Chapter Seven: The First to Fall: The Death of David Rossi (2009)
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1
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There were seven nightmares that night. Six minds unravelling over the strange things looming, even if It hadn't truly welcomed them home just yet; six adult minds trying to comprehend the strangeness that was beginning to rear its impossible head from below the quiet waves of their lost memories. They weren't children anymore. As children, when the impossible had happened, they had dealt with it. A bear attacked at breakfast and, by lunch, they were calm once more. A man who couldn't be there sneaking into their bedroom at night with his silver-dollar eyes hadn't stopped two young boys from practising a yo-yo trick once the sun was up once more, and JJ had survived the night of her sister's death. Impossible hadn't broken them because children were advocates of the impossible. As adults, their minds rebelled. They'd stiffened in their ways since those years that had come before.
What was approaching, a small part of each of them knew, was nothing any adult could justify or comprehend, and it would destroy them simply.
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2
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Jennifer Jareau dozed in the armchair by the unlit fireplace of her grandparents' home above Dark Score Lake, one ear awake and listening for the sound of her grandmother moving around above. She wore her gun at her hip and a locket around her throat; in the pocket of her sensible pants was a men's wallet she wore on cases when it was untenable to carry a purse. Within that wallet, there was a picture of her family.
She dreamed of something feasting in the lake, biting and gnawing and sucking down the marrow of the bodies that floated there, so many bodies. A boy with one arm who couldn't stop how his body bobbed and rolled in the listless waves, and Hannah who had been eaten by the bear and had bites out of all of her when JJ had looked into the water and seen her there, and there was Emily with her face messed up and with her hands burned black and charred. Even as JJ watched, they began to crumble away, black staining the water with the ashes that were left. Below the bodies, so many bodies—Spencer and Ethan and Henry and Rafe, all dead, all eaten, all gone—the something moved. It hungered. It gloated welcome back, whispered in a chant from all those dead faces.
And, when she woke with a start, the nightmare already forgotten, her wallet had slipped from her pocket and lay, open, upon the floor; her son's face smiled up at her.
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3
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Aaron Hotchner slept without moving, his form laid out as neatly in the hotel bed as he would wish to be eventually laid to rest as: upon his back with one arm at his side, the other over his chest, and his feet together. If the others had stiffened, he had solidified in the time since he'd been seventeen; even then, he'd barely survived what he'd seen. Despite his unmoving demeanour, he dreamed greedily and viciously. He saw Sean's body thrown down on the floor of his bedroom and he saw their father standing over him with a bloodied belt.
"I had to do it, son," said their father calmly. The belt dripped upon Sean's open eyes. "I had to give him what for. He was bad, you see."
"We're not bad," Aaron gasped, staggering back with the knowledge that his brother was dead and there was no undoing that, not ever. "We didn't deserve this."
"You're all bad," said his father. "Rotten right through. Turn around."
Aaron did. He saw his team. Dead, each and every one, the marks of that belt upon them… the belt that now hung heavy and wet in his hand, bits of skin and hair and spit upon it.
"You had to give them what for," said Emily's body, opening her eyes and smiling at him sadly. "Just like you did to me that time. Don't you remember? Don't you remember beating me?"
"I never," rasped Aaron.
"Oh, but you did," was Emily's response as she struggled to stand on her ruined legs. She kneeled before him, half unclothed and cut to slivers, and he struggled to breathe through the knowledge of what he'd done to them. "You really, really did. And now you're back, you'll do it all over again."
Welcome back, chanted all the rest of those crumpled bodies, their mouths barely moving but every unseeing eye locked upon him. Welcome back welcome back welcome back.
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4
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Spencer Reid dreamed of Ethan leading him down a path that grew slick and oily the further along they walked. Every step gurgled and groaned, the trees around them growing crooked at sharp angles as though they couldn't bear the touch of the sun. The ground beside the path was quite littered with bones, Spencer counting each one as he went with a disinterested kind of fascination.
"See," said Ethan with a crooked smile, gaps showing left by missing teeth that had never had time to grow. He held his hand back and Spencer took it since it was offered; together, they walked from that forest and out into the light of the carnival waiting. "I told you I'd get you a balloon one day, Spence. Aren't you excited?"
Spencer was distracted, looking back at the forest behind them. It wiggled in his mind, the perfect term to describe what it had felt like in there… the cold that stole into his body with every shallow breath, that dripping wet that felt like it had left a membrane over his skin… the perfect word…
And then he remembered exactly the word he needed, turning and facing that carnival and watching as the row of balloons along the entrance swivelled in the windless air to face him.
"Moribund," he said, standing alone and knowing that what was waiting, forwards and back, was terrible. "Moribund means the act of dying."
The balloons bobbed in agreement, each one of them splashed with the merry words welcome back.
Welcome back to the camp of death.
Welcome back to the act of dying.
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5
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Derek Morgan dreamed of fire. He tossed and turned in his bed, mind locked onto an incendiary night, one that he knew wasn't solely created by his sleeping mind: in the dream, Emily was burning. There was screaming, mostly his, and he fought some terrible grip because he'd sent her into Hell to burn alone and he was desperate to save her from perdition.
"Emily!" he screamed over and over again, his feet kicking, those hands still vicelike on his arms, his gaze locked onto that fiery mouth ahead. "Come back!"
Because he needed her back, otherwise he was alone. She'd told him to run and get help, but all he did now was stare as, within those flames, she burned alive.
"Welcome back," said the person holding him using the voice of Carl Buford, Morgan bucking in that grip as the nightmare hammered home. "Welcome back, Derek… isn't it exactly how you remembered?"
"She didn't burn," Morgan snarled. "She didn't burn!"
But he was watching her stumble from the flames, her clothes on fire and her eyes melting from the heat, and he screamed.
"She will," promised the creature holding him in an entirely pleasant voice. "This time, she will."
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6
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Penelope Garcia slept fitfully and dreamed in shallow bursts of her waking worries, drifting off as she thought of Reid's worry and Prentiss's caginess. She dreamed of Morgan in danger and woke again, pulling her covers tighter around her as she lay with her eyes open and thought over and over of what she now worried was a black spot in her memory.
What had happened when she was eleven?
What had happened at that terrible place?
And, when she dozed off again, this time she dreamed of the rec hall. She knew immediately where it was despite it having been over twenty years since she'd stood here last, rows upon rows of camp mattresses lined up and the distinct smell of sweat and urine on the air. Those last few nights had been tortured, she'd remembered now.
She remembered being locked in here. She remembered that, by the end, most of the littles had made messes of themselves and some of the bigs as well. The water had started to run like blood and no one had wanted to go into the bathroom at all, not after the boy died in there. There hadn't been food or drinkable water and the heat on her arms burned now along with the stink in her nose, that remembered stink, but in this dream, unlike in reality, she was alone.
She stood there silently, remembering it all, until the smoke began to curl under the doors of the hall. Flames licking at the door with greedy tongues, the heat pressing inwards. And she thought of what she'd discovered now as an adult: it had always escalated, hadn't it?
The fire at the Black Spot. The explosion at the metal-works. Those pilgrims who had gone missing, a whole town vanished. It always escalated…
The memory of smoke grew.
"We made you angry," Garcia remembered out loud, shuddering as she took a step back from the burning door and almost tripped back over a mattress. "We infuriated you…"
The flames cackled.
She remembered.
"No," she said quietly, horror slamming home: she remembered. "Aaron infuriated you, didn't he? In the end, it was Aaron. And you said—"
"You'll be back," whispered a voice around her, a terrible voice. "We always come back here, Penny, you and Aaron and little Spencer and me, of course, I came back… and when you're back… when you're back, you'll die here too. You'll join us too."
Garcia knew that voice. She knew it.
"Rafe," she gasped. "No… you escaped. You got us out."
But when she turned, her heart slamming hard, there he was; hand in hand with Rosaline Jareau and with his eyes dead inside and his smile too wide.
"Come back to us, Penny," he said with that smile growing wider. "Come home."
"Come die," offered Rosaline, slipping her arm around his waist and holding him close. "Your team has, after all, and they're calling you home too."
When Garcia woke with a start, the nightmare already fading but her terror lingering, her cheeks were wet and her heart twisted tight. This time, she didn't go back to sleep. Instead, she did what she should have done years ago.
She went to find her brother.
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7
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Emily Prentiss dreamed of the deadlights. The dreams were impossible to describe using the words of waking hours; she'd never be able to tell anyone of what she saw. In the lonely bedroom of the hotel where five others of her team also slept fretfully, she twisted and turned in the rucked-up sheets, her body writhing like a fish on a hook.
If she'd been awake to see how she fought so violently to escape her bounds, she'd have thought that description was apt; a fish on a hook she was and had been since the day she'd looked down the throat of a clown. It had hooked her that day, hooked her well and truly. Her furious anger as an adult didn't all stem from the festering wound left inside her where the barbed metal had latched on, but it certainly contributed. There was no escape from Camp Moribund, not for any of them, but especially not for her. Pennywise had shown her that day, shown her what he was, and he never let those who saw him—It—get away.
It would kill her, she knew, just like Rosaline Jareau, and just like Marcie Harris. All his dead-eyed fishes, all rotting from the head down with the tenebrous knowledge it had poured into them.
And when she snapped awake with this knowledge bubbling up in her brain, her wide eyes locked on the shadowy surface of that hotel ceiling, she knew It was watching. The room stunk of her sweat and she'd pulled her summer sleepwear into disarray during the battle. When she sat up slowly, her shoulder cocked towards the bedside cupboard where she'd left her gun, loaded, she first fixed her tank top: not to cover her breasts, but to hide the round scar upon her chest, the scar that looked almost like a bite.
She was calm, very calm indeed, when she looked to the bathroom and, in the unsteady light, locked eyes with Pennywise standing there watching her.
"Welcome back, Emily," said the clown politely, reaching up to honk his red nose at her with a salacious wink. "Oh my, oh my, look at you. Look how you've grown, how you've changed."
With fixed calm, Emily took out her gun and stood. Her chest heaved; she was breathing rapidly but it didn't shake her hand or her aim when she fixed the sight on the second down of those silver buttons. Anyone looking at her would have seen her fear, almost tasted it: it was as obvious as her blown-wide pupils and that heaving chest, as obvious as the goosebumps up her arms and the sharp nubs of her nipples under that thin material.
"It won't hurt me," the clown promised her, and she knew he was right. "You're too old, all of you. Too old to harm me, too old to fight. My spring lambs all grown up into stupid sheep, blundering happily back into the floodwaters… and you're trapped, my dear, you're being swept down the river, each and every one of you. I could kill you now, couldn't I?"
"No," Emily rasped. It was a lie.
"I could," It said, smiling wide. It's teeth, she noticed, were sharp. It's lips were wet. Red and wet. She almost choked on the stink of It, the dripping rot. "I could… they won't wake to save you. Why, you could scream and not a mouse will hear you, just like that night. None of them heard you that night, did they? Sleepy little lambs, as their throats were cut, and you screaming… I'll show you."
And It threw back its terrible head and laughed and laughed and laughing, with a noise like all her nightmares come alive at once; it laughed so loud her ears ached and she almost dropped her gun to clap her hands over them. It laughed so loud it seemed impossible that no one hear, that lights wouldn't snap on in every room in the vicinity as they rushed to see what that terrible noise was in her bedroom, penning her in.
But no one came; just like that night, she was alone.
When It stopped, those laughs finally quelling into soft howls of monstrous mirth before fading away, Emily was left frozen and shaking. Her finger, despite being locked on the trigger, had no feeling left within it. She could not have fired to save her life, her entire being still shaking with every one of those boundless cackles as each one hammered home just how dead she was.
"And you remember now, don't you?" It asked her. That white-painted face, those silver-lit eyes, they were cocked to the side as It studied her curiously. "Don't you remember what we did together? Don't you remember how much fun we had?"
She remembered. She remembered completely.
"And whose fault was it, Emily?" asked the clown, slinking closer. The closer it came, the light shifting on those torturous features, the less sure Emily was that it was a clown at all: now, instead, it looked like a face from her memories. It looked…
It looked like Aaron. Aaron at sixteen, before he'd been Hotch. The Aaron she'd kissed. The Aaron she'd turned her back on fleeing alone for, because he'd promised he'd keep her safe and she'd believed him. The Aaron she'd had sex with for the first time in the basement archives of the Castle Rock Public Library the night they'd run for their lives, before they'd gotten caught, and the Aaron who'd whispered I love you into her ear as he'd made a mess of them both down there on a pile of emergency blankets and torn couch cushions. He'd given her her first orgasm, she remembered with a strange thrill, all the hair on her arms now standing to attention with fear and shock, but that had been, in the end, the only good thing he'd given her. He'd given her pain too, so much pain. More than she'd ever felt before, and that was saying something.
It looked like Aaron the day he'd beaten her senseless. But that hadn't been Aaron, it had been this creature, hadn't it?
Hadn't it?
"Whose fault?" asked the Aaron standing before her, his hair floppy and his smile sly. "Who called It to come and take the littles away? Who betrayed you all to save his brother?"
He leaned closer, so close that his mouth was brushing her ear, her head tipped back to avoid touching him. The gun barrel pressed hard against his cold chest and her nostrils full of that rotting scent.
"Who ran when you needed him?" It asked. "Who lied… and who watched you get taken?"
Oh, suddenly she remembered. She remembered it all. Remembered screaming his name as the claw had snapped around her ankle, and remembered watching his back retreating as he'd run away while that claw had dragged her kicking and screaming down below. It was his fault that she'd seen so much; his fault that the glimpse she'd gotten of the deadlights had turned into a full baptism in their darkness; Aaron's fault and Aaron's alone that she'd been so thoroughly destroyed.
"Your turn," It told her. "Run, Emily. Run before he does it again. Run and maybe, just maybe… maybe you'll escape."
The laughter that followed this statement, that manic, hysterical guffawing, chased her as she twisted herself out of his grip and bolted for the door, wrenching it open and fleeing with every devastating memory hot on her heels. It wasn't just the memories she was running from: she could feel it, the deadlights. The madness it had sunk into her brain, the creeping hooks that crawled into her sanity and tried to shatter it like glass. It hadn't managed it last time, even though it had tried… it hadn't managed it all because of one person. Just one. One person who'd pulled her back to sanity.
Running from the laughter and the memories, she bolted for that remembered salvation because that laughter was madness and she, alone out of all them, had the propensity to fall to its tempting insanity.
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8
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And, in the seventh nightmare which was different from all the others only because it was a waking one, David Rossi was dying.
It began much as their tale had with a child crying. There was no real consensus on where It had come from, but most who knew of Derry's terror would assume that soon after It's creation, a child would have met an untimely and gruesome end before it. David Rossi, who had been waiting at the camp in the vain hope of a better future for those children within it, perhaps would have survived if he'd known as much about Dark Score as his teammates were beginning to.
He'd put the children in their beds after managing to fire up the aged industrial kitchen and putting his long-learned culinary skills into play to feed the fifteen hungry mouths waiting. Fifteen, he noted, checking his cell and finding that according to the list JJ had sent through there should be twenty-eight, not including Tommy Hiscott or the unfortunate Marcie Harris. Now he sat alone in the silent rec hall, the case file before him and the camp silent except for the humming light overhead.
The approach of a vehicle was loud enough in the silent night that he was immediately aware that he was no longer alone. Closing the file and carrying it with him in case of curious children seeing the photos within, Rossi walked out to greet the officer sent to relieve him. The police cruiser was a strange comfort to Rossi's eyes as he crossed the camp, for some reason uneasy despite the relative lack of danger in the place.
"You're alone?" he asked the officer who stepped from the car, hat in hand and gun in his belt. The officer was a wiry kind of skinny with nervous eyes and a patchy beard, those blue-washed eyes darting around as though he sensed the wrongness in this camp too. Upon his breast, his badge read 'Kallum'.
"Yessir, couldn't spare another hand away from the search for the Harris girl. Deputy Kallum. Any trouble with Hiscott?" The officer's lingered on the shower block as he followed Rossi back to the rec hall, his expression taut.
"No sign of him. Kid's probably halfway to Bangor by now. Is there a problem?"
Rossi asked this question sharply, alarmed by the man's skittish behaviour. This was who he was expected to leave in charge of fifteen scared kids?
"No problem," said Kallum. "I'm just…" Those eyes skittered about again, fingers tight on his hat. "You hear stories about this place, you know. Weird things happening. Hauntings. Ayup, hauntings, that's it… it's a creepy place, you know? Look at that."
He'd pointed one knobbly finger towards an overground mound of weeds and gravel, the bare suggestion of the jutted skeleton of some kind of frame thrust out from the gravel like a burned finger.
"Why leave that there?" he said quietly. "There's no sense in that."
"What is that?" Rossi asked.
"Old cabin. Burned down, some twenty years ago. Girl died in it, I'm told, though I don't know myself. Was too young to really take notice of things like that."
Rossi watched him carefully. "You grew up around here then, did you?"
"Not really." The man was still staring at the frame, before turning and grinning a little self-consciously. It wasn't a comfortable smile. "But I've never really felt at home anywhere else, doncha know? There's something about this place. Something welcoming."
"Kids die here a lot?" asked Rossi.
Kallum shrugged a little disinterestedly. "No more than other places," was his answer. "Maybe more than some too. Who knows. How many left here?"
Alarms were buzzing now. Rossi hadn't worked the job he had for as long as he had without getting a feel for 'wrong' and this man, Deputy Kallum, he was ringing all kinds of wrong. He was ringing 'scared' too, which Rossi thought was strange since the only thing they had to be scared of up here was mad Tommy Hiscott, who weight about a buck twenty soaking wet.
"Fifteen," said Rossi.
Kallum nodded. For a fleeting instant, Rossi saw a smile on his face, a sad kinda smile.
"A bad summer," said Kallum, in a way that sounded like he'd almost meant to say 'good'.
"Uh-huh. Look, say we head up to the main house?" Rossi had his hands slung in the pockets of his expensive jeans, always dressed for comfort below and style up top. His jacket was fine, his shirt finer, and his jeans were expensive enough that he could buy them to look cheap. It suited him to dress this way, a counter-point to Hotch's stark professionality. 'This job hasn't changed me' his clothes said, which was a lie. "Check in with my partner and then I'll get you settled here. You got backup coming, yeah?"
Really, he just wanted another gun at his side that he trusted while they got Garcia to run a check on this man, this Deputy Kallum. JJ would sense the wrong too, he was sure. Woman had brains to spare.
"No backup," said Kallum quietly. "Do you hear that?"
Rossi did. A child was crying. But not from the cabins, which were silent and lit by the yellowed lamps set around them on long poles; this child was crying from the path that led down towards the lake. Rossi turned to look, staring down that unsealed path and seeing flickers of movement between the low-hung branches. Something moved within.
"Take point," he told Kallum. Like hell he was having this man's gun at his back. Kallum obeyed.
Together, the two men walked toward the lake. Rossi thought, strangely, of his old hunting hound as they came out onto the shore. Mudgie, that was her name. Mudgie, and she was a good dog. A fine dog. They'd hunted plenty of ducks together, him and Mudge, on lakes that were just like this one.
The crying was louder down here. Rossi could pinpoint the direction as being roughly towards a sloped shed perched on the side of the lake, the kind that would keep safety equipment and swimming toys and gear for the children of the camp to have close at hand. Plastic buoys and long noodles made of foam and endless child-sized lifejackets coloured in neon-bright shades that had long become firmly associated with 'danger' in his mind.
"No key to that shed," said Kallum, just staring at the shed without making a move towards it. "It was lost, years ago."
"Was it?" Rossi asked without caring to hear the answer. The crying was hiccupping now, almost broken-hearted, and he couldn't stand to hear it anymore; without Kallum, he walked towards the shed, flashlight held aloft to look for small, terrified shapes in the gloom.
"Ayup. Nineteen-eighty-eight, it was… they got the body out of the lake, but not the key."
Rossi turned, staring at Kallum now. The crying had quietened for a moment like it was also waiting for an explanation.
"What body? Who got it out?" Rossi turned slightly, darting his flashlight at the door of the shed, which was open. He didn't point that out. It seemed unimportant despite the topic of conversation.
But Kallum was still watching the lake with a strange, hallowed expression, almost awed.
"You should have seen it," he said. "Torn right open it was… I watched them get it out, Hotchner and Prentiss. Prentiss, even though she was fucked up that day, really fucked up. It got her, you know. Smashed half her face in and I remember Hotchner was so pissed at me because I wouldn't help with the body and Prentiss had to, even though she was fucked up. And I remember that they didn't know where to hold it and Prentiss slipped and her hand went right in with this noise and, shit, that was a moment. A real moment. I realised some things when that happened."
Rossi was stunned silent, completely thrown. His brain was skating over those familiar names in such an unfamiliar context, trying to deny that there was any sense in what was being said… but the photo in the diner, and his teammates' skittish behaviour, and everything else that was weird about this place. JJ's grandma and Aaron's erratic demeanour and Reid's uncharacteristic vacuity
(and that photo)
and it all kind of worked out to scream one thing: he'd better listen up and listen good because this was a tale and warning the likes of which he'd long learned to respect, even if it seemed insane. Especially because it seemed insane. Some of the best advice of his life had come from the lips of madmen, usually resplendent in its simplicity.
(run)
"What did you realise?" he asked, narrowing in on the one thing he felt sure of getting an answer for, even though what he really wanted to ask was whose body was it and what had 'fucked up' Prentiss and how was the shed door open if the key was still in that deadly silent lake.
"I realised," began Kallum (and the child wasn't crying anymore, but giggling), "that there was no escaping Camp Moribund, and that Hotchner was an idiot for trying. The only way to win is to join them."
Join us, whispered the child behind Rossi, whose hands tightened around the heavy weight of his flashlight. Without turning, because he didn't want to see just yet, he used his other hand to slide his cell-phone out of his pocket. Eyes still locked on Kallum, who watched him disinterestedly, and there was something walking on the gravel path behind Rossi leading to that unlocked shed. Join us, said the child again, except there were more now. A legion of voices, a legion of children. An impossible amount and Rossi didn't believe in ghosts, but he believed a little right at that second.
When he darted his eyes down to his phone, looking away from Kallum for just a second to see the screen where his fingers had already pressed down speed-dial #1—Aaron—he found that the screen read 'Reception Unavailable'.
He looked again at Kallum, who slid a small box from his pocket and waved it at him. A jammer.
Rossi swallowed, pocketing his cell in favour of his gun. The snap of the holster almost drowned out the feet shuffling towards him.
Join us, whispered the lake as well as those children and when he glanced at it as he began to sidle sideways, along that shoreline—away from Kallum and also away from those shuffling feet—he saw pale blurs shifting under the shadowy waves. He knew what those blurs were. Faces, drowned faces. Dozens of them, slowly ascending. Coming towards him, their features becoming clearer.
"You can't escape," said Kallum with a sad smile. "It's alright, Agent. He
(Rossi actually heard the word spoken as though it was both bolded and Importance Capped, as someone particularly pious would speak of their God)
welcomes you, even though you're an outsider. He sent me to fetch you."
"Not planning on dying today, thanks."
With that said, Rossi turned and sprinted for the path that led up to the house where JJ was. He didn't look left—to the seething lake—or right—to the shambling children who, if he'd looked, watched him with deadened eyes. He just locked his gaze ahead and ran like he hadn't run since Vietnam, distantly hearing Kallum call out after him:
"Don't worry, Agent—no one who dies here really dies. In the end, we all come back."
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9
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Here we take a brief break from the inevitable truth of David Rossi's death. At the exact moment that Rossi was running from the legion of murdered children, those of both Derry and Dark Score joined as one horde to help face one of the two groups of now-adults who had, as children, faced him and lived, his team had no idea of the danger he was in; many of them, in fact, were preoccupied with unfortunate events in their own context.
JJ had snapped awake to a thump above her, sprinting upstairs with a hand on the butt of her gun and her heart hammering just in time to find her grandmother seizing on the dusty floor of her bedroom. There was spit on her lips and piss on her nightgown, and JJ didn't notice either of these things in the rush of adrenaline that spiked in order to keep her gran alive. At the point of Rossi's desperate flight, JJ was no longer in the house on the hill; dream long forgotten in the face of a living panic, she was sitting in the waiting room of the Castle Rock County Hospital waiting for news, her cell-phone in her lap as she pondered whether her boss would be awake yet or not.
The time was four thirty-eight a.m. The sun was still down. The town slumbered on.
Aaron Hotchner was indeed awake. He'd woken with the precognition of a man who spent more time in danger than out of it, showered and dressed before the clock had ticked to four and was now doing a nervous patrol of the outskirts of the hotel. His flashlight lit up every shadowed nook, his route taking him past each of the rooms which contained his team. The doors, on the inside of the hotel hallways, were closed and peaceful.
When his restless feet took him outside—right as Rossi reached the house and, fortunately, although in the end it didn't change the outcome, threw himself into cover rather than sprinting out into the open—he found that Reid's window was wide open, the curtains flapping outside where they'd been dragged out by a breeze.
But the night was still. No wind blew. And with that same endangered tenacity, Hotch walked towards that window with a feeling of doom. He peered in, seeing nothing but shadows and the couch set against the wall, the bathroom door neatly closed. There was a light on around the corner of the room, where the bed was set, but the bed itself was hidden from sight.
"Reid," he said, expecting and receiving no answer.
The silence boosted him. He put his flashlight back in the inner pocket of his suit jacket, the one which contained many small items designed to keep him alive on duty, and rested his hands on the windowsill. It was an easy effort to pull himself up and through the window, landing quietly on his sensible shoes, which were polished to a high shine. And inward he went, gun now in hand and careful to clear every corner—he was a father and a smart man and refused to become a picture on the wall of the FBI while still either of these things—before rounding that dividing wall to find that his youngest team member was gone.
The bed was there, the bedding tossed about as though the person who'd slept within it had slept terribly. The pillow was still indented where his head would have lain. If Hotch had walked forward and opened the drawer on the side of the bed, he would have found Reid's credentials and cell-phone both set neatly in there, right atop his unloaded service weapon. These things would have alarmed Hotch.
But they didn't, because they had no need to.
Hotch was already alarmed.
Above the bed, bobbing like so many accusing faces, were dozens of red balloons. They drifted on a wind of their own becoming, each turning in unison to stare Hotch down. Their strings seemed, in the light that Reid always kept on—he was scared of the dark, Hotch remembered—to shine garishly, as though covered with slime from a pond or a sewer. They smelled of rot. And, put together, they spelled out WELCOME BACK over and over and over again, their sides squeaking a little as they rubbed together.
Someone spoke to him. As it wasn't Reid or saying anything that made any possible sense, he ignored it.
"Do you remember now, Aaron?" it asked in his father's voice. "Do you remember the lake? Do you remember Emily's face? Do you remember ME?"
He kept ignoring it, moving around the balloons, which couldn't exist, in favour of looking to see if Reid had left in a hurry, which was quantifiable in a way the balloons and the voice weren't. He refused to look, despite his neck prickling.
"Do you remember the bear?" it asked. "Do you remember the smell of cherry-ass? Cherry-ass! And the taste, oh, how it burned your tongue! Emily was too smart to drink it. You remember that, right!?"
It was getting closer. Hotch had found Reid's gun and phone and was now dreading the worst.
"Do you remember Sean?" it whispered. "And the whupping I gave you? Do you remember what for?"
"Do you remember giving Emily what for?"
"Do you remember how GOOD it felt?"
"Do you remember the body in the lake? Boy, I did a really good job with that one, didn't I? You puked, remember! Threw up all over yourself and then did it again when Emily touched the stomach, because the sound! It was like this."
The sound that followed slammed hard into Hotch as some long-forgotten nightmare. He froze, eyes locked on the screen of Reid's cell, which he was checking to see if there was something there explaining the man's disappearance. His stomach twisted and gurgled, threatening to spill bile and his half-hearted dinner right up his throat and out onto the bed and all those balloons. He closed his eyes and saw
(Emily yanking her hand out of the gaping hole with a small scream, tripping in the bloody water and falling back and, when she lurched up, her skin and clothes pink and foamy, and he threw up again and added to the unholy mess. She was crying and so was he and so as everyone watching and he)
nothing, just the dark of his eyelids. When he opened them again, he was calm. There was no voice talking. There was no one here, which was a problem as Reid was supposed to be here. That was what he would focus on, not impossible voices or balloons.
As Hotch ignored the voice talking to him, Rossi was staring at something else entirely and Morgan was following a bloody trail to a silent door.
A shout shattered the peace of the hotel. Hotch turned and ran towards the scream, refusing to look back to see if the balloons were still there and refusing to look towards that voice to see if it was watching.
(he knew the answer anyway)
.
10
.
David Rossi was crouched in the bushes that ringed JJ's grandmother's home, and he was typing a text he knew wouldn't send in time to save his life. The text read this:
'Dep. Kallum is complicit. Foyet is here w. Aaron's family at Jareau house. Going to get Jack out.'
He paused, looking back up to what he'd seen, which was Haley Hotchner nervously holding hers and Aaron's three-year-old son—he'd be four in October, Rossi remembered grimly, but only if Rossi did his job tonight and did it well—by her side. That would have been alarming enough since she was supposed to be in WITSEC and definitely far away from here, but Rossi had gotten a nice long look at the man who'd exited the driver's side of the neat sedan parked there. He was dressed like a US Marshal, but he most definitely wasn't: Rossi hadn't spent the last few months chasing George Foyet's tail without learning very well what the man looked like and that, that was most definitely him. Him putting his hand on Haley's shoulder and smiling at her before leading them up the porch stairs to where the door stood open. There was no sign of JJ and her SUV was gone from the drive.
"Fuck," Rossi whispered to himself. He couldn't call for backup. He couldn't leave. The chances of him surviving an encounter with Foyet were fairly high, except maybe he was overstating those chances since Hotch—who was a good fifteen years younger than him, at least—had barely escaped Foyet's knife with his life.
He could die here, he realised.
He added a line to the text: 'Died fighting' because he hadn't lived a life like his to go out with a squeak. And then he amended that to 'It's not your fault, you couldn't have seen this coming' because there was no way Aaron wouldn't take this personally.
After all, if he survived, he could delete the text before they saw it. He could be a little sappy.
Pressing send, the message showed the spinning icon that meant it had no signal to send on. Rossi watched that for a moment, one eye on the silent house, before flipping the cell closed and tucking it into a fork between two branches.
Gun in hand, Rossi stood and stalked carefully to the house which, upon examination by others in the light of day and with the knowledge of what was about to happen, seemed almost like an open mouth waiting for a long-awaited meal.
.
11
.
Morgan had no idea why he'd been struck by the desire to go walking through the hotel at ass o'clock of the morning, feet bare on the carpeted halls and thinking how silent it all was. He'd wondered where everyone was, if their team were somehow the only people staying here despite how popular the place supposedly was, and then he'd come around a corner and his bare foot had stepped into something that had squelched.
When he looked down, the floor was soaked in blood. It oozed through his bare toes, bubbling a little under the pressure of his heel. There was enough under his foot that he knew whoever had left it was in a lot of trouble.
"A real bleeder," he murmured, brain misfiring over that unsteady pool and some old memory. He understood at that moment that he'd gone walking because the blood was here needing to be found, or perhaps the blood was here because he'd gone walking, but either way the message was clear. He followed it. His heel left more red splashes on the tan carpet as his eyes tracked the drips and drops, the veritable pathway. Before he'd rounded the corner and found the door the trail led to, he was sure he was going to find a body: no one could lose this much blood and survive, although it did remind him of Foyet's kitchen when he'd faked his death… no one could lose that much blood and survive, except the Reaper.
The blood led to Prentiss's door.
Morgan very much wished he'd brought his gun as he realised that, looking up to see the handprint that curled around the handle of his teammate's hotel door. Inside, she slept. Vulnerable.
It was that that goaded him forward. The door, he realised once he was standing before it, was partially open, and he pushed it the rest of the way and called her name (no answer) into the waiting dark. When that brought no reply, he, probably stupidly, walked inside.
When he saw what was waiting for him, he yelled. Hotch came running, already dressed and already pale, even if what he saw hadn't been already guaranteed to add to the lines on his face.
"Shit," Hotch breathed, arm flung out as though to catch himself on the doorway he'd just thrown himself through. Morgan said nothing, the cry having choked out everything he felt capable of verbalising even in the face of Hotch swearing, an unprecedented occurrence. "Where's Emily?"
Morgan shook his head, closing his eyes against the garish scene before them as Hotch slammed home just how fucked they really were.
"Reid's gone too."
"Did he leave behind something like that?" Morgan managed to spit out, eyes still closed but the red lines burning his retinas. He was reminded, suddenly, of Elle. Elle and Gardner and everything that had gone wrong.
It was about then that he started praying because he couldn't handle another Elle.
"Something like that," said Hotch. Morgan opened his eyes again, forcing himself to look at what was splashed above Emily's bed—at the giddy wordsthat were written over and over and over and over again (welcome home welcome home welcome home welcome home welcome home) in what was undoubtedly blood, the letters still dripping with how fresh it all was. Whoever's blood it was, it was recently shed, and there was way too much for a person to survive losing.
When they dialled her number, her cell rang from the counter against the wall.
Morgan prayed harder.
No one was listening.
.
12
.
JJ, sitting alone at the hospital with no idea that any of this was happening because no one in the chaos had thought to call and warn her as of yet, was unprepared for what was to happen next. She sat alone, staring at the oddly patterned walls, the tiles swimming together in her restless mind as she went over and over the oddity of her grandmother's existence and those graves down the hill and the church that had sat squat overtop of them, oddly shaped as though it had been half-built and forgotten.
The sun, when she glanced to the window, was rising.
And she was still thinking over those things, her brain coughing up the same thought over and over again instead of anything useful when someone walked into the waiting room and choked out her name.
She lurched up, thinking for a moment that it was a nurse with news—although what nurse would cry her name, Jen, like that, like they'd never expected to say it again—but finding that that was not who was standing in the doorway looking at her like she was a ghost.
"Will?" she asked stupidly because it was undoubtedly her boyfriend standing there with their son sleeping in his arms, wrapped tight in the bunny-blanket Spence had bought him in a fit of god-fatherly worry that they weren't keeping him warm enough. "What are…"
But she never got to finish her exclamation, because Will had strode forward and dragged her into an awkward, one-armed hug that was damp and desperate and crushing enough that she worried for Henry between them. "I don't understand," he was repeating into her hair, his voice oddly thick and his breathing heavy. "I don't understand, they said, they said…"
She pulled back, looking up at him and seeing his red eyes and unbrushed hair and generally haggard look.
Something in her stomach twisted hard.
(there's something in the water)
He was here. In Castle Rock, within reach of something.
Henry too. Henry was here too.
"You can't be here," she stammered out, but he was talking overtop of her. Saying something about her dying, about someone knocking on their door and telling him that she was dead, killed in the line of duty. That he was here to ID her body, except she wasn't dead and Henry was here.
"Didn't you call the precinct to check before you rushed here?" she asked him.
"Of course, I did, don't you think I did?" he snapped at her. She ignored his tone. If the roles were reversed, she'd be snapping too. "No one told me otherwise—they consoled me, Jen."
That something in her gut twisted harder.
"Did you call Hotch?"
"No answer. I tried your cell too, it said it was off."
Her cell, when she pulled it from her pocket, was very, very on.
"We need to leave," she said distantly, focusing (remembering). She took his hand. Henry slept on. They walked calmly. Will said very little, keeping close to her; he was a cop too, and he felt it as well, she suspected, judging by his clammy grip on her palm. He felt the wrongness, that feeling like there was a snare waiting to loop around their necks. Henry grumbled a little, blue eyes blinking open. JJ paused, taking him from Will and holding him close. They looked at each other. She saw it in his eyes; he felt the wire touching his throat too, that danger looming.
A nurse walked past without looking at them. JJ turned away from her, choosing a different hallway, and another still when she saw a doctor ahead. Will followed. They found the gated doorway to the paediatric ward, balloons tied to a chair near the door. Those balloons terrified JJ deeply. She walked faster.
"Are we in danger?" asked Will, who'd seen the balloons but didn't understand why JJ looked so frightened by them.
"I don't know," lied JJ, who knew very well what Emily had told her all those years ago (he's never going to let you go, JJ. He's never going to let you go. He wants the full set, you and Ros together again, isn't that fucked) and believed completely that she'd meant it. Because she remembered now, didn't she? She remembered Emily when they'd gotten her back from somewhere, where had she gone? She didn't remember that, but she remembered the wrongness… oh yes, the wrongness that JJ and Will could sense thrumming through this hospital, feeding off the sickness and the death and the morgue below that was lined with little bodies, it had been in Emily that day, hadn't it? That day in nineteen-eighty-eight, when Emily had died in vain and then come back to them wrong. Come back knowing too much, and what had she promised in her blank, nothing voice with her too-shiny eyes staring and Aaron trying desperately to snap her out of it?
(JJ remembered how hard he'd shaken her trying to make her stop being crazy and start being Emily again, shaken her so hard her teeth had rattled together and her breath had skipped and JJ had been scared he'd shake her till she fell to pieces or bit her tongue off or something else equally horrible)
She'd promised that JJ was definitely, absolutely, going to die.
And she'd laughed as she'd said it.
"Jen," said Will, breaking her from that terrible memory. Her son in her arms and feeling sick all the way through, JJ turned to see what he'd seen—and a burst of relief almost slammed her to her knees.
Rossi was here. He stood at the end of the hall, gesturing them towards him frantically. JJ, seeing safety in the gun at his hip and the unwavering strength of his abilities, ran towards him. With Will at her side and Rossi ahead, she shoved Emily's premonition aside. Emily had been crazy that day, she'd seen
(everything)
something that had spooked her, that was all. She was fine now.
Rossi waited until they were close before opening a door and slipping inside, leaving it open just a sliver.
"Come on," said JJ, following her friend without hesitating through that door and down the waiting stairs. Henry was awake now, smiling to see his mommy holding him. Will seemed to have calmed down. They were okay. "Rossi will know what to do."
The door closed behind them.
.
13
.
It was eighteen past seven in the morning. Emily Prentiss and Spencer Reid were long gone. Derek Morgan and Aaron Hotchner were terrified for them. Jennifer Jareau was undoubtedly in more danger than she knew, and David Rossi had been dead for just over two hours.
His body lay among the gravestones in the small cemetery just down the hill from the Jareau house. The knuckle of his right hand brushed Rosaline Jareau's headstone. The dirt around him was buckled, disturbed from below as though something had shoved upwards to grasp at him when he'd foolishly stepped upon the unhallowed ground. His eyes were open and stared up at the sunrise he hadn't lived to see. His mouth gaped. He'd died screaming, gazing at something terrible.
It would be impossible for those who would eventually find his body to imagine how terrible the thing he'd seen in his last moments had been. They could hazard a guess though that it had been dreadful, as there was very little of the man left below the torso and, what was left, had certainly been devoured by something monstrous.
David Rossi had, in fact, not died fighting. He hadn't died saving Jack Hotchner from his fate, and he hadn't even managed to warn Haley of the danger. He hadn't died the hero he'd lived as. He'd died running, died alone, died terrified and screaming and wishing for someone to save him.
Ain't that the damnedest thing.
