Caution to the Wind

Chapter 8

Chapter Summary: Tara and Emily adjust to their new dynamic, and JJ stirs up some shit. Fair warning: If you're a hardcore JJ or Jemily fan, you might not like this chapter very much. Follows S12E8 to S12E12.

Emily had been a little bit distant ever since that night they spent together, and Tara couldn't really blame her for it. They'd both crossed a line, but Emily had crossed a bigger one because she was Tara's boss. They agreed to move on and act like it had never happened, but that was easier said than done. It was hard to carry on as normal when they'd never really had a normal, at least, not one that truly felt entirely platonic. But they were trying, really trying. They were focused on being friends and coworkers and nothing more, and sometimes, it was surprisingly natural. Other times, it really, really wasn't. Emily was good at compartmentalizing—too good, perhaps. She was a master at boxing up her feelings and putting them to one side, but this time it was different. Her feelings for Tara didn't fit inside a neat little box. She couldn't pretend that her heart didn't beat just a little bit faster whenever she heard Tara laugh. The only way she could keep herself sane was by staying as distracted as possible, focusing her attention on anything that wasn't Tara.

She channeled it all into hunting down Scratch, and nobody thought to question it. Of course she'd be focused on catching him; they all wanted to catch him. He was a dangerous psychopath hell-bent on forcing the team to play his mind games. It made sense that Emily would want to catch him. It even made sense that she'd be more motivated after what he put Tara's family through, regardless of why she felt that way. But by going after Tara, Scratch made it personal for Emily, too, even if it wouldn't be appropriate for the unit chief to admit that. She was bringing in a new agent to help them, someone she knew had the skills and the smarts and the years of experience to get Scratch once and for all, but she wouldn't tell the team anything about him yet, instead letting them wonder while they worked their latest case in Washington.

It was a long flight to Yakima, which gave the team plenty of time to discuss the case, and also plenty of time to speculate about the new agent. Tara hadn't intended to sit next to Emily on the plane, but when JJ and Rossi took their seats, it just happened to end up that way. When JJ fell asleep with her legs stretched out in front of her, Tara had to angle hers to the side to avoid bumping up against JJ's knees, meaning that every so often, Emily's hand or her knee or her thigh would brush up against her. It was a long flight to Yakima, and now it seemed even longer.

Once they were on the ground, they had a missing woman to save and an unsub to catch, and between the case and the new agent joining their team, Emily and Tara had enough on their minds that they couldn't dwell on each other. It was all going well, until Emily and Luke narrowly escaped being buried alive in a grain silo with their unsub. On the plane back to Quantico after her brush with danger, Emily wanted nothing more than to rest her head in Tara's lap and close her eyes as the stress of the day left her body, and Tara wanted nothing more than to card her fingers through glossy black hair as she watched Emily drift off to well-earned sleep, but that was exactly the kind of thing they knew they shouldn't do now. And the long flight home provided little in the way of distractions to keep them from thinking about what they couldn't have. But there were other things happening at the BAU to occupy their time and their thoughts: new team member SSA Stephen Walker joining the BAU, Spencer taking time off to be with his mother at the Anderson Clinic in Houston, and of course, the never-ending supply of unsubs and cases.

Things were just starting to calm down at the BAU—for the team as a whole, but also for Tara and Emily. Reid was still away taking care of his mom; Walker was settling in well and getting to know the team; Rossi was getting ready to give another one of his profiling seminars; Tara and Emily hung out after work one evening just the two of them, and it wasn't that weird, and they didn't have sex. Things were good. Then Tommy Yates popped back up. They hadn't heard from him since he escaped in the mass prison break, but now he was back, and back with a vengeance, and taunting Rossi with new victims and late-night phone calls.