No Ordinary Love...What Comes Next?

What Comes Next

S12 Ep13 Never Say Goodbye.

Goodness...there sure was a lot to compute!

The follow up to this episode deserves a bottle episode. We'll never get it...but we can pretend....

Anyway, this is my take on how the last S12 episode could have continued after the cameras stopped rolling.....or where in the new season they could start rolling....

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Whatever response Stella had expected from her husband when she turned her phone around to show him the latest photo of Julia from Brett, it wasn't what came out of his mouth. Start their family? Whoa! Where had that just come from?!

"I hadn't expected that," was all she managed to finally say, her brain having turned into scrambled eggs, struggling to compute the unexpected topic of kids coming out of left field, when only a minute ago she'd been teasing him with her new bra.
Having children wasn't something that they had talked about for a long while, given for the best part of the last year they had either been apart or rebuilding their fractured relationship, so yeah Kelly had caught her out with this.

But any further conversation on the topic was cut short by the joint dinging of their phones with the breaking news of Wallace Boden's appointment as Deputy Chief Comissioner, leaving them both shellshocked and somewhere between ecstatic for the Chief and melancholy for themselves.

So, it was an unusually quiet Lieutenant Kidd who jumped in the back of truck later that day, her company figuring that the Chief's news had hit his protégé particularly hard. They'd just wrapped up a domestic fire call, which hadn't taken very long to control, a relief given the pinball wizzard game going on in her head right now. Unconciously playing with the black resin wedding ring she wore while on duty, her forehead was furrowed, still trying to absorb Kelly's revelation from that morning. She had been caught completely unawares by the way he had casually thrown into conversation that he'd been ' thinking about it a lot,' so her response had been uncharacteristically awkward and uncomfortable.

Acutely conscious and increasingly guilt ridden as the day had worn on about her underwhelming reaction to his suggestion of starting their family, she had sought out opportunities to get him alone. To explain herself. However, between the firehouse being in a state of emotional flux over the news of the Chief's impending departure and three calls, opportunities for 'alone time' had been at a premium. Several times during the day, she had caught his eyes on her, but as she'd take a step towards him, someone would claim his attention or hers, or the bells rang and she would have to reluctantly retreat.

"You o.k, Lieutenant?"
Damon startled her out of her preoccupied thoughts. He was sitting opposite her in the truck and had been watching her.

"Yeah...of course." Stella's smile was forced, aware that the kid was regarding her with an intensity which if she thought about it seemed to happen a lot.
She had been keeping him at arms length since the night of Kelly's disappearance, knowing he'd been pissed about having his integrity questioned, but hell, she didn't give a shit. At the time all she had cared about was finding her husband so Damon's feelings were the last thing on her mind and since then he hadn't exactly endeared himself to her with his part in the restaurant brawl. She was still expecting a formal complaint to find its way to head office, and if that happened, there's no way he was staying on her truck. He was lucky Carver had taken furlough. Otherwise, Jack Damon would be sitting this shift out already.

"I guess it must have hit pretty hard, ...the Chief moving on......"

She didn't respond straight away, afraid that her inner conflict about losing the Chief would show.