A/N: This is a bit more of a dialogue led chapter, at least for the first part, anyway! Hope that's okay and hope you guys are still enjoying this, please leave me a review to let me know if you are. :)
S x
It was seven o'clock by the time they were on their way back to precinct. Today had been long, but Emily guessed that was probably because she'd felt useless and groggy for half of it. The headache was slowly coming back, although she'd been told that her painkillers should work for a good six hours. They shouldn't be wearing off for a good hour. She turned her head away from Hotch, looking out of the window and squinting at the pain. It slowly subsided (it was coming in random bursts) and she looked towards the front again, to find Rossi watching her. He raised his eyebrows, questioningly, and she gave a minute shake of her head.
"Should we phone Ava? Or will she already be in bed?" Hotch suggested, from where he sat in the drivers seat. Emily pulled her phone out of back pocket and hit speed dial 2, for her mother. She still had, and supposed she always would have, Aaron as her number 1 on speed dial.
"Hello?" The voice of Elizabeth Prentiss came through the phone, on speaker. Aaron glanced down at the device, but his eyes went instantly back onto the road.
"Hey, mom," Emily greeted her mother, but it wasn't a greeting so much as the beginning of her question, "I know we said we'd phone earlier, I don't suppose there's any chance she's up at," She quickly worked out the time difference, "Ten o'clock?"
"Actually," Elizabeth said, and they could hear the high pitched tone of their daughters voice in the background. Emily was smiling down at the phone, as if Ava could see her, "Once I told her you'd be calling, she refused to go to bed. They always call, she was saying. So I told her she could stay up until half past ten, and if you hadn't called by then she simply had to sleep. Good timing, Emily."
There was some incoherent noise on the other end of the line while the phone exchanged hands, and then Ava's voice came through clear. "Momma, Daddy?"
"Hey, sweetheart," Aaron greeted her, smiling slightly as he drove.
"Hi, baby girl. Are you being good for Grandma?"
"I'm always good, mummy." That made her parents smile, not only because they knew it to be true, but because of the matter-of-fact quality to their young daughters voice. She somehow always managed to seem older than her six years. "Are you with anybody?"
"Uh, yeah, Uncle Dave is here."
"Hello, angel." Rossi said from the back of the car. "Are you practicing your italian?"
"Uh...si." There was a question in Ava's voice that said she wasn't certain whether she had replied correctly. Rossi and Emily laughed.
"Well done, la mia bellezza!" He was smiling in the back of the car, Emily saw in the rear view window. She had always loved her team; she wouldn't have come back after everything that had happened with Doyle if she didn't love them. But, if it was possible, Emily thought that she loved them even more after Ava was born, after she saw the love that the team had for her daughter. Of course, she loved Henry and Luca, JJ's boys, and Penelope and Kevin's son, Jamie, so she had never doubted the teams affection for her daughter, but there was something about seeing the way she loved them, right back, something about their sweet little nicknames for her, that melted her heart. They truly were a family. That only reminded her, however, of how their own little family inside of the family was broken.
"Mummy, daddy, are you being nice to each other?"
That startled them both and they exchanged a look. Emily briefly glanced back at Rossi before she cleared her throat. Aaron, however, got there first.
"Mommy is being mean to me, sweetheart." He said, and Emily frowned, raising her knee on the chair so she could rest her elbow on it, while she held up the phone. She rolled her eyes at Aaron's smirk and reached out to swat at his arm as their daughters reply came through the phone.
"Mommy, don't be mean to daddy. Daddy, I know you're telling tales because mommy is always nice to me. But are you shouting at each other again? Because I don't think that's very nice of either of you."
There was a guilty silence in the air. Emily cleared her throat.
"Uh - no, Ava, we're not. We're working together, we're a team, remember? Mommy and Daddy only fight when they're at home."
"Who's home, mommy? Ours or daddy's?"
Goddammit. There it was, from the mouth of babes. Emily glanced at Rossi in the rear view mirror once more and, out of the corner of her eye, saw Hotch's eyes flicker up there, too. The Italian in the back of the car was staring out of the window now, as if he wasn't paying any attention at all to their conversation. Emily and Hotch met each others eyes in the mirror and Emily dropped her eyes almost instantly.
"Mommy?"
"I'm here, honey." Emily replied. "We were just phoning to make sure you and Grandma were alright, to tell you we love you and to wish you sweet dreams and good night."
"When will you be home?"
"We're not sure yet, sweetheart," Aaron told her. "We're trying to solve this case quickly, though, and rush home to you. We love you very much. Good night, Ava."
"Goodnight, daddy." The innocence that dripped like liquid gold from her daughters voice made Emily want to cry. "Goodnight, mommy."
"Good night, my little one. We'll come home to you as soon as we can, okay? And we'll phone you every night until we do. Give Grandma a kiss from me, tell her I had to go, okay?" Emily didn't think she could take getting into a conversation with her mother right now; she didn't have the energy or the time to have the wrestling match that it took to get Elizabeth off the phone.
"Okay, mommy. I love you, daddy. I love you, momma." Aaron and Emily repeated their love to Ava, who made kissing noises down the phone before hanging up on them. Slowly, Emily lowered her arm and put the phone onto the dashboard, where it rattled away quietly. She looked at Aaron again, who glanced at her before sighing and clearing his throat.
"Dave-"
"Aaron, what happens between a husband and wife is none of my business." He said, simply. Emily turned in her seat to glance at him, earning herself a wink from the older man. There had always been something fatherly about Rossi; she knew she could go to anyone on the team with any problem she might have, but Rossi was the one she would go to if she needed to feel comforted, after Hotch, of course. He had a soothing presence about him that she had always appreciated. She smiled back at him, and he turned, once again, to look out of the window.
More so than Morgan, even, they knew that Rossi would keep what he had heard to himself. They were both grateful for that.
That night, at the hotel, the team decided to go down the restaurant for dinner. They were all tired and they were all famished. Most of the meal was devoured in silence; there was an unspoken rule around the dinner table that there would be no mention of the case. It was difficult, when they were in the middle of it, when they knew that everyone else around the table was going through the details in their own head, but it hardly made for light dinner conversation, to discuss the in and outs of a murder investigation. Especially one as brutal as the one they were dealing with right now.
"Oh," JJ said, as if she had forgotten, when they all looked at her expectantly. She produced an envelope from her bag, containing all of their room keys. "The bags were taken up earlier today. Sorry, I didn't get a chance to hand these out yet."
She gave out the keys, one to everybody except Hotch. When he looked slightly confused, Emily kicked him beneath the table and set their key between them. It had seemed ridiculous, after they got married, for them to continue sleeping separately, or bunking with JJ and Rossi, when on cases. So it had become ordinary procedure for them to share a double room. This, Emily mused, would be the ideal time to explain their situation to the team. Rossi and Reid might have some awareness of what was going on between them, but so far Morgan was the only one who knew any details. She knew, however, that they needed to decide together what they were going to tell everyone. They probably had very different ideas about why their relationship hadn't been working, and it just wouldn't do to get into an argument about that in the middle of the dining room, so they both stayed quiet.
Still, that didn't mean it wasn't going to be awkward for them.
Standing in the middle of their room for the night, Hotch could hear the shower running in the bathroom. He and Emily hadn't said two words to each other on the walk up to the room and as soon as they'd come in, she'd mumbled something about a shower, grabbed her bag and disappeared into the bathroom. Now, he was standing there, in the middle of the room, with the bed, which looked abnormally large for a double, staring at him. There was a sofa near the window, but it was a small one. Too small for either of them to sleep comfortably on it.
This is ridiculous. He thought to himself, moving to sit down on the sofa. He hitched up his trousers before taking the seat, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands together. Regardless of their personal situation, they were two grown adults who could have an adult conversation about the circumstances and then share a bed without it being awkward.
Awkward, though, wasn't quite the word, he mused. It was more like excruciating. He ran his hand through his already mussed up dark hair. It was his nervous tick, he knew. It was frustrating to know your own tells, but not to be aware of them until after the fact. How was he supposed to feel about spending the night with her? It was such an odd situation. An awful situation. He had put them into this position, he knew. It wasn't as if he had done it on purpose, though. They were nearing the ten year mark of their relationship. Not of their marriage, but of their relationship. He and Haley had been coming up for ten years when everything had started to go wrong and it had agonized him to think the same thing might happen with him and Emily. There was just something so different about their relationship; the dynamic was the complete opposite to how it had been with Haley. But he had messed it up in exactly the same way.
Looking back, there wasn't a lot of logic in his decisions. For a logical person, the choice he had made to start spending more time at the Bureau, to give Emily the space he thought she would appreciate, had in fact, driven them apart. It had been his decision to put a little bit of space between them, although that had been the last thing he ever wanted, that had started their downwards spiral. And now everything was out of control, and he had no idea of how to fix it.
The bathroom door opened in the middle of his contemplations and he looked up to see Emily walking out, looking fresh and damp and lovely. She was dressed simply in a pair of grey sweatpants that, with a twinge, he realized had been his, once upon a time, and a white vest top. It appeared as if she, too, had noticed that they had been his, because she put her hands into the pockets and rocked on her heels.
"They always did look better on you." He told her, with a slight smile. She smiled down at her feet; it wasn't quite back at him, but it was good enough.
When she looked up at him, it was with tired eyes. "When do you want to tell them? And what do you want to tell them?"
He hadn't thought about what they were going to tell their team. As he pondered, he twisted his wedding band around his finger. It was an old habit that she used to tell him off for. Now, she was enjoying the sight, in a kind of torturous way; it was painful to see that he was still wearing his band. She had taken it off as soon as he had walked out of their front door. From that moment, it had felt as though the metal was scalding her skin. The ring had been put away, along with their wedding photograph. It was strange how she had gotten rid of those things, the obvious things, yet the items that held possibly even more sentimental value, such as the sweatpants he had given her, or the t-shirt he had left behind that still smelled like him, gave her nothing but comfort. Well, not nothing but comfort; they still tugged on her heartstrings, she still had to steady herself whenever she smelled him on her clothes.
His smell was affecting her, right now. It was almost as if she wasn't allowed to smell him anymore. There was something too intimate about it, which, of course, she knew was ridiculous.
"I don't suppose we have to tell them anything, really. Only that we've separated." Emily was already shaking her head. She sat on the bed, folding one leg beneath her and letting the other trail on the floor. Looking over her shoulder at him, she shrugged.
"I can't do that, Hotch. They're our friends, not just the people we work with. They're family. They deserve, and they're going to expect, some sort of explanation. And would you rather that came from you and I, or from Derek?"
She had a point, he had to admit. He stood up, tired from the long day and tired of having to raise his voice to talk to her from across the room, and moved to sit beside her on the bed. The fact that he could see her tense up as he sat down killed him, but he didn't comment on it.
"Tell them," He said, in a much softer voice, and with a sigh, "That I started being distant. That we grew apart because of my actions and that it simply became...too difficult. Tell them that..." He took a deep breath, and she could hear it shake. He cleared his throat. "Tell them that we still love each other, but that, in the long run, it's going to be better for everyone this way."
The softness and pure emotion of his words gave her goosebumps. She couldn't look at him, but looked down at her own hands in her lap, as she picked at her nails. He reached over and took one of her hands in his, stopping her from savaging them and causing the pain he knew she always did when she was stressed. Tiny dark patches appeared on the sweatpants, where her tears fell. She shook her head. She didn't have the words she needed right now. She didn't know what she would say, if the words came too her; there didn't seem to be anything she could say, and Emily squeezed his hand.
"Aaron," She said, looking up. Her words never made it out. He was looking at her with such...such raw emotion on his eyes that she found the words floating right out of her head.
"I do love you, Emily. I always will." The hand holding hers let go and came up to push the damp hair back from her face. He pressed his palm to her cheek, a soft gesture of affection that most people would find uncharacteristic of the hardened, stern Agent Aaron Hotchner. Not Emily, though. She had become accustomed to his softer side, to his loving, affectionate side. That was the thing she had missed the most; his candid shows of emotion. She pushed her face into his hand as his thumb wiped away a stray tear.
His hand moved to the back of her head and, just like that, she was kissing him. There was nothing new about it. There were no fire works. There was just a warm burning in her chest, an intense burst of emotion in her mind. He couldn't believe she was kissing him again, had thought she never would again. God, he had missed her. They kissed for what felt like forever, before, finally, they both had to breathe again. Begrudgingly, he pulled away, pressing his forehead to hers. Her hands came up to brush against the lapels of his jacket. She traced the lining, softly, slowly. Then she started to push the jacket off his shoulders.
Aaron looked at her in surprise, but there was a fire in her eyes, which shone, wet with still unshed tears, that he hadn't seen in weeks. He didn't have time to ask if she was sure, before she was kissing him again, their tongues effortlessly finding the steps in a dance they had known for years.
Even as they kissed, though, even as they undressed, even as he loved her as he knew she wanted to be loved, something inside of Emily didn't feel right. Something was weeping. This didn't feel like a reunion; it felt like a goodbye.
