Cruel - Criminal minds enemies to lovers

Beautiful Fear

"Athena, I really think this will be good for you" Morgan got into his costume in their hotel room as she finished sewing the others.

"And I really think that you don't know me if you think that I'm going to go talk about my shit to a stranger from the internet who will judge me" she responded.

"It's not a stranger from the internet" he rolled his eyes, "it's a therapist."

"A therapist who will judge me and throw me into a loony bin" she added and finished the finale stitch.

"Did you make Reid a slutty nurse costume?" Morgan asked with amused confusion at the garment in her hands.

"A slutty doctor costume" she corrected with a laugh and folded the outfits on the bed laid out for each of the team members to collect.

"Back to the therapy conversation-" Morgan tried to start again.

"Dude let it go. No one can fix me, not even your fancy therapist can fix my shit- I'm too far gone" she rolled her eyes dismissively and stretched her aching back.

"You don't need fixing Athena, you're not broken and you're not 'too far gone.'"

"I mean I guess you're right, in order to be broken you have to be whole in the first place and I never have been stable" she chuckled, he gave her a stern look that told her it wasn't the time for joking- she rolled her eyes and tried to stand up which was difficult sometimes given her growing stomach.

"I think it could really help you process everything that happened before, everything that happened on the mission, everything before that. Your life hasn't been easy Athena-"

"Understatement of the freaking year" she laughed, he carried on.

"-Your life hasn't been easy and you can't keep living it with all that dragging behind you. I know that you can't brush it off anymore and I know that scares you. I see the way you are on cases now, the way things get to you, the way it makes you feel about yourself when you can't just push past things. You don't have to be ashamed of it."

"I'm not ashamed by it, I'm just annoyed by it- it gets in my way" she lied, she was very ashamed by the new fear the consumed her in all aspects of her life that she had been able to push past for years.

"You're a great liar to a staggering degree but I know you, Athena-" he walked over and sat on the bed next to her.

"I know you better than you think. I know that you can fool me with your perfectly scripted lie and body language to get past my profiling but you can't fool the man who's spent every day with you reading your expressions hidden behind layer and layer of carefully crafted masks. I know you Athena, I'm married to you, I love you and I know when your lies are even lies to yourself."

"You speak like a fucking profiler all the time- you're so annoying" she rolled her eyes through a laugh before turning to face him. She watched the concern and love in his face as he looked down at her, the begging of his eyes, the need he had for her to make a change that he thought would help her instead of her just pretending she was doing better to make him feel okay.

Truth be told, she was scared of the idea of therapy. She had always brushed it off by saying she was 'too far gone' to get help or that it didn't help or couldn't help people like her but the truth was she was scared. Scared of the layers that would be unpacked, scared that she would lose herself without the trauma and pain built into those layers, scared that she wasn't anybody without that constant anguish and problems in her. She sighed and pushed past those fears, just like she always seemed to do when she looked into Morgan's big, loving eyes staring down at her.