WARNING: Guys this is not a happy story. It's not happy at all. If you don't want your day ruined, click out. I'm not even going to send you in blind; this fic absolutely deals with the death of both of JJ's children as well as her husband. There's no fluff or resolution, it's just a grief so huge I can't even begin to try capturing it on the page. Please do not continue if you think this is going to negatively impact you.
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You think that their dying / is the worst thing / that could happen. / Then they stay dead.
Donald Hall, Distressed Haiku
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She didn't cry when she got the call. She just wrapped the cord of the phone around her knuckle as the voice droned on the other end until her finger throbbed and ached and finally went numb. She could have done better. She could have done this so much better. She had done it better in the past. It was her job to do it better.
It was their job to do it better as well, but this voice with his nasally whine and his real-but-disconnected sympathy had no idea what he was doing. Hotch would have been horrified.
When she hung up, she carefully put the phone back in the cradle, walked to her sons' room, and didn't cry.
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Aaron Hotchner got the call three hours after JJ did.
Aaron Hotchner wasn't the kind of man who put things off, even when he thought he might shatter under the horror of them. So he quietly sent Jack to Jessica's, trying not to cling too hard when his son hugged him goodbye, and did what had to be done.
He informed work. JJ wouldn't be coming back, not for a while. He took the team off active rotation. They wouldn't be either, although none of them knew it yet.
He went to the hospital. He identified the bodies. He didn't flinch, despite wanting to.
He called Dave. He told Dave.
He went to JJ. He, more than anyone, knew there was nothing he could do there, but he couldn't not go. She needed to know she wasn't alone.
And not once did he falter.
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Grief was a suffocating thing. It had made an airless vacuum of her life, centred on the empty rooms of her house that had ceased to be a home. It was the monster under the bed that she'd told Henry wasn't real, only to discover that it truly had been all along. It was real and terrifying and hiding under Henry's blankets only served to strengthen it with his fading scent.
It was three coffins and her life alone.
It was people talking to her but saying nothing of importance.
She went home and didn't cry.
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He knew facts. He knew statistics. He could ramble them until his lips turned blue and left him gasping for breath. He didn't.
Road crashes were the 9th leading cause of death and account for 2.2% of all deaths globally.
Road crashes were the leading cause of death among young people aged 15-29, and the second leading cause of death worldwide among young people aged 5-14.
Over 1,600 children under 15 years of age died each year in road accidents.
How easy it was to stop being a person and become a statistic instead.
Spencer Reid dressed himself carefully, stepped out into the sharply cold air of the winter day that had begun with JJ's family alive and would end with them gone, and caught the bus.
Every car that whirled past his window he hoped would reach home safely. Most of them would. Some of them might not. One already hadn't.
He didn't even know he was crying until the lady behind him handed him a tissue and patted his shoulder carefully.
He didn't thank her because his mind was all caught up in the myriad of ways a heart could stop beating.
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Spencer came on the third day before they were buried. He didn't try to speak and if she could remember how to be, she'd have felt thankful for that.
He found her sitting cross-legged on the floor of the room her children shared. Had shared. Would never share again. She held a shirt she'd brought for Michael to grow into.
He sat by her side. He held her hand.
He said nothing.
And she still didn't cry, even though she could feel him sobbing through their tenuous grip on each other.
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Emily bought a plane ticket and flowers. She caught the plane and left the flowers sitting on a bench at the airport.
The fuck did flowers know of grief anyway? What sicko had decided that ending a plant's life by ripping it out of the ground was an appropriate way to try to lie to someone and tell them that 'I know how you feel'?
She didn't know how JJ felt. How could any of them? They'd seen it enough, working the job that they did, but they'd never actually known it. Except now they did, in a way, in the way that a community mourns when a tragedy happens. The ripple effect. Will's wheels had skidded out from under him in just the right way at just the wrong time, and he'd plunged into the centre of their little pool and the ripples were throwing them all outward.
Emily had once gotten mad at her friend for not sharing the delicate folded-paper boats he was floating on a wide puddle. He had almost a dozen, all carefully waxed, all brightly coloured. She'd stamped her foot in the middle of the puddle and watched as the boats went flying. None landed near each other.
They all lay like broken things on the gravel and the puddle failed to ever resume its former shape; the water trickling away and seeping into her socks and the thirsty ground. She'd gotten in trouble. He'd cried.
Well, she wasn't going to leave them laying apart in the wake of this.
She threw the flowers away and brought wine instead. Then she went and found Penelope, found Spencer, found Morgan. And she held them the fuck together, because someone had to.
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Her mom helped her organise the funerals, and by that she did everything. JJ couldn't, wouldn't, shouldn't. This wasn't life, this echoing numbness. This wasn't possible, this aching pain. This wasn't her, this ghost of the woman who'd died with her family on the road that day.
At first she stayed in the guest room and JJ was fine with this because at least she could pretend the house still held life.
The third time she found her mom crying over his cologne; a single shoe; a broken toy; she picked up the phone that hadn't been quiet since that day, and booked them both a hotel.
And they didn't go back to that house, not for a long time, but that was fine because JJ knew it didn't really belong to her anymore anyway.
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Dave dressed impeccably in the same suit he'd worn the day he'd buried his son. This he could still control.
It still fit. Some things never changed.
The funeral was over-long and not as beautiful as people would later say it had been. It was scattered and disorganised and JJ spent the whole thing looking vaguely distracted. No one really knew how to hold the coffins right, fingers scrabbling awkwardly on the too-fucking-small surfaces. Rossi quietly explained, and Hotch stared at him like he was seeing him for the first time.
He stayed by her side the whole time and every time she reached down to her hip as though unconsciously seeking small fingers that had once been there, he let her take his hand.
She didn't cry, but he knew that would come with time.
And he wasn't leaving her side until she was ready to let him.
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The first morning after she'd woken up and forgotten.
She'd continued forgetting right until she poured a serve of sugary cereal into a bowl decorated with badly drawn dinosaurs, and then she'd remembered all at once.
It was three weeks after and she was pretty sure that bowl was still sitting on the table where she'd left it.
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JJ sold the house and Morgan helped her pack. They all did actually, of course they did, but he was the one who took the boxes into the brightly coloured room and begun folding dinosaur sheets and battered toys into the dusty confines of the cardboard.
Reid tried to help. He lasted all of two minutes before picking up a microscope he'd brought them last Christmas and breaking down. Morgan couldn't help him, because if he walked away from this JJ would grit her teeth and steel her shoulders and do it to spare them all the pain.
And he was strong enough to say goodbye, but he wasn't strong enough to watch that.
Emily led Reid away, her arm around his back, and Hotch joined him.
They packed the room together and neither spoke because there weren't words for this.
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Spencer and Aaron carried Henry one last time, and she saw their shoulders buckle under the weight.
Penelope had declined to carry Michael. JJ didn't blame her. She owed her baby this final service anyway.
Emily helped her and oddly, JJ felt stronger with the silent strength of the woman at her back, even as the over-shined wood caught on her nails and bit at her skin cruelly. The coffin smelt of lilies. She never could stand the scent again.
Will's friends carried him and she realized once they'd lined the three in a row like macabre toast soldiers ready to be dipped into a child's breakfast, she hadn't yet grieved for him. That pain was yet to come.
She realized with a firm finality that this was it.
This was alone.
She still didn't cry.
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Penelope's fridge was full of cake and cookies and it only grew fuller as she baked and baked and gave none of them away. She couldn't, she couldn't, walk up to the hotel room JJ and her mom were living in and knock on the door and hand them a cake and say all the things that meant nothing but that someone had decided were the right things to say in this situation.
She eventually packed them all carefully in her car and drove them to a homeless shelter. She cried as she tried to explain why she'd brought them there. She ended up saying nothing, just blubbering wordlessly and messily.
The woman running the shelter hugged her close despite not knowing her, and Penelope marvelled at the capacity for empathy in the world.
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Emily went home, but she left a plane ticket with no date on the rickety table of the hotel. It was one-way. It almost felt like running away. JJ tucked it in a photo album that held the photos of their wedding and didn't think about it.
The books and the man she went to to try and 'work through her feelings' didn't help. Her friends didn't help, despite trying. They tried. They tried so damn hard, but she couldn't explain how much she hurt when she looked at them and saw that they were hurting too.
How could she add to that pain?
Her mom went home eventually after begging her to come, and that felt like running away too.
She visited the graves. She watched as the rich soil was covered with new grass. She watched as leaves blew over them. She watched as time ticked on. And she waited for the moment people kept talking about; the moment when she took a breath and continued living again.
In her dreams, she told them about her day, and they never answer. Just sat in front of her and smiled while Will held her close.
She hated waking.
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He felt almost unwelcome as he walked up the hall to the quiet apartment door. The handle was spotless, unmarred by grubby fingerprints or muddy kick-marks; things he remembered from his son's childhood.
He didn't know why he was here. He'd never known Will or Henry or Michael, but he did know JJ. Had known JJ.
He didn't know her anymore but he was here anyway, because he also knew grief and he knew it never really faded.
She answered the door. She looked… different and the same, all at once. She didn't look surprised to see him. He guessed that she'd probably had a revolving door of old faces walking in and out of her life since it had happened.
He tried to say hello and froze. He tried to say he was sorry, and choked.
Instead he nodded, and raised his arm as though to shake her hand, and she stepped into his grasp and pressed her face to his shoulder.
And Gideon held her close and wondered if she'd let herself cry yet.
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She was reaching up for a bottle of milk when a little girl nearby tripped over her own feet and tumbled to the ground at her shoes. She laughed and climbed up without missing a beat, running back to her mom.
JJ watched as the mom reached down and took her daughter's hand, smiling vaguely, and it hurt.
But not as much as it had.
She took a breath and put the milk back. Walked to the checkout.
She smiled at the girl checking bags as she left without buying anything. Outside, it was summer.
She drove home and dug through the boxes in the apartment she hadn't bothered to unpack yet, finding a battered album full of shrink-wrapped memories.
Something fell out. A plane-ticket. One way.
It was the easiest phone call she'd ever made. And it wasn't running away at all.
The plane ticket in her hand was damp and her cheeks were too, and it felt like going home.