A/N: This is a short fluffy chapter that's all Emily and Hannah.
Chapter 21
Emily never thought she'd get to have her daughter in her home for more than a few hours at a time, if that. With the way Steve had been acting ever since Christmas Eve, even that was starting to seem unlikely so no one was more surprised than Emily when the adoptive father asked her to take Hannah for the better part of a week.
As sorry as she was that Hannah was sick, Emily was grateful to have five days of uninterrupted time with her daughter, even if the girl would be spending most of that time resting to recover from the flu.
So far Hannah had been asleep in Emily's guest room almost the entire time she'd been there, but it had only been three hours. Steve was on an early evening flight and dropped Hannah off on his way to the airport.
Emily had a Friends re-run on with the volume turned down low so it wouldn't wake her daughter up. She wasn't really watching TV. She just had it on in the background while she tried to reconcile the BAU's expenses with the budget they had to stay within. When Hannah finally emerged from the guest room and joined Emily on the couch, it was already time for dinner.
Emily saved the Excel spreadsheet she had open, closed her laptop and set it down on the coffee table before turning her full attention to Hannah. "Hey," Emily said with a warm smile. "What do you want for dinner?"
"I'm not hungry," Hannah said. "You can have whatever you want."
"What's wrong? Is it your stomach again?" Emily asked, frowning in concern. The last time Hannah's stomach was upset, her fever was dangerously high. Without thinking about what she was doing, Emily got up from the couch and moved to stand in front of her daughter, leaning down to place the palm of her hand on the girl's forehead.
"No," Hannah said in response, but she tolerated the parental gesture from her birth mother without complaint. "I don't feel like I'm going to be sick again or anything," she assured the woman. "My throat's just sore."
Emily thought Hannah felt warm but not like she was burning up. Now that Hannah mentioned it, Emily realized the girl's hoarse voice wasn't just from sleep. It was likely due to her sore throat.
"You have to eat something. What did you have for lunch?" Emily wondered, trying to get an idea of what she could feed her daughter.
"A smoothie from Jamba Juice," Hannah answered.
"Do you want another smoothie?" Emily asked. It wasn't a substantial meal, but it was better than nothing. Hannah couldn't keep taking medicine on a completely empty stomach or she would definitely get sick to her stomach again.
"I guess," the teenager said unenthusiastically. She wasn't trying to be difficult. It was just that nothing sounded good. Her throat really hurt. Just the idea of swallowing anything solid made her wince.
"There's a Mediterranean place a couple blocks away that has smoothies. I have a menu around here somewhere," Emily said. She disappeared into the kitchen and returned a moment later with the takeout menu, which she handed to the teenager.
Hannah took several seconds to look at the menu and then gave Emily her order for a banana, apple juice and nonfat vanilla yogurt smoothie with an immunity boost.
Emily ordered online so her wrap and Hannah's smoothie would be ready when she got to the restaurant. Before she left, she handed the girl the remote control for the TV and made sure she knew how to work it. It turned out she didn't need to worry – figuring the TV out was an innate skill programmed into every teenager.
When Emily got back, Hannah was lying down on the couch, but she sat up immediately when she saw Emily – something which didn't go unnoticed by the profiler. Emily wanted her daughter to be able to relax and make herself at home while she was there, but the girl wasn't acting how she would if she were at home. She was acting like a guest who didn't want to impose.
Hannah thanked Emily as she accepted the smoothie. She always said 'please' and 'thank you,' but she was being almost overly polite if there was such a thing. She was thanking Emily for every little thing. Earlier Hannah had thanked her after asking if she could use the bathroom and being told where it was.
Emily sat down next to Hannah on the couch and opened the to-go container that held the wrap she ordered for herself.
Hannah hadn't changed the channel, but she had turned the volume up. Emily wondered if the girl really wanted to watch Friends or if she just didn't want to change the channel because she thought Emily was watching it.
"Do you want to watch a movie?" Emily asked the teenager.
"We can watch whatever you want," Hannah said. It was Emily's house, not hers. She was a guest, and she wasn't going to just take over Emily's TV.
Emily went into the movies that were available On Demand. "Let me know if you see anything you want to watch," Emily told her daughter.
Neither of them saw anything they were dying to see as Emily scrolled through the new releases. It mostly consisted of horror movies, which made sense for the time of year - it was the end of December, and movies that came out before Halloween were just now available to rent.
"How do you feel about horror movies?" Emily asked her teenager as she took in the limited choices.
"Like everyone in them makes bad life choices," Hannah replied with a dry expression.
Emily chuckled softly at her daughter's response. "They're teaching you what not to do," she joked. "Never pick up hitchhikers and stay away from clowns," the profiler told her daughter mock seriously.
"I can't drive yet, and I wasn't planning on hanging out at any little kid's birthday parties," Hannah told the woman in an amused tone.
Giving up on the idea of renting a new movie from On Demand, Emily switched to Netflix and started going through the titles in the "Trending Now" section.
"Sixteen Candles?" Emily suggested, stopping on the thumbnail image of the movie poster featuring Molly Ringwald front and center.
"That's so overrated," Hannah said.
Emily gasped, mock-scandalized that her kid had no appreciation for John Hughes. "No!"
"Yes," Hannah insisted.
Emily stared at the girl in disbelief. "It's a classic."
"That's just a nice way of saying it's old," Hannah said dismissively. She preferred more modern teen movies like The Edge of Seventeen to outdated eighties teen movies. It was more of a generational gap than anything else.
"It came out when I was your age," Emily told her fourteen year old.
"And you're how old?" Hannah retorted with raised eyebrows. Emily just made her point for her. Her birth mother didn't act old, but she was…well, literally old enough to be her mother, and not in the teen mom sense. That made Emily old by the young teenager's standards, even if Emily was pretty cool for an old person.
"Old enough to have a teenager who thinks I'm practically ancient," Emily replied dryly.
"Not ancient," Hannah told the woman. "They didn't have TV in ancient times." She gave Emily a cheeky grin.
Hannah didn't really mean to start with old jokes, but the conversation went that direction naturally after Emily made the mistake of choosing an old movie from the eighties. Once she got started, Hannah couldn't seem to help herself. Fortunately, Emily seemed to take any jokes at her expense in stride.
Emily wasn't easily offended, and she actually thought it was nice to see the daughter she had come to know and love acting more like herself and not like the model child Hannah had been trying so hard to be since she got there.
"Okay, young lady," Emily said playfully as she dropped the remote control in the girl's lap. "See if you can find anything you would watch."
"Beauty and the Beast," Hannah murmured softly when she came across the 2017 remake, talking more to herself than to Emily. "That was my favorite Disney movie when I was little," she said a little louder.
"Because Belle's a fellow bookworm?" Emily guessed.
The profiler's guess was correct. As a young child, the girl saw herself in the smart heroine who loved to read and always had her nose stuck in a book. Hannah was continually amazed by how well her birth mother seemed to know her already. Sometimes it felt like the woman could read her mind as easily as she could read a book.
Hannah looked at Emily in surprise. "Yeah. And because she didn't need a prince to save her."
Now, that was the independent teenager talking – a teenager who sounded a lot like Emily.
"Let's watch it," Emily said, surprising Hannah further.
"We don't have to." Hannah immediately tried to backtrack, not wanting the sophisticated older woman to think she was a baby for choosing that particular movie – a movie that, at least in her mind, was for kids. The original version was anyway. This version wasn't animated, but still.
"I want to," Emily insisted. She wasn't sure why her kid was backing off of a choice they were both okay with, but Emily really did want to watch it with her. It was her daughter's favorite fairy tale, even if this wasn't the version that Emily imagined her daughter had probably watched countless times as a little girl. It wasn't the same as being there when Hannah was younger, but it was Emily's chance to experience a childhood favorite with her now.
Hannah stared at Emily for a several seconds as if waiting for the woman to change her mind before shrugging and pressing play.
"I want to see Hermoine as Belle," Emily said excitedly as Emma Watson came on the screen.
"You like Harry Potter?" Hannah asked, looking a little surprised.
"Yes. I'm a nerd," Emily admitted.
"No, you're not," Hannah told her. "I think everyone who hasn't been living under a rock has read or at least seen Harry Potter."
"I take it you've read the books? What's your favorite?" Emily asked eagerly.
"Order of the Phoenix," Hannah answered immediately. "What's yours?"
"Half-Blood Prince." Although she wasn't going to get into it with her fourteen year old daughter, the former spy could relate to Snape in some ways. Half-Blood Prince resonated with Emily because of that. "But Order of the Phoenix was a close second. Oh, I know what we're watching tomorrow. Harry Potter movie marathon?"
"Okay," Hannah agreed readily with a small grin.
They stopped talking and started paying attention to the movie when Emma Watson broke out into the first song. Emily finished eating within the first thirty minutes of the movie. She glanced at Hannah, who also appeared to be done. "Why don't you take your medicine now? It might help to take it with food, if you can call a smoothie food."
"It makes me tired," Hannah said. "I want to watch the rest of the movie."
In that moment, the girl sounded younger than she was. She didn't sound like a teenager. She sounded like a little girl who didn't want to go to bed because she was afraid she would miss something. But in this case, all Hannah would miss was watching a movie with Emily, and they could do that any time.
"If you fall asleep, I'll stop it and we can finish it tomorrow. We have five days to do nothing but watch movies," Emily pointed out.
"Okay, fine," Hannah gave in reluctantly. To the teenager's credit, she really was trying not to be difficult. She got up from the couch and picked her cup and Emily's empty to-go container up. She'd become more relaxed as the night wore on, but she was still trying to be a good houseguest.
"You don't have to do that, honey," Emily told her, not wanting her sick kid waiting on her.
"It's okay. I don't mind," Hannah said.
Hannah threw her empty cup and the empty to-go container away and then stood in the middle of the kitchen, looking around uncertainly. She didn't know where the glasses were so she started opening kitchen cabinets at random.
"What are you looking for?"
Emily's voice coming from right behind her startled Hannah enough that she jumped slightly.
"Jeez, you scared me," Hannah complained as her heartrate returned to normal. "I didn't even hear you come in."
"Sorry. Can I help you find something?"
"I was just looking for a glass," Hannah explained.
Emily opened the cabinet to the left of the sink, took a tall glass out, and handed it to the girl.
"Thanks." Hannah went over to the refrigerator to get ice and filtered water. Once the glass was full, she took it into the guest room, where she took her medicine – all three kinds. There was Tylenol to keep her fever down, Tamiflu, and finally the nighttime cough syrup without which she would be up coughing half the night.
When the girl returned to the living room and sat down next to her on the couch, Emily moved a velvet throw pillow to her lap and patted it in invitation. "Lie down, sweetheart," Emily urged her, knowing Hannah was right and all the medicine would make her tired. She really doubted her kid would make it through the movie. "You'll be more comfortable."
The tall, long-legged teenager could easily take over the entire couch – and had while Emily was out picking up food. There wasn't really enough room for both of them on the couch, not if Hannah was going to lie down…not unless the girl was practically lying on top of her birth mother like the woman was encouraging her to do.
Hannah hesitated, looking at Emily uncertainly. "I don't want to make you sick."
That was definitely true, but it was only part of the reason for her hesitation.
"I'll take my chances," Emily replied easily. As if to prove it, she dropped a tentative kiss on the crown of the girl's head. Emily held her breath as she waited to see how Hannah would react to the decidedly parental display of affection.
Hannah debated for another second before lying down with her head on the pillow in Emily's lap. At first, the teenager was stiff as a board, but the feel of Emily's fingers running gently through her hair helped her relax.
That was how the fourteen year old fell asleep.
True to her word, Emily stopped the movie when her daughter's eyes fluttered shut and her breathing evened out. She thought about waking Hannah so the girl could move to an actual bed but decided to wait a while. She didn't want this moment to end. She was finally getting to mother her child. As she looked down at her sleeping child with a soft, tender expression, Emily felt like her heart might burst.
A/N: Thanks for reading! Next one will have some Emily and Hannah, Emily and Mendoza, and maybe a little tiny bit of Hotch.
