Title: Victimology
Authour: prettychemistry
Pairing: gen
Fandom: Criminal Minds
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Criminal Minds and do not own its characters.
Spoilers for "Profiler, Profiled" , "Revelations" and "Fear and Loathing"
Summary: Morgan's musings about post-Revelations Reid and the idea of being a victim. (Gen. not directly affiliated with any of my fics, but could be considered an affiliate of "Failsafe".)

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Morgan has never had to come back from the dead - that's Reid's alone to deal with. But Morgan knows a lot about how it feels to be tortured. Psychologically at least. Practically. He's a practical person, gets by on logic when Reid uses intelligence, analysis as opposed to knowledge.
 
Morgan knows about being beaten down until something in you breaks. About the aftermath, the hollow feeling of being a vessel for the sharp-edged fragments of who you were, that seem to jumble inside you when you move, disconnected from the parts of you that miraculously remain intact. About acknowledging the futility, but wishing anyway, that you could reach inside, find some kind of superglue, reattach yourself together. Knowing that if you could only lay the pieces out, you'd recognize the patterns like a jigsaw puzzle, be able to match them up and join them back into a cohesive whole.
 
The fear that if you tried, some of them would be missing. Without all the pieces, no puzzle makes sense. And if there are holes in him somewhere, scar tissue instead of healthy cells, places he's healed improperly, is still damaged - Morgan would rather not know about it.
 
The power of profiling is empathizing, at least according to Gideon.
 
Morgan watches Reid and waits for him to crack. Remembers that denial can only be stretched so thin before you can see through it, that the moment will come when you realize you've forgotten who you were before you were a victim.
 
It happens in New York. Reid went to the bathroom and came out with dead eyes, fingers shaking like his subconscious was literally grasping at straws. On the plane, Morgan tried to talk to him, but he was thrown by those eyes. He can't lie to Reid, and he can't bear to tell him all he knows about recovery.
 
You'll feel like shit. For a long time. But you'll find it in yourself to fight, every day, to not collapse under it. You'll fight for what seems like forever, then look back and know you're better than you were when it happened, maybe better than you were before it happened. But ten years later that scar tissue is still going to pull at you sometimes, make it so you can't watch a talk show about child molesters without feeling like you'll die, would die if you could only take them all with you, and you'll wonder who you might have been, how well-adjusted and happy you might have been if it had never happened, but it did, and you're not that man, and that never goes away. Never.
 
Morgan won't say it. He can't lie, can only offer what he can spare. A hand up, a shoulder, just being someone for Reid who distantly kind of loves him, one nonjudgmental face among millions in the world who won't understand. Even if Reid never knows it.
 
For now all Morgan can do is watch, and care, and hope hard that if that crack widens, if it comes to a point when Reid's eyes come back from the dead and start hurting, that he'll be able to offer more. Wonder if the strength he's cultivated is too brittle for this.
 
Wonder if anyone, anywhere, ever really stops being a victim of someone else.
 
~~~
 
"I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to be this person. I don't know who this person is."
- Izzie, "Grey's Anatomy"

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