Okay, I have to apologize for the longer-than-usual absence.  I had relatives over for the Easter weekend, and I was very busy playing gracious hostess, and then, on Sunday, when I looked over this chapter, I realized something very important - - it sucked.  A lot.  So I had to rewrite it.

Again, I'm sorry about the dry spell.  We should return to the regular, once-every-other-day posting schedule now, and I hope you enjoy the revised chapter, as it is has crazy Greg, unseeing Warrick, and snarky Hodges.

**

Chapter Four: Be Nice to People

**

They didn't talk about what had happened the night before.  Greg warmed up pizza for breakfast, washed it down with orange juice, and made small-talk with Grissom before calmly excusing himself, going to the bathroom, dropping to his knees, and throwing everything up.  He washed his hands afterwards, turned on the fans in the bathroom, and Grissom didn't ask any questions.  They rode to work in silence until Greg turned up the radio until it almost shattered Grissom's speakers.  Grissom turned it down.  Greg waited five minutes before turning it right back up again.  He got away from Grissom the second he entered the lab, eager to wash the sheen of sweat off his forehead and the taste of vomit from his mouth.  He was shaking, and not just his hands.

Hodges was the first one to notice anything.  "Sanders, if you're going to catch the flu, you could at least do the rest of us the courtesy of staying home."

He didn't think he had the flu.  He had a vague memory of high school health courses.  Something about stress-related ailments.  "Don't tell anybody, Hodges, okay?"  He was surprised by how pathetic that sounded, like he was pleading.  "I don't think what I've got is contagious."

Hodges looked him up and down with a dispassionate glare.

"Something about that thing with your coma?" he asked finally.

Greg didn't know whether or not he could laugh at that.  He curled his hands into fists at his side.

"Yeah.  Something about that thing," he said.

Hodges sniffed and spun his cup of coffee around.  "As long as I don't have to worry about it.  It's your problem, not mine."

Never thought I'd agree with him.  Too bad no one else thinks that way.  He thanked Hodges with a slightly shivering nod, drowned the rest of his coffee, and beat feet back into his lab.  The machines surrounding him gave a warm hum as he sat down in the chair.  He knew it was just his ears adjusting so he could hear it, but it still sounded like he was being welcomed home.  A gentle, relived smile broke out over his face.  The lab was better than Grissom's townhouse.  Safer.  More secure.  And no worries of DNA textbooks cracking against the table.  No china shards to pick up in the mornings.

He felt better after a few hours had gone by, and even managed, around two in the morning, to get hungry.  He was debating the respective merits of pizza with Archie versus Chinese takeout with Jacqui when Warrick dropped by and offered to buy.

"I'm climbing the walls," Warrick said easily, "and you look like you could use a break.  Hey, I'll even get you real food - - none of that takeout crap you lab rats eat half the time."

Greg was both amused and gratified by the offer, and happy that his mind didn't immediately bulk at the idea.  "Sure.  Let me clock out."

Warrick shook his head.  "Already done.  I checked you out with Grissom.  He says it's fine."

"How'd you know I'd come with you?  Maybe I had previous plans.  Secret, dangerous, covert plans that don't involve going out to dinner with you."  The banter was making him feel a little unbalanced.  The sensation of being back in the groove of things was exhilarating, but dangerous - - something like skydiving, or standing at the very edge of a precipice.

"My offers are impossible to turn down."

They took Warrick's car and talked, albeit a little awkwardly, on the way to the restaurant.  He was starting to remember why Warrick had been the easiest to live with - - no questions, no comments except when necessary.  It was almost easy to feel alive again.  They pulled into the parking lot of a small, neat building labeled as the Flying Skillet - - which Greg duly commented on - - and got into a booth almost immediately.  The smells of cheap vinyl and Formica swallowed him.

"I'm thinking about a burger," Warrick said.  "Something huge, charbroiled, and covered in bacon and onions.  Portobello mushrooms, too."

"Yuck."

"Not a mushroom fan?"

"Not an onion fan," Greg said, studying the menu.  "I'm going the way of a BLT."

The waitress arrived and took drink orders.  Greg's stomach felt fine, but he took the cautious route and got water with lemon.  Warrick ordered an iced tea and exchanged polite flirtation with the young woman.  Greg looked at her - - he'd barely noticed before, being focused on his menu - - but she was pretty, a neat, petite auburn-headed young woman in her early twenties.

Pretty.  Like to get him a look at some of those epithelials.

He thought of Melissa Sharpe, and his napkin crumpled in his hand.  He found himself staring at it, like some other person had crushed it.

He said to Warrick, "Gotta go the bathroom - - be back in a minute."

The bathroom smelled like grease and lemon cleanser.  He didn't want to throw up again, so he stood over the sink of a long moment, shuddering.  He splashed cold water on his face, working quickly in case Warrick got curious and decided that a certain DNA tech was too unstable as of recently to be left alone.  His face felt frigid, and he stared at himself in the mirror, watching droplets fall down his face and cling to his eyebrows and eyelashes.  He blinked water out of his eyes.  Couldn't tell if those were tears or not, but he hoped they weren't, because he'd cried too much lately.

"Not very manly," Greg said to his reflection.

Warrick entered two minutes later, under the oh-so-obviously bogus pretext of washing his hands.

"You okay?"

Greg smiled.  He'd dried his face and there was no sign of any problem.  "Me?  I'm just fine."

"You ran out of there like your shoes were on fire."

"That actually happened once."

Warrick didn't look like he believed him.  "Are you sure you're fine?"

Be nice to people, Greg reminded himself.

"Yeah.  One hundred percent."

Warrick smiled uneasily.  "I ordered your BLT.  The waitress is throwing on a side of tomato soup - - she said you looked pale."

"And, what?  She thinks the color of the soup is going to seep from my stomach into my pores?  Because, if it is, I'd much rather order clam chowder.  The side-effects wouldn't be as . . . orange."

Warrick's smile steadied.  He looked like he'd just stepped out into the sun.  "You really do sound fine, you know that?  You sound happy."

Greg hadn't realized that he might have been upsetting them before.  He hadn't wanted that.  Hadn't cared, but hadn't wanted it, nonetheless.  He thought he might have been annoying Grissom, but the idea that his sadness had somehow permeated through the lab hadn't occurred to him.  He still couldn't trust, but he felt that he could pretend.

I can fake it.  They'll be happy if they think I'm happy.

"I feel happy," he lied, stretching his smile.  He didn't want to go too far.  He tried to remember what a genuine expression looked like.  It had been a while since he'd had one.  He played the act out as they walked back to their table, practicing with ease the art of being the old Greg.  He summoned up words to describe this role: geeky.  Energetic.  Verbose.  He chattered brightly.

Greg sipped at his lemon water.  Warrick closed his lips around his straw, but it did nothing to disguise his widening grin.

"You're really okay," Warrick said in amazement.  "Damn.  We've been walking on eggshells around you."

Hey, I've been walking on eggshells around me, too.  But just because I panic when I see a beautiful stranger - - just because I can't seem to feel any better - - just because it's easier to be around Hodges than anyone else - - just because a late-night conversation about trust ruins me in the morning - - that doesn't mean that I'm crazy.

Just getting there.

"Aw, you really haven't, have you?"

He tried to smile bashfully.  Warrick seemed to respond correctly.

If lying was that easy, Greg had missed his calling as an actor.

"All of us.  Even Grissom.  I gotta tell you, man, we all thought you were going to lose it.  Going, going, maybe even gone.  You had us worried."

"I'm not worrying you now, am I?"

"No," Warrick said, squeaking his finger along the glass.  "You aren't.  As long as you're okay - - I like this.  I like having you back to normal.  Grissom's going to be relieved.  I told him that you'd start trusting people again pretty soon."

Pretty soon?  Maybe never.

Pretend.  Be nice to people.  Warrick is your friend, and even if he can hurt you, he doesn't want to.  Not right now, anyway.  He's buying you lunch.  The waitress is a pretty waitress and nothing else.  She's not Melissa.  She's not going to try for a second chance.

He took a long drink of water.  It was nice to think that he might never have to feel the cold steel of a gun nuzzling into his temple again.  That was what he remembered - - the cold.  Even through his hair, he could feel how freezing it was, like Trey had put the damn thing in a freezer before going out to kill him.  And how warm the bullet had been as it scorched through him.  The gunpowder residue that would have been sloppily sprayed around his ear.

Who had processed him at the hospital?  What had they gathered?

These were the wrong questions to ask Warrick.  Nick would have answered out of understanding - - no doubt Nick had wanted to ask a few questions of his own when Nigel Crane was caught - - and Grissom would have answered out of guilt.  Sara and Catherine might have answered, after a while, but he wouldn't have asked them, and he wasn't going to ask Warrick, who finally seemed so confident that Greg was normal again.

The food arrived.  It was warm.  The bacon was crisp and lined with strips of fat.  Greg got his soup after all, whether he wanted it or not.  He made himself smile at the waitress.

"You okay?" she asked him.

"Yeah, I'm fine.  Just a little queasy before."

Nice girl.  Probably.  Not the kind who'd want him dead.

I have some screwed-up criteria for dating, he thought, sickly amused.  Some guys are leg-men, some are ass-men - - I think Nick's a foot-guy - - and I used to be a man who liked his skin cells - - but I think this new "non-homicidal" quirk might be just what I've been looking for.

He tore into his sandwich.  Carnivore.  Sara would be ashamed of him.

He didn't look at Warrick when he ate, and though he knew that before, he would have snitched away a few of the other man's French fries, he couldn't quite bring himself to do it.  There was too big of a gulf between who he was and who he had been - - a gulf as wide and long as the Pacific, and without the desperate beauty.

Greg's girlfriend in college had told him, when they broke up, that she had fallen for someone else.  Greg had tried to impress her, gain her back with outlandishly romantic gestures and pretty words, but nothing had worked.  Nothing had even seemed to register.  She'd said that she liked the quiet type.

I'm nothing now if not the quiet type.  Think she'd take me back?

He was halfway through a conversation when he realized that he had no idea what he was saying, but found that he could continue anyway.  He wondered when being himself became a rote act that he didn't have to think about, like breathing, and wondered why he didn't have more trouble acting cheerful when his thoughts were anything but.

Warrick looked pleased that Greg was fine.

Be nice to people.

His stomach curled in sudden protest against either the food or the thought, but smiling suppressed the gag reflex wonderfully, and he was grinning so widely that Warrick must have thought that everything was completely fine.

Maybe I'll even be able to fool Grissom tonight.

He wanted to laugh, and did, but pretended that it was at something Warrick had said.

It was just all so crazy.