FIC: History Lessons 2/8, Part 2 of 2-COMPLETE

[laguera25]

Title: History Lessons 2/8, Part 2 of 2-COMPLETE

Author: laguera25

Fandom: CSI:NY

Rating: FRM for violent imagery

Pairing: N/A; gen

Spoilers: S1-S3, especially "Tanglewood", "On the Job", "Run Silent, Run Deep", "All Access", and "Snow Day".

Disclaimer: All recognizable places, characters, and events herein are the property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

A/N: Written for the all_hallows_fic Ficathon and dedicated to stellaluna_, who deserves more fluff, actually, but I'm afraid the country I inhabit is too dark for that.



Part I-Lindsay Monroe

Part 1/2-Danny Messer


It was never the same between you after that. Both of you tried for a while to pretend that nothin' had changed, but he spent more and more time with Sonny and the rest of the Tanglewood Boys and less and time at home. Each time he did come home, he was a little leaner and a little meaner and smelled like wet dog and fresh cigarettes. Everyone noticed the difference, the bitter, dark edge that had crept into his voice and the increasingly slouched, furtive posture. Sometimes when he sat at the supper table, his expression was feral and watchful. You could practically see the wary, lupine twitch of his ears. Everybody saw, but nobody said anything. They just kept their heads down and feigned blindness.

You tried to tell him once, God knows why. It was already far past too late. Maybe it was envy that moved your tongue, or a desperate love for the brother that was fadin' a little more every day. He came home one night, stinkin' of cigarettes and booze and a tart, sea salt smell that you'd recognize as pussy when you got a few years under your belt. He was listin' appreciably to port when he lumbered in and had to catch himself in the splinterin' doorjamb when he wobbled over the threshold.

Hey, Lou, you muttered without lookin' up from the math homework that was fanned over the kitchen table. Been out with Sonny?

Whass it ta you? he slurred as he tottered against an invisible wind.

You shrugged and concentrated on your pre-algebra homework, the straightness of your lines, the roundness of your numbers. Nothin'. I can just tell.

Louie stopped and wavered, eyes red and glassy and brow furrowed in concentration. Oh, yeah, smartass? How's that? You figure it out with one'a your fancy fuckin' math formulas there? He peered at the pages of your open math book with myopic contempt. Think you're so fuckin' smart with your books an' your honor roll.

Your face grew hot, and the pencil gained weight in your hand, a stake instead of a thin shaft of wood and graphite.

Wrong weapon, you thought as you studied the pencil. Stakes are for vampires, not werewolves. You need silver bullets for werewolves.

You're different, that's all, you answered neutrally, and plotted a dot on a graph.

Louie's unfocused eyes narrowed, and he bent so that his face was level with yours. It'd changed so much in the year he'd run with Sonny and the Boys, broadened and darkened. Grooves had etched themselves into the corners of eyes that had retreated into their sockets and taken refuge behind perpetually hooded eyelids. The bridge of his nose had been refashioned by a well-placed fist and sprouted a spidery network of ruptured capillaries. It was impossible-teeth didn't grow after they erupted from the tender tissue of gums and took their places in your mouth-but his eyeteeth had lengthened and yellowed. In fact, they were so stained that they were nearly brown. Nicotine, you told yourself, just nicotine, but God help you, you knew better.

Different how? he asked, and his hand splayed over the pages of your math book.

You shrugged and pushed the glasses you'd acquired that spring onto the bridge of your nose. I dunno. You're just different. You walk different. Your voice is different, too. You smell different, too. Like them.

Like who?

Like the werewolves, you thought. Like Sonny, you mumbled.
Louie laughed, a wet, rasping rumble inside his chest. And what does Sonny smell like, short pants?

Bad, Louie, you answered. He smells like somethin' bad.

Another laugh, and Louie straightened. Well, ain't you a poet? He ruffled your hair and stumbled, nearly smashed your face into your notebook. Do the world a favor, kiddo, and stick to the numbers. And stop worryin' 'bout Sonny. He patted you clumsily on the shoulder and tottered toward the kitchen door and the livin' room beyond.

He's a werewolf, Louie, you blurted to his retreating back. He's one of the monsters you told me about when I had the chicken pox. His mask is thin, and his eyes go silver in the right light. He's bad, Lou. He's so bad. Don't let him get you. You stopped, stunned at your unexpected flurry of courage and embarrassed at the words comin' outta your mouth. What had sounded convincin' and desperate inside your head sounded like chickenshit baby talk on the thick, sticky air of the kitchen.

Louie paused in his totterin' exodus and turned to study you. Jesus Christ, you still remember alla that shit? He laughed, but there was no humor in it. Well, fuck me. I hate to break it to you, short pants, but you've been readin' too many comic books and watchin' too many movies. I made alla that up to fuck with your head. Sonny ain't no more a werewolf than I am Santa fuckin' Claus. Don't tell me you're still buyin' into him, too?

You shook your head. There was a hot, tight knot in your throat that made speech impossible.

There's somethin' in your favor, at least, he grunted, and tapped a jaunty staccato on the door lintel.

But Lou-

But nothin', Louie snapped, and you knew that was it. That imagination of yours is gonna get you in trouble one'a these goddamn days. If you know what's good for you, you'll stop worryin' 'bout Sonny Sassone and werewolves and worry 'bout studyin' hard and getting the hell outta here before you end up like Pop, fifty and lickin' the boots of fatass mob goombas with nothin' to show for it but grey hairs and a fistful of busted knuckles.

But-

Grow up, short pants, before life kicks your ass and does it for ya. His words were hard stones, but his tone was gentle, and the lopsided smirk he shot you before he wobbled into the livin' room was fond.
'
Night, Lou, you said quietly, and wrote a zero sum on your paper.

G'night, short pants. Far away even though he was only five feet across the linoleum, and then he stepped through the doorway and was gone, swallowed up just like Lou Diamond Philips and Snow White before him. You never saw that Louie again.

You never mentioned Sonny again, and Louie never offered, and by that winter, it was a moot point anyway, because the werewolves had claimed him for their own, tainted him and left their mark beneath the skin of his left shoulder, a Tanglewood tattoo whose fresh ink glistened like blood on his raised, irritated skin for the first week and then settled into his skin like poison. That tattoo changed everythin', changed him. Family was redefined, and the strongest ties no longer bound. Brotherhood was no longer a matter of blood, but of Indian ink and painted skin. What time Louie didn't spend in the can on petty drug and larceny charges was spent in the company of Sonny Sassone and the ferret-faced twins. Louie's room was empty more often than not, and by the time you were in high school, he was little more than an abstract collection of bittersweet memories that tasted like baker's chocolate and clove on your tongue. The werewolves had devoured him and left no trace, and as the years passed, it was easier not to think of him.

So, you didn't. You hunted werewolves instead.

Danny smiled bitterly at the thought and took a drag from the cigarette pinched indelicately between his thumb and forefinger. It was an apt description of his job, all things considered. He'd been hunting them since he was twenty-three, chasing them through dark alleys and brightly-lit penthouse suites, armed with his silver and his lead. He followed their trail of carnage and their telltale stink of wet dog and cornered them, unmasked them for the world to see. They always fought when he produced the silver bracelets, snarled and whined and rolled in splay-legged submission when all else failed. Sometimes, they bit. He'd been lucky so far; their snapping, yellow teeth had never broken his skin, but he sensed that his luck was running out. His armor was threadbare, riddled with chinks and drafty crevices where cold fingers could worm their way inside and curl around his balls and the base of his spine. His conscience was fraying and tired, and the only warmth in him now came from the stolen heat of Lindsay's pussy and the merrily burning ember caught between his fingers.

The hunt had brought him here tonight, called him to stand beneath the streetlight across from the rubber room where Louie now grew and rotted in his own soil, left damp and fetid by indifferent nurses who tended their own gardens behind the locked doors of the doctors' lounge. It was too late to go inside; it was past midnight, and visiting hours had ended before he got here, but he lingered anyway, entranced by the brooding, blank face of the building and the bloated waxing moon that hung above it. It was peaceful here with nothing but the skirling leaves for company.

He'd come here without conscious thought, simply left his apartment and Lindsay's hectoring voice behind and begun to walk. Past delis and dark bodegas and darker bars illuminated by giant, neon beers. He'd taken the subway and rattled through the tunnels with his hand curled around the overhead support bar, a zombie lurching aimlessly through the city's underground catacombs. He'd let the people expel him onto the dirty platform, and then he'd stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket and walked on. He'd passed Sullivan's along the way and thought he'd seen Flack, perched at the bar and watching hockey players flit over the polished ice like moths. If he had, Flack wouldn't be there for long. He had a hunt of his own tonight, a call to penance that wouldn't go unanswered.

Danny hadn't been surprised to find himself here. In fact, he'd greeted the sight of the building and its hundreds of idiot, unblinking eyes with relief. Here was where the bullshit stopped, where the pretty trappings of humanity fell away and left nothing but the cold, hard truth. Here was the home of ugly answers for those brave or dumb enough to seek them out.

He was hunting for answers, and Louie was the only one who had them anymore. He'd thought that Mac had them once upon a time, but Mac saw only black and white, not silver. Mac would never believe him if he told him about werewolves. Stella, maybe, after her experience with one in her own living room, and Flack, definitely. Flack knew all about the truths that haunted your dreams and slipped under your skin when you weren't looking. Maybe even Montana would understand, but even if she did, she'd only turn it into a reenactment of all her old battles, and he was too damn tired to play nursemaid to a woman who never wanted the bleeding to stop. But not Mac. He'd just trot out platitudes and stale reassurances and wrap himself in the comforting blanket of science. If he didn't believe it, then it couldn't exist. That was the way Mac liked his world-neat and ordered and classed by the Dewey fucking Decimal System.

Stella would believe him but lie to protect herself, and he couldn't blame her for that. Hell, he'd do it himself if he had the luxury. Flack would believe him but lie to protect him. Danny couldn't blame him for that, either. In fact, he loved him for it, though he'd admit it to no one but God. Louie was the only person on God's earth that would give it to him straight, crush bone and tear muscle to expose the rotten truth.

Louie would tell him why the surgically repaired bones of his hand still wept and sang and burned with the salt of their own queer poison months after they'd been reset and declared healed. Louie would tell him if it meant what he thought it did, that soon his mouth would taste only blood and like it, that soon he'd smell like wet dog instead of cinnamon gum and Drakar Noir. That soon his eyes would show silver in the right light, and he'd dream of nothing but making Snow White bleed.

Besides, a morbid part of him needed to see how much of Louie was left. He wanted to know if he could still catch a glimpse of the brother who'd taken him diving for cans and bottles in Long Island Sound and taught him to smoke Luckies behind the body shop where he worked. He wanted to see if the Louie who'd met him for beers after he'd spent sixteen hours trapped inside a panic room with a stiff was still alive, or if his last spark had been snuffed out by the taint of the beast. He wondered if the eyes that now looked out of Louie's face still possessed the muddy cunning of an alligator drifting through the murky underworld of the city sewers, or if they'd given way to silver entirely. He wanted to look into the future and see if there was any hope for him.

He looked at the moon and loosed a lungful of smoke on an experimental howl.

Silver flickered in the darkness of an upstairs window, so quick that he almost missed it. He shuddered and dropped his cigarette, crushed it beneath the toe of his shoe. Another flash of silver, longer this time, and he thought that if he stood there long enough, he'd see a familiar face.

He raised his hand in greeting, and the reconstructed joints wailed. "How ya doin', Lou?" he muttered. "They got me, I think, got me good, but you know that, don't you? You always knew they would."

The silver gleam disappeared, but not the surety that he was being watched. He looked behind him and down the street, brow furrowed in concentration, but there was no one. He wondered if Montana had taken it upon herself to follow him and continue her fine tradition of sticking her nose where it didn't belong, but dismissed the idea. If she were here, she never would've let it lie this long. It was probably just his overtired imagination.

He lowered his hand and left the circle of light provided by the streetlamp in search of a cab. He was so tired and intent upon his search that he didn't notice the bronze Pontiac that squatted in a nearby alley, no light coming from its interior save that of a cigarette shared betwixt two men.