'Close our eyes, pretend to fly' [Derek Morgan/Penelope Garcia] [2/2]
Title: "Close our eyes, pretend to fly"
Author: that_1_incident
Fandom: "Criminal Minds"
Art: Here by astral_angel and here by kymericl
Pairing: Derek Morgan/Penelope Garcia
Rating: PG-13/FRT
Word Count: ~16,500
Warnings: Semi-AU, the Boston Reaper, a fair amount of abyss-gazing, and a small guest appearance by Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs.
Summary/Disclaimer/Author's Notes: See Part One.
---<---<---@
The shootings, it turned out, had been part of a terrorist plot designed to strike fear into the hearts of the people of New York City - as if its residents hadn't already been through enough. The pièce de résistance was to be the detonation of a bomb in an ambulance that would have ravaged an especially crowded part of the city had authorities not foiled the plot and transported the ambulance to Central Park before it exploded. A technicolor photo of the bombed-out crater in the middle of the park's lush greenery was on the front page of that day's New York Times, and Penelope winced whenever she caught sight of it on the newspaper rack by the counter, imagining how much worse the whole thing could have been.
In fact, all of Quantico seemed subdued, which wasn't surprising considering the deep patriotism shared by many who lived and worked there. Penelope's takings were down and her customers less chatty than usual - even Reid, who showed back up after an absence of a few days, wasn't his usual fact-spewing self - and for the first time in the history of Penny's, it looked like she was going to be able to close on time.
She locked the door right at five and had retreated to the back of the store to turn off the lights when a soft knocking caught her attention. She looked up and saw Morgan peering through the glass, a bouquet of flowers in one hand, and her stomach tied itself in knots.
As soon as Penelope un-clicked the lock, Morgan strode breezily into the coffeehouse, the bell unnecessarily tinkling the news of his arrival.
"Hey," he said casually, but something about his demeanor seemed strained. She wondered if he felt as uncomfortable as she did about trying to act like their friendship was still intact after Scarpetta's and weeks of no contact. He awkwardly held out the flowers. "I'm sorry I haven't stopped by."
She gave him a guarded smile as she accepted the proffered bouquet, fully aware that she would have swooned at the gesture just a few short weeks earlier and marveling at how quickly her defenses had repaired themselves.
"You're a busy man," she responded, and the excuse sounded hollow even to her own ears. Why was he here?
He followed her into the store, then hovered by the register as she went behind the counter to find a makeshift vase.
"Listen..."
She stood silently by the sink, studiously watching the water line rise in the jug she'd picked out.
"I should've come around, I know that."
She arranged the flowers carefully in the jug, pulling off a broken leaf.
"I get that I was kinda sending you mixed signals, and that wasn't cool," he continued. "It shouldn't have taken something crazy happening on a case for me to realize that."
Penelope frowned, feeling worry spike in her chest as she turned to look at him. "What do you mean, something crazy?"
Morgan shrugged. "I jumped out of a moving vehicle," he said nonchalantly, but she could tell by the look on his face that there was more to the story than he was willing to tell right now. She boggled at him, setting down the jug and heading back to the counter.
"How are you even here?" she demanded of him, the hostility she'd felt toward him instantly overridden by concern. "Why aren't you in the hospital?"
"I landed on grass; I'm just a little sore, that's all." He lifted his shirt. "See? I got a big old bruise on my side, but that's it. Let me put it this way - if I hadn't jumped, it would've been a hell of a lot messier."
Haltingly, she reached over the counter and touched her fingertips to the discolored skin. Morgan's breath audibly hitched.
"Does that hurt?!" She drew back, alarmed.
"Not really, but you can't just go around touching guys like that, you know. You're gonna give people the wrong idea."
His tone was light, but the words hit close to home. Penelope's gaze wavered and she broke eye contact with him for a moment.
"Penelope..." Morgan said seriously, smoothing his shirt back down over his six-pack. She'd forgotten he even knew her real name. "I'm gonna level with you right now - I'm sorry about before, at Scarpetta's. It's sorta my go-to place where I take girls, and I know you picked up on that."
She shrugged and did her best to seem nonplussed, although she was secretly surprised by his honesty. "Last time I checked, I was a girl."
He made a face at her. "Come on, you're my Baby Girl O.G., bringer of baked goods, maker of coffee, owner of the best smile below the Mason Dixon Line." The present tense and easy bravado he affected made it seem like the past few weeks had never happened, but then he paused, seeming almost unsure of himself. She'd never seen him hesitate like this before. "Would you let me take you out to dinner again?"
"To Scarpetta's?" Penelope asked flatly, only half joking, and Morgan shook his head.
"To this place in D.C. where I go with my mom when she's in town. I've never been there with anyone else. I save it for the best of the best."
She tilted her head at him, ignoring the compliment. "You want to go now? Tonight?"
"Tonight. I want to talk to you about something."
"We're talking right now," she pointed out, and couldn't resist adding, "For the first time in a while, in fact."
"Penelope," Morgan said levelly. "Are you seriously about to turn down a free meal at a very expensive restaurant with the most eligible bachelor in the tri-state area?"
She rolled her eyes. "Modest, too."
He grinned at her hopefully, and she sighed.
"You said you're buying?"
"I sure am."
"I'll get my coat."
--
The restaurant was understated in a classic, old-money sort of way, with dimmed lights and high, wooden booths bearing plaques that showcased the names of famous patrons: congressmen, senators, a former fire chief. It was the type of place where couples conversed in hushed tones at its fringes while groups of affluent, suit-wearing gentlemen who'd likely migrated over from nearby Capitol Hill congregated at the larger tables toward the center of the room, laughing uproariously in a way that somehow didn't carry, or at least not unpleasantly. The heaviness of the place must have something to do with it, Penelope thought, the sound waves muted by the plush drapes hanging from the windows and the patterned upholstery padding the chairs.
Morgan was being more courteous than usual - not that he'd ever really been rude to Penelope, but that night he treated her as if she were made of glass or porcelain, careful not to chip her edges or nick where it was sore. As the night progressed from hors d'oeuvres to entrées, she sensed ever more keenly that he hadn't told her everything, but it wasn't until dessert that she was proven right.
"So, you know that ambulance that exploded in Central Park?"
Morgan phrased the inquiry as innocuously as if he were referring to the weather, the light drizzle they'd had earlier in the week that didn't even last long enough to leave anything wet, per se, just glistening with a sheen that hadn't been there previously.
"Yes?" Penelope said uncertainly, wondering what that had to do with anything. It would've been hard not to know, given the front-page newspaper coverage and the fact that every news station in the country was running aerial footage of the fiery wreck with a macabre eagerness that, frankly, unsettled her.
"You heard about it?" Morgan persisted.
"They caught the bomb in time and were able to get it to an isolated area before it exploded, according to officials," Penelope elaborated, parroting the phrasing that had been uttered by virtually every newscaster and reporter who'd covered the story over the past few days, their reports filled with buzz phrases like No indications from authorities and A source close to the investigation. "Morgan, why are you asking me this?"
He watched her seriously, a strange expression on his face. "What, I don't look official enough for you?"
Her eyes widened. "That was you? You drove the ambulance to..." She trailed off. "Oh my God, Morgan..."
He wisely gave her a minute, and she didn't speak again until something occurred to her.
"Is that how you got hurt?"
Morgan shrugged. "Collateral damage. Like I said earlier, it could've been a lot messier."
A chill ran down her spine. It really could have.
"You know what I thought about as I was driving that ambulance away from all those people?"
Penelope swallowed hard, stabbed the piece of cake on her plate with her fork, and tried to feel normal. She suddenly didn't want to know, to dwell anymore on what Morgan did, on the danger in which he'd put himself. She couldn't fault him for doing it, for wanting to save hundreds - maybe thousands - of people who would have been killed or injured had the bomb gone off amid the hustle and bustle of the city, but at the same time, she thought him immeasurably brave. She wondered what she would have done in the same position and secretly doubted whether she would have been able to rise to the challenge.
"My mom and my sisters," he continued in lieu of a response, "and then I thought of you."
She froze, a forkful of cake suspended in midair. "...What?" she repeated, sincerely afraid she'd misheard him.
He again allowed her a few moments, and she gaped at him. She didn't know what to say. Thank you was the first thing that came to mind - somewhat ridiculously, as if he'd given her a compliment - but she wasn't sure it was the right response. Would she have thought of Morgan had the situation been reversed? Would she have thought of anybody at all? Her parents were dead, she was an only child, and the only connections she'd made in Virginia had been forged across a countertop over steaming mugs and sticky bakery items. She had no living family, no close friends, and as the architect of her own life, she had historically done a superb job of making sure her little snow-globe microcosm of a world didn't brush up too closely against anybody else's. Morgan was her first failure. After he'd disappeared, she'd shored up her emotional walls to be stronger than ever, but now that he was sitting in front of her, she could feel the cracks start to take hold.
"Why are you telling me this?" she murmured, the fork still hovering halfway between her mouth and the table even though she wasn't hungry in the slightest, and Morgan gently eased it back to her plate, metal softly clinking against ceramic as he set it down.
"I've been thinking about some things since then. Near-death experiences will do that to ya, make you see people in a new light, you know?"
Her heart leapt in her throat, feeling at once as if it were being squeezed by an icy hand, and she had the sudden realization that she knew what was coming.
"Don't," she implored him, half a plea, half an order.
Morgan's forehead creased and he opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, Penelope caught the eye of their blessedly passing server and cut him off by asking for the check. At her insistence, she and Morgan split it.
--
They didn't speak again until they were leaving the restaurant. After Morgan held open the door, Penelope inhaled sharply as the frosty night air hit her face, as cold as the chill that had descended between them.
"Are you really planning not to talk to me for the entire ride home?" Morgan's voice was serious, but she detected an iota of a smirk in his tone that made her irritation spike. "I know why you're mad at me, Penelope. I get it."
"I'm not mad," she told him with as much nonchalance as she could muster, opening the car door on her own before he could do it for her. She hated the position he'd put her in by suddenly seeming poised to offer something she'd wanted so much but had already painstakingly drawn a line underneath. Things were safer if she kept him at arm's length, and she knew it.
He climbed into the driver's seat, shrugging as he put on his seatbelt with a click. "I just wanted to tell you that facing my own death made me realize how much I care about you."
He sounded annoyingly calm, and she wondered how he managed it. Internally, she was a wreck.
"That was stupid of you," she chastised him as he carefully backed the car out of its parking space, hand pressed behind the headrest of her seat. She ignored the way the air suddenly seemed to still at the proximity of his hand to her shoulder. "I get why you did it, but it was reckless."
"Nearly getting myself blown up, or telling you how I feel?"
She couldn't answer him.
--
They drove back to Quantico in silence, with Penelope staring firmly out of the passenger-side window for most of the journey. She gazed at the houses visible from the freeway, their lights winking like fireflies as her thoughts raced faster than the cars outside. Morgan was respectfully quiet, no longer pushing her about her feelings - or, indeed, his own - and she wondered if he'd realized how so not a joke this was, how uncharted the territory of letting someone matter this much to her.
Morgan turned off at her exit and the roar of the other vehicles faded behind them, scooped up into the vacuum of the receding highway to leave the two of them alone with their thoughts. It felt to Penelope as if it took much longer than it should have for them to reach her street, and when the car finally turned onto it, Morgan glanced sideways at her as if he were about to say something but then thought better of it.
He slowed to a stop outside the coffeehouse, the sign out front bathed in the soft glow of the lamps Penelope always left on at night. As Penelope's heels hit the sidewalk, Morgan leaned across the center console and implored, "At least let me walk you to the door."
"Fine," she said lightly, trying to hide her reluctance. It wasn't that he'd really done anything wrong, she reminded herself, other than felt something for her at a different time than she'd felt something for him. Her hang-ups weren't his fault; he'd just been the one to light the touchpaper.
They headed up to the coffeehouse in silence, and Penelope slipped her key out of her purse and slid it into the lock. When the door cracked open, the jingle of the bell had an unearthly quality to it as it disrupted the still of the night. As she moved to cross the threshold, Morgan's fingers gently grazed her arm.
"Penelope..."
She bit her lip. Her heart was hammering like a drum, the staccato vibrations reverberating throughout her chest. "Yeah?"
He touched the side of her face, leaning into the space between them as if to ask a silent question. When he tilted her head up, she didn't resist.
The press of his lips was so soft at first that she questioned whether she'd dreamt it, wondered if there could be any verity to this incredulous diorama of the two of them standing in the darkness, silhouetted by the Penny's sign blazing bright against the night. She found herself pushing up on her toes to deepen the kiss, and it was one of those frozen moments, she thought, a snapshot suspended in the dark and the quiet. Her heart twisted under the weight of how much she'd wanted him, shuddered with the release of finally letting go.
--
It had been - God, it had been a while since Penelope had done this, splayed like a snow angel on her double bed that was far from accustomed to holding two, and Morgan handled her with a gentle strength, guiding her without being overbearing. His stubble grazed her skin when he tongued the hollows of her neck, his fingertips feather-light as he unbuttoned her blouse and kissed her chest. He clasped her hands in his, placed them at his waist and guided them upward, encouraging her to help slip his shirt off. The planes of his torso were even firmer than she'd imagined, his six-pack lean but muscular, the tattoos on his biceps no longer obscured by the fabric of his sleeves. She slipped her fingers through the belt loops of his jeans and pulled him toward her, the firmness of his chest pressing against the swell of hers as their lips met. They moved together languidly until, all too soon, she felt herself coming apart beneath him. When they were both left gasping for breath, he pressed his lips to her cheek and swept her into his arms.
--
When Penelope's alarm went off at 4:45 the next morning, Morgan thought it was a joke.
"Nobody wakes up this early," he groaned, burying his head underneath a pillow, and Penelope's amusement staved off the rush of uneasiness she'd been expecting to feel.
"Did you think those blondies you like so much just bake themselves?"
"I figured they fell from heaven and you just went outside and picked 'em up," he responded, the words muffled, and she tugged at the edge of the pillow, exposing one eye and the bridge of his nose.
"Good morning," he murmured, his voice a little more gravelly than she was used to, still rough around the edges from sleep. He brushed her cheekbone with the pad of his thumb and she waited for the much-anticipated sense of panic to spike in her chest, but it never came.
--
"Have you ever baked before?" she inquired of Morgan a little while later, after he'd showered and stumbled downstairs without a shirt on and she'd sent him back up to find one.
He shrugged. "Cookies a few times, when I was a kid. With dough from the store."
She sighed. "I'll take that as a no."
--
By the time Penny's opened its doors that day, there were baked goods next to the counter as usual, sitting above the refrigerated shelves of cold drinks and yogurts. The muffins Morgan had helped with were a little lopsided, but after critically regarding them, Penelope had concluded that they were the baked goods representation of her mismatched tables and chairs, and doubted any of her patrons would even notice. Agent Gibbs, her first customer of the day, certainly didn't seem to, while Morgan was much too biased as he sat at a table close to the counter and tucked in.
When JJ walked through the door, back from maternity leave and looking entirely too svelte for someone who'd recently had a baby, she caught sight of Morgan and did a huge double-take.
"Why are you here so early?"
Morgan hesitated for a moment, glancing at Penelope before opening his mouth to respond, and JJ grinned hugely.
"Because you never left," she concluded, and Penelope's blush was all the confirmation she needed.
--
"I actually had something I wanted to ask you," JJ told her a little later, after Morgan had surreptitiously kissed Penelope on the cheek and headed to the office. "Will and I have been talking about who we want Henry's godparents to be," she continued, sipping one of the caffeinated specialties she'd missed so badly while pregnant and relegated to decaf, "and we decided on Reid for the godfather."
Penelope smiled. "That's a great choice, JJ. He'll be thrilled."
"And you as the godmother."
The quip about Henry being able to recite the Periodic Table at an age when most children would still be mastering the alphabet died instantly on Penelope's lips.
"...What?" she asked lamely.
JJ shrugged, then grinned. "With the job I have, someone will have to teach the kid how to bake."
--
It had been awkward at first, informing Morgan's colleagues one by one that the longstanding flirtation he'd shared with Penelope had developed into something more tangible, but nobody seemed particularly surprised. Reid was the one Penelope had been most worried about in the same way a long-single mother might be about her son's reaction to her dating again, but he seemed to be taking it well enough - understatedly, in his stoic Reid way.
"Can I ask you something?" he'd inquired about a week after they'd broken the news, upending the sugar Dalek into his mug and carefully avoiding her eyes. Without waiting for her acquiescence, he'd ploughed forward. "Why Morgan?"
Although the question had been out of the blue, Penelope somehow sensed it was coming, had grown to know Reid well enough to develop a relative familiarity with how he processed things, how he made sense of the world. The realization in itself surprised her - that she'd become sufficiently close to another living human to be able to predict something like that.
"He just showed up one day," Penelope responded honestly. "He carved out a space for himself, and he just never left."
Reid nodded slowly, considering her response as he stirred his coffee. "Do you think he ever could?"
I don't know, was what Penelope meant to say, because she and anticipating the future hadn't been on good terms for years, but "No" was what came out of her mouth.
--
It was strange, Penelope thought, how one aspect of her life could change so tremendously while the rest of it remained intact. She still awoke at the crack of dawn every morning, donned an ensemble she doubted anyone else in Quantico could come up with, prepared Agent Gibbs' extra-super-huge coffee, and, if she had a spare moment, put aside some treats for the members of the Behavioral Analysis Unit to take on their jet or simply enjoy at the office if their work kept them in Virginia that day. The differences only became apparent under closer scrutiny: the bookmark she used to mark her place in Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (a photo booth printout from the time she and Morgan had shown up way too early at the movie theater and he just happened to have exact change), the smudges of icing on certain baked goods that, over time, grew to be big, bold hearts clearly demarcating particular items as being made with Morgan in mind.
They settled into an odd kind of kinship that was defined as much by its apartness as its togetherness, Morgan's absences routine enough that Penelope never had the chance to become unduly accustomed to his presence - and perhaps, she thought, that was why they worked so well together.
She caught Hotchner smiling at them once, his expression wistful as Morgan ducked behind the countertop to kiss her cheek and she swatted him away because she had customers. In the midst of ordering coffee and a Peppermint Penny, Hotchner, having given up on his efforts to hide his affinity for the latter, murmured something that she didn't fully process until after he'd headed out of the coffeehouse.
"I'm glad he realized what he had," Hotchner had told her, serious as always, and she smiled so hard her cheeks hurt.
--
Penelope had been vaguely aware of the Boston Reaper case when it happened and, if pressed, could somewhat recall the details: A lone predator who attacked couples traveling along deserted Massachusetts highways at night inexplicably stopped killing about a decade earlier, likely due to incarceration, injury or even death. There had been a book about him, she remembered, dimly drawing upon the faint memory of the author appearing on a morning talk show she'd happened to be watching, but as far as she knew, the case had never been solved. Indeed, she hadn't heard the name mentioned in years until the night Morgan slept over and his phone rang at an ungodly hour, long before even the early-rising Penelope was accustomed to awakening.
"The Reaper?" Morgan said quietly into his phone, his body a dark silhouette as he crouched over the go-bag he kept at Penelope's place in the event that he got called off on a case while he was with her. "Wasn't that your first case as a BAU senior?" A pause. "I'll be right there, Hotch. I'm at Penny's."
He lowered the phone from his ear and looked up in the direction of the bed, squinting as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. "You awake, baby girl?"
"Mm-hm," Penelope confirmed blearily, raising her head to offer him a reassuring smile in the near darkness. This was by no means the first time Morgan had been called away at an unreasonable hour. "Go, my sweet. Slay the dragons, vanquish the demons, and I'll bake you something nice upon your return."
"You're the best, you know that?"
"I get that a lot. Stay safe, angelfish."
--
Penelope's firsthand experience with the effects a tough case could have on Morgan preceded their courtship, going back to the night he sat at the counter at Penny's and told her about the woman in Seattle with the bomb under the seat of her car. She was no stranger to seeing him shaken up or spent, but the Morgan who returned from Boston was different somehow, more scarred by this case than she'd ever seen him before. He had superficial cuts on the side of his face and a bandage on his left arm that he wouldn't let her take off, but the true damage, she sensed, was to his psyche.
"I wish you could tell me what happened," she said to him the second night he was back. They'd been watching Top Chef when someone on the show shattered a glass and the arm Morgan had draped over the back of the couch tensed instantly, his hand gripping her shoulder hard enough to hurt.
"You know I can't," he reminded her quietly.
"Is that what happened to your arm? Something broke against it or smashed into it? Something made of glass?"
"Penelope..."
She knew she wasn't being fair to him, but the anxiety that had been coiling in her stomach since Morgan's return the previous day was now taut and jittery and ready to snap. "I'm sorry."
He sighed. "During the course of the investigation, I... was separated from something that links me to the FBI, and if it gets into the wrong hands..."
He trailed off and her eyes widened. "Like your gun or your ID or something?"
He looked away from her for a moment, and she sensed one of her guesses was correct.
"I'm just a little concerned about it, that's all," he said evenly. "And don't worry about my arm, OK? It takes more than a flesh wound to stop Derek Morgan; you know that."
She nuzzled the shoulder of his uninjured arm. "I sure do," she said lightly, but as he absently pressed a kiss to her forehead, her unease only grew.
--
Penelope wasn't a profiler, but she could see what this unsub was doing to Morgan - controlling the agent through his possession of what he stole, cultivating persistent uncertainty over how this part of Morgan might be used against him at any given time. The preoccupation strained their relationship, hanging over the two of them like a black cloud preventing Morgan from being altogether present whenever they were together, so when the missing piece showed up, Penelope's first instinct was relief.
"That's good, right?" she asked when Morgan called to let her know that his credentials were used to drop off a wounded John Doe at a local hospital.
"It's the exact opposite of good." Morgan sounded distraught, and Penelope felt her heart sink. "The John Doe was Hotch."
--
There was only so much Morgan could tell her, but he did admit that the Reaper was stalking Agent Hotchner, had some kind of vendetta against him - and the other members of the BAU were likely to get caught in the crossfire.
"Including you?" Penelope's voice came out high and panicky, and her stomach churned as she put the pieces together. "When you came home with your arm all bandaged up, did he do that to you?!"
Morgan was silent, allowing her to fill in the blanks in her mind.
"Wait, why didn't he just kill Agent Hotchner if he had him?"
Morgan sighed heavily, and she could feel the strain he was under seeping through the phone. "You can't torture somebody who's dead."
Penelope felt sick.
--
In the ensuing weeks, Agent Hotchner's ex-wife and young son went into hiding while the members of the BAU did their best to track down the Reaper. The strangest thing to Penelope was that even though one of their own was in crisis, the team was expected to work cases as usual. She saw a clip of JJ on the news warning against a group of killers with a pack mentality wreaking havoc in southeast D.C. and wondered how any human being could compartmentalize like that. Indeed, Hotch, who by all accounts and purposes should be falling apart, was as stoic as ever, seeming completely unruffled whenever he came into Penny's for coffee or a snack. If it weren't for the telltale dark smudges beneath his eyes that seemed to grow ever darker as the days went on, Penelope would have been hard pressed to find a single outward sign of the tumult ravaging his life.
Perhaps it was just because she knew Morgan better, but the cracks in his facade seemed much more obvious to Penelope than those of any of his colleagues, serving as a constant reminder of the danger that loomed over him - over them - at any and every point in time. She'd always been aware of what his job entailed, but the reality of it had never hit so close to home before. She could lose him at any time, the first person she'd truly allowed herself to care about since her parents, and she wondered how she could ever have become so caught up in the promise of Morgan, of a future, that she'd made herself vulnerable to another bone-shaking loss.
In a way, Morgan's emotional distance almost made it easier for her. She broached the subject as he was grabbing his go-bag, about to head out the door on another case, which wasn't a fair way to do it but it was the only approach she could stand.
"Derek?" she began quietly, and he stilled and looked over at her as if he already knew.
--
Breakups, Penelope thought, were like ripping off Band-Aids. It was easier for everyone involved if the severance of ties was swift and sudden, rather than an achingly slow divergence that went on and on. She had no idea of Morgan's opinion on the matter, hadn't talked to him since the day he walked out of her bedroom with his go-bag, and it occurred to her that at some point he might want to come back to grab the clothes and toothbrush he'd left there, but he hadn't reached out to her and she wasn't going to bring it up.
Oddly enough, some of Morgan's friends - hers too now, she supposed - seemed almost more affected than she was. JJ seemed especially saddened by the news, while Reid treated her with the same strained kind of awkwardness she'd seen in him the first few times he'd visited Penny's.
"Hey, Boy Wonder?" she'd asked one day, filling the sugar Dalek to the brim before handing it across the counter. "Just because I'm not with Morgan anymore, that doesn't mean anything's changed between you and me, especially now we're godparents. You know that, right?"
Reid nodded slowly, his doe eyes huge and sad. "It's just weird, coming here and seeing you be so sad, then going to the office and seeing Morgan be the same way, and knowing you both feel that way because of each other. It's like watching a movie, except I'm in it."
She frowned, glanced down at her extra-bright attire, and wondered whether the concerted effort she'd been putting into beaming at every single customer hadn't been enough. "I seem sad to you?"
Reid shrugged. "Maybe not to most people, but I'm a profiler, remember?"
It took Penelope until later that day to process the fact that Reid had said Morgan was sad too.
--
Penelope hated the word closure. It implied a definitive end to something, the closing of a chapter or maybe even an entire book. Her parents' death would never be closed to her, she'd never be over it, and there would never be a day when she didn't wake up with an ache in her chest because of it. Losing Morgan, if losing was even the right word for a schism she'd initiated, became just another ache - a deepening of the yawning emptiness she fancied people would see if they cut through her skin and broke open her ribcage, looking for the place where her heart should be.
She decided to debut double-chocolate Peppermint Pennies to take her mind off things, and her takings went through the roof.
--
It would have been all too easy for the other members of the BAU to side with their colleague and patronize the FBI cafeteria whenever they wanted coffee or sweet treats, so the fact that every single one still came to Penny's regularly over the ensuing weeks meant more to Penelope than she was willing to let on. JJ in particular start coming around more often to share pictures of Henry or simply to chat, so it made sense that she would be the one to break the news of a somber development in the Reaper case.
Penelope could tell something was wrong the second JJ stepped through the door, the expression on her pretty face more serious than Penelope had ever seen it. Penny's was mercifully quiet, filled with just a handful of patrons, and JJ made her sit at one of the mismatched tables before breaking the news that the Reaper had murdered Agent Hotchner's ex-wife.
Penelope's eyes instantly filled with tears, and for once in her life, she was speechless. "And Jack?" she managed to ask, referring to the agent's young son.
"He's fine, at least physically. Hotch spoke to him on the phone before it happened, told him to run and hide so the Reaper couldn't find him." JJ took a steadying breath. "The Reaper's dead too, by the way."
Penelope numbly sat in silence for a little while before finally saying, "Good."
--
Penelope had considered attending the funeral - JJ gave her the date and time and directions, and she'd almost gone but thought better of it. She wasn't sure she knew Agent Hotchner well enough that her presence was warranted, and she didn't particularly want to see Morgan either, so she sent over several dessert plates but ultimately recused herself. Three days later, she received a thank-you in the mail printed on good-quality card stock and punctuated at the bottom by Hotchner's signature, and the first time he visited Penny's after coming back to work, she found herself unable to look him in the eyes.
"Sir!" she said, a little breathless with nerves, then, "Welcome back!"
He gave her one of his solemn smiles distinguishable only by a tiny momentary uptick at one corner of his mouth. "Thank you again for sending over all those dessert trays. You must have been baking half the night."
It was the least she could do, and she told him so as she scooped up a double-chocolate Peppermint Penny even though he hadn't asked for one.
"On the house," she said quietly, and she wasn't sure but she thought Hotchner's eyes seemed brighter than usual, maybe even a little filmy with the beginnings of tears.
"If I may..." Hotchner began as she handed him his coffee, "have you spoken to Morgan lately?"
She froze. "No."
"Perhaps this is out of bounds," he said carefully, "but if there's one thing I've learned this week, it's that life's too short not to spend every moment you can with someone you love." He cleared his throat. "And thank you for the Penny."
--
There were steady gusts of wind coming off the Potomac, and Penelope was the only one walking along the water's edge that evening, letting the quiet put things where they were supposed to be. She thought of Agent Hotchner and Haley, of last minutes and lost evenings and not taking things for granted, and then she texted Morgan.
--
When Morgan showed up at Penny's later that night, he looked different yet the same all at once. She remembered the first time she'd ever laid eyes on him, the bell above the door tinkling as he'd headed inside behind Reid. As she stood in the middle of the floor, he approached her cautiously, a question in his eyes.
"Remember when you said New York made you look at things in a new light?" she blurted, not bothering with a hello.
"Yeah?"
"Haley's death was my New York."
Morgan let out a measured breath, almost as if he'd been holding it, and waited for her to continue. Her heart was beating so hard in her chest that she wondered if he could see it pounding beneath her shirt.
"I just..." she continued. "I guess it made me realize that I shouldn't let my fears about the future prevent me from enjoying the good things in the present."
Morgan cleared his throat. "What are you saying, Penelope?"
She swallowed hard, willing her voice not to shake. "I'm saying I let my fears push you away, and I'm sorry."
"Penelope, I..." She could sense how badly he wanted to reassure her, but it wasn't fair of him to do that. It wasn't fair of her to ask. "I know we got the Reaper, but I can't promise you that I'm always going to be OK."
She felt a tear slip down her cheek. "I know."
"My job can get dangerous, and if that's too much for you to deal with, I understand and I won't blame you for it. But I also..."
Morgan paused, and something about the way the words dissipated into space made Penelope's breath catch in her throat.
"I also know I love you," he finished, "and I don't want to let you go."
All at once, she felt a lightness rising inside her, as if she were a swimmer and Morgan were the surface of the water. In a way, she thought, despite all her insistence to the contrary, she'd loved him for as long as she'd known him, from the first time he'd walked into Penny's on a rainy summer afternoon and asked if ordering a blondie meant he'd get a miniature version of her.
"I love you too," she finally admitted, and with that, the last shred of resolve crumbled inside her. Morgan caught the pieces.
---<---<---@
Author: that_1_incident
Fandom: "Criminal Minds"
Art: Here by astral_angel and here by kymericl
Pairing: Derek Morgan/Penelope Garcia
Rating: PG-13/FRT
Word Count: ~16,500
Warnings: Semi-AU, the Boston Reaper, a fair amount of abyss-gazing, and a small guest appearance by Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs.
Summary/Disclaimer/Author's Notes: See Part One.
---<---<---@
The shootings, it turned out, had been part of a terrorist plot designed to strike fear into the hearts of the people of New York City - as if its residents hadn't already been through enough. The pièce de résistance was to be the detonation of a bomb in an ambulance that would have ravaged an especially crowded part of the city had authorities not foiled the plot and transported the ambulance to Central Park before it exploded. A technicolor photo of the bombed-out crater in the middle of the park's lush greenery was on the front page of that day's New York Times, and Penelope winced whenever she caught sight of it on the newspaper rack by the counter, imagining how much worse the whole thing could have been.
In fact, all of Quantico seemed subdued, which wasn't surprising considering the deep patriotism shared by many who lived and worked there. Penelope's takings were down and her customers less chatty than usual - even Reid, who showed back up after an absence of a few days, wasn't his usual fact-spewing self - and for the first time in the history of Penny's, it looked like she was going to be able to close on time.
She locked the door right at five and had retreated to the back of the store to turn off the lights when a soft knocking caught her attention. She looked up and saw Morgan peering through the glass, a bouquet of flowers in one hand, and her stomach tied itself in knots.
As soon as Penelope un-clicked the lock, Morgan strode breezily into the coffeehouse, the bell unnecessarily tinkling the news of his arrival.
"Hey," he said casually, but something about his demeanor seemed strained. She wondered if he felt as uncomfortable as she did about trying to act like their friendship was still intact after Scarpetta's and weeks of no contact. He awkwardly held out the flowers. "I'm sorry I haven't stopped by."
She gave him a guarded smile as she accepted the proffered bouquet, fully aware that she would have swooned at the gesture just a few short weeks earlier and marveling at how quickly her defenses had repaired themselves.
"You're a busy man," she responded, and the excuse sounded hollow even to her own ears. Why was he here?
He followed her into the store, then hovered by the register as she went behind the counter to find a makeshift vase.
"Listen..."
She stood silently by the sink, studiously watching the water line rise in the jug she'd picked out.
"I should've come around, I know that."
She arranged the flowers carefully in the jug, pulling off a broken leaf.
"I get that I was kinda sending you mixed signals, and that wasn't cool," he continued. "It shouldn't have taken something crazy happening on a case for me to realize that."
Penelope frowned, feeling worry spike in her chest as she turned to look at him. "What do you mean, something crazy?"
Morgan shrugged. "I jumped out of a moving vehicle," he said nonchalantly, but she could tell by the look on his face that there was more to the story than he was willing to tell right now. She boggled at him, setting down the jug and heading back to the counter.
"How are you even here?" she demanded of him, the hostility she'd felt toward him instantly overridden by concern. "Why aren't you in the hospital?"
"I landed on grass; I'm just a little sore, that's all." He lifted his shirt. "See? I got a big old bruise on my side, but that's it. Let me put it this way - if I hadn't jumped, it would've been a hell of a lot messier."
Haltingly, she reached over the counter and touched her fingertips to the discolored skin. Morgan's breath audibly hitched.
"Does that hurt?!" She drew back, alarmed.
"Not really, but you can't just go around touching guys like that, you know. You're gonna give people the wrong idea."
His tone was light, but the words hit close to home. Penelope's gaze wavered and she broke eye contact with him for a moment.
"Penelope..." Morgan said seriously, smoothing his shirt back down over his six-pack. She'd forgotten he even knew her real name. "I'm gonna level with you right now - I'm sorry about before, at Scarpetta's. It's sorta my go-to place where I take girls, and I know you picked up on that."
She shrugged and did her best to seem nonplussed, although she was secretly surprised by his honesty. "Last time I checked, I was a girl."
He made a face at her. "Come on, you're my Baby Girl O.G., bringer of baked goods, maker of coffee, owner of the best smile below the Mason Dixon Line." The present tense and easy bravado he affected made it seem like the past few weeks had never happened, but then he paused, seeming almost unsure of himself. She'd never seen him hesitate like this before. "Would you let me take you out to dinner again?"
"To Scarpetta's?" Penelope asked flatly, only half joking, and Morgan shook his head.
"To this place in D.C. where I go with my mom when she's in town. I've never been there with anyone else. I save it for the best of the best."
She tilted her head at him, ignoring the compliment. "You want to go now? Tonight?"
"Tonight. I want to talk to you about something."
"We're talking right now," she pointed out, and couldn't resist adding, "For the first time in a while, in fact."
"Penelope," Morgan said levelly. "Are you seriously about to turn down a free meal at a very expensive restaurant with the most eligible bachelor in the tri-state area?"
She rolled her eyes. "Modest, too."
He grinned at her hopefully, and she sighed.
"You said you're buying?"
"I sure am."
"I'll get my coat."
--
The restaurant was understated in a classic, old-money sort of way, with dimmed lights and high, wooden booths bearing plaques that showcased the names of famous patrons: congressmen, senators, a former fire chief. It was the type of place where couples conversed in hushed tones at its fringes while groups of affluent, suit-wearing gentlemen who'd likely migrated over from nearby Capitol Hill congregated at the larger tables toward the center of the room, laughing uproariously in a way that somehow didn't carry, or at least not unpleasantly. The heaviness of the place must have something to do with it, Penelope thought, the sound waves muted by the plush drapes hanging from the windows and the patterned upholstery padding the chairs.
Morgan was being more courteous than usual - not that he'd ever really been rude to Penelope, but that night he treated her as if she were made of glass or porcelain, careful not to chip her edges or nick where it was sore. As the night progressed from hors d'oeuvres to entrées, she sensed ever more keenly that he hadn't told her everything, but it wasn't until dessert that she was proven right.
"So, you know that ambulance that exploded in Central Park?"
Morgan phrased the inquiry as innocuously as if he were referring to the weather, the light drizzle they'd had earlier in the week that didn't even last long enough to leave anything wet, per se, just glistening with a sheen that hadn't been there previously.
"Yes?" Penelope said uncertainly, wondering what that had to do with anything. It would've been hard not to know, given the front-page newspaper coverage and the fact that every news station in the country was running aerial footage of the fiery wreck with a macabre eagerness that, frankly, unsettled her.
"You heard about it?" Morgan persisted.
"They caught the bomb in time and were able to get it to an isolated area before it exploded, according to officials," Penelope elaborated, parroting the phrasing that had been uttered by virtually every newscaster and reporter who'd covered the story over the past few days, their reports filled with buzz phrases like No indications from authorities and A source close to the investigation. "Morgan, why are you asking me this?"
He watched her seriously, a strange expression on his face. "What, I don't look official enough for you?"
Her eyes widened. "That was you? You drove the ambulance to..." She trailed off. "Oh my God, Morgan..."
He wisely gave her a minute, and she didn't speak again until something occurred to her.
"Is that how you got hurt?"
Morgan shrugged. "Collateral damage. Like I said earlier, it could've been a lot messier."
A chill ran down her spine. It really could have.
"You know what I thought about as I was driving that ambulance away from all those people?"
Penelope swallowed hard, stabbed the piece of cake on her plate with her fork, and tried to feel normal. She suddenly didn't want to know, to dwell anymore on what Morgan did, on the danger in which he'd put himself. She couldn't fault him for doing it, for wanting to save hundreds - maybe thousands - of people who would have been killed or injured had the bomb gone off amid the hustle and bustle of the city, but at the same time, she thought him immeasurably brave. She wondered what she would have done in the same position and secretly doubted whether she would have been able to rise to the challenge.
"My mom and my sisters," he continued in lieu of a response, "and then I thought of you."
She froze, a forkful of cake suspended in midair. "...What?" she repeated, sincerely afraid she'd misheard him.
He again allowed her a few moments, and she gaped at him. She didn't know what to say. Thank you was the first thing that came to mind - somewhat ridiculously, as if he'd given her a compliment - but she wasn't sure it was the right response. Would she have thought of Morgan had the situation been reversed? Would she have thought of anybody at all? Her parents were dead, she was an only child, and the only connections she'd made in Virginia had been forged across a countertop over steaming mugs and sticky bakery items. She had no living family, no close friends, and as the architect of her own life, she had historically done a superb job of making sure her little snow-globe microcosm of a world didn't brush up too closely against anybody else's. Morgan was her first failure. After he'd disappeared, she'd shored up her emotional walls to be stronger than ever, but now that he was sitting in front of her, she could feel the cracks start to take hold.
"Why are you telling me this?" she murmured, the fork still hovering halfway between her mouth and the table even though she wasn't hungry in the slightest, and Morgan gently eased it back to her plate, metal softly clinking against ceramic as he set it down.
"I've been thinking about some things since then. Near-death experiences will do that to ya, make you see people in a new light, you know?"
Her heart leapt in her throat, feeling at once as if it were being squeezed by an icy hand, and she had the sudden realization that she knew what was coming.
"Don't," she implored him, half a plea, half an order.
Morgan's forehead creased and he opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, Penelope caught the eye of their blessedly passing server and cut him off by asking for the check. At her insistence, she and Morgan split it.
--
They didn't speak again until they were leaving the restaurant. After Morgan held open the door, Penelope inhaled sharply as the frosty night air hit her face, as cold as the chill that had descended between them.
"Are you really planning not to talk to me for the entire ride home?" Morgan's voice was serious, but she detected an iota of a smirk in his tone that made her irritation spike. "I know why you're mad at me, Penelope. I get it."
"I'm not mad," she told him with as much nonchalance as she could muster, opening the car door on her own before he could do it for her. She hated the position he'd put her in by suddenly seeming poised to offer something she'd wanted so much but had already painstakingly drawn a line underneath. Things were safer if she kept him at arm's length, and she knew it.
He climbed into the driver's seat, shrugging as he put on his seatbelt with a click. "I just wanted to tell you that facing my own death made me realize how much I care about you."
He sounded annoyingly calm, and she wondered how he managed it. Internally, she was a wreck.
"That was stupid of you," she chastised him as he carefully backed the car out of its parking space, hand pressed behind the headrest of her seat. She ignored the way the air suddenly seemed to still at the proximity of his hand to her shoulder. "I get why you did it, but it was reckless."
"Nearly getting myself blown up, or telling you how I feel?"
She couldn't answer him.
--
They drove back to Quantico in silence, with Penelope staring firmly out of the passenger-side window for most of the journey. She gazed at the houses visible from the freeway, their lights winking like fireflies as her thoughts raced faster than the cars outside. Morgan was respectfully quiet, no longer pushing her about her feelings - or, indeed, his own - and she wondered if he'd realized how so not a joke this was, how uncharted the territory of letting someone matter this much to her.
Morgan turned off at her exit and the roar of the other vehicles faded behind them, scooped up into the vacuum of the receding highway to leave the two of them alone with their thoughts. It felt to Penelope as if it took much longer than it should have for them to reach her street, and when the car finally turned onto it, Morgan glanced sideways at her as if he were about to say something but then thought better of it.
He slowed to a stop outside the coffeehouse, the sign out front bathed in the soft glow of the lamps Penelope always left on at night. As Penelope's heels hit the sidewalk, Morgan leaned across the center console and implored, "At least let me walk you to the door."
"Fine," she said lightly, trying to hide her reluctance. It wasn't that he'd really done anything wrong, she reminded herself, other than felt something for her at a different time than she'd felt something for him. Her hang-ups weren't his fault; he'd just been the one to light the touchpaper.
They headed up to the coffeehouse in silence, and Penelope slipped her key out of her purse and slid it into the lock. When the door cracked open, the jingle of the bell had an unearthly quality to it as it disrupted the still of the night. As she moved to cross the threshold, Morgan's fingers gently grazed her arm.
"Penelope..."
She bit her lip. Her heart was hammering like a drum, the staccato vibrations reverberating throughout her chest. "Yeah?"
He touched the side of her face, leaning into the space between them as if to ask a silent question. When he tilted her head up, she didn't resist.
The press of his lips was so soft at first that she questioned whether she'd dreamt it, wondered if there could be any verity to this incredulous diorama of the two of them standing in the darkness, silhouetted by the Penny's sign blazing bright against the night. She found herself pushing up on her toes to deepen the kiss, and it was one of those frozen moments, she thought, a snapshot suspended in the dark and the quiet. Her heart twisted under the weight of how much she'd wanted him, shuddered with the release of finally letting go.
--
It had been - God, it had been a while since Penelope had done this, splayed like a snow angel on her double bed that was far from accustomed to holding two, and Morgan handled her with a gentle strength, guiding her without being overbearing. His stubble grazed her skin when he tongued the hollows of her neck, his fingertips feather-light as he unbuttoned her blouse and kissed her chest. He clasped her hands in his, placed them at his waist and guided them upward, encouraging her to help slip his shirt off. The planes of his torso were even firmer than she'd imagined, his six-pack lean but muscular, the tattoos on his biceps no longer obscured by the fabric of his sleeves. She slipped her fingers through the belt loops of his jeans and pulled him toward her, the firmness of his chest pressing against the swell of hers as their lips met. They moved together languidly until, all too soon, she felt herself coming apart beneath him. When they were both left gasping for breath, he pressed his lips to her cheek and swept her into his arms.
--
When Penelope's alarm went off at 4:45 the next morning, Morgan thought it was a joke.
"Nobody wakes up this early," he groaned, burying his head underneath a pillow, and Penelope's amusement staved off the rush of uneasiness she'd been expecting to feel.
"Did you think those blondies you like so much just bake themselves?"
"I figured they fell from heaven and you just went outside and picked 'em up," he responded, the words muffled, and she tugged at the edge of the pillow, exposing one eye and the bridge of his nose.
"Good morning," he murmured, his voice a little more gravelly than she was used to, still rough around the edges from sleep. He brushed her cheekbone with the pad of his thumb and she waited for the much-anticipated sense of panic to spike in her chest, but it never came.
--
"Have you ever baked before?" she inquired of Morgan a little while later, after he'd showered and stumbled downstairs without a shirt on and she'd sent him back up to find one.
He shrugged. "Cookies a few times, when I was a kid. With dough from the store."
She sighed. "I'll take that as a no."
--
By the time Penny's opened its doors that day, there were baked goods next to the counter as usual, sitting above the refrigerated shelves of cold drinks and yogurts. The muffins Morgan had helped with were a little lopsided, but after critically regarding them, Penelope had concluded that they were the baked goods representation of her mismatched tables and chairs, and doubted any of her patrons would even notice. Agent Gibbs, her first customer of the day, certainly didn't seem to, while Morgan was much too biased as he sat at a table close to the counter and tucked in.
When JJ walked through the door, back from maternity leave and looking entirely too svelte for someone who'd recently had a baby, she caught sight of Morgan and did a huge double-take.
"Why are you here so early?"
Morgan hesitated for a moment, glancing at Penelope before opening his mouth to respond, and JJ grinned hugely.
"Because you never left," she concluded, and Penelope's blush was all the confirmation she needed.
--
"I actually had something I wanted to ask you," JJ told her a little later, after Morgan had surreptitiously kissed Penelope on the cheek and headed to the office. "Will and I have been talking about who we want Henry's godparents to be," she continued, sipping one of the caffeinated specialties she'd missed so badly while pregnant and relegated to decaf, "and we decided on Reid for the godfather."
Penelope smiled. "That's a great choice, JJ. He'll be thrilled."
"And you as the godmother."
The quip about Henry being able to recite the Periodic Table at an age when most children would still be mastering the alphabet died instantly on Penelope's lips.
"...What?" she asked lamely.
JJ shrugged, then grinned. "With the job I have, someone will have to teach the kid how to bake."
--
It had been awkward at first, informing Morgan's colleagues one by one that the longstanding flirtation he'd shared with Penelope had developed into something more tangible, but nobody seemed particularly surprised. Reid was the one Penelope had been most worried about in the same way a long-single mother might be about her son's reaction to her dating again, but he seemed to be taking it well enough - understatedly, in his stoic Reid way.
"Can I ask you something?" he'd inquired about a week after they'd broken the news, upending the sugar Dalek into his mug and carefully avoiding her eyes. Without waiting for her acquiescence, he'd ploughed forward. "Why Morgan?"
Although the question had been out of the blue, Penelope somehow sensed it was coming, had grown to know Reid well enough to develop a relative familiarity with how he processed things, how he made sense of the world. The realization in itself surprised her - that she'd become sufficiently close to another living human to be able to predict something like that.
"He just showed up one day," Penelope responded honestly. "He carved out a space for himself, and he just never left."
Reid nodded slowly, considering her response as he stirred his coffee. "Do you think he ever could?"
I don't know, was what Penelope meant to say, because she and anticipating the future hadn't been on good terms for years, but "No" was what came out of her mouth.
--
It was strange, Penelope thought, how one aspect of her life could change so tremendously while the rest of it remained intact. She still awoke at the crack of dawn every morning, donned an ensemble she doubted anyone else in Quantico could come up with, prepared Agent Gibbs' extra-super-huge coffee, and, if she had a spare moment, put aside some treats for the members of the Behavioral Analysis Unit to take on their jet or simply enjoy at the office if their work kept them in Virginia that day. The differences only became apparent under closer scrutiny: the bookmark she used to mark her place in Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (a photo booth printout from the time she and Morgan had shown up way too early at the movie theater and he just happened to have exact change), the smudges of icing on certain baked goods that, over time, grew to be big, bold hearts clearly demarcating particular items as being made with Morgan in mind.
They settled into an odd kind of kinship that was defined as much by its apartness as its togetherness, Morgan's absences routine enough that Penelope never had the chance to become unduly accustomed to his presence - and perhaps, she thought, that was why they worked so well together.
She caught Hotchner smiling at them once, his expression wistful as Morgan ducked behind the countertop to kiss her cheek and she swatted him away because she had customers. In the midst of ordering coffee and a Peppermint Penny, Hotchner, having given up on his efforts to hide his affinity for the latter, murmured something that she didn't fully process until after he'd headed out of the coffeehouse.
"I'm glad he realized what he had," Hotchner had told her, serious as always, and she smiled so hard her cheeks hurt.
--
Penelope had been vaguely aware of the Boston Reaper case when it happened and, if pressed, could somewhat recall the details: A lone predator who attacked couples traveling along deserted Massachusetts highways at night inexplicably stopped killing about a decade earlier, likely due to incarceration, injury or even death. There had been a book about him, she remembered, dimly drawing upon the faint memory of the author appearing on a morning talk show she'd happened to be watching, but as far as she knew, the case had never been solved. Indeed, she hadn't heard the name mentioned in years until the night Morgan slept over and his phone rang at an ungodly hour, long before even the early-rising Penelope was accustomed to awakening.
"The Reaper?" Morgan said quietly into his phone, his body a dark silhouette as he crouched over the go-bag he kept at Penelope's place in the event that he got called off on a case while he was with her. "Wasn't that your first case as a BAU senior?" A pause. "I'll be right there, Hotch. I'm at Penny's."
He lowered the phone from his ear and looked up in the direction of the bed, squinting as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. "You awake, baby girl?"
"Mm-hm," Penelope confirmed blearily, raising her head to offer him a reassuring smile in the near darkness. This was by no means the first time Morgan had been called away at an unreasonable hour. "Go, my sweet. Slay the dragons, vanquish the demons, and I'll bake you something nice upon your return."
"You're the best, you know that?"
"I get that a lot. Stay safe, angelfish."
--
Penelope's firsthand experience with the effects a tough case could have on Morgan preceded their courtship, going back to the night he sat at the counter at Penny's and told her about the woman in Seattle with the bomb under the seat of her car. She was no stranger to seeing him shaken up or spent, but the Morgan who returned from Boston was different somehow, more scarred by this case than she'd ever seen him before. He had superficial cuts on the side of his face and a bandage on his left arm that he wouldn't let her take off, but the true damage, she sensed, was to his psyche.
"I wish you could tell me what happened," she said to him the second night he was back. They'd been watching Top Chef when someone on the show shattered a glass and the arm Morgan had draped over the back of the couch tensed instantly, his hand gripping her shoulder hard enough to hurt.
"You know I can't," he reminded her quietly.
"Is that what happened to your arm? Something broke against it or smashed into it? Something made of glass?"
"Penelope..."
She knew she wasn't being fair to him, but the anxiety that had been coiling in her stomach since Morgan's return the previous day was now taut and jittery and ready to snap. "I'm sorry."
He sighed. "During the course of the investigation, I... was separated from something that links me to the FBI, and if it gets into the wrong hands..."
He trailed off and her eyes widened. "Like your gun or your ID or something?"
He looked away from her for a moment, and she sensed one of her guesses was correct.
"I'm just a little concerned about it, that's all," he said evenly. "And don't worry about my arm, OK? It takes more than a flesh wound to stop Derek Morgan; you know that."
She nuzzled the shoulder of his uninjured arm. "I sure do," she said lightly, but as he absently pressed a kiss to her forehead, her unease only grew.
--
Penelope wasn't a profiler, but she could see what this unsub was doing to Morgan - controlling the agent through his possession of what he stole, cultivating persistent uncertainty over how this part of Morgan might be used against him at any given time. The preoccupation strained their relationship, hanging over the two of them like a black cloud preventing Morgan from being altogether present whenever they were together, so when the missing piece showed up, Penelope's first instinct was relief.
"That's good, right?" she asked when Morgan called to let her know that his credentials were used to drop off a wounded John Doe at a local hospital.
"It's the exact opposite of good." Morgan sounded distraught, and Penelope felt her heart sink. "The John Doe was Hotch."
--
There was only so much Morgan could tell her, but he did admit that the Reaper was stalking Agent Hotchner, had some kind of vendetta against him - and the other members of the BAU were likely to get caught in the crossfire.
"Including you?" Penelope's voice came out high and panicky, and her stomach churned as she put the pieces together. "When you came home with your arm all bandaged up, did he do that to you?!"
Morgan was silent, allowing her to fill in the blanks in her mind.
"Wait, why didn't he just kill Agent Hotchner if he had him?"
Morgan sighed heavily, and she could feel the strain he was under seeping through the phone. "You can't torture somebody who's dead."
Penelope felt sick.
--
In the ensuing weeks, Agent Hotchner's ex-wife and young son went into hiding while the members of the BAU did their best to track down the Reaper. The strangest thing to Penelope was that even though one of their own was in crisis, the team was expected to work cases as usual. She saw a clip of JJ on the news warning against a group of killers with a pack mentality wreaking havoc in southeast D.C. and wondered how any human being could compartmentalize like that. Indeed, Hotch, who by all accounts and purposes should be falling apart, was as stoic as ever, seeming completely unruffled whenever he came into Penny's for coffee or a snack. If it weren't for the telltale dark smudges beneath his eyes that seemed to grow ever darker as the days went on, Penelope would have been hard pressed to find a single outward sign of the tumult ravaging his life.
Perhaps it was just because she knew Morgan better, but the cracks in his facade seemed much more obvious to Penelope than those of any of his colleagues, serving as a constant reminder of the danger that loomed over him - over them - at any and every point in time. She'd always been aware of what his job entailed, but the reality of it had never hit so close to home before. She could lose him at any time, the first person she'd truly allowed herself to care about since her parents, and she wondered how she could ever have become so caught up in the promise of Morgan, of a future, that she'd made herself vulnerable to another bone-shaking loss.
In a way, Morgan's emotional distance almost made it easier for her. She broached the subject as he was grabbing his go-bag, about to head out the door on another case, which wasn't a fair way to do it but it was the only approach she could stand.
"Derek?" she began quietly, and he stilled and looked over at her as if he already knew.
--
Breakups, Penelope thought, were like ripping off Band-Aids. It was easier for everyone involved if the severance of ties was swift and sudden, rather than an achingly slow divergence that went on and on. She had no idea of Morgan's opinion on the matter, hadn't talked to him since the day he walked out of her bedroom with his go-bag, and it occurred to her that at some point he might want to come back to grab the clothes and toothbrush he'd left there, but he hadn't reached out to her and she wasn't going to bring it up.
Oddly enough, some of Morgan's friends - hers too now, she supposed - seemed almost more affected than she was. JJ seemed especially saddened by the news, while Reid treated her with the same strained kind of awkwardness she'd seen in him the first few times he'd visited Penny's.
"Hey, Boy Wonder?" she'd asked one day, filling the sugar Dalek to the brim before handing it across the counter. "Just because I'm not with Morgan anymore, that doesn't mean anything's changed between you and me, especially now we're godparents. You know that, right?"
Reid nodded slowly, his doe eyes huge and sad. "It's just weird, coming here and seeing you be so sad, then going to the office and seeing Morgan be the same way, and knowing you both feel that way because of each other. It's like watching a movie, except I'm in it."
She frowned, glanced down at her extra-bright attire, and wondered whether the concerted effort she'd been putting into beaming at every single customer hadn't been enough. "I seem sad to you?"
Reid shrugged. "Maybe not to most people, but I'm a profiler, remember?"
It took Penelope until later that day to process the fact that Reid had said Morgan was sad too.
--
Penelope hated the word closure. It implied a definitive end to something, the closing of a chapter or maybe even an entire book. Her parents' death would never be closed to her, she'd never be over it, and there would never be a day when she didn't wake up with an ache in her chest because of it. Losing Morgan, if losing was even the right word for a schism she'd initiated, became just another ache - a deepening of the yawning emptiness she fancied people would see if they cut through her skin and broke open her ribcage, looking for the place where her heart should be.
She decided to debut double-chocolate Peppermint Pennies to take her mind off things, and her takings went through the roof.
--
It would have been all too easy for the other members of the BAU to side with their colleague and patronize the FBI cafeteria whenever they wanted coffee or sweet treats, so the fact that every single one still came to Penny's regularly over the ensuing weeks meant more to Penelope than she was willing to let on. JJ in particular start coming around more often to share pictures of Henry or simply to chat, so it made sense that she would be the one to break the news of a somber development in the Reaper case.
Penelope could tell something was wrong the second JJ stepped through the door, the expression on her pretty face more serious than Penelope had ever seen it. Penny's was mercifully quiet, filled with just a handful of patrons, and JJ made her sit at one of the mismatched tables before breaking the news that the Reaper had murdered Agent Hotchner's ex-wife.
Penelope's eyes instantly filled with tears, and for once in her life, she was speechless. "And Jack?" she managed to ask, referring to the agent's young son.
"He's fine, at least physically. Hotch spoke to him on the phone before it happened, told him to run and hide so the Reaper couldn't find him." JJ took a steadying breath. "The Reaper's dead too, by the way."
Penelope numbly sat in silence for a little while before finally saying, "Good."
--
Penelope had considered attending the funeral - JJ gave her the date and time and directions, and she'd almost gone but thought better of it. She wasn't sure she knew Agent Hotchner well enough that her presence was warranted, and she didn't particularly want to see Morgan either, so she sent over several dessert plates but ultimately recused herself. Three days later, she received a thank-you in the mail printed on good-quality card stock and punctuated at the bottom by Hotchner's signature, and the first time he visited Penny's after coming back to work, she found herself unable to look him in the eyes.
"Sir!" she said, a little breathless with nerves, then, "Welcome back!"
He gave her one of his solemn smiles distinguishable only by a tiny momentary uptick at one corner of his mouth. "Thank you again for sending over all those dessert trays. You must have been baking half the night."
It was the least she could do, and she told him so as she scooped up a double-chocolate Peppermint Penny even though he hadn't asked for one.
"On the house," she said quietly, and she wasn't sure but she thought Hotchner's eyes seemed brighter than usual, maybe even a little filmy with the beginnings of tears.
"If I may..." Hotchner began as she handed him his coffee, "have you spoken to Morgan lately?"
She froze. "No."
"Perhaps this is out of bounds," he said carefully, "but if there's one thing I've learned this week, it's that life's too short not to spend every moment you can with someone you love." He cleared his throat. "And thank you for the Penny."
--
There were steady gusts of wind coming off the Potomac, and Penelope was the only one walking along the water's edge that evening, letting the quiet put things where they were supposed to be. She thought of Agent Hotchner and Haley, of last minutes and lost evenings and not taking things for granted, and then she texted Morgan.
--
When Morgan showed up at Penny's later that night, he looked different yet the same all at once. She remembered the first time she'd ever laid eyes on him, the bell above the door tinkling as he'd headed inside behind Reid. As she stood in the middle of the floor, he approached her cautiously, a question in his eyes.
"Remember when you said New York made you look at things in a new light?" she blurted, not bothering with a hello.
"Yeah?"
"Haley's death was my New York."
Morgan let out a measured breath, almost as if he'd been holding it, and waited for her to continue. Her heart was beating so hard in her chest that she wondered if he could see it pounding beneath her shirt.
"I just..." she continued. "I guess it made me realize that I shouldn't let my fears about the future prevent me from enjoying the good things in the present."
Morgan cleared his throat. "What are you saying, Penelope?"
She swallowed hard, willing her voice not to shake. "I'm saying I let my fears push you away, and I'm sorry."
"Penelope, I..." She could sense how badly he wanted to reassure her, but it wasn't fair of him to do that. It wasn't fair of her to ask. "I know we got the Reaper, but I can't promise you that I'm always going to be OK."
She felt a tear slip down her cheek. "I know."
"My job can get dangerous, and if that's too much for you to deal with, I understand and I won't blame you for it. But I also..."
Morgan paused, and something about the way the words dissipated into space made Penelope's breath catch in her throat.
"I also know I love you," he finished, "and I don't want to let you go."
All at once, she felt a lightness rising inside her, as if she were a swimmer and Morgan were the surface of the water. In a way, she thought, despite all her insistence to the contrary, she'd loved him for as long as she'd known him, from the first time he'd walked into Penny's on a rainy summer afternoon and asked if ordering a blondie meant he'd get a miniature version of her.
"I love you too," she finally admitted, and with that, the last shred of resolve crumbled inside her. Morgan caught the pieces.
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