I hold no copyrights for the Characters or properties of Law & Order: Criminal Intent or the situations described in the following.
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Insomnia was his friend. A good friend, it visited frequently and often stayed for days at a time. So Bobby had a lot of time to think. More time than was advisable really, but ...
On nights like this, when his friend first came to visit, he would occasionally go out to a bar, but not all that often. Even being 6'4" and 200+ pounds couldn't stop a bullet and there were a lot of bad people in this town. He should know.
Sometimes he spent his "extra" thinking time contemplating those bad people, sometimes when his friend visited it was because he was trying to catch one (or more) of those people and he had an excuse to indulge in insomnia, to make it more acceptable really.
A lot of times, however, he couldn't legitimatize it. Couldn't say this thing or that thing was keeping him up. He just was. Up that is. And, well, that lead to "extra" thinking.
Thinking about things he shouldn't be thinking about or things that he could only make worse by contemplating.
It's on those nights that he would start thinking about when it was. When was the moment? That pinpoint of time? That exact second in the ticking of the universe that he knew?
Sometimes he would decide it was the first time he had let loose in interrogation and she hadn't bolted out of the room, screaming in the night, but instead had looked amused. That was a good moment. A clean, precise moment. Sometimes that decision would work.
But some nights that didn't click for him, didn't satisfy the constant searching and analyzing that his brain indulged in and he would have to look further, deeper to find the moment. Then he would search more distant memories looking for that exact spot in time. What if it was the first time she made some snarky remark that just tickled him? His humor, his real humor, was rather oblique. Not much really made all the way to his funny bone, but she had the knack, that little twist of dry that would penetrate and cause him to chuckle. Yes, he would then decide, that was that moment when he knew.
On the roughest nights, he would have to go deeper, ponder the larger implications. Those nights, frequently after several nights just spent in the same occupation, he would have to blink at the honest fact, the truth that he was too tired, too exhausted to hide anymore. Those nights he would recognize that revelation in time, that instant in the universe when everything in his life changed, when the fear of being alone, of never really connecting with another human being would disappear. It was the first time she looked at him. Really looked. She saw him. She actually saw him. She didn't see a prophet or a genius. She didn't see an insecurity in herself or her own ability to find and understand the hidden clues he often recognized. She saw who he was. She saw and didn't flinch but just kept looking. That was the moment he fell in love with Alexandra Eames.
Then he could sleep.