Disclaimer: All recognizable The Fall characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners including, but not limited to the BBC. The original characters and plot are the property of the author of this fan fiction story. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any previously copyrighted material. No financial gain is associated with the publishing of this story. No copyright infringement is intended.

Author's Note: This piece follows themes throughout both seasons of the show, but particularly episode 2x04. –dkc

The Trick

What she said to Jim Burns echoed repeatedly in the depths of her mind.

We all have physical, emotional needs that can only be met by interaction with another person. The trick is to ask someone appropriate to meet them.

Since she arrived in Belfast this "trick" had been a battle for her. It got off a to a horrendous start with James Olson, though if she were honest it began the moment she arrived and saw Jim Burns again. Sharing a bed with Burns had certainly met her physical needs. Now she realized there had been an emotional and professional cost, too. After Olson she had found herself curious about the woman she pulled off patrol to join the investigation. Danielle Ferrington was cute. She was curious. And she acted in Stella's best interest in that hotel room after her superior's night with Olson. The trick, the battle for her needs to be met kept following her through the dark nights of Belfast. When she met Tom Anderson at the crime scene where she thought she was to find Rose Stagg, she would have usually looked him over the way she had James Olson and considered his suitability, but not now, not anymore. Not after Reed Smith.

Only another human can appreciate the sensation of feeling out of control when desire takes hold. Fleeing the person others believe us to be for a soul hardly reminiscent of the person we have always known our own self to be takes on a cyclical dimension. In many ways, the only person that could understand this was the pathologist herself because she had shared in those torrid, out of control moments in the bar and at the lift with Stella.

And even when control is regained, the larger trick may be remaining human, alive. There has to be a touch that can bring you back to life, to a realm of existence that becomes foreign over time. There has to be a scent that can hold power over your very being, drawing you in from a mile or a millennia.

How to know when whom we have let in is worthy of our trust and when they are not is a battle of its own enormity. Can they be trusted with our carnal bodies while being held at arm's length from our actual soul? This was part of the trick, she supposed, the trick of satisfying her needs while never truly growing close to someone. When to trust, when to be trusted; these were never simple endeavors.

Stella found herself thinking about the philosopher Arne Vetlesen. The Scandinavian—was he Norwegian? She couldn't remember—had a theory about the givens of the human experience. As humans we all struggle with five inescapable facts of living. Those five: Vulnerability, dependence, mortality, loneliness and frail relationships. She had had her share of the frailty of human bonds, relationships as they were. In some ways these shaped the woman she had become, not the type to give two fucks about what others made of her. While she stood in opposition to the very notion of dependence, she knew there had been times when she was as dependent as any other being. Her dependence now revolved around the job, the hunt for Paul Spector. Loneliness and vulnerability were weaknesses to Stella. Nothing of use came from their existence within a human psyche.

Had she been lonely? Had she ever been truly vulnerable with another person? No, she reckoned she had not. Or, as was often the case lately, she had not been vulnerable until one Reed Smith entered her life. The doctor challenged the very definition, the foundations of Stella's loneliness and vulnerability.

It wasn't that she couldn't trust others. It was simply her natural suspicion. She found it easier to question motive than give the benefit of the doubt. It made her a good detective and a lousy lover.

There was a fine line for Stella, hardly one to make friends easily, when it came to the distinction between chemistry and a connection. She met so few people that she found genuinely interesting, even less that she could conceive as a friend. In her adult life she had hardly met the person with whom she felt immediate chemistry and the kind of connection that promised a continuing connection. So often she noted sexual chemistry or found a person she met to be sexually attractive and acted only on this. Rare was the occasion of meeting someone like Reed.

From what she could tell, Reed Smith was similarly built. Her trust was in science. She had been burned a time too many by feelings unsupported by facts. Though Stella had never asked to know the doctor's story, she suspected her daughter's to be the result of a failed trust. Life had a way of making beautiful things in the meantime—the meantime between a modicum of trust and it's shattering. Frailty of relationships, she thought, almost always encountered a barrier of trust.

Here she stood in this dark, quiet station. Belfast long asleep and her tiredness engraved on her face. There was a bone-weariness she had carried since he, that monster, had been in her hotel room that night. She thought once again of how things might have gone had Reed gone through with following her up to her room that night. She had found that person, that person appropriate to meet her physical, emotional needs and by some random act of a damning universe had nearly exposed that person to a hidden threat.

If the battle for Stella Gibson had been finding Reed Smith and acknowledging their mutual need for companionship, trust and a physical as well as emotional outlet, she had no idea how to proceed while protecting them both from the danger lurking in the Belfast night.

-finis-