A/N - Sorry for the slow burn. I just really wanted to do this from Derek's perspective, so I needed to get there. :)

September 23, 2016

I'm not sure how most husbands feel when their wives are in labor. All I know is that I've spent the better portion of the past eighteen hours wishing I could trade places with Emily and take on all her pain and discomfort. Or at least crawl inside her and experience it with her so I'd know exactly how she felt.

At first it wasn't so bad. I laid in bed facing her, in shock, with my heart beating quickly and tears barely held behind the surface of my eyes when she told me was in labor. She left a hand on my chest while she called Dr. Craig's after-hours number with her free hand.

"Why didn't you call her cell phone?" I asked her when she disconnected the call.

"Because we're not going anywhere for quite awhile, and there's no reason to wake her up. Her call service will do that if we need to head into the hospital in the middle of the night, but I doubt it. We probably won't be going anywhere until morning, if even then," Emily responded. She kissed my forehead and smoothed down the lines I knew where there.

I knew what we were supposed to do. I knew that because of Emily's age, Dr. Craig wanted Emily to head straight towards the hospital when her water broke, or when her contractions were about ten minutes apart, instead of waiting for that five to eight minute mark.

All I could see in my mind at that moment was the morning traffic into DC and possibly having to fight it. All I wanted in that moment was Emily safe in a hospital, hooked up to a fetal monitor so I knew everything was okay. I wanted her within easy access to the drugs that could alleviate her pain; she'd stated emphatically that she had no intention of using them, but I wanted us there if she changed her mind.

And all Emily wanted was to stay at home as long as possible.

She'd kissed me again there in the bed, just a little after midnight. She'd smiled softly at me. "You should get as much sleep as you can tonight," she whispered. She was eerily calm, and it kind of freaked me out.

"What about you?" I asked.

"I want to take a bath before my water breaks. My back is a little sore."

I sat up in bed. "You rest. I'll start the bath."

The funny thing was, I knew that Emily - the Emily who was experiencing physical pain. I hadn't seen her in a very long time, but I knew her. The worse the pain got, the more she tried to convince me or anyone else that she was just fine, the more she pushed people away so they wouldn't see her showing any sign of weakness or pain. Emily had made huge strides when it came to letting me share her emotional challenges with her, but she hadn't yet attempted being vulnerable when she was physically hurting.

If she thought I was just going to doze while she suffered through her contractions alone, she was nuts.

She moved to stand from the bed. "I can do it, Derek. It's okay," she said.

I reached for her arm. "Not this time, Emily Prentiss. You can come with me to the bathroom, or you can rest. I'll sleep when you sleep and I'll be there with you when you can't." I smiled softly at her wide eyes. "We're married and this is our baby and you're going to let me love you through this pain. You can cry when it hurts or you can scream every foul name in the world at me if you need to. Consider it your final challenge in this new life of ours - letting me in when you're physically hurting."

She blinked at me for several seconds. She nodded slowly. She smiled slightly and then laughed softly. "I haven't been Emily Prentiss for three weeks, remember?" she asked. "It's Emily Morgan now."

And then, miraculously, she relaxed against the pillows and let me go start her bath. Better still, she had me get in the water with her. She sat between my legs and leaned her back against my chest, and I kept adding hot water between massaging her shoulders and kissing her neck. She squeezed my fingers through three more contractions that were about eighteen minutes apart while we sat in that water, and in between them, she rested the back of her head against my shoulder and lightly dozed.

I'm not sure it was physical pain at that moment. I think it was more just the emotions she was feeling about everything that was happening to her body, and me being right there with her. After the last contraction, there were tears in her eyes. "I'm scared," she whispered.

"I've got you," I whispered back. But the truth was, I was a little scared, too. I knew how this was all supposed to go, but I hadn't really put myself in the position until that moment to imagine myself watching Emily go through the full course of labor.

I'd watched her body change over the months. I'd rubbed her back and her feet when she was tired and sore. I'd felt and even seen the baby move inside her. I'd held her hand through every doctor's appointment and listened so intently to the baby's heartbeat that they almost felt like they'd become my own. I'd seen our daughter on a screen three times, moving and kicking.

But I still couldn't believe it was real and actually happening. That we'd have a baby in our arms soon. And at that moment in the bathtub, the concept of "soon" took on an entirely different meaning. I didn't know how each hour could stretch into something that felt like a full day.

We got out of the bath, and I asked her what she wanted to wear. She grabbed the t-shirt I'd been sleeping in that was hanging on the hook in our bathroom and pulled it over her body, letting the material stretch over her stomach. I helped her into clean underwear, and got her back into bed. I brushed her hair and listened as her breathing evened out.

We did manage to doze between contractions until about five o'clock in the morning. I was walking with Emily to the bathroom when her water broke. Not a trickle, but a gush of clear liquid that her underwear was no match for.

"We're going to beat the majority of the commute into DC," I thought to myself in relief.

I called Dr. Craig's service to let them know we were heading to the hospital. I called my mother and woke her up. Fran Morgan was out of her apartment, down the stairs, across the driveway and into our house before I'd barely set my phone down. For all her speed, she was calm when she got to our bedroom. Emily was wearily laying in bed at that point, new underwear on and wearing a pad, blankets pulled over her waist and my old, soft, worn FBI Academy t-shirt clinging to her slightly sweaty body.

I was re-checking our bags for the hospital, dressed and ready to go, just needing to get Emily into a pair of her maternity pants when my mom sat on the bed next to her. That didn't surprise me. What did surprise me was when she laid down next to Emily and put her arm around her.

"The next few hours are going to be some of the most excruciatingly painful of your life, but I promise you, Emily, that when that baby comes into the world, you won't feel or even remember the pain. So you hang in there and hold onto that," my mom whispered in Emily's ear.

I saw Emily nod. I watched her touch my mother's hand and let my mother comfort her through yet another contraction. When it was over, Emily kissed my mother's cheek and whispered, "I love you, Fran."

My mom smiled. "I love you like you were my own daughter. I have since I found you sleeping next to Derek in his hospital bed over a year ago, before we really even talked. You brought peace to my son's face like I hadn't seen since he was a young boy."

That statement seemed to bring renewed strength to Emily. She kissed my mother's cheek again and sat up in bed. She reached for the pants that were dangling uselessly in my hands while I watched the whole beautiful spectacle before me. I'd been watching and memorizing Emily with her father for months, but I hadn't been paying enough attention to the relationship my own mother had developed with her.

Emily pulled on her pants and slipped on the flip flops I put at her feet. I handed her one of my fleece zip-up sweatshirts in case it was chilly outside. I grabbed our bag and a towel for the seat of my car and we slowly headed downstairs.

My mother assured us that she and Chris would take care of Leon.

I reminded her to not make the drive into DC on her own. My mother was fine driving around the quiet streets of Alexandria, but she didn't feel comfortable dealing with the city, and Chris didn't even have a license. We'd set it up weeks ago, that when the time came, Penelope would come and get everyone and drive them to the hospital, with Will serving as our back-up if the BAU was in the middle of a case.

It was still dark out, only the murky light of pre-dawn and streetlights guiding our way towards the hospital. There were cars on the freeway, but traffic was flowing. Emily was quiet, except for moaning through two more contractions that came about twelve minutes apart. Fix You by Coldplay came on the radio as I was pulling into the parking structure at Sibley Memorial Hospital. I'm not sure why I took notice of that, but I couldn't help relating my relationship with Emily to the words.

Everything moved fast and slow at the same time. Getting into the maternity ward and into a birthing suite was fast since we'd already filled out all of our paperwork in advance. Getting Emily set up to the fetal monitor seemed incredibly slow. For some reason, she shook her head when the nurse handed her a hospital gown. She had a quiet showdown with the nurse, her lips set firmly, refusing to take the hospital gown in her own hand. She seemed far away when she willingly pulled off her underwear and got on the bed, not really caring who was there, but she wasn't letting go of my shirt.

"It smells like you," she whispered to me as she pulled up the shirt so the monitor could be strapped around her.

Well, okay then. The shirt was staying on and if the hospital staff didn't like it, they could try to go through me and fail.

A doctor came in and examined Emily. He informed us that she was four centimeters dilated and we could expect the contractions to start coming faster. He told us that Dr. Craig would be here soon. He asked Emily if she wanted an epidural and I cringed while she shook her head, declining the drugs that could ease her discomfort.

"Em, you don't have to do it like this. It's not a sign of weakness to take the drugs," I said.

"I'm not doing it because of that. I want to feel and remember everything," she said.

It all blurred for me after that. Dr. Craig arrived. The clock ceased to have any meaning. There was me and Emily and her contractions and our baby's heartbeat. There were ice chips and endless minutes I spent brushing Emily's hair, which was the one thing she seemed to find comfort in. The bathtub in the birthing suite was out since her water had broken, but there was a shower with a hand-held massage head. I couldn't begin to recall the minutes we spent in that shower over the course of the day, me in my swim trunks, Emily's arms around my neck, while I used that massager on her lower back.

I made phone calls to keep our family in the loop. I quietly ate a sandwich out in the hallway, inhaling it between Emily's contractions when they were about five minutes apart.

And at four o'clock in the afternoon, eleven hours after her water broke, I got to call my mother and Penelope and tell them the show was really on the road now. Emily was fully dilated and ready to push, and they could head towards the hospital soon.

The clock comes back into focus for me now, at six o'clock, when we've been at this pushing for two hours. Twenty hours of labor is really nothing, from what I've read online. Nothing, but everything, and endless and excruciating. There have been no complications, no stalling of this labor, nothing out of the ordinary at all, and for that I'm thankful.

But I'm losing Emily in a haze of blinding pain, and I can't get her to focus on me or herself or pushing anymore. My t-shirt is a sweaty mess bunched up over her stomach, and only really serving to cover her breasts. Her hair is slick with sweat at the scalp, her cheeks are red and she's breathing heavily. Dr. Craig is looking at me, telling me to get her pushing again, and I'm at a loss, because the words I never thought I'd hear from Emily's lips just came out in a whimper.

"I can't," she said a few seconds ago, her head slumping back against the bed with tears rolling down her cheeks.

I could be like every father in a delivery room I've ever seen on TV. I could grab her hands and squeeze her fingers and assure her with a firm voice that she, indeed, can keep pushing, but I know that's not how I'm going to reach her. Because I know her, and we are people who are reached with meaningful stories and heartfelt words, despite the decades we lived before we found each other pretending that wasn't true.

I don't know where my move comes from. I'm operating on instinct and how much I know the woman whom I love with my whole heart laying there in the bed. I get my knee on the side of the bed near her armpit. I carefully hoist my other leg over her torso, above her belly, not putting any pressure on her, and let that knee settle on the opposite side of the bed. Now we're face to face, and she has nowhere to look but at me.

I put my hands on her cheeks and kiss her lips. "This baby was conceived on January sixth, but I wasn't even home, Em. That's how I think I knew from the beginning that we were having a girl, because boy sperm swims faster, but girl sperm lives longer, up to five days. It was January third. You took me to the morning football game. Baltimore Ravens vs. the Chicago Bears. We gorged ourselves on garlic fries. It was the first football game you'd ever attended, and you had a smile on your face the whole time. After the game, we took a detour to Annapolis to check on the boat. Do you remember?"

Her eyes are on me again, and she's hearing me. She nods.

"We went inside the cabin and you smiled at me while you made the bench seating into a bed. And it was there, in the cabin of our sailboat that was docked in a slip in Annapolis, on a freezing cold January afternoon that our daughter first started. Because the next morning, I was called away on a case, and I didn't come home until late on January seventh. Remember?"

Again Emily nods.

"That's what I believe. She was always meant to be conceived on a boat and she was meant to be born today with the harvest moon in the sky. Do you believe that?"

"Yes," she whispers, reaching up to wipe the tears on her cheeks.

"She's ready to meet us now, so you have to push, Em. And you can. I know you can. You're the strongest person I know."

She nods again, more firmly, and I remove my hands from her face and get off her body. I stand beside her, linking my fingers with one of her hands and keeping my other arm around her shoulder, and when the next contraction come, Emily pushes harder than she had been. She screams and pushes and buries her face in my neck.

It goes on for what feels like forever, her contractions one on top of the other it seems, and the room seems so noisy, but also feels silent when Dr. Craig says, "There's the head."

I can't help myself. I step forward just a bit so I can catch a glimpse of our daughter's head, which is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, with dark curly hair, even if it's matted with bodily fluids. I nod at Emily and move to stand beside her again. "Here she is. Push, Em," I whisper in her ear.

And Emily does. She pushes and screams as our baby moves out of her body, and then we are in a suspension of silence so complete for a few seconds as Emily's tired body slumps against me that I think something is wrong.

But there's nothing wrong at all. For once, we are in a hospital and absolutely everything is right.

There's a baby girl in Dr. Craig's arms and a cry that slices through the silence in the room, and then there's a baby on Emily's chest, right on my Academy t-shirt that I'd hung onto for well over a decade that will never be the same again because our baby and is there on it, crying and covering it with blood that probably won't ever come out.

I don't care, because I'm crying, too. And Emily is crying and laughing and her hands are on our daughter. There are other hands there, too. Dr. Craig's. She's turned our baby slightly on her side and is clamping the umbilical cord and trying to hand me a pair of scissors to me.

I take them, feeling like my hands belong to someone else. I cut the cord and think, "How can two people even make something like this?"

At least I think the words are in my mind, but Dr. Craig laughs lightly. "I've been doing this for years, but I always wonder the same thing."

A nurse is there, wiping down the skin of our daughter, but not taking her from Emily's arms yet, and I think I'm experiencing some moderate form of shock. I count toes and fingers. I count the wet clumps of lashes on Emily's eyes. I bend my head to kiss Emily's sweaty forehead, and I'm not sure if we murmur "I love you," to each other one time or a thousand times.

Silence descends on the room again, because our baby has stopped crying. She's staring with eyes that won't focus on Emily's tear-filled but smiling face, blinking with a look that I can only describe as, "What the hell just happened?"

Cordelia Frances Morgan.

Cordelia means from the heart, and jewel of the sea. It's unique and old-fashioned and has many nicknames. Lia is too close to Leon, and neither of us liked Delia or Cory. But we liked another nickname born of Cordelia, one of those nicknames where you don't quite know how it derived.

I get my face next to Emily's, so that my cheek is against hers and look into our daughter's eyes. It's impossible to know exactly who she looks like at this moment, but even without discernible features that can be assigned to either of us, it's impossible to think she's anything other than ours.

I run my finger down her soft cheek that is ivory with just a hint of mocha behind it. "Hi Rory," I whisper.

A nurse comes to take the baby to weigh her and Dr. Craig is still between Emily's legs, and that's when I completely lose my shit after hanging on for Emily for all these hours. I wrap my arms around her and I sob uncontrollably, not even able to find the words, because Thank you and I love you isn't enough.

She hugs me back and I feel her lips on my cheek. "I know," she whispers in my ear.

And then she nudges me slightly. A nurse is there with Rory in her arms, now wrapped in a blanket with a pink cap on her head. I take her. I hold my daughter for the first time, and my heart isn't even something I recognize anymore. It feels strange inside me. I never thought I'd have this.

"That's what I fantasized about," Emily says with a tired voice.

I look at her and raise my eyebrows.

"When I decided I wanted to try and get pregnant, this was the best part of what I imagined, how you would look when you connected with our child for the first time. It's better than anything I ever dreamed."