Macdennis Fic Rec List by wordcount
“If you’re struggling to find a good guy to get down with, I could let you blow me.”
Mac tenses. Is he seriously hearing this? Has he had too many beers, passed out and slipped into some alternate universe, half nightmare, half… something else? “What?”
“I’d be willing to let you,” Dennis says. Mac twists on the couch to look away from the TV and at Dennis. Dennis’ face is neutral, but as Mac stares, he raises an eyebrow. “Out of the goodness of my heart, or whatever.”
He finds him licking his wounds under the bleachers.
Mac’s flicking a lighter under a scrawny little scrap of a cigarette and he’s doing it way too fast. He’s slicked his hair back like a John Wayne wannabe and he has blood crusted on his bottom lip - everyone saw the punch up, Dennis included. Bradley Morgan punching Ronnie the Rat in the jaw for tipping off the school office; it’s yesterday’s news and it happened this morning.
“You need some help with that?”
“Fuck off,” Mac mutters. Dennis take the lighter anyway.
“It was by the dumpster,” Mac says. He sounds scandalised. “It’s been shitting it down with rain all day, bro. C’mon. I’ll take it back tomorrow.”
The cat stares at Dennis, wrapped up tight in the duster. It blinks at him, looking thoroughly unimpressed, and then it sneezes. It’s the tiniest, most pathetic hiss of a sound he’s ever heard.
“Jesus Christ,” Dennis mutters. He moves out of the way, letting Mac step inside, and then he slams the front door with significantly more force than necessary.
“You piss her off?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Mac snaps, because he didn’t, him and his mom are doing fine, thank you. “She - she’s been really busy today, probably, so she just -“
“She didn’t answer the door,” Dennis says.
It’s not a question. Mac scuffs the toe of one battered sneaker on the ground.
“She’s busy, man.”
One second passes. Two, three. Then:
“Get in the car.”
The doctors discharge Mac around 8:30, after a hellish 18 hours of hospitalization. He’s prescribed two EpiPens for the nut allergies, along with extra strength Benadryl and an inhaler for the leftover side effects of anaphylaxis. Dennis elects himself in charge of the EpiPens, which Mac is okay with in his exhausted state. There’s no way he can trust Mac to hold onto something so vital, so crucial to his safety. Mac never worries about himself; he’s always more concerned with Dennis. That’s not gonna fly here. No, Dennis will oversee the EpiPens, just like how Mac oversees Dennis’ eating schedule.
Post-Gang Chokes. Dennis gets what he wants.
It's New Year's Eve. Dennis, not for the first time, has made some regrettable choices.
"Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned." Mac vs. the Ten Commandments.
Sometimes Dee thinks the reason she and Mac have never gotten along is that they’re just too much the same; both of them caught up in Dennis’s orbit, thriving on whatever attention he deems fit to bestow on them.
“I just think we’re spending too much time together,” Mac blurts out.
The silence that follows is so complete, Dennis can hear the blood rushing in his ears.
—
Mac and Dennis break up. Again.
“Jesus Christ, Charlie, this isn’t about banging -- it’s about two men, who have been living together for years anyway, taking advantage of government handouts while winning an argument. Don’t cheapen this, okay?”
Instead of fighting, when Dennis came home stressed while they lived in the suburbs, he and Mac would go for a relaxing swim to calm down.
Dennis figures out he needs to spice up his and Mac's routine movie night blow jobs.
From a distance, Mac smelled like an alpha.
(Or: Dennis has never gotten the appeal of alphas. He tries something else.)
Or, Mac and Dennis move to the suburbs.
Dennis will always come back home to Mac, even when neither of them think so. For better or worse, the same wretched parts of them are magnetized together, and no amount of fighting or running away will change it.
What happens after Dennis leaves.
He could maybe get addicted to this, if he let himself. Or: five times Mac and Dennis toed the line between friends and lovers, and one time they crossed it for good.
fellas is it "gay" to marry your best bro. asking for a friend
The gang think Mac is dating someone in secret so they follow him to try to figure out who.
Mac and Dennis sleep together the night before Dennis leaves to spend Christmas in North Dakota.
Mac expects Dennis to keep in touch while he's away. He doesn't, leaving Mac to worry about what it all meant.
Many years ago, when they were seventeen and eighteen, Dennis told a lie. He’s told a lot of lies, actually, but this one stuck.
(Or, The Song of Solomon, except, Macdennis, in which Dennis has been in L--- with Mac for a lifetime)
“This is just one man wanting to bang another man, and that other man charitably capitulating for the good of the friendship. Nothing more.”
(Or: Dennis comes up with a way to fix Mac's feelings for him. Mac reluctantly agrees.)
It's the summer of '93 and Mac's only sure of three things: Charlie will be his best friend forever, Project Badass is going to take over the world and no-one makes him feel quite like Dennis Reynolds does.
Dennis scratches at his chest. Water bugs. “No offense, man, but then how do you know about them?”
“Oh, Mac told me.” Charlie threads the hose back into his tiny tool belt. “He’s got some sources about these kinds of things.”
Which is great for Charlie, but doesn’t really work for Dennis.
“I’m not talking to Mac right now,” he says diplomatically.
During quarantine, Mac catches Dennis branching out in his pornography intake─watching gay porn and shamelessly jerking off to it. They come to a mutually beneficial arrangement that'll help them both get through lockdown without falling victim to overbearing sexual frustration. No strings attached, right?
Dennis chose North Dakota which means changing diapers, meal prepping, working on the weekends, and not having sex with his best friend. While Mac and Dennis rekindle old feelings and fights over the phone every night, Dennis thinks about all that could've been for the first time.
Mac and Dennis survive each other. Mac and Dennis will always survive each other.
Mac comes up to visit Dennis at college junior year, alone for once. Their boys' day turns into a night out — one that Dennis would probably classify as a date, if they were anyone else.
But maybe, privately, he still thinks of it as their first.
5 times Dennis bottoms + 1 time Mac is desperate for it.
For the server. You fuel the holy-water-needed section of my brain.
“Are you satisfied with this?”
Mac blinks, eyes flickering between their thighs nearly touching and Dennis’s face. “Satisfied with what, dude?”
Dennis grins like he's doing something malicious and Mac gasps when he feels Dennis’s hand on his knee. Okay. Behave yourself.
“This. Us.”
It clears up nothing but somehow Mac knows exactly what he's asking. He gulps. Shrugs. His eyebrows are arched down, brown eyes wide and full of stupid hope. “Sometimes,” he settles on, because he figures the truth is too much of a mouthful.
Dennis leaned toward Mac, lowering his voice. "I see what you're saying. You want to put the responsibility of your sexual self determination in my hands. You want to relinquish the burden of free will to me."
Mac squinted. "Yes? Er, I think so."
-
Dennis (graciously, selflessly, heroically) helps Mac overcome an addiction.
The things Mac and Dennis do when they're alone, from 1994 to 2019.
Dennis really, really wants to pick up the hot guy who keeps coming into the bar every weekend. Somehow the words keep getting fumbled on the way out of his mouth. He's trying, he swears.
“It’s like this,” Mac explained. “Dennis has been kinda sad lately, you know? It’s… he has this thing, he calls it his God Hole, and he’s trying to use this kid to fill it up. But he’s way more dumber than I thought because he already tried that, and it didn’t work. And it’s so annoying because he still doesn’t realize that the person who’s gonna fill his hole is right in front of him.” He gestured to himself, just in case his point wasn’t clear. Charlie’s face lit up in realization.
“Ohhh, okay, that’s what this is about,” he said. “You want to fill Dennis’s hole.”
Mac coughed. “No, that’s— that’s not what I meant, don’t say it like that.”
He wants to wrap himself around Mac like a python buries its prey in its inescapable, deadly embrace. With his chest against Mac’s back and his face against his nape, he wants to press closer and closer until he can sink his claws into his very bones and seep his poison into his veins and Mac can never, ever walk away from him without tearing himself apart in the process. He wants to stay like this until they both die.
Mac lets out a pleased, half-asleep hum and lovingly puts his own hands on Dennis’ fists that are grasping the front of his old T-shirt so vehemently they’re almost shaking.
“Dennis,” Dr. Eddy says, still writing, still smiling. “I want you to take some work home with you from this session.” She finally looks up at him and nods encouragingly. Dennis can’t help the way his eyes roll all the way back into his head.
“Great,” he mutters.
“I want you to track your impulses,” she says. “I want you to track your impulses and I want you to put the intention behind that impulse in one of two categories.”
She stands, goes to her desk. She opens a drawer and pulls out a second notebook. She opens it to the first page and begins to write in it. Then, she comes to Dennis, stops right in front of him and presents the journal to him, still opened.
She’s drawn a table. A question looms at the top of the page: What is my intention with this action? And there are only two columns. One labeled growth and the other: stagnation.
—
Dennis decides that there should be a third column: destruction.
Dennis comes back.
Dennis experiences the same day over and over. A peculier, yet totally unoriginal day. When it becomes apparent he isn't having Final Destination style visions, he must figure out how to break the curse.
Mac hatches a secret plan to repair his and Dennis’s friendship. Dennis is pretty sure he knows what the root of the problem is, though, and he isn’t going to let up until Mac admits to it.
Set after Season 11.
After Dee's landlord threatens to kick them out for squatting, Mac and Dennis get a place of their own and it's all downhill from there. Dennis tries to keep himself together. Life's got other plans.
Set a few months after the end of Season 10.
Dennis Reynolds is forty-four years old, and it doesn’t get any better from here.
‘You’re what?’ Dennis asks blankly.
‘I’m moving out,’ Mac explains. The same three words he said a second ago, and they don’t make any more sense in that order than they did the first time. ‘I was just – I was thinking about what you said, about wanting – uh. Wanting me to move out. And it kind of made sense, so. I guess I’m doing it.’
‘How did it make sense?’ Dennis asks.
---
After the events of Season 13, Mac moves out. Dennis handles it really well, obviously.
“I just want to be normal, Mac. Is that too much to ask for?”
“I don't know, Den. Maybe it is.”
-
or: mac and dennis get worse before they get better
Dennis owns a flower shop. Mac's trying to grow a garden.
Sometimes Mac will kiss him to calm him down. It’s a no strings attached kind of thing, until it isn’t.
