DISCLAIMER: Criminal Minds and its characters are the property of CBS. No infringement intended.
SERIES: Part one of the ‘5 times Emily and JJ don’t let go’ series.
ARCHIVING: Only with the permission of the author.
fugit inreparabile tempus
By racethewind10
JJ was aware that somewhere, in the distance, someone was yelling and that she was yelling back. The blonde agent knew this in the kind of absent, unaffected way that one knows gravity holds you on the earth – knowing, but only remembering when shown the effects. For JJ, all knowledge had ceased to exist. Indeed gravity itself seemed to have loosed its grip on her body, leaving her reality broken and adrift, and she bereft of air and warmth and sense.
The only thing Jennifer knew, the only stability in the dark void that was threatening to swallow her whole, was the still rich brown of the pain filled eyes below her. She let those eyes fill her awareness, willingly diving into their remaining warmth and holding it tightly to herself, using them as an anchor even as she pressed her hands tighter against the wound in Emily's shoulder. The action caused the dark agent to cry out, and for a second, those eyes flickered, shaking their connection and causing JJ's already flimsy reality to tip on its axis.
"Stay with me Em, please stay with me," she pleaded softly, mindlessly, her heart speaking with its own voice, bypassing her head entirely.
Beneath JJ's fingers, the thick, subtle heat of Emily's blood rushed – traitorous – to stain the snow white shirt and the navy Kevlar vest, the brilliant crimson of fear and the sickening black of loss. Each pulse of that fragile organ sent a rush of life to escape the desperate, failing dam of flesh and bone she had built, mocking as it did, her helplessness, and marking each remaining beat of Emily's life; taunting 'one less, one less'.
Somewhere beyond their reach, time marched resolutely forward; uncaring of the battle being waged against it by two fragile hearts, one of which struggled just a little bit more with every second that passed callously by.
Between their eyes however, time did not move. It hung suspended, stilled and tamed by the power of the emotions that charged that simple, invisible connection between cobalt and mahogany.
And then suddenly the others were there. Police sirens shattered the silence in JJ's mind, and light and cold, time and sound rushed in. Like the endless assault of the ocean on its beach, the wave of the present crashed upon JJ's reality, washing away the restraints their connection had bound her fear in, and losing it to scream into her mind full force.
The paramedics swarmed Emily, cutting away her clothes and vest, calling commands, shoving JJ aside…but not away. In the midst of the storm of noise and fear and adrenaline and pain and people, two hands, bloodstained but whole, remained clasped.
The End