A/N 1: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs. We're heading into the home stretch and resolution before too long here, folks! To all of you who take the trouble to comment, praise, or criticize, to ask questions, to guess what's coming next, thank you so very much!

Solitary 5.0

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Ourobouros

He'd been asleep—or at least, trying to sleep, in that muggy, inhospitable pit of tears and misery—when the guards rousted him, searched him, chained him hand and foot, and shoved him down shadowy corridors. He asked what he had done and they silenced him. He asked again and one of them dropped him with a Taser to the back of his neck. Complaining loudly and (at least by their own lights) amusingly about his weight, they'd dragged him face-down through three sally ports to one of the lawyer-client rooms and left him there, alone on the floor.

He had been alone in the dark for so many days already that even this was human contact of a sort, and therefore an occasion for gratitude. He lay there passive and waited for the public defender who'd taken up his appeals, but the scuffed Rockports that entered belonged to the Reverend John Septimus Parkhurst, an Episcopal chaplain at the Marion Federal Correctional Facility.

"Put him in a chair," Parkhurst demanded of the guards who accompanied him.

There was some sort of conference out in the hall, and someone said, "Negative, Reverend. He's been resistive and combative."

"For the love of God," Parkhurst said, his voice quivering, "allow the man to sit in a chair."

"He made his choice," the same guard replied. "He had his druthers, and it was that. He was combative with the collection team."

Right. Asking questions was resistance. Was combat. And why in the hell is Parkhurst here?

He'd met the man only once, when he'd stopped by in Charpentier's first week there. Norton had been ashamed of his tears, but Parkhurst had seemed not to notice them. Had spoken softly, gently, about courage and about what the chaplaincy corps could and could not offer, had recommended some classes and groups for when Norton was out of reception.

And now, he lowered his elderly bones to the floor and lay down beside Charpentier.

"I don't advise that," the guard said.

"Fortunately, I haven't asked your advice," the chaplain observed, his voice still mild, gentle. Norton thought the man reminded him, in manner if not appearance, of TV's Mister Rogers.

He peered through his trifocals at Norton, and his pale blue eyes were sad and gentle.

"I am so very sorry," Parkhurst said. "So very sorry to tell you that there has been an auto accident in Maryland."

And Norton Charpentier's life had ended. Oh, the name had waddled on for a few years more, and the massive body for a little longer, but his spirit had died there on the floor of Attorney-Client Room CXR-0221, and the last thing he'd beheld was Parkhurst's anguished sympathy.

…

Now, standing there in the bunker below the mountain, he wondered what had brought on that hideous memory, the absolute nadir of his existence. His fingers fiddled idly with the zipper of his hoodie as he gazed, unseeing, at the metal wall.

Prisoner.

Right.

The man whose perfidy had put him at Marion stood at the window, his cuffed hands fisted, his head bowed low against the wall. In Norton's fevered fantasies, the lawyer had crawled on his hands and knees, sobbing, begging for mercy. The reality was silence and stillness. It was nothing at all like Charpentier's fantasies.

Charpentier actually had to command himself to look up, to notice. To think.

He opened the three locks, the sense memory of the man's escape attempt still fresh in his mind and his nerve endings, but no. His own prisoner barely stirred, no longer even showing any interest in Norton's entrance. The door shut with a clank and an electronic snick, and the lawyer remained motionless.

Charpentier sat down on the cot.

"You say that you failed to meet your professional responsibilities?" he asked. He wondered whether his voice sounded as distant, as foreign and distorted, to Prisoner as it did to his own ears.

"Yes." The word was just barely audible, even here in the deepest of silences.

"So it was just a slip, an oopsie?"

All he could hear was the annoying tip-tip-tip of the clock on the wall. He'd chosen it because although it was digital and displayed the date as well as time, it also ticked away seconds. It had been his hope that the constant sound in the silence would serve as something like the proverbial Chinese water torture for his captive.

At the moment, he seemed to be the only person whom the tip-tip-tip was annoying.

"It was beyond error," the man by the wall finally said. "It was failure."

"So, like—oh, who was it? Wasn't it Ciano who said, 'La victoria trova cento padri, e nessuno vuole riconoscere l'insuccesso'?More or less 'Victory has a hundred fathers, but no one wants to claim failure'?"

Hotchner gave a deep and bitter sigh. "Oh, there's always a father. He can hide all he wants, but he's still the daddy, and the DNA will tell."

Now Charpentier better understood what Prisoner had been saying. He'd been using the word failure in a far more negative sense than Norton had realized. He sat quietly for a moment, allowing himself to absorb the layers of meaning that the lawyer intended. He was just about to say something vaguely related to Who's your daddy, but the prisoner was suddenly squirming the front of his body against the window.

Norton narrowed his eyes and rose to his feet with all his senses on alert. Had Prisoner managed to create yet another handcuff key?

But, no. The lawyer wrestled the front of his uniform shirt close up against the bar so his fingers could work a facial tissue out of the breast pocket, then bent so he could wipe his eyes and blow his nose. He may have been silent, but his features were twisted and he'd been weeping.

Norton didn't even know he was asking the question until he heard himself say the words. "Who is it that you're crying for, anyway?"

His captive wiped his nose again and seemed to struggle to get control over his breathing. "Hell, fucked if I know," he grumbled, his voice low, rough, and still muffled by a tissue and the angle of his shoulder. "You? Me? Both of us? Neither of us? Does it matter?"

There's still some spirit in there. Thank God!

"I suppose not," Norton said with the beginning of a smile. He reached into his pocket. "Ready for some exercise?"

Prisoner straightened up and deliberately squared his shoulders. "Sure," he said. His voice was still a little too listless for Charpentier, but he'd take what he could get. Norton reached up and fastened the collar around the lawyer's neck.

~ o ~

If he had to compare it to something else in his life, it would be the death of Haley. Seeing that sweet, still body, no light in those enchanting eyes—realizing that all hope was gone that some day he would say or do or be the right thing and could put their marriage back together again—he'd felt as though his internal organs were being run through a shredder. He'd held her corpse and howled like a wild animal, hoping that a loving universe would hear his agony and reverse the flow of time, give him another chance, another shot at saving her. He'd been incapable of speech, barely capable of thought, just one great throbbing nerve ending that screamed No, this can't be happening!

If he was good at his job with the BAU—and he was, he knew; not truly gifted, perhaps, but intelligent, ferociously dedicated, and detail-oriented—it was because he would stay up all night, skip meals, do whatever it took to bring down the UNSUB, because once the BAU got the case, every new victim suffered and died on his watch, practically at his hand. The new images that went up on the case boards, the new blank eyes, abused bodies, were in a sense his fault.

The therapists the Bureau sicced on him seemed to feel that this was a function of having been an abused child, helpless and stressed, not knowing when the next parental tantrum would erupt. That taking responsibility gave him the illusion of control, an illusion that had been more important to his emotional survival than any reassurance of his innocence might have been. He'd said all the right things to dissuade the therapists, the things that would have deflected anyone else, but he hadn't fooled them. They hadn't even had the courtesy to pretend that they were convinced.

…

Now, standing bruised and shattered beside the entrance to his exercise cage (cue happy little gerbil wheel image) he wondered whether he would ever recover from this second dose of guilt. He watched the fussy little man entering the cell with his little hand truck full of food and clean bedding.

Aaron had huddled on his cot for hours after he finally put it all together, hating himself so passionately that his whole body ached. Uncharacteristically, he'd floundered around, looking for someone else to blame: Haley, his parents, his in-laws, Van der Weese, his ethics prof at Georgetown. The stars. Maybe Charpentier and his astrology stuff knew something that made the difference, something that, if he'd only known it, might have put him on alert.

He'd considered killing himself—nothing new; he'd considered it after Haley died, too. In the end, both times, he'd dismissed it as the response of a coward. Stand up straight, his father's voice had echoed in his head. Take your goddamn medicine, and get on with it.

He looked around—at the pickaxe, at the treadmill, at the horizontal bar—and the only thing of any interest to him at all was the upholstered easy chair. He made an effort: he took off his sweater and jumped for the horizontal bar, but he managed only one pull-up before he didn't so much wear out as—lose interest. He simply couldn't be bothered to make the effort.

He sat down in the easy chair and opened up the cooler. He selected a bottle of white grape juice and listened to see what was playing on the boombox.

Another of those pop covers of the so-called standards: Cher and somebody (Rod Stewart?) doing "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered."

Couldn't sleep and wouldn't sleep until I could sleep where I shouldn't sleep …

Had the words to that song always been as suggestive as they sounded now? He wished he'd paid more attention to lyrics on a regular basis, but he didn't. Maybe that was why he'd had all of that trouble recreating the words to his favorite songs in high school.

When I'd been here less than a week. And it felt like forever, and I didn't think that I'd survive a month of captivity. And tomorrow it'll be a hundred days. A third of a year.

"Hey," Warden said, standing beside the bars, "my family wasn't much for communication. I don't know why, but they just weren't comfortable with the whole shared feelings thing. You know what they did when they had to talk about something of significance?"

Aaron blinked and wondered how Warden had sneaked up on him.

I've lost some time, he realized. Cher and Rod Stewart were long gone; the Steve Miller Band was singing "Abracadabra" now.

Think about what he asked you.

"My family just didn't talk," he said. "If something really needed to be said, my father would eventually shout it."

"Waldo was like that, too," Charpentier said, pulling his own armchair up close to the bars. "At least, when the rest of the family wasn't around. When his brothers or sisters came through town, though, there was family conversation."

"All but one of my uncles and aunts lived right there in the Richmond area," Hotchner replied, "or so close that their visits weren't big deals." He thought about that for a few seconds. "I'm sure that there were family conferences, like when my grandfather was dying, but they were never carried out anywhere that I could see them. I don't think my cousins saw them, either."

"My folks played cards," Norton said. "They sat around the kitchen table with a deck of cards and their beer bottles and their cigarettes and cigars and they played these obscure forms of rummy I've never heard of before or since, and somehow things got talked out. It's as if they had to pretend they were doing something else if they wanted to say anything of significance. I would sit right outside the kitchen, where all Tiskie's dollhouses were lined up, and I'd play with my—" He sighed explosively. "What were they called? You marked on the film, then you lifted it to erase what you'd written or drawn."

"Oh, sure," Hotchner said, picturing them, recalling the precise sound the film made when you peeled it upwards. "They're—damn. I don't remember what they're called, either. The Magic-something, probably."

"Anyway," Charpentier said, "I'd sit there with my—whatever it was, drawing dogs and guns and space ships and erasing them, but all the while I was listening to the grownups talking, saying things they never said in front of us kids. Things about wars and pregnancies and who owed whom a bunch of money and who was screwing who over. But they would be playing cards, and nobody looked at anyone else."

Aaron considered that. "I think," he said hesitantly, "that the same thing was going on with my father, but he and his brothers would vanish into the den and shoot pool. I heard a lot of anger coming out of there. I think I sort of assumed that playing pool made you angry, but now that you bring it up, I think that's the way they got stuff talked over. They shot pool and drank and shouted and cussed and—" He shook his head. "No idea why I'm thinking of this."

Norton raised an eyebrow. "Because I raised the subject?"

"Mm, sounds like a reasonable explanation," Aaron said.

Charpentier picked up a folding TV tray, a solid one with strong legs and a wooden surface, and arranged it butting up directly against the bars of the exercise cage. "You ever play cards, Hotchner?"

"Some." He recalled endless hours on the jet, especially homeward bound, hours of poker and hearts and gin and occasionally bridge. He noticed that Warden had called him by name, but as always, he pretended he hadn't heard it.

"Ever play cribbage?"

"Jesus, not for years. I used to play it with my great-uncle on holidays. I think it was his job to keep me distracted so I wasn't constantly running into the kitchen where all the important stuff was going on."

"Where was your dad?"

Suddenly it was as though he were back there. He smelled sage dressing and peppermint and pumpkin pies and Christmas cookies. Heard the clattering and soft laughter in the kitchen, the secret whispers of his much older cousins, all obsessed with members of the opposite sex. He didn't even have to close his eyes to be there. "In the den with his brothers," he said. "Drinking and shooting pool. Cussing and yelling."

"My grandmother taught me cribbage," Warden said. "Probably for the same reason, to keep me out from underfoot. Tiska was welcome in the kitchen. Not me. Too big, too noisy—too everything. I teach it to the kids I'm helping with remedial math; it gives them a reason to know their basic math facts."

Yes. He recalled now the elegance of the scoring system; it had appealed to the nerd in him, and it had been a social game, impossible to play without conversation. He found that he was grinning. "I don't suppose you have a board there, do you?" he asked.

Norton grinned back at him and reached down into his computer bag. "As a matter of fact, I do," he said. He drew a deck of cards out of its pack. "Cut for deal?"

Aaron picked up half the deck. "Low man deals, right?" He checked the card that showed. It was a jack. "Doesn't look good for me."

Charpentier picked up the same pile, but lower down. "Looks good for me, though," he said, displaying a seven. "How much do you remember?"

Hotchner pushed the sleeves of his sweater up his forearms, leaning forward, ready to play. "I'm fine on scoring, I think," he said. "Six cards, two to the dealer's crib. I may need a little prompting, but I think I'll pick it back up quickly."

On the boombox, AC/DC sang "You Shook Me All Night Long."

Charpentier shuffled several times with his small, precise hands—and I'm wondering whether that thing about hands and penis sizes is accurate, I need to get real here—and dealt the first hand.

He remembered that it was rude to pick up one's cards until the dealer picked his up—the same thing applied in bridge and hearts, he recalled. When he did pick them up, he was looking at a five, a six, a seven, two tens, and a king. Crap, the scoring is one thing. Making tactical decisions is something else.

After staring at them for a few seconds, he realized that it depended on whose crib it was. It was Norton's. So much for pitching the tens. He threw Charpentier the six and seven. Stick with the basics, your fifteens.

He fumbled his way through the first few counts, but eventually fell into the rhythm of the game. Each turn contained three "hands," each consisting of four cards and the same "turn card." The dealer got two hands, one of them the crib, formed from two cards each player contributed.

By the midpoint of Game One—they would play a standard rubber of three—everything had come back to him. They'd fallen into a comfortable rhythm of playing cards and talking, and he was beginning to enjoy himself.

"So how many kids were in your family?" Norton said, then took a last glance at his cards and made his decision. "Seven."

"Seventeen," Aaron said, laying down a king. "Two kids, just me and my little brother."

"There were three of us," Norton said, laying down another seven. "Twenty-four for two. My brother was six years older, then there was my sister and me, but my brother died when we were, ah, about three. I hardly remember him except in photos."

"Thirty. What did he die from?"

"And thirty-one for two. Ran out into the street, didn't see the car. He was in the hospital for a while, I don't recall how long." Charpentier pegged his points and looked up at Aaron. "I wish I remembered some of this stuff. Sometimes it's hard, not even knowing whether my parents are still alive. It's like part of me's missing."

"Nine. What's the advantage to being whoever you are now? The courts gave you back your presumption of innocence, so why not be Norton Charpentier again?"

"Suit yourself, eighteen for two. I just can't. There's too much there. I don't want to be that person. I don't want to be a living memory to people who knew me back then."

"'Suit yourself,' huh? Fine, twenty-seven for six and a go. What's stopping you from looking them up online?"

Norton sighed heavily. "I just—that person's dead and gone, and if I look them up, he starts to live again."

"Nortie, whatever I did to make him somebody you didn't want to be, I'm sorry. I know that sounds pretty feeble, but—"

Charpentier laughed shortly, bitterly. "What's done is done. I'm happy with my current life, or happier than I ever thought I'd be. I really thought my life would end when Diana died. More than that, I hoped it would."

Jesus, I called him Nortie.

"I felt pretty much the same way after Haley died. That one was my fault, too."

"Bullshit. The Reaper was a goddamned maniac. You aren't God. You did everything that you could. Are you gonna count your goddamn hand? 'Cause if you aren't, I have one hell of a muggins lined up."

Right. Claiming points your opponent neglected to count.

"Dream on," Hotchner said. "Fifteen-two, four, six, pair is eight. But I didn't do everything that I could. If we'd still been married—"

"Fifteen-four. And why were you divorced?"

Yeah, Aaron realized as he started explaining the ongoing problems he and Haley had faced in their marriage. It's easier to talk when you're doing something else. Maybe I should play cards with the assholes I'm interrogating.

"Wow, one big pair there," Norton said when he exposed his crib. "While you're shuffling, let me get this out, fresh-baked this morning." He brought a plastic container and a handful of paper napkins from his computer case. "Raspberry coffee cake."

"Looks great."

I gotta admit: If you're confined to prison for five years, it's good to have a friend.