Work Text:
Love And Blood
He cried so hard against her shoulder. She could feel his tears soaking her shirt, wetting her cheek. She could hear the desperation and howling emptiness in his sobbing breaths. She could feel his hands, his fingers, gripping her and digging into her even through the stab vest she was wearing.
“Shhhh…” she soothed, tightening her own grip on him. “It’s alright.” She stroked the soft, downy hair on his nape. “I know. I know.” She whispered it to him softly, like a mother eases the troubles of her infant son. She soothed him as if he were the seven year old boy that she first met, and not the nineteen year old murderer that he had become.
“I’m so sorry.” He cried. “Help me, Emily.”
“This is who you are.” She whispered. “This – a good person. Not the monster she tried to make you.” She closed her eyes and continued to hold him. She heard JJ farther back in the room telling the local cops to wait a while before putting the cuffs on him.
“Unit Chief Prentiss will take care of it.” JJ told them, her voice soft so as not to agitate the boy.
The EMT’s were quietly leading Elizabeth Rhodes from the room, careful not to disturb Prentiss and the boy.
Emily pulled gently away from the young man’s grip, taking his heaving shoulders in her hands and looking into his eyes. “We need to go David. It’s time.”
He looked forlorn, lost, and his eyes regarded her with a deep hopelessness. “A-are you c-coming?” he said, his words catching on sobs.
“I am. I’ll ride next to you, okay? You’ll be alright with me.” She nodded to him for emphasis and he nodded back. “You ready?”
David Smith wiped his eyes and nose on the back of his hand and let Emily help him to his feet. God he wanted to hold her again. When he was seven…she… she was his light. She was the start of his new life…and he felt like… he wanted her to be his mother. He had no real memories of his mother, and when he saw Emily… those feeling of love for her that he had when he was a child returned in spades.
Emily rubbed his back and said “I’m gonna have to put these on you, ‘kay?”
He looked at the handcuffs and nodded. “I should die.” He whispered. “I deserve to die for what I’ve done. I’m so sorry, Emily.”
“Okay, it’s okay. It isn’t your fault David. You come with me and it’ll be okay.”
“I…I wouldn’t have shot you…” he said.
Emily nodded. “I know. I know. Because you’re not that person. You’re a good person, inside I know you’re a good person.”
“I’m not.” He whispered as Emily Prentiss led him from the dark, dank room and out into the night.
“You cold?” she asked him once they were outside.
He nodded.
“Hey, officer – get this man a jacket.”
The officer nodded and fetched a police windcheater for the young man and Emily draped it over his shoulders. “Better?”
He nodded silently.
“I’ll be there in a minute.” She told him. “Officers.” She nodded at the uniformed police to seat him in the back of the car. “Hold the vehicle – I’ll be joining.” She added.
David looked out at her from the car and she turned away and sucked in the emotions that were threatening to show their hand.
JJ headed over to her. “Wow, that was…. What was that?”
Emily shook her head, struggling to find the words.
“I thought he was going to shoot you.”
Emily waved the suggestion away with her hand. “Nah.”
To be honest, there was a second or two that she also thought he was going to shoot her. He’d had the gun trained on her, and warned her that he’d shoot. But… whether it was intuition or guilt or just some damn idea of heroics… whatever it was, she’d holstered her glock and approached him, telling him “If that’s who you are now, then you’d better shoot.”
Emily shrugged at told JJ “We knew he had extreme maternal transference.”
“Uh-huh.” JJ raised her eyebrows as the rest of the team joined them. Luke Alvez and Matt Simmons hadn’t known Emily for very long and they wisely kept their opinions on her actions to themselves.
“Local cops can take him in.” JJ offered.
“No. No I owe it to him.” Emily said.
JJ frowned and opened her mouth to ask, but Emily nodded. “I’ll tell you later JJ. Right now, I gotta go.”
Emily headed back to the police car and saw the briefest look of hope, of love, cross David’s face. Love.
She knew he loved her. She’d known it for a decade. When she had burst in on his father’s crime scene… well… it was at a critical time for him. It influenced his ‘love map’. It reminded her of the boy he once was… of the person she’d hoped he would become.
~
It had been ten – no twelve - years ago that Emily Prentiss met seven year old David Smith. David’s father, Joe, had been murdering women in Milwaukee after his own wife walked out on he and David after Joe had been diagnosed with a terminal tumour. Something snapped in Joe and he wound up using his son to lure victims to his house. Once there, he’d make them play ‘mother’ to the boy before strangling them and cutting out their hearts.
Emily remembered the day they found Joe – and David – as if it were yesterday. It had been quite an eventful week all around for her, personally. She’d only been at the BAU for a year, a job she’d been given partly (maybe primarily) so she could gather dirt on her boss Aaron Hotchner. Of course she had no intention of doing that and hoped that her performance in the field would negate that ‘rider’ in her contact. But the boss, Strauss, wanted that dirt so Emily had resigned – turned in her badge and her gun – rather than betray Hotch.
Hotch knew the reasons though, and he convinced Emily to come back to help on this case. When the team managed to trace Joe to his house they had no probable cause, so Emily had volunteered to go in. As a ‘civilian’, Strauss couldn’t order her not to, and if after gaining access to the house there was nothing there, then as she was no longer technically a federal agent there would be no blowback on the Bureau.
Derek Morgan had given her his gun, and she had a bleeper to signal the team if she found anything. So she went in with that as her only protection.
David answered the door.
‘Are you David? Hi. I’m Emily.’ She told him she was a friend of his dad’s and could she come in and wait for him.
The boy let her in and locked the door behind her. He told her that his dad was working, but he didn’t let David go down there when he was working.
‘That’s okay you don’t have to.’ Emily told him gently. ‘I’ll just see if he’s busy. I’ll be really quiet. Can you be really quiet?’
She headed down the steps, drawing her gun once the boy was out of sight. She’d quietly pushed the door open and saw the latest victim trussed up and gagged. The woman’s eyes flicked to her right in terror, and Emily turned and got a 2x4 in the face.
She’d fallen, her gun now in Joe’s hands, and as she struggled to focus her eyes, the boy came in.
‘Who is this?!’ Joe yelled at his son. Then Joe took the gun and placed it in David’s hands. ‘Shoot her’.
The boy shook his head, his eyes wide with fear. He watched as his dad heaved a bleeding Emily to her feet, urging the boy to shoot. David aimed the gun but it was heavy and it wavered in his hands.
‘No.’ Emily had pled, triggering the signal alarm for the team.
The team arrived in seconds, and Hotch took the gun from David, and…
…anyway… after all that, when Joe was sentenced, David had been adopted by neighbours – the Addisons. They’d changed David’s name to ‘Eddie’ and moved out to Baltimore.
It was JJ who made the connection between then and now. JJ had been to Joe’s crime scenes, and now David’s own dump sites were an exact match – as was the MO. Bodies dumped in the Third Ward; hearts cut out. The only difference was that David was killing men and he broke pretty much every bone in their body before killing them. That element spoke of rage. It told the team that the suspect was using these men as a surrogate for some man in his life who he believed needed to be punished.
As it turned out, poor David had been manipulated again. He’d been seeing a shrink – Elizabeth Rhodes – to try and deal with the trauma of his past, and that bitch had used him, used her position of trust… used his need for maternal love – to get him to murder the men that she believed responsible for her own daughter’s murder. David had trusted her word that those men were evil, and he had slaughtered the main suspect and three guys who had given false alibis – and at Rhodes suggestion, he was beating these men first to work out his paternal issues.
Christ. Emily felt sick, and angry and… guilty. A part of her felt that she could have prevented this. If things had been different…
~
Closing the patrol car door behind her she nodded to the officers and the car pulled away.
David looked at the floor and wiped at his eyes again.
They rode in silence until Emily spoke up, her words private, for him and no one else. “Thank you for believing me.”
David nodded. Earlier that day he’d spoken to Emily on the ‘phone. He knew the police had tracked him and were watching him and had put an undercover woman in play. So he asked to speak to Emily and she told him, she told him that Rhodes had lied to him about those men. At first he wasn’t sure. Emily used to visit him before the adoption was finalised. She’d said ‘Whenever you’re scared, I’ll be there.’ And… for a while she was, and then… she wasn’t. But, but she always told him the truth, and he believed her now, too. That was when he’d decided to abduct Rhodes and make her pay, make her reveal the truth for using him, for making him do those terrible things.
“I’m… I’m sorry we lost touch.” Emily said. “I promised to be there for you and I wasn’t.”
“Where did you go?” he asked, his eyes still fixed on the footwell.
She sighed. She had her death faked, was spirited away to another continent, another world and given a new identity – an identity designed to keep her safe on the proviso that no one, but no one, knew about it. God it was complicated, so she told him, simply, “I had to go away for my job. I wasn’t allowed to maintain any contact. Not with anyone. And I’m sorry, David, that it meant that I had to break my promise to you. I never wanted that.”
“I…I needed you.” He whispered.
“Yeah. Yeah, I see that now.”
The car slowed as it neared the station and Emily sighed. “Like I said, David, the road from here will be hard, but there’s hope. If…?” She waited, wanting to see if he had listened to her words.
“If I let you help me?”
She nodded. “I won’t let you down again, David. All of this…it wasn’t your doing. I’ll do whatever I can to help you, David.”
He nodded, hanging his head as his tears began to fall again.
Emily rested her hand briefly on his wrist as the car stopped. She was determined to make Elizabeth Rhodes pay for causing this, for using David to carry out her own version of justice. Well, Emily would see how she liked Bureau justice.