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“Ready? This is the last one.”
Eyes blink. His eyes. He blinks. The room goes dim, sways back into view. The back of the couch, a loose thread. The carpet under his hand is like steel wool. Cold prickles up his arm, it seeps from the back of his neck. Cold sticks to his face in little pools, slides along the skin tacky-slow.
A drip of either sweat or blood, Aaron thinks, grasping for a flash of clarity. He had faded out for a second. A second? It felt like he'd been here all night. What time is it? How long has it been? He needs to get up get away. check the phone the time call the phone call the team call help, help
help
“Aaron? Hey buddy, you with me here? Come on, I saved the best for last.”
Aaron tells his body specifically what to do. He tells it to snap out his left leg into a kick at Foyet's shin because Foyet's position leaves him vulnerable to destabilization; once he's off balance, Aaron tells his left arm, bunch the muscles here and here and arc into a hook, and follow through into a flip that sends Foyet towards the coffee table. Maybe he'll hit his head. From there, legs underneath, push, stand. Spin, dodge for table, gun. Fingers around grip, the weight, the metal. Sight, trigger, follow through. Sight, trigger, follow through.
But he lies still, cold bursting across his skin like a nova. His left hand drags across the carpet by an inch. He can feel the gun in his hands, he can taste the cordite at the back of his throat. If wishing made it so. The room rocks gently, a boat at bay, and he feels like an anchor, so heavy, so cold. Hypovolemic shock, he tells himself by way of general interest, in a voice that sounds a bit like Reid. Acute stress syndrome. His heart hammers like a drowning thing. He is dying. Dying?
A sharp sound catches his focus. He wishes it hadn't. Foyet snaps in front of his nose again. “Come on, come on, don't go anywhere, it's the grand finale. Okay, see?” Foyet rears up, weight settling hard on the tops of Aaron's thighs, baring his chest and all Aaron can see is a cobra spreading its hood. Foyet's hand, the one without the knife, traces the scar across his lower left quadrant. “This was the worst, I'll grant you,” he says. “I nicked my lower intestine, which hopefully I haven't done again, you know, practice makes perfect. Let me tell you, sepsis isn't fun. But this baby...” His fingers ghost up his belly to his chest, upper left. Run horizontal over a long pale line. He draws a perpendicular line over it. Cross my heart and hope to die.
“This baby was my get out of jail free card,” Foyet breathes.
He leans down. The weight shifts again, up onto Aaron's groin, his abdomen. Foyet puts his hands possessively on Aaron's stomach, fingers butterflied out, mesmerized for a moment by the ooze of blood. Then he presses two fingers hard under Aaron's lowest rib and starts counting upwards.
“Now would be the time to tell me if you have any cardiac abnormalities that aren't listed on the chart I swiped,” Foyet says conversationally.
Aaron thought his heart couldn't pound any harder. He thought he was beyond panic. “No” escapes him as a soft groan. “No.” Adrenaline spikes higher and hotter, it cauterizes the cold fog for a moment at least. He strains for movement.
“Shh,” says Foyet. “Don't make me lose count. I could not be a suspect, not after this one. The Reaper had quite clearly gone for the heart and missed. I was hospitalized for months – complications, you understand, mostly because of the damned sepsis. There was always a risk that someone would ask how a killer who had been so precise had suddenly forgotten where the heart was, but honestly, most cops are just too dumb.”
Fingers jab deep into flesh so close to his heart, so close. He's going to die; he closes his eyes; he's going to die with Foyet's hot breath on his cheek and steel wool under his hands. The fingers are replaced with one sharp little point. His whole being focuses into that point. The knife was cold going in the first couple of times, but he stopped noticing. He supposes it's body-temperature now. The team will profile his crime scene. He won't know where the dump site is. He wonders if he'll be watching.
“Shh. I know what I'm doing, Aaron. I'm gonna take care of you. Just stay... very... still.”
The knife pushes in between his ribs and he can't stop his heart, it's racing racing ra c in g. The knife is a pressure, not a presence. The knife pierces a pocket of pain like an overripe fruit, thin skin of willpower and dissociation stretched taught over pain Aaron thought had all been spent, but he had been holding some in reserve, just this, just enough to kill him.
He goes away again. It's black where he is, or a dark violent; it's thick and wet and bitter here. It's choking on something warm and sour. It's a raging inferno throughout his body driving out the cold, rushing dry blistering feverheat over every inch of skin, it's speech lost in white noise. It's pain, only pain, only pain. We say: it's only. We say: it's nothing but. We want to say that a thing is small but instead we tell the truth – that it's everything there is, the only thing that exists.
His eyelids are clinging together with saltwater glue. He blinks them open and the sting of sweat is absurd. He is bleeding out from multiple stab wounds and his eyes still sting from a drop of sweat. He can no longer feel the floor beneath his hands, or his hands, or tell if he's lying on solid ground. He thinks he feels cold again, but can't be sure.
Dimly he registers that something feels different, a kind of weightlessness, and with great effort he tracks his gaze down from the ceiling to the middle distance above him. Foyet is gone. Foyet is gone. His eyes track further down, see a glint off a metal object. It flickers in time with the next breath he takes. It takes an eternity to realize he's seeing the handle of the knife.
The blade is still in his chest.
He must have made a sound, because Foyet appears above him. “Look who's awake,” he says. He's pulling on a white shirt, starting to do up the buttons, smearing red with every movement. The shirt is Aaron's. “Good. Gimme just a second and I'll be ready.”
Aaron breathes in again, watches the knife rise and fall. He makes an involuntary sound of fear and panic, tries to choke it down, tries to be as cool and collected as the man who didn't blink when a bullet tore a hole in the wall by his head. He can't remember being that man. It feels forever ago. With the next exhale, another choked sob, like the knife has cracked a dam. Rage boils up under the scummy swirling depths of humiliation. He wants it to be directed at Foyet but a lot of it is self-loathing for finally breaking.
Foyet's still talking. Where he'd been grim and almost seductive before, he sounds conversational now. Elated, even. “Tell you what, those scars really brought in the ladies. Nothing like playing broken. God, what a life, being a victim, you know? Think Haley'll like yours?” He peers down at Aaron, buttoning the last button and swiftly tucking the shirt into his dark pants, so soaked that they cling to the tops of his thighs. “Hey, need your advice. Tie or no tie?”
Feeling is trickling back into Aaron's arms and legs; though his skin is still running hot and cold, he can cling to a continuous thread of clarity. He grits his teeth, clenches his right hand into a fist and tries to move the left towards his chest. Foyet's left him a weapon, if he can just use it.
“Tch.” Foyet clicks his tongue and steps closer, kicks Aaron's left hand back to the floor. “I mean, what are you even gonna do with that? But seriously, don't take it out, I'm not taking any chances.” He walks away towards his duffel bag, discarded hours ago on the floor in the kitchen. “It's a twenty minute drive to the hospital, depending on traffic. I'm not saying I made any mistakes, but better safe than sorry.”
Aaron's head is swimming. He manages to croak out, “What?” while Foyet lugs the duffel over to Aaron's side and unzips it.
“We're going to the hos-pi-tal,” Foyet drawls. “Otherwise you are going to dee-eye-ee.”
“But,” Aaron chokes.
Foyet pulls out a roll of duct tape and a couple of hand towels. He folds one, places it over Aaron's stomach, rolls his eyes. “I know you're distracted, but turn your big profiler brain back on, buddy.” He jerks a long piece of tape loose with a loud snap. “Why would I want to kill you? Sit up.”
Aaron rolls his eyes back and closes them. Of course not; Shaughnessy. Yours are gonna look just like them. He's only started playing. Then why can't you catch him? He's only started.
Hands around his left shoulder, one shoved under the blade, one under his armpit, hauling him upwards, and – a cymbal crash of pain, a wave of nausea so strong it makes his jaw seize. He groans with agony and resistance. Foyet makes an irritated sound. “Up, you lazy bastard,” he mutters. Foyet shifts around to get behind Aaron's back, lets Aaron fall back against him.
All of Aaron's attention is caught up in the renewed pain and he can only scrape his nails uselessly against Foyet's forearm – he's spreading the towel back into place, wrapping the tape around it and around Aaron's abdomen, jerking it tight to keep pressure in place. Aaron gives a choked yell; it's like getting hit with a wrecking ball.
“Hush,” Foyet snaps. “Big baby.”
He repeats the process with another towel over the upper right side of Aaron's chest, and adds extra tape to keep one edge packed against the place where the knife blade remains sunk in flesh.
“Mkay,” Foyet grunts. “Up.” Aaron feels him shift, rise; arms slide around him; Foyet drags him up mercilessly, stronger than he looks – he always has been. Aaron's ears fill with rushing, circulation explodes back into his legs and feet and everything is oversensitized, uncontrollable, he tries to get his feet properly on the ground but an ankle bends wrong and he loses his weight and the rushing is so loud and the edges of his vision are all gray snow and blur.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Foyet spits, grabbing Aaron around the waist to keep him upright. “You useless sack of shit, I'm trying to save your life here.” He wriggles around, gets Aaron's right arm slung firmly around his shoulders, takes the weight like a soldier carrying a comrade off the field. He picks up the duffel with his free hand.
It's a slow, awkward shuffle, but they make it to the door, then into the hall. Foyet kicks the door behind him haphazardly, not bothering to shut or lock it. Not for the first time, Aaron thinks of Elle, wonders how it is that every person alive is so stupid that they all universally believe this could never happen to me. It happened to her, one of the most guarded, trigger-happy people Aaron has ever known, and yet in an astonishing display of hubris, Aaron has never installed a home security system. As far as he knows, no one on the team has, except Garcia, whose system is homemade.
Aaron finds himself trying to help Foyet, which makes his stomach lurch again, but it's better to drag one foot in front of the other than to be dragged altogether. He wonders if he could wake his neighbors if he yells. His eyes flicker to the side only to find Foyet looking at him from half-lidded eyes twinkling with knowing. He winks, slings the duffel up to his shoulder, puts his free index finger over his mouth: shh. Anger floods up Aaron's esophagus and he takes a breath, God damn the consequences.
Foyet stops, right there in the hall, reaches across to Aaron's chest, takes a light hold of the knife handle. Leans his face right next to Aaron's ear, breath hot and damp, purses his lips and - “Shhh.” And he gives the knife a little wiggle.
Aaron's breath leaves him in a short punch. The tiny motion of the knife in his chest leaves him winded, his head humming with white noise, fingers numb. Foyet lets go of the knife and pats Aaron's shoulder. “Good boy,” he murmurs.
It's an eternity to the elevator, the ground floor, the front door. Aaron keeps his eyes closed and fights passing out. Outside air hits him, tepid, a little muggy; it smells of asphalt, trees, a faint hint of cigarette smoke. He drags his eyes open again and sees that Foyet is hobbling him along towards a little silver sedan in the apartment building's closed lot. He can't see any bystanders across the street.
“I know, not really the car of a serial killer,” Foyet murmurs in his ear. “Sorry to disappoint. But good lord, how do you drive those land yachts in city traffic all the time? Besides, I'm not usually much for having passengers.” He digs keys out of the duffel, hits a button on the fob and is answered with a flash of taillights. He reaches the car, opens the passenger door, maneuvers Aaron around and drops his arm from Aaron's waist. Aaron bangs his shin before he can lift his foot, slips sideways and cracks his head against the top of the door, leaving smears of blood; Foyet pushes, grunts, grabs a handful of Aaron's slacks to lift and shove his other leg into the car; somehow, a vertiginous forever later, Aaron is bleeding gently onto the upholstery while Foyet slams the door in his face.
Foyet is breathing hard when he slides into the driver's seat. “I begin to get the appeal of the van,” he says, jangling through his keys. The engine coughs to life. Foyet is calm as can be, as if he's going out to the grocery store. He puts on his seatbelt. The windows aren't even tinted. The arrogance is overwhelming.
The little bump down from the parking lot to the street makes Aaron black out.
Some time later, he jerks back into consciousness with a jolt of panic. He recognizes the street immediately – it's about ten minutes from his building. Some logical part of his mind whispers that Morgan had only been spared all of this because he'd been unconscious; that it would probably be better just to let the blank black take him and keep him safe until this nightmare was over.
But he wouldn't be safe, only absent. He'd still be in Foyet's hands, unable to react or defy, to own himself. Consciousness is the only shred of control he has left and he isn't going to let it go.
He rolls his head to the left and sees that Foyet has one hand on the wheel, opposite elbow propped by the window, cheek resting against his palm. He notices Aaron's movement and glances over and smiles, showing teeth.
Foyet turns his eyes back to the road. Traffic is light; it's late, or early; Aaron's glance wavers to the digital clock: 4:47. The cars to either side are carrying people home from graveyard shifts, or towards stores that open early; they're carrying nurses, he thinks, and doctors, and cops. Far ahead, he can just make out the light bar on the top of a black and white sedan, though from here he can't see the DCPD logo. Foyet drives with agonizing care, one or two miles below the speed limit, never missing a turn signal. He even slows once to let another car make an unprotected left in front of him.
At a red light, Foyet glances at Aaron again, gaze flicking over Aaron's shoulder. “Look out the window,” he says.
Aaron glares at him.
Foyet shrugs with one shoulder. “Could end this right now. Never say I didn't do anything for you.”
Cop, Aaron thinks, and rolls his head to look out.
But he can hear the smirk when Foyet says, “Made you look.”
It's an SUV that has just bumped to a halt next to them. Family inside, mother driving, focused on the road. Father asleep in the passenger seat; one visible teen in the back, her face illuminated by the smartphone in her hands. The side door is scratched here and there. Key scrapes, collisions with shopping carts, rambunctious kids, minor accidents, love and wear. There's a suitcase bungee-corded to the top of the van. On a trip, or on the way home, pulling an all-nighter to cut the expense of one more night in a hotel. It's so easy to see Haley in the mother, though this woman's hair is long and dark, her jaw too square; it's the way her brow is drawn tight in exhausted concentration, invested in an act of love and determination that only family can make her capable of.
Aaron sees all this in seconds. The red light seems eternal. For a moment, the teenage girl in the back of the SUV raises her eyes from her phone and gazes absently out her window, right in Aaron's direction – Foyet's little silver sedan, blood smudged on the passenger door, Aaron inside with blood drying down his face from more than one scalp wound, knife visibly sticking out of his chest. Then the girl looks back down, having seen none of it.
The light turns green. Foyet dawdles after the SUV, letting it pull out of Aaron's line of sight. He's smiling fondly at the retreating taillights.
“I want you to understand,” he says, “how easy it is to be me. Every obstacle I've come up against has been a handicap I gave myself to make the game more challenging. Of course I considered how much simpler it would be to never get caught. It would be the easiest thing in the world, to choose to be invisible. But God, it's so dull.”
Another left turn, and Aaron recognizes where they are again – within streets of St. Sebastian.
“There's no point to this without getting caught,” Foyet continues. “The trick was always to get found out but to stay free. When I was younger I thought the second part would be the hardest, but I've come to realize it's the getting found out that's hard. I gave everything to the cops. I made it so goddamn easy they couldn't see the forest for the trees. I mean, I do appreciate that at least you finally figured it out, but even you took your own sweet time. I literally had to write all my addresses on a crime scene in blood to get you to come back to my place. Come on, I was going to propose to her? The cheese. But no matter how much I hammed it up, everyone still bought it. Shaughnessy interviewed me plenty of times, comforted me, wrote a check for five hundred bucks to go to my hospital bills. Big dumb fucker. Roy was the best and the worst. He understood the Reaper so well but he never could understand the people standing right in front of his face. Caught up in a pretend version of someone else's mind. I bet you know how that is.”
They reach the entrance to the hospital parking lot. The visitor lot. Ambulance lights flicker like Christmas, across a sea of asphalt. Tiny in the distance, between the neat little trees and shrubs of the landscaping, Aaron can make out a few of the neon red capital letters: RGE – CY.
Aaron's palms are hot, sweaty. He folds his freezing fingertips into them and tries to squeeze his hands into fists, but his grip is weak. He's lightheaded, heavy-bodied. His eyes are gritty and need to close. He's a perimortem bruise in an abstract humanoid shape.
“One more joke to round out the evening,” Foyet says, laughing to himself as he creeps through the byways and roundabouts of the cramped parking lots. More red neon emerges from behind trees while other letters disappear. RGENC. MERGE. MER – CY.
Aaron tries to take a deep breath and can't. It catches at the level of the knife. He sucks in another in panic, can't expand his chest. His freezing hands are shaking. His face is cold and clammy with sweat, so it's easy to feel the tears slipping down. They carve a scalding path. His nose stings like standing into the brunt of the wind on a winter's day.
Foyet glances over and sees Aaron slipping. “Ah,” he says. “Good timing.” He rounds a last corner and the sign for the emergency entrance is full and clear and bright. Red isn't the color of blood, Aaron thinks. The color of blood is the kaleidoscope of black-burgundy-blind behind his sinking eyelids.
Foyet parks at a little distance. He turns off the engine, reaches into the backseat for his bag and digs around. He emerges with a flat black wallet, the kind Aaron knows all too well. “Last act of the night,” Foyet says, earnest assurance. “Everyone loves impersonations. Then it'll be over and you can go on home. What'd'ya say?”
Aaron lets his eyes slip closed at long last and manages to shake his head, pressing his lips tight together and stopping the tears by sheer force of will. He focuses on the pain instead, only the pain, only only. If there's only pain then there's no room for him. For either of them.
Foyet sighs and Aaron hears him say, “Well, you weren't going to be awake for this part anyway. At least your teammates will appreciate it.” He opens his door and slides out.
For half a labored breath, Aaron's alone in the car. Blessed silence. But his damaged heart pulses a surge of fear – is this it? Foyet's leaving him here, in sight of the hospital, a few yards from neon and EMTs? He reaches blindly for the door handle, stiff and cold and clumsy, hits plastic with his knuckles, and wishes wretchedly for help.
The door opens and Aaron's last breath emerges as an almost-silent sob. Foyet shushes him gently, maternally, and Aaron's never known hate like this. Never. The hate is transcendental, cuts into him more easily and more deeply than any knife. It leaves him utterly breathless.
Foyet brushes Aaron's hair back from his temple. “Since I won't get the chance to say it later,” he says, “I just want you to know that I had a really great time tonight.” He uses a fingernail to scrape up a corner of the tape holding the soaked towel to Aaron's chest. He peels it with great care, microscopic wriggling, a miniature crime scene not to be disturbed. Loose but not entirely unattached, it hangs like a blood-sodden terrycloth tumor.
Foyet slips his slick red fingers around the handle of the knife. “See you later, Aaron,” he says with a smile, and pulls.
-
if I could I'd kiss your lips so hard your entire face would bruise
write your name in blood on every wall, it would make the evening news
I'd chain our feet together so that you could never leave
I'd make you love me so much you'd have to ask permission to breathe