Chapter Text
The Kowalski case closed at 4:47pm on a Thursday, which was the kind of thing that felt like it should mean something — a reasonable hour, a solved case, everyone alive who was supposed to be alive — and mostly just meant that the team stood in the Chicago field office parking lot with their go-bags and the specific hollowness of people who had been running on adrenaline and bad vending machine coffee for seventy-two hours and were only now remembering that their bodies existed.
The jet, as it turned out, did not exist. Mechanically speaking.
"Hydraulic something," Rossi said, relaying the information from the pilot with the serenity of a man who had survived considerably worse than a delayed flight home. "They can have it fixed by tomorrow morning."
"Tomorrow morning," Luke repeated.
"Tomorrow morning."
Luke looked at the sky. The sky offered nothing.
It was Emily who made the call, the way it was always Emily who made the call now — quietly, without drama, with the particular authority of someone who had learned that the fastest way through a logistics problem was to simply decide. Three SUVs from the field office motor pool. Overnight drive back to Quantico. Eleven hours, maybe twelve with stops, they'd be home by morning.
Reid pulled up the route on his phone before she'd finished the sentence. Luke was already texting someone. Rossi said fine in the tone he reserved for things he had already accepted. Tara looked at Emily with an expression that was approximately I trust you but I want it noted that I would have preferred the hotel.
Emily noted it. They were still driving.
It was Tara, as it happened, who suggested the draw. Or rather it was Garcia — Garcia who was four hundred miles away and present anyway, the way Garcia was always present, her voice coming through Tara's phone at a volume that suggested she considered the speaker setting a suggestion rather than a limit.
"You cannot just assign cars, that's so boring, do the couple draw, you have to do the couple draw—"
"We're not doing the couple draw," Emily said.
"Emily Prentiss you are no fun, this is a long drive and I am providing morale support from a distance and I am telling you that the couple draw is the correct—"
"Fine," Emily said. "Give me something to write on."
Rossi produced a notepad from somewhere with the air of a man who had been producing notepads from somewhere for thirty years. Emily tore six small strips, wrote a name on each one, folded them, and dropped them into Luke's baseball cap because it was the nearest available vessel and Luke was too tired to object.
She shook the cap once. Reached in.
Tara. She set it on the hood of the nearest SUV. Rossi. She set it next to it.
"Car one," she said. Rossi looked at Tara. Tara looked at Rossi. Some silent negotiation occurred about who was driving first and appeared to resolve itself without words.
Emily reached into the cap again.
Emily.
She set it on the hood. Kept her face where it was — neutral, professional, the expression she had spent the better part of a decade perfecting. She was aware of Reid glancing up from his phone. She was aware of Luke going still in the particular way people went still when they sensed something without knowing what it was.
She reached in for the last name in the second draw.
She unfolded it.
She looked at it for exactly one second longer than she looked at any of the others.
JJ.
"Car two," Emily said. Her voice came out even. She was distantly proud of that.
The reaction from the remaining audience was immediate and varied. Luke made a sound that was not quite a word. Reid looked between them with the expression of a man rapidly running statistical probabilities. Garcia, still present via speakerphone, made a noise that could generously be described as delighted.
"Oh that's—"
"Car three," Emily said, dropping the last two names without unfolding them, "is Reid and Alvez. Keys are at the front desk. We leave in twenty minutes."
She picked up her go-bag. She did not look at JJ.
JJ had not looked at her either. She was very focused on adjusting the strap of her bag, with the concentration of someone for whom bag straps had become suddenly fascinating.
Rossi fell into step beside Emily as she walked toward the building to collect the keys. He said nothing. This was somehow worse than if he had said something.
"Don't," Emily said.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"Good."
He smiled at the parking lot. Emily looked straight ahead.
Twenty-three minutes later — because Reid had a question about the optimal route that turned into a ten minute debate with Luke about whether I-80 was statistically safer than I-90 at night, and Emily had let it run because it was better than standing in silence next to JJ while they waited — the three SUVs pulled out of the Chicago field office lot in a loose convoy.
Tara and Rossi went first. Reid and Luke went last, still audibly disagreeing.
In the middle, Emily pulled onto the highway and merged into the thin evening traffic, and the city began to unspool itself into distance, and JJ found a playlist on her phone and connected it to the aux without asking, and the first song came on low and unhurried, and neither of them said a word about it.
Outside, Illinois stretched flat and indifferent in every direction.
Emily drove. JJ looked out the window.
The playlist moved through its songs like weather.