Title: Dose
By: Mia Shade
Pairing: JJ/Reid
Rating: NC-17
Summary: With drugs, enough is never enough. With Reid, an overdose is inevitable. Struggling in the dark aftermath of Tobias, JJ and Reid begin to bond, to slowly heal—until the night that his addiction wins in an overdose, and JJ is the one who finds him.
Disclaimer: It's not mine; I'm just borrowing the characters.
Author's Note: I am a massive fan of Chuck Palahniuk's work (he's the fantastic guy who wrote the original Fight Club novel); he has an incredibly distinct style, and this story is an exercise in emulating it. As a result, it is going to be very dark, with run-on sentences galore and repetitions of ideas; it's all purposeful. I'd love it if you told me what you think; I know this prologue is terribly short, but I already have the next few chapters written, so the first should be up in a few days.
***
"And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had…" – Tears for Fears, "Mad World"
Dead Dream Thoughts (Prologue)
1. (Dead or Dreaming?)
When you hear the screams of young girls, the echoes of their last horrifying moments—when those phantom sounds wrap around your heart like vines full of thorns, then put your hand into your messenger bag and touch the coolness of the two little bottles inside.
When the crime scene photos throw you violently into memories that you'd rather forget, clutch the bottles in one hand, discreetly, squeezing them like a pimple, until the glass is slick with the sweat from your palm.
It's a game, see. A choose-your-own adventure with no choice.
When you wake up in bed and have to clamp one hand over your mouth to muffle the yell of terror that is rising in your throat, then go to your kitchen, brew a pot of coffee, and spend the rest of the night in your boxer shorts, strung out on caffeine, staring at the two bottles of milky-clear liquid on your kitchen table. Try not to think.
The following night, repeat.
When your boss has to call your name four times before you're aware of him, find yourself a syringe or two.
When the smell of fish—any fish—sends you to the nearest bathroom with a gripping nauseous fear in your stomach, then sit on the tiled floor and cradle the bottles in your hands and curse the stupidity that made you leave the needles at home.
When that thought scares the hell out of you, play the game some more.
When you forget the sound of your mother's voice, when all you can hear are terrified cries for help from victims you never knew, and when you've gone five nights sleepless and can barely recognize the faces of your friends…
When all of this becomes too much, knot your thinnest tie just above the vein in your elbow, draw a few milligrams of Dilaudid into a syringe, swab your arm and the needle with alcohol, and inject.
When you've pushed the syringe away from you, close your eyes and sleep.
The following night, repeat.
2. (Dream or thought?)
At first, she doesn't notice.
She just thinks she can stay up later, wake up earlier, and it's more productive because she doesn't seem to have a problem with getting less sleep. She does twice the paperwork and doesn't bat an eye; she finishes late at night and has time to watch TV.
At first.
Funny how what you don't know really can hurt you.
And then comes the first night, the first long night of total insomnia, and then another and another, nights of her sitting on her couch in a pale silk slip, watching TV so late that it turns into morning before she realizes it. Flipping between the slasher movies and the old black-and-white romances, the horror stories and the love stories; flipping until they merge into one.
A horror story and a love story.
This isn't just about her. It's about him, and her, and the frightening bond that they will share.
It's about being paralyzed by the viscosity of chemicals and the velocity of trauma, and in this suspended motion time slows, runs backward, skips over; it's some twisted reversed thing that is too strange to think about in clear terms, like when you run a song backwards to find the hidden messages among the Psycho string movements and the gnarled, choking voices. Something fundamentally not right, but not quite wrong.
This is about Tobias Henkel, whose love was also horrifying.
When she reflects back on it later, she realizes that that's what her life becomes: a horror story and a love story, an amalgamation of the two genres; a mutant; a midtone, a romantic terrifying scramble for meaning.
The only question that remains in her mind is: is she the love or the horror?
But that isn't how this story begins.
***
"Stones taught me to fly,
love, it taught me to lie;
life, it taught me to die,
So it's not hard to fall
when you float like a cannonball." – Damien RiceChapter One: (Ghosts, Spirits, Lullabies and Cries)
How it begins is that Jennifer Jareau's across-the-street neighbour, Mrs. Bronson, receives news that her sister's house in Wilmington has been robbed.
This is all while JJ is away with the team on a case, while she's tossing in her hotel bed at night and pretending to sleep on the plane, while Prentiss is asking her about the dark shadows beneath her eyes one day and Hotch is not four feet away and JJ is incredibly ashamed.
What you don't know really can hurt you.
And when JJ comes home, finally, and parks her car and unlocks her door and picks up the mail, what she hears is a dog's barking.
And it's only when she has dropped and rolled to the ground and emerged with her gun aimed at the sound and her heart feels like it might burst, it's going so fast—it's only then that she sees it, across the street: a big sucker of a Doberman pinscher, chained in the yard of dear Mrs. Bronson, barking. Barking. Tobias' dead dogs are there again; ready to rip her to shreds.
JJ can't move for four solid minutes, lying there in her foyer with the front door wide open and her gun aimed at the dog across the street.
When she's calmed down, she closes the door and phones the Bronson house, and in her nicest press-conference voice, she asks when they got the dog.
"Oh, we just got him two days ago!" Mrs. Bronson exclaims, casual and nonchalant, and in the background JJ can hear the sounds of the eleven o'clock news. "My sister, you know, she got robbed three weeks ago, and Daniel and I agreed that you can never be too careful. I think you can agree, Miss Jareau, can you not?"
With a silent sigh, JJ agrees that yes, you can never be too careful.
"Especially now that we have small children to worry about, we realized that we have to protect ourselves, so we bought the dog. Daniel Junior and Lisa just adore him."
JJ bites her lip as the dog begins to bark again, thanks Mrs. Bronson, and hangs up, and before she knows it she starts to cry.
Jump to a doctor's office across town from the FBI building, a walk-in clinic where JJ wastes two hours of her day off in the waiting room and finally sits down with a nice but reserved male doctor who calmly asks her what the problem is.
"I haven't slept in four days," she confesses in a whisper.
"Oh, my," the doctor seems mildly impressed, like she's a circus performer, a caged thing. "Do you have any idea what might be causing it?"
JJ shakes her head even though she knows the answer to his question: the dog, the damned dog Rex, and also Tobias Henkel, a dead man who emulated a dead man, who now haunts her twofold. All of this and more.
What you don't know really can hurt you, and JJ can't bring herself to tell this nice young doctor of the horrors she's seen.
Fifteen minutes later she has a prescription for sleeping pills and is back on the road, back in her neighbourhood, back in her cool house where she's closed the curtains against the light. JJ sinks onto the couch and turns on the television, and when she thinks she can hear the dog across the street barking she turns up the volume as high as she can bear it, and she clutches the bottle of pills close to her like a lover. That they won't work is something she doesn't know yet, and for the moment she feels calm, and enlightened, and saved.
It's not really okay, but someday it might be.
She doesn't know how bad things are about to get.
How it begins is he's just finished needling a few milligrams of Dilaudid into his arm, and it's dark and time begins to fall away and melt like the fat from someone's face on fire.
His heart feels like it's trying to worm its way out of his chest, and he shivers, pulling himself inwards, collapsing around his weak and limping core. He feels like there's too little of him left, too much of him gone.
Spencer Reid sits back against the wall of his bathroom, closing his eyes, willing himself to sleep.
(hush little baby don't say a word)
Lullabies in his mother's voice. Ghosts and spirits.
His eyes open, glittering in the dark, and he stares at the ceiling, but the room is so dark that all he can see is the blackened void where the ceiling is supposed to be.
He feels dizzy, like when he was seventeen and drank a large glass of rum because somebody dared him to, he can't remember who, but he remembers the dizziness, the perfect tilting of the world. Swallowing his nausea, Reid closes his eyes again.
It's not okay, but someday it might be.
To him, it sounds like an excuse. Someday is just a fancy version of never. User is just another word for addict. Survival is a badly translated adjective for Enduring when you shouldn't.
Nothing is okay.
Nothing is right.
Somewhere beyond his mother's phantom song and his own gasps in the throes of drug-induced non-reality, Reid thinks he can hear voices whispering to him:
What you don't know really can hurt you.
What you remember will haunt you.
What you force yourself to forget will destroy you.
Reid's head drops to his chest—
What you hide from the world will comfort you.
***
Martin Luthor King said: "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
Chapter Two: Cotton Ball Reality (Dream #1)
Funny thing is, everything's fine when Reid's at work.
He can hide it. It's almost comical how easy it seems: dress in long sleeves to cover the marks and prevent shivering. Drink coffee to warm yourself and keep you awake. Answer direct questions. Remember the statistics. Front sight, controlled trigger press, follow through—and another body slides to the floor, another innocent saved, another job well done, and all the while nobody's the wiser that all of this comes to Reid as if through wads of cotton balls. His mind is so sharp that, even slowed by fear and trauma and drugs, it's still faster than most. Nobody seems to notice, and for that Reid is grateful.
He's tired nowadays, no matter the time of day; morning or evening, light or dark, he's exhausted. His body feels as though it's slowly running down; enduring when it shouldn't. Survival, they call it, though to him it's just bad translation.
He's a zombie.
He's a junkie.
He's a goner.
The next moment, repeat.
There's a lull in their cases at work now, which means that he can come in to the office and stare at his computer and mildly wonder how many games of FreeCell he can win in an hour.
This is what's called a mental health vacation.
Reid sees JJ at work, where she's busy, always busy, always moving. Her blonde hair is dull, pulled back into a ponytail, and the dark circles under her eyes mirror his own.
It's only when he realizes that she's done every piece of his paperwork for him that he realizes that she's hiding something, too.
And it's only after he realizes that she's done everyone's paperwork that he understands how late JJ must be working. At first it baffles him but then Reid grasps the truth: she doesn't have much else to do in the middle of the night.
This insight comes to him as sharply as a lightening strike one morning, piercing through the cotton ball reality, making him sit up in his chair and watch JJ as she moves through the office swiftly. Their eyes meet for a minute or two and in her gaze Reid hears her screaming: help me, help me, help me, help me…
What you hide from the world will comfort you, until someone finds out.
The first night, the sleeping pills don't work.
JJ sits on her couch in her silk slip nightgown and flips channels, too lethargic to even cry. The sun rises, filtered through the curtains she's pulled across the windows, and JJ gets dressed and goes to work. Life goes on, dragging her by the tails, yanking her along, and she has no ability to make it stop.
The second night, after taking the prescribed dose, she doesn't even bother to get undressed.
The third night, the same.
The fourth.
The fifth.
The only time that something happens is the sixth night, the first hour of the sixth night, when JJ accidentally takes two doses, six pills instead of the usual three.
It was an honest mistake. She didn't mean to.
Terrified that she's overdosed, JJ spends the first two hours of the night at her kitchen table with a phone in her hand, waiting to call someone at the first sign of a symptom. Fear prickles her skin and makes her feel like throwing up; thoughts of all the famous suicides by medication run through her mind like a newsreel.
Finally, she's just too exhausted, and stumbles into bed with her phone on the night table, just in case. She has exactly one dream, in this first hour.
In JJ's dream, she is a zombie, a junkie, practically dead inside her skin. Induced and inspired and infested and impressed by the pills, she dreams that she has overdosed, that she's taken the entire bottle, and that she's dying.
What you don't know may end up killing you.
In her dream, it's only when she's driven the short way to work and has parked her car that JJ realizes that she can't stand up, that she's too dizzy to move, too nauseous to breathe. Opening the driver's side door, she slithers from the seat onto the cool concrete of the parking garage, her cheek against the grey stone, and she tries to breathe and prays that Hotch won't find her like this.
Then, without warning or whisper, she knows she's not alone. Rolling over onto her back, the Zombie who is JJ forces her eyes to open, and above her she sees someone kneeling, wearing a hooded sweatshirt.
"Please," her voice is a whisper. "Please, help me."
The hood shakes back and forth. "You disobeyed," it says, and she recognizes the voice.
Oh, god.
Tobias.
JJ tries to move, but her limbs are dead flesh and are frozen in time and space, and she is made of stone. "No," she whispers, unable to scream. "Not you. Please, not you."
"What did you do?" Tobias asks, chastising her. Ashamed of her. Angry at her?
"I just want to sleep," JJ replies. Begs. "That's all. I took some pills. Please let me sleep."
Again, the hooded Tobias shakes his head. "You can't sleep; Hotch gave you the command six days ago, remember? You're not allowed to. Now you've disobeyed orders."
Is that a dog's growl she hears behind him?
All JJ can do, poor Junkie JJ, is stare at the ceiling of the parking garage as it begins to swim before her vision, and the growls get louder—
—and then she's awake, lying on the floor, with her entire left side aching from falling off the bed. The phone is ringing.
Reaching up, over her head, JJ pulls her cell from the bedside table, opens it, and sighs.
"Hello?"
"…JJ?" Morgan's voice. Warmth and recovery. She's never been so glad to hear him."Yeah?"
"We've got a case. You need to come in," he yawns. "I'm sorry to wake you up."
JJ sighs again, sitting up and rubbing her eyes with the heel of her hand. "It's no problem," she replies, pulling herself to her feet. "I'm already awake."
Reid's asleep in the boardroom.
Well, to be fair, almost the entire team is asleep. This case is not exactly typical; instead of JJ receiving the file first, it was Gideon who was sent a DVD in the mail of a young man being held, kidnapped, in a room somewhere in the government buildings of DC. The unsub's violent rage against the bureaucracy of the United States. With less than twelve hours left to find him, the entire team has been dragged from their respective beds and into work, where they now sit, silent and totally exhausted. It's so early that coffee doesn't even help; the smell of it is sour at the back of JJ's throat, and she sighs, flipping absently through the file in front of her, watching Reid sleep.
"So far, the bodies of three other men have been found; all in their early twenties, they are always held for approximately seventy-two hours, under video surveillance that is later mailed to various members of law enforcement; following those three days, each victim is bludgeoned to death and dumped on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial," Hotch is summarizing the contents of the file, pacing around the table. JJ can't find the strength to turn her head to follow his movement, and so she stares straight ahead, where Reid is sitting with his chin cradled in one hand, his eyes half-lidded: asleep but still awake enough to answer to his name. JJ swallows bile at the thought of her nightmare, but all the same she envies his ability to sleep.
"The SUVs will be ready in fifteen," Hotch says, closing his file with the light slap of manila enclosing paper, the slap of conclusion. The sound, however soft it is, jerks Reid from his slumber and he flinches, almost imperceptibly, but it's a shudder that runs through his entire body and makes JJ feel cold.
With a sigh, she pulls herself up, out of her chair, her movements a slow-motion dance in contrast with the grumbled hurriedness of the rest of the team. They gather their things and file out of the boardroom, passing JJ by like streams of water, softened and muted and blurred; she feels as though she's been wrapped in cotton balls.
"Er…JJ?"
A light tap on her shoulder. JJ turns, slowly, to see Reid. Everyone else has gone.
"What is it?"
He casts a nervous glance around the room, ensuring that they're alone, and then his hand comes out from behind his back, as smooth as a magic trick, holding her bottle of sleeping pills.
Oh, hell.
She must have put them into her bag by mistake. She meant to throw them away.
JJ swallows nervously. "I…"
He blinks, lips drawn into a tight line, and the shadows beneath his eyes seem more prominent than ever. Softly, Reid places the bottle onto the table with a slight click and forces a tight smile.
"These fell out of your bag," he says, soft and tired. JJ can only nod.
"Thanks," she replies, wanting to cry. She reaches for the pills, repulsed at the thought of having them with her, and she's planning which garbage to discreetly throw them into when Reid speaks again:
"Did—did you know that sleeping medications only work twenty-one percent of the time, depending on the user's reasons for insomnia?"
"Reid, I…" JJ can't think of what to say, can't think fast enough to make up an excuse. Reid shrugs.
"—I'll…um, I'll see you at the car, okay?" he smiles again, turning to leave.
She nods, watching his retreating back, consumed by shame. Ducking into the nearest bathroom, JJ throws the pills into the trash and stares herself down in the mirror, challenging her reflection, which looks too tired and shadowed to give much of a fight.Splashing water on her face, she takes a deep breath and forces herself to wake up, to be alert and to appear normal. Staring at the almost-dead girl in the mirror, the zombie who has stolen her face, JJ's eyes narrow in focus and in steely resolve. She will join the rest of the team; she will find the victim and take down the unsub. She will communicate with the media, calm down reporters and comfort mothers whose sons are lost; and she will nod when Morgan or Prentiss or Hotch asks her if she's okay, and in her mind she will whisper it's not really okay, but someday it might be. And when it's all over, when she gets home…
JJ's breath catches in her throat.
When she gets home—
Damn it.
When she gets home—
Then what?
Breaking her gaze away from the mirror, JJ looks around; at her shaking hands perched on the countertop, at her bag on the floor, and at the little garbage can, a tiny basket with no lid on it. Moving as silently as she can and as quickly as she dares, JJ stoops and picks up the little bottle of sleeping pills, tucking them into her bag.
The worst kind of sleep may be better than no sleep at all.
In the car on the way to the crime scene, JJ avoids meeting Reid's eyes.
***
"Cause I'm not who I used to be…
No longer easy on the eyes
But these wrinkles masterfully disguise
The youthful boy below…
But now he lives inside
Someone he does not recognize
When he catches his reflection on accident." – Death Cab for CutieChapter Three: Bare Skin (Now I Know Your Secret)
JJ rubs her eyes, again, and absently reaches for the cardboard coffee cup by her side. Her Americano is room temperature and getting colder by the minute, but she swallows it anyway, trying to ignore its bitterness.
She is sitting on the floor of a seemingly endless hotel hallway, surrounded by file folders. She's supposed to be working with Reid on the files, trying to find parallels; the rest of the team is following leads and dealing with the DC police force.
They're looking for potential suspects: insiders, people with constant and uninterrupted access to the various government buildings. Janitors. Construction workers and restorers. Even clerks; anyone with a lot of keys and the ability to blend in.
It makes for a hell of a lot of people.
Gideon was the one who suggested, in his nonchalant and unobtrusive way, that JJ and Reid take on the files and try to find a pattern. If they stayed in contact with the rest of the team, that would be fine.
Considering that JJ could barely stand when he gave her the order, she wasn't exactly unhappy about being let off the hook regarding field work. She almost kissed Gideon when she realized that she didn't have to deal with people all day.
Considering that she can barely stand now, she's utterly mortified at the thought of working with Reid, alone.
How much does he know? How much can he guess?
The bottle of sleeping pills in her bag rattles, right on cue.
Damn it.
Reid isn't answering to her knocks, and JJ can't focus at all on the tiny printing in the files she has. The light in the hallway is gritty and yellowy and poor, and it makes her feel like there are grains of sand in between her teeth and in the pores of her skin. JJ knocks on the door beside her again, and this time, there is an answer.
"…who's there?"
Good lord, he sounds worse than she feels. What you don't know really can hurt you.
JJ clears her throat, feeling that sandy feeling again. "Reid…it's me. Can I come in?"
He coughs, ragged. "Give me a second…"
The hallway goes silent again except for the incessant buzzing of the lights; JJ closes her eyes, and she doesn't exactly sleep insofar as she passes out, just for a few minutes or seconds or moments—just long enough for Reid to open the door and startle her, jerk her violently awake like a gunshot.
He looks down; she looks up.
In the dim yellow light, what she sees first is his forearms.
It's a strange thing to notice, but Reid's been wearing long sleeves for about two solid months now; JJ is actually startled to see bare skin above his wrists.
When was the last time I saw Reid in short sleeves?
JJ's eyes take him in, and it doesn't take more than a second, maybe two, although it seems like longer. She knows it must just be the insomnia wreaking hell with her perception, but there's something about Reid in short sleeves that seems—something's not right.
Reid is on his knees, gathering the file folders, and if he's spoken JJ hasn't heard him; he's been silent. He looks up and, apparently sensing what she's looking at, folds his arms across his chest quicker than JJ can follow, covering the insides of his elbows with his hands; and although she's sure it means something, she can't quite figure out what, and a moment later the thought slips from her mind like sand through her fingertips.
Shaking herself out of the reverie, JJ struggles to her feet. Reid drops the files onto one of the beds and, kneeling, begins to sort through them, silently, entirely too casual for JJ's comfort. She sinks onto the other bed, watching him work. His sleeves are down again.
"…Reid?"
"What?" he sounds irritable, and he doesn't turn to look at her when he replies.
"Do you mind if I just rest for a second here?"
"No, go ahead." Again, he speaks without turning around.
JJ lowers herself so that she's lying on her side, facing his back as he sorts through files. She closes her eyes and breathes in the cool perfection of the pillow beneath her head, and again, she thinks of Reid's bare arms. His elbows. His hands, with their long fingers, clever hands that are shaking nowadays more often than not.
He used to do magic tricks and now he doesn't. JJ has spent many a meeting stifling giggles as, across the table, Reid makes a coin appear and disappear again and again—and now his hands are always folded across his chest.
Something's not right.
Something about his elbows, the inside of his elbows, where there are reddish round marks that stand out brutally against his pale skin.
JJ blinks and Reid comes back into focus; he's sitting on the floor beside the bed, reading a file, with his hair falling into his eyes like a little kid. She licks her dry lips, and they sting with the sudden moisture.
"Reid, why don't you wear short sleeves?"
"What makes you think of that?" He doesn't look up. Why won't he look up?
JJ bites her lip. This is all because of her sleeping pills, or possibly it's all because of the dogs or because of Tobias. At this point, she's not sure.
Reid, still reading the file, must be waiting for an answer. She shrugs even though she knows he can't see it.
"I don't know," she lies. "I just haven't seen your arms in a while."
One hand comes up from the pile of manila and paper to touch a spot on his arm, softly: just two fingers, barely kissing the skin on the inside of his right elbow. JJ, through all of her dulled perception, catches it in an instant.
Something's not right.
"Is there something—"
Reid stands up suddenly, cutting JJ off. Still avoiding her eyes, he moves to his messenger bag and begins rummaging.
"It's a rash. I'm allergic to a few things. I get sensitive about it, all right?" his tone is softer now, and JJ is lulled by it, as she always is. Reid is just naturally a calming force—or he used to be.
"I'm sorry," she feels her face burn.
"It's all right. I have a lead on the case."
No invitations or rejections. Just a statement. He doesn't ask if she wants to come or stay.
JJ nods, closes her eyes until she hears the door click shut, and when she opens them Reid is gone. The thought of climbing underneath the sheets makes her feel cold; she's wearing a skirt that will get wrinkled. Plus, it won't matter, since she won't sleep anyway.
She can't.
Not without the pills.
Not with the pills.
Those red marks on Reid's arm—the cause is on the tip of JJ's tongue but she just can't reach it. She's seen it before. It's on the edge of her mind, just beyond her perception and consciousness. The frustration of that makes her jumpy, and suddenly the bed seems too hard and too foreign and too much to handle.
Tiptoeing into the bathroom and snapping on the light, JJ ignores her reflection for as long as she can as she inspects the room out of sheer boredom. There's a syringe in the wastepaper basket.
Goddamn cheap hotels. That's freaky.
JJ's thoughts do not turn to Reid.
Later, she'll wonder why the hell they didn't.
***
"One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place." – Emily DickinsonChapter Four: Bring me Your Nightmares
Some people, they cry when you save them.
Some people laugh.
It all depends on what the unsub has done to them, how far they've descended into madness and humiliation and terror.
Everybody always has an idea of what they'll say to the person who saves their life, but it never actually turns out that way. Eloquent, well-versed people who plan on thanking their rescuers politely have been reduced to gibbering, drooling idiots, barely able to mutter their own names. People have attacked those who save them, thinking that they are another enemy. Spencer Reid has seen all this.
He's seen the tears. The maniacal laughter. He's been kissed by a few victims who have been overcome with joy. The scrabbling nails, screeching war cries, and the vacant look that some people get when they'll never be the same.
Think of all the nightmares you've ever had and combine them into one.
It's not okay, and possibly it never will be again.
Some people cry. Some people laugh. Kevin Pullman, he doesn't say a word.
Some claw and scratch, some beg for forgiveness on behalf of their captors, and Kevin Pullman is silent.
Remembering that vacant and horrified face, Reid tightens his tourniquet a little more. His hands shake with the syringe, but he manages to draw some Dilaudid from the bottle. He always manages to do it.
He's back in his bathroom, sitting against the tiled wall, safe in the darkness that swallows him like black velvet, soft and hazy.
He's not quite sure how he got here, but he doesn't care. He's home.
Another quarter of a milligram of Dilaudid goes into the syringe. He's at his normal dose now, and none too soon, because his mind won't stop running, won't stop remembering, won't stop casting those horrifying images onto his mind. Memories of tonight, of what happened in DC.
They find him, of course. It takes the better part of eleven straight hours of investigation, but they find and arrest the unsub, a man named Ron Drake, who was kidnapping and killing the men who looked like his son. Kevin Pullman, Drake's last would-be victim, has been sealed inside an unused and unknown broom closet in the Capitol building, waiting to die.
It is Reid who finds him, who kicks the hole in the wall where he figures out Kevin will be.
It is Reid who sees Kevin first, poor twenty-three-year-old Kevin Pullman, cradling the bloodied body of his own two-year-old son.
Drake had murdered the little boy in front of his father, bashed in his skull until it was little more than pulp, and Kevin held the sad little corpse tenderly, whispering lullabies into one tiny, ruined ear, waiting and wanting and wishing to die.
He has been alone with his son for three days, each of which has seemed like weeks.
The son, what happened to Kevin's son? The team went back to the BAU without Reid finding out.
Did that boy have a mother? Did Kevin have a lover, a wife, a dear friend, a mistress?
What will happen to her?
Reid stares at the clear liquid in the syringe.
His hand on the plunger pulls another half a milligram into the chamber.
Reid yells for backup that takes ages and ages to come, and Kevin doesn't try to hush him, even when his calls echo and resound endlessly in the empty and dark hallway. He doesn't blink against the brightness or call out. His arms do not move from their position, holding his little boy. Spencer Reid and Kevin Pullman, they consider each other for a while; in the beam of Reid's flashlight, it seems as though nothing else exists.
Even when the backup comes, all bellowed orders and pounding footsteps and increasing heartbeats, it's all muffled as Reid stares at the bloodstained corpse of the boy, held so gently that he has to swallow the urge to warn the officers that it might break if they touch it.
Think of all the nightmares you've ever had and combine them into one.
He knows somewhere in the back of his mind that he's seen worse—not very much worse, but certainly a bit more than this. This is so bad because in Kevin's eyes Reid saw exactly the same feeling he had when he was being tortured by Tobias.
Kevin was Reid, if the team hadn't found him in time.
Kevin was Reid, if given the smallest bit more time to become desperate enough to welcome death.
Kevin was Reid, minus the will to live on, even if living was just surviving, even if surviving was enduring when he shouldn't.
And he realizes that this is no longer about Tobias, that this is no longer about self-medication, and that using the Dilaudid is now independent of what happened in Georgia.
A little more liquid pulls itself into the syringe.
Kevin Pullman allows himself to be taken from the hole in the wall, and Reid still doesn't move. He can't move. He's frozen in position in the hall, gun raised. He can only watch Kevin, with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, as Gideon gently takes his son away from him. And then Kevin is moving, shuffling towards Reid, so slow that it seems impossible. A magic trick.
One moment there. The next, here.
And as slow as all of this is, Kevin moves too fast for Reid to react when he lunges forward suddenly, his hand clenching around Reid's gun, forcing the barrel up to his own head. For one impossible moment they are eye to eye before Kevin's finger curls around Reid's finger at the trigger and pulls and then his face matches his son's, a bloody pulp of bone and brain. Reid flinches as blood suddenly splatters onto his face.
Think of all the nightmares you've ever had and combine them into one.
Ron Drake is in custody, but the damage has already been done. He will never know the ringing of a gunshot as it rips open the face of an innocent man. The shock that comes with someone killing themselves on your own gun, using your finger on the trigger.
And even if he did know all of that, he's a psychopath. He'd probably enjoy it.
Think of all the horrible things other people have done, and dump all that emotional trauma and unrest directly on your head.
Another half a milligram into the needle. A full milligram over his normal dose.
Before Reid can think twice, he injects it, letting the needle fall to the tile floor with a click as his vision begins to swim. In the next moment he knows he's taken too much.
Oh, no.
Morgan moves toward him in slow motion, and his hand reaches out and lowers Reid's gun, frame by frame, out of sight. More bodies push towards him, sweat and breath and smell and skin, overcoming him, swallowing him up.
Stuck in an oblivion.
It's a magic trick. Close your eyes, and when you open them maybe you'll be somewhere else.
Overcome with nausea, Reid pitches forward onto the floor of his bathroom, resting his cheek against the cold tile, shaking like a leaf. The floor begins to tilt, but this is not the vaguely pleasant dizziness that normally comes with his high, but rather something that is dangerously out of control.
His towel has fallen from the rack and is crumpled in a heap across from him, and all Reid can see there is that broken doll of a boy, a dead boy whose father loved him and then went insane with grief.
Suppressing a shudder, Reid suddenly remembers catching a glimpse of himself in the window of the SUV, a monster with a mask of blood.
Raising a hand to his cheek, he can almost feel the blood there again, warm and clotting, an extra layer on his face. Imaginary and yet, at the same time, almost real.
Oh, no.
This is bad. This is too much. The voices and images of Reid's memory are beginning to swirl around each other, melding into nothing but extremely loud chaos.
This is a bad trip.
This is everything that the Dilaudid was supposed to prevent.
In his mind he sees the pictures of victims with their lower jaws blown off, grinning, sneering with too-white teeth sticking up from bloody palates, which reminds him of Kevin.
Reid flinches sharply as these images fly at him like bullets.
Kevin's jaw has been taken clean off; his nose is in tatters like a torn piece of cloth. Somehow his eyes have stayed intact, thank god, but they remain open as his body slides to the floor, staring at Reid, forever frozen with that hopelessness, that empty hollow look that some people get when they'll never be the same.
Off to one side is the sound of someone retching.
Gideon, his mouth slack in horror, is still holding Kevin's nameless son, the little dead boy body, and the blood is already clotting on Gideon's hands. Emily's jaw is set, her mouth a thin line, trying to hold back tears or screams or shocked silence. Reid sees all of this.
Kevin stares back up at him, forever in shock with his wide-open jaw. Reid swallows the bile at the back of his throat as Hotch slowly takes his arm and turns him away from the scene, still so slowly.
A drop of blood trickles from his chin down his neck and inside the collar of his shirt.
He can still feel the blood on his face, even though somebody washed it off of him at some point. Imaginary shards of bone on his skin, and bits of brain which are too horrifying to think about. The blood, warm and thick and still pulsing from Kevin's wasted veins. Slick and nauseating. Dripping from his chin down into his shirt.
Think of all the nightmares you've ever had.
Give me your horror movies, your ghost stories, your urban legends, your feverish hallucinations.
The little broken thing in Kevin's arms was almost too perfect, too real, too much like a doll. Its skin blindingly white except for where it was stained brown with old blood, the hair like wisps of wool pulled too thin. Reid's fingers creep up his neck to the space just behind his ear, and his hair now feels like that hair. Horrified, his fingers tighten around a clump of that broken-boy-doll hair and pull it out, yanking so hard that it draws blood, which feels thick and sticky and exactly like what was on his face.
A drop of it creeps down Reid's neck and under his chin, and he moans in helpless terror. The clumps of hair slip from his trembling fingers and float slowly down, touching his cheek ever so softly, which is enough—his stomach revolts, and he throws up.
Bloody child.
Bloody father.
Blood and bone and brains all over him and inside of him—Reid can't get the idea out of his head.
Reid gasps as his heart pulsates, pumping blood (and bone and brains) through his veins; each pump feels like an anvil crushing his head. His toes twitch with each pulse.
The phone rings, shrieking, higher in pitch than Reid could ever imagine. His hands fly to cover his ears like he's a very small child, and he curls into a small ball on the bathroom floor and squeezes his eyes closed as the ringing resonates inside his head and bounces around the room, getting louder and louder and louder.
Please, Reid trembles, whispering without sound. Please, let me get through this. Please let me live. I won't do it ever again.
The ringing gets louder.
Please.
Louder.
Please.
Louder.
Then it stops. The echoes of sound begin to fade slowly from his mind.
Reid, left alone on the tiled floor in the dark, covered in sweat and twitching with the residual Dilaudid in his system, opens his eyes the tiniest crack.
I have to stop this. I have to cut back. I could have killed myself.
Some people cry when you save them, and some laugh; Spencer Reid lies on the bathroom floor and lives out the remainder of his bad trip bit by bit, tear by tear and twitch by twitch and gasp by gasp, and knows that nobody can save him now but himself.
***
Elie Wiesel said: "There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest."
Chapter Five: Take a Deep Breath, and Speak.
There's a phenomenon, in social psychology, called the Bystander Effect. It's what happens when a large group of people all witness something horrible occurring right in front of them, and not a one of them calls for help.
They all assume that someone else will be the one to dial 911, to scream stop!, to step in. Everyone turns away; not because they are bad or evil or mean any harm, but simply because they know that they are not the only witnesses, and they think that somebody else will do it.
What you don't know really can hurt you.
JJ is used to the Bystander Effect. Whenever a police tip line number appears beneath her head on a TV, she knows that only a tiny percentage of witnesses will actually call. Everyone assumes someone else will do it.
She remembers the first time she ever did a press conference, two weeks into the job; the first time she witnessed the tactic of luring the killer into calling the tip hotline and falling into the clutches of Garcia's trap and trace. Watching herself on the television in the police station, JJ had innocently wondered aloud if Garcia would know which number belonged to the killer and which belonged to the other witnesses who would call the number.
Hotch had looked at her, long and hard, and JJ had felt her cheeks flush under his gaze because she was still so terrified of him. When he spoke, his voice was filled with bitterness and apathy, even though he only said four words:
"Nobody else will call."
And nobody else did.
Everyone assumes someone else will do it.
It's like with Reid. JJ has watched him since Georgia; she's seen him snap rudely at Emily and disobey Hotch and completely tune out the office briefings.
Thing is, everyone has seen this. Everyone, every member of the team, has seen his mood swings, the yellow colour under his eyes, and the way his hands tremble, and they do nothing.
They've all hoped that someone else will do it. Someone else will step in. Someone will be the one to lay their hand on Reid's thin shoulder, feel the bone and muscle and skin beneath the sweater, and say, stop.
And nobody has moved. Nobody has had the guts to say a word.
JJ sees him, on the Monday following the DC case—three days after the fact—looking like hell. Again.
She doesn't know exactly what happened to him during the case. She was not in the Capitol Building. All JJ found out was that Kevin was dead, that Reid had found him, and that possibly their youngest member needed the weekend off. They all did.
JJ leans around a pile of folders, looks out her office door, and catches a glimpse of Reid in the bullpen; he's got at least two sweaters on, and as he checks his email he takes robotic sips of coffee. She watches it: his left hand reaches out, takes the mug, lifts it to his mouth, and then puts it down.
The next moment, repeat.
Two sweaters on. Layers. Long sleeves.
Is it possible that JJ dreamed the marks were there?
Watching him, she is suddenly terribly ashamed of herself for falling for the Bystander Effect so easily. She has watched and remembered all of his problems, and she hasn't said a word.
Everyone assumes someone else will do it.
When you wake up on your bathroom floor on Saturday afternoon and the light hurts your eyes enough to make you want to cry, then go back to sleep for another hour.
When you begin to reach for the syringe automatically, then remember your bad trip and pull your hand back like it's been burned.
The next hour, repeat.
The next hour, repeat.
When being inside of your own home makes you crave the sweet numbness of your high, then throw yourself out of your door and wander the streets until dusk.
Promise yourself that you are going to stop. You can stop.
Conveniently forget that the dependence liability of Dilaudid is high.
When the sound of your constantly ringing phone sets your teeth on edge, then unplug it from the wall. When you're not sure if it's actually ringing that much or if you're just imagining it, then set your cell phone to silent just to be sure.
When you've lost count of the number of hours it's been since you last had a dose, then sneak your hand up the sleeve of your right arm and run your fingers over the tiny track marks on the inside of your elbow. Feel free to wonder if they'll ever fade away or if you'll be scarred with them forever.
When you spend Saturday night on your couch, too distracted to read and too twitchy to sleep, then go ahead and wish desperately that you had a TV. A stripper. A circus. Anything to distract you from the goddamn craving.
When you've chewed your fingernails down to bloody nubs from your jitteriness, then lie. Say that this is residual effects from the bad trip. It's not withdrawal. You're not addicted.
The following day, repeat. Walk and sit and lie to yourself.
And when you find yourself in your bathroom on Monday morning before you have to leave for work, feeling violently ill with your heart fluttering rapidly, then promise yourself that you'll only inject enough to calm you down. Just enough to let you survive, to let you endure when you should be fired or dismissed of dead. Less than half of your normal dose.
You know the rest by this point.
Seven o'clock in the evening. The sun is beginning to glow dark yellow and warm on the windows, setting earlier and earlier each night. That may be a sign of winter, but for right now it makes JJ feel calm.
She is still in her office, working on the files. She doesn't want to go home quite yet.
JJ has spent half of her day watching Reid in his desk, completing his paperwork for the DC case. Robotically. Minimally. Like he was reaching through wads of cotton or thick molasses.
Watching him, she feels slowed herself, sluggish, and feeling the way he feels only increases her guilt about the Bystander Effect, and not saying anything.
So when she gets the phone call, at first she thinks nothing of it; she just puts the phone on speaker and answers:
"Agent Jareau."
"Agent? Oh, good, I called the right place," a woman replies. She sounds like she's trying too hard to be sophisticated. "I'm looking for information about my son."
JJ tries not to sigh too loudly. "Ma'am, I'm sorry, but in order for the FBI to look for your son you need to file an official report—"
"—please, listen, I know my son is dead," the woman interrupts. "I know you must have a file on him. I just want to know how he died. I want to know if his father finally got to him in the end. I've seen you on television, Agent, and you must know something about him."
What?
JJ cradles the phone against her shoulder, reaching for a pen and piece of paper. "Sorry, what did you say your name was?"
"Woodrow, Lisa Woodrow."
"Okay, and your son's name?"
Lisa sniffs. "Tobias," she whispers. "And his father's name is Charles."
JJ drops her pen.
Tobias Henkel's mother.
What you don't know really can hurt you.
"…Agent Jareau? Are you still there?"
"What? Oh, yes. Sorry," JJ can barely believe it. "I…this is just all a bit of a shock. Your son's case…"
"—did his daddy kill him?" Lisa sounds worried. "Did the bastard do it?"
JJ bites her bottom lip. "No, it…it was the other way around. Tobias Henkel killed his father."
"Oh, my lord! Why?"
"He…it's complicated."
What you don't know will tear you apart when you learn it.
"Mrs. Woodrow, I'm not going to lie to you," JJ automatically reverts to her best sympathy-for-the-families voice. "Tobias Henkel was killed by one of our agents eight weeks ago."
"I know," Lisa replies. "I knew all of that. I know what his daddy did to him and I know what he did to other people, Agent Jareau, but—well, I'm a good and moral Christian, and I want my son to be in heaven if he can. I need forgiveness for his soul."
JJ's blood boils.
"How can you—"
"Please, Agent, I've already called the families of his victims but they've all hung up on me. I know that Tobias was mislead, but he was a good boy. He deserves to have someone to look out for him after he's been gone."
JJ is shaking with blind rage. Something inside of her snaps, and she realizes that she can't do it anymore. She can't watch Reid waste away and then comfort his torturer's mother. It's human nature to notice something horrible happening and to do nothing; it's time stand up and scream that something's not right. Bystander Effect be damned.
"Do you know what your son did?" she cries, rising from her chair with anger, leaning over the speakerphone so that Lisa does not miss a word. "He kidnapped one of our agents, one of our best agents. Reid, Spencer Reid. Tobias beat him and drugged him and murdered people before his eyes."
"You have it wrong," Lisa replies curtly. "That was Charles. Tobias was unwilling. He was innocent. He was forced."JJ's eyes narrow at the speakerphone, almost as if Lisa could see her glare. "I don't care what you believe," she spits out in a deadly whisper. "Reid hasn't been the same. I haven't been the same. None of us have, but Reid was hit the hardest. He's a genius, and all of that potential is now locked inside of him because he's too traumatized to let it out and try again.
"And you know, he would grant you your forgiveness, but he's young. He doesn't know how to hate anyone yet, and that's what makes him so amazing, and your son ruined that. Your son locked that up and almost killed it. And now Reid is a zombie, a shell of who he used to be, and Tobias did it!"
"Agent Jareau—"
JJ's upper lip curls in disgust. "I hope your precious son rots in hell for the sins he's committed," she hisses. "Never call this number again. Your son Tobias was a monster, and I hope that the only forgiveness he will get is from the woman who committed him to a life of terror by leaving him with his father."
She punches the OFF button so hard that she pushes the speakerphone off the desk; it falls to the floor with a crash, and JJ hears someone gasp in surprise at the noise.
She looks up through the partially opened door to see Reid's retreating back. She goes to call after him, but decides against it.
It was good that he heard.
It was good that he knows that someone is there to take a deep breath, no matter how difficult it may be, and speak out when he can't.
JJ suddenly feels a bit better.
***
Joseph Conrad wrote: "I take it that what all men are really after is some form, or perhaps only some formula, of peace."
Chapter Six: It's Almost like a Romance
When staying at home means you'll shoot up, then don't go home.
It's simple.
He's alone in the dark now, leaning back in his office chair with his feet up on his desk.
Silent and soft and wrapped in a delicious dark hug.
Reid sighs softly, rubbing his eyes with the fingers of his right hand, wondering why he can't sleep and why he's asking a question to which he already knows the answer:
He can't sleep because he's in the office, not at home.
He can't go home.
Quod erat demonstrandum, he can't sleep.
He yawns. (I hate logic.)
Gazing up at the ceiling, Reid remembers his mother singing to him in a time when life was hazy, draped in gauze and soft around the edges—a memory that he can barely remember. Something that is not a thing. A sound that can't be heard.
A memory of a mother whose mind isn't scarred with disease—but a memory of someone whose very reality is undeniably pocked with mental illness. A thing negating its own existence; that is the memory of his mother singing.
(Hush little baby)
This is what passes for rest.
Reid closes his eyes and takes a few deep breaths, alone in the office in the middle of the night. Staying here so that he won't go home.
Easy logic.
The small amount of Dilaudid still left in his system makes him feel peaceful and blissful and almost like he's floating; it's a fragile feeling, apt to break at any moment, but it's gorgeous.
And then, like mercury sliding away between his fingertips, some amount of time passes—maybe he falls asleep, but he's not sure—but when Reid opens his eyes again it's still pretty much pitch black and he's still in his office chair, but he's not alone.
"…Reid?"He turns in his swivel chair to see someone across the bullpen, silhouetted, the darker black of their body against the black of the room. His terrified heart stops for a moment even though he knows—he knows, he knows—that it's her, that he's safe in the womb of the BAU office where nothing can hurt him.
"JJ?"
"Yeah," she whispers. Reid can't see her face in the dark but her voice evokes warmth, an It's not really okay, but someday it might be idea.
"What…what're you still doing here?" his voice sounds slurred, pulled like wads of cotton until it's combed long and thin.
"I can't sleep," JJ answers, and her voice changes position as she comes closer.
"Did you take your shoes off?" Reid's voice is dreamy, slow and floating, as if he's already half asleep—and he doesn't know this but it's the sort of voice of the calm, casual pillow talk of lovers.
"How did you know?"
The touch of a smirk graces his dry lips. "Your heels always click on the floor of the bullpen."
He imagines JJ smiling. "Do you notice everything, Spence?"
Reid chuckles, once. "Very nearly," he replies.
The both fall silent again, so that he can't tell where JJ is, or if she's even there, until:
"Spence…"
She's right beside him, standing, leaning against his desk, so close that he can smell the fresh, soapy scent that clings to her and could reach out and wrap his hands around her stomach if he wanted to.
She looks down; he looks up. Reid can only barely see her eyes, and it's almost like a romance.
(people will say we're in love.)
He has to inwardly laugh for a fleeting second, because he's still high—and with all his heart he hopes to god that she can't tell.
"I heard what you said today," he murmurs, trying to find the dark glitter of JJ's pupils. "To that woman."
"I know," JJ replies. "You're welcome."
Reid nods. "I…I don't think I could have done that. What you did."
"I know you couldn't have done that," JJ replies. "Someone has to be the resident bitch around here, don't you think? Garcia's too nice, Emily's too new, and Morgan is too pretty."
Reid grins despite himself.
They look at each other, both swayed by sleeplessness and chemicals and the absurdity of being in the office in the middle of the night, when JJ suddenly blurts out:
"I haven't slept in three weeks."
Out of the blue. Sudden. A piece of her offered up without warning and without asking, and he gets the distinct impression that she didn't really mean to say it out loud.
Reid isn't quite sure what to make of it, so he opens his mouth and murmurs the first thing that pops into his head.
"Actually, it's impossible to go for more than eleven straight 24-hour periods without sleep. Any more than that is fatal."
Damn it.
"What did you say?"
"Never mind."
Reid squints, searching through his memory for that hazy, drug-infused moment before they left for DC, of JJ's sleeping pills. He'd completely forgotten about the entire thing until now, but once he thinks about it a lot of things begin to make sense.
The circles beneath JJ's eyes.
Her zombie-like movements in that DC hotel room.
The way she flinches at the light and always seems to be slightly out of reality, off in her own world.
And Reid has been so addled with drugs that he hasn't noticed a single bit of it. Guilt surges through him.
"JJ, I…do you know why?"
She laughs, dry and sarcastic and bitter. "No. It started a few weeks ago, and tonight I just can't bear to sit at home and do nothing."
Reid sighs. Neither can I, he thinks, but doesn't dare speak. He's overcome with the guilt that comes when someone has confessed something as personal as JJ has: the need to reply, to give back. Reciprocity.
How much does she know? How much did she guess?
All of this is so hazy and quiet and soft that he wonders if it's a dream or not.
And suddenly he's so glad that he's not alone that he reaches out and finds JJ's hand, sandwiching her cool fingers between his palms.
"I can't go home, either. I can't sleep."
There. Reciprocity.
"Spence, your hands are shaking," JJ murmurs, as if it's their secret, and it's not really okay seems to scream out from behind her words.
Reid swallows. "I'm all right," he murmurs in reply.
"Are you sure?"
He nods even though he knows she can't see. "I'm sure."
What your friend doesn't know will probably end up hurting you in the end, but if it saves her from worrying for the moment than it's worth it to lie.
They stay that way for a few minutes, a tableau of two, frozen in a moment that is not quite peaceful but is not quite volatile either, just an exhausted sort of truce between the two. They're both too tired to feel awkward about how JJ's fingers wrap around Reid's, connecting them together, and how his hand stops trembling with her holding it so hard.
Reid thinks and focuses and realizes that he has gone for most of the day without Dilaudid, and all of that residual sickness is absent.
He remembers JJ's voice yelling at Tobias' mother, her passion and her rage and her concern. Reid has seen JJ break down in tears over people she's never met; he's seen mothers send JJ birthday and Christmas cards in thanks for rescuing their children. He's watched her select their cases and has seen the paralyzing fear in her eyes when she wonders if she's chosen the right one. She is the face of them, the heart where the rest of them have brains, and the common sense where they only have intellectual knots to tie themselves up in.
And he looks at the soft curve of JJ's hair as it frames her face, Reid can't help but think that she's just about one of the most amazing people he's ever met, simply because she cares so much about those around her.And once the moment is over, JJ lets her hand slip away, breaking the connection and coming back to reality, and she says, "Want to play cards?"
Just like that, things seem to balance themselves, and in the moment when her face breaks into an almost-invisible smile Reid thinks that he adores her, just a little. He feels almost normal again as he nods, smiling, and snaps on his desk light, breaking the soft darkness' hypnotic spell. He's rummaging around his desk drawer for a pack of cards when his phone rings, loud and jarring and making him feel sick. He unplugged this work phone, too, but apparently the janitor reversed that situation.
But JJ is right there, and it would be too weird for him to unplug the phone with her watching, and so Reid picks it up and says hello and, just like that, the world comes crashing down around him again, and the almost-romance of the moment transforms into a horror story of the highest degree.
***
"My baby's got the lonesome lows,
Don't quite go away overnight;
Doctor Blind, just prescribe the blue ones.
If the dizzying highs don't subside overnight,
Doctor Blind, just prescribe the red ones…" – Emily Haines
Chapter Seven: Dose (Over)
Reid's mother, Diana, has a PhD in Medieval Literature. She taught at several universities before her first psychotic episode, when Reid was seven. She read him every book that she could think of and taught him the same things that she had taught her students.
Imagine her, in the Bennington Sanatorium, feeling a little dizzy one day, but she's on so many medications that nobody at the sanatorium notices it. Maybe she has a few bouts of nausea, but it's all written off as side effects.
These things happen.
Imagine Diana Reid having some problems with her eyesight one day, and then maybe a horrifying headache or two. Migraines. But she's not a healthy woman, and headaches have been common throughout her life.
Imagine Reid's mother on Friday night—the night of his bad trip—overcome by a sudden headache so powerful that she vomits, that she loses control, that finally the doctors notice that something is very wrong.
In the office in the middle of the night, Reid listens to the voice on the other end of the line, saying that they've been trying to get through to him for days. They tell him the bad news and say that they'll call back when they know more. He hangs up the phone, stares into JJ's confused eyes for a moment, and then leaves without a word.
He can't say it.
He can't tell her.
He needs a hug, a kiss, a sweet warmth that he knows only Dilaudid will give, and the need overwhelms him so much that he can think of nothing else.
An aneurysm is a weak spot in a blood vessel that fills itself with blood until it balloons out past normal size. It may put pressure on surrounding nerves or, in the case of cerebral aneurysms, surrounding brain tissue.
They can be genetic, or from a previous congenital disorder. And sometimes they just happen. Sometimes someone will sit down with the newspaper one morning and end up dead on the kitchen floor.
A small brain aneurysm is not necessarily fatal. The vessel may just mend itself, the blood flow repaired, and except for a few headaches nobody's the wiser. The true problems only come when the aneurysm itself bursts.
Reid knows all of this. He forgets where he learned it but it has been stored deep in his mind for years, just waiting to be spoken aloud, and now that the time is right for it he can't bear to form the words.
He tries, but can't remember the last time that he and his mother spoke face to face.
He hasn't sent her a letter in two weeks.
What you don't know really will hurt you.
When an aneurysm bursts, there's often little the doctors can do except try to prevent more bleeding in the brain. Brain damage is often a result, if the patient survives.
Imagine all of Diana's brilliance, that brilliance that possibly drove her mad; take all of that and throw it away forever.
It will never be okay again.
Approximately forty percent of all brain aneurysm victims do not survive the first 24 hours. They simply hemorrhage to death. Some experience brain damage, and others recover with no ill effects.
Blood and bone and brains.
Reid fumbles his key in the lock of his front door and practically falls over when he finally gets it and the door swings open under his weight. He staggers to his bathroom and feels around for the syringe in the dark until it pricks his hand sharply, and when he yelps the sound is swallowed up into nothing.
Sometime on Friday night, when Reid was twitching on his bathroom floor, in the depths of his nightmarish trip, the assistants of the Bennington Sanatorium found Diana Reid on the floor of her room, trembling and soaked in sweat, with one side of her face sagging and numb. Drool in a puddle on the ground beside her open mouth.
Mother and son, hundreds of miles apart but in the same position, vulnerable and alone on the floor.
They shaved her head and opened her skull and exposed the brain below at the site of the bleed; they clipped the burst blood vessel, sealing it off, and drained the blood and at some point in the procedure somebody remembered the statistics and thought that maybe they should call Reid.
Sometime on Friday night, someone tried to tell him that his mother was dying, and Reid never answered the phone. He remained wrapped in unconsciousness past the 24-hour mark that was the critical point for his mother, and all the time the phone was ringing and all the time he was sleeping off the drugs.
And when he awoke on Saturday, his mother was still alive and Reid unplugged the phone, obsessed with his own problems; and as Diana drifted into a coma Reid was wandering the streets of Quantico, hungry for a fix.
Right when she needed him most, he abandoned her.
Reid crawls to his bedside table and pulls out the newest bottle of Dilaudid, the one he bought a week ago but hasn't used yet, as his mother haunts his mind. This sample was not cut with a psychedelic. He asked. He wanted to know.
His hand shakes so hard that he drops the syringe twice before he gets a good grip on it.
Reid doesn't even notice how much Dilaudid he loads into the needle's chamber. It's maybe a bit more than his bad trip, maybe a bit less. He's not sure and he doesn't care. Tears threaten to loosen themselves from his eyes as he rolls up the sleeve of his right arm.
He ties the tourniquet so tightly that his fingers go numb.
On Friday night, as he indulged in the darkness of his addiction and nearly killed himself in the process, his mother Diana was dying. The Sanatorium said that they were keeping her stable, but that it was a Grade Three aneurysm. They were going to try to prevent any further bleeding, but nobody knew if she'd wake up. Nobody knew if she'd be the same if she did.
All that time and all that love and care spent on her, and now it no longer matters.
Guilt burns through him. He should have been there. He should have been able to answer the phone.
Reid's arm is so tense that he has to try three times to find the vein, and his arm aches from the long needle and the plunger seems to depress in slow motion, forever and ever and ever.
His eyelids flutter shut.
All so gracefully.
A kiss, a hug, a sweet warmth—and something else.
Something empty.
Reid knows what's happened before he thinks it over. The conclusion before the evidence, although it's more suspenseful the other way around.
It starts in his arm, where the needle went in three times before he got the vein: there in that third spot, there's a feeling of numbed, high pain.
Imagine your arm falling asleep, and as it wakes up it aches in a way that makes your bones creak.
Like that.
It spreads. It moves. This empty, painful nothingness. Through down to Reid's torso, to his toes and his fingertips and his scalp and behind his eyes.
It hits his stomach and he feels nauseous.It hits his brain and his head explodes in ringing.
It hits his heart and makes it flutter too fast to keep track, almost like a hum, and Reid trembles right along with it.
This is nothing like the last time he took a little too much Dilaudid.
This is worse.
Last time, Friday night, as his mother's aneurysm burst and Kevin Pullman's body was still warm, there was fear and anger and horror and dread.
Now, there is nothing but this white blankness that is beginning to encroach on the edges of Reid's mind.
Last time there were images in his head and magnified senses and overwhelming nausea. Now there is only the sick knowledge that he has gone too far to come back, and a strange feeling of static, of chaos, that is getting louder and louder and louder.
Too late to go back.
Too much to handle.
And instead of being loud and gory, it's quietly terrifying, a silent and out-of-control rollercoaster.
His vision blurs, doubles, triples, and never returns back to normal.
Fumbling one trembling hand into his messenger bag for his cell phone, Reid leans against the wall beside his bed and tries to dial 911, but his hand is too shaky and he's beginning to foam at the mouth.
His finger hits speed-dial number six. JJ's number.
It rings three times before Reid loses control of his grip and drops the phone, but it doesn't matter because he knows he's lost the ability to speak. Aphasia.
He closes his eyes, and behind his eyelids all he sees is white nothingness.
Reid curls up, pulling his knees in towards his chest and tucking his arms beneath his legs, and knows, without research or eidetic knowledge, that he's having an overdose.
***
"I can't see the thief that lives inside of your head,
But I can be some courage at the side of your bed…" – Our Lady Peace
Chapter Eight: Overdose
Maybe it's women's intuition, and maybe it's God or Fate or maybe just simply paranoia stemming from insomnia, but JJ knows something's wrong the moment her phone rings.
Two in the morning.
Reid has been gone for maybe half an hour and JJ is still sitting in his office chair, staring into the lone desk lamp, her eyes burning slightly from the light. It's jarring when contrasted with the dark that envelops her.
Alone in the dark.
Alone in the light.
Nobody else knows she's here.
She still doesn't know what made Reid leave, and she's too exhausted to rationally believe that it's nothing personal, and so like a high school girl with a broken heart she sits and lets the waves of hurt wash over her.
Two in the morning. JJ can afford to act immature at this time of night, at the very least.
She sighs, and sits back in Reid's office chair, unintentionally copying his position when he was here. Everything seemed to be going so well. The quiet adorable genius, half asleep in his office chair, was enough to make her want to smile again.
And then he got that phone call, whatever it was, and he left without a word.
Goddamn scary look in his eyes.
The time has crawled by since then, one minute seeming like five.
Her cell's sudden ringing makes her jump, and it breaks the soft lovely silence of the room around her.
"Hello?"
Nothing.
An ambient soft sound of background movement.
No voices.
"Hello" Is anyone there?"
Is this a prank call…?
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Then…something.
Someone moans, ever so softly and from far away. A moan that cannot be faked or acted out. A desperate effort to make a sound when you're fighting death or unconsciousness of pain.
An exhale of breath with the tiniest bit of sound weaved in.
JJ's heart leaps to her throat. She pulls the phone away from her ear and looks at the caller ID even though she's already guessed who it is.
Reid Cell.
Reid.
Reid.
Something's wrong.
JJ swallows, feeling dread twist her stomach into something tiny and wretched. She goes to find her car keys.
JJ has only been to Reid's house once, when he was sick with the flu and she had to deliver some files for him. It's a five minute drive from the office, one part of an old duplex, all sandstone block and carved wood trimming. Cherry wood doors and single-frame windows with no screens.
The door isn't latched. Nobody bothered to shut it properly.
Standing under the warm yellow glow of the light in the doorway, JJ gently pushes on the door with the very tips of her fingers, almost afraid to touch it. It swings open to reveal near-complete darkness, so much that she can't tell where anything is.
Reid is afraid of the dark.
Something's wrong!
JJ tiptoes inside, shutting the door fully behind her, unsure of why she's so scared to make a sound. The latch's click sounds like a gun being cocked.
"Spence?"
A moaning sound from the right of her, through the door. JJ opens it to discover more darkness, and she opens her cell phone and casts the screen's pale blue light around the room.
Someone inhales softly, shuddering.
Oh, god.
JJ's light finds a pair of bare feet lying sideways on the floor, and follows them upwards to knees and elbows and a hunched, curled torso. A mop of sweat-soaked hair. All of it, trembling, curled in the fetal position like a small child.
JJ tries to scream but all she can manage is a choked whisper: "Reid—"
He looks up, and his eyes glitter in the dark and remind JJ of her childhood, of seeing raccoons on the garbage cans and how when they heard your footsteps they'd look up at you and freeze, their eyes the only thing giving them away as living beings.
JJ moves slowly towards him and lays a hand on his shoulder.
"What happened?"
Reid shakes his head, pointing to his mouth.
No.
He can't speak.
His chin is covered in something clear and wet and shining, which JJ wipes away with a Kleenex from her pocket. There are dried tears on his face, too.
Beyond the realm of it's not okay and into something very bad.
JJ pulls open the shutters, letting in the barest amount of moonlight; it's enough to roughly see where she's going. She kneels, intending to help Reid sit up, but her knee comes into contact with something extremely sharp and she yelps in surprise.
"What the—"
JJ feels Reid tense up as she gropes carefully with her other hand, finding the sharp point first and then the rest of the object.
A syringe. Empty.
JJ feels as though she might be sick.
She drops the needle, her fingers flying to the sore spot on her knee, feeling through her pantyhose.
No blood. The point didn't break the skin.
Sweet relief floods her, but far too soon, because JJ suddenly remembers and turns to Reid; pulling him gently into a sitting position, she grabs his right arm—where the sleeve is rolled up above the elbow.
Bare arms.
Bare skin.
JJ's fingers slide up the inside of his arm, feeling and looking in the poor light, squinting for the little marks she saw at the hotel in DC.
Track marks.
How could she be so stupid as to miss them?
Track marks. Imagine junkies on the street and dirty needles in those yellow disposal bins and AIDS and—god, he's been injecting something, and now it's killing him.
She looks up to meet Reid's wet eyes, and almost bursts into tears.
"Reid, I…why would you—" His eyes roll up into his head and he suddenly begins to convulse—"Reid!"
Oh god.
She remembers her first aid courses, taught in those little airless rooms in community centers, and pinches Reid's arm. Hard.
Keep him awake. With overdoses, you have to keep them awake. Don't let them fall asleep.
Another little red mark on his arm to compliment the others, but it does the job. His eyes open.
And then they close.
JJ pinches him again.
Open.
Close.
Pinch.
No response.
JJ taps his face, pulling him back to her, and when Reid's eyes have focused again she puts her hands on either side of his face and presses her forehead to his.
"Don't do that, Spence," she whispers, shaking her head. "Don't, Reid, you have to stay awake. You're a genius; you know what you have to do. Stay here with me. Please, Reid, stay with me…"
She's hyperfocusing, listening to the sound of Reid's breath and the feel of his pulse against hers, the sweat on his brow and the constant movement of his trembling, and so it takes JJ completely by surprise when Reid suddenly closes the space between his lips and hers.
It's chaste and abrupt and as terrifyingly random as two kids playing spin the bottle. Reid's breath is the only part of him that's warm.
Kissing her, trying to keep that connection to her, to reality, trying to keep from slipping away.
JJ can't even think of what to do before he pulls away, back the barest of inches until they can see each other's eyes, and in an instant JJ knows that he's fighting and desperate and scared to death, and she can't even know how to form her face into something reassuring.
Beyond it's not okay, but someday it might be.
This is so much worse than that.
God damn it, Reid, what have you done?
It's not the moonlight that's casting his lips in blue.
JJ remembers her cell phone, and she feels for it on the floor beside her.
"Don't fall asleep," she whispers; he exhales softly, and she takes that as an okay.
JJ dials 911, her eyes never once leaving Reid's face, as tender as a mother. She brushes away the hair that's fallen into his eyes as she speaks to the dispatchers.
He's having an overdose.
I'm not sure, some sort of intravenous drug. A syringe.
Keep him awake. Got it.
They promise to be there in five minutes.
She can tell that Reid's slipping away from her faster than she can bring him back to wakefulness; strictly dying without the violent frills that they are so predisposed to expect.
Somehow, this way is scarier than any bomb or gunshot.
JJ taps Reid's eyelids, pinches his arms, and runs her finger softly over his long eyelashes; anything to keep his eyes open. She knows he can't answer but she still can't help it, and she whispers it's not okay, but someday it might be.
I'm here.
Stay with me.
Please, Spence, don't leave. Just a few more minutes.
They kneel together in shared prayer or punishment, prostrating, and they are still there, alive and alive and alive, barely, when the EMT finds them minutes or hours or years later.
***
Philip K. Dick said: "Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane."
Chapter Nine: A Horror Story and a Love Story
1. Dead or Dreaming?
Close your eyes, and imagine that you're somewhere else.
It's not okay now, but where you're going it might be.
This is how this story ends.
2. Dream or Thought?
How it ends is that JJ jerks awake, glances at the clock, and realizes with soft shock that she's slept for an hour.
The hospital room, all white and pastel and the soft fluttering hum of murmurs outside the door. Reid's thin form underneath the baby-chicken yellow of the blanket.
Breathing.
Sleeping.
Living.
Opposites and opposing forces. Awakening and slumbering.
Take a deep breath, and then let it out. You have nothing to say.
That's okay. Nobody will mind if you're silent for a little while.
The soft beeping of a monitor will be enough of a soundtrack.
JJ straightens in her chair, stiff, and realizes that, in her sleep, she let go of Reid's hand. She takes it again, relieved to find it warm, and sandwiches his fingers between hers. Comfort and reassurance even though she's still scared herself.
The EMT team said that she likely saved him.
The emergency room doctors put even more needles in him, and JJ watched and the spot on her knee where Reid's syringe poked her felt like it was still in there.
He regained his voice shortly before the sedative took effect, and Reid's eyes found JJ and all he had said was, "Did I kiss you?"
She had blushed, a faint wisp of pink across her cheeks. "Yes."
"Sorry."
JJ had smiled at him, holding his hand tightly as the nurses wheeled him into a private room. "It's okay," she replied. "I won't tell anyone."
And she won't. There's too much else to know and understand.
That kiss was solely theirs.
JJ watched as the doctors drew blood and put it back, as they injected and infused and dosed him, and all the while she had to keep reminding herself:
Good drugs. Things to help him.
Keep saying it.
He's safe.
He'll live.
They detoxed him, cleaned his blood and made sure he'd survive the night, but JJ knows that things are about to get so much more difficult.
Reid has to get help.
And he has to figure out what to say to the team.
He's alive, yes, but what will happen next?
JJ bites her bottom lips and stares at Reid's eyelids, moving now as he dreams. How does she tell him that the Sanatorium called about two hours ago to say that Diana is in a coma?
How does she tell the others what happened?
How will Reid be able to keep his job?
What will happen next?
She doesn't know. For right now, all that matters is that Reid is safe.
There's a TV in the room, showing an old silent film that JJ knows is called Love. Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in one another's arms, the greatest lovers in history, locked in passion that didn't need sound to make its point.
JJ picks up the remote and changes the channel. Bela Lugosi looms on the tiny screen, cape and teeth and all, shadowed and flickering. Helen Chandler as the doomed Mina.
JJ wonders where she learned all of this, and then remembers that Reid told her, long ago, when she professed her love of old movies.
She flips back to Love.
Back to Dracula.
Back to Love.
She does it fast until they begin to look like the same film, Garbo and Lugosi, Gilbert and Chandler. A horror story and a love story.
JJ realizes it.
A horror story and a love story.
(Is she the love or the horror?)
Her breath catches in her throat.
JJ's finger stops pushing the button on the remote, and the channel continues with Dracula.
Her eyes travel to Reid, asleep beside her, peaceful for the first time in months. He's got such a long way to go before he heals.
So does she.
She considers, thinking on the night that she's had. The office, where she came so close to feeling at peace, there with Reid.
The call, which made her feel as if her own life were in danger.
Finding Reid alone on the bedroom floor, gathering him into her arms and comforting him as if he were her own son, her own lover, or herself.
Staring at Reid's boyish features, JJ realizes that she may not know what happens next, but that they will both get through it.
It's not okay, but someday it might be.
Looking back to the television screen, JJ hits the channel button one more time, switching it to Love, and then sets the remote down beside her and squeezes Reid's hand.
The horror part of the story is over. All that can possibly be left is love.
She can deal with that.