A/N – My own (completely unworthy) post-Endgame thoughts. I will have to work on this some more in future. I just have so much trouble imagining what it must be like to suddenly find out that you're not who you think you are. As someone with my own skeletons… what if somebody told me there was a chance that my dad was not my dad after all? And what if it was EVEN WORSE than you thought? Not to mention all the other shit that's happened to our favorite detectives… and Bobby's obvious drinking & overeating problems this season. "You're not taking care of yourself," indeed!

Father.

What makes somebody a father? Is it simply DNA? Is it that momentary exchange of bodily fluids that culminates in the silent knitting together of a human being from mysterious, infinitesimal building blocks into a 6'4" wild-eyed overweight drunk with nothing going for him except that he DIDN'T strangle his biological father while two prison guards watched silently from the corners of the room? Is it the mind games that grown men can play with innocent children… of 46?

Or is a father something else entirely, something I have never seen before? Does a father host Thanksgiving dinner with his two boys, their mother, and her new husband, maintaining strained civility for the sake of the children? Does a father take one for the team, sacrificing his job so another hot-head can live out a second chance? Does a father ask all the right questions from the sidelines, making sure the kid thinks he figured it out for himself? Does a father come to basketball games and watch proudly from the sidelines, lie and cheat and steal to give his son everything he ever wanted? Does a father take weekly trips out to visit his mother and call her every night?

I always thought Father was a dirty word - it certainly was the way that my mother said it. But to question that my father was a handsome, feckless rake who broke my addled mother's heart and left my 14 year old self to protect her. Imagine, all this time I had my father's attention. Well, when he wasn't raping and photographing and killing dozens of beautiful women.

And so I sit here, my heart is completely broken. The one woman I could have loved… oh GOD, that's the phrase he used… well, she's gone. Off solving cases with the hot-head. I hope to heaven Mike doesn't get her killed. Because then I would definitely be lost.