Author's Note:

This is my entry to the Fanfic Challenge Round 12 - Writers of the Silver Screen challenge on Chit Chat on Author's Corner.

The main character of my choice was Ashley Seaver (I like her a lot & think it's sad that Rachel Nichols has to leave the show) and the character I got was Hotch. Which came in pretty handy. The prompt is "A Beautiful Mind", one of my favourite movies. I hope the connection to the plot of my story is obvious enough.

I tried hard on correcting most if the mistakes in grammar and spelling & hope that everything's understandable.

I do not own anything. Neither 'Criminal Minds', not 'A Beautiful Mind'. No copyright infringement intended.

Please, please, please leave a review! I love every form of feedback - praise and worship as well as some criticism. Just tell me what you think!

Look down at me and you see a fool; look up at me and you see a god; look straight at me and you see yourself. - Charles Manson

The girl's tears sparkled in the blazing light of the midday sun as they were rolling down her cheeks.

The man, still wearning his loud orange prison jumpsuit, which was way too big for his stocky build, reinforced the pressure of the hunting knife against the girl's throat, causing her to cry harder.

A bunch of policemen, her backup, as she ironically thought, stood behind her, forming a large semicircle to assure that none of them would miss what for sure was the most volatile scene each of them would ever witness; witness being the operative word considering that they all owned duty weapons but kept them properly holstered.

Ashley Seaver, however, stood right in the middle of the situation, holding her gun in one hand next to her body as she decided that trying to solve the problem non-violenty was definitley worth a shot. In fact it also was her best, maybe only, chance. The man, by the name of Doctor Joseph Huntington MD, had killed more than enough children during the past two months to leave no doubt that he would make this girl -Haley Jacobs, eight years old, randomly grabbed when she was on her way to her weekly piano lesson- his last victim, if Ashley wasn't careful enough. Unfortunately she hadn't been supposed to be the one to talk to him since she had too little of experience to be able to impeccably estimate his reaction. Only due to a bunch of coincidences she had happened to be the sole BAU member present and there she was - facing a situation that was too dangerous to be a good opportunity to train her skills.

"Doctor Huntington", she began, forcing herself to talk with a firm, confident voice.

Accordning to the profile Joseph Huntington had been pushed around all his life by abusive parents, indifferent guardians, gruesome schoolmates and later on in life by his superiors. The constant feeling of inferiority, combined with his never ending, frantic attempts to free himself from the pain of humiliation and weakness, had finally brouht him to take ou all his anger on children. The local LEOs had caught him about five months ago, brought him to prison and then someone had failed to fulfill his job properly and he had taken his chance and started to kill again.

Ashley's only idea was to stick to the profile and to use the weakness he showed whenever facing someone of whom he knew was stronger than him. In court he had been terrified of the judge and broken down crying multiple times simply because this very had looked at him.´Authorities scared the crap out of Joseph Huntington. She had to use this. It had to work out. If this tactic should fail there wasn't another one she could think of.

"Put the knife down", she instructed, giving him a cold, boastful glare, "or, I swear to God, you will regret not doing as I tell you! I give you ten seconds, otherwise I'll make you follow!"

"N-no, you c-can't do this!", he replied stammering, while his eyes swayed between Ashley and his hostage, "I have her. She's with me, see? I-If you do anything I'll kill her. I'm good at killing people, I... I can do that, I will do that, you know I can, I-"

"I want my mommy", Haley whined softly, "please, I only want to go back to my mommy."

Ashley smiled inwardly as the girl spoke. This was exactly what she needed. Haley pleaded that he would let her go. It was the power he wanted, making her stay was his decision and so was allowing her to go. Yet she literally saw the fear growing inside of him. It was perfect. Hopefully.

"Let her go and drop the knife!", she repeated, "you have about five seconds left to clinch what you want - this can have either a good or a bad end for you, but I'm going to make sure it will be an end!"

"Yes, I... I need to..."

Only for the split piece of a second Joseph Hintington was completely distracted as he felt how the end depended solely on what he did. Maybe if she wouldn't have been so scared Haley would have known that in this very moment he would have let her go anyway. Instead, battling for her existence, she took every bit of bravado she had left, pushed the hand with the knife away from her throat and attempted to run. Ashley quickly approached her to get her out of the danger zone but they both weren't fast enough.

"NO, you cant just run away from me, NO!"

As Ashley saw him grabbing Haley's arm again there was only one thing she could do.

She had always been a good markswoman and so, as usual, she did not falter, did not fail to hit her aim .

.oOo.

For everyone else on the team it hadn't been much of a rough day and when they finally returned to their bullpen they only moaned about how being with the FBI sucked because there was still quite some paperwork to come. Ashley was the only one who kept quiet. For sure killing a man was a far bigger deal than writing a report about how she had done it could be. At any rate he would keep her hands and mind occupied. She tiredly let herself drop into her bureau chair and started to work off her stack of forms and reports, which was, due to her role in the shooting, even bulkier that those of her teammates, who had arrived only a couple of mintues after Huntington had already been pronounced dead by the emergency doctor on site. They weren't even witnesses and since a bunch of paramedics had tried to save the offender's life while Haley had been cared for by her parents, a social worker and a child psychologist immediately there had barely any evidence been left for them to judge whether she had handled the situation the right way.

"Come on, Hotch, do we really have to get started on this tonight?", Ashley heared Emily stridently complain across the whole bullpen, "it's not that I had plans, but there are a lazy weekend, a whole bunch of freshly rented Netflix and a few liters of Ben & Jerry's waiting for me so I'd suggest we call it a night, go out to have a drink and, for a change, enjoy out lifes, huh?"

"She has a good point there, Hotch", Reid supported his colleague, "there's a promising looking documentation about Joseph Polchinski on tonight that I would love to see. Since he was the one to contribute the D-Branes to the Superstring Theory we really owe him watching that, don't we?"

"Ehm... right", Emily grinned and looked at Hotch again, "we owe Joseph-Something something; you can't deny the words of a confirmed boy wonder, now can you?"

Hotch couldn't supress a smile and nodded his agreement.

"Indeed, it would be nice to spend some extra time with Jack. See y'all back Monday, then."

While Reid tried, as he went to the elevator, to convince Emily to maybe watch the documentation together instead of DVDs that weren't such a unique, informatory event as the Polchinski report, Rossi left with a short Have a Good Weekend and Morgan nodded as he passed Ashley's table. She didn't notice and ignored Hotch, too, when he went to leave.

"Hey Seaver?"

She stayed as focused as possible, only responding by a mumbled M-hm. She really wasn't in the mood for talking and searched through a file until she found the copy of a photo, showing the scene where the last hostage situation had taken place. Joseph Huntington had lost a lot of blood and the sticky substance covered almost his entire body. She had put four in his chest and two in his head. It hadn't been just an overreakcion - in situations like the one she had been in, Agents had to make sure the perpetrator wasn't dangerous any longer. She had had to make sure he was dead. And yet this hadn't been her concern. But what she had felt was unspeakable if she wished to stay with the FBI.

Despite the relief, nothing at all.

Ashley shivered, lightly shook her head and put the photo away, taking another one. It showed Haley. Her white shirt was covered with splatters of blood due to the close distance between her and Huntington. Looking at the picture felt weird, again. She had saved that girl and for it was about the first time ever she had done this she should have felt a lot more pride. But she was filled with nothing but numbness when she stared at the photo. After all, Haley Jacobs was one of many girls out there. Did, what Ashley had done today, really matter?

"Seaver?", Hotch asked again and she gave him a vexed, disruptred look that she hurried to hide as soon as she took note of it. He smiled.

"You should go home, too. It's been a hard day and the paperwork can wait 'til Monday."

"I'd prefere to get everything wrapped up before I leave. I don't like to procrastinate much and I... I guess it's just better to get done with this right away. I couldn't enjoy the weekend knowing I still have to finish all this stuff about killing people, you know."

She tried to smile but knew she failed right away. Hotch saw the grimace she formed and was instantly worried. She hadn't had it easy.

"Are you going to be alright?"

She nodded and sighted lightly.

"Sure... I guess."

"It's never easy to take someone's life but doing it for the very first time is even harder. It's okay to find that difficult. Nobody expects you to take it easy."

"I know. I'll get over it. It always takes some time. Have fun with your son. I'll be fine."

"You're sure about this?"

"Yes, quite."

"Okay, so... if you want to talk, just give me a call. I'll have a sympathetic ear, if you need one."

"Thank you."

Hotch left and Ashley turned back to her reports.

Yet she couldn't concentrate. Images of blood flashed through her mind, of cases she had studied at the Academy as well as those of the recent events. Joseph Huntington's and Haley's words echoed inside of her head, the feeling one had when pulling the trigger and taking the life of another person seemed to be remembered by her limbs and it wasn't anything she felt too bad about. She remembered approaching the dead body and how Haley had thrown her arms around her. But most of all... there was the blood. Blood that came out of the dead's mouth because her bullets had perforated his lungs. Brain matter, because his skull was wrecked and distorted. Lifeless flesh that was still as warm as her own.

She hadn't been so close to death ever before. Not to this kind of death, after all. But neither the act of killing someone nor looking at the bloody rest of a former life and knowing that it was all her fault had left her terrified or haunted by guilt.

Before thinking about it any more, Ashley stood up, grabbed her gear and hurried to leave the BAU. There elevator was at another floor so she decided to run down the stairs. When she left the stairwell Hotch was just about about the leave the building to the parkinglot and Ashley out of breath.

"Hotch!", she called out and he turned around, not really being surprized to see her. He had expected that she'd change her mind about not talking to him. Because killing, he knew, was something different to her than it was to every other person around.

"Do you still have a momet or so?", she asked, a little sheepishly, regarding that she had been quite refusing just the other minute, "it's, ehm, about... all that taking people out kind ofstuff."

"Of course. I sayed I'd have time."

"Yes, ehm. I only wondered... what people feel like when they kill."

He looked at her with narrow eyes. Basically this was the topic he had been expecting and yet he didn't know what answer he was supposed to give her. The state of Ashley Seaver's mind was most of all a Rossi-thing. He was the one she trusted the most and knew for the longest period of time. He had seen them talking in the airplane after the first case she had been on.

And still - Rossi hadn't been the one to ask how she felt. Maybe he hadn't thought that killing might hit her harder than it hit other Agents. Maybe if Hotch hadn't called it a night yet Rossi had noticed and everything would be way easier now...

"Why do you want to know?"

"Because... look, it doesn't sound right at all when I say it like this, but I don't know whether I'll be asked about it later and then I... I really don't want to mess everything up. Like saying something wrong and getting fired the following day. I like working with the FBI, Hotch, I really do and I like catching the bad guys and I don't want it to be taken away from me, that's... they can't do this, can they? Just because I killed that man and-"

Looking how Ashley was seized with panic Hotch felt slightly overwhelmed.

"Okay, Seaver, just calm down. Nobody is going to fire you just because you shot someone in line of duty. You have plenty of witnesses, you saved an eight year old - it's gonna be alright. Nobody is going to just kick you out."

"But I think it would be reasonable", she countered, "they wouldn't be wrong to do this!"

"Why would you think this?"

She took a deep breath and teared her hair. Hotch hadn't seen her so troubled since she had joined the team; actually she had been calm and reserved most of the time. The sudden insight scared him, no chance to deny that. How could he have missed that one of his agents was dealing with problems of such a significance for weeks? It was basically impossible that all of this appeared withing thr past few hours. The roots must have been there long before.

"It's not the first time that I think about this. But it's the first time that I killed someone and still nothing changed!", Ashley said in a whisper. He saw a deep-seated fear lighting up in her eyes that he had never known and which caused a cold shiver to run down his spinal. "I think I feel it, Hotch. It's in fifty percent of my genes, he is half on my self and I think I feel him. It's... when I look at pictures of people who are hurt... or dead... or somehow damaged... everyone else seems to be really, really disgusted. And I am not. I see all the details and I process them and I come to the correct conclusions but I never ever have nightmares from them and they don't haunt me or make me suffer or... anything at all. I don't feel what everyone else feels. I don't want to really be my father's daughter. But it's so likely-"

"This doesn't have to mean you're like him. Maybe you're just better in compartmentalizing than everyone else, to use your own words, is. There are quite some people out there who can't even watch a horror flick without dreaming about it. On the other hand there are some who don't mind at all. And then there is us - those who are confronted with real violence every day. But you can't take the grief of everything you see with you."

"But I killed someone. I didn't feel anything and I still don't."

"You had no other option and by the way, you did great!", he said empathic, "if you had shot only a second later he might have killed that girl. If your shot hadn't been as targeted the result had been the same. But it turned out fine. You did all the right things. And more than taking a life... you also saved one. That's worth a lot, isn't it?"

Ashley stared at him and her eyes were hollow as she shook her head.

"That's s´the problem", she breathed, "because I don't think it is."

"Oh."

His aknowledgement wasn't helpful but he couldn't think of anything better. Hotch eyed Ashley again, as she stood there in front of him, scared and anxious but surprizingly frankly, and inwardly cursed himself for feeling concern. After what he experienced the saved ones were what gave his Agents the strengh to face the horror they worked with. Back in the days, Gideon had even had a list and photos of those he had saved in time. They all knew that if their job would only consist of analyzing violence, not above all from protecting and asserting justice, they wouldn't be much more than a bunch of perverts who got off by martyred flesh and blood.

"I'm wrong, am I not? You know it, too. It's not normal. It's not how real humans are."

"Seaver, you-"

"You think the same thing I think. I can see it."

"You're considering that your character traits are alike to those of a sociopath, that you are unable to feel any, or at least some, empathy."

"And you think I am right."

Again, Hotch halted for a couple of seconds. It didn't take him long to go through his knowledge again but he needed time to think about his answer. Eventually, it was fairly easy.

"Growing up in the house of a psychopath you should now better. You don't have all the symptoms. Just take the most obvious one... right now you are revealing your worries to me. Not psycho-ish. Also, you feel guilty for what you father did. You feel guilty for not feeling a lot when facing violence - that's why you're talking to me this very second. Which is naturally, because unlike everyone else you had to face the human abyss earlier and more intense than anyone. It's not that you have no conscience. Yours only had to endure a lot more. It's your way of protecting the own mind, the own sanity."

Ashley couldn't help it but had to doubt the truthfulness of his words. Eventually she concluded that Hotch was a frank man, yet far from infallible. Hotch sensed her misgiving. But there wasn't really anything else to tell her that he could think of.

"Look Seaver, if you want facts here are some", he began, making a last-ditch effort to get her to believe she wasn't evil to the bone, "you are a well-trained FBI Ag-"

"Trainee."

"Trainee, then, it doesn't matter in your case anyway. Have you ever killed animals as a child?"

"No, but-"

"Been cruel to them? Scared younger children? Hurt them? Anything spectacular in those matters? Do you take delight from it? Pleasure? Satisfaction?"

"No, b-"

"Wet your bed at an older than usual age?"

"No, but keep in mind tha-"

"Do you hold a lot of grudge against other people? Do they offend you enough to make you want to make them suffer on purpose? Do you never feel empathy? And, most of all... did you want to kill Joseph Huntiongton today? Is this why you want to joing the FBI? To pull a couple of pathetic bullets into a man's chest?"

The breeze of suspense Hotch feeled while waiting for her to giver her last response made him almost feel guilty. But as she thought about his words, what she had learned on the Academy and earlier, from watching her father, Ashley felt a great wave of relief coming from the bottom of her heart.

"No", she breathed and a smile crossed her face, "none of this has even been applicable to me. I came to fight those who might not be like, but who share at least something with me. I don't want to hurt people. I just don't want more people to get hurt. By all available means."

Hotch answered with a compassionate, encouraging smile, which he managed to keep his own relief from to not ler her know that he had almost had the same fears, too, and which she had not seen him wearning many times before.

"Then it's all good - don't you see? What you feel is not a sign of spite or evil. It's a scar that you have and which you will never be free of. It's a form of pain and that you are able to feel this means that you'll never stop aching and you'll never get rid of the misery, but neither will you inflict that kind of ache to someone else. You are not your father's daughter."

Saying this he turned around and went across the parking lot, leaving Ashley behind.

As you age naturally, your family shows more and more on your face. If you deny that, you deny your heritage. - Frances Conroy

So - how did you like my story? Did it make sense (I'm not that good w/ emotions so I seriously have no clue)

Again... please review!

~ AJ