This idea wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote it. Hopefully it will at least back off a little now.
Anyone recognize the image for the story?
WARNING: THIS STORY DOES NOT HAVE A HAPPY ENDING!
HOWEVER, there is a happy, multi-chapter version of this story called Hallucinating Happiness in the works. Keep an eye out for it, if you're interested, but it won't be out for a long time.
Hallucinations
There was shock on the faces of everyone who didn't know, but relief only on most of those faces - relief that Emily was not, in fact, dead. Only Reid looked absolutely terrified, but he had fled before anyone could grab him - he needed to analyze.
Emily was the one who found him - he was sitting with his back against the tombstone in front of hers, just staring at it. Emily sent off a quick text to JJ to let her know, then sat with her back to her own headstone, slightly uncomfortable with the knowledge of what it was.
"There was only a 10-15% chance this would happen," Reid said. "But I suppose I should have expected it after the headaches." His voice seemed flat, and very unlike the Reid she knew and loved.
"What do you mean?" Emily asked, trying to figure out where his mind was going. That there was only a 10-15% chance she had faked her death seemed somewhat reasonable, but what did it have to do with his headaches.
"There's only a 10-15% chance that the children of schizophrenics will inherit the disease," Reid clarified, voice still flat. "Headaches are a common precursor."
Emily swallowed back tears as she finally understood what he meant. "Reid, I promise, I'm not a hallucination," Emily reassured him. "JJ and Hotch decided to fake my death to protect myself and the team."
"You would say that your not hallucination," Reid dismissed. "And of course my mind is trying to rationalize it away, make it seem more real, that's what a schizophrenic's mind does."
"Which one makes more sense; you're suddenly having extremely vivid hallucinations, or my death was faked?" Emily asked, racing to convince him she was real.
The question seemed to give him pause for a moment, but he still responded fairly quickly, "It makes more sense for your death to be faked...but not for JJ to lie to me."
"Not even to protect me?"
Reid pause again, then shook his head firmly. "Not after I confessed to her," Reid insisted.
Where the hell is the team? Emily thought. "Confessed what?"
"How much I cared for you," Reid said with a sad smile. He seemed to look through her for a moment as a tear slipped down his cheek. "I must admit, I'm glad my hallucination took the shape of the woman I love." She gasped as he pulled out his gun. "I'm glad you're the last thing my mind will see."
Emily scrambled to get up and get to him when she realized what he was doing. She made it to her feet as he placed the gun under his chin. "I'm coming, Emily," he whispered.
Then he pulled the trigger.
"Emily says he's at her grave," JJ informed the team only moments after fruitlessly searching the building for Reid.
"But he's in the building," Garcia insisted.
"No, just his phone is," Morgan said, picking it up off his desk with a sigh to show Garcia the phone she had traced. "He must have left it."
"But he always has his phone on him - you all do," Garcia said almost numbly as she stared at the evidence contradicting her.
"Not always, baby girl," Morgan said, wrapping an arm around her. "Come on, let's go find out why Reid ran off." Morgan led the way to the elevators with Garcia as Reid pulled the trigger.
The team arrived to the sound of heart-wrenching screams that froze them in place for a moment. Morgan unfroze first, sprinting towards Emily and Reid. "No, no, no! It wasn't supposed to be like this! Not like this, not like this!" Morgan heard Emily shouting as he got closer. He pulled a frantic Emily into his arms when he got there, unable to look at Reid, and uncaring of the tears on his own cheeks.
"I loved him," she sobbed into Morgan's shoulder, breaking his heart; he'd always thought they seemed to click a little better with each other than the rest of the team. "I loved him and then this..."
Morgan pulled back a little to look at Emily. "Did he say anything to you? About...about why?"
Emily sobbed harder, and nodded, though it was hard to tell with the shaking caused by her sobs. "He said I...he thought I was a hallucination...He said that...said that JJ wouldn't lie about...about something like this...and then...oh, God...he said...'I'm coming, Emily.'"
Morgan closed his eyes and nodded, holding her as she sobbed, ignoring the tears streaming from his own eyes as the rest of the team caught up to them. He quietly repeated the information Emily had given him, not able to find it in himself to care about the guilty, heartbroken looks that JJ and Hotch had exchanged.
It was two years to the day since Reid had committed suicide, and Morgan found himself standing and staring at the two graves, thinking about how everything had gone since then.
Emily thought that if she had told everyone about Doyle, this wouldn't have happened. Exactly one year after Reid's suicide, she sat across from his grave, put her gun under her chin and pulled the trigger.
JJ had found her, and became so consumed by guilt that Will had eventually been forced to commit her. She barely got to see her own son.
Hotch had been nearly as bad as JJ, but managed to keep it hidden until JJ was institutionalized. He had quit the bureau the next day and became a school bus driver, trying to surround himself with the happiness of children to forget. He was a broken man, only held together by the fact that his son needed him.
Rossi had become an alcoholic. Turns out he had known Emily was alive and felt guilty for not sharing it with the rest of the team. His liver was failing, but he kept drinking, anyway.
Garcia had been the biggest change, far less bubbly and cheerful, only opening up to Morgan anymore; she had even closed herself off to Kevin. She refused to speak to JJ or Hotch at all, especially once it had been revealed that they had decided without Emily's input to fake her death, and Emily had protested not telling the team, but JJ and Hotch had disagreed. The last words she said to them had been, "We all trusted you. And Reid trusted you more than his own mind. Why couldn't you trust us?" They had been unable to answer, or even look at her.
Morgan himself had become a destructive workaholic. He threw himself into even more dangerous situations by himself, and found himself acting like Reid, walking up to armed suspects while unarmed to talk them down. Sometimes it worked, and other times he got shot. He hadn't died, obviously, but he knew his luck was bound to run out sometimes. A part of him even wondered if that was the plan.
With a heavy sigh, Morgan turned and walked away. Behind him, the tombstones of Spencer Reid and Emily Prentiss stood, together in death like they couldn't be in life.
Huh. I only realized on that last line how very Romeo and Juliet this story was. Girl fakes death, guy believes it, guy commits suicide, girl is upset guy is dead, girl commits suicide.
I don't know if headaches really are a precursor to schizophrenia; let's just suspend reality and say they are, though.