"Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it." Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Reid remembered when before he would listen to chain smokers go on and on about how they could quit whenever they wanted, but they just didn't want to quit that day. The young agent remembered how he would simply look on, puzzled slightly at how the smokers could never just stop. It couldn't be that hard, could it?
He remembered a quote from Mark Twain about how easy smoking was, for he had done it thousands of times. Reid used to smile when that came to memory and would think with a smile that at least he didn't have that problem in his life. All he had to deal with was mental illness, serial killers, social awkwardness, nightmares, abandonment issues, but not drug addiction.
The young agent missed those times when he could count himself among the number of Americans who had not gotten lost down the path of drugs. Now, he was sitting in the other pile of statistics with souls lost to drugs.
Of course, nobody could blame him for those first few times. There wasn't exactly much he could do when one was strapped down to a chair and had a needle forced into his bloodstream.
Then those next few times…while, naturally he needed an escape. He had been forced to be beaten for his supposed "sins" and watch as people were murdered all because he was too weak to stand up to Tobias' father.
There was no way Reid would have been able to face every single new day without the help of those sweet, soothing drugs that took all the bad things away. They whisked him away with a soft caress on his face. They were like the mother he never really had.
They were perfect, for a while.
Then Reid began to notice that perhaps these weren't the best ways to handle his kidnapping. People around him were starting to notice. They never said anything of course. Nobody wanted to confront him, the baby, about a grown up problem.
His team members were much too content with living in the fantasy that Reid was innocent. No way would boy genius get himself mixed up in such a dark thing as drugs.
But Reid knew he wasn't innocent. Charles made sure of that while beating it into him.
It was the plane that finally did it for Reid. Missing the plane meant that his drugs were now interfering with his work. And the young doctor could not let the drugs eat away his job too.
If he didn't have the BAU, then all he had was dilaudid. And no matter how sweet it may be, that scared him to the core. Dilaudid could get mean, it sometimes brought to mind things that were better left forgotten and then would leave Reid in a pool of darkness without its soft caress.
It was then that Reid tried to quit.
He tried constantly. Sometimes he would almost make it, but then the call of the drug would be too strong and pull him right back to where he had started.
It was after his fifth attempt at detoxing by himself that Reid knew he needed help from his team. They had been with him through thick and thin, they would help him through this.
Gideon had already talked to him and Reid knew that Gideon knew. It was hard to hide something as big as being addicted to drugs from a group of profilers.
But still, he didn't watch to break that image he had made of himself as being the innocent little genius. By coming up to his team and saying, "Can you help me with detoxing" he was officially declaring to the world that he had problems.
And all too often, problems led to stress and darkness and diseases and voices in his head that drove him to a sanitarium. If Dr. Spencer Reid could get himself addicted to drugs, then who's to say that he won't become a crazy just like his mom?
So Reid made his attempts subtle. He even went as far to compare arsonists to drug addicts, saying how they need help from others to stop. All of his team knew that he was struggling, but they all avoided his gaze.
Not one of them wanted to help.
Reid was on his eighth attempt to detox himself. He was at the point where the pain started to come back.
Yes there was the physical pain that any detox came with, but this pain was something stronger. Something that had been hiding in his subconscious since Georgia, since high school and it was awful.
Whoever said that words couldn't hurt you was wrong, oh so wrong. Words hurt more than the beatings his sustained as a child from teenagers or the occasional slap from his mother when she was lost in her disease.
Even without his eidetic memory Reid would have been able to remember every single hurtful phrase thrown his way.
"Freak!" "Geek!" "Shrimp!"
And then there were the insults from the goalpost incident. Comments about his body type and more private areas that still caused Reid to cry even to this day.
Reid also remembered his mother screaming at him. Calling her own son a traitor and even comparing him to his father sometimes. Those hurt the most; Reid never wanted to be his father.
The young doctor was clutching the porcelain toilet seat as the nausea swept over him. Sobs wracked his thin frame as he slowly reached his breaking point. He didn't want to deal with this, he shouldn't have to.
Reid was a good person compared to most. He went to church whenever there wasn't a case, he hardly cursed, he gave money to charity, he didn't look down on others. He saved lives for Pete's sake, shouldn't he not have to deal with the guilt of sentencing two people to their death.
Or for practically saying that he would have a dangerous man kill his team's supervisor.
Or for sending his mother away when he knew how desperately she wanted to stay at her home.
"I'm sorry," Reid choked out. He wasn't apologizing to anyone in particular, just the whole universe. He wasn't strong enough to do this.
He had suffered his entire life; his strength was running out minute by minute.
The profiler crawled across his bathroom floor, trying to ignore the irony of how he was literally crawling back to drugs. He kept a stash of dilaudid in his bathroom cupboard. He just wasn't strong enough to throw all of it away.
He knew that he would never actually go through with the detox. After so many attempts, it was logical to just predict failure.
Reid's shaking hands opened the cupboard and found the vial and needle. "Hello old friend," Reid said with a sad smile. "Please…take it away."
"What are you doing?"
The agent gasped and almost dropped the vial as he heard another voice. Was he finally being overtaken with his mother's disease? Were the voices here to drive him to the madhouse?
"What?" Reid asked, licking his dry lips. His voice was hoarse from lack of water and use. He barely spoke to anyone nowadays. Somehow statistics didn't seem that important when he was constantly being called by the drug.
"You were going to stop."
Reid recognized the voice, though he wished he didn't. "Tobias?"
"I thought you were going to do it this time," Tobias said. Reid looked up and saw the sad looking young man staring down at him with his big doe like eyes. The last time Reid had seen those eyes, they were in a graveyard as Tobias slowly bled out from under him.
"I-I-I can't do it. Tobias, it hurts so much."
"I know, I was there too once."
"How do you handle it? There's so much to deal with and I just can't do it by myself," Reid said, staring down at the vials in his shaking hands. He was softly sobbing now, the reality of his defeat finally coming over him. He was too weak.
"It's hard."
"Too hard."
"You can do it."
"No, I can't."
Tobias took a few steps and knelt down by the shaking doctor. "It's not worth it in the end. You miss too much with this," he wrapped his fingers around the vial in Reid's hand. "You don't feel the pain, but you don't feel the happiness either."
"I don't care."
"You should."
Reid shook his head. "You're dead, you shouldn't even be here right now."
"I wouldn't be here if there was another way. You have to stop. Your team will do something about this soon. You'll get fired and then where will you be."
"They won't fire me, they won't even help me. They just ignore me."
Tobias nodded slowly, "Alone, whether you like it or not, alone is something you're going to be a lot."
"Don't quote Dr. Seuss to me, not now," Reid whispered. "Was there pain when you stopped doing it?
"Yes. My father made sure of that."
"How did you handle the pain without…just breaking?"
"I didn't. But you can do it."
Reid looked up into the dead man's sad eyes. "How do you know?"
"Because, we're different. This," he took the dilaudid from Reid's hands, "is the only thing that connects us. You can do it."
"What if I can't?"
"Just tell yourself you can, and then you will."
"I don't want to deal with it," Reid said, feeling the tears come up. "All I can see when I close my eyes are the faces of all the people I couldn't save. I can still imagine the screams as they were brutally murdered. Sometimes I don't think I can do this job. I just want a nice life, a wife and kids and a steady job."
"If you really wanted that, you would have it."
"I just don't know," Reid admitted.
"Do you want these? Do you really want them?" Tobias asked, holding the vial in front of Reid's face.
And looking at the drug, seeing it for all the pain and heartache it really was, Reid shook his head.
Tobias smiled. "You're one step closer."
"To what?"
"To stopping," Tobias said and stood. He pocketed the vial, "I don't think you'll need these again."
"How can you be so sure?"
Reid never got an answer, for the dead man was gone. And the young doctor laid his tired, aching body down on the cool bathroom tiles.
He closed his eyes and breathed out a sigh. There was a long road ahead of him and a long road behind him. But there was at least someone who believed he could do it.
"Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if only one remembers to turn on the light." Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Author's Note: Oh goodness, that was… I hoped you kind folks enjoyed it. Have any questions/comments/fears/concerns, please tell me. And I will reply! I'm quite bad at replying to reviews; hopefully this time around I'll actually do it. Don't worry, I read and treasure every single one, even if I am too busy watching Criminal Minds to reply.