It had been another long and hard gruelling case, and it had been weeks since he had seen his wife and kids. The separation was beginning to take its toll on them. Something was up with Penelope, as hard as she tried to hide it from him, he could feel it in his gut. Before he could corner her about it they were called to another case. She had been distant when they spoke on the phone, and when he called at home, she would put Jay on and seemingly busying herself to miss his call. He knew he screwed up on that last case, that he could have gotten himself killed and that frightened her to a point that she began to withdraw from him.
"Derek are you okay?" JJ asked as she caught him lost in his thoughts. They were finally on their way home from their case, three weeks since they had left.
"Yeah, just looking forward to seeing my wife and kids." JJ smiled,
"I'm sure they're excited too. Did you call to let them know you were on your way home?"
"I tried but Jay said Pen wasn't home, so I thought I would just surprise them."
"Pen working today? I thought she had a few days off?" Derek looked up at her in surprise not knowing that,
"She sick?" he asked worriedly. The look on his face alarmed JJ knowing how very little Derek knew about what was going on with Penelope.
"She's fine Derek," she said trying to appease him, but knew it was beyond that as he stood to his feet and flicked open his phone. Thinking on her feet JJ quickly typed a text message to Penelope.
Penelope saw her husband's name flash on her cell phone, and ignored it allowing it to go straight to voicemail. A few seconds later, a text message from JJ came through,
"He knows something's up Pen. Why haven't you talked to him?"
Groaning Penelope knew she was in trouble. She had been avoiding his inquisition for weeks now, and she knew she was merely buying time knowing it was a conversation they needed to have. She picked up her voicemail and heard the worry in Derek's voice,
"Alright P, I'm beyond worried now. If you're still pissed at me I get that, but you promised to never stop talking to me, you promised. I just want to know that you're okay?"
Tears began to well in her eyes as she heard his pleading on her voicemail. She knew she wasn't being fair, at the same time. She just couldn't bring herself to have that conversation with him, with any of them.
"I'm fine. We do need to talk when you get back."
Derek's phone beeped with a message from his wife. He looked at his watch and counted the hours till they landed.
"Be home soon. You and I are going on a date, and you're going to start talking Baby Girl. This has gone on for far too long. I love you." He replied.
"I know Handsome. We'll talk when you get back. PG promise."
Derek talked to Hotch on the plane about taking a couple of weeks off to spend time with his family. Knowing that something was brewing within the Morgan household he granted leave without a second thought. Knowing if they truly needed him, he'd make himself readily available.
Derek called home and Fran had confirmed that Penelope was still at work, so he decided to head straight there. He found her in her office, amongst her hard drives, monitors, with her Chick Rock music blaring in the background. He stood leaning against her doorway watching her as she worked,
"You'd think after all the time we've spent apart you'd want to be doing more than staring handsome." Penelope said without turning her head. Derek grinned and within a couple of steps he had pulled her into his arms,
"I'm sorry." She whispered tearfully against his shoulder as she breathed him in,
"Talk to me P."
"I just got scared."
"What happened Baby Girl?"
"When I went in for an Ultrasound after the Doctor confirmed that I was pregnant they found a mass. I didn't want to worry you, you were so far away and that case just are you up, I didn't want to add to it." Derek's heart stopped,
"Where's the mass P, what is it?"
"On my Pancreas, my back has been hurting and I thought it was due to the pregnancy and it partly was."
"So what do we do?"
"I needed to get a biopsy to see if it was benign or malignant."
"Penelope Morgan, why didn't you tell me? I would have been here. I wanted to be there. Why would you go through this alone?" he admonished,
"I was scared Derek, and I didn't want to worry you either. I thought if I kept it to myself, then it wasn't real. I'm sorry."
"Have you gotten the results?"
"Yes, the it's non cancerous, but they're keeping an eye on it. They want to take it out as soon as possible, so after the baby."
"Are you at any risk?"
"No,"
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, I promise." Derek pulled his wife to his chest holding her so tightly she could barely breathe.
"I hate that you kept this from me. I hate that you could have been sick and I wasn't there. Don't you trust me?"
"Of course I trust you. I just didn't want to add to what's already a full plate. Your face when you got back from that case, I just couldn't speak the words to even begin to tell you that I may have been sick. Then another case came through, and it's equally gruelling, where did you want me to slip this in Derek? Over the phone? We've hardly had any time together. When you're home, we're trying to do family things together. You're exhausted, I'm exhausted. You don't talk to me anymore." She said in a whisper dropping her gaze and stepping out of his embrace.
"Best friends first remember? I haven't felt like your best friend in a really long time. It's like..."
"Like what P?"
"It doesn't matter." she replied sadly
"P..." he pleaded
"Like you've never forgiven me for the whole Mac thing. The moment I said what I said you dethroned me from being your best friend because you think Mac will always be mine. You shut down on me and we stopped being friends. I was just your wife, the mother of your kids."
"P..." he said again in anguish knowing she was right. Subconsciously he punished for her admission that Mac was her safe place because he had been the one person that had stood by her through the years, the one person that always put her first and never let her down. After the wedding Penelope and Mac had begun to enforce boundaries between them and it tore Penelope to the core but she owed it to her marriage to Derek. They were now limited to random phone calls and emails. She had hoped it would help but in the end it only meant she lost the one person she trusted most in the world because she walked away from him. Though he was still readily available and vice versa, there was a distinct difference in their countenance with each other. Despite the boundaries they both knew they would always be there for each other.
"I'm sorry Baby Girl."
"I know." She replied softly as she turned away from him. Derek reached out for her but missed.
"You're right, I have distanced myself. Deep down I always knew it was unfair. That though you offered to distance yourself from Mac, it wasn't fair of me to let you. He's your family and if you shared the same DNA it wouldn't be an issue. I had no right to feel jealous of the one person who has stood by you from the moment he met you, who has done nothing but protect you. That's who I was in your life,"
"You still are…" she assured him in frustration,
"I felt terrible knowing what I had allowed you to consciously walk away from. I didn't want the day to come that you would hate me for that, so unconsciously I distanced myself from you. Instead of taking the opportunity to work on us so we could grow more, I bailed and I am so sorry P."
"Did we make the right decision Derek?" she asked absently still not looking at him. Her question knocked the wind from under him. He crossed the distance between them and took her face in her hands,
"Telling you I loved you, and asking you to marry me is the best decision I've ever made in my life. I love my life with you and wouldn't trade a day of it for anything. I love you P, heart and soul I love you."
"I don't doubt you love me Derek, loving each other was never a question between us. I loved you the moment you called me Gomez. But I can't help but ask, did I force this? By leaving did I force your hand in this? Because if we can't even be honest about the things we should really be honest about, how is that a partnership, how is it a marriage? With the exception of our kids, and the fact that we love each other, what do we have? I don't want to get to a place where we resent each other, I couldn't handle that. It's easy to love someone, but you can love someone and not like them. We're barely friends now, what's it going to be like in a few years?" she asked tearfully. They had been married for a little over a year, and they had battled the whole way.
"P, it's not meant to be easy."
"But it wasn't meant to be this hard either Derek."
"Are you giving up on us P?"
"I'm not the one that throws themselves in harms way every chance he gets Derek. I'm the runner in this relationship, we've established that, so if I was ready to run, I would have already." She replied hurt as she removed his hands from her face.
"P…"
"And seeing as we're being honest now, does Tamara Barnes know that you have a wife?" she asked looking right into his eyes.
"I was helping her, her brother was murdered." Even to his own ears it sounded pathetic and the look in his wife's eyes made his sentence leave a bitter taste in his mouth,
"So you're telling me when you guys finally broke that case, you weren't the one who drove to her house to tell her you guys got the bad guys?" His silence confirmed what he knew, she already knew.
"That the cross you have on the top drawer of your office desk, wasn't the one I recognised from William Barnes crime scene photos. That you haven't been meeting her for coffee at work." Derek had the grace to drop his gaze to the floor.
"I think you forget that you and I work in the same building Derek. I'm not stupid and I am certainly not deaf. I may trust you, I may even know that you would never cheat on me, but the gossip mill at the Bureau doesn't have the same faith in you as I seem to have. I know you love me, I know you love our family, our kids, that we're your world, but I can't help but ask if maybe you're wanting more than that. So you can't really be angry at me for not telling you about what's going on with me, it's true that I didn't want to add to the burden you were already carrying at work, but maybe it's also because I don't want to guilt you into staying if that's not what you want."
Okay this so didn't go where I had intended and it sort of wrote itself. It seemed that there were all these unresolved issues that needed to be addressed. Hope you liked it. Will endeavour to post next update soon. Thanks so much for your lovely reviews!
