A/N: This is all Emily and Hannah and is a little shorter, but felt like it should be a standalone.
Chapter 11
"Well, that was fast."
"If you need more time to finish…" Emily's voice trailed off as she picked up the research journal Hannah was reading.
"Hey," Hannah protested weakly as her reading material was snatched right out from under her. She'd moved on from the study Reid pulled for her and was now reading one focused on violent and antisocial behavior.
Emily ignored her daughter's protest and flipped to the title page, careful to mark Hannah's place with her finger. "The Nature and Nurture of Antisocial Behavior and Violence?" Emily read the title aloud with raised eyebrows.
"I thought it was fitting since my father's a criminal," Hannah said.
"Right. Well, I can wait while you finish." Emily returned to her daughter's place and slid the journal across the table so it was within Hannah's reach, but the teenager didn't make any move to reclaim it. "Go ahead. Don't let me stop you from finding out if you're destined to be an arms dealer when you grow up," Emily told her child facetiously, trying to get her to see how unfounded her fears were.
The fourteen year old wasn't going to suddenly turn into a criminal mastermind just because she shared DNA with Ian Doyle. As a profiler with the BAU, Emily Prentiss knew it was nurture that made serial killers do the things they did. It was the triggering events and stressors in their lives. It could be childhood abuse or the trauma of losing a loved one. It could be a betrayal or a perceived injustice. It could be anything, but it was always something.
Neither Hannah nor Declan grew up the way their father had. Ian was orphaned at a young age and spent his childhood in an Irish orphanage. The overburdened caretakers saw that the basic needs of food and shelter were met for the orphans in their care, but no one really cared about Ian. There were too many children and too few adults. Growing up like that Ian didn't have a strong bond with any adults. He didn't really know what love was and had no real attachment or emotional connection to anyone. It didn't excuse what he had become or the things he did, but there was a reason Ian Doyle was the way he was.
"I'm not going to be an arms dealer," Hannah replied to the preposterous suggestion with a hint of exasperation in her voice. She knew Emily didn't really think she would be an arms dealer, but she still thought the woman was being ridiculous – which was the whole idea. She shot her birth mother a look of teenage annoyance. "That's not what I'm worried about."
"Well, right now that's the only thing you really know about your father," Emily pointed out rationally.
"That's enough to know I don't want to be like him," Hannah said, shuddering visibly at the thought.
"You're not," Emily told the girl.
"You don't know that," Hannah said, easily dismissing what Emily had to say on the subject.
"Because I just started getting to know you?" Emily said with a knowing expression, beating her kid to the punch. She knew that was coming, and she was going to head it off. She didn't wait for the girl to respond – she didn't need to. She already knew the answer. "I know I haven't known you that long, and I still have a lot to learn about you," Emily acknowledged, "but I already know you are nothing like your father, sweetheart."
Hannah tilted her head to the side and looked at Emily in disbelief. All the woman really knew about her was how she liked her eggs and her taste in books.
Seeing that her daughter didn't believe her, Emily sighed and bit her bottom lip. She really didn't want to have to do this, but it was the only way she could think of to show Hannah that she did know her well enough to know if she was anything like Ian Doyle – which she wasn't as far as Emily could see. The profiler was going to profile her kid.
Emily didn't even have to try to profile her kid. As a profiler, Emily noticed things that the average person might not think were important. It was only natural for her. It was just how her brain worked after doing what she did for as long as she had. There were a lot of things the profiler had already noticed about her kid in the limited amount of time they spent together. She was trying to get to know Hannah so of course she listened carefully to every word her daughter said to her and paid attention to nonverbal cues and behavior that could give her an idea of what the girl was thinking or how the girl was feeling.
The seasoned profiler went back through everything she'd learned about her kid so far. She licked her lips as she decided what she could say without making the young teenager any more guarded with her than she already was. No one liked being profiled.
"Last weekend," Emily started cautiously, "when we needed somewhere to go talk after brunch, you didn't want to go back to your house, but only because you wanted to ask me about your biological father and you didn't want to hurt your dad's feelings. You feel like your dad lied to you because he didn't tell you that you were adopted until now, right? But even though you're mad at him, you went out of your way to spare his feelings. That tells me you're caring and considerate. It also tells me that even if you haven't yet, you're going to forgive your dad."
"Um, I haven't actually forgiven him yet," Hannah admitted. She felt like Emily was giving her more credit than she deserved.
"You will," Emily said confidently. "Your biological father wasn't capable of forgiveness. He would have wanted to hurt anyone who betrayed his trust, no matter how close he was to them. He would have enjoyed it." The profiler had a faraway look on her face as she remembered the things Doyle did to her while she was waiting for her team to find her…branding her chest, repeatedly throwing her into a cement wall, the brutal beating at his hands, literally kicking her while she was down and breaking a couple of her ribs in the process.
"He sounds like a real charmer," Hannah said sarcastically.
"He lacked empathy. You don't," Emily continued. She looked at her kid with a soft, almost tender expression. "When you thought there was a possibility he raped me, you showed empathy for me. We just met, and you don't know me that well yet, but you still didn't like the idea of anything like that happening to me."
"Of course not," Hannah said quickly, looking horrified. "No one deserves that." She realized a second too late how that must sound. It sounded like she didn't feel anything more for Emily than she would for anyone else in that situation. But Emily wasn't just anyone. Emily was her mother. Hannah didn't want the woman to think their connection wasn't important to her because it was. "And you – you're not just anyone. I mean…we're kind of related," the teenager added hastily.
Emily wanted to smile at the girl's awkward acknowledgement of their relationship, but she didn't want to make Hannah feel self-conscious. "Oh, we're related, all right," she agreed, trying to keep her tone light. "You have my eyes, my love of historical fiction, and my sarcasm. You don't just have his genes, you know." She gave her kid a look that was a little pointed, but not hard or unkind.
"I don't think the FBI agent's genes cancel out the criminal's genes," Hannah said. She looked down, averting her eyes. "Everything I read said there's a connection between genes and personality. There has to be something I got from him." She thought of her worst qualities. Things she wasn't proud of became magnified in her mind, suddenly seeming much worse to her than they actually were. Everything she was thinking of was pretty normal behavior for a teenager like lying to get out of trouble or to get her dad to say yes to something she knew he wouldn't let her do if he had all the information, but now Hannah was wondering if the little things she'd gotten in trouble for over the years or gotten away with but still felt guilty about were things that made her like her father.
Emily looked at her daughter sadly. It was bad enough to see her kid struggling, but knowing she caused it by telling Hannah about Doyle just made it ten times worse.
To her frustration, her attempts to convince the girl that she was nothing like Ian Doyle weren't working. Hannah was absolutely convinced she had gotten some fatal personality flaw from her biological father, and nothing Emily could say was going to convince her otherwise. Emily needed to try a different tack.
"Okay, you want to know something you could have gotten from him?" Emily said reluctantly, knowing this could end badly. It was a risk, but Emily needed to take it to make her kid see that genetics didn't make her destined to be like Ian Doyle - she had a choice in how she lived her life.
Hannah's head snapped up in surprise, her wary eyes meeting her birth mother's determined gaze.
"You care enough about your grades that you asked me for help with your French paper. That wasn't your dad making you get help because you got a bad grade. That was all you wanting to get an A. That tells me you're driven to succeed. Maybe you already know what you want to do or where you want to go to school, and you're working toward that?" Emily guessed, going back to profiling the girl with an end goal in mind.
"I want to be a doctor," Hannah told her. "An oncologist."
"An oncologist, huh? Does that have anything to do with how your mom died?" Emily asked with a sympathetic expression, knowing it did.
Hannah nodded sadly.
"Okay, you want to save lives. That's a far cry from what your biological father did," Emily told her kid. And it would help illustrate her point. "He was also very driven, but it's what you do with that drive that makes you different from him. You're going to use it to help people." Emily looked her daughter straight in the eyes. "Hannah, genetics is only one part of what makes you who you are. There are a lot of other things that go into it. You want to cure cancer because your mom had breast cancer. That's nurture, not nature."
"And that's it? That's the only thing I got from him?" Hannah wanted to verify, desperately needing confirmation that there wasn't anything else. She looked at her birth mother intently as she waited for the answer only Emily would have. She no longer thought Emily didn't know her well enough to say whether she was like her biological father or not. She had realized by this point in the conversation that the woman knew her better than she ever would have thought possible after one brunch.
"You actually could have gotten it from either one of us," Emily told her honestly. "I was always pretty driven, too."
"You really don't think I'm like him, do you?" Hannah said in a surprised tone. At first she thought her birth mother was just saying that to make her feel better. That was what moms did, and while Emily didn't strike Hannah as the stereotypical mom, the woman was in fact her mother. She had to have some kind of maternal instinct, right? But the more they talked, the more it seemed like Emily really believed what she was saying.
"I really don't," Emily replied. That was only what she'd been trying to convince her kid of this entire time.
"What if I was? Would you have wanted anything to do with me?" Hannah wondered. It was something that had been bothering her. She thought maybe if she said or did something that reminded her birth mother of her father, the woman wouldn't want to spend any more time with her. Why would she? Her father sounded like a complete and total jerk.
"Yes," Emily said without hesitation. "I've always known who your father is. It doesn't change the fact that you're my daughter." She looked at Hannah with a newfound understanding as her child's reluctance to talk to her about this suddenly made sense. "Wait a minute, is that why you didn't want to talk to me about this? Because you thought I wouldn't want-"
"Yeah," Hannah cut her birth mother off. "But we talked, and we're good now, right?"
Emily narrowed her eyes suspiciously. "I don't know. Are we?"
"We are," Hannah told her.
"If you say so," Emily said skeptically, not quite sure her teenager was being honest.
"Let me buy you a cup of coffee," Emily said suddenly as they left the library, wanting more time with her daughter.
There were a few coffee shops nearby, but Emily led the way to a local independent coffee shop that had a good collection of board games for its patrons to play. She thought it would be good if there were something for her to do with Hannah besides just drink coffee and talk.
There was a reason child psychologists played games with their young patients. Playing a game could be a conversation starter, a welcome distraction from more difficult topics of conversation, and a way to make any awkward silences less awkward.
They ordered – an herbal tea and a breakfast sandwich for Emily and a peppermint mocha and a sugar cookie for Hannah – and found a table.
Emily nodded toward the shelves that were full of different board games. "Do you play chess?" She asked.
"My dad taught me when I was younger, but I haven't played in years. I don't really remember how," Hannah said honestly. She scanned the shelves for something she would play and suggested, "Scrabble?"
"Sure," Emily agreed readily.
Hannah retrieved the game and set it up.
"So you never said how you did on your French paper," Emily said curiously as she looked at the letters she had and thought of possible words.
"Oh, I got an A," Hannah told her.
"That's great," Emily said happily with a beaming smile. "I knew you would."
"I wouldn't have, not without your help," Hannah acknowledged.
"I'm happy to help any time," Emily reminded her. "Are finals coming up?"
Hannah nodded distractedly as she studied the Scrabble board. "The week before Christmas."
As they played, Hannah answered Emily's questions about her classes and what she was taking next semester.
"I have to take Speech or Debate. My dad wants me to take Debate. It's the lawyer in him. He loves arguing about everything." Hannah rolled her eyes. "And then I have to take an art or music class. I have no musical or artistic talent so I'm taking Art History." She shrugged unenthusiastically. "I can't take any of the electives I really want to take until junior or senior year."
"What do you want to take?" Emily asked.
"Well, there's a medicine class I really want to take," Hannah said. "It's actually before school. It starts at, like, 6:00 am so that's gonna be rough, but everyone who takes it loves it. They have doctors come in to teach part of the time, and they get to watch a surgery," she explained excitedly.
Emily made a face. "Oh, man, that sounds awful to me. I hate hospitals."
"Don't tell me the badass FBI agent's afraid of needles," Hannah teased with a grin.
"I'm not afraid. I just don't like being stabbed with anything, and that includes needles," Emily told her. She looked at her daughter's new Scrabble word and gave the girl a look. "Okay, twerking is not a word."
"It is, too!" Hannah argued.
Emily had to laugh at the childish argument coming from her fourteen year old. "It is not. It's not even really dancing."
"Miley Cyrus would disagree," Hannah told her.
"Forget Miley Cyrus. What does the dictionary say?" Emily challenged her kid.
Hannah unlocked her iPhone and went to a free Dictionary site where she searched for the word in question. She showed Emily the result with a smug smirk. "It's in the dictionary."
"As slang," Emily pointed out. There was an italicized Slang label above the definition. "Sorry, kid. There's no slang in Scrabble."
"Ugh, okay, fine," Hannah conceded, grudgingly removing the tiles. "You know, you're supposed to let me win," the teenager grumbled good-naturedly with a sly look at Emily. "It's, like, an unwritten rule of being a parent."
"Oh, yeah?" Emily said with a little laugh, pleasantly surprised that Hannah referred to her in that context even if it was in a roundabout, half-joking way. "Does your dad let you win?"
"He doesn't have to let me win," Hannah answered honestly but with a hint of teenage arrogance. "He's terrible at Scrabble."
"Okay, so you're just not used to having any real competition then," Emily said with an amused expression.
Hannah just shot her birth mother a look and then carefully laid out her tiles to form the word twenty. It wasn't worth quite as many points as twerking would have been, but she still managed to strategically place the 'W' on a Double Letter space putting her just ahead of Emily in points so the teenager considered it a win.
In the end, it was close, but the word jukebox won the game for Emily. Hannah was a pretty good sport about it, but she still wanted a rematch.
"Next weekend?" Emily proposed a time for the rematch. "Unless you're going to be too busy doing homework all weekend," she said with a pointed look at her daughter. It was her way of calling the girl out for the excuse she had used when she said she couldn't go to brunch with Emily.
Hannah stiffened and looked down. "I'm sorry I lied. I just didn't want to hurt your feelings by saying no." She cast a furtive glance at Emily and saw that the woman didn't look mad. She almost looked sad, which was worse. "I did want to do something with you," Hannah told her birth mother. "But…I don't know. You had just told me who my father was. I knew I didn't want to be like him, but he's my father, and I was just…I was afraid I'd start to remind you of him. Why would you want a constant reminder of him?"
Emily frowned, appalled by the teenager's logic. "Uh, maybe because that reminder is my daughter." She stared at the top of the girl's bowed head and sighed wearily. "Hannah, would you please just look at me?"
Hannah looked up, reluctantly meeting Emily's gaze.
"Honey, I don't see you as a reminder," Emily told her child. "I don't look at you and see your father. I just see an innocent child – my child." She reached across the table and took Hannah's pale hand in hers, rubbing circles on top of the girl's hand with her thumb. "My flesh and blood."
Hannah was moved by her birth mother's heartfelt words, but she didn't really know how to respond. "I don't know about the innocent part," she said, trying to lighten the mood. "I did lie to you," she reminded the woman.
"Yeah, well, next time you're going to blow me off, at least come up with a better excuse," Emily teased her kid. She was every bit as uncomfortable as her daughter with having an emotional conversation in a public coffee shop and was more than willing to let the moment pass now that she'd made her point. "Really, what teenager does homework on a Saturday?"
They were both laughing as they left the coffee shop. They walked to the nearest Metro stop together in companionable silence. Since she was planning on having a couple of mimosas with JJ, Penelope and Tara at brunch, Emily hadn't driven to the restaurant and had taken an Uber to the library. Like Hannah, she would be taking the Metro home.
Hannah grudgingly agreed to text her birth mother when she got home so Emily would know she made it okay even though she thought it was a silly request and told the woman so.
"Humor me," was all Emily said in response.
"Fine," Hannah conceded with a roll of her eyes. "Emily?" She called a little shyly as they started to part ways. The woman turned back to her with a smile. "Thank you for everything today," Hannah said sincerely. "It was good. I'm glad we talked."
"Any time, kid," Emily replied with a big, beaming smile.
A/N: Thanks for reading and to everyone who reviewed!
I intended to end this chapter with a scene with the BAU in Quantico, but I'm still not quite happy with it and this seemed like a natural ending. Next chapter will be focused on the BAU and may not have Hannah in it at all to make up for this chapter being solely focused on Emily and Hannah.
Here's a question. We're not quite there yet, but in the timeline of this story we're getting close to Christmas. I have an idea for Hannah to invite Emily to spend Christmas with Steve's family. That would include a bunch of OC's in the form of Steve's mother, sister, and nieces and nephews and would be 1-2 chapters at the most. I don't want to write something everyone will hate because there are too many OC's though. I will include some holiday fluff and a BAU holiday party regardless, but I'd love some thoughts on whether you would like to see the Christmas day chapter or would prefer to avoid a chapter with that many OC's. Thank you.
