Strong

The real reason Stella left New York traces back to 9/11, and as she goes about her new role of leadership in New Orleans, she must also remember what brought her there.

IMPORTANT: I don't mean to offend anyone by the content of this chapter. I cannot express to you the horror of watching the Twin Towers—the World Trade Center—fall, and neither do I want to. While no one I knew was in the buildings when it collapsed, it made a lasting impression on me that made this chapter—and the next one—hard to write. I have no intentions to desecrate any part of 9/11, and if there are any mistakes that one would like me to fix, please tell me so I can make the corrections. Thank you and I hope you will enjoy your read.

-decyfer

"Time is passing. Yet, for the United States of America, there will be no forgetting September the 11th. We will remember every rescuer who died in honor. We will remember every family that lives in grief. We will remember the fire and ash, the last phone calls, the funerals of the children."

-President George W. Bush, November 11, 2001

New York was screaming.

It was a collective scream heard around the world, of terror and disbelief, of dashed dreams and impossible hopes.

New York was burning.

The smoke wafted in the air, painting lazy curling trails around the rubble. As it burned, the screams reached the other cities, reached the nation separating and connecting each and every one of its people.

New York was dead.

Or, at least, it would never be the same, even after the screams died down and the fires were put out.

But New York and the rest of the nation would not give up.

It would shape a generation and inspire a sleeping nation to stand up and fight for itself. It would make decisions, sometimes controversial, in order to inspire hope. But what it wouldn't do was give up.

Because giving up is only a way to say that the lives that were lost in protection to this country weren't worth enough to fight for.

And the United States of America has never said that before.

From outside the rubble of the South Tower, a man watches in horror. His face is cut and bleeding, hands torn open from sifting through it all. He was once wearing a nice suit, but now it's covered in ash, blood, sweat, and tears, ruined forever in the aftermath. He doesn't blink as he looks at his hands, looks at the blood trailing through the dust, looks through them all the same. Grief washes down his face like a tidal flood, for all that has been lost and will never be found.

He throws himself back into work. He's a first responder, a detective at a crime scene only minutes away. There's a mask on his lower face, concealing the words he's shouting. The screams drown out the sound. It isn't safe to go into the rubble, he knows, but he's on the outskirts, where the people—the citizens—those he was sworn to protect—had jumped, had preferred the air around them to the lick of flames. He steps around brain matter, takes a pulse for one or two, but they're lost, and he knows it well.

The bodies are at angles impossible, and stone litters the street. The North Tower burns on for eternity before it groans and gives out under its own weight. He watches it fall, gaze full of his own weight that he would surely hold for the rest of his life. So many dead. So many maimed. Who would go home to see their loved ones again? Who wouldn't be recovered from the smoldering heap the towers had become?

He realizes that he's breathing, that he's bleeding, that he's alive. He almost laughs out loud, not in relief, but in irony, as everything has been taken from him.

No one on her floor would have gotten out alive. He swallows convulsively as he sees a delicate hand resting neatly on a box, and he almost hopes it's her, for while blood stains the white skin, it will at least bring finality, and at least he will get to put her to rest.

It isn't her, but he isn't surprised, not anymore. Will he ever be again? He can hardly see through the dust and the ash, his eyes are stinging, burning. He's burning.

He hears screaming voices come in tune with each other over the roaring in his ears. It takes time, but he realizes that it's him screaming, that the burning in his throat isn't only from the ash, but also from the terror. The other screams come from a city that has just been attacked, that has just been violated—what had happened?

He realizes that he doesn't know where anyone is, apart from himself, and feels alone, despite the bodies that lay around him. He bends down again and tries to pull a wall off of a woman, but it's too late for her: it was already too late this morning, when she went into work.

He can't possibly know that her name is Eliza and that she's from San Francisco. He won't know that until they pull the crushing weight off of her and until her husband screams her name in shock. She wasn't supposed to be there, she had been visiting her sister on the third floor—a surprise for her birthday—how had this happened?

And he wouldn't have any answers for the man, just like he didn't have any answers for himself now. He tries to take stock of the wasteland around him, for just a moment, but he's close to exhaustion and the world is filled with smoke. He looks up at the fragile remains of the Towers and wonders what the United States had done—what he had done—to deserve this pain. Flames dotted the streets as pieces of drywall rained from the North Tower, the Tower that didn't assault his heart with terrorized madness.

He's being selfish, he knows, but he somehow can't come up with the same amount of horror for those deaths. She hadn't known them. He might have never even seen their faces. He will, soon, though—with their eyes open and staring, rips in their flesh, shreds of skin hanging off their bodies and crushed bone inside them giving way for the medical examiner's knife. He wonders briefly how many teams will be called in to clear the rubble, to identify the bodies that could be salvaged.

He pauses briefly over a man that looks like he's been torn in half. His eyes are open, but in their unseeing depths he finds something that scares him more than all of the other bodies put together: he sees welcoming, like he was looking forward to his death. A small smile is frozen on his lips, and he recoils away in horror. His mouth opens wide, but no noise comes out as he tries to suck in a desperate breath.

He had been so alone minutes ago. Now, not only did he have this strangely complacent body that he feels staring at him even as he walks away, but also a frantic voice in his head, wondering three-fourths the w's—who and why and even what. Who did this? Why did they do it? What exactly had happened? That was the detective in him, he supposes, as he suppresses the chant.

The screaming is less frequent and his ears, albeit ringing, can hear straight again. The smoke is rising away, being blown another direction, not just sitting and cloaking the surroundings. He can see further, and therefore can think more clearly on his task—survivors.

He imagines a mass exodus is taking place, and as he looks back as far as he can see, he notices other mask-clad individuals that looked to be police officers shepherding people out of the surrounding businesses and homes.

Which is what he should have been doing, if he had had half a brain. He switches on his police radio and listens to it roar orders that he can't quite make out. He has to be calm. But damn it all, what was there to be calm about? Who knew how many people were dead—who knew how many people were still alive out there?

People that were injured could be burning alive, and he was stopping to check the already dead! He hurtles along the street, stopping and taking a pulse or two from the ones he thinks are moving, but it's just a trick—a senseless piece of misinformation his mind is forming, like seeing an oasis in a desert.

Around him is the debris of two monumental structures that had been a part of the world's economy. Around him lays the dead and the dying, those who got up this morning ready for just another boring day at work. Around him lays hopelessness and despair and the crying of children, those who would never see their parents again and those that would.

He made a promise to himself in that instant in which he felt like dropping to his knees and shouting blasphemies to the sky, in the moment where he wished that some force would strike him dead—God, are you there? Can you hear New York screaming? Please, if you're out there, please help us—but nothing comes more than a cool breeze in the scorching debris, telling him nothing.

He looks back again and realizes that he hasn't gone far at all. The path he had taken was filled with huge chunks of metal, yards of twisting wire, and burning materials. The heat is unbearable, but he just now notices it. His shoes are half-melted, his hands scorched and skin burned, and he doesn't care—he can't care anymore.

As police escort a family out, a little girl trips over a piece of debris, only it's not a piece of rubble—it's a leg, and he can hear her shrill scream. A figure climbs towards him, carefully but urgently over the dead and the bent and broken pieces of the World Trade Center.

The figure is also suit-clad and a formerly blue tie lies ripped and askew against his chest. Ash obscures his coloration and turns his hair gray, but he recognizes the voice at it calls out to him, recognizes the man underneath the ash, but he can't seem to find the calm man that he had once been.

His face is full of fear. It was an emotion that he had never seen on this man's face before, and it seemed out of place. "Mac," he says.

"Lance," Mac answers, unsurprised at the half-hearted greeting.

No other words are needed. The two stop and stare at the remains of the Twin Towers for a minute, in companionable but heart-wrenching silence, before Lance speaks again. "I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault," the defeated voice next to the Latino offers as an attempt to get out of the conversation he was starting.

The Dayshift Supervisor coughs slightly into his mask and looks over at him through the corner of one squinted eye. While Lance Wheatley is young, able-bodied, and his boss, Mac can usually talk circles around him, and the CSI's rookie orbits, and he can't find it within him to tell Mac that their team is fractured more than it already was.

"I sent Greener to help with the North Tower," Lance says, stuttering over the words 'north' and 'tower' because he can't believe that they're gone yet, either.

Mac is in a puddle of blood, crouched over a partially decapitated woman that he doesn't have to take the pulse of to know she's dead. The destruction and the sparking of electrical wires surrounds them, and Mac takes the opportunity to wipe his bloody hands on his equally bloody shirt. He's torn, cut, and diced in more places than he can count, but he can't really feel the pain, and so he trudges on, looking down into the rubble to make sure he doesn't see anyone that's trapped alive. "Allison? You didn't send her alone, did you?"

Lance grits his teeth at the questioning of his power. He knows that Mac is out of it, that he doesn't mean it, but he should be talking more than he is and that freaks him out enough not to ask exactly what Mac was up to. "No," he answers. "She'll be meeting up with Moran and his rookie, Flack."

Mac's a leader, not a follower. He can follow, but right now he's leading, and Lance can't begrudge him that, when they're dead—he hesitates even to use the word around Mac—and Lance Wheatley hasn't lost anyone important to him, so he feels like he's not doing too much damage to himself by letting Mac do the talking right now. He needed a friend, after all, not someone to order him about. Not right now.

"Listen, Mac, I think you should get out of here," he cringes, waiting for an angry rebuttal that doesn't come. When Lance opens his eyes, Mac has already moved on to another outcropping of concrete, peering into the cavern it had made. "Mac?"

"I heard you," Mac replies, placing a hand on his ash covered face, leaving blood on his jaw. He looked at Lance with eyes that expressed all that he had lost. "I have to find her. I have to find Claire. I won't leave her here, Wheatley. I won't." He turned back to his work, looking up at the burned-out wall that was all that remained of the once great building. "I thought… well, I thought Stella would be here to help me look. Knowing her, she'd be out here already—but I haven't seen her. Have you?"

Lance started. He hadn't thought that Mac didn't know. Hadn't he realized? "I haven't seen her this morning, Mac," he said quietly. "It's a Tuesday."

Mac froze in place. Then, slowly, painfully, he tore his gaze away from the debris to Lance's face. His eyes, which had been full of the pain of Claire's loss and the hatred he felt towards whoever had done this turned into a look of pure horror.

The reason was simple: every Tuesday, Stella and Claire had breakfast together in the Towers.

Question of the Week: What pairings would you like to see? Your answers will have an impact on this story's direction and outcome. Keep in mind, of course, that Danny and Lindsay are not to be messed with.

A/N: This story will deal with the sensitive topic of cancer. As I myself have dealt with the effects cancer can have on lives, I can safely say that this story is not for everyone. If you do choose to continue with the story, you have my thanks and appreciation, but know that you can back out at any time. Please know that I have limited knowledge of this particular type of cancer dealt with within this story and would appreciate any feedback that would make this story a better read. One other thing to know: this story takes place just after season six. All characters season six and beyond will be included.

Additionally, this story will be run mainly on your input. This means that I will need you, as my wonderful readers, to influence this story for the better. I'm leaving pairings, OCs, and ranks to you, if you'd like to have them. Thanks!