A/N: Can you believe it? We're done! Written as always with Esperanta, whose intelligence and sensibilities inform every page of this story. We own nothing but this plot and our original characters. Personal issues again delayed us, but we're safely through them now. Thank you, everyone who stayed the course with us!

Solitary 5.0

Chapter Fifty-Five

Justice Begins Again

Late September: Many Happy Returns

The trip home to Virginia was accomplished in Jessica's red Mustang convertible, which was new to Hotchner. It was a warm, sunshiny Monday, so they'd lowered the top. Aaron sat in the front passenger seat in sunglasses, head thrown back ecstatically, freed at last from IV ports, plastic bracelets, and silly-ass regulations about how and where he could walk.

JJ and Jack sat in the back, and everyone sang along with the stuff Jess had on her sound system, lots of Madonna, Lauper, Mitchell, and Carly Simon. Hotchner missed the Joan Jett and Suzi Quatro songs Warden—no, Joe—had sent him. He'd grown attached to them, he realized.

They ate at two restaurants and stopped at a roadside park to drink canned sodas and watch Jack work out his preschooler's energy on the monkey bars. What could have been a four-hour drive took almost seven hours, but Aaron inhaled every glorious minute of it.

~ o ~

Wednesday started out damp and overcast, but by the time Genie Cruz got free of her Intro to Contemporary European Poetry class to pick up Joe McAfee at Nittany St. Luke's, the sun had come out and the temperature was comfortably in the seventies. They stopped at Eagle on the way home, to fill his prescriptions and pick up some staples, then at Arby's for the sandwich special and giant jamocha shakes.

Genie offered to run him past the school to pick up the previous Friday's paycheck, but he was more interested in fighting his way up the thirteen carpeted steps (including the landing) from the entry door to his apartment, a crutch under his left arm and his right arm braced against the wrought iron bannister, to take any interest in finances. When he fell at last with gratitude into his familiar cocoa-brown recliner in front of the entertainment center, he was starting to think, OK, maybe I can do this.

~ o ~

The Team, minus JJ, returned to Quantico at noon on Thursday, satisfied at a solid bust of a well-prepared but easily panicked copycat killer whom they'd buffaloed into making a few major errors in judgment. They stuck around long enough to ensure that all the paperwork was completed, then adjourned in a body to a rib joint for a late lunch and a few celebratory drinks. To everyone's surprise (except Rossi, who'd placed the calls) and delight, Hotch, JJ, and Will joined them. Aaron drank sparingly, since he was still on meds, but he acquitted himself impressively at the buffet.

Already his face and torso were filling out again. The narrow creases that had appeared in his cheeks were all but gone. He was still using the cane, but he was no longer leaning on it as hard or gripping it as tightly as he had at the hospital.

As a group, as a family, they drank to the fact that on Monday, JJ would rejoin them as press liaison. On Tuesday, Hotch was scheduled for his first meeting with Bureau counselors prior to starting the whole recertification rigamarole.

~ o ~

Erin Strauss woke up moaning at two in the morning on Saturday, the fifth day since Hotch had come home. Her sleepy and baffled husband held her and soothed her, but she seemed unable to express whatever she'd been dreaming about.

There was no way to tell that kind, well-meaning gentleman that now that Aaron Hotchner had returned safe and sound, she no longer had dreams about people bringing his head to her front door. Instead, apparently her libido had decided that it was once again appropriate to have vivid erotic dreams where the once-and-future Unit Chief made crazy-ferocious love to her as she lay splayed across her desk.

October: Major Changes

Two weeks into his renewed life, Aaron found that he'd acquired the ability to cut through the bullshit. Whereas previously, when something came up that wasn't job-related, he'd tended to dither and examine his options repeatedly, now his personal life had greater clarity.

Just a week after he returned to the house Jessica had been maintaining for him, he realized that he had limited physical and emotional resources, and what he had of them needed to be spent on his profession and his son. Home ownership was something his parents and his late wife had valued, but it took too much time, too much trouble, for him to justify.

By the second week of October, when the Team returned triumphantly from nailing the Prince of Darkness in Los Angeles, Aaron and Jack Hotchner had moved into another apartment in the complex where they had lived previously. The layout was identical, and already his son was busily renewing his friendships with kids in the building. Hotchner's lawyer was handling all the real estate details, and had assured Aaron that he'd at least break even.

As a consequence, instead of spending a fun-filled weekend cleaning gutters and winterizing the house, he was at the park with his son, shoving the little merry-go-round as fast as he could, then leaping aboard with Jack. The boy clung to one of the metal supports and jumped up and down each time they passed the white line on the ground as though leaping over it. Aaron half-sat on another metal support, his hands in the pockets of his pullover, luxuriating in the feel of the breeze in his hair and watching the glee on Jack's face.

"Daddy," the boy said as the merry-go-round slowed, "how did you get out of the big box?"

Early on, he'd responded to his son's (surprisingly few) questions about what had happened to him by saying that a bad man had locked him up in a big metal box in a cave.

Now he wondered for a few seconds how on earth to answer his son's question. He didn't want Jack to grow up afraid of caves or boxes or rain or even people, very few of whom were evil, after all. At last he said, "There was a lot of rain and it got kind of floody in the cave, so he came down to get me, to help me out. He didn't want me to be stuck in the flood."

"The bad man?" Jack seemed dubious on that point.

Hotchner gazed off into the distance, watching a flock of birds rise from the trees, turn, wheel like a great boiling feathery cloud, and fly away. "Even bad people can do good things, Jack. You know that sometimes good people do bad things, right?"

"Uh-huh."

"So he decided to do a good thing. He came down and got me and helped me through the cave. It was dark and scary and we dropped the flashlight—" He had a sudden vivid memory of dropping his flashlight, their last flashlight, of lunging for it in the knee-deep water, but he missed it and so did Warden, and they'd watched together, cursed together, as it spiraled off, its beam winking merrily, then vanished down the same hole the two men had just climbed out of, gone forever.

He grinned at his son. "It was scary, but not too scary, because I was with him, and he knew all about the different parts of the cave, well, most of them. I was glad I wasn't alone." Aaron held his breath, hoping his all-too-logical son wouldn't follow that line of reasoning too far.

To his relief, Jack just nodded, then gripped the metal bar more tightly. "Again, Daddy!"

Hotchner leaped lightly off the revolving platform—the bruises on the soles of his feet from hours of tramping shoeless across rock and uncleared ground were long gone, and however he'd wrenched his left knee during his wanderings on Blue Bauman, he was down now to just the occasional twinge. "You got it, Buddy," he said, and bent to propel the merry-go-round forward again.

~ o ~

One drizzly evening in late October, Joe McAfee and Genie Cruz sat across Joe's small living room from each other. Genie was in the rocker, correcting essays. Joe had the lapboard over his legs in the recliner. He'd been making preliminary sketches for the upcoming Introduction to Set Design 301 class when he suddenly gazed with deep affection at the woman with the gamine hairdo and that impish smile—so gloriously, so painfully, like Diana's. The widow and mother of three delightful children who loved them both well and wisely.

"Miz Eugenia?" he said softly.

She looked up at him over her reading glasses. "Mm?"

He gathered his courage. "We need to have a talk."

Something like panic shone in her eyes, and she removed the specs. "Why?"

You can do this. He cleared his throat once, twice. Smiled, probably a lot more weakly than he intended to. "I, ah, I've been giving some thought to taking this, this thing we have, to the next level?" Whoa. Didn't intend for that questioning inflection to be there. Sounding like junior high, redux.

Like a heavy-handed screen-wipe, the expression of panic faded from her face and a cautious interest settled in. "Tell me more," she said, her voice soft and encouraging.

"That's all there is. My feelings for you keep getting stronger, and I'd like to, to—before you make a decision, there are a couple things you need to know about me."

She settled back in the rocker and clasped her hands together over the essays in her lap. "Go on," she said, her voice still low and cautious.

Just do it! "OK. A few years ago, I lost everything—literally everything that ever had meaning to me. My wife, my family, my profession, my reputation. Yeah," he added as her eyes grew wide. "I was married. We had children. They're dead. I'll never stop mourning them, but I am ready to move on, I think."

She looked surprised, but she whispered, "I'm so sorry, Joey."

"Don't be, not yet. What happened to me was grossly unfair, and the people who engineered it tried to set my life straight again with a few words and a whole bunch of money. Money!" He shook his head in dismay. "As if money can fix anything like that. So I just kept moving in this spiral of despair until I got to the point—" He deliberately fudged the year, keeping it as general as he could. "—just about fifteen years ago where there was nothing left. I had two choices: I could die, or I could become someone else.

"So I arranged for it to look like the person I was had died, and I became someone else. And the only reason this is important, the only reason I have to tell you this, is that while the original Joe McAfee—the dead guy whose identity I took, turned sixty back in June, the real me is still forty-nine; I won't be fifty until next month." (Because surely, as a young widow with kids, she'd be concerned about the likelihood that a new man wouldn't have one foot in the grave, too—right?)

Genie stared at him for a long time, then she said, "So—is that why you have no family back home in British Columbia? Are you even from British Columbia?"

He thought he'd anticipated every question she might ask; that one hadn't even been on the list. "I lived there for a year or so when I was becoming McAfee," he confessed. "But, no, I'm not from B.C. I was born in Maryland."

There was another silence, longer and perceptibly chillier. "Tell me this is some weird piece of performance art, Joey. Tell me I haven't been falling for a shadow."

"I'm sorry, Genie," he whispered. "It's true. It's so true that I couldn't go on any further with you without coming clean about myself. You're too important to me." He raised his chin high. "You and Josh and Tina and Richie are so important that I had to tell you that there's—more to me, and less to me, than it seems on the surface."

Her face went pink, and he knew she was fighting tears. "So who are you really?"

"I'm really Joe McAfee," he said. "That's who I am now."

"Then who were you? Does he have family? Is Inspector Javert on your tail? Are you some kind of international con man?"

"Who I was is immaterial," he replied, his heart sinking. He hadn't really expected her to leap into his arms, 'Hey, no problem, Joey-boy!' but he'd rather hoped things would go better than this. "I have a sister and a niece," he told her, "but they got the payout from my insurance and my will years ago. I'm not about to go looking them up; it would only complicate their lives. There's no Javert pursing me; I didn't change my identity to cover up a crime. I changed my identity because my heart was broken; because I couldn't endure being that man, facing the losses I'd taken constantly, day in and day out. It was cowardly, but it was the choice I made. Believe me, if I'm ever arrested, it'll be for something I've done as Joseph McAfee."

Boy, ain't that the truth!

But he said to live my life. To turn the page on the past.

Her lips compressed into an angry line, Genie gathered her essays and jammed them into her briefcase. "You have two minutes," she informed him, her voice cold and detached, "to tell me how that was just a weird experiment in alternate realities."

"I'm so sorry, Eugenia," he said. "I wouldn't take it back even if I could. You deserve to know the truth about me."

She snapped her case shut, collected her shoes and her jacket. "Ninety seconds."

"Can't do it," he said with a sigh.

True to her word, a minute and a half later, she was gone, closing his apartment door behind her with a sharp snick.

His shoulders sagged. I actually don't have a life to live. Any old time, Hotchner can decide that he made the wrong choice, and take away everything I have. It's better that I protect Genie and the kids from that kind of upset.

~ o ~

David Rossi stopped at a party supply store in a small strip mall early on the morning of the last day of October. It was a beautiful Saturday morning, the sun blindingly bright, on that All Hallow's Eve. Although actual door-to-door trick-or-treaters were rare in his neck of the woods, when he was home he liked to make the experience special for the little rugrats who did show up. If at least one child didn't retreat, screaming, back down the front walk to the arms of his or her parents, Rossi felt that he'd failed.

This year—ahh, this year—he planned to return to the cobweb-festooned porch, glowing red and green eyes, and his Count Dracula costume.

As he climbed out of his car and inhaled the sweet autumn smells, he saw a familiar vehicle parked at the far end of the lot. He frowned and studied it. He'd never bothered to memorize his teammates' license plate numbers, but the metallic light green minivan parked with its nose hard up against the redwood fence had Virginia plates. The AAA sticker on the bumper was in exactly the spot where Aaron had put his.

The building housed, according to the small notice posted at the opening in the fence, two obstetric practices, a pediatrician, an advertising agency, and a counseling service.

And—speak of the devil—the man himself, in jeans and fleece jacket, suddenly emerged out of a set of second-floor doors. He looked around, caught sight of Rossi, and waved vaguely at him. Dave locked his car and walked over to Hotchner's van as Aaron all but bounced down the external steps to the parking lot, slipping his sunglasses on as he did so.

"Hey, Aaron," he said. Damn, but the man was making a solid recovery: He already had all the meat back on his bones, and his energy levels were, if anything, higher than they'd been just before his abduction.

"Dave," Hotch said with a cordial nod. His head moved slightly—behind the sunglasses he was noticing the party store—"Getting geared up to terrorize the neighborhood kids?"

Rather than answering, Rossi just grinned. "You're looking good, Aaron."

Hotchner sighed slightly, then nodded. "Working on it."

They chatted for a while there in the sun-drenched parking lot, mostly idle Bureau gossip and pleasantries. At no time did Aaron either volunteer where he had been or remove his shades, and that absolutely delighted the senior profiler.

Aaron had been to see a counselor on his own, and not one from the Bureau's own staff. He didn't want Dave to see his eyes, so he'd probably been crying, but he was contented now, loose, relaxed. He was getting stuff out.

He was making progress.

November: Complications

Her name was Theresa Charpentier Cable, and she was spending that particular Friday night, her fiftieth birthday, contentedly strolling home from the convenience store, her pug-pitbull mix, Miss Maggie, dancing along beside her on her hot pink leash.

"Happy birthday, Tiska-Taska," a creepily familiar voice said.

She spun to face a slim, inoffensive-looking man on crutches. He had untidy light brown hair (like hers) and serious blue eyes (not like hers; she'd inherited her father's brown eyes). He was familiar, yet he wasn't. And he knew both her birth date and her childhood nickname.

Miss Maggie, who ordinarily sensed Theresa's fear and expressed it as a growl, just stood there looking the man up and down.

"Do I know you?" she asked.

He nodded slowly, sadly. "Yes, Tiskers. Twelve years and two hundred pounds ago, I was your brother."

And while the sensible part of her was screaming No, No, another part of her was studying his features, and more particularly, his way of looking at the bridge of her nose instead of her eyes. She'd nagged him unmercifully about that. "Your ears," she finally said.

"Surgery," he replied, straight-faced. "I was tired of being mistaken for Prince Charles."

"He was afraid of dogs." Nortie'd crossed the street to avoid dogs and he'd barely tolerated cats. He'd been as hopeless around animals as he was clumsy.

The man shifted his weight, changed the positions of his hands on his crutches. "I got over that one. I'd pet her, but I'm somewhat limited in my movements at the moment."

His left leg, she could see, was braced and unbending. "What happened to you?"

"Car crash." His voice was right.

She felt the earth shifting beneath her feet and wondering whether she, the toughest of the Charpentier offspring, was about to faint. She'd have dismissed the idea out of hand except for that FBI agent back in September, the one who'd asked whether it was possible that her brother was still alive. Someone had kidnapped whozit, the tall skinny lawyer, and the FBI's theory was that he was being punished for prosecuting Nortie.

If this is Nortie, then he's come to get me at last. She stared in horror at the man who was so like, and yet so unlike her twin. And still Miss Maggie stood there at the end of her leash, her stubby little excuse for a tail actually wagging!

"I believed him," she managed to whisper. "Jerry, I mean. I believed him; he was so persuasive—"

"Water under the bridge—"

Oh, yeah, like you're likely to just blow off my helping to put you in prison. All her regrets came flooding back, regrets she'd only had after he was dead, realizing that her brother had lost everything—his marriage, his business, his reputation, his freedom—at least in part over her lies. He's going to kill me, or maybe lock me up, what did they say he did to the lawyer? Beat him, right? She viscerally recalled her father's scowl when he would open that one drawer, the one where he kept the extension cord, the fury, the hatred in his eyes as he snarled Strip, mostly to Nortie, but sometimes to her.

"Sic him, Missy Mags," she said, but fear had leached all the control from her voice. It came out more of a squeak than a command, and she'd never tried to train the puppy for defense. If anything, she'd tried to compensate for the reputation pitbulls had by encouraging her to be sweet and affectionate.

The man—was it truly Norton? She'd always wondered what he would look like if he lost all that weight. She'd presumed that he'd look like Waldo, their father, but he didn't. Nor did he look like the men on their mother's side. No, he looked like Great Uncle Theo, small and slim and scholarly—he smiled down at Miss Maggie and then cast a positively sympathetic gaze on Theresa herself.

"We're fifty today, Tiskers," he said. "I won't bother you again, I promise. But I needed to see you, to tell you that I love you and I forgive you." He smiled sadly and started to turn.

At last she found her voice. "Prove that you're Nortie."

"Can't," he admitted. "I have a new identity and I'm pretty happy in it. I'm certainly not going to do something stupid like offer you DNA or fingerprints. Besides, if I'm alive, what happens to the insurance money? That all has to be paid back, right? And with interest, I'd be willing to bet."

So Nortie, she realized.

"Tell me what I did for the second-grade talent contest."

He stopped in mid-pivot. "You lip-synched to Theresa Brewer singing 'Sweet Old-Fashioned Girl,'" he said. "You wore a pink dress that you and Aunt Dolly made out of one of Mom's slips."

As she stood there, her mouth hanging open, he completed his turn and began to make his slow hobbling way back down the road. She stood there for what seemed like forever, just watching him.

"Wait!" she finally called. He turned back, one eyebrow raised—oh God, now that's so Nortie, that arched eyebrow!—and seemed to sigh. "Come back," she urged. "Oh, never mind, it's easier for me to come there—come on, Mags, let's run!"

She and her dog jogged down the sidewalk until she came even with the man whom she was now sure was her brother. "Come on, it's your birthday, too, right?"

Nortie shrugged slightly. "In another world," he replied sadly. "In another life."

She wanted to ask him, Do you practice astrology, the dark arts? Did you torture that skinny lawyer from the prosecution team? She couldn't do it. This was Nortie, for pity's sake, her baby brother by four minutes. This was the man who'd wanted to be a priest. The man who as a boy had never once stood up to their monstrous father. The man who'd—in spite of her testimony—remembered her in his goddamned will.

"I'll go get my car," she said. "We can go back to my place. The least I can do is offer a dead man a drink. I have some birthday cake, too—there was a party after work."

"My car's just around the corner," he said. "I know where you live."

It should have sounded creepy, but it didn't.

~ o ~

Aaron and Jack flew to St. Pete to spend the Thanksgiving holidays with his mother, a luxury that he'd never been able to count on while he was in the BAU—and would again be unable to count on once his recertifications were completed. His mom, ordinarily a stiffly formal woman from one of those families, the Virginians who predated the Mayflower, had become obsessed with hugging him. Every time he turned around, there was Adina, throwing her arms around his waist and squeezing him tight, her face pressed tightly against his chest as though she needed to hear his heart beating, muttering about how glad she was to have her Aaron back safe and sound.

She couldn't let it go. Especially when Aunt Miranda and Uncle Morris were there, she constantly pushed him for details of his captivity, although even his visible scars made her wince and turn away. It was as though she felt it was her duty to cluck and fuss over each pain, each indignity he'd suffered as some kind of psychic compensation for having been unable to protect him from Warden. She was so insistent that eventually Aaron shut himself off in his bedroom and called Eileen, the DC-area therapist Mac Pearson had recommended for him. It was that conversation that alerted him to the possibility that his mother was also trying to make amends for standing by silently years ago, while her husband bullied his sons.

The next time his mother hugged him, he rocked her slowly, gently back and forth. "It's OK, Mom," he murmured in his most soothing tones. "It's OK. I survived. We all survived. We're better and stronger for coming through it, and your love made it possible." Although she had never made explicit reference to his childhood, he must have been on the right track. She burst into heavy sobs of what seemed like relief, and her clinginess diminished noticeably.

There were some awkward moments poolside, since Hotchner preferred to wear a tee shirt even when he swam, but they, too, passed. Saturday morning he removed the shirt and his mother bit her lip once then tried to ignore his scars—which was easier than it might have been since Jack was the star of the show, leaping smoothly and confidently into the water, "a little fishie, just like his papa," as his mother and Aunt Randi cooed.

Late on Monday night, when he and Jack returned to their Arlington apartment, the first thing he saw when he opened the mailbox was the thick envelope with the tidy block printing. It had been sent to the house first, to the Westbrook Heights address. Even without the decorative return address sticker that bore the Amnesty International logo and the name J. G. McAfee, with an address in State College, he'd recognized the printing.

Once he and Jack were in the apartment, once Jack was kneeling on the couch and asking his tropical fish if they'd missed him, Aaron sat down beside him with all the mail on his lap, buying himself time by opening a couple bills—they'd be paid electronically anyway—and paging his way through a couple holiday catalogs. Whatever the envelope from State College contained, it didn't feel like a letter. It felt instead like stiff pieces of heavy paper.

He didn't want to open it in Jack's presence. During that one long, intense conversation with his former captor, he'd had a sense of completion, a sense of peace.

Now—two months later—he wondered what on earth might prompt the little guy to write to him. He wondered whether the envelope contained pictures from his captivity—pictures that he'd not been aware were being taken.

Was I wrong? Is there more cruelty, more vindictiveness in him than I realized?

"Anything you need to unpack?" he asked his son.

Jack leaned in close to the aquarium—it was a new acquisition since his father came home, and he still found his four vividly colored pets an endless source of fascination. "Gotsa go and unpack," he told the fish, waving solemnly at them. "I'll be back soon."

When the boy was gone, Aaron slid his penknife under the flap of the letter from Warden. From Joe. From Norton. From whatever he really was to Hotchner: captor, criminal, or—or—or whatever the fuck this Joseph Gabriel McAfee entity was.

When the contents fell out on his lap, along with the pale blue Post-It note with the precisely printed words, "A challenge for both of us," he realized that he'd been holding his breath.

December: To Men of Good Will

The man who had once called himself Warden peered past the wipers and through the light spatter of snowflakes falling on his windshield as he pulled into a parking space at the steak house. He was still a meticulous man, intelligent, observant, and orderly. No wild streak of impulsivity darkened his mental makeup. Ordinarily, he was prepared for any contingency—but not tonight.

"Tell me about these people," Genie asked him. "Where do you know them from?"

He hated lying to her, after she'd come back to him, after she'd given him another chance to be an authentic human being, even if he used a name he hadn't been born with.

"I met him in the hospital," he said, reassuring himself that it was mostly true. For specific definitions of 'met.' "He's an interesting guy," he continued while his heart thudded. "An FBI agent. He has a little boy about Richie's age."

What if he doesn't show?

"Did you hear that, Rich?" Genie said, turning toward the back seat.

"Anybody my age?" Tina asked. Josh was too busy being cool to ask any questions.

"Just the one boy," Joe McAfee replied.

He saw them then, surrendering the green minivan to the valet parking. The lawyer, the man whom he'd tracked so carefully, so assiduously, held his umbrella for a youngish woman with a mass of blonde curls—Jessica Brooks, the lawyer's sister-in-law. They were joined by the lawyer's son.

Joe McAfee could barely breathe.

"There they are," he said, and his voice sounded strained to him. "The tall man, the woman in the red wool coat. The boy—his name is Jack."

It was so simple. Dinner. A young people's performance of The Nutcracker.

The lawyer, himself a careful, observant man, a methodical man, glanced around the drive a couple times, then caught sight of the rebuilt Kia—Does he realize that this is the car I drove him to the bunker in?—looked carefully, and waved. Not an exuberant wave. Not even a cheerful wave.

A cautious wave, from one methodical man to another.

"He's kind of cute," Tina opined, "for an old guy."

"He's a real FBI agent?" asked Josh.

"He is indeed," Joe said. "He's a profiler."

"Like on TV?" Josh gasped, momentarily losing track of his bored-and-too-cool persona.

"Exactly like on TV," said Joe, then—wondering whether he was doing something stupid—he added, "He's the guy who got the Boston Reaper."

They pulled up at valet parking, and there was no longer any time left to change his mind, to tear out of the parking lot sputtering excuses at Genie and her kids and retreat to the safe and respectable life he'd been trying to reclaim.

He swung his still-recalcitrant left leg out of the car—he was only ten days out of his cast—and grasped his cane tightly.

The tall and slender dark-haired man greeted him with a nod and an extended hand.

"Can we do this? Really?" Joe blurted at him quickly, quietly, before Genie could wrangle the kids and join him there.

Aaron Hotchner smiled and his grip tightened. "Yeah, I think we can. In fact, I'm sure."

Finis