I wake up in the middle of the night with a deep need to see Charlie's face, so I carefully creep away from Derek's warm body and make my way to his room. If I sit at just the right angle on Charlie's floor, the light from the hallway bathroom casts just enough of a glow that I can catch the details of his face while he sleeps; Derek's nose and my eyelashes, his lips and my chin. In the past few months, Charlie's lost some of the toddler chubbiness in his cheeks and has grown a couple of inches, stretching out his proportions and making him look older. When I think about how I miss him when he was a baby, it causes an ache in my heart; I wish I could go back and do it all over again, this time with Derek.

Tomorrow I will go in for the radiofrequency ablation procedure on my liver – some intravenous drugs to help me relax and possibly sleep, some local anesthetic, a small nick on my abdomen and then a long needle with electrodes attached will enter my liver and hopefully fry the hell out of the tumor there. I'm hopeful this will work. Even before this procedure, my blood work and cell count has thrust me into the "partial remission" category. There's a very good chance that before we celebrate Charlie's first Halloween in the states, I might get a "complete remission" diagnosis. Just those two words said in my head send anticipatory shivers down my spine.

It's three o'clock in the morning and for the first time since May, I am up in the middle of the night and not feeling exhausted, though I have reason to feel that way. Last night, Claudia went to the movies with Penelope, and as soon as Charlie was asleep, Derek and I had a repeat performance of what transpired a week ago under that canopy in Manassas. An hour later, we repeated it again. Everything has been slow and mellow and beautiful, because, while my energy level is increasing daily, I'm still nowhere near to swinging from the chandeliers when it comes to sexual escapades.

Not that I was ever the "swing from the chandeliers" type. Not by a long shot. But I could see myself being that way with Derek, which both thrills me and frightens me. The fact is that now that the quiet time I have is not dictated by the absolute need to sleep all the time, I've been spending it in quiet contemplation, mostly wondering who the hell I am now.

Last Friday, I called Clyde Easter to inform him officially that I would not be returning to Interpol, and asked for his help to get Claudia the paperwork she needed to stay here with me. Once that conversation ended, I had a long talk with Claudia, and then I booked her an airline ticket to spend the first two weeks in November back in London, where she will empty my flat. I told her to give as much of my furniture to her family as they want, and they can sell the rest and keep the money. I'm taking their daughter away from them, even though she's an adult, she's coming willingly and absolutely wants to stay with me and Charlie and Derek. My nice furniture is the least I can give them in return.

Claudia won't necessarily be without family here, though, because last Saturday when we all gathered at Rossi's to celebrate my forty-fifth birthday and the end of my chemotherapy, JJ had jokingly asked Claudia, "Do you have a sister just like you?"

Claudia had replied with a smile and a sparkling glimmer in her eyes, "Actually, yes. Elaine. She's about to turn twenty-one, not that much younger than I was when I started taking care of Charlie."

So, when Claudia returns the second week in November, Elaine will be coming with her to meet JJ and Will and Henry, to see if it will work, before JJ's baby arrives. I've met Elaine; she and Claudia could be twins in both looks and personality. I'm pretty sure that there will soon be two Wright girls living in the DC area, and though there's a part of me that feels guilty about that, because of their parents and other siblings, I'm thinking JJ and Will could use the reliability and joy a modern-day Mary Poppins can bring to a household as much as I could.

When I told Claudia that next year we'd enroll Charlie in preschool, for at least partial days, and that she could use that time to take college classes herself, her eyes had filled with tears. "Nobody in my family went to University," she whispered.

I had hugged her and told her that she could be the first. The truth is, Claudia could probably run circles around most college literature professors, and I'm fairly certain she'll plow through any coursework thrown her way.

I sigh and shift my angle slightly in Charlie's room so that more of his face is illuminated by the faint light. I clasp the soft black leather in my hand and then hold it up to the light, flipping it open and staring at a picture of myself, my old FBI badge. Last Saturday at Rossi's, Hotch had pulled me aside and handed me the badge wrapped in a small box. It's not valid anymore, but he'd never turned it in like he was supposed to, apparently. "It would be easy for me to make that active again," he'd said quietly. "JJ will be going out on maternity leave soon, and I know you won't want to travel with us, but you could work in the office, even part time, to help with some of the backlog because of her absence."

I remember staring at my face, at a picture that was taken about a week after I came back from Paris, wondering how the woman who looked so confident, happy and in charge in that picture had gotten so lost. "What about my relationship with Derek?" I'd asked him.

Hotch had shrugged. "You won't be in the field together. I won't tell anyone if you won't. Look, I know it's not something you'd want to do permanently, but there are options for you in the FBI, Emily. Plenty that don't require travel. The fact is, getting hired from within the FBI is far easier than getting hired cold from the outside again, regardless of your position at Interpol. Get your strength back, come back after the New Year, work with us for a few months, and take a look at your options." He paused and put his hand on my shoulder. "If you want to, that is."

I'd managed to smile at him. "Thank you, so much. I'll think about it."

I've been thinking about it ever since then, for four days, and I have no real answer about what I want to do. Sloughing through paperwork at the BAU is only appealing because I'd be at the BAU; other than that it sounds rather depressing. Then again, I know I don't want to be a field agent again, and I don't want to apply for higher ranking jobs and the long hours they entail. I'm completely done with sixty-plus-hour work weeks. However, there are other options within the FBI, and Hotch is right, it's easier to get hired from within.

I run my thumb over my face on the picture on my badge, trying to remember that Emily Prentiss, which isn't so difficult. It's the Emily Prentiss before Doyle escaped that I can't really grasp onto. And it's the Emily Prentiss I am now that feels like I'm dancing on a thin wire, straddling one part of me that feels nearly well and healthy and completely grounded for the first time ever in my life, and the other part of me that is completely freaked out by the prospect of a real, lasting relationship with Derek.

"I remember when that picture was taken," Derek whispers from the doorway. I startle at his voice and then look at him, standing like Adonis in Hanes boxer briefs in the doorway. He continues, "I couldn't let you out of my sight at first after you came back from Paris, so I followed you down to Human Resources and made silly faces at you while that picture was being taken."

I smile and laugh lightly. "I remember," I whisper back.

"Nervous about tomorrow?" he asks as he comes to sit next to me on Charlie's floor, grinning softly at our son's sleeping face.

"Not really."

"Nervous about the idea of coming back to the FBI?"

"A little. I'm not sure it's what I want, but I don't know what I really want."

"Nervous about me?" he asks while touching my hand.

I hesitated and then nod, my eyes involuntarily stinging.

"I can understand," he whispers in my ear. "I'm a pretty scary guy."

I laugh quietly at those words. Whatever scary looks like, Derek Morgan is the exact opposite. "I've just never really done this before. I don't know how this all looks, me healthy again and you and me in a relationship, living together, raising a child together."

He kisses my cheek and then takes my hand in his, removing the badge and placing it gently on the ground. "It looks just like the past twelve weeks have looked, Emily, except with me working and you sleeping less. It looks like dinners together, just like we've been having. It looks like fighting for the last cup of coffee in the coffee pot, just like we've been doing. It looks like binge watching television shows after Charlie goes to bed, but instead of sitting beside each other on the couch, you'll be in my arms. It looks like walks to the park and pushing Charlie on the swings, except you'll be able to walk to parks a little farther away and be doing the pushing instead of just watching. That's what I think, anyway."

I turn my head to look at him and catch Charlie moving in his bed out of the corner of my eye. I move to stand and keep my hand in Derek's, tugging until he's standing, too. When we're out in the hallway, and I'm feeling more on the grounded side of the live wire that is my emotions these days, I lean up to kiss him. "You're going to make me lose out that last cup of coffee when I'm well again, aren't you?"

He laughs quietly and kisses me back. "Yes, but I'll always make you another pot of coffee, Emily."

Watching Emily get wheeled away for the procedure on her liver is excruciating. I've waited for her while she was in the hospital a couple of times, but I've only ever agonized over her well-being in a hospital waiting room once before, and that didn't exactly end well.

"This procedure is safe, Agent Morgan, and the doctor performing it is one of the best in the nation," Elizabeth Prentiss says to me.

I turn to look at her and smile. "You really need to start calling me Derek."

She contemplates me for a few seconds, looking like she wants to ask me a million questions, but settles for saying, "I can do that, Derek, if you can drop the Mrs. Prentiss and call me Elizabeth."

I nod. "Deal, Elizabeth."

We lapse into silence before she speaks again. "Emily informs me that you're intending to move her and Charlie out to Manassas."

I nod again, feeling like I'm about to get reprimanded. "I'm having a house built. It's a beautiful property."

Elizabeth's hand on my back is startling and warm; startling because she's been pretty hands-off and uncertain of me the few times I've seen her in the past several weeks, and warm where I always expected cold. "Emily will like that. She's always, always lived in big cities. Even when she was an adult, she chose to live in the city and commute when necessary, like living in DC and commuting to Quantico. But I think she did that because it's what she's always known. When she was nine, we went on holiday to southern France. She looked around wistfully wherever we went and asked if we could ever live someplace like that, with green hills and houses spread far apart. It will be good for her, a mellower life. I think it's what she's always wanted, but didn't know how to get there."

I turn my head to contemplate this woman whom I really don't know at all, and who Emily has always intimated didn't understand her.

"I'm not blind, Derek, but sometimes it takes a crisis to make you really open your eyes. I always thought I had forever to fix things with my daughter, and this has taught me how short forever might actually be. So you take her out to Manassas, and you love her and my grandchild, and I will visit regularly and keep fixing things as best as I can."

I grin and then lean forward and give Elizabeth a light hug, surprising both of us. She only hesitates a second before hugging me back. We pull apart after that, smiling in slight astonishment at each other, and lapse into an amicable silence, alternating between flipping through magazines and staring our watches. A little over an hour later, Dr. Ligh comes out with a smile on his face. "It went well. Amazingly well. Emily's groggy, but you can go back and see her. We'll keep her here for a few hours and do another ultrasound to make sure things look like we hope they do. After that, she'll come back in a week for another assessment and more blood work."

He stops there and claps his hand against my arm. After that, we might get the word that this whole nightmare is over, I think. My heart is racing in hope.

Elizabeth and I flank either side of Emily's hospital bed and she smiles groggily at both of us before her eyes close. I bend forward and kiss her forehead, whisper, "I love you," in her ear, then excuse myself to the hallway for a minute.

I dial Penelope, who anxiously answers the phone before the first ring is over. "She's fine, Pen. She's good. Everything went well."

I hear Penelope's relieved sigh on the phone. "I'll let everyone know."

"I need another favor, and it might be slightly more difficult than getting us on a roller coaster before a park opens," I reply.

"Anything," she says.

It's something completely ridiculous that I've been tossing around in my head. Emily's either going to laugh and cry in happiness, or she's going to think I've totally lost my mind. I know she's been struggling with the idea of a relationship with me, or a long-term relationship in general, not that I think she's going to back away from this, not at all. But I do think my time for overt, romantic gestures might be coming to a close for awhile while Emily finds her cancer-free footing, so I'm going to take my opportunity while I can. I won't follow through on it unless her prognosis a week from now looks excellent, but it will take planning.

So I tell Garcia what I need, and in between fits of giggles and her telling me that I'm priceless, she says she'll get right on it.

"Complete remission," Dr. McKenzie says with a smile on his face.

It's October thirtieth, a little over a week after my ablation, and Derek and I have been hanging out in Baltimore for hours, with Claudia, Charlie and my mother, while we waited for my blood work results. The ultrasound on my liver was exactly what the doctors and we all hoped; the tumor looks like it's completely radiated and soon will be nothing more than a small, dime-sized patch of scar tissue. Though Dr. McKenzie told me not to get my hopes up about my blood work indicating that I appeared cancer free just yet, it looks like my body had other plans.

For the first time since the previous May, I feel like I'm back in control of myself, physically. Emotionally, I'm a wreck, though. As soon as the words are out of Dr. McKenzie's mouth, I am sobbing, my face in my hands and my body hunched forward in a chair. Only Derek is there in the office with me; everyone else is in the lobby.

I don't hear Derek move, but I feel it when his body kneels before mine. "I told you," he says thickly as he moves my hands away from face. "I told you you'd kick cancer's ass."

I laugh through my tears and throw my arms around his neck. I can't get myself under control, and I'm not sure I want to. This feels like a release, more than screaming and crying in a field. Despite what I've shared with Derek, I've held a lot of my own fear in check, and it's all coming out in tears that are soaking into his shirt now.

Dr. McKenzie pats me on my back and says, "I'll give you two a few minutes."

As soon as he leaves, Derek is kissing me. I have tears streaming down my face and my nose is running and he doesn't seem to care. His hands are on my face and he is kissing me, and then he is hugging me again, and he's laughing and crying, too.

I know this isn't a guarantee of an absolute future; I know this could all come back. But I also know that it's a reprieve, for now. And possibly forever. In the moment, I'm going to take what I can get.

Dr. McKenzie comes back in and I reach for the the tissues on his desk. He makes an appointment for me for a month from now, and then we go out to tell Claudia and my mother the news. I try to keep it together, but when Charlie sees us and runs towards me, I'm crying again, and laughing. I pick my son up and clutch him to me, showering his cheeks with kisses and smiling, assuring him that I'm actually happy and that my tears are just because I'm so happy.

"That's it," Derek whispers in my ear.

I turn to look at him as I feel Claudia's arms and my mothers surround me. "That's the look I wanted to see on your face in person with him. You kept your promise, like I knew you would."

I smile and then laugh and lean over to rest my head on his shoulder while everyone's arms are around me.

Unlike the way I walked into my first treatment, with quiet worry and love from my mother and Claudia, we walk out, all connected in some way, either hand in hand, or hands on arms, with relieved smiles on our faces.

I don't sleep much that night, much like I didn't sleep the night before my treatment started. Every time I doze off, I startle shortly after. "It's real, right?" I ask Derek several times throughout the night.

Each time, he kisses my cheek or lips and assures me that it's real. By around four o'clock in the morning, I don't have to ask him anymore. He gives up on sleep. I startle awake and his eyes are right there on mine, his arms around me, he whispers, "It's real, Emily," before I even get the chance to ask.

We wake on Halloween morning to Charlie crawling in our bed, already in his duck costume. We showed him several Halloween magazines and presented many different options, but from the moment we first talked to him about Halloween and started reading him books about Halloween, he said he wanted to be a duck. He never wavered.

"It's Halloween, Mommy and Daddy!" he exclaims excitedly.

"It is!" I say just as excitedly.

"Can we trick or treat?" he asks.

"Not until it gets dark tonight. But we can carve a pumpkin, my little duck."

We spend the day carving pumpkins, watching Halloween-related cartoons, and stringing orange lighting on the front of our house.

At around four o'clock, Derek leaves. He kisses my hand and says he needs to go see about some costumes for the two of us.

"We're dressing up?" I ask. I haven't dressed up on Halloween since college.

"We absolutely are. You just hang tight. I'll be back in a couple of hours," he says with a wink.

I turn to look at Claudia. "Do you know what he's up to?"

"I've been sworn to secrecy," she says with a grin.

I stare at her and she just laughs. "Live a little, Emily. When have any of his surprises been anything other than exactly what you wanted or needed?"

We make it through the next couple of hours and manage to get Charlie to settle his excited body long enough to get a few bites of dinner in him. Just as it's approaching six o'clock, I hear Derek's voice shouting from outside the front door, "Clymene!"

My heart lands somewhere around my knees at that, and my cheeks flush with the remembrance of the fanciful, mythological world I'd been living in my dreams and sharing with Derek the past few weeks. I glance at Claudia, who is very much trying to contain her joyful laughter.

I stand and pick up Charlie. We both approach the front door and open it. I'm not sure what I was expecting; Derek with robes for me to wear, maybe. What I was not expecting was for him to be standing in a horse-drawn carriage, wearing a toga and an olive-branch wreath on his head, a large cardboard sun attached to the back of the carriage.

He's holding out robes to me, long flowing robes. "Ready to go for a ride, Clymene?" he calls out with a smile on his face.

I realize my mouth is hanging open and close it. I'm too shocked to speak at first, but one of the horses whinny, and Charlie says, totally confused, "Horses, Mommy?" and Derek grins even more at me, and I toss my head back and laugh. I laugh louder and more completely than I have in months, possibly years.

"You're crazy, Derek Morgan!" I call out.

"That's Helios to you, and I'm completely crazy. Come be crazy with me."

I grin and make my way towards the carriage. I place Charlie on the ground and Derek jumps down with the robes in his hand, wrapping them over my clothes. He ties the sash and kisses my nose, and my face might crack, I'm smiling so hard. Somewhere in the back of my emotions, I want to let loose a waterfall of tears because of this remarkable man in front of me, but I keep them in. We've had enough tears, and I only want to enjoy this.

Derek picks Charlie up and Claudia is suddenly there, handing Charlie his little plastic pumpkin to fill with candy. She pats me on the back and says she'll walk with Charlie when he's done with the horses and just wants to get to the houses faster.

The next thing I know, I'm settled in the carriage, Charlie sitting between me and Derek. "Since when do you know how to drive a carriage?" I ask him.

"Since last Saturday. When I told you I had to go check on the property in Manassas? I was getting lessons. But don't worry, that man standing on the sidewalk beside us owns this thing. He's going to stay close tonight, just in case we need a little help."

I turn and glance at the elderly man who is smiling at me from the sidewalk. I turn back towards Derek. "Penelope?" I ask.

"Yes, but she doesn't know the whole story, Emily. Just that you like mythology. That story is yours and mine and Charlie's."

I grin at him and he leans over to kiss Charlie's bewildered head, Charlie who is clutching his plastic pumpkin and looking at the horses and wondering why this doesn't look at all like the Halloween picture books he has.

"Ready to go trick or treat, Charlie?" Derek asks.

"With horses?" he asks.

I throw my head back and laugh again. "With horses. Don't worry. Watch. Your daddy knows how to handle these horses just fine and he'll get you there."

Derek snaps the reins lightly and the horses start clopping down the street.

"Pretty smooth, Derek Morgan," I murmur before leaning over to kiss his cheek.

"It will be like this, too, Emily, in our future," he tells me. "Random, amazing surprises. Though I'll be hard pressed to top this."

I grin and an unfamiliar feeling washes over me. It takes me a few seconds to recognize it as contentment, real, genuine, contentment. And the feeling of being in love, I think that's part of what I'm feeling, but it's new and I've never felt it before, so I can't be certain.

But I have time to figure it out.

A/N - At least an epilogue is coming. :)