, Greg, and you cannot give up.”
And Greg understood, even when he didn’t. He smiled a small but meaningful smile, and nodded.
He wouldn’t give up. Not then, not ever.
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Date: 2011-04-07 03:32 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2011-04-10 04:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-08 03:35 am (UTC)I'm glad Greg has Nick to show him he has nothing to fear and that he will always be beside him.
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Date: 2011-04-10 04:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-10 12:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-10 04:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-10 04:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-10 04:26 pm (UTC)