Author: StarrySkies
Rating: K+
Disclaimer: Don't own anything CSI:NY related. They're all property of Jerry Bruckheimer, Alliance Atlantis, CBS, and Anthony Zuiker.
Pairing: Mac/Stella friendship (more implied)
Summary: The same thing on the same day every year.
"Those things will kill you, ya know?" Mac holds two coffee cups with different designs on them and offers one to her before he takes a seat.
"I'm counting on it," she says solemnly through her exhale, a hint of truth on her tongue. She sips the coffee.
This was not an unfamiliar sight for him. Stella had done this only once a year every year since he'd met her. And he always knew exactly where to find her when that day came: always on the exact same bench across the street from St. Basil's Orphanage, cigarette in hand, staring at the play yard the nuns had set up out front, behind the gates. Stella wasn't a smoker. Just on this day. And Mac knew that it never lasted longer than one day, but it silently hurt to watch.
He always stopped at Starbucks beforehand to get a regular black coffee for himself, and then at a little Greek place she liked, not far from the orphanage, for hers. By the time he made it to her, his cup was almost ice-cold. But he drank it anyway.
"You want some of mine?" Stella always offered.
"There's no way I'm drinking that mud," he had replied the first time. But that hurt her deeply, and she had spent the rest of the time staring away from him. And so now, he only smiles and says, "No, thank-you."
Today is no different. Mac sits close, but not too close, on the bench beside her. He stares ahead at the play yard as well and occasionally glances over at her when she inhales and exhales from her cigarette.
Sometimes, she was silent. Some days, she'd tell him about growing up on the other side of those iron gates. How one of the Sisters would sometimes sneak a chocolate chip cookie up from the kitchen and let Stella eat it while the nun would sit by her bedside and tell her Bible stories because Stella was her favorite, and she let her stay up later than the other children.
Or how one time this older Italian couple were in the process of adopting her, and even though she begged them, they wouldn't adopt her younger, now adult and scattered, sisters too. So, she did everything she could to deter the couple from taking her away from them. Mac had laughed when she told him that the day they came for her, Stella climbed a tree in front of the orphanage – with her suitcase full of clothes – and wouldn't come down, screaming obscenities at the couple until they finally gave up and told the nuns that they had "changed their minds about wanting children." She was severely punished, but that night, she and all of her sisters curled up on the same cot, and Stella let each of them fall asleep before she could close her own eyes.
"That tree right there," Stella had pointed out with her cigarette between her pointer and middle fingers. Mac had nodded in the direction, still smiling.
But today was a silent day. And Mac never pushes. Lets Stella do things in her own time. Stella's the pusher, not he. That's just the way things are and the way things have always been. And Mac loves the company. On this day, he doesn't spend all night in the lab. He doesn't come home to an empty house and fill the hours with watching CNN in between brief catnaps and thinking of Claire. No, today, he sits beside one of his oldest friends in the world and listens for words that she's not saying, thinking thoughts she might be thinking, remembering all the stories she'd told him from previous years, and is thankful for the moment.
When the sun is set, the glow from the stained glass is evident, the coffee cups have long since been emptied, and Stella has finally run out of cigarettes, he escorts her to the subway.
They sit together, and she rests her eyes, leaning her head on his shoulder. Mac is aware of the people staring – the one old lady who smiles at him as though Stella was somewhat more than his best friend. And though Mac knows he shouldn't, he smiles back as though it was true.
They reach her stop, and Mac gently shakes her awake. She rubs her eyes and then smoothes down her hair while she stands up. Mac nods toward the old woman who offers a smile in return as his hand delicately finds the small of Stella's back to guide her through the automated doors.
A couple of blocks from where they exited the subway, she digs blindly in her purse for the keys to her apartment. He can see she's still not fully awake. Mac hears the keys at last when she quietly exclaims an "Ah-ha," for victory.
At the bottom of the steps, he stands with his hands deep in his pockets as she extends her right arm, placing her hand behind his neck to give him a kiss on the cheek. A silent thank-you. Platonic, so she thinks, as she has done it every year on this day (and only once in a while when excitement gets the better of her).
He waits as she unlocks the front door and notes the time it takes for her to reach her apartment. He waits, still, for the light to flick on in the window of the apartment on the second floor, second from the left. He hesitates a moment, captivated by the light, before he walks away and sees her shadow pass across the window.
"Happy Birthday, Stella," he says.
.:The End:.