Emily wraps her hands around her coffee mug the second the waitress puts it on the table, murmurs her thanks with half a smile and looks back at Clyde. Just the sight of him makes her antsy, although that seems to be true of pretty much everything recently. She's been back in DC a month and she's starting to realise thing aren't going to be how they were.

"How are you adjusting?" Clyde asks.

He's asked her that question before so many times, and she's answered it as so many people, that she can only smile ruefully at him. "Emily Prentiss is alive," she replies.

He smiles back, raises his mug, and she raises hers and clinks. They sip, and she stares out of the café window even though she can feel Clyde looking at her. She watches the bustle of DC, tries to picture herself a seamless part of it, like she was before, and feels Doyle looming over every memory she recalls. It makes her feel sick and sad, the inevitability of this falling apart every bit as strong as the inevitability Doyle would find her. "You know," Clyde says, after a silence just a little too long, "this place suits you better than I thought it would. I couldn't imagine why you'd want to join the FBI of all things, but your team is really something."

He raises his eyebrows as she turns to him, and she can feel the ghost of a smile on her face. Despite everything, the thought of her team was what made bad nights in Paris bearable. She wants to say, I love them, but she knows better. "It's a more interesting job than you led me to believe," she says instead, and Clyde laughs.

"Well, I wanted to keep you as long as I could." He takes another sip of coffee and watches the smile fade from her face. "They couldn't stand to lose you," he says, and her gaze snaps back to his. "Do you know what Agent Hotchner said to me? He said, 'If anything happens to her, I will destroy you'. He meant it, darling."

She looks down at her coffee, blows softly to disperse the steam but finds tears threatening anyway. She has tried not to imagine the team trying to find her, the fear they would've felt and the unthinkable threat that would've hung over everything. But she has wondered about Hotch, imagined his relentless intensity focused on finding her, how he would've felt when they didn't make it on time to stop her from getting hurt… "He would have, too," she tells Clyde eventually, her lips twitching up a little.

When she can meet Clyde's eyes again, there's a flicker of something like satisfaction there. For a moment she wonders what she's given away that he wanted, then he says, "Do yourself a favour, Emily. Call him." She feels heat flood her cheeks, starts to object but Clyde cuts her off. "Do you remember what you told me about why you didn't want to be undercover any more?"

"I told you a lot of things," she replies, which is so obviously evasive she doesn't expect him to acknowledge she said anything at all.

"You told me it was time to live your own life," he says, "without thinking every single move had the potential to destroy everything. Can you honestly say you've done that, since joining the BAU?"

She closes her eyes, opens them again to look out of the window. "Clyde?" she says, a smile creeping into her voice as she feels a little weight lift from her chest.

"Yes."

"Sometimes I hate you a little bit."

He laughs, reaches across the table and squeezes her shoulder. "I can live with a little bit."