Chapter Twelve: Down Among the Dead Things: Pt III (2009)
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1
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William LaMontagne was dead.
Hotch crouched by the body for longer than he could spare. Scratches and scrapes along his bare arms ached, although it was an unimportant kind of ache that felt completely disconnected from the rest of him. They'd been caused by struggling through the hole that had only narrowed the further he'd crawled into it; it was a hole for children, not for adult men. He'd forgotten them instantly because, as soon as he'd found his feet and turned on the small flashlight he usually kept in his suit jacket pocket—the actual jacket which was still up with Reid—the narrow beam had landed on the motionless form lying sadly here, alone.
"I'm so sorry," Hotch murmured to the body, his hand slipping from that still throat after finding no pulse. He'd checked despite seeing the pallor, the strange discolouration of the skin as the blood began to pool, the mouth that hung open and those clouded, empty eyes. He'd checked despite the blood, all that blood, and the shirt which was torn at every point of impact from the bullets that had destroyed this man who'd done nothing but love a woman touched by evil. Just like Haley.
Hotch stood. He darted his light about the tunnel, seeing the blood that spattered the concrete floor. The fact that the floor was concreted chilled him. A hole dug by an animal, that made sense. This, though? This carefully manmade burrow? It spoke of something darker. And, he thought, looking down again at the bullet-riddled man who'd died so close to the light, Will had clearly been killed by men.
Because it hurt too much to stand here wondering if Will had died within earshot of them, if he'd been calling to them with his last breath, Hotch turned his back and walked away. Following a path he knew led down, down to where the dead remained. He'd walked this path before. He remembered.
The numbness was fading. The wrath from before was back, coming in waves. A tide coming in, bringing with it the drowning memories of everything this town had ever done to them. It seemed like every time Hotch blinked, he remembered another rage-inducing scene: Spencer as a six-year-old boy, crushed behind a toilet in his navy-blue polo with his mouth locked open from screaming even though he'd long run out of breath; Derek throwing the mini-van's radio as he'd howled in some fully actualised pain; Penelope holding Manny as they watched Aaron and Emily pull Rafe from the lake; JJ's hollow eyes when they'd carried her away from her sister's body.
Emily in the cabin. The blood, the bruises, the knife. Emily in the tunnels, limp and staring.
Dave.
And then Hotch turned a corner and his flashlight lit up Hell. It was a red room. The walls were painted in dripping slashes and sprays; the floor was red-washed from the tips of Hotch's shoes to beyond the gory scene. It took a very long moment for Hotch to realise what the cause of the mess was. When he did, walking forward into the bloodied space and looking down at it, recognising her, the world went very quiet.
An unfathomable amount of time passed. Hotch kept blinking but the images from the past were gone now. Just, this. This seared into his brain forever. His knees wet with the blood. His hands red on his lap. The gun strapped to his ankle still there, untouched, because there was no doing anything about this now; they'd failed. They'd promised Rosaline they'd protect her, little Jennifer, and they'd failed.
He'd promised Spencer he'd save her. He'd failed.
She was very, very dead.
There wasn't a tide of anger swamping him anymore. It wasn't anywhere near as predictable. It was a storm, unseasonable and vast. It would crush everything in its path. It would destroy all that stood before it. It was hurting and bitterness and twenty-one years of swallowed up pain; it was their fear and their grief and it was Hotch's father's fury finally rising from the grave with his belt and his cruelty to take root in his brain. He welcomed it. Oh, how he welcomed it.
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2
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He kept going, leaving reddened footprints behind him. Down into the dark, eyes locked forward and not a single part of him able to focus beyond the rage. He would rip Pennywise in half. Crush It. Reach inside and rip It apart, like it had Rafe. Maybe he'd do to It what It had done to Emily. Maybe he'd beat It, whip It, rip a chunk of It's flesh out with his own teeth as It writhed under him and screeched for—
He turned a corner and found Emily, her body thrown down in a pile of faded gas cans. Red plastic tumbled about her and her arms and legs askew, her dark hair wild around a face that was just as empty and staring as Will's had been. It was bright in here, lit eerily, and his eyes hurt as they adjusted to it. A strange, blue-white bulb hung overhead. It seemed ridiculous.
It made the shadows around him starker. It illuminated Emily.
She was so very dead.
It hit like everything else all at once: Hotch staggered with a thin cry of grief and shock as Dave's death and Will's death and JJ's destruction all slammed into him at once at the sight of Emily Prentiss lying there. Never to rise again. Gone for good. So many gone. And Reid was dying and Morgan would die and Jack would die and Haley—
(you should die too. Just die, come on. Do yourself a favour. You're nothing without them, those you led to their doom)
—would die because he had saved no one.
No one.
He turned his head away, squeezing his eyes shut with vomit rising in his throat and tears burning. Hands shaking too much to grip anything, not a gun, not nothing…until suddenly they were steady and he lurched forward drunkenly to gently lift her from the debris. All he could smell was old gas. She was so light in his arms as he hugged her close, so slim, and he turned her gently to try and fix her hair away from her face. Emily was always so well-presented in life, he couldn't bear to see her like…this.
He stared, on his knees cradling his dead teammate's body and she was seventeen in his arms. Seventeen years old with smeared mascara and red lipstick half wiped off. Her chest was bared, a bite above her breast still oozing blood, and her face…her face was beaten. She'd been whipped.
Her eyes opened.
He didn't fling her away from him, although it was a close thing. Remembering what he'd done to the false Dave, he gently lowered her to the ground and stood, backing three steps away from her without ever breaking eye-contact. Not when he leaned down and unstrapped the gun from his ankle, making sure she saw every one of his very deliberate movements as he straightened and checked it was loaded.
When she sat up and wiped one insouciant hand across her mouth, her face was intact. The skin above her breast was clean and unbroken. It looked as though no hand had ever been laid upon her, and she smiled at him with a look that, at sixteen, had allured him beyond all good sense. But he wasn't sixteen anymore; he was thirty-seven and there was nothing seductive about those dark lashes and that curved mouth, not on such a young, haunted face. She was a child and he was not, and he felt sick as this facsimile of the girl he'd loved stood and winked coquettishly at him with one hand on her cocked hip and her chest still exposed.
She was holding his father's belt, red with the blood from the last person it had beaten. Probably him. Maybe Sean. No one who'd ever deserved it, if anybody really had.
"What's wrong, Aaron?" It asked with Emily's young voice. He wanted to rip out It's tongue in that second, because how dare It, but he couldn't bring himself to hurt this child he'd loved so fiercely for one terrible summer. "Don't you want me anymore? Don't you still want to fuck me?"
"Where is Prentiss?" he asked, keeping his voice simmering low. Hiding that acrimonious anger.
"I still want to fuck you," It simpered, the ghost It was wearing biting at her lower lip and looking uncertain. "Is it because I'm not pretty enough for you? Or too damaged? Oh…you prefer blondes, don't you? Like Haley?" Something bit down hard around his heart as she looked away, mouth turning down and chin wobbling. Those dark eyes were glassy, hurting. Scared. He couldn't think; he was suddenly slammed by every dark guilt he'd ever harboured that he hadn't been able to heal her in all the ways he'd longed to when he was sixteen. "I'm sorry I'm not good enough. I was always sorry I wasn't good enough for you. But I sucked cock like a champ, didn't I?"
It held out the belt. Hotch raised his gun, putting her squarely in his sights.
"You can whip me if you like," It offered, smiling with too many teeth. The illusion was slipping. "I know you like causing pain. You're not so different from good old George, are you? Oh, George…your Reaper. No, you're not so different from him, Aaron. You know that she's scared of you, don't you? You know, she's down here hiding from you like a kicked bitch, just a stray mutt."
"You never convinced her I was dangerous," Hotch said quietly. He wondered what It would do if he walked right past, kept on going. "You tried. I remember how much you tried, pretending to be me, trying to set me up for everything. But it didn't work. She never doubted me, none of them did. You failed."
"You failed," It shot back, throat arching inhumanely as Emily's young face split into a snarl. "You think you bested me? You didn't do shit, little pissant. Fucken queer little pissant, you wet little cunt—you did nothing. So what if you got away once, you're not going to now. I'm going to devour you, you and all your little friends, and I'm going to make it hurt so much more because of how pathetic I find you all, how worthy of loathing. I failed? I failed? Your friends are dead and dying, Hotshot! David Rossi died like a whining dog. Jennifer Jareau will have to be buried in a matchbox. Emily Prentiss is running from you. How long do you think Spencer will last alone? Maybe I'll send someone to take care of him, huh? Maybe I'll have them cut off his cock first so I can shove it down your—"
Hotch fired; the bullet slammed neatly into the centre of Emily's forehead, snapping her head back and sending her staggering back into the gas cans. They sloshed, plastic dragging heavily against cement
(he remembered them)
but she didn't fall, just straightened back up and rolled her dark-rimmed eyes at him, blood trickling from the round hole in her temple and the wall behind her splattered with blood and bone and brain-matter. He watched the blood drip between her eyes, rolling smoothly down that long nose and splitting in two to drip over her mouth and off her chin. It made perfectly round circles on the floor where it landed.
"So many of us dead," she said softly, the blood on her lip spraying a little with every word. "So many of us failed. Adult fears have many faces, Aaron, and all yours belong to me now."
The shadows bubbled around them, Hotch's flashlight shaking in his hand as he struggled to avoid the temptation to see what was approaching. Feet shuffled on cement. Old clothes whispered dryly. He heard the wet sound of something dripping as the multiple sources of these sounds approached. He still didn't look: he didn't want to see the dead made into this monster's puppets. He didn't want to see Dave like that, or JJ, or…
A small hand touched his elbow.
Everything went cold.
"Look at him," Emily simpered, her expression colder than the real Emily had ever looked. "Look how small he is… how dead…"
The boy was standing just below Hotch's peripherals. Blonde hair was just visible, but the boy's face was lowered, obscured. Whoever it was, he didn't say anything, just stood there with his little, dead hands curled over Hotch's arm, like he was trying to get the man's attention to play with him. Hotch's brain, entirely without his permission, calculated the height someone would have to for them to stand that tall, and his gun shook as every answer came up: Jack.
"He's not dead," Hotch rasped. "You're lying."
Emily watched him coldly.
He tore away from the dead boy, refusing to look as he shoved past Emily and closed his eyes: blind and frantic, he shoved and struck and pushed his way through the dead clustered in the entrance to the tunnel. He refused to look at any of them; he also refused to stop. There was no going back, not until he was done.
Deep below Castle Rock, Aaron Hotchner kept going. The dead followed silently after him and he refused to be stopped until he got where he was needed: the darkest room which contained that terrible, beating heart.
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3
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The room devoured all light. For the second time in his life, Hotch stepped out into it and knew it instantly for what it was. His flashlight barely penetrated the deep shadows. The air was colder, easier to breathe but with an aftertaste that made him feel sick and dizzy. The claustrophobic feeling of the tunnels dropped away; he took a breath and knew he was in a vaulted space that loomed far over his head and before him. The ground throbbed.
The darkness moved. Hotch stilled, willing even his heartbeat to quieten so he could focus.
He wasn't alone in here.
The ground felt alive under his shoes as he stepped cautiously forward. Something pulsed under it, just out of sync with his heart. There was a soft clicking echoing in the dark, like the whisper of a thousand dry voices. Hotch listened to that for a moment until he realised what it reminded him of with a shudder that worked right from his skull to his gut: it sounded like insects scuttling. It made his entire body itch, every hair stand on end, as he imagined countless eyes and whispering legs and clicking mandibles.
If the dead still followed him, he couldn't tell now. It wasn't important anyway. He remembered that this was the room the kids had been taken too all those years ago; this was the room they'd have been taken to now. Haley and Jack, they had to be here. They had to be. From memory, he walked forwards towards
(there's a pile of stuff ahead of him, lit by his flashlight, and he realises: the pile is made of toys and bags and clothes. The pile is made of bones and bodies. The pile is made of those children who never left Camp Moribund—and the ones he's looking for are there, curled up in a huddle waiting for him)
the darkest part of the room where a great pile of stolen belongings and lives had once stood taller than his head and which he was sure must now stand taller still. It was there he'd found them. He was confident.
He flashlight flickered over a shape that darted out of sight, ducking behind that pile. It was white and sudden, pale in the flash of light, and he twitched slightly with surprise but didn't let it shake him.
"Haley?" he called out gently, raising the arm with the light so he could try see further. It didn't work. The place seemed to eat anything as comforting as the ability to see. "It's Aaron. I promise, I'm real, I'm not a—"
"I know who you are."
He tensed. That wasn't Haley.
It was followed by the sound of a gun being carefully loaded, a sound that seemed to resonate around this haunting space. Even the rustling was silent. Everything was listening.
"Emily," he said.
Silence was his answer.
"Emily? I swear, I'm not It. I'm me. Where are you?"
"I'm here."
He tried to shine the flashlight where he thought the voice was coming from, but there was nothing there. Or, if there was, the darkness hid it. Unease began to grow. This wasn't right. She wasn't right; there was something strange about her voice. Something reserved.
Emily Prentiss is running from youPennywise had snarled at him.
"Where is here?" he called lightly. "Are you hurt?"
"I don't know, am I?" She sounded distracted. He took another step sideways and then forward to try circle around to her voice, but sound carried so strangely in here. "I wouldn't do that if I were you. You're going to touch something you shouldn't."
"What shouldn't I touch?"
"Something."
She moaned as though in pain.
The unease was thick now, choking all hope of this resolving itself easily and leaving him with a gun he trusted at his side. "Can you see me?"
"Yes."
"Come you come towards me then? Without touching the something?" As he spoke, he eased up onto his toes, nervously darting the flashlight in sweeps around his feet to see what she was warning him away from stepping on. The ground, he realised, was strange. It wasn't the same concrete flooring as he'd walked on this whole way down here. It was… white. Glinting sickly where his light struck it, like it had been coated in something. Barely half a foot to his right, his light found the outline of what he immediately recognised as a human form half-sunk into the floor. It didn't look so human anymore. The floor seemed to have grown up around it, slowly drawing it down within it as that sickly white had oozed over it. As he stared at the fully-enmeshed human shape, he thought he could see something moving under the shell of it. Something breathing. That hadn't been here last time, he was sure.
Prentiss wasn't answering.
"Please come to me, Emily," he kept trying, lifting the light slightly. Using her name to remind her who she was, who he was. He could see more of those mummified forms in rows all around him; somehow, he'd walked quite neatly down the centre of an aisle between them. If he'd gone left, or right, he'd be within them. "I need your help. Jack is down here—"
"And how did that happen?" came the low reply. He'd heard that dangerous tone to her voice only a few times before, when she was angry beyond belief at whoever she was interrogating and leading them into a vicious trap. "Tell me how it happened, Aaron. Are you sorry?"
"What? No, I'm scared, I'm scared, I want my son—"
"They want him too," she replied, voice distant again. "Can you hear them?"
He didn't answer.
She continued, "Hear them feeding? Do you know, crocodiles are one of the oldest predators in existence… millions of years and they still feed on us so perfectly. They're still so good at what they do. That's fucked, isn't it, Aaron? That something can be created so perfectly to do nothing but hunt and feed on humans, to kill us. Maybe we're supposed to die. Who are we to argue with that kind of history? Primitive, predatory, older than us… we fear them so innately. Like spiders. Are you scared of spiders? I am."
"Okay," he said, walking forward further down the aisle, now careful where he placed his feet and definitely not looking at the bodies or the clicking, which seemed to be getting louder, more excited. He wondered if the source of that clicking could smell his blood, hear his heartbeat… "Okay, Em. I'm going to come to you. You stay very still, alright? I think there's something wrong and I'm coming to help—"
"One more step and I'll blow your fucking brains out of your skull!"
He froze.
"You're like them," she hissed, her voice's cadence slipping grossly into something he didn't recognise. "You're just like them. The spiders and the crocodiles, the predators…the dangers…you always have been. Rosaline was right. I can't trust you, none of us should and none of us will. Oh, you tried to convince me otherwise, but I'm not stupid. You're not coming near us. I'll kill you if you try."
Us.
"Who is 'us', Emily?" he tried, all his muscles sore from fighting the urge to sweep his light around the room and keep looking for her. "Who is with you?"
"You know, don't act dumb! You sent them down here, you bastard! You fed them to It!"
He was completely lost now. "Jack? Is Jack with you? Emily, tell me!"
He turned, very slowly and ignoring her furious hiss, until his light hit, not darkness, but the mountain of belongings. It was still there. It was bigger.
Prentiss was before it with her gun fixed very neatly on him.
"I'm putting my gun away," he said, making sure to keep his movements slow and predictable at her eyes tracked his every move. She looked bizarre, caught in the flashlight beam as a bright splash of life against the dark of the terrible pile behind her. Her hair was loose, hanging lank around her face, her eyes wide and staring in her chalk-white face. There was blood but he refused to panic; there was no guarantee it was hers. But it was in her expression, those wide eyes, the something unsettling. He remembered, horribly, how she'd been after Pennywise had attacked her, forced her to see something that had almost driven her insane. Had it happened again?
His gun was holstered. He showed her his empty hands. Her weapon didn't waver.
"Are you alone?" he coaxed, standing once more and talking a step towards her that stopped quickly when her finger drifted to the trigger. Don't touch the trigger until you're committed to taking a life he'd taught her, so he took that small gesture very seriously indeed.
Her gaze almost flickered down before snapping back to his face.
He lowered the light in a quick gesture that lit up a small, motionless form laid out by her feet. Blonde hair. Superhero pyjamas.
Jack.
Hotch cried out, darting forward towards his son—
—she shot him.
The pain was sudden and absolutely shocking, and he reacted to it instinctively. Flashlight off and dropping fast, keeping low to the ground as he moved away from the place she knew he was before lying flat, belly to the unsettlingly warm ground and feeling a warm trickle of blood and a hot, throbbing pain start up in his shoulder where her bullet had struck. He didn't think she'd been aiming for his shoulder, closing his eyes and gritting his teeth against a sickening surge of pain from what he suspected was his collarbone, either fractured or broken by the bullet impacting it. He suspected she'd been either aiming for his head or his heart; he suspected she hadn't meant to miss.
He didn't want to shoot her. He couldn't shoot her. She wasn't acting right, but he knew, somehow, that this was Prentiss. It wasn't Pennywise wearing her skin, it wasn't a ghost mocking him while Prentiss's body decomposed somewhere out of sight. It was Prentiss, and he wouldn't kill her.
So why was she trying to kill him?
The room throbbed along with his racing heart. It beat, tha-thump tha-thump tha-thump, with each thump getting deeper, stronger. Something liked that they were here. Something was enjoying this grotesque game of cat and mouse.
"Spencer asked me to come get you," he said, listening intently for anything other than that beating and the resumed scuttling under his prone body. Prentiss was quiet. "He's worried about you. Please come with me, Emily. Come see him. He's hurt, and we need to get him out here but he won't go until you're safe too."
"You shouldn't be giving him a say in if he stays or goes," Prentiss responded dully. She sounded even worse, he realised, the thought not as comforting as it should have been. Her voice was slurring, like she was drunk or exhausted. Another thought occurred to him: there was every possibility he could just stay hidden until she died from her unseen injuries. She didn't sound like she'd last much longer.
That thought sickened him. He couldn't bear to think of her dying. No, whatever was wrong with her, it was temporary. Maybe she'd just hit her head, she'd surely be fine. They'd be fine. They'd all be fine.
He could still carry them away from this.
She was still talking: "He's too little. He doesn't know what's good for him. I'm not strong enough to carry him."
Hotch blinked.
"Little?" he asked, sitting up slowly and holding his breath as he waited for her gun to end him. "How old is Spencer, Emily?"
And she answered: "He's only six. How could you do this to him? He's only six, you monster…"
Hotch stood and walked towards her, unafraid of her gun anymore.
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4
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"Hi, Em," he said gently, finding her sitting where she'd been standing before she'd shot at him. She didn't even raise her gun when he turned his flashlight back on to illuminate her, just blinked listlessly at him with Jack pulled onto her lap and her weapon loose over the little boy's chest. "You know I didn't do that, right? I didn't give the kids to the cops to bring down here. You know I didn't—I was drugged, in the library. Then the police had me and I'm sorry about that, because it meant I didn't get here in time before It hurt you. But I did get here. Don't you remember?"
She shook her head slowly, then frowned. "I kissed you," she whispered, looking down at the boy unconscious in her lap. Hotch stared at him, holding his own breath until he saw the child breathe too; Jack was alive. "I kissed you goodbye. I came down here to die saving them. Counting ghosts. Where the hell were you? I needed you! I… I came alone…"
"You were so brave," he agreed, crouching. "And I'm here now. Can I have Jack? I can carry him out."
Suddenly, she moved. Too fast—and he had a gun aimed at his head and her eyes were wild.
"You're leaving me to burn," she snarled, wobbling in place. "I tried to burn it, Aaron, and you're leaving me here. Well, it's not happening again! I'm taking them and going, we're going, we're…" She tried to struggle up, Jack flopping limply in her one-armed grip, and made a gutting moan of misery when she couldn't make it. "No! Spencer, please, come on. Don't die, you little shit, I didn't come down here to find you dead! It was supposed to be me dying, not him!"
"You're not seventeen," he tried frantically, unable to move with her finger so sloppily cocked on the trigger while she struggling to lift his child with her other arm. "Em, please. You're not seventeen. You're not alone. I'm here—I can help you. It's not then."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" she snapped. "Don't try to gaslight me—I know what you did. You called them, you sent the kids down here, and now you're here to make sure It devours us. You're watching me burn alive—I know you are. I can feel it, the heat…" She turned her face away from him for a moment, as though twisting back from some great wall of flames. He saw blood coating the back of her neck, her shoulders, and it looked wet enough that he knew it was hers.
Hotch looked away to try and gather his thoughts, seeing what else lay there on that horrific stage with Prentiss. He hadn't seen it before, but he saw it now, and it struck him dumb. But there was no time for it yet. He pushed it down and looked for that part of himself he'd locked away, the stuff even deeper than his grief for his team and his fear of Pennywise and his memories of his dad. Everything he'd tried to lose following that summer.
He found it.
Aaron looked back, meeting Emily's eyes calmly.
"There's no fire here," he said, "because you didn't want to come out into this room. We just chucked as much of the gas in here as we could and threw a match. It went out, Em. The fire went out. We're crap arsonists—we couldn't even get the bonfire lit for the kids that time, not until Rafe helped."
She narrowed her eyes, looking around. "We are kinda crap arsonists," she admitted, mouth quirking. Jack twitched in her arms, his eyes moving behind blueish lids. "But I thought… I could feel my hands burning."
"Pennywise did that to you," Aaron told her, a thrill of adult anger rising and threatening to ruin what he was desperately trying to do as it reminded him how terrifying that had been, seeing Emily drop, screaming, to the ground as she howled about her hands melting. "It was an illusion, just one of his tricks. I handed Sean to Derek and ran back and got you, remember? I carried you until you could walk again."
"You did that," she remembered in a soft voice. "I do remember that. Why would you do that?"
He breathed in and out once more, locking this moment in his brain. Closing his eyes and picturing her as she'd been then, trying to remember how he'd been… how real and new everything was at sixteen, how vivid the feelings. How fresh the pain but, oh, how incredible to be in love for the first time. Thirty-seven-year-old Hotch would be lying if he looked at her now and said what he had to say, so he wasn't that man at all; he was the boy he'd killed in an attempt to escape this place. He was Aaron, who'd deserved better.
They'd all deserved better.
"Because you're the only person I trust beside me," he said, locking onto that feeling and ignoring everything else. When he opened his eyes again, he could see it: her kneeling there holding Spencer and watching him warily, waiting for the words he'd been too much of a dumbass to say at sixteen. He still couldn't say them. "You're my co-pilot in this plane we're flying out of hell, remember? And what did I tell you about co-pilots?"
"Captain doesn't do shit without the co-pilot's okay," Emily whispered, the gun lowering.
"Shoot me if you want," he told her, shuffling towards her with a distant realisation that his arm wasn't working anymore from where she'd already made good on that threat. But he wasn't done: "I don't care. Even if you shoot me, I'll just crawl to stay beside you and, when I can't crawl anymore, I'll drag myself until I can't do that either. I'm not who It's trying to make you think I am—I don't run when my friends are in danger. I don't leave my people behind. Not you, not Spencer, not anyone." He was crying, he realised, finally fetching up beside her and reaching out to take the gun from her. She let him; she was crying too. "I'm getting out of here and we're getting those kids out, just like we promised, Em. We can't let Rosaline and Rafe down."
Hiccupping messily, Emily folded forwards into his arms. He hugged her for what felt like an eternity, as though the last twenty-one years was folding into this singular one. There was no letting go until she was done; he might have her gun now, but he still needed her cooperation to get them out of here.
Holding Emily close, the flashlight on the ground beside them and Jack still breathing between them, Aaron stared numbly over her shoulder at what he'd seen before: Haley's body, staring eyes watching him accusingly. He'd known from the instant he'd seen her lying there that he'd lost his wife completely, in a way more final than even the divorce had ever been. He'd never seen her face so expressionless. No living face was ever so expressionless; only the dead looked so gone. But there was no time to react now, he just couldn't. He couldn't. He was too shaken, too hurt, and he needed to be Aaron right now, the Aaron who barely knew Haley. He couldn't be the man who loved her right now; he couldn't be Hotch, and so he didn't react.
Aaron could get them out of here; Hotch would simply give up and grieve.
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5
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The hug ended. Prentiss wiped her eyes as they broke apart. Hotch was careful not to look again at that body behind her.
"Jack?" he called softly, checking his boy's vitals. A pulse thrummed strongly and Hotch breathed with relief.
"It's just like last time," Prentiss murmured, looking around. Hotch took the chance while she was distracted to lean over and try see if he could tell where she was hurt; he suspected she'd hit her head against something, seeing the hair on the back of her head matted with blood. When he reached out to brush his fingers gently against it, he found the skull soft to the touch. His fingers skimmed a wound that still bled in a hot dribble of blood. No wonder she was confused; she'd had her brains rattled, hard. He needed to get her out of here.
"What is?" he asked, looking down at his own shoulder and realising he was probably going to need Prentiss to carry Jack, if she could.
"We got here in time last time, before the frenzy…" She was frowning, that confusion sneaking back in the sharp light of the flashlight. "But I didn't get out, did I, Aaron? Did I? I think I died down here."
"You didn't." Hotch staggered up, bringing her up with him. "Can you carry Ja—Spencer? My arm is hurt, I can't do it."
She nodded, following his instructions without question but still looking around with that same acute look of distress. Despite this, she carried Jack easily. Her gait was strange though, Hotch guiding her down from the ledge she was on and leading her carefully down that aisle of safety among the skittering ground. It was like both halves of her body were slightly out of sync and he had to keep correcting her as she'd list to the left and begin drifting towards those strange, encapsulated corpses and their clicking, moving contents.
"Look," she said suddenly, nodding with her chin towards something only she could see. He aimed the flashlight over there: there was a blank spot in the pattern of bodies. Something in his gut kicked hard. "I told you I didn't get out. Right there, that's where he put me to lock me here forever… right there… and there's your spot, and Derek's, and Penelope's. It told me where It was going to put each of you. No spot for Spencer, though. Pennywise was always greedy about Spencer, I don't think Spencer was for sharing."
Horror slammed home; Hotch realised what she was talking about. Suddenly, he wanted out. He needed out.
"It's a feeding ground," he rasped, looking to his feet where, below, something was alive. Fed by these bodies, these countless bodies. All those helpless children above, penned in and waiting for slaughter.
"No," said Prentiss. "It's a nest. Didn't you know? I did. It showed me. It feeds in Derry for Itself and then It comes here to nest, where the hunting is easy. Fat babies…It says the babies grow so fat here, so healthy… Aaron, can you take Spencer? My hands are sore, they're burnt, didn't you see them burning?"
He looked at her. She looked like Reid had in the church above them, her skin washed out of all colour and coated with a fine layer of sticky sweat. There was still wet blood shining on her shoulders and he swore softly, realising she was bleeding out faster than they were getting out. Even as he watched, she swayed dangerously, her breathing strenuous from a throat that was beginning to fail. The sound was wet, flaccid. She was slipping away as he watched.
"I've got him," he said, taking Jack from her with his working arm. The other hung limp, the pain unimportant but the limb still not responding anyway. He was bleeding too, but he ignored that, continuing to lead them away from
(Haley)
the hungry mouths he now knew were waiting below for one of them to stumble into place. He didn't look back. There was nothing to look back for. At sixteen, he hadn't known Haley, not well enough to grieve her, but he had known Emily and she was at his side, just like Sean was in his arms… he blinked, looking down and seeing Jack, then Sean, then Spencer, and thinking that maybe he should stop his own bleeding before he ended up as lost as Prentiss.
"Oh," Prentiss moaned in a toneless sob of animal pain, lifting the flashlight and holding it aloft to illuminate Foyet in the doorway.
.
6
.
Foyet's eye was gone. A hollow, bloodied socket stared at them, blood coating his face, his chest, his arms. His face was covered in scratches, great gouges of flesh ripped from his cheek and jaw. He smiled despite these things, holding his arms out as though in greeting in the circle of wobbling light from Emily's flashlight. The knife in his hand gleamed slickly red, much like the rest of him was. Hotch stepped forward, putting himself between Prentiss and the grotesque sight before them. Only moments later did he realise this put Jack in danger, turning his body with difficulty to try gesture for Prentiss to step forward and take the boy to give Hotch back his working arm. Everything moved very slowly; they were in indescribable danger.
"Oh dear, Aaron," said Foyet in a tone of great sadness, leaning around them and staring off into the waiting dark. "Is that Haley there? Oh, she's very dead. So very very dead. That's disappointing. I'd have liked to have killed her myself."
"Haley's dead?" Prentiss mumbled, head snapping up from where she'd slumped into a half crouch.
"Take Jack," was all Hotch insisted. She was in no state to help here.
He had to face Foyet alone.
Prentiss took Jack without another word, the flashlight bobbing in her arm and making the light erratic. Foyet seemed to grow and shrink in the fluctuating beam, his shadow growing and shrinking and his smile never slipping.
"Not even a hello? Even after I offer my sincerest condolences for the untimely death of Mrs Aaron?"
Hotch stood, gun in hand.
"Keep the light on him," he told Prentiss.
"Hotch, be careful," was her response. Hotch, he noted. Not Aaron.
"I just want to say, I'm glad the boy is still alive. It's going to be excited, cutting him up. Did you see what a pretty puzzle I made of—"
Hotch aimed and fired in one smooth gesture, but Foyet had stepped back and the darkness had swallowed him. There was a beat of silence—and then he attacked.
The first Hotch knew of him was the shadows beside them buckling as Foyet seemed to burst from them, slamming into him and sending them both stumbling as his feet skidded out from under him. Prentiss cried out—don't touch the bodies! —and Foyet's hand gripped tight around Hotch's hand, nails cutting tight. That empty eye-socket bobbed inches from Hotch's face, made even more horrific by the way the flashlight skipped about on his torn features. Foyet was a man possessed. A demonic strength seemed to drive him; it was all Hotch could do to try keep his grip on his gun—and his other arm was useless, barely able to lift it to try squeeze some space between them.
Pain burst, a familiar pain. Hotch grunted as the knife slid and skipped along his ribs, redoubling his efforts. A knee to Foyet's chest brought a satisfying exhale of air from the man, red-stained teeth bared at Hotch in an animal howl, but it didn't shake him loose. The knife stabbed down again, Hotch twisting out that deadly touch; the gun crept around closer and closer as they rolled on the ground in a terrible tangle of limbs and blood and pain…
— "Just let me kill you," Foyet spat at him, his eye so empty of anything approaching sanity that Hotch knew the same thing had happened to this man as what had almost happened to Prentiss all those years ago, except this man had welcoming it, "you'll beg for it in the end. Jennifer did! She begged and she begged and she"—
…Hotch pulled the trigger as soon as it even seemed like it was close enough, feeling his arm knock something that reached out to touch it back with fine, spindly fingers. Above him, Foyet lurched backwards with a gurgle. The gunshot left Hotch's ears ringing, his side burning from the knife strikes, but that didn't stop him from rolling away from whatever he was touching with a hoarse cry, using his damaged arm to ineffectually scrub away whatever had touched his arm before it could eat into the flesh. Foyet was hunched on the ground like an animal, half-kneeling, half-crouched, one hand to the ground and the other to his face. The bullet had ripped up through his jaw and out through his cheek, but it wasn't stopping him.
It wasn't stopping him at all.
His head turned slowly, to look at Jack lying alone on the ground with the flashlight propped beside him, still on. There was no sign of Prentiss.
"No," Hotch moaned, fighting a wave of hot terror to struggle to his feet. Where was his gun?
He'd lost the gun.
"No," he rasped again, but Foyet lunged: knife in hand and scuttling grossly towards the boy, Jack lay there defenceless, and Hotch was failing again.
Hotch gave chase, leaping one of those mummified bodies and almost putting a foot through another in his haste, not taking any care in his rush to get to his son. To save his son. He flung himself forwards—
—and they went down with twin snarls, Hotch unarmed now as he attempted to do to this man exactly what he'd done to the false Dave. But he was weaker now. He'd lost too much blood, seen too much to break him. The anger that could have ripped through Foyet like a storm through a wooden shack, it was gone; it had reached its peak in that terrible scene with JJ dead, blown itself out as he'd walked away from the illusion of Emily mocking him, and died completely when he'd reached back into the past to try draw Prentiss to safety in the present. It was as dead as Haley.
There were hands around his throat, squeezing tight. Foyet loomed close, no longer human with his face eliminated, his one eye lost to the madness Pennywise inspired. And it was his fault that Haley was dead, his fault Will had died, his fault Jack and Henry were in danger, but Hotch's vision had fractured into bursts of light and shadow, his lungs screaming, his brain shutting down, and he began to drift as he was, inexorably, killed.
"Emily," he tried to
.
7
.
moan, but she covered his mouth.
"Shhh," she whispered, leaning close and kissing him again. She was naked against him, her eyes so dark he felt like he was drowning in them. He felt, all at once, aroused and insanely lucky and as though he was the only boy in the world to live this dream. No one else, he was sure, had ever felt this vividly alive as he did on these faded exercise mats in the basement of some backwater library, with a gorgeous girl naked in his arms and him inside her. "Someone will hear us."
"They're all too busy stuffing their faces," he reassured her. "Didn't I tell you I'd get us out of there? We're safe here. She's going to help us get out of here, you watch."
She moved and he felt her all around him, this time utterly failing to muffle the sound it pulled from him. There was a tattoo on her shoulder blade; he couldn't tell what it was from this angle, not with her hair in the way.
"Maybe we're going to be okay," she said, burying her face against his bare shoulder. Her arms wrapped around him. Her lashes were damp against his skin. "Oh my god, Aaron, we're going to get out of here. We're going to live."
"I told you we would. I promised, no one else is going to
.
8
.
die!"
Hotch breathed in a rush that floored him; the world burst into vivid, burning clarity around him. His eyes fluttered open, suddenly aware that his throat was burning and his body felt disconnected from the rest of him—except for his hand, which had fallen limp on the floor and, somehow, found Jack's little hand to hold on the way—but he was alive. He was alive.
Where was Foyet?
The ground moved below him in a slow, corrosive wave of a thousand concerted beings. He felt himself roll with it, tipping onto his belly and dragging himself in a tired heave over to his son and pressing his mouth to the boy's flushed forehead. Jack's eyes were open, barely, blinking more awake every with every moment that passed…Hotch smiled at him…the screaming started.
With a jolt, he sat up and turned, feeling the room spin with him. He couldn't see. He was blind.
The flashlight bumped against his fingers and he fumbled with it, dropped it twice, ears ringing, mouth burning. He tasted copper and vomit and stale, old pennies dropped down his throat to choke him, every one of them ripping and slicing the whole way down. If he coughed, he felt like he'd bring the whole system up with it, and that was when he got the flashlight on and aimed it towards those wet, shrieking cries.
"Just, die!" Prentiss snarled, slamming Foyet's head down again on the ground with the sound of a watermelon being slapped against concrete from a great height. Foyet burbled. There was a bloodied baseball bat on the ground next to Prentiss, the end splintered but the name JAREAU visible stencilled in black on the polished handle. Prentiss was atop Foyet, straddling him as she pinned him down viciously. Hotch tried to understand what he was looking at, what he was hearing; Foyet's screams were weakening but Prentiss was beginning to cry out with pain too, and it looked like the ground itself was seething around them. Something cracked; they sunk a bit more, and Hotch saw Foyet's chest begin to split and cave inward as spindly legs of shadow began to fight to crawl out of the opening, bubbling around Prentiss's already obscured hands. Where the light touched, the shadows fled, but it left behind torn masses of flesh and gouts of blood and the white hint of bone left behind by a voracious hunger stripping it clean.
He realised what he was looking at and ripped his gaze away, scooping Jack up close against his chest as he staggered up. Everything wavered around him, but it didn't matter; he just ran. Headed straight for that door and away from what he'd seen eating its way through George Foyet while the man was still alive. Jack cried something against his chest, but Hotch pulled him tighter and ignored his shock. His child couldn't see that. He'd never forget it.
The tunnel felt claustrophobic around them as they ran halfway up it before Hotch skidded to a stop and crouched to place Jack down. The air here felt tight, compounded. Jack was crying.
"Mom," he sobbed. "Where's Mommy? Dad, where's Mommy?"
"Stay here, buddy," Hotch pleaded with him, trying to coax him to sit despite his raw terror. There was blood on his pyjamas now, staining the hero's smiling face. "Daddy has to go get Emily, but you need to stay here—please?"
Jack just stared at him, too terrified to understand. There was nothing for it.
Hotch gestured for him to stay, desperately hoped he would, and then turned around and ran back.
She wasn't hard to find. Her sobs were gutting, raw terror breaking him. Foyet was dead or, at least, Hotch fucking hoped he was because the flashlight that he held steady on that roiling, starving mass of black eyes and a million tiny, gnashing teeth revealed that they were almost through eating the man's head from the inside out. All that was left was one blue eye staring and his mouth hanging open to reveal the creatures feeding inside. Prentiss was trying to stand, to pull away, but his hand had locked tight around her arm as she'd died and the creatures were leaping from him to her and trying to burrow in.
Hotch crushed one against her arm with the flashlight, crying out with her as she screamed when it burst in a flood of searing black ooze that ate at her skin. Kicking at anything that scuttled at him, he threw the flashlight into the cavernous space of Foyet's chest and the bubbling darkness there: the creatures screamed with one voice and tried to flee, down into the ground and away from the burning light. He ignored his own pain as he tried to wipe as much of the from her as possible before grabbing that dead, rigid hand and yanking it loose. She stumbled against him and he lifted her, and he ran.
.
9
.
"Let me see your hands," he demanded. They were in the lit section of that tunnel, against the edges of the singular bulb's grim reach. Prentiss had twitched from her undignified seat thrown over his shoulder the whole way back here, Jack stumbling tiredly aside him with his small hand looped through Hotch's numbed one. Hotch could almost feel his strength sapping with every drip of blood from that hand, his collarbone fucking him up so completely that he was pretty sure existence was nothing but pain by this point. He'd dropped her as soon as he'd seen light. There was no way to describe it other than dropping. The sound her head had made on the ground reminded him of Rosaline.
Prentiss said nothing, just let her head tip back and groaned very softly. It was a sound he ignored. With Jack pressed against his back, he kneeled and used his one good hand to strip his shirt.
"Hold this," he told Jack, using the boy to held brace the shirt so he could rip it using his knee. That, he looped tight around his shoulder in an attempt to keep what was left of his blood in. The darkness around him was beginning to be lit by spots of red and green, dancing in his peripherals and vanishing when he looked directly at them. "Good boy. Stay there. Let me help Emily."
"Okay, Daddy," Jack mumbled, his eyes a little glazed. Very, very deeply in shock. Hotch, for a heartbeat, was furious at him for that—and his father's voice whispered see, he's useless just like you were.
He ignored it.
"Emily," he coaxed, propping his numb hand behind her head and wincing as blood squelched wetly against his palm, her hair matted at the base of her skull. "How are your hands?"
She twitched again, before lifting them for his purview. They weren't so bad, not really. The blood of those creatures had burned them a little, but it didn't look too deep and she didn't seem in pain.
"Okay," he breathed, relieved. "I'm going to check out your head now, see if I can stop that bleeding so we can get out of here."
"I'm tired," Jack whispered.
It was a long way out.
Hotch swallowed, easing Prentiss carefully around and tipping her head forward so he could examine it in that unnatural light, the smell of gas thick in his nostrils. "I can't carry you," he said, unsure if he was talking to Jack or Prentiss. "You'll have to walk, Jack, even though you're tired. I have to help Emily."
Jack just looked at him, his mouth wobbling. He was only four. It was a long way out, and sloped uphill the whole way. There was the bloody mess of JJ to get through. The dark. The monsters that lurked.
He wouldn't make it.
Hotch couldn't carry them both.
That settled over him in a dazed wave of horror as he used his good hand to gently part Prentiss's hair, searching for the impact zone. And here it was. For the longest time, Hotch stared at it. It wasn't bleeding now, he noted. That was good. That was a good thing. Curled slightly to her side, Prentiss said nothing, her chest rising and falling with tedious determination to hang on. He could feel her heart going fast against his knee.
She hadn't hit her head either.
That wasn't good at all.
She's not going to survive that, said that voice in his head again, the one he was beginning to suspect wasn't his dad at all, but himself. The cold, calculating, pragmatic asshole that lived in there and had gotten him this far. Look at that. That's a bullet hole. She's got a bullet in her skull, Hotchner. Right in the base of the thing. She's not going to make it.
"You're not going to die," Hotch said firmly. Her eyes were open, but they weren't focused. They moved in spasmodic, uncoordinated twitches from side to side. Her entire body was tensing tight before shuddering into a series of abortive shivering in his arms. The shivering would cease as she tensed once more, before the whole cycle played out again.
That's her brain shutting down right in front of you, said the voice coldly, cruelly, and Hotch tightened his hand into a trembling fist and closed his eyes, willing it to shut the fuck up. He just needed to think. He did this once, at seventeen—walked in here and got everyone out. He could do it again.
Except for Will. Except for JJ. Or Dave.
Or Haley.
She's dying.
"Jack, walk a bit further for Daddy. I have to carry Emily."
But she wasn't cooperating anymore. Carrying a limp Prentiss had been hard enough with one side of his body in agonising pain; carrying one that was losing increasing amounts of control over her motor functions with every passing minute? And she was conscious now, fully conscious, cussing him out in a slow, slurred voice every time her head bumped painfully against his shoulder or the wall. Jack lagged behind. Hotch stopped, exhausted. They'd barely moved out of sight of the gas cans.
He lowered her again. She watched him with one eye, the other half-obscured by her slumped eyelid.
"I can't," Jack mumbled, curling up on the floor like his batteries had abruptly run out. Hotch recognised it as the child hitting the end of his limited reserves. He was exhausted, scared for his mom, confused, probably hungry and thirsty too, but too shell-shocked to verbalise any of that. Hotch couldn't ask more of him, he simply couldn't. That was setting his son up to fail when they couldn't afford that failure.
"I can carry you both," Hotch decided out loud, slowly flexing his fucked arm and ignoring how it almost laid him out with the pain. Sweating and gasping, vomit searing from his stomach to his throat and back down again as he forced it down, he leaned to try wrap that arm around Prentiss and lift her back over his unfeeling shoulder in a fireman's carry.
A hand curled over his arm, pushing him away with no real strength. "Don't do that," Prentiss said tiredly. "You're beat. I'm fucked. You need to just go. Get Jack out."
Hotch gritted his teeth and pushed her hand away. She couldn't stop him, but the half roll of her one good eye was enough to indicate she wasn't happy about it.
"You don't know what you're saying," he snapped at her, furious with her refusal to keep fighting. "I can do this."
"You never knew when to quit," she mumbled. The slur was back. He hated it, teeth ground so tight together he could hear them creaking. "Never. So stubborn. Such a shit. Take your promise back."
Her voice was softening. He couldn't really hear her, having to lean close to her lips to hear her shaping them carefully. "Which one?" he asked, giving in to the impulse to just lean his cheek against hers and breathe for a second, shoving back everything that was threatening to overwhelm him right now: he was losing her. Right here, and not like Dave, not like JJ or Haley or Reid—he hadn't been there to help them when they were hurt. He hadn't been right beside them, but he was with Prentiss.
And she was still dying.
"That you're getting us home. Take it back. Give it back. Make a new promise…"
She'd trailed off, blinking, uncertain. He didn't know what she was trying to say, so he couldn't help her find the words that were evading her.
"I don't leave people behind. Not you, not anyone. Fuck off I don't. You came down here to save my brother, I'm not leaving you here."
He was crying again, furiously, the tears hot as they fell from him to trace lines down her grubby skin. She didn't seem to care.
"Now who's confused…about when…it is…" Her eyes closed. His heart stopped, but hers was still going. She was still going. The world spun wildly, horribly, and he almost wished she'd die now, die faster, so this uncertain misery would end. And then she spoke again, eyes opening just enough for him to see what he worried was their last moment of clarity: "Get him out. Get him safe. And then come back."
"I will, I will, I'll come get you, I promise—"
Head shaking, she laughed. It was almost a normal laugh. He grieved it. "Fuck me, I'm ready to sleep. Headache is killing me. Just want to sleep at this point. No, fuck me… get your ass back here and kill It, Aaron. Don't let It hurt any more kids."
Jack was crying gently, either from sensing that Prentiss was hurt bad or from his terror over his mom or because his dad was crying too, or from a mixture of all of the above, but Hotch's world had ground to a halt on those words. Moments later, it restarted, with purpose.
He had purpose again.
The storm returned and he nodded. "This ends today," he promised her. "We've lost too much."
She didn't answer. Aaron leaned down, pausing for a heartbeat before pressing his lips to hers and feeling her respond weakly to the kiss, one hand fluttering up to touch his cheek before falling. She went still.
When he stood, the tunnels felt colder. Cleaner. Sharper. Sean watched him quietly from his seat on the concrete behind him, standing when Aaron held his hand out to him. He was so light in Aaron's arm, so easy to lift despite his exhaustion. Aaron smiled at him, before looking down to Emily, who smiled back brightly.
"You go," she said with a toss of her hair and a wink, that knife-like grin he loved so much set nicely onto her dangerous mouth. He adored it all, her dark eyes, her stark make-up, her hair spiked up in a wild mess around her head as she reclined there in the light in her leather and sass with a cigarette in hand and booted feet crossed at the ankles. She was so impossibly alive. "Hurry up, Hotshot. When you get back here, we're burning this bitch down."
It was (impossible) easy to (stagger) walk away from her because the tunnels were (dark) bright, the future was (ending) real, she looked (dead) just how she always had at seventeen, and of course he'd see her again.
(he wouldn't)
.
10
.
Footsteps followed him out. He kept his smile up. There was no reason to cry. No reason to choke around the gutting, bitter sobs that ripped out of him and stole all his air with them, no reason for the burning agony of his eyes, no reason to grieve. Everyone was still alive and he'd make sure they stayed that way. He was sure: little JJ was following just behind him and Spencer held his hand, Sean heavy in his arms, and they were okay. Emily would be okay too, once he got the kids out and went back for her, and surely Derek was here somewhere too?
"You're gonna be okay," he told Sean firmly. "We're almost out. Just close your eyes through here, please? It's frightening. I don't want you to get scared."
"Okay, Dad," said Sean, burying his head into Aaron's shoulder.
"You too," he called back to JJ and Spencer. "JJ, make sure Spencer doesn't see."
She didn't answer, but he wasn't worried. She'd always looked after him.
"Everything's gonna be just fine when the clown is dead," he told them. "I promise."