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Derek Morgan was singing September by Earth, Wind & Fire with so much conviction that he looked like he'd been waiting his entire life for this specific karaoke night, and under any other circumstances, Emily would have been enjoying herself just as much as he was.
The team outing had been Penelope’s idea, which meant it had been inevitable from the moment she’d suggested it. Nobody said no to Penelope Garcia when she was that determined to get the team out of the office for a night of levity, and so, what would otherwise have been an ordinary Thursday evening had become a team karaoke night at a bar in downtown D.C. Emily had gone home after work and changed into her good jeans and felt, for the first time in recent memory, genuinely looking forward to a night out.
She’d arrived to find the team already assembled. Penelope and JJ had claimed the best booth, Derek and Dave were at the bar ordering drinks for everyone, and Spencer was studying the song catalogue with an expression of profound seriousness. And Aaron was already there and seated with a woman Emily had met exactly twice, her hand near his on the table.
Nobody had mentioned Beth. That was the interpersonal grenade that had been lobbed at Emily on a Thursday evening when she had been expecting karaoke, Dave sponsoring good alcohol, and the comfortable noise of her team’s singing. Nobody had given her a heads up that, oh, Aaron is bringing his girlfriend, and so she’d walked into the bar with absolutely no intelligence on the situation and found Beth Clemmons already there, already warm and laughing at something Penelope was saying. The geometry of the table left Emily with a seat directly across from Beth and Aaron, and just looking at them made her stomach turn.
Beth, by all metrics, was lovely, and Emily had no ammunition against that. Lovely was impervious to rational objection and immune to the cataloguing of flaws that Emily had been attempting unsuccessfully for the past forty minutes. Beth laughed at the right moments and touched Aaron's arm with ease, which she had every right to do, which was also the problem.
Emily tried to think about Derek’s performance; it was very good, and she was very focused on it. But she had also been seething quietly for forty-three minutes, which she knew because she had checked her watch at the moment of impact — Beth, smiling, Emily, so good to see you — and had been tracking the duration since as a focusing exercise.
Derek hit a high note flawlessly, and the bar cheered. Emily took a large sip of her wine, rearranged her expression before the rest of the team could notice, and clapped.
She had known in the abstract that things would be different when she came back from Paris. A year was long enough for the team to grieve and build new configurations of their lives, and she thought she had prepared herself for that right up until the moment she walked back into the BAU. Dave had taken her aside in the hallway one morning with a knowing glance and said very gently, Aaron’s been seeing someone. She nodded and said of course, that’s wonderful, and meant only half of it.
Re-entry was bound to be difficult, and she had mentally prepared herself for the process. After all, she’d spent months away from the team, many of whom thought that she had died on the operating table in Boston, and was fully aware she had to put in the slow work of rebuilding the pieces of her life that the exile had broken. But she hadn’t expected Aaron to have a girlfriend, because she hadn’t allowed herself to think seriously about what Aaron might be doing while she was performing her own death. She saw now that this had been a form of wilful stupidity.
And one night, alone in her apartment cradling an untouched glass of wine, she realised with a sobering clarity that she was in love with him, and probably had been for longer than she could honestly account for. The exile hadn’t cured it or even dulled it. If anything, the year of distance had stripped away everything except the essential fact of it. Now, the feelings were left sitting in her chest, unambiguous, inconvenient and entirely too late.
She was back, and he had someone. The timing, as ever with Aaron Hotchner, was immaculate in its wrongness. It was extremely on brand for her life.
As the next hour ticked on, Emily was doing an excellent job of not visibly seething. She wanted to think that she was the picture of a woman who was having a perfectly nice time at a karaoke bar with her colleagues on a Thursday evening; she was engaged in pleasant conversation, laughing at appropriate moments, and pretending that she wasn’t tracking every time Beth said Aaron's name.
JJ, sitting to Emily’s left, wasn’t fooled. “What’s going on?” she said, quietly enough that only Emily could hear it. “You haven’t looked at the stage once for the last ten minutes.”
“I’m listening,” Emily replied between sips of wine, in her best attempt to conceal the source of her sour mood.
“You haven’t sung anything tonight. Are you okay?”
Emily finally turned toward the stage, where Spencer was midway through a rendition of We Didn’t Start The Fire, no guide lyrics required. “I’m fine,” Emily said.
“You’re clearly not.”
Penelope arrived back from the bar with two drinks and determination in her eyes. “You need to get up there and sing,” she declared.
“I’m fine where I am.”
“Emily, you haven’t moved from your seat in an hour. You need an outlet,” JJ chimed in.
“You have the best voice at this table,” Penelope added. “Very likely in this bar, and possibly in this zip code. And you’re sitting here like that, when you could be up there.”
Emily sighed. “I don’t need to be up there.”
"Miss Prentiss.” Penelope put her hand over Emily’s on the table. “Honey, you do. Please go up there and sing something before Spencer starts an informational lecture on the historical references in this song.”
“What song?” JJ had already reached for the iPad with the song selection app and placed it on the table in front of Emily.
“I haven’t agreed to anything.”
"What song,” JJ said again, this time not a question.
Emily looked down at her wine glass and then at the stage, where Spencer had just wrapped up the final chorus of the song to enthusiastic, if bewildered applause. She was not in the mood to sing. She was very much in the mood to sit at the table to drink her wine and be fine about everything, which she was. She didn’t need an outlet because there was nothing that needed an outlet, and she was going to sit here quietly for the rest of the evening and not think about anything in particular. That was her plan.
Then, she looked across the table.
Beth had leaned slightly toward Aaron and was saying something Emily couldn’t hear over the bar noise. Aaron had tilted his head toward her in response, patient, attentive, and entirely present. Emily knew that quality of attention; she had been on the receiving end of it in interview rooms and briefings and hospital rooms. And she had not spent considerable energy over the years imagining what it felt like to have Aaron Hotchner look at her like she was the only thing worth listening to.
The wine was doing some of the reasoning for her. She was painfully aware that she had been careful around Aaron for a painfully long time, even long before Paris. She had been so careful for so long that she had nearly believed her own performance…
… and then Aaron pressed a kiss to Beth’s temple and Emily finally snapped.
She reached for the iPad before she could re-think her decision. “Fine,” she said. “One song.”
“Finally!” Penelope cheered as Emily stared at the song selection screen. Total Eclipse of the Heart was an easy choice; she added it on autopilot. It was a power ballad that was dramatic and full of vocal acrobatics, and she could throw herself into it without it meaning anything specific.
Confirm song selection?
She looked across the table one more time before clicking the Enter button. Beth was laughing now, her hand resting near Aaron’s on the table, and Aaron’s eyes were sparkling with warmth and sincerity that Emily had spent years pretending not to catalogue. The wine had loosened her sense of proportion and the careful management she’d been applying all evening. She was feeling reckless, yes, but also impatient — impatient with herself for the past hour of sitting very still and being very fine about things that she was not actually fine about. She was not going to sit in a karaoke bar in her good jeans, being careful.
After a few seconds of deliberation, she deleted Total Eclipse from the queue, added a far fierier replacement, and stood up before she could think better of it.
Enough was enough.
The stage was small and the lighting was terrible, but Emily didn’t care about either of those things. The opening bars kicked in and resolve settled in her chest.
The wine had done something useful, for once. It’d stripped away the careful calculus she’d been running all evening, the constant low-level management of herself, and replaced it with something simpler and considerably less sensible. She’d made a decision and committed to it fully, consequences to be dealt with later.
Spencer handed her the microphone, and she started singing.
She’d been managing her feelings all evening, and now, under the terrible lighting of a karaoke stage, decided to stop managing them. Her voice was good, she knew, and she’d spent years deploying it in appropriate moments. Tonight, she let it do what it wanted.
Shooting at the walls of heartache
Bang, bang!
The Warrior had been one of her go-to karaoke songs for years and she’d sung it countless times, but tonight it was almost explosive in its power. Her teenage self had latched onto Patty Smyth’s images of strength and confidence, and she’d long internalised it as a manifesto about refusing to be diminished by desire. Tonight, with two glasses of wine in her blood and a microphone in her hand, Emily understood that she’d been diminishing herself all evening. She’d been sitting very still and being gracious about something that she was categorically not fine about, and now, she was done being careful. For the next three and a half minutes, at least, she was going to let the song take over.
I am the warrior
Well, I am the warrior
And heart to heart you'll win
She leaned into the chorus with everything she had. The energy of the bar shifted as she belted out each word; even the solo drinkers at the bar who’d been largely indifferent to the rest of the team’s performances had turned their heads when they realised that Emily could actually sing. Her voice opened up even more with each line, and the sound that came out surprised her slightly – it was certain and more honest than anything she’d said all evening.
It was only during the few bars before the next verse kicked in that Emily finally turned back toward the team’s table.
Aaron was still. He was in his seat with his usual careful and controlled stillness that she’d catalogued a thousand times over the years, and she hated that she was trying so hard to read him from this distance.
And then her eyes moved, helplessly, to Beth. Beth was actually clapping along enthusiastically and clearly impressed with Emily’s singing, and even threw in a Go Emily! with a megawatt grin. And Emily, who had been channelling her emotions into what she hoped was a polished and clean karaoke performance, felt the whole situation get complicated in an instant, because Beth was genuinely, disarmingly warm, and there was absolutely nothing Emily could do with that. What else was she going to do? Her chest twisted with an uncomfortable mixture of gratitude and despair, because it seemed unconscionable for her to dislike a person who was giving her no ammunition whatsoever.
However, keeping her eyes away from Beth and Aaron was easier said than done.
Her eyes drifted toward Aaron halfway through the second verse. He hadn’t moved an inch and stood out like a sore thumb between Derek’s rambunctious cheering and Beth’s spirited applause, because all he was doing was watching her. His expression gave nothing away, and she forced herself again to look away before she could do anything inadvisable with the information. Part of her wanted him to react; she wanted him to shift in his seat or give her something to indicate that the song was landing where she’d aimed it. At the same time, she was grateful that he wasn’t, because she didn't actually know what she'd do if he reacted, and was already operating well outside the boundaries of her better judgment tonight.
As she finished the song to applause that was louder than the room probably warranted, she took it all in graciously but felt almost none of it, because the only reaction she was actually tracking was Aaron’s — and she had to take a second to process the absurdity of the situation. A room full of people was responding enthusiastically to her, and the only data point she was collecting was one man (who happened to be her boss, who also happened to be there with his girlfriend) sitting very still in a corner booth.
She resisted the temptation to pick at her nails and decided to file away her worry until she got home and would inevitably spend hours turning it over properly.
Later. She was good at leaving things for later.
(Unfortunately, that included her very inconvenient feelings for the man sitting in that corner booth.)
The applause was still going when Penelope materialised at the foot of the stage and blocked the small staircase that would take Emily back to their table. “You’re not done,” Penelope grinned.
Emily stared at her with her mouth agape. “I’m absolutely done, Penelope.”
“I already queued the next song!”
Emily looked at the screen, where Don’t Cha by the Pussycat Dolls was loading.
“Penelope—”
"JJ!” Penelope turned and extended her hand to where JJ was already halfway to the stage with her beer bottle in hand. “Come on, we need a BAU ladies’ number.”
Emily looked helplessly at JJ, who was clearly not going to talk Penelope out of this, and then at the rest of the bar patrons, who seemed to have recognised the song immediately and were looking at the stage in anticipation. She tried one last time to slip off the stage, but Penelope and JJ were equally determined to stand in the way of the staircase… and so Emily had no choice but to stay in place and accept that her performance wasn’t over just yet.
Within three seconds, Penelope had claimed the centre mic with the confidence of a woman in her natural habitat and launched into the opening lines while JJ did the echoes effortlessly. Emily stood next to them and looked out at the bar and found Aaron immediately, the inconvenient homing instinct she’d spent the whole evening trying to suppress refusing to stay buried.
The Warrior had been hers: a song she’d sung a hundred times, big and fun and entirely her own, with almost nothing to do with anyone in this bar. Don’t Cha, however, was another story entirely. It was a song with a very specific argument, and the argument was sitting at the bar’s corner booth, ten inches from his very smitten girlfriend.
And Emily was standing on the stage, about to make it out loud in front of everyone.
And I know you want it
It's easy to see
To the unassuming eye, she was merely looking at the general area of the BAU’s table, where Derek was cheering and Dave had his phone out to film the performance for future blackmail material. Even Spencer was nodding to the beat although Emily was reasonably sure that he’d never even heard of the Pussycat Dolls before. However, she was also fully aware that she was looking at Aaron Hotchner, directly and entirely on purpose, and leaving no room whatsoever for plausible deniability.
She locked eyes with Aaron and didn't look away after that, because the wine had made her honest and the adrenaline had made her brave. The combination of the two had given rise to this rash decision that she was going to deeply regret in the morning, but was entirely committed to tonight.
He had gone very still. She’d learned years ago how to spot when he was trying his best to assess a situation and not react to it visibly, and tonight, he was trying exceptionally hard not to react visibly. It was a reaction in itself.
Beside him, Beth shifted just slightly, and Emily kept singing.
Don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?
Watching people become uncomfortable in real time always had a rhythm to it. Emily had built a career on reading rooms and could track that slow escalation almost clinically, even through the noise of the bar and pleasant haze of wine. But by the first chorus, she was sitting upright, her shoulders stiff with tension. And by the second chorus, she had her hands folded in her lap, her applause having quietly ceased somewhere around don't cha wish your girlfriend was raw like me. Her expression was still warm and pleasant, but she was working considerably harder to look that way.
Aaron had not moved at all.
Emily found a note that she hadn't known she could reach and held it for a beat longer than the recording. She knew exactly what the lyrics meant, and so did he. There was no point trying to make this mean anything other than exactly what it meant, and she sang the rest of the song looking directly at him with focused, slightly reckless attention, because she had run out of reasons to do otherwise.
She was aware, underneath the wine and the lights, that she was being awful. She was being deliberately awful, and the knowledge sat in her chest alongside a complex mix of adrenaline and satisfaction. But the warmth of the wine only made her lean into every line even more, and she just kept singing.
Don't cha.
Beth’s smile tightened by another degree.
Don't cha.
Emily held another note, and the bar lost its mind. She was probably going to feel terrible about this in approximately four hours, but in this moment, she felt completely and entirely alive. Beth leaned over to say something to Aaron during the bridge, her mouth close to his ear, and Emily watched his shoulders tense as he received it. He paused for just a second before he nodded, once, and deliberately looked away from Emily for the first time since the song had started.
Good. Let him look somewhere else. Let it cost him something to look somewhere else.
Aaron’s hands were moving together in the technical definition of a clap. He wasn’t fooling Emily, and she found this, in the moment, enormously satisfying.
The trio finished to the loudest applause of the evening. Penelope took a bow and JJ headed straight for the iPad to select another crowd-pleaser for their encore performance, while Emily remained on the stage for a few seconds after the cheers died down, her eyes finding Aaron's one last time across the room. She watched his jaw tighten yet again and felt a complicated rush of exhilaration and vindication. It also felt like winning, which she knew she was going to think about tomorrow with great remorse, but in the moment, she decided not to entertain that guilt… until she crossed the room and returned to the table.
As she sat back down, the ambivalence finally arrived, a sobering clarity cutting straight through the buzz of the wine and adrenaline. She had stood on a stage in front of her entire team and sung a song that was unmistakably about wanting a man who was with someone else… and she had looked right at him while doing it.
Beth smiled at her from across the table and even managed a you have such a fantastic voice, Emily and it almost killed her how gracious and warm Beth still was in the moment. It was somehow worse than if Beth had thrown her drink across the table, and Emily willed herself not to look up and say something she’d regret.
Suddenly, she needed air. She needed at least five minutes to recalibrate and let the reality of what she had just done sink in.
Penelope, mercifully, had already claimed the stage again. The opening notes of …Baby One More Time thundered through the bar as Emily got up, and thankfully, every available eye was on Penelope’s surprisingly accurate Britney Spears impression while Emily scanned the room for the exit.
As she stood up and pushed back her chair as casually as she could, she didn’t look at Aaron or Beth, and wouldn’t have been surprised if they refused to look at her too.
The air outside was cooler than the bar and stung her skin, but Emily needed it. She ducked into the alley beside the exit and felt some of the adrenaline drain out of her as she leaned against the brick wall, only for the sound of two familiar voices to pierce the calm she’d been enjoying.
She heard Beth’s voice first, low and even, coming from around the side of the building where the light from the bar sign didn’t quite reach. Emily knew that it probably was her cue to slip back inside and act nonchalant, but she simply couldn’t bring herself to move.
"I saw the way you looked at each other.”
She couldn’t see Beth’s expression, but her voice was almost eerily calm. Emily couldn’t decide if the absence of tears or anger made her feel any better or worse.
“—just tell me the truth. That’s all I’m asking.”
Emily pressed herself against the wall and thought about how unconscionable it was for her to be listening like this, but still didn’t move. Her breath had gone shallow without her deciding to make it so.
“I think you already know the answer,” Aaron said quietly.
Her pulse thundered in her ears. She recognised the slight roughness at the edges of his voice and how it dropped half a register, and realised that knowing how to read him in this moment was its own particular cruelty.
"I want to hear you say it, Aaron.”
He was silent. Emily waited for him to say something and counted the seconds without meaning to.
One. Two. Three. He didn’t say anything.
The silence stretched and stretched until Beth finally choked out a bitter laugh.
“Are you in love with her?”
Emily’s hand found the wall behind her.
Aaron still said nothing. He said nothing for long enough that it became its own complete and total sentence, and the grenade landed in Emily’s chest.
She didn't wait to hear what came next. She already had more than enough to do a great deal of damage with if she let herself, and wasn’t about to ignite more chaos in the dark outside a karaoke bar with the sound of Beth's voice still in the air. Instead, she pushed off the wall and walked away from the bar as quickly as she could, her heels on the pavement and the music muffled behind her.
The cool air was doing nothing at all for the way her chest felt, and she thought about her own inability to just sit in a booth, have one drink, and go home like a normal person. Instead, she had walked into a bar tonight and detonated something, and now Beth was standing in the dark getting a silence she’d probably known was coming.
What else could Emily possibly do? She couldn’t go back in there and sit back down at that table and put on a fake smile, not with the silence still ringing in her ears. She pulled out her phone as she reached the end of the block and typed a simple heading home, feeling tired to the team chat and didn’t wait to see the replies. Then she flagged down a cab and shrank into her seat as the driver pulled away from downtown D.C.
Three seconds of Aaron’s silence were long enough to send her brain into a tailspin. It was three full seconds of Aaron Hotchner saying nothing to are you in love with her, but right now, she was the last person in the world who could be trusted to evaluate that particular silence objectively. After all, she’d just performed Don’t Cha at him in front of his girlfriend and the entire team.
She pressed her forehead lightly against the window glass as the cab sped toward her apartment complex. On one hand, she had heard what she’d heard; Aaron’s silence in the face of Beth’s very pointed question was real. But his silence could mean a lot of things, from yes, to I don’t know, to I need a moment, and she hadn’t stayed long enough to hear what came after it. Walking away was either the most self-protective decision she’d made all evening or the most cowardly, and she genuinely couldn’t tell which.
The cab turned onto her street and she looked at her hands in her lap. She could still picture exactly how they’d locked eyes during the song. She could still hear Beth’s voice ringing in her ears and making her hair stand on end. And she couldn’t stop thinking about what three seconds of silence from Aaron Hotchner, who always had something precise and considered to say, actually meant.
Stop it, she admonished herself as she let herself into her apartment and felt, with great clarity, like an idiot.
Actually, she was feeling like a hopeful idiot, which was somehow worse.
She grabbed a mug and heated some water because her hands needed something to do, and chamomile tea was the most responsible decision she’d made since approximately eight-thirty this evening, when she’d walked into the bar and sat across from Aaron and Beth.
The Warrior was a defensible choice. In contrast, Don’t Cha was not defensible by any metric she could apply in good conscience, even if Penelope had technically entrapped her on the stage. She’d made sustained eye contact with Aaron Hotchner — her boss — while singing a song about wanting him. Now, she had to live with the consequences of her choice.
The chamomile tea burned her tongue slightly as she took a sip. Good, she thought. That seems right.
Her phone buzzed on the counter, and she knew even before unlocking her screen that the team chat was very active tonight, and that reading it wasn’t going to do her any favours. Instead, she put her phone face down on the counter and thought about Beth.
Shying away from the uncomfortable truth was a fruitless endeavour, and Emily kept arriving back at it. Beth had done nothing wrong. Beth had been warm and gracious all evening, only to end the night standing outside a bar with her boyfriend and asking him if he was in love with someone else. Emily had caused that.
As she sat on her couch and stewed in her own emotions, she knew that she was going to feel terrible about the situation for a long time, and she deserved it. It was the most appropriate and proportionate response to detonating an innocent woman’s relationship with a Pussycat Dolls song on a Thursday night. The guilt only festered more when she couldn’t stop replaying Aaron’s silence and how it had made her chest lift with an embarrassing and unearned hope, when Beth probably was having an evening that Emily had materially contributed to ruining.
Tomorrow was going to be a genuinely awful day, and the tea had sobered her up enough that reality sank in fully. In a matter of hours, she was going to have to walk into the BAU and be a professional federal agent in the same building as Aaron Hotchner, who had stood outside a karaoke bar tonight and said nothing for three seconds when asked if he was in love with her. But calling in sick would be an act of cowardice, and she had already used up her cowardice allocation for the week.
Then, as she trudged toward her bathroom for a much-needed shower, there was a sound at the door.
It was so quiet that for a moment she thought she'd imagined it. Her building sometimes made noises at this hour, and usually it was just the pipes or her neighbours, but she stood very still in the dark hallway and listened anyway.
Three knocks.
She knew before she moved. There had been three seconds of silence earlier, and now, three knocks.
“Emily?”
She thought about not responding. She considered this option seriously and in good faith for approximately two seconds.
Then, she took a deep breath and opened the door anyway.
One year later
Derek Morgan was singing Boogie Wonderland by Earth, Wind & Fire with so much conviction that he looked like he’d been waiting his entire life for this specific karaoke night, and this time, Emily was enjoying herself just as much as he was.
Again, karaoke night had been Penelope’s idea. Emily had gone home after work and changed into her good jeans and felt, as she had started to feel about most things lately, straightforwardly and uncomplicitly happy.
She’d arrived to find the rest of the team already assembled. Penelope and JJ had claimed the same booth with the same strategic efficiency, Derek and Dave were at the bar ordering everyone’s favourites, and Spencer was studying the song list like his selections had genuine intellectual consequence. And Aaron had walked in beside her, their fingers intertwined and the keys to the apartment they now shared tucked away in her purse. Nobody had mentioned anything, because there was little that needed mentioning anymore.
She slid into a seat beside Aaron and felt the warm press of his hand finding hers under the table. Yes, she thought, exactly this.
“I’ve queued something for you two!” Penelope announced in Emily and Aaron’s direction. They looked at the screen together.
NEXT SONG: Islands in the Stream – Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers.
“Absolutely not," Aaron said.
“Penelope…” Emily attempted to protest.
"You're up after Derek," Penelope replied serenely.
Emily looked at Aaron helplessly. He raised an eyebrow, and she raised one back.
"I'll go up there if you will," Emily conceded after a long pause.
“Okay.”
She'd expected at least a token resistance or some version of the controlled composure he deployed whenever he was put on the spot, but he stood up and held out his hand, and she took it. Then she looked up at him, and unlike a year ago, his smile reached his eyes this time.
The opening notes of Islands in the Stream rose around them, and the rest of the team began cheering, but Emily barely registered any of it, because Aaron’s eyes were sparkling with affection and warmth, the way he had been looking at her for a year now. The rest was just noise.
“Ready?” she asked.
“No,” he said, and smiled, and began to sing anyway.