Author's Note: I'm so sorry for the delay! Every time I've sat down to upload this chapter, life's gotten in the way. It is what it is, at least for right now. This is a BIG chapter though, and I hope it helps you all to forgive me. ;)
Chapter Four: Fantasy
March 28th 2015, 4:49am:
Sometimes, caught up in a fantasy, we miss what's right in front of us. Sometimes, that which is right in front of us is so weighty that we allow ourselves to drown in the fantasy.
Eventually, all fantasies, end.
JJ, for the first time in years, awoke with a smile on her face. The early morning sunlight that washed over her as she rolled onto her back didn't burn with the reminder that it was a new day, but bathed her in a warmth that only exemplified the reason she'd awoken so relaxed and tranquil.
The plush mattress beneath her, the cool sheets against her skin, the luxurious comforter that cocooned her finally proved themselves worth the inordinate amount of money she'd spent on them. And the prospect of climbing out of that bed and heading into a world where she had to spend every second proving herself, didn't fill her with dread, but determination.
All because she'd had a dream. A beautiful dream. An arguably creepy dream, but a beautiful dream nonetheless.
Striding into work an hour later, she felt brand new. She didn't feel like pre-Askari JJ, and she didn't feel like that JJ that had been born shortly thereafter… She literally felt like a whole new person, carrying pieces of each persona.
Perhaps that was where she'd been going wrong. She'd been mourning the loss of that pure view she'd once had of the world, but could it really be classed as a loss? Furthermore, she'd been going out of her way to banish every part of her that had been located throughout her spiraling, but were those pieces all bad?
Maybe, to get back on track, she neither needed to expel that which she'd found nor search for that which she'd lost… she simply needed to just be. She needed to allow herself to just be.
When her phone rang, she stuffed her keys into her mouth and dug in her purse to locate the device - and then smiled around the key fob when she saw Emily's name accompanied by a photo taken many years ago.
Emily hated the picture, because it was taken during one of the few occasions in which she'd let her guard down and actually gotten normal-person drunk around the team – that and the fact that the goofy smile adorning her face really didn't bode well with the sophisticated, perfect appearance she fought so hard to keep up.
For that reason, it was JJ's favorite picture.
"If you're calling to tell me we have a case," She greeted as she accepted the call, "you need not have bothered. I'm on my way up as we speak."
"On your way up?" Emily frowned, looking to the time on her screen. "It's barely 6am."
"Well," JJ smiled, "I guess I just had the best kind of wakeup call and wanted to get a head start on this beautiful day."
"Is that so?" Emily smiled, overjoyed to hear JJ so, well, overjoyed. "I'm guessing by that you mean that Garcia won her little intervention?"
"Not exactly…" JJ responded, casting an acknowledging nod to a passing agent as she alighted the elevator. "Dreams are just wonderful things."
"A dream…" Emily repeated, intrigued. "Do I get to know whom or what this dream was about?"
JJ dropped her purse to her desk and then paused. There were few agents around this early in the morning, but there were still some – one of whom being Morgan, who, while he was thirty feet away in the break room, would probably still utilize his hawk-hearing to listen to her response.
"Um…" She lowered her voice to a whisper. "Just some… fun involving a motorcycle-riding stranger I know. Which probably makes it creepy but… god, Em. It was hot as hell."
She lost herself to the memory, her bottom lip slipping between her teeth. But when she received no response from Emily, she found herself blushing. Pre-Askari JJ wouldn't have done what she did last night, but pre-Askari JJ also wouldn't have said what she just did in her place of work. Perhaps letting her reborn-JJ flag fly wasn't as much of a positive step as she'd originally thought.
"…Are you still there?"
"Yeah, I'm still here." Emily replied quietly, and then smiled. "I'm just trying to figure out how I get to work now that you're already there."
"Car trouble?" JJ presumed as she headed towards the break room, actually grateful for the topic change. It was all good and well finding her misplaced confidence, but perhaps she needed to ebb it down a notch or five.
"Yeah. On the day that you choose to be an early bird. And that whole 'no unaccounted for vehicles passed FBI checkpoints' rule really doesn't help the issue."
"I can come get you if you want?" JJ offered, pulling a mug from the cupboard, which she quickly discarded with a grimace. "That way I can stop by Starbucks and save myself from using the break room mugs that everyone seems incapable of washing after they've used them."
Emily laughed huskily, tossing her keys up and down in her open palm. "Did anyone get the hint in the inflection of your tone there? I mean, it was kinda subtle."
"Only Morgan." JJ turned and leant against the counter, a smile pulling at her lips. "But something in his schoolboy smile tells me he's not sorry."
"He wasn't sorry for strategically lucking out of being my ride, either." Emily replied, a hint of bitterness in her tone. "It's like he doesn't realize that being one of only two people who don't live forty miles from me instantly means he should be on call to help a lady in distress."
"Wait, I wasn't your first call?" JJ frowned, mildly hurt.
Emily fell silent once again, and when she did speak, her words were unusually clipped. "His name comes before yours in my phonebook. Anyway, I should go. I'll see you soon."
"But I really don't mind coming to get-" The call ended before she could finish, and JJ couldn't help but stare at the phone in disbelief. Emily was never so careless with her emotions, and everything about the way that call had ended was emotional – because Emily was also never so brusque with her, unless something really wasn't right.
"She okay?" Morgan asked with a frown, mostly relying on JJ's not-so micro expressions in order to tell there was something wrong. "I know she had car trouble, but she said she was gonna ask someone else."
"Uh, yeah." JJ quirked her eyebrow, her thumb tapping in contemplation against her phone. "She did: me. And apparently quickly regretted it when she found out I was already here."
She chewed at her lip, every occasion in which Emily hadn't hesitated to help her out flooding her mind and, consequently, every occasion in which she'd likely been too wrapped up in herself to help Emily tagging right along with them. Maybe that was why Emily hadn't called her first – because, for her, asking for help was difficult enough, without knowing you likely weren't going to get it anyway.
She quickly looked back to Morgan. "I'm gonna go get her. There's plenty of time until everyone else-"
"Well it looks like you're going to have to take JJ with you, Morgan." Hotch poked his head around the door, uncaring for whatever he'd just interrupted, and handed over a bunch of files. As he left the room, he yelled over his shoulder. "Rossi has some publisher crisis; just brief her on Mathew Jacobs on the way to the prison."
"Prison?" JJ looked to Morgan, since he seemed to be the only one clued in on their impromptu assignment.
"Yeah." Morgan nodded, absentmindedly placing his mug to the counter as he scanned over the files. "There's a guy being executed on Monday, real creep." He looked up. "But apparently he's willing to give up the burial plots of his last three victims. Rossi and I were meant to head over and interview him."
JJ looked back to her phone and grimaced, as though the device somehow represented Emily. She couldn't not go to the prison – she didn't want to not go. She also didn't relish the prospect of leaving Emily in a predicament when Emily had never once left her. No… she didn't relish the prospect of ignoring the fact that that phone call had been one of the few occasions in which Emily's behavior had implied something really wasn't right.
Reading through JJ's silence, Morgan spoke. "Call her. Tell her we'll pick her up on the way and she can come with. If we get a case we all have to come back anyway, so there's no reason she needs to be here."
JJ dialed Emily without hesitation, and left the break room to grab her jacket. When she met Morgan by the doors less than a minute later, she was already done with the call – something that left her certain she really had missed an opportunity to show Emily that their friendship ran two ways. The brunette's tone had been back to normal, but that didn't say a great deal.
"So?" Morgan asked as he called for the elevator. "We heading to DC first?"
"No." JJ shook her head, and then looked to Morgan with a smile. "But did you really expect Emily Prentiss to burden us like that?"
Morgan chuckled and stepped inside the elevator. Pushing the button for the ground level, he stood beside JJ and fixed his eyes on the numbers above the door. "One of these days, that woman is going to have to accept help."
Not if she can help it, JJ thought, while silently promising Emily that she'd never again let her be in a position where she had to ask for it – or, at the very least, a position where she had to regret asking for it.
March 28th 2015, 2:13pm:
The trip to the prison, as both JJ and Morgan had expected, had been a farce, one last hurrah on Jacobs' part before he was put to death. All they'd really achieved in the seven long hours they'd been there, was a running commentary from the warden about how exemplary his prison is, and a manifesto from their trickster that they imagined he hoped they'd leak to the press. The best they could hope for was that that manifesto would fill in the blanks that he'd failed to, but they weren't holding their breath.
On the way back to headquarters, Morgan had suggested they stop and grab lunch – specifically coffee since they had 40,000 words of nonsensical jargon to plow through that afternoon – and JJ, of course, hadn't argued. Perhaps she could grab something for Emily too, since her morning hadn't gone so well.
While Morgan picked out an almost humorously healthy lunch, she – after making no attempts to hide her amusement – opted for Asiago cheese bagels, cream cheese, and chips for good measure. Oh, and two large iced coffees on the side. But when they arrived back at base and Emily was nowhere to be found, she began to look at her choices a little differently.
There was no way she could eat all that, and if she drank both of those coffees to herself after being on a strict minimal-caffeine diet for four months, Hotch might just begin to think she'd taken a nose-dive off of the wagon. And he'd probably be justified.
Instead, she left Emily's half of the lunch on her desk with a note- Save me from myself, -J xo –and headed back to her own desk to begin the mammoth task of searching for clues in Mathew Jacobs' life story.
For almost a full hour, she read both what was written and what wasn't – the solid and the implied, the implied and the avoided. She treated each word as a stone, and left none unturned, until her eyes felt like they were bleeding. Studying people was one thing; studying text was another. She found herself suddenly envious of Reid's quick-reading abilities.
"This guy is so full of himself." Morgan scoffed. "Listen to this: I don't even have to try anymore; I walk into a room and they flock to me like animals during mating season."
Snickering at the obvious, JJ looked up to the guy who had apparently lost all memory of the dozens of women who flocked to him in clubs… and then stopped. Everything, for a second, stopped.
She blinked, and blinked again, the witty remark she'd planned to toss Morgan's way dying in the very moment that she came face to face with the birth of a reality that she, somehow, hadn't considered.
Across the bullpen, Emily – in full leathers, a helmet under her arm and a brown, paper Panera bag in her hand – stared at her desk, and then looked slowly, cautiously to JJ, an expression on her face of both remorse and panic. And JJ, as an instant reflex, felt vomit rushing to her chest.
She pressed a hand to her mouth and pushed herself hastily and shakily from her seat, taking large strides across the bullpen and towards the restroom. Right up until she slipped beyond the glass doors, her eyes remained fixed on Emily with a distinct sense of caution, like she was looking at a fraud, an alien in her friend's body. And when she reached the bathroom, she barely had chance to close the stall door behind before her lunch burst from her lips.
Sweat beaded against her forehead as her chest continued to heave, until she produced nothing but gassy air. Her lungs burnt and her head pounded, while her fingers gripped the sides of the toilet like it was the only thing that felt real to her.
It was.
She'd thought she was getting somewhere. She'd really thought she was getting better, facing reality and growing to accept her shadows. But apparently she'd just been so afraid of that reality, that she'd created yet another false one to placate herself, and now she didn't know what was real.
She heard the main door to the restroom swing open and Emily call her name, but she didn't respond. And when a hand rested against her back, instantly making soothing circles there, she jerked it away much like she had back in Wisconsin all those months ago.
Emily, for her part, took an immediate step back, her palms out in a surrendering manner even though JJ couldn't see the gesture. "I know this is a whole world of complicated. And I'm sorry that realizing I'm your… stranger is vomit-worthy, but I'm still me. I'm still your friend."
"It's not that." JJ replied, harshly spitting the last few remnants of vomit into the bowl. "I guess it's just difficult to laugh at your own expense when you're not in on the joke."
"It wasn't like that, JJ." Emily reasoned, the expression in her eyes somewhat devastated, because it really wasn't like that. "That night when you asked who I was…" She sighed. "I thought you already knew, and when I realized you didn't, there was no non-awkward way to answer your question. So I just stopped riding, at least to work. But my car's been in for repairs for the past week; I had no choice. So I just did my best to avoid you. And then last night happened and it didn't feel right to ride today-"
She was in full-blown rambling mode now, a few paces away from frantic – because it sounded like excuses.
"-So I called Morgan, and he was already at work, so I called you, and then I didn't know how to respond when you asked why you were my second choice, because you'd never usually be my second choice, and so I ended the call. And then you said you were going to be gone all day, so I figured I'd be safe and that I'd just work something else out for Monday…" She trailed off, certain she was making this worse; dropped her forehead against the wall of the cubicle and closed her eyes with a defeated sigh. "You weren't supposed to be here, JJ."
"…I wasn't referring to you." JJ responded quietly. "I was referring to myself. I was so set on finding the person I once was or the person I now am or the beauty I used to see in the world or whatever that I deluded myself. I had to have known it was you, and yet I allowed myself to romanticize you, to believe that there's still mystery in the world. I created another false reality."
Wiping her mouth with a tissue, she tossed it into the toilet and flushed. And yet she remained still, unable to turn and look at Emily who she knew was still donning those damn leathers that she'd utilized to deceive herself.
Finally pushing herself to her feet, she slipped by the brunette and walked towards the sinks, and only trusted herself to look at Emily when she was nothing more than a reflection in the mirror. She dropped her eyes and washed her hands and mouth.
"I made myself the butt of the joke, but the best part is, I didn't let myself realize it was a joke. That's the issue…" She smiled, but there was nothing elated in that smile. "I convinced myself I was getting better. So better in fact that I was able to feel something towards someone." She met Emily's eyes in the reflection. "But that probably wasn't real either."
Reflexively, tellingly, Emily cleared her throat, and then blended it so seamlessly that it was questionable that it had even happened.
"You're not a joke." She stepped forward, instinctively pulling JJ against her – something that, surprisingly to her, JJ accepted. Brushing her lips over JJ's hairline, she briefly closed her eyes - a moment to prevent herself from creating a false reality. "Not to me; not to anyone."
"Except myself." JJ whispered so quietly that she couldn't be sure Emily had heard, and then, when she began to feel like Emily's perfume was mocking her, she added a little louder, "And I'm sure I smell pretty gross right now so I wouldn't stand that close to me if I were you."
Emily let JJ pull away, unsure what to do with this situation that was seventy shades of complicated. She'd really thought the best way to untangle the web was to remain silent about the situation, but that probably would have worked out a lot better if her clusterfuck of a morning hadn't left her so blind as to not remove her leathers before she entered BAU territory. How could she have not considered the possibility that JJ may be here?
From her standpoint in that very second, all that lay ahead were tangles tighter than ever. She wasn't sure there was a way out of this - at least none that left she and JJ's friendship intact.
"That meeting that night was the reason I stopped, Emily." JJ said out of nowhere, leant against the sink, her fingers gripping the porcelain as she fixed her gaze on the ground. "When I woke in that hospital, with the biggest hangover of the century, I clung to that meeting because it was the only memory I had of the previous year that didn't make me want to wind up in the hospital – or worse – again." She looked up, her jaw locked. "So yes, I am a joke. Because the reason I changed my joke of a life was because of a joke."
Emily's heart ached and, untypical for her, tears pricked at her eyes. How did she respond to that? She hadn't done anything purposely deceitful, but with JJ stood before her in that moment, she couldn't help but feel that that didn't matter. She hadn't intended to deceive, but she had deceived – enough to cause further conflict to someone who had had their fill of it.
As JJ turned away, words passed Emily's lips without any prior thought.
"Someone once told me: Take a second to fall apart, and I'll spend a lifetime putting you back together." When JJ's eyes promptly snapped up in their reflection, she swallowed back the fear she always felt when giving away pieces of herself and continued. "They didn't mean it, but by the time I realized that, I'd already allowed myself to believe them."
"What did they do?" JJ asked quietly, the expression on Emily's face really quite unsettling to be witness to. Her characteristic confidence was gone almost entirely, and then JJ realized why that was: she was giving it to her. In offering this information, showing vulnerability, she was trying to level the playing field.
"What most cowards do – ran when it got complicated." Emily replied solidly, a mask that JJ was more familiar with. "People think they want to see the person they love as they really are, in their rawest form, but when they have it, they don't know what to do with it."
JJ's eyes dropped, as if in agreement with Emily's statement, and she immediately thought of Will.
He'd tried. He really had. But she'd not exactly been an easy person to try for, an easy person to get through to, an easy person to love in the form she'd taken out of nowhere. It told her, with a heavy heart, that no one person could ever know you fully, inside and out, and continue to love you the same as they once had. Such unhindered access was dangerous, and eventually, inevitably, warped love.
It was true that she'd never loved him the way he'd needed her to, and because of that, she hadn't been totally open with him. But realizing in that moment that it was highly unlikely that anyone would ever love her in the way she needed them to – in that unconditional way that allowed her be exactly who she was, at any given point - left her wondering if maybe Garcia should be encouraging her to be like Emily, not deterring her. Maybe the woman was onto something. Why give yourself over to something that, in reality, doesn't exist? It is what it is: love is the idol they warn you never to meet.
Across the room, Emily licked the corner of her lips as she studied an array of emotions flash across JJ's face, and pondered her next words carefully. Because they didn't talk about that. Not since that secret flight to Paris four years ago. Definitely not since she'd found her strung up in a DC warehouse.
"My point is that… I know what it's like to feel like you're a joke, JJ." Her voice was much softer now, much quieter. "And I know we don't talk about it, even though it's that one main thing that we have binding us, but I also know what it's like to feel like you're balancing precariously between sanity and that dangerous place that resides in the back of our minds."
Almost immediately, JJ's chest tightened and her fingers trembled, Emily's words causing that tightrope she'd been walking to sway perilously. She gripped the porcelain of the sink to stem their tremor, and Emily, just as quickly, stepped forward and took her hands in her own, soothing her thumbs over the knuckles.
"You're following the script pretty well, but nothing feels real to you, does it?" Emily asked softly, hers eyes compassionate and fixed on JJ's. "You're afraid to live fully, and instead just exist. Because the last time you lived you almost died."
As JJ remained silent, but allowed her eyes to wonder over Emily's leather-clad form, allowed her scent to filter through her senses, allowed the familiar grip of her hands to comfort her, a little voice in the back of her mind answered: You felt real to me.
The thought – or rather the second-time realization that it didn't matter how real it felt, because it hadn't been real – caused her to lose her words entirely. Because what Emily had said was exactly truthful... except for that morning. That morning, she'd been so sure; that morning, she wasn't putting on a front or following a script; that morning, everything was getting back to normal.
Now, she had no idea what normal was. But what she did know was that the woman stood before her was not the monster that her mind was fighting to create her as in order to protect itself. It wasn't at all the same as the monster she'd had to believe Tivon Askari was, but it was the same in just how easily she could do it. She could so easily blame Emily, just like she'd blamed everything and everyone else for her own retaliations…
Or she could take this as a test – a gust of wind destined to provide an answer.
Flipping her hand over until Emily's was in hers, she squeezed and smiled. "I should probably go utilize the FBI shower facilities, or at least brush my teeth." Moving to leave, she paused at the threshold to answer the question she knew Emily was burning to ask. "We're going to be okay, Emily. I promise."
And with that, she left.
