A/N: I am well aware that Dom seems to live in a heavily wooded area and nothing like a coastal area, but… artistic license.

Cht 7

Once again Liz found herself in a car, off to parts unknown with Reddington and Dembe. The one difference this time, however, was the addition of Agnes. Red deemed it important that she come along and volunteered to sit in the back with her. He kept one hand tucked over the edge of the car seat, so she could hang on to his fingers as she slept through the drive, her little belly full of pancakes from the diner Red had insisted on for breakfast. Liz listened idly to the smooth jazz playing over the car's stereo system, wondering what was in store for her at the end of their journey.

A grandfather. She could not even imagine. Where had he been? And why had they never met before?

Liz wondered, when she realized they were approaching Annapolis, if they would veer toward the Naval Academy there, but to no avail. Dembe steered the car eastward to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. She gazed over the water wistfully, itching to get out there and tread through the brackish waves. She could taste the salt on the air and sniffed appreciatively.

They passed signs for Kent Island, Wye Island and finally curved southward toward Prospect Bay before coming to a stop at a remote home on a shady lane set back from the tidal lowlands.

She got out of the car as Red unfastened the carrier to bring inside, Dembe easing out of the front, as a grey-haired, grizzled man stepped out of the doorway to the house. Seeing him sparked a vague wave of recognition that was enough to bring tears to Liz's eyes. "Dedushka," she said softly.

He came to the edge of the porch and propped a hand on one of the columns there, narrowing his gaze at Lizzy as if gauging her reaction.

"Dedushka?" she said a bit louder, yet still tentatively.

Something warmed in his gaze, and he smiled slowly back at her and nodded once, "eto pravil'no, Masha. Ya tvoy ded."

He planted his feet and stood straight when he saw Red and Dembe approaching, narrowing his gaze again, this time as if in challenge. "And what have you got there," he asked in English.

"This is…," Liz swallowed at the knot that rose in her throat, "Agnes. She's my daughter."

Liz finished on a whisper as Red lifted the carrier for Dom to see, pulling back the convertible top to show the sleeping baby. "She looks like you," he said thickly to Liz, "when you were that size."

Dom sniffed once, snuffling back the tears she had seen spring to his eyes and shuffled back into the house waving them in.

"Come in, come in," he ushered them to sit. "I'm not set up for company, but we'll see what we've got. Perhaps a…cinnamon tea?"

He directed his question at Liz who perked up.

"Yes, I'd love that!"

"I recall."

He nodded gruffly and shuffled off to the kitchen, but she couldn't hold them back anymore. The tears came, and Liz rushed in behind him, catching him as he turned. Dom folded his arms around her as she sniffled tearfully into his flannel shirt. She could smell the pipe tobacco and wood smoke, with a touch of spice. This was what home smelled like, she thought.

They held on for a long moment, he dipped his face to her hair and muttered comforting words in Russian about having to keep her safe, before he cleared his throat and pulled away to put the kettle on.

When Dom suggested they walk later after lunch, she had no expectations other than to traipse through the wooded acreage behind the house and let Dom fill her in on whatever he didn't want to say in front of Reddington. Ten minutes in the trees thinned out and the ground grew sandier, spotted with coastal grasses that eventually gave way to the salty flats that opened wide onto the bay.

He stood hipshot, fingers tucked in his pockets, gazing out over the water. "So," he began slowly, glancing sideways at her, "you've Awakened, I'm told."

"What has Reddington told you about it?"

"Not much."

Dom barked out a grim laugh that warmed to a chuckle. "That's his curse. Telling someone just enough to keep them going, but not enough to know what to do with it!"

Liz laughed for the first time that afternoon. If that wasn't Reddington, she didn't know what was. And if anyone could give her answers, Dom could.

"Was my mother like us?"

"Of course she was! Of course she was, Masha," he nodded. "Where do you think you got it from, eh? Your mother, her mother, me…"

"You?"

He barked his laugh again and ambled six steps toward the water's edge. In that six steps, his body morphed, rounded out, his gait changing from an ambling limp to a harp seal's waddle as he wriggled out of the shirt, his pants discarded a little ways back. He turned and looked back at an astonished Lizzy, barking again as a seal before shuffling straight into the water and gliding away across the surface. She watched her grandfather flip and float along the water for a while, but watching him made her wonder and her mind turn. Could she do that? Could her mother? When she changed, it was never into another animal. For the most part she stayed herself, only in mermaid form. How did that work?

Watching him raised more questions than it gave answers. She wandered off across the salt flats, content to breathe the air there. It was refreshing, bracing to her as being in the water. It was a while later before he joined her, plucking at bits of grass that clung to his clothes from being dropped on the ground.

"How is it you can do that, but I can't?"

"Different type of water beings exist everywhere, Masha," Dom replied. "Your father was a merman, your mother a selkie, like me. I suspect it's why he went for the Navy. I don't see him joining the Army, do you?"

Liz smiled. It did make a sort of sense. She imagined that lots of beings like that gravitated to jobs that associated with their element.

"Do you know what happened to my mother?" she asked suddenly.

"What did Reddington tell you? Left her clothes on the beach…never to be seen again?"

"Did she just…?"

"She needed a neutral place. Double-crossed the Americans and the Russians, cabal after her…she couldn't stay here. With them thinking she was dead, they never looked for her, and assumed you were gone too. That that's what drove her over the edge. It helped sell it, said Red. And so it did."

"She's alive," Liz breathed.

"She is."