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It starts when the police officer in Jamaica pulls her out of that bed. He puts rough hands on her, pulls her, wakes her out of a dead sleep and suddenly she's eight again, she's nine, she's fourteen and seventeen and nineteen and twenty-three, and all she can do is scream.
No, it starts before that.
Of course it starts before that.
The town of Queensbury, New York, never forgot the image of 17 year old Elle Greenaway sprinting barefoot down the street in front of the high school in nothing but a torn pair of denim shorts, beaten and screaming bloody murder. At least, not in the time she’d lived there, and not since she’d come back.
They’d taken her out of the city and brought her upstate because she was troubled, which was a nice was of saying her stepfather had been touching her and she’d threatened to slit his throat if nothing changed. Nothing will go on your record, they assured her. They could make this go away.
Nothing went on his record, either, and Elle went away to live with her grandparents upstate, in that shitty little town off the highway to nowhere where she met Mark Allan.
She hated Mark Allan. By that time, she'd more than grown into her distaste for men, and what she saw in him was a plug and a dick. She hadn't been sure what he'd seen in her, not until he invited her to his house for a small party and gang-raped her with four of his friends. She'd managed to escape, run down the road screaming for help, and to this day she wonders if they’d ever meant for her to leave that house.
By the time someone let her inside to call 911, the damage had been done. She was the hysterical whore, the bitch who fought back, and her mom wouldn't let her move back down to the city. Elle caused unnecessary tension, she'd said, and so Elle applied to a college halfway across the country and got the hell out of New York.
So, yeah, it starts before Jamaica. But in Jamaica, something changes. In Jamaica, she puts all her combat training to use against those cops pinning her on her stomach and it doesn't matter. She can't move, and the next time she sleeps, the nightmares come back.
She's in her grandparents' house and her stepfather is there, only sometimes he's her mother, and she's running but she can't move, and she falls and she's too weak to get up, and when he climbs on top of her she screams soundlessly and wakes up with a raw throat and a racing heart.
Hotch and Morgan are staring at her. She stares back, daring. The rest of the flight is quite, and she gets no more sleep.
Elle had come here from Sex Crimes to do more of what she's been doing since she graduated with her degree in psychology. Some days, she wonders if she'd made the right choice.
Of course, the boys want to play the freak's game. Elle looks to JJ for support, thinking of that lock of blonde hair, but she's already out the conference room door. Gideon leaves next, storms out, really, and that's just typical.
Sometimes, Elle can't help thinking she's the only one here who doesn't get off on the hunt. She just wants to put the bastards in the ground.
The girl they're looking for has been missing for two years. Elle's pretty sure she's been missing for twenty. Maybe twenty-eight; maybe she'd never been there at all.
She used to lay awake at night and listen to her stepfather fuck her mother. He was loud, she heard him through the thin apartment walls, heard the names he called her. She never heard her mother make a sound, and neither of them spoke of the bruises around her neck, or the ones on the insides of Elle's thighs.
When Gideon shows back up, he doesn't bother to explain anything to JJ, just tells her what he needs and leaves again. Elle, curled up on the couch and trying not to fall asleep, watches her go. She won't go after him, won't ask for an explanation, and Elle's so tired. They're playing games with this girl's life, and they're not even abiding by their own rules.
She's not sure when she drifts off, but she's in the middle of another half-waking nightmare when Hotch puts his hand on her shoulder. Then he orders her home, and if it hadn't already started, it does then.
She says no. She says stop. Then she tries to bargain over his shouting and, disgusted with both of them, reaches for her gun. None of it matters.
He puts his fingers inside her and tears her open, and none of it matters.
Rules.
She finds herself chafing against the constraints of language in her hospital bed, wishing for a word for men as vitriolic as any of the slurs for women. That bastard wrote "rules" in her blood. He'd told her to follow the rules the men had broken, and then he'd gotten inside her.
The hospital had been an endless parade of men looking at her, prodding her, examining her and cutting her open to look inside. A female nurse named Jo comes in and washes the blood out of her hair the day after the surgery, and she thanks her and holds her hand.
"You're going to recover from this, sweetheart," she says, and Elle wonders if she knows what Elle knows.
Gideon had told her she understood. He hadn't asked. He's said, "You understand," and she hadn't responded, and he'd nodded like that said it all.
She understands. She understands men.
Back home, she dreams of paralysis and silence. The figures shift: her stepfather, her mother, her father, a blank figure with a penis and a gun.
She wonders, often, if her father was the man she remembers. She doubts it.
It never ends.