Chapter Text
I.
Emily’s hands are cold inside their fur-lined mittens, her cheeks like two ripe apples, rosy and full beneath earmuffs she’s been spending most of the morning trying to discard.
She’s 6. Too young to really understand temperatures, but she does understand enough French to recognise the word merde, which Anaïs only ever uses when she’s angry, and which Emily is forbidden from repeating. She had said it once, at dinner, and her mother had turned the same shade of bright white as the table cloth. Later, Emily had been spanked, after being sent to bed with no dessert.
“Emily!” Anaïs says, in the same tone. In her accent, the end syllable sounds long and drawn out, like the breath that is visible between them.
She’s been playing with the earmuffs, tugging them off her head and pushing them back into her hair. Messing up the neat style with the pretty barrettes and ribbons that her au pair had spent time meticulously placing. They’re itchy, she wants to say, but she knows it will make no difference, that Anaïs isn’t in charge of what she does or doesn’t wear any more than she is.
Across the courtyard, a small band is tuning up. A man with a horn, a woman with a fiddle, two singers. Emily can’t hear them properly with the earmuffs on.
“What time is mother coming?” She asks, tucking her hands into the pockets of her tartan coat, where she won’t be tempted to play with them anymore.
Anaïs murmurs something in French, something Emily hasn’t learnt yet. The smile she offers her is forced. “Soon,” she says, and checks her watch, “just watch the carollers, Emil-ee - she’ll be here soon.”
-
II.
It’s too cold to be standing outside.
The S shaped building, striped with blueish green and dirty-white paint, looks like a half-chewed peppermint cream, the lopsided string lights and tattered tinsel clinging desperately to the balcony rail doing little to cheer the scene up. That seems pretty fitting for the only motel in a town that‘s main claim to fame is that it’s not the ‘rotten sneaker centre of America’—because that’s next door. The weather, which is only supposed to get worse, a snow storm brewing on the edges of town, isn’t helping either. The mottled piles of what has already settled on the poured concrete parking lot look more like shaving cream around an uncleaned sink than anything from a Christmas card, the steadily falling flakes dandruff-like, dirty.
It’s the kind of morning where Emily could do with a cigarette. Unfortunately, she’s currently in the midst of yet another attempt at quitting. The polystyrene cup of lukewarm, watery coffee, and what passes for a view, will have to do.
JJ is still on the phone when Emily gets back to the room, sitting on the twin bed by the window with it tucked under her chin, trying to pack her go-bag. Even without being able to hear half the conversation, Emily gets the gist: the inclement weather means the airspace is closed. The jet can’t fly.
“No, no, I understand. Thank you,” JJ is saying, not unkindly, though Emily can tell from the iron clench of her jaw, the jagged movements of her hands, even the tone of her voice, that she’s struggling not to cry. The “Merry Christmas” she tacks onto the end is cracked through the middle.
For a moment, Emily hangs back in the doorway, giving her space. She knows how JJ deals with things, watches as JJ thumbs away her tears, not letting them fall far enough to leave tracks, willing herself to stop. It’s a familiar gesture, her blue eyes awash with unshed moisture—a snow globe shaken too hard—one Emily has seen more than most. JJ works too hard at not looking weak. She has to, Emily thinks, the same way Emily has learnt to pack things away to break down over later. That’s what being a woman in the FBI is.
She lets the dust settle, and then walks further into the room, the floorboards groaning underfoot giving her away. JJ’s expression changes instantly.
“No dice?”
JJ shakes her head, her lips curling into a half-smile, hand drifting to the pendant that never leaves her throat. “No. It was always a long-shot.”
What she doesn’t say is that she hadn’t wanted to come on this case in the first place. That it had been cutting it too close to Christmas as it was, and that flying out to somewhere that was coated in snow most of winter had been too much of a risk. That she had agreed to it out of necessity, knowing how badly her role was needed in the investigation, choosing to put that ahead of her son, who was waiting at home for her, the guilt of it twisting her belly into knots for the whole four days they’d been here. She doesn’t need to say these things because Emily already knows, can see it only partially concealed on her face.
An apology forms on Emily’s tongue but she lets it die there. She knows it won’t do anything to help. It won’t take the sting out of missing her son’s first real Christmas, but it might break the dam JJ has carefully constructed inside of her, and Emily doesn’t want that.
Instead, she sits beside JJ, watches her patiently wait for Google to open on her cell. She tries not to think about how many motel and hotel rooms across the country she’s sat exactly here, a foot away from JJ. Emily doesn’t acknowledge what she’s typing, doesn’t know where she’s going with this, until JJ is showing her the information, the series of numbers across her phone’s tiny screen. It takes a moment, but then Emily understands. Bites her lip. Whistles through her teeth at how long a drive it is.
It’s not impossible, though. Even in a snow storm, even with the roads slick with ice and filled with Christmas Eve traffic, it’s not impossible.
“You didn’t return your rental yet, right? Think I could borrow it?” JJ asks with a renewed kind of determination, a fierceness bright in her eyes.
“We’ll have to ask Hotch,” Emily warns. But she already knows that even if he says no, JJ’s going. That she’d go to the ends of the Earth for Henry, so 650 miles or so is nothing.
And Emily’s going with her.
-
III.
The day Henry was born had happened to coincide with Elizabeth Prentiss’ annual Winter Soirée. As far as excuses went, her friend going into labour wasn’t the weakest Emily had made use of over the years. The sense of immediate relief—forgetting all about the designer dress hanging on the front of her closet, the hours of small-talk with people whose values didn’t match hers, her mother picking at every little defect in her life—had been short-lived. As soon as the realities of JJ giving birth had sunk in, so had the panic.
Reflecting on it, now, a little over a year later, Emily knows she had reacted the way an expectant father would, despite that very much not being her role. Penelope had rallied around them, excitement barely contained, sort of like trying to zipper closed a too-full suitcase, yapping non-stop and barely pausing for breath. Sensing the affect that unbridled flood of energy was having on JJ, Emily had forced herself to be calm, to be soothing. To be an anchor for JJ, something unwavering to focus on, even if her own anxieties were screaming bloody murder inside of her head. She felt unprepared, despite the mountain of reading she had embarked on almost the moment JJ had confided in her that she was pregnant. That the father didn’t want to be involved.
Unprepared, and like she was, once again, attempting to fit herself into a place she didn’t belong.
In reality, Emily had already been playing the role for some time. Attending birthing classes, spending more than a few overnights at JJ’s place, heading out to get late night and early morning cravings when they came. She’d held blonde hair back whilst JJ emptied the contents of her stomach in a hotel toilet, forced her to gulp down peppermint teas and steeped ginger roots, forgone her own coffee (possibly the hardest of all!) so JJ didn’t have to smell it. Her whole routine had been altered to fit around JJ’s needs.
You. Kids. I can see it.
Emily wonders, but knows better than to ask, if JJ had known she was pregnant then. If that had prompted her to say it.
It wasn’t like JJ had asked her for any of it—besides the birthing classes, about which she had clearly been ruminating on a while, finally choking the question out on a late night in the office, doe-eyed and chewing on her thumbnail. Emily had been more than willing to do it, but similarly anxious not to overstep. She and JJ were friends, their closeness accelerated partially due to necessity—the sharing of hotel rooms, the solidarity of being the only women in the field—but Emily had also, at some point in the two years prior, developed feelings she didn’t know what to do with. The idea that she may be taking advantage of JJ whilst she was vulnerable and alone was never far from Emily’s mind. I will just help her through morning sickness, and then it’ll just be these birthing classes, and then— but there wasn’t a way to distance herself once she’d got started. The quiet bud of attraction she had been trying so hard not to nurture, had, by then, blossomed into something much bigger. And JJ needed her. She had said as much, sobbing into Emily’s chest, the worry of whether she had made the right choice, whether she could do any of this alone, spilling out all in one go.
“You’re not alone,” Emily had found herself whispering, stroking her fingers along JJ’s temple, the soft hair there, her other hand rubbing tight circles into JJ’s back.
The feelings had grown into something uncontrollable, then, some yawning great thing she couldn’t ignore. Emily sometimes felt they must be written across her face, that everyone else in the office could read her like a book, but if any of them did, the usual teasing didn’t occur. Perhaps they were all just too aware of how precarious things were with JJ, as though Emily backing off even just a little might be the move that made the whole thing collapse.
Not that it much mattered. Emily could have side-stepped all she liked, it was still her and Garcia who were there when JJ went into labour. It was still her hand in JJ’s in the delivery room, clutched so tight she wondered if she wouldn’t wear the imprint of it forever. She heard Henry’s first cry, saw the squawking mess of him as he entered the world, pink and shrivelled and so, so beautiful. Watched him be placed on his mother’s chest, and felt the trickle of tears on her own cheeks before she’d even acknowledged she was shedding them.
Then, Emily had let herself hover around the sidelines for the rest of the team’s visit, as though she really were the child’s father; worrying over Reid dropping him, ensuring Derek was supporting his tiny little head, her hands moving of their own accord to shadow his.
Eventually the time had come to go home, and Emily had found she didn’t want to leave.
“So, don’t,” JJ had said, an easy smile breaking through the exhaustion on her face, the way sunshine did through a dense forest.
It had seemed so simple, coming from JJ. She had had a quiet discussion with a nurse, whilst Emily went to a vending machine for tea, more out of habit than necessity. By the time she returned, a cot was being brought out, set up on the opposite side from Henry’s.
“You make such a sweet family,” the nurse had murmured as she left, saying goodbye to the baby for the night.
Emily, too overwhelmed by the way her chest glowed at the compliment, didn’t think to correct her.
Then again, neither did JJ.
-
IV.
Hotch isn’t happy, but he doesn’t outrightly say no. That’s as much of a yes as they’re going to get, so they take it.
It doesn’t take long to pack the contents of their room into their go-bags, to toss them in the back of the rental car the way they have a hundred times before. It takes longer to deal with the frosted over Sedan, the roof so thick with frost it looks like the glittered floor of a cheap karaoke bar. They don’t discuss who is taking the first stint of the driving, Emily sliding into the driver’s seat as soon as she’s finished clearing the mirrors, the iced over windows.
It’s easy in a way a lot of things in Emily’s life aren’t. A few swipes of the windscreen wipers, the last of the stubborn ice scraping against the tired mechanisms, and they’re on their way.
The sky is just starting to grow colour, pale blues and lilacs bleeding in slow. It’s easy enough to see where they’re going, so long as Emily keeps the sun blind down, doesn’t look too far ahead.
It’s also freezing, but Emily doesn’t dare turn the lacklustre heating on, knowing she’ll have to stop every mile to clear the windows again. Wrapped in her coat and scarf, one of the leather gloves Emily got her last Christmas in her lap so she can use her phone, JJ doesn’t seem to notice the cold, too concentrated on the view beyond the smeary glass, her cell gripped tight like a lifeline.
So, Emily turns the radio on.
Through the haze of static, she hears the words driving home for Christmas, and cringes, changing station.
The song is too on the nose.
It’s also apparently the only thing that’s even slightly able to make its way through the blizzard of white noise.
Fine, no radio then.
“The I-89 is closed up to the junction,” JJ says, biting at her thumbnail as she tilts her head in the direction Emily’s turn signal is prepped for. “The traffic report said to wait until the next exit.”
Emily releases the lever, drives onward.
She can’t say she’s spent a lot of time in Vermont, but, driving on mostly empty streets, snow-topped trees as far as the eye can see, Emily sees the appeal. She’s always considered herself secretly meant for the rural life, which JJ would laugh at, if she were able to concentrate on anything but getting home to Henry. She knows she screams city through and through, but some of Emily’s fondest memories involve hikes in the countryside, sleeping out under the stars. Her grandfather’s horse ranch in the mountains, a highlight of an otherwise miserable childhood.
The rest, she thinks, involve JJ.
“Thank you for doing this,” JJ murmurs, touching Emily’s hand where it rests by the gear shift for such a brief moment, Emily thinks she might have imagined it.
“Of course,” she says, not knowing how to explain the rest.
How to say that it had never occurred to her not to.
-
It starts to snow about an hour in.
They’ve already been more or less creeping along the highway, the blizzard warning clearly pushing everyone to leave all at once, hoping to outrun the snow. Emily imagines that if JJ had access to the road map in real time, the hours until getting to Virginia would be going up and up.
It’s probably better they don’t know.
Emily’s fine driving in snow. The very first time she sat behind the wheel, it was that of her grandfather’s Land Rover in the alps, balanced between his knees. She had been six years old, and a fast learner, curiously watching and listening as Papy ran through the different controls, until she could do it for him. Her feet didn’t reach the pedals, but he let her do everything else. By the time she legally got her license, a decade later, Emily had already been driving around Europe for years, ‘borrowing’ cars from her mother’s staff. She’d learnt to ride a Vesper in Italy, though she much preferred to ride on the back of one. Different terrain—the variable European weather—had never much bothered her either way. The switch in sides of the road depending on what country she was in had been far more of an adjustment.
The Sedan has good winter tires, even if the rest of it leaves much to be desired, and the road isn’t as slippery as it could be. The glare of the sun on the tarmac prompts her to put her sunglasses on, the shade not quite doing its job now the sun has shifted, but besides that, she’s driving slow. Almost painfully so, if the way JJ is tapping her fingers against the dashboard, teeth sinking so hard into her bottom lip they might break skin, is anything to go by.
“What did you get him for Christmas?” Emily finds herself asking, the quiet between them having drifted just across the line between comfortable and not.
JJ looks taken aback, just for a second, before her lips quirk up into a quiet smile, eyes glittering as she drags her gaze from the view outside, to Emily.
“Tito the Turtle,” she says, using her fingers as quotation marks, “it’s a bath toy that blows bubbles and sings.”
Sharing the smile, Emily glances at her a moment before returning her eyes to the road, “sounds perfect.”
“It doesn’t feel like a lot, but his birthday wasn’t even a month ago…”
You don’t have to justify it to me, Emily wants to say, but doesn’t.
“…and bath time is one of the only times I really get to spend with him with frequency, so at least I’ll see him enjoy it.”
There’s a wistfulness in her voice that JJ doesn’t bother trying to hide, at least not with Emily. They have spoken at length about how difficult it is, balancing being a single mom and working a job like theirs. She knows Hotch has offered accommodations, has even suggested adjusting her schedule to three days a week, no doubt mindful of his own inadequacies as a father. She also knows JJ would never go for it. That as much as Henry is her whole world, the work is too important to her.
They make it work, for the most part. Henry has a nanny who is always flexible when it comes to JJ’s schedule, and who updates her as much as she can. When possible, JJ stays back in Quantico, working the case from the ground, so that she at least gets to go home to her son some nights, even if he is asleep by the time she gets there. She’s there for the night feeds, and the early morning cuddles, and as many weekends as they can afford to give her. She gets first refusal for the holidays, the option to work from home if absolutely necessary. The rest of the time, Garcia stays local, is never more than a phone call away. They all chip in where they can. It’s manageable, if not ideal.
But then there’s the milestones JJ’s missed. The nights spent in hotel rooms miles away from her child, with only a cellphone held to his head to say goodnight on, a grainy photo message of his first smile, or the first time he’d managed to pull himself up to standing. Countless times, Emily’s heart has broken watching JJ wrestle with the near-constant battle, the push and pull of the two sides of her life that are constantly at loggerheads. Reassuring her that she’s a good mother, that Henry is lucky to have her, even if it does reopen Emily’s own wounds, her own conflicting feelings about motherhood.
But as much as JJ is always more willing to let her guard down with Emily, there’s no acceptance in it. It doesn’t lessen her load, no matter how hard Emily tries, having someone who will always, no matter what, be in her corner.
And it probably never will.
“He doesn’t even know what Christmas is,” JJ says, laughing humourlessly.
She rolls her eyes to try to hide the glisten of tears that have sprung up there, but Emily sees anyway, even just in the mirror.
She sees everything.
She always has.
-
V.
Her first Christmas with the BAU, Emily had allowed Penelope to talk her into going ice skating.
What she hadn’t accounted for—but, had she known her longer, might have figured out—was that Penelope’s version of ice skating was standing at the edge of the barrier, drinking mulled wine, and flirting, whilst JJ zoomed around the rink like she belonged there.
“She does this every year,” JJ had commented, seeing Emily’s eyebrows rise as Penelope shooed them both away from her, “last time, Elle—Agent Greenaway—and I ended up exhausted and with bruises on our asses, whilst she left with a half dozen phone numbers. Never mind the year Spence joined us…”
Emily had pulled a face, already imagining Reid’s long, gangly form trying to stay upright on the ice, Bambi let loose without his mother. She hadn’t been part of the team long, but she recognised enough of herself in Reid to picture it easily.
Of course, JJ was a brilliant skater. She’d waved it off when Emily, astounded by her agility and yet not wholly surprised, complimented her on it.
“All East Allegheny had going for it in the winter was its frozen lakes,” she’d shrugged, nimbly skating backwards so that she could retain eye contact. “Why—have we finally found something Emily Prentiss isn’t great at?”
In truth, Emily hadn’t been ice skating since she was a child, and it seemed a lot more complicated in her adult body. There was a rhythm to it that she hadn’t quite been able to slot back into, even watching JJ do it seamlessly.
Maybe especially watching JJ do it.
Stop that, Emily remembered telling herself. Back then, she was still trying to fight the ever-deepening pit of attraction that had started to form low in her belly with each new part of JJ she discovered.
(Now, she’s given up trying to fight it. It’s gone beyond a crush, beyond infatuation, into something that could grow teeth if she gave a name to it).
“It’s been a while,” Emily had admitted, instead, watching the grin bloom across JJ’s lightly-flushed cheeks, a plan forming behind those bright blue eyes.
Before Emily could stop it, could even realise what was happening, JJ was taking her hands, easily threading their fingers together like they hadn’t only met for the first time a month ago.
The ice had had very little to do with the way Emily stumbled forward, the stutter of blades imitating her heart which now felt like it was lodged part way down her throat.
At that, JJ had laughed, which, honestly, only made things worse.
Untangling one hand, she moved it to Emily’s hip. Even through the layers of coat, jumper, gloves and shirt, Emily felt her touch like a brand on her ribs, couldn’t help but startle at the feel of it there. Somehow too intimate for a co-worker, but at the same time not nearly enough.
“Relax into it,” JJ had murmured, leaning close, “let your hips follow the arc of your feet.”
Emily had had the standard form down, bent at the knee, legs in a V the way she had as a child, some remnants of muscle memory still lingering underneath the years of inexperience. It was the tension that she couldn’t fight.
JJ wasn’t helping.
“There’s a melody to it,” she had said, beginning to hum softly, tugging Emily as she went, first by the hand, then angling her hip, every movement just so. Firm enough that it made something flutter low in Emily’s belly; gentle enough that it didn’t hurt.
When she had eventually let go, Emily had felt her whole body deflate at the loss of her, almost falling over her own feet again.
“You’ll get it,” JJ had laughed, teasing, light, “if not this time… then next year.”
It was a promise.