Title: Failsafe
Authour: prettychemistry
Pairing: gen
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Criminal Minds and do not own its characters.
Warning: drug themes
Summary: Post-Revelations drabble. Reid character study.

***

They'd found the drugs. Of course they had. They'd taken him to the hospital. You can't hide narcotics in a hospital - or, for that matter, in the FBI. Especially not when the CSIs have to take your clothes for evidence. Protocol. Why had he thought they wouldn't find them?

 

The BAU made one a good liar. He'd invented something about how Tobias had given them to him as a "gift", feeling guilty for the abuse his alternate personality had visited upon him. Before I shot him. He had to go to detox anyway - he'd been given dilaudid over the course of days, at least four doses based on the trackmarks, enough to get him addicted, depending on several factors - it was policy, and he was being hospitalized anyway, for his fractured metatarsals and a cracked rib from the sloppy CPR. They'd let him out of mandatory counseling because Gideon had said he would watch him. Gideon thought he knew him, he thought he knew everything, but Gideon could make mistakes. 

 

So he didn't have the vials he'd taken, but he knew what had been in them. Eidetic memory. Muscle memory too, for that matter - the body knows. He could get the same drug combination any time. Being in the FBI made you street-smart fast. There were other vials out there. They pulled at him like a magnetic field that wouldn't go away, as though the injections had left behind electrons buzzing beneath his skin. Like static charge, or gravitational pull.

 

He can argue with psychology, debate the theory and the statistics, tell himself that terms like addiction and compulsion and PTSD and dissociation don't apply to him. But the secret behind Dr. Spencer Reid is that he isn't really a psychologist. Only his third PhD dealt with criminal behaviour.

 

He can argue with biology too - his second doctorate was in neuroscience, embarked upon when his mother kept getting worse, (back when he thought science could really fix things, instead of just push back the rising tide of humanity's instinctual depravity long enough for a breath of fresh air and the feeling of at least I'm doing something). But biology is inherently empirical, because life refuses to organize itself into something fully formulaic and computable, and Reid doesn't really trust what can only be observed but never factually, quantifiably definite. One of his math professors used to joke: there's no proof without proofs.

 

Reid's willingness to take anything on faith decreases in increments that tick by like seconds. Like disappointments. Every new evil he sees in the world opens up the possibility for a thousand more. Every time he feels himself slip, sees one of his fellow agents (he won't say teammates, not since Elle when they all unconsciously stopped believing in their ability to depend on each other) slip, he is forced to remember that they are the victims' best, last chance and sometimes they...sometimes they fucking suck.

 

They're fallible. People are inherently fallible, even on a cellular level. All of evolution is caused by the inherent inability of cells to replicate themselves without miniscule, heritable mistakes.

 

Reid is fallible too; he's acutely aware of his many weaknesses. He doesn't really trust himself and he never has. So on the worst days, when he wakes up from nightmares of the people he has failed to save, the people he will fail to save; when he dreams of the cabin, of being bound and helpless and shaking as Tobias helped him, that first time, to shoot up, and he can't tell if it's a nightmare or a fantasy...

 

He returns to the basics. His first PhD.

 

Physics.

 

When he takes magic out of the equation, he is left with a world of rules and defined variables and equations that all mean something clear that can be tested and evaluated - a world he can see in his mind more clearly, sometimes, than the one he lives in.

 

When things get bad, Reid thinks of the laws of conservation. In a closed system the following are constant: the total mass-energy of the system; the total electric charge of the system; the total linear momentum of the system; the total angular momentum of the system.

 

It only comforts him for a few seconds - as long as it takes for him to remember that he doesn't live in a closed system; that instead, every day he deals with much frailer laws that are broken more often than the general public cares to think.

 

Reid thinks that Gideon is really an anthropologist, because the older man deeply respects the concept of talismans. Gideon keeps pictures of the people they save.

 

On his nightstand, Reid keeps the two things that give him comfort in the open system of his chosen life. One is a letter - not from his mother, or a friend, or even a person - from the CIA. It's an open invitation for a position in a think-tank where he could immerse himself, for the rest of his life, in string theory and relativity and finite, quantifiable things.

 

If he's willing to give up his current life - his socialized, passionate existence that used to make him feel, sometimes, for brief instances like a superhero - if it all gets too hard, he has somewhere to go. "Safety in numbers" taken a new way. Living a life of principle.

 

And when he doesn't have the energy to imagine a new, theoretical life, or to make physics puns; when he allows his brain to teeter on the edge of dark thought that might allow even proofs to falter, on top of the letter is his very last failsafe.

 

A clear glass vial of dilaudid cut with LSD. 

***