Criminal Minds: Trompe L'oeil (part 22)
The sterile air in the hospital trudges warily over the grime on their skin, ruffling the edge of Rossi's collar, rippling the soot stamped to Gideon's shirt.
Closing his mouth, Morgan pulls a slow hitch of it through his nose and feels the recoil against the remainder of smoke in his lungs. Ten minutes of standing in the same spot hasn't eased the contrast. They are like loam on white linen. Like shrapnel fragments recovered from a tragedy and set to study in a lab. The hospital corridor is too clean for the grunge they've carried back with them. Too cold for their exhaustion.
Too familiar.
The dark wood bench JJ'd been sitting on just over a day ago holds an open space next to Prentiss, but Morgan can't bring himself to take it. Instead, he moves in silent intervals across the hallway, rubbing his thumb over the thin wire he'd left coiled around his finger during his quest to separate the row of Gregory's incendiary devices from their flashpoints.
The wire is a physical reminder that it'd worked. They'd minimized the explosion. It should have taken them all out. It should have set trees on fire for a hundred miles, no matter how hard it'd been raining. It should have turned the entire south side of the mountain into a crater.
He stops, flicking his thumb under the wire, using his other hand to twine it in the opposite direction, watching pressure lines appear and disappear on his skin.
They'd still left a graveyard behind them.
Through the trees behind the millhouse, in the rain and the darkness, they'd found the rest of the sepulchers. Handcrafted stone, row upon row. Stretched out through the woods. It would take time to get the final count. To figure out how many women had been killed through the years. To identify the remains. To figure out how far and wide he'd traveled to take them.
Three alive. Too many dead.
A ripple against his sleeve jars him from the memory. JJ paces past his left shoulder, fiddling with her necklace. Their eyes meet briefly but neither speaks, moving forward in their own paths until Rossi clears his throat. JJ sits next to Prentiss then, hand pinched to her eyebrow, and Morgan goes motionless, watching.
Gideon is leaning against the wall to JJ's left, hands pressed to the brick behind his back, eyes distant-a million questions hanging quietly around him that no one seems willing to ask.
Nothing has changed.
Everything is different.
That man was the best, Morgan remembers telling Rossi, and in the end, he simply ran away. It's what the BAU does to people. Morgan's known it from the beginning. He saw it the minute he'd come on board-saw it in Elle, though he hadn't wanted to. Saw it in himself sometimes too. Too many girls buried in bones and stone, with open eyes and accusations.
They'd all contemplated leaving, maybe a hundred times over. But Morgan had learned, of all the possible hells, walking away seemed the biggest hell of all.
Suddenly, the double doors down past the waiting room click open, and Hotch is there, drawing thicker the hue of déjà vu in Morgan's mind. There are dark stitches stretching into Hotch's hairline and bruises spreading down towards his eye. His forehead is shaded like watermelon, but he looks steady on his feet. As solid as Morgan has ever seen him. And abruptly, Morgan feels fiercely grateful for Hotch and what he sacrificed to stay with them.
Hotch could have had a nine to five life. He could have someday run the FBI. If he'd left back then, when Gideon had-he could have done anything. There is no concrete proof of what might have happened to the rest of them, no sure idea where all of them would be. But standing here in this corridor, with all its uncertainty, somehow seems better than any alternative.
"How's the head?" asks Rossi, when Hotch gets close enough.
Hotch returns a neutral look. "Still attached to my shoulders. No word on Reid?"
"Not yet," answers Prentiss.
Folding his arms, Hotch takes a breath and says nothing, easing into the silent rhythm of their waiting.
"Hey," says Gideon, soft voice cracking the stillness a moment later. "How's Our Girl Friday?"
"Crap," says Prentiss. "She's going to kill us."
JJ looks at her, already digging out her cell phone. "I'll call."
"No." Prentiss gets to her feet, touching JJ's arm lightly. "That's okay. Stay. I'll do it." She smiles simply at Gideon, nods carefully at Morgan, and moves away.
Morgan remains stiff nearly a minute afterward, standing taunt with too-cold air grating over his neck.
The intercom beeps, followed by an unintelligible voice that moves like needles through his nerves. Palming his forehead, he looks over to see Hotch watching him. Looking away, he swallows, peels loose his feet and follows Prentiss down the hall.
~
When Gideon had talked Adrian Bale out of the building in Boston, the detonation trigger for the bomb that would end up killing six FBI agents had been in Bale's pocket. If they'd searched him, they would have found it. No one would have died.
The lines on Gideon's face might have become more distinguished than aged. More steady. Less haunted.
Gregory Hanks had sewn his detonator into the cuff of his sleeve. A pressure trigger, Morgan told them, that once depressed became a dead man's switch. A thumb loop in the sleeve of the shirt kept the cuff right in the palm of Gregory's hand, always in his control, pressuring the trigger between his palm and the gun the moment he'd held it to Reid's head.
It'd been there, under the surface. The whole time. Waiting for the pressure to release.
Hotch replays the scenario in his mind, rolling it back, then rolling it forward.
The bright light in the hospital hallway casts wavy reflections of the team's faces onto the stark floor. Hotch rubs thumb and forefinger lightly down his eyelids and blinks up from the below-the-surface image of Gideon's jaw to watch the real thing. The eyes that meet his are flesh and blood in a ghost. Carefully impartial. But the rest of the expression is one he knows.
Boston.
A scenario rolled back and forth with no way to change it.
But maybe that expression on Gideon's face had never softened the way Hotch believed it had. Maybe it'd always been there, from the beginning of time. Waiting for the pressure and release.
Restless on his feet, Hotch paces towards the window in the corner of the corridor, stilling himself in front of the glass panes, glancing through the open blinds to the media firestorm being kept outside the entrance. There are no statements being given. No names being shared. But details would leak sooner or later. They always did. And they would study him. His history. His pathology. His IQ. One way or another, Hanks would live on the way he'd known he would, even with his body stretched dead in a morgue, JJ's bullet in his ear.
Every failure has a domino effect, Hotch thinks. Every success, the same. Somewhere out there a budding psychopath is waiting to hear the story of Gregory Hanks. Waiting to follow in his footsteps.
"Hotch," he hears, and looks left. Gideon is holding a cup of coffee in the air.
After a moment, Hotch takes it, feeling the heat in his fingertips and the watermark of familiarity in his bones. A reflection of memory. Balance and counter-balance. Genius and dedication.
He takes a sip and looks back out the window, feeling the swell of senselessness in the dark. For everything they are able to put reason to, there are a thousand things that never fit.
Gideon leans a shoulder to the outside edge of the window's frame. Hotch can see the unspoken words in his demeanor. The sentences that can't be formed. Not profiling each other on the team has long since become code only for what they don't consistently call each other on. They spend their time tying their identities around each other, all the while sewing secrets into sleeve-cuffs until they all forget what's hiding there.
"Reid will be fine," Gideon says steadily.
"He's strong," agrees Hotch, aware that they are taking about more than this seizure and more than this case.
The rain outside has become a drizzle. Specks of water on the dark glass streaking lines through the echo of the long hallway at his back. He can see JJ leaned forward on the bench-Rossi pacing away with his own coffee in his hands. The transparent image of Gideon's silhouette.
"Aaron. You've always been what this team needs."
Setting his coffee on the windowsill with his hand still around it, Hotch moves his head, seeking Gideon in profile. "You didn't have to leave the way you did," he says quietly, mild and without malice. "We would have understood."
Gideon shifts his weight, a miniscule fraction. "How could you?" he replies. "I didn't."
~
With her elbows on her knees, fingers pressed to her forehead, JJ feels hyper conscious of her scalp and skin. Dry static tingling under her hair. The sensation of the coffee she'd just swallowed sits warm on her teeth. The shockwave from firing her weapon has left a phantom imprint in her palms. It is the only conscious thought she's given to her actions. She didn't blink. She hasn't blinked in a long time.
Later, when she has time to think about more than what's in front of her, maybe she will. When she has time to think of Will, and Henry. Time to think beyond Reid. And Gideon. And the family in front of her.
"Agent Hotchner?"
Lifting her head, JJ sees the doctor walking towards them. She hadn't even heard the doors click-hyper sensitive to them all night, and she hadn't heard the doctor approach at all. Tucking hair behind her ear, she gets to her feet.
"Hotch," calls Rossi, looking down the hallway. Hotch turns, Gideon following.
Gathering them near the wall, the doctor speaks, eyebrows tense, but mouth easy. "He's stable. He's awake. And, he's okay. For the most part."
"For the most part?" asks Hotch.
The doctor sighs, but JJ feels it's more preparation than deflection. "The aftermath of lidocaine poisoning can be difficult to predict. Seizures this length of time after the initial dose aren't common, but neither is lidocaine toxicity. With what he's experienced and with the dose he ingested… his size… his weight. Any number of factors can individualize the effects. At this point I'm going to cautiously say that with rest, he should be completely fine."
JJ tilts her head when she sees Gideon shift like he wants to say something, but he never does.
Rossi trades a look with Hotch. "But," he prompts.
"But," concedes the doctor. "The additional seizure is concerning. We can release him tomorrow, but he shouldn't be alone for a few days, and he should do a follow up with his home physician. He's likely to experience some insomnia, possibly some continued memory impairment for the next week or so, but I'd be wary of any symptoms that persist beyond that time period-headaches, tingling in the extremities that doesn't abate, even ringing in the ears-if it persists, it could be a sign of something else."
JJ folds her arms, re-rolling the words through her mouth to find the good news in the midst. She feels like there should be more questions, more answers. Something more steadily final that would close this all out, but it's not quite there.
"Thank you," Hotch says. "Is there anything else we should know?"
The doctor shakes his head, easing the pinch in his eyebrows. "Just get him plenty of rest. Keep him hydrated. And in my opinion, he's too damn thin, but that about covers it."
Rossi runs fingers over the cut in his goatee as the doctor walks away. To JJ, his face looks too narrow, oddly tilted. The world is still bent off center through her eyes, like it has been all day, and maybe now it's catching up to her. She lets go of her necklace, sitting back down on the bench.
"JJ?" asks Hotch. "Are you alright?"
When she looks up, Rossi sets a hand on her shoulder, heavy, the weight of exhaustion in his grip. At this point, they are all together the walking dead. "I think Reid isn't the only one who could use a good meal, or some rest," he says.
~
The ceiling in Reid's hospital room is patterned in tiled squares. Some white. Some hazy green. Alternating. The exact number you'd find on a chessboard.
Tipping his head against the wall at his back, he closes his eyes and imagines the pieces. Knight to F-3, he thinks. The opening move in the game between Donald Byrne and Bobby Fisher in 1956. Gideon had played through the moves with him once-one of their earliest meetings. It's not just the intentions of your opponent that you need to look at, he'd said. It's what your opponent believes about yours.
Reid's thought about that a lot in the last few years. Breaking down the moves on the board over and over again. All the while thinking that in chess the ultimate intention was always the same. The pathways differ. The results never change. Only who wins. And who loses.
He tilts his head forward and opens his eyes, scattering the chess pieces from his mind. Grey light, the color of graveyard stone, passes through the window, turning the eggs on his plate to dull yellow. The red jell-o cup to burnt mahogany. His eye isn't twitching anymore, and his teeth no longer taste like iron, but he can't find much appetite.
A cotton feeling is curling around the edge of his brain and the soft glow that's been haloing his vision every time he opens his eyes hasn't completely gone away. But he doesn't see Tobias in the corner. He doesn't hear music playing. The walls are pale blue, and he thinks maybe they'll stay that way.
Hotch, and Prentiss, and Morgan had all explained to him what happened, over and over and over again until it seemed it was starting to stick. It's not that he wasn't paying attention. It's that the sequence of events kept falling out of order. The millhouse still feels like a dream. Like snapshots spread beneath is eyes. Still frames of old photographs. Captured moments, fluttering out of sequence through his mind.
When he sees Gideon standing in the doorway, it takes a full minute to realize he's not one of those pictures.
He's real.
He's always been real. More real than Reid's father sometimes, in what he represented.
Blinking slowly at the sight, Reid suddenly thinks it bothers him most that when Gideon left, he took the pictures of the people that he saved, but took no part of them. Gideon always said the pictures were like his family. He took the pictures. He left them behind. What did that make them?
When the still frame of Gideon-in-the-doorway tilts his head sideways, Reid blinks again and realizes he's been staring. "Hey," he says.
"Hey, yourself," answers Gideon, finally stepping through the threshold. "How're you feeling?"
"I'm okay," he lies, like he knows he's supposed to.
The silence runs awkwardly for a moment, until Reid rolls the tray with the food away and tries to sit higher. Gideon comes closer, standing in the dull burn of the bedside light. And there is more silence. Too much to say. No words to say it.
Reid curls his fingers in towards each other. "Did you find it?" he asks.
"What's that?" says Gideon.
"Your belief in happy endings."
Gideon goes abruptly still, motionless on his feet, a soft line of movement working over his throat.
"I'm sorry," Reid says softly.
"Don't be." Gideon clears his throat. "It's not your fault." Smiling lightly, he steps forward, easing a hip against the bed. "What I have learned is that we are part of the happy endings we make. A big part of that is up to us. I… I failed in that regard. I left because I truly believed, at the time, that the only things I could bring those closest around me would be misery and pain. Far more than would be there because of my absence."
"Do you still believe that?"
"Most of the time. Yes."
The tick of a clock hums softly somewhere inside the room. The echo of metal wheels clacking over linoleum leaks towards them from far off down the hallway. Gideon closes his hand, then sets it on the bed near the line of Reid's IV. "Then again," he says, "if you hadn't seen me, you might have swallowed more of that coffee. So… maybe I'm starting to."
Reid swallows, thinking knight to F-6, and pawn to C-4. Thinking, every explanation reaches the same end. But his next breath comes easier, curling tight only when it reaches the pressure built below his sternum. "Did you ever go see Steven?"
It matters, and it doesn't matter. Maybe trying to find meaning reason in the midst of all this is like his mother scribbling Dylan in notebooks, trying to add significance to their lives. Giving reason to their actions. Breaking down the moves, trying to change the results. They all passed checkmate a long time ago.
"No… I always felt I couldn't visit Steven in person until I was able to give you the same," Gideon says matter-of-factly. He pauses, looking at the crest of the window, instead of Reid's face, but his voice is straightforward and calm, steady in the way Reid had always counted on it to be. "If I'd let myself talk to you before I left, Reid, I would have stayed. If I'd stayed, I would have…" At that moment, he looks back towards the door, the grey light dark on his eyes before he turns them back to Reid. "I'm sorry I frightened you. I'm sorry the explanation still isn't better."
Reid opens his mouth, treads a trembly breath and quotes, "We clearly do not derive our concepts from sensations and only sensations, which those concepts merely serve to copy, because we are already presupposing certain concepts that are not reducible to sensory data from the outset."
Gideon lifts an eyebrow.
"Kant," Reid explains. Philosophy. No right or wrong answers. "Just because we think something should make sense, doesn't mean it will."
Gideon almost smiles. Nodding his head, he breathes out slow. "I guess I could just say I had a mental breakdown."
"I guess so," agrees Reid.
And that seems to be where the words run out. He feels settled. He feels unsettled. He still remembers the darkness of Gideon's cabin. Remembers thinking for just one moment, before he'd turned the lights on, that maybe he was going to find a body.
"I should let you get some rest," Gideon says, standing.
The gap under Reid's sternum stutters a moment, cold skin suddenly hypersensitive against his hospital gown.
"I'll be here when you wake up," Gideon adds, then waits a beat. "I'll see you again before you leave."
Reid pulls his lips together, and nods, but he's suddenly not sure it matters anymore. The walls remain pale blue. The lines around the room have settled into a solid, specific reality. When he thinks over their conversation, his memory doesn't fail him. He remembers every word. But he still fears his own mind.
Gideon starts to turn.
"Jason?" Reid stops him. The name foreign in his mouth.
"Yes?"
He licks his lips. "They don't call it a mental breakdown anymore."
There's a scuffle to the left and Gideon turns his head. Morgan is standing in the doorway, shoulder leaned to the doorjamb. "It's called a Major Depressive Episode," he explains.
Moving his gaze between them, Gideon tips a closed smile to the right, laughing out through his nose. "So it is."
~
The space in the long hallway is dark and quiet. The light filtering from the adjacent window has set a surreal tone to the world, adding to it a penetrating feeling of sorrow, like Dante's descriptions of Limbo.
The bench Gideon sits on is worn and old. Long and dark. Out of place and right at home. He's been living a half-life for so long, the bench feels like an old friend. In the background, down the hall, he listens to the soft cadence of Morgan and Reid exchanging words, thinking how far away they feel, how indecipherable. Untouchable to him in so many ways.
Pulling his wallet from inside his jacket, Gideon flips it open. The crease is worn from the motion. From the times he's spent making it open and close. A thousand times. A million. He's lost count.
Two pictures sit inside. Reid. And Steven.
He had always been a collector of pictures. In his office, in his cabin, in notebooks-some tucked into drawers, some carried with him. Most of them he sees now only in dreams.
"You don't have to disappear again, you know."
Gideon looks up from the wallet to see Rossi standing at the curve in the corridor.
"It isn't my place anymore," Gideon answers. "Even before I left."
Pulling hands from his pockets, Rossi walks closer, taking residence on the other side of the bench with a sigh. "Playing the martyr? You had a gift, Jason. As good as we were, it was one the rest of us could never replicate."
Gideon shakes his head. "We all had our specialties, didn't we? We were all gifted in our own way." They are not green anymore. They are not pioneers. But the war they've fought has few other veterans, few with whom to commiserate. Rossi understands things the rest of them don't.
"Had we this group back then, how much faster progress we would have made," Rossi admits, leaning back against the wall.
"Finest minds I've ever known," agrees Gideon.
Rossi doesn't say anything else, but Gideon feels the questions.
"I got tired of seeing the darkness everywhere… of being a part of it. Inviting into our homes, our heads. Never staying far enough ahead to truly stop it. I know you understand that."
Rossi nods. "But what we do, it helps us see the light too, Jason. I learned that from you. I'm reminded of it every day, through them. Because we understand the unsubs, we take on too much responsibility for what they do. We have to continually remind ourselves to separate our actions from theirs, but we still do what we can. We keep living. What other human response is there?"
Gideon watches Rossi's face for a moment, then looks away, closing the wallet with a nod, taking a breath in the silence. He understands what Rossi is saying. He even agrees with it. But on his call, Elle was shot. From his choices, Reid was nearly beaten to death. Hotch was suspended. Sarah was killed. And six agents-agents with friends and families-all blown to hell.
He has no more room to add to the list.
So he keeps Steven, to remind him of what he was trying to come back to. And Spencer, to remind him of where he left. Always a son being abandoned. It seems to him, the most common thing in the whole world. And the thought of it, the commonness of it, hurts, every time. It is the last hurt he does not want to let go of, or forget. He feels it every day in this in between place. He wants to feel the pain of it for the rest of his days.
Like the last pain he can tolerate. Like the last of his humanity.
~
tbc (Epilog)
Closing his mouth, Morgan pulls a slow hitch of it through his nose and feels the recoil against the remainder of smoke in his lungs. Ten minutes of standing in the same spot hasn't eased the contrast. They are like loam on white linen. Like shrapnel fragments recovered from a tragedy and set to study in a lab. The hospital corridor is too clean for the grunge they've carried back with them. Too cold for their exhaustion.
Too familiar.
The dark wood bench JJ'd been sitting on just over a day ago holds an open space next to Prentiss, but Morgan can't bring himself to take it. Instead, he moves in silent intervals across the hallway, rubbing his thumb over the thin wire he'd left coiled around his finger during his quest to separate the row of Gregory's incendiary devices from their flashpoints.
The wire is a physical reminder that it'd worked. They'd minimized the explosion. It should have taken them all out. It should have set trees on fire for a hundred miles, no matter how hard it'd been raining. It should have turned the entire south side of the mountain into a crater.
He stops, flicking his thumb under the wire, using his other hand to twine it in the opposite direction, watching pressure lines appear and disappear on his skin.
They'd still left a graveyard behind them.
Through the trees behind the millhouse, in the rain and the darkness, they'd found the rest of the sepulchers. Handcrafted stone, row upon row. Stretched out through the woods. It would take time to get the final count. To figure out how many women had been killed through the years. To identify the remains. To figure out how far and wide he'd traveled to take them.
Three alive. Too many dead.
A ripple against his sleeve jars him from the memory. JJ paces past his left shoulder, fiddling with her necklace. Their eyes meet briefly but neither speaks, moving forward in their own paths until Rossi clears his throat. JJ sits next to Prentiss then, hand pinched to her eyebrow, and Morgan goes motionless, watching.
Gideon is leaning against the wall to JJ's left, hands pressed to the brick behind his back, eyes distant-a million questions hanging quietly around him that no one seems willing to ask.
Nothing has changed.
Everything is different.
That man was the best, Morgan remembers telling Rossi, and in the end, he simply ran away. It's what the BAU does to people. Morgan's known it from the beginning. He saw it the minute he'd come on board-saw it in Elle, though he hadn't wanted to. Saw it in himself sometimes too. Too many girls buried in bones and stone, with open eyes and accusations.
They'd all contemplated leaving, maybe a hundred times over. But Morgan had learned, of all the possible hells, walking away seemed the biggest hell of all.
Suddenly, the double doors down past the waiting room click open, and Hotch is there, drawing thicker the hue of déjà vu in Morgan's mind. There are dark stitches stretching into Hotch's hairline and bruises spreading down towards his eye. His forehead is shaded like watermelon, but he looks steady on his feet. As solid as Morgan has ever seen him. And abruptly, Morgan feels fiercely grateful for Hotch and what he sacrificed to stay with them.
Hotch could have had a nine to five life. He could have someday run the FBI. If he'd left back then, when Gideon had-he could have done anything. There is no concrete proof of what might have happened to the rest of them, no sure idea where all of them would be. But standing here in this corridor, with all its uncertainty, somehow seems better than any alternative.
"How's the head?" asks Rossi, when Hotch gets close enough.
Hotch returns a neutral look. "Still attached to my shoulders. No word on Reid?"
"Not yet," answers Prentiss.
Folding his arms, Hotch takes a breath and says nothing, easing into the silent rhythm of their waiting.
"Hey," says Gideon, soft voice cracking the stillness a moment later. "How's Our Girl Friday?"
"Crap," says Prentiss. "She's going to kill us."
JJ looks at her, already digging out her cell phone. "I'll call."
"No." Prentiss gets to her feet, touching JJ's arm lightly. "That's okay. Stay. I'll do it." She smiles simply at Gideon, nods carefully at Morgan, and moves away.
Morgan remains stiff nearly a minute afterward, standing taunt with too-cold air grating over his neck.
The intercom beeps, followed by an unintelligible voice that moves like needles through his nerves. Palming his forehead, he looks over to see Hotch watching him. Looking away, he swallows, peels loose his feet and follows Prentiss down the hall.
~
When Gideon had talked Adrian Bale out of the building in Boston, the detonation trigger for the bomb that would end up killing six FBI agents had been in Bale's pocket. If they'd searched him, they would have found it. No one would have died.
The lines on Gideon's face might have become more distinguished than aged. More steady. Less haunted.
Gregory Hanks had sewn his detonator into the cuff of his sleeve. A pressure trigger, Morgan told them, that once depressed became a dead man's switch. A thumb loop in the sleeve of the shirt kept the cuff right in the palm of Gregory's hand, always in his control, pressuring the trigger between his palm and the gun the moment he'd held it to Reid's head.
It'd been there, under the surface. The whole time. Waiting for the pressure to release.
Hotch replays the scenario in his mind, rolling it back, then rolling it forward.
The bright light in the hospital hallway casts wavy reflections of the team's faces onto the stark floor. Hotch rubs thumb and forefinger lightly down his eyelids and blinks up from the below-the-surface image of Gideon's jaw to watch the real thing. The eyes that meet his are flesh and blood in a ghost. Carefully impartial. But the rest of the expression is one he knows.
Boston.
A scenario rolled back and forth with no way to change it.
But maybe that expression on Gideon's face had never softened the way Hotch believed it had. Maybe it'd always been there, from the beginning of time. Waiting for the pressure and release.
Restless on his feet, Hotch paces towards the window in the corner of the corridor, stilling himself in front of the glass panes, glancing through the open blinds to the media firestorm being kept outside the entrance. There are no statements being given. No names being shared. But details would leak sooner or later. They always did. And they would study him. His history. His pathology. His IQ. One way or another, Hanks would live on the way he'd known he would, even with his body stretched dead in a morgue, JJ's bullet in his ear.
Every failure has a domino effect, Hotch thinks. Every success, the same. Somewhere out there a budding psychopath is waiting to hear the story of Gregory Hanks. Waiting to follow in his footsteps.
"Hotch," he hears, and looks left. Gideon is holding a cup of coffee in the air.
After a moment, Hotch takes it, feeling the heat in his fingertips and the watermark of familiarity in his bones. A reflection of memory. Balance and counter-balance. Genius and dedication.
He takes a sip and looks back out the window, feeling the swell of senselessness in the dark. For everything they are able to put reason to, there are a thousand things that never fit.
Gideon leans a shoulder to the outside edge of the window's frame. Hotch can see the unspoken words in his demeanor. The sentences that can't be formed. Not profiling each other on the team has long since become code only for what they don't consistently call each other on. They spend their time tying their identities around each other, all the while sewing secrets into sleeve-cuffs until they all forget what's hiding there.
"Reid will be fine," Gideon says steadily.
"He's strong," agrees Hotch, aware that they are taking about more than this seizure and more than this case.
The rain outside has become a drizzle. Specks of water on the dark glass streaking lines through the echo of the long hallway at his back. He can see JJ leaned forward on the bench-Rossi pacing away with his own coffee in his hands. The transparent image of Gideon's silhouette.
"Aaron. You've always been what this team needs."
Setting his coffee on the windowsill with his hand still around it, Hotch moves his head, seeking Gideon in profile. "You didn't have to leave the way you did," he says quietly, mild and without malice. "We would have understood."
Gideon shifts his weight, a miniscule fraction. "How could you?" he replies. "I didn't."
~
With her elbows on her knees, fingers pressed to her forehead, JJ feels hyper conscious of her scalp and skin. Dry static tingling under her hair. The sensation of the coffee she'd just swallowed sits warm on her teeth. The shockwave from firing her weapon has left a phantom imprint in her palms. It is the only conscious thought she's given to her actions. She didn't blink. She hasn't blinked in a long time.
Later, when she has time to think about more than what's in front of her, maybe she will. When she has time to think of Will, and Henry. Time to think beyond Reid. And Gideon. And the family in front of her.
"Agent Hotchner?"
Lifting her head, JJ sees the doctor walking towards them. She hadn't even heard the doors click-hyper sensitive to them all night, and she hadn't heard the doctor approach at all. Tucking hair behind her ear, she gets to her feet.
"Hotch," calls Rossi, looking down the hallway. Hotch turns, Gideon following.
Gathering them near the wall, the doctor speaks, eyebrows tense, but mouth easy. "He's stable. He's awake. And, he's okay. For the most part."
"For the most part?" asks Hotch.
The doctor sighs, but JJ feels it's more preparation than deflection. "The aftermath of lidocaine poisoning can be difficult to predict. Seizures this length of time after the initial dose aren't common, but neither is lidocaine toxicity. With what he's experienced and with the dose he ingested… his size… his weight. Any number of factors can individualize the effects. At this point I'm going to cautiously say that with rest, he should be completely fine."
JJ tilts her head when she sees Gideon shift like he wants to say something, but he never does.
Rossi trades a look with Hotch. "But," he prompts.
"But," concedes the doctor. "The additional seizure is concerning. We can release him tomorrow, but he shouldn't be alone for a few days, and he should do a follow up with his home physician. He's likely to experience some insomnia, possibly some continued memory impairment for the next week or so, but I'd be wary of any symptoms that persist beyond that time period-headaches, tingling in the extremities that doesn't abate, even ringing in the ears-if it persists, it could be a sign of something else."
JJ folds her arms, re-rolling the words through her mouth to find the good news in the midst. She feels like there should be more questions, more answers. Something more steadily final that would close this all out, but it's not quite there.
"Thank you," Hotch says. "Is there anything else we should know?"
The doctor shakes his head, easing the pinch in his eyebrows. "Just get him plenty of rest. Keep him hydrated. And in my opinion, he's too damn thin, but that about covers it."
Rossi runs fingers over the cut in his goatee as the doctor walks away. To JJ, his face looks too narrow, oddly tilted. The world is still bent off center through her eyes, like it has been all day, and maybe now it's catching up to her. She lets go of her necklace, sitting back down on the bench.
"JJ?" asks Hotch. "Are you alright?"
When she looks up, Rossi sets a hand on her shoulder, heavy, the weight of exhaustion in his grip. At this point, they are all together the walking dead. "I think Reid isn't the only one who could use a good meal, or some rest," he says.
~
The ceiling in Reid's hospital room is patterned in tiled squares. Some white. Some hazy green. Alternating. The exact number you'd find on a chessboard.
Tipping his head against the wall at his back, he closes his eyes and imagines the pieces. Knight to F-3, he thinks. The opening move in the game between Donald Byrne and Bobby Fisher in 1956. Gideon had played through the moves with him once-one of their earliest meetings. It's not just the intentions of your opponent that you need to look at, he'd said. It's what your opponent believes about yours.
Reid's thought about that a lot in the last few years. Breaking down the moves on the board over and over again. All the while thinking that in chess the ultimate intention was always the same. The pathways differ. The results never change. Only who wins. And who loses.
He tilts his head forward and opens his eyes, scattering the chess pieces from his mind. Grey light, the color of graveyard stone, passes through the window, turning the eggs on his plate to dull yellow. The red jell-o cup to burnt mahogany. His eye isn't twitching anymore, and his teeth no longer taste like iron, but he can't find much appetite.
A cotton feeling is curling around the edge of his brain and the soft glow that's been haloing his vision every time he opens his eyes hasn't completely gone away. But he doesn't see Tobias in the corner. He doesn't hear music playing. The walls are pale blue, and he thinks maybe they'll stay that way.
Hotch, and Prentiss, and Morgan had all explained to him what happened, over and over and over again until it seemed it was starting to stick. It's not that he wasn't paying attention. It's that the sequence of events kept falling out of order. The millhouse still feels like a dream. Like snapshots spread beneath is eyes. Still frames of old photographs. Captured moments, fluttering out of sequence through his mind.
When he sees Gideon standing in the doorway, it takes a full minute to realize he's not one of those pictures.
He's real.
He's always been real. More real than Reid's father sometimes, in what he represented.
Blinking slowly at the sight, Reid suddenly thinks it bothers him most that when Gideon left, he took the pictures of the people that he saved, but took no part of them. Gideon always said the pictures were like his family. He took the pictures. He left them behind. What did that make them?
When the still frame of Gideon-in-the-doorway tilts his head sideways, Reid blinks again and realizes he's been staring. "Hey," he says.
"Hey, yourself," answers Gideon, finally stepping through the threshold. "How're you feeling?"
"I'm okay," he lies, like he knows he's supposed to.
The silence runs awkwardly for a moment, until Reid rolls the tray with the food away and tries to sit higher. Gideon comes closer, standing in the dull burn of the bedside light. And there is more silence. Too much to say. No words to say it.
Reid curls his fingers in towards each other. "Did you find it?" he asks.
"What's that?" says Gideon.
"Your belief in happy endings."
Gideon goes abruptly still, motionless on his feet, a soft line of movement working over his throat.
"I'm sorry," Reid says softly.
"Don't be." Gideon clears his throat. "It's not your fault." Smiling lightly, he steps forward, easing a hip against the bed. "What I have learned is that we are part of the happy endings we make. A big part of that is up to us. I… I failed in that regard. I left because I truly believed, at the time, that the only things I could bring those closest around me would be misery and pain. Far more than would be there because of my absence."
"Do you still believe that?"
"Most of the time. Yes."
The tick of a clock hums softly somewhere inside the room. The echo of metal wheels clacking over linoleum leaks towards them from far off down the hallway. Gideon closes his hand, then sets it on the bed near the line of Reid's IV. "Then again," he says, "if you hadn't seen me, you might have swallowed more of that coffee. So… maybe I'm starting to."
Reid swallows, thinking knight to F-6, and pawn to C-4. Thinking, every explanation reaches the same end. But his next breath comes easier, curling tight only when it reaches the pressure built below his sternum. "Did you ever go see Steven?"
It matters, and it doesn't matter. Maybe trying to find meaning reason in the midst of all this is like his mother scribbling Dylan in notebooks, trying to add significance to their lives. Giving reason to their actions. Breaking down the moves, trying to change the results. They all passed checkmate a long time ago.
"No… I always felt I couldn't visit Steven in person until I was able to give you the same," Gideon says matter-of-factly. He pauses, looking at the crest of the window, instead of Reid's face, but his voice is straightforward and calm, steady in the way Reid had always counted on it to be. "If I'd let myself talk to you before I left, Reid, I would have stayed. If I'd stayed, I would have…" At that moment, he looks back towards the door, the grey light dark on his eyes before he turns them back to Reid. "I'm sorry I frightened you. I'm sorry the explanation still isn't better."
Reid opens his mouth, treads a trembly breath and quotes, "We clearly do not derive our concepts from sensations and only sensations, which those concepts merely serve to copy, because we are already presupposing certain concepts that are not reducible to sensory data from the outset."
Gideon lifts an eyebrow.
"Kant," Reid explains. Philosophy. No right or wrong answers. "Just because we think something should make sense, doesn't mean it will."
Gideon almost smiles. Nodding his head, he breathes out slow. "I guess I could just say I had a mental breakdown."
"I guess so," agrees Reid.
And that seems to be where the words run out. He feels settled. He feels unsettled. He still remembers the darkness of Gideon's cabin. Remembers thinking for just one moment, before he'd turned the lights on, that maybe he was going to find a body.
"I should let you get some rest," Gideon says, standing.
The gap under Reid's sternum stutters a moment, cold skin suddenly hypersensitive against his hospital gown.
"I'll be here when you wake up," Gideon adds, then waits a beat. "I'll see you again before you leave."
Reid pulls his lips together, and nods, but he's suddenly not sure it matters anymore. The walls remain pale blue. The lines around the room have settled into a solid, specific reality. When he thinks over their conversation, his memory doesn't fail him. He remembers every word. But he still fears his own mind.
Gideon starts to turn.
"Jason?" Reid stops him. The name foreign in his mouth.
"Yes?"
He licks his lips. "They don't call it a mental breakdown anymore."
There's a scuffle to the left and Gideon turns his head. Morgan is standing in the doorway, shoulder leaned to the doorjamb. "It's called a Major Depressive Episode," he explains.
Moving his gaze between them, Gideon tips a closed smile to the right, laughing out through his nose. "So it is."
~
The space in the long hallway is dark and quiet. The light filtering from the adjacent window has set a surreal tone to the world, adding to it a penetrating feeling of sorrow, like Dante's descriptions of Limbo.
The bench Gideon sits on is worn and old. Long and dark. Out of place and right at home. He's been living a half-life for so long, the bench feels like an old friend. In the background, down the hall, he listens to the soft cadence of Morgan and Reid exchanging words, thinking how far away they feel, how indecipherable. Untouchable to him in so many ways.
Pulling his wallet from inside his jacket, Gideon flips it open. The crease is worn from the motion. From the times he's spent making it open and close. A thousand times. A million. He's lost count.
Two pictures sit inside. Reid. And Steven.
He had always been a collector of pictures. In his office, in his cabin, in notebooks-some tucked into drawers, some carried with him. Most of them he sees now only in dreams.
"You don't have to disappear again, you know."
Gideon looks up from the wallet to see Rossi standing at the curve in the corridor.
"It isn't my place anymore," Gideon answers. "Even before I left."
Pulling hands from his pockets, Rossi walks closer, taking residence on the other side of the bench with a sigh. "Playing the martyr? You had a gift, Jason. As good as we were, it was one the rest of us could never replicate."
Gideon shakes his head. "We all had our specialties, didn't we? We were all gifted in our own way." They are not green anymore. They are not pioneers. But the war they've fought has few other veterans, few with whom to commiserate. Rossi understands things the rest of them don't.
"Had we this group back then, how much faster progress we would have made," Rossi admits, leaning back against the wall.
"Finest minds I've ever known," agrees Gideon.
Rossi doesn't say anything else, but Gideon feels the questions.
"I got tired of seeing the darkness everywhere… of being a part of it. Inviting into our homes, our heads. Never staying far enough ahead to truly stop it. I know you understand that."
Rossi nods. "But what we do, it helps us see the light too, Jason. I learned that from you. I'm reminded of it every day, through them. Because we understand the unsubs, we take on too much responsibility for what they do. We have to continually remind ourselves to separate our actions from theirs, but we still do what we can. We keep living. What other human response is there?"
Gideon watches Rossi's face for a moment, then looks away, closing the wallet with a nod, taking a breath in the silence. He understands what Rossi is saying. He even agrees with it. But on his call, Elle was shot. From his choices, Reid was nearly beaten to death. Hotch was suspended. Sarah was killed. And six agents-agents with friends and families-all blown to hell.
He has no more room to add to the list.
So he keeps Steven, to remind him of what he was trying to come back to. And Spencer, to remind him of where he left. Always a son being abandoned. It seems to him, the most common thing in the whole world. And the thought of it, the commonness of it, hurts, every time. It is the last hurt he does not want to let go of, or forget. He feels it every day in this in between place. He wants to feel the pain of it for the rest of his days.
Like the last pain he can tolerate. Like the last of his humanity.
~
tbc (Epilog)