Chapter Text
It was surreal to be back in Chicago and not visit his mom and sisters. It was surreal to be back in Chicago this soon after Christmas, when the weather was still cold but all the sparkle and warmth of the holiday season had ended, leaving behind gray skies, naked trees, and clumps of dirty snow in the shadows where it never quite got warm enough for it to melt.
Derek frequently visited his dad’s grave and the grave of the boy whose body he had found when he was a kid. Less often, he visited the grave of his great-aunt Amy, at the Lutheran cemetery where she was interred. It was safe enough to visit her here, he was much less likely to be spotted by a member of his family; they couldn’t know he was in town. And the circumstances brought back her memory to him.
Amy was the sister of his mother’s mother, and while Derek’s grandmother on his mother’s side had always been a bit stiff and formal with him and his sisters, disapproving of their most noticeable resemblances to their father — Amy had been welcoming, loving and kind. She had never married or had kids, herself, but she had been more of a grandmother to him than his actual grandmother. She had used to bake him snickerdoodles because he particularly liked them, and when it was time for him and his sisters to go home, she had always said that seeing him had made her day a special day.
She had died while Derek had been in deep cover, of a subdural hematoma resulting from a fall in her home, where she had lived alone. It was likely she had knocked herself unconscious and never awakened. Derek hadn’t gotten to go to her funeral, or even learned of her death until he was out of deep cover. That was what “deep cover” meant — it meant sometimes you had to sacrifice things that were important to you, for the greater good of putting away the bad guy.
Which would have been acceptable if the bad guy had stayed locked up.
Derek contemplated his great-aunt’s modest headstone — Amy Lorraine Polk, followed by the years she had lived — his chest tight with anger, but his face expressionless. Had missing the last few months of her life been for nothing? Gresham Wright was back on the streets, terrorizing Chicago again in his oddly crisp AAVE, probably chain-smoking Swisher Sweets again like they were cigarettes. Those bitches were likelier to kill him than a lethal injection, at this rate.
A plea bargain. Eighteen months of deep cover, and the fucker had gotten out after six years on a fucking plea bargain. He had been in G-pop, and had made and received regular phone calls, had been visited many times, and his operation had run just as if he had still been on the outside. And Derek had not gotten to say goodbye to his aunt before her life support had been disconnected.
Derek left the daisies he had brought her on her grave, kissed the tips of his fingers and touched the top of her headstone, and walked back to the car, gathering his coat closer around him. His handler, Rick Semple, was behind the wheel, reading a paperback novel with the cover folded all the way back as if it were a magazine; but he dog-eared the page and put it away when he saw Derek approaching. Derek thought, hyperbolically, if Spencer had seen Rick treating a book that way, even just a drugstore paperback, he might have drawn his weapon and shot him on the spot.
“So, during the time Wright was in prison, Benjamin Yost was serving a sentence in Wisconsin,” Rick told him as he got into the car and held his hands close to the heating vent to warm his fingers. “You just got out, debt to society paid.”
Not a long sentence for what Benj was guilty of, Derek thought; but he said, “Ready to do good honest work again with the human traffickers,” trying for dark sarcasm, but hearing it fall flat as he said it. “You make sure the signal is strong this time. I’m never doing this again.”
“You’re our only shot, at this point,” Rick said. “We’re extremely grateful that you’re willing to help.”
“Never again,” Derek reiterated. He hadn’t been sure it was a good idea at all; he had been on television, since then, and the risk was enormous, and he wasn’t entirely sure that Rick fully realized that Black people didn’t all look alike to other Black people. But Rick swore that no one had a clue, none of them had ever even seemed to mention in passing to each other that Benj had been an undercover cop.
The drive to home base was short; a dummy “halfway house” set up in an older two-story house in a shitty neighborhood, where Benj “lived” with a few cops posing as ex-cons. Benj didn’t have any living relatives, no one to stay with, so it made sense that he’d be in a halfway house, and it was a reason Benj could cite that he needed to return to home base every night — a curfew.
Derek put on Benj before he got out of the car, like a garment. Benj had had a slouch, avoided eye contact, and maintained a sour, pissed-off expression on his face. Benj who had been to prison would be all of that, but watchful, too. He would appear tired from general loss of sleep, and his hands would be in a loose fist most of the time, ready to throw a punch on reflex; Derek had done some work on a punching bag at the gym, to get his hands to look battered. Benj trusted no one; but a balance had to be struck there, because Benj needed to trust the boss. Benj needed to admire the boss. Benj needed to be, as before, fiercely, fanatically loyal.
Benj got out of the car, looking sullen and wary, carrying a duffel bag with a few belongings. Benj looked annoyed while allowing someone at the door to search the bag and hand it back to him. Benj accepted a cheap plastic wristwatch — which was wired for sound — that the person at the door gave to him to monitor the time and make it back by curfew. He put the watch on his wrist, though it was small enough that it almost didn’t fit. “‘Mr. Yost’ was my grandfather,” Benj snarled at the person at the door as he snatched his bag back and zipped it. Then he stalked upstairs to his assigned room.
Most halfway houses had shared rooms, but the second bed in this one was going to remain empty. That was part of the deal; Derek would get a private room. Derek took the items out of the duffel bag — just a change of clothes and some simple toiletries — and put them away in the rickety dresser, and then lay down on the bed and stared at the upper bunk. He was seventy percent sure that this was a mistake. But Gresham Wright was bad news, and that thirty percent was worth it. Or so he told himself. Gresham Wright was to blame for the damage caused by the weapons he wielded; even if one of the weapons was Benjamin Yost.
Derek struggled sometimes with what he had had to do to maintain his cover. He had had sex, used drugs, engaged in violence, been injured, all in the line of duty. He had posed as an enforcer, and while he had avoided it whenever possible, he had hit people. He had hurt them. They had also been bad people — most of them, almost certainly — but he had never killed anyone. And he was aware that the way he dealt with it, shunting the responsibility off onto Gresham Wright, onto his handlers, onto the persona of Benjamin Yost, was not entirely healthy; but it was better than the paralysis that guilt would have caused him, and he had to live his life.
Derek allowed himself an indulgence as he lay on his back and looked up. He thought of Spencer.
Derek had worked with him for five years, and he knew that Spencer had seen all of the stuff Derek had seen while working at the BAU and more, and had an eidetic memory as well, and remembered every detail — but something about him remained innocent in Derek’s eyes; almost saintlike, as if the evil and foulness they dealt with every day could somehow wash over him and not touch him, not affect him. Derek wanted to be able to do that. He supposed shifting blame for the actions he had taken was an attempt at that, though an imperfect one.
Derek recalled a line of scripture, from when he had attended church as a child: Matthew 10:16, “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” It seemed impossible, to know and to not be affected; and he supposed harmless was also not a descriptor that fit, as he had killed people in the line of duty, and so had Spencer. However somehow — somehow Derek was guilty, when he did it, but when Spencer did it, he appeared unaffected, like an angel. Like the righteous hand of Justice. Derek knew it was not real. It was an obsession, and he was very aware of that, considering it was one of his specializations.
He managed it, like everything else.
He spoke into the wristwatch, “Gonna use the head,” before unbuckling it and leaving it on the dresser and going out the door to the shared restroom next to his room. He intended to obsess with his pants off, and he didn’t want to be overheard.