Disclaimer: I own nothing. This is just a one shot I've been planning for a little while and hope to elaborate on further when the new season starts airing in fall. The woman he refers to is one I created myself and alone is my creation.
I didn't mean to fall for her.
Didn't mean for it to happen. Didn't even see it coming before it did. No warning signs or hints of a wave bursting under the surface before it rose up and drowned me.
But it happened.
We weren't even that close. Just a coworker with whom I shared basic words of courtesy, an almost friend who's life I only knew the bones of. Didn't care to add flesh to them and in them find a human being or someone I could truly care about.
But I did.
I thought she was pretty but that was a fact instead of an opinion. She had an easy smile and her eyes were a softened brown like the underside of bark just warmed and caught by flames. She laughed kindly and when she was angry you could see it coming like the sky shading purple before a violent storm.
But it was fact not opinion.
I was hurt when she had been shot. Saw a brief collision of moments in passing that we had shared and felt them cut at me again when I thought of anything else. I felt relief when she was safe again and awkwardly told her I wished her well and she replied in the same awkwardness.
It hung between us like a word you knew but couldn't quite pronounce.
I felt anger in her name for the first time when she told me about her childhood. When she talked down a victim with a trembling voice and tear filled eyes like rain had quenched and frozen the flames. In that moment I hated her nameless father. Hated him with such purity and blindness that if he had stood before me then I would have killed him without hesitation or regret.
The awkwardness between us faded then. Became ashes and in its place burned something that flickered but never went out: understanding.
I cringed when I heard over the headset the sound of her beaten, her grunts of pain and the crash and collision as she was shoved into either wood or glass. I clutched at the headphones over my ears in contending desperation to either rip them off as far as I could throw them or hold them closer to hear her voice and be assured that she was still alive.
That she was still okay and somehow so was I.
I grew quiet around her when she miscarried seven months into her pregnancy. When she came back to work with a faded light to her eyes like the flames had been doused and all that remained was smoke. I lost the ability to speak to her then. To say words that could either heal her or re-break those wounds. I knew no balance between them and simply watched as Reid poured her a cup of coffee and pressed his lips to her hair in an affection that the BAU only recently allowed.
It wasn't jealousy. Not then. Not yet.
I pulled her into a one armed hug when she came to work with a ring glittered on her finger and a renewed brightness to her eyes. I clapped Reid on the back in congratulations and teased him of his wedding night until his cheeks burned red and she laughingly told me to stop teasing.
It wasn't jealousy. Not then. Not yet.
It was when she was shot in the arm that I felt the shift. Like grains of sand suddenly broke apart inside me and weighed me down with something that I felt but lost track of between my fingers. When she fell and blood soaked into her sleeve and panic and rage became raw and one inside me and it was all red and all her.
It was the waves building under the surface then. The purple in the sky before the violent storm.
It broke when we were assigned a case together apart from the others. When we both sat on the floor next to the victim for hours trying to coax him out and the three of us bonded and locked together with an understood darkness that we all wished we could forget. She sat on the tile with her hair swept and fallen over her shoulder and her nails lazily pulling at the hem of her jeans, her ring glittered and suddenly so significant on her finger.
It was jealousy then. It is jealously now.
I told her that her strength astounded me, so many other words I wasn't allowed to say suddenly broken and sharp in my thoughts. That she was kind. That she was funny. That she was beautiful. That she knew how to knit and sometimes made us scarves or mittens while we discussed cases on the plane. That she took only milk in her coffee and stirred it exactly three times each time. That in a split second and a look with flames burnt gold she made me weaker and more fragile than I had ever dared grow close to.
That if she had touched me then I would have shattered and broken.
I didn't tell her. How could I? She was my co worker. She was my friend. She was the wife of a man I cared for and who loved her in return beyond any reasoning he tried so hard to piece together. I had no place in that picture. In that world that for once in her life held together with no cracks.
I was a missing piece that would break the only image if I tried to force a place.
I avoided her carefully, took miniscule mentions not to sit at her side or teasingly brush her hand as she stirred her coffee three times and Reid for the hundredth time asked her how she could not want sugar.
It seemed impossible that what years ago seemed so insignificant was almost unbearable to now avoid.
She picked up on it though. Asked me out to brunch one morning with the nearly warmed breeze teasingly pulling at her hair and her cup of coffee in her hands that had been stirred three times. She asked if she had offended me and in all sincerity begged me how she could fix it, standing in such perfect stance that the sunlight caught her hair and for a moment blinded me of anything else but her.
I was saved the task of trying to form words when we were interrupted and called in for a case.
My resolve was tested when we took the careful steps to the bank and the windows suddenly blew out with violent burst of glass and stone and I shoved her to the ground beneath me in more urgency and care then befitting our relationship. I breathlessly turned her over beneath me and with the echo of the explosion still muffled in my ears cradled her face between my fingers and begged for her eyes to focus on mine and assure me that there was no real damage and that I saved her.
She couldn't stand and I lifted her into my arms and to my chest, screaming for an ambulance in a panic that rendered me blind.
She returned the favor less than an hour later when the unsub had me pinned to the garbage and the shots of her gun rang out and echoed in the narrowness of the alley. He collapsed with blood soaked in his shirt and she raised her eyes to me breathlessly with the delicate tangle of her hair loose from her ponytail and her finger frozen over the trigger.
There was something in that moment that hurt. The utter determination hardened in her eyes that almost gave way to a hope I couldn't have.
But it was enough. The hope not yet formed had burned its mark and I couldn't stop the words burnt on my tongue and frozen in the air. That I was in love with her. That I had fallen in love with her and I couldn't stop and a small part of me that hurt with hope didn't want to. I was gone and I was fallen and I couldn't go back.
It was the look in her eyes that quenched the hope and instead shoved glass down my throat.
It was only an hour later and we were on the dance floor again that the glass eased and the hope reignited. When my fingers delicately lost themselves in her lower back and she shifted her grasp through mine that tensed under my skin like a line of wire hot like electricity. When I closed my eyes in a moment of weakness and pressed my cheek against her hair to taste the scent of her on my tongue in a hurt I couldn't bear.
When I opened my eyes again a moment later and realised that she had just done the same.