The List - Part 10
Title: The List
Author: ardatli
Rating: Mature (language/mild sexual content)
Pairing: CM: Gen - Casefic / QAF: Brian/Justin
Timeline: CM: Between 307 and 308 / QAF: Two years post-513
Parts: 10/15
Beta: roane, the wonderous and amazing. She's never seen QAF, alas (working on it!), so the character sections there are only beta-ed for the writing. All errors are mine.
Summary:
Criminal Minds / Queer As Folk (US)
Someone is mutilating and killing men in Pittsburgh's gay village. When Pittsburgh's finest can't save Pittsburgh's hottest, they call on the FBI for help. Can the BAU stop the Liberty Avenue Killer before the unsub strikes again?
10.
November 14th, 2007, 9:30 am:
“Horvath’s going to run them all over to the safehouse once we find Blayne Ross-“ Reid was filling Hotch in on the current state of things. A figure moved in his peripheral vision and he turned his head slightly as JJ joined the pair of men. She didn’t look terribly pleased, and Reid’s brow furrowed a little at the frown on her face.
“Kinney’s holding back information,” JJ shook her head.
“You think he knows something more about the unsub?” Hotch asked for clarification.
“I do,” she nodded. “Even if he’s not aware that he does. Taylor’s being slightly more forthcoming, but he can’t give us much other than the sketch and the basic outlines of the original incident. I don’t know how much more I can get out of them.”
Reid shifted, stuck one hand in his pocket. “Let me talk to Kinney,” he suggested, throwing the idea out there for consideration. “Morgan wasn’t wrong about his dominant personality, and he’s not going to view me as a threat. I think I may have the best chance of anybody of getting him to open up about whatever it is that he’s hiding.”
--
The chairs in the interview room at the police station weren’t technically torture devices, but they certainly felt like they were, all hard plastic that probably hadn’t ever been cleaned. Brian settled back into one as best he could, and waited for Skinny to start whatever interrogation he’d dreamed up. The blinds were up on the window that looked out into the hallway and Brian could see Justin leaning against the wall out there, speaking with Agent Jareau.
Doctor Reid had joined him in the interview room and was closing the door. Brian gave him the once-over with an abstractly critical eye as Reid turned and approached the table. The FBI agent had runway-model features; interesting rather than overly pretty. High fashion looks, if you didn’t consider what he was actually wearing. The camera would love him. His wardrobe needed a defibrillator.
He caught Reid’s eye and smiled, slowly, deliberately, keeping eye contact as he did so. He saw Reid swallow, a subtle movement, caught the slight dilation of his pupils. This might be more fun than he’d originally anticipated.
Kinney’s eyes were hazel, flecked with green and gold, liquid and warm- It didn’t signify. Reid was the first to look away, dropping his eyes and giving Kinney the advantage. He’d be taking the lead back again in a moment anyway, if things went as planned. He sat down across from the other man and put the file folder he was carrying down on the table. Brian was still watching him when Reid looked up again, one hand resting casually on the table and the other arm draped over the back of his chair. It was a defiant pose, intended as a challenge, and Reid took that as his starting point.
“You have issues with authority,” Reid began, leaning backward in a conscious mirror of Kinney’s posture. “Why is that?”
Brian titled his head a little, kept his smile the same, but something about the younger man was prickling at the back of his neck. Game on. “You’re the profiler, you tell me.”
Reid considered it, considered a couple of options, then cut right to the meat of things. “Insecurity.”
Brian blinked, shook his head once, chuckled. “Come again?” This obviously wasn’t going to be the ‘do you have any idea where Brandon might go, blah blah blah...’ garbage that he’d gotten from Jareau before. What was he up to?
Reid leaned in, put his elbows on the table between them and watched Brian’s expressions shift, noted his gaze flicker out and over Reid’s shoulder at the door. He had deflection and escape on his mind, was feeling discomfort under scrutiny. Reid could sympathize. “You only feel safe when you’re the most powerful one in the room,” he elaborated on his initial evaluation. “It’s not compensation...”
Brian snorted. “You’ve got that right.”
“You’re incredibly successful by any measure - financially, professionally, socially - and yet you still constantly feel like you have to prove something to others. That suggests to me that you don’t think you deserve all those things you have.”
And again Brian’s eyes went up and away, his gaze flickering over Reid’s shoulder and through the window. Justin seemed to feel the weight of his look, even though it was fleeting, met his eyes and gave him a worried smile in response. Brian felt the raw edges of his nerves smooth down and pulled his glance back to Reid, who was still talking.
“A feeling probably based in the abuse you suffered as a child and adolescent, which eroded your burgeoning sense of self. More importantly, you’re afraid that, since you don’t deserve them, you’re going to lose them.”
Brian reacted almost viscerally to that, pulling his hand back and sitting up a little taller. He flicked his eyes at the window again, then back at Reid. “You’re profiling me,” he laid out the accusation, as ridiculous and redundant as saying it out loud might be. “That’s what you do all day, isn’t it? Profile psychos and killers? I thought we’d already established that I’m innocent, here.” He let out a dark laugh, just one, rested his hand against his chin, and stood his metaphorical ground. “Blood’s a bitch to get out of Prada.”
Reid clasped his hands, watched Kinney over top of them. “We don’t only profile killers, Mr. Kinney; victimology is a major part of it as well. And you’re right - you’re not a killer.”
Throwing his hands up in the air in a grim ‘hallelujah,’ Brian affected a look of shock. “You finally figured it out. What tipped you off?"
“You’ve studied human behaviour as much as I have, albeit in a different context. You know what buttons to push to get the results you want, but not just to sell people things,” Reid suggested, his lips twitching up a little as he hit a mark. He shifted in his chair again, picked up his pen and toyed with it, looking at Brian while he spoke.
“It makes you feel safe. You do it because natural reactions are too unpredictable, too frightening; shock is easier to fathom, and control. Your arrogance is a conscious cover. You’re not naturally narcissistic or damaged enough to be capable of the kind of brutality that our unsub has shown. And speaking of which.” Reid flipped open the folder in front of him, marking an end to that section of the interview. Destabilize, then refocus on what he really wanted to talk about. Basic technique.
“You were able to have Brandon banned from your club - you had all the power there. And yet you took part in this bet. What did he say or do that made publicly proving yourself so important?”
Brian found himself at a loss for words. His immediate impulse was to say something sarcastic, something caustic, but the right words wouldn’t come. He set his jaw instead, looked down at his hands. He fought the memory of the way he’d felt back then, the cancer of self-doubt that had gnawed at his gut, the bleakness that had surrounded him from the moment Justin had walked out his door. Again. Only that time, it had seemed certain that the little twat wasn’t going to come back. Really, he hadn’t been responsible for his own reactions after that. Anyone would go a little off the rails with that kind of provocation.
And speaking of provocation - it would probably be bad form to haul off on an FBI agent. For someone who was generally opposed to fists as a method of communication, he’d been having a lot of violent urges since Skinny and Muscles had first showed up at his office with Officer Krupke yesterday. They probably got that kind of reception a lot.
Reid waited, but it seemed that no answer was forthcoming. It was obvious he’d hit a nerve, and he pushed that button again to see what would happen. “Was it that he was challenging you on your own turf? Is that what it was? A power struggle for top dog?”
That gave Brian a way back into the conversation, and he grabbed at it a little bit too energetically. He looked back up, sneered at Reid in a gesture of bravado. “There was never a question of who was going to be the top,” he advised. A flash of his eyes back at Reid, throw some heat into it - would the little twerp be distracted? No, Brian re-evaluated. Reid wasn’t that little. Skinny, yes, could use a lot more time at the gym, but they were probably about the same height.
Kinney was deflecting again; that was fine. That was to be expected. Reid flickered his eyebrow at Brian and grasped for the next topic he wanted to address. “What was supposed to happen once you won? What were the terms of the wager?”
That was an easier question to answer. Brian’s shoulders relaxed a little, some of the tension there ebbing. “If he won, I had to let him back into Babylon. If I won, he’d let me fuck him.” He was aiming for shock value, ended up surprisingly disappointed by Reid’s non-reaction. “I turned him down,” Brian added for good measure.
“Why?”
“I’d made my point.” Brian shrugged off the question, leaned back in his chair and resisted the urge to clasp and unclasp his hands. He drummed his fingers on the table instead, pursed his lips and elaborated. “He could spout all the bullshit he wanted about taking my place, or being younger and hotter; I’d already proven him wrong. Besides,” he tipped his head a little, a concession to the good doctor. Let him think he’d scored a point. “There are hundreds of guys who would give their left ball to suck on mine.” One corner of his mouth quirked up in a smile, as though he’d said something funny. “Why waste my evening on someone who was only there because he was a loser?”
And that was the thing they’d been missing. Reid’s mind spun with that new fact, nibbling around the edges, fitting it into place. “That could have been the final humiliation,” he suggested aloud, briefly forgetting the interview in the rush of understanding. “He wasn’t even worth collecting the forfeit.”
What was Skinny saying? The final humiliation-? “Wait.” Brian shook his head, sat up a bit in his chair. The weight of it was enormous, heavy and crushing, and he spoke slowly as he tried to wrap his head around the implications. “You’re saying that this is my fault? That if I’d lost the bet,” not that he’d have let that happen. Or would he, if he’d known what the results would be? “Or if I’d fucked Brandon, then what -? Those men would still be alive?”
Reid snapped back in, shook his head and tried to correct his error in speaking aloud. “No, we don’t know that,” he assured Kinney. “The kind of obsessive power-dominance personality capable of committing these crimes was bound to snap at some point. If it hadn’t been about the list, it would have been something else as his focus.”
That wasn’t nearly as reassuring as it was probably supposed to have been. Brian sagged back in the chair, his hand coming up to splay across the side of his face. He stared off into the middle-distance, not seeing the room around him.
“Mr. Kinney?” Reid stood, anxious to get back to the team and their impromptu bullpen, share the information. “You can’t blame yourself.” It was a platitude he was mouthing, but his attention was entirely elsewhere. Brandon had challenged Kinney, had lost to him and been humiliated by him, had been further humiliated by life failures even as his rival continued to succeed - Brian was at the center of everything. Was it possible that Kinney himself was a focus, along with the list of men and the bet that had precipitated Brandon’s initial downward slide?
“Thank you for your time today,” Reid added as an afterthought, even as Kinney was already standing.
Brian rose, his body on autopilot and his brain checked out. He needed a smoke. No, more than that. He needed to get drunk, or high, or fucked up in some other immediate and potent way. He needed Justin. He needed out of there. But more than all of that, he needed to get back into control.
He paused at the door, glanced back at Reid. He straightened his shoulders, closed his eyes for a heartbeat, remembered what it was to be Brian Kinney.
“Dr. Reid?”
“Yes?”
“Are you ever wrong?”
Reid hesitated. “Sometimes.”
Brian gave Reid a sly, smug smile, and another flash of those hooded eyes. There - there was that response again, and he hadn’t imagined it this time either. ‘Shock value’ this, Skinny. “There are some things I’m never wrong about.” And he walked out, letting the door to the interview room swing closed behind him.
**
[notes: Officer Krupke is a reference from West Side Story:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq28qCklEHc
Brian’s called Horvath that before. It didn’t endear them much.]