The air in this room feels thin. All the oxygen had left at once when she heard about Shane Casey and little Lucy, and even when Mac finishes telling her that Lindsay's shot was perfect, that everyone is okay, Stella is finding that her lungs haven't fully caught up.
It ended well runs like a mantra through her mind. It is so different from the last time the team all sat together in a hospital waiting room, reeling from loss. Lindsay and Lucy are fine, getting looked over as standard procedure, not because they're hurt. There's nothing wrong.
Her friends are safe. The monster is defeated.
So why can't she breathe?
She thinks of all the time she's spent waiting outside hospitals doors for news about victims that were never going to make it. She thinks - her mind spinning - that there's not a single street in this city that hasn't been painted with blood, that isn't haunted by ghosts.
The brightest lights and the darkest alleys all tied together by death, and she has seen so much of it.
How much more horror can this city hold? The yawning chasm that has cracked open a blinding ache in her chest tells her the answer: more than she can take.
As Danny drops a kiss to Linday's forehead, Stella looks away. It's an intimate thing, the relief he's feeling to have his family still at his side. Mac is talking to Flack, the two of them huddled, voices low. Discussing next steps and paperwork and getting the shoot cleared by IAB as necessary; she doesn't need to hear them to know that they're thinking about how to make this easier for friends who've become family.
She's not up for that conversation just yet, not when the world seems to be moving in fits and starts, too loud and too quiet all at once, the fluorescents blinding her and keeping her in the dark.
She feels out of place here, even among the people she calls family. The only people she has.
And she almost lost more of them tonight.
When did her world become so small? When she joined the lab, she had friends she swore she'd never lose touch with, whose invitations she declined until they simply stopped calling. How did she forget to look up from the dead bodies and take in the city around her?
She needs fresh air. Wandering away, she absently notes that someone will recognize her disappearance, but she can't make herself care about that.
Leaning against a railing outside, Stella can feel a scream she won't give voice to trying to crawl its way up her throat. Instead, she looks out at the twinkling lights, tries to breathe in the city around her.
She's sworn to protect and serve this place, but New York - her home, the only home she's ever known - is a cold, uncaring place that will just as soon chew you up and spit you out. She wonders how she didn't notice it happening to her.
In her bones, a fatigue washes over her, and she can't remember the last time she wasn't tired. Ever since Angell, since Papakota, she's been exhausted, but hurtling forward for fear of what would happen if she came to a stop. Running a few steps off the cliff before ever realizing there's no longer solid ground below.
Throwing herself into her work in a desperate attempt to stay blind to the fact that she is surrounded by buildings whose beauty she can no longer see for the blood she knows has dripped down their walls.
"Where are you?" Mac's hand covers hers on top of cold metal. He's found her out here, but the look in his eyes makes it clear he knows that she's far away in her own mind.
"New York," is the only response Stella can muster, but she knows it doesn't reassure him. The crease of his brow, the kindness in his eyes. The way that he reaches for her as though she's fragile, as though she may break apart in front of him.
He may not be wrong.
"Let's go home."
Whether he means her place or his, she doesn't particularly care. She follows him either way.
They don't speak on the car ride back, and Stella pretends she doesn't notice the way his eyes slide over to her at every red light. She stares out the window at a city she barely recognizes anymore.
He turns left, heading downtown. His place, then.
She turns up the heat, fiddling with the blowers on the passenger side. She feels like she has so much to say, and no words to say it with.
She's tired.
"I should have seen it." Mac's keys clatter on the counter, and Stella isn't ready for this. He brushes a stray curl back behind her ear tenderly, lifting her chin so that she's looking right at him. "I should have seen this."
She's not sure she wants to know how transparent she is in this moment, not sure she wants to know all that he can see.
She pastes a smile on that she knows wouldn't fool him even if he hadn't been watching her not bother to pretend she's okay the last twenty minutes. "I didn't even know myself, Mac. I know you pride yourself on making sure your people are good and stable and able to do the job, but-"
"This isn't about my position as head of the lab, Stella." Mac's eyes are gravely serious, but filled with a warmth that Stella wishes she could still feel. There's a coldness that has crept into her bones, a grief that has eaten her from the inside out. "I'm your best friend; I should have seen it."
She shakes her head, but he presses on, more adamantly now, taking a step closer to her. "The Garito case," he says. "When you couldn't let yourself believe it was suicide. When you couldn't let yourself think that grief could do that to her, to someone you knew."
"I was right," Stella protests, her words fighting against the tightness in her throat, coming out far more raw than she wanted.
"You usually are," Mac acknowledges. Once, she would have looked smug at hearing it. Would have worn a smile on her face the rest of the day thinking about it. "But you don't usually sleep in the lab. That's my thing," he admits with a wry smile.
"And the Compass Killer case," he says, looking at her searchingly, and Stella wonders if he can't see right through her, if this is how people interrogated by him feel like. Like he already knows the answers he's looking for in her eyes. "You wanted it closed, and you did the work."
"I can hear the _but_ at the end of that sentence." She wants him to stop, can't bear this moment of him flaying her open another second longer. Why is she letting this continue? Why is she asking to hear it?
"You didn't take it as personally." She steps back, a flush of anger running through her, the first thing she's truly felt all night, it seems. His hand on her elbow keeps her close. "Think about the Cabbie Killer case. Can you honestly tell me it felt the same?"
No. No, she can't. From the look on his face, he knows it. "I'm tired," she whispers, and it's more true than it's ever been. They once worked a triple shift together, rushing around the city from scene to scene, to the lab and back out to the field; she'd been swaying on her feet when it was done, exhausted and sore and excited to do it all again the next day.
She wonders where that urgency went, how it slipped away from her. How she went from listening to the police scanner in the shower to dreading the ring of her phone.
Stella lets herself fall forward, her face buried into the crook of his neck. His arms wrap around her instinctively, pulling her closer, a comfort she hadn't known how desperately she needed until she got it.
"It's why you let me take care of Don after Angell, after the bar shooting.I know you two were close, and you kept reaching out for me after," Mac continues, and she hopes he can't feel the hitch in her breath, and knows he probably can. "You needed me to come out of my office," he says, like he's only realizing now it wasn't only for his sake that she tried to get him out of the shell he'd crawled into after the shooting. "You lost Angell-"
"And Papakota," she whispers, and she can feel him go still beneath her. He'd forgotten. They all had, she knows. Stella lost the closest thing to a father she'd ever known, lost a friend, and only just ducked under a hail of bullets that hit another friend in a matter of weeks.
People assume she's always alright, so she carried on, doing all she could to take care of everyone else while she had started fraying at the seams. Coming undone one careless string at a time.
"I should have seen it," Mac repeats. "I should have been there."
She's not sure what possesses her to say it now when she's kept it to herself this long. Whether it's meant as a confession of guilt or a weapon to drive between his ribs. Pulling out of his embrace, she looks down at the floor before meeting his gaze, reckless admission on her tongue. "I slept with Adam."
It's the first time in many years that Stella can't tell what's going on behind Mac's eyes. Maybe the impropriety of it - she is his boss, after all. Maybe the time they'd discussed his crush on her and she had likened it to a schoolboy following around his teacher like a puppy. Maybe the argument they'd had over budgets, and how she insisted the lab needed new technology more than it needed Adam Ross.
Or maybe he's thinking of the nights he'd spent in the lab, rebuffing her when she would tell him to go home, to get some rest. Holding her at arm's length when she would try to offer comfort, not considering that she might need her friend, too.
Maybe he's wondering how he missed the damage she'd been carrying all this time, too.
Whatever it is, he doesn't say, wrapping her in his arms again, tighter than before. "Did it work?" The question itself is matter of fact, but there's something Stella still doesn't recognize in his voice. In the question itself.
"Well," she aims for a sardonic tone, but misses, her voice too strained and low to carry off casual, "I was able to forget, for a night. But… no. I don't know what I thought I was doing."
"Why Adam?" True bafflement is evident in his voice, but so is an edge that Stella can't quite place. It's disconcerting, having had him memorized for so long, to discover parts of him she hasn't yet seen, doesn't know how to categorize. "He's not-"
He doesn't finish the sentence, and there's some relief as Stella finds he doesn't have to. However different he is right now, she still knows him. When she feels like she knows nothing at all, she knows him.
Adam is not many things. Not the obvious choice, not a close friend. Not someone she trusts to see beneath her scars.
Not him.
Adam is sweet and he had a crush on her, but she isn't invested in him. He's someone she could call, grief stricken and a little more than slightly drunk, and not have to worry about what might become of them in the morning.
She would never put someone she cared more about in that position, but Adam is not someone she cares more about.
"That's the point." Mac seems to get what she means, his eyes falling shut slowly. "I wanted to forget, Mac. And he's… it was easy," she shrugs, "to tell him it would never happen again and mean it."
His phone blares on the counter behind them, and his reluctance to step away is obvious, even as he reaches back to check the incoming message. "Danny," is all he gives as explanation, but it's certainly reason enough.
The memories from earlier tonight rush back in, the chill that had only just begun to fade nearly rattling her teeth. Mac types out a quick message as she tries to stop herself from shivering in a warm apartment, her arms wrapping around herself. She looks around the room, thinking about all the time she's spent in this place. Cooking meals in his kitchen, doing puzzles on the couch. That time he'd tried - unsuccessfully - to get her into baseball after she'd failed to recognize a Mickey Mantle bobblehead and she'd kept coming up with increasingly silly ways to 'make the game more interesting' because he laughed every time.
It feels so far away. Like those memories belong to someone else, someone more happy and carefree, someone who happens to look like her and share her name.
"You look exhausted." Stella startles back to attention, blinking at Mac. How long had she been spacing out? How long had he been watching her?
From the shadows she sees in his eyes, long enough.
"Why don't you take the day off tomorrow?" He reaches out and squeezes her shoulder. "I'll take your shift. You don't have to come back to the lab right away."
An echo of the feeling from earlier, of something horrible and alien clawing its way up her throat, returns. She doesn't know what to say. She should rest. She should sleep. Take the day, come back when daylight has shone on everything that has happened tonight.
The idea of it seems beyond her. Going back to the life she's been living, facing tomorrow as one more day, just another day. She can't picture herself in her life anymore. She shuts her eyes, head spinning, tears she hasn't noticed building pricking at her eyes.
"You're not coming back." Mac's voice sounds hollow, weary. He knows it's true.
"I'm sorry," she whispers, slowly shrugging her shoulder out from under his hand.
And she is. She's sorry for reaching her breaking point before he did. Sorry for being hopelessly lost in the only city she's ever known. For all the moments they missed, for leaving even though she hasn't done so yet.
She knows he can hear it all in her voice.
"Already forgiven."