Aimee Lynch is mostly okay - dehydrated, bruised, a little shaken up - but other two are in bad shape. They have been held in a dank and moldy basement, beaten, starved. Charlie has pneumonia and a broken wrist, just for starters. Perhaps more disturbingly, his thin body is covered with scars - belt marks on his back, small round cigarette burns on his forearms. Sarah's been trying to kick the habit for years - she's tried gum, the patch, even hypnosis - but this sight so unnerves her she throws away all her cigarettes the moment she gets home.
"Pinch me." There is an I.V. taped into the back of the hand that Charlie offers her, once the doctors let her in again.
Sarah smiles a little - she's been expecting this. How disorienting it must be, waking up here. "Morning, Charlie," she says as she gives his hand a gentle nip.
Charlie isn't satisfied. "Hard, Mom."
"I don't want to hurt you -"
"You won't," he tells her, though his dark eyes say otherwise.
She looks at him a long moment. "All right." She pinches his hand again, hard this time. His hand. I never should have let go of his hand. "Is it real?"
"Yeah, it's real." Charlie doesn't look as happy about this as one might think. If it's real, then he's been rescued, but all those other kids are dead. What a trade-off.
Restless, Sarah putters around the little hospital room. She would have already had a drink by now. Charlie is clean now, scrubbed raw after the longest and hottest shower in the history of indoor plumbing. There's a razor by the sink and Sarah stares at it like a betrayal. He shaves now, she thinks. Jake was supposed to teach him that. Jake himself isn't there - he'd stopped by first thing, but he had a work meeting he couldn't miss. Sarah has a few words to say about that.
Charlie is in the middle of what appears to be a stand-off with a bowl of Frosted Flakes. What his mother can't know, what he can't tell her, is that he's calculating exactly how many bites of cereal there are. How many sips of milk. It's in his nature to eat last, to do without if need be, and a single bowl of cereal doesn't go far when it's divided among four growing children (only three, he reminds himself. Stephen's dead, he tells himself, picking at the raw place again.)
Breakfast with Them was a single hard-boiled egg (and there will be an inspection later so make sure you don't get any shells on the floor); lunch was a thin sandwich of bologna and Wonder Bread. Dinner, if your chores and your lessons were done, was a brown slop of mystery origin that resembled nothing so much as dog chow. They ate real, human-being food - Charlie knows this because he was put on kitchen duty once he could be trusted not to bolt. Sometimes he'd manage to pocket a few scraps for his siblings downstairs, but She usually caught him.
"Charlie?" his mother says gently, but his shaking hand can't manage the spoon any more. It clatters noisily to the floor, and he flinches like he's about to be whipped. "Do you want something else? We can get you something else."
"No, it's okay." Charlie takes a cautious sip of orange juice - it's much too sweet. The Roycewoods had well water, which always stank of sulfur, and they were certainly never allowed juice. "It's okay," he repeats, unconvincingly.
"You sure?" Sarah prods. She knows the doctors won't let him out until he's put some meat on his bones. But she also knows it's going to take a lot more than Frosted Flakes to get that scared, haunted look out of her kid's eyes.
The door opens, and Charlie jumps about a foot into the air. He pushes his breakfast tray off to the side. The cereal has won for now.
It's the FBI, come to take the clothes he'd been wearing. Hotch has sent JJ and Reid - JJ because she already has rapport with the mother, Reid because he is the least threatening. JJ opens her mouth to speak, but Charlie beats her to it. "Did you find the pictures?"
"We did," JJ assures him. "It was smart of you to take pictures. It's going to help us out a lot." Charlie squirms under her praise. "Where did you get the camera?"
"I stole it," Charlie says sheepishly. "We were at the Value Village for clothes, and I saw it on the shelf, and I shoplifted it." His cheeks are burning with shame.
"Hey," Sarah comforts her son. "You did good, honey, okay? And I'm sure it helped you, to remember them."
Charlie shakes his head. "It wasn't so I would remember," he explains. "I didn't need pictures for that. But I thought, somebody might find them, after I was gone."
Gone. His mother is shocked at the awfulness of this admission. Charlie had never expected to survive.
When The Mother said to clean out his room, Charlie knew what was coming. He retrieved the polaroids from their hiding place and left them on the side table, knowing sooner or later they'd be found. He was taking a bet that she wouldn't come into his room (she usually didn't, said it smelled like boy) because if she had found those photos, she wouldn't have even waited to stuff him into the oven. She would have shot him on the spot.
"What's this for?" Reid asks, holding out an evidence bag. Charlie had been admitted with a black rubber bracelet on his wrist, but neither of the girls had been wearing one.
"They told me it was a tracking device," Charlie explains. "So I wouldn't run away." Charlie spins the hospital bracelet around his wrist - it hasn't escaped his notice that he's still a prisoner.
"That makes sense." Reid and JJ exchange a look. "But there's no tracker in this thing, it's just cheap plastic. They sell these at the dollar store."
Charlie looks at Reid like this is the stupidest thing he's ever heard. "I know."
"Why didn't you run?" Sarah blurts. JJ and Reid would have really preferred to work up to his question, but it's out before they can stop her.
"If I couldn't get away," Charlie says slowly, "they would have killed me."
"And if you could?"
"Then they would have killed the others."
Jake Hillridge is less than thrilled when he learns his son has agreed to be interviewed by the BAU.
"Don't look at me," Sarah says. "It was his choice."
"Why does it matter?" Jake wants to know. "The people who did it - they're dead."
"But there could be others."
"Which is not Charlie's responsibility," Jake counters.
Sarah makes a frustrated noise. "I'm sure it's a disappointment that your son cares so much about other people."
"Don't even -" Jake cuts himself off before the shouting starts. "It's not that. I just don't want him to relive it."
Sarah looks in at her son, picking at another tray of food, his face blank. "I'm sure that's admirable," she concedes. "But don't you think he's going to be reliving it no matter what?"
The nightmares begin on the second night. He never had nightmares when he lived at Mosley Lane. He rarely dreamed, but when he did, his dreams were of the normal life he had left behind - waking was the nightmare.
He was upstairs scrubbing the toilets when Stephen was taken away. He will never forgive himself for that. If he had been there, maybe he could have stopped it - The Mother had threatened Stephen's life half a dozen times, but Charlie had always talked her out of it. This time he just wasn't there.
Reeking of Lysol, Charlie returned to the communal schoolroom in the cellar to find Mae, alone, bent over her vocabulary. "Where's Stephen?"
"She took him away. She was pretty angry."
"Did she say where?"
"Since when does she do that?"
Heart beating in his throat, Charlie ran back up the stairs. No Stephen. He wondered if maybe The Mother had locked him in the hall closet - an ineffective punishment, as Stephen had long since gotten over the fear of the dark, but you never knew. No Stephen. He checked the backyard - the hearse was gone, and that only meant one thing.
"Where did she take him?" Mae popped up unnervingly by Charlie's side. She always managed to startle him when she does that.
"I don't know," Charlie lied. He'd warned Stephen so many times not to go too far, that The Mother was going to lose her patience with him. That morning Stephen had refused to go with them to the festival and Charlie was sure that The Mother was going to flip. He was fully expecting that he would have to stand in front of his brother, absorbing her invective and her punches as he had so many times before. But The Mother had been strangely calm about it. "Well, suit yourself then," she'd shrugged. Charlie should have known that she'd already made up her mind. He should have seen it coming.
Mae's voice cut through his self-recriminations. "David?" He and Stephen knew the others' real names, but wouldn't tell them their own. Too easy for a newcomer to slip up. "What are you going to do about the new one?"
"Is she downstairs?" Mae nodded. "What's her name going to be?"
"Allison," Mae reported. Mae herself was called Ruthie. None of them had any idea where the names came from.
"Allison," Charlie repeated, turning the name over in his mouth. With the Mother and Father gone, he knew there was no time to waste, but he was having a hard time forcing his legs to carry him down the stairs. He stood there for a minute, dizzy with shock. Stephen's gone. And then, as Sarah Hillridge sat in JJ's office and commented on Henry's picture, her son made his way to the basement and retrieved his camera from its hiding place.
He stood over the sleeping form of the new girl - the girl he himself selected - and waited for her to wake up. The cycle had begun again.