Narrowing Dark

--- O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart

-- from "Night" by Louise Bogan

The gutter pours rain in a steady dirge past the window. Some of it splashes back through the exposed screen in a fine mist that reminds Elle of high-velocity blood spatter. The curtain is pushed aside for light - though late afternoon makes it a gray sort of light, more conducive to shadow than to form - and the glass for ventilation. It doesn't help much. Her smoke curls in the opposite direction.

Reid doesn't complain. He never does, though she knows how much he hates it. The truth is that she lets most of it burn down like incense. She takes the first drag, sometimes two in the middle, and the last one, long and deep. The rest is just ritual. Just something to hold.

She keeps her cigarette between two fingers of one hand and his earlobe between two fingers of the other, a meditative back and forth that he leans into like a kitten. He presses his foot back and runs one toe along her arch. The touch is just hard enough; just perfect.

There is a rhythm to this. To them.

Sometimes they talk. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes Elle kills her cigarette against the tray on her nightstand and gets him hard again - her hands, her mouth, her eyes - and sometimes she turns the ringer up loud and falls asleep to his breath. Sometimes he steps into his pants and pads to the kitchen to make tea, and she watches him naked from the doorway. Sometimes he reads to her from a book in his memory, and she closes her eyes and loves him a little.

This time, they talk first.

Elle takes in the last bit of smoke and holds onto it, letting her lungs fill almost past capacity before she turns away from him to let it go. She tamps the butt down, then uses her empty hand to trace the fine line of hair leading down from his navel. "Do you ever wonder why?"

"Why what?"

"Just why. What they get out of it. I mean, I know what they get out of it - power, control, possession, all of that bullshit. But... there are a thousand ways to get that. What is it about putting your hands around someone's neck?"

She knows the answer. She wouldn't be worth her salary if she didn't. That isn't the question she really wants to ask.

It isn't like him not to answer immediately. Spitting out data is what he does. But he turns his whole body to face her, propped up on an elbow with his fingers buried in the mess that wants to be curls on top of his head, and just looks.

She looks back.

"This last case... it got to you?"

"A little," she admits. "Don't they all? No more than usual, I guess. It's just..." She suddenly wants another cigarette so badly that her fingers itch. Instead of reaching into the drawer for her pack, she reaches for him.

His weight is heavy and relaxed when she insinuates her body beneath his, and he falls into her kiss like he might let her swallow him. He doesn't even flinch at the taste, which she imagines is ashy from her cigarette and bitter from his come. He's tough. Tougher than she pegged him for at first.

Elle closes her eyes and lets the sentence die between them.

She feels him stir against her thigh - youth has its benefits, and this one is her favorite - and she opens her legs to let him feel. He still gasps a little every time, like he's surprised to find her wet for him.

As he pushes into her for the second time in fewer hours, she kisses the hard line of his jaw and asks, "Do you ever wonder what it's like? All that power?"

That's the question she wanted all along. The one she couldn't find. The one that disappeared into the odd mist of the day but is lit up and flashing now, electric like the pads of his fingers sliding against her clit as she squeezes her eyes shut against the brightness of it all.

Her body goes off like a shot, already cocked and hot from the last time, and it makes her so tight that he whimpers and loses his tongue inside of her mouth, chasing his orgasm harder and faster and rougher than usual. It's beautiful, though, in all of its inelegance. It's the answer she wanted.

"Come on," she gasps, her voice as taut as her cunt. "Is that the best you've got?"

He pulls out and comes on her belly, and it sticks them together as they pant their way towards sleep.

Before she sinks down into it, before she lets the sound of the rain slip over her like a blanket and the slowing gallop of his heart drown out her thoughts, she whispers, "When we wake up I want to know."

"What?"

"What you would do to me if I let you."


_______________


When she wakes up, he's gone.

They share a bed well, because neither of them likes to be touched. Sometimes they will drift off still tangled together, but they pull away into their own separate, fetal cocoons once unconscious. It's nice not to be pursued all over the mattress, Elle thinks. It's nice not to wake up in a sweat.

She likes his weight beside her, though; likes the white noise of his breath and the shampoo-and-bird's-nest smell on the pillow. She likes a second gun in the room, too, spooning her own on the nightstand.

But there's only one. It's the first thing she notices when she blinks awake two hours later. The second thing she notices is that it isn't hers. He left so quickly that he took the wrong weapon.

Elle squeezes her eyes shut again and mutters fuck against the sheets. When she sits up to scan for a note, there isn't one.

She takes Reid's glock off the table and passes it between her hands. There are bullets in the chamber. She thinks for a moment, then slips one out, its texture sleek and cool against her fingers, and puts it in her drawer.

_______________

He tries to explain himself, and she is tempted to let him stammer and stumble and apologize, but she doesn't. "It's fine," she says, cutting him off. "I'm not your wife. I'm not your mother."

The question is right on the tip of his tongue -- what are you? -- but she knows that he won't ask her. For Reid, not knowing something is a luxury. She likes to indulge him.

They swap back their guns, and she feels him watching her all day. His gaze is heavy and sultry and thick like August. It makes her want to get naked and crush ice between her teeth, get herself off then tuck her panties into his back pocket, take a nap in a patch of sun like a lazy lion.

Instead, she does paperwork and sucks on the blunt end of her pen. She leaves a ring of lipstick around it, then passes it behind his ear when she walks by. He hunches his shoulders at the shiver she sends up his spine, and she smiles.

_______________


"What do you need?"

Her body keeps jerking against him, yanking her right to the edge then veering off course at the last second, and she's frustrated. She's got her teeth in his neck and her nails like claws in his ass, and the angle is right and the pace is right but something is wrong. "Hold my wrists," she says from behind her ground-together teeth, and she drops her arms to let him do it.

Reid hesitates, but only for a second.

Having her hands pinned changes everything. It opens a gap between them that should make it worse, but it doesn't. She has to reach for him now, struggle for the friction, fight a little. He sees it and loosens his grip, but she hisses at him. Don't. He holds tighter then, watches her with wide eyes, and then his body goes still and stiff as death, and he comes. First.

He never comes first.

It startles them both, but it's slippery, and it's hot, and when he pulls out, he slides against her clit, his blunt nails digging down into her flexed palms, and she arches high and opens her mouth and swears and writhes and breaks his grip.

She pants with closed eyes for a moment, and then the tips of his fingers come to rest across her hip. It feels like an apology. She has the sudden urge to lay her open palm across his face, hard, but it's just an aftershock. Just her body discharging energy, like the kickback from a shot.

Elle curls her fingers around his and rubs her thumb in circles across the hard bones of his hand, the roadmap of his veins. "You're stronger than you look," she finally says, rolling onto her side away from him. This time, he follows, fitting himself into the angles of her shoulder blades, her knees, her sharp little waist. He bows his head into the dip of her neck, low like a penitent, and breathes slow and controlled against her skin. "That was a compliment, you know."

"I know," he says, and he does. Of course he does. He doesn't thank her, though. He just tells her to close her eyes, and when she does, he closes his, too, and opens a book behind his lids. "But what we never told anyone was that we too used to play with each other's things under the truck."

"Infante," she interrupts, smiling now and hooking one of her ankles over his. "Good choice."

He thanks her this time and reads her to sleep, then untangles their bodies.


_______________


Three days later, they're sitting at the round table. Reid is absently sipping from both her coffee and his own, his knee bouncing to the rhythm of whatever thoughts are spiraling through his brain, when JJ flips on the screen.

Four women. Redheads. Their freckled faces smile out from their pasts, oblivious to what was waiting for them. One holds a blond baby on her lap; another sits atop a horse. Elle doesn't hear their names, because the images change as JJ's speaking, and four pairs of hands, magnified three times, appear. They're posed. Crossed at the wrists, all of which are cut almost to the bone with ante-mortem ligature marks. Wire. Probably steel.

She feels Reid stiffen beside her. Coffee - hers - sloshes over the side of the cup, staining his sleeve. From across the room, Hotch's eyebrows raise, noting the reaction silently, and when he looks away, Elle tries to catch Reid's eye.

He won't look at her. His eyes are riveted to the screen, to JJ's thumb drawing circles around the top of her clicker, his knee paused mid-lift. Underneath the table, Elle presses her own against his, and he pulls away. She kicks him then, short and swift and silent, to remind him where he is and who's watching.

It works. He blinks back to the room, to the fluorescing lights and four walls and shuffling of paper. He still won't acknowledge her, though, just tucks one leg under himself and starts tapping his pen.

______________


Minnesota is freezing. It's a clean, cutting cold that makes Elle cough her lungs clear and crowd her shoulders together in defense. It creeps up between her clothing and her skin and bites her, sending her into shivery spasms without warning.

"Remind me to quit if some motherfucker starts dropping bodies here again," she says, hunching into the pillar outside of their hotel. Her fingers are numb and shaking, and she can't get her cigarette lit. Reid does it for her.

"You're always cold," he tells her, turning his palm to block the wind.

Elle blows smoke from between her lips. "Except when I'm hot."

"True. Your internal thermostat is broken," he observes with a thin-looking smile. His lips are pale, and his cheeks are red. He's just as cold as she is.

"Good thing the one in my room isn't." True to form, Elle takes two more drags from her cigarette and crushes it under her boot. As they step into the security camera's blind spot -- Reid's calculated it already and leads her there with a surreptitious nod -- she slips her spare key into the pocket of his jacket.


______________


Every room starts to look the same after awhile.

The bed with the roughened coverlet, the trying-to-be-soft blanket underneath, and the overlaundered sheets. The chair in the corner that doesn't recline. The particle-board desk with lamps screwed in overhead and the generically abstract picture in between them. The blackout curtains.

All of them have their rituals, their ways of making this space less abhorrent. Hotch carries a picture he sets out on every nightstand. JJ has a pillowcase stuffed in her go-bag that smells like her own detergent. Even Derek needs some comfort; he brings a pair of slippers that he doesn't think she knows about.

She and Reid are the only two who travel light; who have stripped their lives down to only what is necessary to survive. They both even use the hotel shampoo.

Though, Elle supposes, they do bring something the others can't. Each other. Anywhere you've got a body that you've invited into your own feels a little less bleak.

Elle strips off her shirt -- she's done a one-eighty now and is hotter than fuck; the temperature in her room was set ungodly high -- and connects her phone to the charger on the desk. It beeps at her to let her know it's getting some juice, and just as she's reaching for the clasp on her bra, she hears the knock.

It's his. Shave and a haircut. She rolls her eyes and calls out to him to use his key. No matter how many times she's said it's all right, he'll never just walk in. For Christ's sake, she's told him. There's nothing I do you haven't seen.

The handle turns with a metallic click, and before he even greets her, he sets the deadbolt. "Hi," he says , his eyes fixed on Elle as she slides the straps down her bare shoulders. "I'm assuming you're not cold anymore."

"Nope," she says, turning his way and cocking a hip against the desk. "If you came to warm me up, you're too late."

He watches her for a moment, his mouth working itself like he's screwing up his courage for something, and then he says, "Do you need to cool off?" and starts towards her.

"I swear to God, if you touch me with cold fucking hands, I..."

"No," he says, his voice in its lowest range, the one that means he's fighting with it. "They're not cold. I'm just going to..."

He doesn't finish his sentence, but he doesn't need to. She can feel the rest of it in the sudden, urgent collision of his lips against hers and the way he uses his weight to crowd her against the desk. His idea of cooling her off is pulling her button apart and yanking her pants down. It's too fast and uncharacteristically clumsy. He takes one side of her underwear along with them and misses the other, and he bunches everything just above her knees so that she has to wriggle and kick and help him out.

He's kissing her like he's thinking about biting her, like he's tempted, like she's the Apple in the Garden, and the ferocity behind it sends adrenaline like a quick-burning fuse up her spine. Her heart slams against her ribs, and her muscles tense. Classic fight-flee-or-fuck.

Not classic Reid.

But then, he still surprises her sometimes.

The unprompted grip on her wrists is a surprise, and so is the way he pushes them behind her back, and so is the way he yanks her charger from the wall and starts to wind it around them.

"What the fuck?" Elle pulls her mouth back and stares, but she doesn't resist, and he doesn't stop.

Instead, he pushes his lips against her ear. "You want this, right? You like it?" His tone doesn't match his steady fingers. He's pleading with her, and she knows that if she says no, it will be a gut-shot. A slow bleed. Not fatal, necessarily, but ugly.

Elle doesn't answer right away. She doesn't answer until she feels the hesitation as he pulls the knot, the knock of one of his knees against the drawer between her legs. Even then, it's just one word, clipped and controlled. She uses her SSA-voice.

"Yes." That's all he needs. One twist, and her wrists are tied facing out, the bonds as secure as a pair of cuffs. He didn't even need to look. "You a fucking Boyscout?" she asks. "Some fucking knot. You've been holding out on me, Doctor."

He pulls her legs apart, then, and drops to his knees in between them, and her world shrinks down to his lips and his tongue and his teeth, to the stripes of red she can feel around her wrists every time she moves, to the buck and roll and jerk of her hips, to his hands pressing her feet down towards the floor. Her body slides, and the wire catches on the knob of the drawer and won't come loose.

Panic shoots through her. This wasn't the plan -- not hers, and not his, either. It's out of control. It's a deviation.

She can't move her arms at all now, and the more she tries, the more trapped she gets. She can't separate the fear - strange and sudden and fierce - from the cresting wave of her orgasm. They tumble over each other, throw her body into chaos, set off her nerves like the pop pop pop of glass exploding in a burning building, and when she hollers his name, dangerously loud for where they are, she doesn't know whether she's asking him for help or telling him how fucking magnificent he is.

It doesn't matter. She feels him bite down on her when she says it, sinking into her thigh like he's anchoring himself, and the tidal wave that crashed through her settles into a pool at the pit of her stomach. The pinch of his teeth makes her gasp, and she feels the vibration of his words against her when he apologizes. He licks at the spot, kisses it, and that's when she opens her eyes.

"Jesus Christ. You goddamn fucking animal." Her voice sounds like she's been on a three-day bender. He's looking at her, still on his knees, and his expression is unreadable. Reid uses the back of his hand to wipe his mouth and scoots back, like he's afraid to stand. "Come here," she says, lifting her chin because she still can't move her arms. "Let me finish you up."

He shakes his head and uses her leg to help himself up. "No," he finally says. "It's all right, I... I don't need... I just wanted to..."

He's so hard that he's had to unbutton his pants to make himself comfortable.

"Bullshit," she says, but he shakes his head again, more insistent. Elle's eyebrows pull together, and she watches him for a moment. He's looking somewhere over her shoulder, his hands clenched so tight his veins are pushed against his skin. He's ticking like an overwound clock. He's afraid to touch her. "What's wrong? You gonna come taking it out?" She turns half of her mouth up into a heavy grin, but her eyes give her away. She can tell by his expression. He knows she's got him pinned down like a butterfly. "Let me watch you, then."

"What do you mean?" His voice is threatening to come apart at its fault lines.

"You're afraid of me, so you can take care of yourself."

"I'm not..."

"I want to watch you."

The silence hangs thick around them like fog, and Elle watches him search her face, his eyes careful not to stray anywhere else. She sets her jaw and bites her lip and wins the standoff. "Okay," he says, so quiet that it's almost inaudible.

He moves towards her, hands out to untie her, but Elle stops him with her voice. "No. Leave it."

He waits for a second, then takes his hand and cups her cheek. Underneath his skin, there is something humming, throbbing, barely reigned. She turns her face into his palm, closes her eyes, and sucks his fingers into her mouth, one by one, until they're as slick as her cunt.

It's over in less than a minute. He doesn't take his eyes off of her.


_______________


"I'm not afraid of you." His voice is low, fitting itself into the space between their heads and going no further.

They're sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in the back of the jet, finishing paperwork. Everyone else is asleep. The hush of it all is like a blanket, and Elle has her legs curled under herself, tucked small into her seat. She doesn't look up to answer. "Yes, you are."

"No, I'm not."

She keeps her neck bent, but stops writing. "Okay. You're scared of yourself. How about that?"

"What do you mean?"

"Do you really want me to go there?" She looks up this time and flips the pen over so she doesn't mark her page by accident.

"Yes."

Elle sighs and tilts her head against the seat. "Your whole life, women older than you make you feel powerless. First your mom with all of those problems you couldn't solve, then all the bitches at school who either flashed their tits at you and giggled because you were safe but never let you touch, or got off on tormenting you because adolescent girls are a bunch of sociopathic fucking freaks. Unattainable, emasculating, blah blah blah. You want to protect them because one, that's your job, and two, you're a decent guy, but there's a part of you that wants your power back. Something about being in charge reeeeaaaaaaally turns your knobs. And it scares you shitless because of all the garbage we see every day. Because how many of these fucking nutbags just take that a step too far, right? So when I hand you a little bit of rope, you think you're gonna end up strangling me with it. And even worse than that? You think you're gonna like it." She stops to blow a strand of hair out of her face, then says, "How's that for profiling on two hours' sleep?"

She turns back to her file but watches from the corner of her eye. She can see him turning her words over and over in his head until finally, his focus is so shot that he closes the folder in his lap and leans against the window, balling his jacket up into a pillow.

He doesn't sleep. She doesn't work.


_______________


Elle takes the bullet from her nightstand drawer and rolls it between her fingers. She lets it slide down her palm. She draws her forearms together and watches it cross her wrists and land in the sharp cup of her elbows. She picks it up and presses it to her tongue.

It tastes metallic, like blood. Like a kiss with teeth.

It waits for her on the sink while she showers. In bed, she curls her belly around it and feels the coppery tip rest against her navel.

Her dreams are wet and sticky and hot and hard.


_______________


His car is in her driveway when she gets home. She's got groceries under one arm and her purse between her teeth, and she's sure he can hear her swearing and fumbling through the door. He doesn't come to help.

The key turns with a rattle, and she bumps the door with her hip. "Thanks a lot," she calls ahead of herself, letting her bag hit the floor and kicking it inside. "You're a real gentleman."

She swings her body around and shuts the door, and when she turns back, she sees him. He's on her couch, one ankle crossed over his knee, his gun in his lap like a cat.

"Hi," he says. He doesn't move to get up.

Elle shuts the door and locks it, then pulls the chain across. "Hi, yourself," she says. "What the hell are you doing?" She sets her grocery bag on the table by the door and raises her eyebrows in question.

"I was... waiting for you."

"I see that. And waiting for someone to try a B &E, too, I take it?" She jerks her chin at his weapon.

"No," he says quietly. "Just you."

Elle's heart skips in her chest, a funny little stutter against her sternum. She knows the tone he's using. She can hear it low in her ear; remembers him hovering over her the first time, asking like this?, his fingers slow and methodical as she taught him how to make her come.

"Reid..." she starts, but then she has to swallow, and the words die.

"You took a bullet," he says. "I did a count when we got back from Minnesota, and I was missing one. And I couldn't figure out why. Then I remembered that you had my gun."

"That you left me your gun. And took mine. Yeah."

"Why?"

It's then that she notices the bullets on her end table. His gun is empty, and he's got the one from her drawer, too. "Because I wanted it," she answers. "You've got enough left. Hell, you only needed one for Dowd, right?"

"You wanted it," he starts, but then coughs, hollow-sounding and dry. "You wanted it because..."

"Because I wanted it." There's an edge to her voice now, fire behind it.

Reid rises from his place on the couch, his gun resting against his thigh. "Because it represents authority. Because after your father died, you had to take over for him. Because you've been making all of the decisions since then, and you resent anyone who tries to make them for you. Your mother never did, because she needed you. You had to be in control for her when she lost it, and she was embarrassed by it and proud of you at the same time. You're smart, and you're competent, and you're effective. But you're exhausted."

"Oh, am I? Because I slept pretty fucking well last night, actually."

"You're exhausted. And... and the first memory you have of your father is his gun. The sound of it. And the smell of it. And you were safe when he had it. You could close your eyes, and he was there, and he protected you. You didn't have to worry about anything. Right? Do you remember?"

Reid's thumb slides back, and Elle hears the click of the safety releasing. She closes her eyes, and she does remember. Her heart pulls in like a fist in her chest, and it starts battering her. It's higher than it should be, somewhere in her throat, and then she feels the butt of the gun run up her spine.

"Fuck you," she whispers, but it's thready and shaky. She tries again. "Fuck. You."

"Elle." He says her name, and she opens her eyes, and the expression on his face makes her breath stop. It's tender and terrified and shattering in its heat, and she wants to throw herself into it and burn.

He nudges the muzzle into the back of her pants and edges her closer, and she grabs him hard at the chin, tells him to go fuck himself, and kisses him.

Everything after that is slow.

She strips for him at gunpoint, and his hand shakes madly as he holds it on her. Her clothes fall at her feet, one piece after another, until she's standing exposed under the living room light. The bruise on her hip where she slammed it against her desk. The nick on her ankle from shaving. The scar to the side of her navel from her appendectomy at twenty-two. The birthmark she hates just below her ass. He's looked at her naked a hundred times, but this is the first time she feels like he's seeing her.

The ceiling fan makes her skin prick up into goosebumps and turns her nipples hard and faceted like gems.

"Good," he says. "Come here." He gestures for her with his weapon, and when she starts to walk, she realizes how wet she is. Too many steps and she'll be panting like a dog.

Elle crawls into his lap; he presses the muzzle against her chin, and she tilts her head back for him, giving him her throat, her pulse, her shuddering breath. He draws it down between her breasts, and her heart pounds back like it's reaching for it.

When he dips it between her legs, she spreads wider for him, draws in a breath that feels like a knife to her lungs, and presses her forehead flat to his. His eyes are black. "I dare you," she whispers.

He won't. He won't. He won't, but...

He does.

Just once, slow and deep and deliberate, all the way to the trigger, and he holds it there, his thumb flicking against the safety, on off on off on off, his knuckle sliding everywhere but where she needs it. She braces herself, her nails in his shoulders and her knees shaking against the outside of his thighs, and she hopes that wherever her Daddy is, he can't see her now.

Elle hardly recognizes her voice when she uses it. It's low and quivering and nearly desperate. It makes her flinch. "All right, you filthy motherfucker. You made your point. Come on now."

When he takes it out, he does it slow and hard, lingering against the spot that makes her muscles clench and her hair stand up, and he runs it along the inside of her thigh. It's gentle, like the press of his cheek when he's giving her head, and she kisses him right between his eyes.

Elle doesn't ask, just takes apart his belt, his button, his zipper, and then he pushes the gun against her ribs as she takes all of him at once, hard.

She comes with his cock in her cunt and the barrel in her mouth, the taste of her - sharp-sweet and dangerous - still on it, his fingers between their bodies not rubbing but pinching, too rough, their eyes locked like a sight on a target.

The gun hits the couch and bounces off, and she lets her body go heavy, concentrates on the feel of him as he fucks her deeper with each stroke, pauses in between, starts to breathe like he's dying, and then she leans into his ear, her voice thin and wispy as smoke. "Oh, God, you're so hard it hurts."

All of his muscles tense, and he comes and comes and comes and comes.

He hides his face against her, and she grips him by the back of his neck, and they sit in the stillness for a long, long time.

_______________

"Do I need to toss this milk?" Elle pulls the carton out of the bag and looks at it skeptically.

Reid sets the kettle onto the stove, lights the gas, and checks his watch. "No. Once it's been pasteurized, milk can sit out in temperatures over forty-one degrees fahrenheit for up to four hours and still be safe to drink."

He turns back to his task, and Elle moves her hand to the cap, ready to twist it off and smell, just to be sure. At the last second, she stops and watches him over the top of the container. He's got his damp shirt draped over one shoulder, his arm stretched up to her cabinet. When he takes two mugs out, he sets one down on the counter, but puts the other one back in and peers around until he finds the red one with the sturdy handle and wide mouth. Her favorite. In it, he pours a tablespoon of sugar, then yanks the string from a teabag with his teeth and pushes it to the bottom.

Elle smiles. "Okay," she says, coming up behind him and socking him gently in the arm as she pulls open the fridge. "I trust you."