Operational Definition
She wasn’t sure she wanted to open her eyes. Her body hurt in at least three places, her eyes were heavy, and her head fogged. There was someone there, that much she knew, but the her awareness warned her of tense, stoic posture and she vaguely remembered the paramedics finding her wallet not her ID.
She’d wager the team didn’t even know she was in the hospital and it was a terrifying notion to consider, especially since they were as close as family. Reluctantly, she opened her eyes, closing them almost instantly and groaning as her head started to throb.
“You’re awake.”
Cultured, straight to the point, void of emotion… it could only be her mother. “Hello, Mother,” she croaked out, trying to sit up.
“Don’t do that, you’ll pull the stitches,” Elizabeth Prentiss ordered. “I’ll get a doctor.”
Emily sighed as she lay back against the pillows, wincing when she shifted awkwardly enough to do exactly what her mother had warned her against.
“Emily, you’re awake! How are you feeling?”
“Okay,” she managed to croak out, her eyelids fluttering. It was difficult to focus on the doctor.
The doctor chuckled. “Sleep,” he suggested soothingly. “Your body is still trying to heal.”
“The team,” she managed to mumble out.
“Team?”
That was the last thing she heard before she nodded off again.
He looked determined and professional, the rest of the team behind him, and he knew they were an intimidating bunch as they made their way through the halls of the hospital. Aaron hated the sterile atmosphere of most of the wings, but it was a comfort to discover, via Garcia of course, that Emily had been moved from the ICU earlier that afternoon. The nurse looked up absently as they approached, then snapped up when she registered not only how official they looked, but that they were all carrying.
“Can I help you?”
“We’re looking for Emily Prentiss.” He tried to keep his voice level as he spelled her last name and had to tuck his hands in his pockets so the team wouldn’t see how white his knuckles were from clenching his fists.
“Room 621,” the nurse responded quickly.
He was off almost before the nurse had finished the room number and the team rushed to keep up. He just wanted to see if see was okay. He needed to see she was in one, beautiful piece. He’d analyze the intensity of that need later.
The elevator ride felt too long and the hallway seemed a virtual mile, but seeing her, even lying in that bed looking so pale and definitely not the strong woman he worked with slowed his rapid heart rate and unclenched his body just a touch. Morgan was the one to knock softly on the door, not surprised in the slightest that her eyes opened at the sound. He took that as a greeting and reached by Aaron to open the door.
Emily was over the moon. She was so incredibly happy to see each and every face as they surrounded her bed. “Hey,” she croaked out.
“Hey yourself,” Garcia said gently as she puttered around, pouring water from the nearby jug and slipping a straw in it for Emily to drink. “How are you feeling?”
Emily was thankful for the thoughtfulness as she gulped down the water. “I’ve been better,” she admitted once she’d had enough, voice much clearer than it had been the moment before.
“What happened?” JJ asked on Emily’s other side.
“I’m not exactly sure,” Emily admitted, looking around at her surrogate family as she tried to remember. “I was in my apartment complex, the garage. I’d just gotten home…”
“This happened last night?” Aaron snapped out.
Emily’s eyes moved swiftly to lock on his. “Yes, sir,” she responded reflexively. “My badge was in my ready bag in the trunk. They found my wallet.”
Reid touched Emily’s had to refocus her attention and get her to relax. “Keep going.”
Emily swallowed, her eyes darting to Aaron and his white knuckles closed on the end of her bed. “I don’t remember much more than someone coming up behind me and demanding my purse.”
JJ picked up her hand, squeezing it reassuringly. “Take a deep breath and think carefully,” she encouraged. “Go slow.”
Emily allowed her eyes to slip closed, focusing on the comfort of JJ’s hand and her ‘family’ around her. “I was leaning back in to get my gun and purse. I put the gun in the glove box, the purse on the front seat. Always exactly the same places.”
The team watched as Emily’s breathing grew laboured. JJ looked around at the worried faces of everyone around her. “Breathe, Emily.”
“He thought I was going for my gun,” the brunette continued, feeling the tears well up behind her tightly closed eyelids. “Then… I remember him saying something, then it’s all pain. I managed to dial 911 and stay awake until they got there. That’s… that’s it.” She kept her eyes firmly closed, partially afraid to open them and see what they thought. She was a federal agent and she hadn’t been able to defend herself.
Aaron’s hands unclenched slightly as he watched the play of emotions across Emily’s face. The news of her hospitalization had come at him, punching him squarely in the gut and robbing him of breath. Emily, like Morgan, was a pillar of strength and toughness. She wasn’t one he’d felt he had to protect going into a raid or felt was unable to conduct an interview of a potentially violent suspect all on her own. He allowed her to go into every situation just assuming she was good enough to always come out okay and in one piece.
He’d never thought he’d see her a victim in a hospital bed.
The clenching of her body had come as a surprise to him as much because she hadn’t reacted that violently to him since her first few weeks in the BAU as because he hadn’t realized how deeply it had affected him. In reality, he was more frustrated with the officers working the case that obviously hadn’t processed her ready bag yet and found her ID badge. But then, did that mean…
“Was someone here when you woke up?” he asked, forcing himself to soften his voice and stow his anger. He’d compartmentalized before, he could do it here.
Emily opened her eyes, partially in surprise and partially just to do so. “My mother.”
“What did the doctors tell you?” Garcia asked, sensing the tension between Aaron and Emily fading.
“Knife wound, a broken rib and a concussion from where my head hit the pavement. They’ll let me go as soon as they’re sure there’s nothing wrong.” Her voice was surprisingly clinical as she listed off her ailments.
“How many weeks at home?” Morgan asked.
Emily shook her head. “I have no idea, nor am I really thinking that far ahead. From what I understood, I was lucky they didn’t have to do brain surgery.”
“They’re going to want to you stay with someone,” Morgan spoke up, his tone firm. “You won’t be able to do much lifting.”
Emily appreciated his concern and understood he spoke from experience, but she wished he had waited until no one was around. “I’ll be fine.”
“Emily! Visitors!”
A large grandfatherly man stepped into the room beaming and Emily couldn’t help but mirror his grin. “Dr Hann, these are my colleagues.”
The doctor beamed. “Excellent! And they look worried too, especially this one here,” he said, putting a hand on Aaron’s shoulder. “But no worries. Emily will make a full recovery. Now, I’m going to have to kick the gentlemen out, but you ladies are welcome to stay. Maybe the patient will be less fussy if she knows the hands helping to change the bandages.”
Emily blushed and smiled sheepishly. “I hate hospitals,” she offered as explanation. Nevertheless, she didn’t object to JJ and Garcia staying to help. She took a deep breath as Dr Hann instructed both women to help lift her higher on the pillows so he could get a better angle on the forming scar.
“Knife wound?” JJ exclaimed as the full extent of her injury was revealed.
“More like a slash,” the doctor responded. “Then there’s the concussion, but that is minor in comparison.”
“Em!” JJ admonished in a hushed tone. “You were almost gutted!”
Garcia winced. “Thanks for that charming visual, Jayje.”
Emily sighed, suddenly not only aware of how exposed she was but also of how much pain she was in. Her last dose was wearing off. “You guys worry enough as it is while we work, I figured you didn’t need the extra worry of my recovery. And can you imagine Morgan’s reaction if I told him about this? He’d track the guy down and kill him.”
“And we won’t?” JJ pointed out. “This is big.”
“It’ll heal,” Emily protested. Then, hissing as Dr Hann prodded around the stitches, sent them a sheepish smile. “In time.”
“You’re going to have to stay with someone when they release you,” JJ ordered.
“I. Will. Be. Fine,” Emily repeated insistently.
Garcia cleared her throat, drawing JJ’s attention and sending the other woman a look. “I could use some tea, Jayje, think you could go find some for me? And if they have cookies bring a few of those up too.”
JJ didn’t move for a moment, but something in Garcia’s eyes urged her to just do as she asked. “I guess we could hunt down some dinner.”
Garcia waited until Dr Hann had also left, smiling at his orders to press the drug button whenever she needed it. Then the normally bubbly blond turned eerily serious as she looked down at her friend. “Em, you need to stay with someone when they let you out of here.”
Emily closed her eyes. “Garcia, please.”
“I’m serious. Morgan was stubborn enough to stay with me when I got shot and I’m so glad. Asking for help isn’t weak, it’s admitting you’re human.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Garcia nodded. “Until you have to wash your hair because you can’t stand it anymore or you need the ice cream from the back of the freezer and can’t stretch that far. Then it gets frustrating enough that you just want to cry. Or the nightmares haunt you and there’s no one there to remind you you’re alive and you made it.”
Emily sighed, very much aware that Garcia was detailing her own experience after Battle left her for dead. “I really don’t want to impose,” she said softly.
Garcia smiled comfortingly, taking the other woman’s hand. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Jennifer Jareau was not known for being a particularly violent person. She hated pulling her gun and could only remember killing one person in her time as an agent. So when she stalked down the hall to where the men were waiting, they were all a little afraid of the stormy look on her face.
“JJ?” Reid asked quietly, not wanting the building wrath turned on him. “Is everything okay?”
“Emily’s got a pretty skewed definition of ‘knife wound’,” JJ snapped. “The guy almost eviscerated her, from her hip to her rib, and she calls it a ‘knife wound’.”
Aaron went still. “He what?” He was choking on the words, forcing them from his mouth. Emily could have died and none of them would have ever known because the police had yet to find her badge.
Morgan voiced his boss’ thoughts. “She could have died from that!”
“She probably should have,” Aaron agreed softly, shaking again but out of fear and realization more so than anger. They would not have known. The thought tore at his stomach and heart in a way that hadn’t happened since Haley had left with Jack and started the divorce proceedings. It terrified him.
He wasn’t blind. Emily Prentiss was beautiful and he’d known that before he was BAU. And that was part of the problem. Despite his personal admission of her beauty “ and the boss-subordinate relationship aside “ he had been working her mother’s security detail when she was just starting Yale.
Aaron shook his head. Why was he even thinking like that? He was a workaholic, dedicated to his job and married to those he’d sworn to serve and protect. Marriage wasn’t in the cards for him, as evidenced by the breakdown of his first and only marriage.
She knows what you do and what you see, his mind argued. Haley didn’t understand. Emily would.
“Hotch?”
He snapped out of his thoughts, meeting JJ’s questioning gaze. “I’m sorry.”
“Coffee? Food?” she repeated.
“Please,” he answered. “Whatever you can find is fine.”
“Well, I know Pen’s picky. I’ll grab her and we’ll head downstairs,” Morgan volunteered, his voice tired. Worrying took a lot out of anyone.
Guilt and worry warred in him as Morgan walked the few feet to Emily’s hospital room. “I’ll stay with her,” he said suddenly.
JJ looked both apprehensive and relieved. “Are you sure?”
“You go find something to eat. I’ll sit with her.”
JJ looked like she was ready to argue, but Reid’s insistent hand on her back and the return of Morgan and Garcia gave her very little choice in the matter.
“She’s in good hands, Jayje,” he heard Garcia say as they parted ways. “I mean, this is Hotch we’re talking about, the crusader against all things evil.”
He knew it was nothing personal. JJ was just protecting their own, the same protectiveness that they all felt when it was one of their own healing. He peered inside Emily’s room, part of him relieved to see her eyes closed. He ventured in slowly, afraid to wake her, but needing to actually touch her, to have physical evidence she was indeed there and alive.
He picked up her hand and then almost dropped it in surprise as her eyes fluttered open. “Hey.”
Emily tensed but didn’t move her hand from his. “Hey. I thought it was time for food.”
“They’ll bring something back. Emily”“
“You’re mad at him, not at me. I know, its okay.”
He blinked and let a ghost of a smile flit across his face. “Well, that’s not entirely true.”
She warred with her body to stay awake. If she’d known anyone was coming in to sit with her, especially Aaron Hotchner, she would have held off on injecting herself with the medicine. “You are mad at me?”
He gripped her hand a little bit tighter. “Why did you lie to us?”
Emily sighed, closing her eyes. “I know how you guys get. I’ll be fine, it’ll heal.”
Aaron raised an eyebrow, understanding everything she didn’t say. “So you thought it would be a better idea to lie to all of us?”
“I’m surprised you didn’t catch it,” she admitted. “And when you put it like that it sounds like I lied on the stand.”
He sighed, a little surprise at her humour in the situation. “You might as well have.”
“I’m trying not to dwell on the fact that I could have died and focus on the fact that I didn’t,” she told him sharply. “We see so much death on a regular basis…”
He watched her eyelashes brush her cheekbones, aware that the drugs were lulling her to sleep. “I’m glad it wasn’t you,” he told her candidly. “I’m glad you’re not a case.”
She smiled, fading fast. “Me too.”
“Go to sleep,” he said, not releasing her hand. “Someone will be here when you wake up.”
He stayed with her while she slept, keeping a firm hold on her hand, his eyes trying to memorize what she looked like even though his mind told him remembering her in a hospital bed was not a picture he wanted burned into his eyelids. He only let go when the team arrived with food. True to his word, even as the rest of the team filtered out, he stayed until she woke up again.
Because he promised he would.