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The cases where she could see herself in the victim were always the hardest.
This time, it wasn’t just because they looked like her, although the similarity had been striking when she looked through the case files on the jet. She’d seen it on Aaron’s face too, the tightness in his shoulders as he sat opposite her as Penelope filled them in on all of the details. They hadn’t been together very long, only a few weeks, so they were still figuring out how to work together and how to be together at the same time. It was becoming clearer to her why the rules they were currently ignoring were in place, and she already knew that they couldn’t work like this forever, that one of them - likely her - would have to leave the BAU soon.
Aaron had become her safe space since she came home from Paris. He was the one person who didn’t expect her to be who she once was, and who loved her for the person she’d become, for all the scars she carried now. It was too soon to say the words, too quick for them to be more than something one of them mumbled half asleep that they’d both pretend hadn’t been said the next morning.
It’s a thought she shoves to the back of her head, her focus on solving the case in front of them, of getting the job done so she could go home and sleep curled up next to the man she loved.
Several women had been attacked throughout one small town in Kentucky, every one of them brunette with dark eyes, although that was where the similarity ended. It makes it hard to focus on victimology, to narrow down what the unsub was doing and why, and it felt like they were floundering, like they were reaching out into the dark, desperate to grab onto anything that makes sense and finding nothing.
In the end, after three days of trying to work out their next move, the answer is brought to them by a woman in her early 30s, a look in her dark eyes that Emily knew all too well as she asked to speak to the detective in charge of the case.
Nancy Hughes was nervous, her shoulders tight and arms crossed over her chest as she settles into a chair in the interrogation room. She didn’t have to speak beyond giving her name for them to know she was the victim of abuse, the signs of it obvious even as she desperately tried to hide them. She was trying to make herself smaller, her upper body curled in on itself, and she was jumpy, flinching at the slightest sound in the busy precinct around them, her eyes darting back and forth as she looked for a monster whose face only she knew.
It doesn’t take long for them to decide that Emily is the best person to try to get whatever she’d come here to say out of her, so she takes her to the interrogation room, a coffee for each of them in hand, and Aaron, Dave and the local lead on the case - Detective Roberts - walk into the adjoining room to watch their conversation through the two-way mirror.
“I’m sorry that this is the only place we can talk,” Emily says as she passes Nancy a coffee, taking a seat across the table from her, cursing the precinct’s size and the fact that it meant the interrogation room, was the only place she could speak to Nancy, a woman who was clearly a victim of something.
“It’s okay,” Nancy says, holding the cup Emily had handed her close, her palms pressed against the ceramic, “I…” she drifts off and clears her throat, looking anywhere but at Emily, “I don’t know where to start.”
“How about wherever feels right?”
Nancy chuckles humourlessly, “There’s nothing right about any of this,” she says, swallowing thickly, “I think…I think the person who has been killing all of those women on the news is my ex-boyfriend.”
Emily does her best to keep her face neutral, and she looks up at the mirror in the room, knowing Aaron is standing on the other side of it. She looks back at the woman in front of her, whose eyes were fixed on the table, “Why do you think that, Nancy?”
“I broke up with him about a month ago, he…he was not a good man,” she says, “He hurt me. He kept hurting me. So I left in the middle of the night and went to stay with a friend in Ohio. I only got back yesterday, and I saw the news,” she says, her jaw tight, “He said he’d kill me. The victims look like.”
“And that’s why you think it’s him?” Emily asks, and Nancy nods, her breath shaking as she looks up at her.
“One of them was only 16,” she says, her chin trembling, the weight of guilt that wasn’t hers to feel forcing her shoulders to slump, “What if he killed her because I left?”
“If it is him,” Emily starts, hesitating to reach across the table, not wanting to touch Nancy and take any more autonomy from her when she’d clearly lost so much, “If it is him, none of this is your fault.”
Nancy scoffs and shakes her head, wiping a tear from her cheek, “If I’d have just stayed-”
“If you stayed, he might have killed you,” Emily says, “And whatever he did because you were brave enough to leave is on him, not you. People who use violence to control people can easily escalate if they feel like they are losing that control. ”
Nancy chokes on a sound somewhere between a disbelieving laugh and a sob, “You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”
Emily almost doesn’t say anything, she almost lets it slip by, all too aware of Aaron and Dave standing on the other side of the two-way mirror, but then she looks at Nancy again, sees the guilt and fear in her eyes, and it’s like looking at a version of herself that no longer exists. One she’d buried under suits with sharp edges and a new haircut, her ability to pretend none of it had ever happened made easier by the fact none of it officially had happened. Her mission with Ian as redacted as the memories of that time were, the feel of his fists against her skin, the press of his hand around her throat, muted by the thick black line she’d painted over it all in her mind, the truth peeking through from underneath.
She clears her throat and clenches her hands in her lap, knowing she’d be tearing the lid off a box she’d glued down years ago, leaving herself open to things she had tried to forget, to the questions of her boyfriend and friend on the other side of the glass, everything out in the open with two simple words.
“I am.”
___
She’s grateful when Aaron doesn’t say anything to her. Dave doesn’t either, although he doesn’t hide his concern as well as he thinks he does when she leaves the interrogation room with the name and address of Nancy’s ex-boyfriend.
They find him, and the weapon he’d used to kill his victims, exactly where Nancy said they would. He resists arrest, screaming at the top of his lungs as he’s shoved into the back of a patrol car, admitting to more than they think he realises as he curses Nancy’s name, already aware that she must have been his downfall. They get her somewhere safe before he’s anywhere near the precinct, and she hugs Emily before she goes, squeezing her tightly as she thanks her for listening to her.
Emily knows her quiet admission, the one that hadn’t gone any further than telling Nancy she was speaking from experience, before things turned to finding the unsub before he could kill again, hasn’t gone any further than Aaron or Dave. Aaron wasn’t a gossip, and while Dave had been known to dabble in it in the past, she knew he never would about something so serious.
Aaron sticks close to her on the jet, making sure he’s sitting next to her on the flight home. The team didn’t know about them yet, so she has to make do with his thigh pressed against hers under the table, or the way he occasionally makes their shoulders brush when he readjusts in his seat more than necessary.
It’s unspoken that he’s coming to her place when they get home, so she doesn’t double-lock her front door until after he walks through it 10 minutes after her, the key she’d pressed into his hand on their first date put to use
“You made good time,” she says, smiling as he joins her in the kitchen. She nods towards the wine glasses she already has out on the counter, “Drink?”
“Yes, please,” he replies, leaning in to kiss her cheek as she pours them a glass of wine each, “That was a long few days.”
She chuckles humourlessly, “You’re telling me.”
He squeezes her hip, and he wonders when he’d placed his hand there, when she’d got so used to his touch that it felt natural, like he was an extension of her, “We don’t have to talk about it.”
She knows he’s telling the truth, that if she said she didn’t want to talk about it, he’d leave it alone, that they’d pretend he hadn’t heard her admit to something he hadn’t known about her, but probably could have guessed. It’s tempting. She’d never told anyone, had never admitted to any of it out loud, everything that had happened in the house in Tuscany was something that had happened to Lauren, not her.
And Lauren Reynolds was dead.
Emily Prentiss was not. Or at least, she wasn’t anymore.
She turns her head, her nose skimming his as she sucks in a shaky breath, “I want to,” she says, her smile sad, her lips pressed together as she swallows thickly, “I just don’t know where to start.”
She has unintentionally mirrored what Nancy had said to her, and she hates the similarity of it, but Aaron nods at her, linking his fingers through hers as he squeezes.
“Let’s go sit down, okay?”
She nods, and lets him lead her to the living room. They sit down, and she’s so close to him that she’s all but in his lap, drawing strength from him that he seems to have a never-ending amount of. They sit in silence for a couple of minutes, and she knows he’s waiting her out, his patience as endless as his love for her.
“Ian wasn’t a good man.” It feels like an obvious thing to say. Aaron already knew that, they both did, Ian’s cruelty as infamous as anything else about him, but it’s the only place she can start. “Violence was his answer to everything. It’s how he dealt with anything that didn’t go his way. Work, deals…his personal life,” she presses her lips together, “No one was spared from it. Not even me or Declan.”
Aaron sighs, and he holds her closer, his arm around her shoulders as he turns his head to kiss her cheek, “I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
“It’s not your fault, I know it’s not mine either but…” she replies, turning to look at him. She’s relieved that he’s still looking at her like he always had, and then she feels guilty because she thought he would. “I’ve never told anyone.”
“Not even Clyde?”
She shakes her head, “It was easier to pretend it didn’t happen to me,” she says, laughing at herself as she shakes her head, “I was Lauren when I was with him. It was Lauren he was supposed to love…” she clears her throat, clearing a phantom sensation in it from years ago when it took weeks for the bruises to heal, her love of turtlenecks proving helpful at the time. “And it was her that he hurt when he was angry, her that he hit and her throat that he wrapped his hands around,” her lips start to shake, and she chokes on a sound she can’t name, “But it was me,” she says, looking at him again, “It happened to me.”
She feels something inside of her snap, the pieces of it finally giving way under the weight of everything she’d been ignoring for years, her admittance the final piece of the most heartbreaking of puzzles, shattering her into pieces that Aaron is there, ready and waiting to hold together until she can do it for herself again.
She sobs as she sucks in a breath, her hand over her mouth as she tries to hold it back, but Aaron holds her close, tucking her against his chest as she curls into his lap, desperate to be as close as possible to someone who she knows would never hurt her. Someone whose anger at what she’d gone through was thrumming under his skin, ignored in favour of making sure she was okay, the man he wanted to kill for hurting her long dead anyway.
“I’m right here,” he says, kissing the top of her head, “You’re safe.”
“I know,” she says, holding onto him so tightly she knows she’s creasing his shirt, fistfuls of it in her grasp, “I know I am,” she says, pulling back to look at him, “I’m with you.”
It’s as close as she’ll come to telling him that she loves him tonight, not wanting the first time she says it to be meshed together with everything else she’s told him, never wanting Ian to be anymore a part of the life she had now than he had to be.
He tucks some of her hair behind her ear, “Thank you for telling me.”
She knows they’ll discuss this again, that he’ll talk it through with her when she feels ready to tell him more than the basics, and help her decide the best way to move forward, to deal a part of her history that could no longer be ignored. For now, she’s happy to leave it where it is, let the dust she’d blown off of it settle around her feet, and she looks up at him, concern about something else entirely taking over everything else.
“Dave…”
“Won’t tell anyone, or bring it up with you unless you mention it first,” he assures her, a brief smile flickering across his face, “Although, I think he’s figured us out.”
She scoffs and shakes her head, “Of course he has,” she says, resting her head against his shoulder, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before.”
“Sweetheart,” he says, the nickname still new to them both, the word enough to draw shy smiles out of them both, “You have nothing to apologise for. At all.”
“I hope Nancy has someone to comfort her,” she says, furrowing her brow as she thinks of the woman who was a stranger to her in most ways, but a sister of sorts in one of the worst, someone who understood a part of her history more than most of the people closest to her, “She’s going to need help.”
“I spoke to Detective Roberts before I left,” Aaron says, running his hand up and down her back, “Told him to pass my details on to her so we can help her if she needs it,” he says, “We can help her find a good therapist who specialises in trauma, and make sure she doesn’t go through any of it, espeically the trial, alone.”
She pulls back to look at him, those three words she’s never come closer to saying on the tip of her tongue, sweet as she swallows them back down. She wonders if he can taste them when she leans in to kiss him, her lips stamped against his as she cups his cheek, holding him in place when she rests her forehead against his.
“You’re a good man, Aaron Hotchner,” she says, kissing him again, “The best, actually.”
He smiles at her, self doubt pressed into his dimples that she files away for another day, and he kisses the tip of her nose, “I’ll remind you that you said that the next time I keep you awake with my snoring.”
She laughs, and it feels strange, wrong almost after everything they’ve talked about, but it also feels right. Her love for him, the safety she felt around him, solidified by his ability to make her laugh when it was the last thing she thinks she is capable of. “You can remind me of that for the rest of our lives.”