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Emily was in trouble. Her plan had failed and here she was, stuck in a hospital bed, legs broken and on a slippery slope down to a broken mind. It was only a matter of time before Scratch would find a way inside her mind. The only thing she can do, is buy time. Time for her team to come and save her.
She can’t allow herself to think about the car crash. Not about Stephen.
But the others. They were not hurt (like her). They were not captured (like her). They were smart (smarter than her). She has to believe they were on their way. She needs to remind herself of that. They are on their way. Like they always are. Getting sent all over the country, saving people. She can just imagine herself in the office. Presenting the facts, in tandem with Garcia. And then it’s time to say those magic words. She whispers them.
Wheels up .
It calls forth an old memory, the first time she played chess with Reid on the plane. Gideon was conked out, exhausted. He hadn’t slept since the beginning of the case. Did that man ever have any healthy coping skills? It had been Hotch who had nudged Reid towards her. She herself had been too shy, too new in the team to suggest playing. But Hotch had noticed her eying the plays before. It felt good, being seen.
Wheels up.
She was on the plane, headed to Vermont. She’d dutifully set her phone to plane mode when the flight attendants asked, but couldn’t help but stare at the screen every few minutes. At the picture on the background of Larissa sticking out her tongue at her in a rare moment of childishness. At the message she’d sent a few hours earlier letting her know she canceled dinner plans because she wasn’t going to share her girlfriend with the public that weekend. It felt good, being wanted.
“Taking a little mindfulness break?”
The asshole was back again. Had she zoned out that much that she hadn’t heard him come in? This cell - she refuses to call it anything else but - was eerily quiet. She should have heard his footsteps…
“Trying to control your breathing? That’s smart. That will keep you sane.”
Only then she notices he’s clipping his goddamn fingernails. She silently vows to break every little bone in those hands. One by one. But first things first.
“Look. I’m only alive because you want something. So what do you want?”
Why hadn’t he gassed her? It was his MO wasn’t it? She feels woozy. Was she talking out loud?
“I would like nothing more than that. Unfortunately in your current physical condition, the sevoflurane and scopolamine would send you into a stroke.”
“We’re at stalemate then.”
But then he shows her the morphine.
“This is what is making your life very livable now. Without this, your body will be on fire. And then you really will tell me everything I want.”
And he leaves her. To suffer.
She closes her eyes. And starts mumbling again.
Wheels up.
—--
She’s burning. She’s dying. No, it’s worse than dying. Dying had been painless. Just a black void.
This is all red. She’s seeing red, and she needs it to stop. She needs someone to stop it.
“What do you want?” She sounds pathetic. She doesn’t care.
He’s back, studying her, her pain, like she’s a bug stuck on a needle.
“Tell me and I’ll tell you.”
She’s breaking. She shouldn’t make a deal with the devil like this. But she needs it to stop. He’s talking. About Stephen? No. She can barely keep up with him.
“Let's get down to the question at hand. Where is Hotch?“
No, no, no. She wants to cry. She has nothing left to bargain with. She’s going to die here. In pain. She’s never going to see her friends again. Never going to kiss Larissa again.
The tiniest part of her is relieved however. She can’t give him what she doesn’t have. She can die in peace, knowing he doesn’t win.
“Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. He never gave me an address. All we did was text.”
“No. Last chance.”
He doesn’t believe her. Doesn’t believe the truth. She wants to laugh. Maybe she can make this work. She just has to lie convincinly. She’s good at that. She’s always been good at that.
“Vermont.” She chokes out. “He's somewhere in Vermont.”
He clicks his tongue in disgust.
“No, he’s not. But someone else is.”
Shit shit shit shit. Why did she say Vermont? It was where she wanted to be. Not where Hotch is. She doesn’t know where Hotch is.
“Your darling Larissa.”
The pain disappears for a second, while blind panic strikes. It gets replaced by white hot rage instantly.
She pushes against her broken bones, rising from her pillow, getting her face closer to his and hisses. “Don’t you dare say her name.”
He scoffs again.
“I’m not interested in the principal of your silly school of outcasts.” And then pauses. “Hmmm, that’s not true. I’d love to dissect a siren one day. I worked hard to get where I am. Those freaks just got their abilities for free. I might learn something.”
She thinks of Nila. Of the students she taught. Bianca, Piper, Siobhan, Brendan and many others. Innocent children. She’d gladly suffer through hell to protect any one of them. She had died for Declan. She’d die for any one of them too.
“I will destroy you if you go near them.”
He just laughs and leaves her to suffer.
She focuses on her breathing again.
Wheels up.
Her mind clamps onto the memory of Rossi sliding into the seat next to her. It had been a rough case. They had tried so hard but had been too late. The little boy they had searched for had died before they could reach him. David keeps telling her it wasn’t her fault. That they couldn’t win them all.
She hopes he remembers the words. Will tell her team the same when they are to late to find her. She passes out.
—
And then she dies again.
And realizes it was just another one of his mind games.
She escapes and her team is there.
She finds Reid. She hugs Reid. Can’t let him go. He’s real. She needs real . Is she safe? Is it over? Really over?
in the ambulance she keeps clinging to him. The paramedic is annoyed, but she doesn’t care. Her body is banged up, but her mind is even worse off.
She asks him to tell her about the others. She is relieved. And then she finally cries for Stephen.
—
In the hospital, they take one look at her head wound and rush her off for scans fearing for a blood clot.
Her team is no longer allowed near. She’s angry. She needs to tell them to go home and rest. She wants to beg them to stay.
When they cart her off, she just spots JJ waving at her. She looks relieved to see Emily alive. She hopes Will is here and she gets to hold him. And for a moment she’s jealous that her friend gets to hold her loved one. She wants Larissa, but isn’t even sure she has the right to call her.
When they finally bring her back into a normal room, the nurse tells her she has a visitor and she’ll go and get her.
It’s the first time she’s alone again, without the hustle and bustle of overly worried nurses and doctors hovering around her. She hates it.
She takes a deep breath. Somehow the sharp antiseptic smell in her nostrils comforts her. This is a real hospital. This is real. Scratch is dead. She’s not alone. She has her family.
“Hi.”
Emily turns her face when she hears the familiar drawled voice. Is it her? Can it really be?
“Larissa?”
The large woman rushes over towards her, but stops. Her arms were raised as if she wanted to scoop her up in a hug, but she drops them by her sides. Emily longs for the hug, but understands why Larissa hesitated. It hurts nonetheless.
“The bureau called me after you crashed. Apparently I’m your emergency contact?”
Emily nods. She hadn’t thought twice when she needed to fill in the forms, now a year ago. Larissa was her family.
At least she had been.
The blonde continues. Uncertain. Emily hates that she has reduced the other proud woman to this. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to come. I called Penelope. And she told me you went missing.”
“How did you get here so quickly?”
“I called in a few favors.”
The principal of a school filled with the influential and rich, but also the powerful. She arrived here either by private jet or by magic. Emily couldn’t care less. She hadn’t seen her in months and she was a sight for sore eyes.
“I’m sorry,” is all she dares to say. She wants to hold her. Needs to feel her arms around her. But she knows she has lost that privilege.
“Your team has filled me in a little,” Larissa hesitates, inching a little bit closer, but she might as well be on the other side of the room. Emily pretends she feels her body heat warming her face. “The man who you were hunting. He’s dead? You’re safe?”
“He’s dead.”
She can’t utter the other sentence just yet. But she knows he’s dead. She saw his body, had insisted on seeing it, touching it. He’s dead and he can’t hurt her, or any of her family ever again.
“Agent Lewis… Tara. She told me what he did to her brother. Is that…” Again Larissa hesitates, and Emily hates herself a little bit more for what she did. “Is that why we… grew apart?”
Ever since Garcia figured out Scratch was monitoring their phones, Emily had distanced herself from Larissa. A missed call here. A canceled weekend there. It hadn’t been a conscious choice. But she made it nevertheless. And it had hurt Larissa.
“It wasn’t because of me?” it is whispered, but it crashes into her, hurting more than the actual car crash had.
Emily shoots up straight, broken ribs and concussion be damned. Ignoring the flimsy excuse of a hospital garb - she was baring herself emotionally. What did some naked skin matter? - she tries to wrestle her broken body into a kneeling position on the bed. Wanting to, needing to explain to Larissa that it wasn’t her fault. It would never be her fault.
This in turn moves Larissa into action again. With a scowl she rushes forward, pressing her body against Emily’s in an attempt to keep her lying down.
Emily leans into the touch, she can’t help it.
“Do not hurt yourself. Not for me,” Larissa scolds, but hugs her tight.
And the dam breaks. Tears roll down her cheeks, and she doesn’t care that Larissa sees it. “I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
They sit in the embrace for a while. Soaking up each other’s presence.
“I’m sorry,” Emily says as soon as she stops hiccuping and words are an option again. “I wanted to protect you. I didn’t want to lose you.”
“It’s ok, darling, you haven’t lost me. I’m right here. Scootch over.”
Ever so gently Larissa lowers herself to the bed. They wiggle around until they find a comfortable way to lie together, with Emily’s head nestled under Larissa’s chin. As Larissa kisses the top of her head, Emily finally dares to relax. She’s safe.
“He tried to break me. But I kept thinking about my family. My team. You.”
Larissa’s embrace tightens a bit.
They are an odd couple, Emily knows. Both professionals, high in their respective fields over work. Overtime and long nights were the standard for them and not the exception. They spent more weekends apart than together. And yet they made it work. They had been good together. Until Emily broke them apart.
Larissa just gave her another chance. She has to do everything in her power to make this work.
She thinks about the conversations she had with JJ on the topic. She knows about the deal with Will. That any of the two can call it and they both go looking for another - safer - job.
“If you want, I will walk away now. Quit my job, move to Nevermore. I did what the team asked of me. He’s dead. Hotch can come back from witsec.”
She feels Larissa take a deep breath.
“As much as I like the idea of coming home to you each night. I can’t ask that of you.”
“Yes, you can. I am giving you permission to ask.”
“No, I can’t. This is who you are.” Larissa kisses her head again. “The BAU is your family.”
Emily wants to be stubborn and argue. She can reinvent herself. She has done it before. But she knows that the last year, even with the menacing presence of Scratch, even with the heartache of missing Larissa, had been happy. The team is her family.
But Larissa is her home.
“You’re my home.”
Another kiss on her forehead.
“Do you know when I fell in love with you?”
Slightly intrigued, Emily looks up at her. She shakes her head.
“When I came to your classroom to hand you back the stress ball you had given Mr. Fletcher and told you he had gotten detention because of you. You just flew off the handle.”
Emily blushes. She remembers getting so angry at the ridiculous rule about fidget toys that yes the discussion might have gotten a little bit heated. Larissa had responded with the same energy, both women yelling at each other for quite a while. At the time she was still convinced Larissa hated her guts, and she hadn’t realized her own feelings were a bit more than annoyance as well.
Larissa chuckles. “You didn’t even give me the chance to tell you I’d already waved the detention.”
“Have I apologized about that yet? God, I was so sure you were going to stick me in detention that day”
“I’m pretty sure the thought crossed my mind. You were a bit of a brat for most of those first weeks.”
Surely her ears are bright red by now, but knowing Larissa is just teasing, Emily easily snarks back: “Well, that’s just part of my charm.”
And actually yes. Larissa could handle some ribbing and it wasn’t like Emily - first member of the highly scrutinized Outcast Alliance Branch, then in charge of the local Vermont office and now the BAU - had many safe spaces where she could just be her own sarcastic self, without worrying too much about her image.
“Yes. One of your many charms,” Larissa agrees with a roll of her eyes. “But what I was getting at: you are a protector. You were just there for your cover, but you went to bat for a boy that you barely knew when most teachers would have just seen him as a nuisance.”
Emily wants to scoff at the idea of a teenage boy with ADHD being a nuisance, but she understands the point her girlfriend is making.
“You’d go insane if you stopped being you. You belong here. Chasing criminals. I’d prefer you’d do it from behind a desk… but well.”
Emily laughs softly. “Yeah, a few weeks of desk duty sounds good right about now.”
Larissa makes a show of feeling her forehead looking for a fever, and Emily grumbles through the standard are you sure you are ok joke before they find each other in an embrace again.
It feels right. It feels safe. It feels familiar. But Emily isn’t convinced yet she deserves it.
“Are we..” She bites her lip, but struggles through, because she needs to hear the answer. “Are we ok?”
It hurts when the room falls silent for a moment. But Emily knows Larissa. She needs a moment to organize her thoughts. So she patiently waits.
“For tonight, yes. Tomorrow too. But as soon as you get out of the hospital and back on your feet, we are going to have a long talk. About trusting each other. And how we are going to talk things through next time.”
The soft scolding actually makes her feel better. It signifies Larissa isn’t blind to the situation and isn't willing to blindly forgive her. She wants her to do the work, and wants them to grow as a couple.
It’s the most adult relationship she’s ever been in. And she doesn’t want to jeopardize it ever again.
“Yes, ma'am.”
Then she notices Larissa’s lip is stuck in her teeth and she’s worrying at it as if she’s debating something.
“Please tell me. I will do anything.”
“I want you to find a therapist. Preferably one who also does couple’s therapy.”
Emily closes her eyes, feeling Larissa tense, probably in response to her own body tensing. She hates therapists. Hates talking about her emotions. She knows that she could talk circles around most of them, and has done so many times. But Larissa could see straight through her. She wouldn’t be able to talk herself out of difficult conversations if she was present.
And then she realizes she doesn’t want to. She wants to grow. Wants to be better.
“Ok. We’ll find someone together.”
Larissa pulls her closer and softly kisses her in response. The first kiss they had shared in months. God, Emily had been such a fool jeopardizing this.
“I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Me too,” Larissa admits, voice suddenly sounding small. Not from the kiss, but from cropped-up emotion. She starts trembling and it’s Emily’s turn to hold her tightly, brace her trough the sobs.
“I could have lost you, Em. And I wouldn’t have known if you still loved me.”
Emily’s heart breaks.
“You would have gotten a letter.”
“Don’t you dare!” Larissa hisses, breaking the embrace and pushing herself up on one elbow, glaring down at Emily.
It’s the death glare that scares the shit out of hundreds of students at Nevermore, and Emily has it leveled several inches from her face. It’s terrifying. And yet, she straightens her back and keeps her chin high. She’s not backing down from this. She needs Larissa to know how much she loves her.
“I’m not kidding, Larissa. There is a letter. Ever since I… died, I know how sudden things can end. I know you don’t get to say goodbye. So I update my will frequently, and that includes letters to loved ones.”
Larissa is still angry, but the scowl softens. “I know you’re serious. I’m telling you I don’t want a letter . If something happens and you want me to know you loved me, you better make sure I already know. Make me memories, don’t write me a goddamn note…”
Emily remembers there is also a ring in the safe where she keeps the letters and realizes that if things would have gone wrong with Scratch, Larissa would have gotten it as she lay in a coffin, instead of seeing her in front of her on one knee. It feels like a slap in her face. Larissa is right, and as soon as they are in a better place again, she will give her what she deserves.
Larissa finally let herself cry for the lost months.
All Emily could do was whisper in her ear: “I promise, love. I promise. I love you so much and I’m gonna spend the rest of my life proving it to you. No holding back the truth, I won’t lie to you about anything …”
A nurse comes through the door, eyes on a chart. When she sees the both of them on the bed, she merely raises an eyebrow and asks if she can bring an extra bed.
Larissa blushes and starts to sit up. Emily waves the young girl away. She just got Larissa back, she wasn’t going to let her go just yet. With a smile the nurse does the small check-up she came in for: heart rate (just a little high but understandable), pain level, … and leaves telling them her team had been sent home by agent Rossi but that they would return tomorrow morning. Nothing more is said about the woman in her bed. Emily smirks, sometimes it pays to be a high level government official.
When they are alone again, Larissa speaks. “It’s late, darling. You should sleep.”
Emily agrees with a nod, nestling herself further in Larissa’s arms. She’s tired to the bone, and by the dark lines under her partner’s eye she can tell the other woman desperately needs sleep as well.
Then she remembers something. She just promised to always be honest to her girlfriend. And there was something she hadn’t told her yet.
“Riss, darling?”
“Hmm?”
“I gave Fletcher a fidget ring behind your back.”
A deep sigh. “I know. I discussed it with Dr. Kinbott and she agreed it was a good idea so I let him keep it. Now sleep.”
She dreams of the jet.