summary: after years of no contact, you finally resurface in emily’s life. unfortunately, that involves bleeding all over her doormat. [interpol!reader]
1/2 • 1.2k • part two • series masterlist
contains: blood & injuries, detailed and implied mentions of violence, near death experience, attempted murder (described), alcohol, reader drinking alcohol (for numbing purposes), living room surgery, paranoia, angst + hurt/comfort + yearning, exes, spy!reader, interpol!reader x bau!emily. no use of y/n.
mirrors without reflections
The night is frigid, small specks of ice littering the air. You can see your breath struggling to appear in front of you, pathetic huffs withering with each haggard step. You’re quick to ring the doorbell, hands weak and protesting from the pressure, fingernails torn and sore.
An eternity passes before the door swings open and you almost lose yourself to the blotches creeping in from your peripherals. Through the dizziness, you make out an all too familiar stare, hues of deep cedar feeling akin to another bullet lodging into your shoulder.
Emily hasn’t wavered since you last saw her, since she slipped between your fingers, ran down your chin.
Still carved from marble, she gasps out a string of expletives, moving to grasp your shoulders as aching knees finally give out, collapsing into her as a thousand beads hitting the floor.
“I’m sorry, Prentiss,” you mutter, voice stilted and lathered in pain. Letting your body succumb to her warmth, you rasp your next words against her collarbone, “I didn’t know where else to go—gah—they’re still looking for me.”
Your cellphone is splintering in your other hand, blood and grime smeared along the crevices, shattered glass digging further into the gashes littering your palm. You smell foul, like an aquarium with all the fish risen to the surface, a saccharine yet bitter undertone sticking to your teeth with blood-thickened saliva.
Crawling out of your own algae-ridden grave may warrant that, you suppose.
“You’re blown,” Emily breathes, realization clouding her voice, dawning like the darkest sun. “Okay, okay. We need to get you inside now.”
Guilt finally begins bubbling into your stomach when you catch her leaning over to survey the barren street, her heartbeat picking up beneath your ear. The pillars decorating her apartment complex provide cover, but you’re aware how easy it is to be unknowingly compromised.
“I wasn’t followed,” you croak once the door seals shut, protecting you from shadows neither of you can ever seem to shake. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“You’d have every right,” Emily says, dragging you to the couch. You protest when she moves to sit you onto the cream cushions, crimson handprints smearing across her pale arms. It’s hard not to grimace at the sight. She scoffs, which comes out heavier under your weight. “Don’t be ridiculous, you can barely walk.”
“I’ll ruin it.”
“Then ruin it, I don’t care.”
Frustration stains her movements, desperately trying to wrestle you down. Still, you push back, stubborn as always—had you changed, you may not be here to argue. Too stubborn to burden, too stubborn to die.
“I don’t care about the couch!” Emily snaps, finally.
Like a wire under too much pressure, an old bridge collapsing. There is something symbolic about that image crossing your mind, looking at her after all these years, watching her chest heave—the knowledge that this bridge gave way because of you.
“I don’t care about anything as much as I care about you.”
Your feeble pulse staggers into a sprint, skittering with nerves alight beneath your skin, slamming against the barrier. The momentum strikes through flimsy veins ready to burst, and spins the room around you.
Crumpling, you force a compromise by folding down onto the floor, leaning against the front.
There is no moment of peace, as Emily returns to your side clutching a first aid kit and towels—you’d been too delirious to realize she left you at all.
Making quick work of your shirt, she rattles off questions that you can’t piece together, distracted by her cold hands running along your feverish flesh.
Vision warping with misguided shadows, you think back to that decrepit motel room you two would tumble into. Always under a different name, a different passport, you’d trip over your own clothing, chemicals from far too much hair-dye still resting on the tip of your tongue as it slipped into her mouth.
She never showed much emotion, you remember, heart locked up tight in her chest. Caged, by bones and chains alike. Emily never offered more than she had ready in her hands, rationing her feelings between the few she kept around.
Back then, you had wrongly assumed you belonged in that collective, in those that were allowed a piece of Emily.
It’s different now, you observe through the haze taking over. Something swirls in her gaze, spills down onto her face—something no agent could train you to recognize.
“If you wanted to undress me you could’ve just asked,” you tease, sapless. It curls between the both of you before falling short, crumpling in your lap in the shape of a dying bird.
“What did they do to you?” Emily whispers, finger ghosting across your abdomen. A shiver tears through, a glob of spit struggling to wrench down as she lingers.
“Fell asleep at the safe house, woke up on a yacht in the middle of the bay—ah… cement blocks tied to my ankles.” Her eyes lose focus, and it takes everything in you to not grasp her hand between yours to distract her, to distract yourself from the memories. Memories aged far past tonight. “Safe to say they were not too happy.”
“No kidding,” Emily says, her face melting into an expression you really wish you had enough oxygen in your brain to decipher. Then, her voice is strangled by worry as she continues pawing at your midsection. “I can’t tell where the blood is coming from.”
“Flesh wound below my ribs, probably needs stitches.” A sharp pressure to your side has your eyes bursting back open—you hadn’t realized they drooped, Emily’s own wide and narrowed. Terrified.
“Don’t do that.” Her fingers tremble. “Don’t do that to me.”
“Shit, sorry.” A few huffed breaths as you try to soak the torn air back in. “It’s just a graze. Throwing me in himself would’ve had the same effect, but the bastard was always so meticulous; terrible shot, too.”
“I’ll need to clean it.” Emily ignores you, wiping off the grime as best she can without irritating the oozing cavern carved into marred flesh. “It’ll take longer to heal, but you’re at risk for infection right now.”
“Gag me,” is all you say, trusting her with every atom thrumming you into existence.
She looks stricken, like she expected you to protest—maybe ask her to drag your withering body to the nearest hospital, or to let you do it yourself. But no, you just stare at Emily, offering your life, the stumbling organ in your chest to her.
Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last.
Leaning over you, she uncorks a bottle of vodka left abandoned on the coffee table, and you consider for the first time tonight you might’ve interrupted something.
The thought fizzles, as she seems to catch on to your sudden hesitation, shaking her head. “I haven’t had any tonight, I was, uh,” embarrassment tightens her tone—you find it amusing, all things considered, “waiting for jeopardy to start.”
“That’s not—oh,” you begin to reassure her, but she cuts you off with the spout to your mouth, and you obediently open wide, choking down the rancid rush. “That’s not what I was thinking.”
“I know,” Emily says, capping and tossing it to the side before wrenching off the leather tightened around her waist. “You’re more important than jeopardy.”
“Just tonight,” you joke, head falling back against the couch, her belt slipping between your teeth.
“Yeah,” she bounces back, a weak smirk tugging at her face, antiseptic clutched between her fingers. “It’s a rerun.”
No response ever forms in your head, because the moment she touches the wound, your mind succumbs to the candlelight and static seeping from her television.
summary: love is making you both foolish, which becomes dangerous as your last undercover operation begins to catch up to you.
2/4 • 2.9k • series masterlist
contains: mentions of blood, injuries, & near death experience, paranoia, mentioned/implied smut, excessive making out, mild angst, anxiety, abandonment issues, insecurity, smoking, you both smoke in this universe, implied unrequited!demily inspired by that one deleted scene, secret relationship, spy!reader, interpol!reader x bau!emily. no use of y/n.
hunted dogs ii
Streetlamps pour through curtains, flittering low in your eyes as you’re lost in thick blankets, Emily’s hand sifting through after. Emily has witnessed this before, how the light danced within that hole-in-the-wall room in Bavaria, or the alleyways weaved throughout Prague.
You knock your head into hers, laughing when she intercepts you easily. Tumbling down, a pillow slips and hits the rug. Her lips are on yours then, breaking only to heave a few breaths before latching back on.
When your hands begin drifting across her belt she pulls back, fishing you out of the covers and into her warmth instead. You don’t protest, latching onto her throat as her fingers trail along your spine. Nails dull but more than capable in robbing the oxygen from you; back arching, offering her more and more.
Too much, even.
“She saw you,” Emily blurts, the pressure between you two dissipating with each word. “JJ—on my team, she…” Emily licks you from her lips. “She saw you.”
Her hair still frames your face, preventing her from properly gauging your reaction. Until your hands on her hips heat up through the denim as you gently shove her off. More of a prod that she willingly gives into, guilt greasing the stalling gears in her head.
You’re already slipping into one of her coats and out the bedroom, and fear sinks in her stomach like a weight. A familiar anchor parting waves, similar to the nightmares she’s been having of you out at the bay, fighting to the surface as cement drags you back down—nightmares of when she sat in her living room, oblivious to the fact that you were somewhere dying.
Emily is up, scrambling after you. She stubs her foot on the bed post, grunting as she nearly takes out the wavering door, stumbling into the living room. Adrenaline churning inside wanes the pain, keeps her going.
But you aren’t at the deadbolt, you aren’t gone just yet. You’re staring at her from the balcony, cigarette cold on your lips. Confusion knitted in your brows.
Here. You’re still here.
She has to find your face in the dark, feels at the flesh surrounding the orange paper filter, the only warmth being your soft puffs hitting her jaw.
“It’s cold,” you whisper, fruitlessly trying to push her back inside. She’s always been stronger, days or years apart. Maybe that’s why you give in so easily, wrapping the stolen garment around her shivering shoulders and tugging her close.
Maybe it’s the depth to your gaze, the leaden pause weighing on her skin whenever your gaze falls across. Lurking, something passive and gentle that you refuse to say aloud.
Maybe that is why you dust kisses along her brows, with a mouth that has conspired and lied and corrupted—and why not a single one drifts down her temple. Only soft little noises accompanied by the cigarette being tenderly tucked behind her ear.
“Don’t leave,” Emily whispers, the irony sour on her tastebuds. A similar plea, hollow in her cranium now, had left your lips so long ago. Same as the cigarette, with love.
You don’t let it tumble down like she did, crushed beneath boots no longer owned. A firm finger presses to her outer ear, chilly against pulsating heat gathered in the shell. “Emily,” you murmur.
“She didn’t—it was a second, just long enough to see what you were wearing.”
“Emily,” you repeat, louder, tapping your thumb on her cheekbone. “I’m not leaving.”
Emily stares, dark eyes searching yours. Tentatively cataloguing every detail, the steady drag of your own. You distract her with your touch once you’re sure she’s gotten her fill, separating her mouth with hardly any effort. She gasps into your palm, and you catch the next with a kiss that doesn’t properly chase away the cold.
“I’m staying,” you say into her mouth, probably hoping the words translate better directly. Emily thinks so, her mouth moving to absorb them without any thought. “I won’t survive losing you again.”
She thinks about you on her doorstep, spilling yourself everywhere. Staining the concrete with your presence, your liveliness to be scrubbed away the next morning on her hands and knees. Emily isn’t sure if she’d survive it either, had she seen your face on the news instead of a murky peephole.
She came so close to losing you forever and didn’t even know. How stupid she’d been, before. Letting you go so easily.
“I just needed some air,” you continue, trying so hard to be better for her. God, she knows you are. “Bum a few cigs while I’m out here. You kinda owe me.”
She presses her face into your chest. Enjoys how her perfume mixes with your natural scent, how it scratches up her voice. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” you say, plucking the dart from her hair, replacing the cigarette with your hand. “Just a little. Won’t even miss them.”
Emily doesn’t argue, nor does she reach for the flimsy packet, edges browning from transferring pocket to pocket. She’d rather them gone—she doesn’t think she’ll miss anything like she’ll miss you.
Piling under the comforter, you try to make up for scrambling her. Blankets deepening your embrace, mouths lazily finding each other in the wool layers just to be lost again when Emily dozes first.
Mumbles smear along your clavicle, exhaustion soft and wet.
Soaking through to your bones, seeping under your skin and weighing you down. Dreaming doesn’t always come so simply, but with her it’s different. Comfort wasn’t hard to spoon out, flowing so easily from the crevices.
It’s been years since you’ve been able to succumb, and you have a theory Emily feels the same. She sleeps heavier than she did before, lets herself melt into nothing important for the few mellow hours spent together.
And she snores now. A quiet little cadence, light and vulnerable as it caresses your skin. Breaking between exhales only, yielding to nothing.
It’s a persuasive little lilt, convincing you to submerge yourself also. Coaxes your defenses down, lets your mind drift. Loosens the screws and bolts to fall when her phone begins incessantly blaring. She doesn’t twitch, not a single muscle springing out of place as the grating ringtone wears on the little patience you possess.
Your dulled subconscious guides you to grab blindly, fingertips lacking any logic as they skirt across the screen. Voice sodden with sleep, you murmur into the receiver something close to a greeting.
Baited hesitation parses resounding silence, rousing your brain just as a warm body drapes across your back. Her heat shields your insides from the sharp lurch of your heart, preventing the organ from battering its surroundings.
Emily snakes the phone from your sleepy grip, locking it under her jaw so she can steal your hand too. Stopping you from sinking your teeth into the supple flesh, thumbing at softness there.
The softness that wasn’t there before, the doughiness she’s molded you into so easily. You would never have made that mistake before.
Between whatever the person on the other end is saying, she’s blearily pressing kisses against your face, guiding your pulse back to its natural rhythm.
“I’m on my way,” she says, lifting from you.
An awful part of you wants to beg her back down. Willing it away is easy, something you’ve mastered over the years. But it leaves a bitter taste in your mouth as she slips from the sheets.
Watching her go is nostalgic and a bit nauseating. Because it’s the first time you’ve fallen back to a bad habit, letting Emily leave.
There is a black sedan at the end of the street. Idling. A low purr throbbing inside the engine, revving inside your head. Louder than the winding in Sergio’s small chest as you run your fingers through his fur absentmindedly, blood rushing fast yet ice cold.
You watch from a blind spot, eyes beginning to strain after the first hour. By the third, you’re kissing two fluffy ears while stuffing a weapon into some sweats you stole out of Emily’s drawers. The drawstring pulls taught, irritating the scarring along your midsection as you step out into the cold.
Adrenaline makes each inhale frigid as you approach the all too familiar vehicle, your fingers shaking as they grasp at the handle. It budges, already unlocked. A chirp rings through your bones when the door seals shut behind you, leather sweating, palms smearing across the creases.
Even with the windows tinted black, you aren’t surprised by the face that greets you. Obscured in the dark, you catch glimpses in the rear view as he fiddles with the radio dials.
“…Walk kinda funny for a ghost,” your handler says, eyes catching the reflection of yours.
“How did you find me, Igor?” you hiss, sitting forward—as much as you can while still hiding behind the passenger seat.
He digs around without turning, tossing a file over his shoulder. The folder hits you square in the chest and spills between your thighs, gathering at your feet. You spot a familiar face in the fluttering pages, the one you’ve been waking to every morning for the last few months, and arteries snag tight around your heart.
“Never found your body,” he says, simply. “Call it a hunch.”
“How did you find her?”
“Took a few favors, more than I wanted. But—” Igor adjusts the rearview mirror and you hate how spooked you look. “—Going and dying doesn’t make everything disappear, kid.”
You shakily grab at the scattered mess, palming through the censored intel. More sweat gathers, sheets sticking to your fingers. The blood rushing through your ears makes you strain to hear the rest.
“They think it was a mole,” Igor continues, rubbing the stubble along his jaw. “…Would explain how the safe house was leaked.”
“A mole?” You pause. Years spent with that team, under that alias. Unending months lived vicariously through hands that didn’t feel like they belonged to you, avoiding mirrors that never looked quite right. “No. That isn’t possible.”
He nods anyway, rapping his fingers against the steering wheel. “We’re still looking into it.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter.” Tossing together the documents, you shove the file back towards him, letting it flop onto the console. “I’m done. I’m out.”
“That’s it?” Igor asks in disbelief. You can see him physically struggle not to whip around and face you. He directs his aggression towards his seatbelt, gears straining as he yanks on the strip. “Yeah? ‘Couple weeks of sunshine and you want out?”
“I told you to pull me out months ago,” you snap back, heart pounding in your chest, in your ankles. Instinctively, you shake your foot to rid the crumbling concrete, but there is no rope, no cement blocks. “Way before I ended up out on the bay. Damn it, Igor, he fucking shot me.”
“And when they find you?” A lilt begins to paint his words, coloring the sharpened edges. Tinting them with frustration. You’ve only ever caught his real voice a handful of times, and not one of those moments had you not been close to death.
“They won’t.”
“I found you. And her.” Igor smacks the steering wheel twice in emphasis. “How much longer do you think it’ll take them?”
“You owe me more than a few favors,” you growl, lunging over the passenger seat to manually unlock your door. “Figure it out.”
This time, you let the door slam behind you, and you let the finality vibrate and settle in your gut.
Sometimes, there is ice beneath your feet when you wake alone. Freezing, volatile water begging to consume you behind a thin sheet of cold. And sometimes, it’s slushy, giving more and more under each breath. Frothy with fear and uncertainty, creeping into your socks.
You’ve been trained how to die, but never the part that comes after. The unease of surviving a life that was not yours. Nothing new, you have shed your skin dozens of times before. But this is different, the radio silence is different. You haven’t had alone time in years, especially not with a hypothetical bounty sitting on your head.
Your hand slips out from blanketed layers, cocoon splitting as you grasp the burner phone Emily provided you. Habitual, even as your fingers shake, you navigate to the email app and open the drafts tab. There is one left unsent, just as you knew there would be.
An itemized grocery list with a few words tossed on at the end. Dinner tomorrow night. Meat in freezer might go bad. The weather is unpredictable.
She’s expecting to be home soon.
The translation comes to you like breathing, even after so long without. You spent a good portion of your earlier years trying to learn every nuance of Emily’s second speak, how she warps reality with metaphor. Still, with anxiety roaring low in your chest, you’re thankful the message is relatively straight forward compared to some of the riddles she’s put you through.
Icy hot nerves soothe over, your eyelids sticky again, sleep warming your numb fingers as they go slack against the screen.
Emily is a distraction from yourself and every other person that exists within you. She always has been. There’s many parts of you, but there’s not a single one that disagrees with that fact, that doesn’t crave her like water or food.
It’s why you’re so easy to distract, why you’ve been sloppy. Why you picked up the phone when you knew better. Because you don’t know anything when she is around.
Maybe that’s why you let her go so easily. Your odds of survival could only heighten without her skewing every thought.
That’s what you tell yourself, what you fool yourself with when the memories begin to soak through, mixing with guilt and regret and agonizing want.
It almost works this time too, your burner hitting the rug below when the front door latch slides out. You jolt up, disoriented, fumbling for footing as you stagger, pillow falling behind you.
The lock is tough, and a little wonky, but Emily knows it’s sweet spot well, always tries to teach you too. Whoever’s shadowed footsteps are seeping from under the door is struggling to bypass the sticky gears. They jostle the knob roughly, the key catching on metal.
Sleep softens your joints as you slip around the corner, ready to dart for the fire escape. Scaling the bars will only get you so far, but you’ve already mentally digested the fall months ago.
Just as you step out, the light pours in. You sink back into the shadows, calculating silently.
“Emily, it’s not that big of a deal,” a man says, his tone dripping with concern. Your shoulders droop a little, adrenaline quieting enough to listen. “Doc’ said you can’t be alone. I’ll take the couch, seriously.”
“…S’fine,” Emily, your heart recognizes with a delayed beat, says. Relief is short lived, the slight slurring lighting up your nervous system. “Gonna be fine.”
“You won’t be if I leave you here.” He shifts, and you can see their outlines are blurred together, his arm slung under hers. You’re more attentive to his other hand drifting to the light switch. “What kind of partner would I be…”
This time, you really don’t have a choice. Stepping out, light douses your legs, face carefully obscured in the dark. His hand freezes on the plate.
“Emily,” you call, so syrupy you almost don’t recognize yourself. She snaps to attention, and you catch the glint of a dazed smile. All teeth. “What’s going on?”
“Oh,” he breathes out, arm falling as Emily wrangles herself inside, duffle bag putting up a fight. She grasps the door, and you know even as unaware as she is, she knows this conversation needs to end. “I didn’t realize you had company.”
You think he almost sounds disappointed.
“Thanks, Derek,” Emily says. You file away his name. “But I’m—well taken care of.”
Whatever delay to your heart rhythm she caused before, she now sends skittering from your ribcage. You have half a mind to try and catch it. But then you’d miss her lazy approach once the door is locked, her hands drifting up your side and disappearing into soft cotton. Wandering touches raising goosebumps along your sides.
You brush away her bangs, finding the gauze wrapped tightly around her head. They must’ve escaped from their bindings during the drive. “What happened?”
“Fell,” she mumbles, lost in her nails on your skin. “Bad.”
There’s doubt on your tongue but she leans in to take it from you, her mouth clumsily molding on yours. You laugh into the kiss, blindly coaxing her towards the bedroom. “Can you sleep?”
“Not f’long,” she says against your lips, frowning when you pull away towards the dresser. “Hey, c’mon.” She drags out the last syllable, coming up behind to press against you.
“You need to change,” you argue without any intent, digging through her sleepwear. “I bet you can’t shower. We should have some wipes somewhere.”
Emily grumbles but lets you tend to her reluctantly, cooperating as long as you keep the kisses coming. You’ve never seen her so lax and docile, her eyes dragging to follow your movements as you begin to turn in for the night.
You only check the window after cutting out the lights, ensuring she doesn’t see you spot the creeper car still lurking.
She seems to mistaken your sudden absence as something permanent, her hand reaching out heavily, and the initial reassurance sitting behind your teeth fails to come as easily as it has the last few times. You interlace your fingers with hers, slipping into the covers.
“Stay,” she murmurs, eyelashes struggling to flutter for you.
summary: forced into hiding, you choose to lay low with emily. unfortunately for you, her team seems determined to dig you out of an empty grave. [interpol!reader]
1/4 • 2.7k • series masterlist
contains: mentions of blood, injuries, & near death experience, cooking burns, paranoia, mentioned/implied smut, you both need to be put in timeout, mild angst, one very brief mention of interrogations/torture, humor, like this part is extremely light hearted actually, fluff, the most complicated situationship on the planet, secret relationship, spy!reader, interpol!reader x bau!emily. no use of y/n.
hunted dogs
Her balcony is burrowed away from the street, tucked between brick and stone. You lean against the railing, tea warming your lips. If you close your eyes, you can almost feel her against you.
There is no correct word or terminology to describe what you two have knotted yourselves into after so many nights spent tangling sweaty limbs and warm sheets. Pretty pink lips against yours, your teeth imprinted on her skin, trust between faint molars and incisors. She has the only evidence you exist littered beneath neatly pressed polyester. Indented in her nerves.
There are very dangerous people that would kill for them to be pressed in ink instead of the creamy skin of her thighs, some that already have.
Warmth bleeds into your fingers from herbs and porcelain, the same that envelopes you with two lanky arms. Turning within them, your smile is uncharacteristically soft, having defrosted under enough love and blistering kisses.
“You’re home early,” you murmur, letting her press you into the railing, fingers working the taught muscles lining your back. Tendons and ligaments loosen, your body as pliant as you tend to be beneath her.
“Hotch called it a night,” Emily mumbles while sloppily dragging her mouth along your brow. “Mm. He had JJ drive me home to make sure I left.”
“You sound exhausted,” you observe, returning the sweet affection along her jaw, catching her weight when she melts into you like syrup. You lap her right up until she’s squirming and whining, shoving your jaw away. “He was right.”
All she does is grumble against your neck, reaching for the mug you’re angling away. You let her have it, as you always let her have whatever she wants, noting how her jaw ripples with each swallow.
A sugary residue lingers and you’re happy to lick it off her lips between stupid smiles and quiet laughter. This is nice, you think as you both stumble through the sliding door, reflections blurring together, her blazer caught between shuffling feet. It has never been this nice.
Not when her hair was lighter, not when you responded to a name different than the one you’d pull from her sweat-slick throat. When your teeth bared, her nails dull and ragged as they tore at your back.
Thighs smacking the couch, you topple over the arm—jerking to catch yourself, scrambling slightly, but Emily is there. Her arm roping around your ribcage, like a padlocked chain to tether you to her. Mouth heavy on your neck, hot and sudden, teeth teasing out when a soft sigh deflates you.
She likes that. The needy sound of surrender. You can tell—can feel her smile stretch across your throat. Her breath dancing across your clavicle waltzes upwards, her body easing further into wandering hands, tongue sinking like an anchor through your lips.
Just as her fingers splay across your stomach, yours tangled through her hair, there’s a sharp knock at the door.
She seems reluctant to answer or acknowledge the interruption, lingering in the kiss even when you stop kissing back. Your paranoia has become manageable, a perpetual dull throb, but that doesn’t stop the frost that begins crawling inside your stomach.
Emily notices, all too familiar with how your muscles tense the slightest bit underneath her, and reaches for her phone on the coffee table, still straddling you. You hadn’t heard it buzzing over the pulse in your ears. “Oh, it’s just JJ. I left my badge in the SUV.”
She slips from your lap as you sit up, lazily watching her rebutton the blouse hanging from pale shoulders.
Once satisfied, Emily leans down to scrub at your mouth with quick swipes, frowning when she fails to clean the remnants of herself. You nip at her thumb with a half-smile, shoving her towards the door after staggering up.
“No tampering with evidence, Agent,” you tease, flashing her a look that’s downright cruel. You almost think she’s going to forget the door and pounce, so you fling out your hand with a breathy laugh. “Nope. I’m going to check on the brownies.”
“This is what I get for aiding and abetting a fugitive,” Emily mutters before her eyes light up, belatedly hearing you through the ardor dripping out her ears. “You’re making brownies?”
“Get the door,” you chide, unable to smother the butterflies in your stomach. A nervousness you much prefer, one you didn’t think you would ever feel again. Not too long ago, you thought it was all scorched earth. Everything within you, barren when she left.
You catch the smile she has to physically swallow down before disengaging the deadbolt, and you know seedlings have begun to sprout. You know things can get better from here, that they will. That you’ll be more than whatever this is, more than a pillow after long nights, more than a hand to hold in the dark.
For now, you’re happy to be her well kept secret. Something that can’t be tarnished, something that doesn’t exist outside this apartment. Held tightly to her chest, cradled in domesticity and nothing else. No more deceit, the last bit shredded alongside altered documents and a name you cannot bring yourself to remember.
Remaining in the kitchen, you only catch bits and pieces of the conversation. Something that would’ve driven the old you crazy, floating adjectives and nouns making your skin itch in frustration, the nerves trapped within lighting up.
It’s a little weird, being normal. A civilian and not a caged animal. You wonder if this is the freedom you sold when you gave up your identity, if this is the price you paid. Your gaze flits towards where Emily is no doubt slung on the door, where laughter filters through.
An ache sits in your chest, threatening to break through the bones caging tenderness.
There were far worse things to lose.
Swept in thought, a finger brushes the hot iron lining the oven and you yelp. As the brownie tray clangs to the counter, there’s a lull of silence.
“I didn’t realize you had company,” a woman says—JJ, your mind supplies helpfully through its panic, waves crashing over your skull—and the edge to the soft tone crawls up your neck and spreads across your cheeks.
Emily doesn’t falter. “A friend.”
Her voice wavers, changing direction fluently. You can imagine her shifting her weight to block JJ’s seeking view.
You don’t hear the rest, hunched in on yourself and clutching your fingertips. Not yet recovered from clawing out of an early grave, seared flesh screeches for comfort are smothered in an iron grip. You think you might feel the wet sand chafing still, grainy and everywhere.
A kiss on your neck follows the deadbolt sliding into place, the next dropped on your shoulder. “Hey,” Emily coaxes, gliding down to separate clenched knuckles. “Let me.”
Cold water rushes between and you unspool in her hold, both arms bracketing you against the sink. Catching you, always. Emily would never let you slip from her again.
“Sorry,” you mutter once you can’t taste sea salt, can’t feel it smart your nostrils or spill out your ears. “Sorry—fuck, I was trying to be quiet.”
Emily hushes you, kissing your eyebrow, tending to you. “Your nails are split, baby, I know it hurts.” After drying your hand, she watches you warily while digging out a new first aid kit.
Fresh, sealed in plastic. Since your arrival, she’s restocked plenty. You think it stings a little more than your burn—forcing her back into that mindset.
Her touch is tender as she works the gauze around each pad, her own nails bitten down and raw. You stand there and allow Emily to care for you. You wonder if you’ve doomed her as well. Only an animal free of bars and cages can be hunted.
“She didn’t see you,” Emily eventually says, lip caught in her teeth as she peers up at you. “I promise.”
The way Emily is encasing you, overtaking you, really, feels like she’s sizing you up. Ready for you to bolt, ready to drag you right back. Not wanting to cause any more trouble, muscles relax, and you force air into your lungs gulp by gulp.
“Even if she did, it was a split second. She wouldn’t pick you out of a lineup.”
You nod in tandem with a deep inhale, back pulling taught around the strain. It’s all you can do.
“What’d you tell her?” You breathe out once Emily is satisfied enough to help you onto the counter, hips parting your thighs. A hot mouth finds your pulse, the thrum that you’ve been trained to wrangle steady fluttering under her slow licks.
Emily responds between mouthfuls, “A friend caring for my cat.” Heavy hands contradict the label, skimming down your midsection.
“You don’t have a cat,” you gasp into her hair, lungs struggling to digest her heady scent.
A shrug jostles your arms as she nudges them upwards, kissing your mouth and snaking inwards to steal the little air you manage to get down. “Worry about it later,” she mumbles as bandaged fingers lock around her belt buckle. “Busy.”
Your laugh is quickly swallowed, and Emily indulges in your brownies long after they’ve gone cold.
Emily arrives twenty minutes later than she said she would, half a bagel falling from teeth, hair wet. Coffee is dripping down the sides of an old thermos, lid lost somewhere amidst slamming the car door on her hand and getting caught in the closing elevator. Maybe forgotten in your pajamas strewn along the kitchen floor.
She has discipline, she does.
But you, arguably, do not.
Emily ignores Hotch’s long look, ducking down into the single glaringly empty seat. JJ discreetly slides over a case file, smiling something saccharine sweet. It leaves an awful taste in Emily’s mouth, one she washes away with lukewarm coffee.
You’d made it just how she likes it, slipping a poorly behaved hand under her shirt as she gulped a steaming mouthful, your lips chasing the excess gathered on hers.
She’s not sure what you want, what your tongue searches for inside her. When weathered gasps drag into one another, limbs entwined and growing heavy, she watches your focus fade, eyes growing distant. Glazing over, far from her.
And whatever it is, whatever thoughts you’re burrowing in the lull between you two, two bodies so thoroughly explored, Emily isn’t sure you can have it—if she can. How much longer until the shadows are no longer figures in the dark. How much longer until the past catches up, until you both run out of time.
Emily is sure you know that. Can see it on your face when you think she isn’t looking, how it strains on every breath you take. Fear tearing at your lungs, desperately trying to escape.
And yet you’re silent, deathly so. Emily is so tired of the quiet.
“So,” JJ drawls, once the jet begins to rumble. Emily takes an extra few seconds to look up from her phone, tiny letters blurring together as she mentally prepares herself. JJ is nothing short of thrilled. “How in the world did you convince someone to sit for an imaginary cat?”
“I have a cat,” Emily argues, fingers sliding across her digital keyboard. What cat do you want, she emails you.
Email is easy. Fake names. Nothing traceable.
No sexting me on the job, you send back, completely unhelpful. And untrue. IDK. An ugly one.
Emily smears her smirk on the side of her hand and straightens up, tossing her phone on the desk. JJ is staring. She clears her throat, “What?”
“Nothing,” JJ says, peering at Emily over the rim of her mug. “Who are you texting?”
“No one important,” Emily lies through her teeth easily, as simple as breathing. Cocking her head, she squints. “Why?”
“Just wondering,” she responds, just as quick with a liquid shrug. Syrupy, the tea she swishes around with an idle finger clinging. Her eyes swish to Derek, who’s slumped nearby. “Morgan, do you let your dog sitter wear your clothes, too, or is that just an Emily thing?”
“JJ.”
Derek blinks slowly, hard as the silence grates at Emily’s spine.
“No, I’d say that’s just Prentiss.” His grin is pearly as the sun creeps into the cabin, early morning trickling in. “Since when do you have a dog?”
“Cat,” Emily corrects through gritted teeth.
“She’s the only dog here.”
“Oh, come on,” Emily groans, rubbing at the migraine forming between her brows. Splotching the tension under raw nails. Frustration bubbles hot in her chest, staining the back of her throat. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Her knees creak as she stands, gathering the stray crime scene photos and contact sheets.
“Aw, Prentiss, are you holding out on us?” Derek leans over the aisle, calculating gaze sticky and dripping down the leather. Emily feels it stuck between her fingers, considers wiping them off on his collar after she strangles him. “Who’s the girl?”
Emily ignores them and the urge to refresh her emails, phone hot in her hand—the skin of your back under the streetlights peeking through thick curtains, rivets of bone beneath soft paddings.
“Morgan,” she calls back, glaring over her shoulder as she slides in next to Hotch. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll shut up.”
When Emily kicks the door shut, she has to fight around the bundle in her arms to disable the alarm. Squealing pipes echo from the hall, plastic bags slipping from calluses drowning out the mewling in her coat as she approaches the counter.
Whatever delightfulness she smells while entering is hidden in tinfoil, a sticky note with a horrendously drawn kitten fluttering to the ground before her fingers can peel it away.
“Do you think she was expecting us?” Emily asks the fur head poking out, lips sealing around the tuft between his ears.
Affection blooms in her chest, for once with no thorns to catch the tenderness inside. There is something so endearing about this side of you, something that furls deep. She bends down to grab the note, ardor swelling large enough to press against her lungs, trapping a shaky inhale.
“Oh, hey,” you interrupt, padding in, at least trying to sound shocked. Emily knows you’ve been aware of her presence since her key pushed through the lock gears. She turns just in time to catch a kiss, your scent heady and warm from the steam. “I missed you. How was the flight?”
Responses attempt to form in her mind, malling together misshapen and nowhere near what her bones beg her to convey, nonsensical vowels and even more worthless responses shriveling atop her tongue as it pushes against yours. Stealing anything she can, be it words or thoughts.
Until you pull back with a wet frown, eyebrows furrowed. “Are you purring?”
Sergio chooses then to surge out of her lapels, like he understands the lapse in her heartbeat, meowing. You nearly drop your towel, scrambling forward as Emily laughs, light-headed. “Oh, yeah. Cat. Yeah. I got a cat. Us, I got us a cat.”
“I didn’t think you were being serious!” Your fingers disappear into an abyss, fur clumping around scabs and scars. “He’s adorable.”
“They were out of the ugly ones,” Emily says, dryly.
“I thought we were joking,” you defend yourself, hiding behind two wide feline eyes. “He looks like you.”
“Well, good to know you don’t think I’m ugly.”
Emily catches your towel, the edges slipping with her focus. She crumples the cloth in her grip and tugs you towards her, not caring if you ruin her expensive slacks. You’ve already ruined her as it is, everything else too.
“We both know I’m not with you for your personality.”
“Liar,” Emily rasps against your moist cheek, enjoying the heat there. From the shower, you’d insist. She knows you better than any, knows that now.
This had started from something baser, the steep cliff you’d hassled her up—where she later left you dangling. She needed physical, something real among all the falsities. Someone true. And you were anything but, she had seen worse things tortured out of you, yet still found warmth in your blood, heat between your thighs. Fondness perspiring in your haggardness, from your mouth to her skin.
Emily refuses to let another in, in the depths of herself, anyone besides you.
summary: emily allows you inside her home, and inside her heart once more. [interpol!reader]
2/2 • 1.3k • part one • series masterlist
contains: blood & injuries, mentions of living room surgery, injured reader, near death experience, attempted murder (mentioned), paranoia, mentioned/implied smut but nothing shown, angst, angst with a happy ending, yearning, exes, getting back together, spy!reader, interpol!reader x bau!emily. no use of y/n.
mirrors without reflections ii
She smells the same, is your first thought.
Throat desiccated, the residual buzz makes your facial muscles slow to respond as awareness overtakes you.
Her scent soothes, helps distract from the fire licking up your body, hot and searing. The natural, heavy undertone that mingles under her perfume—it nearly sends you spiraling back into a dreamless state. An artificial fragrance clinging to the air and her throat grounds you, coaxing you back to the present, where the static becomes real intelligent noise.
Jeopardy hums low, illuminating her face as she only seems to be half-watching, gaze long and far from her spot next to you. Still on the floor—but different clothes are hastily tugged on, and your shoulders are bundled in a soft blanket. She hosed you off properly at some point.
“Hey,” you croak, then wince, your esophagus no more than a desert. Emily is at your side in an instant, glass to your lips. You eagerly slurp down as much as she allows you before pulling away, her hand cold against your sternum.
“Slow,” she admonishes but there’s no bite to the scold. You obey anyway, draining the cup in small increments. Then, panting, your tongue darts out to clean the excess, and her eyes follow the movement, candlelight catching in those dark depths.
The glass connects with the coffee table harder than necessary—she clears her throat, avoiding your bleary stare. “We need to get you to a hospital.”
“They’ll find me,” you whisper, as if they already have. “I need to lay low, or these injuries are the least of my worries.”
“You’re going to kill me,” Emily breathes out, two fingers at her forehead, “you’re going to kill me, and yourself.”
“You know I’m right,” you deflect, shrugging as best you can. “I was supposed to be pulled out last week. I’ll come up with something.”
Emily doesn’t say anything, just looks back at the television. Still not quite watching. Muttering the answers and picking at her nails, she seems to stare through the screen.
“Thank you,” leaves you without permission, a careful whisper, heart desperate for some kind of reprieve. “For everything.”
Her eyes flick to you, low light flashing in the whites. They linger, refusal dusting coffee absent of any sugar. Thawing under your bleary stare, she huffs out a reluctant breath, “You’re welcome. But you don’t have to thank me.”
“You could’ve left me out there to rot,” you say, ignoring how vile the words taste, how they taste nothing like Emily. “You should’ve.”
“Don’t,” Emily cuts in, slices right through. “Please, don’t.”
“...Emily.”
Her face tenses, chest slowing on the next intake. She faces you head on, and you can see it now. The desperation, the false sense of reality she’s sorting through by having you next to her. “Why are you here?”
You fumble for an answer, mouth working around what feels like the cotton gauze against your skin. After several tense palpitations in your chest you mistake for heartbeats, you answer. “I miss you.”
Stilted. Cracked along the edges, the confession feels hollow. You’re not sure if there are enough words, or breaths, left inside you to explain that she has woven herself into your arteries, threaded through your muscle.
Emily’s eyes waver just slightly, a subtle sign you’ve skewed the autonomous analog that composes her brain. They continue to shift, then, taking in every twitch and flutter of your face. Studying you. She’s always been rather good at that.
“You’re serious.”
“Dead serious… almost literally.” You crack a smile that Emily doesn’t reciprocate. If anything, her face only seems to darken.
“How convenient for you,” Emily says, hastily, as if she might burn her hands by dwelling. You’ve always been broiling to her, easy to spatter and welt those nearby—her vulnerable flesh she’s only leant you in the dark. “Realizing this when you’re half-dead and need somewhere to stay for the night.”
You flinch, unable to properly process her words. Incapable. Like you’re allergic to them, your body rejects the very idea, the hurt and accusation laden between messy sutures.
“That’s not fair,” you wrench out, the weight of a thousand mistakes pressing down and bruising you more and more—these ones taking the shape of different hands, the ones across from you tearing into each other, as you both once did, nails snagged between raw fingers. “You know that isn’t true.”
“I feel like I don’t know anything when it comes to you.”
A contestant on the TV runs out of time, alarm blaring distantly. Another guesses the answer wrong.
“You knew me once.”
“I knew who you pretended to be.”
Sewing mauled skin back together was fruitless—you think you might be splitting from the seams. Inner workings spilling, staining her carpet alongside your words. “That’s rich coming from you.”
Her features may have hardened since you last ran your lips across them, but you notice the way dark chocolate has melted around the edges, how shoulders droop without your teeth sinking into milky skin. She’s soft now. She’d be warm underneath your mouth, silk on your tongue.
You’re not sure of much when it comes to her, not anymore, but you’re sure of that. You’re sure she still stows her cigarettes in mountains of fabric and thick buttons. Hidden from herself, where most of her guilty indulgences end up. Yourself included.
And you’re sure of this.
“You knew me.” You reach for Emily, always reaching, clammy hand grasping hers. Emily doesn’t deny it again, spares you, lets the accusation sit in the crevices. Watches your thumb stroke across her knuckles. “I loved you. I still do.”
“Don’t say that,” she says, her shattered heart rattling between syllables, choking her up, “don’t say that and not mean it—don’t you dare.”
Instead of trying to convince her, you scoop up her hand and tug until her breaths puff across your cheek. She breathes life back into skin still gleaming, still sopping wet with the bloody towels littering bathroom tiles, settling into your lap.
A familiar weight, those cement blocks still tied to your ankles when you stare up at Emily, cataloguing every inch, filing it all away in case you don’t wake up tomorrow. Every pore and every microscope detail—her fluttering eyelashes, healthier now, and the scar trailing where you used to brush sweaty bangs away, kisses not far behind.
And Emily looks down at you, the mess made of you. It used to scare her away, you think. When she treaded lightly, grazed the petals of what you could’ve been, pollen dusting her nose.
Tilting her head down, overcome by muscle memory, your lips brush across the faint mark. Emily inhales sharply, steals away yours as well.
Possessed by the same ghosts, she nudges you until her mouth melds with yours.
Your grip is weak but never too weak to hold onto her, fingers burying into her thighs, dragging her closer and closer.
Emily kisses you like she had sobbed the night she left you, wet and soft and haggard. Whimpering into your mouth, tongue sliding through to chase after it, fumbling to get as much of you into her hands as possible.
Something of bad omens, clinging to one another, dragging each other beneath the waves. Drowning. You two are the same as you were before while simultaneously nothing alike—cut from the same stone, sledgehammered into a million shards, and messily pieced back together.
Even when sunrise paints her skin a beautiful pink, blending with the brush strokes you left against her yourself, pretty blush misting her shoulders and clavicle, you miss her.
You’d consider it pathetic, missing her when she’s sprawled beneath blankets and muddled love just a touch away, if the feeling wasn’t so normalized in your mind. If there wasn’t already a perfectly carved spot for it.
The distance between countries was no different than what she harbored between messy kisses and rumpled sheets, what it felt to be inches away from her naked back glistening in frothy moonlight. Dripping down her spinal cord, skewed from derelict shutters.
Except now, when Emily blinks awake she closes the distance, hair falling into your face, covering the inescapable need plastered there.
