Just. It wasn't what he wanted for her.

Emily Prentiss was singing with his mother in his childhood kitchen, and outside if she were to take the wrong street at the wrong time some oversized toaster could determine her worth in a fraction of a second and do whatever the hell it wanted with her, and there wasn't a goddamn thing he could do about it.

And that made him weak. And that was not. What. He fucking. Wanted for her.

It was making him petty and mean, snapping over trivialities and spending most of his time alone or with Sarah and her friends.

Emily, to her credit, seemed to take it for what it was and gave him his space, though every once in a while he would catch her with her guard down while doing something totally mundane, and what flashed behind her eyes then was downright wounded. It shattered him every time.

It also pissed him off. Sometimes he would leave simply to rid himself of the urge to grab her and shake her until she fought back. Because surely she could see that he was being a first class fucking asshole right now, and she of all people should be able to call him on that shit.

Instead, she was singing with his mother in the kitchen, and damn it if he didn't even know the woman could sing. Derek's jaw tightened, and he would have hightailed it out of there right then were it not for the fact that he probably could have gone on listening to her all night even though he was fairly certain they were getting about half the lyrics wrong.

It was no secret that the two women had bonded—quickly and, it seemed, irrevocably. That, at least, had minimized the tension between them regarding his leaving nearly every night. Emily seemed content to spend as much time as she could get with Fran. Derek wondered how much Emily was thinking of her own mother and of the very different relationship she had with her. One day maybe he would ask her about it. Not today.

"Sweetie, you keep scowling like that and your face is going to stick that way."

He looked up. His mother had not been sharing Emily's silence about his recent sullenness. "Sorry, Mama." He met Emily's eyes—dark, inscrutable, almost preternaturally neutral—and felt his stomach churn. He looked away. "I'm gonna go for a walk."

It wasn't long after the kitchen door clicked satisfyingly closed behind him when he heard it open again, her footsteps growing quickly louder as she approached him. He didn't turn around. "Go home, Emily."

"The hell I will."

"Oh, now you wanna do this?" He demanded, rounding on her. He glanced warily around them. "Go home. Stay inside. I'll talk to you later."

Emily shifted, squaring her shoulders and setting her jaw. Her face remained stony, and for a moment Derek's mind flashed to cool, white marble—beautiful. Hard. Immutable. "No," she said simply. "I'm not fighting with you in your mother's house."

But she wasn't made of marble. She was soft flesh and warm blood that could be spilled, and therein lay the problem.

"Do you not know what could happen to you if one of those pieces of scrap metal notices you out here?" He hissed. "Or do you just not fucking care?" He stole a momentary, meaningful glance at her abdomen.

He could feel rather than see her body recoil, and the wave of pain it sent through him was a welcome release. This was what he deserved.

It was also unbearable. Some perverse part of him wanted to press on—to probe the wound further just to see how much he could take. Instead, he turned away from her.

"You are way out of line." Emily grabbed at his upper arm, but he shook her off. "You have been trying to piss me off for days, and you're damn well near succeeding." Emily raised her voice, hurrying to pass him and forcing herself directly into his path. "So what is it, huh? What's got you feeling so fucking sorry for yourself that you can't spend ten consecutive minutes with your own mother? That you can't even look at me? LOOK at me!" She brought her hands to his chest to stop his momentum, but he swatted them aside angrily. Undeterred, she pushed back more forcefully against him. "What the hell is your problem?"

"What's my problem?" He spat, this time invading her personal space rather than continue to try to walk away from her. "My problem is that in case you haven't noticed, Prentiss, we're at war. And we're losing. We have no weapons, no army, and we don't know a goddamn thing about what it is we're fighting. This is our place, and we're the ones skulking along back alleys in broad daylight like rats. One wrong move, and we never see each other again; do you get that? So tell me. How the fuck do I get you all the way to DC when I can't even get you to stay. In the fucking. HOUSE?"

His voice had risen with every word until he was almost yelling at her, and what clouded her expression then was unmistakable. She was disgusted with him. Good.

"You know what?" The chill in her voice at once thrilled and terrified him. Emily, his statue. "You don't have to get me anywhere. Fuck you." She pushed past him without a second look, taking long, confident strides back towards his mother's house. After only a brief pause, Derek resumed stalking resolutely in the opposite direction.

It was the wholly unexpected but distinctive hitch in her voice as she called him back that made him halt in his tracks.

"Derek."

He tensed, hesitating, and when he finally turned he did so reluctantly. Emily's stance had changed, drained of all aggression and defensiveness. Her eyes were wide with realization and something akin to heartbreak, her face void of its implacable coolness. The marble had cracked.

"You don't have to get me anywhere."

It was a long time before Derek could trust his voice to come out steady. He swallowed thickly a few times and tried not to feel like too much of a moron, standing in the middle of an empty alleyway fighting tears. Finally, "You know I do, Emily."

They were just close enough to one another that he could see her rolling her eyes. She seemed to come to a decision and started walking, somewhat grudgingly, back toward him. She was still three feet away when she stopped, facing him squarely. "You really piss me off sometimes, you know that?"

There was really only one response to that. "I'm sorry."

He was sorry. For acting like a jerk, for getting her into an impossible situation and not being able to get her out of it, and for not being able to promise her they would all make it home in one piece. And no matter how much he tried to reason with himself, there was no way he was ever going to fully believe that that didn't make him somehow unworthy of the people he loved. And especially—he cringed inwardly—of those who loved him. But he still wasn't ready to think about that yet.

"I know you are," she sighed. Another long silence followed, during which they studied one another but neither seemed to know what to say. Emily broke it by looking abruptly away, as if suddenly becoming aware of her surroundings. "Are you—do you still need that walk?"

Derek considered, then shook his head. "I'll come back with you."

She nodded without smiling and gestured with her head in the direction of his mother's house. With that invitation, she turned again away from him and began walking. Derek hesitated only briefly before catching up to her. Silently, he took her hand, sliding his fingers between her cool, white ones, and absorbed the bittersweet punch he got seeing them intertwined. Emily, his statue. Priceless. Breakable.

His mother was giving him that look.

Derek knew it well. It was a quick, straight-lipped flick of the eyes that somehow without fail caused an automatic, silent debate to take place within him—one that started with him denying to himself that any such look and any such debate were happening in the first place and inevitably ended with him buying his mother roses and asking her forgiveness for one thing or another. He wasn't quite sure if all mothers were automatically endowed with this capability or if it was just his, but it sure was effective at making him feel like a horrible son. What made it even worse was that this time, there wouldn't be any roses.

It was getting pretty hard to ignore, so Derek did what came naturally to him. He pulled his mother into a strong hug and bent to press an affectionate kiss to her cheek. Fran sighed against his shoulder.

"You're leaving, aren't you?"

Derek remained silent, and she huffed a little. "And I suppose you'll want to bring Emily with you. And—"

Fran halted. Her son did not know she was aware of Emily's current state, and she was willing to keep it that way for now, if it would help make the decision she knew he had to make any less difficult on him.

"And what, Ma?" He prompted gently.

Fran just shook her head and gave her son a final squeeze. "Nothing," she said. "I love her, is all."

Derek smiled. "I know you do," was all he said, but she could see the spark of joy and relief in his eyes. Not for the first time, she saw the spitting image of his father in him. Her boys… they just needed to hear it. She smiled back.

"I do," she repeated, as if to reassure him. "And I love you too. Very much."

"Love you too, Mama." Her grown son's voice caught a little, and Fran couldn't help herself.

"You don't have to go," she offered, knowing well before the words exited her mouth what the answer would be.

Derek seemed to have to gather his resolve. "Yeah, we do." His voice was impressively steady now. "They're family too."

A familiar swell of pride clutched at her. She would be seeing her boy leave her, as always, for dangers she probably couldn't even imagine if she tried (which, she didn't. At least, not very often.) As terrifying as that was no matter what form the danger took, Fran found it oddly comforting that, despite everything that had gone down since the day the storms came, Derek Morgan was still the boy she had raised: principled to the point of obsession, devoted to the point of recklessness. So she would send him off, as she always did, without the tears or entreaties that always seemed to avail themselves to her at times like these.

In fact, it was Emily whose lip trembled as they hugged goodbye a few nights later, and Fran could feel the faint quiver in the younger woman's back from the effort of containing her emotion. She seemed reluctant to end their embrace, but once she had given her a final squeeze and whispered a final promise, she turned away quickly to wait for Derek just outside the door. It was then that Fran realized with a start that not long ago she had greeted a son on that porch, and now, only two and a half weeks later, she was saying goodbye to a son and a daughter. She wasn't sure if that made her the luckiest woman on the planet or the most unlucky.

Malik wasn't at City Hall when they arrived.

He didn't come in the hour that followed as they hid in shadows cast by grey concrete and pale moonlight, and he didn't come in the hour after that either.

Though she had been trying to hide it, Emily had been wearing out easily recently, and Derek had to shake her out of one of her frequent naps when he finally decided that if they wanted to be out of the city by dawn, they would have to go in alone. He didn't have to explain; after one look at him as he rose and fished out the single flashlight from his pack, Emily simply nodded, took his proffered hand, and stood to join him.

It took them longer alone. The tiny beam of light in the pitch darkness surrounding them was disorienting, and though undercover work had honed Derek's skill in quick spatial mapping, they made several wrong turns and reached more than one dead end before finally emerging into the dank but blessedly familiar sub-basement that led to the sewers.

By the time they reached surface, the first rays of sunlight were just peeking over the horizon, skimming the peaks of the choppy lake and making them sparkle almost as far as was visible. Behind them, the tarry black wall blocked their view of the shadowed city that had been their refuge. They spared only a quick glance back to ensure they could advance unseen and then headed towards the glistening water.

When they reached the SUV, the sun was high above them. All the windows had been broken, and most of what they had left inside was gone, but the engine started with minimal fuss. Emily fell asleep in the passenger's seat almost immediately and didn't wake up until the vehicle misfired, shuddered, surged, and then stopped moving altogether. One more clunky turnover got them another half a mile or so before they stalled again, and they sat in silence for a few moments as Emily finally took in their surroundings.

It was dark again, and they seemed to be safely off the beaten path near the shoulder of a two-lane country road. What Derek would remember that she naturally wouldn't was that it had been getting harder and harder to avoid towns as they headed towards the more densely-populated east. They were somewhere southwest of Toledo, and Derek had been forced to detour heavily in order to keep them undetected.

With no other option, they stopped for the night to rest, hoping the morning would bring them some better luck.

It didn't. Derek figured they could find and hotwire an abandoned car in less time than it would take them to diagnose and fix the problem, and it's not like they had any belongings left to speak of, so with barely a glance backwards they grabbed their packs and left.

It was almost alarmingly surreal, the simplicity of it. Emily couldn't help but acknowledge the pang of loss that passed through her, as if she were severing her final connection with the life she had before all this. She experienced it only distantly, however, as if she were merely watching the emotion being felt by someone else. The sensation was a familiar one, albeit heightened now. She supposed it would be to anyone acquainted with a lifetime's worth of leaving things behind.

It took the better part of the day to find another vehicle, this time a well-worn Corolla. It was nowhere near as spacious or comfortable as the Suburban, but at least the gas mileage was better.

By that time, though, Emily was ready to collapse again, and Derek could only drive safely for another couple of hours before they were forced to pull over for another night.

At this point, they were making even worse time than they had in California, and it didn't help that each morning they awoke stiff and aching, huddled against one another in the cramped backseat of the car. Add to that Emily's surging hormones and Derek's not-so-well-hidden anxiety any time he had to let her out of his immediate sight ('Can I please take a goddamn piss without you popping an aneurysm' were her exact words,) and the following few days of travel turned out to be tense and exhausting for both of them.

The first time they encountered a patrolled checkpoint, not too far outside Philadelphia, they thought it was an anomaly. They doubled back and chose an alternate route.

The second time, they didn't have time to think much of anything; coming over the crest of the hill, they were too close by the time they recognized the bizarre silhouettes of the Beamers in front of them to turn around without attracting attention. They had just enough time to grab their modest packs, tumble out of the car, and run.

Unfortunately, the only place to go from their high point in the hilly countryside of western Pennsylvania was down. The steep embankment that had skirted their right hand side was not only treacherous taken at a run; it also made them vulnerable as targets. A blast inches from Derek's left foot turned a patch of rock into dust, and it was too close for comfort. Startled, he instinctually dove for Emily, sending them both into an uncontrolled tumble down the uneven slope.

Pain exploded in his left elbow as he landed, striking a sizeable rock. He could feel the skin over it tear and blood start to gush over his forearm, but he kept his body curled protectively around Emily's as they fell, new starbursts of agony shooting up his injured arm with every rotation until finally they reached the bottom and collided roughly with a tree trunk. He heard the groan from beneath him and saw the trickle of blood down her pale temple, but a blast splintered the trunk just above his head, and Derek didn't have time to dwell on it. He stood, practically dragging Emily along with him, pushed her in front, and continued running, zigzagging among the trees in an attempt to disorient their oversized and ungraceful pursuer. It was working, but the blasts were becoming more erratic and closer together, and he knew no matter what their advantage in agility, they would tire sooner than the Beamer would.

A few minutes later, an outcropping of rock beside a stream became his best option. The terrain rose steeply over it, shielding its other side from view. They would be out of sight, but two potential problems quickly presented themselves. One: because he couldn't see the other side, he had no idea how much space, if any, they would have to stand on. Two: It would take too long to scale over the rise in terrain; they would have to go around it. That left them about half a foot of space before the outcropping ended in a steep drop to the stony water below. As they approached, Derek herded Emily towards the sharp edge of solid ground. Just as they reached the steep wall of mossy rock that blocked them from going any further, Derek threw his arms around her and gripped her to his chest, nearly scooping her up in front of him as he refused to let his momentum slow. His course carried them both to the very edge of the outcropping, then, bracing his back against the same jut of rock and earth that threatened to topple them over the edge, used it as leverage to whirl them both over to the other side.

There was no plunge. No sickening drop in his belly as his feet met empty space. The high ground sloped gently downwards to one side from above their heads, and the outcropping stretched a good ways out from where they were sheltered before meeting the forest floor again where it flattened. They remained on solid ground.

Derek wasted no time in crowding Emily back against their temporary shelter, taking the short reprieve to check over her frantically. "Hey," he panted. "You okay?" He cupped her cheek, forcing her to look at him, and thumbed away some of the blood that still ran over it. "You okay?" He repeated.

Emily nodded, her eyes widening as they fell on his swollen elbow which he held, bleeding, at a stiff angle in front of him. She opened her mouth to say something, but the thump of metal against rock signaled that the Beamer had reached the other side of their alcove. Derek pressed Emily even further against the rock behind them, turned so he was facing outwards with his back pressed against her, and used his good right arm to draw his Glock. The instant he reached with his left to steady it, though, his elbow locked in place and the pain nearly brought tears to his eyes. He buckled, regrouping. The clamoring was nearly directly above them now as the Beamer scaled the ridge. He could feel Emily's teeth skim the back of his shoulder as she buried her mouth in his t-shirt to muffle her ragged breathing. Derek steeled himself. They would only have a fraction of a second, and his aim had to be perfect. He wasn't going to get that firing one-handed and exhausted. The front half of the Beamer came into view above them, pausing, but it didn't look down. Then it advanced forward just past them, giving them its back. Derek gritted his teeth and moved to force his left arm through the pain to lift and steady his right. Suddenly, a cool, strong hand gripped his right wrist. Emily's hand moved gracefully up the back of his, steadying it and replacing his finger on the trigger with hers. It was awkward, but it was stable, and it meant Derek could use the entire strength of his right arm to aim. He raised the gun and found the kill shot. The Beamer turned. Emily fired.

The Beamer tipped backwards first. Then, hitting a tree, it wobbled and spun, tipping slowly over the edge of the precipice. Nine feet of metal and flesh passed within a foot of them as it fell, hitting the outcropping top-first and then toppling into the water. Derek heard himself let out some sort of cross between a whoop and a cry of pain. Emily's hand was still grasping the back of his, both their breaths coming loud and ragged in the sudden stillness. Derek dropped the gun, and her grip loosened. He turned, pushed her back against the stone, and kissed her with every ounce of the life that had just been spared them. Emily returned in kind, and it was only when they both needed air that Derek pulled back, kissing her eyes, the angle of her jaw, her hair before leaning his forehead against hers and waiting while their panting breaths evened out.

"Emily," he whispered once they had both relaxed marginally.

"Hm."

Derek's right hand came around to rest on her hip, his thumb reaching to caress her lower abdomen. "Damn it," he breathed, and he placed another peck on her lips. "I think we're going to have to walk for a while."

And walk they did. The farther east they got, the more concentrated the checkpoints became until they could no longer even depend on country roads for more than a couple of hours at a time. The time and energy they spent searching for and hotwiring vehicles for very little payoff became prohibitive, and eventually they stopped trying altogether.

Days turned to weeks. At night they would stop at abandoned houses, barns, even cars if that was their only option (Derek figured they may as well still be good for something,) but during the day they travelled as far away from once-civilization as possible. It was getting hot, it was difficult to navigate when they were doing everything they could to avoid anywhere that might be recognizable on a map, and their inconsistent access to water and calories wasn't helping Emily's now-frequent dizzy spells.

Derek's jaw tensed as he studied her. She was thin. They both were, but damn it, she was supposed to be gaining weight. He had managed a few admittedly risky runs while she slept during which he had snagged some prenatal vitamins, but he was pretty sure they were meant to be taken in conjunction with a diet other than packaged snack food and the occasional canned soup. No matter how much he tried to rationalize it, Derek couldn't help but hate himself for the fact that that was all he was able to give her.

Emily's voice broke his train of thought.

"You notice anything about those checkpoints they have?" She asked pensively.

Derek shrugged. "Notice a couple things. They're everywhere, and they're a pain in my ass."

"Yeah, but think back to every one we've seen so far. We always seem to come up from behind."

It was true. Though they had certainly managed to escape some close calls, the Beamers had generally been facing away from them on their approach.

"I don't think they're trying to keep people out, Derek," she pressed on. "I think they're trying to keep people in.

Derek turned the realization over in his head for a while. "Okay," he mused. "The east coast is densely populated and has a lot of large urban areas… so they form a perimeter around the entire region instead of around each individual city? If DC's not walled, we could have a way easier time getting in than we did in Chicago."

Emily gave him a look. "Easy, yeah, this is a cinch," she muttered.

Derek's chest tightened painfully. "No, Emily… I didn't mean—"

But she was already rolling her eyes at him. "Relax, it was a joke. Jeez, Morgan, you used to be able to handle my sarcasm." She tossed him a lopsided and affectionate grin, one that actually met her eyes, and for a moment she looked for all the world like a blithe co-ed on a camping trip.

He dropped his head, returned her grin sheepishly, and reached out to grab her hand. "It's been hard on you," he began softly, rubbing circles with his thumb on her palm.

Emily seemed slightly confused by the statement. She thought for a moment and then shrugged. "It just is what it is. Hard on everyone who's left."

But Derek was shaking his head. "You especially, though," he insisted.

She turned to study his face, one corner of her mouth turned lazily upwards, and Derek was almost positive that she saw the apology there, but she wasn't taking it. Finally, she smirked and turned away again. "Well," she began with exaggerated flippancy. "I'm happy to let you go on thinking that if it gets me a massage at the end of today."

He used his grip on her hand to pull her closer and planted a sloppy kiss on her cheek. "You got it," he promised.

They walked for over two months.

As far as they could tell, they had headed south through the National Forest into Virginia and then doubled back up through Shendandoah. Once they caught sight of Highway 66 in the distance, they simply kept it to their left.

The farther they walked, the more winding and disorienting their route became as the urban sprawl became denser and denser, until one day they emerged from the comforting peace of a patch of forest to realize they were a mere 50 feet from the highway. Derek's heart leapt to his throat, and he pulled Emily back with him while checking all around them for patrols. Emily hadn't been speaking much lately; she seemed to be using all her energy simply to remain upright. She recoiled silently, expressionless. Derek was just about to retreat and change direction yet again when something made him stop: the angle of the sun…some flash of familiarity from another life. They hadn't accidentally run into I-66 again.

"Em," he whispered, his steadying grip finding her elbow. "That's the Beltway."

Emily's knees buckled.

They had been right: DC wasn't walled, only fortified and heavily patrolled. Minor routes out of the city were crudely blocked off, while major ones were guarded at checkpoints. It made coming into the city on foot a long, mentally exhausting process, but not impossible. Finally, they were playing on their home turf.

They tried Rossi's first. It was certainly large enough, and central, but they found it empty. They stayed to sleep late into the morning anyway, and it wasn't until a close wake-up call with a patrolling Beamer had them making a hasty midday retreat that they realized their mistake: they had profiled the place, and the place had changed. What they needed to do was profile their team.

First, they were a family—the only family most of them had locally. Which meant they'd stick together. Second, what brought them together was work. They had shared goals, backgrounds, and experiences that allowed them to work as a cohesive unit towards a common end. Third, they had all been trained in stealth and strategy. They would choose somewhere familiar—somewhere where they would have the home field advantage. Somewhere where every bit of their heavy training could be put to significant use. And there it was: their training. It was what united them and gave them an unusual advantage.

Hogan's Alley.

Derek looked at his partner and didn't have to ask if she were thinking the same thing. It had been a while since he had seen that triumphant gleam in her eyes, but he still knew what it meant.

And just like that, they were going back to Quantico. It so laughably perfect it could almost have been a joke.

It was already early afternoon when they set out, but it was as if a permanent cloud cover had settled over the nation's capital, making everything seem bleak and a little unfamiliar. Here and there, twisted pillars of inky black, rock solid material, frighteningly reminiscent of the despised Walls, would rise uncompromisingly from the ground creating demented, phantom-like monuments amidst a city already glutted with them.

Sixteen hours later, they arrived at Hogan's Alley in the still, black pre-dawn. The street was deserted, and Derek and Emily were heartened. It was an ingenious location, really. Unassuming, almost exaggeratedly commonplace… significant to no one but the initiated, especially compared to the infinitely more imposing Headquarters buildings on the base.

They bypassed a couple of private houses—too small and too risky. The inn was another story. Large, with multiple rooms and multiple exits, it was the perfect shelter for a sizeable group if they were strategic about security.

Which, naturally, they would be. As they reached the front door, Derek moved his right hand from the small of Emily's back, found her hand, and squeezed. The ferocity with which she squeezed back, as if he were the only thing holding her upright, told him she was as dizzy with fatigue and anticipation as he was. Her eyes were wide and fixed on the door in front of them, and her hand went instinctively to her belly. Derek raised his other arm, still stiff from the probable fracture he had suffered months ago, and knocked.

The tense minutes of silence that followed were almost sickening. Finally, the door cracked open to allow only the barrel of a gun to slide through.

Then, the door was thrown open. Hotch stood before them, silent and disbelieving. He was joined a moment later by, oddly, Kevin. Derek thought he had never been so overjoyed to see the bespectacled man.

It was the sound of a commotion behind him that seemed to break Hotch's inertia. The team was stirring, likely having been alerted by Kevin to a possible intruder. Derek was pulled inside by his former boss's embrace, and all at once they were standing inside the inn's lobby, hand in hand, surrounded by family.

"JJ," he distantly heard Emily choke out. He had less than a second to react to Penelope's muffled sob before finding himself nearly tackled, and his eyes began to sting a little, and everything became a bit of a blur: Reid's radiant, boyish grin, one of Hotch's rare smiles, tears (yes, tears) glistening at the corners of Rossi's eyes… his Penelope—still sobbing, still clinging to his hand with one of hers—attempting to herd both Emily and JJ into a smothering one-armed embrace.

It was Penelope, of course, who noticed it first. There wasn't much yet to notice—a change in posture, a slight exception to the body weight she had lost, or perhaps Emily's hand had unconsciously strayed, as it had been wont to do lately, towards her belly. Whatever it was, Penelope had never been one to spare the dramatics. Her eyes bulged, and she took a long, gasping breath before starting to stutter.

"Is that—are you—" And she gasped again because this time Emily's hand did stray, and her eyes widened a little as if she had been caught, and their friends started noticing what they hadn't truly before, which was that the two of them had arrived hand in hand, and now that Derek had made his way back to Emily's side, he was reaching for her again.

This time, Penelope didn't bother to muffle her cry.

And from that moment, the weeks simply flew. They talked a lot about strategy, about Resistance, but realistically it was Derek and Kevin who ended up consistently involved in the local movement; there was a lot of work to do to ensure the continued safety of their new home, and sparing more than two of them for any significant period of time became unsustainable.

The rest of their energies were almost entirely focused on security, food, and "school" for Jack and Henry. Though the group had previously been sharing curriculum and teaching responsibilities, the addition of two new family members opened up room for reevaluation. Spencer was quickly voted down from the teaching position by parents and students alike. While he seemed genuinely surprised by the consensus at first, he took the ousting good-naturedly and agreed to retire to guest-lecturer status only. Penelope was equally voted down, though by parents only, a decision she simply refused to acknowledge altogether. The boys would be schooled by their Fairy Godmother, she announced, sniffing. Even if it meant she had to continue her tutelage after hours.

Emily and Dave, on the other hand, were naturals, and teaching quickly became a full-time position. Derek couldn't help but adore watching his lover interact with her students. With a roof over her head, a semi-consistent food supply, and the return of that smile, Emily was glowing. It hadn't taken her long after they had settled in to gain back most of the weight she had lost, and she was growing, it seemed now, more quickly every day. The sight had something fierce and possessive and ecstatic constantly humming like a live wire in the back of his head. It suited her beautifully, he realized, now that she actually looked pregnant (though the few times he had tried to tell her that she had only scowled and wished an array of unpleasant and often anatomically impossible physical ailments on him.)

For her part, Emily threw herself into teaching with the same uncompromising dedication as she had in all her previous work endeavours; only now instead of dealing with sociopaths, killers, and terrorists, she got to spend every day with the very brightest parts of a still-bleak world. So she supposed it wasn't really such a big wonder that here at the end of the world, when simply surviving on their own terms took up such a large proportion of their energies each day, there was a part of her that was genuinely happy.

So happy, in fact, that weeks turned to months almost without her realizing it. Though her body seemed to be changing almost faster than she could keep up now, the otherwise unfamiliar monotony of the days lulled her into a strangely blithe complacency. Which was why her mind seemed to seize and then cloud over when, in the middle of class and a little too early, Emily felt the sudden rush of warmth spill down the inside of her legs…

Something inside of her bucked.

No.

Suddenly she wasn't in class anymore, and it wasn't Dave beside her but Derek, and he was trying to hold her to him, his eyes pleading.

"No!"

"Please, Emily."

She tried to push against him. "You can't make me watch this."

"Okay, but just please think. Think. Who was Grace's father?"

Emily couldn't breathe, and her vision was blurring. "How dare you," she spat.

"You know, Emily."

"I don't." she ground out, her voice hoarse with the thing in her throat that was choking her. She backed away, but Derek was relentless.

"You do!" He was close to tears himself, now, and Emily couldn't for the life of her think of what he had to cry about. "You do, Em. I know you do."

With a final push, Emily broke free.

Six: I offer you the emptiness which you seek.

She cowered, still gasping, her back hitting the cold, grey, stone wall behind her. Her eyes darted around her in search of the familiar prisoner, but the cell was empty.

Empty except for her—alone and naked beneath the unevenly-buttoned men's shirt that covered her, and this time it was blood, not water, running down the inside of her legs and making her thighs sticky.

The ragged sob that had been choking her escaped.