Emily Prentiss One-Shots

Emily/Declan

Title: Loving/Loved - SSAScropSik (AO3) 

Summary: Emily visits Declan when she can. The meetings were held in secret... until the day Ian died.

Rating: General 

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She'd got to the water park two hours ago. She moved around the facility, scanning the area, gauging, assessing. It was imperative that secrecy was maintained, that no one was watching. Ian Doyle had a long reach, and many contacts, and if he ever learned the truth and sent an operative...

Emily sighed. There was no sign of anyone who shouldn't be there: just families and couples... tourists and visitors and the usual run-of-the-mill types that one would expect to frequent a place like this.

The meeting had been arranged months ago. She tried to meet three or four times a year now that she was here and not buried alive in the Midwest. Back then, she was lucky if she made it more than once annually – and that wasn't fair on him. He needed her and, if she was honest with herself, she needed him too.

Her contacts were loyal, dependable. They were people she'd known for years – back in her earliest days with Interpol – before she even joined the JTF-12. These were people to whom she would entrust her life. Hell, she was doing just that each and every time she arranged a meeting.

Young Declan was eight now, and her people had been watching over him for three years. They'd found a safe home for him, an adoptive family who didn't mind his 'uncle' staying in touch. 'Uncle Ben' was allowed to take Declan out every few weeks, and Emily tried her damnedest to maintain a schedule of being there at least four times a year – but she did more, too. Each month she wired 'Uncle Ben' money to be put in an account for Declan for when he turned sixteen. She didn't need it herself – she had wealth from birth and a good salary with the BAU. She had no children or lovers to spend it on. No real hobbies. It was Declan who would need it, and she was happy to give it.

She sometimes wondered, during the midnight hours, whether she was simply appeasing her guilt – after all, she took his father from him. And, while he didn't know it, she lied to young Declan. Was continuing to lie to him. Declan still thought she was 'Lauren Reynolds'.

God, how she hated that name and all the memories it dredged up.
But Declan loved Lauren. And Lauren loved Declan... so she remained Lauren for him. She was happy to remain Lauren for him.

Two hours.

She found herself getting antsy as she sat on the bench and waited for a glimpse of him. She chewed at her lip, her leg jiggling with the anticipation. There was always that little jolt of fear that one day he wouldn't want to see her... that maybe he had found out some truth about her... that he might ask about his father...

Then she saw him. Well, she saw Ben first of all. Ben Husted was a tall and muscular man. He had been a great agent a long time ago, before a bullet to the thigh ended his field career. He hadn't the heart for desk work and resigned quietly, slipping into civilian life more easily than she ever could.

As Ben rounded the corner, his own eager eyes having spotted her, she saw Declan. God he was getting tall! His face was changing, his blond hair darkening to a hazel brown. She saw a few freckles on his cheeks; the way his shoulders were beginning to fill out; how he was able to keep up with Ben's large strides.

Her heart leapt with happiness and broke with sadness at the same time. God... she loved him so much. She wanted to take him with her when she left. She always did: every time. But she couldn't: it was too dangerous and, she knew, deep down, that she probably wasn't the best person to raise a child. She'd had a lousy example to follow when she was growing up and the spectre of aborting her own baby long ago was always hovering at the back of her mind. She knew she wasn't ready back then and maybe she never would be? Maybe she'd screw it up like pretty much every relationship she'd ever had, from her mother, to her friend Matthew, to the lovers that she'd discarded and the others that were just stupidly bad choices.