Hi everyone. Just a little piece, set post the 200th episode, which as a big fan of JJ I both loved and loathed (the bar scene mostly!). I hope there's some follow-up with JJ on the show, but if there's not, I've invented my own recovery story.
I don't own Criminal Minds, I've just borrowed these characters and made them even more angsty.
Hands
In the moments before sleep, the memories come to her. She can feel unwanted hands that haunt her like ghosts, their phantom touch on newly healed flesh. Sometimes they feel more real to her than they should.
She's taken to faking slumber and later moving quietly to the couch downstairs, where her movements won't wake her husband. She'll pull the blankets over her head, and let her mind drift and hope that when she's relaxed and vulnerable she won't feel the hands…but she always does. Her body twists as she feels them on her and tries to fight her mind's invention and she knows that sleep will not come easy.
It can't, because when she tries to sleep there are forceful hands over her mouth, constricting panicked wrists into handcuffs. Remorseless hands that hold her place and drown her, over and over. Hands rough in her hair and nauseatingly gentle as they caress her thighs. Hands that take everything from her and steal her carefully constructed control.
Not all the hands belong to those who wish to hurt her, but it's testament to what she's just been through that they feel like violations too. There are the hands of the doctor who examines her in the ER and can find no easy way to help her describe what happened. There are Hotch's kind hands that help her into the ambulance and Emily chewing her nails as she sits beside her while they wait for Will to arrive. There are her own that shake continuously with cold and fail to stop once she is warm.
Now, after the event, in the early hours of the morning, her husband will sneak downstairs, having noticed her absence. More than once he's woken her from a nightmare, sweat soaking into the twisted up sheets. He'll touch her arm gently and whisper her name and when she opens her eyes to him she is so afraid his stomach aches.
When she's back at work she never touches victims anymore, because she realises that she herself, is a pair of hands. She see's them and knows that her comfort is an empty gesture and she makes sure she keeps it to herself. When Spencer asks about it (ever the profiler) she tells him not to worry and he quietly nods and worries anyway.
In time, the hands will leave her for periods of time and she can sleep in peace. But they don't leave completely. It's always something small that brings them back. The rough hands of a police detective as he passes her a cup of coffee or the sight of handcuffs on a female unsub. One time she it's the sight of a puppet hanging slack in the window of a small town toy store, its empty eyes staring blankly, she doesn't sleep for days after that one.
As the year passes, she feels better with each month and the hands are almost never there. In the haze of an early summer heat wave she's ready to sleep upstairs again and by fall she and Will make love like they used to.
In September, they work a case in Texas, and as she sits beside the victim's mother, she reaches unconsciously across and pats her arm.
Reviews always appreciated!