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Who: Emily Prentiss, OPEN
When: A few days after the cornucopia.
Where: Around E-12, top of the waterfall

She was far from an optimist - she fully expected that she wasn't going to make it out of here alive. If anything, she was an existentialist and this was a situation so existential it couldn't have been written better by Sartre himself. She was in her element, in that for once, her fate had never seemed so completely in her hands. It didn't make her happy, per se, but she looked for the silver lining.

She hadn't seen hide nor hair of anyone else in days. Maybe it was time to make herself a little more accessable; still not seeking the others out, but even she was starting to get bored. So bored, in fact that she'd had to take up a hobby. The hours in her day were mostly spent finding what edible plants she could - she wanted to make her Cornucopia scroungings last as long as possible - even if she hadn't seen enough wildlife to make hunting seem worthwhile. The rest she divided up between cleaning herself at the lakeside and finding a new shelter for the night. It left a lot of hours to be filled.

When she would spend time with her grandfather on the mountain, he'd been very skilled at whittling. She'd tried to learn, but she had never been quite as good as he was. He always liked to carve lions because he said the spirit of a lion lived inside her.

Seeing as she had a knife, a lot of time, and easy access to drift wood, she thought she'd try her hand at it again. Maybe some of the viewers were fans of crappy art.

But it only abated the feeling of restlessness for so long. She didn't want to move too far up the mountain for she still felt her initial reasoning held true. But she needed to move. She wanted to reach the top of the waterfall before nightfall - the quieter waters might attract more wildlife which would make her feel a lot better about food, at least.

The climb was rather perilous, full of skree and slippery rocks; and, as it turns out, ant hills. She nearly fell down the incline when she first realized she'd set her hand smack dab in the middle of a hill full of really pissed off ants. But she was a federal agent, she'd spent many years training not to react to pain in dangerous situations. So she just gritted her teeth and kept on climbing until she had a sure footing to shake them off and squeal like a little girl.

She stripped off her clothes and dove into the river to relieve the poison's effects...and then she reflected on whether that was a smart idea. Sure, if someone came upon her, she'd be forced to fight or flee, naked as a jaybird. But then again, if she was going to die anyway, at least she'd have a little shock value in it.

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Lottie, too, was feeling gross. Disgusting, actually. And that was one thing she couldn't do around her new friend at all, as much as she enjoyed his company.

Being higher then Emily, she actually had to wiggle her way down to the water, but it at least looked sort of private. She stripped down to her underware, which was skimpy enough as it was, thank you very much, and slid in.

"Oh lord, that is cold!"

Emily laughed. "You'd think they could at least send us somewhere with a hot spring if we're going to be wet all the time..." she remarked wryly, "Since there's no chance of a damn fire."

Lottie let out a shrill little squeak as she heard the woman, dropping into the ice cold water to cover her self.

"Oh! Oh my, I am so sorry I had...no idea anyone else was..." She trailed off, realizing the woman wasn't exactly awkward about this whole thing.

And boy did a hot spring sound nice.

"Oh, I know what you mean. I would give anything for a nice, hot bath right now."

Emily quirks a brow, amused by the other woman's surprise. "Better keep a sharper eye out next time - that's a good way to get a knife in the back."

A flush covered the blonds cheeks as she sank down to her chin in the water, looking a lot like a small child being lectured.

"I'm just not cut out for this." She said, her drawl just this side of a whine.

"I think that's the point...no one is really 'cut out' for it. That's why it makes a good show. I'm an FBI agent for crying out loud and I'm sitting up a tree cowering. It's bullshit."

"Oh, the is that like the Bureau of Investigation?"

Lottie was a few years before the BOI became the FBI, but the idea got across and she was officially intrigued. She had meet some BOI gentleman at a party of her daddies and they had just been fascinating.

"Essentially the same." She shrugged. "That was before the BAU...before they had any women at all."

Emily let out a wistful sigh. She officially missed work - long hours, cop shop coffee, Reid's lectures, and all. Even Strauss. Sort of.

"What made you want to be one?" She thought back to the stories of mobster and smugglers. Exciting things. But, as Emily had said, woman weren't allowed...

Wait. Whih meant.

"Oh my, you're from the future!"

There was a long, rather awkward pause as she stared blankly, eyes wide (the same look she got when Reid explained something way over her head).

"The future of what?" she asked dumbly.

"Well, you must be from my future. I mean...what year are you from?"

If woman were allowed in law enforcement, but they still had the same guidelines...this place struck Lottie as something out of those new fangled books about people on the moon, but it wasn't the future for her, not at all.

But Emily here...she seemed to line up right.

Emily actually had to stop to think about that one for a split second. Then she realized how idiotic that must make her seem and her cheeks tinged red a little. "It all runs together a little after Paris," she offered in explanation of her hesitation. "I 'died' in March of 2011," she mumbled, doing the math, "And was in hiding for seven months..."

She looked up to meet the woman's eyes, "I guess they got me in early 2012... Why?" She paused, brows knitting, "What year did you think it was?"

"Oh my!"

Lottie put a hand to her cheek, mouth dropping open into a surprised O.

"Well isn't that something...I am from 1926!"

Emily pressed her palms against her eyes for a long moment, as if it might make the world make sense. Thinking about this actually made her brain hurt.

"I...I have no idea how to respond to that."

Lottie, on the other hand, was excited.

She had already been plucked into a strange world and made to fight to the death. She might as well find out what the world turned into.

"So woman can join...can police like that?"

"In fact, a woman is responsible for over-seeing my unit. She's a horrible bitch, but that's beside the point..."

Emily looked a little sheepish - she tended not to hold her tongue if she wasn't thinking. Some people found the off-putting.

Lottie's mouth dropped open into an O...before she let out a small giggle. It was a brazen thing to say, but talking to this woman...well, she felt very brazen.

"That is just fascinating ! My Daddy, bless his soul, but he doesn't even like to know I hear those types of stories!"

"I guess you'd be in luck, then...because between CIA undercover, FBI, and general horribly behaved globe-trotter teenager, I've got enough stories to make a sailor blush."

She wasn't exaggerating, either - in forty years or so, she'd managed quite the repertoire of hair-raising stories.

Lottie's face lit up as she heard that. Oh how she wished they were some where else. They could sit in her gazebo out back and drink lemonade and just tell stories all day.

But instead they were waist deep in freezing water and were suppose to be killing each other.

Everything about life was terrible, and it hit Lottie in a wave that made her lower lip tremble.

"Ah...I'm sorry." She said, pressing her hand to her eyes.

Emily tilted her head, her face gently sympathetic. "Don't be. If there's one thing I'm used to, it's being around crying people. I can't say I'm very skilled at comforting, though." She paused, pursing her lips together. "And usually it's because someone else died."

She sighed heavily, staring off into space, fingers tracing her scar. "Don't worry, it doesn't hurt that bad. It does at first...but then there's a big flood of endorphins and you just sort of drift off."

Lottie looks over at her, before her eyes widen, realizing what Emily means. Or at least, what she thinks she means.

"...dying?"

She nodded, forgetting that it sometimes freaks people out. After a moment of silent thought, she snapped back to reality.

"I mean...it was only for maybe a minute or two before they restarted my heart."

"What happened? How did they restart it?" She moved a little closer. Not too close. But she wanted to know everything this woman had to say about the future.

Emily couldn't help but laugh, in a rather macabre way. She supposed it she hadn't lived it, it would've seemed like something straight of the latest thriller movie.

"I was stabbed through the gut by my ex-lover/internationally wanted IRA terrorist/CIA undercover mission target." (God, how fucked up must that sound?) "I bled out on the way to the hospital and coded in the ambulance."

It still seemed so surreal to hear it described, as if she were describing something that had happened to someone else.

"The paramedics defibrillated - I mean, electrically shocked my heart into working again...but I was still unconscious for a month or so. They had to do a hysterectomy."

She stopped herself mid-sentence. Sometimes she had a tendency to share too much when she got lost in thought.

"Oh my." She said, putting a hand to her cheek. All of that just sounded fascinating. Even if she didn't know what half of those things were.

"So...so maybe it won't be so bad." Her mind went back to the fact that, some time soon...she...she was going to die.

"There are much worse things that could happen..." As bleak as it sounded, it was true. "Dying is easy, living's hard."

That, weirdly, made Lottie feel a little better.

"T-thank you. For that I mean. It's an awfully scary thought."

Emily attempted a faint smile - what she hoped was reassuring.

"Everyone has to die sometime... You can do it when you're old and decrepit or you can do it young, in a blaze of glory, and take down some evil as you go. That's always been my philosophy."

Lottie didn't know what evil they could take down here. They all seemed to be just about as big a victim as the other.

She did know she didn't want to hurt Emily. Or be hurt by her. And with this line of conversation, she was very aware of the fact they should be. Hurting each other.

"I think I need to get back...it was...it was really wonderful talking to you." She hoped Emily knew how truly she meant that.

Amy wasn't looking where she was going. Just heading straight on forward, down the slope, like there was any chance of her finding Kaidan that way.

She'd left the group. She wasn't even really sure why. All of her inclinations pushed her one way, towards alliances, towards help, and instead she went the other way. She must be going crazy. Or maybe she'd been drugged or something. Her brain felt like it was torn in half, and the halves didn't match up.

A whisper of sound caught her attention. She turned, slowly.

There: a huge, hulking mass of fur. Teeth. Claws.

A bear.

Amy shrieked, and ran.

Emily cocked her head to the side slightly to better pick up the scream. Yet another one. It wasn't exactly close, but not far either...though the bowl effect of the mountains made it hard to tell exactly as it funneled sound towards her.

The screaming didn't stop at just one, as most did - one scream, then a cannon. There came another and another, echoing around the basin, making its origin hard to discern.

She stood, shielding her eyes against the sun, watching for movement, dust clouds from a rock slide, some indication from whence the noise came.

Though, to be fair, she had no idea what her next move would be when she figured it out. She just found it a good idea to act with an abundance of caution.

There -- a rockslide, indeed. Amy had tumbled down a steep incline, landed hard on the rock below, and the bear was in pursuit.

Likely Emily wouldn't get there in time.

Emily frowned - what appeared to be a large hairy rock was making its way down the mountain-side, a couple yards behind a girl. She shook her head, that couldn't be right...a big hairy rock?

"Oh, shit!" she cursed, a little louder than was wise, before she was aware she'd spoken.

Despite knowing that she was competing against the girl, Emily just couldn't bring herself to let her be mauled by a fricking BEAR. There were a lot of cruel ways to die, but being ripped to shreds and then eaten was probably the worst.

She couldn't breathe. The fall had hit on her ribs, and something had cracked, and now every breath was agony from hip to shoulder.

The bear was a lot faster than her, and she closed her eyes and wished, prayed that some of her natural speed and strength, whatever it was that they took from her, would come back. But it didn't.

She could run parallel to the mountain and let the bear catch up with her and kill her.

Or she could go up and let it happen a lot faster.

Or she could jump, over the edge of the steep cliff and let herself fall down to the waterfall's height. It was her only chance, and she redoubled her limping effort, trying to make it there.

Emily shut her eyes tightly and tried to remember what her grandfather had taught her about bears. This was a grizzly, she could tell that much.

"PLAY DEAD!" she shouted, not sure if the girl would hear her, but nonetheless hoped that she would. "Curl into a ball and protect your neck!"

Play dead? Like that would work now.

Like she even wanted it to work.

-- And that thought gave her pause. Did she want to survive? Did she really? When it meant that someone else lost their chance?

What would her dad do?

She pulled one of the last of the arrows from her quiver. Gripped it in her hand. And she -- detached.

The fight was over in a few seconds. She didn't remember much of it, beyond flailing, a muted, strange feeling as the claws ripped into her belly, as its teeth sunk into her arm, and then -- then it was over, and the bear had an arrow driven up through the roof of its mouth into its skull, and Amy was bleeding more blood than she had ever seen in her life.

That was when the pain caught up to her.

"Goddammit," she hissed, sprinting up the hill, her thighs burning from the extertion. She forgot about the part where she wasn't supposed to think of these people as human.

"Okay, just...okay," she stammered dumbly, flopping to her knees beside the girl, "You'll be fine. Probably. Just relax." Her fingers were already slippery as she attempted to find the ends of her abdominal aorta in the mess of guts spilling out of her so that she could pinch them off to stop the bleeding and...

And then what?

She tried to lift a hand, but only her fingers twitched; she tried to say it's okay, my fault, really, but what came out was "Miff'd." Funny, though: all she could think about was that stupid little camera ball. Had she dropped it? That sucked. She'd stolen it away from its purpose and shamelessly used it for sponsors and now it was trampled into the mud by a bear, or dropped over the waterfall edge, or something. Jeeves. Poor Jeeves.

Her fingers grasped on the dirt again, and she inhaled, but the air burned in half her chest and it didn't feel like it stayed.

"S'oak." It's okay. That one came out a little clearer. "My ... fault."

She really was taking a very long time to die. Didn't this happen fast, in the movies?

Her fingers slipped and she'd lost the artery again. She turned her palms upwards, staring at her blood-slicked hands. "Out, out damn spot," she whispered, feeling very Lady MacBeth.

The girl was practically swimming in a pool of blood. What was it Reid had said? Someone could lose up to 40% of their blood volume and still survive?

She shook her head. Facts didn't help her now. She had a feeling nothing was going to help at this point. At this point, all she could do was sit there with her through the long and probably painful hours until her heart stopped...and hope the smell didn't attract more bears.

Or...

"I...I can make it stop," she breathed softly, "...if you want."

She wanted to cough, but it came out as just a spasm. Halfway between a cough and a retch.

"I stabbed a bear," she said, wondering. "Thisw." Would make a great story. If she could ever tell that story. If she could live to tell that story. But she wasn't going to live, was she? Her head was swimming, must be blood draining from the brain. Is this how vampire victims feel?

Jesus Christ. No wonder her father's fucked up.

"Good idea," she murmured. She managed to reach, to slide blood-slick fingers over Emily's hand. Too clumsy to do anything more precise. "Very good idea." Grabbed for Emily's hand, slipped. "Thank you."

She bit her lip, realizing that this must be how Morgan felt that night when he held her hand and begged her not to go. She wasn't going to cry - she was NOT going to cry.

She laced her fingers with the girl's and squeezed lightly. "I promise you won't feel anything...I'm going to-" she choked a little on the words, it sounded so heartless, "-to cut your spinal cord. It'll happen fast. Okay?"

"You," Amy said, "are handy. I bet you win."

Her voice was more coherent, but it also seemed farther away. Like there was a little set of vocal cords and lungs just talking on their own, and the thought made her snort, almost laugh. No time to explain the joke.

"Jeeves," she murmured, nonsensically.

"Shh," she soothed, at a lack for further comforting words.

Gently tilting the girl's head up, counting the bones in her neck with her fingers, Emily inhaled slowly through her nose, fighting off the urge to be sick. She held the edge of the knife to what she approximated to be the right spot.

"Okay, count to three..."

Three. Counting to three.

Way too complicated, right now.

Amy inhaled.

"Just do it."

She had to close her eyes. She couldn't watch the girl's face as she did this.

"I'm sorry," she whispered as she felt a slight resistance, then the gush of warm blood as the knife sunk in. It was kind of like cutting through a really tough steak...the mental image made her retch a little.

The girl's fingers went limp in her hand and Emily knew the nerves had been severed. It would happen quick now, she'd stop breathing as she lost control of her diaphragm.

It wasn't painless.

There was a spark, a bright-sharp pain unlike anything she'd ever felt before. Too bright to endure.

But then she was gone, and it was over, and she greeted that thought with a kind of relief as she breathed her last.

She waited a long moment, then leaned in slightly, listening for breath. When she couldn't hear any, she pressed two bloody fingers to her neck to feel for a pulse. Her fingers slipped, but it didn't matter, she was gone.

The knowledge overwhelmed her then and she quickly had to stumble aside as she emptied the contents of her stomach on the ground nearby. All she could think was how weak she must look to those watching...tossing her cookies over a girl she didn't even know.

When the shaking stopped and she once again trusted her legs to support her, she rose and evaluated the bear carcass. She remembered that bear meat was very fatty and that would be very helpful in the coming days of near-starvation.

She used some moss to clean the blood off her knife, then attempted to cut off a large hunk of meat to take with her for future meals. She wanted to get away from the scene as quickly as possible knowing that they would want to collect the body. But she didn't want to risk any of her competitors stumbling across this meal ripe for the taking, so she took the nearest questionable looking berry and smeared it over the carcass where she'd skinned it and hoped it would be toxic to anyone that might stumble upon it with an empty belly.

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I am so sorry for disappearing.

Re: I am so sorry for disappearing.

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