Warning: Gore
Disclaimer: I didn't break Gideon, CBS did.
Spoilers: Mild through 3x1, Doubt
Unbeta'd. All errors are mine.
Author's Note: This was floating in the back of my mind, and, feeling angry with Gideon, I started to write it down. It went in a completely different direction than I had anticipated. Gideon was a great hero, and like all great heroes he had great flaws. So...should I relegate this to The Isle of Murdered Darlings? Please read and review!
...
Gideon's Gift
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.
- William Shakespeare
There are reasons, of course, not to do it. He forces his hands to still when he realizes he is clasping them again, wringing them. The habit started after Boston, came back after Georgia, and he still catches himself at it when feeling rushes over thought.
He turns the movement of his hands to action and purpose, lighting a fat pillar candle.
The air is crisp. He had forgotten to turn on the heat. Dust is a fine layer that blunts the edges of his photographs, his furniture, the screen of the security monitor he had disconnected. There are apples on the kitchen island. They came from a tree more than a mile from the cabin. They were deadfalls and they are rotten.
He stares at his gun and the worn grey edge of the wallet that holds his badge. They reproach him. They make him think of Reid.
...
"I beat you." Glee chased the astonishment from Reid's face. Although the jet was warm, he was wearing a cardigan over the sweater vest and dress shirt and, Gideon was sure, another shirt underneath.
But the planes of the younger man's face were less severe than they were even a month ago. The fingers of his left hand, as it whisked to hover over the black knight that had locked Gideon in checkmate, had not the faintest remnant of a tremor.
Reid's eyes flashed up. "Did you let me?"
"Is it your birthday?"
With a tilt of his head Reid considered this, then beamed.
Perhaps the luminosity in those eyes was refracted. There were shadows there that made Gideon want to weep, because those shadows had remained even when all the anger and pain and confusion had drained away. However indirectly, he was responsible.
And now Hotch was suspended, Prentiss was probably going to turn in her badge, and everything was falling apart.
A touch stilled his twisting hands. Surprise made him jerk up his head, a quick move that before all this would have made the younger man recoil and stutter and smile at him nervously.
But Reid never moved, two fingers ghosting over the back of Gideon's wrist. "It's going to be okay."
The gentleness in Reid's eyes almost let him believe in absolution.
...
A crash shatters through his reminiscence. He calms the racing of his heart and pulls his hand away from his hip, where it was reaching for the gun he has set aside, and investigates.
An image of Accipiter novaehollandiae, a Grey Goshawk, a strongly built, unerring predator, lies crumpled in shards of glass and the splintered lengths of frame. Wear, time, something had caused its wall mount to shatter.
Irritation shoots through him as he surveys the mess. Where did he put the broom? He is going to cut himself on the glass. That frame is oak.
Oak is supposed to endure.
Not break.
There is a sound, tearing through his chest. The cabin reverberates with it. The sound comes again and brings with it a terrible ache. He has wept before, but this is not cathartic. It is destroying.
He stumbles to the desk where he has laid his badge and his gun. Sits, picking up the weapon and turning it to glint in the candlelight. The light flickers, blue and hot and brighter in the instant before it dies.
He sits in the dark. He thinks about his son. Steven's image is flat and motionless as a photograph and the voice his memory supplies sounds wrong. God, how he had loved his son.
He thinks of Reid. The trust in his eyes, the way his hands dance when his thoughts speed ahead of his words, the way he is growing out of his awkwardness.
Of all the people in his life, he knows who will come to his cabin. The slender frame will pause in the shadow of the doorway, and the first thing he will notice is the smell. Eyes will sweep the room, imprinting in that curse of a memory the crimson pooling on the floor, the wall, the ceiling, interspersed with the thickness of brain matter and little chunks of bone.
Yes, there are reasons not to do it.
A sigh drags out of him. He sets the gun aside.
Instead, he writes a letter. He writes about happy endings.
This is his final gift.
...
FIN