"Hey, what are you doing here?" Reid asked blearily as Emily knocked on the door to his hospital room.
"Visiting you..." she said like it should be obvious.
He raised a brow, studying her silently for a moment. Studying the way her hair was out of her normal pristine ponytail to spill about her shoulders in messy curls. The way she'd misbuttoned her shirt, just slightly. The all too satisfied smile on her face.
"No, you're not," he accused. "You just had sex..."
For a moment, her jaw hung open. "Wh-what?" she sputtered, "Why... Why would you...say that?"
He just gave her a pointed look.
"Don't... I mean... That's..." She huffed. "You're worse than Garcia, you know?"
"Wow..." he whispered. "I never get these things right."
Glaring at him, she muttered darkly, "Yeah, well, congrats on seeing the obvious." She flopped down in the chair next to his bed.
"So...who is it?"
For a moment, she looked at him in confusion. "Who?"
He raised a brow, making deductions. "Well, it's got to be someone at the hospital or you wouldn't be here. And it's obviously a woman because of the lipstick on your collar." He paused, waiting to see her reaction.
Cheeks heating up, she brought a hand to her neck in an unconscious attempt to cover her hickey.
He smirked as she proved him right through her body language. "I won't tell anyone," he said quietly.
She wasn't sure if he meant that she was seeing someone or that she was gay (which, to be fair, she was pretty sure was something of an open secret around the BAU). Either way, she sighed, staring down at her hands for a brief moment before meeting his eyes. "Her name is Dawn," she admitted. "We met while I was in the Academy and she was a resident. Now, she's the Chief of Surgery..."
"And you're...dating?" he asked.
She nodded. "I actually just asked her to move in with me." She didn't add again for simplicity's (and secrecy's) sake.
"Congratulations," he murmured, smile genuine. "You seem happy lately – happier than I've seen in a long time."
"I am," she agreed.
Without bothering to turn on the bedroom lights, Emily stripped off her pants and sweater before crawling into bed beside Dawn's snoring form. She wasn't sure she'd be able to fall asleep, but she'd rather lie awake curled into her girlfriend's side than sit up and feel the emptiness of the abyss staring back at her.
In spite of her best attempts not to wake Dawn, she felt her stirring anyway. Sleepily, she mumbled, "Did you just get home?"
She nodded. "Go back to sleep," she whispered, tenderly stroking the mess of blonde locks out of her face.
Dawn studied her face for a few moments, apparently reading more there than Emily realized was written on her face. "Do you want to talk about it?" she offered.
She sighed softly, not really wanting to relive it all, but knowing that if there was one thing she really needed to work on, it was not compartmentalizing all her shit. She nodded slowly. "It was a bad one," she admitted softly.
Sitting up to settle back against the headboard, Dawn attempted to wake up enough to carry on a conversation...though, not without a wide yawn because it was well after midnight afterall.
"Sometimes, you save the victim and you still lose," Emily murmured. "You do everything right and...it's not enough."
She reached over to rest a gentle hand on Emily's thigh in a silent show of solidarity, not saying anything and yet saying everything at the same time.
"By the time we'd caught the case, at least eighty-nine people were dead," she lamented. "The men responsible are dead, but there's no justice, no closure for the families. And the man who is the only reason we investigated in the first place is going to spend the rest of his life in prison for murdering the man who's responsible." She sighed softly, shook her head. "Sometimes, it feels like nothing matters, like nothing I do makes any kind of difference..."
"Oh, Em," Dawn murmured, "That's not true."
Emily remained silent for a long moment, apparently deep in thought. "No matter how hard I work, no matter how long I do this job, it's never going to be enough," she said, "There's always going to be someone murdering someone else. There's always going to be someone hiding eighty-nine victims. It's never going to end. Never..."
Dawn leaned into her side, resting her head on her shoulder. "Emily, you'll just burn yourself out if you think like that, if you try to keep score... I lost a patient today – a patient we could've saved if something had happened just a little differently. And there will always be another patient like that. Always. That's just the nature of medicine. But there will also be the patient we do save...that's the part you have to remember."
Emily turned her head to kiss Dawn's forehead. "I'm sorry," she whispered.
"For what?"
"For monopolizing the sympathy when you needed it more," she said. "I'm sorry you lost someone."
She gently squeezed Emily's knee where her hand was resting in a silent gesture that all was forgiven. "Maybe we should take a vacation," she said, almost apropos of nothing. "We need to get away from it all for a few days."
Emily laughed softly. "I couldn't agree more. I've always wanted to take the train down to Vermont and do the whole cheesy couples' weekend thing."
She raised a brow. "Cheesy couples' weekend thing?" she repeated dubiously.
With a shrug and a smirk, she replied, "You know, touring museums and window-shopping and wine tasting or whatever it is that people do... I don't know, I've never done this before. I'm a lone wolf."
Dawn rolled her eyes. "You are not – you're a golden retriever with a bad attitude." When Emily pouted at that, Dawn leaned in to kiss her gently. "A very cute golden retriever."