Archive of Our Own ^beta

"The killer has an obvious disregard for women," Reid said. "He sees them as disposable and worthless."

We know, she wanted to say. We know, we know. Don't they all. She didn't understand why it had to be said. She didn't understand, either, why he bothered looking at the photos again. She knew he remembered them in exact detail. Even without Reid's eidetic memory, the photos felt like they were burned behind JJ's eyes.

You're fine, she told herself. She had to be fine. She couldn't do this—she couldn't lose it on the job, she couldn't be the weak link. JJ knew that, now and then, the team forgot that her job required a certain amount of profiling—she had to sort through piles and piles of case files, deciding which cases seemed the most urgent, which unsubs were escalating, which unsubs had short cooling-off periods, which victims needed the team the most. Day in and day out she sat there and looked at dead men and dead women and dead children—sometimes, as she compared these cases to each other, measured and weighed and ranked their danger or their severity or their importance, she felt too much like she was playing God. Other times she felt too powerless, like she was wading through wave after wave of unbearable pain, unspeakable human suffering, and just hoping that she wouldn't be knocked down, and that there was at least one case they could solve among the onslaught, one problem they could fix, one killer they could catch. It was always overwhelming, but this time, for some reason, she wasn't coping, and she didn't know why, and more than anything she wanted to close her eyes to it all. She didn't want to be in Fredericksburg, she didn't want to think about women being tortured and raped, didn't want to see the young faces in their missing posters and find echoes of herself in them. She wanted to go home.

She had to turn away while Reid and Hotch spoke with the sheriff about Molly McCarthy's abduction. She put a hand to her head as if she was fighting a headache, when she really hoped that the pressure of her fingers against her skull might stave off the tears she felt pricking behind her eyes. 

JJ heard Reid say, "Can you show us the various entrances to this place?"

"Sure," the sheriff said, and then footsteps, and then Hotch said, "I'll catch up," and she knew he'd stayed behind because of her, because of her incompetence. Anger and humiliation coiled in the pit of her stomach, and she rested her hands on her hips, surveying the area, while Hotch approached her.

"Ever since we had Jack," Hotch said, voice tired and gentle, "I always dread it when you bring me a case involving kids."

It was so far from what she expected him to say that she reeled from it, and every defensive thing she was about to say left her.

"Why are you telling me this?" she said.

"Every case we work, every case we don't work," he said, "comes across your desk."

"Yeah," she said, and she hated how small she sounded, how unevenly she nodded, how she had to look away for a moment before meeting his gaze again.

"And most of the victims are women," Hotch said, “and most of them are about your age. It's okay if you lose it every once in a while," he said. "It reminds people that we're human."

It was and it wasn't what she wanted to hear. She looked away. When she found her voice again, she tried not to sound bitter, and she wasn't sure how well she succeeded.

"You never lose it," she said.

"Maybe I should have," he said.

JJ didn't know what that meant, entirely, but she knew it was an admission of some kind, knew he was trying to help her. She took that for what it was. She tried to turn it into something she could work with. 

She wasn't sure how well she succeeded. She was still bothered, still unsettled, still so hurt and so angry the rest of the case. She knew she needed to focus, she knew she needed to stop sounding like it was a personal wound when a woman went missing and someone didn't notice until it was too late, but she couldn't help her reactions, and she hated the feeling of her team's eyes on her, hated knowing that they were cataloging her behavior. There was a rule against inter-team profiling, but she remembered what it was like to watch Reid spiral after Hankel, to watch him work the cases in ways that weren't like him, to be snappy and unprofessional and recognizably, unavoidably different, and she wondered if that was what she looked like now. 

The thought shamed her in more ways than one. She didn't want to think of Reid that way, so unkindly; she didn’t want to hold that against him, didn't want to associate that behavior with him now. And he'd lost it after going through a trauma. How was her own snappishness now comparable to that? She was just sick of seeing women hurt and killed like this; she was bringing their pain into herself, not acting out because of a pain that was truly hers. She couldn't continue like this. But she couldn't correct herself either. Women were missing and they ran into dead end after dead end and it felt like she was barely holding her head above water.

The barn felt like a punch to the chest. She somehow kept walking, didn't break her stride once, but for a moment she was in Georgia, and it was dark, and she was approaching a dilapidated barn alone, and she knew, she knew there would be dogs inside waiting for her. JJ's heel snapped a twig and she blinked at the sound, and then she was in Virginia again, and she was in broad daylight. She shook herself. Maybe thinking, the other day, of Reid after Hankel, had been a mistake. Maybe if she'd been more focused on the case instead of her own inner turmoil, she wouldn't be remembering Georgia now, maybe this barn would just be a barn, this case just a case, and she would be fine, not having a flashback in the middle of the job. She inhaled deeply. The scent of grass and trees and hay filled her nose—but she didn't smell any filthy dogs, didn't smell the sharp copper smell of too much blood. This was a different barn. This was a different barn. It was. 

JJ tore her eyes away from it and made her way up the front porch steps to the house on the property. She spoke with Charlie Wilkinson's wife Chrissy, let a hint of her anger bleed into her words, and Morgan put pressure on by mentioning the possibility of a warrant. JJ wanted to take the blonde woman by the shoulders and shake her, pregnancy be damned—you should know better, she wanted to say. You married a killer. How could you not know? Why couldn't you tell that there was something dangerous about him?

Chrissy Wilkinson finally nodded her permission for them to search the property, and JJ turned on the porch in time to see Hotch say something to Reid, and then the two of them and the sheriff were heading toward the barn. JJ's eyes glued themselves to Spencer's back automatically, and panic welled in her chest as she watched him run. Her feet felt like they were frozen to the front porch, and she couldn't breathe from the sudden need to grab Spencer, so far out of reach now, by his button-up shirt and haul him behind her. There was a sharp rebuke on the tip of her tongue—don't go off by yourself, what are you doing, don't leave me here—but he was keeping pace with Hotch; he wasn't going anywhere alone. JJ reminded herself that she wasn't alone, either; Morgan's presence at her side was all that kept her from losing her composure. This was not Georgia. The woman in the doorway of the house was not Tobias Hankel. The barn, with its latched door the sheriff was prying open with a crowbar, might have something horrible inside—the missing women, maybe—but it wouldn't be the bloody, shredded mess of a body Hankel's dogs had devoured. There wouldn't be any vicious dogs, either, nothing JJ would have to face from the relative safety of the porch, and no one lying in wait to kidnap Spence; Hotch and the sheriff were with him, and they were more than capable of handling one murderer. 

She still felt her heart in her throat as Hotch and Reid disappeared into the barn, the large wooden door slowly swinging shut behind them. It felt like an eternity of silence—waiting for gunshots or shouts or screams or something, anything—before Hotch gave the all-clear. He and Reid came up to the house while the sheriff summoned more officers from the police department to start cataloging evidence and Morgan called Rossi and Prentiss. JJ stepped aside while Chrissy Wilkinson lead Hotch into the house, and she put a hand on Spencer's arm as he passed her. He glanced at her with a question in his eyes, and whatever he saw in her expression made him offer her one of his small, ordinary smiles before he followed Hotch inside.

If Hotch had given their assignments verbally, JJ would suspect him of assigning her to the house instead of the barn on purpose, if only because of the talk they'd had when they first arrived in Fredericksburg. As it was, JJ and Reid just happened to be searching the Wilkinson house while Morgan, Rossi, and Prentiss turned their fresh eyes to the barn, and JJ allowed herself the quiet relief that she wouldn't have to be in there. While Hotch spoke with Chrissy Wilkinson, JJ searched Spencer's face for any feelings of distress, any sign that this case was reminding him of what Hankel had put him through, but he looked fine, and not in the way where he was pretending to be. He was calm and untroubled and focused on the case. JJ should've been relieved. And she was, a little. But it also made her feel ashamed—Spencer had gone through so much, and he was doing fine; what right did JJ have to be the one freaking out now? 

JJ forced herself to focus on the search. It helped that this house was clean and well-lit, nothing like Hankel's disaster of a home, and it wasn't one of her team, wasn't one of her family, whose life was on the line. She and Reid found a cache of Robert Wilkinson's belongings, and Reid started paging through the journals, reading at his lightning speed.

"Hey, Hotch," JJ called out. "We got something."

Hotch strode over, and JJ showed him the journal in her hands.

"This was all locked in the closet," she said. "Looks like it was Robert Wilkinson's before Charlie got his hands on it."

"So Charlie went looking for a father figure," Hotch said, "and this is who he found."

"He was killing animals," Reid said, recalling what Charlie Wilkinson had done to that cat as a boy. JJ skimmed the journal in her hands while Reid talked. "It's clear he already had murderous impulses," Reid said, "and finding this must've made him feel like it was okay, like it was almost his birthright."

"'They like it,'" JJ interrupted, "'when they get to share me.'"

She didn't mean to sound as harsh as she did. She hadn't meant to say anything at all, really. But something about the way Reid reasoned out Wilkinson's behavior made her angry. 

It wasn't his fault. It was his job to get in the mind of the killer, profile him, spell it out. She knew, logically, that that was all he was doing. But it felt wrong. It felt like it was rationalizing, defending, and she couldn't help the impulse to remind the two men in the room what this man had done to so many women. It might've been easier if she had tears in her eyes now, if only so that the page would blur in front of her, the words would become illegible. But her eyes were dry, her vision clear. The words in the journal were stark and definite and disgusting. Wilkinson detailed how he'd felt, what he'd done—the rape, the torture—but of course he framed it many times with victim-blaming language, and JJ couldn't help but remember the pictures of the missing women, their faces so young, and she imagined them terrified, at this man's mercy; she wished she couldn't picture what he'd done to them. She wished it was impossible to imagine instead of a film reel in the back of her head. Even the film reel descriptor wasn't right—it wasn't some grainy movie, wasn't some pixelated livestream, like when she'd watched Spencer get tortured. No, it was a living memory, it was as if she was there, in Hankel's barn again, but it was Wilkinson in front of her instead of the dogs, Wilkinson beating the other woman bloody, Wilkinson sidling up to JJ, Wilkinson chaining her up or making her dance or—

"Is there anything in there about where he keeps them?" Hotch asked. Direct. Sympathetic. Serious. Professional. 

JJ berated herself. Get your head on straight.

"Nothing yet," she said.

"Keep reading," Hotch said, not unkindly.

Reid finished paging through the journal in his hands as Hotch left and then reached for the one JJ was holding.

"You want to check the rest of the closet?" he said. 

He knew as well as she did that there was nothing else in there. He was offering her a break. It only made her more irritated with herself. How unprofessionally had she been behaving, how incapable of doing her job did she seem, that Reid was saying something like this while two women were still missing?

"This will go faster with the two of us reading," JJ said, indicating the journals. 

Reid looked like he wanted to say something else, but with one hard glance from her—she could do this—he only nodded, and they went back to it.

The journals didn't reveal the location. JJ felt sick to her stomach after reading all that, knowing what she knew now, every intimate detail, while they still had to resort to asking one of Wilkinson's victims to come back to the scene. She and Reid stood by one of the government vehicles while Karen Foley, trembling and terrified, was walked to the entryway of the barn, her son supporting her on one side and Prentiss on the other.

"I hate this," JJ murmured.

"They'll talk her through it," Reid said. "She might not even have to go inside."

"She shouldn't have to be here at all," JJ snapped.

Reid said nothing. JJ felt his eyes on her and she did her best to ignore him. Keep your cool, she told herself. Stop freaking out.

She was with them when they found the missing women. Hotch, Morgan, and the sheriff went into what appeared to be a cave with an iron-gate door barring the outside world from whatever horrors went on down there. The paramedics brought one woman, alive but unconscious, out on a stretcher, and the other was walked by Morgan and Hotch over to JJ, who found herself opening her arms, and the woman—just a girl, really—collapsed into her, sobbing.

"I've got you," JJ said. "It's over, it's over, I've got you."

A paramedic passed JJ a shock blanket, and JJ wrapped it around the girl's shoulder, put a hand to her face and murmured soothing little nothings, rubbed her back, let her cry wordlessly into JJ's shoulder. It's over, JJ told herself. 

It wasn't over, not yet. JJ met Hotch's eyes. He nodded solemnly at her before approaching Mary Wilkinson—they still didn't know where Charlie was.

JJ told herself that they were going to get him, but she was still on high alert; their closure rate wasn't perfect, too many cases were left unsolved. If this man got away, if he hurt more women—the thought was how she found the strength to speak further to the girl, to calm her down, to hand her off to the paramedics with assurances and promises that she was going to be just fine. JJ reached for the steel at her core and found it. She was on the job. She knew his name, she knew his face, she trusted her team. They were going to get him.

"Where would Charlie go?" Hotch was asking Mary.

"I don't know," she said.

"What about your husband?" Hotch said.

"Well, there's a place on the battlefield," Mary said. She gestured beyond Hotch. "It's over the ridge."

"Can you show us?" Hotch said.

JJ followed Hotch and Mary, and they were joined by Morgan and a group of police officers, and when they heard the gunshots, JJ thought the worst. They all did. It wasn't until they crested the hill that JJ saw Chrissy Wilksinson still standing, unharmed, and Charlie collapsed on the ground.

They'd got their man. He wouldn't hurt anyone else. 

JJ wanted to feel relieved, but she still felt a cloud over her as they secured the scene. It would never truly be over for these women. They had survived, but it meant they would carry these injuries for the rest of their lives. Even after the physical pain was gone, the memories would last their lifetimes. And for what? So a violent man could have some fun? All of these lives destroyed, and when JJ gets back to Quantico, there will be more cases, more broken people, more killers to catch—or to find dead, after someone like Chrissy Wilkinson had felt forced to do the unthinkable.

She watched an officer escort Chrissy, handcuffed, into the back of a police car. JJ knew how she must've looked—cold, unfeeling, maybe shell-shocked. She still didn't move from her spot, arms crossed in front of her, as Hotch approached.

"You okay?" he said.

No. But she couldn't say that.

"If you stop caring, you're jaded," she said. "If you care too much, it'll ruin you."

"Just know that you did everything you could," Hotch said. 

JJ blinked rapidly, ducked her head, tried to ground herself. Listen, she thought. Listen. Do your job.

"Sometimes we get it right with a little luck; most of the times we don't," Hotch said. "That's the job. It's never perfect. It's still better to care."

"You really believe that?" she said. To her own ears she sounded dead or rote. Tired, her brain supplied. You hate this, and you're tired.

She finally looked at Hotch. He looked tired, too.

"I believe it's never perfect," he said.

He walked away. She nodded as he left, clenched her jaw. 

The job wasn't over. There were officers to confer with, hands to shake, the drive back to their hotel rooms to get their belongings, the drive from Fredericksburg back to Quantico, the reports to write. And then the next case. And the next one.

They made it back to the office in time to start on those reports, all that paperwork, before it was time to clock out for the evening.

Morgan threw down a folder he looked sick of touching. JJ, buried in casefiles, knew the feeling.

"Who's up for a drink?" Morgan said.

"Who's up for five?" Emily chimed in.

"Count me in," Rossi muttered.

"I don't know," Reid said, fiddling with something in his bag, but Morgan wasn't having it.

"Stop with the 'I don't know.' You're in, kid," he said. "JJ?"

Ordinarily she liked going out for drinks with the rest of the team, might've even joined Morgan in hauling Spencer's skinny, reluctant self out to the bar, but she couldn't shake the darkness that had taken root when she'd first opened this casefile, and now she just wanted to be alone.

"I'd love to," she said, "but I'm going to have to take a rain check." She sorted through some folders for emphasis. Let them think she was just too busy with work.

"Hotch," Rossi said, and JJ looked up. "You up for a beer?"

Hotch looked, for a moment, like he was going to say no, but something uncoiled within him, and he let himself go, relaxed his shoulders, and said, "Sure," and he actually sounded like he might be looking forward to it.

Good, JJ thought. She, like the rest of them, had noticed how tightly he'd been wound lately. Even if JJ can't bring herself to join the others, she's glad Hotch is making good on the opportunity. She hopes he can blow off a little steam. He's earned it.

"Agent Hotchner?"

The unfamiliar voice drew all their eyes, and Hotch turned, all business again, with a serious, "Yes?"

He was handed an envelope, something that made all the light leave his eyes, and any hope JJ had of Hotch having a restful evening evaporated as he signed for the delivery.

"What is it?" Prentiss said.

Hotch stared down at it a moment before answering.

"Haley's filing for divorce," he said finally. "I've been served."

He didn't have to break down for them to understand how devastating this was. He left, quietly, while they all took it in, absorbed the blast of that information, and again JJ hated herself, again, she thought, What right do I have to be the one freaking out on the job? Hotch had known something like this was coming, had been dreading it, and he'd still kept his head on straight, he'd still approached work with the serious intensity they all expected from him, he still held the team together—still took the time to notice something was off with JJ, and to offer an attempt at reassurance instead of a rebuke.

She took the case files in her hands and headed up to her office, more determined to get back in the groove of things, to steel herself and to be ready for whatever came next. 

JJ wasn't sure how much time had passed from when she sat down to when she heard the knock on the doorframe; her door was open, and she looked up to see Spencer standing in it. He was doing that thing he always did where he was trying to make himself look smaller, but there was nothing hesitant about his presence now; he looked just as calm and capable in her doorway as he had in the house of that murderer. 

"Thought Morgan was dragging you out for drinks," JJ said.

"That plan dissolved when Hotch left," Reid said. "I think everybody's gone home."

"Everybody but you," JJ pointed out.

"And you," Reid said.

JJ sighed and gestured to the chair in front of her desk. He sat down, and he rested his shoulder-bag on the ground.

"Gonna lecture me about being a workaholic?" she said.

"I was actually going to ask if you were okay," Reid said.

"I'm fine," she said shortly. "You should go home."

She recognized that she normally wasn't so harsh with Reid. She couldn't make herself stop, though. It was bad enough that Hotch had seen through her, that he'd had to help her—she shouldn't need this, too; she didn't need it. She didn't want Reid to sit here and profile her and know she felt like she was drowning in her own office. There was no reason that this case should've affect her more than any other. 

"But it did," Spencer said, and that was when she realized she'd said that very last thought aloud.

"I can do my job," she said.

"I know," he said.

They sat in silence. There was a file open in front of her but she didn't bother pretending to read it.

Reid cleared his throat. "The Iranian poet Saadi once said, 'A little and a little, collected together, becomes a great deal; the heap in the barn consists of single grains, and drop and drop make the inundation.'"

She was going to ask him what that had to do with anything, but what came out of her mouth was, "I don't know why it didn't bother you."

She hadn't meant to say it, and if the surprise on his face was anything to go by, he hadn't expected her to say that, either.

"Why what didn't bother me?" he said.

"The barn," she said.

"It reminded you of Georgia," he said, understanding.

The case was getting to JJ even before they found the barn. But she didn't know how to say that, didn't know if she wanted to admit that, and so she latched onto Georgia, tried to take the conversation somewhere that made sense.

"I was worried about you," she said. "But you were fine."

"Nothing happened to me in a barn," he said.

"Nothing happened to me, either," she said.

When Reid spoke again, his voice was very quiet. 

"You know, the last thing I heard before Tobias grabbed me," he said, "was you. Screaming."

JJ's head snapped up. 

"What?" she said.

"I was so busy looking for the unsub in the field that I didn't realize I'd made a mistake until it was too late," Spencer said. "I heard you scream, and then there were gunshots, and I thought to myself, I left JJ alone, and I was terrified. And then he hit me."

"Spencer," she said.

"I left you alone," he said. "I left. I was the one who wanted to split up. And I knew that you were in trouble, and I knew that it was my fault, and if something had happened to you, I would never forgive myself. It was the worst moment of my life, knowing I'd left you and I couldn't get to you. And then he kidnapped me, and I—I couldn't handle it. The idea that you were hurt, or dead. If something had happened to you and it was my fault—I couldn't bear it. In order to focus on survival, I had to tell myself that you were okay. I never let myself think for a moment that you might not be. When Raphael asked me how many members of my team there were, I said seven without hesitation, because I needed you to be alive. And then by the time you guys found me, I was too caught up in my own problems to ask if you were okay. I didn't even think about it until I finally got around to writing up my report about what happened and adding it to the case file, and then I read your version, and what you found in the barn, and what happened with the dogs. But I still couldn't talk to you, and I justified it by telling myself that you seemed fine, and I was..." Spencer trailed off. "Well. You remember."

She could fill in the blanks for herself. She remembered how Spencer was then, how unsteady he'd been, and flighty, and like a raw nerve, a live wire.

"I never apologized," he said, "and I should have."

"That wasn't your fault," she said.

"I'm sorry," he said, as if she hadn't spoken. "I'm sorry I didn't ask you how you were. And I'm sorry for not having your back in the first place. I'm sorry for leaving you to face that alone."

Tears welled in her eyes despite herself. 

"I know this case was difficult for you," he said. "I knew when you first brought it to us. I don't know if still reminded you of Georgia at that point, somehow, or if it was something else, or if you were having a bad day, or if it was a bunch of little things coming together and building up, and you don't—you don't have to tell me, but if I don't ask you, I won't forgive myself, so," and now he was hesitant, now he was turning his plaintive, worried eyes to her. "Are you okay?"

"No," she said, finally, and the admission left her breathless, and she found herself putting her head in her hands. 

He sat with her for what must have been hours, letting her unravel, letting her take her time with it, the struggle to find the words, and this time—unlike when Hotch had asked her earlier, as much as he meant well—there was no pressure to get the job done, nobody missing, nobody to hunt, no lives that depended on her ability to hold herself together. This time she could allow herself to break. And her team, her family, was here to catch her. Hotch had tried to show her, but she hadn't been ready to see it; now, again, was Spencer, patient and listening and not leaving, and he was another proof, he was evidence enough.