Title: Heading to Blackout
Author: stellaluna_
Rating: PG
Pairing: Mac/Danny
Summary: It's hard living with the law.
Disclaimer: None of these are mine. Characters are the property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer Television, CBS, and Alliance Atlantis.
Notes: scarletts_awry asked if someone would write her slash based on the lines "You shoplifted as a child/I had a model's smile" from PJ Harvey's "We Float". I did my best to oblige.

***

Mac leans against the wall, sipping his beer and watching Danny flip through the selections on the jukebox.

"Naw, I get the whole teenage thrill-seeking, acting-out trip," Danny says. "Don't mind telling you I was kind of a bad seed myself."

"You?" Mac says. "Never."

Danny glances over at him. "Watch it there, boss," he says. "I think that sarcasm just withered a few plants."

Mac smiles. "Sorry. You were saying?"

"Just that I get it. I mean, I never went as far as some of these little punks we keep busting. Hell, I never even went as far as Louie did." He pauses, looking reflective, then shakes his head and goes on. "But I did my share of underage drinking and screwing around. Got popped once or twice for reckless driving."

"Sounds pretty normal to me," Mac says.

"That's kinda my point. You know, I used a little here and there, too, which I do kinda regret. That was a little too close to me turning into Louie, you know? Oh, here we go," he adds before Mac can reply. He drops a quarter in and punches some buttons, and Lou Reed starts crooning "Walk on the Wild Side."

"Cute," Mac says, and Danny just shrugs, looking pleased, then picks up his beer.

"How 'bout you?" Danny asks a minute or two later, as they're sitting down at a table.

"How about me?" Mac asks.

"What did you get into as a teenager?" he says.

Mac considers the question. "The usual," he says. "A little drinking, a few cigarettes here and there."

"A little screwing?" Danny asks.

"A little of that, too."

"Anything else?"

Mac tries to remember. His teenage rebellion had been a lot like Danny's: Ordinary. Normal. The real rebellion hadn't come until the day he'd applied to the Marine Corps. Until then, he'd managed to hide, mostly, how desperately he wanted to be out and away. "Some drugs," he says to Danny. "Not much, not for the time. I got pulled over once for speeding, right after I got my license."

"And they still let you be a cop with that kind of record?" Danny says. "Shocking."

"It's no less impressive than your record," Mac says. "Anyway, the speeding was the only thing I got busted for."

"Good kid otherwise?" Danny says. "Get good grades and all that?"

"Sure."

"But you must have pushed the limits sometimes. I mean..." Danny takes a sip of his beer. "You know all about the stuff I did wrong. There must have been one thing you did that was, I don't know, a little less upstanding. Aside from getting hammered in someone's garage on a Friday night, or slipping it to some hot piece of schoolgirl ass while Mommy and Daddy were out for the evening."

"Not when I was a teenager," he says.

"But there's something," Danny says. "I saw it in your eyes just then."

Mac hesitates. He has remembered something, but he's not sure if he wants to tell Danny or not. The whole thing is harmless enough -- he's barely thought of it in thirty years -- but it's not something he goes around telling people, either. He doesn't think he ever even told Claire about this.

Then again, it's Danny, and Danny has told him plenty of stories about himself during their evenings out; and Mac has shared so few of his own.

"All right," he says. "But I was a kid, not a teenager."

"Close enough," Danny says. "That works."

"I must have been -- God, I don't know. Eight, nine, somewhere around there. Old enough to know better. I stole a pack of gum from Woolworth's on the way home from school."

Danny looks mildly disappointed. "You couldn't at least have made it a candy bar?"

Mac picks up the beer coaster in front of him and starts to fold it. "Not that time," he says.

Danny raises his eyebrows. "'Not that time,'" he says. "Implying there were other times?"

"There were a lot of other times," Mac says. "Gum, candy...I worked my way up to comic books after awhile. And those little toy soldiers they used to sell."

"You were a serial thief?"

"I was." He concentrates on bending in the sides of the coaster. "Once I got away with it the first time, I just kept on doing it."

"What, did your parents not give you an allowance?" Danny says.

"No, they did. I just..." He tries to find the words. "It wasn't the money. I wanted to see if I could, I guess. And then I wanted to see how long I could keep getting away with it." It had been exciting, too, he remembers; remembers the dry-mouthed fear as he'd palmed a package of Juicy Fruit or casually folded a comic in half before shoving it inside his jacket, and the pulse-pounding adrenaline rush as he would realize that he was safe yet again, that he was outside the store and halfway down the block.

"So let me guess," Danny says. "You got caught and it was your own little juvie version of Scared Straight, and that was what put you on the path of righteousness to being a cop yourself."

"No."

"No?"

"No." Mac shakes his head. "Actually, I never got caught. I don't know if I was good at it or just plain lucky, but no one ever stopped me. I kept it up for a few years, until I was twelve or so, and then I gave it up on my own."

"Didn't want to keep risking the odds?"

"Something like that." He keeps turning the coaster in his hands. Or maybe he had finally realized -- though he never could have articulated the idea back then, and even now he may only be imposing his adult perspective on the situation -- that no one was ever going to notice, that even if he did get himself caught, his parents were never going to sit him down and have a talk with him about it, or ask him why he had done it. For awhile it had been fun, a secret to hug to himself that no one would have ever guessed; the toys and books and candy had been incidental to that. Eventually it stopped being fun, probably when it stopped being a challenge, and he knows that was why he had finally quit.

He supposes that if he had really wanted to be caught, he could have screwed it up some day, made it perfectly obvious to some clerk at Woolworth's or at the newsstand exactly what he was up to, but he'd never been able to bring himself to do it badly.

Danny leans his elbows on the table, shaking his head. There's a smile on his face. "Mac Taylor, juvenile delinquent," he says. "Who ever would have thought it?"

"See, not all juvies end up doing life upstate," Mac says. He holds up the beer coaster, which he's finished folding into a rough airplane, and tosses it across the table at Danny, who catches it neatly. "Some of us grow up and become cops, instead."

"NYPD's finest," Danny says. He sets the airplane down on the table and sets it spinning in a circle, then glances at his watch. "Hey, the Yankees game is starting in about an hour," he says. "Want to go back to my place and watch them whip some Mariner ass?"

"Sure," Mac says. He finishes the last of his beer and then stands up. "I'll even spring for a six-pack."

"My idea of a perfect evening." Danny stands and follows Mac outside. They're halfway to the bodega on the other end of the block when he suddenly says, "Hey, Mac?"

Mac turns, and Danny steps up close and backs him into the wall of the dry cleaners and kisses him. It's firm and light, quick, and Danny pulls away before either of them can deepen the kiss. "Remember," he says, hand warm at the back of Mac's neck, and he licks his lips a little, smiling. "You gotta pay for the six-pack."

"I'll try to keep that in mind." He presses the palm of his hand to Danny's waist.

"Good. Wouldn't want you to get busted and then I'd have to sell you up the river. It'd be way too embarrassing." Danny's smile grows wider, and even though he realizes now that he's never going to hear the end of this, Mac can't help laughing.

"I wouldn't," he says. "I'll need you to keep me in cigarettes when I'm in the Big House."

Danny laughs then, too, and Mac kisses him one last time before he steps back.

Looks like he still can't resist a challenge, and he's good with that.

***