At precisely 10:07 AM on a Thursday morning Agent A.J. O'Rourke stepped out of the elevator and into the halls of the FBI unit. Eight brisk steps brought him to the double glass doors and from then on three more brought him to the top of the stairs leading into the bull pen. He stood there at the top of the stairs, his head swinging from side-to-side as he attempted to make sense of it all. After a moment's hesitation he set aside the large cardboard boxes that he had been holding and fetched himself a cup of coffee from the snack shelf. He swallowed the lukewarm coffee in one long gulp, burped, sighed, picked up his boxes and made his way down into the chaos of the bull pen. By the time he had stopped beside Reid's desk to ask a passing agent for directions to Hotch's office it was 10:15. And yet it was Reid who had been the one to point him towards the foreboding stairs.
"Thanks, brother." the man had said. His bottom lip slipped from between his teeth when he spoke, exposing a plump and honest smile that made Reid feel as if he alone had rescued the man from an impeding tragedy. The time was 10:16.
Years later Reid would still wonder if he could have done something to alter the chain of events that swept through their lives and, like a storm, left the team reeling. After all, the man was nothing if not a storm. But for all of their predictability-in-chaos storms could not be stopped. Reid remembered every minute of O'Rourke's dramatic entrance into their lives because every minute held the slow, deliberate reverence of the man's character. Something as simple as the stirring of tea or laughter was carried out with such consideration and possession that time and time again Reid could only watch the man in awe.
And thus there had been time to do something in those first few fatal moments. He could have launched one of his 'magic' rockets the man's way when he was getting his coffee. Or, more practical still, he could have kept his mouth shut when O'Rourke asked the agent for directions to Hotch's office. Maybe by some miracle she wouldn't have known the answer, maybe O'Rourke would have gone off in search of Hotch down the wrong hall, maybe Hotch would have called them to the table then and, within thirty minutes, they would have been off, leaving O'Rourke to wander the building..
No, Reid didn't believe that. There were too many maybes to that philosophy. The fact of the matter was an equation had drawn itself into existence when O'Rourke had been born. With the addition of the man, the multiplication of evil, and the subtraction of sympathy there was only one possible outcome. The differences brought on by ifs and maybes would not have changed their fate.
Still, from time to time Reid couldn't help but wonder if he should have tried harder to protect his team, especially Morgan. Anything, he realized, negligible or not, would have been better than the final outcome.