Work Text:
Emily wakes to the sounds of a phone ringing. She groans when the arm that had been wrapped around her waist moves, leaving the chill from the air to hit her skin.
“Hotchner.” His voice was rough with the early morning, and it was clear he’d had very limited sleep. She settles down further into the bed, trying to claim the last few moments of rest before they have to leave. “Ok thanks, Garcia. Call the others and tell them to go straight to the jet.”
He hangs up and lays back down behind her. He closes the gap between them, pressing his naked chest up against her back. He wraps an arm around her waist and pulls her closer, nudging hair away from her neck with his nose so he can kiss her throat.
“Morning.” He says, nuzzling her neck. “We’ve got a case in Colorado. We’re meeting on the jet and Garcia is going to brief us in full once we’re wheels up.” He kisses the side of her head. “She’ll call you soon.”
“It’s way too early.” She grumbles, opening one eye to see it was only just 4am. She bats at him when he laughs into her neck. He grabs her hand and kisses her knuckles, laughing when she grumbles again, curse words whispered at him under her breath.
The longer they had been together, now 6 months since his fumbled attempt at asking her out on their first date, the more she felt uncomfortable that they were keeping this from the team. It was starting to feel like a dirty secret, when it was anything but. They loved each other, they’d had a serious conversation about their future. Discussions of a house, a wedding and children whilst laying in the dark together. But they still hadn’t taken that step, still hadn’t told the people they considered their family that they were a couple. Emily knows it’s because they were in too deep now, too far into this secret to claw their way out without there being some uncomfortable conversations.
She knew they’d be happy for them, but it would open their relationship that had been almost exclusively just for them up to scrutiny. The others would watch them, try to observe their behaviour around each other. Their relationship meant too much to her for it to be profiled like the criminals they chased.
She was surprised they hadn’t caught it at JJ’s wedding. Her and Aaron had danced together, his hand a little too low on her back for it to be considered friendly. How they had both disappeared into Dave’s house at the same time, gone for 30 minutes with poor excuses for their absence upon their return. She still couldn’t go into Dave’s first floor bathroom without blushing, memories of her pushed up against the door with Aaron’s hand over her mouth. His joy at her decision to stay, to turn down Clyde’s offer of a job across an ocean, was too great for them to wait until they got back to his home or hers.
Her phone rings and she sighs as she extracts herself from his embrace just enough to pick up her cell phone from the nightstand. “Hey, Pen.”
Emily tries to listen to Penelope as she gives her the same basic details she had given Aaron only moments before, but she is distracted by his lips against her neck, his hand drifting down her abdomen. She manages to catch it with her spare hand, gripping a little harder than necessary when she links their fingers, throwing him a look over her shoulder.
She hangs up the phone with a goodbye to Penelope, hoping the other woman hadn’t heard Aaron’s laugh he had attempted to press into her skin. “That was mean.”
“It’s not my fault you’re irresistible.”
Emily turns over and kisses him, anchoring her hand to the back of his head. She pulls back enough to smile at him. “Do you have a suit here?”
Aaron nods, kissing her gently. “Yes. And my go-bag is in my car.”
She smiles. “Perfect.” Another kiss. “That means we have time for a shower before you have to go.”
_____________
When she steps onto the jet the only seat left is next to Aaron. He looks at her, an eyebrow raised as she sits next to him.
“You’re late, Prentiss.”
She looks at him pointedly, a subtle narrowing of her eyes that she knows he catches.
“Sorry, sir.” She says, biting back the temptation to say it was his fault she was late in the first place, their joint shower lasting twice as long as it should have done. He’d left her at her place less than half an hour ago, a kiss pressed to her lips as she was drying her hair, a promise that he would see her soon. “It won’t happen again.”
Emily fights a smirk at the brief sparkle in his eye. This had become part of their game, pushing the boundaries a little further each time, wondering when the team would catch on to what was going on between them.
They all make small talk as the jet takes off, pointless conversation over cups of coffee. Once they reach altitude Penelope calls and they start to go over the case. Emily freezes when she looks at the pictures of the victims. They are all male. Handsome. White, tall and broad with dark hair.
They all looked like Aaron.
And these men were being viciously beaten to death. She looked up and everyone was still listening to Penelope as she told them the details. It gave her a second to recover, forcing herself to tune back into the conversation around her.
____________
They were struggling to build a profile. The men who were being killed had little in common apart from how they looked and where they were being killed. The only bar in town, a dingy place that reminded Emily too much of her misspent youth.
On the second day they were in town another man was found dead in the alley behind the bar, his face beaten almost beyond recognition. Emily went and delivered the news to his widow, and desperately tried to ignore how much the man in the pictures displayed on the walls looked like Aaron.
She barely sleeps that night. They were good on cases, rarely sneaking into each other's rooms. She knew he had to have seen it too, that she wasn’t imagining how similar the victims looked to him, so she didn’t want to burden him with it. She didn’t want to make this about how it was making her feel. So she stayed in her room, and eventually drifted off to sleep in a bed she wished he was in too.
Emily wakes up gasping, images of Aaron’s dead body in that alley burned into her eyelids.
She doesn’t sleep again that night, and is grateful when he presses a coffee into her hands in the morning, his thumb discreetly skating over her knuckles.
____________
“What shall we do now?” JJ asks. There were concerns that the unsubs, because they had figured there must be more than one person given the size of the men being killed, would strike again that night. The devolution of their actions indicated that there would be an attack a night until they were caught.
“We just so happen to have someone on the team that matches the victim profile.” Dave says, acknowledging what none of them had said out loud in the three days they had been in Colorado. Everyone looks at Aaron expectantly, and Emily thinks she has never been closer to killing David Rossi. “We could plant you at the bar where the victims have gone missing from, see if we can draw the unsub in.”
“And what?” Emily says, somehow keeping her voice even. “Use Hotch as bait?”
“It’s our only option.” Aaron says, a flash of apology across his face as he briefly looks at her. “I can’t exactly wear this to a club.” He says gesturing to his suit. “I very clearly look like an FBI agent.”
Derek and Dave laugh at his attempt at humour, Emily does not.
“Hotch.” She says evenly, her voice not betraying the emotions that were tumbling around in her chest. He turns to look at her, his face neutral. “Can I have a quick word?” She tilts her head towards an empty office and he nods and follows. If the others think it's odd that she wants to speak to him alone they don’t say anything.
“I don’t like this, Aaron.” She says as soon as the door closes behind them, her voice a rushed whisper, not wanting anyone to potentially overhear if they walked past the tiny office. He opens his mouth to speak, but she talks again, cutting him off before he can even start. “We don’t know enough how the unsubs are doing this. Or why they are doing it. It’s too risky.”
“Emily.” Aaron says, his voice soft in a way he only usually used with her when they were alone, tangled up in his sheets or hers, or snuggled together on one of their couches. It makes her sigh, and she closes her eyes to briefly break eye contact with him, knowing he is about to convince her exactly why he had to do this despite her reservations. “We have no other choice. I fit the victimology and we can’t risk them killing someone else.”
“What if this was the other way around?” She asks, crossing her arms across her chest as she tries to reason with him. “Are you seriously telling me that you’d be fine with me going in there? That you’d be ok with me being used as bait after you’d spent the last few days looking at pictures of bodies of people who looked exactly like me?”
Aaron opens his mouth to disagree with her, but a simple raise of her eyebrows stops him. “No, I wouldn’t be ok. But we have no other choice.”
“I don’t like it.” She repeats, defeat making her voice shake slightly.
Aaron turns to look out of the window of the office they are in, and when the coast is still clear he grabs her hand, running his thumb back and forth over her wrist. “It will be fine, sweetheart.”
Emily nods, the protest that he doesn’t know everything would be fine dying in her throat. All she could do was sit back and watch as he put himself at risk. Her love for him stuffed into a box in her head where no one else could see it, the privilege JJ had of breaking down publicly when Will was in the bank not afforded to her. She squeezes his hand back, and wishes more than anything that she could kiss him.
“If anything happens to you, even just a scratch, I’m teaching Spencer just enough Italian to piss Dave off.”
That makes him laugh, a brief flash of his dimples settling her nerves in her stomach. “I would expect nothing less.”
“We should get back.” Emily says, extracting her hand from his. She grasps the lapels of his jacket. “And you’re right, you need to change. You look like a fed.”
____________
Emily keeps staring at the monitor, the CCTV from the bar displayed for the team to watch in the back room they were in. She keeps her eyes on Aaron, her thumbnail in between her teeth, as they waited for any sign that the unsubs were around. That someone besides them was watching him.
“You ok there, princess?” Derek asks, drawing her attention towards him. He is eyeing her curiously. “Worried about the boss?”
She can feel Dave and JJ’s eyes on her too, she pulls her thumb out of her mouth and clears her throat. “I’m just not comfortable with this idea.”
“And why is that? Hotch can hold his own.” He replies, an edge to his voice she doesn’t like.
“It’s because Emily and Hotch are sleeping together.” Spencer says without looking away from the monitors, his eyes still on Aaron.
“What?” Derek asks, snapping his head in Spencer’s direction.
“How the hell did you know, Reid?” Emily says, turning to Spencer. She always figured that it would be Dave who would have figured it out. His meddling tendencies well known.
Spencer turns to look at her, taking his attention off of the CCTV footage. “You’re both happier but trying to hide it. Jack said your name 9 times the last time we were all together, indicating that he is spending more time with you in a personal capacity, and you and Hotch both came to work this morning smelling of the same soap.” He explains, Emily’s blush deepening as he spoke. “Not to mention I saw you kissing in the parking garage last month.”
“You’ve known for a month?” JJ says, smacking his shoulder lightly. “Why didn’t you say anything?
Spencer shrugs, looking back at Emily. “I figured they weren’t telling us for a reason.”
“You are a terrible gossip.” Dave says before looking back at Emily. “So how long has this been going on?”
Emily sighs and rolls her eyes, wishing that this wasn’t happening now of all times, that she could at least have Aaron with her for back up.
“6 months.”
“6 months.”
She says at the same time as Spencer. She looks at him again, unable to cover her surprise at the fact he had apparently known all along.
“6 months?” Derek exclaims, genuine surprise on his face. “Why did you keep it from us that long?”
“Guys.” Spencer says, trying to interrupt the conversation but failing.
“We just did, ok?” She says, crossing her arms across her chest. “We were going to tell you.”
“Guys.” Spencer says again, firmer this time interrupting whatever Derek was about to say. They all look at him, varying degrees of annoyance on their faces. “Where is Hotch?”
Emily felt like ice water had been poured over her, fear flooding her veins as her head snapped back towards the screens. Her eyes flicked across each image displayed and she couldn’t see him anywhere.
“Derek.” She chokes out, her voice not quite sounding like her own.
“Shit.” Derek exclaimed, already striding out of the room, Emily and the rest of the team on his heels.
____________
They find him in the alley behind the bar, two men holding him down as they punch him, one of them managing to kick his ribs. There’s no time to figure it out, no time to wonder how the hell they got Aaron out of the bar in the two minutes they had been distracted.
“FBI.” Derek yells, his gun drawn and pointing at them, local cops right behind him with their guns raised too. The unsubs try to make a break for it, but don’t manage it. Derek being a little too hard with the takedown of one of them.
Emily doesn’t even think about what she does as soon as they are apprehended. She’s naturally drawn to Aaron’s side, helping him sit up.
“What the hell happened?” She asks, wincing as she takes in the blood on his face. His nose was bleeding, and his left eye was already bruising. She cups his face in her hands, thumbs gently moving over tender flesh.
He tries to shy away from her touch, his eyes on JJ and Spencer standing behind her. She turns to look at them and raises an eyebrow, both of them averting their gazes. She turns back to look at Aaron, a shy smile on her face.
“Everyone knows.”
He furrows his brow at her. “How?”
“That’s not important right now.” She says, cupping his face, wiping some of the blood that had gathered at the bottom of his nose away with her sleeve. “What happened? We had our eyes off of you for two minutes and you were gone.”
“I spotted them, they fit the partial profile we had.” He explains, as if it was obvious. “So I followed them.”
“What were you thinking?” She exclaims, smacking him in the shoulder, hard, before grabbing his face again and kissing him. “That was so stupid, Aaron.” She kisses him again.
Emily wraps her arms around him tightly, pulling him into a hug that makes him wince. She lets go instantly, her hands on his shoulders as she looks him over for any other obvious injuries.
“Shit, sorry. Are you ok?”
“Yeah, I’m ok.” He gets out, his face screwed up in pain despite his attempt at assuring her. “They just got a few good kicks to my ribs.”
She looks around, sees a paramedic standing back waiting for the scene to be cleared. “We need to get you looked at.”
“Em, I’m fine.” He protests, his breathlessness at the act of standing up giving him away as he pushes himself up off the ground.
She glares at him. “You are not fine, Aaron. You just had the shit kicked out of you by two men who wanted to kill you.” She holds his hand, links her fingers through his and gently tugs him towards where the ambulance is parked. “Let the nice paramedic look at you before I kill you myself.”
____________
He needed to get x-rays done. The paramedic was concerned that his ribs could be broken, and therefore insisted he went to the hospital to get checked out. Aaron tried to talk him out of it. He’d had broken ribs before, and claimed he knew how to handle them, but then he had looked at Emily’s face, how concerned she was, and he stopped resisting.
Emily was sitting nervously next to the gurney he was on whilst they waited for the results of the scans he had on arrival.
“Em.” Aaron says, making her look up at him from the spot she was staring at on the floor. “I’m ok.”
“You’re ok because we found you when we did.” She scoffs, shaking her head. “If we’d been only a couple minutes later…”
“But you weren’t.” He reaches out for her hand and she accepts it, fiercely holding his one hand between both of hers. “I’m ok.” He repeats, pulling their joint hands to his lips so he could kiss her knuckles.
“I love you.” She says, a sad smile on her face as she has to stop herself from looking at the dried blood on his shirt, or at how his eye was now swollen shut. She interrupts him before he can reciprocate, repeat the words back to her that they had only said out loud for the first time a few weeks ago, even though their actions had shown it long before. “You put yourself in unnecessary danger today.”
“Sweetheart-”
“Don’t ‘sweetheart’ me, Aaron.” She says, moving so she was sat on the edge of the gurney. She leans down and presses her forehead to his, not caring how ridiculous she would look to anyone who walked in. Her FBI bullet proof vest is still on over her sweater, her gun on her hip. “You can’t do that.” She pulls back to look at him. “You can’t, ok?”
“Em, our jobs are dangerous.”
“I know that.” She replies through slightly gritted teeth. “We both have scars to prove it. But today didn’t need to happen.”
“It was a measured risk.”
“A measured risk that could have cost me you.” She says, her voice finally wavering. “I can’t lose you.” He opens his mouth to talk but she presses a finger to his lips. “And you can’t say that I won’t, love. We both know you can’t promise that. But you don’t have to offer yourself up to unsubs like a lamb to slaughter, ok?”
He clearly disagrees with her, she can see it written all over his face, and on some level she knows she isn’t being reasonable. That the emotion of the day is clouding her judgement, in a way she usually wouldn’t let it. He nods though, presses a kiss to the finger still against his lips and it makes her laugh.
“Ok.”
____________
He has three fractured ribs and several bruised ones. He initially refuses painkillers but Emily convinces him to take them, memories of how painful take off on the jet had been after her beating at the hands of Cyrus all those years ago.
Aaron falls asleep against her. He is sitting slightly slumped in his seat, his head leaning on her shoulder. His breath makes her hair tickle against her neck and it calms her, reminds her that he was still there, that he was still alive.
Emily looks up from her paperwork to the sound of a throat clearing, and she sees Derek sliding into the chair opposite her, a curious look on his face. The team had met them back at the jet. Dave explained that the unsubs were brothers, finding men who reminded them of their father who had all but drank himself to death in that very bar when they were young. It seemed so banal, so stereotypical to Emily it infuriated her.
The team clearly had questions about what they had discovered about her and Aaron, but they were silent about it. Emily wondered how long that would last, if they would at least wait until Aaron could see out of his left eye again before they started asking about their relationship.
“Can the Spanish inquisition wait at least until tomorrow, Derek? I’m tired.” She asks, a quirk to her smile.
He holds his hands up, mock surrender on his face. “I’ll leave it for now, Princess. But if you think for one second that our beloved technical analyst will do the same, you are kidding yourself.”
Emily laughs at that, before groaning. “She’s going to be delighted.” She says, looking briefly at Aaron before looking back at Derek. “She’s been trying to tell me to give this a chance for years.”
“Really?” Derek asks, his eyebrow raised.
“Oh yeah.” She replies, a smile on her face. “It’s a common topic on ladies night.”
Derek smiles and looks at her curiously. “You love him?”
Emily bites her lip “Yeah.” She nods. “I love him.”
“I’m happy for you, Emily. For both of you.” He stands, heads back to where he had been trying to nap before he had walked over, but he turns back to her. “You owe us all dinner. Somewhere fancy.”
Emily barks out a laugh, briefly disturbing Aaron from his slumber on her shoulder. “Whatever you say, Morgan.”
_______________
She takes him back to her place. It was too late to get Jack from Jessica’s, and she figured he’d want some time to prepare his son for his injuries anyway.
He’s pretty out of it from the pain and the medication, but she gets him into her bed, managing to get him down to just his briefs and under her covers. She quickly gets ready for bed herself, forgoing her usual skincare routine with just a swipe of a makeup wipe over her face.
She climbs into bed next to him, careful to put more distance between the two of them than she usually would. She turns the lamp off and settles into her pillows, ready to try and get some sleep.
“What are you doing all the way over there?” He asks, his words thick with sleep.
Emily rolls onto her side and reaches out for him, stroking her fingers over his shoulder. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You never could.”
Emily suppresses a smile in the darkness. His inhibitions were always lowered at night in one of their bedrooms, his affection for her blowing over her like a warm breeze. “Baby, you have broken ribs.”
“Come here.” He reaches out for her and she moves towards him, not wanting him to hurt himself any further by dragging her across the bed. He shifts, grimacing as he does, and rests his head on her shoulder. “That’s better.”
She laughs. “We can’t sleep like this. It won’t do either of our backs any good.”
“Just 5 minutes.”
“Ok, honey.” She says, kissing the top of his head. “5 minutes.”
“Love you, Emily.”
“I love you, too.”