take me to church (emily prentiss)

3. seven

•

"i'm feeling so tired, really falling apart." - my kind of woman, mac demarco

•

Liv liked to think she got her overprotective instincts from Dave, though she also thought that she was born with the big sister instinct wrapped around her throat like a noose that cemented itself into place at eight years old when Liv held her baby sister for the first time.

Staring at that tiny little lump in the blanket, eyes already screwed shut with baby cries falling from her lips, Liv knew she would burn the world down to protect her sister if it came to it.

Liv liked to think it wasn't her mother lying in the hospital bed, high on morphine with that doped out grin on her face, telling her in that slurred raspy voice Liv barely remembered anymore that baby Izzy was her responsibility. If anything happened to her, that was on Liv, and Liv would pay the price for it.

So, she liked to thank Dave for it. It was the easiest way to process the lengths Liv would go for her sister, especially when she heard Dave try and book a flight immediately to Virginia when they told him about the balloons over the phone. It reassured her that she wasn't the only person on Delilah's side.

Delilah talked Dave out of it, of course, but it had taken Liv thirty seven and a half minutes to calm him down and convince him that meeting them in Nevada next weekend was the best plan of action, to which he reluctantly agreed to, after asking her a million questions, and then a million more.

Liv didn't want to think about the phone call Dave made to Hotch. His text confirming, again, that nothing had come up from Dave's requests, just made Liv feel a bit bad for the man.

Dave was a force of nature at the best of times, but he would kill in cold blood for either of his daughters if it came down to it. Liv would do it for Dave and Delilah, too, and she knew Delilah was in the same boat. And, currently, all three of them were in moods with Hotch, which couldn't have given the man an easy week.

Now, though, all they could really do was wait for the next sighting of balloons, and for Delilah to get proof of it. There was nothing to be done until then, and time would only tell if Delilah's gut instinct was right, or if Hotch had been right that this was just a hallucination.

It was hard to wait when Liv was so impatient. She could spend hours slowly and painstakingly resecting brain tumours with the finest margins you could expect from a neurosurgeon, but two days off work sitting around the apartment to keep an eye on Delilah's mental state was one of the hardest things Liv had ever done.

How could two days of nothing happening drag on for so long?

Liv was almost relieved when Vince and Hotch cleared Delilah to go back to work. Liv could go back to work, now, too, and she didn't have to keep making Delilah feel like a hazard by hovering over her shoulder constantly.

Liv forgot how much she hated the immediate aftermath of trauma. It was so hard to find a routine when you knew what you knew, when you feared the monsters would come back for you, when you couldn't look at your sister without remembering her at thirteen in the hospital bed looking more like a starved wolf than a little girl.

The worst thing about it all?

No matter how much Liv wanted to, and how good she was at it, she could not find the words to explain this to Emily. Their daily texts avoided any mention of Delilah or her wellbeing, and Liv shut down Emily's questions about her own wellbeing on their nightly phone calls when Liv couldn't sleep.