Title: Advent Calendar (December 21): Five People Who Might Have Played Secret Santa [1/5]
Author: stellaluna_
Rating: PG
Pairing: Danny/Mac
Series: 1) Advent Calendar (December 11): Secret Santa
Summary: Who played Secret Santa for Mac? This is the first of five possibilities. Very mild, vague spoilers for "The Thing About Heroes...".
Disclaimer: None of these are mine. Characters are the property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer Television, CBS, and Alliance Atlantis.
Notes: This is my attempt at a fic version of an Advent calendar. There will be 25 of these.

***

When Mac walks into his office on the morning of Christmas Eve, he finds a note on his desk along with the now-expected bag of candy.

Mac,

Remember, Santa always shows up on Christmas Eve. Meet me at 151 on Rivington tonight at 9:00 and you can get your final Christmas present.

Santa


Mac considers the note, then folds it and puts it in his jacket pocket. He'll go, he decides. He'll go to this bar on Christmas Eve, and he'll find out who his Secret Santa has been. In the meantime, he's got work to do, and a full day ahead of him.

-

-

-

He sees Danny as soon as he walks into the bar a few minutes past nine that night. He's sitting on a barstool close to the door, still bundled up in his coat and blowing on his hands to warm them in between sips of his beer. He looks up when he hears the door close, then grins and waves to Mac. "Evening, boss," he says.

"You're my Secret Santa?" Mac asks.

"Got it in one," Danny says. "Did you guess beforehand, though?"

"No, I didn't," Mac says. "For one thing, I wouldn't have imagined you going to all the trouble of making cookies for everyone in the lab day after day."

"Oh, well. That." Danny blows on his hands again. "See, that's not me. I don't know who's been playing Secret Santa for the whole lab. Whoever's doing the cookies and candy just kinda gave me the idea."

A light bulb clicks on in Mac's head. "Which is why I didn't get anything extra the first day."

"See? Now you're thinking like a detective." Danny looks at him. "You gonna sit down or what?"

"You couldn't have found something a little further away from the door?" Mac says, but he takes a seat next to Danny.

"Wanted to be sure you'd see me," Danny says. "What are you drinking? My treat, of course."

Mac waves over the bartender and orders a Guinness, then turns back to Danny. He's still trying to work out how he feels about all this. Mostly he's relieved, because he knows that Danny wouldn't have had any bad motivations behind this any more than Stella would, but he's not sure what motivations Danny did have.

"I did like all of the gifts," Mac says. "You made good choices."

Danny shrugs. "I tried. I figure I have a pretty good idea of your tastes now, after all this time."

"You do." Mac takes a sip of his beer. "So why'd you do all of this? You went to a lot of trouble the last few weeks."

"I wanted to do something nice, that's all," Danny says. "Something in the holiday spirit. And you..." He pauses, then shakes his head, looking down into his beer. "Nah, forget it. I wanted to do something nice, let's leave it at that."

"You were going to say something else."

"Not important."

"Danny." Mac sets his glass down. "You dragged me all the way down here on Christmas Eve. You spent weeks leaving gifts on my desk and making sure I wouldn't find out who was doing it. You really expect me to believe that it's not important?"

"Okay, okay." Danny turns to face him. "Fine. I did it because we both had such a lousy Christmas last year, with both of us trying to cope with...everything that happened." Pain flashes through his eyes, and Mac remembers, with a pang, what Danny was going through this time last year. They'd both been in a pretty bad way. There's no denying that.

"You wanted to try to..." Mac struggles for the right words. "To try to change that this year?"

Danny nods. "Something like that. And I just..." He looks away again. "Last year you were there for me, and that was good. That was really good."

"You were there for me, too, you know." This is the first time he's saying this to Danny, Mac realizes. He doesn't know why that is. "After everything happened. I was grateful for that. It was...you're right. It was good."

"So why'd we stop?" Danny asks.

"I don't know."

He really doesn't. After the New Year, he remembers, everything had just sort of petered out. They'd both backed off, gone back to the way things had been before everything went to hell for both of them. Or, at least, as close to the way things had been as they'd been able to manage. And it had never gotten uncomfortable between them; they hadn't argued or sold each other out or done anything deliberate to hold each other at arm's length. Not like it had been at times in the past.

But they had backed off even so, and if Mac had occasionally felt a little pang after that when he looked at Danny, a little unexpected sense of loss, he had told himself it was just an aftershock. Nothing more.

"I don't know, either," Danny says. "Maybe I'm...maybe I'm just talking out my ass. Maybe it's no good. And we both need to leave all that baggage behind us. But I miss the good parts, Mac. I miss...fuck it, I miss a lot of things, okay? I've been trying out a whole bunch of different speeches in my head all day, and none of them are any good."

"You..." Mac takes a deep breath. "You brought me here to say something. Not just to reveal you were my Secret Santa."

"No." Danny shakes his head. "Not just that."

"You want to say it?"

"Not really," Danny says, but right after that he says it, still staring down into his glass of beer. "I miss you, okay?"

Mac feels a shiver go through his body that has nothing to do with the constant opening and closing of the door. He looks at Danny, and he thinks about the whole month that's gone before. All the gifts, all the time that had gone into that -- and the whole year prior to that, last December and all the rest of it. All the other years that they've known each other.

"Danny, I..."

Danny holds up one hand. "You don't need to say anything, okay? I don't want you to feel obligated."

"I don't feel obligated." And he knows what he wants to say. He does. He just doesn't think he can say it right then. Instead, he takes another deep breath. "But maybe we should continue this conversation somewhere else."

Danny raises one eyebrow. "Somewhere else?"

"Somewhere less cold, at least."

Danny smiles, and Mac can't stop himself from smiling back. "Less cold. Yeah, okay. I can do that."

At his place, later, with the Miles Davis CD playing low in the background, Mac puts his arms around Danny, and Danny holds him close and kisses him, slowly, so slowly that it has him gasping for breath in no time.

Making up for lost time isn't possible, not really, Mac thinks. But maybe that doesn't matter. "I missed you, too," he says into Danny's ear. He smiles, and Danny laughs suddenly, then kisses him again, over and over.

***