A/N - Each chapter is taking me so long with my crazy life right now, but I won't give up on this story. Thanks for hanging in there!

We did allow ourselves to get too complacent, with routines that were predictable. Our weeks rarely wavered. Leon would walk to and from school with the neighborhood kids. In the summer, Derek and I would run in the mornings before heading to work. On Mondays, Fran went to play bingo, and on Thursday evenings she volunteered at her church's soup kitchen. The typical Saturday involved any combination of the team and a few neighbors coming around for dinner. On many Sundays, my father and Fran ate dinner in her apartment or his cabin, and my mother would join us for dinner.

And on Wednesday evenings, Derek and I had our date night out. That my birthday fell on a Wednesday this past October was pure coincidence. People surveilled us and anyone with the time and desire could have figured out that we wouldn't be home on a Wednesday evening.

For five days and nights after Derek told me that he'd called Gil, but before he arrived, I started taking inventory of my life again, and Derek slowly started taking inventory of me, in a way he hadn't since I'd gotten back from London. I realized that I could go hours during the day without thinking about that cottage on the border of Scotland, and that when I did think about it, it didn't hurt as much as it did before.

Derek found peace in my softness and nights without tears, and I found mine with the stubble on his cheeks tickling my palms at night. With letting him love me, reminding me with the feather light touches of his fingertips on my skin and his lips whispering against me that he was still there for me, that he still loved me just as much as he had before, that an extra measure of security was coming, and we could once again put ourselves back together.

Gil came to us on the wings of a plane that used to belong to Adrian Stancu that he's now commandeered as his own. He came with a suitcase and two trunks that raised eyebrows. Gil called us, and we called Hotch, and Hotch intervened so Gil could leave the airfield with a cornucopia of electronic equipment.

I don't know what it was about seeing him. Perhaps it was because of his connection to Clyde, or perhaps it was just because he was a kind man who had put himself on the line for me and Fran and my family, but when he walked in our door late that night, I wrapped my arms around him and sobbed. "I let that baby go to save myself," I whispered with my chin resting on his shoulder, while Derek looked on, concern and love on his face.

Gil's gray beard tickled my cheek. He squeezed me a little tighter, then moved his body away from me and kissed my forehead, "And I'm here to help make sure you're never in a position to have to make a decision like that again," he said.

He turned and stuck out his hand to introduce himself to Derek. Though it was after eleven, we made tea. The three of us sat around our kitchen table in somewhat awkward silence.

"How's Holly?" I asked him finally.

"Better. Nick's staying at my place with her while I'm here. They've become very good friends. In a strange way, it's like they need each other in order for both of them to move forward in life. Nick comes around a lot. He's writing again. He'd take Holly back with him, but we don't think she's ready for the city just yet. I don't think she'll ever tell about how she escaped her hell, she's just happy to be out of it."

I nodded and smiled slightly at that. "Adrian Stancu's dead," I said.

Gil nodded and sipped his tea. "So I heard."

I raised one eyebrow at him and he glanced away from me and then looked back. He nodded once, briefly, acknowledging that he'd made sure Adrian died. And that was that.

"So what are your plans for this house?" Derek asked to change the subject, his hand resting warmly on my thigh under the table.

Gil looked around and then towards the stairs. "A guard dog...or four," he said with a wink.

"What?" Derek asked, perplexed.

Gil laughed. "You'll see in the morning."

We retired to bed after that, Derek and I going upstairs after getting Gil settled in the den. I changed into one of those nightgowns Derek seemed to love so much, and I laid with my head on his shoulder.

"He's different," Derek murmured against my hair.

I smiled against his chest. "He is. But he's a good man. I think this is strange for him, being in a home like this. He's used to solitude."

"What do you think he meant by guard dogs?" Derek asked.

I laughed lightly. "I don't know. But I'm sure we'll find out soon. Thank you for calling him."

Derek's fingers stroked my arm in a soothing pattern, and I found myself lulled to the edge of sleep by his touch. But then he spoke again. "You miss Clyde."

I lifted my head to look at him. I nodded. "I do."

"I'm sorry, Em. It was all my fault. If Daniels hadn't taken me, none of it would have happened."

My eyebrows raised impossibly high, though I wasn't sure he could see them in the relative darkness of our bedroom. I leaned forward and kissed his cheeks, his eyes, his forehead, and finally his lips. "We've been down that road, Derek. Clyde was dying. He'd be gone from my life by now either way. And if you hadn't been taken, there were be no Leon or Rory or a baby on the way. My father would probably have died by now had we not found him and he was still drinking. And there would be no us."

His arm squeezed me. "I love us."

I kissed him again and whispered, "Me too." And I let his fingers on my skin soothe me to sleep.

The next morning, Gil did indeed produce our "guard dogs." They were robotic dogs I'd seen in the stores around Christmas time, but Gil had tinkered with them to the point that they in no way resembled a child's toy. He patted Leon's head and told him he'd have to be patient to see what the dogs could do, that it wouldn't be time to fully program them for awhile.

He stayed for three weeks. He talked with Fran and my father, and seemed to get a kick out of chasing Rory around the house, hoisting her up and laughing as she squealed and grabbed onto his beard. But mostly he was all business, with Derek's help on the evenings and and weekends if he asked for it, and the rest of us pitching in when necessary. We trusted him. Derek had told him he didn't want the house to feel like Fort Knox, and Gil assured him it wouldn't.

The first thing he did was to rip away the sheetrock in our upstairs hallway, where the wall butted up to our stairs. After a few trips to the store, and one trip to "someone he knew," he had the supplies necessary to install a steel sliding door that, once painted, looked no more like a pocket door at the top of stairs - unless you looked closely. That project took him a week.

He spent several days outside on our property, messing with our motion sensors and installing more equipment. And then he was at our alarm panels, playing with the wires, and putting a few cameras in the house.

He seemed to want to work in solitude for the most part, and didn't say much about what he was doing. He joined us for meals, and seemed to listen more than interject words into conversation. It was sometimes difficult for me to understand how a quiet, understated man like Gil had ever maintained a friendship with Clyde, or how he could have possibly chosen his career path in life.

As Leon's tenth birthday approached, Gil told me he just needed a few more days. I was sitting at the kitchen table looking at a magazine while he was doing whatever it was he was doing with the alarm panel downstairs.

I glanced up at him when he spoke, a surprising sense of loss settling over me when I thought about him leaving.

He didn't glance my way, but I saw him take a deep breath and exhale slowly. "In 1989, Clyde and I were on special detail in Afghanistan. He was strong and quick and his mind worked faster than any mind I'd ever seen before or now. He was the best friend I'd ever had, or ever would have. And we were on a dangerous assignment. Surveillance equipment wasn't what is is now back then, not by a long shot, as I'm sure you can imagine. I was supposed to be his eyes inside a building where we were trying to track down a group of men. We zeroed in their location in a large house. We observed for a few days. We weren't there to make arrests. We were twenty-four years old and we shouldn't have been in that position, but we were the best."

I rested my chin in my hand, elbow on our table, and listened intently. Clyde rarely talked about his days with the Royal Marines, only hinting that he and Markus Klaus were not part of a regular unit, that their assignments were more undercover. He never had mentioned Gil. "Was Markus there?" I asked.

Gil shook his head. "He should have been. But he was sick at the time, and we had someone else with us. His name was Alex. He was twenty years old, good but fresh when it came to things like this. It was the three of us and what we thought were four men that we were supposed to assassinate. We thought it would be a piece of cake, and if we'd had Markus, it might have gone differently. I'm going to make a long story short here, because I want to get to my point. I stayed in our car, making sure no one came in or out. And Clyde and Alex went in. And then all hell broke loose. We'd watched that house for days and had never seen anyone besides those four men, no evidence whatsoever that anyone else was in that house. But there were. Eight women and fourteen children. Young kids. When I saw them on Clyde's camera, I bolted from the car and ran inside to help."

Gil cleared his throat and turned to face me finally. "The women took up guns when the men fell, and Clyde and Alex and I picked them off one by one, in front of their children. And then the oldest child, he was maybe twelve, produced a grenade. He threw it at us, and we ran. The explosion came when we were safely out the door. Alex had taken a bullet in his thigh and couldn't help. We should have gotten the hell out of there, we should have wrapped Alex's leg to stop the bleeding, but Clyde screamed at me that we needed to see if there were any children still alive. All I remember thinking was what the hell we were going to do with a bunch of children when no one was supposed to know we were there. And I knew we only had minutes to escape before authorities arrived. But Clyde ran back into the house and I followed him. They were all either already dead or on fire. Except one. A baby who had been in a different room. I still remember the look on Clyde's face, the tears in his eyes, when he came towards me with a crying baby in his arms."

I blinked back tears and smiled softly at Gil. I nodded at him to go on.

"Alex was dead when we got back outside. The bullet had hit an artery, and we'd gone back into the house instead of wrapping his leg. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered. But I grabbed his body because we couldn't leave him behind, and Clyde carried the baby and we got out of there just in time. We drove around for a long time, Alex dead in the back seat, and the baby in Clyde's arms in the passenger seat next to me. The baby stopped crying. She was just staring at Clyde. 'No one can know we did this,' he whispered to me. I think I was in moderate shock about the whole thing. I told him we needed to report back in. He nodded and we found a small house in a relatively safe area of the city. We left the baby on the porch, knocked until we saw a light come on, and then got the hell out of there. We never told anyone about the baby, or that we'd left Alex to bleed out so we could go back in that house. But that night changed us. Clyde went to SIS, and I went back to the estate my grandparent's had left me. I became hell bent on creating better surveillance equipment so that good men like Clyde would never be blindsided in a situation like that again."

Gil stepped forward at that point and brushed the single tear on my cheek away gently. "When Clyde came to me to give me all of his medals and awards and told me he was dying, he also told me that that baby's name was Asma. That the family in the house where we left her had taken her in. That he'd kept track of her and seen to it that she never wanted for anything, and when Afghanistan got too dangerous, Clyde got her and her family out of there and got them resettled in the UK. She's a doctor now. Clyde anonymously paid for her schooling."

"Markus says he hasn't seen you in decades," I managed to say after I'd absorbed the story for a couple of minutes.

"No. Clyde and I shared something that night that kept him close to me. But Markus has always been a straight shooter, literally and figuratively. He'd never have a need for my services and anonymity has been my mainstay."

Gil's squeeze on my shoulder was full of warmth and kindness. "People like us, we have to make judgement calls all of the time that we'd rather not make, and there's no clear definition of right or wrong. It just is. We can try to go back and spin our wheels at finding a different outcome, but that gets us nowhere. We have to keep on living and going forward when it's over, Emily. And I get the feeling you haven't done much actual living like you used to since October."

I shook my head in confirmation. For as far as I'd come in the couple of months since Christmas, I was still mostly sitting sentry in our home day in and day out, and everyone else was following my lead. Fran hadn't been out much at all, Derek and I hadn't been out together, and Leon played with his friends after school at our house, instead of at theirs.

"I think this is why Clyde made me promise to never go undercover again. I never could recover like he seemed to be able to. And then I went after Fran and broke that promise," I whispered.

"And he would have been right there next to you if he was still alive. We have to break promises sometimes for the greater good. Just like I promised him I'd never tell anyone about that night in Afghanistan, and I just did," Gil said with a slight smile.

I smiled back and looked down at the table, like the grains of wood would help me find something to say.

"Are you having a birthday party for Leon?" Gil asked me, the abrupt change in topic jolting me from my thoughts.

I nodded. "Yes. But just family and the BAU team."

Gil shook his head at me. "Ten's a big year. Invite everyone that comes into this house regularly - his friends and their parents. I'm about done here. I can help you prepare."

I raised my eyebrows but agreed to his plan.

XXXXXXX

Leon thoroughly enjoyed his birthday party a few days later, and our house was filled with friends and family and laughter for the first time in a long time. It was bitingly cold outside, snowing and the wind howling, but Leon's cheeks were flushed in our warm home, a smile lighting his face and a look of wonder in his eyes the whole time. Like he wasn't expecting to find normal again, but there we all were. Still normal, and loving and strong.

After the neighbors cleared out, it was just us, the BAU, and Gil. And that's when GIL brought out one of the robotic dogs. "Give me a couple of minutes," he said, while we all stared on curiously. He powered up the dog, and fiddled with his laptop for a minute and then looked up. "OK," he said. "I need everyone to take turns saying their names. This way the system will recognize your voices as people who can activate it."

We dutifully did as told and Gil nodded. He went back to his computer then looked up and winked at Leon. "Fran and Chris, can you go stand in the living room? Penelope, you go into the den. And Leon, you tell the dog you're home," Gil said.

Leon looked at him doubtfully while everyone moved, but then grinned in interest and said, "I"m home."

The robotic dog raised its head. "Hello, Leon. Welcome home. Your alarm is currently off. Fran and Chris are in the living room, Rory is in her bedroom, and Penelope is in the den. Would you like me to arm the alarm for you?"

Leon's eyes nearly popped out of his head, and his grin widened. "Yes," he said.

A few beeps could be heard from the panel in the kitchen and the panel upstairs. "Doors and windows are armed and the motion sensors and cameras are on," came from the dog.

We all watched in stunned silence that only got more amazing when the dog lifted his plastic head and stated, "Rick is coming up the driveway."

We watched Gil pull a cell phone out of his pocket. "He probably got home and realized he was missing this. The cameras scanned everyone's faces today. All the dogs will be programmed to let you know if someone enters the premises, and let you know if it's someone you don't know. I'll teach you how to program it on your own to add more people, but I think the majority of people who regularly come here were at the party today. No one you don't know will get near this house without you knowing about it first."

There was a knock on the door. Gil said, "Disarm," and there were more beeps and then Derek opened the front door. Rick explained he'd left his cell phone, Derek handed it to him, and he left to go next door again. "Rick has left the premises," the dog said a few seconds later.

"Damn," said Penelope said in awe from the doorway of the den. We all laughed lightly, and Gil looked almost shy.

"I wanted to keep it friendly for the children, so I thought the dogs. Fran can have one in her apartment, and Chris can take one, and you can keep one downstairs and one upstairs. You can also arm the alarm without them. And if you tell them to stand down, the dogs won't say anything until you tell them to wake up. In case you want them quiet when other people are around. The system connects to your cell phones, so when you're out, you can get notifications of the comings and goings here."

Reid reached over and touched the dog and Leon stepped forward to hug Gil. "There's more," Gil said over Leon's shoulder.

And he went on to explain that the steel door at the top of our stairs could be shut with a voice command. That if we ever needed to seal ourselves upstairs, we could. That the cameras he'd installed around the property were on a separate feed than the two cameras we had from the alarm company. That our alarm still functioned the same as before, and everything he added worked independent of that.

When everyone cleared out of the house shortly after that, with handshakes for Gil, I watched Leon carry his dog upstairs to his room. And later that night, after I tucked him in, I heard him talking to the dog.

"Where's Nana?" he asked.

"Fran is in her apartment," the robotic voice of the dog said.

"Where's Grandpa?"

"Chris is in Fran's apartment," the dog replied.

And Leon giggled happily. "Good," he said.

Derek came up the stairs at that moment and saw me standing there, leaning against the wall outside Leon's bedroom. I put my finger to my lips and he stopped. I inclined my head towards our bedroom, and he headed in there with me quietly following him.

"Gil's unbelievable," he said as he pulled off his shirt to get ready for bed.

I nodded and sat on the edge of the bed, my protruding stomach resting against my thighs, our son doing a dance inside me. I looked at Derek's body as he removed his jeans, his sculpted muscles stretching and pulling as he moved. He never ceased to take my breath away, as long as I was giving myself time and permission to look.

No matter how much better things had gotten in the past few weeks, we were still dancing tentatively around each other in a lot of ways, and I was tired of it. It was time to move forward. I'd broken my promise to Clyde and done what I needed to do, and I'd gotten myself too stuck in my own head to let his voice register inside me. But Gil reminded me that Clyde would have been right there with me when I went after Fran if he could have been. And he would have told me I did the best I could, just like JJ had told me and Derek had told me. And I needed to forgive myself and start living again.

My eyes traveled up Derek's body and met his; he was looking at me curiously. I smiled at him before I spoke, "I think your mom should go play bingo on Monday. Or maybe on Tuesday. I think we shouldn't become too routine oriented, but we really need to get our lives back. Maybe my dad can go with her and get off this property. And I think we need to plan a date night. Just you and me. Maybe next Friday?"

You would have thought I'd just handed him a winning lottery ticket the way his face lit up. And maybe I had. He stepped towards me in his boxer briefs, his face lighting up the room. When he reached me, he placed his hand on my cheek. "I'd love a date night," he whispered.

XXXXXX

It's been over three hours since Derek first touched my cheek and told me with his hand and eyes and words that he'd been longing for a date night with me. After he locked our bedroom door and divested me of my clothing, we made love for the first time in months without desperation and sadness or anything but love and happiness in our hearts.

He sleeps peacefully next to me now, our bedroom door open again, our pajamas on, his mouth relaxed and slightly open. He looks a lot like Rory in his sleep. Or Rory looks a lot like him - soft and relaxed and completely in tune with the happiness in life. He sleeps like a child, and my heart thunders in my chest, so in love with him.

I'm not sure what woke me exactly, because I drifted off to sleep at nearly the same time as him hours before, but after I take my fill of his face in the dim light filtering in from the moon into our bedroom window, I glance at the clock.

It's just after midnight.

The winter winds howl outside, and I'm safe in this house with Derek and Leon and Rory. And the baby in my stomach is kicking away again, drumming against me. I'm officially twenty-five weeks pregnant, and every day after today is just one more day towards viability, towards this baby making it.

I bury my head against Derek's chest and rest one hand against my stomach, and I finally start believing again in that moment. Believing in the miracles that Derek and I can create together, believing in our path in life, believing in the people who love me and have confidence in me and have told me time and again that I am good person.

I take Derek's hand and move it so it rests over my stomach and I feel him wake slightly. His hand presses more firmly against my stomach and his other arm tightens around my back. And I shake my head against his chest, my forehead rubbing against the soft cotton covering his skin. The tears come, but they aren't tears of remorse. They are tears of happiness that I haven't felt salt my face or lips in a long time.

"You're my promise I'll never break," I whisper against his heart, hoping he'll understand.

And he squeezes me tighter and I can feel the soft, happy laugh bubbling up from his chest. "There was something there, Emily. Something I couldn't place or recognize, but something, from the moment I first shook your hand in the briefing room at the BAU. We're right where we're supposed to be. And I love you in a way you can't even imagine when I say it. I always will."

And I finally feel completely worthy of him again, for the first time since my birthday.