Work Text:
When Emily Hotchner is sixteen, she brings her girlfriend home for dinner for the very first time. Kris already has the JJ seal of approval, but that's nothing with being confronted with the rest of the Hotchner clan. Emily's been over to the Harrison's three times, though, and both Papa and Dad have been giving her that look.
Dad is cooking lasagna, which means even Derek will be there since it's Spring Break and besides none of the Hotchner kids would miss home made lasagna for anything less than the imminent apocalypse. Emily has tried to warn Kris, but seeing is believing with the Hotchners, and Emily is worried that just the decibel level that Pen and Spence can produce will be enough to make quite Kris flee. It is lasagna night after all.
They come home together after school. Emily had picked Thursday because Kris had swim practice and she had debate club, and that meant that there would be less time for Papa to interrogate anyone before dinner got started. She knows better than to think that there won't be questions, but she'll take what she can get. So if she and Kris walk home, holding hands and dawdling a bit, well, it may just be all a part of Emily's master plan.
"Your family isn't going to eat me," Kris says with a smile when Emily suggests they take the scenic route. "And you've been talking up this lasagna for a week now and I don't want to miss it."
"It is good lasagna," Emily admits, and so forgoes the longer path.
At home, Spence and Pen are in the backyard, running around with a soccer ball while JJ tries to get them to actually play with her instead of some invented game which only Spence and Pen know the rules to. Spence and Pen believe that inventing new rules is part of any game, and that's why in the Hotcher house, when you knock a car off the table in Life, you have to pay for the medical bills. "Dad and Morgan are in the kitchen," JJ says and smiles at Kris.
"Ready?" Emily asks under her breath, but Kris just laughs.
"Ready."