FIC: Fire and Ice
Jul. 12th, 2005 02:27 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
moodymuse19.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
nickngregTitle: Fire and Ice (1/12?)
Author: Fabs G![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
moodymuse19
Category: Casefile, Angst
Pairing: Nick/Greg with some Grissom /Sara thrown in
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Grave Danger
Disclaimer: Ah, if only. The things I’d do.
Summary: Two girls have been killed, and as the team struggle to find their killer, Greg realizes just how much you can get involved with a case.
A.N.: It’s a casefile, let’s start from there. The Nick/Greg and Grissom/Sara are, let’s say, the salt and pepper of it all. While not essential to the food, it certainly gives it a bit of flavor. Besides, there’s no way I can write something without Nick/Greg in it. ;)
A.N. 2: It’s un-beta’ed, mostly because, well… I’ve no permanent beta person. If someone wants to help me beta the rest of the chapters, i’d be eternally grateful (and so would the rest of the comm, because they'd suffer my typos less). Also, this is my first Multi-chapter CSI story. Be kind.
1: Prologue: Three months after finding Nick
There’s a break of about 60 minutes between day shift and night shift, where day shift has already left and night shift haven’t yet arrived. Technically speaking, until 30 minutes past the hour day shift is on call, and from then on till 6 a.m. night shift is on.
But that break of 60 minutes, where the only CSI you find is either doing paperwork or working overtime, few people inhabit in the lab halls. You see a tech or two, because the lab is never deserted, and you might find Grissom or Ecklie, and maybe a lost newbie, but that’s about it.
It’s a ghost hour, where you could run around the halls naked and nearly no one would actually see you. The light of the sun is darkening, giving way to the moonlight the night shift knows so well. Only the windows on the west wall give any natural light. It plays a strange game of light and shadow with the lab’s window panes. It reminded Grissom of some of their cases, oddly. There was a lot of light, as it often happened with cases where they ended up with a lot of evidence, but the sunlight didn’t reach the dark places – corners, under evidence tables, inside closets – where the main clues where.
Grissom walked along a hall, folders in hand, coffee in his mind. Cases had arrived early today – so early they would have had to be reported to Sophia, now the dayshift supervisor after Ecklie reconstituted the group, but one of the cases seemed interesting and its crime scene was so far away it’d be well into his shift by the time anyone arrived.
He opened the first folder – ignoring a breaking and entering and a doubtful suicide of the folders beneath it. Three men, dead over the roof of a house, no witn– he stopped.
He stopped reading and stopped walking, even stopped breathing, because a strange sound came to his ears. It wasn’t any of Mia’s machines processing, nor was it like Greg’s music that he had to admit he kind of missed.
No, this sound was muffled and a bit far away, as if someone was talking through a pillow or something equally fluffy. Grissom walked silently and deliberately slowly, as if he was walking in the middle of a forest and a snapped branch might give him away. Through three panes of glass he saw the break room. Greg’s today spiky hair came into view peeking from one of the old armchairs, and he seemed to be stroking something.
Now, any other person would’ve thought something very out of place and turned around on the spot, but not Grissom. As quirky and forward as Greg was, Grissom trusted him implicitly on his professionalism, so he kept walking forward. He turned a corner and got a better view of it all. And Grissom ached.
Nick was on his knees, head resting on some point of Greg’s stomach, and was bawling his eyes out – the muffled sound Grissom had heard. Greg was stroking his head and whispering what must have been soothing words. Nick’s arms went around Greg’s waist and it suddenly occurred to Grissom that Nicky hadn’t cried once since they got him out of the Plexiglas coffin.
Nick had had to get over some issues, of course, and his first days back at the lab had been hard, but Grissom hadn’t seen him tear up once, and neither had he seemed red-eyed. Besides, Grissom had been sure to maintain the conversation with Nick, to be sure he felt comfortable talking about almost anything with Grissom, so he would have had a pretty good idea if Nick had ever felt as bad as he obviously felt now.
Because Grissom was sure this wasn’t about some bad news that could’ve come from Texas or some case affecting him, a gut feeling Grissom didn’t care to explain told him that that was about the time Nick had spent buried alive.
Grissom backed away, unable to tear his eyes from the scene, and decided to wait out in his office. As he was leaving, Greg caught his eye, and neither of the two ever knew if they had grinned or grimaced or winked or what, but the understanding in that moment was complete, and even if they had had the possibility of uttering them, words would have been useless.
2: Assigments (Three months later)
It was funny when you thought about it. People with a crush – or worse, unrequited love – are positive nothing could ever happen between them and the loved one. In our minds, our love is always unrequited, and we are doomed to suffer.
Not Greg though. Greg had often felt like the ticking clock of a bomb, waiting for it all to happen, because it was inevitable: Nick and him had been flirting with each other since day one –when the newly arrived DNA lab tech from California surprised everyone by both his young age, barely 24, and his lack of first-day-at-a-new-job shyness.
Greg, a natural born flirt, had flirted with him the first time Nick had brought him something to process, semen samples. Greg had greeted him saying something tacky like Nick sharing his semen with him. Nick was floored but, like a cat turning itself in mid air and landing on his gracious feet, he flirted back and teased him, and the floored one then had been Greg: the blonde CSI –Catherine was it?- had threaten to find his manhood new lodging somewhere else in his body, and Warrick hadn’t even noticed the flirting. Nick had, and he had answered with his own flirting, and that had peeked Greg’s interest tremendously.
The flirting went back and forth constantly, and developed into friendship in no time. The flirting didn’t stop and soon the friendship developed into crushes.
And, much to both Greg’s and Nick’s delight, the inevitable happened, one day after a rough session of videogames in Nick’s house they had played after Nick had needed a shoulder to cry his issues on and Greg had offered not one, but two. One game led to the other and Greg was never sure if he had kissed Nick or if Nick had kissed him, but what followed was another rough session of an altogether different kind of games that left them both spent, sweaty, but utterly happy.
The car in front of Greg finally decided to move and he floored his Tahoe, hoping to reach the lab in time for start of shift.
He didn’t. Greg almost skidded along the locker room floor as he threw his locker open, arriving terribly late to work. He threw in his bag, a new change of clothes –wincing as he remembered the past week’s decomp – and changed his loud MARILYN t-shirt for a white button down.
He exited the locker room the same way he had entered, skidding. Only this time there was someone in the way, and he almost threw Nick to the floor.
“Wow, man, where’s the rush?” said Nick, and caught himself in time before saying ‘fire’, because after Greg blowing up in his own lab, the joke wasn’t funny anymore.
“Traffic?”
“Yeah. Is he mad?” asked Greg, still buttoning his shirt. He grinned when he caught Nick avoiding looking at Greg’s partly exposed chest as they walked together towards the break room.
“He’s late.” Nick said “He just called me, he’s stuck in traffic too. I was coming to see if you had made it”
The worry about Grissom reprimanding him for being late gone, Greg reverted back to his usual self. “Aww, worried about me?” he said in that flirtatious tone he knew so well.
“I’m just too good” said Nick self-sufficiently with grin, and headed to the break room.
There were rules, of course. They weren’t living together, so that made it easy to go to work, and overtly obvious displays of affection at work weren’t allowed (even more if Ecklie was around).
Neither Nick nor Greg were the kind that were ashamed of what they felt, they were actually very proud, but they also thought that they didn’t need to go publishing it in the crime lab bulletin. While Greg sure would like to grab Nick and kiss him in the middle of the break room, figuratively branding him as ‘Sanders’ property’, the idea made Nick shudder- because of how things would go at work, because Warrick would look at him with different eyes, because the lab was still talking about what had happened to Nick six months back and because Sara and Catherine would work out their initial awkwardness by teasing him.
Nick chuckled how the normally criticized Grissom behavior – ‘If it doesn’t affect work, then I don’t care’ – now provided him with a sense of odd relief.
They pushed the doors of the break room open, and Greg went straight to the coffee maker. Until Greg had sipped some coffee, brand be damned for once, he didn’t say hello to anyone.
“Nice priorities” said Catherine with a smile, sipping coffee herself. “First the coffee, then his co-workers” Greg merely squinted at her from the rim of his cup.
Paula Francis was on the TV, announcing to everybody who wanted to hear that an odd and particularly strong wave of polar cold had stationed itself over Vegas and had no intention of moving.
“Good” said Warrick “Better to have the evidence frozen and not melted” he said, turning off the TV as Sara smiled at the remark.
“Listen, everybody” began Nick “Griss is stuck in traffic-”
“That’ll put him in a good mood” quipped Warrick, and Sara and Greg chuckled.
Nick only smiled as he looked at the print-out in his hands “We have only one case tonight, a double homicide off Northshore Road, near Callville Bay in Lake Mead, Brass is of course already there.”
Catherine frowned “Why’d he call you and not me?” she asked as everyone made their way to the door.
“Because you don’t have the exclusivity of his friendship?” said Nick, but he said it with his usual Texas Charm at full blast, (which made Greg smile stupidly so he hid it behind a hearty laugh) so Catherine merely grinned at him and chose to leave it at that as Warrick, Sara and Greg laughed aloud.
“He” continued Nick “uh, also made me the primary”
“He did?” said Greg, mostly because after years of working side by side at the lab, and months of being in a relationship with him, being out in the field and having Nick be the boss would be weird. Interesting, yet weird.
Sara and Warrick had no problems with it, but Catherine felt the need to say something “You bossing me. This should be interesting” she grinned
***
TBC, if that wasn't obvious. ;)
Author: Fabs G
moodymuse19Category: Casefile, Angst
Pairing: Nick/Greg with some Grissom /Sara thrown in
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Grave Danger
Disclaimer: Ah, if only. The things I’d do.
Summary: Two girls have been killed, and as the team struggle to find their killer, Greg realizes just how much you can get involved with a case.
A.N.: It’s a casefile, let’s start from there. The Nick/Greg and Grissom/Sara are, let’s say, the salt and pepper of it all. While not essential to the food, it certainly gives it a bit of flavor. Besides, there’s no way I can write something without Nick/Greg in it. ;)
A.N. 2: It’s un-beta’ed, mostly because, well… I’ve no permanent beta person. If someone wants to help me beta the rest of the chapters, i’d be eternally grateful (and so would the rest of the comm, because they'd suffer my typos less). Also, this is my first Multi-chapter CSI story. Be kind.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
”Fire and Ice”, by Robert Frost
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
”Fire and Ice”, by Robert Frost
1: Prologue: Three months after finding Nick
There’s a break of about 60 minutes between day shift and night shift, where day shift has already left and night shift haven’t yet arrived. Technically speaking, until 30 minutes past the hour day shift is on call, and from then on till 6 a.m. night shift is on.
But that break of 60 minutes, where the only CSI you find is either doing paperwork or working overtime, few people inhabit in the lab halls. You see a tech or two, because the lab is never deserted, and you might find Grissom or Ecklie, and maybe a lost newbie, but that’s about it.
It’s a ghost hour, where you could run around the halls naked and nearly no one would actually see you. The light of the sun is darkening, giving way to the moonlight the night shift knows so well. Only the windows on the west wall give any natural light. It plays a strange game of light and shadow with the lab’s window panes. It reminded Grissom of some of their cases, oddly. There was a lot of light, as it often happened with cases where they ended up with a lot of evidence, but the sunlight didn’t reach the dark places – corners, under evidence tables, inside closets – where the main clues where.
Grissom walked along a hall, folders in hand, coffee in his mind. Cases had arrived early today – so early they would have had to be reported to Sophia, now the dayshift supervisor after Ecklie reconstituted the group, but one of the cases seemed interesting and its crime scene was so far away it’d be well into his shift by the time anyone arrived.
He opened the first folder – ignoring a breaking and entering and a doubtful suicide of the folders beneath it. Three men, dead over the roof of a house, no witn– he stopped.
He stopped reading and stopped walking, even stopped breathing, because a strange sound came to his ears. It wasn’t any of Mia’s machines processing, nor was it like Greg’s music that he had to admit he kind of missed.
No, this sound was muffled and a bit far away, as if someone was talking through a pillow or something equally fluffy. Grissom walked silently and deliberately slowly, as if he was walking in the middle of a forest and a snapped branch might give him away. Through three panes of glass he saw the break room. Greg’s today spiky hair came into view peeking from one of the old armchairs, and he seemed to be stroking something.
Now, any other person would’ve thought something very out of place and turned around on the spot, but not Grissom. As quirky and forward as Greg was, Grissom trusted him implicitly on his professionalism, so he kept walking forward. He turned a corner and got a better view of it all. And Grissom ached.
Nick was on his knees, head resting on some point of Greg’s stomach, and was bawling his eyes out – the muffled sound Grissom had heard. Greg was stroking his head and whispering what must have been soothing words. Nick’s arms went around Greg’s waist and it suddenly occurred to Grissom that Nicky hadn’t cried once since they got him out of the Plexiglas coffin.
Nick had had to get over some issues, of course, and his first days back at the lab had been hard, but Grissom hadn’t seen him tear up once, and neither had he seemed red-eyed. Besides, Grissom had been sure to maintain the conversation with Nick, to be sure he felt comfortable talking about almost anything with Grissom, so he would have had a pretty good idea if Nick had ever felt as bad as he obviously felt now.
Because Grissom was sure this wasn’t about some bad news that could’ve come from Texas or some case affecting him, a gut feeling Grissom didn’t care to explain told him that that was about the time Nick had spent buried alive.
Grissom backed away, unable to tear his eyes from the scene, and decided to wait out in his office. As he was leaving, Greg caught his eye, and neither of the two ever knew if they had grinned or grimaced or winked or what, but the understanding in that moment was complete, and even if they had had the possibility of uttering them, words would have been useless.
2: Assigments (Three months later)
It was funny when you thought about it. People with a crush – or worse, unrequited love – are positive nothing could ever happen between them and the loved one. In our minds, our love is always unrequited, and we are doomed to suffer.
Not Greg though. Greg had often felt like the ticking clock of a bomb, waiting for it all to happen, because it was inevitable: Nick and him had been flirting with each other since day one –when the newly arrived DNA lab tech from California surprised everyone by both his young age, barely 24, and his lack of first-day-at-a-new-job shyness.
Greg, a natural born flirt, had flirted with him the first time Nick had brought him something to process, semen samples. Greg had greeted him saying something tacky like Nick sharing his semen with him. Nick was floored but, like a cat turning itself in mid air and landing on his gracious feet, he flirted back and teased him, and the floored one then had been Greg: the blonde CSI –Catherine was it?- had threaten to find his manhood new lodging somewhere else in his body, and Warrick hadn’t even noticed the flirting. Nick had, and he had answered with his own flirting, and that had peeked Greg’s interest tremendously.
The flirting went back and forth constantly, and developed into friendship in no time. The flirting didn’t stop and soon the friendship developed into crushes.
And, much to both Greg’s and Nick’s delight, the inevitable happened, one day after a rough session of videogames in Nick’s house they had played after Nick had needed a shoulder to cry his issues on and Greg had offered not one, but two. One game led to the other and Greg was never sure if he had kissed Nick or if Nick had kissed him, but what followed was another rough session of an altogether different kind of games that left them both spent, sweaty, but utterly happy.
The car in front of Greg finally decided to move and he floored his Tahoe, hoping to reach the lab in time for start of shift.
He didn’t. Greg almost skidded along the locker room floor as he threw his locker open, arriving terribly late to work. He threw in his bag, a new change of clothes –wincing as he remembered the past week’s decomp – and changed his loud MARILYN t-shirt for a white button down.
He exited the locker room the same way he had entered, skidding. Only this time there was someone in the way, and he almost threw Nick to the floor.
“Wow, man, where’s the rush?” said Nick, and caught himself in time before saying ‘fire’, because after Greg blowing up in his own lab, the joke wasn’t funny anymore.
“Traffic?”
“Yeah. Is he mad?” asked Greg, still buttoning his shirt. He grinned when he caught Nick avoiding looking at Greg’s partly exposed chest as they walked together towards the break room.
“He’s late.” Nick said “He just called me, he’s stuck in traffic too. I was coming to see if you had made it”
The worry about Grissom reprimanding him for being late gone, Greg reverted back to his usual self. “Aww, worried about me?” he said in that flirtatious tone he knew so well.
“I’m just too good” said Nick self-sufficiently with grin, and headed to the break room.
There were rules, of course. They weren’t living together, so that made it easy to go to work, and overtly obvious displays of affection at work weren’t allowed (even more if Ecklie was around).
Neither Nick nor Greg were the kind that were ashamed of what they felt, they were actually very proud, but they also thought that they didn’t need to go publishing it in the crime lab bulletin. While Greg sure would like to grab Nick and kiss him in the middle of the break room, figuratively branding him as ‘Sanders’ property’, the idea made Nick shudder- because of how things would go at work, because Warrick would look at him with different eyes, because the lab was still talking about what had happened to Nick six months back and because Sara and Catherine would work out their initial awkwardness by teasing him.
Nick chuckled how the normally criticized Grissom behavior – ‘If it doesn’t affect work, then I don’t care’ – now provided him with a sense of odd relief.
They pushed the doors of the break room open, and Greg went straight to the coffee maker. Until Greg had sipped some coffee, brand be damned for once, he didn’t say hello to anyone.
“Nice priorities” said Catherine with a smile, sipping coffee herself. “First the coffee, then his co-workers” Greg merely squinted at her from the rim of his cup.
Paula Francis was on the TV, announcing to everybody who wanted to hear that an odd and particularly strong wave of polar cold had stationed itself over Vegas and had no intention of moving.
“Good” said Warrick “Better to have the evidence frozen and not melted” he said, turning off the TV as Sara smiled at the remark.
“Listen, everybody” began Nick “Griss is stuck in traffic-”
“That’ll put him in a good mood” quipped Warrick, and Sara and Greg chuckled.
Nick only smiled as he looked at the print-out in his hands “We have only one case tonight, a double homicide off Northshore Road, near Callville Bay in Lake Mead, Brass is of course already there.”
Catherine frowned “Why’d he call you and not me?” she asked as everyone made their way to the door.
“Because you don’t have the exclusivity of his friendship?” said Nick, but he said it with his usual Texas Charm at full blast, (which made Greg smile stupidly so he hid it behind a hearty laugh) so Catherine merely grinned at him and chose to leave it at that as Warrick, Sara and Greg laughed aloud.
“He” continued Nick “uh, also made me the primary”
“He did?” said Greg, mostly because after years of working side by side at the lab, and months of being in a relationship with him, being out in the field and having Nick be the boss would be weird. Interesting, yet weird.
Sara and Warrick had no problems with it, but Catherine felt the need to say something “You bossing me. This should be interesting” she grinned
***
TBC, if that wasn't obvious. ;)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-07-12 06:52 am (UTC)You seem to know the characters very well. I'd be willing to beta, if you'd like.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-12 07:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-12 07:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-12 11:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-12 12:09 pm (UTC)I loved this : because it was just so Nick for some reason. Very in character for him, fitted very well with all those canon flirting moments.
*happily waits for next installment*
no subject
Date: 2005-07-12 07:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-21 11:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-22 01:23 am (UTC)Sara and Warrick had no problems with it, but Catherine felt the need to say something “You bossing me. This should be interesting” she grinned
It's very sloppy. I like where this fic is going, and have no qualms with your characterization or way of writing, but you need to either go over what you've written again, or find a decent beta reader.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-22 03:32 am (UTC)horrorserrors.My beta reader is just fine, and she's wonderful. If you need to criticize someone for this, criticize me, who is the one doing the typing.
Thanks for spotting that, though.