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ilkkawhat · 3 years

Text

to fall on deaf ears

[prompted by myself, using "I never ask for help because I'm not sure I know how." + "It's alright to feel broken every once and a while. And it's alright to take time to heal." off of that prompts list to expand on a vague idea I got from a dream a few months ago. read on ao3 here or continue below]

“If you got a callout tomorrow to the restaurant where you got shot and Officer Clark died, could you focus?”

He pretends that it’s just like any other restaurant that serves them up a crime scene. He ignores that even while the name of the restaurant had changed, just as he had changed his exterior style with a buzzed head, the insides were still the same. There’s still the slits of warm, golden yellow light lining the walls, radiating a gentle glow to add to the elegant, intimate atmosphere.

There’s still the brick tunnel that’s overlit with fluorescence, a segue into the kitchen where it all started.

Where it all went so horribly wrong.

He can still see the pool of blood seeping down the corridor. Spreading to the walls under an imposing shadow answering his desperate calls that fall on dead ears.

He can still smell the gunpowder.

“Could you be there for your team?”

Sara puts a hand on his shoulder, gently shaking him. She gives him a look and he shrugs her off, eyes fluttering and plastering on a smile to indicate he’s fine.

He gets to work.

“Would you want you backing you up right now?”

He thinks he’s okay, just one step at a time. One breath at a time. There’s no more threat, the restaurant has been cleared so they can investigate the body lying motionless on the floor.

A body lying in a pool of blood. Arms spread, eyes closed.

A discarded weapon just out of reach.

A body that doesn’t just look like him…

It is him.

A shaky laugh mingles with a sharp breath, shaking his head in disbelief, he thinks about pinching himself because he must be dreaming, he’ll wake up in just a minute and get his assignment to an unrelated case that doesn’t have his name written anywhere except for his signature on the field report.

But even as he falls to the floor out of a reflex—the same reflex he had in a house of a hoarder—when there’s a loud crash from the kitchen that sounds not completely, but still close enough to a gunshot, he realizes this isn’t a dream.

It’s a waking nightmare.

“Nick!” Sara calls, reaching out her arms after Nick immediately backs away, shielding his shot arm with his other. An embarrassing whimper mixes with his cry—his plea of “No!” and Sara eventually gives up as he huddles himself under a table, a small table that would seat a couple on a date that he then knocks over to protect himself with the same barricade that Ray and Papa—the real target of the mad doctor who viewed Nick as nothing but a nuisance in his way, and treated him as such when he shot him without any sort of hesitation or bargaining or empty threat of telling him to back off—which he wouldn’t have done anyway, of course, but perhaps in hindsight, in another dimension, perhaps he would find himself behind the safety of the table. Perhaps he would have been able to fire a few more shots to incapacitate the serial killer.

“Nick—” Sara starts again.

“Get down!” Nick warns her, because there’s a shadow approaching from the kitchen—he readies his gun—his finger on the trigger—

“Nick, no!”

Sara bats the gun out of Nick’s hand, but the damage is done. A shot is fired, and it’s fortunately a miss, lodging its way into the cemented wall of bricks, engulfed in the shadow cast by one of the stationed uniforms meant to babysit the CSIs as they conduct their investigation.

“Jesus Christ, Stokes! What, did you think I was a ghost or something?” the officer sneers with a red face, and Sara shoots the man a sharp glare before placing herself in front of Nick.

Any words he may have had to bite back were lost anyway to his hyperventilation, still trapped in the morbidly vivid flashback of the shooting. Clark’s shooting. His shooting.

This wasn’t just any restaurant.

This is where he was shot.

And this is where Nick Stokes almost died.

That’s his reasoning for his unfortunate reaction to what he thought was a real threat, but just as before, his call falls on deaf ears and he’s exiled from the restaurant and stripped of his defenses.

Catherine soon rolls up with the coroner, having been called immediately. Their eyes only just meet as she gets an earful from Brass, who is ranting on about how she should have known better than to send Nick there, especially not after what had happened.

Nick did have to wonder if this was some spiteful attempt to show him that no, he’s not fine. That he needs to go back to therapy. That he has a twisted definition of recovery to the point where he thinks he’s already recovered when really, there’s still blood on his hands and a hole dangerously close to his heart.

And to make matters somehow even worse, the next scene he’s sent to after a brief suspension that’s sugar coated as “mandatory vacation,” is with the good doctor himself, and across the street from the Clark family.

They are among the prying bystanders that flock the perimeter of the crime scene tape. He approaches them, because he feels they are owed an explanation, not just for the horrors that happened on their street, but for the horrors of the past that he never got a chance to testify to. Not to them, at least. They didn’t want to hear him.

And unsurprisingly, they don’t want to hear him now either.

The children hug around their mother, and Clark’s widowed wife spits in Nick’s face before he can even open his mouth. The nearby uniforms don’t stop try to stop the commotion, as murmurs through the crowd then break out, “is that the CSI that killed Clark?”

He knows they wouldn’t listen to the truth even if he told them.

He nods as respectfully as he can, before turning away and coiling his fist as he walks back towards Ray.

“You okay?” Ray asks in a careful voice.

“Yeah, yeah, fine,” Nick shakes off.

“That was Officer Clark’s family, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah...Ye—” Nick stops mid sentence, losing his breath and his face contorts into a reluctant cry that he pushes back down into his chest, pressurizing the pulsing wound that stings near his heart. He shakes his head and keeps walking, not allowing himself to break down in front of his esteemed colleague, let alone the general public.

He’ll hold it in, as he always does, until he’s safe in the privacy of his own home.

But as he’ll soon come to find out, that privacy is just as much of a facade as the bravado he continues to put on in order to do his job.

So instead, he settles for the brief moments of privacy he gets in the locker room, which has always acted as a sort of sanctuary for him, dating back to his days on the football field in high school, or the baseball field in college. The time to reflect after a long and grueling game, the adrenaline having sweated out of his body and he gets a moment to think to himself before he has to either celebrate a win or mourn a loss with the rest of the team. The rest of his family.

The time to gather himself before he goes to a home that’s not a true home.

It’s a broken one.

A home where monsters spy on him. Where demons attack him.

Where he can’t sleep without fearing that the wrong move will blow it all up.

“Nicky?”

He lifts his head, and drops the shirt that he was holding in his hands.

“Were...you listening to anything I just said?” Catherine asks in a slow voice.

“Yuh-huh,” Nick smiles as he picks up the shirt, quickly putting it on to cover the scars that seem to scream out of his skin.

He hopes that she doesn’t pick it up too, and realize that it’s the same shirt he wore the day Warrick died.

“You seemed like you got lost for a minute,” she smiles sweetly at him, scratching the top of his head. “What’s the matter?”

“What do you mean? Nothing’s the matter.”

“Nick. I’ve known you for over eleven years now,” Catherine sighs. “You may look like you have a healthy body, but that tired look in your eyes tells me...you don’t have a healthy mind.”

He meets her eyes, glistening with the same softness that his mother had on the night that she came home to find him sitting in the dark.

And for once, he tells the truth in a call that falls on listening ears.

“I never ask for help because I’m not sure I know how,” Nick admits, his eyes still transfixed on the shaking hands in front of him. “I just...I still feel so...so…”

Broken.

Catherine sits down next to Nick, taking one of his fidgeting hands and curling her fingers between his. She wraps her other arm around his shoulder, hugs him tight to her body.

“It’s alright to feel broken every once and a while,” she tells him. “And it’s alright to take time to heal.”

Nick nods silently, his lips quivering as he tries to stop the flood of tears by shutting his eyelids, but one still rolls down his cheek on the side of his face and onto the hand that’s holding him.

“And you will heal,” she assures him. “I promise.”

He hasn’t healed from the shooting, no matter how much he pretends that it didn’t affect him.

The ghost of Officer Clark still haunts him, as well as the souls he’s taken by his own bullets.

He hasn’t healed from being buried alive almost six years ago, his newfound claustrophobia and aversion to fire ants in particular conflicting with the longing for solitude and his new passion for entomology.

He still hears Walter Gordon’s voice telling him what’s going to happen every time he’s trapped by a green light.

Even though it was a long time ago, he hasn’t healed from the slow burning terror of being stalked. Before he moved out of the house, he would slowly discover things that Crane had moved, altered or even taken from him.

Yet he still has one of his jackets that Crane had “graciously” picked up from the dry cleaner’s.

And he’s definitely had plenty of guns shoved in his face, and with every new barrel he stares down he feels himself transforming into something hard, something that will take a lot more to damage—but he still hasn’t healed from that very first time outside of the training field.

He wonders, if Holly Gribbs hadn’t died, would he have died in her place?

“It just feels like I never will,” his voice, fully warbled in a sob that tangles his throat. “I-I haven’t f-for years.”

And he will never heal from the childhood trauma that he’s done everything he could to drown with repression, only for it to resurface with the same ease as a beach ball floating in water. Following him. Bumping into him, reminding him of what happened that night and what was taken from him.

“You will, Nicky. You most definitely will. And I’ll be here, we’ll all be here for you until you do.”

She cups his head to her chest and lets him release the tangled web that’s ensnared him, only letting him go when he feels he’s ready, and helps him stand back up and take his first step into a full recovery.

#csi fic #nick stokes #catherine willows #sara sidle #ray langston #csi 10x23 #mk.fic #mk.op #i was gonna cheekily send the prompts as an ask to myself but lol i figured that'd be a bit lame #(you can actually legit send asks to yourself and not on anon)#sorry i like to see you suffer nick #nick and catherine #also i haven't written a lot of nick and cath fics

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