Chapter Text
“You have to meet this kid,” Lillian says in between hurried gulps of cooling coffee, beckoning Jason down the hall and around a corner, from her office to the lecture hall. She’s a mathematics professor, stern, with a heavy gray cardigan and her name tag clipped onto the stretched-out pocket. “I can only keep him for you for maybe five minutes because he has work after this.”
“What kind of work is a sixteen year old without a car doing during classes?”
“He delivers pizzas by bike. You can't get anything else around here. He’s like this. He’s always either working or studying. He’s graduating already, this year, and we rushed him through the qualifying exam for a doctorate in mathematics. Never seen anything like it before.” She pauses at the end of the hallway with her hand on the doorknob. “He’s a little intense the same way you are. He might start off by asking you questions before you even introduce yourself.”
“Got it, it’s fine,” he says, opening his hands.
She swings the door open. A tall, lanky kid with a bony face sits cross-legged on the floor taking his pen apart and replacing the pieces. By height he’s a teenager but his face looks hardly older than fifteen.
“Spencer, this is my friend Jason Gideon.”
“Doctor Brown said you work with the FBI,” he says quietly.
Jason walks closer to him and crouches down to meet his eye level, hands clasped together. He keeps his eyes fixed on the spring he’s cramming back into the plastic barrel of a pen.
“I do. I work with the Behavioral Analysis Unit. It’s a new part of the FBI—”
“I know about the BAU,” he interrupts. “You use examinations of the crime scene and the selection of the victim to form a profile of a suspect.” He screws the end of the pen back on and clicks it a few times, then looks up at him. “I, um, read about it in that new John Douglas book.”
“I know John Douglas,” Jason laughed. “You must have learned a lot about it then. He’s a bit of a showman, though. I’m more of the shoebox-stage variety of theatrical.”
Spencer smiles a little and clicks his pen again. He rocks left and right. He has eyes that droop down a little at the corners like he’s sad, and the bruised look of his undereyes only adds to the effect. He looks permanently like a kicked puppy. “Why’d Doctor Brown contact you about me?”
“You’re brilliant, it’s as simple as that.”
“Not that. Why you specifically.”
“I’ve been working on building a team up from scratch, Spencer Reid. Soon to be doctor, too, huh? How’s that sound. Doctor Spencer Reid.”
———
Gideon collects birds.
If you’re trying to be accurate, he fosters corvids. And goddamn if they’re not the smartest animals he’s ever seen.
Currently, he is responsible for three fledglings he gives time out in the yard. He sits on the couch while they socialize with other crows out on the rough, bramble-thick edges. They look like black socks hanging on the clothesline the way they perch on the thin, budding branches. They clean greasy feathers with the end of a blunt beak and eat the mix of boiled eggs, green beans, turkey and oats that Jason sets out on the porch. They don’t need heating any longer, and they eat less and less from what he offers.
He hesitates to name them, but one of them brings him gifts.
This far into the woods, they don’t bring him bottle caps or pieces of foil or abandoned nickels. This one brings him blue jay feathers when he goes outside to smoke on some weekends. It’s a female that has intelligent eyes and a single brown feather on its right wing. He names it Ursula, because Ursula Le Guin was Sara’s favorite author. He observes it mourning when another member of the extended flock is eaten by a hawk, the tangled, feathery mess of its remains dropped at the patch of mud by the dried-up culvert at the bridge at the entrance to the property. It also steals things. He follows the gaggle of them, and he leaves out buckets of food and the crows follow, and Ursula rips pieces of meat from the others’ mouths and screams if they fight back. The flock leaves its nestlings on his unmown lawn for him to watch. They thank him with pieces of torn-up soda cans from the highway or smooth stones. Currency.
Ursula is on the old end of the range of a fledgling. It sorts its way through mousetraps he sets in the back storeroom and picks through the carcasses of the mice when he lets the fledgelings in for warmth. Clever. It only leaves the bones when he goes to set the traps again.
———
“You’ve talked to the kid?”
Jason peers over the case file and adjusts his glasses. “Yes, I talked to him when I was in Pasadena last week.” He flips the folder closed and looks across the desk. Hotch looks at him with the same aggravated reserve, but there’s a level of uncertainty. “I decided to take the case in San Bernardino. When we’re around there, I want you to take the kid to breakfast. He’s a good kid, very studious, too busy to get into much trouble. From what I saw, low-risk.”
Hotch sits in conspicuous silence, hands gripping the ends of the armrests. “You want to recruit him?”
“It’ll be years before he’s in the field anyways. We’ll foot the bill for his degrees and get him into the academy when he’s old enough. He’ll do fine, don’t worry.”
Hotch drums his fingers on the wood. A nervous tic. Hotch is paranoid, but rarely nervous.
“What’s the problem?”
“I just don’t know. We all joined as adults. We wanted to do it. How much hardship do you think this kid has seen?”
“How about you go ask him?” Jason says. Hotch glares at him. He’s thirty-three but looks a solid forty-five with the scowl and worry lines and cropped hair that exposes a sloping forehead. He looks mad. That man will kill someone someday, he thinks detachedly, flipping the folder open again.
———
The original Gideon was one of the Israelites. In the Book of Judges, he defeats a Midianite prince named Orev. Orev means crow, or raven, or whatever you want it to mean. Very Hebrew. Very Old Testament.
———
Jason drives to the cabin to pack up and go back to his apartment. Ursula leaves a dead rabbit on the doorstep. Its spiderwebbed, black little eyes gaze blankly up at him.
Aaron catches a United flight to LA and then he gets a rental, a little black sedan with a coffee stain in the passenger seat to drive into San Bernardino. First they talk to the police chief, canvass the neighborhood. If things aren’t urgent—which they usually are—then he can call the professor whose number Gideon left him and take out that kid to get a sandwich.
What do you even say? You look at pictures of all the horrible things that people do to each other all day and talk to parents whose children have been mutilated, decapitated, raped or shot, burned or strangled or drowned in four inches of water. It’s a wonderful job opportunity, truly, especially for the young like you, Spencer. You’ll get decent health care benefits that will cover gunshot wounds. But you have to suck it up when you start dreaming about the dead girls, the fathers, the mothers floating in creeks in Anywhere, USA.
He figures he’ll start with the science. People like Spencer Reid would like things like that. They sit in academic offices and create new words for things that don’t help anyone at all and they perform mathematical operations on a chalkboard in a stuffy lecture hall. Aaron Hotchner took a bullet in his left hip when he was twenty-nine. He’s hoping that Gideon does actually mean to stick him in an office after all. Academics don’t do too well, at least not people comfortable with it. He has a juris doctorate, but he was itching to apply what he knew before people died. He wonders if Spencer is like that. He wonders if it’s bad that Spencer is willing to sign his life to this.
———
The first boy was killed in 1994 and dumped on the dried-up banks of the Santa Ana river in the North Redlands. His name was Mateo Vargas, and he was five years old. The second was killed in 1995, then another in the winter of that year, then two in 1996. In 1997, three boys matching the pattern went missing in the surrounding area. At this point, San Bernardino realized they had a problem. In 1998, they found a mass grave of five boys in the muddy creekbed, says the police chief, scratching the sleepless stubble on his chin. They identified two of the boys as the ones who went missing in 1997 and presume the third one dead. All of them ranged in age from four to seven. The autopsy reports tell a story of sadism—those that weren’t skeletal had been sodomized with foreign objects. One of them still had a piece of PVC piping wedged in the gaps of his hips.
The Vargas family shuffles in real slow and talks softly. Mister Hotchner, they say. Mateo was a good boy. All of them were good boys. They were too young to be anything but. He wonders if he’ll ever have children. He thinks he’ll always think they’re good kids.
They say the profile as follows: Most likely a Hispanic man, age 25-35, who performs manual labor, and is a preferential offender with a history of molesting children. He is belligerent and incompatible with almost everyone who knows him. He has a criminal history, and given the repetitive nature of his crimes, he is a legal resident.
———
The trail is cold. The unsub is likely dead, relocated, or in prison again.
———
They spend the first night napping in the bullpen waiting for the paper records from prisons in the area and calling departments within a hundred mile radius to try and narrow down the suspects. They map out the abductions on a corkboard. Aaron sleeps around six in the morning with his head between his knees.
———
Rossi tells him to take a break when he walks up with a start around eight in the morning. Aaron picks up the phone and calls Doctor Brown at Caltech.
The boy looks like he could be blown flat on the ground with a sneeze. He has brown hair in a thick tangle that has grown out over his ears and deep-set eyes that make him look sickly. His has a mouth that’s twisted up like he’s planning to write a thesis on the color of Aaron’s rental.
“Spencer Reid, I’m Special Agent Aaron Hotchner with the FBI.”
He nods. “Doctor Brown told me who you are.” Hotch offers out a hand and Spencer stares for a moment before shaking it.
“I’m going to take us to a diner and then I’ll explain a little more about the offer the FBI is making.” Spencer nods and lets himself in the backseat quietly with jerky, birdlike movements.
“Spencer, you can sit in the front seat. It’s okay.” Spencer just gawks at him for a moment before unbuckling his seatbeat uneasily. “It’s fine if you don’t want to, I just don’t wanna treat you like you’re ten years old.” He nods quickly and rebuckles his seatbelt.
Think, Aaron, think. You’re a profiler. An adult betrayed him. In a car. In the front seat. Someone made advances after offering him a ride home once. Goddammit, Aaron, are you gonna have to raise this kid? Where the hell is his mom?
As if he was expecting the question, Spencer pipes up, “My mom is a schizophrenic,” and then quieter, “if that’s important. The genetic risk of me developing that isn’t really that high. I don’t know what kinds of things you guys want on a background check.”
“We all have crazy parents, Spencer. The issue is whether or not you feel like your head is screwed on tight enough for this.” Spencer gulps and licks his lips like it’s a nervous habit, so Aaron continues: “Anyways, Agent Gideon said I should buy you lunch. Do you have any allergies?”
“I don’t like a lot of foods,” he says. “I could find something on the menu, though, I guess.” He tugs on his seatbelt so it doesn’t press down over his chest. His sweater is big enough to hang off of his thin shoulders if he didn’t have a stained t-shirt underneath holding it in place. Aaron shifts the car into drive and pulls away from the curb and picks the first place he sees, a greasy spoon across from a bank.
“If your mom’s a schizophrenic, who’s taking care of you?”
“Me,” he says flatly. “Sometimes some prostitutes, but they’re really nice. They know the good places to hustle for part-time jobs and things like that, and resources like food banks.” He pauses. “But I don’t like, I’m not involved in any of that. I haven’t, um—”
“It’s okay,” Aaron cuts him off. “You don’t have to explain.”
Spencer clears his throat and jumps out of the car as quickly as possible and then stands watchfully on the curb. He’s got these haunting eyes, like he’s accusing you of his own murder. Aaron pointedly avoids looking at him and walks in past the ding of the doorbell and picks out a booth near the window. Spencer sits with his feet up on the bench and stares at Aaron inappropriately from across the table, so he ponders the options on the menu for far longer than necessary in order to avoid acknowledging him. He orders a BLT with no mayo and a Diet Coke and Spencer gets french fries and a mushy fruit salad he ends up not eating.
“Spencer, Agent Gideon is very enthusiastic about recruiting you. I’m sure he’s sent you letters with the details of the benefits already.”
He nods and rocks forward in his perch. “Yeah.”
Aaron takes a deep breath. He looks at Spencer, brilliant, skittish, perceptive. A child, still. “I’m going to have to tell you how this job can destroy you. And why you will never leave it despite that.”