The Hospital, Pt 1

UCLA Medical Center

Gwendolyn Reid's eyes fluttered open. "You should have let me go."

Spencer Reid sighed. After she had woken up she had been completely disoriented to time and place. She was uncooperative and uncommunicative and had been showing signs of anxiety and worsening depression. At first she had reacted angrily, fighting the nurses, and had been put on Lorazepam for her troubles. Now she was clearly slipping further and further away, becoming more disengaged from everything, more apathetic. They kept the lights in the room dim, thinking that too much sensory input after so much time in captivity was worsening the anxiety, and kept trying to encourage her to take liquids at least, but she had refused everything, now this.

I am missing something, he thought. I am missing something huge right in the middle of all this. What am I missing?

She just shook her head, and replied in a whispered, broken voice. "You should have just let me go."

Movement caught his eye as his best friend Derek Morgan stepped into the doorway. The rest of the team had gone back to Quantico, to work on paperwork and be there in case an emergency presented itself. Derek had the time off to burn, so he had told them to contact him if it was a bad one, and he would be on the next flight. In the meantime he had found an extended-stay hotel near the hospital. The bill was on Rossi, at his insistence.

Derek waited until Spencer was close enough to not be overheard, "Everything all right?"

"I honestly don't know. I'm trying to decide if she's going suicidal on me. I'm missing something huge. I don't know. What's going on?'

"Do you know a Dr. Karen Kajie?"

"No, why?"

"Because she is sitting at the nurses station watching you two on the monitor and listening over the call channel. If you don't know her, I'll go deal."

"Please." Great, Spencer thought, now what?

-

Derek walked over to the nurse's station, straight for the woman sitting there. She was of average height and weight, had graying brown hair down to her waist, pulled back at the temples, a long skirt that might have been picked up traveling, chunky jewelry that looked the same, and multiple tote bags. Mid-fifties to mid-sixties, he thought, laugh lines and smile lines and not the other kind and a lot stronger than she looks. She stood up to meet him offered her hand and a smile. "You must be SSA Derek Morgan. I know the nurses told you my name. Go ahead and call me Karen."

"Okay, Karen. I'm sorry, I don't know…"

She rolled right over him. "I think time matters right now. So why don't you call Ms Garcia and have her run a background check while I go intercept Dr. Wentworth and keep him from making things worse." She nodded at the head of Psychiatry who was coming toward them as she handed Derek and envelope addressed to Dr. Spencer Reid, in a familiar hand.

"Um, how do you know about all of us?"

"Oh, Jason told me."

"Jason? Jason Gideon?"

"Yes. He's an old friend."

Somewhere else.

"I can't go, you know. If they do this together it will make their bond stronger. If I'm there they'll triangulate off me as the parent figure and they'll just have to do it all over again when I leave." He looked up at the plaster design on the high, Victorian ceiling and sighed.

She pulled the sheet over herself as she rolled over. "My thoughts exactly. Just be sure to pay attention to Bosco while I'm gone."

He reached up to the large cat, lolling in the sunlight on the pillow above his head. "I will pay Bosco lots of attention while you're gone."

Here

Derek was just getting off the phone with Penelope when Spencer wandered out to see what was going on. "Dr. Karen Kajie, apparently one of the current experts on sadomasochistic torture and torture in general." He rattled off the impressive resume as Spencer tore open the letter.

Spencer –

She's good. Use her.

Gideon

"According to Penelope she's somewhat controversial, but she was supposed to present in New York next week, Geneva next month, a whole list of other places, but three days ago she canceled everything for the next six months." He looked over Spencer's shoulder at the letter. "That's it?"

"That's enough." Spencer looked up as the two doctors came down the hall, arguing fiercely. The towering Dr. Wentworth went first. "Spencer, your wife is suffering from acute anxiety and depression. Now a conservative treatment with the appropriate medications…"

"…will only exacerbate the problem." Dr. Kajie broke in. "Dr. Reid, it is far easier to put someone on medication than to take them off. I suggest we try solving the problems before we medicate her into oblivion."

I didn't even need to see the letter from Gideon, Spencer thought. "Dr. Wentworth, I want Dr. Kajie to take over my wife's case. We'll move her to another hospital if necessary."

Dr. Wentworth was clearly offended. "If you did the head of medical would have my head. Fine, do as you wish and good luck." With that he turned and headed down the hall.

Derek sidled over to his friend as the woman in question walked over to her post at the desk, "That was a fast decision."

"Dr. Kajie called me Dr. Reid. That suggests that she sees me as an adult and her equal and by extension Gwen as well. The other physiatrists here have been treating us as freak show children." He led the way over to the woman at the desk.

"Observation," she walked them back over to the desk, where you could see Gwen's bed on the monitor. "What do you see?"

"My wife is miserable," Spencer wrapped his arms around himself. "She said I should have let her go."

"I don't find that surprising. Roll up your sleeve please, to the elbow." She turned to Derek. "Agent Morgan, what do you see?"

Derek studied the woman in the bed. She was holding a small teddy bear on her lap, slowly running the unbandaged part of her arm over its head. "From the look on her face, I see despair, anger, longing. It's odd how she's holding that bear."

While Derek was talking Spencer rolled his sleeve to the elbow. Karen problem wrapped her hands around his forearm and started rubbing with a twisting motion. He pulled away and she pinched him. "Ow!"

"Don't fight me." She kept it up.

Derek continued. "She's become attached to it over the past few days. Dr. Wentworth said she was regressing as a result of the trauma, trying to get back to a time in her life before it all happened. But if she was doing that she'd be holding it closely, hugging it like a child would a toy." He thought a bit. "She's going for the tactile stimulation, isn't she? Abuse victims often suffer from depersonalization; she could be trying to reconnect with her own body."

Karen smiled. "You're close, Agent Morgan, Derek. In fact you have part of it." Movement caught her eye. "Now, watch as the nurse comes in." She kept rubbing Spencer's arm. As he pulled away, she pinched him a second time.

As soon as the door was heard Gwen pushed the bear aside. Her face fell into a pleasant, pleasing, mild mask, her eyes vacant. "I'm here for your vitals." The nurse commented, and proceeded to take them, pulse, temperature, checking tubes, and so on.

"Now what the hell just happened?" Derek saw the reaction, but could not figure out a why. Spencer just shook his head and tried to pull away, getting a third pinch. Fine, Spencer thought, if it makes her happy. He let her keep rubbing.

"In your profile, what were these unsubs looking for? What gave them the pleasure?"

"Control, having control over a woman, every part of her body or mind. But we're not trying to control her here."

Karen nodded. "I thought you didn't like this, Dr. Reid?"

"I don't, but you were pinching…" Oh hell, oh hell, how had he missed it? "Behavior modification, how did I miss it?"

"Someone fill me in?" Derek turned from the monitor.

Karen spoke up. "These men like to control every aspect of a woman, right down to her personality and responses, just like you said. It's not enough that they control her operant behavior, what she deliberately does in response to stimuli, but they want to control her respondent behaviors as well. So, for example, it's not enough that they have control of her personal boundaries, that they can touch her intimately whenever they want, they expect her to be happy and pleasant about it as well, and not cringe or react in fear. So they teach them not to fight back against unwanted touch by administering a painful stimulus every time they react, like I was doing with Dr. Reid. Of course, because it's so difficult to regulate respondent behaviors over time the subject associates every unwanted touch with the negative stimulus."

"So they expect every touch to cause pain?" Derek looked from Karen to the monitor and back. That could be a problem.

She nodded. "Which means every time the staff goes in there they are reinforcing the response. That she doesn't have control over her body, and that if she protests she'll receive a negative stimulus."

"The Lorazepam," I should have known, Spencer thought. "Which was why you disagreed with Dr. Wentworth."

Karen nodded again. "Fighting back means losing even more control. In a way she's still in captivity, all you have done is trade the unsub for the medical staff. It's for the best of reasons, but it still feels the same. So, she's continuing to disassociate, continuing to feel anxiety, and her depression is getting worse. More drugs means less control over her environment and reactions, and exacerbates the problem further"

"No wonder she wished I would have just let her go." Spenser was about ready to give up and go home. I'm useless here, he thought.

"So, how do we fix this? I mean, she has to be in the hospital." Derek was at a loss.

"Well, her reaction to that toy is a good sign. In addition to the stimulation and trying to reconnect, her refusal to show any interest in front of anyone is a way to take back some control over her own emotions and reactions. It's something she can do and enjoy on her own terms. If she's responding positively to that, odds are she'll respond positively to more." Karen smiled and headed for the room.