21/05/10 - Edited to re-add formatting. Sorry for any confusion!

Disclaimer: I don't own Las Vegas.

Author's Note: This is just a collection of very random little stories written for fun/when I was bored/because I didn't want to revise. Some might appeal to you more than others so I've mentioned the characters involved at the start of each, in case you want to skip through and have a look for one that you feel like reading.

I hope you enjoy them! If you have the time to leave a review, any and all feedback is very much appreciated!

Author's Note 2: Danny learns that new parents shouldn't really expect to sleep.

Baby Blues

"Hush little baby, don't say a word," Danny half-mutters, half-sings, under his breath, for what feels like the one hundredth time this hour, "Daddy's gonna buy you a mockingbird."

It doesn't work though; the baby keeps on screaming, fierce, full-lunged wails that rise and fall like an endless ambulance siren. His little face has turned an angry rash red, covered in a sticky film of tears and mucus, and even Danny, who believes his baby to be, of course, the most beautiful in all the history of the world, must concede that right now he looks pretty unattractive.

Helplessly, he bounces the baby in his arms, makes a few soft, consoling hushing sounds, because, he realizes, he's forgotten the rest of the words to the lullaby. He knew them once, he's sure, but by now it's two a.m., and he's spent the last seven hours pacing the apartment with his arms full of a baby who just won't stop crying, and he's not even certain he can remember his own name any more.

"Please, please, please, if you stop right now," he improvises, imploringly, "Daddy's gonna buy you the whole damn town."

But it seems bribery isn't an option, and Danny lets out a loud, weary sigh. He must have tried everything by now: feeding and changing and bouncing and pacing and singing and rocking and soothing. But the crying simply doesn't stop.

For Danny, it started earlier this evening – yesterday evening, now – when Delinda called him at work and then burst into tears the moment he answered, sobbing raggedly down the phone while the baby wept and howled in the background.

Eventually, getting no response to his repeated, and increasingly anxious, demands of, "What's going on? What's wrong?" Danny had just hung up and rushed out of his office, had driven home leaving rubber hot on the tarmac and his foot on the gas the entire way.

When he got in, chest tight at the thought of what he might find there – Delinda or the baby sick or hurt, the house ransacked and broken into – Delinda was waiting for him by the door, in the same things she'd been wearing at six that morning, dried spit-up in her hair, rocking the wailing baby frantically.

"He hasn't stopped," she'd said, looking slightly wild-eyed, and practically thrusting the baby at him, "All. Day."

She's been asleep in the bedroom ever since, so bone-deep exhausted Danny imagines she could sleep through anything quieter than a train wreck, which the baby's crying is, just about.

Unfortunately, that's not something their neighbours can do. They knocked at the door a couple of hours earlier to ask Danny if he can't do something about the noise, and while what Danny really wanted to do was tell them that yes of course he can, he just really enjoys having his eardrums ruptured, all he'd managed in the end was a weakened, "I'm so sorry. Really. He's not usually like this," while they looked on disapprovingly at him and his apparent total lack of parenting skills.

"Come on, buddy," he murmurs now, cajoling, talking mindlessly, just to have something to listen to other than the screaming, "Come on, little guy. You don't want to wake up your mama. You don't want to wake up the nice people next door."

Not that the people next door will be nice to them for much longer, he adds silently.

Gently, he makes slow circular motions over the baby's tiny back, mumbles half-remembered snatches of songs. Still, the baby cries.

Danny loves his son, he does, hugely, heart-wrenchingly so, but, right at this moment, his patience is wearing thin as a gossamer thread.

And the cries just sound so forlorn, so pitiful, that it's hard not to worry that there's something wrong. But Danny's called the paediatrician once already – after trying (unsuccessfully) to comfort the baby with a bath, but before (also unsuccessfully) calling Jillian and Mike and even Cooper with desperate requests for advice – and everything seemed fine.

"Sometimes babies just cry," the doctor told him, though she did have the good grace to sound a little sympathetic.

He's not sure where he gets the idea in the end. He's walking around and around the apartment, tracing the same invisible figure-of-eight into the floor, because he remembers Mike mentioning that apparently babies like motion, and this is the most motion he can manage right now – driving is out, the only car they have lacking a few too many modern safety features, and it's a little late to be wandering the streets with a crying baby in a stroller.

And then, something occurs to him. It's unlikely to work, he thinks, but at this point he's willing to try just about anything, really, that might eventually get him a couple of hours of quiet and sleep.

He grabs the keys from the table, and then takes the baby out into the hall, heads quickly for the elevator doors at the end of the corridor and pushes the call button.

For a while they ride the elevator – down to the ground floor, and then back up to the top, and down to the ground, and up to the top. And finally, finally, it starts to work.

Slowly, the baby's screams become sobs, become whimpers, become soft hiccups, and at last he is quiet, not a squirming, squealing little demon any more, but a sleepy, damp-faced cherub again, drifting off in Danny's arms.

They stay in the elevator a little longer, going up and down, up and down, and Danny's so tired, eyes slipping half-closed, and the movement is actually starting to make him feel slightly motion-sick now, but he doesn't care.

He smiles triumphantly to himself.

"Oh, you like the elevator, don't you?" he says softly, delighted, in that silly, singsong voice he used to roll his eyes at when other people used it on their children, "Oh, yes you do, oh, yes you do!"