A/N: I feel the need to apologise in advance for this. I binge-watched Suspect Behaviour last night and woke up this morning with the absolute conviction that this happens at some point. It's not happy. There is no happy ending. Sometimes terrible things happen, and it doesn't get better; you don't dust yourself off and get up the same way you went down. You shouldn't.
Beth stood in the doorway, weight on her good leg, shoulders tense enough to be visibly an inch or so out of their usual posture, arms wrapped around herself. The knee-high boot encasing her broken leg looked huge on her petite frame. Prophet watched a long breath shudder through her, and even though he knew she wanted space, not comfort, he couldn't stop himself from stepping up behind her and putting his arms around her, gently, painfully conscious of her tender, healing ribs. She stiffened even more, back arching away from his chest, and he could feel her holding her breath.
"Beth."
"I'm fine." She pulled away, and he let her go, fists clenching beside him as he watched her limp across the living room, her good leg and then the boot, silence and then thump, down-up-down.
Six weeks. She hadn't said more than a few words at a time for three weeks. Not since the accident.
Accident. He kept calling it that. Maybe because it was short, simple to say. Maybe trying to convince both of them that accident was what it had been, not a colossal error resulting in pain, injury, loss of life.
Cooper said a case closed was a case closed, even if it happened the worst possible way. Sometimes you closed cases how you wanted to, without finding another body, without anyone ending up in a body bag or the back of an ambulance. Sometimes you closed cases and had to cling to the knowledge that it was over—for now anyway—that at least this one person would never hurt anyone again. This was one of those times, but Prophet was having trouble believing that, or at least feeling optimistic about it. Maybe the bastard wouldn't hurt any more children, but there were three dead little boys that weren't his fault. Not directly, anyway.
Three dead little boys, Mick with a punctured lung, Gina in a back brace with fractured wrists—and Beth. Barely walking, barely moving, barely talking. She barely slept—and he barely slept, because he lay awake beside her, waiting for her to fall asleep, waiting for her to say something, anything, to give some indication of what was wrong. Everything was wrong, but it shouldn't be this bad. It had never been this bad before, not when she'd made her first kill, not when she'd been held hostage, not when she'd taken a bullet to the stomach with that militia group in Florida.
He didn't know why it was this bad now, and he didn't know anything to do except keep being there. Keep saying her name. Keep telling her it wasn't her fault. Keep letting her know he was there. But where before she would have unbent to his steady presence, now she grew more rigid, withdrawing until he sometimes wasn't sure she even saw him.
He followed her across the living room, into the bedroom, watched her stand by the window as she had so often lately. It was as if she couldn't move beyond whatever was in her mind, and she spent her days moving restlessly from one place to the next, wrapped in her own thoughts which she wouldn't share, staring at nothing, until he made her notice him, and she moved on to another place.
"You wanna eat in here?" he asked, even though he knew she wouldn't answer. He'd been coaxing food into her a little at a time for the past three weeks—never enough at a time, never often enough, and he could see her growing thinner, her shoulders and elbows too prominent, her hip bones too sharp. "There's pasta. I'll bring it in here."
"I'm not hungry." She didn't move, and he almost could've imagined the flat tone came from someone else, somewhere else.
He didn't quite stifle a long sigh. "Beth. You gotta eat. You need to heal."
He thought he could see her tensing even more at that, her fingers clutching at the side seams of her shirt, shoulders hunching farther forward. The problem wasn't just that she was closing up, shutting down—it was that he couldn't figure out why. No matter what he said, it seemed to be wrong. No matter what he did, she pulled further in. Further away from him. And there was nothing he could do about it except leave her there, walk back to the kitchen to collect food that he knew she would only pick at, bring it back in, try to somehow talk her into eating something, drinking something.
He didn't even try to convince her to take the meds the doctor had prescribed; he knew she wouldn't, and the bottle of pills had sat untouched on the bedside table since they day they'd come home from the hospital, Prophet carrying her because the doctor refused to give her crutches with her ribs so damaged and she refused to use a wheelchair despite her shattered leg.
"It wasn't your fault," he said again while she pushed noodles across her plate and back.
She didn't answer.
"None of us saw that coming."
He relived it again, every time he tried to convince her—the squealing brakes in his ear, the crunching, Mick's shouts and Gina's sudden cry of pain, and Beth's silence. Panic. Terror. The wailing sirens and flashing lights as he and Cooper left the empty house—why was it always an empty house?—and rushed to the back road where the comms and gone silent and their cell phones weren't getting through, and all there was left was the echo of voices and his own heartbeat. The mangled wreckage when they got there, the paramedics, the metal screaming as they tore into the vehicles, trying to extract anyone left alive. The bodies laid out beside the road, little boys dead because of a head-on collision, which was, maybe, better than being systematically tortured to death by a sexual sadist, but which was the opposite of what the team was there to do. The dead killer, his head bloody and at the wrong angle to his body.
And Beth, unconscious on a gurney, being lifted into the back of an ambulance beside Mick, beside Gina—the only one still conscious to answer the questions that they couldn't ask right then because the paramedics refused to let her talk.
And then, so long later it felt like another lifetime, taking Beth home, trying to be patient because she still hadn't said a single word. Still wouldn't meet his eyes. He'd told himself it would take time. He hadn't anticipated this much time, though, or so much regression instead of progress. He tried to tell himself it was getting better, but he had a horrible feeling it was getting worse instead.
She ate half a serving of linguini without meeting his eyes, without saying a word. He managed to get her to drink a glass of water, more, he thought, because she didn't want him to keep holding her shoulder and looking at her so concernedly than because she agreed with his arguments about how important it was that she stay hydrated.
By the time he'd carried the half-empty dishes to the kitchen, scraped them off, and come back, she was already in bed, on her back, arms still tight around herself, eyes blindly staring at the light-bulb. Prophet didn't bother telling her it was still light outside. Resting was probably better than wandering around the house the way she had been, even if she didn't actually sleep. He brushed his teeth, changed, hit the light. She stiffened when he slid into bed beside her, and when he tried to move closer, she rolled away. He stayed where he was, not so much because he didn't want to push her, but because he'd given up on the idea that pushing her would make a difference. Whether he left her alone or kept trying, it didn't seem to change the fact that she was somehow lost in a world he couldn't reach. He lay in the semidarkness and listened to her breathing, because it was all he could do, counting the seconds between each inhale and exhale, irrationally afraid the steady sounds might stop entirely and leave him alone—more alone.
The shadows spread through the room. The overhead fan ticked almost but not quite steadily. Beside him, Beth didn't relax, not once. Didn't move. But she didn't stop breathing. Prophet's world closed in to the tiny noises, the dark corners, and he felt almost claustrophobic, felt that old fear closing in on him, felt the weight of a hundred bunks above him even though they were on the third storey of only a six-storey building.
"I killed them."
He thought he'd imagined the whisper until he felt a shudder through the mattress springs and realised Beth was crying silently beside him.
"It wasn't your fault." It was all he could say.
"I was driving."
She was driving. That was what it came down to, in the end, for her, at least, he supposed, She'd been the one behind the wheel, speeding down a dark, bumpy road when the unsub had spun his vehicle and caught her head on.
"There was no way you could've known he would do that."
"We profiled an end game."
"We profiled suicide by cop. We did not profile suicide by crashing into a federal vehicle."
Silence. The barely perceptible vibrations kept running through the mattress, and the last blues and greys of evening caught on wet streaks across her cheeks.
Prophet reached for her because he didn't know what else to do, put an arm around her and pulled her close to him because, even though chances were she would freeze up again, shut down, go back to that silence—there was no way he was letting her think she was alone in that blackness. He felt her tense against him, felt her breath catch and her muscles tighten. She didn't relax. But she didn't pull away. She pressed her face into his chest and he felt a damp spot spreading, and that was at least better than her dry-eyed silence.
Her breath made a hot patch against his chest, and he thought she whispered something, but he couldn't hear it.
"Hm?" He drew back a little, trying in vain to see her face in the shadows.
"I lost the baby." She buried her face in his chest again, and he held her shaking body against his automatically while he tried to comprehend.
The baby? The—
His mind felt like it was shutting down, refusing to process that thought, and he snapped his mouth shut on the instinctive "it wasn't your fault" that tried to press out. He tried to form some kind of coherent question, but all that came was her name in a hoarse, desperate whisper, the last echo of the question he couldn't ask.
"I was going to tell you, but the case came in, and…" Her whisper cut off.
"Oh, Beth." And all he could do was hold her close, his own shaking mirroring hers, and he realised he was crying, too, when he shifted a little and felt the wet pillowcase cold against his ear. He'd known it was bad. She always blamed herself—they all did—and being even indirectly responsible for someone else's children dying instead of coming home safe, it got inside you and tore you open in ways you didn't think anything ever could. But this…he hadn't known. Hadn't had any idea.
"I killed our baby."
Our baby. He'd never, ever expected to have those words in their lives. They worked a hard job, spent days, weeks at a time away from home, lived half in hell and half in something that wasn't much better.
"No." His voice broke. "You didn't. You didn't. He did."
They hadn't planned for children, hadn't even considered them as a possibility. And now that he knew they'd had one—had one and lost it before he ever knew it existed—it felt like someone had cut into him and torn out something vital, like one of the monsters they hunted had somehow slipped into their lives without their ever noticing, snuck in and carved out his lungs. He couldn't breathe.
"I'm sorry." He didn't so much hear her words as feel them, a slice of breath against his chest as she curled tighter against him, only her injured leg lying straight. "I'm so, so sorry."
"It's not your fault." It was all he could managed between breaths that kept lodging halfway down his trachea.
Now you know what was wrong, he thought, and that didn't help anything, because there was no way to fix this. Nothing to do but hold her tight and whisper "I love you" into her hair and cry with her as the shadows stretched deeper and darker around them.