It's pitch black when the light dies away, and Annabelle fumbles for her flashlight. "Tucker? Agent Morgan? Agent Jareau?" she calls. She can't hear anything over the sound of the rain on the roof of the barn, but that doesn't mean no one is here.

Her flashlight finds sets of clothing around the circle, but no bodies. A chill runs through her. There were people in those places before the light had blinded her. Now there's just empty clothing. She shines the beam around the edge, and it's just… more empty clothing, until it lands on the tray in the center of the circle.

The tray no longer contains a mound of fancy dirt, but skin, someone pale and solid. She moves the beam up to the man's face, and before he flinches away from the light, she sees a face that was once as precious as her own to her. "Hugh?" she asks, feeling like she must be in some kind of nightmare.

"Hughes," the figure corrects. "Lieutenant Colonel Maes Hughes." His voice is achingly familiar, but something about the way he says the name is wrong—and Hugh never lived long enough to be a lieutenant colonel.

"It's Annabelle," she calls, slowly moving forward. She remembers what Agent Elric says about the circle, and it makes her hesitant to step into it, especially after seeing that… eye ? It couldn't have been.

There's a groan and a scraping sound in the dark, and Annabelle shifts the light to find the source.

She almost shoots it on instinct before she recognizes Tucker's face behind the bloody holes where his eyes were. His ears are also missing, his mouth bleeding. He coughs up blood, swinging his head back and forth desperately. He raises his left arm, which is only a bleeding stump, and she almost drops her gun and flashlight in her shock.

" Tucker! " Mindless of the circle, she runs straight across it, running to Tucker. He's bleeding so much. It's not just the stump of his arm that's bleeding, but she sees that his leg is bleeding too. His whole right leg from the middle of the thigh is just gone , and it's gushing blood. She yanks off her jacket, trying to use it to stem the bleeding, but Tucker flails and tries to fight her off. He makes pathetic sounds, and she can see that his tongue is missing from his mouth. She has to fight down her gorge, but she has to help him, or he's going to bleed out and they're never going to get any answers.

She startles as Hugh settles next to her, and she swings the flashlight to stare at him. No, he's not quite her Hugh, He's too old, for one, at least thirty? Her Hugh was never that old. There's something older and harder in his eyes than was ever in her Hugh's eyes.

"I'll hold him down. I don't think he can hear or see you, so he's panicking," not-Hugh says, apparently not unnerved by the blood or the violence. "If he keeps thrashing, he's going to bleed out."

She's just a small-town deputy, so she's really not trained for something like this , but the not-Hugh's calm helps center her, just the way her Hugh always did. He manages to pin down Tucker's shoulders, and she has to sit on his stomach to keep from getting kicked. She manages to yank off her belt and make a tourniquet on his thigh, which is obviously the most dangerous wound. She hasn't even had a chance to call for backup, she realizes distantly. She's not even sure the short-range radios will work in this storm. They don't always, and her hands are full with trying to save Tucker's life.

When Tucker finally goes limp under them, it's not because he's stopped fighting, but because he's lost consciousness. It makes it easier to try to stem the bleeding, but there is so much blood . She forces herself not to think about it. She can't think about it. She has to think about saving Tucker.

As soon as they've done all they can, Annabelle reaches for her radio. She tries to call out but gets only static.

"How close is the nearest hospital?" not-Hugh asks.

"Twenty-five minutes in normal weather," she says, ignoring the fact that her Hugh would know that. "We've got a clinic that's only fifteen, but in this downpour…"

"We're better off taking him to it than waiting for them to come to him," not-Hugh points out.

"Yeah," she says, nodding, feeling floaty and disconnected. "I'll… I'll get the car."

Not-Hugh looks at her in alarm. "I don't think you should be driving," he says.

"Do you know how to get there?" she asks, and she means to snap, but it just comes out empty.

"No, but you can give directions. We don't have much time if we're hoping to save him, but driving us into a tree doesn't help any of us."

"Right," she says. "I'll… I'll drive the car over here. It's too far to carry him in this downpour."

He nods at her, though keen eyes have been taking in everything that can be seen in the limited light of the flashlight. He's wary, but not panicked or confused. Annabelle wants to panic, and she's distantly sure that as soon as her mind clears, she'll be very confused, but she gets up on shaky feet and tries to rush back to the SUV.

Her rushing isn't great, between the slippery mess the rain is turning the yard into, her own shock, and just the difficulty of seeing in the downpour. When she gets to the car, she's stunned to see a whole window kicked out, then remembers that they'd locked Agent Elric in the car, but it hadn't slowed him down much. He must have had something to break the glass, but it means that water has been pouring into the back seat of the car, which is far from ideal considering they want to use it to take Tucker to the hospital. Still, it's probably better than waiting in the barn.

Circling the car, she unlocks and opens the driver's side door, and it takes her several long moments to understand what she's seeing when she does.

The mesh separating the front and back seats is warped, like a bowling ball had struck it. Sharp edges where it had come free are sticking out at dangerous angles into the driver's seat area, but the hole between the mesh and where it broke free isn't big enough to have let anyone out without costing them a lot of skin, even if they were small.

It's also going to make it impossible to drive the car.

She reaches in and tries to force the mesh back away from the driver's side, but it doesn't give, and her wet hands actually slip on it and cut her. There's no way she can bend it back into place. Unwilling to give up, she goes back around and gets in the passenger seat. Her shoulder radio may not be strong enough, but maybe the one in the car is. She reaches over the console to start the car, and it blessedly still comes to life. When she enters the call for help, it actually goes through. Dispatch, naturally, wants her to stay in the car and on the line, but she knows she needs to get back to Tucker and not-Hugh.

Annabelle gives as much information as she can while holding back as much as she dares, because if she starts saying things about a circle emitting blue lightning that turned red and then vanished fifteen people , then somehow brought back this weird facsimile of her dead boyfriend, she's going to sound hysterical.

She feels like she should be hysterical. A tiny place in her mind says you're in shock , and that's okay, right now, she thinks. She can always be hysterical later.

The slog back to the barn is still slow-going, and the muddy field tries to suck her feet down. She finally makes it back inside, and calls out, "Hugh?" because that's the name she knows, and she somehow can't not.

"Hughes," he corrects. Her flashlight finds him, and he's covered in blood, like she's sure she is, other than what the rain has washed off. He's pulled on some of the random clothing on the floor, so he's not naked anymore, but it doesn't really fit, and is the clothing of an old man anyway. Her training says he shouldn't have touched anything, but she's oddly relieved that he's not naked anymore. Besides, Tucker's blood is probably going to contaminate the whole damn crime scene. What difference does it make?

"How is he?" she asks, moving toward them. This time, more aware, she avoids walking through the circle. It's probably safe, given she ran through it before, but it makes her skin crawl, and she doesn't want to touch it if she can avoid it.

Not-Hugh, Hughes shakes his head. "Not good. I didn't hear a car. Are you pulling up?"

"I called for backup. Agent Elric must have been pretty desperate to get out of the car. The wire mesh is all bent out of shape. The car can't safely be driven."

He snaps to attention at the name. "Agent Elric?" he asks. "Edward Elric?"

"I believe so," she says. "Why?"

His mouth works for a minute before he looks around and says, "Is there an Alphonse?"

"No," she says, very certain of that. "It was Agents Elric, Morgan, Jareau… I'm forgetting the others. I'm sorry."

"It's fine," he says. "Is there an Agent Mustang?"

She shakes her head. "No," she says. She'd have remembered a name like Mustang. She wonders at the questions, though her head is still fuzzy.

"Do you think there's a breaker in here?" he asks, changing the topic.

Annabelle feels stupid . She knows there's a breaker in here. She even knows where it is since she was around the summer Hugh installed it.

Wearily, she gets back to her feet and goes to find it.

By the time she finds the breaker and gets the lights back on, she rather wishes she hadn't. The horror of the scene is somehow much worse when seen in plain light. There is so much blood . She had known that, but it's worse in the yellow light of the barn. It's also worse seeing all the damage Tucker has taken as a whole instead of just wherever her flashlight could linger on. He barely looks human.

She realizes his chest isn't moving. Panicked, she runs back to where he's lying on the ground, and she feels for his pulse. There's nothing. She puts her ear to his chest and listens—the only sound is sounds are the rain on the roof and thunder in the distance. She starts chest compressions because her training says she should, but it's too late.

By the time the ambulance arrives, Tucker is gone.

There is no sign of the twelve abducted senior citizens or three FBI agents.

.o0o.o0o.o0o.

It's still pouring outside, and the inside of the barn is a mess.

Prentiss sighs heavily as she steps up next to where Dave is staring at the mess that's all that's left of Tucker Maes. Despite the horrible wounds, the blood-soaked dirt floor tells the unsub's official cause of death.

"Anyone find anything to indicate what caused our unsub's wounds?" Dave asks, but he's pretty sure he knows the answer.

"Nothing," Prentiss confirms, not bothering to hide her frustration with him. "There are tools in the barn that could have been used to sever limbs, but nothing as cleanly as these appear to have been. And there's no sign of bleeding anywhere else. I think all the blood trails we can trace back to Hugh Maes, or Maes Hughes, or whoever he is."

"And no sign of—?"

" None ," she says, crossing her arms, then fidgets and wipes some of the rain dripping from her hair off her neck. "And the scene is completely compromised between Crawford and Maes."

"Has Reid gotten any more clarity out of Deputy Crawford on what happened?"

He's pretty sure he can hear her teeth grinding when she says, "No."

Dave moves his eyes from the ruin of what's left of Tucker to the circle on the floor. There's a tray in the center of it, just as there was at the first location, but this one is empty, and their mysterious Mr. Maes is wearing clothing that must have belonged to one of the victims, judging by the missing set of clothing from the floor.

"Where could they have gone ?" Prentiss asks, and there's something almost helpless in her voice that Dave hasn't heard in a very long time.

"This circle," he says, tapping his foot around the edge but not touching it. "Is it the same as the one we saw at the last location?"

Prentiss sighs, refocusing. "It looks like it to me, but we'd need Reid to confirm."

"Ed was afraid of the circle at the last location. He admitted that he thought it had real power. He told me that if the unsub weren't trying to fuel it with human lives, that he would say to let him do it. He thought it would kill the unsub."

He's mostly thinking aloud, but he can feel Prentiss's incredulous stare. "You can't be serious."

"Emily," Dave turns to her, using her name to get her attention, "I have never seen Ed like he was at the last location. I think we have to consider that we're dealing with something we don't understand here. All of our victims are missing, nothing left but their clothing. And no sign at all of Ed, JJ, or Morgan. Our unsub has been maimed, but there's no sign of the weapons that dealt the wounds."

"There has to be a logical explanation for it," she insists.

Dave's eyes move back to the remains of Tucker Maes. "Ed knew what this was. Whatever he knew, he was terrified of it, and absolutely certain that he couldn't tell us," he says rationally. "If we can't find Ed, i can only think of one other person who might know what this is."

It only takes a heartbeat before Prentiss's expression becomes disbelieving. "You want to bring Mustang in?" she more states than asks.

"Do you have any better ideas?" he asks.

Her mouth opens, closes, opens again, closes again, then she sighs and shakes her head. "You have his number?"

"I do."

"Call him. We've got fifteen missing people, three of them our own. I want answers. If he's the only lead we have, then he's the lead we've got," she says, but it's clear she's not happy about it.

Dave isn't happy about it either, but he doesn't have any better ideas. He pulls out his phone, fortunately, he has a bar, so he doesn't waste time. He has calls to make.

.o0o.o0o.o0o.

AN: I'd like to do RoyEd week in December with a Wreckage 'Verse short for the crossover prompt. Feel free to throw prompts my way or drop them in my Tumblr Asks box if you'd like to remain anonymous. :)