A sort of post ep for Hunt. For reasons.
"If you're ever lost and find yourself all alone, I'd search forever just to bring you home..."
She spends the night in quiet contemplation. She feels calm and peaceful, safe. She eats when the food passes before her, smiles when she's smiled at, answers questions that float around the topic but never actually delve into it. She's content to let him reconnect, let him laugh and smile and touch and do all the things she expects.
He puts on the show and she lets him, her eyes lingering from a distance.
In silence, she watches.
She knows she's not the only one, she knows when he yawns loudly and flops onto the couch with a long drawn out sigh, that immediately every eye in the room will fall to him.
The feel of it all bubbles away inside her and in the silence she watches, trying to understand.
Her father is a hero and it takes her by surprise.
The lengths he will go to, the force of his love and conviction, his determination, the way he loves. His ability and capacity for it. This great, huge, powerful force that takes him over, makes him take risks and not care about himself.
He's a hero.
Not just her hero, he's been that since he banished the sock gremlin and the boogie man and the monsters under her bed. Since he helped mend her first broken heart with tissues and ice cream and the promise that yes, even though she was the grand old age of eleven she would find love again.
Alexis lets her eyes fall to Kate, to the soft half smile, drenched with relief, that lingers over her face when she looks at him. She finds herself oddly surprised to see it burning brighter still when Kate lifts her head and smiles directly at her.
She sees it all echoed back, in Kate's eyes, in her grandmother's eyes. Her father is a hero.
Not just because he protects his friends and throws himself in front of bullets for the woman he loves. Not just because he risks life and limb, for justice, at her side.
Alexis takes a deep breath, lets it settle in her chest and her heart.
It's not because he flew halfway around the world, willingly paying anything for news of his daughter. Not because he walked into an ambush, walked out of it with a father and immediately ran into battle to save her life. Not because he tricked international assassins and cajoled spies and lied to thieves, kidnappers and murderers.
He was, is and will always be her hero, but not because he promised to stay awake for the entire flight home so she could sleep, even though jet lag was weighing him down. Not because he calmed her panic when she woke from a dream, convinced she was still locked away, alone and afraid. Not because he convinced her to spend the last twenty minutes of the flight detailing her lock picking expedition using jelly beans as props.
She crosses the room, kisses his cheek and whispers she's going to bed, nodding when three separate sets of voices ask if she's ok.
She climbs the stairs, switches off the light and tumbles onto the mattress fully clothed. She leaves the door open an inch so the faded light from downstairs can trickle in, and so when he comes to check on her -because inevitably he will- he can peek inside and see her safe.
And she will dream a dreamless sleep.
She's home, she's safe and her father is a hero.
Because he loves her with his whole heart, down to the deepest depths of his soul, with every fibre and ounce of his being. And he never ever, for one single second in her entire life, lets her doubt it.