We Don't Die

Series Title: We Don't Die
Fandom: CSI:NY (alternate universe)
Pairing(s): Mac/Danny, with a few other characters thrown in here and there
Rating: Varies between chapters, but overall I'll say NC-17 for language, violence, and explicit adult content
Warnings: Blood play, violence, angst, slash (male/male sex), vampirism
Summary: It's a universe much like our own, except that the Children of the Night aren't just legends. Mac's more familiar with those 'legends' than most of the NYPD. He's headed downhill in a very fast way, and those he's closest to all have their own ideas on how to save him.
Disclaimer: I don't own them (shame). I make no money from the writing of this piece. Characters are the property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer Television, CBS, and Alliance Atlantis. I don't own any of the songs or song lyrics I post, either.
Author's note: It's a story I've been puttering with for a while, and I've got about 25 chapters lined up though most are incomplete. Anybody who knows me knows that I'm not one to blow my own horn in any sense of the phrase, but I think this story's gonna be one of the most powerful ones I've ever written. I got the idea by reading numerous vampire and supernatural fanfics, and just about every time, it's Danny that's the supernatural one and Mac that's the stodgy human who's gonna get his world turned upside down, so I decided to do something different.
I should warn you, there's going to be a lot of heavy emotion coming. A lot of it's not going to be very pleasant, but then again, what are vampires if not Angst Magnets? It's also a bit of catharsis in itself, as a way of helping me come to terms with some of my own past traumas. For those of you who suffer from occasional bouts of depression like me... don't let this get to you. Just let it help you feel better when it's all over. There's funny and heartwarming and gut-heating moments, too.
Beta: The wonderful Melissa, faithful friend and source of both inspiration and common sense.

Chapter 1: Bite Me
Rating: R
Musical Inspiration: Bullet with Buttefly Wings by Smashing Pumpkins

The next several days were going to suck… no pun intended.

Mac could smell the hormones, and he knew that several of his female lab techs were going to start their cycles soon. The aroma of fresh, wet blood would be overwhelming, and Mac would have to stand there and smell every single drop and be denied all of it. He could take it, of course, but he was no rapist-feeder vampire. Not anymore.

Mac didn’t have to glance out the window behind him as he sat in his office. He knew the sun was coming up, and he didn’t care. He still had some time before the sun got high enough to start shining over the tops of the skyscrapers, and it was at that point that he wanted to be at home and in bed and protected by blackout curtains. It was a myth that the sun would instantly kill a vampire. Some vampires, but not Mac’s particular type. To him the noonday sun was mildly painful but mostly just irritating, so he’d become supervisor of the graveyard shift.

At least, it was only irritating if he’d fed recently. Nowadays it’d start to get quite painful in no time flat, so he supposed he should start packing up to go home. His thoughts continued to roam as he kept leafing through his paperwork.

There was more than one type of vampire. The typical one was one with constant fangs and red eyes, an uncontrollable urge to feed, a weakness to silver and garlic and holy objects. Those also usually had no pulse and didn’t need to breathe anymore. The living dead, or your stereotypical Dracula, take your pick.

There were other types: psychic vampires that fed on the life energy of the living (and a weird strain that had popped up recently, necro-psychic vampires that fed on the residual energy of the dead). Basically, any entity that existed by taking some sort of essence from something else and living off that essence—and wasn’t typical food—was a vampire, be it life energy or blood or what have you. And there were the vampires like Mac… and there was nothing funny about being a sex-vampire.

He supposed that a better term would be incubus, but that just wasn’t Mac’s style. Mac’s particular strain of vampirism was odd in that he fed on sex as much as he fed on blood. He had a pulse, he was warm to the touch, but he only kept breathing out of pure habit. His fangs could extend and retract like a cat’s claws. One of the interesting things about males of his strain was the way male anatomy worked: when he fed, the blood went straight to his stomach and then leached into the rest of his system, but one of the wonders of erections made most of it pool in his groin, so that his ‘prey’ (and Mac hated that term) would be getting nailed by a dick that was ever increasing in size, slowly, until Mac figured that his host had had enough and Mac finally came.

It had been nearly ten years since he’d really fed on anyone. A decade since he’d leapt lightly from rooftop to rooftop like something out of a movie, searching for open apartment windows. He would find one, he would wait to see that the occupant was alone and asleep, and he would creep into the room as silently as a shadow, and he would wrap a spell around the sleeper to mesmerize his target—some good-looking man or woman, if possible—and he would unbuckle his pants and pull down the sleeper’s pants if they were wearing any, and he would climb on top of them and find the wonderful, pulsing vein on their neck as he’d enter them, and—

“Mac?”

His head jerked up from the papers he’d been ‘working on’ at his desk to see Sid standing in the doorway with a small cooler marked Biohazard. “Brought you some supper,” Sid told him cheerfully, setting his package on the desk.

Mac gave a smile that ended up looking more like a grimace. “Thanks, Sid.” He hated bagged blood, hated dead blood cells. It was like living on nothing but rancid coffee. Sure, if you concentrated the right way, it might conceivably taste good going down and it would give you a nice spike of energy… but in the end it was just a filler, something to keep your brain going while the rest of you starved to death.

Mac knew that if he didn’t feed soon, something bad was going to happen. He’d been just fine controlling himself but it was starting to get to him. All these people, all this blood, so close and so far out of reach… he almost longed for the days where he had gone ‘hunting.’

Mac started to reach for the cooler when a shriek pierced his ears. On the tail end of that shriek was a wave of scent that washed over Mac, a scent that he couldn’t deny, and with speed that made Sid gasp Mac was out of his office and down the hall.

Lindsay was in Reconstruction, clutching at the bleeding cut on her arm and cursing at the shards of glass on the floor. “Stupid,” she growled, “so damn stupid.”

And suddenly Mac was there next to her, and there was a look in his eyes that she didn’t recognize; a hunger, a pure and undiminished lust, and he was staring straight at her. Lindsay’s words died in her throat as he gazed at her and his eyes glittered with colors that she had no names for, and he grasped her bleeding arm gently and brought it slowly to his mouth and she was still staring into his eyes when she felt his tongue drag across her wound.

She gasped and flushed but could not break his gaze, and he licked at her wound like a cat until there wasn’t a speck of blood on her arm and the cut had healed to a thin pink line.

It wasn’t enough. He needed more. He could never take more from Lindsay (even if she asked, he argued, and a small part of him just snorted), but his nose was drawn to the bright red glass shards on the floor. His eyes followed suit, and Lindsay jerked backward as the spell was broken.

Mac wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the blood on the floor, winking innocently at him, and he could feel his fangs sliding out and his tongue swell, and he started to bend, to kneel, when a foot blocked his vision and stepped right on his target.

He looked up. Sid.

Mac came back to himself, and he retracted his fangs as he shook his head rapidly to clear it. He looked around the lab and saw that everyone was staring at him. He saw fear and loathing, disgust and trepidation, and he swallowed. “Sid,” he muttered quietly, “get this blood cleaned up, before I start licking it off the floor.”

Sid nodded and Mac spun, pointedly avoiding Lindsay’s gaze as he stalked back to his office and slammed the glass door closed as hard as he dared. As the lab watched, he slapped open the cooler and pulled out the blood bag—Sid had been nice enough to microwave it today, which meant that it was warm rancid coffee. He started to twist the nozzle off and stopped, his frustration getting to him, and he extended his fangs and bit down into the bag and sucked it dry in a matter of seconds.

He hacked and sputtered at the taste, coughing like a longtime smoker as he dropped the empty bag in the biohazard bin in his office. It was so bitter, so dead after Lindsay’s fresh blood. He stood by the window and hugged himself tightly, hacking deep in his throat and pointedly ignoring his subordinates.

He heard his door open, and he growled. “Now is not a good time to talk to me.”

“It’s just me, Mac,” Sid said quietly.

Mac ducked his head. “Sorry.” He turned to the pathologist and stared at nothing on his desk. “He died of asphyxia, by the way.”

Sid blinked. “You’re good.”

Mac gave a little smile that had nothing to do with humor. “Plenty of experience. There’s a subtle difference in the taste between male and female blood, and it was sorely under-oxygenated.”

Sid nodded confirmation. “This vic was strangled. Maybe you should come down and work with us in the morgue.”

Mac snorted. “Thanks, and don’t think it’s not tempting. The dead may be a lot more tolerant but I still prefer the living.”

Sid shook his head. “Mac Taylor, man of action,” he said with a chuckle. He saw the tense posture of Mac’s shoulders, saw the hardness in his eyes, and he sighed. “What’s bothering you, Mac?”

Mac glanced up at him, incredulous. “Where were you in the last five minutes?”

Sid waved that off. “I’ve known you’re a vampire for a while, and it doesn’t bother me.”

“But think about what I just did,” Mac insisted. “Just like that, I had her mesmerized and I was going for her wound.”

“To clean it and close it, I noticed, not to drain it.”

Mac chose to ignore that; it countermanded his argument. “Sid, I was ready to drop to my knees and lick it off the floor!” he hissed.

“You’re a vampire. You require blood to keep living. It’s just the way you are.”

“It’s not just blood, Sid. I’m from the incubus strain, remember?” Mac growled. “I’ve avoided sexual contact for a decade because I’m not sure if I can control myself and keep from biting my partner in the neck. I don’t… I don’t want to lose control of myself. I thought I’d made my peace with it a long time ago, but after the Towers fell… I can’t go back.”

Sid knew what Mac was referring to and what was still too painful for the vampire to speak of even after all these years, and he clicked his tongue. “No wonder you reacted so strongly to Lindsay’s blood… especially since she’s been after you for so long.”

Mac nodded glumly, quietly grateful that Sid had let that other subject drop. “All those little experiments, trying to impress me… those stopped, you know, right after she found out that I’m a bloodsucker.”

Sid laid a gentle hand on Mac’s shoulder, completely unafraid of him. “It’s not illegal to be a vampire, Mac.”

“It’s not legal, either. I know there’s more of us coming public every year, but… we’re still watched and guarded like we’re going to lose control of ourselves at any minute and go on a bloody rampage.”

“Mac,” Sid said patiently, “I consider you to be more human than most of the suspects I’ve heard about you questioning. Did I ever tell you that?”

No, he hadn’t, and Mac blinked furiously for a few minutes. “Sid,” he started sadly, “all I know is that if something doesn’t happen soon, I’m going to start falling back into my old habits. Home invasion, rape, and bloodletting.”

Sid perched on the desk next to him and crossed his arms. “You never killed any of those people, and none of them ever filed charges.”

“I know what I did!” Mac snapped, and Sid didn’t mention that Mac’s fangs were starting to extend. “I talked to a couple of them afterward, in… in the beginning. They told me that honestly, it was the best sex of their lives and they couldn’t wait to do it again. I couldn’t tell them that I’d done it because I had to feed. Because they… they taste better, when they’re being pleasured.” His face was one of pure disgust. “I can have sex, and I can drink blood, but truly feeding is both at once, and if something doesn’t happen soon, I…” he broke off, frustrated, absently running his tongue over his fangs.

Sid’s gaze was sad and compassionate. “If what doesn’t happen? What are you waiting for, Mac?”

Mac looked at him, his fangs out and his eyes glittering and two single streaks of red making slow tracks down his cheeks. “I don’t know,” he whispered hoarsely.


Author's note: Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated!