A/N: It seems that I haven't been able to write a properly happy fic in a while. I thought Christmas would be the time of inspiration for that, but I came up with this instead. What is going on with my head?
(Also, what is going on with my head for me to watch Doctor Strange and end up with a Criminal Minds fic instead? I honestly don't know; I don't know. It's certainly happened before.)
Guess what? This fic has snow in it. That's how loosely it is tied to Christmas. Sue me.
DISCLAIMER: I don't own anything, I swear!
Don't sue me for that.
"Death is what gives life meaning. To know your days are numbered, your time is short. You'd think after all this time, I'd be ready. But look at me. Stretching one moment out into a thousand...just so that I can watch the snow." -The Ancient One, from Doctor Strange
She opens her eyes blearily to find herself lying in the snow.
Small flakes of it cover her hair, her face, her hands where they are laid on top of the gunshot wound in her gut. The blood, the warmth, leaks out steadily, but she's long since given up on putting pressure on it.
There was an unsub. She doesn't remember his name, his profile, or even what he'd done. That would usually alarm the profiler in her, but right now most of her is too subdued to really focus on much of anything except the looming, swaying trees above her and the cloudy night sky.
It's peaceful, feeling the snow drift like this and not having to worry about how it dampens her clothing, how it makes her feel cold and numb.
Well, part of that is probably because of the dying part, not the snow.
Death, she thinks, is like floating numb above it all, something you can't quite achieve just being drunk or high. That is, assuming that you don't overdose or get into a car accident, things like that.
Death, she thinks, is like falling asleep, because you don't remember when you actually do die, only that you did when you wake up (if you wake up).
And surely, she must be dying now.
It makes her vaguely scared of what's to come.
"Are you afraid of death?" she asked him once.
He smiled easily at her, sipping a little at his wine. "Why do you ask?" he replied, leaning forwards to gently take ahold of her hands. She resisted the urge to push him away under a smile.
"Just...with this profession of ours, y'know? Don't tell me you haven't thought of it."
"Of what? Our mortality?" He laughed. "Lauren, we are all human. Why should the two of us be any different?"
And despite everything, she took that to heart. "Are you, though?" She let her (not so fake) fear show clearly on her face.
He sighed, squeezing her hands a little. "Not when you are at my side."
Even now, she feels his hands pulling at her from the other side, grasping at what life she has left. She hopes she never has to see him again. She hopes that he rots in hell.
(But then again, she had been there, when he'd died. Had he been afraid then? Or had Emily been enough for his mind to conjure up Lauren? Had she been enough?) She doesn't know. She'll never know.
She's met death before, of course; the whole team has. But it has never been as prominent as it is now, when she is alone, all alone.
(The parts of herself war with one another, on whether or not it is better that the rest of the team is not here. A vulnerable part wants their comfort so very much, longs for it. Another part is much braver, and one she's far more familiar with it; it thinks that it'd be better if they don't see her suffer. Yet another one thinks that they need the satisfaction of getting to her before her death, but a small part says no, let's bask in the peace.)
And so she does.
It's not like she can really do anything else.
Somehow, people always know when they're going to die. She knew it then, and she knows it now. It's simple, a fact that leaves you no choice but to click 'accept'. Death is going to find her tonight.
But not yet. Not yet.
She continues blinking slowly up at the sky, wishing that it isn't cloudy so she can see the stars. Something warm dribbles down her chin; she does not look but knows that it is blood. (She's dying.)
"I don't get it," a four-year-old her asks stubbornly, looking up at her mother as they walk hand-in-hand by a cemetery.
"What don't you get?" her mother asks, humoring her. This is years before she starts burying herself in her work and away from her daughter; this attention is what teenaged Emily craved the most.
But right then, right now, none of that matters; it is simply a mother and a daughter taking a stroll around their neighborhood.
"If people's souls go up to heaven, then why do we keep their bodies down here?"
Her mother thinks about it for a bit, and Emily has to smile. She thinks she's actually stumped her for once. "The dead no longer need their bodies. The living, on the other hand..."
She scrunches up her face up in disgust. "The living don't need their bodies. They're rotting and they stink and if we keep them here, a zombie a-po-ca-lyp-se could happen." She enunciates the word carefully so that her mother can understand what she is saying.
She laughs, so perhaps Emily had not enunciated it carefully enough. A zombie apocalypse is nothing to laugh about. "The living mourn, my little snow lily. The bodies of their loved ones are almost like keepsakes, to remember them by when they're gone." She cocks her head to the side, a mischievous smile spreading across her face. "But, of course," she starts (Emily giggles in anticipation), "a zombie apocalypse wouldn't be too out of the question, either."
She knows she's dying.
The team doesn't. It'll take them a while to accept it, to get used to it. But they've done it before, she reasons, all those years ago with Doyle. If this is the second time, will she really be missed all that much?
Yes.
And that's terrible, so terrible. She's the one dying but the hardest work goes to the living. Her team is going to hurt and she doesn't want that.
She should resolve to fight, right now. To get up and stumble out of this forest and to wherever the ambulances are. She should, to save her team the grief.
But she can't, because she's going to die. She can't escape this, and yet she feels like trying, not for herself, but for that group of people who mean so much to her.
It feels like she's sunk deeper into the snow.
Dying isn't like how it is in the movies or on TV. Sometimes, you don't get the chance to say goodbye; and sometimes, it's so sudden that you can blink and miss all the life that's left.
She thinks that's the case now.
All of this might be happening in the mere span of a heartbeat, for all she knows.
Not to get too philosophical.
Not that it matters.
Reid once told her that, when he died for those two minutes in that run-down shack, he saw a light, and felt such a great warmth it was almost overwhelming.
Almost.
Well, how cliché of him. Emily has never been one to draw in between the lines (but then again, neither are any of her teammates).
That all-consuming cold had enveloped her, and she had shivered at its unfamiliarity.
Now, though; now she is neither warm nor cold. She's just numb.
She doesn't know what to think about all of this, doesn't know if she'll get answers in the beyond or whatever, but she does know this: she's dying, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
Her heart rate slows.
She closes her eyes.
When Emily was a young girl, her winter evenings were spent sitting around the crackling fireplace and basking in its heat, letting the warmth of her hot cocoa fill her up until she could lie to herself and say that it was summer. Her mother would be reading in a chair nearby, a slight smile on her face, and it was perfect. That had been perfect.
If she could, she would've painted a picture of that scene. Yes, that one right there; perfect. It was something one could almost see hanging in a gilded frame in the family living room.
But there were no pictures of those times, nothing except the memories she'd stacked up in her head.
The thing with memories is that, unless you were Reid, they were distant, clouded, aged. There is a difference between remembering because you remembered and remembering because you know it happened.
So because Emily's brain is relatively normal, and Emily isn't Reid, she doesn't remember those days. Not really. But she remembers how warm she felt, once upon a time, before the innocence had been stripped away, before the cold.
Those feelings wrap around her now, like a soft blanket, warding away the cold and whisking her into the unknown.
For once, she finds she doesn't care.