Home of Greg Sanders Slash Fiction
Chapter Three: The Borders of Gregland
Characters: Gil Grissom, Greg Sanders, Nick Stokes
Rating:FRAO
Warnings: None
Summary: In which Gil is reminded that he used to have fun
Gil lets his work swallow him for the next few days - three double homicides, unrelated and all over Clarke County - gotta love the summer heat, he thinks. He keeps a weary ear to the vine nonetheless, decides that Nick and Greg have reduced their sudden-death hostilities to a slow simmer, and in his long hours of absence from the lab neither of them has killed the other.
He comes back after four exhausting days of chasing down minuscule particles in impossible cases to find out that, even if Nick and Greg aren't at each other's throats, the rest of the night shift seems to be waging a subtle war against their resident DNA tech.
For what it's worth, Greg seems to be taking it in stride, has started listening to obnoxious music full blast again, added purple and peroxide highlights to his blue hair, and has developed a mean tongue that he lashes at anyone who crosses him.
"Is this a bad time?" Gil asks when he has a free moment to drop in and visit.
Greg looks up and grins at him, turns the volume way down and shakes his head. "No such thing as a bad time in Greg-land," he says.
Gil raises his eyebrows. "Greg-land?" he asks.
"Yeah, didn't the border guard ask you for ID?"
Gil looks over his shoulder at where Greg is looking, finds himself on the receiving end of one of Jacqui's 'just humour him' looks, and turns back with a smile. "I bribed my way in," he says.
"Ooh - contraband. Whatchagot?"
"Well..." Gil digs into his pockets. "I have... a parking ticket from the middle of nowhere, I have a scrap of paper with three numbers on it that mean nothing to me - no, wait, better not get rid of that, they might come back to me. And... half a pack of gum."
"Sold on the last one," Greg says, and actually holds his hand out.
Gil grins and tosses the gum at him. "You cleaned me out," he says.
"I'll have a word with my border guard," Greg assures him and squirrels the gum away somewhere. "Make sure she doesn't take all the good stuff next time."
"Border guards are uppity," Gil says, and there's a sudden shift in perspective and he realizes what this must look like to someone else. Gil Grissom having a nonsense conversation with Greg Sanders for no reason whatsoever.
"Tell me about it," Greg continues. "She wants to unionize."
"With whom?"
Greg points at him. "Good question," he says. "You want to head up Greg-land's Department of Homeland Security?"
"In exchange for...?"
Greg thinks. "Fifty percent of the spoils of war?"
Gil shrugs. "Sounds fair," he says.
The pack of gum reappears and Greg pulls half of the sticks out, and tosses the rest of the pack back to Gil. "It's retroactive," he explains. "So get cracking on the border guard scandal, Chief, and I'll see what other spoils of war I can scare up."
"If it came from this lab, Greg, I honestly don't think I'm all that interested."
Greg pretends to look hurt, but it doesn't last long. "How're your cases?"
"They're impossible," Gil tells him cheerfully, "which is not to say that I won't solve them."
"Good."
"How are you holding up?"
Greg shrugs, drops his eyes to the counter for the first time since Gil appeared. "I'm okay," he says. "Finally got my place clean, you know. I hardly recognize it."
"I meant with Nick," Gil says. "With the others."
Another shrug. "Been better," he says, "been worse."
Gil narrows his eyes. "One of these days," he says, "I'm going to get you to explain what that means."
Greg looks up again and smiles. "It's bad form for the Director of Greg-land Security to be interrogating the Dictator-at-Large, you know," he says. "Bad for job security."
"Well, maybe I'd better head back to Gil-land, then," Gil says, and tosses the pack of gum at him again. "While I still have some scruples left."
"And you're returning the kickback?" Greg asks, his eyebrows climbing. "I'll be damned. There is a moral backbone in this corruptible world."
Gil grins. "When you least expect it," he says, "it'll jump out and bite you in the ass."
"Promises, promises," Greg mutters.
Gil laughs. "Later," he says.
He sits in his office for a while, doing paperwork and wondering why all of a sudden, after four brutal days of being lied to by strangers, he's feeling content. Sure, home turf, he thinks, that'll make anyone breathe a little easier, but this is ridiculous.
Catherine calls him on it a few hours later, when he fails to rip her a new one for slipping up with one of their suspects.
"Who hit you with a happy stick?" she asks, leaning against his door frame.
"What?"
"You came in here like a thunderstorm," she tells him, "and now you're smiling and letting me get away with stupid shit."
"You want me to ream you out?" he offers pleasantly.
She holds up her hands in surrender. "Not that I'm complaining," she assures him and backs out of the room. "It suits you, you know. Happy." She waggles her fingers at him and disappears.
It suits you. The words echo in his head for a bit, sound like something he said not so long ago, and then they settle: Greg.
That's what it is, he thinks, that's what managed to turn his mood from foul to fair - his inane little flirt with Greg. His visit to Greg-land. It brought back a ghost of a kind, of the time when Brass was in charge and he still had time in his life to have fun.
He used to date, he thinks, only right now he can't remember when the last time was. He used to laugh and enjoy the sheer intellectual thrill of his job. Now that thrill is blunted by paperwork and looking over people's shoulders and sitting through Ecklie's endless status meetings and he can't remember the last time he did something just for the hell of it.
No, wait, he corrects. He dropped by to say hi to Greg just for the hell of it, and see what a difference it made in his day?
Interesting. Cause, or effect?
He grins, and thinks maybe he should conduct a little experiment to test his hypothesis.
Greg's new weapon of choice in the war against the CSIs is competence. He's going to outclass, outperform and generally outdo all of them.
Except, possibly (inevitably), Grissom.
But that's okay, because Grissom is at worst neutral, and at best marginally on his side. He doesn't need to show Grissom up. Which is good, he thinks, because he'd kill himself trying and never get past the foothills.
He discovered entirely by accident that there's a specific volume for any given type of music at which he can ignore it completely. He's not sure why that is - any louder or any softer and he notices it, he starts singing and air-drumming and dancing. But at that particular volume, whatever it is for the music in question, he can tune it out completely, and not even notice when the disc is done.
So he keeps music on all the time now, not just when the mood strikes him, and he works like a maniac. Jacqui's got her hands full with one particularly gruesome case and isn't using two pieces of equipment in her corner of the lab, and she trades Greg the use of them in exchange for putting on one of her CDs.
"I mean," she says, "since we ALL have to listen to it..."
"Cool," Greg says, "excellent," because he doesn't care what it is, he's not going to be listening to it. But he needs something going when Nick and Warrick and Sara come down to sneer at him. Baby, he thinks, Greggo's gonna sneer right back.
His first stun of the night is Catherine, who (to be fair to her) seems equally ticked off at Nick as she does at Greg. But anyway: she's his first catch, and he has his results back to her not only in record time but also colour-coded and collated, spreadsheet layout designed by G. Sanders.
She looks at him, looks at the report (typed, presented in a clear plastic folder that he stole from Hodges' desk when he wasn't looking, quite possibly the most professional thing Greg has done since he left grad school) and then looks at him again.
"That was... fast," she says and narrows her eyes.
He sparkles, or at least he does his best to sparkle. "The new, streamlined, totally Nick-free Greg is a wonder machine," he says.
She shakes her head. "I'll believe that when you're still doing it in two weeks," she says on her way out.
Greg grins at her back. In two weeks, he thinks, he's going to be even faster.
Next up are Sara and Warrick, tag-teaming on a hit-and-run, and with their usual communications skills manage to both come down looking for the same results within five minutes of each other. The new Greg, however, is a psychic on top of it all, and he has two blockbuster copies waiting for them.
His best catch by far, however, is Nick, who tries to make a joke about it as he examines the glossy report Greg hands him wordlessly.
"If I'd have known you'd work faster, I'd have dumped you ages ago," he says.
Greg shows him his teeth. "You didn't dump me," he says and tries to force a little pleasantness out between his clenched jaws, "I left you."
Nick flashes his most insincere grin and shrugs with one shoulder. "Yeah, sure," he says, "whatever."
"You're not really good at remembering the way things happen, are you?" Greg asks, fully aware that Jacqui is listening. "I mean, in your version I was deadweight, whereas in what we like to call 'reality', I ditched you."
"Keep telling yourself that, man," Nick says.
"I don't have to," Greg says, "because it's the truth. You only have to practice lies."
Nick shakes his head and leaves with his report, and Greg's mood is starting to ebb but then he sees that Jacqui is giving him a thumbs up and so is Archie, from the door to the A/V lab.
Dude, he thinks, I rule.