csi fic: breakfast tales
SUMMARY: Post Rashomama. Sara convinces Nick to go out to breakfast with her. Sleep deprivation leads to some of the most revealing conversation, at least on Nick’s part. One-shot. A bit of pre-Nick/Sara fluff
RATING: PG-13
DISCLAIMER: CSI and all related trademarks are the property of CBS. I’m just borrowing the characters. They’ll be returned in mint condition, I solemnly swear.
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wedding. n.
A marriage ceremony (considered by itself or with the associated celebrations).
-From the Oxford American Dictionary of Current English
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After he had talked to IAB, all Nick Stokes wanted to do was to go home and fall into bed. Hell, he’d take collapsing on the couch if he couldn’t make it to the bed. He just wanted to sleep and forget all about this case. It was a case which had really been nothing more than a sequence of bizarre circumstances when you boiled the case down to its bare bones. But the series of bizarre events that led to the case of the Wedding from Hell had been unmasked by the CSIs and now Nick just wanted to escape from the hellhole he had been locked up in for over twenty hours.
He was grabbing his bag, preparing to make his exit, when his dark-haired co-worker walked into the locker room and leaned against the row of lockers next to Nick’s locker.
“Do you want to go get some breakfast?” Sara asked, her fingers playing with the hem of her lavender tank top. She had obviously changed from her earlier navy blue long-sleeved shirt.
Nick gave her a tired look. “Aren’t you exhausted?”
Sara shrugged. She tucked a front section of her hair behind her ear as she regarded him with serious brown eyes. “I got my second wind.”
Nick just stared at her in wonderment. Sara shifted on her feet.
“Are you really just going to go to sleep right away?” she asked in a light tone.
“I was planning on it,” Nick retorted.
She gave him a hurt, puppy-dog look.
He sighed and postponed his sleeping plans, at least for a little while. He told himself that he probably wouldn’t sleep right away anyways. He was that sort of dogged tiredness that made it impossible to fall asleep right away. “Can we go someplace other than Frank’s diner?”
Sara grinned at him. “Of course. You can even pick,” she offered graciously, as if she hadn’t just roped him into going out to breakfast with.
“There’s a place near my house. It’s small and the service’s great. How does that sound?”
“That sounds great,” Sara said. She pushed herself from the wall of the lockers over to her locker. She opened the door and grabbed her bag, just as Nick was preparing to shut his. She glanced at over her shoulder and asked, “Are you planning on wearing that shirt?”
Nick gave her a dubious look. “What? Is the shirt too ugly for your tastes, Sara?” A part of him was annoyed but another part of him was feeling deliciously warm. He chose not to dwell on that. He didn’t want to think about what that meant.
A small smile played at the corners of Sara’s mouth. “I just think that a fresh shirt might help with your attitude,” she said with a hint of humor evident in her voice. She sounded way too awake, in Nick’s opinion. He wondered if she had been dipping into Greg’s stash of Red Bull.
Choosing to ignore her dig about his attitude, he hastily tugged his brown t-shirt over his head. Sara watched him with barely concealed amusement on her face. He tossed the balled up shirt at her, smirking when she caught the wad of fabric right before it hit her on the chest. Nick turned to his locker and grabbed one of his spare shirts. Working the nightshift at the crime lab meant that he often kept several shirts handy in his locker. It was impossible to predict where the next call out would come from. One too many garbage jumps had made Nick leery and he preferred to have an abundance of clothing rather to leave that sort of thing to chance.
“That’s much better,” Sara commented as Nick pulled a form-fitting black shirt over his head. She had folded his brown shirt and she handed it to him as she sat down on the locker room bench after she closed her locker. She had put on a white button-down shirt over her tank top, somewhere looking fresh and not like she had been on-duty for over twenty-four hours. Her purse and black coat rested on the bench next to her.
“Let’s go,” Nick said as he grabbed his bag. He didn’t have a coat as his jacket was now residing in the evidence vault. Not that he wanted the blood-spotted coat back. He was pretty sure he had a black fleece jacket in his truck but his truck was still in the garage. He was glad that the sun was out-that sun would prevent him from freezing too much.
As the two dark-haired CSIs walked through the front door, Nick realized that it was probably a good thing Sara insisted upon going out for breakfast. He needed a ride a home and he doubted that the sheriff would be pleased if he borrowed a department vehicle. He doubted that the sheriff would speak civilly to him for the next month.
They headed towards Sara’s car. “Hey Sara, will you give me a ride home afterwards?” he asked as they neared the car. He gave her a sheepish smile. “I seem to have misplaced my wheels.”
Sara laughed but nodded. “Does this mean I have to pick you up tonight too?” Her tone was light, with just a hint of the flirty tease that made Sara unique.
“If you would be so kind.”
She opened the car doors and they climbed in. “I suppose it wouldn’t be too out of my way,” she said as she started the car.
Nick gave Sara directions as she drove them to Alexis’ Restaurant. The restaurant was really not much more than a small coffee shop. The place was situated in a location where most of its business was local. Few tourists would have chosen to dine at this restaurant, despite the good food and relaxed atmosphere, which was precisely why Nick liked the place so much. It also helped that the restaurant was only ten minutes from his house, a stone throw away really.
“This is nice,” Sara commented as they walked into the restaurant. A woman in her early twenties seated them on the terrace outside. The shining sun and the cloudless sky made it a perfect morning to enjoy breakfast while outside. As well, the terrace didn’t face the road so they didn’t have to worry about inhaling car fumes all throughout their meal.
They were seated and they exchanged friendly chatter as they decided what to eat. They spent time mocking Greg’s ringtone on his cell phone. They speculated on just who had called Greg-Nick insisted that it was probably a new girlfriend while Sara expressed her doubts and said it was probably his mother. Their conversation had drifted towards Warrick and his tenuous marriage when the waitress came to take their order.
After she left, a hush descended over the table. Sara rested her chin on a propped-up arm and her dark eyes were studying him. Nick felt like he was under a microscope. He shifted in his seat, feeling slightly uncomfortable under Sara’s intense gaze. He wondered what she was thinking. He was about to ask when she asked: “Do you ever think about getting married?”
His eyes now studied her face for a moment before he leaned back in his seat. “Well, growing up, I always expected I’d get married.”
“And now?”
Nick shrugged. “I’d have to meet the right woman…”
Sara cut him off. “But what kind of wedding would you have?” The sunlight hit her hair in such a way that her hair had taken on a reddish, golden-brown hue. Her face was serious, but slightly troubled under the golden gleam from the sun.
Nick took a sip of his water as he thought about his answer. He had never really given much thought to the type of wedding he’d have. He had spent some time considering the type of woman he’d like to marry when he was younger, before he had realized that you didn’t get to pick the person you fell in love with. Love wasn’t logical. You just had to take it and let it run.
“Nick?”
Nick smiled before he finally answered Sara’s question. “I don’t know, Sara,” he said honestly. “I do know I don’t want a wedding like my sisters’ had.”
She gave him an odd look. “What kind of weddings did they have?”
He took another sip of water, his mind wandering back to some of the horrendous weddings he had been forced to suffer through as a teenager. He remembered huge crowds of people, hues of baby pink and pale blue, dresses of enormous proportions, smiles that didn’t quite reach the eyes. “All of my sisters had these Cinderella-type weddings.”
Sara groaned in sympathy. “That sounds like fun,” she replied with a sarcastic air. Her fingers traced the rim of her coffee cup before she picked up the cup and took a delicate sip.
“I think the saddest thing is that their weddings really weren’t their weddings. My mother gave them all this impression that they just had to have these huge, elaborate weddings lest they regret it later. Their weddings took on a life of their own and I don’t think any of them was really happy with the end result. Their smiles all seemed a bit forced,” Nick said with an air of regret, even though he wasn’t the one who had forced his sisters to surrender to what their mother wanted. Jillian Stokes was number of things. Subtle was not one of them.
“Well, given the artificiality of weddings, I’m not really surprised that you thought their smiles were fake,” Sara retorted from her side of the table. She looked at him for a minute. “How come your mother never got you married?” she asked, genuine curiosity written into her voice.
He shrugged. “Well, it’s hard to marry off your youngest son when he runs away from Dallas.”
There was a touch of bitterness to his words. Even his choice of words represented that bitterness. Nick hoped that Sara would let it pass. She regarded him with those large dark eyes that always seemed unreadable unless she was angry. Now she was calm, but Nick could read her eyes anyways. His grandmother had always said that the eyes were the window to the souls. If that was true, what Nick was seeing was sympathy and compassion and he wondered what else lay buried behind those dark eyes. Inexplicably, he found that he had this huge desire to discover just exactly what the emotions in Sara’s eyes meant. He forced that thought away.
Sara’s voice brought him from his musings. “I always wondered why you left Dallas.”
She said it more as a statement than as a question, and she left it open-ended enough so that it was clear she wasn’t demanding a response. He could respond, Nick knew, but Sara had phrased her sentence in such a way that even if he didn’t it would still be all right.
He wanted to answer the question though. “It was hard being the son of two prominent attorneys, the grandson of a Congresswoman and an Austin Supreme Court Justice. Everyone knew my family when I worked with the Dallas PD. I was tired of being known as the youngest Stokes. I guess I just wanted a chance to prove that I could make it on my own.”
“That’s all?”
Nick hesitated before responding truthfully. “When I went to college, the expectation was that I was going to go to law school and work at the firm with my father. Only, I decided that I didn’t like the idea and going home after that was just a painful reminder of how I had disappointed my parents. I couldn’t handle that disappointment so I eventually took the job here.”
“Where you had a new parental figure to please,” Sara finished gently, referring obliquely to Nick’s relationship with Grissom. Nick nodded but didn’t say anything, a frog in his throat preventing him from speaking.
"I know what that’s like,” she added softly. She didn’t elaborate, and Nick decided that maybe his heartfelt confessions were enough for one day.
Their food came, saving both of them from having to go too in-depth in a place that really wasn’t appropriate for such deep conversation. Or maybe it was and they were just scared, having revealed tidbits of the past but terrified to open the entire book for fear of what they may expose. They came to a silent conclusion that there would time enough later to reveal whatever they may chose to tell.
They retreated to the safe topics. They talked some more about Warrick and his relationship troubles before moving onto a general mocking of Hodges. That started a debate about the lab rats and which lab rat each CSI preferred. Nick argued that Archie had the best sense of humor while Sara confessed that she found Hodges to be the most amusing. She said that anything she needed a good laugh, she just had to find Hodges trying to find an in with Grissom and she got all the laughter she needed to meet her daily quota for a month.
Eventually their food was gone and whatever second wind either one of them may had gotten was gone. Nick insisted on paying, because that was what a gentleman did he said. Sara just sighed before mumbling that this was the twentieth century. Nick ignored her and held open the door for her on their way out of the restaurant.
She drove them to Nick’s house, parking the car silently in his driveway. They stared at the front façade of the house. Nick started to get out of the car after a few minutes but, before he did, he turned and looked at Sara. “You know, we never got to discuss your issues with weddings,” he said.
Sara turned and grinned at him. “I was wondering if you’d eventually notice that,” she teased.
Nick huffed and decided that if she could pout at her age, he could too. Sara rolled her eyes at his expression before shooing him out of her car. Nick gave her a mock-hurt expression but Sara just crossed her arms, her expression not moving an inch.
Nick opened the door and hopped out. Before he could close it, Sara called out his name. He leaned on the car door and waited for her to speak. “I’ll pick you up an hour and a half before shift tonight, okay?” She paused, light dancing in her eyes. “We can go out for dinner and talk,” she added meaningfully.
He nodded and shut the car door. Sara smiled and waved at him as she pulled out of his driveway. There was an amused smile playing across Nick’s face as he watched her car disappear from his sight. Finally he turned and headed inside, already mentally preparing a list of questions for her. When he realized what he was doing, Nick realized with a horror that he was becoming like his mother, with all her lists and expectations.
As he stripped down to his boxers and padded to the bedroom, Nick decided to just wing it. Afterall, if he ever got married, he wanted a causal affair. Nothing fancy, nothing that required a lot of preparation and lists and expectations. Just him and her and some close friends and maybe their families, if their families would be reasonable. Yeah, he just wanted something simple. He wanted something he could cherish for the rest of his life without any negative memories clouding his remembrances.
He climbed under the covers with a smile on his face as he thought of sunshine and the way it highlighted a particular person’s hair. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to reveal some secrets was his last musing before sleep overtook him.
His dreams were of sunshine and the color of golden brown.
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The End
RATING: PG-13
DISCLAIMER: CSI and all related trademarks are the property of CBS. I’m just borrowing the characters. They’ll be returned in mint condition, I solemnly swear.
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wedding. n.
A marriage ceremony (considered by itself or with the associated celebrations).
-From the Oxford American Dictionary of Current English
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After he had talked to IAB, all Nick Stokes wanted to do was to go home and fall into bed. Hell, he’d take collapsing on the couch if he couldn’t make it to the bed. He just wanted to sleep and forget all about this case. It was a case which had really been nothing more than a sequence of bizarre circumstances when you boiled the case down to its bare bones. But the series of bizarre events that led to the case of the Wedding from Hell had been unmasked by the CSIs and now Nick just wanted to escape from the hellhole he had been locked up in for over twenty hours.
He was grabbing his bag, preparing to make his exit, when his dark-haired co-worker walked into the locker room and leaned against the row of lockers next to Nick’s locker.
“Do you want to go get some breakfast?” Sara asked, her fingers playing with the hem of her lavender tank top. She had obviously changed from her earlier navy blue long-sleeved shirt.
Nick gave her a tired look. “Aren’t you exhausted?”
Sara shrugged. She tucked a front section of her hair behind her ear as she regarded him with serious brown eyes. “I got my second wind.”
Nick just stared at her in wonderment. Sara shifted on her feet.
“Are you really just going to go to sleep right away?” she asked in a light tone.
“I was planning on it,” Nick retorted.
She gave him a hurt, puppy-dog look.
He sighed and postponed his sleeping plans, at least for a little while. He told himself that he probably wouldn’t sleep right away anyways. He was that sort of dogged tiredness that made it impossible to fall asleep right away. “Can we go someplace other than Frank’s diner?”
Sara grinned at him. “Of course. You can even pick,” she offered graciously, as if she hadn’t just roped him into going out to breakfast with.
“There’s a place near my house. It’s small and the service’s great. How does that sound?”
“That sounds great,” Sara said. She pushed herself from the wall of the lockers over to her locker. She opened the door and grabbed her bag, just as Nick was preparing to shut his. She glanced at over her shoulder and asked, “Are you planning on wearing that shirt?”
Nick gave her a dubious look. “What? Is the shirt too ugly for your tastes, Sara?” A part of him was annoyed but another part of him was feeling deliciously warm. He chose not to dwell on that. He didn’t want to think about what that meant.
A small smile played at the corners of Sara’s mouth. “I just think that a fresh shirt might help with your attitude,” she said with a hint of humor evident in her voice. She sounded way too awake, in Nick’s opinion. He wondered if she had been dipping into Greg’s stash of Red Bull.
Choosing to ignore her dig about his attitude, he hastily tugged his brown t-shirt over his head. Sara watched him with barely concealed amusement on her face. He tossed the balled up shirt at her, smirking when she caught the wad of fabric right before it hit her on the chest. Nick turned to his locker and grabbed one of his spare shirts. Working the nightshift at the crime lab meant that he often kept several shirts handy in his locker. It was impossible to predict where the next call out would come from. One too many garbage jumps had made Nick leery and he preferred to have an abundance of clothing rather to leave that sort of thing to chance.
“That’s much better,” Sara commented as Nick pulled a form-fitting black shirt over his head. She had folded his brown shirt and she handed it to him as she sat down on the locker room bench after she closed her locker. She had put on a white button-down shirt over her tank top, somewhere looking fresh and not like she had been on-duty for over twenty-four hours. Her purse and black coat rested on the bench next to her.
“Let’s go,” Nick said as he grabbed his bag. He didn’t have a coat as his jacket was now residing in the evidence vault. Not that he wanted the blood-spotted coat back. He was pretty sure he had a black fleece jacket in his truck but his truck was still in the garage. He was glad that the sun was out-that sun would prevent him from freezing too much.
As the two dark-haired CSIs walked through the front door, Nick realized that it was probably a good thing Sara insisted upon going out for breakfast. He needed a ride a home and he doubted that the sheriff would be pleased if he borrowed a department vehicle. He doubted that the sheriff would speak civilly to him for the next month.
They headed towards Sara’s car. “Hey Sara, will you give me a ride home afterwards?” he asked as they neared the car. He gave her a sheepish smile. “I seem to have misplaced my wheels.”
Sara laughed but nodded. “Does this mean I have to pick you up tonight too?” Her tone was light, with just a hint of the flirty tease that made Sara unique.
“If you would be so kind.”
She opened the car doors and they climbed in. “I suppose it wouldn’t be too out of my way,” she said as she started the car.
Nick gave Sara directions as she drove them to Alexis’ Restaurant. The restaurant was really not much more than a small coffee shop. The place was situated in a location where most of its business was local. Few tourists would have chosen to dine at this restaurant, despite the good food and relaxed atmosphere, which was precisely why Nick liked the place so much. It also helped that the restaurant was only ten minutes from his house, a stone throw away really.
“This is nice,” Sara commented as they walked into the restaurant. A woman in her early twenties seated them on the terrace outside. The shining sun and the cloudless sky made it a perfect morning to enjoy breakfast while outside. As well, the terrace didn’t face the road so they didn’t have to worry about inhaling car fumes all throughout their meal.
They were seated and they exchanged friendly chatter as they decided what to eat. They spent time mocking Greg’s ringtone on his cell phone. They speculated on just who had called Greg-Nick insisted that it was probably a new girlfriend while Sara expressed her doubts and said it was probably his mother. Their conversation had drifted towards Warrick and his tenuous marriage when the waitress came to take their order.
After she left, a hush descended over the table. Sara rested her chin on a propped-up arm and her dark eyes were studying him. Nick felt like he was under a microscope. He shifted in his seat, feeling slightly uncomfortable under Sara’s intense gaze. He wondered what she was thinking. He was about to ask when she asked: “Do you ever think about getting married?”
His eyes now studied her face for a moment before he leaned back in his seat. “Well, growing up, I always expected I’d get married.”
“And now?”
Nick shrugged. “I’d have to meet the right woman…”
Sara cut him off. “But what kind of wedding would you have?” The sunlight hit her hair in such a way that her hair had taken on a reddish, golden-brown hue. Her face was serious, but slightly troubled under the golden gleam from the sun.
Nick took a sip of his water as he thought about his answer. He had never really given much thought to the type of wedding he’d have. He had spent some time considering the type of woman he’d like to marry when he was younger, before he had realized that you didn’t get to pick the person you fell in love with. Love wasn’t logical. You just had to take it and let it run.
“Nick?”
Nick smiled before he finally answered Sara’s question. “I don’t know, Sara,” he said honestly. “I do know I don’t want a wedding like my sisters’ had.”
She gave him an odd look. “What kind of weddings did they have?”
He took another sip of water, his mind wandering back to some of the horrendous weddings he had been forced to suffer through as a teenager. He remembered huge crowds of people, hues of baby pink and pale blue, dresses of enormous proportions, smiles that didn’t quite reach the eyes. “All of my sisters had these Cinderella-type weddings.”
Sara groaned in sympathy. “That sounds like fun,” she replied with a sarcastic air. Her fingers traced the rim of her coffee cup before she picked up the cup and took a delicate sip.
“I think the saddest thing is that their weddings really weren’t their weddings. My mother gave them all this impression that they just had to have these huge, elaborate weddings lest they regret it later. Their weddings took on a life of their own and I don’t think any of them was really happy with the end result. Their smiles all seemed a bit forced,” Nick said with an air of regret, even though he wasn’t the one who had forced his sisters to surrender to what their mother wanted. Jillian Stokes was number of things. Subtle was not one of them.
“Well, given the artificiality of weddings, I’m not really surprised that you thought their smiles were fake,” Sara retorted from her side of the table. She looked at him for a minute. “How come your mother never got you married?” she asked, genuine curiosity written into her voice.
He shrugged. “Well, it’s hard to marry off your youngest son when he runs away from Dallas.”
There was a touch of bitterness to his words. Even his choice of words represented that bitterness. Nick hoped that Sara would let it pass. She regarded him with those large dark eyes that always seemed unreadable unless she was angry. Now she was calm, but Nick could read her eyes anyways. His grandmother had always said that the eyes were the window to the souls. If that was true, what Nick was seeing was sympathy and compassion and he wondered what else lay buried behind those dark eyes. Inexplicably, he found that he had this huge desire to discover just exactly what the emotions in Sara’s eyes meant. He forced that thought away.
Sara’s voice brought him from his musings. “I always wondered why you left Dallas.”
She said it more as a statement than as a question, and she left it open-ended enough so that it was clear she wasn’t demanding a response. He could respond, Nick knew, but Sara had phrased her sentence in such a way that even if he didn’t it would still be all right.
He wanted to answer the question though. “It was hard being the son of two prominent attorneys, the grandson of a Congresswoman and an Austin Supreme Court Justice. Everyone knew my family when I worked with the Dallas PD. I was tired of being known as the youngest Stokes. I guess I just wanted a chance to prove that I could make it on my own.”
“That’s all?”
Nick hesitated before responding truthfully. “When I went to college, the expectation was that I was going to go to law school and work at the firm with my father. Only, I decided that I didn’t like the idea and going home after that was just a painful reminder of how I had disappointed my parents. I couldn’t handle that disappointment so I eventually took the job here.”
“Where you had a new parental figure to please,” Sara finished gently, referring obliquely to Nick’s relationship with Grissom. Nick nodded but didn’t say anything, a frog in his throat preventing him from speaking.
"I know what that’s like,” she added softly. She didn’t elaborate, and Nick decided that maybe his heartfelt confessions were enough for one day.
Their food came, saving both of them from having to go too in-depth in a place that really wasn’t appropriate for such deep conversation. Or maybe it was and they were just scared, having revealed tidbits of the past but terrified to open the entire book for fear of what they may expose. They came to a silent conclusion that there would time enough later to reveal whatever they may chose to tell.
They retreated to the safe topics. They talked some more about Warrick and his relationship troubles before moving onto a general mocking of Hodges. That started a debate about the lab rats and which lab rat each CSI preferred. Nick argued that Archie had the best sense of humor while Sara confessed that she found Hodges to be the most amusing. She said that anything she needed a good laugh, she just had to find Hodges trying to find an in with Grissom and she got all the laughter she needed to meet her daily quota for a month.
Eventually their food was gone and whatever second wind either one of them may had gotten was gone. Nick insisted on paying, because that was what a gentleman did he said. Sara just sighed before mumbling that this was the twentieth century. Nick ignored her and held open the door for her on their way out of the restaurant.
She drove them to Nick’s house, parking the car silently in his driveway. They stared at the front façade of the house. Nick started to get out of the car after a few minutes but, before he did, he turned and looked at Sara. “You know, we never got to discuss your issues with weddings,” he said.
Sara turned and grinned at him. “I was wondering if you’d eventually notice that,” she teased.
Nick huffed and decided that if she could pout at her age, he could too. Sara rolled her eyes at his expression before shooing him out of her car. Nick gave her a mock-hurt expression but Sara just crossed her arms, her expression not moving an inch.
Nick opened the door and hopped out. Before he could close it, Sara called out his name. He leaned on the car door and waited for her to speak. “I’ll pick you up an hour and a half before shift tonight, okay?” She paused, light dancing in her eyes. “We can go out for dinner and talk,” she added meaningfully.
He nodded and shut the car door. Sara smiled and waved at him as she pulled out of his driveway. There was an amused smile playing across Nick’s face as he watched her car disappear from his sight. Finally he turned and headed inside, already mentally preparing a list of questions for her. When he realized what he was doing, Nick realized with a horror that he was becoming like his mother, with all her lists and expectations.
As he stripped down to his boxers and padded to the bedroom, Nick decided to just wing it. Afterall, if he ever got married, he wanted a causal affair. Nothing fancy, nothing that required a lot of preparation and lists and expectations. Just him and her and some close friends and maybe their families, if their families would be reasonable. Yeah, he just wanted something simple. He wanted something he could cherish for the rest of his life without any negative memories clouding his remembrances.
He climbed under the covers with a smile on his face as he thought of sunshine and the way it highlighted a particular person’s hair. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to reveal some secrets was his last musing before sleep overtook him.
His dreams were of sunshine and the color of golden brown.
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The End