Her dark eyes fearfully shot from corner to corner as she looked around the room, hearing the heart monitor start to pick up. She was panicking.
Her breath came out in pants and her chest hurt from breathing as hard as she was, and her gaze immediately flickered over to the door when it shot open.
Hotch raced to the closest side of the bed, the vein in his forehead that Emily had always watched when he was nervous or angsty or mad popping out as he grabbed onto her hand. "Emily? Em baby, can you hear me?"
The agent quickly nodded her head, her eyes wide as the nurses came filing into the room.
"Emily? Emily what's wrong?"
Was he really asking that? What was wrong? She had lost an arm, that's what was wrong.
Emily gripped her fiancé's hand harder than she meant and heard a small snap, not catching the small wince of the older man as the doctor quickly made his way to her IV. "No please," she whispered, her heart beating so loud she was sure the entire room was echoing, and she wanted desperately to reach out and stop the man in the white jacket from injecting her with a sedative, but she had no arm. "Please!"
Hotch swept her hair from her eyes as the doctor emptied the syringe, and he watched with pained eyes as the love of his life started to breathe even breaths and stop her eyes from shooting from spot to spot. "Baby?"
The agent's head rolled gently to one side, her eyes now slow and glassy. "Aaron I want to leave," she almost slurred now, shaking her head when the doctor gestured for her fiancé to meet with him just outside the room. "Please stay with me."
"I'll be right back."
She sniffled when he slipped his hand from her now weak grasp and let him press a kiss to her forehead. "Don't leave me," she hiccupped, a pang in her heart when he looked back at her once more before shutting the door behind him.
Hotch huffed as he shook the pain from his hand, not able to glance through the window and into the younger woman's room. She couldn't have been more upset. "You didn't have to do that," he gruffed.
The doctor with the ends of his hair just turning white shook his head. "Your wife has gone through a great amount of trauma," he explained, gesturing to the crying woman just on the other side of the door. "She panicked, and we calmed her down."
"You're scaring her," the Unit Chief accused.
"We're making sure she doesn't go into respiratory failure because of a panic attack," the gray haired man shot back. "If we let her panic and have her heart rate blowing up our machines, we'll have a bigger problem on our hands than we do now."
Hotch angrily shook his head, a dizzying sensation raining over him when he did so.
"We're not hurting her, Agent Hotchner," the doctor tried. "We're doing what's best for her. Your wife is a survivor."
He looked up to the older man before him with tears in his eyes. He could hear his fiancé crying just a few feet away. "I need to go back in with her."
The doctor nodded. "I need to tell you that she's not going to react well."
Hotch rolled his eyes.
"She's going to get extremely irritated and angry when she realizes everything she now won't be able to do, and everything she'll have to be taught again. But if you take your time and help her with it, it'll come naturally."
The Unit Chief held his head up and took his hand from his hips. "There's nothing natural about this," he huffed angrily, walking past the doctor and back into the room where he could be with the woman he loved. "Baby?"
Emily cried at the sound of her fiancé's voice. "Aaron," she sobbed, letting him hug her the best he could. "Aaron I'm scared." She let her dark eyes open up and flicker over to the older man. "Take me home."
The beg broke the agent's heart, and he ran his thumb down Emily's wet cheek. "We have to stay for a few days. You lost a lot of blood."
She watched him nod as he continued talking to her, his voice breaking with every word and his tears falling against the skin of her arm. Biting her lip, she let him grasp the one hand she had left, and she held on.