Desperado
a/n: First CSI: NY fic evarrrr, whadddup d00ds! I'm streco, aka stephanie pascal. I'm here, from RENT fandom, Twilight fandom, and Maximum Ride fandom alike. This story is basically smacktastic, so try to keep up, eh loves?
All information I get on Stella's and Mac's backgrounds comes from wikipedia. I haven't seen all the episodes so if I'm incorrect please politely inform me of this, or any mistakes I make, so I can hit myself silly and fix it. :)
1
"Lady sings the blues so well
As if she means it, as if it's hell down here
In the smoke-filled world where the jokes are cold
They don't laugh at jokes, they laugh at tragedies."
"What?"
"You heard me."
"Yeah, but—what?"
"Idea was not mine," Mac waved a hand through the air in front of him, chuckling under his breath. "Danny's. 'Sadday night,'" he quoted in his best impersonation of the infamous accent, "'le's all go out and get drinks togetha in a bar, whaddya say? Le's go clubbin'." He chuckled again. "I kid you not, he wants us to have a playdate."
A crooked smile crept onto Stella's face. "Not such a bad idea, I guess. If we can prevent him and Flack from getting absolutely smashed again, it might actually be a good time."
Mac's memory flashed back to the eventful night in which Danny had stood on a table and danced suggestively to "My Humps," with Flack providing the backgrounds. It was an unfortunate sight to see, even though he'd laughed so hard he'd almost pissed himself.
"I'll be sure to bring my video camera this time," he decided.
Stella laughed, straightened up her papers, and rose to her feet. She gave Mac a pat on the shoulder as she walked by. "I'm calling it a night, you coming with?"
He didn't turn around after she passed by, instead staring thoughtfully at the chair she'd just left from. "Nah, I'm gonna stick around a little longer." He turned around slowly, watching her stalk away, her curls bouncing.
"See you tomorrow night, then?"
"See you then," he confirmed, and smiled as she looked back and winked.
"Why don't we do it in the road? / Why don't we do it in the road? / Why don't we do it in the road? / Why don't we do it in the road? / No one will be watchin' us, / why don't we do it in the road?"
The frontwoman of Styx and Stoned wailed on the dimly-lit stage, her hair fluorescent colors and her voice just raspy enough to pull it off. Mac stood, admittedly with a headache building, a coke with rum in his hand. The only person who'd remained with him, Stella, had returned to the bar to get another drink, leaving him alone with wildly dancing people decades younger than him He felt old. He felt sick. For an odd reason, he felt nervous.
Though he'd never been one to have useful gut feelings—for instance, the day Clarie died, he'd felt a good day coming—something made him listen to this one. Nervously, he counted team members. Hawkes was talking to the tall brunette, Lindsay was dancing with Danny, Flack was dancing with the nearly-naked blonde, and the top of Stella's hair was visible behind a large crowd of people moshing.
Mac sighed and backed up, sitting down on the booth he and Stella had been staring. The feeling was probably nothing, as it always was. If it wasn't, he'd find out soon enough, and he gently patted the gun on his belt that he always kept on him. When you were a cop, he always claimed, you never had a day off.
"Mac!" Danny called from across the room, waving his arms frantically. He peeled himself away from Lindsay, tipsily trying to navigate over to his boss. "What are you doin', eh? C'mon, this is supposed to be fun. Where'd Stella go? You two need to dance."
Boldly, he captured Mac's arm and dragged him toward where Stella was returning with her martini. Stealing the olive and instructing them to "have a little fun, huh?", he returned to Lindsay, dancing in a way that only the younger Samaritans of New York could pull off.
"Why do I regret coming?" Mac asked, as Styx and Stoned began their next song.
"Because you're not twenty-five," Stella shouted back, and pointed toward the front door. "Want to come outside with me for a second? I can't breathe in here."
The two of them exited the club, stepping out into a perfect New York evening. It was early fall, summer's spirit still idly soaking the city in oblivion until the cool winter months drove everyone indoors.
The cloudless sky beckoned the two of them, and they subconsciously moved closer, each not wanting to ruin the moment of perfect silence between them.
"Remind me to kill Danny," Stella murmured, and Mac laughed loudly.
"It's because you're not twenty-five," he retorted out of the side of his mouth, not looking at her. She smacked him playfully, smirking.
"I was never into the whole clubbing thing. A bar is fine. Dinner is fine. But clubbing? Seriously? There's too many STDs to choose from, and creepy drunk men to be hit on by. Definitely not my thing."
"Oh, really?" Mac challenged. "Not even when you were younger?"
She smiled out at the street, watching as a taxi drove by. "Want to know the truth?"
"If I'm worthy."
She hit him again.
"Okay, okay. Shoot."
"I always dreamed I'd meet my dream man in a coffee shop," she confided in him, looking up to make sure he wasn't looking at her like she was crazy. Of course he wasn't, though. Mac wasn't one to jump to conclusions, or to judge at a first statement. He listened to the whole thing, and then determined whether you were a freak or not.
"I would step up and order my chai tea, he'd be behind me. He'd pay for me, and I would smile shyly but do a visual overview to make sure he wasn't a creep. When I made sure he wasn't, he'd comment on my choice. I'd take a sip of his hazelnut, or French vanilla, or whatever. We'd listen to the stupid sixties elevator music that they always played. Or maybe it'd be a sweet ballad. Whatever they were playing. But we'd sit and drink coffee, and talk. At our wedding, we'd dance to that stupid sixties doo-wop shit we both hated. But it would be our song. The song we met during."
Mac studied the trees in front of the club, watching the busy and oblivious passerby. "Why a coffee shop though? Why not a Stop and Shop?"
She sighed. "Everyone drinks coffee. It's universal. It's warm. It calms you down, but it excites you. It can't make you drunk or angry. It's fucking coffee."
The grin on Mac's face might as well have been stapled there. "Leave it to you to do things extremely unconventional. When you get married, I'm playing sixties doo-wop tunes the whole time."
"Fine."
"And I'll pour chai tea all over your wedding dress."
"Whatever floats your boat."
"And your bridesmaids."
She looked up at him, a wild, childish gleam in her eyes. "Now that's just too far."
His laugh lit up the night, and she smiled pleasantly. He pointedly eyed her empty glass. "Come on, let's go back in and you can fill that back up." They turned and returned into the smoky bar, where a slow dance was now taking place.
"Desperado, oh, you ain't getting' no younger / your pain and your hunger, they're drivin' you home / and freedom, oh freedom, well, that's just some people talkin' / your prison is walking through this world all alone."
Stella smiled and stalked off to the bar, and he followed her hair for a minute before it disappeared behind a crowd of slow dancing couples.
He sat down at the same booth again, looking outside at the setting autumn. The trees had begun to change, their reds and oranges blazing in the crystal clear night. He picked a star and stared at it, admiring the way it twinkled, its own individual thing in a sky of billions of others like it.
Styx and Stoned were still capturing the night, the lead singer's voice now soft and delicate, floating over the swaying bodies. He watched as Lindsay and Danny shared a short, peaceful kiss, and looked away, trying not to let the envy set in.
"Don't your feet grow cold in the winter time? / The sky won't snow and the sun won't shine / It's hard to tell the night from the day / you're losin' all your highs and lows / ain't it funny how the feeling goes away?"
Happy couples always made him think of Claire. In his memory, she was there, always there. The nightmares still came—the ones where he couldn't find her, where she disappeared. Where he'd wake up, surprised why she wasn't there. Then the fatigue would melt away and he'd realize that she'd been gone a long, long time. That she was dead, just ashes in the wind, a vague memory of a specific event that America could never, never forget.
He missed her. But more than that, he missed the emotion. He missed unrequited love. He missed the ability to trust, the ability to give himself to someone completely and not be afraid for them to lose it. Not only did Claire lose her life, but she lost Mac's. She had taken it with her when she'd died, and now he was trying to find the pieces. He'd started at ground zero, but the rest had blown away in the vacant September midday years ago, and he had to find them before it was too late.
"Desperado, why don't you come to your senses? / Come down from your fences, open the gate."
He gritted his teeth at the first thought that came to his mind: Stella. She was the only one who could make him feel whole again. Was it because she was his best friend? Closer than any spouse or sibling? Or was it because he loved her? His feelings were so tangled that he couldn't even identify them anymore. Who was he? Where the hell had Mac Taylor gone?
"It may be rainin', but there's a rainbow above you."
A heavy sigh slipped through his lips and he looked up, pushing his empty Coke and rum cup away from him. Actual question, where the hell had Stella Bonasera gone? Literally?
He stood up. "Stella?" he shouted, and wove through the crowd. There was that gut feeling again, bleeding through his system, clouding his head, making the room spin. Where were the curls? He'd been able to see them before, just over the crowd, but they weren't there.
He walked up to the bar and rapped on it a few times with his fist. "Hey," he called behind the desk, but nobody came to his service. He pounded on the little bell a few times. "Hey!"
His eyes raked across the bar. Drinks. Sugar packets. Behind the counter, a drink machine.
Problem: there was blood on it.
He leaped over the bar and drew his gun out. "NYPD!" he screamed, kicking the door to the back room open (he always felt a little bit badass when he kicked doors open, though he wouldn't allow himself to examine the fact at the particular moment). Where are they? NYP-fuckin'-D, they better get their asses out here. "Stella?" he roared, but there wasn't a response except for the sound of Desperado's closing chords and goodbyes and kisses goodnight, the smell of sex calming and the soft fragrance of love blossoming in the emptying club.
Just then, the door to outside swung open and a tall, tan man with naïve brown eyes came through. When he saw Mac, he looked up, and rose his hands.
And they were covered in blood.
The last lyrics set upon him like the weight of a million bricks, suffocating him as he tried to keep his stance.
"You better let somebody love you, before it's too late."
a/n: Hope you enjoyed it, songcred at the beginning: "Lady" by Regina Spektor. First song by Styx and Stond: "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?" by The Beatles. Last song: "Desperado" by the Eagles. Next chapter should be up soon, I am SOOO busy so nobody kill me if it takes a little while.