Once, she had seen him put his fist through the window of a car

disclaimer: not mine. the lyrics belong to the Beatles off their album Abbey Road.

rating: pg13, borderline r (language, inexplicit sex, mature themes).

summary: There is no overcoming, no conquering, just bearing, enduring, sublimating.

pairing: mac/stella – past and present-ish, dashed with angst

author's note: a) wondering if this was worth the agony, sweat, and sleepless nights of tweaking every word into something that only mimics perfection. b) there's no order to this, but like mac says, "Everything's connected – you just have to figure out how." c) feedback would be nice; thank you.

The Beauty of Breakdown

author: Jo C.

And they learn to break down, together, in the midst of faded colors, pale lights, and their lives, their city, and their world swirling around them until they are certain they are the two loneliest people they have ever known.

Once, she had seen him put his fist through the window of a car.

It was chilly that night, surprisingly chilly, and Stella was standing under an impossibly dim streetlamp on the corner of West Broadway and Canal, trying to wrap his hand with her favorite (white) scarf while the vehicle's alarm was shrieking in her ears and he was bleeding, bleeding, bleeding every which way. Dark red blood crawled down the length of his forearm to his elbow where his sleeve was gathered, and he watched with a dumb, child-like fascination, completely unaware of the painfulness of the circumstances due to the amount of alcohol in his system.

She wanted to yell at him then, or call him something akin to a fucking idiot, but she stifled the indignation she felt rising within her and did neither. She scribbled her name and phone number on an ancient receipt she found in her jacket pocket and thrust it over to the typical New York bitch who was next to her car, screaming her fucking head off about the fucking glass, and don't you know how to control your fucking husband, for Christ's sake?

"He's not my husband," wasn't the best defense, so Stella suffered the abuse for a few more minutes, let the middle-aged pile of shit complain until she was satisfied with her own self-induced sore throat, then took Mac by his uninjured arm and flagged down a cab to take them back to her apartment.

He collapsed on her couch there a good twenty minutes later, and while she knelt on the floor next to him and checked to see if he needed stitches, he played with her brown curls of hair, tugging at them like a little boy who had a crush on his babysitter and didn't know it. He looked at her, then in a fleeting moment of quasi-sobriety he touched her neck, felt her steady heartbeat pulsing through the vein along her throat, and said very quietly and shyly that he suspected his wife was seeing somebody.

She didn't answer, didn't meet his suddenly blurred gaze, but just continued studying his lacerations – his physical ones, because the emotional ones she wanted no conscious part of, naturally.

She helped him out of his coat and after draping it over the couch's armrest, turned the television on to MSNBC and sat down beside him. Together, silently, they watched the meteorologists make horrendous predictions and fools of themselves, and less than ten minutes later, Mac was asleep, snoring softly.

It wasn't until then that she wiped up the blood droplets from the hardwood floor and retrieved, from the kitchen drawer, a pair of pointy tweezers to pick out the tiny splintered pieces of glass that were sticking out of his palm.

Close to a year later, Stella watched him sitting in a plastic chair next to his wife's hospital bed waiting for her to wake up, and he had been staring at the back of his hand for a long time; when he finally took the risk to look up at her gentle knock from the door, his eyes seemed to ask her why he thought that night – months and months ago – was the end of the world.

(She doesn't like to wear white anymore.)

She is his city: Bronx toughness, Manhattan beauty, Brooklyn wit, and ambitions as high as sky-scrapers.

It is almost one in the morning, but Mac makes up a flimsy excuse for showing up at her doorway, and though that distinctive knowing look appears in her eyes and smile, he sticks by his flimsy excuse, even when he's kissing her, undressing her, and gasping her name moments later.

It's this thing, this ambiguous, confusing process of free falling, or falling down, or some sort of falling, collapsing, disintegrating into a person he doesn't recognize. She puts him back though, slowly, piece by piece, struggles to hold him together with duct tape words and barbed wire looks.

"Chunks of my hair were falling out," she said very suddenly, "and when I touched them, you know, tried to pick them up, they morphed into different things. Like a hammer. A clock. A deflated bicycle tire."

"What?"

"My dream," Stella added, "Last night."

Mac stared at her long curly hair, tried to imagine a wrench growing at the ends. "So, what do you think it means?" he finally asked.

She never answered.

It was early June (1989), but the heat and humidity made it feel like mid-August.

Mac had been living in his new apartment in Brooklyn for close to a week, the majority of his boxes still packed, the refrigerator empty, and the bed that was delivered the previous morning yet to be unwrapped from its plastic covering.

Stella insisted on a grand tour anyway, and when he navigated her through the different rooms, showing off the bareness of each, she made fun of him nineteen different times along the way, and he couldn't help but start laughing, too. They stood in the hallway, where the boxes were stacked down the lengths of the walls, laughing and laughing, and then she was kissing him hard against the mouth, and he was undressing her, backing her into the doorframe of the bedroom, and suddenly it wasn't very funny at all, and no one was laughing anymore.

A few hours later, he was opening a box labeled 'linens', and she was lying in his bed, watching him with sleepy eyes and a curious smile. He took out a gray bed sheet, and despite the heavy late afternoon sunlight filtering in through the windows and the warm, stifling air, she slipped under it and pulled it over him.

The plastic covering still on the bed crackled when he moved, and his skin stuck to it uncomfortably, but she had fallen asleep, and he didn't have it within him to wake her.

September rolled around, and she commuted from Soho (where she was rooming with a friend) to Columbia University in Harlem for her Masters in Biochemistry. Meanwhile, with his handy degree in Physics, Mac was juggling two jobs – a maitre d' at a Manhattan restaurant and a nightshift gas station attendant in the middle of Queens – while he was waiting for his NYPD application to be processed.

He only saw her occasionally during the weekdays, but sometimes he met her for lunch when a class of hers got cancelled. She spent her weekends at his apartment though, and he let her complain about her professors, listened to her rattle off chemical compositions and formulas, and she let him distract her from her reading assignments with cheap beer, slow sex, and the Beatles.

He wasn't sure when his life had become this way, but he woke up one Sunday morning and found Stella's toothbrush in a glass in his bathroom, and she was in the kitchen making tomato and mushroom omelets and humming along with the radio and John Lennon's lead vocals: "I want yooouuu, I want you so baaaaaaaad, it's driving me maaad, it's driving me maaad..."

They fight, argue, and in a bewildering rage, he calls her Claire, and he doesn't realize his mistake until his next sentence, and she's already backing away before he can find his voice to apologize.

He self-exiles himself then, avoids her door for days, weeks almost, until he forgets the taste of her skin and the touch of her fingertips, while she avoids his gaze. She doesn't ask for her spare key back though, and its weight is heavy and solid in his pocket; he feels need clawing at his gut and quickly drowns it in cases and reports and gin and sleeping pills that don't fucking work.

He, of course, ends up in the exact same place from which he started: watching her from across the bar, and she's talking to her old Narco partner, standing too close, wearing a brown leather skirt, white tank top and standing too fucking close, and all Mac can do is pray to God, please, don't let her go home with him.

He still hears the Beatles in his dreams.

A couple hours and one too many drinks later, she is sitting on the edge of her dining room table, and Mac is standing between her knees, sliding his hands up her thighs under her leather skirt.

His kisses taste like gin and guilt, but there's a faint tinge of passion on his tongue and a distant, nameless affection lingering behind his eyes that she can't ignore, and god, she wishes she could ignore it. She hangs on to him, and it's out of spite or hunger – she's not sure which – that makes her bite down on his earlobe hard enough to draw blood.

They come together, very suddenly and very silently, and everything around them is stillness and sadness, and this isn't what he wants. He wants something he can never have: sunny days of lying in bed with her, watching the city rise from the Atlantic. This isn't it; this is painful, fast, and rough.

He doesn't want a girlfriend – god, no – because he is too old to have a girlfriend, too old to be termed a boyfriend. What is the proper word then? Lover? No, that implies a few things, namely love, and while he does love her, it is a desperate, clinging love, and their relationship is too dark, too filled to the brim with grief and longing and alcohol to be labeled with such a generic, sugary, Saint Valentine's Day word.

What they have between them is an eternal ache from the knowledge that there are too many wasted years against them, that now it is too late to have a proper romance. What they have between them are sleepless nights spent at each others' apartments (though mostly hers) and their history, long and evocative like the eastern horizon.

Tragedy lies ahead because that's the way it is, because as individuals, characters in the typical drama, they are flawed, too flawed with too many ghosts and demons and skeletons and personal darkness. Their chance at beating the pain had long since been buried by the sands of time and fossilized into layers upon layers of ancient history.

There is no overcoming, no conquering, just bearing, enduring, sublimating.

Mac watches her walk to the bathroom, waits until he hears the shower running, then after straightening out his clothes, leaves without saying good bye.

He tries to pinpoint the exact time, date, event that had made his entire life unravel, spiral into this cyclic continuum of breakdown after breakdown after breakdown, and he comes up with nothing because the past has collided with the future, in effect producing this never-ending present where he is adrift in this sea of lost souls with no way home.

She couldn't sleep; there was too much activity, too many images behind her closed eyelids, haunting her already cluttered mind, and Lord knows there was never any rest for the very weary. She lay there, hiding under the bedsheets, waiting in silence, and she felt like a wounded soldier, praying for that abstract peace that no one had ever seen to come through the darkness.

Screw it: she got out of bed, and on light feet, she ventured out to the living room. He was there, still sound asleep on the sofa, snoring into a cushion. She pulled a comforter from the linen closet in the hallway, and when she draped it over him, the movement jump-started him back into consciousness, and he had her wrist in a firm grasp before his eyes even opened. He looked up at her then, blinking back the stars tainting his vision, and a sheepish expression crossed his face.

"I –" He loosened his grip, let his hand drop to hers and linger for a moment longer – his touch entirely too apologetic for such a harmless action – before he released her completely. "I – uh, what time is it?"

"Two-thirty, give or take."

"I should go."

His gaze swept the room, finally resting curiously on his other hand – bandaged and bloody – and it occurred to him for the first time that evening that he had nowhere to go. She sat there with him then, lonely, unwanted, forgotten, until the sunrise had invaded through the slats of the ivory blinds and the pink and orange morning was shining over all the sorrow that had been given neither acknowledgment nor voice.

They sat together one late evening in autumn on the cold steps outside her old apartment building in the Village, blatantly drinking beer, violating a handful of city ordinances, and not giving a shit because goddamn it, neighbors of hers were blaring the Beatles at an obscene volume, violating a handful of city ordinances themselves ("You never give me your mooonnney, you only give me your fuuunnny paaapers...").

Stella tapped her empty bottle against the edge of the step for every taxi cab that passed by, one, two, three, and the distinct sound of glass against cement echoed in her ears.

It was a few moments longer before he finally spoke up. "I'm not going, Stel," he said, "I hate Chicago anyway, so I'm not going."

"Mac, how much more money is Chicago offering you?" She leaned back against the metal railing and didn't wait for him to answer. "Don't be fucking unreasonable; it's a bad color on you."

He didn't reply, listened to the sirens of an ambulance nearby – the Doppler Effect – and drank the rest of his beer grudgingly because it was deflated and disturbingly warm.

She turned to him abruptly then, and with a creased brow said, "Chunks of my hair were falling out."

After he presses his key into her hand, he shows her each room, points out where the furniture would be, the couch, the dresser, the table, and the shelf, here, here, there, against the wall. She laughs and mentions something about déjà vu, but her comment is swallowed up by his kiss.

They make slow, easy love that night; they christen his new apartment: the kitchen, the bedroom, the shower, and the living room – twice, and it's close to three in the morning by the time he spreads layers of linens across the floor for a makeshift bed.

Stella falls asleep in the sea of swirling white, gray, and navy blue sheets with his warm breath on her neck, his skin sticky against hers, and a strange comfort hovering in the backdrop of the city.

When she wakes up in the morning, he is already in the kitchen making tomato and mushroom omelets.

It was the first time he saw her smile, and it was sullen and sexy under the dim lights of the bar, and it made him wonder how many drinks it took a guy to forget someone like her.

"Stella Bonasera," she said, shaking his hand.

"Mac Taylor," he replied shyly.

(A month later, for her birthday, he gave her Abbey Road.)

February 2005