Title: Underworld
Author: stellaluna_
Rating: PG
Pairing: Danny/Don
Summary: In another version of reality, Danny tries to right certain wrongs. Danny/Flack UST. AU.
Disclaimer: None of these are mine. Characters are the property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer Television, CBS, and Alliance Atlantis.
Notes: A holiday ficlet for bedlamsbard, who asked for gen Danny and Flack AU with UST, with Poe's "Hello" as a prompt. The idea of ghoul cults comes from Caitlín R. Kiernan's work.

***

Danny walks the corridors of BSI alone, a cup of coffee in one hand and a stack of files in the other, a neutral expression on his face: nothing to see here. Overhead, the doorway charms and hexes shiver constantly as people pass back and forth beneath them. He pauses at the entrance to the weapons lab to scan his palm, and after a pause the protective spell yields to him. He sits down and opens up his files, and starts to work, trying to lose himself in routine as he concentrates on trying to distinguish one caliber of crossbow from another.

Mac stops by later to see how things are going, and Danny is careful not to let his emotions slip. There's no hint of apology or regret in Mac's eyes; there never is, and Danny wonders if he's the only one here who still thinks about Flack these days.

Later, he watches as Hawkes and Adam Ross sit in a room filled with nothing but the sound of rushing wind and a low, electronic hiss, playing back the tapes they made two nights before in Greenpoint Cemetery, and he begins to get an idea.

It's a long shot, and it's going to have to be done on the down-low; he'll never get authorization for this, and if it does work, he's going to get in trouble: with Mac for sure, and maybe even with the national office down in DC. But shit, he has to try, because it's Flack. That BSI, of all places, has been so quick to write him off as dead and gone (if not buried) is the most hypocritical thing Danny has ever heard. There was never a body, after all, never a sign of conventional foul play or so much as a single drop of blood found.

There was only Flack, flicking his cigarette into the dust at the side of the mausoleum and saying, "Wait here, Messer," then walking through the doorway and past the sealed coffins, to where a second doorway that shouldn't have been there had opened up in the back wall of the tomb and stretched away to an impossible corridor. The whole place had been lit with a glow that made Danny think of swamp lights, and that made him think of St. Elmo's Fire and the ghoul cults that, even in the circles he travels in, are spoken of only in whispers, open disgust at the mentions of the catacomb wanderers down in New Orleans; only uncomfortable, superstitious silence whenever they have to talk about the ones that are supposed to be headquartered in Rhode Island. Had he known even then that this was a bad idea? Christ, of course he had.

Technically, Flack was doing the job he was supposed to as BSI's police liaison, but he wasn't trained in this kind of thing. Danny was, and he should have gone first. But he hadn't, and although he'd waited an hour, Flack had never come back. The doorway and the corridor were closed up and gone by the time the rest of the BSI team had shown up, and hadn't reappeared since.

Flack had never come back, either, and six months later he'd been officially declared dead. It had been Mac's call.

Danny thinks about all these things, and about Flack sitting next to him in the squad car the night he'd disappeared, talking to Danny about baseball and restaurants and what it had been like back in the days when he was straight-up NYPD homicide instead of spending all his time focusing on supernatural crimes. "I hate to believe in all this shit, but I guess I have to now, you know?" he'd said, and Danny had nodded, watching Flack's face in the small red glow of his cigarette.

"Yeah, I know," he'd said, then added, "Lemme have one?" Flack had tossed over the pack, then, instead of handing Danny matches or a lighter along with it, had leaned forward so that he could light his cigarette from the end of Flack's. They'd sat there and smoked together in silence for awhile longer, and if only they'd stayed there instead of going to check out the mausoleum. If only.

If only Danny had found a reason for them to. But he hadn't, and now he has to fix it if that's in any way possible.

Smuggling the equipment out of the lab is tricky, but not impossible. Talking his way past the cemetery caretaker is easier; all Danny has to do is flash his badge, and he's in. He's just going to have to hope that the guy doesn't get suspicious for whatever reason, and decide to make a phone call over to BSI. If he does, Danny's ass is going to be nailed to the wall, but he can't think about that now.

An atavistic shudder runs down his spine at the sight of the mausoleum, but he pushes that away and sets up all of the equipment, and then leaves. By the time he retrieves all of it the next night, the recorder is damp with condensation, clammy to the touch, and his skin crawls the whole time, even after he's out of the cemetery and away.

He doesn't dare bring the tape back to the lab, so he takes it to his apartment instead, and sets it up to play on his bedroom stereo. Then he gets a beer and sits down on a chair, and presses play with a hand that's only shaking a little bit.

For hours, there's only the blank, idiot hum of the open mike. Danny has been steeling himself for this to be the outcome, but can't help feeling a growing sense of frantic disappointment, anyway. He forces himself to sit still and listen, and as the hours pass and hopes fade, he begins to doze.

He's almost asleep when he hears it, and his eyes snap wide open. It might be nothing, he thinks as he rewinds the tape. Such a faint, far-off sound to begin with, and it might be nothing more than imagination, or some trick of the wind. He turns the volume all the way up, then plays back the section of tape again.

And he hears it again, and after playing it back twice more he's convinced that he's not imagining it:

"...Danny..."

Just that, his own name, and he's sure that it's Flack's voice, not something else calling to him from the graveyard, although he still has to allow for the possibility that it's something that's a good mimic. His name, soft and echoing like it's coming to him from down a very long tunnel, and then, minutes later, another sound. Not even a whole word this time, just a single syllable, el, and after he's played this, too, back a dozen times, he decides that it's either hell or help. Or maybe both.

Every hair on his body is standing on end by now, and he can feel his eyes bulging in their sockets. He realizes that he's sitting straight up in the chair, no longer slumped down, and his hands are clenched into fists, fingers digging furrows in his thighs.

It's Flack. It is. Has to be, and he doesn't allow himself to think about the very good possibility that he might be listening to the man's ghost, or that it might be something else entirely, no more than a trick of the imagination. He's dismissed his earlier idea that it might be something mimicking Flack, has pushed this out of his mind. He was right. He's been right all along. And now he's going to have to do something about it, God knows what. God knows how he's going to handle this with the rest of BSI, or with Mac in particular, but he'll worry about that later.

Danny rewinds the tape again and plays it back for maybe the twentieth time, and listens to the far-away voice calling to him and thinks about lighting his cigarette from Flack's, watching his face and the way his mouth moves in the semi-darkness as they talk; and he knows he'll do anything to have that moment back again, anything at all.

***