The Downward Spiral

Time is a cruel thief to rob us of our former selves. We lose as much to life as we do to death.

Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey

TWELVE

Hotch was back at the BAU offices. He had been accompanied by Morgan. Neither man felt like going home that night. Morgan was going over all his paperwork, making sure everything was up to date, when Hotch entered the bullpen from his office.

'Shots fired at Emily's apartment,' was all it took for Morgan to throw down the files and follow his boss.

Hotch refused to let him drive; he was irrational. They'd sooner end up in the ICU than at Emily's.

'She's not defenseless,' Hotch tried to reassure the younger man, but Morgan wouldn't have any of it.

He didn't want to lose her.


They had been at a stand-off for almost half an hour. Neither party would walk into the ambush that had been set on both sides.

The body at the top of stairs began to stir. At first it was just groans, then he began to move his head, then his limbs.

'Hostage?' whispered Hassan softly.

'No. They're all expendable.'

Hassan nodded. 'We could just kill him now,' he suggested.

Emily gritted her teeth. 'Believe me,' she said. 'It's taking all my self-control not to.' She saw that face in her nightmares every night. Torturing her. Taunting her. She knew they sent him along just to make her crack. She wasn't entirely sure it wasn't working.

'Help me with this,' she asked Hassan, and before he could refuse, she crawled over to the barely conscious man. A couple of shots rang out above her head, but her attackers didn't have the right angle to actually hit her. She grabbed the man by the collar, and, with Hassan's help, dragged him back to their metaphorical trenches.

When he awoke fully, her gun was pressed into his forehead.

'Do you remember me, you son of a bitch?' She wanted – needed – to pull that trigger, but her conscience wouldn't let her.

You're not a bad person, it said.

'Do you remember how you ruined my life?'

'He wanted you to know,' the man finally said. His voice sent shivers down her spine. She associated this voice with knives piercing flesh, with the searing pain of leather striking her back.

'Who wanted me to know what?' she asked, her fingers shaking. So pre-occupied, she didn't notice that the gunfire had stopped, that footsteps were transcending the staircase.

'He wanted you to know,' said the man, 'that he was the one who betrayed you.'

Then, his arms unpinned, he forced her hand. She pulled the trigger involuntarily, his thumb caught in the guard as his brains blew out through the back of his head.

She sat there, staring at him for several seconds.

'It's okay, Emily,' a voice said. A warm, soothing voice. Whose voice was that?

Familiar hands took the gun from her grip. Her own hands were still shaking.

'I…I…He's dead.' She stepped back quickly. The bringer of her torment was dead, and somehow she didn't feel any better.

'He killed himself, Emily,' Morgan told her, trying to put an arm on her shoulder. She let him hug her, and then apologized for getting a terrorist's blood all over his shirt.

'It'll wash out,' he said.

Hassan gave the two of them a sideways glance. Just that one brief gesture between the two of them made it abundantly clear to him. She might still have loved him, but she wasn't in love with him. It was a cliché he'd have to deal with.

The rest of the night, they stayed at Quantico. It was highly unlikely that a terrorist organization would be able to get through the stringent security measures on such short notice. Meanwhile, it gave Morgan a chance to keep an eye out for Emily and go over the case files at the same time.

He was staring at a page blankly when Hassan came over to him. He had not spent any time alone with Emily's husband, and didn't particularly want to.

'I have work to do.' He tried not to let the hate, the jealously overtake his voice, but the emotions he was feeling were clear, even to a non-profiler.

'How long have you loved her?' Hassan asked him. His own voice didn't have that anger, that hate in it. Instead, there was sadness.

He didn't have an answer to that. The truth was, he didn't know. When had it crossed the line from friendship into something else? After Colorado? After Maine?

'I don't know.'

That was as good an answer as he could give.