Fic: They Shoot Agents, Don`t They? (Criminal Minds, Reid / Morgan, Hotch / Chad, JJ)
Title: They Shoot Agents, Don`t They?
Fandom: Criminal Minds
Pair: Spencer Reid / Derek Morgan,
Aaron Hotchner / Chad Christensen
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine, etc.
Criminal Minds Main List
The idea is to die young as late as possible.
~Ashley Montagu
“Have I ever told you how much I like mornings like this?” Morgan sighed dreamily as he and Reid stepped out of the elevator. “I mean we’ve not been called here in the middle of something, we don’t have a case that just can’t wait, we actually had time to get coffee and doughnuts on the way…” He glanced at the guilty look on the genius’s face. “Well, coffee and what’s left of the doughnuts.”
“We were stuck in those red lights for a long time.” Reid wiped powdered sugar off the corner of his mouth. “Stress related eating is-”
“Morning, guys.” JJ walked out of her office and came down the stairs. “Did you bring anything for me?”
“Low calorie diet muffin.” Morgan snatched the separate little bag from the doughnut box and tossed it over to her. “I got no idea how you can eat that. Where’s everyone?”
“Emily and Rossi are still on that consultation job, Hotch had to go somewhere and Garcia is reaming that poor guy from technical support, who tried to advice her.” She pulled the muffing out of the bag and took a bite. “And I’m collecting donations for flowers, so-”
“Flowers?”
“For the funeral.” A quick look of comprehension hit her. “I forgot, you left early yesterday.”
“So who’s dead?”
“Sanchez. You remember him, right? Graduated last year.”
“No, and why are we sending him flowers?”
“He was assigned with us a few times.” Reid reminded grimly. “When we needed extra hands going through records.”
“Still nothing.”
“You kept running him ragged with coffee runs.”
“That kid?”
“Yeah, that kid.”
JJ cleared her throat. “Anyway, the bureau will send someone to the ceremony, but I thought it would be a nice gesture to send something from us too.”
“Yeah.” Reid agreed and pulled out his wallet. “You know how much it will be from each of us?”
“Some people from other departments wanted to give too, so we can get a really nice flower arrangement. Five bucks from us and twenty from Morgan.”
“Why? I hardly even knew the kid.” Morgan protested, but reluctantly opened his wallet.
“Because you bullied him more than all of us combined.”
“I didn’t bully anyone!”
“What would you call that trip to get fast-food in a pouring rain?”
“That wasn’t me, it was Mother Nature.”
“Or how you sent him back, because he forgot your fries?”
“Rookies should remember their instructions.”
“Maybe Garcia still has the surveillance footage saved from that sermon you got from Hotch after that-”
“I’ll pay, I’ll pay… Just don’t remind me about that.”
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ------
Hotch peered into the office through the blinds first. The lights were on and Chad was sitting behind the desk, working his way through a stack of papers. Hotch knocked on the doorframe and peeked his head inside.
“Morning.”
Chad put down the prints he had been reading and looked up.
“Morning, babe. Sorry I had to leave early, I wanted to catch up on some stuff.”
“You left before I woke up.” Hotch walked in and closed the door. He pulled one of the stuffed armchairs closer to the desk and sat down. “You kept tossing and turning all night. What’s going on?”
“Some really severe self-criticism.” Chad opened the bottom drawer of his desk and selected a blue folder. “Wanna know what this is?”
“A folder.”
“This is my Folder of the Doomed.” He flipped it open. “All those agents I’ve been training, who died on the job. Well, the guys I’ve been training since I took this gig anyway.”
“How many?”
“Sanchez was the unlucky number three. I asked a copy of the report.” He picked up the loose sheets of paper and pushed them across the desk so Hotch could read them. “Three slugs in the upper body. One pierced a lung, another one nicked an artery, and the last one went right through. Bled to death before the ambulance got there.”
“I’m sorry. He was a good kid.”
“Yeah. And terrified of guns. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“He hated it when they had to learn shooting and gun maintenance. I remember when I was supervising them, his hands were shaking like crazy. I don’t even know how he actually passed the firearm qualifications.”
“I suppose he learned to control his fear.”
“Or not.” Chad shoved the folder further away from himself. “The preliminary report says he had neglected cleaning his gun. You know what happens if you don’t take care of your gun.”
“It can get jammed.” Hotch was aware they both knew it without saying it, but couldn’t come up with anything better to say. “Is that what happened?”
“Yeah. The kid was too scared of guns to take care of the gun that might have saved his life.” He leaned back in his chair, prodding his head against the padded headrest. “Maybe we should have pushed them more.”
“I admit, neglecting a duty gun is one of the biggest mistakes to make on the field-" Hotch admitted. He rubbed his palms against the dark leather of the armrests, took a deep breath and continued. "-but there`s nothing you or anyone else can do about Sanchez, except hope other new agents will learn from this. Besides, you didn’t even teach gun maintenance, so there’s no reason to think it has something to do with your training.”
“See what is says.” Chad pointed down at the metallic name plaque on his desk. "Director of Physical Training. Guns, hand to hand, all that. It’s my department, even if I don’t teach it myself.” He tilted his head back and closed his eyes for a minute. “I didn’t see it. Normally I can see who’ll be great out on the field, who’s trainable, and who’s a hopeless cause. I knew he had some weak spots, but I thought he would get over them.”
“He passed the training, and that’s where your responsibilities end. If his gun jammed, it wasn’t because he didn’t know how to take care of it to make sure it worked.”
“I know. It just doesn’t make it any easier to process.” He opened his eyes and gave Hotch a weary glance. “That kid wasn’t ready to be out on the field, and I shouldn’t have put him there.”
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ------
Morgan paused outside the conference room, observing the genius marching around the table, waving his hands and talking up a storm. Morgan waited till the monologue machine had come to a temporary halt, and pushed the door open.
“Who are you talking to?”
“Myself, and I can’t get it right!” Reid groaned and pulled out one of the chairs. He sat down and rested his head on the tabletop. “Why me?”
“Why you’re talking to you?”
“No, why did it have to be me. JJ could have roped Rossi to do it, he isn’t even here to object!”
“Rope him to do what?”
“Pick a text for the flowers. She told me to pick a nice quote and then some condolences and we’ll all sign the card.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I can’t come up with anything! My head’s full of quotes about death, and none of them fits. Look at those.” He handed Morgan several sheets of paper, filled with almost unreadable handwriting. “None of them sounds right.”
“Mark Twain, Francis Bacon, Emily Dickinson, Lord Byron, Euripides, JD Salinger, Leonardo DaVinci, Marcel Proust, Roseanne… Roseanna?”
“I was low on caffeine.”
“Some of them must be close enough, just pick one. How bout this: Death never takes the wise man by surprise; He is always ready to go.”
“Jean De La Fountaine… I don’t think that would really fit, when someone gets gunned down like that. It’s the same problem with all of them. People shouldn’t die young. I still think of myself as young and he was three years younger than I am, and all the poems and quotes about dying young don’t really cover a situation like this.”
“What about: I knew a man who once said, "death smiles at us all; all a man can do is smile back."
“Who said that?”
“Whoever wrote Gladiator.”
“The movie? Forget it, that thing wasn’t even close to historically accurate.”
“This is kinda grim…” Morgan scanned down the list of quotes. “The goal of all life is Death.”
“Freud, and we can’t use that. His parent will see it, and would you like your mom to see a flower arrangement with a quote from the father of penis-envy?”
“Didn’t think about it like that… are you sure JJ didn’t mean you to just pick up a nice verse of something? Maybe you misunderstood that. I mean we already know he’s dead, or we wouldn’t be sending flowers. Can’t you think of something about life instead of death?”
Reid stared at him, but finally nodded and got up from his seat.
“You’re right. I think I better get some fresh coffee and start from the beginning.”
“Think of the bright side: Everyone else has paperwork to do.”
“That doesn’t really help, I actually like doing paperwork. Most of the time.”
“You’ll come up with something really good.”
“You think so?”
“With enough coffee and sugar, undoubtedly.” Morgan assured. “And if it makes you feel any better, I just picked up the one I want for my own funeral. One less thing for you to think about.”
“How do you know I won’t die before you?”
“I just know. I want this one from Robert Alton Harris.”
“You want a quote from an executed murderer?”
“Yeah. It sounds kinda cool: You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everyone dances with the grim reaper.”
“Well, I don’t like it, and I doubt your mom and sisters would either.”
“It’s my funeral, and it kinda suits our job.”
“But it’s something no-one wants to hear at a moment like that, and funerial occasions are not supposed to be cool.”
“Calm down, baby, I was just kidding.” Morgan claimed soothingly. “It was just a joke.”
“Jokes are funny.” Reid corrected. His chin was tilted slightly up, but he couldn’t quite control the nervous shaking. “That wasn’t funny.”
“Pretty boy-”
“Humor and understanding of individual nuances of it depends on each and every individual and their personal leanings and unique characteristics, but that wasn’t funny and it wasn’t something I want to hear or even think about.” He slammed the door shut behind him.
“Nice work there, Derek.” Morgan resisted the urge to bang his head against the table. “Really smooth.”