For Warnings and Disclaimers, see chapter 1.
Reid was torn. He was confused. He was hurt and angry and felt like he was being pulled in a million directions at once. He felt like he'd been on the rollercoaster ride from hell for nearly a year now: JJ leaving the team, headaches and insomnia with no discernable cause, Emily's…"death", grief, cravings, problems with his mom, finding out Emily was alive, and finding out that he'd been deceived for months by nearly every member of the team. What happened yesterday with JJ during the case, well that was just the icing on the cake. The guilt trip from Emily? Maybe that was the candles.
It was too much. Reid still couldn't sleep well at least 4 nights a week on average. He still had headaches that lasted for days at least 3 times a month, often more, though he didn't talk to anyone about them anymore. His cravings had resurfaced months ago, when the headaches had begun, but they'd been firmly under his control at first. Thoughts of easing the pain and getting sleep were there, but they were far outweighed by the potential consequences of relapsing. Instead, Reid had started going to Beltway Clean Cops meetings again.
When he thought Emily had died, the cravings intensified. He couldn't find the motivation or energy to go to the BCC meetings and had, instead, sought comfort in JJ. There were a lot of things he could turn to Morgan for, but letting go and allowing himself to just breakdown and be completely open and vulnerable with his emotions, just wasn't something he thought he could do in front of Morgan, alpha male and all-around tough guy. Besides, though Reid knew that Morgan wouldn't really judge him, he also knew that Morgan was having a really hard time dealing with Emily's death, too, and he couldn't bring himself to add to Morgan's burden.
The cravings, though, that was something he couldn't bring himself to admit to JJ, Morgan, or anyone else on the team. Grief was normal and to be expected, but the desire to use dilaudid again would send everyone into panic mode. They'd be watching his every move, coddling him, and questioning if he was fit for duty. Reid needed to work. He needed to have something to focus his mind on, something to distract him from the physical pain, the emotional pain, and the cravings. The cravings had grown and were severe enough, at times, that if he had too much time to think, his mind used the time to imagine what it would feel like to find that escape again, to think of ways he could get away with using and still do his job, to think of the safest way to obtain his drug of choice. No, having too much time to think was not a good thing at all. He had to work. So, he kept his cravings to himself and added going to the firing range, every free minute he had, to his list of ways to cope with everything he was thinking and feeling.
Just when Reid had begun to think that things couldn't get any worse, he'd gotten the call from Bennington and been told about the problems with his mom. He'd been torn. The team had already been short-staffed since Emily died. Then, Ashley had transferred and Hotch had been reassigned to take over some of Strauss's duties while she was on leave. Thankfully, JJ had decided to undergo the additional training to become a profiler as a means of coming back to the team. She would be rejoining the team by the end of that week. Reid had been relieved, but he was feeling too down and stressed to be as happy about it as he thought he should, and they'd still be undermanned if he left to tend to matters with his mother. For 2 weeks, he'd tried to manage the situation with his mother by phone. JJ had come back and Reid realized that he really needed to be there for his mom, so he'd taken a sabbatical from the BAU.
Knowing the team needed him, however, he returned as soon as his mom was somewhat stabilized. Still, he continued to worry about her and kept in close contact with her doctors on a daily basis. His cravings were worse than ever, with the added stress of worrying about his mom, but knowing that he was needed by her and by the team helped him to maintain his sobriety. He couldn't let them down, his family.
Reid had thought things were finally getting better, beginning to calm a bit, when all hell broke loose. Over the span of just a few days Reid learned that Morgan and Garcia had left him out of the loop during their investigation into Doyle and the location of Declan, that Emily was alive, and that JJ and Hotch had been lying to the team about it since the day she "died." Reid felt like his entire world was crumbling around him. The people he trusted and depended on most, those that he'd thought of as family, had betrayed him. Of course he was immeasurably happy that Emily was alive. How could he not be? But how could those closest to him deceive him this way? Did Morgan and Garcia think his assistance in their investigation would have been worthless? That he didn't have a vested interest in the outcome? Or did they think they couldn't trust him?
Perhaps trust was the issue. Hotch and JJ had apparently come to the conclusion that the team couldn't be trusted with the truth about Emily. How can you put your trust in people who don't demonstrate the same trust in you, especially given the fact that, for Spencer Reid, trust isn't easily built in the first place?
Despite what others may have thought, Reid was never angry with Emily. She hadn't been the one to make the decision to fake her death and he was too relieved that she was alive to hold any real malice toward her. That didn't mean it was entirely easy to be near her. She was a constant reminder of everything that had happened within the team over the last few months and the feelings Reid associated with that. He was also still trying to process and come to terms with the fact that she was really there again, whole and healthy, and that for all those months he'd visited an empty grave and grieved for a friend who wasn't truly lost.
Though he knew that Rossi had suspected Emily was alive, the fact that he hadn't know for sure, nor did he know about Morgan and Garcia's clandestine investigation, meant that he was the only member of the team who hadn't outright lied during the time Emily was gone. Unfortunately, though he liked and cared for Rossi, he was also the member of the team that Reid felt the least connected to.
Reid was still angry with Hotch for his decision to fake Emily's death and hide it from the team, but it was getting easier, as the days passed, to put himself in Hotch's shoes and understand that he was protecting Emily, who had come so close to actually dying. Reid was beginning to accept that, in Hotch's role as the leader of their team, he's forced to make decisions based on the welfare of the team and not on his or their emotions.
Reid had been able to forgive Garcia fairly quickly. He knew that she'd wanted to tell the rest of the team what she and Morgan had been up to, Morgan had said as much, but she had gone along with Morgan's wishes. It's hard to stay angry with Garcia, who wears her heart on her sleeve and would do almost anything to make others happy.
Forgiving Morgan was proving more difficult and Reid still hadn't fully managed it. He knew that Morgan didn't want to get the rest of the team's hopes up, nor did he want anyone else to get in trouble for taking part in something that wasn't authorized. Reid was trying to come to terms with that reasoning. It also helped that Reid knew Morgan had been hurt as much as he had by the deception about Emily. Morgan had held her, bloodied, in his hands and he'd blamed himself for not being there soon enough to save her. Furthermore, the hard feelings Reid held toward Morgan were simply eclipsed by those he held toward JJ.
There was a part of Reid that believed JJ when she said that she couldn't tell him the truth, or at least believed that's how she saw it. There was a part of him that knew it must have been a difficult secret to keep. The problem was that there was another part of him, the part that had lived in agony for months, the part that only she had fully seen, and Reid couldn't begin to understand how JJ could let him suffer so much if she genuinely cared about him. It seemed that all of the pain and anger he had toward the team was focused on her because she was the one he'd gone to and trusted so utterly and completely and bared his soul to. All of that had now been thrown back in his face in the worst possible way. How could he not be hurt? How could he ever trust another word she ever said if she could see him in so much pain and still lie right to his face? Reid couldn't help but question if he'd ever really known her. He'd thought of her as compassionate, trustworthy, and kind, but when he'd needed her most, she'd only pretended to be those things when she could have taken that pain away even more surely than dilaudid ever could have.
The secret Reid would never share was that, the night Emily came back and Doyle was killed, he'd driven around for hours trying to convince himself that all that mattered was that Emily was alive and that he should go home. The truth of it was, though, Reid had felt like he was dying inside, that the family he thought he finally had was just another lie. The reason he wasn't going home was because he kept driving by the place he knew to be the safest option for him to obtain the vials of precious, clear liquid he wanted more at that moment than at any time since he'd gotten clean and made it through the worst of the post-Hankel aftermath. The truth is, Reid didn't go home. He gave into temptation and bought 2 bottles of dilaudid and a sealed box of new syringes. When he'd finally arrived home, Reid had quickly begun making the preparations to administer the relief he'd so long denied himself, but with the belt around his arm and the needle poised to enter, he couldn't do it. He'd tossed the needle to the corner of the bathroom, picked up one of the vials and smashed it against the wall, then slumped down onto the floor in tears. Some time later, once he was emotionally spent, he forced himself up from the floor and emptied the remaining vial and needle into the sink. He cleaned up the mess from the smashed vial, placed everything into the trash, and took it all to the dump outside, wanting to get it as far from himself as possible. He'd never imagined that he would mention the fact that he'd even thought of using dilaudid to JJ or anyone else. Saying what he did in that station had happened in a moment of anger and, yes, a desire to hurt JJ as she had hurt him. Still, he would never let anyone know how close he'd come to falling over the edge or how much he had continued to fight the urge to use every day since.
A/N: When I began writing this chapter, I had no intention of discussing Reid's cravings to the extent that I did, but that's what came out. I guess I've wondered how serious Reid's thoughts of using dilaudid were, if he came close to relapsing, and how close, if so. When I wrote this, my mind apparently decided on one possible answer.
For anyone confused or frustrated by the vague references to what's going on with Reid's mom, I'm right there with you. They made vague comments in 'It Takes A Village' and 'Proof', but have yet to explain them. I chose to leave it vague so that what I wrote would be less likely to conflict with this storyline if it is picked up on the show again in the future.