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[helsinkibaby]

demon_faith - I hope this gets you in time, if not, better late than never! As per request, Nick fic, and I even did Nick/Greg conversation just for you... you can read it any way you want! {g} And again, slightly over the word count, but I'm sure you'll forgive me!


Title: New Beginnings
Fandom: CSI
Pairing: Nick/Greg friendship
Word Count: 564


“I just don’t understand, Greg.” Nick stared at the neck of his beer bottle, fingers idly peeling off the label as he made his mournful pronouncement, not for the first time that night.

“So you keep saying,” Greg replied, not unkindly, and Nick looked up at his friend, smiling sheepishly.

“Sorry.” Then, after a pause, “But I don’t.”

From clear across the table, he could see the other man fighting not to roll his eyes. “Maybe you’re not meant to,” was Greg’s reasonable argument.

Nick, however, wasn’t in a mood to be reasonable, ignoring the other man’s words completely. “I mean… to just up and leave like that? No goodbyes, no nothing, not a word?” Balling up the little piece of label he’d succeeding in ripping off, he rolled it around between his fingers. “I never thought Sara’d do that.”

He knew that it had come as a surprise to everyone when a pale-faced, thin-lipped Grissom informed them all that Sara had quit, taking her vacation days in lieu of notice. Silence had reigned in the room for a good minute before Grissom had started handing out assignments, and Nick hadn’t missed the way that every conversation around the lab for the entire shift had Sara’s name whispered in quiet tones.

No-one could believe that she’d left without saying goodbye.

But what Nick really couldn’t believe was that, even with the shock, everyone else seemed perfectly able to go on with their work. It just seemed to him like there should be more upset somehow.

“I mean… aren’t you gonna miss her?” he demanded, because of all the people in the lab, he would have been expecting Greg to be distraught, the younger man’s crush on Sara being something of an open secret.

“Sure I am,” Greg shrugged easily, bringing his beer bottle to his lips, taking a long swallow. “But come on, Nick… can you really blame her?” Curious at Greg’s matter-of-fact tone, Nick tilted his head, wordlessly inviting him to continue, and Greg ticked off on his fingers the reasons why he wasn’t shocked. “Hank… Melissa Winters… the promotion… Grissom… that thing that no-one’s supposed to know about, but everyone does because PD can’t keep their mouths shut? I’m not surprised she left… I’m just surprised she stuck around this long.”

Put that way, it makes perfect sense, and Nick leans back in the booth, sighing. “I guess,” he allows grudgingly.

“She needed a fresh start,” Greg says. “Don’t tell me you’ve never felt that way… Mr Stokes.”

The emphasis on his name is deliberate, making Nick smile ruefully, because he did feel that way; in fact, it’s the reason he moved from Dallas to Las Vegas in the first place, because, much as he loved them, proud as he was of his father’s achievements on the bench, being his parents’ son was just too damn exhausting.

“Fair point,” he grinned, holding up his beer bottle in salute. As he did so, a fancy struck him, and he held out the bottle to Greg. “A toast… to absent friends.”

“To absent friends.” Greg held up his bottle, but didn’t otherwise move it. “And new beginnings.”

At Greg’s words, Nick felt a smile, the first of the day, come to his lips. “To new beginnings,” he echoed, the necks of the bottles meeting with a glass clink.

He liked the sound of that.