Archive of Our Own

Work Text

Ocean separates lands, not souls. – Munia Khan

The first time it happens, Emily had just turned thirteen, and she walks herself all the way out to the front yard before someone— her mother— wakes her up.

Of course, the Ambassador doesn’t realize her daughter had been asleep , which results in an imminent grounding that Emily doesn’t even try to fight. Partially because she doesn’t think her mother will believe her, but mostly because she’s horrified that it happened at all. What causes sleepwalking? What if she’d walked even further? What would she do if it happened again? She hopes she doesn’t have to find out.

But she does. Because it happens two weeks later. This time, she’d been up late studying for an exam, which might have been her only saving grace because she doesn’t make it out the front door, and instead, she collapses on the floor of the foyer, curled up halfway under the console table.

She’s fortunate that she wakes up before anyone else, counting her blessings as she retreats back to her room in a daze. She tries to pretend like it didn’t happen, even though all she can think about when she goes to sleep from then on is the haunting question— what if it happens again?

She starts locking her door, but that only works a few times before she starts unlocking it herself while asleep. The only other solution she has is to push a piece of furniture in front of the door, which proves effective, at least until Emily wakes up one morning on the small overhang roof outside her window.

What is she doing?

Sleepwalking—she knows that much, but is the habit so bad that she would climb out a window with a twelve foot drop? Ridiculous , she thinks. Clearly this is just some kind of phase that she’ll grow out of. Maybe it’s a puberty thing. The idea doesn’t seem that far-fetched. She’s almost too afraid to look it up, as if she knows she won’t like the answer, so she doesn’t. It’s just a puberty thing , she tells herself over and over again.

But then she turns sixteen and is still sleepwalking, even more frequently than before.

On one night in particular, no one hears her get out of bed and move through the house. No one hears the front door open or close, and Emily manages to walk half a mile before she collapses in the yard of one of her mother’s colleagues.

Really, she’s relieved that it isn’t a stranger’s house, but her mother has other opinions.

“What were you thinking ? Sneaking out in your pajamas like that, without so much as a pair of house shoes on your feet. Imagine what the neighborhood thinks!” Elizabeth Prentiss exclaims, while her daughter just tries to shrink further into the couch and disappear. How is she supposed to explain this? “I ought to have you take a drug test.”

“What? Mom, no. That won’t be necessary.”

The Ambassador squares her already perfectly squared shoulders with a disdainful hum. “If you can give me a reasonable explanation for how you managed to fall asleep on the Bertelli’s front lawn in sleepwear in the middle of the night other than drugs, then I will reconsider the test.”

Emily can’t help but groan. There’s no way out of this one without the truth, as there isn’t any other feasible excuse in sight, so she hopes for the best, as ridiculous as the reason sounds, when the words finally leave her mouth. “I was sleepwalking.”

If she expected any visible reaction from her mother, it would have been a small tut and wave of her hand, but when she sees the woman’s eyes widen and her jaw shift almost imperceptibly, Emily isn’t sure what to make of it. When the woman says nothing, Emily decides to offer a follow-up explanation.

“It’s been happening for several years now. Since I was thirteen. Do you remember that time you stopped me in the front yard?” She waits for a nod from the Ambassador but receives nothing short of the woman wiping her previous expression clean in exchange for one even more blank. “I was asleep then, too. I didn’t say anything when you woke me up, just in case it was a one time thing.”

There’s another long silence before her mother speaks again. “Three years?” Emily nods. “And how many times has this happened?”

Emily blows out a single breath as she looks past her mother, preparing to give the woman an answer she won’t like. “Too many? Honestly, I don’t know. It’s gets more frequent every year.” She stops talking before telling her mother how many times she’d barricaded her own door after waking up at various exits to the house. The woman already looks rattled, and Emily isn’t interested in making it worse. It’s bad enough to think she could sleepwalk herself into traffic or end up miles from home. The disappointment of a mother is just one more misfortune (and one she happens to be used to).

“You’ll grow out of it,” the Ambassador says, like Emily hadn’t already considered the idea. She starts to shake her head, but catches the motion, albeit too late. “What? You don’t think you will?” her mother challenges. “You’re still a teenager, Emily. It’s not too late to fix this.”

“You can try ,” Emily mumbles, knowing full well that she already has.

She’s given up on the door barricades due to window scares—especially after she realized window barricades are never efficient enough. It’s only a week after waking up in the Bertelli’s yard that Emily wakes up in the grass again, this time in her own backyard and significantly more uncomfortable. As it turns out, whatever this sleepwalking problem is, it’s enough to have her climb from her bedroom window and fall right over the overhang and into the backyard.

Given the circumstances, she’s incredibly lucky. It‘s a twelve foot drop from her window, but the landing is on soft earth rather than pavement. She’s asleep when it occurs, which leaves her landing safely on her side rather than swaying her center of gravity through consciousness and hitting the ground head first. It only warrants a trip to the ER, which leads to a check-up, and Emily is walking out of there with nothing more than a fractured shoulder and a small concussion.

It’s fine . She is fine. But unfortunately, her mother is not. She moves Emily to a room on the first floor with an adjoined bathroom and takes more precautions on locking up the windows, hoping it won’t come to Emily breaking through the glass.

It doesn’t, fortunately, and it’s another couple of years before the brunette manages to walk any further than her bedroom.

By the time she graduates high school and sets off to college, Elizabeth Prentiss has convinced herself that Emily has, in fact, grown out of her sleepwalking habit, and isn’t worried about what will happen if it’s to resurface at university, not that she believes it will.

For her part, Emily hadn’t been worried either. She’d been taking a sleeping pill that knocked her out hard enough that she wouldn’t so much as budge in bed, much less walk anywhere, but it only takes a few weeks in her new dorm with her new curriculum to realize she can’t rely on a sleeping pill. She simply has too much work to do and can’t afford to be asleep for a full eight hours every night. Not to mention, she usually falls asleep at her desk in the middle of studying.

The first few times that happens at college, she wakes up in the same place she fell asleep, left to wipe the drool from her mouth and hope she didn’t get any saliva on her notes from class. Even if she had, it’s certainly a better alternative than sleepwalking across campus. However, she knows it’s only a matter of time before that particular event occurs.

Two days later, in fact.

Since she has a roommate, barricading herself behind a sealed door is no longer an option, and she’s frustrated at her mother’s obstinate belief that being at college would stop the sleepwalking once and for all. ( “Don’t be ridiculous, Emily. You can have a roommate just like all the other students. It’s time you grew out of that sleepwalking nonsense, anyway.” ) There isn’t much room for argument, especially when the tuition not covered by her scholarships is her mother’s money.

In the end, inevitably , Emily sleepwalks herself from her dorm room, out of the building, and she ends up breaking her sleepwalking record before collapsing in a drugstore parking lot where she’s found the next morning at eight on a Saturday by a confused employee and taken to the nearest hospital.

She wakes up feeling more refreshed than she has since starting her degree program, but the feeling quickly subsides when she hears her mother’s voice enter the room, fussing about sleepwalking solutions. Needless to say, she pretends to be asleep until the nurse’s departure when the room is coated with silence.

Her eyes open and almost immediately meet her mother’s, sitting in the only chair in the room with a concentrated look on her face. “How far did I go?” she asks, knowing she doesn’t need to explain what happened to her mother.

“Further than before,” the woman stiffly responds before waving her hand. “It doesn’t matter.” Emily opens her mouth to protest, but before she can get a word in, her mother speaks instead. “What happened to those pills you were taking.”

Emily groans to herself. “When I take them, I’m out for at least eight hours, sleeping like the dead. With all the work I have to do, I haven’t been able to afford taking them.”

The Ambassador hums. “You’d think you wouldn’t make it quite so far whilst sleep deprived.”

Emily tries not to roll her eyes. “How far?” she asks again.

There’s a long pause before her mother finally admits the distance, likely knowing that her daughter would find out regardless. “Three quarters of a mile.” Emily gapes in utter disbelief. She tries to sputter an answer, but she’s too surprised to say anything. “I know,” her mother tuts, “this is getting out of control. You’ll need to talk to your roommate, as well as find a solution as long as this ridiculous habit continues.”

“What if it never stops?” Emily asks before she can stop herself. “If I were to grow out of it as you’ve said before, don’t you think that would have already happened?”

There’s a silence where Emily almost regrets challenging her mother on the issue, but really, this is her issue to be dealing with, after all. She’s the one who’s sleepwalking herself into harm's way, and she’s the one that suffers if she can’t find a solution. But Elizabeth Prentiss doesn’t seem to be thinking of that as she adjusts slightly in her seat before finally standing and walking to the door, turning back one more time before her exit. “Talk to your roommate, Emily, so this doesn’t happen again. The hospital should discharge you soon.”

The college student huffs out a breath of air after her mother’s departure. Needless to say, she’s frustrated by the whole sleepwalking situation, and her mother’s stance on the issue isn’t helping. A part of her wants to ignore her mother’s advice entirely, but there might be something in talking to her roommate. Not so the other girl could lock her up, but just so she’s aware .

It’s the first thing she does when she leaves the hospital and arrives at her dorm, relieved when her roommate is in their shared room. “Hey, Kim,” she starts, perching herself on her unmade bed until the other girl turns from her desk to face her. “I just thought you should know”—she takes a deep breath—“I sleepwalk.” The room is silent for a second too long, prompting Emily to keep talking. “It’s not that big of a deal, but it’s been happening frequently since I came of age…including last night. It seems like the kind of thing you should know about.”

There’s another pause before Kim finally reacts—and clearly responses to her sleepwalking habit never cease to surprise her—because her roommate squeals as she jumps up from her desk to sit on her own bed directly across from Emily, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and her head on her hands like she’s about to partake in the best gossip of the semester. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah?” Emily responds, thrown by the turn in the conversation.

“I can’t believe you’re a fatumsomnambulant!”

A beat passes before Emily deadpans, “A what?”

Kim blinks at her, clearly surprised her roommate had never heard the term before. “Fatumsomnambulism?” she says, as if changing the suffix would make a difference, but Emily just stares at her, lost as ever. “You’ve really never heard this before, have you?” Kim laughs.

“Clearly not…” Emily mumbles. However, she can identify the root words and their derivations well enough, and she’s not so sure she likes where this conversation is headed.

“Okay, well, fatumsomnambulism is soulmate sleepwalking. It generally starts around puberty and doesn’t stop until you’re joined with your soulmate, usually in an act of intimacy or something.” Emily can’t help but laugh. “It’s rare though, and there’s not much concrete research on it yet. Most of the population isn’t affected. It’s something like 3%? I’ve never met anyone who has it though.”

“Yeeeah,” Emily starts with a slight grimace, “I think it’s just called somnambulism, hold the fatum. It affects 3.6% of the population, and it isn’t connected to other people.” Her roommate’s face falls, and Emily can’t help but feel like a downer. She gives a small smile with her next words, hoping to let the other girl down easy. “There’s no such thing as soulmates.”

The downcast look on the other girl’s face is replaced by one of more friendly determination. “And how would you know?”

Emily’s response is a single laugh before, “Are you serious?” Her roommate gives her a pointed look that tells her she is. “I know they’re not real the same way I know Santa Claus isn’t real. Or ghosts. The same way I know that astrology is just an entertainment source rather than something that holds any truth. Soulmates aren’t real, especially not in accordance with sleepwalking .” She gives a shrug that is half humored and half apologetic, but it doesn’t seem to faze her roommate.

“Have you ever done research on sleepwalking?”

At the question, Emily falters a bit. She usually was the first to turn to research for answers, but something about her sleepwalking habits made her nervous to look too far into it. For one, she didn’t want to come across any disturbing stories from other sleepwalkers. (Her mother had told her one day about homicidal sleepwalking, a woman who fell off a bridge while sleepwalking, and a man who tried to drive his car while asleep and crashed into a tree. It reinforced her hesitation into turning to the internet for help.) And two, looking into it would make the issue real. Only a handful of people knew the truth about her somnambulism, and anyone who wanted to find out about it would have to do some deep digging. There wouldn’t be any records of it in her search history or journals, and Emily intended to keep it that way. “Sure,” she ends up answering. “A few times. How else would I know the statistics?” She gives a nervous laugh—her mother had told her those, too.

“You could have heard that anywhere,” Kim points out. “But c’mon, Em. You can’t lie about that. Fatumsomnambulism is one of the first things you’ll find when you look up sleepwalking. It has its own category in the library, and if you type sleepwalking into any search engine, there’s soulmate talk left and right, mostly theories but still . If you’ve ever researched sleepwalking online or in a book published in this century, you’ve heard about fatumsomnambulism.”

Emily falls quiet after that, thoughts circling in her mind. She didn’t believe in this soulmate nonsense for one minute, but she can’t help but wonder if her mother’s reaction to the recurring problem was because she knew about fatumsomnambulism. The Ambassador would be just as irritated at the possibility that something so utterly ridiculous had started to prove itself before her very eyes. Maybe that’s why she’s always been so adamant about Emily growing out of it, and why she never wanted to tell anyone or seek help.

But she could have at least said something.

“Okay, so maybe I haven’t heard of it,” Emily continues in a soft voice. “But that doesn’t mean I’ll believe it.”

Kim rolls her eyes. “ Look . You said this started when you were thirteen?” Emily nods. “And it happens frequently enough to be an active concern for you?”

“I’m not concerned so much with the frequency so much as what I do when I’m asleep. I’ve fallen out a second floor window before and last night I walked three quarters of a mile from campus. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve woken up at my bedroom door, barricaded in, as long as I haven’t done anything reckless in the times I’ve gone further.”

“You almost walked a mile?” Her roommate asks her, clearly impressed.

“Yeah, I’m lucky nothing bad happened to me. I only have a few scrapes and bruises, probably from the parking lot collapse.”

“What’s the farthest you went before that?”

Emily shrugs. “A few houses down. Maybe two hundred meters?”

The brunette can’t imagine why, but her roommate perks up in excitement at that information. “Where did you live then? You were in Europe, right?”

“Yeah… I hadn’t been to the US since I was younger.”

“Before thirteen? Before you started sleepwalking?”

Emily nods, the same unease she felt at hearing the word fatumsomnambulism coming back to her. “Why?”

“You must be walking further now because you’re physically closer to your soulmate!” Kim practically squeals. “There’s a whole theory about it, where your unconscious mind can tell how far away you are and how realistically you could reach them. Your soulmate must live in the states! Maybe even in ours,” she says, wiggling her eyebrows.

“Yeah, sure,” Emily says with a laugh before she changes the subject. No reason to dwell on something that is clearly a myth.

The only problem is that she can’t seem to stop thinking about it.

The entire next week, she buckles down on studying so that she can take her sleeping pill every night—because she has a feeling Kim would encourage and track her sleepwalking rather than help stop her—but in all the moments she isn’t doing her schoolwork, her mind drifts back to Kim’s words about fatumsomnambulism.

It is a little suspicious, after all, that Emily would suddenly walk seven times further than she ever had before after being back in the United States. Almost as if there was some kind of force outside of her control.

But how could that be true? She sleepwalked no matter where she lived, and it wasn’t like she would have swam across the Atlantic in her sleep. It makes more sense to blame her recent sleepwalking record on something like stress, which she had significantly more of since starting college. The coursework is heavier, she has to readjust to a new environment, and she panics about sleeping, namely because she doesn’t want to wake up miles away from campus behind a gas station or, like that poor woman, end up going off a bridge in her sleep, but also because she doesn’t want anyone finding out about it.

The sleeping pills prove effective once again (much to Kim’s disappointment) and Emily doesn’t leave her bed unless she’s actually awake. Keeping up the habit of taking the medication nightly and making sure she has all her coursework completed so she won’t fall behind (while her classmates pull regular all-nighters) is draining, but since she’s getting proper sleep at night, it seems to be working itself out.

Three years pass before another incident occurs.

Emily’s excited about the class trip to Pittsburgh, at least until she realizes that she forgot her sleeping pills.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

What are the chances you’d ever meet someone like that? he wondered. Someone you could love forever, someone who would forever love you back? And what did you do when that person was born half a world away? The math seemed impossible. – Rainbow Rowell

Jennifer Jareau believes herself to be ordinary. She loves playing soccer, hanging out with her friends, and other completely normal teenage activities.

Which is why when the sleepwalking starts, she does everything she can not to tell anyone about it.

It’s a little difficult not to, considering she lives in a small town, and if anyone is to see her wandering around late at night, her mom would find out before she did, but over the past couple of years, she’s found ways to play it safe. She always has alarms set to wake her up before anyone else in town, just in case she’s wandered off in the middle of the night again , so she could get home, clean herself up, and be back in bed before her mom comes to wake her up for school.

The only person who’s ever known about the sleepwalking and understood what was really happening, was her older sister, Rosaline, who had been the one to catch her the first couple of times it had happened, before she’d managed to walk out of the house.

It wasn’t until the third time that Rosaline stopped her and sat her down with an explanation, the only conversation the two of them would ever have about it. Rosaline grinned down at her baby sister, only eleven at the time, and had told her about soulmates . That only a small number of people had the condition known as fatumsomnambulism, and while it was dangerous (for obvious reasons), it was a gift above all else. She told JJ to be safe, and that she hoped her soulmate was everything JJ needed in a partner, no matter who they were.

The words stick with JJ over the years, and every time she wakes up in a parking lot, in someone’s bushes, and eventually, all the way across town, she thinks of her sister’s words and smiles up to the sky as she starts the trek home, wondering if Rosaline is up there somewhere looking out for her.

Seven years pass in which JJ has managed to keep quiet about her sleepwalking tendencies. Deep down, she knows it’s only a matter of time before someone finds out, but she doesn’t know what she would say when confronted about it. It was almost inevitable that her parents and brothers would find out eventually ; it’s just that she had never expected the subject to come up the way it did.

Before now, the furthest she’d walked was a mile, going right over the Rachel Carson bridge and into downtown Pittsburgh. She was only thirteen at the time, and it had scared her to pieces. Waking up behind a building on the streets of Pittsburgh had been loud and disorienting, not to mention, she’d walked herself across a bridge and through the night life of Pittsburgh on a Friday night.

All in all, she was lucky, and she did what she could for the next few years to stop herself from going too far, or leaving the house at all. It was frustrating, and it meant she never got adequate rest, but setting alarm clocks on her watch throughout the night was the best way to catch herself in the act, especially once she found out that locking her door wasn’t enough. She’d even gone so far as to scale out her bedroom window one night—fortunately not falling—and had to make up a story about meeting with a friend in the middle of the night, a friend from the soccer team.

But this time .

This time, she walks herself straight into the Allegheny river.

When she wakes up, she’s in a hospital bed. The room around her is abnormally still, silent short of the beeping monitors surrounding her, but not at all empty. Her parents and her brothers all found a place to rest around the room—her mother in the chair beside her, her father and oldest brother, Scott, on the bench by the window, and Tommy leaning up against the wall in the corner.

Wondering what happened, she shifts slightly in the bed, wincing at the movement. She can’t tell exactly what hurts, but nothing feels particularly good. There’s no doubt in her mind this has something to do with her sleepwalking. After all, with seven years of sleep walking under her belt, she can think of countless ways the habit could have backfired.

Except for one aspect of the entire situation:
her family’s reception of the incident.

Sandy Jareau opens her eyes just as JJ glances at her again, and they immediately widen, the woman suddenly alert as her eyes fill with tears when she realizes her daughter is awake. It’s a reaction JJ would have expected, albeit a little intense, and she nervously tries to laugh it off with a half shrug that makes her wince internally, trying not to showcase the amount of pain she’s in more than she has to. “Mom, it’s okay. I’m fine.”

Her mother sobs once, so soft it’s almost inaudible, and reaches to rest her hand against JJ’s face. “Baby,” she starts, swallowing back her sadness in preparation for what seems to be a very serious conversation. “You could have talked to us about this, you know.”

JJ releases a heavy sigh as she leans back into the hospital bed. “I know,” she softly admits. “I just… I was never sure how to. None of you would have understood, and even if the precautions you would have taken might have made the past several years safer for me, I just couldn’t bear the thought of that kind of restriction. I didn’t think it would get this bad.”

“I don’t think anyone does,” her mother says, her voice cracking just slightly, the regret drawn clearly across her face. “You’d think I would have seen the warning signs this time.”
She shakes her head, resting it in her hand for a long moment, and JJ’s brows furrow for a short second before her mother looks back up at her. “From now on, do you think you can be more open with us about this? You know we aren’t going to judge you, but the last thing we want is for something like this to happen again.” All JJ can do is nod, speechless at the intensity of the conversation. “Have you ever talked to anyone about this?”

“Only Ros—when all of this started.”

At the mention of her late daughter, Sandy chokes on another quiet sob, her hand coming to cover her mouth before she tries to speak again, “You talked to— This has been going on since before— Seven years? ” JJ nods again as she tries to figure out why her mother finds her sleepwalking habit so upsetting. “What did—” (the woman takes a deep breath) ”—Rosaline tell you?”

JJ swallows as the words come to her like she had just heard them yesterday: the excitement in her older sister’s eyes when she talked about soulmates, the cautions about sleepwalking, but most importantly—”She wanted me to be safe and happy.” This time, JJ sees it coming when her mother bursts into tears, and she finds herself tearing up, as well, as she continues. “She told me the condition is rare and has its dangers, but it makes me special, and it will eventually lead me to someone else who’s special, too. Someone I was born to meet.”

Somewhere in JJ’s recount of her conversation with Rosaline, her mother stops crying, and instead looks more alarmed than anything. The teenager frowns in the silence that follows, not sure which part of what she said caused such an odd reaction. The woman swallows hard, taking her daughter’s hands in hers before she says, “Jennifer, sweetie, listen to me. Taking yourself out of this world—” she closes her eyes and takes another deep breath before trying again. “I can’t lose you, too.” Her voice cracks at the end of her admission, and she bows her head down to rest on their joined hands, sobbing gently.

“What?” JJ is more confused than ever as she watches her mother fall apart in front of her, the words she’d just spoken echoing through her mind. Clearly, they aren’t on the same page, but could she really be talking about JJ taking her own life? Her mother looks back up at her, her expression shifting under JJ’s confusion. “Wait, you thought I was trying to—” The blonde stops, unable to say the words out loud, still trying to wrap her mind around such a large miscommunication. “Mom, I could never—”

“You jumped off a bridge in the middle of the night, Jennifer. It was a forty foot drop. What were we supposed to think?” Sandy interjects, slightly relieved but still visibly unnerved. JJ’s eyes widen in more surprise at the information her mother just shared with her. Why had no one told her that’s what had happened? She knew it must have been bad, but jumping off a bridge ? She would have never expected something so extreme.

“I jumped off a bridge?” She asks, her voice barely above a whisper.

This time it’s her mother’s turn to be confused. “You don’t remember? The doctor didn’t mention anything about amnesia…”

“Mom, no. I don’t have amnesia. I don’t remember because—” she hesitates before the confession, suddenly nervous, despite having just recounted her conversation with Rosaline about fatumsomnamulism. Not to mention it was easier when she thought her mother already knew what she was dealing with. The woman gives her a gentle and encouraging smile, and it prompts the words to finally leave JJ’s mouth. “I was sleepwalking.”

“Sleepwalking?”

JJ nods. “Yeah. It’s been happening for years now, since I was eleven. It wasn’t very frequent at first, just a few times a month, but it got worse shortly after I turned thirteen.” She starts to tell her mother about the frequency it happens now (on average, twice a week), the distance she usually walks (“not that far, Mom; don’t worry”), and her methods for keeping it under wraps or making sure she doesn’t freeze to death on the nights when it’s cold outside.

The rest of her family had woken up somewhere in the middle, their eyes full of the same heavy emotion her mother had before the situation had been clarified. Sandy clears the air with a simple, “It wasn’t what we thought,” and JJ watches everyone slip back into their normal selves as the tension leaves the room. Tommy makes a comment about being hungry and Scott lightly pushes him over with his foot.

“You’re always hungry,” he laughs. “Come on, let’s go find some food.” As they disappear, JJ gets her dad up to speed on the situation, wondering how he in particular would take the news. He’d always been such a dad when it came to his little girl going out with friends and talking to boys, and now, here she was about to tell them that she has a soulmate .

It isn’t until she mentions fatumsomnambulism by name that she considers her parents opinions on the topic. She’s heard it come up a few times among some, but the reviews are always mixed. People either believe it, or they don’t. JJ always had, because what other reason could there be for her unconscious mind to put herself at so much risk?

“Fatumsomnambulism, huh?” her father says with a throaty chuckle that lets JJ know that everything’s going to be okay.

“Oh, honey. You could have told us, you know.”

The teenager shrugs, “I just didn’t know if you believed in that stuff. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything.”

“Don’t be sorry, Jenny. We’re just glad you’re okay.”

“And now that we do know, we can make sure that incidents like this don’t happen again. I’m sure we can find some good resources online. Have you looked for any?”

“Not really,” JJ admits. She’d done a few searches, but most of what she found were either from skeptics or were horror stories of sleepwalking accidents. Incidentally enough, there had been one about someone walking off a bridge.

“Well then, we’ll just have to help you find some, hm?” her father reassures her with a grin before he goes off to join his sons in search of bad hospital food.

“I’m glad you told us. Even if it is seven years late,” her mother says, with a smile that wrinkles the corners of her eyes before she stands, her hands resting on her thighs in a way that indicates she’s looking for a way to make herself useful. “Do you need anything? Food? Water?”

“Sure,” JJ simply answers as she watches her mother retreat.

She’s incredibly lucky. To have such a wonderful family, to have such supportive parents, and of course, to have survived the bridge incident. She still can’t wrap her mind around it, especially when her mother told her it was the Rachel Carson bridge—the same one she’d walked across only a few short years ago. Why didn’t she do the same this time? Why jump off?

All JJ can think is that it has to do with her soulmate’s location, but what kind of coordinates would it take to send her over the edge of the bridge instead of just crossing the whole way and continuing west? She has so many questions, but before she can work through them all, there’s a short knock at the door before the doctor pokes his head in. “Miss Jareau?”

“Yes,” she answers, allowing the doctor to enter.

“Dr. Carlson,” he introduces, shaking her hand. “How are you feeling? Your vitals are looking good.”

“Definitely a lot better,” she tells him. “My headache is almost gone, and my mom just went for more water and something to eat.”

“Good, good,” the doctor smiles. He’s incredibly friendly, which normally wouldn’t phase JJ, but there’s something that makes it seem like a bit much. She can’t quite place it until he takes the seat next to her and says, “I would recommend setting up an appointment with a psychiatrist. I have a list of referrals, and if you would like, we can go ahead and do that right now, or—”

“Dr. Carlson,” JJ starts, cutting him off. She doesn’t like to interrupt, but she can already tell that this is the kind of conversation she doesn’t need to let go on any longer than it has to. He must be thinking the same thing her parents had. “I understand what the situation looks like, but I didn’t jump off that bridge on purpose. I was sleepwalking,” she tells him, confidently enough that he knows she’s telling the truth.

She expects him to be shocked, or maybe even a little confused, but instead he nods, accepting her answer at face value. “Do you sleepwalk often?” JJ nods silently, not wanting to talk specifics with the doctor. A number of the skeptics she’d heard had been in the medical field. A beat of silence passes while the doctor scribbles notes onto the chart. “Sleepwalking,” he chuckles. “It’s funny. The other girl said the same thing.”

“The other girl?” JJ asks as she perks up in the bed.

“Yep,” he confirms, “You weren’t the only one going for a sleep swim in the Allegheny last night. Only difference is that she went over the Roberto Clemente bridge and had been walking from downtown Pittsburgh. Almost like you two were trying to meet in the middle,” he jokes as he skims over her chart.

“Is she okay?” JJ asks, bypassing the doctor’s final comment. That’s something she can’t think about right now.

“She will be. She’s been in and out of consciousness since we got her here—shortly after you were brought in, actually. Her injuries are a little more considerable, so she’s on a lot of medication. Not to worry though. You were both very lucky.” He smiles at her before his eyes fall back on his clipboard, oblivious to the thoughts running through JJ’s mind about the odds of someone else sleepwalking themselves into the river—coming from the direction she seemed to be headed no less.

“Well, Miss Jareau, it looks like you’re cleared to go home, but our recommendation is that you stay in our care for one more night. We don’t want you sleepwalking anywhere dangerous while you’re still in recovery.” She laughs with him, trying to immerse herself more in the conversation, just to get out of her head.

JJ ends up agreeing to stay one more night in the hospital, even now that she knows her family will have her back when it comes to her sleepwalking. She isn’t sure if her agreement to the situation has more to do with giving her family time to prepare for dealing with it or because she knows there are more hospital staff than there are members of her family to catch her before she goes anywhere. Not to mention, her curiosity about the other sleepwalker.

She doesn’t know anything about her other than what the doctor had said—that she also sleepwalked off the bridge last night and that she was a she . It’s something JJ never thought to consider about her soulmate. To her, she always knew that whoever her soulmate was, regardless of gender, she would like them. With fatumsomnambulism being as rare as it is, how could she not? Would the universe pair two incompatible people together—have them walk off bridges and travel for miles only to match up and not get along? And certainly, sexuality would have to play a role in this cosmic matchmaking, and if her soulmate happens to be a woman…well. It’s a good thing JJ is into women.

When the nurses wake her up in the middle of the night, just outside the door of another patient, there are two things she knows for certain.

The first is that her soulmate is a woman.

The second is that she’s on the other side of that hospital door.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Our lives may not have fit together, but oh, did our souls know how to dance… – K. Towne Jr.

“I can’t believe you jumped off a bridge,” Kim laughs as Emily finally trudges into their apartment after the longest week of her life. She feels like she’s been to hell and back (maybe even literally considering she was in cardiac arrest in the ambulance). Overall, the Pittsburgh trip had been great, up until she woke up in a hospital bed, more than a little disoriented, and told she went for a midnight sleepswim.

“Yeah, yeah,” Emily laughs. “Get it out now, while you still can.”

“James already told me you were too weak to throw a half-assed punch, but nice try with the threat, Prentiss.”

Emily rolls her eyes as she drops her bags and crashes onto the couch. “Whatever. Make fun of me all you want, but I definitely died for a second there and still managed to survive a forty-foot drop into some random Pennsylvania river.”

“Yeah, you know that isn’t what I care about, right?”

“Thanks, Kim,” Emily responds, sarcasm dripping from her voice but the smile still on her lips. “Good to know you care.”

“No, no,” Kim says. “You don’t understand.”

“Then enlighten me.”

If she were being completely honest, Emily should have known where this conversation was going—she knew her roommate after all—but even if she’d anticipated it, she wouldn’t have been able to hide the surprise she felt stirring within her. “Sleepwalking, right?” Emily nods. “Yeah. So, you weren’t the only one that sleep-jumped into the river that night.”

The words ‘ the silence is deafening ’ had never meant anything to Emily until this exact moment when she could almost feel the silence coiling around her. The only thing that didn’t fit the expression was the clear sound of the air conditioning in the background, but otherwise, she felt compressed by the lack of words leaving her mouth. Until— “What?”

“You haven’t seen the news?” Kim asks, and Emily shakes her head, at a loss for words. She doesn’t even know what she would say if her mouth allowed. “It’s basically on every channel. They haven’t said either of your names, but still .”

“What?”

“ Both of you jumped into the river at almost the exact same time. It was from different bridges, but the direction you jumped off was like you were headed toward each other. The news is talking about the story as proof of fatumsomnamulism.”

Emily shakes her head, but she can’t stop the nervous laughter that bubbles up from her throat. “That’s ridiculous. It’s just—” Kim gives her a pointed look that clearly says don’t-say-it-you- know -this-isn’t-a-coincidence , and it effectively renders Emily silent mid-sentence. She waits for the look to subside before she says, “Come on, Kim. You know I don’t believe in that stuff. Is it weird that we both sleepwalked into the same river? Yes. Does that mean she and I are soulmates? No way.”

It’s a slip she regrets as soon as she says it, and even more when she sees Kim’s face light up, the confirmation that her roommate didn’t miss it. “I never said they were a girl.”

“What?” Emily asks, playing dumb.

“You said she .”

“No I didn’t. When did I say that?”

“Literally just now! Seriously, Em, you can’t tell me you don’t believe in this stuff at all. Why else would you have said she .”

Really, she doesn’t have an answer. She shrugs, feeling too on the spot to talk about this and shakes her head again and throws her arm over her eyes. “You don’t have to grill me about it. I could have died, you know. Long term ,” she points out.

Kim just gives her a playful scoff. “Alright, but whenever you want to talk about it, you know where to find me.”

Emily keeps her eyes covered while she listens to her roommate retreat, and she doesn’t move until she hears her door close. It’s with a heavy sigh that she brings her arm back down and tries to sink further into the couch. Ever since the subject came up almost four years ago, she’d managed to lock it away in her mind, only ever laughing about it when Kim would mention it. Emily had never found reason to dwell on it or even consider it , and she still never met anyone else with the same problem that she had. All the more reason to pretend like it didn’t exist.

But now, she couldn’t help but wonder. What are the odds? Was the other girl— person , she corrects groaning internally once again—really sleepwalking?

It’s how she ends up in front of her computer, trying to find information about what happened in Pittsburgh only a few nights ago. Sleepwalkers go off bridge… Proof of fatumsomnabulism?… Identities to remain anonymous …

Most resources she finds recycle the same phrases, but they all have the same details, about which bridges they went over, which directions they jumped—as if they were headed toward each other—and that they had ended up in the same hospital. Emily notes the consistent use of they in the article, for both her and the other person, and the avoidance of gendered terminology. Though honestly, the deliberation is enough for Emily to confirm the other jumper was a woman. If the other jumper was a man, no one in this heteronormative society would blink before mentioning that, especially since the news was spreading nationally.

This is what people want to read, Emily thinks as she rolls her eyes and continues to look through all the details she can find. There doesn’t seem to be anything new in any of the articles she finds, except for one that mentions the other jumper’s familial support at the hospital. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that she must be local, and possibly younger.

It gets Emily thinking about the other girl, wondering if she’s still living with her parents. Does this mean she’s still in high school? Is it possible she’s younger than that? Or she could be visiting. She could be older than Emily, and maybe lives across the country and had no way of knowing this would happen because Emily happened to be in the area as well.

No. She shakes her head and shuts down her computer, deciding once and for all not to dwell on it anymore.

Fatumsomnambulism is the kind of phenomena with too many factors to be considered a valid source of information:
sexuality, age, and location to name a few. It would be completely illogical to pair two people up only to have them live miles and miles apart, or to have one of them not be into men or women, or however their match identified. When would sleepwalking start anyway? For Emily, her habit began at puberty, but what if someone’s soulmate was significantly younger and the sleepwalker in question woke up on the porch of someone who was only a child at the time? There are too many possibilities, and within that, too many things that could go wrong.

She dismisses any connection she might have to the other sleepwalker, but she can’t seem to shake the thought entirely.

Not even on graduation day a month later, when she’s surrounded by her classmates, paying full attention to their guest speaker, and the man mentions Pittsburgh and her concentration evaporates, imagining being unconscious in a hospital bed, just down the hall from someone that some people believed to be her potential soulmate. Had she looked for her? Did she do the same research Emily had? Does she still wonder who she is?

No sooner than the thoughts came back, Emily dismisses them again, filing them away in a box in the far back of her mind and hoping they will stay back there. Even if fatumsomnambulism were real, the chances of her finding a specific girl from Pennsylvania, even if she lived there herself, was incredibly rare, if not impossible.

With that in mind, she made the decision to not let her sleepwalking interrupt her life or prevent her from following her career path.

When she starts at Yale and her sleepwalking seems to improve, she catches herself wondering if it’s because she’s further from Pittsburgh. But since she doesn’t know that’s where her fellow sleepwalker is from for sure, she adds that thought to the locked box in her mind, figuring that her lack of sleepwalking has more to do with her growing older and having a better handle on things. After all, she’s been dealing with this habit for nearly ten years now. It’s about time she knew how to gain control over it.

She’s noticed that her stress levels might have something to do with it, at least some of the time. She’s more likely to sleepwalk when she has a project or an exam, and if she falls asleep in a strange place, like the library or with someone she’s hooked up with, she’s more likely to wander off in her sleep, although it isn’t usually as far these days.

A few of her relationships end prematurely because she keeps walking herself to the couch, only to be woken up by her girlfriend at the time, demanding an explanation Emily usually doesn’t want to provide. To the few she tells about the sleepwalking, in the hopes that they’ll know this decision to leave bed isn’t conscious , they end up dumping her anyway, not wanting to be with someone who the universe has already destined to belong to another.

It’s annoying . Especially since she doesn’t agree with them, but it isn’t her place to argue, as she found out the hard way. Ever since Jess had tore her apart for dismissing someone Emily didn’t believe she had any actual connection to, she’s gone back to simply not discussing sleepwalking with other people, especially since it seems to become a more popular theory each year. Overall, it works out for her, since she doesn’t have much time for dating anyway.

Her time at Yale flies by, and before she knows it, she’s training for, and ultimately working for, Interpol. No one asks her about sleepwalking—that’s a question that comes up in later years—and even if they had, she doesn’t worry as much about it. Working in France, she sleepwalks significantly less than she had in the States, and even less than she had as a child. Maybe she really was growing out of it—almost fifteen years later, but that’s better than nothing.

She said she wouldn’t let it hold her back, and she keeps that promise to herself.

It’s been five years since the last time she sleepwalked when she joins the JFT-12 team and goes undercover to bring down international terrorist, Ian Doyle. Since her last sleepwalking incident had been so long ago, she decides not to disclose the information, finding it better to remain silent rather than jeopardize her position on the team. Besides, she hardly thinks about her past habit anymore, referring to it as exactly that, a past habit.

She’s been Lauren Reynolds for almost a year when it comes up again, but not in the way she’s expecting.

One Saturday morning, she wakes up early to make breakfast for Declan (chocolate chip pancakes), and she ruffles his hair as he beams up at her when she sets the plate in front of him. Louise has already started doing dishes in the kitchen, but Emily stops her. “Non. Laisse moi,” she says with a gentle smile, taking the sponge and the spatula out of her hands. “There’s enough for both of you,” she tells Louise with a nod toward the stack of pancakes. “Go eat with him.”

She’s still cleaning up when Doyle makes his way into the kitchen, leaving a quick kiss to her cheek before pouring a cup of coffee and sitting at the kitchen island. This only happens when he has something serious to talk about, so she internally braces herself for whatever he has to say, remaining outwardly unphased. She almost slips up by dropping the pan into soapy water when he says, “You sleepwalk sometimes. Did you know that?”

The moment after feels like it drags on for entire minutes. She remembers every morning she’s spent undercover, and she absolutely knows that she’s never woken up anywhere other than where she’s fallen asleep, in this case, next to him . She puts on her most innocent expression as she turns off the water, drying off the now clean pan as she turns to face him. “I do?”

He nods. The smile on his face reads as genuine, so she allows herself to relax. She’s sure that whatever she’s been getting up to in her sleep, she can rationalize to him. “Sometimes you just sit up in the middle of the night, and sometimes you stand up and walk to the door like you’re going to leave, but you always come back.” She swallows hard, but smiles at him to hide the way her mind has started racing during this conversation. Now is not the time for that locked box of thoughts to break open. “It took me a few times to realize you were asleep, but I finally figured it out last week. You did it again last night, but I wasn’t sure if you realized.”

Emily tries to recall any clues to whether or not Doyle believes in this fatumsomnambulism stuff. She wouldn’t think so, but since people never cease to surprise her, she’d rather be safe than sorry. Unfortunately, he’s never given any indication of the sort, so she gives a small shrug, taking no risks. “It’s happened a few times before that I remember, but nothing serious.”

“Well,” he starts, as he walks back around to stand in front of her, an unnatural grin on his face. She smiles back as if it’s the easiest thing in the world. “You never leave the house, so I guess you found me.”

She doesn’t need to ask to know he’s talking about soulmates, but she also doesn’t need to ask if he’s ever sleepwalked. She already knows the answer to that, and in the end, it just begs more questions she doesn’t have answers to. Is she returning to bed with Doyle because it’s her job and she’s finally learned to control her somnambulism? Why would she get up at all unless her body is telling her that she’s lying next to the wrong person?

With her past relationships, waking up on the couch, she had always been emotionally invested to some degree, and she had never ended up next to them in bed. But with Doyle, nothing is real. Her time with everyone else had more to do with chemistry than any moment with this man, which only makes her more curious about the science behind soulmates.

Of course, it’ll have to wait.

“That must be it,” she tells him, doing her best to be the Lauren Reynolds that Doyle believes has found her soulmate, rather than the Emily Prentiss who doubts she ever will.

Her focus doubles after that incident, and as long as she continues to wake up where she’s supposed to, she doesn’t spare any thoughts for sleepwalking, soulmates, or the mystery girl from Pennsylvania from all those years ago. It’s been almost ten years since that happened, and she still finds herself thinking about it from time to time when anyone mentions soulmates or sleepwalking.

Declan asks her about it a couple of months later, after an incident where she’d walked herself downstairs before turning around. She would have never known if he hadn’t been looking at her that way he always does when he’s trying to figure something out. “Whatcha thinking about, buddy?” she asks him the following morning, hoping it’s nothing serious about his dad.

“Is it true?” he finally asks with a mouthful of cereal, milk dribbling down his chin.

She chuckles as she takes a napkin and wipes it off. “Is what true?”

“The stories Louise tells me. About people sleepwalking to their true love.”

True love . Emily’s so accustomed to hearing the word soulmate that this one throws her for a loop. Soulmate is typically synonymous with true love , or at least it’s close enough to be, but she’d never thought about it the way Declan does in his innocent mind. There’s something magical in the way children see the world, but all Emily can do is panic, especially when he says. “ You were sleepwalking. I tried talking to you but you didn’t wake up.”

Her eyes are wide with surprise as she laughs, but if anything is wrong in her reaction, Declan doesn’t sense it. He just continues to eat his cereal as he awaits an explanation. “I don’t know,” she tells him. “What do you think? Is it true?”

He squints as he considers his answer. There are a million ways this conversation could go wrong. It’s one thing to have Doyle believe she and him are soulmates. When all is said and done and the mission is complete, if he feels betrayed, she doesn’t care. But Declan is innocent in all of this, and right now she’s someone who’s influencing his life, whether she’s Emily or Lauren. It’s safest to let him lead the conversation and to make up answers as she goes along, keeping everything open. It could easily be explained to Doyle as something she wasn’t sure how he wanted to address with his son , and she would be blameless. Unfortunately, Declan doesn’t have a strong opinion about it one way or another, and he pouts at her lack of an answer.

“You’re supposed to know everything ,” he says.

She laughs at that. There is a lot she knows, after all, but not in the way Declan expects from her. “I know it seems that way,” she says, deciding to just be honest, “But I think this is something no one really has the answers for. It might be something you can believe in if you want to, or ignore if you don’t.”

He considers that for a moment before he says, “Do you sleepwalk to Daddy?”

Her breath catches, The answer to that is decidedly no , she doesn’t, but that answer could get her in trouble if Declan ever brings this topic up with his father. Again, she decides to play safe. “You know, I’m not sure. I might just sleepwalk for no reason. I always come back to the place I got up from. Sometimes people walk really far in their sleep, but sometimes they come back. Whatever that means is up to them.”

Declan frowns. “You’re the only one I’ve seen do it. Do you think I will one day?”

“Who knows,” Emily smiles, grateful the conversation’s focus is leaving her. “You’ll just have to wait and see.”

It’s the last soulmate centered conversation she has for a while, since no one else brings it up and she continues to wake up next in Doyle’s bed each morning.

The next time she wakes up anywhere else is when the mission is over, the reports are filed, and she’s back in a place that doesn’t belong to the terrorist. Its recurrence is something she’s expecting. There’s nothing inconsistent anymore about waking up in mysterious places, and none of her team has any suspicions or questions about somnambulism (or fatumsomnamulism for that matter), so she locks all thoughts on sleepwalking away once again.

Even if she were to think about it, she’s too distracted by her next mission, keeping Declan and Louise safe, to even think about anything else. She orchestrates their ‘murders’ and acquires their fake identities while resuming her real one. It’s a relief when she finally sets foot in the states as Emily Prentiss once again.

For now, anyway.

She gets Louise and Declan settled in Reston, Virginia, assuring them that they’re safe, and that if they ever aren’t, Emily will be there to protect them. Her plan is to stay with them for as long as she can, as long as she can find work. Interpol is out of the question but so is leaving criminal justice. Fortunately, Quantico is only about an hour away.

Un fortunately, her decision is made for her a few nights later when she falls asleep earlier than usual and wakes up on a Metro on her way into DC. Luckily she wakes in enough time to get off at L’Enfant and head back home before the station closes.

If it were a one time thing, she might try and stick it out, but for the next month, it doesn’t seem to get any better, and with Declan as curious as he is about sleepwalking (not to mention the knowing looks Louise gives her when she walks through the door at odd times in the middle of the night, clearly not dressed for going out), she decides its for the best that she leaves Virginia altogether. Maybe even the entire East Coast.

So she sends her resume out west and accepts a job in Kansas City.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

When deep down in the core of your being you believe that your soulmate exists, there is no limit to the ways he or she can enter your life. – Arielle Ford

If JJ thought for a minute that fatumsomnambulism could have a downside, other than walking off a bridge, she would have been

almost

right.

It never held her back from doing things she wanted to do, such as going to college, attending events and soccer games, or just doing things for fun, and it never caused any inconveniences as long as she stuck to her routines and didn’t give it too much thought. The only problem was the thoughts that had been circulating in her mind since the bridge incident, just before going off to college.

She has a soulmate out there that, by this point, she’s almost positive she’ll never find.

After she’d gone home from the hospital on that fateful night at the Allegheny, the first thing she did was turn to the internet for a name, hoping to find the other woman who had jumped in at the same time as she had. When the search had been fruitless, she’d actually made her way back to the hospital to find out there, but by that point, according to the nurses, the woman (whose name couldn’t be disclosed) had already checked out and went

all the way back home

, which was god only knows how far away.

Her sleepwalking happened a little less frequently after that, as if affirming that her suspicions—that the girl from the bridge was her soulmate and didn’t live nearby—were correct, but it didn’t stop altogether. It became a habit, after sleepwalking, to pull out a map to try and piece together which direction she was headed in, to search for any kind of clue.

The only differences she recognized over the years were small ones, and her routes stayed more or less the same throughout her time at the University of Pittsburgh. It kept her belief in soulmates alive, knowing that she was almost always headed toward the same destination, but once she started grad school, everything changed.

She only sleepwalks a couple of times a month, always heading in different directions like she’s lost, and maybe she is. If her heart no longer knows how to lead her to her soulmate, how will she ever find her? Giving up hope in the idea isn’t an option she wants to consider, and anyway, it isn’t as though she can just

forget

all the years of thoughts she’d had about soulmates and the responses she’s had to her own sleepwalking experiences in the past; however, if her fatumsomnambulism has become more or less stagnant over the years, maybe her own soulmate has also forgotten.

(Unless she lives far away. Could she be overseas? Is there a limit to how far fatumsomnambulism can reach?)

Either way, it’s clear that the chances for their meeting in the middle have dropped, and at this point JJ would be lucky to sleepwalk herself to anyone’s door.

When she’s a senior in grad school, and a certain David Rossi inspires her to join the BAU, she’s already prepared to start her FBI training. For awhile, she’s nervous about how sleepwalking would impact her performance in the FBI, but she can’t even name the last time she sleepwalked outside of her own living room. It happens so infrequently now, JJ hardly thinks about it anymore.

Over the years, JJ has watched fatumsomnambulism become a more popular theory, and it seems to be affecting more people than anyone was aware of. It’s still nowhere near affecting the majority of the population, and JJ still doesn’t know any other fatumsomnambulant’s

personally

; however, she’s overheard people talking about it when she’s out with the team, and they even had a case once where someone had been murdered while sleepwalking and their

soulmate

, who happened to live in the same city, finished the walk to their body and collapsed on top of them.

JJ shuddered when she realized what had happened, but the idea of her soulmate

dying

had never occurred to her. If her sleepwalking stopped forever, would that be the reason why? Or would she always be walking toward the woman’s grave until she knew her name? It’s morbid, but she can’t seem to shake the thought from her mind as she does everything in her power to remember when she’d last sleepwalked, as if it could help her deduce her soulmate’s fate.

In the end, she has no idea one way or another, but she doesn’t have to wait long.

Her sleepwalking starts up again about a year and a half since joining the BAU, and now it isn’t a matter of her waking up on the couch in her living room or curled up by the door. This time, she’s on the DC metro headed for the Wiehle-Reston stop at the end of the silver line.

Fortunately, she awoke in time to get off at Spring Hill and take the next metro in the other direction, but when she gets off to switch tracks, she’s too late to have made the last train and has to take a taxi home.

It takes her far too long and costs her more than she was prepared to spend, but knowing that her soulmate is not only alive but nearby enough to have her on the metro is worth it, especially when her specific route was full of clues. Did her soulmate live in Fairfax? What would her sleepwalking self had done once she’d reached the end of the line?

JJ was so giddy with the idea that they could be within an hour of each other that she doesn’t consider the consequences of this until she has to go into work that morning. She hasn’t slept once she’d returned home, which puts her at only a couple of hours of sleep, just over eight hours ago. Her exhaustion paired with her workload demolishes what’s left of her soulmate high, and eventually she reaches a state of near panic when they take a case in Annapolis that has her wondering if that’s close enough that she’ll sleepwalk out of their hotel and back into Virginia.

It might have happened, too, but since JJ was the only woman on the team at the time (that travelled, anyway), she was able to barricade herself into her single hotel room without raising suspicions or having to answer any questions other than responding to why she was late the next morning, to which she chose the answer “my mom called me just when I was trying to leave” rather than “I had a hard time moving the hotel furniture back into place.”

But as always, life goes on, and they take cases further and further away, which gives JJ peace of mind even though her soulmate could be anywhere, and when they aren’t on a case, she takes better precaution for her sleepwalking, adapting to being a fatumsomnambulant in a big city, as opposed to the tight knit community of East Allegheny. It happens several times a week now, as if all the times before now when she didn’t sleepwalk have been saved up for this particular period of time, urgently trying to lead her to where she needs to go.

It gets to the point where she’s sure she’ll have to tell Hotch about it, since it happens so frequently. Even if she isn’t sleepwalking on cases, she could easily end up in a hard to explain situation, like the bridge from all those years ago or, god forbid, any case like their few sleepwalking unsubs. She could easily

be

that dead body with a random woman sleeping on top of her who immediately becomes a top suspect until they realize what actually happened.

The week before JJ decides to tell Hotch, the sleepwalking seems to stop again.

She doesn’t go anywhere in her sleep for nine days, and while she’s relieved she doesn’t have to open up to the team, she’s disappointed that she’s back to where she started, lost and further away from the woman she could have met ten years ago in the Allegheny General Hospital.

It doesn’t destroy her belief in fatumsomnambulism, but it definitely puts a damper on the whole idea. If she couldn’t meet her soulmate after jumping into the same river and ending up in the same hospital, she began to wonder if she ever would.

In the end, she decides to keep the information to herself, just like she was used to. The closest she ever came to providing insight was on sleepwalking cases, where she would just shrug it off as having done research on fatumsomnambulism. It works for the most part, with one exception when she almost blows her cover with an almost strangled reaction to Reid’s “Fatumsomnambulism appears to be a conspiracy, but there are many specific instances that go beyond simple speculation. The few cases we’ve seen it in, for instance, and there was even an incident near Pittsburgh where two people jumped off nearby bridges as if trying to reach each other, ignoring the safest path for the most direct path.”

“What?” JJ asks, nearly choking on her coffee.

Reid nods. “Did you never hear about that?” The blonde just shrugs as the genius continues. “It’s not necessarily a logical condition, but scientists have found a lot of value in the direction soulmates sleepwalk. There was a pair of soulmates in New York who kept passing each other on the Subway until eventually one of them fell asleep on a bench at one particular stop, which led the other to find them. The only issue with fatumsomnambulant research is that most people who speak up about it have found their soulmate. Otherwise, they typically remain quiet due to stigma or fear. Some parents have been known to lock up their children at night to keep them safe, but it does more harm than good. Not to mention, potential soulmate death, incarceration, or even taboo, particularly with age differences or gender—”

JJ abruptly stands, leaving the room before she can hear anything else. She heads into the bathroom, knowing that it’ll help her explain her quick exit, but also because no one would follow her in there. She just needs a minute to regroup. She splashes water on her face as she tries to think of anything but the conversation taking place and what she’s keeping from her team. It’s not much later when there’s a soft knock at the door.

“JJ? It’s me. Are you alright?” The blonde sighs at the sound of her superior’s voice on the other side of the door before she decides to open it.

“Hey,” she says as she meet’s Hotch’s intense albeit concerned stare. “I’m alright. I just needed a minute,” she shrugs but provides no further explanation. It’s safer to remain silent. Fortunately, the Unit Chief accepts her answer, and she meets the rest of the BAU back in the room the Raleigh police had lent them for the duration of the case.

In the end, the victim turns out to not be another sleepwalker, and JJ can rest easy for the night, at least until they return back and are immediately sent on another case not twenty-four hours later. This time, it’s the fourth abduction in under a week in Kansas City. All blond females, and on the jet ride over, Hotch gives them a stern pep talk about needing to provide their all for this case, despite the lack of sleep they’ve gotten.

Normally, this wouldn’t phase JJ much. She hasn’t had any major sleepwalking adventures in almost two years, and even if she had, when she’s exhausted, she typically doesn’t go as far. She’s always figured it had a lot to do with the stages of sleep, and dropping into deep sleep early on in the sleep cycle seemed to limit the night’s sleepwalking.

Except that this time when she falls asleep in their borrowed conference room, she doesn’t stay with her head on the desk where she had fallen asleep. Instead, in her sleep, she stands right up and walks out of the police station, going unnoticed due to the chaos around the station.

When she wakes up, it’s to Morgan’s hand on her shoulder, the rest of the team behind him looking down with concerned expressions as she shivers in the October chill. There’s no way for her to avoid getting checked out at the local hospital. She considers trying, but when she sees that intense look in Hotch’s eyes and Reid’s worried puppy dog expression, she doesn’t bother arguing with them.

As expected, she’s physically fine, which leads her to try and pull herself out of bed before the nurses recommend it, insisting that she’s good to get back on the case and hoping this won’t be turned into a bigger deal than it already is, but Hotch has other ideas as he tells JJ to stay put and takes a seat in the chair by her hospital bed. It reminds JJ vaguely of the last time her sleepwalking had landed her in the hospital, waking up next to her mom and disclosing her deepest secret. She sighs as she leans back, knowing this event will likely lead to the same confession.

“Do you remember anything about where you were?”

Hotch’s question throws her for a loop, and she blinks in surprise, trying to find its context. She can’t figure it out. “What?”

“Did you see the unsub?”

Her jaw goes slack as her eyes shift nervously around the room.

Does the whole team think I was kidnapped by the unsub

? “I—” she starts, her mind spinning once again with sitting up in a hospital bed and struck with questions that are rooted in a misunderstanding that could have been solved with a simple explanation at a better time than the last minute. “The unsub didn’t abduct me,” she finally admits.

Hotch steels himself, preparing for something that’s worse than it is, and JJ can’t find the words to stop this kind interrogation in its tracks. “JJ, all due respect, but given what we know about the unsub’s victimology…”

“I fell asleep at the station,” JJ interrupts. “I walked out on my own.” She avoids her boss’s eyes as she says it and wants to disappear into the silence that follows. It’s likely he already knows all the things she doesn’t need to say, but she finds herself saying them before she can stop herself. “I was sleepwalking. This has nothing to do with the case.”

Hotch’s expression is especially unreadable, and his eyes remain on JJ in the silence following her confession. She doesn’t want to volunteer any more information than she has to. “How long?” he finally asks, and she releases a shaky breath before answering.

“Almost twenty years,” she answers as casually as she can. “When I joined the BAU, it almost never happened anymore so I didn’t think it was worth mentioning. Then it happened a couple of years ago, but I had it under control, and it only happened at home—never on cases. Then it suddenly stopped again until last night.”

The man next to her nods once, taking it all in. “I wish you’d told me. It wouldn’t have, and it

won’t

, cost you your job, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important information for the team, or at least me, to be aware of.”

JJ nods. “I understand, sir.”

“That being said, the rest of the team will have questions, but I don’t have to tell them if you would rather them not know. If you do choose to tell them, however, I am certain that no one will judge you for it, and no one will bring it up without your consent to discuss it.”

She knows it’s the truth, but a part of her is still beyond apprehensive to disclose the information. Together, she and Hotch decide to tell them it was a sleepwalking incident, but not anything further. Aaron lets the team know that if any of them have any further questions, they can take them up with JJ, but can otherwise lay them to rest and focus on the case.

Since JJ doesn’t hear from the team during her brief hospital recover, she presumes that all goes well, even if the situation isn’t hard to figure out—especially for a group of profilers. She feels a little relief. At least until she gets a phone call from a certain tech analyst.

“JJ, talk to me. I have
few minutes of downtime, and Hotch told me you sleepwalked—sleptwalked?—yourself at least half a mile across the city and gave everyone quite the scare. What gives?”

JJ laughs. “It’s nothing, Pen. Just something that happens sometime.”

“Sometimes as in

frequently

?” JJ almost answers, but catches herself before she can give herself away. As it turns out, the silence is more telling. “Jayje, how many times have you sleptwalked? Sleepwalked?

God

, which is it?” Garcia mutters to herself before, “Either way, you know what I’m asking you. How many times?”

“I don’t know,” JJ answers honestly. “I’ve never kept count.”

Penelope’s high pitched, sonar-like noise is enough to tell JJ that her friend has put all the pieces together, which is just enough time to prepare for the flurry of questions that comes her way.

What age did it start at? What’s the farthest you’ve ever gone? Does anyone else know? Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Do you know anything about your soulmate? Are they in Kansas City

right now

?

The blonde in the hospital bed laughs once, trying to figure out how (or if) she should answer all of these questions. Penelope is her

best friend

after all. She clears her throat once before telling the other woman, “I was eleven. Maybe twenty-five miles on the Metro in one sleepwalk, but never that far on foot. Only my immediate family and the team know. I’m sorry, I should have told you. Not really, no, but I think she’s a woman. I don’t know where she lives.”

“JJ!” the other woman exclaims. “How could you not tell me this?! This is

huge

.”

“Penelope,” she laughs. “It's not a big deal. This happens to plenty of people, and it's not like I've

met

my soulmate. If that's even what this is,” she mumbles, suddenly feeling the need to minimize the situation, even though she already knows the other woman is the farthest thing from a skeptic.

“No, it is a big deal,” she corrects. “I've only ever known two other people this has ever happened to, and that was a long time ago.”

JJ nods, each end of the phone going silent for a moment. “Your parents?”

Garcia makes a noise in the affirmative before letting the moment pass, not wanting to dwell on it. “The point is, JJ, you have something really special, and personally, I think you should be really excited about this.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do? Not rest until I find her?”

“Technically, you might

have

to rest

in order to

find her—”

“Garcia.”

“Alright,

fine

. But you know what I mean. Aren't you at least a little curious?”

The blonde laughs, thinking her friend's question over. Admittedly, she's more than just

a little

curious. It's been over twelve years since she'd almost walked into her soulmate's hospital room after they'd jumped into the river, and every day she wonders what would have happened if she'd walked through those doors while conscious. “Yeah,” she softly admits.

“See?” Penelope says, and JJ can hear the smile in her voice as she responds. “I'm here for you, Jayje. Please just know that, whether you want to find her or not.”

“Thanks, Pen.”

A moment of peaceful silence passes over the phone before the tech analyst speaks again, “Okay so you don't have to talk about this if you don't want to, but JJ, I have to ask…” The blonde nods into the phone, bracing herself for whatever other question her friend has planned. With Penelope, it could be anything. “How do you know your soulmate is a woman?”

Jennifer laughs again. She should have seen that one coming. “Um, okay. I'll tell you, but you have to

promise

this stays between us.”

“Oh, absolutely. My lips are sealed tighter than the Mona Lisa's security. Your secret is safe with me.”

“You know that fatumsomnambulism story people always bring up? About the bridge jumpers in Pittsburgh?”

“Yeah, of course,” Garcia answers. “That's one of my favorite ones.”

JJ pauses for a moment, waiting for the revelation to sink in. When it doesn't, she says, “Well…” Another moment passes before she hears Penelope's gasp on the other end of the phone. “There it is…” she laughs.

“

No.”

“Yep.”

“Jayje, are you

kidding me

right now? That is—This is—” the woman sputters for a moment before she suddenly pulls it together. “Hold on. Morgan is calling so I've gotta go, but we are not done talking about this, missy. Got it? Get better and help catch that scumbag, and when you get back, we're going for drinks and you're telling me

everything

.”

“You've got it,” JJ says before she hangs up, leaning back into her pillows, waiting to be cleared and sent back on her way.

No one other than Penelope asks her specific questions regarding fatumsomnambulism, and for that, she's grateful. Despite that, there is definitely something therapeutic about discussing this part of her life with her best friend. She's gone so long just thinking all these things in her head but never vocalizing them, and doing so is a weight off her shoulders. When they go out together after the case, she doesn't hold back when she tells Penelope about the genesis of her fatumsomnambulism and Rosaline's advice, the incident at the Allegheny, and the fluctuations in her sleepwalking over the past decade, especially the time it started back full force after a long period of nothing in 2003 and during the Kansas City case last week.

Since Penelope loves conspiracy theories more than anyone JJ knows, she brings all her old maps with her to the blonde's apartment, and together the two non-profilers try to find the connections their colleagues would be so good at discovering.

“I bet if you gave Reid a few minutes alone with your resources, he'd be able to figure this out.”

JJ laughs. “I'm sure you're right about that.”

“But?” Penelope prompts.

“

But

I'm not sure I want to find out like that. It feels like cheating the game. And anyway, how do I know she'd believe me? If someone showed up at my door, fully conscious, and said they were my soulmate, even

I

would find them a little crazy.”

“But?” her friend says again, and JJ's brow creases as she looks over at her. “Come on, Jayje. I can actually

hear

that ‘but.’ It's really loud for a word you didn’t even say.” When she doesn't answer with anymore than a dismissive laugh and a shake of her head, Penelope continues. “You're worried you'll never meet each other.”

JJ shrugs. “Maybe.”

“I don't need to be a profiler to know that you

want

to. It's a natural thing, and worrying about it never happening

isn't

unreasonable. This is such a specific event, and it doesn't help that your woman seems to be a world traveller.” JJ nods, silent once again, mulling over the conversation. “You never know. Maybe she'll move closer? She does seem to be all over the map.”

“You're right,” JJ agrees, even though she's still not convinced it'll ever happen.

She's reached a certain complacency about the entire situation over the years, which is

fine

for the most part. There are periods when she'll decide to date like a normal woman who doesn't have a soulmate waiting for her on the other end of a sleepwalk, but then there are times when she doesn't, and of course, she doesn't—under any circumstances—bring anyone home to meet her family. She'd learned not to do that after a hard series of trial and error when her parents would look between her and her date and ask:
“Is this the one?” which always led to an awkward conversation, and inevitably, another breakup.

No one wants to date someone who belongs to someone else, whether they're in the picture or not. But JJ didn't let it bother her too much as she was sure none of the relationships would work out anyway. If anything, it just makes her long even more for her mystery soulmate.

“You really think it's gonna happen?” JJ whines to Garcia one night a couple of months later over a glass of wine.

“JJ, listen to me,” Penelope says. “You are a sparkling and glorious jem in this crummy world. If she's nearby, she will absolutely be sleepwalking to your door. You're like…the light that guides her home. The beautiful gingerbread house with gumdrops and vanilla icing waiting at the end of a breadcrumb trail.”

“Then where is she?” JJ pouts.

Garcia gives her a reassuring smile, bumping her shoulder against JJ's until the blonde is smiling with her. “She's getting here as fast as she can, boo. I bet she'll be asleep at your door before you know it.”

“Or I'll sleepwalk into her,” JJ snorts.

“Hey, you never know,” Penelope shrugs. “You might even meet her when you're awake first.”

She was right.

A week later, JJ's looking at a folder as she walks through the bullpen, not paying attention to where she's going. The area is significantly empty, especially considering she'd gotten to work earlier than usual. It's not until around eight that anyone starts to trickle in, and since it's only seven…

But as always, life throws her a curveball, and if she wasn't wide awake from the coffee she'd just finished, she certainly is from her body colliding into another.

She almost falls backward and has to grip the arm of the woman she'd run into just to remain steady. “I am

so

sorry,” the woman says, even though it's clear she had just been standing there and the entire collision was JJ's fault. The blonde tries to answer, but when she meets the woman's dark and unfamiliar eyes, she loses all her focus, leaving her shaking her head and producing a nervous laugh instead of words. “Are you okay?” the stranger asks, resting a gentle hand on JJ's forearm, and for a moment, the blonde worries she sounds

that

deranged before she realizes the woman is probably asking the question, not because of JJ’s unnatural laugh, but because she almost fell over.

JJ nods again, and smiles at the woman, kicking herself for not being able to say anything. She's a media liaison, after all. It's her

job

to talk to people, so this should be no problem. After a harrowing moment of silence, she finally answers. “Shouldn’t I be the one asking you?”

The brunette laughs, and JJ can feel her skin warming under the woman's touch before she slowly removes her hand from the blonde’s arm. “Answering a question with a question? You know what they say about that, don't you?”

“Didn’t you just do the same thing?” JJ points out.

“I'm sure we could do this all day, what do you think?” she smiles.

“Who

are

you?” JJ asks with her own grin in place, the question coming out almost reverent, but she can't bring herself to be embarrassed about it.

“My name's Emily,” she says, finally seceding from their string of questions. “Prentiss,” she adds. “New supervisory special agent to the BAU.”

It's not until after they shake hands that JJ remembers she should be introducing herself as well. “I'm Jennifer Jareau. Or uh, JJ. Media Liaison, also to the BAU.” There's something about the way Emily's looking at her that makes JJ wonder, “You already knew that, didn't you?”

The brunette chuckles, “I did. But it's nice to officially meet you. Agent Hotchner told me you'd be the one filling me in on protocol?”

“Yes, of course,” JJ beams as she directs Emily to her office. She isn't sure what's come over her. She's never been so smitten with anyone before, but today must be her lucky day.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

You are not supposed to go out and find love. Love will find you when you are ready. – Suzy Kassem

After Emily is accepted into the BAU (all miscommunications and paperwork issues aside), she feels a sense of relief. This is the kind of job she feels she was made for, and living in DC, a happy medium between Quantico and Reston, is more than she could have hoped for.

So when Hotch says, “Prentiss. There’s something important we need to discuss,” she immediately imagines the worst.

Just before this happens, she’s sitting in JJ’s office listening to the woman discuss some of the cases they’ve done, from the most dangerous with the craziest criminals to the ones that they could tuck away neatly and easily (though there didn’t seem to be too many of those). There’s something about JJ that draws Emily in, to the point where she can’t look away, or even wipe the smile from her face.

She can’t remember knowing anyone she’s ever hit it off with so quickly, and while she hopes it happens like this with the rest of the team, she knows that this woman is special.

Hotch knocks on JJ’s door while she’s in the middle of discussing a fatumsomnambulism case that was funnier than all the completely morbid ones, which JJ had just told her about, laughing as if sleepwalking discussions were the most casual thing in the world. Normally, this kind of thing might bother her, but given who was telling the story, Emily didn’t mind, and she even found sleepwalking stories to be captivating in a way she’d never expected them to be.

But then comes the knock on the door and the tell-tale, “Prentiss. There’s something important we need to discuss.” Emily can’t shake her panicked feeling as her eyes meet JJ’s, and she knows that the blonde can see it by the kind smile she offers her.

“I’m sure everything is going to be fine. He always looks that intense,” she explains. “He can be hard to read, but you’ll get used to it.” Emily hesitates but nods, distracted as she stands to leave. By the time she turns, JJ is at her side, a hand gently resting on her shoulder. “You’re not going anywhere,” she smiles, her thumb brushing once against Emily’s collarbone, and the brunette can actually feel her heart rate starting to slow both at the motion and the reassuring look in those bright blue eyes.

She returns the smile, a faint pink tinting her cheeks, and she turns to head toward Hotch’s office, trying to hold onto the feeling JJ gave her for as long as she can. She’s calm enough to give the unit chief a pleasant smile as she steps into his office, closing the door at his request. “Agent Prentiss,” he greets. “Your first day is going well, I hope?”

“Yes, of course, sir,” she assures him, taking a seat across from his desk.

“Good,” he says, his voice a kind contrast to his intense gaze. After a beat, he says, “The reason I asked you in here isn’t anything to be concerned about. By which I mean, you’re not in trouble, and there is just something I need you to know. Please keep in mind that you can be—and I encourage you to be—completely honest with me.” She simply nods, without any idea which direction this could be heading. “About a year ago, we had an incident with an agent sleepwalking on a case.”

Emily’s breath catches in her throat. This is about sleepwalking . She tries not to let her reaction show as she intently listens to the man discuss what had happened. According to him, the sleepwalking agent fit the unsub’s victim type, and when they couldn’t find her the next morning, they panicked, thinking she had been abducted. Needless to say, it was a relief—albeit a surprise—when she turned up safe, having sleepwalked instead.

“Despite the fact that everything turned out okay, that night it became clear to me that this is a topic with which I need to address the team. Any information you disclose with me will be kept between us unless you choose otherwise, but if there’s any chance you could have a sleepwalking episode, whether near home or any location we travel to, it is in your best interest for me to be aware.”

“I understand, sir,” Emily nods, her mind moving a thousand miles a minute. He patiently awaits her answer while she thinks of the best way to go about this topic. It’s comforting to know that if she opens up to him, she won’t have to tell the whole team, but at the same time, she wishes she didn’t have to discuss this with anyone, especially when she still isn’t sold on the belief that when she’s sleepwalking, it’s all in an effort to meet her soulmate. She settles on the words “I do have a history of sleepwalking, but it hasn’t had any negative impact on my career so far,” as they fall easily from her lips. “It used to be a regular occurance, but it isn’t anymore.”

Hotch nods. “So, have you met your—”

“Oh, no,” Emily laughs. “I’m not sure I ever will. I haven’t sleepwalked past my front door in almost a year. You have nothing to worry about.”

“Alright,” he says. “I really appreciate your honesty, and, like I said, no one will know about this without your permission. You can count on that.”

Emily smiles at him once more as she leaves. She believes he’s telling the truth, and she believes this isn’t the first time he’s made that promise. It’s impossible for her not to wonder if anyone else on the current team sleepwalks, or if the agent Hotch mentioned is someone who recently left. Either way, it isn’t likely she’s going to find out, just as no one will find out about her sleepwalking, so she lets the curiosity drop as she steps back into JJ’s office. “Is everything good?” she asks her.

“Absolutely,” Emily assures her, resuming her previous seat before the two agents pick up where they left off.

That night, Emily thinks about what she and Hotch had discussed, as well as the sleepwalking stories Jennifer had told her. For some reason, she can’t get the topic off her mind. Since taking the job in Kansas City, she’d only had one sleepwalking incident, and it was both fortunate and unfortunate that she had been sick when it had happened. Fortunately because it didn’t interfere with her job, but unfortunately because, even if she hadn’t gone far, the cold weather had made her symptoms come back with a vengeance. She still isn’t sure what prompted that particular excursion.

She’s been staying in DC for almost a week, and if she hasn’t sleepwalked by now, she’s sure it won’t become a regular occurence. She’d exhibited her certainty in her words to Hotch earlier, but now that she’s getting ready for bed, her confidence is starting to falter. Logically, she knows there’s no reason to think her situation would change just because someone here knows about it, so she dismisses the queasy feeling in her gut and allows herself to fall asleep.

It all would have been fine, but the next morning, instead of waking up burrowed under her covers, she finds herself huddled around some bushes in a park not too far away from her apartment.

She’s shocked, to say the least, but she makes quick work of brushing the dirt off her pajama pants and heading back home, grateful that her unconscious self at least grabbed a coat and slippers before sleepwalking out.

There’s hardly enough time for a shower before she has to leave for work, but since she actually smells like she spent the night in the bushes, she’s going to have to work with the time she has. Eventually, Emily makes it to the office with time to spare, and she heads to the coffee machine for some much needed caffeine.

Her hair is still damp as it hangs limply by her shoulders; she’s too preoccupied thinking about why she sleepwalked last night to worry about it not looking professional, and she’s too busy worrying about it happening again to hear anyone approaching. Emily jumps when someone suddenly appears next to her, pouring a cup of coffee in such a rush that it splashes over the side of the mug. “Sorry,” JJ mumbles.

“It’s fine,” Emily tells her, finally glancing over. She smiles at the sight awaiting her. “Looks like I wasn’t the only one running late this morning,” she says, taking in Jennifer’s own damp hair and slightly frazzled expression.

The other woman laughs nervously. “Yeah, uh. My mom called this morning, and we talked longer than I had time for. You know how moms can be,” she dismisses with a wave of her hand that makes Emily wonder. Something about JJ’s words raises a red flag.

“Is everything okay?” she asks.

For such a normal question, JJ looks a little alarmed, but she recovers quickly with a series of nods. “Oh, yeah. It’s just been a while.” Emily considers continuing the conversation, wondering if JJ wants to talk about whatever is clearly bothering her, but before she can, the blonde turns the conversation around. “How are you doing? You moved to the area recently, right?”

“Almost a week ago,” Emily nods, turning to pick up her coffee and take a sip in time to miss the thoughtful crease between JJ’s brows. “I’m living up in DC.”

“How do you like it so far?”

“It’s great,” Emily answers, but before she can say anything else, Hotch pokes his head in with a conference room in five . The two women drop their small talk and head over with their coffees.

The rest of the team files in shortly after, and Emily only has a few minutes to meet them before her first official case with the BAU begins. The only people she really knows so far are Hotch and JJ, so when she’s sent to Guantanamo with Reid and Gideon, she can’t help but feel a little nervous. In the end, her worries hold no weight, and she feels more like a part of the team than before, something that continues to happen with each case.

She gets to know the team well enough to make jokes with them and go out for the occasional drink or two after a long week, but she doesn’t once consider confiding in any of them about her sleepwalking. She thinks back to what Hotch said about an incident involving a member of the team, and it’s in these down moments where she finds herself the most curious about it; however, no one ever mentions fatumsomnambulism or sleepwalking, much less having such a thing happen to them. Despite her curiosity, Emily is more grateful than anything, because the lack of conversation about it means that no one ever asks her.

If they were to, she would be more hesitant to deny it than she had in the past, but only because she’s been sleepwalking more lately than she has in the past ten years. It’s only a matter of time before they find out, given how frequently it’s occurring.

Her only solace is found in the cases that take place miles away from DC, and she decides early on that as long as she doesn’t sleepwalk out of the room during an ongoing investigation, she plans to stay silent about the whole thing indefinitely.

The first time she shares a hotel room on a case, she worries about sleepwalking, despite being far enough away from DC for it to matter. It’s just JJ, she reminds herself, and because she feels so comfortable with the woman, she almost mentions her habit as they get ready for bed. But if fatumsomnambulism really is the cause, what are the odds that her soulmate will have also travelled across the country at the same time as her? Slim to none, she figures, so she remains silent.

When she first wakes up the next morning, she’s relieved to see the same hotel walls she fell asleep within and the horrible art hanging across the room. It’s good she didn’t say anything then, since she didn’t go anywhere in her sleep. However, her relief lasts only a minute before she rolls over, lying so close in bed to JJ that she’s worried she’ll wake her up.

With as little movement as she can manage, Emily eases herself out of JJ’s bed until she’s standing in the middle of the room with her hand against her forehead, her wide eyes on her blonde colleague. What the hell was she doing in JJ’s bed? Did she sleepwalk there? As far as she can remember, she’d never sleepwalked herself into someone else’s bed, only out of it. It often led to unfortunate conversations, but she couldn’t imagine any of those being worse than explaining to Jennifer why she had climbed into bed next to her.

But it’s okay since JJ hasn’t woken up yet. She never needs to know that this happened, and Emily can forget about it.

Except she can’t.

Because it keeps happening.

Nevertheless, her silence about sleepwalking will remain as such until she’s walked out of the hotel room, and as far as she’s concerned, as long as she isn’t caught, walking a foot across the hotel room to lie in someone else’s bed hardly constitutes as sleepwalking, no matter how many times it happens.

She always wakes up before JJ does, which gives her time to retreat to her own bed—where she never falls back asleep—and pretend like nothing is wrong when the blonde wakes up that morning.

Meanwhile, at home, Emily’s sleepwalking continues to be worse than ever, and she has to go back to her old methods of barricading herself inside the apartment or taking sleeping pills, just so she doesn’t wake up even further from home than the last three times that week. It works, and it becomes habit for a few months to take a sleeping pill if she’s getting to bed on time, or locking her door with a complicated enough system that she can’t unlock it in her sleep.

It’s a few months later during a particularly uneventful summer week, where she stays up later than usual, sipping wine and reading. She doesn’t have work the next morning, and for that, she’s beyond grateful. She’s putting off her sleeping pill until she’s content to go to sleep, and then she’s going to take it and sleep in as late as possible. With almost a year at the BAU under her belt, she feels like she’s earned this.

It’s almost midnight when she hears a strange noise coming from outside her door. She passes it off as her neighbors being noisy until there’s a loud thump right against the door. Frowning, she gets up and hesitantly walks over—glancing behind her and vaguely considering if she’ll need her glock for this but deciding against it—looking first through the peephole before removing her sleepwalking-proof padlock and opening the door.

She isn’t sure exactly what she’s expecting, but it isn’t an unconscious Jennifer Jareau lying on her doorstep.

Her mind is still reeling with suspicion, so she quickly wakes the blonde up enough to bring her inside, thinking first of safety and then the obvious. “JJ, what are you doing here? Is everything okay?”

“What?” the blonde asks, clearly still disoriented. “Emily?”

“I’m here,” she answers, leading JJ over to the couch. Emily can’t shake the idea that something’s wrong, but the other woman doesn’t seem alarmed in the slightest at waking up in a strange place. She kind of chuckles and mutters something about being lucky this time before checking her watch, and it’s only a moment later that Hotch’s words resurface once more: we had an incident with an agent sleepwalking on a case. ( Could it have been JJ? Did she sleepwalk here? But why did she end up at my apartment ? ) “Would you like some water? Coffee?”

“Whatever you’re having,” JJ answers, and Emily’s eyes shift to her glass of wine on the coffee table, still mostly full.

“Um, alright,” she says as she gets up and heads to the kitchen, pouring a glass and hoping the blonde doesn’t have a concussion or anything. When she gets back to the couch, she hands JJ the glass, trying to ignore the tug at the corners of her pink lips and the way her blue eyes widen under raised brows, and instead insisting on making sure the woman is fine before she consumes any alcohol.

JJ laughs through the inspection with several comments like, “Emily, I’m fine” and “you’re sweet, but there’s no need to worry so much” and finally “this kind of thing happens all the time.”

“What?”

It’s almost like JJ hadn’t realized exactly what she said until she sees the alarm on Emily’s face. At least she’s awake now, the brunette thinks as she takes in the situation in full, watching as JJ stumbles over a response for a moment before finally asking, “Where do you live again?”

Answering a question with a question . Emily can’t ignore that as she tells Jennifer her address, dismissing how odd it sounds considering they’re literally in her apartment, and she watches the blonde’s eyebrows raise even higher than before.

“Wow,” JJ laughs. It’s then that Emily decides she needs that wine after all, but she chokes on her next sip when JJ continues, casually admitting, “The last time I went this far, I fell off a bridge.” She misunderstands Emily’s stunned reaction as she continues to laugh with a simple shake of her head. “Don’t tell anyone that.”

By the time Emily recovers, all she can ask is “Where are you from, again?” In retrospect, she wishes she’d done more research on sleepwalking incidents. Maybe sleepwalking off bridges is common…

“East Allegheny,” JJ answers, and Emily can feel the blood draining from her face as she remembers leaving the Allegheny General Hospital after jumping into the Allegheny River on her trip to Pittsburgh. “It’s near Pittsburgh.”

“And that’s where you jumped into the river?” Emily asks, finishing her whole glass of wine in one fell swoop.

JJ, who doesn’t notice Emily had just said river when JJ had never said what body of water she jumped into, nods with a smile. “Yep. Right into the Allegheny River,” she confirms. “But that was almost fifteen years ago, and I think this might be my new record. Other than the time I sleepwalked onto the Metro and made it all the way to Fairfax a few years back...four years ago, maybe?” she rambles, starting to go on about how easy Emily is to talk to and how none of this information can leave this room , but all Emily can do is sweat as she does the math.

Her Pittsburgh trip and dive in the river happened almost fifteen years ago. She had sleepwalked onto the Metro once before as well…also four years ago. As she struggles to keep up with this conversation, she thinks back to all the times her sleepwalking had flared up again, and the locations she’d been in versus where JJ must have been. She thinks back to the case that Hotch had referred to, wondering if it was in Kansas City, where she’d been working at the time. As if on cue, she hears JJ mention a case in Kansas City. “I’m sure the whole team knows by now, but no one ever talks about it. I’m glad they don’t,” she admits, her voice softer than before.

“That was the case Hotch mentioned,” Emily blurts, and JJ cocks her head. “On my first day when he called me into his office. He asked me about sleepwalking, and just mentioned there had been an incident in the past.”

JJ nods. “That was probably what he was talking about, yeah. As far as I know, I’m the only fatumsomnamublant on the team,” she shrugs, and the use of such a specific word sends Emily into another tailspin. My soulmate. Jennifer is my soulmate? She’d never believed in the idea enough to matter, but all of a sudden, it felt like the only reality she could think about. “Anyway, what did you tell Hotch?” JJ asks, a curiosity in those blue eyes that almost scares her.

“I told him he didn’t need to worry,” she answers. It isn’t a lie per se, but it isn’t the most honest she could have been. JJ deflates a little at the comment, like she almost wanted Emily to have a sleepwalking habit as well. If it were any other circumstance, she might have told her. Instead she asks, “Do you really believe in that stuff? Fatumsomnambulism,” she clarifies at JJ’s frown.

“I do,” she admits. “Can I tell you something?”

Emily nods. She knows the direction this is heading before she agrees to listen, offering JJ the rest of the wine because god knows she shouldn’t have any more, and it’s not like she can send JJ back home, because a part of her knows that the blonde will just sleepwalk herself right back.

“I was eleven the first time it happened. I thought I was alone, but my sister, Rosaline—” (Emily nods again. remembering when JJ opened up about her). “She was the one that told me about soulmates. I haven’t doubted it since,” she smiles. For the first time since JJ’s surprising arrival, time seems to slow, and Emily realizes she isn’t sure what else to say. The blonde’s admission to believing in soulmates sounds so simple , and there’s something about it that makes Emily want to believe, too. “What about you?”

Her answer catches in her throat, caught between the classic no, I never bought into that stuff , and I didn’t, but now that you’re here, how can I not? She laughs just to buy her some time (but it isn’t hard to manage since this whole situation is something from a sitcom), and eventually shrugs. “I’ve always been a skeptic, but this?” she says, vaguely gesturing to JJ, “I can see it.”

Jennifer beams, seeing right through the double meaning to Emily’s words and the blush that follows them. It’s best that she doesn’t say anything else on the topic until she knows exactly what this means, and fortunately, JJ drops it. It’s all Emily can do not to ask the blonde what she’s thinking, wondering if there’s a part of her mind wondering why she sleepwalked right to Emily’s door or if she’s still just accepting it as dumb luck.

“Thanks, Em,” JJ says, setting her empty glass down before snuggling deeper into the couch, her feet tucked under Emily’s thighs. “I’m glad we have tomorrow off.” Her voice sounds sleepy again, and the brunette smiles to herself as she answers, a soft me, too escaping in time for the blonde’s breathing to even out.

Emily smiles at her friend across the couch, admiring how peaceful she looks before she decides to let her rest where she is. All it takes is a swift movement to stand without waking her and a quick search for a cozy blanket to drape over JJ’s sleeping form before Emily retreats to her own bed to settle down for the night.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to her the next morning when she wakes up with a pair of arms wrapped tight around her waist and a face nuzzling against her neck.

Emily’s first thought of the morning is that she could get used to this, but then she remembers that this is Jennifer , who sleepwalked all the way across DC to her apartment in the middle of the night. Jennifer , her coworker, and possibly the most captivating woman she’s ever known. Jennifer, who walked into the Allegheny River almost fifteen years ago at the same time as Emily.

In all those nights spent in hotel rooms with Emily waking up by Jennifer’s side, she always imagined it would be like this—with the blonde’s gentle breaths tickling the space just beneath her ear, her soft fingers grazing Emily’s stomach where her shirt has ridden up just enough—and she doesn’t want it to come to an end. But she knows that it will eventually, so for the moment, she just pretends to be asleep until she feels JJ shift in the bed, stretching like someone who had an amazing night’s sleep.

Emily thinks through all the things she can say in response to the situation, but she really has no other explanation other than the one JJ will surely reach on her own—she sleepwalked to Emily’s apartment and then sleepwalked again from the couch to her bedroom due to the fatumsumnambulism she admitted to believing in wholeheartedly the night before. So when she feigns waking up and rolls over to meet JJ’s wide eyes, she’s not expecting the blonde to laugh and say, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to spoon you,” and when the follow up comment is more along the lines of thanks for letting me stay over rather than sorry for intruding your night with my soulmate minded sleepwalking, not to mention claiming more than half the space in your bed , Emily realizes that JJ doesn’t even remember everything.

They’re soulmates, and JJ has no idea.

All her prepared responses go out the window, short of a few remarks she’d thought of to bookend the elephant in the room. “It’s fine, Jayje, you’re welcome anytime.”

“To stay over or to spoon you?” JJ asks with a smirk.

“Either,” Emily blurts, shrugging as if to take the weight out of her confession. She hardly doubts this will be the last time something like this happens, whether at her apartment or in hotel rooms on cases. The brunette frowns as the thought occurs to her. She’s lost track of the number of times she’s woken up next to Jennifer on cases. Had it ever happened the other way around? Could Jennifer already know ?

She can’t let herself think about it, especially not with the way the blonde sits over the edge of the bed, stretching again and exposing the creamy skin of her midriff, making a grumble-moan hybrid noise that makes Emily want to fall back against the mattress and take the blonde down with her.

But she’s on her best behavior, and instead, she gets up and offers JJ coffee, deciding once again to remain silent until she knows what to say or until JJ brings it up first, whichever happens sooner.

In the meantime, it’s nearly all she thinks about.

She considers saying something to Hotch, but since neither women are sleeping further apart than two beds in a hotel room on cases, she doesn’t see how it would make a difference. Besides, it wouldn’t be fair to talk about this with Hotch before discussing it with Jennifer, and especially not without the other woman’s okay to do so. This is highly personal information, after all.

For the next couple of months, nothing changes between them, and if anyone notices Emily acting unusual, they haven’t connected the dots. JJ, to her credit, seems to be more oblivious than ever. She hasn’t sleepwalked to Emily’s apartment again, but there have been at least two incidents where Emily woke up in Jennifer’s hotel bed after the blonde had already woken. If JJ ever had a question about it, she didn’t voice it, and it was starting to drive Emily insane.

Which is why, when Garcia invited the two of them over for a girl’s night sleepover, Emily tries to lie her way out of it.

Tries .

She’s only been in the doorway to Penelope’s office for a second before her excuse from the previous day is uncovered. “Hey Em? So, I may have just accidentally found your mother’s schedule online, and I happen to know that she’s attending an event in Rome this weekend, so unless you’re catching a plane to Rome tonight, you are absolutely coming to girl’s night on Saturday.”

The brunette groans internally, but tries to recover as she steps into Penelope’s tech cavern. “You’re right,” she starts. “I am going to Rome this weekend I have to be at the airport in an hour.”

The blonde groans out loud and throws her head back dramatically. “You wound me with your lies, Emily Prentiss. The last plane to Rome tonight actually left fifteen minutes ago. So unless you’re piloting the BAU’s jet without the permission of our Unit Chief, or you’re attending your mother’s party late —both of which I find to be incredibly unlikely—you have no reason to not be at the best event of the weekend.”

Really, Emily should have known from the beginning that she wouldn’t be getting out of this one.

So when the fateful night comes, Emily keeps herself on a tight leash, having only a few drinks while she watches her friends overindulge, especially JJ, who passes out in the living room before the night has even come to a close (or perhaps that’s just a habit of hers). Either way, Emily stands to leave just as Penelope emerges from the kitchen, with three tequila shots and soon after, a pout.

“Sorry, Pen. I think JJ’s out for the night.”

“And you?” Emily’s response is a half hearted but apologetic shrug as she takes a step toward the door, her shoes already on. Garcia manages to point a firm finger at her despite the tequila shots she’s still holding, and Emily stops in her tracks. “Emily, this is a sleepover . You’re not getting out of this unless you pass out like Jayje over there.” They both turn to look at her, and for a brief moment, Emily wants nothing more than to curl up with Jennifer. But then she remembers why she decided to leave in the first place.

“I’m sorry, but…” she trails off, not knowing how to say if I stay you could find out that we’re soulmates, and I’m not sure if anyone is ready for that . She can’t pinpoint the exact moment when she’d been sold over into the fatumsomnambulism narrative, but she has a serious suspicion that all those nights with JJ asleep in her arms has a lot to do with it. “Keep an eye on her, okay?” Emily says as she tries to slip away, but she makes the mistake of meeting Garcia’s puppy dog eyes, and she knows for the second time that night that she’s not going anywhere. It’s with a huff that she moves back to her place on the couch and is given two tequila shots from Penelope. “You can’t be serious,” she says, glancing over at JJ, lightly snoring from an armchair across the room.

“Oh, sweetie, Jayje isn’t taking one of those. You’re taking them both.”

“What?”

“There’s clearly something we need to talk about, and if this is the way I get you to do it, so be it.” She holds out her own single shot to cheers, and Emily is helpless to respond, raising only one before a quirk of the blonde’s eyebrow prompts her to raise them both and down them one after the other. “Wow, you didn’t even flinch,” Garcia observes with wonder, and Emily just half shrugs. “Okay, so now that you’ve shown your impressive skills with drinking tequila, spill .”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Emily lies, knowing that if this conversation continues, it’ll eventually lead to the big sleepwalking reveal. A part of her is surprised Garcia hadn’t already unearthed it somehow.

“I know I’m not a profiler, but I could have identified that lie from a mile away. First, you tried get out of tonight altogether, and then you tried to leave early. What’s going on?”

Emily hates the idea of lying to her friend, but even if she wanted to blurt out the truth, she isn’t sure she could. Sleepwalking is something she still wanted to keep private, especially since her alleged soulmate was asleep not even six feet away. In the end, she finds a safe answer with, “I’ve never had a sleepover before. I was nervous.”

“Oh, you sweet baby angel. You could have told me!” Garcia says. It’s clear on her face that she wasn’t expecting such a soft answer, and there’s a moment of relief where Emily just smiles, acting about as innocent as possible before Penelope suddenly levels her with a squint. “There’s more, isn’t there?”

The brunette’s jaw goes slack, and she laughs out a disbelieved “what? ” waving away the interrogation before it can begin. Garcia doesn’t let up though, and Emily eventually leans back in defeat. “You know, for someone who’s not a profiler, you sure can sniff out lies like a dog can sniff out a bone.”

“Thank you,” Garcia accepts with a pleased grin. “So spill it, Prentiss. There’s only one person I know who’s never had a sleepover before she met me, and that was because—” There it is . Emily can see the realization spreading like wildfire behind her friend’s passionate eyes, and she braces herself, knowing full well what’s coming next. “You sleepwalk, too, don’t you?” Despite the complete inevitability of this conversation, Emily still feels compelled to find a way out of it before she eventually surrenders with a nod, at which point, Penelope offers her more tequila, which she graciously accepts in bottle form. “How long?”

Emily blows out a full breath of air before taking a swig of the tequila and setting the bottle back on the coffee table. “Twenty three years? Since I was thirteen.”

“Woah.”

“Yeah,” the brunette nods.

“And have you met…” Garcia trails off, clearly expecting the brunette to dismiss the entire topic. Everyone knows how much of a skeptic Emily is after all, but all it takes is a glance toward Jennifer and a moment’s hesitation to give everything away.

“Do you know anyone who has?” Emily responds in question, hoping to derail the conversation.

“That depends,” Penelope answers, and Emily sighs. This woman doesn’t miss a thing. “Come on, spill it,” she requests again. “No point in keeping silent now. You may not know this about me, but I am great at puzzles. And this puzzle,” she says gesturing between Emily and JJ, “just got unpuzzled.”

Emily releases a long sigh, accepting that there’s no way out of this conversation now. She glances over at Jennifer again before turning back toward Penelope, patiently yet eagerly awaiting a response. “Look, Pen. JJ doesn’t know,” she explains in a low voice, “so you have to keep this a secret.”

To her, it’s perfectly logical, but the blonde just looks exasperated. “A secret?” she nearly hisses before groaning into her hands. “Emily,” she starts again, after a brief moment of reflection, her fingertips coming together to form a triangle hovering in front of her face as she speaks. “How do I put this delicately… Soulmates are not supposed to be secrets! If they were, why would anyone be endangering themselves in the middle of the night by walking across town or, I don’t know, jumping into rivers ?” Her voice is raised above the whisper Emily had been trying to maintain, but it isn’t loud enough to wake JJ.

“I know,” she sighs again, talking to Penelope but with her eyes on Jennifer. She feels buzzed enough from the tequila to let herself fall into thoughts she normally keeps herself away from, and it’s easier to admit than she’d thought it would be when she says, “I think I’m actually falling for her.”

There’s a pause after she admits it, and she’s not sure who’s more surprised—her or Garcia. Emily finally turns to meet the soft gaze of the other woman just before the question:
“Then why the secrecy?”

Emily’s laugh is short and bitter as she shrugs. “I never believed in this soulmate stuff, ever . Not even when I first joined the BAU. Now that there’s evidence, I just…I never expected it to be so real.” Her eyes drift over to JJ of their own accord, and even though finally admitting this outloud terrifies her, she can’t seem to wipe the smile off her face. “I like being in control, but this is one thing I think I have to surrender to.”

“I think you’re right,” Penelope says, and Emily can only nod in agreement as her eyes remain on JJ. She’s sure she looks like a lovesick puppy right about now, but she knows Garcia doesn’t mind because Emily can practically hear the smile on the blonde’s face before she even looks at her, and she can definitely hear it in her voice when she speaks a moment later, “So, when you say evidence…”

Emily laughs at her friend, fishing for stories. She’s trying to think of a noteworthy moment, and is about to go with the time Jennifer showed up asleep at her doorstep when the blonde in question stands up without warning and walks four short steps before taking a seat on the couch, curled up halfway on Emily’s lap with her head on the brunette’s shoulder, her arms around her waist, and her knees tucked up to rest on Emily’s thighs.

Penelope’s expression is a mix of endearment and surprise as she watches the scene before her, and one glance at the woman’s heart eyes incites a chuckle from Emily. “When I say evidence…” she echoes, unconsciously shifting toward Jennifer, wrapping her arms around her as well.

“I can’t believe that just happened. I mean, I can because I watched it happen, but wow.” Penelope squeals a little before she gasps, looking way too excited at what just occurred to her. “Wait—you two usually share a hotel room on cases, right? Does this kind of thing happen often? Have you shared a bed before? How has Jayje not figured this out??”

Emily finds the series of questions amusing, and she smiles as she answers them all, going into a few events, from the first time she woke up in JJ’s bed in the hotel room, the night the blonde sleepwalked over to her apartment and eventually her bed , to another time she’d almost forgotten about when the blonde had fallen asleep in her office only to wander out and try lying down across Emily’s desk. She’d been mortified when she woke up but was mostly confused, and at the time, Emily had been, too.

“As for your last question,” Emily muses, her thumb absentmindedly stroking Jennifer’s shoulder. “I have no idea. Sometimes I think she has figured it out, and we’re at some kind of stalemate…”

“She doesn’t know,” Garcia confidently tells her.

“What? How can you be so sure?”

“Because,” the blonde shrugs, “if she knew, she would have told me, and I would have already coerced her into talking to you about it.”

Emily snorts. “Good to know.” She doesn’t know what to do, but she knows what Penelope’s advice is going to be. She’s too busy thinking of what she could say and all the possible outcomes that her bringing it up could render to realize that she’s pressing a soft kiss to the top of Jennifer’s head, but she isn’t too dissolved in thought to recognize that the comfort she feels in this moment is something she doesn’t want to let slip through her fingers.

“She’s waiting for you, Em. You just need to talk to her,” Penelope tells her with a smile, and Emily returns it as they say goodnight.

Emily keeps her position for a little while longer, not wanting to wake the cuddly blonde next to her. She doesn’t want to get up, and while a major part of that is because she’s content to sleep on the couch with Jennifer, she also knows that she would wake up here no matter where she falls asleep. With that in mind, she grabs the blanket Penelope had left on the back of the couch and drapes it over the both of them, easing the blonde down with her as she settles back into the cushions, thinking about their inevitable soulmate conversation. By the time she’s finally dozing off, she still has no idea what she should say.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind I was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along. -Rumi

“Are you okay?”

Emily looks up from the seat across from her on the jet, her dark eyes wider than usual, a look that JJ has started associating with a distinct lack of sleep. There’s something else in there, too, but the bonde can’t pinpoint it exactly. It’s a look she hadn’t seen until a few months ago, but she was quick to notice that she’s always the one on the receiving end.

“I’m fine,” Emily finally says, and JJ can only shake her head.

“You’re not fine,” she argues. “You look like you haven’t slept in days. And if you want to be useful on this case, you should probably take a nap,” JJ says, nodding towards the couch. “You have plenty of time.” For a moment, the brunette looks like she’s going to fight her on it, but then she grumbles and tries to cozy herself up where she is. Jennifer clears her throat and nods to the couch again, reinforcing the idea. “It’ll be better for your back.”

With a groan, Emily eventually relents, and JJ watches as she walks across the jet, snagging a blanket along the way. Her eyes stay on the woman long after she’s gotten comfortable, slipping easily into sleep. Another noise from across the cabin startles her, someone shifting in their seat, and even though she can’t see through the seats in front of her, she glances in their direction before leaning back and trying to relax.

She doesn’t fall asleep on the jet, and she never has. She doubts she could sleepwalk to the exit and pull it open before someone else stopped her, but she’s never wanted to take that chance. There have been times when she easily could have slept during the flight—and probably should have given how the following days went—but ensuring the team’s safety and keeping her secret always took precedent

The jealousy she used to feel for her colleagues for being able to sleep on the jet has faded over time, fortunately , she thinks as she looks back to Emily. She’s never seen the brunette doze off as easily as she had just now so she must have really needed the sleep. JJ smiles as she looks out the tiny window of the plane, grateful that Emily’s finally getting the quality rest she deserves. She’s been acting a little unusual lately, but JJ hasn’t talked to her about it. She isn’t sure how to, or even where to start.

JJ has been trying to get to the bottom of it for weeks, and she’d never been envious of her colleagues for being trained in profiling until now. It shouldn’t be so hard to figure it out, but then again, this is Emily . Expert keeper of secrets, and compartmentalization extraordinaire—to borrow a few of Garcia’s descriptions. Despite her struggle to unveil Emily’s layers, she’d managed to discover a few clues.

The first was the most evident: an obvious lack of sleep, more than usual. She would leave Quantico at a reasonable time every night, nearly at the same time as JJ did most nights, and she would be there in the morning when she showed up, looking like she’d never left. It was during these days that she would sometimes catch Emily drifting off at her desk, and sometimes even on the couch in Jennifer’s office. Of course, she would ask the usual questions, but Emily would never answer anything in detail, just in vague reassurances that JJ doesn’t need to be worrying about the amount of sleep she’s getting.

The second was the most indicative and revealed after the night that JJ sleepwalked and ended up in Emily’s apartment. It was the next morning that Emily was acting more on edge, especially around JJ. It wasn’t blatant enough for anyone else to recognize, but it was impossible for JJ not to notice the way Emily stopped knowing just what to say and instead always seemed at a loss for words. At first, she thought it was just one of those weeks, but after some time passed, nothing seemed to change.

The only thing that made sense about the whole situation to JJ was that she really liked Emily, and she was worried she had accidentally crossed some boundary in her sleep. It wouldn’t be the first time she woke up spooning the other agent after all, but it’s not like she had told Emily that. How could she admit to that? Sometimes when we share rooms on cases, I wake up in your bed with my arms around you. I never want to let go, but I can’t bear the thought of making things weirder than they already are.

So she remains silent about all of it. Especially after those countless nights when she wakes up in Emily’s hotel bed, her face buried in dark hair, fingertips brushing the soft skin at her waist. It was a sensation she would never forget—that much she was sure of—but when it came to facing the circumstances, she had to let it go.

Ever since that one case in Kansas City, JJ had been more than a little anxious about sleepwalking, especially when the team travelled for a case, but as it stood, there hadn’t been any more incidents surrounding the topic, and when they were out of town, the most she moved in her sleep was from her own bed to Emily’s. It just seemed like one of those things .

As for the time she’d ended up at Emily’s apartment? She wasn’t sure how to rationalize that, especially when she couldn’t remember exactly where she had ended up—if she’d collapsed at Emily’s front door or if she’d been found somewhere nearby. Either way, she was sure she was still half asleep when she disclosed having sleepwalked, but the topic had never come up between them again. Normally, she would be relieved to not talk about it, but this time she couldn’t help but wonder if it should have come up again.

Maybe it still can?

JJ’s thought are suddenly broken again by the sudden appearance of a figure appearing next to her, and she knows it’s Emily without having to look up. She must have really zoned out if she hadn’t noticed the brunette’s movement from the couch, but nevertheless, she chuckles before she actually glances up at the woman. “I thought I told you to get some sleep,” she says.

Her blue eyes raise for only a moment, but her heart seems to stall in her chest when she realizes that Emily is asleep.

Did she just sleepwalk over here?

“Um,” she mutters as she stands up in the limited space, so close to Emily that she forgets how to breathe for a moment. “Em?” she tries, but she gets no response other than the brunette swaying slightly on the spot, and JJ doesn’t know if it has more to do with her state of unconsciousness or the jet’s movements, but regardless she helps Emily into the seat she’d been in before while her mind moves a thousand miles an hour, as she racks her brain for any indication that Emily also sleepwalks. Other than the one time at the brunette’s apartment, JJ can’t recall them talking about the topic.

But then she remembers:
Emily’s first week. I told him he didn’t need to worry, she recalls Emily saying, and it isn’t until now that she realizes that could mean more than one thing. Needless to say, sleepwalking is all she thinks about for the rest of the flight.

When Emily wakes up, obviously not in the same place she fell asleep, she doesn’t look surprised at all, and instead she just glances nervously at JJ like she’s worried she spilled her deepest secrets in her sleep. The blonde smiles at her, unsure what she could say in such a situation.

She puts her focus on work for the rest of the day, but no matter how hard she tries, Emily’s sleepwalking is somewhere on her mind. That night when they walk into their shared hotel room, JJ considers speaking up about the moment on the plane, or even just sleepwalking in general, but she decides against it in the end. The last thing she wants is to take anything away from Emily’s sleep.

The next morning when she wakes up, she feels unusually well rested for the amount of sleep she’s probably gotten, and she burrows herself even further under the blankets, her body pressing back against something warm. It takes her a few moments to realize what’s happening before her eyes open, suddenly alert. With a few glances around the room, she knows she’s in Emily’s bed, but this time is different than the rest. She’s never woken up in this position, with Emily’s arms wrapped tight around her. It’s always been the other way around.

Before, it was easy enough to sneak back to her own bed as long as she was careful when she untangled her arms from around Emily’s body but doing the same in reverse, likely won’t yield the same results. She tries once, just to see, but the brunette just cuddles closer, and even though this isn’t an ideal situation, Jennifer can’t help but smile at the action.

She toils over the position a few moments longer before deciding to roll over, hoping it might make it easier for her to slip away. In some ways, it does, but in this new position, JJ can feel Emily’s breath just against her pulse point, sending a series of shivers through her entire body, enhanced by the brunette’s hand resting lightly against her waist, her warm fingers unconsciously brushing the skin beneath them. JJ releases a level breath, as if not to be overwhelmed by the sensations taking over her body, but she loses all control when she feels soft lips press against her neck, and she lets out a gasp that wakes a half-roused Emily.

The other woman goes from barely awake to wide awake in record time, and she’s standing on the other side of the bed faster than JJ ever thought possible after just waking up, her eyes wide and alarmed but somehow, not surprised. “Jennifer. I am so sorry,” she says, and the blonde’s breath catches in her throat. She can’t remember a time when the woman had ever said her name like that, but it’s like heaven to her ears, and JJ can’t decide how much of that has to do with the charge still coursing through her body.

“It’s okay,” she says, hardly recognizing the sound of her own voice until she clears it and comes up with the first excuse she can think of to leave the room at three in the morning. “I’m going to take a shower,” she says before charging for the bathroom. So much for sleep , she thinks as she turns on the water—as cold as she can get it—before stripping and stepping under the icy stream. She shudders at the temperature, regretting the decision almost immediately, but at the moment, she doesn’t trust herself to be doing anything that doesn’t involve cooling off.

The shower gives her the time she needs to work through everything that’s happened, both on the jet yesterday and just now in the hotel room. She has too many thoughts to work through, and from sleepwalking and her own thoughts, she doesn’t know where she should begin. It takes her about twenty-five minutes to clear her head enough to realize two things. The first is that she isn’t going to be getting anywhere with this tonight—she can’t afford to during this case as it demands her full attention—and the second thing is that she has indisputable feelings for Emily.

By the time she turns off the shower almost thirty minutes later, she’s adapted to the chilly temperature of the water, but she isn’t prepared for the cold of the air against her wet skin, and as she wraps herself up with a towel, she goes into a momentary panic as it dawns on her that she doesn’t have any clean clothes to change into and there’s no point in putting on her pajamas when her alarm is set to go off in only a couple of hours. She’s still too wired to sleep as it is.

It takes her another five minutes to work up the courage to just walk back into the room in only a towel. Judging by the look in Emily’s eyes when JJ had last seen them, neither woman will be getting any more sleep that night, and the blonde is nervous about the situation awaiting her if she’s right and Emily is still wide awake in their room.

The first thing JJ notices when she steps out of the bathroom is that room’s temperature is warmer, and she relaxes significantly at the shift.

The second thing she notices is that she has nothing to worry about—not tonight, anyway—because Emily is nowhere to be found.

When JJ is ready to start the day, nearly two sleepless hours later, she still hasn’t seen Emily, but she’s sure there’s a reasonable explanation for her disappearance, it’s just another conclusion that she won’t be reaching anytime soon. A knock at her door interrupts her scattered thoughts and frenetic pacing, and she opens it fast enough to alarm Morgan on the other side. “Woah, Jayje. What’s up with you? I thought for sure I’d have to drag you out of bed,” he chuckles. She isn’t sure what to say to that, so she just accepts one of the coffees in his hand with a shrug. He holds up the other as he peers into the room. “Where’s Prentiss?”

“Not here,” JJ answers—another question she isn’t sure how to answer. She tries to sidestep around Morgan, but he stops her with a gentle touch to her shoulder.

“Hey, hold up a second.” She meets his eyes for a second before looking away again, worried that he’ll somehow find the answers she can’t resolve herself in just a glance, but she doesn’t miss the concerned way his lips turn down before he asks, “You haven’t seen her?”

“I—” she starts, knowing that her silence might be more telling than anything she could say, but she doesn’t need to worry about making up a cover story for long, because Emily suddenly appears around the corner, two cups of coffee in hand.

“Oh, come on, Morgan. Don’t tell me you already got us coffee?” she laughs, looking at both Morgan and JJ like nothing weird had happened the night before. It sends JJ’s thoughts into another tailspin. Morgan shrugs, making a comment the blonde doesn’t catch in her distraction, but Emily’s voice sounds out like a siren. “Good thing these are for you and Reid. Where is he by the way?”

They start walking down the hallway, and JJ stays frozen on the spot until Emily turns back to her. “Hey, Jayje, you coming?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I just, uh, have to grab a few things.”

“We’ll meet you in the lobby, okay?” she says, and it’s the last thing JJ hears before the door clicks shut. She takes a few deep breaths before grabbing her badge and gun, getting everything situated before she takes a sip of her coffee and heads for the lobby. If Emily can remain calm through this case, she can, too.

By the time the elevator doors open to reveal the rest of the team waiting for her, JJ has her media liaison smile on and is ready to go, hoping she can keep her complicated ideations at bay until the case ends.

The day goes about as smoothly as she could have hoped. They haven’t caught the bastard yet, but they’re on his trail so it’s only a matter of time. When Hotch says, “Get some sleep. We’ll reconvene in the morning,” JJ doesn’t notice that Emily slips out first, with a good twenty minutes on her and Reid, while he makes a few last minute notes before she drives them back to the hotel.

The drive is quiet for enough time that JJ jumps when Spencer asks, “Are you okay?”

“Oh, yeah. Of course. Why?” She doesn’t know if the why comes as more of instinct, formality, or paranoia, but regardless, she awaits his answer with baited breath. It’s the same worry she had with Morgan earlier, only more enhanced because this is Reid . He can always tell when something’s bothering her, and more often than not, he’s right about what that something is.

“You’ve been acting a little strange today,” he tells her. “You always slip into a mask before speaking to press, but on this case, it’s almost like the mask is always in place. The only difference is that with the press, you know the words you’re looking for.”

JJ laughs, because how can she not with how on point he is? “You’re so smart, Spence,” she tells him.

His response, “You know that if you need someone to talk to, I’m here for you,” means more to her than she could ever express, and she can only nod, knowing that it’s enough of an answer for him. She almost wants to ask how much he knows, but since she knows the answer is always more than you , she doesn’t ask. There are a few things she needs to work out first, anyway.

Once they reach the hotel, the smile Spencer gives her before he steps into his room next door is comforting and sends a feeling of peace through JJ, which is something she needs before walking into her own room to face the inevitable. Making it through the day like nothing had happened with Emily the night before was one thing, but sharing a room after the previous night was another, and even if she wasn’t sure of the extent of what she needed to say, some kind of clarity should be better than nothing, if only for now.

But when she opens the door to her and Emily’s hotel room, she’s alone once again. As always, they’d opted out of maid service, but even so, both beds are made up. Otherwise, everything is exactly the same, with the exception of a missing go bag and a missing Emily.

In a way, it’s alarming, solely because JJ’s expectations differed so much from the reality she just walked into, but on the other hand, it’s almost relieving to know that the pending conversation between them is going to have to hang on for a few nights longer, and the blonde can rest easy knowing she won’t wake up by surprise in the other woman’s hotel bed.

Instead, she wakes up curled up on the floor in front of room 318, pulling her out of a dream involving Emily crouching by her side and whispering one simple sentence. It’s time to wake up, Jennifer.

She bolts up on the spot, taking a deep breath as she surveys her surroundings. She has no idea whose room 318 is, but it’s specific enough to be a tell for why JJ is there, especially when her own room is six floors up.

Since this still pertains to a conversation she doesn’t feel confident enough to have, she decides not to knock. Whoever she thinks is on the other side of that door can wait until tomorrow when the team catches their unsub and JJ’s gotten a drink or two in her system. With that in mind, she walks back to the elevator, too tired to deal with the stairs, and makes her way to her own empty room.

She doesn’t realize that she’s locked out until she’s in front of the door with empty pockets and cold toes, and she considers all her options, trying to think of what she should do. It’s early enough that she could still get a few more hours of sleep, and even if she could start preparing for the day early as she had the previous night, it’s not as if she can access any of her things without her key. The hotel desk is probably staffed with someone to give her an extra key, but the thought of having to walk barefoot across the cold tile floor of the lobby and admitting to locking herself out due to sleepwalking is worse than having to sleep in the hallway. She really misses the bed and warmth .

There’s a chance she could wake up someone from her team and convince them to let her crash with them or convince them to help her get a key, but going to anyone but Hotch would raise questions that JJ isn’t ready to discuss with the team, and of course, she doesn’t want to interrupt her unit chief’s sleep just to do ask for his help on something she could just as easily suck it up and do herself.

There’s only one more option in sight. Emily might still have a spare room key, and JJ is knocking on the door of room 318 before she can think twice about it.

There’s a moment where she panics, logically acknowledging the fact that she’d just knocked on a random hotel door in the middle of the night, but the calm she feels when she sees Emily on the other side, looking sleepy but just as unsurprised as JJ, provides more confirmation of the inevitable than anything ever has. She knows in this moment, unable to ignore the incontrovertible truth as she looks into dark eyes—Emily Prentiss is her soulmate.

The realization brings her some peace but sparks even more questions, and now that she knows what she does, there are so many things JJ could say, so many things she wants to say; however, it’s neither the time or the place. Despite the thrumming in her chest and the spiral of thoughts racing through her mind, the moment feels extraordinarily still. JJ smiles. “Hey.”

“Hey, yourself,” Emily says, her mouth tilting up into half a crooked smile. Emily doesn’t ask why she’s up so late or what she’s doing here or how she found her, and JJ wonders how long she’s known.

The blonde’s eyes haven’t left Emily’s, but even so, she finds herself distracted—lost, despite having all the answers she’s been looking for. She has to shake her head slightly just to remember what she’s really doing here, and when she does, she swears that Emily’s eyes brighten. “I got locked out of my room, and I was wondering if you still had your key?”

To JJ’s relief, the brunette nods before walking back into the room to find it. JJ stands half in the hallway, leaning on the doorframe, propping the door open with her shoulder while she waits. It only takes a moment until Emily’s back at the door, standing closer than she was before and holding the key card out between two fingers. The blonde marvels at how calm the other woman seems, knowing that if it were her , her hands would be shaking enough to make her self-conscious. Emily’s, on the other hand, are still, and when JJ’s brush against them, she finds that they’re soft, too.

The contact sends a jolt of energy through JJ that almost makes her drop the card, but she doesn’t and instead manages to maintain a level of calm that lasts beyond this lingering moment. “Thank you,” she manages to say, dark eyes locked on hers.

Until the moment the door is closed between them, a part of JJ worries that Emily’s going to say something that will lead them straight into waters she isn’t ready to tread, but the profiler remains quiet until, “Goodnight, Jennifer. I’ll see you in the morning,” and the imminent closing of the door following the blonde’s modest farewell.

It’s not until the moment JJ stands alone in the hallway that the dam holding back all her thoughts finally breaks, and everything suddenly hits . Her mind is spinning with so much new information—new emotional information—that she doesn’t know if she’s more overwhelmed or overjoyed. But as she enters her room and slips back into bed, all she can do is smile.

All the nerves JJ hadn’t felt the night before come rushing in as the next day begins. From the moment she wakes up to the moment they’re putting the unsub in handcuffs, she’s distracted enough that almost everyone on the team checks in with her at least once, with the exception of Emily, who instead keeps a careful eye on her all throughout the day as if preparing to rush to her aid should she need it.

In a way, it makes her nerves worse. JJ has all but verbal confirmation that the other woman already knows the truth that she realized last night—that the two of them are soulmates—and if Emily does know, it means the ball is in JJ’s court. If Emily is waiting for her to start the conversation, it means Jennifer has a lot to figure out.

They’re boarding the jet when JJ pulls out her phone to text Penelope. You better wait up for us this time. I really need to talk to you.

Tell me your ETA, and I’m there, boo, Penelope responds, and JJ smiles, immediately feeling at ease. At least until she steps onto the jet and has to choose her seat for the flight home. ‘

It’s an overnight flight back, and she already knows everyone is planning on getting some rest during the trip. Before, she never slept on planes, but now that she knows she’s in no danger of walking off the plane mid-flight, only toward Emily, she can join the rest of the team in slumber.

The brunette is settled in a seat by the window, and of the other three seats around her, two are empty, including the one right next to Emily. It’s the seat Jennifer eventually claims, knowing that no matter where she falls asleep on the jet, that’s the space she’ll wake up in. She smiles at the other woman as she gets comfortable, and her heart glows when she receives a similar smile in response. They haven’t talked yet, but regardless, in this moment, as the jet lifts into the air and JJ gets settled under a blanket next to her soulmate, everything feels right.

When she wakes up, the first thing JJ notices is that Emily is still asleep, her head on the blonde’s shoulder, and the second thing is that their fingers are intertwined. She shifts in her seat, keeping her grip on Emily’s hand but making sure not to wake her. She freezes when her eyes meet Morgan’s in the seat across from her. He smirks and wiggles his eyebrows a bit as his eyes dart from her eyes to her hand in Emily’s, but JJ only blushes, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

“We’re landing in about twenty minutes,” Hotch suddenly says to her right, and she nods before turning to wake Emily up. All it takes is a gentle squeeze of her hand, a soft whisper of her name, and the brunette’s eyes drift open, seeking out Jennifer’s immediately.

“Twenty minutes,” JJ tells her, and Emily nods as she sits up. She doesn’t comment on their linked hands, and she doesn’t let go until they stand to leave.

As promised, Penelope is waiting for JJ. She’s in the liaison’s office with enthusiastic wide eyes and a cup of coffee, and as the rest of the team heads home to take the rest of the day off, JJ closes her office door and collapses on the couch next to the tech goddess of Quantico.

“Speak and be heard,” her friend starts, passing JJ the coffee. “I also have liquor if we need to relocate to my apartment for this discussion,” she offers, but JJ eyes the clock with a short laugh.

“Really, Pen? It’s eight in the morning.”

Garcia holds up her hands in a surrender motion. “Hey, I’m not judging. You gotta do what you gotta do. But if I’m being honest, you look like you could use the coffee more anyway.” JJ shrugs as she turns the cup in her hands. She’d slept well enough, all things considered, but all her current exhaustion is less from being low on physical energy and more due to her blatant lack of emotional energy. Can coffee even help with that? She isn’t sure how much time has passed before Penelope speaks again. “Jayje, you’re freaking me out. What’s up?” her friend asks, bringing JJ back to the present.

“It’s…” she starts, but once again, she realizes she doesn’t know where to begin, or if she even can . “Have you ever lost so much hope in something happening that you give up on it, only to have it come back when you’re not even sure that you’re ready for it?”

It’s a rhetorical question, but it’s something that can advance the conversation. If she can’t force herself to say the words out loud, she knows that Garcia will pull them out of her whether she wants to say them or not. She’s expecting a response along the lines of “ of course, Jayje” or “ you’re going to have to be more specific” or both , so when Penelope says, “Oh, sweetie. Please tell me you’ve figured it out,” her brows furrow with confusion, and she has to shake her head and replay the moment just to be sure she heard her correctly.

“What?”

“You know I’m the oracle of all things knowable and unknowable,” is the first explanation she receives, and JJ sighs in defeat. Of course Penelope would have figured everything out long before she even had an idea. “When you text me in the middle of the night before you fly home, it’s not hard to figure out. Did you get any sleep on that flight?”

“Yeah,” JJ answers, not realizing it’s answer enough for her friend who knows she doesn’t sleep on planes.

“So, you’ve finally figured it out?”

“I think I’m starting to,” she admits, the first step to disclose the most life changing event she may have ever experienced.

A moment passes before she’s confronted by the question of the week, “What are you going to do?”

She doesn’t know, honestly. The obvious is talk about it . In theory, it’s a great plan, but in practice it surprisingly requires so much more than talking. It’s a matter of working up the courage and the energy to open up about it, especially to the woman she’s been falling for since the moment they met, who happens to be the biggest skeptic she knows. JJ thinks back to her stay in the Allegheny hospital, wondering who the other bridge jumper was. She’d come so close to sleepwalking into her room before being stopped by the nurses, and now that she’s looking back, it’s crazy to think that Emily could have been in that room, though somehow believable all at once.

“I don’t know,” she admits with a laugh.

“You know what you need to do, right?”

“Talk to Emily,” JJ answers, her voice an almost imperceptible mumble when she mentions her soulmate’s name. It’s the kind of thing no one would would have understood unless they were expecting it, and JJ wasn’t surprised that Penelope was .

Her friend breaks out into a wide grin as soon as she catches it, and JJ wants to curl up so tightly on the couch that she disappears. “So how’d you finally figure it out?

JJ hesitates before confessing, “I woke up in her bed, again ,” she says. “There was…a moment, and she moved rooms the next night without telling me. I would have never known what room she was in if I hadn’t woken up outside her door.” At Penelope’s raised brows, JJ laughs, rolling her eyes again. “It wasn’t like that. I went back to my room.”

“But…”

“ But , I had to get a spare key card from Emily.”

“ And ?” Garcia eggs her on again.

“ And I think she already knows we’re soulmates.”

Whatever Penelope had been expecting, that wasn’t it, and she chuckles a single time before giving her head a small shake. “Oh, Jayje. You are so cute sometimes.”

“What?” JJ asks, observing the woman for any kind of answer and finding nothing until the obvious occurs to her. Her blue eyes widen and her jaw slackens as she regards her friend with surprise. The realization slip out. “You already knew because she told you, didn’t she?”

“Maybe?”

JJ groans, leaning against the wall in defeat. “How long has she known? Or are you not allowed to tell me that?” She isn’t sure she entirely wants to know. She’d read enough stories about fatumsomnambulism to know that some people held back on confessing it until the other half knew. Jennifer has only known that Emily is her soulmate for about thirty hours, and she already feels like she’s been holding onto that for too long.

“Longer than you,” is the answer, and definitely not the one she was hoping for. “JJ, I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but you just need to talk to her. You’re putting off a conversation that I know, deep down, you wanted to have years ago. I promise that if you talk to her, she’s going to listen to you. You have nothing to worry about.”

“But, I—”

“ No.” Penelope enunciates. “No buts , Jayje. You love her? You talk to her.”

Love. The word echoes in her skull, sending her into a momentary crisis before it settles itself down as something that is simply the truth .

As sure as her job is to help catch the bad guys, as sure as she misses her sister, and as sure as she sleepwalks, she’s in love with Emily.

JJ can’t argue with that.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

If we'd never met, I think I would have known my life wasn't complete. And I would have wandered the world in search of you, even if I didn't know who I was looking for. ― Nicholas Sparks

After Emily’s talk with Penelope, she decided to hold off on talking to JJ until they were on the same page, with both women having reached the conclusion that they’re soulmates. Reaching that conclusion had eased some of her anxiety on the topic, and while it was frustrating to know what was to come, but never when, she was grateful for any sense of calm.

At least until she’d been awoken in bed next to the blonde, Jennifer making a noise she’d only ever imagined in her dreams. Emily’s lips were against the soft skin of her soulmate’s neck, and in her single moment of consciousness before she bolted from the bed, she could feel the brisk thrumming of Jennifer’s pulse beneath them.

She knew from the moment she saw the look in JJ’s eyes that night that this was a turning point for them. It wasn’t clear whether or not the blonde knew they were soulmates yes, but she certainly knew something and was approaching the brink of the realization. It was for this reason that Emily had to go. Without the space she needed, who knows what this moment would lead them to—or rather, keep them away from.

When Jennifer showed up at her hotel door the next night, whose number she couldn’t possibly have known, standing barefoot in the hallway with her arms crossed self consciously over her chest, the recognition in those blue eyes was undeniable; however, it was the middle of the night in the middle of a case, and bringing it up now wouldn’t have been smart. Besides, she wanted JJ to be ready for the conversation just as much as she was.

The flight home was more restful than any other return trip they’d ever taken, and when JJ took the seat next to her and settled in to sleep like the rest of them, sending a soft smile Emily’s way as she did, the brunette’s sense of calm amplified.

From the moment she watched Jennifer fall asleep to the moment she woke up leaning on her soulmate like a pillow, she knew everything was going to be okay.

And it was.

Until she walks through the bullpen to take care of some last minute things before she goes home and spots JJ and Penelope on the couch in the liaison’s office, talking with the door closed.

How she had been so calm before this astounds her, because as she freezes next to her desk, her eyes on the back of Jennifer’s head, she can feel her heart racing with a nervous anticipation. She knows what they’re talking about, and if she had any doubts before, they all disappear when Garcia’s eyes meet hers and the woman smirks at her. Emily makes herself busy before JJ turns around. She acts like she has no idea either of them are in there, and when she tries to actually get busy, she’s too distracted to accomplish anything. She keeps letting her eyes ghost up to JJ’s office, wondering if she’ll come out before Emily leaves. If so, will they end up having their soulmate conversation here? Will it be out of obligation or because JJ is ready for it? It’s this that has her packing up early to head home. The paperwork will have to wait, and so will she.

It’s almost twelve hours later that there’s a knock on Emily’s door, both firm and hesitant. She doesn’t need to look through the peephole to know it’s JJ, but she does it anyway out of habit, before pulling the door open and hoping to bring back the calm she’d applied during the case.

She finds it for a moment until the blonde smiles at her, her blue eyes bright and confident. It’s all Emily can do not to unravel on the spot. “Hey,” JJ greets, her smile never wavering.

“I don’t have a key this time,” Emily jokes. The air around them isn’t tense, but Emily hopes to relax it all the same.

JJ laughs easily at the humorous reference to the other night, shyly ducking her head, and Emily knows what she’s about to say before the words leave the liaison’s mouth. “I was hoping we could talk?” It’s evident that she’s unsure, but her confidence is still in place. “I brought food,” JJ says, holding up a bag of Chinese takeout from one of Emily’s favorite places. “And wine,” she adds, holding up a second bag.

“Yeah, of course,” Emily says, moving over to allow Jennifer the space to enter, and she chuckles to herself as the woman carries everything to the kitchen and rummages around for a corkscrew and two wine glasses like she lives there. The thought creates a warmth in the pit of Emily’s stomach, distracting her enough to miss whatever JJ just asked her. “What?”

The blonde smiles. “I was just asking if you wanted red or white? I brought both.”

“Oh,” Emily chuckles as she shrugs. “Whichever you want.”

“Red, it is,” JJ answers as she opens the bottle. As Emily helps carry the food to the table, she can’t help but notice that not only had the blonde gone to her favorite place to get dinner, she’d also gotten her order exactly right. Has she always been paying that much attention? The thought makes Emily smile.

Dinner is more quiet, but it’s the kind of silence that’s easy and comfortable. They make a few comments here and there, not miniscule enough to be considered small talk but nothing that could launch them into their more serious discussion before they’re ready.

That conversation begins just after dinner when JJ offers to clean up the kitchen, ushering Emily to the living area before she can protest or try to help. The brunette rolls her eyes, but complies nonetheless. When Jennifer returns, topping off their wine before sitting next to Emily on the couch, the vibe in the room starts to shift.

Emily takes a sip of her wine as she watches the blonde get comfortable. JJ catches her smiling, and she laughs. “What are you smiling about?”

“You making yourself at home. You’re so comfortable here,” Emily comments. She’s observed the other woman in many new locations, but she never acts at ease like she does here.

“I like your apartment,” JJ explains. “It’s simple. Easy to get comfy in.”

Emily chuckles at that. “This isn’t the first time you’ve shown up here unannounced, after all,” she responds. It’s meant more as a tease, but once she says it, regarding a past memory directly affiliated with the reason the two of them are here now, the dynamic between them makes its final shift.

There’s a small pause before JJ speaks. “Why didn’t you say anything?” she asks, her smile faltering only slightly as she searches dark eyes for the answer. Emily doesn’t need clarification to know exactly what the other woman is asking her, but as it happens, she has no idea what to say.

“I could ask you the same about the other night,” is what she says first, and Jennifer looks down, nodding with understanding. It’s an honest answer, but it isn’t the one the blonde deserves. Truth be told, Emily is still wildly nervous about everything that’s happening right now and everything she can feel or imagine it all building to. It’s a matter of a few deep breaths and reminding herself that she owes it to both herself and to Jennifer to have this conversation, no matter how loud her heart is hammering in her chest. “That was the night I found out, you know,” she starts again. “It didn’t click until you were talking about the river.”

At the mention of that day, Jennifer releases a small laugh. “I almost saw you that weekend,” she says, and Emily can’t stop the blatant surprise from showing on her face. All she knew about that weekend in Pennsylvania was that she’d nearly died after walking over the bridge and had been unconscious and seriously medicated the whole time she was in the hospital. She didn’t even hear the full story until she was being brought back to school, and of course, she had no idea there was another person who sleepwalked into the river until she’d made it back.

“How?”

“They told me about you the next day when I woke up, and the next night I was sleepwalking to your room, but the nurses stopped me,” she explains, a soft blush spreading across her cheeks. “I never knew who you were, just that you existed.” She pauses for a long moment before softly admitting. “It wasn’t enough.”

The words are so simple, but the impact they have on Emily is astronomical. She struggles to wrap her mind around the idea of a younger Jennifer going home from the hospital wondering about the woman she’d come so close to meeting. What might have happened if Emily had stayed overnight one more time? What would have happened if she’d been awake? Without all those medications, would she have sleepwalked and met JJ halfway in the hallway of the hospital? What would she have said? Considering where her thoughts on fatumsomnambulism were at that time, them not meeting may have been for the best. “I didn’t even believe in soulmates until I met you,” she finds herself admitting. It’s a heavier sentiment than she was going for, but it’s so true that she isn’t afraid of having said it. “Somehow then, I knew.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t,” JJ laughs. “In retrospect, I’m shocked by how oblivious I was. I mean, I sleepwalked to your front door. Not to mention all those times I woke up in your bed when we shared rooms on cases,” she admits as the blush grows darker.

“I knew I couldn’t have been the only one that happened to.” JJ’s eyes flash with a surprised relief when they meet hers, and Emily grins. “But you know now, don’t you?”

“What do you think?” JJ smirks.

“Answering a question with a question…” Emily comments with a laugh, remembering the first conversation they ever had. She’d said the same thing then, and from the recognition in JJ’s eyes, she knows the blonde remembers.

“You know what they say about that, don’t you?” JJ asks, continuing the recreation of the interaction, now in reverse.

Emily smiles. “Didn’t you just do the same thing?” she asks, remembering the way she couldn’t bring herself to move her hand where it rested on the blonde’s arm. She wants to do the same now, or make some form of contact at all, but she doesn’t want it to come across rushed or too strong. She reflects JJ’s position, leaning her elbow against the back of the couch, her head in one hand and her nearly empty glass of wine in the other.

JJ surprises her by making the contact anyway, her hand casually brushing down the length of Emily’s arm, her fingers lingering closer to her shoulder. “I’m sure we could do this all day. What do you think?” The brunette knows the question is just what came next when they’d done this the first time, but the lingering contact from the woman across from her makes her breath catch in her throat all the same.

“Who are you?” Emily says, continuing to play along, sounding as breathless as Jennifer had when she’d first asked. She wonders how long they’ll keep playing this game, repeating their first interaction, especially since they’re speaking in reverse now, but the blonde’s next words answer for her.

“Your soulmate.”

It’s the first time the word has come up outloud in direct reference to them, and all the anxiety Emily has been feeling about this conversation just disappears as it had before. Now that the invisible line between them has been crossed, the fear dissipates, leaving nothing but an excited apprehension of what the future holds.

Jennifer’s blue eyes are intense as they latch onto hers, an acknowledgement of everything they are and everything they could become. The word soulmate echoes through Emily’s mind, and she remembers a time when this had felt impossible to her, back when she thought the idea of fatumsomnambulism was ridiculous. But now, looking into beautiful, deep blue eyes, knowing that every moment each of them had lived had been building to this moment, she holds firm in the belief she never imagined accepting. “What do you think about that?” she asks as she finishes her wine and sets the empty glass on the table, ever the pragmatic approach.

However, Jennifer doesn’t seem to mind going by the smile on her face. She shrugs, her smile never faltering. “I don’t know what I think about it, but I know how I feel about it.”

“And how’s that?” Emily asks, watching as Jennifer finishes her own wine and sets the glass next to Emily’s, her hand never leaving the brunette’s arm. A shiver runs down Emily’s spine as the other woman scoots closer, JJ’s shin knocking into her knee as she does.

“I’m glad it’s you,” she says as she glances up, her blue eyes darkening as they meet Emily’s. The confidence that was there when she opened the door still remains, but so does the blush, and the brunette feels her own cheeks burning as she looks down to take Jennifer’s hand in hers.

“I don’t think it could have been anyone else.”

For a few moments, neither of them say anything. They keep their eyes locked on each other, unable to look away. Emily is the first to break the silence, laughing as she tries to hide her face against the back of the couch.

“Oh my god, that sounded so corny,” she mutters before meeting JJ’s eyes again, brighter than ever as she smiles.

“I don’t mind,” JJ says, brushing a strand of Emily’s hair from her face. “I actually really like it.”

“What? Me acting like a sap?” Jennifer bites her bottom lip as she nods, as though trying not to laugh, but they both end up doing so anyways.

“And you, in general,” she says, and the words slip out as an audacious tell, as if Emily could have ever doubted the look in her eyes or found a different message within them. A part of her wants to reassure the blonde that while she didn’t believe in soulmates before, she certainly does now, but something about the way they seem to shift closer together, consciously this time, informs Emily that such words may not be necessary.

Instead, she gives into the moment and surrenders to JJ, whose hand has somehow come to rest against the nape of Emily’s neck, her fingers weaving through dark locks at the base of her hairline. Her own hand settles on Jennifer’s thigh, hallway between her knee and her hip, while their other hands remained joined.

The room around them is silent, but it goes unnoticed with the tension between them, building faster than the throbbing of Emily’s pulse as she watches Jennifer’s eyes linger on her lips, now only inches from her own. She can only imagine what it will be like when they finally meet.

It takes all the self control Emily has to hold back, allowing Jennifer to call the shots as she shifts closer, dragging the moment out. Emily lets her eyes flutter shut just before the silence is broken by her soulmate’s voice. Despite the interruption, the spell between them remains intact, and it even seems to take more control, fueled by the evident desire in JJ’s tone.

“Emily?” the blonde asks, her voice soft, quiet as if trying to cover up the tremors the nerves create in her voice. They’re still evident, but the sound of Emily’s name slipping through such beautiful, quivering lips is incredibly endearing, and the brunette smiles as she echoes the question with the other woman’s name.

“Jennifer?” Her own voice is less shaky, but it’s still nearly unrecognizable to her her own ears. She can’t determine if it simply sounds different over the pounding of her own heart or if its sound is affected by her own emotion.

If JJ says anything to her name being spoken, Emily misses it. She’s too distracted by the sudden emergence of nerves and too overwhelmed by the hopeful prospect of what’s to come. It isn’t hard to determine with the way Jennifer’s fingers ghost over her own and the way bright blue orbs dart between Emily’s eyes and her lips. The quiet moment seems to last for a millennia until she hears the blonde’s voice once again, still shy but full of undeniable longing. “Can I kiss you?”

The answer to the question is obvious, but somehow, Emily finds herself at a loss for words, which is why her answer comes in the form of leaning closer. She licks her lips as she does and uses the hand linked with Jennifer’s to bring the blonde’s hand to her waist before untangling their fingers so she can run hers through soft, blond hair.

When she realizes just saying please is enough of an answer, they’re close enough that their lips lightly brush together as she forms the word, and it’s the last thing Emily thinks about before JJ closes the distance completely.

Their first kiss is soft and desperate. It’s fierce in such a way that proves that passion goes a long way when its held back for too long, but it’s gentle as well. Jennifer’s lips move against Emily’s almost reverently as she grips the back of her neck as an anchor, while her other hand tugs at the material of her shirt.

It has only been a few moments, but Emily is dizzy nonetheless. Her body is on high alert, overwhelmingly responsive to each and every one of JJ’s touches—one hand lightly tugging in her hair, the other roaming up and down her waist, across her back, down to grasp her thigh—and the stimulation is almost too much. She doesn’t want it to end, and as she pulls back slightly to catch her breath, she starts a trail of kisses across the blonde’s jawline, her mouth unwilling to part with the soft skin beneath it. Once she reaches her neck, JJ releases a moan that Emily can feel beneath her lips, and she groans as she gently nips the skin just above her pulse point.

JJ lifts Emily’s chin, needy and sensual as their lips crash back together, and when Emily responds with a gentle tug of the blonde’s bottom lip between hers, a soft whimper leaves JJ’s lips that has the brunette unravelling on the spot. She’s intoxicated by the taste of the other woman on her tongue, and even when she breaks away, she can’t help but go back for more.

Moving at a slower pace, their contact consists of languid kisses and gentle strokes until they pull apart, their foreheads pressed together. They’re still close enough that their noses brush, but Emily keeps her eyes close, relishing in all the detail her other senses are providing her with, and the memory of her wildest dream come true.

After a moment, Emily captures JJ’s lips again, more hesitant than before as if she can’t believe that any of this is happening, but when she feels the blonde kissing her back, a soft hand ghosting across her cheek, she smiles. They share a final, lingering kiss as JJ takes one of Emily’s hands in hers, intertwining their fingers when they part again, with even less space between them than before. “Jennifer,” Emily murmurs against the blonde’s lips, and she can feel the smile it produces.

“Mmm,” JJ hums, leaning in for another kiss before pulling back again. “I like when you call me that.”

“Do you?” When Emily opens her eyes, it’s to JJ’s lips turned up into a radiant smile. Her eyes are still closed, but the brunette doesn’t mind as she takes the opportunity to observe her soulmate’s beauty unnoticed.

It only lasts for a moment before she gets caught, but it’s worth it with the way Jennifer’s smile grows. “Yeah, I do. I about melted the first time I heard you say it. Of course, I was also kind of in the middle of panicking.” Emily’s brows furrow as she racks her brain for the time JJ is referring to. After a moment, she gets the answer. “In the hotel room, a few nights ago. You may have said it before, but that moment was different. It was like I was hearing everything with new ears, feeling everything for the first time.”

Emily lets out a nervous laugh at the memory of that night. She’d been mortified when she realized what had happened, kissing JJ in her sleep. She’d been apologetic at the time, but now she feels differently.

“I still can’t believe it took me even more time to figure everything out after that. You must have been out of your mind,” JJ laughs.

“Not really,” Emily admits. “I knew you would figure it out eventually, and you would want the time and space to work this out before talking to me about it. Besides, it didn’t make life so different. The only difference was what I knew, and since one of us wasn’t ready, there was no point in losing my head over it. I think Penelope was though,” she laughs.

“Yeah, I can believe that. She went on an entire rant earlier about how I should have figured it out ages ago.” She pauses a moment before frowning and meeting Emily’s eyes with an amused glance. “I think Hotch knows.”

Emily laughs, “He might have been the first to figure it out. He had all the clues he needed. You know, your sleepwalking adventure in Kansas City and my transfer from Kansas City .”

The blonde rolls her eyes. “Of course . I didn’t even think about that. Did I know you came from there? How did none of this ever come up?”

“Neither of us talked about sleepwalking,” Emily shrugs. “I mean, I’m not even sure you knew I sleepwalked until the other day on the plane, and I would have never known if you hadn’t shown up here that one night.”

JJ nods for a moment before she opens her mouth, looking like she’s about to respond, but she stops herself. Emily’s too curious not to ask about it, eventually coaxing the blonde’s question out. “Did I go to sleep on the couch that night?”

“Yeah,” Emily laughs.

“But I woke up in your bed…” JJ mutters. “I can’t believe I didn’t even figure it out then . I literally walked to your door, and I still had no suspicion you were my soulmate.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I jumped out a window, fell off a bridge, and somehow rode the Metro all the way into the city, and never changed my opinion on soulmates. Looking back, I don’t know what I thought any of that could have meant…” she trails off as she tries to recall her rationalizations from around those times, but she stops thinking back when she notices the expression on JJ’s face. “What?”

“You woke up on the Metro one night?”

“Oh, yeah,” Emily answers. “It was around the same time as you did. I did the math the night you came over here. It was another one of my clues.”

“Of course,” JJ laughs. “That may have been one of the craziest sleepwalking moments I had, other than the river and the time it happened on the Kansas City case.” JJ pauses as if trying to recall any moments she was leaving out before saying, “I’m sure you have some crazy stories of your own.”

Emily chuckles, her eyes on JJ’s fingers as she mindlessly plays with hers. “Yeah, I’ve got a few.”

“Tell me,” JJ requests, a wide smile on her face. Still embarrassed about most of the incidents, it takes the blonde goading her into talking about it with another soft kiss and a perfectly executed puppy dog expression, which results in Emily leaning close once more to claim that pouty lip between her own. “Emily,” JJ whines, half because she wants to hear the stories and half because she doesn’t really want this distraction to end.

“Alright, fine,” Emily says as she reluctantly pulls away, launching into a series of stories, starting with the first time and every time her mother found her the next morning, the time she fell out the window, and every mortifying time she was in the bed with someone else and woke up on the couch, or just sleepwalked out altogether, completely unannounced. She can’t talk much about the times she left the bed with Doyle, but she tells what she can, however vaguely. “It’s like my body always knew I was lying next to the wrong person,” she says before mumbling, “not that I knew how to listen.”

“Hey,” JJ says, gripping Emily’s hand more firmly and brushing a strand of dark hair from her face that fell in the way as she tore her eyes from the blonde. “You did listen. It doesn’t matter how long it took for that to happen, because the fact of the matter is that you still figured it out long before I did,” she laughs. “And more than anything else, it doesn’t matter because we’re here now, together .”

The words make the corners of Emily’s mouth tilt up, and she finally—albeit hesitantly—meets JJ’s bright eyes. “You’re right.”

Before now, if anyone had ever said anything about becoming lost in someone’s eyes, or being too mesmerized by their smile to do anything but smile back, Emily would have scoffed at the cliche, but now that she can’t think of a more logical reason for her to be frozen in this moment, it’s clear to her that anything can happen. She’s here with her soulmate , for christ’s sake. She never imagined such a thing would be true.

“What are you thinking about?” JJ asks with a similar dopey grin.

“Corny shit that my younger self would roll her eyes at,” Emily honestly admits, rolling her eyes even now. “I’m happy you’re here, Jennifer.”

The smile she gets in response is effulgent, and she’s helpless to do anything other than lean in and claim the blonde’s lips with her own once again. It’s something she already doesn’t think about as she does it, and the realization sends her into a minor panic. Are they on the same page about this ? JJ must sense that something just happened inside Emily’s mind because she’s suddenly frowning, pressing a soft hand to Emily’s cheek. “Hey,” she says, her voice tender.

It’s amazing how a single word, a single touch, could have so much of an effect on her, and she finds herself speaking easily, putting aside all her usual fears and apprehensions. “What does this mean for us?” she asks, hoping that Jennifer’s desire is the same as hers (and that she doesn’t answer with a question).

“It can mean whatever we want it to mean,” JJ says. Her smile fades only slightly, and Emily knows it has everything do do with her own nerves. “I’m kind of hoping it means more of this,” she admits with a blush, her thumb brushing gently over the back of Emily’s hand. It’s a gesture that’s somehow both simple and telling—nothing too intense that it might scare Emily off, but just intimate enough to answer the question.

Nevertheless, Emily can’t help but panic a little. But as always, Jennifer knows.

“We can move at whatever pace you want, okay? This doesn’t have to be everything all at once. I just know that you make me happy, and every moment I get to spend with you is a moment I want to treasure. I don’t think I could ever get enough of this,” Jennifer tells her. “Besides, I’m not sure how fatumsomnambulism works once we’ve found each other—officially, anyway,” she clarifies with a laugh, “but I can’t imagine that I would ever stop trying to reach you.”

“Me, neither,” Emily says. “And anyway, I don’t think I would ever want that.” There’s a moment where all they can do is smile at one another, content with the knowledge that they’re both on the same page about being soulmates. They may not have it all figured out yet, but at least they know that they want to do so together. Emily leans in for another kiss, her fingers brushing softly against Jennifer’s neck, and they linger there as she pulls back, just enough to meet her blue eyes. “Unless it put you in danger, of course,” she adds, vaguely wondering what would happen if they didn’t stop sleepwalking.

JJ laughs. “So, I guess we’ll be testing this out tonight then?” she asks, thinking the same thing as Emily, more or less.

Emily smirks as she leans forward, pressing a quick peck to Jennifer’s lips before leaving a trail of kisses across her cheekbone all the way to her ear. “Who says I’m going to let you go anywhere?” she purrs, her tongue tracing the shell of JJ’s ear. She feels the blonde shudder at the action.

“Maybe we can test it later…” JJ suggests through heavy breaths, her hands clutching the material of the brunette’s shirt as Emily continues toying with her ear. The intimate brushing of her lips ceases for a moment, until Jennifer releases a strangled breath and finishes her sentence. “Later this week,” she clarifies, her breath hitching when she feels Emily’s teeth tugging lightly on her earlobe.

“That’s more like it.”