Title: Elemental
Pairing: Catherine/Nick
Spoilers: Lady Heather's Box
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Archive: At my site, , Always Thinking, Fanfiction.net. Anywhere else, please ask.
Summary: Catherine deals with Eddie's death.
Author's Notes: For the LiveJournal Multifandom1000 "Elements" challenge. You were supposed to pick one, I managed to do one of each. Which I think stand-alone, or can read in a series.
***
Consigned to Earth
In her years as a CSI, Catherine feels like she's sifted through a million tonnes of earth. She's dug it, sieved it, brushed it off evidence, washed it off her clothes. She knows the chemical properties of different kinds of soil, can tell where it was from and what grew in it from whatever the Mass Spec finds.
She's handled a million tonnes of earth, but none has ever felt like the handful that she's holding today. Soft and smooth, it reminds her of Eddie's touch on her skin the first time that they ever made love, the lines he used at first to woo her, later to woo her back after yet another fight. And today's earth comes not from a crime scene, obtained in the dark, but from a mound beside the open grave, a mound untouched by rain or wind or any trace of last week's storm.
Would that she and Lindsey were so lucky.
Catherine's never been lucky though, so she stands beside an open grave, earth in one hand, Lindsey in the other. She listens to her daughter's quiet sniffles and wants to cry herself, but this is outside, in the bright daylight, not the in quiet of her bedroom, so she resolves that her eyes will remain dry.
They do, until her hand is empty, and she hears the dull sound of the earth hitting the coffin.
It's the sound of her old life dying, reminding her that every youthful hope and dream she and Eddie ever had is being lowered into the cold dark earth.
One tear makes its way down her cheek and she makes no move to stop it.
***
Magic in the Air
It is her first case since Eddie died, and Catherine's glad to be out in the field for most of her first night back. There are too many people in the lab who want to ask her how she's doing, and she can't answer them, not when she doesn't know herself. She's even more glad to be paired with Nick, because Grissom wouldn't know what to say, and Warrick would be all concern and solicitude, and she really doesn't want to work with Sara at the moment. Nick, on the other hand, always knows just what to say around her. Or, more to the point, what not to say.
They end up in the back garden of someone's house, tramping through a veritable forest, and after a few hours, she's almost able to forget the last few nightmarish days, the funeral, Lindsey's tears, her own pain. It's easy to concentrate on the work at hand, focus on that and that alone, not her aching heart or her aching back or the goose bumps rising on her skin, her breath making frosty puffs on the air.
She doesn't realise how cold the air is until a warm weight settles around her shoulders, and she looks up to see Nick standing behind her. "You must be freezing," he observes, and she is, standing up to pull the jacket tighter around her. It's one of those quilted things he likes so much and it traps the heat wonderfully. It also smells like Nick, and she knows that if she closes her eyes, she'll be three years in the past, wrapped up in his bedclothes and him. It sounds like a wonderful place to visit, but she knows that she can't go there right now. If she does, she strongly suspects that she'll fall apart completely.
But Nick doesn't know that, rests his hands on her shoulders, rubbing gently. "You're lucky I keep a spare jacket in the car," he tells her, but she doesn't reply because she can't, not when he's looking at her like that. His brow is creased in concern, eyes dark with the same, and she finds herself unable to look away from them.
She is shivering, but it has nothing to do with the temperature of the air around them, and everything to do with the distance between them or the lack thereof. His breath mingles with hers for a magical moment, two swirls of white melding into one and dissipating into the night.
Then his lips are on hers, and all thought is lost.
***
A Lovely Way To Burn
Catherine's been around long enough to know that dipping your pen in company ink is a very bad idea. After all, that's why she and Nick broke it off three years ago.
That, and the fact that she was older than he, a divorcee with a young child, an ex-stripper, recovering addict, still more than a little in love with her not-quite-ex-husband.
She's not exactly the kind of girl that he can take home to meet Mom, not that she'd ever want that, and both knew that there was no future in what they were doing, so they ended it.
They ended it, and they ended it clean, no messy scenes, no regrets, and above all, no repeat performances.
They agreed on that.
Catherine knows all this, but when she's pinned against her bedroom wall by Nick's warm weight, his lips tasting her neck, his fingers making short work of her clothes, she doesn't give a damn. Instead, she gives as good as she gets, fingers threading through the ends of his hair, body arching against him when he finds a particularly sensitive spot.
Which she does an awful lot when his hands slip beneath the waistband of her jeans, fire spreading through her in their wake. Her head falls back against the wall, flames dancing across her closed eyelids, and she has to force them open, because she always loved watching him when they did this.
Reality, she finds, is far better than memory. His eyes burn with desire, desire for her, and he leans into her, whispers in her ear, words designed to make the fire rage out of control.
Words that do exactly what they were meant to.
She knows that they shouldn't be doing this.
She knows that they are playing with fire.
But it's a lovely way to burn.
***
Drowning in Steam
Catherine closes her eyes as the water, as hot as she can stand it, washes over her body. It's so hot that it actually stings, leaves her skin red raw on impact, but she doesn't flinch, doesn't move away, because she needs this now. She needs to wash away Nick's touch on her flesh, needs to wash away the guilt and the self-recrimination, because she can't believe that she just fell into bed with one of her best friends to make herself feel better about her ex-husband dying.
A little voice in her head that sounds an awful lot like Nick tells her that she's just let herself feel, period, and that that's nothing to be ashamed of. She silences that voice by pointing out that not only was Nick a friend, but that he was once more than that, and she might have just opened a can of worms that she had no business opening. That she might have just screwed up a really good thing, and it wouldn't be the first time.
That little voice won't go away through, so she turns up the shower to drown it out, knowing that she'll need more than hot water and resolve to face the man that she just left slumbering in her bed.
She jumps when the shower door opens, a blast of cool air seeping in, along with a smiling Texan accent. "You started without me?" He places a kiss to her shoulder, turns her in his arms, and his eyes flare with surprise when he quickly realises that not all the water on her face comes from the shower.
"What's wrong?" he asks, and when she can only shake her head in response, he takes her in his arms, turning her gently so that the water hits his back and not her. He flinches, but he's made of strong stuff so he doesn't try adjusting the heat, just stays where he is, sheltering her, protecting her, and the thought only makes the tears flow faster.
His hand covers her cheek, and this time his touch doesn't burn her. It warms her, like a fire on a cold winter's night and she leans into the touch, her eyes locked with his. "Talk to me Cath," he whispers, and she sucks in a ragged breath.
"I don't know…" She hardly recognises her own voice. "We shouldn't have done this Nick… and I don't know where we go from here… what you want-"
"Ssssh…" He cuts her off with his lips against hers, slow and gentle, completely non-pressuring, but she clings to him reflexively, knuckles white against his arms. "I'm here Cath," he tells her, bringing his lips to her neck. "Whatever you need…" Another kiss. "No strings…" Another kiss, and one hand slides down the curve of her back, brings her flush against him. The feel of his body against hers has her winding her arms around his neck as the steam wraps itself around them.
Soon, Catherine knows nothing but white mist and Nick and heat.
She doesn't want anything else.