Chapter Text
By the time the emergency services cleared the scene at the Bainbridge Island clinic, it was late and the appetite for flying back to D.C. was at rock bottom. Hood turned to Rachel as she checked flight availability on her phone and shook her head.
“We’d never make that one,” she said, shrugging and placing the phone back in her pocket, “Looks like we’ve got another night in Philadelphia.”
Hood nodded solemnly.
“That’s ok, I’d like to check in on Kelly and David tomorrow anyway, see how they’re doing.”
Rachel nodded, biting back the smile threatening across her face. Eccentric as he could be, Hood actually cared about people, it was one of the things she liked about him. He didn’t see a person’s gender, social status, even their criminal record; he just saw someone who’d been wronged or taken advantage of, and he took their side unquestioningly.
“Well then, shall we?” she asked him, nodding towards their SUV. Hood nodded and they made their way past the activity in front of the clinic. Kelly had been removed to the hospital, where David was waiting for her.
Detective McNeil spotted them heading for the SUV and excused himself from the conversation he was tied into. His path intercepted theirs a few metres short of the SUV and Hood smirked, knowing what was on the young detective’s mind.
“Detective McNeil,” he said, reaching to shake the man’s hand, “Thank you for your help.”
“Anytime,” McNeil replied with a genuine smile. Hood nodded, and kept going to the SUV which Rachel had unlocked with her key.
“So… how about that drink?” McNeil asked her with a smile.
She looked around the chaos of the crime scene and raised an eyebrow, “Aren’t you a little tied up at the moment?”
He grinned, “No, but if that’s what you’re into…”
She chuckled and bowed her head. In different circumstances, maybe McNeil wouldn’t have been a bad option. She smiled back at him and shook her head.
“Maybe another time,” she said. He nodded, then checked his pockets for a business card.
“Damn,” he said sheepishly. She took a step closer to him.
“Don’t worry McNeil. I’m FBI, I’ll find you…”
He looked down at her and smirked, before she turned and headed for the SUV. He watched her walk away, before turning back to the crime scene. He might have hoped, but he felt confident that he would never see her again.
*
They had a late dinner in the hotel bar which, despite calling last orders not long before they arrived, made an exception to whip up the easiest dishes they could for Hood and Rachel. That turned out to be a surprisingly passable pasta dish which, while unexciting, filled the gap in both of their stomachs.
Hood had a beer, while Rachel stuck to a sparkling water.
“You sure you don’t want some vodka in that?” Hood asked without a hint of humour.
“Oh, I’d murder some vodka, but I’m still on duty.”
He shrugged and looked around the deserted hotel bar, saying he thought she could probably risk it. She agreed but wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of hearing her say that. Instead, she shrugged and sipped at the water.
They sat quietly, finishing their drinks after their plates were taken away.
“We had her, Rachel,” Hood said finally, “She was right there, pretending to give a shit, and we just… she just slipped through our fingers. I should have…”
Rachel raised an eyebrow, “Should have what, Hood? Stopped trying to save Kelly’s life? You know she’s only alive because you didn’t give up on her.”
He nodded, twisting the beer bottle between his thumb and forefinger. He knew she was right, but he wondered just how much more carnage Geppetto would end up causing, how much heartache and hurt he could have stopped…
But Kelly would be dead, and her son would be an orphan, unless his father was able to get his own act together.
Finally, he nodded.
“Yeah,” he whispered, “I know all of that but… we could have put a stop to this and it feels like such a huge missed opportunity.”
Rachel understood his disappointment. Her time in Counterterrorism had taught her the virtue of patience but she often forgot that Hood dealt with very definite parameters and processes – a lab culture always took the same amount of time.
He was a man who could measure his day in lab experiments which made him incredibly efficient in theory. But their job required practices that he couldn’t predict, couldn’t put a timeframe on, and that frustrated him.
She reached across the table and laid a hand on his forearm, “We’ll get her, Hood. It’s just a matter of time. In the meantime, a young woman gets to hold her son again because you made the human choice, rather than the scientific one.”
His gaze was fixed upon her hand on his arm but, as she finished, he looked slowly up at her, a resigned smile on his face. He nodded, then lifted his bottle to slug the last of his beer.
“You’re right, Rachel,” he accepted, “Thank you.”
*
Upstairs, Rachel cleared his hotel room first before beckoning him inside and checking the connecting door was open on his side. As he stepped through and slipped his jacket off onto an armchair, she turned to him, with a stern look on her face.
“Panic button?” she asked and he nodded, pulling it from his pocket and leaving it on the bedside table.
“Yep.”
“Not a toy,” she remarked firmly. He looked at her, head tilted slightly.
“What are you implying?”
She was replacing her weapon in its holster when he asked and, off his question, turned to him, eyebrow raised.
“I know you did that on purpose the other night,” she said matter-of-factly.
Hood’s mouth fell open in outrage, “I did not!”
But Rachel had run the evidence in her head a thousand times and had come to her conclusion, nobody was going to make her reconsider her verdict.
“You definitely did. The button is recessed; you can’t “accidentally” press it. Luckily, I have no shame…”
That wasn’t entirely true. The memory of tearing into the lobby of this ‘far too fancy for the Bureau budget’ hotel was not going to leave her mind anytime soon. To his credit, he did have the good grace to look guilty when he saw her, decked out in the shortest robe that ever existed while clad in not a lot underneath it.
“Not sure why you would,” Hood smiled as he sat down on the edge of the bed to reach for his shoes. That snapped Rachel back to the present and she frowned at his response. What did he mean… no, best not to interrogate that too closely, she told herself. Instead, she smiled briefly and turned toward the door.
In her room, she pulled off the utility attachments on her belt and slipped off the white shirt she wore over her tank top. The case was closed. Sure, there would be paperwork tomorrow and a field report to complete by the end of the week but, with the exception of one loose end (sizeable though it was), it was another satisfactory result for their unorthodox partnership.
She was just reaching for the button of her pants when the panic alarm from her belt sounded. Sighing, she grabbed her gun, quickly unlocked the connecting door between her room and Hood’s, and stepped through, gun raised but with no real conviction.
She found Hood, lying against the headboard of the bed, still in his clothes from the day, holding the button and looking sheepish.
“Now this was one was on purpose,” he stressed. Rachel rolled her eyes.
“Ok, Hood, if I agree that the last one wasn’t intentional, can I please go to bed?”
Hood pursed his lips and put the button down on the bedside locker.
“You could, or…” he trailed off.
“Or?” she prompted.
He stood up, crossed the room to the mini bar fridge and pulled out two bottles of beer.
“Or, you could have a beer with me.”
She shook her head again, wincing at the sight of the minibar even being opened, never mind having bottles withdrawn from it.
“Hood, our expenses…”
“..are not relevant, Rachel,” he cut her off, explaining that he had asked the young busboy downstairs to source him a carton of beers that wouldn’t give him a heart attack on paying the hotel bill the following morning. The young man had delivered the beers to the fridge while Hood and Rachel were tucking into their pasta.
“They’re mid-strength, which is barely a step up from the water you were drinking at dinner,” he said, holding the bottle out to her. She sighed and accepted the bottle, settling into the armchair that he had strewn his jacket across earlier. The room was chillier than she’d initially noticed and, after a minute, she reached behind and pulled his jacket around her shoulders.
If he noticed, which he must have done, he said nothing. If anyone else had been watching, it was an action with far more familiarity than anyone in the Bureau would like to see.
When the first beers were gone, Hood withdrew two more and Rachel graciously accepted it. His jacket was still draped over her shoulders and every time she turned her head, she was hit with hints of the smells that made up Jacob Hood – a subtle but masculine aftershave, the heaviness of dried-in rain or dew, the undoubted remnants of sweat as he sat baking in an overheating lab.
The overall scent was far from unpleasant and was uniquely him.
Their conversation was easy, informal, focused primarily on work but veering into personal topics every so often. Hood didn’t know much about her and she didn’t know much about him, outside of the details that had been in his personnel file.
“You know, I was supposed to be replaced six months ago,” she said, a pondering statement rather than a definitive one. Hood looked across at her from where he was slouched on the bed. He stifled a laugh and took a sip of his beer.
“Not by any of the imbeciles Frank’s been sending my way,” he remarked. His eyes widened and he glanced in her direction to see if she’d caught his faux-pas. Of course she had. He tried to remain stony faced, watching an invisible spot on the wall in front of him.
“What?” Rachel asked, not quite catching the implication in what he had said. He winced and glanced sideways at her.
“Can I help it if you’re irreplaceable?”
Rachel sat up in her chair, pulling his jacket tighter over her shoulders.
“Are you saying that you’ve had oversight of your protection team?”
He gulped and nodded dumbly, that way that he did when his mouth was still catching up with his brain.
“And you’ve been rejecting them?” she probed and, again, he nodded, casting a nervous glance in her direction again before pushing himself into a straighter sitting position, twisting so that his feet were on the ground.
Rachel was surprised but not shocked, or maybe it was the other way around, it was hard to say and it was hardly as important as the other question on her mind.
“Why?” she asked, looking up at him, her face unreadable which made him even more nervous about his answer.
“I like working with you,” he shrugged, “We’re a good team, we get results, and you don’t treat me like I just wandered out of Kindergarten…”
“I thought I did…” Rachel mumbled and he chuckled. She looked up at him, eyes wide and curious, “Hood, how many replacements have you rejected?”
She watched the panic streak across his face before he composed himself and adopted a look of deep concentration.
“Oh, I don’t know the exact number…”
She looked at him, a mix of incredulous and annoyed.
“Hood, you can pinpoint a species of ant based on the number of chromosomes it has,” she remarked, leaning forward in her chair as if to emphasise that she was calling him on his bullshit. He sighed.
“Ok, 17. No, 18? Yeah, 18,” he admitted, biting his bottom lip.
Rachel shook her head but, to Hood’s surprise, didn’t look as annoyed as he might have expected.
“Unbelievable,” she said finally though, again, she didn’t sound as murderous as he would have feared. Still, he gulped and leaned forward in his seat.
“If it helps, Frank has completely lost his patience with me and says that I’m not getting a say in the process anymore. So… I suspect you’ll get the chance to move on soon. Although…” he broke off both his sentence and his line of sight, bowing his head as if there was something very interesting on the carpet.
“Although what?” Rachel prompted him, leaning forward in her own seat to try to bring his eye contact back to her. He looked up and took a deep breath.
“Although…” he repeated, “I would obviously like it if you decided to stay in this team, with me. It’s been… stimulating in the best possible way.”
Rachel wasn’t really sure how to answer that… request, statement, question? What about their partnership was ‘stimulating’? Probably best to leave that one alone as well…
Instead, she nodded and drank her beer. As the air grew even chillier, she pulled his jacket tighter around her.
*
On Friday afternoon of that week, Rachel’s phone rang, the vibrating notification sending the phone rouletting around her desk. Hood was engrossed in a journal article on the other side of the room, having already provided and proofread the scientific elements for their report on Geppetto’s latest actions.
Rachel glared at the phone before recognising the name on the screen – Frank Fuller. She gulped and looked over at Hood but he was in that trancelike state where nothing short of an earthquake would pull his focus.
She grabbed her phone and answered it, standing up as she did to move to somewhere with more privacy. Those were hard-found in the Hoover building where every spare space seemed to be taken up by something. If you stood up for too long, you might find someone sitting in your chair when you turned around.
She didn’t move from behind the desk as she answered with a diligent “Sir?”.
Hood glanced up from his journal, head tilted in interest, probably wondering if they had a new case. He, like her, wasn’t overly found of desk duty although at least he could fill his time by catching up on research and peer reviews. She ended up running background checks and all sorts for cases she had zero interest in.
“Agent Young, I know our timeline kind of blew out but… I’ve managed to find a suitable replacement for you on the protective detail.”
Rachel paused a moment before asking if the new person was agreeable to all members of the team – it was as diplomatic as she could be given the circumstances. She heard Fuller chuckle.
“If you’re asking me if Jacob ok’d the guy, I can tell you that the answer is no. Jacob got an entire football team of vetoes, but it stops now. This guy is good and he’s ready to step in from Monday. I’m sure you’re keen to get back to Counterterrorism.”
Rachel sucked her teeth in thought. Was she keen to go back to Counterterrorism? Did she want to go back to month- and year-long investigations which frequently ended with ‘inconclusive’ findings or, worse, a missed connection that resulted in an attack going unprevented?
She had been enjoying the challenge of the work when she’d been whipped out of the taskforce and put on what she had called “babysitting duty” at the time. She’d been resentful in the beginning and, she didn’t mind admitting it, had taken some of it out on Hood who was equally resentful of having yet another “minder” stalking him around.
But somewhere along the line, early enough in the assignment, the two of them had developed a tentative respect for the work the other did, for the personal grievances each of them brought to their arrangement, and found a common ground that had since developed into a highly-efficient partnership.
She might not be tracking down terrorists, but they were making a difference, quietly and in meaningful ways.
“Agent Young?” Fuller’s voice rang through the phone and Rachel realised that she had been silent for a long time.
“Sir?” she replied, in an attempt to buy herself some more time before answering.
When Fuller spoke again, his tone had changed, ever so slightly but Rachel noticed it.
“Should I tell this young man to expect a handover briefing from you on Monday?”
The question was asked in a very routine manner but the change in tone told Rachel everything she needed to know. Fuller had clocked her indecision. Hell, he’d probably clocked that Hood was in the room with her, hence her monosyllabic conversation. But Rachel had clocked something in his tone too – relief. Relief that the Hood protection detail dilemma could be put on the backburner for at least another few months.
“Uh, no sir. That won’t be necessary. I’ve got it under control.”
There was a brief pause before Fuller released a brief sigh.
“Ok, excellent. I’m glad we’re able to keep an effective team working together.”
Rachel smiled and agreed before Fuller hung up the phone. She took a deep breath as she put the phone down on the table, wondering if she had just committed career suicide. She glanced in Hood’s direction and caught him watching her over the top of his journal article.
“Thank you,” he said with an appreciative smile.
“Well,” she shrugged, “You were right. We are a good team.”
She sat down at her desk and turned her focus back to the report on her laptop screen, pushing her glasses back up to the bridge of her nose. Hood watched her, thoughtfully, for a few moments before smiling to himself and flicking the page on his journal article.
*