#matthew benton

[starry-bite]

i. declan doyle's cover identity was. matthew thatcher. matthew. matthew.

emily really named her first kid after him. i'm.

[nostromo13]

Thinking about what if Matthew had been around properly before Demonology. What if the team had gotten to meet him and see Emily around a person that *knows* her. What if it made it all the more harder when Emily comes into the office when he dies, soaked and cautiously wrecked, having just lost one of the few people Emily Prentiss is truly comfortable around.

Emily is shattered as it is in Demonology, but, god, what if the team knew what she had lost in him. Not necessarily what she admits to David, but just the Emily that is even slightly at peace. I need the team to see him stand next to her and afterwards see an Emily that doesn't bring her friend to functions because that friend that she would trust to stop her from embarrassing herself drunk in front of her new (maybe less new) coworkers is dead.

The Emily that shakes in front of Matthew's parents, in front of Rossi, aching for justice for the friend that threw everything away for her. The Emily he or any of the team barely know yet.

I was reading 'I walk my days on a wire' by @leavemurph (which is a must-read. Their writing always changes my brain chemistry), and -spoilers for that fic- Matthew is alive. Matthew gets to stand next to Emily as her friend, and my god, it is 7am, and the plague of these thoughts is how I am starting my morning.

[eyesontheskyline]

reckless (just enough) - ch 1/3.

Read here on ao3.

Rating: M

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply (but we're talking about pregnancy, abortion and Emily-typical Catholic guilt, and there's a decent amount of non-graphic vomiting going on)

Relationships: Eventual Hotchniss in chapter three, but this chapter is Emily and Matthew friendship centric.

Summary: Emily Prentiss and three pregnancies: at fifteen, thirty-three, and forty. (Demonology, Lauren arc and Hotchniss vibes.)

Chapter Excerpt:

“I think. . . a person should be wanted,” she says. “Loved, and. . .” She closes her eyes, wraps her arms around her waist and looks away, looking for the words. “Not – a consequence, you know? A punishment for making a bad choice. A person should mean more than that to their mom.” Her voice cracks on the last word, and without any warning, there are tears rolling down her cheeks, dripping onto her folded arms as she drops her chin to her chest. “I don’t want a baby,” she whispers.

“We’ll figure out a way,” Matthew says, resolute.

“He said I can’t come back to church.”

“Fuck him, Emily. He’s wrong.”

[whitecrossgirl]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

20. Dreaming about them 

Route 66 AU/character swap. 

Emily collapses in the London Interpol Office due to internal bleeding caused by the scar left by Ian Doyle. While Aaron rushes to her side, Emily finds herself face to face with the last two people she ever expected to see. Mainly because Matthew Benton and Ian Doyle have both been dead for years but it seems, both of them need to have a chat with her.

Special thanks to @sequinsmile-x for letting me bounce this idea off her and her amazing support today <3

[nostromo13]

I wanted to bring some thoughts on how older Emily Prentiss deals with Matthew's death years after.

I get the vague sense that she still talks to him. That despite her girls, despite Derek and Spencer and the rest of their team, he's the one she wants to inform first when something happens. In the quiet of her apartment, she will talk to the empty air and hope he is in front of her or listening from wherever he is.

She knows that if the darkness she experienced is in fact hell, that he is probably down there too. Even as she gets older, there is still a pit in her chest of knowing that she was not forgiven when she died, that hell took her ruthlessly and unexpectedly cold. She didn't grow out of the guilt that no one has put on her for being a reckless teenager. In fact, I think it's a guilt she maybe doesn't have in Demonology. In Demonology, she is reeling from a childhood that put her in that clinic, and how alone she felt, but after her death, after witnessing a hell-like death so different from the light and warmth of Reid's, she is terrified because what can she do besides blindly hope that next time she dies it will be warmer. She almost knows it won't, and dare I say I think in the looks Rossi shares with her he knows it too, or perhaps more likely he knows she heavily believes it and he feels so sad for her. I think it can't have helped with the stress of the job that took out her 'spark' that she mentions in Evolution.

Despite this, I believe Matthew's death no longer brings as much resentment to older Emily. Younger Emily doesn't feel the need to disclose what exactly her religious beliefs are, not because they are complicated, but because she is a private person, so it's not difficult for her to chalk her unwillingness to disclose it down to that in front of people. Older Emily is less private, but she just doesn't mention her religious beliefs (not just on the show, because ig a lot of them don't really much).

I think she needs to have healed from him dying because she needs that comfort that he's okay and that he is watching out for her. She feels him in the cigarettes- if they're not a reminder of teenage gafs around shitty fires their friends made up, they get her a little closer to seeing him again. She knows he would be cheering her along if he could. He wouldn't love the stress she is under, but Matthew never did like institutions that took way more than they gave.

[hotchaway]

spencer 🤝 hotch

reminding emily of matthew benton

[pagetbewbster]

do u ever think about how many of her friends’ deaths Emily Prentiss has on her conscience and just fcukin Cry

[criminalmindsmoments]