AN: Holy Muse, Batman! I let Sebastian loose with a notebook and pen and he spewed forth 7 ½ pages worth of story in under 3 hours! I can't take any credit for this. He was on FIRE!

MN: I wanted to write some more but she is insisting on typing this up first…


"Jayje?" The gently prodding voice combined with the steady pressure on her left wrist pulled her from the fog encompassing her mind.

"Hmmm?" She was so sleepy. All she wanted was to ignore the voices swirling around her.

"Exactly how much of that painkiller did they give her?" Why couldn't Morgan talk quieter?

"Apparently enough." At least Hotch knew how to speak softly.

"Should we call the doctor? I'm not sure it should be quite this hard to wake her up." What on Earth was Blake talking about?

"She's fine. Narcotics and exhaustion are just one heck of a combination." Rossi definitely knew what he was talking about with that one.

"C'mon Peaches. Rise and shine." Were they seriously going to sick Garcia on her?

With a sigh, she forced open her eyes, mostly so she could tell her friends to leave her alone. Her plans changed immediately when the reality of her location finally broke through into her clouded mind. She was lying in a hospital bed, her team surrounding her.

"What?" The word came out as a strangled croak thanks to the unbelievably arid state of her mouth. Her tongue felt thick and refused to separate from the surrounding skin.

Morgan's hand appeared to her left, grasping a cup, and he brought the straw to her dry lips as he spoke. "You really had us worried for a while there, Blondie."

The cool water did its job, moistening her mouth and freeing her tongue from the roof. She chanced another attempt at speech. "What happened?"

"What's the last thing you remember?" Hotch's voice was accompanied by a hand on her right shoulder and she turned toward him.

She did her best to rack her brain through the fog still trying to close back in. "We were going in to search the warehouse. I was with Rossi and Reid at the front. Blake radioed that you guys had the UnSub at the back. Then…"

She thought hard for a moment then shook her head. "That's it. I can't remember."

"We didn't have the UnSub. We had his younger brother." Blake's voice was apologetic from the foot of her bed.

"None of us saw any indication he had help, which is why the three of us stood down." Rossi's voice held its own measure of guilt from his spot next to Hotch.

She looked back to the left and locked eyes with Spencer as he fidgeted next to Morgan. "What happened Spence?"

"I was behind you and he just stepped out from behind a crate. He was extremely calm, serene even. Before I could react, he fired."

His eyes fell to the thin blanket covering her and Hotch picked up the story. "You took six shots to the vest at close range. Then you knocked your head on the crate on the way down."

The head injury explained why the painkillers were having such a drastic effect on her level of coherence. "The UnSub?"

Rossi hitched an eyebrow skyward. "Also took six to the torso. No vest."

As she considered this information, another thought crossed her mind. "When I was waking up, I could have sworn I heard Garcia."

"Guilty!" She looked toward the sound of her friend's voice and spotted the cell phone in Morgan's hand. "I had to make sure you were okay before I had to call Will."

She tried to sit up but a sharp pain ripped through her ribs and she sank back against the pillows with a small whimper and tears welling in her eyes.

"You shouldn't try to move suddenly. Ribs three through seven on your left side are heavily bruised and you have hairline fractures on ribs four and five as well as mild bruises on ribs eight through twelve, your scapula, your ilium, and your left hip and buttock." Spencer rattled off her injuries quickly and she rolled her eyes.

"I'm going to ignore the fact that you guys let him read my chart, for now. Garcie, please tell me Henry doesn't know?" Her son had enough fuel for bad dreams without being told his mother had been shot.

"What kind of fairy godmother do you take me for? Of course not!"

"Thank you. And don't worry about Will. I'll call him in a bit." She figured he'd take it a little better coming from her.

"As you wish. I bid you farewell!" The technical analyst disconnected the call without waiting for further reply.

Before JJ could ask any more questions, a nurse appeared in the room and shooed her friends out. The woman checked and recorded her vitals, then breezed out as quickly as she'd come, only to be replaced almost immediately by a doctor.

The man was flipping pages on her chart as he strode in. "Agent Jareau? I'm Doctor Mitchel Long. Glad to see that you're awake. How do you feel?"

She studied the man out of habit, cataloguing pieces of information for later analysis. "Fine, as long as I don't move."

"I imagine. The left half of your torso is pretty black and blue. All things considered though, you're pretty well off. It could have been a lot worse."

She nodded solemnly as she realized that he was right. If the UnSub had taken aim at her unprotected head… "When can I get out of here?"

He grinned as he made some notes in her chart. "I want to keep you overnight for monitoring because of the head injury. I'll make a deal with you: if you promise to never get shot within a hundred miles of here again, I'll make you my first eval in the morning."

JJ groaned. "I take it my team was a little…overbearing?"

He pulled a stool next to the bed and sat down. "I would have used the word 'obnoxious', but 'overbearing' works."

"Just how bad were they?" She tried not to picture how much of a pain the men in her life could be.

"The big guy practically frisked anyone who came anywhere near your room. And the quiet, serious one, your boss I think, he was demanding an update every five minutes until we let him see you. The older guy alternated between flirting with the female staff in an attempt to get information and insulting the coffee. And let's not leave out the tall, skinny one that rode in with you. It took us a minute to figure out that the blood on him was all yours, he was so frazzled."

Her heart sank at the idea of Reid, covered in her blood and panicked.

"As an improvement though, once he calmed down we couldn't seem to keep your chart out of his hands. We finally gave up and made copies for him every time we updated it. Then, of course, there were the phone calls, plural, from some woman named 'Garcia'. Half of my staff now refuses to answer the phone without hazard pay. At least Agent Blake was calm and collected once she showed up. She helped out enormously with the rest of them."

JJ grimaced as he finished. "They can be a little overprotective."

The man smiled at her once again. "It's obvious that they care about you." He checked his watch then stood. "I'm headed out for the night, but I've okayed some more painkillers for you. And I am telling your team that only one of them can stay the night. I'll see you in the morning."


"Spence, I'm fine. Really. You don't have to stay." She tried for what had to be the dozenth time to convince him not to spend the night with his long limbs squashed awkwardly into a chair in her hospital room.

"I want to. And I beat Morgan and Hotch fair and square in 'Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock'!" He pulled a file from his bad as he spoke, setting it on the window ledge.

"I'm going to be doped back out of my mind soon. You are the last person who should have to deal with that."

He turned to look at her. "I can handle it. I promise. Let me stay, okay?"

The pained look on his face made her relent and she murmured an agreement as a nurse once again bustled in. Once she'd been redosed with the narcotics, she returned her focus to her best friend. "You know this isn't your fault, right? If it weren't for you and Rossi, who knows what would have happened."

He avoided her gaze as he settled himself in the armchair. "I know. Logically, I know. But there's still this little feeling in the pit of my stomach of guilt. You shouldn't have been in front."

She had been trying for the past several hours to get him to open up. Now that he was finally talking, she didn't want to make him clam back up, so she proceeded carefully. "Why not? I am a field agent after all. Would you feel like this if it was Morgan who'd been hurt?"

He was still staring intently down at his feet. "No, but…"

"But?" She was treading on thin ice now, but the medication was starting to take hold once again, impairing her judgment.

"But it's different with you. You're always taking care of everyone else so someone needs to take care of you. And since you're my best friend, it should be me."

JJ tried to hide the yawn that came with a sudden rush of exhaustion. "I can take care of myself you know."

"I know." She hadn't noticed him rise and cross to her bed, but suddenly he was there. "But you don't. You're so busy worrying about Henry and me and the team that you never focus on yourself. So just this once, let me take care of you, okay?"

His calm voice was soothing in her current state and she found it impossible to object. "Okay."

As she drifted off, her last awareness was of the blanket being carefully pulled over her.


AN: There's actually another page written, but it is more suited to serve as the beginning of the next chapter. So, we shall bid you adieu for now. We are going to try to get a chapter of 'Freedom' up before we do another with this, so it will likely be a couple of days.