Chapter Four: Our last goodbye
.
.
He carried her coffin and the weight of it dragged him down into the cold earth alongside her.
His phone vibrated with astonishing regularity over the next two weeks, as his friends all appeared to conspire to never leave him the hell alone.
Morgan's texts were bitter with his own failure to stop her life from leaking out from under his own hands; Garcia's were shocked and consoling. JJ's were quick and to the point, increasing in desperation with every unanswered message.
Hotch sent only five, and every one of them was heavy with the memory of Haley.
Rossi didn't text, but every night Reid heard a knock at his door and found food carefully placed upon the stoop.
He read every one of them and answered none.
Blackbird: M?
Cheetobreath: He's tough. He has G to help him.
Blackbird: I'm glad.
Cheetobreath: I need to know. What happened with S? What do I need to expect?
Blackbird: Nothing.
Blackbird: Everything.
His bed still smelt of her and he avoided it, even as every trace of her in his room began to fade with the passing of time. He could feel his soul slipping out of his grasp as her scent dissipated.
He wondered what would happen if he stopped trying to hold on.
Instead he went out and got staggeringly drunk, and tried to lose himself in the night.
"Hotchner." The light on the clock glittered sharply in his sleep-heavy eyes as he answered the phone as crisply as though he hadn't been sleeping at all.
"Hotch," Reid breathed in his ear, and it was an apology and a cry for help all at once. Hotch was up in seconds, reaching for his wallet and freezing as he remembered his son sleeping down the hall.
He knew the cost of inaction.
"Wait where you are, we're coming."
Reid lifted his head as Rossi stepped out of his car, wearing his dressing gown and a wry expression.
They drove back to Rossi's house in silence and Reid followed his co-worker silently into the living room. He still didn't speak as Rossi pulled out a decanter of whisky and two glasses, dropping them onto the table.
"Here's your choice, kid. You can go upstairs and sleep and stop trying to drink her memory away…"
"Or?" His voice was dry and husky from disuse. He hadn't cried yet. He didn't think he remembered how to anymore.
"Or we can both get absolutely plastered and cry on each other's shoulders. I'm up now anyway."
"You fucking bastard," Rossi slurred over the phone to him, and Hotch's heart sank into his shoes. He knew it would be Rossi who'd work out the vanishing act they'd pulled; he was the only one who didn't automatically trust Hotch implicitly. "You absolute wankering bastard."
"Are you drunk?" Hotch asked incredulously. "Where's Reid? I told you to pick him up, not get drunk with him."
"He's in love with her, did you know?" Rossi's tone was mournful and Hotch realized with a jolt that he hadn't been caught at all.
He didn't know if he was relieved or disappointed.
"I know."
Cheetobreath: I miss you.
Blackbird is offline.
He wants.
He wanted a fair amount of things these days. He wanted to be alone, he wanted Emily, he wanted darkness and oblivion, he wanted his friends, he wanted Emily… He couldn't even sort out the threads of all his wanting, spending his days with every desire pulling him in every different direction.
Instead he went to JJ's and spent his nights sitting numbly at her kitchen table, watching her and Will move about each other as though they were trapped in the orbit of their bodies, and he wanted.
Oddly, it made it easier not to give in to the baser desires when the thing that he truly craved was well beyond his reach.
"We can bury you alongside her if you'd rather," Morgan said one day, and he was harsh and cold because to be otherwise would be to admit to himself that he'd lost her too.
Reid looked around at his team and saw the grief that drew lines across their faces, eyes red and skin patchy with tears. They were all mourning.
He should feel angry because they didn't know the first thing about what it was to mourn Emily Prentiss, but he couldn't remember how to be.
"The average human could probably survive five hours in a coffin of typical size," he said instead, and Morgan looked like he was torn between laughing and crying. "But on the bright side, you'd be unconscious before you died because of the buildup of carbon monoxide. It would be painless."
The others smiled slightly at the return of encyclopaedia Reid, but JJ met his eyes and she looked terrified.
JJ rocked up on his doorstep with a black cat in her arms.
"He was Emily's," she said by way of explanation, and somehow out of that Reid got a cat.
"I don't know what to do with you," he told the cat later, when JJ was gone. Sergio just purred and licked his leg in a self-satisfied manner, completely ignoring Reid's existence.
That he could deal with. Oddly, it was comforting to have something rely on him.
Cheetobreath: Sergio has moved in with S.
Blackbird: He's going to kill my cat.
Cheetobreath: He lets Sergio sleep on his chest.
Blackbird: My cat's going to kill him.
He went to her grave, just once, just to see how it felt.
It was surprisingly uneventful, and he couldn't help but feel nothing for the packed earth and emotionless gravestone in front of him. The heavy lettering spelt out her name, and tried to fit her entire life and everything about her into a line between two dates, and none of it felt familiar.
"I loved you," he tried, and that sounded wrong. "I… I still love you." That didn't sound any better.
A bee hummed nearby and he hated it passionately for the life that held it in the air, however fleetingly.
"You were the best and worst of me," he finally said in a low voice, and this sounded truer. "I love you more than anything, but I guess death just doesn't care how much a person is loved. And you… you are so loved."
In that he put Morgan's guilt, and JJ's friendship, and Garcia's smile. There was more than just him in the loss they shared.
He'd made the mistake before of forgetting that.
Blackbird: How is he?
Cheetobreath: He's fine.
Blackbird: Really?
Cheetobreath: He will be.
Reid woke up one day and felt fine.
He padded off the couch in his socks and made a coffee, musing over the startling lack of misery, and felt a pang only once when Sergio sat in front of him and mewled dementedly for his breakfast.
Other than that, he felt fine.
Even grief eventually runs its course.
Cheetobreath: Where are you?
Blackbird is offline.
Cheetobreath: Happy birthday.
Blackbird is offline.
Blackbird: Doyle's back, isn't he?
Cheetobreath is offline.
Blackbird is offline.
Cheetobreath: Christ E. I thought… you didn't reply for a month. You can't do this, you can't just vanish. I need to know you're okay.
Cheetobreath: And yes.
Cheetobreath: I'll keep you updated. Don't do anything rash.
Blackbird is offline.
Blackbird is online.
Blackbird: I'm coming home. Tell them or I will.
Reid walked into the conference room to find Emily standing there, and the only thing he could think to himself was how kind madness had turned out to be in its descent upon him.
"Reid, let me explain," Hotch said, because of course Hotch was going to try to take the fall for this, but Reid could see the guilt and self-recrimination in every line of JJ's body.
"Spencer?" Emily said softly, and he looked into her familiar eyes and oh, that was how to feel fury. And she was alivealivealivealive and all he could feel is anger.
He nodded in assent because he had to, and he did his job because that was who he was.
He was going to find Doyle and stop him. Because they got it wrong when they said Emily was alive, said she was back.
They thought that would stop his grief. In the end, it was only a different kind of loss.
This changed nothing.
She went to his home just once, because she had to. There was anger crowding in on her from every side, and if she could just convince him that she was back to stay, then she had something to cling to.
Morgan was shattered, almost devastatingly so, and she'd forgotten in her worry about Reid that Morgan was the one to hold her as she died.
Rossi's rage was unexpected, and while he was stiffly courteous to her in a way that suggested at least part of him was happy to see her, he stormed out of Hotch's office an hour later pale and shaking. Hotch didn't leave until late that night, and as Emily watched him go, there was an exhaustion to his stride that she'd never seen before.
All those hearts broken, and her the cause.
He opened the door as though he'd been expecting her and stared at her with empty eyes. He didn't step aside to let her in, and she was suddenly horribly aware of what it was like to be closed out. "Why are you here?"
"To explain."
He was already shaking his head. "You don't owe me that. Morgan, yes. Rossi too, if you ever want him and Hotch to be friends again. Probably even JJ, because this is going to cost her our trust. But you owe me nothing."
Her words were hurried, trying to fit them in before he could close the door forever. "I owe you everything."
She'd never noticed how old his eyes were. "You're alive. That's enough."
"Please… we need to talk about us."
A soft, deep breath and suddenly she was fourteen again and her first boyfriend had just walked into the room with that look in his eyes, and she wanted nothing more than to stop the words that he was about to say.
"There is no us. There will never be an us. Because you keep leaving, for all the right reasons, and I keep staying for all the wrong ones. This is the last goodbye, I won't say it again." He looked down at his odd socks and she thought she could see the glint of a tear on his face. "Sometimes people are meant to fall in love, but not meant to be together."
"I don't believe that." Even as she said it, she knew it was useless.
He smiled sadly and stepped back to close the door. "We'll be friends again," he promised her. "One day. But that's it. Goodbye, Emily."
The door closed between them, and she hissed a breath out of her teeth that she hadn't been aware she was holding, laying a hand against the cold wood.
"Goodbye, Spencer."
In the end, the choice to go was the simplest one she'd ever make.
She owed them all that much.
She left a note under his door on her way to the airport, knowing he'd find it but doubting he'd read it.
Spencer.
Thank you for your love. This isn't goodbye – we said there wouldn't be any more.
I'll see you again.
Emily.
P.S. Sergio likes banana milkshake, if you haven't already found out. And corn chips.
Seven months later.
11.47am – One message received.
"Hey Spence, it's Emily. I'm in town for a week. Shall we get a drink? I know a nice bar. You know my number, of course you do."
"Emily? Hey, it's me. What time?"
