You get a call at the end of the week about the results of the blood test. No markers for chromosomal abnormalities were detected.

Your good luck ends on Saturday afternoon. You pull yourself away from your couch and throw together a go bag. JJ and Garcia brief the team on a family annihilator in Tennessee, where local authorities are convinced the unsub has a copycat.

You shoot Reid a text about carpooling to the office, but he replies that he's in the city, so you head to the office alone. When you enter the conference room, JJ has that apologetic look on her face that she always gets during overtime cases. Prentiss comes in with half a manicure done and Hotch has green marker smeared on one of his hands, so he must have been visiting Jack. Rossi and Morgan are next to come in, thought they look like they do on a normal office day. Reid, surprisingly, is last to the office. He too looks like he normally does, right down to the sweater and mismatched socks. You can't help but poke a little fun at him.

"Where've you been?"

With all eyes on him, he responds "Chess tournament."

"Were you winning?" Prentiss asks.

"Well, I was going to."

Morgan cracks a smile. "So you were losing."

JJ and Garcia pull the team's focus to the briefing. A week ago, a small town had a family annihilation case perpetrated by the father, who was still loose. This morning, a family with the kids of the same age and gender were found killed in the same manner-and the father was on the run too.

Given your background in child development, you hope you'll have some insight to offer on family dynamics. There's probably nothing you could tell Hotch and Rossi that they didn't already know, but this was an opportunity to contribute to the preliminary profile that you couldn't pass up.

Morgan took a seat in the back with JJ, leaving a spot for you with Prentiss, Hotch, and Rossi. You shuffle through the school records of both families and the oldest daughters of each family jump out at you.

"Guys, check out the academic records of the first family's daughter. Average grades until tenth grade when she becomes an overachiever. Makes sense, better grades would help keep her father's outbursts at bay. Family annihilators often try to force their family to be perfect, usually because they're obsessed with protecting the family, their version of protecting, anyway." you comment. "She probably started to recognize college as an option to escape her situation. Same goes for her involvement in sports. It probably started as a way to keep her father happy when she was younger and once she realized it kept her out of the house, she picked up a sport in the fall, one in the winter, and one in the spring. Now look at the second family's oldest. She has consistently above average grades. She took a wide range of classes, both in subject and difficulty, so she wasn't overly afraid of failure. She didn't play any sports, but according to interviews with her friends, she had an interest in painting that her parents were supportive of. There's no reports of her staying at friends' homes abnormally often. By all accounts, she had a good home life."

"What are you saying?" Hotch prompts.

"I'm saying that whatever the second family's home life was like, it wasn't the home life under a future family annihilator."

Prentiss jumps in. "Maybe it's not a coincidence at all that the family structures are identical. What if the first father reenacted his initial crime on the second family?"

Hotch runs with it. "When we land, we need Garcia to dig into recent remains found in the area. If he's reliving his crime, he needs the father gone before he starts so he can assume that role. In a delusional episode and given that he's probably in a hurry to get the rush of his actions again, it was probably a sloppy kill. If this is the profile, then the father's body has likely already been found."

When the team begins to deplane, Hotch sticks around for a minute to speak with you.

"Agent y/l/n. Good call-profiling the kids."

It doesn't feel right to say "thanks for appreciating my analysis of dead children's lives, so you settle for a casual shrug and tell him "It's the area I've got the most experience in. I was just telling you what jumped out at me."

"I'm glad you did." He says before giving the team instructions on where to head first, effectively ending the conversation.

You spend the evening on the phone with Garcia. She finds possible candidates for the second father's remains while you call coroner's offices and search for dental records. You finally get a hit at ten pm, after begging a technician to fax you their report.

Garcia conferences in the rest of the team. With the confirmation that the second father was dead, your preliminary profile was looking better by the minute. Garcia had been building a pool of potential victims since the briefing, so the moment you thought to ask for it, you found it already in your inbox. Four families in the area fit the pattern, so the team split into four groups to stay with the families overnight. Local law enforcement would patrol outside and in the morning, a schedule would be organized. For right now though, Hotch trusted his team over small town cops. JJ and Prentiss took one family, Morgan and Rossi took another, you and Reid took the third, and Hotch picked the local officer that bothered him the least to go with him.
Exhaustion had set in by this point, so you handed over the keys to Reid. Thankfully, he seemed plenty alert. This was probably due to the fact that a) he wasn't growing a being inside of him and b) he could drink as much caffeine as he wanted.

You shiver a bit at the drop in temperature when you walk into the parking lot. Sure, it was Tennessee, but it was Tennessee at night in march.

"Here." Spencer hands you his sweater from earlier which he'd had to lose due to the heat earlier.

"Don't you want it?"

"I've got long sleeves on. You're cold. Go ahead." You take it from him and shrug it on. You tuck the front into your slacks and it passes for a professional, if baggy, look.

You politely don't mention that Reid is definitely breaking the speed limit on the way.

a/n: to make a short story long: this chapter was done last night but i generally like to write a bit past each chapter before I post so I know I'm not going to get writers block lol, so this morning i had a dentist appointment. I was like oh good I'll just sit in the chair and thinking about plot stuff while they clean my teeth. but my hygienist was out for the day, and they just hired a new dentist, so the new guy was going to do my cleaning. I was like oh perfect. he is a dentist he will be so good at this. i should have thought about the fact that hygienists are good at cleanings because its their job. the dentist dude struggled very hard. I have never been stabbed to many times. at one point he had to put gauze over a spot he punctured. it wasn't even near a tooth. point being i was distracted so i couldnt think. then i made chicken salad for lunch which was solid, wrote for an hour, made dinner (lasagna, also solid), and then I sat down and finished a 4k block of writing and now we are here. all this to say: sry this one is late, but the next three chapters are now written, so there be daily uploads for a bit

also this all started bc i was trying to come up w a way to do a sly gender reveal, so in a couple chapters you'll get to find out ;)