"Remember Holly, you're never alone."

Monroe snorted as he recalled the earnest sentiment behind that admittedly cheesy line. Little did he realize it actually meant he would never be alone. Ever again, apparently. Between a baby Grimm and a feral blutbad, his carefully regimented life seemed to be spiraling out of control. If it wasn't one of them charging into his house, disrupting his pilates, it was the other, so starved for information and affection that she likely spent more time at his house than her own.

He groaned as he woke up for the fifth time that week, his face full of brunette hair. Once Monroe's eyes adjusted to the bright morning light, he began to take stock of the situation. Holly appeared to be draped completely on top of him with her head on his shoulder and her newly fluffy hair was in his face, up his nose, irritating his ears. A small growl escaped him before he could clamp down on the impulse. Holly's response was disturbing, as she growled back sleepily and cuddled her face into his neck while molding her body even closer to his.

"Feral child, teenage blutbad, cute little Holly Clark, seven years old." Monroe chanted to himself the now-familiar mantra. In his twelve-step program there had been a lot about creating mantras. "Jailbait, killing machine." Repetition of powerful words and phrases was a great behavior deterrent. He sighed and began to extricate himself from under the girl, careful not to disturb her slumber. Monroe vaguely remembered that when he was her age he'd needed lots of sleep, and Holly had a lot of trouble sleeping. Since she'd returned to civilization, she'd improved in leaps and bounds, amazing her psychiatrists and causing undesirable speculation about her case. The first psychiatrist that had been assigned to her at the hospital had insisted that there was no way that a seven year old girl could have not only survived in the wilderness alone, but retained basic language functions for nine years. He made a bunch of noise about how someone must have been caring for her, and kept pressuring Holly to tell him who it was. She understood after some discussion with himself and Nick that she couldn't tell him about her physical abilities or her heightened senses that let her listen to humans camping in her territory without alerting them to her presence. She listened to hear if they had food, camp stove fuel, blankets, and when they were leaving to go swimming or for a hike. Holly hadn't spoken out loud in years when she'd responded to him in her tree house. Now, her vocabulary was almost that of a normal teenager and her reading, mathematics and basic social skills were improving in leaps and bounds. She couldn't seem to shake the habit of dropping pronouns in her speech, but she understood just fine. However, there were lots of other problems, many of which couldn't be discussed with speech therapists and case workers.

Along with all sorts of difficulties suppressing her instincts, Holly found it almost impossible to sleep outside of the woods. She would lie awake listening to the sounds of humans all around her, sounds that years of conditioning had taught her to associate with danger. The smells surrounding her were almost as bad. Monroe had finally gotten Nick to say something to Holly's mother about the cleaners and air fresheners she used. Holly's therapist said she just needed to get used to them. Thankfully, Holly's mother seemed to go along with the idea that Holly was sensitive to them because of her lack of exposure in the woods. But even without the fake pine and scent of bleach, Holly could not sleep.

"Feels bad," was all she'd say about it for weeks. So Holly would show up as soon as her mother went to sleep. Often, in the first couple of months, she didn't want to talk at all, but would just curl up next to him wherever she found him, lean into his touch, and fall into exhausted slumber. It was like being out of the woods completely drained the girl, and while she loved running in the park across the street from his house she never slept there but instead would come back in to see what he was doing, beg for dinner, and otherwise get in his way. Once her mother returned to work, Holly started showing up during the day too.

Monroe blearily made his way down to the kitchen and started the water for coffee. Lately he preferred coffee ground by hand in a pre-1920 coffee mill and made in one of his collection of art-nouveau vacuum pots. He carefully and precisely measured the beans from the neatly labeled canister in his freezer onto a scoop on the kitchen scale. They next went into the top of the metal grinder, and he thoughtfully began to turn the crank on the top, causing the beans to release their aroma as they sifted down to the drawer at the base of the simple machine.

The first time Holly had showed up at his house had been about five hours after Nick had dropped him off there and gone to reunite Holly and her mother. She climbed right through the open kitchen window where he'd been washing dishes and tackled him. She wasn't crying exactly, just shuddering with the onslaught of emotions and changes that had come her way. Monroe could only awkwardly place his arms around her and pat her back at first, but Holly's primal need for comfort had him tucking her head under his chin after a few minutes. He was actually a little weirded out by the rumble that automatically rolled through his chest and how effectively it seemed to soothe Holly.

Being around her was really hard, because being around her was also amazing. Blutbaden in today's world had sublimated their instincts and become enculturated as much as humans, just in different and often more intense ways. Where he would act out in his younger years, going on hormone-fueled rampages, Holly had actually been using those impulses to keep herself alive. In many ways she was more stable, and certainly more mature, than any teenage blutbad he'd known, himself included at the top of the list. Still, there was absolutely no question that shoving her headfirst back into human society was a bad idea. Nick really had no clue what he was doing, and if he hadn't been so goddamned quick to blab back to his work about Holly, maybe he could have kept her from suffering so much.

Reentering the human world was not just difficult for Holly, it was painful and terrifying. While her life had been hard in the woods, it had been relatively simple. Thanks to her abilities as a blutbad, she had been able to meet her subsistence needs. Now nothing felt safe and nothing smelled right, and she was forced to live with a woman who she neither knew nor trusted, and who did not understand her or what she was. Even if she did know, she would still have no idea what was best for Holly. This was why they'd decided against revealing her nature to Mrs. Clark, though Nick still thought they should tell her "soon."

Monroe never made coffee for Holly, and he advocated strongly that she try to keep her diet as much the same as she had been eating for the past almost-decade. Blutbaden naturally needed meat and animal products and were almost universally lactose intolerant, though Monroe himself happily suffered the consequences for eggnog and other occasional treats. Vegetables were somewhat important for minerals, especially if blutbaden were eating low quality meat, but grains were a bad idea in large amounts, as they had never evolved to digest them. Poor Hap's chronic digestive ills attested to this reality. Aside from the fact that Holly had come home with holes in her gut from that drug dealer's shotgun, she was the healthiest blutbad he had ever seen. Her hair was glossy and thick and her teeth were even and straight. She was small and lean but incredibly fast and powerful. Transformed, she could outrun him, and he had always been one of the quicker of his brothers.

Still, something had told Monroe to dole out enough extra beans to make an additional cup. Probably just habit at this point, he thought, though with no real malice. Sure enough, while the coffee was draining into the bottom of the vacuum pot, Detective Nick Burkhardt performed his trademark knock-and-enter-without-permission. Hopefully the idiot wouldn't slam the door and wake Holly.

"Monroe. Good, I need your help," Nick barreled into the kitchen, staring at the cup that Monroe held out to him silently and expectantly.

"Holly is missing."

He said it as though ready to restrain Monroe from some crazy action. As if he would take off without knowing anything about the situation or who or what was involved. Nick really didn't know him that well. While they'd spent a lot of time together and Monroe had had ample time to consider Nick's personality and its strengths and flaws, it seemed the policeman-turned-Grimm hadn't ever bothered to do the same for him, and seemed to assume he would have the same reactions as his impulsive partner on the force. Really, though, that wasn't quite fair. Almost all the time they had spent together had been with Nick about two steps ahead of total disaster. It had been all the kid could do to keep himself from freaking out in most of the situations they'd been in, so it was not terribly surprising that he'd taken some things for granted.

Still, one of the things that made Nick such a terrible, or at least amateur, Grimm, in Monroe's opinion, was his complete failure at effective information gathering. Not only did Nick fail to take in much from observation, he had completely bypassed countless sources of information in their adventures, preferring to exclusively learn from whatever Grimm archives he had access to from his aunt. They sure looked extensive, but maybe he hadn't studied them very thoroughly yet. For instance, Nick had attached himself to not one but two blutbaden who hadn't tried to kill him over the course of the past six months, and instead of making use of the situation to find out more about them he'd just taken Monroe's help for granted and only asked questions that were directly relevant to the situation unfolding at the present moment. Consequently, most of the questions Nick asked him had to do with species he had little information about. But even when dealing with poor Hap and Angelina, the questions had only been about their specific situation. He didn't seem interested in the larger feud between blutbaden and bauerschwein at all, brushing aside Monroe's attempts to explain.

It's like the kid doesn't think these things might be useful to know about in later life. Maybe he figures he won't live that long, but Monroe didn't see Nick as a depressive. In fact, he had managed to survive in several situations more due to stubbornness than to any sort of skill. If all Grimms are as lame as this one, the stories his grandmother had told him were vastly exaggerated. Still, Nick's Aunt Marie had killed Monroe's Grandfather Huber, and that was a feat that must have taken some doing. That old wolf was one of the meanest, nastiest, and most ancient blutbaden around, and it would take far more than your average human with a firearm to have taken him down, whether he could be truly seen or not. So far, Nick's sight seemed to be the only really Grimm-like thing about him. No enhanced reflexes or other powers. Nick plowed through supernatural dealings with just an ability to see through to true beings and a standard issue .40 caliber revolver.

"How long ago did her mother report her missing?" asked Monroe, pressing the coffee cup into Nick's hand so he could get back to his own. "I assume that's what happened," he added.

"Just an hour ago, but Holly's bed hadn't been slept in. Mrs. Clark called me directly after talking to one of Holly's doctors, and I thought I'd see if you can think of any places we should look before getting the rest of the department involved."

Nick looked at Monroe impatiently, seeming scandalized that he wasn't more concerned. Monroe decided to put him out of his misery, though he casually leaned on the kitchen counter first while Nick paced around by the doorway.

"She's upstairs."

Nick's expression had morphed to one of confusion and surprise. Honestly, the thought hadn't crossed his mind that she might seek out the company of the only other of her kind that she knew? This proved that Nick didn't know that he had seen Holly outside of the times Nick brought her over and supervised her "rehabilitation" as he called it. Nick would pick Holly up at her mother's and claim that he was taking her to see a "specialist" who was knowledgeable about the woods where Holly grew up and could help relate to her. This was close enough to the truth to work as a lie, but Monroe choked at the idea of himself as an outdoorsman. Sure, he loved the woods like all blutbaden, but his family would literally howl with laughter if they heard him described that way, since to them his persistent integration into the human world seemed unnatural and prissy. Mostly, during these afternoons every few weeks they hiked around in the park or went to a nearby nature preserve and Nick tried to get Holly to talk about her problems integrating into the human world and tried to get Monroe to offer suggestions, which he was happy to provide. Still, in all of this, Nick focused on how to turn Holly into the perfect human-seeming teenager and appease her mother in all things rather than showing any interest in Holly's status as a blutbad.

"Here?" Nick still seemed floored, though he was starting to look a little uncomfortable. Monroe didn't like where those thoughts might be headed.

"Holly's just a kid and she's having a rough time. She comes here, sometimes, after her mother falls asleep. Holly still can't sleep in that house."

"Even though her mother stopped using scented cleaning products?" asked Nick, with a bit of a puzzled expression.

"Look Nick, I don't think the PineSol was ever the real problem. She's not comfortable there. Her instincts won't let her be comfortable there. And she certainly needs to sleep."

"Why can she sleep here and not at home? This isn't her tree house and it certainly isn't the woods. I know Holly was out of society for a long time, but she needs to try to reintegrate."

Was the guy really this dim? Monroe just shook his head. All these months he'd been hoping to avoid having a revealing conversation with the Grimm and that Nick would just draw his own conclusions, whatever they were, and keep them to himself.

"It may not be her territory, but it's the territory of someone she knows-the only other blutbad she knows."

"I still don't see why she can't get comfortable in her own home."

"Look, Nick, I think we both know that you have very little idea about what Holly needs. I'm not much better, but at least I have some idea about what can keep her safe and healthy. You think there are easy answers to this? Finding Holly threw a real curveball in my life and now everything I've worked for is being tested."

Nick's confusion seemed to grow at this, but he stuck his chin out mulishly. "So this is suddenly about you? Well I'm sorry if saving a little girl was hard for you. But this is about her life, not yours."

"Argh! You just have no idea!," Monroe's annoyance bubbled over. He wiped a hand over his eyes and took a sip of his coffee. It was superb. He went over to the cabinet by the sink and opened the door. A vast array of neatly ordered prescription drug bottles greeted him.

"Blutbaden are driven by instinct. The same instincts that kept Holly alive, healthy, and sane in the woods are the ones that keep me on all of these so that I can handle living in your world. I mostly take them for the side effects.

"This one is a depressant. This one induces extreme lethargy. This one dulls hearing sensitivity. This one, weirdly enough, promotes color blindness. This one," He pulled out each bottle from its place on the shelf, and popped one of the pills as he went, shaking the last at Nick before taking it, "Is known for practically erasing sexual urges. So far it's working well enough. But I have an exhausted seventeen year old girl who can only fall asleep while in physical contact with me. The reason for that is the same reason I'm on all that stuff. Her instincts won't let her sleep until she's safe, and as an established adult male who cared for her when she was injured, she feels safe with me."

Nick seemed a little cowed by this performance, but collected himself and in classic Burkhardt fashion trundled on to what he saw as the next step.

"So how can we get her to feel safe at her house? Is there something she should take-"

"No! I don't want a seventeen year old put on all this crap! She's still growing and besides that, is she aware of the repercussions to the extent that it's even ethical to squash her instincts? And for Holly, who is mostly instinct, if we take that away from her, what's left? She hasn't had time to develop much personhood in relation to society. I was raised by blutbaden, but still within the larger context of our culture. I understand what I'm doing to myself, though most of my kind still doesn't agree with it. Certainly not my mom, who is sure that I'm slowly killing myself by trying to live this way."

Monroe carefully replaced each of the bottles on the shelf and shut the cabinet.

"What do we do then? Regardless of all this stuff, Holly's mother needs to know that she's safe, and I need to take her home."

"Don't want to go. Not going."

A soft voice chimed in from the hall. Holly stood there in her running pants and a t-shirt, looking as serious and formidable as he'd ever seen her.

"Great, you woke her up." Monroe gripped his coffee cup and swallowed a mouthful, along with a powerful urge to shake Nick for coming in here and disturbing Holly. He flickered, which he almost never did accidentally anymore. Thankfully Nick didn't notice since his full attention was on Holly in the entryway. He started talking to her in this irritatingly slow and ultracalm voice they probably trained him in at the department.

"Hi Holly, I'm glad you're safe. We need to get you back to your Mom's so she'll be able to stop worrying about you. It's really hard for parents who just want to make sure their kids are safe."

"Safe here, not there," Holly said, adding, "Not mother. . .adopted." She ended this with a growl meant for Monroe which basically meant "I'll be out front til you come and get me."

He nodded at her in response and she ran out the front door and toward the park. It had been easier than he'd expected to get used to Holly's language of yips, growls, and howls. He'd learned some of them from his mother when he was young, and some were used by his family when they hunted as a pack, but Holly supposedly didn't have those sorts of social experiences with her own kind to draw on. So either she'd learned by listening to actual wolves, which was totally awesome, or the sounds and meanings were completely instinctual, as in already available to all blutbaden, which was also pretty cool. There was a third alternative though, which was not as interesting objectively, but which was vital to understanding Holly's case.

"About that . . .Did you look up the information on Holly's adoption?" Monroe asked.

Nick seemed to shake himself free of whatever worry he was feeling about Holly's declaration and rallied himself to address the present question, something he did rather well. He pulled a little notepad from his jacket pocket and referred to it.

"Well, the original investigation into Holly's disappearance notes that she was adopted when very young, and that her birth mother was an addict, but I haven't been able to confirm either fact myself. It seems that while the adoption was aboveboard and legal, it took place with a private institution in Kansas, St. Margaret's, so some of the paperwork is not available to us. I called them but they said the file was closed. There's no reason to doubt our original report exactly, but I pulled Holly's medical records, and I can't find anything before 1999, when Holly would have been four. It's unusual, but not that big of a sign, since it seems that's when the Clarks moved to Portland."

Huh. While Nick was being pretty nonchalant about the lack of facts, this seemed to support a growing theory he'd had for a while, and it seemed the time had come to get the Grimm on board. Monroe hoped he could, because without Nick it would severely limit his resources for further inquiry.

"Holly doesn't like Mrs. Clark." Great, very convincing. A teenage girl doesn't like her mother.

"Monroe, that is probably the most normal thing about this situation."

Try again.

"She doesn't just dislike her, she really doesn't like her. Holly doesn't trust her. She has trouble remembering a lot before she went into the woods-everything seems to be confused somehow, but she told me that Mrs. Clark is a bad person, and after a few months of observing the situation, I'm suspicious enough to want to know why she says that."

"There is obviously going to be stress if you're going back to civilization after years away, and especially if Holly can't really remember her mother, it's natural she feels alienated," Nick took a deep breath, as if it pained him to say the next bit, "And since she's a blutbad, it may not be as easy for her to fit into a family. That doesn't mean her adoptive mother is evil."

It was so frustrating how to Nick, being blutbaden or anything else was simply an obstacle to be overcome. He didn't seem to really grasp the differences. Though maybe that was his fault, for being the first Nick really knew, and being such a human culture conformist. Still, Nick needed to get outside his assumptions and listen.

"There aren't any pictures of them," Monroe blurted.

"What?"

"Before she's three or four, there aren't any pictures of her with Mrs. Clark or her husband. But there are pictures of Holly when she's a baby. Holly thinks one of them is her with her mother, her real mother."

"But how could that be? If Mrs. Clark had pictures of Holly from before she was adopted, that would mean. . ."

"Something very bad. Look, Nick, there are some other things that make Mrs. Clark's story pretty unlikely. She said Holly's mother was an addict who gave her up for adoption when she was born. I have no doubt that her mother was addicted to something, since she was blutbaden, even if it was just the full moon rush, but heroin? cocaine? meth? They all don't have the same effects on us. In fact," Monroe paused, stopping himself just short of telling Nick how poisonous cocaine was to blutbaden. Sure he liked the guy, but he didn't want to give him-or worse, other Grimm-a weapon that could so easily be wielded against his kind.

"Well, you probably don't need to know what I was about to say, but the point is: not likely an addict in the human sense. The other thing is that blutbaden don't give up children. We aren't quite on the brink of extinction, but we aren't exactly populous either. Due mostly to Grimms and our own recklessness, but we have a low birthrate too. There aren't that many females, and they can only have children at certain times. They always know when they're fertile, and if they want to get pregnant they always find a male to take care of them and their children. Children are a precious gift."

He'd heard the adults around him say that a thousand times growing up, but it never quite sank in until now. Monroe knew growing up with so many more impressive brothers that while he might find female companionship from time to time, it was unlikely that he would ever be chosen to father children. It had never really bothered him, but now that he had exclusive access to a female, however young, the thoughts wouldn't leave him alone. He shook it off. Holly was the precious child they were talking about at the moment.

"Even if something bad happened to Holly's parents, it's almost unthinkable that one or the other of them wouldn't have been from a clan. There would be grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, great-great aunts-in-law, you name it, ready and willing to raise the baby. Something had to have been going on."

Nick took in this information for a minute. "If blutbaden die frequently as a result of their bad choices, why are you so sure that every single child would have such a large extended family? I'm sure there are some only children whose parents are already passed on."

Monroe smiled slightly.

"That's a pretty safe assumption, if you're talking about human families. However, for blutbaden, having children like septuples your chances of survival or something. Different instincts kick in, or maybe you just finally have something to do with them. Anyway, most parents aren't going to do anything to endanger their lives since they have a bunch of crazy wild children who need them."

Nick thought some more, and tentatively said, "Not to bring up a sore point but, didn't my aunt uh, hunt your grandfather?"

So Nick had been listening when he'd said that.

"Yeah, but the old wolf was like a bazillion or something. He had to have been halfway senile."

Nick looked skeptical at this. "It's hard to imagine my Aunt Marie hunting down a harmless old man."

Monroe snorted. "He was hardly harmless. And not exactly decrepit either."

"But you just said he was really old."

Ahhh, so they were finally getting to this issue. Hopefully Nick's reaction would be as amusing as Monroe had always imagined. Maybe Nick already knew, but Monroe couldn't help but get a little bit excited at the prospect of shocking the ridiculously level-headed Grimm. If he didn't want to give it away though he'd have to play it cool.

"Nick, how old would you say I am?"

Nick rolled his eyes at what he saw as a non sequitur and said impatiently, "I dunno, forty?"

"Ugh, Nick, I have been told numerous times I don't look a day over thirty-four. You don't have to be a dick about it. But no. I was born in 1933. Next year I'll be eighty. And that's actually pretty young for a blutbad to be let out alone. Most of us stay close together til we're at least a century. But Grandfather Huber was old. Like, he led a force that pushed back the Romans in one of the early invasions of what we now know as Germany."

"Romans?" said Nick weakly. Monroe took a moment to enjoy the way his eyes had widened and his breath had caught. With Nick you didn't get much more than that, but it was still funny to throw the straightforward cop off-balance.

"Yeah, they seemed to catch on pretty quickly and rustled up some of your people to help with their campaign. But the point is, blutbaden reach adulthood at more or less the same rate as humans, then they stay there. You have no way of knowing how old one is just by looking."

"So Aunt Marie took down a two-thousand year old blutbad?"

"Yeah, I mean, I was pretty little when it happened. I think I was eleven or twelve, but I still remember him. Green suspenders. Lots of teeth."

"Wait, that's impossible! If you're almost 80 and were eleven or twelve at the time-that was like 1944 or 45. Aunt Marie wasn't even born yet."

Yay, yay, yay! Monroe had hoped to be the one to break it to him, since he loved the way Nick's stern jaw would slacken when truly shocked, but he still didn't know how much Nick's aunt had actually told him before kicking the bucket. Not much, apparently.

"Nick, your aunt has been killing blutbaden at least since the reign of Queen Victoria. So I'm guessing she's more like your great- great- great- aunt or something."

Nick turned around and walked into the living room so he could slump down in one of the chairs. Monroe came over to watch the little gears in his head turning, turning. Nick took a deep breath.

"So is Holly really seventeen?"

Bah, so Nick was just going to ignore the news that he stood to live a long time, if he could just avoid getting killed. He didn't even bring up the fact that his aunt supposedly was dying of cancer? That was so Nick, absolutely refusing to rise to the bait if he could possibly help it. Annoying, but also kind of impressive. Monroe would just have to save his theories on that subject until Nick was ready to deal with it.

"Probably more like twenty, give or take a couple of years. I called my mom the other day to get straight with her how old we look compared to humans when we're really young. It was hard coming up with a reason for wanting to know, but thankfully I'm sort of known in my family for asking a lot of random questions. She said that we take a few years longer than humans to 'change teeth' so if humans are about 7 when that happens we are more like 9 or 10, but look the same age."

"So you're saying that there's a possibility that Holly was with her birth parents for as long as six years before being adopted by the Clarks? Wouldn't she have remembered her birth parents?"

"From what she's said, Holly does remember her birth parents, as much as a very young child can. It's her years with the Clarks that are all fuzzy and confused."

"So you think that the Clarks stole Holly from her parents, along with some photos, and moved her out of state. What about her abduction by Addison?"

"Well, you know how he told the papers Mrs. Clark had asked him to take Holly camping but everyone just dismissed him because he had a prior conviction as a sex offender? And you know, kept raving about how she bit him."

"You mean you think he might have been telling the truth about that too?"

"Maybe. Holly still says she doesn't remember much about that day before biting Addison and running off into the woods. But I looked up his record online, and his prior conviction had to do with a fifteen-year-old boy. You're the expert on criminals, but isn't it weird to jump to seven year old girls after that?"

Nick looked more impressed than when he'd told him about his Roman-slaying grandfather. What a guy.

"I'll have to look into that more closely. If what you're saying is true, do you think Holly could possibly be in danger from Mrs. Clark?"

"Well, not directly, not physically anyway." While Nick had carefully and emphatically explained to Holly that she must never use her speed or strength to harm humans ever again, Monroe had taken her aside later and said that the caveat was unless there was nothing else she could do to protect herself from them. She could always run away, and that should be her first instinct anyway, but if she was truly backed into a corner, better to strike first than risk being shot again. And if they'd seen her face, make sure they were dead before leaving. Using claws would indicate a wild animal attack to humans, but there were Grimms out there, so it was important to use caution. Holly was especially vulnerable to humans, because she knew she shouldn't hurt or totally avoid them, but she lacked the experience to divine their motives in approaching her.

"I would feel a lot better if you could find something that bumps her age up at least a year. Then she could choose to either stay here or go back to the woods and look for her birth family in peace. I looked up getting her emancipated, but in her circumstances I doubt a court would declare her fit. Do you think it's a good idea to have her come out with some story about somebody taking care of her in the woods like that first doctor believed? It is completely unheard of that a feral child could so easily learn to live in civilization."

"Maybe. I don't really want to make up another lie surrounding this case, but if Mrs. Clark is really as suspicious as you say she is, perhaps it's for the best that Holly stay here for a little while. I'll tell them I know where she is and that she's safe but that she needs a little time to herself."

Monroe finished his rapidly cooling coffee and went to refill his cup in the kitchen. When he returned to the living room, Nick was on the phone with his partner, giving him the story about Holly and asking him to find out where their original information about her adoption came from. Now that Nick thought about it, it was highly irregular that her birth mother wasn't the primary suspect in the abduction, but as far as Hank could tell him, she'd never even been looked for. So much about that whole case was disturbing.

When Nick hung up the phone, he turned back to Monroe seriously.

"Is Holly staying here going to be a problem?"

Monroe knew, when he said that, Nick was not asking if her presence as a house guest would be an inconvenience.

"Look man, she's already practically living here. If I've made it this far, I see no reason why I can't keep it up. Besides, it is really important that Holly not be totally unprotected."

Nick looked amused, and Monroe could tell it was at his expense.

"I thought you said you'd be no match for her?"

How annoying, to bring that up.

"That's true, as far as it goes. Holly can take care of herself, if it means clamping her jaws around the threat and shaking. But other blutbaden are going to come sniffing around eventually, and it's better for Holly if they can tell without asking that she's not alone. Unclaimed females are trouble. Just look at Angelina, running back and forth across the country, getting everybody's hopes up, but never picking anyone. No one knows if she just doesn't want children yet, or if she can't have them, but still she breaks a lot of hearts."

Nick looked skeptical and uncomfortable again.

"You claimed her? Do I even want to know?"

"Relax. Just by being in close contact over an extended period of time she gets enough of my scent on her that any blutbaden who are close enough to bother her can tell she doesn't sleep alone. It's not even necessarily a romantic thing, just, they'll know if they were thinking about grabbing her, she has a connection to somebody who would do something about it."

Nick's eyebrows raised.

"You would do something about it?"

He didn't have to sound so incredulous about it. Monroe had done loads of crazy stuff for and with Nick, so it shouldn't seem so odd that he could potentially deal with his own kind.

"I may not be the scariest blutbad ever, but I'm not completely useless either. Anyway, Grimms are supposed to worry about us hurting humans. You guys have never cared at all when we start killing each other off. It's viewed more like Christmas coming early."

"Maybe so, but I'm still a cop."

This guy.

"It would probably never come to that anyway. Part of the scent thing is that Holly consents to have me close. So some idiot might try to show off for her, but ultimately it's her decision."

"Does she know that's what it means? Holly might inadvertently put herself in danger if she doesn't."

"I'm uh, pretty sure she knows."

Again with that look of amusement at his expense.

"Does Holly have a crush?" Nick teased, smirking at Monroe's discomfort.

He was blushing. How lame.

"Well if it keeps her safe, and relatively happy, I don't see the harm," Monroe sniffed. He continued, "I know some day she'll need to get out there and meet more people so she can make an informed decision. But she's really young, I'm about as safe as blutbaden come, so just leave it alone."

Nick nodded, looking a little contrite for prying.

"So Holly can stay here for the time being. Do you have any information that might give me a place to start looking for Holly's family. I'll go through hospital records for 1988 on, I guess, looking for the first name Holly. If she was really six when she went with the Clarks they probably wouldn't have tried to change her first name."

"Good thinking, but hospital records are probably not the way to go. Blutbaden pretty much avoid hospitals in all cases, since there are some things about us that would be too unusual to pass off. Female blutbaden are pretty dedicated homebirthers, but they'd probably still have to register for a birth certificate, so you might try that instead. I wish I knew if there were any clans missing a child, but I don't keep up with stuff like that."

"Do you know someone who might remember a little girl gone missing? What about your mom?"

Bad idea! Monroe spluttered, "My Mom? Nick, if I call her up and ask her one more 'hypothetical' question this week, she is going to run down here herself and I don't want to find out what she'll do when she gets here. I'll probably be married by the end of the week. That or dead for keeping this kind of secret from her.

"An unaffiliated female is kind of a big deal. Blutbaden aren't exactly the most populous species, no thanks to your family. My mom has her own agenda, and a moral system that is, uh, not directly related to yours. Tipping her off that there might be a potential grandchild-incubator on the horizon is not wise. Not if you want Holly to have any semblance of that 'normal' life you keep talking about."

"Alright, alright." Nick held up his hands in a placating gesture. "I'll see what I can find to throw Mrs. Clark's story into doubt. If I can't find anything by tonight though, Holly may need to go back and make an appearance. We'll see how it goes. Keep me posted and let me know if anything comes up."

Without even waiting for a nod from Monroe, Nick strode out of the house. There was a little whoosh of air behind him and then Holly's small arms went around him and her face was pressing into his back. She pulled back from her hug, and Monroe turned around to face her. So impatient. Couldn't she have just waited out front like she'd said?

"Your mother...interesting," she said with a raised eyebrow and a little smirk.

"Hols were you listening?" This girl really had no concept of privacy. Really had no concept. He could not count the number of times he had explained to her that certain things were better done without certain people around, but any sort of shyness or reserve, at least around him, seemed completely foreign to her.

She nodded happily.

"For how long?"

"Whole time."

"You said you'd be out front!"

"Was out front!"

"Out front listening!" He accused.

She nodded again, completely untroubled by his annoyance.

"We are going to have another talk about respecting privacy young lady." Monroe wasn't exactly mad, more flustered, as he'd been pretty candid with Nick.

Holly silently stared back, then extended one slim finger to point to the clock on the kitchen wall.

Monroe looked, then looked again, then backed into the living room and checked the grandfather clock there.

"Crap! I'm gonna be late for pilates class. You should have told me before!"

With that, he tore upstairs to get ready at a speed that almost impressed her. Alone in the kitchen Holly walked over to the sink and opened the cabinet to her left. She took out the rightmost bottle, opened it, and shook the contents out over the garbage disposal. She thought for a minute, then picked out the second one from the left and did the same. After replacing the bottles and shutting the cabinet, she went outside to wait in the car for Monroe. They could ride to pilates together today.

A/N: Just a little something that I have had going on in my head since watching episode 7. It kind of bothers me that they link episodes to fairy tales but usually don't go very far at all with it, so I wondered what it would be like if there was a little more depth to the Rapunzel comparison.

I'm gonna call this one completed for the time being, though I've thought out how this might play out if there is any interest in me adding to it.

Anyway, reviews are more than appreciated! They are loved!