Disclaimer: I do not own Criminal Minds, I am not Ghandi, I do not own Cast Away, and I do not profit from this writing ; )

don't forget to review!!

Chapter 21: Psychic tag team

She heard them bring in more food. "So you're the defiant one," the woman said, not understanding.

"It's called protest. You can't make me eat," Aimee pointed out. "Plus, the tax dollars certainly aren't going to the cafeteria. It worked for Ghandi. Cesear Chavez, too," she added.

"Your choice," the woman shrugged. "You ain't no Ghandi, though."

Aimee laughed at the way the woman's twang pronounced Ghandi. It was the most entertainment she had in… she wasn't sure how long she had been in there.

"Don't I get my own Spaulding?" she asked as the door was shut. "Wait, isn't football bigger than basketball round this parts? I'll take a football, I'm not picky," she called out. She wondered if they had even seen Cast Away. She was beginning to think her movie references were lost on her audience.

Silence, as usual. She had no doubt they were watching her if they chose to. "Just because you see fit to torture me doesn't me you have to kill the environment," she huffed. "I hope these are those curly lightbulbs. Must be hell on your electric bill," she said.

She was beyond trying to pass the time. She didn't even know how much time had passed. Well, over two days, she knew. She started reciting some of her favorite songs in Italian, then switched to French, then tried translating both songs into Spanish. She was long overdue for a trip to Spain.

Grant it, the way she was going she would be lucky to get a calendar that had pictures of Spain on it in her cell.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"So you are telling me that she has been in there for nearly 60 hours," Derek said dangerously talking to the lead detective.

He escorted the cop out to Aimee's cell, thinking that him intimidating that punk was the least of this precincts problems, and left Hotch and Rossi to handle them. When the door was finally open it took him a minute to adjust to what he was seeing. Aimee had always had such a presence, and to see her so belittled and lost made him want to haul it back to those pricks and make them pay.

Aimee heard the door open again. She was sitting and thinking in the corner, her knees drawn up to her chest, and she was resting her head on the tops of her knees. She refused to look at the cops; it was the only act of defiance she really had. She wanted to go home. She wanted to sleep, to eat, to shower. Her blonde hair was brassy and oily. She knew she looked horrible, felt even worse. And she could smell that she needed to shower.

She just wanted out of the tiny white room more than anything in the world. The white room she could only escape from by closing her eyes to psychically see doom and gloom.

She felt, rather than heard, someone come in, and she stiffened at first when they ran a hand through her hair. "Aims, baby," his voice said comfortingly. She just turned towards Derek and clung to him. "You came. Please, get me out of here," she said. "I don't know her, I really don't. I have never seen her, not even psychically! I don't know, I don't know," she rambled and he picked her up.

"I'm taking you home," he said softly.

"I've tried, but everything is so frazzled, I can't see. I smell," she said as if afraid he couldn't stand to be near her.

"You're perfect," he assured her.

She shook her head and tried to wipe away the tears and run a finger through her hair. "Aims, you don't have to worry about what you look like."

"If my grandmother sees me like this," she started. "I don't want them to see me like this," she whispered. They had already taken so much from her, and she refused to give them this.

Derek understood and gave her time. He put his arm around her as he led her back out ,and she stiffened seeing the whole team. Her grandmother, still arguing with one of the cops, rushed over. "Please mom doesn't know," she said.

"Of course not," Cecilia said.

"Carter?" her grandmother didn't say anything. "Don't tell me he is cutting his trip to Toronto! I'm fine! I already made him miss his trip in Kansas," she said babbling.

"I convinced him to be on standby," Cecilia said. "But he was ready to board the next plane here. He is already talking to some of his lawyer friends that are nearby."

"I just want to go home," Aimee sighed tiredly. Being locked in a white box for nearly 3 days was exhausting. She turned to the detective as Derek led her out. "If you had asked, I would have helped find her." Derek opened the door to the SUV and got in beside her and she rested her head against his shoulder as Rossi drove to her house.

She saw they had at least shut the door afterwards. She didn't want to see, she knew they had to already have gone through her house.

She walked in anyways. Things were strewn about. She was always eclectic, she and Lily laughed and agreed over that sticker that had the fifties housewife that said "A clean home is a sign of a wasted life" but this was not her type of mess.

She stormed into her studio and saw they had picked the lock on her desk. She made a noise—somewhere between frustration and despair—seeing all of her notebooks were gone. She knew they took one, but seeing the damage caused something inside to frizzle and break.

"We got what they took," Reid said and she turned to see the whole team was there. She took the notebook from him in relief and resignation. Having or not having the notebook didn't affect whether or not she saw things, but it was part of her routine in dealing with it all.

"Well damn it all," she said throwing the notebook angrily back into the desk. She couldn't lock it because they had broken the lock. She stormed upstairs not wanting to see what else they had done. Her anger got her to the bathroom and she managed to scrub her hair and change into comfy clothes. She fell, exhausted, onto her bed. Derek sat on the side of her bed and she laid her head on his lap.

"I don't understand any of this," she said, her voice laced with confusion and exhaustion. "I haven't even seen her psychically."

He looked at her wrists that were lightly bruised from wearing the handcuffs for so long. "When I went home, the time before we met," Derek said slowly and she looked up at him. "I was arrested for suspected murder. Of a teenage boy."

"That is absurd. You would never hurt a child," Aimee said.

"The Detective had it out for me," Derek said and brushed his fingers through her wet hair. "It turned out it was my old pee wee coach. The boy had found out that his friend, also being coached by him … that he was being abused by him. Like I was," he admitted finally.

She reached for his hand that was lightly on the side of her face. "Derek," she said and made him look at her. "It doesn't change how I see you," she promised. She lightly brushed her fingers along his face. "You are still a knight to me. A hero. One who just overcame even more obstacles than I imagined."

"Why are you telling me now?" she finally asked.

"Because I know what it's like to be locked up, confused, wanting answers," he said. "My team got me through it; we'll find this girl and who took her."

"My career …"

"It's fine," he said kissing her forehead. "It will all be fine." He tucked her into bed and she was touched by how gentle he was being. She was even more touched he trusted her enough to confide his past to her. She knew, had seen, that he had a difficult childhood, and that he didn't trust easy. The fact he trusted her enough with his past made her heart burst.

He walked downstairs where he found the team. JJ, Emily, and Garcia were helping Cecilia put things back in order as best they could. "It doesn't have the same flair, but it's at least in order," Emily said.

"She isn't going to be happy, though," Reid said. "Carter called Cecilia and is on his way to Virginia."

"We need to find this girl," Rossi said. "Her continued absence will only continue to taint Aimee's reputation."

"This is what we have from the detectives," Hotch began. "Natasha Redding, age 12. Her family is wealthy, and lives in the nicer part of Charleston. Four days ago she was dropped off at school. Her mother was late picking her up because of car trouble. The parents say that for some time the girl had been talking about Aimee, and recently right before she became missing she told her parents that she was going to meet with Aimee."

"The parents and detectives assumed this meant Aimee had some prior contact with Natasha and that she was the one to abduct her?" Emily asked. If they didn't' know Aimee personally she could see why everyone would be suspicious, but since she knew Aimee the whole thing was absurd.

Suddenly Aimee screamed and Derek was taking the stairs two at a time. Aimee had jumped about a foot in bed and was scrambling out of her sheets as he came in, the more she tried to get out of the sheets the more tangled they became. "She's alive," she said breathlessly. "Oh boy, she's alive."

The fact she wasn't reassured by it was a scary sight. "But?"

"But she certainly wishes she wasn't."

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Someone has her," Aimee told everyone. "I didn't see who. But he is torturing her. I just saw her in so much pain. Too much for one so young," she said sadly.

"How did you see her, but not the unsub?" Rossi asked. It was constantly frustrating to be the rookie when he had helped to build the department. Working with a psychic was just another aspect that made him feel like a newbie, and Aimee was beginning to make him feel way out of his league.

"Natasha is a psychic," Aimee said and everyone just stared at her. "Will people stop staring at me!" she huffed. "Not a strong one, she is outgrowing it, but she reached out to me. Or I reached out to her, I'm not sure," she said tiredly.

"Don't people say children are more prone to psychic tendencies?" Emily asked.

"But you get educated out of it," Aimee said. "Which is how I know she isn't very strong. Probably just really good intuition. But she is suffering right now."

"Could you see anything else?" Reid asked.

Aimee shook her head. "How did you only see her, though?" Rossi asked.

"I don't know. I normally experience the scene. Like a fly on the wall kind of thing," she lied. She did see things that way occasionally, but not normally. "But this time I was only focused on her."

"Can you do it again?" Garcia asked curiously.

Hotch gave her a look. He was more open to the idea of Aimee as a psychic, but he still wasn't comfortable with using a psychic as a tool. "Rossi and I will head to the station. We are taking over this case. Once they continued to hold anyone with any level of FBI clearance without notifying us they overstepped their bounds." Aimee looked at him in shock and gave Derek a questioning look. "JJ, Emily, I want you to go to the parents house with Reid."

"Can you contact her again?" he asked Aimee.

He made her sound like an alien, and she felt like ET phoning home. "I would do better with something or someplace of hers. Everything here is mine."

"Until we get you to her house, this is all you have to work with," Hotch pointed out as he and Rossi walked to the SUV.

She pressed her temples. She didn't want to use her house. It was her safe haven. Too much had happened the last week. She had just gotten through New Orleans and Greensburg to be thrown into jail for 3 days, and then trying to reach out to a psychically tortured young girl.

She so needed a vacation once this was over. "My studio … no," she said. She sat on her couch trying to think.

"Can you reach her again?" Emily asked.

"I have to try," she sighed. "But without anything of hers …" She decided she needed darkness. The girl had darkness; light was too distracting. She was surrounded by light in the cell, perhaps that's why she couldn't find her at first. She decided if it was going to be anything like when she first started working with the team, bathroom access would be a good thing.

She went to the lower level bathroom. "You okay?" Derek asked quickly.

"Terrified. You know when you are kids, and you do bloody mary to freak yourself out? This is going to be so much creepier," she predicted, shutting herself in her bathroom without turning the light on. She sat against the wall taking a deep breath. She wasn't eager but she couldn't let the girl go through that alone.

In, out, in, out. That's the key she told herself as she breathed in steadily. In, out…

It was like being slammed by a giant wet sponge. "The voices aren't helpful, you need to be cleansed of them."

"I don't have voices!" Natasha cried out terrified.

"They are making you lie right now."

"No!" Natasha yelled. "Please, I don't need help. Please I just want to go home."

"Not until you are cleansed," the man said, and Natasha screamed again as he continued his work.

Those young, frightened eyes were the last thing she saw. She leaned over to the toilet glad she didn't have to go far. She couldn't stop the gag reflex. No matter how much she saw or experienced.

She rinsed out her mouth and quickly brushed her teeth before stepping out. "He thinks he is curing her," Aimee said.

"Curing her of her psychic-ness?" Derek asked. "Mission based then. Garcia, see if you can see of any other children or young adults who have gone missing in the last 6 months. If she isn't his first we need to find them."

"We don't exactly advertise ourselves, no secret handshakes or I AM A PSYCHIC pins. How did he know?" Aimee wondered.

"Something else to question."

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Special thanks to Soccer Bitch (I was hoping someone would like the firefly reference! And we now have several angry men, lol) and Sue1313 (I just assumed they had a warrant and everything else to make it legit, and they are now waiting the 72 hours until they have to charge or release her)