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Strauss reached for the recorder, her thumb finding the switch, and the mechanical click that followed cracked through the room louder than it had any right to, the last of the afternoon light cut flat across the blinds, striping the surface of the desk in thin bands that crossed over the recorder, over Strauss's folded hands, over the corner of the legal pad angled just out of Eleanor's line of sight.
Eleanor's fingers found each other in her lap, lacing tight beneath the desk where nothing could see them as somewhere down the hall Hotch was probably sitting in a room exactly like this one, answering to someone exactly like this, and the thought of it moved through her chest fast enough to leave a mark before she managed to smooth her face back into something unreadable.
"Please state your name and rank for the record." Strauss's pen was already resting against the pad, the tip hovering just above the paper, and the question landed less like an opening and more like the first shot fired across a distance neither of them had bothered pretending wasn't there.
Something in Eleanor's chest pulled tightly, gone before it could reach her face, and her spine found another inch of height she hadn't consciously ordered it to find, old training rising up ahead of anything else in her, steadying her voice before she trusted herself to use it. "Supervisory Special Agent Eleanor Beaumont. Behavioral Analysis Unit, FBI."
The movie flickering across the screen was one Spencer had clearly seen enough times that his lips moved faintly along with the lines, half a second ahead of the actors themselves, his eyes tracking motion he already anticipated before it happened. Eleanor sat beside him with her knees drawn up, the phone pressed to her ear, her attention split between a scene she wasn't following and Luke's voice threading through from somewhere she pictured as his kitchen, restless in the way he only got when his hands needed something to do and his legs wouldn't stay still under him.
"Stan said we might get called in this time," he muttered over the phone, and something in the pacing of it, each word arriving a fraction too fast on the heel of the last, told her he'd been sitting on the sentence longer than the conversation had actually been running.
She let her head fall back against the cushion, watching the ceiling instead of the television. BAU cases usually wrapped in days, most of the time, back before the week was even out. His didn't. His and Phil's disappeared for however long the file demanded, no promises attached, and that difference sat under everything else they had been planning. "Well, it's not like you and Phil can sit this one out."
Nothing came back for a few seconds. She could hear something shift on his end, the scrape of a chair leg or maybe just him dropping into one, and when he spoke again the words came out slower, like he'd turned them over a few times before deciding to let them go. "I could ask for a favor from Milliken. See if he can rule us out as unfit."
