Here we are. Thank you for sticking with it no matter what.

Tori: yes! Thank you for acknowledging that!

Guest: we all love happy endings, sadly real life is hardly ever about that...

Cal woke up with a pulsating headache and a deeply seated sense of annoyance, which happened to be tightly related. He would have been mildly ok with the jackhammer trying to drill through his temple from the inside if that had come on the back of a hard drink binge the night before he could have actually enjoyed.

But there had been no more alcohol at the party after the awkward encounter with Gillian. She had gone back to the party and he had followed shortly after, they had stayed clear of each other but gone out of their ways to constantly be in conversation with someone else. Cal had looked for her only one more time, glad to see Emily talking to her as if nothing happened: whatever was going on between the grown ups, his daughter shouldn't have to miss out on such an important human interaction in her life. But aside from that he had ignored her, deciding to stuff himself with food rather than alcohol because he didn't quite trust himself on a tank full of inhibition-lowering liquid.

At some point, unnoticed at least by him, Gillian must have slipped away. As the party winded down and others started to leave, Zoe came to pick up Emily as planned and, feeling his duties fulfilled, Cal had made his exit as well leaving a handful of employees to enjoy the remains of the soiree. Once alone at home, Cal had only glanced at his selection of booze before deciding against it: it was fair to say that Gillian was still in town, probably some hotel not too far from the office, and doing anything that would weaken his guard, even getting spectacularly drunk at home on his own, had seemed counterproductive.

He had gone to bed instead, although sleep had been hard to come by and far from resting once it finally came. So the morning after he was standing there in his kitchen with a strong coffee - no, sometimes a cuppa was not all it took - wearing the fluffy house robe Emily had gifted him to day before - 'to go with your slippers, Dad' - and thinking that perhaps a little hair of the dog was exactly what he needed even if he wasn't technically hangover.

He was trying not to think about it, to convince himself that really there was no point, when he heard a knock on the door. Cal immediately felt nauseous, another usual consequence of too much drinking that came without the funny side of it, knowing full well there weren't many people with good reasons to be knocking at his door on a Saturday morning a few days before Christmas.

He thought about doing nothing, standing still and silent in the kitchen and waiting for the visitor to give up and go: but if he was right about the identity of the knocker then he knew there was no point.

Cal still took his time to sip the coffee, knowing he had to mentally prepare himself, then slowly walked over to the door and opened it without even asking. As he expected, Gillian was standing on the other side, wrapped up in the coat and red scarf & hat accessory combination of the night before; but surprisingly, she didn't look like she knew how she had ended up there.

They stared at each other in silence for nearly an entire, excruciatingly long minute, with Cal almost hoping she would crack a joke about his homely attire. But the days of snarky remarks about how ridiculous he looked were long gone, that much was clear, and when nothing came his way Cal sighed and shook his head.

"What do you want, Foster?"

He tried, he really did, not to sound too aggressive. Dismissive was more in his chords, resigned even: he couldn't quite push himself to slam the door in her face, but he didn't have to pretend he liked seeing her there either. Gillian shifted on her feet for a second, understandably uncomfortable, looking around the cold morning before staring back at him.

"Can I come in?"

Cal studied her for a moment, shocked to find out that time and space apart seemed to have sharpened his ability to read her, trying to figure out if it was just the cold pushing the request or some bigger agenda he should have been wary of. Then he saw her shrug, shake actually, and when a buff of icy air found its way inside his robe, he came to the conclusion that if it wasn't a cold morning they were probably going to have that conversation on his porch.

Eventually he stepped aside and let her in, but when she stepped in the entrance Cal didn't give any sign that he wanted to move further inside and that he was going to defend his turf - and himself - as much as possible. On her side, Gillian wasn't exactly expecting a warm welcome or to be offered breakfast, and to some extent she could easily understand the polite hostility Cal was displaying towards her. It wasn't making things any easier for her, then again the difficulty of the situation couldn't really be put on him.

"I'm sorry I left yesterday."

The moment she spoke, Gillian could clearly see Cal's mouth itching to reply with something about not being the first time, but then a tired and dark cloud passed over his face and she realised he didn't have the strength for it.

Not anymore.

And at that moment, Gillian wished she had gone there with a better plan than what her words were about to express.

"I don't- Cal, I don't know what to do."

She didn't look at him as she spoke but could hear him moan weakly, as if her confession was expected and because of that even more painful. Then she heard him move slightly, fabric rustling as he took off the ridiculous robe and walked towards the kitchen paying attention not to come too close. Not sure she was supposed to, Gillian followed him, trying not to think too much about the fact that it had been so long since the last time she had been in his kitchen, a place where they had shared countless meals and drinks and conversations. Cal threw the remainder of the coffee in the sink and washed off the mug, moving slowly and calmly as if he didn't have a guest waiting for him to react to a heartfelt confession. Eventually he put down the mug and turned around, folding his arms in a rather obvious defensive stance and shrugging at her.

"I'm not sure I can help you, Foster." Gillian almost wished he sounded confrontational, upset, even enraged at her, but the only thing in Cal's voice she could detect was defeat. "When you left-" Here his voice wavered for a second, the memory of her departure and what it had done to him coming back with a vengeance. "You put me in an impossible position back then, and you're doing it again now." Gillian swallowed, knowing he was right. "If I ask you to stay, if I had then… If I ask you to come back now and you won't I'm not gonna get out of this. I barely did the first time, again-" He stopped to regain his composure, shaking his head before waving his hands in a gesture that, only at that moment, Gillian realised she missed like crazy. "And if I don't ask you, if I don't say anything I might never know. But the point is Foster, the real point….is that if you really wanted to stay then, or come back now, you'd do so whether I'm asking or not."

Gillian was floored, completely grounded by Cal's precise analysis. She hadn't thought about it, not in those terms, but he was absolutely - and painfully - spot on. And, she was about to find out, he wasn't done yet.

"I knew you wanted to leave," Cal sighed, setting up to finally make himself some tea and talking away as if he was normally chatting with her like they used to. "I saw it, little by little at first not knowing what it was…I did have a brain tumour, in my defence. Then I started to wonder, if the reason why I couldn't identify what I saw was simply that it was the one thing I'd never imagined would happen. But I wasn't going to use my cancer as a trap to keep you around against your will."

Gillian stood there, watching and listening, even more speechless than before. Besides showing up she didn't have much of a strategy, and most of that first step came from the fact that she didn't like to be the one retreating like the night before, and she had been more than ready for Cal to slam the door in her face and refuse to engage. Not only was he doing the opposite of what she had expected, but he was also freely letting out things she was sure he'd never volunteer if his life depended on it.

"But you didn't say anything." Somehow she managed to speak again, catching him watching her as he sipped his tea and noticing how once again he hadn't offered some. "The reasons why I left…your tumour was-"

"You had already decided to leave based on what you knew, on what you had seen for years, despite being in love with me." Cal cut her off, distant and absent even as he flawlessly acknowledged that he knew she loved him as much as he loved hers. "Finding out about my illness wasn't going to change things, it shouldn't have. 'Cause let's be honest Foster, tumour or not we both know I had given you plenty of reasons to ditch me even before that thing started growing inside my head. I get it Foster, I really do. It's not about me not being enough for you, you don't even think that. It's just about the fact that you can no longer discount how I make you feel. You shouldn't do it, and neither should I. Too many times I didn't take into consideration how you must have felt, or dismissed what my actions did to you." He sighed heavily and slowly shook his head, his face and whole body becoming suddenly darker and more sombre, and the small, bitter, smile coming to his lips looked to her like a horrible grimace. "You didn't want to be one of those women who get stuck in an abusive relationship. You did what you had to do to look after yourself. Quite frankly Foster, I am surprised it took you so long. That's why I'm not gonna say anything and leave it up to you." He paused for a second, gulping down a sip of scorching hot tea possibly to numb his insides before sharing the last bit of his thoughts. "It's always been up to you."

Gillian knew what he was doing, that he was using a lot of extra words and going out of his way to show just how much he understood her reasoning as a way to emotionally distance himself from what that all meant. That wasn't surprising, it was a very understandable human reaction even for someone normally so guarded as Cal Lightman; but what truly shocked her was how precisely he was able to describe what she had felt and thought even when she hadn't been able to fully understand it herself.

His explanation…her own explanation hit her in the face at full force for the first time, unveiling things that even in the most honest self-reflection moments she had gone through over the past months she had not been able to admit to herself. He was right, inescapably right. She had made the life-changing decision of leaving before she knew he was sick but not only based on the recent signs, and with that she had put herself - and him - in a deadlock situation. Once she had known about the tumour and about how it might have changed him she had decided to wait, not to stay but just to wait…because Cal was right; even when she had been able to attribute the recent and dense list of out of order things he had done to the mass in his brain and remove those from the equation, there was still a long series of actions and behaviours that she hadn't been able to overlook anymore.

Cal had known all that, somehow he had seen the quagmire where she stood and realised he was in one of his own. He wasn't a different person because of the tumour, just an exaggerated version of himself, and he certainly hadn't become a different person after the surgery. He was always going to be the man he was, but as imperfect as he was he was still a decent enough human being to know that he wasn't going to take advantage of his near death experience and guilt-trip her into staying.

For a moment, feeling tears forming behind her eyes fixed on him, Gillian considered how painful it must have been for Cal to realise all that on his own, to sit on the epiphany while still in hospital, giving up on her and deciding not to act and simply let her go. But the floodgates eventually opened only when she realised that, much like Cal had been trying to explain, nothing had changed.

Cal was watching, he had been for a few minutes now and it had been the longest he had been staring right at her with no hesitation and with a lot of purpose since the day he had caught that strange expression on her face for the first time. He was waiting, nothing else. Waiting for her to come to the same conclusion he had come to the night before during their brief encounter.

That nothing had changed, and nothing was ever going to. Not even if they would have had the courage to finally bring up how being in love with each other factored into all that

The first tear gave her away, because the rest of her face was pretty much an empty shell Cal couldn't read in any meaningful way. As the tears flowed slowly, the emotions started to show; regret, sadness, love, pain, guilt, confusion, resentment…too many, too conflicting to lead to anything but more pain and utter emotional disaster.

Cal had frequently pointed out that he had trouble reading her, more than once he had said that she could be a fantastic liar when she wanted to, the very genesis of their human interaction had stemmed from that, and they both knew Gillian had taken advantage of it on more than one occasion. But he was having no trouble reading her at that moment, although he wished he had; because Gillian's was the face of someone who knew loving him wasn't enough, not anymore, for neither of them.

And when she finally came to terms with it too she walked out on him, for the third and last time, leaving him to stare at the dark liquid in the mug wishing he could just slip inside and drown in it.

The end

I guess you were waiting for the big final confrontation and reconciliation, for them to find each other as we all would have liked to see them on the show. Sorry to say, not this time.

Please understand, it's not like I wanted to be cruel or something: but almost all stories around here end well no matter how much crap we put them through, and in all honesty I have been meaning to end one badly since Into the Mirror (the original idea had the roles reversed and Gillian would have left, fed up with not being included by Cal).

They loved each other, but it wasn't enough to get them there.

Now, just in case you're thinking about ditching me for one sad story...here is your preview

Smiling to herself, Gillian slowed down a little just so that she could inhale the freshly made chocolate, already looking forward to matching the aroma with the taste, when Cal stormed out of his office fumbling to put on the coat.

"Oi! There you are," he addressed her with his trademark nervous energy. "I was looking for you."

"Why? I am in trouble?"

"I was looking for you because I need to get out a little earlier, if that's ok."

"Don't we have a meeting with the civil rights law firm to discuss their contract?"

"They called 10 minutes ago, their senior associate came down with something and they need to reschedule." Gillian gave him a studying look, showing off her mistrust until Cal rolled his eyes. "You can check with Anna. Why would I lie about that anyway, they are the good guys."

"True, but you don't like lawyers-"

"I don't like one lawyer."

"Cal," Gillian sighed, resuming her walk back to her office where she intended to enjoy her chocolate before it could get too cold. "I know you like to think I do have control of your agenda but we both know that's not the case, mostly because you don't actually keep one. And since we are equal partners, if you say you've cleared your schedule that's good enough for me." The conversation had carried on with the innocent banter during the walk but when they reached her office and went in, away from others, Gillian turned around and gave him a more serious look. "Something wrong?"

Cal smiled cheekily, surprised by the sudden change of register, then nodded and waved his hand to kindly dismiss her concern.

"All good love, nothing to worry about. I just need to leave early to go and pick up a dog."