A/N: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs. Thank you to everyone who reads, reviews, and lets us know what is and isn't "grabbing" you!

Solitary 5.0

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The Power of Promises

"Sh," Spencer Reid whispered.

"So paranoid," Jessica breathed back, her nails trailing gently down his chest. "He isn't an infant; he sleeps through the night."

He shushed her again and listened carefully through the hum of urban living, the refrigerator, the air conditioning, the computer hard drives. The laughter and tracks from Adele's 19 that were audible from the house next door.

She was probably right, although it was surely more guilty conscience than paranoia. He had visions of Jack someday, when Aaron Hotchner was home, safe and sound—and he would come home safe and sound; Reid would give his life to ensure that—imagining Jack telling his father, in all innocence, You know what? I got up to pee in the night and I saw Spensa-Reid and Auntie Jess wrestling under the covers, and you know what? They had no clothes on!

And how would he explain it to the once-and-future Unit Chief, if that happened? 'It's not my fault; she put the moves on me'? How about, 'See, I had this older-woman kink I didn't even realize I had until she came on to me'? Or maybe, 'It's pure propinquity; you spend two nights a week at a beautiful woman's house, and eventually stuff just happens'?

Or, if he were completely accurate: It was last Sunday, sir, Day 100 of your captivity. It was possibly the bleakest day that the Team's ever known as a family, worse even than Haley's death and seeing you a haunted, shattered man. All day I recalled your impulsive hug when you rescued me from the grave I was digging for myself in Georgia. I remembered the way I felt so safe, so loved, and so valued by this amazing new family I'd become a member of. I dream sometimes of hugging you when we rescue you, and—I needed a hug. Sounds pitiful, right? But I needed human contact, and this time, when Jessica squeezed my arm, stroked my thigh, looked into my eyes that way, I told myself that she was lonely, too, and I gave in.

And that was supposed to fly with Aaron Hotchner? Who'd been absolutely faithful to his wife, before, and even after, their divorce? Who'd expressed no interest even in dating?

Hotch would hate him, he decided. No, never hate. But he'd think less of him and have less confidence in his, Spencer Reid's, ability to control himself and make responsible decisions.

He rolled to his left side and looked at the faint glow of moonlight playing across Jessica's breasts and the secret, satisfied smile on her full lips. He wondered, not for the first time, what on earth she saw in him. Not innocence, surely. He was no virgin, and anyone who truly knew him was well aware of it.

He usually spent one or two nights a week with Jack at Jessica's house. It had been three this time: Sunday, Tuesday, and tonight, Friday night. Day 105 of Hotch's captivity.

He's alone in some cold metal room and I'm naked beside his sister-in-law. Obviously, I don't have quite his level of self-control.

He tried to picture Hotch in bed with Haley. With anyone. Although he'd seen him in the early years with his arm around her, nuzzling her face with his own, grinning—he had an amazing, high-candle-power smile—it was as though Aaron Hotchner were his parent. He just couldn't picture him, you know, doing it.

In some ways, I'm impossibly naïve.

And suddenly he recalled some vague things that Rossi and Prentiss had referred to, about dark places in Hotch's past.

"Hey," he said, rearranging the sheets over his lower body, "was Hotch faithful to Haley?"

"When they were together," Jess replied, without hesitation. "At least, Haley always said that he was—how did she put it? Almost oppressively faithful, she said."

"How can that be? How can fidelity be oppressive?"

Jessica shrugged and sighed. "I loved Haley, but I didn't always understand her. What I think is that he was kind of overwhelming, possessive." She smiled up at the ceiling. "I remember, when they separated the first time, she was seriously afraid he would, you know, like, stalk her. He's awfully intense, you know, and if I had to choose, is he more good-looking or more scary-looking, I think I'd go with scary. When we talked about him, her code word for him was Sting, like in 'Every Breath You Take,' you know? Then they separated and—he was out there getting intense with these other women, and Haley about flipped out. She'd cry on the phone, she'd say, 'He's doing just fine without me!' and I'd say, 'Well, so are you, girl,' 'cause she was, she'd gone back to school and she had a great job and she was seeing this majorly hot dentist, and she'd say, 'But that's not the point!'"

She giggled. "You should see your face. What's the big surprise?"

"I think I thought like Haley," Reed confessed. "When I heard they'd been separated for a while, I pictured him hanging around under her window, I don't know, kind of pouting, sullen, keeping track of where she was going and what she was doing."

Because that's how he looked after she filed for divorce—lost, stomped, not seeing anyone.

What was the difference?

It hit him with the force of a concrete duh.

Jack.

He was being faithful to Jack.

~ o ~

Mail delivery came early to the Georgetown apartment complex where Penelope Garcia lived. On that Saturday morning, with the Team on stand-down, a still pretty battered-looking JJ Jareau showed up around 9:30, lugging Henry and two gallons of milk. Garcia hugged her and planted a kiss on the sleepy boy's forehead. She grabbed her mail from the wall of lock boxes and relieved JJ of the milk.

"Will we really need that much?" she gasped. They'd planned to do pudding-painting with the toddler, but Garcia had pictured it as a much smaller operation, not quite the industrial level of production that two gallons implied.

"One's for home," JJ replied with a laugh. "The whole's for home, the one-percent is for the painting." She spread a blanket on the floor for Henry and began unpacking the detritus of motherhood from her bags. Garcia dropped the mail on the coffee table and picked up the milk to store it in the refrigerator.

She had the door to the fridge open when she heard JJ cry out, "Pen, get in here!"

She shoved the two jugs in, bags and all, and hurried back to the living room.

JJ had moved one letter away from the rest of the mail. "It got fanned out when I set the diaper bag on the table," she said, all but sputtering in excitement, "and—" She nodded wordlessly, and Garcia knew exactly what she would see. She even knew that it would be a padded envelope, one that included a flash drive. That familiar printing. That familiar return address.

It's been more than a month. How can it possibly have gotten any worse?

JJ was already on her cell, notifying everyone, the Team, the techs. After a quick discussion with Morgan, Erin Strauss, too. Finally she called Will, asking him to come by and wrangle Henry.

"I'll put coffee on," Penelope said.

~ o ~

"But I thought y'all were on stand-down," Jessica said, just a little more sullenly than Reid would've preferred. She wasn't long out of the shower. She wore shorts, a tube top, flip-flops, and had a towel wrapped, turban-like, about her wet hair.

"It isn't—it's just some new evidence," Spencer told her as he stuffed his wallet, change, keys, and phone into his pockets. Gun? Nope, that can stay in the safe. "I'll be back in a couple hours."

She folded her arms across her chest, her eyes wide. "Evidence? You're going in to Quantico for evidence? Since when?"

Spencer glanced around the kitchen hurriedly. No Jack; he was still out back with Josh and Eli from his T-ball team. "It's a new letter from Hotch," he said softly. "We need to analyze it. And I'm not going clear to Quantico; just over to Garcia's. You know how important this is."

He had her full attention now. She'd seen the two letters that they'd received; the note that Hotch had written to Jack was still posted on the little shelf in the boy's room, beside framed pictures of his parents.

"Why are you sure that they aren't forgeries?" she asked.

Reid blinked his surprise. "That's an odd question to ask," he said.

"I was talking to Sean a few weeks ago," she said. "I told him I was afraid that they were forgeries. He said you were positive that they were real and that Aaron's still alive."

"We have his fingerprints," Reid told her. "Both letters had his fingerprints on the fronts and backs, over and under his writing."

"I want to come along," Jessica said. "Just let me change tops, and I'll ask Eli's mom to keep an eye on the guys. She won't mind; I watch Eli and his sister at least once a week."

"You can't," Reid said.

"Because I might see his handwriting?"

"Jess, it's a small apartment, and the whole Team's gonna be there, and a bunch of techs, and—it'll be way too crowded."

She faced him squarely, stubbornly. "I think you have pictures of him," she said.

"Why? What does Sean think?" he asked, one interested eyebrow raised. He recalled confiding to Aaron's younger brother that they had video of Hotch. Had Sean's promise to keep the secret been worthless?

"Sean says that if you say he's alive, he believes you."

"And that isn't good enough for you?"

"I heard you and Emily and Derek talking one night. You were talking about how he's being starved. I'm no super-genius, but I'm not a dummy, either. If you guys know that he's being starved, then either you have more letters than you're admitting to, or you have pictures."

A fragment of Arthur Miller's play The Crucible came back to him. There is a promise made in any bed … spoke or silent, a promise is surely made…. He had slept with Jessica Brooks, and there was a promise there. He owed her a somewhat higher level of truth than the average person on the street.

He met her eyes. "There is an image."

"An image." She looked horrified rather than gratified, her knuckles flying to her mouth. "Oh, God, why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you copy it for—" Her voice failed as her intelligence answered her questions. "Oh, God," she repeated, but this time her voice was soft and sad, a fearful whisper. "How bad is it?"

"Not as bad as it could be," he replied, picking his words with infinite care. "He's lost weight, but that could be stress."

"Well?" she prompted. "Come on, I'm not a child, Spence. Talk to me."

And he had no idea what to tell her. "What do you want to know?" he asked.

"Is he—what was he doing? What was he wearing? Is he—marked? Has he been mistreated?"

"He was—dressed," he temporized. "Shirt, pants, sweater. Clean, well-groomed. There's some scarring on his wrists but no evidence of—you know—anything else. He was in his cell. It was small and clean, metal walls. In the background we could see that he had writing implements and books and playing cards. A bed with sheets, blankets and a pillow. Bottled water. Fresh fruit."

One of the problems with being Spencer Reid, Super Genius, was that he was wired to show off his knowledge. It took a considerable effort for him to remember not to let slip anything further. Anything about video. About—anything else.

"Why couldn't you show it to Jack, then?" she asked. "If it's that—that bland, what's the harm?"

Reid just shook his head. "He looked miserable, Jess. Anxious. Lonely. He wouldn't want Jack to see him like that."

~ o ~

For the first time, everyone involved was present when Garcia opened the envelope, her hands gloved. She set aside the tiny red flash drive and opened the single folded sheet of paper.

"No computer printing," she reported. "It's all hand-written. Well, printed."

The techies hovered just behind her, ready to seize the document, but first she would read it aloud.

"My friends, it starts," she read. "That's new, a salutation. Then one short paragraph. Both this letter and the enclosed video were created with my full knowledge and cooperation. I'm where I should be. I accept my guilt and I'll serve my sentence without further complaint or resistance. Your ongoing messages and pictures keep me strong and lift my spirits. I think of you warmly, constantly, and with deepest gratitude. My very best, Aaron."

There were a thousand things she wanted to say, wanted to review, but she handed it to Vaughn, who ran a copy and passed it on to Linda, then used the first copy to make ten more for the Team.

"More 'Conjunction Junction' crap," she said at last, as Morgan, Reid, Prentiss, JJ, Rossi, Erin Strauss, and even Will (with Henry at his feet, gnawing on a terrycloth bunny) accepted their copies, "but it sounds a little more like Hotch."

"It does," said Morgan, "but why?"

"Contractions, to start with," Reid answered. "Direct statements, not those progressives we saw in the earlier letters. Active verbs."

"And he's talking about the video, so he knows about it. About our messages. About what he thinks of us," Penelope added. "This is way more personal than the other ones he sent us."

"But it's an ugly message," said Rossi. "He's where he's supposed to be? He accepts his guilt? He's thinks he's just gonna—" He adjusted his reading glasses and read off his copy. "—serve my sentence without further complaint or resistance? That's fucking bullshit." He grimaced in the direction of impressionable little Henry. "Sorry."

"Let's get it over with," Jennifer Jareau said. "Will, could you take Henry in the kitchen or the bedroom or something so we can look at what's on the thumb drive?"

He nodded and scooped up the boy. He took a long look at JJ as he left. His voice warm and supportive, he said, "Hey, keep me in the loop, Sugar."

"Promise," JJ said. She was wringing her fingers together on her knee.

"He knows about the video," Emily said. "So—maybe it won't be as creepy as the other one?"

Spencer Reid sighed heavily. "Let's hope not."

Her hands still gloved, Garcia popped the flash drive into one of her laptop ports. She saw that it contained three files. "It's an MP4 this time," she said. "He converted it before he sent it."

"That's important?" Erin Strauss asked.

"Yes, ma'am, that means that if—when—we find this Warden creep, we should find traces of the operation on his hard drive," she replied.

"Can you play an MP4 on that machine?"

"Yes, ma'am. Nineteen-point-four meg, one minute, fifty-four seconds in duration. Also two JPGs, they look like—like views of his cell. Want to see them?"

"Not yet," Morgan directed. "Let's see the video."

She copied the contents of the flash drive into an isolated corner of her hard drive, ran three analytical programs on them, ejected the flash drive and passed it on to Linda.

"OK," she said. "Looking virus-free here." She picked up her universal remote, turned on the HD TV, and set up a direct feed from her hard drive to the four-foot screen. "Here we go."

When the image appeared on the screen she could almost feel the oxygen leaving the room as everyone simultaneously drew a deep breath.

He was perhaps four feet from the camera, wearing red scrubs and a navy blue sweater. As before, he was clean-shaven and his hair was neatly trimmed. He sat on his cot with walls to his back and to his left side. Visible behind him, attached to the wall with floral refrigerator magnets, were a few of the photographs the team had sent him, printed out on glossy paper.

But he looked dreadful.

In some ways, he looked worse even than JJ, who'd been blown out the closed window of a Denver Field Office SUV two weeks previously. Numerous facial bruises were just beginning that awkward purple-to-yellow transition that under some lights looks green. His left eyebrow and his lip had been split and both of his cheekbones and his left eye were still swollen.

"It looks as if he and I happened just about the same time," JJ commented. Everyone was probably thinking that, but Penelope was grateful that JJ was the one to say it.

"Done by a right-hander," Rossi observed.

"Hey," Aaron Hotchner said in a low, barely audible voice, but looking directly at the camera. "Sorry about my appearance. I tried to escape a couple weeks ago, and there were—" He offered a faint smile. "—consequences. Anyway." He took a long breath and nodded. To some other person? To Warden? To a confederate of Warden's? "I'm hoping that after I've healed a little more, I can make a video that Jack can see. I'd—prefer that he doesn't see this one."

The voice was still his dark rumble, but it was thin and played out, as though all the spirit had been beaten out of him.

He held up a folded piece of legal paper. Again, that faint, weak smile shone briefly. "I have notes here so I don't forget anything," he said, but they had to rewind it. Nobody caught the words because everyone's attention was focused on his raw hand, wrist, forearm.

His eyes drifted away from the camera several times, and then back. He glanced down at his arm as if just noticing it and said, "Yeah, that was part of the same deal. It was pretty ugly—but it's over now." Again he glanced away and drew a long steadying breath.

Is that a message? Is he saying, Don't buy this?

"I know you're wondering about the note, about whether I wrote it under duress, about whether I'm saying whatever I have to say in order to survive. Maybe you're even starting to think in terms of Stockholm Syndrome. Let me be clear on this: I wrote that note of my own volition and just passed it on to my Warden for checking. I'm where I'm supposed to be. I can't give you any details of my—my crime, or crimes, but I'm guilty as charged."

He blotted at his lips with the back of one hand and seemed to hesitate. "I was told when I first came here that acknowledging my guilt would probably be harder for me to bear than the—uh, the measures that the guys who brought me in used to ensure my cooperation. It was the truth, though. Confronting my guilt, my irresponsibility, was a nightmare.

"I can give you no details of it, since that could lead you to the person or persons who first engineered my—incarceration. Please," he said, his voice serious and urgent, and his eyes fixed on the camera, "trust me when I say that I'm guilty as charged and I fully accept my sentence."

Penelope searched his face for signs of deceit, for signs of fear, of compulsion, of sarcasm, of anything other than the solemn statements he was making.

Hotch glanced again at his sheet of yellow paper.

"Um, I saw coverage of the Guffey mess," he said. "I'm glad that the Team made it out of there alive. I hope everybody's on the mend. It kind of pisses me off that Guff used me to create his own little story. I don't know many details, but I'm confident that you nailed him for a phony pretty quickly once you got involved. If you want, and if it doesn't complicate your lives unnecessarily, you can convey my sympathies to the OPR and OKC and Denver agents who were injured, and the families of everyone who didn't make it."

Another glance at his cheat sheet.

"I can't say enough about what your letters, your questions, your pictures mean to me. There are two pictures attached along with the video, one of that wall over there—" He nodded past the camera. "—and this one." He patted the wall behind his cot, the one against which he was leaning his left shoulder. "You may already have seen them.

"When I'm not doing something stupid, I'm treated well," he said. "Cooperation and civility are rewarded here. I get reasonably regular exercise and lately, some social time." He stared intently into the lens. "But please, please believe me, the way to where I'm being held has been booby-trapped. Any unauthorized person who tries to access the area of the cells will trigger explosives, killing themselves and, well, anyone who's here. Including me.

"Thanks for listening. I promise that next time I'll be presentable enough for Jack to see. In the meantime, tell him that I have pictures of him—" He gestured broadly. "—all over my cell. Stay safe, everyone. I miss you and love you. Your messages mean the world to me."

The video ended.

"Holy crap," Emily Prentiss said.

Penelope said nothing at all. What else was there to say? Holy crap pretty much summed it up.