FIC: Before the Dawn, 10/?

[astralis]

Nick knew that the bodies of two young girls were lying on metal slabs in the morgue, near where Brenda Collins was lying in a drawer, now just a body waiting to be claimed.

Bodies.

Death.

Blood.

Screaming.

Darkness.

It felt like nightmares, echoing in his head.

The police told him about the boy he shot. His name was Petey - no last name, no real name - and he was one of the leaders of that little gang, that little family, of kids. It was a clean shot, which was something, and it would heal - but Nick Stokes had still shot a kid.

It was dark in the interrogation room. How had he never noticed it before? It was intimidating, being on this side of the table, and strangely sickening. And if he didn't feel like a criminal before he sure as hell felt like one now, with two cops coming at him from both sides trying to get him to confess to everything in the world. All he did was follow Sara to that factory and shoot a kid - in self defense, sure, but he shot him, he shot a kid -

But he didn't commit every damn crime in the universe, which was what it felt like, and it was like the world was caving in on itself. Despite it all Nick had always thought that if you behaved yourself things would come out okay. Good boys looked after the people they loved and minded their own business and the world was supposed to pass them by and let them live happily ever after.

He should have stopped believing in fairytales long ago, but he'd always kept believing, always kept hoping, because then maybe there'd be a princess and a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. What he got was Sara, and he loved her so much it hurt and maybe she was his princess, and his pot of gold was a job that gave him nightmares and barely paid him enough to keep his bills covered.

Everything it came back to was the dead girls, and Sara. Someone called Rafael had killed the girls, they said, but they wanted to know what Nick and Sara had been doing in the old factory in the first place. Nick said, over and over again, that they were just trying to find out who had killed Brenda Collins, and yes it was against regulations and he'd known that all along, but they were just trying to help -

Over and over and over again.

They let him go eventually, of course. He wasn't being charged with anything (although there seemed to be an implicit hint of "yet" in the air) but he was suspended from work pending further investigation and had to surrender his passport and wasn't allowed to leave town.

It wasn't as if there was anywhere he could go.

"Where's Sara?" he asked.

Still in interrogation, they said.

Sara, he thought; Sara who pretended to be so brave and strong but yet was like icecream inside -

Nick shook his head, stuck inside his own nightmares.

Warrick was, probably inevitably, waiting for him, looking strangely out of place in the corridor. "Want me to drive you home?"

Nick didn't, actually, but he wasn't sure he could stop his hands shaking long enough to drive safely home. "Whatever."

They drove back to Nick's in silence. Nick found he could only bear it because Warrick wasn't saying anything, wasn't asking any more questions about Sara or about the kids or why Nick had done what he had. He supposed that was one of Warrick's best traits, that you could count on him not to say anything when things were really bad. "Do you need anything?" Warrick asked, words finally falling into the silence, as they pulled into the driveway of Nick's condo.

"No." Nick swallowed. "No, I'm fine."

"You need anything, you call me."

"Sure," Nick said, lying blatantly. He'd become better at that. Couldn't lie to Sara, couldn't lie to Grissom - but he could lie to anyone else and hardly care about it. Well, he'd come a long way from that good little Texan boy.

"And you'll be okay?"

"Sure," Nick lied again. Okay probably meant not having too much to drink, not sitting up for hours watching sports mindlessly on television, not waiting for and worrying about Sara. But Warrick's definition of okay and Nick's definition of okay were two different things, and in Nick's world being okay meant that you weren't breaking down. Anything else was a bonus.

"I'll see you, then," Warrick said, and it was clear that he knew not to believe a word Nick said. For a moment Nick felt uneasy, even disloyal, but the moment passed. This was about him and Sara and them getting through this however they could, and all the others - Warrick, Catherine, Grissom - well, it had nothing to do with them. They were on the outside, looking in, with no idea what things were like on the inside. No idea what it meant to be Nick.

"Thanks," he said, almost automatically. "Guess I'll see you soon. I don't know when I'll be allowed back to work."

"Yeah. See you, Nick."

"Bye." Nick began the strangely long walk up to his front door, noting that Warrick didn't drive away until he was safely inside.

Just as the interrogation room felt different, so did home. It seemed unfamiliar somehow, as if someone had come along and rearranged all Nick's things, giving them a different quality. Kicking off his shoes he grabbed a beer from the fridge and sat down on the sofa with it, trying to find something halfway decent to watch. He wasn't supposed to keep alcohol in the house, because of Sara, but she had plenty of alcohol herself anyway. He liked to believe she was over her drinking thing, but knew damn well she wasn't. He just let her do it anyway, because he couldn't stop her without making her angry, and because when she was drunk and miserable she'd lie with her head in his lap and let him stroke her hair.

He sat there until Sara turned up. As she came in, looking worse than he felt, he realised he'd just known she'd come here instead of going home. It was the only thing that made sense. She didn't say anything, just went straight to the fridge and helped herself to a beer, then came back and sat beside him. Nick already had three beer bottles littering his coffee table.

"What'd they say to you?" Nick asked. No hi, no how are you. No point, either.

"Not much. Told me I'm a naughty girl. They suspended me."

"Me too," he said, watching Sara taking a big swallow of beer. "I do love you, you know."

Sara looked at him, and something softened in her face. "I know."

***

Nick awoke on the sofa hours later with a raging headache, a pain in the cut on his left arm, bruises all over, and an aching neck from the angle he'd been sleeping on. Sara was lying on top of him, either asleep or passed out. Judging from the number of beer bottles he managed to register when his eyes focused, between them they'd drunk all the alcohol he had, and that was a fair amount.

Sara or no Sara, life really sucked at the moment.

It occurred to him that his pager was glowing, and that what had woken him was probably the sound of a message being received. Carefully, doing his best not to disturb Sara, he scooped the pager off the floor with his fingertips and, squinting, read the message. He and Sara were wanted at PD.

This was going to go well.

"Sara?"

"Mmmf," she said, eventually.

"Get up and have a shower. We've got to go down to PD."

Sara muttered a string of swear words, and slowly raised herself up off Nick's chest. "You got any more beer?"

"Doubt it. What the hell do you want more beer for?"

Sara rubbed her forehead. "Best hangover remedy. More alcohol."

"Or not." Nick gently pushed her away, and she made it, unsteadily, to her feet. "Go and have a shower."

With Sara gone, and the sound of the shower reassuring in the background, Nick hauled himself into the kitchen and downed several glasses of water. It had the effect of making him nauseous on top of everything else, but it had to be beneficial somehow. Water was always good for you, right?

He sighed, and made his way to his bedroom in search of clean clothes.

***

The news wasn't particularly good, but it could, Nick decided, have been very much worse. They had barely escaped being charged with trespassing, and they were both suspended from work on no pay for two weeks. He wasn't charged, either, with shooting Petey, and he was left with the distinct impression that it was part of some plan to maintain public confidence in PD and CSI. Most of the city's population didn't like the street kids, despite - or because of - the fact that they were children. Countless movements to clean up the city had never gotten anywhere. The whole position left Nick very uneasy, simply because he was well aware that they should have been charged. He was a CSI; it was his job to uphold the law - and here he was, skipping around it.

When all that was over, Sara asked the officer in charge about the kids. Nick saw him go to refuse, but then sigh. "Rafael Cortez had been charged with two counts of murder, but not of assault. The DA wants to try him as an adult. As many of the others as we've been able to track down are in foster homes."

"What about - about the girls?"

"We've managed to formally identify one of them. She's Marissa Hernandez, reported missing from Carson City over a year ago. Her mother and stepfather came down this morning to ID the body." The officer swallowed. "The coroner found evidence of long-term abuse on Marissa's body. When we presented her with the evidence, the mother broke down. Stepfather's been charged with abuse and Marissa's body has been released to her mother."

Nick would have taken Sara's hand, but he wasn't sure how appropriate that would be. "No wonder she ran away," she said. "What about Angel?"

"One of the kids says her real name was Lauren, but she was called Angel because of how she looked. She fits the description of a Lauren Melling who went missing from her foster home in Sacramento, California thirteen months ago. Had a father in Vegas, but he died of a drug overdose. Mother's dead, no other relatives we can find."

"What happens to her body if no-one claims it?"

"State will have it cremated."

Nick looked at Sara, feeling slightly suspicious. He knew her too well.

"And Brenda Collins' body has been claimed by her mother, Christina Collins."

"That took a while," Nick noted.

"Her mother's in psychiatric care. There'd been debates about whether Christina could and should claim Brenda's body."

"I'm glad she did," Sara muttered.

"Yeah."

The interview over, there was nothing to do but spend the next two weeks trying to put the pieces of their lives back together. Sara was silent on the way home until they pulled into Nick's driveway, when she said, "And we still don't even know who killed Brenda Collins."

***

TBC...