Work Text:
**Chapter 1: The Reckoning**
**September 14, 2007:**
I snapped.
The day started like any other—wake up, eat breakfast, and get called in for a case. But this case was different; it was about the murder of Aaron Hotchner. His body was found posed in the bullpen, discovered by Emily Prentiss.
Emily had a typical morning too, waking up with a familiar sense of shame. But that wasn’t the only feeling—it might have had something to do with drinking herself half to death the night before and passing out on her expensive velvet couch, surrounded by case files and half-eaten buckets of KFC in her tiny apartment. She dressed in a tight-fitting red shirt and cargo pants, tied her long jet-black hair into a messy bun, and decided to walk to work, figuring she could burn off some calories—a thought that had been drilled into her by her mother all those years ago.
She pushed that thought back into her mind, intending to bring it up in therapy later. Little did Emily Prentiss know, she would never make it to that therapy appointment.