Emily was starting to go rather stir crazy.
After the events of the case in Rockport, she'd been ordered to take a few days off to recover from her injuries. And no matter how hard she'd tried to argue that she was well enough to at least come with them and work from the precinct, Hotch had refused to listen.
And when she'd complained to Dawn about how unreasonable Hotch was being, she'd sided with him, much to Emily's chagrin.
Which is how she ended up bored within an inch of her life without so much as a case file to keep her mind busy. Dawn, of course, as Chief of Surgery had to continue to work, leaving Emily to her own devices (or, rather, under strict orders not to tax her concussed brain and battered body).
She was currently flipping through the channels, knowing full well that nothing good would be on in the middle of the day, when she landed on a news broadcast.
"...a patient at Hope Zion Hospital attempted suicide today by throwing himself off the hospital roof," the anchor said. "An unsubstantiated report says that the patient stabbed a doctor earlier in the day."
Emily was immediately on the phone, trying to get through to Dawn.
No answer. On any other day, she might have assumed that she was in surgery and unable to answer, but on that particular day, she just couldn't shake the fear that Dawn was bleeding out somewhere...
"Dammit, Dawn," she muttered to herself. She thought about calling Garcia and asking her to do a little snooping around in the hospital records, but she didn't want to deal with all the questions that would surely accompany such a request. It seemed she had only one choice...
Dawn should've been surprised to find Emily waiting in her office when she trudged in after finishing Alex's surgery, but she couldn't seem to muster the emotion. Muster any emotion. She wasn't used to having mortality hit quite so close to home...
"Oh, good, you're alive," Emily spoke like she couldn't quite decide if the words were intended to be sarcastic or not. She hadn't intended to be angry with her, but she couldn't help the hot prickle of tears behind her eyes when she saw her safe and instead covered the emotion with anger.
"Are you trying to start an argument with me right now?" Dawn asked weakly. She didn't have the energy to argue, really couldn't handle anything other than existential emptiness at the moment.
Emily opened her mouth, but seemed to falter at the expression on her face.. "No," she whispered, "I just... I saw the news, I got worried."
Dawn said nothing, did nothing, for a long moment, then crossed the office and sank down on the couch next to her. "I had my hands in my ex-husband's fiancee's heart today," she said softly.
Emily didn't know how to respond to that, so she said the only thing that she knew to be true. "There's no one in the world I would trust more, had it been me..."
Dawn leaned her head on Emily's shoulder. "I'm so tired," she whispered. "It just...never ends, does it?"
Emily said nothing, just stroked a hand up and down the ridge of Dawn's spine. She knew the question was mostly rhetorical anyway.
"How do you do it?" she continued. "You spend every single day of your life knowing that no matter what you do, no matter how good you are at your job, no matter how many lives you save, there will always be another case, another killer..."
"As someone very wise once told me: you can't keep score," Emily said quietly. "And I know that at the end of the day, I get to come home to my loving fiancee."
Dawn gave a wet little laugh. "Or, in this case, the loving fiancee marches into my office..."
"In my defence, I thought you might be dead," Emily said sheepishly.
"You'll have to work a lot harder than that to get rid of me," she teased.
With a little smirk, Emily shook her head, then pulled Dawn in for a kiss. She let her hands tangle in Dawn's hair and she tugged her closer until Dawn was forced to crawl into her lap.
Dawn kissed her like she couldn't breathe without her, like her very life depended on it. Her nails scraped across the back of Emily's neck, the other hand tightening in the fabric of her shirt where it rode up on her hip. Her hips pressed sharply against the ridges of Emily's hip bones, desperate for more – more contact, more friction...
Emily, for her part, understood perfectly the unspoken need, and turned them so she was hovering over her, hooking her fingers in the waistband of her scrubs so she could tug them down over her hips.
She kissed her way down Dawn's stomach, giving into her desperate need where she might ordinarily have teased. Her tongue hit Dawn's clit, producing a whimper, a breathy moan.
"Emily..." she pleaded, "Em, please..."
It wasn't like the last time they'd fucked in her office, when she'd been playful and bossy – this was needy and desperate, an unconscious search for consolation, a sign that things were going to be okay. And Emily was all too happy to indulge her need.
She pressed a tender kiss to her thigh in a silent assurance that she understood the plea. Her fingers traced gentle patterns on Dawn's hip in soft counterpoint to the slight roughness with which she worked her cunt.
When Dawn finally came, it was with a soft whimper, a husky murmur of Emily's name.
Emily kissed her way back up her body, murmuring against her skin, "I love you, Dawn. I love you so much..." because she knew that's what she needed to hear in that moment.
When she reached her lips, she could see the faint sheen of tears in Dawn's eyes. One escaped to cling to her lashes, to dribble down her cheek, and Emily brushed it away with her thumb. Neither of them said a word. There was no need.