CHAPTER 40

DO YOU REALLY THINK THAT OF ME?

"I can't believe you're forcing me to be an accomplice to this." Bryan muttered unhappily once they got into the elevator.

"I don't see you being restrained or kept against your will in any kind of way." She smirked.

After she had finished her lunch, she had the brilliant idea to just get out of bed, look around and to run to the nearest elevator once she was sure nobody was looking at her.

Bryan had then been left with no choice but to run after her.

"You can't just run away from a hospital. There's paperwork to be filled." He informed her.

"I'm not a fan of official business. Think of me more like a…" She trailed off. "An innovative person."

"A con artist, that's what you are!" He rolled his eyes.

"I prefer Grifter, but I'll take 'con artist' too." She said proudly. He had no idea.

She walked out of the hospital calmly and jumped in one of the taxis that were lined up at the front. They got dropped off by the gate, since the taxi was not authorized to go any further. Only actual Agents could get in with cars, other than their own.

But Angie didn't mind the walk. As she had predicted, they had time for a coffee and some nice pastry. Bryan was starving, so he had to get three croissants and two pieces of cake, to tame down the hunger. And he was still looking very much forward to having a huge dinner later.

When she walked in the auditorium, the class was just starting. Everyone was quietly sitting down, with their tablets and books in front of them. She noticed how nobody had dared to sit in her and in Bryan's places, though.

"Oyyyy!" Someone called out when they saw her by the door.

"Champion. Chaaaampion! Ole ole ole!" He chanted loudly, as if he were on a stadium.

He stood up and his example got followed by a whole bunch of others, who were now cheering for Angie and clapping their hands.

"You go, girl!" One of the female Trainees called out.

"Show them how it's done, Hunter!" A guy who Angie had once been coupled for PFT with, yelled from the back of the auditorium.

Angie walked in, with her head held high and a grin on her face. She was enjoying every second of this. As she walked, she gave everyone a little wave, almost Princess-like.

Bryan walked two steps behind her, in disbelief that this scene was actually happening.

Apparently, Angie was well-liked among her fellow Trainees. She had always treated everyone with respect, so now it was their turn to show their appreciation and to give her a boost for coming back after collapsing just hours ago. She truly was a champion, in their eyes.

Dan was watching it all, with his jaw dropped to the floor, as he was standing by the side of a new teacher, one whom he had to yet introduce to the class.

"Let me take a wild guess here…" The teacher whispered at Dan. "That's your wild card this year?"

Dan nodded with a sigh.

That girl sure knew how to make an entrance.

"Somehow, I'm not even mad that she stole my spotlight." The teacher laughed full-heartedly.

"Hey, remember you have to be strict with her, okay?" Dan reminded him.

"Oh, don't you worry. I'll make her life a living Hell." The teacher said, coming off quite convinced.

"Never eating sushi again!" Angie said loudly, blaming her trip to the ER on bad food poisoning.

Dan caught that. She had spoken loud and clear, making sure everyone could hear that.

But, why would she do that? She kind of knew that Dan was involved. She could have easily exposed him.

Dan then urged everyone to sit down and shut up, before he proceeded in saying a few words about the guy next to him. He was one of the best in what he did and he was an expert on evaluating eye-witness statements.

Angela was super excited about this class. It was one of the reasons why she was so eager to get out of the hospital and go back to class. The other reason was because she hated hospitals.

During the entire class, she listened intently and made little notes and diagrams about the things this man was saying. He had worked some of the top cases in the Bureau history, dealing with eye-witnesses in major crimes. He knew all about the complications that came with eye-witness testimony and, quite frankly, Angela wanted to know all of it as well.

"Now, what do we know about line-ups?" The man asked a rhetorical question, fully intending to answer it on his own.

Until one very eager hand shot up in the air.

He ignored it and kept on speaking. "We have simultaneous and non-simultaneous line-ups." He said, on purpose.

The hand was still up there, but this time the person who was holding it up did not want to wait for an invite before they spoke.

"Actually, Sir, they are simultaneous and sequential!" She corrected him. "Sequential is when the witness looks at each member of the line-up, or the parade, as it is called in some countries, one at a time. While simultaneous, it being the more traditional method, is when all the members of the line-up, or parade, are seen all together, at the same time. Simultaneously. Hence, simultaneous line-up. Ha! Get it?" She said cheerfully.

He did not laugh.

"God, can't you just shut up, for once?" Bryan whispered to her and she sighed.

"Since you clearly believe you are smart enough to teach this class, why don't you come join me and explain to everyone what prosopagnosia is?" The teacher suggested. He had a mean look on his face and she really wanted to like him, because of the subject he was teaching, but she simply did not.

"Okay." She jumped up from her seat, the ponytail waving left and right as she walked on the podium.

"Oh, so fancy out here." She murmured to herself, standing behind a big and obnoxious desk, not realizing there was a microphone in front of her mouth.

People laughed.

"Prosopagnosia, informally referred to as face blindness, is a cognitive disorder of face perception in which the ability to recognize familiar faces, which include one's own face – what we call self-recognition, is impaired, while other aspects of visual processing – such as object discrimination; and intellectual functioning – such as decision-making, remain intact." She spoke slowly, eloquently, loudly and with conviction.

The teacher shot a glance at Dan who just shrugged from the sidelines.

Fine then, she had some basic knowledge about the term. He would surely be able to make a fool out of her, asking her more in-depth questions.

"Which specific brain area is usually associated with this disorder?" He asked.

"That would be the fusiform gyrus, Sir. It's the brain area that activates specifically in response to faces. Also, fun fact: The right hemisphere fusiform gyrus is more often involved in familiar face recognition than the left! But I don't know why that is." She smiled.

He hated her more and more with each time she opened her mouth.

He especially hated her because she must have been on to his little game, so she hurried to admit her lack of knowledge, in front of everyone, so that when he would finally ask her something she could not answer, she would have no shame in telling the truth. Smart. She was one step ahead of him already.

The teacher contemplated whether he should continue or just let her go, in which case he was making a fool out of himself, in front of everyone.

Dan gave himself a silent little facepalm.

When Angie got back to her seat, Bryan asked how come she knew all that.

"It was a chapter in one of those extra books that Barbara gave me." She whispered before she gave the teacher her full, undivided attention until the end of the class.

After class, a bunch of Trainees walked over to her and Bryan, introducing themselves.

It turned out, Angie had fans. They pointed out how funny she was and how entertaining it was to have her in class, how much it helped them fight with all the tension from all the training and studying.

She then found herself surrounded by a whole group of people, each one of whom wanted to hang out with her. And that was cool, because she knew those were people who liked her, genuinely, and people whom she would love to be paired for training later on in the Academy. People she could, presumably, trust.

They all went for dinner that night, at one of the restaurants on Campus, and got to know a bit about each other. Everyone spoke about their families, friends, background. But Angela and Bryan kept finding ways to avoid their turn to speak.

At one point, Angie excused herself and went to the bathroom. She walked in the furthest stall, having a theory that it would always be the cleanest, since people tended to walk into the first one they saw, as soon as they entered the bathroom.

And then she heard footsteps. She put her eye on the missing keyhole and saw two middle-aged women entering in a hurry, discussing something.

"I am telling you – this woman is keeping secrets!" The blonde one said.

"She may or may not be. But you're being obsessed with this. Come on, drop it. You got your hearing. Let the Superiors decide the faith of that Unit." The dark-haired woman replied.

"I won't rest until I shut the BAU down, for good." The blonde one said spitefully.

"Well, do as you wish. I just wanted to let you know that I no longer have any interest in taking part of this takedown. Emily Prentiss has never done anything bad to me. If anything, she had been a pleasant company to grab some coffee at the Executive Lounge with, which is more than what I can say about you, especially lately." With those words, the dark-haired woman exited the bathroom.

"You better watch out or you're the next one to burn!" The blonde called out.

"Or what? You'll plant fake evidence in my office, too?" The brunette laughed and let the door shut in the blonde's face.

Angela smirked. She loved middle-aged women's drama more than she should.

When she got back to the table, her new friends were offering to go for drinks at one of the bars on the campus. Angie refused politely, pointing out that her doctor had prescribed her lots of sleep and rest.

Bryan walked with her in direction of the dorms, until she took a different route.

"Where are you going?" Bryan asked.

"Ikea." She said sarcastically.

He followed her, smelling an adventure. Or at the very least – trouble.


Emily sighed with huge relief once she was back home. She liked this apartment. It was not the best, but it worked for her, for the time being.

She kicked her shoes off. For the past week she had worn nice and comfortable shoes, so her work shoes were now giving her a headache.

On her way to the bathroom, she stripped down those plain black clothes that she hated so much, grabbing a fresh towel from the counter by the sink and letting hot water run in the bathtub. She deserved a little pampering.

While it loaded, she grabbed her phone from her room and planned to go through her messages from the previous week while relaxing in the water. She even put bath salts in, convinced that they would help her relax. Isn't that what was written on the package anyway?

When she saw that she had 423 new messages in the group chat, she knew she wasn't going to read everything. Sometimes her colleagues would get carried away after office hours and that chat would turn into a hot mess.

She skimmed through it all, noticing a few key points – everyone was worried; nobody dared to try and find her; Garcia never told them she found Emily in Paris; Dave was being a bit rude and holding a bit of a grudge; they all had a barbeque; they all were left upset after she left.

It was now up to Emily to fix all that. Somehow, even after the heartbreak, she was able to pick herself up, little by little, and find the strength to want to fight for her team. They deserved it.

Then she moved on to private messages, which, she had none. Nobody had messaged her directly. Nobody had the courage to speak to her one-on-one. They all wrote in the group chat, as if they needed each other for back-up, in case her leaving was permanent. Because, underneath it all, that was what everyone was really scared of.

And then she realized she had a long audio message, on the side.

She hit the Play button, clueless as to what was going to hit her next.

"H-…Hi." A weak female voice said, in between hiccups. "I know you need your time and space. But please, I'm begging you, please don't leave. I can't handle it."

Emily thought that her heart had been broken the day before. But she was wrong. It was only starting to break at that very moment.

Certain snippets of this weak and tortured voice popped out to Emily.

"For once in your life, consider that you leaving is only harming the rest of us…"

She bit her bottom lip hard.

"I still have nightmares from the night we found you bleeding out. It took everything I had in me, to tell everyone that you were dead. And while they all dealt with it in their own way, I had to carry the burden of the lie and deal with it, on my own. I couldn't trust anyone with the truth."

Emily gulped, that sense of guilt, the one that she had tried so hard to push aside all day long, had resurfaced.

"You broke me! How dare you?"

Hearing that, Emily burst into tears.

"I promised myself that if you leave again, I would never go back to the FBI. Because, no matter how much I resented you for that stunt, I love you. With all my heart. Endlessly. I love you so much that it hurts to even think about a possibility of never seeing you again."

She sucked in a breath. Was she really so powerful, as to get someone to drop a career they had worked so hard for?

"I hate everything about you, Emily Prentiss! Most of all, I despise the idea of waking up one day and knowing that I wouldn't spend the next 15 hours with you…you, selfish, nasty, human being! You, stubborn woman! You, you inconsistent, narcissistic bitch!"

Emily felt that dagger, going deeper into her heart.

"I hate the idea of anyone getting hurt, but what I hate the most is the idea of you getting hurt. Because each time you get hurt, Emily Prentiss, you leave. You get scared and you leave. And you break everyone around you. You break us to the point where, one day, we won't even be able to trust you anymore."

She licked her lips again, salty from the tears, yet feeling dry, from all the pain.

"We hate you to the point where we hate everything about you, because deep down inside we are scared out of our minds. Scared, because we know that the moment we let ourselves love you, you will leave. And then you will break us even more. Again and again. And that's not cool, Emily Prentiss…that is so not cool!"

With one hand, Emily checked if her heart was still there. If it was bleeding already. It sure felt that way.

After another downpour of all the various reasons why she hated Emily, then came that.

"And I just lied. Because I am a terrible human being and I want to hurt you, to show you how much a person could hurt someone. I want you to think that I don't care, to think that we will be fine without you. I want you to think that I hate you, Emily Prentiss. I want it so badly."

She was confused. She also knew exactly what the person meant, with each word they said. And oh, those words were spot on.

"No matter how much you broke me, I can never hate you. Do you hear me? I, Jennifer Jareau, am never going to hate you, Emily Prentiss. Ever. Not even for a moment in my whole damned life. Because, every time you hurt me, I know that you are hurting yourself, too. And I hate that, but I don't hate you. I could never hate you."

Emily shook her head, because there was no other reaction to all of this.

"I also know that you left, because you need to heal. I know that you will come back and be the most kind and wonderful human being to all of us. And I know that, deep down inside, what happened three weeks ago, is never going to let you sleep at night."

She nodded, as if she were silently confirming JJ's words. After that, she had gone on about all the sacrifices Emily was doing, for the team, including how she pretended to be okay, so they wouldn't be hurt.

"And that, Emily Prentiss, makes you a human being, worthy of love. And I do, I love you, with all my heart and soul. I love you, Emily Prentiss. And I egoistically refuse to think of a life without you in it."

Emily could not lie to herself – it felt good to hear those words. All of them. The good ones and the bad ones, too. She needed that.

"You make us love you, more and more, with everything you do, until it is practically impossible for us to live without you. This is what you, Emily Prentiss deserve – love. Pure and unconditional, never ending love. And I do love you, so fucking much. You are my best friend, Emily Prentiss. And I am always going to need you in my life. Never forget that!"

After that, the audio got cut off. And that was the moment when Emily Prentiss' heart got broken. For real, this time.

Without any hesitation, she dialed JJ's number.


JJ had just finished having dinner with her husband, two kids and their new house guest – Morgan. Will was now upstairs, trying to put the kids to bed, as they both had to wake up early in the morning.

Morgan was trying to make himself fit in, but he felt so awkward. And he could tell JJ felt the same way. Things were just…different.

"Your phone is ringing." He pointed out when JJ failed to give any attention to the first three buzzes.

She shrugged, letting him know she didn't care about it.

He grabbed it, to put it on silent, but then he saw the caller ID.

"It's Emily." He said and JJ nearly flew over to where he was standing, grabbing the phone from his hands and answering immediately.

"Hello?" She said quietly.

"Emily?" She spoke again, since nothing could be heard on the other side of the line.

And then she listened more carefully. It wasn't nothing. It was the sound of a broken soul.

"Oh." JJ exclaimed, realizing what had prompted this call.

"Do you really think that of me?" Emily finally spoke, her voice weak and cracking.

JJ could tell that she was crying. And, at that moment, she realized she was crying as well.

With her back at Morgan, she simply raised her hand up and excused herself for a moment, before he would see tears striking down her face.

"Yes…" JJ admitted silently, as she had just locked herself in the bathroom.

"All of it?" Emily was clearly asking about the hate part.

"Yes…" JJ still kept to her original answer.

"Oh, ChayChay…" Emily didn't know what to say.

She also didn't know she didn't need to say anything at all.

JJ knew.

"I love you so incredibly much, JJ…" Emily whispered.

"Mhm…" JJ muttered.

Each time either of them spoke, they would trail off. The rest remained unspoken, but it didn't mean it wasn't received.

"I'm sorry…" Emily added.

"Yeah…" JJ tried really hard to keep her voice from shaking. She hated crying. She only ever cried when it was absolutely necessary to do so. And, then and there, it was.

Emily waited for a long moment. A moment in which they both thought about what JJ's audio message meant.

"I love you, too, Ems…" JJ added, unable to hold that back.

Emily then smiled weakly. She could now hang up and consider this to be dealt with. For the moment.

JJ splashed some water on her face and walked out, to find Morgan sitting on the floor, in front of the bathroom. He immediately offered a hug – he was known as the best hugger in the BAU, and her tiny frame sunk into his arms.

"Emily?" He asked, but it was more of an affirmation. He knew.

JJ nodded. "You should go stay with her tonight. She needs you. I have Will, I'm fine. But she has nobody. And she's always needed you more than she needed any of us."

"That's not true. She needs all of us." He tried to argue.

"If that were true, then why did you put your new life on hold, just to run back to be by her side? If all of us were enough?" She looked up at him.

"I had forgotten how smart you are, Agent Jareau!" He smiled down at her.

"Kids are asleep. Anyone wants a beer?" Will came down the stairs, only to find his wife in tears one more time.

Morgan stuffed his belongings back in his travel bag and he excused himself.

JJ gave him one of her back-up phones, so he could keep in touch with everyone. All the numbers he needed were already saved in the contact list.

She also tossed him her car keys and asked Will to drive her to work on the next morning. The car that Morgan had rented for the week had barely managed to take him to JJ's house earlier, before it had broken down.

"Now, about that beer…" JJ told Will, already opening the fridge.

They spent the next couple of hours cuddling on the sofa. She confided in him about the BAU being under investigation and she also warned him that she might be one of the main targets, as her gun had been replaced and that was quite serious.

Will did everything in his power to calm her down. Somewhere along the way, JJ had fallen asleep in his arms.