The Sum of Its Parts

On Sunday, Mac walks three blocks from his Upper West Side apartment building to St. Michael's Cathedral. It is always 11:55 a.m. when he reaches the church steps, and he stays until he hears the pervasive sound of the organ, and achieves finality only when the heavy wooden doors close. Then the moment is over, and usually there's a phone call from Flack a couple minutes of later. He's been calling almost every Sunday since last October, around 12:10 in the afternoon, and he always has the same question, Can you spare a little time?

Flack is remarkably good at keeping a cool head, but on Sundays, especially on Sundays, Mac can hear the undertones of frustration in the voice of his fellow officer. It's been this way since administration (whomever or whatever that is) made all these cuts. Cuts to wages, cuts to efficiency, cuts to time, and in turn, Flack cuts into Mac's Sunday mornings, because usually there isn't enough officers in the precinct as there are crashes and bodies.

Mac usually obliges, since he usually doesn't have any plans, and since Sunday is Danny's day to oversee the goings-on in the lab. But he muses that even Danny deserves a Sunday off, and Mac makes a mental note to speak to him about it later. In the mean time, he walks to the precinct. It's a long, familiar walk, and sometimes there's coffee and sometimes there isn't. But what there always is, is that feeling of worth, and it's so addictive it's almost like a drug. And Mac, well, Mac's been thinking that he's a junkie because of this Sunday morning high he gets from just being worth something to some institution of justice, and maybe that's why he needs to stand outside the church for fifteen minutes too.

And like any drug, there's ups and downs to this one. There's that genuine gratitude from Flack that greets Mac when he walks into the precinct at 12:24 p.m., and it's so obvious that he, Flack, doesn't even have to voice it. It's so tangible that it's not even an exchange of gratitude, it's more like an understanding between them, a declaration of being men of justice.

It's the second-most human thing that Mac has ever experienced.

--

End of shift, thinks Mac the way he usually does.

Upper West Side apartment... Queen-size bed... he goes on, Wait, drinks with Flack.

And so the Sunday comes to a refreshing end. Well, refreshing for Flack, who deserves a shot of something strong after nine-days straight of 10-hour shifts. Anti-refreshing for Mac who kind of enjoys the Sunday routine he's adapted to... and it generally doesn't include a god-forsaken sports bar that sits dejectedly on the edge of existence.

For Don, he reminds himself as he tries to position his body on a barstool so that the kinks in his back don't ache so badly.

"Hey Mac," says the younger man.

Mac replies with a glance in his direction and Flack is satisfied. He gently slides his untouched scotch towards his friend and almost sighs, "You look like you need it more than I do."

Mac is almost bewildered, and he stares at the drink for a moment as though trying to decide what to do with it. He remembers suddenly that he hasn't had a drink in months, and isn't particularly inclined to take a swig of alcohol now any more than he has in a long time. But he wraps his fingers around the glass anyways. Mac hadn't quite realized it before but he does then at that very moment come to the understanding that he might actually jump off a cliff if Flack were to ever mention that it "looked like he needed it."

"So how 'bout them Yankees?" asks Flack after a long pause.

Mac lets out an indignant snort before he can stop himself.

"Come on, Mac, talk to me."

"About what?"

Flack isn't sure about what. He isn't sure about anything anymore, only that here he is sitting right next to his best friend and suddenly it seems like there's entire universes apart. Only that when Flack thinks of Mac off in some far off universe, he's always there alone, and he's never making any moves to find anyone to be with, and in Flack's eyes, that just isn't natural.

So he tries again.

"Mac, seriously, what's gotten into you?"

Mac takes a sip from his glass, and the liquid burns down his throat, "The alcohol."

"Aside from that, I mean."

Shrug.

Mac is startled to realize that fifteen minutes of his life have gone by, and he's been sitting next to Flack in the bar, both of them completely on edge, even though their shifts are over and they're supposed to be unwinding now. But Mac gets to thinking that maybe he's been wound so damn tight around the same wooden spool, over and over and-

"How's Stella?" asks Flack.

Mac is startled, almost angered, by the question, and he slams the glass down on the table to show it. He wants to explode all of a sudden, in exactly the way that he's promised himself he never would. But he looks at Flack, right in the eyes, an iced blue against soft sky, and suddenly his anger seems feeble and childish. He realizes, he's looking right at Stella. She's sitting there in the bar right next to him, and she's looking at him, into him with the skies in her eyes. And he gets the same thing from Danny every morning, she's all over his face too. She's standing next to him in the morgue, she's behind the counter at every single coffee shop, she's everywhere, all the time.

It truly amazes him that Stella Bonasera, despite being further away from him than ever before can, when he really sits down and thinks about it, still be everywhere. Really. She's in Flack, and Danny and Lindsay and Adam and the list just goes on. Just as he goes to take another taste of the alcohol, he tries for a moment to see her in his reflection in the amber liquid. But the moment passes too quickly, he's too eager for that burn again. He takes a sip and it feels like there's entire waves of acid searing down his throat.

"Mac," says Stella again, only it's not Stella, it's Don Flack, and he's getting a little impatient.

Why, he thinks, Why me? Why ask me?

He doesn't need to voice the question. He's sure that Flack knows, the same way Stella knows. The same way even he himself knows. But he asks anyways.

"How would I know?"

Flack looks away, stares a row of empty glasses, reflecting an unseen light, "Who else would?"

--

Thursday.

Almost finished here, he sits up in his chair, Then apartment. Upper West Side.

As though he could ever forget. Forgetting is the hard part, after all.

He tries to lean back in his chair but resists that urge when he realizes that it might be too comfortable to get up afterwards. The knots in his back have been forming for weeks, and now seem to have solidified in place. It's been a while since he's leaned back in anything actually.

The lights in the hall way go out, and that probably means that the custodians will be around soon to empty the trash cans and sweep the floors. They generally don't appreciate any staff hanging around after-hours, and although they've grown accustomed to Mac, haunting the entire floor at night, he decides that it's about time he left.

He can't help but glance at the morgue on his way home, and he wonders if Sid is still inside. Or maybe Sheldon. He wants to get out of this cab and pay them a visit, maybe slip on a lab coat and stay a few hours but, Apartment. Upper West Side.

Right.

He successfully leans back into his seat and stares at the windshield, taking in all of its features. He notes the rosary hanging from the mirror, the small compass stuck to the dashboard, and he especially admires the cracked leather gloves worn by the driver. Suddenly he wants to drive. He wants to disregard all of the city's local lore and drive down a street. Any street. Any where it takes him.

So he brushes away the dust from the dashboard of his dejected sedan and climbs into it carefully. He tries to adjust the seat so that it will support his aching back, while shifting uncomfortably against the seat belt strapped against his chest. In the end he is simply left to grow accustomed to the feeling of being confined in his own vehicle, sandwiched between a seat and a seat belt.

He drives.

Drives the way you hear about in country songs on the radio, by artists whose names you can never recall. Drives with some hope that on half a tank of gas, he'll get somewhere. It's not that he doesn't like the city - no, not at all. He loves the city, it's his home, it's his everything. And he's not planning to leave... he's planning to explore. To discover. Maybe an answer, maybe not. Maybe nothing at all.

It's like being on another planet, driving your own car in New York City. Especially if it isn't a Lincoln. But Mac doesn't care. He's numb with the cold, biting at his fingers that are tight at 9 and 3 o' clock on the steering wheel. He drives until he realizes that even if he wants to stop now, he can't. There's just no way. There's a bruise over his heart, and it's long and thick and purple by now. He can feel it throbbing against the seat belt the same way that the gas pedal pulses below his foot.

I'm losing it, he thinks, and it's the invasion of a personal pronoun inside of his thoughts that is what really gets him. He's usually so careful to remain detached, even from the goings-on inside of his head. He's careful to think in fragments, and never in complete sentences. It's almost what defines him. Mac Taylor: many pieces, never whole.

Before he knows it, he's inside of another apartment, but it's not his own because this certainly isn't the Upper West Side of New York City. He's driven too far for this to be the place. And it's not like he can just look out the window and gauge his whereabouts against the buildings he sees, because there's no windows in this elevator.

He presses his palm against the wooden panel, refusing to look at it because he's afraid that if he does, he'll only be able to see one number repeated on every single button. The elevator rumbles to a start, and as he passes through the floors, he's at peace for the first time all day. He can tell when he begins to near his destination because time always seems to slow. He feels dizzy, disoriented, and muses that this apartment seems to have that affect on people, and he knows because the last time he was here, he was rendered nearly immobile with worry and fear. It's that fear that he thinks is the most human feeling he's ever felt, but looks back upon that night and abandons that notion. Fear isn't just human, it's everything, it's everywhere... but so is Stella and that's what usually gets him through.

The elevator doors slide open, Mac steps out into the hallway and is irritated by the ugly ornate wallpaper and the tacky carpeting. He's always had an eye for apartment building decor, as trivial as the subject may be, t's always the first thing he's drawn to examine. And oh, how he examines. Even in the height of emotion, tearing through this same hallway, exhausted but never so keen in his life (he'd taken the stairs; every second that he stood doing nothing that night was another second that may have drawn from her a final breath), he can't help but take everything in. It was all a blur of colours and numbers and of course, Stella. Stella written on the walls, Stella resonating down the hallway, Stella in bed with some other man, Stella bleeding in a bath tub, Stella...

He stops himself in front of her door. Reminds himself that she's on the other side, and that she's okay, that she's breathing, that what happened here was more than a year ago, and that if she got over it and moved on, then he needs to as well.

But damn it, Stella on the floor, almost ceasing to exist anywhere else. Becoming one solitary unit.

I hate this apartment, he decides and brings a knuckle to her door.

"Mac?" there's surprise in her eyes, but that's not what draws his attention first.

She's tired, but a different kind of tired than the type he's used to seeing after a hard day. There's wide grey expanses beneath her eyes, extending down to her cheekbones. Her nose is red and raw, and her eyes look so itchy that he almost wants to reach over and rub them for her. She turns aside, holds the door open with the back of her hand behind her to let him in, and he can't help but notice that she's still got that tousled beauty to her.

"How's everything?" he asks lamely, but before she can reply he reaches out and presses one hand to her forehead, "Never mind."

She takes a seat on a stool next to the window, looks out into the city and says to him, "This is a little out of your way, isn't it?" As though it matters. As though it isn't like him at all to drop in unannounced so late at night after a 10-hour shift.

He wants to tell her some unnecessary story in an attempt to explain how he got here, and why he's here, but then she looks at him straight in the eye with every ounce of the spirit that she's harboured since the day they met.

He can't help but break, "I phoned your office, three days in a row. You weren't there."

She arches an eyebrow and gestures to her flu-survival kit that's sitting by itself on the coffee table. An empty thermos, a package of halls, several coffee mugs and a withered copy of Wuthering Heights, "Does that give you an answer?"

"They're all worried about you," he says.

"They all have my number."

"Your number?" he wonders if he has the right to be hurt, because he didn't even know that she'd set up a new line and had to dig deep past several security firewalls to get her work number at the new place.

She glances at him, her eyes glazed over all of a sudden.

No. He doesn't have the right to be hurt. Not at all.

"Yeah," she looks back at the city, "I went out with Flack last night."

"With Flack?"

"And a couple people from work."

"Oh."

He feels stupid. Stupider than he's ever felt before, and it isn't even the good kind of stupid. The kind that he was used to Stella having inflicted upon him back when they were friends. Before everything had changed. Before the world was pulled out from under his feet as she slammed his office door and walked out of the lab for the last time.

She never came back. They were never friends again.

But she was never gone from him, she was still everywhere and everything and everyone, and it had broken up the pieces of him into even small pieces and now every single shard was trailing back to her apartment as though possessed by some demon.

"I want you to come back," he shuffles his feet and says the only other thing that he thinks there is left to say, "I'm sorry, Stella."

"It isn't that simple," she frowns.

He hates himself even more when he can see her face again and notices that she doesn't seem angry. She doesn't snap, doesn't curse, the way he had at her the last time they were in the same room together. Instead she looks perturbed in her seat, almost confused by his words and his thoughts that (he's absolutely, one-hundred percent certain) she can actually read.

"It wouldn't be the same," she wanders into the kitchen, the fraying ends of her old robe trailing behind her, beckoning to him.

He can't even stand a few seconds standing in the room without her, knowing somehow, that he needs to set this right. He's got to stop her from hurting before he hurts himself.

"Stella, I was wrong," he says, following her but stopping in the door frame.

She's on the floor, her knees drawn up to her chest in exactly the position that she's never wanted him to see her in. It brings him back to the hospital room that night...

But the thought is gone when she looks up at him, like a lost kitten in the road, "I was wrong too."

He opens his mouth to protest but she promptly cuts him off with a, "I shouldn't have reacted the way I did. Overreacted, I mean."

"I shouldn't have put you in a situation for you to overreact."

"There's no way you could have known about..." her eyes flicker with a strange dark light that's usually foreign to her face, "You... "

"Maybe... maybe I sort of knew. A little."

"Either you knew, or you didn't, Mac."

"Okay. I knew. But always went around second-guessing myself... after all, you are Stella Bonasera."

"Thanks Mac," for a second it was like they were friends again, "I'd almost forgotten."

He takes a step towards her, and slides down the side of the door frame so that he's sitting almost opposite her, "Don't ever forget," he whispers, staring at the hand that he so desperately wants to hold.

Her eyes are distant again, "Forgetting is the hard part."

Silence.

"You aren't really helping... showing up here like this," she shoots him an irritated glance.

"I said I didn't want you to forget."

"No, that's not what you said. You said, don't ever forget like the First Officer you are," she pauses as he continues to gape at her, "It's all right. I know that you're all about your job. That's not really a bad thing Mac. Considering the work you do, it's probably necessary."

"It's just a part," he chokes out before the words die, "It's just one piece of me, Stella."

She sighs heavily, not wanting to have another disagreement with him. It's far too draining, and she doesn't want to have a legitimate reason to kick him out of her department. Not when, for the first time since she left the lab, is she finally beginning to feel a little bit more whole again.

"I cannot come back," she says, half to Mac, half to herself, "I can't. Not ever."

He surprises them both, "I know."

She glances at him, curiosity piqued and instantly it's as though he's been replaced by a familiar stranger. Someone from her childhood who she remembers fondly, but whose name she cannot recall. And it's him. It's just him. For an instant he lets her see the feelings running rampant beneath the ice of his eyes, and they call to her, like she calls to him, and suddenly it doesn't seem so strange that they're sitting here in her apartment building.

"I can't work with you anymore," she says.

He takes a moment to swallow that before coming back with, "So we work different cases," and he doesn't even stop to realize the implications of that statement.

She frowns again, her pencil-thin eyebrows knitting together the way they always used to at the lab when things didn't seem to make any sense. None of this makes any sense to her, in the worst way possible. And she's sure of what she's saying, but there isn't a scrap of evidence to suggest the tone of his thoughts. His feelings (or lack thereof). In fact, that only thing that can be sure of (and she muses that it's pleasing in a sick sort of way) is that he's cracking up a little more at his sharp, jagged edges, and she knows that for sure because he wouldn't be here if he didn't need to be put back together again.

It hits her harder than anything else, right at the second. Harder than orphanage door slamming shut in her face, and harder than Frankie dragging her up a flight of stairs, and harder than Diakos jamming her against a wall and harder than her dropping those Request for Transfer papers on Mac Taylor's desk on her last day at the lab. And, like many other seemingly cosmic truths, she is overwhelmed by the meaning of it.

"That's exactly it Mac," she shakes her head, and the room seems darker, "I can't work without you either."

"But you are," he counters, very softly.

"A girl's gotta eat."

"You know it's more than that."

"What more do you want me to say?" she's angry now, and grows angrier still when she feels her eyes begin to burn and her throat grow sore, "I've said it all. I've said just about everything there is to say. And all you want to know is whether or not you for sure can tell Danny that he's been promoted to First."

He stares at her, trying to process what she's saying.

"For God's sake Mac, Detective Taylor I mean, if anything you should be glad. All these budget cuts... with me gone that's almost a hundred grand you don't have to worry about anymore."

"Stella," and he's surprised by the amount of venom he manages to inject into those two syllables, "You are much more to me than six fucking figures."

And he has her attention now, because it's so unlike him to be profane. In all the years she's known him, the years she's really known him, he's always been so careful with his diction, even when it works to his disadvantage. But he's paid to walk on eggshells with his words.

He isn't sure what's keeping him on the ground after that. His fingers are clenched painfully into his palms, and he isn't sure if he's shivering, or if there's just several vibrations running through the ground that are making him shake. But he manages to tear his eyes away from her face, because now just watching her breathe, a simple passage of air between two thin, pale lips is almost enough to push him over the edge. He feels the same way he does when he's out in the world. He's lost in an world so full of her, and he's grown so used to it that even the slightest chance of losing her just does not compute. Like now, when she's sitting right in front of him, and he can't really see her anymore because his head feels heavy and everything is blurring together in a shock of blue-green irises and corkscrew curls.

Then he wants to. Because even though he can't see her, he knows, he just knows that she's there, so close to him, and it would be so easy for him to just...

"Mac," she reaches out just a little bit, but stops when their fingernails touch, "Just do it."

He's still shaking, and a sorry look comes over her face because whatever message she meant to convey to him, she never meant to hit him with it this hard. Like those with papers, that Wednesday morning. She didn't mean to break him, and suddenly she's possessed by the overwhelming desire to let him know.

"Hey," she pushes away the context of the situation and leans forward on her knees, gripping his shoulders, surprisingly the very same way he gripped the steering wheel earlier, like it was a lifeline, "Mac... Mac, it's all righ. We don't have to talk about it anymore, okay? It's fine."

But it isn't. It's never fine. And it's assumption that everything is simply "fine" that has led them here in the first place, but now that they're here, they're here together, and she's powerless to deny him anything. Likewise, on the receiving end of such limitless affection, Mac Taylor tries to piece himself back together. He slowly regains the feeling in his shoulder blades, and feels the warmth of her spread throughout him. There's still so much of him to be fixed. There's still thousands, maybe millions of little bits all over her kitchen floor, all over her apartment, all over her. There's still so many God-forsaken corners of his memories scattered, like the particles of his late wife,carried away by smoke and flames, somewhere across the universe, he'd like to think.

And he wonders, if he's in so many pieces, in so many places at once, how it's even possible that she's always with him. The answer's in her eyes, and he's afraid to look, but then, he reminds himself that there's she's above him with her hands on his shoulders and her breath on his face and that's what gets him through.

"Stella," her name resounds within him, "Stella, can you live? Are you alive?"

She nods.

"Could you live with me?"

There's no answer but "yes". How could she say anything else when it's been true for so many years? It feels like forever, and she's open to the possibility that maybe it has been.

"Without me?" he trails his fingers towards her wrists, brushing them briefly against her soft, brown curls.

"That remains to be seen," she replies, her grip softening on his shoulders.

Then there doesn't seem to be anything else worth saying after that. He wants to tell her so many things, but they all seem so small in comparison to her, to him, to them. Them: crushed together like misshapen puzzles pieces looking for unity, all in an effort to comprehend a bigger picture. She feels a microbe of anticipation sizzle between them, and leans her forehead against his in attempt to bring it to fruition.

And just as he pulls his lips away from hers, feels a wind pass against his lips and acknowledges the fact that she feels it too, he whispers, "I'm alive too."

fin