Home of Greg Sanders Slash Fiction
Chapter Ten
He has to leave early to get to a meeting with the swing shift supervisor. He has no idea what this meeting is going to be about - he found the memo in his mail yesterday, and the way it was written implied that he should already have been up to speed. He suspects this is an Ecklie doing, this random meeting - whatever. If it means Ecklie has to be at work at nine o'clock at night, then Gil can suck it up and tough it out.
He kisses Nick and pulls Greg in for a rib-crushing hug before walking out to his car. He knows that Nick is going to tell Greg about Nigel before they come to work, and that makes it easier for Gil to drive away and leave him, knowing he's not really alone with this, even for a few hours.
The meeting is, as he suspected, an Ecklie attempt to discredit him. He wears a fake grin all the way through it, refuses to be bullied by Ecklie's vague threats of administrative hell, and actually manages to come to an agreement with Jarod, the swing supervisor, about shift carryover.
"It's not that I don't want the labs working on your cases," he explains, "but I'd like them to able to work on ours, too."
Jarod is amiable in an ineffectual way, and concedes to letting the graveyard labwork take precedence over swing's between the hours of midnight and eight in the morning.
Gil is tempted to ask Ecklie if day shift would also like to be so solicitous, but the look of wrath that he's sending across the table tells Gil not to push his luck.
He's in his office by eleven o'clock, listening to the soothing skittering of his racing cockroaches and catching up on the paperwork that he's been dodging for the better part of the month. Catherine interrupts him eventually, reminds him none-too-gently about the start of shift, and he takes the stack of case calls she has waiting for him.
"I assume you've already picked one for yourself?" he asks as they walk towards the conference room.
"Maybe," she says defensively.
"Let me guess," he says, flipping through them. Robbery, double homicide, hit-and-run, suspicious circumstances. He reads through the abbreviated details of this last one. "The room with blood on the walls, locked from the inside, and empty of bodies?"
She smiles. "Well," she says and plucks the sheet from between his thumb and finger, "since you offered so nicely..."
He smiles at her. "Anything for you," he says.
"You're in a good mood," she comments, eyeing him with some suspicion. "What happened?"
"Nothing happened," he says. He can't tell her that he's feeling good about Greg, or that even though Nigel Crane scares the daylights out of him on Nick's behalf, he's got a good feeling about Nick, too.
"Yeah, right," she says. "You get laid or something?"
"I stuck it to Ecklie," he tells her.
"Ahh," she says knowingly. "Better than sex."
This is the line that ushers them into the glass-walled room, and this is the line that silences the half-conversations people are having. Nick and Warrick raise their eyebrows, and Sara's mouth falls gracelessly open.
"...but that's another story," Catherine says smoothly, sliding into the seat next to Sara. She fixes them with her least innocent of innocent smiles, and arranges herself to look professional.
Gil wants to roll his eyes at her, but his eyes find Nick's across the table instead. He looks all right, he thinks: he looks tired, and utterly exhausted, but basically all right. He can imagine Greg's reaction to the news, the dynamic outburst of rage and the enthusiastic plan-of-action improvised on the spot. Well, he hopes that's what happened anyway. He doesn't want to think that Greg-and-Gil's problems have intruded on Greg-and-Nick.
"So?" Sara says, drawing his attention back to the rest of them. "What do you have for us?"
"Sara," he says, "hit and run in the suburbs. Nick and Warrick, double at the Montecito. Catherine is heading out to Henderson, and I'll handle the B-and-E off the strip. Questions?"
They mumble no, collect their jackets and drain their coffee cups, and filter out one by one. Next to the door, Nick turns to Warrick and says, "I'll meet you out a the car, okay?"
"Sure, man," Warrick says, glancing quickly between the two of them before disappearing into the hall.
Gil waits until they're alone. "All you all right, Nick?" he asks, hoping he sounds more like a concerned supervisor than a worried lover.
Nick shrugs, folds the call-sheet in half and then in half again. "I guess so," he says, glancing up with a smile. "I, uh, I guess there's nothing to do but tough it out, right?"
He wishes he had something more encouraging, or more useful, to say to that. "I guess so," he agrees without much enthusiasm. "Nick, I paired you with Warrick on this one because it's going to be big and messy, and because - because I didn't want you working alone tonight."
Nick nods a couple times. "Right," he says.
"I mean it, Nick," Gil tells him, "it's not that I don't think you can't handle the case - I'm sure that you can. But this is going to be a trying time, and I thought it would be easier on you to have a friend at hand."
This time Nick looks at him. "Yeah," he says, "I know. I get it."
Gil considers him for a few seconds. This is what he's never been good at, separating his personal feelings from his professional ones, and he knows it's one of Nick's weaknesses, too: he reads too much into the supervisory concessions that Gil makes, and from time to time they're reduced to yet another conversation at home about drawing lines and trying not to cross them.
Then Nick sighs, and brings a hand to his face. "I know," he says, and sounds defeated but all right with it. For now, anyway. "I - thanks, Grissom. I'm sure I'll be okay, but... thanks anyway."
"You might want to tell Warrick about it," he says carefully.
"He already knows," Nick says, "so we're cool. If I freak out, he can deal."
Gil smiles. "Good," he says. He doesn't need to know how it is that Warrick already knows, when he himself has only known a few hours - he's just relieved that Warrick was able to be there when he wasn't.
He's always liked the dynamic of Nick and Warrick's friendship, even in the early days when they were betting on cases and grating on each others' nerves. Even then, knowing that Nick had a solid connection with a coworker made him feel good. Made it easier to send him out into a night filled with bad guys. It meant there was someone else to cover his back while Gil couldn't.
It still does. And it allows him to lean back and watch Nick walk out of sight, and know that he will be okay.
Now: he just has to get through the night, himself...
He finds him in the hallway outside of the morgue. He has no particular reason to be down there - no bodies hidden in the burgled apartment - but he's been looking for Jim Brass for almost an hour, and short of actually calling him on his cell (which is plan F, his absolute last resort, because he really doesn't want to have this conversation on the phone), he's working the building from top to bottom.
Jim is talking with Sara in the chilled hallway, and Gil hangs back until they wrap it up. Sara gives him a frustrated half-smile as she passes, and he forces himself to return the show of teeth.
Then Jim looks up and when his eyes fall on Gil, he stiffens.
"Jim," he says, approaching with hands out to the sides, as he would a wild animal. "I just need to talk to you about Nick."
"Oh?"
He licks his lips. "About Nigel Crane," he corrects.
He stops a few feet from Jim and they eye each other uncertainly. "I need to know what's going on, Jim. Whatever you feel about me, you have to let it go. This is about Nick."
Jim maintains his icy stare for a few seconds, then lets his eyes stutter shut. "Yeah," he says, sounding deflated. "I guess we do need to talk about that, huh?"
The sag in Jim's shoulders gives him a kind of hope, and he nods them towards a sofa along the wall. They sit at opposite ends, not really looking at each other, but facing in the right directions. It almost makes Gil smile, that even in the basement outside the morgue they feel compelled to present the illusion of civility.
"I hear," Gil says carefully, "that Crane is up on appeal...?"
"That's what I hear, too," Jim says. "Robin Childs - you know her? ADA?"
Gil nods.
"She let me know a couple days ago. She swears he's not going to get anywhere near an appellate judge, that it's just some lawyer trick and he's not going to get anywhere."
"Nick is pretty upset about it," Gil says.
Jim crinkles his face into a sad smile. "...by which you mean, you're pretty upset about it."
Gil ducks his head. "You got me," he admits, feels a smile quirk at his own mouth. "I just - I need to know, Jim, that nothing is going to happen."
"I can only tell you what I know," Jim says, "and that's not much."
"Can you find out?"
Jim looks at him, and Gil is pretty sure that he can see the wheels turning in his head. "I can ask her," he says. "She, uh, I think she has a file going on it."
Gil nods his gratitude. "Jim," he says after an uncomfortable few seconds, "I hate feeling that I'm supposed to apologise, but if-"
He holds up a hand to stop him before he gathers any momentum. "Don't, Gil," he says. "I just..." He shakes his head. "Let me deal with it on my own, okay?"
He purses his lips and nods. What else can he do? Friends give friends space when they need it. "I am sorry, though," he says as Jim gets up to leave. "That it's upset you, that it's put this distance between us."
He sees Jim's expression harden as he stares at a spot on the wall about a foot above his head. "We'll survive," he says stiffly, and walks away.
Gil watches him disappear around a corner, and wonders if they're going to be the same again. He lets his eyes fall closed for a moment, takes a deep breath, and pushes himself off of the hard-packed naugahide sofa.
The surprise that Gil feels when finding his front door locked is short-lived. It takes him all of three seconds to transition from, 'I know that's Nick's car out front' to, 'Of course he's keeping the door locked now.' He fishes out his key and lets himself in.
There's music coming from the living room, and after shedding the dregs of his working life and re-locking the door behind him, Gil follows the sound.
The living room is empty, but the tv is on and the couch is in the comfortable state of disarray of two people watching a movie and elbowing each others' feet out of the way. He smiles faintly at the vacant furniture, then moves into the kitchen.
There's a bucket of ice cream on the counter, and two spoons are sticking out of it at ridiculous angles, but Gil's gaze doesn't really stay there. Because right next to it are Nick and Greg, half-undressed and making out like teenagers. Nick has Greg pinned against the counter, their hips pressed together meaningfully and their shirts scattered on the floor. Greg's hands are moving across Nick's back with purpose, and Nick's hands - well, they're out of sight from where Gil is standing, but judging by the halting movements that Greg is making, they're not exactly idle.
He feels vaguely dirty, just standing there watching, although he knows he has nothing to apologise for. It's his house, his kitchen, and it's not like he snuck up on them... and it's not as though Nick is a little jumpy about being surveilled in secrecy these days or anything.
He clears his throat, and tries to smile meekly when they come apart and turn to face him.
"Sorry," he says, his voice thick with interest, "didn't mean to interrupt."
Greg laughs at him, the throaty laugh of arousal that Gil was so worried about never hearing again. "The hell you didn't," he says.
Nick lets him go, takes an embarrassed step to the side and grabs at the ice cream. "Forgot about this," he says, pulling the spoons out and dropping them in the sink. "Don't want it to melt."
"It's just ice cream," Gil points out, and takes an abortive step towards them. It's not that he's been suffering any great hardship the last few days, but his body has always responded quickly to sexual situations like this one, and it has been a while.
But he doesn't want to push, doesn't want to assume that they can be like this, the three of them, anytime soon. He hasn't earned that right yet.
Nick shrugs, returns the ice cream to the freezer and stands with his back to the fridge, hands in the pockets of his slacks, trying to look as calm and collected as he can given the flushed state of his skin and the half-hard protrusion below his waist.
Gil puts a smile on his face. "Really," he says, "don't stop on my account."
He begins his retreat back into the living room when a quick movement catches his peripheral attention, and he turns back. Greg has pushed himself away from the counter towards Nick, has grabbed a hold of his belt and is dragging him purposefully towards Gil.
As soon as he's within arm's reach of Gil, though, he releases Nick and reaches out for Gil.
The move takes him a bit by surprise, and the look of concentration in Greg's eyes isn't the sexiest thing he's ever encountered, but it's a long way from terrified and he supposes that it's as good a place to start as any.
He lets Greg latch onto him and he kisses him back, opening himself immediately to Greg's insistent mouth, to his questing hands and to anything that Greg wants. Everything. The kiss is skewed somehow, though, he thinks even when he feels Greg's fingers skim just under the hem of his shirt, but he can't quite pin it down. Maybe it's just too forced, too determined not to fail, that it's a letdown.
He thinks Greg feels it too, because his kiss becomes less demanding and then stops, and then Greg has pulled back enough to look him in the eye, and there's a stormy murk of emotions there that Gil is not sure how to handle.
Greg smiles at him, almost apologetically, then turns back to Nick.
"You," he says with a forced kind of bravado, "were supposed to join in."
Gil meets Nick's eyes, and he knows that they both agree: that Greg has a noble heart beating in his chest, but if it's not right, it's not right. And it's not right.
He sees Nick move his shoulders in a tiny shrug. "Sorry," he says. "I guess I missed my cue."
"Amateurs," Greg mutters, and even though he's facing away from Gil, he knows there was a theatrical roll of his eyes because he sees Nick grin.
"Flunked out of drama in high school," Nick confesses, and takes a step forward.
"You what?" Greg asks, genuinely thrown off balance by this revelation. "How do you flunk out of drama?"
"I mouthed off to the teacher," Nick says, "a lot. And I skipped, a lot. And I got caught making out with a cheerleader backstage."
Greg laughs, and although it feels a little forced there's a fair amount of genuine humour there, too, and Gil allows himself to relax somewhat. Crisis not averted, exactly; maybe diverted. But maybe that's good enough for now.
"That's - I don't believe it," Greg says. "You're making that up."
"I swear I'm not," Nick says, still smiling, and he takes another small step forward. "I've got the yearbook to prove it, somewhere."
"It made it into the yearbook?" Greg says, his voice rich with disbelief.
"Sort of."
"I was on the yearbook committee," Greg says, "okay? So I know all about last-minute deadlines full of blank pages. I know how much stuff gets made up because you have space to fill."
"It wasn't in the yearbook," Nick corrects, "but Jolene - that was the cheerleader - she wrote something about it, when she signed mine."
"And where is this alleged yearbook?" Greg asks. "Can it be produced on demand?"
"It's in a box, somewhere."
"See?" Greg says, and his hands find their way to his hips in an admonishing pose. "See? You're fabricating evidence to support a ridiculous supposition."
"I'm not fabricating evidence," Nick says, and now he's almost nose-to-nose with Greg, and if it weren't for the teasing tone of both their voices, or the sparkle he can see in Nick's eyes, then Gil might actually think they were about to start shoving each other.
"You're an evidence fabricator," Greg tells him.
"You're a chronic doubter," Nick counters.
"You're an ice cream fascist."
Nick's mouth falls open. "I - what? That was you, you revisionist. You couldn't eat the bit where the chocolate and the strawberry were touching."
"I don't like the boundary areas of Neapolitan," Greg says reasonably.
"And I'm the ice cream fascist?"
"You tried to evict my spoon."
"You were excavating the bits you like-"
Greg leans in and kisses Nick hungrily, and Nick responds enthusiastically, and Gil stands there and watches, completely unsure of what to do. He's only a few steps from the archway, he thinks, if he could get that far without drawing attention to himself-
Except then Nick starts pushing against Greg, walking him backwards until they bump into Gil, and the hand that isn't holding on tight to the back of Greg's head reaches out for Gil's shoulder. As soon as his fingers find a purchase, they close around a fist of Gil's shirt, and Gil is pulled even more tightly against Greg's back.
He hesitates a moment, waits for Greg to recognise that he's not pressed against a wall or a counter but against Gil; he doesn't want to introduce another thread of panic, of self-inflicted heroics. Doesn't want to ruin another good moment. But then Greg squirms against him, pushes back harder into him and makes another back-of-the-throat sound, and Gil lets his hands settle at Greg's waist.
Which is apparently the right thing to do, because when Nick eases his mouth to the side of Greg's neck, Greg lets his head fall back against Gil's shoulder and he whispers, "Gil - please-"
That's what he's needed to hear.
He slides his hands from the sharp angle of Greg's hipbones around to his front, to the heat of his stomach and the fuzz his fingers find there. Greg makes another sound and his breath hitches, and even as Nick turns his attention to the line of his shoulder, Greg is mewling at Gil, pushing back against him again.
Gil feels one of Nick's hands slide around his back and find access to skin, and he makes a noise of his own. He lets one hand slide up Greg's chest while the other drops a little lower, presses against the taut muscle of his abdomen to slip in under the waist of his jeans. Another half-hiccup from Greg and whatever happened to dim the thin flame of arousal inside Gil has reversed itself, because he's on fire again.
At some point Greg turns around inside the cage of Nick's arms, because Gil feels a second set of arms reach around him and worm their way under his clothes. Somebody strokes up his stomach and does obscene things to his chest, and somebody else traces lines along the length of his spine, and when he manages to force his eyes open against the electrical onslaught he sees that Nick is still focussed on Greg's neck and back, which can only mean...
...that the incredible things being done to his neck must be Greg. That must be Greg's mouth, Greg's tongue and Greg's teeth, and that hand brushing against the fly of his slacks... No, wait, that could be either of them. He takes a moment to try to account for whose hands are where, and only dimly notices when Greg pulls his lips off the skin under his chin.
"Stop thinking," Greg whispers, and ghosts another kiss across his lips.
"Sorry," Gil murmurs, and lets his eyes close. It's not always easy, turning off the intellectual part of his brain; but Nick usually succeeds and Greg is certainly doing his part.
So he concentrates for a bit on the hands sliding along his back, and then he follows one set of fingers around his side to his front, and tracks it in his mind in a circle around his navel and then it dips lower. Then he lets his mind drift a bit, let it encompass something a bit broader, and now he can feel all the hands on him at once, and with a bit more mental reckoning he can feel hands and lips and teeth and tongue and the tight area of movement that is worming against him, and he knows he's in the right space now to participate.
He inhales deeply, almost laughing at how shuddering his breath has become in this short time, and lets his hands explore. He pulls Greg in tighter, and knows that Nick is following; he finds Greg's mouth with his own and knows that Nick's lips are latched onto the nape of Greg's neck; he runs his hands up Greg's sides and feels corresponding hands trace lines on his own skin. Maybe Nick's, maybe Greg's, but in truth it doesn't matter. It feels good, and it's been too long since he's felt this kind of good.
Something warm and many-fingered works its way into the front of his slacks, and whatever is left of his intelligence evaporates. He gives in to what is being done to him, and lets his eyes fall shut. He alternates his concentration between the thrum of blood through his veins and remembering to breathe.
It won't last long, he thinks, not like this, and he's not going to let them nudge him into oblivion without taking at least one of them with him. His hands find a wonderful stretch of skin and he drags his nails across it lightly, and the groan he hears sounds like it comes from Nick. He does it again, and discovers a terrific domino effect: when he prompts that noise from Nick, Nick does something that makes Greg shimmy against him.
Feedback loop. Very - interesting.
The hand wrapped around him picks up speed and he gasps. He thinks, It's been a long time since I've actually gasped, and then he does it again because another hand comes out of nowhere and joins the first, and things start to grey out just a bit and he doesn't want it to happen yet. He thinks, when I go, I'm not going alone...
...and if I do it right, they'll all go together.
Feedback loop is a good word for it, he thinks when his ghost touches along Nick's skin produce the effect of Greg bucking against him, because that just makes his hands work faster and then those two hands on him work faster, and then Greg's rhythm changes and Nick's rhythm changes and then Gil's rhythm changes-
-and it's the most incredible feeling of focus because everything he does comes back to him filtered through the twin lenses of Nick and Greg, and that is just amazing, it's like fire refracted through a diamond and there's only so much of that kind of intensity that he can take before he shatters-
He knows that someone is laughing at him but it's a good kind of laugh, it's the kind of laugh that slips into the marrow of his bones and warms him from the inside.
He opens his eyes at the same time that his brain begins processing sensory input again. He's on the floor, leaning up against the wall next to the kitchen door; his clothes are a mess and he's sure that the inside of his clothes is a mess too; and he feels a boneless lassitude that aches so pleasantly that he can't quite stop the stupid smile from settling against his lips.
Greg is leaning against him, his back resting against Gil's side and he has Gil's right arm draped around him like a shawl. And next to him, mostly sprawled against the floor but with his head resting on Greg's legs and his legs nested against Gil's socked feet, Nick is looking pretty self-satisfied.
"What?" Gil asks lazily.
"You really zoned out there," Nick says, craning his neck to look up at him
"Yeah?" he says. "Guess I did. Maybe I should do it more often."
The smile Greg is wearing when he turns to Gil is endearing. It's a little nervous, a little sheepish maybe, a little tenuous around the edges but it's real, and it gives Gil another shot of heat in his bones. He thinks, maybe they're going to be okay after all.
"I can feel you laughing from here," Nick says, letting his eyes shut. "What is it?"
He's not quite laughing, but he knows his body is loose-limbed with humour anyway. "Jim accused me of having a harem," he tells them with something close to a chuckle. "I told him he was wrong."
Nick laughs out loud. "Spoke too soon, huh?" he says.
Gil shrugs. "Kinda looks that way, doesn't it?"
"I wonder," Greg muses, "if this is what it felt like after a Roman orgy."
They think about that for a moment.
"Cold?" Nick asks thoughtfully. "Muscles cramping up?"
"I think that's why they didn't have their orgies on the kitchen floor," Gil says, and he feels Greg laugh silently against him. That feels good, that little reverberation of joy against his chest, and he hugs him in tightly with the arm already around him.
Yes, he thinks even as the cold of the linoleum creeps into him, things just may turn out all right after all.