Fallen Leaves

**This fic deals in part with Danny's military service in Kosovo. It has descriptions of rape, attempted rape, mutilation and death. It is graphic in nature.**

Agent Danny Love is a by-the-book kind of a guy, at least he has been for the last few years. His alarm goes off same time every morning regardless of whether he needs to be up. His laundry is always done on a Saturday. He even eats by rote. Monday’s spaghetti, Tuesday is steak and so on. It comes from being a born and bred Corpsman. Most of his habits are military ones.

Right now he’s standing in a blackish puddle of blood that’s pooling out from the body of the perp, Morris, who once had a very ordinary face. Now Morris has no face at all. There are pieces of skull and brain spattered over a waiflike naked girl who’s looking up at Danny blankly as if she’s the one who’s the corpse.

“Thank you,” says Rebecca, her voice as cold and detached as always and Danny looks at the blood which is flowing like a river into the V of her spread legs, then he doubles over and vomits.

Less than a minute later, back up arrives in the form of a SWAT team, closely followed by Mel and Paul.

“What happened? Why didn’t you call us?” yells Paul, flicking his cell open ready to report back to Web.

Danny doesn’t answer. He just watches as Mel kneels on the floor, covering Rebecca with a blanket and talking to her in a low voice. The words can’t be heard but compassion rings out clear as a bell.

“She’s okay,” Mel says, looking around at them, every feature on her face screaming with relief even if she isn’t. “Danny got here in time.”

Mel helps Rebecca to her feet and is about to lead her away from the basement of the accountancy firm when Danny remembers that it’s raining. “Wait!” he calls and hurries over, taking his jacket off and handing it to Mel who slips it over Rebecca’s narrow shoulders, holding the blanket in place as the girl puts the coat on properly.

Danny follows them up the stairs and outside, his trigger finger twitching, ready to shoot any fucker who comes within ten yards of them. The rain is heavier than ever, flash flood type weather, and it does its best to wash him clean, but it’ll never get to the root of the problem. His white shirt turns transparent from the wetness and, similarly, Danny becomes invisible as he watches the action from a distance.

The last thing he sees before he gets into his SUV is the obscene childlike image of Rebecca, oversized waterproof jacket falling below her knees as she trails the wet blanket behind her as if it’s a comforter.

The car offers him some kind of sanctuary and he rests back in the soft leather seats, wondering whether that lump of dead brain matter is gone from his cheek, where he felt it land and solidify earlier.

The mobile phone rings with its fifties style jangle and Danny takes it out of his pocket and looks at it for a while before he answers.

The FBI building is cold and dead, much like the bodies of the vics in the basement morgue and the creepy night staff who haunt the place. Danny takes the stairs rather than the elevator up to the fourth floor where V.C.U. is located. He knows Special Agent Webster is in his office waiting to play games, but for once Danny’s not wary of the boss, instead he’s fucking angry. Filled to the brim with effluent-like rage. Murderous even.

He doesn’t knock at the door, even though all of his conditioning tells him it’s bad to walk in on the C.O. without asking permission first. Fuck those statutory orders. Sometimes a command is there to be broken.

Web has his back to Danny, chair swivelled as he stares out the window at the night time vista of L.A. in all its beautiful ugliness.

“Explain why I shouldn’t have you removed from the Bureau,” he says, without turning around.

Danny feels sick with the rage. He’s vomited once this evening and there’s no reason why he won’t repeat the act all over the fucking floor of the boss’s office. “Why don’t you explain why you put Agent Locke in a position of danger, again,” he says through clenched teeth.

“Irrelevant,” says Webster, spinning around in his chair. “You’re part of a team working under me. I give the orders, you obey them. Rebecca elected to go undercover to lure the unsub out. Your job was to work with Mel and Paul and keep her safe. Instead you acted entirely on your own. You failed, Agent Love.”

Danny stares at the cold fish of a man. How does the bastard define this as failure? Morris is dead. Rebecca is neither raped nor mutilated. Seems to Danny it’s an all ‘round win situation against the odds. “Your job was to give us all the information,” he says. ”You didn’t do that. You left Rebecca at the mercy of a serial rapist and murderer, and you knew more about the perp than you were letting on. You failed. You let that girl down badly as usual.”

He’s pacing the office now, revolted by everything about this case, one step away from handing over his badge. Working security would be better than this fucking travesty of a job.

“I put her in danger because I knew you wouldn’t let any harm come to her. Sometimes a person works at his best under extreme pressure… especially when he’s in a familiar situation.” Web crosses his fingers and rests his chin on his hands. “This is a situation you’re familiar with, isn’t it Danny?”

Danny wants to flip out. Wants to scream and cry and black out, do all the things he did for those months in that VA hospital in Illinois.

“Why do you think I chose you, Danny?” says Web, his saccharine voice seeping into Danny’s veins like poison.

“Kosovo wasn’t easy but it was the makings of you… as far as I’m concerned.” Web flicks on his monitor and a gruesome slideshow of images are displayed. Things Danny’s almost been able to forget, except when he wakes up screaming from the nightmares.

He sees the photos of the camp in Pristina and dies a little bit more on the inside.

“We were heroes there,” he says blankly, “Still are I guess. We came in waving our U.N. flags in our pretty blue armoured vehicles and they welcomed us into the city. Then we got to the camp and it was-”

Danny’s staring into the past now. Lost in a muddle of memories; of bad things, worse things; hatred and self-hatred.

Sergeant Love of the 26th Marine. He’s put up with plenty of stick for the name during his service, but he’s twenty eight now and has learned not to take any notice of it. Soon as they enter the camp, he jumps out of the jeep ordering his men to be on full alert. He doesn’t want any more casualties from lost limbs this tour. Too many of them so far. The number of land mine injuries has been numbering well over ten a month. This may be a concentration camp but it sure as hell doesn’t mean it’s safe.

Some of the Serbs give themselves up like it’s a relief. Others take a stand, firing at them with what’s left of their limited ammo from behind broken down walls. It doesn’t take long to quell the resistance.

Once the battle for Pristina is almost won, Danny surveys the area. It looks more like a fucking farm than a camp. Smells like it too. Once he’s certain the place has been secured, he takes his first steps into one of the warehouses? Barns? He’s struggling to describe it because every word sounds wrong. These places are where those bastards kept human beings, not animals. He sees pens full of terrified women staring at him. Huge brown eyes looking up at him from starved pixie faces and for the first time in his life he doesn’t know what to do. He’s petrified in the truest sense of the word.

“Food,” he yells at the top of his voice then remembers he has a radio. “Food,” he says into the mic. “Food, water. For Christsake. Now.” While he’s talking he opens the gates of the pens and waits for the women to do something, anything, but they just stand there cowering away from him like frightened lambs.

The women have nowhere to go and the Americans don’t know what to do with them. This place is barren like unholy ground; there’s no life here, just bodies and blown off limbs and stains on the mud that everyone knows are from massive amounts of spilt blood. Danny reads the reports that have been painstakingly transcribed by the pallid faced translator and wishes he hadn’t. He checks with the medics who are caring for the injured women. Women who are mutilated, who have been raped and beaten, who have had babies cut out from them and discarded in waste heaps behind the camp..

Danny knows that he’s discovered a living Hell, and he cries in painful bursts of tears every time he finds a minute’s peace.

On day six Danny walks into the holding cell at the far end of warehouse three and wishes he hadn’t.

He’s never thought much of Lieutenant Taylor. The officer is an insipid little man who inspires nothing in the troops. Danny reckons that some of these guys have their commissions paid for by rich daddies, because there’s no other explanation as to how they get on in the service. Danny’d never do that no matter how rich his family were. As it happens they’re dirt poor, but they’ve taught him how to keep his head held up high and work for a living.

Taylor is a pathetic specimen. He has a layer of blond fluff over his top lip that’s trying to masquerade as a moustache. He wears round wire-rimmed glasses and when Danny makes his angry face at him Taylor always vanishes into thin air. Sometimes Danny laughs at the ineffectual dick, but not today. The excuse of a man is normally too weak to challenge even the youngest of privates, but finally it looks like he’s found someone he’s able to dominate.

What Danny discovers, as he looks through the doorway of that cell, is something that he’ll never forget. Taylor has one of the Albanian women spread out on the floor under him. She’s naked but for the rags of clothing and she’s pleading in these little mouse like whimpers. Danny might not be able to speak Albanian or Croatian but he knows the sound of desperation.

To start off with, as absurd as it might seem, Danny’s not entirely sure what Taylor’s doing. At almost thirty, he discovers he’s still a naïve little boy who thinks that death is the worst that can happen to a person. With one swift movement, Taylor’s knife slices through tissue and he gives the woman a clinical mastectomy. Fondling the mass of yellow glandular tissue Taylor does this full body shudder and Danny knows he’s come from having his hand inside her breast. Inside it.

Heaving his guts up, Danny races across the length of the cell like a lion, fast and powerful and angry. But he’s never going to be quick enough. Taylor looks over his shoulder and then with one sudden movement he takes the knife to the girl’s throat and slides it across from one ear to the other.

Blood! Danny’s never seen so much blood in his life. He pulls Taylor off the body of the mutilated Albanian woman and he tries to stop her from bleeding out, but he’s no medic. Her heart dies and she stops breathing with a sigh of relief.

“She had info,” says Taylor coldly as he sips water from his canteen, standing over Danny who’s elbow deep in the mess of body parts that was once a person.

The lieutenant is a different man to the one Danny knows. He’s flushed with euphoria, omnipotent from the act of raping and killing this poor nameless bitch.

Danny stares at the bastard who’s looking down at him as if he’s the one who’s a piece of shit.

With a roar of rage Danny tackles Taylor to the hardened mud floor. Officer or not, he’s gonna see to this sumbitch and make him pay. Make him know what it feels like to be that poor girl who he’s just raped and murdered.

Twisting Taylor’s wrist until the bones begin to crack Danny takes the knife off him and uses it to open the man’s clothing - webbing first then tunic and pants. Holding Taylor down with his left hand he slices the right nipple cleanly off. Taylor screams high-pitched and womanly and Danny shivers and tries his best to silence the urges. ‘Make him know what it feels like, ’whispers his subconscious. ‘Make sure he’s never able to do it again.’

Taylor’s dick is slimy and wormlike. Danny watches silently as the man pisses himself, and waits politely for him to finish. Then, with a howl of satisfaction that’s almost like orgasm, he slices off the guy’s prick and balls, squeezing the bloodied mass in his hand before throwing it in the direction of the dead Albanian girl.

He holds the knife high above his head like it’s a ritual then slits Taylor’s throat.

When they find him, Danny is on his knees bent over with his face to the floor. Broken.

For eight months Danny is held in a military prison charged with the rape, mutilation and murder of Luljeta Boshnjaku and the mutilation and murder of Grant Ellason Taylor III.

Once they take enough notice to cross reference criminal DNA records with military ones they drop all charges and discharge him from the service releasing him into the hands of the psychiatric team at St Michael’s VA hospital not far from his home town.

Five years later he’s recruited by Virgil Webster for the Violent Crimes Unit.

“Luljeta means flower of life, I looked it up,” he says in conversational tone. And when Web looks blank he explains further. “The girl’s name was Luljeta. Pretty I thought. She was pretty too, little and blonde like Rebecca.”

“Finally,” says Web, heaving a sigh as if he’s getting through to a particularly difficult child. “You had instincts back then, Agent Love. You just have to learn to listen to them again. You’re the polar opposite of Rebecca. She sees things with the gut intuition of a victim, whereas you-“

“I’m the unsub?” says Danny in disbelief and now he really does feel like vomiting. He’s been brought into this organisation because he thinks like a perpetrator? A monster.

“In a way,” says Web. “What you did in Pristina and what you wanted to do are two entirely separate things. Look at the screen.”

Danny stares blankly at the images on the computer monitor. He sees Luljeta’s body with the slit throat grinning like a wide mouthed frog and the globules of fatty breast tissue spilling out of her. He sees her ravaged cunt and the slices of skin that have been flayed from her thighs. He sees her shredded arsehole and the broken wrists and the distinctive wound where her little finger has been bitten off. The images change to Taylor and he turns away.

Danny stares back at the screen like he’s in a trance. There are pictures of Taylor from every angle showing the bruises and the killing wound in his throat. Mostly though, they concentrate on his genital area, showing the clean incisions in close up. The slideshow culminates in a shot of Luljeta with Taylor’s sex organs splattered obscenely over her face.

“What did you want to do to him?” says Web. “What did you want to do to the man who tried to do the same to Agent Locke?”

“You want to fight to save these girls,” says Web ignoring him as if his words are pointless, “but that’s not why I brought you into this team. I brought you here because you want to cause damage.”

“No!” says Danny. He’s been through years of psychiatric help to get past this.

Anger isn’t red in Danny’s case. It’s misty blue and it obscures everything except the target of his rage.

He’s that lion again, big and powerful and fast. Forcing Webster down onto the desk, he rips the suit pants away from his backside and wants to rape him. He wills his flaccid cock to get hard enough to make this man pay for trying to turn him into that monster. But it’s never going to happen. Web was wrong when he chose him.

The letter opener is shaped like a Samurai warrior’s sword, a kitana, and it sits looking at him from its display stand on the right hand side of the desk. Danny must have seen it a million times before, but he can’t for the life of him recall it. It falls into his hand as if it’s meant to be and Danny thinks he hears Web talking to him, but the misty blue is like white noise and cuts out everything else.

There’s blood pouring from Web’s jugular. More blood than Danny has seen for a long time. He tugs hard, pulling the short blade up and sideways from left to right, ripping and tearing the skin and muscle. It’s hard work and he frowns when the job is done. His suit pants are warm and wet and he wonders if he’s pissed himself, but everything’s thick and red and he’s glad he’s not lost control. He’d hate that.

When Rebecca comes into work early next morning, battered and bruised but still ready to fight, she finds Virgil Webster exsanguinated and Danny kneeling in a puddle of dried blood, his head bent to the floor. Broken.