for my wonderful new friend mk without whom i probably would not have remembered my love of csi, my love of nick stokes, and my love of grave danger.
so here it is - my first actual csi fic. lemme know what you think! and mk, i hope you like it.
(also, title is from sleeping at last's song 'heirloom'!)
Nick's parents are on the way. Grissom hangs up the courtesy phone and lets his forehead fall to rest against the wall of the hospital waiting room. Judge and Mrs. Stokes should be there before too much longer. Warrick is parked about thirty feet away staring at a flickering light in the hall. Sara has given up trying to get either Greg or Catherine to let her drive them home, and is standing next to Greg's shoulder, stirring a paper cup of coffee with a flimsy wooden stick. Greg's got a cup in his hands too, and it's going to get cold fast if he just sits there watching it like that. Catherine has her eyes closed and head tipped back. She isn't sleeping.
Grissom's arm aches where Nick had grabbed onto it when they finally got the lid open, and he absently rubs it, scanning around the room again, making note of every person as he sees them. It's been running through Grissom's head constantly, this checklist of people, where are they, what are they doing. Warrick, Sara, Catherine, Greg, Warrick, Sara, Catherine, Greg, over and over on a loop, cataloguing, monitoring, eyes flicking around to check even as no one who matters has left this waiting room in over an hour.
(Nick isn't on the list. Nick isn't on the list because he doesn't have to be. He hasn't left Grissom's mind for even a fraction of a moment, like some kind of an internal AMBER Alert superimposed over everything else. He couldn't forget if he tried.)
There's a tickle in the back of Grissom's throat, like the raw anxiety in the too-bright, too-artificial hospital air has dried out his mouth, left an arid itch in his lungs. He clears it, pushing off from the wall and stepping into the corridor outside, down which important looking people in scrubs always seem to be rushing to something, already late before the latest crisis has so much as began. No sight of the doctor who'd taken lead on Nick's case, introduced herself to him and said she'd be back when there was news. So, no news.
Stepping back into the waiting room with a sigh, Grissom finds himself automatically counting them again. Warrick. Sara. Catherine. Greg. All here, all fine- Well. All here.
Even Ecklie had been here for a short time, though he's gone by now. He'd stopped and spoken to Grissom before he'd left, a short, grim conversation that had both lifted a stranglehold from Grissom's throat and settled a yoke over his shoulders. He'll be getting his team back, and for the first time since Nick disappeared, since he'd lost them to begin with, Grissom feels like he can breathe.
When he'd been promoted, he hadn't been expecting it. The people part. The team. He checks their work and evaluates their performance, yes, but it's more than that, too. Grissom has bodily placed himself between angry bystanders and his people, coached them through guilt and self recrimination, sat beside them with a hand on their back in silence while they breathed and shook through seeing something no human being should ever see. The day there'd been an explosion in the lab, and he'd said to Greg, softly and kindly, "If you need me, I'll be around"... That had never been the person he was, before.
It's a sense of guardianship, of stewardship he'd never asked for, never wanted, and wouldn't dream of handing to anyone else now for fear they would run ruin with it, this position. Grissom hadn't quite grasped what that meant until he'd been forced to do exactly that. Not only is the lab his, they are too, and it takes his breath away, the enormity of it. The lab is his. They are his.
Nick, laying somewhere in this hospital, vicious cruelty wreaked upon his body and his mind, is his.
"Mr. Grissom?"
The sound of the woman's voice causes Grissom's head to snap over. He wonders for a moment how long it's been that he's been standing here, mired in his own thoughts, but before he can check a clock or think too hard on it, Jillian and Bill Stokes are right there, and he's got more immediate problems. Grissom's hand goes back up to his arm, brushing the fabric covering the imprints of Nick's fingers inked over aching muscle, plastering what he hopes is a reassuring but appropriately solemn face on.
"How is he," Nick's mother asks at the same time his father demands, "Where's the doctor?" The two glance at each other, and Jillian shakes her head like she's clearing the start of the conversation, beginning a new one.
"Is he okay?"
For a moment, Grissom blinks at her, a response he can't say bubbling up in his brain. Of course he isn't okay. You don't come back from this sort of thing and be 'okay'.
"He's in rough shape," he says instead, hoping this version of the truth will be kinder for them to hear. He can't think of a better way to phrase it, not when he can still feel Nick's chest heaving under his palm, hear an exhausted sound describable by no other word than 'whimpering' coming from that horrible, horrible box.
"But he will recover?" Now it's Bill, arms folded across his chest and his shoulders squared. Grissom can see it there, who he must be in his daily life, a powerful man who presides over a courtroom with a respect garnered through decades. That power may be echoed in his stance now but it's gone from his face. He looks aged and exhausted beyond what the late-early hour warranted. Grissom feels the way Bill Stokes looks.
"He's one of the most resilient people I know," Grissom tells him, though the words sound like they're coming from somewhere else. Someone else.
He's lost back somewhere else himself, the day soon after the case with Nigel Crane that he'd been woken from his post-shift sleep by a phone call, a panicked voice on the other end. There's someone here, Nick had said, words half-slurred in a way leading Grissom to believe he was either drunk or had just woken up, jolted from sleep and grabbed the phone before so much as clearing his eyes. I can hear him moving there's someone breathing in the walls, someone's here. Nick had been embarrassed beyond belief when Grissom actually got there, stood in the doorway with sleeves pulled down over shaking hands, insisting you don't… actually have to do this, as Grissom went room by room making sure it was all clear.
And Grissom is ready to do it all again, because Nick is alive. He's alive, and resilient, but resilience is not magic bullet, so he'll keep his phone on in the weeks ahead.
"Okay," Bill breathes. Jillian has her hand over her mouth, lips moving silently under her fingers. Might be praying. "Okay."
They get settled in the waiting room where the rest of Nick's family is still scattered, and Grissom's eyes flick over them again. Warrick. Sara. Catherine. Greg.
Warrick.
Warrick isn't staring at the light with the flickering bulb any longer. He's staring at something else instead, something else producing an intermittent sparkle of light. It's a coin that Warrick is flipping, over and over, spinning it through the air and catching it in his palm, staring at it before flicking it into the air again. Grissom taps his fingers on the side of his pant leg for a moment, watching this happen, before summoning up what energy remains in his body to walk over to him. He sits down in the chair next to Warrick's, tugging at his sleeve over where that persistent ache continues to pulse every time he bumps his left arm.
Despite the new presence at his side, Warrick continues to flip the coin, like he hadn't even noticed another person approaching. The small disk of metal turns over and over, heads, tails, heads, tails, and Grissom can imagine what's going on in his head. In those last few moments, as they dug frantically in the dirt under spotlights chasing away the darkness of the night, it had been Schrodinger's question. Nick was both alive and dead, and Grissom can see it still spinning in Warrick's head, like the coin in his hand.
Heads he lives. Tails he dies. Heads he lives. Tails he dies. The coin flips again. Heads. The coin flips again. Tails.
Unable to take it anymore, feeling the pain radiating off Warrick in waves, Grissom waits for the next drop of the quarter, until it's laying flat in Warrick's palm, and covers the younger man's hand with his own. He wraps his fingers gently around the trembling hand under his and closes it, the coin now gone completely from view. Grissom squeezes for a moment then lets go, moving his hand to Warrick's shoulder, letting it rest there.
"It's not about odds any more," he says quietly. "Nicky already beat them." Warrick says nothing in return, but he leans a little, listing to the side so his shoulder is pressed harder against Grissom's palm. They stay like that for a long time.
"Mr. Grissom?"
It's the second time in as many hours that Grissom's attention has been abruptly grabbed by somebody saying his name at a volume pitched just too high to be a normal speaking voice. He looks over and sees a woman he recognizes, though it takes a moment for his exhausted, overworked mind to place her as Nick's doctor.
"Yes?" he says, getting up and walking over to where she stands in the doorway.
"You're Mr. Stokes' next of kin, yes?"
Grissom nods shortly. They'd done it a couple of years ago. It just made more sense for it to be someone close by, with his entire family in Texas - made sense to put some kind of formality on a responsibility Grissom already felt the presence of.
"Well, Mr. Stokes is showing signs of returning to consciousness. He's been pretty heavily sedated, but he's likely to wake soon. If you or someone else in his family would like to be with him when he wakes up, the charge nurse at the desk here," the doctor indicates behind her about twenty feet down the hall, "will be able to take you."
Grissom nods absently, thanking her in a voice barely above a breath, already turning to look for Nick's parents. When his manners catch up to his strained processing and he glances over his shoulder, she's already gone.
"The doctor's just told me he's showing signs of starting to come around, if you want to be with him when he wakes up you should go now." Grissom is standing with his hands clasped in front of him, Bill and Jillian arm in arm where they'd rose immediately on his approach.
"You should be the one to go."
It's so far from what Grissom had been expecting him to say that all he can do is blink at Nick's father, sure he's misheard. After it's clear Grissom isn't about to respond, he repeats himself, then elaborates.
"You should go. Be with him when he wakes up. We've discussed it and we- we think it ought'a be you."
"Excuse me?" The words themselves are clear, Grissom's heard them just fine, but their meaning is escaping him. It just doesn't make sense. "I don't understand, you don't… You don't want to see him?"
It's not that Grissom suffers under the misguided belief that just because someone is a parent they automatically uphold a level of obligation to their children; he knows better than to assume that. However Nick, though not speaking of them especially often, always spoke fondly of his parents, and their behavior when they'd first arrived in Las Vegas, sitting at that table asserting fiercely their intentions to do whatever it took to get him back, is incongruous to what he's hearing now. The evidence, as it were, just doesn't fit pattern.
Something almost angry flashes across Bill's face at the question. The man almost speaks but doesn't manage to get a word out, jaw gritted and adams apple bobbing as he swallows hard. His wife takes over, fingers absently tapping his arm as Jillian Stokes squares her shoulders, tips up her chin, and looks her son's boss straight on in the eye.
"What we want doesn't matter," she says, and her voice is steady. She speaks with the resolve of a person who cannot question her decision or she knows she'll take it back. "What matters is what's gonna help Nick. And what's gonna help Nick, right now, here? It's being around what he knows, and what he knows is you."
The judge seems to have regained his ability to speak, and adds his two cents, telling Grissom with a slightly damp tone, "We love our son, Mr. Grissom, and there's nothing we want more than to be with him the second he opens his eyes. But we don't speak an awful lot and we barely see him once a year, if that. You see him every day. Nick knows you. He trusts you - boy talks about you like you hung the moon. I've spoken with v-"
Bill bites the word off before it can move farther than one hummed consonant, and Grissom can see tremors running through his lips as he presses them hard together, shakes his head. His eyes wander up and over the heads of the passers-by, searching for composure in the same pale peach walls Grissom had found himself staring at so often the past few hours. He then clears his throat and tries again, though his voice wavers when he actually says it, applies to his son that word that had choked him just moments ago.
"I've spoken with victims, seen them interviewed on the stand. Stuff like… like this, it knocks the sense right outta you, and he doesn't even know we're here yet. He wakes up after- after that and sees us he'll be confused, but you… Like my wife said. You're what he knows, you're what's normal. When you get him settled, make sure he's alright and he knows which way is up, you come get us right away. But it should be you goes in there first."
Grissom is not a person who is often struck dumb, but right now, he cannot for the life of him find the words to respond to Bill and Jillian's assertions, which have settled heavy as anything on his shoulders, compressing the existing weight there tenfold. He feels as if he's been handed something priceless and lethal and he doesn't know what to do with his hands. So instead he nods, wordless, and turns towards the nurse's station.
The only people Grissom is any good with are dead. He is not the man you want to entrust your terrorized son to. He knows this because just that night he'd been knelt on the ground, feeling for all the world as though it was his own terrorized son shaking to pieces under his hands and that he was wholly inadequate to handle any of this. In high school, Grissom was a ghost, and he'd remained that way in the years since. Until this, until them, until the lab and the team, because he can't be a ghost if people need him like Nick needs him right now.
At the doorway of the room, Grissom thanks the nurse numbly. He doesn't hear her respond or leave, but the door closes behind him, prompting him to take a few more steps into the room. Nick looks… better. The painful welts left behind by the ants have faded considerably, and there isn't much physical damage otherwise visible. There are a few bruises from being pulled so, well, explosively from his glass coffin, and Grissom's searching eyes find nothing else. Nick looks like he's sleeping, though lines are etched between his brows in a light frown. A chair has been set beside the bed, and Grissom wanders over to it, sitting down heavily.
"Hey, Nicky," Grissom says, voice sounding far louder than its actual volume in the quiet, still room. No response, so he settles back in the chair, watching Nick's face and feeling the day catch up to him.
It doesn't take more than five minutes for Nick to start moving. His face changes first, brows scrunching further together and a low groan coming from his throat. Grissom sits up straighter, hovering on the edge of rising from the chair. Nick's hand, scratched and bruised, laying on top of the blanket he's been draped in, twitches, fingers spasming once. This is the only warning Grissom gets before Nick's eyes fly open and a strangled yell shatters the quiet.
"Nick," he says, quickly getting up and closing the scant remaining space between him and the bed. "Nick, you're out, we got you out. You're safe, you hear me? Nicky!"
Nick's body has jacknived over, bent at nearly a forty-five degree angle on his side, arms flung out over the thin hospital grade mattress like he's searching for something. The yell has morphed into something else, into breathless sobbing that makes Grissom feel like he's been stabbed. Seeing Nick's horrified reaction on waking has put him in physical pain, and under normal circumstances Grissom would be able to explain exactly why, scientifically, but for once, science isn't even close to the first thing on his mind. It isn't on his mind at all.
"Nicky," Grissom says again, leaning over the side of the bed and grabbing his shoulder. This time it seems to work and wide, frantic eyes lock onto his own, a word making it out halfway to the sound of Grissom's name. "Yeah, it's me. It's me, you're safe. I need you to breathe."
One of Nick's searching hands has landed on the front of Grissom's shirt, fingers gripping hard enough the fabric is sure to warp. Grissom takes it in stride, shifting a little to perch on the side of the bed, guiding Nick into his arms and trying not to put too much pressure on his bruised body. The door opens quietly, too quietly to be heard over the sound of uncontrollable gasping, a nurse's head popping in. Grissom lifts a hand from Nick's back, waving the man away with a mouthed, 'we're good', then settling his palm over the back of his head when the door closes just as softly.
"I've got you," he says, voice as fierce as it is gentle. "You're safe. I've got you."
In a moment of inane recall, Warrick's coin flashes into Grissom's mind, spinning through the air reflecting the light as it whirls and falls. He holds Nick fractionally tighter, hands one splayed over his shoulder blade, one cupped around the back of his neck. Still in his mind's eye flips the coin, asking the question.
Heads he makes it through. Tails he doesn't. Heads he makes it through. Tails he doesn't.
It's Nick, and so Grissom knows the side he'll call every time.
Heads. Heads. Heads.
After all, they're flipping with a weighted coin.