Jane opens the door carefully, slowly. She doesn't know what, exactly, she's afraid of – but she knows that she is petrified.
Hotch is awake. He's upright, and his cheeks have filled, less sallow and pale – he's alive in a way that clenches at her heart and makes her breath skip.
"Jane …"
And she's crying.
She's sobbing, because Danny is dead. Because Desi is dead, and so was her dad, and Casey and Ada and Bree and Rob and Rhys and her baby –
But Rin isn't.
McCrae is dead, the world is dead. But Rin is completely and totally alive.
Crossing the room and collapsing into his arms is simple and real. It's human and cathartic – and when his arms fold around her waist, clutching her close, she –
She feels okay.
They breathe each other in.
When they detangle, it's only just enough to drink the sight of each other in. To reassure themselves that this is real, the here and now.
Eventually the moment relaxes, the fear of any joy being snatched away in an instant dispersing into the cool hospital air. They let their guard down for the first time in half a month and a decade and twenty years all at once.
"You were there with me, the whole time," He speaks into the stillness. "Mari and Ivy and Jane … you were there, the whole time. With me."
And she kisses him.
She kisses him, and she feels the words bubble in her chest. She kisses him, and knows that she has to say it.
"When …" She pulls back, licks her lips and settles on her haunches. "When you first told me you loved me, it was on accident, I think. You were hanging up the Skype call and it just … slipped out."
"I remember," He smiles, a soft thing. "Pakistan. I didn't mean to … but it felt right."
"You've said it since," She tries again, struggling – always struggling – for the words. "Many times."
"And I've meant it everytime," He swore to her.
"I've never said it," Jane bites her lip, because it's been an unspoken crevice. A canyon between them. "To you. Not for real. And … when you were taken all I could think about was how I never said it back. Really said it back – I would just kiss you or smirk or make a joke or say 'you too' or –"
He silences her with a kiss. Effective tactic.
After a moment, they regain their breath.
"I need you to know," She gazes into his fathomless eyes. "I need you to know, Aaron Hotchner, that I love you. I will always love you. I love you."
"Will you marry me?" He suddenly blurts out.
Her heart stops. He pulls out a ring box, opens it – fumbling with one hand because his other won't leave her cheek.
"I was planning on … something," He laughs, eyes wet and fingers trailing across her cheekbone. His thumb skimming over the scars Foyet carved into her. "I have carried this ring in my go-bag for a year, trying to figure out the perfect moment to ask. The right time – but you and I aren't grand gestures and perfect nights. We're messy and chaotic and we've both got scars we can't ignore. But I love you, Dr. Jane Hart. I love you as Jane and I love you as Ivy, I love you as Mari and I love you as none of them and all of them all at once. I love you for all of your pieces, and I love you as your whole – and I don't want to ever lose you again. So will you marry me?"
"Yes, you sappy idiot," She laughs, and it's thick and heady and when he slips the ring onto her finger it fits perfectly.
She kisses him.
Mari watched as her father's body hit the ground.
Her ears are buzzing, echoing from the shot after shot after shot –
She turns and she runs.
She runs and she runs. She runs until her sides are heaving and her feet are bleeding. She runs and runs and hides and runs and hides and gets on a bus – and when the bus stops she's in a city that she doesn't know and surrounded by people who don't know her.
She collapses in an alley, allowing herself to breathe for the first time since her father died.
Her father died.
She's never felt so lost.
She doubts she'll ever be found.
"Mom, where's my Science notebook?" Jack yelled, tearing through the house at breakneck speeds.
Jane just kept carefully snipping stitches. Aaron sighs, a contented though exasperated huff that resonates through his chest and rumbles under her fingers.
"Mooooooooom," Their son calls again, and it's all Jane can do not to burst out laughing at his petulant tone.
"Little Bear, if you can't keep track of your things, I certainly don't know why you think that I can."
The cub tumbled into the dining room then, all wild limbs and flushed cheeks, and skids to a stop next to her. Jack studies his father's back, watches as she continues to cut the cords threaded through his skin.
"Does it hurt?" Jack asks.
"Not anymore, buddy," Hotch answers, shooting a look over his shoulder. "It did, but your mom fixed me right up."
"Sure did," Jane shot her son a smile. "Now he's good as new."
"Does … do you hate it?" Jack pried, energy muted. "That you have it. And you have it forever? The flower scar."
Jane paused in her movements.
"I …" Hotch considered his words. "I don't like how I got it. But it's something I share with your mom now, and it's something that we can bear together. Something neither of us have to have alone."
Jack didn't look like he understood. Jane did.
"Little Bear, did you check under your bed?" Jane queried, breaking the tension. "You accidently kick things under there all the time – maybe your notebook's down there."
And with a whoop and burst of energy, Jack was gone.
She pawns her silver bracelet, because she has to – even though it feels like she's getting her heart ripped out. She gets ripped off, she's sure, but she's out of options and some money is better than nothing. Better than a reminder of the family she lost.
Dad got her that bracelet.
She dumpster dives, finds dirty clothes and rotten food so she doesn't have to spend her money. Because money is finite but garbage isn't. She feels disgusting every time, but her family is dead and she has no choice – no right to be picky.
Not anymore.
She considers trying to find Uncle Rob. But then she remembers her dad's body hitting the ground, and can't muster up the courage.
She sleeps every night behind a tattoo parlor she doesn't bother learning the name of.
She fights for her life, and her territory, more than once. She's seen how hard someone can die, and how quickly. She won't let herself go like that – she won't.
Sometimes she feels like she's been dropped head first into a battle field with no training but the words in David Rossi's books. She dreams, sometimes, that Agent Gideon and Agent Rossi come to rescue her.
They're just dreams.
She makes no friends, no allies. If her own –
If Elizabeth can turn on her than anyone can. She won't be betrayed again, she won't.
There's a shelter that gives her soup on weekdays, and when they ask for her name she says it's Ivy.
It's the one thing she'll let herself keep.
"Please, I'm begging of you," Jane huffed out a laugh, feet up on the dash and window rolled down – sweet southern air flooding in. "If we have to listen to the Beatles for the umpteenth time, can it at least be the Red album?"
"Oh?" Hotch laughed, shooting her a glance – juggling driving the car and opening a water bottle. "And what exactly is wrong with the White Album?"
"The fact you even have to ask that question," Jane grumbled, snagging the water bottle from him and twisting the cap off. "Ever heard of this ol' song called Helter Skelter?"
"Just because Mansen –" Hotch starts to protest, but she cuts him off, passing the drink back.
"Yeah, so Mansen would be a really good reason not to like the White album," Jane snorted. "To be fair, I'll give you Blackbird, and I'll give you Glass Onion – hell, on a good day I'll give you Sexy Sadie – but all the other songs are mediocre at best. At least Red only has good songs. And, bonus, Red also has no obsessive murder cults!"
"First off, Mansen's ignorance of British slang was why he latched onto the White album – the quality of the music had nothing to do with it," Her fiance scoffed. "Second off –"
"Wait, slang?" Jane interrupted, tilting her head. "What do you mean?"
"The term 'helter skelter' refers to a type of children's slide," He laughed, glad to one up her. "Mansen didn't know that and just focused on the 'hell' part and made his own assumptions. That's not the Beatles' fault."
"No, you're right – it's the UK's," Jane deadpans, stealing back the water. "Point number two?"
"Point number two is that Red and Blue are both compilation albums," Hotch picked up where he left off, checking the GPS as he talked. "Therefore, the fact that the White is obviously better despite it not being a compilation is a clear indication of quality."
Jane whipped out her phone, googling for all her worth.
"Ha!" She exclaimed after a long moment of searching. "Not one song in White appears in either Red or Blue! If it's so good, then why aren't any of the songs in the compilation albums?"
"You do know there are more than just two complation albums, right?" Hotch raised an eyebrow.
"No one cares about the other ones," Jane deadpans – "This is our exit!"
The first time the girl talks to her it's to yell at her, for picking through their trash.
The second it's to yell at her for loitering.
The third time the girl is drunk, and she – the homeless nobody – is the one to hold back her hair as she vomits.
They strike up some sort of relationship, after that. She doesn't know what to call it.
But somehow they talk, and the girl – who laughs at her name Ivy, and says they make quite a pair: Ivy and Vine – gives her food. Work cleaning up the back of the parlor, all cash.
They don't trust each other, but they enjoy each other's company.
And that's how she meets Daniel.
Danny.
Abbeville, Alabama, had a handful of things that each of the 2,543 residents were inordinately proud of.
For one, they were the first city alphabetically, both by city and state, in Ruther McNow's Road Atlas. Another was that the town had been around since 1850, back when they had 300 residents, and had flourished all through the wars and the stock market crashes and everything else that had hit the country and its people. And – most importantly – they had both Leroy Cook and Al Richardson, great football players they were, to call Abbeville their home.
But there was another notable little phenomenon that the people of Abbeville, Alabama, had to be proud of – proud as they were, of anything even remotely interesting to come from their tiny little town.
And that was Jane herself.
Small towns gossip, and it makes sense that a young woman with no memories appearing in the middle of the town square would make its rounds. Twenty years ago, all They ever saw her as was that confused little girl in a bloodied white dress, covered in scars.
She felt their eyes follow her around for years. She felt their judgement, their expectations – she felt their ideals.
Coming back felt like victory and loss, all at once.
Her good humor from their roadtrip drains away as they hit the town limits. Hotch reaches over, takes her hand and links their fingers.
"You don't have to be there for this part," He tells her quietly, but they both know she will go anyway.
"I don't want to revisit the past," She repeats, a reminder both to him and herself. "Not more than I have to or need to. But I have to be here, every step of the way."
He squeezes her hand tighter.
Danny doesn't ask anything of her.
Vine and Andy, who drifts in and out in clouds of cigarettes and rage, demand things. Demand she helps out, no matter what it may be. No matter how illegal it may be. She does things with them, for them, that she knew her father would be ashamed of her for.
No one dies. It's a small consolation.
But Danny doesn't ask anything of her.
He draws and sketches and paints like it's the blood that flows through his veins. Like it's the breath in his lungs that flows out and across canvas and skin. He's something pure, just when she believes that there's no such thing left.
She doesn't ask for the tattoo, but he creates it anyway. He offers, with soft words and softer hands, to make her into something. To show the world she has become something new, to honor those that were torn from her.
When she accepts, when Danny and Vine lay her down, she feels exposed.
But it's not the kind of exposed that she was when she was running, or when she was on the streets. It's the kind of exposed that she's never felt before, like they're not marking her skin but carving into her soul.
It should hurt. It should make her afraid.
All she is is relieved.
Because no one can take her family from her now. Not when she honors them every second, with ink on her back and weight in her heart.
Her tattoo has barely begun to heal when she leans in close and kisses him. And it feels like starting over.
The machinery is pounding and loud and it makes her teeth rattle, but Jane pushes through. She made it this far.
Hotch is clutching the file they got from the Abbeville Sheriff, hard copy and handwritten notes – because of course they didn't convert them to digital, so they had to travel all the way to her escaped hell just to sweet talk the old fashioned man into forking them over.
Sheriff Haskins was the same man who processed Jane back when she was Jane Doe. Same man who dismissed her out of hand, as a junkie or a prostitute or a runaway who hit her head too hard. Same man who didn't care, just forked her over to the church for them to deal with.
Jane Hart thinks she hates him. Jane Doe certainly did.
She lets Hotch do the talking, sits out in the hall and stares at a fax machine labeled 'out of order.' Curses how she was so close to avoiding this place altogether, if only the mayor had allocated more funds to fix a stupid fax machine.
Hotch gets the files. They get the hell out of dodge before the gossip that follows them like a swarm of gnats links the woman in black to the girl in white. Before she gets sucked back into the cesspit that Abbeville, Alabama was to her.
They have no right to her now. Not now, not ever.
So now they've backtracked. It took hours of Reid and Garcia's careful work, picking through traffic reports and repaved roads and ancient traffic cameras – but between the two geniuses and Jane's continually sketchy memory and Hotch's steady determination, they found it.
And now the techs are carving out a chunk of soil, no larger than a shoebox, to be taken back to the FBI coroner's lab.
A chunk of soil with her baby's skeleton trapped inside.
If falling in love with Danny is like starting over, then being with him is like a discovery.
Every day it feels as if some part of her is healing. As if she's not this shattered, broken thing anymore. That she's more than just the sum of her shattered parts.
Vine's pissed at her for going after her brother, but they're working through it. The four of them, Andy included, reach an equilibrium.
They even bought her a thin metal band, painted silver, to replace the one she bartered. To make up for that slim bit of history that she lost.
She's almost happy.
And then there's a 60 Minutes piece on her family's murder.
Massacre, they call it.
A perfectly descriptive, terrible word.
She somehow watches it all the way through, because she's frozen to the couch and Danny's head is buried in his sketchbook –
They say the name Jason Gideon and –
She flexes her hand, looking at the scar carved across her palm.
She looks up his number. She calls.
Leaves a message, but just barely. She barely chokes out his name before hanging up.
She didn't realize it would be enough to find her.
She can't work on the skeletal retrieval. As family. As the mother.
They ask her if she wants to know – they all do. Ask if she want to know sex, wants to know cause of death, wants to know know know know –
She doesn't. But she tells Rin to ask. Puts the decision in his hands, because he knows her better than she knows herself. Better than any of these strangers ever could.
He's silent when he returns. Sits next to her on the hard lobby chairs and takes her hands.
They sit there for a long time.
"What do you want to put on the headstone?"
She doesn't know how to answer that.
"I talked to JJ," He continues.
She knew JJ talked to him. Everyone talked to him. She couldn't even be mad about it, not after she spent the better part of a decade keeping the stalker gifts from them. She'd lost their trust, she knows that.
She's working to earn it back.
Rin's expecting a response. She nods, and he continues.
"What about 'Jane'," He offered tentatively. "Maybe 'Jane Ryden'?"
She looked at him.
Measures him.
"Did I have a daughter?" She asks, asks the question that had been eating away at her soul since she lied to Vine. Since she said that she did.
He looked at her. Considered her. Looked through her – into her.
"... No."
She looks away.
"Gabriel Vite," She forced the name out. "No dates. No inscriptions. Just the name."
He nods, and goes to fill out the paperwork.
One moment, they're something like peaceful – as peaceful as the life of tattoo artists, runaways, and vagabonds can be.
And then guns are firing and Danny is dead and Amina and Andy abandon her in a heartbeat.
She's not surprised. She never trusted them anyway.
When the man who killed her father, her brother – her whole word – wraps his hands around her throat, she feels his nails dig into her skin. He spits and his breath smells rancid and he's too big for her to fight.
She passes out.
So much for a happily ever after.
She knew it was too good to be true, anyway.
The funeral service is brief. Jane isn't really there – not the way she should be. Sounds and sights blur, and she doesn't remember a thing that anyone said, because the casket is small. It's too small and –
Jack holds her hand the whole time.
There isn't a wake. Rin knew she wouldn't want one, but the team lingers on the fringe of the graveyard as she crouches next to the oh so small casket. As she runs her fingers along the polished wood.
There's a little marker. Written in sharpie – 'Gabriel Vite'.
Her phone rings. She only bothers to answer it because only one person would call today. Today of all days.
Everyone else is here.
She picks up silently.
The other end echoes her silence.
"I'm sorry you couldn't be here," She says, because she has to. Because she should be.
"So you were telling the truth, then," Amina says. It stings.
"I try to."
"You told me it was a girl," Vine scoffs at her.
"I didn't know," Jane admitted. "I'd always imagined him as one."
A long, painful pause.
"... Danny's dead, then," She huffed, voice thick. "There's nothing left of him."
"You're still here, aren't you?"
The hacker hangs up.
When she realizes she's pregnant, it feels like a cruel joke.
Every family she's had has fallen apart or turned on her. And now she's expected to, what? Give birth in this prison cell? Be a mother?
She heard what He ranted and raved about, when he wasn't carving into her. Both her mothers turned on her. The fact that she only just learned about Desi's betrayal doesn't make it any less true.
It makes sense. How else would she know to be there that day?
She can't be a mother. She can't. She doesn't know how and there's no one to teach her, and for a moment right then she considers killing herself. She's been using a spring from the mattress to saw away at the wooden bars of the door – but she could easily kill herself with it.
She almost does.
But then she remembers that Arthur Ryden had no idea how to be a father. Be a parent. And he was still the best father that she could ever have hoped for.
If he could do it, maybe then so could she.
But there's no way in hell she's giving birth in this shithole.
So she'll just have to escape.
So she does. She escapes, and Desi finds her – and there's a moment when she has a choice. To get in the car with her mother, who killed strangers but fought for her, or to leave with Vine, who left her in a heartbeat but has no blood on her hands.
Her water breaks.
She gets in the car.
When her contractions start she feels pain – more physical pain then she ever thought possible. Tortured for months and she's never felt this much agony.
And then it multiplies, peaks, when Desi digs a pocket knife into her gut and rips out a baby that isn't breathing.
She gives up.
Couldn't even be a mother right, huh?
She leaves. Leaves everything behind – because what's the point. Nothing she has left is worth keeping, not anymore. Nothing she has is worth shit.
Not even her memories.
Nothing at all.
She gives in. Gives up.
Because what good could possibly come from the bloody past she was running from?
She lets who she lay dead and buried beside her baby in that shallow grave.
When they get home – one home, their home, because they were all tired of pretending – Jack retreats to his room.
Jane doesn't know what to do with herself.
But Hotch – Hotch takes charge. He leads her upstairs and helps her out of her mourning black. Slips his college sweater around her shoulders and holds her steady as she steps into her sweats.
As they lay in bed, with him holding her close, she fiddles with the college ring around her neck. They lay there for hours and days and seconds.
She sits up, slips the chain from her neck.
She manuvors to her knees, shins pressed against the mattress, and faces him.
"Tradition can hang itself," She starts out, because she knows it will make him crack a smile – because it lightens something in her chest. "But I want to –"
She loses her words. Busies herself by removing the chain from the ring.
"Brown was where my mother met my father," She tries again. "It's where four people came together, at a time as something like friends, and then scattered. It's because of them that over seventy people died."
She swallows roughly. Looks Rin in the eye.
"Four people came together there, and all four of them made me who I am today – right now," She takes his hand, clutches it because she has never been good at words, not like she needs to be. "All four of them put my baby in the ground. All four of them ruined me in more ways than I can ever count."
She offers him the ring.
"But as selfish as it is … I may have never met you. If they hadn't. Seventy people died, but I'm the mother of that sweet little boy down the hall. My family is dead, but one day I'll be your wife. Because I've got scars on my back, and you have scars on yours – but as selfish as it is I wouldn't trade it for the world."
He doesn't say anything.
"I want you to have this ring – my father's ring – as a promise, from me to you," She says as he reaches out and takes it gently, their fingers brushing. "I swear by this ring that you and I will overcome everything that the world throws at us. Because we are the one good thing that came from all that blood – and I never want to lose that."
He slips it on his finger, mirroring her engagement ring, and there are no words. She's said them all.
And she knows him better than he knows himself.
When he leans forward to kiss her, she feels like she's starting over. Like it's a fresh chapter in their lives, because all the monsters from the past are dead and buried and all their lost loved ones are in a better place than this cruel, cruel world.
And they have each other. After everything, they still have that.
In that moment, she feels invincible.
A/N: Oh. Don't worry. This isn't the end – not yet.
