Disclaimer: I don't own CSI.
Warning: NickGreg, and some dark themes.
A/N: Bad, bad English. Or, at least, my teacher always said so. Heehee. –And I deeply apologize for the wrong update! (I updated the story, without adding a new chapter)
Living with a Monster
Chapter 4: Useless
Greg ran over to the chaos that surrounded the two collided cars. It was a head-on collision. It involved two passenger cars, a black Audi and a smaller red car. The damages on both cars were extensive. He watched the crumbled, burning car. How any of the people who were in those cars could have survived, was a mystery to him. Two elderly men had gotten to the cars before him and worked with the black car. They tried to put out the fire. The driver in it seemed to be dead already. He was the only one in it.
He watched the scene, not knowing where to go first. Panic hit him. Everything happened so fast. The smoke clouded his vision, and made him cough. The dust from the desert the wind blew up didn't make things better, either. A little girl cried. Greg could clearly hear her sobs between the screams of pain and the burning flames. But he didn't know where she was.
This was the last place in the entire world Greg wanted to be.
"Hey, you!" A lady yelled at him. The red-haired woman stood next to the black car, and tried to open it, in vain. She motioned for him to come closer and help her with the car door. He ran up next to her, and noticed that the sobbing from the little girl came closer. There was broken glass all over the scene. Greg suddenly thought of people cutting themselves on the sharp edges. He almost didn't realize that broken glass was the least of his worries.
"Help me open the door, will you?" The red-head said, as she nudged the door. It wouldn't budge. He looked into the car. There was a woman in the front seat, with her head on the wheel. The air bag hadn't worked, it seemed. There was a lot of blood surrounding her. Greg couldn't see if she was breathing or not. Next to her, in the passenger's seat, sat the sobbing little girl. She might have been four years old of age. The girl wore a blue sweater, now dark with her mother's blood. Her dark hair was tied into two pigtails Greg never forgot her gray eyes, how they shone with confusion and despair, how her tears rolled down her round cheeks, and how her mouth made a grimace of pain and how it howled out her desperation. That face haunted him many times in his dreams the coming months.
In the backseat sat an older woman, stroking a boy's head. The boy seemed to have slept in her lap, before the car crashed. The kid was bleeding heavily from where the seatbelt he still wore had cut into his torso, and from something that looked like a broken leg. He seemed to be unconscious, or maybe he still slept, even though Greg doubted that. He might have been twelve-thirteen years old of age.
Greg turned towards the woman who stood beside him. "What do we do? Are you sure we should get them out of that car?" She shrugged. "I'm no doctor, I have absolutely no idea. The guys who put out the fire have called for an ambulance. I just hope they asked for more than one. I think we should get them out of there," she said.
"Okay." And they finally got the door open when both of them pulled it. The door was the left backseat door, so they could manage to get the boy out first. But because of the way he lay over the entire backseat, the two rescuers couldn't get him out of his seat belt. Greg ran over to his car and found a knife he kept there in case of emergencies like this. But he had never thought he would actually get to use it. Even though driving in Las Vegas could be pretty dangerous from time to time. People seemed to want and kill each by driving like lunatics. But stuff like that never happened to Greg. Not like this.
More people had come to the scene, and ran over to help them with the kid. He was bleeding heavily, and the redhead and another of the newcomers got him out and started to put pressure on his wounds. Greg doubted he would survive. Somewhere in the back of his head was there a voice that silently told him that damages to stomach and hips were the most dangerous ones when it came to car crashes. He didn't know where he had got to know that. Maybe the driving school teacher had told him it?
The crushed lady in the driver's seat was still where they had found her. No one had looked after her, even though she seemed to be dead. But the lab rat couldn't just leave her there, so he bent over to her and checked her breathing. There wasn't any. Not even weak pulse either. She was in fact dead. So Greg didn't do anything with her. He just left her there.
The girl was helped out by some of the newcomers. She was still crying, but seemed more or less unharmed. At least she seemed fine physically. But he doubted she would be fine emotionally afterwards. The poor girl had watched her mother die.
So that left Greg with the old lady. The woman was surprisingly calm with the whole event, and waited patiently for him to get her out of the broken car. He didn't manage to get her very far away from the vehicle. She couldn't walk by herself.
Greg laid her down so her head rested in his lap. He thought that might be the most comfortable for her at this moment. She had trouble breathing. "Whe… where are Tadas… and Gabriella?" Greg frowned. The names were foreign to him, but they had to belong to the children in the car. He looked over to where they tried to slow down the boy's bleeding. It was a lot of blood around him. He didn't want her to see, or worry about any of them at the moment. She needed an ambulance. Now.
"Tadas and Gabriella?" he tried his best to imitate the names, without full success. "Are they your grandchildren?" keep the woman's mind off her injuries and her dead daughter.
"Yes… they are. Two wonderful children," she said, and smiled.
"I can imagine that. Huh. What's your name?" He needed something to call her.
"Jovita… My name's Jovita," she breathed. She coughed, and some blood ran down her cheek. That couldn't be good. Her breathing was more labored than before. Greg positioned her so that her back leaned against his chest, in hope that it would help Jovita breathe better.
"So, Jovita, where are you guys from? I just assume you're tourists."
"Yes… yes, we are tourists. We are from Lithuania."
"Oh, my. Did you guys come all the way from Europe? The capital of Lithuania is Vilnius, right?" Jovita nodded, so Greg kept going. He silently begged for the ambulances to come. These people needed professional help. "So, how's Lithuania? I've never been there."
Somewhere behind them yelled a man "I lost him. I can't find a pulse!" That was Tadas, the woman's grandson. He died.
But Jovita was oblivious to her grandson's death. All she concentrated on was telling greg about her home country. She smiled before she began talking. "Well, it is small…" she coughed. "Flat and green-" her breathing hitched. Some more blood trickled down her face.
She never took another breath, and her body went limp in his arms. The ambulance didn't reach them in time. Jovita died. Only the crying girl was left. Her other family members got carried away in body bags. Greg felt so useless, and so lost.
Nick's case was a bad one. He hadn't managed to stop the rapist. The forty year old man had raped and killed another kid before he was put away in a tiny cell. It was a hard case for Nick, emotionally. So when Greg came home that day, he couldn't bring himself to handle Greg too. He had enough of his comments and quarrelling. The brunette couldn't explain
He just had to remove the problem for a little while. But the real problem wasn't Greg. He was just a part of it.
So Nick had gone to a bar. He hadn't end up drunk; he just… calmed his nerves. And then he drove back home. When Nick entered their apartment, he found Greg curled up on the couch. He was bloody and dirty, and he had fallen asleep.
He had been crying. Because of him? Because of what had happened?
Nick regretted throwing Greg out, and some of the treatment he had given the younger man. The Texan had had some time to think about what he had done wile Greg was away. He wanted to have a relationship with him. He really did. But Nick needed Greg to understand some things, and they needed to share the responsibilities equally. They could do it. Nick knew they could do it. But maybe everything wouldn't be okay tonight. They just needed to get better. If Greg still wanted to live together with him.
The CSI sat down on the couch next to the lab rat. The other man woke up when he felt the couch shift. He sniffled. "Hey."
"Hey yourself." Greg sat up and ran a hand trough his hair. He didn't say anything. So once again fell an awkward silence over them. Nick felt some sort of responsibility for the conversation. He was, after all, the one who threw the other out of their apartment.
"Are you crying because of our fight?" Nick just had to know. He started to feel a little guilty of what had happened.
"No… Yeah… I don't really know. Maybe that too. This has been a seriously crappy day. I don't want to be all weepy-eyed. That's not like me. I haven't cried this much since…" he stopped and breathed. "Nick, I held an old woman as she died." Nick frowned. "Or, technical, she was already dead. David said she was already dead before I got her out of the car. It was a car accident." Greg snorted ironically as Nick lifted his eyebrows. The older man probably wanted to make a comment on how rare that happens, but decided to let Greg talk.
"She was dead, but I still talked to her. Apparently, the adrenaline made her brain and body work a little longer. I talked to a dead woman. Tried to make her concentrate on something else than her dying grandson. Her name was Jovita. They were here on a vacation. The daughter was the only one who survived. Her mother was already dead when we got him out of the wreck. Her son had fallen asleep with his head in his grandmother's lap. David said he bled to death. Died before the paramedics got there. I watched him die, too. There was so much blood. You have no idea." Greg lifted his head and looked Nick in the eyes. "I don't know how you do it. Deal with stuff like this everyday. I don't think I could have done it. "
"I usually don't watch them die. I deal wit them when they already are dead. You know that," Nick said sofly.
"Yeah, but still. She was old, you know. But that doesn't make it better."
"I know," Nick whispered.
Their argument wasn't mentioned that night. They had both way to much on their minds for that. They weren't fighting, but things weren't okay, either.
They slept in the same bed, but with their faces turned towards the walls and their backs turned towards each other. No more than that.
They both slept restless that night.
A/N: thanks for reading!
I want to thank all those who reviewed the third chapter- stacy, stellar89, StarShinobi, Sasukemyemo349, Dark Angel Kira, Cassius, Cheezecurls, cameragirl, happyharper13 and Ama.Dear! Thanks to you all! And- as always- I want to thank those who read this story, and those who have put me on their favs/alert lists!