Prompt: A practical joke leads your character(s) to an emotional epiphany. Good or bad, they are feeling something after all of this is over.

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It's Garcia's fault, all of it. The whole damned thing and Emily is pretty sure that she's never, ever going to forgive her for this, except that she probably is. After all, it's not Garcia's fault that Emily's an emotionally castrated wreck with no ability to understand the functions of her own brain and heart conspiring against her.

After all, it's not Garcia's fault that it ends like it does.

It starts with a prank. Emily's always loathed April Fool's Day and today is looking to be no exception. She brings it on herself, really. It's her who complains loudly that her date has fallen through for the weekend: loudly, and in ear-shot of Morgan.

"No Sinning to Win this weekend, Prentiss?" he asks with that same cocky grin she just wants to smack off his face sometimes. "That poor man whose heart you've broken…"

"Attachment takes considerable time to form to the point where any level of heartbreak, literal or figurative, would occur," Reid says absently. He's fiddling with the tiny American flag on his tie, accidentally stabbing himself in the thumb with it as Emily looks over at him.

"Literal heartbreak?" she asks. "Of the medical kind?"

"Of course. There's plenty of documented evidence that—ow, damn."

She's a little disappointed that he's been cut off from his lecture by stabbing himself with the pin again, but not so disappointed that she goads more. Instead, with Morgan revving up to continue teasing her and Garcia hanging over the railing ahead looking down, she simply scoots her chair over to Reid and takes the pin from him. If she doesn't help him, no one will, and his hands are warm and bony under hers as he freezes at the touch.

"Never mind that, Doc," Morgan is saying distantly. Emily is mostly blocking him out; she can feel Reid's heartbeat thrumming in his chest as she affixes the pin back to his tie without a word, his hands suddenly clammy with tension. "Tell her to get back on the horse—find another date. Even better, let us find you one."

"Oh no, I don't matchmake," Reid says, his voice overload with their proximity. Just for his sake—because he looks worried—she rolls her eyes at them. "I don't think we should—"

"Fortunately, lovelies, I do," Garcia chimes in. Emily looks up to find a chilling smile aimed her way, not at all offset by her pumpkin-orange hair and Easter bunny earrings. "How about it, Emily? Me and Derek, we could whip you up a man… maybe dark, tall, and handsome?"

"Don't you dare," she warns them, spinning her chair and shaking her head at them both. They're a dangerous pair. Doesn't Hotch have some kind of regulation against this? "I'm going home to do nothing but eat cereal and watch Doctor Who reruns all weekend."

Behind her, she hears Reid's chair creak as he straightens, and knows he's smiling from the gleeful little oh of excitement. Maybe, just maybe, she'll offer him a bowl and a couch cushion. There are worse people to grieve her singleness with, and he makes amazing caramel popcorn.

But Garcia and Morgan just smile.

It continues with a text that night. 'Found the perfect man' it says, from Garcia. 'You'll never guess where I met him'.

She doesn't really want to.

'Don't you dare' she sends again.

'Too late' is the reply.

The next time her phone beeps, it's Morgan: 'Don't worry' his says—which just means that she immediately is worried. 'Guaranteed to make you smile'.

And she's curious, so she agrees to go.

Damn them.

Damn them, she thinks again, looking up from her nice seat in the nice restaurant he'd picked and seeing what looks like Reid's fucking doppelganger walking towards her. He looks shocked when she introduces herself as Emily—shocked, she realises, that she's attractive and interested and here.

Wait, interested?

She's not interested. She's not even a little interested. Grumpy mostly, and pissed that she's too polite to message her friends with various forms of emojis constituting the emotion 'what the fuck this is the worst prank', but not…

But, when she looks up and him and he smiles in a way that's a little too nice and a little too awkward, her heart sinks. Because he's cute and dorky and his socks match but his tie is crooked; she looks at his jawline that's sharp and his eyes that are blue and thinks that maybe, just maybe, this has been planned for a while.

When he says, "Penny talks about you a lot," she realises this isn't a prank at all. It's a genuine attempt to set her up with something they think is her type, her type apparently being Reid's adequate twin. Adequate, she notes, because he's ever so slightly off in small ways and it throws her.

His socks match.

She tells herself later that she'd have been more interested if they hadn't.

She excuses herself and goes to the bathroom to use her phone, irately sending, 'Did you think this was funny?' to both of them.

It's not at all surprising when she gets back 'Do you like him?' from Garcia, eternally hopeful for her friend's happiness, and nothing but a winky face from Morgan. 'He's sweet' she replies, and wonders if that's enough. Is that what she wants? Sweet and almost-right and somewhat adequate, except in all the ways he isn't. She wonders that until she has to go back out there and decides.

She refuses to break his heart. Before she takes him home, she tells him exactly what this is: sex and nothing else. He seems okay with this, okay in the awed kind of way that means he's into her enough that he's happy just getting a leg over. And maybe she's crap at emotions, but she's fantastic at pretend.

She's forgotten his name but doesn't ask for it again; in her head, she's using a different one anyway.