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His suspect is a social man.
It fits the profile, a classic narcissist: he craves the attention group situations give him, his great winning smile and easy charisma a façade to hide the bitter anger, laughing internally at his superiority as they laugh at a joke. The stab wounds had indicated a dominant left hand and the man passes his champagne flute to his right each time he launches into a story, gesturing broadly with his left. Eases seamlessly into a new conversation with a new group of people.
His laugh is distinct and grating and Aaron is only marginally more grateful than annoyed at it because it’s easier to hear amongst everything else.
The room isn’t loud – not relatively. Close to four hundred attendees, voices compete, rising and falling and rising over each other, conversations carrying across the room, yet each conducted in clustered groups trying to control their volume. It doesn’t work. Supposedly muted music. Sharp footsteps click against intricate parquet and echo off the high ceiling. Quieter, though no less persistent, clothes rasp as people shift, adjust, awful fabrics which make his fingers itch just thinking about. Glasses clink, raised in cheers, champagne fizzing as it’s poured. Empty glasses clash on the trays servers balance as they slip through the crowd. His earpiece whines a long, flat note, so quiet he’s not sure anyone else ever hears it in theirs.
None of which he’d mind on a better day—a day where sound didn’t bother him so much, where there were fewer layers of it, clashing and tangling. A day where he hadn’t spent the morning in a police station with walls too thin to blot out the conversations from the bullpen, pens scratching and paper rustling and someone tapping an irregular rhythm on the table as they worked, forced to split his attention between the work or listening but not both.
The group of people he himself has edged into – he has to at least pretend he has a reason to be here – laugh. Aaron has missed the joke, whatever it was, and takes his cues from their reactions. He can hardly hear what they’re saying when every other conversation sounds the same. Still, he chats with them in that mindless, unfamiliar way, talking without saying much.
He takes a glass from the next server who walks by just for something to do with his hands. Act like he’s interested, like he’s paying attention. Act normal. People notice strange behaviour, if only subconsciously, and he hasn’t been following this man for the past two hours just to tip him off.
The man beside him knocks his elbow. Lukewarm champagne spills over the rim of his glass. He wipes it off with a tissue but he can feel it, the stickiness, and when the man apologises with a clap on his back, his skin hurts at the faintest pressure. He’s fine. It’s just the noise.
It’s the little things. It always is.
Aaron says something – an apology or excuse me or another rote phrase, he forgets what it was as soon as he’d said it – and finds a place to stand, back to the wall, keeping an eye on the suspect.
A collective gasp and a splintering crash. His hand twitches halfway to his ear and he smooths off the motion as scratching the back of his head. It’s not the surprise as it is the sharp spike of noise, damn near painful.
It builds over time but it becomes overwhelming in an instant, the air growing hot and stuffy. Noises blend together like static crashing in harsh waves. Too much.
Get a grip, he thinks, turning the glass in his hands. His skin feels too tight. Get a fucking grip.
He should’ve outgrown this. Should be able to deal with it by now. Aaron sets the glass on a table nearby and searches the sea of faces for one he recognises. If someone can take his place for a minute or two… that’s all he needs to pull himself back together.
But his gaze jumps from person to person, the spot between their eyebrows which convinces them he’s meeting their eyes, stranger to stranger to stranger. The team are here but not in this room, busy with the other suspects, and he can hardly ask them to stretch thin just because he can’t tolerate a small crowd.
The suspect is still talking and Aaron almost wishes he’d figure it out, make a break for it because at least he’d be able to go after him. Outside, even—fresh air and the cold and quieter. His head wouldn’t hurt and he’d be able to think, really think.
Through the floor, the music pulses. It’s a subtle thing, unintentional, but acutely aware of everything around him Aaron can’t help but feel it. His chest aches.
With a hand up his sleeve he presses his fingers into his wrist, right where the bones join. The grounding low ache is too light, too weak—it’s the sort of thing that works on an average day, back in the office. At least the noise is familiar. Predictable.
His nails bite into the skin and it splits, wet with a smear of blood. Fuck.
It’s only a trace of blood yet he nearly tastes it, a thick metal coating his throat, mixing with the rich smell of wine and a hundred different brands of cologne and the more he notices, the harder it is to breathe.
Aaron ducks past people deep in conversation, fitting through the natural gaps between groups, takes the less crowded hallway and out through a back entrance propped open.
The sound fades to a low murmur but it rings in his ears and Aaron paces. He fights the instinct to cover his ears, hands making halting, abortive movements which serve more to frustrate him than help.
(Don’t do that, his father says, and his voice might have weakened with time but the words haven’t. Are you trying to embarrass me?)
Footsteps behind him give him just enough warning to shove his hands in his pockets.
“Aaron?”
He forces himself to breathe normally. Slowly. And he only looks at Dave for a moment, unable to meet his eyes and unwilling to use the techniques he does on most people. It’s dicey around profilers, around the team. Aaron’s fine with looking them in the eyes when he can – the majority of the time – but that makes it harder to pull off when he can’t. It always feels just slightly too risky to pretend in case they notice it.
“Lightheaded,” he says. Probably too short for a real answer. “I just got lightheaded for a minute.”
And it isn’t a lie; he doesn’t want to have to lie to them. But there are moments for the truth and right here right now is not one of them.
“Yeah, it’s warm in there. Just saw you leave.”
For a moment a furious jealousy rises in him like a snake rising up to strike, but as soon as it’s there it vanishes, leaves an empty pit in his stomach. The heat. That’s all it is. The heat.
As long as it looks like the heat, it doesn’t matter why.
“Definitely a narcissist,” Aaron says. Dried blood and champagne itches. “He hasn’t stopped talking for five minutes.”
He fishes his earpiece out of his pocket and clips it back in. Sure enough, the faint humming. “You go, I’ll be back in a moment.”
“Gonna be all right?” Dave says casually. “The – with the dizziness?”
Too tired to play games, he doesn’t try and understand the real question, just takes it at face value. “It’s fine,” Aaron says. He’s not sure why he has the (stupid) urge to explain. Days like this are rare, and days when events line up so badly and push him to this point more so. Not unless he counts the times he’s at home – and he doesn’t. Irrelevant.
He waits until Dave is gone then washes his hands in a bathroom with too-bright lighting, cleans the traces of blood under his nails. The cold water kicks his nervous system into working order.
Like nothing has happened.