Chapter Text
“A weak man has doubts before a decision. A strong man has them afterwards.”
- Karl Kraus
The buffer-dumping hypothesis held that the function of sleep was to allow the unconscious mind to determine which of the previous day’s events to hold in long-term memory and which to dispose of. It followed, then, that the amount of sleep a person needed was individualized and correlated to the amount of information their brain needed to process at the end of each day. A person with a job consisting primarily of mindless data entry would need substantially less sleep than a firefighter or a college professor.
If that hypothesis were to be believed, then Spencer was in for a very, very bad day. Canada had been of the worst cases of his career, and he'd only had four hours of rocky sleep for his brain to decide what to keep and what to dump. It was redundant, in his case, given that his long term memory would invariably keep it all, but his uncanny ability to sleep anywhere, for virtually unlimited stretches of time, led him to suspect that storage was half the battle.
“What is this about?” he asked testily when he arrived at the crime scene. JJ was already there, crouching next to the body of a Hispanic man in his thirties.
“Spence, take the attitude down a notch.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re not the only one who doesn’t want to be here.”
“I didn’t even have time to stop for coffee,” he complained.
“I had to deal with a teething infant all night,” JJ sniped. “So, forgive me if I don’t feel sorry for you.”
“Seriously, what is this?” Spencer asked, gesturing to the body on the floor.
“His name is Nelson Martinez. The locals think he answered the door and got shot at point blank range. They suspect it’s connected to a note delivered to a local trauma surgeon, Dr. Barton, two days ago, threatening his son’s life. The note said that if he tried to hide his son, one person would die every day.”
“Why do they think this is connected?”
JJ handed him the note.
“He left the same signature on the note that he did here. L.C,” she said. As she lifted the tarp covering the body to show him where the initials were carved into the floor, the lead detective walked into the room with Morgan, Rossi, and Prentiss.
“Good timing,” JJ said. “Guys, you remember Detective Walker? Detective, I see you’ve already met the rest of the team. This is Dr. Reid.”
Spencer waved.
“Have you two seen Hotch?” Prentiss asked.
“He wasn’t downstairs?” JJ frowned and pulled out her phone. “I texted him an hour ago.”
She dialed and held the phone up to her ear, and Spencer could hear the ring, ring, ring. Eventually, she ended the call and shook her head. Alarm bells started to go off in the back of his mind.
“He probably had his phone on silent,” Prentiss said.
Aaron’s phone was never on silent. It had driven Spencer crazy in the hospital after his anthrax scare. If Aaron was visiting, the ringer would wake him up every time he started to drift off. It was too early to start panicking, yet, though.
“We can leave him a message to meet us at Dr. Barton’s house,” he suggested.
There were way too many records to go through.
Dr. Barton was right when he said that being a trauma surgeon in D.C. made narrowing down their list of suspects almost impossible. There were at least fifty files here, and Spencer could read fast, but he could only do so much without more eyes. They just didn’t have time. Dr. Barton’s son would be home from school in less than two hours.
“You know what?” Emily finally said, standing from the couch. “We need reinforcements. I’m gonna go get Hotch.”
“Who’s that?” Dr. Barton asked.
“He’s our supervisor. We haven’t been able to get a hold of him,” Spencer said.
“I can get to his place and back before Jeffrey’s school lets out for the day,” Emily suggested. “It’s gotta be faster than this.”
“Okay. We’ll stay here and keep going through these names,” Spencer said. Emily took the keys to the SUV and walked out the door.
While she was gone, Spencer continued to question Dr. Barton about the surgeries he had performed—the patients he had saved and lost. In the back of his mind, though, he pictured worst case scenarios. In all of them, Aaron was dead, or at least horribly injured.
He had confessed, months earlier, on one of their drives home from a long, stressful case, that his father was about his age when he died of a heart attack. Stressful job, long hours away from home. Based on the profile he’d built in his head over the preceding months, Spencer suspected that little Aaron hadn't been too upset by the latter. It didn’t take a profiler, though, to realize that adult Aaron was more nervous than he let on about the ways his own life had begun to resemble his father’s.
Now Spencer was more than a little nervous about it himself, and it was turning his usually high-functioning brain matter into a viscous, unmanageable sludge. It sloshed around his skull and made him sloppy. He wasn’t making connections that he normally would.
And, that was even before Emily called him.
“Hey,” he said.
“Reid, I need you to remain calm,” Prentiss said. The tone of her voice set him on edge immediately.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“I’m at Hotch’s apartment. There’s a lot of blood here.”
“What’s going on?” Dr. Barton asked. Spencer, chest tight, heart rabbiting, just held a finger up and listened to Prentiss.
“He’s not here,” she said. All at once, the air evacuated Spencer’s lungs. Code red, all alarms shrieking.
“Is this about Jeffrey?” Dr. Barton asked.
“No, it’s unrelated.”
It was all Spencer could manage, but Dr. Barton’s voice grew louder when he said, “We only have a few hours left here!”
“I’m really sorry, I have to take this phone call, okay?”
“What could be more important than my son right now?!”
A mix of irrational anger and desperation tore through Spencer. He clenched and unclenched his fist. To his horror, he felt tears rising. First in his narrowing throat, then in his sinuses, and finally flooding his eyes. It was all he could do not to let them spill over.
“Please,” he begged, “I assure you, this will take one second. Please. I promise.”
“Fine,” Dr. Barton said.
“Emily?” Spencer prompted. “What do you see?”
“There’s a huge hole in the wall. Probably a .44, but there’s no blood or tissue spray around it.”
“Do you know how he got out?”
“If he was shot, there are no drag marks, but a body could have been wrapped in something,” she said.
He noticed that she didn’t say his body, but Spencer’s mind easily filled in the blanks. Aaron’s dead body could have been wrapped in a tarp and dragged to a dump site in some derelict industrial district. That is, if the unsub didn’t take Aaron’s body with him to whatever hole he’s hiding in.
“Bureau techs are on their way?” he asked, forcing himself to put the thought out of his mind. Aaron has to be alive, he thought, half-hysterically. He just has to.
“Any minute now.”
“Alright,” he breathed. He could do this. He could compartmentalize. Aaron is fine. “Write down everything you see, and we’ll profile from your notes when you get back."
“How’s Dr. Barton?”
Spencer flicked his eyes toward where Dr. Barton was no doubt eavesdropping from behind the wall.
“It’s a huge list of cases to go through,” he admitted under his breath.
“Okay, don’t worry about here. Just stay focused.”
He wanted to fight her. Tell her he needed to be out looking for Aaron. But, he knew he needed to compartmentalize and get the job done. He could. Even if he couldn’t, he couldn’t ask Emily to switch places with him. He was the only speed reader on the team, and begging her to come back here only to be less efficient would raise more questions than he could answer.
“Alright, you too. Call me when you find him.”
He was an atheist, but he said when like it was a prayer.
Darkness.
His ear was whining, but it didn’t hurt.
That was Aaron’s first thought as he floated towards consciousness. It had been almost two years since the last time that dull ache in his ear had subsided. Its absence, in that soporific darkness between consciousness and unconsciousness, was more disquieting than its presence.
Light.
Whatever anesthesia cocktail he’d been administered had blunted the sharp edge of his memory. He felt almost calm until he started to blink open his eyes and take in his surroundings. Off-white ceiling tiles. Buzzing fluorescents. The beeping of the ECG monitor registered only when his heart rate started to pick up.
Awareness.
Emily was standing on his right side. JJ, Dave, and Morgan near the foot of his hospital bed. Aaron blinked the blurriness away. His eyes darted around the room.
“Where am I?” he rasped.
“You’re in the hospital,” Emily said.
Aaron looked around the room again. JJ. Dave. Morgan. Emily.
“Where is Spencer?”
Emily shared a confused look with Dave. But, they didn’t get a chance to answer before…
Reality.
“Fuck!” Aaron said. His hands scrabbled uselessly with the blanket and scratchy sheet covering him, but when he tried to sit up, the pain made his vision darken around the edges. He almost screamed, and his struggle set off a commotion on the ECG. BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP!
“Is this part of my profile? You can’t show me fear?”
“If you don’t see fear, maybe it’s because I’m not afraid of you.”
“Aaron, calm down!” Dave said. His hands were on Aaron’s arms, but that only made it worse as his dry throat worked around an agonized shout.
“Don’t,” he pleaded.
He could feel Foyet’s hand—the one not nursing the knife—curled around his elbow at the joint. The weight of him dug the bone into the floor. Every time Foyet ground down against his stomach, he ground Aaron’s elbow further and further into the carpet, sending an electric current through his ulnar nerve.
Sensation was returning to his body, starting at the tips of his fingers and toes and moving upwards. He could feel the rug burn. He didn’t realize there were silent tears running down his face until Dave stepped back with his hands up in a display of surrender.
The ECG returned to a steady beeping, and Aaron squeezed his eyes closed, embarrassed by his display of vulnerability. When he opened them again, stars danced across his field of vision.
His team was staring at him in various states of undisguised horror.
“How did I get here?” Aaron asked.
“Foyet drove you,” Morgan said. Aaron exhaled a shuddering breath.
“Can you remember what happened?” Emily asked.
“So, tell me, would I use this?”
Foyet’s knife inside his guts, a violation Aaron had only ever understood as a profiler, not as a person. The euphoric curl of his lips, a threat.
It was too big a question to answer, so instead, he asked, “What’d he take?”
“What do you mean?” Dave asked.
“The Reaper always takes something from his victims,” Aaron said. That’s what I am now. A victim. “Do we know what he took?”
“There was a page missing from your day planner, in the address section. The Bs,” Emily said.
Aaron could do nothing but submit to the mute terror that buried him. He had no hope remaining that he might be wrong about what was about to happen.
“What’d he leave?”
“I don’t know.”
“He also leaves something with his victims.”
“I looked over your whole apartment,” Emily said. “Nothing felt out of place.”
“Where are my clothes?”
Emily grabbed a bag of his belongings and started emptying it. Aaron didn’t miss the flash of conflict across her face or the slight hesitation when she pulled out his blood-soaked shirt and found it crusted near the hem with something other than blood.
Underneath, Aaron found an envelope containing Morgan’s credentials and a bloody photograph of Haley and Jack. He closed his eyes again and hugged the photograph close to his chest.
“Haley’s maiden name is Brooks,” he said, destroyed. “I always listed her in the Bs in my personal information in case it fell into the wrong hands. He knows where they live.”
“We’re going right now,” JJ said with that conviction Aaron had always admired in her. It was useless, now.
When she looked down at him, her eyes held nothing resembling pity. They were terrified and sincere. She made an abortive move for his hand, then cringed and said, “Aaron, it’s gonna be okay. We will get there before he can hurt them.”
“Just go,” Aaron said. “Please.”
But, as JJ, Dave, and Morgan filed out of the room, Aaron knew it was hopeless. He wanted to close his eyes and wail until some merciful God took him away. I wish he’d just killed me, he thought.
The only God Aaron had ever known, ever since he was a child, was a merciless one, so he stayed right there in the hospital bed, overheated and sweaty with fear.
“Do you know how much you have to study the human body to stab yourself repeatedly and not die?” Foyet said. “I don’t wanna brag, but I’m somewhat of an expert.”
Aaron groaned when the knife went in again, nice and slow. A bleak gurgle escaped his throat and his mouth filled with blood. Foyet leaned in further with a gasp, settling atop Aaron’s pelvis, then leaned back again.
“Do you wanna see my scars?”
“Hotch,” Emily said. Aaron looked up at her desperately.
“You were at my place, right?” he asked. She nodded. “Could you tell how he got in?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. Aaron’s chest was filled with noxious gas. It was strangling him. Her eyes darted over to his discarded shirt and asked, “Do you wanna talk about what happened?”
“Your team didn’t catch me until I wanted them to.” He leaned in closer, breath fanning over Aaron’s nose and stinging his eyes. “You’re not in charge, so don’t be foolish. Just try to relax.”
Aaron refused to look at her when he said, “I don’t know. After he stabbed me the first time, it all goes blank.”
Foyet had been right. Aaron’s body did go numb. The pain melted away like flame to plastic, residue gluing to his subconscious. Its place in his conscious mind was overtaken by a nauseating, exquisite terror.
Confronted with Foyet’s jabbing, urgent little thrusts against his stomach, the rancid, satisfied bursts of hot air emerging from his open mouth, the zipper of his pants undone and abrading his wounds with each pass, tearing him open like a slaughtered steer, Aaron was helpless.
The ECG started shrieking again. Aaron didn’t have to answer for his lie just then, because a nurse was hustling Emily out of the room.
“You need to breathe,” she told Aaron. “You’re having a panic attack.”
She held her stethoscope to his chest, and he took a deep, painful breath, then another one, then another one. Eventually, the beeping on the monitor started to slow again.
“That’s it,” she said. “Just keep breathing.”
“Hurts,” Aaron wheezed.
“Okay, hold on.” She fiddled with the roller clamp on the tubing connected to his IV catheter, allowing the fluids to flow into his vein. “That’s hydromorphone. It’s a pain medication. It should take effect in the next five to ten minutes.”
“Spencer,” Aaron breathed, reminded again that he didn’t know where Spencer was.
“Is that one of your friends that was in here earlier?” she asked. She tightened the roller clamp to cut off the medication and pulled up a chair beside his bed. Aaron shook his head. “Well, whoever he is, he can visit you later, okay? I want you to get some rest once those meds kick in, but before they do, I need to ask you a couple questions.”
“Okay.”
“Would you be comfortable letting us perform an examination for a sexual assault evidence kit?” she asked.
Her pleasant Virginia accent almost softened the blow to Aaron’s chest. He clenched his hands into fists and sucked in another painful breath when he processed what she had said.
“What?”
“We took some swabs from your skin when you came in to prevent that evidence from being lost during your surgery, but we were waiting for you to wake up to collect any other samples.”
“I wasn’t sexually assaulted,” Aaron said, conjuring up as much of his old authoritative tone as he could manage.
“Honey, you have nothing to be ashamed of,” she said.
Like JJ’s, her voice carried that deep, uncondescending sympathy developed through years of desensitization. Despite the sincerity, it still pissed Aaron off. His voice used to have meaning, before Foyet stole it from him. Before, people listened to him when he said no, even if he didn’t say it in so many words.
He sounded, to himself, like a much lesser man when he said, “He didn’t—,” and his voice cracked at the end.
“It’s okay if you don’t want the full workup,” she assured him. “But, I do have to ask you some questions, and I do need you to be honest with me so we can get you any tests or medicine you might need, okay?”
“Now, I understand that profilers think that stabbing is a substitute for the act of sex,” Foyet said. Aaron’s vision was awash with static, blurry and disoriented. “That if someone’s impotent, they’ll use a knife instead.”
Foyet skewered him again, drawn close enough to Aaron’s face that his words practically took shape on Aaron’s own lips.
“Is that what you think, Agent Hotchner?” he asked. “Maybe this will change the way that you profile.”
Aaron was completely drained of whatever fight remained, muscles slack and immobile. This time, the knife glided, easy as water, straight through him.
Aaron felt some of that same exhaustion now. He had no fight left in him. He nodded.
“Good,” she said. “This won’t take long. Like I said, we took a sample of semen from your abdomen. Do you know if that sample came from you or your attacker?”
Aaron screwed his eyes shut and said, “Him.”
“Do you remember if that happened before or after he stabbed you?”
“During.”
“Did your attacker penetrate you orally or anally?”
He didn't have to, Aaron thought. That's what the knife was for. A heavy, oppressive pain settled across his ribs, and it had nothing to do with his physical wounds.
“No,” he said. His voice came out weak and dull.
“Are you thinking about hurting yourself in any way?”
Not until I know if Haley and Jack are alive, he thought. Not until Foyet is dead.
Aaron almost wept with relief when he saw Haley. In turn, Haley almost burst into tears when she saw him. If only she could see how gruesome I look under this gown.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
She doesn’t even realize how loaded that question is.
He had made it to the other side of this thing. This rape—that word he had been so sure would never, ever apply to him. He wasn’t dead, he was alive. And, now, his body would forever be something unrecognizable. Never again would it be a soft landing place for Haley; never again would he hug Jack with untainted hands.
And, still, no one would tell him where Spencer was.
“I’m gonna be okay,” he lied. “Did they explain to you what’s happening?”
“They said the Marshall Service is taking us straight from here and putting us into protective custody.”
She was pissed at him, and he wanted to thank God. Let her be pissed off, he thought. She’s alive. Jack is alive.
“Haley, I’m sorry.”
“Do you know where they’re gonna take us?”
“No, and that’s the point,” he said. Can’t you see this is all my fault? “I can’t know where you’re going. If you have any contact with anyone, then he could track you.”
“Jack has school,” she spit. He knew he deserved it. Deserved worse. “He has friends. I have a job now.”
“I know, and I’m sorry. We will catch him, and you’ll come back, and I promise I will spend the rest of my life making this up to you.”
There was nothing in her expression but doubt and betrayal.
“Are you sure that we’re in danger?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“What about you? Are you gonna be safe?”
“He wants to see me suffer,” he said, and seeing those horrible tears welling in Haley’s eyes made him want to throw himself on the cross and repent for the rest of his life. “Knowing that my son is out there, and I can’t see him, is better than killing me.”
“What did he do to you, Aaron?” she whispered. Aaron shook his head.
It was like Foyet wasn't looking into Aaron but into a mirror, at a reflection of his own absolute power. Like it was just him, a sharp instrument slick and sticky with Aaron’s blood, and an eyeful of Aaron’s delicious panic. Aaron, the person, had no role in the equation beyond his blood flowing like water, his eyes wet and afflicted, his body completely separated from his soul.
But still awake. Why?
“I don’t remember.”
“We were married for fifteen years,” she reminded him. “I can always tell when you’re lying.”
“It’s been a while, Hales,” he said, and they let the miserable silence hang between them.
“What am I supposed to tell Jack,” Haley finally asked.
“Tell him it’s a vacation and that it’s not gonna be for very long.”
“How am I supposed to keep him safe if there is no one I know to help me?”
She was really crying now. Aaron’s own tears spilled over, and he forced himself to hold her gaze when he said, “Haley, you’re strong. You lived with me and this job, and you’ve practically raised Jack all by yourself. You’re a great mother.”
“Can you catch this man?”
“I will. I promise I will catch him.”
They said nothing for a moment, until Haley said the words he had been dreading since she walked in: “Jack wants to come in.”
Aaron had been through hell. Had his body used and his soul discarded. He had lived, impossibly, but a piece of hell cleaved to his skin like a bed of hot coals. It was melting through his spine, evaporating his humanity into clouds of toxic smoke.
How can I possibly hold him like this? How can I even look at him? he thought.
“I wanna see him, too,” he whispered, eyes burning a hole in his own lap, feeling like the worst kind of coward. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Look, I know you’re trying to protect him, but you both need this,” Haley pleaded. Her tears made her voice come out wavering and constricted. “Please.”
He would never let Jack see him this broken.
Then again, he once thought he would never show Foyet weakness. He thought he would never be raped. He thought he would never survive being raped.
He might never see him again.
“Okay,” he whispered. He looked up in time to see the relief in Haley’s eyes as she poked her head out the door, and then JJ was bringing Jack in.
Aaron repositioned himself, and Haley hoisted Jack onto the bed. When he took Aaron’s cold hand in his own tiny one, Aaron almost broke down.
“Hey, buddy.” He sniffled and squeezed Jack’s hand. “Don’t worry, it’s okay. The doctors made sure that I’m completely fine. Did Mommy tell you that you two are gonna take a trip?”
“Yeah.”
“So, I’m not gonna see you for a while.”
“Why?” Jack whined.
“Well, think about it like when Daddy goes away for work. Except, this time, you and Mommy get to go someplace,” Aaron said. “But, what do I tell you every time I go away?”
“You love me?”
“More than anything in the world.” Aaron’s voice broke, and he dipped his head to kiss Jack on the forehead. He said, “I’m very proud of you. Every single day.”
“Will you be all alone, Daddy?” Jack asked.
“No. My friends are gonna take care of me.”
“Maybe Dr. ‘Pencer can come over again.”
Aaron’s eyes blew wide and darted up to meet Haley’s. She was giving him a baffled, scrutinizing kind of look, but she didn’t say anything.
“Maybe,” Aaron said. “I’ll see you soon, okay?”
“Okay,” Jack said.
“Take care of Mom, okay?”
“Okay.”
Haley stared at Aaron for a long, loaded moment. Then, she picked Jack up and made her way to the door.
“Haley,” Aaron said, stopping her in her tracks. “I’m so sorry.”
“Did you hear what happened this morning?” Dave asked.
The others had made themselves busy elsewhere, so now they were alone. Spencer’s absence, paired with Dave’s question, was starting to make Aaron nervous.
“No,” he said.
“We had a situation. Unsub killed two people. Said he was gonna keep killing unless a man used his son as bait.”
“What happened?”
“We kept the boy safe. Worked the profile. It was a happy ending,” Dave said. Aaron shut his eyes. “Do you know why I’m telling you this?”
“Yes,” Aaron whispered.
“No other team in the world could have pulled off what yours did in a couple of hours.”
“I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Dave.”
“We’ll get Foyet,” Dave promised. Aaron scowled and shook his head.
“I promised Haley we’d get him, but the truth is, if he stops killing, we have no way of tracking him. He stopped killing for 10 years just for the pleasure of watching Shaunessy’s life fall apart. What’s Jack gonna remember about me in 10 years?”
“Hotch, look at me,” Dave said. Aaron did, vision blurred by tears. “I’m telling you. We’ll get him.”
Aaron didn’t know how to respond to that.
“Dave, no one will give me a straight answer. Where is Reid?”
Dave sighed and ducked his head.
“Reid was shot,” he said. Then, loudly and quickly, he dispelled Aaron’s inevitable panic: “In the knee.”
“Goddammit,” Aaron said, and he really couldn’t stop himself from crying again. “Is he okay?”
“He should be out of surgery already,” Dave said. There was something in his face that reflected confusion over Aaron’s reaction to the news. “He’s at D.C. Memorial. I’m sorry, Aaron, I didn’t think you’d be so upset. He’s going to be fine.”
“It’s not that,” Aaron lied. But, it wasn’t a total lie. This day had scraped him completely raw. “It’s just… I just need some time alone.”
“Okay,” Dave said. He made to pat Aaron on the shoulder, then pulled back with a deep frown when he saw the way Aaron tensed to suppress a humiliating flinch at the kind gesture. Instead, he stood and said, “I’ll stop by in the morning, okay?”
With his jaw clenched, his lips flattened, his cheeks pinched to prevent him from baring the panic that he felt rising in his chest, all Aaron could do was nod.
"Here then at long last is my darkness. No cry of light, no glimmer, not even the faintest shard of hope to break free across the hold."
- Mark Z. Danielewski