❝ you're the best of us. ❞
in which the ex-agent with a therapy license decides to get back in the game.
CRIMINAL MINDS SEASON 4
OC X AARON HOTCHNER
TRIGGER WARNING: THIS STORY CONTAINS GRAPHIC VIOLENCE, MENTIONS OF SEXUAL ABUSE AND ISSUES SURROUND...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
SEVEN. HEAVENLY WATERS
"THEY'RE CONSTELLATIONS!" Emily burst in, making a beeline for the nearest computer. With a swift search in the most accessible engine, she found images for the Heavenly Waters.
Daisy and Spencer looked at each other in deep thought. Spencer nodded to the letters and Daisy rushed over, sorting through them fiercely to find the names of the star patterns. "I remember the Heavenly Waters, I used to be obsessed with space when I was a kid and...aha! Here, June two-thousand and six...the air was salty as I sat by the ocean this morning. He was talking about Delphinus, the dolphin."
"Wait, a dolphin?" Spencer paused, his pen in midair. "One of his origami pictures was a dolphin, right?"
"Yeah," Daisy hummed, walking up to his side. "It looks like he completed six of the nine, and she's doing his last three. That's how she's continuing his legacy. But there's more to it..."
"I've almost got this cracked," Spencer muttered, scratching his chin as he reached out for another sip of coffee. He and Daisy seemed to move in tandem despite their short time knowing each other, and soon enough, Daisy had accidentally walked into Hotch with new information, Reid close behind her.
"Sorry, sir," she muttered, before placing the papers next to Emily. Hotch stared at her for a moment, but chose not to say anything. "They weren't just close. This...Dove and Ryan...they were in love."
Spencer pulled over one of his whiteboards while the team gathered around him. Rossi put his hands in his pockets. "How'd you crack it?"
"Daisy and I profiled the author," Spencer began, and Daisy smiled softly at the use of her first name instead of her last. "Cortland Ryan was on death row with several high-ranking members of the Aryan Brotherhood."
"He got the code from the Aryans?" JJ asked Daisy.
"Either that or he read a fuck-ton of sixteenth-century literature," she replied softly, and her eyes widened when she realised she'd sworn out loud. She made eye contact with Hotch and flushed a bright shade of red. "Sorry."
"The Aryans liked to use a cipher based on a four hundred year-old code written by Sir Francis Bacon," Spencer finished for Daisy.
"So it's a binary code," Morgan noted.
"That's as far as I could get," Daisy wrapped her cardigan around herself. "Spencer managed to figure out the rest. You've got a real genius here."
"That's our boy," Morgan beamed over at Spencer, who rolled his eyes.
"Bacon used a twenty-one letter alphabet. This one's twenty-four. Each letter is assigned a bit string of five binary digits. This combination yields thirty-two possible encodings. Normally, you'd use a computer to run all these combinations, but it was quicker just to do it longhand until I found the right one."
