34 Days
.
.
On the fifth day, Spencer Reid opens his eyes to darkness.
He screams until he can't scream anymore, his throat raw and swollen.
They realize he's missing on the third day when 10am comes and goes and his desk remains silent.
"He's never late," JJ murmurs as she stirs her coffee with a concerned frown.
Garcia runs a search for his phone and closes her eyes for a moment when it comes up empty.
Morgan knocks twice on his door and then kicks it in. He remembers the price of being late, and he remembers the texture of a teammate's blood on his hands.
Hotch doesn't even knock before he walks into Strauss's office. His face is calm but his hands betray his anxiety as he grips his phone with white knuckles. "We have a problem," he tells her.
The second day is a Sunday and Emily calls him to see if he wants to catch a movie. He doesn't pick up and she shrugs and figures he's lost in a book.
So she rings JJ and they laugh and talk about dating. She remembers feeling glad that JJ came out instead of him.
She never forgives herself for that.
On the twelfth day Hotch forces Prentiss to leave the office and get some sleep, and instead she finds her way to his apartment and lets herself in.
Running her hands against the embossed covers of the books on his shelf, she reads every title reverently. Years from now she'd have trouble remembering the sound of his voice, but she never forgets those titles.
He finds her laying on his bed asleep with tacky trails of tears on her cheeks.
He lays next to her and tells her about his childhood and the different types of tears the human body is able to produce.
She wakes the next day with a headache and the melancholy sensation of having lost something.
On the fourth day there's light and he keeps himself calm by documenting his surroundings.
One. Chair. Lightbulb.
Two. The smallest prime number. Two hinges on the heavy steel door. Two years since Foyet.
Three. Three bars on the window. Oaths are repeated three times, traditionally. The cost of his last coffee. Three barleycorns in an inch, three feet in a yard, three miles in a league.
Four. The word four has the same amount of letters as its value, the only number in the English language to do so. His cell is four metres by four metres. There are four wings on a bee, and four leaves on a clover, if you're lucky. He doesn't feel lucky.
Five. Five days since he'd said goodbye to his team. A pentasyllabic word has five syllables, like the word pentasyllabic itself.
Six. He misses his team.
On the sixteenth day, they refuse to give up hope. Prentiss hasn't been home since it begun. JJ rings Will and asks to speak to Henry, but when she hears his voice all she can do is cry.
They find leads, but in the end the trail goes cold and they're left with nothing.
Nine. On the ninth day he closes his eyes in his own personal hell, and when he opens them he's in his apartment and the light is so bright his eyes burn with it.
He's cleaner than he was a day ago, and his skin shows no signs of the injuries he knows he'd sustained.
He stands hesitantly and walks around the apartment, noting the crime scene tape across the door, and that someone, probably JJ, has cleaned the perishables out of his fridge.
When he opens the fridge door the motor hums and chokes uncertainly. He turns on a tap and when he turns around the tap is off and the sink is dry. He presses his face against the cool glass of the window, and thinks about his breath misting the glass.
He stands like that for hours until the sun goes down, and then he returns to the spot on the floor he'd woken up on and watches the light of the traffic flicker across his ceiling.
When Aaron Hotchner receives a lock of his youngest agent's hair in a priority mail package it's the thirty-fourth day.