Home of Greg Sanders Slash Fiction
Chapter Eight
Gil really isn't looking to run into Jim again that night, but they almost knock each other over in the hall outside the morgue, and there's a shuffling moment of avoided gazes and muttered confessions of clumsiness and then they each take a step sideways and pass like ships in the night.
He turns and watches Jim disappear around a corner, feeling a little bit sorry for himself, for the friendship he's missing. He knows they'll patch it up in time, eventually - or maybe, he thinks, they won't. Jim's not good at facing things he's not comfortable with, although as long as he can pretend they don't exist, as long as he never has to confront them, he'll let anything slide. Gil wonders how much of his failed marriage was due to that willful ignorance.
"What the hell was that?"
It's not often that Gil is startled, genuinely caught off guard, but when he is - an unexpected shotgun blast, a body that moves on its own, a coroner who sneaks up on him - his reaction is generally extreme.
Al Robbins grins evilly at him while he recovers his sense of balance, while he tries to calm his heartrate out of the red zone.
"Don't do that," Gil grouses at him.
It earns him another grin. "So you going to tell me what that was about?"
"What what was about?" he asks.
Al narrows his eyes. "I've never seen you and Jim so prickly," he says flatly. "Are you going to tell me, or am I going to have to find out on my own?"
Shit, Gil thinks. The last goddamn thing he needs is to have Al digging around with the best of intentions where things are best left undisturbed. "It's complicated," he says.
"Well there's a surprise," Al says brightly. "Do I get twenty questions?"
"No."
"Animal, vegetable or mineral?"
Gil rolls his eyes. "Look, Al," he says, "I have a case to get back to, really, it's - it's nothing."
"The day that Jim Brass and Gil Grissom can't look each other in the eye is not nothing," Al tells him, and sits in the spot that Gil had so recently vacated. He pats the seat next to him and gives Gil his best I-deal-with-dead-people-all-day look.
He glances down at his watch. "I really have to get back to work," he says, and when he looks back at Al he knows that the man is not going to be deterred. He sighs. "I'll, uh - can I buy you lunch?"
Al grins at him again, a less malicious display of teeth this time. "You can always buy me lunch, Gil," he says.
"And on the promise of lunch," he goes on in the patient tone of one used to dealing with Al's more pedantic moods, "can I safely assume that you will not launch your own investigation?"
It really does his heart good to see that crinkle of delight in Al's eyes when he knows he's been caught out.
Al holds up three fingers solemnly. "Promise," he says.
Gil allows himself a small smile. "Thank you," he says and turns to walk away. After a step, he turns back with a frown on his face. "You were a boy scout?"
"No," Al tells him cheerfully, "but I've known a few in my life."
His smile feels a little closer to real this time. "I bet you have," Gil says, and goes back to work.
"Animal, vegetable or mineral?"
Gil smiles pleasantly at the waiter. "I'll have the club on rye," he says, folding his menu closed and handing it back to him. The young man scribbles it down next to Al's order, and disappears in a flurry of hails from other tables.
"Animal," Al says again, still affably cheerful, "vegetable, or mineral?"
"Al," Gil says, sipping at his glass of water, "that could take all night." It's easy to forget, in the midst of his personal life and the grim work they do, how much he enjoys Al's company.
"Well," Al says, "you could make it easier on me..."
Gil shrugs, sets his glass down carefully in the ring of condensation it left. This isn't Manny's; he figures he doesn't need to have this conversation within earshot of waiters who know him by name. This is further down the strip, a place he's been a few times but seldom frequents because it's too out of the way. And now, at a shade past six in the morning, it's blissfully deserted, which suits his needs perfectly.
"Oh, come on," Al says, leaning forwards. "You and Jim are like brothers. Did you kill somebody?"
He glances up sharply at that. "No...?" he says carefully, wondering where that came from.
"So?" Al says. "Tell me what is so scandalous that Jim would let the fires of friendship burn low?"
Gil sighs, drags one finger down the sweating glass in front of him. "We had words," he says tactfully.
He can hear Al's muttered curse. "Yes," he says, "I had that figured out. About what?"
"Jim... said a few things that cut a little too close to the bone."
"What could he possibly say-"
"Apparently I'm having a mid-life crisis, and taking other people down with me."
"Ooh," Al says, practically wiggling in anticipation. "Who?"
"Nick. And Greg." Gil shakes his head a little, feels his throat close up a touch. "Especially Greg."
"How?" Al asks. "Did you set them up or something?"
Gil actually laughs at that. Well, he thinks, in a manner of speaking... "I've been dating Nick for - let's see, two years now?"
Al frowns. "He left you for Greg?"
"He probably should have," Gil says. "We're... seeing each other."
"Who, you and Greg?"
"Me," Gil says, "and Greg, and Nick."
"I - oh. Ohhhh."
He looks up at that, because he needs to see how badly the rest of his shift is going to go, and he's surprised to see Al trying not to laugh. "What?" he asks, frowning. This is not going strictly according to the script in his head.
"What 'what'?" Al asks.
He really doesn't want to spell it out more than he already has. "So?"
Al picks up a spoon and balances it on a finger. "So what?" he says with a twinkle and a grin. "I mean, you seem happy enough. Or you did, anyway. What's the crisis?"
"I'm forty-eight. I'm seeing two men simultaneously, and one of them is literally young enough to be my son."
"Which one?"
He sighs. "Al..."
He's still grinning, and he sets the spoon down. "Greg's not a kid, Gil. He's old enough to know what he wants, and to go for it. What's the harm in letting him have it?"
"I wasn't exactly a shrinking violet, Al."
"So? You're fearless, Gil. So you took the first step. So what? You expect me to believe that this is anything other than consensual?"
Gil narrows his eyes at Al. He's inclined to think there's another shoe, about to drop and hit him squarely on the head, and yet... "Al, doesn't anything ever upset you?"
A shadow flickers across his eyes. "I've seen kids sodomised with firearms, Gil," he says in a quiet voice. "This thing seems pretty shiny happy to me."
Gil lets his gaze fall to the table between them. After a moment he says, "I'm not sure if your talent for perspective is a blessing or a curse, Al."
"I love you, Gil," Al says with a strange fierceness. "You and Jim and Catherine, and Nick and Greg now, too. You're my family. You're not allowed to fall apart on me. Understand?"
"Clear," Gil says with a false smile, stops just short of snapping of a sloppy salute. "Besides," he adds as lightly as he can a second or two later, "I don't think Greg would let me leave at this point. I've already made him cry."
"You what?" Al asks, his voice rising in light anger. "You made that amazing kid cry? You heartless beast, Gil."
"Amazing kid?" Gil asks with a half-frown. "Al, you're not trying to charm your way into the communal bed, are you?"
Al laughs, a real laugh that almost brings tears to his eyes. "God help me," he says, taking a deep gulp of air. "No, I'm a ladies' man. Greg just... I like the kid. The world has plenty of time to break him. Let him enjoy himself without restraint while he still can, while the universe still delights him. Don't take that away."
"You're making me feel like a heel," Gil chides him gently.
"Good. Now go home and beg and grovel and do whatever it takes to get things back on an even keel with those boys."
Gil narrows his eyes again. "Are you sure you're a ladies' man, Al?" he asks.
"Most definitely," Al says with a smile. "I've tried the alternative and it just didn't push any buttons for me."
Gil's eyebrows shoot for his hairline. "You never told me that."
"It was a long time ago," Al defends, levelling a finger at him, "and you never told me you liked 'em in multiples of two."
He feels the sides of his face turn pink. "Point taken," he says as a limp sandwich is deposited in front of him. He smiles his thanks at the waiter, who blinks blankly at him and sets an anemic-looking steak in front of Al.
"Leave Jim to me," Al says with authority, sloshing hot sauce liberally over his lunch. "You take care of your own nest."
Greg kills some time before he gets the ball rolling. Washes the dishes, does some laundry, drives across to his end of town and waters his plants, then lets himself back into Gil's house. He stands for a moment in front of the door, leaning against it and looking down the hall towards the living room. He wonders how long he'll still have a key, how long he'll be allowed to call this home.
Warrick picks up on the third ring. "Can you do me a favour?" Greg asks him.
"Sure..." Warrick says, a little guarded maybe but that's just Warrick. Greg doesn't take it personally. "What is it?"
"Nick," Greg says.
A little pause. "Oh?"
"Keep him busy for a couple hours after shift tonight, okay?"
A longer pause. "Uh, Greg... isn't that your job?"
"Just... just a couple hours, Warrick." Greg takes a few steps into the house, hopes he doesn't sound too desperate. "Take him out for a drink or something. I'll - I'll pay you back for it, if it's the money-"
"Man, it's not the money," Warrick says, "I just - hang on. Is this about the other guy?"
Deathly long pause. "What?" he asks when he's found most of his voice again.
"Other girl, whatever - man, I know Nick says it's all cool, but - is everything okay?"
He almost wants to laugh but he stops himself. "Everything is fine, Warrick," he says, "I just - I need to do something, and Nick'll only get in the way."
"How much are you going to pay me to keep a lid on that?" Warrick asks, but he's teasing.
Greg lets out the breath he wasn't quite holding. "So you'll do it?"
"Sure," Warrick says. "That's what friends are for. Right?"
He smiles. He likes the sound of friend rolling off Warrick's tongue like that, like it belongs there. "If you say so," he says.
"So..." Warrick says after a pause. "Can I ask you something?"
He narrows his eyes in the privacy of Gil's living room. "What?"
"Is it Jacqui?"
This time the silence is kind of sputtering. "What?" he asks, finally.
"The third party in your social scene, man. I know she kinda digs Nick, and I know you and her flirt like it's going out of style-"
He does laugh then. "No," he says, "it's not Jacqui. And don't let her hear you say that, she'll break both your kneecaps."
Warrick's rich laugh echoes down the line at him. "Thanks for the heads up, man. Don't think I'm giving up, though. ...So - two hours okay?"
He swallows. "Should be just about right," he says.
"I'll make it three," Warrick says. "Later."
"Later."
Gil lets himself into the house and listens to the heavy silence. He knows that Greg's car is still parked across the street, but Nick's is nowhere to be seen. He toes off his shoes and thinks, Maybe they're having that conversation that Nick promised.
He takes of his jacket and hangs it up, grabs at the back of his neck and tries to squeeze a little life into his stiff muscles. Long, boring, painful night of mostly paperwork. He helped Sara where he could, but she was mostly doing it solo; he tried to give Catherine a hand but she had worked with Jim all night, and that was an awkward and horrible thing he didn't need to deal with in public. Warrick not-so-gently told him to leave him and Nick alone, so... so nothing to keep him from his collection of backdated administrative bullshit.
Except for that oddly hallucinatory lunch with Al that he's still not sure how he feels about. On the one hand, Al is right. Gil has found that, on average, Al is usually right. On the other hand...
He sighs. Jim is usually right, too. It's exhausting in a way that he's not used to, this being pulled morally in two directions. He wants to follow his heart, but his conscience is a relentless bastard. He hopes faintly that a good night's sleep will solve all his problems.
He bypasses the kitchen, bypasses the master bedroom, goes straight into the guest room and barely manages to shuck off his slacks and drop his shirt before he falls face-first onto the mattress. Mmmmm... sleep has never seemed so seductive as it does right now.
So why, he wonders almost ten minutes later, is he still awake?
He starts a breathing cycle to count himself into unconsciousness, and he's just passing through twelve when he hears the door to his room open, and a moment later the side of the mattress dips down. He counts himself back into full consciousness as quickly as he can, and by the time he's more or less awake, someone is spooned up against him and has arm around his waist.
He looks down at that arm in a strangled kind of incomprehension. "Greg?" he asks carefully.
He feels lips press into the base of his neck. "I need to tell you something," Greg says against his skin.
"Okay," Gil says, acutely aware of the tension in Greg's arm, thrumming through his entire body. "I'm listening."
Greg takes a breath. "When I was in grade three, there was this kid at my school: Gavin. He wasn't the kid who pushed you down in the playground, but he was still a bully. He was - hell, maybe he was a sociopath, I don't know. He spent a week becoming my best friend once, and I thought I'd died and gone to heaven, you know? He was in grade four and he was so cool and he had the neatest toys and the best lunches and he was the king of the swingset..."
Gil feels him take another breath.
"And he got me to tell him all of my secrets. I mean, okay: when you're eight you don't have that many secrets, but I told him everything anyway. Anything he wanted to know, I told him. I thought, hey, we're friends, right? But - ah, fuck. At the end of the week he told me he'd been kidding. That he hated me and that I was stupid for thinking he'd ever want to be friends with me. He told all of my secrets to everyone, and even the sixth-graders made fun of me. It was - awful. I faked being sick for a whole week after that, actually made myself throw up so I didn't have to go to school."
Gil closes his eyes. "Oh, Greg," he breathes. He remembers the taunts, too, the jibes and the infinite cruelties of youth.
"See," Greg continues, "the next month he did it again. To me. And I let him. I was so - I don't know. I let him apologise and tell me he still wanted to be my friend, and then..." He shrugs. "Next week, bam - ha ha Greg, the joke's on you. I felt so dumb.
"But the raelly dumb part," he keeps going before Gil can say something, "is all that year, I knew if he tried it again, I'd let him. I just... it made sense somehow. Like it was my role in that playground to take whatever he gave me."
Gil wraps his hand around Greg's wrist where it's clutched against his chest, prises the fist open enough to get two fingers inside. "Greg," he says, "I wish I could have been there."
Greg kisses the side of his neck, and Gil can feel the beginnings of tears against his skin. "I know how much you like scars," Greg says, and turns his arm over in front of Gil's face. "I've never shown anyone these ones before."
It takes Gil a long time to find them, thin white lines along the inside of his arm, above his elbow. Short and shallow, he thinks, tracing his finger down the longest. Very old. "What-"
"I wasn't trying to kill myself," Greg tells him. "Just... it was a coping mechanism. When things started to get out of control, when everything got kind of fuzzy. Just a little pain made everything sharp again, made the world snap into focus so I could deal with it."
Gil looks at the scars, doesn't know what to say.
"I was twelve when I started," Greg says, "and fourteen when I stopped. No one ever knew."
Gil kisses the scar closest to his mouth, lets his lips rest against it long enough to feel the steady pulse just under the skin. "I'm so sorry," he says.
"When I was fifteen," Greg says with a brave deep breath, "I let some random old guy give me a handjob in the bathroom at the mall. It was - weird. He didn't really come on to me, I mean I guess I came on to him - anyway. It was short and scary and amazing and I'm lucky he wasn't some freak because I probably would have let him do anything. I just... I'd only ever made out with girls, and it never really felt right, like there had to be more to it than that and there I was, skipping school and killing time at the mall and there was this guy sort of not really looking at me, and, and. And it was so bad but it was the best thing that'd ever happened to me."
Gil keeps a finger moving along the nest of invisible scars because he doesn't know what to say to this latest confession. Part of him remembers being fifteen and terrified, and another part of him thinks of the dead boys he's had to process in places like that. He lets his eyes close.
Greg takes another deep breath behind him, and Gil braces himself for whatever comes next.
"I did drugs in high school," he says, his voice a little shaky around the edges. "Weed and speed mostly, but tried a little of the harder stuff. I had one really bad trip where I almost drowned in this guy's pool - I don't even know who he was. Just this guy that someone knew, giving the shit away for free and I think if I hadn't almost killed myself in such an insanely stupid way, scared myself enough to walk away from it, I would probably still be there. Guess I'm lucky I made it out in one piece. I can still remember hitting my head on the bottom of that pool and not being able to make my arms move the way they were supposed to. I only stopped having drowning nightmares a couple year ago."
Something in the way Greg is breathing, or almost not breathing at this point, makes Gil keep his mouth shut: there's more coming, he thinks. This litany of sins isn't over yet.
"I hit my girlfriend once." Gil can feel Greg tense up at his own words, waiting for some harsh reaction from Gil, and Gil has never been so glad of his reflex control as he is right then.
"I was a sophomore," Greg continues, "she was a freshman, I don't even really remember what happened. I guess we were fighting about something, but it's not like I just snapped and belted her one. We were sort of sparring, sort of swinging at each other a little, and then out of nowhere I threw a real punch. I swear I don't know how it happened. She went over backwards and I just stood there, looking at her - I don't know who was more surprised. She spent the rest of the night with a bag of frozen peas against her face, holding my hand while I threw up. I made her break up with me and I started cutting again. Only twice, and then I, I don't know. I got a grip on myself. She helped a lot. Her name was Lillian and on bad nights, I can still see the look on her face where she was sprawled on the floor."
Gil works his fingers back into the tight fist of Greg's hand, and kisses the back of his knuckles. This time he knows that Greg is finished talking, that he's laid himself as bare as he knows how to and that now he's waiting for Gil to say something.
And he doesn't know what to do with this precious gift.
He knows what he wants to say, that he loves him just as much now as he ever did; that this trust that he's shown means more to him than anything else possibly could; that he doesn't judge him for the actions of his youth; that his smile is the most beautiful thing he knows.
But he doesn't have the words to say that, and couldn't coax his vocal chords into cooperating even if he knew what to make them say.
"So," Greg says after a long time, a long time in which Gil has held his hand, touched his lips to his skin often enough to not be forgotten. His voice is hollow and raw. "There you go, the top five ways that Greg Sanders is going to disappoint you."
Gil forces himself to move, to roll onto his back and look up at Greg in the ghostly glow of the sun through the curtains. Greg is crying, but silently, and without any movement: just tears and a heavy sadness in his eyes. Not crying: weeping.
He reaches up to touch his face. "You don't disappoint me," he says, and is surprised at how rough his own voice is.
"Then it hasn't sunk in yet," Greg says, turns his head enough to kiss the tips of Gil's fingers, then leans his cheek into the touch.
"It doesn't matter," Gil tells him. "We all have things in our past we're not proud of, Greg, and there's no way that the things you did are going to disappoint me now."
Greg smiles at him sadly. "I want to believe that," he says, "I really do, but..."
Gil understands. "But Gavin," he finishes, and blinks his own incipient tears out of the way. "He's not here, Greg. And neither Nick nor I will ever jerk you around like that. We love you. I love you."
"What if that's not enough?" Greg asks, only his voice is barely a noise and Gil can see how much it costs him to put it into words.
"Greg..." He wipes his tears away with one hand, and pulls Greg down to rest against his chest. He holds him close for a few heartbeats, kisses his hair and says, "You want to hear my confession?"
Greg whispers something against his breastbone that he's not quite sure he catches, but decides it must have been an affirmative of some flavour.
"I've hurt so many people in my life," Gil says, "I can't even remember them all anymore. I'm not good at noticing when people get attached to me, I'm not good at dealing with it when it finally penetrates the fog. I have trouble remembering that the things I say and the way I say them affect people. I - I've broken people in two without realising it, I've walked away from them when they needed me because I couldn't see it. I've made my own mother cry, and all I could do was stand there like an idiot, not seeing what I'd done. I never see it until it's too late, and then I don't know how to fix it. I'm ashamed of how many people I've hurt, Greg, and I don't want to add you to that list. Help me. Help me not do this to you."
"I don't know how," he thinks Greg says.
He wraps his arms around his shoulders and pulls him in tight. "Just this," he says. "This is good."