Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Aaron is standing behind the swingset, pushing his four year old son back and forth as the boy squeals excitedly. He is looking down at his hand, rubbing with his thumb the place where a ring had once been. The divorce has not been easy for him. It’s been a few months since everything in the courts was finished. It was done amicably, and thankfully, he isn’t working during his time with his son again. It’s Sunday on his weekend with his boy, and he will be bringing him back to his mom tonight. It’s just 10 in the morning, and he has until 6 before he will need to be driving him home. 

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees something coming towards them. Aaron lifts his hand just in time for the palm to get the blunt force from the frisbee instead of it hitting the side of his face. Aaron stops his son’s swing easily before bending down to pick up the neon green toy of hard plastic from the ground while shaking out the pain from his hand. 

“Oh, sir! I’m so sorry!” a young teen boy runs up to him waving with a worried look on his face. “Are you okay?” the boy asks the question at the same time as a brunette woman shouts it. The woman looks really concerned as she runs up to them, catching Aaron’s eyes. The pain in his hand and the concerned teen in front of him fading from his attention. She is wearing a red t-shirt, black leggings, and tennis shoes with her hair pulled back in a ponytail.

“Are you okay, Daddy?” Jack asks, and it pulls him from his stupor just as the woman approaches. 

“I’m fine,” Aaron says to all of them. “Really. No big deal.”

“It was my fault,” the woman says. 

“It’s fine,” Aaron says sincerely. 

“My son keeps telling me I throw like a girl. I was trying to prove that that’s a compliment, and I utterly failed,” she tells him. Aaron looks between the woman with striking dark eyes to accompany her dark hair and the blond-haired blue eyed boy. They look nothing alike, but Aaron and his own son don’t share those features either. Mostly, Jack has a similar face shape and some of his mannerisms. 

“That really did backfire on you, Ma,” the boy says with a chuckle. 

The woman rolls her eyes at her son, and says, “Go off and play with your friends, and if any of them make fun of me, I expect you to defend my honor.”

“Of course,” the boy says with a chuckle before he turns to Aaron again. “I really am sorry, sir. Have a great day.”

“Thank you. You too,” Aaron says, presenting a tight-lipped smile to him and waves back at the boy as he runs away to the group of boys that’s around the same age as him. 

The woman extends her hand to Aaron, and Aaron accepts it as she says, “I’m Emily. My boy’s Dylan. He’s fourteen and all of his friends were starting to get on my nerves, so I decided to prove that I’m way cooler than them with that damn frisbee.”

Aaron genuinely laughs. “Aaron. Your aim may have been off, but you have a hell of an arm.”

Emily laughs as she looks at him with faux astonishment. “May have! I had no intention of hitting you!” Aaron smiles without any real response. “He’s beautiful,” she says after a moment, looking down to the little boy who was trying to get the swing to start moving again and was succeeding but not getting any significant height. 

“Yes. This is my son, Jack. Say hi, Jack,” Aaron says to his boy who immediately turns toward Emily and waves excitedly as he squeals, “Hi!”. 

“Would either of you mind if I join you and swing too? I’m exhausted from running after them all day,” she says, nodding towards the boy who had again taken up throwing the frisbee, a little farther away from any bystanders.

Aaron nods his head, and Jack agrees without much care, just glad that it probably meant his dad would be pushing his swing again, so he can get some real height. Aaron takes a step back, presenting his arm to let her pass in front of him so she can get the swing next to his son’s. “Thank you,” she says kindly. Once she is seated in the swing and begins moving, she says, “So Jack, how old are you?” 

“Four,” Jack says excitedly as the swing goes higher with Aaron’s help.

“Oh. That’s a great age. I remember when Dylan was four. Back then, he didn’t have all of these friends that I have to buy pizza for soon,” Emily says with a grunt though she smiles as she looks past Jack towards her son. 

“That’s cool. I have friends too that I have playdates with and eat pizza, but not now. Now is me and Daddy time,” Jack says happily. 

Emily smiles back at Aaron, and he is a little stunned by how lovely her smile is that he almost gets hit from not stepping back quickly enough. Emily, on the other hand, stops kicking and slows. “I should probably leave you boys alone though. I know how important that time is,” she says sweetly. 

“Stay, we can compete with who can swing the highest,” Jack says, so thankfully Aaron does not have to step in. 

“Jack, Emily might not want to compete or swing anymore,” Aaron says, softly correcting his son. 

Emily shakes her head as she starts swinging again. “No, that sounds fun!” she says happily.

Once Aaron helps to get Jack pretty high, Jack insists that he does the rest on his own as Emily keeps pace with him. She laughs beautifully as her ponytail swings out behind her as she leans back, meeting Aaron’s eyes when he cannot keep from staring at her. She is a vision, unlike anyone he has ever seen before. He can’t take his eyes off of her, and he doesn’t want to. 

Eventually, she concedes defeat when it is clear that Jack will not be slowing down, and she begins to worry that he’s swinging higher than he should be. She slows down to a stop, so she’s just sitting on the swings. “Daddy, can I go to the jungle gym?” Jack asks when he jumps off the swing just before it comes to a complete stop. 

“Yes. Be careful, but don’t leave my eyesight. I’ll be on that bench,” Aaron says, pointing to a bench on the sidewalk to the other side of the jungle gym from the swingset that they are on now. Agreeing to what his dad said, he runs over to the jungle gym. He turns to Emily, who has stood up from the swing to provide it to the friend of a kid that had taken the swing vacated by Jack. “Would you want to join me?” Aaron asks, trying to hide how timid he feels. 

“Sure,” she says.

As they walk toward the bench, he says, “Thank you for indulging him. He was having a lot of fun.” 

“I’m glad. I had a lot of fun too,” she says as she sits down on the bench next to him just as her eyes search out for her son again, anxiously for a moment before they settle on him and she relaxes noticeably in front of him. “I have been dealing with six teenage boys all weekend. It’s been a lot.”

“Wow,” Aaron says genuinely. “All weekend? That must be messy.” 

“Yeah. It’s a belated birthday present for Dylan. We were moving into a new apartment on his birthday weekend a month ago, and then I was busy with some other things. Anyways, we settled on this weekend. He really is the best kid ever—of course, I’m biased—but he really is great. Still, they are all fourteen, and I am dreading the mess he and I will be cleaning up when we get all these boys dropped off in a few hours,” she says smiling while looking down as she begins to realize that she was rambling more than she ever does. “What about you boys? Is this a standard day for you?”

“Yeah. Jack really likes the park, and I think it’s my favorite one. A little out of our way, but I can stay close and it’s easy to see everyone else and find him,” Aaron shakes his head to get the profiling out of his head.

“I get it. That’s why I like this one. The new apartment is close, but our old one wasn’t and I would take him here even though there had been closer options,” Emily says in easy agreement. 

“Look, Daddy!” Jack shouts, distracting them both as they had been looking at each other. 

He cheers his son on as he shows some tricks on the jungle gym. “So have you always lived in DC?” he asks, trying to know more about her and make small talk. 

Emily shakes her head as her eyes turn back to her son. “No. Well, yes. It’s complicated. I grew kind of everywhere, but I lived in DC a lot too. Dylan and I have been here and in this area for a long time now,” she says, getting a little quiet when she speaks to her son. Aaron suspects it’s because being a single mom, as he has come to believe she is, does not always bode the best response. “What about you and Jack?”

“Always been in DC. I just moved into an apartment around here. It’s closer to my work. Jack’s mom and I used to live on the other side of town, and she still does live over there. So this neighborhood is new to me, but Jack loves this park and the food in this area and the movie theater too,” Aaron says with a smile, unconsciously rubbing where there had once been a wedding band. Emily notices but Aaron doesn’t realize that, and she pretends like she didn’t. 

“Yeah. I really like this area,” she says as she drifts off. “So Aaron, how’s that hand?” 

He smiles a little. “It’s fine. I’ve received worse hits,” he says with a laugh. 

Placing her hand lightly on top of the previously injured hand that is closed into a loose fist on his lap, she says, “Come on, please.” 

The look in her deep eyes as they widen with a little concern causes him to open his hand immediately. Emily takes hold of the hand, palm up, in one of her hands while the other opens his hands from the closed fist. Her fingertips move over the welt that had begun to arise. The slightest wince presents itself only as a quiet breath released from Aaron’s lips, but Emily notices it. “I’m sorry, Aaron. Really,” she says as she pulls away, setting his own hand back on his lap. “Anything I can do?” 

“It’s really fine, Emily,” he says softly, a little taken aback by the lack of contact. 

He is looking at her, and Emily is watching him so they both jump, albeit almost imperceptibly, when Dylan appears behind them, asking, “Mom, are you okay?”

Emily turns her head to her son with a smile. “Yes. What’s up?”

Dylan looks relieved immediately at the smile on his mom’s face. “I looked up for you at the swingset, and you weren’t there,” he says quickly, and Aaron is interested in the concern the boy has for his mom, and the way that Emily reaches out her hand to squeeze her son’s forearm in comfort. 

“I just came to rest on the bench. How are you and your friends?” she asks him easily. 

“Hungry,” he admits then. “Can we go to the pizza place now?” 

“Yeah. Let’s walk though. I don’t want to load all of you back in my car again just to drive down the block,” Emily says. “Gather them up, and we’ll head down there.” Dylan runs off to do exactly that after thanking her, and Emily turns back towards Aaron who’s smile had been masked with a look of seriousness or apathy because he doesn’t want this to end but he isn’t sure how to show that without seeming strange. When Emily can read his feelings on his face, she takes the initiative instead. “Aaron, do you and Jack like pizza?”

Chapter Text

“Aaron, do you and Jack like pizza?” Emily asks, surprising herself.

“Yes, we do.” Aaron’s face lights up as he looks at her, and she can see a youthfulness in this man. He’s about her age. He’s serious, and even just being around him for this little time, she can see that he isn’t that great at expressing himself. Maybe, he doesn’t allow himself to express too much. It’s probably because of the divorce that she had been aware of before he had ever said anything. Rubbing where a band had once been was an obvious sign. He’s stopped doing that now though as he watches her intently, and she feels seen . Comfortably yet thoroughly seen.

“Come with us?” she asks softly. 

“I wouldn’t want to impose. You have your hands full with all of them,” he says, gesturing towards the boys who had been jogging towards them, but got distracted by sliding down a tall metal slide in as many dumb ways as they can. 

Emily shouts her son’s name when she sees him climbing up the slide while a couple of his friends slide down at the same time. “I swear to god if he breaks a bone…” she begins, shaking her head before turning back to Aaron. “And you wouldn’t be imposing. I asked. Plus, they won’t want me at the table with them anyways, so they can talk girls and stupid shit without me making fun. So I’ll be at a table all by myself if you don’t come.”

Aaron looks to his son, who catches his eye and he waves over to him. “If you’re sure your son wouldn’t mind,” Aaron says, and when Emily shakes her head, he smiles. “What do you think about some pizza, Jack? With Emily and her son?”

“Pepperoni?” Jack asks.

“Sure. Whatever toppings you want. But if you say something like pineapple or something, I will refuse to be in the general vicinity of that,” she says with a laugh, and Jack makes an exaggerated ew sound and Aaron laughs. 

“So pepperoni for Jack. What kind do you want, Aaron?” Emily asks. 

“I usually go with hamburger, but I don’t mind whatever,” he shrugs as he stands at the same time as Emily. 

“Hamburger’s my favorite too,” Emily says just as the group of six boys arrive in front of her. “Nice to see all of you made it here without any severe injuries. Let’s go, kids. I’m starving,” she says, gesturing for the teen boys to take the lead down the street. 

Declan—actually it’s Dylan here, Emily corrects herself—stops next to his mom though while his friends run ahead. “They’re coming with us? Are you sure about that?” he says quietly, but Aaron hears it. He pretends that he doesn’t.

Emily wraps an arm around her son’s back while saying, “You know you don’t always have to worry about me. I can take care of myself.”

“Yeah, Ma, I know,” he says. 

“Go. Catch up with your friends. Decide what you’re all going to order, so that we don’t annoy the waitress more than I’m sure we already will be with the lot of you,” she says, patting her son’s back as he takes off jogging after them with a laugh. 

Emily, Aaron, and Jack begin walking after the group of boys. “You have a great son,” Aaron says simply as they watch Dylan catch up with his friends and they all laugh. 

“Yeah, I do,” she says a little wistfully before looking back to Aaron and Jack who holds his hand, excited and distracted by everything around. He’s pointing at some butterflies flying above flowers in the grass patch next to them. “You do too.”

“Yeah,” he says with a smile while acknowledging what his son is saying. 

When Aaron looks back up from his boy, Emily catches his attention again by asking, “Wanna split one?”

“What?” he asks, confused

“A hamburger pizza,” she says with a little chuckle. “That way I don’t eat so much that I get sick. Unless you will want more.”

“No, that sounds perfect, and I’ll get Jack a kid’s pepperoni which he probably won’t eat all of, so I’ll have to eat some of that too,” he says with a grin. 

Emily smiles as they approach where the group of boys have gathered in front of the pizza place. Several of them, not Dylan though, stand in the middle of the walkway, and Emily shouts, “Out of the way of those nice people, boys!” The boys jump out of the way of the family that had been trying to get past them and not succeeding. Reaching the circle of boys, Emily steps forward to join the circle between Declan and one of his friends while Aaron and Jack stay a little behind. “Are all of you ready to go in? You can order what you want, but please don’t go crazy. Order what you can eat. You’ve already ate me out of house and home,” she says, and the boys agree with a laugh. 

“Aren’t you starting a new job tomorrow though, Miss Emily? And your apartment’s really nice,” one of the boys says. 

“Yes, Andrew. And I would like to have some financial security before I show up there tomorrow in case my new boss checks my credit score,” she says. “Now, hurry up. Let’s go in. You kids may have been eating constantly all weekend, but I, for one, am starving.” The boys head in, and Emily waits a moment for Aaron and Jack to come to her side as they all walk in. 

The hostess looks stressed the moment the group walks in, and Emily weaves through the boys up to the hostess to say, “Would it be possible to give us two tables next to each other? One for the teen boys—there’s six of them—and then another table for two with one kid. I want to be close, so I can make sure they don’t get out of hand.”

“We won’t get out of hand, Miss Emily!” one of the boys shouts. 

“Yeah, right, Jeffery,” she says with a chuckle. “You already are.” The boys laugh again, and Aaron is fascinated by the way she handles this group who all seem to respect her. After all, they could be acting much crazier if they really wanted. 

“That would work fine, ma’am,” the hostess says as she pulls out two stacks of menus. She leads the boys away first, and Emily smiles at her son as he looks back at her. 

Aaron and Jack come to stand next to her while the boys are seated. “If you don’t mind my saying, you handle them well.”

She smiles. “Yeah. Fourteen is a weird age for anyone. I like making sure Dylan has a fun time with all of his friends,” she says, and Aaron can tell that there is plenty more behind her words. 

“Yeah. I was something else at that age,” Aaron says with a chuckle. “I hope my boy will be a little less difficult than I was.”

“Dylan is already much better behaved than I was,” Emily concedes. 

“Oh, yeah?” Aaron asks with a hint of a smirk that awards a smile from Emily as the hostess returns and walks them to the booth directly beside where the group of boys sit, though the high barrier between the booths afford both groups some privacy. They order their drinks and then their food order once they sit. 

Once they are left alone again, Aaron smiles at her and asks, “Rebellious teen?” 

“To say the least,” Emily says with a chuckle before nodding down to Jack who had been coloring on the kids menu. “What about you, Jack? You gonna cause your dad trouble when you’re a teenager?”

“No,” Jack says adamantly as he continues to color. “I don’t ever get in trouble at school, and I do all of my homework.”

“That’s wonderful, Jack,” Emily says with a tender, motherly smile. 

“What about you, Aaron? Rebellious teen? Defiant? Trouble-maker?” she asks. 

“All of the above,” he says with a laugh. 

“Same. And somehow, I’m now the responsible mom of a teenage boy. Crazy stuff,” she says. 

“I can’t imagine Jack as a teen. I find it insane that he’s as big as he is now. I remember when he was first born, just a tiny little baby with a mass of blonde hair,” he says, tickling his son’s stomach and making him howl with laughter. 

Emily chuckles as she says simply, “Yeah. Watching them grow up is crazy.” 

The pizza’s are presented to them before the boys get theirs and they express their jealousy. One of the boys gets up when he notices that it’s hamburger and tries to get a piece. Emily snaps at his hand, and he pulls away, apologizing with a chuckle. “Wait for your own food, Cameron,” Emily says as he returns to his seat. 

Soon, Declan’s table gets all of their food, and they are all quieter while eating. “So what do you do, Emily?” Aaron asks between bites. 

At the same time, Emily overhears Cameron say, “Your mom really just picked up a guy at the park, huh?” She lifts her hand to quiet Aaron and scoots to the end of the booth just as Dylan is telling him to shut up, and bends around, flicking Cameron on the top of his head. 

“Ow! Yo!” he says, rubbing the back of his head. 

“That’s what you get. You know Miss Emily’s a whole cop,” one of the boys says. 

“A federal agent,” Dylan pipes in while they all laugh. 

“How did you even know it was me?” Cameron asks. 

“I know and see all. Sit down and finish eating, and I’ll forget what you said. I won’t tell your mom,” Emily says with a stern look though when her eyes flick back to Aaron’s, she can see a laugh in them. 

“Say something again, and Dylan’s mom’s gonna break both of your arms,” Andrew says. 

“Shoot you!” Jeffery chimes in.

“Put you in some prison cell with the worst criminals. Like terrorists and murders!” Micheal adds. 

“She couldn’t do that,” Cameron says, almost sounding concerned, from where he sits again. 

Emily turns towards him. “No, I wouldn’t. I’d give you a choice. Spend a day with the BTK killer or the Son of Sam.” 

“Who are they?” Cameron asks defensively. 

“Dennis Rader and David Berkowitz. Famous serial killers,” Dylan says before Emily or Aaron have the opportunity to. 

“You can’t actually do that,” Cameron says. 

Emily shrugs as she takes another bite of her pizza. “ I won’t if you stop talking like that.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says suddenly, and Emily scoots back into the booth with a bright smile as the boys reprimand their friend about not messing with Dylan’s mom. 

“So a fed?” Aaron asks, even more curious about her now. 

“Yeah. I start a new assignment tomorrow. I haven’t even met my new bosses yet. I’m going in blind. Anyways, I’m nervous, and this weekend with all of these fools in my house has been a good distraction from that,” she says, looking away. 

“I get that,” he says, thinking for a moment what all he should say. Coming to conclusion, he says, “I’m a fed too, not exactly an appetizing thing to discuss though.”

“Yeah,” she says, branching away from that mostly out of concern of her nerves letting her talk too much. “What is your plan for the rest of the day? Anything big?”

“I don’t know. What do you want to do this afternoon, Jack, before I get you back to your mom?” Aaron asks him.  

Jack shrugs while eating another piece of the kid’s pepperoni pizza that he’s devoured. Emily takes this as her opportunity. She isn’t like this. She is usually so private, prohibited. She places herself within a box from the rules that she’s formed for her and Declan’s protection. But there is something about Aaron. Something different. Something unique. Something that makes her trust him, and something that makes her want to see him smile again. “They were talking about going to the movies to see that new end-of-the-world action movie. It’s rated PG-13, but I’ve read up on it. It’s not supposed to be inappropriate at all, or I wouldn’t be taking them, just some bad words. Anyways, would you guys want to join?”

Aaron smiles and looks down at his son. “What do you think, Jack? Action movie?” 

“Can I have sour patch kids? And popcorn?” Jack asks. 

“Yes,” Aaron says with a smile that causes Emily’s breath hitch in her stomach. “We would be happy to join you.”

“Good,” Emily says with a smile as she finishes off the pizza, and Aaron looks away after realizing that he had been staring at her again for longer than he should. He can’t help it. Something about her, it attracts him. He doesn’t want to have to say goodbye, so nothing’s wrong with going to a movie with a stranger and a bunch of teen boys.

Chapter Text

Again, they just walk down to the next block where the movie theater is conveniently located and pretty full for a matinee service. At the window, each boy insists on paying their own ticket after Emily got their lunch. She covers for her and Dylan, and then Aaron comes up to buy for him and Jack before they all go in, and despite having a full lunch, each teen gets popcorn, a drink, and candy. When Emily, Aaron, and Jack reach the counter, Emily orders for herself, and before she can get out cash again, Aaron hands over the cash, saying, “It’s the least I can do for letting us invade your day.” 

Emily smiles, touching his forearm gently. “Thank you. And I wouldn’t call it an invasion. A welcome installation perhaps,” she says with a chuckle and Aaron’s laugh dissuades any worry that the joke would pass him by. Aaron and Jack get popcorn to share, and they all head to where the boys have gathered around the place to butter the popcorn and act goofy again. 

Dylan gets his butter and steps back to his mom while his other friends play around and he rolls his eyes. “Mom, can I talk to you?” he asks, nodding to the side, and she nods, giving a small smile to Aaron as she steps a few feet away. 

“What is it, babe?” she asks. 

Declan nods to that strange man who is not looking at either of them, but switches to the language of his birth before continuing anyways. “Vous ne le connaissez pas. Pourquoi lui fais-tu confiance?” 

Emily shakes her head at his words where he asks why she is trusting this man she doesn’t know. “Je ne lui fais pas confiance, mais il est gentil,” she responds quickly, stating that she doesn’t trust him, but he’s nice. 

“Fais attention. Ce n'est pas parce qu'il a un fils qu'on peut lui faire confiance,” Declan rattles off in concern, and then immediately regrets his words. He had told her to be careful. He said that just because Aaron had a son, doesn’t mean that he can be trusted. 

Emily grins at him softly, sadly. “I’m perfectly aware of that,” she says. With a little smirk, she adds in French again,  “Mais il est mignon.” Declan looks immediately uncomfortable at what his mom had said.

“Fine, fine,” Declan says, rolling his eyes and walking back to his friends. 

Emily walks back to Aaron and Jack as the teen boys move out of their way. “Everything okay?” Aaron asks her. 

“He worries about me,” she says simply. 

“I get it. I was always protective of my mom too,” Aaron says simply as they get their popcorn covered in butter, and then they follow them into the theater. The teens fill up the row in front of them while Emily scoots into the row behind them followed by Aaron and Jack, who had bounded into the aisle seat before Aaron could get it, so he is directly beside Emily as the lights dim overhead. 

“Just in time,” Emily mutters as the movie begins. 

A few minutes in, Emily looks over at Aaron to find him looking at her again just as he looks away. She leans towards him, whispering close enough that he can feel her breath against his neck. “Everything alright?” 

He looks from her lips up to her eyes in the darkness as the scene of the movie flickers brightly, illuminating both of their faces. “You and your son speak French?” he asks, thinking the first thing that appears in his head though it isn’t actually where his mind had been. 

“Mhm. Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Greek, and a little Russian too. Do you speak it?” she asks. 

“No,” he says, stunned by her intelligence as well as the brilliant smile on his face. 

“Wanna know what we were saying?” she asks. 

“It’s none of my business,” he says. 

Emily nods but the smile remains. “He was worried about you. Stranger danger, I guess.”

“He’s got a point,” Aaron says, and Emily chuckles. 

“That he does. He asked why,” Emily leans in a little closer to whisper as the action scene changes to a quiet conversation, and she has to be quieter. He doesn’t notice the movie changes or anything else at all aside from her lips gracing his ear with the slightest touch. 

“And?” he barely manages to say. 

“And I said that I think you’re cute,” she says. His eyes jump to hers as he swallows. His son pulling on his sleeve is the only thing that keeps him from kissing her right then and there. He opens Jack’s candy quickly before looking back at Emily who was staring at the movie screen with a happy smirk on her face. 

Aaron looks back to the screen to find a sad scene playing that he has no context to understand, having been so distracted by this beautiful stranger next to him. He concedes to the knowledge that, for the next hour and a half, he is just going to be lost, so he returns his eyes to her. He finds her already looking at him. A smirk turns to a blush as she looks back at the movie screen.

Aaron leans back over to her, whispering now into her ear despite the speakers being filled with loud noise in front of them, “I think you’re cute too.” The movement of his lips against her ear forces her to release a breath through pursed lips before he pulls away just enough to not be creepily close. 

She turns her head to look at him directly. “What about stranger danger?” she asks in a soft tone. 

“You can trust me,” he says seriously. 

She smiles. “I get that feeling. If not though, I may break both of your arms.” 

“Or shoot me.”

“Or put you in prison with the worst criminals,” she says. 

“I could handle it,” he says with a grin. 

She smiles at the slight of the uplift of his lips before her eyes scan his body—strong arms exposed in his blue polo short-sleeved shirt, big hands, muscled chest and arms within his shirt, strong jawline. “I have no doubt.”

She places her gentle hand over his strong hand on the arm of the chair that they share. He looks at her seriously. “You don’t know me,” he says quietly. 

“No, but—”

“But?” 

“But you can hold my hand for the movie,” she says. 

“And after that?” he asks. 

“You’ll give me your number. I’ll call,” she says simply, holding his eyes as his hand turns over taking hold of her hand in his. 

“And I’ll answer,” he says, and she interlocks their fingers. 

They smile at each other before turning back to the movie. They look at each other frequently throughout the movie. Aaron ends up having enough of an understanding of the movie by the end of it that he would probably be able to give the most basic synopsis if ever asked with few but not zero errors. Emily had a similar experience though her distraction was worry, along with attraction, based. Every once and awhile, he would squeeze her hand and the worry would fade away. 

The movie ends, and they let go of each other’s hands at the same time when standing up and filing out into the hall. They walk out single file after the boys, and Aaron steps back to let Emily walk in front of him—a kindness he benefits from. 

They walk out of the theater side by side behind the teens, who are again goofing off. “Emily…” 

“Yes, Aaron?” she smiles up at him, her eyelashes fluttering. He almost reaches out to grab her hand again, but he stops himself when one of the boy’s voices booms.

“I had a great time,” Aaron says gently. “I—”

“Help!” a woman’s voice screams, taking both of their attention away towards the woman running through the parking lot while screaming. Her shirt is torn and there is a bruise on her face and her arm. 

Emily and Aaron take off towards her at the same moment, and Dylan walks back to stand beside Jack immediately. “Are you okay?” Aaron asks. 

“Who did this?” Emily asks as she nods while Aaron helps her to sit against the back of one of the trucks. 

“Him! In the blue shirt. He just ran up on me when I was getting out of my car,” the woman points to a man who is walking down the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets and his head down. He looks over his shoulder just as Emily looks up and they make eye contact. When the offender takes off running, Emily does too, shouting back to Aaron, “Stay with her!” 

She chases him down the block, getting closer but not catching up fully. Just as he is about to turn the corner onto a busier street, Emily steps onto the seat of the bench and then the back of it, lunging forward and tackling him to the ground. “Crazy bitch! Get off of me!” the criminal yells as he tries to push her off of him. 

“Crazy bitch, huh?” she says rhetorically with a chuckle as she gets up of her own volition, grabbing him by the wrist and flipping him over and bringing both of his arms behind his back. Metro cops show up then, having been patrolling the area. “FBI. Agent Emily Prentiss. I was leaving the movie theater with my kid when the woman back there accused him of assaulting her.” One of the cops says that they will go talk to the girl while the other takes the perp off Emily’s hands, putting him in cuffs. Emily writes her information down on the cops notepad in case she is needed in the investigation before she walks back down the sidewalk. 

Halfway there, she meets Aaron who had stepped away from the injured woman when the cop appeared and had been watching Emily amazed. “Good takedown,” he says. 

With a smirk and a wiggle of her eyebrows, she says, “Thank you.”

Walking back to where the boys and a gathered group of spectators were watching, the teen boys and Jack soon after begin to cheer and clap as the spectators join in. “That was awesome!” one boy said.

“So cool!” another says. Soon, they are all commenting on how awesome and cool and badass it was. 

Emily is laughing and even bows causing them all to laugh as the crowd gets back on with their day leaving their group standing there. “Tell me someone got that on video!”

“I did!” a couple of the boys announce. 

“Good. Now you have proof of what happens if Cameron runs his mouth again,” Emily says, and they all laugh wildly, including Aaron and Jack, who doesn’t really get what’s going on but finds it all hilarious nonetheless. “I gotta get you all home now. Start trekking!” she announces pointing to where her car is parked down the next block in the opposite direction of where she had just run. 

“Your mom is so cool, man,” one of Dylan’s friends says as they pass by Emily who sticks her hand out to receive a high five from her son before she looks back at Aaron. 

“I’m the cool mom,” she says proudly as she, Aaron, and Jack pick up the rear of the group walking down the sidewalk. 

“You are,” he says with a chuckle. “Everyone in school is going to see that video tomorrow. You are going to be the talk of the what? Eighth grade?” 

“Yeah,” she says with a laugh. “What do you think of all of that, Jack? Must be pretty crazy?”

Jack smiles up at her. “You flew to get the bad guy. You’re a superhero, like my Daddy!”

Emily smiles. He reminds her of Declan at that age. “Aww, you are too sweet! And you, Aaron? What did you think of that?”

He laughs as he looks at her. “Very cool. More than cool,” he says to her. Hot, he thinks, and Emily smirks because she knows that’s what he’s thinking. Thankfully, it didn’t scare him off. Only made him more interested. 

“Daddy, we’re parked that way!” Jack says, pointing in the opposite direction of the fork in the road than where Dylan and his friends ahead of them were going. 

“You’re right,” Aaron sighs. He had parked a little farther from the park to get an easier getaway when it got busy in the afternoon. He regrets that now. He was entirely intending on just walking Emily all the way to her car and walking back this way, saying he forgot or whatever. 

“Oh, you guys should head there then. I had a wonderful time. It was great meeting you, Jack,” Emily says with a smile, fist bumping the kid who chuckles when she makes the explosion sound. “And you, Aaron,” she begins turning to him. “It has been lovely meeting you.”

“Yes, it has,” he agrees with a smile. 

Emily pulls out her phone. “We agreed to something,” she says, opening her phone to contacts as she hands it over to him. 

“Of course,” he says, taking the phone and putting in his number and just Aaron for the name. 

He hands it back to her and smiles widely. “I’ll call,” she says. She reaches down to squeeze his hand for a quick moment before pulling away and waving as she turns. 

“And I’ll answer,” he agrees while waving after her. 

When she is fully facing away from them, Aaron stands there to watch her go for a moment until she starts jogging after her son and his friends. Then, he turns with Jack and heads down the road. “Did you have fun today, Jack?” he asks. 

“Yep! The park and the pizza were really fun. And I really liked the movie too. Oh, and when Miss Emily took down that bad guy! That was awesome!” Jack says excitedly as he bounces down the sidewalk next to his father. “Did you have fun, Daddy?”

“I did,” Aaron says confidently. 

“You like Emily, right?” Jack asks. 

“I do,” Aaron says as they reach the car. 

Aaron helps his son get into his car seat as Jack says, “Me too.”

“I’m glad,” Aaron says as he buckles his son in his car seat and drives the short distance to their apartment to get Jack’s toys together and get him cleaned up so he isn’t sweaty and smelling of popcorn and pizza when they get Jack to his mom’s.

It takes a while for the two of them to do everything that they need to, but as always, it is too soon before Aaron is driving Jack back to Haley’s house. Aaron never says anything to Jack about him not telling his mom about their day. He would never do that. But he does hope that his son doesn’t bring it up. 

Of course though the moment Haley opens her front door and bends to hug their son, Jack rattle’s off excitedly, “Daddy and I went to the park. And this lady hit him with a frisbee. And then we ate pizza and went to the movies and had popcorn. And the lady—her name is Emily—stopped a bad guy from getting away after he hurt a lady outside of the movie theater. She just ran after him and then climbed on a bench and flew and knocked him to the ground.” 

“You spent the whole day with this lady?” Haley asks, looking from her son to her ex-husband. 

“Pretty much! After we met her and her son and his friends at the park,” Jack says. 

“It isn’t like that, Haley,” Aaron says quietly. 

“Mhm,” Haley says suspiciously. “Jack, would you put your toys up and change into pajamas? I need to talk to your dad for a minute.” 

“Okay, love you, Daddy,” Jack says before running up the stairs. 

“Love you too,” Aaron says as he walks through the door Haley had opened wide enough for him to come through. 

When Jack is safely upstairs, Haley says, “Next time you want to introduce our son to a woman, ask me first.”

“I will. But I told you it wasn’t like that,” Aaron says. 

“Oh yeah? You just got hit by a frisbee and then just spent the rest of the day with her and her kid?” Haley asks sarcastically. 

“That’s exactly what happened,” Aaron says innocently. 

“Yeah, okay,” she says. “This allows for a good opening. I want to introduce Jack to someone special in my life.” Aaron listens a little uncomfortably as she speaks about the merits of this man that she had been seeing. He commits the man’s name to memory in order to ask Garcia to look him up later. 

“Okay. Thank you for asking. If I planned on doing the same thing, I would ask you too,” Aaron says respectfully from where they now sit in her living room.

As Haley sits back further into the couch, she says, “So you seriously just spent the day with a stranger?” 

“We did,” Aaron says. 

Haley grins a little while asking, “Was she cute?” 

“Haley,” Aaron begins shaking his head and feeling uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation. 

“Oh my god, Aaron! You’re blushing!” Haley practically squeals as she sits forward again. 

“I am not,” he says.

“We have known each other since we were in high school. You, Aaron Hotchner, are blushing! She must have been very cute!” Haley says in excited squeals. “I want to know everything.”

“Haley,” Aaron says in an uncomfortable sigh. 

“Fine, fine. But I want to know,” she says sweetly, like a friend would. Maybe, they’re beginning to be friends again. 

“I should get going, Haley. I have to be at work early in the morning. Paperwork,” he says. 

“Of course,” she says, leading Aaron from the living room to the front door, yelling for Jack to come tell his dad goodbye. 

“I’m coming,” Jack yells from somewhere upstairs. 

“Haley, I’m happy for you and this guy. If he does anything you don’t like though, call me. I’ll take care of him,” he says seriously. 

“I know, and I know you’re going to look into him. He’s really a good guy, Aaron,” Haley says. “And, Aaron, I’m glad you got someone to make you blush again.” Aaron smiles at his ex-wife as Jack bounds down the stairs and leaps into Aaron’s arms. After wishing his son a goodnight and telling him that he loves him and receiving the same in return, Aaron leaves, waving goodbye as he goes. On the car ride home, he wonders how long he will have to wait until Emily calls. He really wants her to call.

Chapter Text

When Emily and Declan get all of his friends dropped off that night, they return to an incredibly messy apartment that they work together to clean up as quickly as they can before they fall onto the couch. “Hope I didn’t embarrass you too much, babe,” she says to Declan as he leans his head against his mom’s shoulder. 

“You didn’t,” he says. 

“Seriously?” she asks. 

Declan laughs as he says, “Well, you picking up some rando at the park was…strange. But then you totally demolished that criminal, so you redeemed yourself with my friends.”

“I’m glad. And with you?” Emily asks him seriously as she throws her arm around her son’s shoulders. 

“It was cool, Ma. I worry though,” he states, not looking at her directly. 

“That’s supposed to be my job. Not yours,” she tells him. “You should be irritated with me because I embarrassed you, not because you’re afraid for my safety.”

Jack looks at her again. “I can’t help it,” he says with a shrug. 

Emily releases a little sigh as her mind transports her back in time. “I remember the first time we met, Declan. Ten years ago, a sweet little four year old with bright blonde curls. You were running around the garden, chasing butterflies and running from bees. I was just standing, leaning against one of the columns when you walked up to me with a bouquet of flowers you had just picked. You said—” 

“—Salut. Des fleurs pour vous,” Declan says quietly. “You thanked me, and then…I don’t remember.” 

Emily smiles. “You ran away, smiling. I watched you run around that garden for maybe an hour after that.”

“Until my father came to get you,” Declan says quietly, sadly. 

“Declan…” she begins. “What’s the matter?” 

Declan shakes his head before standing up from the couch. “There’s some homework that I should be doing,” he says. 

Emily stands up from the couch, following him until he begins climbing the stairs and she stays at the bottom of them. “You can talk to me, Declan,” she calls up after him. 

At the top of the stairs, he looks back down and says, “I know that.” 

Emily sighs as she leaves the foot of the staircase to go and do chores, wash clothes and dishes, and iron her outfit for tomorrow as well as the box of things from her old office where she worked desk duty on profiles ever since she got Ian put in prison and faked Declan’s and Lauren Reynolds’ death. 

After sitting down for a couple hours with one of the many books on profiling that she has read and reread, she gets up as dinnertime approaches and climbs up the stairs up to Declan’s bedroom. She knocks several times and then pushes the door open, saying, “Declan, what do you want for dinner?”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he says quietly, looking up from the picture frame in his hands. She sees the tears in his eyes and she walks to him quickly, sitting on the edge of the bed and looking at that picture he holds. 

It’s the three of them. Ian, Declan, and Lauren sit on the couch, leaning against one another. Declan was being difficult then, refusing to smile for the picture and was instead making a funny face. Emily was laughing a little too much at the faces Declan was making—she always felt at ease when she was with him like the fear faded and she could truly exist in her persona. Ian was smiling at both of them. It was one of the really good moments. That’s why she had taken that photo when she was being forced out. The crease from the double fold that she had made on the picture when she stuffed it into her pocket is still evident even after the picture has been flattened within the frame for years. 

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” she says simply. 

“It’s my fault,” he says. 

“No,” Emily says. 

“It is.” 

Emily turns her body to face her son directly. “What is?” 

“The way your life is now. It’s my fault,” he says simply. 

“Yeah, it is,” Emily concedes, and Declan turns his head on her suddenly, shocked that she would agree. Softly, Emily continues, “It’s your fault that I’m the mother of a beautiful and sweet and kind and amazing and talented boy. It’s your fault that I’m happy, and it’s your fault that I’m the luckiest person ever to call you my son.” 

Declan chuckles a little, wiping tears from his eyes. “That’s not what I’m talking about,” he says. 

“Well, I don’t know what you are talking about then because the only fault you hold is making my life joyful and meaningful,” she tells him. 

“What about the lies and secrets? What about the protectiveness? What about you only now getting to do the job you have always wanted to do? What…what about the nightmares?” he asks finally, looking away. 

Emily grabs both of his hands, making him look back up at her. “Listen to me, Declan. All those things, none of that is your fault,” she says seriously. 

“It’s my father’s fault,” he argues. 

“Last time I checked, you aren’t your father,” she says. 

“Sins of the father—” he begins. 

“That doesn’t apply here,” she says. “You have absolutely zero fault in Ian’s crimes. Nul. None. Nada. You get that, right?” 

“I guess,” he says. 

“Speaking of your father, and this might not sound quite right, but I’m thankful to him,” Emily says. 

“For what?”

“For being the reason I was there. Thankful to the people that gave me that assignment. But your dad, his crimes, his dangers, everything about him, it all led me to meeting you. He told me you were his son. Asked me—well, Lauren—to take care of you. If it weren’t for him having you, trusting me with you, I wouldn’t be who I am today because I wouldn’t have you. You have defined my life, Declan,” Emily says, and Declan looks at her while wiping the tears from his cheeks. 

“Yeah?” he asks, and Emily nods. This child that she gets to call her own, he may be getting older but he is still a sweet little kid. Her sweet little kid.

“Yes, of course. Now, tell me what all of this is about,” she says. “Is this about my new job? Or…”

Declan shakes his head. “I just worry about you. My dad, wherever he is, he’s so dangerous. If he found us—”

“I know, and we’re safe from him. He’s in prison,” Emily says. 

“And he thinks we’re dead,” Declan adds. 

“And he thinks we’re dead,” Emily agrees. “By the way, I can take care of myself,” Emily says a little lighter. 

“You proved that today,” Declan says with a laugh as he puts the picture back in the drawer of his bedside table. 

“But I do need to take care of you, and we need dinner. I don’t want to cook though,” she says. 

“Chinese?” he asks. 

“Chinese,” she agrees. 

The rest of the night, Emily spends with her son, eating takeout and watching old sitcoms while he works on his homework. It’s a good night as they always have. Still, the cloud of worry lays over them. It isn’t fair that Declan has to live his life in fear or full of lies. It isn’t fair, but it is just the nature of their situation. It can’t change, and it won’t unless something unthinkable happens. What is the truth, what won’t ever change, is that they are a family, and at some point in the past nine years that they have lived like this, Emily earned the title of Mom and she gained Declan as her son. She really is so lucky. 

The next morning, Emily wakes up to her first alarm, which never happens but her first thought is starting her new job and her second is making sure Declan gets to school on time so that she can get to work early and figure out where she’s going. She hops out of bed and runs to Declan’s room as she hears his alarm go off, calling in for him to wake up to which he answers, “I’m up, Ma. I’m up.”

Emily returns to her room, brushing her teeth, putting on her makeup, fixing her hair, and finally getting dressed before leaving her room to check on Declan again. “Declan!” she yells when she doesn’t find him in his room. 

“Downstairs!” he tells her, and she runs down the steps. She finds him ready for school and pouring coffee with a cereal bowl already sitting out on the table. 

“You got ready fast,” she says admiringly. 

“I didn’t want to make your morning anymore stressful,” he says as he sits down and begins to eat his cereal. 

Emily takes a big swig of the coffee before saying, “What told you that I’m stressed?”

“I profiled you,” he deadpans. 

“Wow. I’m proud,” Emily says. 

“You literally yelled for me to wake up when I was already awake, Mom,” he says while laughing. 

“I did not realize that,” she admits, and they both end up laughing. 

Once they are done with breakfast and have all of their things together, they head out to the car, and Emily drives, more like speeds, to drop him off at school. “Have a good day, babe. It’ll either be me or grandpa picking you up,” she reminds him. 

“Okay, mom. Good luck! You got this!” he says, leaning over to hug his mother. 

“Thank you, babe. I love you,” she tells him as he climbs out of the car. 

“Love you too,” he says back as a couple of his friends walk up to him. “Bye, Mom!” he calls to her while waving as he runs inside with them. She waves back with a smile, watching as he makes it inside the building safely before driving away from the building. 

The closer she gets, the more scared she becomes. This is a job that she’s always wanted. Similar to JTF-12, but without the false identities and faked deaths. Just traveling across the countries profiling serial killers and saving lives. She has put in for it several times over the past few years. Began putting in for it when Declan got into middle school and started to express his concern that he had messed up her plans. Of course, that isn’t at all the case, but with him getting older, she really wants to do this again. Be impactful. Be a superhero to him. 

She pulls into the parking garage, grabbing her things. She is especially early, so there is no one in the foyer for her to ask where exactly she’s headed. She gets on an elevator and rides up to the floor that she will be working on. She has never actually been up to the Behavioral Analysis Unit, so when the elevator lands in the middle of some dark hallway surrounded by closed and windowless offices, she goes one way in the fork of the road, hoping to find it without too much trouble. 

She wanders down a few hallways never coming to any signs that help her to find where she is headed. Looking down at her watch, she stands still for a moment, her stress and the weight of the box in her arms being more than she would like. She looks down at the paper with her transfer information, beginning to wonder why there isn’t any actual information on it when she hears the sound of a heavy door shutting. She looks up at it, hoping it will be someone she can ask. She sees a strong shouldered man in a suit down the hall from her. She blinks, thinking it couldn’t possibly be him. She watches him flex his hand as she begins walking towards him, and she knows it is. 

“Aaron!” she calls down the hall, taking a chance. 

The man turns on his heel. A glare changing immediately to a smile. “Emily?”

Chapter Text

“Hey. I’m so glad it’s you,” Emily says as she approaches him. 

She looks at his lips still formed in the smile as he jokes, “When you said you would call, I didn’t think it would be in person.” Emily laughs and Aaron’s smile changes to a smirk to have succeeded. 

“Actually, I’m trying to find where I’m starting today. I think I took a back elevator by accident. I can’t find it for anything,” she says. 

Aaron looks into her box of things, noticing the transfer paperwork. “May I?” he asks. 

“Please,” she says. He grabs the paperwork and reads through it quickly then he reads it through again. Any hint of the smile disappears and his face turns serious. “Aaron, what’s wrong? Am I on the wrong floor or something? Oh God, I’m not in the wrong building, am I?”

Aaron shakes his head, the smallest smile reaching his eyes at her concern. “No. You’re in the right place.”

“Do you know who I’m supposed to be seeing? The paperwork didn’t say,” she explains to him. He looks through the paperwork again and sees that it in fact didn’t show any names, including whoever approved the transfer. 

“I do,” he says seriously. “Follow me.”

He begins walking rather quickly, but Emily keeps up easily enough. Approaching the glass doors, she is confirmed to have gone on the wrong elevator. Aaron opens the door for her, and he is quickly walking a step or two ahead of her as they pass through the open area when several agents say hello to Hotch, they call him. He doesn’t acknowledge them, but she gives a tight-lipped grin as they look at her, clearly wondering who she is. 

Climbing up a couple steps, Aaron walks into the office and Emily follows him in before he closes the door. She is about to ask what’s going on when she looks down at the nameplate on the desk, SSA Aaron Hotchner . “I don’t think I understand,” Emily says simply. 

Aaron goes behind his desk, gesturing for Emily to sit across from him but she doesn’t and neither does he. “Me either. I didn’t sign off on your transfer, Em—Agent Prentiss.”

Emily tries not to wince at the name change, feeling its abruptness like a punch to the gut. “You’re the BAU Unit Chief,” she says. 

“Yes, and I don’t know anything about your transfer. There must have been a mistake,” Aaron says. 

“I don’t believe so…sir,” Emily coughs a little harshly at the last word. 

“Did you have any idea?” he asks seriously, the glare that she had only a glimpse of before returning in full force. Emily clenches her jaw, trying to figure out what to say so it doesn’t just come as mouthing off or too defensive. A knock on the door distracts both of them and Aaron says through the door, “What is it?” 

A blonde agent peaks her head in, looking between them and trying to gauge the situation. Emily looks away because she isn’t in the mood for pleasantries. “We have a case,” she says with a kind smile. 

“I’ll be right there,” Aaron says, and the agent walks out after glancing at Emily again. 

Aaron begins to walk around his desk again when a thought strikes him. “Are you Ambassador Prentiss’ daughter?”

Emily nods. “Yes,” she says. 

“I worked her detail as one of my first assignments. You must have been in college. Brown?” he says simply. 

“Yale,” she corrects, and the smallest grin pulls at his lips again. 

“There must have been a mistake,” he says again. 

“I had no idea,” she says. “About you and this yesterday. Never even occurred to me to ask—not a good thing for an agent.”

“Didn’t occur to me either. Look, Emily, I don’t know what happened,” he says simply, a sense of responsibility for her situation falling on his shoulders. 

“Me either,” she says. 

“I have to go,” he tells her. He walks past her as she grabs the box of things that will not be finding a home today. 

“Aaron,” she begins as he is walking out of his office. He turns back to look at her. “My number is on that paperwork.” He nods before walking away, meeting Rossi as he asks if he had approved a transfer. He had not, and Aaron catches another glimpse of Emily again then. 

This beautiful woman that had made his day yesterday looks utterly confused now. The soft hands he held now hold onto her box of things. The bright smile is gone, and the openness is diminished. The fearlessness that had tackled that man and that had allowed her to accept Aaron into her day is absent. Her happiness is gone. But like yesterday, he would do anything to reach out to her, to hold her. In fact, that feeling is stronger than it had been before. He would have done anything to kiss her then, now he just wants to comfort her. He would do anything—except cause a scene at work. He has to work this case. He has to focus. He has to not think of Emily Prentiss. He does not succeed. 

Emily walks in a daze from Aaron’s office, finding herself eventually in a lady’s restroom down the hall. She sets her things on the counter and just leans with her elbows propped on the counter and her head in her hands as she calms down the stress rising up in her. She has been effectively transferred from her old desk job. She could probably go back there, but she doesn’t want to. It would be embarrassing, and such a let down. Today as a whole has been a let down though. Not just the job that she had soon been looking forward to but whatever it was that was going on with her and Aaron. He’s the unit chief of the job she wants so much. What could possibly happen with that being the case. She wants this job. She needs it. Atop of being where she has wanted to work for years, it has a pay raise, and she could use that. Declan’s getting older. College is coming soon, and she would like to get as little money as possible from her mom to pay for it. Besides, that private school he attends isn’t getting any cheaper.

“Hey, are you okay?” a woman asks from behind her. 

Emily looks up into the mirror to see who it is while answering, “Fine.”

Meeting the woman’s eyes in the mirror, she sees her concern as well as her flamboyant clothing. A shocking sight in Quantico, or anywhere really. “Are you sure? You look upset,” the woman says. 

“Yeah. I was supposed to be starting a new job today. Apparently, the paperwork is messed up or something,” Emily says simply, leaving out all of the other complications for a number of reasons. 

“In the BAU?” 

Emily stands up completely and turns against the counter to face the other woman directly. Her voice is a little more tender when she says, “Yeah. I got the paperwork, packed up from my old office, and came here. The Unit Chief,” Aaron , she thinks, “said that he didn’t sign off on it.” 

“You don’t know what you’re going to do,” she says empathetically. 

“No, I don’t,” Emily says. 

The woman with the color streaks in her hair and the kind smile says, “Hotch is a stickler, but he’s a good guy. He’s not going to want to turn you away. What’s your name? I’m going to contact you when this case is over and they’re on the way back. That way you get the opportunity to fight for the job. If you want it,” she says. 

“Emily Prentiss. But why would you do that?” Emily asks. 

The woman shrugs, and with a smile, she says while walking to the bathroom door, “I’ll email you, Agent Prentiss.”

“Thank you, um…”

“Penelope Garcia. I’m the in-house tech guru,” she says before walking away with her heels clicking down the hall. 

“Nice to meet you,” Emily says to the woman as she departs. She waits there in the bathroom for a few minutes before taking a deep breath and leaving Quantico to go back home. 

Emily spends the rest of the day wondering what she should do to pass her time, so she doesn’t do anything at all. She drinks a glass of wine and watches TV and makes a sandwich and takes a nap, and maybe this could be called relaxing by a lot of women, but she is honestly just so bored. So concerned and so bored. 

She leaves her house earlier than she has to to get to Declan’s school and ends up sitting in the car reading one of her favorite Kurt Vonnegut books. When she sees Declan come out of the school, she instantly smiles. She says hello to his friends as they pass, the ones that had been at her house among others, because her window is down and they all wave as they pass her. “Hey, Mom!” Declan says as he climbs into the car. 

“How was your day?” she asks sincerely. 

“Good. They showed everyone that video. The whole school was talking about how cool you are. My math teacher was wondering if you could teach her self-defense, but I think she was joking,” he says, and Emily laughs. 

“Not too embarrassing, I hope,” she says. 

“Nope. Even Charlotte thought it was cool,” he said as nonchalantly as he could. 

“Oh, Charlotte did? I’m glad,” Emily says, trying to repress her smile. 

“Mom…” he says awkwardly, not wanting her to make a big deal out of this. Emily agrees, letting it go just before he asks, “So how did it go today? Was your new boss nice?”

“Uh… It’s a little complicated,” she says. 

“How’s that?” he asks. 

“Well, my new boss may not actually be my new boss. But yes, he is nice,” she says. 

“You aren’t making sense, Ma,” he tells her as they pull into their parking spot at home. 

As they get it out of the car and start walking up the steps to their apartment, Emily says, “Yeah. My day didn’t make much sense either. Turns out my boss is Aaron Hotchner.”

“Aaron. The Aaron you spent the whole day flirting with?” Declan asks incredulously as they enter their apartment. 

“Declan,” Emily attempts to reprimand, but the teasing smile on her son’s face breaks her seriousness.

“Yes, that Aaron. Also, that Aaron didn’t sign off on my transfer, so I don’t know where I’m going to work,” she says. “Never should’ve picked up that damn frisbee.” 

“Yeah, sure, Mom,” he says, rolling his eyes. 

“What?”

“Because it was totally the frisbee that did you in,” he says sarcastically. 

“It is why I spoke to him in the first place,” she says. 

“Not why you invited him to spend the day with us,” Declan says, and she stares at him for a moment because she knows that he’s right but she doesn’t want to acknowledge it, so she doesn’t say anything on the matter. “So what are you going to do?” 

“An agent said that she would call me when the team returns so I can fight my case,” she says. 

Declan smiles at his mom. “Good. So there’s nothing to worry about.”

“I don’t know about that,” Emily says, sitting down on the couch next to him and turning on the news, just as coverage on a serial killer in St. Louis appears and the BAU is mentioned. She tries not to think that she could have been out there working today had everything worked as it should. 

“I do,” Declan says. Emily looks up at her son as he smiles. “Whatever you fight for, you get,” he says simply, and she can’t argue his point. After all, what she fought the hardest for—the fight that was the hardest—sits beside her now. 

Chapter Text

It has been four days since she had heard anything from anyone, and she hadn’t called Aaron. He was busy, and now, she doesn’t know if his promise to answer stands. She is sitting on the couch again watching a movie with her son and nursing a glass of wine when the email comes over the laptop that she hasn’t let out of her sight. The email is from a Penelope Garcia and the subject line reads just her name. In the text, it says: They’re getting on the plane to come back soon. Hotch will be in his office, so you can talk to him there. Come early if you can and stop by my office. See you. Hugs, Garcia. Emily doesn’t know this woman, but she owes her so much.

“You should go,” Declan says. 

“I don’t want to leave you home alone,” Emily says hesitantly. 

“I’ll be fine. Go, fight,” Declan says, and Emily smiles before running up the stairs and getting ready as quickly as she possibly can. 

Running back down the steps a few minutes later, she rambles, “Call me if you need anything. Don’t open the door for anyone but me. Don’t go anywhere or do anything dangerous.”

“I know, Mom,” he grumbles a little before grinning and continuing, “You got this. Get that job.” 

“Okay, okay,” she says, looking for her keys. Declan grabs them off the coffee table and tosses them to her. “Okay. I’m going now. Wish me luck.”

“You don’t need it,” he tells her. 

“You’re right. I totally demolished a dude a few days ago,” she says. “I got this. Love you! Bye!”

“Bye!” he says as she leaves the apartment, locking the door and checking it several times. She walks as calmly as she can to her car, and speeds all the way to the office. 

When she gets there late at night, she rides up the elevator, finding a random agent to ask where Agent Penelope Garcia’s office is. Following their direction, she finds herself walking into a room with more computers and more cute figurines than she ever has before. “Hello,” Emily says as she sees the woman in the colorful clothing leaning back in her chair with her platform shoes on the desk and a pen with a pink plume in her hand.

She turns around with a bright smile, and Emily can only smile back. “Hey there, pretty lady. Ready to get your spot on our team?”

“Yes,” Emily says though she isn’t as confident as she’d like to be. 

“Good. It shouldn’t be much longer now before they get back. The others are going to go straight home off the plane, but Hotch is going to come back and do paperwork. He always does. You’ll have his time. Use it,” she says. 

“How?”

Penelope passes over a folder. “This. You want to be a profiler on this team? Profile.” 

Emily smiles. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Get on with it,” Penelope says, shooing her away. 

“I don’t know how to thank you,” Emily says, looking back from the door. Penelope smiles at her, shooing her away with the pink pen and her jeweled hands. 

Emily runs off, clutching the folder to her chest as she goes. She considers where she should sit and read it, and she settles on the couch in Aaron’s office under the soft lamplight. After all, if she is going to fight, she might as well use all of her tactics—starting with surprise. She studies the case back and forth, easily forming a possible profile in her mind. It’s like flipping a switch. It may have been years since she had done work similar to this, but that way of thinking has never really left, and in that dark room late at night, she can feel Lauren Reynolds and every other identity she has ever adopted sitting with her, evaluating this unsub from every perspective.

She catches Aaron stalking up the steps just in time to snap out of her trance and be ready. 

As soon as he opens the door, he sees her and is taken aback, but tries to act like he wasn’t. “Please tell me you haven't been there for the last four days,” he says, his voice expressing exhaustion and nothing else. 

“I came here to convince you that you should hire me. I don’t know what happened with my paperwork. My mom didn’t pull strings, and if you think she would, you don’t know her at all. I had no idea who you were when we met at the park.” You were just some guy, some really hot, really nice guy, but she doesn’t say that. “But none of that really matters, does it? What matters is if I’d make a good addition to this team, and I will prove to you that I will.”

“Emily—” Aaron leans forward to prop his elbows on his desk.

“The murders in Santa Fe are all being committed by one individual. He, a white man between the ages of 30 and 35 is killing prostitutes because of a deep-seeded hate that is likely born from a poor relationship with his mother. He will not stop until he is caught or killed. At first, the murders took place weeks apart, but the last three have occurred in only a weeks time. His brutality is increasing and aspects of his MO is changing. The unsub is devolving fast. If we don’t get to work soon, many more women will die,” she says, confidently.

“Agent Prentiss, I respect what you’re doing—” Hotch begins, but Emily stands interrupting him.

“Excuse me, sir, but I really don’t care what you do or don’t respect. I belong in this unit. And all I’m asking you for is the chance to show that,” Emily says, standing proudly in front of his desk. She is vulnerable. His decision will greatly alter her life and her plans and her happiness. He knows that, but in the strong figure in front of him, he can’t see it. She has a lot of confidence and a damn good poker face, maybe too good. 

Quickly, Aaron considers all of the facts, weighing the pros and cons of hiring her. In the end, it is the look on her face—coldly serious, strategic, and unemotional—that makes the decision for him. 

“Okay,” he says. “It will be on a probationary basis.”

“I understand,” she says, her eyes lighting slightly but the rest of her face remaining unchanged. “Thank you, sir.”

“Go home to your son, Agent Prentiss. Make sure your ready bag is packed. We will be going to Santa Fe tomorrow morning. Do you think you can handle that?” He asks her, sure to keep his tone measured and the same as how he would talk to any of his other coworkers. 

“I can, sir. Thank you,” she says, beginning to walk out. 

“Emily?” he stops her just as she is nearly out the door. “If we could not mention to the team everything that happened the other day--”

“You mean my badass takedown,” she says with a smirk. 

“Yes, and the rest. I would appreciate it,” he says, having a difficult time keeping a smile from his lips at her joke. 

“My lips are sealed, Aaron,” she says, signaling it with her hand zipping over her lips. His eyes are drawn there, and he forgets to respond. She beats him to it when she makes her own request. “If we’re making deals, could we also not mention my son to the team for a little while? It’s easier that way.”

“Of course, Emily, but they won’t judge you.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” she says seriously, providing no further explanation, and he won’t request any. 

“Bonne nuit, Emily,” he tries with the smallest grin, and it seems to finally break the seriousness from her features again.

“Bonne nuit, Aaron,” she says, wishing him goodnight as well, a smile stretching across her face.

She gives him a nod then and leaves the room, but he stares at the space she left. The smile she had is still present in his mind’s eye. It’s bright and lovely. It’s the only look that should be on a face that beautiful. She can do the work, he is sure of it. Don’t get him wrong, she will be a good hire, he knows. But the reason he hired her comes down to one thing: he has not even known her for week and he is sure that his life’s mission has become making that smile appear on her face again. If it’s through this job and nothing else, it will be worth it. 

Aaron sighs, leaning back in the chair. How could so much begin with a damn frisbee?

Chapter Text

Emily—Agent Prentiss, he means—proves an outstanding asset on the Santa Fe case and the several that follow, and the team, especially Garcia, have really grown fond of her. The more they praise her merits, the more standoffish Aaron becomes. He knows he shouldn’t. It isn’t her fault that he only likes her more and more and can’t seem to shake it. It’s not her fault either that he can’t communicate that, even within his own mind. 

When a terrorist threat requires agents to be sent to Gitmo, Agent Prentiss is the obvious choice. Fluent in Arabic, she provides much needed expertise. Rossi and Reid go with her and question the terrorist for information on the threat. 

At first, he is happy to be free of his attraction to her for a while, but when she calls him directly—her caller ID reading, Agent Emily Prentiss—with the information that the mall is the threat, he can hear the fear in her voice. He tells the others the location and then turns away and drops his voice. “Call him,” Aaron says without hesitation. 

“I don’t think that appropriate, sir,” she says politely, but he knows she’s only a moment from giving in. 

“Call him, Emily. That’s an order.” It’s the first time he’s spoken to her with her first name since the day she started.

“Yes, sir,” Emily responds as she hears the click of him securing his vest. “Be careful, Aaron.”

“Always,” he says quietly and hangs up. Off to save the day. 

When Emily, Spencer, and Rossi are back in Quantico, the bomb threat has been thwarted and everyone is sent home. Emily calls Declan though and says she will be there to pick him up from her mother soon, but she has to make one stop first. She knows one person who won’t be going straight home, and she has something to say to him. 

Back at the BAU, she knocks on his office door, and he tells her to come in. “How may I help you, Agent Prentiss?”

“I wanted to say thank you, for earlier.” 

“No need,” he says. “Why are you really here?”

“Hotch.”

“Prentiss.”

“Why did you really hire me? You don’t trust me.”

“Trust has to be earned,” he says. 

“And I began in the negative.”

“No,” he says. She began with more trust than anyone ever does with him. That’s what keeps him skeptical. She blinks, nods, and turns to walk out. “How is Dylan?” he asks suddenly. He hadn’t mentioned her son since she started either, and it catches her off guard. 

“Good,” she says with a smile. 

“He wasn’t at the mall,” Hotch says, knowingly. 

“No, he was at Cameron’s house, doing something stupid I’m sure, but safe,” she says with the smallest of laughs. 

“He should be very proud of his mom. She saved a lot of people today,” he says softly, that kind softness that had been largely absent since that day in the park returning. 

“Hardly. You did the dangerous part. Going toward the bomb like that,” she says. 

He shrugs. “That’s the job.”

“Yeah. See you tomorrow, Aaron.”

“Bonne nuit, Emily.”

“Bonne nuit,” she turns on her heel and leaves him behind working on paperwork. She gets to go home to her son, to her whole world. Tomorrow, she will return to work and keep doing all she can to earn Aaron’s trust. She doesn’t actually know what is to happen next, but she knows that in the very least she will earn his trust and work tirelessly at this job while also being the best damn mom that she can be. 

The cases have followed one after the other with very little break time in between, and absolutely none of them have been particularly easy and hitting to close for several of the agents. When Emily finally gets to go home after each case, she spends every moment that she possibly can with her son, and he doesn’t even get too annoyed with her. It keeps her from creating outside-of-work friendships with her coworkers where she has to lie to them and from having too many awkward moments with Hotch. They have plenty of those on the day-to-day work hours. Somehow, even when surrounded by death, destruction, and the most evil acts she finds herself staring at him and catches him staring at her too many of those times. It feels…far better than it should.

When she receives a text from JJ suggesting they all meet up at her favorite bar for the Super Bowl, she is ready to respond that she can’t, forming any number of excuses for why she can’t, but Declan catches her before she can send it. “Go, Mom,” he encourages. “Team bonding is good, especially for a team like yours. Plus, you deserve to have fun.”

“You just want me out of your hair,” Emily responds jokingly.

“Yes,” he deadpans, and she is annoyed that her own sarcasm has rubbed off on him.

“If you insist,” she responds with a smile as she nudges him, drawing a smile from his falsely serious face. When she responds to the message, it is only her and Hotch who hadn’t agreed to show up yet. He responds only moments later as she is heading to her room to get ready. 

Getting ready isn’t the easiest task. Judging by JJ's personality, she knows that anything too fancy or too extreme wouldn’t match the vibe of the place, and yet she wants to look good. She won’t say for whom in her head, but the whole time she is getting ready she is wondering how he will act in this different atmosphere. 

Settling on a white top that is appropriate but still flattering, her favorite pair of jeans, sleek black heeled boots, and just the right amount of makeup, she is kissing her son’s cheek and insisting he follow all of her safety rules before heading out the door. 

When Emily arrives at the bar, she sits anxiously in her car for several minutes, checking herself in the mirror multiple times until she looks out and sees Hotch’s car pulling up beside her. Once he is parked, she steps out of the car as he does the same.

“Hotch,” Emily calls over to him. “I’m surprised that you decided to come to a thing like this.”

“Why?” he asks in a very serious tone, and she stares uncertainly at him until there is a slight uptick to the corner of his lips.

“Not really your scene,” she answers finally.

“Not really yours either,” he tells her. 

“Oh, and what do you think is my scene?” she says, not shying away from the flirty tone in her voice. 

“The park,” he responds, making her laugh fiercely.

“It wasn’t always,” she says as Garcia appears from behind a row of cars. 

“Emily! Hotch! I’m so glad we’re all doing this! It’s just been case, case, sleep, case! We haven’t had any time for fun and team bonding!” Penelope squeals excitedly, putting her arm around Emily’s back as they walk in together. Emily looks back at Aaron happily and sees the smile on Aaron’s face reaching into his dark and lovely eyes. 

Once inside the bar, the three of them join the rest of the team at a table as they all drink and eat snacks, chatting about their lives and telling funny stories about one another that Emily thoroughly enjoys though the only person to call out Hotch in any of these stories is Rossi. Several times, she catches herself almost speaking of Declan or throwing in a frisbee joke, but she is very good at holding her tongue. After so many years of lying, she has truly become an expert in that regard. 

Eventually, JJ goes to destroy some guys at darts, and Reid overhears some geeks giving incorrect facts on some subject that he loves and has to correct them. Garcia drags Derek onto the dance floor, and Rossi goes to flirt at the bar with a woman he says looks uncannily similar to his second ex-wife. And just like that it is Aaron and Emily alone at the table. 

“You didn’t tell any stories, Hotch,” she says, sipping her red wine. 

“Neither did you,” he says as his eyes stare deeply into hers, asking the questions he doesn’t feel comfortable asking. 

Before she continues the conversation, she stands and moves into the chair closest to his. She can feel him watching her, so she gives him a moment before meeting his eyes. When she does, there is just a hint of crimson in his cheeks. It could be mistaken for being caused by the heat in this sweaty bar, but by the way he looks away she knows it is not. 

To fully gain his attention, she leans in closer and asks, “Why don’t you tell me a story, Aaron?” 

“I don’t think I can,” he answers. 

“Just give it a try.”

“Emily,” he mutters, and she shakes her head and smiles. 

“It doesn’t have to be a story that actually happened. I imagine you can come up with something enticing.” When he doesn’t say anything and looks away uncomfortably, she decides that she will instead. “Well, I can tell you a story that isn’t true.” The music in the bar is loud and the people are louder, so Emily leans toward him. It would look perfectly normal to anyone else, but the way that both of their hearts begin to race is anything but normal. Except it has become standard for them when they are around each other. 

“The story?” he asks, after Emily is quietly thinking for a moment. 

“Once upon a time, in a world that looks almost identical to the one we’re in today, I called a man I met at the park, a man I don’t know at all, and he answered,” she begins. Her voice is quiet and husky, and feeling a bit slippery from her drink. 

“Of course,” Aaron says, meeting her eyes. They both know she would have called and he would have answered, and this is how it would have gone. 

“We met at a bar. I wore my most flattering blouse and my favorite jeans, and he wore a blue, short-sleeved polo shirt that fits him just right and cute jeans that display a cute—”

“Prentiss!” he stops her, a bit too loud, but no one notices them over the music. “This is very unlike you.”

“This may be unlike Agent Prentiss, but this is very much like Emily. Besides, it’s fictional. Let me tell my story,” she says firmly, and he clenches and unclenches his jaw—another welcome sight—and doesn’t stand in the way of her continuing her story. “I had red wine, and he had a beer. We drank and ate,” she says. “I steered clear of the onion rings and opted for chips instead. Though I definitely wanted the onion rings, I wanted something else more,” she pauses to take a bite of an onion ring, which she had been snacking on all night. “Eventually, he got loose enough to dance, and we did until closing time. He walked me out to my car and…” Emily leans in closer to his ear to say the last bit. It’s not really to not be overheard because of how loud it is. Emily just wants to throw him off his game. She wants to be as intimate as possible. She wants to blame the alcohol on the loss of her inhibitions, but she holds her drink too well for that. 

“And?” Aaron asks, and she smiles next to his ear. He is engaged. 

“And he opened my car door. I climbed in and drove away,” she says, and the huff that Aaron releases makes her laugh hard. 

Her laugh draws Garcia’s attention, who goes over and pulls Emily onto the dance floor. They both try to get Aaron to join them, but he won’t, intent on drinking his beer and eating his snacks at the table alone. It leads Emily to make one decision. She’s going to have the time of her life on the dance floor with the rest of the team, and she will try to meet Aaron’s eyes as frequently as she possibly can. 

And she does, making him smile or roll his eyes or, even better, look away many times. 

When she looks over a while later, she sees him talking hushed with JJ, all of the humor gone from his face. She leaves the dance floor, letting Garcia and Morgan continue their fun undisturbed. “What’s wrong?” she asks when she reaches them. 

“Time to sober up. We have a case,” Hotch says, though was already sure of that. 

JJ goes to round up the others, and Aaron nods his head to the side, drawing her closer. He drops his voice low, making her heart drop in her stomach. “There was one thing wrong with your story.”

“Oh, what’s that?” she asks quietly, thinking of the abrupt end. 

“I would have picked you and dropped you off,” he says, and she has to bite the inside of her lip to keep from smiling. 

“Who said it was you?” she asks as the others join them and they separate. 

Leaving the bar minutes later, Emily and Aaron are the last to walk out the door. His hand touches the small of her back briefly, and her insides warm in response. She looks back at him to meet his eyes and finds their mouths very close as she watches his lips say, “It was definitely me.”

Chapter Text

The cases go on, and the flirtation returns to nothing but too much eye contact and standing too close and thinking too much of the other. 

The case with Tobias Hankle starts like anything else, and it showed no early sign that it would become what it did. But now, Reid is missing and being projected onto the computer. He looks bad, all of this looks so bad. JJ is jittery, traumatized from those dogs and from losing Reid. Neither Emily nor Hotch blame her though. Emily blames Hankle and Hotch blames himself. 

This is hard. Everything they’re seeing, and the fear for Reid. He’s a kid, a genius kid. He doesn’t deserve any of this, and it makes Emily want to scream, but she knows better than that. She must remain clear-headed and deal with all of the emotions from this later. She is very skillful at that, after all. Too skillful, it seems. 

“Emily,” JJ says. 

“Yeah,” she says calmly.

“How come none of this gets to you?” JJ asks, and Emily’s first thought is that she couldn’t be more wrong. 

“What do you mean?” Emily asks instead. 

“You came off a desk job, now suddenly you're in a field, surrounded by mutilated bodies and you don't even flinch,” JJ says, and Emily is trying to think of a response that isn’t I’ve been through worse when Aaron appears behind her. 

“She’s right. You've never blinked,” he says, and just like that his distrust of her is back in full force, and it takes way too much of her not to prove that she is trustworthy and instead to try to sound nonchalant. 

“I... guess... maybe... I can compartmentalize better than most people,” she says, and it even sounds stupid to her own ears though it isn’t exactly a lie either. She is great at compartmentalizing. She just had a lot of practice to get there. The suspicion in Aaron’s eyes is strong as he and JJ walk away, leaving Emily standing uncomfortably in the bathroom. Her focus has to Reid and no one and nothing else. She can do this. Still, not thinking of Aaron is not exactly easy .

The case progresses leading Aaron to ask a question no one is immediately ready to answer. “Everybody, right now, what's my worst quality?” After a moment of silence, he says, “Okay, I'll start. I have no sense of humor.” Emily would be willing to argue that in any of the other situations.

“You’re a bully,” JJ says, and Emily knows that one is right. 

“I’m a bully,” he agrees. 

“You can be a drill sergeant sometimes,” Derek chimes in, and Aaron agrees. 

The next words leave Emily’s lips before she even processes them, which really is not like her, “You don't trust women as much as men.” They are honest words though.

Without fanfare, Hotch agrees and says, “Okay, good. I’m all of these things. But none of you said that I ever put myself above the team, because I don't, ever. Reid and I argued about the definition of classic narcissism, and he knew that I would remember that. And he also quoted Genesis chapter 23, verse 4. Read it.”

“I am a stranger and a sojourner with you. Give me property, forbear a place among you that I may bury my dead out of my sight,” JJ reads. 

“He wouldn’t get it wrong unless it was on purpose,” Aaron says, and just like that a lead leads them to where they need to be. 

To Spencer. He is alive and as well as can be expected, and they are heading home. 

On the plane ride home as the others sleep, Emily stares out the window, thinking of what the team has been through and what she has been through. The world is not an easy place, but she knows she doesn’t struggle with that as much as she should. What she is now struggling with though is her dishonesty, something that has truly never bothered her before. She is protecting Declan, and that is what matters. He comes first, and she will never regret that. Before though, it never even bothered her. Before Aaron and the team. Now, it does. Now, she wants to completely honest.

But she will always put her son first. She knows that it will never be easy.

Chapter Text

After so much team bonding and so many successful cases, Emily’s resignation comes as a shock to everyone, including herself. The only person that is unsurprised is Aaron because he knew why. She is protecting him. She wouldn’t betray him, and Strauss had certainly tried to get her to. 

That first meeting with her had been surprising but also enlightening. It explained it all, and it made Emily so angry. But she didn’t show it. She refused Strauss and she tendered her resignation to Aaron as professionally as possibly. She had no desire to draw up feelings beyond the professional with all that was happening. 

At the same time, it turns out, he had put in for a transfer to protect the team from Strauss wielding any more of her hatchet, leaving Rossi to lead an unsuspecting team. 

But then a serial killer started murdering women and removing their hearts, and the team suffered whiplash with the monstrosity of the case and the team changes especially since Strauss had insisted on tagging along. The phone call Aaron receives from a team struggling with a devolving killer taking more women and seemingly using a child to do it, forcing him to think past himself and the team and to the people they help and the lives they save when they are working together. He thinks of how his son calls him a superhero, and immediately he thinks of Emily. Not that she had ever actually left his mind since her sudden resignation and his realization of why. 

He had her address from her file, and he was driving to her apartment before he even really processes it. Being a Monday around noon, he is expecting to immediately confront Emily once he rings the door, and he tries to prepare for that in his mind. Somehow, Dylan opening the door makes the whole situation immediately more difficult. “Agent Hotchner,” the teen boy says, opening the door wider for him. 

“Dylan,” Aaron responds, stepping past him into the entryway of their apartment. 

“He insisted on staying home if I was going to resign,” she says, stepping out of a hallway. “I stopped arguing with him about it when he kept arguing back.”

“Why are you here, Agent Hotchner?” Dylan asks seriously, protectively. 

“I’m going back. I want your mom on that plane with me,” Aaron says, firm but kind. 

“Good,” Dylan says before disappearing up the staircase. 

“Hotch. I don’t think Strauss is just going to stop coming after you or stop trying to use me to come after you just because we go to work this case,” Emily says, standing tall a few feet from him. 

“Maybe not, but I can handle that,” Hotch says. 

“Aaron, she’s the reason I got the position. I don’t think--”

Aaron takes a step closer to her and says, “I don’t care. You were right when you said you deserve this position, that you belong at the BAU. The team needs you.” Emily sighs, but doesn’t argue, still clearly unsure. “Come to Milwaukee. I'll make you a deal: If your ready bag isn't here, packed, I won't bug you anymore. If it is, I want you on that plane with me. One more case.”

Again, she sighs, but she also nods. “I already turned in my badge and my gun.”

“That’s just hardware,” Aaron says with a smile as he looks into her eyes. He knows that if it is only one more case for him, if he can’t work it out with Strauss, it won’t be just one more case for Emily. She has a great career ahead of her. 

Behind them, Dylan clears his throat, and Aaron looks up at him, having not noticed him return. “Here’s your bag, Mom.”

“Thank you,” she says, turning her full attention to him and taking the bag from his hands. “I’ll be careful.”

“I know. I’ll call Grandma or Grandpa if I need anything,” Dylan says before his mom can instruct him. “And I promise I’ll go to school tomorrow whether you are back from the case or not.”

“Good. Don’t you go start a pattern of defying me,” she says quietly, and Aaron looks away because he feels like he’s violating a private moment.

“I was just doing what you were doing. Be safe, Mom,” Dylan says and kisses his mom’s cheek. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” she says, grabbing her things and following Aaron out the door. 

“How did we get the plane when we’re both off the team?”

“Garcia,” he says, and she laughs. 

“Of course.”

The drive to the airport is quick and quiet as Emily reads the casefile that Aaron had already read a few times. Once on the plane, the two of them discuss the profile, the victims, and the child he is using to get the women to trust him. But it isn’t long before a lull happens in the conversation, and it’s uncomfortable as both of them have things to say other than the questions they aren’t sure they have the place to ask. Mulling over these questions, they both come to a conclusion simultaneously that the other would rather them just ask, so they do, at the same time. 

“Why did you resign?” Aaron asks.

“Why did you ask for a transfer?” Emily asks at the same moment.

Aaron grin as Emily chuckles at themselves. “Do you want to go first?” she asks, but he looks at her with the obvious opinion that he does not. “Fine, I will,” she says. “I resigned because I wasn’t going to do what Strauss wanted, and I wasn’t going to let her get the chance to force me or fire me.”

“I doubt anyone can force you to do anything,” he says. “And I wouldn’t have let her fire you.”

“You were transferring,” she says, unsuccessfully trying to ignore how wanted that makes her feel. He nods, not going to argue with her. “So, why transfer?”

“My marriage,” he says before thinking. When Emily raises her eyebrow at his statement, he continues, “My ex-wife, Haley, left me because of the job. I get why she did it, and I’m not mad or even really upset about it anymore. She’s moved on and…” He drifts off as he stares into Emily’s eyes a message passing through them, and so have I . “But she made good points then. About the time that I missed with my son. About him growing up. About how closed off this work made me. All of it compounded with Strauss, I put in for a transfer.” The way he says all of this--strong and sure, but incomplete--makes Emily timid but also gives her the desire to reach out for his hand. She does not. 

“You thought it would be better,” Emily says. “But it wasn’t.”

“No, it wasn’t,” he says. “Why didn’t Dylan go to school?” Aaron asks, changing the subject off of him.

“Because he’s a know-it-all,” she groans. “I told him last about why I was going to resign and he basically told me if I wasn’t going to do all it takes to do my job, he didn’t have to try for his either. He used how I always called school his work to get him to do his homework against me.”

The story makes him laugh and say, “The more I learn about the two of you, the more I see it. He really takes after you.”

“He does,” she says with a bright smile. “Of course, my sweet boy was right. I should have fought more, I just…”

“What, Emily?” Aaron asks, leaning forward. 

“I didn’t want to risk you,” she says. 

It is Aaron who reaches across the table then, taking her hand. “I can take care of myself.”

“I didn’t want to risk giving you another reason not to trust me either,” she says, the honesty too much when mixed with the contact that she has to stand. 

Aaron walks over to where she now stands in the middle of the plane’s little walkway. Gently, he reaches for both of her shoulders, and she lets him hold onto them. “When I told you that you deserve to be a part of this team, I should have said something else too: I trust you, Emily. And not just because you resigned. I trust you because I have since you hit me with a frisbee.”

“I’ve trusted you since I hit you with that frisbee too,” she says quietly, making him smile. 

“Please buckle up and be seated. We will be landing shortly,” the pilot says over the intercom. 

They are standing so close now, too close. They gravitate towards each other without even fully realizing it, and he loves it. So does she. 

She also hates it. The closer she is to him, the closer her secrets are to him. She feels wrong keeping secrets from him even though she has not known him long enough for it to really matter. Her parents don’t even know the truth, and they’re her parents. They’re dangerous secrets, and usually protecting the secrets and protecting the people she cares about from these secrets is enough. It isn’t with him. 

When they arrive at the police station in Milwaukee, everyone is happy to see them except Strauss, but she doesn’t really seem that bothered and they ignore her successfully. “How fast can you get us up to speed?” Emily says, diverting her attention fully to the case as Hotch does the same. 

“How fast can you sit down?” JJ says, and just like that, they are hard at work once again. 

The case leads them to standing outside the house of Joe Smith and his son, David Smith, as he seemingly holds a woman inside. 

“Call in S.W.A.T. Secure the perimeter. Wait for him to come out,” Strauss says. 

“Ma'am, he's holding a woman inside,” Morgan argues respectfully

“We don't know that for certain. We don't have probable cause,” Strauss continues

“She’s right,” Aaron states, albeit begrudgingly.

“If he’s got her, he waits 48 hours. He's not going to kill her yet,” Strauss continues. 

“He’s changed the pattern of the dump sites. Now he's changed how he abducts them. Do we really want to gamble that he's sticking to the rest of the model?” Derek says. 

“So let’s pound on the door! Maybe he’ll panic,” a local cop says. 

“But he could spook just enough to kill her early,” Aaron says before Emily has the opportunity to. 

Knowing what to do, Emily says simply, “I want to go in alone. The boy’s in the family room. He’ll answer the door.”

“No,” Erin Strauss immediately rejects.  

“We need to get invited in that door. He's looking for female authority figures. If he lets me in, I can signal as soon I see anything that gives us cause,” Emily argues, and Aaron doesn’t like it, but she’s right. Part of trusting her is trusting that she can do the more dangerous parts of the job. They’ll be right outside. 

“Technically you're not even in the F.B.I.” Strauss says. 

“All the better,” Aaron says, nodding at Emily. She nods back. 

“She’s interfering with a federal investigation!” Strauss says, but they’re all ignoring her at this point. 

“Well, if I’m no longer in the FBI, then you have no authority over me. I’m just a civilian knocking on a little boy’s door,” Emily says with ease. 

“Prentiss,” Derek says, passing her a gun.

“Thanks,” she says, starting towards the house. 

Aaron walks beside her. “As soon as you have probable cause, give us the signal and get out of there,” he says. His trust in her is complete, but so is his worry.

“Okay,” she says, and she goes up to the door alone. 

From the moment she steps inside the house to the moment they are slamming through the door, Aaron’s mind is clear, too clear. He can see everything that this perv could do to her. Everything he may say and everything she may say back and what all could happen before they are even on the porch. And yet, he is completely aware and alert. He’s ready to get her out of there and get her home. 

Seeing that boy--not much older than Jack and not much younger than Dylan--point a gun at her drops his heart to his stomach. Emily though amazingly talks the boy down, and she is walking out of there soon after. He walks out just behind her to make sure she doesn’t fall with that gash on her forehead worrying him. 

“Good work, Prentiss,” he tells her as she insists she go to the hospital and get the couple of stitches she will need there. 

“Thank you, Hotch.”

After he and Strauss have come to an agreement that keeps him and Emily both with their jobs, he sends the rest of the team to the police station to clean up their work area and then to the hotel to get their things, and he heads over to the hospital. 

He knocks on the hospital door the receptionist had pointed him to, and he hears Emily argue with a nurse, “I have had stitches before. I’m fine. I need to go back to my team.” He hears the nurse tell her that she has to stay there for an hour before walking out, and he walks in after her. 

“Ugh,” Emily sighs. 

“The case is done. We don’t need you right now,” he tells Emily. 

“Aaron,” she greets, her irritation dissolving almost entirely. “How is everything?”

“We still have our jobs. We saved a woman and a child, and the unsub is going behind bars forever,” he says. 

“How did you pull off the job part?” she asks. 

“I can be very convincing,” he answers with a smirk, and she smiles. 

“Thank you for letting me go in there, Hotch,” she tells him. 

“You had the right idea,” he says nonchalantly, and she agrees. “Besides, I knew you could handle it.”

“Because you trust me,” she says with a smile. 

“Yes,” he answers and smiles back. The rest of the team comes bounding through the door then, breaking their moment, but not their eye contact, at least not for another moment, and then they are pulled into another conversation about Strauss’ tactics and how happy everyone is to have them both returned. 

On the plane ride back, Emily and Aaron claim the seats across from each other that they had before, and everyone sits quietly. Only Reid can catch sleep as everyone else is still too uncomfortable with Strauss’ presence. Emily’s headache keeps her from reading or looking at her phone like some of the others, so instead she looks out the window like Aaron is. What she doesn’t realize is that he is also thinking about the person that sits across from him. 

Chapter Text

When the plane lands back in D.C., it is late and Aaron tells them all to get home and some sleep because he expected them at their desks bright and early to do paperwork. “Prentiss, could you hang back a minute?” he asks. When it’s just the two of the left on the plane, he says, “I’d like to drive you home.”

“That’s what I expect since you drove me here,” she says, and he just nods with the understanding that he only waited because he felt like he had to keep it a secret when he didn’t. 

They drive peacefully to her apartment, and when they get there, Aaron says, “Do you mind if I walk you up?”

“If you insist,” she says. 

“I do,” he responds gently, and they head up there together. 

At her apartment door, Aaron asks, “How do you feel, Emily?”

“Good. Happy to have this job again,” she says, leaning against the door.

“What about your head?”

“Like I told that nurse, it’s not my first time getting stitches,” she says. 

“But you definitely have a headache.”

“Oh, definitely,” she says and laughs. “Oh, shit, laughing makes it worse.”

“Too bad,” he says, smiling at her, wanting to continue hearing her laughter. 

Unlocking her front door, Emily says, “Wanna come in? We have leftover pepperoni pizza.”

“I don’t know, Emily--” Aaron begins. 

“Mom!” Dylan shouts excitedly, drawing their attention away from each other. 

She hugs her son and says, “I’m happy to see you too. But try and keep it down.”

“What happened to your head?” Dylan asks, noticing the bandage worriedly. 

“Nothing a few stitches and some Advil can’t cure,” she says. 

Noticing Aaron then, Dylan says, “What happened to my mom’s head, Agent Hotchner?”

Emily groans. “If you’re going to be interrogated, you might as well come in and eat some pizza.” Aaron agrees and walks in, following them to the kitchen table. 

“What happened?” Dylan asks as Emily pulls out the pizza box. 

“Your mom saved a woman and a child from a serial killer by convincing the child to let her in. Without her, we wouldn’t have been able to get inside,” Aaron says after sitting down, knowing that the child deserves the truth and that Emily approves of that. 

“You went in alone, Mom,” Dylan says, looking over at her. 

“I did, and I’m fine and so is the potential victim and the unsub’s son. I know it looks scary, but I wasn’t alone. The team was right outside the door. I’m fine,” she says, squeezing her son’s shoulder. “Cold or reheated?” she asks Aaron to put Dylan’s plate in the microwave. 

“Reheated,” he says, and she nods. 

“You’re fine?” he says. 

“Yes,” she says. 

“This time,” Dylan says, and she walks over to him and kisses the top of his head. 

“Yes,” she answers, and her son just nods. “Now, tell us about what you’ve done today on your skip day.” 

As Dylan goes into an explanation of the essay he spent the day working on and then the videogame he really wants to get with his allowance, Aaron listens intently. He thinks back to how he had walked in on JJ telling Emily how strange it is that she doesn’t blink given her job experience, and he had agreed. Now, seeing how the deeply concerned son moved on to topics typical of a teenage boy, he wouldn’t claim that Dylan doesn’t blink, but he does seem too prepared for a situation like this. He loves his mother so much, but a teen would normally respond to upset a bit more dramatically or even explosively, but when his mom instructed him to change the subject, he did, just like that. It’s odd, and it makes Aaron wonder what he doesn’t know about them. It makes Aaron wonder about Dylan’s father and think of his own. It isn’t something to ask now, but he wonders if someday he will be able to.

“Does Jack play video games yet? I don’t remember when I started playing them,” Dylan says, capturing Aaron’s attention again.

“You were 7, and I got you a PlayStation because I wanted to play it,” Emily says, sitting down next to Aaron with her own plate having already given him his plate and handing him a water.

Aaron grins at Emily. “I don’t think he plays video games yet. He still cheats at CandyLand, so I don’t know how fun he would be to play with anyways.”

“I’m used to cheating. Mom cheats at everything she can,” Dylan says. 

“I do not !” Emily announces defensively. 

“Sounds like you do,” Aaron says. 

“Aaron Hotchner, are you profiling me?” Emily says even more defensively, turning on him a little too dramatically to not be flirty. 

“Yes,” he deadpans. 

“Isn’t not using contractions a clear sign?” Dylan asks, obviously already knowing the answer. 

“Yes, Dylan, it is,” Aaron says, looking at Emily in a faux accusatory manner.

Emily stares with squinted eyes into Aaron’s knowing stare for several long moments before she breaks, “Fine, so maybe I cheat at games every once and awhile. It’s just because my son has beat me at every game since he was ten, and I have to humble him a bit.”

“It would be humbling if I was actually losing, Ma,” Dylan says, as he goes to the sink to wash his plate. 

“How often do you let Jack win, Aaron?” Emily asks him. 

“Most of the time, but not always. Have to keep him humble,” Aaron says, and Emily nods in agreement. 

“When do you have Jack next, Aaron?” Dylan asks, and he tells them that he’ll have him over the weekend. “Maybe, we could all go to the park or we could play board games here if the weather isn’t great.”

“Oh, Dylan, I don’t know if Aaron wants to share his time with Jack with us too,” Emily says nicely, trying to keep from inconveniencing Aaron. 

“That would be great. I’m sure he would love to, though he’s probably gonna beg for Emily to arrest someone again because he hasn’t stopped talking about that,” Aaron says, looking at Emily with open eyes to show that he really would like to.

“Guess it’s a date,” Emily says, then inwardly cringes at it.

Dylan rolls his eyes and says, “A playdate.”

It isn’t long before Aaron leaves, talking about how he’s going to have to be at the office before everyone else if they aren’t going to complain but saying that Emily is more than welcome to come in whenever she feels like it and he would just contact her if there’s a case. She promises to be at the office bright and early like everyone else and wishes him, “Bonne nuit.”

Later, that night, when Declan and Emily are watching one of their favorite cop shows on TV, Emily asks during the commercial break, “Why do you want to hang out with Aaron and Jack?”

“Because you do,” Declan answers simply. 

“I never said that--” 

“You never had to. Besides, Aaron walked you to the door after you got hurt, so I don’t think he’ll be too bad to spend time with, especially if you guys could flirt a little less,” Dylan says. 

“I make no promises,” Emily says and Declan rolls his eyes and throws him back into the couch. 

By Friday afternoon, they haven’t gotten a case, but paperwork has kept them busy. A couple of hours before the work day is over, Aaron leaves his office for coffee, and Emily goes over there too, trying to be as unsuspicious about it as possible. The others don’t notice but only because they're focusing on finishing their paperwork to get out as soon as possible. 

As Emily gets her creamer, Aaron pours his coffee and asks, “Looks like this rain is going to be continuing into tomorrow.”

“Ready to play CandyLand?” she asks.

“As long as you don’t cheat,” he answers. 

“I’ll do my best,” she says. “But you have to beat Dylan at least once.” 

“I will,” he says, and Emily has to hold in her laugh. “What time?”

“10 a.m. Don’t forget to bring the games,” she says. 

“We won’t,” he answers and returns to his office.

Soon, Emily is picking up her things at the office a little early in order to pick up Declan. “You ditching us, Prentiss?” Morgan asks. 

“I’m done with all my work,” she answers just as Aaron steps out of his office again. “Plus, I have a big weekend ahead.”

“Hot date?” Morgan asks. 

Emily’s eyes meet Aaron’s for a moment when she says, “Something like that.” 

“Me too!” Garcia says, walking excitedly into the bullpen and the attention is off Emily. She takes that opportunity to wink at Aaron across the room.

Chapter Text

Friday night, Emily gets Declan to help deep clean the apartment and get all of the games out of the closet and set out on the coffee table for tomorrow, so that everything will be ready for Saturday because honestly 10 a.m. is a little early on a Saturday for both of them. Emily only said because, well, Emily wanted more time with Aaron though she tried to convince herself it was just because she assumed he’s an early riser. 

On Saturday morning, Emily wakes up before her alarm, showers, and gets dressed in a pair of jeans and a casual black top. She considers curling her hair, but that would not be casual enough. 

When there’s a knock on the front door, Emily runs down the stairs, passing where Declan is sitting casually. At her raised eyebrows, he says, “I know you want to be the one to answer it.” 

She rolls her eyes and runs up to the door as Declan stands and walks calmly behind her. Emily looks through the peephole and then opens the door with a swing. “Dramatic,” Declan whispers. 

“Jack! Aaron!” Emily says, welcoming them in.

“Hi, Emily! Hi, Dylan!” Jack squeals as he runs into the room and hugs Emily’s side. 

“Hi,” Aaron says with a smile. “He’s very excited.”

“Not just him, I hope,” Emily says, and Aaron smiles at her. 

“Not just him,” Aaron agrees, and behind them, Dylan groans. 

“Come on, Jack. Let’s go find you something to drink before I puke,” Dylan says. 

“Why would you puke?” Jack asks, innocently concerned. 

“Because their flirting is gross,” Dylan says in an exaggerated tone that gets Jack to immediately agree. 

“Eww!” Jacks says. 

“Ew, indeed, Jack. Ew, indeed,” Dylan says as he opens the fridge door, telling him the drink options.

Emily looks back at Aaron, who has a small grin on his face. “Please, ignore my son. He woke up funny. I strongly disapprove of it.”

“He seems just like you,” Aaron tells her, making her smile beautifully. 

“Yes, well, I am blessed even when I’m also annoyed,” she whispers to keep Declan from hearing. “Would you like something to drink?” Aaron tells her orange juice, seeing what Jack was drinking. “Have you guys eaten? I had meant to make breakfast, but I didn’t wake up early enough.”

“Typical,” Dylan mutters, and Emily glares at her son’s sweet sarcastic smile. 

“I am going to destroy you at whatever game we play today, son,” she says. 

“No, you won’t,” Dylan says. 

“I bet Aaron will,” Emily says, nodding at him and Aaron only shrugs. 

“We will see,” Dylan says. 

“Jack had cereal, so we’re fine. Thank you, Emily,” he says, but there is a change in her face, indicating that she wants to make breakfast. “But I’d be happy to help you make breakfast, if you want to.”

This makes Emily smile. To be honest, that’s exactly what she wants to do with him, something domestic. “That’d be great.” 

As Dylan shows Jack all of the game options and talks about little kid shows, Aaron and Emily make breakfast. Aaron is in charge of the pancakes whereas Emily does the bacon and eggs. They make small talk about breakfast foods--their favorites now and growing up--that doesn’t seem so small, and even in the lulls in conversation, neither of them is uncomfortable. It’s easy, and neither of them realized until now how badly they wanted easy.

When the food is ready, they call the kids back to the table from the living room, and they eat together, asking the kids about school and their friends and whatever drama has been going around. It leads to a lot of variety in conversation that carries them from breakfast through five rounds of CandyLand, a couple games of Chutes & Ladders, and chaotic and exhilarating round of Hungry Hungry Hippos. 

It’s during a game of Go Fish’ when Jack’s story about how Aaron had coached his T-ball team to success. Emily laughs at the animated way Jack illustrates Aaron and then gasps moments later when Jack asks, “Where is Dylan’s daddy?”

Aaron gasps at that too and immediately after says, “Jack!”

“What, Daddy?” Jack asks innocently.

“That’s--” Aaron begins. 

Emily cuts him off with a hand squeezing his forearm gently. “It’s okay, Jack. You have every right to ask questions that you’re curious about.”

Dylan grins over at Aaron sadly and says, “My dad isn’t around. My mom has raised me all by herself.” Aaron had assumed this already, but still to hear it interests him, and he feels so badly that his son pushed him to say it.

“Why isn’t your dad around? Does he live far away?” Jack asks. 

Aaron again tries to get his son to drop it, but Dylan says, “He does, and that’s a good thing. My family is me, my mom, and my grandparents, and they’re all I need.” 

Emily smiles at her son. “And our friends,” Emily says and winks at Jack, making the little boy smile. “Now, what should we do next?”

They get Chinese takeout for a late lunch and play a few card games before deciding it was time to change to watching movies. Jack and Emily both stay awake through what would typically be their mid-day nap, so it doesn’t come as a surprise to Aaron or Dylan when the other two both fall asleep on the couch around five. Jack is snuggling into Aaron’s side and Emily’s head has slipped from back on the couch onto Aaron’s shoulder and then against his chest. Dylan looks over at them and laughs quietly before looking back at the movie and Aaron just smiles, knowing that Dylan was probably going to tease his mom for this later. 

When this movie ends, Aaron whispers, “Wanna pick the next movie?” 

“Nah. I was thinking about making dinner. Mom’s least favorite part of the day is deciding what to eat. Ever so often, I like to do it for her, except she usually stops me when she’s awake.”

Aaron grins. “Can I help you?” he asks. 

“If you can get out from under them,” Dylan says. “I’m gonna see what we have.”

Slowly, Aaron shifts a pillow under Jack’s head and then leans Emily’s head back onto the couch. He removes the blanket that lays over the back of the couch and puts it over them both. 

“Steak or chicken?” Dylan asks Aaron when he gets over to the kitchen. 

“What does your mom prefer?” Aaron asks.

“Steak,” Dylan says, and when Aaron looks over, he sees that the steak was already in the sink defrosting under water. Dylan notices that he’d see it. “I knew what you were going to say,” is all he says. 

“You’re a good profiler,” Aaron says. “What about the sides?” 

“We could make mashed or baked potatoes. Before you ask, my mom does not have a preference, and then we have a lot of frozen vegetable options. Technically, she hates all vegetables, but she insists that she loves them all because she thinks that gets me to eat them. Ironically, I love vegetables,” Dylan says, and Aaron chuckles. “For desserts, we have a lot of cake and brownie mix and ice cream, but if we’re going to make that, we can’t put it in the oven until the rest of the food is ready because my mom will wake up at the smell.”

“What’s your mom’s favorite cake or brownie mix?” Aaron asks.

Dylan looks at the boxes in the pantry, saying, “Excellent question. She will always eat brownies, but the cake type depends on her mood. But she was talking about wanting strawberry cake the other day, so?”

“So we go with strawberry,” Aaron says, and Dylan nods approvingly. Aaron looks at the steak that isn’t fully ready yet, so he goes for the potatoes instead. “Since your mom doesn’t have a preference: baked or mashed?”

“Mashed,” Dylan says. Again, he’s approving of him, and Aaron is sure that the boy is testing him, and he’s passing if not also acing them all. 

Dylan fills a pot with water puts it on the stove as Aaron finds the dish drawer and then the potato peeler. Once the potatoes are in the pot, Aaron goes to sit at the table across from Dylan. “So how am I doing, Dylan?” Aaron asks, and Dylan looks at him in surprise. “You forget I’m also a pretty good profiler.”

“Yeah, well, you are dating but not actually dating my mom, and you’re her boss who almost never even gave her a chance, and you were in charge of her and she still got hurt, and you are newly divorced with a young son.” Aaron’s eyebrows raise in surprise at the last statement. “Mom didn’t say anything about it, but it’s so obvious,” Aaron nods at that, both glad of the confirmation that she hasn’t been gossiping about his marriage with her son and irritated that he was so obvious. “You also obviously feel something for my mom, but you’re both acting so odd. Before you say it’s complicated , I know. I just don’t want my mom to get hurt.”

“You are a very good son, Dylan. Everything you said was right, including the complicated part,” Aaron says calmly, patiently. “I have no intention of ever hurting Emily or letting her get hurt. Something we both need to remember is that no matter what we feel for her, she’s an adult, and a very strong and capable and intelligent one at that. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen. I can tell you that I care about her,” he says. This fact he had admitted to himself a long time ago and yet saying it is shocking.

“What are your intentions with her?” Dylan asks. 

“I want to stay in her life--in both of your lives--as long as she’ll allow me,” Aaron says, and Dylan nods. 

“Does she know that?” Dylan asks.

“I don’t know,” Aaron answers. 

“You should tell her,” Dylan says, standing to go look at the steak. 

“I know,” Aaron mutters quietly before Dylan pulls his attention to the steak that is ready to be prepped. 

Together, the boys season the steaks and cook them in the oven. Aaron mashes the potatoes and Dylan pops a bag of frozen veggies into the microwave. As Aaron sets the table and lays everything out on the plates, Dylan mixes the cake batter and puts it in the oven once the steaks are out. 

“Why don’t you wake up your mom? I’ll start getting drinks. What will you want?” Aaron asks, and Dylan tells him a coke and goes into the living room excitedly. 

From the other room, Aaron can hear Emily announce clearly, “Five more minutes!” After a moment, he hears, “What do you mean dinner’s ready?” And then, “Oh, you and Aaron didn’t have to do that.” 

Then, Aaron hears, “Dinner! Yay! I’m hungry!” from his immediately energetic little boy. 

Moments later, Dylan walks into the kitchen followed by Emily holding Jack. Both of the latter look like they just woke up. Jack’s eyes are open wide but still puffy from sleep, and Emily’s hair, though she pats it down with her free hand, is mussed from sleep and her mascara is smudged but her eyes are so happy and beautiful. It stuns him quiet for a moment.

“This looks wonderful,” she says as she sits at her chair, where she had sat for breakfast and lunch, placing Jack in the seat to one side of her. 

“What would you like to drink, Emily?” Aaron asks. 

“It doesn’t matter,” she says.

“She wants red wine,” Dylan says as he hands him a wine glass from the cabinet. “The bottle’s in the fridge.” 

Aaron pours it and carries it to her. As soon as Dylan and Aaron sit, Emily digs into her meal and eats it happily, looking frequently at Aaron between bites. “Delicious, boys!” she says as she finishes her plate. Oh my god, do I smell cake?”

Dylan nods at Aaron, so Aaron says, “Strawberry. Dylan’s idea.”

“You two are too good!” she squeals. 

“What about me, Emily?” Jack says, and Emily smiles, reaching for his face.

“You are also too good, Jacky,” she says, and Jack looks pleased. 

“You deserve it, Em,” Aaron says, and she looks up at him. The nickname is new, and the soft way he says it is almost too much. Thank goodness the boys are there, if she and Aaron were alone, she might just--. 

“Thank you,” she says, and she stares into Aaron’s for a long time. 

Taking Jack’s hand, Dylan leads him to the living room and says, “What game should we play now?”

Emily smiles as she watches them walk into the other room. “Your son is a great young man. I hope I can raise my boy half as well,” Aaron says to her as he picks up his and Dylan’s plates. 

“You and Haley are doing a spectacular job. He’s a wonderful little boy,” Emily says softly, and he smiles. Emily stands to grab her and Jack’s plates to the sink. 

“Leave them, Emily. I’d like to do them,” Aaron says, and Emily shakes her head with a smile. 

“You’re my guest. If you are going to insist on doing the dishes, I will help you with them,” she says, and he agrees with a grin. Emily unloads her dishwasher as Aaron scrubs off the food and reloads the dishwasher, and she pulls the strawberry cake from the oven.

As they finish, Emily leans back on the counter and Aaron starts the dishwasher. “I had a great day, Aaron,” she says as he leans next to her. 

“So have I,” Aaron says, and his eyes are so open, sparkling and Emily’s heart races. 

Emily thinks to say thank you again, but instead she says, “I don’t want this to end.”

Aaron sucks in a breath sharply. He wasn’t expecting that--the truth. “Emily,” he says as he inhales another long breath. It’s what he wanted to hear, but hearing it knocked the breath right out of him. 

In that moment, his phone rings too loud. The sound breaks the moment and pushes them physically farther apart. “Hotchner,” Aaron answers the call. What he hears on the other end makes everything else fall away. “Is she alive?”

Chapter Text

“What do you mean? Garcia was shot? That doesn’t even make sense,” Emily says. 

Aaron blinks, trying to make sense of it. “I have to get Jack back to Haley, and then I’m going to the hospital too find out more about the surgery she’s getting.”

Emily nods, her face also immediately businesslike. “And I’ll take Jack to my--Shit, the one weekend that my parents go on a work trip together. I guess he could stay--”

“No, we don’t know if she was the sole target or the team,” Aaron says. 

“Right,” Emily says with what feels like on of the last breaths in her lungs. “I don’t--” 

“It’s fine. I’ll be right back,” Aaron says, and he leaves the room. Emily pours herself a glass of water, drinks it in one swig and then splashes water onto her face. She slicks her hair back a bit and pulls into a ponytail.

Aaron returns to the room with the phone still to his ear after Emily had refilled his water glass and her own. She hands his to him as he says, “Okay, Haley. Thank you,” and hangs up the phone. “Listen, Emily, I know this is weird, but I asked Haley if she would mind watching Dylan. I also have already sent patrols to her house and to all of the other team members and their family’s homes.”

“Aaron, I don’t know…”

“Haley has an air mattress when her sister’s kids have sleepovers and--”

“I get it, but--”

“Emily, Garcia has been shot, and I need you,” he begins and clears his throat, trying to keep the emotion out. “I need your help, and I know you need to know Dylan is safe. He will be safe there.” 

Emily nods and then it is her time to leave the room. She hears him speak to Rossi as she walks into the living room. “Will you come here, Dylan?”

He nods, high fives Jack for winning a round, and runs over to her happily. “What’s up, Ma?” 

“Something happened,” she says.

“What’s wrong? Did Aaron do--”

“No. Garcia from work, she was shot,” Emily tells him. 

“Is she okay?” Declan asks. 

“She’s in surgery. We don’t know who did it,” Emily says. 

“You and Aaron need to go into work,” Declan says. 

“Yes, but Grandma and Grandpa are on that work trip. Aaron asked his ex-wife, Haley, if you could stay there tonight, so you’ll be safe, but I know how weird that is, so I understand if--”

“I’ll go get my bag,” he says, and he turns to head upstairs for it. 

Emily grabs his arm and pulls him in for a hug. She whispers to him, “Declan, you don’t always to be so easy going. You can complain, and tell me what you want.” 

Declan pulls back from the hug and says, “I want you to get the bad guy who hurt the nice lady who’s become your friend, and I could get some information on Aaron while I’m at it.”

Emily smiles at his mischievous grin. “Why would you need to do that?”

“I like Aaron, but if he plans on continuing flirting with my mom, I need to know all about him,” he says and Emily smiles. 

Again though, Emily’s face turns serious as she leans in and says, “Don’t use the go-bag. Pack a change of clothes, soaps, and an extra toothbrush into your school backpack.”

“I know, Ma,” he says, kisses her cheek, and then runs upstairs. 

Aaron walks in a moment later and says, “I called everyone except Derek. His phone kept going to voicemail.”

“That’s weird. He’s never out of contact,” she says, and Aaron nods. “If you’re sure that it’s okay with Haley, Dylan and I would really appreciate it if he can stay there.” 

“I made sure it was,” he said. “I’ll tell Jack. I don’t think I’m going to tell him about Garcia, just that we have to go to work and Dylan’s going to have a sleepover at his mom’s.”

Emily nods. “Thank you, Aaron. For thinking of us when you have so much else to think about.”

Aaron smiles and says, “Of course, I would.” 

“Now let’s get the kids to the ex-wife to take down the bastard that shot Penelope,” she says, enjoying how it sounds even in such a frightening moment.

“We will get him,” he says.

“We will,” she agrees.

The drive to Haley’s house is quiet and awkward and sad as Aaron and Emily think of Garcia in pain, but Jack’s excitement to have a slumber party with someone who isn’t his cousin lightens the mood in Aaron’s car a little. 

When they arrive in Haley’s driveway, Aaron helps Jack out of his carseat as Jack comes to his mom’s side and puts his arm around her back and she puts her arm around him. “May not be a good time to make a joke considering, but I spent all day watching you flirt with your boss and now I’m spending the night with his wife. Very soap opera.”

“What will it take for you to stop teasing me?” she asks. 

Declan considers for several moments and then says, “Nothing.”

Emily grins at him. “Good.”

“Ready?” Aaron asks. 

“Are you?” Declan asks. “This should be really awkward for you.”

“It is,” Aaron responds and grins at him, the worry for Garcia clear in his eyes. 

Emily nudges her son. “Go, now,” she says, and then mouths sorry to Aaron. 

He shakes his head and walks up to the door with Jack in his arms and Emily and Dylan following behind him. He rings the doorbell, and it is only a moment later of Emily and Dylan making eye contact that says, This is so uncomfortable , and You kinda did this to yourself, Ma , and How? , when a pretty blonde woman opens the door, saying, “Good evening! Come in. Come in.”

Aaron lets Jack down and the little boy hugs his mom and runs inside. They all step into the entryway of her house. “Thank you for this, Haley. This is Agent Emily Prentiss and her son, Dylan.”

“Please call me Emily,” Emily says as they shake hands.

“It’s nice to meet you both,” Haley says, shaking Dylan’s hand then as he says hi as well.

“I wish it were under better circumstances,” Emily tells her with a kind grin. 

“Yes, Penelope is a fabulous young woman. I expect you guys to bring him down,” she says. “I know you both have to get going soon, but if there’s any way I can make this easier for you or Dylan, please allow me to help.”

“No worries,” Emily says, as she pulls her son into a side hug. 

Then, Jack runs in from the other room with a little tub of legos and pulls on Dylan’s pant leg. “Play Legos with me, Dylan! We can build towers and castles and then we can destroy them!” 

“Okay! I love legos!” Dylan responds pulling from his mom’s hug. He turns back to her and says, “I love you, Ma. Be careful.”

“I love you too, son,” she tells him. 

Taking Jack’s outstretched hand pulling him into the living room, Dylan starts walking away with his bag on his shoulder. “You be careful too, Aaron. Watch out for my mom.”

Aaron nods, accepting the task honorably as Emily says, “I’ll watch out for myself.” 

“I will still, Dylan,” Aaron says and Dylan nods approvingly, going into the other room. 

When Aaron’s phone rings, he steps outside leaving Emily alone with Haley and she steps closer to the blonde woman. “I owe you so much for this,” Emily tells her. 

“No, you don’t. Jack adores Dylan, so this will make him happy. Besides, Penelope is a good woman who deserves the very best on her case. That’s Aaron and you and the rest of your team. She needs all of you,” Haley says softly. 

“Still--”

Haley raises her hand to stop her and then grins and says, “If you insist on repaying me, maybe we could meet sometime. Aaron and Jack are both so fond of you, and I’d like to get to know you.”

Emily nods, thinking of how she would feel if the roles were reversed. She would want to know the woman spending time with her son. “That would be great. Lunch sometime?” 

“For sure,” Haley agrees. 

Aaron walks back in. “Emily, we need to get to the hospital.” She nods, shakes Haley’s hand again, and shouts bye to her son, who promptly responds. 

Quickly, Emily and Aaron are in the car racing to the hospital in silence except for the occasional phone calls that he picks up. To be fair, this is how fast he typically drives, just not with the kids in the car. They arrive outside the hospital and move swiftly inside, following the receptionists instructions to where everyone waits for Penelope. They turn the corner at the same time, not thinking of how it looks or caring because really it doesn’t look like anything to anyone but them, and like that, they are back in their work atmosphere. The case comes first, and now the case is Garcia. 

Garcia wakes up and they get closer to figuring out who shot her. After 24 hours of straight working and little progress, Emily goes up to Aaron’s office, knocks on his door, and walks in, closing the door behind her, “I think I’m going to go relieve Haley of teenager babysitting duty if that’s okay. My parents are back in town, so I’ll bring him there and come back.”

Aaron nods at her and as she goes to walk out, he stands, grabbing his coat, “I’ll come with you.”

“I’m fine, Aaron. Your ex-wife is incredibly kind,” she says, and he nods again. 

“I’d like to see my boy tonight,” he says, and Emily nods. 

He goes to follow her and she turns on him, wiggling her eyebrows and asking, “Should we leave at different times?”

He stares at her, attempting to lack amusement, but she knows he actually finds her incredibly funny. “You know, Aaron, that face is making that Emily-is-hilarious-and-if-we-weren’t-at-work-I’d-laugh-hysterically look, so it really makes me feel deeply appreciated.”

“I’m sure it does, Em,” he mutters. “I’ll tell everyone to go home, go out to the car, and wait for you to get your things and meet me there,” he says in a tone so quiet that it feels intimate. Despite initiating this conversation, Emily blushes. It does not go unnoticed by him. “And that face is your--” 

“Shut up, Aaron,” she says, though her tone is humorous, and she walks from his office to her desk. 

He follows a moment later and announces, “Everyone go home. We need sleep to figure out this case. Go.”

“Hotch,” Reid protests. 

“Go and sleep. I’m going to,” he says and walks from the bullpen, his eyes never meeting Emily’s. 

JJ grunts but stands up to go, so Emily follows after just enough time to not run into her in the parking lot. When she gets to his car, she climbs in and looks over at him, “Let’s go hug our kids.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says and pulls out of the parking lot.

Chapter Text

When they get to Haley’s, they are welcomed inside. The boys were watching a movie and eating popcorn, but as soon they walk in, Jack runs over to hug his father and then Emily, which makes her smile. Dylan follows and hugs his mom after Jack, and Aaron pats Dylan shoulder as he does.

“I’m going to take Dylan home now, Jack. I had a wonderful time hanging out with you yesterday, and I’m sure Dylan loved your sleepover,” Emily says.

“I did,” Dylan smiles at the kid and gives him a fist bump.

“Can we hang out next time I’m with Daddy, Emily?” Jack asks hopefully, now clinging onto his dad’s shirt after he picked him up.

“We’ll see, bud,” Aaron says to his son, kissing his forehead, and Emily winks at the little boy, making him laugh.

Dylan runs upstairs when Emily asks him to get his stuff, and with a friendly goodbye to Haley, they go out to the car to give Aaron a moment with Jack and Haley.

 “Did you enjoy watching a teen, Haley?” he asks, grinning at a lego creation his son presents to him.

 “I did. That’s one good kid, Aaron. Loves his mother, and was really great with our boy, who was off the walls the entire time,” Haley says, and Aaron grins.

“I’m sure he was. You gonna make it hard for your mom to put you to bed tonight, Jack?” Aaron asks, and Jack shakes his head.

“It is about that time,” Haley says, and Aaron goes to leaves, giving his son a hug and a kiss goodbye.

They walk over to the door and Haley stops him and says, “There is one thing.”

“What is it?” Aaron asks. “I don’t know, but Dylan--he’s been through something.” Haley pauses and takes a breath before continuing. “I put him in the guest room, right next to mine, and something woke me up in the middle of the night. A sound from his room. I went to check on him, and he was having a nightmare, Aaron. Crying in his sleep. He was telling someone not to hurt her, not to hurt Emily, not to hurt his mom. In that order. I stood there for a moment, considering waking him, but he calmed quickly after, and I thought he’d probably be embarrassed.”

“Yeah,” Aaron agrees. “Isn’t it weird though, Aaron? When he was talking in his sleep, he called her Emily first, a couple times, before calling her Mom,” Haley says, before shaking her head with a empathetic frown. “I just--I hope they’re okay.”

Aaron nods and then says something he doesn’t really believe but would like to, “Emily got hurt working the other day, a really bad hit to the head. That, plus what happened to Garcia, probably just got into his dreams.”

Haley nods and says, “Yeah, I’m sure. Have a good night, Aaron, and remind Emily that she and I will be having lunch soon. I’ll call her.”

Aaron gapes at her at the sudden change in conversation. Emily hadn’t mentioned that. “Aaron?” she asks, waving her hand in front of his face and then laughs. “What? Don’t like your ex-wife having a date with your girlfriend.”

“Haley, please,” he says with his classic frown.

“What?”

“She isn’t my girlfriend,” he says instead of any number of other things he should have to feel less pathetic.

“Not yet,” Haley says and laughs.

With a thank you, Aaron goes out to the car, huffing on his way. When he climbs in, Emily asks, “What’s wrong?”

“You have a date with Haley,” he says, sharing the information that is truly freaking him out.

“Ah, yes, we forgot to determine when,” she says.

“She’s going to call you,” he says, monotone and grunting a bit.

“Excellent,” Emily says and claps excitedly.

He starts pulling from the driveway then, and she waves excitedly at Haley as they go.

When they get to Emily and Dylan’s apartment, Emily says, “I know it’s late, and we’re exhausted, but I’m gonna have some of that cake we never got to eat before I sleep. Wanna join me?” Aaron almost turns down the offer, thinking of sleep and what’s appropriate, but then he looks at Emily. She’s smiling and her eyes are hopeful and perhaps a bit concerned, and then he looks at Dylan who looks unbothered if not a bit embarrassed.

“Sure,” Aaron agrees with a grin that spreads easily, and they go upstairs together. Aaron following behind mother and son, in a unit, like he was apart of what they are—their family.

Inside, Emily goes to the kitchen, and Aaron follows her as Dylan goes up to his room. She pulls out the vanilla icing from the cabinet and ices the cake quietly. She cuts pieces of cake for her and Aaron and carries them to the table.

“How are you doing?” she asks Aaron as she takes her first bite of the cake.

“I’m fine,” Aaron says as he puts another forkful in his mouth.

“This has been hard on all of us,” Emily tells him quietly. She knows he knows but she needs Aaron to hear her say it. “You don’t have to be strong for me. You deserve to be able to share how you’re feeling with someone else.”

Aaron looks at her for a long moment. She is certainly plenty strong but that doesn’t change his reservations. “What if I want to be strong for you?” he asks in a tone so intimate everything else falls away, and Emily is left just looking in his beautiful eyes for the longest moment.

“Talking takes strength too, especially for people like us.”

“Like us?” he asks softly.

“Strong, capable, enduring…protective, caring,” she tells him. “Sharing will just make us emotionally stronger. I think we both could use that.”

“We could,” he agrees, and she nods, reaching her hand out to his and holding it gently. And he begins, “I can’t believe someone hurt Garcia. She is the friendliest, lightest person I know. It’s unfathomable.”

“It is, and the fact that getting anything on him is so damn hard makes me angry,” she says, and the ferocity is clear in her eyes. “Everyday, we see people being killed. Innocent, undeserving people murdered in cold blood by psychopaths, but for it to happen to Garcia is terrifying. And poor Derek, he’s going through hell. I can’t imagine being him.”

 “I can,” Aaron says, looking down at the table, before he even knows the words had left his mouth. “I mean--”

“I think I know what you mean,” she says, and then she looks away, at the wall behind Aaron. “Earlier, when I said--I--I didn’t mean to put you in an uncomfortable position.”

“Emily, please,” he begins and she looks up at him, meeting his eyes again. “I didn’t want that to end either.”

“And then life and work ended it for us,” she whispers.

Aaron shakes his head, his hand reaches up for her face. The cake is long forgotten, and to Aaron, all he sees is Emily’s glistening, hopeful, fearful eyes.

To Emily, everything is forgotten, all she sees is the openness of his face and all she feels is the warmth of his hand cupping her cheek.

Aaron’s thumb draws the lightest of circles on Emily’s face as he whispers, “It just paused it. Nothing could end that but us.”

And, like that, he is leaning towards her slowly. She can’t help herself. She can’t think. He is there. Those darkly beautiful eyes, and those soft lips leaning towards her. She can’t stop herself. She can’t stop this moment. She wouldn’t even if she could. Her mind is only his face, his lips, his touch.

She leans further, and his lips graze hers. Just a touch--light and soft--and cursedly, her mind turns back in time. Back and back and back, and in just a moment, she can see Ian’s eyes clearer than she has in years. She can see his love and his anger and the family that she and Declan and Ian had, and she flinches back.

“Emily?” Awoken to present, all she sees is the concern, the sorrow coating Aaron’s face. “I’m sorry I shouldn’t have done that. I don’t know--I’m sorry,” he says suddenly, much too apologetic.

“Aaron, please, it’s not--it’s just--I’m not ready…yet,” she says, and that is true but isn’t really. It isn’t about Aaron. It isn’t even really about Ian. It’s entirely about Lauren Reynolds. She is dead, but she isn’t gone.

“I understand,” he says kindly, distancing his face and then pulling back his hand. The loss of contact is a shock to her system. “When you are ready, I’ll be here.” And she believes him. She believes that he understands and that he’ll be here in front of her—ready. It’s terrifying and wonderful.

The phone rings before either of them even has the time to think to return to the cake.

Aaron answers, and by the change of his face, she knows it’s nothing good. “I’ll be there as soon as I can, make sure the crime scene is secured and do not take your eyes off Garcia.”

“What is it?” Emily asks as soon as Aaron hangs up his phone. “The unsub showed up at Garcia apartment building. Garcia and Morgan are fine, but the two officers outside her apartment are dead,” he says as he stands.

“God,” she says and then she runs over to the staircase, yelling up at Dylan, “Get your stuff quick. I’m taking you to Grandma and Grandpa’s!” Emily turns to see Aaron there and tells him that she’ll meet him at Garcia’s.

“I’d rather drive you and Dylan, if that’s okay?” Aaron says, and she can read how his worry has changed—how desperately he wants to be there for her and her son, to protect however he can.

“It is,” she answers. They drop off Dylan quickly. Emily has a passing thought that she is grateful to be in a rush and not have to explain them to her parents, and they are off to Garcia’s apartment.

It’s time to get to work—to take the Unsub down. They can think about them later.

Chapter Text

Later comes, but it doesn’t come with a conversation. Instead, they think about them when they solve the case, and Aaron drops her off at home. They think of them when Emily squeezes Aaron’s hand before stepping out of his car. Aaron thinks of them as he watches Emily walk into her apartment building, and he thinks of them on each mile he drives home. Emily thinks of them as she walks up the stairs, and she thinks of them as she calls her son, telling him she will be by her parents to pick him up in the morning. She thinks of them as she changes into her pajamas and falls onto the bed, and she and Aaron think of them as they fall asleep that night. 

They get one day to think about them without a case to distract them. Emily spends that day with her son, starting with breakfast with her parents though she really did not want to and then she and Declan stayed the rest of the day at home. 

Declan speaks exactly once of Aaron that day when he says over a lunch of leftovers, “Did something happen between you and boss man?”

“Declan,” Emily says, sharper than is normal for her to speak to him. But when her eyes meet his, she softens, seeing the worry in her little boy that she has seen more than any mother should. “Kind of. I don’t know,” she contemplates before she watches a frown deepen on his face. “Nothing bad. Just complicated.”

“Yeah,” Declan sighs as Emily lets her eyes sink down to her plate. “You want to tell him, don’t you?” The words spoken by her son are nothing more than a whisper, but Emily's head snaps up at them nonetheless. She’s truly surprised. 

“I—what—why do you ask, Declan? You know I’d never—” 

Declan’s hand grasps hers across the table. “Because I do too,” he tells her in an exhaled breath. “I want to tell Aaron and Cameron and Jeffrey and Andrew and Jack—in kid’s terms, of course—and…maybe Charlotte.”

“Oh, Declan,” Emily says, scooting to her son and pulling him into a hug, kissing his forehead. “You know—”

“I can’t tell me dumb friends, or little kids, or strangers, or go by my name anywhere but here, but maybe we could trust Aaron. Even just a little bit,” Declan compels, looking into his mother’s eyes, and she can see the faith and the hope that maybe they can trust just one other person with the truth. Even a little bit of the truth. 

She knows that when she looks at Aaron her eyes say much of the same.“Maybe,” she hums, placing another kiss to her boy’s head. “Maybe.”

When Emily gets to work the next morning, a case iss already in JJ’s hands, and she sighs because the look on JJ’s reads a bad one. Emily sets her things on her desk before following the rest of her team to the round table room. 

Aaron steps out of his office and is walking alongside her. She looks up at him, and he quickly says, “Good morning, Prentiss.” 

She sees the uncertainty in his face and responds quietly, “Good morning, Aaron.” In response, the uncertainty turns into an uplift of his lips that Emily knows is a grin behind his stoic SSA Hotchner mask.

They walk through the doorway of the round table room, Emily followed just a step behind Aaron, and they sit side by side. With the briefest of nods from Emily to Aaron, they are fine and fully compartmentalized for a later time. 

Soon, they find themselves in Fredericksburg, Virginia, working a case where women are being brutalized and killed in the same way they were decades before. It turns into a question of which son was repeating the sins of the father, and it’s terrifying. 

Emily works the case though, easily, like it’s any other case. No one suspects that it’s affecting her. No one but Aaron. He keeps catching her eyes, and she know it’s not about the kiss or them. She sees his question of are you okay? in his eyes each time they meet, and it’s about the case—about how the case is impacting her. He doesn’t come to her about it though. She knows why that is too—to keep her secret. The secret he can’t possibly fully grasp. 

The case ends like it had decades before: a wife killing her husband before their child can be born to meet their murderous father, and the team is heading back to the office—piles of paperwork awaiting them. 

Emily is reading a text from her son at her desk asking if he can spend the night at a friends when Derek—the only other agent still in the bullpen—calls it a night. She responds to "Dylan," as he is programmed in her phone, with an okay, her usual safety reminder, and a wish goodnight. She looks up from the paperwork she is struggling to complete tonight, and she finds her eyes solidly on Aaron’s open office door. She sighs, knowing that thinking about this is useless. She is going to go to him. The question is how many seconds she wastes thinking about it. With a file of papers in her arm, Emily walks to his office. “Hey, Aaron. Can I join you?”

His tired face lifts. The light in his eyes greets her and she sits in the chair across from him. She knows she’s welcome.

They work for several minutes with only the scratching of pencil on paper in the air. But Emily breaks it with a huff, “Today sucked.”

“It did,” he responds. His focus fully on her now. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” she answers, but she remembers her son’s hope from the night before. “Ugh, maybe. I don’t know. De—Dylan thinks I should.” Fuck, she hasn’t slipped on his name in a long time. The raise of Aaron’s eyebrow isn’t about that though, she hopes. “He thinks I should talk to you more.”

Aaron’s head tilts. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

“I do…want to,” she answers in a whisper, too intimate to be just about the case. 

Aaron lift in a real smile. That stoic Hotch face gone, and it’s like the day at the park but more. “Then I think you should listen to your son.”

“I think you’re right,” she says, sharing a smile of her own. “But not here.”

“No, not here,” he agrees, and he straightens the constant stack of papers and slides them into his desk before he stands. “Can I walk you out, Agent Prentiss?”

“Yes, you may, boss man,” she says, wiggling her eyes on the last words, and he laughs. They walk out of his office, and Emily grabs her things from her desk. “I think that may be my son’s nickname for you, boss man.”

“Yours too?” he asks as he holds open the bullpen door open for her.

She turns to face him as he follows her through the door, a smirk on her lips. “Only if you want it to be,” she flirts, and the cough of laughter that leaves him is a wondrous shock to her. For a moment, she thinks there’s no way these gray halls have ever heard so beautiful a sound. 

“So where to, Em?” he asks, in step alongside her.

“Chinese at my place?” 

“Perfect,” he tells her. He walks her to her car, holding the door as she climbs in. “I’ll get the food and meet you there, Agent Prentiss”

“Okay, Hotch,” she answers with a wink. She watches him walk the few steps to his car and heads—where Aaron is also going—home.

Chapter Text

Emily is home and inside quickly. The anxiety of it soon being just her and Aaron in her apartment has the butterflies taking flight in her stomach. The lump in her throat is also telling her how much she is not prepared to talk about the truth, even with Aaron—even though she knows in her gut and in her heart that she can trust him. It’s hard to break a decade-long tradition born out of the need for her son’s and her own safety. Declan had said just a little , and so that is what Emily decides she will do. She will talk to Aaron, even just a little bit.  

She is straightening up her apartment when there’s a knock on the door, and she is quick to answer it. She finds Aaron’s grinning face on the other side of the door with Chinese take out in his hands. 

Emily steps aside, so Aaron can walk past her and place the food on her kitchen table. After handing over plates and pouring water glasses, Emily and Aaron sit together at the table. “Thank you for the meal, Aaron.”

He just smiles, and she is reminded how much she loves to see his face outside of work and the way the lack of stress and responsibility changes him. She hopes that whatever she manages to tell him tonight doesn’t result in her never seeing him like this again. For the briefest moment, she worries maybe he won’t even want to see her at work masked in his stoic professional face, but the trust she feels for him overwhelms the thought. 

“Thank you for having me, Em,” he says softly, taking a bite of orange chicken. “I guess Dylan’s with your parents.”

“A slumber party at Andrew’s actually, though he always gets bent out of shape when I call his sleepovers slumber parties,” Emily tells him between bites, falling into the ease of talking about her son. 

Aaron laughs. “I’m sure I wouldn’t have liked that either at his age.”

“How’s Jack?”

“Good. I talked to him on my way here. He’s got some class party tomorrow for doing good on a food drive. He really wants me to come,” Aaron says, a little sad in the last sentence. 

“If we don’t get a case—” Emily says, grasping his hand comfortingly in hers.

“Yeah,” he answers. “Sometimes, this job really sucks.”

“It does sometimes,” Emily says. “It can be good too, really good. When we save the victims, when we save the day, when we get justice for the families. And we did do some of that today.” 

“But it still sucked,” Aaron huffs with a sympathetic grin. There’s a long pause where they eat their meal in a silence that’s comfortable aside from Emily’s worry about what she will say. Aaron must sense that when he tells her, “We can talk about anything. It doesn’t have to be this.”

“Yeah, but I want to be real with you,” she tells him but her eyes are fixed on her plate. His hand is on hers then, drawing her eyes back up to his. “I want to be ready to be real with you, Aaron.”

“Okay. How about we try something? Change up the topic when it becomes too much? Something hard and then something soft,” he offers. 

“Kinky,” she says with a wiggle of her eyebrows, and Aaron’s corresponding cough of embarrassment brings a fit of giggles out of her. When the laughter calms, she takes a breath and nods, “Sorry, Aaron—”

“No, you aren’t.”

“No, I’m not, but that sounds like a fabulous idea, genuinely. Is there anything off-limits?” she asks. 

“No,” he tells her, spooning more food out of the to-go box and onto his plate. 

“Okay, I’ll go first: what’s your favorite color?” 

“Black. I don’t know why,” he answers easily, and Emily hums awaiting her question, but instead he continues. “No, I do know why. I remember reading somewhere—or maybe it was Reid who told me—that the color black isn’t a color at all but the lack of color. That you know that because outer space is black and outer space is nothingness. With all of the darkness we see, I like it because it’s nothing. It can’t be corrupted because there’s nothing to corrupt.” 

When he finishes his explanation, Emily smiles brightly at him. “Plus you look totally hot in black,” she says, but the teasing tone is gone. 

“Well, I’m not the only one,” Aaron says, and a blush dances across Emily’s cheeks. “What’s your favorite color?”

“Purple,” she tells him easily. “It reminds me of…” Images of purple flowers in the hands of a curly-headed toddler prancing around the courtyard of a villa in Tuscany. “…my son.”

Aaron had caught the way Emily’s eyes had clouded. Saw the pain and love in them, as clear as day. Could see her looking back through time and space. In her eyes, he couldn’t see what she saw, but he knew what she saw meant too much. 

So he says quietly, “Purple is a good color on you.”

Startled back from her reverie, Emily laughs loud. “I’m glad you think so. Perhaps I should buy more purple clothes.” Aaron shrugs with a smirk across his face. “Alright, Aaron. Speaking of sons, what does Jack think of me?”

Aaron’s answer is quick and sure. “He likes you and Dylan a lot. He’s always asking to see you both, to come over here or go to the park or the movies, and he loves talking about the takedown at the movie theater. I don’t know how often he’s told that story at this point.” 

Emily smiles into the memory of that day. “That feels like yesterday and years ago at the same time,” she says, gone in the thought of her hand in his in that movie theater.

“If the day after never happened, do you think we would ever be having this conversation?” Aaron says in a murmur, reaching for her hand.

She takes it and says, “I don’t know. I know I can never trust easy, especially not with this, but I trusted you quick. So I don’t know. But knowing how so many trust you completely at work and how many people you’ve saved helps.”

“I’m just grateful you can’t throw a frisbee with any aim,” Aaron says as he squeezes her hand. 

“Maybe I have perfect aim,” she says with a smirk though they both know she’s lying, and Aaron laughs. 

“With a gun, yes. A frisbee?” Aaron shakes his head as she chuckles. 

The seriousness settles on her face quickly after that, and Emily takes the moment to stand. She pours herself another glass of water and downs it as Aaron watches silently. She is preparing to ask a hard question, and he knows it. 

Emily turns back to Aaron and looks him directly in the eye. “What if the truth puts you in danger?” There is a pause between each word, as the fear in the question fills the air around them. 

Aaron stands slowly after she asks. She’s afraid, and he knows how to put her at ease. “Then, Em,” he begins as he takes measured steps towards her across the kitchen, “we handle it together.”

“You didn’t sign up for this,” she says quickly, leaning back against the counter.

It’s then he reaches her, standing not even an arms distance away. Any closer and they’d be breathing the same air. Any farther and she’d be able to look away. 

“I would have. Besides, I’m signing up now.” The words rumble from his chest, past his lips, and makes Emily’s lips part in surprise. 

“You don’t have any idea,” she says as a rush of breath leaves her lungs. “I’ve lied to you. I’ve lied to the team. I’ve lied to my parents. You don’t know the truth. You can’t know what you’re signing up for.”

“But I am. Give me the damn pen, Em. Because I’m in this, whatever it is.” 

Her head tilts in confusion. She can’t understand how he can trust her. He shouldn’t trust her. But for some reason, he always has. 

“Why?” 

Aaron takes the smallest step forward now. “It’s my turn to ask the question, Emily.” His eyes search her face. That little intake of breath, the lip caught under her teeth, the wide ponderance in her eyes. She’s waiting for him to ask and so he does. “What truth do you want to tell me?”

Her eyes drift down. To his lips speaking the words, to the bob of his Adam’s apple, to his relaxed, unclenched jaw. She realizes then, for the first time, he really is in this with her. He just doesn’t know what this is yet. 

“Everything.”

Chapter Text

“I want to tell you everything.”

The words are so raw, so true that Aaron just cups her cheek and nods. “I’m ready to hear whatever you’re ready to share.”

She leans into his touch, pressing her lips into his palm and mumbling, “Come with me to my bedroom?”

Aaron’s hand slides from her face then, and Emily captures it with her own. “Yes, ma’am,” he whispers, and she tries to ignore the rumble of warmth it gives her deep in her stomach. 

The smile Emily gives him is soft, not showing any teeth, but reaching her eyes nonetheless. With his hand in hers, she leads them to her bedroom. 

Aaron follows without a word. In her room, he finds a clean and organized but lived in space. A towel hangs from the door that must go to her bathroom, a bra hangs from her dresser, and a fluffy purple blanket lays rumpled on her bed. The walls and the comforter are a matching cream, and there’s a picture of Emily and Dylan on her nightstand, when he must have been 10. Seeing this altogether, he gets why she brought him in here. It’s a cocoon. Safety. And she’s bringing him inside.

She gestures to her bed for him, and he sits on the edge near the foot of the bed. He watches as she goes to her closet, opens a safe and pulls out a stack of items. Files, pictures, passports, and a gold ring on a chain. Emily leaves the safe door open behind her, empty. She doesn’t look at Aaron as she returns to the bed, placing everything between them as she tucks her legs underneath her and pulls the blanket over her lap. 

“This is everything,” she says, her hand laying gently over the chain and the files. “The truth.”

Aaron nods, meeting her eyes and waiting. He won’t push this, and Emily warms with the realization as she begins. “I went to Quantico, right after Yale. I wanted to be a profiler. I wanted to understand everything, what pushed people. I did well, graduated top of my class.” 

Aaron nods then. He knew that from her file. This is where what he knows changes, and she can’t look at him as she speaks. “I was approached by Interpol before I even got my first assignment. They wanted me to join a joint task force, profiling and apprehending terrorists. They said that my skill at profiling and my knowledge of language would be instrumental in bringing down terrorists. I don’t think I even thought about it for more than 30 minutes before I said yes,” Emily shakes her head with a sad grin, running her hands through the soft blanket.

“This wasn’t in your file,” he says quietly, not accusatory but curious. 

“No. Because of what ended up happening, we had to fake the entire time frame I was in that role,” she says, looking up to his eyes and finding understanding and unflickering support. 

“I worked in an office in London with my team, profiling and very rarely entering the field for two years before they came to me with the truth. Why I was really hired. We needed to bring down the leader of a breakaway IRA faction,” she says, and she catches the quiet gasp and the widening of his eyes. “Ian Doyle. He’s a killer, an arms dealer, a terrorist, and I was exactly his type.” 

“So they sent you in?” Aaron doesn’t know who her bosses were, but if they appeared standing before him now, they wouldn’t be standing for long. 

“Yes. I was sent in as a young, successful arms dealer. I got into his inner circle. I got into his—” Emily breaks the hesitant eye contact she had been holding. She stares down at the space between them. About a foot of purple fluff atop the soft cream comforter and a pile of documents with the gold chain laying precariously on top. She fists the blanket, still angry at herself for doing all she did. 

He reaches over the stack of secrets and places his hands over hers. The tension leaves her hands, her body, herself. “You did what you had to do.”

The softness in his voice dissolves her disgust at herself, at her past, and she looks up again. “And a little more.” 

Emily turns over one hand to hold his while she grabs the gold chain with the other. She holds the chain and ring hanging from it between them. “It was about nine months in when he proposed, and I accepted. I moved into his Tuscan villa shortly after that. I was getting more and more information by the day, but they weren’t ready to pull me yet. I was starting to doubt they ever were, starting to consider running when I found my new purpose.” 

For the first time telling this story, she truly smiles, and Aaron knows why, “Dylan.” Her smile falters, and he guesses why that is too. “That’s not his real name.”

Emily looks away ashamed. “The only one who knows his name now—who calls him by it—is me. He should get to be him. I hate making him lie.”

“You're his mom,” Aaron says. The way her lashes flutter, he knows there’s more to that too, but it doesn’t change anything. “You’re doing what you have to to keep him safe. No one can blame you, and I’m sure he doesn’t.”

“I blame me,” she says weakly. Her dark eyes shine with unshed tears as she looks up at him from beneath her eyelashes.

Aaron stands then, and Emily’s suddenly terrified he’s going to walk away. She’s struck by how idiotic that is when he kicks off his shoes and stands next to where she sits. “Can I?”

She nods then, nearly too sharply and scoots over, just enough for him to fit firmly by her side, and he does. The files and the chain fall to the side as Aaron settles at her hip, slips his legs beneath the blanket, and wraps an arm around Emily’s back. With his other hand, he cups her cheek, holding her face to look up at him. “Don’t,” he whispers. “You did the right thing.”

“How can you know that?”

The answer is so obvious Aaron has to restrain himself from rolling his eyes. “Because I know you.” 

Doubt takes over her face for a moment, but she doesn’t voice it. 

“I was in the villa. It was a beautiful place for all the terrible that made it possible. There was this courtyard lined with these lovely purple flowers,” and Aaron smiles at the way Emily eyes drift to the walls but only sees beyond them, “and running around it chasing a butterfly, was this little boy. Blonde curls bouncing as he ran. I waved at him when he saw me, and I watched as he picked a handful of flowers and brought them to me. I swear, without even realizing it, I fell in love with him in that second and vowed to protect him no matter what.”

When Emily returns from her reverie, she finds Aaron’s eyes on her, bright and beautiful. It’s not the face she suspected he would make during this story, but she is grateful he is. “You became his mother the moment you laid eyes on him.”

Emily just grins at him as her eyes fill with joyful tears. “Yeah, I did.” With a shake, Emily returns to her story, her truth. “And a couple days after that, I met him formally. Ian introduced him as his son, and he asked me to take care of him. I played along like it wasn’t for me. After all, I was an arms dealer. My name there was Lauren Reynolds, and Lauren wasn’t meant for kids.” With a scoff, she goes on, “But I made him think he changed me into the perfect mother, and I kept gathering information and passing it along. I shared with Interpol everything I had, every single detail, everything but him, but the boy I vowed to save.”

Then, Emily’s eyes ghost over again but not in the warm way they had when thinking of meeting her son. Aaron squeezes Emily's shoulder and whispers simply, “Em…”

She nods. She’s still in the memory but in this moment too. With Aaron’s arm around her and her hand in his, she goes back into that villa the day everything went to hell. “I had a plan to get us out. But Interpol came early. I—Lauren Reynolds was arrested. Ian was arrested. As was always a part of the extraction plan, we were in different vehicles, they faked a crash and Lauren was dead. But I was alive, and De—my son was alive. But he was with a criminal that got away, wanting to stay in his boss's good graces, or to get leverage over him.” 

Emily sighs. “It took me a few terrible days, but I got away from Interpol’s watchful eyes. I found my son, and I took him in the night… but not without a fight. The guy holding him woke up, fought me, and I killed him. My son saw,” Emily looks up, deep into Aaron’s eyes as tears run from her own. She didn’t know what she expected to see there, but it wasn’t this. His face is calm and his eyes glisten with admiration. “He saw me kill a man. I hate that he saw. But… that was the first man I killed, and I don’t feel bad about it.” The look doesn’t change. “How can you look at me like that?”

Aaron shakes his head, a grin lifting his lips and a short huff of laughter leaving his lungs. “You’ve felt terrible about this for 10 years.”

“Yes,” she answers. It wasn’t a question. And it was far too joyful. 

“You’re amazing, Emily. You amaze me.” She pulls from him confused, but the firm hand on her shoulder holds her there.

“I don’t get—“

His voice is strong, deep when he responds, “You saved a child, and you still feel guilty. You protected a boy, became his mother without a second thought, and you still treat yourself like shit about it. As if you didn’t do more than anyone could have expected. You took down a terrorist, you saved a child, and you continue to raise him into a good man. You raise him good, and you still worry. I look at you like this because you are raising him to be good, because you’re good, and I’m damn fortunate to have you in my life. Both of you.”

She shakes her head, not in disagreement. No, it’s confusion. Not just in what he said but in the way it made her feel. She shakes her head like she’s loosening up the cobwebs. Dust fogging her thoughts with a decade of doubt and anger start to fall away. Not all of it, not completely, but she can feel it loosening. The loss of it is a weight rolling off her chest, and her shoulders relax. Emily leans against Aaron’s shoulder, as he leans them back on her pillows. 

With her head in his shoulder, she thinks back on their conversation. She looks for one piece, one thread she can pull to make this feeling—this relief—fall away, but there isn’t one. 

Instead, she says, as warm as his arms wrapped around her, “You never answered my question earlier.”

His hum against her hair is all of the acknowledgment she gets. 

“Why? Why are you in this?” The tender words fall from her lips. He captures them—the words and her lips—with the gentle touch of his own. There and gone just as fast. 

Her body sings with the rush of him flowing through her veins. He holds her tighter, so she can just barely look up at him. They stare into each other nonetheless. “Everything, Em. You’re everything. Somehow, I knew that from the start. I saw you without knowing a thing.”

“Right back at ya,” she mumbles into his shoulder, tears falling unbidden, as the exhaustion of her day and of the truth settles over her, combined by the warmth of his presence. 

“Bonne nuit, Emily,” he whispers as his hand soothes her hair.

“Bonne nuit.”