Welp ain't this a kick in the head? I originally wrote this fic back in 2009, after a several years' break from fic writing. Now here I am, back again, after another long-ish break, to completely rewrite it. I've recently gotten back into Criminal Minds and wanted to check out my old fic. This one? Not that good, y'all!

This fic takes place in s2, after Elle, before Hankel. My OC is sort of a replacement for Prentiss, but I'll probably end up changing that when I redo the sequel to this fic, because I love Prentiss and I miss her.

I hope everyone enjoys this new, revised edition of "Endgame." Without further ado...

You cried for night; it falls: now cry in darkness.
Samuel Beckett

The night was deep and lonely, deathly dark and icy cold. But one man—a hunter—who strolled the back alleys didn't care: darkness was his home, his safety, his love and companion. The cold kept him sharp, kept him alive. Heat would only soften his senses and dull his keen mind as he slipped through the sleeping streets. She was there, somewhere, he just had to find her. As he rounded a corner, he saw her, a vision of light and beauty and young, coltish grace.

"Hey, sugar," she said in a heavy Southern accent unusual to Detroit, "you lookin' for a date?"

Tossing back a lock of long, teased blond hair, she sauntered up to him, hips swinging, and he grinned coldly. "Yeah, it just so happens that I am." He threw his arm around her and led her away from the glaring streetlights, across the street and back into the comforting darkness of the alley.

"Money first," she said as his hand ran up her thigh.

He took a long, deep breath, enjoying the heady, cloying scents of cheap perfume, sweat and…fear. God how he loved the smell of fear! In a vicious motion, he turned her around and pressed her against the wall. Pulling something from his pocket, he ran it gently, lovingly up the side of her neck.

She whimpered and tried to wriggle away from his heavy grasp, but he only held on tighter. "I don't have any money," he told her, his breath hot and fierce in her ear. He pulled the knife across in her throat in a quick, hard motion and she let out a little gulp. "But I think that's the last thing on your mind right now."

Releasing the girl, he took a step back and watched the blood drain from the cut in her throat and gather in a pool all around her. In the darkness it was black, but in his mind's eye it was bright crimson, like rose petals.

"Goodnight, sweet princess. May flights of angels wing you to your rest."

With a feral smile, he raised the knife again and set about his work with the precision of a careful, skilled butcher.

It was a quiet morning at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, even on the usually hectic floor that housed the Bureau's Behavior Analysis Unit. The team members worked at their desks, tackling old paperwork, or, in one agent's case, a particularly challenging game of Solitaire. Senior Supervisory Special Agent Jason Gideon was in his office updating his kill book, the journal he kept to record the victims of the cases the team worked.

Today was a good day, because today he got to add an entry to his victory list at the front of the book. These names belonged to the victims he'd helped to save. He smiled as he added the new name, and he was still smiling when there was a knock on his office door.

"Come in," he called, assuming it was a member of his team, most likely Spencer looking for a game of chess. He would enjoy some chess right now, as a matter of fact. He looked up, over the rim of his reading glasses, and his smile slowly faded as he absorbed the sight before him.

"What the hell are you doing here?" he said when he could speak again.

She lifted dark brows over clear, glass-green eyes and her mouth quirked, but not enough to flash the dimple that he knew hid in her left cheek. "Hello to you too, Jason," she said in a voice that seemed too low and smoky for someone so young.

He yanked off his reading glasses and tossed them onto the desk. "You've got no business here. What the hell were they thinking, sending—"

She lifted a hand, briefly silencing the angry flow, and stepped into his office. The door closed quietly behind her and he glared first at it, then back at her. "You requested a replacement for Agent Greenaway, yes?"

"Aaron Hotchner is the agent in charge of this team. All personnel changes go through him, not me."

"And yet," he said, her tone cool.

"And yet. Here you are. Like a bad penny."

Her head turned away, as though from a blow, and her eyes closed, briefly. When she opened them again she pinned him with a baleful glare. "It's been three years. Three years, and you never even bothered—you could have reached out. When you worked the mole case. You were still profiling agents even then."

He sat back in his chair. "You know about the mole case?" That case was highly classified, covered up by the CIA. No one wanted to admit when one of their own went rogue, especially a career man like Bruno Hawks.

She dropped a thick file on the center of his desk and sat, crossing one leg over the other. "They called me before they called you. I refused to do their digging for them."

"You disobeyed a direct order?" he said, though something in his tone told her he wasn't surprised. He didn't ask why they'd called her; he felt certain she wouldn't answer him anyway.

She shifted in the chair. "It's not that simple. The division of the Agency I report to doesn't…accept orders…from anyone else. We're our own entity. I thought you knew that."

"I did." He leaned forward again and rested his palm on the file. "I thought your unit was largely defunct."

"It is," she said. Her head tilted as she studied him. "Since we last met, I've been on…not leave, exactly. Retainer, maybe? Still employed by the CIA, still expected to keep all their secrets, and still available should they ever call."

"Hm."

"Always the best poker face, Agent Gideon."

He ignored that. "So they called you in after three years to fill a hole in my team?"

"No," she said. "I requested the position when I heard it was available."

That gave him pause, but only for a moment. "You aren't FBI. We've got dozens of qualified agents—actual profilers—who would be better for this position than you."

"What defines an actual profiler?" she said. "Education? How many of Dr. Reid's Ph.D.s are in psychology?"

A perfunctory wave of his hand dismissed that entirely. "Spencer Reid is an exceptional case."

She laughed, but there was a bitterness to it he didn't like. "As am I."

"You're a spy, Dr. Jackson. Not a profiler."

She leaned toward him and tapped a fingertip against the folder beneath his hand. "It's my file, Jason. The real one. Not that fairytale bullshit they fed you for your profile."

He made a low noise of amusement and relaxed into his chair. Rubbed his hands together, his face a picture of self-satisfied bonhomie. "Is what why you're here? Because you think I profiled you?"

A quick, surprised blink. "Isn't that why—? That was your job. It's why they brought you in."

"You're right, it was my job. But you." He chuckled and shook his head. "You were off limits. Doctor Elliot Jackson, youngest CIA agent I've ever seen, if not the youngest in the Company's history. Member of an elite and hush-hush unit that worked outside regular Agency parameters…and right smack in the middle of a multiple-murder investigation that by all rights should have been Bureau jurisdiction. And they wouldn't let me within a hundred feet of this." He tapped the file. "Or of you. Figuratively speaking."

"Oh," she said, drawing the syllable out. "And you assumed they were protecting me. Covering up—what I'd done. The murders."

"No," he said with another of those dismissive flicks of his fingers. "They wouldn't let me work the case, but from what I saw, those killings were done by a man in his mid-to-late thirties, not a petite woman in her early twenties."

"Okay, then I don't understand. If you know I'm not a killer, why all this hostility? The way you vanished, I thought—"

"They warned me off of you," he said.

She froze. "I'm sorry?"

He let out a sigh. He'd met Elliot Jackson before Boston, before his breakdown and absence from the BAU. He'd been consulting with the CIA, profiling agents and suggesting the best assignments for them. Some of that had come back to bite him in the ass on the mole investigation she'd mentioned, but he didn't regret any of the calls he'd made then.

Except for maybe one.

He knew next to nothing about her unit, and the files of the agents he'd profiled from it had been heavily redacted. The interviews had been limited, too, which frustrated him and caused multiple clashes with his bosses and hers. She had been the last agent on his list, and shortly before her turn came the first body in what would be known as the Silar Creek Slayer case dropped.

He'd offered his help and been refused. The Agency was working it, even though it was on American soil and therefore out of their jurisdiction. No one bothered explaining to Gideon why that was possible, and all his questions had met with classic CIA stonewalling.

So he'd shrugged and gone back to the job he'd been called to do—except suddenly all the files he'd collected were confiscated and he'd been denied access to the agents. Especially, he was instructed, Elliot Jackson. He was not to contact her, speak to her, or otherwise seek her out at any time now or in the future. She was being returned to the field, he was told, and that was the end of that.

His time with the Agency abruptly over, he'd gratefully returned to the BAU and its usual lineup of serial killers and kidnappers.

He explained all of this to her now and watched most of the color drain from her face. "Maybe I should have fought harder against it, but it didn't seem like they were giving me much wiggle room," he said.

"No," she said, her voice quiet. "They wouldn't have."

"So that's it. I thought you were in the field. And even if you weren't, I had pretty explicit instructions to stay away from you."

"But apparently your mentor gene was activated, because you went out and found Dr. Reid," she said. "Another exceptional case for the great Jason Gideon to mold in his image."

His eyes narrowed. "Is that what you thought I was doing with you?"

"We didn't really know each other long enough, did we?"

"So you figured you'd offer me a second chance?"

"The thought occurred to me." In control once more, she rose to her feet and smoothed the lines of her black wool skirt. "Read the file, Jason. Then destroy it. Then call me. My number's on the first page."

"Wait," he said, stopping her at the door.

She cast him a look over her shoulder, brows lifted in a question.

"Why would they call you in on that mole case?" he said with a frown.

A sphinx-like smile and a wave toward his desk. "Read the file."

Part of him didn't want to give her the satisfaction of opening it as soon as she was gone, but he knew that was petty of him. And it didn't matter anyway: she played on his innate curiosity and his need to solve a puzzle. He'd been denied a chance to solve the puzzle that was Elliot Jackson once, and he was eager to change that.

Sliding his reading glasses back into place, he opened the file and dove in.

Whatever he might have been expecting, it sure as hell wasn't what he found.

whoop whoop, all fresh and new. I've got the fic completely finished, so updates should be quick. Drop a line if you'd like. ;)