Disclaimer: I do not own anything Criminal Minds related. Characters are merely borrowed and will be put back later. ;)
Title: City Lights and Ice Cream
Prompt: Comfort Food
"That's something I've noticed about food: whenever there's a crisis if you can get people to eating normally things get better."
Madeleine L'Engle
Arriving back at the office had brought with it that familiar tingle of being almost home, as well as that dreadful reassurance that tomorrow, they would relive it all again when paperwork had to be filed. It had been a really bad case. Any case involving cannibalism and mutilation with five dead girls was never going to be easy. The fact that they all looked just like Emily was harder still. And the fact that Reid had placed himself in grave danger to catch the unsub had led to much horror and grief in the group. They had all, thankfully, arrived back in one piece.
And so they all left as quickly as they could, until eventually only Hotch and Emily were left.
"I want ice cream," she said half sadly.
"Good news because I have some at home," he said, gently kissing her cheek. "Let's go. Forget the paperwork, forget the tidying. Let's just go."
And she wasn't going to fight him on that. So she left with him and wandered with him, hand in hand, to her car. She kissed him softly and squeezed his hand, tossing her work bag into the back seat and pulling another overnight bag from the passenger seat. "Let's go," she said, abandoning her car in the lot and making a beeline for his.
They had been doing this for what felt like forever now, and though the swapping bothered them both, they were taking things as easily as they could and in as relaxed a way as was possible. He would bring her to work in the morning and the team- or rather, Derek- would make smart comments to her, which she would ignore but grin at nonetheless. And the rest of the team would simply accept it, as they had been doing for quite some time now.
Emily was relatively quiet on the ride to his house. She couldn't help it, the details of the case simply kept coming back to her and she had difficulty compartmentalising them into anything approaching civil sense. The pictures and horror just seemed to take over her brain as she analysed the case again in her head. Solved it may be, but it had not been resolved properly in her head, and she was having trouble putting it to sleep.
So when Aaron moved his right hand to rest on top of hers and squeezed it gently, she suddenly smiled and felt a pleasant wave of affection for him. He knew what she was trying to do, trying to fix in her brain. And he was giving her the entire car journey in which to do it, not talking to her, letting her process what she needed to.
When they arrived at the house, she did what she always did and took off her jacket, resting it on a peg in the hall, and she disappeared to the bathroom to find something more comfortable to wear. When she got inside, she pulled her hair into a ponytail, pulled on her sweats and t shirt, and left the room quite quickly. By the time she got downstairs, there was a steaming cup of tea waiting for her on the table, the television was on and the film selected (Chaplin's City Lights), and popcorn sitting pleasantly in a glass bowl nearby. How he had gotten it all made so quickly was beyond her, but it wasn't the first time and she climbed onto the sofa next to him, kissed him softly and settled against his side to watch the movie.
He wrapped his arm around her and grabbed the popcorn bowl, resting it against her leg for ease of access. When she grinned at him and took some for herself, she could feel the horrible tension of the case eking away. She smiled the whole way through the movie- it was one of her favourites- and even though it was 3am by the time they were finished, she was uncaring and felt happy and content. She was tired too, but she knew that the promised ice cream was waiting nearby, and she had every intention of happily eating it.
She followed Aaron to the kitchen like a whining puppy, asking for it, wondering where it was, looking around for it, and eventually he pulled her into his arms, kissed her deeply and stroked her back with his hands, hugging her close to him and breathing in her scent. Though he managed to shut her up, the relapse came quickly and she picked at his t shirt, begging for more. He sighed and opened the freezer door, pulled out the Ben and Jerry's and handed it to her. She grabbed it happily and spun from his arms, pulling open a drawer to yank out a spoon and delve it into the glorious bliss of the ice cream tub.
He watched her for a few seconds, taking in how beautiful she was with her hair pulled back, before he walked closer and fixed his arms around her waist, pulling the spoon from her hands easily and tasting the ice cream himself. She pouted at the loss of a perfectly decent spoonful she could have gobbled quickly, but she turned to face him nonetheless and kissed him softly.
"This helps," she said.
"It's not the ice cream that helps," he asserted. "It's that we're both here, and we're here together."
And then he dug in the tub for more ice cream and fed it to her.
It was 3am, and the house was quiet, and she was standing in his kitchen, in a pair of grey sweatpants, loving him with more ease and more strength than anyone else ever had- or ever could.