Author's Note: Thanks so much to everyone for your reviews and support. I'm so glad everyone's enjoying this.

The honeymoon is definitely over, Emily thinks as she enters the Quantico offices used by the BAU. The rest of her team is already here - she knows that Garcia, dependable as the sunrise, is already in her lair; she sees Reid, smiling and well rested, and JJ, effulgently content, chatting amiably in the bullpen. Rossi's blinds are open, and she can see him pouring over files. Further down the catwalk, Morgan's office door is open, and she knows her partner is in as well. Her eyes drift over to Hotch's office, though she already knows he is there.

Here, he is Hotch.

Last night, he was Aaron.

The habit of compartmentalization is hard to break, and is also necessary, she knows. He will send her resignation to Strauss today, after they tell the team, but she still will have two weeks as a member of the BAU. Whatever they started last night, however overdue, is still against regulations, and she's not looking to scuttle his career.

Here, he must be Hotch. Hotch, her boss, who orders her to negotiate face-to-face with serial killers; who goes through the door with her, guns blazing. Hotch, who tells her to follow his orders no matter how angry they make her; who stays late and arrives early and who always wants to protect his team. Hotch, who asked her to rethink her resignation after that first year; who enlisted a State Department representative to mastermind her deep cover exile.

Although, maybe it was Aaron who did that, who risked so much and lied to so many to save her.

Last night, Aaron held her, and spoke to her with kind words, looked at her with soft eyes, and touched her with gentle hands. He dried her tears, made her laugh. He didn't let her hide from her ghosts, from the demons to whom she knows she gives so much power. Moreover, he stayed with her - he stayed - until well after midnight. Jessica, with near unrealistic patience, had told her brother-in-law to take all the time he needed. And he had, but he'd taken all the time she needed. They had tea, and talked of simpler things - shoes, and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings - and did not mention again her move, or her much-needed break down. She still feels shattered, worn out and uneasy, but knows that could be nerves as much as anything else.

She reminds herself to not pick at her nails, since Reid will notice, as he noticed during the initial Doyle debacle. She cannot rely on them all being caught up in JJ's post-wedding high to not see that something is different with her. Mentally taking a deep breath, she bypasses her desk, her friends, and the stack of consults, and makes a beeline for Hotch's office.

"Good morning," she says in what she hopes is a typically-professional voice. Everything feels different. And she wants to kiss him. Hotch, she reminds herself. This is Hotch.

He smiles at her.

Dammit.

"Good morning," he replies, and sets down his pen. There are stacks of files on his desk, pending cases Garcia has given him to review, consults, post-case reports and debriefs. "What do you need?"

She huffs out a breath, the "tell" he teased her about a few nights ago. "A year's supply of Valium and a vodka chaser?"

His welcoming, decidedly un-Hotch-like grin softens into something more like empathy, and she wishes he'd be more Hotch-like, so she can keep them separate in her mind; the man who is her superior and the man discovered last night that she likes it when he scrapes his teeth along her collarbone.

"Round-table room, five minutes?" he asks.

She nods, "Rip off the bandaid, I guess."

"Emily," he begins, rising from his desk. He comes around the side of his desk, but comes no closer to her, and she is grateful. She is so nervous right now, she wants to wrap herself around him and feel safe again, and knows that she can't.

"Call me 'Prentiss.'" She all but begs it, and feels embarrassed that she is having such trouble keeping their professional and personal lives separate. Perhaps if she didn't feel so unhinged, wasn't so afraid of undoing all the trust she has spent eight months rebuilding with her friends, it would be easier to compartmentalize him.

He arches an eyebrow, unable to hide his bemusement. "I've called you Emily for years," he says in a low voice, since his door is open and people are constantly walking by on the catwalk.

"But until last night you never did it just before licking that spot behind my ear," she retorts in an equally low voice.

He almost blushes. "Fair point." He chuckles to himself before sitting behind his desk again. "See you in five."

With a swift nod, she leaves his office, and hopes she's got enough acting chops to get through the next 300 seconds. She approaches the team, schooling her face in what she hopes is a neutral mask - very Hotch-like, she thinks.

"Morning, Princess." Morgan greets her with his customary cheeky grin. He and Garcia have wandered out of their offices to join Reid and JJ. For form, she rolls her eyes at the nickname, even though they both know she secretly doesn't mind it.

Ried, sitting at his desk, meets her eyes. "How was your day off?"

"Oh, y'know," she begins, waving her hand dismissively. "Didn't do much. Woke up with a crazy hangover."

"You too?" Garcia exclaims, mirroring Derek's body language as she half sits on a desk that isn't hers. He has his office, she has her lair, but they are down here mingling with their friends and colleagues, because all they've got are consults and as far as anyone knows, it's going to be an easy day.

Emily nods sympathetically, and mentally sighs in relief that she didn't let it slip she already knew about Penelope's hangover, from Aaron. She softly hipchecks JJ and grins. "And how're you, Mrs. LaMontagne?"

The team collectively laughs as JJ pales.

"Did you forget what happened the other night?" Derek teases. "I mean, Rossi throws a bangin' party, but…"

"No, I definitely remember that I got married," JJ replies. "It's just….gonna take some getting used to."

"Are you doing to change your last name?" Garcia asks, playing with a pen she has picked up off of JJ's desk.

JJ wrinkles her nose. "I don't think so. I mean, professionally, I've built my reputation as Agent Jureau. Changing it to LaMontagne might be confusing."

"Plenty of people keep their maiden names professionally but change them legally," Emily interjects, happy to keep the focus of the conversation on JJ. Derek had given her a look when she first joined the group, and she doesn't want to give anything away before the team meeting Hotch should be calling in….about 120 seconds.

But JJ still looks uncomfortable. "Yeah, but...I dunno. It just doesn't feel like it's for me."

"You know," Reid says, and they all know they're in for a mini-lecture on the history of married women changing their surnames.

"In the United States, women historically took their husbands' last names because they legally were made to. It was called 'coverture,' and it stemmed from the notion that a married woman had no rights to her own property or to make contracts in her own name. The law essentially stated that she had no right to her own name at all. Her husband took on all legal rights for the couple. You know, coverture remained law in most states until the 1960s and '70s. There were remnants of coverture laws in some states that forbade women from taking out their own lines of credit."

The team exchanges amused glances, all far too used to Reid's dissertations to remark on the length of his speech.

"Happily, I've had my own line of credit for years," JJ quips.

"And Will doesn't strike me as the kind of guy to care about that kind of thing," Derek adds.

JJ shrugs, "We've done everything else untraditionally - got pregnant before we were engaged, and our four-year old son was at the wedding…"

Out of the corner of her eye, Emily sees Hotch stick his head into Rossi's office, and her heart begins to pound.

"BAU Alpha Team," Hotch calls, striding towards the conference room with Rossi close behind. "Meeting."

The team exchanges confused glances, their eyes filling with a trepidation and resignation that comes with years of doing this job.

"Do we have a case?" Reid asks, rising from his desk.

Garcia shakes her head, and begins teetering on fabulously high heels towards the stairs. "Not that I know of."

"Ugh, that's never a good sign - when a case goes straight to Hotch," JJ adds, remembering her days as Press Liaison.

Emily files in behind her friends, with Morgan taking up the rear. She feels his hand gently rest on her tricep. "Do you know what this is about?" His voice is low in her ear, only for her.

She pauses and forces herself to look him in the eye, but says nothing. She doesn't want to lie to him.

He nods, his eyes expressive and resigned. "Alright, then. If you're sure this is what you want."

She can't hear any derision or disagreement in his tone, and tries to find courage and peace in that.

The rest of the team is seated when they enter the room. She meets Hotch's eyes - she can't help it. She needs his reassurance if she's really going to do this, and she finds herself both ashamed and thrilled that she has that need. She likes to think of herself as a woman who doesn't need a man to validate herself. Her inner profiler chides her. It's not that he's a man and you're a woman. It's that you're human, and scared, and need a hand to hold. What's wrong with that?

She sees his nearly undetectable nod, and offers him a tiny smile by way of thanks. She takes a seat between Morgan and Rossi, and folds her hands on the table in front of her. It is taking all of her willpower not to pick at her nails.

The television behind Hotch displays only the FBI seal, and not the orangey desktop that indicates there is a pictorial briefing to follow. The team looks at him expectantly, their faces varying degrees of what he has come to call chaotic neutral. They are all trained profilers, used to keeping their expressions schooled. But he knows them, knows their body language, and can see the tension in the way they sit, the apprehension in their eyes.

He remembers the looks in their eyes, the shock and disbelief, the pain, the hope, the betrayal, when he stood before them - fresh off the plane from Afghanistan - and told them Emily was alive. He knows he is lying to them by omission now, but whatever is happening between he and Emily is private. The team is their family, but even family doesn't need to know everything all the time. And thus, he begins with a lie. A white lie, but a lie nevertheless.

"This morning, Agent Prentiss handed me her resignation. In two weeks' time, she will no longer be a member of the BAU."

It's like all the air is sucked out of the room. Garcia nearly gasps. Reid appears resigned, as does JJ - they both overheard her end of the conversation with Clyde the day of the bank heist. Morgan, of course, already knew, to a degree. Rossi simply offers her a reassuring smile - he has lived through too much, seen too many things, to begrudge a friend and colleague much of anything.

She feels as though she has to apologize. "Clyde Easter offered me leadership of Interpol's London office. It seemed too good an opportunity to pass up."

"You're going to London?" Garcia's voice is teary, and Emily knows her soft-hearted friend doesn't want her to be on another continent again.

"Actually, I turned down the London posting," she replies hastily, wanting to remove the look to sadness from the technical analyst's face.

JJ clears her throat. "But you're still resigning." Her face, only moments ago full of happiness, is now shadowed.

"Jayje…" Emily's voice is soft, apologetic. She had hoped her friend - who had commandeered a State Department jet and flown her under cover of darkness to Paris, who had stayed awake all hours of the day and night playing Scrabble with her while she was in exile, who welcomed Emily into her home while her lover and child slept and listened to her grief and guilt - would be more understanding now.

She looks around the table, meeting the eyes of her friends, her team. "You guys….know that I haven't been the same since…"

"Since you got back?" Rossi supplies helpfully.

"Since I died," she answers. Her conversation with Aaron last night, she realizes, has given her the words she needs to help her family understand. "The whole thing with Ian...broke something in me, and I've spent over a year trying to fix it. But in Paris, I couldn't be me, and when I came back here, I spent so much time trying to fix everything that I thought I'd broken between all of us, I never took any time to try and figure out how to fix myself."

"But...we can help you," Penelope insists. "We're a family."

Emily reaches towards her friend, and can barely brush the other woman's fingertips across the table. "I know we are. You all mean the world to me." She sighs. "But I think this is something I have to do on my own."

"Where will you go?" Reid's voice sounds almost tinny, and slightly hollow.

"New York." She offers him a smile, hoping the fact that New York is so much closer than London will be a pick-me-up. "I'll be running Interpol's office at the UN." Easter had sent her an email earlier that morning - the head of the Americas had agreed to the request, and the paperwork was being typed up as they all sat in the BAU.

"Congratulations." Morgan's voice is strong, and she knows he means it.

"Thank you." She looks around the room, and sees that Reid and Garcia are trying to muster up the same sentiment. JJ is too good of a friend to hold an actual grudge about this, and the blonde woman rises from her seat and gives her a hug around the shoulders, her chin on Emily's shoulder.

Rossi squeezes her hand, murmurs, "Way to go, kid."

"Thanks Dave," she replies.

Reid and Garcia still look crestfallen, and she knows what she has to tell them. It's things she never said to her bureau-mandated therapist, things she's never shared with Hotch, but it's something she knows she needs to say now.

She looks Reid in the eyes. "You remember the case with Sammy and his parents?"

He nods, confused. Of course he remembers. He doesn't understand how that has anything to do with her leaving again.

"The night we got back from Louisiana, what did you do?" She knows what they all did, in crystal clear detail, because Ian had told her.

He frowns, searching the archive that is his brain. "I went to a music store and bought a keyboard. Sammy made me want to learn to play properly."

She nods, looks at Garcia. "Do you know what you did?"

Garcia shakes her head. "No."

"You had a movie night with Morgan, in your office."

Garcia's eyes snap to Morgan's for confirmation, but he can only shrug, as if to say I suppose we did. They do movie nights a lot, so remembering one in particular from over a year ago is a challenge. But there's something that tells him Prentiss is correct.

Emily points at Rossi. "You and Seaver played video games in your office."

Finally, she points at Hotch. "You were home, with Jack. You probably snuck into his room while he was sleeping, gave him a kiss on the head."

He nods slowly. "Yes, I probably did. What's this about, Prentiss?"

He is addressing her as she requested to be addressed, and still it makes her ache inside. She wants to hear him call her by her name.

"That night, I went to the Mall. I bought two cups of coffee, and sat outside."

"That was in February," Reid reminds her. "You must have been freezing."

"I was," she tells him. "But I didn't care. I was too focused, and too scared." She's still not sure how much of the entire tale they managed to piece together, while they were looking for her, and while they thought she was dead. "When Sean McAllister told me Ian had escaped from prison, it was like my entire world came crashing in. I thought I'd put Lauren Reynolds behind me…"

She had viewed the "car crash" as a clean start. JTF-12 faked Lauren Reynold's death, and Emily Prentiss had buried everything she'd done and everything she'd felt. But it hadn't been enough.

She takes a deep breath, and continues. "Then Sean was killed, and Tsia told me Jeremy had been killed. We closed ranks. While I was with you all in Louisiana, Clyde and Tsia worked the Doyle case. They found video footage of him disembarking a chartered jet at a small private airfield in Virginia. He'd already sent me anonymous text messages, flowers. I hadn't been sleeping."

She forces herself to look at them all, again. Unsurprisingly, her gaze finally lands on Hotch, and she tells him her story, taking comfort from the look of support he's giving her, even though she knows he is angry, though not necessarily at her. "Every night since I'd spoken with Sean, I sat awake, with my gun, staring at my booby-trapped front door, listening for my booby-trapped windows. When Tsia and Clyde confirmed for me he was in DC, I knew it was only a matter of time. He'd had me under surveillance anyway. So I bought us coffee, and I waited."

She knows in their minds, they're running the reasons why she would have bought a murderer and international weapons dealer who was out for revenge a cup of coffee. To this day, she's not even sure why she did it. It seemed….hospitable, in a way, if nothing else.

She sighs. "I waited for two hours before he showed. He touched my shoulder, and called me Lauren. And then he told me what each and every one of you were doing. He asked me what the 'lovely Penelope' would think if she knew what I'd done as a member of JTF-12, what Hotch, home with Jack, would think. He asked me why I hadn't been invited to Rossi and Seaver's game night, or why I wasn't riding the Metro with Reid." She clears her throat, the memories threatening to strangle her. "He told me I was alone."

"He lied," Morgan growls.

"I know," she says as she sees old rage flash through his eyes. They all have it, Hotch seemingly most of all. "But he wasn't lying about having the rest of you under surveillance. And I couldn't let him hurt you the way I knew he would hurt me." The brand had burned so much, hurt so much, and yet she'd almost agreed with him - she almost agreed that she'd deserved it. And then when he stabbed her - well, the woman he'd called Lauren Reynolds was supposed to be dead, right?

She feels her eyes fill with tears, and tries to blink them away. "I couldn't let him hurt Jack, or Henry, or Will, or any of you. I would let him stab me again if it protected all of you."

"Dammit, Emily," Rossi begins.

"I know," she says quickly. "But I was under oath, and you all didn't have clearance. None of you agreed to be a member of the joint task force. It wasn't fair to let my sins ruin your lives."

Her sins. The words ring in Hotch's ears. She still thinks of them as sins, the things she did following orders. Her upbringing, old habits, and her humanity, all mixing together to torture her. He remembers, years ago, on the Schrader case, that she said people who go undercover have to be willing to take a lot of professional and personal risks. None of them realized she was speaking from personal experience. He wonders if, at the time, she had any idea of the risks to come. His heart breaks for her, and he wants to sweep her up and carry her away from this, but knows he can't, for reasons far beyond and far greater than simply the FBI's regulations about fraternization.

Tears sting in her eyes, and she wills them not to fall. "I know I hurt all of you by not telling you, and then by what had to happen after Boston…"

"That's in the past." JJ all but whispers it.

Emily nods. "And I know I can't apologize for it any more than I've already done…"

"You don't need to," Reid tells her, and she feels her heart swell. His anger at her return at stung worst of all, and to hear him say that she has no need to apologize heals something inside her.

"But I do need to try and get past everything that happened, and I just don't feel like I can do it in DC." She lets out a watery laugh. "If I could pack you all up, and move the whole BAU to Timbuktu, I'd do it, but I can't."

Rossi points a finger at Hotch, "Send a memo to Strauss, wouldja?"

Garcia wipes away a tear as she rises from her seat walks towards Emily. With more strength than Emily thought the other woman capable of, she is pulled from her seat and wrapped in a bear hug. "I am going to throw you such a bitchin' going away party," Garcia whispers tearily in her ear.

"Thank you Penelope," she replies, the tears in her eyes finally spilling over. The team gathers around her, taking turns for hugs and congratulations. She finds herself in a Reid and JJ sandwich and over their shoulders, she meets Aaron's eyes.

And smiles.

Author's Note:Reid's dissertation on coverture is lifted nearly word for word from an NBC news article about it. It was written in such a way that sounded so in character for Reid, I didn't have to do much to it. Thanks, NBC news! (no copyright infringement intended)