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“FBI! Let her go, Broderick.”
Danny Broderick turned slowly, holding a gun tightly in one hand and loosening his grip on the girl in the other. She whimpered and darted toward Tara, who led her away to safety.
Broderick smirked at Emily. "Agent Prentiss," he greeted.
“Lower your gun, Danny,” Emily said firmly.
“Not when all of you have yours pointed at me like that.” Broderick waved his weapon to gesture at the many agents surrounding him, causing them to only tighten their grips. Even with a profile, every unsub was unpredictable, and Danny Broderick was no exception. His careless handling of the gun served only as a reminder of the long list of reckless murders and mistakes that had left the team on edge.
“We just want to talk, Danny,” Emily continued.
“With this many weapons pointed at me? Not a chance.”
Emily raised her gun in surrender, gesturing for Broderick to do the same. "Together," she encouraged.
"No way, sugar pie," the unsub answered, glaring at the rest of the team with their weapons raised. "Just you."
“Okay.” The brunette complied after a moment, slowly kneeling to place her gun on the ground and kicking it away. JJ lowered hers slightly, but kept her eyes trained on Broderick cautiously. Reid and Luke followed suit behind her.
“Can we talk?” Emily asked carefully, training Broderick’s focus on her alone by raising her arms, gesturing for the rest of the team to take a few steps back.
The tactic held true as the unsub narrowed his eyes at her. “Take off your vest.”
“I’m not gonna do that, Danny.”
“I’m not wearing a vest, so it’s only fair,” Danny’s voice began to rise, and his finger hovered threateningly over the trigger. “Take it off!”
“Okay, okay.” JJ threw a concerned look at Emily as she began to loosen the straps on her vest, but Emily's eyes remained on Danny Broderick. What was she doing?
“Now, let’s talk,” Emily reasoned after she had dropped the vest to the floor.
In her time as a profiler, JJ had noticed that there was a look that certain people got when they were about to shoot a gun, especially when they were not supposed to. There was a wariness in their eyes. Lips pulled back, jaw set. A shift in weight. A slight twitch as hands tightened around the gun ever so slightly.
She wasn’t sure if the rest of the team had noticed it, but she found herself diving towards Emily when the gunshot sounded. At the same time, Luke sprinted to tackle Broderick, sending his bullet off target. JJ gasped as she felt a pain in her side, like someone had taken a hammer and given her a generous whack.
The distinct click of handcuffs soon sounded in the middle of Broderick's low screaming and complaining. Through managing the mess of tangled limbs, JJ could hear him grunting as Luke and Rossi led him to the waiting police car, with Reid announcing that “the paramedics are on their way.”
“Are you crazy?”
To be fair, anyone in the vicinity would have been justified to ask that question. JJ herself, her teammates, the unsub, even the victim that he had let crawl away.
But it was Emily who asked, and she was clearly the most furious of everyone there.
It was followed by an angry “Are you okay?” and when JJ stood up slowly with gritted teeth, it reverted back to “Are you crazy?”
The injured agent only winced in response, hand drifting to cradle where she had been shot, thankful that the vest had dissipated most of the impact. It certainly didn't feel great, but it sure beat being dead.
“Jumping in front of a bullet, Jennifer? You could have been killed!” Emily’s eyes were wild, a combination of fear and anger mixing.
JJ scoffed at the accusation, suddenly finding her voice. “Me? You were the one who took off your vest in front of an armed serial killer!”
“I knew what I was doing!”
A fire began to grow in JJ’s eyes as well as she spoke louder. “Are you kidding? He told you to take off your bulletproof vest and you listened? What were you thinking?”
“I had it under control!”
“You didn’t have shit.”
The team had only heard the blonde agent curse a handful of times, but Emily knew that those words only came out when JJ was well and truly angry. Those were the rare times that JJ became even more foul-mouthed than Emily.
Emily shook her head and put a hand to her face in annoyance. “You were just in the hospital a few months ago with a gunshot wound. You think I want to go through that hell again?”
“You think I do? At least I’m wearing a vest!”
“Congratulations,” Emily responded sarcastically. “If I remember right, you were wearing a vest last time too!”
JJ glared at her for the reminder, both agents knowing full well that Grace Lynch’s shot had landed out of sheer luck and not out of incompetence on JJ's part. “Oh, so it’s better to just take it off then?”
The sound of sirens drawing near caused the women to raise their voices louder to be heard, and the team watched in stunned silence as they bickered, unsure if intervention would be helpful or welcome. In over a decade, they had never seen either of the pair quite so angry or quite so loud before.
One brave paramedic began to approach the agents, seeing JJ holding her side delicately, but Rossi stopped him with a raised hand. It was a signal of assurance that her injury would indeed be checked, but stubbornness and anger in the moment overshadowed any possible pain.
“I was going to reason with him!” Emily insisted. “We had his profile! We knew his story.”
“Nothing you said would have stopped him from trying to shoot you!”
Emily shook her head stubbornly. “You don’t know that. I could have done this!”
“There’s procedures for this kind of thing. Like don’t take your fucking vest off!”
“The situation was changing!”
JJ threw up one hand in exasperation, the other still holding her ribs. “To one where you were about to be shot?”
“What, you think I couldn’t do it?”
“No, I thought I was going to lose you!”
Emily blinked and stopped.
JJ was having trouble breathing now, both from the knot in her throat and the pain in her side. Screaming at Emily was certainly doing nothing to help her bruised ribs. Seeing her in pain, the brunette had to consciously stop herself from reaching out to hold the wounded agent.
“I thought I was going to lose you,” JJ repeated, her voice breaking. The quiet admission hung heavier in the air than any of the yelling that had taken place before it, with only JJ’s ragged breaths to break the silence.
Emily opened her mouth to fire back a retort, then closed it again when she could think of nothing to say. JJ shook her head and brushed past her to the waiting paramedics, using the heel of her hand to wipe angry tears out of her eyes before they fell.
Fuck. I’m an idiot. Emily closed her eyes and tilted her head to the sky in frustration. How could she be so stupid?
Emily felt Rossi’s hand guide her to the waiting car.
“Come on. We’ll meet them at the hospital.”
The hospital was bustling and full of activity, but to the anxious team, it seemed too quiet. They had spent more time in these rooms than the average person, waiting for news about one of their own. The time was usually spent pacing, talking quietly, and for Emily, chewing on or picking at her fingernails.
Reid watched warily. Emily’s hands were eerily still this time, elbows resting on her lap with her body bent rigidly over her clasped hands, jaw tense. If not for her eyes wide open and staring at the tiles of the hospital floor, Reid would have thought she was praying. She hadn’t said a word since the argument with JJ, and the young doctor shifted uncomfortably at her silence. He almost wished she was yelling again, or at least moving. He glanced around at the rest of the team, wondering if anyone else would do anything. Each was eyeing Emily as surreptitiously as possible, but the agent was lost in her own mind, thinking through every word she had screamed at JJ.
After some time, Rossi rose and sat down next to Emily, who finally moved as she closed her eyes and shook her head.
“Don’t,” Emily said softly. “I know. I know what I did was incredibly stupid.”
“You mean what you did before or after the unsub shot at you?”
Emily chuckled. “Both.”
There was a silence.
“I’ve never lost it at JJ like that before. We just- we never argue.”
“Never?” Rossi said in disbelief.
“That’s why I’m still on my first wife,” Emily answered, surprised that she could find it within herself to crack jokes.
“Touché,” Rossi responded with a smile.
“We never argue,” Emily repeated, biting her lip. “We’re on the same page about everything, but when something like this happens…”
Rossi nodded in understanding.
"I'm too stubborn for my own good." Emily groaned and shook her head, her face turning serious as she met the older agent’s eyes. “What do I do?”
“You love her, right?”
“More than anything.”
“Then don’t do things to make her needlessly worry about you,” Rossi reassured. “You both are running in circles trying to keep each other alive, and you forget that keeping yourselves alive is part of it. It’s difficult in this job, I know. But try keeping your vest on next time you need to go for a daring takedown."
Emily smiled and looked down. “I'll do my best. Thank you.”
"Now go talk to her. If you truly love each other, nothing you say is going to change that.”
Emily stepped hesitantly into the room where JJ was sat up, ice pack held tenderly to her torso. The blonde glanced up, then carefully avoided her eyes when she saw who had entered.
“How are you?”
“Oh, I’m fine. Nothing broken. It’ll just hurt to breathe for a while.”
JJ managed a tight-lipped smile. A tense silence followed, both ashamed of the events that had transpired.
Emily sighed and began to speak. “JJ, I-I’m sorry. That was…that was careless. I thought I had it under control, but you were right. That was stupid of me, and I can’t believe I put myself and you and the team in that kind of danger.”
JJ’s eyes met hers, and Emily breathed a sigh of relief to find there was no more anger, just love and concern.
“I’m sorry I blew up at you. You are incredibly brave and selfless, and I love that about you,” JJ smiled softly. “I've never doubted you as a profiler. I know you probably could’ve talked down Broderick if you wanted or handled the situation differently, but…”
There was a long pause. She swallowed hard, blue eyes seeking some corner in the room on which to anchor. When she spoke again, her voice was barely a whisper, but the gravity of each word filled the room.
“I can’t watch someone I love give up their life, while I keep on living. I’ve done it before, and I can’t do it again.”
JJ didn’t talk about the events surrounding her sister’s death much, but it wasn’t every day that she came this close to losing someone she loved so dearly. How quickly her mind had fluttered to the image of herself at eleven years old, staring frozen at a dead body, struggling to understand what had happened and what she could have done.
Emily’s shoulders sagged and her expression changed, realizing the full weight of what she had done to JJ.
“Jayje…”
JJ continued speaking. “You can’t just do reckless things like that without thinking about the consequences outside of yourself. It’s not just you alone in the world anymore. You have me. And you have Henry and Michael. And we need you. I need you.”
JJ’s hand reached up and gripped Emily’s arm tightly. She lowered her gaze to the floor again, knowing if she looked at Emily's eyes now, the tears would never stop.
Don’t leave me. The plea was silent, but Emily felt it in the way that JJ’s fingered tightened around her arm.
Emily shook her head and pulled JJ in close, pressing her lips to the top of the blonde’s head. Everything she had been longing to do since JJ had been shot.
She held on just as tightly, making it known that the need was mutual. That Emily was terrified of JJ slipping away, that she had felt unspeakable fear grip her heart when JJ had collided with her and gasped out in pain at the bullet hitting her vest. That she hated every moment they had been angry at each other, and she had spent every second in the hospital waiting room wishing she could take back her words. That she knew JJ was okay this time, but if she was ever in danger because of Emily's reckless decisions again, she would never, ever forgive herself.
Please, don't leave me.