Two Weddings

The First Wedding

Rossi's backyard is decorated with string lights and paper lanterns and flowers everywhere. A trail of purple flower petals leads up to a beautifully adorned wedding arch. The tables all have crisp white tablecloths and perfect place settings. There are waiters in starched button-downs carrying trays of drinks and appetizers, and if it were anyone other than Rossi, Emily would wonder how the hell he managed to put all of this together in just twenty-four hours.

Twenty-four hours. That's how long it's been since Will asked JJ to marry him. Really it's been more like four years since he first proposed, but it's been twenty-four hours since she said yes. That means it's probably been about twenty-seven hours since Emily saved Will's life in that train station—the second time in a single Saturday that she'd come perilously close to dying in an explosion. Until yesterday, JJ had been reluctant to get married—why change something that was working just fine? But after coming so close to losing Will, she'd changed her mind, and now, here they all were. A few more seconds and they would have gathered for a funeral instead of a wedding, but Emily was there to defuse the bomb strapped to Will's chest, risking her life to save him even as he told her to go. In a way, that means Emily's the reason they're all here tonight. Emily's the reason JJ and Will are about to get married, and that's a nice thing, isn't it? She should feel good about that, shouldn't she? She's glad Will's not dead, but there's a part of her that knows nobody would blame her if she'd made a run for it and let him die. She hates herself for even thinking that, but it's true. And it's also true that while she's happy JJ's so happy, there's a part of her that really, really doesn't want JJ to marry Will.

Emily's not in love with JJ—truly, she's not. But she knows she could be, if things had been different. She knows there are a bunch of reasons—good reasons—why she and JJ aren't together. She knows the reasons because they've talked about them at length, more than once. But she also knows the reasons why she and JJ are so right for each other. She knows how well they fit together. She knows that, together or not, nobody has ever known her the way JJ has, and she wonders if anyone else ever could. She also knows they probably are better off just being friends. She can't change the past, but tonight, she also can't stop thinking about it—what they had once, what they have now, and what they might have had in a different world.

Emily remembers how it started. It was after the case in Golconda, where the BAU faced off against the most prolific serial killer they'd ever found, and when the team got back, JJ stopped Emily as she was leaving the office and suggested they go out for a drink to unwind after such a brutal case. Of course Emily said yes. It was just supposed to be a friendly drink, but then a friendly drink turned into two, and then three. Emily was so accustomed to hiding her sexuality at work and immediately shoving aside any thoughts that were even remotely romantic in nature that she didn't even register the way JJ kept looking at her all night, and she was caught off guard when JJ kissed her. They didn't do anything more than kiss that night, and the next day, they agreed to pretend it had never happened.

It was easy enough to write that off as a one-time thing, but then it happened again, after the Tobias Hankel case, when JJ asked Emily to come over because she didn't think she could manage being all alone in her apartment. The first time it happened, they'd been drinking, but the second time, they were both stone-cold sober. And it kept happening after that, and at a certain point, they couldn't blame alcohol or fragile emotional states anymore; they had to admit that they kept kissing each other because they just wanted to kiss each other. They liked kissing each other. It never really went beyond kissing and petting—JJ had never done anything more than that with another woman before—but it was nice, and it was fun, and it helped them unwind after tough cases, so it kept happening. Even after JJ met Will, it kept on happening. In the beginning, JJ's thing with Will wasn't any more serious than her thing with Emily, and neither thing was really going anywhere, so it didn't matter. Gradually, though, JJ started talking to Will more frequently and flying down to New Orleans on weekends. Emily could see the way that things were headed, but she'd keep making out with JJ as long as JJ wanted to keep making out with her, and so there were more kisses: after Emily's mother came by the BAU unexpectedly and asked—demanded—that the team take a kidnapping case, when Frank Breitkopf came back for another showdown with Gideon, when Strauss was trying to tear apart the BAU and Emily decided she'd rather quit than snitch, after Emily offered to take Carrie Ortiz back to Washington and JJ told her she would have made a good mom.