They leave from a staff entrance at the hospital, her head held high and her bag swung over his shoulder as curious cleaners and orderlies watch their departure. He glances sideways at her as they walk the short distance to the car - she is still limping, her arms folded across her abdomen, never quite catching his gaze.
He opens the car door for her and she gives a small smile as she gets in. He stows her bag in the trunk, gets in the driver's seat, and they're silent the whole way to the airstrip where their jet is waiting. The sight of the private, unmarked jet on the runway drives home the danger she is in here, and he finds himself on high alert, his hand at her waist holding her close to him before he realises what he's doing, the other hand on the gun at his hip. She doesn't look at him, or pull away.
Neither of them says a word until they're in the air.
"Thank you," she says, her throat dry, as she sits across the table from him. "For everything, for this." She waves vaguely around the jet.
He shakes his head. He almost reflexively tells her it's okay, but the words catch on the way to his throat, because he doesn't feel he can accept her thanks when he has failed her so absolutely.
"Hey," she says, when he's quiet too long. She taps her fingers on the table between them. "You saved my life."
"It shouldn't have needed saving," he says before he can stop himself. His usually concrete self control has been sliding since she flatlined in the ambulance - the EMTs made him let go of her hand so they could shock her heart back to life, and he's been stuck with that wrenching loss ever since.
She nods, slowly. "I put myself in danger," she says. "I did it to protect you, all of you, and -" she pauses, her expression sad and determined, and he thinks not for the first time that she's still hiding something. "And I understood what I was getting into. You couldn't have stopped me. Okay?"
To his surprise as much as hers, he finds himself smiling. She's reminding him of another time, when she marched into his office in front of Strauss and calmly explained that she was leaving the unit because the team needed him. He runs his fingertips over his knuckles, reminds himself of Foyet and how he has no right to condemn the decision she made. But it still hurts that she couldn't tell them, couldn't tell him. "Okay," he says, and a second later she's reached across and taken his hand in hers. He looks up at her and sees that despite the ghost of a smile on her face, there are tears in her eyes.
They talk, then, like they haven't for months, and he finds himself feeling closer to her every second, trying to ignore the inevitability of where they're headed. She doesn't take her hands back, and he starts to dread the moment when she will.
"Can I ask you something?" she says after a short silence, and she sounds more vulnerable than he has heard her since his first visit to her in hospital. He nods, squeezes her hand, and waits for her to go on. "My funeral," she says, and his heart sinks. It must show in his face, because she shakes her head, starts to apologise.
"No," he says quickly, although he can see the casket being lowered into the ground, JJ's determined eyes meeting his as they shared the heartbreaking horror of what they had done. "It's okay. You can ask."
"Was -" she hesitates, and he can see her steeling herself. "Did my mother go?"
His heart sinks again. JJ had been the one to call Ambassador Prentiss, and she'd come into his office afterwards, shaking her head in disbelief. Short notice. An engagement. They'd comforted themselves with the thought that she just hadn't taken the news in and would arrive on the day, but it hadn't happened.
His hesitation is enough to answer Emily's question, and as the tears pool in her eyes she turns to look out of the window. She looks so broken in that moment, and for a moment he sees her as disconnected as she must have felt when she ran from them to go after Doyle. "Emily," he says softly, and waits until she's turned back to him, tears sliding down her cheeks and dripping onto her arms, a slightly rueful, embarrassed smile on her face. She drags her gaze up to meet his, and he feels it again, that overpowering, tearing loss he'd felt as her lifeless hand dropped from his, and knows he's about to face it again in a few hours' time in Paris, and he knows he shouldn't say what he's thinking. "I love you."