White Rabbit - A Criminal Minds Fic

Twenty Seven

"And I bet you'd like to know what else I lied about too, right?"

Alice and Spencer stared at each other, his genius brain working overtime until she spoke again.

"Nothing Spencer. I haven't lied about anything else. Except Charlie maybe but we'll come back to him. I knew though that if you knew I had a child here, then you wouldn't take me as serious. That I'd present a conflict of interests. I certainly wouldn't have been able to come back in undercover, which would have put your team in an extremely tricky position trying to figure out another way to do this."

"You should have told us."

"There's a lot of things that I should have done, could have done. But which I haven't or didn't for whatever reason. Yes Abby is my biological child. Which I left here. Think about that for a second. I ran. But I left her here. What kind of mother does that make me?"

"The kind..... "

Alice interrupted him. "It doesn't, Spencer, it doesn't make me a mother. I left her and only thought about myself that night" she sat down on the double bed, kicking her shoes off and pulling her legs up beneath her. Spencer moved to the bed sitting by her to ensure they could keep their conversation hushed.

"You must have had your reasons for leaving her Ally, just like you had your reasons for coming forward when you did."

"My reasons for leaving her, Spencer? They were this. I had no idea how to get her out and I had no idea what I'd do with her once I'd got her out. She may be my child biologically, but she never felt like it. I never had a bond with her, not like Rebecca and Marnie did. At most she was like an annoying little sister to me, one I'd carried inside me for nine horrific months. I spent most of the pregnancy in the infirmary because she was such a drain on me, I was so ill with her. When I was well enough to look after her, I didn't know what to do. So the others did it for me. I'm not surprised she doesn't remember me. She was two when I left her, toddling around and babbling. I'd play with her occasionally, try to act like a Mom to her but I couldn't. It wasn't me she went to if she needed anything, it was the others. I knew though, that Lewis would never let any harm come to her. He idolised her, just like he idolised me. She would have been looked after. She WAS looked after."

Alice looked around the room, the room she'd lived in for so long. It hadn't been changed at all since she'd left. It had been cleaned and the sheets changed but that was it.

"You're judging me for leaving her here aren't you? You think I'm a bad person, a bad parent."

Spencer shook his head, choosing his words carefully. "I'm not judging you for leaving her here. If it wasn't safe to take her with you, then you couldn't take her with you. And I don't think you're a bad person or a bad parent. It sounds like you didn't get chance to be a parent to her. It sounds like you may have been suffering from post natal depression if you struggled to bond with her. You were young and out in the middle of the woods where you wouldn't have got the help or counselling you'd have needed. I'm not judging you at all and you need to believe me when I say you're not a bad person, otherwise these next few days are going to be very hard, okay."

"Okay... Spencer. I'm sorry for not telling you about her. It doesn't change anything though. At least, not for me."

Her hair had fallen forward shielding her face so Spencer very carefully leaned forward and gently pushed it back, tucking it behind her ear.

"Alice it does change things. When this is over, you'll have a daughter to take care off."

"I don't think I can though. I don't think I'll be able to. I don't think.... I don't think I'll want to because of everything she'll remind me of. This place, him."

Reid understood.

As did the rest of the team who had been very carefully monitoring the conversation back at their tiny base in the Rylon Country PD. They'd been as shocked as Spencer when they'd realised that Abby was Alice's daughter. There wasn't anything they could do about that now though. All they could do was bide their time until they had the information needed to be able to go in and take the camp down.

And for that, they needed Alice and Spencer to work together to get Lewis and any the other dangerous elders, to a certain place at a certain time so that they could swoop in.

They were intrigued by an earlier comment she'd made about Charlie and the snippets of the brief conversation they'd picked up between him and her. It very much sounded like Charlie could be an asset to them.

"Sir, they've gone to bed by the sounds of it." Garcia called over to Hotch.

"Yes, it is late. Team, get some rest. We'll monitor them overnight in case anything does happen but I think for tonight, that's all we're getting. We'll wait for them to make contact tomorrow and start reassessing using any new information they feed to us."

"Have we made a mistake sending Spencer in with Alice?" Dave voiced the same thoughts that the rest of the team had had when they'd discovered she'd been lying about having a child, one that was still living at the compound.

"I don't think so. I don't think it will affect her judgement. You heard her, she doesn't feel any connection to the girl. If she did, I think she would have come forward a lot sooner."

Dave nodded "True, true. I guess we'll just have to wait until tomorrow now."