A/N: Reviews motivate me an absurd amount. Let me know what you think!

JJ had been captive for three weeks and two poker nights when Anita first dragged her, spitting and thrashing, upstairs. She'd never been into the Roycewood's kitchen before, but having seen a few other rooms in the house, she could've accurately predicted what it was going to look like; musty and run-down, but decorated in a way that might've once given off an air of grandeur. The countertops were covered in marble tile that'd been stained brown and dull with age. The walls were dotted with glass cabinets that'd been rendered opaque by layers of dust.

"What do you want?" JJ screamed as Mrs. Roycewood cuffed one of her hands to a towel rack. "Why don't you just leave us alone down there? You already have us! You already ruined our lives! Just leave us alone!"

She recoiled in anticipation of a blow, but none came. Instead, Mrs. Roycewood simply reached into the sink and pulled out a stack of grimy china plates. JJ gagged; based on smell alone, she could tell they'd been sitting there, festering, for days.

"Time for you to earn your keep, girl," the woman spat. She shoved a scrub brush into JJ's free hand. "You don't get to go back down and play with your little friends until these are spotless."

She raised her chin at the woman. "No."

"Yes."

JJ let the brush fall from her hand and clatter onto the floorboards. Defiance blazed in her eyes.

She hadn't even noticed the black leather belt laying on the counter until it was grasped tight in Anita's hand and screaming across her upper arm. White hot pain exploded in JJ's bicep. She couldn't help but cry out.

It was a free-for-all from then on. Hours passed with JJ reluctantly scrubbing the crusted food off the pile of dishes. If she didn't move quickly enough, the belt found her arm again. If so much as a morsel was discovered on one of the cleaned plates, Anita took the opportunity to inflict another round of flogging. By the time JJ had finished six teeming loads of dirty dishes, both of her arms were covered in angry red welts.

The house had been cloaked in the pale violet of early evening when JJ was finally uncuffed. Even through the haze of pain, she couldn't help but marvel at the change in light. It'd been so long since day and night had discerned themselves from each other. In the cellar, there was only the shutting off of the lamps to act as a surrogate for such shifts. She stayed silent as Anita marched her back towards the heavy cellar door and shoved her inside. JJ's vision was spotted with white. Whether it was from exhaustion, shock, or pain, she couldn't tell.

The boys, excluding Jason—he was asleep, of course—couldn't quite believe their eyes when JJ came hobbling back down the cellar stairs. Her arms were raw and blistered, and she had this look in her eyes. Like she was ten million years old. Like eons had passed since the morning.

"I don't want to talk about it," she said as she stumbled down the hallway towards her room. "I just want to go to bed."

But because they were her people, her brothers, and they deserved more than silence, she told them the whole story the next evening, as Aaron applied ointment to her now scabbed-over welts. He'd fallen off his bike when he was little, and gotten some pretty nasty road rash across his palms. JJ's arms, he thought nauseously, now looked as though they were sheathed in strips of that same sort.

"She's going to take me upstairs again one of these days," JJ said, her voice hard and blank.

Derek gently squeezed her shoulder. "Did she say so?"

"No," JJ replied. "But she will. I know she will."

There was a pause, heavy and thick with dread.

"Sometimes," Aaron said, "sometimes I really think I could kill them. I never thought I could hate anybody enough to want them dead, but if I ever got the chance…"

Both of the other children nodded.

"I was thinking about that too," JJ said quietly. "If she'd given me a knife to scrub…" She shuddered. "It scares me, how much I hate them. I scare me."

Another set of rigorous nods, followed by yet another fog of silence.

"I saw the sun go down," JJ finally offered up. "I almost forgot that that still happened."

"What was it like? What were the colors like?" Derek practically begged.

She gave a weak smile, and then began to tell them.

Another, far more malevolent conversation was taking place at that very same time in that very same house. The couple was lounging in the living room, sharing a bottle of red wine as the ancient TV blared some 90s sitcom. Anita was embroidering; Roger, smoking. The space between them on the maroon couch was fraught with an unspoken argument.

"She's useless, Roger," the woman finally said. "Took the little rat four hours to do the dishes. I don't see why we can't just get rid of her."

Roger sighed. A plume of cigarette smoke floated through the low-lit air.

"It's been less than a month. She's still adjusting."

"I'm tired of her," Anita griped. "The whole point of having a girl was that she was going to be of use around the house."

And just like that, as quick as a heartbeat, an idea struck Roger. A genius, genius idea.

"Maybe," he said, "all she needs is a bit of a push. A bargaining chip, per say. A good influence."

Anita glanced towards her husband and saw a yellow-toothed smile tugging up his cheeks. She, too, grinned.

"A helping hand," Anita said. "It's time again, isn't it?"

"Yes," he replied. "It is."

Five days later, a photo was taped to their lunch tray of sandwiches. JJ puzzled at the image as she brought it back down to the schoolroom; she had no earthly idea what it may mean.

"Hey," she said as she strolled in, "look what they left us."

She waved the black-and-white picture. Aaron and Derek both looked up. Immediately, faster than she'd ever seen before, their eyes went wide and horrified.

"Shit," Derek said. "Shit shit shit shit shit."

They prepared her the best that they could. Naturally, JJ was utterly disgusted by the idea of playing a role in the very act that'd made her life a nightmare, but the evidence was indisputable; if she were to refuse, someone would die. Aaron told the story of the baseball bat, his voice low and haunted. He explained how it'd been raised over Jason's head, how there was no inch of hesitation in Roger's eyes. How the oldest boy's knee had never been quite the same.

"I can't," JJ said. Tears of shame and terror had begun to gnaw at her.

"You have to," Derek replied. "Because this?" He gestured towards their surroundings. "This isn't right, and it isn't fair, and it sure as hell isn't fun, but JJ; we're still alive. And someday, those bastards upstairs will mess up, and when they do, we'll be here, alive, ready to fuck them up."

"Look at me," Aaron said. She glanced up from her lap. Her cheeks were streaked with wetness. "The only thing about life that's really… unchangeable, is death. Everything else—well, there's at least a chance that it can be fixed. Okay? We still have a chance. Until one of us isn't breathing any longer, we could all still make it out of here."

JJ was crying now, albeit silently. She looked down at the girl in the photo and apologized over and over again in her mind. The bands of wounded skin on her arms throbbed with a new poignancy.

"She'll hate me," JJ whispered. "I'll be the one who destroyed all the good things she ever knew."

The room went quiet once again.

"Do you hate us, JJ?" Derek asked softly. "Knowing everything that you know now, do you hate us?"

She stared at these two boys, the very same ones who'd grabbed her off the street just a month earlier. She thought of Rosalyn, and how long she'd cursed her sister for leaving her. She thought of her father, who'd run from his family the very instant things got hard, and of her mother, who never quite figured out how to love.

She found that there was nothing in her soul that even remotely hated the boys. She couldn't. She knew what it was to decide to do something irrevocable; she'd seen her family, each in turn, making life-altering decisions of their own. She'd watched as they'd charged down twisted paths of abandonment, and apathy, and last resorts that shouldn't have been last resorts. But Derek and Aaron… they had no semblance of control over their situation. Their hands had been just as forced as hers now was.

"No," she said. "I don't hate you. Not even close." She paused and wiped her eyes on the shoulder of her tee-shirt. "I don't think I ever did. I think I knew, deep down, even when you took me, that you didn't have a choice. I think I felt it."

The boys looked at each other, then back to her. Between the three of them, their stares held equal parts guilt and comradery. Regret and kinship.

"Make sure you tell her how sorry you are," Aaron said quietly. "She needs to know that you're sorry."

David Rossi knew, better than most, that patterns only became patterns at the first distinguishable juncture. It was practically law in his line of work; the piece of the puzzle that first separated itself from the pack was what gave meaning to every otherwise arbitrary piece before it.

In this case, that juncture was Emily Prentiss.

Missing children's cases had been high that year; that wasn't up for debate. But the ones that hadn't ended in either a reunion or a body bag had remained rather run of the mill. Run of the mill by BAU standard, of course, which was a rather austere standard. Repeat runaways, foster kids, kids who should've been foster kids. So yes, the numbers had risen, but the general demographic wasn't anything out of the ordinary. High-risk victims, Rossi was forced to conclude, were high-risk for a reason.

But then came Emily.

It was already big news that Ambassador Prentiss was losing her battle with breast cancer, and so for her daughter to vanish seemingly into thin air was cause for national panic. Search parties ensued. Every news station in the country was running hourly updates. Bulletin boards were plastered with her face.

People were looking for her. No one had looked for Jennifer Jareau, or Derek Morgan, or Aaron Hotchner. There had been the obligatory half-assed police reports filed, sure, but their backgrounds were simply too compelling. Another street kid had bolted. Another orphan had taken to the streets. Another neglected youth had run off in search of something better. The fliers and the milk cartons and the amber alerts could be saved for the white-picket fence, two-parent household, picture-perfect, undamaged-goods missing children's cases.

Because why was there any grounds to believe that self-perpetuating cycles wouldn't, well, perpetuate themselves? That fucked up parents wouldn't produce fucked up children who wouldn't do fucked up things like go missing?

Maybe one day they would realize that this girl who represented the epitome of class and power had ended up in the exact same situation as the four children who represented society's cigarette butts. Maybe one day they'd understand that there were evils that transcended high-risk and low-risk, and rich and poor, and those who deserved to be looked for, and those who had been doomed from birth to someday disappear.

But today was not that day. Today, David Rossi was tasked with finding only one child; the ambassador's daughter. And because it was who he was, he was going to go to the ends of the earth to do so.