Emily returned to consciousness and almost immediately emptied the contents of her stomach over the side of the gurney she was strapped to, leaving her throat burning, since her stomach had been full of nothing but acid and a little dirt she'd managed to swallow during the scuffle.
Tears burned at her eyes as she attempted to work up enough saliva to spit the sourness out of her mouth. She coughed as her lungs seemed to reel from the shock of the violent reaction of her body.
There was the sound of an air-locked door opening and footsteps crossing the floor to where a curtain blocked her from taking stock of the room in which she was currently housed. She couldn't remember anything that had happened after she'd pleaded with Ian to kill her and she had absolutely no idea where she was right now. She couldn't really bring herself to care anymore.
Metal slid along metal as the curtain was pulled back and she quickly shut her eyes again, not particularly caring to have a conversation right now.
"Hey, Princess," a voice murmured, work-worn hands brushing her dishevelled hair away from her face. "You pull a Whiskey Pete?"
She lay in silence for several moments, planning to act like she hadn't heard, until the words sunk in. There was only one person in the whole world that called her princess...
She sat straight up, causing her stomach to heave painfully again and it felt like her entire body were trying to turn itself inside out. He pressed a gentle hand to her shoulder to guide her back down to the bed, then found some button out of her sight that brought the bed into a sitting position.
"You've gotta relax or you're gonna bust your stitches open," he warned her. "You're already in for a long recovery, if I were you, I wouldn't make it any worse."
Her head was spinning from the effort of trying to make the things he said fit in with her knowledge of the situation in which she found herself. "Where?" she managed to croak out of her parched and stinging throat.
"We're on a jet...we've gotta get out of dodge because the Capitol is sure to be pretty damn pissed about the stunt we just pulled."
"What stunt?" she demanded in her raspy voice, getting distressed. "What happened? What's going on?"
"Shh," he soothed, trying to get her to lie back down. "You've gotta calm down or your doctors aren't gonna let me in here anymore." Her stern unimpressed glare, one he was no stranger to getting, brought a grin to his face. "I'm not supposed to tell you until they've deemed your stress levels low enough to handle it...I don't tell it very well anyway, there's some people you've gotta meet and they'll do it justice."
She sighed unenthusiastically, lips pursed, crossing her arms over her chest as she laid back.
He couldn't help but laugh a little at her pouting. "Cheer up, Princess."
She turned her head so that she could look at him with a steadfastly cheerless expression. Another question struck her and she couldn't help but ask, even knowing that Derek probably wouldn't be thrilled to hear it. "What happened to Ian?"
Sure enough, it was his turn to look displeased. "I don't know – I was knocked out when they lifted me, Jayje, and Will into the jet. The Capitol probably got to him first." Seeing her brow knit with concern, he couldn't help but try to assuage her distress a little. "But I wouldn't worry...District Two is the Capitol's pet, I can't imagine them laying a hand on anyone from there."
"What are we going to with him?" Aaron Hotchner, District Twelve's mentor, asked the room at large as he stared through the two-way mirror that looked into Ian Doyle's cell. "We can't just keep him locked in here forever."
"We've got no choice," Jason Gideon argued. "The Capitol is going to want him back. He's the best weapon we've got against them. To let him go would be foolish."
"I'm not talking about letting him go," Hotchner pointed out, "We could always just kill him. He's too dangerous."