i'm numb
a shell of empty thoughts
but you glow
you stretch and pull me out
does that trouble you?
do i trouble you?
Better Than Ezra, "Live Again"
Back at the station the rest of the team was busy assembling the profile. Gideon had returned from the crime scene to consult with Hotch and Morgan, and they were awaiting Reid and Jackson's report from the school before presenting it to the locals.
"These kids were well known," JJ said. "Everyone we talked to knew their faces, names, everything."
"He's choosing popular couples who are, on the surface at least, very happy," Morgan said, scribbling on the dry erase board as he spoke.
"On the surface," Gideon said. "That might be the key. We'll have a better idea once Reid and Jack talk to the roommate."
"You're thinking he stalked them long enough to see the chinks in their relationships?" Hotch said.
"Yes. He's patient, but not so patient he's willing to wait for a couple who might not accept his ultimatum."
Morgan tapped the dry erase marker against the table as he considered. "He's young and fit enough to carry these kids fairly long distances, but he's old enough to wait them out. Plus he's obviously had time to get everything just right."
"He's someone who blends in," Hotch said. "A maintenance man or, if he works at the park, a ranger or volunteer."
"He could be both," Gideon said. "He works at the school, and he volunteers at the park in his free time."
Morgan jotted that down on the board. "He obviously has a van or closed-bed truck, something he can transport them in."
"This guy is smart," Gideon mused. He rubbed his hands together as he studied the evidence board. "And he's not interested in their physical suffering. He drugs the second victim before the burials, which explains why Jack didn't sense their suffering, or the UNSUB's pleasure in it. It's the psychological anguish he enjoys, giving them that ultimatum and watching them wrestle with it."
"Why doesn't he let the other one go?" JJ said. "If he enjoys their emotional pain so much, surely living with the memory of killing your lover would be the ultimate torture."
"I seriously doubt he wears a mask at any point, and he's too careful to leave witnesses," Hotch said.
"It's possible he did, though," Gideon said. "Has Garcia had any luck with those missing persons reports?" he asked Morgan.
"I haven't heard from her," he said. "She said she'd call as soon as she found something."
"If he originally let one go, the crimes probably went unreported. That would be part of the deal," Hotch said. "Morgan, ask Garcia to look at school records—any students who abruptly dropped out mid-semester. Look for average students, not the sports stars or potential valedictorians."
He nodded and turned away to make the call. As he faced the squad room he caught sight of a familiar lanky figure moving their way. "Here's Reid," he said over his shoulder, "but Jack's not with him."
"Oh no," JJ murmured.
"What?" Hotch said. His dark brows drew together over deep, penetrating brown eyes.
JJ sighed, shook her head. "They were…" She hesitated, tried again. "Reid was kind of being a jerk, and I could tell Jack was getting frustrated."
"You don't think he killed her and stashed the body, do you?" Morgan said with the flash of a smile.
Hotch glared, instantly quelling Morgan's mirth. Suitably chastened, he bent his head and started dialing Garcia. "I had hoped she would come to me if Reid's behavior became more than she could handle," Hotch said.
"I told her to talk to you. She said she was dealing with it," JJ said.
"Let's just ask Reid, shall we?" Gideon suggested with a thin, sphinx-like curve to his mouth.
The young man in question popped his head into the room to find the entire team staring at him. His face scrunched. "What?" he said, sliding hands into his pockets.
"Where's Jack?" Gideon said, his tone gentle.
"Oh," Reid said with a shrug. His expression smoothed. "I just assumed she came back here."
"You assumed?" Hotch said as the lines of disapproval drawn on his well-made face deepened.
"I didn't ask," Reid said. "She got mad and stormed off. I figured she'd come back here."
"What did you say to her?" JJ said.
"Um." He suddenly became engrossed in the images on the evidence board.
"Spencer," Gideon said.
He let out a long-suffering sigh. "Nothing! I just—I criticized her ability to question witnesses."
"Criticism has never bothered her before. She knows she's not a trained profiler, and she likes the opportunity to learn," Hotch said in that flat, stern voice all his agents had learned to fear.
Reid fidgeted. "Um. It was sort of…strident…criticism? In front of the witness…?"
"You did what?" Hotch said as JJ threw up her hands in exasperation and Gideon rubbed his short, graying hair.
"Look," Reid said, "Michelle's roommate was holding out. I knew she wasn't telling the whole truth, but Jack wouldn't read her."
"What did you say, Spencer?" Gideon said, brows raised.
"I told her…" He squirmed as it suddenly hit him how incredibly inappropriate he'd been. How just plain mean. He let out a little breath. "I said if she refused to use her ability to help us, then she wasn't of any use to this team. She might as well just go back to the Agency and let us all get on with our jobs."
Silence fell, hard and echoing.
He lifted his hands in a warding gesture. "Okay, listen, in my defense—" He broke off, because he knew he didn't really have a defense. He had been cruel to her for no reason other than his own defensiveness and idiocy.
Cruel to her in the way he knew would hurt her most, especially coming from him.
"Morgan," Hotch said, not taking his angry, disappointed gaze off his youngest agent, "go find her. Spencer, you and I will talk later. Right now we're going to focus on this case, and you're going to remember that this is a team. No one is more valuable than anyone else. Understood?"
Reid, flooded with shame and humiliation, gave a brief nod. Morgan hung up from his conversation with Garcia—after listening to a few choice words about Reid's behavior—and quickly left to find their wayward colleague.
Elliot Jackson was fuming. Spencer Reid had lost his damn mind. He'd been abducted three months ago, and watching him get tortured at Hankel's hands had nearly broken her. As tragic as it was, that was no excuse for his current bullshit. Not the level it had taken.
He'd been shaky on his first case. They'd all kept constant vigil, ready to step in if he needed them. But, apart from a brief conversation with Morgan, he kept to himself. They thought maybe he'd come back okay. Different, of course, but still pretty much the Spencer Reid they all knew and loved.
Time passed. Days turned into a week, weeks into a month. Time passed, and Jackson watched him fade. Her perceptive gaze followed his every movement. She noticed—as, surely, did the whole team—how he carefully, obsessively avoided getting close enough to touch her, even an accidental brush of arm against arm. He canceled plans. Backed out on their standing hang night so often it stopped standing altogether. Any excuse to avoid five minutes alone with her, unless forced into it because of work.
Jackson stared at him across the conference room table every morning, and the man who stared back out of Spencer Reid's familiar, deep-set hazel eyes was a stranger to her.
She wanted a moment alone with him, just a quiet second where she could remind him of the closeness they'd begun to share as the two youngest members of the team, as the Freaks. She wanted to see the smile brighten his face, hear his nervous laughter—or, better, the real laugh that so few were privileged to hear. She wanted to run her fingertip between his brows and smooth away the worry line that had become a permanent feature there.
She knew what kind of toll that type of experience could take. She'd been through something similar early in her career with the Agency. He didn't have to talk. He didn't have to let her read him. She just wanted to know he was okay, or at least that he would be.
When Hotch forced them together as he'd been wont to do since that first case back in Detroit (though until Hankel it hadn't been forced—they'd worked well together, and always enjoyed it), Reid was sullen, withdrawn. He snapped at her, made snide comments when he disagreed with her, and generally made an ass of himself. Now, today…he knew her rule. She'd never forgotten what he'd said to her on the plane back to DC, that she had plenty to offer the team without her ability. No one had ever said that to her before.
But now…
His words, the look on his face, the sheer contempt he'd radiated, all echoed inside her head like a tape caught on a loop.
She was fed up, practically speechless with hurt and fury. That was how Morgan found her, angry and brooding on it, in a coffee shop down the block from the St. Augustine police station.
"Hey, pint size; we were missing you," he said by way of greeting.
She gave her BlackBerry a meaningful glance. "Not so much. No missed calls."
He frowned. Growing up with two sisters had taught him a thing or two about dealing with pissed off women. It was why Hotch had sent him to find her. He gestured to the small cup on the table by her elbow. "What ya drinkin'? I'm buyin'."
"Upside down doppio con panna," she said.
He blinked. "Upside down whatta con whatta? You can't just drink coffee?"
She softened enough to look up at him, her lips twitching just a little. "It's two shots of espresso on whipped cream, but I think I've reached my limit of caffeine-laced fat today. Just some water would be fine."
He returned shortly with a large coffee and an ice water. Taking the chair next to hers, he sipped his drink and studied her over the lid. "So," he said at last, "what's crawled up Reid's ass, huh?"
She snorted. "Damn profilers. Y'all don't miss a trick."
He shrugged, an easy grin unfurling across his handsome features. "It's why I'm rollin' in honeys."
"You did not just say that."
He wagged his brows at her and took another sip of coffee. As he lowered the cup, his face took on a somber cast. "Seriously, Jack, I know the kid's been bein' a dick to you lately. We've all seen it. What he said today was completely out of line. You know none of us think that. Hell, he doesn't even think that."
"Hmm. So he told you." She looked down, fiddled with the straw in her cup of water. "He's been through a lot."
"Yeah. That doesn't give him license to disrespect you."
Her head snapped up, eyes flashing. "I know that, Derek. But, honestly, can you blame him? He went through hell and we all watched. If it were you, would you want me anywhere near you? Would you want me in your head, seeing all that pain replaying over and over? I sure as shit wouldn't."
He fell back in his chair as though the string of furious words from the petite brunette had been paired with physical blows from someone much larger. He hadn't really thought about why Reid was acting like he was, beyond the obvious residual trauma from his ordeal. Morgan considered. It hadn't occurred to him to worry about her being in his head. Seeing his pain. Of course she saw it. Not because she was a mind reader, but because she was Jack.
The kid clearly didn't have his head on straight.
"You wouldn't look, though," he finally said. It wasn't what he meant to say, or what he was thinking, but it didn't seem like the time to pour out everything that ran through his mind. Hell, in this case her ability might make it easier.
"Of course I wouldn't. He knows that." She took a pull from her straw and set the cup aside. She slumped back in her chair, her eyes far away. "He's hiding something from me. Something big. I'm scared to find out what it might be."
He hesitated. Then, "I know you guys were close before."
"Yes," she said softly, regret shading her voice. "Before…we were."
He didn't ask about the nature of that closeness, though he and Garcia had debated it a lot—were the team's youngest members secret lovers? Garcia, the romantic, said yes, but Morgan leaned toward no. He cleared his throat, focusing his attention back on Jackson. "You don't think he'd talk to you, though, if he had the chance?"
"Before, yes. Now? No. I don't think so."
"Have you discussed any of this with Gideon?"
Her gaze drifted away to the window. People, tourists and students, streamed past in a colorful parade. "I could try." She looked back at him, her normally clear green eyes opaque with secrets. "Gideon and I have a history, as you know. It makes it hard to talk to him sometimes."
Gideon could sometimes be hard to talk to without a history. "You know he's noticed. Reid's like a son to him. He'll listen, and he'll help if he can—in his way."
"Like he helped you in Chicago?" It was an unfair question, and she knew it. Morgan had gone to Gideon with problems in the past, it was just that after revealing such painful secrets about himself, he hadn't been able to face any of his fellow team members. Jackson was new. And, stubborn as she was, she wouldn't leave him the hell alone.
"Whoa," he said, hands raised, "you know who helped me after all that. It's why I'm here now."
The corner of her mouth lifted. "And here I thought it was because Hotch made you come, son of a single mom, brother of two sisters."
He rolled his eyes. "Hotch is scared of women. It's a fact. I'll never know how he landed Haley."
"Dimples," she said, tapping her cheek. "That's the real reason you're rollin' in honeys."
He grinned, flashing said dimples. "If you and the kid can't work things out, I'll get rid of all of 'em and pledge my undying devotion to you."
"Didn't you already promise Garcia the same thing?"
"Probably, but she didn't believe me."
"Smart woman." Her smile gradually faded, and a silence fell between them. "Why did you finally talk to me that night? In Chicago, I mean."
He had hoped she wouldn't go back to that, but he should have known better. "I knew I needed to talk to someone," he said with a brief shrug.
"Of course, but why me? I'm not a therapist. Even Reid has a BA in psychology. You've known all of them for years. So…why me?"
He shifted in his seat and put his coffee on the table. He owed her a real answer. The truth. She deserved that much. Maybe now was the time to get into it after all.
"Because I knew you'd listen. We're all behavioral analysts; we're all trained to observe, to watch. But the way you listen…it's somethin' else. I don't mean the mind thing. It's like because of the mind thing, you work extra hard to hear what someone's saying. To really understand it."
She studied his face for a long time before she spoke again. "So it's not because I'm temporary?"
"Temporary?" he said, blinking.
"On loan. The others will stick around because it's their real job, but I…might not."
"Semi-permanent loan," he said with a brief smile.
She acknowledged that with a wry tilt of her head. "Yeah," she said. "That's what they tell me, anyway."
"I don't understand what you're sayin', Jack. Do you think I came to you because I thought maybe you wouldn't be around the next day?"
"I don't know. It occurred to me."
He sighed and ran a hand over his head. "I came to you because you're you. I don't know what else to say about it."
She mulled that over. "I thought Reid might do the same," she said. "When he didn't—that's when I began to doubt."
"Well—don't. Reid's fucked up right now, and rather than reachin' out, he's lashing out. Unfortunately you just happen to be his target." He paused and gave her a shrewd look. "Probably because you're the one he feels closest to."
Her mouth twisted in a frown. "Look, Derek, about that…"
"It's none of my business."
"I know you and Garcia talk about it."
"Yeah, but we talk about a lot of things."
"We were only ever just friends. It was never…romantic."
He raised a brow at her. "You just won me five bucks."
"I guess you owe me two fifty," she replied, full lips curving.
Their eyes met, and he reached across to tap a finger against her knee. "You know he didn't mean it," he said again. "Special ability or not, you're part of this team. Period."
"Thank you," she said in a small, quiet voice. "I mostly believe that's true, but it's still good to hear sometimes."
"Anytime you need remindin', you know who to talk to." He grinned at her. "Think you're ready to head back now?"
"I guess I can't pout forever, can I? We have an UNSUB to find."
He pushed to his feet. Held out a hand for her. "Come on, pint size. Let's get back to it."
I know I promised y'all a Reid gets kidnapped fic, and it's coming! I promise! I just had to get them there first.