Summary: Slash: Mac/Danny UST; Danny/other. If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with; Danny thinks it's only good common sense.
Spoilers: None
Rating: R for language and sexual content
Disclaimer: None of these are mine. Characters are the property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer Television, CBS, and Alliance Atlantis.
Archive: Please ask.
A bar, somewhere in Manhattan: There are Christmas lights strung up all over the place, red and green and blue, mood lighting on the cheap even though it's March, and old neon beer advertisements; and the overheads are turned off until the place closes down for the night and the cleaning crew comes in. The jukebox is full of songs by people who died early of alcohol and sorrow, or who should have, and almost all of the selections circle back to several common themes, lost love and murder and God. The song playing right now is all about missed chances and war death, harsh and angry and mournful.
Danny sits and plays with the plastic sword in his drink and watches the man at the other end of the bar. The lead singer's whiskey-wrecked voice is a steady thrum in his ear, and the lighting is soft and kind, and Danny is well aware of what the predatory innocence of his smile can do to people.
The man he's watching meets his gaze. There's assessment in that look, but surprise as well, and Danny registers the presence of both emotions even as he holds the stare, holds the smile for just long enough that the man will know that this isn't an accident. Danny wants him to know that, wants him to understand that the eye contact didn't happen by chance, that the smile is right now meant for him and him alone. He's still sober, after all, and he's feeling picky tonight. Some nights he's so drunk, or so needful, that he doesn't much care who he goes home with. Aiden hears these stories in the aftermath and makes jokes about beer goggles, and all Danny can do at these times is shrug and grin. What else can he do, when she's right?
Tonight, though, he's making a deliberate choice; no one else will do. He came in here not even sure if he wanted to go through the ritual or not; sometimes the dance takes more energy than he has. He wonders if all the nights when he wants nothing more than to go home and take a shower and then settle on the couch with a book and ESPN mean that he's getting old. He would prefer to think not, that he's just moving beyond his youthful insecurity.
Once he saw the man at the end of the bar, all thoughts of having one drink and then going home by himself fled from his mind. He'd felt the sharp tug of attraction that always seemed to center itself somewhere around his solar plexus, and he was lost. That was it, that's all she wrote; Danny Messer was getting himself some tonight.
On the heels of that decision came a great feeling of relief. He hadn't realized until just then how much he didn't want to go home tonight with nothing to show for it, how much he'd been dreading falling asleep on the couch and waking up with corduroy imprints on his face. A good night's rest isn't the cure-all for the kind of long bad week he's just had. Though it might, he thinks, spearing an olive from the little tray when the bartender isn't looking, do some people some good, it's not what he needs right now.
The man at the other end of the bar has not dropped his eyes, and Danny favors him again with another of his dangerous smiles. The man returns the smile, and raises his drink. Danny raises his own, and a moment after that the man is threading his way through the crowd to where Danny sits. Score, he thinks.
After that, it's easy. Academic, almost. They make small talk; the man's name is Joe (he tells Danny his last name, too, which Danny almost immediately forgets), and he's a literary agent. Danny finds obscure relief in the fact that his profession has nothing to do with any branch of the law, and that, while he asks questions about Danny's work, he's no more interested than propriety would dictate. Cop fetishists bore Danny to tears.
They talk, then, and Danny asks all the right questions of his own, and looks into Joe's eyes when he talks, and every now and then he touches him, just a light brush of fingers against his forearm or shoulder. And the smile. Always the smile. Danny knows what it can do, and long ago stopped thinking of it as taking unfair advantage. Everyone needs to use their talents to the best of their abilities, after all. Some may sneer at intuition, but Danny's been relying on his for years, and it's rarely steered him wrong. So...to hell with pure logic.
So between the smile and the touches and the quiet questions, Danny knows that, when Joe leans over him in a corner by the jukebox and kisses him, it's what he really wants to do. All Danny did was guide him in the right direction, help Joe to see the light in case he didn't know already.
For a second, as Danny returns the kiss, tilted at an awkward angle but he doesn't care, because this is good, warm lips and tongue and a hand pressed to the back of his neck, he thinks of the locker room down at the lab, of standing there after his shift was over and deciding suddenly that he needed to go out for a drink. Why he's thinking of this, or of a cold metal locker against his hand, he doesn't know, and so dismisses the thought. Joe's mouth is insistent, groin hard against his, and he feels the surge of desire all the way down to the pit of his stomach, his entire body a lightning rod now.
Discussion after that is brief and to the point.
"My place?" Joe asks. "I'm close by."
"Yeah."
They go outside to find a cab, and Danny hangs back a step as Joe paces the curb. He likes the way the other man moves, confident and controlled, no wasted gestures, and this gives him a chance to watch, to take in the whole picture, instead of fragments under the Christmas lights. It's good, and oh God, it's familiar. Danny swallows hard. He knew this, knew it in the back of his head all along, and now it's no longer so easy to ignore.
Close-cropped brown curls, blue eyes that shift to gray under the streetlight, and a baseball player's build, and Danny stops trying to kid himself about who Joe reminds him of. It's not a one-to-one match, of course; Joe is younger and more hip, and seems infinitely less damaged. Or at least his damage (because everybody has some) is less visible to the naked eye, is not, perhaps, so fundamental.
He looks at Danny, really looks at him, and even when he's idle, during a moment when he gazes out the window of the cab, his face doesn't take on that thousand-yard stare. He's just a man glancing out the window to see what street they're on, that's all; and when he looks back at Danny, he smiles and touches his wrist.
Danny reminds himself to live in the moment, to not substitute one man for another; Joe is a nice guy, and doesn't deserve to merely be a means to an end. And Danny is attracted to him, would be even if he didn't know Mac existed.
But he can't help it: and so as they kiss in the foyer, it's Mac's hands he's imagining on his face, Mac's stubble scraping against his lips, Mac's tongue in his mouth. It's Mac's belt he's fumbling with as they stagger-stumble into the bedroom, Mac who's unbuttoning his shirt.
The bedroom is dark except for what little light shines through the closed blinds, thin slanted stripes of neon and moonlight on the bed and walls, and Danny closes his eyes, shutting out even that small bit of visual stimulus. He wants to concentrate on other things, like the hands roving up and down his body (they are Mac's, behind Danny's lowered lids, and they are trained and dangerous and knowing), and on the mouth pressed to his, to his cheek, to his neck, teeth scraping over his pulse point (Mac's, hot breath and hard mouth).
And the helpless thrust against his seeking hand is Mac's, low ragged moan that makes Danny grin into the hair brushing his mouth. Mac leaning back against the wall and breathing hard as Danny kneels, and later, Mac shivering against his back and swearing softly as Danny sprawls prostrate on the bed, clutching handfuls of sheets in his fingers.
Later still, Danny lies awake, staring at the ceiling. Joe (Joe; he says it to himself again so he'll remember) dozes lightly beside him. This was good, he thinks: not the chance to forget that he might have hoped, but good all the same. It's no one's fault but his own that he's unable to turn off his brain even for the duration of a sexual encounter.
If only things were different; this is pointless wishing of the sort he doesn't normally allow himself to indulge in, but for the moment he goes with it. Pointless wishing is what led him here tonight, after all, and what made him pretend that a man far away was the one in the room with him, the one touching and caressing him. He used to be much better at pretending that these things didn't matter, but the ability to do so fails him, these days, more and more often. What's shifted in his head he doesn't know, and supposes it doesn't matter. In the end, he's led to the same conclusions, and it isn't his feelings that have changed, only his awareness of them.
He watches Mac at the lab, has learned to chart the rise and fall of his moods by the smallest of clues: a gesture, a word, a turn of the head. He wouldn't be surprised if, on any given day, he were able to estimate how much sleep Mac had the night before, or how much he'd had in the past week. He thinks of this ability as insurance; it's better to know what he may be walking into, if he can.
He watches Mac in the field, too, on the too-rare occasions when he's the one Mac pulls for a case. More often he's assigned to work with Aiden, and he has no objections to this; they work well together, and her teasing, cheerful regard for him is something that never fails to brighten his day. But being picked to work with Mac is like being picked to pitch in the major leagues, heading on up to the show after too many seasons with a minor-league team somewhere in a rural backwater: the bright lights of Yankee Stadium after the low wattage of an elementary school softball field.
Those times are great, but they also send him into a tailspin. He's well aware of the scrutiny he's under every second when Mac is there, and of how he descends without fail into nervous twitches and shakes, every single time. Mac tactfully ignores his flailing, but Danny knows that he's not oblivious to it, and fears that it means Mac will dismiss him as not good enough, as not ever up to snuff.
But it's not the work that troubles him, in the main; he knows that he's a good criminalist. It's Mac, of course, always Mac, and if Danny is able to read his moods and insomnia with little trouble in most respects, in other important ways he can't read the man at all. Mac isn't an open book in any area of his life, but it's in the realm of the physical that Danny finds himself most at sea. Stella said once, drunk, that Mac could probably fuck a person without even unbuttoning his jacket, or loosening his tie. ("Except he wouldn't call it fucking," she'd added, and both she and Aiden had dissolved into helpless laughter, while Danny sat there, and coughed a few times, and cracked his knuckles.)
Danny doesn't know; he knows that most of the lab thinks Mac is probably registering zero on any scale of sexual impulse. He thinks this himself sometimes, but other times he wonders. There's been something there once or twice, some kaleidoscope spinning way down in his gaze when their eyes have met (when Mac is not quick enough to look away, to avoid eye contact the way he seems to prefer) that makes Danny think the world could one day shift under his feet. And Danny would prefer not to think these things, despising as he does the thought of setting himself up for failure.
If it were only sex, if only; physical desire would be so easy to ignore.
Most of the time he can bury it, even so. But then there are other times, times when everything he suppresses day after day comes rushing to the forefront. Times like tonight.
The end of shift; Danny had been in the locker room changing out of his lab gear. He'd gone into the shower area to wash his hands, and stayed for a few minutes to slick down his hair and run cold water on his face. When he came back out, he'd gotten only as far as the door, and then froze where he stood.
Mac was there, leaning against a bank of lockers. Tie undone and half the buttons on his shirt open, and all he was doing was standing there, not moving, head back against the locker and eyes closed. He looked, Danny saw right away, beyond exhausted, a weariness and strain evident on his face that he managed, most of the time, to hide. A clean arched line of throat against a crisp white shirt, face pale under the flickering fluorescent lights, and even as Danny watched he squeezed his eyes shut tighter, as if trying to chase away some insupportable mental image.
After that he retreated to the sinks, and counted to sixty before he came back out, and by then Mac was wearing a fresh shirt and was doing up his tie, face as calm and blank as it was at any other time. They exchanged a few meaningless words, and then Mac had wished Danny a good night and left. He stood for a long time after that, clutching the edge of his locker door, forehead pressed into the sharp metal edge.
It's always the little things that get to him. Then again, with Mac, these little moments are all he has. He's never dared, even in his imagination, to aim the deadly arrow of his persuasive smile at Mac. Danny could, if presented with the opportunity, give him what he needs what they both need but he's afraid the cost might be too high. It's better to leave him alone; he has other ways, he thinks, looking around the room as an exhausted afterglow begins to sink into his bones, of fulfilling his needs. He also knows when it's time for him to leave.
He wants to pretend for just one more minute, so he turns to the man sleeping next to him, and thinks Mac, and presses a soft, lingering kiss against his forehead. He holds still, fingers brushing Mac's cheek, then sighs. Minute over. He gets out of bed, not making a sound, and begins to gather his clothes.
After dressing quietly in the bathroom, he lets himself out, and heads for Third Avenue, where his chances of finding a cab will be much better. Walking along the quiet, tree-lined block, he thinks again of smiles across a crowded bar, of imagined promises in dark bedrooms, of hands and mouths. He thinks of the locker room, of an exhausted man at the end of his rope, and of all the things he could do to ease that weariness, to soothe some of the jagged edges into calm.
He concentrates on the physical space he occupies, on the real. His hands in his coat pockets. The night breeze in his hair. The sidewalk under his feet.
His heart a pendulum in his chest, steady beat of pulse in his neck, and unwhispered words on his lips: Love me, love me, love me.