Shadows And Light・A.H.・

Roles We Fill

When Beauregard had stopped by his office to ask if he needed anything else from her, Hotch had been prepared to send her home as quickly as possible. If she wasn't in the office she could not turn in any more forms and he might stand a chance of getting out of the office by midnight.

But then she had offered to help him. Not just offered, demanded. And he had been so stunned that he complied without a fight.

He had not had an agent offer to help him in well over a year. Even if they had, he probably would have told them no. As much as he appreciated the team, the only member other than him who was any good at this part of the job was JJ. She was also the only one with a four-year-old at home, and Hotch could not ask her to sacrifice time with Henry for his sake.

Of the roughly three dozen files Beauregard had submitted in the past three days, Hotch had maybe read five of them. "Read" was a strong word. "Skimmed for glaring errors" was far more accurate. She worked too quickly for him to do any more. He knew the risk he ran of regretting this delegation if it turned out she was incompetent. But he told himself that even if the forms she filled out for him tonight were incomplete, having a base to build on might save him some time. Beauregard had a way of not leaving room for questioning her in the moment. But nearly half an hour had passed, the moment was gone, and he was watching her work with a tightening knot in his stomach.

His computer chimed with her fourteenth email to him that day, and she looked up from her computer.

"That would be the profile analysis complied from the team's notes," she explained as he clicked on it.

"You finished it already?" he asked, glancing at the clock. 

She nodded, watching him as he read the document for errors to correct or gaps to fill. But as he scrolled through the pages he found nothing. It was... it was good. Thorough without too many details, accurate clinical terminology- she even included references to other cases and standard profiles for further research and development, all with proper USAGov formatting. He could not have done it better himself.

"And edits?" she asked after the silence stretched to well over a minute.

"You've done these before?" he asked, looking up at her.

"A couple hundred times," she chuckled. "Back at CNU, we didn't have a team leader. Chief Eppes gave us our assignments, but we mostly did our own thing; including all the paperwork."

Was he terrible for wishing Strauss had led with that fact when pitching her addition to the team?

"It's good," he managed to reply. She blinked. He did not say anything more. She got back to work.

Hotch caught himself sneaking glances at her over the edge of his laptop screen. She was virtually unknown to him, and he was regretting the lack of time he had spent paying attention to her. Sure, they had been in the briefing room together for a few minutes, and her desk was twenty feet or so from his. But before tonight he had been too busy trying to keep up with everything else that demanded his attention to look at her.

Before tonight he had not seen the pearls around her neck, the same ones she had been wearing a week ago in Harrisburg. He had not seen the way her fingers flew across the keyboard, rarely pausing to correct mistakes. He had not seen her mouth set in a hard line of determination as she worked. He had not seen anything about her other than the fact that Strauss wanted her and he would not be able to stop her transfer. He hadn't even read her file since for the cursory glance he had given it back in Harrisburg. Frankly, Hotch had hardly given her a second thought until that moment in his office when he could no longer ignore her. And now that she was here he wondered how he had missed her for the past two days.