gojo satoru x reader | college au [18+]
kickoff ch.12 how you get the girl
ᰔ pairing. college au - soccer player! gojo x film major! reader
ᰔ summary. gojo satoru is the most popular guy on your college campus. he's tall, funny, hot, not to mention he's the most talented soccer forward the school has seen in years. but he's also a frat dude, which puts him in a world very different from your own, as he spends most of his nights partying while you spend most of yours working on your annoying film major assignments. but when he reaches out to you for a favor, you realize that helping him out might have something in it for you too.
ᰔ warnings/tags. 18+, fem reader, fluff, angst, smut, college au, fraternities, sororities, partying, drinking/alcohol, romance, jealousy, pining, slow burn, opposites to lovers, friends to lovers, she falls first he falls harder, gojo being an idiot, marijuana use, sexism, sexual harassment (verbal only)
ᰔ chapter. 12/x (probably 18)
ᰔ words. 11.3k
a/n. man the color scheme for this chapter is kinda giving BRAT lolol...i mean gojo IS brat. anywho, i don't have much to say at the beginning of this chapter but i do have a LOT to say at the end of it sooo see y'all at the bottom!! hope u enjoy. also BIG THANK YOU to @whereflowerswenttodie who beta read parts of this chapter for me n convinced me not to scrap it lol
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☾·̩͙꙳ moodboard no.1 :: ♬.*゚playlist
11:03am you: hi!
11:03am you: good luck today
11:03am you: incase i don’t see you
11:05am Gojo Satoru: Why wouldn’t you? Aren’t you gonna be on the field for your newsletter shots?
11:07am you: i mean yes but idk where i’m gonna be stationed so
11:07am you: it might not be on UTokyo’s side of the field
11:08am Gojo Satoru: Okay then I’ll look for you before the game starts
11:10am you: no pls don’t. coach yaga thinks i distract you. i don’t want to get yelled at again. he scares me :(
11:12am Gojo Satoru: Haha you’re silly
11:13am Gojo Satoru: East side entrance at 2
11:13am Gojo Satoru: Be there
11:14am you: or be square?
11:15am Gojo Satoru: Yea whatever shape you wanna be in is fine cutie
It’s a bright sunny day outside, perfectly blue sky with a scattering of fluffy clouds seen outside the window of your shared room in your apartment, and you realize spring is fully here from the way birds chirp past the glass. You’re stuffing your camera case full of chilled Kodak film rolls, your last stash left, and it’s the last piece of equipment you pack before slinging the strap over your shoulder and heading out the door.
Mina had offered to give you a ride to the stadium since your car’s still at the shop, but you’re happy you opted for the bumpy bus ride and although you come close to low-grade concussions from the bang of your head to the window at every other speed bump, the music in your ears while someone else is operating a public transport vehicle helps you think creatively before shooting shots.
It was surprise enough that Mina of all people was going to this game, and when you questioned her about it in the morning, she looked at you like you were absurd to assume anyone from UTokyo wouldn’t be at this game, and sure enough, it’s all anyone on Instagram has been repping on their stories or talking about in the bustling minutes before lectures. Even Utahime was going to this game, and she hates all intercollegiate sports. You knew the game was a big deal, given the way Coach Yaga was yelled at via email by the Dean of UTokyo to make sure the team wins today because a multimillion dollar Nike sponsorship would be greenlit by the prospect (for some reason you were cc’d in an email chain among divisional higher-ups, but you weren’t opposed to snooping in on conversations that were entirely outside of your tax bracket).
It’s because it’s the second to last home game before the season ends, and apparently this has been statistically the best season the UTokyo D1 Men’s Soccer team has played since the new millenia. No pressure to the players on that fact, but failure wasn’t much of an option for them anymore.
And you can feel the stakes the second you step inside the stadium. Packed would be an understatement, there were people flooding the aisles, overbooked for the sake of the university pocketing an extra buck no doubt, but spectators could care less since they were able to at least get in on the basis of that irresponsibility in the first place, despite the stadium’s capacity having long been reached before the pregame festivities even start. Banners and signs drape over railings with the school’s striking blue and golden colors, every single replay screen is lit up and brightly pixelated at every north, south, east, and west entrance for inclusive viewing. As you pass VIP security and make it into the lower field-level entry, the scattered chants from the crowd amplify in volume and you almost wince a little to yourself from the noise. The stadium felt like a living, breathing entity, pulsing with the collective heartbeat of everyone inside.
You’ve never been more overstimulated in your life, except instead of finding it frightening, it was electrifying. And for once, you think you can understand what an athlete must feel when playing on their own home turf surrounded by those that are wholeheartedly rooting for them.
Hana is quick to spot you, panic clear across her face as she regards you with a couple pages with your assigned vantage points, a rushed briefing session, and then she’s darting down the sidelines to make sure equipment is set up appropriately where needed. She’s understaffed, given you told Utahime about Kai’s little intervention last week and she made a nasty point to the university (and possibly a handful of legal threats) and they relented in firing him. So now the three of you were down a photographer, and the extra work shows in the instructions she gave you as you skim the sheets.
A glance at your phone tells you it’s close to 2pm, and your eyes take in the expanse of green on the field. UTokyo’s players practice kicking shots off to the right goal post, while YCU’s players practice shots off to the left. You can’t spot where Gojo is, but you faithfully head down to the East Side entrance like he asked you to.
When you round the corner, you almost crash right into an Ichiko mascot, but swiftly dodge, and then you stop in your tracks when you see Gojo standing right at the concrete entrance. He’s leaning back against the adjacent wall, arms crossed at his chest, and he’s stretching his neck side to side with a creased brow, an intense look in his eyes, lost in serious thought, scanning the wall across from him like he’s mapping out plays in his head.
When you approach him and catch the corner of his eyesight, he leans off the wall and flashes you one of his so extremely charmed to see you grins on reflex, and suddenly there’s nothing your senses seem to pick up on except him. Like everything else around you just disappears.
“Hey, you,” he says when he comes up to you, and you walk him like a dog back to a corner that’s tucked further away from noises and sights. You lean your back against the wall now, the coolness of concrete seeping through the fabric of your shirt, and he stands a step in front of you. Your hands toy with the strap of your camera.
“Are you ready to win today?” you ask him, and look off to the right into the flourishing seats that are still being filled to the brim, “clearly there’s no pressure.”
He breathes in deep, and releases it slowly, like there really was tension to relieve. “We’ve got no choice but to win.”
“Is that something Coach Yaga says to you guys often?” you ask him, because the man recited the same thing about five times in that email chain. “Also, apparently you take years off of his life.” Another thing he recited about five times in that email chain.
Gojo only addresses what he wants to address, as per usual. “Yeah, it’s something he says to us often.”
“So,” you say, “what did you want to talk about?”
He looks at you puzzled, tilting his head to the side. “Nothing. I just wanted to see you.”
It’s hard to assume that he didn’t have something to talk about with the intention of telling you to meet him here, because this is the same place you confessed to him a few weeks ago, and so is also the place he so painfully rejected you. But maybe he doesn’t think about these kinds of things as much as you do. “I see.”
His tongue pokes to his cheek as he studies your anticipating expression, and then he sighs, his shoulders slumping slightly. “What are we doing? I mean, I like you, and you like me too, at least I hope you still do. Why don’t we—…why don’t we just give it a go already? I don’t see how we can move forward if you won’t at least let me take you out on a date.”
Your hands stop fidgeting with your camera strap from his words, and you lick your lips, suddenly unable to keep eye contact with him so your gaze drifts down to his chest in front of you. His uniform is clean, no smudges of dirt or grass, just pure white fabric underneath heat-pressed blue and golden accents, and of course, that signature number 10. You’re sure he’s all you’ll ever think of when you see that number now for the rest of your life.
You know when you want something so bad you don’t know what to do once you have it? Because it almost seems too good to be true?
“I just wanted to let stuff between us breathe for a little bit,” you confess, “it’s just, it was a lot to deal with. Being around you when I thought you didn’t want me the way I wanted you. I don’t know if this is odd to say, and maybe I’m overthinking it, but I just feel like somewhere along the way, I kind of…forgot who you were for a little bit.” This kind of vulnerability would have you running away with your tail between your legs with anyone else, but not with him. Not after everything.
His expression softens, melting away that confrontational energy he had earlier, and he nods slowly. He opens his mouth to speak, but he can’t seem to find words. The presence of them is there, though, you can feel them. But what good are his thoughts if not voiced?
“I just wanted to spend a little bit of time getting to know you again, I guess.” You squeeze your arm in reassurance of yourself because he wasn’t giving it to you. You let out an awkward laugh. “I don’t really know what I’m saying right now, to be honest.”
You can tell he’s at a crossroads, and you think back to this week and his efforts to get you to open up to him again. You know how he feels right now, because it’s exactly how you felt when he rejected you. Like when someone is so close, yet so far, you can feel that they’re within arms reach but never truly. And they’re slipping away for some reason that you may never know, but all you can do is assume that it’s a fault of your own. You’re not really sure what he can do to make you feel secure about this whole thing anymore, and you can see the slight panic in his eyes when he realizes that too.
“I don’t mind waiting,” he tells you, rushed with a desperation entirely contrary to his words, “what’s a week or two when I want to spend a lot more of those with you anyways.” But he takes a deep breath, like he’s already mentally preparing himself for an agonizing wait in his head.
There’s a sound over the stadium speakers, something technical and sporty and goes entirely over your head in dismissal, but to Gojo it seems to have a different effect, as he’s suddenly attentive and stands up straighter, that focused expression on his face from earlier resurfacing. You realize he needs to get back to the field.
“Can we continue this conversation after the game?” he asks you hastily, already turning towards the center of the stadium. And he adds an obligatory, “sorry.”
“Yeah, sure,” you quickly agree, suddenly feeling like you’re taking up his time.
He gives you a small smile, unsure in its presentation but pure in its intention. But he can only take one step towards the field before you reach out and pinch the fabric of his jersey to keep him still. He feels the tug of it and fully faces you once again.
“Um. Just a sec,” you say, “I have something to give you before your game.”
“Oh?” he looks at you with interest, “I fucking love things.”
“You have to close your eyes though.”
“…what is the thing…” He squints at you with a what are you up to expression.
“Just close your eyes!” you snap at him.
“Okay, okay, jeez,” he holds his hands up in front of him in surrender, shaking his head to get his hair out of his face and then he closes his eyes. “You’re scary as hell sometimes. Excuse me for being cautious.”
You roll your eyes, useless because he doesn’t see it, and then take a step towards him. You cup his jaw with the palm of your hand, his cheek twitching slightly from the unexpected contact, and then you raise on your tiptoes to press your lips to his cheek. It’s short and sweet with the sound of a peck.
“For good luck,” you whisper, then you quickly lower yourself back onto your heels, take a step back and tuck some strands of hair behind your ear. The ground suddenly interests you.
He opens his eyes, blinking a few times with shock and his hand comes up to brush the tips of his fingers against the spot you kissed him, and then his gaze goes comically dazed when he reaches out to hold you. “Alright, c’mere you,” he says, closing his eyes and puckering his lips as he leans down to kiss you but you laugh and push his face away.
“No no no, only on the cheek for now,” you say with a small laugh.
He does nothing to restrain his frustrated groan. “You can’t do something that cute and then expect me to be chill about it.”
“If you win, then, maybe I’ll let you kiss me for real.”
“Maybe?”
“Yes. Maybe.”
He’s close, towering over you near this bustling east side entrance that he seems to like so much, and his eyes drop to your lips. “Alright. I like those odds.”
You give him a smile and slip away from him to get back towards the field, and you feel his eyes on you as you walk away.
The pregame events are a blur, with blaring music accompanied by the sounds of the sports announcers clipping across the speakers, finally quieted down in time for the players to line up on the field for the national anthem which was then followed by UTokyo’s alma mater.
You’re stationed on the same side of the field as Minato, UTokyo’s side, while Hana is covering the sidelines of the opposite end with the opponents goal post. Minato’s filling up a cup of Gatorade for himself at the athlete’s station and then he comes back around to find you.
“Are you ready to take your shots? I see Hana wanted you to shoot on film today,” he says to you as he sloshes around Glacier Freeze in a flimsy plastic cup.
You twist your aperture dial with your thumb. “Yesss, all set. I’ll try to keep up.”
He nods at you in approval.
The atmosphere feels nerve wracking. Something felt different about this game, the stakes feeling high. Well, of course they’re high, because if they lose today then they’re out of the tournament. But the stakes feel high for other reasons too, an energy you can pick up on but can’t quite discern.
Your eyes drift across the field where you can see a referee placing a ball at the center of the field. Off to the right, you can see Gojo standing with a few of his other teammates, including Geto, Nanami, and Choso, and they’re all gesticulating to various corners of the field as they discuss what you can only imagine have to do with their plays for today. And you realize— it’s their last college soccer season. Their second-to-last official home match before the championship, and for those of them that haven’t qualified for the national league, it may be their second-to-last match of this caliber for the rest of their lives. One of the final chances that they have to prove something of themselves. The determination was palpable.
The chief referee’s whistle cuts through the air with three short chirps, and that gathers the attention of all the players on the field. UTokyo wins the coin toss, choosing to kickoff, and YCU’s players choose to attack the left side goal.
Your stomach churns with anticipation, the crowd hushing too as all the players take their places on the field. If you feel nervous, you can only imagine how the athletes feel. There’s a rhythm that you’ve learned over the past couple of months getting to know the sport, where players stretch out their necks and kick out their feet and take subtle deep breaths as they survey the stands. Idle moments before the start of the match where they have no choice but to look forward and only forward, so they take a moment to stay in the present for as long as they can gather. You’ve never been much of a sports spectator, and perhaps you’ve only recently had some personal interest in the team, but you realize you feel pride in your school as you stand behind chalk sideline and see UTokyo’s colors scattered across the field in uniform. And fuck, you wanted them to win. You wanted them to win with fierceness and wrath, and it’s a desire you share with the crowd.
Gojo spends a minute talking to the referee before the black and white striped man pats him high on the back in the good sport and urges him towards the center of the field. He lifts his foot up onto the ball, rolling it back and forth underneath the spikes of his cleat, and you can see it in his eyes, even from all the way over here, that he seems to have different ideas in mind for this game too. High stakes. Pre-determined, set with will, evident in the clench of his jaw and the concentrated furrow of his brow as he surveys the field with his eyes, and you’re lost in the sight for what feels like forever because you can hardly register the chirp of the ref’s whistle.
And then the kickoff starts.
The ball is tapped to Geto to start the play, and the first few minutes were intense as the ball was passed back and forth between UTokyo’s players, placing pressure on YCU’s defense as they inched closer and closer towards the goal. A pass between UTokyo’s #4 was intercepted by YCU and the ball was rushed down towards the left side, the crowd’s horror evident in the uproar as they raise to their feet in fearful anticipation, and with ruthless offense, YCU’s forward takes a clear sink shot towards the goal, and the crowd holds their breath before they watch Choso lunge for it in air, gloved hands firmly grabbing the ball and then pulling it to his chest with a possessiveness you can only expect to see from a skilled goalie, before he crashes down into the ground and the crowd releases relief in the form of rowdy roars.
Ten minutes in, with everyone on their toes, each team tested each other’s defenses. UTokyo were known for stellar offense, especially within the past few years with players like Gojo Satoru and Takuma Ino joining the league as powerful forwards, but UTokyo’s overall offense was still statistically second to none other than YCU. And the pressure YCU was putting on UTokyo’s defense was wearisome to say the least. You glance to see Nanami, who is UTokyo’s best defensive player, huffing and puffing as he stands between two light-footed YCU players in an attempt to guard, and fails an attempt to steal the ball before it gets to the feet of YCU’s striker #6, passed in a split second off to his teammate, with a fake so seamless that it has Choso just a couple inches away from touching the ball before it’s sent flying into the net.
The noises from the crowd are still loud, but dampened in spirit.
With the referees hand signal up in the air, the current score is confirmed. 0-1, YCU.
Coach Yaga calls for a sub, in which he switches Nanami out for who you believe is a 2nd-year defensive player name Yuta you’ve seen around practice with a promising statistical record for interceptions, and you watch as Nanami takes the bench before he swipes the sweat off his face in exhaustion. God. Just fifteen minutes into the match, and YCU already has UTokyo’s defense winded from play.
You bring your camera up to your face, forgetting for a moment that there was still a job to do here, and you position the direction of the lens towards the center of the field, where Gojo takes his place at the ball once more. Yuta briefly passes by him, signaling some play to him by holding up a number three, likely something Coach Yaga asked him to pass on to Gojo, and you see him briefly nod, his mouth slightly agape as he breathes slowly and pulls his jersey up to wipe at the sweat at his forehead.
The referee chirps the whistle, Gojo taps the ball to Yuta, and the play starts.
YCU immediately puts pressure on UTokyo’s offensive play once more, with eager movements to steal the ball, but it’s passed between UTokyo’s players with ease, more practiced and more sure. The kind of play that you and the rest of the school was used to seeing from them. However, Geto loses the ball on a left-back pass, but right when YCU makes attempts to cover field in a long-shot kick towards the left, Yuta intercepts the ball and swiftly passes it to Gojo.
The crowd immediately rises to their feet in anticipation, watching as Gojo shuffles the ball down the field, dangerously close to off-field boundaries, a signature tactic he uses because he knows there’s not a single player in the league that can match him in precision and control to keep the ball in-field on a steal, and he swiftly passes it towards Geto with a side-swept kick, beelining down towards the goal post, in perfect time for Geto pass-back to meet his feet and when Gojo was this close to a net, there was no stopping him.
He draws his right foot back, and explosively kicks the ball forward, chipping the grass under it in the motion, and it’s sent flying towards the goal, and then threaded past the goalie right to the back of the net. The cheers that erupt across the stadium rumble the ground beneath you.
1-1, even match.
UTokyo spends no time celebrating, other than a few pats to Gojo’s back as he nods in acknowledgement, no emotion on his face other than pure concentration and greed. The greed to win, like a righteous sin. He stretches his neck out, panting slightly as he takes his place towards the right side of the field and the referee chirps his whistle to signal YCU to start the kickoff.
They quickly make attempts in moving the ball towards their scoring-end of the field, but face push-back from UTokyo’s defense, unable to make it much further past the midfield line, and you bring your camera up to take a snap of Gojo, who you see is still standing off to the right side of the field. But when you position it and peer through the viewfinder, that space he once stood at was empty. You pull your camera down, and blink at the sight, and then the crowd is picking up in volume once more.
Gojo sprints down the flank, cutting past every defender, and moves towards YCU’s attacking goal, which was a shocking place to be for a center forward, but you could feel his desire and determination to steal this back-and-forth ball, and succeeds when YCU makes an open pass, thinking they were in the clear, only to have Gojo sneak in at the last moment and get the ball at his feet.
The play moves by in a flash, a blur that you or anyone else in the stadium could hardly keep up with it, movements so fast you were shocked a human being was capable of even running that far in such a short amount of time, and in an almost embarrassingly easy play, Gojo makes a fool out of YCU’s defenders as he slips the ball through the legs of his last obstacle before he struck it with sharp precision, sending it soaring to the corner of the goal, past the outstretched arms of the goalie, and into the net.
2-1, UTokyo.
It was electrifying, the feeling that strikes through the stadium, one that reaches you in your own blood. You’re shocked, standing here, after witnessing Gojo score two goals within the matter of minutes, against one of the top three teams in the league. It’s a shock that reaches everyone, including Coach Yaga who’s standing about ten feet down the line from you, his arms crossed, and you see his eyes for the first time as he takes his sunglasses off to get a better look at what he’s seeing.
You trail his sight, dragging your gaze across the field until it lands at Gojo, who is barely acknowledging the encouraging pats and shakes and goodhearted shoves that his teammates were giving him, because he was focused. It might sound crazy to say, but you swear his eyes looked like a fiercer shade of blue, like they were lit up, and you’re insanely glad you’re not one of YCU’s defensive players at the moment because you feel fearful of him even just standing on the sidelines.
Your gaze trails back to Coach Yaga, who slowly puts his sunglasses back on but his brows are narrowed tightly as he crosses his arms over his chest tightly.
The “athletic zone”... You’ve heard of it before. A state of pure focus, of peak performance, where an athlete experiences optimal concentration and a sense of effortless control over their actions. In which they perform at their highest level, where time slows down, any and all distractions fade away, and they’re completely immersed in their sport at hand. At the task at hand.
Coach Yaga seems to pick up on the fact that Gojo was on the edge of tapping into that state.
YCU makes a substitution, and you watch in anticipation as they begin the kickoff.
There’s fire in their veins with desperation to even out the score once more, rushing the ball down the off-field line, one of their center forwards mimicking Gojo’s signature attack pattern, and Yuta struggles to keep up with the expert dribbling of a fourth-year player with more experience on him, so much so to where he completely leaves the ball unguarded and there’s an open shot, but Geto places pressure at the last moment, in a fierce battle for the ball, before YCU’s center forward loses the ball over the goal line.
Choso picks the ball up, tapping on it harshly a few times as he surveys his eyes down the field, and all offensive players begin to shuffle towards their attacking goal in anticipation for the goal kick. He signals his hand down and then holds up two fingers in the air before placing the ball down on the six-yard box. He tightens the strap of one of his gloves, eyes squinting, and you follow his gaze down to a part of the field where you note UTokyo’s best aerial players are located and being guarded by YCU’s defense. And with complete trust in his team, that’s exactly where he kicks the ball.
Geto makes first contact with the ball, his chest colliding with two other YCU players as his head comes out on top and he headbutts the ball closer towards the inner field, and Gojo immediately gains access to it with a bounce of his knee. The crowd holds their breath, fear that they’ll lose the ball to a steal in the split second it spends floating in the air, but Gojo urges it forward with a bounce off of his chest and then rushes it straight down towards the goal post.
You wonder what sight he sees right now. Where you’re dead center, at no angle, lunging towards the sight of an open goal with a sole goalie standing in the center, anticipating to block your shot, and three defenders on your tail. There’s no room for error, no time to think, only instincts that you cultivate in the last leading milliseconds. They say that, in sports, athletes channel one hundred hours of practice in just a brief second on the field. A split second success that was years in the making. You can’t even imagine possessing that level of perfection in your body, or possessing that level of confidence that you can follow through with it in a moment as dire as this.
It was unreal, the way Gojo fades away from all the defenders, and faces no fear when confronted with the sight of the goalie in front of him while drawing his foot back to kick the ball. You lift your camera up at the last second, no time to think about aperture or ISO, just like he had no time to second-doubt a single twitch in his muscles, and his foot makes contact with the ball so harshly that you can hear the explosive sound even among the delirious cheers from the crowd, before he hook, line, and sinks it straight past the goalie’s head, rushing by like a scarcely deflected bullet, and into the net behind him.
3-1, UTokyo.
The whole stadium is momentarily speechless, all players and referees and recruiters and reporters and coaches and employees alike, before the most deafening cheers you’ve ever heard in your life scatter across the stands.
There’s a moment of brief reprieve, where the players can catch their breath while YCU makes yet another substitution, as if they’re just trial-and-erroring it at this point, and the cheers in the stadiums remain idle as you can’t tear your gaze away from Gojo.
It’s one of those moments where you realize that someone who you thought was so familiar to you was actually someone you hardly knew at all. You knew he was a talented soccer player, everyone on campus knows it, potentially one of the best to ever grace the league, and the amount of times you passively watched his plays on a lecture hall projector screen as your professor enthusiastically broke them down during class, even before you met him, was good enough for you to realize that he was insane, a one-in-a-million, a talent you cannot replicate, one you have by divinity. One you were born with.
And yet, somehow, getting to know him these past couple of months, he just felt so human. For someone so seemingly beyond you, he felt so…close? In those moments where it was just the two of you, it was hard to imagine that he was capable of such greatness, and that so many people were rooting for him with wholehearted tears in their eyes and cheers from their hearts, because most of the time, when he was with you, he was just a dorky idiot. You find that your heart is beating fast in your chest, that feeling of being unsure of what to do with what you’ve been wanting resurfacing powerfully.
“This is insane,” you hear Minato say from beside you and you jump a little from your thoughts being interrupted.
You twiddle with your camera straps. “I know…almost done with the first half and we’re up 3-1…I thought YCU are number one in offense for the league?”
“Oh, yeah, I mean, yes, that is insane too. But what’s even more insane is that three of the goals so far have been scored by one player.” He tips his chin towards the right sight of the field and you trail his line of sight. “By Gojo Satoru.”
Your brow furrows as you watch Gojo, his hands on his hips and his mouth slightly open as he indulges in a few shallow breaths to gain energy while YCU prepares for kickoff. Three goals, by just one player. Your eyes widen when you realize that is insane, especially for a D1 semi-final qualifying match.
“You know what the divisional record is for most goals scored by a single player during a championship match, y/n?” Minato asks you as he lifts his camera up to take a picture of the area Gojo was standing in.
You shake your head and wait for his response.
He drops his camera down and glances at the photo on his screen. “Four. During Keio Uni vs. Osaka Uni, near the beginning of the tournament back in 1997 by Osaka’s center forward number 24, Yuji Nakazawa. Meaning no one’s managed to beat that record since the new millenia, for a couple decades. Although a few players came close.”
You blink at him, and Minato is jerking his chin over in the direction of Gojo again.
“I think he’s trying to beat the record.”
You can only widen your eyes at Minato in realization, and then the chirp of the referee’s whistle draws everyone’s attention back to the field.
The sports announcers go wild on the speakers, the crowd raving all the same, standing to their feet like the team just won the championship match.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!! We are watching HISTORY in the making!! Gojo Satoru, UTokyo’s very own 3-year consecutive MVP, has scored his 34th goal of the season, highest of any player in this year’s season so far, and is now on the road to beat the league’s long-standing record for most goals scored by a single player in a championship match since 1997!!” And the crowd roars even louder as you stare out at the field in awe.
YCU starts the kickoff following the prompt short chirp of the referee’s whistle, and with two minutes remaining on the clock for the first half, make desperate attempts to book it down the field towards their attacking goal, one of their midfielders making a clumsy attempt to strike the ball to the net in the final minutes of the half, and Choso easily catches it in his arms, right before the buzzer of the timer sounds, and the match moves into halftime.
All of UTokyo’s players immediately flock towards Gojo in sportful glee, finally having a chance to surround him and harass him with harsh pats on his back and ruffles of his hair for his play in the first half. Choso even puts him in a headlock because they all don’t know what else to do with their excitement and adrenaline rushing through their bodies. Their win for today was basically confirmed with the way he was playing.
You catch a glimpse of him through the crowd of people, and he has a boyish grin on his face, reveling in the embarrassing amount of attention from his teammates, that focused look from before dissolving into his normal self again. But you can see through him, as well enough as you’ve learned to at least, and you can tell he’s not satisfied. He’s thinking it’s not enough. There’s still more to be done, and it’s not time to celebrate yet.
His eyes scan down the sideline until they find you.
Your heart jumps a second in your chest. He stands up straighter, despite his teammates still clinging to him, and there’s a twinkle in his eyes when your eyes meet.
Cheerleaders take their place out onto the field, performing their numbers with loud music blaring, and the recruiters seated at their white tables get up to roam across the sidelines in discussion with referees and with Coach Yaga and with whatever players they can sink their greedy teeth into, as well as sneak at refreshments while they’re at it. You can see off to the right that Hana has reunited with Minato and she’s showing him some of the shots she took over at the opponent's side.
UTokyo’s players start to make their way to the benches to grab for towels and drinks of water and to sprawl across in rest, and you hear loud familiar laughter approaching as you watch the players sprawl across the benches, so you avert your eyes towards the source of the sound.
You see Gojo approaching the benches, two of his teammates slung with their arms around him in some type of adrenaline-drunken glee as they talk dramatically and theatrically which Gojo entertains with his own drunk-off-of-adrenaline glee. And you raise an eyebrow at his demeanor when he makes eye contact with you.
“There’s my freaky little photographer,” he says, and he’s standing up straight and—wait, is he puffing his chest out as he makes his way towards you? Oh for fucks sake.
Gojo has always been confident around you, for as long as you can remember, but in the fair few moments he’s been cocky, he’s been a menace. And you can only assume the testosterone-induced high of being on the verge of breaking a league record in front of the entire school then subsequently getting homiesexually praised by his teammates for the better part of the past five minutes, not to mention with the crowd and the reporters feeding his ego with a spoon across the speakers, he’s been transformed into the final boss of cocky.
His teammates surround you too, their hands on their hips as they assess you and Gojo when he meanders right up to you, arms held out to hug you, a sleazy sight you’ve seen probably six times this week, and you feel a rush of warmth in your cheeks as you place a hand on his chest to keep him away.
“You’re sweaty and gross, please stay away from me,” you reprimand him, “this is an expensive lens that is not humidity-proof.”
“Hey, you’re the girl that Kentaro socked in the face with a ball the other day at practice, right?” one of his teammates asks, leaning in towards you to take a closer look at your face.
“Oh yeahhh, ‘cause Satoru wasn’t paying attention,” another one of his teammates chimes in teasingly, hardly heard over the loud remix playing in the background as the cheerleaders continue to perform on the field.
You shrink a little from where you stand. Gojo’s got an irritated look on his face and he’s shrugging his teammate’s elbow off of his shoulder.
“I really hope you’re getting my good angles,” his teammate to the left comments before winking at you, and you purse your lips together.
The one on the right leans in too, looking at your cheek with an assessing look in his eye. “At least it didn’t leave a scar on your cute face—”
Gojo shoves the both of them back and away from you by elbowing them in the chest, and they make deep eugh noises before stepping away and rubbing at their sternums with pouts on their faces.
“Get the fuck away from her,” he grumbles, “she’s mine.”
Your cheeks flush slightly with warmth at the attention, and you watch as his teammates scurry away to adhere to some social hierarchy Gojo seems to possess over them.
You raise an eyebrow at him. “Yours?”
“Yes. Eventually. Whatever, did you see me out there?” he turns his torso towards the field and points behind himself with his thumb, “when I—”
“Oh god, you know what’s soooooooooo super sexy to me?” you interrupt him. “When guys are humble.”
“Oh c’monnn,” he curls his arm around your waist and pulls you to him, to where you stumble a little on grass and he holds you when you fall into him with more clumsiness than grace. “Tell me you aren’t at least impressed by me.”
You pout, because you are, and you’d really like to give him some reassurance and validation, but for some reason his cocky attitude is setting you off. “Satoru,” you sigh, wiggling a little in his hug, but he holds you tighter, “I’m working right now. Cut it out.”
He lets go of you at that, sober enough from the adrenaline to realize you’re being serious, but he steps into your space so only you can hear him. “What? Are you embarrassed?”
“Of what?” Your face twists with confusion.
“Of me. Are you embarrassed of me?” he asks.
“No. Why would I be embarrassed of you?” you ask with sharpness.
“I don’t know, just, sometimes I feel like you’re always annoyed by me,” he says with a sigh. “It’s like, you’re really sweet sometimes, and then kinda rude out of nowhere, and it’s sort of messing with my head.”
You pout. “You were messing with my head for weeks.”
“And I’m sorry about that,” he quickly interjects, like he already knew you were brewing up that counterargument, “but you don’t have to act like you’re all disinterested and indifferent just to get back at me for it.” He places his hands on his hips and wipes his temple on the round part of his shoulder when he feels a drop of sweat trickle down from his hairline. “You don’t have to act embarrassed around me either.”
“I’m not embarrassed,” you deny, and your cheeks feel hot, and for some reason you feel angry. “In fact, I’m the one that should be asking you that question. Because I still very clearly remember that time you said I was just someone you know in front of your friends.”
He groans and tilts his head back with frustration. “Can you just let that go? Things have changed between us since then. Move on.”
“You kissed me and then pretended I was just a stranger to you in front of your friends,” you grit as you cross your arms. “That’s the level of sincerity that I know from you, Satoru.”
“Oh, okay, so there’s nothing else I’ve done that shows you that I’m serious about you?” he asks rhetorically with incredulity, throwing his hands up in the air in disbelief.
No. That’s not true, not true at all. But he’s pissed you off now and so all logic was to the wind. “Doesn’t matter. If you’re not embarassed of me, and if you’re really serious about me this time, then fucking prove it.” You’re speaking out of spite, and you fear you’ve just set him off too.
“Fine,” he says, and he grabs the microphone straight out from a passing reporter’s hand, replacing it with a gatorade bottle. The reporter stares at the bottle he’s now holding with confusion. “I will.”
“W-Wait—” you squeak out, feeling the hair at the back of your neck bristle in anticipation and a shiver gets sent down your spine. The cheerleaders are making their way off the field at the end of their routine, and you can hear the thumps across the loud boisterous speakers when Gojo whacks his palm to the microphone to make sure the thing was on before he jogs to the center of the field.
The crowd is already cheering, ecstatic to see the afternoon's star player and pride & joy of their school, and Gojo takes a moment to soak in all the glory in comical appreciation with bowing towards all 360 degree angles of the stadium.
“Uhhh,” you hear Choso from beside you, who’s strapping his thick goalie gloves tightly to his wrists, “Why the fuck does Satoru have a microphone while standing in the middle of the field.”
“It can’t be for any publicly decent reason,” Geto muses.
All you can do is watch.
“Hi, uh,” Gojo starts, static blaring slightly across the speakers and the crowd winces with him, “sorry. I’m Satoru, Gojo Satoru, you might know me from—uh, the game you’ve been watching?”
Cheers all around, because as if a single person wouldn’t know who he is. The stands were rowdy and most definitely drunk off of sidestep beers the stadium has been serving all afternoon long.
Gojo is about to continue speaking, when he catches sight of the table of recruiters in the corner of his eye and he turns to face them out of respect. “Oh, yeah, uh, number 10,” he tugs his jersey up at the shoulder to stretch out the fabric, the 1 and the 0 flattened in view, “division player ID 233-997. Coach Yaga keeps my business cards in his purse if you want one.”
“SAAAAATTOOORRUUUU!!!!!” you hear Coach Yaga yell from somewhere in the distance.
“Anywho,” Gojo continues, and the music dims slightly, so he glances at the stop clock on the screen, which shows him he’s got roughly five minutes left to pull off whatever idiocracy he had in mind before the second half of the game starts. “Just here to say that there’s this girl I really like.”
The crowd gets louder, almost deafening, and sonically mostly feminine in (delusional) hope he’s gonna name call one of them.
Gojo’s voice is crisp and clear through the speakers as he clarifies. “She’s standing over there,” he says as he nonchalantly points to your exact latitude and longitudinal direction, “with the big camera slung around her neck that looks like it could pull her down to the center of the earth. Yeah. She’s super cute and I really like talking to her.”
“Uh-oh,” Geto murmurs from beside you, and you glance at him to try to get a read on the situation but you can’t.
Gojo starts to pace across the center of the field now, like he’s working the crowd. “But get this—she thinks I’m not fuckin’ serious about her!!!”
The crowd groans with him in unison. Yep, most certainly drunk. Or high off of glee. Either way, he’s playing them like a violin.
“Huh?” Gojo’s voice sounds distant now, away from the mic, and you can see on the large pixelated screen that he’s being interrupted by someone that looks like one of the videographers, “oh, what’s that? This is being broadcasted? Uh-huh. Oh. I’m not allowed to cuss? Oh fuck, okay. Er— shit, okay. Wait—shoot, okay.”
Choso’s smirk is heard from beside you, and you catch Geto and Nanami shaking their heads in your periphery.
“LIKE I SAID,” Gojo continues into the mic, “the girl I like thinks I’m just messing around, so. Uh. To show her that I’m serious about her, I’m gonna…” He looks up at the sky to ponder, and you can hear people shouting all sorts of suggestions of nonsense from the crowd. And instead of saying proclaim my undying affection for her through a romantic soliloquy straight from my heart in the presence of the entire school, he says—“I’m gonna strip. Yes. Down to my tighty whities, Imma strip.”
H–
Huh?!?!?
You don’t even have time to be horrified or scared, you’re just bewildered beyond belief that that’s what he came up with.
What the fuck kind of reassurance did you ask for. And what the fuck kind of reassurance were you about to get?
The crowd goes wild, it’s no surprise to say everyone and their mothers wants to see him naked, even the straight dudes would dig it for the gym inspo. And he points straight to you, sleazy look on his face and you’re going to ignore the fact that he just winked at you too as he crosses his arms to hold the hem of his jersey and pulls it up over his head in the most raunchy and slutty way a man can take his shirt off.
The music manager is quick with the bit, and is most definitely a fellow Gen Z college student, because Justin Timberlake’s SexyBack (ft. Timbaland) starts playing across the speakers and the crowd goes ballistic.
“Ayo why’s Satoru Magic Mike’ing the field right now?” one of his other teammates calls out through a mouthful of protein bar, “What the fuck did I miss?”
The cameraman does God’s work in a hella zoom-in of Gojo’s sweat glistened abs, then pans up the naked expanse of the perfect taut skin across his chest, and you can’t help but stare even among all your horror. It’s like when a male bird embarrasses the fuck outta himself to attract a female bird sitting on a perch, except instead of within the context of a NatGeo documentary, this was your real life. Everyone wants him, but he’s making a fool out of himself for you.
He pretends to stretch his arms up into the air, a cover-up to flex his biceps, and then he kicks his cleats off, and the socks come off too. Entirely unnecessary, as showing one's ankles is simply too slutty, but alas he’s a whore. And when his thumbs dip into the waistband of his shorts, and there’s anticipating screeching from the crowd, he finally gets chased by security.
Except he’s an intercollegiate D1 athlete, why the fuck wouldn’t he be able to outrun a bunch of dudes in black?
The camerawork on him is phenomenal as he runs across the sidelines of the field, eliciting a wave down the bleachers. So good in fact that you’re pretty sure the camera man could shoot for the Olympic track and field, with the way the stadium’s got a clear sight of Gojo mouthing the lyrics Them other fuckers don’t know how to act from the song still blaring with satirical rage on his face as he makes a fool of the men chasing him around the perimeter of the field.
And then he does it, drops his shorts, discards them with a kick, and he’s down to his tighty whities as promised. Cameraman has got to be displaying some previously undiscovered level of talent as he zeroes in on a shot of said tighty whities, with Gojo’s—forgive me, I need to be crass—huge bulge prominent in Big Dick Energy fashion except his tighty whities have little red hearts in rows across the fabric so do with that duality what you will.
He’s outrun security with a steady grin on his face as he eats up the drunken crowd’s cheers and riots and roars and you feel like you’re the only sane person in this stadium, or maybe you’re just not used to the fanatics of a college sports crowd. You peep the men in black trailed all the way on the left side of the field where they abandoned their pursuit of Gojo.
He taps imaginary pockets at his thighs, very muscular thighs you take indulgence in noticing, as if he expected to find something there, and he looks around when he doesn’t. He shrugs and grabs the microphone of the next passing sports commentator he spots, and then he makes his way back to you.
His breathing is a little shallow, and he inhales deep to catch his breath. “Baby.” The crowd SCREAMS at the way he purrs the word into the mic. “Will you do me the honor,” he’s huffing and puffing, heard across blaring speakers, “of being my lawfully wedded girlfriend?” And then he holds the mic to your lips.
“W-Wha—” you stutter, and there’s chanting across the crowd with words that barely make sense until you finally realize they’ve started to yell say yes! say yes! say yes! “Oh my gosh, okay, yes, fine, now please, for the love of god, put some freaking clothes on!”
The crowd goes wild with cheerful glees, and Gojo shoots fists up in the air in celebration as he runs all the way towards the center of the field with high knees, and you’re gawking at the sight, before he falls backward onto the grass and makes delirious snow angels on the ground. You see Coach Yaga’s vein popping in his neck from pure agitation as he storms off towards the center of the field to knock some sense into Gojo, but you know that Coach Yaga can’t kick him out, because they still have a game to win. The perks of being the most valued player in the league is getting to act like an absolutely insane idiot because you know they still need you in the end to bring it home.
You glance to the right, seeing his teammates nodding slowly then getting back to wrapping athletic tape around ankles and stretching out shoulders, with immediate acceptance of his actions like it wasn’t even out of character for him to do. And you realize again that you don’t know Gojo as well as you think you do.
And then the halftime timer is up.
You see Gojo approach the benches in a quick jog, squeezing some water into his mouth with his green gatorade squirt bottle, and when your eyes flit up to the screens on all four entrances, you see that the cameramen are still all focused on him accompanied by the continued buzz of conversation among the crowd following his public spectacle. But he seems to already be past any semblance of embarrassment as he takes the attention with ease, before he glances up to make eye contact with you and then lightly jogs right up to you.
“Did that prove to you that I’m not embarrassed of you?” he asks you, cocking a brow with a smug look on his face as he gets all up in your personal space.
“I don’t know, but I’m certainly thoroughly and expeditiously embarrassed of you now,” you say, cheeks feeling flush when he leans forward so he can make eye contact with you at eye level. “I’ll have to move to a different country.”
His grin is relaxed. “Yeah well you asked for it.”
“Maybe. But I underestimated what a lunatic you are.”
“You’re my girlfriend now, you’ve gotta get used to it.”
Your heart skips a beat in your chest. “Satoru–”
“Tomorrow,” he cuts you off, “Hinode pier. I’ll pick you up at six. It’s a date, so wear something cute. And preferably easy to take off.” And then he’s attentive to the chirp of the referee’s whistle in the air before jogging backwards towards the feel and eventually turns on his heel towards the field while you’re left with warm cheeks and a heart that felt like it was moving at a mile a minute.
The timer for the second half refreshes on the screen while you loosely hold your camera in your shaking hands. It occurs to you that you haven’t taken a single photo of him before the start of the kickoff, and so you bring the piece of consolidated metal up to your eyes, peering through the viewfinder and focusing it on the center of the field. And there he was. Your muse.
Gojo lets out a breath, which you can see even from here that it’s shaky and staggered with resistance, and he lifts his jersey up to swipe at the sweat trickling down his face as he eyes the ball underneath YCU’s player’s foot just prior to the start of the second half. There it was—that look again of pure focus.
3-1, forty-five minutes on the clock. And the referee chirps the whistle to start the second half.
It’s immediately evident that YCU has returned to the field following halftime with renewed energy, pressing high down the flank relentlessly past UTokyo’s defense, so fast it was hard for anybody to even keep a steady eye on the ball with the fluidity of their passes. The persistence pays off in the fake double-pass that slips past Geto’s feet, a moment of hesitation in the broken flow of UTokyo’s defense, and one of YCU’s strikers has the perfect line of shot towards the goal before digging his foot under the ball and sending it flying towards the corner of the goal post, scoring themselves a goal within just the first five minutes of play.
3-2.
The pressure mounts at the next kickoff, and with about seven minutes of solid play, with back-and-forth passes, multiple attempts at both goal posts to no avail on either side, it was clear that exhaustion was bustling in the veins of all the players.
One of YCU’s offensive players seems to capitalize on this, jumping on a defensive lapse of a pass Nanami attempted to make towards Yuta, and the ball is swiftly stolen then raced back towards the goal post. Choso prepared himself at the line, light on his feet paired with a solid stance, but in a millisecond of a moment, YCU’s offense unexpectedly passes the ball to a player racing up the midfield, and the player chips the ball neatly into the exposed corner of the goal despite Choso’s attempt to lunge for it in mid air.
Equalized, 3-3 game, momentary shock across the players’ faces, and the crowd bustles with something that sounds less like glee and more life fear. YCU was prepared to live up to and hold onto their title as the league’s number one offense, and as Minato explained to you during your time working in this job, an offensive team isn’t good at scoring goals, but rather exceptional at breaking down the other team’s defense.
Your eyes zero in on Geto, who stands in the center of the field for kickoff, and he’s huffing and puffing. He's the lead of defense for the team, and you can only imagine the level of pressure he feels right now. He glances around to his players, over to Nanami who seemed to share the same level of exhaustion, and then he glances towards Gojo who stood in front of him off to the right. Except you notice that Gojo looks relaxed, albeit still exhausted, but there’s a composed expression on his face even in the moment of heightened stakes. With locked eyes, Geto nods at Gojo and raises two fingers up into the air to signal a play, of which Gojo seems to respond to by closing more distance between him and the goal post prior to the kickoff, positioning himself almost directly in front of it, to which YCU’s defense immediately begin to guard him in a tight radius.
The kickoff begins, with Geto making a few passbacks with Nanami as they close distance towards the field before passing it off to UTokyo’s string of offense and then receding back to their defending goal. UTokyo continues to close distance, raising stakes for YCU as their defense begins to falter under pressure, and the ball gets passed to Gojo, who only keeps it in possession for less than three seconds before he passes it back to Yuuji, a risky decision to make in the second half of a semifinal match, but the first-year swiftly unleashes a powerful shot that rockets past YCU’s goalkeeper, up towards the corner, except–
It bounces off the metal of the goal post, shot off with projectile speed back towards the center of the field, but with razor-sharp reflexes, Gojo headbutts the ball in air, twists his torso and strikes the ball with his foot past a dumbfounded goalie who can’t even move an inch to guard the ball that he already knew was going to sink right into the goal, and that’s exactly what it does.
The stadium erupts with the momentum.
4-3, UTokyo.
It was a sweet moment, one you manage to capture on camera of Gojo running up to Yuuji and ruffling his hair in reassurance, despite the missed goal. Your heart feels warm in your chest, feeling your own sense of melancholy that this was one of the last times they’ll ever get to play together on a team.
Your eyes widen when you glance at the scoreboard, realizing that he’s tied. Gojo is tied for the most goals scored during a championship match. There were less than three minutes left on the clock. UTokyo either preserves their lead, or they risk moving into overtime, which, judging by the exhaustion on the UTokyo players’ faces in the wake of YCU’s relentless offense this entire game, moving into overtime would be a hefty, hefty risk.
YCU’s center forward takes his place in the center of the field, fire evident in his eyes as he glances across the field. YCU are light on their feet, channeling everything in their bodies into these last moments of the game as they prepare to start the kickoff. You glance across UTokyo’s players, and although they look spent, there was a resolute look to all of them. It wasn’t the time to give up or feel at ease even near the end of this grueling battle. Now was the time to play.
The referee chirped his whistle, and the kickoff began.
YCU immediately presses hard, as all their other plays have been all game, in their desperation to score. You can already see UTokyo’s midfielders move sluggishly in comparison to YCU’s offense, a drag to their feet as YCU pushes past the first layer of defense towards their attacking goal. Geto takes an aggressive approach, making moves to steal the ball while Nanami and Yuta guarded both flanks, and there was a relentless pass-off happening that ate up more than a minute of the remaining time.
Nanami succeeds in stealing the ball, but immediately loses it under his feet by a YCU midfielder, who makes a broad pass down the sidelines to YCU’s star forward who then powerfully kicks the ball towards the unguarded area of their goal, a dangerous shot that was clear towards the crossbar and Choso makes a leap for it, high into the air, his glove brushing against the ball, the entire crowd holding their breath in anticipation–
And the ball lands in the net.
4-4, tied game. With one minute and seventeen seconds left on the clock.
There was no time wasted in getting back to center field. No time spent dwelling in the horrific roars of the crowd as they watch with anxiety and fear. No time spent to process or consider or signal any plays. Not even a single second used to catch breath. When there is this much at stake, an athlete thrives on momentum.
To your surprise, Gojo isn’t the one that takes place at the center of the field to start the kickoff. Yuta stands there instead, and you notice his eyes are erratic as he surveys all corners of the field.
The referee chirps his whistle.
Yuta immediately passes it off to the side to UTokyo’s midfielder, who curls it towards their attacking goal with a swift pass to Ino, who closes distance towards the goal, but one of YCU’s defender slips in, undoing any progress they had made in their offense by stealing the ball and sending it back towards mid-field. Forty-three seconds. The crowd’s roars heightened as YCU continued to push forward, thirty yards now from scoring, and UTokyo’s defense was desperate to stop them but their momentum was cracking in the wake of their exhaustion.
It was a moment you don’t think you could ever fully or truly recall, one that you wish you had focused all your energy and attention to so that you could commit it to memory for the rest of your life. The image of Gojo pushing all the way to ten yards before their defending goal, a place where no center forward should really be at in a game like this, but it was exactly what their defense needed. It was exactly what the team needed. It was exactly what the school needed. For the ball to be in his possession.
With twenty-two seconds left on the clock, he steals the ball from right under YCU’s offensive feet, and then charges towards the opposite side of the field. The crowd rises to their feet, thunderous roaring that overtook any and all senses, as Gojo weaves through forwards, center forwards, midfielders, and defenders, covering the entire span of the field in lightning time. Fifty yards, forty yards, thirty yards, twenty hards, ten yards–
In a moment you couldn’t believe, he digs his foot underneath the ball, and sends it flying out towards the goal. There was not even a margin of an inch in which it slipped past the goalie’s hands, past his head, and swiftly flew right into the net.
With three-two-one seconds, the match was over.
5-4, UTokyo’s win.
The final whistle blew, and for a moment, there was silence. As if the world paused to catch its breath. Then, all at once, the crowd erupted with glee that shook the entire stadium at its core. Flags waving, scarves held high, toasts of beer held up to the sky, it was deafening, and it almost makes you want to cry. Thousands of voices shouting in unison, celebrating the hard-fought victory of their school’s team. A type of pride that was fostered, and well-deserved, and long-lived.
You quickly glance towards the field again, and see Gojo standing right at the same spot where he had kicked the last and final goal, staring towards the net. You can’t see the expression on his face, but it surprises you how still he is. Like a statue, staring at the goal with the ball tucked into its corner. The very epitome of what it means to succeed in this sport was right in front of him, and it seemed like he wanted to soak the visual in for as long as he could.
His trance is abruptly interrupted when his teammates swarm in, rushing over like a wave of pure adrenaline. They slap him on the back, ruffle his hair, shout his name, the sounds of gleeful disbelief mixed with exhausted sighs of relief swarming into the air. And Gojo finally melts away from the tension of the match and into the celebration as he weakly returns the embraces of his teammates while he catches his breath.
“IT’S OFFICIAL!! IT’S OFFICIAL!! UTOKYO’S VERY OWN GOJO SATORU HAS OBLITERATED OSAKA UNIVERSITY’S RECORD FOR MOST GOALS SCORED BY A SINGLE PLAYER IN A CHAMPIONSHIP MATCH!!”
The speakers are blaring the voices of the sports announcers, along with ambient music to match the intensity of the match that everyone had just witnessed.
You should probably be doing your job. You know, take a picture of the huddle of players on the field as they bask in the glory of a close victory, but instead your feet start moving on their own. Like a magnet drawn to him, you make your way towards Gojo, only a slight hesitation in your step as you stop about ten feet away, suddenly unsure. But when he makes eye contact with you, all that fear melts away.
He hastily pats the backs of some of his teammates, acknowledging their praise at the center of the huddle before tightly squeezing past them to make his way over to you. Your heart is beating fast in your chest, feeling an almost overwhelming sense of pride in your school’s team, but more importantly, in him. What was the acceptable thing to do? Run to him, into his arms, and hug him while he twirls you around? Tackle him to the grassy ground? Kiss him like your life depended on it? You have no clue what the acceptable or sane or normal thing to do is. But he’s made his decision for you when he walks right up to you, his hands holding your waist as he pulls you towards him. He smells earthy, of grass and salt and sweat and of all the hard work he poured into today, the wear and tear of the game evident in the wear and tear of his jersey. He only manages to huff out an exhale at the sight of you, like some relief washing over him just by looking into your eyes. Forget the fact that the crowd was all watching and that all of the screens you could see past his head were focused on the two of you, because all you could hear or see or think was him.
“I believe you owe me a kiss,” he says, huffing as he catches his breath but that doesn’t stop the smile that makes its way onto his face.
You nod your head, giving him your own version of a sweet smile as your arms slide up past his shoulders, crossing behind his neck, and he leans down to kiss you.
You hear a swell from the crowd, some teasing comments off in the distance from some of his teammates, you’re pretty sure you hear Coach Yaga yelling at him to get back to the benches, but it all melts away with the feeling of him smiling against your lips as he kisses you at the center of this stadium.
It was a moment so pure, so sweet, so picture perfect, and for once, you’re not the one behind the camera taking the photo. You’re the one that’s in it.
.
.
.
.
.
[end of kickoff ch12]
a/n. aaa thanks a lot for reading!! pls the fucking public stripping scene was so stupid i apologize on behalf of kickoff gojo for his behavior 😂😂 i’ll put him in his cage dw
this chapter had some of what i consider to be the most challenging aspects of writing for me (internal conflict, grand public gesture, sports jargon) and so writing it felt like an uphill battle the ENTIRE time i wrote it and edited it. i considered scrapping it sooo many times cuz i just wasn't happy w it...but whatever i can't expect to be 100% happy w every chapter i put out there haha. i think kickoff has become a lil sacred for me since i've been working on it for a while now but likeee...sometimes u just gotta say fuck it we ball (tbh kickoff gojo probably says that to himself before a match)
anywho, i am veryy thoroughly excited for what i've got planned for the chapters to follow, especially moving into the last angsty arc before the end of the series!! so i look forward to picking up momentum w this series again :0 honestly chapters 10 through 12 were the most difficult things i've written so far for a lot of reasons, but i have a feeling things will go more smoothly for me creatively going forward since what i've got planned falls well within my writing comfort range
oh also there seems to be a little confusion about the number of chapters left, as i know i had originally said 12, but i anticipate that there will be about 18 chapters of kickoff total!! so still around six chapters left before the end :)) much lovee thanks for reading!!
OH WAIT ONE LAST NOTE I'M SORRY i didn’t really have a way of organically incorporating this into the story n i’m not sure if i’ll get a chance to in the upcoming chapters, so i just wanted to share this part of ch7 (gojo’s pov chapter) that is relevant to this chapter:
During the thrilling semifinal match between Keio Uni, Gojo’s father’s team, and Yokohama Uni during the end of his senior year, spectators witnessed a game that most college soccer enthusiasts would deem was a once-in-a-lifetime watch. Both teams engaged in relentless offense, and Gojo’s father was on his way to shatter the record of the most goals scored in a single championship match within the history of the league, but when he received a call from his wife during a timeout with the most life-altering news he could have ever heard, he abandoned everything on the field that day to go home and be with her. Grainy footage from the televised broadcast still exists online today—the moment he sprinted across the field, confused players glancing in his direction, amidst the uproar of the crowd. She called to let him know she was pregnant.
the record that gojo broke in this chapter is the same record that his father almost broke before he got the call that he was going to be a dad :0
➸ you're all caught up!
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TROUBLE ALMOST ALL MY LIFE | Spencer Reid x Prentiss!Reader
Description: The ONE time the BAU needs you + the FOUR times you need them.
word count: 24k (what on earth was I thinking)
trigger warnings: mentions of spencers addictions + use + side affects. MOMMY ISSUES thankyou ambassador Prentiss. hostage scene + injuries. mentions of forced/pressured marriage. fem!reader. reader and Emily struggle to bond.
authors note: We never meet Emily's dad nor do we see a picture so while reader is given a nickname of Bugsy, she still keeps her real name (no use of y/n) and is given ZERO physical descriptors. ALL of my fem!readers should feel included here, let me know if this is not the case! also I don't speak any language besides English however she does speak many because of her mom, so I really tried to get it right, message me if I'm being stupid!!
series masterlist | next chapter
[this] means its spoken in another language.
—
‘trouble on my left, trouble on my right,
I’ve been facing trouble almost all my life’
1. the one where you become a translator.
“I’ll make some calls, I may still have some friends in the Eastern countries,” Ambassador Prentiss announced to the room, standing from her place on the plush sofa.
A case had landed quite literally in Emily’s lap when her mother had come by that morning asking for Hotch, a Russian migrant looking for her father with a ransom note and a sliced off finger shoved through her mailbox, wedding ring still attached.
It wasn’t every day Emily wished she’d brushed up on her Russian, but today of all days she was struggling to keep up.
“We don’t have much time, we need a division of labour,” Hotch’s serious face settled, the time constraints making him just that bit more dictatorial, “Morgan, someone needs to go to the Chernus’s house in Baltimore in case they are contacted again,”
“What about the language barrier?” Derek raised, smoothing a hand over the short scruff of his beard, “We can’t have the unsub speaking with the family directly. He could say anything to them without us knowing,”
Bugsy would hate to admit she fit the criteria for youngest daughter of a workaholic mother and distant father to a tea, but Emily would say different.
Elizabeth Prentiss had never been a warm woman; Emily used to tell her the scowl was a side effect of the overplucking of her eyebrows, not the serious nature of her job. Her youngest girl once said her mother’s lips looked like she’d sucked a lemon. Of course they admired her work, but world peace meant jack shit to a little girl wanting nothing more than a mother’s hug.
Despite the fact she’d pushed away her husband and both her daughters in favour of her career, the one useful thing about being the Ambassador’s daughter wasn’t just the money, but the widespread culture the girls had been crammed full of since they could so much as beg for a sippy cup.
“Baltimore, you say?” Emily asked Hotch with a somewhat doubtful wince, “I mean you could always-”
“Absolutely not,” Her mother cut her off, rubbing the stress lines already creasing her forehead at the very notion of her other daughter, despite the fact Emily hadn’t even finished her thought.
Emily’s sigh was a reflex, the years of her mother cutting her off sparking the frustration on instinct.
“She lives right in the city, Mother, it can’t hurt to have her just talk for them-” Emily tried to bargain, only for the sharp mouthed Ambassador shoot her a frown.
“End of discussion, Emily,” Elizabeth snipped, her manicured fingernails twitching with annoyance, “Your sister is much too young for an assignment so serious,”
Emily rolled her eyes with a scoff, as if the two had slipped back into the role of rebellious teenager and scathing mother without much thought.
“She's twenty-two, mom. She’s getting her masters degree for Christ sakes, she’s not ‘too young’,” The dark headed woman fought back, clicking her pen a few times as if the spring loaded ink would take away some of the temper Elizabeth seemed to flare up.
Her mother’s lips pursed, in the way Bugsy hated, in the way that meant she was going to be mean.
“Immature may have been a better word, then,” She replied, and Emily seemed to pause. She couldn’t argue with that. “Or perhaps lazy, or puerile; callow, wild, irresponsible. Would you like me to name more?”
“Asinine would be a good term; deriving from the Latin asinus it not only means foolish, but to be stubborn and lazy like an ass,” Spencer input helpfully to the Ambassador, only for his bright smile to fade when he saw the daggers Emily stared at him with, “Sorry, I love word games,” He muttered into his lap.
“Asinine. Perfect, Dr Reid,” Elizabeth said, and Emily could only roll her eyes harder.
Hotch huffed, the victim’s daughter watching between the two women’s quarrel with wet eyes, the ice box with her father’s finger clenched tightly in her lap, the cold of the limb bleeding into his own gaze.
“Unfortunately, Ambassador Prentiss, despite just how asinine your daughter might be, Morgan is right. Having the Unsub possibly speaking with the family without us understanding what he’s saying could prove fatal,” He explained, ignoring the way the older woman’s mouth scrunched in bitterness. They didn’t need to be profilers to see that despite how tempered the relationship between Emily and her mother was, a tension seemed to fall between the women the moment the younger Prentiss was mentioned.
Spencer was sure he was the only person who even knew Emily had a little sister.
“Very well, but don’t be surprised when you find your hands full of the girl,” Elizabeth said with a shake of her head as she led the victims, a mother and daughter that seemed to cling to one another for comfort as if to rub salt in her matriarchal wound, into the break room to get away from the frosty atmosphere that now lingered around the table.
Emily sighed, picking around her fingernails the way she did when she was bothered.
“I’m going to hate these next words that are gonna come out of my mouth,” She started with a long exhale, “But my mother’s right. Bugsy is a handful. Just try not to get her wound up, that girl smells fear,” She looked to Reid who seemed none the wiser, “I’m talking to you, wonder boy. She’ll eat you up and spit you right back out,”
Spencer gulped quietly.
Derek only chuckled, slapping a hand down onto Emily’s shoulder, “Relax, Prentiss. Your mom’s just got you all worried. Need I remind you I grew up with two sisters? This will be a piece of cake,”
–
Those were the famous last words of Derek Morgan.
Loud, heavy metal music jumped through the wooden door, so loud Morgan worried his three polite knocks would go unheard as the two of them waited outside her dorm for her to answer. Morgan was about to knock again, figuring the music had drowned out the first lot, when the door swung open and a frown the spitting image of Emily’s stressed expression met their gaze.
She looked so different to their Prentiss, but the way she seemed already scorned by the two of them told them they had the right woman.
“Miss Prentiss?” Morgan asked formally, though he felt the warmth grow when he caught sight of a beat up friendship bracelet around her wrist amongst newer gold chains, five white blocks spelling out her sister’s name pulling tight on her skin, as if she’d quickly outgrown the thing but hadn’t the heart to remove it.
It was then that he and Reid seemed to both reel back slightly at the fact she was standing in a large shirt, ratty around the edges, and what seemed to be a pair of men's boxers covering her bottom half, clearly not suspecting particularly important visitors.
She looked him head to toe with a frown, a dozen piercings in her ears, her hair highlighted with streaks of cardinal red, as if he was the one confronting her in his underwear, before she moved onto Spencer, who’s face seemed to be getting hotter by the second as he forced his eyes away from her bare legs.
“Are you guys strippers? Did someone send strippers to my door?” She asked, strawberry gum smacking between her lips as her gaze seemed to finish mulling over Spencer’s tall form and returned to Morgan.
“Emily sent us.” Reid said shortly, the music blaring in his ears making it difficult to focus on what it was she was saying, “As co-workers, no-not strippers. We’re with the FBI,”
He hated loud noises anyway, cringed at the sound of particularly cutting rock songs, but since he’d developed his … problem, the dilaudid had him feeling like someone was clawing at his skull, tugging his brain through his ears.
“Emily sent you here?” She asked with a scoff, looking the two up and down again. They both easily caught the way her face hardened, “Are pigs flying today or something?”
“We’re here to ask for your help on a case,” Spencer rushed through a sweaty brow, “Emily said you’d be able to act as a translator for us and some Russian citizens who are being targeted,”
She sighed sceptically, crossing her arms and leaning against the door frame, “Any strippers or non-strippers can fraud an ID. Emily’s name was in the paper just the other week. I’m gonna need a little more than that,”
She keeps track of her sister despite the supposed distance between them. Spencer was quick to profile, his mind whirring at all the ways she reminded him of her sister down to the way she raised her eyebrows expectantly at them.
“Emily was born October twelfth, 1970 at 7:12am, graduated from Garfield High School in 1989,” Spencer said as if reporting the weather, her eyes narrowing in on him all the more coldly, “She attended Chesapeake Bay University and speaks six languages, as I expect you do from moving so often with your mother. She coined your nickname Bugsy from your childhood love of ladybugs, which she said you grew out of by the time you turned eleven yet the name stuck, though you still like counting the spots to identify their species. Your parents split when you were five and your father moved in with his now wife, born September ninth-”
“Alright- alright. What are you, living in her walls?” She interrupted incredulously, before turning her attention to Derek who seemed to hide a chuckle with a cough. “Either you really are a stripper or you’re a terrible friend,”
“She loves Kurt Vonnegut,” Derek held his finger as if to prove her entirely wrong, although not much else came to him. Maybe he was a bad friend, he thought guiltily, or maybe he simply lacked an eidetic memory like the wonder boy next to him, who had been about to tell her how old she was when Emily’s pet betta fish died, “Slaughterhouse 5?”
Rolling her eyes, she grunted at them, kicking her door open for them to enter.
“Everyone loves Vonnegut; only losers under a rock dislike Vonnegut,” She drawled, edging back into her room, the heavy bass rock growing in volume as they followed her in, “I’ll be ready in a second- Emily’s always bugging me about wearing pants,” She said vaguely, scanning around the dirty dorm, until she found one particular pair of jeans laying half under her bed, quickly yanking them up her legs. “Come in, come in.”
She flicked the speakers way down to which Spencer took a breath of relief. His eyes fell to the laptop that had been set up on her desk, the five different textbooks littered around the spare space, energy drinks and empty mugs filling the cracks where he could barely see the generic white of the table top, his nose crinkling. About as gross as he’d expect from a college student.
“Emily said your Russian was pretty good,” Derek made conversation, his eyes wandering over the various posters plastered over her walls, some fraying round the edges from where she had likely been moved from bedroom to bedroom when the Prentiss’s inevitably had to move country again.
“Yeah,” She snarked, pulling a nicer top over her head, “Kinda tends to happen when you live in Russia,”
Morgan raised his eyebrows to Spencer who seemed to give him the same look back, though the latter was biting back a snicker at her words.
How in the hell was she the Ambassador’s daughter?
–
“This all involves Russian Mafia, it’s really beefed up here the last ten years or so,” Agent Cramer, a tall, slim man who looked entirely overwhelmed by the workload on his shoulders reported, as she listened intently.
She had been somewhat de-briefed in the car, Emily messaging her for the first time since Christmas, the message a simple: “Have you met with Morgan and Reid yet? Make sure to put on pants,” to which she sent her a thumbs up emoji. She didn’t have much to say to her at the moment, barely even knew her sister anymore.
“It started off mainly in New York and LA but they send lieutenants from the old country,” Cramer went on, and she caught Reid scratching his arm beneath his shirt. She knew it was mozzy weather, and he was already under the blaring sun in a little sweater, it wouldn’t surprise her if he felt a bit prickly.
“Pahkans,” She interrupted, the man named Gideon shooting her a glance as she dug through her purse.
“Your Mom do much work about the Mafia?” He asked, as she produced a clear nail varnish.
“Here and there, I had to sit with her in her office for a whole Summer once when I got caught sneaking out. Picked up a few things, though,” She said, holding the polish out to Spencer, nodding to his arm, “Here. Supposed to help bug bites,”
He looked at her as if he wanted to say something, perhaps question her sources for such an old wives tale, but he stopped himself quickly, taking the varnish out of her hand with a dejected nod.
“Thankyou,” He muttered, shoving it in his pocket.
Three months he’d been in this rabbit hole. She had noticed it in a matter of hours.
“They open up branch offices in other cities. Baltimore, Saint Louis, Chicago, Dallas, the list goes on,” Cramer added, nodding at her words, “They’re mainly offshoots of the Odessa Mafia and they’re especially tough to crack from a law enforcement standpoint. I mean beside being well organised with sophisticated technical equipment, there’s Vory v Zakone to contend with,”
“The thieves code, eighteen principles they live by,” Reid jumped in before she could, to which she nodded as Gideon looked to her for more.
“It means ‘thief in law’, or ‘thief with code’. It's a system of repeatedly jailed convicts that have been crowned or ‘made’ with a strict list of ideals, breaking them usually means death,” She explained, kicking a stone between her feet.
“It’s like bible to these guys. We’re not gonna be turning any of them informer anytime soon,” Cramer said. Gideon seemed to tune the three of them out however, his gaze locking on the house across the street, where a curtain twitched, and a man’s face appeared in the window, watching the crime scene with guilt.
“Then we’ll need a witness who will talk,” Gideon replied, heading straight towards the neighbour who seemed just a little too invested in what was happening, much more than a concerned third party should be. Though, she had barely noticed, digging through her purse once more for chapstick.
“So, you study Russian or something?” Cramer asked as she applied it gently, Spencer swore he could smell the cherry flavour from where he stood beside her.
“I lived in Moscow until I was six, moved back to France, then back to Italy, then Algeria for a bit. Bounced around Europe for a bit longer, but I still speak better Russian than anything else,” She clarified, and she saw Cramer’s eyebrows shoot up, “Military brat except I don’t get the cool discount at the store,”
“You must have had a lot of friends though, going to so many schools,” Spencer added, and though there was nothing teasing about his tone, she laughed sharply anyway.
“You’re funny,” She snarked, but smiled at him anyway.
Spencer had never been called funny in his life. ‘Funny looking’, ‘funny sounding’ maybe, but never funny.
In fact he was so confused by what she had meant, whether it had been a taunt or genuine that he almost missed the sound of the whole street locking their front doors, dead bolting their lives away when a black prius, an expensive one at that, pulled through the street and swerved into park next to them.
“Guess who,” Cramer bit, her eyes ripping away from where Gideon had the door slammed in his face.
Detective Cramer aged by about five years when two tall men got out of the luxury car, opening the door for a shorter man in the back seat, their faces thunder.
“You familiar with them?” She asked, shoulder brushing against Spencer as she turned to watch the men approach, entirely aware of the .9mm on each of their hips.
“Arseny Lysowsky,” The detective identified, his voice cold, eyeing the two men who flanked the leader, towering over them.
“Agent Cramer, how are you?” Lysowsky smiled at him, which oddly enough seemed somewhat real, as he also took stock of the three other people around him. His eyes lingered on her for a moment, noting her lack of gun and badge, trying to decipher if she was local or just a very unprepared fed.
“Lysowsky, what brings you out?” Cramer asked, a tightness to his tone, his hand all too eager to grab his own pistol.
“I heard Chernuses had problems,” He kept it vague, didn’t reveal too much, and looked back at the victim’s house with a scorned frown.
“How did you hear that?” Gideon challenged, stance unwavering as the mob leader turned to meet his cold gaze.
“And you are?” He asked, a sinister smile on his face that flipped her stomach. She didn’t like the tension that had overcome the little patch of sidewalk they took up, and she was quick to notice how Spencer moved towards her.
He, by far, wasn’t the best shot on the team, but he was sure Hotch and Prentiss would have his and Morgan’s heads if any harm came to her.
“Churneses said they hadn’t told anyone,” Agent Gideon ignored his question, hands firmly planted on his hips. If he was unnerved by the criminal in front of him, he never showed it, not even when Lysowsky’s grin widened horribly.
“It is a small community. Word gets out,” He said simply, looking past him to the neighbours house that had kicked Gideon to the curb, “Are you a friend of Gorban’s?”
A second of silence passed between them, neither of them backing down from the moral standoff they’d engaged in.
“Mr Gorban wouldn’t talk to me,” Gideon admitted, and Arseny only smiled again, flicking a look at the house behind him, as if hearing his dog had obeyed without command.
“Would you like me to talk to him for you?” The threat was there clear as day, clear enough to have Gideon’s eyes narrow, “I can’t promise something will come of it,”
“You!” In a second, Natalya, the victim she’d briefly met when Morgan had pulled up around an hour before, had stormed out of her house, her black kitten heels clicking against the concrete, “Where’s my father? He has my father!”
“Wait a minute,” Derek called, restraining her where she stood, trying to pull his muscled arm from her shoulder, “Do you know he has your father?”
“He’s responsible for all of this,” She spat, her eyes cold as she glared at the three men with vitriol hate, “Why everyone’s afraid, him and his animals,” She threw a hand up to his bodyguards that seemed barely contained by Cramer’s silencing hand.
“I am only here to help,” Lysowsky replied, confident and calm in his words, though not as taunting as the agents would have thought, as if he truly cared for her.
A vast difference to the sadistic mob boss Cramer’s team had painted him to be.
“Help?” She laughed woefully, tears in her eyes, “You’re a dog,”
“Natalya,” Arseny said in a warning, the way a teacher would to a student, as her breath rattled in her chest through a weep.
“How exactly can you help them?” Bugsy braved to speak, Gideon and Reid both flashing her a look. She’d always had trouble holding her tongue.
Lysowsky turned his attention to her then, his eyes running down her figure, still deciphering whether she was armed; she looked much too young to be an agent.
“In any way that they’d like me to, darling,” He replied, the disdain in her frown clearly not deterring him in the slightest, though again the act of concern held up in his own grimace, “As I said this is a small community. If one is in pain, we’re all in pain.”
Natalya weeped behind Morgan, sniffling as the boss made his way over to her, “Natalya, [you didn’t have to bring in outsiders],”
The younger woman’s ears pricked up as he spoke in his native language, Spencer’s eyes flicking to her from behind his sunglasses.
“[Let me help you],” He continued, taking a step towards Natalya, unthreatening yet she saw Morgan tense, his fingers twitching towards his gun.
“[My family will never come to you for help],” Natalya hissed back, also in Russian, her face contorted in disgust, “[Get away from my house],”
“[You are not right, Natalya],” He replied, yet again the concern in his eyes was either genuine or very well faked, “[You have made the wrong decision],”
Taking a step away from the victim that wept with a scorned sneer, he looked back to the agents, noting the way the youngest of them glared at him hotly, before retreating to his car.
“What did he say? Did he threaten you, Natalya?” Morgan asked, the woman watching the group of men drive away, as if Mr Chernus wasn’t still missing and they hadn’t just bumped themselves up to number one of the suspects list. “Talk to us and we can do something about it,”
“He said I made the wrong decision,” She said wetly, frustration turning on Derek as he pushed her for an answer, “I hope I didn’t,”
With that she stormed off back into her house, the same stomping of her kitten heels in her wake, leaving the agents to all look between one another before they simultaneously turned to look at Bugsy, questions hovering on all of their lips.
“What did he say exactly?” Gideon asked without frills, a hand rubbing his brow. Relaying the information, the men’s faces all drew into frowns as they heard Lysowsky’s parting statement. Gideon huffed, turning to Morgan and gesturing for him to follow Natalya inside.
“Morgan, keep an eye on her, Reid and I are going to Cramer’s office to look over the files,” He looked at her then, worry lines littering his otherwise friendly face, damn near scowling as she looked over at him, “You are here to interpret, you understand? You do not speak to the suspects, that’s our job.” He growled, watching her with disappointment, the same tone a father used when scolding a petulant child, “Do you have any idea how much danger you could put yourself in? These guys won’t hesitate to take you out the second we’re not around, kid,”
“But-” She started with a bite, though her whole fight left her when he silenced her with a raised hand.
“Buts are for cigarettes, kiddo,” He interrupted, and Spencer winced slightly, knowing he’d heard that one a few hundred times when he’d first started under Gideon and had yet to mature entirely. Reid watched something rebellious flare in her eyes, and he worried for a moment she might just slap his boss for the patronising tone he took, “Just keep your mouth shut, you’re doing great so far,”
She opened her mouth to protest, only to then register his words entirely and stay silent once more, appreciating his praise with a guilty smile. For once, she listened.
–
The grandfather clock chimed to tell them it was merely 11am; two hours until the unsub would start cutting more if they didn’t get the ransom fee, two hours to figure out who wanted Natalya’s family to suffer.
Said woman paced her living room at the sound of the hour, as Bugsy picked over the knick knacks on her fireplace, a small smile teasing her lips when she saw a picture of three small children grinning toothily at the camera.
She had never gotten any photo’s similar, Emily being fourteen years older. The majority of their childhood photos consisted of a very grumpy teenager holding her baby sister that seemed to squirm in the tight, formal dresses Elizabeth Prentiss had forced them into, identical scowls on their faces as they were made to sit for the picture.
There were some good memories, ones where Emily let herself be a sister and not a mom, where she would put makeup on her for fun and do her hair, let her have all the clothes out her wardrobe she thought looked nice, reading to her before bed, even letting her sister keep her pet corn snake when she left home for good.
But now, it seemed like she was too caught up in her super serious grown up job to give a shit that her sister lived just an hour away. Still messaged each other for holidays, but the last few times she’d braved a call to the eldest Prentiss, it had gone unanswered. They argued the majority of the time they spoke, or there was an awkward long silence in between words, whichever was worse, but they each knew the other would come running if they were to ever need them so desperately.
“Are you hungry? I could make something?” Natalya offered kindly, Derek having a poke through her collection of books that sat on the end table, though he’d have a tough job reading them as she’d already caught most of them were in her home language.
“Oh, no thanks. I’m fine,” He replied with a small smile, putting down the books to calm the clearly on edge woman that looked to the twenty-something year old hopefully.
She shook her head, “I’m good, thanks,” which seemed to deflate her entirely as she sat next to Derek with a sigh.
“I guess I’m like my mother. When she’s upset, she cooks,” Natalya said with a sad huff of a laugh, running a hand through her short, dark hair.
“Yeah, mine does too. I think that’s just a mom thing,” He replied, and Bugsy felt the two of them look at her as her finger traced the old brass ornaments gently, “How about you, baby Prentiss?”
She snorted, “You’re kidding, right?” smiling bitterly, “My mom never cooked for us, she said we needed to figure it out for ourselves rather than relying on the staff. Didn’t stop her from trying to end world hunger though,”
It wasn’t lost to Morgan the way her eyes trained on the picture of Natalya and her mother, cuddled together with genuine love in their embrace, the snarky humour as she spoke, the same longing Emily seemed almost too good at hiding from them.
“Your mother is a great woman,” Natalya complimented, though she missed the way the girl’s face steeled over, chewing her bottom lip as if to stop herself from snapping at the woman who meant well. She said nothing. “Where is your mother?” She turned her attention back to Derek who seemed the more talkative of the two of them.
“Chicago. That’s where I’m from,” He replied, watching Bugsy turn away from the two of them to inspect more of the Chernus’s trinkets on their walls.
“I’m from Dolgoprudny. Just North of Moscow.” Natalya replied. Opening her mouth to add something else, she was cut off by a knock at the door and the three of them froze in their place.
“Are you expecting someone?” Morgan asked Natalya in a hushed tone, reaching for his gun and heading for the door.
She shook her head, “No,” She whispered back. Morgan pulled the curtain back the smallest inch to see a small blonde boy staring back, a box in his hands and a bored look on his face.
It all happened too fast from there, Natalya opening the door for the neighbourhood kid, opening the box to see a decapitated ear, the blood fresh and pooling in the bottom of the box. It couldn’t have been taken longer than an hour or so ago, unless they were keeping the parts on ice.
Bugsy’s hand slapped over her mouth, Natalya’s scream piercing through her as she shoved the box into Derek’s hands, fleeing to the toilet, and she heard the woman retching. Part of her felt the same nausea settle in her stomach, looking away from the body part with a wince as Derek got straight on the phone to Gideon.
“They didn’t wait, man. They sent a box with-” He swallowed thickly, “With Mr Chernus’s ear inside.”
Gideon replied, and whatever it was, it had Derek looking back to her. He agreed, hanging up the phone and rooting through his pockets, producing a set of rattling keys, holding them out for you between the tips of his fingers.
“Gideon wants you, kid. He said they’re at the Little Kiev restaurant, they’re going to talk to Lysowsky,” Morgan said, grimacing as he held the ear away from her, “You sure you’ll be okay to drive?”
“I’d rather be on the road than look at what’s in that box,” She said in disgust, taking the keys and heading out to the car.
She thought it best for everyone she didn’t tell him she hadn’t yet got her licence as she made her way over to the restaurant.
-
“Reid and I will do the talking, just see if anything he’s saying connects with Vory v zakone, think you got that?” Gideon instructed her the second she got out of the car, taking the keys and handing them back to Reid who gave her a small nod.
“We think the reason it was Mr Chernus who was targeted has something to do with the code,” Reid explained, his hands in his pockets as the three of them approached the restaurant, “You said earlier you understood the tenants,”
“Why me, though? I thought I was just translating?” She repeated Gideon’s earlier words, almost cocky that they needed her.
“Lysowsky would feel the need to show face in front of men like Morgan and Cramer, even in front of Natalya since she lives locally. Between the three of us, he had less reputation to uphold, less so with a young woman like yourself,” Reid added, holding the door open for her to go in front.
And so there she was, trailing behind Gideon and Reid over to where Lysowsky sipped a spoonful of borscht, as she tried not to marvel at the grandeur of the establishment inside. Clearly, Arsney had money to build a place like this, and wasn’t afraid to be flashy about it either, that much was apparent from the other clientele that tended to their beers around their own tables, Rolex watches and designer shoes adorning nearly every one of them. She hated to think of how many ears or fingers those suits had cost.
“Would you like something to eat?” He asked, a chunk of bread in his hand dipping into the thick sauce, seemingly unbothered that they were there, “This borscht is exquisite, it’s my mother’s old country recipe,”
“Didn’t you forsake all your relatives when you swore the thieves code?” Reid asked, which she guessed was hit foot in to get Lysowsky to talk.
“I didn’t forsake her recipes,” Lysowsky replied with a shrug, looking to her where she seemed to be staring at his plate, “Borscht?”
She shook her head, her nose wrinkling, “Much preferred stroganoff, mom used to force me to have borscht to make sure I ate my veggies,”
His eyebrows raised, surprise written over his face, before he gave a short laugh.
“[Where are you from]?” He asked in his mother tongue, gesturing for the three of them to sit down, though his eyes lit up as he watched her carefully.
“[I was born in DC, but my mother worked in Moscow for a few years],” She answered shortly, and he seemed to find it even funnier that the near child they’d brought along on their case spoke as fluently as he did.
Laughing with a heavy hand smacking on the table, he gestured to a nearby waiting staff to come over.
“What are you having then, borscht for the gentle man?” He looked at Reid and Gideon, the former shaking his head while Gideon nodded with an awkward smile.
“I’d love a taste,” He said, though any enthusiasm seemed to have drained out of his voice.
“And what is the little lady having?” Lysowsky asked, his eyes falling back to her, as she straightened in her seat.
She chanced a quick glance to Gideon, who nodded at her to play his game. She had not expected to be so deep in criminal territory when they’d said they needed a translator, and truly they hadn’t planned on getting her in the field until they realised she would know much more about this than they would.
“Do you have sharlotka?” She asked, returning his smile wearily as he clicked at the waiter who all but bolted to the kitchen.
“A sweet tooth. I like it,” Arseny replied, shovelling a heap of beets into his mouth, “Our favourite was always Leningradsky,”
“Ours?” She prompted, giving a polite thanks to the waiter who returned too quickly with a slice of cake. She caught Spencer glancing at the bowl with intrigue, the hunger clear on the quiet man’s face. Gently pushing the bowl and clean spoon towards him, he flicked a look up at her, “Apple cake,” She whispered, sending him a small smile, “Really yummy with the sugar on top,”
“Mine and my mother’s,” Arseny replied, though Gideon and Reid both caught how he paused before he replied, as if he had to think about the answer he was giving; the oldest tell that it wasn’t entirely true, “We didn’t have much when I was a boy, but that was always our dessert of choice,”
She stopped for a mere second, missing the moment when Spencer spooned the tiniest bite of the cake into his mouth, trying to ignore the way his tongue exploded in the sweet, fruit taste. He hadn’t eaten anything properly in days, and maybe that was why it tasted so good, but more likely it was just the fact that everything sweet tasted even better when he was on his come downs.
“We need to talk, Arseny,” Gideon interrupted, ignoring the way Spencer pined to go back in for a second mouthful, but chose to hand the bowl back to her with a small smile.
“We are on first name basis?” Lysowsky asked, shaking his head, and she took a small bite of the sweet cake for herself, “I still don’t even know who you are,”
“I think I understand something about this,” Gideon replied, his thumbs tapping together, the waiter returning with his borscht, “You have a problem,”
“I do?” The pahkan titled his head at the agent, the annoyance clear on his face.
“That’s why you came to the Chernus’ house this morning,” Gideon answered, unbothered as he began to scoop the borscht onto the spoon, the apple cake in her own mouth going down a treat.
She kept her head down, took tiny bites of the dessert that certainly tasted like a fresh baked sharlotka. But her thoughts lingered on what Lysowsky had said, about his own favourite pudding.
It made no sense that he would have ever tasted Leningradsky shortbread, not for the time that he was born, nor with the amount of money he claimed his family lacked. Infact, the way he fully pronounced his vowels, the akanye, the stress he put on certain parts of his words, all pointed to the same dialect you’d heard back in Moscow, more central than anything else.
So how on earth would he have eaten the so-called ‘Royal Cake’ that had only been made eight hours from there, in the town it grew its name from.
There was something glaringly obvious about his story missing.
“A man like me?” She tuned back into the conversation, swallowing another mouthful down as Gideon took another bite himself, though it seemed the topic had turned sour as Arseny wiped his mouth with the corner of his napkin.
“Four watchtowers and a convict signifies a stay in prison,” Spencer cut in, nodding towards the tattoos branded across his knuckles, “Each one of those crosses symbolises an individual sentence,”
“Twenty three years in prison in the Ural mountains,”
But she was still stuck on what it was she was missing. It had been such an odd thing to lie about, particularly when he’d even admitted himself that they hadn’t had much money, so he clearly hadn’t been lying to fake a reputation.
So why lie?
She was ripped out of her stumped silence when Natalya entered the restaurant, her voice grabbing the men’s attention immediately.
“Mr Lysowsky. You said you could help me,” She said, her purse over her shoulder and her own car keys gripped tightly in her hand as if she’d all but thrown herself out the vehicle to get there faster.
“Don’t you already have help,” Lysowsky snapped, clearly Gideon had dug under his skin enough to garner a reaction.
“I made a mistake,” Natalya replied, barely meeting Bugsy’s gaze as she stared at her from her seat at the table. “I talked to my father on the phone,”
The girl frowned at her, “That’s a lie,” It came out before she could hold herself, brows furrowed at whatever it was she was trying to pull. Gideon said her name in a reprimand, though he too was looking at the woman as if she’d grown a second head.
“Thankyou for coming, but I don’t need your help,” The woman met her confused look with a saddened expression, nodding to her solemnly.
Leave it alone, she seemed to be saying, there’s nothing more I want you to do.
And with that, the two of them left the restaurant, Natalya walking by his side obediently, her purse tucked in close under her arm, as Morgan and Cramer filed in from the parking lot, watching their only leads drive away without a fight.
–
The team were quick to head back to Natalya’s home, only to find the ear missing and the finger gone too, the only evidence left of any crime being committed leaving with the victim’s daughter herself.
“She’s not here, and the garbage was never taken out,” Morgan said with a grimace as he walked down the front steps to meet the four of them on the sidewalk.
“Her dad just went missing, surely we can cut the girl some slack-” Bugsy words were hidden in a huff, rolling your eyes at the man who cut a glance to her.
“No, no. When Hotch first talked to us, he said she noticed her father’s car in the driveway when she took the garbage out,” Morgan explained, his shades blocking the way the cogs turned behind his dark eyes.
“Right?” Reid asked, his own sunglasses now covering his eyes that winced at the brightness, surrounding them.
“Garbage can in the kitchen is completely full, she never took it out.”
“She lied,” Gideon said with finality, the penny beginning to drop for him too.
“She could be half way back to Dolgo-whatever by now,” Morgan scoffed, his arms smacking against his side as the lightbulb went off over her head, the final puzzle piece falling into place.
“Dolgoprudny?” Spencer asked, exchanging a glance with Cramer, “Isn’t that where Lysowsky’s from-”
“Yes, YES, of course!” She exclaimed, grabbing onto Spencer’s arm as he spoke.
He looked at her with wide eyes, not that she could see since his shades blocked the way, only to feel her shake him harder in the midst of her enthusiasm. Part of him wanted to rip his arm out of her grip, waiting for the sickness to crawl up his throat at a strangers germs touching him, but the oddest part of him reasoned she had the same germs as Emily did, that the fifty percent DNA the women shared negated the fact she was a stranger, just as it did when he met Jack. Jack had Hotch germs. Bugsy had Emily’s. He didn’t feel so sick thinking of it like that.
“I knew I was missing something,” She said, turning to Gideon, “He was lying before, about his favourite dessert. There was no way he could have had Leningradsky with his mother. Given his age, at that time in Soviet Russia, shortbread was incredibly expensive, only extremely wealthy families could have eaten it. That, and given the Central dialect he speaks in, I’d pinpointed he lives somewhere near or around Moscow, which means there was no way he was eating that cake considering it was only ever baked in one shop at first, one way up in Leningrad, where St Petersburg is now, like nine hours away from Moscow-”
“What’s your point?” Cramer asked, tired of the somewhat slew of thoughts she’d been saving until she knew for sure what she meant.
“Before when he said it was ‘our favourite’, I don’t think he was talking about him and his mother,” She explained, looking to see if Spencer at least understood what she was getting at.
“It was him and his own child…” Spencer finished, as Morgan’s phone began ringing.
“Yeah, what?” He asked, the frustration clear in his tone that they were all still without the evidence needed to pin it on Lysowsky, “You’re sure? Uh-huh. Okay, thanks doll,”
The four of them looked at him expectantly as he nodded to her, “Garcia just got into the bank’s system, somebody wired 500 thousand dollars into the account ten minutes ago,”
“Who wired it?” Spencer asked, though he was still reeling from the way she’d touched him, the way her voice went up about five octaves and a dozen decibels.
“She didn’t say, but the name on the account is Lyov Fulenko. She says that’s Lysowsky’s wife’s maiden name. Fulenko.” Morgan replied, and her brows furrowed.
“Why did she bring us into this?” Gideon asked, though the solemn look on his face said he already knew, “Because she needed to put pressure on the other victim,”
Gideon headed towards Mr Gorban’s house once more, though it was clear he had already sketched out in his head who was their unsub and Natalya’s involvement, he simply needed the confirmation.
Morgan clapped a hand on her back, “Nice job, baby Prentiss. Those were some mean profiling skills out there,”
She frowned at him, scoffing, “I’m not a profiler, that’s Emily’s job. It was just basic linguistics really; more a display of how I need to lay off cake for a while.”
The man kissed his teeth with a grin, “Don’t put yourself down. What’s your degree even in?”
She shrugged, picking under her nails for something to do, “Individualised genomics and health.” She said as if it were child’s play, though Spencer’s head shot to her.
“Biotechnology?” He asked, and she glanced at him with a nod, “What’s your thesis on?”
Gideon had returned by the time he’s asked, and began corralling the two of them back to the car, “We’re heading back to the restaurant. We need to speak with Lysowsky again,”
But it had fallen on deaf ears as Spencer looked at her expectantly.
“Just some new research into prenatal screening, nothing too fun,” She simpered, climbing into the back seat as he nodded with her.
“I read a fascinating paper on the uses of hCG in a woman’s body-”
“Reid,” Gideon cut him off with a short glance from the front seat, “Continue this conversation once we’ve found Mr Chernus alive,”
Spencer blushed, feeling like a kid caught in the cookie jar, “Sorry, sir,” He looked over at her, only to see her hiding a smile to herself.
He thinks it was then he’d decided Emily had been wrong about her.
-
“You paid the ransom already,” Gideon said plainly, the four of them trailing behind him as he followed Lysowsky to a small seating area in the front of the restaurant. She could tell the whole way Spencer had been itching to ask her more questions about her paper, barely contained as his fingers had twitched in his lap, but he seemed to straighten himself out once she’d reached the restaurant, “You paid all the ransoms,”
“Sit,” The boss ordered, barely glancing at them as he held his strong whiskey up.
“Are they going to kill Mr Chernus?” Morgan asked, cutting to the chase as Lysowsky spared him a bored glance.
“No,” He replied shortly, the look on his face about as grumpy as when they’d left.
“The account is in the name of Lyov Fulenko. Lyov is a man’s name.” Spencer input, crossing his arms as the boss glared at him, “A son’s name. Vory v Zakone. Never have a family of your own. No wife. No children.”
“Lyov,” He looked at her then, gesturing to her with the glass of strong liquor, “You know what it means?”
“The Lion,” She replied gravely, steeling herself against his dark eyes.
“No one else would be so stupid,” Lysowsky ran a hand over his weathered face, swigging his drink as if it was the only thing keeping him talking. “At first it didn’t mean much. It was a way of letting him earn his own money. I could afford it, it came from the fund. And no one questions the use of the fund-”
“Where is he?” Gideon asked, his elbows on his knees as he leaned in.
“What else could I do?” He was ignored, “I couldn’t admit I wasn’t blessing the kidnappings, I couldn’t even admit my son existed.” He huffed when he saw Gideon’s face unmoving from the glower, his question still unanswered, “Chernus will be home in a few minutes. You should be there, he will need medical attention,” He shooed them away, with his final words, drink sloshing in his hand. His face darkened, impossibly so, and the five of them looked at him, something sad and remorseful shining back.
“What are you gonna do?” She asked, though she had a feeling she already knew the answer.
“Vory v Zakone.” He said heavily, nodding to her, “We take care of our own troubles.”
It was a silent journey back to the Chernus’ house.
-
Morgan and Reid pulled up to the campus, the younger girl in the back seat almost dozing off with the rhythmic hum of the engine, the evening sun much nicer on Spencer’s sensitive eyes.
“This is you, baby Prentiss,” Derek’s voice jolted her out of the half sleep she was in, straightening herself from where she had her head pressed against the window.
“Thanks,” She muttered, rubbing her eyes and unbuckling herself as they did the same, assuming they wanted to walk her back to her dorm since it had gotten dark, “I’ll be okay on my own, campus security should be out by now,”
“You sure?” Reid asked, flicking his watch up to his eyes to see the meagre 6:13pm staring back at him, “I thought they started at 7,”
She blinked at him, her eyebrows quirking for a moment, “How do you know that?”
“Johns Hopkins was my backup option- well actually it was my third, I much preferred Caltech’s curriculum, Yale was my second-” He started, flicking a glance to her where she waited for him to finish, “Not that Johns was bad, there were just better- alternative options out there-”
“Don’t shit your pants, I’m hardly the dean of the university,” She chuckled indignantly patting them both on the shoulder before sliding over to open the door, “Nice meeting you both, I’ll just get back to my mediocre college with my poor curriculum, nothing like the solid gold bathrooms at Caltech-”
“I never said that!” She laughed again, with her whole chest, at his defensive tone as she stepped out the car, hand on the door to shut it behind her.
Leaning down to give them both a wave goodbye, Derek’s voice stopped her again, “Baby Prentiss, do us all a favour and enrol yourself into forensics, we need more people on our team,”
Smirking at him, she shook her head, “Very funny. Never gonna happen. I like my little slides and samples, thankyou,”
Slamming the door on the two of them she headed for the front gates, swinging her purse over her shoulder. She was stopped by a hand on her shoulder, and she quickly realised she’d been too tired to even realise a set of footsteps jogging after her.
Maybe she should have taken that walk home after all.
Whirling around, her eyes widened as Spencer had clearly not been leader of the track team as he was half out of breath just from the few feet he’d covered, though she reckoned she could have guessed that seeing his lean ribs beneath his shirt.
He shoved a business card in her face as he caught his breath, though it was more just his name and credentials followed by a phone number.
“I-I don’t have email otherwise I would-” He huffed, scratching his forehead as she frowned and looked at him.
“I’ve never been hit on via business card before,” She bit her lip with a smile, reading over the card again as he choked on his words even more than before.
“N-no, I-” He spluttered, ignoring the way Morgan beeped the horn for him, seemingly in a debate with a ticket metre that had caught him parked on yellow, “If you needed us for anything, or if you needed a second pair of eyes for your thesis, I’m happy to help,”
“You don’t have faith in the dummy that got into Johns?” She asked, and his head couldn’t shake fast enough, though he seemed to catch her teasing and shared her smile, “Thanks, Dr Reid,”
“Spencer’s just fine,” He said, giving her a small nod and a wave as Morgan’s palm bounced on the horn a dozen times. She flashed him one more smile, pocketing his number and heading back to her dorm, wondering what the doctor would think about the paper due in tomorrow she’d yet to get started on.
+1. The one where you get arrested.
The case had been heavy. They’d felt it in the car on the way back to headquarters. A little girl, molested and groomed by her own uncle, his own wife covering for him.
His mother always told him love makes you do crazy things, but Spencer hoped that whatever part of him worth loving would at least stay sane by the time he found the one. He was loyal to his team, to his mother, but that was where he drew the line. He was loyal to his family, undoubtedly so.
Yet so was Emily.
The call came to the second SUV, her phone set up to hands free mode, quickly flicking to answer the call on speaker, the other half of the team ahead of them on the freeway.
“Prentiss, speaking. Who is this?” She spoke clearly to the unknown number, her knuckles going white at the wheel when she heard a nervous laugh.
“It’s me,” Her sister mumbled through the speaker, “You wouldn’t by any chance be near DC would you?”
She huffed, cursing the knack Prentiss women had for showing up at the worst times.
“Can’t this wait, I’m on the clock,” Emily hissed, her finger edging towards the ‘End Call’ button, “I’ll call you after,”
“Wait, wait, don’t hang up!” As if sensing her movements, she all but screeched, “This was my one phone call, they won’t let me have another,”
The car went silent for a moment, Spencer’s eyes narrowing on the dash from his place in the passenger seat, JJ also leaning forward from the back with a frown.
Emily grit her teeth, her upper lip twitching the way it did when she was mad.
“What do you mean by one phone call? Where are you?” She bit in a cautious tone, though knowing how reckless Bugsy tended to be, she had a pretty good idea.
The hesitation on the other end of the line was palpable, as was the way she awkwardly cleared her throat.
“Fairfax County Jail,” She murmured sheepishly, “But it wasn’t my fault, these assholes don’t know what they’re talking about, I swear-”
“Stay there and keep your mouth shut,” Emily ordered, her expression furrowing into a sneer, “And for the love of god don’t antagonise the officers,”
The agent didn’t even wait for a response, knowing it would probably be something snarky, her mind already racing at what the hell her sister could have done this time, every worst possible explanation jumping to the forefront.
“I’ll call Hotch and tell him to turn around,” JJ offered, her fingers already searching her contacts for their boss, as Emily sighed through her nose.
“Tell him not to worry, I’ll drop you guys back to headquarters, make my way there myself,” She said, picking the skin of her nail softly with her thumb.
“By the time we’ve reached Quantico, visiting times will be over and she’ll have to stay the night,” Spencer pointed out, his own surprise evident. Sure, she had certainly been a personality when they had met, but a criminal seemed a stretch.
“Maybe it would teach her a lesson,” Emily mused, shaking her head to herself, “Who am I kidding, that psycho would Shawshank her way out of there by dawn,”
“You don’t actually think she would hurt anyone do you?” JJ said, the dial tone ringing out from the phone she held to her ear.
“Wouldn’t put it past her. She once cut a girl's pigtail off for wearing the same dress as her on her birthday,” Emily winced as Spencer’s eyebrows shot into his hairline.
“I thought getting swirlied was bad,” He muttered, watching out the window as Emily made a U-turn at the traffic lights. He and the now twenty three year old had been bouncing research papers back and forth for a few months, the odd one every week, Bugsy even once joking it was much more interesting and riveting than foreplay, which had his face red hot at his desk.
She was like that, he’d quickly realised, had a vulgar sort of humour about her, yet he couldn’t help the snigger that came out whenever he’d receive one of his papers back through the mail with pink writing scrawled all over his ideas. The little hearts that dotted her exclamations whenever she wrote “AMAZING!”, the odd time she’d written “sexy ideas, doctor Reid” which he’d come to understand meant it was really good. He’d even gotten back the drawing at the end of the paper of a stickman of the two of them, his hair a curly scribble and a purple tie which told him immediately who was who, her line of a hand pointing at his caricature with the speech bubble, “everyone point and wave at the smart man,” which had made him laugh.
She was odd, toeing the line between childish and witty, nothing like the scholars he usually worked with, and the writing he usually sent back on her papers were all in standard black ink, his own pharmacist handwriting staring back at him as he crammed in his every thought of her research into the margins. If she couldn’t read it, she hadn’t said, but he liked to think she took notice of it all, even if it wasn’t strewn with stars and doodles and the occasional flirt he knew meant nothing. He knew her from her writing, knew her from her ideas that sometimes kept him up at night thinking more about them, but the two of them hadn’t spoken directly, most certainty hadn’t seen one another since that day with the Chernus’.
Emily hummed, fingers drumming on the wheel, entirely unaware of the thoughts rattling around in Spencer’s head, then again that’s how it always was, “I just pray to god she’s listened to me for once in her damn life and keeps quiet,”
-
“Fucking bitch. The nuns in Moscow hit harder than you,” She spat, blood dribbling from her split lip. She wasn’t entirely lying, but god did her mouth sing with pain as she tried to muffle a moan.
“You got jokes, pig lover?” The other woman asked, a tattoo covering half her cheek, her nose crooked from the shiner the Prentiss girl had already given her. “Won’t be fucking laughing when I’m done, bitch,” The woman was quick to tackle the girl around her stomach, slamming her into the hard concrete of the holding cell. Bugsy felt her skull rattle, the wind whooshing from her chest as rough hands grab her shirt and pin her down harder.
The younger girl reached the nerve under her opponent's armpit, the soft of her ribs, twisting until the woman gave a bark of shock, and she took the opportunity to shove her off, climbing on top of her as they both scrambled for some sort of control.
“I got one for you. What’s got a broken nose, a black eye and doesn’t know what’s good for her?” She swung twice as hard, the other women in the cell rattling against the bars as if watching a matador taunt a bull, the air thick with excitement as the two of them cursed eachother out.
Emily’s sigh was audible across the room as the wardens separated the cat fight, the largest of the officers all but grabbing her sister by the scruff of the neck like a feral beast, dragging her over with stubborn feet to where the BAU stood in the lobby, eyes widened at the state of her.
“You better start acting your age, little girl. Mommy’s not gonna be around forever to save you,” The officer hissed in her ear, manhandling her over to where Emily glared daggers into the side of her head. She knew that look, it was eerily similar to mom’s that time she’d been caught sneaking out of the house, something in the warm brown of Emily’s eyes frosting over into a cold blackness. Fury.
She chewed her words for a moment, waiting until the man had turned around with a grunt of acknowledgement to the badge Emily had flashed to get his attention, before she spoke.
“She’s not my mom, she's my sister, dumbass-” Emily slapped a hand over her mouth, gripping her shoulder with the bear-like strength her jagged nails possessed when she was mad, the scoff of disgrace leaving her mouth as her team trailed behind the two of them.
“What the hell happened, baby Prentiss?” Morgan asked, ignoring the way Emily’s heated gaze turned on him, “What’s got you so worked up?”
“Don’t entertain her, Morgan,” Emily seethed, all but shoving her into the back of the SUV. She looked up at her sister with an open mouth, the guilt flashing in her eyes as she wavered under the pointing finger Emily jabbed in her face, “Don't you even dare,”
“But-” She stammered, cut off when she saw the glare intensified, if that had even been possible.
“I don’t want to hear another word from you for the rest of the day unless you’re prepared to give me a good explanation why I’ve dragged my team out here to save your sorry ass,” Emily hissed, and the girl’s mouth bobbed a few times, feeling the rest of the team watching as she got thoroughly chewed out.
“Wait-” Emily’s hand lingered at the car door, ready to slam it in her face as she rubbed her cuff over her chin, mopping up the damage. Her head tilted for a moment, hoping her sister had something good to say, only for it to be; “He just called you old, I hope you realise that,”
Emily’s gaze darkened, slamming the door shut with an anger she imagined her mother had kept warm for the past twenty three years, whirling around heatedly when she heard a snigger from one Derek Morgan.
“Damn, mama, hear the girl out.” He said, slapping a hand on the woman’s shoulder as he passed, heading back to their own SUV, “Maybe she’ll surprise you,”
If Emily was going to bite anything back, she didn’t. Instead she ran a hand over her brow, the group disbanding to their cars now the problem child had been picked up from daycare, except for Hotch who watched the older Prentiss with a scowl, despite the worry in his eyes.
“Hotch, I’m so sorry, just take it off my timecard, I’ll cover all the costs,” She said shakily, her own frown adorning her face as she felt herself blush from embarrassment under her boss’s gaze.
“I understand she’s your sister, but this was a gross misuse of agent time and resources, Prentiss,” He said, his gaze drifting to where Spencer sat next to the girl, pulling a packet of tissues and hand sanitizer out of his satchel while JJ rooted through her own purse for a plaster, “Don’t let it happen again,”
Emily nodded vehemently, flushed with anger, her palms sticky as she wiped them on her jeans.
“Absolutely sir. Believe me, this ever happens again, she’s on her own,” She replied, though they both knew she didn’t mean it. Emily would never.
He nodded stonily, deciding quickly that it was punishment enough that she felt so ashamed, he knew from his years of arguments with Sean what it was like to have a sibling stray so far.
“We can fill out reports in the morning, just get Reid and JJ home,” Hotch said, putting a tentative hand on her shoulder as he passed her to head towards his own vehicle, “And try not to kill each other in the company car. It doesn’t look good on paperwork,”
She beat off the smile on her lips as she got back into the driver's seat, the air that engulfed the four of them foul as she glared over her shoulder and into the back. Spencer twitched in his seat uncomfortably, his hand still passing over tissues to the bloodied girl.
“So, you gonna tell me what that was about?” Emily asked, her tone brittle and warning, not in the mood for any snarky response she could give, “Or is this old lady going to have to lay into you some more,”
The smell of strong ethanol engulfed her nose as she held the soaked tissue to her face, frowning into her lap silently and avoiding the burning stare as Emily stuck the keys in the ignition and started the car.
“Let’s start with why you were there,” JJ input, the same tone of voice she used as when talking to victims, calm and motherly, unlike the pissed off snarl Emily gave, “You wanna tell us why you were arrested?”
“You two really gonna pull the good cop, bad cop on me?” She snapped, her lip swelling around the wound, tongue grazing it softly despite the heavy taste of the sanitizer.
Emily said her name in a warning, her last warning, and she knew better than to push her luck even more, the SUV pulling out of the station and onto the road.
“I was just shopping for groceries,” She started, fiddling with the bloodied tissue, wincing under her tongue stroke, “Store clerk made a pass at me, I told him I wasn’t interested. So he put a pack of smokes in my handbag while I wasn’t looking; the alarms went off. I didn’t even know what was happening until security grabbed me at the door,”
JJ flashed a glance at Emily, like two parents deciding an appropriate punishment, the brunette’s lips straightening out into a line.
“You’re telling the truth?” She asked cautiously, glancing in the rear view mirror to see how her sister balled the mess of paper between her palms.
Rolling her eyes, she gladly accepted the other packet of tissues Spencer slid over the leather seat between them.
“I went out for milk and oranges, I was not looking to get picked up, Em,” She bit back, groaning when she felt it jostle the cut, “And certainly not for cigarettes, you know I only smoke on New Years,”
Spencer looked at her with a frown, and she caught his confusion quickly, pulling another leaf of paper from the packet.
“Emily and I had a rule after she caught me smoking when I was like fourteen, that we could have one cigarette between the two of us on New Years eve,” She explained, JJ also perking up to hear it, “So that by the time morning came around, it would be last year’s mistake, and it would be like it never happened,”
JJ smiled to herself, remembering the time she caught Roz sneaking one of her dad’s cigarettes on the back porch back when she was just ten. She remembered the little secrets the two of them kept back then, held them even all these years later.
“So how did that lead to, well,” JJ gestured to her lip, “That,”
“Yeah, didn’t I specifically tell you to not antagonise anyone?” Emily chimed in, signalling she was changing lanes as they headed down the freeway for a second time that day.
“Technically you said not to antagonise the officers,” She pointed out, before Spencer had the chance to, shutting his mouth as he caught the glare Emily shot through the mirror.
“Keep talking,” The older Prentiss ordered, as Bugsy sighed and blotted her lip some more.
“That woman, Mira I think her name was, anyway, she recognised me from that picture mom had us take on Independence Day, the one they put in The Hill, and she asked me if it was true my sister was a fed,”
Emily’s fingers twitched at the wheel, knowing the status agents and even people associated with agents held in prisons; knowing just being a Prentiss in a jail cell held a big, dazzling price over her head that said ‘kill me, kill me!”
The air sucked out of the car, a look passing between JJ and Reid as they thought the same thing, waiting for her to go on.
“So then you hit her?” Emily guessed, the bitterness slowly ebbing as she understood maybe her sister wasn’t as unruly as she thought.
“No, I told her to leave me the fuck alone, but she said you guys sent her brother down for something a while back, and she asked again if my family were all Pigs,” She picked her nails, the blood stain on her sleeve staring back at her, “I told her if she didn’t stop calling you a Pig, I’d make her squeal like one. And then I hit her,”
Emily tried to pretend she didn’t smile hearing that, her cheeks tightening, lips pulling down as she fended it off.
“Is that good enough, officers, or will you be needing fingerprints?” The girl chimed after a moment, a weight seemingly lifted from the car as Emily quickly realised she had, for once, not been entirely at fault.
“I want a handwritten apology to my boss for wasting his time,” Emily demanded, her unforgiving gaze softening when she saw her smile, “And you owe my team coffee,”
“I can do coffee, coffee coming right up,” She agreed, shoving the used tissues into her purse with a crooked smile, “It’s a date,”
Spencers ears turned red, looking over the seat at where she dabbed at her lip gently. She didn’t look much older for six months, but she had gotten her nose pierced since the last time he’d seen her, unless he just hadn’t noticed it before, and the streaks of red were slowly fading out into a blush pink that said it was old, and he wondered if she’d done it herself in that tiny little cubicle bathroom of hers she shared with the four other girls in her block.
“You finished your stats papers yet?” He made polite conversation, though part of him was dying to know out of curiosity if she could crunch numbers and equations as well as she could in her own labs.
“Got two more this week, they’re kicking my ass man,” She replied with a huff, and he didn’t think he’d ever been called ‘man’ by a woman before. He knew if he’d known her in college, ignoring the fact he would have been twelve, he would have thought she may just be the coolest person alive, “I miss my labs with my microscopes and watching all the little baby cells move around in the ethanol. Stats are like, just not sexy,”
He smiled at her as she stared out the window, unaware of the way she’d managed to make DNA sound like a play pen full of kittens. He held off from telling her he found stats really quite sexy, knowing it would never sound the same coming from his mouth.
He pulled a leaf of the tissues from the packet, producing his own pen from his pocket and began doodling carefully so as not to rip the delicate canvas.
Sliding it over to her after five minutes as Emily and JJ made conversation in the front seat, she didn’t care that the grin tugged on her split lip, the reaction was instant, she couldn’t stop it if she tried.
Two stick men stared back at her, her hair a close match in texture and a childish triangle drawn as means of a dress, a very tall stick figure next to her patting her metaphorical head, a speech bubble coming from his mouth.
“Maths is fun!” It said, and she flicked a glance at him, her smile the most genuine he’d seen yet. He just smiled back.
+2. The one where you graduate
Emily felt the looks on her the moment JJ had mentioned Maryland. The case was a little under their pay grade, nothing more than a stalker, no bodies or bloodshed, but one very rattled woman that had turned to the communications liaison with fear for her life.
With Hotch and Rossi in Boston helping a case of their own, the rest of the BAU had been twiddling their thumbs waiting for something to come across their desk.
“This case is in my hands now, and if we do nothing and something happens to her,” JJ took a heavy breath, her eyes lingering on the three names Keri had given her in case of her untimely death, “I’ll be the one notifying her family,”
Derek, despite his own hesitations about using their time for a case like this, caved the moment he saw the guilt on the blonde’s face.
“Okay,” He shuffled the papers into a pile, Emily and Spencer gathering their own resources on the case and standing from the round table.
Luckily, one government SUV was more than enough to carry the four of them for the hour drive North, all of them well aware Hotch would flip if they used more funds than necessary.
JJ piled into the front beside where Morgan climbed into the driver’s seat, leaving Emily next to a particularly fidgety Reid. It took all of fifteen minutes of the man flicking a glance at her, his mouth quirking as if he were about to use it, before he thought better and looked out the window, and the whole thing would start again.
Derek, the less shy about his thoughts of the two men, even glanced at her through the rear view mirror, before he too returned his gaze out the window silently. JJ shifted in her seat, knowing she had to tread carefully around mentioning Bugsy to Emily, particularly after the last time they’d seen her. Emily had said they’d grabbed coffee once or twice since then, but that was all she spoke about it, which left her team walking cracked eggshells at the thought of bringing her up.
It seemed the three of them were bursting at the seams with the same thought, and it wasn’t until Reid cleared his voice, his puppy eyes stuck in his loop, that she had had enough.
“Does anyone here have something to say?” Emily huffed, Derek immediately reaching to turn the radio up the same time that JJ flicked the AC on for something to do. Realising they weren’t easily broken, she turned to Spencer who already looked slightly guilty, thumbing at his sweater, “Reid?”
“Did you want to see your sister?” He asked without hesitation, as if the words had fallen out of him, “You know, since we’re so close on this case. It would be a good excuse to-”
“You did say she owed us a coffee,” JJ pointed out, spurred on by Spencer’s nerves, “Wouldn’t mind cashing in if we’re coming all this way.”
“Morgan, do you have anything to add?” Emily asked with raised brows, though she already knew what was coming.
Derek chewed over his thoughts a second, “I’m just saying, you only get to see your baby sisters grow up once- you know, and it couldn’t hurt to see her even if she runs rings around you with that smart mouth-”
“Shouldn’t we be focusing on the case?” Emily cut him off incredulously, but received three knowing looks back. She met JJ’s gaze where the woman had swivelled in her seat to talk to her, and Prentiss was fast to catch the buried grief in her best friend’s eyes. She knew it pained her to even bring up sisterhood, let alone watch Emily throw hers away for the sake of a decade and a half between them. It was the desperation in JJ’s face that did it, knowing she would give anything to spend just an hour with Roz one more time, that had her drawing her cell out her pocket and calling the contact with the little ladybug next to it, “Fine,”
As a profiler she would have been tempted to ignore the way Spencer smiled into his lap; as a sister, her eyes narrowed at him.
The phone rang surprisingly only once before she answered, and she heard an unnaturally tame version of her sister answer.
“Emily?” She asked, her voice hushed, worried almost, “You okay?”
Her brows furrowed, “Yeah, I’m fine. Are you?” She got no more than a hum in return, somewhat agreeing though Emily could tell clear as day she was holding something back. “Look, we’re gonna be in Silver Spring, I was thinking tomorrow we could grab lunch-”
“Can’t, I’m busy, it’s an all day thing,” Her sister cut her off, yet it wasn’t rude or demeaning like usual. Nervous almost, sad, “Sorry,”
“What’s an all day thing?” Emily asked, the concern matching her words.
Her sister swallowed on the other end of the phone, before she found her words, or maybe even the balls to actually speak, “I’m graduating tomorrow,”
Emily’s face lit up, the smile spreading fast on her face, ignoring the way Morgan’s words seemed to ring true in her ears; she was growing up too fast.
“Graduating, why didn’t you say!” She asked, the joy in her tone unmissable, “How’d your papers go?”
Spencer held himself off from correcting her that she’d only done five papers, that the rest of her results had come from theory and labs, thinking better than to interrupt the one conversation they’d had where there was no underlying argument brewing.
“Full honours, obviously.” Bugsy drawled with a snicker, and Emily shook her head, the smile never dimming.
“Look at you, y’little superstar,” Emily bit her lip, ignoring the guilt that tore at her when she realised she barely knew what Bug spent her days doing, “Did Mom and Dad get good seats? Oh god, dad’s not bringing Stephanie is he?”
The silence on the other end had her halting, the light in the conversation wavering for a second, before she understood the nerves, the quick defence her sister had been on the moment the call had been answered.
“Bug-”
“They’re not coming,” Her heart ached in her chest hearing it, “I sent Mom the details, she said she’s in Ukraine this week settling some papers. Didn’t even get a chance to ask Dad before he and Stephanie were off on their fifth honeymoon in the Bahamas until October,” A painful laugh echoed down the line, as if she were holding back the gravity of the situation.
“Bug,” Emily tried again, picking her thumb viciously, punishingly, hating herself for being so blind to her sister’s troubles, “Why didn’t you invite me?”
“I figured you’d be busy,” Came the reply, sad and tender, the most honest she’d heard in a while, “You’re always busy,”
“Never too busy for you,” Emily’s guilt tripled when her sister didn’t answer, knowing if she were to counter the statement with hard evidence it would only hurt both of them, “Look, I have some time today, probably,” She didn’t, not even a few minutes, “Why don’t we get that coffee, you don’t even have to pay,”
Bugsy gave a sad laugh, “Sorry, Em, I gotta get my dress fitted today, and some of the lab techs invited me to a party later. Maybe some other time,”
“A party with biology nerds?” Emily asked with false excitement, the air turned stagnant between them now, “Well, rock on, science freak. Don’t leave your drinks with strangers, and don’t walk home alone, and for god sake use protection-”
“Bye, Emily,” She said with a chuckle, the older of the two gracing her with the same, as they put the phone down.
The car was quiet, waiting for Prentiss to speak, none of them missing the way her lip pulled between her teeth, a bitterness on her face that told them she was holding in something close to sadness. You’re always busy. It echoed around her head, stabbing at her chest to think her sister was graduating alone, no one to congratulate her, no one to pat her on the back and tell her how clever she is despite the fact Bugsy would happily tell anyone just how smart she was on her own. Never too busy for you.
“She’s graduating tomorrow,” She said to the three people waiting for an update, Spencer’s brows shooting to his hairline. He hadn’t heard from her since her last paper got sent off, and why would he? They had exchanged a few little anecdotes and doodles, sent each other research papers to be graded like teachers exchanging lecture notes, “She didn’t even tell me. She’s gonna be alone,”
JJ grimaced, “What? What about your mom- or, or your dad, an uncle, someone-”
“Mom and dad are out of the country, Mom’s brother lives in Mexico with his seven kids, he can barely get a night’s sleep let alone a day off to travel up to Maryland. Dad’s sisters passed away when I was a kid,” Emily explained, running a hand over her face, “I can’t let her go up there alone,”
“So we don’t,” Spencer said, as if he’d never been more sure of anything in his life, “We don’t let her do it alone,”
-
“Graduating with Masters in Biotechnology; Jasper Adams, Tom Adamson, Kristen Afkins, Gavin Agriths-”
The dean read off the names of the students as she fiddled with the hem of her dress.
The dress fit beautifully, her make up done to near perfection, her hair styled neatly, she was graduating with full honours for christ sakes. Why couldn’t she just be happy with what she had? Why had she got to be so spoiled?
Lots of peoples parents missed their graduation, lots of people her age didn’t even have parents anymore, she ought to be grateful her mother was increasing famine aid in foreign countries, all the lives she would save, or even be happy her father had found a pretty, rich new wife to tour every known vacation destination with. Or even that her sister had called her just yesterday and told her in a few words she was proud of her.
But none of them quelled the feeling of loneliness that blossomed inside Bugsy. The kind that had always been there, the kind that just wanted someone in her corner, telling her she was doing pretty good for a kid who raised herself in all those big houses they’d moved to, who saw the au pair more often than her own mother.
All those rooms were so empty, the houses so quiet besides for her. It was like living in a cemetery.
“Robert Lewsinsky. Marcus Linford. Tara Lorence. Katie Macauley.”
P would be up soon. Each name of her classmates drew an applause, some whoops and screams, one family she swore there must have been ten of them in the back row cawing and howling like monkeys at a zoo, proud of their son for making it.
She willed a smile on her face, hearing Orla Parkins get called up, and she knew just by the steward that directed her where to stand in line she was close.
“Kenneth Patterson. Joshua Perriman. Harriet Pimms. Lauren Pintons.”
She held a rattled breath as Renly Prackett walked ahead of her, strolling over the stage to collect his degree, flashing the crowd a wide smile and a fist pump. She had always liked Renly, having been his experiment partner for a year, despite the fact he never washed up after himself in the lab.
Then it was, her name was called. The one no one but her mother and Stephanie ever called her, she solely went by Bugsy courtesy of Emily. It was a family name, a nice one at that. Maybe it had been the fact she had been eight and her cool big sister crowned her the new name, or maybe it just rolled off the tongue better, made her feel less like a Prentiss, that she chose to go by her monika.
She tried not to think about where or what Emily was doing, only hoping she was safe, as she began walking over the stage, her heels clicking loudly with her hesitant steps.
To her utmost surprise she heard a loud whistle echo through the auditorium, a group of jeers and screams of her name, even an air horn signing off that had her almost tripping over her own feet turning to see who it was.
Surely it was a joke, a cruel prank, she barely had any friends in her class. Acquaintances sure, but no one so bold as to make such a fuss over her.
Squinting down at the audience, her cap nearly slipping off her head as her head turned to the source, she felt her chest burst when she saw the dark hair and bangs, her sisters butchered fingertips in her mouth with a loud cattle whistle, screaming like a firework right to the stage where she graciously accepted her award, despite the fact she barely paid any attention to the dean anymore, more to her sister who smiled at her widely as she clapped. Behind her, her team she’d met on the off chance, the pretty blonde, JJ, who pressed the air horn a few more times, cheering just as loud for her. Morgan, the handsome one who had stood himself on top of his chair, cupping a hand over his mouth to scream “Kicking ass, baby Prentiss!” at her, ignoring the way other people stared wide eyed at them.
And Spencer, tall enough to be seen over the crowd even without the help of a chair, who smiled at her, clapping those big hands of his loud enough to reach her, his own whoops never ceasing even as she stepped off the stage to head back to her seat.
The rest of the ceremony dragged, a speech from one of the alumni and the exit music playing, but she simply grinned into her hand, where her degree smiled back at her, counting down the moments she would be allowed to stand.
And then she was fast walking down the stairs, amongst the bustle of students, the black gowns flurrying around her as she burst out into the square where parents, fiancees, brothers, sisters, cheered their loved ones, pulling them into tight hugs.
Her eyes scanned the wave of black hats, landing on two dark eyes, the thick sable hair framing the dazzling smile that awaited her with open palms. All but shoving her way through the crowd, she stopped in front of her sister, the urge to jump at her with a hug shying the moment she got close.
“Told you. Never too busy for you, Bug,” Emily said, pulling her in by her shoulders for a tight hug. She knew her sister wasn’t one to beg for affection, wasn’t one to let her guard drop so soon, but she also knew she’d needed it by the way she melted against her, the way she chuckled into her hair, pulled her closer.
“Do I owe your boss another letter of apology for this or do I get you guys for free?” The girl asked, as her sister pulled away, keeping an arm around her shoulder as they turned to the rest of the team.
“No, this one is entirely on us, promise,” JJ said with a smile as she saw Emily beaming maternally over at the girl, the flat of the cap knocking against her cheek as she squeezed her in once more, “We’re very proud of you,”
She heated under the woman’s words, wriggling in her shoes as bad as Emily did when she felt awkward, Derek chuckling and taking the degree out of her hand.
“Alright, lets see the creds, Prentiss,” He held it up next to her face as she shrugged, the ‘4.0’ clear as day next to her name, “Good looking, and smart. Those boys in the lab ought to watch out,”
She grinned under his teasing, “What can I say, I got the deep end of the gene pool,” She teased, feeling Emily swat her ear, her eyes falling to where Spencer held a plant pot with a poorly wrapped bow of twine around it, the soil a little displaced from the journey.
“This is for you,” He said, handing her the small green sproutling, his cheeks blushing as her face lit up, reading the small inscription on the front, “It’s-”
“Dionaea muscipula,” She said, biting her lip as she smiled at him, “This is so cool! Where on earth did- I had a paper last semester on the ways to study their electrophysiology you just have to read- oh thank you!”
“English, please?” Emily asked, though the warmth flooded her chest when her sister threw her arms around a very rigid Spencer.
Thinking she should grab her and warn her the man disliked touch almost as much as she does, she was surprised to see him give her a small embrace back, smiling proudly the way he did when he’d made someone happy.
“Piège à mouches Vénus,” Her sister responded cockily, tugging herself away from the tall man, to inspect her new plant, well aware that Emily rolled her eyes at her use of French, “Venus Fly Trap. I’ve never seen one so young, still I should be able to pull some slides on the Rhizomes in the soil-”
Emily put a hand to her temple, JJ smiling widely as she saw for once Spencer be the one on the receiving end of an earful, chuckling to himself when she began dishing out name ideas for the sapling.
“Holy shit, there’s two of them,” Morgan grumbled, nudging his shoulder into Emily who simply sighed, her migraine already starting as Reid began jumping in with his own thoughts, which didn’t take much effort.
“Don’t even,”
+3. The one where you’re taken hostage
“Tell us about the 911 call,” Spencer requests, flicking through the file himself beside her in the back seat. She had her own set of paperwork in front of her, her pen attached to a clipboard the lanyard around her neck reading her real, honest credentials, unlike the fake ones Emily and Reid were given. She’d been to one of these sects before, invited kindly as part of her research on the effect isolation has on cultivation of crops, knew one of the mother’s well from her last research paper, and had managed to get the group a foot in the door to entering the Separtarian Sect with little fuss.
Hotch, usually hesitant to allow outsiders in on the job, especially as young and spirited as Bugsy, had to admit it would calm any potential unsubs and make them see the team as unthreatening if they had a friendly face there. He’d signed the papers with a frown that morning, and they were on their way to the little apartment the girl occupied just outside Baltimore, sample tubes stuffed into her pack ready.
“I believe the he that they refer to is the church’s leader, Benjamin Cyrus,” Nancy, a woman from child protective services, replied from the driver's seat, Emily thumbing through her papers as they neared the compound.
“Benjamin Cyrus, no criminal record; no record of him at all actually,” Reid replied, watching Bugsy scribbling notes into her lab book, perfecting her report before she had even begun, “What else do you know about him?”
“The sect I spoke to before, the one in Utah, said he was rumoured to be practising polygamy and forced marriages,” The younger woman said, looking back at him with a frown, “They were much more modern in their beliefs than these guys. Last time I spoke to Marina she was happy there, I can’t see why she would want to move here,”
Spencer looked as if he were about to answer, perhaps to tell her he was sure her contact would be just fine, when Emily shrugged and turned to Nancy.
“Do we know who the caller is?” She asked, sipping her now lukewarm coffee out of the disposable cup.
Nancy’s head tilted in a so-so motion, “Uh, Jessica Evansen is the one who the age fits, but we can’t be sure.”
“Well given their view on outsiders, it would be best if you didn’t identify us as FBI.” Emily instructed, handing Reid his new, fake credentials and his gun she’d kept in her bag through customs. “Just use our real names and introduce us as child victim interview experts.” Nancy nodded, the compound coming into view, the dust flurrying under the car wheels as the road turned into nothing more than a sandy path.
A guard seemed to be expecting their arrival as he stood, unarmed at the main gate, unlatching the bolt in the middle and opening it wide for their vehicle to pass through. She nodded in thanks, her eyes flicking out the dirty window to see a collection of mobile homes surrounding a large church, a few smaller outbuildings dotted around the compound. It was quiet, not full of laughter like the last group she had been to, the children nowhere to be seen, only a few of the handier members of the flock that were either fixing up walls, trimming trees besides a man sprawled too casually on the steps of the chapel, a bible in his hands he seemed to be catching up on.
The car pulled to a stop in front of the man that barely batted an eye at their arrival, the safety locks flicking off each of the doors, Nancy collecting her briefcase and exiting the car first.
She had all but reached for the handle when Emily stopped her, swivelling in her seat to look her dead in the eye.
“Your job is mediator, you got that?” Her sister had never looked more serious, but then again she did know her almost too well, “You and your field research are a… buffer between our investigation and the unsub. Just try to take the focus off what we’re doing, but do not provoke anyone,”
She raised her hands in innocence, “Got it, jeez, what could I possibly do that could ruin this investigation?”
Emily stared back at her blankly, unnamused, as if they both knew there was a lot she could, and would, do that would blow the whole thing.
“You look like mom when you give me that look,” She bit back, leaving the car, as Nancy spoke to the man laying on the steps, “It’s terrible,”
“I’m looking for Mr Benjamin Cyrus?” Nancy reported, her tight, knee length skirt and blouse entirely out of place amongst the dirt track.
“You found him,” The man replied, still not so much as granting them a glance of interest as he flicked through his passages.
“I’m Nancy Lunde, we spoke on the phone regarding the allegation,” She replied, which was the only thing that garnered his attention as he looked up at them behind slightly bent reading glasses.
“Savages they call us; because our manners differ from theirs,” He said, though it was clear it wasn’t entirely his own words, more likely a segment of his preach he’d repeated a handful of times. Bugsy tried to hide her disgust behind her hand tightening around her lab books she kept tightly to her chest.
“We didn’t come here to hear you cite scripture, Mr Cyrus,” Nancy snipped as he approached the group, pocketing the glasses though he kept hold of the bible in hand as if it was part of his own arm.
“Actually it’s Benjamin Franklin,” Spencer murmured to the woman, which had Cyrus’ cold brown eyes narrowing at the tall man, assessing for a motive.
“Emily Prentiss, Spencer Reid. They’re child victim interview experts,” Nancy introduced them quickly, the two of them flashing their badges, the unofficial ones at least. Gesturing to the youngest woman, she introduced her with her real name, his gaze flicking to her as he seemed to recognise it.
“Marina’s friend? The plant lady?” He asked, face half amused as she fought her lip from twitching into a sneer. Instead she smiled, holding out her hand.
“That’s what they call me,” She said, shaking his hand, ignoring the way he flashed her a cheshire cat smile, “Hope you don’t mind me dropping by, Marina said I could take some samples for my research,”
He laughed, shaking his head, looking at Spencer, “Women and their flowers, right?” Spencer swallowed back a retort, shrugging his shoulders, though Bugsy’s eye twitched. Benjamin patted her on her shoulder, “Of course you can honey, I’ll find Jared, our head gardner, and you can run along for your research,”
He said it as if she were lying, that her degree and endless hours of work would only ever chalk up to a few doodles in a notebook, or a garden full of hydrangeas, or tulips, or roses, because she couldn’t possibly care about anything else but pretty flowers.
Nodding her head graciously, choking back the hateful response she wished to spit in his face, she gave him a polite thankyou, feeling Spencer’s eyes burning into the side of her head.
“The children are in the school as I indicated,” Cyrus said, turning back to the other three, Emily and Nancy taking off in the direction he pointed, the former knowing her sister was at risk of blowing a fuse if they were here for long.
Spencer hung back, partially because he had a plan of distraction in mind to allow the women a chance to speak with the children whilst Cyrus wasn’t around, partially because he didn’t want to leave Bugsy anywhere on her own. Sure, Emily had said they were both trained in self defence when they were kids, but with no weapon of her own, he was reluctant.
“You're using solar power?” He prompted, gesturing towards where the eight blue panels warmed under the Colorado sun.
“We’re completely self-sufficient,” Benjamin nodded along, catching the impressed look on both their faces, “Electricity, food, water. Ben Franklin said ‘God helps those that help themselves,’ you look surprised,”
“No, impressed actually,” Spencer replied, and he wasn’t entirely lying. The system was incredibly complex, particularly if they received no help from outsiders, for as many people as there were in the compound.
“Thankyou; for admitting that,” Cyrus said earnestly, flicking his gaze back to Bugsy who studied the solar panels, “I’ll go find Jared, he can take you to the greenhouses,”
Thanking him again, he led the way towards the school where Nancy and Emily had headed, as the two of them exchanged a look, Spencer smiling half piteously, wishing he could shake her and tell her just how smart she was and that Cyrus knew absolutely nothing.
He didn’t miss the way she walked closer to him, or how she thumbed the corner of her notebook, or how she looked back at him, biting the inside of her cheek. He thinks he might get slapped if he pointed it out, but Emily had the exact same tell when she was nervous, which is why he bumps their shoulders together in means of reassuring her he was still there.
It was only then she gave him any sort of smile back.
-
Jared, as expected, had been just as condescending and patronising as Benjamin whilst she slipped on her latex gloves, scooping no more than a handful of homemade fertiliser into one of her test tubes. It had been a partial cover, their story, but she had been telling the truth when she’d contacted Marina and asked if she could drop by. She’d been meaning to expand her field research in hopes of stumbling on a job opportunity since she spent most of her postgraduate days reading while her cat pawed at her leg for more treats than he deserved, the odd phone call with her sister much more common than it had been before.
She didn’t miss the way Jared’s hand fell into the small of her back as he led her back towards the school, after having noted down a few more readings, fussing over the state of the carrots that seemed to grow entirely naturally thanks to the systems they’d been smart enough to set up. He seemed rather bored by the whole thing, for a head gardener, more interested in staring at her legs as she leaned down to identify the fat black beetle that crawled along the rockery.
It wasn’t until they were halfway to the school that the sound of tyres on a dirt path met her ears, and she saw five armoured SUVs out the corner of her eye.
She hadn’t even the time to question what was going on, before Jared’s face dropped, the hand gently holding the soft of her back grabbing on her forearm hard enough to leave bruises, as he was dragging her to the chapel they had seen when they had pulled up.
Emily had said the rest of the team stayed in Quantico, if it wasn’t them, who was it.
“Whats going on- who is that?” She asked him lamely, her feet stumbling as she half fought his heavy hand off.
That was when the shooting started.
She thinks it came from the compound first, she’d seen two men stationed on top of one of the outbuildings, thinking nothing much of it, until she saw clearly now the assault rifles they bore, pointing it straight at the vehicles that drew closer. The whistle of bullets, bangs of the chambers emptying their artillery, and it wasn’t until she heard the doors to the SUVs start opening, more gunfire began hitting the wall ahead of them that she started running. Running fast, for the cover the church provided until she figured out just what the fuck was happening.
Jared all but threw her past the chapel door, where Cyrus and four other men were waiting, a heavy barricade in their hands, her chest pounding with adrenaline, she couldn’t help the yelp that left her as Cyrus whirled on her, grabbing her shoulders firmly and looking her dead in the eye.
“Did you know anything about this?” He asked, his calm demeanour cracking when she scrambled for a response, “ANSWER ME,”
“No-no not at all.” She shook her head, voice weaker than she’d like, but the sight of more guns in the men’s hands twisted any resolve she had, “Where are the others- the- the experts-”
“Take her into the tunnels,” Cyrus ignored her question, nodding at one of his men to grab her as Jared armed himself. She felt another callused hand yank on her upper arm, and part of her wondered if that was how men handled all women here, as if they were herding cattle, as she was dragged down into the catacombs below the church.
They’d made plans for a day like this to come, she realised.
Her heart constricted at the sound of bullets rattling above them, she hadn't been able to tell in that last moment whether Cyrus believed her or not as, nor whether she was being taken to the tunnels for her own safety or to be questioned harder about the gunmen.
She could only hope Emily was safe.
She felt her tongue too big for her mouth as the man all but shoved her into the bunker, the nervous chatter of women and children, some of the more elderly men, as they clung to one another for safety, the scathing remark she would have usually made about his heavy hands failing her as she scanned the room for her sister.
Emily was faster however, and she nearly yelped again as two bony arms yanked her into a hug, a rare one, and she knew by the blazer and the sigh of relief in her ear it was Em.
Usually she would bat her off, tell her to stop fussing like a mother hen, but today she embraced her right back, trying to note if her sister had any bullet holes in her before she allowed herself the same relief.
“Are you okay? Are you hurt?” Emily asked, the whole thing coming out in a slew of worry, and she nodded, pulling away as if she needed to see the proof in person.
Bugsy’s eyes were wild, as if she were a doe in a meadow hearing a rifle cocking near. No scratch that, she was a doe being chased and shot at and hunted, narrowly escaping being mounted on a wall.
“They were all shit shots,” Bugsy said, through a laugh she didn’t quite mean, “You would have done much better.”
Patting her sister on the shoulder, Emily finally released her when she realised the humour meant she at least had her head on her shoulders. Spencer watched her with meticulous eyes, knowing the shock that registered on her face, knowing it was the same one he wore when he first had shots fired at him. He saw her own eyes quickly check him over, satisfied with a breath of relief when she saw they were both fine.
“Where’s Lunde?” Emily asked, and she realised then Cyrus had followed her down into the shelter, two of his men grabbing handfuls of guns she had never seen before, likely imported out of country, and returning to the ground level, preparing for more shooting.
“It wasn’t us,” Cyrus replied, as if that negated the fact their recklessness had gotten the agent killed.
“What? You can’t shoot it out with the cops, you have children in here,” Emily seethed, her voice harsh and incredulous.
“I didn’t start this,” Cyrus bit back, looking towards his men as they grabbed boxes on boxes of ammunition, “I’ll take the front, you take the roof,”
And with that they stormed their way back through the tunnels, leaving the three of them to look between each other, knowing this could only end badly. Knowing the only people that could figure out how to get them out of this mess was the BAU, all 1,700 miles away.
–
They’d been in the bunker for fourteen hours when there was finally movement. The shooting seemed to have quietened down, in which Spencer whispered it was around 11pm and it was likely neither party had a clear shot. She’d managed to fall asleep leaning against the wall, Emily’s blazer draped over her legs. She’d regretted wearing cropped pants, despite how the shade of green complimented her eyes nicely, and she’d been shivering by the time she fell asleep, Emily’s hands stroking her hair gently as if she knew she was struggling to relax.
She hadn’t realised she was staring at her little sister, frowning even as she slept, which made part of her want to laugh, until she caught Spencer’s tired eyes looking between them, something knowing and warm in his gaze.
“You know, she’s always scowled in her sleep, ever since she was born,” Emily said, quiet enough it didn’t interrupt the hum of small snores, the odd baby cry that filled the bunker, but loud enough for him to smile at her, “She used to sleep walk terrible too. I’d find her in the kitchen trying to make pancakes with a cheese grater. It’s like that big brain of hers doesn’t know how to shut off,” Emily shook her head with a fatigue, rubbing her eyes.
“Was it weird? Being fourteen years older?” Spencer asked, his own hands shoved into his sleeves to try defend from the draught. Emily thought for a moment, her hand slowing for a second on her sister's hair, before she answered.
“I felt guilty leaving her in that house with my mom when I went to college,” Emily answered, Bugsy unconsciously tucking her face closer into the jacket, “I think part of her kind of hated me for it for a while.” She went quiet, the shame in her voice thick as the silence that encompassed them, “She’s never been very affectionate you know? Before her graduation I don’t think I’d hugged her in twelve years,”
Spencer held himself back from pointing out that she had been just as touchy with him since they’d met, and that maybe it was Emily’s own regret that seemed to shut the both of them down. He wasn’t one to rub salt in the wound, not since he’d gotten this job and learned to watch what he said.
He didn’t know what to say, didn’t want to give her advice, knowing the whole subject of their slowly repairing relationship was a sore one. He had no siblings of his own, had a mother who loved him despite how much she grappled with her own mind, and he had only known the girl briefly enough to consider her a friend at a push.
“I always thought the two of you were similar,” Emily chose to continue, offering him a small smile. He returned it, his face blushing at the fact that was a huge compliment to him, “Granted, you roll your eyes at me less and don’t act like I’m dumb, but you remind me of her,”
“Thankyou, I wish that were true,” He replied, eyes flicking to her sleeping form, the way her eyebrows were indeed scrunched in a permanent frown. He wondered if she was actually angry, or if she was just thinking hard, perhaps her dreams were full of equations or labs she needed to sort through. Either way, he wanted to know. “She’s much cooler than I’ll ever be,”
Emily snorted, shuffling against the wall to cosy herself, “That’s one way to put it,” She said, smiling over at him as he did the same, his head resting against the wall, Bugsy’s legs stretching out to knock against his feet, and he didn’t mind that she scuffed the bottom of his already dirty trousers. “Get some sleep,”
And so they did.
–
Cyrus had corralled the whole flock into the church, where the shooting had stopped and the bodies had been removed, stating at the break of dawn that there was a hostage negotiator coming in to make sure everyone was safe before they made any deals.
She sat next to Spencer, the three of them stiff from their sleeping arrangements, and her stomach churned with hunger. It had been over 24 hours since they’d gotten here, and besides the small bit of bread and water Cyrus gave everyone for breakfast, she was starving.
“Remind me to never leave the house, ever again,” She grumbled, as everyone waited in the pews for the negotiator to arrive, “My cat is gonna be pissed I’ve not fed him,”
“Since when did you get a cat?” Emily inputted from the other side of Reid, keeping one eye on the door in case any agents start shooting again.
The girl shrugged, “I got lonely, there’s not much to do now I’m not studying anymore,”
Reid watched how she clutched her stomach, feeling his own complaining at the lack of nutrition, “Morgan wasn’t lying when he said you should sign up for the academy. We could always use the help, we wouldn’t have solved that case in Baltimore without you,”
She snickered, nudging his foot with her boot, “You’re being modest, you would have done it just fine,”
He was a little, wasn’t surprised she called his bluff either. “Okay, so probably yes- but it would have taken us a whole lot longer. Mr Chernus likely would have died,”
She shook her head, glancing at Emily who watched her carefully, “That was all you guys. I just translated.”
Emily and Spencer exchanged a glance, leaning back in their uncomfortable seats calmly.
“You’re probably right,” Spencer said, dusting the dirt off his trousers, “Probably couldn’t handle it, high intensity mind games and such,”
She blanched, looking at him as if he’d grown a second head, not knowing him to be so brutally honest, realistic yes, but not bordering on rude.
“And it’s a lot of work,” Emily jumped in, her mouth a straight line, “I don’t know if you’d be dedicated enough,”
Bugsy scoffed, indifferently. “I have a masters degree, I was offered a scholarship to do a PHD, asked to be an assistant professor at Yale, I can work hard, Emily,” She snipped, and perhaps she was particularly just hangry or they had struck a nerve with their doubt, “and I could do it if I wanted to, I’d have the best shot they’d ever seen, guaranteed- mom made me take lessons when you left- trust me I could do it-”
She shut up when she saw their small smile exchanged, as if she’d told them a joke, or moreso they’d had the same identical thought and that alone was hilarious.
Scowling at them, she looked from where Spencer looked almost, almost, guilty at making her the butt of the joke, to where Emily had a ‘told you so’ smirk, and she kissed her teeth at their childishness.
“Are you guys reverse psychology-ing me? Seriously, so original guys,” She snapped, crossing her arms and straightening herself in her seat, ignoring the snigger that passed between them.
“You’re not wrong though,” Emily replied quietly as Cyrus walked past them, his eyes falling to them with a frown. Bugsy kept her head down, heeding Emily’s warning of not provoking anyone, and Spencer eyed the way she leaned closer to him.
If she was going to retaliate, whether agreeing or not, she stopped herself, the doors the church opening and an older gentleman walking through the doors, arms full of supplies she’d figured must have been part of the negotiation. He was patted down by an armed guard, searching for his own weapons do doubt, or a wire perhaps, as he handed the box over to another who took it without a thankyou.
“Rossi,” She heard Reid whisper beside her, and from the look he shot Emily and Spencer she gathered he was from the BAU, just as they’d expected. His eyes fell on her, softening as alot of Emily’s team did when they saw the two of them, as if they were picking her face apart for the tiny ways in which she resembled their Prentiss, or maybe it was the way she curled up in her seat, tired, hungry, on the defence. He just looked sorry for her.
“The children,” Cyrus said with no greeting, the air between them particularly frosty. He gestured towards the three of them, though Rossi had already clocked their tired faces staring at him with worry, “And our guests,”
She saw him trying not to react, guessing they had not let it slip to Cyrus he worked with the two undercover FBI agents, looking away from them as if the sight of their forlorn figures was enough to turn him sick.
Judging by the way Cyrus and he spoke quietly, tensely, Bugsy just hoped they had a plan to get them out of here soon as he soon left with a rigid handshake to the man keeping them hostage.
–
The three of them had been moved to a backroom a few hours later. Her stomach ached, the little sustenance Rossi had brought being distributed to the community before they’d been offered anything, which hadn’t left much. Reid and Emily had tried to get her to take some of their sharing, and despite how her insides cried out for it, she declined, stating they would be more use than she would; that they needed their strength more than her if they were going to get out of here alive.
The two of them hadn’t liked that answer judging by the frowns on their faces, but they sat in their seats with little fuss as they waited for things to quieten down after Cyrus’ staged “mass suicide” that had turned out to be nothign more than a test of loyalty and grape juice.
They had been sat in silence, aside from her foot bouncing on the floor impatiently, as she picked at the threads on her pants, the material uncomfortable on her skin after a day of wearing it. The door slammed open, Cyrus entering the room with nasty scowl. She didn’t know what had changed in the man in a matter of hours as he stormed over to them, two of his men behind him, loaded rifles in their arms.
This was not good.
“Which one of you is it?” He asked almost too calm for his demeanour, his eyes flicking between the three of them, where Emily attempted to brush her hair using her fingers, Reid played with the hem of his cardigan, an she sat beside him, resting against the cold stone wall behind them, her eyes narrowing at his furious expression.
The three of them remained silent, waiting for him to explain more, though clearly it was not the answer he was looking for as he threw his jacket open, revealing a loaded pistol tucked into his jeans. Drawing it into his dominant hand, her body tensed up, her back straightening like a rod as she looked up at him through fear.
“Which one of you is the FBI agent?” He repeated in that same calm tone, and her heart fell through her stomach.
She opened her mouth to say something in retaliation, though the way she saw his hand shaking with fury, she knew it was better to stay quiet in case her voice would be the final straw that made him trigger happy.
“Why do you think one of us is an FBI agent?” Spencer replied softly, and if he was panicking even a fraction amount she was he held it back, though his eyes flicked to Emily.
But it was a tell. The smallest movement alone was a tell he was lying, or perhaps it was the fact he’d answered a question with one of his own, distracting from the attention on them with the unsubs own answers. Maybe his quiet and calm showed how trained he was for a situation like this, showed he had gone up against bad guys before and won.
Whatever it was about him, it had Cyrus cocking the barrel of the gun straight at Spencer’s temple.
“God forgive me for what I must do,” The preacher murmured, his finger moments away from the trigger, when she lurched forward in her seat, hand shooting out to grab his wrist deathly tight.
“It’s me,”
She hadn’t realised she’d said it until the room went quiet. She thought for a moment it had come from Emily, Emily had always been the braver of the two of them, but it wasn’t until Cyrus’ unforgiving, dark gaze fell to her where she froze in her spot, that she understood her mouth had been the one moving.
Emily looked as if she was about to vomit, Spencer looked dumbfounded, but all she could do was stare back at Cyrus as if to will herself not to back down, knowing all three of them could fall victim if she gave them reason to doubt her; he could kill all three of them just to be sure the mystery agent was dealt with.
“It’s me,” She repeated, voice stronger this time, and she felt her chest relax just the tiniest amount as he turned the gun away from Spencer’s head.
He stared back at her for a moment, before the weapon smacked across her face in a sharp whip, her cheekbone crying out in a sting she knew was going to bruise.
He grabbed her hair at the nape of her neck, yanking her into a stand hard enough she yelped, despite not wanting to give him the satisfaction of the torture.
“Watch the other two,” Cyrus barked, dragging her out of the room as she squirmed under his hand, feeling it only tighten into an unforgiving pull.
She barely caught Emily bolting out of her seat to yell at the other men, all but fighting in their heavy grasp to follow wherever it was he was taking her, only for the door to be slammed shut behind them.
It was only then she realised how fucked she truly was.
–
She struggled to breath through the blood clotting in her nose. She didn’t think it was broken, not that she could check where her hands had been tied to the bedpost, tape over her mouth to stop her calling for help, her feet bound. She’d done nothing but give him hell as he’d been laying into her, keeping her cries and groans of pain silent as he’d kicked her in the ribs hard enough to know he’d damaged something at least.
She’d not made it easy for him to tie her down, worried about what they were planning next, she’d managed to headbutt him in the mouth, and the way he clutched at his jaw when he’d left gave her a sick satisfaction, though her temple now hurt more than she’d like to admit. But they’d only covered her mouth after she’d screamed obscenities at them for an hour or so, hoping to attract attention, hoping if the BAU were on their way, Emily and Reid would be able to find her fast before they could dispose of her.
Bugsy didn’t want to go like this. Tied up like cattle, gagged and beaten, the spirit kicked out of her as the dehydration gnawed at her limbs, making her too weak to even try wriggling out of the binds.
She felt herself dropping off to sleep, or maybe it was a concussion, he’d slammed her face into that mirror quite viciously, she wouldn’t be surprised if it had rattled her head around. Fighting with her eyelids to stay open, she jumped in her battered skin as the door unlatched, and she thrashed on the rickety bed to get away from the impending second beating.
But it wasn’t Cyrus. A fawn haired woman entered, her eyes falling on the girl on the bed, where blood trickled down her cheek, pouring from her nose like a thick liquor. Frowning, she was on high alert as the woman approached, a small, damp cloth in her hand.
“Relax, I’m not going to hurt you honey,” She hushed, approaching the young girl. Bugsy didn’t believe her for one second, her head pulling away from her as far as it could, her eyes wild and distrustful as the woman kneeled down beside the bed. “I’m Kathy,”
Bugsy debated jabbing an elbow in her face then and there, telling her in few words to stay as far away from her as possible, that the moment she was free she didn’t care who she hurt; she was getting out of here even if she had to crawl.
“That woman’s your sister right?” The blonde said, and the words stopped her heart for a moment, giving the woman the chance to run the cloth over the dribble of blood, “Emily,”
“Where is she?” She tried to ask, but the gag made it little more than a muffled cry, the woman’s eyes turning down in sadness. Pity. Bugsy hated every second of it.
“She’s okay, she’s worried about you though,” Kathy said, wiping under her nose, making her wince at the feeling, “Put up a hell of a fight after they took you away,”
She must have rolled her eyes, or perhaps it was just telling on her face that that didn’t surprise her as the older woman wiped over the superficial cut on her forehead she hadn’t realised was deep until the cloth went over it and she yawped like a dog having it’s tail pulled.
“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Kathy cooed, and she seemed genuinely guilty as she did. She tutted, shaking her head, fighting the urge to smooth the girls hair down the way she did when her own daughter was upset, “Emily said they’ll be coming for us at 3am, Cyrus has a mass suicide planned but they think they can stop him, you just have to hold on a little longer honey,”
“I want to see her,” Bugsy tried to talk again despite her mouth being covered, only for it to come out unintelligible once more. Huffing, she resigned herself to glaring at the ceiling, biting back frustrated tears. Kathy seemed to want to say something else, but thought better of it as the twenty something year old turned away from her to stare out the window, as if she were being dismissed.
Sighing, she rose from the bed and headed for the door, praying the FBI would get them out in time, before Cyrus put his plan into action.
–
Bugsy didn’t start panicking until it hit 2:50. She’d managed to kick the small analogue clock on the beside into working, the red numbers seeming to take a millenia to change over.
Yet it wasn’t until 3am neared, and the hallways remained silent, did she start to wonder if Kathy had been telling the truth at all. What if they had found out Emily and Reid were FBI and not her? What if they’d already been caught?
She really had wanted to see Emily, wanted to scream at the woman, who had meant well, to bring her sister to her or she would make every damn bible basher in this compound regret the day they were born. She felt helpless. She despised feeling helpless.
It was only when she heard shots rattling from outside did the cold fear set in. 2:52. Any minute now.
It was then an even worse thought struck her. What if they didn’t bother to come for her? Reid and Emily were safe downstairs, at least that was how Kathy had made it seem. If they got the women and children, the agents out first, she wondered if they would leave her for last since she wasn’t their top priority.
2:53 stared back at her.
At least Emily would make it. She was more important, had more going for her. She was supposed to be an only child anyway, mom had said it herself. Bugsy was the product of a failing marriage and a shared bottle of 1896 Bourbon that had been a wedding gift they’d never opened.
2:54.
She could have sworn she tore something the way her head snapped to the door as it swung open on its hinges, as if two large men had thrown their weight into it. But it wasn’t two men at all, just one frantic Derek Morgan with an FBI grade assault rifle.
The relief in his eyes was immediate, and he pulled a pocket knife from his boot, rushing over to where she lay, almost in shock, wondering if he was real at all, her heart pounding as she heard shouting in the corridor.
“I’m gonna get you out, kid,” The man promised, slinging his gun over his shoulder as he sliced through the rope on her ankles, her eyes trained on the 2:55 that watched them as if to laugh at them.
She whimpered, cursing behind her gag when she heard footsteps pounding through the hallway, and she was sure they were going to get caught. She thought then it would have been better if they’d forgotten about her, that at least Derek would have been safe, and he could have made sure the children got out safely, could have gotten Spencer and Emily medical.
Derek whirled on the doorway the same as she did as a tall figure all but skidded around the corner, his legs weak as hers felt, too long and not at all built for running. Clumsy almost.
Spencer. She should have known from the way he looked white as a sheet the moment he saw her it was him, but maybe she really did have concussion, as it seemed within moments he was fussing over her face, tearing a little too sharply at the tape over her mouth.
She thinks she groaned, or maybe cursed him out, as he started apologising immediately, his eyes a puppy kind of sad as she stared up at him, Derek handing him the knife to cut her arms free.
He was talking, but she couldn’t make a lot of it out, just that he was really sorry, it was 2:56 now. It was like her brain switched itself back on when she realised she was free, and the two of them were trying to haul her to her feet.
“Come on, princess, we gotta get out of here,” Derek said, as Spencer looped an arm around her waist, helping her limp across the room where her weak limbs did little to hold her upright, her ribs throbbing with every step, “We managed to stop Cyrus from detonating it manually, but the circuits are all still live,”
Morgan took the lead with the rifle, knowing some of Cyrus’ men had stayed to look for them, that they would go down with the building even though he’d already shot their leader the moment they’d breached the front door, because that was how loyal they were. They’d proven so already with the wine.
She kept her groans behind tight lips as they made it down the stairs, knowing Spencer didn’t mean to hold her bruised bones so tight, that he was just worried and her legs were doing the bare minimum to keep them both moving very fast. It wasn’t until they made it within a few feet of the door that they seemed to pick up the pace.
And she saw why.
Jesse, Cyrus’ child bride that had been the reason they’d come here in the first place was holding the detonator, her face tear streaked at the sight of her husband and prophet dead on the floor, the people responsible all but dragging a lame girl through the foyer and to the doors as if they hadn’t killed a handful of her flock tonight.
Bugsy saw the moment Jesse decided she wanted vengeance on them, but then, she guessed Spencer had already acted as he slung one of her arms over his shoulder, yanking her out the front door in a matter of seconds as Morgan pulled up the rear, and the two men shoved her down behind the small wall outside the church steps.
Bugsy expected the bang to be louder as the rubble flew over their heads, the floor shaking with the impact of the bomb detonating, and it was then she realised one of Derek’s large warm hands held her head into his shoulder, protecting her already rattled skull as best as he could. Spencer had done the same, throwing half his body over her back as he covered his ears, the two men tucking into the wall tightly and waiting for the dust to settle.
Spencer started coughing first, though his position over her never faltered, and she heard his chest wheezing, and knew they needed to move away from the thick smog that blew into their faces. Morgan released her ear, tipping her head back to check her over once more.
“Kid! You okay?” He fretted, noticing the way her nose had started bleeding again from all the movement; the way the bruise had already started blotching her cheek from where Cyrus pistol whipped her.
“I didn’t think you’d come for me,” Was all she could say, and Derek thought it was the saddest he’d ever heard her.
Reid was pulling her to her feet then, where he was still hovering over her, despite the fact the blast had already cleared, still sputtering and hocking up a lung, but it didn’t stop her from throwing herself at his middle, burying her face in his dusty sweater, not caring one bit if he jostled her aching ribs.
He was trying to be gentle with her as he squeezed her back, but she knew by the way he pressed his face into her hair he needed it just as badly.
“You saved my life,” He said, his long arms wrapping around her waist, hauling her whole body against his.
She laughed through a cough, their cheeks brushing past one another as she pulled him in tighter, thankful, relieved.
“You saved mine,”
And then she heard Emily. Emily, who sounded frantic and heartbroken as she called for her, her voice breaking as if she was crying, or atleast on the verge of, and as comforting as Spencer’s long arms around her cracked ribs were, she needed to see her sister was okay.
Ripping herself from his embrace immediately, she tore off after the sound, and there she was. Her older sister, who had always seemed immovable, like she wouldn’t so much as budge for a bucking horse, like water couldn’t drown her, or however many unsubs she’d faced could stop her from catching them. Her older sister, who looked like she’d taken a few punches of her own, judging by the blood on her blue blouse, that looked around the crowd of fleeing people with watery eyes and a shaking bottom lip.
“EMILY,” She yelled, her voice a bleat, a lamb calling for its mother, as she sprinted down the steps, whatever strength she had left carrying her to where Emily was rushing towards her, taking the stairs in threes, “EM-”
She crashed into her sister’s chest, and it was only then she started crying.
“I swear I’ll never give you trouble again, I’ll never talk back, I’ll never be a bitch ever again-” It was all a slew of mumbles against her sisters shirt, that was beginning to wet through at the rate the tears were coming, “I thought he was going to shoot you-”
“I was so scared, Bug, oh my god,” Emily murmured into her hair, squeezing the life out of her baby sister that sniffled and sobbed, “You don’t ever, ever do that to me again,”
Bugsy shook her head, clawing at Emily’s back as she pulled her closer, feeling Emily stroking her hair softly to calm her even in the slightest. They stayed like that until she managed to wrangle her sobs into little sniffs, the fire burning her eyes where it burned the rest of the church to ashes.
She stayed with Emily for a month after that.
+4. The one where you leave the altar.
She knew she was turning heads, walking down the street of a drizzly day in Virginia, hair wet and sticking to her face, makeup running down her cheeks, and the sodden, dove white wedding dress clasped in her hands as she paced towards the government building.
Whether the guards recognised her as the Ambassador’s daughter, or whether they really didn’t want to get into it with a bride looking like that on her day, she didn’t know, but they opened the door for her nonetheless, exchanging raised brows as a trail of wet followed her gown over the marble floors.
Heading up the desk, she flashed her driver's licence, which was enough to gain her a visitors pass she didn’t bother putting to use as she headed for the elevator, her ballet pumps squeaking under the body of the dress. Waiting for the doors to start closing when she finally let a few tears slip, burying her face into her cold, drenched palms, undoubtedly making the mess of mascara even worse.
Her heart gave a leap when she heard someone stop the doors, hoping she could get to her sister with little delay, and she quickly wiped her face with whatever was left of her pretty, dobby cloth shawl she had yanked on before she’d ran.
Whatever excuse she was about to give, whatever one liner she was about to drop to clear the awkwardness this agent was about to walk in on was sucked out of her when she saw Spencer staring at her, his briefcase in his hands he’d used to hold the doors, a wide eyed look plastered on his face as soon as he saw her state.
“Bugsy,” It was somewhere between surprise and sadness, jumping into the elevator before the metal could shut again, the button for the sixth floor already lit up in a ring of red, “What are you- I didn’t even know…”
“Spencer!” As seemed to be a common occurrence between them now, she threw two very cold arms over his shoulders, tugging him for a hug he quickly reciprocated, feeling like she needed it in the moment, “It was so awful, I just couldn’t all those people staring at me, and he- I just feel so-”
“Hey slow down,” He soothed, slipping his favourite cardigan off his body to put over her shoulders, ignoring the way he cringed as it quickly got sodden, “Let’s get you to Emily, I’m sure we can fix this,”
She nodded, though he could tell she was still shaken up, the elevator dinging to a stop on the fifth floor where an agent looked ready to step in, his face dropping when he saw the sight.
“Sorry, we’re full,” Spencer said, with little room for discussion, pressing the button to close the doors once more, and taking her by the elbow as she began shivering, “We’re gonna be just fine, you look beautiful,”
She laughed sadly with a roll of her eyes, the tears sticking to her cheeks. She knew she looked no better than a drowned rat, windswept and disgruntled, her dress full of muck from the street.
“Thankyou, Spencer,” She mumbled, the door sliding open to the sixth floor, where Penelope and her everlasting smile greeted her favourite boy genius.
She almost dropped her glitter pen when she saw the woman stood next to him looking like Dorothy dragged through the twister.
“Oh you poor little lamb, what has happened to you honey!” She all but cried, the cute little pom poms in her hair bouncing as she brought Bugsy closer, taking her hands tightly. “Your hands are ice! You’ll catch cold with that wet hair, and your gorgeous dress-”
“Garcia,” Spencer cut her off, though the woman didn’t seem to mind being manhandled into the kind grip, he guessed her state had her letting her guard down, “This is Bugsy, Emily’s little sister.”
Penelope gasped, her ponytails swishing around some more, the gems on her glasses as bright as the light in her eyes as she yanked the younger girl in for a tight hug.
“It is so nice to meet you! Emily talks about you all the time,” She said, pulling away and fumbling through her pockets for her fresh pink handkerchief she always carried around, mopping up the girl's eyeliner.
“She-she does?” Bugsy asked, sniffling, her body trembling as the AC beat down through the water ladened on her body.
“Of course she does, come on, let’s go get you coffee, I have a new machine in my office that makes the best espresso-” Garcia grabbed her hand as if they were kids in the playground, as if she’d known the girl years, which she sort of had. She had, of course, stalked every single one of Emily’s known relatives, even a distant cousin that never left Europe, and that had thrown up the quiet corner of the internet that Bugsy took up.
“I needed to talk to my sister, if that’s okay,” Bugsy braved enough to say, the swishing of her dress on the carpet making her wince, practically hearing the gallon of rain that soaked the expensive fabric.
“Ofcourse! How silly of me, I’ll bring it out right to you, little bug. You just go with Spencer,” Handing him the handkerchief, she set off towards her ‘bat cave’ in search of a hot beverage for the shivering woman, “Spencer, clean her makeup!”
He did as he was told, dabbing the water off her face as he led her to the BAU, where Emily and Morgan sat on their desks, chatting as they finished off lunch, Emily flicking through photos on her phone of baby Henry that JJ had sent over to her that morning from maternity leave.
“He’s just the sweetest little boy, he’s got the biggest blue eyes just like Jayj,” She said through a smile, “You know Will even said-”
“Holy shit-” Morgan cut her off, and she glanced at him, wondering about his use of a curse. Following his eyes over her shoulder, she swivelled in her position to see where Spencer led a very wet, shaken version of her little sister through the doors of the BAU, a snowy ball gown hanging off her, a veil clinging to her hair that had seen much better days.
“Holy shit,” She agreed, immediately darting for the girl that tugged Spencer’s cardigan tighter to her body, “Bugsy,”
“Emily, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t take up too much time- I just couldn’t do it- and I know mom’s always saying ‘Bring home a doctor, bring home a rich man,’ but I just couldn’t no matter how rich his daddy is, he wasn’t even too bad-” It all came out in a slur, not making too much sense, and she didn’t stop until Emily held up her hands, as if easing a wild dog.
“Woah, take it easy, kiddo,” Morgan hushed, as Emily brought a hand over her sister’s cheek, wiping away the last of the mascara, “What happened?”
Bugsy took a deep breath, looking between Emily and Derek, feeling the rain drip down her back.
“So a few weeks ago, Mom made me go to that stupid debutante ball,” She started, rolling her eyes already as Emily winced, knowing Elizabeth loved any excuse to dress her youngest up like a Barbie doll.
“I hated those things,” She confessed, shaking her head, “I thought you’d agreed you didn’t have to go to them anymore,”
“That was while I was in college, she said at least I could focus on my studies,” The girl explained, as Garcia tottered back through the office, a steaming cup of coffee in her beloved Bratz mug. Taking it from the chirpy woman, she took a deep gulp, not caring if it burned her mouth as she wished for the damn chill to go away, “Thankyou- But she made me go to this one on the condition she would pay off some of my college loans, and I was dumb enough to fall for her bribe,”
She huffed, taking another sip, her stomach warming with the hot liquid settling through her throat.
“You know how she is at these things, she knows everyone, and everyone knows her. I had four guys asking for my dance card within minutes of arriving there, it was like trying to walk through a dog pound wearing a meat suit, all the hand holding, trying to touch my waist- one guy even called me Madam Prentiss,” She grimaced, shuddering at the thought of it, “Madam? No one even calls mom that-”
“Focus,” Emily reminded gently, and she seemed to nod to herself, setting back on track.
“Right. And then he was there. Byron Hastings.” Bugsy said, wrapping her hands around the mug some more.
“Oh, isn’t he that super yummy bachelor that just inherited his fathers business?” Garcia jumped in, not noticing how it made her wince, “I hear his dad totally owns a bunch of shares in Facebook and as like just signed a deal with a new company that will change the future of computing-”
“Not now, baby girl,” Morgan said calmly, patting Penelope on her shoulder when she saw the bride’s crestfallen face.
“Right, sorry. Your turn, little bug,” She said, shaking her head and fiddling with her dozen rings.
“Yeah, that’s him.” She replied, running a slightly warmed finger over her eyelash where rain even collected there, “And you know, I wasn’t complaining, he was certainly easy on the eyes, and he smelled nice, like he just smelled rich, but man alive he was so boring,” She sighed, “I like computers as much as the next girl, no offence, but he didn’t once ask me what I was into or, and when I tried to bring up my degree he just patted me on the head and said ‘That’s nice’ like I was some child that had brought him a pretty colouring or something,”
“Ouch,” Emily grimaced, rubbing her arms over the cardigan to warm her up a little more, “And then?”
“And eventually, his dad and my mom cut a deal that we’d make a good pair. He said we could be married within the season, and suddenly everyone seemed up for it, and it was like no matter how hard I tried to dig my heels in, no one would listen, and mom just seemed so pleased with me-” She spluttered, sipping her drink to catch her breath, “I just let it happen and just thought, you know, maybe we could learn to like each other, or we could just be like mom and dad and separate in everything but paper,”
“It’s your life, who is she to tell you how you’re gonna live it,” Emily was outraged, the tip of her nose pink, her dark eyes stormy as her hands fell to her hips, huffing as if it had been her backed into a corner, “I can’t believe she would do this to you,”
“I was fine with it, really. It's not like its the fifteenth century when I’d be forced to consummate- anyway,” Bugsy rubbed her face, “I just got there, and mom put on my veil and told me I’d make a lovely Mrs Hastings, and just the sound of it- I couldn’t-”
“What on earth is going on?” A new voice cut through the BAU, and the group disbanded like kids caught trading answers to the homework. Rossi and Hotch stood by the unit chief’s office, brows furrowed at the wet bride and his team that tended to her as if she were a princess.
“Should we be expecting four wet bridesmaids too?” Rossi asked, the two of them making the steps down to the floor, approaching the guilty faced woman, noting Spencer’s cardigan wrapped over her shoulders.
“Nope, just me,” Her joke fell flat as she met the stony face of Aaron Hotchner, who looked thoroughly unimpressed, “Nice to see you again, Mr Hotchner, sir,”
His gaze slid to Emily, mouth opening to share whatever scathing remark bounced around his mouth, but the younger girl beat him to it, everyone’s eyebrows raising when she all but cut him off.
“This wasn’t on Emily, sir, I just showed up out of the blue, I can go- I’ll go- I just need to figure out where I’m staying since I left my purse at the church- don’t you worry I’ll be out of your hair, Aaro- sir,” Bugsy stammered, plonking the mug onto Emily’s desk, backing away to the doors of the office, clutching her visitor pass tight in her fist.
Maybe it was because she looked so hopeless, or maybe it was the way his team shot him the same look of horror he would be so regimental, or maybe even it was the fact part of her reminded him of Sean, only his brother wouldn’t have had the courtesy to apologise for his mess.
Sighing, he gestured her to come back, “Wait,” He said her name, her government name because the other one didn’t fit right in his mouth, “Reid, get her some clothes out your go bag. Emily, tell your mother she’s safe and will be staying in Quantico until you can figure something out,”
Heaving a sigh of relief, she launched her still sodden form at the chief, wrapping him in a stiff hug, bolder than anyone else on the team had ever dared to be.
“I swear to god, Mr Hotchner, the next letter you're getting will be the best one yet,” She mumbled into his hard chest, and he fought off the way the corners of his lips twitched upwards. Patting her on the back gently, he ignored the way his dress shirt wet through.
–
let me know what you think! mAYBE A FEW MORE PARTS COMING UP ??
Edit: This is a part one of 3 or 4 I have planned, thankyou so much for all the love on this I did not expect the reaction 🥺🥺
SECOND EDIT: part two and three are out now!! Have a look at the top where it says ‘next chpt and it’s there bbys!!
THIRD EDIT: we are now balls deep into this universe here's th link for the masterlist
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