Sub Zero
by Layla

Gates sits in the interrogation room calmly, looking around the bare walls and dim lighting with the curiosity of a small child in a brand new world.

Next to him, his lawyer reads from a file, frowning at the pages as she turns them quickly.

Behind the glass, Danny, Flack and Mac watch quietly.

They need to figure out a way to proceed with this, because just looking at Gates it's clear they'll have to rely on psychology rather than intimidation if they want the information they need. Mac is tired, his head pounds loudly and he thinks he might possibly be facing the biggest obstacle this case has offered so far. He tells himself, over and over again, that he has to remain calm, he has to remain in control, he has to remain one step ahead of Gates if he wants to win the race, but it's hard to think of control and calmness when he's so close to the verge chaos and thoughts of Stella still out there plague his mind.

He can feel Danny's energy next to him, and he can tell the young CSI is itching to run into the room and beat Gates to a pulp. He considers briefly the idea of leaving Danny behind and proceeding with Flack, but in a way he needs some of that frustration Danny is feeling to keep him grounded.

"Let's go," Flack says next to them, and Mac takes a look at Gates one more time before they walk into the room.

Gates' lawyer is a serious, well put together African American woman, and her expression doesn't give much away. She stands up when they walk into the room and introduces herself as Regina Walker, and shakes their hands politely before she sits down again. Mac can tell she has trained Gates well, because the man simply remains in his seat, barely looking at them and seemingly off in another world.

"I've been catching up on some light reading," Walker says as she sits back, and Mac can tell by her body language that she's a shark. Something tells him this might not go over well. "Two counts of kidnapping... very intrepid accusation."

"Sadly it's not based on fiction," Mac tells her, and his voice is raspier than usual. "We have proof that your client may have been involved in the kidnapping of Elias Gomez."

"The child from the news," Walker nods and considers this for a second. "What kind of proof?"

Mac looks at Gates, and he repeats the mantra in his head over and over again – relax, stay focused, stay grounded, one step ahead. Gates doesn't seem interested in the conversation, merely focuses on his hands as if they were the most fascinating thing in the world to him. Mac feels the base of his neck burning with anger, frustration, yearning, and desolation. He knows what he has to do to beat Gates. He knows he'll have to play a psychological game of cat and mouse, and for the life of him, he cannot seem to find the energy in him to start, knows that right now Gates is in the lead, Gates is ahead. His head pounds one more and he feels the energy draining out of his body in slow motion, his sanity flowing out with it.

You own this, Mac. This is your thing. Just relax...

"We found this, in your apartment," Danny continues for him, producing Elias's yellow cap inside a plastic bag.

The lawyer inspects it closely and sits back, nonplussed. "So what? A lot of kids own baseball caps like that. My nephew has it in three different colors."

"That's funny. Do they all have Elias Gomez's DNA on the rim?" Danny says cockily.

The lawyer looks at him over her glasses. She takes a deep breath quickly and leans forward, and Mac can see it coming, the killer move, and yet he can't find the energy to stop it. "How did you get this?"

"I just said," Danny says, completely oblivious, "it was in his apartment."

"How did you get in my client's apartment?" Walker says, a self-satisfied smug already forming on her lips. Danny gets it then, and says nothing, and Mac can barely stand the thought of watching.

"You searched my client's apartment without a warrant," Walker finally says, sitting back. "Do you really think this is gonna hold up in court?"

"Your client raped and possibly killed an 8-year-old boy," Mac finally says, his voice barely registering above a whisper.

Walker finally looks at Mac, and though she looks somewhat sympathetic, Mac has known enough lawyers in his lifetime to know it's an act. "Look, I'm sorry about this little boy, I really am. And I'm sorry about your friend. But my client did his time in prison, he's been going to meetings, he's rehabilitated. And then you break into his apartment and retrieve a baseball cap that, for all we know, he found on the sidewalk. I'm sorry, detective, but I'm not seeing the proof here."

"Your client kidnapped and murdered an eight year old boy," Flack says, standing next to the table and though he's the most put together of the three, the frustration is still evident in his tone.

"You can't prove that, not with this," the lawyer says and starts putting her things together. "You have a baseball cap that you obtained illegally. You violated my client's rights. It's not admissible in court. So unless you have something else, we're out of here."

Mac ignores her, and looks at Gates. The man is still enthralled by his hands, but after a moment, feeling Mac's eyes on him, he looks up, and Mac fights every urge he has, every molecule in his body screaming at him to get violent, to grab him and smash his face against the wall and never stop until he tells him where Stella is, until he assures him that she's safe.

His eyes are vacant, empty, and Mac knows at that moment – this is it. This is the answer they've been looking for all these days, right in front of him. He's always rejected the idea of instincts and feelings when it comes to his work, but looking into Gates's eyes, and Gates looking into his, he can feel it, and he can see her, and though it's hard to verbalize or even think about, he knows Gates knows, too.

Walker stands up, and Gates tears his eyes away from Mac's to follow her. As they're leaving he stops, turns around and looks at the floor as he says calmly, childishly, "I'm sorry about your friend."

Sitting next to Mac, he can feel Danny's hands balling into fists, and it takes an extraordinary amount of strength for Mac not to lose control as well.

"Come on," Walker says and guides Gates out, and with the bang of the door echoing in the small room he can see the final piece landing on the board

Checkmate, and he's out.

oooo

He sits in his office hours later, his fingers playing with the corner of a piece of paper.

He looks out, though he focuses on nothing, on nobody. The lab is quiet, but this time for different reasons. He's been in his office, alone, uninterrupted for hours, and he knows most likely he'll remain that way for the rest of the day. Outside, his employees walk around seemingly aimlessly (or maybe he's projecting) and whereas they weren't able to look him in the eyes before because of Stella, now they avoid him to prevent him, and themselves, from thinking about what happened with Gates.

He feels his chest heavy, and though he tries, as hard as he can, to put it all behind him he's unable to. He feels the loss, like millions of grains of sand slipping through his fingers until none remain. He had it, had it all, was this close to putting all the pieces of the puzzle together, and in a moment of irrationality all the pieces were blown away and he lost everything.

Danny and Aiden have moved on to other cases, because despite it all, the world has continued to spin, minutes are still ticking by, and people are still dying in the streets of New York. The amount of paperwork on his desk increases, though is ignored, and criminals are still roaming the streets. They have jobs to focus on, cases to close, and though he can't fathom the idea of removing Stella's file from the top of his opened cases pile, he can't very well expect everyone else to exhaust the lab's resources on this.

Though he wants to, wishes he could give that order, but it's not in his hands now. It was, just hours ago he had it, and quickly it slipped away, and now his hands are empty, his fingers playing with the corner of a piece of paper.

The elevator suddenly dings. A door opens, and his eyebrows flicker slightly at the sight of Duncan Cohen.

The older man makes his way across the lab, everybody's eyes following, none daring to say a thing. Instinctively, Mac stands up, and his hands find their way into his pockets as he waits, and the beat of his heart increases. The pieces are strewn all over the floor. He's too tired to pick them up and knows they most likely wouldn't fit together.

Cohen starts speaking before he even closes the door behind them. "The hell were you thinking, Mac?"

He doesn't answer. There's no point anymore. He can't ration it, can't explain the man he's become in just a few days, a wild creature on no sleep and too many cups of coffee and tormented by racing thoughts.

Cohen gets this, and instead of gracing him with a lecture, he places his hands on his hips and paces around the office a few times as the people outside try not to stare.

Finally Cohen stops, and while looking down he takes a deep breath and lets it out. "I'm gonna need your gun and badge."

In a way, in some strange way, he saw it coming, but the words still sting him deep and he needs to look down, take a deep breath and try to remain collected. "Look—"

"Mac, it's not a negotiation," Cohen says, his hands on his hips and his face hard. "I told you to stay away from it. I told you to let Sam deal with it, but you didn't listen. And now I have a little boy missing, possibly dead, and the man responsible for it is going to walk away scot free. How do you expect me to explain that to the family?"

He says nothing, because he knows Cohen is right. He messed up. He tried to remain objective but feelings got in the way, and an innocent child paid the prize for it. It's this fault. This. All of it. And if she dies... it's on him. On him. And that thought consumes him more than anything else.

"Go home, Mac. Take some time off. Go on a trip, visit your family... do whatever it is you need to do to put yourself together, otherwise I'm not sure I can have you working on this lab anymore."

The words barely hit him, barely register. He's past the point of dealing with the rules and regulations and following protocol. It's gotten him nowhere yet. So without fighting it, without saying a word, he reaches for his belt and throws his badge on the table, and his gun soon follows. He grabs his jacket and coat, and as he walks out he glances at the file on top of the desk.

Bonasera, Stella.

Briefly he considers grabbing it and taking it with him but it's no use. There isn't a fact, a sentence, a single word in that file that isn't imprinted in his memory already. So passing Cohen quietly he opens the door and makes his way out, and he can feel Aiden's eyes and her questioning look on him, but they have no effect. This, this place, this lab, his second home, is suddenly unknown. Unimportant. It's only a part of the Mac Taylor he can't be right now, the Mac Taylor who could remain objective, the Mac Taylor who would've found her by now, and brought her home safe. It's in him, buried deep under too much weight to retrieve.

He presses the elevator button and waits, and after a moment he hears the dingle, and the door opens. As he steps in he hears another ding, and suddenly he's back under that giant tent, and smells the elephants and hears the crowd cheering and he thinks – when she comes back, when he gets her back, he's going to give the circus a second chance. The resolution is the only thing that prevents him from crushing all the bones of his hand into the elevator wall.

oooo

Her breathing is hitched, and comes to her only in slow spurts.

The cold is gone, and replaced by an underwhelming numbness that tells her the end is near. Her mind is hazy, and she teeters on the edge of consciousness and not, but for the few seconds, mere seconds, that she can think, she knows she can't fight it anymore, can't win. It has consumed her slowly like a virus, taking everything away, inch by inch, limb by limb, until what remains now is a dulling, losing fight, a faint stubbornness that is slowly quelling, and what waits for her is nothing.

It goes and comes back, until she can't tell what's consciousness and what's not, what's real, or if she's already died and this is hell, or the purgatory, or something else. But when she thinks she has the answer it disappears, buried in black, and it all goes.

But the weeping. It's the only thing keeping her on the now, and often the one thing that makes her wish it would all end. Her eyelids flicker, less than a second of instinctive motion, but the blur of darkness is impossible to surpass, and so they close again. Her mind wills her hand to move, but its numbness prevents her from knowing if it does. Even if she did she can't tell where is up, or where is down, or if she's on the floor or somewhere else. If there's contact she can't feel it, but judging by the constant weeping she wonders if her presence there is any help at all.

And then suddenly, without a warning, a flash of light bursts into the room, the loud bang of a door, and her mouth opens and she tries to speak, but there's no voice there, at least none than she can hear. But there's noise, a shuffle, a raging shout, the light flickers, and as quickly as it came it's gone. Her eyelids give out; she takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly and feels herself floating away.

In her subconscious, the motherly tone of a Greek lullaby she was then too young to know and now too old to remember. Her time slows, the last few grains of sand falling agonizingly slow and yet not, and in her last few seconds she finds herself in the hallways of the lab, in the comforts of her bed, in her old desk at the academy, the smell of old books and newly sharpened pencils, hiding under the table of the dining room at the orphanage, dreaming of a different life, and back to infancy, back to innocence, back to a last long embrace and a tearful kiss, back into her mother's womb and the circle comes together and she's a group of cells drained of life once more.

In that last second she sees the bags under his eyes.

oooo

Stella's couch is uncomfortable, and it causes a dulling ache in his hips, but he can't bring himself to touch her bed. He lies there looking at the ceiling, with Brutus casually sleeping by his legs.

He's paralyzed.

His resources are out, the questions lead to more questions, so do the scarce answers, and everywhere he turns there seems to be a brick wall. He's gone through tanks and tanks of gas driving around the city, around the park, asking complete strangers if they've seen the woman on the picture. He leaves the television and the radio on, hoping some intrepid reporter has been able to get their hands on any new piece of information, but like the city, the media seems to have forgotten about the missing detective. After all, other people go missing, other people are dying, and for everyone else, time continues to move forward.

On his way home, his new post, he passed thousands of homes. In them, women were preparing meals, children were washing their hands, men were casually glancing the paper. In them, people were living – a young man calling his parents, a woman checking her reflection in the mirror and stressing about wrinkles, an old man dying, a new child being born right next door. People living and therefore dying. People moving. Couples arguing and couples making love. Lights turning on and going out. People living.

But staring at the ceiling, he can't get rid of the stench of snowing debris.

And like the same roar and impact of the falling twins, everything once again changes in an instant.

The call comes in at 11:53 pm. If it hadn't been for Stella's scanner he would've missed it completely. He's out the door before he gets the chance to put his coat on, and the streets are cold, with a high wind chill but he doesn't feel it. He drives faster than usual, beating some of the officers to Bowling Green Park.

He starts to make his way to the front, but a young officer stops him.

"Sorry, sir. No civilians."

Mac starts reaching for his badge only to realize quickly Cohen has it, and he starts to come up with an explanation, but lucky for him Flack sees him and quickly lets him through. The young detective starts talking to him about the conditions, about the jogger who found the body, about the apparent cause of death but Mac doesn't hear it. He reaches the end of the line, and as the coroner makes her way down he takes a deep breath.

His eyebrows furrow, and his hands ball into fists. In the cold ditch lies the body of Elias Gomez, frozen and lifeless.

The minutes tickle by. He stands there and watches and around him everybody moves. In a building a mere three blocks away a baby's crying, and in the apartment next door a father talks to his son about sex for the first time. In the floor below a couple prays for the safe return of their son, and further away, in the darkness, the melody of an old Greek lullaby faintly fades.

Mac stands there watching. He can't hear her voice anymore.

TBC