CSI: V N/G: Strangers

Title: Strangers
Characters: Nick, Greg, Warrick
Rating: Gen
Disc.: Not my characters, not my show
Summary: The prompt placed me in Nicks shoes on his first week at the lab.
Prompt: Journey

There is this sound coming from the end of the hall. He can hear it over the receptionist's typing as he takes long slow steps in that direction. She nods at him as he passes, flashing his badge in case she doesn't remember him. Past the front desk he can hear it over the whirring machinery in the lab to his left, then still over the video Archie has going because the closer he gets the less the sound is muffled by distance and scattered by echoing walls. The ambient noise of the lab gets worse too as he steps deeper and deeper into it, janitor's floor machines are going, someone is using power tools down the hall. It gets so noisy as he approaches he isn't sure he heard this other sound at all, the one that drew his attention and his feet to the end of the hall. And maybe he didn't, just imagined it, but he could swear there was strange and out-of-place bleating sound cutting through all the auditory garbage and reaching his ears all the way in the lobby. As Nick pushes open the door to the men's locker room and closes out the din behind him, he is left with but one sound, that of the crackling of distant falling water.
Then it starts again, and he knows this is what he heard from the end of the hall, but it is still no clearer to him what it is beyond a human voice. A lone man is in the shower at the back of the locker room singing. Nick hasn't worked here long enough to tell who it is through three rows of lockers. The voice is distorted by the water and artificially low singing this strange haunting tune that Nick thinks he might know, but it's so simple he can't place it. The man dums a wordless string of perhaps four measures, three notes at a time that create a musical circle starting and ending on the same baritone key. Repeat.
Nick steps cautiously forward, reshoulders his backpack softly, guessing he is yet undetected and aiming to keep it that way for now.
Then the voice changes abruptly, goes three times higher and louder, and forms the words to the verse, and all at once Nick grins because he knows the song, he knows who is singing it, and he knows Greg has no idea he's standing there listening.
"Just a small town girl! Livin' in her LONELY wo-orld. She took the midnight train goin' ehn-nee-where!"
Nick bites both his lips at once.
"Just a city boy! Bornanraised in SOUTH de-troi-oit. He took the midnight train goin' ehn-nee-where!"
Nick has to laugh eventually, quietly, to himself. He's not that bad really. He's very nearly hitting all those high notes, Nick just can't help but laugh though, cuz, well. Cuz.
"...It goes on and on and on and uuuoooyyyonnnnn! Strangers, duh-din! Na na na the boulevard! Somethin', somthin' in the NAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIGHT!"
Greg bursts into a squealy guitar solo as Warrick walks in the door wearing a face like someone left the cap off the sodium sulfide. He looks to Nick who is pinching his face and laughing still. "Greg!" he shouts and it echoes over the lockers.
"Yo!" he calls back immediately and the singing stops.
"Knock it off. You're gonna break the windows."
"That's cold!" Greg warns and the sounds from the shower change, water cascades in a cacophony as Greg gets to the business of showering again instead of unwittingly serenading Nick.
"He'll know cold when I go over there and turn on all the other showers on hot," Warrick says sidelong to Nick and wanders off to his locker.
Nick lets the smile linger on his face as he puts his own things away in his locker. It starts up again almost immediately, though softer. "Do-on't stop, belie-vin. Hold on to that feelayeeyaaan..."
Nick grins and bites his lip for the hundredth time since they first introduced him to Greg four days ago, opens the package on a brand new combination lock and slips it into place.