Disclaimer 1: I do not own Criminal Minds.

Disclaimer 2: I do not own Caltech, although I did go to college there. All characters are fictional, regardless of how much they may resemble actual persons.

Author's Note: The format of this story is unusual. It alternates between 1994-1995 and 2010. I hope the weird format doesn't bother people too much, since I've already got a bunch of chapters written and plan to update regularly. I just need to proofread the chapters before I add them to the story.

Some of the chapters contain quite a bit of nerd speak, but I reserve the right to nerd speak as much as I want in a story about my favorite TV nerds. Nerd speak clarifications may be found at the end of each chapter.

This is my first ever fanfiction. Reading &/ Reviewing are much appreciated. Enjoy!


Chapter 12

January 2010

Garcia heard her head hit the floor with a loud thunk. There was a microphone tangled up in her hair, and it amplified the sound, as it did another.

"Princess!" whispered a voice.

"Princess!" the voice whispered urgently.

Garcia ignored the voice and tried to go back to sleep. It was calling someone else. It wasn't calling her, because she wasn't a princess.

"Princess!" the voice persisted.

"Princess!" the voice annoyed her.

Garcia wondered if it knew any other words. She was bored with "princess".

Then, the singing started.

"I, I wish you could swim
Like the dolphins
Like dolphins can swim
Though nothing
Nothing will keep us together
We can beat them
For ever and ever
Oh we can be heroes
Just for one day..."

The singing was horrible. The voice was screechy and scratchy. It tripped over the lyrics, and it couldn't carry a tune, but it wouldn't stop.

"I, I will be king
And you
You will be queen
Though nothing
Will drive them away
We can be heroes
Just for one day
We can be us
Just for one day..."

Garcia gave up. She couldn't resist the singing. It was both horrible and irresistible. She would never be able to un-hear it, and she didn't particularly want to.

Garcia opened her eyes to see Reid looking down at her.

"You wanna go to Starbuck's?" he asked.

"Sure!" she answered.

She pushed herself up from the floor. He pulled her up in the same direction. The smell of coffee filled the air, taking the sting out of living.

Reid gestured towards a hole in the wall. Garcia remembered crawling through the hole, more than once, but she couldn't remember why she had done it. Right now, the trip to Starbuck's was the only thing on her mind.

"Come on, Reid," she nudged him. "We have to go now! Starbuck's is shutting down for fumigation. We have to hurry if we're going to get coffee before it closes for the weekend."

Reid stared at her, then at the hole, then at her again. He frowned unhappily. He looked like Hell. His hair was matted with blood that dripped out of an indefinite head wound within the strands. The wound dripped slowly. Garcia wondered how much blood a human head could hold. She reminded herself to ask Reid, but not until they had refreshed themselves with coffee.

The passage was wider and less coffin-like than she remembered. It only took a few seconds to skooch through the passage. It was a trick of the mind that venturing into unknown territory always seemed to take ten times as long as returning through known territory. Garcia peered through the hole on her hands and knees, waving at Reid to do the same.

He peered uncertainly through the hole.

"It's dark," he complained.

"Your Maglite," she pointed at the keychain clipped to his belt. "Give it to me," she ordered.

He unclipped the Maglite from his keychain and tossed it through the passage. She flicked it on and shone the light through the hole.

"How about now?" she asked.

"Better," he gulped.

"Come on, Rube," she reassured him. "It's like climbing the ladder into The Pit, except much shorter. If you can climb the ladder, you can wiggle through this hole. It'll only take a few seconds," she waved the beam in circles.

"If you say so," he answered, temporarily blinded by the beam of a flashlight pointed directly at him.

The circle of light bounced away from his face and began sweeping itself over the surface of the passage. It carved out a path of light for him to follow.

Reid lay down on his back and began skooching his way through the passage. Garcia recalled the ending scene of "Dead Alive", when the zombie body parts had been processed through household appliances, when Lionel's zombie mother had blown up to the size of a house and re-birthed him from her zombie womb, fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus, except not like that at all.

She felt a tapping against her knees, a good excuse to expel the horrifying image from her mind. A set of long skinny fingers tapped at her, making her knees twitch the way they twitched under a physician's hammer. She pulled the lanky figure to a half-standing position, and she bent over with him, resting with her hands on her knees, waiting for the burning in her muscles to ease up.

Here, in the steam tunnels, the air was warm, humid, and musty, and they, the girl and the boy, were loathe to leave it. They looked down at the dead body together.

"Who is he?" asked Reid.

"I don't know," Garcia replied.

"Is he dead?" asked Reid.

"I think so," Garcia replied.

"Was he bad?" asked Reid.

"I don't think so," Garcia replied.

"Who killed him?" asked Reid.

"I don't know," Garcia replied.

"Was he bad, the one who killed him?" asked Reid.

"I don't think so," Garcia replied.

She poked at the small figure with her index finger. She drew her hand away, scared to touch a corpse with a gruesome head wound. Whoever had shot the man had been brutal about it, but she was sure that he had not been bad. She was sure that he would have been sorry, would have felt empathy for his victim if he had been given the chance.

Garcia felt a spot of pressure impinging upon her forehead. She rubbed at the spot, but it persisted. The rubbing made it worse, made her feel the white hot bullet tearing through the tenuous layers of flesh - ectoderm, mesoderm, endoderm.

Reid rubbed at the spot of pressure over Garcia's forehead. He didn't know why he was rubbing her forehead, but he knew that somewhere along the line, he had a mistake and she had paid a price for it.

They sat on the dirty floor of the steam tunnels, breathing in the fresh air enveloping the cooling corpse, contemplating their successes and failures, until the SWAT team appeared. Semi-automatic weapons shifted in and out of focus in their blurry vision, the barrels intensifying the spots of pressure over their foreheads. They glanced at each other and reached an unanimous decision.

It was time to take a leisurely nap. Not even Starbuck's, not even David Bowie, could do a thing to wake them.


Garcia waited for the nurse to disappear out the door of her hospital room before setting to work on her handcuffs. She wasn't waiting around for Detective Kim to release her from these damned handcuffs. She had spent way too much time in handcuffs today.

"Or was that yesterday?" she wondered.

Orange light shone through the window of her room, so she guessed that it was the day after the Great Cyanide Siege of 2010.

The handcuffs snapped apart in the seasoned fingers of a lock-picking expert. They were easy to pick, now that one of her hands was free. She placed the used paperclip on the bedside table and stood up on the bed.

"Not tall enough," she muttered.

She sat back down and pressed a button to raise the bed up to its full height. Once raised, the bed served as a platform for her to climb into Hyperspace - the space between the ceiling and the floor above.

Garcia poked her head into the dark pipe-lined interior of Hyperspace, mustering her strength. With a kick and a lunge, she lifted herself through the hole of the discarded ceiling panel. Hyperspace in a hospital was much more spacious than Hyperspace in the South Houses. There were pipes and cables everywhere, but they ran in tidy bundles rather than chaotic jumbles with live wires hanging out of torn insulation. She only had to hunch over slightly as she tiptoed in Hospital Hyperspace.

She edged along a clear corridor between the pipes that carried oxygen and water into each room. She avoided putting her full weight on any ceiling panels, lest she fall through them into the room below. The corridor stretched in both directions, the pipes entering and exiting the rooms in a regular pattern.

Garcia wasn't sure which direction to take. She guessed that she and Reid would be kept in adjoining rooms, so it was easier for the police officers to stand guard over two of the three psychotic hostage-takers from Gates Lecture Hall.

"What if he's not here at all?" the thought suddenly struck her, "What if he didn't make it out?"

Her heart thumped against her chest. Her breathing ripped into shreds. It was the first time she had considered the possibility.

"Garcia!" whispered a voice near her foot. "You're standing on my hand!" the voice whispered urgently.

Garcia jerked her foot off the skinny hand clutching at the floor of Hyperspace. Her heart settled back into a healthy rhythm. Her breathing evened out.

The Princess grinned at her noblest Knight as he grinned back at her through a hole in the ceiling of his hospital room.


"How do you feel?" Reid asked Garcia. They perched on the floor of Hyperspace, their legs dangling out the hole in the ceiling.

"Pretty good, all things considered," she replied. "And yourself, dear Sir?" she asked shyly.

"I believe the term is peachy perfection, dear Princess," he answered, imitating her everyday pattern of speech. "Cyanide poisoning is a classic case of easy come, easy go," he explained, "Once you get the antidote and breathe in fresh air, your body recovers pretty quickly. There won't be any lasting ill effects, except some occasional shortness of breath over the next few weeks. We did breathe in a huge dose."

He was about to launch into a monologue on the mechanism of cyanide detoxification when Garcia clamped his lips shut in her fingers.

"How did we get out of there, Reid?" she asked, her tone turning serious. "I don't remember anything beyond injecting you with that vial of hydroxo...whatever. Sorry about those," she added, pointing at the multiple puncture marks on his arm where she had repeatedly stuck the needle without hitting a vein.

"Sorry?" asked Reid incredulously, "You saved my life in there, Garcia."

"Actually," he continued, "I don't remember how we got out either. The last thing I remember is wanting coffee really really badly. Even the cyanide gas smelled like coffee."

"I remember something about coffee too!" Garcia exclaimed. "We were going to Starbuck's! David Bowie was going to be there for a concert. Then, we were going to help the staff fumigate the place."

"Really?" Reid asked. "I don't remember anything about fumigation. And who's David Bowie? All I remember is wanting coffee, then something hit me on the head, then I wanted coffee again. And something fell on top of me...before the second time I wanted coffee..."

"Oh, that was you," he realized. "You have a bad habit of doing that, you know. You would always fall on top of me whenever we fell out of your horrible little bed in The Pit," he teased. "Lucky for you, you always had bottles of NyQuil lying around The Pit. I stole a bottle once, when I was too lazy to go to the store myself," he admitted.

"I knew it!" Garcia squeaked. "I thought I was going crazy when I couldn't find it!"

"The UnSub was the one who hit you on the head," she revealed. "He hit you on the head with an Erlenmeyer flask."

Reid gasped in shock. He patted at the bandage over his head wound. He had waited his whole life for this day to come, the day his beloved lab equipment turned against him.

"Which one?" he asked.

"500 mL," she answered.

"Good thing it wasn't the 1-Liter," he sighed. "The glass of the 1-Liter Erlenmeyer flask is twice as thick. Larry told me all about glassware specifications, when I worked at the Chemistry Department Glass Shop."

"I remember," Garcia smiled.

"What happened to the UnSub?" Reid suddenly remembered.

"I, uh, I shot him," Garcia replied. "With your revolver, with the bullet in the last chamber. He came through the passage after hitting you with the flask, and I shot him in the forehead," she rubbed her forehead.

Reid gaped open-mouthed at the unexpected revelation. He brushed his fingers involuntarily over her forehead.

"It's funny," Garcia continued. "You know that I hate guns, right? My parents were hippies, and so was I. They didn't believe in violence of any kind. When I shot that man in the forehead, I didn't feel a thing. Afterwards, when I was crawling back through the passage to find you, I still didn't feel anything. I killed a man, and I felt nothing."

"I'm so sorry," said Reid, looking down at his lap. "I never wanted you to do something like that. The man was pinning me down, and the cyanide was getting to me, and I couldn't lift a finger. I had the gun pinned under me, but I couldn't get it into position to shoot him. Then, he hit me and let go, and the gun rolled away. I'm sorry that you had to shoot him. I should've been the one to do it. I should've done it in the control room, but I was confused. I thought I was twelve, and I didn't want to shoot anyone."

"I thought we could all walk out of there together," he continued. "The UnSub wasn't a murderer to begin with, but I drove him to it, just like..."

"Shhhhhhh," Garcia shushed him. "Listen to me, Reid. You remember James Clark Battle, the man who shot me after I went out on a date with him?"

He nodded.

"JJ shot him through the glass doors at the BAU, remember? That was the first time she had killed anyone. You know what she told me afterwards? She told me that she was only doing whatever it took to protect her family."

"The BAU is my family, Reid," she continued, "It's yours too, isn't it?"

He nodded.

"But you're not the BAU," she sniffled. "You're something else entirely. You...me...The Pit," her voice cracked. "Back when I was living in The Pit, for the nine months that we hung out together...If you hadn't been there, I would've ended up like the UnSub. I had cut everyone off, even my brothers, but I still had you, and for some reason, you were willing to take part in my bizarre little fantasies. I was so screwed up, but for a lot of the time, when we were together, I was happy. Looking back, it seems like a waste of nine months, but it wasn't! It was a good nine months!"

She choked out the words, tears rolling down her cheeks as she shook her head of messy blonde hair. Reid nodded, not daring to lift his head to look at her. He thought about the UnSub, the unknown subject who remained nameless, even after his death. He thought about the girl in The Pit, the mysterious entity who had finally received a name.

"How could I have forgotten it all?" Garcia wiped her eyes. "Well...I didn't really forget it, not a single minute of it. I just wanted to forget it. I refused to connect it with you, all these years that we've been working together. I refused until it was just you and me in a roomful of cyanide, no BAU, no family, no one to help us," she whispered through her tears.

"So did I," said Reid. "I didn't want to make the connection either, for different reasons. It helped that I looked really different back then. I was only thirteen that year. You looked different too," he tugged at her formerly blue- and pink-streaked hair.

"I tried to block out that whole year," Garcia explained. "After the FBI caught me hacking into their systems, I had to leave Tech. I put the past behind me, assumed a new persona. I wanted to start over. I wanted to be Technical Analyst Penelope Garcia - normal, healthy, and well-adjusted!" she laughed at the ridiculous notion.

"Did it work?" asked Reid.

"Of course not!" Garcia answered. "I'm still the same as always...as screwed up and broken as ever. It wasn't just my mom and my stepdad and the accident. My dad, my real one, died of cancer when I was four. That was the first thing that screwed me up."

"My mom married again, a couple of years later, and everything was perfect for awhile, until the accident," she continued. "I took comfort in my new family and forgot the one I had lost. I pretended that Rick was my own father. I even took his name. My brothers, Josh and Jonathan, never did."

Garcia stopped. Here she was, divulging such information to the best of friends, and it felt right.

Reid smiled softly. He was ready to listen to her troubles, any and all of them, but he was not ready to divulge his own. He was not broken enough, but sooner or later, he would be.

"You're not the only one who tried to block out The Pit," he revealed, "So did I."

"I went down there to check on you one day in July. You were gone, and you hadn't left anything behind. There was not a single scrap of evidence that anyone had lived in The Pit for nine months. I thought I was going crazy. I thought I had hallucinated everything. Even while you were there, I never told anyone about you, just in case you weren't real."

"For me, the line between reality and illusion has always been blurry..." he admitted.

"I know," Garcia said quietly. "The FBI didn't let me leave anything behind, not even a note for you. They collected all my belongings as evidence to use against me, in case I rejected their job offer. As if I had any other prospects! As if I would have chosen to go to prison instead!"

"They offered you a job right away?" asked Reid, leaning forward to hear the tale.

"Yeah, they were desperate to keep me under their control. They didn't want me hacking into their systems, and they didn't want anyone finding out about me hacking into their systems. One night, when you were off on one of your geology field trips, I hijacked the entire FBI computer system. I unleashed a computer virus that took them weeks to eliminate. There was no point to it, but I wanted to see if I could do it. It was like running an experiment. Like the UnSub was running his experiment..." she trailed off.

"You're not the UnSub," said Reid. "You didn't shut yourself off completely. That takes courage, you know. The easy way out would have been to crawl into a hole and never see anyone again."

"But I'm curious," he changed the subject. "What did you find out about the government? Did you find out anything about Area 51?"

"Oh, you wouldn't believe half the things I found out!" Garcia whispered. "It would take weeks to tell you all of it."

"I'm listening, I'm listening," Reid encouraged her.

"Another day, Junior G-Man!" Garcia smiled wickedly. "I don't want to disillusion you about your beloved Big Brother just yet. Right now, my butt is getting numb from sitting on this ledge. How about we snuggle up in your comfy bed down there?" she pointed at the room below. "I promise I won't fall on top of you again."

"I don't believe that for a second!" Reid snorted. "However, if you steal a cup of coffee for me from the nurses' station, I'll overlook it the next time it happens."

Reid lowered himself through the hole in the ceiling and stood on the bed to help Garcia on her descent. Even with his bad knee, the jump out of Hyperspace had been easy. He was so tall now.

The Princess and the Knight plopped down onto the creaking hospital bed and burrowed deep into the blankets, just in time for the LAPD to barge through the door with their guns drawn.


"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" came the sound of a booming voice.

Derek Morgan barged into the room behind the police officers, Detective Kim following right behind him.

"Put your guns down!" he yelled, furious that the lowly street cops were pointing their weapons at his Baby Girl and Pretty Boy on the hospital bed. They looked so pale and helpless in his eyes, the eyes of a natural protector. He was so furious that he didn't even stop to consider why they were in bed together.

"Do as he says!" yelled Detective Kim. "They are no longer suspects in custody! They are Federal agents!"

The police officers slowly lowered their guns and looked from Morgan to Kim to the bed before holstering them. Detective Kim took them by the shoulders and guided them out of the room to explain the situation.

"Well, well, well," said Morgan, as he approached the bed, "Look what the cat dragged in."

Reid and Garcia snuggled closer together, waiting for his reprimands. Reid whisked out the sad puppy dog eyes that he used to manipulate people, and Garcia batted her eyelashes in wide-eyed innocence.

"You two just couldn't wait to go through official channels, could you?" Morgan tugged at a pair of empty handcuffs attached to the bedrail.

"We're Techers!" they replied in unison.

They glanced at each other as Morgan raised his eyebrows. Their unspoken understanding remained intact. Their friendship, the friendship that did not need to be articulated, was still their very own secret.


Derek Morgan looked across at Reid and Garcia sleeping on the BAU jet. They leaned their heads against each other. Herbert rested on the table between the facing seats.

"NyQuil," Reid mumbled in his sleep, "Want NyQuil..."

"No Nyquil...pumpkin ale..." Garcia mumbled in response.

"Princess," murmured Reid, nuzzling his nose against Garcia's bangs.

"Sir Rubik," murmured Garcia, "Want story..."

Morgan chuckled in the darkness. They looked and sounded like children, their heads leaning against each other, their lips murmuring incoherent nothings about princesses and knights and bedtime stories.

He moved into the couch across the aisle. He didn't want to fall asleep across from Reid, in case Reid had a nightmare, snatched up his cane, and mistook him for the UnSub. He didn't want to fall asleep across from Garcia, in case Garcia had a nightmare, snatched up Reid's revolver, and mistook him for the UnSub. They looked and sounded like children, but they were not children.

Morgan stretched out on the couch and settled into a leisurely nap with his headphones over his ears.

In his dream, Morgan dreamt that Reid and Garcia rode upon a large white cloud in the heavens. One moment, the heavens gleamed in the sunlight, and the next moment, they parted to reveal the starry night sky behind a veil of blue. He waved at the figures on the cloud, and the figures waved back at him. The cloud dipped in his direction, turned, and swooped down to pick him up. He waited patiently. They were safe, and he was content.

In her dream, Garcia dreamt that she was a princess. She was Princess Grendelin, and she rode upon a large white cloud with Sir Rubik at her side, flying into a flurry of pepperoni slices that he plucked out of the air and inserted into his long brown hair. Images and reels peeked out of little cubbyholes that stood ajar in their aisles. They swirled gleefully in their new-found freedom and came to her as if for the very first time. Each image was different but much the same - the Princess and the Knight, young again, hurtling down the 110 Freeway, lurching up the hill near JPL, twisting and turning through the curves of the Angeles Crest Highway. The past was the past, and she was content.

In his dream, Reid dreamt that he was a knight. He was Sir Rubik - Champion of the Princess, Protector of the Realm. He rode upon a large white cloud with the Princess at his side, but he was uneasy. He searched the red-tiled roofs below, squinting to spot something he had left behind. The past was the past, and he was not content.

Up to this point, his life had been full of mistakes, and he had yet to forgive himself for a single one of them.


Nerd speak clarifications

1) Hyperspace

In addition to being the space between the ceiling and the roof or the space between the floors, it also refers to dimensions beyond the three dimensions of the physical world. Used in math and physics, especially string theory. Used in science fiction for faster-than-light travel in the universe.

2) David Bowie

Constant references not caused by author's insanity. Instead caused by episode "Penelope" (Season 3, Episode 9) when Garcia is at the hospital after getting shot, and she's telling Reid and Morgan that she kept hearing David Bowie and wondering if David Bowie was God. Then, they played the Heroes song at the end of the episode.

Author's Note: So concludes the first arc of this story. The second part, chapters 13-24, will cover Feb-July 1995 and the equally disturbing events of July 2010. It will explore many of the same themes from a different angle, and focus more on Reid's "mental problems" than Garcia's "mental problems" that were the focus of this arc. The case will be the complete opposite of this case, but the UnSub has already been mentioned.

Thanks again for reading!