It seems to start when the truck hits them, literally turning Emily's life upside down.
She has worked so hard on that tough-chick swagger; it is such a part of her now, but Jennifer Jareau ruins it, because Jennifer Jareau is a proper life-ruiner.
Emily is hurting. Physically, she wouldn't have been surprised if the doctor had told her her ribs were nothing more than a pile of fine dust. Emotionally, she shouldn't be in shock. She's alive and she's certainly seen worse things than a man get strangled next to her. Then again, the un-sub is in the wind, the team are working without her, and she's terribly, terribly lonely.
JJ turns up to the hospital, and Emily in her self-deprecating state tells herself that Morgan has ordered them to visit her on rotation. She's wearing that damn grey skivvy that accentuates the soft curve of her stomach, and a pair of low-riding jeans. When she sits on the end of the bed and bends down to pull her boots off, the skivvy rides up, the jeans ride down, and the thick expanse of alabaster skin, dotted only with a few light moles, is something Emily could make constellations from.
Of course, it gets worse.
Boots discarded on the floor, JJ curls up on the bed and Emily could almost, almost tell herself that JJ wanted to be there. Her blue-green eyes are sparkling with concern. Emily gives her a lop-sided smile.
"Time to buy a lot'ry ticket" she wheezes and she wishes JJ would laugh, just to give her some self-assurance that she's still funny.
"Oh, Emmy" JJ doesn't laugh, but she does move to gently brush the bangs from Emily's gashed forehead. Immediately, the strands spring back into place from under the palm of her hand and so she does it again, and again. Emily wishes she would stop, unless she's planning to do it forever, because comfort, to the hardened heart of Emily Prentiss, is like crack.
Of course the fix ends as quickly as it begins. JJ has a partner, and a child. And Emily, well, Emily has Morgan to pick her up in the morning.
After she leaves, with nothing more than a gentle kiss on her cheek, Emily feels the most uncharacteristic surge of anger towards Will.
She has seen so few mistakes from JJ that the ones she does make stand out.
All morning, JJ has been poring over pictures of strangled teenagers with the most anguished look on her beautiful baby face and that chain between her fingers. It's hard to read a distressed JJ but certainly not impossible; she becomes a little less eloquent and a little more vulnerable, and it doesn't get past Emily
It's only a single "if" – if they committed suicide - and yet the reaction is devastating. Emily feels for her; the bar is set so high - the blonde's own doing - that there's nowhere to go sometimes but under it. The grieving parents back JJ into a proverbial corner and Emily gets protective, but JJ is too hurt to notice.
On the jet, JJ is avoiding the team, but Emily wants attention so she recounts the story of the star loud enough for the tiny blonde to hear all the way at the back of the plane. A second later she hates herself for it, because it's not about her and she damn well knows that. What she really wants is for JJ to turn around with the sudden epiphany that Emily would bring down a star for her. She wants to be the one who gets to brush her hair back and whisper terms of endearment. She wants to be good at comfort, like JJ is. But she's not, and so, she concedes, it's incredibly selfish for her to want to be a part of JJ's grief.
Emily stays where she is and JJ talks to Hotch instead, returning to her seat without a word, eyes red-rimmed and teary. Although Emily expected it, her heart feels like the broken star in her stupid story.
A few weeks later she wears that red dress.
"Have a good weekend, JJ," she slurs with all the confidence of those couple of Friday lunchtime mojitos. Hell, she's sly, up against the desk, all legs and brashness and she knows it. But JJ doesn't even blink as she spins around holding another manila folder. She cares about ruining their weekends, but not that Emily has had to avoid almost every sleaze in the building all day just so JJ could see her in her best come-fuck-me dress.
"Sorry guys. Wheels up in an hour"
That means that Emily has 45 minutes in the gym, and she pounds a bag until her knuckles are the same color as the stupid red dress that has only ever helped her pick up wanker suits in cocktail bars.
The heat in Tallahassee puts a pink glow in JJ's cheeks and Emily has to train herself to look away. She slips up twice; once when JJ pauses to tie up her hair into a messy blonde pony, and once when she spreads lotion on her v-neck burn exposing slightly more of her cleavage than she intends to. Both times Emily reprimands herself. She tells herself she'll learn. Besides, none of her previous teenage-e girl crushes had stuck around long enough to turn into big girl crushes.
The resolve lasts until the trip home. She gambles her way to a giant pot of peanut shells, and then, with the extra ego, struts up the jet catwalk past JJ just to show her she'd sinned-to-win at least once this weekend.
JJ doesn't look up from her case-file and Emily couldn't have felt more invisible if they'd left her in Tallahassee.
She beats herself up for a week. Well, a working week, really, she tells herself in an effort to lessen how pathetic she feels. She tries to find that tough-girl swagger, but one morning, right after she's layered on the standard amount of Emily Prentiss-mascara, she thinks about JJ stroking back her hair all those months ago in the hospital and her tears make the ink run before it's set.
It's the first time she concedes, as she's scrubbing black smudges from her cheeks in the BAU bathroom, that this might be a problem. A proper fucking problem.
But how many ways were there to ignore everything that Jennifer Jareau was? How many ways were there to not fall for her? Reid with his eidetic memory and Einstein bravado couldn't remember her coffee order, but JJ could. JJ could be more tender with her than any man had been in her life, and yet, none of it meant anything, as much as she'd wanted to believe it could.
Another wave of tears and she opts to forego a second attempt at her mascara and makes for a cubicle, trying to sob as quietly as her rapidly swelling sinuses will let her, completely classless in her inability to regain any semblance of control. The memory of JJ comforting her with an 'Emmy' as she lay so miserably in that hospital bed sets her off a third time, and a fourth. It's only when the roll is empty and her hands are clutching the last wad of available toilet paper like a lifeline, that she tells herself this can't go on.
It's that same night that JJ invites her out.