A/N: As always, thank you to everyone who read and reviewed the last chapter! This chapter is a little bit on the shorter side. Emily finally talks to Steve for the first time since she was stabbed. And then there's some Emily and Hannah interaction and some set up for Hotch and Emily, with much more of that to come next chapter.

Chapter 36

Emily was in the hospital for the next week. She was only alone at night when it was after visiting hours. The rest of the time she always had at least one person from the BAU visiting. Hotch came every day, bringing a bouquet of roses with him the first time he visited her in the regular hospital room she was moved to after her condition was downgraded from critical to serious.

When Steve appeared for the first time on Wednesday morning, hanging back awkwardly in the doorway of Emily's hospital room, Hotch gave Emily's hand a reassuring squeeze and then excused himself, leaving Emily and the adoptive father alone to talk for the first time since Hannah was held hostage.

"Hey. How are you feeling?" Steve asked in a friendly enough tone as he moved a little closer to Emily's hospital bed. He made no move to take the chair Hotch had vacated. He wasn't planning on staying. This wouldn't take long.

"I'm fine," Emily answered automatically. She looked at the adoptive father nervously. "How's Hannah?"

"She's okay, thanks to you," Steve said, shifting uncomfortably. It wasn't exactly a thank you, but at least he was acknowledging what the woman had done to save his daughter.

"She was only in danger because of me," Emily pointed out, not sure she deserved any kind of acknowledgement. She knew the adoptive father blamed her – at least he did before. And the truth was that she blamed herself. "The only reason Jeremy Sayer went after her is because she's important to me." As she turned over the events that landed her in a hospital bed in her mind over the last twenty-four hours, Emily had planned out what she would say to Steve the next time they spoke, but it felt like the words she needed to say next were sticking in her throat. She took a deep breath and forced herself to continue. If she didn't say it now, she never would. "After everything that happened, I- I would understand if you don't want me to see her anymore," she told him, her voice cracking with emotion at the mere idea of never seeing her daughter again.

Steve was surprised, and it showed. He didn't expect the woman who clearly wanted to be a part of Hannah's life to so readily accept that maybe it was too dangerous for her to see Hannah.

But Emily was trying to do what was best for Hannah. That was what parents did, and it was what Emily was doing now. It was just more proof to the adoptive father that Emily would do anything for Hannah.

The adoptive father knew his life would be a lot easier if his child's biological mother wasn't in it. The real question was whether or not Hannah's life would be easier – better – if her biological mother bowed out now.

His daughter's words to him in the back of the SUV on the way to the hospital stuck with him. I can't lose another mom. It had just about broken his heart.

As much as it pained him to admit it, his daughter already saw Emily as a second mom, and losing Emily now would hurt Hannah. That was the last thing Steve wanted to do, but what happened on Monday could never happen again. He didn't think he had to say that though. He knew Emily would die before letting anything happen to his daughter. She almost had died for Hannah. That was enough for him. That was all the proof he really needed to know without a shadow of a doubt that Emily would never do anything to hurt Hannah or jeopardize the girl's safety.

"I trust you with her," Steve said.

Now it was Emily's turn to look at Steve in surprise. "You do?" She questioned with raised eyebrows.

"How could I not after what you did?" Steve muttered the rhetorical question more to himself than to Emily. "I think she was more scared of losing you than she was of anything else," he admitted. "She loves you." He hesitated slightly. He wasn't sure if he should betray his daughter's confidence, but there was something he wanted Emily to talk to Hannah about. "She thinks it's her fault you got hurt."

"It's not," Emily said immediately.

"Try telling her that," Steve said ruefully. "She won't listen to me or anyone on your team. Maybe if she hears it from you…"

Emily nodded in understanding. "I'll talk to her," she promised.

Steve had only kept Hannah home from school for one day. The fourteen year old went back to school on Wednesday morning. She turned up at the hospital just before 4:00 pm every afternoon to visit Emily. Emily's first chance to really talk to the young teenager about what happened with Jeremy Sayer was the first afternoon Hannah showed up, still in her school uniform with her backpack in tow.

"Come here," Emily said, motioning for Hannah to come closer to the bed. She'd seen Hannah a few times now since waking up in the hospital, but she hadn't gotten a hug yet, and she really wanted to hold the girl in her arms for just a moment. "What do I have to do to get a hug?"

Hannah hesitated uncertainly. "I don't want to hurt you."

"You won't," Emily assured her.

Hannah walked over to the bed and leaned down to gingerly put her arms around Emily's shoulders in a very tentative side hug. When she started to pull away, Emily reached out to cup the girl's cheek in her hand and looked her over carefully. Everyone had told Emily that Hannah was okay, and Emily had even seen Hannah for herself, but Emily was pretty out of it at the time. Now Emily's eyes roamed over the perfect, unblemished skin on her daughter's throat where the knife had been to make sure it hadn't left its mark. Once Emily was satisfied, she let her hand drop from her daughter's velvet soft check and allowed the girl to sit down.

Emily knew that just because it didn't leave a physical scar, that didn't mean the traumatic experience didn't leave an emotional scar. Hannah was absolutely terrified when Jeremy Sayer had the knife to her throat. Then the girl had to watch as he stabbed Emily with that same knife. It was a lot for a fourteen year old to deal with.

"How are you sleeping?" Emily asked, studying the girl intently. What she really wanted to know was if Hannah was having nightmares.

"Fine," Hannah responded, a little baffled by the question. "I'm not the one sleeping in a hospital bed," she pointed out in a somewhat playful tone before turning serious. "You are," she continued solemnly. "But it should've been me."

"Oh, honey, I would never have let that happen," Emily told her daughter, looking the girl straight in the eye.

"You told me not to leave the house alone, but I didn't listen," the fourteen year old confessed. She felt like she might cry but was doing everything she could to keep her tears at bay. "I was looking for Alex, and he had Alex. He only got into the house because I didn't listen. It's my fault you got hurt."

Rossi had already filled Emily in. She knew Jeremy used the dog to lure Hannah out of the fenced backyard. It wasn't unusual for serial killers to use a ruse involving animals. More often than not, it worked. Emily couldn't really blame her fourteen year old for falling for the same trick so many grown men and women fell for. And, if Hannah didn't actually fall for it, Emily knew Jeremy would have just broken into the townhouse.

Emily shook her head. "No," she said firmly. "Sweetheart, what Jeremy Sayer did is not your fault. If you didn't go out to the back alley looking for Alex, then Jeremy would have broken into your house. The outcome still would have been the same."

What Emily didn't say was that it would have been very different if she had been there. She wouldn't have let Hannah leave the house alone. She would have known something wasn't right the second she saw the open gate. She still thought Jeremy would have broken in, but he wouldn't have gotten anywhere near Hannah.

If she had been in the townhouse, Emily would have shot Jeremy Sayer before he ever laid one finger on her child. But Emily wasn't there, and that was on her. Steve didn't want her there, but she should have fought him on it. She knew what could happen to her daughter. She knew, and it had almost happened despite her best efforts to stop it from happening.

"He had me. You shouldn't have taken my place," Hannah said guiltily as she thought about how badly she had wanted her birth mother when she first felt the cool edge of the blade against her throat. Even as terrified as she was in that moment, she knew Emily would save her, but she didn't know the woman would risk her life to do it. And Emily didn't just risk her life. Emily begged Jeremy to let her take Hannah's place. She flat-out told Jeremy that killing her would get more attention than killing Hannah would. The showdown had been a lot more talk and a lot less action than the fourteen year old expected. In her mind, the young teenager had sort of expected Emily and her team to come in, guns blazing, like in a movie. In movies, the good guys always won, but life wasn't a movie, and Jeremy hadn't just surrendered the moment the FBI arrived. It didn't end when the good guys arrived. The townhouse had literally been surrounded by FBI agents, and Emily had still gotten hurt. "I- I wanted you to come and save me, but I didn't want him to hurt you instead of me," Hannah tried to explain.

"This," Emily said, gesturing to her abdomen, "doesn't hurt me anywhere near as much as it would hurt me if you got hurt. It was my decision to take your place, and I would do it again."

"Does this happen a lot?" Hannah asked. Her tone was lighter than it had been up to that point, but there was an underlying worry and fear behind the question.

"Not a lot," Emily answered carefully.

"But it does happen," Hannah concluded, reading between the lines.

"Sometimes my job can be dangerous," Emily responded honestly.

Hannah nodded despondently as, for the first time since meeting Emily, she thought that maybe her birth mother's job wasn't so cool, not if Emily was in danger all the time.

"Not to brag, but I'm pretty good at what I do," Emily told her kid, trying to reassure her in a more lighthearted manner. When it didn't work, Emily sighed. "Look, I'm not going to lie and promise that I'll never get hurt again, but I've been doing this job for a long time, and I know what I'm doing. And I don't do it by myself. My team always has my back."

Hannah merely nodded again, but she didn't look nearly as upset as she had before. She just had to trust that Emily knew what she was doing and wasn't going to get herself killed. She really didn't think she could handle it if she lost Emily. She had a mom again, and she didn't want to lose that.

"I brought you some books," Hannah told the woman in an abrupt change of subject, knowing there was nothing Emily could really say that would make her stop worrying for the woman's safety. She reached into her backpack and dug around for the paperbacks she'd finished over the holidays. It seemed like they had similar taste in books, and she thought Emily might want to read them while she was stuck in a hospital bed.

From there, their conversation segued into books and Emily's extreme boredom. Emily was rarely alone in her hospital room, but the boredom of being unable to do anything but lie there was getting to the field agent who felt more like a prisoner than a patient.

Elizabeth Prentiss had left D.C. after ensuring Emily was going to be okay and had the best care possible. The elder Prentiss was still hurt by all of the secrets and lies of omission. She needed some time to get over it and decided to leave rather than stay and say something to her daughter that she would regret later. Emily could tell her mother was still upset and thought it was probably best that she left when she did. Neither of them wanted to fight.

The family that was there for Emily throughout the duration of her hospital stay was her BAU family. They all tried their best to keep Emily entertained. JJ, Tara and Penelope spent hours in Emily's room gossiping. They talked about everything from what they were going to wear to Rossi's upcoming wedding to whether there were any hot doctors in the hospital who were Emily's type. Okay, that last one was all Penelope. Still, the female profilers had fun with it, making a game out of looking for rings on the fingers of any and all male doctors and asking Emily if she would go out with any of the ones who were unmarried. During the course of that conversation, Emily profiled her own surgeon as a sadist who enjoyed her misery and was only keeping her confined to the hospital bed for his entertainment. He wasn't actually a sadist, but Emily had never been the biggest fan of doctors.

Reid brought a deck of playing cards, and they played poker. They tried to teach Hannah, but she realized right away that she was at a definite disadvantage playing with a bunch of profilers who were, in the fourteen year old's words, 'human lie detectors.' Emily chuckled softly at that and joked that she hoped the young teenager would remember that when she was tempted to lie to her in the future.

By the time Emily was finally released from the hospital, her condo was as good as new, thanks to Derek Morgan. Hotch insisted on driving Emily home from the hospital. His lips twitched into a small smirk when, in typical Emily Prentiss fashion, she argued vehemently with the nurse about the wheelchair and then tried to tell him she didn't need a ride.

Hotch glanced at her with a neutral expression, successfully hiding his amusement. "I distinctly remember you driving me to and from work for a week after Foyet attacked me in my apartment," he reminded her as he waited for her to sit down in the passenger seat of his car. Once she did, he closed the car door carefully, loaded her bag into the trunk, and went around to the other side to the driver's seat.

"What do you want for dinner?" He asked as he started the drive to her condo.

"Okay, I did not feed you when I drove you home," Emily pointed out.

"That's because I can cook," Hotch replied easily.

Emily looked at him incredulously, her mouth hanging open in mock-offense. "Really? I was stabbed, and you're making fun of my cooking skills?"

"I didn't say anything about your cooking," Hotch countered. He only implied that she couldn't cook. He didn't actually say it. "But you do owe me dinner," he said, thinking of the dinner plans they made on New Year's Eve. That felt like it was a long time ago, but really it had only been a matter of weeks. "We were supposed to get dinner the week after New Year's..."

"But we didn't because of Jeremy," Emily said.

"Have dinner with me tonight," Hotch pressed her. "We don't have to go out," he said quickly, knowing she would be more comfortable at home while she was still recovering from her stab wound. "I can cook, and we can eat at your place if you feel up to it."

"You just don't want me to cook," Emily retorted playfully.

"Or maybe I just want you to follow the doctor's orders and take it easy for a while," Hotch told her. "Which is something you've never been good at."

"Following the doctor's orders or following your orders?" Emily questioned wryly, a smirk playing across her lips. She knew she'd never been very good at taking orders.

"Both," Hotch told her dryly as he remembered the times when he was still Unit Chief and she had disagreed with his orders. They were few and far between, but they were certainly memorable.

When she ignored his orders and continued investigating Father Paul Silvano after her friend's death, Hotch was legitimately worried he wouldn't be able to protect her. She was right all along, but the priest had diplomatic immunity, and there were politics at play. Hotch didn't want to have to fire her over it and was glad she was right in the end. If she'd been wrong, it would have been her badge, and the decision to fire her would have been made over his head. Aaron Hotchner wouldn't have hesitated to come down on any another agent who so openly defied his orders, but, for some reason, he didn't want to fire Emily Prentiss, no matter what it was that she did.

"And yet you recommended me for a promotion," Emily teased, referring to his last request that she be named Unit Chief of the BAU when he officially resigned.

When they got to her building, Hotch parked the car and walked Emily up to her unit. Before leaving, he set her bag down just inside her bedroom door and made sure she didn't need anything. She had finally agreed to dinner so he would be back in a few hours at the most, but he didn't like the idea of her being alone when she had just gotten home from the hospital. Knowing her, she would try to do too much too soon, with painful consequences. Although she wouldn't admit it, there was no way she wasn't sore. As someone who had been stabbed before himself, Hotch knew she was still hurting. He wanted her to just relax and let him take care of her for one night, but Emily Prentiss wasn't very good at letting anyone else take care of her. She wouldn't be Emily if she was.

A/N: I really wanted to include Emily's dinner with Hotch, but I'm not quite happy with it yet and decided to go ahead and post what I have written. Thanks for reading. And, for anyone in the US, happy Thanksgiving (a few days early)!