Hey, thanks for the reviews, and thanks Miss Anonymous hp for the advice and I understand where you're coming from about people taking chapter stories too far. I think that I will probably have this extend only a few more chapters for when Sara is in Dallas with Nick and I'll probably end it there with whether he decides to go back or not.

Disclaimer: I do not own any CSI characters, I do however own Nick's sisters and brother and sister-in-law and brothers-in-law, but only mention of one sister in this chapter

Nick Stokes was not your ordinary cowboy. For one thing, he no longer lived in the cowboy state; he lived and worked in Las Vegas. It was there that he met his best friend Catherine Willows, and the woman he loves, Sara Sidle. It was there that he learned how to truly be an amazing CSI, and it was there that he did not want to go back to.

After being buried alive, Nick had thought about a lot of things, mostly about how he hasn't gone very far in his life. How he has no wife, no children. He didn't want to go back to that city, the city that he had never liked, but stayed in because of Sara and Catherine. He wanted to stay here with his family, but he wasn't about to give up his friends. He felt as though he was being torn in two by what he wants and what he fears, both of those being going back to Las Vegas, Nevada.

Sara had been with him in Texas for almost a week now, he taught her how to ride a horse, he showed her around Dallas, and they took a drive around the desert. Almost a therapy for Nick was showing his friend around his home. He didn't talk to her at all about what had happened. He didn't talk to anybody at all about what happened. He couldn't, he couldn't even begin to try and explain what he was feeling. Ever since Nick was nine years old he had been keeping his emotions to himself, with his molestation, reliving it in nightmares, having guns pointed at him, and the entire Nigel Crane fiasco. He had done so well with holding back his tears, holding back the words of explanation, and the nightmares, he knew that nobody knew of his nightly nightmares.

Sara looked at him different now. He hated it; she looked as though he was going to break in two if she touched him, or have a heart attack if she brought up what had happened. After Nigel Crane, everybody had just thought that he had dealt with it, that it hadn't hurt him at all. Nobody seemed to realize that he moved to a new house, bought all new furniture, all new clothes, just so that he wouldn't have to touch anything that Nigel Crane had touched. It had seemed almost like they were so preoccupied with themselves to even care, and he had to admit that it had hurt him deeply. Nick knew that they had been uncomfortable discussing it, and had therefore not brought it up, and he didn't want to talk about it, but he did want to think that they cared.

Nick stood at the moment on the porch, with his guitar in hand, strumming useless chords that slowly strung together to form a melody. He had been playing the guitar ever since he was five years old when his father had bought him this very guitar. Sure, it had been pretty big when he first got it, but he had managed and he loved the guitar. Whenever he was sad or wanted to be alone, he would play his guitar, just useless chords, that was how his family had first known the full blown affect that his being buried alive had had on him. Up until Sara had come, Nick had played the guitar constantly, barely putting it down, and they all knew very well what that meant. Nick didn't like to bother people with his problems, he preferred to help people with theirs, as though theirs were more important than his.

So Nick sat here, Sara had gone shopping with his sister Amy, and strummed a song that he had written when he was fifteen years old about his first girlfriend, Elizabeth. People had always told Nick that he could have made it as a country star, and everyone knew that Nick could have made it as a lawyer, after all he did have a law degree from Harvard from before he decided to be a CSI.

Sara was getting deeply concerned for her friend. The more that she tried to talk to him, the more he would pull away, as though he didn't want to talk about anything. She had brought up Nigel Crane, telling him that he was the first person that they had thought of who would kidnap Nick, and his eyes showed the fear that still came to him whence hearing that name. She knew just from looking at him everyday that he wasn't sleeping, and once she had gone downstairs to see him sitting in front of the television watching a Discovery Channel show on the migration patterns of birds. She knew that he had seen this before, because he was talking along with the show, saying everything the narrator was saying, as, or just before, he was saying it. Another time Sara had gone downstairs at night and found him sitting outside on the porch playing soft melodies on his guitar. She didn't understand what was with his guitar, but he always seemed to be playing it, and she wasn't sure if the old Nicky, her designated 'cowboy' would ever be back.

"It's not something that you can decide on

It's not something that you can say

It's not something that will get better

If you talk about it every day"

"It will always haunt you

A ghost from your past

You'll never stop the nightmares

They're always coming fast"

"Once and a while you see

The way it used to be

And then you know that

It will never be the same again"

Sara listened from the screen door as Nick quietly sang to a song that she knew was obviously written by him, in the middle of the night.

"Can things ever go back?

To the way that they used to be

Can things change again?

Can we see?"

"A love is almost lost

A friendship almost gone

Quiet thought of what would have happened

A never ending sorrow

From deep inside your heart

It's something that only you can understand"

"And as you sit by yourself

In the dark by yourself

You only wonder why it had to be

And as you strum on your guitar

And breathe in the night air

You're truly thankful for the fact that you can breathe"

Sara had tears in her eyes as he finished the song. Nick put down his guitar and put his head in his hands; he was sobbing. And that was how she knew that he was truly broken inside, and that was how she left, on a dark Texas night, deciding that he would be happier thinking that she didn't know about the song he went out and played and sung every dark Texas night.

Okay, that's it for chapter three, I really hope that you like it. I especially liked writing the song. I wanted something to completely express Nick's sadness, and then I thought of the idea of him playing his guitar, and I figured he would write a song so there it is. Please review and tell me what you think. I hope that you guys understood the last line of his song about how he's grateful that he can breathe, and I am practically crying as I'm singing this in my head, but maybe I'm just a wuss.