"What she did was wrong, Chief. You can talk about 'grey areas' all you want, but she's still guilty."

It had been hours since our "discussion" of whether Mrs. Delgado's extenuating circumstances were sufficient to justify her behavior, and the words were still looping through my head.

Not because I cared about Mrs. Delgado particularly... it was the argument itself that was bothering me -- and the fact that it hadn't become an argument until Blair brought up "grey areas." Then I took the hard-assed, "right is right, wrong is wrong," everything is black-and-white line -- and it had nothing to do with domestic disputes in the Delgado household and everything to do with the state of the Ellison/Sandburg household.

I had been lying in bed the night before, thinking about how things seemed... strange lately. Somehow things have shifted between us, and I couldn't pinpoint just how, or when, or why. Nothing is specifically wrong, it's just weird.

It's not like we haven't had fairly regular changes in our relationship since we met, but there have always been fairly obvious reasons for it -- you could find the cause and effect, for the most part. As we went from strangers to scientist and lab rat to roommates to partners to Sentinel and Shaman to partnered detectives, it's always been explicable. Bizarre as hell, sure, but I got it, usually, eventually.

This time, I don't see anything different, any concrete change... but I feel it. And I know Blair does too; I can tell by the way he watches me, the way he looks around sometimes, questioning, as if there is something real to be seen that would account for this.

We don't talk about it... and as much as it makes me queasy to even think this, I think that the not-talking is part of the problem somehow. But I don't think I'm up to tackling that part just yet. That's his strong suit, not mine... but I admit that I shut him down the first time he tried to bring it up, weeks ago now, so I guess he's waiting for me to make the next move. Fantastic.

So I was there last night, thinking that it was like we've slipped somehow, just a bit, out of our old relationship, but without having somewhere else to go... thinking that we're stuck in some sort of grey area between the place we'd been and where it is we're supposed to be going.

And it pisses me off! I don't like grey areas! I like order, and predictability, and I liked how things were. I mean, what have we done to make the cosmos so desperate to fuck us over all the time? We're the good guys. But something is going to happen, change is coming, and I just know it's going to get worse before it gets better...

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