Dark Minds (a Criminal Minds story)

"I thought there were vampires on this show," Reed complained. He was sitting in Rossi's recliner, looking comfortable for a change.

"Yeah, where are the vampires?" Kevin asked. "We were promised vampires."

Garcia, sitting next to him on Rossi's loveseat, elbowed him, but couldn't resist saying, "Sir? I don't really like vampires, but you promised they weren't very scary vampires. But so far what we have is a nine year old boy who has been so emotionally traumatized by his father that he's tried to kill him. That's an awful lot like work. Vampires would at least be something different. Sir."

"Penelope, you're a guest, you don't have to call me sir," Rossi tried again. He told her that each time she came over, but it seemed to make her more tongue-tied, so maybe he should drop it. He handed her the bowl of popcorn he'd just made, and found himself a seat on the sofa next to Emily.

"Yes, s—yes, all right, yes, thank you."

Before Rossi could answer the question about the vampires, Reed asked, "What is wrong with these people? David's father treats him like something he found on the bottom of his shoe, and nobody says a word. And whenever he expresses fear about being sent away, they ignore him. It's no wonder he tried to kill his father."

Rossi hid his smile. You could take the profiler away from the crime scene, but you couldn't make him stop profiling. He hit the pause button and the picture on the enormous TV screen froze. "All right, first, I didn't get you here under false pretenses. There will be vampires, but when this show started, it was a gothic soap opera. They talked about ghosts, but there wasn't anything verifiably supernatural—" Rossi stifled a laugh; verifiably supernatural. You couldn't change a profiler's vocabulary, either. "For a while, it's just a sort of spooky soap opera. But I think it's always good to watch things from the beginning."

"Excuse me—um —" Garcia didn't know what to say if she couldn't call him sir. "You don't seem like a soap opera fan."

"I have many facets, Ms. Garcia," he said.

"One reason soap operas are so popular," Reed said, "is that the storyline moves along slowly enough that the viewer can miss multiple episodes without being lost when they pick up the storyline again. And people whose jobs require a lot of travel like them because they're the same no matter where you watch them, something familiar in unfamiliar surroundings." He grabbed the bowl of popcorn from Penelope, took a big handful, and passed it back to her.

"I started watching it when I was in college," Rossi explained. "It got really popular with kids—even us grown-up college kids—after the vampires and werewolves showed up. Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to get this DVD back in the mail tomorrow." He pushed the play button on the remote.

Rossi had known two things when he invited the team—an invitation that included Garcia's boyfriend, Kevin and JJ's husband, Will—over to watch episodes of Dark Shadows: JJ and Hotch would say no, and Reed would say yes. Everyone else was up in the air.

He had no doubt that, if this worked out, at some point both JJ and Hotch would come for an evening. When they were alone, Rossi had said something to Hotch, that he really wanted him to come, at least once. "Dave, that show was on the air five days a week for how many years? I think in the time it'll take you to show all the episodes, I'll manage to get there a few times. Let me know when the werewolves show up and I'll be there. I've always been partial to werewolves."

Hotch was right, of course—there were a lot of episodes. But they were short—even shorter without the commercials—and watching a full DVD took under three hours, not much more than a long movie.

Rossi also had little doubt that Reed would ever miss an evening. His upbringing had left him with a craving for both strong male companionship and a peer group he could trust. The team might kid him about his social awkwardness, but no more than they kidded each other about other quirks. Reed wasn't the scapegoat of the group; they could tease him, and he could tease them right back. Reed felt safe with them all.

Hotch's lecture about being part of a team had gotten Rossi thinking about their job, and what being a team meant. When he'd first done this job, he'd been alone, with no one to share things with when he was out on the road. His first wife had said the job killed their marriage. His second wife had been more observant. She'd said that if he had a normal job where he could come home every evening and talk about how his day was, he'd have gone looking for a reason to keep her at a distance.

It was true, he was a loner. What did he know from being part of a team? And what did a team know about what it had been like for him, doing this job alone?

So Rossi had started off with some resentment, not just because they had a freaking jet, but because they had each other, and even though he could work as part of a team, he was still a loner at heart. He couldn't make a relationship with one other person work, how could he juggle six other people?

The answer was, when you were part of a couple, it was just the two of you holding up your world together. You could let go for a little while, but not for long.

But when you were part of a team, you were part of a family. Hotch was clearly the stern father. The other agents were the idiosyncratic children he loved and looked after and counted on. And they all had their quirks, their broken-and-healed places that made them who they were.

Anyone could see Garcia's individuality. And it only took a few minutes of conversation with Reed to find his. But Morgan hid a past of fear and betrayal, and you didn't have to look very long into Emily's dark eyes to see her vulnerability, how she'd forced herself to fit in wherever her mother's work took her. They were drawn to this team not just because the work was important and the status gratifying; when you hung out with the broken people, you didn't have to play normal, to pretend you weren't broken.

In some ways JJ was the least "normal" of the bunch because she was so normal—and yet she preferred the company of people who were, shall we say, off the beaten path. They were her brothers and sisters and she was their designated driver, their true north.

And who was he in this family? Too old and scarred to be one of the kids, too detached to be a parent, Rossi saw himself as an uncle: connected by the blood they'd seen spilled, but not truly responsible for them, he'd only discipline if he saw one of them running out into the street, and they could come to him for advice on things they wouldn't tell Hotch. His third wife had said he didn't really want a family, but she'd been entirely wrong. This was the family he wanted.

They shared the horrors, and it changed each of them—in different ways, and in universal ones.

They also shared their lives with each other, but this job they did compromised their lives outside it: Hotch's marriage had been one casualty. JJ worried about her own. Too often they didn't want to talk about their lives, and that left small talk—or the job.

Hearing a couple of women in the grocery line discussing the latest goings—on on Days of Our Lives gave Rossi the seed of the idea; he didn't know why he thought of Dark Shadows, except that he remembered the show with great fondness, and in spite of its campiness and technical problems, there was still a certain cache to it. It had been easy to get involved, and more importantly, it would give the team something to talk about, if they wanted to. And while so far it had been almost impossible to shut them up to watch a whole disk without pausing a few times, there was no pressure to talk. Emily had been entirely silent throughout the first two disks, but she'd stayed to help Rossi clean up, and he had the feeling she had figured out what he was doing before anyone else—if only by a nanosecond or two.

And that was another thing about this team: Rossi knew they all knew what he was doing, and why, but not one of them had said a word. The closest anyone came was the way Hotch gave him the barest of smiles when he extended his invitation.

"Who is Victoria's father supposed to be?" Reed asked.

"We don't know," Emily said patiently. "She was left in a box—"

"No, no, I know that. But it's obvious Elizabeth is her mother, so who was her father? It wouldn't have been Elizabeth's husband, or why leave her at a foundling home?"

Morgan opened his mouth, probably to tell Reed to let it go, but instead he said, "And why didn't Roger know about this? It would have been while he was still living there, right? How did she hide her pregnancy?"

"Maybe Elizabeth left home first," Emily suggested. "Maybe she was living in Bangor and got pregnant by some local boy. She couldn't bring the baby home, so she had it and left it at the foundling home, then returned to Collinwood."

"That makes sense," Reed said.

"I could buy that," Morgan concurred.

"Is there any more popcorn?" Reed asked. Rossi took the empty bowl from him and went to make more. He heard Emily ask if anyone needed more to drink, then she joined him in the kitchen. With the air popper popping, it was impossible to talk, but that didn't matter. Emily poured melted ice from three glasses, then refilled them, first with ice, then one diet Coke and two Sprites. She carried them back to the living room and he heard her say, "Sprite, right? Now which one of these did I spit in?"

Rossi was going to be vacuuming up a lot of popcorn in the morning.