A/N: New chapter for you. I hope you enjoy it and I hope you review! Can't wait to hear your opinions on how the team deals with a new situation.
Well, I'm not dumb but I can't understand
Why she walk like a woman and talk like a man
(Ray Davies, Lola)
Maeve's phone rang. She had been half asleep in her chair, so she just lazily picked it up and looked at the caller ID. When she saw it, her heart jumped with excitement.
"It's Spencer!" she called.
The room changed from slightly sleepy to frantic activity in a blink of an eye. Morgan was telling Garcia to trace the call. Hotch told Maeve to put it on speaker and quickly instructed her how to talk to whoever was on the other side, while Blake was trying to get everybody to shut up. As soon as the room was silent, they gathered around the phone and Maeve pressed the button.
"Spencer?"
"Hello." He sounded a little shaky, but otherwise normal. Maeve had to grip the table because she felt like her legs were going to give up. It felt like an actual physical burden was lifted off her shoulders.
"Where are you?" she asked, trying to keep calm.
"I have a message for you," he said in a monotone voice that suggested that he was reading something. "Nobody will get hurt, if you just return Anna where she belongs. Give Anna back and everything will be the way it's supposed to be."
"Who is Anna?"
There was a long pause. "You act like you know everything," Spencer said without any emotion, which strangely contrasted with the message. "Play God one more time, find Anna and give her back. I will call you again tomorrow."
"Are you okay?" Maeve asked. "We are worried."
"I am not hurt. I have had worse, you know." They could almost hear the smile in his voice and they realized that this is Spencer himself talking. "Fear not, my drowned Viola, and give my regards to fair Portia..."
Suddenly the phone went dead. Maeve reached for it like she could catch the signal, but Rossi gently stopped her. "They hung up. The unsub didn't want Reid to have any more time with you, he needs to show Reid that he controls everything."
Hotch turned to their tech analyst. "Garcia, could you trace it?"
"No, sir, not enough time. I ran the number – it's a prepaid cellphone, trying to locate it now, but I doubt there'll be any hits."
"Good. Cross-reference the list of suspects with the name Anna. She might be a child lost in a custody battle, someone imprisoned, institutionalized, anything that can be interpreted as taken by establishment."
"On it." Garcia started typing rapidly, hitting the keys so hard that Maeve was afraid she was going to break the keyboard.
"Okay," Morgan sat on the table. "What was the last bit about? Is he drugged?"
The team exchanged worried looks because the last sentence seemed like Spencer went completely mad, but Maeve was thinking hard. Spencer rarely said things without a reason. There was a hidden message in his last words. Drowned Viola. That phrase rang a bell, if only she could remember it.
"He was trying to tell me something, if I only could..." she banged her hand on the table in frustration. "C'mon, Spencer, I don't have eidetic memory and you know it..." Suddenly realization dawned on her face. "You do know it, that's why you would never code a message if you weren't sure I can understand it." The team was watching her cautiously, wondering whether she finally snapped. "Drowned Viola... I should my tears let fall upon your cheek and say: "Thrice welcome, drowned Viola." That's it!" she exclaimed.
"Maeve, I know this probably makes perfect sense to you," said Rossi slowly, "but you're the only person in the room who has ever been able to keep up with Reid, so would you be so kind and tell us what's going on?"
"Viola and Portia are both Shakespeare's characters, Viola is from Twelfth Night, my favorite play, Portia is from the Merchant of Venice. There is one thing they have in common – cross-dressing."
"Wait, so he was telling you to dress like a man?" JJ couldn't understand.
"He wasn't talking about me. He was giving us a tip on his kidnapper," said Maeve. "He was taken by a woman!"
Blake, who had caught on a few moments ago, already scanned the board. "It all fits. She keeps stressing out that nobody needs to get hurt, that fits a woman better than a man. Also the word choice – where Anna belongs, give her back, the way it's supposed to be – it could be a mother asking for her child."
Maeve nodded. "It's not so hard to put on a beard and man's clothes."
"But how did she pull it off? I know that Reid looks like Joanna could beat him up, but he is still a field agent. He would put up a fight," Morgan argued.
"Chloroform, sedatives, name it," shrugged Rossi. "This was planned carefully. She would have found a way."
"So we're looking for a woman kidnapping Reid," Morgan gave up. "That's a first."
"I have bad news, my lovelies," Garcia said from her computer. "I looked through every unsub's mother, wife, sister, daughter, and pet fish, looking for Anna, and nothing that fits the description."
"Try extending the search on their lives after the case. Maybe Anna was born after our encounter with this unsub," Rossi suggested.
"I did that. Still no hits. It's like this Anna is a ghost."
"Tell me," Spencer asked when his kidnapper brought him dinner, "why me? Of all the people to trade for Anna, why me?"
He figured out that pressuring her for more specific facts would not work, but this was something he saw as an option. He still hadn't seen the woman's face, she was wearing a ski mask now, but he watched her hands pause as she was thinking about the answer.
"Because you're a liar. I needed a big sinner."
"And you thought it was me? That's not very flattering," Spencer attempted a smile, but failed. The memory of Tobias Hankel was too fresh in his mind. Why are they always religious?
"You are a traitor and a liar. If anything goes wrong, I can kill you without remorse," she said, but her voice betrayed doubt.
"Did I betray you?" Spencer asked, hoping to get some answer.
She hesitated, then nodded.
"Tell me how and I will make it right," he promised.
"No!" she yelled, yanking the uneaten food from his hands. "You can't make it right, nobody can make it right, except God!"
"How about making it better? Would Anna make it better?" Spencer tried a different tactic.
The eyes behind the mask were glistening with tears now. "They took her from me. I just want her back."
"I know. This is hard for me too, being separated from family, but I will see them again, right? When you have Anna back, I will go back to my baby, won't I?" He wasn't acting now. He desperately needed reassurance that he'll see Maeve and Joanna again.
"Yes," she said. "That's the way it's supposed to be."
"I'm still thinking about this," Blake pointed at the board with the notes about the mystery missionary. "What made her dress up and go talk to him?"
"Contact with the victim?" Morgan suggested.
"She has plenty of that," Hotch shook his head. "And that's not what she's after. Taking Reid has no emotional payoff, it's a tool that's supposed to get her what she really wants."
"Maybe she was testing something," said Rossi.
"But what? This doesn't make any sense," Blake kept frowning.
JJ looked at the board, then at Maeve with Joanna. Then she made a gun from her fingers and tried to point it at them, but shook her head. "Our working hypothesis is that she's a mother fighting to get her child back, right?" she said after that. "I can imagine how she feels right now. She is desperate, she misses Anna, her maternal instincts are working overtime. But she is clever, she planned all this and executed her plan without a glitch so far. She must have considered the possibility of the kidnapping going wrong. She must have had a backup plan.
I know it's a stretch, but listen to this. She wants to coax Reid to go with her somewhere she can knock him out and take him away. Like we said, doing it in Quantico is stupid. So her first plan is to approach him where he lives. She is ready to take him at gunpoint if necessary, shoot her way out if she's forced to, because she needs him to trade him for Anna and there's no way she's giving up on that.
She dresses up and starts a conversation with him. She is getting ready to lure him away, but at that moment Maeve with Joanna appears. There is a baby now and in her state, she sees Anna in every baby and she panics. What if I have to shoot and I hit the baby by accident? She's confused and she can't handle it, so she runs. Makes a new plan, where, in case things go wrong, only FBI agents would get hurt.
This," JJ jabbed her finger at the board, "wasn't a test, it was a failed attempt."
"Meaning she wasn't scared that Maeve would see her face, she was scared that Joanna would get hurt by accident," Rossi agreed.
JJ wanted to answer, but she yawned widely.
"You should all go home," said Maeve. "I'll rather stay here, but it's almost midnight and you should all go to your families."
As soon as she said that, Kevin Lynch appeared in the doorway with huge bags. "Six sleeping bags, as ordered," he announced cheerfully.
"Jack is at Haley's sister's, anyway," said Hotch, taking one bag from Kevin.
"And Will and Henry can manage for a day or two," JJ added.
"And the rest of us doesn't have anyone to get home to, so we decided to have one big sleepover," Rossi concluded.
"Dibs on sleeping next to Garcia," Morgan smiled.
The night was restless and Spencer was feeling the effects of caffeine withdrawal, as well as desperation. He tried not thinking about the night before, when he complained about having to get up to Joanna. His mind played a much more cruel trick on him – it took him back to the first night after Maeve was saved.
"So this is my apartment," she twirled awkwardly.
It was everything he imagined it to be. Her book collection included the whole work of Arthur Conan Doyle, Chaucer, Dickens, Hugo... Among her DVDs he spotted the last two seasons of Doctor Who. In any other apartment he would have been halfway through The Tale of Two Cities by now, but not with Maeve. He watched as she looked helplessly at the smashed coffee table and clothes pulled out of the closet and left scattered on the floor, the painful remainders of what happened just a few hours ago.
She decided to shower first and when she was done, it was Spencer's turn. The smell of her shampoo still lingered in the air and it was doing the strangest things to his body. He finished the shower fast, afraid of what would happen if he smelled jasmine any longer.
Even in that short time span Maeve managed to clean the shattered glass and he found her standing over the sink, blood dripping from her finger.
"I cut myself," she said. "Clumsy."
She attempted a smile, but she broke down in tears instead. Spencer didn't know what to do, so he did the logical thing – found a band aid and took care of the cut. After that, when Maeve still hadn't stopped sobbing, he hugged her. She leaned against him and they both slid down on the floor.
They sat on the floor for an hour, maybe more, not saying a word, just fighting for some control over their emotions. Sometimes one or both of them cried, sometimes they laughed, sometimes they just held each other so tight it hurt. It was like trying to regain balance on a swinging rope bridge, but slowly, step by step, they were getting there. Only after their bodies were all sore from the uncomfortable position, Maeve suggested going to sleep.
"I'll take the couch," said Spencer and moved towards the living room, but Maeve gently caught his arm.
"Don't be silly. The bed is quite big enough for both of us," she smiled.
He hesitated. "Maeve, I don't know what you expect, but I don't think... I don't think I am ready."
"I don't expect anything, Spencer. I just want to know that if I'm scared during the night, you're right next to me," she whispered.
"I am," he answered quietly, holding her hand. "I always will be."
Nothing happened that night. They didn't sleep, they stayed cuddled together, not talking, just listening to each others heartbeats. In the morning they guessed how the other one liked their coffee and when Morgan came to pick them up, they walked to his car holding hands.