Title: Under a Green Sky
Author: stellaluna_
Rating: PG for language
Pairing: Mac/Danny
Summary: Mac feels like he's been holding his breath all summer.
Disclaimer: None of these are mine. Characters are the property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer Television, CBS, and Alliance Atlantis.
Notes: Written for the summer_bits ficathon. Thanks to scarletts_awry for talking me down.

***

Mac wakes from confused dreams of standing on the deck of a naval carrier in the middle of a green sea. Someone had been standing with him for part of the time, a warm arm around his waist, and that same someone had kept a hand on his shoulder when the boat had started to pitch, but he had never been able to see who it was.

The city is an island and the island is a heart, he thinks, the only other thing he can remember from his dream, a sentence that had crackled through the air like it was coming over an invisible P.A. system. The words keep repeating in his head as he lies there, not asleep any longer, but not really awake, either, and in this half-dazed state, he thinks that they're one of the most true things he's ever heard.

But the city is a group of islands, not just one, islands held together by subway tunnels and by bridges that snake across the night-black rivers and shimmer with glimmering lights. No matter how hard he tries, though, he can't remember the collective noun for a group of islands, or even if there is one. He thinks the heat is getting to him.

If the city, the island, is a heart, then the heat is a fist, one that may close at any moment.

Because there is this, this heat wave, and of course that's nothing new; they get them every year, and right now most of the Northeast is smothering under the same warm front they are. It's nothing new, but that doesn't mean he likes it, doesn't mean he can prevent himself from being afraid when he wakes up again, this time to the alarm clock, and finds sweat already pooling in the small of his back and a dull headache starting to compress his temples. By this time, he's forgotten the green sea in his dream, along with the voice that had told him the island was a heart.

The air is still and heavy and damp, weighted with anticipation. Weighted, and waiting. Like they're all waiting for something, like he is. It's a hammer about to fall, or the blade of a guillotine. The line We stuck, nor breath nor motion occurs to him in the shower, and then it gets stuck in his head, repeats over and over the whole way into work.

It's not the discomfort that makes him dislike heat waves -- or, rather, it's not just that. It's what it does to the city. People get crazy during heat waves, and crime rates go up, and he and everyone else in the lab get run more ragged than usual by the sheer variety of things people can think of to do to each other. Today is just going to be more of the same, he knows, and he steels himself as he gets into the elevator.

His phone doesn't stop ringing all week. They're stretched to their limits, all of them, and all of them have to leave at least one scene midway through processing when another call comes in. Mac just tries to keep working and keep himself focused, but he can't shake his confused thoughts from the first night and day of the heat wave. He can't remember the dream, not precisely, but he can remember the feeling, and the sense that something is about to happen is with him all the time, even when he tries to forget.

He ducks under the police tape at yet another scene and pulls his damp shirt away from his stomach. He does his job.

But they're all, or almost all, starting to crack in little ways.

Stella frowns and asks him if he's all right, if he's sleeping. He brushes off the question and tries to let himself be distracted by her cleavage in the white tank top she's stripped down to, but she's too angry for him to touch. Lindsay doesn't say anything, but she's fallen back into old habits from when she first started at the lab, trying too hard and too anxiously to please him. Hawkes and Flack get into a fight Mac doesn't understand at all, and spend an entire scene glaring at each other and directing all of their conversation only to Mac. Under any other circumstances, it would be funny.

Only Danny seems the same as ever. Mac isn't sure if this is a good sign or a worrying one, but either way, he doesn't spend very long considering it. That would mean thinking about Danny, and that's something he can't let himself do. He paces at night, instead, when he can't sleep, or watches TV until his eyes burn. He doesn't dream again of green seas, or of anything else.

The heat wave has been going on for over a week, and Mac is starting to think that everyone he passes on the street or in the subway is a potential murderer. The news keeps saying that it'll break any day, any day now, but it doesn't get any cooler. The sky stays relentlessly blue.

On the eighth night, when it gets to be too much, Mac tells Adam and Stella that he's taking a coffee break.

"Why don't you go home?" Stella says. "We're fine here. You're not even scheduled for this shift."

"I'll be back in fifteen," Mac says, ignoring this, even though he knows she'll give him hell for it later.

Leaving the cool of the lab for the roof, which is where he really goes, is like stepping into a slow ocean. The heat closes tight around him, and right away he can only move in slow motion, like there are weights on his feet, like in other dreams he's had. He tries to take a deep breath, but his lungs don't seem to want to work that way, and he ends up breathing in shallow gulps as he stands near the edge of the roof and looks out over the city.

It's too still, too frozen. Nothing moves, no breeze; even sound seems muffled up here. The sky is caught somewhere between twilight and dark, a strange, pale green color that he's seen only once before, from the deck of a ship in the Azores, just before a storm rolled in. The green reminds him of something else, too, something else to do with ships, but he can't figure out what it is.

That sense of waiting hits him full-force again, the sense that something is about to happen, some blow is about to fall. Sweat crawls along his skin in steady trickles.

He hears the door open behind him, and when he turns around, Danny is standing there. Mac doesn't say anything.

"Thought I saw you head up here," Danny says.

"What can I do for you, Danny?" he asks.

"I'm off shift," Danny says. "Stella told me you're not supposed to be here at all. You want to go get a beer?"

Mac looks away. Somewhere, down on the street, a siren wails. "I really should -- "

"Christ, it's hot. You'd think it would be cooler up here." Danny walks over to the roof's edge, to where Mac is standing. "Hell of a view, though."

"It is."

"When was the last time you slept?" The question comes out of nowhere, and it makes Mac take a step back.

"Danny, that's not -- "

"C'mon." Danny turns to face him. "You think I don't know?"

"Know what?" Mac asks.

"That you aren't sleeping." Danny's tone is much too patient for comfort. Much too gentle. "I know what you look like when you don't sleep. And in the summer, you get -- I don't know. You don't get all short-tempered like some people, but the heat gets to you. It worries you."

"Worries," Mac says, and he leans against the ledge so he can face Danny. "That's one way of phrasing it." He can't say the words he really wants to use, doesn't know what the words are. "We've all been overworked since this started. It's aggravation I don't need."

"Yeah, same here. But..." Danny spreads his hands, palms facing up. "Come have a beer. Give yourself a break. Just -- just don't be a cop for one night."

Mac looks at Danny's face, lit bright by the strange green sky. He's smiling, but there's something raw in his eyes, something shivering. Mac suddenly remembers his dream from eight nights ago, the green sea and the naval carrier and all the rest of it. The warm hands on his body and the voice on the loudspeaker saying The city is an island and the island is a heart. The pitch and roll of the ship beneath his feet, though that part may be only some half-forgotten sense memory.

"A beer," he says.

"Maybe some pool, too. Tom Waits on the jukebox," Danny says.

"All right," Mac says.

Danny nods.

We stuck, nor breath nor motion, Mac thinks, and in the next instant Danny's mouth is pressed to his. They kiss briefly, and Danny's fingers touch his cheek. Mac closes his eyes and concentrates on Danny's lips against his.

After they stop kissing, they stand still, Danny's forehead still pressed to his, breath warm against Mac's mouth, a shared breath between them, and as they stand there, a cold breeze suddenly ruffles his clothes, and before he knows it, his body has gone all over to goose bumps.

"Hey." Danny pulls back a little, tilting his head to stare up at the sky. "You feel that?" He grins. "Maybe this goddamn heat's gonna break after all."

"Maybe so." Mac looks up at the sky, and as he does, another breeze teases at his shirt, licks at his skin and dries some of the sweat there. Whatever he's been anticipating will either happen very soon now, or won't happen at all.

"About time." Danny looks at him as if he's thinking about kissing him again, but then just reaches out and touches his arm. "Let's go get that beer."

He nods. "Let's do that."

The sky is the sea, Mac thinks, green sea and green sky, and that makes the world make some kind of sense again, instead of turning it upside down the way the thought should. The breeze caresses him, and the sky shudders, ready to break. He takes one last look at it, then turns and follows Danny to the roof access door.

***