Chapter Text
They found her on top of a serial killer. Morgan broke down the door after Garcia tracked the address down from the boxes he was using to mail pieces of his victims to random places. Libraries, cafes, a junkyard one time. Homeless people taken off the street, never reported missing.
“It’s kinda scary,” Garcia had said when she relayed the address. “If he didn’t send those boxes, we might never have known…” She trailed off. Morgan had thanked her, thrown in a baby girl just to try to make her smile and forget exactly how horrible the situation was.
Ahead of Morgan, Hotch signaled for him to follow. The orders were clear. They would go in first, the police searching the house behind them. General consensus was that with the unsub’s cooling down period, he probably had a victim already in the house.
The house looked normal from the outside, but the facade fell apart inside. The walls were so moldy they were almost black, the wood floor streaked with scratches. The lights had burnt out, and the curtains were drawn closed, plunging the room into a darkness their flashlights barely cut through.
Morgan and Hotch tread through the hallway, as silent as they could be on creaky floors. To their left, Reid and Elle headed up the stairs. Hotch motioned to a door.
“Basement,” he mouthed. Morgan nodded. When the door didn’t open under Hotch’s hand, he kicked it down.
The basement was even worse than Morgan had expected. Even before he stepped down the stairs, he knew that this had been the kill site. There were flecks of dried blood on the walls, some newer than others. In the corner was a pile of clothes and bags. One had a little stuffed animal of indeterminate species poking out the top, and that was enough to indicate the unsub in Morgan’s eyes. He could hear faint noises, the sound of repeated punches and aborted swears echoed off the walls. He glanced at Hotch, their eye contact a silent agreement to investigate.
The hall seemed to constrict the deeper they went. The scratches were deeper, more desperate, pieces of broken off nails littering the floor. The whole house reeked, but the basement contained a special type of horrific odor, the kind that came with the knowledge that people died here, their last moments spent in horror. A door stood ahead of them, half off its hinges, wobbling back and forth. The noises seemed to be coming from something in the room.
At Hotch’s command, Morgan pressed his back to the wall, gun in hand. His view of the room was limited, but he could see a man on the ground, a mess of brown hair and green fabric stretched over him.
“FBI,” Hotch called as they burst into the room, guns aimed at the mess, and the girl looked up, pausing mid-swing. Morgan didn’t recognize her, which was normal, he didn’t know her, but there was something more than that. He didn’t recognize her as a person. Her face was gaunt and almost sickly, blood from a broken nose trickling down her chin, eyes wild and pupils thinning in the light of their flashlights. She was slouched over the man on the floor, knees pinning his arms down, the position defensive, almost animalistic. It took him a moment to register exactly what he was looking at. In that time, Hotch had already called it into his walkie-talkie (“Found him and a girl, need EMS”) and had holstered his gun. With no clear threat–this girl certainly wasn’t one, not to two FBI agents and the dozen cops outside–Morgan followed suit.
“It’s alright,” Hotch said. It was a little shocking how he could make himself appear less threatening to children, less unforgiving, soft, even. He had her hands out, approaching almost delicately. The girl waivered slightly. The man below her, who Morgan just barely recognized as the unsub through the mess of blood and broken flesh on his face, let out a low plea for aid. Hotch reached out a hand to help her up, the stairs rumbling as their team came down to meet them. The girl stumbled up, but didn’t fight.
“Get the paramedics,” Hotch said, and a nameless police officer went outside to do just that.
“It’s alright,” Elle said, switching places with Hotch. She had slipped into the soothing voice she used on children and victims. “It’s alright, he can’t hurt you.” The girl didn’t make a single sound. She was shaking like a leaf.
Morgan knelt down to handcuff the unsub, and a wave of nausea rushed over him. His face was slashed up to all hell, already swelling. Part of his right eye was missing. A few of his teeth were on the floor nearby, some others hanging precariously in his mouth.
“He took me off the street,” the girl said quietly. Morgan glanced back at her. Elle was behind her, having stepped back once she was sure that the girl could stand on her own. Morgan knew his size was probably a bias, but damn if that girl was not tiny. Skinny, short, a too big jacket hanging off her shoulders that just accentuated exactly how small this girl was.
“It’s alright,” Elle murmured.
Something flashed over the girl’s face.
“He tried to kill me,” she said, as if she was just realizing what had happened. Then, her face spasmed.
Morgan didn’t know this girl, but he knew that look.
“Wait,” he started, but the girl was already moving. She lurched forward, hands stretched out for the unsub’s throat.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Elle said, grabbing the girl’s arm. Morgan lurched forward to take her other arm, but the girl was fucking feral, scratching and pulling, screaming like a banshee. It wasn’t particularly hard to hold her in place–she was strong, sure, but she was still a small kid, fighting two full grown, highly trained agents.
Elle was still attempting to comfort her, falling back onto the idea that maybe this was just a trauma response–a violent trauma response, sure, but still a trauma response. Hotch glanced at Morgan.
“Get her out of here,” he said. There was a harshness in his tone, but Morgan understood. Traumatized or not, if this girl got her hands on the unsub, she’d kill him before he made it to trial.
Morgan picked the girl up off the floor, holding her in front of him like a wet cat. It wasn’t the most dignified position for either of them, but he was decently sure that touching her anywhere else would end with her panicking more. Even as her legs dangled in the air, the girl kept fighting, spitting, clawing uselessly at Morgan’s arms.
They emerge out of the house into the cooling air of the night, and the girl slumps in his arms like a marionette with its strings cut. There are paramedics waiting, the lights from their ambulance painting the perfect houses red and blue. Morgan sits her down on the back of an open ambulance, certain that if he tried to get her to stand, she’d either fall to the floor or attempt to run.
He stepped back, allowing the paramedics to swarm her. The girl looked more tired in the red and blue lights, but her gaze remained intense even as she stared at the concrete. Her mouth was set into a thin line. She didn’t offer a single objection as the paramedics carefully peeled off the blood stained green jacket. She seemed to only have two modes: doll or beast.
Morgan saw a flicker of yellow interrupting the scene–a stretcher being carted into another ambulance. Gideon and Hotch were following after it, discussing something intently, occasionally glancing towards the girl. Morgan moved slightly to the side, trying to block it from view so she wouldn’t chase after it like a hunter after a deer.
“Do you have anyone we should call for you?” he asked. The girl licked her lips, a motion that might have seemed sexy on an older woman but on her, only felt painful. Her lips were filled with jagged chipped pieces of skin, more white than anything else. She shook her head.
“He took my bag,” she mumbled, instead of the name or phone number Morgan had been hoping for. Her voice was hoarse and dry as the sahara. “Can I get it back?”
“It’s probably in evidence by now,” Morgan said. The girl’s posture slumped every so slightly. “I can pull some strings,” he added. “Get it back to you after the trial. There’s so much evidence against him, it shouldn’t take long.”
The girl didn’t react visibly, but he sensed a great tiredness in her, the same tiredness he sometimes saw in veteran agents, the tiredness worn into their bones by seeing horrors over and over again. She seemed too young to be that tired.
“Morgan,” Gideon called. The other agents were standing next to him, clearly ready to walk into the night and leave the locals to finish up. Sometimes it was easy to do that, but that wasn’t the case this time. There was a girl who was alone in police lights, a girl who had probably been homeless based on past victimology, a girl who had somehow done the impossible and not only survived but almost killed a serial killer, and Morgan wanted nothing more than to stay with her and tell her everything would be okay, lie if he had to because this was a child, but he knew that wasn’t his job. A cop moved past him to the girl’s statement. With one glance back to memorize the girl’s face, he trailed after his team, and slipped into the night.
—+—
It is two days later when JJ goes into Hotch’s office with purpose in her step and a file in her hands. She stays there for two minutes before leaving, going into Gideon’s office, and by now half the bullpen is watching her.
“New case?” Elle suggested.
“I can’t imagine a case that can be briefed in two minutes,” Reid replied.
JJ was walking down into the bullpen, already commanding their attention without saying a word. “Arlington PD called,” she said. “The girl we found was reported missing by her case worker. She vanished from the halfway house she was staying at.”
Morgan’s stomach lurched with worry. “Are we assuming kidnapping?”
“She left a note,” JJ explained. “It was two sentences long, basically said she was going home and not to waste resources on her. Looks like she just left.”
“Going home,” Reid repeated. “Are we sure it wasn’t a suicide note?”
“No,” said JJ, which was bad enough on its own, but only made worse by, “we won’t know for certain unless we find a body.”
“A homeless girl committing is a tragedy,” Elle said, “but I don’t see how that’s our problem, exactly.”
JJ hesitated. “Arlington’s evidence locker was broken into as well,” she said eventually.
“Was anything important taken?” Reid asked.
She shook her head, disrupting the perfect lemon lines of her hair. “No, just the bag we found in the Jefferson house.”
She doesn’t need to specify that it was the girl’s bag, the one Morgan saw with the corner, the one with a stuffed animal poking out of the top. They all know.
Morgan leaned back in his chair, brain working overtime as he compiled a profile. A teenage girl, skinny and small, alone, still young enough to take care of a stuffed animal, indicating at least some caretaker instincts. Fight or flight instinct that opts to fight. He couldn’t get himself to work everything out in order. Everything was messy, contradictory. Violent, but she took care of a stuffed animal. A girl, but she took down a man twice her size who had at least a hundred pounds on her. He recalled the snapshot memory of her: face lit up by the lights, knees pulled up to her chest, the paramedics circling around her asking question after question as her stout, determined, almost fervid face said nothing.