Title: Secrets become dark
Author: Sara Nublas
Characters: Derek Morgan, Emily Prentiss
Rating: T
Warning: takes place after "Profiler Profiled"
Summary: after the events of "Profiler Profiled", Derek considers his past and present. A new friend is there to provide some comfort
Notes: dedicated to zackgibra, who requested it. Thanks a lot to Nix1978 for the hunch and for the feedback!
All secrets are deep. All secrets become dark.
It's dusk when the funeral is over, and after bidding his goodbye to the people who came along for the function, Derek really doesn't feel like company. His mother squeezes him in a tight hug when he assures that everything is fine and he'll come over later. She takes his face in her hands and smiles, "I'm so proud of you Derek," she whispers with trembling voice.
In that moment Derek comes to the definitive resolution that she'll never have to know what really happened with Carl Beauford; she'll never have to guess why every time he comes home, a weight sets in his chest, and it's so heavy that sometimes he cannot even breathe. As long as she thinks that it's his father's memory casting a shadow upon his thoughts, then it's fine with him.
He starts walking, careless of the winter chill and the unsafe neighbourhood; he doesn't mind the darkness approaching, altering profiles and giving buildings and corners a shade of ambiguity. Anybody else would find these outskirts creepy and dangerous. Derek instead feels perfectly at ease while he walks through the familiar streets of his adolescence, sheltered by the silent dimness.
He doesn't know exactly what guides his footsteps, if habit, awareness, or the unconscious need to deal with unfinished business, but he finds himself staring at the dumpsite where many years ago he found that body.
Something unspeakable started here. The trauma he went through, the horror he overcame on his own, the fear that dwelt with him for so many years. Those memories still ache and will never stop, but they are also among the reasons he turned into the man he's now. And he can't deny it, that's why it aches so much.
He clenches his jaw realizing that the most traumatic experiences he went through are also the milestones that turned him into the FBI profiler, something that by far is much more than a profession to him now.
If he didn't see his father die, if he hadn't been abused, if he hadn't been faced with such an amount of pain, he probably wouldn't be here, right now. Maybe he would be in some club, shaking the party and enjoying the company of some nice ladies.
He looks around at the deserted alley and chuckles realizing how bizarre he must look, planted in the middle of a dark road, staring at a mound of garbage.
He turns around to head back home and bumps into someone standing behind him "Sorry I didn't…"
His apology echoes incomplete in the silent street, while he gapes in recognition.
Emily really doesn't know why she's here. She's just joined the team and she's trying to integrate, but also to lay low. She's sometimes fazed by all this degree of confidence. Even though through the years she learnt to adapt to new situations quickly and to deceive the permanent sense of inadequacy that dwells in her, this time it's different. She cannot pretend. She cannot simulate; to deceive people that you keep at a distance and that, after all are not so interested in you, is one thing. But you cannot play your family; not if they are profilers; not if you practically live with them and you all work in stressful situations; not if they care so much about you. Or at least they will, at some point.
The question now is whether it is legitimate or not for her to care about them, so much to check on one of them personally, after work, or if instead it's just an awfully indiscrete initiative.
It's with these thoughts that she walks toward the man standing in the middle of the dark road, staring at a dumpsite. I can still turn around and go away, and he will never know I've been here, she thinks just seconds before he moves back and bumps into her.
In this exact moment she curses herself for her bad ideas, her lack of timing and for the dumb look she's giving Derek Morgan. What the hell is she doing here?
"Prentiss, what the hell are you doing here?" he echoes her internal voice.
Were it any other member of the team standing in front of him, Derek would be genuinely pissed. He's been under the magnifying glass for two days, they rummaged through his life, opened old wounds, regarded him as a suspect, with the best intentions of course. Yet this doesn't change how exposed and violated…. again…. he felt. But in seeing Prentiss, he doesn't feel scrutinized, or stalked, just genuinely surprised and a bit curious. Focusing his attention on this mysterious woman, who came out of nowhere and seems perfectly at ease everywhere she is, provides him a nice distraction from his relentless personal inventory.
The rumor has that Derek Morgan is a player and a womanizer, a self-centered egotistical individual. Nevertheless Emily learnt a long time ago to ignore the gossip and to look behind the appearances, and in these days she realized that Morgan did an awful lot of work to pull up a curtain and to keep so much of himself behind it. She doesn't know exactly what went down at the youth hostel, but she has a hunch. A bad one. She knows how it feels to live with a secret and to keep it hidden from everybody, even from the ones you love. Especially from the ones you love. Oh, she knows this charade so well.
That's why she's here, because she knows.
"I used to live in Chicago for a while, I kind of miss the charm of the outskirts" she manages to evade a direct answer.
Morgan stares at her for a moment and then chuckles, relaxing a bit.
They stare at the broken fence in front of them for a while, without saying a word; few cars passing by occasionally are the only intrusion into their silence.
"So," Emily finally says, casually, "Garcia says you were a football star in college…"
Morgan turns slightly bemused at the comment that definitely evades the range of questions he was expecting. Then he nods, meeting her sincere gaze.
"Did it hurt a lot?" she carries on cautiously.
"What?" he turns, defensively again.
"Your knee? When you broke it" she offers.
"It was painful, yes. And it took long to recover" he answers, after a pause. Even though now, in all honesty, the pain of a broken knee seems such a minor detail to him.
"Were you seriously considering becoming a professional football player?"
Morgan has to think about the answer. Was he? So many things happened since then, he changed so much and his priorities as well, that he realizes just now he never really turned back to explore the alternative life he would have had if that accident hadn't occurred. Maybe because it seemed so natural to follow this path; maybe because since he became a cop and then a profiler, he never felt out of place.
"It was a possibility back then," he shrugs.
"Would you change things if you could go back?" she almost whispers.
"I would be happy to skip the part in which I break my knee," he responds sarcastic, "but not the rest. I'm happy where I am now." He resolves.
"It's not easy to get up and build something good from scratch" she casually drops, glancing briefly at him.
"No, it isn't.." he replies cautiously. He keeps his eyes on her, searchingly. Are they still speaking about football here?
"But you know that, don't you?" his words come out rougher than he planned, so much he wants to bounce the attention off himself. His defensive stance is up again. He has spent the last days justifying himself, fighting for his innocence, trying to protect the last fragments of private life he has left, and now he really doesn't want to talk about all this again, especially not with the person he knows the least in the team.
Emily is not hurt by his tone. Just taken aback. For a moment their eyes meet and she's sure he can see right through her, dodging all her walls. She feels awfully vulnerable, but also comforted by this feeling, as if she has finally found someone of her own kind.
"As much as I find those tight uniforms appealing, I'm afraid football is not my thing" she resumes her shield.
Derek lets out a smothered laugh and goes on looking at her expectantly. This woman, so composed and impassive on the outside, is turning out to be a maze, and a troubled one.
"…but I broke my bones a time or two, nonetheless" she carries on.
"Bad falls?"
"Let's say more of a run against a brick wall.." she bitterly adds, "I used to change country more often than haircut, and no matter what, I was supposed to keep a demeanor appropriate to the daughter of an ambassador…"
"Sounds a lot of pressure," he agrees.
"The important is to keep on smiling. What's going on behind the mask is your problem exclusively."
"I take it, it wasn't exactly a happy adolescence.." he knows well the feeling of being caged.
"I wasn't….It wasn't…" she gasps for words, "It really wasn't that bad. I had everything I needed; I was taken care of and healthy. I was just…."
"Alone" the weight of that simple word seems to open an abyss under their feet, and to engulf them both.
"All you really want is just to be liked, so you start looking for approval in the wrong places, and then it's easy to lose it," she continues after a pause.
The bitterness she lets out with that final sentence is just enough for Derek to understand that she didn't come here to dig into his dirty laundry. She's here because she knows how important it is to be able to keep some secret, as dark as they get, under lock and key.
"But in someway you got yourself out of the gutter and you got to decide what to do and where to be…" his voice is deep and gentle now.
Emily inhales deeply, pondering the awkwardness of the situation, then she shrugs "I guess that's all what matters at the end of the day, isn't it?" she finally looks at him with a tentative smile, "feeling that you're doing something good with your life, having friends and family caring about you, sleeping in shitty hotels and drinking burnt coffee…"
Derek cocks his head on one side and can't help a smile, one of those smiles she has missed in the past few days, "Listen to yourself, Agent Prentiss… You just started and you complain already?"
"I wasn't complaining… Just saying" she smiles back.
Derek takes a deep breath and gives one last look to this place. In some way he feels like a circle was closed and it's time to move on, leaving some grudge behind.
He's thankful for not being alone in this moment, and truly appreciates Emily's discrete companionship, her being here with him (for him?) without any demands, "So you had enough of the Chicago outskirts, or you think you might use a coffee in some hovel around here?" he asks while they start walking away.
"Mmmh, I don't know," she teases back following him, "I kinda loved the burnt coffee of the police station. It might be hard to top such an experience…"
"I think we can work on that," he offers, "I know one or two places round the corner, where you can get the worst slime of the entire city" he winks.
"Well… if you put it like that, Agent Morgan, I don't think I can turn down the invitation."
"I bet you can't."
When Derek walks away with her, he never looks back and during that evening, while he talks to Emily about his years at the BAU and his youth in Chicago, not once his thought goes back to the dumpsite or to the youth centre.
After all, life turned out quite good for him.