xviii. Moonlight
They manage to trace her location by farms with wheat threshers. Miraculously, only one was registered in the kill zone, and they take it quickly. They find Emily tied up and barely conscious in a barn on the outskirts of West Virginia.
"You remembered," she breathes just before her legs give out and she collapses limp in his arms. Of course he remembers. He remembers everything about her.
He orders JJ to ride with her to the hospital and he handles the rest of the scene, but as soon as everything is in order, he relieves JJ of her duties as Emily's guardian.
The moon streaming through the hospital blinds hit her in just the right way to make him nostalgic for nights past in another life when he watched her sleep.
"Hotch?" Her voice cracks and he passes her a cup of water. "How long have you been here?"
"Long enough," he answers, then tries for an encouraging expression. "You pulled one hell of a stunt back there."
"I didn't know if the camera was even panned out far enough to see my hands," she confesses. She won't make direct eye contact and it worries him.
"You're safe," he reassures her, and he sees that she really needs it. "It was smart thinking, saying that you blamed me so it would grab my attention."
She turns her lip up in an apologetic smile. "I figured if there was one person who would catch on, it's you. Maybe Reid, but if the video hadn't shown my hands, he wouldn't have known how to take it. He'd misinterpret it, and then I'd die, then he'd blame himself."
He doesn't have the energy to even try to cover his feelings, not this late, and not after this much stress trying to find her. "Reid isn't the only one who'd have blamed himself if you died."
Her head whips up and her gaze on him is fiery intense. He matches her look with a raise of his chin, defiant and daring her to take his words to heart.
"I know," she says the words with care and gentleness, but a solid resolve underneath. She knows what he's meaning to say.
"I'm sorry I wasn't with you when you woke up here," he rushes out the apology.
"You had a job to do," she says with a shrug. "I know what that's like."
"Prentiss," he starts and doesn't quite know where to begin with all he needs to say. All he would never have said to her if she had died in that dilapidated barn at the hands of a serial killer. But she's just been tortured, and the last thing she needs is to revisit old emotions.
"You're too smart to die like that," he says instead.
She counters him, "My team's too smart to let me die like that."