Chapter Text
The park is deserted at this time of night and cold at this time of year when there’s no snow on the ground but still a chill in the air. The two coffees warm her hands, at least, though she has no intention of drinking either of them, even the one she bought for herself. She’d only gone to get them to have something to do. She’s been waiting for a while.
(Both coffees are black. That’s one thing they have in common, though if Emily is honest with herself, she has much more in common with Ian Doyle than she’d like to believe.)
She sets one of them down on the side of the table that faces the road and takes the other to the opposite seat. It’s not much protection—the park is big and open, and there’s plenty of space for someone to sneak up on her. But at least this way, it’ll be harder for someone to get her in a drive-by, even if they have excellent aim, as Doyle’s associates always do.
She spins her coffee, not drinking it, unsure if it would stay in her stomach. Ian is late, which is both unlike him and very much like him. Ian is always in control, and human obstacles like lousy traffic or forgetting car keys never seem to stop him or even happen to him in the first place. This means he must be late on purpose because he intends for her to wait and stew and spiral. She’s halfway through scolding herself for not considering that when a hand lands between her shoulder blades.
It’s such a gentle touch it’s hard to believe it’s the hand of a killer, but she’s felt Ian’s hands many times in many places, and she knows. His thumb slides up under her hair to touch the base of her neck, swipes once in a near-caress, and then his hand stills. He makes no move to grab her. In fact, he is motionless. He just wants her to know he’s there. He wants her to know that he could.
“I knew you were watching me,” Emily says. It’s not really a lie, depending on how you cut it. She hadn’t felt his eyes on her exactly—she hadn’t even heard him approach; he’d seemed to have simply emerged from the night—but she knew him well enough to know he had to have been observing her for some time before he even took a step toward her. To scope her out or to watch her squirm.
“What’s the expression?” He sounds the same as he always has, and for a moment, nothing has changed. For a moment, she is Lauren again, but she looks down at her bitten nails and reminds herself—Emily, Emily, always Emily. Ian’s hand slides across her back and wraps briefly around her shoulder before slipping away. “Keep your friends close, your enemies under surveillance?”
“I’ve been here for two hours,” Emily says. “You should know better than to keep a lady waiting.” She cringes. That was Lauren, woken briefly from her slumber by the sight of Ian’s face as he stepped in front of the table.
“It seems hypocritical,” Ian says. “Seeing as I had to wait seven years.” He sits and leans casually against the back of the seat, afraid of nothing because anyone shooting from the street would be doing it under his orders.
He’s silent for long enough that Emily knows she’s expected to respond. This fucking chess game. She itches under her skin. “Hello, Ian.”
“Hello, Lauren,” Ian says, then blinks in faux realisation. “Oh, wait. Lauren Reynolds died in a car accident, didn’t she?”
She’s done playing. “What do you want?” It is a demand, not a question.
“You,” Ian says.
She doesn’t know what he means. All the options are terrible. Does he want Lauren back? Does he want to kill Emily? Does he want to—
“Oh, not today. Don’t worry about that. But soon.”
She pulls back and squares her shoulders. She’s met worse men than him. None have frightened her like this because none have known her like this, but objectively, there have been worse. Worse men will come if she lives to see morning. “I’ve got a Glock levelled at your crotch. What’s to stop me from taking you and the little ones out right now?”
Ian tilts his head and smiles like he’s looking at a painting. “You’d never make it back to your car and you know it.”
So, he does have some of his men with him. Not that she’d expected anything less. She tilts her head back despite her instincts telling her not to expose her throat and has nearly reassured herself that Ian has no plans to kill her tonight when he speaks again, the words falling over her like a bucket of ice water.
“Tell me, does the lovely Penelope know the truth about you?”
Her mouth twitches, her upper lip nearly curling into a snarl. Do not react. If you show him you care, he will go after them if he’s not already planning to.
“Or is she too busy watching movies with Derek to care?” She hears her pulse loud in her ears and doesn’t know if she’s controlling her expression well enough as Ian continues to speak. “Here you are, all alone, while Aaron sits at home with his son. And why didn’t Dave and Ashley invite you to their game night?”
She thinks she might be sick despite her empty stomach. Garcia and Morgan watch a lot of movies together; the most cursory amount of surveillance would reveal that. Hotch having a son is common knowledge. But Rossi and Seaver playing games together…it’s so random and so specific it has to be happening right now. Ian has people watching her team now. She’s stupid for ever thinking otherwise.
Ian smiles. She’s failed to hide the fear, then. It’s an emotion she usually feels in her stomach, but tonight, it is full-body, freezing her fingertips even as she presses them against her coffee cup.
“Maybe they thought you’d be on the Metro with Dr Reid,” Ian continues, and his teeth flash. “That one does have some quirks.”
“Come near my team, and I will end you,” Emily spits. She was foolish to think she could hide the depth of her care. She will settle for wielding it like a knife.
“I don’t have a quarrel with them,” Ian says. “How long that remains the case depends entirely on you. They’re innocent. You are not.”
“I was doing my job.” What is this, this defensiveness? This isn’t Emily or even Lauren. It’s some frightened girl.
“I think you did a little more than that. You took the only thing that mattered to me. So I’m going to take the only thing that matters to you.”
For a terrible moment, Emily is more scared than she has been her entire life, even more than she was as a fifteen-year-old girl staring down at two red lines in a drug store bathroom. The only one of Emily’s people who Ian hasn’t named yet is JJ, and while she’s certainly not the only thing that matters to her, she’s also the only person Ian hasn’t yet assured her he has no plans to immediately harm.
“Your life,” Ian says, and the relief the threat brings is so strong Emily doesn’t even pay attention to what else he says before he walks away.
She waits until he disappears into the night again to bury her head in her hands. What the fuck is she going to do? She knows the same way she knows that her heart beats, that if she told her team, they would drop everything to help her. That’s why that’s definitely not an option; if she involves them, Ian will kill them. She could give herself up, but then Ian will kill her. That’s not even what scares her about that option because what Ian said was only true of Lauren. Emily couldn’t care less. No, if Ian kills her, whether he makes her disappear or leaves her body for some poor dogwalker to find, the team will stop at nothing to solve the case, and when they inevitably do, they will stop at nothing to take Ian down. And then, he will kill them.
Her shoulders hitch, but no tears form. She could run, but the team will search for her. And so will Ian. And when their paths cross, he will kill them.
There are no good options. Emily never should have kidded herself into thinking she could have a happy life with people she cared for and who cared for her in turn. She was never meant for it. Her team is damned for the crime of loving her.
Unless.
Unless she takes herself out of the equation entirely.
She tilts her head back and looks skyward. It’s a beautiful night, really, despite everything that has transpired. She can see more stars than she usually can in D.C. She finds Polaris and blinks back tears.
It’s not a terrible night to die. At this point, the best she can hope for is purgatory, but that doesn’t matter. She doesn’t matter.
Calm steals over her, and the tears dry before they can even fall from her lashes. She rises from the table and leaves without her coffee.
She doesn’t go through with it that night, and she kicks herself for it in the morning because every second Emily spends in her friends’ lives is a second she puts them in danger, but it’s not like she can turn back time. If she could, this would be a far simpler dilemma—she would just never apply to the BAU and disappear to Berlin or Paris or somewhere else, far from anyone she cared about who could be caught in the crossfire whenever Ian inevitably caught up to her.
It’s a stupid thing that makes her change her mind, really. She opens her hall closet and plans to die. She unlaces her boots and plans to die, then hangs up her coat and sees the wrapped box on the top shelf.
She shouldn’t even have it. JJ’s birthday is a while away, even further away when she bought it. Still, when she’d spotted the beautiful gold bracelet etched with butterflies at a jewellery store they went to during a case, she had returned for it in the precious hours between catching their UnSub and catching their flight.
After taking it down, she sits on her couch, holding the small box gingerly in both hands. For a while, she only stares. It’s strange that she bothered wrapping it. She’s usually a “stick it in a bag with some colourful tissue paper and call it a day” kind of person, but it felt special.
(Maybe because the price had made her wallet cringe. Maybe because the person she intended to give it to is special).
She can’t—it’s so stupid, but she can’t leave before giving this to JJ. She knows her friends will clear out her apartment once she goes, cradle her meagre belongings like they hold a piece of her inside of them, and once they find the box, they will open it in case it holds answers, and then they will see the butterflies and know who it’s for.
If that’s how JJ gets it, she knows her friend won’t be able to bear wearing it. In this altered state of quiet panic or maybe even mania, she doesn’t consider that receiving a gift just before your friend kills herself is hardly better than receiving it after. And the name Roslyn means nothing to her, yet.
JJ will be suspicious if it’s wrapped, especially in this robin’s egg blue paper that’s obviously been chosen specially for her, so she unwraps it. On Emily’s last birthday, she’d left so many scraps of paper on the floor that Derek had seemed mildly impressed. Tonight, she throws the paper away in one whole piece. Leaving the bracelet in the box on its bed of bubble wrap (since that can be explained away as simply not wanting to damage the expensive present), she sets it carefully in her purse.
She changes into a t-shirt and shorts and kisses Sergio on top of his fuzzy head. He chirps at her like he knows, and she thinks of the time Reid told her about Oscar, the therapy cat from Rhode Island, who likes to nap next to terminally ill people before they pass. How she will miss him.
(That one does have some quirks—)
Lauren tells the Doyle in her head to shut his fucking mouth and goes to bed. Just in case, she keeps her gun on her nightstand and does not sleep.
Work goes…surprisingly normal. She knows she should have expected that—she did expect it, at least intellectually—for the team, life is proceeding as it always has. None of them are aware this is the last time they’ll see her.
So, she buys Spencer an extra large caramel latte with oat milk and an extra shot of espresso and doesn’t even make fun of him for it. On the same trip where she buys Spencer his coffee monstrosity, she buys Penelope a blueberry croissant, hot and fresh enough to hurt her hands through the paper bag. She ducks into Derek’s swanky new-ish office and swipes some files off his desk.
“Oh, my hero.”
“You say that to all the girls?”
“Only the ones who do my job for me. I owe you one, Prentiss.”
She smiles and ducks out of his office before her face can fall. This is going to hurt them, there’s no avoiding that. But this is the least painful route, in the end. Maybe they will understand that, someday.
She doesn’t do anything nearly so dramatic for Hotch, Rossi, or Seaver—as much as she likes them, they’re her boss, pseudo-boss, and newest teammate, respectively, and any grand display of affection from her will make them raise their eyebrows. She can’t have that. Being a profiler requires some kind of background in general psychology, and the signs of suicide are well taught.
(Emily hasn’t genuinely wanted to die for a long time, and even now, knowing this is the right thing to do—the only thing to do—there’s still a fourteen-year-old trapped behind the white bars of her rib cage, sharp-toothed and spitting like all little girls. That girl wants to live. That girl does not understand sacrifice yet. This isn’t fair, she cries. I know, replies Lauren, standing in the shadow of her future. Nothing ever is.)
But the red flags of suicide don’t change even when it’s for a good reason. Emily knows they won’t understand why she’s doing this if they puzzle it out. They’ll try to stop her. They’ll succeed because Emily knows she’ll wilt at the slightest prodding from her family. Then, Ian will punish her for her weakness by killing them.
She can’t leave them with nothing, though. She can’t leave Hotch and Rossi and even Seaver, who is new but quickly worming her way into Emily’s heart, with the very false sense that she doesn’t treasure them.
As luck would have it, as the day winds to a close, the whole team is in the bullpen. Penelope is draping herself over Derek’s back and saying something probably inappropriate for work into his ear. Hotch and Rossi are standing off the side and chatting about whatever men their age chat about. Spencer spins too fast in his chair and falls out of it. Seaver laughs.
It might be the only kind thing the universe has ever done for her, aside from letting her meet these people in the first place. Getting to see them all happy one last time before she destroys it, leaving their lives like a hurricane.
“Aw, I love you guys,” she says, slinging her bag over her shoulder as Spencer picks himself off the floor and mock-glares at Seaver, then at Penelope and Derek as they join in the schoolyard giggling. Hopefully, that sounds casual enough.
“We love you too!” Penelope calls and makes kissing noises.
As she brushes past Hotch and Rossi, she hears the latter speak. Whispers, more like, but Emily is a diplomat’s daughter and a spy and hearing things she’s not supposed to is kind of her thing.
“Well, what do you know? She does care.”
Emily bites her lip. She does, she does. It’s her undoing. It was worth it.
Her heart pounds as she approaches JJ’s front door. She’s pretty sure it’s safe. If she’s been being followed for a while, she doubts whoever is doing surveillance hasn’t seen her visit JJ and doubts even more that they haven’t seen her visit anyone. This isn’t such an out-of-character action that it will raise the eyebrows of whoever is watching, she hopes.
She trips up the steps and pauses in front of the door, swinging back and forth on her heels before knocking. She considers the opening notes of Sleep Now in the Fire, but that feels like a confession, even if, on the surface, it’s only to the knowledge of JJ’s secret favourite band. Instead, she gives four quick, non-indicative knocks, and then steps back.
“Coming!” JJ calls.
Emily hears Will say something—she can’t tell what it is because it’s mumbled, and she’s always had trouble with his accent, but whatever it is, it must have been funny because JJ laughs brightly, the echo of it still on her face when she opens the door. With it open, Emily can smell something spicy and earthy and hear the sounds of someone moving in the kitchen. She realises abruptly that she’s intruding on her friend’s dinner, but JJ’s face, already sunny, brightens regardless.
“Emily, hey! What are you doing here?”
“Um,” Emily says eloquently.
JJ frowns curiously and steps to the side, opening up the doorway. “…You wanna come in? Will’s making dirty rice. It’s better than it sounds.”
“Oh, I—I couldn’t impose,” Emily says, waving a hand.
“You’d actually be doing me a favour,” JJ smiles. “Will’s making way too much for two adults and a toddler.” She turns her head and shouts into the kitchen, “again!”
“That’s how we do it in the bayou!”
The sense of being an outsider threatens to suffocate her. It’s not even like watching a movie—it’s like walking into the wrong theatre. She wants to stay. She wants to stay so badly, sit at the dinner table with JJ and Will, laugh with them when more of Henry’s food winds up on his face than in his mouth, and pretend she belongs in a place like this. But if she goes inside, whoever is following her might think she’s telling her friend the truth. That would make JJ a threat that needs to be neutralised, along with her boyfriend and maybe her toddler, if Doyle is feeling particularly sadistic. It’s an easy decision to make, but it aches. “Tell Will it smells great, but I really can’t stay long. I just…I have something for you.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah.” Emily pulls her bag out in front of her and takes the box out from where she’s rested it carefully atop the rest of her things. She pulls it out, and since she can’t think of how to introduce a gift like this in a situation like this, she just holds it out to JJ wordlessly.
JJ takes it delicately, drawing her brows together and frowning before opening the velvet box. Her mouth drops open. “Woah, Emily—this is—when did you—” She takes the bracelet out like she expects it to crumble in her fingers, wetting her lips and drawing her brows together.
Yeah. Not really the kind of gift you just casually give to someone. Emily rushes for an explanation. “I—Spencer and Penelope talked me into going thrifting with them and—”
JJ’s brows shoot to her hairline. “…You bought this at a thrift store?”
“No, no, sorry. It was on the way back. I saw it in a shop window, and, you know, butterflies. I thought of you.”
JJ squints, but before she can respond, Will interrupts. “Hey, baby, dinner’s almost—” He stops, looking from the bracelet to JJ to Emily. “…I need some new cufflinks if you’re buying.”
JJ swats his arm.
“I’m kidding! Heard you two talking—you sure you don’t want to stay for dinner? Least we can do after…this.”
“I’d love to, but I really have to get home, or Sergio’s going to start shredding my curtains.”
Will gives her a look, but he’s hard to read, as always. Finally, he nods and retreats back to the kitchen.
JJ says nothing; she just holds the bracelet and stares. Emily gets the distinct sense she’d underestimated how expensive it was for the average person. “Sorry, I know it’s—really random. I don’t know how long I’ll be—”
Alive.
“—In D.C. before we get another case, and I wanted to get it to you before Sergio knocks it off my shelf.” That’s twice now she’s used her cat as an excuse. She shakes her arm, so her sleeve falls over her hand and crosses her fingers where JJ can’t see. She’s being significantly less subtle than she’d hoped.
“Um. Yeah. Right.” JJ blinks before carefully sliding the bracelet over her wrist. “It’s. Um. It’s really beautiful. Really. I—” She laughs. “I have no idea how I’m going to get you back for this.”
“You don’t have to,” Emily says, which isn’t a lie. “You—you’re my friend. I wanted to do something nice for you.” One last thing, she doesn’t say.
“Well, you succeeded.” JJ steps forward and folds her into her arms. The cold metal of the bracelet presses into the back of her neck. “Thank you. I—I’ve missed you, since they kicked me upstairs. Please do come by for dinner sometime.”
Emily can’t lie, so she says nothing, just squeezes hard like an apology.
“Take care of yourself,” JJ says as if she senses something. But she doesn’t know. Emily exhales as JJ releases her.
“Bye, Jayje.”
“Night, Em.”
Emily leaves JJ’s doorstep before the truth can leave her mouth, darting for her car fast enough that she suspects JJ is frowning suspiciously at her back. That’s fine. Suspicious is fine. She’s gotten away.
She’s really going to do this.
She casts one last look at JJ’s nice house before she starts to pull away. She hopes they don’t find out what she’s done to herself until morning. She hopes they get one last night where they believe all is well.
Emily stops at CVS on her way home and buys the biggest bottle of Benadryl she can find. She’d considered shooting herself, but when she doesn’t show up to work tomorrow, someone from the team—maybe Derek—is probably going to come by to check on her, and she can’t leave them with that image. It’ll be slower, and it’ll hurt, and worse, it might not work. But it’s the only option she can think of that won’t hurt her people more than she absolutely needs to.
It’s like she’s floating. It’s a strange feeling, knowing her life is ending, the feeling so strong she thinks she must be broadcasting it, but everybody is treating her very normally. She wonders for a second how many perfectly pleasant strangers she’s interacted with have gone home and offed themselves but stops the thought before it can wander towards the idea of asking Spencer, whom she will never see again.
She says something to the cashier about the coming Spring (which she won’t see, though she doesn’t mention that part) and the young man laughs and commiserates before wishing her a good night. Rush hour traffic makes her commute drag. It’s so normal she nearly forgets what she’s going to do until she’s inside her apartment and it’s time. She leaves the door unlocked to make things easy for whoever comes to find her.
Emily fills Sergio’s food and water bowls as high as she can without making them overflow, just in case she’s wrong about the depth of the team’s care for her and nobody comes to check on her for some time. Even if they do care as deeply as she suspects they do, they might get a case.
“Don’t eat me?” she requests, stroking her thumb over Sergio’s tiny head as he begins to drink.
She sits with him for a moment before standing and retrieving the bottle of the nice red wine Rossi had bought her last month, insisting she needed to try something other than “that boxed crap.” It is genuinely good, a final indulgence before she makes her last sacrifice, and she needs something to wash down all the pills she needs to take, anyway. And it’ll probably help get the job done.
It happens quietly. Emily takes a sip, and then she takes a few pills. Sip, pills. Sip, pills. It’s like nothing bad is happening at all. She repeats this until the bottle of Benadryl is empty and then heads for her bedroom, where she wraps herself in her softest blanket and lays down to wait.
She sits through the tremors without blinking. When her stomach starts to cramp, she closes her eyes, grits her teeth, and reminds herself that this is necessary. When her mouth and throat dry like sandpaper, she only considers getting up and drinking more wine. Her heart jackrabbits in her neck, and she ignores it. Sergio jumps up on the bed beside her and nudges her face with his head. She reaches up to pet him, knowing he won’t understand and hoping someone on the team (Penelope, maybe) will take him in. It might do her friend some good to hang on to one last part of her.
The pain changes nothing. Her cat changes nothing, not even when he starts to meow at her like he had when she got a bad case of the flu.
And then, she starts to think.
What if Doyle hears about her death and, rather than being glad she’s gone, he’s enraged she stopped him from being able to do it himself? What if he becomes angry that he couldn’t get at her while she was alive and decides instead to get at the people who loved her while she was? What if she’s dooming the team by trying to save them?
She bolts upright, sending Sergio scampering out of the room. She nearly folds in on herself when the movement makes the pain in her stomach spike from bad to blinding, but she manages to stagger to her feet and into her living room. She doesn’t make it as far as she needs to before it spikes again and knocks her to the ground, but all that means is she has to crawl. And she does, all the way to where she’d set her bag down.
Emily drags it towards herself even as her vision begins to spot black and pulls out her phone. She feels like she’s moving both too slow and too fast, and her fingers are clumsy as they fumble with the device. Her vision is too spotty to tell whose contact she’s selected—it could very well be Sara - Match, who will definitely not pick up. But she dials someone.
She drops her phone and slumps over as it rings, her carpet scratching her cheek. She has no idea what she’ll do if she leaves—maybe there is no winning. But this is not the right choice.
(It’s sad, thinks the part of her that is still barely conscious, that in the end what saves her isn’t that dying hurts, or that she doesn’t really want to, even though both are true. Emily Prentiss lives not because she cares about her life but because she’s scared her death won’t solve things like she thought it might).
She’s unconscious by the time Derek answers the phone.