Chapter Text
Aaron Everdeen is asleep when the call comes.
The team just came in from a case across the country, a family annihilator in LA, and Emily had practically kicked him into the elevator, telling him to go see his son and get some sleep. He’s still unit chief but ever since Katniss was taken—almost six years to the day—Emily had become somewhat of a co-captain, picking up the slack as he fought, grieved, and resigned himself to spend more time with the child he still had.
He’s sleeping, face buried in a pillow, still wearing his slacks and white button down—blazer, tie, and belt strewn across the carpeted floor of his bedroom, chucked off mechanically as he stalked in from reading Jack to sleep. Drool is soaking into the cotton pillow case when he starts at an aggressive buzzing on top of his bedside table. Aaron rubs at his eyes and finally blinks sleep away to see Emily glowing on the screen of his vibrating phone.
It’s three in the morning, he thinks with a groan as he picks up the phone before it dances its way off the table. Late night (or early morning) calls aren't necessarily unusual, especially from Emily as they’ve grown closer, but they’d barely wrapped up the LA case when he left his office.
“Mmhm,” he more or less grunts as he answers the call. “Mornin’ Em.”
“Aaron, get up.” Her voice is thick and high with emotion, but that’s not what has Aaron rushing clumsily out of bed; she never calls him Aaron, only ‘Deen, a nickname she gave him when she joined the BAU and one that spread throughout the team. His chest goes tight. Aaron. Something’s wrong.
“I’m up, I’m up.” He stumbles around looking for his loafers then decides to slip on his running shoes. “What’s going on.”
A small gasp comes through the phone, rough and tinny. “Aaron, they found her. They found Katniss, somewhere in butt-fuck Ohio—”
Aaron grips the railing at the top of the stairs like it’s his last anchor to reality. “What do you mean they found her,” he chokes out, breath stuck somewhere behind his lung. Images of a six-year-old corpse flood his mind and he slowly sinks to his knees.
“Oh my god, ‘Deen, no, she’s alive ,” Emily says, words tripping over each other. “They found her with 8 other kids, most of them in their late teens, one of them—Jesus fuck, one of them is only twelve.”
Aaron leans his head against the smooth wood of the stairs’ railing. Alive, alive, alive. “Em, wh-what happened to her. Why’re you—what’s going on. ” His voice cracks and he clenches his jaw out of habit before he realizes there’s no one there to see him break. Emily’s seen it all before anyways.
“‘Deen, she was—I don’t know half of it but, she was taken by this guy. Snow. They were kept on his farm, there were,” she inhales sharply, “ bodies buried around the property, killed in different ways.”
Bile creeps up Aaron’s throat. What the hell had this guy done to his daughter?
“When the local force found him, he told them they were interrupting a tournament— ”
Aaron pushes himself to his feet and hurries down the stairs. “Emily, I have to go. I have to...oh my god, I have to call Sean, someone has to watch Jack—”
“Aaron, Aaron, breathe . Call your brother. I’m on your street, wheels up in thirty.”
*
They arrive at the farm an hour and a half later, Aaron wearing an ill-fitting blazer courtesy of Rossi. They pull up the long dirt drive in a government issue SUV, and the unit chief is out the passenger side door before Emily can even turn the ignition off. A local detective meets him halfway to the large, falling-apart house.
“SSA Everdeen, I’m assuming?” He hooks his thumbs into his belt loops (the detective wears jeans and a button-up, untucked, and work boots). “I really don’t see what the FBI’s doing here, my force is plenty equipped for this—”
“Where is she,” Aaron interrupts, looking around impatiently.
“Who?”
“My daughter. Katniss,” Aaron says shortly.
The detective looks at Aaron like he’s an escaped mental patient before slowly turning his gaze to Emily as she sidles up beside her unit chief.
Emily holds his eye contact stoically. “I’m SSA Prentiss, we spoke on the phone.” She holds her hand out for a shake but he just stares at it, nonplussed. “This is my unit chief SSA Everdeen, his daughter is one of the victims. We were on the case originally six years ago before it went cold.”
The detective seems to find his footing in Emily’s formal, coplike tone and nods quickly. “The kids are in the house. Paramedics are treating the ones who could do to stay, but we just sent two off in ambulances—one of the boys though, his leg’s in a really bad way, think they might have to give it the boot if you catch my meaning,” he huffs a laugh. “Awful stuff really, his girl, or, well, I’m assuming it’s his girl—we get all sorts—she nearly took the poor paramedic’s head off when he separated ‘em. Screamin’ and lurchin’ like she was gonna kill ‘em, wasn’t worried, mind you, about her actually succeeding. They’re all so damn skinny, but it’s the thought that counts I guess, makes you wonder what he did to ‘em, doesn’t it, that they’re so protective o’ each other. I mean, po’er to ‘em, bandin’ to’ether like that but I seen platoons who ain’t as close, the ones who stayed won’ let go ‘er ‘chother, even with the paramedics tryna treat ‘em…” The detective trails off as they reach the door and Aaron watched Emily’s chest heave a sigh of relief, he wasn’t really listening but he could hear the Ohioan’s accent thicken as his ramble lengthened.
“They’re all through there,” he says gesturing to a short hall leading to a room bustling with motion. “I’ll, uh, leave you two to it…”
Aaron doesn’t hear the rest of the detective’s sentence, instead walking down the short hall, heart thumping like he’s headed to his own execution. He stops right before he turns into the room and tries to compose himself, slipping into the solid suit he wears with most people, not guarded but hardy, a support beam for the people around him.
He turns the corner and barely schools a grimace from his face at the sharp scent of human filth that meets him. He blinks at the bright lights in the room for less then a second and then he spots her: long black hair loosely braided down her back, strong jaw and cheekbones to match his own but instead of the warm tanned skin she inherited from her mother, his daughter’s face and body is tinted gray with grime, the skin on her face flaking from too long in the sun but somehow still paler than it should be. His breath sticks in his throat and he allows himself a moment to let his face fall; she hasn’t noticed him yet, talking in hushed tones to a too small young black girl with a mane of curly hair. Katniss rubs her hand up and down the girls forearm and Aaron is struck with deja vu, memories of her doing the same with her younger brother hounding him. A paramedic is shining a penlight into her left ear and careful wipes at... blood , Aaron realizes grimly.
Emily strides in behind him and puts a hand on his shoulder. “Go o—” Emily starts but cuts herself off as Katniss and the six other kids in the room swivel to look at the BAU agents.
“Hey, K,” Aaron whispers, but the words seem loud in the silent room.
A tall and muscular black boy tenses on the other side of the small curly-headed girl as Aaron walks over. He kneels in front of his daughter (the paramedic moves on from Katniss at a nod from Emily and begins to examine a large blonde boy) and recognition flashes on Katniss’s face.
“Dad?” She inhales sharply and he gives her a tentative hug even as he nods the answer to her question.
Tears wet Aaron’s eyes as his daughter pulls herself flush against him, hugging him like her life depends on. He almost winces as she grips his shoulders with a strength she certainly didn’t have at age ten, when he lost her. He feels water trickle onto the back of his neck and knows Katniss is crying too.
“Hey, hey, hey,” he says, rubbing circles on her back. “You’re okay, I’m here. It’s okay. Oh, I’m so glad I found you, I’m so glad you’re back.”
Katniss sniffles. “I missed you so—I thought you were dead. I—I…”
“Oh, baby, I’m here, I’m not going anywhere, ok? We’ll go home soon enough—”
Aaron feels Katniss tense the moment he mentions home. Even now, as unmoored as he feels, his profiler instincts are sharp. No one else has come into the room, nothing’s changed, no loud noises, no sudden movements. Katniss doesn’t want to go home.
But why?
He wonders for a split second if it’s Stockholm Syndrome, but immediately discards the idea. On the jet into Ohio, Emily had filled him in more. His daughter’s kidnapper, Cory Snow, had forced his captives to play out something from a bad novel, “training” them to fight, holding feasts. For six years, he molded them all to fit into his twisted play, and then, a month ago he released them into his barb-wire fenced “arena,” two acres of land designed to be a stage for the slaughter. Earlier today, a handful of the kids had banded together and made it back into the house, into the room Snow watched them all on cameras from. Katniss shot him. With a bow and arrow, right through his abdomen, not fatal, but enough.
Aaron tightens his arms around his too thin daughter for a moment before letting go. He keeps his hands on her shoulder and looks her dead in the eye. The relief she’d expressed had clearly faded, her face now etched with anxiety. “What’s wrong. What do you need from me?”
Almost instantaneously, Katniss unravels, no longer holding herself tight. She’s shaking as she says, “Do you know where Peeta is? They took him, they wouldn’t let me come, he’s hurt, he’s hurt bad , Dad, and he’s alone and if they call his parents—”
Katniss cuts herself off with a sharp breath and rubs at her face. She pushes Aaron’s hands off her shoulder and pins him with her stare, face hardened with something foreign to her father (on his own daughters face at least): anger. “You cannot let them call his parents.”