I just binge watched Emerald City, and I'm really disappointed to find out almost immediately after finishing season 1 that the network cancelled the show! Boo! Emerald City and all it's characters belong to NBC. Here is my idea of what might have been, tweaking the last part of the last episode a bit, and starting out my imaginary Season Two. Leave me a comment if you liked it! -HybridVigor999

It had been almost a month since Karen and Dorothy had been taken to the hospital after a serious and unpredicted twister touchdown. What the police could pieced together from their accounts and whatever hadn't blown away from the scene was that Karen interrupted a robbery in progress, officers responded, Dorothy arrived on scene just as a tornado touched down. They never found the robbers or the officers involved, but figured their remains would eventually turn up as debris in whatever path the twister took.

Karen had been in intensive care in a coma since the incident. She'd lost quite a lot of blood from the gunshot wound that had also clipped her spine. Dorothy said she could not to remember the 10 minutes during which the tornado had raged above the cellar, and they chalked it up to head trauma. Emergency responders had asked Dorothy a few pointed questions about the deep, hand-shaped bruising around her neck, cut and bruised face and other assorted injuries. One of the docs was pretty well acquainted with Dorothy, and had seen her at work within the last 36 hours, making the half-healed wounds that looked weeks old very odd indeed.

Since there was no forthcoming answers, they just made their notes and asked their screening questions for domestic abuse. Dorothy didn't have any answers-and she wasn't even casually dating according to nurse friends and close family. She seemed impatient with triage, and declined bloodwork and deeper looks at her own injuries, using her leverage as a nurse to speed the process along so she could get to Karen's bedside.

Life settled down a bit, but Aunt Em was worried. Something seemed terribly wrong, but Dorothy wouldn't open up about it. The bruises faded, some slower than others, and Dorothy even went back to work within the week, putting on a brave smile before heading out in her patterned scrubs. She would come home after every shift, and shut herself up in her room. Aunt Em was beside herself, pestering her husband with questions instead of Dorothy until he muttered Spanish underneath his breath and took to sitting on the porch with a newspaper.

This morning though, she'd heard some odd noises from Dorothy in the bathroom-maybe crying but Em couldn't be sure. After that, the younger woman had come out in her favorite gray tanktop and jeans, and wandered into the kitchen to fill a glass of water at the kitchen sink. She looked pale as she stared out the bright window. Aunt Em puttered around the living room for a few minutes before approaching Dorothy.

"Dorothy, hon…"

Dorothy had been bracing herself against the rim of the sink, but when she heard Aunt Em approaching, she straightened up and brushed her dark, wavy hair away from her face. When she turned around with a fake smile, Em could see she'd splashed cold water on her face, and she had dark circles under her eyes.

"Good morning," she chirped.
"Oh my dear, come here…" Unable to hold back after seeing the desolate expression in Dorothy's eyes behind the fake cheer, Aunt Em wrapped her arms around her.

"I wish you would tell me what's wrong, Dorothy. I can't help you, if you don't let me in."

The young woman finally broke down and sobbed, pressing her face into the older woman's shoulder. Her slim frame, now more gaunt than before, shook as she cried. She didn't resist as her aunt led her to the old 50's dining set and helped her sit down.

"I'm sorry. I guess the attack on Karen, meeting her like that, the twister...I haven't really gotten over it. You don't need to worry about me," said Dorothy, as she scrubbed the tears from her cheeks with the heels of her palm.

"Dorothy, please. I can tell there's something more. You barely knew about Karen before you met her, and now you still barely speak of her. You go quiet so often these days, and I can tell you're dropping weight."

Dorothy watched her aunt as she got up and paced toward the cupboard that held the mugs, thinking about what to say, what could be believed. Her time in Oz was hard, painful, and left her with inexplicable scars, both physical and invisible. She had lived weeks in Oz, and only ten minutes had passed in this world… There was no way to tell Aunt Em that she had lived and loved more within that 10 minutes than she had in her entire 20 years. She thought about what to say as she listened to the familiar sounds of her aunt opening and closing cupboards, ceramic clicking onto the formica counters.

Aunt Em poured coffee into two mugs, and picked up Dorothy's favorite red mug to bring over to her.

"You're right. There's something else, a lot more. I found out Karen isn't my mom, and so much more that I can't explain right now. I'm trying to be okay though."
"Karen isn't your mother? Is that what this is about? Oh my lord-"

As her aunt put the mug of steaming coffee in front of her, the strong sweetly bitter scent rose up and struck a discordant note between her nose and her belly. Her stomach roiled, and she gagged. Slapping a hand over her mouth, she stood so quickly, she knocked the chair back and barely made it to the sink before violently vomiting.

She heaved over and over again, arms draped over the edges of the sink. She felt her aunt's cool hands pulling her hair away from her face and rubbing her back. When the nausea finally passed, leaving her shaking and sobbing, she slid down to the kitchen floor, the worn linoleum tiles firm and steadying beneath her.

"Dorothy," Aunt Em hesitated, crouching and carefully sitting beside her adopted daughter. "How long have you been throwing up? Did I hear you this morning in the bathroom?"

Dorothy nodded, but couldn't find the words. I've been nauseous and throwing up for weeks. I'm pregnant. He tried to kill me, and I'm pregnant. There was no way to give voice to those thoughts. Her luminous brown eyes were filled with tears as she looked at the compassionate expression on her aunt's face.

"Do you need me to go with you to buy a test?" Aunt Em didn't ask any more questions than Dorothy could handle at the moment, and she was so grateful.

She nodded again, and they both stood up together.

"You go and get some air for a moment while I grab my purse and the car keys. We're going to be just fine, no matter what, okay?" With one last touch to Dorothy's shoulder, she turned and went into the house.

Dorothy stepped out, pushing the screen door open, quietly walked the length of the porch, and stepped out toward the garden and the cornfields where the glaring sun highlighted the silhouette of their old scarecrow flapping in the breeze.

A shadowy cloud loomed over a distant stretch of land, and Dorothy shaded her eyes to look across the rolling fields of yellow. A familiar german shepherd lay panting. Reality started to warp around Dorothy as she felt some hair-raising barometric shift.

Oh no.

When she turned, he was there. Lucas-no, ROAN.

Part of her wanted to pounce on him and drink him up like the last clear, cool oasis in a hundred year desert. Part of her wanted to run, pictured his hands around her neck again, the darkening around the edges of her vision as he screamed at HER to stop HIM.

Her eyes rolled back, and she never even felt the ground as it rushed to meet her.