Chapter Text
Emily Prentiss learned, in her first year at the BAU, how to be two people at once.
There was the version of her that existed at Quantico. The one who read crime scenes like other people read novels, who could hold the weight of the worst humanity had to offer and still make it to her desk the next morning. Competent. Contained. Four separate colleagues called her intimidating in her first year, which she privately considered a compliment.
Then there was the version who drove forty minutes back to Arlington after every shift, let herself into a two-bedroom apartment that smelled faintly of poster paint and lavender baby wash, and stood in the doorway of a small room watching a two-year-old sleep.
Francesca. Dark hair fanned out across the pillow. One arm around Green Ted; slightly matted in the places she held him most, one ear a little flattened from being slept on, still recognisably green, still entirely himself. He went everywhere. This was not negotiable.
Nobody at the BAU knew about Francesca. It hadn't been a careful decision so much as a fierce, quiet instinct; keep her separate. The job was dark, and Francesca was the only thing Emily had made that the darkness hadn't touched. So she drove the forty minutes every night and kept the two halves of her life from ever knowing about each other.
Francesca at two had strong feelings about which cup was the correct cup. She had recently decided, with great conviction, that orange was the only acceptable colour for any cup, plate, or bowl, and would accept no substitutes. She carried Green Ted everywhere with the quiet ferocity of someone protecting something important and had named him with a two-year-old's straightforward practicality; he was green, he was a ted, the matter was settled. She slept like she did everything else: with her whole body, entirely committed.
Emily loved her in a way that had no ceiling. It worked. It was enough.
She believed this completely until Jennifer Jareau smiled at her on her third day, and Emily felt the whole careful architecture of it shift on its foundations.
JJ had been at the BAU for two years when Emily arrived. Media liaison; the public face, the one who stood in front of cameras and made horror manageable for public consumption. Emily had prepared for someone polished. Remote. Good at performance in a way that made the person underneath hard to find.
She was completely wrong.
JJ laughed with her whole body. She had her son's drawings stuck to the corner of her monitor and a habit of appearing at Emily's desk with a second coffee at exactly the right moment, as if she'd developed a sixth sense for when Emily was about to need one.
'You looked like you were reading that file with your teeth,' JJ said, setting the cup down on Emily's third Thursday. 'Bad one?'
'Aren't they all bad ones?'
JJ made a sound that wasn't quite an agreement. She sat in the spare chair without being asked, easy and unhurried, and Emily found she didn't mind.
She learned JJ in increments over those first weeks. Henry was three, blond like his mother, devoted to a picture book about trucks that had to be read to him every single night without variation. 'I know it word for word,' JJ said one morning, dropping into the spare chair. 'Every single page. He got upset last week because I accidentally skipped a line, and he knew. He just looked at me.' She demonstrated the look: patient, betrayed, and Emily laughed despite herself. 'Three years old,' JJ said. 'Three.' Will LaMontagne came up the way furniture came up; just there, assumed, solid. Five years married, his name in JJ's mouth as comfortable as breathing. Henry's bedtime negotiations. The evenings that sounded warm and lived-in. Emily listened to all of it and told herself it was fine.
She was a profiler. She knew what she was doing.
The realisation came on a Tuesday in November. Grey outside the bullpen windows, between cases, Morgan doing something loud at his desk. JJ came back from a press conference still in her coat, dropped into her chair, tipped her head back for just a moment, and then looked across the bullpen and caught Emily's eye.
She smiled. Not the press conference smile. The real one, small and tired and entirely for Emily.
There it is, Emily thought, and looked back down at her file.
She turned pages without reading them. Outside the bullpen, someone's phone rang. Reid said something that made Morgan laugh. The ordinary sounds of the place moving around her while she sat very still with the thing she'd just named and understood that she had probably known it for weeks and had been not-knowing it on purpose, and that this was what it felt like when you ran out of road.
She looked across the bullpen at JJ. Coat still on. Wind-disordered hair. Pen tucked behind her ear that she'd forget was there. She was reading something on her screen with the slight frown she got when she was working something out, and in a few minutes, she'd probably go and make coffee, and she'd stop at Emily's desk on the way back, the way she always did.
JJ deserved to be happy. She was happy. Emily got to be her friend, and that was genuinely more than a lot of people got. It wasn't even a difficult decision; she'd expected it to feel like loss, and it didn't, it felt more like something settling, a thing finding its right place, and she made herself read the file, and then JJ came by twenty minutes later, 'Do you want anything from the kitchen?'
‘Yes, please, same as always,’ Emily said and meant it.
December arrived. The feeling became quieter. Not gone; she'd stopped pretending it was gone, but manageable, background noise, traffic on a distant road. JJ was her colleague and her friend and someone she was glad to know, and most days that was simply true and enough, and she didn't have to work at it.
Most days.
Three weeks before Christmas, JJ appeared at her desk with that direct, guileless look she had when she was about to ask something personal.
'Do you have someone to be with over the holidays?' she said. 'I always worry about people on the team who don't have family nearby.'
Outside, it had started to snow. First snow of the year, slow and indifferent past the bullpen windows. Emily thought about Francesca. About her mother arriving in four days. About Christmas morning, Francesca had no real concept of what was coming yet, only that there was a tree in the living room that she wasn't supposed to touch, which she found completely unreasonable.
'I have someone,' Emily said. 'I'll be fine.'
JJ's face eased into a small, genuine smile. 'Good,' she said, and went back to her desk.
Emily looked at her own hands for a moment. Then she got back to work.
In Arlington, a two-year-old was at daycare doing something with glitter and cardboard that would become apparent on collection. Emily didn't know this yet. She would find out at pickup in a few hours and Francesca would be so pleased with herself that Emily wouldn't be even slightly annoyed about the coat, and she'd carry her to the car with both of them sparkling under the car park lights and Francesca would fall asleep before they reached the end of the street, Green Ted clutched to her chest the entire way home, as he always was, as he always would be.
She was already slightly smiling in anticipation of it.
It was, all things considered, more than enough. She meant that. Every word of it.