Disclaimer: Not my world, not my characters. I just love writing about them.

My first story, reviews welcome.

The first thing Lucy noticed when she woke up was that her head was at a strange angle and her neck was sore. The second thing she noticed was that the reason for the first thing was that she'd fallen asleep on Emerson's couch, indeed on Emerson's chest. All of the previous evening flashed through her mind, and she looked down at her left hand. The ring was real, the sleeping Emerson was real (and slightly snoring). They'd stayed awake talking and holding each other until quite late, and she remembered listening to the quiet rumble of his voice. She wanted to know everything that had happened to him and everything that he'd done in 50 years, and he'd laughed a little and started telling stories randomly. The case that got him his last promotion at the bureau, what it had been like learning to speak Korean after learning the written language from books, the interesting things had happened to him in Paraguay. The late hour and the comforting feeling of his arms around her had eventually dragged her down into sleep, despite her best attempts at staying awake. I wonder what time it is. The lights were still on, so she didn't even know if it was daylight yet.

She moved her head to try to relieve some of the stiffness, and disturbed Emerson. He awoke with a jump and tried to grope for his gun before realizing what had woken him up. He reached out and cupped her face. "Good -," he rasped, and cleared his throat, "Good morning, Lucy." She snuggled back into him a bit, relishing the moment, before sitting up.

"Good morning, but what time is it?"

He struggled a bit getting up and reaching for his cell. "Oof. I'm stiff in muscles I didn't know I had. That was not a complaint, by the way. You're welcome to elbow me in the kidney while sleeping anytime you want."

She blushed a little. "Oh dear, did I really? I'm sorry."

"A quarter to six," he said, after finding his cell. "I think we got about 4 hours sleep. How do you feel?"

"Like I need a shower and a change of clothes. Although, I suppose just the shower will do for now," she smiled.

Later that morning, as they were walking into their information-dense control room, Lucy was glad that the other people on the task force were mostly absorbed in their work. No one noticed her new ring, or that she was wearing the same clothes she had been wearing the previous day. She and Emerson would be professional at work, of course, and no one here except Dr. Soto knew about her history as a '63. And of course Dr. Beauregard back at the ops center. Maybe if Dr. Beauregard smirks, Emerson will kill him, she thought with a grimace.

While Emerson caught up on what the scanners and cameras had found overnight, she slipped down to the staff quarters to change clothes. When she came back up and re-joined them, they seemed engrossed in some camera footage, and very excited about it. "Have we found another one?"

"We're not sure yet," said Dr. Soto, "but the scanning algorithms identified the man in the lower left corner of this image as possible hit on Warden James."

The image on the screen was from a surveillance camera outside a courthouse. The man looked like he was about to cross the street, and some of his face was obscured by the hat he was wearing, but the general build seemed right and the face she thought was possible. Emerson turned to her.

"What do you think?"

"It... does seem possible. I wouldn't care to say anything certain based on this picture, it's not very clear. Where and when was it taken?"

"This is the city courthouse closest to the warden's spot on the map and it was taken about 45 minutes ago," he said.

They'd been paying special attention to anything within 5 miles of the warden's projected arrival on the map. It was about 20 miles from San Francisco, and they guessed that he would probably have some kind of shelter prepared and stocked. With no clues on when that arrival would be, all they could do was keep watching and hope that he would eventually need to leave it.

"What's that he's carrying, a briefcase?" she asked.

"Soto, play the whole clip from the beginning. There, you can see the object a little more clearly when his back was to the camera. Looks like a suitcase."

It did look like a suitcase. Was it the reason he had left his hidey-hole? Maybe he had to deliver something to someone, or maybe he had picked it up from someone who had delivered it to him. They'd never had any sign of him operating near the other inmates that they had found, so he had to have some way of communicating with them, or perhaps just with Tommy Madsen.

"What other cameras are in the area? Maybe we can get an idea of where he was headed," she said.

"Not so far," said Soto, "We'll just have to keep monitoring them."

Several hours later, as Lucy was well into a re-review of the latest interview with the mystery doctor (who was still not giving any information away), the computer alarm started beeping. Everyone jumped up but Soto got there first. It was more footage from the same surveillance camera that had provided the earlier result, only this time, the man was going the other direction. He was still carrying the suitcase.

"It's easier to see his face from this angle," Lucy noticed. "I would say that he definitely looks like Warden James from here. It still could be someone else, but this man does bear a striking resemblance."

"Ok, I'll get everything ready for a trip to San Rafael. Lucy, can you call up their police department? I may need some backup when I get there. Soto, you can... stay here and keep us updated on anything else the searches turn up," said Emerson. Ever since Rebecca had been killed, Dr. Soto had lost his inclination to be on the scene, and Emerson had been glad to leave him behind. Lucy headed for her phone, but she noticed and frowned at Emerson's use of the word I. She let him see the frown, and he only strode out of the room grimacing. Clearly, last night's revelations had not solved everything.

Lucy made arrangements with the San Rafael police, although they'd wanted more information than she could give and hadn't been happy to learn of an FBI incursion into their area. Soto was still fiddling with the computer, trying to wring out more data from a distance.

"I've checked and rechecked the footage from the nearby cameras, and the warden doesn't show up on any of them," Soto said, "so I've made this map of where those other cameras are and what their field of view is. I can't tell you where he went, but I can tell you he didn't go any of these ways." There were 7 other cameras in the area, mostly to the south and east of the one they were interested in, but one was a few blocks north. "Assuming he doesn't know where the cameras are, he probably came from the west."

"I'm not sure that's a safe assumption to make," she said. "He is proving to have a surprisingly good grasp of modern life, and we don't know how long he's been avoiding us."

Emerson came back, looking harried. "Alright, Art is checking all of his instruments to see if he can make any guesses about the warden's shelter. Am I going to have backup when I get there?"

"Yes," she said, "They don't seem happy about helping an unspecified federal mission, though, and they were certainly not happy with my lack of answers for their questions."

"They don't need to be happy, as long as they do it."

Lucy bit back a comment on his predictable nature. Fortunately, Soto gave them something else to talk about when he added a new feature to the map – two concentric circles centered around the courthouse camera.

"The inner circle is the maximum search area based on his walking speed as caught by the camera. The outer one is if he had a car traveling at no more than 20% higher than the posted speed limit. It's a pretty traffic-heavy area, so I figure that's a decent practical limit. Wherever it was that he was going is inside one or both of those circles. Of course, that doesn't tell us anything about where he started from..."

"Good work, Dr. Soto. Whatever is drawing the warden out of safety is likely to be very important, to him and to us. Can you send that map to our phones?" Lucy looked at Emerson as she put a slight emphasis on our. "We should get going, he's not going to get any easier to find." She looked expectantly at Emerson, who glared at the back of Soto's head before leading her just as far as the other side of the door.

"It is enough of a risk to have you here, in San Francisco," he growled, just as the door closed, "but we don't know what kind of preparations the warden has made. We only know that he is a dangerous man, and that he thinks you are a danger to him. He may have any number of the other inmates or even the guards around him. He may have set traps -"

"I will not stay behind," she said, almost shouting, "I know it's dangerous, I also know that I can help you. I know these men's minds, even the warden's, far better than you. You need my help and I will not sit here calmly and watch you walk away to live more of your life without me. Would you wrap me up in wool? Would you put me in storage? Like this?," she said, raising her left hand to show the ring on her finger. "Would you come visit me once a year? Take me out of my box, hug me tightly, and then put me back in? You're too used to loving something that doesn't change, Emerson. I love you too much to just let you walk away as if what you do doesn't matter to me."

"If something were to happen to you -"

"What if something happens to you? What if you go up against the warden without me and don't come back? I need to find and stop whoever did this to me, to us, as much as you do. Neither one of us wants to live without the other, only we mean different things by it. It looks to me like you want to go live," she gestured towards the outside, "without me."

He glared at her, but she didn't flinch. Then, suddenly, he let out a breath and nodded. He looked resigned. "Will you at least wear a bulletproof vest?"