Identity, 16/16
Title: Identity
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Criminal Minds
Characters/Pairing: Prentiss-centric - gen
Genre: Angst/Drama
Summary: In the clutches of Ian Doyle, Emily dwells on her past. Meanwhile, the team are forced to dig deep into their colleague's secrets in order to find her.
Chapter Sixteen
Six weeks later.
When she walked into the BAU for the first time in what felt like an eternity, Emily tried to downplay the cane.
Her knee hurt like hell if she walked without it - and the limp was ten times worse - but it was still a sign of weakness, not to mention a tangible, constant reminder of the shame she felt.
She'd tried to keep Doyle out of her BAU life, and that had failed in the most spectacular way possible.
Ignoring the look Morgan sent in her direction, Emily hobbled towards her desk, setting her bag down on the floor before dropping into the chair. Her car was an automatic, which meant that the leg hadn't cramped up too much on the drive in, but the walk up had taken toll enough.
Even with rehabilitation, it was unlikely that she'd ever work in the field again. Her doctors had said as much, even if Emily hadn't quite gotten around to telling the team. Hell, she was having a hard enough time admitting it to herself.
'Hey,' Morgan greeted her, as he got up from his desk. 'You got a moment?'
Crap.
Emily turned in her chair. 'Sure.'
'Can I get you a coffee?' he asked, gesturing towards the elevator bank, rather than the kitchenette, which meant he wanted to go down to the cafeteria. Emily bit her lip.
'We don't have to,' he said, hastily. 'I just thought we could…you know…try to smooth things out a little.'
'Sure,' Emily said decidedly. Her hesitation had mostly been because of the leg, but it was always going to hurt, so she was pretty much going to have to get used to it.
'You want me to carry something?' he asked, after Emily had pulled her wallet and phone out of her bag. She gave him a look that hopefully said quite clearly, "Are you kidding me?"
He kept his pace slow to match hers, which was a little irritating, but so very Morgan. For half a second, Emily considered calling him out on it, but that only would have made things worse. Telling him not to be so damn protective was like telling him not to breathe.
The walk down was awkward, mostly because he didn't seem to want to bring up whatever was on his mind until they were actually in the cafeteria - a fact for which Emily was grateful. The last thing she wanted was for their conversation to spread across the gossip chain. She felt like a suspect being escorted to the interrogation room.
Downstairs, the cafeteria was quiet. Most people generally got their coffee on the way into work, rather than risking the possibility of being a few minutes late. Of course, when it rained, the place was packed.
Emily sat at one of the small wooden tables while Morgan got coffee. She stared at the wood grain, tracing its path with her finger. It provided the slightest distraction from the throb in her knee.
When Morgan returned, it was with two cups of coffee, and a chocolate brownie. He slid one cup across to her, and cut the brownie in half. He didn't speak for a long while, and Emily wondered why. It wasn't as though he was ever unsure of what to say - Derek Morgan said what he meant. He didn't generally beat around the bush.
'I don't trust easily,' he told her, matter-of-factly. 'The things that…happened to me when I was a kid make it difficult.'
Emily nodded. While Morgan had never explicitly said what Carl Buford had done to him, there were some benefits to being a profiler. Not that any of them really relished knowing.
'For what it's worth…I didn't keep it secret because I didn't trust you,' Emily told him. 'I…I was ashamed, of what I had to do. With him. And I was ashamed of the fact that I felt more for him than I should have.'
Morgan gave her a surprised look. 'Guy was a sociopathic, serial-killing terrorist, who almost killed you in warehouse basement, and you loved him?'
'Well I never said it made sense,' Emily said, drily. 'But when I was with him - when I was Lauren - he made me feel like I deserved to be loved. It might seem pathetic to say that, but no-one else has ever really made me feel that way. There's a reason all my dates turn out so disastrous. Even after all this time, he's made a mark on me that I can never scrub clean.' She wasn't just talking about the bullet wound.
'After a while, it gets better,' he told her. 'He'll stop…defining who you are as a person, and that crushing weight that you didn't even realize was there has suddenly lifted. You may not ever forget him, but trust me. It does get better.'
Her life had changed irrevocably, but now Doyle was dead, and she could move on.
'Good to know,' Emily smiled, though she knew it didn't quite reach her eyes.
They finished their coffee in silence, before starting to head back over to the elevators. All the reassurances in the world would change the heaviness in her heart.
The Emily Prentiss that they had known was dead.
Tied to a chair, in a warehouse, Ian Doyle had murdered her.
He had pulled the trigger eight years ago, only the bullet had taken this long to reach her.
'Everything okay?' Morgan asked, apparently noting her wince as put a little too much weight on her leg.
'Yeah,' Emily said, with a smile. 'I'm good.'