Here is my Elias Voit mini series! There are literally no fics with him so I had to take it upon myself to write some because I'm feral for him rn!!
Reader is in the BAU, and is Jason Gideon's granddaughter! As a child she was kidnapped and used against Gideon. She is mid to late 20s. No use of y/n, no physical descriptions. Starts at season 16!
Will have significant time jumps, I may go back and fill in gaps eventually though! Also BAU gate was not Elias in this fic, one of the network people did it.
warnings: serial killers, murder, torture, voit ( a warning on his own), falling for a serial killer, blood, gore, mentions of past trauma, mentions of childhood kidnapping, angst, trauma, eventual smut, MDNI, 18+.
Synopsis: Reader is taken by one of Voits network killers to get closer to him, causing him to leave his family and risk his freedom to save her.
Warnings: Elias Voit, kidnapping of federal agent, serial killers, near death, blood, gore, death, murder, MDNI, 18+
Masterlist
She knew the man who had taken her left the room because the sound of the door closing had become the most important sound in the world. For several seconds after it shut, she did not move. She stayed where he had left her, tied to the chair in the middle of the room with her head hanging forward and her wrists burning against the rope, listening through the pulse in her ears for footsteps, for breathing, for any sign that he had lingered on the other side just to see what she would do. The house settled around her in small, ordinary noises that felt obscene after what had happened inside it. A pipe ticked somewhere in the wall.
Wind worried at a loose windowpane. Her own blood dripped steadily from somewhere near her hairline onto her shirt, each warm slide of it reminding her that time was not something she had much of. She had stopped trying to measure how long she had been here.
At first he'd wanted information. He'd pulled up a chair across from her with an almost conversational calmness, asking question after question about Elias Voit with the patience of someone convinced the truth was only one answer away. He wanted to know what had happened between them, why Voit had spoken to her differently than everyone else, why a man whose entire life had been built on violence had suddenly become protective of a single FBI agent. She had answered exactly the way she had been trained to answer: carefully, truthfully where she could, and refusing to speculate where she couldn't. She had told him there was nothing to explain because she genuinely didn't understand it herself. That answer only seemed to frustrate him further, as though her confusion were an act designed specifically to keep something from him.
Eventually the questions stopped sounding like questions and started sounding like accusations. Every answer she gave seemed to convince him she was withholding something rather than simply admitting what she didn't know, and she found herself growing more irritated than frightened. There was something almost absurd about the situation, a realization that became harder and harder to ignore the longer he spoke. she found herself sitting in another chair while another dangerous man insisted she was somehow the key to understanding someone else. The ridiculousness of it escaped her before she had the good sense to stop it.
"I'm getting really tired of this," she said, her voice rough but steady. "Honestly, it's becoming a pattern."
He frowned, clearly not understanding. "What does that mean?"
"It means this is the third time in my life somebody's kidnapped me because they think I'm useful against somebody else." She let out a tired breath that sounded almost like a laugh. "I have to tell you, I'm really over this whole thing."
Whatever composure he'd been holding onto slipped. She watched irritation flash across his face so quickly that she almost regretted saying it, not because she believed she'd made a mistake, but because she knew she'd found the nerve she hadn't been looking for. For a long moment neither of them spoke. She could see him trying to convince himself she was manipulating him, trying to fit her words into the version of events he'd already decided was true. It struck her then that whatever he wanted from her had very little to do with her at all. Every question circled back to Elias. Every frustration came from the same place. She wasn't the mystery in front of him. She was simply the person he believed might explain one.
"You don't actually care about me," she said quietly.
His eyes narrowed.
"You want to know why he cared."
He didn't explode or immediately deny it. Instead he simply looked at her for a fraction too long, and in that hesitation she realized she had finally understood what had been driving the entire conversation. Whatever obsession had brought him there wasn't really about her. It was about solving the one question he couldn't answer on his own, and he had convinced himself that she held the missing piece. That was when he had stormed out leaving her alone.
Her fingers were numb when she began twisting her wrist again. The skin had already torn, and the rope rasped over raw flesh in a way that made her stomach heave, but she kept going because stopping meant waiting for him to come back. She had worked at the knot for so long that she no longer knew if she was making progress or only hurting herself, and then suddenly her right hand slipped farther than it had before. The shock of it nearly made her sob. She froze, breath caught painfully in her chest, terrified that some part of the house would betray her by creaking too loudly or that the man would somehow sense the shift from wherever he had gone.
When nothing happened, she forced herself to keep working, using the slickness of blood and sweat to drag her hand through the final loop. The rope peeled against her torn skin, and the pain was so sharp that blackness crowded her vision for a moment, but then her wrist was free. She stared at it like it belonged to someone else, swollen and shaking and streaked red, before the urgency of her situation returned with brutal clarity. Getting out of the rest of the bindings took too long. Every second felt stolen. Every sound outside the room made her flinch so hard the chair scraped beneath her. Her left hand had less strength, and her fingers fumbled uselessly at first, clumsy from numbness and terror. By the time she finally loosened enough rope to pull herself free, she was shaking so badly she almost collapsed before she managed to stand.
The floor seemed to shift under her. Her knees buckled, and she caught herself on the back of the chair, biting down on a cry when the movement pulled at the bruises across her ribs. He had hit her more than once there, deliberately, with the kind of practiced restraint that told her he knew how to hurt someone without ending the game too soon. She hated that thought because it came from the profiler part of her, and right now she did not want to be a profiler. She wanted to be out. She wanted air. She wanted her to see her family again. She wanted the world to be bigger than this room. She wanted her grandpa back.
The hallway beyond the door was dim and narrow, smelling of damp wood, mildew, and old smoke. She moved through it with one hand against the wall, trying to make her steps quiet even though her legs threatened to give out with every movement. Her bare feet stuck slightly against the floorboards where something had spilled earlier, and she refused to look down because she already knew too much of it was blood. The house seemed unfamiliar even though she had been dragged through parts of it when he brought her in, because fear had blurred everything then and pain blurred it now. She passed a half-open doorway and saw a sink, a cracked mirror, a towel stiff with dark stains. She kept moving. Somewhere ahead, faint and almost impossible, she thought she could see a thinner kind of light. Not the yellow light from the room where he had kept her, but something gray and natural. A window, maybe. The possibility of outside was enough to make tears rise hot behind her eyes, but she did not let herself make a sound. She had learned as a child that hope could become dangerous if it made you careless.
She reached the kitchen by holding herself together through sheer refusal. The refrigerator hummed loudly in the corner. A chair had been knocked over near the table, probably when he had dragged her through earlier. On the counter lay a phone with a cracked screen, and for one wild second she thought about grabbing it before she saw the battery lying beside it, removed and useless. He had planned for panic. He had planned for obvious escapes. She took a breath that hurt all the way down and kept going, because the front door stood beyond the next room and the sight of it nearly broke whatever was left of her. It was real. It had locks, yes, but it was real, and beyond it there would be air and trees and maybe a road if she could run far enough. She did not think about how badly she was hurt. She did not think about the blood drying under her nose or the way her right side felt wrong when she breathed. She focused on the door because if she let herself think about anything else, she would fall.
She had nearly reached the entryway when an arm closed around her from behind and yanked her backward against a hard chest. The scream tore out of her before she knew she was making it. Her body did not care who it was or why they had grabbed her. She twisted violently, throwing her weight sideways, clawing at the arm locked across her ribs even as pain shot through her from the pressure. A voice spoke near her ear, low and urgent, but she could not understand the words at first because terror had filled her head with a rushing noise that swallowed everything else.
"Sweetheart, stop," the voice said, sharper now. "Would you stop fighting me for two seconds?"
The familiarity of it cut through just enough to make her freeze, and that was almost worse. She turned her head as much as she could, vision swimming, and saw Elias Voit behind her. He had one arm braced around her middle, the other hooked across her upper chest to keep her from bolting toward the door, and the sight of him so close made panic flare even hotter than before because her body could not separate one danger from another anymore. The man who had taken her had asked about him for hours. The man who had taken her had hurt her because of him. Now Voit was here, holding her, trapping her against him with his breath uneven near her temple and his grip tight enough that she could not pull free.
"Don't touch me," she gasped, trying to twist away from him. "Let me go."
"I'm trying to help you," he said, and even through the fear she heard the agitation in his voice, the rough edge of someone who had arrived to a situation already spiraling and hated every second of not being in control. "So maybe don't run straight through the front door right into his trap."
"Let me go."
"Not until you stop trying to get yourself killed."
"I said let me go!"
"I heard you. The whole house heard you, keep your fucking voice down!"
She drove her head backward as hard as she could. The impact was clumsy because she was weak and disoriented, but it connected with his face. Voit cursed sharply and loosened his hold just enough for her to wrench herself free. She stumbled forward, nearly falling, then caught the edge of the table and shoved herself away from him before he could grab her again. When she turned, he was bent slightly, one hand pressed to his nose, blood already spilling between his fingers. For one second their eyes met across the kitchen, and the expression on his face was so strange that she could not make sense of it. He looked furious, yes, but also startled, and beneath that something almost like fear moved before he buried it under irritation.
"Jesus Christ," he snapped, voice muffled by his hand.
The second she recognized Elias Voit standing in front of her, every survival instinct she possessed took over. Fear drowned out logic, drowned out questions, drowned out the part of her that should have stopped long enough to wonder why he was there. All she knew was that he was dangerous and close enough to touch her, and after everything that had happened she could not survive another pair of hands on her body. She turned toward the front door, ignoring his curse behind her, ignoring the fact that his voice followed her with a sharp warning that sounded almost desperate. Her fingers had just closed around the deadbolt when movement erupted from the dark hallway to her left.
The man who had taken her slammed into her before she could scream. His hand caught her hair first, fingers twisting near her scalp as he yanked her backward with such force that pain flashed white behind her eyes. Her body left the door and hit the floor hard, shoulder and hip striking the wood before her head snapped back against it. For a breathless moment, she could not move at all. The impact knocked the air from her lungs, and she lay there gasping soundlessly while the man loomed over her, his face twisted with rage and sweat shining on his forehead. He looked worse than when he had left her, more frantic, less controlled, and that frightened her because men like him became more dangerous when their plans broke. His eyes flicked past her toward Voit, and something ugly and triumphant moved through his expression.
"I knew you'd come," he said.
Voit had gone very still a few feet away. Blood ran from his nose over his mouth, but he did not wipe it this time. He looked at the man on top of her with a calm so complete it made her stomach drop, because she could feel the violence inside it. "You had one instruction."
The man laughed, breathless and high. "You think you give instructions anymore? You think any of us owe you anything after you disappeared?"
She tried to crawl backward, but his knee came down hard across her thighs, pinning her to the floor. She cried out and shoved at him, her injured wrists screaming with the effort, but he barely seemed to notice. His attention was on Voit now, and she realized with a cold, sick clarity that this had never really been about her.
Voit's voice dropped. "Move away from her."
The man looked down at her, and the sight of his smile made something cold settle into her chest because there was no hesitation in it, no uncertainty, no trace of humanity left behind it. He looked pleased. Genuinely pleased. As though hurting her had finally given him proof that he could make Elias Voit react.
"That's the thing," he said, pressing more weight onto her legs when she tried to twist away. "I don't think I will."
The knife appeared in his hand so quickly that her mind barely had time to understand it before her body did. She saw the flash of metal, saw Voit move, saw the man's arm drive downward, and then pain tore through her side with such brutal force that the scream ripped from somewhere deep in her body before she could stop it. For a moment there was no room for thought. The world narrowed to the knife, the pressure of his body pinning her down, the hot shock blooming through her abdomen, the awful sensation of something inside her being opened. Her hands flew to the wound instinctively, but he had already pulled the blade back, and the sudden absence of it somehow hurt worse than the entry. Warmth spilled across her fingers. She tried to breathe and found that she could not get enough air.
Voit hit him so hard the sound seemed to crack through the room. The man was thrown sideways off her, crashing into the wall near the entryway, and she rolled onto her side with a broken cry, both hands pressed to the wound as blood slipped through her fingers no matter how hard she tried to hold herself together. The floor felt far away and too close at the same time. Everything tilted. Through the blur, she saw Voit cross the room with a speed that did not look calculated anymore. There was no careful mask in him now, no sarcasm tossed like a shield, no easy performance. He hit the man again before he could fully regain his footing, and the fight that followed was not clean or elegant. It was furious. The man clawed at him, drove a fist into his ribs, reached for the knife again, but Voit caught his wrist and slammed it against the wall hard enough that she heard something give. The knife fell from his grip.
She tried to keep her eyes open, but the room kept dimming at the edges. She could hear furniture scraping, glass breaking somewhere behind her, a body hitting the floor and then the wall. She had seen violence before. She had studied it, written reports about it, stood in rooms where the aftermath of it clung to everything. This was different. This was happening close enough that she could feel the vibration of it through the floorboards. Voit moved like someone who had stopped caring how much control he had. The man who had taken her fought with panic, with the frantic brutality of someone realizing too late that the thing he had summoned was worse than the thing he meant to control. Voit fought with something colder underneath the rage, something personal enough that even half-conscious and bleeding, understood she was seeing the part of him he usually kept disciplined and hidden because it was too honest to be useful.
Then he moved again, and she turned her face into the floor because she could not watch anymore. The sounds were enough. A struggle, a choked curse, the dull impact of flesh and bone against wood, and then a silence that seemed to rush into the room all at once. For a few seconds, she heard only her own breathing, thin and uneven, and the wet sound of blood moving beneath her palms. Footsteps came toward her. She tried to recoil, but her body no longer obeyed fast enough. A shadow fell over her, and she made a weak sound of protest before a voice cut through the ringing in her ears.
"Sweetheart." Voit crouched beside her, breathing hard enough that the words came out rough, his face streaked with blood that was not all his. "Hey, hey, don't do that. Don't move."
"Don't touch me," she whispered, though the words had lost most of their strength.
"I know," he said quickly, and the speed of the answer confused her. "I know. I'm not gonna hurt you, but you're bleeding too much."
His hands came over hers, firm and careful at the same time, pressing down against the wound. Her back arched as agony tore through her, and the cry that left her sounded nothing like her. Voit flinched, actually flinched, but he did not let up.
"I know," he said, voice tight. "I know, I know. I'm sorry. You have to let me do this."
She stared at him through tears she could not stop, unable to reconcile the man above her with the man from the case files, the man from the bunker, the man who had taken Rossi, the man who had just killed someone in front of her because she had become the one thing in the room he could not let be destroyed. She closes her eyes and blinks several times his voice calling out to her fading out. She came back to herself through pain so intense it did not feel like pain at first, only a vast, pulsing pressure that filled her body before it narrowed into places she could name. Her ribs hurt when she breathed. Her mouth tasted like blood. One of her eyes felt swollen, and when she tried to open it, the world came in blurred and uneven, a smear of concrete floor, harsh overhead light, and a dark shape moving near her.
Fear found her before memory did. Her body tried to recoil, but she barely managed to shift against the floor before agony tore through her side and forced a broken sound out of her throat. The sound seemed to pull the figure toward her faster, and when he crouched beside her, blocking some of the light, her heart lurched so violently she thought for one terrible second that the pain itself might kill her. Elias Voit was looking down at her, blood spattered across his shirt and one side of his face, breathing harder than she had ever seen him breathe, and the sight of him made panic flare bright and wild through the fog of injury because some part of her, the part that had been trapped and hurt and certain she was going to die, could not understand yet that the man who had terrified her was not the same man whose hands had just been on her.
Voit stopped immediately, and that was the first thing that confused her. He did not smile. He did not make some awful joke. He did not lean in anyway just to prove he could. He froze with one hand half-raised between them, his eyes moving over her face and then down to the blood darkening the front of her shirt, and for once there was no smoothness in him, no easy mask sliding into place before she could read what sat beneath it. He looked angry, but not at her. He looked almost sick with it, his jaw tight, his breathing uneven, and when he spoke his voice came out lower than usual, rough around the edges in a way she did not know how to reconcile with him.
"I'm not going to hurt you," he said. "Gideon, I'm not going to hurt you."
She stared at him, trying to make sense of the words while memory returned in pieces that scraped their way back through her mind. A room that smelled like mildew and copper. A man she had only half-recognized from the network files before he hit her hard enough to send her into the wall. Questions about Voit. Questions about what Voit wanted. Questions about why she mattered. Then his hands, the knife, the pain, the awful clarity of realizing that the man hurting her did not even hate her, not really. He had been using her like bait. Like proof. Like a message with a pulse. Her gaze shifted past Voit, and she saw the body on the floor several feet away, twisted at an unnatural angle, blood spreading beneath him in a slow, glossy pool. The sight should have made her scream. Instead it left her hollow, because somewhere inside the terror and shock, she understood that Elias had killed him.
"You tried to help me," she whispered, and the words sounded wrong the second they left her mouth.
Voit followed her gaze to the body, then looked back at her. "Yeah," he said, with a humorless edge that sounded like he was trying and failing to make himself normal again. "Try not to sound so disappointed."
Her throat tightened. She wanted to look away from him, but she could not. He was still too close, still covered in another man's blood, still the same man who had taken Rossi, the same man who had built nightmares into networks, the same man who had looked at her like she was a question he could not put down. None of that had changed because he had come here. None of it became cleaner because he had killed a worse threat in the room.
"Why?" she asked, her voice breaking around the single word. "Why would you do that?"
Something moved across his face, quick and irritated, as though he had expected the question and still hated hearing it. "Because he was going to kill you."
"You sent him."
"No," Voit said, and the sharpness of the answer made her flinch before he visibly pulled himself back. His hand lowered slowly to his knee, fingers curling once as if he had to restrain himself from reaching for her again. "I didn't send him to hurt you."
She breathed in too fast, and pain cracked through her ribs so brutally that she had to close her eyes until it passed. When she opened them again, he had shifted closer without touching her, his attention fixed on the way she was breathing. That frightened her too, not because he looked predatory, but because he looked scared in a way that did not suit him.
"He said you would come," she managed. "He said if he had me, you'd come."
Voit looked toward the dead man again, and hatred settled into his expression with a quietness that made it uglier than rage. "He was using you to get to me."
She swallowed, tasting blood again. "Why would he think that would work?"
Voit did not answer right away. For a few seconds there was only the sound of her uneven breathing and some distant noise she could not place, a faint, far-off wail that might have been sirens or might have been her own blood rushing in her ears. He looked at her as if the answer was there on her face and he resented her for making him see it.
"Because he wasn't stupid," he said finally.
Her stomach twisted, not from the injury this time. "What does that mean?"
"It means he paid attention."
"To what?"
"To me." His voice turned bitter on the last word, and he looked away as if the admission had cost him more than he wanted it to. "To the fact that I was paying attention to you."
She stared at him, dizzy and cold and suddenly more afraid of the conversation than the body on the floor. "Why would I be something of value to you?"
Voit laughed once, but the sound had no humor in it. It came out thin and wrong, almost panicked. "That's a really inconvenient question."
"Answer it."
His eyes came back to hers, and for once he did not look like he had the next line ready. He looked furious, cornered, and confused by his own inability to turn the moment into something easier. "What if I said you were?"
She wanted to reject it immediately, wanted to tell him she was not his, not important to him, not anything that belonged inside whatever broken logic made sense to Elias Voit, but she did not have enough air to make anger sound strong. "I don't understand."
"Yeah," he said, and his voice dropped until it barely sounded like him. "Join the club."
The answer frightened her because it was not clean enough to be manipulation. It was not romantic. It was not soft. It was worse than that. It sounded like a truth he had not wanted, something that had happened inside him without permission, something he could not study his way out of or joke into submission. She tried to keep her eyes open, but the room tilted, and the light above him smeared into a pale halo that made her nauseous.
"I'm scared," she said, and the confession slipped out before pride could stop it. Her voice sounded small, young in a way she hated, but she was too hurt to take it back. "I don't want to die."
Voit's face changed. Not dramatically, not in any way she could have explained later without sounding like she was giving it too much meaning, but something in him faltered. The anger went strange and directionless, and his hand finally did move toward her, stopping just short of her arm as though he remembered at the last second that she had told him not to touch her.
"You're not going to," he said quickly. "You hear me? You're not going to die."
"You don't know that."
"Yes, I do."
"You don't."
Elias Voit had sounded amused while threatening people. He had sounded calm while cornered. He had sounded bored in rooms where other men would have raged. But now he sounded like someone trying to hold a door shut against something stronger than him, and she could not understand it. She could not make it fit beside everything she knew he was.
"Stay awake," he said, leaning closer. "Come on. Stay with me."
"Elias," she whispered, and her eyes burned though she did not know if it was pain or fear or the effort of keeping them open. "Why are you here?"
He stared at her, and for a second she thought he might lie. She almost wanted him to. A lie would have been easier. A lie would have given her something familiar to push against. Instead he dragged a hand through his hair, leaving blood near his temple, and looked around the room like the answer might be hiding somewhere outside himself.
"I don't know," he snapped, but the anger fell apart almost immediately. "Fuck, I don't know. I just don't want to see you die."
The words settled between them with a weight neither of them seemed ready for. She tried to breathe around them, but the movement caught somewhere deep in her chest, and she coughed before she could stop herself. Pain ripped through her side. Blood filled her mouth, hot and metallic, spilling over her lip when she turned her head. Voit went still for half a second, then whatever fragile control he had been holding shattered into motion. He reached for her, then stopped, then reached again, his hands hovering uselessly before one finally pressed carefully against the wound at her side. She cried out, and he flinched as if the sound had struck him.
"I know," he said quickly. "I know, I'm sorry. I know it hurts. You have to keep pressure on it."
"You're sorry?" she breathed, the words barely there.
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Don't start doing the profiler thing right now. Don't look at me like that. Just stay awake."
The distant sirens were clearer now. She could hear them through the walls or through the ringing in her head, she was not sure which, but they were there, rising and falling somewhere beyond the room. Voit heard them too. His eyes lifted toward the sound, and for a brief, impossible second relief crossed his face before he forced it down.
"Hear that?" he asked, looking back at her. "That's help. That's your people."
She tried to nod, but the movement made the room swim.
"Don't move. Just listen to me." His hand stayed pressed to her side, firm enough to hurt and careful enough to confuse her. "They're close. You're going to be okay. You hear me? You're going to be okay."
She wanted to believe him. She wanted it so badly that tears slipped hot into her hairline before she could stop them. The sirens grew louder, and somewhere in the distance there was shouting, the heavy sound of doors, the world beginning to rush back in after narrowing for so long to pain and Voit's face above her. She felt his other hand close around hers, tentative at first, almost as if he expected her to pull away even now. She should have. She knew she should have. Instead her fingers curled weakly around his because she was terrified, because his hand was warm, because she did not want to disappear alone before the others reached her.
Voit looked down at their joined hands, and something unreadable moved through his face. "That's it," he said, his voice low and unsteady. "Just keep doing that. Keep squeezing my hand."
She tried. Her fingers tightened once, barely enough to count, and his grip closed around hers in response, no longer tentative. The room had started to fade at the edges, his face blurring in and out no matter how hard she fought to keep him clear. She heard voices closer now. Heard someone shout her name. Heard Voit say it too, sharper, more desperate, as if he could pull her back by refusing to let the sound leave the room.
"Sweetheart," he said. "Stay awake, come on, look at me."
She tried to answer, but her mouth would not shape the words. The sirens, the shouting, the pressure of his hand against her side, the warmth of his fingers locked around hers, all of it slipped farther away until only his voice remained, calling her name with a fear he had no right to feel and she had no strength left to understand.
-
She surfaced slowly, pulled out of darkness by the steady sound of a monitor and the low murmur of voices she knew before she could place them. Her whole body felt distant and impossibly heavy, as if she had been put back together in pieces that did not quite trust each other yet. The air smelled sterile, sharp with antiseptic and plastic tubing, and when she tried to move her hand, something tugged at her skin. She opened her eyes to a blur of white ceiling, fluorescent light softened by half-closed blinds, and the shadowed shapes of two people sitting on either side of her bed. For a moment she could not remember where she was or why her throat hurt so badly, and then Garcia made a sound that was half gasp, half sob, and the fear in it brought her more fully awake than the pain did.
"Oh, thank God," Penelope whispered, already on her feet, one hand hovering near her arm as though she wanted to touch her but was afraid of hurting her. Her eyes were red behind her glasses, her hair slightly messy in a way she had almost never seen, and there was a trembling smile on her face that collapsed the second she blinked at her.
"Hi, my angel. Hi. You're in the hospital. You're safe. Please do not try to sit up, you're okay."
Luke stood on the other side of the bed, his chair scraping softly beneath him, and the relief on his face was almost harder to look at than fear would have been. He had that tight, controlled expression he wore when he was trying not to let emotion run the room, but she could see the damage underneath it, the sleeplessness in his eyes and the way his jaw kept working as though he had been holding back too much for too long.
"Hey," he said, his voice quieter than usual. "You scared the hell out of us."
She tried to answer, but her mouth was too dry and the first attempt came out as a rasp that scraped her throat raw. Garcia immediately reached for the cup on the bedside table, guiding the straw to her lips with a gentleness that made her chest ache. The water was cold and tasted faintly of plastic, and even the small act of swallowing hurt enough that she had to close her eyes until it passed. When she opened them again, both Luke and Garcia were watching her with the careful attention people used around something fragile. She hated it and needed it at the same time.
"What happened?" she asked, though the question came out barely above a whisper.
Garcia's face tightened, and Luke looked at her before answering, not asking permission exactly but checking the weight of what he was about to say.
"You were taken," he said carefully, and she felt the word move through her before memory fully caught up to it. "We think it was one of Voit's network people. We're still confirming everything, but the house was tied to a guy who had been communicating with members of the network. He moved you fast. Covered his tracks better than most."
"Not better than me," Garcia said, trying for indignation and not quite making it because her voice shook. "Temporarily inconvenient, yes. Better, absolutely not. I would like that entered into the record."
Luke gave her a brief look, almost grateful for the interruption, then turned back to her. "We didn't know why he took you at first. We still don't know everything. We found signs he was trying to bait someone, but we didn't know who until..." He stopped, and she saw his expression darken with frustration, the kind that came when there were too many missing pieces and all of them had almost cost someone their life. "Until we got there."
She stared at the blanket covering her, trying to make sense of the strange heaviness in her body and the flashes beginning to return behind her eyes. The house came back first, not as a full memory but as sensations: rope burning her wrists, the smell of mildew, a man's voice asking the same question in different forms, pain spreading through her side, the floor rushing up when she fell. Her breathing changed before she could control it, and Garcia noticed immediately, her hand settling lightly over her forearm.
"You don't have to do this right now," Garcia said softly. "Nobody needs you to be on it five minutes after regaining consciousness."
Luke's mouth tightened, not because he disagreed with Garcia but because the investigator in him was fighting with the friend who wanted to let her sleep for a year.
"Only what you can remember," he said. "Anything. A face, a name, something he said. We can wait, but if there's something fresh..."
She nodded faintly, then regretted it when pain pulsed behind her eyes. "He kept asking about Voit," she said, and even saying his name made the room shift. Garcia's hand went still against her arm. Luke's posture changed, not dramatically, but enough that she felt his attention sharpen. She stared at the blanket because it was easier than looking at them while the memory assembled itself in pieces she did not want. "He wanted to know what Voit said to me when he released me. Then he found us."
Luke leaned forward, his concern hardening into something more protective. "So Voit was there?"
She swallowed, and the pain medication made everything feel slippery, as though the truth might slide out wrong if she did not hold it carefully enough. "He found me," she said. "I got loose. I was trying to get out, and I ran into him. I didn't know it was him at first. He grabbed me, and I panicked. I thought he was going to hurt me too."
Garcia's face went pale. "Oh, honey."
"I hit him," She said, and the memory of Voit cursing through a bloody nose came back with a clarity that almost made her laugh, though nothing about it was funny. "He kept saying he was trying to help me. I didn't believe him. I got away from him, and then the unsub grabbed me."
Luke had gone very still. "And then?"
The room seemed to dim at the edges though the lights had not changed. Her hand moved toward her abdomen before she realized what she was doing, stopping when the pull of bandages and pain reminded her exactly where the knife had gone.
"He stabbed me," she said, and Garcia made a soft, wounded sound she tried to hide behind her hand. "Voit tried to stop him first. I think he tried to talk him down. He told him to move away from me. He sounded angry, but not like... Not like he was angry for himself."
Luke stood too quickly, the chair shifting beneath him, his face suddenly tight with something that was not disbelief exactly but refusal.
"No," he said, and the force of it made her flinch before he softened his voice. "Kid, I'm sorry, but no. He does not get to become the guy who saved you because one of his own people turned on him."
"I'm not saying he's good."
"I know you're not." Luke dragged a hand over his face, anger and fear tangled so tightly in him that she could see him fighting to keep his voice under control. "But you're lying here with tubes in your arm because of that network. Because of him. He kidnapped Rossi. He nearly killed you before. He has manipulated every person around him for years. So when you tell me he was there, and he was calm, and he helped you, I need you to understand why I'm having a very hard time accepting that at face value."
"I know what I saw," She whispered, but the words broke slightly because she was tired and confused and the pain had begun to climb again, hot and insistent beneath the medication. Luke's reaction was making her doubt the shape of her own memory, not because she thought he was right, but because everything inside her was still too raw to defend. The room blurred, and for one terrifying second she was not sure if she was in the hospital or back on the floor with Voit's hands pressed against her side. Garcia saw it happen before Luke did.
"Okay, stop," she said, her voice suddenly firmer than she had heard it since waking. "Luke, sweetheart, I love you with my whole heart, but you need to back up before I remove you from this room."
Luke looked at her then, really looked at her, and guilt softened the intensity in his face almost immediately. "I'm not trying to upset you."
"I know," she said, though she was no longer sure if she was answering him or trying to reassure herself. The door opened a moment later, and Garcia turned with visible relief when a doctor stepped inside.
"Perfect timing," she said, already moving toward the doctor as though she had personally summoned medical authority. "She is awake, in pain, overwhelmed, and surrounded by profilers who cannot stop profiling for twelve seconds, so I would very much like assistance."
The doctor approached with the practiced calm of someone used to rooms full of frightened people. She asked her questions she could barely concentrate on, checked her pupils, examined the monitors, and pressed gently around the bandaged area in a way that made her inhale sharply despite herself. Luke stepped back toward the wall, arms folded tightly, his face turned away with the look of a man punishing himself for losing control. Garcia stayed close to her shoulder, narrating softly whenever the doctor moved, as if translating the world into something less frightening. When the medication finally entered the IV, warmth spread slowly through her veins, dulling the hard edges of the room and making Garcia's voice sound farther away.
"Sleep," Garcia told her, smoothing the blanket near her hand. "No more Voit talk."
She wanted to answer, wanted to tell Luke she was not defending Voit, wanted to tell Garcia she was sorry for scaring her, wanted to ask if Rossi knew she was awake, but the medication pulled too heavily at her. The last thing she saw before her eyes closed was Luke standing near the window, looking at her with grief and protectiveness written so plainly across his face that she understood, even through the haze, that his anger had never really been at her.
-
When she woke again, the room had changed. The bright hospital afternoon had softened into night, and the overhead lights were off, leaving only the muted glow from the monitors and the city beyond the window. For a while she lay still, listening to the quieter rhythm of the hospital after dark, trying to decide whether she was alone. Then she heard the faint turn of a page. Emily Prentiss sat in the chair near the window with a file open on her lap, her posture composed in the way it always was when she was exhausted but refusing to show it. She looked up the moment she shifted, and the relief that crossed her face was subtle but real, softening the careful authority she wore like armor.
"Hey," Emily said, closing the file without marking her place. "How are you feeling?"
She looked at her for a long moment, grateful that Emily did not rush toward the bed or overwhelm her with questions. That was one of Emily's gifts. She knew how to be present without crowding the space. "Like I got stabbed,"
Emily's mouth curved faintly. "The doctors did mention that."
A tired smile tugged at her lips, but it faded quickly. The memories were clearer now than they had been earlier, sharpened by sleep into something harder to ignore. She looked down at her hands, at the bruising around the IV, at the edge of bandage visible beneath the hospital gown, and felt the weight of what Luke and Garcia had not known what to do with.
"Emily," she said quietly. "I have to tell you something."
Emily's expression did not shift into alarm, "Okay," she said, and the simplicity of it nearly undid her. She took a careful breath, feeling the pull in her side.
"The man who took me was using me to get to Voit. I don't think I understood that at first. He kept asking what Voit said to me, why Voit wanted to talk to me, why he kept watching me. I thought he was just trying to scare me, but later, when Voit got there, he said the unsub had been paying attention to him. He said the guy saw that Voit was paying attention to me." She looked up at Emily then, needing her to understand that she knew how dangerous it sounded, how impossible. "I asked him why that mattered. He said he didn't know."
Emily stayed quiet, letting the silence make room instead of filling it too fast. Her eyes held hers steadily, and because she did not interrupt, she found herself able to keep going. "I got loose before Voit reached me. I was trying to get out of the house. I ran into him, and he grabbed me from behind because I was heading straight for the door. I panicked. I didn't know it was him at first, and then when I realized, that made it worse. I told him not to touch me. I hit him. I got away from him." Her throat tightened at the memory of the door, of almost reaching it. "The unsub grabbed me before I could get outside. He threw me down and stabbed me."
Emily's face remained controlled, but she saw the change in her eyes, the flash of anger that came and went beneath all that discipline. "And Voit?"
"He tried to stop him," she said. "He told him to move away from me. He gave him a chance, maybe more than one. I don't know if it was negotiation or control or just ego, but he tried before he killed him." The memory of the fight made her stomach turn. "I saw some of it. Not all of it. I was losing too much blood. But I know he killed him. And then he came back to me, and he was trying to stop the bleeding."
Emily leaned back slightly, not distancing herself, only settling into the information with the kind of care she recognized from hundreds of briefings. "What did he say to you?"
She looked away because that was the part that made her feel most exposed. "He was nice," she said, and immediately hated how small the word sounded. "I know he's not good. I know that. But he was trying to calm me down. He put pressure on the wound, and I screamed, and he kept saying he was sorry. He said he knew it hurt, but he had to do it because I was bleeding too much. He kept telling me to stay awake. He kept asking if I could hear the sirens." Her voice thinned, and she blinked hard. "He said my people were coming. He said I was going to be okay."
Emily's expression finally changed, not dramatically, because Emily rarely gave that much away, but she saw her brows draw together with genuine concern and confusion. "He apologized for hurting you while he was trying to stop the bleeding?"
She nodded slowly. "More than once."
"That's unusual."
"I know."
"And he said he didn't understand why he came?"
Her fingers tightened in the blanket. "I asked him why he cared if I died why he was even there, and he got angry, but not at me. More like he was angry that he didn't have an answer. He said he didn't know. He said he just didn't want to watch me die."
Emily was quiet for a long time after that, long enough that she began to worry she had said too much, or that the medication had made the memory sound different than it was. But Emily did not dismiss her. She did not soften it into confusion or trauma or pain medication. She only looked down at her own hands for a moment, thinking, then back at her with the careful seriousness she had needed earlier and not gotten. Emily said at last. "It does make sense in a behavioral way."
She breathed out shakily. "You believe me?"
"I believe that you remember him trying to keep you alive," Emily said. "And I believe that his behavior was inconsistent with what we expected from him. That doesn't make him safe, and it doesn't make him honest in every other context, but I'm not going to tell you the thing you experienced didn't happen."
Tears filled her eyes so suddenly that she had to look away. "Luke thinks I'm confused."
"Luke thought he was going to lose you." Emily's voice softened without losing its steadiness. "That came out sideways. It doesn't excuse him pushing you, but that's what it was."
"I'm not defending Voit."
"I know."
"I know what he is."
"I know you do."
"I think he sees something in me. I think because of what I told him about when I was taken as a child, because of my grandpa, because I survived and ended up here, he feels connected to me somehow. Like I lived the life he thinks he should have had." She swallowed carefully. "He told me before that he didn't want to hurt me. I know I can't trust that. I know believing him would be stupid. But I think that part was true."
Emily held her gaze, and she could see the profiler working behind her eyes, not coldly, not like a report, but like someone trying to protect her by understanding the danger clearly. "It may be true that he doesn't want to hurt you," Emily said. "That doesn't mean he won't hurt you. It doesn't mean he won't use you. It doesn't mean the fixation is harmless."
"I know."
"But yes," Emily continued, more quietly, "it's possible that he identified with you. It's possible that what happened in the bunker created a psychological attachment, especially if he sees you as proof of an alternate outcome. You were hurt as a child and surrounded by people who helped you build a life. He was hurt as a child and shaped by someone who made him worse. That contrast could be powerful to him."
She let the words settle over her, both relieved and frightened by how closely they matched what she had been afraid to say. "So what do I do with that?"
"For tonight?" Emily reached for the blanket and adjusted it over her with a gentleness that made the authority in her voice feel warmer rather than softer. "Nothing. You sleep. You heal. You let us worry about Voit."
"He saved me."
Emily's hand paused briefly on the blanket before she nodded. "Then we'll factor that in. Carefully."
She closed her eyes, exhaustion creeping back in. Emily stayed beside her as the medication and exhaustion began pulling her under again, quiet and solid and watchful. Just before sleep took her, she thought of Voit's voice in that room, telling her to listen for the sirens, telling her that her people were coming, and she understood with a chill that healing from what happened would be complicated not only because he had hurt the world, but because in that room, against every rule that should have governed who he was, he had helped keep her in it.
Synopsis: Reader is with Rossi as they investigate Elias Voit, they're prime suspect. Voit was ready for Rossi, but her presence was a rather unexpected surprise, leading him to try and understand her over their shared childhood traumas.
Warnings: Elias Voit, kidnapping of federal agents, mentions of childhood trauma, mentions of kidnapping of a child, serial killers, child abuse, allusions to CSA but not written!!.
Masterlist
She opened her eyes with the horrible, sickening awareness that her body was moving while she was not the one controlling it. For a few disoriented seconds, she could not understand the rhythm beneath her, the steady lift and fall that made her stomach roll and sent pain blooming through the back of her skull every time her head shifted against something solid.
She knew she was cold. She knew her shoulder hurt. She knew there was a hard arm under her knees and another braced behind her back, holding her close. The smell reached her next, damp concrete and old metal, the stale underground air of a place sealed away from sunlight for too long. Then memory returned with such force that it nearly made her gag. Voit had kidnapped them when they'd been baited into his home in Seattle. Rossi had convinced Voit to pull over so he could go to the bathroom when they were confronted by Tyler Green, the guy who had infultrated the network and sent word of it to Penelope, forcing her back into the BAU. The last thing she could remember was the gun shot, and screaming for Tyler before she was knocked out again.
Her eyes opened, and for one awful heartbeat she was staring at Elias Voit's throat, close enough to see the shadow of stubble along his jaw and the calm, ordinary set of his mouth as he carried her deeper into the bunker. She had to fight the Panic taking over her body but training followed close behind it. She twisted hard, shoving one hand against his chest and driving her elbow into his ribs with as much force as she could find. He cursed under his breath, more surprised than hurt, and his grip broke just enough for her to slip from his arms. She hit the concrete badly, her shoulder taking most of the impact, pain flashing through her so sharply that her vision blurred at the edges. She still scrambled backward at once, dragging herself away from him with one hand braced against the floor, breath coming too fast as she tried to put space between them and make her body obey her despite the dizziness swimming behind her eyes.
Voit stood a few feet away, one hand pressed against his side where her elbow had landed, looking down at her with an expression that was not quite anger and not quite amusement.
"Jesus that had to hurt," he said, exhaling through his nose as he straightened.
Rossi rushed forward and bent down to check if she was okay, she gripped onto his hands as she kept her gaze on the killer in front of her. Her shoulder throbbed where she had landed. Her stomach rolled again when she tried to rise, and she had to press her palm harder into the floor until the bunker steadied around her. When she finally looked up at him, she forced herself to use his name because she wanted to humanize him, she needed him to feel small, only then could she try and get into his head, convince him to let them go.
"Lee," she said, her voice rough from pain and fear. "You don't want to do this, you've got two FBI agents thats 40 years in prison,"
He watched her for a moment, and what unsettled her was not that he smiled or flinched or corrected her, because he did none of those things. She had expected some reaction when she used his real name. Most killers had one, even if it was small, especially when the name belonged to a version of themselves they had tried to bury. Instead Voit only looked at her, calm and unreadable. The lack of visible response made her skin prickle, because it suggested he was not hiding from the kid he had been.
Her eyes moved past him, and the bunker pulled at her attention despite everything. The air was damp and stale, heavy with the smell of old concrete, rust, and earth, but it did not have the layered, unmistakable scent of death. She had been around enough crime scenes to know the difference, though she did not think it like a lesson or a report. She felt it in her body first, in the way dread shifted shape inside her, becoming less about what he had done here and more about why he had brought them back.
"This place doesn't smell like death," she said quietly.
For the first time, something in his face changed, not enough to be dramatic, not enough for anyone else to point at with certainty, but enough that she felt it like a thread tightening between them. His eyes stayed on her, and his mouth kept that faint, irritating shape that almost suggested amusement, but the air around him seemed to go still.
"That's what you're going with?" he asked. "I drag you into an underground bunker, and your first review is about the smell?"
"You brought us here for a reason." Rossi states.
She pushed herself to her feet slowly, one hand against the wall when the room tilted. She hated that he watched the weakness. She hated more that he did not look especially pleased by it. His attention stayed too focused, too curious, as if her pain was not the part that interested him. Her pulse beat hard in her throat.
"This was where Lee Duval died," she said, watching Voit now instead of the bunker, because his face was the only map she had. "And where Elias Voit was born."
He moved before she could prepare for it. His hand closed around her arm, hard enough that she cried out before she could stop herself, and the pain in her shoulder flared when he pulled her toward him. She fought immediately, twisting against his grip, trying to wrench herself free, but the effort made her dizzy and he was stronger than she was.
"Get your hands off of me," she said, breathless now, fear cutting through the fragile control she had managed to build.
"I think we're done with the tour," he said, his voice low and tight, the humor not gone exactly but sharpened into something colder. "You were doing great, by the way. Really good spooky bunker commentary. Then you had to get personal."
"Voit!" Rossi's voice tore through the bunker, rough with anger and something that sounded too close to fear. She turned her head toward him at once, and relief hit her so hard that her knees weakened. He looked at Voit's hand on her arm and then at her face, and the fear in his expression made something in her chest twist violently because she had seen that kind of fear before, years ago, on her grandfathers face when she was a child and too young to understand why grown men looked broken after finding her alive.
"Don't touch her," Rossi said, each word carrying the kind of controlled fury that would have frightened anyone who knew him less.
Voit sighed, and the sound was so casual that she wanted to hit him again. "David, I'm starting to feel like you don't trust me."
"Let her go."
"Shut the fuck up old man, I've heard enough out of you." He snaps. "And you were onto something there Gideon, this is an important place, this is where David Rossi ends."
"Don't do this! Please just take me and spare him, I'm a lot more your type than he is."
She looked at Rossi, trying to keep her face steady for him because she knew him well enough to recognize the guilt already beginning to tear through his anger. He would blame himself for this. He would blame himself for every bruise on her body, every second she spent in Voit's reach, every breath she took in this place.
"It's okay," she said, though her voice shook enough to betray her. "I'll be okay."
Rossi's jaw clenched. "No, you won't. Not if he takes you out of here."
Voit tilted his head, and the irritation on his face deepened into something stranger. "You know, that's the problem with you people. Everything is always a rescue mission. Always somebody else to save."
"She has nothing to do with this," Rossi said. "You want me, you have me."
Voit's attention flicked to him, and for a second she thought she saw genuine contempt there, not theatrical, not performed, but tired and old.
"That's the thing, Dave," he said. "You keep saying that like it's true, what makes you think that it's you that I want?"
He started pulling her up the steps and toward the exit before either of them could answer. She fought him with everything she had left, digging her heels against the concrete, twisting her wrist until pain shot up her arm, but he dragged her anyway, and the sound of Rossi shouting behind them followed her through the bunker like a physical hand reaching for her and missing.
"Voit, please," she said, the word breaking loose because she could not stop seeing Rossi's face, could not stop imagining him alone in the dark once the door closed. "Please don't leave him here."
"Stop talking about him! You wanna make it out of this then you have to talk to me, no profiler shit, actually talk to me."
Voit shoved open the vehicle door and forced her into the passenger seat, not gently, but not with the mindless brutality she would have expected either. That almost frightened her more. He was controlling himself. Choosing the amount of force. Deciding where pain was useful and where it was not.
He stopped close enough that she could see the fine tension at the corner of his eye. For one second neither of them moved, his body angled over hers, her breath caught painfully in her chest, the bunker entrance behind him like a mouth in the dark. He looked at her as though her voice had pulled him back from somewhere else, and she realized with a cold twist of fear that his irritation was not only because she kept mentioning Rossi. He wanted her attention.
He pulled back and climbed into the driver's seat. The doors locked with a quiet mechanical sound that made her stomach drop. She reached for the handle anyway, testing it once, then again, because fear made the body do pointless things even when the mind already knew the answer. Voit watched her without comment. That was worse somehow, the absence of gloating, the patience of it, as though he had all the time in the world and she was the one wasting energy. She turned toward him, forcing herself to breathe through the panic clawing at her ribs.
"Please don't leave him," she said again, softer this time because screaming had not worked and fighting had not worked and she needed to find another way in.
Voit gripped the steering wheel, his fingers tightening for a moment before loosening again as he began to drive them away. "I just spared your life and you wanna go back there?"
"You aren't sparing me, we're leaving him to die, I can't do that, he's my family."
"That's generous. I thought the BAU was more of a workplace with boundary issues."
"He is my family," she repeated.
"Family." He huffed.
Voit's eyes shifted toward her at that, and she regretted the words the moment they left her mouth. She had given him something. Not much, but enough. His expression did not brighten exactly, but his attention sharpened.
"There she is," he said quietly.
She went still. "What does that mean?"
"It means you that even after all that training you still relive that what happened to you when you were a kid, I can see it in your eyes." He leaned back in the seat, not starting the engine yet, and the stillness of the vehicle made the conversation feel too intimate, too sealed away from the world.
"You kidnapped me so you could psychoanalyze me?"
"No," he said, and his mouth curved faintly. "I lured Rossi to my house to kidnap him. You were more of an unexpected complication."
"Then let me go."
"I said unexpected. I didn't say unwanted."
She forced herself not to react, but he saw something anyway in her eyes, because his eyes narrowed slightly, amused and dissatisfied at the same time. She hated that he was good at this. Hated that beneath the jokes and the performance there was a mind always moving, always testing pressure points, always finding where people tightened. He was a profiler, one of the best she'd ever seen.
"You said you're not going to hurt me," she said.
"I did say that."
"Why?"
Voit exhaled as if the question bored him, but his fingers shifted once on the steering wheel. "Maybe I'm a good person, maybe you've got me all wrong."
"You're careful," She said, keeping her voice low because she could feel the line beneath the conversation and knew that pushing too hard too fast would make him pull away. "You don't waste energy unless there's a reason. You don't bring someone with you unless they matter to the plan. You don't keep someone alive unless you want something."
"See, that right there is why people hate profilers," he said. "You make everything sound so bleak."
"I don't fit your victim type."
The humor faded from his face, not completely, but enough that she knew she had found something. He looked out through the windshield toward the road, and for a moment she thought he might not answer at all. When he finally did, his voice was flatter than before. "No."
She swallowed. "Why not?"
"You're asking that like you want to qualify."
"I'm asking because I want to understand why I'm still alive? Why not kill me back at your house when you knew two hostages would be harder to contain?"
He looked back at her, and she felt the weight of his attention settle over her with an intimacy that made her skin crawl.
"I don't know," he said.
"You expect me to believe that?"
Voit's gaze moved over her face. "You don't make sense," he said.
"What about me doesn't make sense?"
"You were taken when you were little," he said. "Used against your grandfather Jason Gideon. It was a big story. Not hard to find if you know where to look, and I usually know where to look."
She stared at him, and the inside of the car seemed to shrink around her. She had lived long enough with that memory to know the difference between being triggered and being surprised by pain. This was not the old wound ripping open the way it used to when she was younger.
"Are you trying to hurt me with that?" she asked. "People have been dragging that out like it explains me since I was old enough to understand what happened."
Voit did not look pleased by the accusation. That surprised her. "I'm not trying to hurt you."
"You're a serial killer holding me hostage in a locked car while my partner is trapped underground. You'll understand why I'm skeptical."
"Fair," he said, with a small nod that somehow made her angrier. "But no. I wanted to know if you remembered it."
"Why would that matter?"
He looked away again, and this time she could tell he was choosing his words with more care than he wanted her to notice. "They say when something like that happens to a kid, and it either ruins them or it doesn't. Except that's not true, is it? It always ruins something. The difference is what grows around the damage."
"Make your point Voit." She snapped.
"I know you joined the BAU."
"Wow sherlock you've outdone yourself, truly incredible." She says sarcastically.
"You joke," he said. "But it tells me a lot about you."
"And whats that?"
"You walked straight back into the world that destroyed your family, the world that nearly cost your life." His eyes returned to hers, and there was no softness in them, but there was interest so focused it felt almost like pressure against her skin. "You could have done anything. Could have gone into medicine, law, academia, whatever makes overachievers feel spiritually superior. Instead you chose this. You chose to study monsters for a living."
"I didn't choose monsters."
"No?" His mouth twitched. "If you hadn't of chosen the monsters how would you be sitting next to one, explain that."
She breathed in slowly, forcing herself not to let him get into her head. He wanted her irritated, off balance, defensive. He wanted to keep touching the bruise until she reacted, because every reaction gave him information. Spencer had taught her once that some unsubs did not need a confession to feel powerful. Sometimes they only needed proof that they could make you reveal yourself. She had hated that lesson when she was younger because it sounded too much like something her grandfather would have said. Now she understood it in the locked car with Elias Voit.
"What are you getting at here?"
"I want to know how you got here after what happend to you."
"What do I get out of this?"
"You get to have a chance to see your family again." He says.
"And Rossi?" She asks.
"Maybe, depends on what you give, start from the begining."
"From birth?" She asks sarcastically.
Elias smiles at her and runs a hand over his head. "Tell me what happened, tell me about the man who took you."
She closed her eyes, trying hard to fight the instant panic that those words brought her. She takes a deep breath and looks down at her hands. "Jeffrey Damien, he caught the attention of the BAU when four little girls were found killed and assulted on their parents front lawn only 24 hours after they were taken. Damien was a cop so he knew how to take forenstic countermeasures."
She pics at the skin along her nail beds as she continues, and Elias makes note of it but doesn't say anything he just listens.
"He tried to frame a local registered sex offender, but my grandfather saw right through it. When they gave the profile they said the unsub would be a white man in his mid to late 30s, he would be overlooked at work and do his best to stay out of the way, he would do anything to fit in but he never could, he would likely hold a position of power like a cop as he was searching for power and respect he'd never been given and he'd find that within the killing."
"Smart." Voit nods.
"But as Damien felt my grandfathers eyes on him, watching him at all times he panicked. He came to my house and I was playing outside, my parents were inside finishing up dinner. So when a cop pulled up to my house telling me my grandpa was asking for me I believed him. He was always my favorite person and I rarely got to see him, so of course I jumped at the chance. I ran to his car and we drove and drove and drove for an hour. The longer the drive went the more I began to understand something wasn't right. I asked about my grandfather and he told me to shut the fuck up."
"Where did he take you?" Voit asks.
Her eyes glaze over as she falls back into the memory, like she was reliving it in front of him. "He took me to a property he had been given after his father passed. We got out and he forced me into the barn, and tied me up. He put a gag in my mouth after I started crying and begging to go home. I stayed there for a long time, I began to lose track. He was gone for hours, he didn't come back until that night. He pulled up a chair and sat in front of me, telling me about how my grandfather was looking for me. He would slap me around if I made a noise, and how it was his fault that I was here, and how he was gonna kill me, and how he was gonna do it. And what he would do before he took my life... "
She swallows and looks over at him, seeing his full gaze on her, but much to her surprise he had a look in his eye, as though he felt sorry for her.
"I was only six years old I didn't know monsters were real, I didn't know why someone would want to hurt me. I was scared and cold and he just sat there, watching me. Then he got restless, he started to realize his mistake. That taking me had only sharpened their focus on him. He untied me and forced me outside, he began trying to rip off my- it doesn't matter he wasn't able to, I got away and ran into the woods. I could hear him running after me, the crunch of the leaves. The scratches of the branches against my skin as I kept running. At one point I tripped and fell down and lost consiousness. I didn't know how long I was out for, but when I woke up I could hear voices calling out my name. My grandfather was the one who," she said, and she chose the truth because lies were too easy for him to pick apart.
Voit's expression changed in a way so subtle she almost missed it. "Jason Gideon saved you."
"He found me," she said. "That's not the same thing."
"No?"
"No." Her voice softened despite every part of her that wanted to keep it sharp. "Finding me got me out of woods. But for a long time it felt like I never escaped, even after Jeffrey Damien was put on death row."
Voit did not interrupt, and that made it harder to stop. She looked down at her hands because she did not want him to see too much on her face, but that was probably pointless. He saw everything he wanted to see anyway. "My parents put me in therapy. They did everything right, or as right as they could. They told me it wasn't my fault so many times I started getting angry when they said it. They checked closets. They left lights on. They tried not to cry in front of me. But my grandfather was the one who answered my questions. Not the safe ones. The real ones. I wanted to know why someone would take a child. I wanted to know why he picked me. I wanted to know if he liked hearing me cry. Everyone else wanted to protect me from those answers, but Gideon understood that not knowing was worse."
Voit watched her without his usual smirk, and she hated the part of herself that noticed. "And what did he tell you?"
"He told me that understanding evil doesn't make it less evil," she said.
That seemed to land somewhere in him. His eyes shifted, not away from her exactly, but inward, toward some private place she could not follow.
"When you're a kid, fear becomes whatever shape your mind gives it. A shadow. A monster. A man who can appear anywhere because he already appeared once. He gave it a shape I could survive. He didn't make me feel powerful. He made me feel informed, he told me that information was power."
Voit was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, "That sounds very Jason Gideon."
"You didn't know him."
"I know enough."
"No," she said, more sharply than she intended. "You read books. You read articles. You studied his work because it helped you understand the people hunting you. That doesn't mean you knew him."
The corner of his mouth lifted, but the smile did not reach his eyes. "There she is again."
"Stop saying that."
"Why? You don't like being seen?"
"I don't like being studied by men who think noticing things gives them ownership."
For the first time, he laughed in a way that sounded almost genuine. It was quiet and brief, but there was something startled in it, as if she had surprised the sound out of him. "Okay," he said. "That was good."
"I'm not trying to entertain you."
"No, you're trying to survive. That's much more interesting."
She looked at him, and for a second the fear in her shifted into something colder. "Did something happen to you?"
The question slipped in softly, not because she was trying to comfort him. He was not asking about her childhood with the detached cruelty of someone searching for leverage anymore. There was still leverage in it, because he was Elias Voit and she would be stupid to forget that, but there was something else underneath it. He did not understand how she had come out of one kind of darkness and landed where she had. He did not understand it because some part of him had once wanted another outcome for himself.
Voit's expression closed. "Careful."
"I'm trying to understand why you care, why we're sitting here and I'm not dead."
"I don't care."
"You do."
He looked at her then, and the humor that returned to his face felt forced for the first time. "You hit your head pretty hard. I wouldn't trust any conclusions you're drawing right now."
"You knew about what happened to me before tonight."
"I know a lot of things."
"You didn't bring it up to hurt me."
"I already said that."
"And you didn't kill me because I was a surprise."
His eyes narrowed slightly. "You're very confident for someone locked in my car."
"I'm not confident," she said, and the honesty cost her more than she wanted it to. "I'm scared. But I can be scared and still know when someone is avoiding a question."
The silence that followed was different from the others. He did not rush to fill it. He did not joke immediately, and he did not look away fast enough to make the avoidance clean. She heard her own breathing, shallow and uneven, and beneath it the faint hum of the vehicle, the distant emptiness outside, the knowledge of Rossi underground like a weight pressing against her spine. When Voit finally spoke, his voice had lost some of its polish.
"I had a chance," he said.
She kept very still. "A chance at what?"
He gave a small, humorless laugh. "That's the thing, right? You people love that question. What happened? Where did it start? Who failed him? Who hurt him? Makes everyone feel very smart after the bodies are already cold."
"I'm not asking everyone. I'm asking you."
"Why?"
"It's only fair, I bare my soul to you, now its your turn."
He looked at her for a long moment, and something in his face shifted again, not softening exactly, but tiring. "When I was a kid, there was a fire," he said. "My parents died."
She did not give him pity, because pity could turn a moment like this into performance, and she needed whatever this was to stay as close to truth as possible. "What happened?"
Voit's jaw worked once before he answered. "Kids do stupid things. They play with things they shouldn't touch. They think nothing bad can happen because they don't know what bad is yet." His voice sounded almost bored, but she could hear the strain underneath it, the faint roughness he seemed to resent even as it emerged. "Then something catches. Then people start screaming, and by the time anyone understands what's happening, it's too late."
She felt the words move through her slowly. She had expected a lie, or at least a polished version of truth shaped for manipulation, and maybe this was still that. Maybe he had told this story before in his head until he knew exactly where to pause and how much shame to let show. But there was something in her that told her that he was telling the truth. He was not asking her to forgive him. He seemed angry that she had brought him close enough to remember it.
"You didn't mean for them to die," she said.
His eyes snapped toward her, and this time the reaction was immediate. "Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Make it sound okay."
"I'm not."
"Yes, you are. That's what people like you do. You take a disaster and put language around it until it suits your narritave."
She absorbed that because there was truth in it, and because denying truth only gave him more room to maneuver. "Maybe," she said. "But an accident is still different from murder."
"You think that makes a difference?"
"Yes," she said quietly.
She understood with a sick clarity that she had found one of the few places where Elias Voit still hurt in a way he could not fully weaponize. He looked away first, staring through the windshield toward the bunker entrance.
"After that, I went to my uncle."
"Cyrus Duval."
"Yes."
"Cyrus Duval killed at least twenty four people that law enforcement could prove," she said, not reciting a report but reaching for facts because facts were steadier than fear. "Probably more. He kept trophies. He liked control. He liked making people participate in their own terror."
"Sounds like you did your homework."
"He taught you everything didn't he?"
Voit did not answer immediately. His hands were loose on the steering wheel now, but she could see the tension in his forearms. "He didn't teach like normal people teach."
"No."
"He didn't sit me down with a syllabus and a gold star chart. He beat me," Voit said, and the bluntness of it made the car feel colder. "Chained me up when I didn't listen. Made sure I understood that whatever I thought I was before the fire was over. I was his right hand man, he made me help bury the bodied. He had this way of making the world very small. You learn fast when the world gets that small."
Her throat tightened. She thought of herself as a child, surrounded by people trying desperately to widen the world again after someone else had shrunk it to one room and one fear. She thought of her grandfather sitting beside her on a porch in summer heat, answering questions no one else wanted to hear. She thought of Voit as a boy with no one widening anything, no one explaining the monster except the monster himself. Compassion rose in her before she could stop it, and she hated the danger of it, hated that truth could exist beside horror without canceling it out.
"I'm sorry," she said.
Voit's head turned slowly. "That's a bad idea."
"What is?"
"Feeling sorry for me."
"I didn't say I felt sorry for you."
"You said you were sorry."
"I'm sorry that happened to you. That doesn't change what you did afterwords."
For a moment he only looked at her, and the intensity of it made her want to shrink back against the door. She did not. "You really believe that, don't you?" he said.
"Yes."
"That people can be victims and monsters at the same time."
"I know they can."
His expression shifted with something like irritation, but it was not aimed entirely at her. "I wasn't born this way."
The words came out too quickly, as if they had been waiting behind his teeth. She felt them settle between them with more force than any confession he had given so far. "I know that."
He stared at her, and for the first time since she had woken in his arms, he looked genuinely thrown. Knocked slightly off balance by an answer he had not expected. "You believe me."
"I believe no child is born evil," she said. "I believe something terrible happened to you before you had any chance to understand it, and then Cyrus found you before anyone could help you heal. I believe he hurt you, and trained you, and made violence feel like survival until the two got tangled together. I believe that part."
"But not the rest."
"The rest is bodies," she said, and her voice shook now because she was tired and hurt and terrified and because Rossi was still beneath them while she sat here talking to the man who had put him there. "The rest is families. The rest is what you chose to do after you escaped him."
Voit looked almost pleased then, though not in a happy way. It was something darker, more fascinated. "There you go," he said softly. "That's why."
"What?"
"Why you don't make sense to me. You don't excuse it," he said, ignoring the warning. "But you don't need it simple either. Most people need one or the other. Monster or victim. Evil or damaged. You don't."
"I'm a profiler."
"No," he said, and his voice sharpened enough to make her go still. "Don't hide behind the job. That's not the job. That's you."
She looked away because he had come too close, and because she could feel exhaustion wearing down the parts of herself she needed most. "You asked how I didn't become a monster."
"I did."
"I had help."
"Therapy, right?" His mouth twisted faintly. "That's the one people always say."
"Yes, therapy, a mother who slept inside my bedroom until I was old enough to tell her I didn't need it anymore, a father who loved me so much he couldn't forgive his father, and my grandpa." Her voice softened around her grandfather's name despite everything.
Voit said nothing, and she kept going because she had already opened the door and because maybe the longer she kept him talking, the longer Rossi stayed alive.
For a long moment, the only sound was her breathing. Voit seemed to take that in, not gently, not kindly, but with a concentration that made her feel exposed in a way she could not defend against. "That never should have happened to you," he said.
"No," she whispered. "It shouldn't have, but it shouldn't have happened to you either."
He looked back toward the road, and she knew before he said anything that the conversation had reached its end. Not because he was done with her, but because he had given away more than he meant to and the retreat was already beginning. His face smoothed out, the familiar sarcasm and control returning like a door closing. When he reached down and picked up a bottle from beside the seat, her body went cold.
"Drink this."
"No."
"It won't kill you."
"That is not comforting."
"It'll put you to sleep."
"No."
"Drink it sweetheart."
The way he said her name was quieter than she expected, and that frightened her more than if he had snapped. "No," she repeated, though her voice had less force this time because she could see the calculation in his face and knew the choice had already been arranged before he offered it.
Voit held the bottle out, patient and terrible. He tilted his head slightly toward the bunker without looking away from her. "You wanted to understand me, congratulations. You got further than most people."
Her hand shook when she looked at the bottle. She thought of Rossi underground. She thought of Gideon and Spencer and every person who had trusted her to be more than the frightened child she had once been. She thought of Voit watching her with an expression she could not name, some awful mixture of curiosity and possession and confusion, as though he had found something he wanted to keep studying even if he had no idea what to do with it.
"How can I trust that this isn't poisened," she said, forcing the words through a throat gone tight with fear.
"Not my style."
"Neither is letting someone live."
"If I wanted to kill you I would've." He says firmly. "Why would I want to kill the one person who understands me?"
"You think I understand you? So that means I should trust you?" She asks
"Yes."
"Well I don't."
His mouth curved faintly, but his eyes did not. "Then I guess I better be telling the truth, because you have no choice. Drink this and I give your team a chance at saving him."
She took the bottle. The liquid tasted bitter and chemical, and her stomach rebelled the second she swallowed. Voit watched every movement, not triumphantly, not with the pleasure she expected, but with a strange, intent stillness that made the inside of the car feel smaller. The heaviness came quickly, crawling through her limbs before she could prepare herself, softening the edges of the world as her fingers loosened around the bottle. She fought it as long as she could, keeping her eyes on him because looking away felt like surrender, and because some stubborn part of her wanted him to know she was still there, still seeing him, still refusing to become only what he decided she was.
"You're wrong," she whispered as the darkness pulled at her. "We're not the same."
Voit leaned closer, his face blurring as her vision failed. "I know," he said, and his voice was the last thing she heard before the world slipped away again. "That's the problem."
-
Consciousness returned slowly, surfacing through layers of thick, drugged exhaustion that made her feel as though she were swimming upward through wet concrete. Her head pounded with a deep, rhythmic ache that spread behind her eyes every time she tried to think, and for several long seconds she couldn't remember where she was or why every muscle in her body felt so impossibly heavy. The air around her was warm, carrying the smell of dry grass and sun-baked earth through the cracked driver's side window, and somewhere outside she could hear insects buzzing lazily in the afternoon heat. None of it made sense. The last thing she remembered was the him. Elias handing over a bottle. His voice telling her it wouldn't kill her, only make her sleep.
She forced her eyes open, immediately squinting against the sunlight pouring through the windshield. It took a moment for the blurry shapes around her to settle into something recognizable. She was sitting in the driver's seat of an SUV, the one Voit had taken them in. Her seatbelt wasn't fastened. The engine was off. The keys were still hanging in the ignition, gently swaying whenever a breeze drifted through the open window. Beyond the windshield stretched an endless field of waist-high grass that rolled toward a line of distant trees, interrupted only by an old dirt access road leading toward the highway several hundred yards away. There were no buildings, no people, no sign of the bunker.
She lurched forward, one hand bracing herself against the steering wheel as nausea rolled violently through her stomach. The movement sent pain exploding through her skull, and before she could stop herself she shoved the driver's door open, stumbled out into the uneven grass, and barely made it three steps before collapsing to her knees. She vomited into the weeds until there was nothing left, her entire body shaking from the force of it. Tears burned involuntarily in her eyes as she coughed, trying desperately to catch her breath while the world tilted alarmingly around her. Whatever Elias had given her hadn't simply put her to sleep. It had left her body feeling disconnected from itself, her thoughts sluggish and her balance unreliable. She stayed there for another minute, one hand pressed into the dirt beneath her, waiting for the dizziness to ease enough that she trusted herself to stand again.
When she finally climbed back into the vehicle, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, something immediately caught her attention. Sitting neatly on the passenger seat was everything that should have been missing. Her phone, badge, her holstered service weapon. Beside them rested David Rossi's badge and sidearm, carefully arranged as though someone had taken deliberate care to make sure neither of them would spend even a second wondering whether the other had been disarmed permanently. Resting on top of everything else was a cold bottle of water, beads of condensation still clinging to the plastic. Wrapped around its middle with a strip of gray duct tape was a single folded piece of paper. Her pulse quickened. Slowly, keeping one hand near her weapon despite knowing how irrational it was, she picked up the bottle. The note wasn't long. Just one word, written in thick black marker.
Safe.
She stared at it for several long seconds. It wasn't just the note. It was everything. He had returned her weapon. Returned her credentials. Returned Rossi's things too. He'd left the keys in the ignition. Parked her somewhere visible enough to be found but isolated enough that she wouldn't wake surrounded by strangers while disoriented. He'd even left water, anticipating exactly how she'd feel when the sedative wore off.
She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, forcing herself to breathe through the fresh wave of conflicting emotions threatening to overwhelm her. None of it erased what he'd done. None of it changed who he was or what he had taken from countless families. Yet every instinct she had as a profiler recognized intentional care in every decision he'd made after she lost consciousness, and that realization disturbed her almost as much as the kidnapping itself.
Her phone suddenly felt impossibly heavy in her hand. She unlocked it with trembling fingers and saw that it still had signal. Dozens of missed calls from everyone on the team. The sight of Rossi's name made her stomach lurch again. She hit Emily's contact before she could think twice. The line rang only once.
"Gideon?"
"Hi Em its me, I'm okay."
Emily answered so quickly it almost sounded as though she'd been holding the phone the entire time.
"Where are you?"
Hearing Emily's voice shattered whatever composure she had been desperately trying to hold together. Relief flooded through her so suddenly that her eyes filled with tears she hadn't realized she'd been fighting.
"Emily I don't know where I am." Her own voice sounded small.
"Penelope is tracking your call right now,"
Emily didn't try to hide it. For a brief second she heard muffled voices in the background, chairs scraping across a floor, someone asking what had happened. Emily answered them away from the phone, her voice suddenly carrying the command she knew so well.
"She's alive. We have her. Don't worry we have your location Luke and JJ are coming to you now."
Emily came back onto the line almost immediately, but her voice had shifted. The relief was still there, though now it was wrapped tightly around practiced control. The bottle of water still resting in her lap. Her fingers tightened around the note before she quietly unfolded it again, almost hoping she'd somehow missed another message hidden inside.
"Emily... its Voit he took us, Rossi is in a bunker."
"We know, he's communicating with us through the cameras."
"He's okay?" She asks.
"For now, are you okay? What happened?"
"He let me go."
Silence settled over the line for several long seconds. Then Emily asked the question she had been dreading since the moment she'd opened her eyes.
"Voit let you go?"
"Yeah." She looked down once more at everything laid out so carefully beside her. "He didn't wanna hurt me."
significant time jump - reader has been avoiding Voit for a long time, set around season 18.
Synopsis: After Voit confesses to a murder he didn't commit so they'd put him on death row reader and Voit argue (shocker), and she finally expresses everything she couldn't say.
Warnings: Elias Voit, prison, serial killer, talk of trauma, angst, mention of murder, suicidal thoughts, death row, makeout, 18+
Masterlist
The back of the transport van was louder than it should have been. Every crack in the road sent a dull vibration through the reinforced steel walls, making the benches shudder beneath them and the chains bolted to the floor rattle softly against the metal. Beyond the partition separating the rear compartment from the driver, a radio crackled with half-finished dispatches neither of them listened to, its static rising and falling beneath the steady growl of the engine. It should have been enough noise to fill the space, enough to give her something else to focus on, but instead every sound only seemed to emphasize the silence stretching between them.
Since the doors had closed behind them, she hadn't looked at him once. She refused to. Across from her, Elias sat with the transport restraints secured around his wrists, the short chain resting loosely across his knees whenever the van slowed. She didn't have to look at him to know he was watching her. She could feel it. It had been that way since they left the prison, his attention fixed on her with a patience that only made the silence harder to bear. Eventually he let out a slow breath, the kind that sounded more tired than frustrated.
"Will you just say something?"
She didn't react. She kept her eyes on the scratched metal floor between her boots, pretending she hadn't heard him.
"I know you're angry."
Still nothing. She didn't wanna give him anything at all.
"I'd honestly rather you yell at me than this silence."
The silence continued until it almost seemed to challenge him.
"Sweetheart-"
"Shut the fuck up." The words came out flat, almost weary, and even then she didn't look at him. She only heard the small breath that escaped him, something so close to relief it made irritation immediately tighten in her chest.
"There you are."
Her jaw clenched. "I told you to shut up."
"I know."
"And you're still talking."
"I am."
A bitter laugh escaped her before she could stop it, short and hollow, carrying none of the humor it might once have had. "You really don't know when to quit."
"No." His answer came without hesitation. "I don't."
For the first time since the transport had begun, she looked up. She met his eyes with open disbelief, already annoyed by the simplicity of his answer. She stared at him for another second before shaking her head in frustration.
"If you just talk to me," he said quietly, "maybe we can actually get somewhere."
She leaned her head back against the steel wall of the van, closing her eyes for a moment as if that alone might make him disappear.
"Fuck you."
"There we go. Now we're getting somewhere."
Her eyes snapped open again. "Are you serious?"
"You can swear at me, you can yell, you can tell me you hate me, just keep talking."
"You are unbelievable."
"No." His voice softened almost imperceptibly. "I'm just tired of you pretending."
That got her full attention. She straightened where she sat, the anger she'd been holding down beginning to stir again. "Pretending?"
"You're pretending this doesn't affect you."
Her eyes narrowed immediately. "You think you know everything."
"I don't."
"You've built your entire life around that."
"I did." The correction came so quickly it almost seemed involuntary. "I did."
Past tense. The tiny change caught her off guard, and she hated that it had. She hated that something so small could make her chest tighten.
"I don't know what's going on in your head," he continued. "I only know what's happening in front of me."
"Oh?"
"You won't look at me."
"I don't want to."
"You've been avoiding me."
"I've been working Elias I have a time consuming job."
"No you're hiding from me, from the truth. I know why you're doing it."
She leaned forward immediately, cutting him off before he could continue. "No. We are not doing this. You just lied about killing a woman so we'd put you to death, lets talk about that for a second!"
His shoulders dropped almost imperceptibly, as though the weight of the question had been sitting on him long before she asked it. "I wanted to die."
She had expected the answer. She had rehearsed it in her mind a dozen different ways. Nothing prepared her for how quietly he said it. There was no performance. No dramatic pause. No attempt to make her sympathize with him. He said it the way someone admitted they hadn't slept in weeks, as if it were simply another fact about the world.
"I wanted it to stop. I've spent months trying to undo things that can't be undone." His eyes drifted toward the tiny reinforced window in the back doors before returning to her. "I've met families. I've answered questions. I've helped your team the best I can"
A faint, defeated smile crossed his face before disappearing almost immediately. "And every time I think maybe I've managed to give somebody one honest answer all I see is another reminder of what I took from them. I don't have a life waiting for me."
His voice had become quieter now.
"I don't have a family. I don't have a future. I don't deserve one."
She felt her pulse beginning to race. "So you wanted us to put you on death row."
He nodded once. "I figured it'd be easier."
"Easier for who?"
"For everybody."
"No."
The word left her before she realized she was standing. The movement rocked the van slightly beneath them, and she steadied herself against the reinforced wall without taking her eyes off him.
"No, you don't get to spend years deciding who lives and dies and then decide your own life suddenly isn't worth anything."
His eyes dropped toward the restraints around his wrists. "I am so tired."
The confession barely rose above a whisper. She wanted to stay angry. She truly did. Anger had been keeping everything else at bay for months, giving her something solid to hold onto whenever the rest of her emotions threatened to swallow her whole. But as she looked at him now, something colder settled beneath the anger.
"I don't know how to keep living with what I've done."
She watched him in silence. For the first time since she had known him, he didn't look like someone asking for understanding or forgiveness. He looked like someone who had simply run out of strength.
"You'd all be better off without me."
Her voice rose before she even realized it. "You don't get to decide that either."
He looked genuinely surprised by the intensity of her reaction. "Why are you so angry?"
She opened her mouth to answer, but nothing came out. Because every honest answer led somewhere she refused to go.
"You should be relieved." His voice remained painfully calm. "If I'm gone you never have to think about me again, its the right thing to do Gideon."
"No." She pointed at him, though her hand trembled. "You do not get to say my name like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you love me."
His eyes filled, and he looked away too late to hide it. "I do."
She closed the distance between them before thought could stop her, reaching for him with both hands, and Elias went completely still when her fingers curled into the front of his shirt. For one suspended second he looked down at her like he did not understand what was happening, like his mind had offered him every possible outcome except this one. She hated him. She loved him. She wanted him gone. She wanted him alive. She wanted to be the kind of woman who could walk away untouched by what he had become to her, and she was not. Since she could not say any of it, she pulled him down and kissed him.
Elias froze against her mouth, shocked so deeply that for a heartbeat he did not respond at all. His hands hovered at his sides as if he were afraid touching her would wake him from something he did not deserve to have. She kissed him harder, not gently, not sweetly, but with all the fear and grief and fury that had nowhere else to go. It was not forgiveness. It was not absolution. It was not an answer that made anything easier. It was everything she had refused to say tearing out of her in the only form she could bear. Elias made a broken sound against her mouth then, something between relief and pain, and finally his hands came up to her face, the handcuffs clanging, he touched her so so gently as though he still expected her to pull away and hate him for touching her. The restraint in him undid her more than desperation would have.
The kiss deepened because neither of them knew how to stop it once it had started. She pressed closer, fists still twisted in his shirt, and Elias bent toward her as if the contact had taken the strength out of him. He kissed her like a man starved. She hated the tenderness in it. She hated that he tasted like tears. She hated that her own body, traitorous and desperate, recognized him with a relief she had spent far too long trying to discipline into silence. Every part of it hurt. The wanting hurt. The grief hurt. The knowledge of who he had been and what he had done stood between them even as she held him, impossible to erase, impossible to forgive, impossible to make irrelevant. But for those few seconds, she let herself stop arguing with the truth. She let him feel what she could not say. She let the kiss carry all of it, the terror of losing him, the shame of needing him alive, the fury that love had chosen the worst possible place to grow, the aching, humiliating truth that when he said she did not have to say it, she had needed him to know anyway.
His hands drop and she pulls back and looks up at him, her face flushed and lips swollen. She had tears on her face. He sits back down on the bench, looking up at her in awe, a smile on his face. He reaches out, his cuffed hands touching her skin softly. She looks down at his hands and he pulls her closer to him, she allows him to pull her in-between his legs. A bump in the road causes her to place her hands on his shoulders. He looks up at her as she steadies herself. He pulls her down wordlessly and she lets him, putting her weight on his lap, straddling him. He raises his arms and she looks at him in confusion he shifts his arms around her, settling them along her waist. She looks down at how close they were, he connects their lips once more. The sound she made was the single most beautiful thing he'd ever heard. His arms raise and he squeezes her waist as her hand curls around his neck.
They continue for a long time, she had no idea as she lost herself within him. She let go of the shame and let herself feel it, everything all at once. The van begins to break and lurch forward, she quickly pulls back and he lifts his arms. She gets off of him and moves back to the other bench across the van. She looked up at him, surprised as his face was pale and wet with tears, his breathing uneven. He looked stunned to his core, devastated and hopeful and afraid to move, as though one wrong breath might shatter whatever fragile thing had just passed between them. She touched her own mouth with trembling fingers, horrified by herself, by him, by the fact that nothing in the room had changed and yet everything had.
significant time jump - reader has been avoiding Voit for a long time, set around season 18.
Synopsis: Reader goes to visit Voit in prison after ignoring his letters and he admits much deeper feelings
Warnings: Elias Voit, prison, serial killer, talk of trauma, angst with no comfort.
Masterlist
Emily called her into the office a little after lunch, and she knew before she crossed the bullpen that whatever waited behind that closed door was not going to be a normal conversation. Emily’s voice had been too controlled when she asked for a minute. Not cold, not angry, but careful in a way that immediately made every instinct in her body sharpen. She set the case file she'd been reviewing aside, stood from her desk, and followed Emily through the quiet hum of the BAU without asking questions.
That was the first mistake. She should have asked. She should have made Emily say it in the open, should have forced whatever this was to become real before they reached the privacy of the office, because the moment she stepped inside and saw Rossi standing near the window with his arms folded tightly across his chest, she understood that this was not a check-in. This was an intervention.
Emily closed the door behind them with a soft click and remained near the desk rather than sitting, which told her almost as much as Rossi’s expression did. Emily was trying to keep the room balanced. Rossi was already past that. He looked at her the way he looked at a case that had turned ugly after too many missed chances, his jaw set, his eyes tired and sharp with something that was not only anger. When Rossi finally spoke, his voice had none of the warmth he usually saved for her.
“We know about the letters.”
“Okay,” she said, because she had not actually done anything wrong and she refused to start the conversation by acting guilty.
Rossi’s eyes narrowed slightly. “That’s your answer?”
“What answer did you want?”
“I wanted you to tell us before we had to find out from security screening.”
“They’re screened before they ever reach me. There’s a record of every one of them. I didn’t sneak them into the building under my jacket.”
Emily stepped forward before Rossi could answer too quickly. “The point is that correspondence from Elias Voit to a member of this team is not a small thing. Even if the letters are screened, we needed to know that he was contacting you directly.”
“I haven’t responded,” she said, keeping her attention on Emily because she was at least trying to make this sound procedural. “Not once. I read the first few because I thought there might be relevant information in them, and after that I stopped opening them right away. Some of them are still sealed. If you want them, take them.”
Rossi let out a short, humorless breath. “Listen to yourself. You’re talking like this is an evidence transfer issue."
“What exactly do you think I’ve done?”
“I think you’re letting him keep a line into your life.”
She stared at him, the words hitting harder than she expected because they were not entirely untrue. That was what made her angry. Not that he had accused her unfairly, but that he had reached toward the part of the situation she had been trying very hard not to name. “He sends letters. I don’t write back since when is that a crime?”
Emily’s eyes moved briefly to Rossi, a warning without words, but he was not looking at her. He was still looking at the woman in front of him with an intensity that felt too personal to be only professional. She knew, suddenly, that this was not just about the letters. The letters were the excuse. The wound in the room had a different name.
Rossi shifted his weight, his voice lowering instead of rising, and somehow that made it worse. “Do you know what it felt like to look families in the eye because Elias Voit had taken someone from them?"
She took a slow breath. “I’ve never forgetten any of that. I’m only asking you to believe more than one truth at a time.”
Rossi’s mouth tightened. “That phrase is starting to become a problem. I don’t like any truth that makes Elias Voit sound like he deserves any empathy.”
“That is not what I said. No, it’s where you keep dragging the conversation because you hate him, he triggers you and you can't see past it.”
Rossi looked at her as though she had slapped him, and for a second she thought he might step back, might realize how much of his anger had nothing to do with her. Instead his expression hardened further.
“You think I’m triggered. Is that it? You think this is about me not being able to see clearly?”
“I think you have every reason in the world to hate him,” she said, and her voice softened despite herself because she did not want to hurt Rossi, not really. “I think you saw the worst of him. I think he made you suffer. But I also think I saw things you didn’t.”
Rossi’s face changed. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Don’t split him into pieces.”
Her stomach tightened. Emily moved again, closer now, but still did not interrupt. The conversation had shifted too quickly, gone from policy to accusation to something dangerously close to the truth. “I know what he did. I know what he took from people.”
“Then why are you arguing with me?”
“Because you keep acting like acknowledging change is the same thing as excusing murder.”
“No,” Rossi said, his voice sharpening at last. “I am acting like I’ve seen this before. Offenders don’t always manipulate people by lying. Sometimes they manipulate them by becoming exactly what that person needs to see.”
She felt heat rise into her face. “He confessed, Rossi. He gave the Bureau everything. He dismantled his own network knowing it guaranteed he would never see daylight again.”
“He did that after he got caught, after the walls closed in!”
Her mouth opened, then closed. Not because she had no answer, but because the answer she had was not one she could safely give him. She wanted to say that remorse still mattered, even late. She wanted to say that the man who shielded her with his own body in the hospital had not been performing. She wanted to say that there was a difference between trusting him blindly and refusing to deny what she had witnessed. Instead she said, “You’ve seen one side of him.”
Rossi stared at her. She knew immediately that it had been the wrong phrasing.
“One side,” he repeated.
Emily’s voice came softly but firmly from behind the desk. “Dave why don't we take a break.”
He ignored her. “One side of him buried people. One side of him built a network that turned murder into a franchise. One side of him put me in the ground. So forgive me if I’m not interested in hearing about the other side because he managed to look sad in a hospital room.”
Her anger flared. “He saved my life.”
Rossi shot back before she could continue. “And how many lives did he take?”
The room went silent. That was the thing about Rossi. When he wanted to hurt someone, he did not need cruelty in his voice. He only needed the truth sharpened to a point. She looked away first, and she hated herself for it because it made her feel guilty when guilt was exactly what she had been trying to resist. “You think I don’t think about that every single time he crosses my mind?”
The words landed low and ugly. Emily’s expression tightened. “Alright guys, enough.”
“No, I want her to answer.” Rossi stepped closer, not threateningly, but with the restless fury of a man who had lost patience with restraint. “What are these letters doing to you? Don’t tell me they’re just paper. Don’t tell me you don’t answer them. What happens when you see his handwriting? What happens when one shows up on your desk? What happens when you read whatever carefully worded minuplation tactic he’s decided to send you that week?”
She hated that her eyes burned. She hated that Rossi saw it. She hated that Emily saw it too. “That’s not fair.”
“I’m not trying to be fair, I don't give a fuck about that. I’m trying to keep you from walking into something you can’t profile your way out of.”
“I’m not a child.”
“No, you’re one of the smartest agents in this building, which makes it worse. You know exactly how dangerous emotional access is.”
Emily finally stepped fully between them, not physically blocking either one, but changing the shape of the room with her presence. “We are not here to put her on trial. We are here because this situation has risk attached to it, and we need boundaries before someone says something they can't take back.”
"Just say it!"
She looked at him, furious now because he was getting too close. “Say what?”
“That he means something to you.”
Emily closed her eyes briefly, as if she had hoped he would not put it so plainly.
She felt her throat tighten. “He saved my life. More than once. If my life means something then yes Elias Voit has different sides to him, maybe he's changed, maybe you shouldn't be so hell bent on acting like he's put on this act and he has a master plan, but I really believe that he's changed.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“That’s the only answer you’re getting.”
Rossi stared at her for a long moment, and when he spoke again his voice was quieter, rougher, more wounded than angry. “Do you know what scares me? It’s not that he writes. It’s not even that you read the letters. It’s that you keep arguing like the rest of us are missing something only you can see.”
“Maybe you are.”
The silence after that was immediate. Emily said her name softly, but she barely heard it. She was looking at Rossi, and Rossi was looking back at her as if the last thread of his control had finally begun to snap.
“You want to know what I see?” he asked. “I see a young agent with Jason Gideon’s blood in her veins standing in this office telling me there’s more to Elias Voit than his crimes.”
Her face went cold. Rossi kept going because he was angry and scared and too far into it to stop himself.
“Jason spent his life trying to hunt monsters. He built this place because he knew what people like Voit could do when everyone else looked away. And you are standing here telling me two things can be true like that man didn’t take everything Jason believed in and turn it into a hunting ground.”
Emily’s voice cut through the room. “David.”
But he had already said too much, and some part of him knew it. She could see the regret beginning to form even before he reached the worst of it, but grief had momentum and his had not stopped moving.
“If Jason were here, he would be ashamed of you.”
Everything inside her went still.
The anger vanished so completely that for one strange second she felt nothing at all. Just a hollow, ringing quiet where her grandfather’s name had struck bone. Rossi’s face changed the instant he saw what he had done.
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “You shouldn’t have.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shook her head, already backing toward the door. “Don’t.”
Emily stepped around the desk. “Please wait.”
She looked at Emily because looking at Rossi had become impossible. “No.”
Rossi said her name, then stopped himself because he seemed to understand too late that there was no version of it he could say now that would not sound like another wound.
“You don’t get to use him against me,” she said, and her voice was quiet enough that it made both of them still. “You don’t get to decide what my grandfather would think of me because you’re angry and scared and you don’t know where to put it.”
Rossi looked stricken. “I was out of line.”
“Yes,” she said. “You were.”
She opened the door before either of them could stop her and walked out into the bullpen with her eyes fixed straight ahead. The noise of the office rushed back around her, phones ringing, printers humming, agents talking over case files, all of it impossibly normal. She kept walking because if she stopped, she would break in front of everyone, and Rossi had already taken enough from her for one day. Emily caught up near the elevators.
“Wait,” Emily said, breathless not from the short walk but from the emotional whiplash of the office. “Please.”
She stopped because it was Emily, but she did not turn around at first. When she finally did, the tears were already there, hot and humiliating, slipping down her face before she could wipe them away. Emily’s expression softened immediately.
“He was wrong,” Emily said but there was anger beneath it now, controlled and directed elsewhere. “I will deal with him.”
She wiped at her face, furious with herself for crying in the hallway. “He thinks I’m compromised.”
Emily hesitated just long enough for honesty to matter. “He's in pain and too close to the source of it.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No,” Emily agreed. “It isn’t.”
The answer eased something in her chest and tightened something else. She looked toward the closed office door at the far end of the bullpen, then back at Emily. “Do you think I’ve crossed a line?”
“No.” Emily did not soften the word. “No professional line has been crossed. You have not answered the letters. You disclosed the safe house visit when asked. You have followed protocol even when this got emotionally complicated.”
“But?”
“But I need to make sure it stays that way.” Emily stepped a little closer, lowering her voice so no one else could hear. “Not because I think you’re weak. Not because I think you’re foolish. Because this is exactly the kind of situation that can become dangerous.”
She nodded, though her throat hurt. “Of course.”
Emily studied her face with the kind of careful compassion that made lying harder. “Whatever this is, you don’t have to explain it to me right now.”
“There’s nothing to explain. I couldn’t ever fall for someone like him.”
Emily did not call it a lie. She did not agree either. She simply let the words sit between them with all the weight they carried and said, “You deserve more than a life spent punishing yourself for what you feel.”
The tears came again, though quieter this time. “I don’t know what I feel.”
Emily placed a careful hand on her shoulder. “Do whatever you need to do to get through it. Talk to me. Talk to a therapist. Stop reading the letters. Burn them. Keep them in evidence. Take space from anything involving him if that’s what helps. But do not let shame make decisions for you.”
She gave a small, broken nod. “Okay.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
Emily squeezed her shoulder once before letting go. “Go home early. I’ll smooth it over.”
“I don’t want special treatment.”
“This isn’t special treatment. This is me telling one of my agents to take the afternoon after getting hit where it hurt.”
She almost smiled, but it did not quite reach her face. “Thank you.”
Emily nodded and returned toward her office, already looking like a woman preparing to have a very different conversation with Rossi. The protagonist stayed near the elevators for a long moment after she left, trying to breathe through the shame that had crawled beneath her skin. Rossi’s words replayed with brutal clarity. Her grandfather would be ashamed. She knew he had said it because he was frightened. She knew grief had spoken before love could stop it. She knew all of that, and still the sentence lodged somewhere too deep to remove.
By the time the elevator doors opened, she had already begun building the lie she would later tell Elias to his face. She would tell him she could never love someone like him. She would say it coldly. She would make it sound like certainty. She would make it cruel enough that maybe he would believe it, because if he believed it, perhaps she could too. And if she could believe it, then maybe she would not have to hear Rossi’s voice every time she looked at herself in the mirror.
-
She knew before she sat down that this visit was going to be different, though she hated herself for knowing him well enough to sense it. Elias was already in the library when the guard brought her in, seated on the far side of the table with his hands folded in front of him, his posture controlled in that deliberate way he used when he was trying too hard to appear calm. Since the injury, since losing his memories and regaining them piece by piece until the full weight of himself had come back and nearly crushed him, Elias had become worse at hiding the things that hurt him, he still tried. He still used sarcasm to mask the pain, still watched people too closely when he did not know what to do with his own feelings. He looked at her and sometimes forgot to make his face unreadable. He heard her voice and went still before he could stop himself.
"Elias," she said as she sat.
Keeping her tone flat because if she let any softness into it, she was afraid the whole room would change shape around them. She forced herself not to notice the way his eyes followed the movement, not possessively, not greedily, but with the quiet hunger of a man who had learned to survive on details.
"Please tell me this isn't one of those conversations where you actually have something to tell me, and its not gonna waste my time."
Elias's mouth moved like he almost smiled, but the expression never fully formed. "Hello Agent Gideon, I'm doing great thank you for asking, how are you?"
"Voit what is it that you need? I got your letters." She said coldly.
"You did? I was convinced they weren't sending them out, but you were just ignoring me."
"You're in federal custody and I have actual work to do rather than sit here with you for no reason."
"Come on nothing could be more important than spending time with me," he said, and under different circumstances, with anyone else, it might have sounded like a joke. With him it carried the faint echo of the person he had been, and she saw the moment he heard it too. His face tightened almost imperceptibly, not because she had reacted but because he had. He looked down at his hands for a second, thumb brushing over the side of one finger, and when he looked back up there was no humor left in him. "Sorry. That wasn't funny."
"Why did you ask for me?"
"I didn't ask for you per say. I'm only fucking with you."
She lifted her eyes. "You put my name on the visitor list every week, you keep sending me letters what is it that you want?"
"That's not the same thing."
"It is exactly the same thing."
"No," he said quietly, and the quickness of the answer made the air shift. "Asking implies I think I have a right to your time. I don't, I know that. I put your name down because if you come, I want them to let you in. That's all."
She stared at him, hating the way the distinction landed. It was exactly the kind of thing he would say now, careful and devastating because it acknowledged the boundary instead of trying to break it. She should have been relieved by that. Instead she felt cornered by it, because every sign of restraint from him made her more aware of how much feeling remained beneath it.
"You always do that," she said, sharper than she meant to. "You say things like that like they're supposed to make me feel better."
His eyes narrowed slightly, not in anger but in concentration. "Do they?"
"No."
"Then I'm not doing very well."
"No you're not."
Her voice rose before she could stop it, and she hated that too, hated how quickly he could bring the emotion up in her even when she entered the room determined to be flat and professional. "Because sometimes it feels like you're still trying to manage me. Like if you say the right thing in the right way, I'll forget what you are."
Elias flinched, and for once he did not hide it quickly enough. "I don't want you to forget."
"Good because I can't, thats not possible, look at where you are."
"I know where I am, this is all I have outside of my fucking cell, forgive me for trying to get anything I can."
"Things were different before, I knew that nearly anything out of your mouth was to miniplate me. Now you sit there and sound honest, and I have to remind myself that honesty coming from you doesn't erase anything."
His gaze dropped to the table. For several seconds, he was silent, and she thought perhaps she had finally pushed him back into anger, finally given him a reason to become the man she knew how to resist. But when he looked up again, his face was only tired. "I know it doesn't."
"Stop saying that."
"What do you want me to say?"
"I don't know." The answer came too fast, too raw, and she looked away as soon as she said it because it revealed more than she wanted. "That's the problem. I don't know what I want you to say. I don't know why I came here. I don't know why I can sit across from you and have a conversation like this is normal when nothing about it is normal."
Elias leaned back slowly, as if giving her space even though the table and the rules already ensured there was more distance between them than either of them could cross. "You keep coming because leaving things unfinished bothers you."
She let out a humorless laugh. "That's your theory?"
"It's one of them."
"Of course you have more than one."
"I have a lot of time to ruminate."
She should not have smiled. She did not fully smile, but something in her face betrayed her, and she saw the moment he caught it. The shift in him was small, but it was enough to make her stomach drop. His expression softened with such naked, helpless affection that she felt suddenly exposed, as though he had touched her without moving.
For a while neither of them spoke. She listened to the quiet hum of the building, the distant sound of a door opening somewhere down the hall, the faint scratch of Elias's sleeve against the table when he shifted. There had been a new interview with one of the remaining network offenders, a reference to an old file, a question only Elias might be able to contextualize. But now the case sat unopened in the folder beside her hand, and she could not make herself touch it. Work had been her shield for so long that without it she felt almost indecent, sitting there with all the unsaid things pressing against her ribs. She felt Rossi's voice in her head.
"You're thinner," he said after a long silence, and his voice was careful, almost reluctant.
She looked up sharply. "Excuse me?"
"Not like that." He looked irritated with himself immediately. "God, no. I mean you look tired. You look like you're not eating, like your face looks a bit thinner. You keep rubbing your left wrist like it hurts, which I imagine it does because the ligaments never healed right after the ropes. You seem off, like you have something you have to say."
Her mouth fell open slightly, not because any single observation was surprising but because the accumulation of them felt invasive in a way that was almost tender and therefore worse. "Stop profiling me."
He smiles and looks at her with a gaze that made her stomach drop. She knew the look, she'd seen it before.
"That is exactly what I mean. You can't look at me like I belong to you."
His face changed, pain moving through it so quickly she almost wished she had not said it. "I don't think you belong to me."
"But you look at me like I matter to you. I owe you nothing, I don't have to explain anything to you."
The words landed between them, harsh and clean. Elias drew in a slow breath, and she saw the effort it took him not to answer immediately. There was passion in him now, rising too quickly for him to contain, but he fought it because some part of him understood that every unrestrained feeling from him had weight.
"You're right,"
That should have ended it. It would have, with anyone else. An acknowledgment, a boundary, a pause long enough to retreat into safer conversation. But she was already too raw, and his restraint only made her feel more ashamed of her own lack of it. "Then why do you keep doing it?"
"You know why."
The answer came out too honest, and both of them froze around it. Elias looked away as if he had exposed something before he meant to, his mouth tightening, his shoulders rigid beneath the plain institutional shirt. Her heart began to beat harder, not from surprise exactly, but from recognition. There it was. The thing under the floorboards. The thing they had been stepping around for months.
"Don't," she said, barely above a whisper.
He laughed once, but there was no humor in it. "You keep saying that."
"Because you keep getting close to saying something really stupid."
"I know."
"Then stop."
"I can't keep swallowing it every time you walk in here."
The words came with sudden force, not loud enough to bring the guards in but charged with so much feeling that she felt them physically. Elias leaned forward, his palms flat on the table now, not threatening, not reaching for her, but bracing himself as if the confession had started moving inside him and he had to hold on to something before it tore through.
"I have tried. I have tried to make it smaller. I have tried to call it gratitude, or guilt, or attachment, or whatever clinical word would make it sound less impossible. I have tried to tell myself it's because you were kind to me when you had every reason not to be, or because you looked at me once and saw the boy before the monster, and I have hated myself for needing that from you. I have sat in this room week after week and told myself not to look at you too long, not to notice when you're tired, not to care whether your hands shake when you talk about certain cases, not to wait for the sound of your shoes in the hall like it's the only thing in this place that means time is still moving."
She stood so quickly her chair scraped against the floor, the sound cutting through his words but not stopping the panic already unfurling inside her. "Stop."
Elias stood too, then immediately checked himself when the guard outside shifted near the door. He stayed on his side of the table, hands visible, breathing unsteadily. His eyes were bright, furious with himself and desperate all at once. "I can't."
"You can."
"I can't." His voice broke on the edge of the sentence, and he looked almost angry at the sound of it. "That's the problem. I know exactly what I am. I know exactly what I've done. I know there are people in the ground because of me, people who never got to go home, families ruined forever and I wish I could go back but I can't! I know your grandfather is rolling in his grave. I know your team would hate you. I know all of it, and none of knowing it has made it stop."
Tears burned behind her eyes. "You're so fucking selfish."
"I know, but I'm not trying to be."
"Yes, you are." Her voice rose, shaking with anger now because anger was the only thing keeping her from breaking completely. "You stand there and act remorseful, like saying it makes it noble. Like self-awareness is penance. Like if you say these things to me I'm supposed to forget the bodies."
"I don't want you to forget."
"Then what do you want?"
He stared at her, and for a moment the entire argument seemed to balance on that question. She wanted him to dodge it. She wanted sarcasm. She wanted manipulation. She wanted the old mask because the old mask would let her breathe. Instead Elias looked at her like a man with nothing left to protect himself with.
"I need you to know," he said. His mouth trembled before he caught it, and the sight made her feel sick because it was too human and she did not want his humanity. She did not want to see it. She did not want it pressing against the monster until she could no longer keep the edges clean. "That I'm in love with you."
The room did not change, and that was what made it unbearable. The lights kept humming. The guard stayed outside the door. The table remained between them. She stood perfectly still, her hands curled at her sides, and felt the confession move through her like a blade sliding between ribs. There had been too many looks, too many silences, too many moments where he forgot himself around her and then looked away as if ashamed. Elias closed his eyes as if he had expected the word and still was not ready for it.
"I'm not asking you for anything."
"No." The refusal came sharper, breaking loose from somewhere panicked and childlike inside her. "You don't get to do that! You can't just say that to me!"
"I know."
"Stop saying you know." She stepped back from the table, but there was nowhere to go except the door, and leaving now would feel like running. Staying felt like bleeding. "You don't know. You don't know what that does to me."
His face shifted, and the pain there made her angrier because she needed him to be selfish. She needed him to have done this without thinking about her so she could hate him cleanly. "Tell me."
"Fuck you!" She says standing up and hastly grabbing her things.
"Please."
The word nearly undid her. Elias Voit had begged for many things in many lives, she imagined. But this was different. There was no strategy in it, no angle she could find. He looked undone, desperate not for forgiveness but for a truth he seemed to believe already existed between them.
"Tell me," he said again, quieter now. "Tell me I'm wrong and I'll shut up. Tell me there's nothing here. Tell me you don't feel it and I will never say it again."
"That's not fair."
"No," he said, tears standing in his eyes now. "It isn't. I'm trying to give you an exit."
"No, you're not. You're asking me to lie to you so you can pretend you're being noble when you accept it." The tears spilled before she could stop them, hot and humiliating, and she wiped them away with the heel of her hand as if she could erase the evidence before he saw it. He saw it anyway. He always saw everything. "You want me to say it. That's what you want. Don't dress it up as mercy."
Elias's face crumpled slightly, not into weakness but into the terrible recognition of being seen. "Yes," he said. "I want you to say it."
The honesty stole the air from her. He pressed on because he had already crossed the line and could not seem to make himself turn back.
"I want you to say it because I feel insane in this room with you. I feel it every time you walk in and every time you leave. I feel it when you hate me and when you're kind to me and when you look at me like I've ruined you. I know I have no right to ask anything from you. I know that. But I need to hear that I didn't imagine this. I need to hear that I'm not the only one sitting here being destroyed little by little."
She shook her head hard, tears blurring him until his face lost shape.
"You are disgusting. You don't know what it is to go home and wash my hands like I touched something filthy even though you never touched me. You don't know what it is to look at my grandfather's picture and feel like I betrayed him. You don't know what it is to sit with victims' families and think about the sound of your voice telling me to stay awake while I was bleeding out." Her voice cracked so badly she had to stop, one hand pressed against her mouth for a moment as if the words themselves were making her sick. "Do you understand what that does to me? Do you understand how much I hate myself? How I can't even look at myself in the mirror anymore because I don't recognize who I see?"
Elias looked stricken.
"Don't look at me like that, like a kicked puppy, like I'm being cruel. I want to be cruel. I need to be cruel. Because if I'm not cruel, then I have to feel everything else, and I can't. I can't do that."
His tears fell then, silently at first, and he did not wipe them away. "I'm sorry."
"I don't want your apology. I don't want anything from you."
"That's not true."
The words were soft, but they struck harder than if he had shouted. She stared at him, her breath caught in her throat, and for the first time in the argument she hated him with a clarity so sharp it almost felt clean.
"You want me to be the old version," he said, voice shaking now, but steady enough to cut. "You want me to be cruel, because then you can catogorize me easier. You want me manipulating you, because then none of this belongs to you. You want me to say something ugly so you can walk out of here and feel sane again."
"Shut up."
"You want to hate me without complication. And you do hate me, I can see it, but two things can be true at once."
Her hand struck the table before she realized she had moved, the sound sharp enough that the guard looked in through the window. She barely noticed. "Stop it Voit, you don't get to fucking read me like that."
"I'm not reading you. I know you."
"You don't know me."
"I do."
"You know pieces you stole."
"I know pieces you gave me."
"That was my mistake, I gave them to you when you kidnapped me."
He flinched again, and this time the wound in his face satisfied nothing in her. It only made the grief worse. "Maybe."
"Maybe?" she repeated, nearly laughing through the tears. "That's it? That's all you have?"
"What do you want me to say?"
"I want you to take it back."
The room went silent. Elias stared at her, and she saw immediately that he would not. Not because he wanted to hurt her. Because he could not lie about this now that it had finally left him. "I can't."
"You can."
"No." His voice broke again. "I can regret saying it. I can hate myself for what it's doing to you. I can wish I were anyone else, anything else, someone who could love you without hating yourself. But I can't take it back, I won't do it, and maybe that makes me a selfish asshole but I couldn't keep doing this."
The sentence destroyed something in her, and she hated him for that too. She hated that he had found the exact language for the horror of it. Another thing she had to survive. That was what loving him would be. Not a romance. Not a choice she could make and defend. A wound. A secret. A moral injury she would carry until it either scarred over or consumed her.
"I could never love someone like you," she said, because the words were the only weapon left, the only wall high enough to stand behind. "Do you hear me? Never."
Elias nodded once, tears in his eyes, and the gentleness of it enraged her.
"You listen to me Elias Voit." Her voice rose again, and this time the guard opened the door halfway, but Elias lifted one hand slightly without looking away from her, silently telling him not to enter. The guard hesitated, and she was too caught in the storm to care. "You are a monster. I don't care what happened to your brain. I don't care how many memories you lost and got back. I don't care how sorry you are now. You were a monster before you loved me, and loving me doesn't make you less of one. You're just like him."
That finally changed him. The words had left her before she fully understood she was going to say them, pulled from the deepest, ugliest part of the wound, and the second they were in the room, she knew exactly who she meant. Elias knew too. She saw it land. The man who had kidnapped her as a child. The faceless figure who had lived in nightmares long after Gideon found her. The first monster. The one who had made fear a permanent room inside her body. Elias went completely still, and for the first time all day he looked genuinely afraid of what she might say next.
"You're like the man who took me when I was little, Jeffrey Damien." she said, voice shaking violently now. "You're like the man who used me against my grandfather. You're like every man I spent my life trying to understand so I could make sure no one else had to sit in a room and wonder if they were going to die." She was crying openly now, but there was no dignity left to protect. "And you're like the man who killed my grandfather. You're part of the same world. The same rot. The same nightmare. You make me fucking sick!"
Elias looked as if she had gutted him, and for a terrible moment she thought he might finally become angry. She almost wanted it. She wanted the proof. She wanted the punishment. Instead he only lowered his head, shoulders shaking once before he forced himself still. When he looked back up, his face was wet, his voice quieter than she had ever heard it.
"You're right, I can't argue with that."
"Then why are you doing this?"
The question came out small, stripped of rage so suddenly that it frightened them both. Elias looked at her with such grief that for one moment she saw the full tragedy of it, not softened, not forgiven, but there: a man who had become monstrous, who had remembered being human too late, who loved someone whose life had been shaped by men like him.
"Because I love you," he said, and the simplicity of it was unbearable. "Because it's the only true thing I have, even though I know it hurts you. Because when everything came back, all the memories, all the blood, all the things I did and the reasons I told myself I did them, you were still there. You were the person I remembered wanting to protect, even when I didn't know what it meant to care for someone I knew that you were different. And I know that's not fair to you. I know it isn't enough. I know it doesn't redeem me, nothing ever could."
"What are you asking?"
He looked at her for a long moment, and she knew the answer before he gave it. "Say it."
"No."
"Please."
"No."
"Please." His voice cracked around her name, and the sound of him begging made her feel as if the floor had vanished beneath her. "I'm not asking you to stay. I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'm not asking you to choose me. Just don't leave me here like this, just tell me the truth."
"I already told you the truth."
"You lied to me." He pressed one hand flat against his chest as if something physically hurt there. "God help me, I have to hear it. I need to hear it once. One time is all I ask, I'll never ask again. I just need to know that the only person I've ever truly cared for feels the same, that I'm not completely alone in this world."
"You are alone in this world, Elias. You have nothing...I could never love someone like you," she said again, but the words barely held their shape this time.
Elias heard the difference. She knew he did. His face crumpled, and he closed his eyes for a moment as if the almost-confession hurt worse than any clear rejection could have. She hated him for not pushing harder, then hated herself for wanting him to. She hated that part of her wanted to be cornered into saying it so the responsibility would not belong entirely to her. She hated that another part of her would rather die than let the words exist where cameras and guards and God and Gideon's memory could hear them.
"I have to go," she said.
Elias nodded, though he looked like the movement cost him. She turned toward the door, but her legs felt unsteady, and for a moment she had to grip the back of the chair to keep herself upright. Behind her, Elias made a small movement as if he wanted to help and then stopped himself before even the instinct could become another injury. If he had been only a monster, she could have left. If she had been only a victim, she could have hated him. If love were clean, it would never have entered this room.
"I'm sorry," he said behind her, his voice shattered. "For hurting you."
She wiped her face with both hands, but the tears kept coming. "You should be sorry for the bodies," she said, and the cruelty came back weakly now, exhausted but still necessary. "Not for me."
"I am sorry for the bodies."
He did not answer, and somehow his silence followed her harder than any argument could have. The guard opened the door when she reached it, his face carefully blank in the way people looked when they had heard too much and understood too little. She stepped into the hallway without looking back, because she knew if she saw Elias still standing there, crying because he had confessed the only harmless thing he believed he had left and it had still hurt her, she might break in a way she would never be able to explain to anyone who loved her. She made it three steps before she heard him through the open door, his voice quiet and ruined but steady enough to reach her.
"I love you, I wouldn't blame you for never coming back here."
She stopped just long enough for the words to enter her body like a wound. She did not turn around. She did not answer. She could not give him that, could not give herself that, could not put language to the thing already destroying them both. Then she walked away, crying so hard she could barely see the hall in front of her, while behind her Elias remained in the room with the truth finally spoken and nothing in the world made easier by it.
Synopsis: Reader goes to visit Voit in the hospital as they are trying to figure out who the disciple is and they are attacked, forcing reader to trust Voit completely with her life.
Warnings: Elias Voit, prison, serial killer, talk of trauma, kidnapping (again sorry), shooting, explosives, angst with comfort.
Masterlist
She found him half asleep when she entered. The room was quiet except for the steady rhythm of the heart monitor and the distant hum of hospital ventilation. He looked exhausted. Not simply tired, but worn down by weeks of trying to remember a life full of horror. She quietly closed the door behind her and lowered herself into the chair beside the window without saying anything. He had requested her specifically again that morning. He stirred a few minutes later, blinking slowly as sleep gave way to awareness. His eyes wandered lazily around the room before settling on her, and the tension she'd watched settle across his face during previous examinations seemed to melt almost immediately.
"You're here." His voice was rough with sleep, carrying the soft confusion that had become strangely familiar over the past few days. He smiled faintly before realizing she wasn't smiling back, and concern quietly replaced the warmth in his expression.
"I'm sorry." The apology came so naturally that it almost sounded instinctive. He frowned slightly afterward, as though surprised by his own response. "I seem to say that a lot."
"You do."
"I suppose..." He rubbed absently at the bandage near his temple. "...I owe a lot of people apologies."
"You do, but you don't have to do it every time you see me. Tell me, how are you today?"
He accepted that answer with a small nod instead of asking another question. The silence settled comfortably between them. Finally he looked down at his hands resting on top of the blanket.
"It feels heavier today."
"What does?"
"The guilt."
He laughed quietly, though there wasn't any humor in it. "I know how strange that sounds considering I can't remember all of it."
He pressed his palm lightly against the center of his chest.
"I don't know their names. I can't see their faces. But every time someone tells me another thing I supposedly did..." He searched for the words, visibly frustrated by how inadequate they seemed. "...it's like someone places another stone right here. I don't know how to explain it any better than that."
Before Ivy could answer, a heavy thud echoed somewhere beyond the hospital room. Both of them looked toward the door. Another sound followed almost immediately. Something striking the floor. Elias's posture changed so quickly it was almost startling. He sat straighter, every trace of fatigue disappearing beneath instinct as he tilted his head toward the hallway.
"Stop." His voice dropped. "Don't move."
She was already standing. "What?"
"Listen."
She held her breath. For a moment there was nothing. Then two muted pops echoed through the corridor. Even through reinforced walls she recognized the sound instantly. Suppressed gunfire. Her stomach dropped. Her hand flew automatically toward her hip before she remembered she wasn't carrying.
"Fuck." She looked down in irritation. "My gun."
Hospital policy. No firearms inside the room. She turned toward the door anyway.
"I have to help them."
She had barely taken two steps before Elias caught her wrist. His grip wasn't painful. It wasn't controlling. It was desperate.
"No."
"There are deputy marshals out there."
"I know."
"They're my responsibility." She snaps.
"Stop please."
She tried pulling free.
"Elias, move."
"You can't go out there."
"It's my job."
"So is staying alive."
She looked at him incredulously. "My people are out there."
"I know."
"They need help."
Another muffled shot echoed somewhere outside. She stepped toward the door again. He stepped directly into her path.
"I've hurt enough people. I've taken enough lives." His breathing had become noticeably uneven now. His eyes met hers. They were full, not with manipulation, with fear. "Please. I can't let you be another one."
"Elias..."
"No." He shook his head before she could interrupt. "I know these people. I made them. They won't negotiate. They won't hesitate." His voice dropped to almost a whisper. "If you walk through that door without a weapon..."
He couldn't finish the sentence. Instead he simply looked at her with an expression she'd never imagined seeing on Elias Voit's face. Desperation.
"Please."
For one suspended moment she couldn't move. Every instinct she possessed screamed at her to ignore him. Then she looked into his eyes again. He wasn't trying to save himself, he was trying to save her.
"Fuck! Okay."
Visible relief washed across his face.
"The cart."
He pointed toward the heavy stainless-steel supply cart beneath the sink.
"Help me move it."
Together they threw their weight against the steel frame, forcing it across the linoleum until it slammed beneath the reinforced door handle. They had barely stepped away when the handle jerked violently. Then someone threw their full weight against the door. The frame groaned. Three suppressed rounds punched through the wood, splinters exploding into the room as Elias reacted without hesitation, grabbing her around the shoulders and pulling both of them behind the hospital bed. Glass from the shattered observation window rained down around them while another volley tore through monitors mounted on the opposite wall.
"Stay down." He covered the back of her head instinctively. "Don't move."
The emergency lights suddenly flooded the hallway in flashing red. Alarms erupted throughout the hospital. Voices echoed somewhere in the distance. The pounding against the door stopped. Elias listened for several long seconds before finally lifting his head.
"They'll regroup." His voice was calm again. "We have to move."
The utility corridors beneath the hospital were almost completely empty. She supported part of his weight whenever he stumbled, his recovery from surgery making every hurried step more difficult than he wanted to admit. Neither of them spoke much. There wasn't time. They reached the underground ambulance bay believing they'd found a way around the attack. Instead they walked directly into an ambush.
Armed figures emerged from behind concrete pillars before either of them had time to react. Weapons were raised. Hands grabbed them from behind. Plastic restraints bit painfully into their wrists. Within seconds they were shoved into the rear compartment of a black transport van, the heavy doors slamming shut with a metallic crash that swallowed them in darkness. The vehicle lurched forward almost immediately.
Thrown sideways by the movement, they landed opposite one another on the cold steel floor. For several long moments neither of them spoke. The only sounds came from the tires humming against pavement and the loose chains somewhere beneath the vehicle rattling with every bump in the road. She stared at the ceiling. Then let out one exhausted laugh.
"...How the fuck am I here again?"
Elias turned toward her immediately. She looked back. His expression had become strangely calm.
"I need you to listen to me. When those doors open, I'm going to have to become the man they expect."
She understood immediately. "I know."
"They have to believe nothing changed."
"I know."
"They can't think I care about what happens to you."
"I know."
His eyes searched hers anxiously.
"You understand?"
"I do, we both have roles to play."
"I swear to God I'm getting you out of this."
She held his gaze. "I believe you."
He looked genuinely surprised. "You do?"
She managed the faintest smile despite everything. "What exactly have I got to lose?"
Emotion flickered across his face so quickly she almost missed it. "I'm so fucking sorry."
She shook her head. "Don't spend whatever time we've got apologizing. Do what you need to do. If I try talking them down they'll kill me before I finish the first sentence. So this part belongs to you now." Another bump shifted them slightly closer together. "I believe in you."
The words seemed to leave him speechless. Neither of them moved for several seconds. Then, surprising both of them, she carefully shifted the last few inches between them until the side of her head rested lightly against his shoulder. He didn't dare move. He scarcely seemed to breathe. She closed her eyes. For the first time since the alarms had begun, the panic inside her quieted just enough to think.
"Playing a part remember?" She asks, lying to herself and to him.
"Right yeah..." He agrees, feeling his stomach sink in dissapointment.
-
The knife rested against her throat as she forced herself not to pull away. Every instinct she possessed told her to fight, to search the room for an opening, to start talking and buy whatever time she could, but she'd made a promise to Elias before the van doors had opened. He had told her he would have to become someone else for a little while, someone the network still believed in, and she had believed him without hesitation. Now that promise was all she had to hold onto. She let her breathing shake, allowed tears to gather in her eyes, and kept her shoulders rigid against the restraints until she looked exactly like the terrified hostage The Disciple expected to see.
"Agent Gideon," The Disciple said with obvious satisfaction as he tightened his grip on her shoulder. "What an honor, we've got a household name with us here today,"
She let her gaze dart toward Elias, not because she doubted him but because she knew the movement would sell the illusion. When their eyes met across the room, the exchange lasted no longer than a heartbeat. He didn't nod. He didn't smile. Nothing so obvious. Yet she understood him anyway. He was asking her to trust him one more time. She answered by holding his gaze for just a fraction longer than fear alone would have allowed before looking away again, as though she were searching him for rescue. The Disciple interpreted it exactly as she'd hoped. To him, she was a desperate profiler clinging to the last scraps of a man she'd convinced herself could still be saved. He never considered that she was helping Elias build the lie.
"You don't have to do this," she said, her voice shaking as she looked back toward him. "You told me you didn't want to be that man anymore. You told me you wanted to make things right."
The Disciple laughed, delighted by the plea. "Listen to her, Elias. She still thinks you're redeemable."
"I know you're still in there," Ivy continued, refusing to acknowledge anyone else in the room. "I know this isn't who you want to be. Please... don't let them take that away from you."
For the briefest instant she saw genuine pain cross Elias's face before it disappeared beneath the expression she'd once known so well. His shoulders straightened almost imperceptibly, his breathing steadied, and the cold composure that had made Sicarius so terrifying settled back over him like an old coat. Even knowing it was an act, she felt a chill move through her. He looked toward The Disciple instead of her, allowing just enough distance to convince everyone watching that whatever compassion had lived inside him moments earlier had finally been buried.
"You wanted Sicarius," he said evenly. "Then stop pretending you've become him. You're imitating someone you never understood."
The room fell silent around those words. She lowered her eyes exactly when she knew she should, letting disappointment and fear settle naturally across her face. It hurt to watch him speak that way again, even knowing every sentence was part of the performance, but she understood what he was buying with every cruel word. He wasn't betraying who he'd become. He was creating the opening that would let both of them survive.
The Disciple watched Elias with the kind of hunger she had seen too many times before, the hunger of someone who had mistaken imitation for inheritance. He wanted permission. That was what she understood in the silence after Elias spoke. He did not only want the network, or the codes, or whatever remained of Sicarius’s architecture hidden in dead drops and encrypted servers. He wanted Elias to look at him and name him worthy. He wanted the monster who built the maze to say that he belonged inside it. She kept her head lowered, letting her hair fall partly across her face as she breathed through the fear and forced herself not to look too carefully at the camera in the corner. If the BAU was watching, if Emily and Rossi and Luke had found the feed the way Elias believed they would, then everything depended on the next few minutes. Elias had to sell the lie. She had to sell hers.
“You don’t know anything about what I built,” Elias said, his voice low and flat, and she felt the room respond to him even before anyone moved. The operatives standing near the walls shifted slightly, attention drawn back to the man in the chair as if some old gravity had returned to him. He sounded like the version of himself they had worshipped, but she could hear what they could not. She heard the strain beneath the control, the effort it took to keep his voice cold when everything in him wanted to look at her. “You found scraps. Password fragments. Old routes. Dead identities. You took bones from a grave and convinced yourself you had a body.”
The Disciple stepped closer, the amusement in his posture tightening into irritation. “Careful.”
“No,” Elias said, and the word was quiet enough that it sounded almost bored. “That’s the problem with people like you. You mistake cruelty for intelligence because cruelty is the only thing you understand. Cyrus made the same mistake.”
That name changed the room. she felt it in the way The Disciple stopped moving, in the way the silence sharpened. She did not lift her head, but her eyes found Elias through the fall of her hair. He had gone still in that deliberate way she recognized now as performance layered over pain. Cyrus Duval was not a name he could say without cost, not anymore. Maybe he never had been able to. But here, in this room, Elias used the name like a blade because he knew exactly where The Disciple’s pride lived.
“You don’t get to say his name,” The Disciple said.
Elias’s mouth curved faintly, and the expression was so old, so familiar, that Ivy had to remind herself to breathe. “I knew him better than you did.”
“You were his failure.”
“I was his proof of concept.” Elias leaned back as much as the restraints allowed, his gaze fixed on The Disciple with a calm that made everyone else seem suddenly smaller. “And then I outgrew him.”
The Disciple’s hand tightened around the knife, but he did not immediately move toward Elias. That was the first sign the bait was working. She let herself make a small, frightened sound, just enough to pull the attention back where it needed to be. The Disciple looked down at her, and she forced herself to shrink slightly beneath his gaze. It humiliated her, but humiliation was useful. Fear was useful. He needed to believe she was nothing more than leverage, that whatever understanding existed between her and Elias had been broken by the return of Sicarius. She lifted her eyes toward Elias and let the tears there become part of the performance.
“Elias, please,” she whispered. “Don’t do this. Don’t give him what he wants.”
The Disciple laughed softly, pleased again, and she felt the pressure in the room shift in their favor. Elias did not look at her right away. That was the hardest part. He let the silence stretch just long enough to make the refusal believable before his eyes finally moved to her. When they did, they were cold enough to hurt even though she knew better. He had warned her in the van. He had told her he would have to become someone they recognized. She had told him to do what he needed to do.
“You should have listened when you had the chance,” he said.
She let her face crumple as though he had truly abandoned her, let her shoulders sag against the restraints, let her breathing hitch in the exact way it would if the last hope in the room had just vanished. The Disciple was watching her, so she gave him what he wanted. She gave him the frightened woman. The betrayed profiler. The person who had believed in Elias Voit and now had to watch him choose the monster. Beneath all of it, hidden so deeply that no one but Elias could have recognized it, she held onto the truth: she believed in him still.
“There he is,” The Disciple said, and his voice carried something almost reverent. “I knew it. I knew she didn’t ruin you.”
Elias looked back at him. “She was useful.”
She closed her eyes for half a second, not because the words were true but because the room needed them to look true. When she opened them again, Elias was no longer looking at her. He was looking at the camera. Not obviously. Not long enough for anyone else to notice. But she saw it because she had been waiting for it.
“The architecture is still mine,” Elias said. “You have fragments because I allowed fragments to survive. You have names because I left names behind. You have routes because I wanted the FBI chasing routes. But the core was never in the network.”
The Disciple’s arrogance faltered into interest. “Where is it?”
“Untie me.”
“No.”
“Then stay ignorant.”
The silence after that was almost unbearable. She could feel The Disciple deciding, weighing the risk against the thing he wanted most. Elias gave him nothing more. That was what made it convincing. He did not bargain too eagerly or plead for her life too openly. He simply sat there with the terrible patience of a man who knew the value of what he had. She understood, with a cold flicker of admiration, that he was using the truth of who he had been against the people who still worshipped him. They believed Sicarius would never hand over power unless he had already found a way to keep control. They believed cruelty made him rational. They believed their own myth of him more than they believed the man sitting in front of them.
Finally, The Disciple nodded to one of the operatives. “Cut him loose.”
Her heart kicked hard against her ribs, but she kept her face slack with fear. The operative moved behind Elias and severed the restraints at his wrists. Elias did not lunge or look relieved. He only brought his hands forward slowly, rubbing the raw skin where the ties had bitten into him, and then he flexed his fingers once as if returning to himself. The Disciple watched every movement, suspicious but enthralled, and she knew that was the danger of men like him. He wanted the performance so badly that he could not fully see the trap built inside it.
“Let her go,” Elias said.
The Disciple’s head tilted. “That wasn’t the deal.”
“It is now.”
“You’re not in a position to negotiate.”
Elias smiled faintly. “I’m the only person in this room who knows where the core is.”
The Disciple stepped closer until he stood over him. “You care if she dies.”
“No,” Elias said, and the lie came so smoothly that Ivy hated how good he still was at it. “I'd kill her now but she's a Fed, dumbest thing you can do when you're trying to escape."
The Disciple considered him, then looked back at her. She made herself look afraid of both of them now, caught between the man holding the knife and the man she had supposedly failed to save. It was almost too easy to let the fear show because, beneath the act, she was afraid. Trust did not erase terror. Believing in Elias did not make the blade less real or the room less dangerous.
“Fine,” The Disciple said at last. “She lives until I have what I want.”
"If you kill her they'll never stop, her team will find you just like how they found me. She's not worth it, trust me I've tried."
"But she's exactly my type."
"Fine you wanna kill her? Go ahead, after I'm out of here, I'm not going down for that."
Elias nodded once, as if that had been all he needed. Then he turned his attention toward the camera again, and Ivy felt the entire room balance on the edge of his next words.
“The master encryption key isn’t a string of numbers,” he said, his voice carrying clearly through the basement. “It’s a phrase. A full legal confession.”
The Disciple frowned slightly. “What?”
Elias did not look at him. “Listen carefully. I, Elias Voit, knowingly and with malice authorized network terminations from 2020 through 2026.”
She lowered her head so The Disciple would not see the sudden rush of emotion across her face. There it was, the confession. The thing that would strip away whatever legal shields remained and give the BAU the confirmation they needed. Elias continued speaking with a steadiness that made her chest hurt, reciting code words, location markers, access references, all of it disguised as surrender and delivered like a man handing over his kingdom. The Disciple listened with growing hunger, not understanding that every word was closing a door around him. Somewhere above them, distant enough that no one else reacted, she thought she felt a vibration move through the concrete.
The Disciple stepped closer, drawn in by the promise of inheritance, while the operatives remained fixed on Elias as if the rest of the room had ceased to matter. She turned her face slightly, just enough to glance toward the door without making the movement obvious. She could not hear the team yet. But something in the air had changed. Years in the field had taught her the feel of a room seconds before it broke open.
The Disciple finally noticed something in Elias’s expression and went still. “You’re lying.”
“No,” he said quietly. “I’m confessing.”
The Disciple’s face twisted with understanding too late. The doors burst inward a heartbeat later. Everything happened at once, but she would remember it later as a series of sensations rather than actions, the sudden white burst of light, the roar of voices filling the basement, the scrape of her chair across the floor as someone grabbed for her, Elias moving before anyone else could, the weight of his body between her and the chaos. She heard agents shouting commands, heard The Disciple curse, heard the operatives lose the certainty they had carried into the room. But beneath it all she heard Elias close to her ear, rough and urgent, telling her to keep her head down. His entire body covered hers as shots wrung out.
She kept her eyes squeezed shut as the raid consumed the basement around them. She heard a familiar voice calling her name through the ringing in her ears. The ropes fell away from her wrists, and the sudden freedom hurt almost as much as being bound had. She reached instinctively for Elias, but another agent was already pulling her back, trying to move her toward the exit while medical personnel flooded in behind the tactical team.
“No,” she gasped, struggling against the hands guiding her. “Wait. Elias.”
Through the haze, she saw him on the floor near the overturned chair, coughing hard, one hand braced against the concrete as agents surrounded him. For one sick second she thought they were restraining him again, and panic shot through her so violently that she nearly broke free. Then Elias lifted his head and found her across the room. He looked terrible, pale and shaken, but alive. More than that, he looked at her without the mask. Without the old coldness he had worn so convincingly only minutes before. His eyes met hers, and in that one look she understood everything he could not say out loud with the room full of agents and cameras and consequences. He had kept his promise.
Emily reached her then, gripping both of Ivy’s shoulders with a force that cut through the shock. “Look at me. Are you hurt?”
She tried to answer, but her eyes kept going back to Elias. “He did it,” she said, voice breaking around the words. “Emily, he did it. He gave you everything.”
“I know.” Emily’s voice softened, though her hands stayed firm. “We heard him.”
“He was playing them.”
“I know.”
Outside, the night air hit her face like water. The abandoned site was flooded with emergency lights, red and blue washing over the concrete and the dark shapes of vehicles clustered around the entrance. Agents moved everywhere, speaking into radios, guiding medics, securing the perimeter. Someone wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, and she let them because her hands had started shaking too hard to hide. The cold air filled her lungs, carrying the smell of rain and smoke and metal, and for a moment she could only stand there while the world reassembled itself around her in pieces.
Rossi approached a few minutes later, his face drawn tight with worry he did not bother hiding. He looked her over quickly, taking in the bruising, the blood at her temple, the marks at her wrists, and she saw anger flash across his face before he forced it down.
“You okay, kid?”
“No.”
Rossi nodded once. “Good answer.”
“He saved me.”
Rossi’s eyes softened, though the rest of him remained guarded. “I know.”
“He knew what he had to do. In the van, he told me he’d have to play a part, and I told him I trusted him. I meant it.” Her voice trembled, not from fear now but from the aftershock of saying it aloud. “I trusted him, Rossi.”
Agents moved with purpose instead of urgency now, paramedics packed away equipment, and evidence technicians disappeared into the black mouth of the building one by one. She stood just outside the perimeter tape with a blanket wrapped loosely around her shoulders, though she barely noticed the cold anymore. Her eyes never left the stretcher emerging from the building. A black body bag rested on top of it. Across the front, secured beneath a strip of clear plastic, was a white identification tag.
VOIT, ELIAS.
The sight of his name written there hollowed something inside her chest. She knew it wasn't real. She knew the body inside the bag wasn't his. Rossi had explained the plan in hurried, clipped sentences while SWAT secured the scene. The decoy would leave through the front entrance where local law enforcement, reporters, and whatever remained of the Sicarius network could see it. The world would believe Elias Voit had died in the explosion. The real Elias would disappear before dawn into a government safe house so secret that only a handful of people would ever know where he'd gone.
She knew all of that. It didn't stop the sight of his name on that bag from making her feel as though she couldn't breathe. Emily appeared beside her without saying anything at first. She watched the stretcher disappear toward the waiting medical examiner's vehicle before quietly folding her arms across her chest.
"It's convincing," she said, almost to herself.
"It has to be."
"Can I ask you something?"
Emily turned toward her. "Of course."
She kept watching the black bag as it disappeared into the back of the vehicle.
"Can I see him?"
Emily didn't answer immediately. "Why?"
She looked down at the blanket gathered in her fists, realizing she'd twisted the fabric so tightly her knuckles had turned white.
"Because he saved my life...Twice." The words came out barely above a whisper. "The first time. He didn't have to come for me. He could've left me there. He risked everything to get me out when one of his followers used me against him. And tonight...tonight he could've chosen himself. He could've given The Disciple exactly what he wanted and walked away. He protected me, he kept his promise and he confessed to all of it. I think..." She closed her eyes briefly. "I think I finally believe this isn't an act."
Emily studied her for a long time. Not like a unit chief. Like someone who had known her since she was young enough to wander the BAU hallways looking for her grandfather.
"You care about him."
It wasn't phrased as a question. She looked away immediately. Her throat tightened.
"Gideon." Emily's voice remained gentle. "You don't have to hide from me. You can say it."
For several long seconds she couldn't.She had profiled murderers her entire adult life. She had spent years studying trauma, attachment, survival, the impossible ways the human brain tried to make sense of unbearable things. None of that prepared her for how ashamed she felt standing here beneath the flashing emergency lights, trying to put words to something she had spent months denying even to herself.
"I do." The admission broke something loose inside her. Fresh tears spilled freely now. "I hate it, I know how wrong it sounds." Ivy wiped roughly at her face before another tear replaced the first. "Every logical part of me knows exactly who he was. I know what he's done. I know what he took from people. It makes me sick. I've fought it every day."
She looked directly at Emily now, her eyes red and exhausted.
"I've tried to convince myself I was just confused. That it was Stockholm syndrome or trauma bonding or pity or survivor's guilt." She shook her head again. "I analyzed it from every possible angle because that's what we do. We explain things until they make sense."
"And?"
"And none of the explanations fit."
Emily remained silent.
"I don't care for the man he was." The words came carefully now, each one feeling impossibly heavy. "I care for the man who's been trying to become someone else every single day since he woke up and that terrifies me."
Emily watched her carefully. "Why?"
"Because if I admit that..." her voice dropped to almost nothing. "Then I have to admit that the person who understands me better than anyone else..." Another tear rolled down her cheek. "...might actually be him."
Emily's brow furrowed slightly.
"He understands what it feels like to have your childhood stolen." Her eyes drifted toward the dark outline of the factory. "He understands what it feels like to wake up every morning carrying memories you never asked for." She gave a sad, defeated smile. "They're different memories. Different pain. But somehow..." She shrugged helplessly. "He understands."
Emily let the silence settle between them. When she finally spoke, her voice carried none of the judgment Ivy had spent months fearing.
"I don't think you care for a serial killer. I think you're grieving the fact that the man standing in front of you now is someone you never would've met if the man he used to be hadn't destroyed so many lives first."
"I don't know what to do with that." Emily stepped closer.
"I don't have an answer for you."
"No?"
Emily smiled sadly. "No."
Another quiet settled over them as the last of the emergency vehicles began pulling away. Finally Emily sighed. "How long?"
"What?"
"How long do you need?"
Emily looked toward the convoy preparing to leave.
"Emily..."
"You asked to see him."
"I only need five minutes."
Emily searched her face one last time.
"No interviewing."
"I won't."
"No case."
"I promise."
"No pretending you're there as an agent. You'll have five minutes."
Emotion rose so suddenly in Ivy's chest she couldn't find words. Emily rested a hand gently against her shoulder.
"After that..." she said softly, "...he disappears."
"I know."
"And whatever this is..." Emily glanced toward the convoy waiting in the distance. "...it's going to become a lot more complicated."
She looked toward the unmarked SUV that would carry Elias away from the world. Emily squeezed her shoulder once before stepping back.
"Go."
-
The drive to the safe house was quiet enough that she could hear every thought she wished she couldn't. The convoy had long since disappeared into the darkness, the public believing Elias Voit had died beneath the collapsed factory while only a handful of people knew he had been moved somewhere far from the world he had once controlled. She had told herself the entire drive that she wasn't coming here for closure because closure implied something had ended cleanly. Nothing about Elias had ever been clean.
Too many lives had been shattered long before he woke from the injury that had forced him to confront everything he had done. Too many people would spend the rest of their lives carrying wounds he had inflicted. None of that disappeared because he had confessed or because he had chosen, at the end, to help dismantle the network he had built. Still, gratitude had a stubborn way of existing beside anger, and she couldn't convince herself to leave without saying one last thing before he vanished into another prison where she might never see him again.
The safe house looked less like a government facility than an abandoned maintenance building tucked deep into the woods. Floodlights illuminated a chain-link fence crowned with razor wire while armed agents watched every approach with the practiced alertness of people protecting something that officially did not exist. She parked, stepped out of the SUV, and walked toward the checkpoint with her badge already in her hand. One of the marshals checked her identification against a clipboard before disappearing into a small guard office. When he returned, his expression remained as professional as before.
"You have five minutes."
She nodded once, slipping her badge back into her jacket. "That's all I need."
The marshal unlocked two reinforced doors before leading her down a narrow concrete hallway that smelled faintly of disinfectant and fresh paint. The silence inside the bunker felt different from the hospital. There were no nurses, no distant conversations, no monitors humming softly in the background. Only heavy doors, security cameras, and the unmistakable awareness that every room had been designed to prevent escape. They stopped outside the last door, and the marshal glanced toward her before resting his hand on the handle.
"I'll be right outside," he said. "Five minutes." She acknowledged him with another nod, and he opened the door.
Elias sat on the edge of a narrow bed bolted securely to the floor, one wrist secured to a steel cuff mounted beside the mattress. A blanket had been folded neatly at the foot of the bed, and a half-finished cup of coffee rested untouched on the small table nearby. He looked up at the sound of the opening door, clearly expecting another guard or another doctor, and the surprise that crossed his face when he recognized Ivy erased every other expression. He stood almost immediately despite the restraint, staring at her.
She stepped inside, listening as the heavy door closed behind her with a metallic click that seemed louder than it really was. For several long seconds neither of them spoke. He simply looked at her as though trying to understand why she was standing in front of him, until finally he broke the silence.
"What are you doing here?" There wasn't any suspicion in his voice, only genuine surprise.
She offered him a small, tired smile. "I wanted to see you."
He searched her face as though trying to decide whether he had imagined the answer. "Why?"
"I never thanked you."
His expression softened almost immediately. "You don't have to."
"I do." Folding her arms loosely across herself, more to steady her emotions than anything else, she met his eyes. "You saved my life."
His gaze drifted toward the concrete floor. After a long breath he answered quietly, "I had a promise to keep."
The words were so simple they almost broke her heart. She remembered the transport van, the certainty in his voice when he had promised he wouldn't let anyone hurt her, and the look he had given her before stepping back into the role of Sicarius because it was the only way to dismantle the last pieces of the network.
"You kept it."
He gave the smallest shake of his head. "I tried."
"No. You did." The silence that followed settled naturally between them before she glanced around the room and returned her attention to him. "You did the right thing, you confessed."
"It doesn't make anything I've done better."
"No."
"It doesn't undo anything."
"No it doesn't."
"But... maybe it's a place to start. I can't change who I was." His gaze fell briefly to the restraint around his wrist. "But I can decide who I am every morning after that."
"I think that's all anyone can do."
He looked back at her, and for the first time since she had entered the room there was something resembling peace in his expression. "I've been thinking about what you told me."
She tilted her head slightly. "What part?"
"That surviving isn't the same thing as deserving." He says. She remembered saying it. "I've held onto that."
"I'm glad."
Another quiet settled between them before Ivy glanced toward the closed door.
"I should probably let you get some rest." She says.
Understanding flickered across his face almost immediately. "This is goodbye."
"I think it has to be."
His smile faded, though he didn't argue right away. "Does it?"
She sighed softly. "Elias..."
"I know."
"I'm walking away because I have a job. We hunt killers. My life keeps moving, and I'm unraveling more often than I'm not right now. I need to figure out what that looks like before I can be anything for anyone else."
He accepted the answer without complaint. After a long moment, the faintest smile returned. "...Maybe stop by sometime?"
The question carried an uncertainty that hadn't existed in him before. She couldn't promise something she wasn't certain she could keep, so she answered honestly.
"I'll try."
"That's all I ask." He nodded immediately.
Another silence settled over the room. She took a step backward toward the door and quietly said, "I have to go."
He looked as though he wanted to say something more. She watched the thought rise behind his eyes before he deliberately swallowed it back down. Whatever words had reached the edge of his tongue stayed there. He simply nodded once.
"I understand."
Her hand found the doorknob, but she stopped before turning it. She didn't know what made her look back. Maybe gratitude. Maybe compassion. Maybe the knowledge that, despite everything, this was another human being about to disappear into years of confinement carrying memories that would never leave him. Before she could second-guess herself, she crossed the room.
Elias looked genuinely confused. "What are you-?"
She answered by stepping close enough to wrap her arms around him. He froze instantly. Every muscle in his body went rigid beneath the unexpected contact, and she felt the sharp intake of his breath against her shoulder. It struck her then, with quiet sadness, that he genuinely didn't seem to know what to do. For several long seconds he simply stood there, stunned, as though kindness itself had become something unfamiliar. Then, very carefully, almost hesitantly, he lifted his free arm and returned the embrace. The movement was awkward at first, tentative, like someone afraid that holding on too tightly would make the moment disappear. His forehead came to rest lightly against her shoulder as he closed his eyes.
"I don't know if I deserve this," he admitted quietly.
She answered just as softly. "It's not about that."
He let out a slow, unsteady breath, he understood. "It's about saying goodbye."
His arm tightened for only a moment before he caught himself. The restraint on his other wrist pulled taut, the short length of chain dragging the heavy bed a few inches across the concrete with a loud scrape that startled both of them. They looked down at it together, and despite everything that had happened over the past months, she let out a small, unexpected laugh. Elias followed her gaze before looking back at her, a sheepish smile finally breaking across his face.
The heaviness in the room eased just enough for both of them to breathe again. After another quiet moment she stepped back, and he lowered his arm immediately. Neither of them seemed eager to break the silence that followed. Finally she offered him one last small smile.
"Goodbye, Elias." He held her gaze for several long seconds before answering just as quietly.
"Goodbye."
She nodded once before opening the door and stepping back into the hallway. The marshal looked up as she emerged, said nothing, and simply escorted her toward the exit. Behind the closed door, Elias remained standing exactly where she had left him, holding a hand to his chest as his heart raced erratically. He looked down, the smile on his face dropping as he thought about how he was already missing her. How he would likely never be able to hold her like that again, about how in another world they could be together and he would've met her rather than go down his dark path. How his life could've been. He hoped that in another universe some version of him was happy with her by his side.
Synopsis: Reader goes to visit Voit again and he finally opens up about his trauma.
Warnings: Elias Voit, prison, serial killer, talk of trauma, angst with no comfort.
Masterlist
The secure wing had become strangely familiar to her. She hated that it had. Every afternoon she found herself walking the same quiet hallway lined with armed federal marshals, the same antiseptic smell lingering in the air, the same reinforced door separating Elias Voit from the rest of the world. Months ago she would have considered this room the safest place in the country because it kept him inside it. Now she wasn't so sure.
The danger hadn't disappeared. It had simply changed. Elias remained under constant observation while his memories returned in fractured, unpredictable pieces. Some mornings he remembered nothing beyond waking in a hospital bed. Other days entire stretches of his childhood resurfaced without warning, followed by isolated flashes of murders he had committed decades later. The recollections never arrived in order. They came like broken glass surfacing through water, each sharp enough to leave another wound behind. Dr. Julia Ochoa had described it as neurological reintegration. JJ had called it a slow reconstruction of identity. She thought it looked more like watching someone survive the collapse of their own mind. The nurses stopped her before she reached his room.
"He asked for you again." She wasn't surprised anymore.
"Has he spoken to Dr. Ochoa?" The nurse nodded. "For nearly two hours."
She nodded at that, glancing toward the heavy door farther down the hall before asking, "And agent Jareau?"
The nurse's expression softened. "Earlier this morning."
"How did it go?"
The nurse's expression softened even more, and her answer told her everything she needed to know. "He barely spoke."
She thanked her quietly before pushing open the heavy door. The room was almost dark except for the fading evening sunlight filtering through the blinds. Elias sat beside the window instead of in bed, wrapped in a gray sweatshirt despite the warmth of the room. He looked thinner than he had a week ago. His elbows rested on his knees, his hands hanging loosely between them while he stared through the glass at nothing in particular. He didn't seem to notice she had entered until the door clicked shut behind her. When he looked up, relief crossed his face so quickly it almost hurt to see.
"You came."
"You asked to speak with me."
He looked at her for a moment as if he still wasn't entirely sure what to do with the fact that she had kept her word. "I wasn't sure you would."
She moved farther into the room, careful not to make the moment heavier than it already was. "I said I would talk to you whenever you wanted."
He nodded once before looking back toward the window. "I remembered something today."
She pulled the chair closer but didn't sit immediately. "Do you want to tell me about it?"
He laughed quietly. "No."
The answer surprised her, and she echoed it before she could stop herself. "No?"
He rubbed both hands over his face, exhaustion settling visibly across his shoulders. "I don't want to tell anyone about that one."
She sat beside him without pushing further. The silence between them stretched comfortably. It had become one of the stranger parts of these meetings. Neither of them felt compelled to fill every quiet moment with conversation. Sometimes simply sharing the room seemed enough.
"I talked to Dr. Ochoa."
"How did it go?"
He kept his eyes on the window. "I think I frustrated her."
She smiled faintly. "Probably."
That earned the smallest breath of amusement from him, though it vanished quickly.
"I don't mean to."
"I know." Her answer came gently.
He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, the words seeming to cost him more than he wanted them to.
"She keeps asking me what I feel." His voice had become so tired it barely rose above a whisper. "I don't know how to answer anymore. I feel everything." He laughed bitterly. "I didn't even know that was possible."
She waited for him to continue. He had begun trusting silence more than questions. Eventually he did, his voice lower now.
"I remembered one of them... A victim." His hands had started trembling almost imperceptibly. "I remembered her face."
Another long silence followed, and She stayed still beside him, allowing him whatever time he needed to force the memory into language.
"I remembered exactly what she sounded like." His breathing became uneven. "I remembered..." His voice caught before he forced himself onward. "...that she begged me to let her go."
He stared down at his hands as though they belonged to someone else. "I can still hear her. I've spent weeks telling myself they weren't real memories. Turns out they were."
The room fell silent again. When he finally looked at her, there was no attempt to hide what he was feeling. "I don't know how people survive this."
She understood immediately. He wasn't talking about memory. He was talking about guilt.
"You take it one day at a time, thats how you survive."
"I don't deserve to." His eyes dropped
"No. You probably don't." She did not soften the answer into something untrue. He nodded, accepting it like he had expected nothing else. "But deserving isn't the same thing as surviving."
"I don't understand." He frowned slightly.
She leaned forward a little, keeping her voice quiet. "You don't get to erase what happened. But you also don't get to erase yourself because you're horrified by it."
"I wish I could." He looked away.
She understood the exhaustion in that confession more than she wanted to. Another silence settled between them before Elias spoke again.
"I talked to JJ this morning. I couldn't tell her any of this." He laughed softly. "I couldn't tell Dr. Ochoa either. I didn't know how, why can I tell you?"
She considered the answer before giving it. "Because I don't need you to protect me from what you're feeling. I've spent my whole career sitting across from people whose lives have been shattered by trauma. I don't scare eaisly."
A faint smile touched his mouth through the exhaustion. "No. You really don't."
"And... I think we understand different parts of the same language." He watched her carefully as she said it simply, matter-of-factly. "My childhood was stolen. So was yours. They're different stories. But they're both trauma." His voice changed around the words.
"I don't think anyone's ever said that to me before." His breathing became noticeably shakier. "I keep thinking..." He stopped, and she waited. "I keep thinking about you."
The admission embarrassed him enough that he laughed awkwardly. "That sounds strange."
"It depends what you mean."
He searched for the words. "I keep wondering... what would've happened if someone had found me when I was little." His voice had become almost childlike. "What if somebody had taken me away from Cyrus?"
"Thats an understandable thought, we always think about the what ifs."
"Exactly, what if somebody had taught me something different?" He asks as a tear slips down his face. "I look at you..." Another tear escaped before he wiped it away impatiently. "...and I think maybe I would've become someone like you."
The room felt impossibly still. She reached over without thinking and gently took his hand. He froze and simply stared down at their joined hands as though he couldn't quite believe she had chosen to bridge the distance herself.
"I wish...I wish I'd been even a fraction of the person you are." Fresh tears spilled before he could stop them. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry for what I did to you." He shook his head. "I'm sorry for every time I made you afraid. I'm sorry that every room I've ever walked into left more pain behind than when I entered it." He covered his face with his free hand. "I don't know how to live with that."
She tightened her fingers around his gently. "You don't have to figure it out today."
He laughed bitterly through tears. "I don't think I'll figure it out in a lifetime."
She held his hand a little more firmly. "Maybe not, but that doesn't mean you stop trying, because that means you care enough to try and be better."
He lowered his hand enough to look at her again. "You know why I keep asking for you?"
"No." She admits.
"When everything gets loud... I remember something you told me."
"What was that?"
"You told me nobody is born evil. I hold onto it." He looked down again. "I don't know if I deserve it."
"You don't have to deserve it. You just have to keep choosing to be better." A long silence followed before She spoke again. "You know why our stories ended differently?"
He shook his head.
"My parents loved me. When I came home after the kidnapping, they never treated me like I was broken." She smiled faintly at the memory. "They found the best trauma therapists they could. And every summer... I stayed with my grandfather." A tired smile touched her lips. "He answered every question I ever asked." She laughed quietly. "Sometimes questions little girls probably shouldn't have been asking."
Elias smiled through damp eyes. "I remember now, I remember you telling me that after I..."
"You kidnapped me." She adds.
"Fuck..." He trails off as he runs his hand over his shaved head.
Her expression softened. "My grandfather never lied to me, he promised he'd always tell me the truth, just like I promise you, okay Elias? I will always tell you the truth." He taught me that understanding monsters didn't mean becoming one." She looked at him carefully. "And the truth is that you never had that."
His eyes dropped. "No."
"You had Cyrus. He didn't just abuse you," she said gently. "He shaped the entire world you grew up inside."
Another tear rolled silently down his cheek. "I never really had a chance." The words were almost too quiet to hear.
She felt her own eyes sting. She answered with heartbreaking honesty. "No. I don't think you did."
He closed his eyes. For several long moments neither of them spoke. Eventually his breathing slowed, and the tension gradually left his shoulders. He carefully withdrew his hand from hers, wiping his face with the sleeve of his sweatshirt before giving her an embarrassed smile.
"I'm exhausted." He let out one long breath. "I think... I think I need to sleep."
"I think that's a good idea."
He nodded. As she reached the door, his voice stopped her.
"Hey."
She turned back.
"Thank you."
Her hand rested lightly on the doorframe. "For what?"
"For reminding me that if my childhood wasn't my fault..." He glanced down at his hands. "...then maybe the rest of my life doesn't have to be the end of the story."
Emotion caught unexpectedly in her throat. "We'll talk more tomorrow."
"I'd like that." He nodded.
She gave him one last reassuring smile before quietly switching off the lamp nearest the window. Within minutes, his breathing had evened into sleep. She stood in the doorway for a long moment before finally pulling it closed behind her, hoping that, for one night at least, sleep would be kinder to him than memory had been.
significant time jump - takes place in season 18, six months after Voit was attacked in prison.
Synopsis: Reader goes to visit Voit in the hospital to see if she could get him to admit to faking his perfectly timed amnesia.
Warnings: Elias Voit, hospital, angst.
Masterlist
She had been standing in front of the observation window with a cup of coffee she'd forgotten to drink, watching nurses move quietly in and out of Elias's room while the afternoon sun washed the sterile hallway in pale light. The hospital had settled into its familiar rhythm over the past four days. Specialists came and went. Neurologists repeated the same cognitive assessments. Dr. Ochoa documented every improvement with careful optimism. The BAU, meanwhile, remained divided. Half the team believed they were witnessing one of the most extraordinary neurological cases any of them had ever seen. The other half believed Elias Voit was simply the most convincing liar they had ever encountered. She belonged firmly to the second group.
Emily stopped beside her, folding her arms as she looked through the glass toward the room. Elias was asleep again, one arm resting outside the blanket, the fresh scar disappearing into the bandage near his temple. He looked impossibly ordinary lying there, almost peaceful, and she hated that her brain kept trying to reconcile the image with everything she knew about him.
"Dr. Ochoa says he usually sleeps after therapy," Emily said quietly. "They've been working him pretty hard."
She nodded without taking her eyes off the room.
"I read the reports."
Emily was silent for a moment before continuing.
"I want to be very clear about why you're here."
That finally pulled her attention away from the window.
"You are not here to interrogate him. You're not here to educate him. You are absolutely not here to tell him who he was or what he did."
There was enough weight behind the words that she understood exactly what Emily was asking. If Elias truly remembered nothing, learning about his past from one of the people he'd hurt the most could do real damage. The neurologists wanted to introduce information slowly, carefully, allowing them to distinguish genuine recovery from confabulation. If he was pretending, they wanted him to reveal that himself.
"I won't tell him," she said quietly.
Emily studied her for another second before nodding. "Good."
"So what exactly am I supposed to do?"
"Talk."
Emily shrugged lightly.
"Be yourself."
She laughed once. "I don't think that's a recognized interview technique."
"No."
Emily smiled faintly.
"But it's the one most likely to work." She glanced back through the window. "If he's acting, he'll eventually slip. If he's manipulating us, he'll try to manipulate you. You've spent more time sitting across from Elias Voit than almost anyone on this team. You'll notice if something doesn't fit."
She took one slow breath before pushing the door open. The room was quiet enough that she could hear the steady rhythm of the cardiac monitor before she crossed the threshold. Sunlight spilled across the floor beneath the window, warming the otherwise sterile space with a softness hospitals rarely managed. For nearly twenty minutes nothing happened.
He remained asleep, breathing evenly beneath the blanket while nurses passed occasionally in the hallway outside. She found herself studying him despite every instinct telling her not to. The bruising across his face had begun fading into pale yellows and greens. His hair had been shaved. Without the intensity she had always associated with him, he looked strangely younger. Less dangerous. She immediately resented herself for thinking it.
Movement finally drew her attention back to his face. It began almost imperceptibly. A crease formed between his brows. His fingers twitched against the blanket. His breathing deepened as consciousness gradually pulled him back toward the surface, and after another few seconds his eyes opened slowly, unfocused at first as they wandered across the unfamiliar ceiling. She had watched patients wake from sedation before. There was always the same brief period of disorientation while the brain attempted to reconnect itself to the world. Elias turned his head slightly, taking in the monitor beside him, the IV line in his arm, the sunlight spilling through the window, and then, almost absentmindedly, his gaze drifted toward the chair beside the bed.
It stopped on her. The confusion in his expression eased almost immediately. Not because he recognized her. Because seeing her seemed to reassure him. His shoulders visibly relaxed, and a small, tired smile found its way onto his face before he spoke.
"Oh." His voice was rough from sleep. "There you are."
She didn't answer. He continued looking at her with quiet relief, almost as though he'd been expecting her to be there.
"I thought maybe you'd gone home."
She held his gaze without reacting. After another moment he frowned slightly, concern replacing the faint smile.
"You look upset, I'm sorry." The apology came so naturally that it almost sounded reflexive. "I have a feeling that's probably my fault."
She leaned back in the chair, crossing one leg over the other. "What makes you think that?"
He looked down at the blanket, considering the question with surprising seriousness. "I don't know." His hand came unconsciously to the center of his chest. "It's just...when I looked over and saw you sitting there, it felt..." He laughed softly, embarrassed by his own uncertainty. "I know this is going to sound strange."
"I've heard stranger."
"I thought..." He looked back at her with genuine hesitation. "...I thought maybe you were my wife."
The room seemed to become perfectly still. She stared at him for several seconds before letting out a disbelieving laugh. "I am absolutely not your wife."
"Oh." He looked genuinely embarrassed. "I'm sorry."
She narrowed her eyes. She studied him carefully. There wasn't the slightest indication that he was performing. She refused to believe that.
"What exactly are you trying to do?"
His confusion deepened. "I'm sorry?"
"If this is some elaborate act, it's not going to work."
He looked between her and the room around him before finally settling back on her face. "I don't know what you mean."
"You don't?"
He slowly shook his head. "I really don't."
"So you're sticking with it."
"With what?"
"The memory loss."
"I don't..." He looked almost frustrated with himself. "I don't remember anything."
She folded her arms. "Convenient."
"What do you mean?"
"You honestly expect me to believe you woke up one day without a single memory?"
He looked down at his own hands. "I don't expect you to believe anything." His voice had become very quiet. "I'm still trying to believe it myself."
Silence settled between them. She decided to push. "What is your name?"
He looked up immediately. "I don't know."
"Think harder."
He closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, the frustration on his face looked painfully genuine. "I wish I could tell you."
"Where were you born?"
"I don't know."
"What year is it?"
He answered that one correctly.
"Who's the president?"
Another correct answer.
She continued asking simple orientation questions, watching carefully for any inconsistency, any flicker of calculation she recognized from the Elias she'd spent years interviewing.
"So you really don't remember anything."
He gave the smallest shake of his head. "I remember how to speak. I remember what a fork is." He glanced toward the water pitcher beside the bed. "I know what hospitals are. But every time somebody asks me who I am..." His smile disappeared entirely. "it's just blank."
For the first time since entering the room, She found herself looking not at what he was saying but at his eyes. They had always been the first thing she read in every interaction because they never quite matched the rest of him. Even when he smiled, there had been calculation buried underneath it. Even when he laughed, there had been an awareness that he was always measuring the person across from him, deciding how far to push, what to reveal, which weakness to exploit. Pain had lived there too, old enough to become part of him, but it had always existed alongside manipulation, each feeding the other until separating them became impossible.
She couldn't find any of it. His eyes looked startlingly clear. There was confusion there, certainly, and fear he wasn't trying very hard to hide, but the relentless watchfulness she'd come to associate with Elias Voit simply wasn't present. He wasn't reading her. He wasn't trying to stay three steps ahead of the conversation. If anything, he seemed to be looking to her for answers she refused to give him. He noticed her staring.
"Did I say something wrong?"
She realized she'd been silent too long. "No."
"You've been looking at me for a while."
"I've met people with memory loss before."
"And?"
She held his gaze another second. "I'm still deciding what I think."
He accepted that answer with a small nod instead of pressing her further. That unsettled her more than anything else. The old Elias would never have let a statement like that go unexplored. This man simply smiled politely.
"I hope," he said quietly, "whatever happened before today... I hope I wasn't cruel to you."
The question lingered in the room long after he'd finished speaking. She stood slowly, picking up the notebook she hadn't written a single word in. "I'll let your doctor know you're awake."
As she reached the door, his voice stopped her one last time.
"Agent? I don't know why," he said with quiet sincerity, "but I'm glad you were here when I woke up. I don't recognize you, but my heart does? I know that sounds weird, but you are the most familiar person I've met since I woke up."
She looked at him for a long moment before giving the smallest nod. Without another word, she stepped into the hallway, closing the door softly behind her. For the first time since Elias Voit had opened his eyes she wasn't walking away convinced she had just interviewed the most dangerous manipulator she'd ever met. She was walking away wondering whether that man still existed at all.
