Okay guys, I realized that I made a mistake last chapter in the summary. It said six months when it should have said eight, my bad. Please forgive me. Anyway, here's the next chapter, and let me tell you this has easily started out as one of my most popular stories yet. Keep it coming!
"Trust takes months to build, but only a minute to break." -Unknown
Before the team could process this or even begin to try to understand it, the hood was down and the unmistakable face of the once thought to be dead was revealed. She shot a somewhat scared glance at JJ, who nodded her encouragement and offered a small smile. She licked her lips and smiled in return, daring to set her gaze back on the team.
Reid was opening and closing his mouth like a fish out of water. Rossi was looking away, and Morgan looked beyond taken aback. Garcia was shaking her head, muttering something under her breath about dreaming, tears already beginning to leak down her cheeks.
Reid ended up being the one to break the silence. "Emily?"
"You're alive?" Morgan demanded harshly, which apparently Emily had been prepared for. She sighed, accompanied by a sad smile.
Before Emily could say anything, which might have been for the better, JJ patiently cleared her throat. When all eyes were on her once more, she subtly reminded them that there were pictures of beaten and battered people behind her on a giant screen and that there were more urgent matters to attend to. A collective murmur of agreement rose for a moment and settled once more. Emily fidgeted, having no available seat around the table, and instead settled for the couch off to the side. Nobody looked at her with the exception of a momentary glance from JJ.
Undeterred, JJ jumped headfirst into the case. "Small groups of up to two to seven people are being found in New York, beaten to death. The more of them there are, the younger their age group. The majority are girls, but in the larger groups there have been boys," JJ pointed to a picture of the only group of seven. They were teenagers, easily overpowered, and positioned like sardines. In this picture, there were four girls and three boys.
"So the boys were in the wrong place at the wrong time?" Rossi suggested and JJ nodded.
"It appears that way. The girls all showed signs of sexual trauma; however, they were cleaned off so no traces of semen could be recovered."
There were three pictures in total on the screen, including the one of the group of seven. There was a group of five, consisting of four girls and one boy, and a group of two, both girls. All of them positioned in the same fashion and all of them with obvious bruises, cuts, and scrapes covering nearly every inch of the parts of their bodies that were exposed.
"All of them have had their IDs confirmed." She pointed first to the picture of the two women, who both looked to be in their early forties. "The first one is Joey Torres and Brittany Willes. Both in their early forties, no physical traits in common." Next she pointed to the picture of five, who looked to be younger, perhaps in their twenties. "The group of five victims are as follows from left to right: Natalia Bensfield, Jared Mitcheld, Lola Clarkson, Maya Randle, and Samantha Punnings. The group of seven consists of Randall Wellings, Kristen Scher, Donald Chur, Michael Eidens, Rachel Stein, Roslyn Cunner, and Josephine Fieldston."
"How'd he manage to subdue all of them?" Morgan inquired.
"Tox screen reports show traces of chloroform for all of them," JJ replied evenly.
Finished for now, the team left one by one to prepare themselves individually for the plane ride to New York until only JJ and Emily were left. Emily stood, looking a little dejected, but JJ walked over to her and draped her arm over the brunette's shoulders.
"They didn't even look at me," Emily shook her head.
"Just give them some time to come around. It's a lot to take in," JJ soothed, dropping her arm to her side once more and leading Emily out the door. "Now, c'mon, we're going to the Big Apple!"
The jet took off with the BAU team, for the most part, scattered in various seats. Reid had sat himself down by the chess table and Rossi, who pitied the younger agent, had wasted no time in joining him and he continued to fruitlessly challenge the genius in the game, no matter how many times he lost and was bound to lose. As Rossi glued his eyes to the checkered board, he thought about their "newest addition." Out of all of them, he should have been the most understanding, and he was, for the most part. Except for the fact that he couldn't seem to get passed her fake death. That had been a hard blow not only to him, but the whole team, and watching them crumble before his eyes was just as difficult as experiencing it firsthand, if not worse. Watching other people suffer so terribly for someone else's actions was never an easy thing to get over. But surely there had to have been another way to go about securing safety for everyone involved that wasn't so emotionally damaging. She should have at least tried harder, he thought, instead of just deciding to leave us.
Meanwhile, as the two battled in chess with the same end result every time, Hotch and Morgan ended up sitting across from one another. Hotch was busying himself with the case files, reluctant to face the woman that had just returned to the BAU. He too knew he should have been one of the ones to forgive her and welcome her back with open arms, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Not only had she withheld extremely significant information pertaining to a case and her and the team's safety, she had abandoned his team. It was childish in his position to blame her for upping and departing, considering he knew all of the details, but he couldn't help feeling the way he did. He couldn't say that he had forgiven her, even with his complete knowledge of the situation that had forced her to take the actions she had, no matter how drastic, and he wasn't sure if he would any time soon. All their trusts and bonds with her had been betrayed—it wouldn't be so simple to excuse, as much as he wished it was.
Morgan was drowning himself in his music, his headphones covering his ears and the volume of his music on so high that Hotch could faintly hear it, but chose to say nothing. Morgan was easily the angriest out of all of them and didn't bother hiding it. He was silently steaming, visibly as well by the expression plastered on his face, letting the blasting music take over the majority of his senses as he kept his gaze out the window. Nobody on the team blamed him for the way he felt, Emily included, and in truth he felt similarly to Hotch and Rossi, just on a much larger scale and with both focal points melded together. Morgan was pissed at Emily, to say the least, for everything she had said and done ever since she had learned of Doyle's escape from prison and up 'till now. Furious, he refused to pay any mind to the woman that was silently pleading for her family to welcome her back, but he didn't see that happening any time soon, much like the rest of the team, JJ included.
The plane was silent for a long time. Eventually, JJ had made to sit next to Emily, even though the two didn't share any words. Emily looked forlorn and full of regrets, so JJ shortly left her to her own devices and instead sat next to Hotch to quietly review the case. The blonde brought up the fact that in each group, the times of death were different for each person, and Hotch voiced their combined musings that their UnSub had forced the remainder of the group to watch while he mercilessly beat and for the girls, raped, a member until they were dead. For some, the bruises and cuts had had a small period of time to heal, which implied that he had taken a break between beatings, but for what, they couldn't be sure at the present.
They decided to do the usual checking of any possible outside connections, so JJ pulled out her laptop and set it on the table in front of them. They didn't bother Morgan, Rossi, Reid, or Emily, assuming that they would join if they felt they could, which, apparently, they did. Shortly after booting up the computer, Morgan removed his headphones and turned his head, Reid checkmated Rossi and the duo removed themselves from their spots at the chess table and came and bent over the laptop, and even Emily managed to drift over, situating herself behind all of them. They purposely didn't give her any acknowledgment.
Finally, Garcia's face appeared on the screen and it was obvious she had been crying by her red eyes and the tear stains on her cheeks, but the team said nothing as she typed away, doing exactly what she knew they were about to ask of her. "There are only connections between the groups; the two women went to high school together, the five attended college together and recently graduated, and the seven go to high school together as well. Nobody in the groups collided with someone else," she reported solemnly, dismissing any ideas that they had a common enemy.
"Thank you, Garcia," Hotch automatically said, but apparently Garcia wasn't finished yet.
She had glanced up as soon as she had finished reporting her findings, looking deceived and hurt. They could guess what she was going to say before she said it, but she went ahead anyway. "Miss Emily Prentiss, how on earth could you do this to me? To us? Just leave us like that? I felt for you for a while, but now… now I can't possibly understand how you could do something so cruel!" Emily shifted uncomfortably behind them, and Morgan turned briefly to glare at her. The rest of the team looked away because they all knew what Garcia was telling them, or more directly Emily, was true and straight from the heart. They weren't about to interrupt.
"I thought you were my friend!" With that final declaration, the screen closed and a sniffling Garcia had disappeared without another word, leaving Emily partially heartbroken and the rest of the team touched and/or fueled by Garcia's display. The rest of the plane ride was as silent as the dead.