A/N: This is from Nick's pov, in case you can't tell, and it's not that great, I only wrote it to pass the time until September 22nd, when I will be happily watching "Bodies in Motion", the season premier of CSI! Any reviews you can spare for a miserable oneshot about a CSI reminiscing about his life would be greatly appriciated! Also, I'd love it if you read my other fanfiction, "We were merely Freshmen." It's about them all in high school. Anyway, enjoy the story!

Disclaimer: I don't own CSI, but I am always open to buy them coffee or to play dead body #3 on their lovely show.

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What am I doing? I can't sleep, I can barely stand to get myself up for another shift at the lab. I can't go out into the field, sometimes I wonder if I should quit and retire. There's been so much, I don't know if I can take it anymore.
In my dreams, the few that I get the chance to have, it's always the same. I feel a cloth over my face, suffocating me, the bitter smell of chloroform pungent and nauseating. Everything goes dark, then I'm in the coffin. Being eaten alive. The gun is in my hands, it's under my chin, and I desparately pull the trigger. I wake up, and it's always the same. Sweating bullets, too scared to move. Sometimes I wonder why it everything seems to happen to me.

I count on my fingers all the terrible things that have happened since I started this miserable life, starting when I was nine years old. She came. I thought I could trust her. But she came into my room, and she locked the door, and when she was through with me she hissed in my ear, her voice venemous as a snakebite, twice as painful.
"Don't tell anyone, Nicky," she whispers, running her fingers down the side of my face. "Don't tell anyone, or I'll come back for you."
I don't tell anyone. Only Catherine knows. My mind jumps to a few years ago, right after I was made a level three, when she, the other she, could've killed me. She had her gun in my face, and I was trying not to cry. I don't even remember what I said, I just wanted her to calm down so I could cry, so I could freak out and take out my gun and threaten her with it. I wanted to be that hysterical. So I tried to make her stop, make the world dissappear, just sink into the ground under my feet and rest there. Now that's not even a place to hide.

A year later. I can feel the glass shatter on my back, and I'm falling. I can almost hear Warrick yell something before I'm gone, flying away in my mind. Finding a safe place to run to, a place in the back of my thoughts where I don't have to deal with anything. With anyone. But he didn't stop there. It's not enough to break the window with my vulnerable body, leave me unconcious and bloodied in the bushes two stories down. No. He's creeping around above me, and he can see everything I do. When I think it's all over, he's there. With his gun, his eyes bright and wild behind their black plastic-framed glasses. He's going to kill me and all I can think is that Elvis Costello wears glasses like those. Then I snap out of it, and I can't figure out what to do. There's a body on my floor and I can't remember how it got there. I try to distract him, but his eyes never leave my face, and his fingers never come off the trigger. And I wish I'd never gotten the title, "Crime Stopper."
But that's over for now. He won't be coming back, for now at least, but it's not over for me. It's over for the ones he killed. They don't have to live with the fear, the dreams, the constant reminder that someday, he'd come back for them. They don't have to think that the clock's still ticking, that they could still die at his hands, that it will never truly be over for them. Because they're dead.

It's been a month now, since my last brush with the cruel world of torture and suffering. I have to relive it every day. Whenever I turn on the tv, it's still there. I can't make it go away. It was all on a coin, Warrick and me had the choice. I got the trash run. And then the hand is closing over my face again, the white rag blocking my vision, the acrid smell filling my nostrils, and then there's nothing. Until I wake up in the back of the truck, but they put the cloth over my face again, and when I wake up next it's in the dark, with only a pile of glowsticks, a tape-recorder, and my gun. And god does that gun had never looked better. Then the light. It kept coming on, blinding me with each flash. Every time it went off, I sighed with relief, thinking that this time it wouldn't come back. But it always did. Never ceasing, always there. I could have lived with it, but after a while I noticed that when the light would come on, the fan would go off. The fan that I needed to stay alive. So I did the only thing I could do. I shot the light out, wasting one of my bullets. When I couldn't take it anymore, I put the gun to my chin and I was ready to shoot. But they came for me. And now I'm here, reliving my ordeal, no, my ordeals. Plural. Or maybe not. Maybe all my life is an ordeal, a long stretch of desert highway that I have to walk, and I'm not allowed to hitchhike.
I read Catcher in the Rye when I was in high school, and I always remember what Holden Caulfield says about life being a game. It's only a game if you get the best cards. Well, no. That's not true. Life's a game to me. Only I'm one of the pieces, and people can abuse me as they please. It's all a game to them, and I'm a casualty of the war they're playing at.

Oh. There's one other thing the hands of fate have put me through that still twists my stomach into knots. My girl. I loved this girl, this prostitute, like you couldn't imagine. I thought about her after seeing her only once. But I can't have anything, can I. This one day, I finally got to be with her. I was pulling her into the vortex of our bodies like I had imagined so many times, and I wasn't dreaming. But I left her alone. Only for a little while. I went to get coffee, bring it back to her, give her a surprise. But when I drove up there were cop cars everywhere. And they were telling me she was dead, murdered, and would I please answer a few questions down at the station?I wanted to scream.

WHYISTHISHAPPENINGWHYISTHISHAPPENINGWHYISTHISHAPPENING? She was all I really wanted. If I could at least have one thing in life, none of this would matter. But they won't let me. The people who try to hurt me, who try to hurt my friends and the people I love, and who take away my soul in little bites, stealing pieces to chew up and spit out, like Wrigley's doublemint, when they think I'm not looking. They don't know I can feel it. I know what they're doing. They're turning my soul into an abyss, turning me inside out, making me empty space, taking away everything. Now I can feel it. They abyss isn't part of me. It is me. I am the endless abyss.