I do not own CSI or any of it's characters.
We All Smile
Nick Stokes was a lot of things. A good listener, sympathetic, a great CSI. He was also a good friend. If his friends were in trouble, he would always find a way to help them. Nick could make anyone smile. He was a fun guy to be around. He was my best friend, and I'll never forget him.
I always feared that Nick's protect-everyone-you-can attitude would get him hurt. And one day, it did. We were at a crime scene searching for evidence. A family of three had been stabbed to death in their beds. Nick was smiling and making jokes, trying to lessen the morbidness of the situation. We never thought the killer would come back to the scene, but he did. And this time, he brought a gun. Whether he was scared he would get arrested or just plain pissed off, I don't know. But he raised the gun, and fired. The bullet was meant for me, but Nick was such a firm believer of "friends first, worry about yourself later," that he stepped into the line of fire. The bullet hit him square in the chest, and he toppled into a heap at my feet. An ambulance was called, but it was too late. The last thing he did, before he died in my arms, was look up at me and smile.
That was a year ago, and the events that happened at that crime scene are still fresh, seared into my mind forever. Whenever I think of that night, my mind always drifts back to a case that Nick and I had a couple of years back. A 16 year old boy's best friend had been shot and killed while that two of them were at a park. But the boy, for whatever reason, was too afraid to do anything about it. He just left his friend to die. Nick had gotten very emotional about this and had told the boy, "Friends don't let their friends get hurt. And if they do, they do everything in their power to help them." I never knew how serious he meant that.
We will never forget Nick. He will always be in our hearts. Whenever I see Nick's smiling happy face in a picture, or his name pops up in a conversation, I feel sad. But I know that he would not want me to feel this way. So I do what he always did. I smile. We all do.