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He reaches for her hand, and watches as her fingers slip effortlessly into the space between his thumb and forefinger. She twirls into him and lets him lead her: all at once, he takes in the familiar subtle redolence of florals, clinging to her clothes, a scent that he could identify anywhere; the pearl tinted shadow of her lashes on her cheek, there and then gone; the movement of her hair, raven and tumbling. She smiles, and he’s struck by how beautiful she is and how different it looks from before in heart-stoppingly equal measure as she floats into his embrace and allows him to put his hand on her waist, the contact a pleasant burn that sears through the fabric of her dress and the callous toughness of his skin.
As he moves with her, guides her— he catches a glimpse of her fingernails and notes that they’re chewed down again, shining a blistering red in the light as she moves in step with him.
It’s the moment he knows.
He had known already— the moment she blew out a breath; when she said she wanted to talk later; when she looked at him like that; when he caught a glimpse of her over Beth’s shoulder as she walked a slow, solitary perimeter around them all. He just hadn’t wanted to admit to knowing it, refusing to acknowledge the way that it climbed up into his throat and threatened to scrape its way to his mouth, the knowledge so sharp and bitter that he couldn’t bear to taste it.
At the sight of her fingernails bitten unevenly down to the quick, he doesn’t have the option anymore.
She’s leaving.
He doesn’t notice he’s doing it when he pulls her closer, just that little bit— only realizing it when she tilts her head back to look at him, and the angle is different. It’s a conscious effort to loosen his fingers from her waist, and he knows that she’s aware by the way her face softens.
He can’t remember, as his chest begins to ache with fear and panic with every step around the dance floor, when exactly it was that he and Emily came to know each other so well. When he looks back, all he can see are the little moments that built up to it: there’s her in his office that first day and again when they got back from the case, as determined as anyone he’s ever known. There’s her diligently showing up, never backing down. Her slowly building the trust of every single one of them, bit by earned bit. Her, through the glass of his office window, laughing. Her bent double over her knees, dark eyes focused on the latest victim or witness, walking them through a cognitive and holding their hand through the reliving of the worst moments of their lives with total compassion and grace— the reason he always sent her when he could. Her, showing up in his office doorway soaking wet. Her, in a hospital bed and him, knowing it might be the last time he ever saw her. Her, coming back to life. Her, and her, and her.
By the time she pulls away from him, drawn into a dance with Spencer, he knows what he has to do. He lets her go, and recedes to the edge of the dance floor with his eyes still trained on her.
It’s where JJ finds him, radiant in her wedding dress but looking no less sharp and perceptive than she ever does as she rakes her eyes over his face like she can read him inside and out. She glances back to where he’d been looking, and he identifies the moment that her blue eyes find Emily, too; when she looks back at him, she looks as if she understands exactly what he’s thinking.
“You know,” she says delicately, “it seems like Jack is having fun playing with Henry. Will and I are dropping him off at our house with my mom in a little bit and we could take them both. If you have something you need to do.”
He allows himself an amused huff that rings faintly of laughter, shaking his head as he looks up at her.
“How is it that you were ever not a profiler?” he asks, and JJ smiles.
“Between you and me,” she says, “that job involved a lot of profiling, too.”
He smiles a little at that, nodding his head. “I don’t want to impose on—”
“Hotch, please,” JJ laughs, shaking her head. Her smile slips and then she fixes it back on her face, just as knowing but a little softer, a little sadder, as she meets his eyes. “It’s what we do, right?”
He suppresses a shuddering breath and nods. “It is,” he admits. “Are you sure?”
“About Jack?” JJ laughs, waving him off. “He’s twice Henry’s age and has half as much energy. He’ll be fine.”
He nods, glancing across the glimmering expanse of Rossi’s backyard until he lands on his son— laughing and playing with Henry, the picture of the sweet and gentle boy that Aaron knows him to be.
“Okay,” he breathes. “Thank you, JJ.”
She smiles like she might have known even before he did.
He turns, catches sight of Beth across the grass, and resolves himself to what he has to do.
Emily sighs, looking at her reflection in the mirror of her bathroom.
She looks the same as she had yesterday. The same as she had the day before that, and last week, and the week before that, and when she’d first gotten back from Paris, and in the reflective glass windows at the row house in Dupont Circle when she’d caught a glimpse of herself and barely recognized the woman standing there.
She looks the same, more or less, as she had before Paris, too. She just doesn’t feel the same. She feels— has felt, since she got back— like Emily Prentiss is as dead as Lauren Reynolds, and all that remains with her are the shreds of them both left behind in the wreckage.
The Emily in the mirror reaches up and brushes a strand of dark hair out of her face; tucks it behind her ear and exposes a swath of endless cheekbone in the process. The Emily with her feet on the floor feels her stomach turn, and can’t profile herself effectively enough to understand why.
She thinks about the wedding. She starts broad: recalls the way the lights had sparkled on the glass and the expensive taste of champagne on her tongue and the festive fizz of joy that lingered between every song and every dance. All of that had been real, and all of it had meant something to her. She may be distant, out of body, someone else— but that part is among the shreds of who she is; that part is something that still matters.
She narrows in further: on the deep, spreading melancholy in her chest and the slow pace of her steps beneath her as she watches them from the outside. The wall is her own, she knows that. It doesn’t stop it from being real.
She keeps narrowing her focus on the memory until JJ and Spencer and Will and Derek and Penelope have all been carefully weeded out and set aside like flowers to press and preserve, and she’s left with a tangle of weeds so thick and impossible that she isn’t sure where the roots begin.
If Emily had to offer a guess, she would say that she started to care too much about Aaron Hotchner when she stepped into his apartment and found only blood. If she were being honest with herself, she would say that it happened much earlier— a moment lost to mundanity now, something through the blinds of the offices or dipped in shadow like molten chocolate or illuminated by the light of the truth that she had always felt this way, sort of.
She shakes her head and clears the memories like tumbling rocks. If she can’t rip up the weeds, she’ll simply have to take the flowers with her and move on. She thinks fleetingly of the way he’d looked at her and then she pushes that aside, too. None of it matters now, anyway, because she’d come back from Paris and found that everything was tattered where once it had been sewn together with the thin gold thread of hope she never meant to allow herself, and that was as appropriate a penance as she could imagine for herself— so, she’ll accept it as such and bow out gracefully while she still can: before things get bloody again.
There’s a knock at the door, and it pulls Emily from a reverie that feels more like a nightmare.
Later, she’ll think that maybe she should have expected it to be him. Maybe she would have, if she’d been paying more attention to the version of her with her feet on the floor and less to the ghost in the mirror. As it stands, she’s surprised when she peeks through the peephole and opens the door to a breathless, faintly wild-eyed Aaron Hotchner.
These things are a contradiction— or they would be, to most people. But Emily has seen him crawl under tables in stitches of laughter after Jack; seen his shoulders seize with undisguised fear on the day he was released from the hospital after being stabbed and had to go back to his apartment; seen him build himself back up just to break again; seen him smiling and grief-stricken. She knows him, even if she doesn’t know when it happened.
Still— she can’t quite manage to identify this expression when she looks up and sees it on his face.
“Hotch,” she says.
He looks back at her and she sees Jack in his features. From his side of the threshold of her apartment door, he looks at her and sees something shimmering and slipping away like summer nights that fade to fog-drenched dawns and cloud his vision, his reason.
She’s dressed in pajamas now, her face bare, and she looks— for a moment so brief and soft— like the version of herself who had shown up in his office once and refused to leave. But she’d been hurt then, too, Aaron reminds himself now. The innocence in her face had been an illusion, and she may not know it herself, but he does. He does.
“Emily,” he says, and something flickers on her face. “Don’t go.”
Emily blinks as the breath tears from her lungs like January, and there’s a moment of quietly settling gravity that stretches out so long he starts to wonder if she’ll respond at all, before she bites the inside of her cheek and says,
“Come inside.”
She watches as he does— still wearing his clothes from the wedding in juxtaposition to her own sleep shorts and threadbare t-shirt. She buys herself time by locking the door with slow and deliberate turning of her fingers on the bolt, and then she turns to look at him and tilts her head.
“Do I have a tell for that, too?” she asks eventually.
He doesn’t smile. “No,” he tells her. “Not exactly.”
Emily nods, feeling like she’s walking a tightrope instead of shuffling over carpet as she crosses the room and stands facing him in the impersonal center of a living room that she hasn’t bothered to decorate. It was always supposed to be temporary, until she found a place of her own. A house without cracks in the foundation.
She studies him for a moment, and then shakes her head.
“What are you doing?” she asks, hearing it come out soft when she hadn’t meant for it to.
Aaron looks down at the floor.
“Do you remember the first time I came to your door?” he asks.
Emily sighs. “Yes.”
It comes back to her in flashes— two apartments ago; her pulse quickening in her wrist; his earnest expression and the flash of something that had kept her here— in DC, with the team, with him. All he’d had to do was ask, then.
“Is that what you think this is?” she asks, still too gentle. “That this is going to be like that, and I’ll— I’ll still have my go-bag packed?”
There’s a part of her that hopes he does think that.
But Aaron shakes his head, presses his hands subtly together in front of him, and looks up at her.
“No,” he says honestly. “I know it’s not like that anymore.”
She bites her tongue, physically sinks the sharp edge of her teeth into the flesh to fight the instinct she has to blow a breath out of her cheeks.
“Okay,” she says. She looks up at him again. “How did you know?”
He looks at her, long and steady and dark. “I know you.”
Misplaced fury flares bright and hot in her chest and she scoffs. “Do you?” she asks, taking a step back and pressing her hands to the back of a kitchen chair, leaning in over it just for something to do with the building and restless energy she’s trying to contain. “Because I don’t know that I do.”
For some reason, this seems to ignite something in him and he nods emphatically.
“I do,” he tells her in a tone that reminds her of steel tables in interrogation rooms, so sure and steady that nobody would ever dare to argue with it.
Except for her.
“How is that—”
He takes a step toward her. “Don’t go.”
Emily tilts her head back, slams her eyes closed, and tries not to think about how it had felt to have his hand on her waist.
“Don’t make me do this, Hotch,” she says. She doesn’t mean for it to sound like a plea, but it does because it is. “I don’t know what you expect from me. It’s—”
She doesn’t look, but she does feel it when he steps slightly closer. It brings, first, a thrill of something warm and firelight. This feeling is closely and immediately followed by a rush of dark dread like churning ocean water putting out warmth with ice water and salt that ruins the soil all in the space of a second.
Emily shakes her head into the silence and swallows hard.
“You don’t understand,” she says, horrified to hear her voice splintering in the center.
“I do understand,” he tells her fiercely, and she’s surprised to find that now his voice sounds like a plea, too. She opens her eyes to find that he’s standing much closer to her than she’d thought he was: she could reach out now and touch his chest without so much as extending her arm, and he’s near enough to her that she can see his lashes beneath the prominence of his brow, or the shadow of stubble on his jaw in deep detail.
“I do understand, Emily,” he tells her, her name a breath on his lips. “I understand that you came back and you felt like nothing was the same. That you don’t feel like yourself and that no matter how hard you try to make it work, you can’t stop looking at that spot on the wall and seeing your own face. I know that the bad days are worse, and that you feel like there’s nothing left of the life you were building before.”
Emily glares at him. “Stop profiling me.”
“No,” Aaron says. “I’m not profiling you, Em. I’m knowing you.”
She lets out a sound that’s half-agony and half-fury. “You don’t know me, though—”
Later, he won’t recall making a conscious decision to say what he says. It’s more a thing that comes to his lips unbidden, spilling out to her in spite of his usual sense of complete control.
“I broke up with Beth.”
Emily stops in her tracks, her brain stuttering and her heart skipping a half-beat against her ribs.
“What?” she says.
He swallows hard, and his gaze darkens impossibly as he repeats the words, slower and more measured. “I broke up with Beth.”
There had been no good way to do it, but she’d looked at him like she understood even when he had no answers. In truth, that made him feel worse for doing it, but he knew he was right to anyway. He’d known all along what this was— what it was about her that appealed to him; who he was seeing in her dark features and hearing in her quick wit. He feels guilty for it, but less so knowing that he did it for this moment.
“Why?” Emily asks eventually.
He takes a steadying breath, one that he needs, and tilts his head at her as his voice softens in spite of himself.
“Emily,” he says. “You know why.”
She’d thought she did, maybe— would have known, before Doyle and before Paris. She was dangerously hopeful then for something that she can’t dare to let herself imagine now.
She shakes her head and looks away from him. “I don’t.”
“I’m sorry,” he offers, softer than he has any right to be if you’re asking Emily. “Will you please look at me?”
She hates how easy it is to give in to him, but meets his eyes at his request and finds that he looks as deeply earnest as she’s ever seen him.
“Sorry for what?” she asks.
His expression flickers into shadow and back again. “Sorry that I let you think that there was nothing left of your old life.”
Emily tilts her head, a dangerous spark of hope in her throat. “Why would you say that?” she asks.
“Because it’s true,” he scoffs.
“Why did you break up with Beth?” Emily asks again. “She seemed—”
The words, when they come, are as catastrophic as they are cathartic.
“Because she wasn’t you,” Aaron says. And then, softer: “Because I couldn’t come here and ask you to stay if I couldn’t show you that there was a reason to.”
It leaves Emily reeling, and he looks at her like it might be the last time, and for a long moment she thinks it might still be.
Except—
In the end, it’s not the thought of Aaron that draws her into the brief flash of herself that gives her the courage to think that the thread of hope may not be broken after all. It’s a memory— one that comes to her in vivid clarity, of a morning months and months ago and a little boy with sticky fingers reaching for a cookie that she was holding out of his reach, please on his tongue and an inherited pleading look in his eyes.
Jack. A child she knows and loves; a child she’d touched on the worst day of his life, her hand on his head like a blessing as JJ carried him out of the house into the sun. She’s not a mother and never thought she wanted to be, but it means something that in this moment it’s the thought of his face that makes the choice for her, because she looks at his father and imagines what it might feel like to never see either of them again.
There’s a parallel here— two bookends of her life marked by men and their sons, except that in Aaron and Jack’s matching features Emily finds chemtrails of sweetness that she’d never been able to seek out before; a searing honest in their dark gazes; a truth in the sound of their names on her lips and hers— Emily, hers, the one that is real— on theirs.
“Is there?” she asks, and watches hope spark on his features as he closes the small remaining distance between them.
He doesn’t touch her— not yet— and she knows deep down in the marrow of her bones that when he does it’ll be her undoing.
“Emily,” he says, voice low. “If you want to leave, I won’t stop you. But I won’t be the reason you think there’s nothing worth staying for, either.”
She feels her chest shudder as the weight of her reservations begins to ease off of her breastbone, a weight she had not registered until it’s lessening. She tilts her head back, and he watches as the light casts shadow dancing over the slope of her nose and the faint violet beneath her dark eyes and delicate lashes.
How had he ever missed it, he wonders, that feeling of thundering pulse that beats beneath his skin when he looks at her? How could it have ever been anything— anyone— but her?
“I’m— not very easy to be around,” Emily prefaces, relenting inch by inch. “Right now. Maybe ever. I don’t know.”
He shakes his head, and this time when his voice comes out soft it’s because he means for it to. Nothing accidental about it when he tilts his head to look at her and meets her gaze and drops tenderness into his words.
“I don’t need this to be easy,” he tells her.
She hears the implications in it— that he wants her even when it’s hard. That she’s worth it to him. She doesn’t entirely believe it, but she thinks as she pulls her bottom lip between her teeth and bites down out of habit, that maybe she could. It’s more than she’s had in a long time.
And then he touches her, and when he does—
She shouldn’t have been surprised that it’s a touch like this: his thumb at the corner of her mouth, gently pulling her flesh free from the destruction marked into it with her own teeth. The metaphor would be a little heavy-handed if Emily didn’t need it so much and if Aaron didn’t do it with such purity in the callus on his thumb.
He doesn’t kiss her.
He tilts her head up and meets her eyes, and doesn’t kiss her.
Instead, there’s hope that sparkles in the inches between them, and promise that settles deep into her bones, and each is more valuable than the taste of him could have ever been, proof written into the warmth of his fingers on her cheek that he knows what she needs sometimes better than she does.
“Okay?” he whispers, like he needs to know for sure.
Emily takes a breath that feels clean in her lungs and nods her head. “Okay.”
And for the first time, she starts to feel like she could be the Emily in the mirror again.