Chapter Text
It was an early summer day and thankfully the sweltering heat had not set in as the storms of spring and summer that melded the seasons together were keeping the days cool. Jennifer Jareau was driving the old black SUV, one that had held so many happy memories, the same one they’d had for years and sweet memories of three blonde haired children resided in it.
She can’t believe it had been a year. Well, a year and a day but who was counting other than a certain blonde and brunette, two former FBI profilers who had quit the bureau shortly thereafter. She let the aviators hide the deep set gray craters below her eyes. Her hands shook more readily the closer they got to the cabin. The two boys inside the vehicle were calmer than she was by far.
Her youngest son in the back of the vehicle was escaping into the sounds that his iPhone delivered and her oldest, nearly entirely a man now, was set in the front seat, his blonde brow furrowing beneath the black-rimmed glasses that set on his face. She can tell that the 22-year-old was lost in deep thoughts of his own. She reached out her unsteady right hand, grateful that at least her left was stable on the steering wheel, to clasp with his and send him a grave smile. He took it but didn’t look from the window he was staring out of.
“Hey,” JJ said softly but it might as well have been a bomb going off in the vehicle with the dead silence between them. “Are you okay?”
“Hmm?” Henry asked, snapping out of his thoughts to finally look over at his mother. “Oh yeah, uh, yeah, I’m good.”
“You sound about as convincing as me,” the blonde woman offers quietly. She let her son’s hand drop replacing her left hand on the steering wheel with her right as the other went to lean against the door panel. Her fingers lacing her brow, she could feel the year of stress set there.
“When was the last time you actually came out here and saw mom?” the boy asked, back to staring out the window as he watched the greenery of the mountains fly past them now.
“Uh,” JJ contemplates, her hand falling over her mouth with worry. “It’s been a couple of months but you know I still talk to her all the time, why does it matter?”
“I just wonder about her sometimes is all,” Henry says with a shake of his head. “I mean, after everything that happened with Carrie, she just sort of, I don’t know, I felt like I hardly recognized her when I came home for Christmas.”
JJ swallows thinking about this. The boy was right because Emily had changed since everything had happened. But honestly, most of them had changed in some fashion or another but that was usually because they we’re all just trying to keep their heads above water and not drown in it.
“Do you really think she’s happy up here?” Henry asks seemingly out of the blue as the silence had fallen over them again and the drive continued. “I mean, moving up here so close to where everything happened and all, I just-”
“Honestly, I don’t know, Henry,” JJ admitted, she knew her son was no longer a child and was aware of the harsh realities of life especially after this past year. “I doubt that you could say that your mother is happy anymore but she did always love the mountains so maybe she’s found some sort of solace up here that we just haven’t yet.”
Henry nods his head in silence and continues staring, lost in thoughts of his mother. The dark-haired woman was but a shell of her former self the last time he had seen her. Her brown eyes were dulled, there was a stoic-ness to her that hadn’t been there prior despite the woman always having a serious air about her. But she was not the mom he once knew, the one that could laugh, would try and fail at playing the video games that her sons adored and would roll around in the grass with them playing cops and robbers even though it was all too real for the former agent at work.
He even recalls the time that the brunette let Caroline dress her up as a pretty princess and put on a fashion show for their family and the team. It had been one of his favorite memories and it’s how he liked to remember the two of them together, dressed up in pinks and purples and a mess of makeup adorning their faces. The two wearing smiles that could last for ages, it was the best version of his usually too tough mother that he could remember.
JJ watches as best she can the emotions play over her eldest son’s face as she pulled up to the relatively rundown cabin and puts the vehicle into park. She watches the grin that laces his features fall suddenly as the reality seems sets in again and his face with it. She closes her eyes in the grief of it all. How had her family become such a fragmented portion of what it once was?
“Hey, where’d you go there?” JJ inquires quietly, letting the air between them fall freely.
The young man just shakes his head and looks at her with a half-hearted smile and she could almost see the bittersweet memories playing in his blue eyes, “Back to better, more simple times.”
She realizes that Michael has ripped the headphones out of his ears and is already halfway out of the car now and there’s only one person who could draw such a reaction out of the usually quiet and well-mannered boy, his other mother. As much as Henry and Caroline both had given JJ and Emily hell throughout their teenager years, it was so far smooth sailing with their third child. She wonders if that is chalked up to chaos and mayhem that impeded on their lives the past year.
“Mom!” she hears Michael exclaiming through the rolled up windows as he ran up the gravel driveway to meet his older mother who stood on the porch. JJ relieves herself of the aviators set over her eyes as she takes in the woman who was still technically her wife. Her dark, now nearly salt-and-pepper hair was in its short, usual bob, she wore a brown button up over cargo pants and combat boots. Despite everything, JJ still thinks that she’s the best looking woman that she’s ever seen.
With one final look over at Henry who seemed to be gazing longingly at the woman out the window, she nods her head and finally opens the door and eases her way out of the SUV. The blonde realizes that her son is doing the same but maybe at a slower pace. Maybe this was just as hard on them both.
The younger woman can’t help but feel her heart ache a little further at the sight of her fifteen-year-old son embracing his mother and not wanting to let go. She knew that everything had fallen the hardest on Michael, he was the youngest and still living at home so he was certainly the most effected by the sudden absence of his sister and then his mother with the separation. The blonde usually was on the receiving end of his backlash and blame but she was never angry with him. Hell, she couldn’t fault him.
As Emily and Michael pull away from their hug, blue and brown meet in a stare and both boys are not ignorant to the estranged nature of their mothers’ relationship. But somehow they always knew that there was still love there, they had witnessed it all their lives and it never faltered. Not at least until they all lost Caroline.
“Jennifer,” Emily nods towards her wife with squinted eyes in the summer sun.
“Emily,” JJ responded with her own nod as she looked away from the brown eyes that had always held her heart captive. She crosses her arms over her chest more out of defensiveness than anything.
“Alright, Henry, I get that you’re about to be a big Ivy League college grad and all, big man on campus,” Emily says with a weak smile on her face when addressing her oldest. “But you’re never too big to give your mom a hug so get over here.”
JJ is vaguely aware of Henry doing just that, walking over and embracing his older mother. She watches as his head dips in the curve of the woman’s neck and suddenly his shoulders are shaking. The blonde stands more readily, shifting and starting to make her way over when she sees Emily’s eyes meet hers and holds the hand that is around her son out towards her wife in a signal to stop. JJ hesitantly agrees and looks away. She couldn’t stand this.
“Henry, bud, it’s alright,” the brunette says softly to her son. She’s aware of Michael standing next to her, head downcast in thought. “Hey, I’m right here, we’re all right here, you know?”
“Carrie’s not,” she hears the man sniffle and mumble into her shoulder, shaking his head in his grief.
“No, she’s not,” she says as she pulls away, one hand staying steady at the base of his neck. She looks him the eye now. She gestures with her other hand, a finger aimed right at his heart. “But she is right here, she has and always will be right here, son.”
The oldest blonde boy just nods but then shakes his head, sniffling and wiping at his nose. Seeming a little ashamed at his show of emotions but they all knew he was the most sensitive member of their family, the one who channeled how JJ used to let herself be, open and vulnerable. She hardly even remembers that version of herself anymore. It had been so long.
“Why don’t you boys grab your bags and go check out your rooms that I setup for you?” Emily suggests easily, gesturing towards the old SUV. “Grab your momma’s things while you’re there and just put her things in my room.”
Both boys look at JJ now for a cue, a little confused at the notion that their blonde mother would be staying with Emily after everything that had happened. She just rolls her eyes as she says, “Don’t act so surprised, we are still married after all and it’s not the first time we’ve slept together.”
“Ew, gross,” they hear Michael groan but both boys do as they’re told, making their way back to the vehicle. The youngest teases the oldest about being a cry baby and they get into a little playful shoving match on the way there. The two women know that the boys have a close bond to one another and have never really been the kind to fight so they smile watching them go.
The blonde rolls her eyes again at the boys though as she makes her way closer to Emily, facing her and looking over the cabin a little closer as she nears. Her eyes wander over the outside, a fresh coat of paint set there actually livened the place up a bit. She couldn’t help but feel disconnected from it though, regardless of years of happy memories spent there. This would always be the place that her daughter came to die. She has to force the thought out of her head before it threatens her completely.
“The place looks good, Em,” JJ sighs while staring up the old place that she used to love coming to on vacations. “Early retirement is keeping you busy, I see.”
“Yeah, I got sick of looking at the dingy beige and decided that brown suited it better,” Emily says with a shrug. “It’s more than I’ve done for the inside but it’s a start.”
The boys pass them and make their way up the rickety old stairs with their bags and Emily offers her hand toward the entrance. JJ takes in a deep breath and stares the place down as if it were a formidable foe. But as she feels the brunette’s hand land on her back, she manages to move forward again, nodding her head.
They all make their way through the doorway and the boys make a straight line for the old bedrooms that they used to use as kids. JJ can’t seem to make it any farther than the living area. She recognizes the old, worn out couches and tables. The only relatively new items were the endless boxes scattered about that were mostly untouched.
Emily had been here for nearly six months now and she still hadn’t unpacked. JJ knows this is something to be expected of the brunette because Emily had travelled the world once so often that unpacking might seem useless. That was until she met the younger blonde. So much had changed in their twenty years together but JJ supposes that old habits die hard.
“You know, a long time ago there was a case that we were working together, at an unsub's apartment and he hadn't unpacked anything at all. Do you remember what you told me when I asked what it meant that he lived like that?” JJ inquires as Emily looks over at her with her brow furrowed, shaking her head and licking her lips slightly. “You told me it was because he was stuck.”
The brunette seems to realize what her estranged wife was insinuating now and she shakes her head, trying her best to remain calm although these days, it’s more hard for Emily than not. She hardly even remembers what an even temperament looks like but all that was before last year and the drinking and everything else that had gone wrong in her life.
She can’t hold in or temper the words that finally shoot back out like venom, “Yeah, well, I'm not the one who chooses to stay in that old house and keep that bedroom like a shrine or better yet a fucking tomb of who our daughter was.”
“I’m the one who lives in a fucking tomb, me?” JJ angrily asks, incredulously really because she genuinely couldn’t believe that Emily Prentiss, of all people, was judging her. “This is where our daughter spent her final hours before she walked into those woods to die, Emily!”
Emily winces at the harsh words but she couldn’t exactly fight her wife on the matter. It was the truth. This is where Caroline Jareau Prentiss had come to celebrate her graduation with some of her friends; they had planned to spend a night out camping but decided to stay in the cabin because of bad weather.
Instead the girls decided to get drunk off Emily and JJ’s wine. While the other girls had passed out, Caroline had wandered into the woods to throw up and no one saw her again until her body was found two days later. Her throat slashed with seventeen stab wounds all over her body with clear evidence that she had been raped. The older woman knew these details like the back of her hand, like she could ever forget them.
The older woman had never walked two miles faster in her life. She didn’t even know if her wife was keeping up with her but she knew that if JJ felt the same fire in her bones, the same terrifying ache and intense thumping of her heartbeat in her ears then she was. They had gotten the call from Rossi. They had found her two miles away from the cabin.
Rossi was long retired from the Bureau again, this time for good but he had made the trip when he heard the news that Caroline was missing. The FBI and BAU had insisted on taking the case, there was no other option when the Unit Chief’s daughter was the one at stake. It didn’t matter if the case was too close or that it was a conflict of interest. They would all be damned if they weren’t the ones to find her.
Emily nearly runs smack into Rossi and Reid on her way past but the older man had her by the stomach before the scene was entirely in view. Reid had done the same of JJ, grabbing her before she could truly witness what had been done to her daughter.
“Emily, please, I promise you, you don’t want to see her,” Rossi had tried to reason with the woman that was fighting against him with all she could muster. “You can’t remember her, not like this.”
“Fuck you, Rossi, don’t tell me what I want and don’t want,” Emily said as she manages to free herself from the man’s grasp. “That is my daughter and I’ll be damned if you or anyone else tries to stop me.”
Reid had looked into JJ’s eyes, his big brown orbs begging her and she could read it. He was begging her not to go, to not see the state of his goddaughter. She could see all the regret in his eyes that he ever had. The blonde could count on one hand how many times she had seen Spencer Reid cry but this was one of them. He didn’t just have tears in his eyes, he was openly crying and the salty substance was making its way down his cheek as she made her way past him to follow her wife.
The two women made their way up the slope slower now, each foot dragging them closer to the one thing they had seen a million times but never like this. Never so close. The scene was much like any other and they knew it. The local law enforcement was traipsed around, forensic units were combing for anything they could find and Luke Alvez and Tara Lewis were standing near the body.
Luke standing a ways away but staring at the girl with wide eyes, flared nostrils and his jaw set tight. Tara was kneeled next to the girl gazing upon the young woman with all the love and kindness and regret that she had ever felt in her life.
Emily knew instinctively that Rossi and Reid were following her and JJ but keeping a safe distance. JJ had managed to be the first one to arrive at the plateau that evened out into a lining of trees there. The scenery would be beautiful and ideal had it held almost any other scene other than this.
The blonde stops in her footsteps as she witnesses the lifeless body of her daughter, her daughter who she had given birth to, the daughter who she had cared for from the moment she was brought into existence. Emily stopped short herself and she sees her daughter, the one that had scared the shit of her when she first found about her, the one that she had vowed she would protect until her dying breath but here she was. The blonde and brunette were staring at the lifeless body of their daughter, their child. The one they both knew that they had so completely, utterly and readily failed.
JJ had never felt a shot of pain wreak havoc through her body, not when she was shot nor when she was tortured, no. There was no greater pain than at that moment, the moment she looked upon her little girl with her throat cut wide open, the dirt and debris upon her seeping into the open stab wounds, her body barely covered by the clothes that had been torn from her by whoever had done this and who had tossed them haphazardly over her. That’s the moment that the sob releases itself from her mouth, her hand falling over it to keep it at bay but there was nothing that could hold the waves that took her under now.
Emily just stared, entirely numbed by the millions of crimes she had witnessed by countless murderers, thieves and rapist across the entire world. It was a sight that was never supposed to get easier but over time, the brunette knew it did. It’s what made her Unit Chief, at both Interpol and the BAU. The ability to show no emotion at things like this but she never thought that she wouldn’t be able to feel it. But this was not easy by any means and it did not feel real. It was the hardest thing the woman would ever come to see in her lifetime. There was no crime scene she had ever witnessed or scoured that had left her feeling quite so entirely empty and cold as this one did. Yet she was emotionless. Her wife was crumbling next to her and her daughter was dead in front of her. And Emily Prentiss did not a feel a goddamn thing in that moment.
She faintly feels her wife tugging at her shoulder before the blonde has completely turned and walked away from the scene. She hears the feint sounds of the woman collapsing behind her and the sounds of both her and Reid’s sobs. The younger man desperately attempting comfort but Emily knew there was no such thing as comfort. That’s when the graying David Rossi comes up beside her, entirely facing her with his bloodshot stare as serious as she’d ever seen him. She somehow manages to swivel her neck to meet his eyes, her own cold ones were starting to shake with what felt like the sting of tears.
She simply shakes her head once, staring up at the sky and back towards the man. Emily doesn’t cry when she sees the lifeless body of her daughter in the aftermath of her rape and murder.
“It’s still here, isn’t it?” Emily hears the words come out of her wife’s mouth but she is caught drifting off into the past, dead eyes searching for nothing. The older woman senses her wife go in a huff, the blonde a mere streak in her peripherals, off to the left and into the dining area that had been covered by a sheet long ago. She pulls back the curtain and there it lies and the younger woman is swinging back towards her wife. “How dare you have the nerve to call me out and say I’m living in a tomb when you are quite literally living with your daughter’s corpse plastered on the walls and a white board?”
Emily’s eyes roam the room, anywhere but the blue ocean of passion in her wife’s eyes. She sees it, every single bit of what logic JJ was spewing but she couldn’t face it. She looks at the white board where her daughter’s senior photo is posted there. The details of how she was taken only feet away from this very house and dragged two miles to that plateau where she was beat and raped by a man. She was choked and held at knife point before he slashed her throat as he was still inside her, and then stabbed multiple times then left to bleed out and die. It was dark and it was bleak but it was reality.
The blood spatter reports, the DNA, the partial prints that just weren’t ever enough to find the man who did this to their little girl were all there and constantly in her face. In gory and bold detail splayed out on the walls and in boxes opened. In fact it was one of the few things in the cabin that Emily Prentiss had actually unpacked.
“How can you live like this, Emily?” JJ asked in a mere whisper, tears welling in her eyes and she searches but her wife doesn’t let her find her irises. But the blonde needed answers, she needed to know that she hasn't entirely lost everything in her life to one single man’s actions cause right now, it felt like it. She rubs her fingers over her eyes, exasperated. “You can’t live like this.”
“How do you expect me to live, JJ, huh? Like it never happened?” the brunette suddenly finds her voice as it spills over her tongue in anger and bitterness and harshness. “Like our daughter wasn't brutally beaten, raped and murdered? She is our daughter, Jennifer, and she’s dead!”
“You don’t think I know that?!” the blonde screams back in vehemence as she shoots forward in her own fury, stopping just centimeters from her wife’s face. “I know that, Em, I know that but when the DNA doesn't match anyone who’s ever been arrested and the MO, the victimology, the geological profile doesn't match any other crime in the nation and when there wasn't a single eyewitness that saw our daughter leave this cabin then we have nothing, there is no case, and there are no leads here.”
The younger woman is panting in the face of the brunette who stares her dead in the eyes and JJ saw it, she still managed to see in that dead stare a slight glimmer of hope. She wishes she could understand it but she doesn’t. Maybe JJ came to understand things that had no reason or explanation or justice to them more readily because of what her sister had done when she was still so young. You tend to accept the inconceivable that much easier when your sister kills herself out of the blue one day and you never get the answers you search for. So perhaps it was instinct, second nature now.
JJ and Emily are broken from their intense glare by the deep clearing of a throat. Both women’s eyes shoot away from each other to look at their two sons, two sets of big blue eyes searching them after clearly having heard the entire argument. Henry’s eyes are pleading between his two mothers while Michael’s innocent eyes were taking in the expanse of contents spread out in the dining room.
“Uh, me and Mikey are gonna head down to the water and try to catch some fish,” Henry says with a slight shrug, looking away and out the window nearby. “You know, like old times and all.”
“Yeah, yeah, of course,” the younger woman nods her head at this, her blonde ponytail bobbing with the movement as she looks away from every single member of her family, not able to take any of them in at the moment. Her lips caught tight under her teeth for a moment and as the boys start to walk away in their unseeing way, the woman calls back. “And Henry, look after your little brother.”
Henry scoffs slightly at this notion as it had become a typical expectation every single time he was home now so he just pulls back the red flannel shirt he wore and reveals the glock 19 that rested on his hip and he smiles over at his mother half-heartedly, “I don’t think that will be a problem.”
JJ just nods her head, staring at her son seriously in the eye as Emily watches on, a simple spectator with her mouth hanging agape and the boys are out the door in seconds. The brunette scoffs as soon as the door closes, “Oh nice, JJ, our 22-year-old son carries a pistol now.”
“Yeah, that’s right, he does,” JJ nods as she returns her eyes to the brunette’s. “Cause if you had actually supported Carrie when she wanted to follow us into the FBI, if you had ever shown her how to use a gun then maybe, just maybe we wouldn’t be here right now.”
“Oh, that falls squarely on me then, huh?” the brunette grits her teeth. “Then it falls squarely on you that the girls came up to this cabin all by themselves when I didn’t want to let it happen for even a second. You trusted them to act like adults when they were still just kids, kids who get into trouble and who break into their mothers’ liquor cabinet because they can and get so drunk that they pass out, that they have to run outside to throw up.”
The blonde is shaking by the end of the accusatory sentence that Emily lobs her way and she was seeing red, most of the time JJ was level-headed and calm and could keep her composure under the hardest and most strenuous of distress. But right now her impulses get the better of her because she feels like she could cry but fuck it if she could cry anymore and she also wants to smack her wife upside the face for the words she had just allowed to slip from her mouth.
Instead, JJ grabs a nearby vase, one long forgotten about, one that had been a wedding present or maybe it was an anniversary gift but it honestly didn’t matter because it was all lost now. The younger woman grabs the ceramic regardless and chunks it past Emily where it collides rapturously with the wall and yet the brunette doesn’t even flinch. The blonde shouldn’t have been surprised as much, there wasn’t much that ever made the woman blink, not even staring at the dead body of their daughter had gotten beneath the calm, cold, callous, calculating and compartmentalizing skin of Emily fucking Prentiss, the cunt.
“We can sit here all day and play the blame game, Jennifer,” Emily says seriously, her flaring nostrils and heaving breath showing that maybe this confrontation was getting to her, if only slightly. “But what fucking good is that going to do, huh? It won’t bring her back, it won’t bring our daughter back.”
Jennifer Jareau laughs the most rueful laugh that has probably ever slipped from her mouth at this statement before she is back in her wife’s, at this rate soon-to-be ex-wife’s face, “And what fucking good does it do to keep all this shit posted up like it’s gonna bring her back? What good does justice do anyways? Or is it really just vengeance at this point, Emily?”
“That’s not fair, cause where is that innocent little JJ that I fell in love with all those years ago, huh?” Emily asks rhetorically. “Where is the woman that used to actually care to fight for justice because I haven’t seen her for a very long time now?”
“She grew up, Em, and you know this!” JJ shakes her head, not feeling like she has to justify anything to her wife anymore and is more than fed up with what always seems to become of them these days, every time they were together now. “You know what? I’m going for a walk.”
“Yeah, well, don’t get yourself killed,” Emily shoots off haphazardly, not really caring where this conversation led at this point.
“Oh, nice, Em, I’ll make sure to do that,” JJ replies with venom in her tone. “You know what? Your entire family hasn’t even been here an hour and you’ve already pushed us all away from you so I hope you’re real proud of yourself cause you're making me regret letting you convince me to come up here at all.”
With this JJ is out the door which she slams behind her and it’s now that Emily flinches because here she was all alone again in this isolated cabin and right back where she started.
“Real fucking nice, Prentiss,” she groans to herself as she goes to pick up the shattered remains of the vase that was probably a much bigger metaphor than she cared to dwell on.