The minute Nick sees Henrietta, he knows they must be in worse trouble than he thought. He isn't able to see her woge, but he doesn't need to for this. She radiates power and control and calm. She feels like a force of nature, and she probably is. What had Adalind said? Hexenbiests are conductors of the earth's natural magic? Henrietta is a lightning rod in reverse—crackling with energy that feels surprisingly grounded and all the scarier for it.

He's only just realizing that Adalind is actually quite young in terms of hexenbiest lifespan, and that thought is terrifying. Her powers were more than enough of a challenge for him—a match for his own—but Henrietta walks with the surety of centuries behind her, and he knows in his bones that her power is orders of magnitude greater than Adalind's just by sheer dint of experience.

"What have we here?"

Henrietta peers down at them with a little quirk of a smile, her eyes clearly seeing far more than two beat up, exhausted people sacked out on Monroe's living room floor.

"How very curious," she says. "A Grimm and a hexenbiest—joined and destroyed and reborn—all at the same time."

"Is that what happened?" Adalind asks, but Henrietta shushes her and starts scanning them with her hands, floating her palms over their bodies an inch from the surface, pausing briefly to mutter something under her breath before moving onwards again.

Eventually, Henrietta sits back and turns to look at Hank, who's muttering something about cookies and canines in his sleep.

"What's wrong with him?"

"Love spell," Adalind says. "It didn't end well."

Henrietta turns back to her with narrowed eyes, and Nick feels a little of the chill that passes through Adalind at the clear reproval there. Then Henrietta turns her gaze to Rosalee.

"You are the lady of this house?"

"Me?" Rosalee blanches and looks to Monroe, the two of them caught by the shock and fearful hope in each other's eyes.

"No," she says quietly. "No, I'm not."

"You will be," Henrietta says, brushing past the awkward tension in the room with the air of a woman who's been watching mortals cavort for ages and is beyond such petty human concerns as timing and chemistry and luck. "Your friend needs a restorative potion—something to clear out the love spell and help settle his mind."

"Oh," Rosalee says, "we'll have to go to the shop for supplies."

"Tea should suffice. Bring me the pot when it's brewed."

"Should we—you know—think about a memory spell, too?" Monroe asks. "Hank saw us woge. That can't be good."

Henrietta shakes her head sharply. "His connection to reality is already precarious. If you throw one more spell his way, it will be lost forever. That love spell was really quite nasty, you know." She's talking to Adalind now. "Your mother must be very proud."

"You don't know my mother," Adalind says, under her breath so only Nick can hear it. Well, Nick and Henrietta, who seems to be listening very hard for something.

"I know her too well," Henrietta says. "Her brand of magic is not for you, little witch. You have another path to tread."

"What path?" Adalind asks. "What's happening to me? To us?"

Henrietta smiles, and Nick finds himself thinking of the Sphinx and the Nile and an impending flood.

"You're growing," Henrietta says. "Both of you. You're growing a brand new life."


"So just to be clear," Monroe says for the third time, "we're talking a life-life, right? A baby? They're not going to run off to Vegas and join the circus and take new names, right? That's not what you meant by a new life?"

"No," Henrietta says, still smirking that Sphinx smile of hers, "and yes."

"Well, that's clear."

"A new life means making a choice. To go down one path, another must be abandoned, and you cannot go back the way you came. All possibilities are open now—in this moment. The choice is yet to be made."

"Great," Monroe says. "That's just great."

It's a little odd, Nick thinks in a distant kind of way. A little odd that Monroe seems to care a lot more about nailing down the answers to these nagging questions than the potential parents to be. Nick supposes that he and Adalind are both still in shock. In the space of an evening they've gone from mortal enemies, to lovers, to the only two people in the world who might understand the depth of their grief in the face of the loss of an essential part of themselves, to finding out they might be parents in the not too distant future.

So really, it's not odd that Monroe has more energy than they do when it comes to nailing down the particulars of this final revelation. It's more odd that they have any energy at all, frankly.

And it's also odd that in some bizarre way, Nick's not all that surprised by this new turn of events. It's almost a comfort to realize that there might be some larger plan at work—some primal force that drove them together on that forest floor with the express purpose of creating something powerful and new. It's better than the alternative, which is that two grown adults sworn to destroy each other touched their bathing suit parts together by accident and just couldn't help themselves. That's a level of whoopies he can't handle right now, so predestined magic baby is suddenly sounding completely fine. Not great, but absolutely better than the alternative.

"Tea's ready," Rosalee says, entering with the teapot. Henrietta waves her over and stills with her hands over the lid. They all sit in silence for a time, aware that whatever is going on between Henrietta and the teapot is almost certainly much more complicated than it looks.

"It's done," Henrietta says. "Make sure he drinks it all—slowly—over the next hour. Don't tell him anything until it's done. He needs to find his feet in his own mind, and anything you share with him before he does might cripple his recovery. Take him to another room for quiet, while I tend to these two."

Rosalee disappears again while Monroe helps Hank shuffle to the other side of the house for tea and mind quarantine.

"Now," Henrietta says, "what are we going to do with the two of you?"

It's clearly a rhetorical question, but Adalind is a lawyer—something that Nick is viscerally reminded of when she leans in and asks, "What's the loophole?"

"Excuse me?"

"Come on," Adalind says, "there's got to be a way out of this. A way to ditch the baby and get our powers back and go back to life as normal, all happy mortal enemies again. There has to be, right?"

"Does there?"

"Yes!" Adalind shouts, loud enough for Rosalee to pop back in from where Hank needs silence and glare.

"Sorry," Adalind says, wincing. "But what's the point of magic if you can't fix things that obviously shouldn't be happening? I can't have a baby right now. And Nick and I barely know each other—just two killer ships in the night, really—so there has to be a way out of this. There just has to be."

There's silence then after Adalind's little speech, and Nick thinks about how nice that all sounds and how completely unlikely. He doesn't know a lot about magic, admittedly, but he's pretty sure you don't get do-overs on things like technicalities and unclear intentions. In fact, he's pretty sure magic thrives on making the most out of those things. Nature always finds a way, and human fuckups must be it's preferred medium.

"So sure that this is not your path," Henrietta says. "So sure the way forward is meant to be paved with death. This is not your way, Adalind Schade. Your way will be forged in life and in love and yes, dearheart, in magic beyond measure. This is not the end, little witch. This is just your beginning."

"Oh," Adalind says, sounding very young all of a sudden, and Nick squeezes her hand a little to give her what strength he can spare. She grips his hand just as tightly, sending it back—a little circuit of energy that sustains them both in this increasingly unsustainable world.

"And you?" Henrietta asks next, turning her eyes down to Nick. "What say you, Grimm?"

"I'm not a Grimm," Nick says. "Not anymore."

"No?"

"No. This thing—what happened up there between us—it took my powers. I can't see wesen at all now—probably can't fight the way I used to either. It's all over for me."

"Ah, yes," Henrietta says. "You lost your weapons in the fight, and now you lay here ready to die. Is that it? Not superhuman anymore, so forget about protecting the world, you'll just let it burn?"

"What? No," Nick says, "I'm still a cop. I've still got a job to do."

"And being a Grimm is not a job?"

"Is it?" Nick asks, genuinely puzzled. "I thought it was just who I was."

"Your friends in the other room—the blutbad and the fuchsbau. Do their other faces come with a calling and a mission?"

"No?"

"Then perhaps being a Grimm is more of a vocation. One you chose just as much as it chose you."

"Oh," Nick says, thinking about the first time he saw the inside of Aunt Marie's trailer. The first time he hefted the great axe that he'd found there. How its touch had electrified him—made him feel like a live wire in his worn out skin.

The truth is he'd been bored before. Before he saw Adalind's face outside of that jewelry store, he'd been stuck in a rut, staring down the barrel of fifty more years on the force where the work was crucial but the mystery was long since dead. In some dark little part of his mind he worries that was why he'd bought the ring that day. That he'd decided to change something just for the relief of it—even if it was just his marital status.

And then there was Adalind. Beautiful and terrifying and yes, dammit, mysterious—and suddenly fifty more years of hunting bad guys—actually hunting them like the predator he was born to be—well, suddenly, it didn't seem so bad.

"So," Henrietta says, "you both have choices. Life and death. Power and responsibility, or their abdication. This baby isn't made yet, but the first choice has been. Tonight you merely cleared the way for it. Made a space for it to take root. The blood you share now—that's what makes this all so possible. It's stripped you bare of all your defenses—your magic, your power, your differences. You are one now, and you can create another more powerful than you both. You can create a life that will transform the world."

Nick finds himself looking to Adalind, just as she looks to him. Their eyes catch and they hold, tethered here together on the edge of a destiny that stretches out before them like a forest—wild and unknown.

"Or you can not," Henrietta says calmly. "You can lay down your arms and return to your fields and forget all about the time when you once strove with gods. It's entirely up to you."


A/N: Thank you all for the great response so far! It's really exciting that people are interested in where this is going.