The only two people to die at the BAU have been the agents she appointed.
It starts like this: she can’t choose someone. Bile rises in her throat every time she tries to pick up the stack of files with replacement profiles. Good people. Excellent, brilliant people. She thinks Clara is in there somewhere.
And every time she opens one, Dave finds her in the bullpen’s single stall bathroom, collapsed over a toilet.
The bureau is breathing down her neck. They want a replacement. But she thinks of Stephen, thinks of wheels up, matt, and she hands the files with a shaking hand to Dave.
And: she freezes. They ask her where do you want us to go and she looks at them with such terror that the next four minutes aren’t something she remembers.
( Later on, looking back, that’s when she knew. When she couldn’t tell Luke and JJ to interview their victim and Reid and Tara to analyze the scene, she knew. )
She pretends, for a few more weeks. Goes to therapy appointments where they ask her whether or not she’s sleeping or calling her mother or picking her nails ( two nos and a yes ), where she hides her bleeding cuticles inside her fists, and doesn’t say that yesterday, she saw Stephen in the bullpen, or tried to answer a phone call from Matt.
She thinks: fifty is a good age for retirement, anyway. She thinks: why couldn’t it have been me?
( She’s not an idiot. She does not think that this team would be alright if she was gone instead of Matt. But she knows, too, what he had and she doesn’t. There’s four children and a widow and nothing, nothing she can do. )
By the time she can’t okay the case for Garcia, she lets herself know.
She hands her recommendations for unit chief in the same day.
my muse is dead. tell me how yours is dealing with it.