"I thought that being somewhere so bright and sunny would mean that this case wouldn't be so heavy," Alex said as she and JJ trudged back into their room at the end of the day. Alex didn't like the fact that they hadn't found the unsub yet, that there was a young woman out there being held captive, coming closer to death while they tried to hunt them down and rescue her.

"Los Angeles is never a happy place to visit. We've been here four times, and each time it seems to affect a different one of us more than others."

There was a deep sadness to those words, and Alex looked at her closely, seeing just how tired she looked. This case was getting to her, and Alex wondered if she would be able to talk her out of the funk or not, given how well she'd done with Spencer. "Do you want to talk about it?"

JJ blinked a few times as she took a deep breath and then sank down on her bed, patting the spot next to her. Alex took the opening for what it was worth and sat next to her, keeping an appropriate distance between them as she turned slightly to gaze at the younger woman. "I'm always bothered by cases that seem to have a correlation to my personal life. At first, it was when young women were tortured and killed, because I was so young when I became attached to the BAU. I was only a media liaison then, so I didn't have the training to deal with crime scenes and victims and all that. I just empathized with the victims and their families."

"That makes sense," Alex said as she reached out and squeezed JJ's knee softly. The younger woman smiled briefly before taking another deep breath.

"Well, this job, it hardens you, quickly. You get used to the grime that clings to your skin. And so, little by little, those deaths didn't affect me as much as they had. But now, it's cases with children that affect me so deeply. Will and I have a nanny. We have to, because of our jobs, but it makes me feel so guilty in a way. And now that we have a case where some unsub is kidnapping nannies, it makes that guilt even heavier. Because I can relate so much with these parents who utilize a nanny. I mean, sure, Will and I could move to a less expensive area around Quantico, and one of us could quit our jobs to be a stay at home parent, but that wouldn't make either of us happy. We were born to be who we are. Hell, I came back from maternity leave early because I wanted to be out in the field once more, hunting these bastards down! But now, with this case, I find myself wondering if I should have made a different choice."

Alex nodded as she clasped her hands in her lap and sighed. "I felt that way when I returned to the workforce after having Ethan. But I needed the distraction of work to take my mind off everything that was going on in his life. His case was a little different than yours, since he needed a specialized caregiver, but there was still that guilt that weighed heavily on my heart. I wish that I could take that burden from you, but I can't. All I can offer is the knowledge that I completely understand that guilt. But in this case, you have to try and remove yourself from that. Because the guilt will eat you alive. Ask Erin, she knows that feeling all too well, also. It's harder for women, because we're still expected to be the primary caregiver of our children, on top of our jobs, and that is a heavy burden to bear. We can't do everything to perfection, but we can do as much as we can with what we have."

JJ slumped over onto her shoulder, her head thumping heavily on her chest as she nodded. "I am so glad to have another person who understands the burden," she murmured as their stomachs growled in tandem. "And I suppose that is our cue to get something to eat. Did you want to order Chinese?"

"That sounds good. You know my usual, yes?" she asked as she leaned forward and fumbled for her purse, trying not to dislodge JJ. The other woman nodded as she sat up, and Alex was able to grab her purse and pull out her billfold, taking out thirty dollars and handing it over, knowing that food was more expensive in Los Angeles.

After placing the order, JJ stuffed the money in her purse before getting up and heading to the bathroom. "I'm going to take an early shower, the food should be here in forty minutes, they're bringing it up to the room."

"Sounds good." They shared a smile, and then JJ was grabbing her nightclothes and closing herself in the bathroom. Once she was alone, Alex hurriedly changed into her own loungewear before curling up on the bed with her ARC of a new linguistic text by one of her colleagues. She'd been asked to review it, and so was trying to cram as much reading of it into whatever downtime she had. Even when she was loathe to do so when she was with Erin. She wanted that time to be theirs, since they had so little of it.

JJ was finished with her shower before their food came, and Alex knew enough not to comment on the fact that her eyes were puffy and red when she plopped down on her bed and stared at her. "What are you reading?"

Alex placed a bookmark and opened her mouth to answer when someone knocked on their door. JJ was fast to pop back to her feet, padding over to the door and looking out the peephole before opening it. Alex craned her head to look at who was there, keeping her eye on the delivery man until JJ had the door shut and locked once more. JJ carried the bags over to the table and Alex followed, taking a seat across from her as JJ laid out their food. "It's an esoteric text on linguistics that I was asked to review for a colleague. And I'm stealing every moment I can to read it when I'm away from Erin, since we have so little time to be together."

"So, you've made your choice."

Alex nodded as she took a bite of her egg roll. "I have. I thought it would be harder, but once we were intimate once more, it became clear. Though I still don't know what I'm going to say to James when he gets home. I know that I'll hurt him, but he's also been pushing me to follow my heart, since he knew that I was still in love with Erin, too. I just hope that he can understand."

"I will hold that same hope, for you. You've been happier since you've been with her, and I think that that looks lovely on you. I still wish that I had been brave enough to choose Emily before my heart finally settled with Will. I can't see any other future than with him, now. And I suppose that you feel the same about Erin?"

She nodded as she continued to eat, the ease of being so open with JJ both a shock and a joy. She hadn't had a close friend like her in ages, and it had been nice to be open with her, to have someone who understood the weird pull of loving both sexes. "I do. I would never have thought that that would be the case when I first returned, but now it almost seems like a foregone conclusion." Alex let out a soft sigh. "You're going to be all right, Jen. You have Will, and when you have someone in your life that you love, it eases the way for everything else."

JJ gave her a shy smile as she nodded, and they finished eating in a comfortable silence. Once the meal was over, Alex gathered her shower things and headed into the bathroom, taking a quick shower before changing back into her nightclothes and getting back into bed to pick up her book once more and focusing on what her colleague had written.

Alex had just finished the penultimate chapter of the book when her phone rang, and she smiled as she set the book aside and picked up the device. JJ was just settling down to sleep, and she grinned at Alex as the woman stood and made her way over to the balcony door. "Tell Erin I said hello."

"I will," she replied as she accepted the call and stepped outside to speak with Erin. "Hello, darling."

"Hello. How is the case going?"

Alex made herself comfortable in the chair as she thought about what to say. "It's a sad case, but it seems to be affecting Jen more than me. We had a nice chat about how victims affect us based on our life experiences. It was nice to get a better handle on her and how she deals with cases. And how was your day?"

There was a brief pause, and Alex frowned a little as she waited for Erin to speak. "It was a difficult afternoon. Director Shepperd called me up to his office, to discuss the Replicator case."

"Oh? What did he want?"

A soft chuckle slipped out of Erin, and Alex found herself relax a little as she waited for Erin's answer. "You're keyed up about him, good. We all should be. He tried to figure out if anyone on your team was still working the case. And since he worded it like that, I could tell him in all honest that none of you were working on it."

"But Hotch…!"

"He's focusing on his family in his free time."

Alex let out her own chuckle as she nodded. "Oh, that is clever. Because he treats us like a family, yes?"

"Precisely. And then, after the meeting, I, I had a breakthrough when it comes to our mutual problem."

Alex stiffened in her seat, her eyes focusing on a building across the way as she fought to keep her reactions in check. "What?"

"Yes. I think that I know where he is hiding in Quantico. I had to do some deeper digging into public records, which led me to his parents' names, and then his grandparents' names. John is a common enough name, but Calvin is not, and when I used his middle name in conjunction with his grandmother's maiden name, I found a property rented halfway between our homes."

"Fuck."

"That was my first reaction, too. It would be one thing if he was located in a place equidistant from all of us, but this rental home is placed in such a way that it was not an accident. His focus has been on us all along, and we weren't able to see that, since he was replicating all our cases. He didn't show his cards because he knew that to do so would arouse our suspicions way too soon."

"So now we can go to Ron and tell him that we need to ramp up our efforts against John! He's stalking us, and we can prove that!"

"I wish it were that simple. But Ron will say that just because someone who has a similar name to John's doesn't mean that it is John, or that John is the Replicator. The link is entirely too tenuous to net us more leeway to look into him and tie him to what's being done to us. But it's a link in the chain, and I just need to keep forging links together until I have a long enough chain to bind John to the Replicator and to his targeting of us. But I've made the breakthrough!"

Alex let out a long breath as she shook her head. "Please, promise me that you will not surveil him alone. I know that I can't tell you not to do it, because you're bound and determined to take him down, just like I am, but I don't want you to take any risks. Surely there's someone in the BAU that we can trust not to run squealing to Ron."

"I am going to ask Agent Anderson to accompany me, yes. Because you're right, I can't do this alone, not this time. But oh, we're one step closer to finally putting him away!" Alex nodded, the excitement in Erin's voice sending a shudder down her spine as she knew that this was merely the beginning of something that didn't have a clear, good, outcome.