The Five Stages of Grief

by La Guera

In the aftermath of the bombing, the team reacts to Flack's injuries.

2. Anger

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

A/N: This story contains spoilers for S1 and S2. Read at your own risk. keeps bunging up my formatting, so if there are no italics where they should be, my apologies.

Stella was not surprised that it was her and Mac who wound up holding vigil over Flack in the hospital hallway, clutching twin cups of coffee. Somehow it always came down to the two of them when everything went to hell, Captain America and his avenging Athena, and she found that reassuring even as she berated all the saints in the pantheon for bringing her back here to these ugly, green walls that smelled like medicine and repressed death. She took a sip of her coffee to mask the stink and the unwelcome memories it carried.

The last time you were here, you were a couple floors down, getting a sterile, cotton swab jabbed into your vagina by a nurse with twitchy fingers, and Flack was pacing outside the door and pretending to be riveted by the out-of-date Outdoor Life magazine he'd found on one of the tables. The last time you were here, you had Frankie Mala's skin under your bloody, ragged fingernails, and you were trying desperately not to remember all the other places his DNA had been over the past few months. Mac was trying to figure out if you were a cold-blooded murderer, and Flack was trying to peel off your skin as gently as he could. The last time you were here, you were a victim, and you hated every minute of it.

Of course she'd hated it. That wasn't the way it was supposed to work. She caught the bad guys. She put them away. That was the deal she'd made with the Almighty on the day she'd decided to become a cop. Being a victim wasn't a part of the deal, never had been, and she couldn't help but feel a little gypped as she'd lain on that examination table with her legs in the stirrups and one of her colleagues a head-turn away from getting an eyeful.

Since when has God ever driven a fair bargain? asked a cynical, incredulous voice inside her head. As a child struggling to stay awake in the soporific silence of early-morning Mass, she'd been convinced it was the voice of the Devil, come to tempt her from the path of righteousness. As an adult, she'd come to realize it was the uninflected voice of reason.

Since a quarter to never, that's when, it went on. You should have known that. You do know that. It's one of the first lessons the orphanage taught you. God wasn't fair. Life wasn't fair. It didn't matter how good you were or tried to be, how devoutly you read your prayer book or how deeply you curtseyed. Life had an unpleasant way of turning to shit. Just look at old Job if you need any proof. Poor bastard lived his life by the book with nary a hair out of place, and God still had no problem using him as a living betting chip. That should tell you all you need about God's sense of justice.

There was no justice. That's what life in the orphanage had taught her. Not really. Justice was revenge and retribution in fancy dress. If justice were real, she would never have grown up as a little girl lost, dressed in grey, wool skirts and knee-high socks to match and pretending that Mary Poppins was her mother and would come to rescue her someday. She would have known whether she looked like her mother or her father or both, and she wouldn't have spent the Resurrection Feast every Easter resenting Jesus because he might have been nailed to a cross, but at least he got thirty-three years with his mother first.

That's the other reason you hate it here so much. It smells like the orphanage. Cleanliness is next to godliness, after all, and the nuns, bless their black-habited hearts, had an abiding love of Pine Sol that bordered on the obscene. The whole place was awash in the cloying reek of synthetic pine needles. They even used it on the wooden pews of the small chapel, and sometimes, the smell was so acrid and pungent that your eyes would water. You'd sit in the pew, back ramrod-straight and ankles crossed, and breathe as shallowly as you could because the air burned in your nostrils and lungs. Pine Sol was the smell of penance and absolution.

You hated that stink, and every time it was your turn to scrub the floors or clean the pews, you'd grit your teeth and swear like a sailor in that mental voice that not even the sharp-eared nuns could hear. There was no question of shirking your duty when it came; corporal punishment might have been banished to the days of yore in theory, but the ageless gestalt of the Holy Mother Church moved on its own time, and there still existed ancient nuns who thought nothing of bringing a ruler across the smarting skin of calf or knuckle.

So, you got down on your hands and knees and crawled across the smooth wooden floor, a penitent making her way to absolution, trailing water and Pine Sol in your wake like blood. It was three and a half hours from start to finish, from one side of the chapel to the other, and by the time you dropped the sponge and brush into the bucket of dirty, soapy water, your knees throbbed and your shoulders burned with exertion. The sisters told you that idle hands were the Devil's workshop, and that hard work strengthened faith, and maybe that was true. For them, anyway. But all you ever felt after a morning of scrubbing the chapel was grungy and bone-tired and lonely.

Your knees got the worst of it. From the ages of nine to eighteen, they wore perpetual bruises, and over the months and years of friction, they became thick-skinned and callused. Elephant wattles, the prim, Mary Poppins voice in your head would call them, and when you were a little girl, you'd giggle, because elephants were funny animals, big and lumbering and awkward on their dinner-plate feet. You knew this because the nuns had taken you and the rest of the children to the Central Park Zoo as a reward for good behavior in the summer after first grade. You'd seen all the animals as you'd wandered behind the nuns and jostled elbows and knees with an ugly, cow-licked, snaggle-toothed kid whose name you've long since forgotten, or maybe you never knew it in the first place. But the slow, tootling elephants were your favorite, and you lingered at their enclosure for so long that you earned a stern reprimand from Sister Edna, who seized your wrist in her bony, wattled vulture's talon and dragged you away.

But the comparison wasn't so funny years later, when biological curiosity overrode the long-held theory that boys were the spawn of Satan with poisonous spines for privates. Then it was horrible, and you'd stand in front of the tarnished, full-length mirror in the girls' dormitory with your grey skirt hiked above your knees, turning this way and that in the feeble hope that a different angle of light would erase the hard calluses that the mirror reflected so pitilessly. It didn't, and you wound up standing there with your grey skirt-so like an elephant's hide when you considered it-bunched in your hands. In your more morbid moments, you imagined that what you were seeing wasn't a callus, but bone, that your knees had grown threadbare from years of scrubbing the wooden floors. A blasphemous part of you wondered what the knees of the nuns looked like beneath their skirts after all these years.

Scullery-maid knees, you called them. Loveless, old nun-knees, and you were determined to get rid of them. The day the State of New York declared you an adult, you packed your bags, kicked the dust of St. Basil's from your heels, and never looked back. You'd been waiting for that day since you were old enough to know what you were missing, and you'd been saving toward a place of your own since you got your first job at fifteen, taking orders at a Tastee Freeze after school. You left without a fare thee well or a forwarding address, and that was the way you wanted it. Let your unhappy childhood rot in the dark corners of the cloister. The overwhelming stench of Pine Sol would cover it nicely.

It didn't take you long to re-invent yourself. The scullery knees were the first to go, smoothed away by liberal and fanatical applications of scented moisturizing lotion. You threw away the dingy convent clothes permeated with the lingering memory of cleanser and weekends spent on your knees beneath the forbidding cross upon which all the sins of the rested, and bought clothes with bright colors and flattering cuts meant to accentuate the figure you used to examine so forlornly in front of the dormitory mirror. They made you look like a woman instead of a gangly, unisex child who had once prayed for Mary Poppins to spirit her away with her magical umbrella. You were sure that the plunging necklines on some of your choices would have scandalized the well-intentioned sisters who had so jealously guarded your virtue, and the thought was delicious.

You enrolled at NYU and set about defining who you were and wanted to be. For a while, you dreamed of being a dancer and seeing your name up in lights on the Great White Way. Dance was graceful and intrinsically feminine, even when performed by men, and sheltered as you had been by the withering brides of Christ that were gradually eroding to sainted dust within the walls of St. Basil's, you were painfully aware of its simmering sensuality and its close kinship to sex, that most forbidden of all fruits.

So you signed up for dance classes and joined the milieu of lithe bodies that pranced and pirouetted across small, dark stages that were years and miles from the hot, relentless lights of Broadway. During the day, you preened and flexed and high-kicked until your ankles and knees wept in time to the music, and at night, you smoked your first cigarette, drank your first beer, and lost your virginity to a guy with more talk than stamina. After it was over, you wondered what all the fuss was about and why the nuns had worked so hard to steer you clear of sins of the flesh. You figured out why a couple months later when you met a guy who knew what he was doing, and then sex was a vice in which you'd happily engage periodically for the rest of your life, but the rest you could take or leave. You tie one on now and then during the holidays, but you haven't touched a cigarette in twenty years.

Eventually, your knees and ankles refused to cooperate no matter how much ibuprofen you dry-swallowed or how many shrieking muscles you numbed with ice, so you turned in your leotard and leg-warmers in search of a profession that couldn't be wrested away from you by the vagaries of time or the stiffening of joints. You'd had your fill of religion, and so you gravitated to the other end of the spectrum, to the hard, ruthless exactitude of science. Science was equal opportunity in all respects; the weight of a gram was the same whether you knew your parents or not, and unlike people, who were usually full of shit, science gave it to you straight.

You might have ended up a botanist or a chemist, but you knew that all power sprang from the muzzle of a gun, and that's what you wanted. Power. Not to hurt anyone or play God, but just to make sure that nobody but you decided who you were going to be. Justice might have been a manmade concept that existed solely because people chose to believe it did, but it was a far cry better than the shitty job God the Father had been doing in his firmament. You couldn't wave your hand and make it so that no other kid grew up wondering who they were and where the hell they came from, and you couldn't stop people from making stupid choices, but you could make sure that no sin went unpunished.

So, you headed for the academy armed with nothing but brains and determination. You busted your ass twice as hard as the next recruit in line, and you learned to ignore the snide sexual innuendoes and the not-so-subtle leers at your cleavage. You learned to bust heads and balls with equal impunity, and if some recruit got too grabby on the mat, you didn't hesitate to defend your personal boundaries with the snap of breaking fingers. It landed you in hot water with the academy brass a few times and earned you a reputation as a woman who didn't know how to play ball. You've gone to loggerheads with IAB half a dozen times since, and each time you have to deal with their condescending, ass-covering crap, you come out more determined than ever to not take any of their bullshit.

You might hate St. Basil's, and you might even have a reason to, but that place made it possible to do this job. It toughened your soul the same way those wooden floors toughened the skin of your knees, by stripping away all the pretty artifice of childhood. You never had the luxury of thinking life was fair, so you weren't surprised by the tragedies that confronted you when you hit the streets with a badge and a gun. While other rookies were puking into the gutters at the scene of a nasty triple with blood and brains smeared on the walls and ceiling, you could observe it with a straight face. That God had a nasty habit of pulling the rug from underfoot when you least expected it was old news to you. You just took your notes and made your reports, and then you squared the brim of your hat, clapped on your sidearm, and caught the son of a bitch. That was all you could do.

Besides, try as you might, it's not like you could forget all the lessons life in the orphanage taught you. They were sunk too deeply into your skin, embedded beneath it like a latent case of the shingles that never quite erupts. To this day, you cannot stand the scent of Pine Sol, and your own bathroom smells like citrus(and blood if you think about it for too long).

It taught you love of privacy above all. And space. You spent eighteen years sleeping on a narrow cot in a big room with thirty other girls. Nothing was hidden from curious eyes. Not the embarrassing red badge of puberty that accosted you in the middle of the night when you were twelve, and not the constant, nagging need to massage the soreness from your budding breasts. Colds and flus were shared along the ward like whispered secrets, and if one of the older, more brazen girls had braved the art of Touching Herself, the news rippled through the dorms with the speed of a snapping bedsheet. Not even dreams were secret if you had the misfortune to talk in your sleep. You didn't-at least not that you know of-but other girls did, and the night hours were filled with moans and whispers and cries as the ghosts came to drift down the aisles and rattle their chains at the dreaming.

Privacy was and is your most cherished commodity. You like airy rooms to let in the light, but you have curtains to block out unwanted scrutiny and heavy doors separating each room from the next and you from the outside world. None of your apartments had to be big, but they all had to have doors separating one room from another. It's a requirement that borders on the pathological if you ever cared to admit that to yourself. You've got all kinds of quirks that mark you as a State kid. Like throwing away clothes the minute they start to fade or grow drab, to turn grey like the lackluster plumage of a baby penguin. Or your stubborn refusal to wear socks that come any higher than your ankles.

They're all hallmarks of who you were and never wanted to be, so you don't acknowledge them, but they're there all the same. You can change your clothes and your hair and cultivate a set of balls to rival those found on the egotistical pricks on the Vice Squad, but underneath the skin, you're always going to be Stella Bonasera, a little girl in a grey, wool skirt who knew better than to talk to strangers and somehow found one standing in the middle of her kitchen anyway.

An image arose in her mind of Frankie standing in her kitchen, living shadow in the brightness of the room. It had been such a shock to see him there with his broad sculptor's hands full of takeout bags. Anger had come a moment later, white and hot as phosphorous in her veins, but for a few precious seconds, she had been rooted to the spot by surprise.

It was the audacity of it that galled her the most, the presumptuousness of it that still stung and burned beneath her skin and on her tongue like rancid vinegar. He had invaded her most private space as though he had every right to be there just because he had a cock between his legs, and it didn't matter that she'd never extended the invitation. He had assumed it was his because he had been so sure she was his, and she often wondered if the glimmer of shock she'd seen in his eyes just before she pulled the trigger hadn't been so much shock at the realization of his death as outrage that she'd one-upped him.

It's his eyes that have troubled you the most, isn't it, Stella, dear? said a prim voice that reminded her of Sister Ertrude, the Mother Superior that had presided over St. Basil for most of her time there. You read once that the eyes were the windows to the soul, and as practical and pragmatic as you turned out to be in most other aspects of your life, that bit of fancy has always stuck with you, just like a rescuing Mary Poppins did when you were little. Maybe it spoke to a part of you that wasn't as jaded as the rest, the part that still believes in good and happily ever after and the possibility, however remote, that justice might really exist, after all.

Sister Ertrude replaced Frankie on the canvas of her mind, though the takeout cartons he'd been carrying inexplicably remained, arrayed on the smooth, wooden surface of her desk like cheap chess pieces on a squareless board.

Probably the only hunk of wood in the whole damn place that I never dusted, scrubbed, or polished, she thought morbidly.

Language, Miss Bonasera, Sister Ertrude chided, but there was no threat in it, no ominous crack of wood on papery palm. In fact, she sounded faintly amused, and a furtive smile twitched in the thin corners of her colorless lips. Her thin fingers were interlaced on the desktop, half-hidden by the cluster of cartons, and her habit framed her face like a Pharoah's ceremonial headdress.

Whatever the reason, she went on kindly, you were obsessed with the idea for a while. While the other girls studied the boys' faces and hair and derrieres, you found yourself riveted by their eyes. You studied them every chance you could, over the battered tops of books or under the pretense of wiping specks of dirt from their cheeks. You were convinced that you could tell the kind of men they would become if you could only meet their gaze. It was a child's notion, inexpertly employed, and yet, the forensic psychology textbooks you read bore it out. A wealth of information was contained in the eyes for those who knew how to look for it-love and hate and indifference, madness or cold sanity, cunning or deception. The mouth of Man is imbued with Satan's forked tongue, but the eyes cannot lie. It's a belief that has served you well in your life, and it's why you always look a suspect in the eyes. Sometimes, they hold the only truth when the evidence is slow in coming. A good look into a man's eyes has spared you a great deal of grief and heartache over the years.

Oh, but Frankie was a rude awakening, wasn't he? Your time-tested hypothesis was obliterated in that kitchen. The eyes staring back at you weren't the same eyes that you had seen by candlelight, the same eyes that could find beauty in a single brushstroke on canvas or a line of clay on a sculpture. They were lifeless eyes, cinder eyes pressed into a vacantly grinning face. They were so fundamentally wrong that you wondered how you could possibly have missed it. It was your job to notice things like that.

You wondered it again when he was looming over you in your own bathtub, smiling that terrible, empty smile and speaking in that low, too-rational voice that promised more than conciliatory kisses over dinner. It was the voice of lunacy and serial killers, and it turned your stomach to think that you had kissed that mouth that seemed to have sprouted too many teeth, that you had allowed the same hands that had forced you into your own bathtub to trace illicit, possessive lines over your most exposed, secret flesh. It was disgusting and violating, and as you sawed through your flexcuffs with the unprotected edge of your razor and felt your blood dripping into your spotless tub, fear and confusion was replaced by righteous indignation.

Everyone thinks that shooting him was the worst part, that the report of those three shots is what torments your dreams and keeps you up at night, but it's not. You hear the echo of those shots with every step you take in high heels and in every slam of your locker door in the labs, it's true, but what haunts you are the questions that came afterward, the doubts that Flack unwittingly seeded in your mind when he pulled up a chair beside your bed, flipped open his notebook, and asked you in his gentlest yet most professional voice what happened in your apartment.

For every answer you supplied, he raised three more questions, ones you hadn't had time to consider. Was your door unlocked when you got home? Any idea how Frankie could have gained access to your apartment or keys without your knowledge? Did you, at any time, notice that your keys were missing or otherwise moved from where you'd left them? Was there any sign that this Mala guy was a whackjob? All standard questions, questions you've asked shaken victims yourself, but you couldn't resist a needling resentment that the tables had been turned.

Not that you'd ever admit it, especially not to Flack, who was only doing his job, and who, for all his swagger and bluster on the streets, was remarkably sensitive to his friends. If he even suspected that he'd hurt you, he'd ride himself unmercifully for months on end. Besides, you'd rather suck it up than spend the rest of your career with your friends walking on eggshells. So you kept your mouth shut.

Sister Ertrude peered into one of the takeout boxes on her desk. Sweet and sour pork. My favorite, you know. Then, ruefully, Damn. It's Lent.

Frankie again, eyes blank and face stony as he raised the gun. Three blood roses blooming on the white of his shirt just before the world spiraled to black. Bang. Bang. Bang. She closed her eyes against the memory, and her fingers closed spasmodically around the heavy cardboard of her coffee cup.

"Stella." Mac's voice, grating and weary. "Stella?' His fingers on her forearm.

She blinked to clear her head and forced her fingers to relax. "Hmm? What's up, Mac?"

Mac shrugged. "Nothing. You just looked a little lost there for a minute." His voice was calm, but his eyes were tense and bloodshot, and he was pale and bruised in the harsh, fluorescent lighting of the hallway.

She took a sip of coffee and grimaced. It was cold and gritty. Apparently, she'd been drifting longer than she'd thought. "I'm okay, Mac," she assured him, and patted his hand. "I'm just-," She shrugged in turn and wiped her burning, tired eyes with the heel of one hand. "It's just been a long day that's only getting longer."

"You don't need to stay here, Stella. Go home. Get some rest. I'll call you if anything changes."

She dismissed the suggestion with an emphatic shake of her head. "No way, Mac. I'm here for the long haul."

Mac knew better than to argue. He simply looked at her for a moment in speculative silence before nodding and sitting back in his chair. "All right, then," he said. "But if you change your mind-," He left the sentence unfinished.

She mustered a wan smile for him. "I know, Mac. Thanks." She patted his shoulder.

Leaving was out of the question, and it didn't matter how exhausted she was or how leaden her arms and legs felt. She owed it to Flack to stay here until his family turned up or until he opened his eyes, whichever came first. It was the least she could do, and Flack would have done the same for her had the situations been reversed.

He has done the same, Sister Ertrude pointed out matter-of-factly. She was still behind her desk now, but the takeout cartons were blessedly absent. He rode with you in the ambulance on the way to the ER, and he stayed with you even after his job as a detective was over. He could have left after he took your statement, but he didn't. He lingered in the hallways and pretended to be fascinated by the dreadful watercolor art that adorned the walls or the ancient, crumbling magazines. He puttered an aimless beat outside your door.

He never said it, but he worried for you. It was in his eyes, so dark and full of outrage and sorrow on your behalf, and in the way he stuck his head into your room at regular intervals to see if you needed anything. He brought you three boxes of tissues because he never remembered bringing you the first one. Sometimes, he just came into the room and sat, hands folded loosely between his knees. He never tried to engage in small talk or cheer you up. He just…sat. It was his way of letting you know he had your back, and it made your chest ache.

He was the one who told you that you were in the clear with IAB, and he was practically dancing when he delivered the news, a kid who'd gotten to open the biggest present first on Christmas morning. He helped you into your coat and wrapped you in a gentle hug, and in that moment, you could gladly have kissed him because you knew he was good people.

He offered to drive you to a hotel, but you insisted on going home. You weren't going to let Frankie take your home from you on top of everything else. You could tell from the set of his jaw that he thought that was a terrible idea, but he didn't push. He just helped you into the car and got into the driver's seat. Halfway home, he offered to let you stay at his place for the night until Crime Scene Clean-up had expunged all traces of the boogeyman from your carpet, tub, and walls, and you were tempted because Flack was safe, and there would be someone to talk to if the ghost of Frankie Mala found its way into your dreams. But you had your pride, and to back out now would smack of being a damsel in distress, so you gritted your teeth, squared your shoulders, and told him to keep driving.

He drove you home and walked you to your door, and then he sidled there. He asked you if you wanted him to stay, and you told him no and shut the door in his face. You could still hear him pacing in the hallway for several minutes thereafter, and even after you knew he was gone, you sensed him down on the street, standing on the sidewalk with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his coat as he watched your window.

You made sure he was gone before you conceded defeat, packed a bag, and left the apartment to the blood you could still smell beneath the Comet and bleach the cleaning techs had used to blot it from the carpet and tub, and the peppery tickle of cordite, anger distilled into breath. You didn't want him to see you running away with your tail between your legs. When you casually mentioned to Mac that you'd decided to move a few weeks later, Flack's only reaction was to blink once, and then ask if you wanted anything from his coffee run.

Here in the hostile light of the hospital, she had to admit that Flack hadn't been her first thought when the apartment building detonated with the bellowing roar of crumbling stone. It was Mac she'd thought of. Mac, who could be so damn single-minded when he was on the trail that he didn't see the shadows encroaching from the rear. He'd nearly been crushed by a cargo container at the Port Authority once because he was too busy sinking his teeth into a suspect to notice the rumble of imminent calamity. Mac waited for the truth, but when it came, he went in hard and without hesitation, and it had been all too easy for her to imagine him trying to dismantle the bomb with his teeth and a Swiss Army knife because he was damned if he was going to see another innocent soul suffer under his watch.

She had assumed Flack would be fine because he was always fine. He was solid as a rock under his clothes, and he was cool under fire. She'd seen him wrestle perps twice his size into weeping submission and do it with a mesmerizing, giddy joie de vivre, as though wrangling murderers and perverts to the dirty precinct floor was an honor to be savored. Flack was one of the good ones, and she'd never had any doubts that he was going to make it to his pension and then some.

So when she'd seen that pale, convulsing figure strapped to the gurney and registered who it was, her heart had dropped into her knees, and she'd felt gut-punched. "Oh, my God," was all she could say. Then Mac was limping out of the rubble with dirt and blood on his face and hands, and there hadn't been time for anything else. Mac wasn't going to stop until the bastard who'd spilled Flack's blood and killed six others was in custody. So she'd followed in his wake like a baying hound, and whenever she was sure she was too tired to take another step, she only had to picture that twitching body on the gurney.

If she turned her head, she could see Flack through the glass wall of his room. He wasn't convulsing anymore, thank God, but he was still bloodless and fragile and too white against the sheets. Maybe it was because she was used to seeing him in a suit and tie, but the explosion had diminished him. He was smaller than she could ever remember, a child's toy swatted by a careless hand and forgotten where he lay. Her throat constricted.

"Have you called his parents?" she asked Mac suddenly.

He did not tear his gaze from the figure on the bed when he spoke. "Twice."

"Then where the hell are they?" she demanded. It was almost frantic.

Now Mac did look at her. His eyes were bloodshot and ringed with deep bruises of exhaustion, but his voice was strong and even. "I'm sure they'll be here, Stella. They might not have gotten the message yet."

She took a deep breath and forced her jaw to unclench. Mac was right and perfectly reasonable, of course, but…

But it's not right. It's not fair, Sister Ertrude finished for her. Every child should have the love of his parents to fall back on when the rest of the world goes to hell. It's the one constant, the one great, universal truth to a child. Your parents love you even if no one else will or can. You've seen it a thousand times. Mothers of junkies dredged out of the Hudson or Long Island Sound weep bitter tears for the angels they've lost, and so do the mothers of child-killers and rapists. There's no love in the world like mother love, and the lack of it is devastating.

You know what it's like because you've lived it. They say you can't mourn what you don't know you've lost, but that's-if you'll pardon my corrupted Latin, dear-bullshit. You knew very well what you had lost, been denied, and it pissed you off. Never did you feel its absence more acutely than when you were sick. Then all you wanted was your mother.

When you were six, you contracted chicken pox, and the sisters put you in quarantine to keep it from spreading. You burned with fever and itched all over, and it was the loneliest week of your life. The sisters tried; they were overworked, not callous, but no matter how often they came to sing or smooth your sweaty hair from your hot forehead or how much calamine lotion they smeared over the pox, it never quelled the voracious itch. Their hands were gentle and well-intentioned, but they were not your mother's hands, and they did not possess a mother's magic. So you cried and cried, and at night, you prayed for a mother with Mary Poppins' face to come and make it better.

You learned to live with it eventually, learned to navigate around the gaping hole in the fabric of your life. You papered over it with grim practicality and steely-eyed resolve. What's done is done, and no amount of whining will change it, you told yourself, and soldiered on.

You were right, absolutely right, but the reality of it still rests uneasily on your bones, a dress three sizes too large or two sizes too small. Sometimes, it chafes your skin like the starched wool of your orphanage socks, and it's an effort of will not to lash out at the oblivious, Fifth Avenue parents who treat their children like status symbols or inconvenient pets to be boarded the minute the novelty wears off.

Flack needs his mother now. He deserves her now. If some rotting, hollow-eyed junkie merits sobbing hysteria, then so does he. He ought to have her in there holding his hand and stroking his face and pressing dry, trembling kisses to his forehead. She should be in there telling him childhood bedtime stories or just praying for his life while the beads of the rosary dripped through her fingers like tears. But he's alone in that room, encased in glass like a medical museum exhibit, and his parents don't even have the luxury of being dead.

She studied Flack through the glass, lips pressed into a thin line to keep her growing fury locked behind her gritted, grinding teeth. The nasal canula feeding him oxygen stood in sharp relief against his pallid skin, and his eyelashes were oil drops on alabaster as they fluttered. His lips were parted just enough to offer a hint of his teeth. His arms were arranged perfectly at his sides, and his broad hands were slack and limp on the thin blanket. He was utterly helpless.

She swallowed a mouthful of cold coffee and set the cup by her feet. If I find out they couldn't be bothered to cut short a trip to Atlantic City, I'll-, She let the thought hang. She didn't know what she'd do, but the thought of it burned in her veins like a shot of iodine.

Now that she considered it, she knew very little about Flack's family. That his father was a lionized legend of the NYPD was a matter of public record, but beyond that, Flack kept his mouth shut on the subject of his roots. He turned up at the labs for the parties on Christmas and New Year's Eve to raid the olives and the prosciutto cold cuts and squabble with Danny over the baseball superiority of the Yankees to the Mets. More often than not, he'd pour himself into a cab at the end of the night, happily drunk and bellowing at Danny not to forget what he fuckin' said, didja hear, Messer?

She'd asked him why he wasn't with his family once a few Christmas Eves ago. She hadn't meant to pry; God knew she had her own secrets to tend. She had just been curious as to why he would want to spend the holiday with the Nerd Squad when his father was alive and well in Yonkers.

"Hey, Flack," she'd said as she'd sidled up to the bar for another martini. "You mind if I ask you something?"

Flack, who was buzzed but not yet drunk, had raised his glass to his lips and taken a sip of his rum and Coke. "Sure, Stel." He'd crunched a piece of ice between his teeth.

"What are you doing here?" She'd gestured around the room at the CSIs. Some of the lab techs were still in their coats.

His brow had furrowed in confusion, and he'd set his drink on the bar. "What do you mean? There somewhere I should be? Some rule about cops minglin' with the Nerd Squad?" He'd been smiling, but his voice was wary, even a trifle hurt.

She'd shaken her head. "Of course not. We know you liven up any party." She'd shrugged. "I just thought you'd want to spend Christmas with your family."

His smile had faded, and those brilliant, blue eyes had dimmed. He'd picked up his glass and drained it. "You don't need to worry about that, doll. I'm right where I wanna be tonight. I'll see my family tomorrow down at the stone garden," he'd muttered, and signaled for another.

She'd opened her mouth to ask what the hell that meant, but he'd shaken his head. "I gotta go, Stel," he'd said abruptly, and taken the drink that had come sliding down the bar. A few seconds later, he'd threaded seamlessly into the crowd, and the next time she'd seen him, he'd been picking listlessly at the olive tray while Danny harangued him about girls always wanting jewelry for Christmas. There had been no merry bellowing at the end of the night. There hadn't even been a cab. Flack had walked home, weaving unsteadily over the icy sidewalk with his hands thrust into the pockets of his overcoat and his muffler tucked haphazardly around his mouth and nose. She'd been tempted to follow him, if for no other reason than to make sure he got home without busting his face, but in the end, she'd let him go. She'd been sure he would be pissed at her, but when they returned to work the day after Christmas, everything was okay.

You saw Flack, Sr. once, a voice said suddenly. At a police barbecue, one of those meet the public campaigns cooked up by the brass to improve the department image with the public. Normally, you gave them a miss, but Aiden wanted to go as an excuse to girl-talk on the clock, and it wasn't so bad once you got there. You and Aiden settled down under a tree with watered-down lemonade and gossiped about the latest crop of rookies while you watched Flack and Danny kick the ball around with a bunch of neighborhood kids. Flack on one team, Danny on the other, and they were doing a heroic job of keeping it clean, considering the both had mouths like longshoremen when competition was involved.

Flack was sweaty and happy and careful not to jostle the kids as he moved over the grass. It was funny to see him dressed in shorts, with those bony, Irish knees peeking from beneath the hems like newborn vulture chicks, sparsely haired and knobbly. Danny was leaner, and his knees were in better shape, but he paused every few minutes to push his sliding glasses onto the bridge of his nose.

The game was winding down when Flack, Sr. showed up, shadow stretching across the grass like blight. You knew who he was without having to ask, because Flack was his father's son. The same eyes, the same square jaw. Even the same mouth. Sr. was greyer than his namesake, and heavier, but he carried himself with the same swagger.

Flack was crouched in the grass, trying to teach a four-year-old how to kick the ball, when his father's shadow loomed over him.

Hey, son, his father said, and rocked on the balls of his feet.

Flack froze, and his head came up by torturous degrees, as if he didn't want to see who was standing there.

Hey, Pop, he said stiffly, and rocked back on his own heels, a plant drawing away from noxious, lethal night.

A strained half-smile. Gotta minute? Just to talk?

Flack studied his father, jaw twitching. His eyes narrowed and darted to Danny, but he was already retreating, hand rubbing furiously at his grimy, sunburned nape. Danny would not be riding to the rescue.

Yeah. All right. He turned to the little boy, who was whacking resolutely at the ball with one small, sneakered foot. Hey, see my friend, Danny, over there? He pointed at Messer, who had taken refuge beneath a tree in the hopes that its branches would hide him from the sun and the conversation brewing before him. Why don't you go ask him to help you keep practicin', and I'll be over to see how you're doin' in a few minutes, all right?"

The boy nodded and scampered off, leaving Flack alone with his father. Danny turned his head as if he were watching something unseemly, and Aiden went off in search of the oatmeal cookies in which she had previously had no interest. You knew you should excuse yourself, too, but you couldn't. You could only watch in morbid fascination.

You remember a lot of things from that stilted conversation on the grass of Central Park. Like the way they never touched each other, not even to shake hands or clap each other on the shoulder. In fact, Flack spent most of the time backing away from his father, trying to stay in the light and warmth of the sun. They were stiff soldier-boys on opposite sides of an invisible line, and Flack stiffened whenever his father's shadow touched him.

You also remember wondering just why in the hell Flack, Sr. was wearing his dress blues to an informal barbecue in June. It was in immaculate condition, but it was too tight around the middle, and the shiny, brass buttons looked dull and fake, cheap, costume jewelry on expensive wool.

But what you remember most is the way Flack looked when he first saw his father standing over him. It wasn't pleasure or respect or even indifference. It was irritation and a flash of something darker and more virulent. For just a minute before his face smoothed to careful blankness, you saw hatred. You still remember the way he looked, crouching on the grass, swallowed by his father's ravenous shadow. Small and tired and defenseless. Just like now.

Suddenly, she didn't want to sit there anymore. She wanted to move, to think and clear her head. She stood abruptly. "I'm going to take a walk, get some air. You want to come?"

Mac shook his head. "No, I'm good."

"I think there's a vending machine down the hall. I know you're not one for chocolate, but I think I saw some apples in it."

Mac grunted. "Considering that they've probably been there since '74, I think I'll pass."

"All right, then. I'll be back in a few."

She set off down the hall and willed herself to let her mind go blank, to concentrate on nothing but the sensation of movement in the soles of her feet and the flexion of her muscles as they moved. It was a calming technique she had learned in an interpretive dance class in her college days, and she had relied on it heavily to get her through particularly tough cases. It allowed her mind to filter out the white noise of her life and focus on the pertinent details of a case.

That was the theory anyway, but ever since Frankie had tainted her life and left himself behind on her former bedroom carpet, it never seemed to work. With every click of her heels on asphalt or concrete or the lab linoleum, she heard the click of her hammer as she turned off the safety and the definitive boom of three shots to the chest. Click. Boom. Boom. Boom.

It shouldn't be surprising, dear. Sister Ertrude was back. Our unfortunate Mr. Mala has infested everything in your life like pestilence. Even moving hasn't helped, and how could it when you carry him everywhere you go like a perverse relic? You tell yourself that you want to forget him, and you do. You hate him so much that he inspires a dull nausea in your gut if you think about him too long. You hate him and all that he represents, but you cannot let him go. Every time he begins to recede, you find yourself questioning a vic or a suspect and wondering if you're missing something, some vital clue that you should see but can't. He lives on in every moment that you doubt yourself.

You see him everywhere. In the dark corners of your apartment, and in the rumpled dune of clothes around your laundry hamper. You hesitate before you unlock the door to your apartment, and when you step inside, you sniff the air for smells that don't belong-cordite and blood and cologne. You check the tub for blood spatter each time you step into it. There's no reason to, of course, but you have to. You have to be sure. You can't help it.

You don't tell anyone this, especially not the department shrink, but you can't shake the feeling that some of them know anyway. Not Mac-he's oblivious as a post, bless him-but Danny maybe, and definitely Flack, who goes out of his way to sprinkle extra jokes into his conversation. Even Lindsay has tried, in her fumbling way, to help, though you sometimes find her perkiness grating so early in the morning.

Past the vending machine, which squatted against its wall like a forgotten and ignored peddler. Click. Past the nurses' station, with its blinking bank of monitors ready to sound the alarm should one of their charges try to slip away in the night. Boom. Past the blandly inquisitive face of a duty nurse. Boom. Past glass-walled rooms of individual sorrow. Boom. And all of it was tinged red.

She stumbled into the nearest bathroom and stood clutching the counter in a drunken, white-knuckled grip. It was mercifully deserted, and she gulped a steadying lungful of air and willed her galloping heart to slow. The air tasted of Pine Sol, naturally, and she laughed, a brittle, cracked sound that echoed off the tile walls.

"Jesus," she muttered. "Get a grip, Stella," she told herself, but there was no force behind it.

I do have a grip, her mind responded with lunatic cheer. Right here on the countertop. With both hands.

She gave an indelicate snort of laughter and turned on the tap. Water gushed into the basin, and she cupped her hands beneath the flow, filled them, and brought them to her mouth. The water was cold and metallic.

Pine Sol, she thought. This is what Pine Sol would taste like, and spit it out with a grimace.

She splashed it on her face and neck and rubbed it into her tired, burning eyes. She studied herself in the smudged mirror over the sink and was shocked at how gaunt she looked, how pale. Her cheekbones were sharp juts beneath her skin, and her eyes were gritty and hollow and more bruised than Mac's, a feat she would not have believed possible. Her hair was a mass of straggling frizz, and her dress, so crisp when the shift had started an eternity ago, was rumpled and listless on her frame, and covered in dust and minute flecks of masonry.

She smiled ruefully at her reflection. "No chance at Miss New York today," she told herself.

"Aw, now I think you're being too hard on yourself, Bonasera," said a voice from behind her.

She whirled to see Frankie Mala standing by the tampon dispenser. He was grinning at her with blood-blackened teeth and swaying like a cobra.

"You may not be pretty, but you're one tough broad," he said, and she heard the wet, rattling wheeze of blood in his lungs. "You put three in me okay." His grin widened, and he took a shambling half-step forward.

The blood on his shirt is still red, she thought with stupefied detachment. It should be black like the blood on his teeth, but it's not. It's still red. In fact, it's still wet.

It was, in fact, dripping onto the tile floor with a wet plip. Frankie looked down and then at her again. His eyes were dead and clouded as tiger's eye marbles. He shrugged, a horribly slow, stiff movement of shoulder that creaked like untended hinges.

"Hey, what can I say? Death is messy. It cleans up easily enough, though, doesn't it? You know that, too. Those crime scene guys had me out of there in about three hours. No fuss, no muss, just poof. I was out of your life. Except I'm never gonna be out. Not really. I told you we'd be together forever, and here I am."

"And I told you, Frankie," she snarled, "to fuck off."

He's not real, Sister Ertrude said calmly.

She closed her eyes and counted to ten, and when she opened them again, he was gone, as was the blood on the floor. Her shoulders drooped, and she let out a ragged breath and ran her fingers through her hair.

"Bastard," she swore savagely. Then, to herself, "Get a fucking grip, Bonasera. Right now. This is not about you."

No, it wasn't. It was about Flack, who had very nearly made the ultimate sacrifice in the line of duty, and who was lying in a hospital bed with no one to watch over him but an old warhorse Marine and a woman who had called him friend too casually until now.

She squared her shoulders, set her chin, and strode towards the bathroom door. Click. Gunmetal on her thumb.

She bent down and pulled off her shoes. She contemplated throwing them away, but decided against it. She adored them, and she was damned if Frankie was going to rip out another thread from the ravaged fabric of her life, even a thread as trivial as a good pair of shoes. She stepped out into the hallway with the shoes in one hand, the linoleum floor cold and soothing on her stockinged feet.

Mac had succumbed to sleep by the time she returned to Flack's room. His head rested against the glass, and one arm lay across the back of the chair. He looked thin and utterly wasted in the unflattering light, suddenly old, with too many lines around his eyes and in the corners of his mouth. She wondered just how much the explosion had taken out of him, and if he still heard the resounding boom that came at the end of the world.

She thought about waking him, but didn't see the point. Flack's condition was unchanged, and Mac needed rest. Besides, if she woke him, she would have to explain why she was mincing across the floor with her shoes in her hand like a kid trying to sneak past her watchful father after curfew. So she let him sleep and slipped into Flack's room.

"Hey, Flack," she said softly, and tried to ignore the fact that the smell of Pine Sol was stronger here, as though the nurses were trying to smother the odor of imminent death.

Flack did not stir, and the only response was the monotonous beep of the cardiac monitor mounted on the wall above his head. She padded to his bedside and reached out her hand to smooth away a stray lock of hair. Flack would hate to be disheveled and sick. His flesh was too pale and too cool underneath her fingers, not warm and vital like it had been when he'd told her Frankie hadn't cost her her job on top of everything else.

This was not her friend, this pale, dying thing. Her friend was strong and young, and would eat anything once, including the kitchen sink.

Except for fried spiders. He drew the line there.

Yes, it is your friend, Sister Ertrude said with the implacable voice of conscience. But he's not dead yet. He still stands on the thread of God's grace, and there's still a chance to call him back.

She pulled up a chair beside the bed and sat, shoes dangling from the end of her fingertips like a lantern in the dark. She searched her mind for the right words to say to someone who might be waiting for a voice in the night to call them home. Nurturing had never been her strong point. She was good at fixing problems, not tending to the messy aftermath.

She was tempted to say the rosary for him, a simple repetition that would never change no matter how many times she said it, a string of ageless words he could follow into the light, but she had no idea if he was Catholic, and she had no desire to inflict her moldering religious convictions on a captive audience. Besides, her rosary was at home in the junk drawer of her kitchen, buried beneath rubber bands and paper clips and an old tube of lipstick.

She slipped her hand into his cold, limp one. "Hey, Flack?" she said at last. "Did I ever tell you the one about the Greek Orthodox priest and the Vegas hooker? So, anyway, this Greek Orthodox priest goes to Vegas on vacation, and while he's there…"