Chapter Text
“Hello?”
Raising his fist to knock again, Morgan huffs as he cocks his stature to the side.
“FBI. Open up, please.”
Rolling your eyes as you get up from your chair, you toss your book over into the corner before slinking over to the door.
“You wanna take this one?” you hear the deep voice mutter.
“Not unless someone wants to purchase me a new door,” you lilt blankly, swinging the door open as your deadpan Y/C/E eyes take in the two agents standing before you.
“Miss…Y/N?” the bald, muscular agent asks, his brow furrowed as he slowly looks back at the other man with him.
“Yep,” you say, popping your “p”.
“We need you to come with us,” the bald one says.
“Why?” you shoot back.
“We would enjoy it,” the other man interjects, shooting the dark man a stern look, “if you came with us, because we believe your expertise would be useful in a particular case we are working.”
“Flattery gets you nowhere,” you drone, your eyes grazing over to the man with the stern eyes as you hear the dark one huff.
“Guess her file was right,” he mutters.
“Depends on what was said,” you drone, panning your gaze over to his.
“Says you’re not one for manners,” the agent bites.
“When given, ye shall receive,” you say, your eyes moving back over to the man you would eventually come to address only as Aaron.
Eventually.
And that was how it all started. That is how the BAU department of the FBI swept into your life. Your doldrum, repetitive, caged existence, pulling you from your books and your dark, dank corners and your research journals and your erratic grooming methods and tugged you into a twisting world of interesting minds and spiraling criminals.
A world that, in any psychology office, would have dictated you ruler.
Dictator.
Dead Eyes.
Queen of the Spirals.
It’s easy for a world as basic as the BAU to assume that they are knowledgeable because of the sheer amount of good work they produce, but when “experts” in their field default to the belief that sociopathy and psychopathy are they same thing, you know you are dealing with amateurs.
Case and point? You.
At last, what you portrayed as you.
You had gone from helping with one case, to consulting on a few cases, to Aaron calling you into his office and handing you a position on the team.
Needless to say, the bald one wasn’t impressed.
“Hotch, you can’t just hire a psychopath to work on this team. We…we put people like her in jail!”
“People like me that commit crimes,” you say, not looking up from your file folder as you take a seat on the far end of the table in the briefing room, “you seem to forget that I haven’t committed any.”
“Yeah, but your skewed moral compass dictates you probably will in no time,” he scoffs.
“Right now, you’re lookin’ like a nice candidate,” you robotically lull.
“Did you just threaten the life of a federal agent?” he asks, turning his body and puffing out his chest.
“No. I threatened the life of a rude, insolent, pretentious, bombastic over-grown man-child who uses the literal size of his dick to make up for the proverbial size of his intelligence.”
“Enough,” Aaron states, his words cutting through your mindset as you flicker your deadpan gaze up to him.
“We have four dead girls and two reported missing in the area,” you say, flapping your folder in your hands as you hear someone clear their throat.
“She..she’s actually not a psychopath,” Spencer interjects.
“What?” Morgan breathes.
“He’s right,” you admit freely, “the DSM-5 published in 2013 categorizes my particular ASPD as sociopathy. Just not classic sociopathy.”
As Morgan shoots a confused and exasperated look around the room, Rossi’s mouth upticks into a sly grin as Spencer begins to whirl his hands around in the air.
“Correct. While Y/N has a disregard for social norms and cues, and doesn’t feel any sort of remorse or guilt for the things that she says around us or for disregarding protocol on the few occasions that she has, she is also educated, organized, able to focus, and doesn’t seem to have flare-ups of anger.”
Turning your head slowly, your eyes connect to the side of your colleague’s face, burrowing a hole into his temple as he clears his throat nervously as he continues talking.
“A-a-at least…no flare-ups that we see personally,” he finishes.
“So…what? She…she’s a ‘sorta’ sociopath?” Morgan asks.
“This is getting old,” you drone.
“We can discuss this later,” Hotch bites, glaring at Morgan as he turns his attention back to his folder.
The genius was right. In order to have a definition of classic sociopathy, one would also need a disorganized mind, a withdrawn social status, be uncomfortable enough in physical surroundings to never be able to hold down a job (or acquire an education), and also be unable to form deep emotional attachments to people or things.
However, in order to have a definition for “classic” sociopathy, one also needed deviations.
Skews from the norm.
After all, that’s all psychology really was.
Defining skews from “the norm.”
Maybe it’s a sociopath that’s organized.
Or a sociopath that’s able to form emotional relationships over long periods of time.
Or a sociopath that can putz through an education, or even be able to study and learn enough social cues to be able to conduct themselves in a job.
It was these traits, these…deviations…that you were banking on.
After all, a doctorate in Abnormal Psychology doesn’t just come in handy for diagnosis and catching criminals.
It also comes in handy when creating facades.