They hadn't asked for his opinion about her headstone.
Why would they have? It wasn't as if he were her significant other or her family or anything other than a coworker. But still...
Whoever had chosen those words had absolutely gotten it wrong. They had reduced her entire life into three words – three words that immortalized her life in the context of an agent and nothing more.
FBI agent didn't even break his top ten list of things that Emily Prentiss embodied. Yes, she had been a kickass agent, she was very good at her job, but she was so much more. And it broke his heart to think that the legacy of Emily Prentiss that had been preserved for future generations was not at all the things worthy of preserving.
But she also wasn't one of those cliched 'Beloved daughter and friend' or 'Rest in Peace' headstones either. Partly because she wasn't entirely proud of her relationship with her parents and she had never been one to rest in life, so he doubted that's what she was doing in death. Partly because not even that came close to summarizing her life.
But then, how did you summarized nearly fourty years in the letters you could fit on a slab of granite? You might as well nail Jell-o to a tree or empty the ocean with a teaspoon. He could've filled the suface of a mountain with her legacy.
In the five years in which he had known her as an agent and a friend, he'd thought he'd come to know her quite well...but as he'd found out, he really didn't know her very well after all. And as he'd learned that, the things he'd learned had only reaffirmed his core beliefs about her.
She devoted herself completely to the people she cared about, the people she felt responsible for. In fact, she gave herself so fully to this pseudo-family she formed that she was entirely willing to die for them. She had died for Declan, to protect his secret location, his life from the very person who should be the one to lay their life on the line for him.
It was that loyalty that was right now making him feel so...angry over the inadequacy of the inscription. The only word that really belonged there was bravery. Because, down to her very last moments in which she had stared him in the eye and begged him to let her go, she'd stood toe-to-toe death – the one foe that even he was too much of a coward to face – and never once backed down. He'd been scared for her and begged her to keep holding on because he wasn't strong enough for her to face her mortality. But in the end, she had departed with her lifelong rival as equals, instead of with him...rightly so, he supposed, since he hadn't known her quite as intimately as death...