dear_mun | (no subject)

Working girls and Thin Mint cookies?

Are you a very specific pimp?

[ He laughs -- ] No, not a pimp. [ Voice is a slow drawl, New Orleans native accent. ] I arrested 'em both, once upon a time, and they crawled outta the woodwork after I got shot. Turns out they don't bear a grudge.

...wait.

Your perps bought you cookies?

They're good girls. In tough times, sure, but good girls.

Cookies. I get kidnapped, you get cookies.

[Universe, what the hell?]

Bullet wounds heal. I'm sure there are worse situations you could have been thrown into.

Inch or two one way or another and it wouldn't have had a chance.

[ His tone is serious, here. He feels astonishingly blessed to have lived. ]

For what it's worth, I got the kidnapping end too. Will LaMontagne, Jr. [ By way of introducing himself. ]

So be glad you're sore. Better than the alternative.

[Ah. She doesn't feel contrite, exactly. But she does nod her head. An acknowledgement of a shared experience.]

Dani Reese, LAPD.

MPD. Washington, DC.

I'm sorry that happened to you, Dani. [ Completely sincere. He wouldn't wish that on anyone. ]

Yeah. [A shrug of her shoulders. This isn't something that she talks about. Definitely not to Tidwell. Charlie will bring it up at some point, but they're in this sort of holding space right now. He doesn't talk about what happened in that warehouse, she doesn't ask about what happened in that car.]

Your guy dead?

[ The corners of his mouth twitch, something that might have been a smile if not for the look in his eyes. Wounded. Disappointed. Guilty. ]

Three guys dead.

[ He takes a breath. Not looking at her. ] Four hostages, too. And my partner.

The last one, a woman, she was arrested. [ Not by him. He had to be saved. ]

I'm sorry.

[Crews almost -- she thought she was saying goodbye. He absolutely was.]

Pretty sure my guy's dead. My partner killed him in an orange grove. I think we were at nine civilians dead, last count. But the way that the guy worked, it was nearly impossible to tell accomplice from victim.

[Roman had something on everyone. Unlike Will, Dani doesn't look particularly haunted. She gets through this crap by getting through it. Acknowledging it, and letting it go.

She's still working on that last part.]

How are you sleeping?

[ A sharp look, at the partner killing thing. But he doesn't say anything. ]

Not great. [ -- admits. He wakes up a lot, has weird and vivid dreams. Some of it maybe from the medications, probably. ] It'll get worse if I end up, for example, stranded on a turtle without any morphine.

[ dafuq is his life becoming. ]

[Not something she'd ever say aloud, back home. Charlie will probably confess before she'll ever voice the thought, because he does really stupid things sometimes. But something said here doesn't seem like it will make much of a difference.]

If you can find some way to manage the pain, living day to day on a giant turtle -- a giant turtle? -- could be a decent distraction.

I sure hope it's giant.

[ A joke. His left hand drifts up, his palm pressing against his right shoulder, where the wound is. ]

Any doctors where you're heading?

I don't know. I'm not sure there's really people where I'm heading.

[ He's being kept in the dark, on this one. ]

There's got to be some kind of...bipedal thing, you can talk to. Otherwise it wouldn't be interesting enough to put any effort into.

Bipedal? What if there's talkin' dogs or something?

If you're lucky, maybe they'll have thumbs?

Dogs with thumbs, huh?

...did you say you've been shot? [Doctor Watson to the rescue.] Where? Have you been to the hospital?

[ He taps somewhere in the area between right shoulder and chest. He holds his arm with stiffness, too. ] Don't worry, [ and his voice is a soft Louisiana drawl, ] doctors were climbin' over themselves to take a look. I got X-rays, stitches and all.

Oh good. [He feels a little better about it now.] Glad to hear it. Did you see whoever shot you? [Watson is curious.]

He's dead.

[ A little duck of his head, with this. He's -- upset. Blames himself at least partway for how it went. ]

[sympathetic] M'sorry. I take it that's not the way you wanted it to end up?

Any day I end up firing a weapon didn't end up how I wanted. This one started there and just got worse.

[ But there's no reason to set all of that on a stranger. He extends a hand. ] William LaMontagne, Jr. MPD. [ Metropolitan Police, from Washington, DC. ]

[John likes to think he's a good listener, he doesn't mind. He meets the mans hand for a handshake.] Dr. John Watson, army retired. Nice to meet you.

Medical doctor?

Indeed. I was stationed in Afghanistan, now I'm back and working at a clinic in London. [Among other things, like following after Sherlock Holmes.]

Then I guess you'd know a thing or two about firing guns and having bad days.

Quite a few things. Not all pleasant but memorable, certainly.

If you need someone to check on that shoulder...? [He'd be more than willing to check it over for infection or anything like that.]

Will?

[Now here's a face he never expected to see. And...]

You... wh-who shot you? Are you okay?

What d'you mean, Spencer? You were there.

[ Honestly hasn't occurred to him that someone might be from a different time. ]

...What?

[He looks quizzical for a moment, but of course, it doesn't take long to figure out.] Oh, you were talking to a different me. There're, uh, sort of multiple versions? I'm, um, I'm in a different world. [There is no way for him to say he's in the Pokemon world and maintain any kind of dignity.] So you're, uh, you're okay, right?

No, it was in our world. In DC. There was a bank robbery... my partner -- the BAU got called in.

[ There's an edge in his body language, now. He's been coping with the fourth wall well enough, but the thought that things that are familiar to him, things that should be recognized, might not be -- that's not settling well at all. ]

I'll -- I'm all right. I'll live.

Wait, DC? W-with Izzy Rogers and Matthew Downs?

[He gets a little rigid. He left home the night of Will and JJ's marriage, and he remembers the bank robbery vividly. It just happens to be five months ago to him.]

No, you're right, I was there. I was just there... one week short of five months ago. I left right after I got back home from the wedding. Did you just get here?

[ There's a visible flinch at Izzy's name.

And a slow nod. He looks -- small, somehow. Tense. ]

Yeah. I just got here. That was -- barely days ago.

Just a few days? You're reacting better than I did. [No, really. Reid nearly had a nervous breakdown because he thought he was schizophrenic.

Yet he still recognizes the tenseness in Will. He's never been particularly close with the man, but being one of JJ's best friends and the godfather of his son, Reid likes to think he knows Will pretty well. It doesn't take a genius to see that Will's still recovering from the near-death experience and sudden change in world.] Do you have any questions? I mean, there isn't really any organized data to draw scientific, unbiased conclusions from, but I can offer you what I and other people I know have experienced?

And... have you found JJ?

[ Will has incredible emotional stability. Hard to find someone who could be this coherent after a week like he's had. Doesn't mean he's doing well, right now.

The mention of JJ has his eyes snapping up, his focus zeroing in. ]

Is she here?

She is. Or, well, was. I met her when I was put in a game for the first time, but neither of us remembered anything about our lives, so I didn't know we were together. I don't think she's still there, but I saw her again on a meme maybe a month ago...

[Beat.]

You, uh, do you know about games and memes?

[He's starting to learn about being comprehensible! Comes with tutoring a teenage girl for five months.]

[ This is the first he's heard that there's even a possibility, and the uplift of hope is as brutal as it is keen. He might be able to find JJ. He wonders, when he was shot, if someone told her he might be dead. ]

The turtle's the game, the memes are the other ones. [ The ones where he's married to someone else, or has a child with someone else, or runs into another killer. ]

The... excuse me? [Reid is assuming Will has had encounters with both of those things, when he describes it like that. Reid's experience with memes and games haven't always been the best, either.]

The little universes. [ Because for some bewildering reason, he assumes Reid's asking about the memes, not the turtle. ] The ones where I have a kid with someone else, or get caught up in another killer. The Edgar Allen Poe guy. Or the Alpha and Omega one.

You had some run-ins with those?

No, yeah, I definitely have had run-ins with memes. They're, uh, pretty disorienting, usually.

But I wasn't talking about that. I was asking about the turtle. Are you in a turtle-related game?

Yeah, on the back of a turtle. Or somethin'. I don't know.