A/N: This oneshot is my 50th story on FFN! I decided to celebrate by finally writing a oneshot I owe Rachelkillers from months ago. I lacked inspiration until now. Sorry it took so long, Rachel.
She makes the BEST Hotch/Prentiss videos, by the way. She makes so many based off my song requests because she's amazing like that. Search for the same username on YouTube :)
Prompt: quarantine
This turned into kind of a stream of consciousness dialogue between Hotch and Emily, which was really fun and relaxing to write.
Credit goes to felena1971 on Twitter for coming up with the drive-thru idea!
November 2015
"Wha—you're joking," Emily said, unimpressed.
"I'm sorry, but Dr. Thurman was doing research on a new strain of the flu," said a Center for Disease Control worker as he began to seal off the door to the research laboratory of a suspect of four recent murders in Chicago.
"What new strain of the flu?"
"Prentiss," Hotch warned.
"I have a right to know how I might die," she snapped at Hotch. "Excuse me, what new strain of the flu? H1N3? 4? 5? Which one are we on now?"
"That's classified information, Agent."
"If this is such a big deal, how were we granted access to this lab in the first place?"
"That was a mistake. You don't have clearance to be in this lab."
"Oh, oops, sorry, you might have a new strain of the flu. We forgot. Some idiot at the front desk just forgot to tell us."
"Prentiss," Hotch said again. "Let him do his job." Hotch stood near a wall with his arms crossed, eyebrows slanted downward menacingly.
Emily huffed and rolled her eyes. "How long do we have to stay in here?" Emily asked aloud, not really expecting an answer from Hotch.
"How would I know? We'll just have to wait until they tell us what they know. I'm sure we'll have to be tested and everything before we can go."
"This bites the big one," Emily mumbled, plopping down into a spinning chair.
"It is what it is," Hotch said calmly.
"How are you so relaxed about it? We could have contracted…equine flu, or whatever farm animal hasn't had a flu named after it. Barn cat flu. Chicken flu—wait, no, they had bird flu…"
"Panicking won't change that," Hotch said matter-of-factly. "Besides, we're healthy. The flu shouldn't kill us. They just want to make sure it doesn't get out of the lab."
"You are absolutely no fun whatsoever," Emily said, disgusted.
"Would you like me to panic?" Hotch asked somewhat condescendingly.
"I'd rather you panic than look at me like I'm crazy."
"We haven't even been in here five minutes and you're talking about dying. You are crazy. We need to talk to Garcia and let her know we've been quarantined." Hotch took out his phone and dialed their technical analyst, then set it to speakerphone.
"Penelope middle-name-redacted Garcia speaking. I can't come to the phone right now. Please leave your name, number, message, and a compliment to yours truly, and I will get back to you right now. Beep."
Hotch and Emily shared amused glances. "Hey, Garcia," Hotch said.
"Ooh, hello, sir. You didn't leave your number, a message, or a compliment, but I can forgive you. What do you need?"
"I need to know if anyone's gotten further information from you on any of the other suspects."
"Yes, sir. Rossi just got off the phone with me about ten minutes ago. He was headed to the suspect's home."
"His home?" Emily asked. Their profile had resulted in a list of three men in the area, all of whom ran research labs in the area. Since it was during normal working hours, the team had been going to workplaces first.
"Yes, sir. He said he had reason to believe the suspect would be at his residence, so I provided him with the address."
"All right, well, Prentiss and I are out of commission for a while. We've been quarantined in Dr. Thurman's lab. He'd been trying to isolate a flu virus and apparently we were never supposed to be in here."
"Quarantined? Oh, wow." Garcia's voice heightened to a squeak. "Are you two okay?"
"We'll be fine, Garcia," Hotch said impatiently. "Can you just pass along the information on Dr. Thurman along to Morgan? Let him know he's in charge until further notice."
"Will do, sir. Anything else I can do?" Garcia said, more bravely now.
"That's all. I'll get a hold of the others and let them know what's going on." Hotch glanced at Emily, who watched attentively as Hotch got Rossi on the phone.
"Aaron, we have him," Rossi said right as Hotch turned the phone to speaker mode.
"Have whom? The unsub?"
"Yup. Found three women in Dr. Green's basement out in Forest Park. None of them had even been reported missing yet. They're all okay."
"Good work," Hotch said. He heard the door open and looked up. "Hang on, Dave."
"Agents, we need your cell phones. This is classified information we're dealing with." A suited up CDC worker held out his rubber-covered hand for Hotch and Emily's cell phones.
Hotch said nothing about having told his team where they were, knowing that would only get them into trouble. He hoped Garcia had the sense only to tell the team what was going on with him and Emily, and no one else.
"Sorry," Hotch said as he and Emily relinquished their phones.
"Great," Emily mumbled when they were sealed in again.
"At least we have our unsub in custody. Are you all right?"
"I'll be fine. I just don't like the idea of being cooped up in here for however long."
"At least we don't have to feel like we're not helping," Hotch said.
"Okay, so the unsub's in custody. What about tonight, then?"
"What about tonight?"
Emily glared at Hotch. "You know exactly what I'm talking about."
It was Hotch who rolled his eyes this time.
"Come on, Hotch. Fifty is huge!" Emily marveled.
"Exactly. Which is why I'd rather not talk about it."
"You're a big stick in the mud. You know that, right?"
"I've heard variations of that sentiment expressed in some way, shape, or form, yes. Don't tell me there was a party planned."
Emily wasn't quick enough in looking innocent.
"Who was behind it?" Hotch asked, his overexaggerated exasperation an attempt to mask his mild amusement.
"Uhh, the party planning committee may or may not have consisted of me, JJ, and Garcia..."
"Well, I'm sure it would have been lovely."
"It was actually going to be really nice," Emily said playfully. "Really classy. We have a full bar ready to go in my hotel room, and we got glow sticks and everything."
"Nice," Hotch said with a grin.
"But, we're not getting out of here in time to do any partying."
Hotch watched as Emily swayed back and forth slowly in her chair, looking miserably at the door. There were no windows to the outside.
"You're really truly bummed out, aren't you?" Hotch asked.
"About what? Possibly dying or not being able to get wasted tonight?" Five or six years ago, Emily would have had to have a lapse of reason to say something like that to Hotch. But she'd been working with him for nine years now, had served as acting unit chief three times for various reasons, and had kept Jack overnight at her apartment once when Hotch had had to tend to an extended family emergency with his sister-in-law, Jessica. Thus, she knew Hotch trusted her and her judgment enough to hear these little less-than-professional tidbits from her.
"Well, both. But particularly the party, now."
Emily shrugged. "I just…we never get a chance to wind down, really. By the time the weekend rolls around, I have laundry and cleaning—mostly dusting and throwing away spoiled food—to do, I usually need to make a visit to my parents', where my mom asks me questions until my ears bleed, and then I'm just plain tired. I never simultaneously have the time and energy to go out and have a good time anymore. None of us do."
Hotch offered an apologetic half-grin. "Do I work you guys too hard, do you think?"
"I could pick on you and say yes, but that wouldn't be fair. What we do is important."
"Hmm." Hotch's face puckered in thought.
"What?"
"If you're so upset about all the partying we're missing out on, why don't you just…run me through all your finest moments? You know, reminisce about the good times. We can take turns."
"I am not giving you a bunch of dirt on me," Emily said, shaking her head.
"I can start," Hotch offered.
"Deal," Emily couldn't say fast enough. "This I have to hear."
Hotch chuckled. "All right…on my twenty-first birthday—"
"Please don't tell me you waited until you turned twenty-one to get trashed."
"All right, you got me, on my nineteenth birthday—actually, you know what, I was legally allowed to buy beer in Virginia when I was nineteen, now that I remember. Oh, it's all coming back to me."
"I'm listening," Emily said with a curious smile, elbows on knees, chin in her hands.
"My parents wouldn't let me have alcohol at my party, because I was older than most of my friends, and legal age was nineteen, up until the following year when they upped it. Most of my friends wouldn't be nineteen until later."
"Wait, you weren't in college already by the time your nineteenth birthday rolled around?"
"I was, but my parents made me come home for the weekend so they could celebrate with me. Besides, most of my good friends from high school didn't go away to college, so they were all back home, and they were the ones who wanted to party with me."
"So what did you do?"
Hotch leaned against a counter top. "Snuck out my window that night and went to my buddy Steve's. Bought a ton of beer on the way over, was back in bed by seven in the morning, and my folks never found out."
"Impressive," Emily said with a laugh and fake applause. "I never would've thought you had it in you."
"Oh, it gets better. I paid my brother five dollars not to say anything when he caught me walking on the roof past his window to get to the tree to climb down."
"Oh, that's classy. How old was he? He's a bit younger, right?"
"Yeah. He was four, I think," Hotch said, snickering.
"Oh my—four, really? That's quite the age difference. Did you push him around a lot?"
"For the most part I was a pretty nice big brother. Your turn."
"Uh oh. Where should I start?"
"Earliest."
"I would not feel comfortable telling you my age at the time I got really drunk," Emily said, grimacing. "But anyway, it was my first experience with tequila and I threw up all over this guy I had a crush on."
"Never got that date, did you?"
"No," Emily said, hiding her hands in her face as her body quaked with laughter. "Your turn."
Hotch rolled his eyes back into his head in thought, then found himself a chair and had a seat in it. "Let's see…Christmas vacation when I was twenty-one or twenty-two, a bunch of friends and I rented a cabin upstate to go skiing."
"Sports and drinking are almost never a good combination. Go on," Emily said.
His lips curling against his will, Hotch continued. "We bought as much booze as we thought we'd need for the whole week we were up there—oh, and I think the only food we thought to buy was chips—but we ended up drinking everything the first night we were there. Huge snowfall a couple of days earlier, so the roof on the cabin had a foot of snow still on it."
"Oh no."
Hotch let out a high-pitched belly laugh that Emily had only heard a handful of times over her nine years of knowing Hotch. "I was the first and the last to try that."
"Did you jump off or ski off?"
"We were there to ski," Hotch answered with an innocent shrug. "Actually, I think I still have the scar…" Hotch shrugged off his jacket and let it hang over the back of his chair. Then he unbuttoned one sleeve and rolled it up. A scar ran from right inside his elbow, almost down to his wrist about an inch wide but faded.
Emily gasped and covered her mouth. "Oh my gosh, what happened?"
"That's the best part. I don't even know. No one could figure it out, but I was bleeding so much that ski patrol couldn't do more than wrap it up and tell me to get to an ER."
"Bet that ruined your weekend."
Hotch shook his head. "I didn't get back up on that roof, but I didn't go home, either. I just kept my drinking a little lower to the ground."
Emily cringed. "Wow, I seriously think you have me beat."
Hotch's face was ridden with skepticism. "I beat you?"
"I don't know, Hotch, skiing off a roof? I mean, most of my stories just involve where I threw up, how much, and where I woke up in the morning. One time I came to in a lawn chair in front of a church. No idea how that came about and no one ever fessed up to putting me there."
"Is that really the best you have?"
A look of inappropriately deep thought crossed Emily's soft features. "Hmm. Ohhhhh," she said, giggling afterward. "Well, this still isn't as stupid as you skiing off a roof—"
"Hey."
"Sorry, but you know it was stupid. Anyway, after I graduated from Yale, I convinced my parents I didn't need to come home right away, so my friends and I just partied for a week straight. Nothing too out of the ordinary except for when my girlfriend, Amanda, who was totally sober, drove a bunch of us drunks to a Burger King and convinced us to walk through the drive-thru." Emily was already cracking up when she finished her story, but when she looked up and saw Hotch only slightly amused—probably only smiling at her own reaction—she stopped. "That's not funny?"
"It's funnier how funny you think it is."
Emily's thick lips stretched out into a much more composed smile. "Fine. You don't get anymore of my stories for sure, then."
"Probably for the best."
Emily leaned back in her chair. After only a moment of silence, her stomach grumbled audibly.
"Was that you?" Hotch asked.
"I had Pop-Tarts out of a vending machine for breakfast about twelve hours ago. Yeah, it's me."
"Pretty sure there's no food in here," Hotch said.
"I've gone hungry for longer than this. Maybe if they foresee us spending a week in here, they'll feed us." Emily shifted her lower jaw from side to side in boredom. Their conversation about drunken escapades had been fun, but it seemed to have come to a natural end. Picking it back up wouldn't be nearly as much fun. "So how's Jack?" she asked.
Hotch cocked an eyebrow at the sudden subject change. Then he realized they hadn't had a conversation going anyway. "Jack's good."
The entire team had been invited to Hotch and Jack's home for Jack's tenth birthday, which was just last month. They had all become like aunts and uncles to him. "I can't believe he's ten," Emily said with sincere wonderment.
"You're telling me. When I got home the other night, he told me he had a girlfriend."
"Isn't he in the girls-are-yucky stage?"
"I thought so. Anyway, I know at that age the word girlfriend doesn't really mean anything, but I decided to sit down and—"
"Oh my God, you gave him the talk, didn't you? Please repeat everything you said verbatim."
"Eh, it wasn't anything too complicated."
"No, there's an important distinction between sex talks. Did you give him the actual anatomical terminology, or did you say, When two people love each other very, very much, they have a baby?"
"That wouldn't exactly qualify as a sex talk," Hotch pointed out.
"So you gave him the details? He knows what a vagina is now?"
A little pink crept into Hotch's cheeks. Emily's cavalier attitude in some conversations still caught him completely off guard. "Yeah, but I wouldn't be surprised if he already knew. Kids these days—"
"Oh, don't even. You know we were probably just as knowledgeable. We didn't have the internet but we did have creepy uncles and friends a couple years older who were willing to share tidbits."
Hotch twisted an eyebrow. "What kind of family did you grow up with?"
"A normal one with the token creepy uncle. You didn't have any creepy uncles?"
"I think my aunt Betty held that role. But the creepiest thing she ever did was ask me if I'd kissed my girlfriends with tongue yet."
Emily scrunched her nose. "That's kind of disgusting. Did she give you a big fat red lipstick kiss on your cheek after that?"
"Actually, yes. Can we talk about something else now? Memories I thought I'd repressed are coming back."
"Fine. What's with the new car?"
"What about it?"
"Midlife crisis car, or did you actually need an extra car with more horsepower than your last three cars combined?"
Hotch's eye twinkled. Emily knew him irritatingly well. "Hey, you never know when I'll have to chase down an unsub off duty."
"You're never off duty."
"Exactly. And they won't let me keep one of the Bureau Suburbans, so I took matters into my own hands."
"Ah, I see. So besides that, what else have you done to get through your midlife crisis? Are you dating a hot little blonde coed?"
"She graduated this spring, actually," Hotch quipped.
"In all seriousness, when's the last time you went on a date? And it's not just me asking. It's everyone on the team, when you come in on a Monday morning, ready to roll, while we're all exhausted. Please tell me you have a secret life we don't know about, where you smile and have fun."
"I smile. I've been smiling this whole time."
"You've been grinning. This—" Emily said, beaming, "—is a smile. Try it."
"I'm good, thanks," Hotch said, grateful at least for the distraction from the topic of his love life, or lack thereof.
"Then answer the question about your love life. Or any life."
"I'm a perfectly happy perpetual bachelor," Hotch said neatly.
"The word 'perpetual' in there tells me you're not perfectly happy."
"Reasonably happy."
"Hotch," Emily said dreamily, "being reasonably happy sounds boring as hell. I mean, I work eighty hours a week just like you but I manage to be more than reasonably happy, even though I'm single."
"I'm happy for you."
Emily's stomach growled, though she was pretty sure that this time it wasn't from hunger. "Let me buy you a drink."
"I think the bar's closed," Hotch said, glancing either way around him, trying to disguise his shock.
"Very funny. Seriously, though—everyone else is going to drink all the booze I bought, and they're going to celebrate without us. Let's go get sloshed the next weekend night we're free. I'll pay for a babysitter and cabs and all that jazz, and the drinks, of course."
Hotch's dark eyes squinted. "Are you asking me out?"
Emily had no answer prepared for that, so she just shrugged. "Interpret it how you want. You just need to have some fun for a change."
"Fine. Don't plan on getting me too drunk, though. I lose my taste after maybe three drinks."
"That's when you say screw the vomiting and the hangover, and switch to a different liquor. It'll be fun. Maybe we can do one of those pub crawls with the little bus that drives you around."
"Or not."
Emily grinned slyly for a moment, but her confidence wavered once the lull in conversation hit.
"I—"
"Agents," the CDC worker said, popping his head in the open door.
"Please feed us," was Emily's first response. "We haven't eaten in twelve hours."
"No need to worry. There's been a mistake. The flu research was being done in another lab."
Emily's jaw dropped and her eyebrows formed a fierce V. "You've got to be kidding me. So what's in the petri dishes in here?"
"Actually, nothing."
Hotch was surprised he didn't have to grab Emily's arm to keep her from going after the CDC worker. Her look apparently said everything she wanted to say.
"Very sorry for the inconvenience. You're free to go."
Emily gave her eyes a hearty roll and looked at Hotch.
"What? You wanted out, and now we're out," Hotch said. "No one's going to die. We can eat, drink, be merry…"
"What a waste of time."
"How so? We got to get inside each other's heads a little," Hotch said as they departed the laboratory. "Isn't that always on your Christmas list? Crack my shell open a little?"
"True…"
"And you got a date out of it."
Emily turned back to Hotch as she opened the door to the stairwell, not wanting to wait for the elevator. "So you want it to be a date?"
"Well, it sure sounded like one. So are we still on?"
"That's up to you. You're the birthday boy."
A/N: This is being posted only 3 days before TG's 49th birthday, which I find kind of funny. Anyhow, I hope you enjoyed. Please review!