Emily was hopeful that her and her mother could start having a better relationship, but it was almost like her mom didn't know what to do with the fact that she'd actually shown emotion or been compassionate. She called Emily, and in her usual stiff way, said she was going to Italy for awhile. It was like that night Emily stayed at her mom's house never happened.

Emily was naive to think that things would steadily improve with Derek. She was slammed with reality the day after the gym, when she went to work, coffee for Derek in hand, and brought it to his office. She walked in with a smile on her face, and he looked up from his desk like he barely knew her.

Her hands were shaking by the time she set the coffee on his desk and got out of there. Maybe this was how it was going to be, two steps forward and one step back, or two steps forward and a giant leap back, if she was being realistic.

She went to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror, trying to calm her nerves, trying to get her worry and sadness under control. JJ walked in and saw her standing there.

"What happened?" she asked softly. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

"Not quite. Derek just looked at me like he was seeing a ghost. Yesterday at the shooting range and the gym was fine; it was good. It was a starting point. And now when I just saw him, he was right back to how he was during the trial."

JJ stepped forward and wrapped Emily a hug. "Do you want me to talk to him?" she asked.

"No. It's going to take time. I want this to play out how he needs it to. At least for now. If you talk to him, he's going to feel like his behavior is under scrutiny, and I don't want that."

The door to the bathroom opened and Garcia stepped in, speaking before she really saw them, "Enough making out in the bathroom; we have a case."

It was said with a smile, delivered as a joke. But JJ and Emily released each other and both went to the same place in their minds, blushing slightly, blushing enough that Garcia looked at them both curiously. JJ stepped into a bathroom stall and Emily smiled at Penelope.

"You okay, Em?" asked Penelope.

Emily smiled. "I'm good. I just...I'm still getting my footing again around here." She squeezed Penelope's hand as she walked out.

Jesus, she thought as she walked to the briefing room. Her head felt like it was going to explode.

Derek's surly mood was still there in the briefing room, and still there on the plane. It was there throughout the case and the remainder of the week. By the time Friday rolled around, Emily had taken a container of Tums off Reid's desk and was popping them like candy. Every time she tried to speak to Derek, he shut her out.

But then, on Friday evening, as she watched him leave his office and walk down to the bullpen, he came right up to her desk and stood next to it. "Shooting range on Sunday?" he asked her.

She stammered. Those were the most words he'd spoken to her not related to a case all week. "I...yes...yes. I was planning on it."

That time at the shooting range was far more tense, and she was surprised when he asked her if she was coming to the gym with him after. She nodded. When they practiced take-down drills that day, there was absolutely no playfulness to it. Derek was serious, physically letting his anger out, not as intensely as he could, but not gentle either. She didn't just let him; she gave as good as she got. Both of them would have a few bruises the next day.

When he finally got her down on the mat, both of them breathing heavily, she didn't laugh when he pinned her. She pulled on her wrists and clenched her teeth, "Let go of me."

He didn't and the look in his eyes was pure anger. She stared defiantly at him.

"How many fake IDs did you have?" he asked.

Emily took a deep breath and stopped tugging at her wrists. This was Derek. He was angry, he deserved to be angry, but he'd never hurt her. "In Europe? Three."

He shook his head. "No. Not there. We found Declan because of the copies of a few IDs in that forger's apartment. The one Doyle killed. There were a couple of yours in there, too. A Helen Ramsey and a Carla Englen. How many more did you have?"

Emily's heart didn't just skip a beat at the mention of Carla Englen; her heart rolled and knocked around in her chest so hard, she felt like it might bust right through and actually fall out of her body. She swore she'd never lie to him again, but she wanted to. She wanted to say she'd never seen or used the Carla Englen ID.

She swallowed past her fear. "Those two that I had made when I brought Declan here. And two others I had from Interpol."

He nodded and finally released her hands. He didn't get off her body, though he did raise himself slightly, enough so she could get out if she wanted to. She stayed put.

"How many times did you go undercover like you did with Doyle, where you had to fake a personal relationship with someone?"

"The situation with Doyle was unique, it went on for months. It was the first time I did anything like that."

He stared at her.

"That's not what you're really wondering. You're wondering how many times I screwed someone as part of the job," she said flatly.

He gritted his teeth and nodded.

"Three times, including Doyle."

"When was the first time?"

"About this time of the year, in 1995."

Derek shook his head. "You were twenty-five years old? Clyde Easter is a fucking bastard."

"He can be, but I knew what I was doing."

"That's bullshit, Emily. JJ wasn't that much older than that when she started working for the BAU. And neither was Ashley Seaver. You know what I think? JJ would never have done that. She would have told Clyde Easter to piss off. Ashley would have, though. She would have because she was already damaged and fighting her own demons and would have done whatever was asked of her to prove she was tough enough."

Anger flared in Emily. "That's what you think? That I'm damaged?" She moved to get up and Derek stood with her, grabbing her from behind and wrapping his arms around her.

"I don't think you're damaged. I think you have a lot of things you need to work on. You're one of the strongest people I know, but strength doesn't just come from blocking everything out and pretending it didn't happen; it comes from opening up."

Emily huffed out a laugh at that. She'd essentially told JJ the same thing back in Madrid. Except now Emily was actually having to live it, and she didn't feel strong. She felt weak and vulnerable, and she hated it. And Derek was being a hypocrite.

She spun to face him. "Because you're so good at that? Opening up? I had only been here for a few weeks, so I stayed out of it, but when we came back from that case in Chicago, when you had been arrested? It didn't take a genius to figure out what was going on. I watched Hotch and Gideon try to talk to you for weeks, and you completely shut down. There's not a whole lot of differences between you and me."

She watched him clench his jaw again, and then he surprised her by reaching forward and lifting her shirt until he could see the scar on her abdomen.

"How close did you come to actually dying?"

Emily watched his face as he stared at the scar, watched him blink rapidly. She couldn't figure out where he was going with this.

She reached her hand out to touch his arm. "I coded once in the ambulance, and twice on the operating table. It was close."

He reached his finger out and traced the scar. "You told me to let you go. Did you want to die?"

Oh. That's where he was going. But she promised herself and him that she wouldn't lie.

"Yes," she whispered, knowing what his response was going to be as soon as the word slipped past her lips.

"That's the difference, Em. No matter how shitty it got, I never wanted to die."

She stood there in shock and watched Derek release her shirt and walk away. He was in the locker room and out with his bag over his shoulder before she could move her feet.

They got called out on a case that night and flew to South Dakota. Hotch must have sensed the tension in the air because he paired Emily with JJ for most of that case and Emily was thankful for that because she didn't have to pretend with JJ. On Monday night, when they were given a six hour reprieve for some sleep, JJ sat next to Emily in the hotel room with her arm around her shoulder while Emily sat there, too raw to cry.

And then, Emily wasn't quite sure what happened, what shifted, or what it meant. They flew home on Tuesday evening and she drove home and fell into bed, emotionally exhausted. The next morning, on her birthday, when she opened her door to leave for work, there was a book and a cupcake in a box.

They never communicated with cards or notes when they gave each other these birthday gifts, but that time, Derek did. "I'm sorry," was written on the top of the cupcake box. Emily squatted and stared for several seconds before reaching for the box and the book and bringing them both inside. She went to her closet and grabbed a book that was sitting there.

She walked into his office that morning and he smiled at her for the first time in a week and a half.

"I was in Madrid until the second week in June. I bought this before I left, for your birthday, even though I couldn't deliver it to you." She set the book on his desk.

"What, no cupcake?" He said it with a smile, innocent and friendly sarcasm in his voice.

She huffed out a breath and laughed, and he laughed lightly, too.

"Are you glad you didn't?" he asked.

"Didn't what?"

"Die."

She paused and chose her words carefully. "I'm glad I'm alive, but I'm sorry I hurt all of you. I'm sorry I hurt you, Derek."

He nodded and stood, giving her a brief hug. "Happy Birthday, Emily."

This is going to be exhausting, she thought. But she found her resolve. She promised herself she would ride these waves for as long as she possibly could, hoping she could hang in there for as long as it took for them to get someplace normal and right with each other.

At first, he didn't know how he would feel every morning when he woke up. Sometimes elated and sometimes angry, sometimes numb and sometimes sad. It seem largely tied to whatever dream he'd had the night before. Kissing her in the locker room had been a huge mistake, a surge of emotion that rose to the surface; he wanted to scream at her, he wanted to grab her shoulders and shake her, and he couldn't imagine doing either. So, without thought, he wrapped his arm around her waist and pressed his lips against hers.

Which left him confused and angry, at her and himself, and feeling completely out of control. From a chaste ten second kiss. So he shut down and spent the next ten days being an asshole. He snapped out of that mood when he stopped by the grocery store on his way home from their case in South Dakota. His shopping cart went on autopilot to the bakery section, seemingly on its own. He found himself staring at the cupcakes in the display case in and knew the next day was her birthday.

He stood there for over ten minutes as he felt the anger fizzle in him, and he was left with a deep desire to just have his friend back.

He stopped asking her questions after her birthday. She was more open and honest about her feelings. But he didn't ask questions about her past, and she didn't offer anything up, seeming relieved that the onslaught of difficult conversations had stopped. She was alive and was sorry she'd hurt him. He told himself that was enough, but he knew he was playing roulette with his real emotions in a lot of ways. He'd had three difficult questions he really wanted answers to:

Who was Tom Kohler?

Did she want to die?

Did she know she was leaving that night she showed up at his office?

He'd only gotten answers to the first two, but he decided to let the other one go. He didn't want more time where he felt like he couldn't look at her because of her answers. And, if he was totally honest, he thought he knew the answer, and he didn't want it confirmed.

She was right - he was just as good at shutting down as she was.

So they pretended. They were better friends. They spent more time together. But it was still pretending, this acting like Emily had never been gone. They both pulled it off so well that with time, it seemed like what they were living was the truth. They pretended through the winter, and straight into March, when three things happened that month and the beginning of April that significantly shifted things.

The first didn't seem significant at all at first, and wouldn't for a long time. The opportunity for a special assignment came up, to work the Olympics in London the coming July. And Derek signed up without much thought, looking forward to a couple of weeks of something different.

The second was that Emily got shot because of a judgement call he made.

The third was that he bonded with a damaged, abused teenage boy that was found wandering in the desert.

"You guys need to stop looking at me like that. I'm absolutely fine." Emily faced JJ and Morgan in the bullpen, and both of them were looking at her like she had nearly slipped through their fingers, when it was nearly the anniversary of her supposed death the year before.

She'd joked with Morgan about the gunshot wound on the plane, she said it was nothing, but the truth was her shoulder throbbed like a mother fucker and she just wanted to go home and pop another Percocet. In all her years in the field, in all the dangerous situations she'd been in, she'd never been shot. It was something she very much hoped she never experienced again, and this had been a relatively minor shooting injury.

She looked at JJ first. JJ, whose friendship she relied on, whose bond had remained the same despite what had gone on in Madrid. Emily had at first endured, and then enjoyed Christmas at JJ's house a few months back. She was nervous at first, being around Will, but she saw JJ genuinely happy, and let the guilt go. Whatever they'd done, it hadn't seemed to damage JJ's relationship with Will. She still was worried that JJ's secrets would one day come back and haunt her, but as time passed and JJ seemed really okay, the less Emily thought about it.

She smiled at her friend who kept giving her concerned looks and glancing at her arm in the sling. "JJ, Henry's sick. Go home. I'll call you tomorrow. I'm really fine."

JJ finally nodded and patted Emily's good shoulder before walking towards the elevators. Morgan was still staring at her though. She smiled at him. Whatever they were doing, or however they were doing it, they were better friends than they had been before in a lot of ways. But it was a friendship filled with insecurities for Emily. He was pretending like she'd never been gone, and he never once brought up that night in his office. And she was letting him pretend, enjoying his company.

"I'm really okay, Derek."

"You shouldn't drive. You've only got one working arm and you're on pain medication. Let me drive you home."

The wound wasn't significant enough that she'd be off work for long, but Hotch had ordered her to take the rest of the week. "I'll need my car at some point."

Derek nodded. "I'll drive your car and take the Metro home and into work tomorrow morning."

Emily sighed and rolled her eyes, pretending she was exasperated, and then grinned at him. This was their new thing, sarcastic ribbing and letting each other in a little more. The old Emily would have told Derek to piss off and have a good night and gotten in her car to drive herself home.

This Emily let Derek drive her home, let him walk her to the door, let him order take-out, let him sit on the couch while she went into her bedroom to put on some pajamas, knowing as soon as she ate, she would take another pill and pass out. She only realized when it was too late how much the nurse in the hospital actually helped her get dressed earlier that morning.

She had her sling off and was trying to take off her sweater, pushing the limits of how much she could actually lift her injured shoulder, when she cried out in pain. Derek was in the room in an instant.

He smiled at her like it was no big deal at all, eyes only on her face. "Want some help?"

"No," she said firmly.

He stared at her.

"Yes," she conceded.

He laughed lightly and stepped towards her. He kept his eyes on her face and she felt him move her injured arm. "Just keep it like this, like it's in a sling even though it's not."

She nodded and avoided his gaze. She felt the him gently pull the sweater off her right arm and over her head, then down and off her injured arm. She could have done that herself, probably. Once she got over the initial pain, she would have figured it out. But this was nice. His hands on her skin were nice.

She stopped the thought process, knowing she was walking into dangerous territory in her mind. Just friends. They were great as friends, and they'd worked to get back to this point. Anything more than friends would open up the questions again, she was sure, and she just didn't want to go there.

She startled when she felt his arms go around her to unhook her bra. "Just leave it," she whispered.

"You want to sleep with a bra on? And tomorrow when you want to shower? It's going to be a bitch to get off."

She smiled at him. "I can do it one handed. Just leave it."

Somewhere in her sentences, she lost him. His eyes dropped and they caught the edge of the branding, just peeking out of this particular bra. She saw his eyes swimming with anger and sadness as he moved the material slightly and took in the scar of the clover on her chest. She watched his finger lightly trace that mark and inhaled deeply.

Finally, when she couldn't take it anymore, being exposed like that, having his eyes on her chest, watching him hold himself back from falling apart at the sight of that scar, she reached her right hand up and touched his cheek. She cleared her throat and smiled when his eyes found hers again. "Eyes up here, Buddy."

And like they were so good at now, he immediately snapped out of it. He huffed out a laugh and let it go, reaching for the pajama shirt on her bed, and helping her get it on.

"Can you manage the pants?" he asked.

"I think so. I managed to get these on on my own this morning. The nurse only helped with the top."

He kissed her forehead. "OK. Then I'll go pick up the food. Back in twenty minutes."

Emily used that time to calm her racing heart. By the time Derek got back, she was sitting on the couch, sling back on, TV on, safely back in the friend zone in her mind.

But that evening, after they ate and she took her pill, she must have dozed off against him. She didn't know how it happened exactly, only that she woke up in the middle of the night laying on her right side on the couch and felt Derek's chest against her back.

He could have helped her to her bed and left. He could have thrown a blanket over her on the couch and left. But he stayed. He stayed with is arm carefully over her waist, below her slinged arm, and his body pressed closely against her. It was a deep couch and she was plenty comfortable.

She should have moved when she woke up and left him to sleep the rest of the night on the couch, she started to. But then his arm squeezed just a little more firmly around her when she moved. She thought it was instinct, until he whispered, "Stay."

Heart hammering, she worried about the ramifications of something like this, something this simple and friendly, but not. It was more intimate in a lot of ways than she'd ever been with anyone, because it was him, and when she searched deeply within herself, she realized how completely comfortable she was being with him like this.

She closed her eyes and decided to save the internal dialogue for the morning. She stayed.

Three weeks later, it was JJ and Emily looking at Derek with concerned eyes. Something about the case in Arizona with the boy they found in the desert resonated with him, and they both knew what that was, and where his mind was at.

JJ didn't have anywhere close to the same type of friendship with Derek that Emily had, but she still cared deeply. Emily caught her eye when they were back at the BAU. JJ knew that Emily and Derek were flirting with a little more than friendship these days, doing a tentative two-step around each other trying to find a way in without bringing up the past. This mostly involved movie nights at one of their homes, where one of them would pretend to fall asleep so they could sleep wrapped in each other's arms and act like it wasn't deliberate.

"I got it," Emily said softly to JJ.

She went up to his office and she watched him adjusting the Challenge Coins on the display on his desk, grabbing a different one and putting it in his pocket, sliding the remaining ones over so they were evenly spaced.

His back was to her, and he didn't turn around when he spoke. "I'm okay, Emily."

"Are you?"

He turned, and his words were the last she was expecting. "It's the last Saturday of the month tomorrow. Are you seeing Declan?"

She blinked at him. "Yes. I don't know what we're doing, but I'm picking him up from school in the morning."

He smiled. "It's supposed to be a beautiful day. Maybe you could do something outside. Maybe I could come with you?"

Emily smiled at him. "Of course you can."

The next day was gorgeous, the first hints of spring in the air. They all laughed a lot. She and Declan tried to take on Morgan at basketball and they ate at an outside table at a restaurant for lunch. Declan and Derek got along well. But she couldn't quite figure out his angle or why he wanted to be there, or why it seemingly sent Derek completely out of his funk and into a very happy frame of mind.

What she did know was that afternoon, when they went to the movies, Derek reached out in the dark and held her hand.

That evening, after they dropped Declan back off at school, Derek asked if she wanted to grab take out for dinner, and she agreed. She was a little uncertain, feeling like there was a conversation coming and she wasn't quite sure what the topic would be. Maybe he just wanted to talk.

And talk he did, on his couch as they ate through some Chinese food. He talked about his dad, and skirted the edges of Carl Buford. He talked about how difficult it was for him to see kids who had been abused, like he felt like he was reliving a nightmare whenever there was a case like that.

She listened, patting his leg while he spoke, feeling sad for him. But when they were done eating, he turned to face her and took both of her hands in his. "I should have taken Ellie Spicer. I wanted to, but I knew I couldn't do it on my own. I think about her a lot, though. I think about the kids we leave behind a lot, and I want that. I liked watching you with Declan today. I want to give a child a good life, but I don't want to do it alone."

Forget a racing heart. What Emily felt in that moment was blind panic, a panic so great she couldn't see clearly. If he was saying what she knew he was saying, there was no way in hell she could do it. Not because she didn't care about him, but because in order to have any sort of honest relationship with Derek, she would have to tell him her past. Her real past, the pregnancy and the baby she gave up.

And she didn't think she could be a parent because of that, because no matter how good she was at blocking things out, any child she had would remind her of that time in her life. Declan was different; Declan was there and in her heart before she got pregnant. But that's where she felt like her ability to be any sort of emotionally healthy, maternal person completely ended. There had been that one case with the older teenage girl, Carrie, and she could have handled that, but not this. Not a young child, not a family.

It wasn't his fault. He couldn't have known how deeply cutting his words would be. They were both in their forties now, and time was running out. He was seeing where she was at, being honest about the idea that if they started down a road to a relationship, kids was where he wanted to end up. She felt herself on the brink of a shut-down so deep she wondered if she'd be able to climb out of it.

She realized in that moment that what she was doing to him was almost worse than pretending to be dead, because they were getting closer, and even though they were going almost painfully slow, she knew where they were heading. But Derek wanted a real life, a family. And she was not the person who could give that to him. Ever.

With tears in her eyes, she pulled her hands from his. She stood and bent to kiss him gently on the lips. "I can't, Derek. That's just not me. I'm so sorry. You deserve that and you should have that, but not with me."

She left him stunned and sad on his couch, and walked out the door.