He was pretending to sleep when he heard the door slam. What the point of pretending might be, he didn't care to examine too closely. No one was coming home to him tonight.

Danny imagined her walking around the apartment next door (his apartment, only sort of her apartment, definitely not their apartment) and flipping lights on. He remembered too well following her around her own home as she turned every light on as soon as she walked in (So I don't get murdered, Danny.) and then leaving them blazing, some of them all night. Most of them all night.

Sometimes she made tea at night, although it was more likely she was opening wine. If the date with the cop had gone well she'd be pouring a glass, if it had gone badly she'd just take the open bottle to bed. He couldn't really hear through the walls, but he knew her so well, he knew his place (not her place) so well that through rough brick and smooth plaster he could imagine the click of heels as she neared the bedroom, the soft shuffle as she kicked them under the bed. It was only when he heard her voice that he realized his bedroom window was just open enough, just enough, that what he was hearing was real. She'd left her bedroom window open again while she was gone, a habit he'd tried to break her of even before she moved into his extra apartment (definitely his, not hers at all) and a habit she'd probably never drop. (You're going to get murdered, Mindy. he'd admonished, once upon a time when what he said mattered to her.)

When he heard a low voice he let himself pretend for just a minute that she'd turned on the TV, or she'd just called home and put the phone speakerphone as she wiped the eye makeup away and struggled out of her pink dress. She'd probably told him at some point what the real color was, something like electraberry or sugarplum, but it was all pink to him. But the low voice was followed by a peal of her laughter, date laughter - not real laughter, and he knew that she'd brought her date home.

The accent was familiar, and if he could just shake away some of these things he had been trying to shake away for weeks (months, years) he could just pretend he was back on Staten, windows open on a warm night, the sounds of the neighborhood filtering through the window. He could pretend he'd wake up to one of Ma's big breakfasts (You're so skinny, Daniel. You and your brother both. I should have let you stay my little butterball.) and they'd go to church together like a family. The only kind of family he'd ever known, maybe the only kind he'd ever know. If he could just forget where he was (where she was) he could go to sleep and let the day ebb away, and the anger, and the fucking humiliation that curled his hands into fists under the bedspread.

She couldn't have meant to be cruel. Mindy was a lot of things, but not cruel. She just...forgot. She'd just had a nice date with a probably nice enough man and she'd invited him back to her place. Maybe she'd opened that bottle of wine for the two of them. Why would she think about the neighbor, surely sleeping by now? She'd simply forgotten about him, and that was the realization that pushed hot tears through tightly closed eyes and pulled a sob like a hiccup from his too tight chest.

He could almost live with it if the story stopped there, but something almost exactly like a gasp cut straight through the air, through the walls, through his gut, and he knew that it hadn't.

She'd be a little flushed with wine and those little short kisses she liked to start with; she'd have a fine sheen of sweat building on her forehead as she got hotter (Ladies' don't sweat, Danny. They glow.) and her lipstick would be all rubbed away as the kisses got longer and the cop's hands gripped her tighter. Maybe that pink dress was being pushed up her thighs now. She only wore pantyhose occasionally (They're hot and you only ever get to wear them once before they get a run. You try them, Danny. A man invented them, I swear.) so right now new hands could be caressing that silky skin. It was a little softer inside her thighs than outside, and a little darker too. Danny could count on one hand how many times he'd gotten that far (I said let's take it slow, not let's stop altogether.) and somehow those few memories were distinct like fingerprints on his mind and too sharp tonight as he lay there in his bed. Danny hadn't had the chance to let them blur together, start to take those moments for granted, start to forget the difference between the first time she'd let him slip his hand between her legs and the second time, when he'd kissed her soft belly until giggles turned into sighs. Until her legs fell open in front of him. Until he'd held his breath and lowered his lips to that forbidden, silky, dark skin and almost passed out because he was afraid breathing would break the spell.

He understood why some people needed to listen to music to run, but the city has a beat of its own and when you're really there in the moment you don't need anything else. You just listen to the city as you cut right through it, a part of it all, in the way that people who haven't lived in a city would never understand. The sharp hoot of a pissed off cabbie, the occasional whoosh of train cars unseen, 80 different mother tongues lilting to his ears with a rhythm and tone all their own that would push him along.

For some reason he couldn't possibly explain to himself, let alone someone else, he'd pulled the front door behind him so carefully that he might as well have been a ghost passing through. He was angry enough that it could just almost come down to not letting her get the best of him, not letting her know that he had gotten up in the middle of the night and dressed in perfect silence, pulling on his running clothes, adding a navy hoodie as an afterthought so he could carry his phone. He didn't usually take his phone on a run, but something told him he wouldn't be back in 30 minutes. Or an hour.

He'd laced his shoes too tight, but once he'd picked up a little speed everything but the burn faded away. The pound of his feet as they struck pavement was almost as loud as his heartbeat in his ears, almost enough to drown out the city around him. This alone should have been some sort of red flag, that he wasn't a part of the city anymore, not even a part of himself, but he just pushed past it and let the sweat trickle across his skin in strange patterns that made him shiver despite the steamy city air.

His rhythm faltered and time slowed as he saw the cyclist a second too late to correct his course. The guy shouldn't have been on the sidewalk, but late at night maybe he'd thought a little cut-through couldn't hurt anything. Stupidly Danny wondered if the man on the cycle had someone waiting at home for him, someone with soft hair and a smile like warm sunshine and absolutely no reason to believe he wouldn't be coming home tonight.

Bright yellow exploded in his vision, and Danny Castellano's last breath on earth was cut short by a sharp pull and the sudden impact with another body.

As Danny tried to breathe again, his chest struggling against the sheer force of gravity and the unexpected expulsion of every molecule of air in his lungs, the edges of his vision began to blacken ominously. Right in the center he saw bright green eyes shining with tears, and then nothing.

Notes:

I've been thinking about trying my hand at a crossover for a very long time and tonight seemed like the time to dive in. It's kind of training wheels for AU for me.

Comments are the absolute best, and I'm down to talk about either or both shows forever.

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