Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The wind is cool as it hits his face and Holden closes his eyes. For a moment, the first of many, in his current state he's not standing in any windowsills, he's just a part of the night sky, he's the wind. He doesn't think about the things he always thinks he doesn't need to be heavily medicated to be functional. He's high, high and detached and far far away.

This is what his victory lap looks like: a dangerous mixing of prescribed drugs and cheap beers in an empty, functional apartment with little personality and with little life to it. It's too much like him for comfort, too empty and practical and useful. It makes him think it's only one proper hit shy of falling apart like a castle made out of cards. He takes another chug of beer, stands up, paces around, thinks about a man he knows is guilty with only two charges to his name, thinks about those moms and those kids and the receptionist he can't quite name who had looked at him with hope and admiration like he could help but he didn't help. This is a victory leap, and it's as depressing as his victory is a sentence on the first page of newspaper to drive the nation's eyes from Atlanta. He didn't win. Children died. Mothers won't ever have closure. He took two Valiums and hoped he would be under enough to not feel bothered.

Holden dangles the bottle of beer between his fingers in the same way he dangles his fragile sanity: with a careful grip of unsteady fingers and a looming knowledge that at the first matter that calls his attention, his grip will loosen and something will shatter.

He gazes at the bottle as if he was gazing at a clue he can not figure out as if he's analysing files about infamous killers, analysing pictures of brutal slaughters, analysing the rock used to crush a girl's skull the maps of the city, with those red pins where the bodies were found.

He wonders for half a moment why does he always waits for a slip up? Why does he always wait for things to shatter?

“Seems to me, everything you know about serial killers has been gleaned from the ones who’ve been caught.”

This is his world, it's made him paranoid, it's all biting him in the ass. He should cave under the pressure, but all he does in unravel until all that is his is spread around him like papers knocked from a file cabinet do on the basement's floor.

Why does he wait until the man holding those people hostage blows his head off? Why destroy a High School's principal life? Why prod with the right words until their subject broke and spilled all those terrible details? Why be such an excellent recreation of a mirror to that he could not tell his own reflection? Why jeopardize their research over 'eight ripe cunts'? Why go and see Ed Kemper after a suicides attempt? Why only run when his survival instinct wouldn't let him stay put any longer? Why ruin Sheppard's career? Why press Bill regarding matters of his family that were privy to him and him alone? Why did he wait for more bodies to litter Atlanta?

Freud spoke of a death drive. Five floors up, he's high enough to make this a lethal fall. All it takes it's a step forward. Heavens knows he's not afraid of doing so anymore. He's too aware of what can be hiding behind the mind of the living to be scared of the dead. This is just as good of a way out as any.

Then he climbs back down, adrenaline still being pumped by his heart and running through his veins, almost as fast as his erratic shallow breaths. He didn't want to die. His knees buckle but, by the sheer will of his stubbornness he remains standing. By the sheer will of his stubbornness he remains faintly sane.

He takes a step and two, tests his weight — strangely heavy and foreign and all in all too awkward overall — and stops, swaying from one side to the other.

He is paranoid. It's all biting him in the ass. Truth is, he's slowly growing closer and closer to being Kemper than to being the Holden he first was when Debbie said he dressed like her father.

Nietzsche knew his shit, he figures, as the words of his saying crumple together and tie knots to his train of thoughts.

Holden throws the bottle against the wall and he could swear something snaps inside of him as the bottle turns to smithereens upon impact.

No one comes the next morning, it's a Saturday morning. Sunday goes by the same way, then Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and his phone rings and rings and rings and Gunn is skeptical and annoyed and Gregg is stressed and Wendy is nurturing anger over yet another situation and Bill is pissed and pressed by all sides until he knocks on the door long enough to get too pissed and knock the door down.

By then, the apartment is empty, no furniture, no clothes, no nothing. It's like it was never lived on to begin with. It's like Holden Ford had been smoke, and the strong winds Quantico had been subjected to had blown him away, along with his possessions.

On the kitchen there's a letter and a note written on Holden's perfect and loopy handwriting, by their side there's an empty glass and a pill.

‘In case you're anxious before reading the letter, take a Valium. If you are not anxious yet, save it for after.'

Chapter Text

The woman in question, walking home in an unadvisable lack of hurry for this hour of night, is named Mary, Mary Page if one wants to be more specific. He's studied her enough to know all the opportune things to elect her the next kill. Mary works in a cafeteria near her University's campus, on the radius in which other seven women with brown hair, intriguing complexion that live alone while having a relatively active social life have disappeared in the last three months only to be found in mangled pieces with their underwears shoved down their throats and bags over their heads across the dirtiest corners of town.

Mary, much like the other now-bodies, remind Holden of Debbie just a little bit too much for comfort, appearance and otherwise. He could picture Debbie dressed in the same outfit Mary wears, he can picture her walking through the street to her house, fishing on her beg for her keys with a hand, multitude of papers on the other. 

Does she have a mood like Debbie? Does she take illicit drugs to stay up and broaden her mind as she writes several pages of a paper she's had months to write but chooses to do it the day before her deadline? Does she like cheap red wines bought in the grocery store religiously once a month, if only to look pretty on the one glass cabinet she owns? She might, she might not. Maybe Mary is a little more on the well-behaved side, active social life and his preconceptions about University students be damned. Debbie be dammed too, he thinks, as an afterthought. It's so rare to think about her nowadays. What would she say of this Holden he has become? Nothing good, most likely. Then again, she didn't say much good things about the past Holden either. All his appeal laid on analysing the FBI specimen, giving inputs over the country’s worst possible murderers and the… expertise of his tongue, so to speak. 

Nevertheless, Holden thinks this Mary's a little reckless, walking about alone and as unbothered as she is in this silent dark neighborhood, this relatively big town where girls like her are being found on ditches, but she might think it's too big of a city for her to be next. Holden twists his hands around the rope and climbs out of the car. Perhaps she's having a bad day and she's not thinking straight. Bad days are usually bad nights and bad nights, as a rule, means that tonight won't be her night.

She walks, discrete heels hitting the pavement and he walks, car already on and ready to have a passed out woman shoved on the back and driven off on. He has all the essentials in it, no doubt, gloves, ropes, the butcher knife, the signature pastel bag. He walks slightly faster, because the shady dirt road that leads to her street will be over soon, and then she'll be out in the open, a more illuminated open and he's going to lose his kill. He twists the hope in his hands, ready to sprint, reach over her head and tighten it around her pretty neck.

It's the hunter's high. To have an animal at your mercy, under your aim, moments away from death and not even noticing. Of course, Holden is and always has been a hunter more inclined to dangerous animals than little deers walking home after a shit shift.

He gasps for air, confused and startled when it's his neck that is laced instead and Holden tightens it even more then, taking advantage of his moment of shock to make sure he keeps the upper hand during their little struggle.

It's his own brand of hunter's high to hunt another hunter.

 Holden takes methodical steps backs, all the while pulling Boris Walker along with him as his face reddens from the cut circulation and his mouth opens and shuts like a fish's as air evades him and as Mary finds her way into her neighborhood and arrives at her doorstep, her keys still elude her on her purse.

He keeps tightening his grip long after she does eventually find the keys, long after she enters the house, long after Walker's eyes lose their light, his neck snaps and his face turns blue.

Hunting is always more fun than the next part is.

He won’t ever say it outloud, of course, but amidst the disappearance of one boy scout Holden Ford, and one wife Nancy Trench and their unresponsive perhaps psychopathic son Brian, the pressure of Tedd Gunn, the disapproval stained sympathy in Wendy’s eyes and Gregg’s overall redundancy, Bill wishes from time to time he hadn’t let that bloody pill Holden left behind be taken as evidence, because he feels pretty bloody anxious right about now.

The elevators open leisurely and he walks out on the new, improved and glamorous new room their glorious boss has flung their way, because of the intuitive criminal genius that has very much disappeared in a dramatic manner from a day to the other, and not without plenty of warning signs either

“You might want to see this.” It’s Wendy that says it, so he knows it’s not a good thing, specially because she’s speaking on that cool, collected, calm, professional tone paired with the urgency, intense eyes and she does not leave after resting the fax by his side, resting her waist against the desk and crossing her arms, waiting for a response. Bad news. Absolutely shit news. Terrible, terrible news.

“A new killer?” He asks, picking the paper and the file up, eyes running over the words, seven women of brunette hair, slim build, college students, social life,on a specific radius, butchered, Boris Walker, case closed. Case closed? He frowns, looking up at her. “The case is closed, Wendy. I’m not sure what you expect me to—”

“Second to last page, Bill.” She says, her tone edging on internalised annoyance which he thinks is deep as a well. Their breathing probabbly pisses her off, and he can’t much blame her. He used to be equally annoyed with Holden and Gregg, but now there’s only Gregg. In flesh and bone, that is. He’s still pissed at Holden, wherever the kid is, but he's also worried. “You're mentioned by name.”T spikes his interest, frowning deeply before he flicks the pages over to the picture of a package of his favorite brand of cigarettes, with a note taped to it addressing it to him. “I think you’ll find the writing familiar.”

God fucking dammit.

“Gregg, get James Barney hired. I’ll go see this case, tell Gunn it’s usual interview work. Do not listen to your conscience this time around, okay?” He says, picking the coat he just took off and his case, standing up abruptly as he gathers the papers and tries to think as obsessively as possible that this cannot be, the kid couldn’t have done this “Wendy, you coming?”

There’s an appreciative, dangerous gleam to her eyes as she picks her own coat that reminds him of Holden and that’s the last thing he needs.

As the taste of mouthwash and vomit from last night lingers on his mouth, he finds himself increasingly disappointed, not with his weak stomach, but of not having had one single good metaphor for the oozing of blood at the time. But it doesn't matter. It was only his first kill. He doubts any of the others were as well spoken and profound about their experiences at their first time; no, he's heard enough to know that what this truly is, this bewildered feeling is the first rush, it's a common enough reaction, something they all share. This is the shit that gets them addicted, the first needle to a unpricked vein.

Whatever is left of Holden Ford unravels and spirals and comes back together, with new pieces and new arrangements to his person that make him more and less himself simultaneously. A little bit like the mangled corpse he’s left behind on his shit car where seven women found their ends. It’s poetic justice, Debbie would say, that he dies as his victims did and that his body is found as they were. Of course, there’s the 25 pages of evidence and his typewritten proven theory he left behind to be found, along with the cigarette pack addressed to Bill (he’s anything but inconsiderate this days, aware of the headache he must have sprung out to any and everyone on the BSU) but still there’s still a postcard to be sent. There’s still one single person in this world that would be eager to listen what he has to say, even when he’s become what he’s become. He probably was eagerly awaiting on the wings for all of this to happen.

Ed told him once that butchering people was hard work. That people needed to vent. He should have taken him more seriously about the first, but the second doesn't phase him at all. He has listened enough to know that whatever there is to be known down the line, there's a shitton of experience from others to get a catharsis over.

There's nothing new, nothing that can surprise him, really. Holden has it laid out for him, he has tips and former experiences and a shitton of research and that lovely FBI knowledge that police are often times incompetent and what is hard to catch and what is not. He knows how Bill and Wendy think — Bill with his leg work, Wendy with her data and Gregg with... Whatever it was that Gregg brought to the table apart of big expectations and a self imploding morality — if it ever comes to the BSU being sent after him, which will absolutely happen given he addressed a pack of cigarettes to Special Agent Bill Trench on a crime scene, he knows they're good but he also knows he is better. They can understand the ones who were caught, like the Holden of before, they can even somewhat create a profile for the ones they hadn't yet, but he had gone a step further: He had become the abyss.

He thanks the old man behind the glass when the postcard is stamped and set to be delivered, he turns to walk out of the door, walk over to his own car (he already has a next destination in mind) and drive away when Bill’s car speeds by in the little road of this little nowhere town that leads to the slightly less nowhere town where his pack of cigarettes and a body awaits.

Holden wishes he could say he did not feel sorrowful to not be able to say hello to his friend, though hello would be the last thing he’d want to hear from him right about now, but he did. He wishes he could pretend he did not feel a pang of hurt to see Wendy sat on the passenger seat of the car, where he himself had the habit of sitting back in the days where he was not broken glass floating about in a storm of lacerations.

He takes a breath, holds onto the car keys and walks out of the store

In Vacaville, dark eyes skim over the neat writing on the back of a postcard of a town so small and unremarkable that it’s own name sounded made up when it was announced to him. Except it wasn’t made up. It was just his good friend, travelling about as he was prone to.

“This is interesting.” Ed murmurs.

Chapter Text

The cause of death had undeniably been strangling; the eyes all but popping from the man's blueish face and the red rape-burn mark that circled end of the form just to make things official. He had been strangled well after to squish his windpipe to the point the killer had to lay the body in a peculiar position so his head wouldn't dangle from the crushed neck.

That should to have been enough, but they never never stopped there, did they? Just not fucking enough.

A butcher knife with only the victim's own fingertips to it (that conveniently was a perfect match to the one suggested to have been used on the bodies of the seven murdered girls) sticks out of his carcass after having been used to cut him open from throat to stomach (like a damn pig; like the girls) and his blood had stained the car seat after hours of bleeding out there. His boxers were and upon pulling that piece of evidence out, the cops had going his tongue stretched with one single Valium pill over it.

The pictures of the victims were littered in the backseat and in the passenger seat laid the best pile of typewritten proof and theories pointing to the guilty man, with a damn pack of cigarettes box from his favorite brand, all labeled with a neat note of 'for Bill'.

All the victims' families had also received weirdly impersonal letters with lines of regrets about their loss and with the name of their guttered murderer.

Bill had grabbed the cigarettes with a blanket of numbness over his sense and awkward fingers, eyes trailed on the butcher job ahead.

He had half-expected them to blow up, to be filled with fingers or something equally gruesome. Still, there had only been cigarettes — and now Bil smoked them as if they could provide answers.

Maybe they were poisonous. Maybe they were laced with drugs. Maybe. It wasn't like the bloody things hadn't been killing him all along, so after he grew the balls to light one, he smoked through four in the way with Wendy to the police station. She frowned, but said nothing if it. He let the smoke into his lungs so he could distract himself from the unsettled stomach turning flips at the memory of the scene as he drove; keeping it in between his lips was also an excuse not to talk.

He didn't do it, he didn't do it, he didn't do it, he didn't do it, he didn't do it, he didn't do it.

Bill picked a fifth cigarette.

He felt like throwing up.

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Turns out, snapping doesn't make you more friendly or sociable or even less odd. It just makes you be more mindful of how you've been sowed at the seams and how you cut that sewing from the inside out with the broken pieces of what was left.

And when you're cut open, what you kept inside spills through the cuts; Holden's darkness pour out in steady waves, but rather than be horrified, he feels relieved. The floor of the car is ankle deep in the darkness.

He stares at it, feels numb by it.

There's a cigarette burning on his hand through the window, but it never touches his lips. It's more nostalgia than anything else.

He feels relieved but he feels alone

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“He did it.” Wendy's voice cut the silence. “That was Holden.”

She sounded as sure as she did when she was talking about the link between troubled childhoods and their interviewed killer's conceptions of life. But this wasn't Kemper or Speck or Brudos, this was Holden Ford. He was a cocky son of a bitch with a Mormon haircut that didn't know how or when to shut up, but was the boyscout star of the BSU whose institution got him heart eyes from Gunn himself.

Sure, the kid had mirrored and projected and empathised and dug deeper into the mind of the countries' worst murderers than any sane person would, but he was still a kid. A kid that had been taking Valium pills like if those were candy, like Bill smoked through his cigarettes. He was just a kid.

“Holden did it.” Wendy says again, sounding like she is trying to convince him and herself at the same time.

Brian did it.

Bill sucked in a hitched breath as if he had been punched in the gut.

“We don't know that just yet.” he replied, all too defensively, angry. He sounded angry. It was the only thing he could emote from the overwhelming mix that made thinking straight harder: the anger — not the confusion, not his fear, not the apprehension, not the feeling he was losing bits and pieces of what he had always took for sure and granted in his life, not the utter frustration.

Sheppard was gone, Nancy was gone, Brian was gone, Holden was gone.

Brian hadn't meant it. He was just a kid. He just wanted to help.

Holden couldn't have meant it, couldn't have done it. He was a kid. He just wanted to help.

He remembers his anguish about the tickles principal, remembers his offers to do it alone if Bill couldn't do it with him, remembers how he broke the man who murdered a 14 years old girl, how he caught Beverly Jean's murderers, remembers him barely taking a week off before being back at work after Vacaville, remembers all the bullshit paperwork he filled for remembers him assembling the crosses, running to get the damn thing there, how many times he met with those mothers, how many times he tried to make people listen, to make people care , to understand that children were dying .

He just wanted to help.

Empty eyes, orange pill bottles on the inside pockets of his jackets, growing silence, hunched shoulders as his ever upright posture cave under the weight of it all.

He just wanted to help.

He had asked the point of it, if Wayne Williams only had two charges to his name with more than 28 victims dead behind them.

He just wanted to help. And Bill had told him to take a victory walk.

Wendy leaned back at the chair, brown eyes laying heavily over him, judging silently, mulling over the gruesome scene they saw and the fragile boy that had taken her for drinks in a bar to spill his guts out. Bill recognised something under that heavy brown; concerns, fear, confusion. She bit her lip and crossed her arms, as a okay of strength of a gesture of comfort he couldn't tell.

“Then where is he Bill?”

Silence was all they had, over their heads, heavy and suffocating like a wool blanket woven out of uncertainty and doubts and questions without answers. Bill's eyes flicker to the pictures ahead of them, the victims on the left side of the table and the murderer to the right. Where there is passion and anger seeping through the methodical procedure of the mangling of the bodies to her left, the scene of the right is a perfect copy, done with a controlled hand and only vague hints of squeamishness in the preparing of the scene for the police forces' inevitable findings, a squeamishness vastly absent in the act of killing itself. It was passionate, almost as passionate as the own murderer had been.

He had only wanted to help and seven girls were dead but Mary had escaped with her life. The murderer was dead and beyond the will or will they not arrest him dance the law made then tag along to. He can see how the kid with eyes wide and quickening breath could have thought this was helping.

Bill's hand twitches, but there's nothing to hold. There's nothing to take. There's no cigarette to light. He doesn't want to argue with her, he doesn't feel like entertaining the idea.

“Agent Tench?” His head and Wendy's snap at the same time to the cop that looks more like a teenager dressed up for Halloween than anything else. He's bony, small and he can't even hold eye contact to them.

“Yeah?" He says, annoyed and impatient, after a long moment of silence.

“It's from someone on the bureau.” The cop replies, voice so meek Bill can barely hear the words that come. “Tim Liz? He  said he has information about the Model T."

He frowns at the man, and turns frowning to Wendy, but she looks just as confused, and neither of them can find answers on the other's face.

Model T? What does that even mean?

The realization hits his chest like the impact of a bomb.

“What is ‘Model T’?”

“It's a codename. For Ford.”

Ford.

It means Ford.

“How about I call you Tin Lizzie?”

Holden.

Bill stands up abruptly. The chair falls behind him on the ground and Wendy stands, already raising her voice to question him but he runs out of the room, through the hallway to the telephone set aside for him and her voice is just an indignant echo behind him. Even then, he still doesn't care. His heart is echoing on his ears in a manner it hasn't since Korea.

He grips the phone and says what he's been thinking all along.

“Tell me it wasn't you. Tell me you didn't do it. Tell me you are not that insane that you have done something as stupid as this!"

“It's nice to hear your voice too, Bill.”

“Don't you dare sound smug on me now, you little shit." He spits as frustrated worry courses through his veins. “Did you do it?!”

“What does the evidence tell you?”

His stomach drops. He did it. He murdered a man, butchered him and wrote postcards to the victim's families and called it all justice. 

“It's a good thing, Bill. We would never have get whiff of this one. The cops would have never got him.” Bill shakes his head. Holden sounds so convinced of what he's saying. He can imagine the crazy look to his eyes. He used to know what it meant. “Turn a blind eye. Wendy can focus on the study. One less killer for you to worry about, you can focus on the case you've been so worried about.”

“When you murder a murderer, the number of killers doesn't change.”

There's a beat of silence. He can almost trick himself to think he's reasoning with the other. 

“II better make quick work on the next town, then.”

The line goes dead.

Bill smashes the phone.