Disclaimer: I own nothing - CSI:NY is the property of CBS and its creators. Please do not sue, unless you wish to inherit a dented iPod, a 3 year old laptop and a substantial student debt.
Author's Note: My second foray into the world of Mac/Stella - since we're not going to be getting anything new now that Melina has left (*sob*), I've been inspired to try and keep the fandom alive. So here is my latest offering - hope you enjoy. Please let me know what you think - reviews fuel my muse to finish the story off ;).
PS To Nil1875 - see, I posted it. Now gimme the next chapter of The Dead of Winter! :D
NOTE: This story is a 'missing scene' for Ep 5.17 'Green Piece'. My muse insists that Danny and Lindsay's wedding took place the day after the case concluded. Therefore this occurs after the case wraps, but before their nuptuals. Thanks!
The conclusion of a case usually brought a sense of grim satisfaction to Stella Bonasera. The puzzle had been unravelled, the mystery solved. The guilty party was in custody with enough evidence piled up against them (gathered by the finest CSI's in New York, if she did say so herself) to put them behind bars for a very long time. The victims had justice, and the families had closure. Easily 95% of the cases she worked for the New York City Crime Lab ended like that.
Unfortunately, this one seemed like it was going to fall into that pesky 5% that weren't so easy to reconcile. If the faces of the poor (in so many senses of the word) people in Guiyu, China didn't haunt her dreams tonight, the knowledge of the sacrifice made by Alison Redman, dying in an attempt to save her father even though he barely deserved it, almost certainly would. In either case, it equated to unnecessary death and suffering by everyone except the one who was the most guilty (although she hoped after learning the truth about his daughter, Felix Redman might at least now begin to grow something resembling a conscience).
Either way, Stella wasn't especially looking forward to going home. There was precious little there to distract her from the images dancing around in her head.
So, she was procrastinating – the pile of paperwork on her desk was now substantially smaller than when she had returned from interrogation. Her office in general was a lot tidier too – she could actually walk all the way across it without having to navigate around something. A first, she thought wryly.
Beyond the glass walls of her office, the New York City crime lab carried on as normal, with the nightshift techs busily sifting through evidence gathered in countless other cases, both new and old. The rest of her team were nowhere in sight – given the late hour she imagined they had long-since left for their respective homes or distractions. If Don and Danny were at homes other than their own, she would be the least surprised person on Earth, but that was beside the point. They had all gone somewhere.
All except one, she admitted to herself with a sense of resignation and a mental eye-roll. Mac Taylor was without question the most dedicated CSI she had ever known or worked with, and rarely left the lab at anything remotely resembling a reasonable hour on the best of days. This case – the outright senselessness of the whole thing – and their tangles with the eco-terrorist group the Purists meant that he was unquestionably still in his office, tirelessly pursuing every possible lead to track down more Purists and put them behind bars. She did not doubt that he understood their cause, but Mac was a former Marine, a man of honour, and he had no time or sympathy for the methods the Purists chose to use to send their message.
Shaking her head, Stella turned back to her desk, only to find with some dismay that the pile of paperwork from her IN tray was now all in her OUT tray. She had no viable reason left to avoid going home. Almost as soon as the realisation hit, the images returned, flickering past her mind's eye like some hideous parody of a slide-show. She pushed the heels of her hands into her eyes, squeezing them shut as if it might make the children in her head disappear – it didn't work.
Resigned, Stella pushed back from the desk and rose stiffly – apparently she had been sitting longer than she realised. She rubbed the back of her neck and turned, grabbing her coat from the rack by the door and flipping the light switch off. She stood for a moment in the darkness, weighing her options. She could go home, try to sleep, face the nightmares. She could go to a bar, drown her sorrows in drink long enough to put the nightmares off – that wasn't her style though. As tempting as it might seem now, she would regret it almost immediately – it would be a brief reprieve at best, and avoiding issues in such a manner was not how Stella handled things. She'd been through enough crap in her life, and survived it, to know she was stronger than that. Using alcohol to hide from her fears was weak – Stella was not.
That left her with one more option – the only one, if she were honest with herself – and having made the decision she pushed the glass door open with one hand and turned resolutely toward her chosen destination.