Disclaimer: I don't own CSI - - CBS does.  Done for non-profit fun and sadistic pleasure, so I'd like not to be sued.

Notes: Glad to have everybody onboard for the sequel to "Blood in the Water."  To make up for the lack of Greg in the aforementioned Greg story, this entire one is set from his POV (well, it's third-person, but you get what I mean).  Of course, the other characters, and particularly Grissom, are still important, so remember what they went through in "Blood in the Water" and what their thoughts were.  In short, remember that you know quite a few things that Greg doesn't.

So, this is a Greg story with Greg this time, Greg both suffering and recovering from all the sadistic angst I put him through, and it's not going to be easy for him, but I'll give you one assurance that you didn't have with the first story . . . he's not going to die.  Other than that, no promises, as usual.

This is a sequel, so I'd much prefer if you read "Blood in the Water" first, but if you're trying to run this alone, I'll try to sketch in a quick background: Greg was attacked before the beginning of the story, and survived by pure chance - - a bullet circled through his skull instead of going through his brain.  He was comatose for about a month while the CSI team investigated his attack, and eventually found the culprit, Melissa Sharpe (a cadet CSI envious of Greg's chance at fieldwork) and her lackey boyfriend, Trey.  They're both going to be back for an encore.  To make matters worse, Nathan Sanders, Greg's estranged father, arrives in Vegas at Sara's call.  And, well, he's a controlling, borderline psychotic that has been variously described as "the spawn of Satan" and a "pathological narcissist."  Then there were the good old standbys of "asshole" and "bastard."  The latter actually came from the night shift, so you can guess that he's not a good guy.  Anyway, Nathan hit the road after threatening to shut off Greg's life-support and generally making no excuse for his inhuman actions.

Longest Author's Notes ever.  Read the story now, okay?  Please?

**

How long have I been sleeping?

And why do I feel so old?

Why do I feel so cold?

My heart is saying one thing

But my body won't let go. . .

-Sarah McLachlan

**

Chapter One: Round and Round We Go

**

Greg was twelve the year his mother left.  She left when he was asleep, just slid out the door after packing his lunch - - turkey sandwich, potato chips, animal crackers, and a can of Mountain Dew.  The next day, Greg would methodically go through the house and throw away all the turkey, all the potato chips, all the animal crackers, and open all the Mountain Dew cans and pour them into the sink, but for the present, he slept, his hair mussed against his pillow, swallowed by his own dreams.  Annabeth Hojem Sanders didn't come into his bedroom to kiss him goodbye, and Greg, years later and years wiser, would guess that she didn't want to wake him up.  He was a light sleeper, and once he realized that she was leaving, he would have done whatever he could do to keep her there.

He didn't wake when his mother came to kiss him because she never did.  He woke, instead, when his father turned on the lights, slamming his bedroom into a sudden brightness.  Greg knew better than to squirm into the covers - - his father was an early-to-bed, early-to-rise man, and he was always irritated when Greg tried to sleep late.  He sat up, instead, a kid in a faded baseball tee and a streak of dried clay from art class clinging to the back of his hand.  He noticed it; covered it with the covers.  His father liked things to be neat.

Indeed, Nathan Sanders himself looked impeccable, even at that early hour in the morning.  He looked around his son's room with the faintest wrinkle of disgust on his mouth.  He rarely entered into Greg's bedroom - - it was one thing for which Greg had always been thankful - - and he stood, rather than sitting in one of the low-slung canvas chairs, or the end of the bed.

"Your mother's gone," Nathan said.

"What?  Mom?"  Fully awake, Greg pushed through the covers.  A mesh of cotton fell away from his body.  The scruffy dry-clay mark gleamed in the new light, and pulled at his skin when he moved his hand to bring himself upwards.  "Where'd she go?"

"She didn't say."

"When is she coming back?"

"She isn't.  Hurry up.  You're going to miss the bus and I don't want to have to take you.  She laid out your clothes on the sofa and your lunch is on the counter."  Nathan's scowl was intense and Greg realized, quite without noticing that he did, that he was afraid of his father.  And he thought that his father hated him. "You're the only one she left anything for."

Greg scrambled through the covers and winced as his feet touched the cold floor.  If he had hurried out to brush his teeth and pour himself some cereal, it might have ended then.  But he saw something in his father's eyes - - a touch of sadness beneath the anger, and Greg was too observant for his own good, and too kind to know when it was better to be cruel.  And Nathan was still his father, so he said:

"I'm sorry, Dad."  He was, too, and genuinely.  His mother had left them both.  They were going to be alone together.

Nathan turned on him.  The motion was quick and snappish.  The man was pale, and, to Greg, it was like looking in a bizarre funhouse mirror; seeing himself grown and frightened, or full of some other, more complex, unidentifiable emotion.  "Don't feel sorry for me, you little brat.  I lost her, but I have you, and you aren't going to get away."

"No, Dad."  He tried to get away but the room was suddenly larger than he remembered, and it was a full ten miles to the door.

Nathan was smiling now, and that was worse.  "I've never hit you, have I?"

Something in Greg's head started yammering and pushing away, panicked schoolyard words, urging him to turn tail and run from his bully who wasn't a bully but his father.  He was twelve, pale, a goof, and good at science.  He knew about bullies.  He knew sometimes it was good to fight, and sometimes it was good to flee, and he even knew the reaction name: fight-or-flight.  He'd had fights before on the playground and he understood when he could win and when he would have to lose.  He wasn't consistent in choosing to fight or run - - he fought when he thought he could win, but only he knew that, and viewers were always confused.

He couldn't fight his father.

And his father wasn't a bully anyway, right?

"No, never," he said.  "You never hit me."

"Do you want me to?"

If only that door wasn't so far away.  If only he could get to it.  But he was stuck, and Nathan was smiling at him, and Greg thought, confusedly, that it must have been the same way the Big Bad Wolf had smiled, the way that made Little Red Riding Hood so scared.  It was the smile that said there were things to be eaten; things to be devoured whole.

What came out of him was a guttural denial.  It tore his throat, but it was a denial, just, "No."

"Are you sure?  You haven't been a good child - - I know that.  And I'm going to have to raise you myself, now.  Your mother and I - - we never wanted children.  You were an accident, but we did our best with you, but you've never been grateful for that, just troublesome."

"I'm sorry, Daddy."  He flinched away from his own voice.  It sounded painful.

"Are you going to be good for me, Gregory?"

That name.  No one at school called him Gregory.  Greg was quicker, Greg was faster, Greg sounded more like the name he was supposed to have.  Eleven years later, he would meet Gil Grissom and be nervous about his new job.  He would feel young and inexperienced even though he knew that he was good at what he did, maybe even the best at what he did, and he would feel that nervous grin on his face, and his mouth would chatter a mile-a-minute, and Grissom would look at him with a reversion of Nathan's expression.  With Nathan, it had always been good on the surface - - a plastic gleam of love shown for the sake of strangers who couldn't see deeper, and underneath would be anger, and irritation.

Grissom would have a faint glaze of irritation, and underneath, there would be - -

Affection?  Liking?  Attachment?  An already willing feeling to protect some kid straight out of university?

Grissom would call him Greg, not Gregory, and not Sanders,  and that would cement the feelings of admiration that Greg would already feel by the time he got his interview.

"I'm going to be good," he said, twelve and scared and years away from anyone he would call his real family.  "I'll be good, Dad.  I promise."

"Good boy."  Nathan hugged him, and Greg was smothered in his father.  The corded muscle, and the smells of cloth and cologne.  He'd been hugged before, but it hadn't ever felt so much like drowning.  His father's hand slid through the soft mess of the back of Greg's hair.  "You don't need to worry about catching the bus.  I'll give you a ride."

"Okay."  Some part of him thought it was over; some part of him knew that it wasn't - - but the door seemed closer, and he could no longer hear his own heartbeat.  "Thanks."

He even made it to the door and put his hand on the knob when Nathan said:

"Gregory?"

"Yeah?"

A slowly spreading smile, like molasses being poured: "I'm all you've got now."

Not, "you're all I've got" or "we have to be here for each other," or even, "it's just the two of us now," but "I'm all you've got now."

Greg said, "Yeah.  You are."

**

"Greg.  Greg, wake up.  You're having a nightmare."  A gentle beam of pressure on his shoulder to wake him.  But he was already awake, wasn't he?  His dad woke him up by turning on all the lights.  It was a bright, glaring wake-up call, nothing like this gentle shake, but it worked.  He was awake - - oh.  Nightmare.  Grissom.  Coma.  House.

Greg opened his eyes.  "I was not having a nightmare."

Grissom didn't look apologetic for shaking him either way.  "You were talking in your sleep, and you didn't sound happy about it."

That wasn't on his list of things to explain to Grissom, mostly because he was sure that the conversation would be of the horrifying-comic variety.  Well, boss, it was about my childhood, and I wasn't too happy about that even when it was going on, so yeah, I get why you'd think it was a nightmare.  In fact, sometimes I think it must have been.

"What time is it?"

Grissom glanced at his watch.  "One in the afternoon."

A glance at the drawn blinds clued him in, and the memories were slowly coming back.  Yeah, they'd both clocked out at seven, and Grissom had given him a ride back home - - if home counted as a huge, hollow townhouse with a great stereo system as its only asset.  They'd eaten, showered, and Greg had taken the guest room around eight.  And Grissom had his own room.

And that chair by his bed looked pretty dented.

"I told you that you didn't have to watch me sleep."

"I spent four weeks watching you sleep," Grissom said.  "It's hard to break the habit."

It wasn't as if Greg didn't appreciate the concern.  After all, it wasn't like he hadn't had the major/minor breakdown that they were all studiously not talking about.  Wasn't like he hadn't been in a coma for about a month, switching back and forth between nightmares, while his father wrecked havoc on the world outside.  And it wasn't even like he hadn't agreed to live with Grissom for a while so he could put things back together.  It had only been two days, but it was already annoying how much Grissom hung over him, like he was afraid a wrong word or a slip might send Greg back in time and back to West Palms.

He didn't know what he needed, but he didn't need that.

"I'm not going to just go back into a coma, you know," he said.  "Not unless you get fed up with me and crack me over the head.  Doc Brenner says I'm still pretty tender back there."

Grissom looked pained, as if he didn't appreciate the joke.  "I couldn't sleep," he said, as if being unable to fall asleep himself meant that the perfect activity to get him to drop off would be watching someone else do it, as encouragement.

Greg started to point out the ridiculousness of the statement, but closed his mouth instead.  Verbal zingers didn't have the same charm anymore.

Why did he have to keep waking up, anyway?  And why couldn't he sleep without dreaming?  Since the coma, he would have guessed that his sleep would be uninterrupted, his REM function way too frazzled to continue its work, but instead, he'd been dreaming constantly.  And they were vivid, realistic, and - - many of them - - real, just a rehashing of old memories.  Like his father.  And Melissa Sharpe.  Then he woke from past to present, and things weren't any better.

Grissom was watching him.  "Are you happy, Greg?"

What a weird question.

"Sure," he said, wondering why it sounded like a lie, even to him.  "Sure I am."

"If you have to repeat it, you're just validating it to yourself.  People who are sure of things only say them once."  Grissom had apparently been attacking another volume of Zen sayings, Greg thought sourly, and listened as his boss continued.  "You don't like to sleep, and when you do, you have dreams - - of course I've noticed," he said, off Greg's surprised look.  "You toss and turn, and you mutter."

"I don't think it would bother you so much if you'd stay in your own bedroom."  Greg kicked the covers off.  "Grissom, do you want me to leave?"

"No, of course not.  I'm trying to help."

"Well, I don't want help.  I told you I could work this out on my own."

"I do not," Grissom said mildly, "recall those words ever leaving your mouth."

He sat up and bounced his heels against the mattress.  It was a new, restless habit that he'd acquired somewhere between the hospital and Grissom's house, and he hated it.  He kicked back savagely, and bruised the back of his foot.  He gritted his teeth.

"Do you spend all your time coming up with snappy Zen comebacks to everything I say?" Greg asked bitterly.

"No.  Do you spend all your time coming up with the best ways to dodge my questions?"

"That's exactly what I meant."

"And that's exactly what I meant, Greg.  Nothing's going to change if you won't ever let anyone help you."

Greg chewed at his lower lip - - another new tic that he realized he'd acquired and was revolted by, but unable to stop - - and said, "Want to hear a riddle?"

Grissom sighed.  "Sure, Greg."

"How do you know when you've really reached rock-bottom?"

"How?"

"Gil Grissom starts telling you to open up to people."  It was a nasty thing to say - - and probably unfair - - the first time Dr. Brenner had heard Greg caustically smart off to Grissom, he'd scolded his own patient mercilessly once Grissom had left ("That man did nothing but wait for you to wake up for four weeks.  Treat him with more respect.") - - but what Brenner hadn't understood was that Greg did respect Grissom - - and he always had.  It just didn't change anything.

I'm being pulled apart.  Everything in me is tearing up.

None of them got it.  They were all nice, even if they treated him like he was a delicate piece of glassware close to being broken, but they still didn't understand.  They didn't know what it was like to hang in a limbo that hadn't been a limbo at all.  And, maybe even more importantly, they didn't know what it was like to be attacked like that, by someone they'd trusted.  Granted, he'd only had one date with Melissa, but he'd met her, and liked her.  He'd wanted another chance.

She'd paid attention to him and treated him like he was someone valuable.  How could he have resisted that?  In retrospect, it was a personality flaw - - his unerring willingness to be drawn to someone who showed him the slightest hint of affection.

He'd almost died because of the casual, unassuming trust - - because you didn't walk around believing that someone was going to hurt you.

And since then, he'd been on eggshells.  Every new person was a threat unspoken.  Even his friends . . . he loved them, but it felt impossible to open up anymore.  How easy was it to turn on someone?  How easy was it to flip a switch and decide that Greg was worth less than - -

I've never hit you, have I?

"Greg, what are you thinking about?"

"Trust."

"You remember the word.  I'm surprised."  Grissom frowned in reflex, and rubbed at his mouth.  "I'm sorry.  That was cruel."

Cruel.  Well, what wasn't?  In comparison to everything else, a sharp retort from Grissom shouldn't have been able to wound him, but it somehow had.  Everything meant more coming from Grissom.  A compliment was sweeter, a reprimand more hurtful.  He could tally them up on his fingers - - every single good and bad thing Grissom had ever had to say about him or to him, and was it sad, pathetic, or both that he wished Gil Grissom had been the one to wake him up the morning his mother had left?

He didn't accept Grissom's apology, even though he knew it was sincere and even though he knew he should have been apologizing himself.  After all, Grissom had given him a room and was putting up with the mood swings, and Greg felt bad for being able to do so little in return.

But trust. . . love. . . family. . . even friendship - - they were all so much harder now.

Besides, if he forgave Grissom, it would mean that he'd have to talk to him, and silence was easier.

"Are you going back to your own room?" he asked instead, hoarse from talking more than he had in days.  "Because I really want to get some sleep."

Grissom looked at him from behind the gentle curve of his glasses, and finally nodded.

"If that's what you want."

Nobody ever asked him what he wanted.  It didn't make him feel any better.  He rolled over away from Grissom, and by the time he turned again, the door was shut and he was alone.

Somehow, that didn't feel better, either.