Minimal Loss (S4E3)
The problem with having friends was that you might lose them. Or they might get hurt - Gwenda Bond
Rossi was sure he'd never forget that moment of sheer panic and terror when he couldn't see Morgan and Reid. The explosion that flattened the libertarian compound had deadened his eardrums to the point that Prentiss' frantic screams for them barely even registered in his hearing. The feeling of relief when they finally emerged from the billowing clouds of dust and smoke was as sweet as the fear had been painful.
Catching sight of Pip waiting in the bullpen for him as the elevator doors slid open was just as much of a relief. After what had happened, an evening arguing with her was just what the doctor ordered. Rossi smiled, an open smile of pleasure at seeing her after the stress of Colorado. He spotted her warning glare and flick of the eyes a second before he realised Hotch had caught the direction of his gaze. Nobody else noticed the atmosphere between them cool rapidly.
As the rest of the team piled out of the elevator, Hotch held him back.
"Dave?" The rest of the question that came with that quiet, authoritative utterance of his name was left unsaid. Hotch had mastered the interrogatory stare while studying to be a lawyer, and his time in the Bureau and as BAU Unit Chief had only honed the skill. He didn't need to ask the question, it stood between them solidly enough to walk into.
"What?" asked Rossi testily in the face of that stare, as if he didn't already know. His friendship with Pip was no one's business except his own, and he'd wanted to keep it that way.
"Dave, there are rules," growled Hotch sternly. "If Strauss finds out…" He spread his hands. "With your history, she'll run you out of the Bureau."
"Strauss can bite me," snapped Rossi forcefully. "We're just friends." He returned Hotch's glare with one of his own. "Do you give Morgan the same hard time over his relationship with Garcia?"
"Morgan doesn't have your reputation with the women he works with," said Hotch reprovingly.
"No, just the ones he doesn't," retorted Rossi, before sighing. "That was a long time ago, Aaron. That's not the man I am anymore." He fought to keep a poker face. His friendship with Pip had started originally because he'd planned on doing exactly what Hotch was accusing him of.
"So, you're not sleeping with her?" pressed Hotch intently.
Rossi rolled his eyes. "No." It had only been the once, after all, regardless what he'd like to the contrary. Pip had been clear on the matter and he'd continue to respect that. Neither Hotch nor Pip needed to know it was her he pictured when he took himself in hand in the shower.
"We're back, it was stressful and I'm glad to see my friend, that's all," he insisted. "I plan to take her out for dinner, drink far too much red wine, top it off with a scotch or two and relax, all while dodging a constant barrage of disrespectful commentary on everything I think or believe."
Hotch searched his face and apparently found what he wanted. He nodded. "Alright." He glanced towards the bullpen. "I thought you two hated each other," he said thoughtfully. "You do nothing but argue."
Rossi chuckled. "She's creative with her insults, I'll give her that. A bottle of wine turns those insults into carefully crafted disparaging remarks on my opinions of just about everything. It's refreshingly entertaining."
Hotch clapped him on the shoulder. "More like masochistic," he said, his tone lighter, before turning serious again. "Be careful, Dave. "Here be dragons", remember?"
He walked away, leaving Rossi to wonder just how much of his relationship with Pip Hotch had already known about, and how long for.
A gentle touch on his elbow broke him from his reverie. He didn't need to turn to know who it was, the subtle fragrance identifying her to his senses before she spoke. Coconut and vanilla from her shampoo, honeysuckle, and something else he couldn't put a name to, but which was uniquely her. Rossi wanted to just bury his face in the crook of her neck and inhale, breathe her into his lungs and drown in her scent.
"He emailed me from the plane to say we'd do the closing paperwork tomorrow," said Pip, looking in the direction Hotch had gone. She frowned. "What was that expression all about?" she asked. "He didn't look happy." She paused, and added, "less than usual, I mean."
"Us," Rossi replied wearily. "He said the Director would hang me if we were sleeping together."
"Well," she said lightly, jabbing an elbow into his side, "it's a good job we're not then, isn't it?"
Rossi glanced sideways at her. "Not…strictly true," he muttered.
"Once." She elbowed him again. "We're just friends. Nothing changed."
Rossi bit his tongue hard enough to hurt. He wanted to tell her how much things had changed, at least for him. But his revelation that night also meant that he would abide by her boundaries, the limits she'd put in place. It was one-sided, that much was obvious; she loved him as a friend and that was all. So, he'd hold his counsel, continue to be just her friend; to make sure he would still be able to spend time with her, to selfishly have her to himself on these precious nights.
He'd been silent long enough for Pip to search his face, to analyse his expression the same way Hotch had done. She obviously saw something of his bleak thoughts that Hotch hadn't, because she looped her arm through his and tugged gently.
"Come on, you look like you need feeding and insulting. Although not necessarily in that order." She dropped him a cheeky wink, and startled, he could do nothing but smile in response.
With that smile, he could follow her, feeling a little lighter. As he always did in her company.
She cast a questioning glance towards the whisky when she brought the coffee through. He was sorely tempted. After his conversation with Hotch, an evening with Pip had brought everything he thought and felt about her to the forefront of his mind, but Rossi shook his head. Tonight, just conversation and coffee would do, lest he said something he ought not. The fact that she'd offered it showed how well she knew him. The single malt was for when it had been really bad, or his thoughts particularly dark.
That evening, his thoughts weren't dark, just impossible. About something he couldn't tell her, and because he told her everything, she knew there was something on his mind. Catch-22. For a moment, Rossi reconsidered her offer of the single malt; just to get it over with, for the whisky would make his confession inevitable. To just blurt it out, to hell with the consequences. He immediately dismissed the idea. Not a sensible thing to do, not if he wanted to keep the little piece of her life that he had.
There was period of companionable silence as they both sat and savoured their coffee. Distant sounds of rowdy locals on their way home filtered up from street level, mingling with the Jazz and familiar odour of pot from the apartment below.
"Was it the case?" asked Pip eventually, "that put that look on your face?" Her tone made it clear she didn't really think it was, but was offering him an escape route against better judgement. She'd nested herself into her usual position, back against the arm of the sofa, but that evening she'd stretched her legs out. She nudged his thigh with a sock-clad foot to punctuate her question when he didn't answer. Rossi turned to look at her and Pip nodded. "Yeah, that's the one."
Rossi opened his mouth to speak with no idea of what he was about to say. "I thought, just for a second, that we'd lost Morgan and Reid this afternoon."
It wasn't what was immediately troubling him, but saying it aloud made Rossi realise just how much that feeling had frightened him. And how badly it still bothered him, even sat safely on her couch hours later. At the time, with the adrenaline pumping and the hostages streaming past, it had been scary as hell. Relatively sober and without the emotional numbing that came with an adrenaline rush, he could admit just how strong the fear had been.
"When the compound blew, there was this…this moment…and it felt like it was as long as a lifetime, before they emerged from the smoke. In that moment, I was sure they were dead." He offered her a tiny smile, no more than a wry, self-deprecating twitch of his lips. "Last time something hit me that hard, I'd been shot." Not entirely true, his revelation the night after New York now held that title, but he could never say that.
Her eyes widened. "That little detail hadn't filtered back to Quantico."
"You think any of us wanted to tell Garcia that we could have lost Morgan, after what he did in New York?" Rossi retorted. "She'd never let him out of the building again!"
Pip pursed her lips to prevent a smile. "Fair point." She considered him for a moment. "We've both lost people on the job before, so I'll save you the overly trite psycho-babble bullshit. Regardless of how it happened, who did what, what could have been different, or how close it was, they're alright. Hang on to that. Obsessing over the what-ifs never helped anybody."
Rossi let out a deep breath and nodded. "I know. But that moment will live with me for a little while, I think."
"Of course it will, you're human like the rest of us and we all love our friends. Especially those that are more like family." Pip prodded him with her foot again. "It's ok to be troubled by it. You're not a superhuman, Dave."
"Just a possessed of a super-sized ego?" he asked, trying to lighten the mood.
Any other time, she would have jumped on that easy opening with a sassy remark, but their time over coffee in her tiny apartment was different. Pip just cocked her head and raised an eyebrow. "I think you earned some of that, the rest is just a barrier to keep people out," she asserted.
That was uncomfortably accurate. Rossi looked down at his hands, fiddling with his FBI signet ring to avoid her eyes. "Are you sure you're not a profiler?" he asked suspiciously.
Pip huffed with amusement. "Profiler? No, but my life story reads like a badly-written daytime soap opera. Trust me, I've seen some things over the years. If you add my role in the BAU to that rather chaotic real-world education…" She shrugged. "Every report, every file, every tiny bit of analysis comes across my desk eventually. Everything you band of illiterate apes produce, down to the last poorly punctuated set of field notes written in multi-coloured chicken scratch." She smiled at him. "You pick things up, it's like osmosis. Be around it long enough and it kind of rubs off whether you like it or not."
He smiled a little at her description. His habit of using different colours in his notes had always struck her as odd, and she never hesitated to tease him about it. "And that unofficial tutelage makes you think I'm...what, projecting?"
"Nope," she said easily. "I don't think, I know. Beyond what little profiling skill I've absorbed, willingly or otherwise, I know you." Pip favoured him with a soft look that Rossi caught out the corner of his eye. A look he felt more than saw. "You're not nearly as much of an asshole as you try so hard to come across as." She leaned forward to put her empty mug on the table. "I just can't work out why."
"I don't want to get hurt. I've had too much of that," replied Rossi gruffly. His thoughts had gone full circle again, no longer thinking of Reid and Morgan and the billowing dust, but of her. He'd spoken without thinking, but what he'd said was true in both contexts.
"Doesn't work though, does it?" asked Pip, completely unfazed by the glare he threw in her direction. "Don't look at me in that tone of voice, it doesn't work, not on me. Never did," she added dismissively. "Keeping people at arm's length doesn't work either, and you know it doesn't. Otherwise you wouldn't have been so scared when you couldn't see Agent Morgan and Dr Reid."
Rossi shut his mouth with a snap. "You're incredibly frustrating when you're right, you know that?" Not to mention beautiful, with that glint dancing in her eyes.
"Yeah, I know. Accept the good in your life. Like me, I'm a fucking delight." She grinned at him as he laughed before yawning widely. "Ah, bedtime I think. You going to sleep alright? Do you want to stay?"
As with the offer of whisky, it was tempting, but he decided against it.
"No, I'll be fine." Rossi drained the last of the coffee from his mug and stood to leave, gathering his coat from the arm of the sofa. He quirked her a crooked smile. "Thanks for the offer," he said, as he made his way to the door.
"Dave?" He turned to see she'd followed him. "Is everything really ok? You seem a little…I don't know, off, this evening. It's late, but I'm here for you if you want to stay a bit longer."
"I'm tired, that's all," he reassured her, hoping she couldn't spot the lie.
Pip wrapped her arms around him in a hug, and after a millisecond of hesitation, he followed suit. With his chin resting on her shoulder, Rossi closed his eyes and just breathed her in. He stayed like that as long as he dared before reluctantly pulling away.
Pip held onto him long enough to whisper, "I don't believe you," in his ear as they separated.
"Good night Pip." His voice had a note of finality to it, a gentle warning not to tread any further.
She frowned, but nodded, accepting. "Good night Dave."
The sound of her door shutting behind him sounded like the clang of an iron cage closing around his heart.
