Okay, Krazy - - a Greg chapter.
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Chapter Five: All the King's Men (GREG)
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There was no way he was turning on his music today. It would have been too much like playing rock in a funeral home. Everyone was moving around stiffly and they talked in whispers, even about their own cases, like Grissom was going to overhear and attribute some innocent fingerprint-powder remark to the Zimmer scandal. Greg had been pissed when he'd clocked in and found that he was in one of those rare situations where everyone seemed to have called and discussed their outfits ahead of time, because they were even dressed like it was a funeral - - all charcoals, blacks, and navies.
It made his lime green shirt look ridiculous, it made him feel ridiculous, and ridiculous was not something that he wanted to feel today.
Besides, he had test results to run, and he didn't need a dress code running through his head. He had enough things to think about.
CODIS spat out his results. Even it sounded bitter about something. The machine's humming was usually good background noise, but it seemed louder, harsher than usual.
Or it could just be that I'm going completely insane, Greg thought optimistically. That would be a refreshing change of pace. Instead of doing overtime tonight, I think I'll write on the walls and become paranoid that the computers are talking to me.
He pulled the printout up from the tray and headed down the hallway. This was one he wanted to take to Grissom personally, more because of the circumstances than the actual info. The case itself was the robbery Grissom had been working before he went off-shift, and Greg could have paged him, but something personal needed to come through.
He found his boss sitting in the break room, sipping at a cup of water.
"Hey," Greg said cautiously. "Results."
Grissom looked up. It seemed like he had aged ten years in the last few hours. And he looked tired, which rarely happened - - Grissom simply looked exhausted, as if he'd like nothing better than to curl up with a pillow and sleep for six days straight. He reached for the results, but Greg held them back, his hand tightening around the paper.
"You don't look so good," he said, sitting down across from Grissom. "You ought to go home and get some sleep."
He knew from the look he got that Grissom wasn't sure if Greg had heard about the Zimmer girl yet.
Greg continued, "You don't have to be here just because of her. No one cares what she's saying, you know. It doesn't make a difference. Everyone knows that there's no way you did something like that." He slid the results across the table, suddenly embarrassed. There weren't very many unspoken rules in the lab, but one of the few was that you didn't talk to Grissom about anything happening in his personal life. Even if you were just trying to help. "I - - the, the blood matches your victim."
"Thank you, Greg," Grissom said finally, taking the printout. "This - - helps."
"Good," he said, trying to be lighthearted. "Then this definitely places me in the favorite lab tech position, right? Because Hodges has been making some noises about how he's the only one you like, and personally, I've been getting a little nervous about job security."
"Just not nervous enough to turn down your music," Grissom said with a weak smile.
"Right," Greg said, returning the smile. "Not nearly that nervous."
"Well, thank you," Grissom said again, and Greg was no longer sure why he was being thanked. Grissom stared back down at his cup, as if the water was going to divine something for him. Greg almost leaned over to see if there were an answers floating on the surface, but he pulled back in time, distastefully conscious, once again, of his own separation.
He wasn't Grissom's friend. He was loyal to Grissom, and he liked Grissom, but he wasn't Grissom's friend. That would imply some level of understanding between the two of them that absolutely did not exist. He was never going to divine Grissom.
"Well, I've got work to do," he said, and scampered off.
Not that he was actually going to go back to work, of course, because he was on break right now. No reason except that he was bored. Of course, midway between the break room and the lab, he realized that there was nothing to do on his break, and he even though he was hungry, he didn't really want to go back in there with Grissom's Uncomfortable Emotions just to get a pint of Chunky Monkey out of the freezer. He needed some other alternative.
Well, he'd ask Nick. They'd get some lunch. Except, he discovered after a few painful minutes of popping his head into every room, Nick was nowhere to be found. It figured. Nick was probably the one person he could have talked to about the Zimmer thing without screwing himself over, or not talked about the Zimmer thing, whichever worked better, and Nick wouldn't have asked any questions.
Except Nick was gone.
That made him uneasy. It wasn't like Nick to not show up when something like this was going on, and all the others were there. Someone had probably called him, and Greg most emphatically was not going to pick up a phone to call his friend just to ask if he'd heard about a rape charge, and then ask if he wanted to go get something to eat.
He stuck his head into the trace lab, wondering whether or not this was even worth a try. "Hodges?"
Hodges gave him a look that most people reserved for particularly vicious pond scum. "Sanders. What do you want? Shouldn't you be working?"
"I'm on break."
"Fantastic."
"I'm hungry."
Hodges bent over his microscope again. "So eat something."
"Yeah, well, I don't want to go back in the break room. Grissom's in there, and the positive energy is, like, zilch. And I'm not going to sit in a restaurant all by myself, so come with me, and you'll actually get the impossible free lunch."
"Sitting with you would be a price all its own, Sanders," Hodges said, but he pushed the microscope away despite himself. "You talked with Grissom?"
"Yeah. He's depressed."
"Score one point. He's been charged with rape, and in fifteen minutes, the director's going to have his ass on the pavement for at least a week. No point giving the defense lawyers the ammo that an accused rapist is heading up their investigations."
Greg sighed. "He didn't do it, and I didn't come here to listen to you snark. Are you going to come with me or not?"
Hodges tossed his folder to the side with a groan. "Where are your other friends, Sanders? I thought you were supposed to be the little pet. Why don't you ask Nick Stokes to baby-sit you?"
"He's not here. You're my second option."
"I'm trying to get you to leave me alone," Hodges said with a slightly disgusted tone in his voice. "Can you not take a hint, or do you just not pick up on all the sarcasm? I'm not your friend, and I'm not going to have lunch with you. Get out of here."
Greg clapped a hand over his heart. "Oh, I'm so wounded. Hey, your tough break, not mine."
He wondered when he made rejection an art - - even if said rejection was something as simple as Hodges turning down a lunch invitation, and Hodges had been right, after all, the two of them had never really been friends, or even amiable co-workers, they'd always circled around each other warily, striving for the approval of the people above them in their different ways. But this day - - this time - - it was supposed to be different. Because Elizabeth Zimmer had just called for everyone to come out of the pool, and lab rats on a sinking ship were supposed to stick around, not desert.
Well, it served him right for trying to make some kind of a connection with a guy who looked like he'd like to get "piss off" tattooed on his forehead.
He tiptoed past the break room this time, because he'd made a mistake going in there in the first place, and he knew it, and Grissom knew it, and he didn't want to get called back in there for some kind of very awkward, "thanks for the support."
It was enough that Grissom knew that Greg didn't believe a word of the rape charges.
They didn't need to turn it into anything more complicated. It wasn't some kind of a political game, and he didn't need to be thanked for the truth.
Grissom didn't see him. Good. He headed through the maze of hallways until he came into his own lab again. There was a new stack of folders on his desk - - Ecklie was probably pissed that Greg had pushed the night shift ahead again. A bold handwritten message in Sharpie: As soon as possible. Clearly, Ecklie hadn't been operating under the same restrictions, or he would have just written ASAP instead of spelling out the acronym itself.
He wasn't so hungry anymore. The possibility of eating his lunch all by himself wasn't as appealing as digging into burgers with Nick running a commentary on a football game. It just seemed kind of pathetic. Kind of Ecklieish or Hodgesish and not Greggish at all. He was a social creature, and to be in his natural element at all, he needed people. He went kind of crazy without them, which was why alone-Greg was liable to turn into brooding-Greg or spaz-Greg or some other kind of identifiable Greg. And being alone with no focus except food was going to turn him into other-Greg.
He'd rather work.
Samples taken, extra plastic clipped away. He was good at this - - better than average, and he knew it. Ecklie's samples were in the computers in a matter of minutes, relatively speaking. Fast for DNA work. But as soon as it was over, he had nothing left to do, and he wished that he'd gone slower.
Greg sat there, waiting for the tests to finish. He drummed his fingers in an incomprehensible beat on the table - - a-rum-pum-pum-pum. Little drummer boy, he thought sardonically, and was continuing the rhythm when someone said:
"Still hungry?"
Hodges.
Greg swiveled his chair around. "Absolutely starving."
"Still willing to pay?"
"As soon as I get these results to the Prince of Darkness, yeah." He didn't ask why Hodges had changed his mind, because Greg couldn't care a whit about Hodges's personal motivations in the matter as long as he didn't have to turn into other-Greg. "Pick someplace."
"Prince of Darkness, Sanders?"
"Ecklie. The guy's been on my ass all week." Greg shoved his hands against the desk and brought his chair forward. "Says I'm giving the night shift all my time, when clearly, I'm supposed to be on my knees, licking his loafers. If that guy had his way, we'd all be brownnosing him every shift."
Hodges rolled his eyes, which could have been interpreted in several ways. Greg took it as agreement.
The results came out with a soft whirring noise, and he snatched them up. "I'll drop these off. Wanna come with?"
The eye-rolling stopped, and there was a smile instead, which, willingness to be blind to motivation aside, was kind of creepy. Greg wasn't sure if he'd ever seen Hodges smile before. "Yeah, I'll come. Why not? Then we'll take off." The smile widened just a little - - a fraction of an inch, maybe, but enough to make Greg wonder, uneasily, if Hodges was on something.
Maybe he should have stayed away from lunch invitations today.
Too late for that, though, so he shrugged in response, something that, like Hodges's eye rolling, could mean anything, and exited, Hodges right behind him. He could almost feel the trace tech breathing on the back of his neck, so he sidestepped until Hodges finally started walking next to him. He found Ecklie in a file-clogged office, and dropped the results on the desk with little fanfare.
Ecklie stared back at him coolly. "Nice to see you've finally started to process my evidence," he said. Then his eyes darted to the side and found Hodges. "David. Going on break?"
"If you don't need anything put through trace," Hodges said calmly.
Greg watched the exchange with fascinated confusion, unable to understand what, exactly, was happening in front of him. He had never, admittedly, seen Hodges and Ecklie talk to each other, but he had assumed that Hodges would have the same attitude with the Prince of Darkness that he had with everyone else. Apparently, not true. There was none of the bitter sarcasm, and not even any of the bootlicking that Hodges usually reserved for Grissom. There was some kind of peace between the two of them - - two assholes, Greg thought, who fought everyone else, being okay together.
The whole world was going crazy. A camaraderie between Hodges and Ecklie was the last thing that needed to be going through his mind right now.
"No, go ahead. I'll clock you out."
I really need to stop being a people person. People are scaring me today. And why is it that I'm almost as bothered by Hodges and Ecklie playing nice as I am by Grissom getting charged with rape?
"Thanks," Hodges said, and in a second, he turned his head back to Greg and was Hodges again, and there was some indefinite look there - - some strange, elusive hurt under the layers of brown iris - - something that made Hodges look resigned. "Come on, Sanders. I don't want to stay here forever."
He wished he'd just gone back for the Chunky Monkey, no matter how awkward facing Grissom again would have been. Something was - - off here. Something, beneath the surface, was wrong, and it wasn't just his imagination - - it was other-Greg, kicking in with some valuable input. It was a little whisper in the wind as he and Hodges headed out into the dry desert air that told him, in no uncertain terms, that he was screwed.
Hodges was still smiling when they got in the car, Greg having offered, absently, to drive.
"Good mood?" Greg asked, sliding his keys into the ignition.
Hodges looked at him in surprise. "No. Not particularly. Why?"
"You're smiling."
"It's just to keep you nervous, Sanders. Drive."
"It's working," Greg said shortly as he entered the highway. "It's really off-putting, too. I thought you never smiled. I was operating under the assumption that your facial muscles weren't capable of such a gesture, and now I'm alarmed."
"Get over it."
His mouth was dry. He pressed down on the gas to take them away.