Chapter Text
The first time they share a bed is in Alaska. There’s only one bed in the hotel room and they’re both too bone tired to politely argue over one of them sleeping on the couch, or the floor, or whatever. They pick sides without any debate, JJ by the window, Emily facing the door. They fall asleep easily, the exhaustion of the day overriding any feelings of unease over sharing a bed.
Emily wakes up with JJ’s arm draped over her and she stoically ignores the way the fine hairs of her stomach stand on end at the contact. Ignores the way her heart beats just a little bit faster as she imagines this becoming a regular occurrence. Blinks away the thought.
By the time the case ends, they’ve fallen into a weird routine, and somehow the usual relief of returning home to her own bed doesn’t quite feel the same.
-
The second time, it’s after a girl’s night. They’ve both drank too much, and Penelope’s passed out on the couch, and they fall asleep curled around each other on her bed, amongst an abundance of garish throw pillows. Something pink and fluffy is tickling at JJ’s nose when she wakes up. The bright fuchsia of the walls is too loud for their hangovers, and they both vow never to touch a bottle of tequila again, but neither of them complains about the sleeping arrangement.
When JJ finally stumbles to the bathroom, wincing against the light, she finds a fading red imprint of Emily’s cheek on her chest, her shirt smelling faintly of her perfume. Somewhere, deep under the stench of alcohol.
After that, it becomes almost routine for them to drink too much and wind up sharing a bed, or a couch, or even, once, the backseat of a car.
On the jet, they fall asleep in adjacent seats, occasionally finding one of their heads resting on the other’s shoulder. JJ jokes that she spends more time asleep next to Emily than she does Will, and then pretends not to notice the look in Emily’s eyes when the joke doesn’t land. She pretends not to understand what it means, just like she has all the other times, and they don’t talk about it.
-
JJ is given the task of clearing out Emily’s apartment and it feels like a lot to ask of the person who also has the weight of such a huge secret balancing on her shoulders. She gets it; it makes sense for it to be her, given she’s the only one in contact with her to work out what nicknacks Emily might want to keep, something small to remember her life by (when she asks, Emily doesn’t cry, just shakes her head, asks JJ to make sure Garcia gets Sergio and all his things). But it’s heart wrenching, separating out all of Emily’s belongings into things to throw out, things to thrift, things to go into storage, things to send to her mom. Even though she knows Emily’s alive, has visited her in the secure, private hospital ward, it’s hard to remember that when she’s surrounded by things she’ll never get to use, clothes she’ll never get to wear again. It’s too reminiscent of her sister’s room, reminds her too much of her parents fighting over whether to leave it alone or not, of finding her father tossing garbage bags of stuff out whilst her mother screamed at him to stop.
(Garcia cries when she hands over the box of cat toys and bowls and unopened kibble, and JJ realises then why it had to be her, why Hotch couldn’t put anyone else through it. At least she knows this is only temporary.)
Once the apartment is empty, and all that’s left is Emily’s go bag, still packed from their last case, JJ finds she can’t stay any longer, can’t stand to look at how easily one woman’s life can be broken down into refuse sacks and cardboard boxes. She takes the duffle, and leaves.
(And if Will questions why she falls asleep in a ratty grey YALE t-shirt that smells like someone else’s perfume then he knows better than to voice it. As far as he’s concerned, Emily is dead, and JJ has already lost so much, she can grieve how she needs to.)
In Paris, they share a hotel suite. They have separate rooms, but JJ finds herself lingering in the doorway between the two in the middle of the night, watching Emily sleep. It’s the only time in weeks that she’s looked at peace, pain medication helping her to do what JJ cannot. Still, JJ feels like she needs to watch over her, still conscious of how close they came to losing her on a surgical table. How they still are losing her. JJ feels all the breath go out of her lungs when she thinks about boarding the plane tomorrow night, alone; about never seeing Emily again.
“Jayje?” Emily murmurs, her voice rough with sleep, and JJ panics, contemplating ducking back into her own room, but her feet are glued to the spot. “C’m’ere.”
She moves on autopilot, ducking in between the sheets Emily holds open for her, body curling around Emily’s, like every bone of her body feels the need to be close to her right now. In her half-asleep state, Emily wriggles closer, letting out a contented sigh, and JJ has to blink back the tears that have suddenly sprung to her eyes, squeezing them closed. Her nose buries in soft, dark hair, taking in the smell, cataloguing it for later; citrus shampoo, expensive perfume, and smoky Parisian air. She prays for this moment to stretch out forever, for the morning to never come and for her to never have to go home.
Eventually, she drifts off to sleep, awakened hours later, only by the quiet sound of the bathroom door closing, the shower running.
On her flight back, JJ doesn’t sleep at all. It’s eight hours of agony. She knows if she closes her eyes she’ll dream of Emily, dream of their bodies melded together, of all the tomorrows they’re never going to get, all the moments she was too much of a coward to put into action.
She can’t bear it.
-
The night before she’s called back to Quantico, Jennifer is there, shaking her awake. Emily rolls onto her side, blinking blearily at the concerned face hovering beside her.
“My waters broke,” JJ says, voice urgent, and Emily’s eyebrows shoot up into her hairline.
In that moment, she’s immediately completely awake, climbing out of bed, eyes quickly scanning over JJ. The blonde is dressed for work, a blue button down stretching across her enlarged belly, her face already made up perfectly. Emily frowns at the sight of her, but as soon as she goes to speak, JJ’s hand covers her mouth.
“He’s here,” she hisses in a low voice, and even through the haze of confusion that’s lingering, Emily knows the he isn’t referring to a baby. “He’s looking for us.”
Emily reaches for the gun she keeps in her side table, scrambling to try and open the drawer silently so as not to draw attention to them. She can hear heavy footsteps in the room underneath them, the creaking of old floorboards, Doyle creeping closer and closer to them. There’s tears in JJ’s eyes, whether it’s from labour pain or fear, Emily isn’t sure. She frantically pats around in the drawer, panicking when she realises it’s empty, her firearm somewhere else.
The footsteps are closer now, the stairs groaning with the weight of them, and Emily quickly moves toward the large closet in the corner of the room, shoving clothes aside where they hang.
“Get in,” she murmurs to JJ, watching the blonde’s eyes squeeze closed in pain, her hand moving to her bump.
“I can’t,” JJ sobs, “I can’t. The baby.”
Despite the blonde’s protests, Emily helps her into the closet, firmly closing the door on her, unable to do anything more except pray to a god she doesn’t believe in, beg him to keep them safe. The footsteps have stopped, and Emily looks pleadingly at the bedroom door, watching as the knob slowly, slowly turns…
She wakes to the shrill sound of her phone ringing. Not the landline, not the cellphone that’s registered under a fake name, but the other one, the one she keeps permanently on charge.
The bed is damp with sweat as she peels the covers away from her body, her heart still pounding in her chest as she searches the end table for the right phone. The dream… it had felt so real. She doesn’t know how to make sense of it, but then, it doesn’t matter now. None of it matters. Not now.
Emily raises the phone to her ear, trying not to get her hopes up over who is on the other end.
“Emily? We need you to come home.”
-
The first new case they go on together, they have to share a motel room.
There’s a tension, an uneasiness between them that neither of them wants to acknowledge. JJ let’s out a sigh of relief when the door to their room opens, revealing twin beds instead of a double, hopes that Emily didn’t hear it.
Emily is alive again and they’re trying to act like nothing has changed between them, but deep down they both know that it has. Or at least, JJ does. She’s too damn frightened to bring it up in conversation incase it’s all in her head, in case the pressure of it sends Emily running for the hills.
She’s never been good at feelings. Emily’s version of sharing emotion is in action, in holding JJ’s hand or squeezing her shoulder, in playing countless games of online scrabble with her in the middle of the night, in bringing her fresh cups of coffee from her favourite cafe. It doesn’t come in the form of words, and JJ has known her long enough to accept that, to consider how lucky she is to ever come on the receiving end of Emily Prentiss’ affection, whether it’s said aloud or not.
In all honesty, JJ isn’t sure what she can say, anyway. She’s not the same woman that said goodbye to Emily in Paris, she’s lost too much of herself in the interlude between Emily’s first life and her second.
And besides, there’s still Will, and Henry, and a baby who she never got to meet. Her life is somehow even more complicated than when Emily left it.
It isn’t fair for her to turn Emily’s life upside down, again, for something she isn’t even really sure what to do with. Something she can’t even offer.
So. Twin beds. Twin beds are good. She knows that if they’d had to share a bed right now, her resolve would crumble, and she’d do something she’d later regret. JJ isn’t even sure them sharing a room is a good idea right now, let alone a bed, where she can be reminded of how perfectly their bodies slot together, of how Emily felt in her arms, as if she could in some other world belong there.
No, twin beds are perfect.
-
She doesn’t sleep well anymore. Okay, she hadn’t exactly been a solid eight hours a day kind of gal before death either, but it’s somehow even worse now. She works herself to exhaustion, eventually passing out, only to be awoken by nightmares, a phantom pain in her abdomen, something she can’t sleep through… and the cycle starts all over again.
Which is fine, when she’s in her own bed. Not so much when she’s on the jet, or, worse still, in a cheap motel room, lying a few feet away from where JJ is snoring softly.
JJ, she knows, is already used to being woken up by her tossing and turning, by mumbled words and sudden yelps in the middle of the night. She takes it all with the kind of patience that is a reminder of why she’s such a good mother, a patience Emily can’t bear. This isn’t the first time they’ve shared a room in the months since her return, isn’t the first time she’s laid awake staring at the ceiling and trying not to think about the other woman nestled safely in a bed across the room.
It doesn’t help that since Paris, JJ has been showing up in the nightmares more and more, usually taking a pivotal role: someone Emily can’t save, a hand trying to pull Emily out of the darkness, and even, once, her face - a face so lovely and beautiful and good - had replaced Doyle’s as he rammed the splintered wood into her abdomen.
If she doesn’t go to sleep, then she won’t wake her up. If JJ sleeps through the night without having to shake Emily awake, Emily won’t have to look into deep pools of blue, glistening with concern. She won’t have to spend the flight home knowing those same blue eyes are scrutinising her every move.
She won’t have to face up to what all of it means. Or might mean.
Whatever.
Emily resigns herself to not sleeping, already thinking about the copious amount of coffee she is going to have to consume tomorrow to ensure she’s awake enough to be of use on this case. She’s so lost in her thoughts, in her concentration on resolutely not closing her eyes, not drifting off, that she misses the telltale signs that JJ is, as it happens, also awake.
That is, until the blonde is suddenly standing right there next to her.
“You’re thinking too loud,” JJ murmurs, and even in the dark static of their motel room, Emily thinks she can see that look in her eyes. Then: “scooch over.”
Emily goes to protest, but something about the way JJ is standing, the hazy outline of her with her hands on her hips, the line of her jaw, stops her. Instead, she does as she’s told, tensing when she feels JJ’s warm body stretched out next to her. They’re not touching, but the tension is enough to make Emily’s heart hammer in her chest, her mouth suddenly dryer than the Nevada desert outside their window.
They’ve shared a bed so many times before, but not since she came back, not since she’d had enough time to really scrutinise her feelings, the bond between them stretching thin enough that it might snap. As JJ shifts closer, gently moving her chin to rest against Emily’s shoulder, as if to ask permission - which Emily grants immediately, pulling her closer - it’s like all the time and distance between them melts. Inexplicably, Emily has to blink back tears, unsure of where they’ve come from or what they mean.
“Go to sleep,” JJ commands, her mouth warm and open against Emily’s skin, not quite a kiss but not quite not, and Emily finds it impossible to deny her.
Finally, she sleeps.
-
That night in Nevada opens the dam. They don’t talk about it, but in the months that follow, they find themselves sharing a bed again more often than not. Even when they’re given separate rooms, JJ is drawn to Emily’s like a moth to a flame.
Despite it being nothing sexual, nothing beyond someone to lie next to in the dark, purely platonic, they find themselves sneaking around like teenagers. If anyone did catch them both leaving one room together, they know how it would look.
JJ looks at it like this: she’s used to sharing a bed with Will. It is completely understandable that she might find it hard to sleep alone after years of sleeping next to him. Should anyone ask, that’s the reasoning she’d use, knowing Emily would rather keep her night terrors to herself. Rationally, however, she knows it isn’t as simple as that, knows that just because what they’re doing technically isn’t cheating, the fact she also isn’t telling Will about it basically constitutes as the same thing.
Especially, when she starts to forget that it’s him she’s lying next to in their own bed, waking with a start when her fingers are met with his stark, long lines instead of Emily’s curves, desperately hoping she hasn’t murmured the other woman’s name in her sleep.
She doesn’t ask Emily whether she’s managing to get any rest in her own bed, doesn’t need to because she sees the evidence of her insomnia in her bloodshot eyes, in the multiple cups of coffee, in the way her hands sometimes shake when she’s writing notes. If it were bad enough that JJ thought it might jeopardise her work, she might say something, but as it is, they spend so little time in their own homes, the sleepless nights are always broken up by nights curled around JJ.
And it isn’t just Emily whose sleep is improved by this new routine. JJ blames her restless nights at home on Henry, when in reality, at almost four, her son is a pretty good sleeper. She feels guilty for pushing the blame onto him, the person she loves more than anything in the whole world, but motherhood is such an easy scape goat for tiredness, one that nobody ever thinks to question. In truth, JJ sometimes finds sleeping in Will’s arms almost unbearable in a way she isn’t sure how to explain. She loves him, loves being with him, but lying awake whilst he paws at her, lazily cupping one of her breasts or nuzzling into her neck, brushing his lips over her, is beginning to make her skin crawl. That just adds to the unbearable weight of guilt that’s building in her stomach.
Will is her person, the father of her child, the man she’s supposed to want to spend the rest of her life with.
But, she begins to realise, when she pictures the future, it’s Emily she sees herself with. And that realisation changes everything.
-