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JJ thinks about her sister.
The loss of Will is raw and recent. Worse, JJ knows that it is her own fault. Not for being beautiful. Not for attracting interest. She knows none of that is ever the fault of a sociopath’s target, but she is more than a target. She has always been more than a victim. As a trained FBI profiler, she should have noticed the warning signs. She should have known Will was at risk. He died because she didn’t do her job. He died because she wasn’t paying attention.
As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would say, “By seeking and blundering we learn.” JJ learns from her mistakes. She focuses. She pays attention.
She still misses things.
She still misses Will. She always misses her sister. She even misses Emily. Like a limb, raw with the phantom pain of not knowing, but hoping that if anyone could survive the crush of Europe’s zombie population it would be Emily Prentiss. JJ misses a lot of people.
When Spencer puts a gun to his temple, she isn’t shocked. She doesn’t hesitate before agreeing that she will be next. It has nothing to do with taking the easy way out. But in that moment, she thinks about her sister. She thinks about Henry and how it will feel for an orphan to know that his freedom was bought by suicide. It doesn’t come to that. Her son sees death, but he doesn’t see that. In the new world, that’s the best she can do for him.
It’s a shock when she finds out Spencer is sleeping with Morgan. She’d been watching. She’d been watching so closely. She saw the way Park smiled at Spencer, how he relaxed in her presence enough to motor on about minutia. She saw the way Freeman looked at Morgan, coolly assessing his fitness as a father figure. She’d seen, but she hadn’t known. It was her job to do better.
JJ thinks about her parents with dread. It’s almost a relief to put them down. It would be better to bury them. To burn the past away. It would also put the future at risk. JJ might be sentimental, but she doesn’t take risks. She pays attention.
She watches Morgan closely. Sees him pulling away from Spencer. Sees Spencer reeling him back in carefully, hesitantly. She’s happy for them. Together, they’re more stable than they would be apart.
Spencer doesn’t need to be watched in the same way. He has been broken a hundred times in a hundred different ways, many of them long before the world ended. She knows what that looks like at least. High on dilaudid, weeping in her apartment, listless on his own floor—she’s seen the way he falls apart. She knows those signs. She saw them when he shot a dead little girl in a hospital. She saw them again when Blake died. Yet for all the ways he breaks, Spencer might be the most durable member of the team. JJ watches him lace his fingers with Derek’s and she knows that he’s happy. For the moment, he’s whole.
Penelope doesn’t need watching either. She doesn’t break; she bends. When the sunshine goes behind a cloud, everyone knows it. Penelope weeps and clings to JJ and rails about Kevin’s stupidity and mourns Will even more obviously than Henry. In a way, Garcia’s volatility makes her more stable than the rest of the team. When the tears pass, they’re over and she is once again nothing but smiles and witty quips to keep their spirits up. Garcia doesn’t hide anything, not like other members of the team.
Not like Hotch. JJ watches Hotch constantly. He hides more than anyone else, takes his role as a leader seriously, never lets his guard down for a second. It’s a brittle facade, and she keeps a careful eye on the cracks. When his paranoid, protective impulses ramp up to eleven, she angles Garcia toward him and watches him calm under her endless stream of comforting chatter. The way that works makes her nervous too. For other reasons. Because he is a good man, and Penelope loves him, but JJ has never seen her look at him the way he looks at her. If Hotch is going to break, JJ thinks it will happen there, in the space between his longing to relax with someone he can trust and what Garcia is able to give. But JJ can’t do anything about that, so she watches.
Watching the younger Hotchner is a little more complicated. The whole group recognizes his instability, but bearing down on him doesn’t help. Adding external pressure to his own drive to parent his daughter perfectly will only crush the already broken man. He doesn’t need anyone to see his failures. Still, she watches. JJ can’t help watching, and at least she has more practical infant care advice for him than Morgan does.
It’s the same with Freeman and Park. Worse, because they’re both trained observers. They know she’s watching. Unfortunately, they react differently. Freeman just smiles privately at JJ and starts narrating her movements a little more. Somehow, recognizing JJ’s hypervigilance seems to decide Freeman in their favor, earning a measure of trust beyond the initial decision to join them on the road. In the other corner, Park wilts. She talks less and less, reads more and more. Some of that could be the discovery of her dead grandparents and the loss of hope, but JJ doesn’t think her close scrutiny helps. It doesn’t matter. She can’t stop paying attention.
She can’t stop thinking about her sister. She won’t let Park go the same way; she’ll notice the signs this time, if there are any.
JJ watches her boys. Henry and Jack have become inseparable, brothers in everything but blood, and she loves Jack just as much as her own son. She loves him for the way he plays with a boy six years younger than him and never once bullies or belittles. Sometimes watching them breaks her heart, thinking about all the pain and death they’ve seen with their innocent eyes. Even so, watching them gives her strength. Purpose. Neither of them could ever be a danger. They can only be in danger, and JJ will not let that happen.
She won’t let harm come to any member of her family.
But she knows that isn’t a promise she can make. Not really. Even she has to sleep. She can’t be in all three cars at once. She can’t always be watching. She can’t watch Emily at all. If anyone could survive the end of the world, it was Emily Prentiss, but there was more to survival than skill. There needed to be hope.
JJ thinks about Emily a lot.
And she thinks about her sister.