Title: Bring Me Down
Author: StarrySkies
Pairing: a bit of Mac/Stella
Rating: T
Disclaimer: Everyone belongs to Alliance Atlantis, J.B. & Co, CBS, Anthony Zuiker, etc. The title comes from Miranda Lambert.
Summary: "There is a lot more to me than you know." Stella-centric.
A/N: set during 2nd season. References to "On The Job," "Three Generations Are Enough" and "Creatures of the Night." Spoilers for '"Til Death Do Us Part."
She thumbs through the stack of messages the receptionist hands her when she gets back from lunch with Dr. Hawkes - - or just "Hawkes," as he is now called, seeing as how he's moved out of the morgue and into the field. She'd taken him to Sullivan's as sort of a belated welcome-to-the-team gesture. Everyone had an open invitation to join them, but Danny and Flack were only able to drop by for just a moment on their way to Soho to grill an eyewitness of some sort. And, of course, Mac was too busy to actually take a lunch break.
"Case #42367 – Ms. Karas' lawyer would like to speak with you."
"Case #41503 – DNA is taking longer than expected. Please call the lab ASAP."
"Call Father Michael."
Her eyes see the message, but it takes a moment to fully register. She blinks and the smile she had been wearing up to that point gradually fades away.
She hasn't heard from him in years. She attended mass one day a couple of Septembers ago, sitting in the very back row, but she slipped out of the service just before it ended so her return to the church wouldn't be blown out of proportion. She hadn't intended on making mass part of a regular routine. She's left those days far behind. And there was that odd occasion where someone was murdered in a church in the city. Wasn't her church, but still a church nonetheless. She had been in there alone, trying to figure out who'd killed a young mother-to-be, but in the back of her head, something urged her to at least ask for a little assistance on the case. So she did. She's afraid to admit she sins more than she prays now. But even though she's distanced herself from the church, Stella still tries to remember the lessons she was taught as a child.
She takes both the message and her purse back to the locker room with her cell in hand. Scrolling through her address book, she comes across the number to the church and is thankful that it's stayed in her register all this time, though it's never been used.
She lets her purse hit the floor in front of her while she listens to the ringing. She contemplates opening her locker, but for the life of her, she can't remember the combination.
"St. Basil's. This is Francine. How may I direct your call?"
She doesn't know a "Francine." She must be new. "Hi. This is Stella Bonasera. I'm returning a call for Father Michael?"
"Yes ma'am. Please hold."
"Thank-you."
She takes the opportunity to lower herself onto the bench just a few feet away. Her heart is beating twice as fast as normal. The wait seems to be taking forever. She's feeling a dread in the pit of her stomach. Father Michael doesn't call her at the station, let alone just call her up out of the blue.
"Stella?" a gruff voice says over the line.
"Yes, it's me."
"Stella, I'm sorry for calling you at work. I know you must be busy, but I --"
"No, it's okay," she says quickly and silently scolds herself for interrupting him as if she's six years old again. "Is something wrong at the church?" She knows something is. She can feel it. One of those sixth sense things; has to be.
"Actually," he starts.
She inhales and holds the air tight in her lungs.
"Uh, Sister Elena, had been having some health problems, and she -- she passed away last night in her sleep."
Stella's heart drops freefall.
She ended her phone conversation with a promise to come see him after she got off of work. Truth is, she could've left for the church that very second, but there is something she has to do first.
She's locked the door, and now the hissing of water is drowning out all other sounds. She's sitting on the floor of the shower. The spray is stinging her skin, her bloodshot eyes. Her lungs feel like they can't get enough air, she's sobbing so hard.
She is used to death. She's been around it practically every day for the last ten years. She accepts it as a part of life, as part of The Plan. But it's not supposed to happen like this. It's not supposed to happen to her. She's supposed to be the one giving the bad news, letting someone know how their loved one died, making sure the culprit is apprehended. It's not supposed to happen this way.
She throws her head backwards repeatedly, feeling her skull connect with the tile. Maybe if she hits it hard enough, she'll forget.
Stella noiselessly enters his new office and sees him sitting at the desk, going over a file folder. And he barely lifts his head to acknowledge her presence. A "Hey" is faintly mumbled.
Cutting right to the chase, she says, "I'm gonna need some time off."
"You? Time off?" he laughs. "I, uh, haven't had a chance to watch The Weather Channel. Is hell freezing over?" Pieces of paper are flipped through without his attention being taken away from them.
She suppresses a sigh. "I'm serious."
Then he looks up into her eyes and sees the insistence and then her dampened hair. He tries to read her face, but it's more difficult than it seems. "Why? What happened?"
"Please understand when I tell you that I'd rather not say," she answers calmly. She wants to get out of that building as soon as possible. Her head is throbbing, and she silently makes plans to grab some aspirin before she goes to the church.
"Stella…" he continues.
"Mac. Please."
"Sure," he finally says. "Take all the time you need." There's no sense in pushing her. At this point, she's a closed book.
"Thanks."
Stella's crunching aspirin between her teeth to try to make them work faster. They taste like hell. The Cherry Coke she bought to take them with isn't helping matters all that much in the taste department. People walking near her SUV must think she's having some kind of crazy spastic fit. She's got other things on her mind. Other things, like how she's just supposed to step out of this car and walk into that church like it hadn't been twenty years. She always knew she'd come back someday, really come back, but she hadn't thought it would've been under these circumstances. And now she's more than a little sorry she'd stayed away for so long.
Surprisingly finding some courage amidst the chaos inside her, she gets out and crosses the street. The big iron gates accept her warmly as if she'd never been gone. Some of the younger kids are playing in the courtyard. It surely is a different feeling to be coming and going freely, when she used to be on the inside, always looking out with no choice but to stay.
"Hey lady," she hears called out to her.
"Yeah?" she turns and finds a boy, about 8 years old, with the fullest head of light brown curls she'd ever seen. His skin was near the same shade as Stella's. She guesses he is mixed too. Caucasian and African American, maybe. A beautiful combination, Stella's always thought.
"Whatchu here for? You gonna adopt somebody?" He's holding a bright red ball while kids behind him clamor for him to come back to the game. He pays them no mind.
She remembers looking at everyone who entered the gates, wondering if they would be the one to give you the family you'd always wanted. Only, he had enough courage to ask. Good for him.
"No, baby. I'm here for Sister Elena."
"She died, you know," he says with indifference.
"Yeah. I know." She's taken aback by how little it affects him, though she knows that kids don't really understand what death means until much later in their lives. Maybe he hadn't been there long enough to know her like she did.
"Father said she went real fast in her sleep because the Lord didn't want her to suffer."
"Well that's good to know." Stella tries to force a smile as if it would somehow help. She starts walking up to the double doors and turns around mid-step. "Hey," she calls back to him.
He catches the ball and spins toward her. Curls fly in every direction. "Huh?"
"Good luck."
He's confused. "What for?"
"… The game," she says, though she means something entirely different.
"Thanks!"
The place still smells the same. She breathes in the scent of her past and basks in the stained glass glow. She walks slowly down the aisle, patting each of the pews' oak banisters as she passes them. She finds the seat she used to sit in all those years ago and can't resist revisiting. She's a bit taller now and can see much farther.
She used to have to sit next to Sister Elena during service because she'd get too rambunctious if she didn't. Once, when she was five, she crawled on the floor army-style underneath the pews in her Sunday dress, made it all the way to the back of the church, and was almost out the door before Sister caught her and forced her to park herself in between her and the end of the pew for the rest of the service.
"Don't even think about trying that again, Stella Bonasera," she warned. Stella smiles fondly at the memory. She was such a rebel.
But even after she'd turned twelve, she still sat in the same spot. Old habits die hard, she guesses, and she never wanted to sit anywhere else even though she was way past crawling on the floor.
"Thinking about escaping my sermon?" a voice asks.
She stands up from her seat and is face to face with the man whom she'd spent her first 18 years of life with. "Father," she says and opens her arms to him. She puts her head on his shoulder, and for the first time in a long while, she feels safe. She weeps silently, but he knows she's crying.
He pats her back. "It's okay, Stella. It was her time."
"I didn't get to see her again. I should've come to see her."
"She thought about you often," he says, trying to make her feel better, but all it seems to do is make her feel worse. "She kept a newspaper article about you."
"About me?" she asks, stepping back and wiping her eyes.
"Yes. Something about apprehending a suspect who had been on the run for ten years or something?"
"The Steve Kinsley case," she remembers.
"That's the one. You can have it if you'd like. I found it in the back of her Bible. I think she really missed you."
This makes her tear up once again. "I missed her too."
"She knows now."
Stella halfway smiles and wants more than anything to believe that's true.
Father Michael scans her from head to toe. "Well, you've turned out quite nicely, Stella Bonasera." Time has been etched onto his face. His eyes wrinkle when he smiles. "A long way from that defiant little monster you used to be, I hope."
"That's debatable," she jokes.
He sees a sadness deep in her eyes, one that comes with wisdom from seeing too many things so early on, surely more than any other human being sees in an entire lifetime. Fully understanding that fine line between life and death, the mortality of a human being, the inner workings of a criminal's mind. All things she'd signed up for, but not realizing the toll it would take on her own existence when it hits this close to home.
"How's work?"
"Same. Blood and guts from dawn 'til dusk." She pauses for a moment. "Funny. I'm the one usually giving the bad news. Well, not 'funny.' But, you know..."
"Yes, I know."
"We've really missed you here. People are always asking me when 'Little Stella' is coming back for a visit."
"I'm sorry. I tried once."
"You didn't think I saw you," he confesses. "2001, I think it was. Was it not?"
"Yeah. You remember that?"
"I remember all kinds of things, my child. Some important, some not so important. But they're still in this memory just the same. I don't think you were even listening to my sermon. Just staring up at the window, doing your own talking with the Lord, I assume."
"I had some things on my mind."
"I think we all did back then."
She nods in agreement.
On her way out, she blows a kiss to the little boy she'd met outside earlier. He blushes and smiles, revealing a gap between his new grown-up teeth.
Mac walks past her new office, not expecting to see the lights on or her sitting on the floor up against the bookshelf, no less.
He opens the door and sits his briefcase down on the chair. "I thought you left?"
"I did."
"…But you came back?"
"I did."
"What about your time off?"
"It's not like I have anywhere to go if I had time off anyway."
"What's going on, Stella?" he says, tired of the runaround.
She sighs and then announces, "Mine and Hawkes' lovechild lives at St. Basil's. Whew! Does that feel good to get off my chest or what?"
"Oh, really?" he plays along and sits down on the floor beside her.
"Yeah, really. A cute little boy. Curly hair, and all. I think he has Hawkes' nose."
"Huh. Isn't that something?"
"Isn't it?"
"Seriously."
"Sister Elena died," she says blatantly after a moment. "Service is on Thursday. 10 a.m. "
"Oh. I'm sorry." He remembers her telling him once Elena was her favorite. Not much other than that, just that she was the one who mainly took care of her.
"Don't worry about it. She was old. Had to happen sooner or later. Life's short like that."
"Sure is."
"I didn't have much else besides her," Stella confesses. "She was the closest thing I had to a real mother."
"I can go with you if you want. On Thursday. To the funeral," Mac suggests.
She looks over at him. "That'd be nice."
He nods and asks, "You think you'll adopt someday?"
"Please," she scoffs. "I don't need kids. Who would even give me one? I wouldn't be a good mother."
"Whatever, Stella. You'd be great." He remembers baby Daniela from that dead nanny in Central Park case earlier this year. "You don't give yourself enough credit."
"There is a lot more to me than you know," she whispers at a barely audible level, almost repentantly.
He doesn't know what to say but can't argue with the fact that she is right. For someone who spends all of her time trying to get him to open up, she sure doesn't give much back in return.
She pushes up the jacket sleeve covering her left arm and offers her hand out to him into the fluorescent light. "You see that right there?" She points to a vague white line that runs from side to side on the inside of her wrist with her pinky -- which he remembers she broke a couple of years back, trying to fend off a suspect nearly twice her size.
Mac nods and then finds himself feeling rather oddly impatient, waiting for her to tell the story, wanting her to take him down deeper than he'd ever been before where she was concerned.
"I had… just gotten rejected for the nine hundredth time in fourteen years." He knows she's exaggerating, but he still listens intently. "The couple told Sister Elena that I didn't look enough like them to pass for their real child. My nose and my curly hair 'didn't come from good Irish people like themselves'" she mocks. "Like that is the whole point of adoption – to make the kid believe they're a part of that family because they come from the same country, and they -- they look good standing beside them like the biological children that they couldn't have -- not because they want to genuinely love the kid. There aren't too many half-Greek, half-Italian couples just running around New York, wanting to adopt, you know. That's why I was screwed from the beginning." Her animated hand gestures were out in full force. And before Mac can say anything to dispute that statement, she was continuing on with her story. "They were in the corridor, where they thought I couldn't hear them talking. But I did. They said what everyone else always said."
She remembers that fourteen year-old version of herself running as fast as she could, wanting to break away from something she wasn't capable of outrunning.
"And she found me in the tower. Someone had left an old mirror up there, leaning against the wall. I broke it into like a hundred pieces… and picked one up." Her eyes start to tear over, and Mac knows what's coming next. "And I was bleeding when she walked in."
His stomach tightens and feels his heart ache for her, imagining that day.
"But I just," she pauses and runs her hands through her hair. "I just wanted it to stop. But she wouldn't let me do it. She told me it wasn't my right. 'Only God can make that decision.' And she tied a handkerchief around my arm and took me to the infirmary to sew me up. And she… tried to make me understand that I didn't do anything wrong. They were just… looking for something else."
"Stella, one of these days, you are going to find someone who really loves you. Who loves your curly hair. Your dark Italian skin. Your Greek nose. And none of what happened before is going to matter anymore, I promise," she remembers Sister Elena telling her, which she then told Mac.
"Heh, so much for that," she scoffs through tears. "I left St. Basil's when I was 18 because no one wanted me before the cut-off date."
"Stella…" He wants to tell her to quit being so unreasonable, but he just can't find the heart to do it.
"What?"
"…Want to go grab a drink? Sullivan's?" he changes the subject.
"Sure." She stands, wipes her eyes again, grabs her purse from the coat rack by the door, and then reconsiders. "Maybe just a coffee." Her head hurts enough as it is.
"All right. But none of that Greek stuff. It tastes like mud." He shakes his head back and forth really fast and pretends to gag.
She laughs, really laughs for the first time today, batting his shoulder, and walks out of the building with him.
She wraps her arm through his, locking elbows with him. "You know, I hadn't been to church in years. The last time I was there… I prayed for you."
A private, tired smile graces his lips. "I pray for you too."
The End.