Author's Note: Inspired totally by Fade Into You by Mazzy Star. (if you really love me, you'll listen to that before/while you read this, cause I can't really explain it, but the mood of that song is the mood of this story!) This is set midseason 6-please try to imagine Nick and Greg with their long, unruly hair. =) Enjoy, and please review!

I'm not sure how I came to be awake, but I can hear my own scream echoing in my ears. Dreams are too real, have been for a long time: since my body caught on fire, or later, when I started spending my life talking to dead bodies.

I can't even be sure that I didn't actually scream as I woke up… I certainly did in my dream.

I feel the shift in the bed where he moves, and I don't want to look into his eyes, don't want to admit that I've woken him. I'm suddenly too aware of the tension in my body, of my shoulders lifting harshly with every breath. The night has stripped me bare; the bed sheets are too thin to hide me.

I'm lying naked next to the man I have given myself too. I've known him for six years; there is enough trust between us. But I can't stand for him to see me. I don't know what I look like right now, but I can feel the fear shaking through me, the sweat beginning at my forehead.

It's when he says my name that I have to look at him. His voice holds what could be concern or irritation, and I'm suddenly reminded that he's older than me, that he didn't even like me when we first met.

He's on his side watching me, his eyes dark with sleep. He's frowning because he can sense that something is wrong. I know he can see the panic written all over me, and maybe if it wasn't so late at night I'd be able to hide from him.

"Did I—" even my voice sounds wrong in the still, dark air. I stumble over my words, my silly words that shudder through my lungs. Did I what? Scream? Cry out? I can't say those things to him.

He waits so long for me to continue; he's so patient with me. My throat tightens; I close my eyes against this weakness in me. "Nothing, forget it."

And God bless him, he does.

A few minutes later, my breathing has calmed. Sleep is still far away, but I'll get there; I have to. I lie still with my eyes closed, just concentrating on not seeing my nightmare scrawled across my vision.

I can't stop it, the memory fresh in my mind. The blood all over me, the stench of it. Scrubbing blood off the walls, off my body, but never getting clean. The dread made me sick… made me so hysterical that the intensity of my own emotions frightened me.

I open my eyes; it's too much for me. But my body is fighting my mind, my eyes slipping closed on their own. Sleep threatens me; it never ceases to shock me, how something that was once so sweet now scares me.

I glance at him, surprised to find him awake still. He's not looking at me; there is a river of distance between us that makes it hard to imagine that only last night we were lovers. But it is me who doesn't touch, who craves personal space. It is me who is too tense. He's tactile, and I'm panicking with the distance of the bed between us.

He seems to sense me watching; he reaches across the bed, his eyes still in shadow. He can't not touch me. He grips my hipbone, fingertips pressing down hard, nails too short to speak of. I took away from his eyes, because now there is his touch between us and we need no other communication.

My chest hurts with the harshness of his hold on my bone. His hand is so close to what could be a repeat of last night, so close to my sex. If he would only touch me, we could forget about all this. The adrenaline's enough, the fear is enough—I'm already half way there. If he would just touch me, we could do something about it. I could show him, show him that I am more than this sweaty mess of fear and bad dreams.

I could put myself inside of him, show him that there is man in me yet. I need him to know, that when I writhe beneath him is it by choice and not because of weakness. That if I want to, I can bite into his shoulder and press into him from behind and make him know me.

But everything is out of whack tonight. He's touching me differently: without the erotica we usually have, without the intimacy we don't say we want. His touch wouldn't be painful if only it wasn't so hazy tonight. Things are too unreal at this hour, when reality is separated from you by blackness. I am too sensitive tonight. I am too vulnerable.

I let my throat make the sound it wants; I can't stop myself. He can sense something in me, something in my noise—a whimper, if only I could bear to call it that. For a moment, he hesitates, his hand fluttering cautiously above my hip. Then, he touches me again, but differently. The heel of his palm presses against my bone, and his rotates his hand, moving it over the area with the slightest pressure. He's trying to remind me that's he's here.

I can pretend to believe that he is trying to soothe me, to comfort me, but I see his eyes, how they are drawn to the soft skin, to his slow, gentle movement that could be intimate if only we allowed it to be. He is lost to me now, lost in my Christ-hips and the memory of their desperate bucking last night. He is only trying to make up for the trouble I've caused, trying to make this unearthly hour worth something. He could be sleeping, but instead he's watching me recover from a nightmare—not speaking to me. He can find the words, but he knows I can't. He's doing me favours.

He wants to turn this into sex. He can't help himself. He wants me, and I have to remind myself that I want him too, that this is what I want too. I need the distraction; I need to apologize to him. I could give it to him again; he could take me, take it all, but he's too scared to take the initiative, and I'm too scared to let him.

I'm used to the nightmares, but I'm also used to waking up alone. I don't know if I can calm myself down, while trying to hard just to act like I'm okay. He knows, he has to know that I'm losing it, and goddamnit I'm trying so hard not to, but I can't. stop. it.

I could make him forget, take away all this embarrassment. I'd fuck him if he'd let me; let him fuck me if he wanted to. He does, he always does, but he doesn't want to ask.

I grab his hand and pull it off my hip. Too much force, more than necessary, and I can see the shock written all over his face. I wipe it off with a kiss I can feel in my teeth. I'm still fumbling with his hand, finally pressing it down hard onto the length of me. I can feel him struggling to respond to my advances; his hand limp on me, his mouth closed even I lick his bottom lip. But I can't keep this up for long. Remnants of my dream are still lodged in my chest, and the breath is being forced out of me. If he would just kiss me back, goddammit.

I'm fighting my need to breathe, but he can feel my shallow breathing in my kiss. Before I can even decide to pull away, he's gripping my chin and yanking me away from him. He moves his hand off of my penis, and rests it on my shoulder instead, rubbing it soothingly. I look at a spot over his shoulder, trying to get my breath back. I feel oddly rejected, unworthy, useless. Why is he looking at me like that.

He says my name again, low and concerned—and I wish he wouldn't do that. I wish he wouldn't use my name like he knows me, like he has any right to me. I look at him, feeling fierce, feeling aroused and deserted in the midst of this feeling.

I feel like I've been leaving him all these clues that he can't decipher. I wish he would give me what I want, but I have this sneaking suspicion that he is giving me what I want—or, he thinks he is.

It doesn't occur to me until now, how we rarely ever look each other in the eye. Now, I can find the feeling in his gaze, I just can't name it. I do know that I don't want to arouse this feeling in him, not this.

But he's looking at me in the old manner of his; usually it makes me feel confident in my body, but tonight I am all too aware of the flaws in my being. He likes to stare in an almost clinical appreciation of my body; he says he likes the flatness of me, the masculinity somehow missing in my personality, and yet featured in everything I do. This is what he speaks of when he is watching me objectively. He reserves the grunts and the moans and the meaning in his silence for when we fuck. On the days when we are too tired, or after we are already spent, that is when he watches me like this. It is when he touches my chest, palms down, pressing hard as though trying to flatten me further.

The first time he did this, the first time we did this, and I saw and felt the beauty of his curvaceous body, I couldn't grasp why he liked my flat chest, and flat buttocks. I could understand why he was drawn to me, as a person, but not to my body. I felt that, bodily, there was a lack of me.

But I learned soon enough, that this kind of staring had nothing to do with attraction. Sometimes he maps out the distance between my ribs, spans the distance between my stomach and my hips with his palms, and then his hands move back up the uneven topography of my back—what does he see there? My penis will lie limp and forgotten, as though even my body knows this ritual, knows there is no sex in it.

But now, his hands are touching my shoulders, my arms—the touch of a friend, not of a lover. Is he studying me now, in the same away he watches his birds? Is he trying to memorize me for later? Why won't he touch me the way I want him to? Maybe he does not want to feel the manner of my body as it is now—tense and frightened. Sticky. Maybe he doesn't know me anymore, doesn't know how to touch me in the right way.

Maybe I am scaring him. Maybe he is scaring me.

Is he being gentle with me?

The thought rushes through me, and brings anger with it. I have not yet learnt to swallow my pride for this man.

The anger enters my eyes; I watch him from behind a frown. I see his concentration melt into concern, and that is when the realization destroys me: I am not fierce, only fiercely panicked.

He can see that.

The anger burns out, leaving the remnants of its flame in the stinging in my sinuses. The fear gathers in my throat, and the absurdity of my tears is what hinders me from keeping them at bay.

I have never loved in front of him; how can I cry?

My ears feel hot with embarrassment. I scrub my hands over my face, and stumble out of bed, ignoring his hand at my wrist. I won't look at him; I can't. It's bad enough that he's seeing me like this; I can't watch him see me like this.

My feet don't work; I'm falling over them, staggering into the bathroom. I close the door behind me, lean against it. Even now I'm fighting the tears, so desperate not to allow this weakness in me to surface.

I don't turn on the light. I don't want to be visible, not even to myself.

I splash cold water on my face, careful not to catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I'm trying to fight the thoughts, the desperation of my thoughts, but they are overwhelming me, bringing tears to my eyes again, and again.

"Show me the way to the next whiskey bar, oh don't ask why, oh don't ask why," I grip the side of the sink and close my eyes. My voice comes to me, the mutter low and masculine—but strangely vulnerable. "For if we don't find the next whiskey bar, I tell you we must die. I tell you we must die."

Because if I'm singing ludicrous 'The Who' lyrics, then I don't have time to think about my nightmare or about him.

I perch on the edge of the tub, aware of the nervousness in my body, my leg twitching. I press my hand against it, pushing it against the floor and biting my lip. I remember the day he got out of the hospital, and I went to visit him at home. It wasn't awkward, only because he had almost died, and the thought of it pushed us all closer together.

We sat together on the couch; he seemed happy that I had come, happy to have someone around. That's the way it was during those days, with Sara and I suddenly conscious of each other's comfort. We all needed each other. Honestly, it was the wine that kept me from losing my nerve. So when he got drowsy halfway through the episode of X-Files, and fell asleep with his head first on my shoulder, then my chest, I was overcome with a sense of protectiveness and relief. He wasn't okay, but at least I could help, somehow. At least I was no longer the useless half-assed CSI who lagged behind as everyone else figured out ways to find him.

At least we did find him, or rather, at least they found him. I found a fucking dog.

But his face, open and vulnerable in sleep, filled me with affection. Even if he wasn't healed yet, at least he wasn't hiding from me; at least we could make him heal in time.

I wonder if I will ever have the courage to let my guard down in front of him. What would I have done if he had come to visit me in the hospital after the fire invaded my body? He came the first day, I remember that vaguely between pain and painkillers.

But what if he had come after the morphine wore off? With the pain, and the fear—how I felt like I was a child again, but without my mother to save me. Would I have tried to hide the shaking hands, and the hair too messy to look styled? Would I have tried to smile?

I wonder if he knows, knows about the skin graphs and the pain; the nurses who changed my bandages every three days, and left me a delirious mess of blood and tears. I don't know half of it myself: that time is just a blur of too much fear.

I was too good at hiding it at work. I was relieved when he didn't notice; Grissom did.

Hand on the doorknob, my fingers come up automatically to touch the scars on the back of my neck. I wish he knew the truth about those. I wish that the first time we had sex I hadn't played them off as sexy, or something I didn't care about, wasn't ashamed of. Just bits of skin that I couldn't feel, and that didn't make me feel anything.

Fucking nerve endings may be gone, but my nerves are shot to pieces too.

I slip into the bedroom, closing the bathroom door silently behind me. He appears to be asleep, lying on his side with his arm tucked under his head, but when I sit down on the bed, the movement wakes him. His eyes flutter open tiredly, and he tries to smile at me.

"Do you need anything?" He is careful not to touch me now, afraid to set me off again.

I shake my head. "Go to sleep," I murmur, pressing my hands between my thighs; I want to touch him, but I don't know how.

"You too," he says just before his eyes slide close. I lie down next to him, and stare at the ceiling.

I wait for his breathing to even out, then I call out his name hesitantly. He doesn't respond; only then do I touch him, pushing his fringe off his forehead, and running my fingers through the smooth, long hair.

I grew my hair so he grew his.

I like to have something to tug, his hair when I'm excited, mine when I'm anxious. But I'm aware of the childlike excitement in our decision, a tiny declaration of our three-week relationship. We're like teenagers again, with our private jokes and our secret giggles, between the glass walls of the lab, where it's surprisingly easy to hide.

I could teach him Norwegian, to give us one more thing that could be ours. I could him to say, "I really like you," instead of love, or better still, "I trust you," because three weeks isn't long to love, but six years is a long time to trust.

Maybe the trust can grow between us, till we are one in our ease with each other. Maybe one day, he can understand my nightmares, the way I understand his—when he wakes up at night in a coffin.

Maybe he doesn't know, or maybe I just don't know how to tell him, but a part of me is already in that trust, in those six years, and the fear that is still within my body.

Maybe. But tonight, I need to sleep.

I need to stop dreaming about him.

Fade into you; I think it's strange you never knew.