Phew. Got this one up without the month's delay :D. BeTheOne/Allie: 'You know what' is doing perfectly fine thanks (:
I'm sorry I don't have time to reply to each and every one of you who review, but you gotta know I appreciate it so so much. Chapter title by Kelly Clarkson.

Disclaimer: HAPPY HALLOWEEN! I may possess about 50 dollars worth of candy to hand out to little kiddies on my street, but the deal on Cold Case has yet to be signed.

Chapter 26: The Trouble With Love Is

Kat Miller was the new girl of homicide. At least, that's the way she'd always seen herself. Sort of on the outside of a well balanced and long established team dynamic. Joining the squad just over a year ago was a dream come true, career wise, but personally, well… she'd always felt like a temporary replacement, partnerless and expendable.

Oh, how wrong she'd turned out to be.

In that one short year her life had been turned upside down, particularly when Nick Vera showed up out of nowhere and turned out to be exactly what she and V needed. In a way, Kat guess wryly, her life had been turned rightside up, and after all those years of celibacy, it felt right again. Against her will, the corners of her lips twitched in a smile. Yes, joining homicide had become much more personal than she expected it to be.

Much, much more personal, Kat griped as she tapped her foot with irritation and jammed the button for level three repeatedly. The elevator ground to a halt on the third floor and a moment later the doors slid open with a quiet creak and Kat strode purposefully toward her and Lilly's room. She couldn't believe she was playing the role of moderator to Valens and Rush's love lives. This was so far into the business of the squad, that despite still being partnerless, Kat couldn't see herself as the outside girl anymore.

"Lil?" Kat slid the electronic key card into the slot and eased the door gently open. True to her cop training, she immediately did a sweep of the room, taking in the discarded cell phone and sweatpants on the floor by Lilly's bed, and Lilly lying in it. "You awake?"

Lilly stirred, turning around to face her colleague. "Hey…" She said softly.

Kat sighed with exhaustion and deposited her jacket on her own bed, waiting for Lilly to speak. A long moment of silence stretched between them, with Lilly unwilling to say anything and Kat still too weary from her journey here to push. Finally, she asked, "You gonna give me the info I need, or am I gonna have to beat it outta you?"

"Don't know what you're talking about." Lilly countered immediately, suddenly feeling nothing but irritation at her meddling colleague. Wasn't it enough that over the last few hours, she'd gone from complete denial, to agonizing worry that what she'd said was irreparable? Wasn't it enough that the best relationship of her life was over? Did Kat have to come along and pour salt in her wounds?

Kat snorted. "You don't know, huh? Well, then care to tell me why Valens is missing?" Kat hoped the hard edge to her voice would tell Lilly, in no uncertain terms, that this was interrogator mode, not friend mode. It was damn hard to use it when Lilly was already looking so… lost.

Fear suddenly flashed into Lilly's eyes. Scotty was, missing? Missing like, unlocated, or missing like abducted? "Where is he?" She asked urgently, sitting bolt upright.

"Fine." Kat answered immediately. "He's fine, but…" She dropped the interrogator tone and leaned in, compassion written all over her face and woven into her tone. "What the hell happened?"

Fine. Lilly mused bitterly. He was fine. Of course, she wouldn't have wished anything less for him. She wholeheartedly wanted and expected him to be okay with their little fling to have ended.

Right?

Suddenly, the hurt she was feeling indicated differently, and in an instant, Lilly knew. She wanted him to care, so much that he wasn't still fine, despite the fact that she was trying to convince herself to do exactly the opposite. But Kat was waiting for an answer, so Lilly pushed her thoughts away and scrambled for one. "He's fine, huh?" She managed to ask. "Well then I guess nothing happened." She couldn't quite keep the sadness from her voice. "Everything's the same as it was before."

"Don't even think 'bout lyin' to me, girl." Kat snapped. And Lilly marveled at her colleague's ability to switch between personas, so fast it made her dizzy. Maybe she was dizzy before.

She faltered. "I-I'm… Me and Scotty, it's just…"

"Start at the beginning." Kat requested patiently, knowing a full story would be necessary to dissect through today's carnage. Besides, she and Lil had never gotten that girl-to-girl confrontation about the fact that Lilly was seeing her partner, and as a good friend, and the genius who'd figured it out, Kat figured she deserved as much.

"It was - a mistake." Lilly admitted reluctantly, and at Kat's incredulous glare, she backtracked. "Not the…relationship… how it all started. What happened after was on purpose."

"How'd it start?"

Lilly sighed, but felt relief that she could explore these memories without the crushing despair she'd felt before. "Scotty came to my place and he said a lot of stuff and we ended up…" She trailed off awkwardly at Kat's disgusted squeak.

"Hey, there's some things I don't gotta know…" She paused for a second. "But it sounds like Casanova fully wooed you.

Lilly picked up the edge of the pillow case and rubbed it absentmindedly with her fingers. "I guess."

Minus the 'wooing' as Kat colloquially put it, Lilly figured that's exactly what Scotty did. Amaze and transfix her with how much brighter he made things, make her ache for his presence and mourn his absence. He'd chipped, slowly and surely at her walls, until one day, she'd looked around and found them almost level with the ground.

"You ever thought of Valens like that before?" Kat pressed. She could sense Lilly's discomfort at being forced to talk about something so personal, and so prohibited by all sorts of regulation. Her fault for sleepin' with her partner. An' for… whatever the hell went down today.

A few moments later, Lilly reluctantly nodded. At Kat's surprised look, she added, with just a touch of humor. "I'm not oblivious Kat. Scotty and me, I think there's always been… or there was… something." Lilly finished, a tad desperately.

Kat hooked on to one of Lilly's words easily. "Was?"

The pain returned in a wave and Lilly was startled by its force. It was over. In the sobering presence of Kat Miller, Lilly knew that any delusions she'd had about Scotty forgiving her, them talking it out, coming to an agreement… they were just that, delusions. Scotty was sweet, caring, and gentle exactly when he needed to be, but Lilly also knew that he had his pride and his shortcomings, mostly involving a tendency to love too fast, too deep, and to blame himself for everything he could. What she had done had hurt him. Lilly knew that. And Scotty, with his ever innocent, black-and-white views, wouldn't see it any other way.

"Yeah." Lilly breathed. She waited for Kat to inject a sarcastic comment, or an awkward question, but the seconds ticked by slowly and none came. To her chagrin, Lilly found herself talking again, as though the words had been magically drawn out. "After today… he isn't going to forgive me. He said…"

"Said what."

"That he loved me."

Kat's eyes widened. So that's what Valens had gone and done? Proclaimed his love to a woman who had only ever known pain in relation to it? And only a month into their relationship? She couldn't quite decide if that was bold or brash, and sympathy flashed into her eyes. Sympathy for Scotty, for not being able to stop himself, and for Lilly, for not being able to find the right response. She let out a low whistle. "Ouch."

"What?" Lilly snapped. She hadn't even told the rest yet.

Kat gave her a weak smile. "I can guess. Valens got all wordy and put his feelings out there for you to see, an' you decided that instead of talkin' to your boyfriend about your feelings, the best thing to do was to turn and high tail it outta there? Am I close?"

Well when she put it like that… Lilly cringed. There was a reason you couldn't keep any secrets when you spent all day with detectives. "Yeah, but it's not that simple."

"Oh?" Kat raised her eyebrow questioningly.

"This is my career." Lilly argued, more with herself, than with Kat. If she could convince herself it was for the best that it was over between them, maybe it would make it a bit easier to accept. "Me and Scotty, you can't deny it's - was - inappropriate, and stupid. It's good that it's over. We spent way too long putting everything at stake."

"If you say so." Kat allowed passively, "But I gotta tell you Lil. You're the only one you're fooling. Everyone else, we can see how Scotty loves you. Me, Will, Nick, probably even Boss. An' you ain't fired yet, so I doubt that's the real problem."

For a moment, Lilly forgot to feel panic at the fact that her colleagues, all of them apparently, had figured out her secret, and that her Boss may very well be in the loop as well. She latched on, instead, to the rest of Kat's words. You're the only one you're fooling… Was she? Fooling herself? Was thinking that she and Scotty could go back to normal, after this whirlwind of an adventure… was that just crazy? Lilly knew that she'd done some serious damage to their potential friendship by walking away like that, after… leading him on, and deluding him into thinking she would one day love him too, that she was whole and healthy and capable of love. Suddenly, with a rush of certainty, Lilly was sure that when this all blew over, and the dust settled, she and Scotty would no longer be working together. It didn't matter if he transferred out, or she did, or if one of them quit or was fired. They wouldn't see each other anymore, not if seeing him meant reliving the moment she'd broken his heart, his and her own. It made her infinitely sad.

"Guess you're right." She replied quietly. "We're not going to be able to keep seeing each other everyday. It'll just be… too messy." Lilly quickly glanced up to gauge Kat's expression, and was surprised by the utter shock and exasperation on her face.

"Were you even listenin'?" The other detective demanded, thoroughly annoyed. Geez. It's like the words go in one ear an' out the friggin' other, never mind where her damn brain is. "The job doesn't matter." She repeated her point slowly and clearly. "But you guys do."

"What do you mean?"

Kat sighed. "It matters, Lil. The point where the job, and all the crappy rules that go with it, ends, and the heart begins. I think you an' Valens passed that point a few millennia ago."

Lilly just stared back, so Kat continued. "An' I think he loves you, an' you know that, an' it scares the hell out of you so you're sittin' here tryin' to think up reasons why he don't mean what he said. Right?"

Thinking back at the way she'd desperately hoped to believe Scotty didn't love her, and how she'd tried to convince herself of it upon arriving back here, Lilly nodded numbly and a second later Kat was speaking again.

"An' when you couldn't do that, you wanted to hide behind the job. But that ain't gonna fly with me because I know you love him too. Don't even try an' deny it Lil. If you didn't love him, you wouldn't be feelin' like shit; if you didn't love him, you woulda kicked him out a long time ago an' we wouldn't be sittin' here; if you didn't love him, it wouldn't be so damn hard to let go."

At this point, Kat seemed to have finished her diatribe and fixed Lilly with a questioning glare, as though daring her to contradict anything she said. Lilly didn't. She knew Scotty loved her, she'd come to the conclusion hours ago. But, her? In love with Scotty? It didn't seem possible. She was Lilly Rush, the strong, silent, independent one, who held on to no one and nothing but the job; who'd made it through all those years; who was so walled off it took a jackhammer to make a crack in her icy façade; who… needed… Scotty Valens.

She needed him and she wanted… him. As a partner, in her life, in her house, in her heart. She needed him, like oxygen, or something equally essential, but less cheesy that Lilly couldn't think of at the moment because she was realizing - for the first time - that if Scotty truly left, it would be a crushing blow she wouldn't recover from. He was her last chance, at love, and life had certainly saved the best for last because Lilly couldn't imagine any other men in her life that even began to compare to Scotty.

"I love him." She whispered. It wasn't a question, just a mere statement of fact. Lilly Rush had fallen in love with Scotty Valens. Somehow, somewhere along the way. The only question was, what was she going to do?

"… all in all, an unmitigated disaster." Kat summed up what she, Will, and Nick had found out that night from their separate colleagues grimly. After listening calmly, for the most part anyways, to Lilly's sob story, Kat knocked on Nick's door to find him and Will waiting for her.

Nick shook his head disbelievingly, still in shock from Scotty's abrupt transformation from driven cop, good friend, to drunkard. "I still don't believe it." He griped.

"What?" Kat asked.

"That him, and" He sputtered. "Valens and Rush." At the exasperated glance both his colleagues immediately sent him, he continued. " I mean I know it's true, I saw Valens today. But I mean,.. what the hell?"

"In case you haven't noticed." Will smiled. "They're kinda made for each other."

Nick snorted. "And you have noticed?"

Will and Kat just nodded and Nick fell silent, continuing to shake his head at the mystery of it all. He'd done his own detective work, turned over stones, and discovered that Scotty Valens was head over heels for Lilly Rush. But that didn't answer how in the hell? It was a moment before Kat spoke again.

"What's he doing anyways?" She asked.

With a heavy sound in his voice, Will replied. "Drinking, down at the bar."

"Don't look so hopeful." Nick immediately added. "He ain't just drinkin'. We think he's tryin' to dry up the city."

"That bad?"

They both nodded.

Kat blew out a deep breath and said. "At least we can get home soon." There was a slight weariness in her usually crisp voice, one that no one could miss, but that no one could comment on either, given that they all sounded the same right about then. "I'm going to bed." She declared a moment later, and with a slight parting nod, turned to leave.

Her hand on the doorknob, Kat couldn't help but hesitate and add softly, "If those idiots don't figure things out…" She let the comment hang in the air.

A few minutes after she was gone, Nick burst out. "Seriously, it's like picturin' my brother and sister!"

Will gave him a disgusted look, picked up a pair of socks off the bed and tossed it in his - none too mature - partner's direction. "Then don't picture it, man."

Lilly can be a hard character to work with. How's she supposed to realize that Scotty loves her and vice versa? At least I got that over with though. We're nearing the end guys... 3-4 chapters left? Not sure, but please leave a review and I'll get them up ASAP. I love hearing from you guys.