5a/n: Drabble-y goodness because I just can't get enough of Emily as Lauren…she is endlessly fascinating.
With a wince, Emily gingerly fingers the mottled purple flesh under her eye and studies the angry red welts at the base of her neck... battle wounds, as she calls them.
She stares at her reflection in the mirror with contempt. Emily Prentiss would never allow a man to raise his fist to her and stick around for the encore.
Yet, here she is.
She sticks around because Lauren Reynolds would. A fiercely unrelenting, confident woman in the international arms game, but nauseatingly compliant and fragile in her personal life, Lauren is the type of woman to stick around when a man hits her.
As long he expresses regret with forty-two long stemmed red roses, murmurs of "I'm sorry, love," and a glittering ruby ring set in twenty-four-carat gold, she will stick around.
Emily is having difficulty reconciling herself with this Lauren character, a character dictated entirely by a profile some Interpol agent constructed, because they are two entirely different personas trapped in the same physical body.
This is undercover work and she knows it, but that doesn't preclude her from having moments like these where she steals away to the stunning alabaster bathroom suite and finds herself bent over the sink, breathing deeply, slowly, and nursing her latest injury at the hands of Ian Doyle.
In and out. In and out. She coaches herself.
It's in these rare moments alone where she lets Emily Prentiss bubble to the surface, as if she has been trapped underwater for days, flailing and fighting for air.
Several times she has thought about calling Clyde and insisting he get her out. Pull some strings and get her the hell out of this sprawling Tuscan mansion with its lush green gardens and endless gilded hallways and out from Ian Doyle's vice grip.
But that, too, is not Emily. Emily would finish the job assigned to her, regardless of a target's rough hands and violent tendencies.
Plus she knows Clyde will ask too many questions. She can't lie to him, and once he finds out Doyle has been hitting her, he'll pull her out without a second thought, and they will lose their target.
No, she can't do that. She won't be the reason their mission fails.
With a splash of water to her face and the straightening of her silken blouse, Lauren stands up defiantly.
And just like that, for yet another day, Emily has been tucked neatly back into her pocket for safekeeping, and her Lauren Reynolds suit has been zipped back up.