Disclaimer: I do not own the original canon nor am I making any profit from writing this piece. All works are accredited to their original authors, performers, and producers while this piece is mine. No copyright infringement is intended. I acknowledge that all views and opinions expressed herein are merely my interpretations of the characters and situations found within the original canon and may not reflect the views and opinions of the original author(s), producer(s), and/or other people.
Warnings: This story may contain material that is not suitable for all audiences and may offend some readers. Please exercise understanding of personal sensitivities before and while reading.
Summary (What Fades Away): Jason Gideon finally noticed that his TA wasn't always around anymore. He would have liked to say that Spencer making a new friend would always be considered a good thing. The problem was that he had spent too long hunting the monsters of men to not recognize a trained fighter. There was no doubt in his mind that Dr. Harry Black was more than a simple librarian.
Series Note(s): This fic take place within the continuum of The Quiet Calm. Specifically, it follows the oneshot Feed the Rain. While care has been taken so that this story can stand on its own, reading the preceding fics will increase one's understanding and enjoyment of things. Since this series is being written out of order, I recommend going by the series order given on my profile.
Special Disclaimer & Reminder: Salwa Ismail is a real person who actually exists. I have never met her or even seen her in person. I am going off of a snippet of a bio on her and the picture that goes with it. Even then, I've made a few changes (mostly by changing dates of things). So, please forgive me if I've gotten the badass librarian wrong. No insult is intended, because all librarians are badasses, even if Jason Gideon doesn't recognize it.
Song Recommendation(s): "No Light, No Light" by Florence and the Machine
Book Reference(s): Post-Deathly Hallows, disregarding the Epilogue.
Episode Reference(s): S01Ep03 (Won't Get Fooled Again); S01Ep04 (In Plain Sight); S01Ep05 (Broken Mirror)
Timeline Reference(s): October 2005
-= LP =-
What Fades Away
-= LP =-
"The wisest of the wise may err." – Aeschylus
-= LP =-
It was so satisfying to return Bale to that tiny cell. The fog that had been there the last nine months receded and it felt like all his senses were coming back online. Jason Gideon had finally achieved a victory over that egotistical twat. The loss of the agents in Boston didn't feel like an albatross around his neck anymore and saving the ones sent after Walker was sweet, sweet triumph on top of it all.
Because Jason was always good at ignoring what he didn't want to face, he shunted the reminder that the grief had started lifting when Bale had forced him to apologize and not after defusing the bomb by going contrary to Bale's advice.
The high of it lasted through the following week. He made it to all his classes for once. Hell, he even got caught up on much of the backlog of paperwork which covered his desk. It wasn't until he had turned to hand off a stack of finished files that he realized that Reid wasn't at his own desk. Panic flared hot and bright before something tumbled out of the fog that still haunted the corners of his mind.
Reid has been leaving for the main library every Tuesday and Thursday in the afternoon. Reid wasn't missing. He hadn't been taken by an unrecognized unsub who had noted that he was the most vulnerable of the team. This was normal behavior even if Jason hadn't noted when it became a habitual thing. He had noticed it though, because spotting changes in behavior was second nature after what seemed like a lifetime of working in behavioral analysis, which helped now to shove away sharp edges of the hypervigilance.
Reid was not the eighteen-year-old who had listened to his lectures at the academy like they were the most fascinating radio dramas of all times. He was not the twenty-one-year-old that had almost vomited at his first disposal site that doubled as a murder site. He may still have had a lot of growth ahead of him, but Reid did not require any more protection than the other field agents on the team. Besides, if Reid was at the main library, then he was under Salwa's watchful eyes and the only thing she guarded more fiercely than her favorite TA was the books under her care.
Reid was safe.
But it wouldn't hurt to be absolutely certain.
Salwa pointed off to the research section the moment she spotted him, too busy wrangling the press of students which seemed to always swell right before the midterm tests and due dates. Jason figured that Reid had probably taken over the main table in the section again. As he searched for his AWOL TA, Jason sorted through the possible research projects Reid could have taken up. Reid was prone to binges when something came up in cases which interested him.
This was not anything to be worried about; this was normal.
Except Reid wasn't at the main table with his research spread out around him. He was sitting behind the desk with another young man. Jason stopped in his tracks, shocked by what the pair's body language revealed. They were sitting close together, despite the ample room being the desk and Reid's typical aversion to people in his personal space. When Reid raised a ceramic mug to take a drink, Jason felt his own focus narrow to his companion.
The stranger was around Reid's age but given the dullness in his eyes, he was most likely older in at least experience if nothing else. Jason estimated that the man would be at least a head shorter than Reid, but the way he held himself, like he needed to be smaller and unnoticed, could just be giving that impression. They had the same whippet builds, but even from so far away, Jason could see the faint lines of hard muscles on the other man's arms and shoulders. So, someone who likely had some kind of fitness regime that included strength training. Like Reid, the man didn't seem to regularly schedule a haircut or shape it into any particular style. Unlike Reid, the hair was as black as pitch and as wild as a scalded cat.
Jason was just about to leave Reid to his new friend when the man stood to help a student who had approached with a question—but before the girl had done anything to get either man's attention. The man moved with the same fluid grace as a cat. His every motion wasted nothing, super-efficient in their entirety.
Dangerous and blooded combatant was the analysis Jason's mind screamed, rousing all the protective instincts he had been dismissing as paranoia. He wasn't military; the training left a distinctive stamp upon a person's posture and habits which this man didn't have. Besides, he was so young, easily within a year of Reid's twenty-three almost twenty-four. Unease curled in Jason's gut as the man returned and Reid tilted his head so that Jason saw the smile he gave.
This was potentially bad.
-= LP =-
"I'm sorry, sir, but what the fudge?" Garcia looked confused, annoyingly so. Jason had thought that his request had been simple. He was providing her with far more details than the team was normally able to give as they hunted an active unsub, because he had made sure to pull Harry Black's employment file from Georgetown. The girl was constantly going on about how skilled she was. Moreover, she routinely backed up those claims. This shouldn't be a problem.
"I want you to pull all the records you can for him," Jason repeated. "Anything and as far back as you can go. Do you need the information again?"
"Sir, is this official business? Because I'm not really supposed to use the Bureau's resources for private research. Hotch—I mean, Agent Hotchner made that a term of my employment and I'd really rather not go to federal prison. I'm not meant for prison gray. I require color, sir—lots of it—and nice, fuzzy things—"
"He's a new hire at Georgetown," Jason interrupted. The tech could be overwhelming even on a good day, and this was already shaping up to not be one of those. The good feeling from beating Bale had fully faded with the discovery of the potential predator so close to the kid. He forced himself to focus on the blonde. Focusing was the best way to achieve his end goal. "Reid's been spending time with him, but there's something off about him. The university's file on him was rather thin. I just want you to see what you can find, Garcia."
"This is for Spencer? You should have led with that, sir." She spun her chair back towards her monitors. Her fingers tapped away at the keyboard as she rambled her thought processes. "I have a Harry James Black on staff at Georgetown University as chief research librarian since July 1 of this year. Entered the country on June 10 with a valid visa issued from the UK—oh, my."
"What is it?"
"The visa type is O-1, and he has a Diplomatic Note that's signed by Elizabeth II herself. It cites him as a national treasure which holds personal interest to the Crown. Dear God, sir. He's a librarian. Apparently a damn good one? Because record shows that he has two doctorates, Data Science and Psychology, and four Masters, which are in no particular order: Librarianship, Laws, Business Administration, and Literature. All from Cambridge. No undergraduate degrees but apparently a crapload of course credits gained through testing by the aforementioned school. That's a whole lot of really high scores, sir, and none of them were flagged for suspicion. There's a slew of awards for research projects in the six-ish years he attended. Those projects were not exactly clustered by topic either. It's a real Heinz-57 mix. It almost looks like he did research projects on anything that caught his attention for longer than five minutes. I can see the draw for the Boy Wonder if these records are even half-legit."
"They may not be," he cautioned to buy himself time to think about the spill of information. "You said he studied at Cambridge for six years? Where was he before then?"
"Yeah, he started October 1999, a month after taking twelve A-Level exams in September. Do you want the list?" She let him wave the question away because she had found the juicy bits now. "Harry Black comes into being at a private meeting with the Queen on August 3, where he was presented with a Victoria Cross for, and I quote this in its entirety: 'services rendered to the Commonwealth'. He was nineteen."
"What about before that?" Jason demanded. Garcia was already click-clacking away at her computer. He couldn't track what databases she was accessing, not with the way she was jumping between them. Frankly, even finding the record of a private meeting with a member of the royal family was impressive and probably only possible because of the investiture. Still, no one comes out of nowhere, especially not directly into a Victoria Cross. "Military records? Prior schooling? Parents?"
"On it, sir, but it may take a while…" Garcia sounded unsure, which Jason knew wasn't like her, but he was too focused on trying to track the information on her screens to care. "Nothing in any of the British Armed Forces' open database, and I'm not finding his nomination for honor, not even a retracted notice of it. I could dig deeper but that risks pinging something in their system if I'm not careful. Given time to work around their encryption, I can probably get it, and frankly, I'm curious now. Do you think he could be a real-life James Bond? Would they train someone that young? He's only a year older than Spencer. I think I found school records that aren't Cambridge, but—oh, that would explain things, wouldn't it? Sneaky, sneaky, little geeky. Come ta Mama now."
"Garcia?"
"Sorry, sir," she apologized immediately but didn't turn away from the monitors as she worked through systems. "Our mysterious librarian was apparently born Harry James Potter. He attended Brickman Primary in Little Whinging, Surrey, before going to…that can't be right." Garcia flipped through pages and data sets as fast as Reid did books. "There's nothing. The record goes dead for eight years. The local secondary has him down as a withdrawn student, but his records were never requested to be passed along to another school and the local truancy officer was never sent to verify his attendance anywhere. Brickman's records are thick with notations and incident reports, but once Black left, he didn't seem to go anywhere else. I'm not seeing any indication that any of this is forged, but that doesn't happen, sir."
Jason let the information digest for a few minutes. Garcia continued her search, filling the room with muttered curses and clicking keys. He doubted the file was fake, because anyone good enough to avoid obvious tells would not have left the blank spots. That meant that even as unbelievable as the Cambridge portion of the academic record was, it was legit. That explained why Salwa had been willing to hire him as soon as she reviewed his application, despite the oddness of the timing. Salwa always did have an eye for rare collector pieces, even when those pieces were people. She had spotted Reid on his first Master's, after all. By process of elimination, that left covert operations for where Black could have disappeared to, the deep kind that was typically not acknowledged outside the intelligence community because no one wanted to admit to training children as operatives.
"This doesn't make sense," Garcia snapped. The frustration in her tone made the words ominous. "There's tons of reports in the Brickman file, but it's all contradictory even before taking into consideration the later stuff. It's like looking at the record of two different people! From halfway through his first year at Brickman, his grades are consistently and perfectly average, but that first semester is full of assessments that are even higher than Spencer's at the same age. There's no record of brain injury during the winter break, but the kid goes from uber-genius to exactly middle-of-the-class and that's no exaggeration either. Kid holds that middle ground like it's the hill he's gonna die on for the next five years. Then there's the behavioral reports."
"What, what do the behavioral reports say?"
"There's reports of fighting at least once a week throughout the school year, mostly with the same group of boys, but occasionally only two or three of the five. The boys cite self-defense against Potter and Potter ends up with disciplinary notices—oh, and repeated suspensions of library privileges. That seemed to be the school's default punishment, given the number of absences the kid racked up in a given term for illness. Checked the local medical facilities already, by the way, and there's no corresponding records for treatment. Potter's only medical records are the required vaccinations and examinations required by the school and a single trip to an eye doctor that resulted in a recommendation to a neurologist that was never followed up on. There's repeated notations from the school about hygiene and nutrition concerns—apparently, he routinely didn't have his packed lunch and when he did, there was not a lot in it—but it's apparently explained as being Harry's fault for being picky. His guardian of record, Petunia Dursley, claims that her nephew is a violent delinquent prone to pathological lying. The first time that claim makes it into the record coincides with the first report of Harry allegedly bullying his cousin and his friends. The boys were seven."
"Antisocial Personality can manifest that young," Jason replied to her skeptical tone. She gave him a look that made it clear exactly what she thought of that remark. He nodded sharply. "It's unlikely in this case, but it can present that young." He didn't mention that genius of this level was rarely the sole neurological divergence present in an individual. Jason was certain being told that their socially awkward coworker was more than capable of lying and manipulating just like any sociopath would shake Garcia even more than she already was. "Print this for me, will you, Garcia? And don't go digging into the military records any further."
"Sir?"
"Let's call it precautionary preservation of Bureau assets," he answered, deliberately being vague. "That's a beehive you probably don't want to go poking."
"Sir," she questioned as he was leaving. Jason turned to find her blue eyes focused on him with uncomfortable sharpness, assessing him as so many gazes were since his return. A feeling that he had underestimated the analyst niggled at the back of his mind before he pushed it away as unimportant. Aaron had personally sought her out and he was as picky as any of the other original members of the BSU. No matter how much that look unnerved him, he could trust that Aaron wouldn't have brought a viper into the unit. "Did you find what you needed to make sure that our Boy Wonder is safe?"
"I saw enough to know that Reid is either safer than he's ever been or in more danger than he would be in an unsub's hands." The words were too honest, too blunt, and Jason knew as soon as he said them that Garcia would probably not understand what kind of threat this man posed. Jason wasn't even certain if he could articulate it properly.
How does one talk about the danger to someone's soul without sounding like a zealot?
-= LP =-
Jason had known it was a gamble when he gave Reid the tickets. Reid was not the type to be interested in sports of any kind, but JJ certainly was. Given how Reid had noted her unique name for him with a carefree grin on his face, Jason knew that JJ was probably the best person to divert the kid's attention from Black without a confrontation with either genius.
He should have expected it not to work when Reid had left him in checkmate.
He was not expecting to return to his office at Georgetown to find that Salwa had let herself into it. The woman barely paused from rearranging the collection of books they kept in the cluttered room. The glare tossed over her shoulder could have been for the disordered books, but Jason had a feeling that she knew what he was trying to do and didn't approve.
Being right didn't bring the vindication that locking away Bale a second time had.
"You're a good man, Dr. Gideon," she said when she finally had the books the way she wanted them. Unsurprisingly, it was similar to how Reid had taken to organizing them the last few months. The realization that the kid had started using a proper archival system felt heaving in Jason's stomach. How deeply ingrained had Black's influence gotten before he had even noticed the man existed? Salwa snapped her fingers, drawing Jason's attention back from the brief rabbiting it had been threatening to do. She used two fingers to point to her eyes in a silent command for him to focus.
"You are a good man," Salwa repeated once she was assured of his attention, "and you've had a tough year, so I'm going to give you a chance to talk to me about this before you do something more obvious than sending Penny off to a football game with some random woman who doesn't even have a Masters in anything. I can only imagine why you thought that was a good idea, but then again, I imagine that you must have been feeling rather desperate. I understand how someone with your experiences might view someone like Dr. Black. I'm sure that by now, you've ran his background as well."
"Dr. Ismail, you have to know that he's dangerous, and in more ways than one."
"You are correct, Dr. Gideon," she agreed without hesitation. Her dark eyes flashed with restrained irritation. She folded her hands together at her waist and raised her chin in defiance. "You are not the only person on this campus capable of recognizing the potential monster in strangers. The difference between us will always be that I have not spent my life hunting them down like rabid dogs."
"Of course not," Jason dismissed. "You're a librarian."
"Exactly, Dr. Gideon. I am a librarian. I have a doctorate in Mathematics and another one in Social Psychology. I am finishing another doctorate in Computational Social Sciences. Yet I chose to become a librarian. I chose to dedicate my life to hunting down books and databases instead of the monsters that hunt my fellow humans. You have to see how that is relevant to this discussion, and in more ways than one."
"You don't—"
"Understand? Is that what you were going to say? Do you think I am blind, Dr. Gideon? I do know a predator when I see one."
"Then you know—"
"That Dr. Black is not harmless should he be provoked," Salwa interrupted again. Jason threw his hands into the air to vent his frustration. She raised a single eyebrow at his melodramatic gesture. Unable to bear the weight of that stare, he rubbed a hand over his face. She didn't let him have his momentary retreat. "I do not know everything about my research librarian, but I do know that he needs a safe place to lay down the burden he's been carrying for far too long without any help. I see a monster just the same as you do, Dr. Gideon, only I am also keeping watch for Frankenstein."
"You saw the hole, right?"
"I did," she answered simply, "and I am not unaware of what kind of things typically fill such a hole and end with a Victoria Cross. Did you see his visa?"
"O Type," Jason stated. He closed his eyes to better maintain his neutral tone. "Nonimmigrant with extraordinary ability or achievement. His Diplomatic Note calls him a national treasure."
"The personal interest was what threw me," Salwa admitted. Something in her tone made Jason look at her. Her olive skin was slightly flushed across the cheekbones. "I thought it was just a phrase, something that gets mentioned. He has a Victoria Cross. Of course, he would be of interest to the Crown. I was not expecting a direct call from Her after I hired him. It was terribly unnerving."
"You still think it's wise to let him get his claws into Reid?"
"Do you really think that's the greatest danger here? As far as I can tell Harry is protective of Penny and far more adaptive to his boundaries than the agents I've seen, yourself included. If Harry is the uncontrollable beast you fear him to be, what do you think the fallout would be if something were to happen during a case? Consulting has such a broad definition for your team, after all. I'm just a simple librarian, but even I can see how one genius leading another down a life of violent crime is the least likely problem to come out of their keeping company."
"Such an old-fashioned phrase," Jason commented in lieu of anything else to say as he contemplated the rest of her words. Salwa shook her head slightly, not attempting to justify it anyway. He understood the dilemma with the terminology. Relationship implied something that was most likely not there, at least not yet. Friendship failed to capture the depth of emotion that was obvious to anyone watching the pair together.
He didn't like this.
Moreover, he didn't like that he couldn't tell how much of that feeling was an honest assessment of the situation and how much was hypervigilance from his textbook case of PTSD. Jason knew that as protective as he was of all the team, Reid was a special case. The kid was too much like Stephen and Jason had pushed through Reid's assignment to the BAU which made the kid doubly his responsibility. Field work always held dangers. Chasing monsters was not without risk. He had to stop letting this get to him to the degree that he had this last month. He closed his eyes with a sigh and held onto a single thought.
Reid was safe.
Jason repeated the words like a mantra.
He didn't let himself think about what might happen if it was ever not the truth.
It didn't matter now, and therefore it could be worried about some other time.
For now, the danger was contained. Salwa may have brought a viper onto the campus, but she was a competent handler. He could trust her to recognize if the situation ever changed. He could trust her to keep a watchful eye on the kid. Meanwhile, he'd keep watch on the other end.
Reid was safe, and they would keep him that way.
-= LP =-
An Ending
-= LP =-