A/N: This really is the last chapter -- only an epiloguey sort of thing to go. Thank you so much for all the lovely reviews! This is my first story to go into triple-digit reviews, and I am rather indecently excited about this ;). And thank you to mistywabbit for help with section breaks.

The usual disclaimers apply.

Chapter 13: Toronto, Edinburgh, 4–6 August

For a long, long moment there was no sound in the room but her breathing and his, no movement of any sort. She hung in his arms, her face against his shoulder and her arms about his neck, and wondered.

At last she raised her head and pulled away, trying to see his face.

He blinked at her, his dark eyes wide, and opened his mouth – then shut it again. When this performance had been repeated, Daine at last realized something: for perhaps the first time in his life, certainly the first time since she had known him, Numair had lost the power of speech.

She began to laugh.

Numair shook his head, rather like a dog shaking water from its ears. Again he drew breath to speak, then shut his mouth again. "How do—" he said at last, then, "When did—"

"This morning." Daine answered his second question first. "Khaja told me. Well, Laurel told me first, only I didn't quite believe her."

"But you did believe Khaja. Wait – what am I saying? Of course you did." He set her down gently and sat down in the chair she had vacated, pulling her into his lap. "But – please forgive me for asking this – are you sure?"

"Of course!" Daine said indignantly. "Oh – I meant to show you this." Opening her left hand, she held out the odd-shaped plastic object she had now been clutching for three-quarters of an hour, the two round windows of which each showed a straight blue line.

Numair still looked shell-shocked. "See," she said patiently, "you remember how it works." He had seen several of these, though not for some time – not since, unable to bear the compassion in his eyes, she had begun buying them in secret and stowing them in her locker at the Zoo. And, of course, neither of them had ever seen one quite like this. "That line's to show the test is working, and that one—" pointing with one finger— "means it's positive."

She paused again, waiting for a reaction. When none came, she couldn't resist a little gentle needling: "Some husbands would be pleased, you know. Possibly even … excited."

He looked down at her, and her breath hitched: rarely had she seen his love for her so clearly written in his face. Then he kissed her, softly at first but with ever greater urgency, until – when at last he let her go – she was dizzy and breathing hard.

"Does that … answer … your question?" he demanded.

Daine nodded. It was astounding – considering the way he usually talked – how much Numair could manage to say without using words.

A flash of movement drew her eyes to the door. It had been shut, she was certain of that, but now it was just slightly ajar, and the late-afternoon sunlight glinted on one – two – six pairs of eyes.

"Don't look now," she whispered to Numair, "but we've got a bit of an audience …"

Laurel and Jan insisted on a congratulatory dinner out; Numair and Daine, still feeling rather dazed, allowed themselves to be propelled out of the house and up the street, then into and out of a streetcar and a subway train, and into an unassuming Indian restaurant on Danforth Avenue.

"I know it looks like a hole in the wall," Laurel assured them in a low voice, as though one of them had said something to that effect, "but the food is amazing. Especially the pakoras."

The food was indeed delicious, and Daine ate a great deal of it, much to everyone else's amusement. "You don't really have to eat enough for two, you know," Laurel teased her gently. "It's just an expression."

"But I'm hungry," Daine said. It seemed a perfectly reasonable statement, and she was rather put out when the rest of the party dissolved into gales of laughter.

"I feel a bit stupid," Daine confessed, "not to have thought of it before. The bras not fitting … the falling asleep …" she paused, shaking her head ruefully. "And the animals, of course."

"The animals?" Numair, propped on one elbow beside her, raised an eyebrow. "Which ones?"

"All of them." Daine waved a hand vaguely. "Especially the ones that wouldn't stay out of our tent. I kept being surprised at how friendly they all were, and reckoning it must be something about Canadian beasts, or perhaps they just weren't used to me … I don't know. But it wasn't that at all, it was …"

"They were trying to tell you something?"

She nodded.

Suddenly Numair grinned hugely and his eyes developed a mischievous twinkle. "I can't wait," he said, "to see how Griffin reacts."

From: aly cooper

To: Sarrasri, Daine

Subject: luggage

hi aunt daine,

someone from air canada rang. they've got your case, but it's gone to … let me see if i can remember … montreal, newark (sp?), paris, madrid & barcelona. i think that's right. they asked where you're staying and wanted to send it back there but i told them just to send it here. i hope that's ok.

love,

aly xo

Numair and Daine came down to breakfast looking vague and bleary-eyed. A good-morning greeting from Benson and Hedges, the two resident Labrador retrievers, nearly knocked them over.

"Did the thunderstorm keep you up?" Laurel inquired sympathetically.

"Thunderstorm?" they asked in unison, then looked at each other and smiled.

Laurel rolled her eyes and went back to supervising the waffle iron. Emma and Ben, however, were not so easily put off.

"It was awesome," Ben enthused. "I thought for sure the power would go off."

"The lightning was this close," Emma added, holding her finger and thumb a hair's breadth apart. "I counted. There's a huge tree branch on the sidewalk down the block, I saw it when I took the dogs out. It was a really cool storm."

"We must have slept through it," Numair said; his voice was even, but Laurel saw that his face was crimson under his tan. Daine had suddenly become extremely interested in the contents of her coffee mug.

Jan emerged into the small, slightly chaotic kitchen, his blond hair still wet from the shower, and grinned at the assembled company. "I hear we're all going to the zoo today," he said cheerfully.

A pink-cheeked Daine looked up at him, wearing an expression of concern. "You lot needn't come with us if you've other things to do," she said. "We can always go on the bus. It's no trouble."

"But we want to go!" Emma protested.

"And we haven't been to the zoo in forever," Ben put in.

"About three weeks, to be exact," said their mother. "It's fine, Daine. It'll be fun."

As they made their leisurely way through the Saturday crowds at the Zoo, Numair stared in fascination at the enormous diversity around him. He had always thought of Edinburgh as offering considerable ethnic and cultural variety, but, if this crowd – and the ones he had observed during yesterday's streetcar and subway journeys – was any indication, Toronto must indeed be, as he had read somewhere recently, the most multicultural city in the world. In less than half an hour he had heard snatches of conversation in five languages he recognized, and at least three more he didn't.

"The sheer diversity here is astonishing," he murmured to Daine, who walked beside him, her small hand in his.

"It is," she agreed, smiling up at him. "There are more than five thousand animals here, and nearly five hundred separate species."

"I meant the people, actually, vetkin."

"The people?" Daine looked around vaguely. "Yes, I suppose so," she said.

"You hadn't noticed?" Numair inquired, amused.

She shook her heard. "I never do," she explained, inadvertently answering a question that had been troubling him for some time. "Not with so many beasts about. It's the same at home."

Numair felt strangely nervous about the object of their visit. He had heard all the stories about Daine's ride to his rescue, of course; he had seen a number of her four-legged allies, and knew quite well that he owed his life – in a painfully direct sense – to the lion who had leapt into the path of a bullet meant for him. Eitan was the lion's name – "strong one." I'll have that nightmare as long as I live, I think. He had a vague memory, too, of being helped to his feet by two extraordinarily hirsute people, one black and one ginger-coloured: in fact, he would later learn, an orang-utan and a gorilla. But even those aspects of the experience had a surreal quality; events he had not himself witnessed seemed more inaccessible yet.

"'Mair? Are you OK?" Daine was looking up at him anxiously; had he spoken aloud?

"I'm fine, love," he assured her. "Only remembering."

She nodded, understanding perfectly what sort of remembering he meant.

When they reached their destination, Numair followed his accustomed procedure when dealing with animals, which was to let Daine lead the way. He was not as accustomed as she to the smells of pachyderms, a fact she seemed to appreciate, for she went slowly, giving him time to acclimate.

"Khaja!" she called softly, as they approached. "Khaja, it's me! I've brought someone to meet you."

The elephant looked up – Daine and Laurel had said it was a small one, but to Numair it looked impressively gargantuan – and trumpeted. Numair winced slightly at the sound; Daine merely gave a cheerful wave in return. Then, ponderously, Khaja trudged toward them, her lifted trunk questing ahead of her. She greeted Daine with what could only be affection, then turned her attention to Numair.

Encouraged by Daine, he put up a hand to touch the finely creased hide of the elephant's forehead; she stared down at him with small, long-lashed eyes and delicately explored his face, hair, and upper body with the finger-like tip of her trunk. "That tickles," he protested in a half-whisper.

As though she had heard this comment and was not much impressed by it, Khaja took hold of Numair's hair with her trunk and tugged on it – gently, but hard enough to make her point.

"Sorry," he said. "Do carry on."

"She likes you," Daine said, after some time. "She—" she chuckled softly. "She's glad we rescued you."

"Thanks ever so," Numair said dryly.

"I don't suppose you can ever really get used to that," Jan commented later, as they watched Daine lean on the rail around the giraffe habitat, scratching a female giraffe behind the ear.

"Yes and no," Numair confessed. "It doesn't frighten me the way it did at first – I know now she's safe as houses. I must admit, though, I'm still not able to … to take it for granted, the way she does."

"You two are going to have very interesting kids."

Numair thought about this, and rather wished he hadn't.

From: Sarrasri, Daine

To: aly cooper

Subject: RE: luggage

Hello, Aly!

Thanks for dealing with the luggage crisis (!). You handled it exactly right. We'll be home tomorrow morning as planned -- are you coming with your mum and/or dad to collect us at the airport? We've had a marvellous holiday, but I'll be very glad to be home again.

See you soon!

Love,

Daine

P.S. There's exciting news -- we'll tell you when we see you :-)

The entire family insisted on accompanying the travellers to the airport, and Benson and Hedges had to be persuaded to stay behind. "Just as well we haven't got the rest of our luggage," Daine whispered to Numair, as they all trooped across the street and clambered into the van; "we'd have had to leave someone else behind to fit in one more case."

As they drove off, she looked back at the house – its waist-high wrought-iron fence obscured by a riotous growth of morning glories, the profusion of half-wild flowers and herbs that filled the small front garden, the brickwork in need of pointing and the cheerful blue paint peeling from the woodwork, the blond and black canine faces panting at the bay window – with something very like regret. Of all the places they had visited on this journey, this had felt the most like home.

"Can you come back next summer?" Emma begged them, as they stood in the by now familiar Pearson Terminal 1, an island in the current of travellers and their families and friends moving toward the security gate in one direction and the extravagantly over-decorated cafeteria in the other. "Please?"

Numair and Daine looked at each other and smiled. "We'd love to, Emma," Daine said, "but this time next year we'll be a wee bit busy, I'm afraid. Perhaps in a few more years …"

"I have a way better idea," Ben announced. "You have to get someone in Edinburgh to invite Dad to be a visiting professor, or give a lecture or something, and then we can all come visit you."

Daine, about to explain that it wasn't quite as easy as that, saw Numair begin to look speculative, and guessed that he was making a mental list of people he knew who might be in a position to issue such an invitation. "We'll see," she said instead. Then she looked at her watch and, startled, realized that they had only twenty minutes to get through security and onto their flight. "We've got to go, I'm afraid," she said, tugging at her husband's elbow to bring him back to earth. "Thanks awfully for everything …"

The next forty-five minutes were a blur of noisy leave-taking, repeated explanations to airport security staff of the perfectly innocent contents of their rucksacks, a mad scramble to locate the appropriate departure gate. At last they were in their seats in the Air Canada 747, the emergency procedures lecture over with, each separately performing the small rituals that would enable them to survive the flight to Heathrow: Numair stowing the packs, extracting the books and papers with which he intended to occupy himself during the night, and carefully arranging his long limbs so as to maximize the available space; Daine making a small nest of pillows and blankets around herself and readying her iPod in anticipation of the moment, once they were in the air, when the flight attendant would announce that she could use it.

There was another pre-flight ritual, too.

"Ready, love?" Numair asked her softly, taking her hand and leaning down to brush his cheek against her hair.

"As I'll ever be," she replied, and closed her eyes.

Daine could ride in cars, now, easily enough, though it was better when the weather was fine and she could have all the windows open. Trains and buses, allowing as they did a degree of freedom of movement, had always bothered her rather less. But there was something about aeroplanes – about knowing that she was vacuum-sealed in a long metal tube thousands of metres above the ground – that could make her usual mild claustrophobia surge into full-blown panic. She had developed a variety of coping mechanisms, but the only thing that reliably helped was this.

"Just a little longer now, sweetheart …" Numair's low, gentle voice seemed to pull her into some other space of existence, where the cramped quarters and the sealed windows didn't matter and there was nothing but herself and him. "We've reached the runway – there, we're accelerating … and now we're in the air …"

It hardly mattered what he said, only that he stayed with her, his voice in her ears, his hand enclosing hers. Tomorrow, when she was herself again, she would thank him for this, would thank whatever twists of fate had led her into the arms of this gentle, infinitely patient man. For now, all she could do was concentrate on his voice and on keeping her breathing slow and even.

By the time the drinks cart reached their row, three-quarters of an hour into the flight, Daine was fast asleep.

The inside of the 747 was shrouded in darkness – except for the tiny puddle of light over the right-hand window seat exactly halfway to the back of Hospitality Class, where Numair sat silently correcting the page proofs of a book chapter and watching his wife sleep.

Numair had never been much good at sleeping on aeroplanes. He might have envied Daine her ability to do so, had he not understood so well that it was her only escape from crushing panic. Nevertheless, he thought wryly, after this experience he was going to make sure that she was in charge of doing all the unpacking, handing out the presents and setting the house to rights: when they got home, he was going to go upstairs for a good long sleep.

The note from Lindhall Reed, the book's editor, that had accompanied the page proofs reminded him that he had yet to submit the requested paragraph of acknowledgement, and it was to the composition of this brief text that Numair now turned his attention. Having, in his small, neat script, thanked Lindhall himself, the trust that had helped to fund the research documented in the chapter, and the assorted colleagues who had read and critiqued various iterations thereof, he put down his pen and considered. After a moment he took it up again and added another sentence:

And, finally, to Daine Sarrasri – beloved wife, trusted colleague and ingenious research assistant – without whose boundless love for the author, and unstinting support of this and other endeavours, these words could not have been written.

When he capped his pen for the second time, Numair was smiling.

It was a little over the top for a book chapter, true. But Lindhall would understand.

"Aunt Daine! Uncle 'Mair! Over here!"

They heard Aly long before they saw her or her parents; the entire population of Scotland appeared to have crammed itself into the arrivals level of the Glasgow airport, and it was impossible even to determine from which direction the voice came. At length, when the crowd had thinned somewhat, Numair caught a glimpse of something blue, and then, some inches below it, something orange. "There," he told Daine, pointing, and he took a firmer hold of her hand and began towing her through the mass of people.

"There you are!" Alanna exclaimed, hugging Daine and reaching up to clap Numair on the shoulder. The look she gave Daine was full of speculation. "We thought you'd been trampled to death. I gather there's no need to wait for your cases to appear?"

Daine shook her head. "Why are there so many—"

"Bomb scare yesterday," George said quietly, relieving her of her rucksack before she could finish her question. "Did you not hear about this down London way? The airport was closed for six hours and everythin' rerouted elsewhere. This is the fallout, as you might say."

"Come on, Dad," Aly was saying impatiently. "It's horrid in here. We can talk outside."

"Hear, hear," her mother agreed feelingly, and they made their way out into the pale sunshine of a Scottish morning.

Numair, heavy-eyed after his largely sleepless night and the nightmare of an early-morning terminal change at Heathrow, stopped on the pavement for a moment to put both arms around Daine. "Welcome home, vetkin," he whispered.

Then, releasing her, he added, "I'm going to sleep. Wake me when we get there."

She raised an eyebrow at him, but he was indeed dead to the world before George had pulled out of the car park.

The moment Aly unlocked the front door, Daine disappeared under a noisy tide of black and grey and parti-coloured fur and wagging tails. Strangely, Griffin did not join in the half-hysterical welcome; he had erupted through the doorway with the rest of them, but had stopped quite suddenly, sniffing, and now sat back a foot or two, slowly blinking his yellow eyes and twitching his tail.

"That answers your question, I think," Daine said to Numair, once she had extricated her top half from the dogs and cats. She knelt in front of the large marmalade cat and lowered herself on her elbows until she could look him in the eyes. "There's no need to be jealous, Griffin," she said reasonably.

Alanna tugged at Numair's arm until he looked down at her, grinning. "Have I missed something?" she asked, sotto voce. "You lot haven't brought back some sort of contraband pet, have you?"

Not for lack of trying, Numair thought, suppressing a laugh. "Not exactly," he said. Then, raising his voice a little, "Sweetheart, I think we ought to tell them our news, don't you?"

Daine looked up at him and blushed. Alanna's violet gaze shifted from one of them to the other, and her lips curved into a half-believing grin. "Congratulations," she said, and hugged them both again.

"I knew it!" Aly shouted, grinning even more broadly than her mother. She turned to her father and held out one hand: "Dad, you owe me twenty pounds. Pay up!"

A/N: I have borrowed the names Benson and Hedges for the black and golden Labs from a conductor I used to work with. This does not mean that Laurel and Jan are heavy smokers, just that they have a somewhat unusual sense of humour.