"So you're saying that your options are to sleep with each other again, make a baby, and get your powers back, or to go your separate ways, live a normal Kehrseite life, and try to forget everything you've ever known about the wesen world?"

It's a good summation, Adalind thinks from where she's slumped on the couch, leaning her head on Nick's shoulder. Monroe's summation powers are top notch. Too bad he can't use those powers to fix any of the options he just summed up, but hey, he gets points for clarity.

"Pretty much," Nick says, sipping at his brandy now that he's finally able to sit upright under his own power. "Henrietta hooked us up with these charms for two weeks. Should help us stay connected and upright while we figure out what to do next."

He holds out his new necklace to Monroe, who leans in with a critical eye to inspect the intricate triple spiral of metal holding a glowing red stone.

"I gotta tell you, that is some nifty metalwork," Monroe says.

"It's a set." Nick gestures to Adalind, who dutifully holds hers out for a similar examination.

"Wow," Monroe says, "what's the stone? I've never seen a ruby glow like that before."

Nick turns to her with a raised eyebrow, and she sighs. Hexenbiest weirdness is her specialty subject, after all.

"It's blood," she says. "Our blood, all mixed together and frozen at the same vibration. It'll keep us on an even keel for the next two weeks until we decide what steps to take. If we decide to part ways, Henrietta can help untangle us and send us out into the world without anything connecting us to our old lives."

"And if we don't decide to part ways, she'll let us keep the charms until the baby comes and our powers are restored," Nick says, like he's talking about an incoming cold front rather than an honest-to-god baby.

"Two weeks isn't a lot of time," Monroe says, and Adalind could not agree more. But Henrietta had been clear—their window of opportunity to finish what they'd inadvertently started was already closing, and it would be gone altogether by the time the moon went dark two weeks from tonight.

"No," Nick says, "it isn't. But we don't have a choice. We can't go back to the way things were either way."

"That sucks," Adalind says. "Although mind you, working for Sean Renard wasn't exactly working out."

"What?" Nick sits up so fast that Adalind is knocked out of her spot cuddled into his side. When he turns to her, his eyes are huge. "You're working for my Captain?"

"Unfortunately, yes," Adalind says. "He's really obsessed with that fucking key."

"The Captain. My Captain? Does he know what you were doing to Hank?"

Adalind snorts. "He made me do that to Hank. No offence to Hank, but he's way too nice to be my type. Sean put me up to it to get to you."

"Jesus," Nick says, "what does he have on you?"

"Nothing." She sinks further back into the couch, away from his searching eyes that want to believe she was forced to hurt Hank rather than just willing to do it for the right man. "Sean is my type, and my mother always wanted me to marry a prince, and it just seemed like what I needed to do to be with him, you know?"

"You slept with my Captain?" Nick asks, the question bursting out of him in a way that makes Adalind sit up again, ready to fight.

"That's what you got from that? Yeah, I slept with Sean. I slept with Hank. I slept with you. It's a fucking Portland PD trifecta, and let me tell you, it's been lousy."

"Lousy?!" Nick looks nearly apoplectic, but Monroe cuts in with a well-timed query.

"The Captain's a Royal prince?"

Adalind turns to him with a grateful smile. Monroe really is a gem.

"Yes, he is, Monroe. Thank you for noticing the important part of the story here."

"Listen," Nick says, "STIs are also important—"

"Yes, Nick. Of course, I'm unclean, how thoughtless of me—let's round up Sean and Hank and Juliette and all go get tested. I'm sure that will go down really, really well."

"I didn't mean—"

"Yes, you did. You think just because I use my body to get what I want that I'm unsafe. Well, for the record, I've had all sorts of protection—magical and mundane—and regular testing, and you are the only man I've ever met who didn't think to ask about a goddamn condom."

Monroe coughs then, awkwardly, and Nick blushes red hot.

"I don't think either of us were thinking much about that"

"Exactly," Adalind says. "So what the hell are we fighting about? So I slept with your boss. That doesn't make you special. I've slept with plenty of people's bosses. Hell, I've slept with my boss. It doesn't mean anything."

Nick stares at her—his eyes gone dark and dull again.

"I guess maybe it meant something to me," he says.


Adalind finds Nick on the porch once she's had a chance to calm down. He'd stormed out after those last cutting words, leaving her blinking at Monroe who looked just as stunned as she felt.

"It meant something to him?" she'd asked Monroe, and he'd shrugged—more of a flail really—and went back to Rosalee, who was still nursing Hank back to sanity in the other room.

Now she's on the porch, and the damp, cool April night air makes everything seem just a little less inflammatory. They've been on fire since the forest, but the coming rain makes her remember that fires can't burn red hot forever. Not without consequences. Finding balance in this situation is going to be everything

"What did you mean?" Adalind says quietly, coming to rest at Nick's side, looking out over the shadowy yard and the woods stretching deep on the other side of the road. "It meant something to you?"

"I don't know," Nick says, eyes flicking over her face and away again. "I don't know why, but being with you—what happened up there at the ruins—it felt real, you know? It felt like we really connected in some deep, primal way. And if you didn't feel that—if that was just in my head—I don't know…"

He trails off, and they both just stand there with the echo of that thought—that connection—vibrating between them. He's not wrong. Adalind knows what he means. Sex has always been pretty utilitarian for her, but being with Nick—that was something else entirely. Primal, like he said, and raw and powerful. The way they fit together—the way they moved—it was like a dance they knew all the moves to, even without hearing the music. A dance they were born to do together—that they might never do again if they take the second option and go their separate ways.

"You have a girlfriend, Nick," she says.

"I know," he says. "I know."

"I know you love her." The thought sort of turns her stomach. "I know you're not going to leave her just because some freak magical accident made you fall dick-first into a hexenbiest."

"Right. You're right."

"So just where exactly do you get off, being jealous and righteous about my past partners?"

"I don't. I know I have no claim on your past."

"Damn straight," she says.

"Yeah." He's still looking away, into the dark. "I guess maybe I'm slightly more invested in your future. In our future. Together."

Adalind stares at him—the most frustrating man in the world and also the most interesting—staring pointedly at anything but her.

"You want to have a baby with me?"

He sighs and shrugs. "I don't know. I do know that I liked being a Grimm. I liked seeing the world in a new way—I liked protecting it and feeling like I had a purpose. What did Henrietta call it? A vocation. I think I'm really going to miss having a vocation."

"I get that," Adalind says. "Being a witch—it's like that. A calling you can't ignore. Something so deeply tangled up with who you are that losing it feels like a death, I guess."

"Yeah," Nick says. "And I know I could go home to Juliette. Ask Henrietta to untangle us and send us on our merry way. Juliette and I could leave—start a new life somewhere else. Get married, start a family, work 9 to 5 until we retire and then garden until we die."

"Sounds nice," Adalind says. "I mean, not for me, but if the American dream is your cup of tea, that sounds just about perfect."

"Yeah," Nick says, turning finally to meet her eyes. His are bright now in the moonlight. Awake. Alive. Not looking away. "Only, I don't think it is my cup of tea. I mean, I love Juliette, but the rest of it sounds boring as shit."

"There is that," Adalind says, smiling up at him. It's so easy sometimes.

"So, I think I want to be a Grimm again. And I guess that means I might want to have a baby with you."

And then...then it's hard.

"I don't think that's a great reason to have a kid, Nick," she says, sighing and looking away. "I've seen what happens when people have kids because they really want something else. The something else turns out to be not what they thought it was, and then there's this kid, all sentient and existing and inevitably very, very hurt. My dad left when I was four, and my mom never got over it. She never let me get over it, either. I'm not going to do that to my children. Not on purpose. Not even to get my powers back."

It's quiet then for a while afterwards. There's an owl hooting softly in the woods and the rustle of small, fuzzy things in the bushes. Rabbits probably. It's that season again. The wild things are making babies and getting on with the work of living.

"You're right," he says finally, pulling her into a one-arm hug, dropping an unexpected but welcome kiss into her still tangled hair. "If we decide to make a baby, we're going to be responsible for that baby for the rest of our lives. We should be committed to that, if we're going to do it."

"Yeah." She leans into him, feeling held and supported and safe for the first time in a very long time. She takes a minute to savor that—to file it away in her memory—so that when this all goes tits up she has something lovely to hold on to.

"Nick—what are we going to do?"

"I have no idea," he says, thumb stroking warmth and strength into her shoulder. "I guess we'll have to figure that out."