AN: So, I'm really going Through It lately and as such, a lot of my writing motivation and energy has dried up. I'm doing my best, but I can't promise regular updates to anything in the near future. If you have any questions or anything, feel free to PM me.

Emily was drunk.

Well, maybe not drunk, per se...but she had been drinking for most of the night. Which is why Alex had volunteered to stay and drive her to her hotel.

"Are you sure?" JJ asked, still wrapped tightly in Will's arms. Her gaze kept drifting over to Emily where she was swaying slightly, even as she used the pool cue to balance while she waited for Derek to finish his turn. "I know you two have history – we could call her a cab or Will and I can..."

Alex shook her head, glancing over her shoulder at Emily as well. "It's fine," she insisted, "We're both mature adults, we can handle one car ride...especially if one of us is drunk off their ass."

JJ was obviously unconvinced.

"Go home with your husband, JJ," Alex said. She attempted a smile that really didn't feel all that convincing either, thankful when JJ didn't comment on that fact.

"Where are we going?" Emily asked, speech slurred as she stared out the car window, forehead leaned against the cold glass.

"Home."

"Home?" Emily repeated, somewhere between curious and confused.

Alex sighed, glanced over at her. "I don't trust that you won't choke on your own vomit and asphyxiate in the night," she explained, "So, I'm bringing you home with me."

"Oh." A beat. "Oh..." She grinned, waggled her brows mischievously.

She didn't need to say anything for Alex to know exactly what she was thinking. They'd known each other long enough that words were rarely needed. "Don't get any bright ideas, Emily. We're not going to sleep together tonight."

"Are you sure?" Emily asked, perhaps a little cocksure in her drunkenness.

Rolling her eyes, Alex managed to remain remarkably calm as she chided, "Enough, Emily."

Under her breath, Emily muttered, "You used to be more fun..."

"More fun?" Alex scoffed, shook her head. "Maybe I was more fun...before the woman I loved – the mother of my son – left me. Not to mention faked her own death and moved an ocean away without even bothering to tell me!" Her voice became louder and increasingly agitated as she spoke until she was nearly shouting.

That seemed to sufficiently appeal to Emily's guilty conscience and she immediately clammed up, no longer in a playful mood.

It was too late, though. Alex had already started in on her rant and there was no stopping it now that she'd begun. "You do not get to lecture me anymore. You gave up that right a long time ago. I think I've been more than flexible tonight, put up with more than my fair share of aggravation. And it was for the sake of saving JJ, so I said nothing, did nothing. But you don't get to sit here and act like the victim in all this."

"'Victim'," Emily repeated dubiously, "God, you're dramatic."

That was clearly the wrong thing to say. "You can fuck right off, Emily. I'm looking after you out of the goodness of my heart, because I thought we could both be mature adults about this and put the past aside for one night, but if that's too hard..."

"No one asked you to do that!" Emily snapped.

"You're joking, right?" Alex said, obviously unamused. "Everyone asked me to. Literally every single person on the team seemed to think that seeing me again would be hard for you, asked me to treat you with kid gloves and I wanted to laugh because they all seemed to know something I didn't – they all seemed to think you still carry a torch for me. And much as I wanted to believe that might be true, I figured it couldn't possibly be...afterall, you're the one who left."

Silence followed as Emily seemed to digest the fact that the entire team seemed to know far more than she'd ever wanted them to see.

Alex continued on undeterred, "Maybe if you weren't drunk and belligerent, we could have had a real conversation about us, but that's clearly not about to happen now, so I'll just grin and bear it – as usual – and nurse you back to sobriety and then pretend like nothing ever happened when I wake up and you're gone to catch a plane back across the ocean without so much as a 'thank you' or even a 'goodbye'."

Emily said nothing. She would have liked to argue, to insist that Alex was overreacting and over-dramatic, but knew that Alex was completely just in her accusations. She would have liked to apologize for all the ways she'd hurt her over the years, but knew that Alex was in no mood to hear apologies. She'd never been all that good at apologies anyway.

She sighed sadly, rested her forehead against the window once again rather than say anything else that might risk another verbal evisceration. She could feel Alex's gaze on her, though, and knew that the conversation had not finished.

Emily clutched the pillow to her chest while she watched Alex make up the bed in the spare room, too drunk to be of any real assistance, and it struck her in that moment as odd that the one person who quite possibly knew her better than anyone else in the world, the person who was still, after everything, taking care of her could manage to contain the dichotomy that was still being in love with her while also being barely able to stand the sight of her.

"Why?" she blurted out before she'd even begun the thought process of initiating speech.

"Why what?" Alex asked on a sigh as she smoothed out the top sheet, not even bothering to spare Emily a glance.

Emily shook her head a moment, tongue flicking out over her lip. "Why didn't we work together?"

Alex finally did look at her then, expression something approaching exasperation. "You tell me, given that you're the one who left," she snapped. Which Emily had to concede was fair, she deserved that.

"I didn't leave because of you," she said in a voice that was uncharacteristically meek. "It was never about you."

"You'll have to excuse me if that fails to be of any comfort to me," Alex said dryly. "Because it sure felt really fucking personal when I came home to find all your things gone with only a note to provide any sort of explanation. A note, Emily! You didn't even have the basic decency to tell me to my face that you were leaving!"

Cheeks flushing faintly under the intensity of Alex's anger, Emily mumbled, "I tried, but..."

She shook her head furiously, crossing her arms firmly over her chest. "I deserved better than the way you left. After everything we'd been through together, I deserved more."

"I get that..." Emily started to respond.

Alex didn't give her the chance to finish. "I don't think that you do, Emily! Because it's been almost ten years and we're still exactly where we were before. Nothing has changed and you have the audacity to ask me why we're not still together!? Maybe it's time you looked in a mirror..."

It wasn't what she'd wanted to hear – not that she was all that clear on what kind of answer she'd anticipated – but it left her very little room to argue, as nothing she'd said thus far was untrue.

"Do you want the truth, Emily?" Alex asked. Without giving her time to provide an answer either way, she continued, "The truth is that I do love you; I probably always will. And if I thought that things might be different if I took you back, I probably would do so in a heartbeat.

"That's the thing, though... I don't think you've changed. I've done a lot of work on myself to get to a point where I don't hate you, a point where I could actually see myself being friends with you and I respect us both too much to throw away that progress. But more importantly, I respect myself too much to put myself back in a situation I know is toxic."

Emily nodded slowly, looking very close to tears but refusing to let them fall.

With a sigh, Alex settled on the edge of the bed, absently playing with a loose thread on the comforter. She patted the bed beside her in a silent signal that Emily join her. When Emily settled next to her, Alex surprised both of them by wrapping an arm around her shoulders, leaning in so her temple pressed against Emily's.

"I will always always love you, Emily," she confessed, "But we're just too different to be together anymore."