Chapter Seven: 63 Hours

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1 hour 13 minutes.

She wakes to distant voices. People around her, leaning over her. Lights and sounds… at first, she thinks she can hear Hotch calling her name and tries to lean towards him; seconds later, it's JJ with a flashlight calling out for her to tell them where she is.

"I'm here," she rasps, smelling the cornfield thick and earthy in her nose, the damp of the ground still seeping through her pants. "I'm here, I'm here… I'm here."

It takes a monumental effort to tear her eyes open, something sticky and half-dry gluing them shut. It hurts. It hurts…

And then her eyes are open and she sees clearly. She sees the wall across from her; she sees the cabin surrounding. When she looks down, she sees the ties binding her tight to the chair that she's slumped in. She sees that she's alone and that there's no light here to be found.

She sees just how much trouble she's in.

"Fuck," she chokes out through her crushing headache, just one thought surmounting over all else: if she's here, captive… where's Spencer?

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9 hour 43 minutes.

Hankel watches her. Despite all her training and her experience in the field, she's not as good at Reid is at connecting with the truly broken. If it was Reid in this seat, she can't help but think he'd likely know the words to worm his way into the mind of the man holding him captive. He'd know the cleverest way to talk his way out of here, since she's always been better at shooting her way out of trouble but that's hard to do when disarmed, concussed, and chained to a chair.

"Tell me about yourself," Hankel says suddenly, almost buckling her down the middle as she remembers the last person to ask this of her, under such vastly different circumstances. "Tell me why you've become the person sitting here before me."

"I'm not giving you the ammunition to shoot me," she snaps back. He's pacing around her and she can't watch him the whole way around, neck aching as she strains it to try and keep him in view. "If you're going to kill me, just do it. Don't fuck around trying to validate murder."

He stops and looks at her with something so focused in his expression that she almost reels back. It's nothing like Doyle—there's none of the fantastic intelligence there, instead, all she can see is a fanatical kind of zeal. But, in the end, they're as deadly as each other.

"Are you devout, girl?" Hankel asks with one of his other voices, the one that's hateful and spitting. "Do you pray for absolution?"

"Yes," she lies. "Your God is mine. We're the same, you and I—"

Reid would never have lied like this.

But Hankel snarls, moving like a dog and cutting her off as his hand wraps through her hair and yanks her back hard against the chair, neck pulled back and throat bared. It's a viciously vulnerable position, and Emily tries to breathe shallowly as every part of her rebels against the way her spine is twisted.

"Get your hands off of me," she snarls, trying to twist so that her chest isn't thrust out with the angle he's yanking her head back at. She sees the way his gaze skims down her, nothing but repulsion in his eyes as he studies her body.

"'Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die'," he murmurs, her blood running cold at the remembered line of Ecclesiasticus from the Catholic Bibles of her childhood, the churches that had cast her aside. "'Give me any plague, but the plague of the heart, and any wickedness but the wickedness of a woman'. We are nothing alike, girl. You revel in your whoredom in your attempt to live like a man in a man's world. You debase yourself."

He's going to kill her, she knows this completely in that moment. If he doesn't find a reason, this will be it. That she's a woman in a position of power over him, an equal with men, and he's repulsed by that.

She stops playing nice, refusing to be kind to the man who's going to end her.

"My team is going to find you," she says quietly, going still and hate-filled in his grip. "And if I'm not alive when they do, they'll make sure you spend the rest of your days on this earth in just as much misery as you will be when you finally burn in Hell."

He tilts his head and stares right at her, not a flicker of emotion in his eyes. The hate is gone, as is the anxious neuroticism of the Tobias personality. Instead, there's nothing. Emotionless apathy. And, when he speaks, his voice is chilling enough that she feels it in her bones, the tenor resonating into her through his hand still gripping her hair and raising bumps of fear on every inch of her chilled flesh.

"Let the women learn in silence with all subjection," he cites with that same deadpan apathy, letting go of her hair and reaching down to undo his belt without breaking eye contact. That simple move guts her. She freezes like the lamb she'd likened Spencer to, thinking of the knife coming her way. The sound of the belt slithering through the loops of his jeans is, somehow, less frightening than the sight of him undoing the belt had been. In some way, realising he only plans to beat her is a hell of a lot kinder than the alternative.

Another part of her is almost disappointed. To rape her, he'd have to untie her, and she'll go down fighting with her teeth in his throat and his death in her eyes.

And he's still talking in that same dead voice as he snaps the belt taut and stands above her. "But I suffer not a woman to teach—" The belt falls across her thigh, first one and then another with the tail end slashing her bound arms between them, with a sound like pure noise; she does not flinch. "—nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence."

Down comes the belt again, across the same place. And again. She's thankful that he's left her pants on her, the material taking the edge from the blow.

The next strike falls across her chest, and this time she jerks with the pain. But she does not scream.

"For Adam was first formed, then Eve."

Again. This time, when he pulls his hand back, she feels something wet beginning to trickle down her skin.

But she does not scream. And she doesn't look away. Let him look her in the eyes as he hurts her. Let him carry this too, along with every other act he's undertaken.

"And Adam was not deceived—" The blow to her face is shocking, and she knows instantly that it's fucked her mouth up for sure, but as soon as the stars have faded she merely cocks her head again and stares him down, seeing him pause for just a second before continuing: "—but the woman being deceived was in the transgression."

And when he finally stops, she gathers together her shaken wits, smiles at him, and then spits the blood from her broken mouth into his face, watching with satisfaction as it drips from his chin.

"Try harder," she sneers. "You can't break me, and I'll kill you if you try."

After all, he's no Doyle.

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11 hours 59 minutes.

Hankel vanishes for what Emily estimates is just over an hour, leaving her alone with offal burning on the wood-stove behind her. The stink is revolting but she's smelled worse, putting it aside as just another thing she's going to survive and move on from. In that time, she fights her bonds as much as she can, until the blood from her wrists is running just as freely as from her fucked up mouth. When that fails, she tries to shuffle the chair towards the door, the legs grating and complaining on the cement floor beneath her. But it's locked and she can't stand properly to reach it with her hands tethered to the chair how they are.

There's nothing else in this cramped hovel. Gravestones propped against the back wall that she looks at for a while, noting their unmarked faces on the freshly hewn stone. A cemetery then, or a stone-smith. Either way, she tucks the information away just in case.

There are more computers set up in the alcove at the front of the cabin, the screens powered down but with the occasional LED light blinking. Dragging the chair over there earns her nothing but more blank screens, none of them waking to her jolting the desk with her shoulder. By this point, her lashed legs are screaming with pain, her eyes watering from the agony of the stripes across her chest and tits, and she barely manages to get the chair back in place before sagging into it with her head spinning and a migraine that she knows is going to fuck her up building steadily.

The door opens and she turns to sneer at Hankel as he walks in, making sure he feels the absolute hatred she has for him. He stops, looking at her strangely. When she follows his gaze, her red shirt is marked with smears and spreading pools of blood.

"Did my father do that to you?" Tobias asks with what genuinely sounds like wretchedness in his voice. "I'm sorry. He can be… cruel."

Emily thinks fast. The voice he'd used while striking her hadn't been cruel—it hadn't really been anything. "I don't think so," she says carefully. "The man who did this didn't seem to feel any kind of emotion. I don't think he understands cruelty, not like we do. And we do, don't we, Tobias?"

Hankel swallows. His arms are full of wood, which he puts down by the door before walking over to her with short, nervous steps. "Raphael," he murmurs, but refuses to expand on that thought when she asks who that is. "Father is only cruel to us to teach us what we need to know, to be pious and good and to avoid sin."

"You know that's not true. Abuse isn't teaching—abuse is abuse. This is abuse." And she takes a wild guess that she doesn't really feel is all that wild, not with how his eyes never really meet hers and the way he winces and twists away from her regard. "He's been abusing you for a long time, Tobias. You know, we can help stop that… we can keep him away from you."

"No one can keep him away from me," is all Hankel says with a kind of fatalistic resignation that she can't quite feel sorry for him for, not through the pain. When he reaches down as though to touch where one of the places the belt split her skin is still bleeding, she can't help but flinch away. His hand draws back. "I can't clean those. I can't place my hand upon you in such an intimate way, it wouldn't be right…"

"You can let me go," she coaxes. "Isn't that a kind of repentance? It would be good of you to release me—your God would want you to let me go, so I can go seek help for my injuries. Maybe you can even come, hey? Away from here, away from him?"

Hankel reels back, shaking his head with a ferocious kind of fear. "He warned me," he breathes. "He warned me the serpent would speak through your tongue, beguiling me."

"I'm not—"

"No!" Hankel whirls away from her, carding his trembling hands through his hair, and Emily falls silent. She doesn't want to push him into taking on his father's voice, or 'Raphael's', not when she's barely managing to move beyond the pain of what's happened to her. There's a dangerous amount of compartmentalising going on in her brain right now: pushing aside everything that isn't immediate. She refuses to think about her team or about Spencer or whether he's alive or about dying, not right now. That will cripple her. But Hankel is coming back, kneeling by her side in one smooth movement with the belt that's still stained with her blood in his hands. "I can help, though. This helps me, and it will help you. I promise, it will help."

Her confusion lasts until he slips the belt around her arm, pulls it tight, and then fumbles for the bottle in his pocket. It takes until he uncaps the syringe for her to fully realise what he's about to do to her.

There's no compartmentalising how she feels in that moment. It's absolute, raw, inescapable horror. To control her body like he does right now is one thing.

But her mind?

Entirely another.

"Don't," she breathes, watching the clear serum fill the syringe with a hypnotic kind of horror. "Don't do that to me. Don't, no no no, no no!"

She screams the last, finally—after all her attempts to stay stoic and firm—losing control. Kicking against the chair and screaming at him until her throat feels like it's tearing and her arm is pulled so tight against the chair that the needle rips the skin as it bites in hard.

But he does. He takes her control from her. He takes her mind from her.

She's still screaming when the drugs slam home and her world dissipates around her.

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Undetermined.

After John, she finds a vicious kind of satisfaction when people treat her like she expects to be treated. Like she's exactly as dirty and sinful as the priest of her church had told her she would be if she'd broken her word and aborted the life within her.

There's a dichotomy within her in the time after, a duality of Emily that she can't realign. There's the Emily she was Before John, the one who believes in her inherent value and knows she's smart and fiery and brave and wild. That Emily is as confident and accomplished as always, tackling anything that's thrown at her with the brash self-assurance her upbringing had installed in her and refusing to be cowed by any societal expectations that she finds to be false. And there's the Emily of After John, the one that stands before the priest with Matthew by her side after they walk hand and hand into his services. That Emily has no baby in her belly and no spine to hold her up as the priest lashes her with his tongue and calls her a murderer, a fiend, a repulsive child with no respect for anyone or anything and especially not God's word. A being unworthy of love or respect.

That Emily carries those words, even though the person who she was before still thinks that they're lies. That Emily believes them.

It's that Emily at the helm when she's eighteen and her first college boyfriend hits her for the first time. It's that Emily that just buckles down and takes it, figuring it's the love she deserves, really. It's that Emily that, after the dissolution of that relationship, struggles to find anything that feels as savagely punishing as his hands on her had been. Alcohol and drugs and other men, right up until she works out that she can put this relentless quest for self-destruction into something useful: she's unlovable and therefore wrong so, then, she should find herself a job where she can quietly find a way to pay penance for what she's done. An eye for an eye, a life for a life. Her life for someone else's.

It's the Before John Emily that loves the FBI for what it offers her in agency and independence, utilising her intelligence and her street-smarts to excel.

But it's the Emily of After that yearns for the day the wrong gun goes off.

A life for a life. Absolution for the life she's told she ended, even though a part of her knows she did what she had to survive herself. But that argument only holds water if she believes her life is worth saving.

And this is what she dreams of the first time Hankel drugs her, lost in a sea of her past faces and wondering if anyone could hate anyone as much as she hates the teenage version of herself.

She doesn't see Spencer; he has no place here.

No one's ever loved her like he has either.

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20 hours 27 minutes.

The time after she wakes passes groggily. She feels hungover and confused, barely aware of answering the questions Hankel asks her with his father's tongue. Something about penance. She doesn't know. Her memories are as blurred as her brain is, left slumped in the chair with her faltering vision left locked on the ground in front of her.

The high doesn't fade as fast as it should. Time doesn't really have meaning to her right now, but she's gotten stoned before. Never with opiates, which is what she suspects she's been given judging by how slow and floating everything had felt before passing out, but enough for her to know that she shouldn't be feeling this fucked up this far along. When he comes back and ignores her in favour of working on his computers, dragging a camera on a tripod out in front of her and setting it up with her in the eye, she tries to hang on just a little bit more to that drifting floatiness.

"Open your eyes," he says.

She does, trying to pin him with the hate she feels for what he's done to her, to the parts of her he's violated with the needle in her arm, but he's derailed her hate and left her hollow. But he just stands there with his hand on the camera, watching her impassively.

He turns the camera on. She wonders whether he's streaming this or if it's just for his own pleasure—if thousands of strangers are now watching her buckled down on this chair with dried lines of blood across her tits and her face patterned with stripes from his belt. She knows her mouth is hanging open garishly, likely a bloodied mass of torn lip and teeth, but she can't close it through the pain and the struggle to breathe through a nose that's stopped up.

A small, quiet part of her wonders if her team is watching.

A smaller part grieves the concept of Spencer seeing her like this.

"Do you really hold dominion over men's minds?" Hankel asks, hand still on the camera and gaze boring into her. "Can you see their innermost thoughts?"

She sways a little, trying to blink and feeling her lids flicker like they're out of sync. "Go to hell," she rasps, refusing to play his games any longer.

Hankel doesn't react, walking back from the camera and pressing a button on a waiting keyboard. Three screens flicker to life: a dull part of her sinks low when it sees three lives displayed, one on each.

"See these vermin?" he asks her. "Choose one to die."

She swallows and says nothing. Feels nothing. It's a habit she's fallen out of, finding something deep in her mind to focus on to the exclusion of everything else, but she struggles to do so now, to completely block this moment out.

The last time she'd done this, it was the last time she'd had sex with Doyle. It's a strange feeling to remember that she'd always done this when he'd touched her, found something kinder to think of.

Usually, she'd thought of those nights she'd spent with Spencer, the ones where he'd been Rob and her just Emily and they hadn't had sex or even considered it… they'd just been.

But today it doesn't work. There's just this cabin. Those screens. Hankel.

"Choose a sinner to die," he keeps coaxing. "I'll say the address of the one to live, for the other heathens watching. They'll be saved."

Other heathens?

Her team.

She shakes her head slowly, barely having to fake the confused slur to her voice as she stumbles out something about his sadism, his cruelty—how untrustworthy his word is. She lets her head hang, eyes closed, flinching when he wheels over to her and yanks her head up to force her to stare at those three sacrificial lives.

She needs to tell them what she knows, and before Hankel gets angry… she opens her eyes, heart thumping. It's a stupid way to get a message across. It's so stupid. If she gets out of here, Morgan will never let her live it down. But he might understand… if anyone will, he will. He has to. She's calling on their history together, all those quiet moments together—the parts of her she knows he treasures, all those beautiful, together moments.

"You can't force me to be responsible for someone's death," she tells him, looking away from the screens. Just like she'd expected, he grabs her by her aching jaw and tries to force her to look. She closes her eyes.

He shakes her.

God, she hopes Spencer is alive to hear this.

She sings, although it's more like a panicked kind of recitation of the lyrics of a song she desperately hopes Garcia will recognise and tell Spencer the name of. Making sure it's kind of panicked, almost shrill, banking on Hankel's confusion to stop him stopping her before she gets far enough in to get her point across, if Spencer's alive to query it. Code-switching as she goes to add to the illusion of her using the song to drown out his words, one line in English, the next French.

She's very careful which ones she picks to be French, going from, "You know you got a willing slave," in English to, "Oublie moi au passage, J'veux reposer en paix," right before Hankel snarls at her to shut up.

She shuts up, breathing hard and staring at him waiting for the blow to fall.

"Speaking in tongues won't help you now," he snaps at her, earning a soft, exhausted laugh from her as she realises he hasn't recognised she was speaking French. "Choose one to die or I'll kill them all while you watch."

"Okay," she says, struggling to control her breathing in the aftermath of the adrenaline rush. "On one condition."

"You don't make the conditions. I do, now—"

"My partner," she blurts out fast, giving into the fear that's been growing since she'd woken up from her drugged sleep. She can't push it down anymore, all her careful walls beginning to crumble. That fragmented mind Spencer had once accused her of having suddenly and violently falling in on itself. "Agent Reid. Is he dead?"

Silence.

"Did you kill him?" she breathes. "Tell me, and I'll choose."

"The Satan died upon his own sword when he attempted to stop my taking you," says Hankel in the Raphael voice, almost bored. "He paid the price for trusting his life unto someone like you."

Emily feels something deep inside her break, folding down into the chair and shuddering with the way it doesn't hurt, even though it should. Instead, she's just numb.

"Centre screen," she says quietly, hardly even hearing him tell their audience the name and address of the life she's just saved. That life for Spencer's.

It hardly seems worth it anymore.

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24 hours 5 minutes.

She's alone in the after. There's no sleeping. Every time she closes her eyes, she sees Spencer bleeding to death alone in the corn. Down among the stinking dirt and cloying earth, just as lost among the dead as she is. Dead, because she'd taken him in there to be killed. She hadn't waited and called for backup, she'd taken her green-as-grass partner into a dangerous situation and lost control of it.

Alternatively, he's dead because she didn't trust him to stand at her side, pushing him harder and harder to hide behind her, to use her as a shield—despite knowing that the concept of letting her take a bullet for him was impossible for him to obey. She's supposed to understand the human mind, but she'd done this knowing he'd never allow it. A complete misunderstanding of how his mind had worked, and how it worked no longer.

But she can't think about that, or she'll break.

Instead, she stares numbly at the screen as the scene within plays out for her haunted eyes. She watches them die, the people she hadn't chosen. She watches their bodies cool until they're found. She watches the forensic personnel begin to filter in. Cleaning up the mess she's made. The lives she's ruined.

She watches until she can't anymore, looking away and hating herself for being unable to cry. And like that she stays, until someone calls her name.

Stupidly, she first looks to the door, a dull thrum of hope kindling and dying when she finds it still closed.

The voice says her name again. She recognises it.

And she looks to the screens.

He's there. Kneeling in front of the camera capturing the grisly scene, Spencer is there with his expression firm and more determined than she's ever seen it. There's no trace of Rob's gentle vulnerability in his eyes or face, not even a sliver. He's all Reid, fierce and composed and determined to save the world.

"I'm alive, Emily," he says, each and every word slamming into that broken thing inside her and bringing it thudding back to life. "Tobias lied to you—I'm alive and I'm coming for you. None of this is your fault, none of it. Gideon says to remember that you're strong. You're strong and he can't break you, so just hang on until we can get there, okay? And Emily?"

He pauses, like he's waiting for her to respond, before leaning a little closer and saying in a voice that she knows is now just for her and her alone, speaking to their quiet nights together and his intimate knowledge of her soul.

"When in doubt," he says softly, "choose to live."

If she could have, she'd have reached down to brush her fingers against the words tattooed into her hip after she'd done exactly what he'd recommended and found a new favourite book. After she'd almost died and then found a new way of viewing that rather than fanatical desire.

Instead, she just breathes again, alive again, and for the first time since waking up in this unholy cabin, she finally cries.

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41 hours 9 minutes.

It really does make things better. Suddenly, she understands Michael so much more than she ever has before.

If she wasn't so relieved for the break from this hell, that would frighten her more.

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Undetermined.

They're in Room 302.

God, she's missed this place.

"What do you want to do today?" she asks him brightly, but Rob just curls his knees to his chest and watches her with the saddest expression she's ever seen on him. "Buffy marathon?"

"I didn't get the message, Emily," he says quietly. She swallows. "If I had, I'd have found you by now."

"Yeah, well." Emily walks over to the window, unsurprised to find that the world outside is dark and cold. Minus five and getting colder with every minute that passes. She leans against the frigid glass and stares out at the cemetery waiting for her through the foggy view. "It was probably optimistic of me to try and get a coded message to you in French, especially a Buffy reference. But hey, it doesn't matter now. We're together, right?"

"You're dying," he says.

"Aren't we all?"

She's trying to be glib, but it doesn't seem to be working. When he holds his arm out, she hurtles into that offered embrace and curls in against his familiar body. The speed in which she holds him close betrays how scared she is, feeling his heart beating stronger where hers is struggling.

"Tobias didn't realise you were speaking French," Rob is saying into her hair, kissing her between every other word like he's trying to fit as many in as possible before the end. Maybe he's scared of each one being the last. "He's not educated and anything he did know, he's lost to the chaos of his mind. He's manic, delusional. Confused."

"Tell me something I don't know…"

"He's giving you the same doses that he gives himself, despite the vast difference between height and weight between you both."

Emily is silent. She guesses that maybe she'd known this from the start, seeing as she's hallucinating this and Rob isn't really here to warn her, but it's one thing to suspect and another to be faced with the reality that she's on the cusp of overdosing.

"You should have let him take me," Rob keeps saying, ignoring how the concept makes her struggling heart thump harder. "I'm the same size as him. I could survive this…"

"You couldn't survive this," she says with a passion, feeling everything from the past however long it's been begin to overflow into an inescapable pain not even the drugs can dull. The hunger, the pain, the shame, the horror… "No one could survive this."

"I'm stronger than you believe," is his answer. "And more resilient than you know."

It's the truth. He is.

And she's sorry she's probably not going to be able to tell him that.

"Do you know I'm dying?" she asks him miserably, glancing to the window to find the outside lightening, a pull deep in her body beginning to draw her up and away from this beautiful place. "I don't want you to know. I don't want you to see."

And he's quiet for a moment, doing nothing but holding her while she slips away.

"I know," he says finally, kissing her once more and letting his lips linger against her, his hand resting gently over the tattoo on her hip that she's never had the chance to thank him for. "I knew as soon as I saw the first video… but I'm not ready to find your body, Emily. Don't do that to me. I told you how destructive to me that would be."

"Then don't," she says. "Just let me go."

And he says, "Never."

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47 hours 52 minutes.

She wakes to warmth and the drifting feeling has increased to the point where she doesn't hurt anymore, not even a little. In fact, if it wasn't for the vaguest sense of pressure around her wrists, she wouldn't even really be sure that her body even exists at all anymore.

That's not good.

There's a distant bang. She struggles to open her eyes, but they don't listen, her hearing coming in and out and in and out. Someone shouting, far away…

They're trying to silence my message, she hears him snarl, but she can't focus on it. Do you think you can defy me?

Even further away, she can hear Rob calling to her.

"What's your name?" she asks him, feeling the words trip and fumble as she drifts back to sleep—

—and snaps back as she's dragged up by the front of her shirt, the material pulling hard against all her sorest parts.

"Get off," she rasps, trying to fight that grip but finding herself as weak as a kitten and just as petulantly useless.

"Then confess!" Hankel screams at her, spit flecking her face. If she answers, she doesn't know, feeling her feet leaving the ground with the weight of the chair pulling her. "Confess your sins so this can end!"

"I don't…" Emily shakes her head. Nothing makes sense. She just wants to sleep. "I, urgh."

She's going to be sick.

"Stop it!" someone screams at her. She blinks her eyes open, surprised to find Hankel staring at her oddly. Had she passed out? "Confess!"

All she does is shake her head, not even surprised when he lets go of her with a snarl of disgust. She lands heavily, the chair-leg buckling and flinging them both to the ground where she lies with a sense of awe at how disconnected from herself it feels to sprawl out. Her head thumps. Did she hit it? Maybe…

Maybe.

Her eyes close.

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Undetermined.

There's a voice in her dying nightmare. It lilts and whispers around her, distracting her from this comforting sense of everything ending. She wishes it would go away. This is a nice death, really, this feeling like she's drifting off into the most comfortable sleep she's ever had. The cold cement floor under her doesn't feel so hard or unforgiving anymore. The welts on her thighs have faded; the strips of split flesh across her chest have healed. Her sins have gone away.

She's free.

But the voice won't go away. It's insistent and clawing, scrabbling at the warmth she's wrapping around herself, this comfortable passing. She resents it a little for not realising how long she's been searching for an end that's kinder than anything she's ever lived for.

Let me see her, it says, and she wonders who. Tobias, please. 'For God is not unjust. He will not forget how hard you have worked for him and how you have shown your love to him by caring for other believers, as you still do.' Let me care for her, please.

You can't save her. She needs to be burned so that God will forgive her following her passing.

If you don't let me see her, I can't help her and she'll die. If she dies, how will you hear her confession? Just let me touch her—I won't do anything. Just to touch her, to see if she lives.

One wrong move and you both die here, before your heathen friends can stop me.

A hand touches her. It's ice cold and, if she was capable of controlling her limbs anymore, she'd have jerked away from it. It presses against her throat before slipping up to cup her cheek, a shadow falling over her.

The witch dies. I told you.

She doesn't have to. There's an ambulance outside—let me give her to them and you can hold me in her place.

You know why I can't do that… if she's a witch, she can't live. She can't.

The hand shifts and she feels, for a moment, like she's floating. There's complete silence around her, except for a sudden soft thump against her ear. The cold encompasses her. It takes her a second to realise that she's being held. Someone is holding her.

For the first time, she fights whatever is dragging her down, torn by curiosity about who would hold her so gently in such an unhallowed place. But it doesn't work. She can't see. She can't know.

That's enough. I said you could hold her, not—

If she's to die, will you let me kiss her one last time? Please?

You're not married. It's a sin—

We would be, had she lived. Look at me, Tobias, know I'm telling the truth. We're engaged. Let me say my final goodbye, please. I love her. I love her more than sanity allows. If she's a witch, she must die, but the heart is weak. It grieves her. Can't you allow a moment of human weakness before the glory of God?

Emily isn't really following the conversation, but she's aware enough when she feels the shyest touch of pressure against her mouth. Off to the side, avoiding where the belt had split it down the middle, but the touch lingers.

Something damp taps against her skin, tracing a final line down her cheek towards her hair. It's warm like he isn't.

And the moment pauses as she focuses on that warm dampness and falls…

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…there's a pinch in her thigh. It stings minutely, and then more. Emily twitches, her fall slowing.

And stopping.

It's the most horrible feeling to have something hook deep in her chest and haul her up and out of the sweet warmth she'd been happily dying in, cold flooding every part of her body in a shocking wave of agony. Her face is on fire, her chest stripped raw, her thighs screaming. She's half-starved and dehydrated, her mouth dry and her head screaming as her stomach screams along. There's piss drying her pants to the welts on her legs, her entire body cramped and gutted from so long in the same position, and all of that smashes into her at once in a feeling like every single hangover she's ever had compounded into one with an added dose of withdrawal too.

If she makes a noise, it's muffled by a burning heat against her mouth that swallows the sound and masks it.

"Don't move," he whispers to her through the agony. "Shh. Don't open your eyes."

It's almost impossible to obey that. Her entire body wants to curl up into a dried husk like a dead spider pulling inwards, her hands curling tight as she struggles to breathe. Nausea slams hard. She can't even hear them talking through it, fighting her body as it rebels completely against her in every way a body can rebel; a shocking reminder of just how terrible life is in comparison to the dreamless sleep she'd been offered. She wants dying back. She wants the drugs. She wants anything but this.

And she keeps wanting and wanting and hurting alongside until she loses the fight against hiding her survival and begins to choke on the spit and vomit she can't hold back anymore, finding oblivion on that filthy floor with hands scrambling to turn her onto her side.

She's never been gladder to pass out than she is at that moment.

.

.

63 hours.

If she woke up at any point between choking on her own bodily fluids and right now, opening her eyes in a silent hospital room with muted lights and no colours on the walls, she has no memory of it. Everything beyond getting into the car with Spencer on the way to interview Tobias Hankel is a kind of horrific muddle of pain and misery with a few standout moments shining grimly in her mind.

But she's alive. She's alive. There's IVs in her arms and she's in the world's loosest hospital gown to cover what she's sure is an intensive amount of bandaging, but her whole body is a numb kind of nothing and she's alive.

Turning her head hurts. Every part of her just wants to sleep, but she needs to know. Needs to see…

She can't even call his name, just making a hoarse kind of grunt and fumbling an unresponsive hand up to touch at his hair from where he's folded forward onto the bed beside her, fast asleep with his face flat in her blankets. Despite this, he hears her, jerking upright and staring at her with red eyes and wild hair and drool on his chin.

"Emily," Spencer breathes at her, standing and leaning forward with one hand reaching for her before freezing as though unsure of how to touch her anymore. "Are you conscious this time?"

She nods weakly, studying him where he stands. His cheek is bruised, as is his temple, and his arm is in a sling—but he's here and watching her like he can't look away.

She's also pretty sure he saved her life.

It takes three tries, but she gets the all-important words out.

"Tell me," she rasps, trusting him to understand.

He does.

"Hankel is dead," he says. "I shot him when he objected to my clearing your airways. We got your message—it was Garcia who recognised the song as being from Buffy, and me who recognised the scene as taking place in a cemetery. And it's been sixty-three hours and four minutes since you were taken and I'm never going to forgive myself for taking so long to find you, never."

She swallows, the motion hurting, and fumbles for his hand. Their fingers grip together warmly, him holding her tight as she looks around at the room around her.

"They have you on an opiate painkiller," Spencer says when her eyes pause on the slow drip. "It seemed kinder than adding withdrawal to your suffering at this point, at least until they're able to properly assess the damage done to your chest and lungs. The others know you were drugged, I had to tell them when I realised you were in danger of overdose and needed to implement a plan in preparation for that outcome. I'm sorry. I… I can't…"

But whatever he's trying to say chokes in his mouth and he stops, pulling away just a bit.

"Spence?" she rasps. She's falling back to sleep but his pain is rawer than hers right now, while she's this drugged up and barely aware. If he answers, she doesn't hear, but charges ahead anyway. "Can you…"

She's not really sure if she got the words out but either she did or he knows her as intimately as she's always suspected, because his careful weight is suddenly beside her and she feels him wrap his arm around her—avoiding all her rawest parts—and holding her close as she drifts to sleep.

I did it, she dreams of assuring him. I chose to live.