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When Hotch pulls JJ aside under the guise of getting coffee for the team from the hospital cafeteria, she immediately clocks something is going on. No longer is she the same person she was when she’d been the BAU’s media liaison. She catches the quick look he throws around the deserted hallway, the tension in his body and the unwavering decision in his eyes.
Still, when he explains in a low voice that the surgeon told him they were able to stabilize Emily, JJ can breathe for the first time since getting the call in Afghanistan.
Emily is alive.
As soon as the relief comes, it is replaced with heavy suspicion. Because…
“Why didn’t you tell me along with the others?”
And there it is.
A tactical, rational plan, laid out in front of her. To keep everyone safe, Hotch says, but all JJ hears is you will have to tell them that Emily died. A burden for her to bear, for as long as the case drags on.
Hotch watches as JJ processes his words. He knows that she can’t – won’t – say no to his plan. He knows JJ will do anything for Emily and she hates him for it. Despises him for abusing her ability to feel so deeply, and putting her in a position where she has the choice to either lie to the team and keep Emily safe, or tell them the truth and put Emilly’s life in danger.
JJ will always choose Emily.
(She had fallen for Emily mere months after they had met. Fallen deeply for this wonderous person who opened up and slotted into place within the team as if she’d never existed outside of it. Who shared more and more of herself with JJ in shared hotel rooms and during late nights of completing paperwork in JJ’s office. From the cautious longing look in Emily’s eyes, JJ had believed, hoped, Emily felt the same. But neither of them had ever taken that step to say it out loud.
JJ had been content, floating safely in the soft, warm friendship.)
JJ loves Emily, and she’ll uphold the worst lie of her life if it protects her.
The strategic part of JJ – the part that had filtered methodically through cases as a liaison a the BAU, the part that the State Department had caught onto and had been in part responsible for her reassignment – that part is aware that Hotch’s proposal is a clever move. This course of action will be their best chance at keeping Ian Doyle at bay, whilst the BAU continues their investigation. If Doyle thinks he has succeeded in killing Emily, he won’t come back to try again. (He won’t fail twice). In turn, the lack of Emily’s presence will take the target off the team’s backs, because Doyle won’t need to use them to hurt her anymore.
Still, JJ stares at Hotch in silence long after he has said his part.
“It could be for only a couple of weeks,” Hotch breaks through the oppressive air, attempting optimism. It’s an interesting attitude, coming from someone who has gone through the worst imaginable and came out a rigid realist.
It’s how JJ knows he is trying it on for her, to balance out the path her brain goes down, because she knows how these cases play out. She has seen it often enough to know the highest probability is that Doyle goes underground and lays low until he feels safe enough to make a move and make himself known again.
It could be weeks, like Hotch says, but it could just as well be a decade.
Hotch glances at his watch, and JJ can almost hear the hands of the tiny clock tick menacingly with the seconds, minutes that pass by in the weird stasis of the deserted hospital hallway. There isn’t much time for JJ to make a decision. There is not much to decide. JJ will bear any burden, if it keeps Emily alive.
“It could be our best option,” JJ agrees, and she hates herself for it.
Hotch nods.
JJ adjusts her blazer, hugging her arms tightly around herself. It doesn’t provide any of the comfort she craves. A cavity has opened itself in her chest, widening as her mind jumps ahead to the future scenarios she has just agreed to. It’s hard to breathe around, her lungs aching as she painstakingly drags the oppressive air into them.
She swallows and allows the slightest emotion to seep into her voice as she asks, “Why did you tell me?”
Hotch says he told her because she’s a person in a position outside of the team who knows Emily through and through. He tells her it’s because of her new connections, because of the abilities she has developed in her time away from the BAU.
(He doesn’t mention her position at the State Department by name. The changes he sees in her, they don’t happen when you’re just a liaison. She sees how Afghanistan changed her clear as day, whenever she looks in the mirror. The last slivers of innocence lost. The angles of her face sharper than before, her eyes telling the stories that she cannot ever speak of.)
Hotch squeezes JJ’s arm briefly, falling silent, watching her.
And with startling clarity, JJ realises that in a twisted way this might be the most compassionate position he could have put her in. Emily alive, out of reach, is painful. But Emily dead? It would break JJ in a way that she would not be able to come back from. Not even if Emily herself did return from the dead, weeks, months, years from now.
Hotch knows that. He knows JJ will do anything for Emily.
(He knows JJ loves Emily.)
…
They part ways when Hotch has filled her in on the basics. There are plans in place, arrangements with people who will transfer Emily through covert exfiltration to another hospital when the doctors give them the okay. There are steps to be taken after, when Emily has recovered, but from what JJ gathers about Emily’s condition, that is still a while off.
(She coded in the ambulance, Hotch had informed JJ, and her heart had caught in her throat at the sharp image of the narrow ledge between life and death Emily had wavered on.)
The ‘what’s next’ will partially be JJ’s responsibility to figure out. To make calls and meet with people who will get Emily off the grid.
But there are other matters to see to, first.
Hotch brings the promised coffee to the team in the visitors lounge, whilst JJ stays in the hallway, waiting around for the surgeon. Nausea swirls in her stomach as she paces, never losing sight of the door. She counts the seconds, starting again from the start when she loses her train of thought.
The door swings open. JJ freezes. The surgeon’s gaze finds hers, recognition in his eyes and he motions with his head, stepping to the side of the hallway. JJ floats closer, holding her breath. Her eyes fall to his lips, needing to read the words as much as hear them.
“She’s out of surgery. The first few hours will be crucial, but she appears to be stable. I expect it will stay that way, and she can be transferred later today.”
Waves of relief wash right over JJ, quickly followed by the heavy punch of dread. The whiplash of emotions has the nausea rising up her throat and she loses the contents of her stomach in the lone trashcan along the wall. The surgeon’s hand is instantly on her arm, asking if she’s okay, and JJ spits the last of the acrid bile out before straightening back up. She accepts a tissue a nearby nurse hands her to wipe her mouth, apologizing under her breath.
JJ takes a few measured breaths, pushing the threatening tears back, though they burn in her eyes. She wipes at her face with her sleeves and contemplates finding a bathroom to compose herself in. Ultimately, she knows that if she delays the inevitable, she will only make it harder on herself.
She has to rip the metaphorical band-aid off.
JJ thanks the surgeon and sets course for the waiting room. It’s like trudging through knee-deep mud, every step a task in and of itself. The hallway seems to stretch out infinitely, the artificial white light never wavering as JJ’s boots click against the linoleum. When the end finally comes in sight, her hands clench into fists, her knuckles turning white. She forces out the tension with a measured exhale, stretching her fingers, pressing them into her thighs.
One, two, three steps and she turns around the corner, slowing to a stop.
Hopeful heads perk up, staring at her, and JJ’s red-rimmed eyes drift past everyone. Derek, Penelope, Spencer, Ashley, Dave. Aaron. Thick tension thrums heavy in the room, backs straightening as they wait.
JJ swallows, and watches the news hit before she has even spoken the words.
“No,” Penelope whispers brokenly, shaking her head in denial.
JJ knows she has to say it. “She never made it off the table.”
She hates herself. Hates that she has to witness their hope die, the light in their eyes extinguishing. Complexions pale, tears rise, realisation hits and she has to watch these people – her friends, her family – try to comprehend that Emily is never coming home.
Spencer shoots up from his chair, face blank as he tries to shoulder past her, but she catches him with a hand on his arm and a whispered, “Spence.”
He looks at her, as if waiting for her to tell him something different than she had a minute ago. When JJ stays silent, tears spill over and roll down his cheek.
“I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye,” he tells her, his voice cracking.
A truckload of guilt hits her and she lets it run her over as she pulls Spencer into a hug, pressing her face to his shoulder. JJ wonders, vaguely, how they are going to explain to the team that they won’t be able to tell Emily goodbye.
There is no body to see or to whisper any last words to in the hope they reach beyond the grave.
…
The answer to that question has JJ thinking six words she never thought would cross her mind: thank God for Ambassador Elizabeth Prentiss.
As Emily’s next of kin, she’s the only one outside of Hotch and JJ who knows the full truth. But Emily was never particularly fond of her mother, and her team knows it. The Ambassador always has her own agenda and outspoken opinions she is known to force upon others. For once, it works in Hotch and JJ’s favour, and Elizabeth Prentiss becomes a scapegoat.
It’s how they can get away with saying that Emily’s body has been transported before anyone can visit her in the morgue: Elizabeth Prentiss has been notified of Emily’s death, and it was her request to move Emily to a funeral home immediately.
There won’t be a viewing, nothing but a closed casket to look at, because the Ambassador doesn’t want people gawking at her dead daughter.
It’s also how they end up with a big, flashy, government-funded funeral – one that will scream to Ian Doyle that Emily Prentiss is dead – instead of the cremation Spence utters like a broken record that Emily had said once that she wanted.
There is a whole different layer of guilt that piles on top of the mountain JJ already carries when she nods along to Penelope’s tearful rants, Derek’s quiet seething anger and Spencer’s frustration, all aimed at Elizabeth Prentiss. She witnesses the lack of closure eating away at the team, and there is nothing she can do about it.
(JJ can never return to a time of undamaged friendship, even if she’s the only one who can see the damage right now.)
…
Five days after Emily Prentiss dies on the operating table, they walk an empty coffin to a grave.
Other than the team, JJ vaguely recognises no more than a handful of the people in attendance. It’s Hotch, Rossi and Emily’s mother who each give a short eulogy at the cemetery. JJ had been given the option to say a few words too, but she had selfishly declined. She doesn’t even know what she could have said. Would people have expected her to profess her poorly hidden love to a woman who is not really here?
It's too quiet, when the last words have been spoken. The team converges around the coffin, each member holding a red rose that they place down carefully, piling them atop the lid one by one. A final gathering of the BAU with Emily Prentiss in their midst.
JJ stands beside Spencer, listening to a priest reciting a poorly chosen bible verse and she wants to laugh at how much Emily would have hated all of this.
Will. Her breath catches. Will hate this. She mentally repeats the mantra of Emily’s alive, she’s alive, she’s alive, on a loop until the words blend together. She stares down at the black, shiny coffin and tries to remember that Emily is recovering in a hospital in Bethesda, and not lying dead inside the dark box.
How many more lies can she tell before she starts to forget the truth?