this is part one of a two-parter. this is the part with warrick - the part with grissom is next. thanks for clicking into this, i hope you'll drop me a line if you liked it, and stay tuned for part two!

(also, title is from sleeping at last's song 'snow'!)

"Let's get back to the lab."

With her quietly spoken words, Catherine prompts their way out of the observation room. One by one, Nick's teammates leave, until he's alone, watching Nigel Crane muttering to himself, I am one, and who am I? over and over like the words mean anything at all. Whatever it is he's looking for, staring through the one way mirror watching the man who'd killed Jane Galloway and Morris Pearson, almost killed him, Nick doesn't find it before it all becomes too much and he has to get out of there, away from Crane, as fast as possible.

However long he'd spent standing in there alone, trying to find some sense in any of this, Nick had been expecting the others to have dispersed by the time he left. This turns out not to be the case. The door swings shut behind him at the same time that Warrick gets up off a bench in the hallway, clearly having been waiting there for him. He approaches Nick with a hand hovering out a little, like he's afraid Nick might keel over at any moment.

"Hey," Warrick greets, hand still out like he's ready to catch Nick if he has to. Nick wonders if he even knows he's doing it, acknowledging the greeting with a tight smile.

For a second they just stand there in the hall, neither speaking, and really, what do you say after that? Nick certainly doesn't know. There's a thousand things in his head, hammering at the inside of his skull along with his concussion-induced headache, and none of them seem to be capable of making it down through his head and out of his mouth. Luckily for him, Warrick seems to figure out the mechanics of speech before he has to.

"Why don't you come sit down for a minute," Warrick says, which opens up an easy and painless line of conversation Nick can follow him down easily.

"Nah, I gotta head home," he refutes. Even as he stands there, it's all catching up to him, the last day. Getting thrown through a window and falling twenty feet onto a hedge, lack of sleep, grappling with his would-be killer, all within a span of twenty-four hours, is a recipe for a bone-deep, aching exhaustion that's taking hold of his body now. Nick rolls his neck, trying to do literally anything to dissipate even a bit of this headache, but stops halfway through the motion when Warrick's response brings him up short.

"You can't go home, Nick."

For several silent moments, Nick blinks at Warrick and attempts to figure out what he possibly could mean by that, before giving up and asking him directly, "What?"

"Your house is an active scene, remember?" To Warrick's credit, he speaks in a gentle, calm tone, but doesn't beat around the bush, making his point directly and clearly. "And even when they get done processing, cleanup won't be there for a couple of hours, minimum."

"Oh." Nick squeezes the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. "Right. Right." Obviously he can't go home. Not yet. He lowers his hand, breathing out heavily. "Sitting down is, uh. Yeah. I think I'm gonna sit down for a minute."

Warrick holds out his arm, indicating the hallway, and Nick starts walking in that direction, feeling his friend fall into step beside him as he passes. As they walk down the hall, Warrick's hand settles over his back, guiding him through the building with gentle, unobtrusive pressure. Another day he may have shrugged it off, been affronted by the implication that he's incapable of walking down a hallway under his own power but today that hand represents both a fair point - he might not be able to walk down this hallway under his own power - and a comforting presence.

Once in the breakroom, Warrick gives Nick a barely-there push towards the couch, walking over to get a glass of water and talking as he goes. He tells Nick to 'hang tight', says something about talking to Catherine and Sara, and before he's made it a full sentence Nick has tuned him out. It's not something he does on purpose, just a product of the way his mind keeps drifting. Warrick's voice is a reassuring rumble, familiar and steady, though Nick isn't tracking anything he's actually saying. The room feels fuzzy and distant, like he's watching himself sit on this couch from somewhere far away. Only when he realizes Warrick is standing there looking at him expectantly, the way you look at someone just after you've asked them a question you need an actual answer to, does Nick come to the conclusion he probably should've tuned back in before now.

"Hm?" he hums, prompting Warrick to repeat what he'd said.

"Anybody we need to call?" Warrick's question is quiet and pitched obviously, deliberately, artificially into casual. It mirrors the way he stands, arms folded over his chest and face too neutral. "Your parents, or somebody?"

Before he's so much as finished the question, Nick is shaking his head. "No, don't. I love 'em, but they'd freak, probably be on the next plane."

Which is true, but it isn't the whole story. His reasons for not wanting his parents called aren't purely altruistic. Sure, he wants to shield them from this, to avoid breaking their hearts the way he knows this news would, but it's more than that. There's selfishness in there too, because if Nick's parents are called, and they get on the first plane out, he's going to have to make himself be fine. He's going to have to look them in the face and smile and laugh a little and reassure them that it's okay, it was a close call but he's fine. Really.

And right now? Nick is not fine. He's not even remotely fine, and he needs some time to keep being 'not fine' until the world stops upending himself and he can stop hearing phantom breathing in the walls every time the room gets too quiet. So, no. It's really for the best if Warrick doesn't call his parents.

"Alright." Warrick relents easily and without question; a small mercy. From the look on his face, it's easy for Nick to assume he's figured out the other reason why, but in another minuscule kindness he doesn't push, just nods and resumes his exit from the break room.

Sitting there on the couch, alone with just his thoughts, Nick tries to piece together what to do next. Warrick is right. He can't go home. His house is still an active scene, not to mention the man who'd died on his floor, the blood still staining the wood. Psychic or no, whatever he'd been, he'd been trying to help, he'd come there to help Nick, and for his trouble he'd gotten-

Lurching up out of his slump, he presses the back of his wrist over his mouth, nausea stabbing and wrenching at his gut. The break room's trash can isn't in his line of sight, so he grits his teeth, squeezes his eyes tight shut, and tries to breathe through it. The urge to throw up slowly fades, and Nick is left to fall once more against the back of the couch, wrist moving up to cover his eyes. Above his head, the lights glare garishly down, and Nick knows he can't stay here. He has to go somewhere, preferably somewhere with lights he can turn off, and he can't go home. The question of where to go pulses in Nick's brain in time with his mounting headache.

Logistics and planning is not in the cards at the moment, it would seem, and with a low groan, Nick leans his head back further against the couch. His hand returns to cover his eyes, blocking out as much of the persistent light as possible. Maybe he can just take a quick nap here, and when he wakes up, it'll all make something approximating sense. Maybe not, too, but right now Nick is just tired and worn thin enough to try.

Sleep doesn't really come except in drifts and eddies, shallow and fleeting. It's the type of sleep that leaves a person more tired even than before, and he wakes feeling groggy and disoriented. For a few fuzzy moments, Nick looks around, trying to figure out what it was that finally pulled him completely into consciousness. His eyes eventually land on Warrick, leaning against the doorframe and looking mildly worried.

"Hey," Nick mumbles, rubbing his eyes to clear them. He sits up slowly and tries not to wonder how many times Warrick may have said his name, trying to get his attention. "Hey, man."

"You ready?"

The question doesn't make any sense, and Nick's confusion must show on his face as he blinks over. It takes a few moments before any response makes it out, and when it does, it's a flat, bewildered, "What?"

"To go, Nick. Are you ready to go?" Warrick illustrates his point with a slow gesture over his shoulder with his thumb, still hovering half in, half out of the break room. "I've got my case stuff sorted with Catherine and Sara, so we can just take off."

"Take off," Nick repeats blankly. Warrick's frown deepens and he steps into the room, gesturing again behind him.

"My place, y'know. Cause you can't go back to yours."

Understanding dawns, followed shortly by relief. Nick is too tired and in pain, glad to be rid of the convoluted question of 'where am I supposed to go now,' to put up even a farce of a protest, an objection of not wanting to cause Warrick any trouble. For right now, he will follow Warrick to his car without argument, leaning against the door as the engine starts and they pull out of the parking lot. Passing rows of employee cars reminds Nick of the basic fact that he's actually quite lucky Warrick is taking him home - his car isn't here anyway. What they don't tell you about being the victim of a violent crime is that outside of the physical pain, the psychological trauma, the emotional consequences, is that it's also complicated in a mundane way. How do you get home after? Where do you go when home isn't an option?

Nick glances over at Warrick and feels a sharp twist of gratitude. He hadn't had to actually think about either of those questions - someone else had answered them for him before they'd even crossed his mind.

The glass of the passenger's side window is cold underneath Nick's throbbing temple. He's he's rested his head against it in an attempt to alleviate his headache, which has been steadily mounting in intensity along with the rest of the aches gripping his body. There's a Vicodin prescription in his jacket pocket that he's supposed to have taken another dose of by now, and he's being punished for not having done so, every injury he's borne over the last day aching sharper and more violently with every passing minute.

Even the side of his neck is stinging again, and Nick touches it absently with the tips of his fingers. A piece of glass from the window had left a cut there; just a scratch, barely a pencil thin line of red. The doctor had called him a lucky man when she looked at it. Didn't even need a Band-Aid. Nick hadn't felt lucky. A piece of glass had cut his neck. He's seen what happens when pieces of glass come in contact with necks far too many times to feel lucky for having any personal experience in the subject. He leaves his fingers there, flattening out to cover the extent of the small, superficial laceration. It pulses under his hand like a threat. The thought swirls around and around, an agitated swarm of bees knocking around in his skull, until something abruptly stills them, halting the panic before it can overtake him.

Warrick's right hand, taken momentarily off the steering wheel, squeezes his forearm again, lightly, eyes never leaving the road and voice making no comment, no observation. It stays there for just long enough that Nick's heart stops racing - long enough for him to remember that he's still alive and his carotid isn't about to leave a splatter pattern he's seen a thousand times before on the inside of the windshield - then returns to the wheel.

By the time they reach Warrick's place, the pain is bad enough that Nick is having trouble focusing. He follows his friend inside slowly, moving with the jerking unsteadiness of a person whose entire body feels like one giant bruise. The kitchen counter was the first available surface to lean on that he'd spotted once inside, and Nick plants himself firmly next to it, drawer handle digging into his hip as he lets the cabinet next to him support his weight. Somewhere else, he can hear Warrick moving around, doing what, he couldn't say, while he stands there and just loses time, drifting.

"Hey."

The sound of Warrick's voice next to him jolts Nick into the present, injuries angrily protesting the full-body flinch, leaving him to breathe through it with fingers digging sharply down against the countertop. Again, Warrick doesn't draw attention to this obvious evidence of just how not-okay Nick is, instead giving it a moment and then holding out a pile of neatly folded fabric.

"I can have somebody grab some stuff from your place tomorrow," he says while Nick unfolds the pile, shakes out a t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, "but for now you just need to get some sleep."

There's an implication there that this may go on for longer than a night, longer than it'll take for cleanup to have Nick's house released and habitable again, but for now, Nick ignores it. He's too tired and strung out to argue, and Warrick seems to notice, watching him with narrow-eyed concern as he leaves the bathroom wearing clothes that don't belong to him and feeling like his own skin is just a size too small.

"Nicky," he says, getting up off the couch when Nick walks into the room, still doing that hovering thing that means Nick must look bad, "when was the last time you took your meds?"

The silence is enough of an answer.

"I'll get you a bottle of water, where are they, in your jacket pocket?"

Nick stands behind the couch, leaning against the back of it, eyes screwed shut against the light that once more feels assaultingly bright, listening to Warrick rattle around with his prescription, the fridge opening a second later. It takes him until Warrick returns, standing in front of him with a pair of white pills in his open palm, for Nick to gather his words together, ignore every instinct screaming at him to take them, and explain.

"They make me foggy," he says. Presses his own hand down hard against his thigh, against the worn fabric of dark grey sweatpants just a little too long for him. He does this to stop it from shaking - shaking from pain or exhaustion or the memory of what happened the last time he dropped his guard, Nick doesn't know. "Can't, y'know. Can't think straight. I have to... They make me foggy."

Something twists in Warrick's face and Nick is too tired and distracted to figure out what it means. He just keeps standing there, even as Warrick reaches out and grabs gently ahold of his forearm, pulling it up and putting the pills into Nick's hand.

"So be foggy, then," he says, like it's that simple. "All you've gotta do now is sleep. Go ahead and be foggy, cause I'm not goin' anywhere, and you're gonna be fine. Nobody's gonna get the drop on you."

Moments tick by, while Nick thinks on the promise, on the pills in his hand, the water Warrick is still holding out to him. Trust or desperation, one of the two, causes him to toss the pills back, accepting the water. Once that's taken care of, he goes to round the couch, to lie down and finally get some sleep, as instructed. Before he can make it, Warrick stops him with a hold on his elbow.

"I know your brain's a little scrambled, but not enough that you can't remember where my room is."

This one, Nick is going to argue him on.

"Come on," he says, "I can't put you out like that. You- You already…"

"It's night time," Warrick interrupts, eyebrows arched, though the expression is softened with a slight smile. "We work nights, and I'm not concussed or medicated. There's no way I'm gonna be able to sleep, but you need the rest, and you got tossed out a second story window today. You're not sleeping on my couch."

Nick nods, the movement slowed as if a video game in lag, head bobbing down then up then down and staying there, chin tucked to his chest like he's lost the strength to raise it again. Maybe it's because of this seeping away of the last vestiges of his energy, or because Warrick makes a pretty good point, but Nick agrees after that. He stands where he was stopped in the middle of the living room for a few moments longer, trying to organize his thoughts, until a gentle tug on his arm pulls him towards where he does indeed remember Warrick's room to be.

Left alone, with the door half-ajar and light filtering in from where Warrick sits in the living room watching TV, Nick gets as comfortable as he can and tries to sleep. Tries to sleep. He'd been so tired, at the lab, and in the car, and standing there next to the couch, but as soon as he'd laid down, aching head on a pillow, sleep had fled like a spooked rabbit. Every time he squeezes his eyes shut he sees a gun in his face and they snap open again, frantically combing through the heavy dark of Warrick's room trying to pick out details. To make sure he's alone, that he's safe. That the shadow in the corner, a shade darker than the night around it, isn't Nigel Crane or some other boogeyman.

It isn't Crane. Not the first time Nick drifts into unconsciousness only to jerk awake with his heart pounding and cold adrenaline running frost-leaves down his shoulders and spine. Or the next time, when he lays there in a state of half-dreaming and a car backfires outside the building and suddenly he's up and his body's wired up all over again. It isn't Crane the third time either, when Nick's eyes, frenetically flicking around over and over, alight on the alarm clock on the other side of Warrick's bed. Red numbers taunt him with the information that it's only been six minutes that time, six minutes of what could loosely be described as sleep before the skin-and-nerve-stored memory of crashing through a window and twenty feet down shocks him back to now with a persistent danger danger danger you're in DANGER.

The air is still. The night is calm. Nick breathes as slowly and shallowly as he can, in and out, and tries to find that calm in himself too. He loosens- tries to loosen muscles tensed so hard they ache deeper than the bruising laid over them, and searches for something to focus on.

From the living room, there's a sound. A voice. Warrick must have the TV on, Nick decides, and he concentrates on the voice, trying to make out what it's saying. He sits up, slowly and gingerly, deep contusions punishing him for every movement, and leans back against the headboard, listening. The voice clears up, and Nick realizes the TV isn't on at all, or if it is, it's on mute. It's Warrick talking, presumably on the phone.

"-could have done. Hang on, I think he's up. Thanks, Grissom. Yeah. I'll call you later."

The voice in the living room goes silent, there's a plastic click of a phone snapping shut, and then footsteps. Nick is too tired to scramble back into a horizontal position and pretend to still be asleep, so he stays put, sitting propped against the headboard. The exhaustion and shattered nerves must be evident on Nick's face, thrown into relief by the lamp on the bedside table that Warrick wordlessly clicks on, because he cringes as he sits down.

"Can't sleep, huh," Warrick says, in a half-volume rumble of a voice.

It isn't a question. It would be insulting to ask as a question, because anyone who looked at Nick for more than maybe a second and a half could see it. It's obvious in the way his hands are plagued by periodic tremors that haven't stopped since he turned his back on a ghost in an empty apartment building, and the way his eyes are half-lidded but still refuse to close, clocking the windows and the door, every entrance like someone's about to come through the moment he looks away.

Nick swallows hard and nods. The action sends an aching pulse through his bruised, scratched throat. The headboard of the bed is hard and unforgiving against his back, and all of his weight is suddenly against it. He's a puppet whose strings have all been cut, and he feels like he doesn't have so much as the strength to hold his head up.

"Might help if you laid down," comments Warrick, just a hint of teasing in his voice, though tempered and leagues from their usual ribbing. It's something of a relief, that Warrick will still poke fun at him, will treat him with caution and care but not like he's made of glass. He was nearly killed, sure, but he's still Nick, and it's good news that Warrick is still Warrick too.

With movements slowed and made clunky by pain and a deep, sick tired, Nick eases back down the bed, stretching cautiously out until he's returned to the same position he's been in for more than an hour, trying and failing to sleep. If Nick were Dante, he thinks, with the aimless hysteria of the bottomed-out gas tank left behind when the adrenaline fades, this would be one of the levels of his Inferno. You're so tired you think you might die, but no matter what, you just can't sleep.

Above him, perched now on the edge of the bed, making the mattress dip slightly to one side, Warrick arranges the blanket up to his shoulders, saying nothing more, just pulling at fabric until he's satisfied. He sits there in the dark, sitting next to where Nick's head rests on the pillow, and Nick tries to close his eyes, hoping that maybe if he can fall asleep in the time it takes Warrick to leave the room maybe he'll be able to stay asleep. After all, if Warrick is still here, there's no way Crane or anybody else with ill-will could be.

The mattress shifts, and Nick's eyes snap open, his breath catching and choking in his chest.

"Easy," Warrick says, barely audible. "Just getting comfortable, okay? I'm not goin' anywhere."

True to his word, he settles back down instead of getting up, and a moment later, Nick feels a hand come to rest on his head. He flinches unavoidably, holding his breath, but Warrick doesn't move. The touch is a little stiff and slightly awkward, but it eases quickly to a steady, comforting presence. Nick focuses on the touch and keeps breathing. Just keeps breathing. Warrick is here. Crane isn't here. He's safe. He's safe.

As if sensing Nick's thought process, Warrick speaks again, in that same quiet, non-judgmental voice. "It's just you and me here, so you go ahead and stand down. I got the lookout so you just get some rest, huh?"

Nick breathes, slowly and evenly, and the hand on his head doesn't move, a promise he doesn't have to keep his strained eyes open to see.

When sleep finally comes, it comes in a blackout curtain, slamming down over Nick's world and taking everything else away. By the time he surfaces from unconsciousness, the sun blazes bright and awake outside, striking into the room around the edges of the blinds drawn down over the windows. Warrick, wearing different clothes and reading a newspaper he hadn't had when Nick fell asleep, is still there.