#anyway this originated in tags i left on a gifset of them dancing in 7x24

[ssaemilyhotchner]

there is so much i have said over the past decade about hotch and emily dancing at the end of 7x24, and yet still so much more i could possibly say.

i frequently come back to how it felt to watch this scene for the first time when the ep first aired - the euphoria, the grief, the claws around my heart.

it was, for me and so many others who were online at the time, the perfect embodiment of what shipping can be for people. the scene in question was, for all intents and purposes, the last time we thought we would ever see the character of emily prentiss again. and so if you really wanted to view it uncharitably, you could have seen that scene as the ultimate dashing of hopes that our ship would ever become canon. but by and large, that's just not how we saw it in real time.

instead, there was this sense of true joy, a perfect culmination, closure, bittersweet and blissful. closure to have gotten them acknowledging each other's tells. smiles, tenderness, attention. it's a date.

and then.

then we got hotch pulling emily to him. we got the juxtaposition of how he looks dancing with beth compared to how he looks dancing with emily - gone is the levity and in its stead is a deep intimacy, understanding, and gentleness that undergirds so many of their interactions throughout the series. (and again, you have to realize, this is before we knew what we know now - that emily would not just return but take up the mantle of unit chief at his request, that she would risk death for him and his son. we couldn't have imagined that then and it was still this clarion moment of yes, this is what we have been seeing all along represented in technicolor on the screen.)

i will always be silly about hotch and emily, but i will also always be so deeply serious about their pairing. i just love them.