fic: roadblocks (emily/reid) pg
Apr. 20th, 2009 03:00 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
verbwinds.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
criminalxmindsroadblocks
~2890 words, emily/reid - pg
spoilers up to and including 4.20
This is how it works:
They have their cases and they have their lives. Two separate entities, but the overlap is inevitable.
They have each other too. They have badges, guns, and cuffs that click easy around waiting wrists.
Sometimes, they wish it really could be that easy. Most of the time, it isn't.
But what they want is the least of their concerns. That's how it goes, that's how it is.
We all have our constants.
-
Spencer thinks in phrases ripped from books left dusty on shelves. People get used to it, the people he works with get used to it. The odd joke is made. He laughs a little, twists his tie a little. Returns to the task at hand.
One day, Emily sits across from him, her eyes too open. Like they're searching, sieving what they can and it makes him flick back further into discomfort, a familiar ground.
"What?" His throat clears on the word, distorting it, but she hears it all the same, gaze snapped back to the window, to the clouds, below and above, to blue spread on blue thinning fast.
"Nothing, just thinking."
"About?" It's a press, he's pressing, the act instinctual more than anything else. The profiler in all of them. Questions beget questions beget questions and answers become harder and harder to come by, a tired cycle they all know too well.
"Just people. This job. I can't help, but feel as if there's always something we forget, something we're looking over to get to the big picture."
A sigh parts his lips, hair dusting at eye level, a boundary of sorts, and he tells her the truth because that's all he knows how to do.
"That's probably because we are," he'll say and her shoulders might slouch at that, the back of her head sliding against the seat, her shoes half on, the heels all but, removed as her feet twist in them.
He imagines they're sore. He imagines she's used to it. He'd be right on both counts.
A moment later: "Yeah, that's what I was afraid of."
His smile is tight when she looks up. It's more comforting than she would've expected.
-
Years, she's worked with him.
It fools them sometimes. That face, that young young face and those big big eyes. It makes them forget the demons, the ghosts, the memories that haunt us all.
On the field, shots are singing through the air between them. Behind a car, the bullets cut their way through glass, rebound off and into metal.
Her hand holds her gun tight against her chest. She breathes. Her fingers flex, once - twice.
"Got me?"
His nod is quick, almost defiant. Emily closes her eyes, moves fast.
There are shouts, more gunfire, but they run, finding better cover, their feet on automatic by now.
After, two men are dead. Their bodies on the ground, white sheets acting as their only boundaries to the world they've left behind them.
"That was close," Spencer says.
"That was close," she parrots.
In passing, her hand squeezes his. He notes its warmth.
-
It's a progression.
They are friends first. A different sort of friendship than the ones that sprout spontaneously in the world outside of this office, their work, but the important elements are there still.
It's Georgia and he is sweaty and flushed under the sun of the south.
Emily hums. Spencer tugs at his tie.
Hotch sends them out to investigate possible suspects in an arson.
They do their jobs and it isn't the same. It never truly is.
She finds humanity where he finds patterns. He seeks the original question while she mulls over the answer, testing its validity.
In the car, she'll reach for her canteen, bring it to her lips, the water shiny against her mouth.
"Thirsty?"
"No," he lies.
Head shake ready, she throws him the container anyway and he laughs, a soft non-existent kind of sound, catching the plastic on his palm.
"Drink," is the order that passes by her tongue.
He appeases it as best as he can.
-
A case goes south.
Emily takes a walk.
Someone calls her name.
She doesn't stop.
Someone calls her name.
She breaks into a run, stops at the corner, hands to knees, breaths lapsed in her throat.
"Emily," the voice says, "Emily."
It's her name. Just her name. She rises to lean against brick and beside her, his foot steps back against it too.
"I'm usually better at this. I'm better than this, Reid. I can deal. I know I can."
Hands dig into his pockets. The air sweeps into a breeze. He shivers all over.
"I know," he tells her, and maybe she smiles. Maybe, he makes her smile.
-
Not all those who wander are lost.
But some of us are.
-
Spencer doesn't kiss her first.
That much she could've figured out herself.
Their hands are wound together, skin slipping and her mouth kicks forward against his, a brush of a kiss that doesn't last long enough to matter.
Emily blinks. Reid follows suit.
He moves his lips to articulate what she can only assume are statistics about inter-office relationships and the thought makes her laugh, harder than she means to, when he does just that.
"Em-"
She grins over his surprise, feels him tremble, shake apart. And Spencer, he opens up beneath her.
-
He had asked what was wrong and she had said, people, this job. Something about forgetting and the consequence of forgetting.
Spencer doesn't forget.
He can't.
Emily stands at his left and Derek at his right. The elevator pings with every level it meets.
He tries to see her face. Her eyes are trained north.
Her hands are warm and so is her mouth. So is her laugh. So is.
Endorphins, he tells himself. Chemical reactions, he tells himself. Biology, he tells himself.
As explanations go, they all fail him just the same.
It's more than a little disheartening.
-
In New York, a mini bar waits for her.
She drains a tiny bottle of vodka, another, and the glass refracts the light, spills it divided around her.
The knock on her door comes later.
"Can't sleep," goes the admission.
"Me neither," she matches, "Me neither."
They stand facing each other. He is fidgeting, and she is still.
His hands are nervous. He talks and he talks and her hand finds his arm, palm melding flat around elbow.
"Hey. Breathe."
He laughs, light - strained - barely there. "You first."
"Okay. Okay."
Her exhale skips across his face. He shuts his eyes.
-
Emily has always wanted this.
There has never been a point where she hasn't wanted this in some capacity or another.
The BAU is where she knows she can do good. Where she is most efficient. Where she - it's a cliche, but cliches are born out of truth in the beginning - belongs.
At the end of another day, Derek checks her shoulder on his way out while she offers a backhanded wave.
Her jacket sweeps up into her arms. She checks her watch.
"Have a good night," says Hotch and Emily nods at him, doesn't miss the dips of black under his eyes as he goes. To home, to Haley, the family he's always trying to keep together, whether he says anything or not.
Later, she'll share a drink with Penelope. A bar and a friend and some time to themselves.
The quarter is smooth as it slides from her fingertips into the slot of the jukebox.
Elvis begins to sing about broken hearts and love lost.
And the song isn't meant for dancing, but she and Garcia do it anyway. They dance, move, forget for a moment the trials of the day job, being who they are.
"We need to do this more often," the other woman calls out over the music.
"Yeah," she agrees, "We do."
Tomorrow waits too soon regardless.
It always does.
-
On the plane, they play chess.
Queens and kings and pawns moving across the board.
The ultimate game of wits, strategy.
She is white and he is black. He takes his time; she doesn't.
In the end, she is the one who wins as he goes over the last few plays in his head, sees where he unknowingly gave her the opportunity to beat him.
"Two out of three?"
"Your funeral."
She laughs at his eagerness and he sets up the board.
This time, it's her that doesn't see the opening and he takes full advantage of that, leveling the score.
"Finally got me."
Spencer shrugs, "It was inevitable."
The jet dips to land and the pieces scatter in haste. Her fingers cover the ones still upright and as they do, his do the same, catching between her own.
Inevitable, she thinks to herself later. Right.
-
The first time, it happened, it wasn't really supposed to.
Her lips had pressed against his. Chaste, quick. Nothing more, nothing less.
His mouth turned into a smile, those sad, flat ones he has, and she felt it against her skin, the spread of it.
"You're okay?" she whispered.
"I'm okay," he had answered back.
Her lips had pressed against his and at some point it stopped being chaste, quick. Nothing more, nothing less.
She's still trying to pinpoint when exactly that was.
So far? No such luck.
-
He visits her place once.
It's wide, spacious, spotless. Nothing near or out of place.
Somehow, he was expecting more.
-
A serial killer is hunting women in Arizona.
They bridge a profile together like they always do.
They study the victims. Thirty somethings, smart, well-educated, ambitious.
They pour over the evidence.
She leaves the station after they brief the officers and it's step step step until she's half way down the block.
Faces pop out at her. Her mind skips them into crime scene photos before she blinks the images back.
Later, they catch the man, but not before he kills three more. Takes three more lives.
Her stomach twists when she sees him duck, arms at his back, and head held high, proud even now.
When she turns, Spencer is behind her.
She walks around him with a smile that sharpens at the corners.
It doesn't fool either of them.
-
He stills writes to his mother.
A letter a day. Sometimes, he sends them. Sometimes, he doesn't.
He grew up not being able to fix her. It's something that he's not sure he can handle now.
Children are resilient. They can try and fail and try again.
With age, all one gets is the certain knowledge that no matter what you do, there are some things that can't be helped.
"You shouldn't feel guilty. It wasn't your fault."
He's heard this speech before. From estranged family members. From Gideon. Even Morgan in some capacity or another.
"I left her."
Emily takes his hand. Squeezes it. He breathes with the pressure.
"No, you got her help. That's not a betrayal. You did the right thing, Reid."
He's heard this speech before, but she delivers the lines with a kind of stringent conviction that is hard to argue with.
Her fingers loop for his wrist and stay.
"It wasn't your fault," she tells him.
"I know. I know."
Maybe, someday, he might actually believe that.
-
They all find themselves in the position.
Identifying with the people they're supposed to protect and sometimes, the ones they're trying to protect the world from.
It scares her. How invested he becomes sometimes.
Adam Jackson is just one of many.
Emily, she can move on better than most, put things in their place and keep them there.
Reid carries a certain responsibility for things he can't possibly have any control over. And they all do in someway, she supposes.
She finds him with the case file months later, on his desk and open wide.
It's not the first time.
-
Sometimes, she thinks she need this job more than it needs her.
If home is where the heart is, Emily Prentiss's is firmly inside the BAU.
After work, she goes home, takes a bath, sits on her coach in her robe and slippers, hair wet and dripping cold.
The news is on. Someone's been killed not four blocks from where she lives.
She's already built a rough profile in her head before the anchor woman segues over to the weather.
-
It's Los Angeles and six dead.
Garcia is talking to Morgan via speakerphone and they're all listening in.
"That was too easy. Give me something challenging next time," and through the line, Emily can hear her earrings swish with her movements.
Derek laughs, "Will do, baby girl."
They're down to four potential unsubs now.
Hotch splits them up in pairs to save time.
Outside, her keys twist the car to life. Reid pushes his hair back in the passenger seat.
Through the windshield, the sun shines through unfiltered.
They both blink against it.
-
"Anyone up for drinks?"
Garcia casts her head no, the apology set in her grin, "Got a date with my man."
Morgan shrugs, mentions something about staying behind, something he has to do.
Hotch, Rossi, and JJ are already at the elevators.
Coat on, she's got a sigh on her when he finally speaks up.
"I could use the distraction actually."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
They end up at a bar five minutes away. She sits at a back booth, karaoke night well underway as off-key and off-pitch prevail.
Through the smoke, a smile runs over her face, a song he doesn't know the lyrics to humming low in her throat.
He's heard it before, the melody. Heard her humming it, but he doesn't know the words. He thinks he'd like to.
When he asks, it's a collection of surprise and something else on her face, and his stomach pinches at the sight, her gaze held on him before twisting away.
"It's nothing," her teeth slip easy into her lip - press and release, "A hymn."
A moment later, she recites it for him, the curiousity evident in his face. And the words trip off her tongue, sliding down into the space between them. It's Italian, the meaning lost on him with the language, but still he listens.
He listens and her voice holds clear through the din.
-
At home, in his own bed, it stays in his head.
The loose trail of her words, the hymn he didn't know was a hymn.
He sees her mouth. The stretch of teeth, white, sharp. The way she bit her lips when he had asked her.
He sees her and closes his eyes until everything fades, shifts over into black.
-
Colorado ends happier than most.
Well, happier relative to what they usually see.
They all realize they're called in when there is a body count already in place. It's something they knew going in - accepted long before this, but that chance to stop it. To bend every resource they have available to them and prevent one more - it's something they strive for with everything they have.
"Good job, everyone. We leave in the morning. Get some rest."
They all nod, the exhaustion seeping in faster now as Hotch walks away and Reid falls in step beside her.
Later:
Fingers splayed out over her shirt, her ribs breathe back against his touch, barely there, but noted all the same.
It's a balcony and it's dusk. It's her eyes shut against the sky spinning into indigo, into night.
The air winds cold around everything. Around them.
She moves first. Inside and away, arms looped tight at her sides, finding a wall to lean back against, the weight of the day, of lots of things holding her there.
When she looks up again, he's watching her like he needs to figure something out and that in and of itself isn't new, but it unnerves her. His hand's in his pockets. Head bent.
She closes her eyes again and their lips catch with her frown.
Eyes shut still, his skin wrinkles warm over her open palms as she digs his hands out, setting them at her hips.
A gasp slips between them. A thumb counts at her ribs, runs under fabric as a hand chases through her hair.
It doesn't go beyond this. A wall and him and her stuck in the middle. It never does.
"Emily-"
She sighs against her own name. Doesn't answer the question hidden in the syllables.
In the streets, someone runs a red light, the peal of tires rushing through the dark and then gone just as fast.
Neither of them will remember hearing it.
-
The jet is leaving in twenty minutes.
They're the first ones to arrive.
Outside her window, she sees the rest of the team. JJ and Morgan are laughing. Hotch and Rossi aren't. The contrast is amazing even at this distance.
Her shoulders roll back and there's a dull crack as they do.
The chess board rests between them. It's her play.
"Need more time?" He's smiling, almost smirking, but not quite there, and she shakes her head, eyes falling to roll back on cue.
"You wish."
She plays to win. But then again - so does he.
That much they've always shared.
-
~2890 words, emily/reid - pg
spoilers up to and including 4.20
This is how it works:
They have their cases and they have their lives. Two separate entities, but the overlap is inevitable.
They have each other too. They have badges, guns, and cuffs that click easy around waiting wrists.
Sometimes, they wish it really could be that easy. Most of the time, it isn't.
But what they want is the least of their concerns. That's how it goes, that's how it is.
We all have our constants.
-
Spencer thinks in phrases ripped from books left dusty on shelves. People get used to it, the people he works with get used to it. The odd joke is made. He laughs a little, twists his tie a little. Returns to the task at hand.
One day, Emily sits across from him, her eyes too open. Like they're searching, sieving what they can and it makes him flick back further into discomfort, a familiar ground.
"What?" His throat clears on the word, distorting it, but she hears it all the same, gaze snapped back to the window, to the clouds, below and above, to blue spread on blue thinning fast.
"Nothing, just thinking."
"About?" It's a press, he's pressing, the act instinctual more than anything else. The profiler in all of them. Questions beget questions beget questions and answers become harder and harder to come by, a tired cycle they all know too well.
"Just people. This job. I can't help, but feel as if there's always something we forget, something we're looking over to get to the big picture."
A sigh parts his lips, hair dusting at eye level, a boundary of sorts, and he tells her the truth because that's all he knows how to do.
"That's probably because we are," he'll say and her shoulders might slouch at that, the back of her head sliding against the seat, her shoes half on, the heels all but, removed as her feet twist in them.
He imagines they're sore. He imagines she's used to it. He'd be right on both counts.
A moment later: "Yeah, that's what I was afraid of."
His smile is tight when she looks up. It's more comforting than she would've expected.
-
Years, she's worked with him.
It fools them sometimes. That face, that young young face and those big big eyes. It makes them forget the demons, the ghosts, the memories that haunt us all.
On the field, shots are singing through the air between them. Behind a car, the bullets cut their way through glass, rebound off and into metal.
Her hand holds her gun tight against her chest. She breathes. Her fingers flex, once - twice.
"Got me?"
His nod is quick, almost defiant. Emily closes her eyes, moves fast.
There are shouts, more gunfire, but they run, finding better cover, their feet on automatic by now.
After, two men are dead. Their bodies on the ground, white sheets acting as their only boundaries to the world they've left behind them.
"That was close," Spencer says.
"That was close," she parrots.
In passing, her hand squeezes his. He notes its warmth.
-
It's a progression.
They are friends first. A different sort of friendship than the ones that sprout spontaneously in the world outside of this office, their work, but the important elements are there still.
It's Georgia and he is sweaty and flushed under the sun of the south.
Emily hums. Spencer tugs at his tie.
Hotch sends them out to investigate possible suspects in an arson.
They do their jobs and it isn't the same. It never truly is.
She finds humanity where he finds patterns. He seeks the original question while she mulls over the answer, testing its validity.
In the car, she'll reach for her canteen, bring it to her lips, the water shiny against her mouth.
"Thirsty?"
"No," he lies.
Head shake ready, she throws him the container anyway and he laughs, a soft non-existent kind of sound, catching the plastic on his palm.
"Drink," is the order that passes by her tongue.
He appeases it as best as he can.
-
A case goes south.
Emily takes a walk.
Someone calls her name.
She doesn't stop.
Someone calls her name.
She breaks into a run, stops at the corner, hands to knees, breaths lapsed in her throat.
"Emily," the voice says, "Emily."
It's her name. Just her name. She rises to lean against brick and beside her, his foot steps back against it too.
"I'm usually better at this. I'm better than this, Reid. I can deal. I know I can."
Hands dig into his pockets. The air sweeps into a breeze. He shivers all over.
"I know," he tells her, and maybe she smiles. Maybe, he makes her smile.
-
Not all those who wander are lost.
But some of us are.
-
Spencer doesn't kiss her first.
That much she could've figured out herself.
Their hands are wound together, skin slipping and her mouth kicks forward against his, a brush of a kiss that doesn't last long enough to matter.
Emily blinks. Reid follows suit.
He moves his lips to articulate what she can only assume are statistics about inter-office relationships and the thought makes her laugh, harder than she means to, when he does just that.
"Em-"
She grins over his surprise, feels him tremble, shake apart. And Spencer, he opens up beneath her.
-
He had asked what was wrong and she had said, people, this job. Something about forgetting and the consequence of forgetting.
Spencer doesn't forget.
He can't.
Emily stands at his left and Derek at his right. The elevator pings with every level it meets.
He tries to see her face. Her eyes are trained north.
Her hands are warm and so is her mouth. So is her laugh. So is.
Endorphins, he tells himself. Chemical reactions, he tells himself. Biology, he tells himself.
As explanations go, they all fail him just the same.
It's more than a little disheartening.
-
In New York, a mini bar waits for her.
She drains a tiny bottle of vodka, another, and the glass refracts the light, spills it divided around her.
The knock on her door comes later.
"Can't sleep," goes the admission.
"Me neither," she matches, "Me neither."
They stand facing each other. He is fidgeting, and she is still.
His hands are nervous. He talks and he talks and her hand finds his arm, palm melding flat around elbow.
"Hey. Breathe."
He laughs, light - strained - barely there. "You first."
"Okay. Okay."
Her exhale skips across his face. He shuts his eyes.
-
Emily has always wanted this.
There has never been a point where she hasn't wanted this in some capacity or another.
The BAU is where she knows she can do good. Where she is most efficient. Where she - it's a cliche, but cliches are born out of truth in the beginning - belongs.
At the end of another day, Derek checks her shoulder on his way out while she offers a backhanded wave.
Her jacket sweeps up into her arms. She checks her watch.
"Have a good night," says Hotch and Emily nods at him, doesn't miss the dips of black under his eyes as he goes. To home, to Haley, the family he's always trying to keep together, whether he says anything or not.
Later, she'll share a drink with Penelope. A bar and a friend and some time to themselves.
The quarter is smooth as it slides from her fingertips into the slot of the jukebox.
Elvis begins to sing about broken hearts and love lost.
And the song isn't meant for dancing, but she and Garcia do it anyway. They dance, move, forget for a moment the trials of the day job, being who they are.
"We need to do this more often," the other woman calls out over the music.
"Yeah," she agrees, "We do."
Tomorrow waits too soon regardless.
It always does.
-
On the plane, they play chess.
Queens and kings and pawns moving across the board.
The ultimate game of wits, strategy.
She is white and he is black. He takes his time; she doesn't.
In the end, she is the one who wins as he goes over the last few plays in his head, sees where he unknowingly gave her the opportunity to beat him.
"Two out of three?"
"Your funeral."
She laughs at his eagerness and he sets up the board.
This time, it's her that doesn't see the opening and he takes full advantage of that, leveling the score.
"Finally got me."
Spencer shrugs, "It was inevitable."
The jet dips to land and the pieces scatter in haste. Her fingers cover the ones still upright and as they do, his do the same, catching between her own.
Inevitable, she thinks to herself later. Right.
-
The first time, it happened, it wasn't really supposed to.
Her lips had pressed against his. Chaste, quick. Nothing more, nothing less.
His mouth turned into a smile, those sad, flat ones he has, and she felt it against her skin, the spread of it.
"You're okay?" she whispered.
"I'm okay," he had answered back.
Her lips had pressed against his and at some point it stopped being chaste, quick. Nothing more, nothing less.
She's still trying to pinpoint when exactly that was.
So far? No such luck.
-
He visits her place once.
It's wide, spacious, spotless. Nothing near or out of place.
Somehow, he was expecting more.
-
A serial killer is hunting women in Arizona.
They bridge a profile together like they always do.
They study the victims. Thirty somethings, smart, well-educated, ambitious.
They pour over the evidence.
She leaves the station after they brief the officers and it's step step step until she's half way down the block.
Faces pop out at her. Her mind skips them into crime scene photos before she blinks the images back.
Later, they catch the man, but not before he kills three more. Takes three more lives.
Her stomach twists when she sees him duck, arms at his back, and head held high, proud even now.
When she turns, Spencer is behind her.
She walks around him with a smile that sharpens at the corners.
It doesn't fool either of them.
-
He stills writes to his mother.
A letter a day. Sometimes, he sends them. Sometimes, he doesn't.
He grew up not being able to fix her. It's something that he's not sure he can handle now.
Children are resilient. They can try and fail and try again.
With age, all one gets is the certain knowledge that no matter what you do, there are some things that can't be helped.
"You shouldn't feel guilty. It wasn't your fault."
He's heard this speech before. From estranged family members. From Gideon. Even Morgan in some capacity or another.
"I left her."
Emily takes his hand. Squeezes it. He breathes with the pressure.
"No, you got her help. That's not a betrayal. You did the right thing, Reid."
He's heard this speech before, but she delivers the lines with a kind of stringent conviction that is hard to argue with.
Her fingers loop for his wrist and stay.
"It wasn't your fault," she tells him.
"I know. I know."
Maybe, someday, he might actually believe that.
-
They all find themselves in the position.
Identifying with the people they're supposed to protect and sometimes, the ones they're trying to protect the world from.
It scares her. How invested he becomes sometimes.
Adam Jackson is just one of many.
Emily, she can move on better than most, put things in their place and keep them there.
Reid carries a certain responsibility for things he can't possibly have any control over. And they all do in someway, she supposes.
She finds him with the case file months later, on his desk and open wide.
It's not the first time.
-
Sometimes, she thinks she need this job more than it needs her.
If home is where the heart is, Emily Prentiss's is firmly inside the BAU.
After work, she goes home, takes a bath, sits on her coach in her robe and slippers, hair wet and dripping cold.
The news is on. Someone's been killed not four blocks from where she lives.
She's already built a rough profile in her head before the anchor woman segues over to the weather.
-
It's Los Angeles and six dead.
Garcia is talking to Morgan via speakerphone and they're all listening in.
"That was too easy. Give me something challenging next time," and through the line, Emily can hear her earrings swish with her movements.
Derek laughs, "Will do, baby girl."
They're down to four potential unsubs now.
Hotch splits them up in pairs to save time.
Outside, her keys twist the car to life. Reid pushes his hair back in the passenger seat.
Through the windshield, the sun shines through unfiltered.
They both blink against it.
-
"Anyone up for drinks?"
Garcia casts her head no, the apology set in her grin, "Got a date with my man."
Morgan shrugs, mentions something about staying behind, something he has to do.
Hotch, Rossi, and JJ are already at the elevators.
Coat on, she's got a sigh on her when he finally speaks up.
"I could use the distraction actually."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
They end up at a bar five minutes away. She sits at a back booth, karaoke night well underway as off-key and off-pitch prevail.
Through the smoke, a smile runs over her face, a song he doesn't know the lyrics to humming low in her throat.
He's heard it before, the melody. Heard her humming it, but he doesn't know the words. He thinks he'd like to.
When he asks, it's a collection of surprise and something else on her face, and his stomach pinches at the sight, her gaze held on him before twisting away.
"It's nothing," her teeth slip easy into her lip - press and release, "A hymn."
A moment later, she recites it for him, the curiousity evident in his face. And the words trip off her tongue, sliding down into the space between them. It's Italian, the meaning lost on him with the language, but still he listens.
He listens and her voice holds clear through the din.
-
At home, in his own bed, it stays in his head.
The loose trail of her words, the hymn he didn't know was a hymn.
He sees her mouth. The stretch of teeth, white, sharp. The way she bit her lips when he had asked her.
He sees her and closes his eyes until everything fades, shifts over into black.
-
Colorado ends happier than most.
Well, happier relative to what they usually see.
They all realize they're called in when there is a body count already in place. It's something they knew going in - accepted long before this, but that chance to stop it. To bend every resource they have available to them and prevent one more - it's something they strive for with everything they have.
"Good job, everyone. We leave in the morning. Get some rest."
They all nod, the exhaustion seeping in faster now as Hotch walks away and Reid falls in step beside her.
Later:
Fingers splayed out over her shirt, her ribs breathe back against his touch, barely there, but noted all the same.
It's a balcony and it's dusk. It's her eyes shut against the sky spinning into indigo, into night.
The air winds cold around everything. Around them.
She moves first. Inside and away, arms looped tight at her sides, finding a wall to lean back against, the weight of the day, of lots of things holding her there.
When she looks up again, he's watching her like he needs to figure something out and that in and of itself isn't new, but it unnerves her. His hand's in his pockets. Head bent.
She closes her eyes again and their lips catch with her frown.
Eyes shut still, his skin wrinkles warm over her open palms as she digs his hands out, setting them at her hips.
A gasp slips between them. A thumb counts at her ribs, runs under fabric as a hand chases through her hair.
It doesn't go beyond this. A wall and him and her stuck in the middle. It never does.
"Emily-"
She sighs against her own name. Doesn't answer the question hidden in the syllables.
In the streets, someone runs a red light, the peal of tires rushing through the dark and then gone just as fast.
Neither of them will remember hearing it.
-
The jet is leaving in twenty minutes.
They're the first ones to arrive.
Outside her window, she sees the rest of the team. JJ and Morgan are laughing. Hotch and Rossi aren't. The contrast is amazing even at this distance.
Her shoulders roll back and there's a dull crack as they do.
The chess board rests between them. It's her play.
"Need more time?" He's smiling, almost smirking, but not quite there, and she shakes her head, eyes falling to roll back on cue.
"You wish."
She plays to win. But then again - so does he.
That much they've always shared.
-
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Date: Apr. 20th, 2009 08:59 am (UTC)This part was excellent: A gasp slips between them. A thumb counts at her ribs, runs under fabric as a hand chases through her hair.
It doesn't go beyond this. A wall and him and her stuck in the middle. It never does.
"Emily-"
She sighs against her own name. Doesn't answer the question hidden in the syllables.
In the streets, someone runs a red light, the peal of tires rushing through the dark and then gone just as fast.
Neither of them will remember hearing it.
Very evocative - a fantastic read, thankyou.
no subject
Date: Apr. 21st, 2009 07:55 pm (UTC)Thanks so much for reading and telling me what you thought. I'm happy it worked for you.
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Date: Apr. 21st, 2009 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Apr. 20th, 2009 11:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Apr. 21st, 2009 07:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Apr. 20th, 2009 06:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Apr. 21st, 2009 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Apr. 21st, 2009 03:28 pm (UTC)This is so them, everything from their thoughts to their mannerisms to how they eventually come together. I am just in awe of how you spun this fic. It's gorgeous.
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Date: Apr. 21st, 2009 07:58 pm (UTC)