heap earth upon you — cult leader reader / fbi profiler simon riley.
trigger warning : self harm (slight), cannibalism, eating disorders, unbeta-ed
your voice was a breath of air, softer than the harsh, static hum of the ventilation. the interrogation room had been assembled with the joyless precision of a crypt and all the warmth and imagination of a storage closet. fluorescent lights droned overhead, dying in rhythmic, epileptic stutters. the pale cinderblock walls had been painted over so many times that older layers bled through the newest coat like bruises beneath translucent skin, creating uneven, jaundice-colored islands. a rectangular wooden table occupied the center of this ossuary, its surface scarred by the fingernails of the terrified, the coffee rings of the impatient, and the tremors of the damned. the air hung stagnant, heavy with the sterile scent of chemical disinfectant and the desiccated dust of old paper.
you sat waiting, hands folded in your lap with the devout stillness of an icon in a neglected chapel. as though this were a routine office-hour appointment rather than a descent into the maw of a federal detention facility.
the newspapers had been incapable of capturing the decay. every photograph released to the public had been a grainy, distant ghost-image, a smear of pixels taken in transit. none of them had shown the deep, violet-stained craters pooled beneath your eyes, nor the way your shoulders seemed bowed under the weight of an invisible, perpetual penance. the exhaustion had leached the artifice from your features. it softened the sharp angles of your anatomy, lending your face the fragile, porcelain aspect of a reliquary—something precious, broken, and recovering from a wasting sickness.
your clothes were a study in erasure. a cream-colored cardigan hung loosely from your frame, the sleeves swallowed by your wrists, shielding them from the world despite the warmth of the room. beneath it, a modest blouse buttoned to the throat, a garment so unremarkable it bordered on the sacred. there was nothing here of the woman whose face occupied every evidence board in quantico, nothing that hinted at the violence you had unspooled upon the world.
your gaze tracked him as he entered.
large eyes. rimmed in a feverish, weary red. bright, crystalline, and terrifyingly lucid. the eyes of a woman who had spent years training federal agents to read the map of a corpse.
“mr. riley,” you continued, the ghost of a smile curving your mouth. “i hope your ride here was safe. how can i help you?”
the question should have felt like an insult, an absurdity couched in courtesy, coming from a woman awaiting the judgment for a string of horrors that had consumed entire divisions of the bureau. yet, there was no irony, no mocking veneer. you asked after his journey with the same earnest gravity one might extend to a colleague arriving after a redeye flight. for a fleeting, jagged second, simon felt a spike of irritation—the impossibility of detecting the performance in your manner.
he pulled out the chair opposite yours and sat. the old wood groaned, a pained protest beneath his weight. he placed the thick, leather-bound case file on the table between you with a heavy, final thud.
the folder was an altar to atrocity. hundreds of photographs, reports, witness testimonies, forensic dissections, and confessions—a mountain of paper documenting nightmares most people would spend their lives trying to unsee.
yet, you regarded him with the patient, unblinking interest of an instructor waiting for a student to find his place in the syllabus.
the fluorescent light flattened the room into something sepulchral, draining the heat from every surface, yet you remained oddly untouched by the gloom. not untouched, exactly—haunted. you resembled one of those saints painted onto crumbling cathedral panels: diminished, burdened, carrying some esoteric suffering, yet still possessed of a quiet, inexplicable grace.
it disturbed him. it cut deeper than it should have.
for a heartbeat, he simply stared. you were slight, a whisper of a person, your hands vanished into the oversized cuffs of your cardigan. your wrists appeared alarmingly, pathologically thin. the hollows beneath your collarbones traced fragile, skeletal maps. you were spectral, pared down to your essential marrow by exhaustion.
yet, simon had spent the previous week drowning in the crime scene photos.
he had seen what remained.
he had reviewed pathology reports detailing disarticulated joints, stripped tissue, organs harvested with the anatomical precision of a surgeon performing a high-mass ritual. the work had required patience. endurance. a steady hand that never trembled in the dark.
sitting across from you, simon felt his mind fracture, unable to reconcile the two realities. you looked as though a strong wind might dissipate you into ash, yet the woman in the reports had dismantled human beings with the cold efficiency of a god.
“i’m an instructor,” he said, his voice grating against the quiet. “behavioral science unit. quantico.”
recognition flickered behind your eyes.
a small sound. warm, resonant with genuine, unfeigned interest.
your fingernails suddenly dragged across your forearm.
a sudden, violent reflex.
the curse fell from your lips, jarringly out of place, a dissonance in a hymn. you looked stricken, an abrupt flush of embarrassment climbing your throat.
your hand retreated, and only then did he notice the cartography of damage left behind. several raw, angry scratches mapped the pale interior of your forearm. tiny beads of blood welled along the broken skin like garnets pressed into ivory. for a moment, your gaze drifted to them, distant, faintly puzzled, before your sleeve slid down to shroud the ruin.
the motion was effortless.
your fingers retreated into the cuff of your cardigan, and the wreckage vanished beneath soft, cream-colored wool as neatly as a magician palming a coin. there was no urgency, no self-consciousness. only the quiet, rhythmic efficiency of a habit repeated so often it had transcended thought.
simon found himself anchored to your hands.
that was the sickness of it. everything about you invited observation, forced him to look. not because you were beautiful—though the admission clawed at his chest—but because you were a cipher. beauty was a categorization, a filing cabinet for the soul. you resisted all categorization.
most of the killers simon hunted carried their own gravity—arrogance, jagged resentment, the heavy, suffocating scent of entitlement. their personalities clung to the air like smoke.
you? you offered nothing. you listened when people spoke. you apologized without the sting of hesitation. you smiled as if kindness were the only oxygen you breathed.
simon couldn’t find the seams.
most people fractured under pressure; they revealed the machinery, the rehearsed phrase, the flash of teeth. you remained smooth, seamless. the gentleness seemed woven into your very dna, carrying the comfort of a physician or a caretaker standing vigil beside a sickbed.
that was exactly what poisoned his thoughts.
he had seen the photographs. he had seen what remained of the temple.
the same hands that hid now in oversized sleeves had opened bodies with the reverence of a surgeon and the cold certainty of an executioner. the same soft voice had persuaded men to surrender their trust, their autonomy, and eventually, their lives. sitting across from you felt like praying in a chapel built atop a mass grave. everything looked holy. everything beneath it was rot.
for the first time, a chill, colder than the air conditioning, settled at the base of his spine. not fear. something closer to the dreadful fascination inspired by reliquaries and saints’ bones. the absolute, bone-deep certainty that he was looking at something beautiful and terrible, locked in a singular, impossible vessel.
simon cracked the file open, his eyes glued to your face.
“i heard you used to teach too.”
you lifted your head. the question seemed to pull you, like a hooked fish, into deeper waters.
“oh, a loooooong time ago.”
there was no reluctance, no defensive wall. only a faint, sweet melancholy, the kind reserved for abandoned lives and rooms that have long since stopped smelling of their occupants.
the smile that touched your mouth was a ghost, a ripple on a dark pond. so slight, most would have missed it.
for the first time, he saw something that looked like happiness. something perilously close to affection. the expression moved across your face like candlelight through a darkened nave, softening the harsh edges of your fatigue. the violet shadows beneath your eyes remained, but they were eclipsed by the sudden, warm glow of memory.
for a fleeting breath, the woman across from him ceased to be a name in a case file. she was a lecturer again. a woman standing before a lecture hall, explaining the architecture of the human machine with the quiet devotion of a priestess.
your fingers folded together, an architecture of calm atop the table.
the words hung between you, crystalline and fragile. then, the smile dissolved—not shattered, but melted, like mist under the tyranny of the sun. your gaze drifted downward. for a moment, you looked lost, a wanderer in a corridor of half-ruined memories, finding only locked doors where familiar rooms should have been. a faint, hollow sadness washed over you. not grief. something quieter. the mourning of one who stands before a grave that only she can see.
“i’m here because i’ve been conducting interviews for research,” simon said.
he opened the folder, his eyes refusing to leave you.
“with certain individuals. individuals like yourself.”
the explanation was met with neither apprehension nor the bristling of a caged animal. if anything, your attention sharpened, a predator sensing a shift in the wind. he watched curiosity settle over your features, brightening your expression the way a lamp vivifies stained glass. the sadness retreated, displaced by something sharper, more hungry.
the transformation was subtle but violent in its implication. whatever discomfort such a statement should have provoked in an inmate was entirely absent. instead, you seemed genuinely intrigued by the mechanics of the project. like a scholar encountering an unfamiliar, brilliant theory. like a professor presented with a conundrum she had never considered.
you leaned forward. the movement was minute, yet it carried the sudden, electric energy of engagement.
the fluorescent lights hummed a funeral dirge overhead. beyond the walls, the prison breathed—doors grinding, voices echoing, the rhythmic, mechanical pulse of an institution dedicated to the ritual maintenance of confinement. none of it seemed to touch you. for the first time, a genuine, intellectual hunger illuminated your face.
it transformed you. it made you radiant.
the question arrived stripped of all mockery. you leaned in, elbows hovering just clear of the table. the movement stirred a ghost of a memory in simon; he had seen this exact shift a thousand times in laboratories and conference halls—the sudden, sharp quickening of a mind turning toward a problem. it became, for a terrifying instant, absurdly easy to imagine you elsewhere. not beneath the surveillance glare, but seated in a department office, debating theory over cooling coffee and marked papers.
your expression brightened, a tiny flicker of ignition.
the use of his first name should have been an offense. instead, it landed with the disarming ease of a stone dropping into a still lake. there was no presumption. no calculated intimacy. you said it as one might address a colleague after years of shared trenches, as though the two of you had simply bypassed the formalities of introduction.
before he could answer, a bell rang somewhere beyond the room—a clangor that rolled through the building like a church chime distorted by concrete and steel. it reverberated down the corridors, followed by the scrape of iron and the low, groaning machinery of the institution. the spell fractured. simon was struck by the sudden, suffocating weight of the cinderblock, the reinforced glass, the hidden cameras.
the gravity of where he was. of who sat across from him.
“your behavior, i suppose.”
the answer earned a reaction. your brows arched. then, a small laugh escaped—a soft, involuntary sound. you covered your mouth, a gesture of instinctive, old-world courtesy, looking like a lecturer caught speaking over a student in a seminar.
the amusement in your voice was a caress.
simon exhaled, a sharp, ragged sound through his nose.
“i mean, if you want to,” he amended. “we don’t have to talk about anything if you wouldn’t like to, miss.”
you lowered your hand, the smile lingering. what unsettled him most was the sincerity of your receptivity. most people in your position were already calculating, weighing the cost of silence against the price of cooperation, playing games of leverage he couldn't see. you merely considered the question.
thoughtfully. as though the option to decline had never occurred to you until this precise second.
“and what is the nature of your research?”
you shifted forward again. only a millimeter, yet it felt like a lunge.
the energy of interest radiated from you.
“like, what do you want to use my data for? you’re from behavioral, right? is this some prediction thing?”
a spark, bright and feral, ignited behind your eyes. the exhaustion was still there, the shadows still etched into your skin like weathered stone, but beneath it, the scholar stirred. it was the unmistakable, insatiable delight of encountering a problem worthy of the scalpel.
for the first time, simon didn’t see the woman from the headlines, nor the killer from the case file. he saw the seeker. the lecturer who had once devoted her life to the questions most people were too cowardly to confront. it was mournful, a jagged piece of beauty. watching that spark ignite felt like unearthing a ghost—a preserved fragment of a life that should have stayed on its path.
it sat in the room, heavy and wrong, beside the crime scene photos and the confessions.
“can i ask you something?”
you nodded, a motion as fluid as water.
“sure, go ahead. i just bombarded you with questions, so of course.”
the answer came with such easy sincerity that simon nearly forgot the bars. the conversation possessed a strange, terrifying equilibrium. neither interrogation nor confession. at times, it felt like two colleagues circling a jagged, difficult subject from opposite sides. you settled back, patient, your focus an unwavering beam aimed directly at him.
“do you think prison can help you?”
you stared at him. not startled. not offended. thinking. your gaze drifted to the grain of the tabletop, tracing the invisible history of the wood, before returning to his eyes.
the answer was soft, unburdened by hesitation.
“i want that really badly.”
simon studied you. hope was not a currency he expected to find in this currency of shadows. he had seen regret, fear, defiance, and the desperate, practiced repentance of the inmate who knew the language of the parole board. you didn't speak that language. the hope visible in you lacked the frantic, clawing urgency of a man bargaining for his life. it resembled something older, more stubborn—a small, guttering flame protected against years of wind and rain. despite the concrete, despite the certainty that your future was a closed loop, some part of you still believed in the alchemy of transformation.
simon found the thought profoundly disturbing. because it felt true.
“but do you think it can help other people?” he asked.
something shifted behind your eyes. the brightness remained, but a veil of sorrow draped over it.
your name slipped from your lips with a natural, unconscious weight. you folded your hands and glanced toward the reinforced slit of the door. beyond it, the institution chanted its endless, soulless liturgy. footsteps, iron-on-concrete, the slamming of tombs.
“but this place is mostly filled with two kinds of people.”
your gaze locked with his again.
the word was delivered with a strange, haunting tenderness. not cynical. merely a statement of fact.
“or people who are still breathing but should’ve been helped years ago.”
a faint, rueful smile curved your mouth. there was no humor in it, only the weariness of one who has seen too much suffering to be surprised by its architecture.
“it always seems to be too early or too late.”
the observation hung in the air, heavy as lead. it wasn't dramatic; it was simply the truth, spoken as one speaks of the weather, or the changing seasons, or the inevitability of the frost.
“then what do we do with people like you out there?”
the question lingered, a ghost in the room. you didn't answer instantly. your fingertips traced the grooves of the table, reading the wood as if it were braille. there was no irritation, no defensive barricade. only the same thoughtful, clinical seriousness.
“well, si, that’s your department, not mine.”
the nickname struck him with the force of a physical blow. simon kept his features locked in a neutral mask. years of interviewing the broken had taught him that familiarity was a weapon—a way to establish rapport, to unsettle, to test the boundaries of the cage.
this didn’t feel like a weapon. it felt like a name he had been called a thousand times before.
the realization irritated him, an itch under his skin. because the nickname carried the phantom warmth of someone who remembered birthdays, who made coffee, who worried if others had eaten. it belonged to the kind of person who accumulated ghosts of affection for everyone they met without ever realizing they were doing it. simon suspected the whole prison possessed a nickname from you.
that only made the small, unwelcome satisfaction of hearing it harder to ignore.
“but from your perspective?” he pressed, his voice dropping into a quieter register. careful. as though he were beginning to suspect that the answer was the only thing that mattered.
your gaze returned to him. for a moment, he watched your expression grow heavy with thought. the enthusiasm that had animated you earlier receded, replaced by the careful, deliberate concentration of a professor choosing words for a final, difficult lecture.
you repeated the words, tasting them. a crease appeared between your brows, a shadow of intellectual labor. then, you sighed—a quiet release of air.
“i think most people spend their lives imagining monsters are easy to recognize.”
your hands remained interlocked, a locked box.
“they think dangerous people must look dangerous. that there should be signs. something obvious.”
a sad smile touched your face, tracing the ghost of a heartbreak.
the fluorescent lights caught in your eyes, turning them into cold, mirrored glass.
“that’s what frightens everyone, isn’t it?”
simon didn’t answer. you seemed to sense the depth of his silence. your smile softened, becoming something achingly, painfully gentle.
“because if people like me can exist, then anybody could be standing next to someone they don’t truly know.”
by the time the conversation drifted into its second hour, the table had accumulated the chaotic clutter of a life interrupted—the plastic debris of two coffees, one barely touched, the other a cold, bitter slurry. the fluorescent lights still buzzed, a persistent, maddening insect in the ears. the room remained a tomb.
simon, unfortunately, had changed.
that was becoming impossible to ignore. every profiler is trained to keep a distance—to be the surgeon, not the patient. empathy is a tool, but attachment is a terminal illness. the work requires a clear lens; clarity dies the moment personal feelings bleed into the evidence.
yet, simon found himself fixated on things that held no forensic value.
the way you listened—not just hearing, but consuming. the way your face woke up when the discussion turned to the abstract. the unconscious, ritualistic folding of your hands when you were concentrating. the small, apologetic smiles that broke through the surface whenever you felt you had interrupted him.
none of it belonged in a case file. none of it should have mattered.
and yet, his attention circled back to these details like a moth to a flame. the strangest, most terrifying part was that he understood exactly why so many had followed you into the dark. the reports spoke of manipulation, of cults, of influence—the grand, theatrical, booming charisma of the monster.
yours was not that. yours was intimate.
it was the terrifying, concentrated focus of a magnifying glass under the sun. when you spoke to someone, they were the only thing in the universe. everything else—the laws, the walls, the ethics—receded into the periphery. simon found himself understanding the siren song, even as he fought against the tide.
“why do you look at me like that?”
your voice hooked him, pulling him back from the precipice of his thoughts.
you had propped your chin against your palm, head tilted with the curiosity of a child. the posture stripped years from your face, making you look terrifyingly young, vibrant, and entirely unconnected to the atrocities listed in the folders.
a smile tugged at the corner of your mouth—amused, knowing.
your eyes narrowed, the amusement dancing behind them like flames.
“like i’m a specimen. a lab rat.”
a quiet laugh escaped you—soft, private, a secret kept from the room. the sound settled beneath his ribs, and he resented the visceral, physical impact of it. you continued to watch him, waiting. observing him with the same clinical, terrifying care he was using on you.
“to be honest,” simon said, his voice roughened by a gentleness he hadn't invited, “it’s hard for me to associate you with the things you’ve done. you don’t sound anything like what people would expect. i guess that’s the catch, right?”
you didn’t answer instantly. your gaze drifted to the cold coffee, then returned to his face. for a moment, your expression held a melancholy amusement, as if he had stumbled upon a realization you had been forced to witness a thousand times before. the fluorescent light was a bleach, washing color from the walls, but it couldn't strip the warmth from you. simon thought of all the interviews he had conducted, the parade of subjects hungry to be understood—the narcissists wanting to be defined, the pathetic wanting to be excused. you wanted none of that. there was no hunger for vindication, no desperate plea for him to see your humanity. you seemed resigned to the fact that people would spend their lives trying to reconcile the ghost in the chair with the monster in the files. you didn't struggle with the contradiction because, to you, there was no contradiction. the woman before him and the woman in the reports had never been separate entities. you simply existed as the whole, while the rest of the world tore at the seams.
“yeah, that’s the catch. i was just another girl for most of my life, to be honest. i was a cheerleader, you know? i was in the mathletes… i was raised in good old suburbia. all the glorious american get-up, dressed nicely on sundays and everything. i had a little bunny, went to an amazing school. i was thoughtful and well-educated… but at the same time, i felt so incredibly lonely, and every second of my life where i was going through a repeated pain, so unimaginably desensitizing, i got lost in myself. sometimes i fasted for weeks on end. over and over again. it’s like living two lives at once.”
“do you think what led you to this moment were things beyond your control?”
“not this moment, but my actions, i think so. i think it all led me here, but maybe that’s not the case for everyone.”
“you think there’s more people like you? that kill in sequence?”
“one after another. regularly. i’ve been calling them sequence killers, if you will. how many would you say?”
you considered this, the weight of the question settling. he had expected deflection, or the cold amusement of a predator, but you fell silent, your attention drifting, sifting through the archives of your experience. he recognized the look: the academic reaching into the library of memory for an estimate that could never be precise.
“well,” you said, drawing the word out like a thread of silk, “from all the cases i’ve ever seen, and for all i know… maybe thirty-five?”
simon’s eyebrow climbed. you caught it. a faint smile ghosted your lips.
a shrug, careless and slight.
your expression softened then, a shift in the tectonic plates of the room.
“but you won’t find them.”
the certainty in your voice was absolute, gentle, and final.
“not if they don’t want to be found.”
you looked genuinely apologetic. the reaction hit harder than a lie would have. most offenders enjoyed being right, enjoyed the game of outsmarting the hunter. you just looked sorry to have disappointed him.
you folded your hands, fingertips pressing against each other like an archway.
“it’s not really my area, you know.”
a quiet laugh, devoid of humor.
“i’m just accomplished in… whatever this is.”
your gaze flickered to the thick, tomb-like file.
the word sounded strange, an alien thing in your mouth. not because of denial, but because of the terrifying plainness with which you spoke it. no dramatics. no fascination. just the anatomy of the fact.
“making people do things for me. making them want me. want to be me.”
for the first time, a profound, rattling weariness settled over you. not the physical exhaustion, but something older, heavier—a fatigue of the soul.
“and getting away with it until i pleaded guilty because i couldn’t live with what i felt anymore.”
the fluorescent lights hummed, a low-voltage scream. a door slammed, miles away. you didn’t blink. you were anchored to him.
“you seem like a smart man, simon.”
the compliment wasn’t a lure. it sounded earnest, uncomfortable, heavy with a truth he didn't want to accept.
“i think you already know all of that.”
your smile returned, but it was a shell—a slow, reluctant thing that failed to ignite your eyes. it was stripped of the easy curiosity, the intellectual hunger. for the first time, you didn't look like a professor. you looked like someone staring into the shape of a life that had been cast in iron and could no longer be bent.
“i wish i’d met you in different circumstances.”
the statement fell into the room like a stone into a dark well. simon’s attention remained fixed on you, the silence stretching, pulling taut. the recorder continued its mechanical, droning breath. the lights buzzed. the cinderblocks held their ground. yet, for a heartbeat, the reality of the prison dissolved. he found himself seeing a different space: a lecture hall, the smell of chalk and old books, the dust motes dancing in shafts of afternoon light. a reality where your name lived on the spines of published journals, where the two of you disagreed over case studies rather than documenting the end of the world. the vision was unbidden, invasive, and he resented it for how perfectly it fit.
“i think i could’ve done more for you.”
the sincerity in your voice was absolute, as if the thought had never crossed your mind that he might view it as a manipulation. it was the same instinct he had tracked all afternoon: the persistent, terrifying urge to be useful. it lived in the way you answered, the way you listened, the way every conversation became a laboratory for discovering what the other person needed.
sitting across from you, the question he had been dancing around his entire career finally caught up with him: not how someone like you could commit such acts, but how a person capable of such genuine, quiet kindness had managed to carry those impulses alongside the butcher’s knife for so many years without one destroying the other.
you looked down, then back up, your eyes searching his.
“but i don’t actually know what you want from me.”
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