(no subject)
Fandom: CSI
Title: In Search of a Reason
Pairing: Gil/Nick
Rating: NC-17
Summary/Notes/Warnings: I'm guessing you've seen all of this by now: Mpreg, genetic mutation, bun in Gil's oven, worried!Gil, and a Nick who's surprisingly cool with the whole thing.
Additional Notes for this chapter: I'm so sorry that "a few days" turned into a week, but it took me a long time to hammer this into something I was actually happy with as opposed to something that merely worked. Most of the changes are superficial, with only some slight tweaking due to that fabulous information I got from elementalv and joannindw. And speaking of, those of you with any medical backround may notice that I've taken a few liberties with what would be actual procedure in a case like this. My reasoning is that some bits of realism are good ingredients for storytelling and some actually detract. I offer the following words of comfort to anyone who feels a little off-balance because of my artistic license; It's still a pregnant man. It couldn't happen in ANY way. ;)
Anyway. Previous parts are posted in this journal, and can also be found here. (when the memories feature is working)
He’d held dead infants before. Not that it was something you could ever get used to, and each instance made part of him die and take a little more of his faith along with it. Not much could stand up in the face of something like that.
All around him doctors were talking, hurrying, trying to speak to him. It was all so much white noise, as far as he was concerned. His own world felt very small right now. Small and full of dark, painful images.
When a baby is stillborn, its body is turned over to a pathologist - with consent from the parents, of course - for an autopsy. During his time as a coroner in L.A., Gil had performed three such autopsies. And he could remember every detail about every one of those with perfect, horrible clarity. The information was always in the back of his mind, and always had a tendency to re-assert itself at the worst possible moments.
Like now; when he was trying so hard to remember that his own baby was not dead. When he was trying hard to believe that it wasn’t going to die.
Stillborn. What a perfectly awful term. What a despicably benign word for something so unspeakable. He’d thought so before, in passing, about the terminology he and his colleagues tossed around the lab; it kept them sane - talking about a DB or a vic instead of a person - but it was so cold…so heartless.
He shouldn’t be thinking about these things; borrowing this kind of trouble when his baby’s heartbeat was still registering - faint and erratic but still there - on the monitor. But he seemed to have lost any input into where his mind went and where it dwelt; he couldn’t think of anything but the worst, darkest thoughts and scenarios.
He couldn’t hope; it hurt too much.
“Mr. Grissom, do you understand?”
Being addressed so pointedly and directly gave him a start. It pulled him back to the here and now, and it distressed him to return. The here and now was foreboding and ominous; something he wanted to be aware of only in the dimmest sense possible, not in this bright, clear fully animated and articulated depiction.
It wasn’t just his fear for the baby; even as devastating as that fear was, it was quantifiable. His child would live, or it would die, and they were doing all they could to prevent the latter. They’d acted as quickly and responsibly as possible, and they now had every chance for success. But he was prepared for the grief; could look it in the eye and know it by its true name.
But this other fear he had no name for; this terror that spiked high and anew with every touch of an unfamiliar hand and made him flinch. His mind tried to recoil, tried futilely to protect him from feeling, from knowing what was being done. But the sensations were sharp and distinct and he couldn’t escape.
“Mr. Grissom!” the nurse said again, more urgently. Gil focused on her, suddenly looking and seeing for the first time, even though he’d been staring at her, watching her speak, and knowing he needed to listen but staying stuck in his hazy mental quagmire.
“What?” he said, so instinctively and helplessly that he hardly remembered deciding to say it.
“Gil,” Nick’s voice came at the same time his hand touched Gil’s shoulder. Gil swallowed, suppressing the urge to pull away, to exercise the one bit of control he still had and refuse to let Nick touch him, but he didn’t. Couldn’t.
“I don’t think he heard you,” Nick said to the nurse. He sounded so far away.
“Mr. Grissom, I need your full attention, all right?” She was trying to sound friendly and reassuring, he could credit her with that much. He nodded and tried to focus on her voice; to anchor himself to that and ignore the alien, unwelcome invasions to which he was being subjected.
“We’re doing everything we can to protect you and your baby,” she began. Someone was turning his arm, inserting the IV needle. He didn’t look at it; his gaze never wavered from the nurse, from Nick standing next to her. But even with his determination, he missed a bit, and some of her words drifted away before he had a chance to grasp their meaning.
“….damage to your uterus,” the nurse went on, and as much as he tried, he could barely hear her. Her words were swallowed in the roar of panic in his ears, and his concentration was lost in keeping his fight or flight instincts at bay.
So many people, and all of them taking such liberties with him. Procedure, he told himself desperately, just standard procedure. But the empty words didn’t chase away the latex-covered hands, the cold metal, the hum and touch of the electric razor, or the open, exposed terror they induced. They weren’t just robbing him of his control, but of something deeper, more intimate, and much more fragile.
He couldn’t make it stop, and some small part of him still understood that it needed to happen this way, that he needed to trust them, so he tried to focus on the nurse. He gave up trying to listen, and focused on her lips instead.
“…may…case….surgery….remove it,” she said. He’d missed a lot; he knew that, but he was still supposed to respond. Nick was nodding, even if he was looking grim, and Gil nodded to. He trusted Nick in all of this; he wouldn’t let anything go wrong for Gil. But even that thought made him swallow nervously.
The nurse said something more, mostly to Nick, held up a finger to indicate that he should wait a moment, and then pulled a doctor over. The three of them spoke to each other as Gil watched in a hazy, half-interested way. Then the nurse turned to him again.
“Mr. Grissom, this is Doctor Tomas, from the neonatal intensive care unit.”
Those words were the metaphorical bucket of ice water, and pulled him out of his self-indulgent reverie. There were more important things at work here than the violation of his comfort zone, and he couldn’t believe that he’d let himself forget that, if even for a few moments.
“Mr. Grissom,” Dr. Tomas began. "I'll be honest with you and say we’re not sure what to expect. Your baby is on a developmental cusp. Another week or two and we'd probably treat this as a full-term birth. But if this had happened a week or two earlier, both you and your baby would be considered very high risk.”
“I know,” Gil snapped. “You can find that on the internet.” It came out a little crisper than he’d intended. He was trying to hold off his frustration with the entire process. He couldn’t blame anyone in this room for what was happening, but he sure as hell wanted to blame someone.
Dr. Tomas nodded once, sharply. “Yes,” he said. “What you can’t find on the internet are the problems specific to your condition, because we simply don’t have that information available. We’re running this blind, Mr. Grissom, and to ensure the health and safety of your baby, my team and I are going to be here to take your child into our care as soon as he’s born. He may need only a few hours of observation, or he may need to stay in the unit for weeks. But I’m telling you this now so you can begin to prepare yourself.” The doctor glanced up at Nick.
“Both of you,” he added before leaving. Gil turned his head to look at Nick, trying to read his expression from behind the surgical mask, but not having much luck. Nick was staring at something, and Gil followed his gaze.
Gil didn’t know much about these kinds of medical procedures or the accouterments thereof, but he recognized resuscitation equipment when he saw it. He glanced impulsively back to the fetal heart monitor, and felt only the slightly comforted by the steady pulse.
Now the sensations were beginning to fade, and some part of Gil recognized that what had felt like an eternity of preparatory hell could not have been that long if the anesthesia was beginning to work now. Nick took his hand, squeezing it before glancing around the curtain.
“Do you want me to tell you what’s happening?” he asked. Gil shook his head. He could barely make out what was going on; between the lights, the voices, the blood rushing in his ears, the sounds of the machinery - and some horribly inappropriate part of him choose that moment to wonder, darkly, if they had the machine that went ‘ping!’ - he could only make out snatches of the conversation; short, clipped and completely down-to-business.
But it wasn’t distant. He couldn’t ignore it, and he didn’t want it brought to the fore of his mind any more than it already was. It wasn’t just a naked feeling; it was the cruelest exposure he’d ever endured. And he hated that Nick was here. Nick, who had more right than anyone else, could see everything and was seeing everything; was seeing him like this.
He hated it, but he didn’t want Nick to be anywhere else.
Nick stroked his hand over Gil’s forehead; brushing across his temple, and Gil started to drift away. There was probably some kind of sedative in the IV, he thought, and it made him feel better; calmer.
It almost felt like it wasn’t happening to him; like he was watching all of this. And that made sense. If it was happening to him, he’d feel like he was involved somehow, wouldn’t he?. But this…this was too passive. He was supposed to be the one fighting for the life of his child. That was what mothers did, wasn’t it?
Except he wasn’t a mother. Not really. Or rather, not in any way except technically. Technically. That was rather contrived, wasn’t it? This whole damn thing felt contrived. He shouldn’t even be here, according to the overwhelming majority. This wasn’t supposed to happen; it was an anomaly, a mutation, a mistake.
It wasn’t natural.
And that was a little paradox that almost made him giggle in a drunken kind of way. Nature had done this to him, but it wasn’t working out the way nature supposedly intended, now, was it? What kind of silly mutation was this, anyway? Something that allowed him to get pregnant but not actually deliver? Definitely not natural.
He remembered his priest, back when he’d been in high school and still attending mass, had had a few things to say on the subject of what was ‘natural’ and what wasn’t. It hadn’t been the only thing that had sent him packing from the Catholic church, but it hadn’t been an incidental factor, either.
What was taking so long? It seemed a simple enough procedure to him, so why did it feel like it was stretching forever? He tried to listen to the doctors, but found that their voices seemed even further away than they had a few minutes ago. He glanced at the IV, wondering what the hell they’d given him. It was making everything go all swimmy.
Something was definitely going on over there. People were talking faster; louder. If he strained, he could just about make out…
And then the most beautiful thing; he heard his baby crying. His heart leapt and lodged in his throat at the same time a smiling face said,
“Congratulations Mr. Grissom, Mr. Stokes. It’s a boy.”
He almost cried, and glanced at Nick to see that he was crying, just a bit. His eyes were glazed with tears that were just this side of rolling down his cheeks, and the sight touched something deep inside Gil; made him feel warm and start to ache. But the moment was broken almost before Gil was even aware of it; all of the attention in the room focusing itself on the tiny, crying shape in the doctor’s arms.
He tried to remember what he’d read about fetal development…the lungs were amongst the last things to form - and obviously they had if those cries were an indication - but how strong were they? Would he be able to breathe on his own? He tried to ask, but the commotion amongst the doctors was getting louder, more frenzied, and everyone’s attention was diverted.
“Mr. Grissom?” the nurse was back by his head. He tried to look around her and see his baby; where he was, what was happening to him.
“Mr. Grissom, your son seems to be fine, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to proceed with your surgery. The damage to your uterus is too severe, I’m afraid we can’t risk leaving it.”
Gil barely heard her. “Where’s m’son?” he asked. His tongue felt thick in his mouth, and his lips didn’t want to form themselves into the proper shapes.
“We’re going to make sure he’s all right first,” the nurse soothed. “Then we’ll bring him over for you to see him, but then we need to put you under-” she kept talking but Gil stopped listening, because someone else - doctor, nurse, he didn’t care - was coming toward him carrying a tiny, crying, flailing infant. His son.
He felt Nick squeeze his shoulder, could feel his wonder and excitement through that touch, and Gil felt left behind. He’d never stopped to imagine this moment, it had never occurred to him to do so, which meant he couldn’t say if this was what he’d been expecting or not. He didn’t know what to do with the moment now that it was happening.
Didn’t most parents say that the happiest time in their lives was when their child was born? Isn’t that how he was supposed to feel? Maybe it was the drugs, maybe it was the stress of the situation, or maybe it was because he couldn’t quite focus on the squirming pink shape in the doctor’s arms, but all he could think was, What am I supposed to do now?
He didn’t have much time to ponder that question, as the mask for the general anesthesia went over his face and the room started to fade. He felt tired. And then he slept.
* * *
“Mr. Grissom?” Gil groaned and turned away from the sound.
“Mr. Grissom, can you wake up?”
No, he thought. Stop bothering me. He ached all over, and it felt like deadweights were attached to his eyelids. He could no sooner lift them than he could fly. But something felt wrong; itched at him and tried to nudge him into consciousness. He wished that would go away too.
“Gil?” said a new voice, and that one was so familiar and so welcome that Gil almost opened his eyes.
“Someone wants to meet you,” Nick said, and that was the trigger he’d needed. Not quite knowing where he’d gotten the sudden strength or will, he turned, sitting up and blinking
Nick was smiling at him; a broad, face-splitting smile, but one that was tight at the same time. He looked ready to laugh, except for his eyes, which were lined with red even as they sparkled. Gil blinked, confused, and then Nick’s eyes dropped and Gil’s followed…
…to rest on the tiny infant curled in Nick’s arms.
He opened his mouth to say something, but all thoughts, and all breath to propel them, were suddenly gone. Looking now was nothing like it had been when they’d held him up, moments after his birth. The disorientation and confusion were gone. All he could manage was a soft, subdued little, “Oh!” as he reached out a hand.
“He’s fine,” Nick said, and now Gil could hear the strain in his voice, the dogged determination not to crack, “He’s small, but he’s healthy.” Nick didn’t look up at Gil while he spoke. It was like the baby held some kind of power over him; pulling all his attention and reshaping Nick’s world to a new center. It seemed almost magical, and Gil didn’t want to break it or intrude, as much as he wanted to be a part of it.
“Your baby is in fine health, Mr. Grissom,” the nurse said from over his right shoulder. Gil listened and nodded, but didn’t look at her. He was too caught up in observing this moment between father and son next to him. “His breathing is steady and strong, so his heart. We’ll keep an eye on him, and you, but it seems like we’re in the clear.”
Gil had been worried, and he’d been aware of that. He’d done enough research and reading to know what could go wrong and more or less how, and it had fueled enough anxiety to twist him into all sorts of knots. But he hadn’t realized how strong a hold those thoughts had over him until all of them dropped away in a single instant and he felt so light it was a wonder he wasn’t actually floating.
“Here,” the nurse said from behind him. “Let me help you sit up.” She started to adjust the angle of his bed and re-set his pillows, but was stopped. Gil glanced over his shoulder.
“I can do that,” Caryn said, and the nurse nodded and stepped back. Gil nearly informed them both that he was capable of sitting up by himself, but he recognized the look in his mother’s eye. It told him to shut up and let other people take care of things for a while. And it worked just as well now as it had when he’d been seven. Besides, if anyone was going to see him in less-than-peak condition, he could tolerate it being family.
“I’ll be back later,” the nurse said. Gil and Nick nodded, but didn’t look up, and after a second they heard the door close behind her.
He still tried to sit up on his own and instantly understood why people had been so adamant that he be helped. The incision in his stomach pulled and he hissed in sudden pain. Nick and Caryn both looked at him with concern, and he shook his head, but couldn’t hide the wince.
“Easy,” Caryn said. “Lie back.” He did as he was told and she found the control that elevated the bed for him. He should have expected that, he realized.
As soon as Gil was settled, Nick leaned forward and held their son out to Gil. “Careful,” Nick said, needlessly concerned. “You gotta…support the head.” Nick clearly knew that his instruction wasn’t necessary, but if it gave him some sense of security and control than that was fine with Gil.
He still wasn’t quite sure what to do, or rather, how he was meant to feel. He was finally getting a chance to hold the thing that had been inside him, kicking, turning, and keeping him up at night. It took a second to get himself situated; to arrange his arms in a comfortable position to cradle and support, but then….
Oh. Then.
The little body wriggled, adjusting to its new position, and the tiny eyes and mouth opened for the briefest second, and Gil was lost.
He’d thought he knew what love was; thought he’d discovered it that day on Lake Calhoun, and rediscovered it every time Nick smiled at him, but he had to have been mistaken. If that was love, than what was this? ‘This’ that was coming at him, hitting him in wave after wave, stealing his breath as if he were drowning and filling him up as though he’d never been complete until now.
Now he understood why Nick’s smile had been so tight; why his eyes had been red-rimmed. He imagined he probably looked the same way himself, right now. His mother laid a hand on his shoulder and squeezed, very gently; very knowingly.
His son. Their son.
And suddenly he knew. He turned his head to look at Nick, who was resting his chin on Gil’s shoulder and looking completely smitten.
“What do you think of ‘Daniel’?” he asked, and something lit in Nick’s eyes.
“Daniel,” he said, and grinned. “Yeah, I think you’re right.” He glanced up at Caryn, who must have missed what was said, because he slowly and carefully finger spelled D-A-N-I-E-L to her. Something about the gesture was so awkward and self-conscious that it was completely perfect in Gil’s eyes, and Caryn smiled and nodded.
“Hello, Daniel,” Gil whispered, and slid a finger into the tiny hand. It was amazing how small he was. His head could easily fit into the palm of Gil’s hand, and his entire body was probably shorter than either Gil or Nick’s forearm. So small.
Gil’s throat went tight as the thought of how close they’d come suddenly hit home. The residual fear still tasted bitter and foul in the back of his throat, and he suspected it would be that way for a while, whenever the thought occurred to him.
“Are you all right?” his mother asked. He nodded.
“Yes,” he said, and she smiled at him a little. In truth, he wasn’t sure what he felt. When this had begun, he knew he would have wished it all away if he could have. Would have undone it and walked on down the path his life had been headed if he’d had the power.
And then, a few hours ago, he would have done anything; agreed to the most infernal bargain imaginable to hang onto it. To see this through to a happy ending. And now?
But then Daniel wriggled again, grunting, sighing and nestling tightly into every warm curve of Gil’s body, and Nick made an adorable, cooing, answering sound.
Now he had everything he wanted.