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There were roughly 147 minutes left until the ceremony, or at least that was how much time Spencer had clocked when he stepped out of the car with Morgan, and that number had ceased to matter the moment they walked through Rossi's front door and JJ materialized at the end of the hallway wearing a long, silky white nightgown-like dress, her golden hair still pinned in rollers and her makeup freshly done, her eyes finding them before either of them had a chance to get their bearings.
Derek saw her clock them from across the room and felt his body make an involuntary adjustment, the kind that happens before the brain has fully caught up to what it's registering. Penelope was somewhere nearby, visibly stretched thin across a dozen different responsibilities at once, and Derek had already filed away a reminder to himself not to become one of them before the wedding started, unless he wanted to earn a smack or two. Rossi was peacefully somewhere in the backyard with his cigar, which was where Derek had been hoping to end up, but, instead, JJ was walking towards them with her attention fixed and her expression doing something he couldn't quite afford to read too carefully.
"What are you doing here?" he asked, which came out wrong the moment it left his mouth, too close to deflection when what he actually meant was something more like please tell me we're not already in trouble, but her brows had already pulled together, her eyes moving between him and Spencer slowly.
"What do you mean what am I doing here?" Her arms dropped alongside her, an abrupt little motion she made no effort to cushion. "It's my wedding."
"I mean," Derek clarified, lifting an eyebrow and already feeling the structural weakness in his own logic, "isn't it bad luck for the groom to see the bride? What if Will happens to be walking around here?"
JJ's frown shifted into something more genuinely puzzled, her head tilting a degree to the left as she looked between the two of them, like she was trying to locate the conversation they were apparently having and finding it nowhere near the one she'd come over for.
Spencer, who had been standing slightly to Derek's left and operating at what appeared to be a completely separate frequency, chose that particular moment to look at her with the uncomplicated sincerity he reserved for things he meant entirely and offered, "You look really beautiful, JJ," apparently unbothered by the emotional weather of the room.
Something crossed JJ's face, the frown still present underneath it but interrupted for just a second before she pulled her focus back and let it settle where it needed to be, her patience visibly reorganizing itself around a shorter timeline than usual. "I'm not dressed yet," she told him, her eyes finding Spencer's and staying there. "Where is Eleanor? Why is she not with you?"
Spencer's inhale caught somewhere in the middle of his chest and stayed there, not quite completing itself, because of course that was who JJ was looking for and of course he already knew that even before she asked, since the moment Derek had shown up at his door and they'd left Eleanor's apartment behind, the door barely closed before he realized he'd left something unfinished inside it. There was still plenty of time, technically. The guests hadn't started arriving yet and Emily was probably already somewhere in the house, and the math of it all was still in their favor if he looked at it practically, which he was trying to do, and mostly failing at.
