Warnings: this story contains drug use and swearing.
Disclaimer: I do not own Criminal Minds.
Stuck
"Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why." -Kurt Vonnegut
He had been throwing rocks like a kid. It was childish and he knew it because even his anger was such a childish thing. Like a teenager sore over losing a girl or something else teenagers get mad about. Like people leaving. Like dad leaving. Like mom getting sick. Like nightmares. He felt completely unjustified anger directed to everyone and the resulting forces would end up falling in the first person who talked to him.
The truth is, he couldn't care less.
He grabbed another rock and threw it as far as he could hoping it would kill it. The constant pain in his stomach, aches all over his body and migranes. Lying in bed for hours and hours unable to sleep, feeling his skin crawling off his body like dozens of leeches. Rationally he knew this was necessary, but a strong part of him was crumbling under pressure and that made him angry beyong belief.
Another truth was, he was never one to be angry much.
The funny thing is that even if he was exploding inside, outside he looked pretty much the same. He still wore the same battered cardigans and his hair was just in badly need of a cut as it had been before Georgia. His eyes were still brown, the world was still rotating around its axis and turning night into day, and day into night, moving on repeatedly. JJ looked so fine. She had been forced to the psych eval too, but they all knew that psych eval inside the BAU was the equivalent to ask a militant to pass a shooting test. They had formulated those questions after all.
Still, he really meant JJ looked fine. At first she seemed worse than him, easily spooked while he just tried to retreat inside his mind and disappear; but maybe because she was putting it all out she got better quickly. And he envied her, because he wanted to move on too. Instead he was standing in this big abyss where there was a Prior to Georgia, and there should be; he wondered; a Post-Georgia somewhere. He just didn't know where yet.
Third truth was he was stuck in purgatory. And it smelled like fish and devils.
He could smell it sometimes. A week after the Georgia incident he had actually washed all of his clothes repeatedly and obsessively, but the stench of fish organs was still present so he threw them away. All his clothes in the garbage for a second before he took a deep breath. This was textbook PTSD, Mcbeth relieving the blood in his hands over and over again. This was his mind against him and his name would not be goddamn Spencer Reid if he let it win, so he grabbed them back one by one. And he really wished he had had strength enough to grab the first one he had expurged, the one he had actually been wearing that day. But there was blood on it, and he wouldn't be able to wash it off so he excused himself of doing that.
Truth is, he could never even touch those clothes again without wanting to throw up.
Throwing up was another thing bothering him. And he knew it had nothing to do with PTSD. It had to do with it. It had been making him throw up and it had made him reckless, and he was scared it would someday stop him from doing his job. So, obviously, he had decided to stop it. He had, as his first measure, taken it out of his satchel and hid it behind the TV. And then he spent three days, agonizing three days without even watching TV or stepping near the TV room. He locked it shut, he barricated it inside his mind and he wondered if he was going crazy because never in his whole damn lifetime he had wanted anything so badly.
There was no pressing case, and sitting at the bullpen working on a few analyses that didn't required traveling, he had to stand the fact he went home to his own private hell. Morgan had invited him to go out, but he couldn't. Morgan would notice there was something wrong with him, he would find out and then he would do just like he had done when he told Morgan he had nightmares. He would tell Hotch and Gideon. And it was weird how his mind could only really register about Gideon knowing, even though Hotch would be the one firing him.
Truth being he didn't want to disappoint Gideon.
He had wanted to tell him, part of him did. But part of him knew that if he told anyone they would help him and he wasn't sure he wanted help because most of the time he didn't really want to stop. The worst part about Gideon is that he knew the man saw him as someone he didn't have to look after, but who he did look after because he wanted to. And as much he wasn't all that into being treated as a kid, he didn't mind Gideon's guidance. It was simply a push in the right direction sometimes. He tried really hard not to think that Gideon did what a father would do, because he never needed a dad and he didn't need one now.
It was just rational. Truth is: after you've lost too much, you just don't go digging for anything else to lose.
But not telling ayone didn't make it any less real. That was literature gibberish. It was as real as the sweat running through his forehead all day long as he worked, doing his best to ignore the awkward chills, the unexpected spasms of his muscles and things crawling on his skin. Each second was spent forcing himself not to snap.
However he didn't try to retrieve the Tv room key he had thrown under a heavy forniture setting. Not yet. And the funny thing is his bigger motivation was JJ. He had glanced at her one day and she was calling this Will person and telling him about how they were going to have turkey next weekend or whatever when she thought no one was listening to her loud laughter. JJ was beautiful; with soft skin and shiny blond hair she had gone back to wash and straighten. She was so far ahead, she was having turkey on weekends when a few months ago she had stepped back at the office just as peeved as him.
And he was still stuck, hiding keys to his own house and throwing rocks after work so he didn't need to go home and deal with it. It. Surely he knew the words to what he was going through: Withdrawl and PTSD. He knew both names, and just like when he had been fifteen stealing files from private research on schyzofrenia, his brain couldn't help him. His extra IQ was as useless as the heavy forniture would be if just for one second he decided he wanted to move it.
And the hardest truth to admit to himself was that he wanted. He wanted it so much it plagued him constantly like cramps.
And he knew the excuses he had made up inside his mind were bull because he had used them a hundred times before. He needed it to work. He couldn't work going through withdrawl, and if he didn't work people would die. It helped. He could stop whenever he wanted, he was just chosing to do it when he was on vacations or whatever. Textbook hopeless addict and he had read about it over and over again in the last months. He wasn't going to make no excuses, he was going to be rational. Rational would be getting himself admitted in some rehab program in Canada or Mexico while saying he was taking a break.
Only he didn't feel all that rational. He wanted it to be over fast. He didn't want to tell Hotch, he didn't want to stop working. He wanted to blink and then for it to be gone because he was so stressed out. Maybe his mind was preparing to shut down soon because he felt so incredibly tired all the time. Tired of trying even. This wasn't the first attempt. Real first time he had freaked out while he was still high as a kite and managed to lock himself inside the bathroom and throw the keys through the roof.
That lasted for about five hours since later he got better and was able to open the door with a ted bit of brain cells and a few toothpick tricks. The next day at work he forced himself to forget about it. For the first time in his life he had been too terrified to stop shaking and he wondered if that was a side-effect of the drug. But something told him it wasn't. That was normal, regular, but overwhelming fear. Fear that constricted his throat and left him completely restless because that was madness. He wasn't addicted, he was stoping now, that was it; and as soon as he went back home he would prove it to himself.
They were all lies. He threw another rock even farthest away than the last one. If Tobias wanted to kill him for a sin it shouldn't have been for cursing his father and mother. He dedicated his life to help his mother, and he would never feel an ounce of guilt if he cursed his father through oblivion. But he was becoming a master in the art of lying. He was a big lie himself.
The thin line he crossed freaked him out more than he felt comfortable to admit. And it wasn't his fault, he hadn't chosen to be a pathetic miserable little shit addict, Tobias had done that to him. And it wasn't even the boy's fault either, it was probably his dad's, right? Who had gone pshyco after his mother left with another man. So was it Tobias' mother? Maybe her man's fault?
Who was it to blame for his disaster?
Life was unfair. Everyone had to pay for things they had nothing to do with, so how could he give a damn if he was being rude to anyone? Especially Emily who though she deserved to be treated nicely. Respect had to be earned and thinking about it he didn't even know her that well and he didn't feel like he needed her. She annoyed him, talking to Morgan, laughing with Garcia, sitting at Elle's desk, taking Elle's place. And if it was unfair to her, who cared? Nobody had actually cared about it. He was absolutely ashamed to admit that deep inside he wanted someone to care. And at the same time he knew he contradicted himself when he spat an "I'm fine" to whoever asked.
What he needed was deeper than a question. He wanted a mother or a father, someone who would love him unconditionally and...not judge him. Someone who wouldn't tell him he was destroying himself or how bad it was for him because for Heaven's sake he wasn't dumb, he knew all of these things. He wanted his mother to be ok, because he was tired of lying in each one of his letters. He had to be fine. He had to be fine for her. Since he was 10 he had managed to be always fine for her.
And his father was a son of a bitch he wasn't willing to consider.
He had to go home. There was no way he would just sleep on the street especially because his back burned with pain and he felt like he had been run over by a truck. The worst part was he felt too horrible, the side effects of withdrawl had finally become strong enough they were impossible to forget about, to ignore, to force himself not to snap. He would snap and he knew it. He would get home and move the forniture because he couldn't stand the feeling. It reminded him back at the hospital when he had just gotten away from the cemitery. He had been jittery and awkward and denied he needed to go to the hospital, because after all, he really didn't feel any pain.
Even though he did have two broken ribs and one broken finger, fracture feet, bruises all over his body and perhaps a concussion.
They took him to the hospital and then came the morphine. And it was blessed escape to the funny feeling of floating in the air. He giggled back then.
He hadn't giggled for weeks now. Dilaudid high wasn't funny anymore. It was pretty fucking disgusting. He imagined it was like Morgan had told him once.
"You know when you go to bed with this chick, and right after the great part it's over you just want her to disappear?"
He didn't of course. But now maybe he could relate a lot. Dilaudid was like sex; only he had never felt anything so good and he was pretty sure that even if he went to bed with a goddess he wouldn't. It was twenty times better than any orgasm, and it made his eyes roll back and his whole body tingle for some miserable seconds.
And after the great part he felt like he wanted to zip his skin off and run away. Ashamed of himself and crushed as a hundred realizations crashed hard onto him. He was using a dosage almost three times what Tobias had given him. And that meant wanting or not he wasn't just a user. He was a shitty junkie. And he was a mess, working cases where messing up could get people killed right after going to his hotel room to shoot up.
Truth was the word mess clearly defined him
He pretty much ran to his car when sheer desperation hit. It was like wanting to go to the bathroom badly. He drove home over speed limit and when he finally reached it he parked his car like a madman. He ran upstairs and wished he could shut his brain off, even if only for a second. He was tired of the inner fighting, maybe if he was dumber, like everybody else at least it wouldn't matter so much. Even though he couldn't actually imagine what should be like to be...slow. To take his time, to not simply know things. He had spent his life reading his exams in three seconds and knowing the answers right away. he was an observator of everyone around his who had to sit in those uncomfortable chairs for four whole hours to finish a test.
He didn't feel superior at all. Normal was good. He just couldn't understand normal.
Maybe normal wouldn't allow his mind to run crazily with ideas and plans while he rushed upstairs the building though. Maybe there was a way out, maybe he would throw the key away just as he gets it. Not think about it, just throw it out. If he used it he was back to being a junkie and he had been drug-free for three days, going back would be such a...waste of time, waste of all the side-effects that he had been going through. The maximun it would last would be a little over a week. He could take it. He couldn't take it. He had no idea because the only thing he cared about was the little vials behind his TV set.
Ten Percent. Schyzofrenia is genetically passed and there is a ten percent chance he is going to turn out just like his mom. And he loves her so much it hurts because he can't even look at her without wanting to leave. Schyzofrenia can be activated by a simple flu, a traumatic even and drug use. Drug use and traumatic event. He was probably raising his chances and the thought made him want to hit something just like Morgan would. He was weak just like his father, weak because he couldn't help his mother and weaker even because he couldn't help himself.
He kicked the door to his apartment shut not even bothering to lock it before he ran to the forniture set. He grabbed a heavy pan from the kitchen and heaved it beneath it so it was slightly not touching the floor and then it was as easy as anything. Keys were there. And one second later television room was open and it smelled kind of weird, but he was already moving the TV out of the way.
Vials. He almost broke them against the wall because his anger was coming back full force. Ten percent. He had been less moody today, he was evolving. If he just didn't give up now he could probably find the Post-Georgia. For so many months he had been feeling so intensely confused. When he was alone he wanted to be around people, and when he was in any sort of social situation he felt crowded and wanted to be left alone. But he was so much better, and he would get even better if-
Oh who was he trying to fool?
The needle didn't even hurt anymore and he had sense not to do any damage to his arm. Someone could see and for a genius that would be pretty stupid. He knew the human body and he knew veins, he knew how to leave the smallest track marks. Nobody would ever find out and maybe that was a good thing. Maybe not.
He had no idea because he was too far gone inside oblivion. He rested his shoulders against the sofa letting his legs sprawl ungracefully in front of him while running a shaky hand through his hair. His senses were suddenly numbed, his breathing was rapid, but there was no trouble at all in the world and even if there were; there was virtually nothing he could do about it. The TV room smelled of burning fish organs.
The door was unlocked, but he knew he couldn't get out.
"No man knows when his hour will come; As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so men are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them" -Bible