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Chapter Text

“How was your last ever case in the field?” Prentiss asked Rossi, grinning at her team.

Rossi smiled back, “Well, I guess it ended well, but that was one sick sicko,”

Simmons nodded grimly.  “Enucleators always are,”

“With Rossi as close as I think he’s ever going to get to actually retiring, do we finally get to know who our new agent is?” Alvez asked.

Prentiss smiled. “Well,” she said, “He’ll be here in a few minutes, but I can give you all some hints until he arrives,”

“You could just tell us,” Lewis reasoned, but Prentiss shook her head.

“Where’s the fun in that?  I have it on good authority that a few of you have met this agent before,”

“Well that doesn’t really narrow it down,” JJ complained.

“In fact, members of this team are credited as being his inspiration for joining the FBI,”

Reid’s mouth shaped itself into a silent o.  “It’s not…?”

“Oh, Doc, it is,”

“Care to share with the rest of us?” Simmons asked.

“Not so much,” Prentiss really was enjoying this.  Garcia joined the rest of the team as they walked tiredly to their desks, dropping their go-bags by their feet or on their chairs and slumping, eager for a day of rest they knew better than to expect to go by uninterrupted.  As usual, she seemed to be running on much higher levels of energy, upbeat in a vested attempt to combat the general gloominess of the job.

“Are we finally finding out about the new recruit?”

Prentiss opened her mouth with every intent to continue but was suddenly cut short by a new voice.  “Finally?  Prentiss, have you been keeping me a secret?” It was distinctly young, buried somewhere in it an accent that was definitely from New York but somewhat diluted as though from years spent around people from other parts of the country.

“Nice to see you again, agent Jackson,”

“Ditto,” he walked to the rest of the group, his expression self-assured but not arrogant, seemingly playing a perpetual balancing act of mischief and composure.  “It’s been a while,” he said to Rossi, Reid, Lewis, and JJ, before turning to the rest of the team.  “It’s nice to meet the rest of you, oh and you must be the famous Garcia, I’m told I missed you last time,”

“Yes.  You did.  I have to be in my office,” she said stiffly, avoiding his eyes and darting from the room.  He made a face akin to a wounded puppy.

“Have I already said something wrong?  I know I have kind of a habit of it that but this is a new record,”

“I wouldn’t think too much of it,” Alvez advised, “Compared to what I got, that counts as a warm welcome,”

“She probably feels bad for having looked into your background when we worked that case,” Reid explained.

“Ah,” Percy nodded, “That makes sense.  I’ll talk to her later,”

“You were involved in a case the BAU was working?” Simmons asked.

Percy chuckled.  “Uh, yeah.  It must have been, what, almost ten years ago now?  They briefly thought I was a serial killer,”

“And then we realised he wasn’t.  He got abducted by the guy and managed to escape and save one of the other victims,  He was instrumental in getting him caught,”

“If by instrumental, you mean I got his knife away from him and held him back until people got there to arrest him, then yeah,”

“You also helped us figure out his identity,” JJ reminded him.  “How did that gash in your hand heal, by the way?”

“Oh,” he held up his hands so that his palms faced them, on one an old scar like an asterisk and on the other a thick white band of scarring, marked on either side by the distinct pinpricks of old stitches.  “It’s all good,”

“Which killer was this?” Alvez asked.

“Hugo Gabrish,” JJ provided, “Manhattan,”

Alvez’s eyebrows shot up.  “The cannibal?”  He confirmed, “The one who was sacrificing his victims?” He then looked especially hard at Percy.  “ You were the kid that survived that?”

He shrugged, perhaps too nonchalantly.  “One of them,” he turned his focus back to the members of the team who had been there the first time around.  “You know, Thomas Miller actually named his son after me: Jackson Miller,”

“Oh wow,” Rossi said, “So you two are still in touch?”

Percy nodded.  “He still lives in Manhattan actually, near my mom,” He turned to Prentiss.  “So which one of these desks is mine?  I have a box of things that are in your office and I’m sure you don’t want me to leave them there indefinitely,”

“To be completely honest, I’m not the neatest person and there is a solid chance I wouldn’t have noticed them,” she shrugged.  He squinted.

“Aren’t you a profiler?”

She looked sheepish for a moment before it was drowned by a smile.  “I’m not trying to profile my own office,”

He was clearly aware of them all watching him as he arranged a series of photographs on his desk in what might have been an attempt at neatness but evidently not a striking success.  It didn’t seem to perturb him too much as he laid out framed photos of friends and family, some collages, amongst them a beautiful photo from a beach wedding and a photo of himself with his sister, mother, stepfather, wife, and a toddler with a head of unruly blond hair.  The photos of his friends seemed to span over a decade, photos of preteens with bright eyes and dishevelled clothes, of teenagers wearing the same orange t-shirts smiling earnestly yet tiredly, of young adults whose relaxation made it clear in hindsight how tense the earlier photos had been.  The team couldn’t help but notice a few faces disappear from the crowd: the tall, broad boy with dark skin and dark hair who just disappeared between tired teenaged photos, the pretty girl with the enchanting almond-shaped eyes and the long, wavy hair who left alongside him, the blond kids with the freckles and the bright eyes who seemed to get fewer and fewer until they seemed to almost disappear entirely from the large group photos, two identical boys who turned to one between photos.  There were a lot of photos of a tall kid with cropped hair and a scar on his lip but they seemed to start and stop when he looked to be about seventeen.  Alvez hoped that they had just left what looked, for the most part, to be a camp, that they just moved away and all was well behind the scenes, but he had a bad feeling in his stomach that that wasn’t the case.

“The kid yours?” Rossi ventured to ask once Jackson had stepped back.  He gestured to the family photo where Percy and his wife were fussing over the toddler with the bushy hair so blond it looked white under the light.  Percy nodded.  “Cute kid,” Rossi commented.  “What’s his name?”

“Jason,” Percy told them.

“Jason?” Rossi repeated, “Are the mythological names a thing in your family?”

There was a moment of near silence when Percy looked over the photos, never  making it quite clear which face exactly he was seeking out amongst them.  “Yeah,” he said eventually.  Though many of them had just met him they could tell that the flatness of his voice was uncharacteristic.  “You could say that,”

Reid made a face.  “Wasn’t that your cousin’s name?” Percy sighed then nodded solemnly.

As FBI profilers, they were all very curious people, people striving for answers, but they didn’t get the chance to ask any questions before Prentiss’ phone pinged and, as if on impulse, all of their heads turned to face her.  Dread and knowing were accepted constants of the BAU, Percy was learning that quickly; his eyes followed barely a moment later, his face schooled and accepting.

Prentiss looked up from her phone, a cool white glow making her face look pallid and weary.  “Sorry to ruin the fun,” genuine remorse was evident in her voice, “But we’ve got a case.  We’re headed to Westport, Connecticut.  We’ll debrief on the jet, wheels up in 20,”

Everyone nodded and turned to leave, though before JJ did she couldn’t help but turn back to Jackson, looking at his face and the description-defying look on his face, within it something akin to grim familiarity,  She was reminded, for a moment, of him ten years ago, a messed up kid who should have been nothing but scared but was instead just resigned and angry.  She watched him leave, tried to direct her vision to his palm to see the deep, aggressive scar without picturing the layers of exposed, scarlet-slicked viscera writhing where it had once been opened,  She was frankly shocked he could still use that hand with any kind of dexterity at all.

“I hate flying,” Jackson complained as soon as the jet was in the air.  His knuckles were white, grasping a half-empty water bottle between his hands so tightly Lewis, who was sitting besides him, was slightly concerned that it was going to explode.  She gave him a sympathetic smile.

“I’m afraid we can’t do too much about that,”

He sighed shakily as if trying to steel himself,  “I know.  I signed up for this job knowing so I’ll have to suck it up,”  He looked suspiciously out of the window and eyes the clouds, stark white and sparse, calm.  His shoulders slumped as though in acceptance or relief, and he turned his focus to Prentiss.

“Westport is a town that typically enjoys a very low crime rate so both the public and the police were shocked and unprepared for the recent discovery of a young woman’s body in the Saugatuck River,” she explained.  “The first body was found a few months ago and there has been little success in identifying her due to a combination of degradation caused by the river, as well as the intentional destruction of identifying features such as the removal of the fingerbones, likely an attempt to prevent fingerprint identification, and the destruction of identifying dentistry.” she looked down at her tablet.  “Photos being sent to you now.

“By the time our first Jane Doe was found she was already just bones and her estimated time of death is placed at around a year before she was discovered.  Trauma to her sternum and skull are assumed to be contributors to her death and there is evidence of defensive wounds on her arms.  Westport police have been attempting to investigate her case as an isolated event and, due to the excessive aggression, it was assumed to be a very personal crime of passion,”

“And things have changed?” Alvez guessed.

Prentiss sighed as she nodded.  “Unfortunately correct,” She folded her hands over each other on the table in front of her.  “Westport authorities are now expecting that it is serial due to the recent recovery of a body in a very similar state by children who were playing by the river.  Only parts of this body have been recovered, including the skull, the majority of the torso, and the left femur, so it is similarly unidentified and thought to be anywhere from a couple of months to almost an entire year older than the first,”

Jackson made a face.  “Westport authorities probably aren’t working with many theories then.  I hate to suggest that there might be more victims but the Saugatuck empties into Long Island Sound…”

Prentiss nodded.  “I’ll get Garcia to check the databases to see if there are any other bodies,”

There wasn’t much information to be discussed for the case so Prentiss’ briefing was short-lived and concise.  The majority of the BAU settled themselves as comfortably as they could with the limited space to nap, still worn out from the case that had really only just ended.  Lewis turned to Jackson, more curious than she was tired and prepared to have to keep downing coffee for the rest of the day to stay awake.  “That was a Reid fact,”

“Huh? he looked genuinely confused, his face like a puppy’s.  He shook his head and the grey hairs at the front of his head fell in front of his eyes.  In the moment where she couldn’t see them, Lewis became really aware for the first time quite how uncomfortable she was when they were looking at her.  “Oh,” he pushed his hair back, “about the river?  I studied marine biology and I just kinda know about these things.  There’s a pretty limited field of things I actually know about like that, unlike Reid.”

“Marine biology?  That’s a new one, most agents study criminology or criminal justice, you know, things that are actually useful on the job,”

“Yeah,” he carded a hand through his hair, thick and shiny under the light, and it fell back into an unspecified place on his head.  Lewis was beginning to understand why it looked as much of a mess as it always had.  “I hadn’t even thought about joining the FBI until the whole Gabrish thing, and honestly?  Occasionally having a field of knowledge the people you’re working with, no matter what it is, comes in handy,”

She nodded thoughtfully.  “Well, anyone who can have a unique set of knowledge in Reid’s company is pretty impressive,”

“I’ll try my best,” he shook his head, “You know, I was telling my wife before I left that I had a feeling I wouldn’t be coming home for a few days,”

She smiled ruefully.  “Gift of prophecy?”

“No,” he denied it too quickly, too decisively.  She’d notice the way his expressions would twist from time to time during the day, and had known that decade before that he had had a pretty unstable life, that he was a strange kid who reacted in unpredictable ways to the world around him, whether it was doing its absolute worst or someone was just speaking to him.  “Call it pessimistic realism,” he paused. “Actually don’t do that.  That makes me sound like teenaged Nico,”

“Nico?”

“My cousin.  He went through the whole emo thing as a teenager and, between you and me, he never really grew out of it,”

“You know, I was pretty surprised to see you today.  You seemed so tired already when Gabrish happened,”

“Yeah well,” he took a gulp of his water, finishing the remaining half of the bottle all at once, and took another cursory glance out of the window.  “Things more or less quieted down when I was in college and I got pretty restless.  I was already so used to helping people, usually to my own misfortune, and I finally had the chance to stop but I felt guilty about knowing I could do someone some good and just choosing not to do it,”

Lewis was hyperaware of the vague terms he spoke in but, for the time being, she wouldn’t press.  “It’s nice to see you came out of the Gabrish thing as well as you did,”
He smiled wryly,  “Thomas too.  I think he was a lot more shaken at the time than I was,”

“Yeah, you were a pretty hardy kid,” she agreed.  “How’d that go for you in the academy?”

“Pretty well.  Some of the theory was kinda a lot of work but Annie was a lot of help getting me to push through it all,”

“Annie?”

“Yeah, Annabeth.  My wife,”

Lewis nodded and Prentiss leaned into their conversation, seemingly giving up on her attempts to fall asleep sitting upright in her chair.  “He’s got a pretty interesting reputation at the academy,” she offered to Lewis who looked quickly intrigued.

“Do tell,”

“Please don’t,” Percy groaned.

“He set some physical records during his time-”

“You can stop there,” Percy offered.  Prentiss shook her head.

“But he was an infamously terrible marksman,”

“Ugh.  You could have waited to tell her that: I don’t really need my team having their trust in me knocked before I’ve had the chance to prove myself a little,”

Prentiss grinned at him.  “Well you passed,” she reassured him, “It just took you a lot of extra practice hours.  A lot.  You know, I’m friends with Agent Carmichael, your instructor.  I believe her exact words were ‘he’s completely mediocre by academy standards now but, with all the hours he put in, you’d really expect him to be a lot better,”

“Thanks for the glowing review… and for hiring me despite knowing that actually,”

She shrugged.  “There’s a lot of talk that follows you, Jackson.  Most of it is just people calling you weird, but I’ve also heard enough about you being a great field agent and talented profiler to feel confident in my choice,”

“Who in the FBI is calling me weird?”  She sent him a long, probing look and didn’t dignify his question with a response.

When they touched down in Connecticut Jackson looked about ready to kiss the ground but, to his credit, stayed on his feet doing nothing more than sighing in relief and smiling.  It wasn’t an expression that lasted long as they got into the car that had been hired to take them to the Westport police station and he was forced to draw back from the relief and immerse himself back into the reality of murdered bodies found in the river.

“I didn’t intend for you to be plunged into a case so immediately after getting here,” Prentiss apologised, but Percy waved her off.

“It’s all good,” he reassured.  He looked out of the car at the residential area they were driving through, well-manicured lawns and well-maintained shrubs and plant beds.  “It’s quite literally what I signed myself up for,”

“Still, it would’ve been nice to have had a day or two to show you the ropes instead of having to fly you out to Connecticut less than an hour after you got here,”

“Nice but optimistic,” he shrugged.  “It really is fine.  Pretend I’ve been here for a while, this is just another case and you really don’t have to hold my hand through it,”

She smiled sadly and looked down at her hands.  “I really do wish any of them were just cases,”

He nodded.  “I know it can’t be easy,” he said, “But you do it because somebody should.  So tell me what you want me to do when we get there and make sure you check with Garcia about bodies being found elsewhere along the Sound.  I kinda have a feeling,”

“Let’s hope that’s not the gift of prophecy you definitely don’t have, for the good of the people of Westport,”

“So you were just listening to everything Lewis and I were saying when you were pretending to be asleep then,” He was smiling rather than seeming upset or annoyed so Prentiss merely shrugged.

“For what it’s worth, I actually was trying to sleep,”

“Doesn’t mean you weren’t eavesdropping,”

She smiled, glad to have a new perspective on her team and someone else around her who was willing to do the exhausting work they did for the good of other people,  She had a good feeling about this new addition to the team.  “I never said it did,”

Chapter Text

There was little for the BAU to do in terms of staking out crime scenes or talking to witnesses.  There wasn’t much to be gleaned from what little they had so instead of splitting up as they normally would they all went straight to the local police station.  Prentiss introduced them all, watching the obvious overwhelm on the local police chief’s face “Thank you for coming,” The head of the Westport police, Captain Phan, was a tall, physically imposing man but his voice had a somewhat reedy, unsure sound to it.  Prentiss was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that it was simply the stress.  “We’ve put together a task force of more than capable officers who have my utmost trust and respect but, as I’m sure you know, we’re all a bit out of our depth and we haven’t been given much to work with,”

Prentiss smiled politely and sympathetically.  “Of course.  You wouldn’t be the first.  Have you been able to set aside a room where we can set up?  We’d also like to know how the ME is doing and where your task force members are so we can discuss what you have,”

“Of course,” he scratched absently at the dark stubble on his chin.  “The task force is being headed by officers Jacob and Whistler, I’ll direct you to them after showing you to the boardroom we’ve set aside.  The ME report is available but understandably lacking detail.  If you would like to talk to her personally and observe the remains you’re more than welcome,”

“Perfect,”

Prentiss decided that she would set up in the boardroom and call Garcia about Jackson’s hutch whilst Lewis, JJ and Alvez spoke to the task force and Jackson went alongside Simmons and Reid to see the ME.

“How are you feeling about your first case?” Simmons asked as they walked down the metal stairs that would lead them to the ME.  They made a sort of displeased squeal underfoot but felt more sturdy than not.

“Well we don’t have much to work with,” Jackson admitted “So I’m a bit worried about how much I can help here,”
Simmons nodded.  “Makes sense,” he said, “But we always seem to get there eventually,”

Reid walked ahead but turned to look over his shoulder and tell them that they had reached the clearly labelled door Phan had directed them to.  Jackson nodded, ready to enter, and Simmons quietly watched him walk ahead.  He knew what it was like to be a rookie, remembers being in his twenties and having to prepare himself before he felt ready to enter a room, never wanting to waste the locals’ time when they were relying on him to help them.  It was never a productive exercise and he had grown out of it some time ago, long before he had ever been assigned to the BAU.  Jackson didn’t have a single sign of that old hesitation that Simmons had previously thought was the unmissable mark of a rookie.

There was a distinct chill in the room when they walked in, though it was slightly cut through by the warmth of the woman standing in it who reminded him somewhat of Penelope.  She seemed to be a few years older than Jackson, probably in her early thirties, with freckles on her cheeks, a smile that dimpled on either side, and hair dyed pale pink and pulled back snuggly into a french plait down the back of her head.  She was wearing the typical white coat but the clothes underneath were loudly patterned and brightly coloured.  She looked thoroughly out of place.

“Dr. O’Brien?” Reid checked.

“The one and only.  I’m sure you special agents all have a lot of questions but I don't think I have many answers,”

“We understand,” he said before turning to look at what remains they did have laid out.  He couldn’t help but notice that they seemed to have been divided into three rather than the two they had been led to believe was the case.  “Three?”

Dr O’Brien nodded one too many times.  “Three,” she repeated.  “We initially assumed that it was two because the size of the disparate remains we had seemed to be consistent.  On closer inspection, though, I am quite confident that the femur doesn’t belong to the same person as the other remains, I’d place the time of death a little while before,”

“Because it’s a femur I guess we can’t really say if it matches the probable COD of the other bodies,” Jackson commented, leaning in closer to the isolated bone.  “It could be completely unrelated,”

“Correct,” she confirmed.  “What I can say is that I’d place the height of all three as somewhere between 5’9” and 5’11”, so there are some physical similarities,”

“Tall for women,” Simmons commented.

“Assuming they are all women,” the ME added.  “We’re waiting on DNA tests.  I’m fairly certain about the first body we found but the second I’m not so sure of and the femur doesn’t really tell us anything,”

Reid joined Jackson as he leaned over the isolated bone, staring intensely at its water-worn porous surface in hopes of finding any clues at all.  “Yet,” he decided.

They thanked the eccentric ME and turned to leave the room.  “What gets me,” Simmons admitted to his colleagues, “Is that this guy has been active for over a year and we haven’t heard of him once.  Sometimes with things like this I’m kind of reminded that there will always be more sickos to take down, more that we don’t know about,”

Jackson shook his head, the grey hairs at the front of his face falling over his eyes which shone brightly from beneath the near-white strands.  “I have a bad feeling,” he admitted, “that it has been much longer than a year.  Get a big enough body of water and you’ve got a great forensic countermeasure,”

His hypothesis was unfortunately proven right.  They returned to the board room where Prentiss was sitting, piecing together the few clues they had in any way she could to see if she might be able to extrapolate something new.  Based on the defeat evident on her face she hadn’t had much success.  They went over what they had learned from the ME and she nodded and diligently updated their boards.  They lapsed into pensive silence as soon as they had exhausted all of their information, then Prentiss’s phone rang.

“Garcia?” she said without looking at the caller ID, phone on speaker and held out in front of her, into the middle of the gathering of agents who were in the room.

“The one and only.  I’ve got news about Long Island Sound.  Bad news.  Or good news for investigation, I guess,” Everyone in that room could imagine her grimace as she said it even if they couldn’t see her.  “We’ve got bodies in Norwalk and Compo and possibly elsewhere, I will keep on looking.  The bodies are older than our current ones but they were found a bit earlier.  The Sound did degrade the evidence quite a bit so there was no DNA evidence that they could log in the system much less link back to their killer but they do have IDs on the victims.  Layla McCall in Compo and Connie Barber in Norwalk.  I’ll send over more of their information but it doesn’t stop with them.  They were assumed to be separate cases but neither has been solved in the two years since they were found and the COD really matches our current victims.  They were both in their early twenties and they look remarkably similar, tall, very pretty, pale, dark eyes, brown hair, parted in the middle,”

“Like Ted Bundy,” Prentiss muttered.

“Yeah.  It’s not an uncommon description but I’ve been looking through missing person registers for towns and cities near the Sound and there are a lot of young women who look a lot like them.  A few of them are probably coincidences, like, I found some old news articles from about three or four years ago about five young women exactly like them who were victims of shark attacks, so I might be reading into nothing,”

Jackson made a face.  “That’s not right,” he furrowed his brow and looked at the phone as though the wavering letters that made up Penelope’s name would contain an explanation within them. “Sharks don’t have victim profiles, people do,”

She sounded robotic again when she answered him and he decided he would have to confront that problem the next chance he had to talk to her away from the rest of the team.  “It was explained by the areas where they were attacked being ones frequented by college students,”

“Still…” he drummed his fingers against his chin.  “Garcia, could you put me in contact with the relevant stations?”

“Yes, Agent Jackson.  I’ll get on that,”

“They were ruled non-suspicious,” Prentiss said, “I don’t know how much useful evidence they’ll have,”

“I’m just looking for photos of the bodies,” he explained, “Hardly my favourite things to look at but I’d like to double check and make sure they are actually consistent with shark attacks,”

“So you think this could have been going on for six years?” Simmons checked.

Jackson nodded and Reid dropped his head in though.  “That’s quite the change in MO, though.  That’s rare, typically serial offenders find the methodology they like and stick to that.  Why would he change?”

“And if this has been going on for so long how many bodies do you really think we’re looking at?”  Prentiss added.

Jackson sighed.  “I think those things might be related if my hunch is right.  I think the development of the MO is progress in the forensic countermeasures.  At first he is attempting to disguise the deaths as animal attacks so they can’t be linked back to him, and then he realises he doesn’t have to do that and he can do whatever he likes to the bodies so long as he disposes of them so they won’t be found,”

“But we have at least four relevant bodies,” Simmons reminded them.

“Which are all at least a year old.  He could have just improved his disposal method,”

“That means you think there are newer bodies,” Prentiss couldn’t help but observe.  Jackson nodded solemnly.

“I think we might have to get divers into the sound and some of the surrounding rivers.  And establish better lines of direct contact between Westport and other nearby stations.  If another girl who matches the description goes missing we need to know immediately,”

She nodded.  Those were all the next steps she could think of at that moment.  “Update us if there’s any news, Garcia, and put Jackson in contact with the other stations,”

They hung up the phone and began talking amongst themselves about what little they had and what they could do with it as they waited.  It wasn’t long before the others returned from their discussions with the task force.

“They aren’t working with much,” JJ explained.  It was about what they had all been expecting to hear.  “But they have been working on trying to identify the first victim they found.  They’re hoping to find someone close to her who might’ve had a motive but we all know with serial offenders that might not help,”

Prentiss hummed.  “We could attempt to follow her movements on the day she went missing though.  It might give us a hint as to when, where, or how this killer strikes,”

“They’re going through their local missing persons to find women who are in the approximate age range, the right height, and who went missing around the right time,” Alvez explained.

“They only have a couple,” Lewis told them, tone tinged with a hesitant sort of optimism.  “Westport missing persons are overwhelmingly teenage runaways who return within the month.  There aren’t many people who were missing a year ago who have yet to be found.  There is a chance she went missing from outside of Westport however, or perhaps that her disappearance was never reported, in which case we have almost nothing,”

Jackson scrunched his features as though in thought.  “Which officers are working on this?  I’d like to have a look at their shortlist,”

“Whistler and Jacob,” Lewis said, “They’re at the far end of the bullpen.  The bald man with the pink tie and woman with the curly hair,”

Jackson thanked her and left.  The police station was basic, familiar.  Back here it was all clean walls decorated with the occasional placard or framed photograph of an officer smiling handsomely, achievements spelled out proudly, one or two losses mourned sincerely.  There was a glass vase with sad looking roses sitting in its clouded water on a side table, an evidently failed attempt to liven up the area, probably an addition associated with the shock of the murders.  There was little else by way of decoration aside from personal effects on desks and a few mugs with bright colours or illustrations clearly brought in from home as a preferred vessel for the burnt coffee from the station as opposed to the sad paper cups that were piled high next to the machine.

It didn’t take him long to find who he could only assume were Jacob and Whistler so beelined in their direction past curious local officers who all looked up from their desks and their paperwork to ogle the federal agent with the shock of white hair and the excessive scars.  “Hi,” he started somewhat awkwardly, “You’re the heads of the task force right?  I’m special agent Jackson.  If you don’t mind I’d like to look at what you’ve got,”

The woman nodded.  Her hair was chestnut brown and shiny, curled into loose ringlets, her skin tanned and olive.  She was relatively unadorned, dressed in a nondescript white shirt and black slacks, a black blazer cast neatly across the back of her chair, the only accessory she wore being a simple silver wedding band.  “Melanie Whistler,” she introduced, holding out a hand for him to shake.  He took it and turned to the man.

“Peter Jacob,” he sounded tired and looked it, dark circles under his eyes and rough, uneven stubble casting the lower half of his face into grim shadow.  He could have been in his thirties and having a particularly rough time of it or reaching towards fifty and Percy wouldn’t have been surprised at either.  “We’ve got three women from Westport on the shortlist and two from neighbouring towns but we don’t know how to cut it down any further,”

Percy hummed.  “You mind if I have a look?”

“Go ahead,” Jacob leaned back in his chair and sighed deeply as Whistler pulled up a series of images on her computer screen and clicked on the first of the five so that the visage occupied most of the screen.

“Carly Gilder,” she said as he leaned closer to get a better look at the young woman’s face.  “19.  She was working for a year between high school and college to save up some money,” her eyes were a bright blue and her face dusted thickly with freckles, wire-framed glasses perched on the bridge of her nose.  “Her disappearance was always a big question here, she doesn’t really fit the runaway profile and she left her wallet and car behind.  We found her phone about a week after she went missing and there hasn’t been a sign of her since,”

Her hair in the photo was dirty blonde and shoulder-length, dyed a deep pink towards the ends.  “How soon before she disappeared was this photo taken?”

“Two days,” Jacobs told him.  Perfect nodded and quietly ruled her out in his mind.

The next girl appeared on the screen.  “Sacramento Velasquez.  23. Her family are close and were always very concerned about her disappearance but she frequently expressed a desire to move to a big city to her friends. There’s always a chance she just ran to New York,” Her skin was light brown, her hair rich and dark and relatively long but parted almost all of the way to the left side of her head.  He filed her away as a maybe and they kept looking.

When he saw the next girl’s photo his heart stuttered in his chest.  “Marley Fife,” Whistler told him, but he could barely hear her, much more concerned with the picture before him.  Her skin was almost shockingly pale, only accentuated by the curtain of her dark hair as it framed her face evenly on either side. Her eyes were near black and he could see her long bony arms in the photo.  “22.  She was back from college for the summer, studied history in New York.  She also wasn’t a typical runaway candidate.  She met up with some friends and headed home.  When her dad and younger brother got back the next day from a fishing trip she was nowhere to be seen.  We don’t know when in that window she actually went missing,”

He listened as they discussed the last two candidates, the two from outside of town, but remained convinced that Marley Fife was their best shot.  He told them as much and tried to answer their questions as honestly as he was able without causing too much alarm.  He finished and turned, leaving them at their desks.  As he walked back to their boardroom he tried to battle away the sick feeling in his gut because, despite his conviction that it was Marley’s disappearance they were currently concerned with, those other four girls were still missing and had been for a long time.  One or two of them might have simply left without announcing their departure but he couldn’t stop thinking about Carly Gilder’s wide eyes and wider smile, about her car in her parents’ driveway and her money left behind, her phone found on the side of the road and then nothing else.  Even if she wasn’t involved in the case they were there to investigate, she was still missing and he had a feeling that she was never going to show up back at her parents’ front door.

JJ was given the job of talking to the Fifes, asking them about Marely’s disappearance and if they were willing to give DNA samples they might be able to compare the first victim’s remains against.  With Lewis at her side, she knocked on the door and felt her heart hammer in her chest as they waited.  Were she to be in their place, she wasn’t sure if she would actually want to know.  On one hand, the closure would let both them and Marley finally rest, on the other she had no idea how much heavy lifting that thread of hope, no matter how thin, was doing, what would fall and break when it was snapped.  She couldn’t think about that, though, as she flashed her badge to the teenaged boy that opened the door, his hair dark and overgrown, skin pale like it couldn’t even remember the sun.  He looked tired, like a year had passed and he had never, not for a second, forgotten that he was missing his older sister.

She and Lewis didn’t even get the chance to say anything before the boy was speaking, so quietly she almost had to strain her ears to hear him.  “This is about Marley, isn’t it,”

“It is,” Lewis knew that beating around the bush wouldn’t help anyone.  “Is your father in?”

“Yeah,” he called to him, voice crackling with exertion it had clearly grown unfamiliar with.  “You think they found her in the river, right?”

As JJ and Lewis had the unenviable task of talking to a small family who had been left to grieve without answers for far too long, Jackson and Alvez went about asking the neighbours for any information they might remember.  The locals had done it at the time but it wouldn’t hurt to ask around again, besides when they had initially investigated they had done so under the assumption that anyone that might have taken Marley might have had a personal connection to her, a personal motive.  They didn’t think that anymore.

It had been a long time since her disappearance so whatever information the neighbours had to offer was minimal and they were all solemn and apologetic about that fact.  It was a nice neighbourhood but not so nice that household security cameras were commonplace and no footage that had been deemed of use had ever made its way to the police.  They didn’t even know that Marley had made it back to the neighbourhood before her disappearance.

Jackson and Alvez nodded at the inhabitants of their third house of the day as they finished up their brief and fruitless conversation and turned to go to the next house, the door closing behind them.  Alvez couldn’t help but notice how Jackson looked around the neighbourhood with a distant sort of recognition, the disquieted type that let him know that Jackson did not want to be here.  Alvez would ask but it didn’t seem to be getting in Jackson’s way and they had a job they needed to do, so they just continued, making their way to the fourth front door of the day.

The house was immediately different from the others, no planters or cushy furniture on the porch, and instead a vague impression of disuse.  The curtains were pulled closed over the downstairs windows and from outside it almost seemed as though the upper floor had been forgotten about entirely by whoever lived there.  The recognition on Jackson’s face changed quickly to dread but Alvez didn’t get time to note it before he knocked thrice on the door.  There was bustling inside as they waited for the door in front of them to be pulled open.  It took maybe a minute, a little bit too long but not so much that they had turned away by the time the occupant greeted them.

When the door opened Alvez was hit in the face with a stench that made his stomach churn: the saccharine sweetness of mould and rot and the acrid tang of burning.  He didn’t even get the chance to flash his credentials before there were bony liver-spotted arms encircling his neck and matted grey hair tickling the side of his face.  He tensed as an old woman’s reedy voice said “Luke!  Welcome home,”

Chapter Text

Alvez stared at the woman with wide eyes as she stepped back, her smile shaky and too wide on her thin face, her eyes wide, too large, like they were about to fall out of her head, only held in with papery skin, grey and clouded over like she was somewhere else, like she could barely see.  But there was a moment, a long one, where she did nothing but stare probingly into ALvez’s face as though she knew him, as though she loved him.  He gulped and she kept grinning, her thin lower lip splitting and the small crack that formed filling quickly with a bright red that made the rest of her--her white hair and white skin and pale eyes and dull, stained clothes--look as though it had been desaturated, as though she was existing half inside of reality and half removed from it.  He shuddered at the sight of her and she turned to Jackson and flung her bony arms around his neck, the sharp points of her elbows threatening to crack the skin.  “Luke!” she said again.  “Welcome home,”

Alvez scrunched his brow and, as the woman turned to walk inside, looked at Jackson, eyes wide.  “How does she know my name?”

To his surprise, Jackson didn’t mirror any of his shock or his concern, at least not in the same way, he just looked kind of sad, like he was thinking of something, a distant memory brought to life in front of him like a nightmare incarnated into the form of an old woman whose body looked to be about to fall out from beneath her.  “She doesn’t,” he said.  “Her son was named Luke,”

Alvez was even more confused.  “You know her?”

Jackson sighed and looked for a second as though he had aged ten years in a moment.  “I’ve met her once.  I knew her son,”

“Your new agent is really something,” Simmons said to Prentiss as they stared at young women’s faces on the cork board, trying their best to figure out who fit where and who didn’t fit at all.

Prentiss nodded.  “I heard good things,” she explained.  “Amongst them that he had the stomach for this kind of work,” she looked grimly at the photos of Layla McCall and Connie Barber, their bodies well decomposed by the time they had been found but still far from skeletal like the ones they had in Westport.  Their flesh was missing in many places, bloated and distorted in the others, discoloured and sickly.  She knew from grisly experience what sort of smell they would emanate and she felt almost guilty for the thought, after all those were young women, victims of a monster.

“What have we got on them?” Simmons nodded pointedly in the direction of the photos of them smiling and breathing that had been attached to their missing persons’ reports rather than their bodies.

“Not much,” she sighed.  “Jackson was right about the Sound being a good forensic countermeasure.  They’re helping us put together a victim profile, though,”

“Do you think he was right about the other thing too?  The shark attacks,”

Prentiss dropped her head.  The curtain of grey hung down in front of her face and she wondered if she felt her age or decades older, maybe younger, what her life would look like right now had she followed more conventional pathways.  “I hope not,” she admitted, “But he might be,”

“And if he is?”

“Then this killer has been active for a lot longer than we thought and we have absolutely no idea how many bodies or gaps in the timeline we’ve got,”

“Right,” Simmons shook his head.  “Any thoughts on the profile yet?”

“Very few.  It’s real early days but he’s organised and, from the two we’re sure about, the specificity of the victim profile suggests that the girls are substitutes for a specific person rather than victims of a general hatred for women,”

“Any ballpark on age?  Organised killers tend to blend in pretty well so he’ll probably have a half-decent job,”

“None,” she admitted, “I think the victims’ ages are tied to a specific time rather than ageing with the person they represent to the killer,”

“So he could be fifty or twenty five,”

“Unfortunately,”

“We might know more if Jackson is right,”

Prentiss finished the thought.  “But we won’t be happy about anything we find out,”

Her phone started to ring and Simmons watched her as she looked at Penelope’s contact name with a distant sort of dread as the phone vibrated against the desk before she picked it up with a long-suffering exhale and raised it to her ear, pressing the answer button somewhere along the way.  “Okay,” she said a few times.  “Okay, thank you.   Perfect.  That’s not good.  Hmm.  Right, I’ll let them know,”

“She got the shark attack photos?”

Prentiss nodded  “And she is not happy about having to see them.  I know Reid wants to look over them with Jackson.  He’s out with Alvez right now and Reid’s reading the McCall and Barber files, I’ll let them know when Jackson gets back.  Unless they’ve stumbled across something especially interesting or an especially conversational neighbour they shouldn’t be too much longer,”

“I’ve been making cookies,” the woman sounded excited but her voice had a painful quietness to it, an undeniable hint at disuse.  Alvez looked sceptically around her home, at what should have been a nice building that was infested with vermin, covered in mould, in a state of disrepair even he wasn’t used to seeing.  This was years upon years of neglect.  He had precisely no plans on eating anything that came out of that kitchen.

“Thank you so much, Ms. Castellan,” Percy said.  She had gestured for them to sit down but they both hovered decisively behind the couch, a floral monstrosity that had probably been mostly white, or close to, but was now crawling with all manners of filth. Luke choked on the smell in the air and tried to decide (unsuccessfully) whether it was better for him to breathe through his nose or his mouth.  The floor was hardwood, warped and creaky, much of it hidden beneath tupperwares and plates of cookies and sandwiches and non-descript rot and mould that was no doubt made of more PB and Js and chocolate chips.  The curtains were closed and the overhead light turned on, flickering periodically as though the bulb was on its last legs.  Luke got the sense that there was no real night and day in those four walls, just cookies and sandwiches and cookies and sandwiches and waiting for the real Luke to come home.  He wondered if he did, or if he had just stopped, left her there like that.  He couldn’t imagine doing such a thing to his own mother, seeing her in the sort of state where she couldn’t care for herself and not at least trying to step in and save her from destroying her life.

He noticed the photographs before too long.  There were a lot of them, all of the same kid with blond hair and blue eyes, freckles on his nose.  He was accompanied in many of them by his mother who looked so wildly different in the early years that Alvez was having trouble seeing the pretty young woman with the wavy blonde hair and the smiling eyes as the older woman a room over who looked as though she had been all but hollowed out.  The kid looked happy in the earlier photos, but his mother started to change as the years progressed and his expression became tighter, more feigned, until he eventually seemed to give up entirely on the ruse.  They stopped when the kid was in his mid teens and never started again.  He felt a bit bad for judging the boy so quickly, because this had seemingly all started early and he couldn’t imagine being a teenager in that sort of position.

He picked up one of the photos and blew the dust away to get a better look at the boy’s face--elfish features, upturned eyes, smile that tilted down in a way that reassured Alvez that this was one of the genuine ones, eyebrows that sat at different levels, ears that jutted out to either side of his head.  “You look so handsome in that one,” the old woman cooed, walking back into the room holding a baking pan in her bare hand, on it disks of charred dough that were actively smoking.  The tray must have been hot but she showed no indication of being able to feel it.  He played along, discomfort an unwelcome guest in his stomach, sitting heavy and restless.

Jackson showed her a photo of Marley as Alvez picked up a ‘cookie’ to appease her but never even pretended he was thinking of lifting it to his mouth.  “Do you know her?” he asked gently.

May took the photo, looked at it intently, then looked back at Percy, her eyes occupying half of her entire face.  She grabbed his hand and he didn’t stop her.  “Do you remember babysitting her when you were a kid?  She was only real little but she’s got those same eyes--I’d recognise her anywhere!”

Perhaps they could work with that.  “When was the last time you saw her?”

“Well,” she scratched her chin, her nails long and curling, their surfaces stained yellow and their undersides clogged with some kind of gunk.  “Must have been last week,” maybe they couldn’t work with it.  “She was with a young man.  Looked like you, Lukey.”  She started the sentence looking at Jackson but finished it looking at Alvez, so she could easily be saying he looked like either of them or the real Luke Castellan.  It didn’t help, and even if it did, she seemed to be entirely divorced from time, could be thinking of a time five years ago for all they knew.  It could be helpful information or a complete red herring.

“Thank you for your time,” Alvez said as they left and the woman asked if they couldn’t just stay for five, ten minutes, hours, eternities more.

He shook himself as soon as he was outside as if trying to get the traces of the house off, gulping at the clean air like he was about to die without it.  He looked at Jackson but he just stood, relatively calm and collected, his breathing even and regular.  Alvez looked at him like he had lost it.  “Does the smell not bother you?”

Jackson shrugged and his eyes briefly became unfathomably distant before he was back on that dilapidated porch.  “I’ve had worse,”  He shook his head, his shaggy hair falling in front of her face.  “I can’t believe she’s still living there like that, alone in that house in that state,” he pulled his phone out of his pocket and typed a number without looking at the keyboard, as though it was one he had typed many times before.  “I have a few friends who do social work in New York, I’ll see if they have any good welfare contacts they can call to her,”

Before he hit the call button Alvez decided he was going to just ask.  “Does her son not come around anymore?”

“Uhh, no.” Jackson scratched the back of his neck and shifted his eyes to the side as if he was going to find the right way to answer that question written on the façade of the house across the street.  He didn’t.  “He died a long time ago,” he admitted awkwardly.

“Oh,” Luke said, “Sorry.  I take it you two were close?”

Percy laughed shortly with surprise and perhaps nervousness or disbelief before he seemed to remember that the person he was talking to wasn’t clued into whatever the situation there was.  “I looked up to him for, like, a summer and then he became…” he paused like he was searching for a word that didn't exist.  “Different.”

Alvez suddenly felt very awkward.  He hadn’t really expected the conversation about the kid with the bright eyes and the diminishing smile to end like this but he didn’t know if it seemed rude to just shut up and not dig the hole he was making any further, so he kept his shovel grasped in his hand.  “How did he…?”

“It’s complicated,” Jackson usually seemed confident but now he just seemed nervous and Alvez had this sudden urge to know precisely what ‘different’ meant.  “Short version is that he did it himself,”

“I’m sorry for asking,” Jackson looked at him intensely, his eyes too bright, not quite right, his face handsome in a way that felt separate from the world around it, like it was distinctly different from every other face he had ever seen in a way he couldn’t quite place.  Half of his mouth twitched upwards, as did one of his eyebrows.

“No you’re not,”

Prentiss greeted them when they returned to the station, deflating when she learned that the only piece of information they had with so much as a chance at being useful had come from a woman who claimed it had happened last week.

“No matter,” she mumbled, blatantly trying to convince herself.  Young women were dying and that very much did matter but there was nothing she could do quite yet.  She hated it.  “We’ve got the shark photos.  Reid wants to look them over with you, he’s already in the boardroom when you’re ready,” Jackson nodded and headed straight over so Prentiss stayed with Alvez for a moment.

“Pity about your information,”

“Yeah,” he nodded.  He contemplated for a moment before he said “Jackson knew her, well more her son.  I got the vague impression of a stroy there but nothing actually.  Where did you find that kid, Prentiss?”

She shrugged, her shoulders feeling heavy as though the light padding in her blazer was actually made of solid lead.  “There’s a reason he has a bit of a reputation in the FBI as being kind weird,”

He chuckled.  “There’s no way you’re content with that,”

“Oh,” she said, “I’m not.  But I have no doubt he’ll be good at this job and he’s a fun little mystery I’d like to unravel.”

Reid looked up from the printed photos in front of him as Jackson walked in, the white light glinting off of the old scars on his knuckles as he raised his hand to push his hair back away from his face.  “Hey,” he said.  “You get anything so far?”

Reid had been sitting there for all of a minute and seven seconds so told Jackson as much.  “Besides, I don’t have quite your knowledge on the topic,”

“Right,” Jackson sat across from him and Reid passed over the first of the five series of images, the one which he had been previously looking at.  He leant down and looked closely at the image, undeterred by the blood and gore of it all, of the tearing and the viscera that had been pulled out and revealed beneath ruined skin.  He squinted and dropped his head to his hand so that he was holding his hair out of the way as he examined the images with forensic precision.  “These look a lot like bull shark teeth,”

“So they’re genuine?  Bull sharks are thought by many to be responsible for the majority of attacks against humans that happen close to shores,”

Jackson nodded.  “Euryhaline and diadromous, you’re not safe in salt or fresh water and they’re known to live in the Long Island Sound.  But they’re consistent with a bull shark’s teeth, not an attack,”
“What do you mean?”

“When someone gets attacked by a bull shark they aren’t left intact like this,”

Reid’s eyes lit up.  “Right,” he said, “Of course.  The bull shark is a common suspect for the Jersey Shore Shark attacks in 1916 and the victims were all mutilated by the attacks.  Even the survivor had the flesh stripped from his leg, and one had his legs severed,”

Jackson nodded and moved onto the next series of photos, finding all of them to be much the same.  As soon as he had confirmed his suspicion he sighed and slumped against the desk, little regard for the bloody photos just to the sides of where he rested his head.

“Are you okay?” Reid asked.  He was never much good at comforting people so he really hoped the answer would be a yes.

“Yeah,” Jackson sighed, “It just sucks that nobody investigated this properly when it happened.  I also don’t know what it tells us about the unsub,”

Reid nodded.  “I agree,” he said contemplatively, “The ability to convincingly mimic a shark’s bite pattern is concerning,”

Jackson picked his head up.  “But the inability to actually mimic the attack makes me think he copied the bite pattern from pictures online rather than actually being a specialist of some kind.  What worries me is how long he has been killing.  I’m going to join the diving teams, but I’m pretty worried about what we’re going to find,”

Chapter Text

“You’re sure you’re up for this?” The head of the diving team looked down her long nose at Percy.  She was a lot shorter than him but that didn’t stop her from playing the role of intimidating.  To her credit, she was good at it, Percy just wasn’t that easily deterred.

“I’m sure,” he understood where she was coming from.  He was an FBI agent, this wasn’t the sort of thing they typically did.  “I’m a qualified marine biologist and I have my scuba licence.  I have plenty of practice and I won’t be a liability to your team,”

She sighed and put her hands on her hips.  She had sharp features, dark, intense eyes and bony elbows.  “Fine.  You’re signing a waiver though,”

He chuckled.  “No problem,”

Percy wasn’t strictly the biggest fan of scuba gear, kind of just because he personally didn’t actually have any need for it.  It was just an unnecessary burden and weight on him.  There was just about no chance he was going to be able to convince any mortal at all that it was safe for him to free-dive though, so he put up with it.

The water was cold around him, refreshing.  He kicked his legs languidly, enjoying the novelty of the flippers and how much he really didn’t need them.  He stuck close to his group and they spent a moment together by the boat they had just left, remaining relatively still, getting confirmation from everyone that they were okay and everything was working as it should have been before they ventured further away.  There were three other divers in his group, a woman maybe a couple of years older than him, another in her middle age, and a man  who was probably in his mid thirties.  They were all nice enough from the brief interactions he had had with them above the surface, but more importantly they were all competent and comfortable.  That was good, what they were doing was important and he really didn’t want to have to worry about the people he was searching alongside as well as the grizzly things he was searching for.  Still, he couldn’t help but be a little bit worried about whether they had all seen bodies before, if they were going to be able to keep their composure if they found something.

In spite of why he was there he found himself rejuvenated and refreshed by the water.  If he could without it being suspect he would do all of his thinking down here.  As they moved through the water they passed fish of all sorts of sizes and, knowing that none of the people he was with were going to be able to hear or understand, he asked each and every one of them if they had seen anything.  Evidently that sent them in all of the right directions.

They found skulls, ribs, vertebrae, all sorts of bones and bone fragments, a water-logged leather wallet, a single black boot with the foot inside still semi preserved, a woman’s size 10.  The team all kept their composure for the most part, but Percy was the only one who didn’t wince at that last one.  The sight when all of the teams reconvened and gathered their findings into one place was horrific, grim.  It was almost all disparate pieces but there were three skulls and several more skull fragments.  And that was just what they found.  There could be plenty more in the Sound.

“So what now?” the man from Percy’s team asked him.

Percy sighed.  “They get investigated in a lab, we attempt to determine how many people’s remains we have and how many are likely to be relevant to the current case, and we learn what we can from them,”

The mood was sombre.  There was no way it couldn’t be.  “The fish really seem to like you,” the younger woman from his group commented in an effort to break through it and Percy smiled half-heartedly back.  It wasn’t very effective.

JJ hadn’t gotten much opportunity to talk to Jackson one-to-one since he joined the team. They had been launched without delay into the next case and he had been busy proving his worth to the group like he was determined to reassure them all that he was there for a reason, right for the job.  It’s a bit strange to see him again in such a different capacity, to see him be so much like he was all those years ago and yet, at the same time, so completely different.

“I bet people were kind of fascinated by you in the academy,” she commented as she drove them along a near empty stretch of straight road.  They were still waiting on forensic follow-up of the possible evidence the divers had retrieved and were investigating what other leads they had in the meantime.  For Rossi back in Quantico that meant calling into other stations and creating a line of contact and facilitating an exchange of information, for her and Jackson it meant speaking to the people who knew the victims of the staged shark attacks.  When Garcia had looked into them she had found out that they all had priors, were known to engage in sex work, were vulnerable, high risk targets.  They were very different to Marley Fife in everything but appearance.  That told them a few things, first was that the killer had seemingly gotten bolder and more reckless over time, second was that the visual element of the profile was probably the only one that was actually significant to the killer and the rest of it was just a matter of availability, opportunity and confidence, third was that there were other people they talk to in hopes of getting information.

That was what she and Jackson were doing.

“Because of Gabrish?” he checked.  She nodded, not letting her eyes leave the road.  She turned left.  “Yeah,” he said, “But that wasn’t specific to the academy.  The only real difference between there and anywhere else was that everybody knew the case well enough to know who I was,”

“That must have been hard,” she said, and because she didn’t know how else to continue she commented “I’m glad your hand healed up okay,”

“I’m glad you did too,” they were in very different states at the end of that day.  JJ had a few broken fingers and had suffered some pretty bad but fixable damage to her legs.  They were all things she had been assured would heal up just fine if she let them, and so long as she rested appropriately the only permanent damage she really risked was a bit of stiffness and recurring soreness.  Jackson had been a different matter.  The cut in his hand had been deep and severe and there should have been some kind of structural damage in there that would stop it from healing nearly as well as it did.  Still, she thanked him and didn’t pry.

She wondered why exactly Prentiss had assigned this job to them.  For her it made sense.  Once upon a time she had been their liaison.  It was her job to communicate, to manage the intricate social aspects of a case, to make grieving families trust and respect her.  She was good at talking, especially with people who might be somewhat hostile to the thought of an open dialogue with the authorities.  Jackson, however, was brand new.  Part of her wanted to ask Prentiss if she was sure she was doing the right thing throwing him straight into the deep end over and over but another part of her had seen him when he was ten years younger and more capable than anyone should be.  He had been a troubled kid.  Part of JJ suspected Prentiss had assigned him the role she had in hopes that he might be the most able to relate and therefore the person people were most likely to willingly open up to.

She stopped at the corner she had been told to, a few towns over and in a rundown area where all the grass had dried up and the streets were littered with rubbish.  It was a neglected area and that was precisely why they were there.  She got out of the car and stepped over a discarded needle.  She made a note to herself to see if she could organise some sort of sharps disposal system; she would hate to think about what sorts of diseases some of those needles might be carrying and if she was less observant, or perhaps intoxicated or walking in the dark, then there would be a very real chance of a misstep changing her life quite dramatically.

Jackson followed her out of the car, navigating deftly around the detritus. He moved his hair out of his eyes and peeled off his thin jacket, tying it loosely around his hips.  There were women on the corner who watched them as they got out but, to their credit, at the sight of FBI agents made no attempts to run away.  If JJ is being optimistic she thinks she might even see the most distant little spark of hope in some of their eyes.  Unfortunately that doesn’t necessarily mean these girls are going to be any more cooperative.

There was a tall woman with bleach blonde hair standing only a few feet away from their car, robotically smoking a cigarette almost as if she was daring them with little more than her strict composure to talk to her.  So JJ did.

“We’re from the FBI,” she said.  It was already written out on the breast of her jacket so it wasn’t really news.  The woman raised her eyebrows and they showed her their credentials even though she didn’t ask.  “We’ve been investigating over in Westport and it has come to our attention that a few years back some women went missing from around here?”

There was a moment of silence as she took a deep inhale and then blew out smoke.  As she did she eyed them up and down, the curiosity plain on her face.  JJ knew most of that wasn’t aimed at her.  “You think I’m old enough to know about all that?” She paused and smiled saccharinely.  She couldn’t possibly be trying any harder to be ingenuine.  She looked to be maybe in her early thirties, the makeup breaking up and gathering in the areas where her skin creased only ageing her.  JJ didn’t dignify that with a response and just cocked her eyebrows.  The woman sighed and dropped the burnt out butt of her cigarette to the pavement, grinding it into the ground under her shoe.  “Fine,” she said “Yes.  Some girls went missing.  That was a long time ago.  Shark attacks, right?  I don’t really see how that’s the FBI’s business.  Or mine,”

“Recent developments suggest foul play,”

“Wow,” the woman drew out the syllable, “Only took them four years to raise what we told them all along!  Listen, our girls aren’t disappearing anymore and we’ve got nothing for you,”

JJ tried to think of a response but before she got any real chance Jackson spoke up.  “Is there any particular reason why none of you have dark hair?”

The woman looked at him from underneath mascara-clumpy eyelashes.  Her smile changed from sickly sweet and artificial to genuine, intrigued, and somewhat rueful.  She rifled in her bag for a box of Camel cigarettes and a lighter and, as she lit one, held out the box to Jackson like an offer of goodwill.  He didn’t take one but thanked her anyway.  “How observant,” she commented, her dark eyes shifting to look down the street at women with hair dyed blonde and ginger and pink and bright red, anything but black or brown.  A lot of them had dark roots growing in, some almost an inch of chocolate brown hair at the tops of their heads where they parted their hair.  She rolled her eyes.  “Fine,” she pulled on a piece of bleach-fried hair to the side of her face.  “Girls went missing and we realised what they had in common so we protected ourselves,”

“How many girls?” JJ asked, something in her gut insisting that it was probably more than the five they knew about.

The woman let out a long-suffering sigh.  “Who knows?”  She sounded sad.  JJ didn’t blame her.

“How many did you know personally?” Jackson asked her instead, giving her a question more easily answered.

“I think 7,” she admitted.  “I don’t know if it was all the same guy because I could swear they got into different cars which is why I never stopped them, but there were seven of them.  Tall, young, dark hair.  I’m sure you know that already.  It’s a hard life out here,” she cocked her head to the side and shot them another smile.  It was as though each one was getting smaller.  “I wouldn’t have chosen it if I had the choice.  I don’t think they would have either.  It’s hard, you know, to lose people like that and never really know for sire what happened to them.  There are people out for us,”

“I can imagine,” JJ agreed.

The woman scoffed.  “That’s just the thing.  You can imagine.  That’s it.”  She looked at Percy intently, eyeing up the scars lining his bare arms.  JJ got the feeling that he intended as much when he took the jacket off, like an invitation for people to ask about him, to see him, in the hope it might prompt some of them to open up in return.  “How about you, Mr. FBI?  Where do you come from and how did you end up here?”
“I was the poster child for troubled children,” he almost laughed.  “I was wanted when I was twelve for suspected murder and terrorism that I didn’t commit.  I basically grew up in schools for troubled children but the only thing that ever did me any good was the camp for troubled kids with learning difficulties where I spent every summer,”

She looked him in the eyes, like she was trying to make sure he wasn’t lying to her.  JJ already knew that every part of the story worth lying about was true.  “I guess you knew a lot of people just like you,” the woman said.  “What happened to them?”

“Mixed bag,” Jackson shrugged.  “Just about everyone who didn’t end up dead is doing just fine now,” JJ’s skin went cold, like someone had dumped ice water all over her, and she squinted up at her co-worker.  That she didn’t know and she didn’t feel good about learning it.

The woman cocked an eyebrow.  “So what,” she said, “do you think I’m a fuck up because we came from similar places and here I am turning tricks and there you are in the F.B.I,” she said it so slowly that, even though she didn’t move as she said it, JJ could imagine each letter punctuated by a poke to the chest, by her drawing ever closer.

Jackson didn’t seem the least bit phased.  He shook his head.  “Not at all.  I wouldn’t have ended up anywhere near where I did without that support system.  Besides, you’re here, you’re doing plenty better than a lot of people I used to know,” he seemed genuinely sad.

“Fine,” she turned to properly face them and JJ tried not to wince at smoke being blown into her face.  “What do you want to know and what do I get for telling you?”

“Safety?” JJ suggested.  “The satisfaction of knowing you’re stopping him from getting to other girls?  People are still going missing,”

She deflated in a moment.  “Okay okay,” she threw her second cigarette to the ground and rubbed her hands together like she was trying to warm them up even though it was not a cold day.  “I’ll tell you what I can.  And I’ll come with you to talk to the others.  They’ll warm up to you faster,”

“Thank you,” JJ said earnestly.

The woman looked at her not unkindly.  “Yeah, whatever.  The first one I know about was about 5 years ago.  Her name was Bella, I don’t know her surname, I don’t even know if that was her real name at all, but she was lovely.  She was hooked on drugs but if you talked to her when she was sober, oh my god she was the smartest person I think I’ve ever met.  And then she got into that car--a squeaky clean blue pick up, I’m pretty sure the licence ended with T3--and nobody ever saw her again until they found her body.  I think she was actually the second to go but I didn’t know the first.  The next was Milly and she was mean.  But, you know, funny about it.  If something was upsetting or annoying she’d be the first to complain. When girls went missing she did not stop bugging the police until she turned up dead too.  And even then I don’t think they ever really came around,”

Chapter Text

They decided to hold a press conference.  There was still a part of JJ that felt as though it was too early because they hadn’t been there for very long and they were still sifting through unknowns that seemed to just increase exponentially, but the case had really been years long and there were plenty of people who must be missing family and friends, who deserved the best semblance of an answer they had to offer.  But still, they didn’t even have a profile.

She tried to ignore that, schooled her face into something welcoming but serious, sombre, something that said ask me your questions, trust my answers but also young women are dead and I am deeply saddened by it.  It was a careful balance, a hard one to strike.  That is why it was assigned to her, the one with the most training in it and the most practice, the one they trusted to do it well.  It was a routine she had been through time and time again and she never didn’t feel terrible about it.  It made her face the representation of the case until they caught their unsub: she had been the face of so many murdered people as well as that of the monsters who killed them.

She answered questions honestly but gave away no information that would compromise their case, nothing that was too speculative, but enough to hopefully reassure people that they were doing their best, that they were on the case, that they were going to step in and stop the killer as soon as they could.  They were doing their best.

She deflated the moments the cameras stopped rolling and she stepped back and away from the public eye.  She did nothing but breathe for a moment and then found herself facing Prentiss, her trusted team leader.

“You’re sure this is the right thing to do?” It was already far too late to change it but JJ needed the reassurance.

Prentiss nodded.  JJ always appreciated her confidence, her steadfastness.  It was a specific quality that could only be learned through a life like Prentiss’, the kind where moments of true normalcy were few and far between.  There was something not dissimilar but much more tumultuous held by Jackson.  “This guy has been killing in the shadows for a long while.  If we’re lucky even a hint of public pressure will make him scared, make him sloppy,” JJ didn’t miss the other meaning in that: they were expecting him to kill again, hoping he’d be shaken enough to leave them more evidence and they would be fast enough to find it before it deteriorated.

Prentiss’ face was sad, worried, in no way an act for the camera, in no way an act for JJ.  But still she examined it.  It was a good face, familiar and comforting, framed with hair that was thick and silky, more grey than not by then.  But JJ remembered how it used to be, how dark it was.  She could imagine a young Prentiss looking so much like the girls they had been called in too late to protect.  Had she been in the wrong place at the wrong time she could have ended up just like them, there would be nothing her mother’s political sway could do besides get the guy caught when it was already too late for her.  Some of those girls could have grown up to be somebody much like her, but they had been cut off, their futures stolen.  Some of those early victims could have found a way out, gotten clean, gotten sober, gotten work that paid enough to keep them off the streets.  They were never going to know that for sure though, and the uncertainty, the what ifs made JJ feel sick.

She and Prentiss exchanged shaky smiles and then she left the boardroom.  She needed fresh air.

Lewis read over the report for the third time then looked over at Jackson where he was sitting, squinting at their board as though there was something wrong with it.  Probably all the vital bits of evidence they simply did not have.  She cocked an eyebrow.  “You really found all of this stuff?”

He shrugged like it wasn’t almost supernatural of him to have found so many small pieces of evidence in such a large body of water in so little time.  “I get lucky sometimes,”  So lucky, in fact, that it had almost gotten him tortured and killed by a deranged cannibal.  Lewis didn’t think it was a good time to mention that so just nodded along as though it made sense.  She had realised in the short time that she had worked with him that Jackson was intensely interesting to talk to, even if (and perhaps because) she was never quite convinced he was telling the truth.  “Have they found anything interesting about it?”

“They’re still waiting on DNA tests, but we have information about the material evidence: the wallet and the boot,”

He looked away from the board to really face her.  “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.  They have a brand on the wallet.  All the cards and personal identifiers in it got pretty much ruined but the locals, here and in the other nearby towns, are asking around about whether it might be something any of the known victims owned,” he nodded.  “Same with the boot.  The foot is just about the best thing they have for testing, too.  The forensic teams are optimistic about finding out whose it was,”

Jackson smiled tightly.  “That’s assuming that she’s in the system somewhere,”

“Yeah,” she sighed, “Yes it is,”

The room went quiet and Lewis couldn’t look away from Jackson, his face brooding when he relaxed it, his eyes too dark and his posture too loose, almost like he had given up.  Some part of her was sure he hadn’t, that he’d perk up soon and be right back on form.  And then Reid came rushing in and the silence was broken as he almost tripped over a chair that hadn’t been properly tucked beneath the table in his hurry.  His eyes were wild.  That meant big news.

“There’s another body,” So bad news then.  “A new one,” Less bad from an investigative standpoint then.  The recent press conference just might have worked.  A part of Lewis had hoped it wouldn’t, that they would be able to solve it without a single other person having to meet an untimely end.  “The locals have been doing rounds of the river.  They found her.  She probably hadn’t been in there for more than a couple of hours.  They’re moving her body to the M.E now,”

They headed to the M.E’s as soon as they got the news.  All of them.  There was this sort of energy that hummed insistently between them, buzzing and impossible to ignore, a desire coloured with desperation driving them at full speed in the direction of new information.  They barely had anything else to go off of and most of what they did have they couldn’t be certain was actually related to the case.  It was broken up, fragmented, destroyed.  It was barely evidence at all.

The young woman’s body was there, waiting for them.  It was bloated in its decomposition, smelled terrible, but it was all there, all her flesh and all her skin and all her hair.  It was limp and sad and stuck to her blue-tinged skin, soaked through like her clothes.  Maybe it held evidence, maybe it didn’t.  Either way there had to be some part of her that had something helpful.  There had to be.

“I haven’t had much time to look yet,” Dr. O'Brien disclaimed.  She was still bright and warm and so alive.  Lewis had a feeling like she had to be or she would never be able to do a job like this without it consuming her.  “But I’d estimate she was dumped in the early morning, a little before sunrise,” Sunrise was at 05:30, it is now ticking steadily towards eight am.  She was found in short enough time that she might just be the key they had been searching for the whole time, the thing that could unlock the investigation.  “I think she was probably killed a little while before she was disposed of,” no matter how bright the M.E was, her face was sad, something about her speech almost subdued.  She looked down at the young woman’s face and sighed and there was something about the silence that felt like a goodbye.  She was the first of these victims that had appeared with her face, her identity, still intact.

“Did you know her?” she found herself asking.  O’Brien shook her head.

“I don’t think so,” she paused, “I feel like I might have seen her before though,” a long exhale of air.  “Or maybe I haven’t,” a shrug that tried much too hard to be casual so it ended up being precisely anything but.  “Maybe she just looks like all the others,”  Just like everybody else, she had clearly seen the photos.  She was quiet for just a beat too long.  “The officers have bagged up all her belongings.  For the time being there might be a bit more for you there,”  It was as polite of a get out as Lewis had ever heard, more of a please leave.

Reid missed it.  “I’d like to help you here,”  And to Lewis's Surprise, O’Brien nodded, albeit stiffly, and let him stick around.

The moment they were out and the door was closed, she looked over to Jackson who was looking back over his shoulder, the worry on his face a pit in her own stomach.

“The serial murder is always a lot,” she said, “Even to people like Dr. O’Brien who are used to things that most people would be much too squeamish for,”

Jackson nodded at her.  In some ways he was just like the M.E in that he was young and alive and his face was tight like he didn't quite remember how to move it.  She was talking as much about him as he was her.  The first case was never not a hard one and the body count this time around was getting to Lewis in a way that no case had in a long time.  A trail of young women’s lives heartlessly extinguished, a gut feeling that they would never be able to trace it back through every step, like even when they caught their unsub there would still be questions unanswered, murders unattributed, girls still unidentified.  Even the ones they knew about would still be dead by the end of it.  All of them.  And still she was taken aback by what Jackson said next, through a sigh as though it was frustrating and a little sore but not necessarily shocking.  “I really thought I’d aged out of being surrounded by dead kids,”

Lewis didn’t respond to that because she had no way to,  She put a hand tentatively on Jackson’s back, a frail offer of comfort, not enough, so far from enough, and felt a spike of relief (underwhelming) when he seemed to relax ever so slightly into it, accepting it.  “Where do you come from, Jackson?” she muttered to herself rather than him, so quiet that even she was having a hard time finding words in the sounds.  And still he looked over like he heard her with complete clarity, and did not offer so much as the vague semblance of an answer.

True to O’Brien’s words, everything found on the girl was being examined then sorted, filed as evidence.  There was really nothing for them to do but join and help the locals.  They gloved up and leaned over.  Cargo shorts, a charcoal grey t-shirt, a silver necklace, a braided leather bracelet, mis-matched ankle socks, green Vans.  They were waterlogged, like everything, and there were these dark smudges across the fabric as though there had been ink or paint on there, as if some of the character had been washed out.  Three hair ties, another which had snapped, a handful of brassy bobby pins--she counted them, eight--some with hair still tangled in them, a keyring with three keys and a handful of eccentric keychains.  Most were acrylic, one was a stuffed sasquatch no taller than Lewis’ thumb.  A wallet.  Fabric, not leather.  A beat up thing, like she had been using it for years.  It bore the logo of a National Park and it made Lewis inordinately sad.  Laid out in front of her were the details of a person’s life, a person’s interest, all taken from her too early, removed from her body.  She didn’t think she believed in any god, but sometimes she hoped in despite that there might be an afterlife, or a cycle of rebirth, that these girls might get a second chance.

She opened the wallet.  A licence.  “Penelope Elizabeth Green” it was still legible though barely and there was something that compelled Lewis to read it aloud, to let the girl have her name if she could have nothing else.  One of the locals froze where he stood, his eyes wide.

“Penny?”

Oh no.  Lewis swallowed.  “You knew her?”

The man nodded mechanically.  “She was friends with my daughter,” his eyes were glossy like they were brimming with tears but none spilled.  His posture was awkward, like he was trying too hard to have it not be.  Deep breath.  “She was seventeen.  Somebody needs to tell her mother,” that someone couldn’t be him.  It went unspoken but well-understood.

Simmons called his wife every day when he was away, made sure he spoke to every one of his children every opportunity he was given.  They were his world.  The thought of losing any of them terrified him, stopped him dead in his tracks.  He loved his work for all the good it allowed him to do and the company it put him in.  He hated it for just about everything else.

The girls’ faces on the board stared back at him.  Penelope.  Penny.  The youngest yet.  He tried to read every bit of information they had on her without thinking too hard.  She was still older than all of his children but there would be a day when that stopped.  He needed to not think about how young she was, the family she had, the family that was never going to get to have her back.

She was middle class, a senior at the local high school.  She worked in a coffee shop and she had been on a road trip with one of the local’s daughters only months before.  She looked just like all the others, with the dark hair and the pretty face.  In every photo they had of her she had messy hair, either ruined by wind or tied back like she didn’t care what it looked like, just that it was out of her face.  It had been wet when they found her, should have been more tangled than ever.  But it wasn’t.  There had been smudged traces of makeup on her too, which there wasn’t in any of the photos.  Someone had tried to make her look like someone else.  That just reiterated what they already knew.

The crime was not about Penelope Elizabeth Green like it wasn’t about Marley Fife or any of the others.  There was a woman somewhere who was really at the centre of all of this, who probably had no clue that she was, who knew a man who did terrible things to young women and teenage girls and knew all sorts of ways to get away with it.  So who was she?

It was as though some sort of higher power had read his thoughts and saw it fit to grant him mercy.  A nervous-looking local, young, green, basically brand new--not an ideal position to be in, Simmons could admit--knocked at their boardroom door and, at their invitation, shuffled unsurely in.

“Uh,” his face went pink and he wouldn’t look specifically at any of them.  Simmons had a feeling he wasn’t going to stay in the job for long.  “Special Agent Jareau, an envelope was left for you,”

Simmons watched her squint then smile.  Her face was calm and inviting and the young local still couldn’t look at it.  “Who left it?”

He gulped.  “It doesn’t say.  It has URGENT handwritten across the front of it,”

Either it was a letter from the killer or a hoax from somebody who was pretending to be.  Simmons squinted at it.  They hadn’t been expecting this; it didn’t fit the scant profile they had barely been able to cobble together.  So either a hoax or a man who was desperate, who had a goal he had yet to achieve and a suddenly urgent need to get it over with before they got to him.  Assuming it was real, the press conference worked.  Prentiss was right.  They trusted her to be for a reason.

The envelope was slightly yellow and the letter was a few sentences of near incoherence.  They pleaded to have somebody returned, though they did not give a name, in about as many iterations as the addled brain of the writer could come up with.  If it was real the woman was almost certainly the one who all the victims resembled.  She could have been a first victim, an accidental one, or else an ex, the one that got away, even a family member.  The letter itself gave little away.  But there was something else inside the envelope alongside it.  A photo.

Simmons squinted at it.  It had been ripped in half.  Once upon a time there was presumably at least one other person held inside of it but all that was left was a teenaged girl.  The photo was small and seemed pretty old and the details were hard to make out.  She was tall, had pretty, long, dark, shiny hair.  She was wearing casual clothes, some sort of necklace like the kind that Jackson wore.  She was maybe the best lead they had.

“We need to find out who she is,” he voiced.  Prentiss took a photo of it to send to Garcia and then called her as the photo was passed between the rest of the team.  It stopped when it reached Jackson, before it got to Alvez, and Simmons looked up at the youngest member of the team.  He squinted at it a little too intently, like he was trying to pull something out of the sparse detail that might not have been there.

“I think I might know.”

Chapter Text

Upon closer inspection, there really was something about the girl--her shiny waves of long, dark hair, her almond-shaped eyes that seemed like they couldn’t decide on which colour to be, her winning smile and her bright white but slightly uneven teeth, the scrunch of her nose and the seemingly effortless grace about her--that struck a very distant chord of recognition in Prentiss.   It wasn’t much, something she could easily write off as being a product of seeing all the victims who had been chosen precisely because they looked somewhat like her, but the horror of a much stronger recognition was blatant on Jackson’s face and “I think I might know,” echoed around her head as though he was saying it over and over again as she turned to look at him.

“You do?” she asked, attempting to keep the optimism out of her voice and making no such attempt to drown out the curiosity ringing in her mind that was much more about Jackson than it was their case.

He nodded hesitantly.  “You see the necklace?” He pointed one finger at the girl and used his other hand to lift the leather band heavy with the hand-painted clay beads from beneath the collar of his shirt.  “I used to go to a camp that would give out one of these beads every summer.  It’s not the best photo but I’m sure we went to camp together--I think this is Silena,” he sounded choked, uncomfortable.  All eyes were on him and it was clear that, whilst he wasn’t exactly unfamiliar with the intention, he was far from revelling in it.   His fists were tight and his jaw was clenched and there seemed to be something about him, something small and subconscious but far from insignificant, that was expecting a fight.

“Okay,” Prentiss nodded, turning her gaze from Jackson and offering him a semblance of a break for just a moment.  “That’s good.  That’s a lead.  What’s her surname?”

“Beauregard.”

“And do you have any idea where she might be now?”

Jackson’s eyes bore into her and Prentiss, a person very much used to pressure and hostility and attempts at intimidation, all of which she had become adept at overcoming in time, felt the urge to flinch crawl up her spine.  “I think her dad scattered her ashes in the Sound.”

“Oh,” Prentiss said.

“Oh,” Jackson agreed, expression rueful.  Prentiss didn’t miss the way that JJ looked at him in that moment, something like realisation or remembrance, understanding,

“How long ago did she pass?”

“On my sixteenth birthday.  August 18th eleven years ago,”

Prentiss winced.  “Okay.  So that’s something.  The object of the unsub’s obsession has been dead for over a decade and our best estimate is that the unsub has been killing for five years.  He might be seeking her, but he might also be trying to avenge her,”

“He could also be angry at her and taking it out on other women that look like she did,” Reid pointed out, “Like Bundy’s victim profile being based on an ex he held a grudge against,”

Prentiss nodded.  “Because she’s not there anymore and these other girls are.  But what happened five years ago?  I’ll see if Garcia can verify that this is actually Silena, and Jackson, I’m sorry to do this, but could you tell me what you know about her?”

He looked like he wanted to refuse but still nodded his head stiffly, his hands twitching at his sides, his eyes narrow and cold, his necklace still on the outer side of his shirt.  “Yeah, sure,” the sound of defeat in his voice was not one Prentiss enjoyed.  “What do you want to know?”

“Can you think of anyone from your camp who was obsessed with her?  An old boyfriend?  Anything?  Did she ever mention anything from home that felt like a red flag to you?”

“Nobody I can think of from camp fits,” he said decisively.  “The only boyfriend she ever had is long gone too,” and that was when Prentiss realised why the girl in the photo had seemed vaguely familiar: Jackson’s own photographs.  There had been a girl with long, dark waves and a pretty face and just about everything else the girl in the unsub’s photo had, and then the girl had stopped showing up.  There had been a tall boy in a few of them too, his arm around her shoulders in at least one.  They seemed to have disappeared at the same time from Jackson’s pictures.  “She didn’t talk about home much,” he looked at her apologetically.  “At a camp for troubled kids that’s not so shocking.  After Beckendorf, her boyfriend, died her dad sent her chocolates so she must have been in contact with home but,” he shrugged.  “She wasn’t really attached to it,” he looked away from Prentiss, up to the featureless white of the ceiling, memory playing at the corners of his mouth, twitching between a nostalgic smile and a grimace.  “She said they tasted like cardboard,”

Prentiss sighed too and looked him up and down.  There was always something off about Jackson and this had always been an accepted fact, but there he was talking about two dead teenagers and there she was, sitting with a feeling in the pit of her stomach that there was much more to the story.  JJ, Lewis and Alvez had both told her as much--that the strange women they had called welfare on had once had a son, that some time ago Jackson knew him, that it had been a long time since anyone did; that there were a lot of ghosts behind their new recruit, too many, too young.  “You can’t think of anyone who might be a better lead?”

He shook his head.  “I can think of someone who knew more about her than anyone else though,” he said after a moment, his tortured expression shifting to something more contemplative.  Prentiss perked up.  “She’s a bit much,” Jackson warned.  “And she lives a long way away but I can probably get her on the phone or a video call or whatever,”
“Who is she?”

“Her name is Clarisse La Rue,”

There was a part of Lewis that was strangely excited for the video call they had scheduled with La Rue, perhaps because she might just serve as a puzzle piece that might help them make sense of the mystery that was Jackson’s background.  But then again, there was always a chance she would simply end up serving as a mystery of her own.  Either way, knowing what she did about Silena and her boyfriend, she was getting a bit more of a sense of what Jackson had meant by being surrounded by dead kids.  It was strange, undeniably so, but she was so certain there were more of them--three was already too many, but it didn’t feel like enough.

Still, she had a lot of work to do that was frankly much more pressing than digging into Jackson’s peculiar background.  Namely solving a string of murders that was seeming more and more horrifically prolific with every day of their investigation.  She loved her job in a lot of ways, but in a lot more it was frankly miserable.

Penelope was working on getting into contact with Silena’s father as well as making sure that Jackson’s identification of the girl in the photo was actually correct, not that any of them particularly doubted him about it.

For the rest of them, at least for the time being, their main focus was Penelope Elizabeth Green and what information their was to glean from her body and her family and, if they were to get especially lucky (the sort of word Lewis always felt a bit gross at applying to her job where just about everybody involved had been abandoned by luck all together), there might just be more physical evidence left behind her that was still new enough to be of use, some security footage, even.

She had the unenviable job of joining Jackson and talking to her closest friends whilst JJ had the even less enviable task of talking to her parents who were stricken, bereaved and floating in the middle of space, their lives changed for the worse forever.  She couldn’t even imagine being in their situation.  It did make her wonder somewhat, as she waited by Jackson’s side for the friends to arrive at the station for their scheduled interviews, how his mother had felt all those years ago when he had disappeared for the third time, how she had felt the first and the second, if each subsequent disappearance only tightened the knot in her stomach or made her understand more and more that he had some sort of uncanny knack for getting himself out of difficult situations, that he would come back definitely worse for wear, but he would always come back.

“I hate this bit,” she found herself telling him.

He sighed.  “I can’t say I don’t see why,”

“You lost a few friends when you were their age, right?”

“ A few,” he repeated under his breath for a moment, like he was testing how the words fit in his mouth and in his life, like he was trying them on before he threw them to the floor, shaking his head so subtly it didn’t seem like he was aware he was doing it at all.  “Yeah, I’ve lost a lot of people.” A far cry from a few, Lewis didn’t miss the difference.  “It sucks, it always sucks.  There’s nothing that makes it suck less,” 

“You-” Lewis hesitated, sighed, then ploughed ahead.  “You named your kid after your cousin, right?  You lost him too,”

“When he was 16.  I didn’t realise at the time how little of a life he got, and then I kept getting older and he didn’t and I understood.  That’s what these kids have ahead of them.  It’s horrible.”

She nodded sympathetically.  “They’ll be okay, shaken, sure, but they’ll keep living, just like you did,”
His expression got stuck halfway between wry and rueful.  “I hope they’ll live better than I did.  And this will change them, at least a bit.  Trust me,” Lewis nodded.  She knew loss changed people, she knew losing her sister had changed JJ even if she hadn’t known JJ before her sister’s death, she knew the slow loss of Reid’s mother had changed him, she knew that it was impossible not to let life affect you.

“Do you believe in an afterlife?”

“Not the Christian one,” neither a yes or a no, “how about you?”

“I don’t think so.  But I’d like for there to be one,”

“What would you want it to be like?”

She looked down at her shoes, polished leather, not yet scuffed, more new than not.   A job like hers would ruin them soon enough.  That was just what the job was: ruination in whatever form it cared to take from one day to the next.  “I’ve never really thought about it.  I don’t think I want these monsters in it,”
“Not to be punished?”
She shook her head.  “No.  Even if they spend it getting punished it’s still an afterlife, right?  Like a second chance.  There are some people that don’t deserve those.  I think eternal paradise would be a bit boring too, so I don’t really know what I’d want.  I don’t think Heaven feels right to me though,”

He nodded like he was considering what she was saying.  “Yeah,” he agreed after a moment, “I could see that,”

“So if you don’t believe in Heaven either what do you think?”
“I think I like reincarnation,” he shrugged, “Or at least the choice--you live in paradise until you’re tired of perfection and then you get to live again,”

She smiled at him.  “I could get on board with that,”

The interviews were exactly as awful as she had predicted they would be.  They began with a teenaged boy with sad eyes that looked like he hadn’t slept since his friend disappeared, who sniffled through the whole thing but looked like he had cried so much he had lost the ability to shed any more tears.

“I saw her at school last,” he told them.  “She was there Friday and then she bailed on our plans for the weekend and I started to worry and I was right too.  The last thing I ever said to her was that she couldn’t copy my psych homework.” His hair was greasy, unwashed.  Lewis far from blamed him for that, it wasn’t the time.  Jackson looked at him with more empathy than sympathy.

“And there was nothing strange about Friday?”  Jackson’s voice was softer than Lewis had ever heard it but he sounded well-accustomed to the tone, like he was used to having these hard conversations, perhaps even harder ones, with kids who were going through the worst thing that had ever happened to them, whose worlds were crumbling from rose-tinted and youthful to grey and dead, dying.  She didn’t like that thought all that much but it fit into place a little too well.  With every revelation, no matter how small, she had about him she was wondering more and more if she actually wanted to keep digging at all, if she would like what was sitting underneath the surface.

The kid choked down a sob, the kind that sounded like it hurt.  Lewis couldn’t help but wonder what his voice normally sounded like, what he was like when his world wasn’t ending, what his life might have been like if this monster hadn’t taken his friend away.  “No.  Not really.  She was late to homeroom, she is occasionally.  Oh--I think she went home with someone--Ash--after class,”

Ash came in to speak to them a while later, their hair cropped short and dyed red, their eyes so bloodshot they almost matched.  “We played a videogame and cooked together.  She left around seven, it was still light out so she decided to walk,”  They were scratching at the back of their hand, so much that the skin was starting to come away.

“Do you know what happened after that?” Lewis asked.

They shook their head.  Not really.  I know she didn’t make it home: her mom texted me asking me if she had left yet at 9, but the walk shouldn’t have taken more than 30 minutes even if she went the long way,”

The third grieving teenager they had to interview was the dead girl’s girlfriend.  They had been planning on going to college together, planning their second anniversary in a month, planning a future they were never going to get to have.  Lewis’ stomach twisted over itself.  “I don’t know anything,” her voice was thick and sore and sorry.  “I was off sick on Friday and suddenly she was gone,” her eyes were watering the whole time, the determined swipe of her thumb under her eyes stopping the tears from trailing down her cheeks but making the skin red, sore and puffy.  Not for the first time that day, Lewis suppressed the urge to reach out and take a kid’s hand in hers, stopping them from just hurting themselves in an effort to cope with the impossible and unpredictable.  This sort of loss was the kind that nobody could ever be prepared for.

“She texted me when she left Ash’s that she was excited to go to the arcade tomorrow because she’s been saving up enough tickets to win the prize she wanted.  I don’t know what it was.” she got out her phone and clicked through a couple of pages before turning it to face them.  “That was at ten past seven, I saw it five minutes later and then I kept trying to text back but she went quiet,”

“Thank you,” Jackson told her, edging around "I'm sorry for your loss ” like he knew all too well how much it just wouldn’t help.  “You’ve been very helpful, I’m sorry we have to bother you at such a hard time,”

“You’ve done very well,” Lewis tried to reassure her.  “It takes a strong kid to be able to do this,” she knew it was hollow, that it wasn’t as though she really had a choice, especially if she wanted her girlfriend’s killer caught.

“I’d rather be happy than strong,” she got up without a more formal goodbye, stretching her arms over her head and wincing at the click of her own elbow.  “I don’t think you get to be both at once,”

“They should write a better script for these things,” Lewis told Jackson without a hint of humour as they waited for the next interview, the last of the day, with the police officer’s daughter.

He cocked his eyebrows.  “Nothing makes this suck less,” he told her without a hint of doubt or hesitation.  “There is no better script,”

“ I’d rather be happy than strong, ” she repeated.

Jackson nodded.  “ I don’t think you get to be both at once.   She’s right, you know,”

“I do.  I hate this job sometimes,”

“You’re really selling it to the rookie,”

“I don’t think I have to sell it to you Jackson.  It’s good work, really fulfilling, and depressing as hell,”

“But now you’re all too hooked on saving people to step away from it,”

“Exactly that,”

He hung his head and inhaled loudly.  “I know the feeling,” and she didn’t know how but she definitely didn’t doubt it.

“I’ve always hated this station,” Rebecca King, the police officer’s daughter, said the moment she walked into the room, her dad close by her side dressed in his civvies, his eyes focused on the side of her head like he couldn’t stand the thought of letting his daughter out of his sight anymore.

“I’m afraid we’ll just be confirming that opinion today,” Lewis winced.

“Yeah, I got that.  Marcus, Ash and Tanya have all been here already right.  They said it sucked.”

“It was always going to,” Jackson told her.

“Yeah,” she sighed and it sounded like she was miles away, on another planet, in another life.  “I figured.  She called me at 7:13 pm, it only lasted about 30 seconds and I just assumed the signal was cut off because there was a sound, I thought it was static, and then the call just stopped.” tears streamed down her cheeks freely.  “I tried calling back and she didn’t pick up and now,” her voice was distorted, sobs sitting just behind the words in her throat.  “I don’t think it was static anymore,”

“You think she was attacked then?”

A shaky nod.  “And I think she fought back.  I can’t imagine Penny not fighting back.”

Chapter Text

Westport was always safe, at least relatively, always a place where people could be well out of harm’s way walking in most areas even if the sun had set and birds rustled the leaves of the trees and the rushing of water and the smell of the Sound made it evident that nobody was ever really alone.  It had its worst areas, just like everywhere else, but it was more safe than not and its people appreciated that fact even if they didn’t think about it too much.  And then it wasn’t.

A body in the Sound.  Another.  Girls washed up, pale reflections of themselves if they managed to be reflections at all.  Old women who looked nothing at all like any of them in the nicest, safest communities installed additional locks, could sleep only following a complex series of pieces clicking into place.  Women in their twenties shilled out money they never would have before for ride shares instead of walking ten minutes alone through the fields that were safe once upon a time even if they were not lit and were overshadowed and isolated.  Any man not too proud to would admit to looking over his own shoulder as well as that of his wife and daughter, to looking a little too closely at the face of just about every man just like himself, to thinking that the danger could be anywhere which meant it must be everywhere.

Emboldened by the immortality of youth, young girls would ignore the warnings and their parents’ pleas and walk alone where there were no witnesses of their passing, slip out of their mothers’ sight for a party or a trip, promise to send their fathers’ their locations and forget after the third or fourth.  It was a funny kind of immortality, in that it saved you except for the one time when it didn't.

A girl pulled out a phone.  A man watched her through the trees.  She didn’t see him but he saw her all too clearly, for everything that she was not but he wished she would be.  She talked for a moment, about a game he hadn't heard of and a group of people she would never see again.  He let her walk for a moment, and then his patience wore thin.  The phone fell, shattered on concrete, and the girl screamed just a moment too late for the call to transmit it, a sound that was short and high and panicked.  This couldn’t be happening, not to her, because she was young and she had so much more of her life left and had done so little with the time she had had.  She had plans, big ones and just ones for the weekend and she would live to see them because she had to, because this was the type of thing that happened to other people but could not happen to her.  She scratched at the man, pushed and punched and kicked and landed a knee to the groyne but could not get more than an arm’s length away before she was grabbed and rendered unconscious.

The man stood up, cursed, looked at the figure of the girl on the floor and brushed his cheek, sticky with blood--his own, for once--with his fingers.  She could not stay here like this so neither could he.  Girl and man receded back into the trees, phone stayed broken on the concrete, evening remained hanged in the sky and Westport remained alive and more safe than not except for where it wasn’t.

The people of Westport had become acquainted by then with their perception of security and how they hadn't appreciated it until they would give just about anything to have it back.

Lewis watched the computer screen as a woman who appeared to be about thirty appeared from the darkness.  Lewis smiled, trying her absolute best to look welcoming and inviting but it was evident immediately from the woman’s natural scowl that she shared no such concerns.  “You work with Percy?” was the first thing out of her mouth, before Lewis had the chance to say so much as a hello, said like she couldn’t quite believe it.

“I do,” she nodded, “he’ll be in soon; he got caught up in a discussion with the local police chief.”

Clarisse shook her head.  “Who would’ve guessed it,” she half-laughed.  Lewis took a moment to really take her in, from the red paisley bandana keeping her hair away from her face to the square jaw and the broad shoulders and the scars cutting across her bare bicep like a set of claws too large to belong to any animal.  It was strange exactly how much she looked like she belonged in the company of Agent Jackson, like she also had something about her that didn’t sit quite right.  She wore the same necklace too, the same leather strap weighed down with heavy, hand-painted clay beads, the same one as Silena.

“That he’d join the FBI?”

She hummed, pressing her lips together and raising her eyebrows.  Lewis very much got the sense that there was something there she was being kept out of, like someone was playing a game with her and never told her the rules.  It was more intentional than the general impression she got from Jackson but it wasn’t far off.

There was a knock on the door behind her and she looked over her shoulder to call Jackson in.  He smiled at her as he eased the door open with a click and took a seat by her side, immediately leaning in towards the glow of the computer’s screen to get a good look at his old friend.  Clarisse smirked and Lewis sat back in her chair, taking a moment to observe Jackson with somebody who already seemed to be a bit more like him and a bit less like everybody else.

“Well well, if it isn’t Peter Johnson on the right side of the law,”

“She says like she isn’t a teacher,”

Clarisse blinked at him slowly for a second.  “I teach gym in New Rome,” she said, like that completely modified the word teacher in a way that Lewis could not possibly understand but Jackson obviously did.  He rolled his eyes.

“You keep telling yourself that.  How are Chris and the kid?”

“Still appropriately scared of me.  I think we need to see each other more often because it seems like you’re forgetting that you should be,”

“Aw,” Jackson cupped his face in his hands and smiled mockingly and for a few moments he seemed incredibly young and incredibly at ease and it made Lewis more content than she ever had been to be left out of joke after joke.  “The great, fearsome Clarisse la Rue missed me?”

“Never,” she said but she didn’t exactly seem like she meant it.  She shook her head and flicked her dark eyes back to Lewis.  She couldn’t help but notice that they weren’t so much a true brown as they were slightly tinged red.  “You wanted to talk to me about Silena?” the mood changed immediately, becoming sombre and respectful and Lewis felt more locked out of it than ever.

“Right,” Lewis stepped in and Jackson leaned back.  “We think she might be related to a case we’re working,”

She became immediately defensive.  “No.”

Lewis quickly shook her head and held her hands up.  “We don’t suspect she did anything wrong,” she explained with as much haste as she could.  The woman could click out of the call the moment she became annoyed with it and then they’d lose one of their only leads. “We think someone she used to know might be,”

“Nobody from Camp,” she decided with just as much conviction as Jackson had about the issue.

“Right,” Lewis said.  “We were wondering if she ever talked about anyone else,”

To her credit, Clarisse thought long and hard for a moment.  To Lewis’ chagrin, after a moment she shook her head.  “She spoke about her dad occasionally and she mentioned a friend or two back home but I don’t know anything about any of them.”  Just as Lewis was losing hope, she paused.  “You’re in Connecticut, right?  Where Luke was from?”

Jackson nodded.  “You think Silena was here?”  He and Clarisse both looked very much like they were unhappy with where they were taking the conversation, like it was bringing up the sort of memories about the dead they didn’t want to remember.  Part of Lewis couldn’t help but wonder if they were related to the way that she died or the events that led directly up to her last moments.

“Well she wouldn’t have told me if she was,” Clarisse sounded bitter, like she was trying her hardest not to feel upset.  She inhaled deeply and bared her teeth, letting out a hissing breath through them.  She put Lewis in mind of a person in pain trying their hardest to breathe through it.  “Maybe Luke had some stragglers,” she pinched the bridge of her nose.  “Look, I need to go listen to a bunch of first graders play the recorder-- not a word, Jackson --but for what it’s worth, I hope you catch him.  For Silena and everyone else,”

Lewis and Jackson let her go and the screen went dark before Lewis posed the question.  “So what does that mean for our investigation?”

“It means I’m getting a headache,” Jackson rubbed his temples and looked down at the table, “and that we need to start asking around about people who knew Luke Castellan.”

“You can tell me if I’m overstepping,” Lewis folded her hands over each other, “but what happened to Silena?”

“Nothing good,” he said almost too quickly and the look on his face almost made Lewis regret even asking because he looked like he was right back there with her, like it was something he lived through rather than simply being told about.  “You know how the unsub put makeup on the last victim to make her look more like Silena?”

“Of course,”

“Well she didn’t die like that.”

Lewis didn’t press the issue any further but once she and Jackson left the room with the walls that felt like they were closing in she was taken quickly to the side by Prentiss who asked for a very professional recap before slowing down and asking about Clarisse la Rue and what Jackson’s friends were like.

“Like him,” she found herself saying because she didn’t know how else to put it.  “Not exactly, but she’s like he is,” she knows it’s an underwhelming response as soon as she says it but it’s all she has.

“I don’t know what that means,” Prentiss tells her.

“Neither do I, but I know it’s right,”

Alvez watched JJ as she masterfully conducted her second press conference within the week, asking the people of Westport about two long dead teenagers and the people that might have known them more than a decade before, when there was anything left of them to know.  It was a strange line of questioning but it was shaping up to be a strange case and Jackson seemed to be standing in the middle of it, not in a way that made him suspicious but in a way that made him desperately unlucky.  Frankly Alvarez couldn’t help but wonder how he was dealing with it all, as a photo of Luke Castellan taken from the collection in his mother’s house, all years out of date, and his own old photo of Silena only months before her death began to fill Westport’s media.  It felt like a desperate plea to the kids’ associates from a long time ago to come forward and give them whatever shreds of information they might have had because they seemed to be all out.  It was hardly as though they were expecting the unsub to step up and turn himself in but Alvez was still holding out a vague shred of hope if only because it kept him going.

They knew enough by then that they had to be closing in on their unsub but they still had a ways to go before they got him.  A lot of what they knew was in the abstract, not the kind of thing that the could have Garcia search for, create an ever-dwindling list of names that would have them arriving at the right one any day now, but they were still closer than they ever had been and it was all because he had been riled enough by the original press conference to react, to start making demands in his own abstract, disoriented way, to give at least a few of his secrets away.

They knew something else for sure by then, from Penelope Elizabeth Green’s friends and the traces of blood beneath her nails that Dr. O’Brien had found and the labs had confirmed was not her own: whoever their unsub was he was injured.  Not seriously injured but he had been clawed at by a girl who was desperate and terrified and grappling for whatever flesh she could find to dig her nails into so he would be injured in a recognisable way, likely somewhere visible.

He was about as hopeful as he could be in a job like this one because trusting that terrible people couldn’t keep getting away with all the evil things they did indefinitely was just about the only way he had managed to cope with the stress of the job for so long.

Maybe the problem with being hopeful was that it left him very vulnerable to being let down.

As the next few days passed it felt like every person in Westport was calling into the station to say that they knew Luke Castellan once upon a time, that so did this extensive list of other people, to say that they had no idea what happened to him or his mother and they hadn’t seen him since he was thirteen years old but they had known him back then.

“He didn’t look much like his photo in the years we’re interested in,” Jackson admitted after more than a dozen dead-ends.  “Everyone is thinking about Luke Castellan at thirteen with the bright blue eyes and the baby face.”

“What did he look like?” Alvez asked.

“He had a scar,” Jackson said, tracing a line up perpendicular to a scar on his own cheek, “And gold eyes,”

“Gold eyes?”

For just a moment, a spark of panic registered on Jackson’s face, and then he said “He wore contacts for a long time,” with a nonchalant shrug Alvez couldn’t quite bring himself to be convinced by.

“Mostly he just looked older.  Not like a different person, but also not really like the same one,”

Alvez nodded even though he didn’t really know what Jackson meant.  “Too much to hope you have a better photo?”

“Afraid so.  I think we’re just going to have to sift through a lot of outdated bits of information.  We’re looking for people that knew him a long time after he left his mom if we want information on Silena.  We might be completely wrong but, i don’t know, I trust Clarisse’s judgement, and it’s a pretty big coincidence otherwise,”

“So why would he come back here?”

“We’re not even sure he did,” he admitted, “at least not for long.  But I trust Clarisse’s judgement.”

“Are you ever going to tell us what really happened to him?”

Jackson sighed.  “Probably not,” he admitted.  “I won’t say I don’t understand what he was thinking, at least at the start of it, but, well… he did some pretty not great things and he got Silena all caught up in them,”

“And now they’re both dead,”

He hummed.  “Yeah,”

He tapped the back end of a pen on a piece of paper sitting next to him, covered in notes scrawled in what might have been the worst handwriting Alvez had ever seen, loose and looping and shaking and next to illegible.  It may as well have been written in code from the angle Alvez was looking at it.  “What do you normally do when the leads start to go cold?”

“This is far from a cold case right now,”

Jackson cocked a heavy eyebrow.  “You aren’t answering my question,”

“Because the answer is that we feel really disheartened and then we eventually go home and don’t stop thinking about it and I don’t think it’s really what you’re looking for,”

“You got a few cases like that?”

“We get through most of our cases in one visit but sometimes we come and we help and we leave and the locals call us back a while later when something new happens or they solve it themselves eventually with the help we’ve left them with.  And sometimes we just don’t get answers,”

“Well that sucks,”

“It’s not work for everyone,”

“So everyone keeps telling me,”

“We’ll probably solve this one,” Alvez tries to cheer them both up.  He’s not being dishonest but he doesn’t feel good about what he is saying either.  “The case is still progressing and the unsub is getting sloppier.  He showed some of his hand after the last press conference.  We’re getting a lot of tips so the chances of at least one of them being somewhat useful are quite high and it isn’t out of the question that he’ll slip up again,”

“I think it’s getting to me that this whole thing is about Silena,” he admitted.  Alvez quickly decided he would buy Jackson a drink as soon as they were back home and everything was solved because he had to believe that it would be soon.  “I saw her die and now somebody is killing her over and over again,”

“But they aren’t Silena,”

“No.  They’re other girls, who are alive until he decides they shouldn’t be,”

They would have kept talking but they were interrupted by one of the locals who told them that they had just had someone call in to talk about a Luke Castellan in his early twenties with a scar on his face and strange eyes who was definitely Luke Castellan but seemed to be going about it in a strange way and who would be showing up to the station soon to talk with them.

Alvez could tell that Jackson was trying his hardest not to get his hopes up, but in his own tumultuous way, Alvez let his skyrocket, just to keep himself going.

Chapter Text

Percy didn’t recognise the person who remembered Luke as he had become under Kronos’ influence.  He didn’t have much to say--”He ran with strange crowds, nobody older than him, just big groups of teenagers, some as young as thirteen probably.  There was something wrong with all of them, though.  Or there wasn’t,” a shrug, “Maybe it’s just that they were all strangers.  I hardly know everyone in Westport but I’d like to think I could at least recognise most of them.  I’m, like, too sure I’d never seen any of those kids before.” A pause, the pregnant kind.  “Or since , now that I think of it.”--but it was enough to prove that Luke had been to Westport with his army at some point, maybe even Silena, loathe as Percy was to consider her defection.

“Silena and Luke were close for a while,” Percy explained to Prentiss, being as evasive as he could whilst trying his utmost to sound like anything but.  “She was probably here with him,”  She looked at him in that probing way all the BAU agents seemed to have mastered and he did all he could to keep himself blank, unreadable.  Maybe right in the middle of a group of profilers wasn’t the ideal place to be when one was doing everything in their power to maintain a lie that, though second-nature by then, was admittedly rather complex, but it was also where Percy felt useful, so he stayed put.

“But why would they be looking for her here?”

He mulled it over.  “Maybe because they think her friendship with Luke is what ended up killing her?  Maybe because her body is in the Sound too, and it’s just what’s convenient?  Maybe it just feels right?”

Prentiss gave him another of her looks, like she was trying to see right through him but he remained stubbornly, unrelentingly opaque in the face of all her best efforts.  “ It feels right ?”

He feigned nonchalance.  “He’s killing for a dead girl--to avenge her, to resurrect her, to kill her all over again, we don’t know--so why should I assume he’s operating logically?”

“Because logic is easier to dissect than random whims,” she suggested, but Percy was still caught up in his own thoughts.

“What if he’s trying to bring her back?” he repeated.

“Definitely a possibility,” Prentiss nodded, “but not one we haven’t been considering thus far.

Percy shook his head, pressing the heels of his palms hard against his eyelids.  “I need to make a phone call,” he said too quickly.  “I need to call my wife.  I’m either being really dumb, or I’ve just thought of something almost smart.”

“Aphrodite!” Jackson announced, abuzz with misplaced energy that made Simmons all the more concerned that his run-in with Gabrish in his youth had actually messed with his mind much more significantly than any of them had realised.  He braved a glance over at Alvez who seemed to be sharing his concerns if the furrowed brow and the grimace were anything to go by.  The others, however, seemed oddly open to the idea, or at least interested in what it could shape up to be.

“Aphrodite?” Simmons echoed.

“Greek god of beauty, love, desire, all of that.”

“Okay…” Simmons said slowly, finding it hard to look Jackson in the eyes.  “And what exactly does that have to do with any of this?"

“Silena,” he said simply back.  “It would take too long to explain really, we learned a lot about Ancient Greece at camp and, yeah, it was kind of an inside joke,” Simmons wasn’t sure he believed him, somehow, but that could have just as easily been the way Jackson talked, his uncanny ability to make everything sound like a lie and unfortunate inability to make it sound genuine.  “Just trust me.  Aphrodite and Silena go hand in hand.  Maybe whoever is doing this knows that.”

“Which means what, exactly?” Lewis leaned forward in her seat, watching Jackson from beneath a brow furrowed in more curiosity than bewilderment.  Simmons stopped squinting at Jackson for a moment to squint at her instead.

“There are a few versions of the myth--tends to happen to old stories, I guess--but one of them says Aphrodite was born from the sea…”

Reid groaned, dropping his arms from the top of the desk so they hung limply by his sides and staring up at the ceiling like he might find better, more agreeable answers there.  “This would be the third time an unsub in one of our cases was inspired to kill by Greek mythology.” Simmons didn’t know who Reid was speaking to specifically, but the room had fallen silent to listen anyway.  “They aren’t astronomical odds but I don’t like them at all.”

“Who was the other one?” Jackson cocked his head, dark eyebrows low over bright eyes.

“William Harding, invoking the Moirai.”

Jackson nodded with an understanding Simmons couldn’t hope to share and muttered something to the effect of “Hate those guys.”  He shook his head.  “When you think about it,” he said, “as a rule, mythology kinda sucks.”

“Sure,” Simmons went along with it, not feeling like he was in much of a position to disagree, “But how exactly does the birth of Aphrodite have anything to do with our killer?”

“What if he wants Silena to rise from the Sound like Aphr odite from the Aegean sea?” Jackson posited, surely skipping, at a bare minimum, several steps.

Catching onto Simmons’ evident bewilderment, Reid tookit upon himself to fill the blanks in.  “In this version of the myth,” he began, “Aphrodite wasn’t created from the sea itself.  Rather, when Ouranos was castrated by Kronos and his genitals were cast into the sea, she rose from the sea foam.  It’s an interesting story, actually--see, Gaia, Ouranos’ wife, encourage disobedience in their children because Ouranos was ashamed-”

“Thank you, Reid.” Prentiss interrupted.  Simmons tried to telepathically communicate his gratitude to her.  He respected a Reid rant as much as anyone else, but there wasn’t always time for one, and sometimes all they served to do for those amongst them who didn’t have Mensa-qualifying IQs was create confusion, long tangents to trek down with effusive ends that promised no answers and were rarely able to produce anything of even theoretical use to their cases.

Alvez nodded surely.  “So, how many human girls are the equivalent of a god’s dick and balls?”

“Obviously more than he’s tried to far,” Simmons remarked grimly .

. “it was really only his testicles,” Reid corrected at the same time.

“You’re the opposite of a good luck charm,” JJ told Jackson after a charged moment of almost-silence, trying for humour and missing by the wide margin demanded by being in the middle of an ongoing serial murder investigation.

“I’ve noticed,” he responded in much the same tone.

“So if we’re going with your theory,” Prentiss said, “which I’m inclined to do--we don’t really have any others right now and it’s interesting even if it isn’t right--that would mean whoever our unsub is has to be aware of your…”

“Inside joke,” Jackson filled in for her, putting a strange emphasis on the word joke that made it sound like it could be anything but.

“Yes, your inside joke.  But you’re standing by your belief that it can’t have been anyone from your camp?”

Jackson’s jaw was set as he shook his head.  “No.”  Something in the steely tone of his voice seemed to effectively cull any urge to argue with him.

Lewis found herself wandering Westport with Jackson by her side for company, manually compressing the rising urge to feel guilty for wasting time when she was supposed to be solving a case.  She knew better, after all.  A relaxed mind was better than an addled one.  Knowing the area would never hurt.  Talking to people as she bumped into them, even if they didn’t think they had anything pertinent to offer, would provide nothing at worst and everything at best.

These were the same streets the unsub must know well to be able to pass through unseen, the same community he must be able to at least appear to belong in, a taste of the life he might be living when not trying to beat Death by playing its own game.

The air was cold and salty when the wind brushed past, and there was something undeniably quaint about the low rows of stores and houses that created almost labyrinthine streets the further out from the town centre they got.  The people were of a quiet disposition mostly, who waved hello to neighbours and smiled at acquaintances with lips closed over teeth and did not volunteer information when not demanded of them.  The air was bitter and heavy with a rain as yet unshed but promising soon to fall with gusto, so hoods were pulled up in anticipation, eyes cast at feet as they passed well-trod routes against the pavements, faces hidden.  There was an emptiness to it that set her teeth on edge, a feeling like she was passing through a ghost town where only she and Jackson, bright spark he was (the kind she couldn’t help but fear would burn out, in both glory and in haste), were really alive.  Fear had a way of doing that, of creating a barrier between people and their lives even if they were not the ones who had died.

She talked to Jackson as they passed through narrow streets, about the case and the creation of Aphrodite (“not Venus, the differences are subtle but they matter sometimes,”), about the nature of origin stories, about good and evil and, at the end of a few tangents, Elizabeth Olsen’s interpretation of the Scarlet Witch.  She talked to Westport residents when she passed them by and they felt compelled by those three oh-so-intriguing letters on her jacket to answer her questions, no matter how sparse the detail they were able or willing to give (“yes”, “no”, “maybe”, “I don’t know”, “I can’t prove it, but I think so”, “terrible, isn’t it?  Pretty things and all so young”, “these things don’t happen here, y’know?”).

Jackson joined her without complaint but mostly didn’t look at her--that much she could tell, even when she wasn’t looking at him either, because there was something about the way those eyes would bore into her back she was certain, illogical as it was, she would notice no matter whether or not she could see them.  He turned, instead, to the Sound when it was visible.  To Silena’s memory she supposed, to Marley Fife’s and Penny Green’s, to Bella’s and Milly’s, to nameless and numberless more.  And when he could not see the Sound he looked upwards, to the grey accumulating in the sky like a wall of cement, a trap of some kind.  “Ouranos,” he had offered simply in explanation when she had not even asked for one, “but I don’t think he’s really got anything to say to me.”

“Or anyone,” she supplemented.

He shrugged his response.  “Someone might be listening anyway.”

The rain started, hard and unrelenting from the beginning, and Jackson did not turn his face away from it, closing his eyes and breathing deeply, staying strangely still for about a minute or so.

“Do you want to head back?” Her hair was already wet, heavy and clinging to the sides of her neck, effectively channelling the water right past her waterproof jacket and right onto the shirt she wore beneath it.  She would have loved to be inside.

Jackson shook his head no.  “There was enough skin under Penny’s nails that she must have gotten a good scratch in.  I want to find this guy before it heals.”

“We don’t know that he’s out and about today,” she reminded him gently.  There was something about his determination that set her teeth on edge, a new strength to it that hadn’t been there before, that didn’t feel quite right.  He seemed to almost glow in the grey of the day, skin shiny in its bronze and its scarring, eyes so bright she could no doubt pinpoint them from a distance, hair so dark it just emphasised the light where Jackson’s presence allowed it to exist.  It wasn’t news that something about him wasn’t quite right, but this specific thrum of discomfort was new and it made her stomach ache.

“We also don’t know that he isn’t.  You can go back if you want to, but even if I can’t find the unsub I might find something. ”

Lewis made the conscious decision not to press him about what something might be.  She got the feeling that he knew about as well as she did.  “I’m not leaving you alone.”

“I’d be fine,” he reassured her with an uncomfortable half-smile.

“Still better safe than sorry,” she shrugged, feigning a casual affect she certainly was not feeling.  “I can handle a little rain.”

“You should’ve brought an umbrella,” Jackson admonished, apparently possessed by the spirit of her mother for a moment, “You don’t want to get sick.”

“Neither do you.”

“I love the rain and the rain loves me.”

“I don’t think rain is capable of love.”

“Favour then.  Let’s get back to exploring.”

So they did, passed small shops and listened to precipitation hammering against taut awning, smiled at children jumping into puddles, pitied a poncho-wearing dog walker who had seemingly been dragged outside against his will at first sign of the downpour by the world’s most stubborn bichon frisé.  Asked more questions, got more non-answers, asked about a bandage and winced sympathetically at a middle-aged man who had gotten a little too insistent upon caring for a stray cat, talked some more about superheroes and supervillains--about how much easier it was to see the unsubs as villains than themselves as heroes.

Jackson bought her lunch at some hole in the wall Italian place that appeared to be nothing more than an aged sign above a nondescript door until they walked down the stairs into a warm place that resonated with a sort of familiarity even though neither of them had ever been there before.

“It’s a family restaurant,” their server had explained with a shrug after bringing them hot coffees they hadn’t ordered, on the house, simply because they must be cold after spending time outside in the rain, “my dad would have my head if I didn’t make the customer feel comfortable here.  And if he found out they were FBI agents on top of that?” he shook his head and Lewis laughed as she pressed her hands to her mug to keep them warm.  “It’s quiet here this time of day, and I know this town as well as anyone.  If you have any questions I’ll try my best to answer them,”

“Thank you,” Lewis said, not really planning on asking anything if he didn’t have anything to offer.

“You’re about my age, right?” Jackson asked, surprising her.

“Well I don’t know how old you are,” he said good-naturedly back, “but I’m confronting the thought of turning thirty very bravely.”

Jackson smiled then squinted.  “The name Luke Castellan wouldn’t mean anything to you, would it?”

“I don’t remember him, but I know the name.  His mother went batty--Dad’s word, not mine--he ran away, she got battier, he didn’t come back.”

Jackson nodded, a little uncomfortable, and it was like an idea had appeared to him as if from thin air.  “How about Beauregard?  Does that name mean anything to you?”

The server thought for a moment.  “There was a shop here a little while ago called Beauregard's,” he supplied, “speciality hand-crafted artisan chocolates, or something equally pretentious.”  He laughed a little.  “They sucked.  It was like eating cardboard-- expensive cardboard at that.  He messed up a lot of people’s Valentine’s and then promptly went out of business.  He might still live around here.  I don’t know.  If he does, nobody seems to talk about him anymore.”

Jackson let out a deep, meaningful exhale.  “Thank you so much.”

“Any time.”

As soon as the server had turned away, Lewis turned to Jackson.  “Care to explain?”

He sighed, inhaling half of his coffee in one sip.  He swallowed with a pronounced gulp.  “I was thinking about people who might know about the Aphrodite thing.”

She levelled him with a long look.  “And you came up with someone.”  It wasn’t a question, not even close to one.

Chapter Text

Alvez stood outside Martin Beauregard’s front door with Jackson by his side, his hand on his gun, and felt oddly like he had been there before.  At least from outside, it didn’t appear to be nearly so bad as May Castellan’s home with its years upon years of accumulated neglect and disrepair, but it bore a startling similarity in that it stood out from its neighbours in a disquieting sort of way.  The houses in the neighbourhood were small, rows of bungalows with narrow but well-kept lawns on either side of a quiet road few cars passed down.  It wasn’t the sunniest of days but curtains and blinds were open to allow light to stream onto the leaves of potted plants in kitchens and living rooms, and one little tortoiseshell cat sunned itself on a windowsill, blinking blearily at them as they passed by.  Except for Martin Beauregard’s home that, just like May Castellan’s, had its dark curtains pulled closed so no light could break in.  There was creeping ivy clawing its way up the brick, grass growing long and wild where it wasn’t choked with weeds, a bush that was home to more thorns than sickly, washed-out roses.  A car sat in the driveway, the concrete cracked where the hardiest weeds had broken through.  Its tires were flat and the paint was coming off in places and there was bird shit all across the windows.  It didn’t look like the inhabitant had left in a very long time, but if they were right and he was their unsub he would have to, at least occasionally, perhaps only on foot, beneath the cover of night.

One hand still readied by his weapon, Alvez took a steadying breath and rapped his knuckles against the door.  “FBI, open up!” he announced but there was no sound of movement from within the silent house, no sign of life at all.  He repeated the demand a few times but it became quickly very clear that they would have to force their way in.

It being his first case, Alvez let Jackson do the honours of breaking the door down, watched the flicker of quickly suppressed glee on his face as he did it with a hint of amusement he too was quick to smother.

Inside the house there were no lights on, just dark corners where the sunlight would never have reached even if it had been allowed to break in.  It was a deeply impersonal sort of home, with no photos on the walls or above the mantle, no rugs on the pale hardwood floors, no art, no tchotchkes, just dust on furniture Alvez would assume had already been in the house when Beauregard bought it.  The kitchen was small and out of date, cupboards left open and overflowing with pieces of confectioners’ kit Alvez didn’t have the know-how to put a name to.  Pots and pans were unwashed, lined with chocolate that had solidified, multi-coloured remains of nondescript fillings.  Burnt sugar turned the air acrid but disguised the smell of the bin in the corner, overflowing with grease-stained takeout containers.  It definitely seemed as though the only thing ever made in that kitchen was chocolates and, when Alvez cautiously opened the fridge, he found it full with nothing but tupperwares full of heart-shaped chocolates, their shells matte and bloomed.  Jackson took a shuddering breath and looked around, wincing, his expression practically forcing Alvez to remember that he knew the dead girl at the centre of this whole thing, as if he could ever forget.

The only other rooms in the house were a small, nondescript bathroom and the bedroom which was anything but.

Scattered all across the bedspread were photographs, many of them snipped into pieces, all of them focused on the pretty smile of his long-dead daughter.  The family photographs were intact but the images of friends and campmates were all cut-up.  A number of them, aside from their current ruined state, would be perfectly at home on Jackson’s desk back in Quantico, could perhaps even be a copy of the same picture.  With ash smeared on his face, grinning even though his bright orange t-shirt was singed, stood to the side of a hulking boy with dark skin and a bright smile, was a teenager who could be nobody else but Agent Jackson.  He made a face when he looked at the photo, at the uneven edge where it had been cut off to the other boy’s side.  There was a quilt beneath the photos, made up of little squares of fabric that appeared to have been cut from clothes: white cotton with a lacy layer over it, pale yellow linen, something pink and knitted and well-worn, familiar orange fabric with black marks that had been text once-upon-a-time.  Handmade beads on a leather necklace were laid out on the bedside table, the little patterns on each copied out almost painstakingly to include the places where the paint and the engraving were lopsided or worn away, over and over again on post-it notes and notebook pages.  Jackson’s hand went up to his own neck as he looked at them, where his own near-identical necklace was tucked beneath the collar of his shirt.

“He’s not here,” Alvez observed, feeling almost guilty for talking and breaking the silence in a place that was starting to feel much more like a memorial or a shrine than a home, like the only thing that ever lived there was Silena’s memory and her father’s misshapen grief.

“So where is he?”

They continued to look around, for anything incriminating or any sign as to where Martin may have gone.  But it seemed as though nobody in Westport really knew him and there weren’t many hints to be found.  The only mail they could find was bills and a weekly newspaper, there were no hints of places in Westport that might be significant to him, no signs of death in the home besides Silena’s pervasive memory and the body of a dove in the gutter.

“This is starting to feel like a dead-end.”  Though he didn’t want to, Alvez was inclined to agree.

“Well he has to be somewhere,” he posited, “and they’ll put a watch on the house so he’ll be taken into custody the moment he tries to come back here.  We should be able to find him before he takes his next victim.”  As if to spite him for his hubris, not thirty seconds later his phone started to ring.

“That feels like your fault,” Jackson remarked as Alvez fished his phone out of his pocket and groaned at seeing Prentiss’ contact on screen.

“Yep,” he said as he accepted the call.  “We should get back to the station.”  He paused and listened to Prentiss for a moment.  “It’s not a body,” he said, with the put-upon optimism that was the only kind a person in his position would be able to muster, “but there’s been a missing person’s report filed for another girl who fits the victim profile.”

The case was suddenly very time-sensitive.  It had never been particularly easy-going, of course, and they had always known they would have to solve it as quickly as they could, what with all the lives that were on the line, but being practically certain of the identity of the killer and another girl going missing had converted it into something of a race.  They had laid out the situation for the locals and everybody was on high alert for any sign of Martin Beauregard.  They had thought, at first, that they’d had some luck because his car was still in his driveway and he probably couldn’t get very far on foot but Garcia had burst that particular bubble rather swiftly.  There was another car registered in his name: a minivan better suited to a suburban mom, a family car he had bought many years before when Silena was just a child.  Like he had planned on growing his family, or at least on keeping it.  Prentiss assigned JJ to put out a broadcast to the public so they would know who and what to keep an eye out for too, and the whole time she felt as though there was so much more she should be doing.

She was in charge of the team after all, and it was her job to decide their next steps, how they would save the day this time.  But their unsub was like a ghost, so haunted by one he had no choice to become on himself, and there was no obvious next move besides placing roadblocks and monitoring every person that dared approach the Saugatuck.  But if they were to catch him by the river it would already be much too late for his latest victim.  Prentiss couldn’t let that happen.  Until they found her body they had to assume that she was alive, that he was operating on his usual timetable and they had enough time left to find her before she was sent the way of all the poor unfortunate souls that preceded her.  The hope was just a part of the job, a necessary thing to be able to do it year after year, but so was the feeling of helplessness, despite them only ever being summoned because the local forces were downtrodden enough to require their help.

It wouldn’t do to wait in the station, in the room the locals had cleared out for them, for news that someone had seen Beauregard or his minivan, that he had been stopped with a body by the river.  There wasn’t enough time to waste simply idling, hoping and doing nothing else.  They had to think, to speak, to formulate ideas and act at them.  Grasp at every straw the universe afforded them and hope one of them led somewhere.

That was easier said than done.

They didn’t know where Beauregard did his killing, where he made up his victim’s faces to look more like his daughters, or even how long they actually had.  It didn’t give them much to work with: nowhere to look and no definite deadline.  Just hope and helplessness.  Prentiss inhaled deeply and tried to keep thinking in any way that wouldn’t lead her right back into that corner.

He probably wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere, so he was more or less stuck, but if he had been near enough to a TV or radio when JJ’s broadcast went out he would be aware that they were closing in on him, growing desperate when there was already a victim in his custody.  Not a useful avenue to travel down.  Prentiss dismissed it for the time being, shoved it to the side to be dwelt on later when they had already saved her or when they knew for sure it was too late.  A spiral she knew she had to avoid.  She rubbed her eyes and decided she would never follow it downwards.

He had no friends in Westport, nobody who knew him.  His neighbours barely even knew his name.  He wasn’t a social creature so he didn’t have an accomplice.  He also didn’t have a second property and there wasn’t much in Westport by way of abandoned buildings.  There were wooded areas and places where people didn’t often pass but they all seemed pretty exposed as any sort of base of operations, and there were too many to search them all.  Still, she resolved to have a group of locals assigned to canvassing what they felt were the best candidates.

And then it struck her, like a bullet to the brain.

She turned to Jackson, found his too-bright eyes wide and desperate as he tried to sort through the same straws she was juggling.  “You said Silena knew Luke.”

He looked like she had cut her off mid-thought, and it took him just a moment to turn and look at her, brows low and expression pinched and pained.  He nodded slowly.  “ Knew is a word for it.”

Intriguing.  “What does that mean?”

He winced, wringing his hands together and bouncing his knee, always fidgety but no doubt more aware then than usual how little time was remaining for them to save the newest victim: 20 year old Westport native, Amy Stern. “You could argue,” he said slowly, “that her-” he waved his hands, a vague gesture taking the place of a word he did not have or perhaps just one he did not wish to use, “-with him kind of led to her death.  Maybe.”

She squinted as she tried to decide if that gave her theory more credence or less before deciding it was still worthwhile either way.  “Would her dad know that?”

Jackson made another of his very particular faces, the kind that would soon be followed with hazy details to describe what she had no doubt was a very specific thing.  “He could think it, I guess.”

She nodded along.  She wanted as ever to dig further into the mystery of him, to puzzle him out, but that was a task best saved for later, maybe the plane ride home, when she had a little bit of spare time.  “Luke’s mom lives here.  I know you tried to have social workers intervene with her living situation, but do you know if they’ve come yet?”

“My contacts are in New York,” he explained, “they made it sound like it would take at least a little bit of time.  You don’t think-?”

“She’d be no good as an accomplice,” Alvez reasoned.

Prentiss shook her head.  “I don’t think she’s in on it.  But he could be exploiting the fact that she can’t be.”

When Amy woke up she was sore and disoriented.  Her throat ached with the memory of the bruising pressure of what must have been fingers across her windpipe and her head swam like her addled brain was rattling about in her skull.  She was sprawled on her back on some filthy blue carpet she was sure she had never seen in her life in what looked like a little boy’s bedroom stuck well in the past.

The bed was made, some animated character or another smiling out from the bed sheet almost like an attempt to taunt her.  There were glow-in-the-dark stars on the navy blue ceiling, like a mockery of the sky she couldn’t see through the blackout curtains drawn closed across the windows.  An old school bag had been long-since abandoned by the door and there was a shelf full of books so dusty she couldn’t even guess at their titles right beside it.  She tried to turn her neck in spite of the pain, tried not to think about the fact that, no matter how desperate she was to do so, she couldn’t pull herself up off that floor.  That’s when she saw the desk, saw the man sitting in the chair wearing the sort of resigned-satisfied expression she couldn’t assign a name to, and suddenly she was struck with a horrible sort of knowing.  She was going to die here.

In this strange bedroom cum tomb, in this house that smelled like mould and mildew and decay, like something else that was rendered unnameable by her refusal to label it death.  Never mind that she was supposed to drive her dad to his chemo this weekend, never mind that she was supposed to surprise her sister with the tickets stowed in her glove box.  Never mind that she’d promised herself she’d reapply to college this year, never mind the cake ingredients taking up space in her mom’s kitchen, never mind that she was turning 21 in a little over a month and she and her friends had been planning for that day for a very long time.  Never mind that she had no intentions to die here.  It seemed inevitable to her as she lay splayed across that gross carpet and that strange man looked at her like a means to an end.

She didn’t see the man that took her--just felt his hands close around her throat from behind, fought to push them off but could do no more than claw at knuckles that only tightened the harder she tried to wrench them away.  Still, she had no doubt, for what little she could stand to think in that moment, that it could only have been this man.  This man who should have been handsome but wasn’t, who looked old in the way only an unlucky middle-aged person could, whose eyes were blue and striking and droopy, whose full lips twisted from one unpleasant angle to the next as he watched her struggle against her bindings like an animal in a zoo, with more desperation than satisfaction.  There were deep scratches across his face, like they were left by someone who had done a better job at fighting back than she had.  Someone who had died anyway.  She knew, of course, about all the dead girls, she just hadn’t expected to be one of them, hadn’t expected to know what the killer’s face looked like in the sort of striking detail she could never forget.  She regretted, oddly, that she didn’t know the dead girls’ names, didn’t know whose company she’d surely be entering soon, didn’t know who to congratulate for their efforts, no matter how unsuccessful they had been.

The man stood from the chair, pulling out his own slate-grey hairs one-by-one as he fretted over her.  “Nose too big, eyes too small, skin too pale, but good enough, good enough, good enough.” She was sure she’d feel offended if she had that luxury left.

A wispy older woman swooped in with a tray of what appeared to be discs of charcoal in her bare hands, her eyes milky and almost unseeing, her smile wild and unhinged and uncomprehending.  “Cookies, Luke!  For you and your friend.  It’s so nice to have guests.”  Her eyes met Amy’s, so happy they were bordering on elated, and the only thing Amy could do was start shouting then sobbing, making all the noise she could in the hopes somebody somewhere might hear.  “It’s always nice to see you again, Silena,” the woman said, unbothered.  Amy didn’t know who Silena was.  Nonetheless, the dread struck her anew.

Chapter Text

May Castellan’s house looked just the same as it did the last time.  Like a body rotting in the middle of this otherwise well-kept street.  Part of Alvez couldn’t resist the urge to blame himself, at least a little bit, for not noticing what sort of much more sinister decay the decomposing cookies and sandwiches might have been masking last time.  He had thought her house smelled of death and he had been much too quick to let it go.  As much as he regretted it in hindsight, agonising over the past did little to change it, so he resolved himself not to leave a stone unturned this time around.  They had to assume Amy Stern was alive until they knew for a fact that she wasn’t, and he had to save her.  Sometimes the job, for all its difficulty, was a startlingly simple one.

It was well-established fact amongst the law enforcement officers swarming outside of her house that Ms. Castellan did not have the faculties to understand what Martin Beauregard was likely using her home for, that she was not a threat to anyone, that she would be likely to answer her door because, in her mind, she would have no reason not to.  But she didn’t.  They knocked and shouted and, despite how excited she had previously been to have company, even if she couldn’t comprehend who that company actually was, the house remained still and silent.  Alvez waited for a moment more, grip on his gun strong and steadfast, dread pooling in his gut, before kicking the door down and storming in, his resolve slightly shifted.  Amy Stern suddenly wasn’t the only victim they had to save.

Every time Amy tried to scream it came out as more of a squeak, a groan muffled against the tape holding her mouth shut, keeping her quiet, stopping her from calling out for help.  It didn’t matter that she seemed to be in the middle of suburbia, that there were probably other houses just past those blackout curtains, that there were people outside who would probably want to help her, who would probably try.  They had no way to know she was there, and she had no way to tell them.  Her faith in the inherent goodness of most people had little power as the worst of humanity grimaced down at her.

“It isn’t about you,” the man who was going to kill her told her through gritted teeth as his scratched-up, scabbed-over, shaking hands rifled through a stained makeup bag with holes in the corners that, like everything in this godforsaken crypt, looked old and perversely well-loved.  He lined up products on the desk in front of him: a long-discontinued foundation at least three shades too dark; a mascara with dried-up product smeared all over the packaging; a small plastic compact of red blush, the product inside shattered; a tube of lipstick with all the identifying marks rubbed away.  She had a strange urge to want to talk to him, to want to ask why he was doing it, then, to want to know who it really was about.  But all she could do was listen and wait and be helpless and doomed and almost more angry than she was terrified.  From the doorway, the old lady smiled at her, pressing a charred disc--still hot--into her bound hand, and urging her to eat, and she tried to convince herself the whole thing was just a nightmare, that real life was nothing like this.  It didn’t work.

“You don’t deserve this,” the man told her, holding a makeup sponge tight in his fist like it was the sort of thing worth holding onto.  There was nothing she could possibly do with the fact he seemed to mean it.  “Young people like you are supposed to live, right?  And I’m sure you have a family who want to see you safe.  But that’s what makes it a sacrifice,” he choked out a strangled sort of laugh beneath the words, “If they love you enough, they’ll do whatever it takes to get you back.  Whatever it takes.”  He rubbed at his face with the heels of his hands, really digging them in, and dislodged a barely healing scab from his cheek.  She watched the way the blood trailed down as though it were a tear.  “This is what it takes.”  He nodded as he said it, too quickly and too many times, and he winced as he bent his injured fingers around the lid of the foundation and twisted it open.  “Just gotta make you pretty.  Just gotta make you right.  Just gotta make do.”

And, despite everything in her that wanted to be the sort of girl who didn’t go down without a fight, as he lunged towards her with that filthy sponge, laden with goopy cosmetics maybe a decade past expired, she just laid still like a corpse and shut her eyes tight and breathed in the chemical scent.  “Stay quiet and I’ll take this off.”  She kept her eyes closed so she didn’t know what he was talking about until she felt a quivering hand brush against her jaw, and then a spike of pain as he started to lift up the tape and it pulled at her skin.

And then the shouting started.  Not her, but someone outside.  Someone outside whose words she couldn’t quite make out, but who sounded angry, who sounded sure of himself, who must have known she was there.  She felt something almost like relief for just a moment, tried to cough out something between a laugh and a sob that the tape kept painfully trapped inside her mouth.  The man replaced the tape he had begun to peel up with haste, hitting her hard in the face as he did so, and the old woman turned unstably on her heel, her bloody smile only widening, as she made to leave to answer the door.  The man didn’t let her.  The only thing Amy could do as the man bit back a snarl and grabbed the old woman by the hair was watch in horror as she tried to yelp through her painful grin and he jumped up to shove a hand into her mouth to silence her, moving his hand from her hair to clamp her wrist instead, sending long, white hairs flying across the room.  It was becoming clear to Amy that whoever this woman was, she seemed more like another victim than she did an accomplice.  The man threw the other woman to the floor and Amy watched the way she crumpled like paper, the way her pale limbs folded and her head slammed almost limply against the floor, and, somewhere beneath that matted hair, the smile finally dropped.  Real panic bloomed across the man’s face and, eyes wide and mouth hanging limply open, he pulled open a desk drawer and pulled a sturdy-looking knife from within.  Amy tried to scream again, tried to crawl over to the old woman, but couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, couldn’t escape.  Couldn’t stop the doom creeping in.

As much as May Castellan’s home was not the sort of place Percy--or really anyone else who was even close to being in their right mind--should want to stick around in, there was a part of him that wanted to linger in her living room.  Right there in the middle of the rot, where the neglect lived, where no person should.  He wanted to stand there and dig through everything, parse through all the cruel things the gods did to this woman, that they didn’t stop from happening, even when they promised him they would.  He wanted to find parts of May somewhere in amongst it all, wanted to see some sort of evidence that she was more than Luke’s lost mother, that there was some hope of her remembering that.  He wasn’t optimistic.

Regardless of what he wanted, gun ready and heartbeat frenetic, he had to keep moving, didn’t have time to stop and think about Ms. Castellan and the slim chances of saving her from something bigger than Mr. Beauregard’s own addled brain.  He kept his back to the wall, his gun by his chest, and peered round every corner before he rounded it, just like he was supposed to, but he moved as fast as he could because he knew from too many years of too many near misses, that a second could be valuable, and time wasn’t the sort of thing you get back.  He told himself that Amy Stern wouldn’t die that day, and neither would may Castellan, and should he be misconstrued in that assertion then he would struggle to see what exactly the point of him was.

He felt his feet, fast and heavy on the stairs, and found himself wincing at the sound they made.  Stealth had been programmed into his brain and, especially given recent circumstances, he had been thinking about Beckendorf and Silena, about the doomed Princess Andromeda mission, about sneaking through the ship and Luke/Kronos knowing their plan the whole time.  He wasn’t new to the FBI, wasn’t new to being law enforcement even if the BAU was a huge step-up for him, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever really get used to having the sort of upper hand he does in situations like those.  People like Martin Beauregard in situations like that one were trapped and Percy had a life outside of that house, outside of that battle, outside of that nightmare.  He was finally in a situation where he would get to win a battle weighted well in his favour, and then leave, to something other than another fight.  It was a nice change, albeit one his brain struggled to consistently keep up with.

Alvez and Simmons were right there with him, just a little bit behind, and, to their credit, they were doing a very good job at making it seem like they weren't babysitting him.  Like they might have even trusted him, in spite of all the half truths he had been telling them and the fact he had completely failed to be subtle about them.  He felt bad for the lies, but they were unavoidable given exactly how much of his life is a fucked up mess that any attempt to honestly explain would be quickly branded as psychosis.  The same kind that the BAU team had seen drive people like William Harding, Hugo Gabrish, and Martin Beauregard to do horrible, unforgivable things.

The upstairs of May’s house looked almost the same as downstairs, though perhaps a little more disused, and Percy saw the open door immediately, like it was a beacon.  “That must be Luke’s old room,” he said lowly, to Alvez and anybody else who cared enough to listen.  Alvez nodded his acknowledgement and took a deep breath.

“Good luck.”  And, as a unit, they closed in.

They found Beauregard with a knife to a young woman’s neck, an older woman splayed out on the ground beside them.  She wasn’t moving and, from that distance and with his stomach in his throat, Simmons couldn’t tell if she was breathing, but he knew Amy Stern was.  She was staring at them, her eyes wide and watery, her face smeared with too-dark makeup, and she was crying and she was shaking and there was something almost tender, perhaps even apologetic in the way Beauregard was holding her, but the hand he held his knife in was grimly still, certain.

“Let her go,” Simmons told him.  There were too many guns pointed at him for him to possibly believe he was getting out of this but he kept his weapon steadfast and shook his head too quickly.

“No,” he said, like the words were falling out of him, “I have to do this.  I don’t want to, but I have to.  I’m so close to getting her back, I can feel it.  You can’t take her from me again.”  It didn’t matter that he was shaking, that he was twitching, that his voice kept lurching up and down; his hand stayed still and his resolve stayed intact.

“Who?” Simmons asked him.  “Silena?  She’s been dead for 11 years, Martin, killing Amy won’t bring her back.”  Amy squeaked and her shoulders started to shake as Beauregard flinched.  Simmons wasn’t sure whether it was at his victim’s name or his daughter’s.  Beauregard started to shake his head then seemed to notice that one of the people pointing a gun at him looked an awful lot like one of the kids from his daughter’s photos that Jackson and Alvez had found in his bedroom.

“You,” he said, his injured face going red as his voice faltered.  The knife twitched ever so slightly as he lifted his index finger from the hilt to point it at Jackson, but not enough so to provide an opportunity to sweep in and execute the rescue.  “You knew her.  I know you did.  You’re one of them!  You were there, weren’t you?  Tell them.  Tell them!  This will work, because Silena was special and she -” he shook Amy as he said it and Simmons, looking closely for the opportunity to save her, noticed the way her jaw tensed, like she was gritting her teeth.  He chose to believe that it looked like resolve, like she was deciding that she would live, that she trusted them to save her. “-isn’t.  You have to let me get her back.”  It really did sound like a genuine plea, like he really believed it to be a reasonable request.

Simmons didn’t let himself look away from Beauregard to watch Jackson shake his head.  “I did know Silena,” he said, “and I miss her too, but she’s dead.  She’s in a better place.  Killing Amy won’t change that, Mr. Beauregard.”

“No!” he snapped.  “You just don’t want her back like I do.  You don’t think she’s worth this.  But I know she is.”  He was breathing heavily on Amy’s neck and she was doing a very good job of staring right at Simmons and resisting the urge to cower away.  “I’m doing it right this time and I’m not letting you people kill her again.”

“You people?” Alvez parroted.

“Not you,” Beauregard all but scoffed.  He squinted intensely at Jackson.  “They don’t know what you are!” he declared in this strange staccato rhythm, underpinned with an odd sort of mirth.  “ I do.  I know your secret.”

“I’m sure you do,” Jackson replied, his tone steely and cold.  He spoke in a voice that didn’t sound like his own and even Simmons felt a chill work its way up his spine.  “I bet you know all about me.  I’m sure Silena told you about Camp all the time, right?”  His tone turned mocking and Simmons watched the way the taunting caused Beauregard’s once-steady hand to begin to shake.  He nodded, well-aware Beauregard was looking past him and hoping Jackson understood that he was telling him to keep going.  “You were such a good father she didn’t come home.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying!”

“Don’t I?  You’re the one that has photos of the two of us together.  The photo you sent to Agent Jareau was one you had to cut me and Beckendorf out of.  I’ve never seen a photo of the two of you together.  The only time she ever mentioned you was to tell us how bad the chocolates you sent her were.  You weren’t much of a father to her.”

“Shut up!” He sucked in air through his teeth and the hand that was clasping at Amy’s t-shirt loosened so Simmons leaned in a little closer, aware that the opportunity would be coming any moment now.  “You people got her killed and I’m going to bring her back.”

“She wouldn’t want you to.  She might have loved you when she was younger, but now?  After all of this?  If you could bring her back, she’d hate you for it.  She’d hate you for this.”

Simmons watched so closely it was as though the world slowed down as Beauregard’s shaking hand pulled the knife away from Amy’s next to point it at Jackson, giving him exactly the opportunity he had been waiting for.  He lunged in and wrestled the knife from their killer’s hand and suddenly it was easy to have him pinned and cuffed, to see him as a grieving parent and not a monster who had spent the past five years killing other people’s daughters.

Simmons, as soon as the cuffs were on and a group of locals had him secure, was content to leave him to be someone else’s problem in favour of tending to the victims.  Jackson seemed to have had the same idea because, as Simmons tried to remove the tap from Amy’s mouth as gently as he possibly could, Jackson had holstered his gun and dropped to his knees by Ms. Castellan’s side.

“She has a pulse,” he said after a moment, and Simmons began to allow the relief to flood in.  It was finally over.  Westport, Connecticut could be safe again.

“I’ll send for two ambulances,” Alvez decided, as the locals led Beauregard from the room, muttering and cursing and begging all the way, never looking away from Jackson’s back.

“There’s blood in her hair,” Jackson observed, “looks like a head wound.  Beauregard probably panicked when we got here.  I’ll make sure social workers are sent straight to her at the hospital.”

“Good idea,” Simmons nodded, working the last of the tape from Amy’s face as Alvez joined him to remove the bindings from her extremities.  “How are you doing?” he asked her, noting the petechiae in her eyes and the bruising circling her next as she sucked in air greedily through her open mouth.

“Who was the girl that did that to him?”  She didn’t answer his question, just mimed scratching at her face with one hand as she wiped her tears with the other, further smearing the smudges of makeup.

“Penelope Green,” Jackson said solemnly from his position to her side, May Castellan’s head pillowed on his lap, her eyes hazy but moving as she finally began to come back around.

Amy nodded.  “I should have known her.”

“I thought the same thing when it happened to me,” Jackson admitted, “but look around.  You can’t live your whole life for the dead.”