Alex Eames & Bobby Goren: Criminal Mind
Title: Criminal Mind
Author: klblack
Theme/Set: 15. Stray / CI
Rating: PG/K+
Warning: Heavy drinking and mild cursing
Claim + additional character(s): Alex Eames & Bobby Goren + Nathaniel Eames (Alex’s younger brother)
Summary: And now she had a criminal record because in a moment of weakness, she’d strayed.
Notes: This is a post-ep for ITWSH. I finally decided to crank one out.
She’d strayed from him once. Regretted it to this day. Despised herself in that moment of weakness. Couldn’t possibly forgive herself for it. And didn’t even have it in her to let him know.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. The mantra was beginning to bother her; she took a drink to shut it up.
You’re a friggin’ idiot. Hm, not quite what she was looking for, but that was better than constantly thinking stupid, stupid, stupid over and over again. Hey, she could drink to that, so she downed another shot of grotesque tequila. She nearly gagged and remembered why she hated the stuff. Well, no more tequila for her.
Rum. That’s what she wanted. The stupid rum - Nathanial had given her a bottle of it for her birthday, laughing his head off, sweet little brother that he was. She liked rum; what a wonderful idea. Just one problem: Where was the rum exactly?
And was she actually quoting Pirates of the Caribbean or was she already drunk? Both sounded like a good answer.
Where was she again? Rum, right - great, now she was straying from her train of thought and alcohol. She couldn’t even be a sad alcoholic. Not like she wanted to become one anyways, but she couldn’t even keep her mind from drifting away from the alcohol she was supposed to be drowning her ungodly sorrows in. How pathetic. Of course, she already knew she was pathetic; after all, just today, she’d practically cried on the stand in front of everyone when she’d been confronted with evidence of her secret sin against Bobby.
Her crime - not believing in him, almost giving up on him. She’d given Deakins the letter! She’d given up on him. If it hadn’t been for Deakins asking her to hold off for two days, she would’ve left her partner in the dust to do work with some other random detective. She could’ve missed the greatest opportunity in the world. It was an atrocity. A crime that deserved punishment. Her tears and humiliation and shame weren’t enough. Degradation wasn’t enough. All the alcohol in the world wasn’t enough. She was weak.
And she hadn’t even had the honor to let him know. Instead, she’d left him in the dark, buried her crime in the back of her mind, and tried to forget that she could’ve helped in killing him on the inside. Of course it had to come back and bite her in the ass. Just another stab in the back in the many wounds he’d already acquired from past partners. She helped in that - helped assault his mind and heart, maybe even his soul.
Write me a letter, Bobby, like I wrote one for you. And you can stray from me, like I strayed from you. It won’t hurt me a bit when I’ve already hurt you.
Drunk Alex was poetic, dark, and morose. She was brutally honest with herself. And had a problem with crying. Very nasty problem. Especially when she ran out of alcohol. She’d forgotten that she’d already drank the rum through the course of their last few cases that had run her down like a truck. Damn. So she sank to the kitchen floor and sobbed like a baby, hugging herself and rocking back and forth. Over a damn letter. Her crime. She did this to herself - to him - to them. And now she had a criminal record because in a moment of weakness, she’d strayed.