Nick felt he was being watched. Glancing at Grissom sitting at the kitchen table proved his unease, seeing as the man had put his crossword down to observe him. It was then that he made a promise to himself to never ignore that feeling of unease ever again. “He’s a manipulative son of a bitch.”

“Oh?”

“Nigel Crane. He manipulated me.” Nick slowed his pacing while rubbing the back of his neck, trying to put his feelings into some comprehensible thought. He’d spent so much time analyzing that psycho, wondering how he could have missed or ignored all that evidence that said he was in trouble. “God damn it, he had the whole situation under his control, Gris.” And he probably still does, Nick added silently.

Grissom pushed his glasses up, unconsciously taking on the professor mode with his hands folded on the table in front of him, his head tilted slightly to the left. “Did you have any reason to suspect that all those little coincidences would add up to someone stalking you?”

He shook his head, wincing at the oncoming headache, “That’s not the point.” Nick stopped pacing, standing a few feet away from his boss. “He held a gun to my head and I just had to tell him that it wasn’t the first time I had one aimed at me.”

Looking confused, Grissom asked, “And how did he react to that?”

“He pointed the gun at himself.” Nick’s face went red, as he wanted to explode, though he did his best to keep calm. “That little shit made me save his life.”

The few feet between them grew smaller as Nick pushed forward, “It wasn’t my choice. You said he wanted to be me, right? He calculated the whole thing in only a matter of seconds.” There were no more than a few inches between them when he finally stood still. Grissom had to lift his eye level as Nick went on, “Crane wanted to know what it would feel like to have the nozzle of a gun pointed towards him, because I knew. It would be one more thing he’d have in common with me. He had no intention of killing himself. He knew!”

Nick was seething.

Grissom pulled out the seat beside his, seeing how agitated Nick was becoming. He’d welcome the change compared to the quiet, subservient man that Nick was since Crane had been arrested, but his health wasn’t entirely up to par to handle such stress. Nick sat down without fuss as he continued to sort all the puzzle pieces into something tangible. “You’re telling me to not take this personally Gris, but man it sure as hell is. He called Galloway a ‘gift’. I hadn’t put the two together, but his method for killing her was because of me.”

“How so?” His guest was near breaking point, the only thing probably stopping him from reaching it was the need to get his thoughts out in the open. A powerful need to reach out and touch coursed through his body, his fingers sparked, with only the kitchen table to ground them. He wanted to show Nicky that he wasn’t alone, that he was safe. But the younger man radiated with fear and hatred, warding off any sort of intimate contact. There wasn’t anything he could do except let Nick compartmentalize his experience all on his own.

“’Rick and I– We’d finished a really quiet shift and neither of us had any place to go afterwards, so we decided on my place for a couple of beers and just chilled out for a while. We wound up comparing notes on some of the more unsettling evidence that we’d ever witnessed on a case…”

“Oh, come on! A quarter?”

“Yep. Right between the eyes.” Warrick illustrated by pressing his index finger to the same location on Nick’s forehead.

“That’s not scary, dude--gross yes, and maybe a bit unsanitary, but definitely not scary.” He snorted while lifting his beer can to his lips.

“You weren’t there, partner.” The corner of his mouth was twitching into a smile.

“Nuh uh. I can count on both hands the number of nastier things we’ve both seen while on a case.” They’d sat quietly for a few minutes, neither wanting to budge on the issue, but Nick wasn’t going to cough anything up in return until he was satisfied.

“Alright, well there was this one case,” Warrick paused dramatically as he leaned in closer, his voice was no more than a whisper, “Have you ever seen what a plastic bag looks like after being processed?”

Nick followed suit and leaned in to hear, completely amused at his friend’s antics, “For what?”

“Strangulation. I had to process one for prints.”

“And what’s so scary about that?”

“The bag, it can stretch, leaving an imprint of what the vic’s face looks like at the time of their death. Large blank circles where their eyes would be and the mouths are open so wide you can nearly hear the screams. I’m telling you, that’s real freaky shit. It’s like seeing a ghost.”

“You’re so full of shit, bro.”

Nick looked down at his hands, fiddling with the bandage over his right wrist, “Crane must have been listening in on us. And at some point he decided to give me that gift.” Bile rose to the back of his throat at the idea of someone having suffered such a horrific death, just for his experience--his curiosity.

“You know, studies have shown that at any given day, one in a thousand people will feel as if they’re being stalked. And at the same time, if I remember this correctly, one in every forty-nine actual victims don’t believe that they were.”

“Yeah? Well, which statistic do I fall under? I didn’t have a clue.”

Grissom decided to take a chance then, placing his left arm over the back of the other chair, giving his thumb opportunity to stroke over Nick’s shoulder in hopes of comforting him. “I’m not sure. But what I do know is that this was not your fault.”

“I know. It’s still difficult though...”

Nick shifted his chair, leaving their bodies flushed as they sat there for some time after in comfortable silence. Leaching on each others strength, crutching each other’s weaknesses, both knowing that within this mess something changed the dynamic of their friendship.

When their temples touched, Grissom had to remind himself to breath.

the end