Part 21
It is in slow motion that everything happens next. The warped feeling of being under water. Sound and sensation all out of proportion.
The tall posts once framing the pallet shelves are bent against the wall where the power switch had been—where Hotch had been standing. Like trees off their stumps, stripped of their branches. Splintered but solid. At their base, the shattered remains of broken planks and crushed crates are clumped haphazardly, like undergrowth.
Reid can see Hotch's sleeve mixed in with the destruction. He can see the dark color of Hotch's hair, clear but dusty, beneath a ripped twist of canvas, and can't blink away from it.
He feels dizzy as he stares—wobbling between right-side up and upside down, half of him there, half of him gone—the last solid thing pulled from under his feet.
Hotch.
Rossi's voice resonates somewhere in the distance as Reid is dragged backwards against Hanks' body, then into that open center space with the stone coffins. Like he's being dragged to the center of a stage. The wrenched grip grates into the gash on the back of his arm. He feels a new surge of blood, warm on the skin below the wound.
Twisting his head, he tries to keep Hotch in his view.
Hanks is shouting something back at Rossi, right in Reid's ear, but it sounds muffled and far away, indecipherable, hidden under the now perpetual whispering of dead leaves. Like those leaves will be the last rumblings Reid will ever hear. Like he has never stopped hearing them. Like he has never stopped digging his own grave. Every sound is encased in the cotton of that memory. Every sound except the rain. For some reason, Reid can hear the rain tattering on the roof with crystal clarity.
In the rubble, Hotch's sleeve is motionless. His hair and head completely still. Reid is not surprised to see that Tobias Hankel stands above him, a shadowy specter, calm in the chaos. There are seven members on your team, he says, looking at Reid. Choose one to die.
Reid swallows, a compulsive clench of his throat. Kill me, he thinks, mouthing the words, like the whole ordeal is right in front of him again. He's back in that loop. Stuck in the repetition. Kill me.
Then he blinks.
Tobias fades to black, and all the current sounds catch up with him, loud and caustic, as if someone just changed the station on the radio.
"Put the weapon down," Rossi is saying. "This is over. Let him go."
"Over?" Hanks laughs, soft and normal sounding, and Reid feels his skin prickle. "Are you going to shoot me, Agent Rossi? I'd love for you to try. I'd love for you to see what happens if you do."
"Gregory," says Reid, but it's choked off as the arm tightens over his throat and he's yanked completely around to face Rossi, knee knocking into the stone edge of one of the coffins as he spins, Hotch suddenly gone from his view.
He whites out for moment, blinking to clarity with the sensation that he's lost time. The world looks whiter than it did before. Brighter. Rossi is standing closer than he was a moment ago. Standing out from the shadows of the still-standing shelves on that side of the building. Illuminated by the high bay lights above the mural. Hands gripped carefully around his aimed weapon. Eyes steadying from Reid to Hanks and back again.
The ghost of Tobias Hankel is back, standing just behind his shoulder, holding Reid's gaze, looking ethereal and angel-like. Like Raphael.
There are six other members on your team.
Choose one to die.
Reid opens his mouth and feels the tentative slide of air through his throat, Gregory's hard arm rough under his chin.
Morgan and Prentiss and JJ. They should be close. They should be coming. Reid thinks maybe that's what Hanks is hoping for. The team. All of them. Revenge for a perceived wrong. Restitution for ignoring him. Payment for what Gideon never gave him.
Hanks. Hankel. Tobias. Gregory.
Sin and consequence.
Checkmate.
Rossi shifts. A simple, steady step.
Hanks hauls Reid back farther in response, closer to the shelter of the coffins, putting the large mural across from them more fully in Reid's view. A testament of a hundred deaths. A gory allegory. Reid imagines the mouths moving, filled with silent screams. All of the faces tying knots in his brain until Hanks flexes a muscle and jars the blood trying to push to his head.
The wires lined down the painting look like bars on a cage, meant to hold them all in. Reid can't see where they end or where they begin and he can't fathom where the trigger might be to set their point in motion. Where's the ignition?
Rossi steps again. Reid barely gets a glance at the flicker in his eyes before a new sound registers and he's spun back in the other direction.
Prentiss is standing near the slope of broken shelves—soaked, like she's just walked through a river. And Hotch—Hotch is on his knees in the wreckage with his hands out to his sides, blood on his hair, holding Reid's gaze like he can read his mind. Reid breathes, expanding his ribs carefully within the momentary loosening of Gregory's grip.
"Agent Prentiss. So nice of you to join us," says Hanks. "But where is JJ?" He ducks his head closer to Reid's ear. "She's my favorite."
Prentiss starts forward, but is stopped by the debris of broken shelving and the suddenly altered aim of Hanks' gun. Going still, she lifts her weapon out to the side, drawing her arms apart slowly and deliberately, looking at Reid with a pointed expression, like she's trying to tell him something.
Slow down, Reid thinks. We all need to slow down.
"What's the plan here, Gregory?" Hotch asks, still on his knees, voice commanding just the same. "Let us talk you out of the building? Then blow us all up? Burn us inside? What do you have? Pressure plates on the coffins? A tripwire somewhere?"
"Very good, Agent Hotchner. You're getting warmer."
Abruptly, the warped cry that drew Reid into the building in the first place, rises up from one of the coffins. Vibrations of it bleed through the carved stone box to his right—shockingly loud. Three boxes. Three women. Pawns. Sacrifices for the figment that is Jason Gideon. Real or not. Here or gone. Reid suddenly wonders if Gideon has never been more than that ghost. Intangible. Unsubstantial. Reid has spent his whole life seeking solid ground, instead he keeps walking through mirages.
Maybe Gregory Hanks believes that too.
As the cry dies out, a crush of empathetic claustrophobia tightens Reid's chest and he strains his chin down, holding his breath, groping his hands tighter around the arm trapping his neck. "Gregory," he repeats, shoving the word out. There is a constant vibrating in his throat, in his lungs and his vocal chords, shaking the edges of his vision, making him feel out of breath. Like something has halted the oxygenation of his blood.
"Think that gets you extra credit, Dr. Reid?" Hanks responds, voice culled in a whisper that penetrates Reid's mind in a way all of the shouting couldn't. "You using my name like you know me?"
Flattening fingers around the bend of Hanks' arm, trying to get himself air, Reid flicks his eyes right to left, Hotch to Rossi, Rossi to Hotch, and stumbles his words. "I do… I do know you. I know why you brought us here. I know what you want. If you let us take the girls out, I… I can help you get it."
The arm encasing him jerks inward, forcing Reid to lift his chin.
"And what is it you think I want, Special Agent Doctor Reid?"
Swallowing with difficulty, Reid speaks. "You want what you've accomplished to be appreciated before he retires. You want him to realize what he missed out on. But it's too late—he's already retired. He never saw your painting. He never saw anything you did. He didn't come back to Colorado for you. He doesn't care."
There is a stiff pause. Reid feels the expansion of Gregory's chest against his back and a second later, the close press of the gun to his temple. "But you do, is that it? You understand?" The gun slips lower, digging into his cheek. "As touching as that is, Dr. Reid, there are only two things I want today. The first, is for Agent Gideon to show himself!" Hanks voice bellows loudly at the end. "The second… is for you to die."
Reid jerks and tries to turn his head, feeling the gun jab roughly into the pressure point below his ear. The world goes fuzzy, bends of light darting angrily in his vision.
"Hanks!" Hotch says sharply, voice washed with rust.
"You hurt him, and you will never get out of here alive," Gideon's voice rings out, stepping from behind the shelves near Rossi's flank, weapon aimed.
Reid flutters his eyes towards him, feeling his pulse speed up. The constant tremble of leaves in his ears rushes faster—pulse beating louder, darker, harder—a thousand conversations judder to the surface of his brain.
I have been playing at this job in one way or another for almost 30 years. I've felt lost. I've felt great. I have felt scared, sick, and insane…
"Jason Gideon," says Hanks, like an announcement for royalty. Reid can feel the smile against his ear, and it's jarring, how the tone feels familiar. Like Hanks is the one that's been seeing Gideon in his dreams. Like he's the one that slept in an office in front of a chess board, waiting for a game that would never happen.
Jason Gideon. Jason Gideon. Jason Gideon.
It's not like Reid imagined it. Gideon doesn't look like he did with the glinting keys. He doesn't look easy, or casual. He looks dark, and transfixed, and like half of him is someone else entirely. But he also looks real and tired and angry. Flesh and blood familiar. Old and new, all at the same time.
You are stronger than him, Reid hears. He cannot break you. But it's not the Gideon in front of him who says it. This isn't the Gideon from Reid's memory. This isn't that man. Not anymore.
"You don't get it," Hanks says, and his voice is suddenly cut with calm and anticipation. "You, out of all of them. You were supposed to understand."
"What was I supposed to understand?" asks Gideon.
"The best artists, the most skilled—they're only appreciated after they're dead, Jason. It doesn't matter if I live or die. After today, I will be remembered forever."
"We will forget you tomorrow," Gideon returns steadily. "You've entered this game in the shadows, hiding behind images and aliases. You can't take responsibility for anything, you're not man enough. This was your master plan? Bring us here? Hold the kid in front of you? This is what, your third time trying to kill him?"
Hanks' arm pulls tightly against Reid's neck, gun jabbing harder. "I didn't care if he died or not the first time. It would have worked for me either way."
"Right," agrees Gideon, nodding. "Because you were already planning to abduct the girl from the hospital, kill whichever agent you'd poisoned at the same time, if they'd lived… but he wasn't there, was he? Not as smart as you think you are."
Hanks' chest expands into Reid's back, the tip of the gun wobbling with agitation. "No. You. You were the one that didn't figure it out. You were supposed to see what was going on. You should've understood. You—"
"You know what I think?" Gideon interrupts. "You didn't single out Agent Reid to poison, he's just the one that walked into the coffee shop, but you were glad it was him. True genius bother you that much? Show you too much of your own inadequacies?"
"No. No."
The gun wavers, allowing a sliver of space between Reid's skin and the barrel. Next to Gideon, Reid sees Rossi's eyes flicker, stance tensing. Reid hisses in a lungful of absurdly clean air and holds his breath.
"You want to know why you didn't get my attention?" Gideon continues. "It was shoddy work. All this—everything you've done. This master plan? It's wasting everyone's time."
"Reid, down!" Morgan's voice suddenly yells. A command from the sky. Reid lifts his feet off the floor, gripping Hanks' arm as he drags his weight down, going boneless. The shift drops him on his knees, cracking them against the cement. Two gunshots resonate. One loud and right behind Reid's ear, breaking over the whispering of leaves, cutting all other sound and leaving a high pitched ringing to fill the void. He rocks forward, palming the ground for balance, and a second later feels the floor shudder beneath his knees. A shockwave from something unknown, dust and grit shaking down on the back of his neck.
Forcefully, he gathers air into his lungs and coughs, looking up to see smoke running into the room from the direction of the mural—the middle of it crumpled inward to show a slice of the outside storm. There are no flames with the smoke, but it feels like there should have been. Smoke of an event cut short. Curtailed tragedy.
Sound cuts in again, and there are voices everywhere.
Reid drags his feet under him, palming the ground and stumbling upright, coughing in the thin smoke as a hand lands on his arm. Steady, stark, and purposeful. Hotch.
"Get him out," he hears Hotch say. Sees him turn his head. Morgan is with them, reaching for his shoulder. Prentiss is bending over one of the stone boxes. Policemen in flack jackets are filling the space with Rossi's voice giving slow-motion commands.
His pulse is slowing down.
He turns his head to look for JJ and Gideon's face comes into focus. His pulse speeds up again and his lungs begin to stutter. There is no more space in him for air. No more space in him for anything. The smokey light around him starts blinking in time with the hitch in his lungs. Faster and faster, until the flutter of them is all he sees. Suddenly he's on the ground again, feeling his limbs go numb as his body starts to seize.
Then memory disappears, and all is quiet.
tbc