Disclaimer: I don't own anything PLL-related. I just mess with the characters.
Author's Note: This is somewhere between canon and AU. Meaning, this picks up where the last episode left off but most likely is not how things will work. It would be interesting, though, I think, if things did happen this way. Anyway, enjoy the story. Feel free to review and tell me what you thought! :)
The Weakest Link.
'A' told her she was the weakest link. In a way, Emily still believes that. She was always the quiet one, always willing to submit to Alison or her parents or whoever. She respected people of authority without question and had an ideal view of the world and held on tight to her morals and beliefs. She almost never said a bad thing about anybody and could find the the positive side of any situation. The other girls were bolder, more daring, more realistic and adventurous. Stronger.
But then she also believes that she is the most protective one of the four. She has chased black hoodies into the woods and pushed Aria and Mona away from speeding cars. She befriended Toby when nobody else would walk on the same side of the street as him and never doubted him even when Spencer insisted he was part of the A team. Alison used to call her "Killer" because she would bristle any time someone so much as looked at Ali in the wrong way. She tries to walk in the front or the back of the group, depending on the situation, so she feels like she has some control - so she feels like if things go wrong, maybe she can do something. She walks behind Hanna and Aria as they enter Hector's shop, feeling him a little too close to her but glad she is the one next to him instead of either of her friends. It's just the way she is. She would do anything for her friends, would try anything to keep them safe.
The picture on the screen still stares at her, cutting through the darkness of the room. Detective Tanner has long since left the room, telling her she can leave whenever she's ready. Emily can hear her, sometimes, just outside the door, talking on the phone or to somebody walking by. She tries to ignore it and focuses on the screen, her heartbeat pounding in her ears. A red coat. A sign that reads "Guilty." A mask Hector made staring back at her. Her face.
She wonders if this means she might go to jail. If she might be blamed for Wilden's murder. It's a scary thought. Terrifying. Paralyzing. It leaves smog in her brain and a bitter taste in her mouth and makes the blood in her veins burn. She doesn't want to go to jail.
Then Hanna's terrified face flashes through her mind. Hanna's panicked voice cuts through the fog in her brain. Ashley might be going down for Wilden's murder and Emily honestly doesn't believe the other woman did it. It has to be 'A.' Maybe if they blame Emily instead, Hanna can get her mom back. The girls can make it without her; Hanna can't make it without her mom. Emily knows this. She understands it.
She wonders if it's possible to make a deal with 'A.' How she would be able to get in touch with Red Coat. How she could make this happen.
Emily has already killed one man. Would it really be that much of a stretch for the cops to think she killed another?
She doesn't want to go to jail. She can feel the bile threatening to rise in her throat just thinking about it. But she would do anything for her friends. Anything to keep them safe and happy.
The video replays. The masked figure holds up the "Guilty" sign. Her own face, glossy and fake, stares back at her. She tries to swallow but her throat is too dry. All the water has gone to her eyes, spilling over and running down her cheeks. She didn't even know she was crying.
Emily wipes the tears from her eyes and waits until she thinks that the cops won't be able to tell she was crying. Then she walks out of the room and smiles as she passes Tanner. She has made her decision. Now all she has to do is figure out how to make implement it.
-x-
She doesn't say anything about her plan to the others. They all ask her what Tanner wanted and she tells them the truth. "'A' gave the cops a video of someone in a mask of my face holding up a sign that says 'guilty,'" she says, and her face looks appropriately worried. "Apparently the note on the disc looked like my handwriting, so they think I left it."
Aria is shocked and talks about how horrible 'A' is and how it doesn't even make sense and how Emily is innocent, so, in the end things will work themselves out.
"Well, my mom is innocent, too," Hanna says, and it's the first time she has spoken since they started talking.
They spend a few seconds in silence, somewhere between being apologetic and sympathetic and angry. Spencer clears her throat awkwardly and she seems like she is about to speak, but Emily beats her to it. "We know that 'A' set your mom up. Now we just have to prove it. She's not going to go down for a murder she didn't commit, Han, we'll make sure of it."
It's easier said than done, and they all know it, but Spencer and Aria chime in with their agreement. Hanna doesn't look entirely convinced but there's a fire in her eyes that says she isn't going down without a fight. Emily breathes out a sigh of relief when she sees that. It makes it seem like everything might be worth it in the end.
Then Spencer starts talking about possibilities and plans. Ways to prove Ashley's innocence and to keep the cops off of Emily's back and how to keep solving Alison's murder. Aria hangs on to every word, adding in her own ideas, and Hanna leaps on every plan that could possibly free her mom until Spencer points out her own flaws. Emily lets them fade into the background, the wheels in her mind turning as she works on her own plan.
The way she sees it, Spencer is brilliant, but these plans aren't going to stand up against the evidence the cops have in the back of the police station. Spencer has to realize that. But shifting the blame always works. Isn't that partly how 'A' has kept them going so long?
Spencer is talking about ballistics when Emily texts Mona. If anybody knows how to get in contact with 'A,' it would be her.
She figures she'll try Lucas if this falls through. Or maybe even Jenna.
-x-
Mona either doesn't know how to help or she refuses. Emily isn't entirely sure which one it is. Either way, Emily is out of luck, and she can't find a way to get in touch with either Lucas or Jenna and Melissa is halfway across the globe. She is almost about to give up when a light bulb goes off in her head and it makes her feel dumb that she didn't think about it earlier.
'A' is always watching her. It seems like 'A' is always sitting in the shadows, phone in hand and a text message at the ready. So she decides to leave 'A' a note.
'Blame me for Wilden's murder instead,' she writes, careful to make the letters look completely different than she normally writes them. She leaves it in her purse and makes sure to accidentally drop it throughout the day.
Sure enough, by the time Emily looks for it again barely 24 hours later, it is nowhere to be found. She gets a strange sense of satisfaction and a nauseating feeling of dread when she notices. But this is her plan. It is the only way she is sure will work, and she made her peace with it days ago.
She clutches her phone in her hand tightly, waiting for a text message. For the next few days, she doesn't so much as put her phone in her purse. It stays in her hand or her pocket. She keeps it right outside the tub when she showers. The hours drag by slowly and she wants to beg 'A' to message her. To send her details. A confirmation. Something.
-x-
Three days later 'A' has still not contacted her and Emily begins to wonder if it was even 'A' who took the note. They are no closer to figuring out how to free Hanna's mom and sometimes when she leaves the restaurant after work she sees Detective Tanner across the street, like she is watching and waiting. It scares her. Emily would much rather be in control of this situation. Up until a few days ago, she thought she was.
She is having yet another sleepless night, kept awake by thoughts of jail and 'A' and Child Protective Services and murdering Wilden and stabbing Nate and losing Alison and Maya, when she hears her mom talking on the phone downstairs. Emily can't make out the words but she can hear the hushed whispers, the desperation, the words that would probably be yelled if she was talking louder.
Silently, she climbs out of bed and goes to crouch down on the stairs, focusing on her mother's words. She can't figure out who Pam is talking to. And just when she is starting to piece together some of what she has heard, she sees headlights, coming in bright through the big window in their living room, coming closer, and she doesn't have time to react when a car comes crashing through their living room and barrels into her mother.
She vaguely remembers screaming. She can still hear her mother's scream over the shattering glass and the snapping couch and the twisting metal and squealing tires. It takes her too long to react. She knows that. She started to go back up the stairs as she car came pushing through. She regrets that, regrets the instinct to leave her mother, even if it would save her own life. But as soon as that car comes to a stop her frozen mind kicks back on and she is running down the stairs, tripping over one and falling the rest of the way. She vaguely registers the fact that she is landing on part of what was once her living room wall and then she is scrambling back to her feet despite the renewed pain in her shoulder. She finds her mom and falls down beside her. She doesn't feel the tears streaming down her face or the sobs erupting from her chest or even the hot blood slipping through her fingers as she tries to stop the bleeding that seems to be coming from everywhere. She feels cold. Detached.
And her mom isn't making a sound, even when Emily pushes down on one open wound, and that scares her. The amount of red she is seeing scares her. She can't think of anything else right now, isn't processing anything else, but she knows that she is scared.
She didn't even think to call 911. She figures a neighbor did it, and for that she is grateful, because her brain is still caught up in all the red that covers Pam and now herself that she barely registers it when the ambulance comes up to her house. The paramedics pull her away from her unconscious mother and make her ride in the back of the second ambulance, separate from her mom, and they check over her and ask her questions.
They ask most of their questions twice. She just doesn't hear them the first time. Some of them she doesn't know the answers to. "Are you hurt?" She doesn't know. Apparently, she is, because she feels the sting of antiseptic against her skin. "Do you know what you cut your leg on?" She looks down. She didn't even know she had cut her leg, but there it is, a giant slit across her calf.
They take her to the ER. She gets checked over more thoroughly and they get all the blood off of her. She gets stitches in her leg and on her foot and on her right arm and her face. For a while she wonders how all of this happens and then she remembers the disaster that is her living room - broken walls and shattered glass and a splintered couch and a smashed-in car - and the fact that she fell down the stairs. They spend almost a good hour looking her over and taking out splinters. They give her pain medicine and take an x-ray of her shoulder and she's sure that now she really won't get to swim again.
She asks about her mom a few times. They avoid her questions with bullshit reassurances ("she's in good hands" and "they're going to do all they can for her, sweetie") and eventually she is in a room on her own with an IV of pain meds attached to her arm. She doesn't think there is anything seriously wrong with her enough to warrant that, but apparently they're discussing surgery on her shoulder and have to wait for her dad to get to the hospital and they are worried about potential infection in some of her cuts.
It isn't until Emily wakes up the next day that she realizes that she has more small cuts littering her body. The doctor explains that they have opted not to do surgery on her shoulder and gives her and her father instructions. She doesn't listen, and interrupts him multiple times asking about her mom, until finally her dad pulls him out into the hallway to talk in private.
Then they tell her. Her mom is in ICU. She has already been in surgery and they are doing the best that they can but right now it is pretty touch and go. They are watching her like hawks and hoping nothing else goes wrong. "We're doing the best we can for her," they keep assuring her. But Emily doesn't feel so assured.
When she is discharged her dad takes her home so she can get some clothes and other things she needs. They'll be staying in a hotel for a while. There is something that looks like plastic wrap covering the giant window of the living room and except for the absence of the car, it looks too much like it did the last time Emily saw it. She can even still see the dried blood where her mother was. It doesn't feel like home anymore. It is destroyed and violated and she wonders briefly if this is anything like how her father felt when he would walk into an abandoned house while he was fighting in the war. And then she wonders if he ever guessed that he was being pulled out of one warzone just to be dropped into another.
Emily shakes the thoughts from her head and focuses on what she came to do. Get enough of her things to last her for a while. She gets her clothes thrown into a bag and is going for her computer when she notices a piece of yellow notebook paper laying on her desk.
On one side, it reads, 'Blame me for Wilden's murder instead.'
On the other, written in a handwriting that is scarily similar to her own, is, 'Just remember that you don't call the shots.'
She sits on her bed and cries.
-x-
Two weeks later it is revealed in the newspaper that the Wilden murder case has been tampered with. They cannot find any of the lab test results regarding the gun, and when the gun was retested the results were completely different than the cops remembered them being.
As a result, Ashley Marin was released from custody and the investigation had to start almost from the beginning again.
Emily can't help but feel a small bit of relief for that, even if now she is left to wonder if maybe 'A' is taking her up on her offer and blaming her instead. Spencer has been going over the list of other potential suspects in an attempt to make Emily feel better, but usually, it doesn't work. She has gotten pretty good lately at tuning Spencer out and getting lost in her head.
They are just beginning to have workers fix their destroyed living room. Emily and her dad are still staying at a hotel in Rosewood and eating out of take-out boxes and spending hours upon hours at the hospital. She prays every day, in the morning and at night and so many times in between, hoping and begging that one day soon her mom will wake up. She feels like she's in the middle of a movie, sitting by a hospital bed with a cold hand in hers talking about her day and whispering apologies to her comatose mother ("medically-induced coma," they emphasized, as if it made a difference).
Meanwhile, Aria's mom is in a different country and her dad comes home every night to sit at his desk and work on grading papers and Mike goes to lacrosse and hangs out with his friends. Spencer's parents still spend hours holed up in their offices or their studies and Melissa calls her every now and then from London. Hanna's mom is home, and her dad is at his house, but this time he actually calls a few times a week and tries to spend time with her. Their lives are fine, almost normal - as normal as they have been in a few years, at least, ever since they've been followed by black hoodies and plagued by anonymous text messages.
Spencer still acts like their fearless leader, trying to make progress. Aria is still her sounding board and sidekick. Hanna still brings a sense of humor and realism and bluntness. And Emily still sits there, arms crossed against her chest, listening as they discuss ideas and make plans. She agrees to go with Spencer back to the sorority house and she says that she's okay to go back to Hector's shop when Aria brings up the idea.
Sometimes Emily feels jealous. Her friends have their families all in one piece and their lives as put together as they can be given the situation that is 'A,' and here she is, living in a hotel because her house is missing half of its living room. She has lost her dreams of swimming and, with all the hospital bills, she might not even get to go to college. And now she has the possibility of being blamed for murder hanging over her head, and more than anything else, her mother is laying in a hospital bed barely clinging to life. It hurts, and it scares her, and it makes her jealous of the other girls. Of Spencer, of Aria, of Hanna.
But she doesn't say anything, because her friends are happy and safe, and that's all she ever wanted for them. She hates all the things going on in her life right now but she doesn't know that she'd be any happier on the other side, watching any of her three best friends going through the same things. That's always been part of her problem, really; she has a big heart and can be just too sympathetic sometimes.
So she sits back and says a prayer while her friends continue to talk about ideas. She thinks about what she wants to say to her mom next time she visits and whether she wants to pick up Chinese or Mexican for thinks about Spencer sitting in Radley and Hanna after she found out Mona was 'A' and Aria's breakdown when that kid was calling her a slut. Then Hanna says something and she is pulled into the conversation, eyebrows furrowed. "No, it couldn't have been him," she says, elaborating only when she sees Spencer's raised eyebrow.
Maybe she isn't the weakest link, she thinks. Maybe she's just the one best built to handle the pain.