2.11

KATHARINE'S BODY WAS LITERALLY VIBRATING WITH EITHER NERVES OR ANTICIPATION AS SHE SAT IN THE PASSENGER SEAT OF THE BLACK SUV. Derek was in the driver's seat, allowing Katharine to make a call to Nina in an attempt to confirm that the woman was okay.


"Hey, Jupiter," she used Nina's codename, letting her know she was on the job. "It's Songbird. Let me know if you'll need an umbrella."


That was it. She ended the call and turned her phone in her hand. Katharine bounced her knee up and down anxiously, hoping for a call, or even a text, back.


"Umbrella?" Derek asked, looking at her briefly before returning his attention to the road.


Katharine nodded. "We based our code off of old SHIELD admittance codes. It'll help tell me if she's okay or not. Weather's nice but I still carry, everything's fine. Looks cloudy and I could use one, might need back-up. It's pouring and I could use one, imminent danger."


Derek nodded, coming to a full stop at a red light. There was no one else at the intersection but the light stayed red.


"That's smart," he commented, looking up through the rearview mirror. "That car's been following us since we left the BAU."


Katharine turned in her seat so that she could look out the back window. It was a black 2007 Saturn VUE. The driver looked caucasian with sunglasses shading their eyes. They had blond hair, cut military style, and a sharp jaw. Beyond that, Katharine couldn't make anything else out. The tint on their car was just a tab bit too dark and the glaring midday sun didn't make identification any easier.


"Should we try to shake them?" Derek asked, moving his sunglasses back up his nose. He glanced nervously in their rearview once more as the light turned green.


"I'll call Hotch, let him know we're gonna be a little late," Katharine said, scrolling through her contacts and finding their boss's number.


The phone rang twice before the man in question picked up.


"Hotchner."


"Hey, Hotch," Katharine said, looking behind them as their stalker followed them with their next turn. It was strange. "We seem to have a bit of a problem. There's been a man following Derek and I's SUV since we left the BAU. We're gonna try to shake him before meeting up at Triangle PD."


"Stay safe," Hotch said before hanging up.


"You know," Katharine said, slipping her phone into her pocket. She ran her hand against her thigh to ensure her knife was still strapped there. "It's nice that our boss has so much trust in us. Didn't even ask us any questions."


Derek took the next right, driving away from Triangle PD and back toward the BAU. "I've worked with him for long enough."


"Is that so?" Katharine pointed off to the side where a ramp onto the freeway sat. That too was strangely void of cars. "We can try to shake our guy on the freeway, take the next exit and circle back."


Derek nodded and signaled right, taking the entrance ramp and soon merging with traffic. He moved to one of the center lanes and watched as their stalker followed them over. His grip on the wheel tightened as he merged with the right lane, slowing down just enough that the flow of the traffic carried their stalker away.


Derek exited the highway on the next exit and looped back around, getting them back on track to Triangle PD.


"Did you see a plate on that car?" Katharine asked, trying to bring any useful information back into her mind. Not only was the fact that the plate seemed to be missing, but the details of the entire encounter seemed to be slipping out of her grasp.


Strange, she thought. Usually, her memory was impeccable with things like this. License plates, identifying features... those were things that stayed with her.


Derek frowned, pulling into the Triangle PD parking lot. He parked the car and took his sunglasses off, squinting at her through the sunlight.


"What car?" he asked, unbuckling his seat belt.


Katharine blinked in confusion. What was Derek talking about...? There was a car?


She exited the vehicle, grabbing her bag and slinging it over her shoulder. Derek met up with her at the front of the car and they entered the station together, the interaction with their mysterious stalker quickly fading from their minds.


Hotch met them at the door.


"How'd it go with the man that followed you?" was the first question out of his mouth. "And the detour?"


Katharine took a moment to look their boss up and down. Surely he was joking. There had been no man following them. As far as they knew, they had driven straight from the BAU to Triangle PD. No detours nor any strange men were involved.


She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes at the man. "There was a man that followed us? And detours? We didn't take any detours."


Derek narrowed his eyes at the man as well. "Hotch, what are you talking about?"


Hotch looked around, eyeing the multitudes of cops that were now staring at the three agents that were beginning to make a scene in the middle of the station.


"Let's talk about this in the conference room. Detective Santiago was kind enough to set up for us before we got here," Hotch said, turning around and heading into a conference room.


Katharine and Derek exchanged looks of confusion but following their boss regardless. Derek walked in ahead of Katharine, passing through the open doors without hesitation.


Katharine's phone pinged from inside her pocket and she stopped just before crossing the threshold. She fished the device out and turned it on, reading the message displayed on the glass screen.


It's pouring, she read. Those two words confused Katharine even more than she already was. She read the words again before reading the contact name to find she didn't recognize it at all. Nina Hayes... who was that?


Katharine entered the conference room to face a bunch of unfamiliar faces. Hesitantly, she stepped foot into the space. Her hand rested on her holstered weapon in case she was in immediate danger.


"Who are you guys?" she asked, not moving further than the front door.


The only person she recognized, her cousin, also had his hand on his gun. Did he even know how to use that?


She looked back down at her own weapon. Did she even know how to use that?


"Derek?" she asked, looking between the man and the room's occupants. "Do you know these people?"


After a moment's hesitation, Derek frowned and took a step back from the group assembled in front of them.


"I have no idea who any of these people are."








"WHAT DO WE KNOW?" Hotch asked his team, looking at Katharine through a two-way mirror.


She and Derek had been separated once it was established that neither of them knew anyone in the BAU. Their weapons had been confiscated as a safety precaution which revealed to them that Katharine had at least three guns on her person at all times in addition to a modified taser and two small, easily concealed knives.


Any other time the sheer number of weaponry Katharine had on her person would have been almost comical but now it was just concerning. Especially after her confession that she had absolutely no idea how to wield any of them, save for the knives which was just as concerning.


"I have Katharine's phone here," Reid spoke up. "It looks like she made two calls of relevance, one to Nina Hayes and one to you, Hotch. I've already contacted Garcia and she says that Katharine had made the call to Nina and left a voicemail with the transcript, 'Hey Jupiter. It's Songbird. Let me know if you'll need an umbrella.'"


"Jupiter? Songbird?" Prentiss asked, squinting at the woman behind the mirror. "And 'Let me know if you need an umbrella?' What does any of that mean?"


"Songbird was her codename," Hotch said, pulling memorized facts from Katharine's heavily blacked file. "So I'm assuming Jupiter was Nina's."


"And 'let me know if you need an umbrella' was a coded phrase SHIELD used to use in order to gain access to their secret labs back in the nineteen-forties--around the same time Captain America was, well, created," Reid said, reading through Katharine's phone. "Nina replied, 'It's pouring,' a minute before Katharine stepped into the conference room."


"So we're dealing with another Inhuman case," Hotch inferred, sighing heavily. "And not only is our best agent for dealing with Inhuman cases out of commission, but her cousin is also too. This can't have been a coincidence."


"You mean someone targeted them?" JJ asked, frowning. "You think our unsub is trying to cover up their tracks by taking out what they view as threats? But Katharine being Inhuman wasn't public knowledge."


"But if our unsub does have Nina hostage, it wouldn't have to have been public knowledge," Rossi pointed out.


They watched as Katharine glanced between the mirror and the door, looking scared and fragile--two words none of the team would have used to describe the woman.


"So our unsub erased Katharine and Morgan's memory?" JJ asked. "I mean they both didn't know who we were after Katharine entered the conference room. Morgan knew who we were when he entered on his own."


"And they both knew who I was when they entered the station," Hotch said, "But they were already forgetting that they had called me about the man that followed them out of the BAU. It seems like memory erasure could play a significant role in this case."


Reid squinted. He watched as Katharine tapped her fingers on the tabletop before reaching for the tips of her hair, braiding and unbraiding the ends.


"No," he pointed through the glass. "See that, she's playing with her hair instead of biting her lip. Katharine told me that when she was a kid, she would play with her hair when she was scared or nervous. More specifically, she would braid the ends. I think our unsub somehow aged both Katharine and Morgan backward to a time before they knew the BAU or SHIELD. It happened gradually and then all at once until they regressed to a point in which their memory was stable enough to support them."


"So how do you want us to progress from here?" Prentiss asked, crossing her arms. "Nina Hayes most likely has less time than the other two girls and unless we apprehend the unsub alive, we might not get the Morgans back."


"Then that's what we'll do," Hotch decided, turning away from the mirror. He looked at the remaining members of his team. "Prentiss, I need you at the first crime scene and Rossi, I need you at the second. JJ, get in contact with both the victim's families. See if they'd be willing to come down to the station to answer some questions for us. Call Garcia while you're at it, see if she can access the Inhuman databases to see if there's someone with time centric abilities."


With a nod, each of the respective agents dispersed and set off to do their assigned tasks.


"Reid, you and I will question Katharine and Morgan," Hotch said, looking at the genius dead on. "Try to figure out anything that might be able to help, if Katharine knew anyone that had a vendetta against her or Morgan that would have pushed them to do something like this."


Reid nodded, looking between his boss and the woman that he was more than certain he was falling in love with. The woman that told him that it really was the little things that made a person fall in love and not the big romantic gestures.


"Hotch," Reid said, looking back at his boss. "We both know Morgan's past and if this unsub really aged them backward, my guess is it's going to be to a time before he even graduated from high school. Before he became a cop and before he made it out of Chicago."


Hotch nodded, taking mental stock of how he should adjust himself. Reid was right, the Morgans might look like the ones they knew for eight years and eight months respectively but mentally, they weren't.


"That means you'll be dealing with an eleven-year-old Katharine Morgan in there," Hotch said in warning. "Or maybe it'll be a nineteen-year-old Katharine Morgan. Either way, they've both been reverted back to a time before they were in law enforcement."


"Be safe in there," Reid warned though they both knew the implications behind the words. Be safe in their heads, was more like it. The human mind was a very fragile thing, one slip-up and they could lose both of the Morgans without even meaning to.


Be safe.

Comment