Chapter Eleven: He Really Can't Appreciate the Dramatic Flair

Thanks to my beta, Greeneyedconstellations!

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When Aaron's phone rang, none of them thought twice about it. The man spent half his life with the thing glued to his ear, and the other half chasing after the collection of reckless ducklings he called a team, so it really wasn't that unusual.

Besides, they'd lost so much that year.

What more did they have that could possibly be taken from them?

"Boss," Eris said suddenly, rearing upright. JJ glanced at her, biting at the end of her pen, and Rossi was too busy trying to explain to Morgan just why his taste in scotch was wrong and he should feel wrong about it, so he didn't quite catch on to the concern in her tone as quickly as she would have liked. "Dave!"

It was almost comedic. The team fell silent, all eyes swung to his familiar, and then to the silhouette of Aaron in the doorway. They took in his expression. Rossi had seen that expression before. Oh god, had he seen that expression before.

It was the expression Aaron had worn when burying Haley. The one Dave himself had carried like a mask when he'd lost Emily. The one that was always one bad memory away from slipping back into Reid's eyes and the shape of his mouth.

It was a 'the worst has happened' face, made of a combination of guilt and sick, sick horror, and Rossi felt his heart break just a little. Again. It was a familiar feeling.

No.

No more. They couldn't do it. This family, this weird little collection of broken people, there was only so much they could take. No more.

JJ swallowed and the sound was loud. Rossi swore.

"That was DCPD," Hotch said, and the quiet somehow, impossibly, grew. "It's Reid."

Damn.

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At first, he wasn't angry. He wasn't furious. How could he be? None of them could have stopped this, this was no one's fault (bullshit it wasn't, because you saw this coming), and Christ, did he really blame the kid? When it came down to it, did he fucking blame him? Life had just kept piling crap onto Spencer Reid's stupidly skinny shoulders and then had the audacity to wonder why he'd crumbled.

Then he went to the kid's apartment. One more visit. And this time there was no Sergio twining around his ankles and sniggering when he fell; there was no Emily running around looking for her lost keys again and shouting at Reid as though he was the one who'd hidden them; there was no Reid patiently padding after her, having fetched the keys from the couch cushion or the pot plant on the windowsill or, one memorable time, from within a mixing bowl in the cupboard. There was no laughing or shouting or life.

There were two bored looking police officers, ticking off their 'just another suicide' box on their report, a collection of stunned looking neighbours, and the distinct scent of something threatening in the air. Remember heartbreak? that scent asked him mockingly, you will now. Here it is again, in case you'd forgotten.

Aaron was with him. Aaron was silent. Rossi was under no illusions of his purpose here. They'd asked Aaron to be the one to confirm the spellwork was Reid's, that it was him and only him who'd passed through that final gateway—stepping over, the demons called it, and Rossi fucking hated that stupid term because it made it sound so reversible—but Aaron was one harsh word away from meltdown and this was the third person they'd buried this year. Rossi would be the one to call this, to say that final brutal yes.

Not that they'd be burying Reid. Kid had done them that favour at least. Back in the Army, Rossi had seen his share of people who'd simply woken up one morning, deciding breathing wasn't for them, and spit-started their own service pistols. He should be grateful Reid hadn't done that, hadn't left them with brain matter and skull fragments to ID instead of a graceful rune splashed onto the carpet.

"Definitely a gateway, definitely used," the homicide magus drawled when they walked in, expression shuttered. "This guy was one of yours, right? Wouldn't have called him for a fed."

"Why not?" Aaron's eyes were locked on the rune, the concentric pattern work of soot and ash that had flared out from it as Reid had casted. There was a deadly kind of anger in his voice, one Rossi had only ever used when he was about to rip shit out of some student who'd fucked up badly enough they weren't about to be a student anymore, or possibly ever again.

And Rossi hadn't been angry at that point, not like Aaron was, but he would be in a minute.

The homicide magus shrugged. Jackwell his badge declared him. Oh good. Rhymed with jack-off. Almost. Close enough. Rossi quickly memorised that in case they had to make a complaint. Or in case he needed to write him a 'I'm sorry but not really' card after Aaron kicked him. However this went. Hell, he wasn't going to get in the way. "Demon has enough pharmaceuticals in there I'm surprised he was even sober enough to draw a workable spell," he said, and walked away like he hadn't just left them reeling.

"Bullshit," hissed Eris, spitting and churning under his feet. She flowed away, skirting the rune and the pattern work, and vanishing into the bedroom. "He's not an…"

Her voice trailed off.

Rossi followed. Aaron followed him. They found the (impossible) box.

And oh, there was the anger.

He welcomed it.

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The day ended early for them. Strauss' orders. Maybe the woman did have a heart.

He'd put in for leave. They needed it, all of them. Not one of them was fit for active rotation at the moment, not a single damn one of them. He'd taken Morgan and Garcia back to his home and left them offering whatever thin comfort they could to each other. JJ had vanished, and fucking hell, Rossi couldn't breathe if he even tentatively considered the conversation she'd be having with Henry right now. Hotch was… somewhere. Work still, probably. The man didn't know when they were beaten.

Rossi hadn't taught him how to quit because he didn't know how. He wasn't ready to give up, not yet. There was a mystery here, a small one. One that, on the surface, didn't seem much.

Well, it's obvious why he did it, said one of the voices in his head, the slightly condescending one that was Morgan when he thought one of them was being deliberately obtuse. Rossi liked to give voices to the irritating parts of his mind. Made them easier to deal with when he could blame his co-workers for their irregularities. Kid has had a shithouse year. A shithouse life. And you knew he was leaning too heavily on Prentiss, knew they were dangerously co-dependent, but did you stop them?

But why? asked the JJ voice, managing equal amounts of sad and angry. Rossi rapped his fingers on the steering wheel, waiting for the light to turn green, and waited for her to finish. He didn't even know where he was going, let alone her. He has us. And Henry. He'd never do this to Henry. There had to be signs. Something pushed him over. Why didn't you notice?

Emily. He wondered, for a second, if he remembered her voice correctly. Maybe he just couldn't think for missing me. You know how that feels, to lose someone like that. Your son. Gideon. So many others, countless others. Me.

Morgan again. Man didn't shut up. You noticed them. Why didn't you care?

The voices in his head, unlike his co-workers, were all arseholes.

Fuck this. There had to be signs. Somewhere, there were signs. And not in that abandoned apartment wiped clean of anything but what Reid wanted them to see.

He turned right.

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Rossi tried not to stereotype, but every single satyr he'd ever met had had three things in common: they were absurdly disconnected from every facet of reality, absolutely awful to hardwood flooring, and they were all promiscuous as hell. And he meant that in the kindest way possible.

It was irrefutably bizarre to be standing in an office that was stamped with the indelible personality of Reid, discussing the man with a satyr who was visibly two of those things and probably the third one too (but he really didn't want to dwell on that). Elias Juster was… odd. Capital O odd.

Twenty bucks he'd gotten along famously with Reid.

"I'm afraid I don't quite understand why you're here asking all these questions about the Doctor," Dr. Juster was replying coolly, his doe-brown-eyes tracking Eris as she twisted into the roughest form of Rossi's shadow possible and peered about the office floor. "Is that a shadow-ghast? How on earth did you acquire one? Is it… does it have an assigned biological sex or is it fluid? Fascinating…"

Rossi hrumphed in his best listen the fuck to me voice, but the satyr was muttering to himself and very clearly off in his own little academically minded daydream.

"Eris," he said, with emphasis on her name just so she didn't bitch later that he was objectifying her, "Is indeed a shadow-ghast, indeed a she, and—"

"So not getting involved with this," she murmured, twisting into herself and coiling away. Traitor.

"Dr. Juster, did Reid give any reason as to why—"

Juster made his own hrumph noise. It was a decent attempt, if a bit goat-y. "Dr. Reid, if you please. We do respect titles within this facility – what did you say your name was?"

Rossi counted to three to stop himself from saying something Aaron would describe as inappropriate, Dave, and held his palm up, the even blue glow of his credentials flickering into the shape of the FBI crest on his hand. "SSA David Rossi," he repeated, again, and the blue flashed green to confirm his identification.

"Is Dr. Reid in disgrace?" Juster tossed his head, a move which would have looked ridiculous on any other – no, no, it still looked ridiculous even on the goat-man, with the added benefit of hinting to Rossi that there was something here he wanted to know, something Juster didn't want to tell him.

"No, he's—"

"Do you have a warrant?"

"No, I—"

"Is Dr. Reid aware that you're questioning me, Agent?" He said 'agent' like Rossi would say 'good lord, look at the pus on that.' The same kind of distasteful-yet-fascinated upward inflection.

Rossi tilted his head. Rossi smiled. Juster swallowed. "Dr. Reid was an agent too, I feel needs mentioning," he said sweetly. "A very good one. If we can get past that little stonewall, this conversation will move so much smoother."

"He is a scientist and an academic. If he was misguided… ah." Juster stopped and the half-toss of his head he gave was now nervous, his throat working busily. Rossi watched with interest as the man's fingers tightened around the top of his chair, knuckles whitening. "Past tense, I notice. How… distressing."

To his credit, he did look genuinely distressed. Rossi felt bad. A little bad. A small part of him whispered that this guy saw him twice as much as you did – why didn't he notice?

Or did he?

"You don't seem surprised." Rossi softened his tone, just in case this guy was the weeping type, because fuck. He wasn't feeling stable enough himself to deal with someone else grieving right now.

"I'm not. Sometimes we are given more than we can carry. Dr. Reid carried his own burdens, and quite often those of every demon he felt had suffered similarly to himself. Some level of mental distress was inevitable, and after the unfortunate death of his mate, I can't say that I am surprised that it culminated in his removal from this plane."

"I never said it was suicide," Rossi interjected. Juster didn't look thrown, merely shrugged awkwardly, like the movement was foreign to him. Something he'd picked up from watching other people do it but never actually tried himself.

"You didn't need to. Dr. Reid's behaviour had grown erratic. His health, both physical and mental, was declining. The nightmares, the migraines, the events that led to Agent Prentiss's death, they all added up, as did his failure to move beyond his past. It was destroying him. I suspected this was looming when he put in his resignation for this office. A move, I must inform you, that set every sector of research into necromantic bindings back five years. Entirely selfish. Do you know the reason he gave to withdrawing his mind from the academic world?"

Perhaps the satyr's grief only extended as far as Reid's grey matter, rather than Reid himself. Rossi hated him for that, just a little. More had been lost than just a resource.

"No," Rossi said shortly, biting back the spite that threatened to show.

"He engaged in a sexual tryst with a student of his. Hardly worth the theatrics, I thought, but there you go. And while I don't pertain to understand his discomfort with this act, he was considerably troubled by it. I do understand enough to know that it is an entirely unprofessional act, one that could have far-reaching implications for the student if it is discovered, and that it was completely out of character for him to be so feckless with his powers. Take of that what you may."

"You seem more forthcoming now that you… know." Clumsy. It was clumsy, but the day was beginning to drain him, and it was becoming hauntingly obvious that this should have been obvious. He adjusted his shoulders from where they'd slumped forward and huffed a breath to bring his chest up. Fine. He was fine.

"A man who cannot tell his tales requires one to tell them for him," Juster replied, leaning against the desk and rubbing his temple tiredly. "And my kind are, above all, storytellers. These events are distressing, Agent Rossi, and I chose those words carefully. They are not joyless. Some demon-kind celebrate the agency shown by those who choose to move beyond rather than allowing injury, accident, or illness to shunt them over."

"He was twenty-nine-years-old," Rossi spat, and he couldn't keep the anger out of his voice no matter how much he tried. "Do you know the average age of a demon when they choose to die? I bet you do, but here you go—" You machine, was on the tip of his tongue, but he held it back. "—five-hundred. Five-hundred-years-old. I think Dr. Reid was a little short of that, don't you?"

"You keep using those terms 'die,' 'suicide.' Those are not adequate terms. You are misinformed. Dr. Reid is not dead, merely not a conscious part of your world anymore. If he desired true death, he would have been much more… visceral about it. I will not grieve for him, just as I would not grieve for a colleague who decided that their calling was to retire to some hut in the middle of a far-away jungle with no telephone. In neither case will I ever see nor communicate with them again, but I am assured of their pleasure in their choices. You will note that Dr. Reid's family will not mourn him either. It would be a grievous insult to him to do so. You could learn from this."

Rossi was done here. He was going home.

Maybe it was time to learn when to quit.

"We are his family," he said, quietly. "We do mourn him. We always will. The problem with your analogy is that the man in the jungle can come home back to learn that."

Reid never would.

Or… could he?

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"This is dumb," said Eris.

"I'm not helping with this," she said again later, and really, did she think he was going to start listening to sense now? In all the years she'd known him, had he ever been one to shy away from something stupid or reckless or fun? Aaron would have laughed himself sick if someone had told him that Rossi had chosen now to decide to be sensible.

Well, he probably wouldn't have laughed. Rossi had the suspicion there wasn't going to be much laughing going on anymore.

And that was why he was doing this downright dangerous, immoral, and foolhardy thing. This dumb thing. Because David Rossi was angry and he really wanted the focus of his anger to know it. Spencer Reid was not leaving this plane of existence without one last lecture.

He was summoning that little shit with his ridiculous hair and his puppy-dog eyes, and he was going to describe in explicit detail everything he'd had to deal with that day.

"This is only going to hurt the both of you," Eris reminded him, sulking in the corner of the room as an amorphous mass of shadow and sass and unwanted advice. He couldn't help but be reminded of his Nonna. She was real good at ignoring people ignoring her as well. "You don't just summon demons willy-nilly, Dave. Once they're beyond, they're gone. He's gone. Whatever you call back, it won't be Reid, and you know it."

Yep. He was going to explain just what it had looked like walking into the BAU and finding the team huddled in a miserable circle around Emily's photo on the wall, turning in unison with fucking hope on their faces. What it had looked like as they'd seen Aaron's face and that hope had faded.

Aaron not saying a word, just walking up to his office and closing the door.

JJ covering her mouth, and then her eyes, and then her shoulders shaking just once. Dropping her hand and following Aaron to his office, tapping softly before letting herself in.

Morgan holding Garcia while she cried and cried and fucking cried until Rossi couldn't bear it anymore and drove them both back to Morgan's home.

And the drugs. What the fuck was the kid thinking? Some genius he was if he'd thought he could find what he was missing in a pill, or a needle, or a dozen of them both.

(But that's not right, you're being reactionary. All this time, you've never seen him high.)

He wasn't a rune mage, not even close, but he kicked aside the rug and painted his goddamn shadow-mage heart out until there was an almost perfect rendition of the summoning rune curled onto his heartwood floors. He lit candles. He found a bottle of twenty-one-year old single malt, choked down three fingers of it and then just drank from the bottle itself, and then fetched the paintbrush he'd found in the dumpster outside Reid's apartment. Kid had made sure the only mess he left behind was the rune and the hole in their hearts.

But there was still paint on the bristles, paint Rossi knew was mixed with blood, and that was enough. He threw the brush into the centre of the rune.

Probably a little drunk. Definitely a little more than somewhat reckless. He looked to Eris.

"Summoning demons is necromantic," she hissed, pressed up against him anyway and bolstering his magic. She'd stand by him, yeah. She always would. Steady as a rock, his Eris. Even when he was stupid. "This is wrong. Let him rest. You don't know what this will do to his soul when you break the circle."

Maybe he didn't have to break the circle. As long as the circle was whole, Reid would stay (trapped. You're trapping him). He could… fuck, he could set it up nice, or whatever. Garcia would stop crying, Aaron would stop guilting, JJ would just stop… stopping. He could fix this. Fix it proper.

But he paused. Swallowed around the lump of something choking and cruel in his throat.

What would Emily say if she was alive? If she knew?

"Dave?" A tug at his fingers. Eris. He sank to his knees, closed his eyes, and screamed inwardly at the world and everything that was fucking wrong and pointless about it.

"Why don't we ever get to say goodbye?" he said finally, and she couldn't answer that.

He reached for the abandoned bottle, overshooting and almost sprawling forward, putting his hand down to balance himself. Smeared the circle. Never mind. He wasn't going to use it anyway (you were never going to use it because nothing would be crueller). Whoever came up with the jolly idea that most gateway runes worked better wet was an idiot. Rossi had been to plenty of cocked up suicide attempts where the demon had made the rune too small for them to be able to paint it wet and still stand inside without smearing it. Sometimes they survived. Often they didn't. A misprinted rune could be…

Oh.

Sobriety smashed into him with the realization.

"Get up," he said to his familiar, and staggered upright. Reached for his keys. Wait, fuck. He was over the limit, he couldn't drive. Who would be sober this time of the night? "We're going out."

Who could he call?

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"Sir, this feels… ick. Like. Super creeptastic. And I really… really don't want to see, I mean, it hasn't even sunk in yet and I don't even know if I miss him because I'm kind of thinking this is all a really bad, stupid, terrible, really bad dream and now we're here and oh oh oh oh…"

"Penelope." Rossi turned to her, taking in her vivid orange and purple dressing gown and slippers and shaking body, and rested a hand on her shoulder. "You can wait outside."

She looked back at him, steel in her gaze despite the tears. Reid's door stood next to them, silent. A heavy bass beat thudded dully through the door of the apartment that had been Emily's.

"It's just…" she began, and breathed in deeply. "He's not going to be there. We're going to go in and he's not going to be there, he's never going to be, and he chose that and oh…" She closed her eyes. "I'm coming. I… I don't know why you're doing this, sir, but you're not doing it alone."

Atta' girl.

They hesitated as the door swung open, silently. The apartment seemed cavernous, almost threatening. Shadows and looming shapes and dark patches on the bare floor that Rossi knew were the rune. Garcia began to wheeze, before shouldering past him and storming in. Smacked her hand on the light and every light in the apartment flared on. Rossi heard the fridge choke and splutter at the surge of power, a dull thrum from the bedroom that was probably a TV or radio.

"There!" Garcia declared. "Much less… is that it?" She stared down at the rune, eyes wide, and he saw her flicker. "Oh. Oh. Sir. Those boxes… they have our names on them. He… he left stuff for us. Sir? What are you doing?"

Rossi was, in fact, doing what he did best.

Profiling.

There wasn't much to go on. The apartment was scrubbed clean. Reid had disabled his security work, swept, even fucking dusted the windowsills. The fridge and cupboards were empty. It absolutely looked like the home of someone who'd left, never expecting to return. And there was the box they'd found in the bedroom, left openly on the bed like a note, like an explanation…

"There was a box," Rossi said slowly, and didn't walk to the room. He knew there was nothing in there now but furniture. The cupboard, the closet, the bookshelves, all stripped clean. All packed in the neat piles of boxes around Garcia, or taken to charity shops in the back of the kid's shitty old Austin. "Drugs. Paraphernalia. Prescription medication. Lots of it. Why would he have left that out for us? Reid hated looking weak. He wouldn't even take painkillers unless he was incapacitated… why leave that as his legacy?"

Silence. He turned, frowning, mind whirling, to find Garcia staring at him with her eyes bulging out of her head. "He was taking drugs?" she whispered, voice muffled behind the hands over her mouth. Damn damn damn. He'd forgotten. He'd gotten so caught up in his head, he'd forgotten the human behind it all… this was Reid. This was their friend. He needed to… "He wouldn't. No gosh-damned way was he taking drugs, he's Spencer. I don't believe it. I won't."

"Penelope…" To her credit, when he reached for her arm, she shook him off. Now she was angry. At him? Probably. It was a lot easier to rage at the people who were still alive. Yelling at the dead? It wasn't anywhere near as satisfying.

Not that Rossi himself hadn't tried, when Emily had had the audacity to die before him. Damn her. She was supposed to bury him. He had it all planned out: she was going to cry and be all sad and say lovely things at his funeral and he would know, somehow, and be smug about that. His final act, forcing his cocky-ass student to be nice to him for once, instead of contributing to his rapidly greying hair.

"No! Shut—shh!"

…. Did Penelope Garcia just tell him to shut up? Huh.

"I mean, I'm sorry, that was so rude, sorry, but… no. No, nope, nossirie, that's not happening. He's not leaving us that. That's… that's… crap." She whirled, slippers shuffling, and frantically looked around the silent apartment. Stunned, Rossi watched her, not stopping her when he moved towards the boxes. "Can I open these? Is this still under investigation? I'm guessing not because no tape, so I'm just going to…" The sounds of tape tearing and cardboard being torn open filled the air.

Rossi padded over and peered over her shoulder. A laptop. A laptop, a few books, letters, a sealed envelope that she hovered her hand over, trembling. He left a note. A note? Or several?

The rune. Rossi turned his attention to it. He could see Reid's mannerisms in it, sections where the Greek flair of the original pattern almost styled into the more Anglican style Reid was more familiar with. It wasn't as smooth or as complex as one Emily would have made. There wasn't a smudge or a smear breaking any of the lines, the gaps in the paint wide enough for a person to carefully step their way through to the centre. The only sign that an amateur rune worker had cast it was the scorch marks flaring outward. Rossi wasn't as good as Emily, but he wouldn't have royally fucked up the flooring like that either.

He left Garcia still shaking over the note, knowing he'd have to read it himself but god that wasn't something he'd woken up this morning wanting to do, and paced around the rune.

His behaviour, how erratic he'd been… nails bit into Rossi's palms as his fists clenched, he fought off the surge of biting, frantic anger that rushed to replace the small hope he'd been toying with. A note, leaving his belongings to them, sticking his tongue down Aaron's throat, his student… even the dinner party, that final dinner party. They should have seen it. Classic presentation. The person makes a decision to end their lot, and everything is so much easier. So much easier to smile, to pretend, to sit and feed their godson ice cream while weaving a perfect fucking illusion of okayness.

He kicked the burn marks, furious. Fuck Reid. Fuck Reid and fuck his death and fuck the way he'd fucked it up and ruined the goddamn floor, didn't the man have any kind of care for his home? The whole place ruined, all of it (except for that bit there, right there. See it?), and Rossi was probably going to have to deal with that, deal with it all, because was… what?

A bare patch of floor. The smallest, barest patch of wood. Unmarked. On the outside of the rune.

As though someone was standing there. Watching.

Or… casting.

Whirling, Garcia was crying again, the note in her hands, but he ignored it. Dumped his box on the floor, belongings scattering; she cried out with shock, but couldn't she tell he was looking? Profiling

Reid. What was the first thing he'd learned about Reid? Years ago, all those years ago, when he'd walked into Reid's room to find Emily curled up on his bed with her heart breaking.

("He keeps the things he loves close, and the people he loves even closer. Why would a man who cannot forget keep so many mementos? Because he's scared of forgetting or because he can't bear to be without those things?")

JJ's box. Photos for her, books for Henry. Games and kits for Hotch, for Jack. More books for Morgan – did Reid have anything he loved that wasn't a book? When he saw him again, he was going to take him out, get him wankered, loosen him up a bit. Show him what fun was, Christ.

When he saw him again? Was he expecting to?

"Garcia, help me," he ordered, standing up in a sea of scattered belongings. "What's missing? What would he take if he was leaving?"

Garcia stared at him. "Nuh-nothing," she stammered, hugging the note close. "You don't take things with you through gateways. Nothing passes through. I don't… I don't know."

Okay, try again. "What does he love? Besides books?" He flapped his hands at her, coaxing, hurry. As though there was no time. Maybe there was – it had only been less than twenty-four hours. Whatever had happened, whatever choice he had made, it could be undone. If he hadn't stepped through that gate, they could get him back.

"Um." She looked around, slowly scanning the motley collection of belongings, the boxes still unopened. "Us. His friends. Emily. His mom. Henry."

Henry.

"Can you find a drawing? A child's drawing, of a swing-dinosaur-thing, from Henry. Is it here, anywhere?" Garcia shot him a frightened look, then began searching. He joined her, picking through every last item, finding what was there, what wasn't.

"There's no drawing," she exclaimed finally, and light was beginning to slink in through the curtains. "Rossi, what are we looking for?"

She was right. No drawing. Every box was open, every single fucking one, and there was no drawing. In the books, the ridiculous amount of books, there was a single notable one missing. A book of poetry, a tiny, leather bound book with musty pages and a bent spine from being held open loose in a hand. The book that Rossi knew the sentimental little weirdo kept photos tucked within. One of Emily, conspicuously. The book Reid had taken to carrying with him recently, like he couldn't bear to let it out of his sight.

And the knife. Emily's knife. Reid wouldn't have thrown it out or just into a box, not when he didn't know who would be sorting through them… he wasn't that thoughtless. He'd taken it. Taken all three items.

He wasn't dead.

That little shit.

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He found Aaron in his office. Between Reid's apartment and the Bureau, while humming non-committal answers to Garcia's concerned queries about why he was going to work in yesterday's clothes and stinking of whiskey, he did a lot of thinking. A lot of thinking.

"You're not supposed to be here," Hotch said when Rossi strode in, and Rossi took a moment to note that he wasn't the only one in yesterday's clothes.

"You bastard," Rossi replied, and Aaron blinked.

"Pardon?"

"You bastard," Rossi repeated, since Aaron appeared to have gone fucking deaf in the hours since he'd seen him last. "She's not dead."

A coffin that was a shade too light. Aaron standing back at her funeral, like he was unsure he was supposed to be there. They hadn't let Rossi see the body. Family only, they'd murmured. Because Emily could spin a rune to make her look dead to Reid, blinded by grief and trust, but Rossi would have seen through it in an instant.

Aaron swallowed and leaned back in his chair. There was a long moment where he visibly considered continuing to lie.

"Dave," Aaron began, and Rossi cut him off. No time for the man to talk stupid, they could still fix this.

"He's gone after her," he said, and Aaron paled. "You idiot, he knows and he's gone after her."

To give him credit, Aaron's voice didn't falter despite his skin taking on an interesting shade of grey. "He wouldn't do that. He wouldn't do that to JJ or to Henry."

They hit the same conclusion at the same time; Rossi watched it happen.

"Well," Rossi said softly, "At least we now know why he threw himself at you. That's cheeky of him. I'm proud. Where is she, Aaron? Where is he going?"

Aaron dropped his head into his hands and his shoulders slumped. Whatever hope Rossi had been bearing that this could be over soon faded with the defeated movement.

"We lost her," he breathed, voice muffled by his fingers. "She took off after Doyle and we haven't been able to get hold of her since."

"Where?"

Damnit, Prentiss. Not now. Not when he was just about to right all the wrongs of this year.

Dear world, don't half give her back to me. Don't offer me this and then take it away.

Don't you fucking dare.

"Russia."