Chapter Text
They'd gone back to Reid's finally, after another round of explanations of what had happened at Colonel West's, of how Reid had gotten shot, of how a valued Air Force officer had just happened to agree to confess to his crimes on video. This was, Reid suspected, another one of those things that would haunt the remains of his career. At least he hadn't been fired, yet. Maybe the Bureau would be good enough to wait until he could consistently feel both his hands, again. For now, he was on medical leave, Chaz was on administrative leave, and Garcia was trying to reassure them both that they'd brought back more than enough evidence that no one in their right mind could dispute the necessity of the arrest, and the speed with which that last day's events had been planned and executed. The man had admitted to abducting no less than two government employees and a handful of citizens, before hiring assassins to take out the task force investigating him and any potential witnesses to past misdeeds. There was no way, Garcia assured them, that they'd be in trouble for anything but getting Reid shot.
And that, Reid could agree, was both a problem and his own fault. He and Chaz had been working with different priorities, and neither of them had realised the other wasn't watching their backs, until he took a bullet in his. They'd work on that.
But, now, he sat in the chair Langly had bought him, all those months ago, with the vibrations turned on for his legs, but not his back. He still couldn't take the risk with his back, for a few more days, but the prognosis was optimistic. He'd be fine, barring any further trauma. They just had to wait for the bruising to pass and his vertebrae to settle back into place. Like whiplash, the doctor had said, but lower. And there were a hundred arguments Reid could have made about that explanation, but none of them would have gotten him out of that room any faster, so he'd inclined his head in the way that had temporarily replaced nodding, and that was that.
Langly sat at Reid's desk, laptop open before him, and a box of Chinese food in one hand, a pile of empties sitting next to the screen, and Reid had to make an effort not to say something about that, not to get up and throw them in the bin. Chaz watched him, amused, from just past the extended footrest of the chair, where he'd pulled up one of the reading chairs that were actually of a size that was probably almost comfortable for Reid, but were still a little short for him.
"So, we're safe here, right?" Chaz asked Langly, passing a box of orange chicken to Reid.
"Anything that gets in is going to be pretty obvious, now that we've replaced the locks. I really want to get construction started next door, so we only have to worry about one wall. The longer that place sits empty, the more likely some asshole's going to try to drill through the wall." Langly rolled his eyes. "I know that. It's what I'd do, in Bollinger's shoes."
"Bollinger's an idiot, if he actually thinks he can spin public opinion, now. As long as Asher's case is going well, I'm a national hero wounded in the line of duty." Reid rubbed his fingers along the plastic fork, making sure he could feel them, before he took a bite. "And I hate it."
"You got shot in the back. I'd hate it, too." Langly flicked his fingers and another article on Asher's testimony from the day before opened on his screen.
"That's not what I meant. I had a nice, quiet life. I wasn't anyone important. And more than that, I'm still not."
"Look, I get that you've got some kind of compulsion toward humility, but we just saved the damn country, Reid." Langly rolled his eyes again.
"You know, if you roll your eyes any harder, you're going to sprain something." Chaz nodded and swallowed. "True fact. It's a real thing."
"Only in people who lack the muscle tone," Reid joked, the amusement not quite making it onto his face. "It's like training for the Olympics."
"We're going to be arguing about Helmsman for months, in front of a whole lot of people we're hoping will make sure he doesn't do this again, and nobody else gets any bright ideas about repeating his decisions." Chaz reached for another bag of egg rolls."Spencer doesn't want to be famous. I don't want to be famous. New subject time. What are we doing about your cousin?"
"What is this I hear about you taking her on a date?" Langly shot back. "I mean, I know, we're Langlys; we're irresistible to people who obviously need glasses, but what the hell, Villette?"
"She's an attractive, single woman, close to my age, and she's smart. And, you know, Spencer's got you, and..." Chaz shrugged eloquently.
"And you wanted one for yourself?" Langly sounded a little less than impressed. "I mean, I can't blame you. But, you can't share her with us. With me. That is not going to happen, evil twins thing aside."
"I wouldn't try. I mean, that's..." Chaz almost ran a hand through his hair, and then reached for a napkin, instead. "I didn't really think this through. But, I like her. I haven't thought about anyone like that in years."
"Hey." Langly waited until Chaz looked at him. "I'm not making you pick. Just, you know, only one of us at a time."
"She still doesn't know you exist, Langly," Reid reminded him. "This isn't going to go well at all, if we don't ... do something about that. You have to make a decision about how to approach this. We could tell her you're dead. We could tell her you're Frank Arroway. But, if Chaz is serious, she's going to be in a room with you, eventually, and we're ... honestly, you look enough alike that I think we're going to have a problem."
"DNA test," Langly said, after a moment spent chewing and staring into space. "She's looking for me, right? Or she thinks someone's still looking for me, which, let's be honest, someone probably is, and I'd really rather they not find me. But, the DNA on file for 'Richard Langly' isn't mine. And there are less than ten people in the world who know that, and you've met six of them, including me and yourselves. So, we don't test her against Cousin Dick. We test her against me. And then, if she's actually related to me... you can tell her you found me. But, you can't tell her in any way that can be traced. I don't want anyone getting this. I don't want to find out Bollinger's hijacking signal with Narcisse's tools, and there's suddenly proof."
"There's going to be proof in the test results," Reid pointed out.
"No, there's going to be proof she has a living relative. We're not the kind of close where anyone's going to be able to prove which relative I am. I'm a cousin. I might be an uncle, at that distance. I might be from some totally other branch of the family that lost the name because it was all daughters. Tell her I'm in Witness Protection or something, and if she says anything I'll disappear again." Langly shrugged. "At the worst, we can spin it. 'See, this is why everyone thinks I'm this Richard Langly guy. I'm his third cousin, and we look alike.' Besides, I pick the lab, and we run the samples anonymously. There's no easy way to link that back to either of us."
"Why even go to the trouble?" Reid asked, catching the fork in the container as it slipped out of his fingers again. "Why do you need the proof? You know who you are. You know who she is..."
"No, I know who she says she is. Right now, that's not good enough for me. I know she's got a really Norwegian face, and that's also not good enough for me. Look, I read the reports. No living family, only one friend, single? Went away to college and came back with a job in law enforcement?"
"Not technically law enforcement," Chaz said, around another mouthful. "It's Nebraska. Forensic pathologists aren't called in until something really weird happens, and even then, it's the coroner's choice. And the coroner's a lawyer, not a doctor. I have no idea who designed the system, but it makes my job more difficult."
Reid flexed his fingers and rolled his shoulders. "She works for the University of Nebraska's infectious diseases response team, out of Omaha, but she's on long-term loan to York General, doing research into local epidemiology. She also just happens to be friends with the coroner, so when four weird bodies showed up in corn fields, nepotism to the rescue."
Chaz blinked in surprise.
"I read her last seven articles on the flight back to Virginia. I think she's onto something with the cow parasites." Reid gestured with the hand that almost worked. "Anyway, from anyone else, I'd think this was paranoia, but seeing as I've been through two cases in the last nine months involving people extremely invested in killing you, I'm willing to take this caution at face value. If she's not related to you, we tell her she doesn't match the sample we have, so we haven't found her cousin after all. Or we just show her the death certificate."
"We don't tell her we have a living source." Chaz wiped his fingers off and leaned back in a way that made the wood of the chair squeak, and he shot an apologetic look at Reid. "We tell her we have a sample from what might be her cousin, and we need a relative to match it against. We have evidence, not a person. We might be able to tell her what happened to Cousin Dick."
"And if she matches, what happened to Cousin Dick is that he's living under the watchful eye of the hottest feds in the history of the government." Langly nodded slowly. "Otherwise, there's that grave in Arlington that got dug up by Narcisse."
"A plausible alternate source for the sample, since it's recently been disturbed in connection with one of our cases." Reid attempted to eat, again, this time with somewhat more success. "So, how do we present the idea, and when?"
"And how hard is Dr Langly going to kick Agent Villette's ass when she finds out what's going on here?" Chaz groaned, sliding down in the chair and staring at the ceiling.
Reid sighed. "I told you it was a bad idea."
"I knew it was a bad idea, but I've never been any good at this. I don't know what I was thinking, except that it probably ended in a white picket fence. At least this one's not a serial killer."
"That you know of," Reid pointed out. "She really is well positioned for it."
"You're an ass."
"Not unless you're a French whore," Reid retorted, absently, attention mostly on the fork in his hand.
Langly blinked. "I am missing so much context, but I'm totally sure that was funny as hell."
"It wasn't," Chaz muttered, getting up to put on another pot of coffee.