Chapter Text
Chapter 1
Jazz woke with a start.
This was not particularly unusual, he rarely slept without a nightmare, and on the nights he did get that brief reprieve, he still woke after a generous five hours—force of habit.
What was unusual though, is that tonight the sound was not just in his head: someone was pounding on the door.
“Jazz,” Connie shouted, from the living room where she had slept. “There are people at the door! FBI!”
Despite the anxious energy coursing through him, setting every muscle tensed as flashes of his last interaction with the FBI hit from every angle, Jazz huffed a laugh. He was certain the agents on his doorstep could hear his girlfriend, just as he was certain she knew they could hear her. He had taught her well.
Jazz vaulted out of bed, quickly slipping a loose pair of sweats over his boxers, forgoing a shirt in favor of rushing out of his bedroom, down the hall, and down the stairs.
He came up the hall that bisected the ground floor of what had been his grandmother’s house and saw Connie looking at him with worried eyes. Though Connie hadn’t had much real contact with the FBI that summer, she’d heard the stories, been there to see the cold looks the NYPD and FBI had given him even after they knew (a heavily redacted and censored version of) the whole story.
He reached over and rubbed her arm , watched her features soften a bit, haloed in the teal satin of her bonnet, before walking the rest of the way to the door and pulling it a third of the way open.
*
“Can I help you?”
Spencer’s eyebrows raised for a second before he attempted to settle his expression back to something resembling a real FBI agent—he wasn’t really, but it’s the thought that counts. He was surprised at the Dent boy’s gruff greeting, having heard, along with the rest of the team, the agents originally on the Hatdog case’s dramatic warnings of Jasper’s smarminess.
He supposed if he was the FBI’s Most Hated Teenager, he would forgo the pleasantries, too.
It was also seven in the morning on a Saturday.
In front of Spencer, Morgan was introducing the two of them. Dent was looking bored, annoyance tickling the corners of his eyes.
“Look, kid, it’s cold, it’s Saturday, and we’re in for a conversation I expect you don’t want to have on your front porch.” Spencer did not miss the way Dent tensed at Morgan’s words, particularly the word “kid,” and he knew the senior agent did not either.
The boy’s jaw clenched, his visible hand following suit.
“Just let them in, Jazz.”
*
Derek peered around the chipping white door to spot black girl in pajamas and a bonnet. He smiled genuinely at her. Turning back to the boy, who was nearly as tall as him, and said, “She’s a smart girl.”
The Dent boy was not amused, but he let go of the door and turned, walking deeper into the house. The decor was outdated, tacky, and largely falling apart, robin’s egg walls glaring to any newcomer, but what caught Derek’s eyes was the plethora of, well, silly tattoos scattered on Dent’s body like stickers. He was ready to crack a joke about the flaming basketball as he followed Dent into the kitchen and caught sight of his chest tattoo: I hunt killers , in a simple, heavy font.
If Dent noticed the agent’s eyes on him, he showed no reaction. The girl, however—Connie, his brain supplied from the detailed dossier Garcia had pulled—gave him a sharp look, apparently unmoved by his position of authority.
Derek blinked, watched Spencer putter around the room, taking in details only Boy Wonder would notice, then situated his gaze square on Dent’s face, determined to ignore the tattoos and faint scars for the time being. “We’re here because the Behavioral Analysis Unit’s taken on a case involving your father.”
At this, the boy finally looked up from the cup of what had to be very stale coffee he’d been nursing. “Copycat?”
Derek took his unruffled reaction in stride, the team having profiled that the younger Dent shared some of his senior’s sociopathic tendencies. “Yes.” Of whom, Derek did not specify.
“How many bodies?” Dent took a sip out of his mug.
“Three.”
“Barely a serial killer then.” At this, Dent’s presumed girlfriend gave the boy a sharp look, one which he returned icily, uncowed.
Derek could see the vague anxiety written in the lift of the shirtless boy’s brow, and he presumed Connie did too, as she walked around the island to lean shoulder to shoulder against the counter with him.
“Which kills?” Jazz looked at Derek appraisingly as he said this, clearly testing the agent.
Further into the city of Kentucky, where the third body had been found, the team had debated how much the Dent boy should know. Rossi, the least sympathetic of the BAU wanted to treat Dent as an Unsub, giving him the barest details, dropping one or two shockers to gage the boy’s reaction.
Derek advocated a similar approach for the opposite reasons: the kid had been through enough, didn’t need to be retraumatized by being drawn into another investigation, shouldn’t be forced to reopen a wound that was probably barely healed over.
Emily, blunt as ever, said Jazz was obviously a resource and mature enough (at the ripe age of eighteen) to aid the investigation. Derek had shouted that he was “still a kid, dammit!”
Hotch, ever the mediator, found a happy middle. They’d tell Dent more than they would a normal civilian, but wouldn’t bring him in or give him full access to the investigation. He also pulled Derek aside to ask if he needed to step away from the case.
He’d had a point. Derek realized this doubly as his mouth opened and closed, a thick fissure in his G-man facade.
Spencer picked up the slack, his underdeveloped social skills awarding him the ability to notice Derek’s fumbling, but not the tact to soften the blow. “It would be more accurate to say that the BAU has taken on a case involving you , Jasper.”
*
Connie felt her boyfriend (she really wondered if that was the word for him, anymore) tense next to her as his full name left the agent’s—doctor’s—mouth.
She eyed the mug in his hands warily. He no longer drank from glass, too many shattered in his weathered hands when something triggered him. He objected to the word—trigger.
She’d told him to talk to his therapist about it.
She waited futily for Jazz to correct the agents, knowing he’d rather suffer through grating memories than show any weakness. He corrected G. William everytime the sheriff even began to venture past that first syllable.
She didn’t understand this, but she also did, more than Jazz would probably like her to.
“ Jazz ,” she said pointedly, knowing Jazz would berate her about it later.
“Our bad,” the black agent said with more sympathy than Connie’d expected from him. The buddy-buddy act apparently wasn’t one.
The skinny, young one, who Connie had liked for his silent energy a few moments before, looked at Jazz with creased eyebrows.
Her boyfriend spoke up, his voice carrying that blank tone that still scared her. “What. Does that mean?”
Morgan answered with a sideways glance at his colleague. “What doctor Reid means is our Unsub seems to be mimicking the events of this past year.”
Jazz tensed further for a moment, and Connie wondered if the ceramic would crack. And then, like a light switch had been flicked off—or on, really—Jazz’s muscles loosened. His face and body long and languid. So particularly Dent that Connie involuntarily scooted down the counter before she caught herself.
The agents also reacted visibly: Morgan frowning, rocking back on his heels, the doctor stepping forward, interest piqued. No fear.
“Oh so another prolific serial killer got paralyzed by his teenaged son?” Jazz smiled innocently. The phrase was obviously sarcastic, but Connie found herself wanting to believe it.
Her boyfriend was Billying the FBI. Again.
Morgan seemed to see through Jazz’s act, but not quite through the boy himself. His voice hardened just barely, any play at whatever neighborly thing he’d been trying to build abandoned. “No. He’s recreated the murder of your theater teacher, your social worker, the man whose clothes you stole in New York.”
Jazz paled almost imperceptibly. “I didn’t kill him. I didn’t kill any of them.”
Connie reached for the hand not wrapped around the coffee mug but her boyfriend swiftly pulled it away.
“We know. He seems to be escalating, the man killed most recently. He’s not going chronologically, the social worker’s murder recreated before The Impressionist’s.” The burlier agent’s odd sympathy was back, voice almost unprofessionally gentle.
The doctor seemed to have finally noticed either Jazz’s uncomfortableness or, more likely, his fellow agent’s tone. Reid’s voice was much softer as he said, “We’ll need you to give us more detailed accounts of the original...crimes. And the rest of the events of this summer. It’s possible our Unsub has more kills under his belt than we realize, the system missing less obvious copies.”
“You mean you missed kills,” Jazz said icily, pushing off from the counter. “You’re the system.”
Morgan inclined his head and Connie felt a small surge of pride towards her boyfriend. The feeling died as quickly as she bore it, a choked sound coming from behind her.
For a moment she though Jazz had finally dropped the Billy act and begun to cry. Guilt raced through her at the quiet pleasure she felt at her boyfriend acting human for once, the feeling doubled when she turned to see Jazz hunched at the sink, one arm frozen in middle of pouring his coffee down the drain, the other painfully white-knuckled around the lip of the counter. His breaths came harsh and heavy, quickening every second.
“ Connie .”
*
Jazz’s skin pricked as the agents told him about the kills of his father’s newest fangirl. Or his. His chest tightened with a cold heat, like putting your hand in ice water too long.
The younger agent, a doctor—which fascinated Jazz in that way he felt guilty about sometimes but would never be able to turn off—told Jazz that they’d need more detailed accounts of the past year from him. Crimes . Jazz rolled the word around in his head; it was accurate enough, but the fact that he’d been the culprit, committed crime some psycho was now emulating only worse, it made Jazz feel that unnameable thing. Sheila, his therapist, had asked if it was shame, and there was a large piece of that perpetually lodged in his ribs. But what really generated that cold heat was fear.
Of himself.
After sending an icy reply towards Dr. Reid, Jazz slid off the counter and walked to the sink to pour the sludgy, day-old coffee down the sink.
He raised his arm, shuddering from the breeze tickling his bare ribs, and then, as he looked down at the basin of the old kitchen sink, he shuddered for a whole different reason.
A knife.
In the sink.
Jazz had a thing with knives in sinks, at first a benign phobia, paired with the sinister, but quick flash of an image he couldn’t quite place in the context of his life.
Then, as he’d learned about Ugly J and taken the trip to New York and begun to remember what his mother had done to him, knives in sinks became deeply visceral reminders, suffocating him in an irrational fear.
After meeting his mother, hearing her, framed miniature on the screen of an iPad, tell him it wasn’t his Aunt, it wasn’t just the once. After facing her in person, seeing her slouch off sleek clothes to display a body crosshatched in thin, pink, raised scars. Knives in sinks had become something...unbearable. What Connie and Sheila called a trigger, clinical language chafing and ill-fitting.
Knives in sinks had become worse than Jazz’s worst night terrors, because the memories they brought were just that: memories, facts. Irrefutable.
Terrifying.
Jazz clenched the counter with his free hand, raised arm frozen above the sink. His chest heaved.
More, more…
...doing great, Jasper.
I love you, Jasper…
Your first.
A choked sound escaped Jasper of its own volition, a broken mix between a gasp and whimper. He heard the swish of clothes behind him but he couldn’t move, couldn’t look away from the silver knife in the sink. Where had it even come from? He and Connie had eaten at her parents’ last night. Suddenly he was in a storage unit in New York, dead bodies surrounding him, pain racing through his leg. His dad’s there handing him a loop of Connie’s braid. She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead.
He was back in his childhood home, with his mother. A knife stood steady in his practiced grip, a hand guided his over alabaster skin. His mother’s hand. His mother’s skin. His stomach rolled, gurgling hotly. Hands were on him. Hot. Everything’s too hot, he can’t breathe.
“ Connie. ” The word scraped out of his drying mouth. He knew he was breathing too heavy, he knew he should just move, just pick up the knife and clean it, set it in the drying rack next to the sink, but he couldn’t move. Couldn’t catch his breath. Couldn’t feel the mug shaking in his grip, couldn’t feel his body shaking.
All there was was his mother’s too naked body, and hands, and knives, and that uncomfortable tightness in his torso. That heavy nausea. His mother’s silky voice.
Suddenly, there was a hand in the sink, not his, instead a deep, earthy brown. It picked up the knife and rinsed it under the faucet before placing it off the side, out of sight.
“I’m sorry, Jazz, I’m sorry. It was late and I forgot—I just cut up some of the banana bread Mom sent with us, okay? It’s ok.”
Jazz nodded, tried to slow his breathing with only marginal success. He still couldn’t move, one hand still raised around the mug, other still on the counter, gaze still firmly planted on the basin of the empty sink.
He listened to sound of Connie’s breathing, calming with each exhale. She reached and took the mug out of his hand, pouring its contents out and setting it down, and he only flinched a little when her hand brushed his.
“I’m okay.” And he almost meant it.
*
Derek rocked forward onto his toes, aching to comfort the kid, give him a hug, something.
He didn’t know what had triggered the kid—something in the sink—but he knew from Dent’s panting breaths and heaving shoulders that it had reminded him of something bad.
Derek was familiar to the feeling, more so than he’d like to admit—not as bad as when he was a kid, but still. Just little things, random, that set his breath quicker.
Dent— Jazz —seemed to have come back to himself. Connie hovered her hand above her boyfriend’s shoulder, hesitant, careful not to touch him.
Spencer was frozen beside the older agent, brows furrowed, his inquisitive eyes tinged with concern.
“Are you gonna be sick?” Connie whispered. When Dent shook his head, his clenched jaw made Derek doubt the truth of it.
“Are you alright?” Derek’s cheek twitched at the utter stupidity of the question; of course the kid wasn’t alright. The files Garcia had pulled from the investigation of not only Hatdog, but of Dent’s assaults (“Attempted murders,” Rossi had mumbled) on his parents alluded to a traumatic childhood. Derek, in the kid’s posturing, faux swagger, and visceral reaction just then, recognized traumatic didn’t begin to cover it.
But, more disappointing than surprising, Jazz simply turned around, good as new, save the slick of sweat on his face and bare chest. His movements lacked that slippery feline quality, instead short and precise. “I’m fine,” his jaw jutted to the side awkwardly. “I—Sorry. I have a thing about knives in sinks.”
“People who have been through intense traumas often retain triggers even years after the fact,” Spencer said in that very intelligent and humble way he always spoke. “I don’t eat fish.”
Jazz looked at the BAU’s Boy Wonder for a moment, face impassive. Derek raised his brows at his startling resemblance to Hotch.
“We can talk in the living room. I need to get dressed.”
*