Electra and Antigone, a csi: new york fanfic

electra & antigone. (csi: new york)
stella/mac; stella/flack (implied); minor pairings
spoilers through to the S2 finale
It's an awful two months

with thanks to fallapartagain for helping me bash out the wonky bits. no copyright infringement intended.

"I promised her," he repeats, needlessly.

So you keep telling me, you think.

"I know," you say.

It's an awful two months, and it starts with Danny and follows all the way through to Flack. In the middle there's your own little tragedy, and Aiden (oh god, Aiden), and even Lindsay has a crisis of faith. (You've learned to look for the signs; you lost Aiden out of negligence, damn if you'll let this girl drown, too).

Mac is Mac; he's trying; he's still healing. You miss him, you think, you miss the man you knew and if this recovery is all you're going to get, well— you're only human. You'll take what you can get. You'll hate every moment of difference, you'll keep wishing for yesterday, but you won't reject him. You need him too much just to throw him away.

"You belong here, Lindsay. Ignore whatever you're hearing on the grapevine. It's not worth a thing."

Lindsay gives a half-shrug, a grimace of sorts. "I know."

"No," and you break, like a twig, like a dam. "You don't know. You have a place here; stand up for it."

Oh god, and then there's Flack.

When you end up in the hospital, Mac barely looks at you; you don't know if that's because of memories or because he's trying to stop himself from saying, 'I told you so' but you're more than a little grateful. And then he offers you a hotel - gee, really, Mac? - and you think, well, no, he didn't care that much after all. Flack tells you he rushed to your side when he found you and you think that makes sense; you really would like to believe that.

You don't, of course. Of course.

So you say, no, I need to do this, I need to go home and of course (yes, inevitable) you can't stand it in there - there's still blood in the carpet, for fuck's sake and he told you, godammit, he told you it would be like this and you just did not want to know, did you? - so you grab your bag, you grab what you can and you make a run for it.

Flack held your hand, you remember, and he's seen more of you than even Mac has now, and you think, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck—

"Stella?"

"Can I come in?"

Two days after you toast to Aiden, Sheldon asks you how long it'll take for the lab to get to normal.

"Come on, doc," you say, not unkindly, your head tilted to one side (though you never could tell, what with the way your hair falls about), "it takes time." You don't mention it's a wound so big adults could fall in and die; you don't even tell him it's about healing. Healing takes time, you know, you think, and even when it's done there's still a scar.

He's outside your door and you're not surprised. He looks up at you (god, you could at least fucking try, Mac. Try to look like you're a little ashamed, embarrassed. Jesus) and he shakes his head.

"I promised her."

You wonder if he knows Aiden was sleeping with Don.

Lindsay mopes and you want to shake her. You don't.

"I promised her and I didn't… I didn't come through."

(Get off the floor, Mac).

You don't know what to say anymore. You're not surprised that he's there because come on, this is Mac, and this is what he does when he can't do anything else (and he'd never turn to anyone else because he's the boss and they're the people under the boss, and that's not how it works. You're the exception to every damn rule and where once that was okay, more than okay, now it hurts. You want to be the rule, dammit, you want to be the standard, not the breaker). You're so over the platitudes so you unlock the door and step over him to walk into your apartment. You're not going to leave him on the floor, whatever you think of him (of yourself), so you tug on his shoulder until he gets the hell off the floor.

The space in the apartment suddenly feels less dangerous, and maybe you're thankful for the inevitable, after all, because despite whatever the hell it is that's eating away at you on the inside, Mac is dependable. This is a shape that you know and he fits into your life so comfortably that it's almost painful to you.

(You're all a little broken).

Danny is furious; he's ready to make war, and you think, hell yes, Danny, you do it. You do it because I can't. You're sorry because Louis is still in the hospital, and you think, Messer, you're such a boy; but you're sorry because you love Danny, you do, you do, and it's just not fair.

(You can hear him breaking like glass behind you when her face scrolls up on the screen in front of you and it's so fucking ironic that you need a computer now where Aiden's hands could once have brought up her own features; you can hear him breaking and you envy him the freedom to be able to just do that. You're not allowed to shatter, not this time around. You've had your little tragedy, do you remember?).

Danny sounds like war and you think, thank god. Thank god one of us is still real.

"Can I come in?" (Please? Don't make me beg).

"Stell— what are you doing here?" He's so casual in his shirt and his vest, and that bottle swinging from his hand.

"I can't… it's not safe." (Don't make me cry, please, god, don't make me cry). "I don't feel safe in my own space anymore."

And then he's hugging you, kindly, a true friend and you cry anyway because no one has touched you in so long and he reminds you how lonely you really are.

Mac is on the floor outside your apartment and then Mac is in your apartment, and he's talking about Aiden and opening old wounds, and this, at least, is familiar territory.

You want to ask about Don, ask if he's doing better than when you left the hospital; you want to know if you can go in and hold his hand then way he held you, press two fingers to his cheek, and maybe your lips, but you don't. You don't ask because you don't want to give yourself away, least of all to Mac. You hate that he comes to you when he's broken because you cut yourself on him and he could bleed you dry.

They don't know, you think, they don't know that he leans on you so much and you lean back, too. They don't know you've been circling each other for years.

"I made her a promise."

"It's not your fault."

"I—"

Your fingers on his lips; his voice stills.

"It's not."

(Contact bruises. You don't pull away; you let him retreat instead. If you had any sense, you'd step forward and kiss him; you'd hurt him; you'd press forward and try to calm the ache that weighs on you. You'd try to make something out of the pieces, the fragments, but you're broken, too, damn it and this is too much. This is the déjà vu all over again, and fuck it, it's not going to work, you know it's not).

He backs away, eventually, although for a moment you think he might lean into your touch, even press his lips a little tighter to the break in your fingers. He doesn't. Instead he sits down on your couch – the new one Don helped you to buy the week before – and he falls asleep there. He'll be gone by morning. Hell, you've read this script before; who needs an autocue? Not you, not anymore.

You can't stop thinking – about Frankie, his hands, his weight above you; and then of your fear and your mortality. You stumble, sometimes, when you think of what you had to do to get him to stop, dammit, just stop, and Mac catches you by the elbow and steadies you, and you're a little bit more grateful to him. He wants you to go home, to rest some more, but damn if you're going back to an empty apartment to live out an on-set reproduction of that night. And it is a reproduction; it's a never ending movie reel that skips back to the start once it's done, and you find yourself huddling under the covers trying to block out sounds and sensations that aren't really there.

In the morning, you find Lindsay in the break room with Danny; they're drinking coffee like it's the only thing to keep them breathing and you think, oh. Oh, it's done. Danny's grinning like a loon, but Lindsay doesn't meet your eye. You think, fuck, you don't know what to think; you think, you idiot, Danny, and, how could you? How could either of you.

Mac assigns Lindsay to you and you spend the whole day not forcing the issue. Hard to do when you find her sobbing in the locker room and then it only takes you a second to figure out that you got it all wrong and Lindsay's just another face you've got in your repertoire. You've seen this, you've been this girl and now Danny is her Mac (and it's not like she can help it; it's a big city and she's just a little girl) and you're pretty damn mad at Danny, too. So you hug her, you stroke her hair, and she sobs and you think, damn you, damn you that you do this to us.

Don touches you like you're a human being and you think, yes, yes, this is what it's like to come home; this is what it's like to breathe. But then there's a bomb and a schizophrenic who in another life is another of Mac's little men, and there's Don tied to a hospital bed by wires and tubes and machines that measure his life in heartbeats and lung volume, and it's not fair, not one bit. No, you think, damn it, no, you're not going to let this happen; but Mac is in the daylight and still solid around the edges so you sit with him and you ingest marginally decent caffeine. Then it's night time and he crawls to you and it may be one year on since he started to blossom again but Mac is still Mac and you are still you and it doesn't matter. You've read this script. You know these lines. It doesn't matter.

end.