Notes: To RainbowsnStars - - I'm sorry about that. There wasn't so much a clear reason for Greg not liking to be touched, more just that it involved human contact, something that he didn't really want at the moment. KrazyKid - - I'll miss you, and have fun on your trip. This story should run approximately the length of "Blood in the Water." This chapter is pretty much the three-quarters mark. And, finally, to Kathryn Mason-Sykes - - I'll see what I can do. I think you'll like it.
Okay, I feel that you all deserve something nice after, you know, how I almost killed Greg again, so this chapter is actually pretty pleasant, relatively speaking. It starts a path for recovery, is purposefully meant to echo the conversation in the first chapter, and I really hope you like it.
**
Chapter Eight: A Single Step
**
They'd painted his room.
Sometime between the grocery store, the hospital, the breakdown, and the return, someone had found the time to paint Grissom's guest bedroom. Greg stood in the center, staring at the new yellow walls, and inhaling the scent, still edged with fumes. The bed looked stiffer, too, as if someone had put on newer, more starched sheets. He hedged his bets between Nick and Sara on the actual painting - - he'd read somewhere that yellow was the color of hope, and it sounded like the sort of thing that one of them would think of and use. The flowers, daisies again, were definitely Sara's. She'd left the same ones in his hospital room to meet his eyes after the coma.
He was pretty sure that sleeping in a yellow room with a vase of daisies was the sort of thing that should bother his sense of manly pride, but he was too tired to care.
Greg stripped off socks and the flimsy pair of pants they'd given him at the hospital, tugged the shirt over his head, and found himself in the uncomfortable position of hunting completely naked for wherever the anonymous cleaners had placed his clothes. He found them neatly folded in the cedar chest at the foot of his bed, slithered into his pajama bottoms, and lay facedown on the mattress. He was a few seconds from dozing off when a knock at the door startled him.
"Go ahead and come in," he said irritably. "It's your house." He dropped his face back to the pillow, inhaling the clean cotton smell. His nose tickled.
"You'll suffocate doing that," Grissom said from the door. He sounded almost amused.
Greg raised his head a fraction of an inch off the bed. "This room smells like paint."
Grissom sniffed; nodded. "Yes, it does."
"Was there something in particular you wanted, or, having escaped the hospital, am I still on suicide watch after all? Hey, if you need any help cleaning me out, the razor's in the sink, my belts are God knows where, thanks to whoever cleaned up in here, and all of my shoelaces are still in my shoes. Fancy that. I don't own a gun."
Grissom sighed. "You never make it easy, do you?"
"For you?"
"For anyone, yourself included. And no, I wasn't going to check any of that, although, for your own reference, your belts are in your sock drawer."
Greg rolled over and stared at his ceiling. There was a crack in the plaster that splintered down around the light fixture. It looked almost like a spider-web. He decided that Grissom either hadn't noticed it or had left it alone on purpose, hoping that it would attract actual spiders. He named all the different species he could think of in his head, counting down: black widow, brown recluse, tarantula, and so on until he couldn't remember if he'd named one before. It was simple and it filled his mind.
He could stare at that crack all night, worrying about spiders, and it would still be better than dreaming.
"Do you mind if I stay?"
Greg squeezed his eyes shut. The crack winked out into darkness. "I don't care."
"You cared a few weeks ago, remember?" Grissom's voice was so infinitely gentle that it hurt. Greg tightened his hands into fists and reminded himself again that Grissom hadn't caused any of this, that Grissom was only trying to help, and that, in fact, Grissom had been succeeding until the parking lot and that sudden chill at the back of his neck where the gun had touched his skin. Grissom had been doing what no one else could do. Grissom had seen through him and not wanted the fake-but-quick recovery. He'd wanted it to be genuine, however long that took.
He's not like Dad. People are here for me now. They paint my room when I'm lying unconscious because they expect me to come back.
It seemed to make him feel a little better. The knot in his stomach loosened, anyway.
He admitted, "I'm kinda scared." He covered up the genuine fear with a nervous laugh that sounded too loud in the small room. "Like I need a nightlight or something, man, it's pathetic."
"Well, I don't have a nightlight, but I'll stay here until you fall asleep."
"What time do I clock in tomorrow?"
"You're not clocking in tomorrow. As of three days ago, you've been on paid leave." Grissom busied himself around the room, doing unnecessary tasks that seemed to serve as distractions. He brushed away a line of silvery dust from behind an empty picture frame, and straightened Greg's jacket. "I ought to have made you stay off longer when this first happened."
"I liked going back," Greg said, focusing on the crack in the ceiling again. "It's - - comfortable."
"Comfortable or not, I'm not going to let you work yourself into a breakdown."
"Why not?" His grin hurt his mouth. "I mean, look at it realistically, boss. I've really only ever had breakdowns on my leisure time. Maybe I should work more."
"Can we discuss this?"
"What?"
"This annoying habit you're beginning to develop where you act like sarcasm is really going to change anything, including how we see you. I don't know whether or not you're trying to fight off being vulnerable, or if you think that you only sound normal when you're smarting me off, but it's not working, you don't sound normal, and I'm sick of it."
"I'm sorry if I'm upsetting you."
"That's exactly the kind of thing I mean, Greg."
"Why? How do I sound?"
"Poisonous. You sound bitter."
"Don't you think I have enough to be bitter about? A month out of a coma, and just when I'm finding my footing, someone pulls the rug out from under me?" He pushed his palms down, hard, on the mattress and straightened, levering himself upwards so that he could face Grissom. "Look at me. I'm living with my boss and you're so worried about whether or not I'm going to go crazy that you're going to come in and stare at me until I fall asleep."
"Are you?"
"Am I what?"
"Going to go crazy," Grissom said quietly. "Do you think that's likely?"
Greg started to say something and then snapped his mouth shut, pressing his lips together so that all the blood seemed to rush out of them. He could practically feel the ridges of his teeth through his own skin. He exhaled slowly.
He's trying to get a reaction out of me. He's a scientist, and I'm his experiment. He wants to know how far he can push me before I start to snap, and once I snap, he'll want to know how hard and how badly. He knows that I feel bad about what I said in the hospital, and he's using it against me.
"Maybe," he said. "Maybe I will go crazy. I wouldn't call it a refreshing change of pace, but it'd be something. Is that the answer you're looking for?"
"It's not good enough," Grissom said.
"Story of my life." Greg's hand squeezed the sheets almost against his will, and he had to look down to see if he was really doing it.
Grissom looked like he was going to reply to that, but he said, instead, "What would make you feel better?"
"What kind of question is that?" Greg felt his face grown warm as he flushed. "Do you really think I know, and I'm just going to be able to rattle it off? Like, oh, a million dollars would really help, Grissom. Or a backrub. If I only had that cherry convertible I wanted, things would start going my way. I don't know what would make me feel better, Grissom. I don't have a clue."
"Then why do you think I should be able to tell what's going to upset you?" Grissom sat down, not in the chair, but at the foot of the bed. Greg shifted his legs to one side, grudgingly giving the other man a little bit more space. "I'm not a mind-reader, Greg. I'm trying to work through this with you the best I can, but I've never been good at knowing what you were thinking and I'm even worse at it now."
"So you think I'm different."
"I know you're different now. That's not hard to figure out, and it's not an accusation. You've changed. Anyone would change, after what you've been through. I'm just telling you that we're here, and we're trying to help, but we're human, and there's no need to jump down someone's throat because they aren't sure what mood you're in."
Greg smoothed the sheets around him, embarrassed of having
mussed them in the first place. "How did
you know to take me grocery shopping?"
"I didn't. It was a gamble."
"It was working."
"I noticed that. Were you happy?"
"I think so. A
little, at least. It - - it felt
good. I wasn't expecting to be let
down."
Grissom closed his eyes suddenly, as if something had hurt him. "I'm sorry about what happened. I told you that I found you on the ground, and bleeding. You wouldn't talk to me, you just kept screaming, and saying that you were dead. I - - I panicked. If I'd acted sooner, I might have been able to find whoever attacked you, but I was . . . preoccupied."
Greg tried to think about how he might react to seeing someone on their knees in a parking lot, dripping blood from their mouth, and howling. He shuddered and tightened the blanket around his shoulders.
"I should have been there," Grissom finished. "You were right, about what you said."
"This is more your fault than his."
"No." Greg shook his head. "I - - I wasn't. I shouldn't have said that. I didn't mean it."
"You did say it, you did mean it, and you were right. I keep thinking about what it would have taken to get out there a little sooner. If I'd been quicker about moving the groceries. If I hadn't held open the door for the other person leaving." Grissom smiled wearily. "I can't seem to stop thinking about it. I keep thinking that I can prepare myself for whatever you're going to throw at me, if I just rehearse everything beforehand, but you keep - - stepping outside the box."
"Sorry to disappoint you."
Grissom thought that he was right. Grissom thought that he could have stopped what happened. The only person blaming Greg was Greg, and the only person blaming Grissom (anymore, at least) was Grissom. There was a cruel sort of irony about it. Grissom had told him he was right, and that should have been, at the very least, gratifying to some extent, even bitterly, but the taste in his mouth was all of the sour with none of the sweet.
And that paint smell was driving him crazy.
"Do we have a deal, Greg?"
He brought himself back to the conversation. "I wasn't listening." He didn't apologize, because he found it hard to feel sorry for that. Other things, yes, but that, no. He was entitled to his own little bit of selfishness, after everything else.
"I asked if we had a deal - - if we agreed that we were going to be able to talk instead of you going into defensive mode automatically and me having to chase you down some hall of mirrors every single time I want to have a conversation."
"I'm sure you didn't express it that way before."
"If you wanted the nicer version, you should have been paying attention. Do we have a deal?"
Greg closed his eyes again, and thought of the bright platinum tint of Melissa's hair. The feel of gunpowder residue spraying around his ear. The vague remnants of some dipthalamine dream that he still carried around with him after all those days. His father's smile. And, of course, the smell of paint, the taste of Nick's cooking, the sight of Sara's daisies, and the feel of Catherine's hand brushing away his tears. And grocery shopping.
They were trying. He could - - he could try to help them. If he deserved to be selfish sometimes, than they deserved for him to be unselfish sometimes. They deserved to be considered.
"We have a deal," he said. "Is this a formal thing, or can we just shake on it?"
"The old-fashioned way is fine."
They shook over the mess of covers. Greg had to lean over his knees.
"Do you think you can sleep now?"
"I'm not scared anymore," he said, feeling idiotic again for saying that out loud - - like he was five, and prone to nightmares with embarrassing side-effects, "but the smell is still bothering me."
"I can't smell it anymore."
"And it's not you that I'm worried about. If you feel guilty over letting me walk through a parking lot alone, how do you think you'll be able to live with yourself if I die from breathing in paint fumes all night?"
Grissom said, "Still bitter?"
"I still deserve that."
He could hear Grissom exhaling. "Yes, you do. I keep forgetting."
Why do we both have to pretend to be fine sometimes even when we know that we've already broken apart? Greg yanked the sheets and they came un-tucked from the mattress with a rough pulling noise, falling around him a lump. I guess it gets to be easier - - you try out a conversation first to see if it's gonna work for you . . . being normal again.
"I'll sleep on the sofa," he said, and, arms full of covers, stalked into the living room, irrationally feeling better than he had before.