Archive of Our Own ^beta

Erin pulled up to the curb and turned on her blinkers. She wasn’t quite parked and knew some people around here could be real sticklers for traffic rules.

“Here you are, Zoe.”

“Thanks, Agent Strauss.” Zoe Hawkes smiled in the back of the car. She grabbed her backpack off the seat beside her and opened the passenger door. Then she reached up and gently pulled one of Emily’s plaits. “Later booger breath.”

“I’ll call you tonight.” Emily said.

Zoe nodded, doing a nice jog up the walkway to her house in the light rain. Both Emily and Erin were surprised her mother wasn’t waiting for her on the porch. Sheila Hawkes had always been an overprotective mother, and it had been more so since her contentious divorce with her husband. Zoe was stuck in the middle, she had been most of her life. Erin was glad to be able to give the teenager a break from that whenever she could.

She knew the sometimes burden that came with being an only child. It was even worse for Zoe since she hadn’t been one until her older brother died six years ago. Erin watched her walk into the house and then looked at her own daughter. Emily was 120% her own person. Spring was in full bloom and she wore army green shorts and a Cure tee shirt.

The warmer weather did nothing to prevent her from putting on combat boots with even longer socks. Her hair was in plaits and as usual her outfit was capped off with a headpiece. Today it was black, fuzzy, pointy dog ears. Erin, in sensible red cropped pants, white shell, and white boat shoes looked the epitome of suburban mom. She guessed her daughter looked like the epitome of rebellious teen. The truth was that both of them were about so much more.

“You're looking at me funny.” Emily said, glancing at Erin as she pulled away from the curb.

“I love you, that’s all.”

“Uh uh, what did I do? Whatever you heard, it’s a lie.”

“Somehow I doubt it.” Erin made a face. “I didn’t hear anything. Aren't I allowed to tell you that I love you.”

“It’s nice sometimes.” Emily nodded.

“Only sometimes?”

“Well, all the time really. But then it reminds me that there's so much you don’t remember.”

“Do you want to go and grab a burger and some shakes?” Erin asked.

She tried, and it wasn’t always easy, to spend alone time with each of the kids. Erin and Dave wanted to make sure the kids didn’t have too much free time on their hands to possibly do drugs or plot world domination. The 21st century family was often too busy for each other, which made no sense whatsoever. That didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

“I could eat.” Emily nodded again.

“I'm sure you could. You have the metabolism of…” Erin paused to consider her answer. “An animal who has a very fast metabolism.”

“Hummingbirds have the fastest metabolism of any other mammal. It’s especially so while in flight, to keep up with the rapid movement of their wings.”

“Uncle Jason?”

“Uncle Jason.” Emily smiled. “Can we go to The Gap too, Mom?”

“If you come home with shopping bags your brothers and sister will want something.” Erin replied.

“Yeah, but if you come home with shopping bags, no one will be the wiser.” She countered.

“Your mind is like your father’s sometimes. I hope you know how scary that is.”

“I do.”

They sat in a Formica booth at The Burger Joint. It was in the shopping center that also held The Gap, Old Navy, Barnes and Noble, and DSW Shoe Warehouse. While the family didn’t usually shop there, Erin and Dave would take the kids to the mall to unleash the kraken, The Burger Joint was a favorite. They had three hungry kids and a Hotch. Aaron really was a three meals a day and an occasional snack kinda kid. His siblings ate as if the apocalypse was coming tomorrow and they had to build up their strength.

“Well I wasn’t sure if I was gonna tell you but since you kinda already know…I kissed Jordan Todd.”

“Did you?” Erin wasn’t quite sure what to say. Emily was 13, and 13 year olds thought about kissing. She’d quickly gotten over the initial shock that Emily wanted to kiss a girl she went to school with. But the fact that she was doing it now; this was really happening. Erin was much more frightened about her daughter growing up than her daughter growing up queer. “What was it like?”

“Kissing is pretty awesome.” Emily ate her fries. “It’s like bubbly and weird and gushy and like whoa, all at the same time.”

“I think that’s a good way to describe it.” Her mother nodded.

“But Jordan and I have decided to just be friends, without the kissing part. The sparks weren’t there I guess.”

“So you felt gushy but there were no sparks?”

“I probably just felt gushy cuz I’d never done it before. Maybe by the time I kiss like 20 girls I won't feel so gushy anymore. I mean I like her, for real, but I'm more of a lone wolf type.”

“It’s not easy being a girl, Emily; an alpha or a beta. At 13 it’s OK to want to be on your own. At 30, it’s still OK.”

“But what about all that soul mate stuff?” Emily asked.

“Soul mates doesn’t just mean the person you marry or date. Soul mates can be lifelong friends, like Aunt Ursula and I. Soul mate can be the person who comes into your life for just a little while but helps you discover an essential part of yourself. I think, and we all think differently, that having a vast amount of soul mates over the course of your life makes you one complete person.”

“And where is the soul anyway? I looked it up online and didn’t get a thing. Some even say it’s not real. So is all of this fake? Was it created by advertisers to make you buy lip gloss and chocolate and Twilight books?”

“It’s right below your sternum.” Erin put her hand on her chest. “It’s in the middle of your rib cage, in front of your spine, below your heart and lungs.”

“Are you making this up?” the teenager raised her eyebrow.

“No, I am not. Your soul isn’t a physical entity, Em. It’s your ball of light, your center of being. A doctor will probably never see it but it’s always there. It’s responsible for the butterflies in your belly when you're excited or nervous.”

“For real?”

“Absolutely.” Erin nodded. “Your soul is the essence of who you are. It’s what you give to the world and what you use to take what the world has given you. Together with your brain and heart, it houses all of the precious things that make up living.”

“Mom, you're totally making this up.” Emily laughed. “Don’t worry, I'm buying it for now. It sounds kinda nice actually. At least there’s one thing in your body that can't break and kill you. Good to know.”

“You're a cynical child. I love you anyway. What else is happening?”

“I think I want to learn to play the guitar this summer. Penelope wants to learn the drums and we can create a sister band, like Heart. I've been dabbling in writing songs but I suck. And St. Amelia’s has a field hockey team so I'm thinking about trying out when I start high school next year. I want to get into archery…I don’t even know why. Zoe’s mom is getting a pool to increase the value of their house so that’ll be good times. Why don’t we talk about you?”

“Me?” Erin stopped sipping her strawberry milkshake. She really didn’t expect to hear that. Not that Emily was selfish, no more so than any teenager was, but Erin thought she’d be happy to talk about her own life even if just to appease her mother.

“We’re on month five of ‘oh shit, I've got a husband and kids’.” Emily said.

“Language, Emily Prentiss.”

“Sorry.” She smiled. “I want to know how it’s going. Tell me the real truth.”

“Oh, well,” Erin sighed.

Emily was so much like both Erin and Dave in that way. She was going to know if it was or wasn’t the truth and she was going to hold that against her mother. Parents never wanted to burden their children with their problems. But that didn’t mean the problems weren’t there. The children were going to find out about them anyway. A controlled environment was probably best.

“Sometimes it’s hard.” She said. “It’s not one of those dreadfully hard things that you just want to give up on, but it’s hard. I never want to say the wrong thing or forget that everything I do reflects on my family. Before all I worried about was being an excellent FBI agent…that was my success. Now I have to focus on something completely different.

“I'm so glad that your dad is there to share the load with me. He knows what it’s like to want to accomplish the FBI thing and he knows what it’s like to be a dad. We work together and it’s been really helpful. You guys have been great too. You probably give me more of a break than I deserve.”

“You and Dad did pretty good falling back into the touchy-feely, sexy thing.” Emily said.

“No comment.”

“Aww c'mon, Mom.”

“I'm attracted to your father, yes. It seems whatever universe I end up in he's going to be my type.”

“Are you in love with him?” Emily asked.

“I love him.” Erin replied. “I love him deeply. But right now I'm still living my life one day at a time. Some days I live it one hour at a time. So I try to think about things on a whole scale and not dice them up into little pieces and categories just yet. There's time for that; I hope there's plenty of time for your father and I to grow old together.”

“Can I ask a question I'm never going to ask again?”

“Normally this part would scare me but I'm going to say go for it. We’ve gotten so far already.”

“It’s totally OK to have sex with someone that you just like and don’t love, right?”

“Now I'm going into full mother mode and saying that it’s better for you never to have sex.” Erin smiled. “That’s my antiquated answer, and I'm sticking to it. You really know how to keep me on my toes, Emily Kat, you know that?”

“I know.” Emily couldn’t help but smile when her mother called her by her first and middle name, Katherine. It was one of those things that came back to Erin’s battered memory and it meant so much to her daughter. “To make it up to you, we can sing Beyoncé songs really loud in the car on the way home.”

“That’s a deal.” Erin smiled too.

“Hmm?” she looked up at him.

Erin was sitting outside on the deck later in the evening. Their new dog, Scruff, was sitting at her feet. Doing well in her recovery, the mutt decided that Erin was her favorite person in the whole world. This wasn’t easy for her to handle. Erin had never been a dog person, at least she didn’t think she was, and it took some getting used to.

Just after nine o’clock, the house was settling down. Penelope was asleep; Derek wasn’t far from it. Hotch was watching a movie on his tablet while Emily was surely on her laptop making plans for world domination or watching YouTube videos. Dave just wanted to check on his wife.

While the rain had been falling light but steady earlier, now it was coming down. There was a bit of thunder rumbling in the distance but he didn’t think the storm was going to get close to them. She had a glass of wine, a pack of cigarettes, and seemed to be lost in her own thoughts. He hated to even disturb her; just wanted to make sure she didn’t need anything.

“Are you OK?” Dave asked again.

“I'm good.” She smiled some. “It’s a great night; I was just getting a little air. Enjoying the quiet.”

“You want me to leave you alone?”

“Come and sit with me, Agent Rossi.”

Erin reached out her hand for him and he took it. When Dave sat down on her lap, they both laughed. He kissed her nose and then her lips. Erin sighed, holding her hand to his cheek. He always gave her energy. She hoped she was doing the same for him. Having never quite been in a relationship like this, not even counting the fact that she’d forgotten most of it, Erin wasn’t entirely sure how to ask. Sometimes she skipped the analysis and went with the feeling.

“What are you thinking about?” Dave asked as he sat down in his own chair.

“Aaron and Emily start high school in just a few months.” She replied. “We’ll be the parents of high school kids.”

“You'll be the best looking mom of them all.”

“They're going to start changing, David; they're changing already. They're going to be dating, going to parties, hanging out with friends, breaking curfew. They may try drugs or do something crazy and get arrested. They're not going to be perfect, and that’s OK. I'm just not sure how I'm going to handle it.”

“You always told me that you were one of those perfect teenagers.” Dave said.

“I didn’t have a lot of friends, I hate admitting that even now.” Erin shook her head. “I was the captain of the debate team, the captain of the fencing team…I wrote for the school newspaper my junior and senior year. I went to a girl’s school so it was a little easier not to get wrapped up in the convoluted plot lines of who’s going out with who. Still, there were times when I stepped outside the box. There were times when being accepted amongst my peers was more important than my better judgment.”

“That makes you human. I was out of control as a teenager. I wanted to be; it had nothing to do with anyone else. I wanted to experience everything. I wanted sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I wanted wine, women, and song.

“I got it too, and can look back on those times fondly. I think the most important thing is not to lose yourself. You can experiment and figure things out and push all the boundaries. But you have to know when to grow up. When you don’t know that, that’s when you get in trouble.”

“What about sex?” Erin asked.

“We've had the talk with both of them. You bought them books that made me really uncomfortable because they had way more than I knew about sex at 13. They had some things I need to learn now.” He smirked. “The point is that our kids are growing up in a vastly different world than we did. They know that but they don’t have much of a frame of reference. We watched it all change.”

“I don’t think it’s that much different, except for the internet. Honestly, I just think so many things that were in the dark and taboo when we were kids are more out in the open now. Have you ever thought about the fact that one or more of our kids may not be straight, or even the gender they were assigned at birth?”

“If Aaron is gay he's not going to come out until he's 35.” Dave replied. “There's a repression in him that I just can't even get close to. He may need some therapy; to talk to someone who isn’t us and know that things he feels are OK. That’s he OK. Emily will come out in the next couple of years if she's gay.

“She is the opposite of Aaron in her repression, except when she's not. The child is a conundrum actually so the entire analysis of her is just wishful thinking. Derek, I'm not sure.” He shook his head. “He's 11 and his attachments are more to stuff than girls at the moment, unless we’re talking about Beyoncé.

“Does his love for her make him straight…no. I just think it’s important to give them all an open environment where they know their parents will love them no matter what. Surround them with love, positivity, reality, and as many different kinds of people and experiences as we can. What else can a parent do?”

“And Penelope?” Erin asked.

“She's seven…I'm gonna let her be a little dragon princess for a few more years. She can be a dragon prince if she wants to. I'm still gonna love her, or the pronoun of her choice, to pieces.”

“Good plan.” She lit a cigarette. “I talked to my parents about us going away and the kids coming to New York for a week or so.”

“When?”

“Sometime this summer. I think it'd be nice for the two of us to be just a married couple for a little while.”

“We can send Derek and Penelope…they’ll have a ball. Emily will probably want to stay with Ursula and Rachel in DC. I can check and see if Sam or Jason would keep Aaron. They're a bit older now; removing them from their whole lives for a week in the middle of the summer might not be a battle we want to fight.”

“Again I say, good plan.” Erin nodded.

“Where are you taking me?” Dave put his hand over hers on top of the table.

“A part of me just wants to get in the car and drive. What better way to get to know each other better and completely regret the decision that we married than to take a road trip?”

“I'm there.” He smiled. “We could drive to New Orleans, its only 1000 miles. I say we rent a car, drive there over 2 days, party hard, and then fly home.”

“How about Savannah?” Erin asked. “I was thinking tranquil but gothic.”

“It’s half the distance and time, which would give us more time to be a couple.”

“Savannah it is.”

“Good plan.” Dave winked. “So you're feeling good?”

“I've become one of those people who truly appreciates weekends.”

“And tomorrow there will be Sunday brunch.”

“Shh,” Erin put her finger on her lips. “It’s not tomorrow yet. I still have some of tonight to enjoy.”

“I can think of a few ways to make that happen.”

“You have a one-track mind.” She laughed. “I don’t know what I'm going to do with you.”

“I wasn’t talking about sex, woman. I was talking about flipping a coin between Identity and The Grifters. I was talking about a half a pan of double fudge s’mores brownies. I was talking about snuggling under our ‘just a tad too warm’ blankets.”

“John Cusack.” Erin said. “You're willing to do John Cusack for me?”

“Yes I am.” He nodded. “Just John, two dogs, a man, and the woman he loves.”

“I love you too, and it’s going to be The Grifters. Identity scares the pants off of me.”

“I’ll get things ready.” Dave got up from the chair. “You finish relaxing and I’ll be there when you come up to the bedroom.”

“I won't be long.”

“Alright.” He leaned to kiss her before going into the house.

Erin smiled, leaning back in the wrought iron chair. She thought about lighting a second cigarette but decided against it. There was still wine to drink and that was a good thing. Scruff wanted a little attention so Erin gave it, petting the dog’s head in time to her breaths.

It had been a good day with her daughter, a good evening with her family. Now it was time to settle in for the night. She would check on the kids before sliding into bed with Dave, John Cusack, and brownies. It didn’t get much better than that.