Pain makes people change.
It wasn't as though I didn't believe this statement, for I had been through hell and back multiple times. My mind was well aware that it could be thrown once again through the violent spell of depression that it had so horribly fallen into before, and my heart was well aware that it could be torn into two again. Just after I had finished repairing it piece by piece. But once things shatter, they never truly get put back into place no matter how hard one may try to fix it.
I had tried so many things, you see. To tape myself back together after Will left me. Case files piled up passed my table top, a glass of whiskey in my hand, and the television turned on but with the sound only at the lowest notch. By drowning myself in work, it kept myself from the heartache that resided permanently in my chest. Isn't it funny how we get hurt by those we feel safest with? The place that I would automatically find comfort was in my Will's arms, the place that kept me safe through the night even throughout all of the horrors that I had seen earlier in the day. This was the place that took the nightmares away, the place that enveloped me and swallowed my screams whole.
One day my safe place was there, and then one day it wasn't.
There was only one person who truly understood to the extent that I was hurting, and it was a very familiar woman. She was the one whose house I would go to if I was having a particularly bad night, she was the one whose eyes, as brown as milk chocolate, I would gaze into perhaps a little more unprofessionally than I should have. I was stupid for not having recognized it before, but this woman was none other than my real safe place. Emily Prentiss had this way of fighting off even the worst of my demons, even the ones that haunted me in the back of my mind. The ones that pertained to the loss of my sister, the loss of the only constant in my life even as a child. People kept leaving, and I was convinced that people would continue to do so. That was, however, until I allowed Emily Prentiss into my life. Slowly but surely, I began to open up, my withered and yellowed pages crunching as Emily attempted to flip to reach a new chapter. At times, I felt as though Emily was drawing my heart out, attempting to dissect each and every part of me, but for once, I did not mind. Emily Prentiss could pull my heart directly from my chest and I would not have minded, until one day, she did.
People have a tendency of saying that even though physically someone may leave us, we never truly forget them. I call bullshit.
Almost as soon as Emily was gone, it was only a short matter of time until I began to forget pieces of her, bit by bit, each passing second managed to dissolve everything that was left of her in my mind. I hadn't wanted to see her body because that's all it was. It was no longer my Emily. It was no longer the person whom I had gone to for comfort, for love, and for her. No. It was just a body, and one that I was practically being forced to see. They needed someone close to identify her and, with her family being irrevocably troubled as she called it, I was the only person she had. So I complied, not for those who asked, but for her. For the beautiful brunette who had allowed me into her mind. The mind that was haunted so heavily by demons and ghosts that it reminded me of my own. Apart, we were messes. We were just two struggling people with pasts that followed us like dark clouds. Together, however, we were a different story.
She was the only thing to breathe air into my lungs when I couldn't breathe. When the tide that was the world washed over my head and swallowed me whole, the only one thing that could pull me from my trance was none other than those chocolatey brown eyes. Her favourite colour was red. Not like blood, no. More subtle. The type of red you pin down to be the colour of satin. She loved the sound of rain on the window in the morning, and nearly every spring morning I would wake to her beautiful brunette hair falling down her bare back as she sat in the chair near the window. Just watching. Just listening in peace. She was a night owl, but never ever a morning person. I was the exact opposite, and perhaps that's why it worked so well. Her favourite movies were none other than damn black and white French movies which she would always insist on watching with me. I never understood, though, since half the time she would have to whisper the translations in my ear. And yet, maybe that was the fun. She always knew how to make me shudder. Emily Prentiss had saved me countless times, and now I was struggling to remember the sound of her fucking voice. How pathetic was that?
I'm still calling bullshit.
Within a mere month, I forgot the sound of her voice. The sound of the voice that had soothed me to sleep countless nights, the voice that had coaxed me out of nightmares and flashbacks so powerful that I feared she was one of the people after me. I began to forget the way that her hand would fit in mine. It was perfect, yes, but without the feeling of her calloused hand intertwining its way into mine at night, the length of her fingers, the size of her palm, the feeling of her constant hangnails were nothing but a mere memory. I began to forget the seamless movements she made every night in her sleep, the arch of her back, the wiggle of her toes, the scrunching of her nose and the wrinkles that it created. Everything that once mattered to me had dissipated into thin air, much like Emily's life.
People told me I'd be fine. We would all be fine. The team slowly but surely moved on; Derek joked around substantially less since his partner in crime had passed, Garcia stared at the picture on the wall as though she could not believe it was real, Reid spouted off on statistics whenever her name was brought up as though that's all she was, Hotch refused to fill her empty desk, Rossi stopped having team pasta nights every Thursday because we were missing one integral part. And me. I just stopped smiling. I had nothing left. Nothing. The only thing keeping me alive at that point was gone, so what would I do?
Every time I visited her grave, I cursed the fucking headstone that her mother had picked. It was so very… Bland. Boring. Diplomatic. Not Emily. But then again, what was Emily? How could I attribute a headstone to the body that laid under the sod? There was no way.
I brought her flowers this time. Normally, I didn't bother. Emily hated flowers. She hated the thought of killing something living for viewing pleasure. If that wasn't the purest thing I had ever heard then I didn't know what was. As I laid the roses on top of her grave, I sighed and sat cross legged next to the raised grass, shrugging my shoulders simply. The day was gorgeous, although a dark cloud overhead began to roll across the sky, giving the previously joyful ambiance a dark undertone. It was as though the sky was grieving along with me. I chuckled softly to myself, knowing damn well that this was probably Emily in some other life telling me to get my ass back home. Silently, I stayed in my position until I realized that the drops of water on my legs were not raindrops, but rather my own tears. When the fuck had I even started crying?
As I packed up to leave, a simple sniffle escaped me, and my arm raised up to wipe at my tears. This wasn't the first time that one of my visits had been silent and ended in me crying. Crying over her. Crying over us. Crying over what could have been.