"Smells, I think, may be the last thing on earth to die." - Fern Schumer
Emily thinks they're wrong, when they say that the smell of death stays with you forever. It's not that it lingers, it's that the smell is so amorphous. "Death" is so wide; how a body came to be permanently retired changes the smell of decomposition. But so many other scents trigger a sensory memory of that smell of death, whether it comes to you as a thought in the back of your mind or as a vivid recollection of the stench.
She's out at a steak house with Morgan and Reid when it hits her; she likes her steak a little bloody, and there's something about the smell of the cooked flesh that registers on a level that reminds her of death. She doesn't say anything, and she drinks deeply from her glass of wine, trying to block the smell. She ends up getting a little drunker than she'd anticipated, because she can't take a bite of the meat without drinking from her glass to mask the cognitive association going on. She wouldn't have been surprised if Morgan knows what she's doing, Reid not so much; he seems to cope with smells on crime scenes a lot better than she does.
"Macrosmatic", Reid has said before; someone with a very sensitive olfactory system.
She's interviewing a hospital patient recovering from being tortured by an unsub; the man's leg is gangrenous, certain to be amputated below the knee, and it reeks. It takes so much effort for her face not to twist in reaction to the smell that small tears prick at the corners of her eyes. The victim, thankfully, mistakes it for empathy – which if course it is in part, but not quite as much as it seems. Gangrene is rotting flesh, and it triggers memories of so many bodies, so many decomposing remains that Prentiss doesn't want in her brain at that moment. In fact there's no moment when she wants them, but knows that she needs those experiences and those memories to do her job.
She shares a birthday with Reid, and it falls on a Sunday and they get a rare day of peace. Morgan treats them, and they're both shocked that it's something so thoughtful and perfectly them as a trip to the Botanical Gardens in Virginia. She's bombarded by the smell when they reach the largest flower in the world; Amorphophallus titanum, Reid informs, and launches into an explanation about the lack of explanation of why it stinks of rotting flesh, and while she'd normally listen with interest, she's instead trying to stand as far back from it without seeming obvious, and breathe through her mouth.
The most disconcerting time is when she's sitting on the couch with Reid at Morgan's house, while he cooks dinner. He's trying something fancy, and he burns caramel. There's a sickly sweet burning smell coming in from the kitchen, and as she breathes it deeply in, its pleasant but there's something wrong. Then quite suddenly she remembers why it's familiar; corpses from fires sometimes smell sweet as the heat breaks down the tissue. She flinched, her knee bumping against Reid's, and he looks at her curiously. She keeps watching TV, pretending it hadn't happened.
There are smells that don't make her think of death, thankfully; rain, clean sheets, coconut shampoo. The most enjoyable ones of them are the two flesh scents of the men she's been periodically sharing a bed with for a year. Reid's scent is musky, earthy, and there's a slightly sharp note that reminds her of apples. He stretches out beside her, the vertebrae of his spine pushing up against his back as he sighs contently. Morgan smells heady and smooth, both sweet and bitter; smelling his body is like tasting dark chocolate, which is fitting. He wraps his arms around her waist from behind, reaching across to pet the skin of Reid's thigh just below the swell of his rear, and he too lets out a little happy noise against her shoulder. The room smells of sex; close, comforting instead of suffocating, thick as if she can actually feel the scent lingering on her skin.
She closed her eyes and breaths in deeply, knowing the smell of their skin will be waiting for her in the morning.
"There are ways of dying that don't end in funerals. Types of death you can't smell." - Haruki Murakami