This is just a short little thing, to dip my toe into the fandom. I really want to write a casefic, but those tend to be hard for me to wrap my brain around. In the meantime, this popped into my head and wanted out.

Enjoy!

Something woke Dwayne Pride out of a deep, well-deserved sleep. He wasn't sure what it was, at first. Glancing about the darkened room, his didn't spot anything out of place or any suspicious movement. Tossing and turning, he stewed about it for a long while, wondering why his brain was racing at nothing at all.

Granted, his chosen family had had their fair share of hardships recently. A little paranoia was probably to be expected and perhaps even a little healthy.

He had just convinced himself that he was being silly and was about to drift back off to sleep when a sound from downstairs caught his ear, jolting him back awake again. It had been the metallic rattle of a filing cabinet drawer opening. Dwayne sat up in his bed, listening for a moment, his hand drifting toward the drawer in the nightstand where he kept his backup gun. He heard the filing cabinet drawer close again with a grinding squeak. Seeing a few minutes past oh-three-hundred on the clock, a knot formed itself in his stomach and he got out of bed as softly as he could manage and crept across the room to the door.

Gun in hand, he gently opened the door with his off-hand. Careful to keep his feet from hitting that squeaky floorboard at the top of the stairs, he stepped out and crouched down to look out over the office bullpen.

It was still dark, save for a soft glow coming from the corner of the room just under the stairs. Dwayne leaned out over the railing to get a better look and found the lamp on LaSalle's desk on, casting deep shadows across the room. And sitting in his seat was the man himself, head bent over an open file that he was paging through, the blue glow of his computer lighting his face.

Dwayne sighed and looked heavenward with a roll of his eyes, silently pleading with the almighty for patience. Of course. Of course it was Christopher. He had sworn he had gotten the message that Dwayne was trying to send him earlier. "I heard ya, King," he had said with a blase grin as he had left earlier that evening. So, why wouldn't he end up back here, still not getting a proper night's rest?

Flipping the safety back on his gun, Pride stood up again and went back into the room to return it to its place in his nightstand drawer, no longer worrying about stealth. In his frustration, he pushed the drawer shut a little more forcefully than was strictly necessary.

Pulling a sweatshirt on over his head, Dwayne went back to the stairs and went down, not bothering to try to mask the frustration that was radiating from him.

"Christopher, I swear to God, I'm gonna have Loretta give you a tranquilizer," he said.

With a sigh, LaSalle looked up from the file he had been studying. "Hell, I'd almost take it, at this point," he drawled out, "sorry, I didn't mean to wake ya. Just gettin' some work done."

"That can wait for tomorrow," Pride responded, coming to a halt in front of LaSalle's desk, his tone stern, "you told me earlier that you heard me."

"Yeah, I did," Chris said, leaning back in his chair heavily, looking more tired that Dwayne had ever seen him. "An' I wasn't lying, I swear. I went home, I ate somethin', took a shower. Even got into bed."

The look of utter exhaustion on Christopher's face instantly took the edge off of Dwayne's frustration. The kid's eyes had dark circles under them, making his whole face look sunk in.

Kid. No, not a kid. Dwayne checked himself. He might have been a hot-headed kid in his mid-twenties when they had met, but it had been almost a decade now. Christopher wasn't a kid any more. Dwayne had seen to that. Hell, he was even proud of the man that Chris had turned into, even though he wasn't really sure he had that right. Dwayne wasn't actually his father, after all, though sometimes it was difficult to remind himself of that.

To hell with all that, Dwayne decided, looking at the hollowed out young man that was flopped over on a desk chair before him.

"Couldn't sleep?" Dwayne asked.

"I tried to, King, I swear," Chris answered, sounding miserable, "I must'a tossed an' turned for four hours. Just couldn't turn off my brain."

"The noises," Dwayne said.

"Yeah," Chris affirmed, "the noises. Figured maybe I'd just work until I got to a point where noise don't matter."

Dwayne gave a shake of his head and reached over to the file laid out on LaSalle's desk, turning over the cover to close it. "Christopher, you've been like this for weeks. If you're not that tired by now, you're never gonna be. An' workin's just gonna rev you back up."

"Yeah, you're prob'ly right," Chris sighed, rubbing his hands over his face, "you're almost always right. It's aggrivatin'."

"It's what I do," Dwayne replied, giving a lop-sided grin, he started heading for the kitchen. "C'mon. I got some eggs that need to get used and Percy overbought on veggies. I'll make you an early breakfast."

"You tryin' to chill n' spill me?"

"And I'm not taking no for an answer, Christopher," Dwayne affirmed as he paused by the doorway, waiting for his protege to haul himself off his chair and follow.

Christopher gave one final blow of his cheeks before doing just that, shaking his head the entire way, giving a bit of a glimmer of the rebellious kid he had been during that case they had worked against the terrible backdrop of Katrina. He trudged over to the kitchen table heavily and flopped down in one of the chairs.

"Nothing like a good meal to make you want to hit the hay," Dwayne went on, making his way over to the fridge and pulling out eggs and a few different veggies.

"I said that I ate, King," Chris protested.

"An actual meal, or a Chris LaSalle meal? 'Cause if you just grabbed a snack bag of crappy pork rinds-"

"I did not eat pork rinds for dinner."

Dwayne looked over at Chris with a knowing look of skepticism, prompting a surrendering toss of hands from the younger man.

"It was potato chips," Chris admitted, resting his forehead in a hand and leaning an elbow on the table.

"That's what I thought," Dwayne replied, turning to the cutting board with a sharp knife and a red bell pepper. "How you eat that garbage and stay in the shape you do, I'll never know."

"I run," Chris said with a shrug, "besides, life in the Quarter ain't for the weak," he added with a grin.

"As you have so wonderfully illustrated the past couple weeks," Dwayne agreed, cracking an egg into a frying pan, "you ever thought it might be time to get a new place? Maybe somewhere not in the Quarter?"

"One of the many things that went racing through my head," Chris answered, forlorn, staring off into space, "but the 'burbs? I dunno, King. It just ain't me. Besides, leavin' the place where she... was... It just feels like I'd be givin' up. Runnin' away. That won't do me any good."

Dwayne gave an appreciative smile, pouring a little bit of milk into the frying pan with the eggs. "So you did hear me, then."

"Hell, King, I've said it myself enough times to Cade," Christopher shot back, "mamma don't need both her boys goin' down the rabbit hole."

"That just might be the smartest thing I've heard you say in weeks," said Dwayne, dumping the chopped peppers into the egg mixture and starting in on an onion, "outside of a case, anyway."

Christopher gave a disgusted huff. "Probably inside of one, too. The rate I've been goin', probably screw up big-time real soon. I'll make you need to fire me."

Well, that came out of nowhere! Dwayne paused, mid-egg scramble and turned to look at Chris with a puzzled look. "How did you manage to follow that up with the dumbest thing I've heard you say? And I mean ever."

Christopher just scoffed again, giving a bitter shake of his head and leaning both elbows on the table, his hands moving to the back of his neck to idly pick at the short hairs there. He was trying to close off. And Dwayne knew that meant that he had hit on something important, something that Chris had been keeping buried deep down where no one could see. Not even Dwayne Pride. But it was time for it to be coaxed out into the light.

Dwayne went back to scrambling the eggs, adding the onions into the mix, letting a moment of silence stretch out while he carefully considered how to get at this particular delicate artifact of his protege's inner workings. He had to be careful. If he tried to force it, that would be the end of the whole conversation and Chris would be out the door. As the sound of the cooking food dragged on with little else, Dwayne could sense the defenses coming back down as Chris realized he wasn't about to hammer on that point; a held breath that was released, a slow shift in his chair.

"You talk to your brother, recently?" Dwayne asked, dumping a handful of shredded cheese into the nearly-cooked eggs.

"Not for a couple weeks," Chris answered, lifting his head back up to speak.

"He still back home in 'Bama?"

"Far as I know. He seemed pretty content to stick around home for a while. I figure at this point, no news is good news."

"Seems like a good sign," Dwayne said, turning off the stove burner to let the remaining heat finish cooking the meal. He reached for a kettle and started some water for tea. "Maybe you've finally gotten him 'round the corner."

"Yeah, maybe," Chris said, bitterly, "he's gotten real good at coverin' it up, though. Fooled me plenty a-times."

Dwayne almost said something about it running in the family, but managed to clamp down on that thought before it escaped his mouth. He knew Christopher would be the first to agree and, paradoxically, that would cut off any hope Dwayne had of getting at what he was after.

"Well, you're already doing the best thing you can do, believe me," he said instead, "just being there for him, hoping for him, believing it'll get better for him, even when he doesn't. It goes a long way."

"Yeah," Chris sighed, once again leaning his forehead into a hand, rubbing his temple, tiredly, "a long, long, long way. I'm not sure how much longer I got in me, to be honest. I feel like I'm runnin' out of hope, myself."

The kettle had begun to boil while Dwayne had divvied the eggs up on to two plates. He poured the water out into a pair of mugs and dug through Doc Wade's stash of tea until he found a couple bags of chamomile and dunked one in each.

"I give hope to men," Dwayne said, carrying one plate and one cup over and setting them down in front of Christopher. "I keep none for myself."

"Since when do you quote the Bible?" Christopher asked with a skeptical, lop-sided smile.

"It's Tolkien, actually," Dwayne replied, grabbing the other plate and mug and bringing it over to sit across the table from Chris.

"Lord of the Rings?" Chris asked, his skepticism naked, now, as he looked over at Dwayne and began pushing the eggs around on his plate. "Elves and fairies? Really?"

"What can I say?" Dwayne said with a shrug. "Sebastian kept pestering me to read it. Said it was one of the greats of modern literature. Surprisingly, he's not wrong. Eat."

Christopher gave short chuckle and shake of his head, then dug into the eggs. "Well, if it's got more words of wisdom like that, maybe I been missin' out. Seems a bit dense for my taste though."

"Yeah, I thought so too, at first," Dwayne admitted, "but, hey, story was good. And then I hit that line... Fantasy or not, the man knew a thing or two." He took a bite of his own eggs and chewed it thoughtfully for a moment. "Made me realize the big lie that every parent tells their kids."

"What's that?" Chris asked, taking a swig from his mug.

"That hope has no limits," Dwayne said, "that a person can just keep giving hope to others without keeping a little bit back for himself. The danger is, once you care enough about someone that you give all you got, that's when you start hurtin' yourself until you can't help them any more. But you don't care and you keep giving anyway. And then, the only hope you got has to come from someone else."

Christopher looked up at Dwayne again, slowly chewing a bit of eggs and veggies, clearly thinking about other things entirely. They held each others' gaze for a long silent moment before Dwayne spoke up again.

"You're not goin' down the rabbit hole, Chris."

Christopher's eyes slid away, looking back down at his plate while he swallowed. He began pushing the eggs around without actually doing anything with them and for a moment Dwayne was worried that he might have jumped the gun, that Chris had just shut down. But then he lifted his gaze back up again, impossibly, looking even more tired than he had earlier.

"It runs in the family, King," he said, softly, not entirely succeeding in keeping his voice from breaking, just a little bit.

Got it! Dwayne thought to himself, carefully schooling his face into concerned attentiveness, despite the little feeling of victory he had. Taking a sip from his mug, he waited for Christopher to continue.

"Cade used to be fine, too," Chris went on, "what if it's my turn? What if this is me, finally going crazy, too? I mean, think about it. Not sleeping, hardly eating, can't seem to stop? What's that sound like to you?"

"Sounds to me like a perfectly normal guy going through a rough patch," Dwayne replied, "can't say I haven't been there myself."

"It's gettin' awful hard to tell the difference," Chris said, looking back to his plate and fiddling with his fork.

"Yeah, I know," Dwayne assured him, "like I said, I been there. I know what it looks like. You're thinking 'this is it. This is my limit. This is where I crack.' But, God, Chris, think about it. Everything that's been thrown at you this past month or so; your brother and Wendy? Savannah? Staring down Baitfish? It's enough to push any man over the edge. But you're still here. You're still fighting and you're still making a difference. We saved Na'Orleans, you and me. Wouldn't'a turned out that way if you weren't there." He paused for a moment, letting his words sink in, studying his protege's face and making sure he wasn't closing off. "You're not crazy, Christopher. You're grieving. There's a difference."

Chris gave a long, drawn-out sigh, his shoulders falling as a knot seemed to finally release. Closing his eyes, he set his fork down on the plate and just sat there for a moment. Dwayne waited him out.

"I'm just so tired, King," Chris finally said, eyes still closed. And it was the truth, too, Dwayne could tell. He finally looked like he was ready to simply put his head down on the table.

"C'mon," Dwayne said gently, getting up from his own seat and going around the table to put a hand on Chris' shoulder, "there's a sofa upstairs with your name on it."

Christopher didn't even resist as Dwayne coaxed him out of his seat and lead him to the stairs and up to the second level. He only seemed to open his eyes just enough to keep his feet. Once upstairs, Dwayne led him to the well-worn sofa that was set against the wall in his tiny efficiency that passed for an apartment. He just managed to get a pillow under Chris' head as he flopped down with a sigh, letting his eyes fall closed again, one arm dangling off the side. He must have been asleep as soon as he was down, because he didn't even react or protest Dwayne taking his shoes off or pulling a blanket over his shoulders.

Once he was finished, he stood nearby looking at Christopher for a long minute, as if to assure himself that the younger man was well and truly asleep and beyond the dark and racing thoughts that had been plaguing him. Finally, Dwayne nodded to himself in satisfaction.

"This'll do," he mused, "not perfect, but this'll do."

The full weight of his own exhaustion now taking hold, Dwayne made his way back over to his own bed and settled in, laying down so he could see Christopher and keep watch on him until he could no longer keep his own eyes open.