B for Beck

by Assbitch67

Beck has had her life planned for her whether she liked it or not... But for some reason it all just keeps going to shit. Maybe it has something to do with her ability to kill a full grown man with a paperclip and snipe a grape inside a shot glass from nearly 6 miles away. But, hey, the cute Doctor at the BAU that doesn't know how to carry his Revolver seems to tolerate her.

12. Bottom of You

A/N: I'd like to first and foremost begin this chapter by saying that although I passed the LSAT's, I never went to law school and I am not a lawyer. Please don't skin me alive for getting something wrong in our judiciary system. I've only been to jail like once.

I'm trying to fall down another Criminal Minds rabbit hole, so I'm clinging to any and every shred of validation you guys have given me lol. Everyone say "thank you Wolverine123" for writing the most recent review that made me remember "oh yeah, i was still writing this one."

---

Bottom of You

•••

"So I will wait for the next time you want me. Like a dog with a bird at your door." - Moon Song, Phoebe Bridgers.

—

It had been a difficult past two months since what happened in West Bune.

With the high-stakes case in Miami followed by the team splitting up for a stalker case, everyone was running high on adrenaline and coming back to the office dripping in exhaustion. They didn't have time to breathe at certain points, but that may have been for the best.

No one addressed the elephant in the room after what had happened between Beck and Reid. And from the way the pair were both acting around each other since then, it was a good idea no one had.

Emily Prentiss, however, needed answers. And if Clyde Easter wasn't going to provide them to her anymore, she needed to get them herself.

It had been months since she last heard from any of her Interpol contacts. And it was all the same answers: nothing but dead ends on the Sword front. Even after she'd given them Beck's name, her unit, her agency- she had still somehow managed to cover her tracks. It was like Emily was searching through a maze for a person that just didn't exist, which of course couldn't be true because she was sitting across the walkway from her.

But then Reid had had that outburst after the standoff with Owen Savage.

"You're a killer!"

Most people on the team overlooked this miniscule outburst as nothing more than an overdramatic statement Reid had blurted out in the heat of the moment. They were both angry, both hopped up on adrenaline. He didn't know what he was saying and he probably didn't mean it.

But Emily knew better than that.

It was 7pm on a Monday afternoon. Usually, Beck was one of the last people in the office to go home, but after what had happened in West Bune, one of the many small changes she'd made to her routine in order to stay clear from Reid- or really anyone else in the office- was that she now left as soon as all of her work was done and filed and she no longer had an obligation to be there anymore. Typically, Prentiss would've confronted Reid in the morning since Beck still hadn't changed her habit of arriving fifteen to twenty minutes late every day, but that still meant she'd have to get him alone and away from all the rest of their team members that were on time.

So, late night when most of the unit had gone home and it was just Reid, Prentiss, and a handful of other office-goers too distracted by their own work to listen in on whatever hushed conversation was going on yards away- Emily finally made her move.

Reid didn't drive home, he didn't have a car and he'd expressed multiple times his preference for using public transportation as a means to getting around. This gave Prentiss the perfect cover and opportunity to isolate him.

It felt like being back at Interpol. Reid was her target, intel on Beck was her mission, and her plan involved casual conversation.

She fished out her car keys from her back pocket as she started towards the elevator outside the BAU office. She'd planned this meticulously so it didn't feel as though she had followed him out that made him feel cornered, or that this was at all planned- even though it was. She knew that at 10:30pm sharp that the BAU office lights shut off. She also knew Reid hated the dark and that the minute she left, he wouldn't feel comfortable working in there by himself.

As if on cue, Reid came rushing out of the doors, his hands fumbling with his satchel strap he'd thrown on haphazardly once he'd seen Prentiss walking out. "Hey, wait up!"

"Oh," Prentiss chuckled a little, reaching out to stop the elevator doors from closing so Reid could slide in. "Not burning the midnight oil tonight?" she prompted the young doctor.

Reid shrugged. "You know, I'm more of a morning person," he answered jokingly instead of outwardly admitting he was afraid of the dark.

Emily felt bad taking advantage of Reid's fear like this. But it wasn't as if she was exploiting him or anything, she just needed to have a long overdue conversation with the kid.

"That makes one of us," Prentiss replied, playing along.

The elevator beeped with every floor it hit, Reid nodded to the beat unintentionally. A comfortable silence fell upon the pair as Emily waited for Reid to inevitably ask for a ride home because it was too late and too dark for him to take the train and walk to his apartment.

"Hey, do you think I could get a ride home?"

Prentiss tried not to smile to wide when she turned to face him.

"I mean, if it isn't too out of the way or-"

"Reid," she swiftly cut him off before he talked himself out of going with her. "Your apartment is only a couple miles from mine, it's no problem. You're always welcome to carpool with me."

His shoulders sagged in relief. Good, Emily thought to herself. The more comfortable he was with her, the more inclined he'd feel to talk with her in the car. And the drive from Quantico back to Downtown DC gave them plenty of time to talk.

As they made their way out of the elevator and across the lobby to the front entrance which led to the parking lot, Reid had already begun to explain his reasoning for asking for a ride. "It's just... it's a bit late to take the train and I'd usually call Morgan, but..."

"He's got a date," Prentiss finished for him with a wide smile. "With Miami PD."

Reid chuckled, shaking his head in fond recognition as they made their way over to Prentiss's car. Reid would typically ask Morgan for a ride and Morgan would usually be at the office late with them, but like Reid had mentioned, Derek Morgan had a hot date with Miami Detective Tina Lopez tonight.

"I can't believe he convinced that poor girl to use her vacation days to fly out here for a date," Prentiss laughed, unlocking the doors and climbing into the front seat, Reid climbing into the passenger's.

"Maybe he took a page out of JJ's book," Reid joked. It was true. Ever since the team had started to notice JJ leaving early every Friday afternoon and getting in a little late Monday morning, the case in Miami did nothing but confirm their suspicions about where and who she was spending her weekends with.

"William LaMontagne," Prentiss purred as her car roared to life with a twist of the key in the ignition. "Well, it looks like it's just us working the late shift now."

Prentiss had just pulled out of the parking lot when she'd made the comment, hoping to illicit a reaction from the Doctor. Sure enough, she watched as his body language completely shifted and his joking demeanor all but vanished because he was no longer thinking about the fact that Morgan and JJ were no longer joining them at night because of their significant others, he was thinking about the fact that Beck was no longer staying at night because she no longer wanted to be around him.

"You okay?" Prentiss prompted when it became a little obvious that she had noticed his change in behavior. "You kinda shut down on me there for a second." She tried to play it off as a joke so it didn't seem like she was prying.

"Yeah- no, I'm fine," he replied a little too quickly.

Clearly, he wasn't going to naturally spark up conversation about Beck. So, Emily would unfortunately have to pry just a little it would seem. "Come on, Reid," Prentiss sighed. "You've been off since that case in Texas. And don't think anyone else hasn't noticed the way you are around Ryder now."

He winced, his eyes turning to look out the window as if he could see something in all the darkness passing them by as they hit the freeway. "I don't, uh, I don't really want to talk about her... If that's okay."

Okay, so he definitely wasn't going to give anything up.

"You can tell me anything, you know that, right?" Prentiss prompted, playing at using his trust in her. She knew it was wrong to manipulate Reid, especially when he wasn't behaving like himself, but he was the only one who could give her answers.

Reid nodded. "I know, but... it's not that I don't trust you, it's just..."

He trailed off.

Prentiss sat up a little. "It's just what?"

"It's not my place to tell," he eventually answered.

Prentiss wanted to slam on the brakes out of frustration but she knew that'd get her nowhere. So, she had to resort to Plan C- just straight up asking him about what she wanted to know.

"You called her a killer," she stated.

Reid shook his head. "I didn't mean it-"

"Reid, I know you," Prentiss didn't let up. "I know you don't just throw words around like that. You called her a killer..." He ducked his head, unable to meet her eyes. "...why?"

Reid inhaled and exhaled loudly, as if he was preparing to either take whatever knowledge he had to the grave or spill it all out like a volcano. Prentiss held her breath.

"Do you remember the first case we worked with Beck?"

Prentiss, still holding her breath, nodded. She wasn't sure where this was going, but she hoped that if he didn't outwardly give her answers, he'd at least give her insight. He was a lot more observational than she was, admittedly.

"Well, before you'd joined the team, we'd actually worked a case where she was one of our suspects," Reid explained. "It ended up being her power-hungry supervisor that she'd had a close relationship with, but there was something off about her connection with Gideon I couldn't quite place at first."

Prentiss's forehead creased in confusion. Gideon? What did he have to do with Beck? She'd only ever seen them interact once before after she'd sniped and killed Frank Breitkopf at the train station. There was nothing out of the ordinary she'd noticed, but perhaps she hadn't been paying as much attention as Reid had.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"It was her name," Reid explained. "In her file, when we were first tasked with profiling our multiple suspects in that case, it was listed that she'd been adopted at a fairly young age by an Army General, but whatever program she was in afterwards kept her away from home. She'd trained with the CIA so the supervisor that had ended up betraying the unit acted like a sort of father figure for Beck, only he didn't call her by the name she'd introduced herself with. He'd called her Becca. But Gideon... Gideon addressed her as if he'd known her only he was unfamiliar with what name to call her, like it was foreign to him."

"I'm confused, what does this have to do with her being a killer?" Prentiss dropped the niceties when she realized Reid wasn't going to make this easy on her.

"They had a prior relationship. She trusted him. Gideon knew Beck before she was with the CTU," Reid explained. "So after what happened with Frank... After Gideon left, I went looking for him and found his cabin. He'd left a letter for me and he'd left his journal."

Prentiss did a double take. "Wait, you mean the journal of all the people he's saved?"

Reid nodded. "It felt wrong to go through his journal, but after he had left, I wanted to look for any clues of where he might've gone so I started just skimming and I found a copy of a letter he had sent to Hotch on one of the last pages... It was a recommendation letter for Beck to join the BAU."

"Gideon recommended Beck to Hotch?"

"Yes, but it was weird..." Reid admit. "It read more like a warning. I guess, before the CIA sealed and locked Beck's personnel files, Gideon had gotten ahold of them somehow and explained in his letter that Beck was... experienced."

"Well, she was in the CIA for a pretty big chunk of time. I'd assume she'd have to be pretty well-rounded after that," Prentiss replied.

"But she was going on field missions fresh out of whatever unnamed training program Hawks- her supervisor- had her in. She was eighteen in the CIA carrying out full-fledged international espionage missions. That doesn't make you wonder where she came from before?" Reid prompted.

Prentiss faltered for a second. "Wait, you're saying Beck has been a full-fledged field agent since she was eighteen?"

"Yes..." Reid answered uneasily.

Well, this was certainly a new discovery. "They don't let eighteen year olds join the field fresh from CIA training, or any training really... Do you think her supervisor was able to override this?"

"I think the CIA made a direct exception for her," Reid replied hesitantly.

"But... why? What made her so special? The training program?"

"I think it was something else," Reid answered. "When I skimmed through Gideon's journal, I didn't just find that letter..." Prentiss turned to face Reid, his eyes still wouldn't meet hers. "I went back to the beginning of the journal and I found his first entry..."

Prentiss frowned, "Gideon's first entry was about Beck?"

"It was about someone named 'Sword,'" Reid answered.

Prentiss felt herself stiffen. The Sword.

"There was no first and last name, there wasn't even a picture like the rest of the entries have. It had a date and he made a note at the bottom. '1990, Vietnam. I failed you.'"

Prentiss sat back for a second, she had to remind herself she was driving after nearly passing the exit. "You think that entry was about Beck?"

"Gideon knew Beck prior to seeing her at the CTU, he also mentioned having served in the military in Vietnam with Hawks- Beck's supervisor," Reid explained, putting the pieces together. "I didn't put the pieces together until recently that Beck is hiding more than just those sealed files."

Prentiss slackened in her seat once Reid was finished putting all the mental pieces of the puzzle he'd found together. This was a lot more than any Interpol source had given her thus far, but it didn't exactly give her answers. If anything, it gave her more questions.

What had Gideon warned Hotch about Beck? Why would he recommend her to the BAU and leave? If Gideon really had first met Beck in Vietnam in the 90's, she would've been young- just before she was adopted and put into whatever anonymous training program she was in. But if she was the Sword- how had Gideon failed her?

Then Prentiss had to wonder... she was in close proximity to a man the BAU arrested as a traitor to his unit with the CIA, would Beck hold similar ideologies?

"Prentiss?" Reid calling her name brought her back to the present. "We're coming up on my apartment."

"Oh, right..." she muttered dejectedly.

As they pulled in front of the brick building Reid called home, Prentiss felt the tension in the car spike. Clearly, they'd both learned new things they probably shouldn't have mentioned to one another and there was no easy way to process what they'd discovered together. But Prentiss still had another question before she let Reid out.

"You called her a killer," Prentiss muttered, both hands on the steering wheel despite the car being parked. "You didn't answer my question about why."

She turned to Reid who pursed his lips. "The letter to Hotch didn't go into much detail about what Gideon meant about Beck being experienced," he explained. "But there was something he wrote that made me realize that maybe she wasn't who she was pretending to be..."

"What did it say?" Prentiss pressed.

"It's late, I should go." Reid pulled at the door handle and started to climb out.

Prentiss sat straight, "Reid!" She called after him. He paused, standing outside the car door while still holding it open. "What did it say?"

Reid looked torn, like he was about to share a secret he shouldn't be. But he had already told her so much already. What was this one piece of information really going to add to the pile?

"'Rebecca Ryder is by no means someone who is afraid to do what she is told to do. And while this is commendable in our line of work, I feel that her previous commanding officer may have taken advantage of this strength of hers too much for her to be comfortable taking it up with ease again,'" Reid began to recite from memory, his eyes glued to the leather seat he had sat on moments before. "'CTU methods are not BAU methods. If you decide to take Rebecca Ryder on, you should know that despite the lost lives of over 152 people at her hands, she has saved nearly ten times that amount as a result.'"

Prentiss slid her hands down from the wheel and let them fall to her lap as she processed what Reid had read back to her. 152 people. Prentiss could probably count on a piece of paper how many people she'd had to take the lives of while on the job... each death was seared into her memory. Killing didn't come naturally to humans because it wasn't in their nature. So it was hard to fathom taking over 152 lives, whether she was ordered to or not.

"Thanks for the ride," she heard Reid mutter before shutting the door. She didn't stick around to see if he'd made it inside his apartment building because the second she had gotten her thoughts back together, Prentiss put her car into drive and sped back to her apartment.

She had gotten the answers she'd wanted, but at what cost?

—

"Nothing further to report? Sorry to disappoint?!" Erin Strauss read aloud a series of recent reports Beck had been sending in the past few months. A variation of the same message that Beck couldn't find anything incriminating on Aaron Hotchner or anyone else in the BAU.

Clearly, Strauss wasn't exactly ecstatic about this.

"You've been with this Unit for almost eight months and yet you still haven't gathered enough intel to make up a measly report?" Strauss demanded to know as she plopped back down into her rolling chair behind her desk.

Beck shrugged. "Your guy Hotchner is a little hard to pin when it comes to misdemeanors on the job," she explained. "You want me to nitpick his every move, the only thing you'd have in your reports is that he's a hardass."

Strauss narrowed her eyes to glare back at the young woman seated across from her. "I don't believe you."

"I don't know what else to tell you then," Beck threw her hands up, pushing herself up from her seat to stand above Strauss's desk. "Believe me. Don't believe me. You knew from the start that getting Aaron Hotchner out of the BAU wasn't going to be an overnight thing."

"You're prolonging it," Strauss shot back. "I don't know how and I don't know why, but you were supposed to be the key to getting that Unit under control and you aren't giving me anything. Don't you want to be Unit Chief or have you given up on that as well?"

"I haven't given up on anything," Beck retorted. "I have your Unit under control."

Strauss scoffed. When Beck raised an eyebrow at that reaction of disbelief, Strauss reached into a drawer in her desk and dropped a file onto the counter between them. "David Rossi's report on the case in West Bune, Texas that was so... disappointing to you. It's very detailed. Perhaps you should give it a read to help refresh your memory about a standoff where you practically offered to shoot a suspect through one of your own teammates."

Beck closed her eyes. Dammit Rossi.

Strauss leaned forward, her hands resting on the desk as she pushed herself up to eye level with Beck. "You are lying to me. Why? I have no clue. But it stops now."

Beck clenched her jaw, but she didn't answer. Strauss took that as enough of an answer.

"You're dismissed," she waved her away.

With that, Beck turned on her heel and stormed out. As she passed the front desk, Strauss's little assistant called after her, "Have a nice day."

"Fuck off," she shot back.

Beck sauntered out of the Section Chief's office and stood stagnant for a moment in the middle of the empty Quantico hallway for a moment, collecting her thoughts and composing herself once more. She took a deep breath in, her head cocking back as she stared up at the LED lights above her. Then she released it with a heavy sigh, relaxing her body and realigning her crazed emotions.

It was like a million things were going wrong at once.

Beck was used to being isolated when she was with the CTU, but she knew she'd always have Hawks in her corner. But after Hawks' betrayal and the scars it left behind, Beck wasn't sure who she could trust within the BAU. And that somehow made it that much worse.

After what happened in West Bune, Beck had made it no secret that she was trying her best to avoid the subject all together.

"You're a killer!"

Beck pursed her lips and shut her eyes.

Shake it off. Focus on the task at hand.

That had been her mantra for the past couple of weeks since they'd gotten back. Thankfully, the team had been kept on their toes since then. The case in Miami, then the stalker case in Baltimore. This was the first real period of calm they'd gotten since Texas and Beck, while she was more exhausted than ever, wished nothing more than to return to the field as quickly as possible.

On one hand, she would have to be in close quarters with Reid, but on the other, if she stayed at Quantico any longer, she was going to drive herself crazy with how suffocating Strauss was being as of lately. Her lack of detailed reports was only fanning the flames, too. Beck still wasn't even sure how to explain to herself let alone Strauss why she wasn't sending in her defamatory reports.

So, Beck did what she did best: deflect her attention.

This time, all her efforts were being placed into figuring out who had dropped the tip on her from Interpol now that she had Gina Sanchez and Kruger Spence in her back pocket.

Like every morning, Beck stuck with her routine. She was already at the office so she took a quick swing by the vending machine outside and down the hall from the Bullpen. She pushed in her couple bucks and waited for the machine to spit out her Snapple and peach rings. She thought it was a day to switch it up for once in an attempt to keep herself at least somewhat unpredictable.

As she made her way into the office, she was greeted by the same fleeting glances, semi-smiles, and blissful ignorance from passing agents. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Kevin Lynch passing by with a bright grin on his face as he waved eagerly to her. Ever since what had taken place in the BAU office a couple months ago with Jason Clark Battle, he'd always beamed at her when passing the halls. Apparently the glare Beck returned his smile with wasn't as effective as she thought it was. Or maybe Kevin Lynch's spirit was just harder to crack than most. Today, his greeting was a comforting sight.

Beck didn't meet anyone's eyes as she trudged over to her desk, snacks in hand. They must've already noticed her helmet had been set down earlier in the morning- an odd sight considering she'd never been one to show up on time before let alone an hour early into work. And when she worked with psychological profilers, it was a little hard to slip something like that beneath the radar.

The second she fell into her chair behind her desk, Morgan pounced.

"Good morning, sunshine," he smirked at her from across the sectional between their desks. "You're here bright and early."

Beck shrugged. "Working on a theory..." She could see Dr. Reid pick his head up, slightly leaning in the conversation's direction from out of the corner of her eye. Of course that caught his attention. "If I actually show up on time, then maybe my karma will dissipate and we'll actually get normal cases assigned to us."

"If it doesn't work?" Morgan perked an eyebrow up.

Beck tore open her bag of peach rings, "Then I'm gonna start taking the scenic route to work again." She said, tossing a ring into her mouth and chewing with a smirk Morgan mirrored back to her. Even if she couldn't count on Dr. Reid as an ally in the BAU anymore, she was starting to find a bit of solace in Derek Morgan, surprisingly.

As she continued to tear into her breakfast, Beck spared a glance at the clock on her monitor. Almost 8:30 and neither JJ or Hotchner had interrupted the blissful morning with a case. Not that Beck was going to complain about not having to see dead bodies before she could finish her food, but it was a little uncommon.

As she reached for her Snapple on her desk and popped off the lid, she let her eyes wander to Hotchner's office. Empty. She glanced over to Rossi's office. Empty. Finally, as Beck took a long sip from her drink, she turned to the opposite end of the office towards the briefing room. Empty.

"Hm," Beck hummed.

"What?" Morgan prompted, hearing her small musing sound.

Not daring to jinx her luck this morning, Beck brushed off the absences of three key team members by glancing at the bottle top in her hands. "A compass needle does not point directly North," she read off.

"Is that so?" Morgan chuckled, a sly grin spreading across his face. "Reid, you wanna take a shot at that one?"

Reid, who'd been quietly preoccupying himself with whatever newspaper was in his lap, barely even bothered to glance up. "Not really, no," he muttered back passive-aggressively.

Beck clenched her jaw, but didn't bother addressing him.

She watched as Morgan glanced between the two younger agents in the desks adjacent to one another. "Seriously," he sighed, exasperated. "How long is this stalemate going to go on for? It's been months-"

Beck cleared her throat as soon as Prentiss walked in, a passing savior with a mug of hot coffee in her hands. "Prentiss, where are Rossi and Hotchner?"

Morgan looked a little annoyed that she'd cut him off, but didn't press the issue further when Prentiss glanced back at the agent. "Rossi and Hotch?" she repeated the question, almost as if she'd been caught off guard by Beck even addressing her. She noticed her eyes flicking across her desk towards Reid uneasily. "You don't know?"

"No..." Beck answered slowly, her eyes trailing over to Reid who kept his eyes downcast and focused on his newspaper that he definitely wasn't reading. It had never taken him longer than a couple seconds for him to turn a page and he'd been on the third one for almost two minutes. Something told Beck that maybe someone had neglected to fill her in about what was going on today in the BAU.

"We just got here," Morgan chimed in. "Mind filling us in?" Hm, apparently no one had told Morgan either. Now Beck was starting to feel a little less alone from the outside of this interaction.

Prentiss shrugged as she pulled up her chair behind her desk and took a seat. "You just missed them on their way out."

"We got a case?" Beck frowned. Why weren't they being briefed?

"We don't know yet," she answered. Beck noticed her eyes didn't meet hers. Could it be that Reid had congregated a following against her within the Unit? Prentiss had always been a little unsettled by her methods. Maybe this was her subtly choosing a side. "It's an old case. You and Reid worked on it a few years back," she addressed Morgan. "The name Brian Matloff ring any bells?"

"No," Beck answered the same time Morgan did, "Yes."

Morgan sat up straighter in his seat. "Yeah, Matloff. That was in Roanoke. Couple years ago, the Blue Ridge Strangler killed three women. We worked the case and profiled a man of authority who tricked women at the park, caught them off guard, and strangled them with a belt before burying them face-down in a shallow grave. We figured maybe there were more victims, but we never found out."

"If you caught the guy then what's the case?" Beck wondered. "A copycat?"

"There aren't any new victims," Prentiss clarified. "He just woke up."

Beck's frown deepened, her hand pausing before she could toss a peach ring in her mouth. "Woke up?"

Morgan nodded. "The reason why we were never able to get the full story on the guy was because when we went to make the arrest, something happened. An accident. He made a run for it on the roof, took a fall almost ten stories down and hasn't woken up since... Until today, I guess."

"The prosecutor on the case called Hotch almost two hours ago, he and Rossi left about thirty minutes ago," Prentiss stated.

"They're helping testify?" Beck pondered. "Does the team normally do that after cases? We haven't been served yet for other cases, have we?"

Morgan shrugged. "It's not a normal thing. Most of the time, all local prosecutors need to try some of the Unsubs we profile and catch are our reports we send in with evidence and written recounting of what happened. Every once in a while though, depending on how concrete the case is, we'll get called out to testify at the trial."

"This is a special case though," Prentiss chimed in. "Almost four years of time and we don't know what kind of state Matloff is in, that prosecutor is going to need all hands on deck to even get the trial kickstarted again. There was even talk of Matloff suing the PD for what happened to him."

"That's rich," Beck scoffed. "Accused of being a serial killer and he'd be able to get off because of an accident he subsequeantually caused by running. There are a million arguments the defense could make that would sink this case. The coma and time since the crimes is one big one. Witness accounts could be rusty over time. People move on, forget what they saw. With that type of abrasive behavior, he has to have had some kind of prior record, right?"

Morgan nodded. "I remember when we first got ahold of his information, there was a record of bar fights and an outstanding warrant for a hit and run."

"The defense will use that as his reason for running, completely undermining the profile," Beck her bottom lip and leaned back in her seat as she tried to think this through. "Unless the prosecutor has a really good witness up their sleeve after four years still willing to testify, this case is dependent on how well Hotchner and Rossi can argue that the profile is viable. Which ultimately would mean they'd be defending their own profession which is always a little murky."

There was a long stretch of silence following Beck's small rant. She hadn't meant to be overly analytical, truth be told she was just thinking out loud. From the amused smirk on Morgan's face and the slightly taken aback look on Prentiss's, she could tell they had become used to it with Reid.

"Hm," the young Doctor hummed from his place at his desk, still not looking up at her as he addressed her. "If Matloff needs a defense attorney, at least we know who to call."

Reid's low-blow insult shouldn't have stung as much as it did, but the humorless smile that looked more like a grimace that he flashed her way before pushing himself from his desk definitely salted the wound. He excused himself, not bothering to address the tension he left in the air as he made his way out to the coffee machine across the office.

Beck cast her head down, a tightness in her chest building like a tumor of emotions she couldn't quite place. It was somewhere between angry and frustrated that left her wanting to peel her skin off to get it out of her.

Beck's eyes drifted away from her desk up to Morgan and Prentiss to see if they were going to even address what Reid had said. Morgan was shaking his head, looking almost disappointed in the Doctor. While, Prentiss merely took a sip from her coffee and turned to her computer screen as if to preoccupy herself. She was doing a little bit too well of a job to divert her attention that Beck had picked up on how expressionless her face was after Reid's remark. Almost as if she was trying to hard to hide her real reaction.

Beck sighed.

She wasn't a stranger to being outcasted by her peers. She'd dealt with it plenty in her youth with the kids in her neighborhood that didn't want to play with her because she was too 'weird.' The teens her brother went to school with her were scared of how 'adult' she was. The people in the training cohorts who refused to spar with her because of how 'experienced' she had been. Her CTU coworkers off-put by how 'inexperienced' she was. And now here at the BAU where she could feel the dynamics shifting. It had started out as a simple new-person, different-demeanor thing and had now been altered to where she was within the CTU.

On the outside, looking in; held at arms-length for fear of what she would do.

Not even a report to Strauss, no matter how damaging, could fix that.

—

It was around noon when the team back in DC finally heard something back from Roanoke.

Beck was feeling jilted. Reid was still blatantly ignoring her and it became abundantly clearer the longer the pair spent in each other's distant company across from each other in the office. If they hadn't gotten the call from Rossi and Hotchner that early afternoon, Beck would've stormed into JJ's office to look for a case in the pile she undoubtedly had stacking her desk.

But, alas, she was spared.

Beck sat back in her chair around 12:05pm. The end of May was coming up fast and Colleen wasn't letting up on Beck's mandatory attendance at her Godson's christening.

Colleen: have you booked your flight yet?

Beck frowned, her fingers tapping the keyboard with precise speed as the rest of the office blurred away. Agents going about their day as Beck texted her sister-in-law back.

Beck: you know how my schedule is. I haven't even confirmed it with my supervisor.

A disappointed voice in the back of her head- that sounded much too similarly to Strauss's- whispered to her... You could've been supervisor by now.

The brunette shook off her intrusive thoughts and refocused her attention back to her screen when a new notification popped up. A text back.

Colleen: but you will, right?

Beck's fingers idly traced the letters. N. O.

Another buzz at 12:07pm.

Colleen: Beck?

Beck.

Beck.

"Beck!"

The agent picked her head up at the sound of her name being called. Morgan stood at the edge of his desk, his own phone in his hand.

Morgan's eyebrows furrowed together as he gestured down at her. "You good? You weren't answering to 'Ryder.'"

Beck shook her head, trying to clear out all the fog and mist of distant thoughts and inner turmoil. "Yeah. Yeah..." Beck cleared her throat, her fingers quickly typing up a quick response, hitting send and sliding her phone back into her pocket. "What's up?"

Morgan looked like he wanted to pry, but rightly decided to back off.

He held up his phone, "Rossi and Hotch are on their way back. They need help on the Matloff case."

"Thought it was rare we got called in," Beck remarked, her eyebrows furrowing in confusion that almost mirrored Morgan's moments before.

Morgan shook his head, his frown deepening. "There's another complication."

Beck sat straighter in her seat. "What kind of complication?"

"The amnesia kind," he answered.

Beck scoffed, a disbelieving smile crossing her face. Amnesia. That was rich. But when Morgan didn't reciprocate her humorous expression, Beck narrowed her eyes. When she realized the agent wasn't joking, her smirk dissipated almost immediately. "Wait, seriously?"

"We just got the call from Hotch. Doctors are calling it Focal Retrograde Amnesia," Morgan explained. "It's an all hands on deck situation, like Prentiss said. Circumstances on the trial have changed. We're briefing in the office in a couple minutes."

And just like that, Beck felt the tension in her body simmer away at the sweet, sweet relief of finally getting a reason to leave this fucking office and get as far away as she could from Dr. Spencer Reid.

There was a bit of a pep in Beck's step as she made her way from behind her desk towards the office. Her phone buzzing in her pocket at 12:10pm. She checked the message.

Colleen: be safe.

Beck sighed. She faltered before entering the office above the Bullpen and decided to respond this time.

Beck: i'll try my best.

After hitting send, the brunette sauntered into the office and quickly took the seat farthest from where Reid was already at across the table. Morgan, still standing by the coffee pot after having walked in earlier, glanced between the two not so subtly as Beck settled into her seat.

"So," Prentiss exclaimed loudly to get everyone's attention in the small office. The tension was nearly palpable when Reid glanced up to acknowledge Beck's new presence in the room. "What do we know so far?"

The question wasn't directed to anyone in particular, but JJ took it upon herself to answer as she began to slide the manila folders she undoubtedly scraped together in such a short notice.

"Well, Hotch and Rossi have asked for help in the trial case for Brian Matloff. Matloff was a National Forest employee at the Blue Ridge Parkway. He allegedly used his position of authority to help guide women to their deaths where he'd use the element of surprise, strangle them from behind using a leather belt and bury them face-down in shallow graves," JJ summarized in a rush of words. Beck hung onto every one as her eyes quickly skimmed the case file. "His victims were all young, fit female joggers; Celeste Ferami, April Sutherford and Darci Corbett."

Beck's fingers idly traced the file. She could almost feel her brain splitting off into two sections. The cynical part that sifted through the case file and facts looking for any holes and inconsistences the defense could use to crack the case wide open. While the other half of her brain, worked on possibly sealing those holes and solidifying a rock-hard case against this guy.

But, before Beck could turn on her lawyer brain she'd inherited from countless hours spent around Colleen during her law school days, her profiler brain took the wheel once more.

"Why not dig full graves?" Beck asked aloud without glancing up from the file. "From the looks of it, Matloff had time to do so. Strangle the victim, keep them isolated to give them time to be alone. No signs of sexual assault, but plenty of time to hide the bodies, but instead he digs only a little and doesn't even bother to cover them with brush or leaves? Why?"

This time, when she did look up, she found Morgan walking over, his mug of coffee in his hand with a stirrer still inside. "It's because after the raid on Matloff's apartment, we discovered he had another area of interest," he sighed as he plopped down into his chair at the table. "Native American Mythology. We realized our profile wasn't complete."

Ah. Shallow graves. This was making sense now... Or was it.

Beck had to double check. Matloff didn't sound like a common Native name-

"There's a Native American belief that says burying a body facedown traps the soul and prevents it from haunting the killer," Reid explained enthusiastically, only it wasn't for her anymore. Beck bit the inside of her cheek as she kept her head down during Reid's explanation.

"That explains the shallow graves," Prentiss muttered, holding up the crime scene images in her hands. "It doesn't explain the lack of progression or learning curve in his killings."

"Did you ever find evidence of more killings that could've led up to these prime ones?" Beck asked, making it a point to have the question directed to Morgan. She wasn't going to give Reid the satisfaction. "He had to develop his method somehow."

"We considered it a possibility," Morgan answered. "As a Park Service employee, he had free reign over the entire park." Beck shook her head. All 93,000 acres of land. Had the BAU really scavenged it all for more missing girls?

JJ frowned as she flipped through her notes. "It says here he was raised Polish Catholic," she exclaimed. "Any idea what led him to identify with Native American culture?"

Beck glanced at Morgan for the answer, perplexed by the predicament as well. "We didn't get that far," Morgan reluctantly admit. His eyes glossed.

"Another thing we never got was any physical evidence at his apartment tying him to the crimes," Reid spoke up, at last.

Beck frowned at that. "Says here he took souvenirs from his victims," she pointed to the summary on the first page of the folder in front of her.

Morgan shook his head, dejected. "No trace."

"So what did he do with them?" JJ pondered aloud in a voice barely above a whisper. Before anyone else in the office could throw out a theory to answer the liaison's question, heavy footsteps approaching alerted the team of Hotchner's presence.

Beck sat straighter in her chair upon his entrance when she immediately noted the heavy way he was carrying himself. His jaw was more clenched than usual and the small vein that popped out in his neck when he was irritated was protruding. He was ticked.

"Well, if we didn't need the answer to that before, we do now," Hotchner stated. "It turns out our star witness has been dead for two years."

The room fell silent.

Morgan looked in disbelief, "He was the only one who could put Matloff at the scene..."

Another complication. Shit.

Beck bit her lip and fell back into her chair. How were they supposed to swing this one? As she pondered on, her eyes couldn't help but drifting up to watch the rest of the team work. Maybe this was the impossible point where she'd get to see the BAU in action. Strauss always talked about Hotchner being known to cut corners with his team. Perhaps this was that point in the case.

A sense of guilt flooded Beck's veins, cooling her heated ideas like ice to the flames.

Before she could even process that array of emotions all within such a short period of time, Reid spoke up with an idea.

"There might be another way."

The entire team perked up at that.

"What?" Hotchner prompted.

"If we can't immediately prove his guilt through external evidence, we should focus on internal evidence," Reid tried to explain.

Prentiss frowned, confused at the Doctor's proposition. "His memory is gone," she reiterated.

Reid, looking albeit a little flustered from the obvious confusion, continued. "I mean, we try to get him to prove his own guilt by exposing him to what we already have. Pictures of the crime scene, the girls, the park- try to spark some kind of cognitive reaction that we can then use."

"To what?" Beck couldn't help but speak up. "Prove his guilt? The defense will argue it's circumstantial and something as invasive as this procedure could cause damage to a man already suing the PD and FBI for that exact reason. Be practical."

Bristled, Reid didn't back down. In fact, he almost looked affronted at her words. "Practical? He killed innocent women and you want to let him go off of evidence that could be vital-"

"I'm not saying we should let Matloff walk," she snapped back at the Doctor.

"What are you saying then?" It was Hotchner who questioned her this time. His voice was void of any emotion, as per usual, but when Beck met his eyes, she could tell his question was intended to get an explanation. He wanted to hear what she had to say. Huh. This would be a first. Beck didn't intend to waste it.

"I'm saying that we should go through with this procedure, but cater towards Matloff on this, not his council or the judge. We make it completely voluntary to him," Beck explained. "We order him to do it, there's going to be pushback. But if Matloff really has lost his memory, anyone with that much of a hole in their mind would be curious enough to try out a solution on his own. He'd be more agreeable and his defense would be less inclined to dismiss any evidence we manage to get out of it."

There was a heavy silence that sat amongst the room. Beck realized that maybe she'd stepped out of line for speaking to Reid the way she had, but what came out of Hotchner's mouth next really caught her off guard more than anything.

"Ryder, you're coming with me to Roanoke," he explained. Beck's jaw dropped in disbelief. "Reid, you too." The Doctor floundered for something to say to argue his way out of it, but from Hotchner's clenched jaw, there was no way he was budging on this. "The rest of you, stay here and work on any other leads we didn't get to cover last time around. I don't want this man to slip through our fingers because of four years of lost time and eight months of lost memories."

As the rest of the team began to scramble away from the office table, Beck and Reid remained seated. The pair of them staring at each other from across the table, holding their breath for the storm that was brewing for the hour long drive to Roanoke.

This was not going to be good.

—

"You must be Rebecca Ryder. I'm Cecelia Hillenbrand, but my friends call me Cece," the perky blonde woman in a blazer and pencil skirt introduced herself with an outstretched hand and a phone in her other.

Beck shook her hand a little less enthusiastically with barely a mumbled 'hello' and small nod.

After releasing Beck's hand, the attorney turned to the man standing to the left of her. "And Mr. Reid, I believe I remember you from the last time you were in Roanoke," she gushed, lightly shaking his hand- a little more slowly this time. Beck pursed her lips and shook her head.

Reid flushed slightly as he tried to subtly pull his hand from her grip. "It's, uh, it's actually Dr. R-"

"Aaron!"

"-eid..."

Before letting Reid finish- Cece rushed over to the other man on Beck's right with a wide grin on her face. Beck couldn't help but snicker a bit beneath her breath at this entire exchange. She could feel Reid glaring at her from the corner of her eye, but she didn't care.

"Cece," Hotchner nodded back.

"You ready to get back to work?" the blonde prompted him in a smug tone. "I hope you got something for me that's gonna rock this jury to their core because I've been digging and have come up with next to nothing." At that, Beck glanced around her office that they were standing in and finally noticed the array of file boxes and papers scattered around the room. Geez.

"We managed to come up with a plan," Hotchner explained to her. "Ryder."

Beck nodded. "We need to make a deal with Matloff and his lawyer to get him to take a brain test."

Cece looked taken aback. Clearly, this was something she hadn't heard of before. "Willingly? The defense is already going to try and shoot it down in court, you want to offer it up to them on a silver platter to deny before it even gets to the trial?" The answer had come out of Beck's mouth, yet she directed her rebuttal towards Hotchner. Cece wasn't off to a very good start in Beck's book right now.

"The evidence we get from the test would be admissible," Reid piped up. "There have already been cases that these tests have been used in as scientific evidence and the test is non invasive. We think if we cater the offer to Matloff, he'd outvote his own defense for a shot at getting his memory back... At least that's what we hope."

Beck knew the Doctor added that last comment as a jab at her. She didn't let her facial expressions show it affected her in any way or that she even caught on to it. This stale mate could go on all throughout the trial, but Beck was going to be the bigger person this time. She was determined not to let a lanky Doctor in corduroy sweaters and brown Oxford's get beneath her skin.

Cece pursed her lips, looking between the BAU agents all standing before her. She looked like she wanted to argue, but knew she was out of her depth. Her case was sinking, this was her life jacket. She had no choice but to accept it. "This is a Hail Mary..." she uttered.

Beck shrugged, "So is this entire case."

Later that day, Beck found herself stuck to the wall of the Roanoke County Jail while Hotchner and Cece signed themselves in for visiting hours with the suspect and his attorney.

Lester Serling was a very posh man. She could see his off-white Lincoln parked in a disability space down below through the small window Beck occupied herself at as they waited. He wore a grey suit, the shoulder pads a bit too big for his frame. He puffed his chest as he walked towards the entrance, barely glancing at his car as he locked it with the keys in his hand.

"The defense is here," Beck muttered, loud enough that the rest of the group in the room could hear.

Hotchner turned to her, a slight frown of disapproval playing at his lips. "He's late by fifteen minutes." One thing Hotchner had a lot of was patience, but just not when time was against them.

It only took Serling another five minutes to take the elevator up to the interrogation and holding cell part of the jail where the rest of the group was. Upon his arrival, Beck had already concocted a handful of excuses that would fall from his mouth before he could even open it. The original 'rush hour traffic' excuse. The 'my cleaners messed up an order' excuse, followed by a blatant fish for compliments moment. Or- Beck's favorite- the iconic 'my assistant double booked me' excuse.

"So nice of you to finally join us, Mr. Serling," Cece greeted the man. A genuine smile graced her lips, but if you looked past the sparkle in her eye, you could see the great amount of irritation. "We've been waiting for almost fifteen minutes."

"My deepest apologies," Serling replied, not sounding in the least bit apologetic. "My assistant accidentally double booked me. I had to race over here through the rush hour traffic, but I'm sorry for any inconvenience I may have caused to you or the... FBI." While the little 'FBI' side-eye may have bristled Hotchner and Reid, Beck was too busy biting back a smile for getting two of three of her theories right.

When Beck turned her head slightly, she noticed Reid furrowing his eyebrows in his direction as if silently asking what she looked so pleased about. Instead of answering, Beck just shook her head and turned her full attention back to the case at hand.

"You must be SSA Hotchner," Serling shook Hotchner's hand. "You were the head of operations when Mr. Matloff was first apprehended that led to his accident. I'm surprised to see you're still on the case." Phew, these lawyers did not pull punches. Beck bit the inside of her cheek to keep from showing any outward annoyance or irritation with Serling. Now that she knew what to expect from him, any and every shred of information could be used against her in a trial that would dwindle down to whether or not profiling was viable in a court of law.

Whether she liked it or not, this case now fully involved her.

"Considering that what happened to Mr. Matloff was a tragic accident, the FBI tends to assign high priority cases to the more successful units," Beck replied to Serling before Hotchner had the opportunity to. "Especially when it comes to serial killers. The Bureau tends to take these cases very seriously. I heard you took this case Pro Bono. Congrats."

Mr. Serling bristled slightly from the unexpected response from a new player on the field. "Well, Mr. Matloff isn't a serial killer, so the case will be simple enough to make."

Without breaking her stride or her piercing eye contact with Mr. Serling, Beck replied without missing a beat, "Well, we'll see about that, won't we?"

"I guess we will," was his steady reply. He cleared his throat before turning back to Hotchner and Cece. "Let's head in, shall we?"

Cece looked like she wanted to say something along the lines of 'fucking finally,' but settled instead for a brief smile and nod.

Hotchner cast a rare impressed look towards Beck over his shoulder as the group went followed after Serling.

Brian Matloff didn't look like a lot of the killers Beck had stood toe to toe with thus far. He was scrawny, partially bald, and had a look in his eye. Distant. Lost. Confused... Like a blank canvas almost. When Beck looked into Matloff's eyes he didn't look back as if he was disdainful or even really displaying any type of emotion when her, her fellow team members, and the duo of lawyers accompanying them stepped into the County Jail's secluded visitation room. When she looked in his eyes, she only saw the shadow of a person whose soul looked as though it had been carved out like a pumpkin.

Maybe the amnesia thing really wasn't a farce after all.

"Mr. Matloff, this is the prosecuting attorney, Cecilia Hillenbrand and a handful of the FBI's very own. Agents, uh..." Serling trailed off.

"I'm SSA Hotchner," the Unit Chief supplied. "This is Agent Ryder and Dr. Reid. We're from the Behavioral Analysis Unit."

Serling clicked his tongue. "Right."

Beck fought the urge to roll her eyes. Prick.

"Mr. Matloff, we're here to offer an opportunity for you," Cece skipped formalities and started in immediately. The blonde slid into the metal chair at the table Matloff was handcuffed to in his wheelchair, clasping her hands on the counter between them. "In light of the recent news about your amnesia and severe memory loss, we'd like to extend a possible solution."

Matloff looked skeptical. When Beck looked a little closer, she could almost see a spark of curiosity in his mainly soulless eyes. "H-how?"

"We want you to undergo the process of Brain Fingerprinting," the attorney explained. "The procedure will show if the memories of the crimes are present in your mind, regardless of whether or not you may be choosing to recall them after your accident."

"Which was your fault, I might add," Mr. Serling pointed to Hotchner as he sat forward in his seat. "My answer is no. Actually, my answer is absolutely not."

Beck's patience was getting dangerously thin with Mr. Serling.

"What is this?" the defense lawyer prompted, affronted. "You claim you want to offer my client a deal only to hand us your prosecution on a silver platter."

Reid looked a little too pleased and all-knowing from where he stood opposite to Beck on the other side of Hotchner. Beck could see him out of her peripheral line of view glancing in her direction as if to silently tell her 'I told you so.'

"The science on this type of testing alone is unproven, to say the least, not to mention- inadmissible."

Beck was not about to have her plan be run off the rails by cocky attorney Lester Serling, so she had to take matters into her own hands. Well, more like her own knowledge and memory on any and every case she could think up from her time studying with Colleen. In fact, she could've sworn there was a case Colleen studied for a mock trial during her time in law school about this type of procedure.

"Actually," Beck piped up from behind Cece, catching even the prosecuting attorney off-guard. "In the case of State of Iowa v. Harrington, 1979, the Court ruled the test that they had used on the defendant to prove whether or not he'd premeditated the murder of John Schweer, the Overstreet-O'Connell Test, was admissible as scientific evidence."

The room fell silent after Beck's long-winded rebuttal. However, the person who looked most shocked looked to be Serling himself, and that was all the satisfaction Beck needed before smearing salt into the wound.

"Congress Ruling 702 and in the 1993 case of Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, in case you needed some more homework for later, Counselor," she added with a coy smile in Mr. Serling's direction. No, she wasn't going to make this a simple case for him to make at all. In fact, she was going to make him regret ever taking Matloff's defense.

After regaining his composure, Serling scoffed, "This is a Hail Mary. You have no evidence, no witnesses. Nothing. So you bring us this desperate deal that, for all I know, could jeopardize my client's already very fragile mental state." Beck refrained from rolling her eyes again. "I can't in good conscience let you go poking around in his brain for evidence you know isn't there."

Oh yeah, because he definitely only cares about his client's well-being. Beck bit the inside of her cheek to refrain from lashing out or talking out of turn. One wrong step and they could be looking at a mistrial. After all, they were at Serling and Matloff's dismissal.

Out of habit, the Agent popped the knuckles of her fingers at her side. Well, at least we know what direction he's taking the defense. Insanity or incompetence to stand trial. Low fruit, low blows.

"The test is non-invasive and completely safe," Hotchner spoke up this time. "You'll simply be looking at images on a computer screen while an EEG monitors his brain activity." Beck took note of the fact that the Unit Chief was addressing Matloff directly in his explanation, not Serling. He was still sticking to her plan: let Matloff decide whether or not he wants his memories back and see where we stand then.

Of course, it wasn't going to be easy when Serling continuously disrupted any actual negotiating anytime he opened his big mouth.

"Subject him to graphic imagery to prompt some kind of reaction, which you can then point to as evidence of guilt?" Serling scoffed as he buttoned up his grey Armani two-piece, reaching down for the briefcase he'd kept at his feet. "Please, spare me your so-called 'deal.' It's preverse and we're leaving-"

"I want to do it."

Before Serling even had a chance to stand up, his client's statement halted him in his movements. For a moment, the air in the room went still as all eyes fell on Brian Matloff and his emotionless, lost eyes. He was looking directly at Hotchner as if he had the answers to all of his questions.

"One- One moment, Agents," Mr. Serling stammered as he tried to have a quiet conversation with his client, who clearly wasn't having it.

Beck, Reid, and Hotchner watched from behind a stunned Cece Hillenbrand as Brian Matloff sat straighter in his chair, brushing off his lawyer's pleas for just a second of his time to discuss what he was doing. "Every day, I wake up to this... nightmare of not knowing who or... what I am," Matloff began, his voice uneasy and his eyes darting between Hotchner, Cece, and his lap. "If this test can really help me remember, then whatever the consequences, I- I want to do it. I have to."

Beck's frown deepened. Not because she was disappointed that the deal worked according to her plan, but because she hadn't actually expected her beliefs to shift upon actually meeting with Brian Matloff. At first, she thought the dementia thing was just a blatant lie to try and get out of his crimes, then she saw that dead look in Matloff's eye and she became curious and skeptical, but this... This changed everything.

If he was lying about his dementia, he could easily be implicated in the crimes if the EEG brain waves came back that he recognized the images or had an adverse reaction to his crimes. Or, he was genuinely desperate to regain what he'd lost... who he was.

Beck sighed as Reid shifted on his feet. Things just got a Hell of a lot more complicated.

---

"You're a killer!"

Beck flinched, nearly dropping the mug of chai she had in her hand onto the stack of witness statements Cece had dug up for her to go over before the first day of trial. They had a lot of work ahead of them after the results from the EEG wave had just come back... Negative for any sign that Matloff even remotely recognized the crime scene photos.

The Agent ran her fingers through her bangs to get them out of her hair and to try and brush out the words that still stuck with her after months.

It was getting ridiculous how such a stupid, insignificant statement could turn her world on it's axis so easily. Had this happened with anyone else, she might've just brushed it off and went along with her day because she knew it was true, she was a killer. She never sugarcoated what she was and what she did, but she knew it was out of duty.

But after Spencer Reid had told her what she'd already known, all she felt was like shit.

All those deaths, all her kills. It was like Reid had opened a fresh wound she thought had healed with a heated scalpel. And now she was just having to carry on with her life as though she wasn't bleeding out because maybe if she ignored it long enough, it would heal on it's own again. It's how Beck had dealt with a lot of things in her life, the technique had worked for her thus far, so what was one more scar on her skin?

"What does falling to your death feel like?"

Beck furrowed her eyebrows, an amused smile gracing her lips as she turned around to find Penelope Garcia standing a few feet away from the office coffee counter. She looked scared, like an overdramatic type of scared. Of course, if she was imagining what it would be like to be Brian Matloff after falling from a roof during his arrest, she probably wasn't having a lot of trust in their case against the killer.

The Agent shrugged, her mug of chai still in her left hand as the other came to rest on the counter she leaned her rear against. "Like flying... or sometimes like dying. It just depends."

"Depends on what?" Garcia frowned.

"Whether or not you know something will catch you," she answered. "What's got you so worried?"

Taking the question as an invitation, the Technical Analyst took a seat at the table nearby. "I-I just can't imagine how someone could survive that and just not remember. Your entire life, everything you've ever done, people you've- you've killed! All of it just... gone!" She snapped her fingers to make her point. "It sounds impossible."

Beck let out a heavy sigh. Her fingers tapped the counter idly.

A part of her debated telling Garcia a story that would ease her conscience, but the other was hesitant. After what had happened with Reid, it was harder to do what Hotchner had asked her to months ago. To let herself be open and free with the team, not cause a distraction by being secretive and mysterious. She had tried that with Reid and clearly it hadn't worked out well when he threw it back in her face by calling her a killer and lying to her on the case in West Bune. But... Penelope Garcia was Penelope Garcia and it was a little hard not to trust her to not treat her like a ticking time bomb.

"You know, there was a mission I went on in my second year with the CTU," Beck began once her mind was made up.

The Agent kept her eyes glued to the ground as she continued, so not to immediately stop upon seeing Garcia's shock and surprise when she realized she was being told a story from Beck's days at the CTU, a topic the Tech Analyst knew was off-limits.

"I remember being stationed up in a tree in the Indo-Burma forest for three days straight for a stake out. I had drawn the big straw and got the privilege of Sniper that mission," she let out a dry laugh at the irony of her words. "I, uh, I had to live off of rations for nutrients. Calling those things food would be an overstatement. Then for water, I spent the first fourteen hours crouched on a branch carving a hole into the tree and had to live off what little sap or water I could get that day."

When Beck took a sip at her drink, she could make out Garcia's horrified look from where she sat at the table a few feet away. Beck could only shake her head and smile fondly as the Technical Analyst gaped, "That's a privilege?"

The Agent shrugged. "Well, at the time, I thought it was a privilege. They'd left me with a vital job; one that required strength, stamina, patience, durability, agility... survival skills. I was excited for that job. Frankly, I've had worse." Beck frowned as she spun the chai tea bag around in what remained inside her mug. A hundred missions came to mind when she thought about what could've been worse.

"This was your second year? So- so, you were..." Beck didn't have to see Garcia's face when it dawned on her just how old Beck was when she'd gone on that mission in the rainforest, she could hear the soft intake of breath from across the small space between them. "You were twe-"

"Nineteen," Beck corrected her in a soft tone, still not meeting her eyes. "I didn't turn twenty for another two weeks."

"Oh my God..."

Beck shook her head, trying to help the Tech Analyst feel at least a slightly bit better about this story.

"Anyway," she quickly redirected as Garcia quickly wiped the stray tears that were building in her eyes. "While I was up there, I only got a few minutes of sleep at a time. I couldn't let myself drift off or I'd risk losing the target and missing my mark. But I could only stay awake for so long, and after negotiations panned out for whatever billionaire con-artist extradition that was keeping us on the stake out in the first place, I just... let go. Let the exhaustion and the malnourishment and the weakness take over, and I fell."

Beck glanced up at Garcia then, a sad smile on her face as she tried to convey what happened next without having to actually go into too much detail.

However, the Agent failed to remember that Penelope Garcia's imagination ran wild sometimes.

"Were you in a coma for four years, too?"

"What?" Beck couldn't help but guffaw at the blonde's absurd assumption. "No! I was only out for a day. Or at least that's what I thought..."

Garcia's eyebrows creased as she leaned on the table with her elbows, intrigued. "What do you mean?"

"Apparently, I was awake in the hospital after a group of stray hikers found me knocked out on the forest floor. I ate, I was talking, walking around. One nurse even claimed I'd played a game of Mahjong with one of the senile old men on my hospital block. But the thing is..." Beck trailed off. "I don't remember any of it. I hit my head so hard that even after I came to a day later, I didn't remember the day after I woke up. In my head, the chain of events felt more or less as if I'd drifted off on that tree branch and woke up a couple minutes later in a hospital bed two days later."

"That's... terrifying."

Beck let out a soft chuckle, to let the blonde know it wasn't as a serious subject as she thought it was. "It was terrifying in the moment, but now that I think back on it... It's kind of funny that I beat an old man at Mahjong without even being cognitively or subconsciously present. Don't remember a single game. If someone were to show me a picture of his face, I don't think I'd be able to remember or recognize him..." the brunette shook her head as she took a long sip of her drink. "But I didn't murder the guy, so it's a little hard to relate to Brian Matloff."

Penelope Garcia deflated slightly. She could see where Beck was coming from, and she understood why she told her that story. That right now Brian Matloff was afraid, terrified. He had no recollection of not only just the murders, but his entire life. He had no idea who he was and he couldn't remember either. "It must've been difficult. Having to hear someone else tell you things that you did, but can't ever remember doing. How can you know what's true and what's not?"

Beck shook her head, her thoughts idly floating towards the negative EEG test they'd conducted on Matloff. "You don't. It's like trying to shove the wrong pieces into the right places of a puzzle. Trying to imagine yourself through another person's description, creating fake memories to fill in what's missing. Eventually, trying to figure out what's real and what's not will drive a person crazy."

"Mm- you should tell Hotch and the team that during the meeting," Garcia exclaimed, holding up her index finger as though a lightbulb had gone off in her head.

A lightbulb shattered inside of Beck's head.

"What meeting?"

Garcia's excited smile slowly faded into a grimace. "The- the- the meeting. Hotch called a meeting. Emily said she had told you-"

"I would have remembered if somebody told me, well, anything," Beck surmised as she dumped the remaining lukewarm chai down the sink and made sure to rinse and quickly wash the mug, making sure to pluck out the remaining tea bag. "What time is the meeting?"

Garcia checked the glittery purple watch on her wrist. "Uh- right now! Right now!"

"Shit!" With precision, the Agent tossed the used tea bag into the trash bin at a nearby cubicle. She spun on her heel and quickly dashed through the rows of desks to make it towards the Bullpen.

Before she could even get a word in, Hotchner was on her case.

"You're late-"

"Not my fault!"

Hotchner raised an eyebrow at her as she threw herself down into the closest chair.

Beck, dejected, realized her mistake and frowned. "Sorry," she apologized meekly.

"You're forgiven," the Unit Chief brushed off the slight hiccup. Beck was thankful he seemed to have other things on his mind that put her on the bottom of his shit list after what happened in West Bune. In fact, she was a little surprised his report hadn't maimed her, and it was purely Rossi's that subjected her to Strauss's judgement instead.

But... cut one head off, two more take it's place.

In this equation, Beck managed to subdue Aaron Hotchner's agitation towards her, but somehow managed to end up on both Dr. Spencer Reid's and Emily Prentiss's shit lists.

The brunette spared a subtle glance towards the other brunette sitting opposite of her at the meeting table. Prentiss was too distracted by the file in her hands to bother even sparing her a glance in return.

Beck couldn't wrap her head around why Prentiss would lie about telling her there was an important meeting. Maybe she had forgotten. Or sent a text that didn't go through. But as much as Beck wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, Beck would be lying if she said she hadn't noticed the subtle passive-aggressive jabs or snide comments Prentiss had been making recently, especially after the case with Jack and Lindsey Vaughn.

Beck hadn't stepped on her toes at any point that she could remember. She knew there was a split second during the case with the family murders that she could've sworn that Prentiss had a certain look in her eyes that showed just a sliver of recognition, understanding maybe. But maybe Beck had mistaken understanding for what was actually judgement and disturbance.

Great... Two people she thought were allies, now were two more obstacles she'd be having to go through to reach her goals.

"The negative test results on the Brain Fingerprinting may have just killed any chance we have of putting Matloff away." Hotchner's frown deepened as he practically glared at the paper file in his hands. He'd probably gone over it close to a hundred times since they came through, Beck figured.

Rossi, sat in the chair beside the Unit Chief, shook his head. "The DA isn't required to enter it into evidence."

Beck frowned. It would still look shitty if we were the ones who catered the test towards the guy only to find nothing and try to bury the results, she wanted so desperately to explain. But she was in defensive mode right now and it was best not to reveal too much of her opinion, input, or explanations. With so many profilers that could catch any subtle turn of phrase or slight movement, it was like tiptoeing through a mine field. Beck had to be careful, especially now with three targets on her back.

"No," thankfully, Hotchner was speaking what was on her mind. "But he can get it on discovery and you can bet he's gonna use it."

"And that's why I distrust all technology," Rossi tsked.

After downing a long sip of his coffee, Morgan set the mug on the table and leaned forward in his seat. "So, how'd he get over it?" he prompted the question that was on everyone's mind. "I thought nobody could beat this test."

"'Beat' is a strong word," Beck couldn't help but chime in. "He seemed pretty desperate to get just as many answers as we did. If anything, he'd see this as a failed attempt to getting his memories back."

JJ shrugged, "His injury was pretty severe. I mean... falling from a roof is pretty extreme."

"The damage to his parietal lobe must have been more extensive than previously thought," Reid made sure to only specifically direct his input to JJ's remarks, notably glossing over Beck's points. The brunette wanted to scream. "The brain injury could've literally deleted his memories."

"But focal retrograde amnesia that completely erases who a person is- fundamentally and literally- is impossible," Beck interjected, making it a point to directly refute Reid's points. "Brian Matloff is who he is, whether he remembers it or not. A brain doesn't just have a reset button, no matter how far he fell."

"It's not impossible," the Doctor retorted, almost offended that she'd disagreed with him. "It's a rare case that the amnesia is permanent or that it takes up the majority of his life, rather than an isolated period of time- like most cases of focal retrograde amnesia- but it isn't entirely impossible."

Beck sat straighter in her seat, crossing her arms on top of the table to assert herself more. "Neither is the possibility that he's capable of getting his memories back if exposed to the correct material."

Reid scrunched his nose, scoffing. "What? Why would that matter if he's already shown negative reactions of recognition towards any of the crime scene photos?"

The Agent threw her hands up. "Brian Matloff committed three murders in the span of a handful of months. We're talking about a subject who has now forgotten his entire life. What's going to strike a reaction from Matloff isn't going to be a fraction of time in his forty years of life. What is going to gain a reaction from him is going to be whatever triggered him to the point of killing those women in the first place," Beck sighed as she finished her long-winded rebuttal. "What pushes a man to go from park ranger to the Blue Ridge Strangler?"

As Beck had directed the last bit of her argument towards the team, she did take a second to gauge Reid's reaction to her words. He looked ticked, to say the least. He wasn't meeting her eyes, which was an immediate off-putting sign. His hand was covering his mouth and it looked as though he was bouncing his knee beneath the table from the way his side of the table shook a few seats away from Beck.

Shit.

It dawned on Beck that she hadn't helped her case by poking the bear. In fact, she might've just dug herself into deeper shit with the Doctor by stepping on his toes during this investigation.

But in her defense... he was starting to piss her off with his childish game of passive aggressiveness and blatant ignorance.

How much better are you than him if you stoop down to that same childish level? A voice in the back of her head prompted her as a new conversation stemmed from the one Beck and Reid had just verbally sparred over.

"Oh, he did the murders," Rossi mused, breaking the tense silence and bringing the conversation back on track from where the pair had derailed it. "And we'll prove it. What he remembers doesn't matter."

"Doesn't it?" Prentiss challenged the older Agent. Beck glanced down at her fellow brunette with uneasiness. "I mean, if those experiences are gone forever, doesn't that sort of make him, I don't know, like..."

"A different person?" JJ supplied.

"Yeah."

"No, not at all." A new player entered the field in the form of Derek Morgan's skepticism.

A line was drawn in the Bullpen. People knew which side they were on, whether they knew it extended past their opinions on this case.

"It's interesting-" Reid tried to begin when Rossi interrupted him, "Not to me."

"Let him finish," Beck scolded the older Agent out of habit for sticking up for the Doctor. She internally kicked herself for her words immediately as they flew out of her mouth.

Reid glanced at Beck for a split second before turning back to the rest of the group to finish his explanation, "It goes to core arguments about the nature of identity. There's a Western philosophical concept, Causal Dependence, that says that a psychological connection to the past plays a key role in defining who we are."

"Reid, what are you saying?" Morgan prompted the Doctor. "That this guy shouldn't be tried?"

"No, I'm not saying that-"

Just as soon as Reid attempted to save himself, Prentiss threw him a life line when she interjected. "But one could make the argument that in his current condition, he's no longer a danger to society."

"Yeah, until his memories start to come back," Beck shook her head. "The past isn't solely definitive of who we are as people. Our brains develop with us. Different experiences, different habits, different cultures. People who are alcoholics have an altered brain; their neurons have shrunk over elongated periods of time filled with heavy drinking and alcohol abuse. If, say, an alcoholic were in Matloff's shoes with amnesia, if they were to pick up a bottle and start drinking, they wouldn't be able to stop themselves whether they remembered what their life was like before the amnesia or not."

"Homicide isn't comparable to alcoholism," Prentiss retorted, her voice sounding more irritated than helpful.

"You're right," Beck replied, leaning forward in her seat to look down the table at the other Agent. "It's a lot worse, and a lot more emotionally and mentally impactful on a person's mind."

"Look," Morgan came back as a voice of reason. "It's not just about this guy being a danger. It's about making sure somebody pays for what happened to those girls."

"But it's not up to us to decide to what extent he should be punished," Hotchner finally spoke up. The room quieted once their Unit Chief spoke. "That's for the courts."

Beck and Reid both shrunk in their seats when they took note of the blatantly pointed glances he was giving them following his statement.

"Where are we with Matloff's mystery visitor?" Hotchner moved on to question JJ.

The blonde frowned. Beck frowned in response because that obviously wasn't a very good sign that they'd come up with any results searching for a possible connection to Matloff who made frequent visits to him while he was at the hospital. "Prentiss and I contacted every recorded Nina Moore within 500 miles of the hospital. 71 in total, no takers."

"Shocker," Beck muttered as Hotchner shook his head. If Beck were Nina Moore, she wouldn't exactly want to be getting calls about the serial killer she'd been visiting while he was in a coma either.

"Matloff's a textbook loner. No meaningful relationships, no family, no girlfriends," the Unit Chief listed off. "But anyone who would visit a coma patient-"

"A triple murderer coma patient." Beck tilted her head slightly in agreement at Morgan's interjection.

"-We're talking about somebody who feels connected to him," Hotchner concluded.

"Maybe connected enough to know the truth," JJ surmised.

"Or the trigger," Beck added.

Rossi wasn't so easily swayed. "The truth could be she's just a fan. Every serial killer's got 'em." Right. Beck grimaced. Forgot about the fact that some serial killers have creepy fan bases. Beck made a mental note to never underestimate the disturbing habits of some people.

"Let's go back to the hospital and interview the staff. We need to build a profile and help locate this woman," Hotchner deduced as he shuffled the files in his hands and began to stand from the table. "Opening arguments are first thing Monday morning and anyone who isn't running point at the hospital is helping with searching for case files back in Roanoke."

Beck was so close to freedom when she heard the last order fall from Hotchner's mouth. Dammit.

Her face scrunched into one of irritated frustration as Morgan brushed past her with a wide grin on his face. "Not it," he chuckled. Beck glared at the Agent standing above her. She didn't care how childish it looked when she smacked him with the manila folder in her hand, which- of course- only caused him to laugh more.

"Reid. Ryder."

The pair turned to their Unit Chief, both on opposite sides of the Bullpen.

"Cece needs to take your depositions before the trial. Be prepared to testify if she needs us to," he stated before turning on his heel and heading out of the conference room to the safety of his office where he'd be out of the reach from Beck's clenched fists.

Beck turned to Morgan, her glare darkened. "I thought you said you hardly ever actually had to testify."

The Agent threw his hands up as if to say 'I don't know what to tell you,' but the mischievous grin Morgan had on his face told Beck otherwise. Irritated, Beck smacked Morgan a few more times with her folder- a few he managed to dodge, another few that actually left red marks on his biceps.

—

Beck remembered the last time she'd been in a court room was during Bruno Hawks' trial before a federal court of law. It was an unsavory memory the young woman wished she'd been able to forget. But alas, there were downsides to everything. Even photographic memory.

However, it wasn't the trial itself that came to mind as she stepped into the empty gallery of Roanoke's County Courthouse.

Beck took a deep breath in through her nose, savoring the earthy smell of wood, Pine-Sol-mopped hardwood floors, and the unmistakable twinge of rotting oak that dripped through every crack and crevice of this dated building.

Over a century of every kind of case under the Sun being tried inside this Courthouse, but none like what Cece Hillenbrand and the BAU were going to try and pull off.

"So, let me guess..."

Beck paused, halfway down the walkway between all the aisles of benches.

"Former law student," Cece Hillenbrand surmised, pointing down at the Agent from where she stood at the entrance of the courtroom.

The brunette turned to peer over her shoulder at the prosecutor. She clicked her tongue, "Sorry to disappoint."

The blonde looked perplexed at her truthful response. "Really? Well, color me impressed."

Beck scoffed, a little surprised. "Why? I just came prepared. Memorized a few paragraphs from a textbook I read when I was sixteen."

"You don't think that's impressive, Agent Ryder?"

"I guess in your line of work it is," she shrugged. "In my line of work, it's just another survival tool."

Cece's eyes flickered with something akin to recognition, and maybe even a little bit of respect. "Then I guess it's a good thing I'll be sticking to my day job." Beck smirked, ducking her head to hide the amusement. "You know, Serling is going to bring your profession into question during this trial."

Beck could hear the underlying tone in the attorney's words. "... I know that, Counselor."

"Good," she replied simply. "Because what I need to know now is whether I can count on you to use that survival tool you just told me about to help us win this case."

The Agent carefully drew both her arms back to link her hands together behind her back. "You can," she answered, her voice firm and even. Cece tilted her head down in a short, almost discrete nod. There was a moment where it felt as though the blonde prosecutor was trying to communicate something further in what she wasn't saying outright, but Beck didn't have time to question it for long as Hotchner made his way through the double doors.

Beck's train of thought faltered for a moment, her odd interaction with Cece set aside as she took note of Reid's presence beside Hotchner.

"Getting started without us?" Hotchner prompted Cece. Beck frowned. She'd never seen Hotchner's teeth. It was an odd phenomenon she was witnessing before her: Agent Hotchner smiling. He looked about ten years younger and for a moment Beck could almost picture what SSA Aaron Hotchner was like before someone decided to shove a stick up his ass.

The blonde attorney shook her head, returning the smile with a sultry one of her own. "Just going over some basic introductory questions. Hey, since you're back, you mind taking the first crack at witness prep?"

Hotchner grimaced, looking almost embarrassed about whatever it was Cece was referencing that he clearly didn't like having advertised. "This your case-"

"-just as much as it is yours," the attorney countered with a knowing look. "What better way to prepare my two potentially vital witnesses by exposing them to someone with knowledge of the case both from a profiling perspective and a federal attorney perspective?"

Now that piqued Beck's interest.

Aaron Hotchner, former federal attorney, huh? Beck made a mental note to look into that red string of info Cece Hillenbrand just dropped into her lap. But in the meantime, she was being mock-subpoenaed.

Beck felt out of place on the witness stand at the front of the large court room. It wasn't a normal out-of-place feeling someone, one people usually feel at a chain grocery story at a different location; like you've seen these products, theses aisles, these sections... but never in these places. She felt out-of-place in the sense that she felt the room was too large, too bright, too formal. Even the weight of responsibility from just sitting in the witness stand chair alone felt like an overwhelming bubble of air growing inside of her chest as though it were about to erupt at any moment.

Was this how guilty people felt? Beck couldn't help but wonder as she avoided eye contact with the young Doctor seated in one of the pews a few yards away.

It was stupid. Feeling as though she were the one on trial despite not having committed a crime in the eyes of the law... Perhaps the guilt she felt was because she had committed crimes in the eyes of humanity and felt it a little morbidly ironic to even be considered suitable to be put under oath.

On the witness chair, suddenly Beck felt as though she were back at her brother's college apartment, squashing her own hollowed ambitions of studying law like Colleen was. Not only because she felt an underlying loyalty to her projected career in the CIA, but also because of that underlying truth that there would never be a part of her that would be untainted or innocent enough to determine the guilt or the innocence of anyone else.

Beck felt like a fraud up on the witness stand.

Reid staring at her like she was a traitor from across the room wasn't helping.

"Serling is going to try to undermine you in every question he asks. You're going to have to be prepared to not rise to the occasion," Hotchner began his seminar as he stood a few feet ahead of the stand, the click of his dress shoes marking his pacing along the polished hardwood floors.

Beck fought the urge to prove his point by rolling her eyes.

Instead, the young agent held her right hand up. "I solemnly swear not to testify like a hothead."

Hotchner gave her a look that clearly expressed how unamused he was by her antics. "Focus, Ryder."

"You don't have to remind me to keep a level head. I know how to mind my manners in court," Beck replied, her tone bored. "In fact, I could be your perfect witness. Marisa Tomei would weep at my performance on the stand."

When Hotchner didn't respond or even show a sliver of recognition, Beck glanced over to Hillenbrand for verification. However, even the blonde lawyer looked to be a little confused at her reference. Beck didn't bother even glancing at Reid.

"'My Cousin Vinny'? 1992? Seriously?" Still no response. "'Chevy didn't make a 327 in '55. The 327 didn't come out 'til '62. And it wasn't offered in the Bel Air with a four-barrel carb 'til '64. However, in 1964, the correct ignition timing would be four degrees before top dead center,'" Beck quoted, even throwing in a little bit of her impression of Mona Lisa Vito's iconic New York drawl.

Even then, still not a trace of recognition from either Hillenbrand or Hotchner. Though, she did make out a little bit of an amused look on Cece's face that didn't exactly transfer over to Hotchner, who didn't seem to be impressed in the slightest.

"Can we get back to preparation?" the Unit Chief prompted, irritation clear in his voice.

Beck deflated.

Hotchner took that as his answer. "You're not on this stand to defend yourself, Ryder. You'll be on the stand to prove Matloff is guilty. But you should still remain diligent of what the defense will try and throw at you to get you to slip up."

The Agent was tempted to ask what Serling could possibly have on her that would get her to slip up, but she'd be at the mercy of Hotchner if she did. Hotchner, who definitely had a very vital secret piece of information on her that she didn't need Reid to overhear if the Unit Chief decided to use it to her disadvantage. Her body count wasn't something Reid needed to know after what he'd called her back in West Bune.

She took a shallow breath.

"Let's begin."

And with those words, Beck was under the knife.

"Ma'am, if you'd please state your name and title for the record."

Beck's lips pressed into a thin line. Hotchner was already starting to play his role as Serling, she took note of it in the way he'd addressed her as "ma'am" and not "Agent."

She cleared her throat. "My name is Rebecca Ryder, and I am a Supervisory Special Agent in the Behavioral Analysis Unit with the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

"And how long have you held this position?"

"Two hundred and seventeen days."

Hotchner's glare darkened.

"A little over seven months," Beck amended.

"In your professional opinion, what is it that your Unit specializes in?" Hotchner continued with the façade.

Beck frowned. "Our Unit doesn't have a sole, definitive area of expertise." Hotchner opened his mouth, ready to pounce like a regular attorney would. "However-" Beck quickly cut back in with a pointed look. "-we do share a common goal: to use our knowledge and diverse expertise to determine how to catch, diffuse, and prevent potential threats to the greater public."

From behind Hotchner, Beck could see Cece's satisfied smirk.

The Unit Chief himself, however, was not so easily wooed.

"And with that knowledge, you determined that Brian Matloff was a potential threat?" he pressed.

"My Unit determined Matloff as a threat, yes."

Hotchner's eyebrow ticked up in perplexion. "Your Unit. But not you?"

He was playing into Serling's smugness well. He was also playing on what Serling would find on Beck during discovery pre-trial; that she hadn't been involved in the original case like other members of the team. Beck didn't even get the chance to respond when Hotchner continued.

"Of course it wasn't you who classified Matloff as a threat. Seeing as you only just joined your Unit a little over seven months ago, you wouldn't have been involved with this case that began four years ago, is that correct?"

"No, I wasn't involved with the original case," Beck clarified. "But I'm involved now, and clearly the circumstances have changed."

"How so?"

Where to begin? Beck frowned as she began to form a rebuttal in her head. "Well, to start, I'd say a pretty big circumstantial change would be Mr. Matloff's claim of suffering from focal retrograde amnesia. Four years of lost time also tends to change a lot about a triple homicide case-"

"You're running on the presumption that Mr. Matloff is your Unit's guilty suspect from four years ago," Hotchner snapped back. "What's to say your Unit was wrong then, and what proves they're correct now?"

Beck pursed her lips. Oh, he wasn't going to make this easy for her. Good, she thought to herself, licking her lips. Because I'm not going to make it easy for him.

"Well, if you'd let me finish my answer..." she began with a sly smirk playing at her lips. "I would've told you that despite the circumstances changing, one thing that remains constant is the profile. The profile of someone capable of strangling three women, alone in the woods, then burying them in two-feet-deep graves isn't going to be slapped onto just any regular person. My- and my Unit's- job is to determine who would be capable of these heinous acts... Four years ago the profile determined that to be Brian Matloff. Amnesia or not, that still hasn't changed."

After her long-winded answer, she could tell Hotchner was at a loss for how to refute or argue her claims. She recognized the look on his face in the face of her Dad when he'd lose arguments with her on the most mundane of things or the face of her old CIA trainer when she'd give him verbal beat downs. The argumentative stage of her youth having known no bounds made it difficult for her to break her bad habit of always being so determined to be right.

Clearly, it was hard for Hotchner to accept when he was wrong.

"You sure you weren't lying to me about being a former law student, Agent Ryder?" Hillenbrand called out from where she sat at the prosecution table.

Beck and Hotchner both glanced over at the attorney; Hotchner with a look of mild agitation and Beck with an amused smile. The latter held her hand up in a mock-oath like she had done earlier, "I've never attended law school, Counselor."

The blonde clicked her tongue in disappointment, standing from her seat to take her place before the witness stand. Hotchner took her unspoken hint and slowly backed down from his 'preparation'.

"You mentioned expertise earlier, Agent. Do you mind specifying what it is you, individually, specialize in?" the attorney asked, donning the new role of pretending to be the defense.

"Not at all," Beck cleared her throat. "As a former field agent with the CIA's Counterterrorism Unit, I specialized in multiple fields of expertise. International espionage, psychological operations, military intelligence, and civil law were the main areas in which I operated. In the BAU, I use my experience and training to eliminate threats and maintain the safety of the public."

Cece nodded, satisfied with her response. "The CIA and the FBI are both very rigorous organizations to be a part of. I imagine there were many ethical grey areas you found yourself operating in in your line of work."

Beck narrowed her eyes. "Is there a question in there somewhere?"

"My question," Cece fixed her with a playful glare. Easy, her eyes communicated the unspoken words to Beck on the stand. "-is whether or not you'd consider Mr. Matloff's case to be an ethical grey area?"

"In what way?"

"Well, in your professional opinion, would you say that trying a man who has no recollection of three homicides would be deemed inhumane?"

Beck didn't have to think about her answer. Not again. "No."

"Care to elaborate, Agent?"

Beck felt her stomach drop. She had an answer for this question, like she had an answer for every other question. But what was making her hesitate was no longer the weight of the witness stand. It was the attentive Doctor who was hanging onto her every word a few yards away in the gallery.

"You're a killer!"

Beck let out exhale, followed by a sharp intake of breath.

"In my experience, ethical grey area would refer to the complicated reasoning for ending someone else's life. Killing doesn't come easy... to anyone. And in my line of work, not everyone has the luxury of keeping their hands clean. Ending someone's life never feels good, but sometimes it's necessary," the Agent explained.

Necessary. The word left a bitter taste on Beck's tongue as she remembered how Hawks would repeatedly engrain the word in her brain anytime she shed blood. Every body that she kept memories of locked away in some of the darkest crevices of her mind, all kept under the metaphorical file of "necessary."

Beck repressed a shudder.

"I don't believe anyone should be tried for something they did with a good conscience; with the betterment or safety of others in mind as they pull the trigger or watch the life fade from someone's eyes," she continued. "That's what ethical grey area covers. It's not excusing the murder of someone after the fact that their killer no longer remembers having committed the act."

Beck couldn't help but let her eyes trail away from Cece towards Reid. He tensed slightly beneath her eyes, and she refrained from breaking the stare. She wanted him to hear this part, she wanted him to understand.

"That being said, Mr. Matloff is a sick individual who strangled three innocent women for no other reason than to satisfy his own desires. He is-" nothing like me, her subconscious screamed out to her. "-far from forgiveness, and in no way does he deserve the mercy of this court. There's no ethical question about that."

Cece Hillenbrand, unaware of the double meaning her witness was expressing toward the other BAU agent across the room, smiled in satisfaction. "Nothing further," the attorney concluded. "Nicely done, Agent."

Finally breaking her gaze away from Reid, unable to decipher the Dr.'s emotionless expression, she shifted uncomfortably on the witness stand. "Thanks. Am I free to take a break for the bathroom or did you want to go over more theoretical arguments? I mean, I could do this all day, but..."

The attorney laughed. "Oh, I'm sure you could, but why don't you take a break anyway. I believe it's Agent Reid's turn now."

Typically, Beck knew this would be the point where she'd blatantly correct Cece Hillenbrand on Reid's correct title because she knew how much Reid disliked being referred to as "Agent." Probably about as much as she hated being called "Dr."

Despite her former habits still lingering, Beck knew better than to try and rekindle whatever half-assed friendship her and Reid had attempted to form over the past seven months. If 'friendship' was even the word for what they shared. Maybe just 'friendliness.' Whatever it was though, Beck knew that neither of them held trust in the other, effectively ending any trace of likeness the two shared.

Beck was all too eager to climb out from the witness stand. She couldn't help but feel the heated gaze Hotchner and Reid directed at her fleeting figure as she walked down the gallery aisle, back out the way she came.

Whether her team members believed the words she had testified held any weight or not, she wasn't going to force them to see her point of view because... well, why should she? She wasn't the one on trial.

—

The first day of the trial was hectic.

Beck had to be up and dressed to get to the Roanoke Courthouse by 9am, sharp. However, a downside to being on-call for testimonial in a Court of Law was that she had to be dressed a lot fancier than what she was used to. Typically, Beck would have rushed to Mrs. K's place to borrow some spanx and a blazer from Mya's days in debate club, but Hotchner had opted that the trio of them stay in Roanoke, even overnight. So, alas, Beck was left to fend for herself and was forced to go shopping the night before the trial.

After hours of browsing boutiques, department stores, and even the Dollar General, Beck managed to procure a simple long-sleeve, eggshell-colored (whatever the fuck that meant) turtleneck to wear tucked into a black pencil skirt. She had flashbacks to her Mom forcing her to wear stockings for Easter Mass as she tugged on some black spanx and slipped into a pair of knee-level black boots.

It was difficult not to feel out of place as she waltzed into the Courthouse doors, the only weapons capable of being hidden on her persons while in her fancy get-up being those of which she could fit in the inner pockets of her matching black blazer. Beck had made sure to get a Men's blazer instead of a Women's, specifically for the deeper pockets to carry her hand-held pistol, two throwing knives, and a single switchblade tethered to the single-strap thigh holster she had discreetly hidden beneath her skirt.

Had she worn her hair up, she would've even tried to hide a pick for the worst case scenario that she'd find herself in handcuffs at some point during the trial. But Beck didn't allow her paranoia to go that far. Instead, she opted for a simple half-up, half-down approach. She'd been told before in her time doing undercover training with Gina Sanchez and John Summers that the key to gaining trust was by presenting innocence in the form of associating your looks with childlike attributions.

In Gina's case, it was putting the younger agent in pigtails and offering her up as fresh meat for a trafficking ring in Havana. However, for Beck, she'd found that mimicking the effect of pigtails worked just the same if she pulled a bit of her bangs' side hair to the front of her ears and protruded her cheeks more by pulling back the top half of her hair up, while leaving some curls at the bottom, defined her girl-like features.

Anyone who would see her up on that witness stand wouldn't see the sharp-edged, dark and brooding Agent Beck Ryder. They'd see young, fresh-faced BAU profiler, SSA Rebecca Ryder. And all Beck had to do was glare a little bit less and be just a little more amicable than usual.

Upon entering the courtroom, it was clear that the national news coverage of this trial wasn't over exaggerated. It really did feel, from the look of all the cameras and reporters lining the back and side walls of the gallery, like the entire East Coast public broadcasting service was in the building.

Beck was so preoccupied with taking in all of the people inside the court room who hadn't been there the day before, that she'd almost run into the one person she had been dreading to see the most.

The young Agent stopped herself from walking into a pew just in time to not run her elbow directly into Reid's lower abdomen. "Oh, sh-"

Beck cut herself off once the initial shock of nearly running into the Doctor gave way and she was left with the overwhelming realization that this was the closest she'd been in proximity to Reid since nearly throttling him back in West Bune.

Once again, it was difficult to decipher Reid's facial expressions as he tried to look in every direction but hers. He cleared his throat as he uncomfortably shifted from his place, stuck between trying to get out of the row he had been seated in a second ago and staying put in spite of having to be seated next to a woman he was still at odds with.

Before either could speak up to excuse themselves from the row of seats just directly behind the prosecutor's table, Hotchner seemingly materialized from out of the crowd and blocked Beck and Reid's exit plan with his towering body. "Good, you're here," the Unit Chief noted of Beck's presence, but said it in a way that sounded as though he wasn't in the least bit relieved.

Caught off guard by what that could mean, Beck bristled. "Does Hillenbrand need us to testify after all?"

"She hasn't given any indication that she'd need your testimonies just yet," Hotchner explained. Beck deflated without even waiting to hear the rest of his response. Once she'd heard she was in the clear for now, she didn't really care about much else other than the sweet relief of just being able to watch the trial instead of be an active member. "But you should take your seats. Opening arguments are about to begin."

Beck opened her mouth to try and ask him to move out of the way so she could pick a different seat that was anywhere other than the same row as Dr. Reid, but it seemed the world wanted to play games with her wellbeing today of all days.

"All rise! The Honorable Judge Peter Wickham presiding,"

Hotchner was suddenly rushing away to his place beside Cece, leaving behind Beck and Reid; the pair standing stiffly beside one another as the rest of the crowd around them stood in tandem.

"You may be seated!"

Once those words rang clear through the room, the Agent and the Doctor had no other choice but to sit and stay where they'd unintentionally wound up beside one another.

Great, Beck inwardly cringed. If this day couldn't get any worse, maybe this was the best case scenario.

What could go wrong? Beck couldn't possibly imagine being stuck within close proximity of a man who momentarily vexed her was any worse than the hundreds of other less than savory, and even downright horrific, circumstances Beck had found herself in before. All she had to do was try not to pay so much attention to him and what he thought of her. What did it matter?

Seven months ago, Beck could live with the fact that Dr. Reid didn't even know who she was. Today, how hard could it be to get over the fact that Dr. Reid hated her now?

A lot harder than she'd come find...

It was suffocating, trying to pay close attention to everything happening in the trial while slipping up every so often. Whether it was having to catch herself nearly making snide comments beneath her breath so Reid could hear, like she'd used to before, or having to pretend not to notice when Reid would begin tapping coded words on the bench, only to abruptly stop after a few seconds... Beck's inner turmoil only grew inside this court room that felt more like a jail cell with every passing moment.

Despite the dragging opening arguments, Beck found herself able to focus a little more when Hotchner took the stand as the first primary witness for the prosecution.

Serling had already presented his plan for Matloff's defense: attack the so-called "pseudoscience" of profiling to shoot their case out of the water.

His fault, Beck found, was that that was all his defense was riding on. If he couldn't prove that profiling was a fraud, there was no other arguments he had that disproved his client's guilt. Too many eggs in one basket, Beck tsked as Cece and Hotchner began their practiced song and dance before the jury.

"So, through this process of Linkage Analysis, you concluded that all three murders were perpetrated by one man," the prosecuting attorney deduced, her voice projecting through the gallery.

Hotchner leaned forward into the mic. "Yes, that's correct."

"And you believe that man is Brian Matloff?"

"Yes, I do."

Beck followed the direction Cece pointed to a few feet away from the witness stand. It was difficult to see Brian Matloff from where she sat, but Beck could barely make out his side profile over his defense attorney's. The only thing setting the pair of men a part being that Matloff's suit was clearly less expensive and, of course, he didn't have hair to slather overpriced gel into like his attorney did.

Cece turned back to her witness. "Can you tell us how you came to that conclusion?"

"Along with Agents Reid and Morgan, we began to analyze the behavior of the Unknown Subject as manifested before, during, and after the commission of the murders. Our goal was to generate a suspect pool, a list of names which we'd eventually narrow down to one person," Hotchner explained the BAU's rigorous process in just a few simplified sentences.

"How so?"

"We followed the patterns of the murders," the Unit Chief answered simply. "The killer hunted in 200,000 acres of land that he was clearly familiarized with. He attacked high-risk victims, young, strong female joggers, but in low-risk locations. Agents Reid and Morgan deduced that due to the manner in which the Unsub attacked and disarmed his victims- by gaining their trust to garner control- that he would have been in a position of authority. This deduction revealed to us how the killer gained satisfaction from his crimes. By burying the victims in the park, he was able to revisit the scene and relive his acts over and over."

Beck let out a heavy exhale, letting out the shaky breath of air she'd nervously been holding during the most important part of Hotchner's testimony. The hard part of explaining the process was over, now Hillenbrand was setting her sights on solidifying the truth to what Serling brushed off as 'theories.'

"So, I imagine there are a lot of people who work for the Forest Service."

"1,718," Beck heard Reid whisper almost inaudibly beneath his breath. The young agent couldn't help the fond ghost of a smile that graced her lips for less than a second before Hotchner's testimony carried it away.

"Yes, but we knew from his familiarity with his hunting ground that he wasn't a new employee. He was cautious, organized, and left no traces of evidence behind. He was a textbook paranoia and we predicted that he'd already inserted himself into the investigation," the Unit Chief continued. "We then handed these parameters over to our Technical Analyst Penelope Garcia."

"And what did Technical Analyst Garcia do at that time?"

"We asked her to check names of Forestry employees against a list of witnesses interviewed by the Roanoke police."

Cece stepped forward, her hands crossed in front of her as she stood with her shoulders set and her facial expressions firm and sure. "And were you able to find a common denominator?"

Of course, she already knew the answer to the question before she asked it. But Rule #2 of Colleen's Unofficial List of Laws to Abide while Lawyer-ing was that an attorney's job was to do more than just lead the horse (the jury) to water with every question and potential answer in witness examination, they were supposed to shove the horse's face into the water of hard evidence and suffocate them with it until the truth was all they knew.

"Yes, one," Hotchner answered, his eyes trailing past the attorney towards the defendant behind her. "Brian Matloff."

And with that, Hotchner all but drowned a large portion of Serling's defense.

Cece Hillenbrand didn't do a very good job at hiding her smug smirk of subtle victory as she turned to the Judge. "Nothing further, your Honor," she proclaimed, her hips swaying a little more with every step she took back to her place at the prosecution's table.

"Defense," Judge Wickham called out to the occupants of the table opposite of Cece's. "Would you like to Cross Examine the witness?"

"Happily, your Honor."

Beck rolled her eyes at Serling's sly tone of voice. Reid probably saw, but she didn't care. He probably thought the defense attorney was just as much of a douche as she did, whether he agreed with her on most anything else or not.

"Now," Serling buttoned his three-piece as he stood up from his chair. "My client ran from the police, a behavior that you called..." the attorney glanced down at the open manila file spread before him. "... 'a strong indicator of his guilt.'"

"Yes, that's correct." Hotchner wasn't usually one for sly comments or witty retorts the way Beck typically was, but even she could recognize the fleeting flicker of mischief in his eyes as Serling stepped out from behind his table to play ball inside the Court.

"Were you aware that he had an outstanding warrant at the time of his arrest?" Beck scoffed. Was he supposed to be defending Matloff or digging him a new grave? She couldn't tell.

"Yes," Hotchner answered yet again. "I believe it was for an automobile accident, a hit and run."

Now, Serling was standing directly in front of the Unit Chief. The lawyer stared him down, "So isn't it possible that Mr. Matloff fled not because he was guilty of murder, but because of this other warrant?"

Hotchner's eyebrows furrowed in discontent. "There were eight law enforcement officers in bulletproof vests. I doubt any reasonable person would assume-"

"A yes or no answer will do," Serling interjected before Hotchner could blow his argument out of the water anymore than it already was.

"Yes, it's possible."

Beck had never seen Hotchner sound angry while smiling in amusement, yet there he was on the stand, staring at Serling as though he wanted nothing more for the man to get swallowed up by the Earth beneath his... Hm, cheap rip-off Oxfords?

Beck frowned as she leaned forward in her seat slightly. Serling, who drove an expensive Lincoln luxury vehicle into handicapped parking spots and wore overpriced cologne with his three-piece suit... couldn't afford real Oxford shoes? Interesting...

Reid picked up on Beck's skepticism, but couldn't quite place what it was she was specifically examining to the point of going so far as leaning forward in her seat. He wanted to ask, but bit his tongue to ensure his curiosity wouldn't get the better of him. He was still ticked at Beck and he'd be damned, no matter how childish it was, to be the person to break their stalemate now.

"So, you've stated that it was your profile of the killer that led you and the police to my client's door that night," Serling stated.

Despite there not being a question, Hotchner still took it upon himself to provide a response, "Behavioral Analysis was a factor in our investigation, yes." It was hard not to pick up on the agitation in his voice. Who's rising to the occasion now, Hotchner? Beck wanted to snidely remark.

"And was Behavioral Analysis also a factor in the Olympic Park Bombings case in Atlanta?"

Beck frowned. What the Hell did that have to do with Brian Matloff? She knew Serling randomly pulled that sole example of a profile gone wrong out of his ass, but there were a countless number of cases that proved the opposite point in which profilers got it right.

"Yes, it was," Hotchner answered, making sure to keep his voice even this time.

"And was that suspect you identified, Richard Jewell-"

"Oh brother," Beck grumbled beneath her breath.

"-ever convicted of the bombings?"

As if on cue, Hillenbrand piped up from behind the defense attorney, "Objection! Relevance?"

"Goes to the credibility of the witness and his field," Serling rebutted.

Judge Wickham glanced between the two lawyers before settling. "I'll allow it."

"No, he was not convicted," Hotchner answered, having no other choice but to go along with Serling's stupid game of 'Twenty Questions on the Stand.'

"Because... he was innocent," Serling concluded the point Hotchner refused to come to. "Your profile led you to the wrong man."

Not a question, Beck wanted to object as Hotchner persisted. "Jewell was not the perpetrator, but if you look at the real Olympic Park Bomber, Eric Rudolph, you'll see that our profile was dead on."

Clearly, not happy with that response, Serling retreated back to the manila folder at the table. "Well, how about if we look at the Baton Rouge Killer? Your Unit said that he was white and living in the city. He was Black and from the suburbs."

Unable to help herself, Beck kicked her heel into the back of the barrier that separated the gallery and Cece. Having felt the vibrations of the light thud against the back of her chair, the blonde peeked over her shoulder at the agent, a questioning look on her face.

'Sermon,' Beck mouthed to the attorney.

"You said that Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, was divorced and impotent," Serling continued his long-winded rant. "He turned out to be married with two kids!"

Taking the bone Beck threw her, Hillenbrand spun back around in her seat. "Objection, your Honor. He's giving a sermon."

Wordlessly agreeing with the blonde, Judge Wickham turned towards the defense attorney. "Do you have a question in there somewhere, Counselor?"

Beck smirked, too caught up in her own satisfaction to have noticed Reid staring at her out of the corner of his eye, having seen the entire exchange.

Without sparing a glance at the Judge or Hillenbrand, Serling persisted with his Cross Examination of Hotchner. "Having been wrong on those cases, isn't it possible that you were wrong about Brian Matloff?"

As the attorney held up his arm to gesture back towards Matloff behind him, Beck caught a brief glimpse of the way the sunlight from the overhead windows reflected on his oddly-pigmented Rolex watch on his wrist. Beck frowned. A fake Rolex, too? What were the chances that a high-paid attorney was sporting fake Oxfords and a fake Rolex? Was he putting on a front or was he really unable to afford common things regular attorneys of his standard had?

"No."

Hotchner was very firm and brief with his answer, but Serling continued.

"The fact is, Behavioral Analysis is really just intellectual guesswork." Cece was growing visibly upset by the defense attorney's blatant badgering now. "You probably couldn't tell me the color of my socks with any greater accuracy than a carnival psychic."

Cece finally shot to her feet at that statement. "Objection!"

"Withdrawn," Serling called over his shoulder, retreating from the witness stand. Beck shook her head, wishing she were in Hotchner's place so she'd have the chance at tearing the attorney apart by every string on his sock to overly-gelled tendril of hair on his head.

The feeling, however fleeting, was quenched when Hotchner lifted his mouth to the microphone once more. "Charcoal gray."

The room fell silent. No one, especially not Beck, had expected the Unit Chief to actually answer the rhetorical prompt that Serling had obviously meant to be an insult.

The young agent found herself hanging onto the edge of the bench by her fingertips, waiting for the interaction that was about to unfold before her. This was uncharted territory. When Beck had been instructed by Hotchner himself not to rise to the occasion, she didn't actually think she'd get to witness him throw that piece of advice out of the window with just two simple words.

Serling spun around on his heel. At first, expressing complete shock, then smiling demeaningly in the direction of the Jury as he lifted the end of his pantleg up to reveal his socks... Sure enough... "Well, look at that..." Charcoal gray. Beck's mouth fell in amused shock. "He got one right."

Much like the rest of the people in the room, Serling expected that to have been the end of that interaction. Bowing out his Cross Examination with the last laugh, despite having been proven wrong by his witness, Serling knocked on the table and headed back to stand over his seat.

However, before he could even sit down, Hotchner took it upon himself to continue his testimony.

"You match them to the color of your suit to appear taller. You also wear lifts and you've had the soles of your shoes replaced." So, he'd noticed that, too, Beck took note. "One might think you're frugal, but in fact, you're having financial difficulties." Beck thought he was finished, but to her enjoyment, he just kept going. "You wear a fake Rolex because you pawned your real one to pay your debts. My guess is to a Bookie."

Bristled, Serling scoffed. "I took this case Pro Bono. I am one of the most successful criminal attorneys in the state."

"Your vice is horses," Hotchner retorted. Beck's mouth was perpetually stuck in a wide smile of disbelief. "Your Blackberry's been buzzing on the table every twenty minutes, which happens to be the average time between posts from the Colonial Downs. You're getting race results, and every time you do, it affects your mood in Court, and you're not having a very good day. That's because you pick horses the same way you practice Law- by always taking the long shot."

Beck guffawed. Holy shit.

Beside her, even Reid had to smile in impressed amusement and fond recognition of the kind of smart-mouthed shit he's heard Hotch pull on people before; always the silent observer, striking when people least expected.

Finally regaining his wits about him, Serling managed a response. "Well, you spin a very good yarn, Agent, but as usual, you've proven nothing."

While Serling spoke, Beck watched Hotchner's head bow. It shot back up a few seconds later and his eyes focused on the Blackberry he'd mentioned Serling had placed on the table. "If I'm not mistaken, the results from the fifth race should be coming through any minute."

Just as Serling was opening his smug mouth to make another witless retort, the sound of his phone vibrating against the wooden table in front of him echoed across the empty Courtroom.

"Why don't you tell us if your luck has changed?" Hotchner teased the attorney, without breaking out so much as a smirk and maintaining his professionalism even after giving a verbal beat down to a lawyer in front of a jury.

If their positions were switched, Beck knew she'd be the one getting an earful for pulling some shit like what Hotchner just had. But from her place in the gallery, she was happy just having gotten to bare witness to that rare moment of Hotchner being an actual person capable of having humor and wit.

Trying to regain his wits once more, Serling attempted to object. "Your Honor, this is-"

"What do you want me to do?" the Judge retorted. "Either show us your Blackberry or cut him loose, Counselor."

After a tense moment of staring between the defense attorney and their Unit Chief up on the stand, Beck and Reid both watched as Lester Serling waved his metaphorical white flag with a look of utter defeat. "Nothing further," he stated.

"Wise decision," Judge Wickham hummed in acknowledgement, much to Beck's amusement. "Court will be adjourned until 9am tomorrow." The gavel hit the wooden block with a resounding 'bang,' and all bets were off.

As if the gavel had been a race pistol sounding off, Reid had been all too eager for the chance to jump around Beck to make his great escape from the pew. Beck tried not to let it show how hurt she was by his blatant discomfort in his presence.

After Reid's departure, Beck lingered near Cece's prosecution table as she glared at Serling's bowed head he kept hanging as he passed back down through the aisle of the gallery to make a swift exit, as well. He should be embarrassed, having been read to filth so easily on his own turf in front of his own colleagues and peers. Beck should feel bad, but he was defending a murderer and was an asshole on top of that. Two unforgivable sins in Beck's book didn't make you worthy of forgiveness.

Hotchner approached where Cece and Beck were waiting for him. "How'd we do?" he prompted the blonde.

Hillenbrand frowned. "It was touch and go there for a second, but I really think you brought it home with that last bit of testimony. Way to go off-book, Aaron," the lawyer chided, though she didn't sound angry in the slightest. In fact, Beck shifted uncomfortably at the underlying flirtatious tone in her words.

The young agent cleared her throat to make her presence at least a little more notable. Both Hotchner and Hillenbrand turned to face her, only separated by the wood gate between the gallery and the Court floor. "Nice job up there," Beck commended the Unit Chief dryly. "Quick question though: when you said not to rise to the occasion during testimony, was dragging that man's reputation through the mud in front of a Jury an example of what not to do, or...?"

In a rare display of humanity, Hotchner let out a chuckle. "I don't always lead by example."

"Clearly," Beck scoffed, thinking back on how ruthless he'd been in his breakdown of Serling's psyche. "If you don't need me until Court tomorrow, how much would I have to bribe a Bureau driver to escort me back to DC?"

Hotchner fixed the young agent with a look. Obviously, his small win didn't soften his uptight work ethic. "We're needed here in the off-chance that Matloff suddenly remembers anything from the murderers. This much exposure to his past could trigger him at any moment."

"You think he'd go on a spree out of panic?" Beck prompted, her fingers instinctually fidgeting with the hem of her skirt, idly tracing up the side of her thigh until the back of her knuckles traced the gun inside the right pocket of her blazer.

Hotchner's eyes traveled across the Courtroom toward where officers were taking Matloff away in handcuffs. "It's difficult to determine. He still seems..."

"Lost," Beck supplied.

She could see that same carved-out pumpkin look in Matloff's eyes now that he was facing the rest of the gallery wasn't being blocked by Serling's body frame. Even after hearing about himself being told from the perspective of the people who caught him four years ago, there wasn't a trace of recognition there, which perplexed Beck even more.

Beck let out a sharp exhale, removing her hand from her blazer and plucking her hotel key card from her pocket. Hotchner immediately zeroed in on the subtle action. "Where will you go?" he prompted her.

"Back to the hotel," she amended. "If I'm going to be stationed here on the off-chance that Lucy Whitmore over there regains his memories, I'm not gonna be stuck in this tight skirt." She winced as she reached down to pull the hem further down her thighs from where they'd ran up after she'd been seated for so long.

Confused by her reference, Hotchner furrowed his eyebrows.

Beck glanced up at him, expecting a response and being disappointed when, yet again, her fantastic pop culture reference flew over the Unit Chief's head. "Seriously? '50 First Dates'? Drew Barrymore? Adam Sandler?" Still no response. "God, you suck," the young woman muttered, quick to stalk off before Hotchner could get pissy about her joking insult.

Her boots clicked softly with every step she took that maneuvered her swiftly through the thick crowd exiting the Court room. She kept her eyes peeled for Serling, in case he was still pathetically lingering in the Courthouse, but instead happened to find the back of Dr. Reid's head. As Beck grew closer, she could make out that the Doctor wasn't alone.

He looked to be speaking to a short, older man. He was dressed semi-similarly to the young Doctor, and if Beck could make an assumption from his relaxed body language around Reid, the man knew him. But something that Beck did pick up the closer she got to the pair still talking amongst themselves, was how the man's eyes darted back and forth at every passing police officer.

Beck had gotten quite good at recognizing someone's tells, nervous ticks, and lying habits. This small, insignificant skill made her impeccably good at not just poker, but also in investigative circumstances.

It wasn't difficult to pinpoint the older man's nervous tick. People's eyes gave them away more often than not.

What he was hiding, however, remained a mystery to the young woman.

She lingered a few feet behind Reid as she watched the end of the exchange. The older man nodded, sparing Reid a comforting smile before excusing himself and walking off into the crowd headed towards the exit. Reid remained in one place, almost looking confused in his paralyzed state watching the man he'd just spoken to leave.

"Who was that?" Beck threw caution to the wind and took a chance at attempting conversation with Reid.

The Doctor jumped at her abrupt appearance. "How... how long have you been standing there?"

"Not long enough to eavesdrop," she joked. Her smile faded when Reid didn't appear to be amused by her crack. "He seemed nervous," she nodded her head in the direction that the older man had disappeared to. "Friend of yours?"

"Not exactly," Reid answered vaguely. When Beck waited patiently for him to provide an explanation, the Doctor reluctantly obliged. "That's Darci Corbett's dad. I was the one who talked with him after his daughter had been..." he trailed off.

Beck sighed. She understood now. "He's been through a lot. Obviously, he's going to be twitchy at the trial of the man who killed his daughter." She wasn't sure who she was trying to reassure, Reid or herself. Maybe she didn't want to believe the gut instinct she had about the real reason that Mr. Corbett was acting off.

"Hm," Reid hummed, not bothering to look back at her in his acknowledgement. "So you don't think he has underlying intentions to take justice into his own hands tomorrow before the trial?"

She blinked. "Y- how..." the agent furrowed her eyebrows in confusion. When Reid slowly turned to face her, the puzzle pieces fell into place. "You knew already, didn't you?"

The Doctor stared blankly at her. "Yeah. You know, you're not always the smartest person in the room, believe it or not." Beck reeled from Reid's abrupt change of tone. "Although, it's good to know you're not past keeping things like an attempt on Matloff's life a secret from the rest of us. Makes you wonder what else you're capable of hiding behind ethical grey area."

The young Agent nearly blanched at how brutally Reid was twisting the blade of his words into her chest. The worst part was that it didn't even look as though he took satisfaction from seeing her wither ever so slightly under his piercing gaze and shift uncomfortably at his cruel comments he threw back at her in the form of her own testimony from earlier. Perhaps maybe he felt as though he'd done enough damage from the lack of response he got from her because after a few tense moments of silence, the Doctor was all too hasty in his departure towards the Courthouse door.

Beck felt the air return to her lungs once Reid didn't feel like such a suffocating presence.

Her clouded thoughts cleared up once the initial shock of Reid's remarks finally dissipated. The frustration that had been building in her chest for the past few weeks- every time Reid had made passive aggressive comments beneath his breath or any time she had to bite her tongue since West Bune so she wouldn't step on the Doctor's toes- was finally reaching a boiling point.

Initially, Beck had every intention of allowing Spencer Reid to feel what he felt about her: pissed off, agitated, exasperated, angry. Whatever it was, it didn't matter to her because Reid certainly wasn't the first person to hate her and wouldn't be the last. But this... This was a shift.

This was the end of Beck's patience she'd given Reid in his month and a half of throwing himself a pity party while simultaneously stepping all over her back as though she'd done anything directly to him to deserve the treatment.

She made an executive decision while standing amongst the bustling crowd of bystanders in the foyer of the Roanoke Courthouse: she was done with the bullshit.

Within a few short strides, Beck had made it out of the double doors and had no trouble at all spotting the Doctor as he descended the last of the stairs down towards the parking lot. "Hey!" she called after him as she herself began to climb down.

"Hey!" She shouted a bit more forcefully once her feet hit the last set of stairs.

Reid halted in his steps, just a few yards ahead of her. His eyes widened once he realized how close she was. "What are you-"

"What? You think you can talk to me like that, run off, and expect me not to come back to give you a piece of my mind?" She shot back at him, and although she stood at a few feet shorter than the Doctor, she still knew how to make herself look intimidating from even at a disadvantage in height. "What gives you the right to say shit like that to me? Mouth off like you think you're somehow better than me all because I pissed you off in West Bune?"

Reid's eyes flickered with that same fury she'd seen in them back in Texas. "Owen Savage-" he started, but she'd already had enough.

"-was a spree killer with eight bodies under his belt that had every intention of adding you to his list," Beck shot back at him, her teeth grit as she growled the last part of her sentence. "So you can stand there and bitch all you want about the Savage kid, but you and I both know that that's not what this is about. Now stow the 'woe is me' bullshit, because if you're not going to be straight about why you're pissed at me, then as far as I'm concerned- you can shove it, Dr. Reid."

Now it was the Doctor's turn to reel from the words being spat at him. She really was giving him a taste of his own medicine, and maybe for a second, Reid had a moment of clarity. A brief moment where he had forgotten about what he'd read in Gideon's letter to Hotch, about his conversation with Prentiss a few days ago, and forgotten about why he'd been so upset with Beck to begin with.

For a second, he saw Beck in the light he had when they'd first met... an angry young woman, unrelenting in her strife to get the job done and complete her mission.

The aggressiveness she was reciprocating to his passive aggressiveness now fanned an idle flame that still hadn't gone out from their initial argument in West Bune. Reid could tell that since their standoff in Texas, neither of them had really let go of the grudge- like Spencer assumed she at least had.

She was right about one thing in her retort: Reid had been mistaken in assuming she was going to let anyone, himself included, tell her how to do her job or get in her way. He'd thought he'd known her well enough to pick up on her habits- her anger being one of them- but he'd been wrong about Beck; she didn't lash out at people as a defensive tool to distract from her own feelings of insecurity.

What Reid had failed to see up until this moment was that her lashing out was a part of a built-in response to threats or obstacles that kept her from doing what she was trained to do: complete her mission.

The moment of clarity passed as quickly as it came. Reid regained his wits soon enough. "You want to know what this is about? Fine," he spat back frustrated. "Jason Gideon has been missing for over 230 days and I want to know what you haven't been telling us about it."

"You-" Beck blanched, momentarily caught off guard by the abrupt change of subject. "You think I had something to do with Gideon leaving?"

"No. No, I don't think you had something to do with him leaving," Reid's voice dropped dangerously low in a way that made Beck take an instinctual step back. She was even more startled when the Doctor matched her pace. "I think you were the reason he left."

The Agent shook her head. "You don't know what you're talking about," she insisted.

"I don't, huh? Then who's 'Sword'?"

... No...

White noise rang deafeningly in the young woman's ears as blood rushed from her head to her chest. She could feel the thumping of her heart in every hallowed rib lining her lungs that felt as though they were going to burst. Beck couldn't tell what she looked like in that moment of pure shock, but she probably looked like a deer caught in headlights.

Beck tried to play it off.

"W-Who?"

Reid scoffed in disbelief. "Right," he rolled his eyes. Beck had never seen him this way. Irate, angry, agitated. He looked as though he were trying to keep himself in check, as though she were frustrating him up to this point. "Vietnam. 1990. Sound familiar yet?" he snapped.

Beck shook her head again, this time more forcefully. "You're delusional. I've never heard of-"

"Gideon called you Rebecca."

She paused. Her eye twitched.

Reid remained stoic, expectant.

"Really? Still with the name? My God-!" Beck threw her head back in frustration.

The Doctor persisted. "You correct everyone on your name!"

"-do you ever quit?"

"You think it doesn't matter, but it does-"

"My name has nothing to do-"

"-because he knew you before that was your name!"

Beck threw her hands out exasperatedly. "Then what do you think this all means? What's the big picture? What do you think I'm hiding, Spencer?" she shot back, every word laced with a mixture of desperation and equal amounts of venom.

There was a beat of tense silence that passed between the pair, the only sounds coming from the bustling Courthouse pedestrians in the parking lot several yards away.

For a second, Beck foolishly thought she'd had him beat. What she wasn't expecting was him coming back at her with a vengeance.

"Aliana Ahmed."

It took half a second for the name to register in Beck's brain. It took another half second for for her to physically recoil in response. How did he...?

"Vernon and Andrade Benavidez."

What the shit.

"Isaiah Wentworth."

He wasn't supposed to know these names.

"Jacob O'Malley. Charlie McNamara. Marco Armendariz."

Beck screwed her eyes shut. She was imagining this. This wasn't real. "Stop-"

"Pavel, Katherine, and Leilani Yeoh."

No, no, no, no, no. "Reid, I said stop," she stuttered through gritted teeth, her hands ramrod straight at her sides as her fists clenched and unclenched with every name Reid said aloud. "That's enough-"

"'1990, Vietnam. I failed you.'" Reid recited, not capable of seeing his teammate wither away with every name he used against her. But despite how difficult it was, he wanted answers. He wanted to know the woman he'd come to trust in the past several months wasn't just another killer. "Who is 'Sword,' Beck? Who?!"

"John Ackerman!"

It was Reid's turn to have the wind knocked out of him. "W-What-"

"John Ackerman," Beck repeated, a bit more firmly. "That was the name of your sponsor, wasn't it? From NA?"

The flames of anger that had been fueling Reid's words and actions up until this point were abruptly extinguished. Now all he felt was fear. He wondered if this pitiful, gut-wrenching feeling of having someone admit to knowing one of your deepest, darkest secrets was what Beck felt when he was listing off the names of the people she'd killed in her time with the CIA.

"How do you know that?"

Beck's nose twitched. A habit Reid had come to recognize as a tick she had for when she'd get angry, so angry that she'd eventually have to leave the room. The Doctor never got the chance to see what happened behind closed doors, but from the tell-tale signs that ranged from her wet eyes to the vein in the side of her neck protruding more than usual, he could only assume she was someone who'd cry when they got this angry.

Carefully, the shorter woman leaned forward, her face just a few inches beneath his as her dark brown irises bore into his. "You have my secrets... And I have yours," she whispered in a dangerously calm tone of voice.

Once she knew her point had been received, Beck slowly backed away.

The damage had been done, and maybe even a few things had been restored with this single heated argument in the middle of a busy parking lot. Most of the cards were down between the two, Beck wasn't sure what else there was to say. She'd revealed her Ace right after he'd revealed his. He knew about her list of names, she knew about his old narcotics habit.

Everything was out in the open.

Sparing one last glance toward the Doctor, Beck let out a sharp exhale. "Now we're even," was the last thing she said before marching back to the Courthouse.

Reid watched her as she departed. His mind racing a million miles per hour as he tried to come up with any kind of coherent theory that would explain how Beck knew about his... addiction.

Of course, she knew the feeling of desperately trying to piece together how her secrets ended up seared into Reid's head, like his sponsor's name was engrained into hers. He had his own way of acquiring her secrets through a provided paper trail Gideon unintentionally left behind for him to find, but even then he only had a piece of the Beck's puzzle.

It dawned on Spencer then that she had been right: they were even. And he'd reluctantly have to have trust in Beck that she wouldn't use his secrets against him, anymore than he'd want to use what he knew against her...

Now we're even.

—

The second day of trial was tense.

Since yesterday, new evidence had come to light. Cece Hillenbrand's case had been drenched in gasoline and set aflame with Prentiss, Rossi, JJ, and Garcia's recent discovery of Nina Moore.

Nina Moore was an older woman, middle-aged and Native American. She was Matloff's biological mother whom he'd managed to track down just a few weeks before the first murder. Nina Moore was their trigger and she'd be the missile that sunk the Defense's attempt at painting Matloff as this innocent victim of wrongful accusations.

The Courthouse was packed. More packed than usual by reporters and spectators alike now that today was anticipated as the day that the jury would go into deliberation. Beck, still in her attempted business-casual attire, felt naked in her pencil skirt and had opted today to wear nicer dress pants. She was nervous for today, for what would happen once Matloff was exposed to what triggered him to kill in the first place. Seeing the nameless faces of the women he slaughtered and not recognizing was one thing, but the woman whom all of this was founded around...

Beck idly traced the outline of her pistol weighing down the belt behind her back, hidden by the suit jacket she was wearing.

Another outcome she was hoping wouldn't go as planned was Mr. Corbett's suspected attempt on Matloff's life. Don't get Beck wrong, she wouldn't lose a day of sleep over that bastard getting a bullet to the cranium from the father of one of his victims, but she wouldn't enjoy having to arrest Mr. Corbett for it.

As if on cue, Beck turned to glance back at the double doors to the Courtroom where Mr. Corbett was being led inside, Reid at his side. The second Beck caught sight of the Doctor, she turned away, as if scared to get caught staring. After their confrontation the other day, it was safe to keep a distance from the Doctor now that she knew he was aware of her list of people that she'd killed in her time with the CTU, and he knew that she was aware of his Dilaudid habit.

The air between the two was like the helium in the Hindenburg, the slightest flame could send them both crashing and burning.

"The Defense would like to call up our new witness," Cece stated as she stood before the judge and newly returned jury.

Beck tuned back into the trial, trying to forget the turmoil outside of these courtroom walls. Right now she had a job to do, and she was no use to anyone with her head so caught up in the smoke and mirror show that was Dr. Spencer Reid.

An older woman with greying hair and a darker complexion walked up to the witness stand. She looked nervous. She looked guilty... of what, though, Beck couldn't determine.

"Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?"

The older woman shifted slightly under the weight of the court's eyes on her. "I do solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that the testimony I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," she declared, her voice not wavering under the pressure.

Cece took a deep breath before beginning.

"Do you mind stating your name for the record?" she prompted.

"My name is Nina Moore," she answered with certainty.

"And what is your relationship to the Defendant?"

"I'm his birth mother."

You could hear a pen drop and echo inside the courtroom. Small gasps could be heard from the crowd surrounding Beck. She could hear the tips of reporter's pens hitting notepad paper at an alarming rate. This was the turning point of the trial.

Cece turned to face the jury. "His biological mother," she reiterated for affect.

Nina Moore's eyes dropped to her lap, probably trying to avoid the prying eyes of Matloff who looked as though the only thing keeping him from running out of the room was the flesh of his own skin keeping him in place.

"I gave him up for adoption when he was a baby," Mrs. Moore explained.

"And that was how long ago?"

"Thirty-seven years."

Beck couldn't help but cut her attention in half, splitting it between Nina Moore's facial expressions during her testimony and Brian Matloff's back as his body language gave off the impression that he was well and truly affected by this turn of events. His shoulders were slouched, his posture rigid. His back was ramrod straight and his fingers clutched at the edge of the Defense table as if it were keeping him tethered to this reality. Beck couldn't imagine what must've been going on inside his head right now.

"So, you didn't have a relationship with him?" Cece prompted.

Mrs. Moore shook her head. "No, I never saw him. Until 2003."

"He tracked you down?"

"Yes," she replied, though it sounded a little forced. For a second, perhaps she felt maternal almost... guilty for framing her biological son as someone capable of tracking her down, like a hunter almost. "We met at a café and talked for a bit, and then he left."

"And what did you talk about?" the blonde attorney pressed.

Mrs. Moore took a deep breath, collecting herself before giving her answer. "He said he wanted to be a part of my life. I told him it was impossible."

Beck felt her chest tighten. Rejection from his biological mother. A clear and indicative trigger for the murders.

"You felt that he was being..." Cece trailed off, pacing the court floor, giving Brian Matloff a clear view of Nina Moore up on the witness stand. He looked as though he were glaring holes through her skull, trying to dig for answers in her brain he knew he didn't have in his own. "...Unrealistic, irrational even?"

"No, not at all," she insisted. "He was just a little lost. He wanted to belong to something... Turning him away was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do." The older woman was beginning to break down into tears and hysterics on the stand. Matloff bowed his head as her testimony continued. "A person can't live two lives. I'm sorry, Brian. I'm so sorry!"

Beck's chest tightened yet again, but this time it wasn't because of any type of realization or break in the case. It was because she almost felt bad for Matloff.

He was a killer. Maybe he did have amnesia, and perhaps he really didn't remember what he'd done in this current state, but it didn't change that he did it. She shouldn't feel bad for Brian Matloff, but Beck couldn't help it. Maybe it should've bothered her more with how much she felt for the man a little. As someone who was also adopted, she couldn't imagine what it would do to her if she tracked down her birth parents and they rejected her the way Nina Moore had done to Brian Matloff. Frankly, the possibility scared her shitless to the point where she hardly ever thought about tracking them down for that exact reason.

Still, Beck brushed aside these feelings and turned her Agent Brain back on, eliminating all distracting trains of thought in order to remain focused.

"Mrs. Moore," Cece interjected, trying to rear her testimony back on track. "Did the Defendant make any subsequent attempts to communicate with you?"

Still sniffling, Mrs. Moore pulled her composure back together enough to give the rest of her testimony. "A... few months after that, I got something in the mail. There was no note or anything, just a postmark from Roanoke, and I knew that's where he lived."

"And what were the contents of that envelope?"

"It was a necklace. Two months after that I got another. And then a watch. I thought he was trying to... I- I don't know, to persuade me with gifts. I thought they were estate jewelry."

Beck swallowed hard. She could see where Cece was leading this testimony. One part of Beck was satisfied to finally be able to see Brian Matloff get put away for his crimes, but the other part of Beck, the one staring at the back of Brian Matloff's bowed head, couldn't bring herself to feel any kind of satisfaction staring at the scene before her. There were no winners in this case. This wasn't going to have a happy ending. Because at the end of the day, was there really any justice to be had in this scenario?

"Your Honor," Cece directed the conversation to her new closing argument. "I'd like to enter into evidence People's Exhibit F through H." The blonde attorney made her way across the floor to the Prosecution's table where Hotchner sat vigilantly and still. She picked up several small bags of jewelry. Carefully, Cece brought them over towards where Mrs. Moore sat at the stand. "Are these the items that you recieved in the mail?"

She studied them for a moment before answering, "Yes."

"And the watch in this bag-" Cece held up a bag beside a complimenting photo of Darci Corbett. "-do you see it in this photograph?"

Mrs. Moore looked as though she was trying not to throw up right then and there. "Yes, that's it," she answered begrudgingly.

"Let the record reflect the Witness has identified the watch worn in this photograph by murder victim Darci Corbett," Cece exclaimed, walking past the jury holding the same pieces of evidence she'd just shown to Mrs. Moore.

Beck didn't need to see the look on Cece's face to know that there probably wasn't an ounce of nervousness or hesitation in her expression. She could see it in her walk back to the Prosecution table and the way in which she stated that she had nothing further to present that Cece Hillenbrand knew that they had the case in the bag.

Beck, however, wasn't so sure. An uneasy feeling settled in her stomach the longer she stared at the back of Matloff's head, watching him struggle with himself internally as the world kept spinning around him.

The young agent had seen a lot of shit in her life. And while she may not have had the most experience in courtrooms like Cece or Hotchner, she sure as shit recognized the look on someone's face when their entire world just caved in on itself and turned on its axis. Although she only spotted his face for a brief second, Beck could see that look reflecting in Matloff's eyes as he was led away after court had been adjourned.

Not wasting a second of her time, Beck pushed herself past the rows of people to get towards the gate leading out onto the court floor where Hotchner was already standing above the Defense table, staring at something unseen now that the two occupants had been ushered away.

"Hotchner," Beck tried to get his attention to no avail. "Hotchner." He glanced up at her this time, tearing his eyes away from whatever it was he was examining that Matloff had left on the table. "I think he's starting to remember."

"Why do you say that?" he prompted.

Beck shook her head, a million well-thought out explanations running through her head, but not a single one that she could readily explain without first needing a pot of coffee and an hour of time neither of them had to waste.

"Call it a hunch."

Hotchner frowned, taking in her words and the situation at hand. He glanced back down at the table, this time Beck followed his gaze to find the notepad that Matloff had left with jotted things he'd randomly remembered... or so it seemed. Each line read a random thought or distant memory he'd seemed to recall.

But what stuck out weren't the sweet nothings and recollections of a man regaining beautiful childhood memories that stood out on the notepad... it was the single smeared tear stain that distorted the ink in the center of the page that did.

"I think you might be right," Hotchner admitted.

Beck shook her head. "What do we do? Are we supposed to tell the warden, the judge-"

"Calm down-"

"I am calm," she shot back. When he peered down at her with a stern look, she sighed. "Okay, fine. What do you suggest we do?"

Hotchner clenched his jaw, his eyes scanning the room for the next course of action. "I need to go find Cece to discuss a next course of action. You need to go find Nina Moore. Keep her safe in case Matloff decides to try something daring now that he may be regaining some of the darker parts of his memory."

Beck nodded. "But..." she hesitated for a moment. "But what if he goes on a rampage instead? I mean, look at what his mother's rejection did to him the first time. It's happened again and it's happening at a point where the floodgates are opening and all of these distant, twisted and dark memories are coming back to him. He'll become desperate and who knows who he'll hurt, it won't just be Nina Moore."

"You can't be everywhere at once, Ryder," the Unit Chief chastised her, much to her frustration.

"I don't need to be everywhere at once. I just need to be at his side," she retorted, leveling her eyes with his. "Because if push comes to shove and he has to decide whether to embrace this blissful ignorance, this new persona that still doesn't have any emotional connection to these murders, or the side of him that does because he's so overwhelmed with rage and desperation- he's going to choose the one that gives him the most release."

Hotchner was inclined to believe her. After all, from the look in his eyes she recognized as genuine fear and worry, he really didn't have a lot of choice once he realized she was right. Again.

"Go find him. Don't let him out of your sight," Hotchner ordered.

Beck nodded, not wasting another minute as she dashed back through the gallery of the court room. For a moment, she could see the outline of Dr. Reid as he glanced between her exiting swiftly and Hotchner staying behind near the Defense table.

For a split second, she considered filling him in on the plan, but figured he was just another person in the way that could be hurt in the fallout if something went wrong.

Beck rushed through the courthouse, pushing through reporters and the sea of police officers at every corner. She could see none of them were really alert, aware of what might come. The young agent didn't even have to flash her badge in order to get herself into the court jail a few hallways down from where the trial had dispersed.

"Where is he?" she demanded of a middle-aged, balding officer who looked to be in charge.

He peered down at her, his hands on his belt. The rest of the officers standing beside him near the coffee pot halted their conversations to tune in. "Do you know who you're talking to, Little Miss? Thinking maybe you might be lost."

"You are Deputy Callum, yes?"

"That's right," he chuckled in a way that made her skin crawl. She could smell the disdain coming off his breath like lingering cigar smoke. "And you are...?"

Beck smiled. She loved this part.

Carefully, she reached into her jacket and brandished her credentials.

"Supervisory Special Agent Rebecca Ryder."

The smiles fell from the officers' faces. Beck's only grew wider.

"Would you mind pointing me in the direction of where your officers took Brian Matloff?"

Deputy Callum coughed to cover a choking sound from the back of his throat. "Gomez," he addressed an officer nearby with a hoarse voice. "Where did, uh, where did your unit take Matloff?"

An officer, whom Beck presumed to be Gomez, staggered forward, forgetting the hot mug of coffee he'd been preparing. "Uh, Matloff was taken to cell block four. Lidia took him back."

Beck nodded, not bothering to stick around to hear the awkward apologies already pouring out of their mouths as she left them behind.

Her eyes scanned every cell block number on the sides of the court concrete walls. Cell block one... Cell block two... Cell block three... Cell block four!

Beck pushed through the door and what she found were her worst fears coming to life before her eyes.

Lying on the ground in a puddle of her own blood was the officer Gomez had referred to as Lidia. There was a gaping wound on the side of her head and she was sprawled out unconscious on the concrete floor.

Beck dropped to her knees beside the woman and turned her head to lift it off the ground. Carefully, she traced a finger down to her pulse point and let out a sigh of relief when she felt the familiar beat under her fingertip. She was alive, thankfully.

Not wasting another second, Beck kicked the door open and screamed out into the open hallway. "Hey! I've got an officer down! I need a bus and emergency units- NOW!"

There was shuffling and the sound of boots hitting the floor echoed in the small cell block as Beck tried to focus on getting Lidia back up. "Officer... Mitchell?" she read the nametag on her breast pocket.

Just as Beck had begun to lift her up from off the floor, the woman jostled awake, kicking and shoving as if trying to fight off her attacker.

"Hey, hey, hey- take it easy. Take it easy." Beck held her hands up to show that she wasn't a threat.

"What- what happened?" Lidia hiccupped, her hands coming up to her head before she winced from the contact.

"Careful," Beck warned. As if on cue, another officer entered the room with a first aid kit. He placed it down and Beck went right to work, grabbing a disinfectant cloth and an icepack to wrap it around. She held it up to Lidia's head and gently pressed to keep the blood from spilling anymore. "You took a pretty bad hit. You may be concussed... Can you tell me what happened?"

Lidia looked lost for a moment. She took over Beck's hold on the icepack on her head, wincing as she pressed down harder. "I... It happened so fast. I didn't have time to react. He just-" she cut herself off, shaking her head.

Beck leaned forward. "Lidia," she spoke firmly, but gently. The officer looked back up at her. "I need you to tell me what Matloff said or did before he attacked you."

A look of horror dawned upon her features. "He hasn't been caught?"

Beck shook her head. "I only just found you here unconscious. The trial just let out a few minutes ago though, so he can't be too far. But I need your help to verify whether or not he's getting his memories back," the agent explained. "We need to know where to look for him, but first we have to find out who he is right now. So what did he say before he attacked you? Can you remember?"

Slowly, Officer Mitchell nodded.

"Okay, that's good. What happened?"

"He... he seemed upset when I was undoing his cuffs. I asked him if he was alright. He told me he just had a lot on his mind," Lidia began to recall. "Then he asked about the trial and he'd asked about something from his mother's testimony. About... choosing one life. He asked if I thought it was true."

Beck felt her skin break out into goosebumps.

"A person can't live two lives," Nina Moore had sobbed on the stand only moments ago.

Matloff was making his decision between his two lives. And introducing Nina Moore to the equation certainly wasn't a factor that would've helped him choose the lesser of two evils.

"He asked me if I thought someone would have to choose before he just... knocked me down. That's all I can remember, I'm sorry-"

"It's enough," Beck assured her. "One last thing... did he refer to Nina Moore as his mother?"

Lidia looked stoic for a moment, mentally reliving the memory before giving her answer. "Yes, he did... Why is that important?"

Beck shook her head. "It means he's beginning to revert back to who he was before he lost his memories. He's remembering what drove him to kill," she answered truthfully. "Is there anything else you can remember?"

Before Beck could get an answer, she heard a familiar voice from outside of the cell. Beck turned around, not exactly expecting a wall of other officers to be lingering outside as all out chaos had broken out the second Beck had announced that she'd found Officer Mitchell unconscious and an inmate missing.

"Excuse me."

Hotchner pushed through the crowd with ease, maneuvering his way into the cell to find his agent accompanied by an injured officer. "Are you okay?" Beck was a little caught off guard by his genuine concern directed at her, rather than the woman before her with a gaping wound on the side of her head. He must've caught on to her slight confusion because he immediately redirected his concern to the officer in front of them. "What happened?"

"He has my gun," Lidia explained through gritted teeth.

Just then, the EMTs began to push through the crowd.

Beck took a step back, allowing the professionals to do their job. "She has a head injury on her frontal bone. She most likely has a concussion, but I'd still take her in for an MRI in the off chance he hit her hard enough to form a contusion. The bleeding is too heavy to not take the risk seriously," she debriefed one of the EMTs immediately upon arrival, not bothering to address the loaded look Hotchner was giving her after hearing her rundown.

Now wasn't the time for the conversation and, frankly, she didn't have the patience to get another lecture from someone in the BAU after already having had her argument with Reid.

"Come on, he couldn't have gotten far on foot," Beck stated as she brushed past Hotchner to get out of the cell.

He was quick to catch up, hot on her trail as they made their way to the front of the building.

The courthouse was already surrounded by police cars and emergency vehicles. Anyone who was inside the courthouse wasn't going to be leaving until Matloff was found, but by the look of it... he might've already bolted.

"Over there," Hotchner gestured towards a group of EMTs addressing the wounds of a woman near the sidewalk. "What happened?" The Unit Chief prompted no one in particular as a larger group of officers all but huddled around the obvious federal agent among their ranks.

One Sergeant took it upon himself to take the reigns.

"She's a law clerk. Matloff stuck a gun in her face, pulled her out of her car- late model Nissan," he explained in a rush of words.

"And you put out an APB?"

"Statewide. We'll block every road out of town."

Beck shook her head. It wouldn't be enough if he was apart of the Park Service. "Don't forget service roads. He knows them all," Hotchner supplied as if he had read her mind.

"You know this guy, right?" the Sergeant began. "Any idea where he might be headed?"

"All depends on who he is." Beck stiffened at the sudden appearance of Dr. Reid. He must've caught all of the chaos from inside the courtroom and came outside to put the pieces together of what must've happened while he was busy babysitting Darci Corbett's Dad.

Beck barely spared him an acknowledging look. One he reflected with his own brief look of reluctant acknowledgement. They'd have to work together in order to catch Matloff. Reid knew Matloff the most in terms of how long he'd worked on this case, but Beck knew the mind of a killer. Whatever was between them would have to be set aside in order to get Matloff back.

"Hey. Hey!"

Both Reid and Beck were jostled by Hotchner's abrupt dash towards Lester Sterling as he made a break for his car.

"Did you know?"

"Know what?" Beck narrowed her eyes. Either Serling was really good at playing dumb or he genuinely had no idea what was going on with his own client.

Hotchner didn't let up, either way. "You talked to Matloff every day. Did you know that his memory was coming back?"

"I don't have any idea what you're talking about," Serling retorted. This time, Beck really did believe him. He sounded more irritated than defensive.

"Hotch," Reid quickly cut in. "He can't help us. Matloff is a paranoid personality. Even if he was aware, he wouldn't have told anyone."

Beck frowned, "He hinted towards his memory coming back to Officer Mitchell. Just before he attacked her. He referred to Nina Moore as his mother just after he heard her testimony."

The Unit Chief's frown deepened. He knew he was chasing a dead end with Serling. He gestured for the two agents to follow him as he took a few steps away from the clueless attorney. "Get over to the jail and into his cell," he ordered the two. "Just look for anything, any clue that might tell us where he's headed."

"Both of us?" Reid prompted, dumbfounded.

Hotchner glanced between the two expectantly. "... Yes. Go."

The two didn't question him after that, so not to let him onto the fact that the two were at each other's throats. Especially not during a high stakes case. The last thing either Reid or Beck wanted to do was tip off their Unit Chief into investigating their feud and adding fuel to the flames.

So, in order to focus, it was a unanimous decision to not speak about the elephant in the room as they crammed into Matloff's small cell and went right to work trying to figure out where he could've gone in the case that he regained all of his memories.

"His trigger was his birth mother. Of course it would've been her that triggered the reemergence of his memories," Beck shook her head as she idly flipped through reports the officers had given the pair to look into.

Per court ordinance, the officers monitoring Matloff were to submit any piece of evidence that Matloff had written or doodled with pen and paper in the worst case scenario like the one they were in now. So far, Beck was coming up empty.

"But he can't reach Nina Moore here. She's heavily protected and he's not looking for a suicide run... at least not yet."

"He's looking for answers," Reid supplied. He was elbow-deep in the underside of Matloff's thin and scrappy mattress. Underneath, he produced a series of hidden papers he'd drawn and written on. "Writing down memories... questions he had for his other self. Almost as if he's thinking of the Brian Matloff who committed the murders as another person entirely. And he-"

Beck lifted her head when Reid abruptly stopped speaking. "What is it?" she set down the stack of papers in her hand to walk over to where he stood in the middle of the cell, staring down at something unseen in his hand.

"I recognize this place," the Doctor explained as he used his free hand to dig into his pocket for his phone.

While he dialed up Hotchner, Beck took the papers in her own hand. She traced the edge of it as she memorized the sketched photo staring back at her of a mountainside with a large waterfall pouring down the center. This was a place in his head... This was a place that stuck out even through the haze of dozens of years of memories.

Wherever this place was, that was where Matloff was headed.

"Hotch, I think I know where he's going," Reid explained on the phone.

—

The Bureau issued Kevlar vest felt lighter than usual on her, Beck noted as she fastened the clasps around her diaphragm. It might've just been the adrenaline starting to pick up in her bloodstream. She wasn't anxious, but she never stopped being constantly vigilant in high-stakes situations.

Beck carefully placed her pistol in the back of her belt, securing it not too tight so it wouldn't be difficult to access in a time of quick peril, and not too loose on the off chance she'd have to get into a physical altercation and couldn't have her gun flying off her waist so carelessly.

Preparing to find a serial killer in his natural habitat, out in the National Park wilderness, Beck was going in on the assumption that this would only end one way: with Matloff's death. She knew when push would come to shove, she'd be willing to take the shot. Her only concern was the Doctor in the driver's seat and whether or not he'd have the gall to kill Matloff, regardless of who he was now.

The car ride into the National Park where Darci Corbett's body had been discovered, where Reid believed Matloff escaped out to, was tense to say the least. Other than a few brief words exchanged, all involving basic questions about whether Hotchner was meeting them there or what previsions the Roanoke PD was sending, the car ride was filled with a pregnant silence.

Beck knew she would have to set the record straight with Reid eventually. If not about what they'd revealed about one another before, then at least about what was to be expected as soon as their feet hit the ground at the site.

"You do realize this only ends one way, right?" Beck prompted, breaking the silence. Reid briefly glanced at her in his peripheral vision as he tried to focus on the road ahead. "Matloff isn't going to come willingly. Either he's going to start shooting at us or he'll decide to shoot himself, but either way..." she trailed off.

... He ends up dead.

Reid didn't need her to finish her sentence. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I need to know we're on the same page about the type of person we're up against and what we might have to do under ethically grey circumstances," she explained, a hint of bitterness seeping out into her tone as she referenced their earlier argument.

"So, you've already determined Matloff's fate for him?" Reid shot back, still not taking his eyes off the road.

Beck shook her head. "He's come this far. If he wanted to surrender himself and face justice as a separate persona from the Brian Matloff that murdered three women, he would've stayed in the Courthouse," she stated firmly.

This time, Reid did turn to look at her. He tried to read her face in moments where she perplexed him; when she did or said something that he hadn't expected her to. One thing about having a high level of intelligence and the job of profiling human behavior for a living was that it was fairly easy to predict how people were going to react to certain things. Reid was a firm believer in the theory that a person's personality was set by the time they turned 7, that all of the fundamental theories of learned behavior from Ivan Pavlov, B.F. Skinner, and Albert Bandura combined to create the way someone would behave and act and react like for the rest of their life, with maybe partial changes.

However, every now and then, he'd find a person who went against a certain pattern. Whether it was a coffee shop barista that would laugh when he burnt himself instead of get upset like Spencer would have predicted from previous agitated behavior, or even often times when an Unsub would target a different demographic from their previously documented victim pool. Reid was someone who noticed patterns, but it was even more noticeable when someone didn't align with a pattern or even sometimes would go against it and be all out unpredictable.

Beck was one of those people.

It was difficult to pin her down without knowing her motives for certain things. She was unlike anyone he'd met before, but so were the rest of his BAU teammates. The best of the best.

But what stood out about Beck wasn't how smart, clever, quick-witted, or determined she was. What stood out about her was that her behavior often disproved the theories he thought he knew that locked her jaded, intelligent, stubborn personality in place when she was younger. She developed with her personality it seemed. The pattern Reid would notice most would be her unwillingness in breaking her unbreakable soldier front she put on all the time, while still allowing her mask to fall every so often in glimpses of time where people could see the young woman who watched too many movies and ate gummy bears for breakfast.

Her outbursts in moments like the one they were having now on their way to capture Brian Matloff, whether they were angry or deeply emotional, were deeply rooted in something Reid couldn't quite place just yet, not without knowing all of the variables of Beck- which he knew wasn't going to be anytime soon.

It was almost as if... she cared. Which, of course she cared about catching bad guys and saving civilian lives, but this was a... selfish kind of care.

As much as Reid wanted to hold a grudge about her nearly shooting Owen Savage through him, he understood that had she listened to her gut and stuck with her training, she would've shot him without a second thought. But Beck wasn't purely her training. There was a complex person beneath all the sharp edges, hardheadedness, cocky tendencies, and continuous secrecy. Reid wasn't sure why it was only taking him just now to realize he shouldn't have been as angry as he had been towards Beck, especially not while recognizing how difficult it must have been to set aside her ethical grey area to not shoot him to get to Owen Savage.

"A spree killer with eight bodies under his belt that had every intention of adding you to his list."

That was what Beck had called Owen Savage in their heated argument. And she wasn't wrong, not even Reid could deny that. But even then, in the moment where she had the choice to take the shot at said spree killer, she wanted to protect him from her own friendly fire more than she had the need to take out the man she viewed as her target.

And now, as she tried to level with him about what might happen again, what he might've originally mistaken for her being careless about the lives of people, was actually her veiled attempt at checking to make sure that when push came to shove, Reid wouldn't have to be the one to take the shot.

Beck recognized the facts of behavior in Unsubs that sometimes the more emotional part of Spencer tended to overlook in favor of giving more complex Unsubs the benefit of the doubt; Brian Matloff and Owen Savage being two of many. She recognized that it was more than likely that Matloff wasn't coming out of this alive... and she still wanted to be on the same page as him going into this situation.

By the time Reid had reached his mini-epiphany, they'd arrived at where Hotchner and the rest of the Roanoke special forces had set up around where Matloff had abandoned the car he'd stolen from the Courthouse. From the look of how many officers were being brought out alongside even a few K-9 Units, the pair of Agents could tell how high-stakes this was now that they were on scene.

For all anyone knew, he could've already taken another victim. And with dozens of acres of land to go, he could've been anywhere by now.

"Any sign of him?" Reid called out to Hotchner, already clad in his own Kevlar vest.

Hotchner frowned. Never a good sign. "He's got about a half hour head start on us," he replied as he turned his attention towards where one of the Roanoke officers had laid out a map on the hood of a police car.

Reid, careful not to rip the page he'd taken from Matloff's notepad in his cell, came over to place the sketch of the waterfall from Matloff's memories beside the map. "There's a waterfall near the site where we found Darci Corbett's body."

Beck, who'd maneuvered herself on the other side of Reid, turned towards the officer. "Look familiar?"

"Yeah, that's Linville Falls."

"That's where we need to go," Hotchner surmised as Beck began to trace through the small miniscule names on the map until she pinpointed Linville Falls, a few clicks West of where their current position in the Park was.

"Figured this guy would have headed straight out of town," the officer frowned. "Why'd he come back here?"

Reid pursed his lips as he gathered up the map. Matloff, yet another person who doesn't follow a pattern, at least not when you don't have all the unknown aspects of his life and why he's headed where he's going. He shook his head as he pulled on his Kevlar vest.

"He's looking for something," the Unit Chief replied.

"For what?"

"Himself."

As the group began to head out towards the direction of Linville Falls, Beck couldn't help but shake her head in dismay. She wasn't looking forward to what was about to happen next. "God help anyone he finds along the trails," she muttered the further into the Park they got. It was isolated, he could've dragged a potential victim anywhere by now and it'd be days before they'd find them. "He may be looking for himself, but he's in the environment where he still committed his crimes... there's no telling if he'd revert back."

"It all depends on who he is right now," someone replied.

Beck was shocked to find it was Reid, right beside her. She narrowed her eyes, trying to gauge if she was actually picking up a more pleasant tone from the Doctor.

After another beat of silence passed and the group of officers and agents tried to quietly pass through the forest, Reid spoke again. Another shock.

"I, uh, I understand," he stammered, barely loud enough for anyone except her to hear as he tried to keep the conversation hushed.

Beck turned to glance up at him again. "You understand?"

"Look, I understand that Matloff may not make it out of this," the Doctor elaborated. "And you're right, we should be prepared for having to... shoot him."

Beck's frown deepened.

Had a switch just been flipped? Was it something she'd said that made him suddenly so civil? It couldn't have been the bombshell she'd dropped on him that she knew about his affliction with Dilaudid and his NA meetings.

For a second, Reid thought maybe she was going to shun his subtle olive branch, still upset about him using her previous kills in the field against her the way he had. Her silence wasn't a very good indicator of what she was thinking in the moment.

"I-" she opened her mouth to respond, only to be cut off by Hotchner's abrupt movement as he stepped down a small grassy slope and spotted something that made him reach for the gun on his holster. Something was happening. We found him.

Matloff was sitting in the tall grass, his head tilted up towards the water fall in the distance. He was holding something in his arms, Beck could only assume it was his latest victim he must've taken sometime between when he escaped to now.

"It's him," Hotchner deduced as he examined from afar through a pair of binoculars. "He's got a girl with him and she's not moving."

That was all the officer in charge needed before he turned to his men. "Alright, let's move in."

Beck was about to protest when Reid spoke up for her. "No, wait-" he interjected swiftly. "If we rush him, he might try to kill her and himself." For a second, Reid and Beck made brief eye contact, an unspoken acknowledgement of his understanding of what she may have to do.

No words were spoken, but Beck was quick to read the message being relayed to her through the subtle looks and word usage. Do what you need to do, I understand now.

"How do you wanna do this?" the officer asked Hotchner specifically, but Beck was the first to answer.

She turned to face the Unit Chief, pointedly not asking permission from the Roanoke PD who'd only shoot her down. "Let me go in alone," Beck proposed. Hotchner opened his mouth to protest, but she beat him to the punch yet again. "He's seen your face. You've been with him every step of the way during the trial, he only associates you with the murders and the trial. He doesn't know me, I'd be a fresh face to talk him down."

"And if he doesn't want to be talked down?" Hotchner retorted. "I can't have you going in alone and getting shot. He's unpredictable right now and there's a chance he won't go down without a fight-"

"I'm the quickest shot you have here and you know it," Beck shot back, leveling the firmness in her tone to match his.

Reid glanced between the Unit Chief and the younger Agent. Hotch looked like he wanted to throttle her. A part of Reid, a more selfishly caring part, wanted him to tell her 'no' to ensure the chances of Matloff shooting her would be nonexistent. But it looked like even when he didn't want her to be, Beck was convincing when she wanted to be.

"He has the officer's gun from the Courthouse still," Hotchner recalled, his eyes darting back and forth between Beck standing in front of him and Matloff still unmoving a few yards behind her. "If he so much as twitches-"

"He won't even have time to aim," Beck assured him.

There was a beat of silence before he finally made up his mind.

He turned slightly to address the officers. "Get your shooters high and wide. Don't shoot unless it's on my mark," he proclaimed before turning to her. "Go."

Beck tried not to look too satisfied as she unhooked her pistol from it's holster and began to slowly approach. It was an easy place to converge towards. He was out in the open, back to her, eyes up in the air, mind adrift. Beck was at a clear advantage, it almost felt wrong to even consider shooting him like this.

"Brian," Beck started carefully.

He didn't react. Not immediately at least. In fact, all he seemed to focus on was the woman in his arms. Beck wasn't sure if it was a sign that she was alive or if he'd succumb to his darker memories and she was already just a few more steps away from being put into a two-feet-deep grave.

"Brian Matloff," Beck tried once more, a little more firmly. She clutched the pistol in her hands a bit tighter as she moved closer. "I need you to show me your hands." Still no reaction. She took another step forward, her finger slowly making its way towards the trigger. "Brian, don't make me shoot you," she quietly pleaded with the man still seated in the grass. "Hands! Now!"

"Stop!" He cried out. "Stop there, please."

As he turned to cry out from over his shoulder, Beck was able to get a good look at the woman in his arms... Although, she probably hadn't been called a woman in a while.

Matloff was cradling a corpse in his arms. A decomposed corpse, probably several years old. She wondered if this was who she thought it was as she began to lower her weapon.

This man was broken, Beck saw that now. He wasn't going to try to shoot her. His anger and pain and torment was all directed towards himself, it seemed. Now Beck found herself in an even deeper grey area... possibly having to talk a serial killer down from killing himself.

"Who-" Beck stopped herself, unsure of how to go about starting this conversation. She'd gotten into the heads of Unsubs before, but... this was a semi-new territory. Typically when she had a gun pointed at someone, it wasn't to try and talk them off a ledge. "Who was she?"

"She was my first," Matloff whimpered, his voice raw and broken from crying. "The minute my feet hit the ground, I knew right where to find her."

He kept referring to this woman he'd killed as "her," but did he even know her name?

As much as Beck wanted to lash out at this serial killer, she realized that the answer to her angry inner thoughts was that no, he probably didn't know her name. Because he doesn't remember having killed her or why. When Beck looked at Brian Matloff, she saw a shell... a new person inside of a used shell with memories and actions attached to it that he no longer recognized. It's why he'd cried during Nina Moore's testimony and why he'd agreed to do the Brain Fingerprinting. He wanted answers... even if he hated what he found.

"I killed them," Matloff admit in a strangled voice.

"... You remember," it wasn't a question.

Matloff nodded nonetheless. "Everything," he sniffled. "Every moment. Every... tiny detail."

Beck didn't know how to feel, her arms still raised and gun still aimed directly at the back of his head. She knew she couldn't pull the trigger. Despite knowing what he had done, what he was... All she saw when she looked at him wasn't someone remorseful for past actions, but someone plagued by the memories of someone they don't remember.

"I remember, but..." his voice broke. "It's still not real. It's like..."

"The memories aren't yours," Beck supplied. Only then did Matloff turn to face her, and only then did Beck begin to lower her weapon slightly. "Brian Matloff before the coma is someone else entirely. Losing the memories only wiped the slate clean, so maybe in a way those memories are someone else's."

"You understand..." he breathed out in a tone of pure relief.

Beck shook her head, "No." He deflated slightly. "I don't understand why you- or he- killed these women. I also don't understand why he did what he did, but neither do you and I can relate to you on that level. But you have to understand... there is no other Brian Matloff to put on trial. Whatever you did, whether you're still that person or not, there are still consequences to be faced. A trial that you're expected at."

Beck realized very quickly that perhaps she shouldn't have mentioned the trial. The second she did, she saw Matloff twitch. Turning back away from her as he raised his free hand that wasn't carrying the corpse in his lap to reveal the stolen gun. He raised it, but didn't point it. Beck reamed her weapon. If he made a move, she knew she'd beat him to the shot. A part of her didn't want him to move so she wouldn't have to.

With the pistol lingering near his temple, Matloff shook his head adamantly. "If I'm gonna be put to death, I might as well die right here," he shouted back. "You can relate on a certain level, but there's only so much you know..."

"You're right. I have no idea what you're going through. No one does. But there is something I know for sure and it's that the man I heard ask to willingly take brain tests and sit through hours of testimony against you, hoping to gain answers instead of insight, he... he's not someone that would've killed these women," Beck supplied, trying to ease her way closer towards Matloff.

Unknown to her, Hotchner and Reid were just a few feet behind her, their weapons lowered, but ready to be used in a moment's notice if needed.

"You're a different Brian Matloff, aren't you? You see these memories in your head, but you're detached because whoever did these things died when you hit the ground four years ago," Beck replied. "You're a different man who knows the difference between right and wrong. Which means you know it's wrong to try to take the easy way out. And while I could stop you right now..." there was a soft click from Beck preparing to take her shot. "... I really don't want to."

Beck was standing just above Matloff now, her jaw clenched as she silently hoped and prayed he wouldn't do what she was scared he would do. C'mon, she wanted to urge him on. Don't do this... Don't make me do this...

"What do you want me to do?" Matloff asked through his choked sobs, his shoulders shaking with every word. "Spend the rest of my life in a cell? Wait for them to stick a needle in my arm or put me in an electric chair?"

"They may show you mercy if you can prove you're a different person," Beck supplied. "You know it, I know it. You want to convince a jury of that, I need you to give me the gun."

Matloff still hesitated, his bottom lip quivering as he pressed the barrel of the pistol closer to his temple, but still not pulling the trigger. She was getting through to him.

"You're a good person. A better person than who you once were. You have the chance to start new by doing the right thing now, Brian."

And just like that, Matloff whimpered before tossing the pistol away from him, letting it land directly at her feet. Beck was quick to snatch it up with her free hand, finally allowing herself to holster her own weapon.

She stood back then as Hotchner and the rest of the officers moved in to cuff Matloff, some of them still keeping their weapons aimed on the man still seated with the corpse.

Beck couldn't do much except watch as they escorted Matloff away. Beck wanted to call this a victory, knowing that Matloff was going to face justice for what he did, take the guilty plea most likely and spend the rest of his life in a prison cell instead of in a grave. But there was something... melancholy pressing on Beck's chest that kept her from calling it a complete success.

The women Matloff killed four years prior were still dead, their families in ruins. Now the man that did them, who wasn't even really himself, would be going to jail for something he technically didn't do. The complexities of this case were starting to give Beck a headache and one thing she was relieved to feel as she started back up the grassy knoll, trailing behind the rest of the troupe, was how glad she was to finally be done with it.

—

Another end to another case. This time, Beck was grateful they had driven the few hours instead of flying in the BAU flying death trap. The stress pilling onto her the past few days was enough to last her the next month, but she knew it wasn't realistic to think she'd have a month off from anymore Unsubs. So for now, she'd enjoy her weekend off.

Knowing Matloff was put away, Serling was being barred due to his gambling problems, and Reid was slowly starting to let his grudge fade away, Beck decided that tonight was a good time to relax.

She wasn't one for spas or facials, but every so often, the young woman did indulge herself in a face mask she'd bought from the drug store and a piping hot shower, followed by a large glass of strong red wine out of a box.

Colleen: (four attachments)

Colleen: Saw your trial on TV. Everyone says 'hi'!

Beck grinned at her phone as she stepped out of her bathroom, steam still billowing up from the small space after her hot shower. As she scrolled through the images her sister-in-law had sent of her nephew, she made her way across her lit-up apartment towards the kitchen. It looked as though Colleen had dressed Mickey in a outfit one of her co-workers had gifted them for Christmas. It was a baby blue sailors suit, included with a matching pale white cap and yellow-laced booties.

Beck frowned as she poured herself a glass of sangria from the chilled box in her fridge.

Beck: He can't even walk yet. Those shoes are wasted!

While the young agent was sipping wine out of a mug currently, she knew she wasn't in such a place to judge Colleen and Jacob's styling choices for their son. But as a dutiful aunt, she had to ensure that her nephew wasn't being treated like a little Ken doll.

The brunette sauntered through her apartment, the pitter-patter of her bare feet on hard floors the only sound echoing in her empty apartment. She'd already dressed in her pajamas, but it was far too early for her to be getting any sleep anytime soon. Might have to pop a melatonin pill... Chase it with red wine... Classy.

Trying not to get too distracted, Beck turned her attention back to her initial task she'd set aside to take her shower earlier: writing Strauss's report.

The harpy of a woman wasn't letting up anytime soon, and apparently Beck's attempts at biding herself time while trying to steer Strauss's attention off Hotchner and the Unit weren't working anymore. She'd caught on to her act. Now Beck had to go back to writing actual reports... but this trial reminded her of something.

She had enough knowledge about the judicial system to pass the LSATs; writing a wordy, unnecessarily descriptive- while simultaneously vague- submission. Strauss wouldn't be able to say much in protest if she gave her crumbs of some of the dirt she was looking for on the Unit.

And while Beck still wasn't quite sure why she had started covering for Hotchner, she still felt inclined to do so. Maybe ever since the Unit Chief had taken the shot at Jason Clark Battle in the Bullpin, she'd felt a strange sense of gratitude, maybe even a sliver of loyalty. The uptight persona he'd upheld in her presence most days was beginning to chip away in partial pieces, some bigger than others. Or maybe Beck was trying to bide herself more time to delay the inevitability of taking on a Unit she still wasn't quite sure she knew how to handle on her own.

The young woman took a seat at her desk. Her eyes were burning from how long she'd been awake for. Beck stared longingly at the bathroom across the apartment, back in her room where the melatonin was.

Report first, she reminded herself.

Beck sighed before beginning.

Supervisory Special Agent Rebecca Ryder

The trial in Roanoke involving Unsub, Brian Matloff, went surprisingly smooth from the Unit's end. Aside from the hiccup involving Matloff's escape, the three BAU Agents in attendance at the trial- Agent Hotchner, Dr. Reid, and myself- assisted Roanoke District Attorney, Cecilia Hilenbrand, in her case against the coma patient. Despite being diagnosed with focal retrograde amnesia, Brian Matloff showed no signs of having recognized these heinous acts he was being charge with. The team decided unanimously to go into the standoff with Matloff with the intention to recover and recapture him alive. We were successful in doing so, while also managing to talk Matloff into pleading guilty rather than continue the trial. Other than success, I have nothing more to report.

Entry date - 5/18/2008

Agent Rebecca Ryder

It looked like it might've been one of those nights.

Beck made her way back to the restroom to grab the pill bottle from her mirror cabinet. She'd popped a single pill into her palm, pausing to a deliberate for a moment before pouring out two more. If she didn't want nightmares she had to be thorough with her deep sleep.

The young woman threw back the three pills as she walked back out into her connected bedroom, chasing them with a large swig of the red wine and barely wincing as they went down. She figured it wouldn't be long before she passed out now, so Beck finished off her mug of alcohol, not thinking about the repercussions. Not caring much for them either.

"Chasing pills with wine?"

Beck dropped her mug upon hearing a voice from out of the corner of her room. She couldn't see in the dark just yet, having just come out of her bright bathroom with only the light from her window and the miniscule light still seeping out from where she'd come from. Beck could, however, make out a slim figure in the dark, seated in a chair on the far side of her bedroom.

"Classy, Ryder" the sultry voice spoke softly.

Beck could pinpoint that it was a woman at this point. She still couldn't quite make out who it was she was speaking to, though. As her eyes adjusted a little more to the darkness, all was revealed.

Beck's posture stiffened, her shoulders squared.

"Prentiss?"

—

"When you saw the dead little bird, you started crying. But you know the killer doesn't understand." - Moon Song, Phoebe Bridgers.

---

A/N: Cliffhangerrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

... I'm so sorry I'm leaving you guys with this one for a bit, but hey- it is like 34k words :)