Orange. This room was orange. Doctor Spencer Reid of the BAU took a deep breath and picked himself off the floor. Looking around, the man took account of his surroundings. He was in some sort of cage, that much he could tell. There were handles on the each of the four walls, and on the ceiling and floor as well. There were faint, perpendicular lines crisscrossing everywhere. And all he was wearing was a drab jacket over an equally drab shirt, and darker, yet still plain, pants. In fact, the only defining feature on Reid's outfit was his own name. Reid sighed. This place was almost certainly rigged.

Stepping to his left, Reid reached for the closest handle. He reached out, but then, just as his hands connected with the metal, the handle began to turn! Reid jumped back and pressed himself against the wall as hands poked through the gap where the door (for that is what the handle was attached to) had been. Reid visibly relaxed as a familiar face followed the hands.

"Morgan?"

"Reid!" Derek Morgan cried as his friend rushed over. Morgan, also wearing the same dull outfit (except with 'Morgan' embroidered on his breast) had worked with Reid for a long time, and they had become close over the years. "I have the others with me. Everyone who is either currently or has worked in the Behavioural Analysis Unit is here, all in adjacent cells. This was the last one. I figured you would be here, if you hadn't wandered off," Morgan continued. His voice turned somber. "Elle, remember when she was with us? Before that one incident? Well, I found her first. We thought we were the only ones. We didn't-" Morgan's voice broke for a second but he recovered quickly. "We couldn't have known you guys were there, or that there would be traps."

"Traps?" Reid asked.

Morgan nodded.

"Deadly ones. She went into a room first. And wires descended from the celing and diced her. I-I-... There was nothing I could do to save her."

"Then we broke in," a voice from behind Morgan said. Morgan scrambled out of the hatchway to make room for David Rossi, the speaker, to crawl through. The others began to follow suit. Rossi continued. "I saw him first. He was huddled in the connector. He told all of us about Elle. I told him that I had found JJ, Prentiss, Blake, and Aaron."

"I believe I found you first, Dave," Aaron Hotchner said imposingly, but Rossi stood his ground. Hotchner continued. "Then we searched the next few rooms and found Seaver, Todd, and Garcia. Seaver refused to join us and went her own way."

"Stop standing around, you two," Jordan Todd said. "We need to get out of here. If you want to stand around explaining stuff to some ignorant third entity like it's a book, go ahead. But I'm going to get out of this cube." And with that, she turned a handle and climbed into the next room. And was quickly incinerated. Reid winced, but what could he do? And unfortunately, a life of hunting serial killers was beginning to harden him to people dying. But, he supposed, that's what happens when you've seen good people die in front of you, bad people die in front of you, neutral people die in front of you, people die on webcam in front of you, and even killed a couple people yourself.

Reid's sharp eyes scanned the room where Todd had been. He looked first inside the room itself, which he noted was purple and now had a little pile of ash sitting inside of it, before looking to the connector between his cube and Todd's.

"Look at this," he murmured, and pointed to a series of numbers enscribed on the hatchway. "All of these are prime. Morgan, can we go back to the room where Elle died?"

Morgan nodded. "The rest of you stay here. I don't want anyone else getting killed."

There was a silent agreement as the others shifted around, getting comfortable. Morgan lead Reid back through the 'safe' rooms where the other BAU members had been housed.


"Here," Morgan said.

Reid glanced in the room and felt sick. There were diced pieces of... well, human, and Reid reconsidered his theory of being numb to death. Blood gushing out of chunks of someone you once knew can do that to a person.

Reid refocused on the numbers inside the hatchway.

"These are all prime as well," he noted.

"Okay, genius," Morgan said. "You know these rooms are prime. Do something genius-like and get us out of here. Who knows how much time we have?"

"Well," Reid returned, "The average human can go three days without consuming food or water. Assuming nothing kills us before then, we have that much time to escape or find water."

"The numbers, Reid."

"Right. Uhhh..." He ran over to a safe room connector. "These aren't prime. And as I recall, none of the other safe connections are either. That would mean that prime numbers mark a dangerous room. However, I think there's more. Get Hotch and the the others in here. Assuming these are numbered in a logical order, and I believe they are, we can escape this cube!"


Hotch listened to Reid's explanation. It made sense: these were numbered using Cartesian coordinates, and due to moving around had scrambled themselves.

"It's like a giant Rubix's Cube," Reid said. "We can't solve this cube, but we can be in the right place when they inevitably solve themselves."

"How do we know where that will be?" JJ asked.

"Well, from looking through these coordinates, I can tell this cube is 26x26x26 miniature cubes like the one we are in. Presumably, only one of these is the exit. Taking out all 6,340 primes, we are left with 11,227 cubes of possibility, of which only 3,774 are exterior."

"Great," Morgan said. "We've got over 3,000 fucking squares to cover while we hope for the cube to solve itself before we starve to death."

"Dehydrate."

"I don't give a shit at this point Reid! We're dead either way. And 3,000 is too damn many to cover! And-"

"Wow," Prentiss pointed out. "Unless you've watched the show, you didn't realize that Agent Morgan was prone to outbursts like these. Or that he is an FBI agent, just like everyone else in the room, myself included. Don't you find it annoying when the author just puts characterization in without explaination that wasn't included earlier?"

"Emily..." Rossi warned.

"Don't Emily me! And you've done it again. Only people who watch the show would know that my first name is Emily. And this is a crossover, so they might well not watch the show. Also, the author is just using me to explain all of this because they are too lazy to actually fix the changes!"

The others stared at Prentiss.

"Well she's not wrong," Garcia remarked.


Reid went back to his calculations.

"Chances are, the exit is on a corner block. I just need to... Oh, here we go, we all need to move to the top left hand corner of the cube."

"How did you know that?" Blake asked.

"Complex logarithms," Reid responded.

"A cop-out for the author to not explain how you did it," Prentiss muttered.

Regardless of whether they actually thought Reid had solved the cube with logarithms, they knew he had solved it with advanced mathamatics and he was Reid, so he probably wasn't wrong.


After retreating to the corner, they waited.


And waited.


And waited.


Then it rotated so they moved back to the corner.


The group ended up repeating this 12 times, until they heard something click.

"That's it," Reid said, and twisted open a handle. "We escaped."

Morgan squinted from the bright light suddenly streaming in. He helped first JJ out, then Blake, Rossi, Prentiss, and Garcia. Hotchner, obviously, helped Morgan help them, before climbing out himself. Morgan turned to Reid.

"Thanks for getting us out, pretty boy."

Reid smiled before Prentiss called down from outside, "Thanks for being an exposition machine, Morgan!"

"Get out, g-man." Reid took the advice and climbed out. Morgan followed suit. And the group was together.


And so concludes my very first fanfiction! I hope you guys liked it, and review! It helps a lot, trust me. Please give me feedback, and I always respond to PM's. Thanks for reading, and come back next time!