Sorry, know that there are way too many of these out there but I watched season 7 again and this wouldn't stop bothering me. Hope it isn't too bad.

He had given her a Taser-gun once. While she had told that captain that sometimes you wanted to be more than your job she had kept it, laughed when he gave it to her. A gun for their anniversary. Typical Joe. Typical Dutton. Typical Eames too. Eames and Dutton had mixed well. Both cops, both from families of cops.

It had been first after Joe's death she understood why her mother always had been so worried. Worried about her father when he was out on duty. The pain that hits you when the impossible happens is almost too much. The only thing is that the impossible is the normal life for a cop. For cops and their families.

Her father had been shoot once or twice, life-threatening once. Her mother had been worried sick while she and her siblings had been too young to understand what had happened.

The day Joe was shoot she understood how her mother had felt that time, that day years ago. The day Joe died she had experienced everything her mother had experienced all those times her father had been wounded. She had experienced every feeling at the same time. Death is so much worse for those left behind.

Alexandra Eames isn't the person that cries. She hates crying. She admires those that allow themselves to cry in public, unless it is fake tears. To cry is to allow oneself to be weak for a moment, to lower ones shield. Eames haven't cried since those few days, maybe weeks, after Joe's death. She had never lowered those shields in eight years. Until she stood in front of her partner who had decided to reopen that case in order to solve Kevin Quinn's murder. She did everything in her power not to cry, did everything to find the anger that she could work with. Anger she could control. Anger didn't require lowered shields.

"If it's not Delgado's DNA it means that he wasn't there... and someone else killed Joe." Her partner reasoned. "And got away with it!"

She hated him sometimes. Hated that he always found some mistake that gave them so much more to work with, hated that he complicated things while he solved others. But at that moment she hated him for destroying something that she had built up for years. The defences she had worked so hard on getting back up, to never let anyone get past the shields. In less than a day he had located a mistake that made all those defences crumble to the ground, turning them to dust by just blowing some air at them.

He closed one case by destroying another. Kevin Quinn had lied and Joe's murderer had gone free for eight years. Patrick Copa had lied to but this time Robert Goren had been there to react, to find that small mistake and complicate the case. Only to solve it later. Theresa Quinn got her closure while Alexandra Eames had to start all over with her defences but this time with nothing to build on. Eight years is a long time and all that time she had been sure Joe murder had been solved.

While she thinks one should always tell the truth this once she had been ready to not hear it. But that is impossible when you are partnered up with the reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes.