She pulls her hood over her head as she walks the shop-lined street. It looks like rain.
Ever since her pregnancy and subsequent stillbirth of the baby, she's been different. It's like all of the pieces and parts of her soul were shifted and shaken along with her hormones. Like someone took her apart like a pocket watch, put all the little gears and pins into a tiny silken pouch and shook it up.
She's left bare with nothing but a pale face. Time stands still. There is no need for time. All of the days that turned to weeks and grew into months while the baby was inside of her are over and gone. There is no need for time to tell her anything anymore, because all it possibly could tell her is how long her womb has been emptied of its sacred contents with that menacing tick, tick, tick.
She has no need for time. Everything stopped the minute she held that tiny, fragile body in her arms and felt its pulse slow and stop. Truly at 19 weeks, it was a miracle the heart beat outside of her at all. It was a blessing and a curse to press her lips to its velvet, violet crown and anoint it with her tears.
They tell her that in addition to the grief, she could also be experiencing the hormonal shifts of perinatal depression and anxiety.
But it is not that.
She feels nothing.
Rage has frozen her heart. Despair has made her entirely numb. She prepares to work like a robot, oblivious to the gazes and sighs around her. She needs to work. She needs to catch and kill and conquer.
She is, afterall, a warrior.
If there is one gift that son of a bitch Reddington gave her, it was the case that brought to light the special little whorls and hooks of DNA that make her special, fierce, and savage. She will use this to her advantage.
He may have disappeared, but she will find him. She has learned a thing or two over the past two years, and she will use this knowledge like a scholar to hunt him down and do to him what she should have done months ago when she still had the chance.
When her baby still had a chance.
If only she'd had three or four more weeks. There would have been hope.
He robbed her of hope, and she would make him pay.
She grits her teeth as she ducks into the pawn shop as it starts to rain in a sudden, steady downpour.
