black_dahlia63 (black_dahlia63) wrote in csi_lv_slash, @ 2008-06-10 13:45:00 |
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Current mood: | sad |
"Kjaere" (Nick/Greg, 7/12)
Title – Kjaere
Author - black_dahlia63
Characters – Nick Stokes, Greg Sanders, various OC’s
Spoilers - Fannysmackin’
Rating – PG
Warning – Serious angst, but hey…people kind of expect that from me by now, right?
Disclaimer – not mine, don’t sue.
Thankyouz to elmyraemilie for creative input and moral support.
AN: The story covers the time span of a year, and will update by one month each chapter.
Previous instalments here.
April 5th – Desert Palms, 3.35 p.m
Three pages had been torn from the calendar that had been a Christmas present, and the current picture showed the little red-haired girl who came to visit Greg several times a week. She was sitting on a horse, her hands gripping the reins and a delighted grin on her face – and the nurses who took care of Greg would look at this picture with heavy hearts, because it had been a long time since the little girl had smiled like this. She had done in the beginning, when she and the man who always accompanied her must have had faith that Greg would wake up, but that had been far too long ago; when the little girl came to visit now – not as often as she had done in the beginning, and she didn’t stay for nearly as long – she would stand next to the bed, both of her hands clasped round one of Greg’s, and the sadness on her face was almost too much for the nurses to look at.
Several helium balloons were tied to the bed, and the pictures on them – SpongeBob, Winnie the Pooh and Hannah Montana - were mute testament to the fact that they had been chosen by the little girl, and the wall behind the bed seemed to be a tableau of everything that had taken place during the preceding five and a half months. Get Well Soon cards, some of them now fading at the edges, jostled for space with drawings in pencil and crayon – all of which bore the name Emily in stick-like printing - that had improved in proficiency as time had passed. There were certificates from kindergarten, the latest of which commended Emily Sanders Stokes for “awesome work on her Florida journal”, and there were photographs; one of these, a Polaroid added several days previously showing the little girl surrounded by five other people, had prompted one of the young male interns to ask, “Hey, aren’t those the guys from Road Trip?”, but nobody had dared try and find out if he was right.
The hospital staff had become used to people visiting Greg at weird hours, and they permitted it – although, strictly speaking, it was against the rules.
The woman sitting next to the bed now was someone who’d become very familiar, still showing up almost every day in a way that some of the other visitors no longer did; tall and slender, with reddish-blonde hair that hung almost to her shoulders, she walked with a dancer’s grace and had been watched covertly by more than one of the doctors. She sat next to the bed now, her hands in her lap as she talked animatedly about a court case she’d apparently been a witness in – and if she felt the same despair that the little girl did, she didn’t show it.
***********
4.25 p.m
“Catherine!”
“Hello, you,” Catherine said with a smile as she turned round, and she lifted the little girl into her lap before turning to face the bed again. “Look, Greg, Emily’s here – are you close enough, sweetie?” and there was a nod as Emily reached out to hold one of Greg’s hands between both of her own.
“Are you gonna hold my hand today, Greg?” the little girl said. “You want to hear about the picture I drew in art time?” and she chattered away, seemingly forgetting that there was anyone else in the room.
“Hi, Nick,” Catherine went on, not looking up as a hand rested on her shoulder for a second or two. “How are you guys?”
“We’re good,” Nick said, although he didn’t really feel he was telling the truth. “Do you want me to get you some coffee?”
“That’d be great, actually,” was the answer. “Let me get my purse.”
“Don’t!” Emily shouted as Catherine moved to get up. “He can’t reach my hand if you put me down!”
“It’s only for a second, baby, I need my bag.”
“No! He’s holding my hand!”
“Emily, you stop that, now,” Nick said wearily, pinching the bridge of his nose as he reflected that the happy child who’d flown back from Daytona several days previously seemed to have been spirited away overnight; he’d practically had to drag her out of the truck outside school that morning, and her temperament evidently hadn’t improved during the course of the day. “Let Catherine get up,” then in the next instant he looked at the fingers that were curled round his daughter’s wrist and felt as though his heart was going to stop.
************
“Mr. Stokes,” the doctor said, fiddling with the pen in his pocket the way someone does when they don’t know what to do with their hands, “for Mr. Sanders to be -”
“His name’s Greg,” Nick said, his temples throbbing with the onset of another headache. “You never call him by his first name, do you?”
“For – uh – Greg to be considered to be emerging from this situation,” the doctor went on, clearly flustered, “we need to establish that we’re dealing with complete awareness, and for that we need reactivity and perceptivity. That means -”
“I know what it means,” Nick said, and he wished he didn’t know – but during the preceding months, he’d learned more medical terminology than he’d ever picked up as a CSI. “You don’t have to go over it again.”
“Well, Mr. Stokes, what I’m trying to explain to you is that the movements you say you noticed could easily be reflexive, the same type of thing as the opening of the eyes,” the doctor said. “You saw that he didn’t respond when I tried to elicit the movements.”
“Maybe you weren’t asking him nicely,” Nick said, trying to keep a lid on his temper but knowing he could only go so far before he snapped - because he’d pegged this doctor as a smartass from the day he’d taken over Greg’s care a month previously, and the young man’s bedside manner was doing nothing to improve this state of affairs now. Turning away, he headed for the door and opened it; he stepped out into the hallway and moved to where Catherine sat on a plastic chair with Emily in her lap.
“Emily,” Nick said gently, dropping to one knee. “Can you come back in with me?”
“Nuh-uh,” Emily said, her entire body still heaving with sobs. “I don’t want that doctor to stick him with a pin.”
“I know you don’t,” Nick said, his throat closing up; when the doctor had brought out a pin to test Greg’s response to pain, Emily had become so distraught that Catherine had had to take her out of the room. “I don’t want him to either,” he whispered, reaching into his pocket for a Kleenex and wiping his daughter’s face. “Can you come back in with me?” he asked again - and when, after some time, there was a tearful nod, he lifted his daughter into his arms and carried her into the room; sitting down in the chair next to the bed, he held Emily on his lap and hugged her tightly to reassure her.
“Can you see if you can get Greg to hold your hand again?” he asked softly, and Emily glanced warily at the doctor who was standing a foot or so away. “No, honey, you pretend he isn’t there, okay?”
“He didn’t believe me,” Emily said, her lower lip trembling. “Greg was h-h-holding my hand.”
“I believe you, sweetheart,” Nick told her in a whisper, and then he fell silent; for what seemed a long time, nobody moved or spoke – and then Emily leaned forward to take hold of Greg’s hand again.
He watched Greg’s left hand enfolded between both of Emily’s, and he heard Emily speaking as though the words were coming through layers of cotton wool. He thought about how it had been during the days right after they’d brought their daughter home after she’d been born, when Greg had been too afraid to give her a bath in case he dropped her; but a bond had sprung up between them, one that had been cemented with every day that passed, and Nick only needed to look at Emily now to realise how strong that bond was….and to know that if it was severed, he would have lost not only Greg but their little girl as well.
“Hi, Greg,” Emily was saying now. “Will you hold my hand again? The doctor doesn’t believe you did it before, ‘cause he didn’t see it.” The tone of her voice became conspiratorial, the way it had done so many times when she’d talked to Greg before - when she’d managed to talk him into letting her stay up late, letting her have an extra cookie, letting her watch “Billy and Mandy” even though she always ended up sandwiched between her fathers in bed afterwards because she was afraid to sleep on her own. “Come on, Greg, if you do it you can come home and play Raving Rabbits on the PS2 with me -”
…and then, through a mist of tears that spilled down his cheeks, Nick saw the finger that bore the silver band twitch upwards before it was joined by its fellows as Greg’s hand curled round Emily’s and held on tight.
*********
7.30 p.m
“Do you want a story?” Nick asked, kneeling next to the pink-draped bed, and his question was met with a silent shake of Emily’s head; she hadn’t said a word since Nick had finally told her they would have to leave the hospital so she could go to bed, and as Nick remembered how Greg’s fingers had been slowly prised away from their daughter’s hand he felt tears stinging the backs of his eyes. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I wanted him to talk to me,” Emily said in a tiny, wavering voice as she lay in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin. “He held my hand, why didn’t he talk to me?”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Nick said, and he rose to his feet; sitting down on the edge of the bed, he held out his arms and waited for Emily to climb into his lap. “He will talk to you, he just can’t do it yet.”
“Why?” Emily asked, her voice muffled against her father’s chest, and Nick thought about something Luke had said to him the previous week.
I think she’s probably figured out that things aren’t as cut and dried as you told her they would be…
“You remember what I told you about his head?” Nick asked his daughter, and there was a nod. “When something happens to hurt someone’s head, it hurts their brain, too – you know? The bit where you keep all the stuff you learn?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Well, that’s what happened to Greg, and it means that he won’t be able to talk to you right away,” Nick went on. “He might even need us to help him learn to speak again.”
“What? Like Alicia?”
“Just like that,” Nick said, managing to smile as he recalled Emily’s fascination with her one year old cousin. “But you know what?”
“What?”
“He held your hand this afternoon, right?”
“Two times.”
“That’s right,” Nick said, stroking Emily’s hair. “Well, that means he still knows he’s got a little girl, even though he can’t say anything yet,” and his heart ached as Emily looked at him and he saw the uncertainty in her eyes. “Did he hold my hand? Or the doctor’s hand?”
“No,” Emily said, and her lower lip quivered before she finally managed to smile.
“See?” Nick told her. “It might take him a long time to do a lot of the things he used to do before he was hurt, but he remembers you already, doesn’t he? Come here,” and he wrapped his arms round Emily and held her tightly. “Now, do you want that story?”
“Yes, please,” Emily said, and she allowed herself to be tucked into bed again before looking up at her father expectantly – and Nick leaned down to kiss her forehead before sitting cross-legged at the side of the bed. He began the story, the way he had done so many times now –
“One evening, Cowboy Bill was riding around his ranch when he saw something a long way away.”
“Was it the horse thieves?”
“No, it wasn’t, miss know-it-all,” Nick told her, and he was rewarded with another smile. “It was a bobcat – a great big one, with stripes on its head and spots on its body and eyes that glowed in the dark,” and as he continued the story, he told himself that the real struggle to get Greg back was only just starting.
To be continued.