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Chapter Thirty-six: What We Do (WARRICK)

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He was brushing for prints on Hodges's dresser when Catherine's cell phone rang so loudly that it jarred him into spilling powder all over the wood, making a snowfall of brilliant pink over the mahogany. He swore, and wiped his hand through it - - there went any potential prints to hope for, not that he had ever thought of finding any interesting ones. This, for once, seemed to be a textbook suicide, but despite all of that, there was protocol to be followed. He only hoped that Nick was doing a better job of tracking down Claberson than he and Catherine were doing of finishing off this case completely.

"Willows," Catherine said into the phone. There was a silence, trailing. "Are you sure? Oh my God. Okay, we'll be right - - yes. Dammit, Nicky, don't argue with me, I can't just - - "

Warrick stopped trying to brush the powder away and froze. There were too many things to think about - - too many jobs he was now glad he didn't have - - and all he could see was Greg pinned to plywood and a telephone pole, only behind his closed eyes, Greg looked like Nick, or Sara, or Grissom. Anyone but Catherine, who was bright and real and within his reach. He touched her wrist, eyes still closed. He didn't have the strength to banish his nightmare by letting in the light. He deserved these nightmares.

"What's happening?"

He didn't recognize his own voice. It was too hoarse. Unreal. But wasn't everything?

Catherine cupped a hand over her phone. He couldn't read anything in her expression, and found himself thinking of the first time he had seen Halloween as a kid, when the Shatner mask on Michael Myers with its bland features and clean expanse of nothingness had been the scariest thing he'd ever seen and the scariest thing he thought he ever would see. Catherine looked like a mask. Catherine looked like old fears and Warrick had too many new ones.

"Sara's missing," she said. "It's Flowers."

"Nick - -"

"Is looking for her. Nick and Grissom," Catherine said, her mouth becoming a thin line. She'd worn lipstick in the morning but it had all been bitten away, sucked off by nervous habits and time. Warrick caught a faint line of cherry on her upper tooth. It made her look careless and human and too vulnerable. "Grissom's back. He's been cleared - - Covallo said - -"

"I don't care what Covallo said." He tore the phone out of her hand. "Nick, what the hell is going on?"

Nick's voice crackled in his ear. "Just what she told you. Sara's missing. We're looking for her. Unless you want to end up taking more pictures of someone you loved pinned up like some kind of dissection project, you'll let me get off this phone so I can pay attention to where we're going."

Funny how it was Nick's voice, and not Catherine's pronouncement, that made the whole thing sink into him. When Greg had died - - the realization had come only because he could look at Greg's death, and analyze it. Sara was nowhere in reach, and Warrick had never been particularly good at making something real out of just a few words. Catherine's blankness hadn't helped him, but Nick - -

He had known Nick longer. He had watched football and drank beer with Nick before Greg or Catherine had really been part of their lives. He knew every crease in Nick's expression, every stain on his couch, every snack in his kitchen . . . he knew all the petty likes and dislikes that stacked up to make Nick human. He knew Nick so well that it almost became tiresome: Nick never surprised him anymore. Everything he said had been mapped out years before by a hint or a promise. Everything he did was nothing less than what Warrick expected him to do. Nigel Crane had scared the shit out of him, true, and when he'd thought that Nick could die - - well, that had never been part of the game plan. But even that fear had eroded over time, and watching Nick closely afterwards had only solidified what he already thought he knew: Nick did not change. Nick was what Nick was, and what Nick was . . . was Nick.

The voice on the line had Nick's cadence. It had that faint, almost unrecognizable drawl that he had nearly stopped hearing over the years. But the spirit behind it was what made things real, because. . .

Because it was new.

There was nothing else of Nick that he recognized. There was no hope. There was no reassurance. All that was there was a kind of existential tiredness, and a certainty that Nick had always lacked. The lack of confidence that had always shortened his steps at every turn was missing, as if it had been sheared clean away. This was not a Nick who doubted what he could be.

This was a Nick who had carefully looked in some invisible mirror, seen exactly who he was, and decided that who he was wasn't enough. That he was not good enough and would give up trying.

Nick's stopped, Warrick thought, with a dryness in his mouth that seemed to scorch his tongue. He's done. Finished. Clocked out. He's never going to be Nick again.

And Sara - -

He couldn't. Couldn't and didn't want to. There were so many things that he could scream into the phone. It wasn't Grissom's case, it was his. He had been placed in charge of the investigation and it was his job to see it through to the end, no matter how bitter that end was. He resented being placed aside. He hated the fact that they followed him when their precious Grissom was down-and-out and pushed him in the corner the second Grissom moved back into the court. But who was he kidding? He'd follow Grissom first, too, trust Grissom before he'd trust himself.

And there was Sara. And if he knew that Grissom loved her, how could he say to his boss - - to his mentor - - to his hero - - "Stand aside, this was my case first and I want to finish it?"

He said to this new Nick, "Don't do anything stupid."

He'd meant it seriously, meant it as a warning, but it came out sounding lame and flat, like a punch-line that hadn't quite come off. Too cliché, too every-cop-movie-ever. It was next to "Don't do anything I wouldn't do" in the bag of cheesy remarks. He closed his eyes once more to let Catherine's surprised expression slide over into black, and bit down on his lip when he heard Nick's pause. He waited for something to happen.

It was new, this anticipation. How many years had it been since he hadn't known what Nick would say? Hadn't even had a clue?

Before, it would have been, "Well - - yeah, Warrick - - why do you think I'm going instead of you?" and the drawl would have come out just a little more with the emphasis, and the whole thing would have been hiding a laugh. No matter how stressed Nick was, that's what Warrick would have gotten from him. A smile . . . a line . . . and a wholehearted reassurance that Nick would do everything he could do.

Don't do anything stupid.

Nick took it as meant, seriously. Through the silence that wasn't silence - - the silence that was fuzzy with lengthy static - - Warrick could hear him thinking.

"You know," Nick said finally, "it's a little too late for someone to say that. To any of us." He hardly waited before saying, in the same quiet voice, "Goodbye, Warrick."

The silence that had been static became velvet-smooth and black.

Warrick closed the phone in his hand and gave it back to Catherine. She took it wordlessly and slid it into her purse with just two fingers, as if she didn't quite want to touch it.

"He wants us to stay here," she said. Her mouth twisted, and again, he caught that little glimmer of lipstick on her teeth. "He says that they have enough to worry about without wondering where we've gone - - you know, without the officers around to look out for us - - " She hit something, hard, and Warrick had to follow the white-streak path of her hand to realize that it was the bed. She collapsed backwards on it, her hair almost highlighting the drab gray cover, and looked at him.

To his relief, she wasn't a mask anymore. He could see her. He still knew every line of Catherine. Frustration in the tightness of her lips. Anger in the color of her eyes. Fear in the way she held her arms to her chest. Desperation in her slumped posture. Catherine was still Catherine, at least.

"It's how he said it, Warrick. Like we're things to be looked after. Like we couldn't take care of ourselves. He's . . . he's younger than me."

The warped logic almost made him laugh. He sat down beside her, comforted by her familiarity, and touched a hand to her hair.

"He's not himself, Cath," he said softly. "He's really not."

She turned her head to look at him, and he marked down "worry" as another appearing emotion. "I've never heard him talk like that before. He sounded - - he didn't sound like Nick. Grissom, maybe, but not Nick. Not our Nick."

Warrick thought about memorizing Nick over long afternoons and longer double-shifts until these new tones and reactions were resented instead of just unfamiliar. He thought about watching Catherine see new men with a little hard knot of jealousy in his stomach, even if he was never sure if he even wanted to see her that way. He thought about the secret stash of memories and compliments from Grissom that his mind had built almost without his permission. The hatred he had felt at seeing Greg not only killed but also somehow defiled. The fear at knowing that Sara was gone . . . the fear that was so total and wave-like in its power that it washed stray recollections on his mind like seashells. And now, Catherine's odd phrase (our Nick) with that same resentment he'd had, as if Nick had no right to change, not when they'd expected him to be constant for the rest of their lives.

How possessive love can be, he thought. He untangled two strands of her hair.

"If Sara dies, Grissom's finished," Catherine said.

Warrick nodded. "I think that's the plan. We thought we were protecting him, and we just - - we set ourselves up like dominos for Flowers to knock us down."

"So what do we do?"

"We wait," he said. "Maybe Nick's right. Maybe we shouldn't give him any chances to hurt Grissom by using us. So - - we wait."

"For what?"

He examined her tone for humor and couldn't find any. No trace. She just sounded tired and curious, as if she honestly couldn't guess when they would leave. We wait for them to call us again, he started to say, or for us to see something on the news, or for Sara to be dead, or for us to believe they'll be okay. Or even, cruelly, for things to be back to normal.

"For it to be over," he said. "Either way - - good or bad - - I think we wait for it to be finished."

"I want to go after them."

Her announcement startled him, when he thought that he'd made everything so clear. When he'd drawn all the lines and connected the points for her to see that constellation: don't let them hurt us anymore, he'd thought, as if he wasn't Warrick and she wasn't Catherine, but the night shift lived and breathed as a single actual thing, and all was plural and possessive. He didn't care if he ended up dead. His life had lost its own value through some kind of cosmic mark-down, but he cared if it would hurt anyone. He cared about the strangeness in Nick and the wildness in Grissom.

"I know," Catherine said, off his look. "I know we shouldn't. I know it's wrong. But it's right, too."

Eloquent. His hand was caught in her hair, and he tugged it free as gently as possible. Not a persuasive speech at all, Cath, but I know what you mean. Because possessive love means that possession comes first - - so we keep them. We keep them, even if we hurt them.

So hurt them.

So let them hurt, but we'll keep them.

We'll keep them alive if we have to kill them to do it.

It would hurt too much for him to laugh, but he wanted to. What a wonderful thing was love. What a really beautiful thing. What a sacrifice it was to love someone so much that you didn't care how much they hurt as long as they were still there to love. What really lovely pain.

So he would keep Sara, Grissom, Nick, and Catherine at all costs. He would keep them even if they hated to be kept, even if they despised him for keeping them. He'd keep them forever, the way he hadn't been able to keep Greg. What mattered was life - - and love. That mattered more than right and wrong. He almost wasn't sure anymore that he knew the difference between those two, no more than he knew the difference between life and love.

He stood and pulled her with him up off the bed, his hand wrapped around her wrist like a bracelet. He could feel her pulse increase.

"So what do we do?" she asked again.

"We follow them," he said, and tossed the keys at her in a graceless arc. "You drive."