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It doesn’t crash down on him all at once. The day doesn’t even dawn, not until the end.
It starts in the hospital, as a spectator watching an invisible struggle for survival, monitored and documented not unlike a case file.
It serves as a reminder to him just how…easy it is, to come so close to death, and death is not a friend Nick’s eager to hang out with again any time soon. There’s a certain level of empathy he has for Jim Brass, knowing how uncomfortable that bed must feel, how suffocating it is having your chest feel like it’s being crushed by an invisible ton of bricks. To have your heart bursting to a near explosion all because it’s trying so hard to keep you alive, even though your finger is on the trigger.
There’s also a certain level of…selfish relief. Not just relief that the man in the bed is still alive, but relief that it’s not him. He’s not the one teetering unsteadily on the brink of death, he’s not the one under the unforgiving blinding light of the microscope, privacy violated with no curtains to hide behind.
That’s when he realizes, this must be how it felt for them on the other side of the glass. Where he’s standing right now. Above ground.
They slowly filter out after paying living respects; a firm grip of a handshake and shoulder squeeze from the old man who croaks out in a hoarse voice that he’ll be okay seems to shudder through Nick long after he leaves the hospital, when he’s in the faux safety of his home feeling phantom pulses pinching his nerves.
He wakes up the next day thinking nothing of a green soaked dream, and moves on.
A few days later, he finds himself tired of the radio stations playing less music and more rants from angry callers or silly banter between frat-like radio hosts that he’s ashamed to admit, he would have once laughed with . He switches to the CD that he didn’t realize he never took out of his player.
He lets the music play, until he hears a familiar twang and echoes of a broken signer that quakes his ears, feeling as if the car were about to crash in the loss of his control.
He ejects the disc and throws it out the open passenger’s side window with such speed and ferocity as if it were a bomb, but the rest of the song plays out in his head.
Later, he’s at a crime scene, a broken A/C unit causing the unfortunate homeowner to invest in a circle of fans around a recliner-turned-coffin. The man’s head turned towards one of the bigger fans, Nick has a moment where he seems to…disconnect, for a moment. Get lost in the motion of the blades and once he snaps out of this trance, he releases a breath he didn’t realize he was holding.
“Man, this heat’s just making me delirious,” he chuckles when Warrick shakes his shoulder.
“Yeah, it’s pretty bad. There’s a cooler of bottles outside, why don’t you grab one?”
Nick nods, and leaves the room for a quick break.
But this hint is shrugged off just like all of the others. Filed away in that corner of his mind that he doesn’t like to think about too much.
He still looks over his shoulder until he’s back with Warrick and back to following the evidence, because that’s what CSIs do.
He goes to sleep, which is a mistake, not only because it’s the middle of the day and no matter how hard he tries, he still struggles sleeping while the sun’s up—but rather, a mistake because he’s awoken by the burning of his skin, red streaks fading from nail scratches and his fingertips are bleeding. He doesn’t quite remember what happened, just that his eyes were squeezed tight, his nostrils and ears plugged. Couldn’t hear, couldn’t see, couldn’t smell but he could taste them crawling into his mouth, tiny legs tickling the crack between each tooth.
When he goes to the bathroom, he finds that the nightmare isn’t over. He sees himself in the mirror, sees the ghost of a man that perished a year ago—covered in red lesions rising through dirt-soaked skin, pulsing with heat that he can feel as he tugs on the collar of his torn shirt. His hair in disarray, pulled in agony as he bounced around the confines of a glass box like a pinball both wanting and fearing its collapse and he looks to the fan for some comfort but it’s not there—he gasps, realizing that he doesn’t have much air to spare so he’s trapped in that gasp, in the final millisecond before he would allow more air into his body, and he can feel the urge to rip the hair out of his skull—
So he does. He grips the wrist that holds the razor to steady it as it shaves off this ghost from the past, feeling the wave of cool water rain down onto him as he then takes a shower with the door open, and as he stumbles out into the kitchen to get some drinking water, that’s when he finally sees the date. May 19th.
He rubs a hand over his freshly shaven head, laughing in absurdity when he finally realizes that it’s not over, no matter how hard he wants it to be.