"Where do I go?" he'd asked, and Emma hadn't known what to say, what she could say that would comfort and soothe his yearning to belong.

Hours later, and she still didn't know what to say to him, because the truth was, his world wasn't the certainty hers was; from what she understood, there were innumerable dimensions out there, and even if they did manage to stumble into Brennan's, who was to say he'd be able to recognize it? Or, if he did, that he'd admit it?

And for all her talk of returning to their own worlds, Emma wasn't at all sure she could leave him - alone, blind and therefore, to some degree, helpless, but beneath it all, still the same man she'd always known, still her Brennan in every way save one: he hadn't really been hers to begin with.

She could almost hear her heart break - one sharp crack down the middle, and it was...

Hard and bright and hot, like sticky white fingers pressing in, and the joy and pain and fear and sorrow were so intermingled she couldn't sort them apart, and oh, God, was this love? Was this grief?

Tears, the bitter ache of them, rode the back of her throat and scraped her raw, and she felt as though she'd fought a battle she'd known she could never win, and...

Lost, so alone and afraid and without hope; a wanderer, eyes taped shut and hands outstretched, faltering, falling, always falling...

And her hands were wounds; cuts that stung and bled-

"Emma? My God, Emma, are you all right? Don't move, there's glass all over the floor." Jesse's voice, bright with shock, punched through to her, and she stared down at the broken drinking glass she still held, with a kind of fascinated horror.

"What happened?" Jesse asked, as he lifted her out of the debris and carefully removed the piece she had gripped in her hand.

"I don't know. I was just standing here and then..."

And then she'd been sucked into someone else's emotions, overtaken to the point where she could no longer feel anything but him, anyone but-

"Brennan," she whispered, and Jesse looked up from examining the cuts on her palms.

"What do you mean? Was he in here? Did he-"

"No! No, he didn't do anything. It was-" Me. "-nothing."

The connection had been so strong, so intense, it could only have been formed by Emma herself, almost as though she'd been... seeking him out for verification of his feelings towards her, and it seemed, intentionally or no, she'd gotten her answers.

"These cuts aren't pretty; we'd better take you to the med lab."

He began propelling her down the corridor, and she said, with a laugh, "Slow down! It's not like it's life or death, or anything."

Jesse's hand dropped away from her back as though she'd shoved at it, and then she remembered that on this world, she had died, and he'd mourned her, all of them had, and once they found the other Adam, they'd lose her all over again.

"Jesse," she said thickly, "I didn't mean-"

He cut her off with a sharp, "Emma. Just. Don't."

They walked the rest of the way in silence.


"I've got it!" Jesse's shout reverberated through Sanctuary, and Emma wandered over to the computer he'd been working at since their non-argument.

"What's going on?" she asked, curious but a little distracted by her newly healed and itching hands.

"I've found him," he said, glancing up as Shalimar strolled into the room.

"Good to know," she said. "Found who?"

"Adam. Well, the second Adam," he corrected. "His com-link's been activated. He's-" Jesse blew out a breath. "He's at Genomex."

Shalimar cocked her head, smiled in a way that made Emma's blood chill. "Then I guess we're going to be paying our old friends a visit."


"How did this happen?" Jesse asked. "How did Brennan become one of the bad guys?"

"Become? He's always been on their side, and even while he was with us, with me, he was working for them."

"Them?" he wondered, not altogether certain whether they were talking about the GSA, or little green men. The way things had been going, who knew?

"Genomex," she clarified. "I should've known when he couldn't produce any of his so-called 'electric charges' that he was... But I didn't want to believe it."

"Wait. What do you mean, 'so-called'? That's Brennan's power, it's what he does."

Emma looked at him strangely, then said, slowly, deliberately, "But Jesse... Brennan doesn't have any powers."


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NOTE: there's a thread on the lXt forum that goes over who is who and what worlds they're on. Just in case anybody is feeling lost.