"Sherlock, anytime you wanna back off would be appreciated."

Maeve frowned at her … girlfriend? Is that what they were at this point, girlfriend and girlfriend?

Frowned at her girlfriend, the buzzkill.

"I'm not taking my shirt off," Jane added, levelling a flat look at her.

"You're ignoring this opportunity," Maeve whined, tugging at Jane's arm as they walked. "You told me that you were afraid of figuring out who you were, right? And you said that you would be less afraid of it all if you knew where to start. This is the perfect way to do it."

"This is a bad idea," Was Watson's only reply.

They ducked into the tattoo parlor.

"Hi!" Maeve grinned at the bored man behind the counter, keeping a firm grip on Doe's wrist. "We have a very strange, oddly specific question. Is there a tattoo artist we can talk to?"

"Vaginal tats cost extra," The man deadpans, flipping through a magazine without looking at them.

"I'm out," Doe turns – but Maeve holds her fast.

"No no no no no," Maeve stops her, giving her a Look. Seeing Jane wasn't going anywhere, she turns back to the magazine man. "We're not getting vaginal tattoos. May we speak to an artist?"

With a disinterested shrug, he gestured further into the parlor.


Hotch wasn't entirely sure why he hadn't actually seen the unsub yet.

If he had to guess – which, really, was his only option at hand at the moment – it was because of his period of unresponsiveness. Based on the thinness of the skin stretched over his ribs and the way his skin, when he pinched it, moved like molasses back into place … he'd been insensate for days. Many days. The Unsub most likely had grown bored, and that coupled with his compulsion to stalk Jane incessantly meant that he may not even be on the premises. He might not even know that Hotch was conscious.

The lack of visible cameras certainly supported the theory.

So he took the time to pull himself together. At least an hour was spent sitting on the toilet lid, scooping up handfuls of water from the sink at a time and sipping them down – waiting. Allowing his body to adjust. Scooping up another handful.

Eventually, the pounding headache lessened.

There was a mirror – metal, no glass to break and use as a weapon – set above the sink. It was dented, scratched –

Hotch knew, now, that Jane had been kept here. That this was where she had been trapped as a oh so young eighteen year old girl, scared and pregnant and alone. Where she had been forced to patch herself up, where she had punched and clawed at the unforgiving metal mirror because she could no longer stand to look at who was reflected back at her.

He pushed it aside. The rage and sorrow could wait. He needed a clear head.

So instead he used the mirror, turned his back to it and craned his neck to gauge how bad the damage to his back was.

The cuts weren't random, weren't indeliberate. Instead they were a precise picture, all the more clear due to Hotch's imperception at the time of its carving; a dark part of him was amused that, hey – at least the fuckwad was a talented artist right?

It was a flower, though not one that Hotch immediately recognized. It was downturned, like a daffodil, and was comprised of six pointed petals on a single long stalk. The 'roots' of the plant rested right above his right hip, with the stem crossing diagonally across his back with the flowerhead taking up space on his left shoulder blade.

The wounds stung, true, and throbbed with a distant pain – but nothing felt too deep, and everything seemed well scabbed over after days of inactivity. A small blessing, because scabbed over or not when he began to trickle water over his shoulder and neck to wash away some of the blood … shiny red skin began to peek through. He was right about the infection.

Though, all things considered, the unsub was more likely to be the one to kill him first, not his wounds. Well, these wounds, rather.

… part of him wished that the cuts weren't just cuts, but tattoos too – like Jane's. He had neither Reid nor the internet at his disposal, and the meaning of flowers could be intrinsic to the message the Unsub was sending by scarring up his back. And Hotch knew plenty of flowers, plenty of meanings, sure – but often he needed at least some color to identify them.

Dammit. The one undeniable piece of communication from the Unsub he had and he didn't even know what it meant.

That wasn't what mattered now. Shouldn't be his focus. Because Mari Ryden was a true crime enthusiast and borderline child prodigy; Ivy was a desperate orphan girl on the run. If his timeline was correct, Jane was trapped in this room for close to a year.

A girl like that wouldn't be stuck in a room this long without having tried to escape.

There was a weakness to this perfect prison. A weakness he could exploit.

He just had to find it first.


Jane's personal phone buzzing in the middle of the bullpen had the whole team perk up in anticipation, expecting the Unsub to have tried to initiate contact following Liber's death and his message to Jack.

But even before Jane answered it, she knew it wasn't Him.

"It's been years, Ivy-dear," Amina's voice came through, the sound bouncing oddly in the bullpen. "I thought you'd forgotten me."

The BAU gave her a wide range of looks, from alarmed (Garcia), confused (Blake), and highly judgemental (Morgan and Rossi).

"Funny thing, I did forget," Jane deadpanned. "Funky how that works, with amnesia and all that."

"Ah, your sarcasm is still as vibrant as ever," Vine chuckled. "Andy says 'hi' by the way. Your last meeting didn't go over too well, I heard."

"I broke his nose, Amina," Jane huffed. "And he pointed a gun at me. How well do you think it went?"

"How come this is the first time we're hearing about this?" JJ cut in sharply with her 'Last Warning, Henry' voice.

"I thought I was on speaker," the hacker laughed sardonically. "Don't mind me. I'll be sure to wait while you hash it out."

"Later," Jane hissed at the blonde. "Get pissed at me later."

JJ's glare made it clear that the conversation was not over.

"I take it this isn't a social call," Vine cut into the ensuing silence. "And that you didn't give your team the courtesy of a heads up."

"My not getting permission is gonna matter a helluva lot less after you give me what I'm owed," Jane deadpans, focusing solely on the phone in her hands rather than even glance her team's way. "And you owe me, Amina. You owe me big."

"And why is that?"

"A decade of letting me walk around knowing jack shit about who I was," Jane immediately dishes it out. "Getting my best friend killed. Getting my uncle killed, along with wrapping them up into some hairbrained scheme that resulted in three casualties. For stealing my blood to impersonate me genetically, for sending your boy toy to crash my one chance of rekindling my friendship with Maeve – which if I had succeeded, by the way, then Maeve would've never gone through the trauma of a kidnapping. If Andy hadn't sent her packing, I wouldn't've had to shoot Diane Turner in front of her – all that and a hell of a lot more you owe me, Amina. And I'm here to fucking collect."

A brief pause.

"What do you need?"

"Hotch has been abducted by the bastard who killed my family," Jane grinds her teeth. "It's been nearly nine days."

"Shit."

"Yeah. Shit. That's where you come in," Jane glances up at the team. "You're searching for my daughter. That's always what this has been about, you want your niece."

The scant sounds of the bullpen dropped to eerily silent.

" … I didn't know she was a girl," Vine spoke after a moment, voice thick. "You never told me."

"You never asked," Jane snarled, wholly done with this bitch. "You just took. And I've never told anyone, not even Aaron. I'm giving you that, and it's all you're ever gonna get."

"Ivy, she's my niece," Amina snarled. "My brother's daughter. I have a right –"

"You have no rights, legal or otherwise," Jane snapped. "And my daughter didn't live long enough to have a birth certificate so her sex is all you're getting. Now help me."

She was panting. Her team was exchanging glances. JJ looked like she was gonna cry.

" … How?"

"The douchenozzle who has my boyfriend is looking for my kid, too," Jane gathered herself, locking eyes with Blake. "He's like you – never saw the baby, never learned that she died. He's hunting for her, because He wants to have a perverted, fucked up family with the three of us."

"You wanna know my steps so you can figure out what steps he's taking – you want me to find him," Vine was quick on the uptake. "Am I gonna get protection on the back end for this?"

"Vine, if you can't cover your own ass I'm not responsible for who's gonna smack you on it," Jane bared her teeth at the phone. "Can you do it or not?"

"This guy – he's the one who killed Danny?" Vine guessed – but it wasn't really a guess, was it? "I may have copied that tattooed freak's confession board to get Liber sent to the slammer, but he framed her, didn't he? For Danny."

Jane closed her eyes, took a deep breath and cracked the door to her memories open, just a bit.

The headache that had been building exponentially since Hotch disappeared jumped sharply, but –

"Yeah, He was," Jane shook herself out of it – shooting Morgan a reassuring look at his step forward. "He was. His name is – is Elton McCrae, Jr. Will you help me find him?"

"Give me nine hours," Amina promised darkly. "Fuck, why do the evil ones always gotta be named something stupid like Elton –"

Jane hung up on her mid-sentence.

Then she braced herself as the team started their indignant interrogation.


"Hi!" Maeve smiled broadly, digging her fingers into Jane's arm as a not-so-subtle indication to keep quiet. "Are you the artist working today?"

The woman who turned from her drawingboard to face them was old – stupid old, with thinning white-silver hair and paper thin skin – and yet somehow made younger by the beautiful lines of ink circling her biceps and creeping down her arms like roots. Jane – Jane had never thought that tattoos were beautiful but … somehow this woman carried them with a quiet type of elegance.

She wondered if, maybe one day, she would be able to carry her own ink like that.

"Yes, that would be me," The woman cocked her head. "I'm Tyne. What're you two looking to get today?"

"Answers," Jane deadpans, only to get Maeve's elbow in her ribs for her bluntness.

"Sorry about her, she's grumpy," Maeve smiled her charming smile. "But I suppose that would be correct – we are, in a way, looking for answers. Well, I am – I guilted her into coming along."

Rather than annoyed, the woman looked amused by their dynamics and smirked at them – gesturing at a handful of mismatched chairs for them to take a seat. Maeve gladly obliged, dragging Jane down with her.

"Now what kind of answers would you two find ladies be looking for in my humble shop?" Tyne spread her arms wide to encompass her station.

"Well, we have a friend –" Maeve began to spin their agreed upon story, back when Jane still thought this was completely hypothetical. "– who was injured quite badly. They're laid up with some burn scars in the hospital right now, and the damage was bad enough that what's left of their tattoos is …"

"Wasted," Jane supplied the word flatly.

"... in a morbid and blunt way, yes," Maeve just sighed at her, like she wasn't surprised but was still disappointed, before getting back on track. "Now, we thought it might be nice to do something for them – cuz they were really attached to the tattoos and the meaning that they held. But … we don't know the meaning, and they won't talk about the tattoos now that they're gone."

"So you want me to try and guess the significance of the tattoos so you can do something for your friend," Tyne guessed, amusement now flecked with intrigue. "I do love a challenge. You have any pictures?"

"No," Jane cut in before Maeve could do more than open her mouth. "Descriptions. I could sketch them."

Tyne nabbed a sketchbook from a side table, flipping to a new page and passing it and a pencil to her. "Knock yourself out. Your friend here can describe them while you get at it."

With only a moment's hesitation, Jane began to sketch. She'd certainly stared at the ink on her back enough times to have it memorized.

"I'm sorry to hear about your friend," Tyne apologized, thankfully not digging any deeper into the fabricated story. "I wish for them a swift recovery. How long have they had the tattoo – did they have the tattoo?"

"Years, at least three," Maeve answered. "It's a back piece, over the neck and curling around the shoulders and the side of the ribs. Like we said, though, they don't talk about it."

"Any major events that happened to them at the time?" Tyne wondered. "Deaths in the family, back breakups, illness? Something that they would want to honor or commemorate?"

"Not that we know of."

Jane finished the rough drawing, passing it to the artist.

"Well, this is a large piece," Tyne studied the paper intently. "How far down the back do these vines extend?"

"Right above the tailbone," Maeve indicated on herself. "And the lettering is right here, on the neck."

"Must've been painful to get done," Tyne nodded. "Any other tats?"

"Only this one," Jane provided.

"Well, without knowing more about the canvas there isn't much I can tell ya," Tyne grimaced apologetically. "The roman numerals could mean anything – from a date, time, Bible verse … what's the color scheme?"

"Red four, green ivy, and black lotus flower," Maeve gestured at the drawing. "Does the color matter?"

"Red lettering is a bit ambiguous, but can be associated with strong emotions such as anger or a substance such as fire or blood – or it could mean nothing but the person's favorite color," Tyne shrugged. "The flower on the other hand … the meaning of a vine of ivy in most flower languages is dependence. Endurance and faithfulness – it could be a dedication or remembrance to someone or something. But the lotus …"

"What about it?" Maeve asked, the excitement of closing in on the mystery building in her eyes. "Is it important?"

"Well, it is the centerpiece," Tyne pointed out dryly. "Lotus flowers mean purity. Sometimes they mean celibacy or chastity … but in Hinduism the most important meaning is rebirth."

"Rebirth," Jane echoed, something about that … idea resonating in her bones. "It's a symbol of rebirth."

"Yes, but the black lotus flower is like an inverse tarot card," Tyne shook her head. "It's the opposite of the typical lotus flower's meaning – the white lotus, I mean. It means power, rebellion. Authority, sometimes. But it also means death. Whatever this tattoo is, for your friend? It's a memorial. Ivy for remembrance, the number four as a signifier, and the black lotus for death."

Death.

She remembered the scar, the scar she'd never talked about. From hip to hip.

She felt sick.

Tyne tore out the page from the notebook, handing it to Maeve.

"My guess?" The older woman frowned. "Your friend lost someone when they got this tattoo – if you want answers, I'd start looking there."


After slowly but steadily hydrating himself, even after what was probably a week with no food, Hotch was feeling a lot better about his situation. Between adrenaline and desperation, he was confident he would at least be able to put up a fight now if the Unsub tried to get close.

A part of himself that he dutifully shushed hoped the bastard did – so he could get his hands around his sorry neck and –

No. Anger is bad. He needs a clear head.

In his investigation of the cell, he didn't find any obvious escape routes – more's the pity – nor any viable options of exploitation … but he did find a pillowcase shoved into the wooden supports under the bed frame.

He perused the contents carefully, almost reverently, because these were the things that Jane kept hidden. That she wanted to make sure wouldn't be found – couldn't be taken from her.

When talking over names, once, Reid had spouted out in his usual blunt way the origin of Jane's first name – her given name. He had said that it was an altered spelling of the name Marisol, an abbreviation of the title Maria de La Soledad – Mary of Solitude; The Virgin Mary. The young genius had then swiftly followed it up with an amused hum of laughter, saying that it was also a portmanteau of 'mar y sol', spanish for 'sea and sun'.

Hotch remembered this as he looked down at a blunt chunk of wood, carefully carved with an ocean's sunset.

His fond, sad smile slipped off his face when he remembered the meaning of the name Mari – 'a sea of bitterness.'

He supposed that Mari had plenty of things to be bitter about too, stuck in a cage like this.

Other than the wood block – which was too dull and flimsy to use as a weapon, unfortunately – there was a penny, a pair of stud earrings in the shape of chipped stars, and a tightly folded piece of paper.

On the paper was a single, bloody fingerprint.

He recalled it, from one of Rossi's books. A case that he and Gideon had worked on in the beginning stages of the BAU. A series of young women were all abducted and held prisoner, and the way that the Unsub was prosecuted for all 42 of the known murders was a copy of the Bible the women were 'permitted'. They had no pens, no pencils, no writing utensils at all – so page after page were carefully stamped with fingerprints in their blood, as a record of who had come before.

It twisted his heart, that Jane would have ever had to make a record of herself – thinking that she, too, like those women would be viciously killed with no one to remember her name.

Hotch carefully folded the paper back up and returned the pillowcase and it's contents to their hiding place. Every shred of evidence counted.

Instead of thinking too hard on Jane's seemingly neverending torture, Hotch focused all of his energy on tearing strips off the ends of the sheets. Well-made hems could make excellent garroting rope.

And as he worked, he tried to think on what possibly could be the meaning of the flower on his back.


"Jane, please don't go consulting criminals without talking to us first," Rossi half-begged, half-pleaded after she finished justifying her actions.

"I promised Jack," Was her mule headed response.

" … you had a daughter," JJ spoke for the first time since the call. Jane glanced over warily at her, not nearly profiler enough to gauge her face. "You had a daughter, and you … you never said."

"Yes, I had a daughter," Jane wearily confirmed, rubbing at her brow. "Emily knew. I was kinda drunk one night, so Blake knows too – and of course Hotch knows, he knows almost everything. I just – I could never admit it, to myself. I couldn't let myself remember her, because she was –"

Jane shook her head, pushed everything back because if she thought about her dead baby she was gonna be even more useless than usual.

"Vine's determined, she'll pull through," She switched tacks. "And in the meantime, we can learn as much as we can about McCrae, because that's where we're gonna be able to pin him down. You guys are profilers – let's profile."


"Doe –" Maeve rushed, trying to catch up to Jane's deceptively long strides, "Doe – hey, Watson. Watson!"

"What," Jane stopped abruptly, turning around sharply. "What."

"I'm sorry."

Jane looked away.

"You told me that you wanted to know your real name," Maeve reached out, ran her hands down her girlfriend's arms. A meagre attempt at comfort – neither of them were tactile people. "And after Abbiville – I thought that maybe together we could do this. For you."

"For me?" Jane shot back, frowning. "Or for you?"

Maeve rocked back.

"I love you, Sherlock, and you know that," Jane shook her head, exasperated and frustrated and a thousand other things all wrapped up. "But you keep trying to fix me. You think that if you solve this one great mystery, then suddenly I'm perfect and healthy and we can go skipping off into the sunset and maybe your parents won't be so pissed when you tell them you've been fucking a woman for the last six months."

"Doe –"

"A name won't fix me, Maeve," Jane bowled through. "Nothing can fix me. So you need to either accept me just as I am, fuck ups and all, or we need to reevaluate what we're doing here."

Maeve was stunned. And then she was angry.

"I don't get you," She snapped, crossing her arms sourly – not even caring that they were in the middle of the sidewalk and were starting to make a scene. "You – it's like you don't even care. You are messed up, Doe. You are mentally ill and you have no memories and it's like you don't even care. Any free second you can you're drinking yourself blind or partying all night or picking fights with frat boys because you're so miserable that just living like anyone else is a burden. It's torture, Jane. You're torturing yourself."

Jane grit her teeth.

"I'm not trying to 'fix you', Jane – I'm trying to make it so you have the will to live without me having to force feed it to you every few hours," She spat, feeling her temper get the better of her. "You have refused to seek any kind of help for the two years I have known you. I can't stand by and watch you kill yourself. I refuse to. I love you too much for that. I thought that maybe, if you had a starting point, you might actually give a damn about who you were."

"I don't care about who I was, I care about who I am."

"Who you are is a suicidal hypocrite who will barely let me even touch you even when we're having sex," Meave huffed. "You're afraid of living, Doe. I won't let myself be the grieving girlfriend when you give up all together."

Jane sighed, a full body downshift into weariness that just fueled Maeve's irritation more.

"Can we go home?" Jane asked, tone hopeful and tired in equal measure. "Finish that documentary we started last night, polish off the rest of the acuka? Pretend today never happened?"

Could Maeve pretend today never happened? Could she? Like every other time they'd argued before, could she just – let it go? Forget about it like it never happened?

Sometimes Maeve caught herself wondering how much of Jane's amnesia was really out of her control.

"No."

"What?" Jane blinked, thrown off by her going off script. "Why not?"

"I'm sorry, I can't – not anymore," Maeve shook her head, feeling numb. Resigned. "We're done."

Jane blinked, still not getting it.

"I can't – I love you, Doe, I really do," Maeve tried to smile. "But I can't. I can't watch you die. I don't want to be the one to watch you die."

"... you're serious," Jane raised her eyebrows, bewildered. "You're actually serious."

"It's my name on the lease, you'll have to move out," Maeve bulldozed on. "You can pack up your stuff in the next week –"

"You're serious?"

Maeve held firm, even as she wanted to crumble.

"Fine," Jane grinned, large and faux and oh-so-pissed. "It's fine! Who needs a week, right? I don't need any of that shit anyway – got everything I need right here!"

And Jane Vana White'd her bag, as if it was some kind of accomplishment that she was so unattached that all she needed was a single satchel.

"If that's how this is going to go, then fine," Jane turned away in a ball change. "Bye, Sherlock. See you in hell."

And she was gone.