A/N: Now one could argue that this whole story came about as a bit of an accident. It began as just some little tangent of my imagination that I was compelled to put on paper. Cut to six months later, where – surprise, surprise – the same few paragraphs lay untouched. But something (probably my nagging conscience reminding me to actually finish something for a change) inspired me to continue. Then I was singing some classic S and G in the shower, and it all came together. Call it fate. Call it kismet. Or call it a complete waste of three AM insomnia. Just please review.
The Sounds of Silence
Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.
-Simon and Garfunkel
Da-da-dum. Da-da-dum. Her fingers drum over the table with agonizing persistence, a tumble of soft pink skin and hard red nails. He watches them, a sticky lump of despair filling up his throat. She's pretty – no, she's gorgeous. And a month ago he would have jumped at the chance to be in the same room with her, let alone possess her undivided attention. But a month ago his life had been normal. A month ago his life had been whole. A month ago he wouldn't have been sitting meekly in stiff cotton scrubs with a psychologist, staring at her immaculate manicure and missing Catherine.
"Post-traumatic stress disorder," she says finally, glancing up from the file.
"Really…" he mumbles, too tired to even feign surprise. He's always tired. Dark purple rings stain his skin, accentuating his bloodshot eyes and sickly white pallor. Combined with the emaciated hollows of his cheek-bones, the effect is similar to that of someone who has had the shit kicked out of him and been left for dead.
And he can't say it doesn't feel that way.
"It says here that you were in an accident three months ago?" The question – stated with an almost frosty indifference – doesn't seem to require an answer, so he remains quiet. Besides, he'd rather delay the inevitable for as long as possible.
She removes her glasses slowly, nibbling an end as she contemplates him with a piercing blue gaze. It's so reminiscent of Grissom that he feels his chest tighten involuntarily and his breathing hitch. If she noticed his sudden discomfort she gives no sign, and only continues her shrewd scrutiny.
"Why don't you tell me about what happened?"
He shifts in his seat, his lungs feeling no deeper than a wading pool and just about as effective at delivering oxygen to his brain. His heart thumps against his ribcage, beating a painful rhythm perfectly in time with her relentless table-top percussion. But as much as he hurts now, as much as he wants to scream at this stranger with a tragedy on paper and a travesty across the table, he knows it's nothing like twelve weeks ago. It's a small consolation, but it still consoles, and he clings to it with his last shards of broken energy.
"…What happened? It's all in the file, isn't it?" he asks quietly, voice thick behind his constricted throat.
"Mr. Sanders," she sighs, discarding her heavy-framed glasses in her collar before smoothing a hand across her forehead, "as my patient, this process is much more productive when I ask the questions. So, why don't you tell me about what happened on June 23rd?"
But she's asking the impossible. Even if he wanted to tell her glaciered countenance exactly what happened on June 23rd, it's no longer his decision. One ragged breath scarcely chokes from his lips before another one overtakes it, making any form of comprehensible communication out of the question.
He wonders if she knows how much she reminds him of Warrick.
A frizzled hum fills the dry desert air, like a wasp caught in a paper lantern. Glancing up, he sees a dilapidated sign flashing "Paradise of Palms Lodge" in flickering neon letters.
"And I half expected it to read Bates Motel," Nick quips.
"Before my time, man," he teases, although as he takes in the low slung building hugging the asphalt, he has to agree. Despite being just a mile off the I-15, the lodge entertains a certain unearthly quality, a twisted charm made no less unsettling by the two bodies he knows are waiting inside."Can't cheat time, Greg. Just because you act like you're twelve doesn't exempt you from growing older."
He grins and draws in a breath to reply, but stops dead at the sound of heels clicking on the pavement behind them. It's Catherine, and judging by the pronounced staccato step, she's not in a very good mood.
"Good, you're here," she says, both ignoring a perfunctory greeting and confirming his suspicions. "Grissom is already in the room with Sara and Warrick. Nick, you're in the office with me, and Greg," she pauses, throwing a look towards the parking lot, "you're on the perimeter."
He bites back a sigh, unwilling to risk provoking the obviously irritated blonde. But as he slips under the crime scene tape and begins what practically guarantees to be a fruitless and menial few hours, he can't help feeling a little disgruntled. He's been in the field for almost six months now, and in spite of proving himself to be not only conscientious and professional, but even talented, he is still being assigned basic tasks. Usually Catherine is more lenient than Grissom, offering at least an encouraging smile, if not some blood and gore; however tonight he finds himself at the increasingly familiar mercy of her emotions.
The crime scene spans an abnormally large area, encompassing the generous parking lot, most of the gravelly track leading from the highway, and bleeding out into the barren soil surrounding the lodge. He treads carefully around the back of the building, stooping to take a few photos of footprints. But as the warm breeze tickling his neck chases the sand into scuttling clouds of tawny dust, he knows they won't stand up in court. Besides, he thinks, nonetheless tailing the distorted imprints, why would the person who just raped and murdered two teenage girls try to escape by strolling off into the desert?
The faint glow of the rising sun kisses the horizon, gilding the distant hills with liquid gold. Looking at his watch, he sees that he has already been out here for well over three hours, a fact which the tightening muscles in his shoulders vehemently corroborate. He straightens up and arches his back to a feline crescent, a maneuver rewarded with the protest of overworked vertebrae popping sharply back into place. I feel ya, guys, he murmurs to himself, licking off a bead of sweat collected on his lip. Right now he would give anything to be back in the motel with the rest of the team, even if it only gained him some air conditioning and a little shade.
As the sun continues its tenacious ascent to the faded periwinkle sky, thickening the dawn with the promise of a hot afternoon, he starts to wander back.
A blinding flash is all the warning he gets.
He wakes with a start.
His sheets are drenched in sweat. Regardless, he pulls them closer to his shivering skin, twisting and winding the cheap cotton around his limbs.
It's very quiet. He used to hear people complaining about hospital food and hospital smell, but for him it's the hospital quiet. It's sinister, somehow, in its absolute silence. As if it knows that the nights are always the hardest; that he struggles against drooping lids to stave off sleep; that he prays to a pitiless god that tonight, just this once, just for an hour, a minute, a second, he won't dream.
They find him on the floor of the DNA lab, curled into a tight ball next to the printer. A rumbled sheet is clutched to his chest, the streams of tears rolling off his jaw leaving widening orbs of wetness on the paper.
Someone reaches toward him hesitantly, but quickly retracts her arm as a violent paroxysm of laughter seizes him and sets his shoulders shaking. He bites down hard on his lip, attempting to quell the hysteria rising like a warm bubble within him, but quickly dissolves into another fit of giggles. Even as his sides begin to stiffen and ache he continues to laugh helplessly, one arm wrapped tightly across his knees, rolling back and forth on his heels like a four year old who just found out he was ticklish.
"…Sanders?" Brass's face swims before his watering eyes, "Sanders, why don't you come with me. I'll drive you home."
He ignores the offer, instead thrusting the wrinkled paper desperately at the other man. "Brass…look at this."
Brass sighs heavily, making no effort to take the sheet. "You've been through a lot, Greg. You need some rest."
"No!" His voice pitches up with sudden fervor, the interruption of a hiccup only slightly belying the frenzied demand. He doesn't even notice the uncharacteristic abandonment of his surname. "Look at it."
Reluctantly the captain reaches forward, takes the print-out, and with a final glance filled with a strange combination of pity, exhaustion, and suspicion, lowers his eyes to read.
"It's –" he wavers slightly and pauses, pulling himself together, "It's the DNA sample collected from the motel after the explosion."
"No," Greg corrects him with a vehement shake of his head and another uncontrollable giggle, "No, it's not a DNA sample." He emphasizes the term like he's speaking to an especially unintelligent child – which, considering the fact that he is the one laughing on the floor of the Las Vegas Crime Lab, seems ironic. "Look closer. Don't you see? It's Grissom. And Catherine. And Warr –"
Another hiccup swallows his words and he stops, surveying the huddled mass of nervous bystanders before leaning conspiratorially into Brass. Then, in a harsh stage whisper:
"It's pink mist."
Click-clack. Click-clack. The doctor's head is bent low over the file, mimicking his thumb over the top of the ballpoint.
Oh, lovely. A Pen Clicker.
He chews on his tongue, sliding it back and forth over the ridges of his molars. One tooth, the second from the back on the bottom left, wiggles slightly when he probes it.
"Well." Click-clack. "It all seems pretty textbook to me." The doctor slaps the file shut and tosses it onto the table with a jovial smile. "Nothing we can't overcome, right?" He clicks his Bic a few times in rapid succession, then pauses and leans forward, contemplating his patient through narrowed eyes.
"You don't believe me, do you?"
If he presses really hard against the side, he can feel a jagged crack between the gum and the enamel.
"Well, I can't say I blame you. I'm what –?" he flicks open the folder and scans the top page briefly, "The sixth psychiatrist in just over twice as many weeks. You probably see me walk through that door and think, 'Here comes another one.' Another shrink with another miracle cure and another thousand questions."
The fissure slowly fills with saliva.
The doctor relaxes back into the metal chair, the easy grin – Nick's grin – faltering for the first time since he stepped into the room. The pen flurries into action. When he continues, his voice is a little more careful, a little less confident.
"I don't want to ask you a thousand technical questions. Because frankly, they won't tell me anything I didn't learn in first year med school. Instead," click-clack, "I want you to ask some questions."
There's an expectant hush.
"Nothing?" He cocks a brow, the wrinkle between his eyes deepening in equal parts amusement and gentle reproach. The gesture looks odd removed from Sara's bright face. God, he misses her…
"I want to know something," Greg says quietly.
"Yes?" Eager.
"What did they put in the coffins?"
His palm is moist and cold on the door handle.
"It's just for a little while…just until things settle down."
He doesn't know quite what Brass is referring to – the turmoil at the lab or his teetering sanity – but he doesn't ask. Silence fills the stuffy car, reverberating against his eardrums until he's sure they'll break."I'll come back for you."
He wants to burst into tears, to plead and beg until Brass relents, and smiling sympathetically puts the key back in the ignition and they drive away. Far away. Right off the edge of the world and into oblivion.
Instead he tightens his grip around the handle.
"I promise, Greg. I'll come back and take you ho –"
"Okay well I should get going," he interrupts quickly, his sunny cadence sounding plastic even to him. "Someone's probably waiting for me."
Brass nods, the sudden return to business reading across his eyes as a flash of relief. "Yeah."
"So…bye then."
"Bye, Sanders."
He squeezes the car door open and steps out, shouldering his scant bag and slamming the door with the heel of his sneaker. He begins to walk towards the entrance, not looking back as the muffled crunch of rubber on asphalt peaks then fades.
His hand leaves a dark streak down the front of his jeans.
Eventually no one comes anymore. Brass doesn't visit. The tide of shrinks trickles to an anemic puddle, then dries up all together. By now I must be a lost cause, he thinks bitterly, his widening smirk the only company in the stale midmorning. He can see it now, doctors and nurses clustered around the water cooler, chatting absently about the poor Lost Cause in room 315. The poor Lost Cause whose world was blown apart. The poor Lost Cause who lost everything.
He shakes his head, his lips twisting into a positively demonic sneer. Listen to him. He's even beginning to pick up the lingo. Soon he'll be spouting about anxiety syndromes and stress disorders, throwing around fucking diagnoses like it will make a difference. And maybe once, at the very beginning of it all, he believed it might. If he was cooperative and docile, if he was the perfect pupil, they could fix him. Somehow the right combination of words, of carefully crafted psycho-analytical techniques and Freudian theories, could put him back together again. Pick up the pieces. Mend the cracks. Heal him so completely that Catherine's slick of hot pink lipstick and Nick's sparkling ebony eyes became but bleached scars, white hairlines crisscrossing his memory.
Instead they put him under a microscope. They put him on suicide watch. They put him on "mild anti-depressants".
He doesn't believe anymore.
The darkness closes in around him, cold comfort in the dead of night. He wants to struggle against the inky bonds, fight until the break of dawn. But he's too tired for that endless battle now, too weary to shoulder another defeat, and for once he just gives in.
Besides, it isn't so bad anymore; haunting the same graveyard of memories, reliving the only life he'll ever have. And he knows they would have been disappointed in him for taking the easy way out, ashamed of his graceless descent into the shell he's become.
But they aren't here. The humorless irony of it all was that it's they who got to take the easy way out, they who were spared from a lifelong sentence of guilt and regret. Because even though he's supposed to be the lucky one, the fortunate one, the survivor…he would still give anything to have been in that motel with the rest of the team, even if it only gained him an end to the silence. Fingernails and ballpoints and silence.
He's so tired, and the horizon so gripped in blackness. For once he just gives in.