Obligatory Disclaimer: these characters are not mine. There is a laundry list of names I credited in the last chapter which I am far too lazy to retype now.
Emily Prentiss spent the days following what she had come to call the Coffee Shop Incident chastising herself for having even possibly given herself away. Sometimes, when a secret has been revealed in such a subtle way, the secret-keeper simply knows that the jig is up. Who the fuck do you think you are? thought she, pacing her apartment at approximately four o'clock one morning, How can you be so stupid? You work with profilers, for fuck's sake! You can't afford to raise the slightest suspicion…
Emily knew that this was not simply about the Coffee Shop Incident. It couldn't have been about something so inconsequential- but reviewing her behavior around the blonde for the past few weeks, Emily knew that she had been slipping up left and right. She'd been wincing whenever she moved too quickly, and displayed the classic signs of someone hiding something- avoiding eye contact when asked about her personal life, spending more time alone than usual… Not a single other member of her team batted an eye, but JJ had watched her sister's stability deteriorate rapidly. JJ, she knew, with her perpetually broken heart and her abnormally strong maternal, protective instincts, was the momma bird always on the lookout for broken wings she might mend.
Emily knew not what frightened her most about the idea of JJ learning that the Great, Unbreakable Emily Prentiss was, in fact, breakable. It would be quite the blow to her ego to reveal any sort of weakness, and of course JJ would have to report such a deviance from healthy coping to Hotch, and how could one forget that it felt so very juvenile? After all, if she was ever confronted, what was she to say? "Oh, yes, Jennifer, I cut myself. Intentionally. Why? For shits and giggles, I guess!" Emily was quite sure that she could not have chosen a more infantilizing method of self-destruction.
And then there would the the question of why, and coming from JJ it would not be the demeaning, patronizing, "pull yourself together, child, we have a gala tonight" conversation she'd had with her mother so many years ago. JJ would be all wide doe eyes, lips parted ever so slightly in a pout, "why do you have to do this?" and, God forbid, "why couldn't you come to me?"
So Emily spent until sunrise trying to think of ways to divert JJ's attention to more benign topics should this one ever be mentioned, and, as soon as she felt she could go to work without seeming suspiciously early, she kissed Sergio upon the head and darted out the door. The empty apartment had come to feel far too menacing.
Immediately after the door to the conference room closed, Emily and her team were informed that they would be taking a trip to Connecticut. Girls from a private school in Greenwich had been going missing, one a day, for the last three days, and none had been found thus far. The school was out of session in light of the investigation, and police presence had been increased by threefold in the area. Emily spent the flight engrossed in a book- Fahrenheit 451- and JJ attempted to play chess with Reid (she lost a grand total of eight games, and Spencer was even trying to go easy on her). Occasionally, their eyes would meet across the plane, and the women would take turns looking away awkwardly. Both felt the tension, and neither were certain if the other felt as uncomfortable as they did.
The uncomfortable silence between the two was broken, for they had a ritual that no amount of awkwardness could change: at the end of every flight, as the jet prepared to land, JJ would move from wherever she sat to meet Emily, close her eyes tight, and hold her breath. Plane landings wreaked havoc on JJ's body- her ears felt full of thorns, her head pounded, and she always felt she might cry. She thanked her lucky stars at every plane landing that Emily was so accepting and unquestioning of this need for comfort; she was humiliated that, after all her years with the BAU, she had not yet learned to tolerate plane landings.
So JJ knocked her own king over, abandoned Reid (who would have felt insecure about this had he not grown used to JJ's and Emily's regular end-of-plane rendez-vous) and ventured across the jet to sit beside Emily, and she pulled her legs up against her chest and waited for Emily to glance up from her book and notice her. It took a few moments, but the wait didn't particularly matter; what mattered was Emily's arms around her, the soothing shhhh, the promise that it would be over soon.
