In the end, Valens and Rush don't get together.
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There are a thousand occasions, a thousand times they could just do something and change everything, but they never do.
There is so much between them.
They are partners, friends. There's always a current of somethingbetween them, that is a to a degree a strange kind of partial trust and to another degree just knowing each other as well as they do.
There is not enough between them.
Not enough trust, not enough courage, so many "not enough" things that they will never get to end of the hypotetical list. They are not lovers, they will never be, even if they are intimate in their gestures. Those unspoken signals never get follow up to with real intimacy, not between them.
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Lilly Rush is screwed up and Scotty Valens isn't much better. They are humans, and as such its normal being that way, but their kinds of screwed up don't mix each other really well.
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They are, and will always be, teetering on that edge, the one where you are stuck.
Stuck between making a step back, and stop everything without knowing how to handle it, or making a step forward, and risk a fall you know you will not survive.
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Scotty ends up never marrying but having a long list of relationships. Sometimes they last months, sometimes they last weeks but he tries his hardest in all of them and maybe, just maybe, that's the biggest of his love life problems.
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Lilly goes another way, sentimentally speaking.
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An apartment frees itself, next to her own. It's cheap and in good conditions so she ends up giving the number to Vera, because he's going through a rough patch with his landlord and has been looking for own.
They become neighbors, never carpooling and respecting each other boundaries. They don't have dinner together and don't intrude into each other personal spaces but one day Jeffries invites Lilly to watch a game with them and that's how it starts.
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Nick Vera is screwed up too, in his own ways. He isn't attractive, like Scotty, and he's not as near to Lilly's age as Scotty is and he's not a dangerous, attractive man like Eddie or Ray used to be.
Lilly isn't a woman like any other Nick has ever been attracted to in his life. She's not plain, she's not shy and she's not all that tactful nor she has any kind of kids.
But they have known each other for years.
Both of them have always kept to themselves, getting to know each other without intruding on one another personal lives too much. They are colleagues and friends and, maybe, that's everything they need to be for it to work.
/
Stillman has to go away, too old to be a cop anymore, and Jeffries succeeds him. They get a new detective, transferred from vice, and they tease him and skirt around him until he finds his way into becoming a permanent fixture of the team.
Nothing happens between Lilly and Vera during this time.
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It's only after Vera has been forced into retirement, age and health reasons, that something changes.
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There are a lot of ways things could have gone, many of them ending at the bottom of a bottle, but Lilly is living just in front of him and she's always has a case she needs his insight in, rules be damned.
Jeffries has to retire too, after a while, and both of them are happy to help her and pitch in on her questions. Lilly starts a tradition of getting dinner with Vera and he remembers old stories for her while she gossips to him about the new people in the department and the suspects she's been grilling.
They talk about Scotty's last flame of the moment and about that first cold case he tricked her into taking and laughs, low laughs between them.
He reads old poetry and a lot more books than what he used to while he was still in the force.
She has her work to occupy her days and someone to talk with late at night without stepping far from the security of her own apartment.
They listen to music from old decades and sometimes, rarely, they even dance, laughing at how goofy they are.
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Lilly is stone cold sober the night she ends up in Nick Vera's bed. They both are and they both know what they are doing because it's been coming for a while.
It started with some gentle gesture from him, weeks before and escalated slowly from there.
Both of them feel that there is no need to talk about it, so they don't do it, and slowly it becomes a part of their lives, happening sometimes when they both need human contact and a friend beside them.
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It's not easy and at the same time he is.
He knows she could have better but at the same time he understands that she's there because she wants it, so it doesn't require further investigations. She knows he's an old man, as alone as she is, and thinks that she doesn't want anything better because Vera knows her and has known her a long time.
The one between them it's a companionship and, after a while, the sex goes away and it becomes simply sleeping together. Having someone who's familiar to wake up next in the morning, someone who understands that need.
So, in the end, it's remarkably easy for a thing as complex as it could be.
/
Lilly never breaths a word to it to anyone, though she's sure that Jeffries knows and doesn't quite approve.
Nick never quite get around to tell him but he makes sure he has understood. He does it because Will Jeffries was his partner and is his oldest friend and he deserves to know, not because he needs approvation or bullshit like that.
The black man keeps his opinion to himself, though, and is a good a friend to both of them so that's good.
Scotty doesn't know and would not understand. He has his way of doing things and loving and coping and that's not it so Lilly just lets things be as they are and never go into details about her love life with him.
It's not like she ever did it anyway.
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She makes captain and they all tease her about it, having a party for her with the original group where the others aren't invited. They leave a glass apart for Stillman, while at Jones, and later Nick teases Lilly behind closed doors while she's brushing her teeth.
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Now it's her, Scotty and Miller at the precinct and three other detectives, the one who came to fill in for Jeffries, the one that came after Vera had to leave and the man they got when Lilly was promoted.
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They exchange the keys to their respective apartments.
Both of them keep their own because they still need their own personal space from time to time and because it's easier that way.
It's a companionship, not a marriage, even if Lilly is sleeping more in Vera's bed that in her own these days.
Nick feeds her cats when she's out and is always ready to give her his opinion on the cases. Lilly stops on her way home to get the take-out he likes and ribs him on his tastes and little passions.
Once, they go together to a Rocky Horror performance because he insists that she needs to live the experience.
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They have each other and it's not a bad life.