She asked him to let her go, and he knew he could never do that.
"Where's my medic?" he screamed.
Her fingers were now feebly squeezing his, like she was barely hanging on. It felt like an eternity, but it was only seconds later when the medics appeared. One of them cut around her shirt quickly. Derek moved out of the way a bit and let them work, but he kept his right hand in hers and he fought back tears.
His left hand reached out and touched the skin on her chest. He registered the wood still sticking out of her, and the angry burn on her chest. He registered how his hand felt against her skin, and how she was so soft. Soft and cold, and though he could feel her chest rising and falling and knew the coldness was from shock, it felt like she was already gone, like there was no warmth left coming from her body.
She was unconscious at that point, and he knew she wouldn't hear him, but he took his hand away from her chest for a moment, and placed his left hand over his microphone.
"I love you," he whispered in her ear.
His left hand went back over her chest and JJ was next to him a moment after that. The medics took Emily away, and he allowed himself the comfort of JJ's arms for a second before standing on shaking legs and asking her to drive him, to take him to Emily.
It was almost two hours later when JJ came into the waiting room at the hospital and said Emily was dead, that she never made it off the table. In that moment, it felt like every shred of humanity was ripped from his soul. He looked at the hand that had been against Emily's chest and tried to remember what her skin felt like under him.
Too late, he thought. He was too late to save her.
In that moment, looking at his hand, every ounce of love he felt for her turned into an all-encompassing hate and obsession for Ian Doyle. He would find him, and he would kill him, and maybe, with time, the memory of her cold and soft skin would stop stinging his hand.
It didn't, not at all. Ian Doyle was dead, but he hadn't killed him. He thought about it back then, trying to revive that man on the tarmac, just so he could stare him down and pull the trigger himself. But he didn't do it, and his left hand still stung.
Emily came back and she was more open in the beginning. He wouldn't risk her friendship, unless she said something first, anything at all that told him it might be okay to talk to her about how he felt about her, but then she shut down again. She left for London and he still stared at that hand on occasion, opening and closing it when it felt like a phantom limb while he tried to push Emily Prentiss from his mind.
He met Savannah; she helped, and he loved her, but it wasn't the same type of love, and he knew it. Emily could have walked back in his door and asked him to leave the BAU and be with her, and he would have done it without a second thought. But he held onto his job like a vice grip when Savannah complained about it. And sometimes that left hand would close on its own, ball into a fist, and not touch her, like his heart and subconscious knew it wasn't quite right.
But that first night with Emily, an hour before the ball dropped and a new year began, when the cold air from the open window in the kitchen that they never bothered to close drifted through the house, when they were naked in her bed and the smell of good food and burned pie lingered in the air, his left hand opened wide and gently over the skin of her torso. It traced the the scar on her abdomen first and then ran over the scar from the branding, before gently running across her and making a feather-light path on the scar from her emergency splenectomy.
It traced healing love over the scars directly and indirectly caused by a man named Ian Doyle. He understood completely, looking at how her perfect skin was stretched and pulled and scarred, why she just wanted it all to stop, and wanted to give herself an opportunity for happiness without looking over her shoulder.
He watched his hand and she watched his eyes, and his hand stopped stinging and felt like it was finally in the right place after over five excruciating years of love and loss he tried desperately not to acknowledge.
"I love you, too," Melanie whispered with her accent.
His eyes stopped staring at his hand on her body and looked at her. His eyebrows lifted.
She blinked back tears and smiled softly. "You just told me you loved me about twenty times."
He hadn't realized he'd spoken out loud as his hand traced over her skin.
"I hurt you. I keep leaving and hurting you," she said softly.
He shook his head and moved to lay his naked body fully over hers, sighing at the contact.
"I shouldn't be doing this to you again," she continued. "I don't want to hurt you."
He kissed her then, and smiled at her. "I know everything now and I'm in. I can handle this."
She touched his face and her legs moved to hold him more closely against her. "I came back because I was lonely and I missed you and I knew you probably would understand. But I want you to know that I'm not doing this because I'm lonely."
He kissed her gently. "Why are you?"
"Because I love you, and I finally have the freedom to know that no one can or will ever hurt you because of me, because of Emily."
He clenched his jaw so the tears wouldn't come. He didn't want to cry in that moment. But an odd reality came to him, that the final layers of the mystery that was Emily Prentiss were being stripped away only because she could be someone else now.
The liquid heat of her was like nothing he'd ever experienced. And he didn't know his heart could beat so fast and still keep him going. He tried to stay focused, to memorize every moan and sigh, to watch her face and kiss her lips. Her hands traced his back and sides and she urged him on with gentle gasps and whispered, "yeses."
When they were both nearing the end, he knew he should say Melanie, he promised himself he would say it the next time, but that time he gasped, "Emily," and her eyes found his. If there was ever a doubt in him that she didn't feel the exact same way about him that he felt about her, it was gone in that moment. Her eyes, the one feature on her he knew completely and could read when she let him and never changed despite all her other changes, showed him nothing but love.
He felt her nails against his back as her hands pressed into him more firmly, he felt her body tightening around him and she still kept her eyes open and on him. He saw her in his mind then, for a brief moment, her silky dark hair and her face the way he remembered it.
She gently rested in his arms with her head on his chest and his fingers skipped lightly over her warm and very alive skin. "Why didn't you have the scars removed when you had your plastic surgery?" he asked gently.
"I was so afraid of looking at myself in the mirror and not knowing myself. I wanted proof of who I was, even if I couldn't be her anymore."
He ran his hands through her hair and whispered, "I'm glad."
She raised her head to find his eyes. "Why?"
"So we'll both always know who you are. I understand why you have to keep up the accent and mannerisms, I understand how hard it would be to go back and forth. I can love Melanie, but you're still Emily there inside you and I won't let you get lost."
She opened her mouth like she wanted to say something, but then her lips closed and she pressed a kiss on his chest before squeezing her arm around him tightly and resting her head against him again.
The next morning when he awoke, with his arms around her and her gentle breathing next to him, he realized he slept more contently than he had since he had just turned ten years old, the night before his dad died. It had been so many decades that he didn't even know that level of pure rest was even possible.
Melanie rolled over and smiled at him. "Do you have anything you have to do today?" she asked.
He smiled and shook his head.
"Good," she said right before her lips touched his and she pulled his body closer to hers.
Three weeks later, he didn't know which end of him was up. He did his job well, he traveled with the team and was focused on their cases. He went out with them on Friday nights so as not to alert them to anything different. He gave one other evening a week to Penelope and whoever else was joining in when she initiated something, just so he didn't raise red flags. But he never stayed too late, and any night he wasn't traveling for work, he was in Baltimore.
Melanie, at first, expressed some reservations at that arrangement. "How is this going to work when I leave? I can't stay here, Derek."
His answers were always vague and loving, delivered with a kiss or a hug. "We'll figure it out."
He had no idea how, though. And she eventually stopped questioning how it was going to work and just started enjoying the time they had.
His home became a collection bin for mail and a place for him to stop by to exchange clothes on his way between Quantico and Baltimore, and even the minutes he was there felt like wasted time.
At the beginning of February, when they were on a case in New Mexico, JJ stood beside him while they watched Rossi on the other side of the glass, questioning a suspect.
"You're kind of freaking me out, Derek," JJ said softly.
He looked at her. "What do you mean?"
"I've never seen you, or anyone, both so happy and sad at the same time. One minute I look at you and you look like you're practically levitating with joy, and the next minute you look like you're on the verge of tears."
The words stuck in his throat for a moment. He thought he was keeping up a neutral facade; he didn't know he was being that transparent. "We're not supposed to profile each other," he replied.
"I know. I'm sorry. But you've been there for me a lot lately, and I just want you to know I can be there for you."
He looked her in the eye and without blinking said, "I know that. I don't know what you're seeing, but I can assure you that I'm good."
On the flight home he fell asleep and he dreamed. It was the middle of the night and they were back at the Washington Monument, sitting by the reflecting pool, only this time Emily looked like Melanie. She told him she loved him, and he remembered he promised her he wouldn't ask her to stay. He told her he loved her, too. He let her go and he watched her walk away.
"Morgan…"
He heard the hushed whisper of JJ's voice and felt her nudge him. He blinked open his eyes in the dim light of the plane where everyone else was still sleeping. He removed his headphones, looking to his right and finding JJ staring at him.
"You kept saying, 'Emily,'" JJ told him quietly.
His heart skipped a beat. "I did?" he asked, hoping she would buy his surprise and confusion. He shrugged, "Sometimes I still think about her. Don't you?"
She stared hard at him for a long time before she slid her eyes away from his and mumbled, "Go back to sleep, Derek. I'll gladly smack you if you start talking in your sleep again."
His heart was beating quickly. Gladly smack him because she was contemplating the possibilities of his current reality and it made her mad? Or gladly smack him so no one else figured it out? How could she possibly put something like that together? His only thought was the woman back at Quantico, one of his best friends who loved and cared openly and freely, but not always sensibly, who wouldn't have told all of his secrets, but who might have innocently said something to JJ like, "Morgan thought she might be alive for awhile." He could see that happening.
He put his headphones back on, and decided he couldn't let himself sleep on the plane anymore.
She was above him and her head was thrown back while she moved up and down. His hands glanced quietly over her breasts before finding her hips.
She pulled her head forward to look at him. Her hands landed on his chest and her face was right above his. "I wanted to do this so many times after a hard case, just to remind us both we were still alive."
He moved his hips to drive up into her and she gasped. "For how long?" he asked.
She moved her forehead until it was resting against his and pressed her chin towards her chest, so she could watch the two of them joined together and moving at counterpoints. "A long time."
He sighed at the reality of all that lost time and then flipped her over, composing himself. He could concede the lost time, but it was almost the end of February and they only had a month left. He moved inside her and clutched her body closely to his, she pulled his head down and kissed him and he refused in that moment to give up on the idea of a future.
"Where?" he asked.
She stopped moving her body and inhaled. "I don't want you to stop being Derek Morgan for me. I couldn't live with that."
"I won't," he assured her. "I want to know where to find you. I want to be able to visit."
"Monterey, California."
He sighed. He had an answer. He would be able to find her, but it was so far away.
When March came, a sense of sadness settled over both of them. Work became crazy in the middle of the month, with several back to back cases that kept him away from Baltimore and away from her for almost ten days. He literally thought he was going to go insane, and he blew out of the building and into his car the second Hotch told them all to go home.
It was the third Sunday in March and he had less than a week left until she would be gone. He couldn't stand the thought of it. He didn't get far inside her door before he dropped to his knees, lifted her shirt and pressed gentle kisses on her stomach. He was desperate and she could sense it.
"I don't want to miss a second more of the time I have with you," he murmured against her skin.
She sank to her knees in front of him and placed her hands on his face. "I love you and I don't want to miss a second, either."
He stared at her. "I don't want to just visit you."
She blinked back tears. "How?"
He kissed her and vowed to himself that he would never let her go again. "I love you. I'll find a way."