Happier

Disclaimer: I don't own CSI: NY or the characters.

Summary: Stella hears a comforting opinion on what she was forced to do to Frankie, and discovers why Mac has been so happy recently.

Spoilers up to 'Murder Sings the Blues'

"They reminded you of your case with Frankie didn't they"

Stella looked up from her cold coffee and the dull beige file to see Peyton carry three empty mugs into the break room. Her voice wasn't accusing Stella of being too emotionally involved or filled with unwanted sympathy thinking of her as a victim: she was merely making a statement. As much as Stella didn't want to talk to her, she was grateful that Peyton wasn't judging the situation. Stella shrugged and looked back at her coffee as Peyton put the mugs in the sink and began to wash them. She resisted the urge to open the file again, knowing that she shouldn't be dwelling on the fact that she had let her emotions get the better of her - it hadn't affected the case in the end.

Stella continued to stare at her drink as she heard Peyton pull the plug out of the sink and turn the mugs upside down to dry, hoping that she would leave when she finished. Apparently Peyton had other ideas: she sat on the chair opposite Stella and pulled one of the chocolate bars she always seemed to have from her pocket.

"Why are you sitting here with that file giving your coffee mug death glares when you could be at home sleeping?" Peyton asked as she fought with the chocolate bars stubborn wrapper.

"I screwed up" Stella muttered, still looking at her coffee, hoping Peyton would be satisfied with the shortest honest answer possible "I believed her because I thought that what had happened to her was like what happened to me with Frankie."

Peyton, having managed to get the wrapper off the chocolate, rose from her seat and began to search in the various drawers around the break room for something. "You didn't screw up Stella" she argued, finding a knife from one of the drawers "you believed her until another more logical solution presented itself." She sat back down at the table and carefully cut the chocolate in half, before pushing half of it towards Stella and cutting the other half into three. Stella nodded in acknowledgement of her comforting if not entirely accurate summary of the situation as Peyton wrapped two of the three pieces up in the wrapper and put them in her pocket and ate the third.

Stella nibbled slowly at the chocolate she had been offered, and didn't speak; knowing that Peyton didn't like silence and would tell Stella what she wanted to talk about if it lasted for too long and wondering who else Peyton was intending to share the last two sixths of the chocolate with.

"Do you actually believe what you told Grace?" as predicted, Peyton broke the silence, but seemed to regret asking as the words left her mouth, and she looked down at the table, hoping she hadn't asked too much Stella didn't mind the question. She was glad someone had recognised that she wasn't made of glass and that it wouldn't do her any harm to talk about it. She did, however, wonder why Peyton had approached the subject as she had, rather than just asking how she felt about it.

"What makes you think I didn't?"

Peyton shrugged. "In my experience it isn't quite as easy as you make it seem to accept that you've taken another persons life, even if it is self-defence"

Suddenly Peyton had all of Stella's attention. "What experience?" she asked, worried by how accurately Peyton had found the problem. Peyton sighed, not wanting to tell Stella and wishing she hadn't brought herself into the conversation

"It's a long story" she murmured, hoping Stella would get the hint and leave the topic alone. No such luck. Stella had noticed her colleague's evasion and found that she was suddenly very interested in getting an answer.

"I've got plenty of time" she objected, "and I won't tell anyone" she promised, guessing that secrecy was a large part of Peyton reluctance to explain. Peyton sighed, defeated, and checked that no one else was around, before beginning.

"It was three months after my thirteenth birthday, middle of December, and I was on my way home from science club. It was dark, so I probably shouldn't have been walking on my own, but I had walked that way for years without any thing happening so I thought it was ok. I didn't notice I had been followed until it was too late to tell anyone because my pencil case always used to rattle as I walked and it sounded like someone was following me even it there was no one there."

Stella raised her eyebrows as she guessed where the story was going and Peyton took a deep breath before continuing "I was nearly home when I noticed I was being followed. I would have run my normal way home instead of taking the shortcut through the alley if it weren't for the fact that I had twisted my ankle earlier and I couldn't run." Peyton stopped talking as Sid wandered into the room, humming a tune neither of the women recognised, took his uneaten lunch from the refrigerator, and left without noticing either of them. "I'd got about half way down the alley when a man came up behind me, put a knife to my throat and grabbed my arm drag me to a sort of alcove further along the alley where he couldn't be seen unless someone walked past us." Peyton stared blankly at the table for a while, and Stella had to remind herself that the story had to end well, or Peyton wouldn't have been sitting across from her, recounting the tale. "I tried to grab the knife from him and we fought over it. We both somehow got stabbed and I passed out, probably from the blood loss. A woman who lived in one of the houses next to the alley found us and called an ambulance. I woke up in hospital the next day. The man with the knife died before the ambulance arrived." Peyton raised her eyes from the table to look at Stella.

"Who actually stabbed who?" Stella asked quietly, not surprised Peyton had tried to avoid telling her about it, and wondering how many times she had told this tale, to tell it so calmly.

"I don't know" Peyton answered "It was winter – we were both wearing gloves, and even if we had left fingerprints on the knife they would all have been jumbled up" She glanced at her watch as Sid came back in, this time for the drink he had left along with his lunch, and got up from her chair to leave. "I have to go now," she called behind her as she left "see you tomorrow." and she hurried out before Stella could ask more questions.

Stella stood up slowly, cleared up the chocolate crumbs and the knife and thought about what she had just been told. Peyton had managed to stop her worrying so much about her own decision, but now she was worrying about Peyton instead. As she walked from the locker room to her car five minutes later, she decided that she could talk to Peyton tomorrow; all she needed to worry about now was getting some sleep.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A packet of cheese and pickle sandwiches dropped onto the table in front of Stella, and she looked up to find that apparently Peyton and Adam had been successful in their mission to find something edible for the team to eat. Pretty much everyone she knew who was working at or with the lab that day had managed to find somewhere to sit in the break room to eat a meal that, despite the fact that it was being eaten at eight in the morning, was supposedly lunch. This confusion had been caused by several difficult but boring cases that refused to produce results and meant everyone had been working double and triple shifts to get them solved.

Stella watched as Peyton finished handing out sandwiches to people who hadn't brought their own food and collapsed into a seat between Mac and Danny with a cheese and bacon filled baguette and a cup of coffee. She had got the distinct impression that Peyton had been avoiding her since telling her story about the man in the alley. The ME had avoided any situation likely to cause a conversation about anything that wasn't work related and had spent more time than usual hiding in the morgue.

"Is anyone sitting here?" Lindsay's voice pulled her from her thoughts and she hurriedly shook her head and tried not to choke on her sandwich as she moved her bag from the space on the table so Lindsay could sit. She wished she hadn't made Peyton tell her the story, knowing that Peyton regretted telling it and was avoiding her to avoid the subject, and wondered if she would have figured it out herself eventually anyway. She recalled an event that had confused her at the time, but made perfect sense now, eight years later.

The first officer on the scene had told her that an anonymous caller had reported the body of a young woman hidden in the alley behind him, but when Peyton had arrived five minutes later they had carefully entered the alley and found that young woman hadn't been a very accurate description of the victim.

"She's just a kid" Peyton had whispered sadly, and she had been right, the girl couldn't have been more than fifteen- not even out of school yet. Peyton had gone over what was visibly out of place on the body, determined time of death and then hurriedly left the alley to wait for the van from the morgue to pick the girl up.

Stella had watched Peyton as she left and noticed that her hands were shaking and she was chewing her lower lip; something she only did when she was upset. Unable to remember any case that had bothered Peyton that much in the seven months they had worked together at that point, Stella had passed the incident off as being nothing to do with work, and been slightly worried when Peyton hadn't gone back to normal until the case had been solved.

Peyton's reaction at the time had made no sense, and though Stella had worried about her she hadn't asked questions, but at her next opportunity had asked Jane, Sheldon, Claire and Aiden what they thought, since they all knew Peyton better than her. Aiden and Jane had been unable to shed any light on the issue, but Dr Giles, who had been arguing with Jane about DNA mutations until Stella had asked about Peyton, had pointed out that apart from a vague mention of a brother she had never told anyone but Claire and Dr Hawkes anything about her childhood or family- they would have to just face the fact that Peyton Driscoll was a mystery. Claire's and Hawkes' answers had only emphasised the mystery. Claire had just told Stella that Peyton had 'been through things as a kid' and Sheldon had insisted that Stella didn't want to know.

She was brought sharply back to here and now by the horrible scrape of chairs on the floor as the break rooms occupants stood up to leave. Lindsay, Adam and Sid dragged her off to work on the case they had been trying to solve and all thoughts of long-kept secrets were push from the front of her brain.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The thoughts of Peyton's story remained at the back of her mind for nearly two months, until she found something much more interesting to think about. Having been vaguely aware that Mac had been looking unusually happy since April she had only been slightly surprised to find that, when she had ruthlessly interrogated him, he had admitted to having a girlfriend. She had been completely unsurprised to find that he was unwilling to tell her anything more than that, even after even more ruthless interrogation, and had only manage to find out that his girlfriend was not Rose, but was someone Stella had met before. When she had asked if his new girlfriend had anything to do with his change of mood the previous year he had grinned and told her he was glad she hadn't lost her ability to see right through him.

On Mac's birthday, she had kept an eye on him at every possible moment, hoping that his elusive girlfriend would call, but by the end of the day, the only calls he had received had been obviously work related, and she had resolved to interrogate him further the next day. This interrogation was rendered unnecessary as she stopped at the vending machine on the fifth floor to buy something to eat on the way home, and saw Mac and Peyton through the glass walls, talking quietly and sharing one of the cakes from the vending machine she was standing in front of. Thinking back, wondering if she had missed any obvious clues, Stella concluded that there was no way she could have guessed, but if she had suspected that they had been dating she might have noticed signs to support the idea.

When Stella had initially gone through a list of women she knew that could have been dating Mac, she had dismissed Peyton as an option because Peyton had been Claire's best friend, for the four years before Peyton had moved back to London, she had shown every sign of not particularly liking Mac, thinking him too serious, and slightly frightening, and Mac had never even seemed to notice Peyton in the nearly twelve years since they had first worked together. Stella now suspected that although the last two reasons had started off true, it was likely that they had changed over time, and Peyton and Mac had agreed to keep things appearing the same to avoid becoming the subject of the lab's gossip, which often ended up so far off reality that Stella was beginning to think that people would believe anything these days.

Quickly removing her snack from the machine and escaping so that the couple wouldn't notice her, Stella hurried back to her car, and as she drove home considered the new questions she would have to ask Mac, such as how long they had been together and why on earth hadn't he just told her? Peyton was also likely to be on the receiving end of quite a few questions, since Stella knew that Peyton would be more willing to give answers than Mac, having stopped avoiding Stella quite recently and now appearing to want to make up for the long silence that she had inadvertently started

Mac should have learned by now, she concluded. He should not try to keep secrets from her and then not expect The Spanish Inquisition when she found out only parts of what he was hiding.