Third Person's POV

Derek is sitting at his desk which is right across from Spencer's desk reading the paper as Spencer was playing chess. He wishes that Maya was here, she'd make this a little bit enjoyable. Even if she's not really talking that much, which is fine because he usually does more of the talking anyway. Gideon approaches Spencer's chess board.

"Check, checkmate in three moves." Gideon says to Spencer which made him look up at him confused.

"What?" Spencer says to Gideon as Derek laughs at Spencer's face.

"You know, you'll beat him when you start learning." Derek says as Spencer looks at him.

"Learning what?" Spencer asked.

"To think outside the box, pretty boy." Derek says as he went back to the paper that he was reading.

"Question for you." Elle asked as Derek sighed a little before turning to face her.

"Shoot." He says.

"The Footpath Killer. Why did he stutter?" Elle asked Derek.

"Oh, come on Elle, we've all asked him and he won't say. He wants us to figure it out." Spencer says without looking up from his chess game.

"Well, okay, I'm up for a challenge." Elle says.

"Good, because these go to you." A voice says as Elle turned around and there was a young blonde female.

"Special Agent Jennifer Jareau, JJ if you'd like." JJ says.

"Elle." Elle says.

"Greenaway. Highest number of solved cases in Seattle, three years running. Specialty in sex offender cases." JJ says as Elle has an impressed look on her face.

"Not bad." Elle says.

"Well, I'm the unit liaison. My specialty is untangling bureaucratic knots. You'll probably be talking to be a lot. My door is always open. Mostly because I'm never in my office. So just call me on my cell, okay? We'll talk." JJ  says.

"BAU team, can you meet me in the conference room, please? I need to tell show you something." Hotch says as they get to the conference room with the rest of the team. When they get settled Hotch goes over the case.

"This is from the Phoenix office. Bradshaw College in Tempe. Six fires in seven months." Hotch says.

"Who recorded it?" Gideon asked.

"A student with a digital camcorder. He was watching a fire in the building, across from their dorm. The other person you'll see is his roommate, 20-year-old Matthew Rowland." JJ says as she plays the footage as the team watches intently.

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on the jet

"There are two commons stressors for a serial arsonist." Spencer says.

"Loss of job." Elle says.

"When was the first fire set?" Derek asked.

"March. The next one was in May, and the third one wasn't until September. Then two weeks later, there were three in one night." Hotch says.

"He's speeding up, fires are closer together." Gideon says.

"Hey, Reid you have a statistic on arsonists?" Derek asked.

"82% are white males between 17 and 27." Spencer says. "Meanwhile female arsonists are far less likely, since their motive is typically revenge."

"Sounds like your boys a student." Derek says.

"Oh, don't be so sure, you rely too much on precedent, you never allow for the unexpected. If he went from setting one fire to three in two weeks' time..." Gideon says.

"Rapid escalation." Hotch says.

"He's gone from the power to damage a building to something far more satisfying. The power over life and death. Who are we talking to first?" Gideon asked.

"Dean of Students, Ellen Turner." Hotch says.

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"No badges. I don't want to satisfy the Unsub's need for attention by letting him know he got the FBI here. Try not to look official." Gideon says as they all share a look then they walk inside to meet the Dean of Students, Ellen Turner.

"Obviously, I'd rather be meeting you under different circumstances. This is Fire Inspector Zhang." Ellen introduces.

"This morning, the chemistry department reported several bottles of highly flammable chemicals missing." Zhang says.

"I'm prepared to evacuate this campus." Ellen says.

"That brings with its own problems." Hotch says.

"You might evacuate the arsonist as well." Gideon says.

"When the case goes unsolved, the campus is re-opened but the fires start up again." Spencer says.

"Wait, hold on a second, you said the chemicals went missing today." Derek says.

"Uh-huh." Zhang says wondering where Derek is going with this.

"It says here that one of the previous fires was set with diesel fuel that disappeared from the grounds-keeping facility. How long after it disappeared was the fire set?" Derek asked.

"One day." Ellen says.

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"Door was locked." Hotch says.

"Matthew Rowland and his roommate watched the doorknob turned against the lock." Spencer says.

"But the Unsub couldn't get in, so he pours the accelerant into the room from halfway, which means." Derek says.

"He couldn't see the fire." Hotch says.

"But he could hear Matthew Rowland screaming." Spencer says.

"Yeah, but not for long. He would have left quickly." Hotch says.

"To avoid being spotted, right, Hotch?" Spencer says.

"You're right." Hotch says.

"Pyromania is a mental disorder may just be a simple myth, but we do know from precedent that serial arsonists derive pleasure from pathological fire-setting." Spencer says.

"Sex and power." Hotch says.

"So why would he set a fire he couldn't watch?" Spencer asked.

They walked back to meet with the rest of the team who was with Ellen and Zhang.

"They turned the water off just before the fire. The last three were set with these. Two devices, simultaneous ignition." Zhang says.

"There was no device used on Matthew Rowland. Unsub set that one manually?" Gideon asked.

"He wanted to be there. To enjoy the kid's death." Derek says.

"Not necessarily." Hotch says.

"Well, if the target was Matthew Rowland, then why set the other two fires?" Elle asked.

"Motives for arson are relatively simple." Spencer says.

"There's vandalism, crime concealment, political statement, profit, and revenge." Derek says.

"We interviewed Matthew Rowland's roommate, and he said Matthew was very well liked. No reason for revenge." Zhang says.

"What about vandalism?" Ellen asked.

"No the fires are too sophisticated." Elle says.

"There's an underlying strategy in this case. Matthew, fire fighters, injured victims, to the unsub they're not people, they're..." Gideon says.

"Chess pieces." Spencer says.

"Exactly." Gideon says.

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Derek walks around the building. "Alright. I wanna see a dormitory on fire. Where would I start?" He asks to himself as he's the only one there. He looks up towards the other floors then towards the basement. "Duh in the basement. The upper levels would be fuel." He says as he's having a conversation with himself. But he could care less either way. "Then why would I start them on the third floor?" He asked himself again then he closed his eyes for a brief second until an idea popped in his head. "Because it wasn't the building I wanted to set on fire."

Derek is walking with Elle when they hear fire alarms. He looks across and sees smoke coming from the building across from them, causing them to bolt to the building. Derek and Elle escort as many students as they could out of the building. He was about to run out when he spotted a student hiding in the corner passed out. His lungs were filling with smoke, but he runs over to the girl, picks her up and runs as fast as he could. A couple other students finds him and he starts coughing like a mad man. The boy takes the girl from him and they all run. He starts to feel dizzy but he manages to make his way out. He stumbles a little but caught his balance.

Later

They've been looking at pictures of witnesses all night and they haven't found a thing. "I've been at this all night and I got nothing." He says as he's basically running on caffeine and snacky foods at this point. 

"Fire starting is one-third of the homicidal trial, an early professor of adult dissociative criminal behavior." Elle says.

"If we look in his childhood, we'd probably find all three. Bed-wetting and cruelty to animals." Derek says.

"Absent or abusive father, trouble with the opposite sex, chronic low self-esteem. M.O will be dynamic. Evolving, as fire-starting escalates, they thrive on panic, fear. It's just standard profile of a serial arsonist." Gideon says.

"Based on hundreds of interviews." Spencer says.

"Based on precedent." Derek says.

"Everything the Unsub should be according to research." Elle says.

"But we're off the mark." Hotch says.

"Because of two missing elements." Spencer says.

"Sex and power." Derek says.

"The two motives that drive a serial arsonist, and without them, we don't have a profile." Gideon says.

Chemistry Department

Hotch and Spencer goes to talk to some of the chemistry students to see if they could find anything that could help them with the case.

"Reid, since you're more their age, why don't you do the talking?" Hotch says.

"Yes sir." Spencer says as he approaches the kids.

"Hi, guys, my name is Dr. Spencer Reid, I'm an agent with the BAU, Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI, which it used to be called the BSU, the Behavioral Science Unit, but not anymore. What I'm trying to say is, I'd love to know how you can help me figure out who the arsonist is." Spencer says as he was about to rant about the BAU, but stopped himself.

A boy named Jeremy steps forward. "May I, please? Thank you." He takes the lightbulb from Spencer's hand.

"See this? Drill a hole on the side, fill it with gasoline or whatever is good and flammable, turn the light on, boom. That is what went down, didn't it?" Jeremy says.

"This stuff's all over the Net." A girl named Clara says. "Wanna know how to make a Molotov cocktail, that sets itself on fire? Potassium, sulphur, and normal sugar. Sugar. Sugar, which is..."

"Not exactly plutonium. You could get the stuff anywhere." Jeremy says.

"Sugar from the supermarket." Clara says.

"But you don't need to be chem major to know that." Hotch says.

"Do you think it's a chem student?" Zhang suggests.

"You wanna know that I think? I think it would be a good time to take the semester off." Jeremy says as they walk out of the chem lab, and into the elevator.

"You need a key to get in going after 10:00 pm." Jeremy says.

"So, what are you still doing here?" Hotch asked.

"I can't leave. We're all got projects. You know how to solve the three-body problem? Computing the mutual gravitational interaction between the earth, sun and moon?" He asks as Spencer nods his head.

later

Derek came into the room. "Hey, Garcia sent us some audio from a call from the lip line. It was marked five minutes before the fire started." Derek says after he came into the room.

"Play it." Hotch says.

The team was listening to the audio that Penelope sent Derek. 

Audio: Karen, I do this for Karen.

"Play it again." Gideon says.

"The call came from the office right next to Wallace's five minutes before the fire was started." Derek says. 

"Play it again." Gideon says as Derek plays it again.

Audio: Karen, I do this for Karen.

"Again, louder." Gideon says.

Audio: Karen, I do this for Karen.

"What is it?" Hotch asked, Jason.

"I'm not sure, there's something about it." Gideon says.

"Is this tape clean?" Hotch asked.

Derek called Penelope to get confirmation on cleaning the tape.

"Yeah, I can put it through some more audio filters."  Penelope says.

"Look, we need as close to the real voice as you can get, and anything that might be in the background also." Derek says. "Can you do that?"

"Okay, you know how on Star Trek when Captain Kirk asks McCoy to do something totally impossible and McCoy says, 'damn it, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a miracle worker?" Penelope asked.

"Come on Garcia, what are you telling us? Not to expect a miracle?" Derek asked.

"No, I'm saying I'm not a doctor."  Penelope says.

Later

Penelope called them back about the audio. "Okay, I put this through every audio filter I've got. There's only one thing I can tell you for sure. This guy isn't saying Karen. It's more like Karown?"  Penelope says.

"Garcia what the hell is Karown?" Derek asked her.

"I will call you when I figure that out." She says.

"Pretty boy, Garcia says it's not Karen." Derek says. "It's actually something more like--"

"Charown. "I do it because of Charown." Gideon says.

"That's Hebrew." Spencer says.

"It's God's burning anger." Gideon says.

"Yeah." Spencer says.

"So the motive now is religious?" Elle asked.

"Well, you know in a lot of religions, God is related to fire." Spencer says.

"And Christians worship God as a consuming fire." Hotch says.

"Okay, so we're looking for a theology major. Maybe he's punishing the others students for their sins." Derek says.

"I don't want this." Spencer says.

"What's the most sinful place on campus?" Elle asked.

"Come on, Elle, when I was in college, it was everywhere." Derek says.

"Fraternity?" Hotch suggests.

"Campus bar?" Elle suggests.

"No, that's a consistent with the previous targets. Hold on. What about the idea of baptism by fire? I mean, aren't we all supposed to be tested through fire in Revelations?"

"Look, it's good. It's good, but listen, please do not jump to conclusions. Religion might be a part of it, but it's not necessarily the prime compulsion." Gideon says.

"Gideon, rush to conclusions, jump to conclusions, who cares?" Derek says.

"We are running out of time." Elle says.

"Compulsion." Spencer says under his breath. They go back to the footage of Matthew Rowland. Spencer keeps rewinding the footage and pay close attention to the background.

"Reid, pause it. Go back a bit and zoom in on the doorknob." Derek says. "You see that? The Unsub turned the doorknob three times, that's a sign of OCD." 

Spencer and Derek run to Professor Wallace's room and rub the ash off the sign and it reads the number three. Then, they run to Matthew Rowland's room and looks at the class schedule. Professor Wallace's class was on Tuesdays at 3:00. They run to Hotch and Gideon and give them what they know.

"Okay, the fires this far have been completely task-oriented." Derek says.

"So once they're set the Unsub is done?" Hotch asked.

"Exactly. The Unsub is not a classical serial arsonist." Spencer says.

"He's someone who uses fire because of a completely different disorder." Derek says.

"Which is?" Gideon asked.

"An extreme manifestation of OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder." Spencer says as they began explaining everything they found from the footage. They soon realize their Unsub isn't a male...it was a female. Hotch and Spencer came to the realization as who it was. It was the chemistry student girl, Clara from the other night.

"When Spencer and I were talking to her and her classmates, I noticed something." Hotch says.

"It was a ring on her finger, she kept turning it." Spencer says. "Of intervals of three."

"And she counted off the ingredients of a light bulb bomb." Hotch says.

"And the word sugar. She kept repeating it." Spencer says.

"Once she started she couldn't stop." Hotch says.

"Yeah, it's palilalia." Spencer says. "It translates to involuntary repetition of words. Howard Hughes had it when his OCD worsened." Spencer says.

"Clara and her classmates were working on a project about gravitational pull." Hotch says.

"The three-body problem." Gideon says.

They soon realize that Clara had a ton of homemade bombs in her apartment off campus, so they start running around pulling every fire alarm and trying to find Clara. They soon realize that a science building was under construction, so Spencer and Hotch run up and they find Clara. They talked her down for a few minutes to distract her and before she could throw the fire into the building, Spencer shoots Clara in the leg. Hotch manages to step on the fire stick before it could roll into the elevator. Once the fire was put out, they helped the kids out of the elevator and the building.

BAU Jet

They were on their way back to Quantico, and Derek was talking to Maya on the phone as there was nothing else to do. He told her about the case as she said that she had a sore throat because she's been crying all night and all day. 

"You okay, why you been crying all day?" He asked her.

"Because I had...um a nightmare last night and I couldn't get over it." Maya says quietly.

"You could've called me or something and I could've picked you up." Derek says as Spencer looked up from his book that he was reading. Of course.

"I know, I couldn't do it." Maya says as Derek nods his head as he understood why.

"Well, if you need anything, please call me. Okay." Derek says, as Maya nods her head on the other line.

"Yeah, okay. Bye." She says as he hung up.

"Maya?" Spencer asked as Derek nods his head. 

"Yeah, she's been crying all night and day because of a nightmare that she had of her father....doing stuff to her." Derek says as Spencer is the only one who knows about Derek seeing Maya and having communication with her.

"Oh wow, that must be awful." Spencer says.

"Yeah, she would have called last night but she's not there yet of being in the same vehicle as me, because ya know Maya and males don't get along." Derek says as they're on the other side of the jet where no one is really listening to their conversation.

"Yeah, makes sense. Speaking of, how is that going?" Spencer asks.

"It's going slowly actually, but it's slowly getting somewhere. You know the safe distance that she has?" Derek says as Spencer nods his head at Derek's question.

"Yeah, what about it." Spencer says.

"She's not as freaking out as a couple days ago. The day that you didn't come with us. We made it about two feet less than that." Derek says.

"That's good that you guys are making progress about it." Spencer says. "What about her opening up more?"

"That's still a work in progress, she talks a little more when we're either texting or calling each other. If that makes sense." Derek says as Spencer nods his head.

"Yeah, it does actually. Glad you're helping her out." Spencer says.

"Because the plan is once she gets more familiar with me and talking more. Hoping to eventually get her a job here, or something like that." Derek says.

"Yeah, so you can flirt with her everyday of your life." Spencer jokes as Derek gives him a look.

"You need to stop going in my head. It creeps me out." Derek says.

"You're welcome."

"I didn't say thank you."

"You just did, and you're welcome."

"Just go back reading your book, genius." Derek says.

"Stop being pushy." Spencer mumbled under his breath as Derek just shakes his head at him as he leans back and before he knows it, they're back to Quantico.

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hannah speaks!
hope you like this chapter!
i know that maya isn't in this book as much, but she will once she becomes more familiar with derek and stuff like that.
she'll either be in the beginning, little bit in between scenes or the end of the chapter.

if you like this chapter, please vote and comment thanks!