Nate River was used to being a ghost.
The FBI didn't want him, but he was too good for them to let go. Too emotionally unstable for field work, it said on his psych eval; if there was a reason written, no one ever told him what it was. He doubted the psychologist who'd done it had a reason. There didn't need to be one with someone like him. Everyone saw the way he looked anywhere but a person's eyes, the way he twirled and tugged his hair and rocked in his seat when he was upset or nervous or excited, the way he sometimes wouldn't speak for hours on end, and they saw weakness. Someone who would need to be babysat if they put him in the field.
So they tucked him away like some fragile curiosity in a china cabinet labeled "Special Investigator" and only brought him out and dusted him off every few months, for special occasions. Eventually they put him in the front of a lecture hall and gave him an office with a brass plate on the door—Nathan River, Psychoanalytics—and left him to talk about murder and mutilation in front of a classroom full of trainees, half of whom were older than him. He didn't feel useless and he wasn't too bored. He'd stopped profiling and taken the teaching job by choice, in a sense; he didn't miss getting into criminals' heads. No one could miss that.
But when Agent Rester from the BAU strolled in and said they had eight missing girls whose abductor needed catching, Nate couldn't find it in himself to say no. He could scoff and recall some quarrel he'd had with Rester in the past, he could roll his eyes when the man asked "Where do you fall on the spectrum?" like it was both entirely his business and something scandalous to even mention, he could dodge his eyes and his questions—but when Rester looked at him and asked if he could borrow his imagination, Nate paused, put his bag over his shoulder, and said okay.
Eight girls with short blonde hair and brown eyes stared at Nate off Rester's wall.
"There were seven last time I heard," Nate said, tracing the patterns of push-pins and string that linked each picture to a location with his eyes, then his fingers. "Isabel Nielsen. Number eight. When did you tag her?"
"When I was on my way to your lecture hall." Rester was most likely staring, but Nate kept his back to him, tugging lightly at the taut string that led to Isabel Nielsen's picture. "Same hair color, same eye color, same height, same weight. All around the same age. All abducted on Fridays so they wouldn't have to be reported missing until Monday."
"You're still calling them abductions because there aren't any bodies?" Nate glanced over his shoulder with a single brow arched, waiting for Rester's nod before looking back to the wall. "They're not abductions. They're murders. One through seven are dead already. Do you think he'd keep taking new ones if he was keeping them around? —No, I say that, but I'm actually only ten percent certain."
Rester didn't seem to know how to respond to that, so he left it unremarked and continued. "I need you to get closer to this."
"You've seen my file. I'm too emotionally unstable for fieldwork. You've got Dr. Lawliet at Georgetown, he does the same thing I do." Better than I do. "Get him."
"If I wanted him on this case, I would have gotten him," Rester said with a quiet sigh he probably thought Nate wouldn't notice. "You have a very specific way of thinking about things."
"When people say I have a very specific way of thinking about things," Nate replied, turning around to face the other man. Rester's impressive height made it easy for Nate, barely past 5'1" even in his shoes, to avoid looking at his eyes, to focus his eyes past his shoulders instead, "that isn't usually a compliment."
"You make jumps you can't explain."
"Ten percent may as well be zero without any evidence. It's the evidence that explains."
"Then help us find some evidence."
Nate raised a hand to twirl a lock of hair around his finger, chewing at his bottom lip.
Finally, he nodded.
Isabel Nielsen was dead in her bed and Nate wanted to tear his hair out.
"Take as much time as you need," Rester had said, and Nate forced himself to shut out the bustling of the EMTs downstairs, the flashing lights of the ambulances and police cars through the girl's bedroom window, the scent of blood and death, the barking of the Nielsen family's dog.
He dropped to the floor at the end of her bed, fingers tangled in white locks and his left knee drawn up to his chest, and for all he hadn't missed getting into criminals' heads, he slipped into Isabel Nielsen's killer's like he was getting into a warm bath.
The brisk November night. The chipping paint on the windowsill scraping his hands. Isabel Nielsen's breathing. Her blonde hair silvery in the moonlight. The rise and fall of her chest. Her waist between his thighs, her throat in his hands, her breathing, her heart beating, his grip on her neck tightening, tightening—
"Are you alright?"
A woman's voice pulled Nate back to the present like his collar had been hooked onto the back of a moving car. He stood up, wide-eyed like a deer in the headlights, brain saying you're not supposed to be in here but mouth and vocal cords refusing to relay the message.
"There was antler velvet in two of the wounds," the woman said, nodding to the corpse lying in bed, the sheet drawn back off of her in the time since Nate had come in. "I was checking the other wounds, but you were sitting there shaking. I didn't mean to shock you."
"Didn't mean to shock you," he repeated, shaking his head to clear it and ignoring the woman's hand when she extended it. "It's—um—it's fine."
As in it's too late to do anything about it now.
"You're Nate River, aren't you?" The woman pulled her hand back, giving Nate a once-over. "Naomi Misora. —That's temporary ID. I've heard about you around Quantico, but I thought you were an agent."
"I'm a... Special Investigator."
"Never been an agent?"
"I made it through the trainee program," Nate said, tugging at the thin blue latex gloves on his hands. He'd never gotten accustomed to the texture, and he found himself hyper-conscious of them now. "Not the, ah... psychological screening."
"It's there to detect instability," Misora said, then went silent. Nate could hear the unspoken question—are you unstable?
Technically, yes.
Rester interrupted before things could go any further, which Nate found himself grateful for. A handful of agents and police shuffled in after him, going on with their work now that the privacy Nate had been given had been invaded already.
He spotted Mihael Keehl, an old academy classmate-turned-unwanted-rival among the hustle, and quickly averted his eyes.
"You know you're not supposed to be in here," Rester scolded, and Misora straightened but otherwise seemed unfazed.
"There was antler velvet in two of the wounds. I was checking the others, but—"
"Promotes healing," Nate cut in.
Mihael materialized from among the throng of law enforcement, unamused. "Excuse me?"
"Antler velvet promotes healing. The killer could have put it there on purpose. That's a sixty—no, seventy percent chance. They were undoing what they did. As much as they could. They couldn't exactly bring her back to life."
Mihael scoffed, but Rester and Misora both looked interested. Nate met Misora's eyes for an instant before looking away, twirling a lock of hair.
"I need—a pad of paper. A pen. Something I can write with." There was no way he could explain this without visualizing it. Even thinking about putting it to words was headache-inducing, when he'd already been so jarringly interrupted. "...And some Aspirin. Does anyone have any Aspirin?"
Nate flew back to Virginia that night. He bought a blanket and another bottle of Aspirin in the airport, ignored the "anything else, ma'am?" from one clerk and flashed his temporary badge in response to the offered student discount from the second. He slept less than an hour once he was home, and when he did drop off, he dreamed of the body of Isabel Nielsen lying still in death beside him, blood soaking through his sheets.
He took another two Aspirin in the morning and went to work.
It took Nate going nonverbal during Isabel Nielsen's autopsy and locking himself in the men's room for an hour and a half before finally telling Agent Rester the girls' killer was eating the bodies to leave anyone considering that maybe an extra pair of eyes might be necessary on this case.
Dr. Light Yagami had a reputation that preceded him far enough for even Nate to have heard of him, the name spoken almost reverently among his colleagues. A promising agent who'd quit young after his father was killed in the line of duty and retreated to psychiatry, where he made just as much of a name for himself just as quickly as he had in the FBI. Nate had never liked the sound of him, and seeing him strutting around Rester's office like he owned the place, scanning over files and pictures so quickly he couldn't possibly be taking in the details... he wondered how anyone could stand the man enough to be his patient.
Even knowing that Yagami had been mentored by Dr. Lawliet, too, Nate had somehow expected the man to be older. That he couldn't be more than five years Nate's senior just made his obvious arrogance all the more grating, and Nate sipped at his coffee like it had personally wronged him while Yagami examined the wall of evidence.
"How many confessions?" he asked, dragging a finger along one of the strings just as Nate had done. He wanted to cringe, as if he was being touched physically, but he kept it back.
"Twelve dozen as of this morning," Rester said, setting down his mug. Nate could tell he was watching him out of the corner of his eye, even while looking at Yagami, and it irked him, like how he'd reacted in the morgue meant he couldn't go without being observed every moment now. "None of them had details, until yesterday. Then they all had details."
"After Misa Amane had crime scene pictures on her website, yes. I saw." Yagami put his hands in his pockets. He said the journalist's name like it stung the inside of his mouth. "Who was it who leaked them? Not one of yours, I hope."
"Local PD. Someone took a picture on his cell phone and showed it to his friends."
"Tasteless," Nate muttered. He thought he'd been speaking too quiet for Yagami to hear, but if he'd been a dog, his ears would have perked up.
"Have much trouble with taste, Mr. River?"
I profile serial killers and lecture trainees about their fantasies. You tell me.
"My thoughts generally aren't tasty," he said instead, and Yagami chuckled dryly, slipping into the chair next to Nate and folding his hands on the table.
"In our line of work, whose are?" Nate's eyes landed on Yagami's mouth as it quirked up into a smile, and he quickly looked away, properly assessing the rest of his appearance. Neatly styled chestnut hair, an obviously expensive black turtleneck, no wedding ring. A wealthy, self-confident bachelor. Irritating. "—Not fond of eye contact?"
Because everyone thinks it's their business to ask me that.
"...Eyes are distracting. Either you see too much or you don't see enough. And—it's hard to focus," Nate made a point of looking Yagami in the eyes, keen, like he was searching for something in their curious shade of maroon. "when all you can think is 'those whites are really white,' or 'he must have hepatitis,' or 'is that a burst vein?'"
Yagami huffed with quiet laughter again, smiling. Amused. "So you avoid eyes whenever possible."
"You could say that." Point made, he turned away, the smile on Yagami's face putting as foul a taste in his mouth as the mention of Misa Amane had seemed to have put in the psychiatrist's. "Agent Rester—"
"I imagine seeing too much isn't a just a problem you have with eye contact," Yagami cut in. "Observing is what you do. No effective barriers, but no way to reach out. Not even through eye contact. What do you do? You build forts? Associations must come so quickly."
"So do forts." Sometimes literally. What he wouldn't give to put a house of cards between himself and Yagami at that moment. And it would already take both hands to count the amount of times he'd been longing for something to work with. His tarot cards or some of his figurines, tools he could use to show his thought process rather than try and express it in things as fickle as words. No effective barriers—blocking out Yagami's piercing stare with an actual barrier would be a bonus.
"I'd imagine what you see, or absorb, colors everything else in your life. Your values and decency are present—you consider yourself a good person, though just about everyone does—but those associations that come so quickly contradict them. You find yourself shocked by the connections. Appalled at your dreams." Yagami's tone was matter-of-fact. He may as well be talking about the weather, but Nate bristled, discomfort and resentment bubbling up in him like nausea. "You build your forts to keep things out. Keep these killers out. Keep the people around you out. You work so hard at keeping things out, and there's no place left to keep the things you love in."
"Whose profile are you working on?" Nate snapped, clenching and unclenching his hands, looking anywhere but Yagami's face. He tangled a few fingers in unruly white hair and gave a satisfying tug as he turned to look in Rester's general direction. Sheer indignation practically made his skin crawl. "Whose profile is he working on?"
"Nathan—"
Don't 'Nathan' me, Nate wanted to say, but Yagami intercepted first.
"I'm sorry," he said, completely unapologetic. Nate suspected he was smiling. "Observing is what I do, as well. I can't stop it any more than you can."
Nate stood from his chair and grabbed his jacket, shaking his head. "Just don't psychoanalyze me."
He was almost out the door when he looked back over his shoulder, scowling at the smile that, clear as day, was plastered on Yagami's irritatingly handsome face. "You won't like me when I'm psychoanalyzed."
"Nate," Rester tried again, but Nate shook his head.
"I have to give a lecture. On psychoanalysis."
Though the loud slam of the door behind him made the hair on the back of his neck stand up, never had Nate found slamming a door to be so singularly satisfying.