Nightmares and Dreams

Summary: How far will Stella go to save Mac's life? Rated T for violence.

Disclaimers: I have made no money from writing this story. I do not own anything connected with any of the CSI franchises, which I assume belong to CBS and its cohorts. I would quite like to borrow Gary Sinise, however… just for a day?

A/N: Set during Season 5.

* * *

Chapter 1

Stella Bonasera, naked in the hottest summer she could remember, was sweating freely into the stifling New York night. She had long since flung the clothes from her bed, and tossed and turned restlessly, unable either to sleep or wake.

She became aware, in the milky haze of half-consciousness, of something pressing down on her chest, and struggled to escape: it was suffocating her in the damp, sticky dark, but despite tugging and straining for release, it would not budge. Her frantic efforts finally woke her, and she felt the thing holding her down: it was soft and almost warm, but a dead, dead weight.

She began to panic – what the hell was she trapped beneath? Pushing more recklessly, she finally managed to dislodge it, and it rolled to the other side of the bed, leaving her gasping for air. In her sudden freedom, she felt chilled to the bone.

Turning, she wrapped her arms around herself for warmth and looked at the thing beside her. It lay without motion, lumpy and shapeless in the gathering dawn. As she stared, her eyes became used to the half-light, and it gradually resolved itself into a human being. Stella leapt back in horror: there was no way she'd invited anyone into her bed last night! This was her space, her sanctuary – whoever was here was an invader, a violator of everything that she held dear. She began to shake with more than cold.

But she couldn't just leave it there, lying gross and inert in her apartment. Slowly, walking backwards so as not to let it out of her sight, she moved towards the kitchen. Delicately taking a knife from the block, she grasped the handle in her right hand and made her way back into the bedroom. Half of her hoped it would be gone: the other half dreaded that it should be, for then she would have to look for it. But it was still there, solid and awful and viciously silent.

She approached it, wondering why it didn't move. Male, and as naked as she was, it was as still as an empty grave. Blanking her mind as to what the hell could have happened to bring it here, she reached out her left hand and touched it, quickly withdrawing in case it responded. It was clammy – almost wet – and most certainly lifeless.

She leaned nearer, daring to get close enough to listen for any sound of breathing. In the still night she thought she could have heard a pin drop, but all that came to her ears was the thrum of an early cab far below and a rush of starlings as they flew past the open window. Other than her, nothing breathed: she was the only life here.

Reaching out with more confidence now, she took the body by its chilly shoulder and shook it. There was no response. She shook it again, harder this time, and the mouth fell slightly open, allowing a small breath to escape. She had seen that often enough: the final breath of an already dead man, trapped until the body was moved. Putting the knife down, she took the head in her hands and turned it so that it faced her: who was this cold, dead stranger?

The first ray of sun swept along the street and through the window, and the features leapt cruelly out at her: a Hallowe'en mask suddenly illuminated in the night. Dark hair, full cheeks, straight nose – she knew them, even as they lay slack within her hands, as well as she knew her own.

"Mac? Mac?"

She began to slap his face, and his head lolled obscenely to one side. She pressed her cheek to his poor scarred chest, desperate to hear even a whisper of sound: there was nothing. She caught hold of his wrist, but when she let it go it flopped down at his side. He was gone – there was nothing left of the man she – she – of the man she knew except this empty, dead thing.

She looked at his body, lean from years of military service, but still in places soft and yielding to the touch. She ran her hands down his chest and across his stomach, feeling the firm muscles that would never move again, the taut sinews that were now limp and dry. She couldn't prevent her eyes from taking in the rest of him: the beauty of the man, dead as he lay there, took her breath away. Involuntarily, her hand moved, but she snatched it back: she had never touched him so in life, and she would not presume to do so in death.

All the years they had known each other – all the years they had been together – and not once had she touched him as she wished. Other relationships, or her own diffidence, or Mac's emotional barriers – there had always been something in the way. Somehow, she had always assumed they'd have the time: that however long it took, it would never be too late. And now it was: there would never be time again.

Tearing her eyes away, she looked again at his face, wanting to kiss it, to stroke its pale, unmoving smoothness. She noticed, suddenly, that his eyes were open, and that they still had that quality they'd had in life of changing colour with the light. She glanced up at the window: clouds were gathering, and sun and shadow were falling across the room, turning Mac's eyes from almost black to almost green. And then, as she stared, the eyes moved: swivelling in their sockets, they fixed her as surely as if her arms had been pinned behind her back.

She cried out: the shock was too great for silence. Backing off, she realised that the dead gaze was following her: she retreated to the other side of the bed, but still the cold, blank eyes seared across the space between them. She whimpered, and fell.

But Stella was made of stern stuff, and finally crept back to the body, standing as far away as she could and reaching out a hand to close those terrible eyes. The lids, putty-like, sank under her touch, and she breathed with relief. But, as soon as she took her fingers away, they sprang open again, fixing her with their gimlet stare and draining her life away.

"No!" she whispered, and leant forward again. Again, the eyelids closed – and again they sprang open. The only way she could keep from looking into Mac's dead eyes was to keep her fingers on his eyelids. "Close," she whimpered, "please, please close."

They would not.

"Close, damn you – close!"

They would not.

Now she was yelling. "Close – close your eyes! Mac – close your eyes, for God's sake close your eyes!" Screaming at the thing lying in her bed – which, whatever it was, she knew now was certainly not Mac Taylor – she lost all control, screwing up her face and flailing in hysteria.

Then she felt something hit her, and suddenly all was calm. Light flooded the room – real, bright, summer sunlight – and she opened her eyes to find that she was lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. Drenched in sweat and shivering with cold, she remained unmoving, not daring to attract attention to herself now that she had escaped that terrible gaze. She looked for the knife, and could not find it. Damn! she thought: her only weapon, and it was nowhere to be seen.

Finally, she lifted her head above the bed to look. If whatever was there was going to kill her, let it try. She would do her best to go down fighting, but she couldn't sit here forever.

Nothing. There was nothing there except creased bedclothes, rumpled and crumpled and twisted almost beyond recognition. Stella staggered to her feet and stared at the empty space. There was no indication that anyone other than herself had ever been there – no dip in the mattress, no knife, no…

No Mac, lying beautiful and dead in her apartment.

Her legs gave way, and she flopped down onto the bed. Glancing again at the place where his body had been, she blinked in the morning sun. On a terrified impulse, she grabbed her cell and dialled Mac's number: it was answered within two rings, and she almost shouted with joy to hear that familiar, loved voice, strong and safe and not a little surprised to be hearing from her at five in the morning.

Assuring him that it was a wrong number, she sat still for a long time, trying to put the world together again, but all she was truly aware of was that the nightmare was over, and that Mac was alive.

And that she had better tell him how she felt before it was too late.

* * *

People die every day. They die because they are stupid, or because they forgot to turn off the gas: some die because they deserve to, and some because they don't. And some are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and die because of sheer bad luck. But, most of the time, it happens to someone else. It's always someone else's lover, someone else's sister, someone else's son. The chances it'll be someone you know are one in a thousand – no, one in ten thousand.

But people die every day, and this was the day that Stella was going to find out what it felt like to be Someone Else.

It was just unlucky that Mac pulled the downtown homicide. Stella was already working another case; Danny and Lindsay had left for a robbery in Queens; Hawkes was assisting Sid with an autopsy that required four hands. So it was Mac, whom she had been surreptitiously watching all morning over her test-tubes, who grabbed his coat and his kit, left with a quiet nod, and walked alone into the mouth of hell.

She watched him go: she loved the way he moved, the way his jacket swung out behind him. That was crazy, she thought – he was only walking, for heaven's sake! He stopped to talk with someone, and she caught his profile against the harsh light: it touched his dark hair almost like a halo, throwing his features into strange relief as he spoke. As he finished the conversation, he glanced back at her and smiled, and she quickly looked away. Damn! Had he been aware that she was watching him? She breathed a little more harshly and pursed her mouth in an effort to regain her equanimity. She was deeply embarrassed – this was something she simply didn't do. What the hell must Mac be thinking?

She didn't find out, for by the time she had recovered herself enough to look up again, he had gone.

* * *

It was three hours later – three hours during which Stella had attempted, more or less successfully, to put Mac out of her mind and concentrate on the work in hand – when the call came in. She became aware of a sudden hush in the lab, following by a strange, almost silent rushing sound like that of the sea flowing over small, sharp stones. It rose and fell, advanced and retreated, all the while seeming to get nearer, nearer, nearer…

She shivered, and looked round. People were standing in small, quiet clumps – one or two looked at her and Hawkes, who had escaped from both the autopsy and Sid's salacious stories sometime during the morning.

"Hawkes? What's going on?"

"I don't know." He looked as puzzled as she, but then seemed to see someone across the room and called out. "Flack – hey, Flack!"

Detective Don Flack, who appeared to be heading towards them anyway, crossed the crowded room. One glance at his normally mobile, ironic face told Stella something was seriously wrong. "Flack?"

"There's a hostage situation downtown," he said shortly. "We've got it contained, but…"

"But what?"

"Dave Shepherd. Broke out of Sing Sing three days ago, comes back here and kills and rapes his little sister, flees the scene. Except he doesn't flee the scene, and now he's got a hostage. He's a serial – taken five hostages in the last eight years, and none of them have survived."

"Hang on," Stella interrupted, shaking her head in confusion. "You said killed and raped his sister? Don't you mean – "

"Nope. He killed her, then raped her, then dumped her out the seventh floor window."

"Wow," was all Hawkes could manage.

"Yeah."

There was a moment's silence. "So why're you telling us?" Stella asked. Flack looked awkward, and Stella noticed how pale his face was. "Don?" He met her eyes, and for the first time she knew a flash of fear. "Don?" she whispered again. "Who's the hostage?"

She knew before he spoke: the softness in his eyes, the sympathy in the way his mouth moved before his words came out. "It's Mac," he said quietly. "He's got Mac in the apartment with him, alone."

Stella's world narrowed: all she could see was Flack's huge, distorted face. It loomed at her out of some alien landscape as if she had never seen it before. Everything became very cold: she tried to blink, but could not. There was no sound.

As her breathing slowed, the light came back, and she realised that Flack and Hawkes had closed in on her, as if to protect her from others' prying or sympathetic eyes. "Stella?" Hawkes said softly. "Stell?"

"I'm OK," she said, automatically pushing her wayward hair back from her face. "I'm OK." She leaned against her bench. "Mac – is – was he…"

"He was alive when I left," Flack said bluntly, and she was grateful for his honesty. "Negotiators are on the way – they'll do everything they can."

Stella swallowed. "But you say nothing works with this guy?"

Flack looked at the floor. "Not so far."

Stella's brain, on fire with fear and fury and adrenaline, began – finally – to work. "He raped his sister," she said slowly. "What else has he done?"

Flack thought. "Sexual assault on a female charity worker, interfering with an eight-year old girl, kidnap and rape of homecoming twins, assault on a corpse…"

"Nice guy," Hawkes murmured.

"Yeah."

"Huh," Stella said, "all his victims were women, yes?"

"Yeah," Flack said again, clearly not knowing where she was going with this.

"So Mac hasn't got anything he wants, has he?" Fighting to control the hysteria that would have overtaken a lesser woman, she even managed a trademark smile. Flack's eyebrows went up.

"He wants safe passage out of there."

"No, Flack, he doesn't – he wants control. He wants power. He kills his hostages, yes?" She swallowed the screaming that rose in her throat – she was no good to Mac if she couldn't function, and if these people thought she didn't care, then so be it.

Flack nodded.

"Then we need to get Mac out of there – give him someone else – have a chance of staying alive."

"What do you mean?" Hawkes asked.

Stella turned to him, her professionalism taking over. "He wants a hostage, but Mac's no use – he can't do anything except kill him, and then he's lost his bargaining tool. So he's going to hang onto him until there's no way out, or until he gets something better."

She saw comprehension flash into Hawkes' eyes. "Stella, no…"

"Give him a woman hostage and he'll let Mac go. Then we can negotiate – he'll be on familiar territory, he'll feel more comfortable – he'll begin to make mistakes."

"And the woman will die," Flack said. "Absolutely not, Stella. No way can I sanction that sort of operation – you know that."

"Yeah – but if you had a volunteer? A professional?"

"I can't send anyone in there, Stell."

"You won't have to." She pulled off her gloves, tossed her hair back and began to unbutton her coat. "I'm going whether you 'sanction' it or not."

"You've got no training, no experience," Hawkes objected. "Wait for the negotiators."

She turned to Flack. "How long?"

He looked at his watch. The senior team are in Jersey, helping out there – they've got a junior guy on his way over, but it won't be for a while."

She looked levelly at him. "An inexperienced male negotiator who won't be here any time soon. Sound like a winner to you, Flack?" Flack twisted his face: it was obvious his feelings mirrored Stella's, though he didn't say so. "So that's it then. Me, or no-one. What do they call that? Oh yeah – a no-brainer."

"Stella," Hawkes said quietly, but she could hear the panic in his voice. "He will kill you."

Flack too spoke, even more quietly. "Aiden…" A shared memory leapt between them.

She thought of Mac's eyes: the way they shifted colour – the way they were so constantly alive. She thought of Mac's mouth, straight and strong and – oh! – how much she would have given right now to kiss it. She thought of Mac's beautiful body, moving beneath its clothing, naked in her dream, and wondered how much reality mirrored imagination. Well, now she would never know. And, she thought with a deep, still sadness, it would be a good 'not knowing' – if she had to die to save Mac's life, she could live with that.

"Better me than Mac," she said briskly, looking at them with sharp, steady eyes. "Coming?"

* * *

"I am not happy about you doing this," Flack said heavily, as Stella pulled on her flak vest and fastened its velcro shoulders. "We won't have any idea what's going on in there; we're trying to get a feed through the central vaccing system, but it's not done yet."

They were standing in the apartment building hallway. Other officers stood with them, most dressed as Stella was but – unlike Stella – carrying a range of weapons which she fervently hoped would not be required. If any of those weapons had to be fired, Mac was a dead man.

Dead and beautiful, in her apartment…

She shook her head, trying to dispel the image: in the past hour, as she had discovered more about the history behind today's events, it had grown more vivid, rather than fading in the daylight as dreams so often do. Only now her nightmare vision was augmented with imagined blood flowing from a gaping wound where Mac's old scar had burst, and all she could do was stand and watch as his life leaked out before her.

"Stell?" Flack was nothing if not persistent.

She shrugged on her professionalism and tough mental skin like a scratchy winter coat, and tensed her lips. "You've seen his MO, Flack – no hostages have survived, but no male hostages have survived – as far as we know – for more than three hours. Mac's been in there for over two – what chance does he have if we can't get him out of there? 'Hostage guy' won't be here for another – what, thirty minutes? – by then it'll be too late."

"But you know what he does to his victims. If he gets you in there, without a weapon – you're not coming out of there alive. And if you do, you're not coming out of there whole."

She had never seen Flack so intense. "At least I stand a chance of surviving long enough to be rescued," she said quietly. "Whatever he does to me – " her voice faltered slightly, " – whatever he might do, I'll be alive. He's kept female hostages for up to a week." She stopped: the thought of what could happen to her in that week was too horrifying. For Mac, she told herself through the panic – for Mac. Taking a deep breath she continued, "That's a whole week you have to get me out of there. He'll kill Mac – a man doesn't have anything he wants. I do."

Flack looked at the floor, and when he met her eyes again, she thought she could see unshed tears. "Come on, then," he said brusquely. "Let's do it."

They moved toward the door of apartment 713. As they neared it, Stella suddenly turned to Flack and caught his sleeve. "Don… If – if you have to Mac what happened… Tell him it was purely professional, won't you?" Flack looked puzzled. "Tell him it was just because – just tell him it wasn't personal, OK?"

Flack's eyes softened in understanding. "I'll tell him. It's not too late to change your mind, you know."

Stella looked him straight in the eyes. "What, and know that I have to live without Mac because I wasn't brave enough to help him? No – I can't do that."

"I know." Flack swallowed, then reached forward and kissed her cheek. "I'll tell him."

Stella stared at him for a few moments. Oh God, she thought, he really doesn't think I'm going to survive.

She was inclined to think that he was right. This was the last thing she would ever do. It was, she reflected as she turned away, a good last thing.

To be continued in chapter 2