I had this 95% done, so figured I'd finish and post it before my writing hiatus.

This was my own attempt to come to terms with Stella's behavior in season 2. I could understand why she broke up with Clay, but I didn't love the way she seemed to waver on that decision and then came back into his life without any guarantee she'd stay this time. So, here's my attempt to get inside her head in the immediate aftermath of the bombing in episode 2x17.

Come Back to Haunt You

After Naima's call, Stella spends the rest of the day feeling like she's watching someone else live her life from a distance.

She has conversations with students and faculty. She smiles at all the right times. Her voice sounds normal.

Why wouldn't it? Her boyfriend isn't critically injured and near death, because she doesn't have a boyfriend anymore. She's not allowed to be terrified for the man whose heart she broke. That's not how it works.

(It doesn't matter. She is anyway.)

She goes to the hospital. She turns around and goes home. She paces. She prays to a God she doesn't believe in.

No one realizes something is off until Stella's mother calls her that night. It takes all of two minutes for her mom to ask, in an unusually gentle voice, "Stell, is something wrong?"

Stella takes a quick breath, everything hitting her at once: worry, guilt, uncertainty. Traces of leftover grief from breaking up with the man she'd loved so much she'd thought her heart might crater in her chest from it. Horror at the thought of him lying in a hospital bed, fighting for his life, alone.

Clay, her Clay, who is stubborn and egotistical and unexpectedly sweet, who's loyal and fearless and loves books and languages and children, struggling to breathe in an empty room without so much as a hand to hold. The thought of it settles like a stone in the pit of Stella's stomach.

Her mother isn't the person she should be talking to about this. She knows that, but somewhere deep down she still has that daughter's instinct, that unswerving childhood belief that Mom will fix it.

"Um," she says. Her voice wobbles. "I got a call this morning from, uh, from the wife of one of Clay's teammates. She said that … that she wanted me to hear it from her."

On the other end of the line, Stella's mother takes a measured breath. She doesn't say I told you so. She might be thinking it, but she wisely doesn't say it.

"There was a bomb," Stella says. "The rest of Clay's team was okay, but I guess he's … it's pretty bad. His legs were full of shrapnel and he almost bled out. They don't know if, um…"

"I'm sorry to hear that. I really am." Her mother sounds almost entirely sincere, which is not what Stella expected, and which makes it even harder not to burst into tears.

"Yeah," she manages. "Yeah, me too."

"Believe it or not, I actually did like him," Stella's mom says. "I didn't like you being in a relationship with him, but I liked him. He seemed … educated. Thoughtful. Not at all what I'd expected. I was just afraid of-"

"This. You were afraid of this," Stella finishes.

Her mom sighs. "Yes." After a moment, she adds, "I hoped he would be safe. But I knew there was a good chance he wouldn't be, and I didn't want that for you."

Stella wants to say, Well, it happened anyway.

She wants to ask, Did you think I could just flip a switch and no longer care about him getting blown up, about him hurting, lying on the ground bleeding out?

But then she steps back out of her own head for long enough to see a bit of her mother's perspective.

What if this had happened after Stella and Clay had been married for five years?

What if she'd been nine months pregnant?

What if she'd had a sweet towheaded child old enough to ask, When's Daddy coming home?

As much as it hurts, as frightened as she is for the man she still loves despite her best efforts, it could be so much worse.

And yet…

She's spent months running circles in her own head, wondering: Should she have broken up with Clay? If she'd waited, just toughed out the terror and soul-eating anxiety, would it have gotten better, the way Trish had told her it would?

Did she needlessly throw away her chance at a future with a man she loved more than she would have believed she could love someone?

This should be her answer. This should tell her that she made the right choice; that she was right to be afraid; that Clay's world, a place where bombs just happen, where good men come home in critical condition with legs full of shrapnel, could never be her world.

It doesn't feel like an answer. It feels like one more tangle in a forest of knots Stella has no idea how to unravel.

"Stella?" Her mother's worried tone suggests it's not the first time she's said it.

"Yeah, Mom. I'm here."

"You're worried about him," her mother observes.

"Yeah. I just…" Stella sighs. "Clay is a good person, Mom. He's smart. He wants to make the world a better place. In another life, born into a different family, he might have ended up in academia, or conservation, or pursuing any of a hundred different causes that would have made his world line up perfectly with mine."

"But he didn't," her mom says softly.

"I know. But he's alone, Mom. He doesn't really have any family, and his team is still deployed. I keep thinking about him in that hospital room, all by himself, and how much he doesn't deserve that."

"And you feel like you need to do something about it?" Her mother guesses.

"I don't think I can," Stella admits. "Having me around probably wouldn't make him feel any better. I just … I don't know what to do." Her voice goes thick and wobbly, and a few tears finally escape. "I know I'm supposed to not care about him anymore, but it's not like there's a switch I can flip to make that happen."

"I understand," her mother says, after a moment. Stella feels certain she doesn't.

After another pause that stretches into awkwardness, her mom says, "Listen, Stell, just … be careful, all right? For his sake as well as yours. You already decided that life wasn't for you. Giving him false hope could just make things worse."

Stella sighs, swiping her hand across her face to get rid of the tears. "I will, Mom."

She ends the phone call, brushes her teeth, puts on her pajamas, gets in bed alone, and spends the night dreaming of fire and metal.