F: Share a snippet from one of your favourite dialogue scenes you've written and explain why you're proud of it.
Well this was hard to do. But okay, this is from chapter 15 of no such thing as over this. Clyde has offered Emily a job running an international taskforce out of London that seems to have been made specifically for her. Will's just walked into the bank.
“If it was you,” she says, barely moving her lips, watching Morgan trying to calm JJ, “I don’t know. . .”
“I know,” Hotch murmurs, his voice low and soothing. “We’re gonna be okay. You ready?”
“Yeah,” she replies, but then her phone is buzzing in her pocket. “No. Hold on.” She looks at the caller ID. “It’s Clyde – he can wait,” she says.
“No, take it,” Hotch says. “He might have something we can use.”
She swipes to answer. “Make it quick,” she says. “I’m on my way into a shootout with some bank robbing serial killers.”
“Does he know who the woman is?” Hotch asks.
“Was that Agent Hotchner?” Clyde says, all polite curiosity. “Do you know what he said to me, when he was trying to track you down? He said, ‘if anything happens to her, I will destroy you’. He meant it, darling. Would he be anything to do with the reason you’re considering refusing a very attractive job offer in my nation’s capital?”
“Oh, a girl can’t turn a job down for her own reasons?” she says. “There has to be a man calling the shots?”
“I’m speaking as a profiler, Emily, not as a misogynist.”
She rolls her eyes. Hotch shoots her a what the hell are you talking about look, and she holds up a finger: give me one minute. “I’m afraid I’m busy right now, Clyde – you’ll need to profile me another time.”
“Wait,” he says, suddenly all business. “Before you cut me off and get back to your gunslinging, tell me this. The team is all over – managing it out of London has been a marriage of convenience. If I made you the same offer, right now, based out of DC, would you take it?”
“Yes,” she says immediately, surprising herself.
“Wonderful,” he replies, satisfied. “Best of luck with your shootout – I’ll start printing your business cards. À bientôt, ma belle.”
She looks at the bank, at the door Will disappeared through and immediately took a bullet. “J'espère,” she replies, and hangs up.
“Anything?” Hotch says, as she stashes her phone back in her pocket and adjusts her earpiece.
And idk, I like it because Emily and Clyde's dynamic is just kind of fun to play with. There's always some amount of power play and reading between the lines going on, they never seem to just be 100% upfront with each other, he's always a little bit flirtatious and she never really flirts back (interesting in itself when she flirts with plenty of other people). And then with Hotch in the middle hearing half of it like 'wtf'... Idk I just liked it. And I always wanted some acknowledgement of the 'I will destroy you' moment because that is a Big Thing to say and then just never have it come back in any way at all.
It took me a long time and a ridiculous amount of back and forth to figure out what her new job was going to be, because I really didn't want it to be running an entire Interpol office. (Because that makes no sense as a step from where she was, and I think it starts her on the path to miserable workaholic she's clearly committed to in Evolution.) So it was going to be a promotion in the FBI for a while... But I had "I'm speaking as a profiler, Emily, not as a misogynist" in my outline from the start and I really did not want to have to kill it lol.
I: Do you have a guilty pleasure in fic (reading or writing)?
Answered (or non-answered) here!
S: Any fandom tropes you can't resist?
Always here for only one bed and all its ridiculous permutations. Fake dating is fun. All those forced proximity 'oops I'm attracted to you, who knew' tropes.
