186

3.You're joking, right?

Songs:
•Bad guy- Billie Eilish
•Fade- Lewis Capaldi

"No, I'm not joking."

"Holy shit." Jane laughed. "Is this some sort of weird game to you?"

The Agents shared a look.

"I'm not some injured little girl that needs rescuing by the FBI. I tackled that man. I brought him in."

"Exactly. I wouldn't be offering you this position if I thought you were incapable of taking care of yourself". Hotch tried to explain.

"No." Jane spat.

Emily looked at her with a questioning look. This was definitely not the way she thought this conversation would be going.

"No? I dont understand."

"No, I won't work for you. I'm not some charity case that needs help from the oh so brilliant FBI, or the CIA or MI6 or any other fucking useless agency." Jane had a bad history with authority. The police in Pennsylvania had gotten to know her quite well.

"Jane, I don't think were on the same page. We know you don't need help. We do. We need more people like you." Emily said.

"People like me?"

Hotch cleared his throat again. "More people with IQs of 186. More people with 3 PhDs."

Jane laughed at them. She started to pick up her jacket from the back of her chair and headed towards the door.

"So, you just want to use me for my brain."

"No, we also want to use you because of your criminal record."

She stopped in her tracks and turned around to face Hotch and Emily. She narrowed her eyes and tried to understand what they were getting at.

"What?"

Emily took a step towards Jane. "You know what it's like to be on this end of the job. You know how a suspect feels when they get put in rooms like this. You know how they think. You know how to cover your tracks. You know things about them, things we couldn't possibly understand. You know the bad guy's. We could really use your talents."

Jane, for once didn't have anything to say. She just looked at the people in front of her defeat. She could see the hope in their eyes. They knew they had got her attention. She slowly walked back to her seat and looked down at her blood-stained hands. She took a deep breathe before speaking again.

"If I do this, how would it work?"

"We would take you on as an apprentice. You're qualified so we can make an acceptation for you not going through the academy. You will be required to go to a selection of lectures and will have to pass a weapons test. You will be working with the rest of our team on whatever cases come to us, this includes cases outside of Virginia."

"But where would I live, I can't just drop everything and move away."

"You don't have to give us an answer right now, but we will need to know buy the end of this week."

Jane frowned at Hotch.

"You realise it's Friday, right?" That only gave her two days to make her decision.

"Actually, it's Saturday."

Yeah, I've been here for 21 hours so that makes sense

"Right."

Hotch cracked a tiny smile at Jane. She was difficult and defiant, but she reminded him of himself when he first joined the bureau, and he was already warming up to her. Emily looked at him in surprise. She raised her eyebrows at Jane, indicating to her that this obviously didnt happen a lot.

"This is my number and on the other side is the number for our technical analyst at Quantico. Please call us if you have any questions." He handed her his card and turned to walk out of the door. Jane coughed, unsure of whether this would tarnish her reputation.

"Uh actually I do have a question. What's her name?"

"Who?

"The woman who got stabbed, what's her name?"

The two agents shared a look before Emily spoke up.

"Rebeca, Rebeca Coleman."

"Did uh, did she have a family?"

"Rebeca's daughter and her family are flying out tomorrow to claim her body."

Jane could feel the weight of the world being forced onto her shoulders. She couldn't save Rebeca; she had tried but she just couldn't do it. She couldn't do anything. She knew how victims family's felt. She knew the five stages of grief and all that bullshit. She knew if you thought about it for too long, it would swallow you whole. Her parent's death's had crushed her and it made her feel sick to think that Rebeca's family were about to feel the same way as her. The only thing that made her feel slightly better was that the daughter had her own family, people she could lean on. Jane had been thrown into the deep end, head first, with no one to pull her out. As if he were reading her mind, Hotch spoke up.

"There was nothing you could've done"

Jane just nodded sadly at the man as he left the room.

"Between you and me, youre already on the right track to being his favourite." Emily nodded at the girl in front of her. "I know you haven't made a decision yet but let me be the first to say welcome to the BAU, Agent Hanson."

Jane let a small smile cross her face as she shook hands with Emily.

She signed the release papers, collected her bag and board from an extremely reluctant officer and stepped outside, breathing in the first bit of fresh air in 21 hours. She laughed to herself as she thought about how she had stepped into the precinct in hand cuffs and had stepped out as an apprentice at the FBI.

Holy shit, Im going to be an apprentice at the FBI.

She took out her phone. 20 missed phone calls from her boss. Won't be needing this anymore she thought as she deleted his number. She took out the card that Hoch had given her, and she plugged the numbers into her phone. She stared at her cracked screen, trying to make sense of what the hell just happened. Her finger hovered over the call button but she turned her phone of shoved it back into her pocket. I need a smoke. She sighed before jumping on her board and skating home.

Emily turned to look at Hotch as they sat down on the jet back to Virginia. They had originally gone to New York to attend a training seminar but somehow ended up in the police station after an old friend of Hotch's told them about a stabbing in the park. Jane was stubborn and she would definitely be a challenge to work with. But she was also extremely smart, and she obviously felt empathy towards victims. Both her and Hotch had read the reports about Jane's parents. She could understand why she shut down for so many years, but she hoped Jane joining the BAU wouldn't affect the team. She was running through all of Janes facts and statistics through her mind as the jet took off. She sounded a lot like someone Emily knew. Hotch voiced Emily's thoughts.

"Did we just find another Genius?"