I have to admit, this chapter came out ridiculously more emotional than I anticipated. And I got some plot inspiration. So hopefully these stupid blocks will cease.

This chapter makes specific reference to the Season 5 finale of CSI, "Grave Danger". Look it up if you can; it's worth it, and will give a bit more insight into what our characters are talking about.

Warnings: Angst, and lots of it. A little bit of foul language.

Grissom tried not to ponder too much as he drove. Nor did he try to wonder how this new victim's family would react when they heard. Nor did he try to draw parallels between this drive and the one that had started this whole mess.

Of course, trying didn't really stop him from thinking any of those things.

He sighed as the construction site finally came into view. As he pulled his SUV through the newly-opened fencing and parked, he grimaced at the sight of shrapnel littering the mutilated ground. Explosions always equalled a world of trouble with evidence.

But his eyes were quickly drawn to the far side of the explosion site when he stepped forward after closing the vehicle door.

The hole in the ground where the shack used to be was, like the rest of the site, littered with tattered sheets of metal and chunks of dirt, but that was not what drew his gaze. It was the partial remains of a large perspex box that was buried half in the side of the hole, and the grisly sight within it.

Oh no...

The feeling of sickening déjà-vu was only emphasized when he spotted Warrick sitting in the dirt not far from the hole, his arm around Nick, whose own face was buried his hands.

Warrick caught his eye as he approached and slowly stood, giving Nick's shoulder a quick squeeze as he stood.

"Hey, Gris," he murmured, his eyes darting back to Nick's curled form as he spoke with the lead CSI. "It's... yeah."

Grissom understood already, and sighed again. "I'll talk to him. You start looking it over."

Warrick's lips tightened as he nodded. Grissom understood that too; no one really wanted to take this one. It hit too close to home.

As Warrick grabbed his own kit from off to the side and stepped toward the hole, Grissom took a seat next to Nick.

"Hey, buddy," he said gently, putting a hand on the younger man's trembling shoulder.

Nick took a deep breath, and then suddenly swore explosively. "She was alive, Gris! Damnit, she was still alive!" His hands came up to grip his hair. "She was still alive and we weren't here to help her and we should have been—"

"Nick." Grissom put his hand on the back of the other man's neck. "Nicky. Look at me." There was no reaction for a moment, except for near-silent sobs. But finally, Nick raised his watery eyes to look at his mentor.

"There was nothing you could have done." He held up his other hand as Nick opened his mouth to protest, his eyes wide and wild, like a caged animal. Memories swirled behind that gaze, memories of pain and darkness and suffocating on his own panic. "Nothing. We didn't know she was here. We wouldn't have found out she was here at all without the explosion. We had no clues. There was nothing you could have possibly done."

"But we could've!" Nick insisted, his hands curling into violent fists. "We should have known she was missing—known she was here! We should have... should have...!" His voice choked off as emotions made him shake and his nails bite into his hand. "Hell, Gris, we're supposed to be able to save people like this! And now we're gonna have to tell her family that we didn't get here in time to help their little girl, and they can't even see her body because it's—" his voice broke with another sob.

Grissom closed his eyes for a moment, abruptly feeling an echo of the same emotions that he'd felt two years ago, when Nick himself had been so abruptly kidnapped from their midst. There was nothing he could say to comfort the man; not after something like this.

He watched Warrick stooping in the hole with his camera, taking pictures of the perspex coffin that had become the girl's last resting place. It made him wonder, with a sickening twist in his gut, exactly what Nick himself would have looked like had they not identified the explosives placed in the coffin his kidnapper had trapped him in before trying to get him out. It made him wonder, with a strange sort of detached horror, what that girl must have been feeling in the minutes, hours, maybe even days before the explosion had gone off and they had found her as she was.

But most of all, it made him wonder exactly how they were going to work through this if the perpetrator was somehow connected to Nick's own kidnapping. How much did he know?

Nick sucked in a sharp breath after a moment, and made a motion to stand. Grissom's hand on his neck, which had been rubbing soothing circles, held him down.

"Lemme go, Grissom," he muttered, his voice somewhat choked. "I need to... need to do something."

"You need to calm down, Nick," Grissom replied gently but firmly. "You know as well as I do that you're not in a fit state to take care of something like this."

"Like hell I'm not!" Nick growled, making another half-hearted attempt to stand. "I need to do this, Gris. I have to."

"You'll make mistakes."

Nick paused in his weak struggling. He stared at his hands, held loosely between his knees. "Grissom..." he started, and then sighed, rubbing his face. "I need to do this." At Grissom's look, he clenched his fist. "I know... I know I'm emotionally involved in this case now. I know that. But... but I can't just do nothing. She... Gris, that could have been me. That could have been me." Another wet choke made its way out of his chest. Grissom's heart clenched. "She... she would have been so scared. So afraid and pleading and trying to find a way out, but she didn't have one. She didn't. She just had to lie there, screaming and begging someone to find her and they didn't—"

Grissom closed his eyes in pain. He could remember all to clearly watching through the camera that Nick's kidnapper had installed into that box—watching as Nick screamed and struggled and cried like he'd never done before in panic; watching as the younger man—one he thought of as nearly a son—lifted the gun, a single bullet in the barrel, as if he were going to end it while they were still trying to find him, while they were trying to get him out—

He had to violently wrench his thoughts from that line. He wasn't one to be afraid of facing his memories, but these were far too personal right now.

"We didn't," Grissom agreed, and felt Nick's eyes on him as he watched Warrick again. Then he turned his head and met the younger man's gaze. "But the least we can do for her is to find the one who did this to her."

He watched with something akin to saddened fascination as Nick rallied himself; something in his eyes hardened over his pain. He took a deep breath, and his fists unclenched slowly. The muscles beneath Grissom's hand remained taut, but there was a distinct difference in Nick's outward appearance, as if he had shed the pain and torturous memories like a second skin and emerged a slightly stronger—but still heavily burdened—man.

"Yeah," he agreed weakly, his voice tired, as he dashed the last traces of tears from his eyes. "We can do that."

This time, when Nick tried to stand, Grissom didn't stop him, letting his hand fall back to the dirt beside him. He saw Warrick's surprise and worried wariness as Nick approached, but didn't protest as the other CSI slipped on a pair of gloves and stepped into the hole with only a moment's hesitation.

Grissom felt a strange swell of warmth in his chest as he watched. This was someone he'd mentored for years, and he was overcoming—or, at the very least, working with—something that would have crippled him years before. Nick was facing the horrors of his past in the best way he knew how.

This was one of his CSIs, and he was proud.

Ed tried not to think that maybe, just maybe, he was enjoying this. It would be a little too much like saying that she was right.

But... maybe she was right.

No, she's not, his mind insisted as he sat in the chair and stared out the window for a moment at the lights reflected in the air over the houses. Because that would be a little too much like saying he was wrong. Which couldn't happen, because his mother had tried to get him to do this for years and had never succeeded, so Catherine had no chance. None at all.

He huffed to himself as he laid The Fellowship of the Ring down on his lap. No, he was certainly not enjoying himself. He'd finished the novel for purely academic purposes.

Purely academic. Which implied that he had most certainly not found himself caught up in a fantasy world with a quest to destroy a magical ring. He had most certainly not found himself identifying with Frodo Baggins' determination and Samwise Gamgee's loyalty and Strider's protectiveness. He had most certainly not given credence to the fact that yes, it was fantasy, but it was actually believable fantasy.

He had most certainly done none of those things. Because he wasn't enjoying himself.

"Enjoying yourself?"

Ed jumped slightly as Catherine came into the living room with a knowing smirk on her face, though it seemed to falter just slightly when she saw the book lying finished on his lap. It had been just over an hour, after all.

Ed, stubborn as usual—though Al would have just called it pig-headed—crossed his arms and simply gave a half-hearted glare.

Catherine only laughed and pulled another book down from the shelf and tossed it on his lap. "Here's the second one."

He tried not to feel pleased as she turned and walked out with a small smirk, the scent of dinner (which was really breakfast, he supposed) wafting through the door. Because after all, he was not enjoying himself. Even if he was fighting against the ever-present itch of tiredness in his eyes. It was because he didn't want to sleep in an armchair, is all.

You keep telling yourself that, a voice that sounded suspiciously like Al's whispered as he picked up The Two Towers and turned to the first page. He studiously ignored it.

Catherine smiled as she stirred the spaghetti. She had truly thought that getting Ed to read something other than the dry textbook that Grissom had given her was an endeavour doomed from the start; what she'd seen of the blonde so far had been a stoically pig-headed teenager who didn't listen to anything anyone told him. She'd almost given up a number of times in the two hours after Grissom left the lab again; after all, most of the books in her office were either murder mystery or, more commonly, romance. After the fourth novel she pulled out and shoved into his hands, Ed had thrown up his arms and told her he was going to look for Sara.

Sara promptly brought him back five minutes later after she'd found him rooting around in the refrigerator for something other than "half-dead jarred insects and musty bags of random crap". Ed was no longer permitted to wander the lab without supervision.

It had taken another ten minutes of Ed's constant sighing as he sat in his seat, along with a gratuitous amount of shifting and eye-rolling, before Catherine decided that it wouldn't hurt to leave work fifteen minutes early.

But it turned out her last ditch effort to get the sixteen-year-old into novel reading—because what sort of kid who wasn't Grissom read textbooks for fun?—had been a success. Ed hadn't been receptive to her cajoling at first; it had taken a threat not to let him eat dinner if he didn't at least try the book before he actually stayed in the the chair and opened The Lord of the Rings.

It had only been after a full half hour of silence from the room that Catherine noticed that Ed was actually reading it.

Her smile widened as she dumped the pasta into a colander and ran water over it. It seems he hasn't had a chance to read some good fantasy before, she mused. I'm glad Lindsey kept those books, because I'm certainly not into that sort of thing.

She dumped the pasta back into the pot and put it on the table along with the sauce she'd been making, before calling Ed's name.

There was no response, but she wasn't really looking for one. She'd seen Ed's almost trance-like state during reading when she'd first checked on him. Stepping into the living room, she was about to say his name again when she noticed the book lying half-closed on his lap, The Fellowship of the Ring lying fully on the floor as if dropped there.

His eyes were closed, and his breaths came deep and slow as he slept.

Catherine's lips twitched upwards as she crossed her arms and leaned against the door frame. It was really no surprise he'd fallen asleep; after all, a night-shift schedule took a lot of getting used to. She wondered if maybe it would be easier just to let Ed stay up during the day and sleep when they got to the lab each night. Goodness knows he'd be easier to deal with and it would keep him out of trouble. There was really no need to turn him nocturnal...

She promptly revised this thought when she realized that it would involve Ed being awake in the house while she was asleep and Lindsey was at school. Which was probably even worse.

He looked so much younger this way; so much more... innocent. When he was awake, there were strange lines around his eyes, and his eyes themselves... they were like molten gold, just as vibrant and just as intense. When he looked at you, you had no choice but to think of him as a man, with a man's cares and a man's burden. But now? Now, he just looked like... like the little lost kitten that Grissom's mysterious letter writer kept referring to him as. Sure, she could see the squareness of jaw and sharpness of features that signalled the man he would one day become, but there was still a softness to his face that said he was still growing, still young enough to not need the burdens he seemed to carry everywhere with him.

Just then, Ed twitched slightly in his sleep, and his sleeve slid back somewhat against the chair's arm, revealing a glint of metal beneath.

Catherine frowned then. Yes, Ed looked innocent and vulnerable in his sleep, but she couldn't shake the thought that he had been far more mature than he needed to be for far too long. That arm... His leg, too... those were testaments to how much this boy had struggled. How much he had lost in his quest for...

For what?

What was this boy, this boy who wasn't a man in body but most certainly was in spirit, trying to gain? Why wasn't he as relatively carefree as her own daughter was? What was he trying to prove to people? He most certainly didn't' live on the streets—his clothes, although dirty and somewhat worn, were most certainly expensive. Leather didn't come cheap, and from what she'd seen of his cloak, it was well-made as well. He wasn't even a runaway, because she couldn't see someone like Ed running away from any situation, and she'd done enough profiling to know the type. So what was he after?

And then she remembered something the guard at the station had said in the midst of his ramblings about magic.

"He said he'd got something to do, something important... I don't know, but he made the damn floor turn into paste!"

Something he had to do...

Grissom's voice.

"He wants to find his brother. At least, that's what he told us in the park."

His brother.

Strangely enough, Catherine could quite easily see Ed in the older brother role; there was something about him that made her think instantly of protector—he was not one to be coddled, but was far more likely to be the one coddling someone else. In an odd way, he almost reminded her of herself—of a parent, giving up things for himself in an effort to make life better for the one he was looking after.

But why would he be looking for him? It certainly wasn't that easy to lose a brother, of all things.

She felt a moment of sudden insight, and her heart nearly stopped.

If he's looking for his brother... and the killer knows all about Ed... could there be a connection?

She sincerely hoped not, because if so, this case had just gotten a whole hell of a lot more complicated.

A small noise derailed that train of thought, and her eyes refocused on the blonde who was sitting in her living room chair.

Or, more accurately, had been sitting in her living room chair.

Ed was already in the process of slipping straight onto the ground, pitching forwards as if he had been shoved from behind. She stepped forward quickly, but before she could reach him, he was already up on his hands and knees, panting. Concerned, she got down on her knees immediately and tried to reach out to him.

A broken sob stopped her short, her eyes going wide. A second sound, as though he were choking, restarted her.

"Ed? Are you alright?" she asked in alarm, reaching a hand towards him.

The arm she touched flew out from under her fingers, his gloved hand suddenly clenched against his chest, as though something there pained him. His breathing hitched, and a broken keening tore its way from his throat. Catherine caught sight of his face. His eyes were open and staring, wide and panicked and—her heart lurched—filled with pain. A second later, his right arm gave out beneath him and he pitched forward again, this time doing nothing to stop his fall.

Her hand was already reaching for the phone to call 9-1-1 even as she rolled him onto his side. His hand was still clenched tightly to his chest, crushing the leather in an iron-like grip.

"Ed, can you hear me?" She snapped her fingers in front of his glazed eyes, but there was no response. Suddenly, he began to cough, and she was alarmed to hear a wet rattle behind it.

Oh god, does he have internal bleeding?

How could the doctors have missed this? Shit, they needed an ambulance!

Just as her fingers pressed the first digit on the phone, Ed's coughs and pained moans broke in a strange way.

A strange, familiar way.

Catherine froze.

As she watched, Ed's eyes focussed slightly, and slow tears began to leak down the side of his face. A moment later, a vicious half-sob escaped the teen's mouth, and his left hand suddenly unclenched from his shirt and came up to wrap around his head, burying his face in his elbow even as he curled into a ball.

She held her breath just in case, but her mom instincts told her more than her still-panicked mind did.

A nightmare.

Before the thought had even fully registered in her brain, she had him in her arms, long-practiced instincts taking over. It didn't matter that this boy had only been in her house for barely two days; it didn't matter that he was stubborn as a mule and fiercely independent. It didn't matter, because he was hurting right now, and he had no one else to fix it for him.

She heard herself whispering the same soothing nonsense she'd used so many times with Lindsey as more half-sobs tore themselves out of Ed's throat as though they had to fight to make themselves known. She got the strong impression that this was a boy who rarely—if ever—cried.

She almost missed it when he started muttering brokenly under his breath.

"—can't, I can't... Al... I can't die, not now..!."

Her heart, still trying to calm itself, abruptly beat faster.

"Ed, what are you talking about?"

The sudden sharpness of her voice seemed to knock him straight out of whatever half-nightmare he was still living in. With a swiftness that astounded her, he rolled out of her arms and came up in a crouch on the carpet four feet away, his arms raised defensively and his breath coming in uneven gasps.

"What the hell?" His voice cracked on the last word as his eyes darted around the room in confusion before settling on her. She stayed perfectly still as comprehension slowly leaked into his gaze, and a little of the tension eased from his frame, to be replaced with another sort of guarded wariness.

After a moment, Catherine found her voice. "Ed... What was that?"

His eyes immediately turned away from her gaze. His hand came up to rub at his eyes, and when he brought his fingers away, he stared at the dampness on his ever-present glove as though it were something entirely foreign and offensive.

"...Ed?"

He visibly shook himself. "Nothing. It was nothing." She watched, curious and worried, as he began to unconsciously rub the place on his chest he had been clutching so hard before.

"It was most certainly not 'nothing'," she said sharply. "You scared me half to death."

Ed's face twitched, and she could hear his teeth grinding. "It was just a nightmare," he finally grunted, the words forced out through unwilling lips. It was like he was admitting a weakness, a flaw that he never wanted to have.

She pounced on that.

"Edward." She stood carefully. "I know the difference between a simple nightmare and reliving memories." She watched his eyes go slightly wider. "That was no nightmare."

"What are you trying to say?" he demanded, probably a tad more unsteadily than he'd intended.

"What memory is so violent that I almost called an ambulance for you?"

Ed's hand stopped massaging his chest and instead clenched around the leather once more. "It's nothing important," he muttered stubbornly. Catherine opened her mouth to reply when Ed turned his back on her and stepped towards the doorway. "I'm hungry. Is dinner ready yet?"

Catherine felt her temper rear.

"Edward Elric, I thought you were dying. The least you can do is give me a reason!" she snapped.

Ed froze.

Time seemed to stand still, and she held her breath.

Then she heard him mutter something about hawks and eyes under his breath before turning back, a pinched look of indecision on his face.

She knew that look intimately, having seen it on her daughter's face far too often.

"I'm not going to tell anyone, if that's what you're worried about," she assured him.

He half-rolled his eyes, as though her suggestion of him being worried was entirely laughable, but she could see something in his expression that relaxed at her words.

They stood there in a silent standoff for another minute. Catherine mentally thanked God that she had learned patience with her own child as Ed visibly warred with himself.

Just when it seemed that he was going to turn around and walk out, her mouth opened of its own accord.

"Ed... who's Al?"

The teen flinched and stared at her with wide eyes. "How do you know his name?" he demanded.

"You were apologizing to him." At Ed's look, she elaborated. "In your nightmare."

Ed abruptly sighed deeply and leaned against the door frame, his forehead on his hand. After a moment of silence, he spoke.

"Alphonse. He's my brother." The blonde's voice sounded impossibly weary.

Catherine took a hesitant step forward. "Where is he now?"

"I don't know!" he moaned, with a strange tone in his voice that she had never heard before.

"You told Brass you wanted to find him. Did he disappear? Was he kidnapped?" she pressed, feeling urgency rise within her. If Alphonse was missing under strange circumstances, then they had to know. They had to know if there was some other aspect to this case that they weren't aware of.

Ed ran an agitated hand through his hair. "No—well, kind of... no. Not really, but—augh! I don't know!" His hand now shadowed his eyes, shoving his bangs back from his face. "I just... I have to find him, okay?" Abruptly, he turned and stalked through the doorway. Worried, Catherine followed silently. "I have to find him, and all I'm doing is sitting here and doing nothing!" She tried not to flinch when Ed's hand hit the table, making the dishes rattle. At least it was only his left hand. "But I can't do anything yet because I have no idea where to look!" His right hand joined his left with a bang. "Damnit!"

Silence echoed for a moment, broken only by Ed's harsh breaths as he leaned over the kitchen table. Hesitantly, Catherine stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder, ignoring the slight flinch it garnered from him.

"Ed... We can help you look. Just tell us what he looks like, and we can help you find him. That's what we do." She tried to keep her anxiety out of her voice, because she didn't want to think of all the possible things that could have happened to his brother. Hell, she didn't even know how old Alphonse was! For all she knew, there could be a toddler wandering around Las Vegas. If they had any hope of finding him, Ed had to help them.

"He's... he's..." Ed's hands clenched on the tabletop. "He might be... Shit, I don't even know anymore!" The desperate helplessness in his voice nearly broke her heart. "What kind of brother am I?"

Catherine bit her lip and squeezed his shoulder for a moment. "Why... why don't we eat something and head to bed?" she suggested gently. "We can talk about this tomorrow."

She almost thought he hadn't heard her, until after a pause he nodded, his face still shadowed by his bangs. With gentle coaxing, she had him sitting in a chair, and a small plate of spaghetti placed before him along with the medication he had to take.

It was a silent meal except for the quiet clinking of silverware on dishes. Catherine watched Ed carefully, but all the teenager did was eat slowly, taking his medication willing while his eyes remained shuttered.

When he finally put down his utensils, she stood.

"If you head to your room already, I can find you something to wear for the night."

Ed simply nodded and stood, making his way down the hall until he was out of sight. Catherine sighed, making her way downstairs and opening a box that hadn't been touched for a good few years.

When she knocked on Ed's bedroom door a minute later, shirt and pants in hand, she didn't pause before stepping into the room.

"I found some old clothes from my ex-husband; they might be a little big, but—"

Both of them froze. Catherine, standing just inside the door, one hand on the knob and the other holding out the small bundle of clothes...

And Ed, half-turned toward the door, his arms raised in the act of removing his black tank top.

For the first time, she had a full view of the teenager's bare torso. Her eyes took a moment to latch onto the base of Ed's metal arm; the bolts that looked as though they were drilled straight into his bones and the scarring surrounding it nearly made her shudder. But a second later, her gaze slid across his surprisingly well-muscled chest and landed on something else.

With a sickening jolt in her stomach, she knew what Ed's nightmare had been about.

An uneven circle of scar tissue nearly six inches across marred his chest just left of center... right where his heart would be.

"What..." She could barely find her voice.

That one word seemed to unfreeze the blonde, and he immediately reached forward and snatched the clothes out of her hand before turning away, inadvertently exposing a second, equally large scar on his back.

It was as if something had been impaled straight through his chest.

Catherine felt like she was going to be sick.

Finally, as Ed was unfolding the shirt with jerking movements, her throat unstuck.

"What happened to you?"

Ed paused at her weak inquiry, and looked over his shoulder at her with dark eyes. "I was protecting my brother."

Her mind reeled at the possible meanings of that statement. What could have possibly threatened him so greatly that Ed would receive a wound like that?

She took an unconscious step forward, her hand reaching out as if to touch him but stopping short.

The only other time she had ever seen something like this...

Had been on a corpse.

"Edward... How did you survive this?"

But he was already pulling the shirt down and turning his back on her with finality, and she knew with a strange certainty that she would get no more answers out of him today. With a shaky sigh, she backed out of the room and closed the door.

She tried to pretend that the half-heard murmur of "I didn't..." was simply her ears playing tricks on her.

So, as always, I apologize for the wait. I will say this: I'm looking to do this fic for Camp NaNoWriMo this August, so hopefully that will get much more meat into this story, at a much faster pace. I will let you guys know.

Important notes in regards to where this is going: I have to say, one of the most amusing things to read is your guys' assumptions about this fic... But sometimes you guys are wording them in ways that turn them into god-given fact, which they aren't. I know y'all are wondering where this is going and who the bad guy is... but nothing is set in stone, except in my brain. I know exactly who the Big Bad is, and I know exactly how I'm going to work this.

I will say that I do enjoy reading the possible directions this fic can go... as long as they are not written as givens. It's slightly annoying to be asked when something specific will happen in my fic, or even ordered to add it, when there is no guarantee that that something is ever going to be present. So, hit me with your best "maybes". :)

Review if you enjoyed!

-AkitaFallow