(someone noted that Gabe is not a nice character. Psst, she is not supposed to be a nice character. Thanks for reading!)
Gabrielle sat by the window in the living room with a gloomy expression on her face. Rain was pouring down in torrents outside, and it only served to make her feel all the more depressed. Sighing rather loudly, she tapped her long, filed fingernails atop her closed laptop, before saying in a sort of drawl, "How long is the rain supposed to last today, Daddy?"
"We're in for heavy rain all week, supposedly," the bespectacled, balding man said to her, not looking up from his newspaper. "Should it really matter anyway, dear? What with you being sick and all, you can't exactly go out and walk around town or anything."
Rolling her eyes at the fact that her father was so pathetically clueless enough to believe her lie about having a cramp-giving flu bug in the first place, Gabe slunk down further onto the couch, before snuggling beneath the expensive, woven throw that was always kept across it. She was sick, in a matter of sorts, though not in the way she'd lied to her parents about.
Ever since running from the classroom and calling home from the office of the high school two days beforehand, Gabe hadn't had the nerve to even wish to attempt to go back and face the sea of students who had hated her very existence from the get-go. Seph's friendship had made things tolerable enough in years past, but now she'd lost that, too. There really was no point in even trying to return to school as normal, as she saw it.
"Well, why don't you call Seph after school lets out today?" her father then said to her, as he paused to turn the page of his paper. "I'm sure he's concerned about your absence."
"No one is concerned about my absence. And I'm not concerned about anyone else, either. Just leave me alone."
Sighing sadly, the older man turned yet another page of the paper, thinking back to when his little girl was but of elementary age; a huggable, lovable little thing that sported pigtails and rosy cheeks. Now she had morphed into some sort of introverted, anti-social freak. How it had happened, Elan Stohnam didn't know - he simply knew that he didn't like it.
He'd had discussions about it with his wife, Carole. Carole - who was ten years his senior and who'd already half-raised a child by the time she met and married Elan and adopted little Gabrielle has her own daughter - didn't seem to have any good answers or observations for the man, either. Carole's flesh-and-blood daugther, Katrina, was a star student, and had never failed to be popular in anything she ever did. While not the best athelete, she was a whiz in every class, succeeding in many honours classes, in fact. And whilst she did all this, Gabrielle was left behind in the dust.
By the time Gabe had reached middle school and Katrina was far away in college, it was nothing short of blatantly obvious that Elan and Carole viewed the quiet, little freak as far less promising than her step-sister. It initially hurt her, the realization, that is, but overtime Gabe decided that it didn't much matter if she was anything like Katrina at all. After all, Katrina took after Carole; Carole was a successful stock broker. Carole had always been in the top of all her classes. Carole was a living goddess, more or less, and she never failed to remind Elan just how lucky he was to have found and married her.
Carole this - Carole that - it was as if Gabrielle's biological mother was a mere phantom; a fairy tale character that had never truly existed of which she'd once sprang forth from, only to have the said character melt away into the nothingness from which she'd came in the first place afterward.
Even now as she remained snuggled on the couch, that's how Gabrielle viewed her current existence. She was wandering about in a void of darkness, straining her mind to remember bits and pieces of her actual identity - parts that perhaps hadn't been lost or misguided by the intrusion of Carole and Katrina into hers and Elan's life.
She called Carole Mom, certainly. Carole was her mother, or, at least, the only one she'd ever known, considering the fact that her birth-giver had died with a needle in her arm not quite a year after bringing Gabrielle into the world in the first place. From that point on, until age three, there had been no one in her life except Elan. And then, as if from nowhere, Carole and Katrina blossomed into the garden of her life, as well, and while Elan, Carole and Katrina formed the perfected, societal view of life, Gabrielle was left to be viewed as a weed, a weed that threatened to choke and take down the garden altogether.
As she now peered over at her father where he sat in his armchair, paper still in his grasp, Gabe pondered him, as if he were a subject to be studied. She found him and his actions rather akin to that of a dog, a dog that followed and obeyed its owner. In this case, that owner would be Carole, and while Gabe did somewhat feel it unkind to think of her father in such a light, she couldn't help but also agree with herself that it was simply altogether too true.
It had taken Elan years to realize that his daughter wasn't quite right in the mind. Years. It hadn't occurred to him, for whatever the reason, that the legacy of having a heroine-overdosed mother buried in a cememtary a few blocks down the street was of any trouble or concern to his young daugther until she was about age ten. As if suffering from the mother of all epiphanies, it was then that he began showering her with the stupidest little gifts: candles, novelty soaps and perfumes; lip glosses and records of all the betterknown pop artists. She thanked him and kept all of these things, aligned on dresser tops and desks in her bedroom, or on the shelf in the bathroom she shared with Katrina until she'd left for college. Yes, she'd thanked him, and yes, she'd found the objects nice, but they did not make her appear unto Carole or Elan or Katrina as any less of a freak than she'd ever been.
Even as she used the little soaps, or bathed in the perfume bath waters, or allowed her step-sister to do her hair in French braids, Gabe always ultimately returned to her routine of spending most all of her free time on what started out as a desktop computer, and what graduated into a laptop by the time she'd reached her early teens. Once she'd discovered the world of MMORPGs, that was the end all for other potential normal prospects for the girl, as far as Elan and Carole were concerned, and while they didn't see it as a truly harmful hobby, they did very much do their best to restrict her use of it. This did little to help anything, as it only made Gabrielle moodier and less tolerable when kept from playing the games she enjoyed best.
In the end, Elan and Carole practically gave up on trying to change their little freak at all. Focusing on Katrina and her elitest education instead, they provided her with a new car and helped to pay her rent for a townhouse in the next town over until she was able to pay for it all by herself with her salary from her new deskjob at some attorney's office.
Left behind once again in the dust of a much better sibling, Gabrielle ultimately decided that she rather enjoyed being left to her own devices. If she was nothing but an ignorable freak at home, then she could basically do as she pleased. No one excepted her to achieve fantastic grades. (She did, in fact, get excellent grades, but she wasn't pressured into doing so, so it hardly mattered.) And thus, for the most part, she stuck to her laptop and her World of Warcraft gaming, and going to cinema shows with Seph.
Now, though, that had began to change. It was apparent that Seph had no interest in her after their kerfuffle over his cellphone, and after Evans had challenged her in front of the entire homeroom, she herself had no desire to place herself in a classroom situation, either. Evans, Teal, Seph, the redheaded girl who'd stolen her seat - they could all go to hell for all she cared now. Sulking further, she slunk fully down onto the couch, pulling the couch throw all the way up over the top of her head.
"The local Behavioral Analysist Unit has decided that the subject in question is most likely a white female in either her twenties or thirties, and she seems to be seeking out to kill recently released criminal subjects who have recently finished paying their dues in jail."
Glancing up and over the top of the throw to view the television screen's news' break, Gabe did a double-take as she caught sight of a familiar looking young man standing amongst a small crowd of people standing outside the local police station. She knew him. It was Reid. Sitting bolt upright on the couch at once, she reached to the coffee table and snatched up the remote control to turn up the television's volume.
"Yes," Reid was now saying to the crowd, speaking in his slightly awkward tone of voice. "We believe the unsub is a young woman who was once pressured into doing many things - pressured to succeed, in terms of academics and the like, possibly by overbearing parents."
"Precisely," a second person spoke up then, an African-American man that was standing in place between Reid and a thin, brunette woman. "We believe that she is targeting released criminals due to having a god-complex about herself. Perhaps she finds herself so intelligent and learned that she can take the power upon herself to deal out justice to others."
"Are there any other defining features, then?" a reporter asked, sticking her microphone out as far as it'd reach to the B.A.U. "For instance, are there specific types of criminals she seeks out - druggists, rapists? Or are there any other defining links between the victims themselves? Anything at all like that?"
"There is one thing," the thin brunette said, in a somewhat cautious sort of voice. "Not all of the victims have criminal records. As a matter of fact, the majority of those murdered thus far have seemed to have been high school drop-outs once upon a time. Not recent drop-outs, no, but drop-outs from as far back as six or seven years ago. In all actuality, this connection seems to serve as more of a point than the criminal record one, to be completely honest."
So was this why Spencer Reid never answer his phone as of late? Was he honestly this busy with just such a case?
As Gabe began to ponder over what she'd heard on the television, she found it puzzling. Why would someone single out high school dropouts to murder? She couldn't manage to make it fit in her mind, and yet, Gabrielle Stohnam still saw it as something that could be useful to her. As she looked back to the television screen, an 800-number tipline was flashed across the bottom of the screen. Quickly jotting it down on the inside of her wrist with a ink pen found on the coffee table, Gabe smirked to herself. So what if she couldn't reach Reid at the 1966 extension? She'd be able to get in touch with the B.A.U. now for sure, even if it meant making up a few tips to humor their hotline operators with.