philharmonie

The projector lens has a small crack. It makes the light disperse in small rainbows. 

It’s physics. A prism made of glass. And yet, across the corner of your notebook, it seems beautiful in the simplest of ways. 

A trace of violet settles in the hollow of a handwritten O — disorganized — blooming in the white spaces of your notes. 

You slowly slide your finger across the page. Beyond the sequence of color, the page is being bombarded by light your eyes cannot see. 

Ultraviolet light breaks down the fibers of the paper while the surface stays perfectly still.

The projector clicks.  A new slide cuts through the air, masking the blankness of the wall with the translucent, static reality of a life reduced to evidence. 

You think about the man in the picture. You wonder if he has an ultraviolet side too. A frequency of existence that sits just outside the lines of the profile. 

Agent Gideon dissects him with absolute certainty. Retraces the path of violence as if it were but an inevitability. Collapses the vastness of a human life into the rigid lines of a unique behavioral descriptor. Disorganized, sexual sadist, socially reclusive. 

It feels like dishonest geometry. An attempt to rebuild the glass from the way it fragments the light. 

Another slide. 

This time it’s a photograph of an abandoned ranch in Montana. 

Agent Gideon raises a hand to point at it. The image distorts, straight lines of the wooden panels molding into his hand. Forcing the crime scene to take the contours of his fingers. 

“This,” he says, “is where David Meirhofer dumped his victim’s remains.”

You watch his mouth as he speaks. You’ve begun to collect his words like specimens. Noting the ones he chooses, the ones he discards. 

This. Dumped. Remains. 

You wonder if this stress on the final syllable is the rhythm of a lecture, or the rhythm of his own revulsion. 

His face is a strangely still landscape. Yet his eyes hold a depth of nuance that his words seem to betray. A slow, drowning recognition. 

Or perhaps you are simply searching for a reflection of yourself in the vast brown of his gaze.

“Meirhofer worked there,” he adds. “He knew the ranch. But he also knew it could be tied back to him.” 

He looks at the room but his eyes find no purchase. As if the rows of trainees diligently listening to him are merely one unsubstantial object in his path. 

You can’t help but think about Boston. The rumors of a man who looked into the sun and went blind for a while. It feels as though his focus is fixed on a point far behind you. 

“Why take the chance ?” he asks.         

The silence is broken by a trainee a few rows ahead of you. 

“Because he’s disorganized,” the trainee answers confidently. “He likely didn't have a pre-planned disposal site. He chose somewhere familiar because it was the path of least resistance.”

Agent Gideon doesn’t nod. He just stands there, the warped image of the ranch still bleeding across his blue shirt. 

“A man who spent his life hiding in plain sight… why choose a place that calls attention to him ?” he asks again.

He waits.  “Don’t tell me what he is. Tell me what he felt standing there… in the dirt.”

Fact : The ranch was isolated and abandoned. 

Fact : Meirhofer was familiar with the ranch. 

Fact : Employment records tied him directly to the site.

Meirhofer would have known that. Yet he chose to dispose of the remains at the ranch anyway. Why ? 

“He felt it was worth the risk,” you say. 

Agent Gideon stops. He looks at you with subtle curiosity and opens his palm toward you, his lips pursed in a thin, contemplative line.

“Why take the risk at all ?” he pushes. 

“His knowledge of the ranch made him believe the likelihood of it getting found was low enough to risk it,” you explain. “He miscalculated the variables.” 

He holds your gaze for a moment, and you force yourself to meet it. 

He raises a hand and taps his lower lip once, twice, and a third time, with his finger. 

“Because he’s arrogant ? Or because he’s driven by something stronger than logic ?” 

You feel the answer getting pulled at your throat. He watches the flicker of hesitation in your eyes, a faint, knowing shadow passing over his face. He doesn’t wait for you to find your footing. 

He turns back to the room, the moment of private interrogation dissolving as quickly as it began.

A click. 

“Meirhofer is a loner, terrified of any social contact he can't control. For him, the unknown is a threat,” he begins.

Somehow, his voice sounds devoid of any judgment. It sounds like he understands him. 

He moves his hand and the light catches the ring on his finger. 

“He needed a place where he felt in control. Safe. Comfortable.” 

He steps closer to the projector, moving into the direct path of the beam. The lens refracts the light across his skin. 

“If you want to find him, you have to understand it. You have to stand where he stood and know what relief felt like there,” he declares quietly. 

You try to imagine yourself in Montana. 

The scorched yellow of the grass bleeding into the deep, stubborn green of the scrub, and you can almost feel the dry heat rising off the dirt. 

You imagine the silence — unnaturally solemn, like the waning of a scream. 

You stop. 

Agent Gideon moves out of the light. The spectrum vanishes from his skin, replaced by the drab, fluorescent reality of the Quantico classroom.

He returns to his desk. His fingers trail over the mahogany as if checking the grain. 

The violet has withered on the page of your notebook. The O in disorganized has gone pale. It looks like a mouth, frozen in the middle of a word you can't finish. 

It’s brutally restrictive. 

He is organized. Or he is disorganized. 

He’s killing for pleasure. 

Looking for lust. For thrill. For comfort. Or control.

It’s a simple switch of this or that. One or two.

And yet, it’s dangerously boundless; the largesse of a mind layering motive upon motive until the act itself is buried under the sheer weight of what we imagine it to be. He felt safe, he felt anxious, he felt in control, he felt … who fucking knows how he felt.

Agent Gideon’s wearing a blue button down shirt, the sleeves messily rolled up to reveal his forearms. A sliver of a navy undershirt and a few chest hairs peek through at the collar, where he left the top buttons undone. 

Your eyes drop to his waist, catching on the black leather of his belt. It’s worn and creased, pulling at the loops of his trousers.

He lifts his hand to adjust his glasses, and you notice his watch. The face is turned inward, resting against the skin of his inner wrist. Anything of his is quietly guarded. 

The glasses slide onto the bridge of his nose. He frowns softly as his gaze quickly scans through the manila folder on the desk. His thumb rests against the pages. 

He picks up a red pen and circles something in the file. Everything becomes a category once you decide how to look at it.

We call an apple an apple so we don’t have to describe the crunch, the acid, the red every time we speak. The word is a cage, but people keep stuffing meanings into it anyway — sin, knowledge, health, gravity itself.

How does he reconcile the two ? Is he understanding the unsub or is he writing him ? 

He closes the folder. 

 “Meirhofer didn’t stop at the ranch,” he adds. “He called the family. Multiple times. And he demanded ransom money he never intended to collect.” 

Agent Gideon takes his glasses off, metal frame pinched between his fingers as he gestures with them. 

“I want a profile. Not the textbook definition. Why the phone ? Why the family ? Why the money ?” 

From where you’re sitting, his face seems to be drawn in a permanent frown of fatigue that he has long since stopped trying to fight.

He looks at his watch then back at the room. 

“You have 10 minutes.”

Pencil scratches against paper. 

To your eyes, the room feels like a prism splitting around Agent Gideon. One side still sees a legend. The other sees Boston and what it may have taken from him.

You aren’t sure where you sit. Perhaps somewhere between the two. A point of stationary observation. Or perhaps something else entirely.

 You look down at your page. 

1.Geographic proximity : lack of toll record suggests that the calls originated within a local calling area, though limitations in 1970s records-keeping of long distance calls should be considered. If local, this would be consistent with some degree of familiarity with the victim’s environment.

2.Behavioral redundancy : frequent contact suggests the calls may serve a function other than instrumental. The offender relies on telephone communication rather than direct contact, which would allow for personal interaction while maintaining control.

3.Functional interpretation: ransom demands may operate as a way of eliciting reactions from the family and observing said reactions over repeated interactions. This could provide psychological reinforcement to the offer and potentially offer informal insight into law enforcement activity. Uncertain whether this reflects true objective or byproduct of repeated contact. 

Agent Gideon walks slowly through the rows. The sound of his footsteps quietly reverberates against the tiles. 

“Too much theory,” he says to a trainee three rows up. 

He pauses at a desk near the window. “Good instincts on the escalation but the timeline is wrong.” 

The sound of his shoes resumes. Each step is a measured punctuation mark. 

You feel him stop by your desk more than you see him. He leans in, looking over your shoulder. 

It smells like cedar and a hint of coffee. You can see the shadow of his head fall across your notebook. 

You find yourself reading your notes through his eyes, suddenly critical of your bent Os and the smudge of graphite in the shape of your finger. 

You hold your breath—not out of fear, but because you don't want to disturb the moment he’s giving you. You want to be still. You want to be right.

He doesn't say anything for a long moment. Honestly, it might have only been twenty seconds. 

“You’ve got the structure right,” he tells you quietly. “Now follow it through.”

He moves on to the next row. 

You can feel a droplet of sweat trailing down your temple. It falls down onto the paper you’re holding. The edges are already beginning to curl in the humidity. 

The sun shines harshly on the asphalt of the Academy’s parking lot. The shadows from the trees blend into the black of the tar. 

The cicadas' singing matches the sound of your steps. 

As you walk, you’re half convinced you’re leaving black foot imprints behind you—but then again, the black wouldn’t show anyway. The rubber of your shoes melting into the ground, eroded by the path you’re taking to find Agent Gideon.

You look down at the margin of your paper. It’s blank. No grade, no percentage, no nothing. Just Agent Gideon’s cramped, heavy ink trailing your observations. This time, he hasn’t even written his usual ‘Choose !’. He just underlined two of your hypotheses and drew a question mark. But both interpretations are supported by the evidence. Choosing one over the other would be a guess. It wouldn't be accurate.

At first, it seemed fitting. That he didn’t grade profiles. 

Then you saw the other trainees’ papers. 34. 55. 89…

And yet he won’t tell you where you stand. Are your shoes even made of rubber ?

Sunglasses cover his eyes. 

He’s by his car, at the far end of the lot. From this distance, he feels less like a man and more like a fault line in the heat. Maybe it’s just the cicadas making the air warp around him. 

“Agent Gideon,” you call. 

His hand pauses on the door handle. You wonder if the metal doesn’t burn his skin. 

It’s difficult talking to him when you can’t see his eyes. Not that talking to him without sunglasses is ever easy. You focus on the way the sun lights the silver in his hair.

“Sir. I — I was wondering…,” you start. “I’ve noticed my last few profiles don’t have a grade. I checked with the others and I realized I’m the only one… without one.” 

You’re phrasing this carefully. A simple student seeking an explanation rather than a critic pointing out an inconsistency. Surely it’s not that he keeps running out of ink when he gets to your paper. 

“I wanted to ask you if there’s something specific that I’m missing.” 

His lips part slowly. He takes a slow breath, the sound of it almost lost beneath the cicadas. 

“If you want your grades, you’re free to go to the administration and ask for your transcript,” he says, his voice a low, even rasp. “I submit them on time. I just decided not to give them to you personally.”

“Why ?” you ask. It seems why is the only word that suits him. 

He lets go of the car handle. Steps closer to you. You can see your reflection in his glasses. 

“Profiling is a science that’s still being written. We’re still figuring out the laws. But you’re treating it like it’s already been solved,” he begins. 

He doesn't point at the paper. Instead, he opens his hands towards you again. You see a faint trace of red on the inside of his knuckles. 

“You’re staying behind the glass,” he continues. “You’re bright—you’re probably the brightest in the class—but you’re playing it safe.”

The glass of his watch catches the sun. Your vision swims with white spots whenever he emphasizes a word.

“The hard part isn’t seeing options. It’s accepting you’re responsible for the one you pick.”

“How do I do that ?” 

He looks down at his own hand, his thumb rubbing against his ring as if trying to erase a stain. 

“You think I’m asking you to be right,” he says after a moment. “I’m not. I’ve been right, and people died. I’ve been wrong, and people died.”

He finally lifts his head back towards you. “You have to trust your instincts.”

He lets out a short, dry breath. As he says it, you think he looks like a man who doesn’t trust much of anything.

“If you want to do this work, you have to be willing to be the one who makes the call. Even if you spend the rest of your life wondering if you were wrong.” His tone drops into something flat, cutting you off with a coldness that feels entirely unprovoked. 

You shift on your feet. Your soles still look the same. They feel a bit softer. 

He leans forward and slowly takes the paper out of your hand. Your fingers almost meet on the page. They don’t touch and yet it feels strangely intimate. 

“I’ll keep this one,” he tells you. 

As he folds it to put it in his pocket, you notice the droplet of sweat from earlier. It had slid down the page in a tilted, salt-stained gully.

Even the Academy eventually wilts into the mundane reality of a three-hour lecture.

Your thumb absentmindedly clicks your pen. It has a little picture of rocky mountains freckled with green. The peaks rise up, brown and rugged. Traces of orange. A waterfall tumbles over the ridge. 

You feel a bit like a prisoner staring longingly out a window—except this classroom doesn't have any.

You let go of the pen. 

“The original profile’s primary assessment was that the unsub was a highly intelligent blue collar worker,” Agent Anthony says. 

Your eyes drift to the laminated plastic ID badge clipped to his suit pocket. In the tiny, high-contrast photo, he’s the Bureau’s platonic ideal : jaw set with optimistic certainty, eyes clear and untroubled. 

A plastic version of a man who hasn't yet been interrupted by the erosive reality of Agent Gideon.

Agent Gideon invited him here specifically. And for the last hour, Agent Anthony has been lecturing with the bloodless precision of a field manual. 

You just don't understand the point of the invitation. 

“The unsub brought his own kit, which denotes an organized offender. But the use of a .25 caliber—a budget-tier firearm—paired with witness sightings of an unrestored late-70s corvette, pointed the profile towards significant financial constraints,” he continues, his tone clipped. 

Agent Anthony offers a sharp, certain nod. “At the time, the conclusion was considered strictly in line with Bureau standards. He was categorized as an intelligent, under-employed blue-collar worker. It was the gold standard of profiling for that era.”

Your hand quietly drifts into your bag, fingers tracing the silver foil of a gum packet. 

Agent Gideon’s sitting in a chair identical to yours, tucked into the corner, finding fault in everything Agent Anthony says.

His glasses are perched on top of his head, pushing back fine strands of his hair.

He’s wearing a white button-down, but it’s cross-hatched with thin, brownish lines that turn his torso into a pale grid. The top two buttons of the shirt are undone, revealing the fine, brown hairs of his chest that smooth down into the cotton.

The pattern is too structured for him. It looks like a graph waiting for data points that won't come.

“Five bucks says he doesn't let him finish his next sentence,” a whisper cuts through the hum of the air conditioning.

“No way,” a second voice murmurs from the row behind you. “Gideon’s going to let him dig himself into a hole again and then he’s going to say that the profile’s too clean.”

You lean back slowly, pulling your hand to cover your mouth. 

“He glanced at Doctor Reid,” you whisper. “He’s going to cut in right now.”

Agent Gideon made sure to introduce him as Doctor Reid. Lines of his lips tensing pointedly. Doc-tor-Reid. 

And yet, after resolutely pinning the title to Doc-tor-Reid’s badge, the fondness of Spencer keeps slipping past his lips.   

“Agent Anthony’s right,” Agent Gideon begins. 

You hear a barely muffled laugh behind you. A satisfied smile tugs at your lips.

Agent Gideon’s attention doesn’t fully follow the words to their destination. As if the agreement is something he’s already arrived at before speaking.

“Single shots. Clean kills. Almost no evidence left behind. That kind of control… that comes from discipline. From training.”

He doesn’t look at Agent Anthony. It’s peculiar. It feels less like a conversation and more like something being written over in real time.

He leans forward in his chair. The brownish grid of his shirt bunches around his middle, the lines distorting. 

“But someone like that doesn’t hold on to the weapon. A high-end firearm leaves a signature. He knows better than to keep it,” he continues confidently. 

“A .25 gives you nothing,” Agent Anthony finishes the thought for him.

Agent Gideon briefly turns his head towards him. He looks at him, just long enough to acknowledge the interruption. 

“The gun isn’t about money. Neither is the car. It disappears in plain sight,” he says. 

Doctor Reid keeps tapping with his fingers against his thigh. Like dots. He’s wordlessly mouthing along to Agent Gideon’s words.

“It’s not about what he can’t afford. It’s about not being seen.”

Agent Anthony doesn’t flinch. His face settles into the same federal amber from his badge picture. He gives Agent Gideon a tight and fascinatingly professional smile. 

“That’s a valid retrospective,” he says. “And I’ll be the first to admit that the Bureau’s data pool at the time wasn’t the most objective.” 

He gestures measuredly towards the rows. 

“But a blue collar offender wasn’t a complete shot in the dark. The unsub fit. He didn’t seem out of place. Whether that was a product of his actual background or a deliberate camouflage, the result remained the same.”

He offers a sharp, knowing nod. 

“It’s a reminder that as profilers we’re constantly learning. But in the 90s, the standard held because the standard worked.” 

The thrumming on Doctor Reid’s knee abruptly stops. He lifts his fingers close to his face. He seems to light up from within. 

“Actually,” he explains. “The standard only appeared to work because of a lack of comparative data regarding high-functioning offenders with tactical training.” 

His words feel like a chromatic blur. A rapid-fire staccato of pure enthusiasm. Doc-tor-Reid.

“Statistically, the assumption that an offender must belong to the class they are mimicking results in a 30% delay in apprehension.”

As he talks, Agent Gideon looks at him softly. You think you almost see something warm in his gaze. Traces of orange. The corners of his mouth move, just the slightest bit, into a tiny smile. 

You look down at your pen. 

It’s like Agent Gideon names the world for Doc-tor-Reid. For him ? With him ? 

You wonder if you’re a fruit he’s interested in naming, or just part of the rocks.  

You take the gum out of your bag.  

Wind softly slips through the grass, shifting the blades with a shushing kiss. Combing through the stems like fingers through hair to reveal pools of chicory.

A bright, purple blue. Like a flame burning in the grass. 

The field stretches too far to hold in one glance, scattered with small suns and soft blushes.

Your hand caresses the grass. You inhale, like the deep, gentle breath you take into the shoulder of someone you cherish.  

It smells sweet, like crushed honey. 

You feel the tiny needle-steps of something climbing on your skin. A small orange beetle walks with a delicate, mechanical precision along your fingers. It pauses on your knuckle, as if curious about the vast landscape of your hand. 

You close your eyes, letting the light press against your eyelids until everything turns a warm, translucent crimson. 

It’s beautiful because it just is. 

The wind brushes your cheeks. A sharp, sudden pinch pricks your finger.

You flinch and pull your hand back reflexively, and the beetle takes flight, a blurred orange spark vanishing into the chicory. 

A small, acrid yellow smudge remains on the curve of your knuckle. 

You lean forward and brush your finger against the blades of grass, trying to wipe the color away, but the stain is stubborn. 

You sigh quietly and turn your wrist inward.

The watch face catches the light. The glass is a cold flat circle against your pulse. The hands move with a precise click click click.

You had left the Academy early this morning, slipping away for a day trip that promised to be endless. Back then, the return felt impossibly far away.

As you leave the field, you reach for a black-eyed Susan. You find yourself staring into its center. It feels like a dark unblinking pupil. Watching you leave as if it’s memorizing your face. 

You pull the stem between your fingers and gently snap it. 

The vivid, honeyed warmth of the meadow begins to cool as the tires hum against the asphalt, the sound vibrating through the steering wheel. 

An old gas station sits at the edge of the road. White walls yellowed by decades of Virginia sun. 

You find yourself standing before a wire postcard rack. It’s slightly rusted in the joints, protesting with a thin, metallic whisper as you give it a tentative nudge. It spins slowly in a blur of colors and serrated edges. 

At first, it’s exactly what you’d expect. 

Greetings from Richmond. Coastal lighthouses. Oak trees and blue mountains. 

But then the rack settles. 

A snowy plain with no trees to cradle the wind. Pale sun bleached stones swimming in turquoise water. Sunny California it says. Eroded badlands in tightly packed ridges and gullies.

Cards haphazardly jammed into slots where they clearly don’t belong. 

You look around the small, cramped station. 

The linoleum is cracked, and the air smells of tanned leather and burnt coffee. 

Your eyes travel down the wire of the rack, following the line of mismatched colors to the very bottom.

A clear plastic-wrapped block of cardstock, far too thick for this shelf, still cinched tight in its packaging. Across the USA : 50-Card Value Pack printed in a dull, functional font across the front. 

The plastic crinkles as you set it on the counter. 

“That’ll be five fifty,” the worker says plainly. 

As you hold out the money, his eyes drop to your hand. 

"Oh, one of those orange beetles get you ?" he asks, his voice scraping through the silence. "They’re all over the place this year."

The register clicks. 

"Those things aren't even real ladybugs. The government brought them in to eat the soybean aphids, and now they’re everywhere."

"I didn’t know that," you say softly.

"That's how they get you. Look just right until they bite."

You hook your thumb under the edge of the plastic. You slide the stack out and go through it. 

One by one, the familiar strangers reappear : the snowy plain, the sunny coast, the tan desert. 

You also find a few Virginia postcards. 

You figure someone else must have bought a similar pack, picked through it to keep the Virginia ones, and left the rest in the rack. 

It’s a simple enough answer. A mundane bit of logic that should be enough to satisfy you. 

And yet, the silence of the gas station suddenly feels like a classroom. 

The worker wordlessly leans over the counter to read through a tattered crossword puzzle. He doesn't look up, the scratch of his pen the only sound against the spinning of the ceiling fan. 

You look down at the tan brown of a desert postcard. Narrow crests and deep grooves. Sort of like a labyrinth. You can almost feel Agent Gideon’s eyes on you. Heavy. Expectant. Sharp. The way his lips move as he leans forward. Why ?

Why go through all this trouble—why not just buy Virginia postcards directly ?

You imagine his brows furrowing in thought. Lines at the corners of his eyes mapping each possibility. How his finger taps his lips quietly. 

The answer tastes like him. 

A perfectionist or a completionist. 

Who didn’t buy the pack because it was convenient.

Who bought it because it gives something to resolve.

A contained disorder.

You wonder if he’d give you a small, proud smile. 

You slide the mismatched postcards back into the wrapper and tuck it inside your bag. 

On the board : three victims, a three-mile radius and one consistent lack of struggle.

The question is already in the room.

Victim selection ?

Agent Gideon didn’t technically ask the question out loud. He simply twisted the projector’s lens for a moment. A slow, methodical rotation of his wrist that coaxed the blurred shapes on the wall into a sudden, agonizing focus. 

So. 

Proximity first. Because proximity is always first. 

Unless it isn’t. 

Unless this is controlled, unless control implies prior knowledge—

He’s leaning against his desk, the dark wood a sharp line behind him. His arms are braced against the edge to support his weight, sleeves rolled back to reveal the tension in his forearms.

No.

Knowledge requires familiarity.

Familiarity implies repeated exposure.

But repeated exposure would mean opportunity already existed, so proximity is still—

Still primary.

Veins blend in with the fine dark hairs on his skin, leading down to his hands. His fingers, blunt and strong, grip the edge of the wood. 

His legs are crossed at the ankles. His brown trousers bunch up a tiny bit where his shins overlap, the fabric pulled taut. He's wearing sneakers of all things.

It’s your own mind doing the running, leaving you feeling winded and out of breath as your thoughts race to keep up with the silence.

Where were you ? 

Proximity. But that removes intent too quickly.

If intent is absent, then the act becomes random, but randomness doesn’t match the spacing of the scenes, the spacing is too deliberate, too clean—

You notice the way his belly juts out the tiniest bit over his belt as he leans back. A posture of relaxed intensity that only makes the air feel sparser around your lungs. 

Too clean means structure.

Structure means planning.

Planning means—

No.

His eyes feel like a physical weight you have to push against to keep your thoughts moving.

That contradicts proximity again.

Unless proximity is chosen, not incidental—

Unless he selected the environment first and then the victim within it—

But that assumes staging, and staging requires time, and time conflicts with the witness window—

“Don’t overthink it. You already know.”

They all still fit. In different ways. In incomplete ways. If you adjust one variable, the others shift. If you stabilize one, two collapse.

But the longer you hold them, the less distinct they become—just overlapping noise, just—

The fluorescent lamps flicker. 

The light seems to fracture in your pupils. 

This or this or this.

Fuck.

“Proximity,” you decide. 

“Why ?” he pushes.

Why why why. Why anything. Why everything. Why not. 

“It’s not about the victims,” you say. “It’s about the location.”

A pause. 

“What makes you say that ?” 

His fingers tap on the desk. 

In a steady, hypnotic loop that feels like it’s setting a pace you can’t quite maintain.

“If it was about the victims, he’d prioritize access to them,” you answer. “But he’s taking on unnecessary risk by staying tied to a specific place. That only makes sense if the place matters more than the person.”

You can see the deep, weathered crinkles at the corners of his eyes. The light shines on his glasses and you feel like you’re under some sort of magnifying lens. 

Index.

Middle.

Ring.

He tilts his head faintly. 

“What does that give him ?” he asks.

“Control,” you say, the word coming out on a short, sharp exhale. 

You find yourself taking a shallow breath, trying to pull enough air in to finish the thought before he moves again. 

“He starts with the environment. Somewhere he already understands. Every entrance, every blind spot, how long he can stay without being noticed—”

“What are you discarding ?” he cuts in.

You blink, and the glare hits wrong —like looking straight into the sun. 

“Random selection,” you tell him. “If it were random, the locations would vary. They don’t.” Another blink. “And impulse. This requires waiting.”

The tapping stops. 

He pushes himself off of the desk and walks towards you.

He looks at you like he isn’t waiting for an answer so much as watching how you arrive at one.

There’s something off in it. Too intent, too immediate. Like your thinking itself isn’t what he’s paying attention to but where it moves, and what it avoids.

Like he’s trying to keep you from stepping out of the reasoning before it finishes forming.

You don’t know. You can’t tell. 

“Keep going,” he instructs. 

You take a small breath. It smells like coffee. And ink. Maybe that wasn’t the best idea. Your heart thumps in your chest. 

“He’s not finding victims and then figuring out where to take them,” you say. “He’s setting the conditions first… and waiting until someone fits.”

“Why wait ?” he challenges. 

The light still lingers, like something burned into your vision.

“Because it reduces uncertainty,” you start—then stop.

No. That’s not it.

“Because out there, he has to adjust,” you correct, more quietly. “He has to react. Here… he doesn’t.”

Agent Gideon’s voice cuts in again, softer.  

“What does that feel like to him ?”

You swallow. Your throat feels dry. 

“It doesn’t feel like a risk,” you say. “Or—it does. But it’s the kind he knows he can win.”

His lips twitch. A smile that’s barely there. Gone almost as soon as it blooms.

It reminds you, inexplicably, of Doctor Reid. Of the way something gentler slips through before he can stop it.

“And if he wins ?” 

You hesitate. 

Your fingers pull at your lips. You taste something acrid. 

“Then he feels like he’s right about himself. That he’s smarter than everyone else,” you begin. 

Your fingers press harder against your mouth. Blunt pressure to steady the nausea and force the words out at the same time. 

You drag the conclusion past your teeth, raw and unproven.

“That people don’t overlook him because something’s wrong with him. They’re just not paying attention.” 

He gives you a small smile. 

Just for a moment. 

It softens the lines of his face. And at the same time, it reveals ones you don’t usually see. Like a band spectrum that only appears at a certain angle.

The lecture has run seven minutes over. 

By any astronomical metric, seven minutes isn’t a long time. 

Seven times sixty. Four hundred and twenty seconds.

Times a thousand that’s four hundred and twenty thousand milliseconds. 

Times a thousand that’s… 

The more you dissect it, the bigger the number gets. It stops being a mere seven minutes and turns into a massive 420 x 10^15 femtoseconds. See now you have to use exponents instead of just writing it out. 

Seven minutes starts to sound like a staggering amount of life to account for.

Beside you, someone is performing a slow-motion ritual of clearing their desk. Moving their highlighter an inch to the left, then the right, eyes darting to the clock every few seconds. 

Two rows down, a trainee is staring at the wall with a glazed, thousand-yard stare. Perhaps they’ve gotten to the point where seven minutes sounds like existential paralysis.

Planck time. The universe’s most elementary unit. You can’t slice reality any thinner than this.

In seven minutes, that’s roughly 7.7 quattuordecillion units. At this point, the number has so many zeros it loses its impact on a human brain. Or at least on yours. 

You wonder what is the smallest possible measurement of Agent Gideon. The single, indivisible moment that makes the rest of him inevitable. Past the point where the universe says the scale has to end.

The gold band on his ring finger maybe.  You’ve spent an absurd amount of Planck units wondering why he still wears it. 

To remind himself of what was. A marriage that didn’t survive the gravity of his work. 

Or a penance for the people he thinks he’s disappointed. 

Or what if it’s not even about disappointment at all. Maybe it’s a tether to the people he loves even if they’ve drifted out of his reach. 

Or maybe it’s just because he’d feel weird taking it off.

You want to know him with a precision that defies the way the world is built. Reach a point where you aren't just watching him, but vibrating at the exact same wavelength. Why do your hands want to circle the ultraviolet ? why—

“That will be all for today,” he says finally. 

You glance at the clock. 

Nine minutes. 

A trainee beside you slings their bag over their shoulder.

“You going to the dining hall ?” 

You nod. “Yeah.”

“Great,” another trainee says, falling into step as they gather their things. “If we get there before the line turns into a disaster.”

“I’m not doing another sandwich run from the vending machines,” someone adds from behind them.

“You say that every time.”

“And I mean it every time.”

You move towards the door. A small current of voices discussing caffeine and the cafeteria’s overly sticky pastries. 

Your shoulder brushes along a passing jacket. You think about getting peaches, but they’re the kind where the flesh still clings to the pit. It’s annoying. 

You hear Agent Gideon call your name. 

“A moment,” he says. 

The trainees glance at you as you stop in the doorway. Something like pity, something like relief. The look of someone being spared a sticky situation they don’t want to peel apart. 

“Save me a seat ?” you whisper. 

A few nods.

Footsteps clack against the vinyl of the corridor. 

“Sir ?” 

Honestly, you were already imagining yourself in the dining hall. Or at least in the sweet mercy of being a student who doesn’t have to solve the man at the front of the room.

He gathers a few stray papers. Makes sure the projector is off. Pushes the desk’s chair back into place. 

He gives the room one last look before he finally turns to you. 

“My office.” 

He doesn’t wait for you to agree. 

He walks ahead of you with a very slight forward-leaning tilt. His shoulders rounded as if he’s perpetually bracing against a headwind only he can feel. 

Seeing the back of his head feels strange. The salt and pepper hair thins at the crown to reveal the skin underneath. It sort of looks like a crater where the sun hits too hard. Oddly enough, you think that the hollowed out space makes him seem more human. 

His office looks more like the frantic cell of a college professor than a federal agent’s workspace. It smells like wood and old coffee and eucalyptus and that very specific smell aging paper has. 

File cabinets and drawers that serve as pedestals for ridged mountains of books and manila folders. 

A corkboard hangs on a wall, disappearing beneath layers of messily pinned pages. Memos and maps and handwritten notes that flutter slightly when he closes the door. 

Directly beneath it sits a black cabinet that is strikingly, almost unnervingly neat. It clashes with the rest of the room. Mismatched frames carefully placed. Portraits of families and people you don’t recognize. A lamp casts a warm light, as if keeping a vigil over the faces. 

He reaches for one of the two brownish-red leather chairs in front of his desk. And with a low, muffled scrape against the floor, he pulls it to face a lone red chair tucked away near a cardboard file box. 

You're stuffing all you can into your mind, like an overfilled bell jar, the glass vibrating and ready to shatter.

Your eyes stop on a chess board. Wooden squares mellowed out into a warmer hue. Countless afternoon suns bleaching the grain. A few pieces already in play. You wonder who he’s playing with. 

You look up at Agent Gideon. A silent, lingering expectation in your gaze. He looks at the board and merely gestures for you to sit. It stings. 

You simply obey. Turning your back to the board and the man alike. Because what else can you do ? 

You settle into the chair he’s pulled out for you. You’re facing the corner of the room. You feel like a child somehow. 

In front of you sits the red leather chair. Beside it, a small cabinet holds a telephone, a Rubik’s cube and a shallow bowl filled with tiny colorful dice. 

The scrape of drawers quietly fills the room behind you.

You can picture him without looking. Slightly hunched over his desk. Glasses pushed up into his hair or balanced low on his nose. One hand rifling through folders while the other steadies the mess from collapsing entirely.

The office settles into a strange kind of silence.

Your fingers drift toward the bowl. The dice are colder than you expected. They make a light, hollow clicking sound. Like teeth of porcelain touching together.

You pick one up between your fingers. Roll it into your palm.

One.

One again.

Then two.

Then three.

The drawers stop moving.

For a moment, all you can hear is the ceiling fan and the faint hum of fluorescent lights. 

The next throw catches briefly against your thumb before settling again. Five.

Then footsteps, measured and unhurried.

You straighten slightly as Agent Gideon moves into view. He lowers himself into the red leather chair across from you with a tired exhale. The leather creases softly beneath his weight.

Up close, you can see the fine creases gathered at the sleeves of his t-shirt. Where the fabric twists from being pushed up and tugged back down over time. The cotton clings to the curve of his biceps.

His forearms rest heavily against the arms of the chair. Thighs straining against the fabric of his pants.

He doesn’t say anything at first. He just watches your hand, his gaze following the tiny movement of your fingers against the die.

Then, he slowly holds his own hand out in the narrow gap between your knees. 

Your fingers briefly rest against his palm when you give him back the die. His skin feels warm. It looks impossibly small in his palm—a tiny, orange dot. 

He drops the die back into the bowl. It clicks. 

He reaches for the manila folder he brought from the desk. The edges are softened with wear. Corners bent white from too many hands opening it the same way. 

He opens it. 

The first photograph is of a white farmhouse. Modest. Wooden porch. A line of fencing cutting a tidy path through grass. Broom sedge field in soft green waves. 

It looks like the sort of place someone teaches themselves to miss. It feels out of place in the folder. 

“The Clutter family,” Agent Gideon says quietly. 

Another photograph. A dining table covered with floral vinyl. A half-empty glass of milk still sitting near the edge. One chair knocked slightly askew. 

His voice sounds different. Lower. Less instructional.

“Holcomb Rock, Virginia. Eight years ago.”

He turns one of the photographs toward you.

A man lies in a field, hands bound in front of him. His body is rigid, stiffly angled toward the distant shape of the house behind him.

“The father was found outside,” Agent Gideon continues. “Shot once. Facing the home.”

The grass stands tall and parched around the body, framing it in a grim, vertical outline. 

He flips to another page.

“The wife. Son. Daughter.” A slight pause between each word. “Found inside the house. Bound and shot.”

The lace curtains hang heavy and still in the crime scene photographs. Family portraits remain mounted neatly on the walls. Their smiles feel coldly intact. 

“No signs of forced entry,” he says. “No fingerprints worth anything. Phone lines cut before the murders.” His thumb presses briefly against the edge of the file. “No neighbors saw anyone. No one heard the shots.”

He falls silent for a moment.

“I want you to work on this.”

He gives you a small nod.

Your thumb catches at the skin of your finger. You tug at the flesh, but it’s stubborn. 

You glance toward the clock on his wall. You don’t really see the time. Only its accumulation.

Twenty-two minutes.

And what is so rare as a day in June ?

The air outside the Academy feels softer by late afternoon. The Virginia sun still clings to the concrete paths and brick walls. But shadows stretch longer across the lawns. 

You’re halfway down the building’s front steps when you hear the door open behind you. 

Someone laughs too loudly near the vending machines. A car alarm chirps in a jarring tune. The sound doesn’t carry far before it gets absorbed by the heat.

Agent Gideon comes out a second later.

He pauses at the top of the steps.

The sun catches in his hair first. Tenderly caressing the strands. Glimmers of silver.

You like how his eyes look in the sun.

You find yourself holding the shape of his gaze. 

It isn’t directed anywhere specific. Still, it feels like it could be.

Like if you could find a way to stand in the right place, in the right way, it might settle on you in a way that feels… warm. Almost familiar.

He looks down toward you, squinting faintly. 

The wind rustles the fabric of his shirt in uneven folds. A small breath leaves him as if he’s replacing the air in his lungs with the softness of summer.

He closes his eyes for a fraction of a second. Just enough to blink away the version of him you were just beginning to imagine. 

Then he steps down.

You stop at the bottom of the steps without realizing you’ve done it.

He notices. Of course he does.

You expect him to ask about the Clutter case. 

The farm house is still warm in your mind. An invasive, sickly heat. 

It dries your mouth, narrows your focus to what can survive being looked at. It feels slightly harsh in your throat. Like the air itself wasn’t meant to be held for long.

It lingers in a way you don’t know how to explain without sounding wrong. 

You don’t want to disappoint him.

Instead of the question you’re bracing for, he says :

“Come walk with me for a bit.”

Gravel crunches under your feet. His keys clink in his pocket every few steps. Your hand brushes his once. 

He doesn’t say anything. 

You don’t mind the silence. You watch the way the shadows of the leaves lace across the shoulders of his shirt. The unhurried movement of his thighs beneath his pants. The fabric strains across his quad with every step, pulling tight before slackening as his foot meets the gravel.

His arms swing in a loose, casual arc at his sides. It keeps brushing the air just millimeters from your own arm. You can’t find a way to adjust your pace for his arm to brush you again. 

You give up on trying to match his stride. Let your eyes trace the slope of his nose, the curve of his neck, the crest of his chest.

The trees rustle with the wind. Leaves fluttering over and around you, thinning the sunlight into soft and gentle rays. 

The light reaches him altered. Filtered through layers of green until the resoluteness of it fades against his skin. 

He looks easier. Less burdened by the act of being observed. 

The corners of his mouth lift slowly into a small, lingering smile, softening the lines around his mouth, then reaching his eyes.

He pauses.

“Listen.”

You stop beside him. 

You only hear the obvious things. 

Perhaps obvious isn’t the right word. 

Shallow water splashes over rocks and fallen logs. Twigs and branches crunch under a deer’s leisurely steps. Insects singing in the high canopy. 

A thousand small living sounds harmonized together without urgency. Nothing stands out because nothing is meant to. 

In the nice ear of Nature which song is the best ?

Somewhere in it, there is apparently a single sound he wants you to hear.

You aren’t sure which one. You could ask. 

His smile is still there. It’s like his face completely surrenders to warmth. It’s beautiful.

The wind shifts again through the trees. His eyes stay on whatever he’s listening to. Does he know ? 

His hand settles right between your shoulder blades, warm through the fabric of your shirt, a broad pressure that gently coaxes you a half-step forward.

He doesn't push you. He gently aligns your frame with his own.

He raises his other hand, a thick finger extending toward the lower fork of a hickory tree.

“There,” he murmurs. “Look past the split in the bark. A wood thrush.”

You squint. A small, mottled brown bird detaches itself from the shadow of the leaves. 

“Three distinct notes, then a thrill,” he tells you quietly. 

A soft, fluted call. One note folding delicately into the next.

“I don’t know much about birds,” you admit. 

His hand shifts slightly on your back. He doesn’t take it off, he just… nestles it. 

“That’s alright,” he says.

The answer comes easily. No pause to weigh your ignorance against you. 

You glance at him. His attention remains fixed on the branches.

You see the way the bird’s tiny body fluffs up completely with the effort. Its beak opens surprisingly wide. The white feathers of its throat vibrate along with the sound. 

You let the notes wash over you instead of trying to separate them.

The wood thrush sings once more.

Then it stops.

“They can sing two notes at once,” he says after a moment. 

His hand slowly drifts off of your back. The absence of it feels immediate. Cool air settling against the space his warmth occupied, as though he had briefly lent something of himself to you and taken it back.

“Two completely separate sounds.” A faint pause. “Most people only hear one.”

You listen for it when the thrush sings again.

At first, you can’t tell where one note ends and the other begins. Then slowly, almost strangely, the sound seems to come apart in your ears. One clear tone carrying beneath another.

You frown faintly.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” you say.

That finally pulls his gaze toward you.

“What isn’t ?”

You hesitate, then look back at the trees.

“That people only hear one note,” you explain. “I think it’s meant to be heard as one.” 

His eyebrows draw together slightly. His jaw goes just a fraction slack, leaving his mouth barely open. 

His breathing shifts. Measured in a way that feels almost interrupted. He holds it for a beat longer than necessary, then lets it out quietly, like someone trying not to let the sound of it become part of the air.

There’s something in his expression that you can’t name. You think it’s a kind of careful curiosity. But somehow he looks… sad. 

Almost immediately, you want him to look away. To blink. To reset it into something ordinary again. Something you don’t have to hold. 

The air carries the dry, sweet smell of crushed leaves warmed by sun and decay. 

He doesn’t. 

He doesn’t look away. 

His eyes stay on yours in a way that feels chosen. A glassy, unblinking hold.

“You take it in whole,” he says. 

His hand lifts.

You think, for a brief second, that he’s going to touch your face. 

Instead, his fingers pause in the air, then shift.

He brushes something from your shoulder. A small bug you hadn’t noticed. The kind of correction that almost feels like care. 

“We don’t hear it the same way,” he continues.

His jaw tightens for a moment, then releases, as if something had almost been said differently and wasn’t.

“You don’t need to separate it to understand it,” he adds.

Then, after a longer pause :

“I do.”

Faint blue ink underlines the sentence : “the disorganized offender leaves a chaotic crime scene, reflecting a sudden, impulsive escalation.”

Above the text, the bold header on the page reads Principles of Behavioral Criminal Profiling. The textbook lays wide open on the library’s table. 

The wood is scratched with decades of absentminded damage. Initials carved into corners. A cigarette burn someone tried unsuccessfully to sand down.

The Clutter murder case file hides the rest of the wood.

Crime scene photographs spill across the table in uneven layers. The white farmhouse. The dining room. The father —Herb Clutter—in the field, body stiff in the tall grass, facing the distant shape of the house.

Two paper cups of stale vending machine coffee sit perilously close to the edge of the manila folder. Dust lifts through the beams of light. Outside the tall windows, Quantico dissolves into black glass.

Agent Gideon leans back in his chair. His glasses sit low on the bridge of his nose. He watches the photographs with the stillness of someone waiting for an answer he already knows.

“You’re avoiding something,” he decides. 

His hand loosely cups the paper coffee cup beside him, thumb rubbing slowly against the seam of the lid.

You keep your eyes fixed on the grain of the photos.

They don’t change. They never change. 

Your pen shifts in your hand.

Avoiding what, exactly ?

The fact that Nancy, the daughter, was found upstairs shot at close range yet tucked in neatly under the covers. 

The fact that the mother, Bonnie, is left the same way. 

Your gaze moves on to the house’s basement diagram. 

The fact that Kenyon, the son, is bound to a couch in the cellar before he’s killed, a pillow placed under his head.

The fact that Herb Clutter is not inside the house at all.

The fact that he’s been moved outside, into the field, shot facing his own home, with a flattened cardboard box placed under his knees. 

Or is it just that you’re not saying what he wants you to say.

You look up at him again, but there’s nothing different in his posture than there was a moment ago.

Still leaning back. Still watching without moving.

“I don’t know,” you say.

It comes out flatter than you want it to.

Agent Gideon exhales through his nose. He leans forward.

The dark wood of the table creaks faintly as he presses his forearms against the edge. The lamp catches the thick, coarse hairs on his arms.

He reaches into the cluster of pages. His thumb clips the corner of a single photograph. The paper drags softly against the others.

He places it in front of your notebook.

“Look at the boy,” he tells you. 

You do.

The picture looks like film left too long in the bath — the scene bleeding together until dark and light erase each other.

Agent Gideon’s voice comes again, softer this time.

“Tell me what you see.”

He doesn’t lean in this time.

He just waits.

And then, after a second, his hand moves lightly toward yours. 

“I see someone trying to make it less violent,” you answer. “Or at least, trying to make it look like it was.”

Agent Gideon’s index finger twitches against the table. A small, absent, lift of his knuckle. 

“Why would someone do that ?” he asks. 

Your nail scratches the wood between your hand and his. It has shallow furrows in it. 

“To make it easier,” you continue, “To stay removed from it.”

“That’s cowardice,” he says.

The word lands with the blunt certainty of something erosion has already tested for weakness. Weathered into existence inside him. 

His brows furrow. His forearms stay braced against the table, heavy and unmoving.

Once you call it cowardice, all the contradictory details start getting absorbed into that interpretation.

You hesitate.

Not because you think he’s wrong. That would be easier somehow.

It’s that the truth of this thing behaves like light. It doesn’t settle into a shape until you look at it. 

“I can see that,” you admit. “The pillow, the blankets… Those feel avoidant. But moving Herb outside doesn’t.”

His hand suddenly leaves the table. He leans back and crosses his arms.

“Then what is it ?” 

“I just—” you start, then stop, as if the sentence isn’t solid enough to stand on. “I feel like a coward wouldn’t take the risk of going outside like that.”

His arms remain folded, but something in the set of them has tightened—less open than before. His hand shifts against his upper arm, fingers pressing in without seeming to notice.

“You’re looking at the field as an exhibition of power,” he says. “You think taking Herb Clutter outside means the unsub wanted a stage.”

His words hit you like a rapid, blinding bombardment of particles.

“It isn’t. It’s panic,” he says.

Each syllable is a tiny, individual grain of his certainty. Too charged to be seen directly, only inferred by what it burns into being.

“A dominant unsub kills him in the house because he owns it,” he continues. “He doesn’t need distance.”

His eyes flick once toward the file, then back.

“This isn’t that.”

Your focus scrambles down to the safety of the table, pinning itself to the faint blue line underlined in the textbook.

“Behavioral indicators may include disorganized spatial arrangement of the crime scene and inconsistent victim positioning”, your mind reads ahead, tracing the text silently while his voice continues to rain down on you. “Planning capacity is typically limited, with minimal effort directed toward concealment or post-offense reconstruction.”

“This unsub kneels a man in the dirt to execute him,” he says sharply. “And even then, he can’t let it be plain. He has to soften it.”

You feel stupid. The printed letters turn into a black blur.

“If you’re seeing this as strength,” he finishes, “then you’re not seeing it as it is.”

You take a small breath and finally look up. His mouth is a thin, bitter line. His chin tucked slightly into the collar of his shirt. 

He doesn’t say anything else. You consider twisting your own shape to fit the contours of his silence. 

“You’re not wrong to hesitate,” he says after a while. 

He picks up his paper coffee cup. Runs his other hand back and forth over his thigh. “But I don’t want you to stay there.”

His eyes lower into a heavy-lidded softness. The fine lines at the corners of them settle, smoothing out as though something behind them has exhaled first.

“Think it through.”

He pushes himself up from the chair.  He stands over you. His large, warm hand comes down on your shoulder.

He lets it rest there for a second. You want to see it as you still being inside the room with him. That he hasn't abandoned you to the dark.

Then he turns away from the table.

The chair legs scrape softly against the floor.

Your eyes drop back to the open page of Principles of Behavioral Criminal Profiling.

You flip a page backward. Then three pages forward.

“Disorganized crime scenes reflect a subset of offender behavior characterized by low levels of planning, situational escalation, and impaired behavioral control. However, not all offenders exhibit such spontaneous or chaotic patterns.”

It’s almost funny. No matter the author, no matter the year or the institution stamped on the spine, they all end up sounding the same. You wonder if there’s a mandatory seminar everyone has to attend before they’re allowed to publish. 

You turn your pen between your fingers.

You flip the page and try it for yourself. ‘To better understand offender behavior, it is useful — maybe useful doesn’t sound textbook-y enough—… it is necessary —it should be something that uses up more ink — … it is heuristically relevant —whatever — to contrast disorganized patterns with those reflecting higher degrees of planning and behavioral organization.’

You flip back the page. 

“In some cases, crime scenes exhibit deliberate staging, evidence removal, and strategic victim selection, suggesting a more controlled and goal-directed behavioral pattern.” 

You pause.

The transition between those two sentences feels a little rude, actually. Like the author forgot they were supposed to sound like they cared.

“Hi.”

You look up. 

“I was looking for Gideon. His car is still in the lot so I thought—”

“You just missed him.”

The words leave your throat a little too fast. Or just… not spaced correctly. Like your mouth chose the end before your mind finished arranging the middle.

Doc-tor-Reid. Or Doct-or-Reid ? Doctor-Reid ?

You can’t find the meter for it.

His hair is neatly gelled back. Careful in a way that suggests effort. He’s wearing a crisp button-down shirt but his tie is distinctly crooked, pulled slightly to the right. 

One hand holds the leather strap of his bag. His fingers keep adjusting it absentmindedly. 

He looks kind.

He doesn’t speak right away. His eyes move over the table instead.

Left. Right. Diagonal. Across the uneven layers of crime scene photographs, the open textbook, your notebook half-covered in notes.

Absorbing the white farmhouse, the dining room, the basement diagram, all at once. So quickly it almost makes you feel dizzy just trying to follow him.

He adjusts the strap of his bag again, thumb dragging once along the worn leather.

“You’re working the Clutter case ?”

The question is soft. Almost careful.

You nod.

He’s still looking at your notes when he speaks.

“You’re leaning towards disorganized,” he says.

“I think so,” you say. 

Then, after a moment, “But it doesn’t fully explain the placement of the father.”

He finally looks up at you.

“Why not ?”

You’re not sure where the useful version of the answer begins. 

He looks at you through his glasses, his head tilted in patient, uncalibrated curiosity. Like he has all the time in the world to wait for you to find the right words.

“Moving him outside doesn’t feel consistent with disorganized behavior,” you answer finally.

His bag comes off his shoulder and lands softly on the table with a muted thud. He pulls out the chair next to yours and sits down. The metal legs make a brief, dull scrape against the floor.

“Consistency across multiple scenes is what gives you a working profile,” he says. “One detail that doesn’t fit doesn’t necessarily break the model. Not unless you see it repeat in a way that changes what the model is doing.”

“That assumes the model is already correct,” you argue. 

He exhales lightly through his nose. The corner of his mouth softens almost imperceptibly. 

“Models are predictive frameworks,” he explains. “They don’t have to account for every anomaly to be useful.”

His hand hovers near your pen. Not quite taking it.

“The unsub didn't become organized when he crossed the threshold into the yard,” he continues. “I’d say it’s more likely he’s transitioning between zones of behavioral constraint. Interior space limits certain actions. Exterior space removes those constraints.”

He taps his finger rhythmically against the edge of the table. It makes your pen rattle. Three quick taps. Then his hand flies up to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear. 

“Which changes the expression of the behavior, not necessarily the behavior itself.”

You frown.

“Putting someone in a field and executing them facing their own house isn’t just running out of space,” you say.

His head tilts slightly.

“Gideon would say the same thing you’re saying,” he concedes. “That it looks assertive on the surface.”

For a second, you consider not mentioning it. The conversation would probably be easier if you didn't. It’s ridiculous. It’s just a word. 

It shouldn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything.

“He called it cowardice.”

His tongue presses briefly against the inside of his cheek, then disappears again. He swallows then he reaches for your pen. He turns it once between his fingers, almost absentmindedly, then rests it against his palm.

Tap.

He wets his lips, once, as if preparing to speak, then doesn’t.

His thumb adjusts the pen’s position. Like he’s correcting a misalignment only he can see.

Tap.

He pauses for a moment. 

Tap. 

It’s a small, boringly ordinary ballpoint with a clear plastic barrel. 

Tap. Tap.

A tiny rolling ball transfers blue ink to paper. Functionally utilitarian. 

This pen is almost out of ink but it’s still writing just fine. Sometimes new ones refuse to work even if the reservoir is full. 

Tap.

Still nothing.

“What does he mean ?” you ask finally. 

He takes a small breath as if to steady himself into speaking. 

“It’s not a word Gideon would use light—”

His eyes drop to the table between you, like he’s re-reading something that isn’t written there yet.

“He doesn’t use it—,” he starts again. 

The pen turns in his palm. 

“I mean he does— actually that’s not…” 

He clears his throat. 

“He doesn’t use it the way you’re thinking.” 

For a second, he studies the pen in his hand. As though the answer might be hidden somewhere inside the transparent barrel.

“It’s not a moral judgment,” he continues carefully. “It’s more like… a shorthand for a pattern of behavior.”

It’s strange how he picks his words so cautiously. You'd assumed Doctor Reid belonged to the category of people who valued precision above almost everything else. 

“The pillow. The mattress. Those aren’t incidental. They’re consistent across scenes where the unsub has full control.”

You sort of pictured him using some textbook word that would need a three minute explanation because it’s the most accurate one. But it’s like he’s sorting through thousands and thousands of specimens and still somehow ends up choosing the simplest ones.

He starts tapping the pen again. A little less rhythmically.  

“So what Gideon’s asking,” he says, pausing briefly, “is why someone capable of escalation keeps reverting to containment behavior.”

You open your mouth slightly, but don’t interrupt.

Reid continues.

“And his answer is… that cowardice isn’t about avoiding violence,” he says, then hesitates like he’s checking the phrasing in his head.

A few quick taps. Then nothing. Then another.

The spacing keeps changing before your mind can settle into it.

Tap.          Tap. 

Tap.     Tap. Tap.

       Tap.

Tap.Tap.Tap.Tap.

“It’s more about not being able to sustain it. Without something to… offset it afterward.”

He taps your pen again, one last time, like he’s grounding the thought.

“The field shot doesn’t really override that pattern, because it’s isolated. It doesn’t repeat. It’s not reinforced across the rest of the behavior set.”

“Disregarding an outlier makes sense if you can justify it as noise,” you say. “But this isn’t a minor inconsistency in the pattern. It’s like—”

You pause. 

“Like…” you try again. “It’s not just deviating from the pattern. It’s…”

The facts click into place like a metronome.  

“Like a break in the most extreme direction.”

You stare at the photographs. 

They have to click. They have to. 

No, they do. That’s how it works. That’s how it works. Not the other way. The other way— that doesn’t make sense. It can’t be that. 

“It feels risky to just discard it,” you admit quietly. 

He sighs softly.

He looks at you. His brow furrows, just slightly. His lips press together.

“Gideon’s right about this one,” he confesses, “But I understand why you’re worried about the risk. He… hasn’t always been right when he’s named it that way.”

Oh. 

He doesn’t say Boston. He doesn’t have to. 

You keep your eyes on the table. 

One of his hands moves to the side of his neck, his fingers scratching lightly against the skin. 

“Okay,” he begins. “Let’s start there.” 

He glances briefly at your notes as if checking the idea against them.

“I think you might be treating it like a linear progression.”  

He sets the ballpoint pen down on the edge of the textbook. 

“Which actually makes sense. If you assume a linear system, then increased environmental risk—like moving into an open field—should correspond to a proportional shift in offender organization.”

He shifts his weight, the old wood of the chair giving a faint creak beneath him. “I just think there’s another way to look at it.”

“Behavioral systems under acute stress don’t really stay linear. It’s more like water. You add heat, it rises predictably… and then at one hundred degrees it changes state. Not because something new happens, but because it can’t sustain the same structure anymore.”

He pauses, his eyes finally flickering up to catch yours through the frames of his glasses. 

“The unsub’s main driver is avoidance. Cognitive denial. He’s maintaining distance between himself and the violence. But that kind of split is… really inefficient. Psychologically,” he continues.

He reaches out and uses the tip of his finger to slide the field’s photographs closer to the center of the table. “With each victim, the pressure builds until it can’t stay contained. Taking Herb outside isn’t planned escalation, it’s spillover. The system expands the environment just to maintain the same internal distance.”

He lets out a small laugh.

“It’s basically thermodynamics with… really bad boundary conditions.”

A tiny, involuntary laugh escapes you before you can catch it. He gives you a small smile. 

“The cardboard box under Herb’s knees,” he says more softly, pointing at the photo, “that’s the clearest sign. Even after the rupture, he’s still trying—badly—to insulate himself. The structure changes, but the math of it doesn’t.”

His eyes linger on the image.

“It’s this… insulation. The separation between the self and the act.” He hesitates, then adds, “That’s what Gideon was getting at when he called it cowardice.”

“And you agree with that label.”

Reid doesn’t answer immediately.

That delay is the point, you think. Awareness that agreeing or disagreeing would simplify something he’s trying to keep intact.

He pauses, then nods once.

“Yes,” he says. “I agree with Gideon’s reading of it.”

The reasoning is consistent, reproductible, traceable.

It sounds familiar in a way that is almost comforting. 

You nod. 

Things shift into casual conversation for a moment. Nothing in particular. You use a postcard from your bag to keep your place in the textbook.

“That’s Zabriskie Point,” Reid says quickly, a hint of sudden enthusiasm slipping through his tone. “It’s actually the remains of a prehistoric lake—Lake Furnace Creek. It’s been dry for five million years.”

Your eyes follow the postcard as he speaks. The pale ridges fan out in layered orange waves, almost like frozen movement, the colors muted into sand and ash tones.

“What you’re looking at in the postcard isn’t just dirt; they’re tilted strata of silt and volcanic ash.”

Your finger traces one of the sharper lines cutting through the formation.

“The most interesting thing is the porosity,” he continues.

Reid has a small smile on his face. He loosely gestures toward the image as he talks.

“Furnace Creek is mostly clay. It’s basically impermeable to water,” he says. “Because of that, nothing really gets absorbed into the ground. It all stays on the surface.”

You notice the faint lines in the skin of your finger. A small stain near your knuckle. 

You look up from the postcard.

“So when it rains, the water moves really quickly. That’s what creates those deep gullies. They call it efficient drainage.”

It’s nice, you think, that he knows so much.

“I think it’s beautiful,” you say. 

He gives you a smile. 

“Yeah.” 

One must imagine the new agent trainee happy.

Which is difficult, in practice, when you are once again eating a peach. And the flesh clings to the stone. Again.

You like peaches. Which is why you keep thinking “it might be different this time”.

And every time it is not.

It’s not quite consistent enough to justify abandoning peaches entirely, but frequent enough to make each new attempt feel personally naive.

Still, you keep getting them. Sisyphus had it simple.

“You’re getting juice everywhere.”

“Am I ?” you ask, glancing down.

Someone slides a napkin closer across the table while continuing their sentence about yesterday’s training run. You take it and wipe your forearm. 

“—and I swear Agent O’Hara was one second away from a total meltdown.”

“No, he was already there,” someone else argues immediately. “You just missed the first five minutes.”

“He literally cut me off mid-sentence just to correct a minor date.”

“It was insane.”

“Every single comment got completely shredded.”

“He was basically looking for a fight.”

You exhale a small laugh through your nose before you can stop it.

“Okay, but word is, his wife has been getting ‘consultations’ from that weird analyst in forensics and he’s just letting it happen,” someone adds

“So he takes it out on us because he can't face it at home ?,” you ask, still wiping peach juice off your wrist. 

“No way. That guy looks like a melted candle, I don't get what she's doing.”

A few people laugh, the conversation overlapping without pause as it shifts again. Someone talking about cafeteria coffee, someone else complaining about sleep schedules, someone interrupting to dispute both points at once.

You angle the peach again, trying to work around the pit, and take another wonky slice. What a fucking pain. 

Across the room, a chair scrapes back harder than necessary.

“Wait—” one of the trainees says suddenly, mid-bite, eyes shifting past your shoulder. “Is that Gideon ?”

A few heads turn at once. 

At first, your eyes go to the man sitting closest to Agent Gideon. Buttoned-down to the point of severity. Tie knotted so tightly you’re surprised his face isn’t turning blue. 

You remember Agent Hotchner from your first day of profiling class. Standing at the front of the room, speaking once, briefly, and leaving before anyone quite figured out whether he was meant to be teaching or supervising. 

There was a peculiar tiredness in his face — sort of like he’s been awake through several versions of the same day and is still trying to prove he belongs in the current one.

Across from him sits someone you don’t recognize.

Hair close-cropped and practical. Skin a warm, even brown that stands out under the cafeteria lights. His suit kind of doesn’t really sit naturally on him. Like it was chosen by someone else, or worn into obligation. 

The man with the shorter hair leans forward and ruffles Doctor Reid’s hair with a teasing laugh. 

Reid’s hand comes up to smooth his hair back into place. It’s clearly not the first time.

“Stop—” he says, sharper than intended. The word carries just enough volume to cut through the cafeteria noise for a second, earning a couple of glances from nearby tables.

Then he seems to register how loud it was. The man with the short hair leans back in his chair, clearly satisfied, mouth pulling into an easy grin. 

Agent Gideon doesn’t react immediately. 

He’s watching the exchange the way you might watch something familiar repeat itself with minor variation. His fork is halfway to his plate, then pauses.

Reid shoots him a quick look, half accusation, half appeal. Agent Gideon’s mouth quirks into a smile easily, and then says something. 

You can’t quite hear it but it makes the rest of his table laugh. 

“So that’s what he’s like with the BAU,” someone mutters, still half-facing the table across the room. “I thought he was, like… always intense.”

“Apparently that’s only for the classroom.”

A few quiet laughs ripple through the group.

Someone nudges their tray forward. “Do you think he’s ever going back to the field, though ?”

That pulls a brief pause. A couple of heads tilt slightly, attention shifting from casual observation into something more speculative.

“I heard he was technically cleared,” another trainee says. 

Agent Gideon, sets his fork down with deliberate care. The metal meets the plate without a sound you can quite isolate from the room.

He reaches for his napkin next. 

It’s a plain white square, already lightly creased from use. His hand closes around it. Broad fingers, slightly rough at the knuckles. 

He brings it to his mouth and wipes. His wrist turns slightly as he does it. 

“Yeah but now that Hotchner’s Unit Chief…,” someone adds, lowering their voice slightly as if the title itself carries weight.

That gets a few glances around the table—quick checks, like everyone is making sure they’re not saying too much too loudly.

“Do you think that changes anything for him ?” someone asks.

“For Gideon ?” another trainee says, skeptical. “He doesn’t seem like the type to care about who’s sitting in what chair.”

“Maybe not care,” someone else counters. “But still. That used to be his position, right ? Before Boston.”

Agent Gideon leans back just slightly in his chair, posture loose in a way that doesn’t quite match the authority people—you— keep assigning to him from a distance.

He takes another bite of his food. A proper bite. Not the restrained, distracted type of bite you might expect from someone being observed. 

A faint sheen of oil catches at the corner of his mouth when he lowers his fork again.

Reid continues speaking quickly, hands moving in small precise bursts. 

Your eyes meet.

For a second he hesitates, like he isn’t entirely sure he’s picked the right person, and then he lifts a hand in a small, slightly awkward wave.

You pause, then lift your own hand in return.

A matching wave, smaller and just as uncertain.

Reid’s mouth pulls into a brief, relieved-looking smile before he turns back toward his table. 

Agent Gideon doesn’t look your way. Not even briefly. 

It shouldn’t matter. He’s mid-conversation anyway. Fork already moving again. Attention split cleanly across the people in front of him. You were never part of the same line of sight. 

Still.

You look away first.

“Okay, but seriously,” one of the trainees says, leaning forward slightly, “what actually happened in Boston ?”

“I’ve only heard bits and pieces,” someone adds. “No one ever says it straight.”

You set the peach pit down on your tray. 

“Did Gideon ever tell you anything about it ?”

That gets a few looks in your direction. It feels like gravity shifting its pull towards you. Silent and inevitable in a way that feels suffocating. 

“You’re basically his favorite, right ?”

You don’t really know how to answer. 

Words disintegrate at the tip of your tongue. Useless and unnecessary and theoretically irrelevant. The question sits there and expands, filling more space than it should. 

All of a sudden you feel small. In the way a body would feel being pulled toward something that doesn’t negotiate with distance. 

A single particle in a black hole. 

You swallow.

“He hasn’t told me anything,” you say finally.

Silence feels like it might be misread. “I don’t know anything about Boston either,” you add. 

“So nobody actually knows what happened.”

“Guess not,” another voice says.

The conversation starts to rebuild itself around that absence, filling the gap with speculation again.

You look down at the tray again. The peach pit sits where you placed it. Pale and slick in places, though still streaked with stubborn bits of flesh clinging to its grooves.

A useless center not entirely returned to itself. 

The Virginia sun beats down upon the valley until the sap goes sour in the earth. Day after day the light drills into the broom sedge, bleaching the deep summer green down to a dry, hollow orange that presses tight against the foundations of the Clutter farmhouse. 

Nobody lives there now but the sun keeps at its work anyway, indifferent to what has been left behind. 

A man standing out in the middle of it could look for miles and see nothing but the crowded, upright lines of the grass, blocking the wind and holding the heat in a motionless pocket until the wide country feels as small and tight as a cage.

You find no solace in the growth, no shade in the specks of green that remain. The air tastes like dust. The blinding glare of the sun strikes the faded, peeling white of the house. 

Out of that glare, a silhouette breaks. Agent Gideon walks slow, his hands deep in his pockets, untroubled by the heat. 

His shoes make a rhythmic, grinding crunch as they dig into the dry dirt. He keeps that same idle pace until he pauses directly in front of you.

“I wanted you to see it for yourself,” he says. 

He stays silent for a moment, letting the words hang in the air. Then he turns toward the farmhouse.

“Start simple,” he says.

You look at the faded house and you look at the field, and the enormous stillness of it all settles hard upon your chest.

There is too much of it. A low wind stirs, and the broom sedge moves all at once, a myriad of orange stalks dry-hissing against one another like a wall of static.

The movement stirs a cold sickness in you. The land is too wide, too silent, and the thing that happened inside the house is too small for it.

A cheap radio. Some cash. All that ruin, just for a handful of small, miserably ordinary things. 

You shift your weight slightly in the dry grass.

“If it was a burglary, it’s inefficient. If it was opportunistic, it’s inconsistent with the level of force used inside the house,” you say. 

You can understand a hunger that makes a man steal. And you can understand a rage that makes a man strike out. But in the vast field of broom sedge, it feels like a machine with gears that do not mesh, turning endlessly toward something that only vaguely resembles humanity.

Your mind reaches out for a reason. For some small grain of sense to bridge the gap. But there is nothing there.

Nothing. 

Only a cold, hollow space where a reason ought to be.

You feel Agent Gideon move beside you. The air shifts, and then he turns his head to look at you. As he pivots, your arms brush briefly. 

Your mind catches on the absence of structure and, almost reflexively, reaches for something that has one.

Reid’s framework comes up before you can stop it. But his exact words keep slipping through your fingers. 

The violence in the house doesn’t have to match the theft. It can spike past it, overshoot, land somewhere the radio and the cash never explain. Right ? 

Something about state change ? Something breaking instead of bending.

And whatever's left after — the radio, the cash, all of it — either means nothing, or the only thing left of a motive that didn't survive contact with the scene.

The answer shapes itself in your mind, thin and brittle. A sickening shame rises up inside you because you know it is wrong. It makes you feel small and unclean, like a dog that has crawled through the mud.

But Agent Gideon is standing right there. His shoulder broad against the light, and a different kind of hunger takes hold of you — an ugly, driving need to make him look at you and be satisfied.

“So it wasn’t really about taking things,” you continue.

You can feel the weight of his face turning toward you, though you keep your own eyes fixed straight ahead on the house. 

“The ransacking comes after. After the violence inside the house I mean. Not before.”

You hear him draw a small breath through his nose. His hand comes up to rest on his waist, his thumb hooked into his trousers, and his fingers begin to tap a slow, rhythmic beat against the leather of his belt.

“It’s not theft as motive. It’s more like … theft as repair.”

You pause. The words have already committed you further than you intended.

You swallow once. “A burglary is survivable in a way a massacre isn’t. The unsub has to rewrite it— has to downgrade what he did, after the fact. So he can live with himself.”

The tapping stops for a second, then starts up again, lighter this time. He is listening to the mechanics of the thought, measuring the weight of it against the empty land.

Finally, you turn your head. Agent Gideon’s face is entirely calm. 

His brown eyes look soft, catching the warm, rusted orange of the broom sedge and the golden light of the late afternoon sun. There is no judgment in his features, only a placid, grounded patience.

His voice very mild, almost a murmur. 

“I see why you went there.”

There is a small pause. Long enough that you become aware of how still his hand is against his belt.

“But you’re explaining behavior that wants to be explained away,” he adds. “Those aren’t always the same thing.”

His tone is gentle. Almost careful. But your attention catches on the word explaining. 

Your throat tightens before you can stop it.

You feel that you are a tool that has gone dull in his hand. A rusted hinge that won't swing true. And it’s like the soft cadence of his words confirms the dishonesty of what you just did. Sealing you inside your own mistake like a dry well.

"He brought a shotgun," he says instead of correcting you. "Not a handgun. Not whatever was already in the house. He brought it with him."

You wait. 

"Smoothbore. No rifling. You can't match it to a barrel even if you find the gun in his closet next week."

The tall, brittle grass whips against the dark blue denim of his trousers, the fabric snapping faintly under the force of it. 

"He cut the phone lines before he ever knocked on the door," he continues. “Wiped down every surface he touched before he left the house.”

Then, more pensively : 

“And after all that he still took the time to arrange them. To tuck them in. To cover them.”

It’s like he's said two true things that shouldn't be able to stand in the same room.

"Those aren't the same person," you say slowly. "Sir, that's—" You stop yourself before that doesn't make sense finishes leaving your mouth.

"No," he agrees. "It isn't."

He doesn’t say anything else. 

Everything refracts. 

Even understanding. 

Even you, standing in the light.

You try to hold both pieces at once. You turn it over. You try to find the seam where the two halves meet. It just doesn’t make any fucking sense. 

And then the anger goes out of it, and something in you goes very tired, all at once.

"You're wrong," you say finally.

The words seem to drop into the dirt and stay there. 

“I think you’re wrong,” you repeat. “This is—” 

Your voice shakes a little, and you hate the sound of it.

“This is pure speculation. A man who somehow is… — is two impossible things at the same time.”

As you say it, you think of how it felt when he left the library. 

You imagine watching him get smaller and smaller against the green as he leaves again. The field goes on for miles under the flat sky, big and empty and detached, and if he turns his back, there is nowhere left to hide the unbearable loneliness of it.

“It just — It doesn’t make sense,” you finish. 

You wait for the blow to fall. You keep your eyes down, staring at the grass by your feet, just waiting for the sound of his footsteps walking away toward the road.

When you look up, his face is not hard at all. 

The deep lines around his eyes are crinkled and relaxed, and he is looking down at you with a smile.

He raises his hand, and sets his palm against your head. The heat of his skin goes right through your hair. He smoothes his hand down, gentle and firm. Like the gesture has its own rhythm independent of you.

The ring on his finger brushes cool against your skin each time his palm goes down and comes back up again.

"Good," he says gently. “It would’ve been easier to agree with me and move on. But you didn’t—”

He stops, his hand coming to rest on the crown of your head, just holding you there. 

“You did good.” 

Your mind spins. You don't know what to do with the warmth of it.

It makes a strange, mismatched picture in your head. You think of a man who reaches out to stroke a creature that just bared its teeth at him. It doesn't fit any rule you know. Some small, starved part of you doesn't care. 

His hand is still there, heavy and patient.

There and not there. Doing its work in a register you have no instrument for, except the dull, after-the-fact knowledge that something has changed and you weren't able to watch it happen.

You don't move. You don't want to be the one who decides when it ends.