Fic: CSI:NY: "Intersections"
Aug. 24th, 2007 11:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardTitle: Intersections
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bedlamsbard
Fandom: CSI:NY
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Everything's connected. Seven interconnected fics. Danny/Flack, Mac/Peyton implied.
Author's Notes: For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
summer_bits. Post-S3.
Disclalimer: All belongs to CBS and Jerry Bruckheimer.
Flack
“No consequences,” Danny says one night while very drunk at the bar in The World’s End. “That’s what summer is, isn’t it? No consequences, no looking back, no wondering if something’s fucking right or wrong – it’s a freefall, ain’t it?”
Flack’s busy trying to figure out if he’s going to have to carry Danny up to his apartment or just help him stumble drunkenly upstairs, and once that’s been completed, if he’s going to have to pick the lock or hope Danny can get his keys out before he passes out, so all he says is, “Sure.” Belatedly, he realizes the correct answer is probably something along the lines of, “Sure, back when we were in college,” but by the time the thought makes its way to the forefront of his mind, Danny’s already busy calling for more shots.
“Yeah, Messer, I think that’s enough,” Flack says, trying to wave off the bartender, but the guy gives him an amused look and jerks his chin toward Danny, saying, “He’s the boss.”
“Well, fuck that!” Flack exclaims, ignoring Danny’s coos of delight over the customized shot glasses, the ones he’s been drinking out of all evening. “He’s plastered, that’s what he is.”
“It’s August, Don, it’s either that or get high,” Danny tells him brightly, giggling.
Flack is never drinking vodka with him again. This is new and also, not good. “Get me another beer,” he says to the bartender, and adds to Danny, “I don’t see a correlation,” the use of which means he’s probably spent way too much time hanging out at the lab and not enough at the precinct.
Danny blinks at him, screws up his eyes, and says seriously, “Well.”
“Well?” Flack prompts.
“Well,” Danny says. “During summer, you gotta do crazy shit, right? It’s in a book or something.”
It probably is in some book somewhere, but Flack doesn’t say anything, just wraps his lips around the cold bottle of beer he’s just been handed and watches Danny trip over his tongue.
“And,” Danny says, “it’s easier to rat – rasha – rationalize it if you’ve got something to blame it on. Like coke. Or vodka,” he adds fondly, staring sadly at his empty shot glasses. He raises his voice suddenly, shouting, “Come on, Vinnie, pour me another.”
“Are you sure you can’t cut him off?” Flack says doubtfully to Vinnie as the bartender comes back with a bottle of Absolut.
The guy nods with really badly concealed amusement. “Sorry,” he says to Flack, “it’s in the papers. He owns the joint; he can drink as much as he wants.”
Flack frowns. “He owns it?” he starts to say, but stops as Danny starts singing. In Italian.
“Okay, you know what, Messer?” Flack says, putting the bottle down and reaching into his pocket to shell out cash for their drinks.
The bartender waves him off. “He’s got arrangements for that,” he says, cocking a finger towards Danny, and Flack shrugs that aside because he’s got Danny to haul upstairs to his place right now.
“I’m cutting you off, Danny,” Flack tells him, but Danny just hiccups and raises his voice, and seriously, Italian? The guy’s got hidden depths to him, and hopefully they got nothing to do with somehow owning a bar and a set of apartments in the good part of town despite NYPD regulations that state otherwise.
“Okay, Danny,” he adds, helping Danny off the barstool and draping an arm around his neck, “you’re done for the night, you here me? Let’s get you up to your place.” He edges around the bar and towards the door at the back, which leads to storage, which has another door that leads straight up towards the apartments, one of which is Danny’s. This isn’t actually the first time he’s done this. This time, it involves more carrying than he’s used to, heaving Danny up the stairs and trying to be careful of his still bandaged hand.
“Okay,” he says again, leaning Danny against the wall while he inspects the door and really, really hopes Danny’s got enough sense in him to hand over the keys, “can you –”
Danny digs in his pocket, which is a change, and comes up with them, dangling the ring off one finger. Flack rolls his eyes and snatches them from him, shoving them into the lock as Danny starts singing again. At least it’s in English this time. “All right, Messer,” Flack says, dumping the keys on the little round table by the door, “come on.” He pulls Danny is and levers him toward the bedroom, edging him around the damn pool table with the weird stains on the velvet, and dumps him on his mess of a bed.
Danny catches hold of his arm as he goes down, pulling Flack with a little more momentum than’s strictly necessary. As a result, Flack ends up with one knee on the bed, leaning over Danny in what’s probably a pretty compromising position. “No consequences,” Danny tells him sweetly, and says something in Italian, and then leans up to brush his lips over Flack’s. Then his head flops back and he starts snoring.
Flack stares at him, shocked, and gets enough of his wits together to start peeling Danny’s fingers off his wrist one by one.
He leaves a message on Danny’s damn blackboard. It says, You do realize you have to work tomorrow, right? See you at the lab. – Flack
Lindsay
Danny comes in while Lindsay is rearranging the pictures on her desk, a wide spread of them spilled from a manila envelope while she fits them into frames, staring at the dirt and the arena a little wistfully.
“Hey, Montana,” he offers, juggling the coffees he’s holding until he can pass her raspberry frappuccino over.
“Thanks, Danny,” Lindsay says gratefully, abandoning the pictures for the moment to rescue the drink before Danny drops something. “You want to put those down for a sec?” she asks, cradling her iced coffee between her palms. “You look like crap,” she adds, just to be friendly.
“Drank too much last night. Bad idea,” Danny says, depositing the two trays of coffee on her desk. He frowns down at them, obviously considering, and picks one cup out, squinting at the scribbling on the side before drinking. “What’re those?” he asks, looking upside down at the spread of photographs in front of Lindsay.
“My niece, Becca,” Lindsay says, grinning. “First place, barrel racing – local junior rodeo.”
“Oh, you gotta be kidding me,” Danny says, staring. “You mind?” He picks up one of the pictures.
“No, go ahead,” Lindsay says. She sips at her drink for a little while as Danny goes through the photos, stirring the whipped cream around with her straw. “I don’t – really keep in touch with my family,” she admits finally and Danny glances up.
“Yeah, I know how that goes,” he says. “Must be on good terms with your – brother? – though.”
“My oldest brother,” Lindsay says, looking down. “Dick. Becca’s his daughter. We don’t talk, but – he sends me things. Pictures. It’s rodeo season back home.”
“That is so wrong,” Danny says fervently and Lindsay laughs, has to, because it’s that or cry. She didn’t see her parents when she went back to Bozeman – that’s a lie, because she saw them in the courtroom, but she didn’t – she didn’t talk to them. Doesn’t even think she acknowledged them at all. Dick called her up, asked her over to dinner, but Lindsay had blown him off. She feels – bad about that, now, because he’s still sent her Becca’s pictures.
“You ever do any of that?” Danny asks, and it takes Lindsay a moment to realize what he’s talking about.
“Yeah,” she says. “I was a princess.”
“What?” he says blankly.
“Rodeo princess,” she interprets. “Miss Rodeo Southwest Montana Princess. It’s basically a publicity stunt, but it’s – it’s nice. That’s a lie, it’s not a publicity stunt, you really have to work for it.” She pauses, thoughtful.
“Wow,” Danny says, “back here we just have Homecoming royalty.”
“We have that too,” Lindsay tells him, grinning. “Who gets the crown for the rodeo is almost more important, though.”
He looks physically pained at the idea. “That is so wrong,” he says again, fervently, and jumps when Mac raps sharply on the wall with his knuckles.
“If you two aren’t too busy, we do have a crime scene to get to,” he says and turns away.
“Hey, wait, Mac –” Danny exclaims, snatching up the trays of coffee and hurrying after him.
Lindsay slides the rest of Dick’s photos back into the envelope, but she pauses on one of Becca and her horse, both of them looking at each other like there’s something deeply private between them, and thinks she might call home tonight.
Stella
Stella staggers out of the crime lab more stoned than conscious, clutching at the iced coffee Danny’s handed her like a lifeline. She’s been awake almost thirty-six hours, through two shifts she was supposed to work and one she wasn’t, but she’s finally, finally got the bastard behind bars. It’s all she can do to stay upright in the elevator and once that dings, she makes her way across the lobby on wobbly legs, nearly walking into the door twice before Hawkes comes and rescues her by opening it from the outside.
“You all right, Stel?” he asks, looking worried. He also looks disgustingly fresh and awake, the bastard.
“I’ll pass out later,” she assures him, swaying on her feet. The building the lab is in is air-conditioned, but New York City isn’t; she feels like she’s just stepped into an oven and she hasn’t even left the building yet.
“Are you sure?” he asks earnestly. “I just have to pick up my kit, I’m on my way to a scene, but I’ve got a vehicle, I can drop you off at your apartment.”
Stella is about to refuse, but then she realizes that if she gets on the subway she’s not going to be able to get off – and that’s not counting whether or not she can make it down the street before she falls over. “All right,” she says, swaying, and Hawkes puts his hand on her elbow and helps her over to one of the sleek aluminum-framed chairs in the lobby. Stella sits – collapses, really, still clutching at Danny’s coffee.
“Now, drink that,” Hawkes says sternly, looking like the doctor he used to be. “I’ll be back in a minute – I have to meet Flack in Astoria.”
“I can –” Stella begins, trying to struggle manfully out of her chair, and woefully fails when Hawkes puts his hands on her shoulders and pushes her back down.
“It is not, in fact, actually out of my way,” he points out. “And I don’t really want to have to process your body if you get horribly murdered on the subway while basically sleepwalking.”
“Thanks, Hawkes,” Stella manages, “that’s really encouraging.”
“I try,” he tells her earnestly, the effect broken by the fact he’s grinning around it. “Don’t go anywhere! I’m a trained detective, I can find you.”
“Well, I should hope so,” Stella says primly, trying her coffee. Danny’s good; he remembered exactly what she likes in hot weather. She’d expect no less, given the fact they’ve been working together for almost six – no, seven years now. Danny always has had an excellent memory, no matter how often he denies that there’s more to him than meets the surface. She takes off the lid to crunch an ice cube beneath her back teeth.
Hawkes grins at her again. “Don’t go anywhere!” he says again, cheerful, and crosses the lobby to the elevators in a few quick strides. He turns again when the doors ding open and before he gets in and Stella smiles back, shoving her hair out of her face with the back of her hand as she decimates another ice cube.
Mac
New York City in summer is hot and humid. His clothes stick to him like a second skin and the air he breathes is thick as molasses. Even in the department’s black SUV he’s driving, he’s reminded of his tours of duty in the Marines, assignments and deployments he can’t talk about and isn’t supposed to remember because they don’t, technically, exist.
The thought is stifling. Mac looks out the window and expects to see real jungle instead of urban decay; glances at the passenger seat and expects his camouflage instead of Danny in a button-down shirt and jeans, head tilted against the side of the car as his glasses slip millimeter by millimeter down his nose. He remembers that Jimmy LeBeau had spoken in a bastard French patois while sleeping; Danny mutters in Italian, quick murmurs of language that Mac won’t pretend to understand. He never would have expected it from Danny, of all people, but even he can tell from Danny’s quiet murmurs that he speaks the language with the same fluency as someone who learned at his cradle, who learned Italian at the same time he learned English. No one unconsciously speaks a language they don’t know inside and out.
Danny jerks awake as Mac parks on the curb, in front of a large airy house with uniforms looking murderous on the front lawn and reporters dogging the street and sidewalks. Lindsay pulls up behind them a few minutes later as Danny swings out of the SUV, opening the back door to get his kit. He undoes the top two buttons on his shirt, face already shiny with sweat, and trails after Mac as Angell ducks beneath the tape and comes over. Her hair is back in a ponytail and she’s discarded her blazer somewhere, stripped down to black slacks and a blouse that shows off rather a lot of cleavage for a homicide detective. The effect is somewhat offset by the fact she’s wearing a shoulder holster holding a very large gun. Her gold shield seems like an afterthought.
“Just tell me the scene’s indoors,” Danny pleads before she can say anything. “Better yet, tell me the scene’s indoors and it has air-conditioning.”
Lindsay doesn’t say anything, but she looks enamored of the idea. Mac sighs, Angell grins.
“Please?” Danny adds hopefully, shoving his glasses up his nose with the back of his hand.
Angell snorts. “Come on,” she says, ducking beneath the tape. “No comment,” she adds quickly as a reporter and her cameraman approach, looking hopeful and determined. “No, I’m serious, no comment.”
They turn towards Mac. “Oh, Detective Taylor,” the reporter begins, batting eyelashes too long and blonde to be real, “can you –”
“No comment,” Mac says firmly, and Danny starts snickering.
“You’re famous,” he says once they’re out of earshot, and Angell laughs too. Lindsay doesn’t, but she’s busy looking at the blood trail on the porch.
Danny sobers immediately as soon as she points it out.
“Keep going,” Angell says cheerfully, shepherding them along. “You’ll like this one, Messer.”
“Oh, heaven,” Danny says as soon as they’re inside; it’s freezing. He pauses a moment later, considering this fact. “Hang on…”
Angell steers them left, into the sitting room. The temperature drops another ten or twenty degrees; the sweat on the back of Mac’s shirt is quickly turning icy.
“Okay,” Danny says thoughtfully, turning his head to one side. “That’s new.”
“Is – is our vic – wow,” Lindsay says, sidestepping the more or less frozen puddles of blood on the floor.
“I thought giant blocks of ice with people frozen in them went out with Captain America,” Danny says brightly, and Mac just sighs.
Peyton
“You’ll like this one,” Mac tells her as he comes out of the house to escort her through the mess of reporters.
Peyton raises one eyebrow. “Oh?” It’s hot enough that her windbreaker is clinging to her bare arms; she’s only wearing a tank top beneath. Completely unprofessional, of course, but it’s that or wear nothing but her bra, and however much Mac might enjoy that, it’s even worse than wearing what she is. She pushes the sleeves of her jacket up.
“You might have a little trouble getting it back to the lab, of course,” he adds, and bites off the words, “No comment,” as three reporters converge on him at once.
“I’m intrigued, of course,” Peyton says placidly, hanging back so Mac can open the door for her.
She steps inside, feels the temperature drop shockingly fast. It’s like stepping from an oven into an icebox. “My God,” she manages, pulling her sleeves back down, but that’s no help, not when they’re entirely soaked through and are fast going even colder than the air. “What –”
“Keep going,” Mac says. Lindsay is crouched down by the blood spatter on the floor, nearly cross-eyed as she takes pictures after picture; she glances up as Peyton passes.
“Hey, Peyton,” she says brightly, just as Danny starts cussing in the background. Angell makes a sound that sounds suspiciously like a laugh and cuts off abruptly. “By the way, I think our crime scene is melting,” she tells Mac, eyes wide and innocent.
“What, again?” Mac says, and Peyton raises both eyebrows this time. “I’ll tell you later,” he assures her. “I think Sid had the case then.”
He steers her into the next room, where Danny is standing holding his bad hand and Angell is pacing carefully around a giant block of ice with a dark shape locked inside.
“Yes,” Peyton says, once she’s gone a little closer to the ice. “I’ll have to take this back to the morgue, definitely. Danny, are you all right?”
He’s gone pale, holding his bad hand with his good one. She, Mac, and Angell all converge on him at once.
Danny grits his teeth and glares. “Put my fingers out again,” he admits, grudging.
Peyton shoulders Mac and Angell aside and takes Danny’s hand in hers, feeling out the ruined and rebuilt bones, trying to figure out where he went wrong. He won’t look at her, just away, past Mac and Angell. “All right,” Peyton murmurs, mostly to herself, visualizing the spray of bones in a human hand. Visualizing Danny’s ruined ones; Mac has shown her the X-rays in confidence, asking if Danny will still be able to do his job or if Mac has to look for another CSI again. She can feel Mac’s eyes on the back of her neck now, considering, wondering, weighing.
“I think you’ll be all right,” Peyton forces herself to say, even though she’s not sure at all. “Hold on – this will hurt a bit.”
Danny nods, jaw set and eyes distant, and Peyton grits her own teeth and puts three of his fingers back in joint. There’s a reason she deals with corpses and not living patients. When she looks up again, Danny has bitten through his lower lip; he’s gone completely white now. He doesn’t look at Mac, but he reaches up to wipe the blood off his chin with the back of his right hand.
“Take our vic over to the morgue,” Mac orders, voice carefully bland and contained. “Lindsay and I can finish up here.”
Danny nods, but still doesn’t look at him; there’s something broken in his eyes.
“This should be fun,” Peyton forces herself to say, turning away to give him a little privacy.
Danny doesn’t say anything at all.
Hawkes
He doesn’t make it back to the lab until late evening, where he sees Danny with his bad hand bandaged squinting into a microscope. Danny glances up, glasses falling back down his nose, and frowns. “Are you even supposed to be working this shift?”
Hawkes shrugs. “I’m not really sure anymore.”
Danny nods, wise to this. The heat wave hitting the city has upped crime to previously unheard of levels; they’ve all been working double and triple shifts and their regular schedules are shot to hell. Hawkes saw Danny wandering around the lab this morning looking like hell and mainlining coffee; he’s surprised to see him now – and on his feet, at that.
He says as much, and Danny shrugs. “Fucked up my hand again,” he says, trying not to sound bitter and failing miserably. “Mac sent me back to the lab in case I fucked up the scene instead of just myself.”
“Let me –” Hawkes begins and Danny jerks back before he can do more than take a step forward.
“Peyton already looked at it, and Sid bandaged me up,” he says defensively. “I’ve got a frozen movie star and all the reporters in the city on my back. What about you?”
Hawkes can see him change subjects with a forced effort, so he goes with it, saying, “A frozen movie star?”
“In a block of ice,” Danny says helpfully, and leads him over to the computers, where he calls up his crime scene photographs with a few clicks of the mouse. “How ‘bout that, huh?”
Hawkes makes appreciative noises. “Where is it – he – now?”
“Morgue. I think Peyton’s planning to use a hairdryer to thaw him out – Mac wants the water and shit.” Danny pauses to shove his glasses back up his nose and turns around toward Hawkes. “How ‘bout you? Anything interesting?”
“Domestic dispute,” Hawkes says. “Wife put a meat cleaver through her husband’s skull, took the kids, and went to her sister’s. The oldest called 911 when he realized what his mother had done.”
“Some people got all the luck,” Danny grouses. “Hey, well, if you got a minute, you wanna take a look at this and tell me if you think it matches? I got five says it does, Adam says it don’t.”
“You’re gambling on evidence?” Hawkes says, bemused.
“Well, we used to gamble on perps, but Mac made us stop,” Danny tells him, unrepentant. “Hey, Adam!” he calls, motioning across the lab. “We got a tiebreaker.”
Adam comes over as Hawkes bends over the microscope. “It doesn’t match, right?” he says, one eye twitching slightly. They’ve all been working for far too long, and it shows.
“Hang on,” Hawkes says, frowning at the two hairs laid side by side. “It’s –”
“I told you!” Adam says gleefully before he’s even finished the sentence.
“– definitely a match,” Hawkes finishes, and Adam deflates.
“Ha!” Danny says. “I’ve been staring at shit way too long today.”
“Me too,” Adam nods, fishing his wallet out of his back pocket and passing over five crumpled ones.
Hawkes commiserates with both of them – Danny especially is looking like he’s gone a few too many rounds with the world, but Adam’s clearly been through the ringer too – and goes off to fill out the paperwork from the Casper case.
“Thanks for clearing that up,” Danny calls after him, taking the slide out of the microscope with careful, steady hands.
Danny
He ends up in The World’s End again, nursing a beer long after it’s gone warm and flat – this morning he woke up with a hangover fit to flatten China; he’s learned his lesson about drinking when he’s working as much as he is. He should skip the bar all together, but it’s hard too, it’s right there, and he has to go through it to get to his apartment if he doesn’t want to wander through the alley to the building’s back entrance. Besides, the drinks are free, so he might as well take advantage of them. Even if “drinks” tonight is in the singular, not the plural.
“I do anything bad last night?” he asks Vinnie behind the bar.
“Sang,” Vinnie says immediately. “But it wasn’t too bad, you don’t got too bad of a voice.”
“Sang what?” Danny asks with grim foreboding.
“That song about the whore and the choirboy – and the milkmaid and the copper – and the virgin and the –”
“Shit,” Danny says fervently. “Did Flack –” He hasn’t seen Flack all day, despite the message Flack left him last night, and it pisses him off, even though he knows it’s no one’s fault, just the vagaries of assignments and cases. Hell, if he’d been lucky he could have got the open and shut case Hawkes did, the one he worked with Flack.
“You sang it in the original Italian,” Vinnie assures him, and escapes down the bar to pour more drinks.
“Shit,” Danny says again, although with less fervor this time. He just hopes he didn’t do anything equally as stupid once Flack got him upstairs, because he knows how his mind works, and he knows he would have if given the chance. Flack’s a good guy, though, wouldn’t mention it even if pressed, but the not-knowing makes him nervous. Better Flack than anyone else, though; there’s stupid shit all of Tanglewood knows about because he did it in front of the boys who didn’t know shit about keeping their mouths shut. Those are the ones stupid enough to be in prison now; the rest are old-school Cosa Nostra, the ones who know enough about omerta not to talk unless it gets them something. Sonny was one of those.
The thought hurts bad enough that he tries to drink his beer and almost spits it out, so he waves Vinnie over and gets a couple shots of whiskey, which is enough to numb the dull throb in his bad hand. Damn straight there was a reason he didn’t go straight up to his apartment, and this is it.
“You all right?” Vinnie asks on his next pass by, pausing with his arms resting on the bar.
“Just peachy,” Danny says bitterly, knocking back his third shot.
“Hit me too, Vinnie,” someone says, sliding into the seat next to him. Danny glances over and Flack grins back tiredly. His hair is hanging lank and tired and he’s lost his tie somewhere, shirt unbuttoned at the collar and the sleeves pushed up to the elbow. “Heard you had a helluva case,” he says to Danny.
“Frozen hell, maybe,” Danny says, grinning as Flack knocks back the shot without even blinking and holds out the glass. “Heard you had an easy go of it.”
“Hawkes is lying,” Flack says easily and holds out his right wrist toward Danny, where it’s heavily bandaged. “The bitch bit me when I went to cuff her. Had to get a fucking tetanus shot.”
Danny winces. So does Flack, and takes another drink to conceal it. “Helluva weak, huh?” he says once he’s got his breath back, and Danny says, “Helluva summer.”
end
Author:
bedlamsbardFandom: CSI:NY
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Everything's connected. Seven interconnected fics. Danny/Flack, Mac/Peyton implied.
Author's Notes: For
summer_bits. Post-S3.Disclalimer: All belongs to CBS and Jerry Bruckheimer.
Flack
“No consequences,” Danny says one night while very drunk at the bar in The World’s End. “That’s what summer is, isn’t it? No consequences, no looking back, no wondering if something’s fucking right or wrong – it’s a freefall, ain’t it?”
Flack’s busy trying to figure out if he’s going to have to carry Danny up to his apartment or just help him stumble drunkenly upstairs, and once that’s been completed, if he’s going to have to pick the lock or hope Danny can get his keys out before he passes out, so all he says is, “Sure.” Belatedly, he realizes the correct answer is probably something along the lines of, “Sure, back when we were in college,” but by the time the thought makes its way to the forefront of his mind, Danny’s already busy calling for more shots.
“Yeah, Messer, I think that’s enough,” Flack says, trying to wave off the bartender, but the guy gives him an amused look and jerks his chin toward Danny, saying, “He’s the boss.”
“Well, fuck that!” Flack exclaims, ignoring Danny’s coos of delight over the customized shot glasses, the ones he’s been drinking out of all evening. “He’s plastered, that’s what he is.”
“It’s August, Don, it’s either that or get high,” Danny tells him brightly, giggling.
Flack is never drinking vodka with him again. This is new and also, not good. “Get me another beer,” he says to the bartender, and adds to Danny, “I don’t see a correlation,” the use of which means he’s probably spent way too much time hanging out at the lab and not enough at the precinct.
Danny blinks at him, screws up his eyes, and says seriously, “Well.”
“Well?” Flack prompts.
“Well,” Danny says. “During summer, you gotta do crazy shit, right? It’s in a book or something.”
It probably is in some book somewhere, but Flack doesn’t say anything, just wraps his lips around the cold bottle of beer he’s just been handed and watches Danny trip over his tongue.
“And,” Danny says, “it’s easier to rat – rasha – rationalize it if you’ve got something to blame it on. Like coke. Or vodka,” he adds fondly, staring sadly at his empty shot glasses. He raises his voice suddenly, shouting, “Come on, Vinnie, pour me another.”
“Are you sure you can’t cut him off?” Flack says doubtfully to Vinnie as the bartender comes back with a bottle of Absolut.
The guy nods with really badly concealed amusement. “Sorry,” he says to Flack, “it’s in the papers. He owns the joint; he can drink as much as he wants.”
Flack frowns. “He owns it?” he starts to say, but stops as Danny starts singing. In Italian.
“Okay, you know what, Messer?” Flack says, putting the bottle down and reaching into his pocket to shell out cash for their drinks.
The bartender waves him off. “He’s got arrangements for that,” he says, cocking a finger towards Danny, and Flack shrugs that aside because he’s got Danny to haul upstairs to his place right now.
“I’m cutting you off, Danny,” Flack tells him, but Danny just hiccups and raises his voice, and seriously, Italian? The guy’s got hidden depths to him, and hopefully they got nothing to do with somehow owning a bar and a set of apartments in the good part of town despite NYPD regulations that state otherwise.
“Okay, Danny,” he adds, helping Danny off the barstool and draping an arm around his neck, “you’re done for the night, you here me? Let’s get you up to your place.” He edges around the bar and towards the door at the back, which leads to storage, which has another door that leads straight up towards the apartments, one of which is Danny’s. This isn’t actually the first time he’s done this. This time, it involves more carrying than he’s used to, heaving Danny up the stairs and trying to be careful of his still bandaged hand.
“Okay,” he says again, leaning Danny against the wall while he inspects the door and really, really hopes Danny’s got enough sense in him to hand over the keys, “can you –”
Danny digs in his pocket, which is a change, and comes up with them, dangling the ring off one finger. Flack rolls his eyes and snatches them from him, shoving them into the lock as Danny starts singing again. At least it’s in English this time. “All right, Messer,” Flack says, dumping the keys on the little round table by the door, “come on.” He pulls Danny is and levers him toward the bedroom, edging him around the damn pool table with the weird stains on the velvet, and dumps him on his mess of a bed.
Danny catches hold of his arm as he goes down, pulling Flack with a little more momentum than’s strictly necessary. As a result, Flack ends up with one knee on the bed, leaning over Danny in what’s probably a pretty compromising position. “No consequences,” Danny tells him sweetly, and says something in Italian, and then leans up to brush his lips over Flack’s. Then his head flops back and he starts snoring.
Flack stares at him, shocked, and gets enough of his wits together to start peeling Danny’s fingers off his wrist one by one.
He leaves a message on Danny’s damn blackboard. It says, You do realize you have to work tomorrow, right? See you at the lab. – Flack
Lindsay
Danny comes in while Lindsay is rearranging the pictures on her desk, a wide spread of them spilled from a manila envelope while she fits them into frames, staring at the dirt and the arena a little wistfully.
“Hey, Montana,” he offers, juggling the coffees he’s holding until he can pass her raspberry frappuccino over.
“Thanks, Danny,” Lindsay says gratefully, abandoning the pictures for the moment to rescue the drink before Danny drops something. “You want to put those down for a sec?” she asks, cradling her iced coffee between her palms. “You look like crap,” she adds, just to be friendly.
“Drank too much last night. Bad idea,” Danny says, depositing the two trays of coffee on her desk. He frowns down at them, obviously considering, and picks one cup out, squinting at the scribbling on the side before drinking. “What’re those?” he asks, looking upside down at the spread of photographs in front of Lindsay.
“My niece, Becca,” Lindsay says, grinning. “First place, barrel racing – local junior rodeo.”
“Oh, you gotta be kidding me,” Danny says, staring. “You mind?” He picks up one of the pictures.
“No, go ahead,” Lindsay says. She sips at her drink for a little while as Danny goes through the photos, stirring the whipped cream around with her straw. “I don’t – really keep in touch with my family,” she admits finally and Danny glances up.
“Yeah, I know how that goes,” he says. “Must be on good terms with your – brother? – though.”
“My oldest brother,” Lindsay says, looking down. “Dick. Becca’s his daughter. We don’t talk, but – he sends me things. Pictures. It’s rodeo season back home.”
“That is so wrong,” Danny says fervently and Lindsay laughs, has to, because it’s that or cry. She didn’t see her parents when she went back to Bozeman – that’s a lie, because she saw them in the courtroom, but she didn’t – she didn’t talk to them. Doesn’t even think she acknowledged them at all. Dick called her up, asked her over to dinner, but Lindsay had blown him off. She feels – bad about that, now, because he’s still sent her Becca’s pictures.
“You ever do any of that?” Danny asks, and it takes Lindsay a moment to realize what he’s talking about.
“Yeah,” she says. “I was a princess.”
“What?” he says blankly.
“Rodeo princess,” she interprets. “Miss Rodeo Southwest Montana Princess. It’s basically a publicity stunt, but it’s – it’s nice. That’s a lie, it’s not a publicity stunt, you really have to work for it.” She pauses, thoughtful.
“Wow,” Danny says, “back here we just have Homecoming royalty.”
“We have that too,” Lindsay tells him, grinning. “Who gets the crown for the rodeo is almost more important, though.”
He looks physically pained at the idea. “That is so wrong,” he says again, fervently, and jumps when Mac raps sharply on the wall with his knuckles.
“If you two aren’t too busy, we do have a crime scene to get to,” he says and turns away.
“Hey, wait, Mac –” Danny exclaims, snatching up the trays of coffee and hurrying after him.
Lindsay slides the rest of Dick’s photos back into the envelope, but she pauses on one of Becca and her horse, both of them looking at each other like there’s something deeply private between them, and thinks she might call home tonight.
Stella
Stella staggers out of the crime lab more stoned than conscious, clutching at the iced coffee Danny’s handed her like a lifeline. She’s been awake almost thirty-six hours, through two shifts she was supposed to work and one she wasn’t, but she’s finally, finally got the bastard behind bars. It’s all she can do to stay upright in the elevator and once that dings, she makes her way across the lobby on wobbly legs, nearly walking into the door twice before Hawkes comes and rescues her by opening it from the outside.
“You all right, Stel?” he asks, looking worried. He also looks disgustingly fresh and awake, the bastard.
“I’ll pass out later,” she assures him, swaying on her feet. The building the lab is in is air-conditioned, but New York City isn’t; she feels like she’s just stepped into an oven and she hasn’t even left the building yet.
“Are you sure?” he asks earnestly. “I just have to pick up my kit, I’m on my way to a scene, but I’ve got a vehicle, I can drop you off at your apartment.”
Stella is about to refuse, but then she realizes that if she gets on the subway she’s not going to be able to get off – and that’s not counting whether or not she can make it down the street before she falls over. “All right,” she says, swaying, and Hawkes puts his hand on her elbow and helps her over to one of the sleek aluminum-framed chairs in the lobby. Stella sits – collapses, really, still clutching at Danny’s coffee.
“Now, drink that,” Hawkes says sternly, looking like the doctor he used to be. “I’ll be back in a minute – I have to meet Flack in Astoria.”
“I can –” Stella begins, trying to struggle manfully out of her chair, and woefully fails when Hawkes puts his hands on her shoulders and pushes her back down.
“It is not, in fact, actually out of my way,” he points out. “And I don’t really want to have to process your body if you get horribly murdered on the subway while basically sleepwalking.”
“Thanks, Hawkes,” Stella manages, “that’s really encouraging.”
“I try,” he tells her earnestly, the effect broken by the fact he’s grinning around it. “Don’t go anywhere! I’m a trained detective, I can find you.”
“Well, I should hope so,” Stella says primly, trying her coffee. Danny’s good; he remembered exactly what she likes in hot weather. She’d expect no less, given the fact they’ve been working together for almost six – no, seven years now. Danny always has had an excellent memory, no matter how often he denies that there’s more to him than meets the surface. She takes off the lid to crunch an ice cube beneath her back teeth.
Hawkes grins at her again. “Don’t go anywhere!” he says again, cheerful, and crosses the lobby to the elevators in a few quick strides. He turns again when the doors ding open and before he gets in and Stella smiles back, shoving her hair out of her face with the back of her hand as she decimates another ice cube.
Mac
New York City in summer is hot and humid. His clothes stick to him like a second skin and the air he breathes is thick as molasses. Even in the department’s black SUV he’s driving, he’s reminded of his tours of duty in the Marines, assignments and deployments he can’t talk about and isn’t supposed to remember because they don’t, technically, exist.
The thought is stifling. Mac looks out the window and expects to see real jungle instead of urban decay; glances at the passenger seat and expects his camouflage instead of Danny in a button-down shirt and jeans, head tilted against the side of the car as his glasses slip millimeter by millimeter down his nose. He remembers that Jimmy LeBeau had spoken in a bastard French patois while sleeping; Danny mutters in Italian, quick murmurs of language that Mac won’t pretend to understand. He never would have expected it from Danny, of all people, but even he can tell from Danny’s quiet murmurs that he speaks the language with the same fluency as someone who learned at his cradle, who learned Italian at the same time he learned English. No one unconsciously speaks a language they don’t know inside and out.
Danny jerks awake as Mac parks on the curb, in front of a large airy house with uniforms looking murderous on the front lawn and reporters dogging the street and sidewalks. Lindsay pulls up behind them a few minutes later as Danny swings out of the SUV, opening the back door to get his kit. He undoes the top two buttons on his shirt, face already shiny with sweat, and trails after Mac as Angell ducks beneath the tape and comes over. Her hair is back in a ponytail and she’s discarded her blazer somewhere, stripped down to black slacks and a blouse that shows off rather a lot of cleavage for a homicide detective. The effect is somewhat offset by the fact she’s wearing a shoulder holster holding a very large gun. Her gold shield seems like an afterthought.
“Just tell me the scene’s indoors,” Danny pleads before she can say anything. “Better yet, tell me the scene’s indoors and it has air-conditioning.”
Lindsay doesn’t say anything, but she looks enamored of the idea. Mac sighs, Angell grins.
“Please?” Danny adds hopefully, shoving his glasses up his nose with the back of his hand.
Angell snorts. “Come on,” she says, ducking beneath the tape. “No comment,” she adds quickly as a reporter and her cameraman approach, looking hopeful and determined. “No, I’m serious, no comment.”
They turn towards Mac. “Oh, Detective Taylor,” the reporter begins, batting eyelashes too long and blonde to be real, “can you –”
“No comment,” Mac says firmly, and Danny starts snickering.
“You’re famous,” he says once they’re out of earshot, and Angell laughs too. Lindsay doesn’t, but she’s busy looking at the blood trail on the porch.
Danny sobers immediately as soon as she points it out.
“Keep going,” Angell says cheerfully, shepherding them along. “You’ll like this one, Messer.”
“Oh, heaven,” Danny says as soon as they’re inside; it’s freezing. He pauses a moment later, considering this fact. “Hang on…”
Angell steers them left, into the sitting room. The temperature drops another ten or twenty degrees; the sweat on the back of Mac’s shirt is quickly turning icy.
“Okay,” Danny says thoughtfully, turning his head to one side. “That’s new.”
“Is – is our vic – wow,” Lindsay says, sidestepping the more or less frozen puddles of blood on the floor.
“I thought giant blocks of ice with people frozen in them went out with Captain America,” Danny says brightly, and Mac just sighs.
Peyton
“You’ll like this one,” Mac tells her as he comes out of the house to escort her through the mess of reporters.
Peyton raises one eyebrow. “Oh?” It’s hot enough that her windbreaker is clinging to her bare arms; she’s only wearing a tank top beneath. Completely unprofessional, of course, but it’s that or wear nothing but her bra, and however much Mac might enjoy that, it’s even worse than wearing what she is. She pushes the sleeves of her jacket up.
“You might have a little trouble getting it back to the lab, of course,” he adds, and bites off the words, “No comment,” as three reporters converge on him at once.
“I’m intrigued, of course,” Peyton says placidly, hanging back so Mac can open the door for her.
She steps inside, feels the temperature drop shockingly fast. It’s like stepping from an oven into an icebox. “My God,” she manages, pulling her sleeves back down, but that’s no help, not when they’re entirely soaked through and are fast going even colder than the air. “What –”
“Keep going,” Mac says. Lindsay is crouched down by the blood spatter on the floor, nearly cross-eyed as she takes pictures after picture; she glances up as Peyton passes.
“Hey, Peyton,” she says brightly, just as Danny starts cussing in the background. Angell makes a sound that sounds suspiciously like a laugh and cuts off abruptly. “By the way, I think our crime scene is melting,” she tells Mac, eyes wide and innocent.
“What, again?” Mac says, and Peyton raises both eyebrows this time. “I’ll tell you later,” he assures her. “I think Sid had the case then.”
He steers her into the next room, where Danny is standing holding his bad hand and Angell is pacing carefully around a giant block of ice with a dark shape locked inside.
“Yes,” Peyton says, once she’s gone a little closer to the ice. “I’ll have to take this back to the morgue, definitely. Danny, are you all right?”
He’s gone pale, holding his bad hand with his good one. She, Mac, and Angell all converge on him at once.
Danny grits his teeth and glares. “Put my fingers out again,” he admits, grudging.
Peyton shoulders Mac and Angell aside and takes Danny’s hand in hers, feeling out the ruined and rebuilt bones, trying to figure out where he went wrong. He won’t look at her, just away, past Mac and Angell. “All right,” Peyton murmurs, mostly to herself, visualizing the spray of bones in a human hand. Visualizing Danny’s ruined ones; Mac has shown her the X-rays in confidence, asking if Danny will still be able to do his job or if Mac has to look for another CSI again. She can feel Mac’s eyes on the back of her neck now, considering, wondering, weighing.
“I think you’ll be all right,” Peyton forces herself to say, even though she’s not sure at all. “Hold on – this will hurt a bit.”
Danny nods, jaw set and eyes distant, and Peyton grits her own teeth and puts three of his fingers back in joint. There’s a reason she deals with corpses and not living patients. When she looks up again, Danny has bitten through his lower lip; he’s gone completely white now. He doesn’t look at Mac, but he reaches up to wipe the blood off his chin with the back of his right hand.
“Take our vic over to the morgue,” Mac orders, voice carefully bland and contained. “Lindsay and I can finish up here.”
Danny nods, but still doesn’t look at him; there’s something broken in his eyes.
“This should be fun,” Peyton forces herself to say, turning away to give him a little privacy.
Danny doesn’t say anything at all.
Hawkes
He doesn’t make it back to the lab until late evening, where he sees Danny with his bad hand bandaged squinting into a microscope. Danny glances up, glasses falling back down his nose, and frowns. “Are you even supposed to be working this shift?”
Hawkes shrugs. “I’m not really sure anymore.”
Danny nods, wise to this. The heat wave hitting the city has upped crime to previously unheard of levels; they’ve all been working double and triple shifts and their regular schedules are shot to hell. Hawkes saw Danny wandering around the lab this morning looking like hell and mainlining coffee; he’s surprised to see him now – and on his feet, at that.
He says as much, and Danny shrugs. “Fucked up my hand again,” he says, trying not to sound bitter and failing miserably. “Mac sent me back to the lab in case I fucked up the scene instead of just myself.”
“Let me –” Hawkes begins and Danny jerks back before he can do more than take a step forward.
“Peyton already looked at it, and Sid bandaged me up,” he says defensively. “I’ve got a frozen movie star and all the reporters in the city on my back. What about you?”
Hawkes can see him change subjects with a forced effort, so he goes with it, saying, “A frozen movie star?”
“In a block of ice,” Danny says helpfully, and leads him over to the computers, where he calls up his crime scene photographs with a few clicks of the mouse. “How ‘bout that, huh?”
Hawkes makes appreciative noises. “Where is it – he – now?”
“Morgue. I think Peyton’s planning to use a hairdryer to thaw him out – Mac wants the water and shit.” Danny pauses to shove his glasses back up his nose and turns around toward Hawkes. “How ‘bout you? Anything interesting?”
“Domestic dispute,” Hawkes says. “Wife put a meat cleaver through her husband’s skull, took the kids, and went to her sister’s. The oldest called 911 when he realized what his mother had done.”
“Some people got all the luck,” Danny grouses. “Hey, well, if you got a minute, you wanna take a look at this and tell me if you think it matches? I got five says it does, Adam says it don’t.”
“You’re gambling on evidence?” Hawkes says, bemused.
“Well, we used to gamble on perps, but Mac made us stop,” Danny tells him, unrepentant. “Hey, Adam!” he calls, motioning across the lab. “We got a tiebreaker.”
Adam comes over as Hawkes bends over the microscope. “It doesn’t match, right?” he says, one eye twitching slightly. They’ve all been working for far too long, and it shows.
“Hang on,” Hawkes says, frowning at the two hairs laid side by side. “It’s –”
“I told you!” Adam says gleefully before he’s even finished the sentence.
“– definitely a match,” Hawkes finishes, and Adam deflates.
“Ha!” Danny says. “I’ve been staring at shit way too long today.”
“Me too,” Adam nods, fishing his wallet out of his back pocket and passing over five crumpled ones.
Hawkes commiserates with both of them – Danny especially is looking like he’s gone a few too many rounds with the world, but Adam’s clearly been through the ringer too – and goes off to fill out the paperwork from the Casper case.
“Thanks for clearing that up,” Danny calls after him, taking the slide out of the microscope with careful, steady hands.
Danny
He ends up in The World’s End again, nursing a beer long after it’s gone warm and flat – this morning he woke up with a hangover fit to flatten China; he’s learned his lesson about drinking when he’s working as much as he is. He should skip the bar all together, but it’s hard too, it’s right there, and he has to go through it to get to his apartment if he doesn’t want to wander through the alley to the building’s back entrance. Besides, the drinks are free, so he might as well take advantage of them. Even if “drinks” tonight is in the singular, not the plural.
“I do anything bad last night?” he asks Vinnie behind the bar.
“Sang,” Vinnie says immediately. “But it wasn’t too bad, you don’t got too bad of a voice.”
“Sang what?” Danny asks with grim foreboding.
“That song about the whore and the choirboy – and the milkmaid and the copper – and the virgin and the –”
“Shit,” Danny says fervently. “Did Flack –” He hasn’t seen Flack all day, despite the message Flack left him last night, and it pisses him off, even though he knows it’s no one’s fault, just the vagaries of assignments and cases. Hell, if he’d been lucky he could have got the open and shut case Hawkes did, the one he worked with Flack.
“You sang it in the original Italian,” Vinnie assures him, and escapes down the bar to pour more drinks.
“Shit,” Danny says again, although with less fervor this time. He just hopes he didn’t do anything equally as stupid once Flack got him upstairs, because he knows how his mind works, and he knows he would have if given the chance. Flack’s a good guy, though, wouldn’t mention it even if pressed, but the not-knowing makes him nervous. Better Flack than anyone else, though; there’s stupid shit all of Tanglewood knows about because he did it in front of the boys who didn’t know shit about keeping their mouths shut. Those are the ones stupid enough to be in prison now; the rest are old-school Cosa Nostra, the ones who know enough about omerta not to talk unless it gets them something. Sonny was one of those.
The thought hurts bad enough that he tries to drink his beer and almost spits it out, so he waves Vinnie over and gets a couple shots of whiskey, which is enough to numb the dull throb in his bad hand. Damn straight there was a reason he didn’t go straight up to his apartment, and this is it.
“You all right?” Vinnie asks on his next pass by, pausing with his arms resting on the bar.
“Just peachy,” Danny says bitterly, knocking back his third shot.
“Hit me too, Vinnie,” someone says, sliding into the seat next to him. Danny glances over and Flack grins back tiredly. His hair is hanging lank and tired and he’s lost his tie somewhere, shirt unbuttoned at the collar and the sleeves pushed up to the elbow. “Heard you had a helluva case,” he says to Danny.
“Frozen hell, maybe,” Danny says, grinning as Flack knocks back the shot without even blinking and holds out the glass. “Heard you had an easy go of it.”
“Hawkes is lying,” Flack says easily and holds out his right wrist toward Danny, where it’s heavily bandaged. “The bitch bit me when I went to cuff her. Had to get a fucking tetanus shot.”
Danny winces. So does Flack, and takes another drink to conceal it. “Helluva weak, huh?” he says once he’s got his breath back, and Danny says, “Helluva summer.”
end