A/N Rambling angsty snippet, because Reid is love and Friday can't come fast enough. Spoilers for season 3. Takes place directly after the 4th episode of season 3.
There were instances, flashes of comprehension that seemed stark against the growing and receding darkness - jagged, and shattered. Awakening and being jostled, everything pounding, and pulsing and aching, and familiarity in a sound, a voice, a touch; hands pulling him, pushing him, shouts that echoed as if down hollow corridors.
Reid came out of it in a single exhalation and gripped the person who knelt above him, his fingers digging into cloth. He blinked rapidly against the threat of darkness, and he didn't know how long he would remain above the surface, but he gripped that sleeve, and hung onto the warmth with everything he had through the incomprehensible malaise of drifting and not knowing; half remembered fractured declarations, a shot fired from behind the curtains and then another. The pain had been immense, wrapped him up tight like he might wish to tuck Matilda in at night, so that she would never leave him again. An eruption of pain, like being bludgeoned.
The person above him, he knew. He locked his eyes with Drake and from the corner he saw flashes of darkness and movement, and he twisted trying to escape it.
"Inspector Reid," Drake said, "You're going to be okay." He tried to decipher the emotion on Drake's face, but his features kept swimming in and out of focus.
"I was shot," he said and found he didn't know much else. "Capshaw." The word came to him a moment later, and he tried once again to escape the heaviness against his chest. Drake settled his weight more firmly. "Captain Jackson's got you. He say's you're going to be all right."
"Hold him down, damn it," he heard. "Reid, he near damn took your head off. Even half an inch inward and it'd be you with your gray matter across the mantle, and no head to hang your hat on. Rattled your brains, a bit, I suspect, though don't be deceived by the blood, head wounds bleed like a stuck pig." Jackson moved into his line of sight. "Try not to move too much. This light's awful as it. Turn up the gas," he shouted and Reid heard footfalls against the carpet, and then as if someone smacked him yet again, the light intensified, and he let out a groan. Something covered his eyes, he bent a knee trying to escape the pain, and his foot scrabbled against the ground uselessly.
"What happened inspector?" Drake's voice broke through the pain, and he panted heavily trying to collect his thoughts. Blurs of images that refused to coalesce. Capshaw. Reid had raised his shotgun. Intent on what? Murder. Capshaw was unarmed, and then out of the darkness - "Behind the curtain," he said.
"I'll check in a moment," Drake said.
"Reid, hold still, or this needle will be more a weapon than either of us would wish." Jackson disappeared once again from Reid's line of sight. "The light's too low," he hissed, and then Reid felt his hands fall away from the wound as Jackson turned and looked towards the door. "Susan," Jackson said. "Susan?" Reid heard the confusion. "She was just here. Must have stepped out," he muttered.
"He'll be all right, then." He heard whispered between the two men above him.
"Wasn't just the gunshot. The impact when he fell may have caused the most damage. Reid can you sit up?"
"Yes," he said tightly.
"If you're going to be sick, it's Drake that's going to face the onslaught. Remember that and hold tight."
The stale smell of cigarettes seemed to follow him as he sat up, and Jackson leaned closer, alcohol on his breath.
"All right, not so bad," the American said.
And then it hit him, the churning wave of nausea, and the room shifted into a roiling wave of color, the blue of the curtains catching his eye and levering back and forth like a ship beneath his feet. And the memories came; of smoke and fire and pain. "Matilda," he whispered, and reached out, grasping, as the pain in his head ricocheted to the damaged muscles of his shoulder, and the whole room darkened and rumbled and broke apart like the surface under his shoes had splintered and cracked, and he'd plunged deep into churning darkness. He fought, striking out with his fists, catching something solid, and then he was on his side, heaving, throwing up the darkness of the water onto the shore, and everything was gone. Matilda vanished and he was alone.
"Inspector. Inspector Reid." Slowly, Drake's face swam into his vision. A purpling bruise across his left cheek. "Matilda. Matilda's okay. Jackson told me. You found her."
"No," he said, and gulped. She wasn't. She was gone. Swallowed up by the same darkness that had spat him back out.
"If you let me fix this head of yours, we'd have you to her by now," Jackson said.
But the coldness of the water gripped him, and the pain in his head seemed justified- in some way a small penance for all of his failures. The light above stung his eyes, and he kept them closed in case in it lay a salvation that wasn't allowed to him; The belief that Matilda lived, a small dream that had come to him when his skull shattered. The hands moved through his hair, gently this time, and yet pricks of pain followed their every ministration as Jackson pulled the edges of him together and stitched them into place.
Matilda lives, the thought came later, when he saw her, when she climbed into the bed and rested her head against his chest. The dizziness seemed paltry, driven out by the realization of his daughter and the warmth of her next to him, and even so he marveled at her presence, that somewhere something had gone right. The blinding light had been a reality he had been too afraid to peer into for a fear that what he would find would be joy he was not worthy of. And yet, there she lay, and he knew how tenuous the ties between them were. Never again, he thought. Never again would he leave her.