Chapter Text
Chapter One
the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it —- Richard Siken
It’s fortunate that Emily had acquired a taste for French cigarettes in her late teens because now, alone in Paris, smoking is one of the few things she can do to stop the tremor in her hands.
As it happens, the apartment that JJ has sourced for her - small and so very French, accessible by a narrow, steep flight of stairs - has a balcony roughly the size of a coffin (an apt comparison, Emily notes bitterly) that is perfect for chain smoking. In DC, she had managed to kick the habit, but she can’t bring herself to care that she has fallen so spectacularly off the wagon. Now, when the mere act of breathing feels like it will tear her throbbing wound wide open, Emily needs something to get her through.
Most of her time is spent in bed, curled on her side as she grits her teeth, attempting to push through the pain. She counts each minute that passes, always waiting to swallow the next round of medication that barely manages to take the edge off. The smoking is her only reprise, a feeble attempt to feel normal.
It never used to be this hard, she thinks over and over again, breathing in the bitter burn of nicotine as she leans against the wrought iron railing, her legs unable to support her full weight.
Only months earlier, Emily had been able to run, to chase down criminals, to take ten fucking steps across a room without needing to catch her breath. It’s humiliating to see just how little she can manage now, but moving makes her stitches tug and she’s constantly lightheaded, unsteady on her feet in a way that she never has been before. She hates it, she hates all of it, but she also doesn’t have the energy to change it.
This in itself is a first: Emily, who never before has backed down from anything, is lying down in surrender. Why? Because is a war that she doesn’t want to wage. She has given too much already and she’s tired, tired in a way that she has never been before. It feels much easier to simply let the world do its worst.
With this attitude, it is perhaps inevitable that Emily feels herself fading away with each day that passes, her mooring coming looser and looser until she’s barely hanging on. There is nothing left to her: there are no books that can make her forget the harshness of reality, nothing to drive her forwards after a lifetime of chasing the high of success, no friends in the trenches with her to lean on. Emily has no one. No one to realise if she dies in the night. No one to miss her if she just lets go. They will only find her when her body begins to decay.
She is, Emily finally realises, becoming a ghost.
-:-
Aaron cannot stop looking at Emily’s empty desk in the bullpen, at the chair where she used to sit, to laugh, to exist.
Missing Emily the way that he does, her absence a yawning chasm in his life, feels wrong because, when it came down to it, Aaron had not hesitated. JJ had come to him, her eyes steely with determination, and offered him two options: for Emily to die, or to lose her forever. Aaron hadn’t even hesitated.
The first twenty-four hours had been a blur of practicalities, trying to make sure that Emily was safe and that Doyle could not touch her. It was only later, when reality had crashed into him with the force of a freight train, had Aaron truly understood what he had done.
The grief he has been left with is raw and visceral. No, worse than that: it’s the kind that eats you alive, chewing you up and spitting the bones out. It’s the kind of grief that Aaron cannot understand because it is not the normal kind of grief. It is not polite, not to be shared, and certainly not the appropriate for him to feel about a colleague.
Not that Emily is just a colleague. Not to Aaron. What she is to him is - well, Aaron isn’t sure how to define it. If you were to ask him when Emily had ceased to be a team member and instead become an essential part to the tapestry of his life, he wouldn’t know that either. What he does know - although this is not something he would ever admit out loud - is that Emily is the person who knows him best, who has that uncanny ability to look at him and see right through his cold front.
He knows he would choose her in every situation without hesitation.
But there’s more to it than that. Their friendship, as unlikely as it would have seemed in the beginning, has been forged in the most difficult of circumstances and their history is a thread that cannot be cut.
After all, Emily is the woman who had point blank refused to give up on Aaron, even when Aaron was more than half way to giving up on himself. She is the woman who had called his name as he walked into the house of a child murderer with a man in the midst of a psychotic break, unarmed and unprotected, his gun and Kevlar abandoned in the car. She is the woman who had driven him home and walked him into the apartment that Foyet had breached, understanding just how vulnerable that level of violation had left Aaron without him even needing to say a word. She is the woman who had stood by his side day in and day out during the blackest period of Aaron’s life, who had leant him some of her own strength when his faltered. It’s no wonder, really, that Aaron has come to depend on her in a way that he could never have foreseen.
And, to complicate matters, Aaron is not the only person who has come to rely on Emily.
In the months after Haley’s death, Emily had been one of the few people who could coax conversation from Jack when his walls went up, one of the only ones who could draw him out of his shell when he tried to hide himself away. On the days when everything felt hopeless, Emily could still find a way to fill Aaron’s small apartment with laughter and light. She had been a godsend. Aaron had lost count of the amount of times that he had found her and Jack bent over something - a sudoku, a Lego set, a piece of Science homework. She had slotted into Jack’s life so neatly that Aaron could almost forget that it hadn’t always been that way.
This is why, in the end, Aaron simply cannot tell Jack the same lie he has told his team. Jack has lost enough in his short life and, quite frankly, Aaron isn’t prepared to take this away from his son too.
“Emily has gone away for a little while,” Aaron tells Jack whenever he asks where she is. “I don’t know when she’ll be back.”
Jack believes him - of course he does, he has no reason not to - and he takes it in better than Aaron could have expected. To keep the lie alive, Aaron tells Jack all about the exciting places Emily is travelling: Morocco, Istanbul, Moscow. The Sahara desert. The Amazon basin. Perhaps unwisely, he lets Jack write Emily long letters and he then has to hide the envelopes in his sock drawer because he doesn’t know where to send them.
Time passes slowly. March gives way to April, bringing with it the bloom of the spring flowers: bluebells and daffodils, tulips and crocus erupt from the flowerbeds outside Emily’s apartment on the morning that Aaron and Dave arrive, the two of them shouldering the responsibility of boxing up her life.
They are practical and pragmatic: they put aside some dresses and shirts that JJ asked for, pile crockery into bubble-wrap and agree that it is too soon to sell on the furniture, a task neither of them can face yet. Dave suggests a storage locker and Aaron nods, deciding it’s best for Emily to have access to the remnants of her past when she finally returns.
“I’ll do the living room,” Dave says after they have made themselves another pot of coffee, placing an empty box on the floor.
”I’ll do the bedroom,” Aaron replies.
Entering Emily’s bedroom manages to feel like a complete infringement of her privacy, even though Aaron tells himself that she would understand. Her bookshelves have started to gather gust and the cheese plant in the corner is more than halfway to dead, but Aaron still half expects Emily to swan through the door and demand to know what he is doing here.
It’s strange, being in Emily’s space. The room where she slept, read, dressed and had sex. (Aaron tries not to think about the last point. It makes his stomach twist unpleasantly). Her room is not quite how he imagined it. Aaron had expected there to be order - which there is - but he was unprepared for the sheer amount of books packed into the space, paperbacks and hardbacks squeezed onto shelves. He could have predicted too that there would be a framed photograph of Emily, JJ and Penelope somewhere in the room - it’s a lovely picture actually, all the three of them laughing, their heads pressed together so that black hair meshes with blonde - but finding a second photo of the entire team is a surprise. Aaron lifts the silver frame from the dresser, finding himself squeezed in between Emily and Dave, his laughter genuine.
The safe where Emily had hidden away part of herself stands open in what feels like a taunt. Aaron sweeps his hand through as a precaution, but upon finding nothing but cold metal walls, turns his attention to the bed.
The silk sheets still hold traces of Emily’s scent, clinging to the fabric in spite of the time that has elapsed since she was last between them. Aaron cannot stop himself from breathing her in as he folds the bedding into yet another box. Beneath the pillow, he finds a single silver drop earring, one of the ones she used to wear often, and a battered copy of The Handmaid’s Tale. For some reason - which Aaron could unpick if he wanted to, really, but ignorance is bliss - Aaron slips the book and the earring into his jacket pocket.
Inexplicably, Dave takes her cheese plant.
“What?” he asks when he sees Aaron watching, eyebrows raised. “We all grieve in different ways.”
And so they do.
Truth be told, Aaron is not only grieving for Emily, but for what might have been. If he had known just how little time they had left together, he cannot help but wonder if he would have taken that shot in the dark. If he would have crossed that line, the one he had sworn he never would. If he would have tangled his fingers into her dark hair and pulled her in close, close enough that they could breathe the same air. If she would have looked up at him with those impenetrable eyes and leaned in to close the gap.
But he didn’t know, and now she will never find out.
-:-
Slowly, Emily recovers - in the physical sense at least. She recovers because, in the end, she has to live; her own stubbornness demands it.
Hitting rock bottom is what finally forces Emily into action. After a lifetime of being tenacious, Emily had initially found it rather liberating to just let herself go and for three weeks had let herself tumble down and down and down - until, quite suddenly, there is nowhere left to fall. The only advantage of this is that reason returns; there must be something hardwired, a protective layer of her personality, that pulls her back from the brink and makes her realise with a blinding clarity that she cannot continue in this way. If she does, she is letting Ian Doyle win.
This thought alone has the strength to propel Emily out of bed, one hand pressed to her abdomen as she lurches across the room to pull the curtains open for the first time. Allowing daylight to stream into the apartment feels oddly symbolic; this is her showing that she is finally ready to step out of the darkness and into the light. The early spring sun warms her face and casts the buildings of the city in a golden glow, like God himself is smiling down on her. At this, Emily feels her lips twist into a bitter little smile.
Needless to say, this is all optimistic beyond measure and ultimately it is only the first, tentative baby step in a long and arduous road to recovery.
The next day, Emily pays an eye watering amount of money for the best physio she can find, determined that, while Doyle might have snatched her life away, he will not steal her body too. With her trademark determination, Emily pushes herself through each exercise, no matter how endless or how excruciating it feels, and, with an agonising slowness, she begins to reap the rewards of these efforts. It is the little things that she notices first: the journey down the stairs of the apartment goes a little quicker or requires a little less effort; getting out of bed in the morning no longer leaves her breathless and gasping. She can walk a little further, venturing deeper into the city, or manage a little more dinner.
Of course, there are still bad days, ones where Emily cannot leave the apartment or where she is certain she has seen Doyle in the crowd emerging from the Metro. Ice blue eyes in a hard, chiselled face make her freeze, even if a closer look reveals a completely different nose or colouring. But, on the whole, the number of good days outweigh the bad, even if it is impossible to feel comfortable in this new life Emily didn’t ask for or want. She cannot shake the sense that she is trapped in Paris, no matter how hard she tries, and there is something particularly heartbreaking about watching a city she once loved becoming a prison right before her eyes.
The hardest thing about Emily’s exile is being cut off from the friends who are her family. Who she had been prepared to lay her life down for. Saying that she misses them doesn’t even cover it; she misses them so much that there is an ever-present ache of longing in the centre of her chest. She isn’t used to being so alone. Her life had been filled with Friday nights out dancing with Penelope and JJ, Sunday morning runs with Morgan, trips to the movie theatre to watch obscure foreign films with Reid. With evenings spent perched in Rossi’s ridiculous kitchen with a glass of wine, heckling him as he cooked. With days spent with Hotch, watching his usually serious face brighten, his smile breaking through like sunlight through storm clouds.
Yes, Emily misses that last one in particular.
The days begin to blur together in their monotony. Emily’s bangs grow out; her nails grow back. She sweats and swears her way through the physio, spitting curses with real venom, but she doesn’t stop, not until it works and she feels more like a human being and less like a mannequin held together by ugly black stitches. She buys herself new clothes from all the shops she didn’t have access to in the US, drinks Bordeaux more often than she should and tries not to be crushed under the weight of her own loneliness.
Ridiculously, being here is the hardest thing Emily has ever done. Harder than fighting for her place in the BAU, than graduating top of her class from Yale, than slipping into the skin of Lauren Reynolds and pretending that she was in love with a terrorist. What she wouldn’t give to be able to pick up the phone and call someone, to remind herself of what it is like to love and to be loved.
But she can’t. In doing that, Emily would put her friends in so much danger and she is not prepared to be so selfish.
Instead, she distracts herself: she pours another glass of wine, or tries to flick through another book she has acquired in the hopes that this one will capture her attention. More often that she cares to admit, she ends up sitting in front of the mirror, pressing her fingers to the glass and trying to find a trace of herself in the reflection. The woman who stares back at her is not someone that she recognises. Emily Prentiss used to laugh, used to have light in her eyes. This new woman - this stranger - is somehow older and colder, a different person borne out of bloodshed.
It is on these occasions, confronted by the person she has become, that Emily wonders if being impaled by Doyle’s stake would have been a better way to die.
-:-
Emily’s earring sits in Aaron’s pocket at all times, somewhere that he can touch. It becomes a talisman, something to brush his fingers over to ground himself when he needs it. At night, he will turn the silver drop over in his hand, remembering the way it used to catch the light when Emily moved.
Remembering Emily.
“You need something to work towards,” Dave tells him pointedly one evening. “You’re working too much.”
Grudgingly, Aaron has to acknowledge that there is some truth in this; the person who used to temper him, who used to pull him out of the paperwork he was about to bury himself under, is no longer with them. So, in an attempt to heed this unsolicited yet warranted advice, Aaron signs up for the FBI triathlon and this is how, battered and bruised as he is, Aaron meets Beth.
“How does one get a girlfriend without realising?” Dave asks a few weeks later, not even bothering to hide his amusement.
“I don’t know,” Aaron says tightly, hating the fact he is even having this conversation. “I just - we were having coffee and I suddenly realised it was a date.”
Naturally, Dave finds this hilarious.
“Fantastic,” he chuckles, ignoring Aaron’s glare. “You could not make this up. Well, I told you last year it was time you got back in the saddle.”
“I’m not- this isn’t-“ Aaron splutters, but he doesn’t know how to rebut this.
Truthfully, he does enjoy spending time with Beth. She is kind and has a normal life, one that is not tainted by murderers or serial killers or anything else. It had been simple enough to gloss over the more gruesome aspects of his job and Haley’s death. “I’m a widower,” he had said, even though he has always hated that term, and if he has let Beth assume that his current grief is for Haley - well, its just easier that way. Besides, running with her has made his training more focused and the conversations over coffee have been pleasant. It’s all nice. Very nice. Very easy.
The problem is that Aaron has never been the kind of man who settles for easy. He’s the kind of man who likes a challenge - especially when that challenge happens to be about 5’7”, in possession of a razor sharp wit, has a problem with authority and speaks about seven languages. Another problem, possibly a greater one if you were in the habit of measuring such things, is that Aaron cannot stop dreaming about the woman who has all of the qualities listed above. And so not only is Aaron ill equipped for whatever this situation with Beth is, but he is also terribly aware that he is lying to her.
“What’s the harm in seeing where it goes?” Dave shrugs, blasé in a way that is at odds with the shrewd look in his eyes. “It’s been shit since Emily - well. It’s been hard. And if it ends up being a rebound, it ends up being a rebound.”
“Right,” Aaron says, so disarmed that he had just been thinking about Emily when Dave had brought her up that he cannot formulate any other response.
They don’t discuss Beth again because they are called to California where a man is butchering blonde surfers, but Aaron feels Dave watching him, his expression unusually sharp. Beth texts him and Aaron gets her messages when he has returned late to the hotel, too caught up in the case to reply.
Before he goes to sleep, however, he holds the silver earring in the centre of his palm, his last fragile link to Emily.
I miss you, he thinks and then proceeds to dream about eyes the colour of bitter black coffee.
-:-
Emily thinks about the team a lot, but she thinks about Hotch the most.
If anyone had asked her on her arrival at the BAU her opinion of the Unit Chief, she would have summarised Hotch’s lack of emotion, his difficulties in trusting women, and the fact he has a giant stick up his ass.
Time and teamwork had changed this perspective. Or, more accurately, have rewritten it completely. Emily can count on one hand the number of times she has heard Aaron Hotchner raise his voice and, even then, it was only to achieve a break in the case, never in genuine anger. Hotch is always calm, always controlled - a little too controlled, if you ask Emily, who has found that she excels in breaking through his walls. In knowing how to slip beneath his skin, how to elicit one of those hard-worn smiles from him, how to make his lose the near permanent frown he wears. She has come to understand that Hotch does not show his emotions outwardly, internalising everything and anything, but that he feels deeply and loves absolutely.
As spring gives way to summer, Emily begins to see Hotch sometimes, a more welcome sight than when she is sure that Doyle is there. She catches glimmers of him in the dark sunglasses and broad shoulders of a man at a cafe, or the black hair of a stranger crossing a bridge with a briefcase in hand. Each time it gives her pause, her heart leaping to her throat as she thinks: he is here. He has come for me.
Without meaning to, Emily’s life had become entangled with both of the Hotchners’, Hotch and his son coming to be more important to her than they should be. That means that, right now, Hotch is the person she most wants to call, longing to hear his deep baritone low in her ear. If he could tell her that it will all be okay, Emily thinks she might just believe him.
She hadn’t expected this. Jack was easy to love; Emily had known he would be. He is full of joy and exuberance, light and life. She has played soccer in the garden with him, cradled him in her arms when he cried, read all of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief with him when he had tonsillitis - and then taken him to the library to research Greek myths when he was better. With Hotch, the feelings of tenderness had caught her off guard. One day, there was professional distance and the next there was not, but Emily isn’t sure when or where this had disintegrated. She hadn’t realised how tactile she and Hotch had become with each other either, not until it was too late, until it was second nature to reach out and brush her fingers over his shoulder or for Hotch to place a hand in the small of her back.
They had never discussed it. Never discussed the way Hotch had put his career on the line when he called the Vatican for her, nor the way he had cried in her arms after Haley’s death. They hadn’t mentioned the fact that they would both seek each other out when they we weary and broken, finding comfort in being together. And there hadn’t been the time to address the hurt in Hotch’s eyes when he realised she was keeping something from him, a secret she couldn’t bring herself to share.
I’ll do it after Doyle is neutralised, Emily had told herself. I’ll tell him when I no longer have Doyle hanging over my head.
But Doyle wasn’t neutralised. Instead, Emily is now half a world away, forced to accept that the precious, golden possibility of Aaron Hotchner has been snatched away.
-:-
The last time Aaron saw Emily, she had been drugged to the teeth.
Even though he was aware that he was not supposed to be visiting her, he had gone anyway. Had driven to the hospital, given the false name she had been checked in under, and had been directed down the long, sterile room towards her bay on the ICU, unable to simply let her go without seeing her one last time.
Nothing could have prepared him for what it would be like to see Emily so still and lifeless. For how small she looked, for the sheer number of machines she was hooked up to, for how deathly pale her face was. Even though her one-to-one nurse had assured Aaron that Emily was sedated and on morphine for the pain, Emily had still seemed uncomfortable, flinching and moaning in her sleep. At one point, her eyes had actually fluttered open, only for her to look right at Aaron without truly seeing him.
“She’s a fighter,” the nurse had told him, tapping away at her computer, updating the log of what medication she had flooding Emily’s bloodstream. “She’s survived quite an ordeal.”
Aaron had made a noise of agreement, all the while thinking that this woman didn’t know the half of it.
Seeing the unshakeable, unbreakable Emily as fragile as a doll under starched white sheets was enough to make Aaron sink down into the hard plastic chair.
It was, he had found, impossible to be alone in ICU. Not only was there the nurse who was at Emily’s bedside at all times, but there was a constant flurry of medical personell: doctors, consultants, the surgeon who had saved Emily’s life, more nurses. With this many people coming and going, Aaron had stayed resolutely silent. Not only were there no words to offer in this situation, but the audience meant that any words stuck in Aaron’s throat. He had so much that he wanted to tell her, so much that he had been holding deep inside, but he couldn’t do it. Not in that moment. Instead, he had taken Emily’s hand in his, tracing his finger along the maps of her veins and arteries, trying to memorise each path and intersection. After a while, the busy ICU had faded into the background, the world shrinking until there was no one there but the two of them, Aaron trying to cling to Emily for just a little longer.
Of course, time was not kind and, as always, it ran out too fast. Only when he knew that he could not linger any longer had Aaron leaned in close, his nose to Emily’s cheek and his lips at her ear. She had smelt like hospital, not like Emily at all, and it had thrown Aaron more than he cared to admit.
There had been so much he had wanted to tell her. So much. But Aaron couldn’t articulate the things he had wanted to there, not with Emily’s heart rate on the monitor, a central line dripping drugs into her blood and her hand limp in his. The four words he had offered up instead were low, for her ears alone, and all he could manage.
Then, Aaron had left her, each step away from her harder than the last.
Now, months later, Emily stands in the doorway of the round table room looking infinitely better. She is awake, for one, and standing on her own two feet. Talking too, apologising for the miracle of being alive. It is Morgan who she hugs, his expression dumbstruck, while Aaron just watches, unable to take his eyes off her.
In fact, it’s only when Doyle is lying lifeless on the tarmac and Declan is in Emily’s arms, clinging to her like he will never let her go, that Aaron does avert his gaze for the first time. He has spent the entirety of the case watching her, as though she might disappear if he so much as blinks. And now they have arrived at this moment, the moment they have been waiting for. Doyle cannot hurt Emily anymore and now -
And now Emily’s life is back in her own hands.
“Is she back?” Morgan asks with more hostility that Aaron has heard in a long time. “Is she back for good?”
“I don’t know,” Aaron answers curtly. “Let’s see if we still have a unit for her to come back to.”
It takes hours to wrap up the cross-continental mess and that means it is hours before Aaron can actively seek Emily out, finding her in the middle of the bullpen. He waits in the door of his office, watching as she looks from Rossi to JJ to Garcia and back again, following the conversation but offering minimal contribution. The team are clearly divided and Emily has automatically gravitated towards the people who are rejoicing in her return. Still, even with Rossi’s hand on her shoulder, Aaron recognises the lost expression on her face. Whilst he has never seen it on Emily before, he has seen it worn by countless other survivors: by Reid, by Morgan, by his own son as Jack grappled with adjusting to life after Foyet bulldozed through the one he had previously known.
Emily feels the weight of his gaze and lifts her dark eyes to meet his. Aaron nods slowly and steps into his office, leaving the door ajar. An invitation.
Moments later, she appears silently in the doorway, leaning her hip against the frame as she has done too many times to count.
“I like the beard,” she says by way of greeting.
Aaron automatically lifts his hand at the beard she has just complimented, all the while taking note of the weariness in her voice, in her posture, in her eyes.
“I’m going to have to shave it,” he says, gesturing for her to come and sit with him. “Strauss has already told me that I look unkempt. Twice.”
Emily’s smile is fleeting. She teeters for a moment, a diver preparing to plunge, before she takes a deep breath and crosses the office. There is another brief pause before she sinks down into the seat that she had always chosen, her death grip on the chair’s arms giving her away.
“I’d ask if you’re alright,” Aaron says gently, “But I know you’re not.”
“Alright is subjective anyway,” Emily says with a brave attempt of a smile that wavers. “I - everyone else is going home.”
It’s easy to read between her words. Everyone else is going home, but Emily doesn’t have a home to go to. She doesn’t have anything apart from the clothes on her back. For hours, she has been running on adrenaline and coffee, but now the reality is setting in and Emily is beginning to show the strain. Despite all of this, Aaron cannot help but smile because here she sits, so very real. Close enough for him to touch.
“Well then,” he says, putting his pen down and rising to his feet, even though he has a mountain of paperwork to get through and endless reports to write. Besides, there’s a high chance he might not be running this unit tomorrow. “Let me buy you dinner before we sort out where you’re staying tonight.”
“No,” Emily says at once. “I can stay on your couch in here. You’ve slept on it enough times.”
“Absolutely not,” Aaron says firmly, coming to pull her from the seat he has only just encouraged her to sit in. “It’s your first night back in the States and it’s been six months since I last saw you. You are not sleeping on an old couch in my office. You are having something to eat and a real bed.”
Here, at these words, the memory of Emily in hospital flashes before his eyes and Aaron has to blink to see her as she is now. When she comes back into focus, Emily is easily the most uncertain he has ever seen her - another indication that all is not quite right.
“I insist,” Aaron says firmly, taking advantage of her uncharacteristic indecision.
Still, he is surprised when Emily acquiesces, allowing him to steer her out of the building and into the night. The air is cold, a slap in the face, and Aaron hears the way that it makes Emily’s breath catch in her throat. He keeps his hand lightly on her elbow as they walk to the car, partly in case she wavers and partly because he wants to remind himself that she is really here, flesh and blood beneath his touch.
“I don’t even have a driver’s license anymore,” Emily says with a hollow laugh once she is installed in the passenger seat of Aaron’s car. “I don’t even exist.”
“That’s a problem for tomorrow,” Aaron tells her as he swings out of the parking bay. “One for JJ to solve. I know she deliberately left a thread loose so that she could unravel it all when you came back.”
Emily turns to him then. “When?”
“When,” Aaron repeats firmly.
Given the late hour, Rockets diner is the only place open with an available table. Away from the bullpen and urgency of finding Declan, Emily is beginning to show signs of coming apart at the seams and she stares at the menu like she has never seen one before. In the end, it is Aaron who orders for them both. When the food arrives, Emily only picks at her fries and sips her Coke, but she does eat all of the pickles off her burger. Wordlessly, Aaron peels his own from the bun and passes them over the table.
“They don’t hit the same in France,” Emily says ruefully. “To be honest, I think I’ve mostly been eating cheese.”
This is opening the door a sliver - the tiniest of cracks, really - and Aaron chances it.
“Do you want to talk about what happened?”
His question is a mirror to Emily’s, the exact same thing that she had asked from the foot of his hospital bed when Aaron was the one who had been torn apart.
“No,” Emily says at once, firm and decisive. “Thank you.”
The door shuts and a key turns in the lock. From this point forward, it is clear that Emily is working very hard to keep the mood as light as it can be, falling back on the polite conversation starters that Aaron suspects she picked up in the Ambassador’s household. She is incredibly skilled, it seems, steering them masterfully from Jack to the weather to current events without pause, all the while keeping well away from Doyle, Declan, faked deaths and what exactly she is planning to do next. Aaron is slightly terrified of her prowess.
“I can take you back to mine,” Aaron says after he has paid the bill, offering for the fifth time since they left the office. “It’s really no trouble.”
Emily turns towards him, shaking her head a little like she is surfacing from water.
“I don’t know what kind of girl you take me for,” she quips, “But I definitely don’t put out after fries and a soda.”
“Emily.”
She falters and, for a fraction of a second, Aaron sees that vulnerability beacon from her once more.
“It’s kind of you, Hotch,” she says, lower and more earnest. “Really it is. But I can’t bring my - my stuff into your home. Not with Jack. I’ll get a hotel.”
It doesn’t take a profiler to deduce she’s worried about trauma and nightmares and how Jack might react to it. Classic Emily: always thinking about everyone but herself, even when the only person in danger of falling apart is her. Whilst Aaron knows that she has a point, he cannot say that he is particularly enamoured with the idea of her spending the night in a hotel alone.
“Are you sure?” Aaron asks her again an hour later, turning on the lights in the room they have secured for her at The Beacon.
Emily moves into middle of the room with her arms wrapped around her torso, giving Aaron the distinct impression that she is trying to hold herself together. When she answers, her voice is even. Too even.
“This is great. Thank you.”
Spies are some of the smartest liars in the world, but Aaron isn’t fooled in the slightest.
“Emily,” he says very carefully, stepping towards her. “I think-“
“I’m fine,” she insists, but her voice betrays her when it trembles. “I just - I don’t have a toothbrush.”
It’s always the tiniest things that have the capacity to break the strongest of people. Of course, it’s not really about the toothbrush and Aaron knows it, but the toothbrush in itself is an issue that is easily remedied; all it takes is a trip down to reception and a flash of Aaron’s credentials for the concierge to bestow an armful of toiletries upon him, followed by a quick detour to his car for his go bag.
Upon his return to the room, he finds Emily leaning her head against the cool glass of the balcony doors, her eyes heavy. Aaron has never seen her like this before and it disarms him.
“A range of essential toiletries,” Aaron informs her, placing the toothbrush, toothpaste and various other bottles on the dresser. “And it’s not ideal, but I have a few spare tee-shirts that you can wear tonight. Tomorrow, we can sort out some proper clothes for you.”
As he talks, keeping his tone easy, Aaron places two neatly folded tee-shirts on the pillow.
“You don’t need to do this,” Emily says with a weariness beyond her years, still by the window with the curtains caught between her fingertips.
“I want to.”
He hears the catch in her throat before she turns towards him.
“I’ve caused so much trouble,” she says, resigned. “I don’t want to cause any more. I can be out of your hair by tomorrow.”
This Aaron has been expecting. Emily has never been one to freeze; her default has always been flight.
“You want to go back to Paris?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.” Emily laughs shakily, a sound devoid of any amusement. “But how can I stay here? Reid can’t even look at me. Morgan is acting - I don’t even know how to describe it, but he’s pissed. Understandably. They’re never going to forgive me, not when - not after this.”
The expression on her face is a strange, heartbreaking mixture of defeat and resolve. Aaron knows two things: one is that this is easily the most vulnerable he has ever seen Emily and the second is that she is hanging on by a mere thread. Even though it’s been half a year since they were last together and even though Aaron has never been most tactile person, he cannot not reach for Emily, not when she looks like this. It feels like the most natural thing in the world to draw her into him, Emily tucking her head beneath his chin, and Aaron’s sigh is pulled from him before he can stop it.
One thing that is immediately apparent is that Emily has lost a fair amount of weight; Aaron can feel bones beneath skin that he has not felt before. The effect is one of fragility, a reminder - not that Aaron needs it - that Emily is not infallible. That Doyle so very nearly ripped her away from him forever. Uncharacteristically, she is shaking like a leaf, her breath tremulous, and Aaron remembers how she had been a pillar of strength for them on so many occasions, never even blinking during some of their worst cases.
At least she’s here, he thinks as she bunches his suit jacket in her hands. At least she’s back where she belongs.
”I thought coming back would be easier,” Emily admits quietly, a little like she can read his thoughts. “I didn’t think it would feel like this.”
“It will get easier,” Aaron promises her. “Every day, it will feel a little bit more normal.”
A pause. A very telling pause.
Aaron presses his cheek to the dark crown of her head, steeling himself to ask a question and receive an answer he might not want to hear.
“Do you want to stay?” he asks, his voice soft.
He feels Emily’s inhalation, the way her grip in him tightens.
“I think so.”
The force of his own relief nearly floors him, even if he is careful not to show it.
“Good,” he murmurs, gathering her even closer and closing his eyes. “Good.”