Title: In Which Nick Stokes is Pretty Damn Surprised
By: geekwriter
Pairing: Nick/Greg
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Written for the "WTF27" challenge, where you write 27 crack fics on different themes. This one is for the "Transformation (Animal)" prompt.

To be honest, Nick was getting a little suspicious. It wasn't that he didn't trust Greg, because he did. He knew Greg wasn't cheating, but there was...something. He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but something was wrong.

It wasn't anything wrong between the two of them--their relationship was great. But still, Greg was holding something back. Nick had the sneaking suspicion that Greg was keeping something from him.

He tried to ignore it. If Greg had secrets, well, fine. It wasn't like the fact that they were dating meant that Greg had to tell him everything he ever did, everywhere he ever went.

Nick tried not to let it gnaw at him, but gnaw at him it did. He'd asked Greg to live with him, and Greg had said yes, then paused, then said it was too soon. They practically lived together, anyway, but sometimes Greg just disappeared. He'd tell Nick he had something to do and Nick wouldn't hear from him for days, sometimes, and Greg wouldn't even show up for work.

He'd started marking the days down in his calendar, but he couldn't find any pattern to Greg's disappearances. Sometimes it was twice a week and sometimes the disappearances were months apart. He tried to justify his worry by focusing on the fact that the disappearances could cost Greg his job, but one night he'd subtly brought the topic up with Grissom, saying, "Hey, have you seen Greg around?"

"He's off for a few days," Grissom had said, unconcerned, as he toasted a batch of grasshoppers over a Bunsen burner.

"Oh, well, do you know where he's at?" Nick had asked. He really, really hoped the grasshoppers were part of an experiment and not Grissom's lunch.

Grissom looked up at him and said, "Aren't you supposed to be heading out to The Palms for that 419?" and that was it, Nick nodded and excused himself and went to check out the body that had been found taped to the bottom of the craps table.

So, Greg didn't seem in danger of losing his job, but Nick still worried. He wondered what Greg was keeping from him. He worried about how Greg didn't trust him enough to tell him the truth. He worried that it was drugs, or maybe Greg was going on benders, or maybe he was on dialysis, though it couldn't really be dialysis since Nick had seen every inch of Greg's body and there had never been a needle mark.

He worried that something was wrong with Greg's parents. Maybe one of them was sick. He didn't know why Greg wouldn't tell him that, though. Maybe one of Greg's friends was constantly getting into trouble and had made Greg promise not to tell anyone.

There could be a lot of reasons for why Greg disappeared sometimes, and there was probably a perfectly good reason why, but Nick couldn't think of a single one. That's why he was sitting in his truck in Greg's driveway after shift, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

Greg's car was in the carport, so Nick knew he was there. He wished, suddenly, that he'd thought to bring something--maybe pizza or Chinese food, something to give him an excuse to stop by.

He took a deep breath, then got out of his truck. He paused twice on his way up the path to Greg's front door, but finally got up the nerve to ring the bell. Greg didn't answer, so after a minute, Nick rang the bell again. After another minute, he started to knock. He called Greg's home phone. He called Greg's cell phone. He sent a message to Greg's pager. He knocked again and then, feeling horribly guilty about it but doing it anyway, he pulled a key out of his pocket.

He'd made the key himself. Once, when Greg had spent the night, Nick had snuck out to the living room while Greg was asleep and made impressions of his house key. He knew it was wrong, and he'd put the key in the back of his closet for months, feeling like a horrible person every time he even thought about it.

He'd finally dug the key out again, though, after Greg had dodged yet another one of Nick's questions about his disappearances. He'd dug the key out and slipped in his pocket and headed on over to Greg's condo.

He unlocked Greg's front door, calling out, "Greg? It's Nick. Are you all right?"

Greg wasn't in the hallway or the living room or the kitchen. He wasn't in his office or his bedroom or the bathroom. Maybe Greg had left but hadn't taken his car. Maybe he'd called a cab to pick him up and take him somewhere, like the airport.

Nick returned to the living room and sighed. He couldn't believe he was crazy enough to break into Greg's house. He'd never wanted to be that kind of boyfriend, jealous and crazy. He noticed a bowl of toasted grasshoppers on one of the couch cushions, which was just weird.

He was just about to leave when he heard the cat flap on Greg's back door flip open. When he looked, he saw that a ringtail cat had entered the room. It was about two feet long, half of that length being its fluffy, black and white ringed tail. The ringtail turned and sat up on its back paws, then snicked the lock on the cat flap shut with both front paws and some effort.

The ringtail turned, saw Nick standing there in the living room, let out a startled screech, and scrambled to the top of the cat tree in the corner. Then it sighed, dropped its head, and said, "Jesus Christ. You scared the shit out of me."

Nick blinked a few times and shook his head. He wondered if he'd inhaled too many chemicals at work. He wondered if he was having a flashback from that one time he'd smoked weed in college. He was pretty sure weed didn't cause flashbacks, but he couldn't think of anything else to explain it.

"How did you get in here, anyway?" the ringtail asked. "I was positive the front door was locked."

"I, uh..."

"You're freaked out."

"Are you...am I insane, or are you talking to me?"

"I'm talking to you. God. I'm so sorry. I didn't want you to find out like this. I wanted to tell you. I started to tell you so many times, but then I just chickened out." The ringtail climbed quickly down the cat tree, hopped across the floor and up onto the back of the couch.

Nick took a step back.

The ringtail wrapped its tail around front and began grooming it nervously. "So, uh," the ringtail said, "just how freaked out are you?"

"You...you're a talking animal," Nick said.

"I know I should have told you sooner." If Nick wasn't mistaken, the ringtail looked somewhat ashamed. "It's just...I've never really told anyone before, not somebody I was in love with."

Nick looked into the ringtail's deep brown eyes, then gasped. "Greg?" he asked.

The ringtail's whiskers twitched. "Surprise?"

Nick sat down hard right there on the floor.

"I knew if I told you, you'd think I was crazy. And if I just let you watch me transform, I was worried you'd freak out and try to smack me with a broom or something," the ringtail--Greg--said.

"You're a ringtail cat," Nick said.

"Yeah." Greg jumped down off the couch and bounded across the carpet. He stopped about a foot away from Nick and sat up on its hind paws like a prairie dog. "Look, I know it's pretty weird. It's a long story, but suffice it to say that Mama Olaf was trying out a new spell, and things went wrong."

"You got this way...through magic." Nick felt like he was quite possibly going insane.

"She feels awful about it, but it's not so bad. I mean, it's predictable and everything, it doesn't just happen randomly."

"But I, I've been keeping track of the times you've disappeared and there's no pattern."

"It's all astrological," Greg said. "It's pretty complicated, but it's mostly just the major events that cause it."

"You change into a ringtail cat because of major astrological events." Nick was almost positive he was going insane.

"You know how I took that semester off my second year of college?"

"You had mono," Nick said.

Greg licked his paw and cleaned behind his ear. "Yeah. Not so much. You see, there was this megaconjunction--seven planets lined up in Capricorn within nine degrees of one another. I didn't change back for nearly three months."

"Three months?" he asked weakly. He didn't know if he could deal with his boyfriend being a ringtail cat for three straight months.

"Don't worry," Greg said, wrapping his bushy tail around him once again. He picked through the fur carefully as he spoke. "It's just a lunar eclipse. I'll be back to normal by tomorrow."

"Can...can I pet you?"

Greg nodded and moved closer.

Nick touched the pale brown fur on Greg's body with his fingertips. He placed his palm gently on Greg's back and stroked down to his tail. Greg's fur was soft, not like a cat's silky fur, more like a fox pelt.

"You can scratch behind my ears," Greg said.

Nick slid his hand up. "You're so small," he whispered. Greg's head was smaller than the palm of Nick's hand.

"I know, right? For a long time, I was pissed that she hadn't turned me into a wolf or something cool like that."

Nick scratched behind Greg's left ear, and Greg leaned into his touch.

"How long have you been like this? How many years?"

"It started when I was in elementary school, so pretty long. Almost 25 years, now."

"That's...God. She hasn't found a way to fix you?"

"Nah. She tried for the first few years, but then I told her to stop trying. I like it. And, you know, Grissom's cool with it, so--"

"You told Grissom before you told me?"

"Not on purpose. It was my first year at the lab, and I was running all those samples from that frat house massacre at NVU, you remember that?"

Nick nodded. "Yeah."

"I lost track of time, forgot there was going to be a conjunction until I felt myself start to turn. I ran to Grissom, told him what was going to happen. He thought I was nuts until he saw it with his own eyes. He's been really good about it, giving me time off when I need it."

Nick just nodded. He guessed it explained why Greg had cat trees and a cat flap in his house when he didn't even have a cat.

Greg climbed up onto Nick's leg. He could feel Greg's sharp claws even through his jeans.

"Did I just blow a fuse in your brain?" Greg asked.

"Quite possibly."

"OK. So, yeah, it's kind of a mind fuck. I get that. We don't have to talk about it anymore. How about we just watch TV. I Tivo'd the game."

Football. Yeah. Nick could do football. He didn't know if he should pick Greg up and carry him to the couch, but Greg made the decision for him, scrambling off his lap and leaping up onto the back of the couch, then jumping down onto the cushion next to the bowl of toasted grasshoppers.

"You can have the remote," Greg said, "but that's only because I don't have opposable thumbs. There are chips in the kitchen if you want them."

Nick sat down next to Greg and picked up the remote. He didn't know what to think, so he decided not to think at all. He decided he'd just sit there and watch the game with the man he loved--his boyfriend, the ringtail cat.