Reid grit his teeth, squeezing his eyes tightly shut, and he groaned as he tried to push back against Fiona's weight, but her arms were too heavy and every muscle in his thigh was screaming with pain.

"I can't, I can't—"

"Fifteen seconds longer," Fiona said sharply, and he grunted as he tried to keep pushing his thigh up against the pressure, the rest of his body feeling numb, his blood pumping, and it hurt— "Ten."

"I can't—"

"Yes, you can," Fiona said. "Five. Four. Three. Two. One… Relax."

Reid's head hit the leather rest under his head hard, and he was aware of the sudden streaks of wetness on his cheeks, took the tissue when Fiona held it out to him and quickly wiped his eyes dry, breathing heavily as he stayed in his place, feeling dizzy with his head spinning, adrenaline streaming through him even though all he'd done is try to lift his thigh up.

"You're doing really well," Fiona said. "You're making good progress."

Reid didn't say anything. What he wanted to do was ask the woman to stop condescending to him, and he knew that he'd be snappish if he said it, knew that he'd come off as aggressive. He said very little to Fiona, when they had their sessions together.

"You doing the exercises at home?"

"Yes."

"You're a liar, Doctor Reid," Fiona said evenly, and Reid looked away, forcing himself to sit up. "But a good one. Didn't even flinch."

"I'm not lying."

"Let's not double down," Fiona said. "Your boyfriend, the jogger, he's been back at work a few weeks, right? Not nagging you to do it anymore?" Reid was silent, gritting his teeth so tightly he could hear them creak, and Fiona crossed her arms over her chest, looking down at him with a slight smile on her face. "I get it, Doctor, it's painful, and it's hard."

"I just… I can't make myself do it," Reid whispered, hating how pathetic it sounded, and he closed his eyes, pressing down slightly on the aching pain in his thigh and feeling a little relief, then a worse, sharper pain. "It takes so long, and I keep thinking about how I'd have to get changed and roll out the mat and—"

"So don't change," Fiona said. "Don't roll out the mat. Do it in bed before you change out of your PJs, stay on the mattress. As soon as you wake up."

Reid pressed his lips together. The past few days, the team hadn't been called anywhere out of state, but he did work long hours, and Reid never really considered how long their hours were until he was reliant on someone else working them.

Hotch left the apartment at seven, wouldn't come home until eight or nine PM, and it wasn't really that Reid wanted him there, because it had been… annoying, stuck in the house with Hotch all the time, when Hotch moved stuff or kept hovering over him, kept just… being there.

But reading was hard to concentrate on, and he missed casework, and there wasn't anything he could focus on, and he knew he had to pick out a project to work on, that he had to find something, but it was hard to concentrate on something, hard to pick something. He just wanted to go back to work.

"Doc," Fiona said.

"Yeah?"

"This is a slow process. I need you to remember that."

"I remember it," Reid said.

"Logically, you do," she agreed. "But I don't think you've quite come to terms with it just yet, have you?"

Fiona was the eldest of four, with two younger brothers and a younger sister – Reid knew that they'd grown up poor in a small farm town, that Fiona had felt the need to protect her siblings from bullies and from her mother, that she was strong, did sports. She was firm and unerring, logical but not robotically so: he'd picked her because she seemed like the physical therapist least likely to try to ask him about his feelings, and he'd been right.

This wasn't really a question about his feelings – it was a statement of the obvious, a nudge in the right direction.

"Your records from the Bureau say you had a medical leave before," she said, tapping the page. "Several months – was that for an injury, did you do PT then?"

"No," Reid said. "No, I, uh… I wasn't injured."

Fiona looked at him expectantly, but when he said nothing, she hummed, tapping the page and setting it aside.

"Your dad, he isn't, uh… He isn't a big physical fitness guy, is he?"

Reid glanced to the video feed Fiona had of the waiting room in the top corner of the room, saw Gideon flirting with a woman in her fifties that usually had her appointments after Reid's – she was recovering from shoulder injuries, something she'd done sailing.

"No," Reid said, not bothering to correct the assumption. "He always got me out of fitness tests at the Bureau, because I couldn't really…"

He put his feet over the edge of the bed, pulling his crutches toward him, and he leaned on them heavily as he pulled himself to his feet, walking a little behind Fiona as he stepped into the other room.

Gideon got to his feet at the same time as Fiona's next patient.

"Hi, Kathy, you can go right in, I'm just gonna hand off," Fiona murmured, and then turned to Gideon. "Your boy here isn't doing his exercises. Can I trust on you to ride him as hard as I do?"

"Are you serious?" Reid asked. "What am I, sixteen?"

"Why don't you get him to do the exercises with you?" Fiona asked, raising an eyebrow. "Bet it'll hit real different to when your boyfriend does."

Reid wanted to be irritated, to be pissed off, but Fiona was smiling, a steel-hard smile, and for some reason, it was enough to make Reid smile just slightly too. Gideon's little grin at being asked had become a tired, put-upon expression, but then he pushed his hand against the side of Reid's head.

"I'll see what I can do," Gideon muttered. "Thanks, Fiona, you have a good day."

"Thanks," Reid said softly, and he walked slowly alongside Gideon as they moved outside.

"Your shoulder still aching on those crutches?"

"Please don't remind me."

"Worse than the thigh?"

"Nope."

"You hungry?"

"I could eat. You want to go to that deli again?"

"I'm that predictable?"

"I guess."

"You'd rather go to that little Indian place?"

"I'm predictable too."

"I'll do those damn exercises with you, you know."

"You won't be able to do them."

"Makes two of us."

"Hey." Despite himself, though, Reid smiled, just slightly. The pain in his shoulder wasn't as bad as usual today, although his thigh was worse than ever – that probably had something to do with it. "Let's go to the deli."

"You're in the mood for a bagel?"

"The old lady in there that always talks in Yiddish, Toiba," Reid said quietly. "I read some dictionaries, because she always… I just think it'll make her smile, that's all."

Gideon was smiling at him, and he reached up, holding Reid by the chin and playfully pressing on his jaw. "I'm kvelling," he said, and Reid shoved his hand off, trying not to laugh.

"Shut up."

"You can't say that in Yiddish?"

"Can you?"

"No, but I'm not trying to impress an old lady."

"I'm not trying to impress her, but she's an old lady, we do nice things for old ladies."

"Sure we do," Gideon murmured, and then exhaled, slowly. "You haven't been doing the exercises?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Okay," Gideon murmured. "I'll do it, you know."

"I know."

"You could've asked me yourself."

"I don't want to talk about it," Reid repeated.

"Eingeshpahrt. You know that word?"

"You know eingeshpart and not shut up?"

"That's a no, I take it?"

"I'll ask Toiba."

Gideon laughed. "You do that," he murmured. "Come on."

That night, Hotch was called out to a case in Arizona, and Reid agreed more readily than Gideon expected to spend the night at Gideon's. He'd fallen asleep with a book in his hand, one of the Star Trek novels he'd never read – they'd bought a box of them at a thrift store while Gideon was looking for some little things to put out around the wood frame for Brisket – fabrics, old furniture, a long pipe he'd be able to ferret himself through once Gideon hung it off the mesh roof. The aforementioned was asleep, too, sprawled out in Reid's lap with his belly upward, one of Reid's hands loosely settled on the centre of his chest.

The cold, heavy ache in his chest, constant worry, where Reid was concerned, did not feel like it was going to recede any time soon.

The flashbacks were still happening, he was still constantly in pain, and he wouldn't talk – and very quietly, the day before yesterday, he'd asked Gideon to drop him off at a meeting, which he had, and after, he hadn't said a word for a few hours.

It used to be Gideon felt like he could see everything inside Reid's head – he couldn't, these days.

He was beginning to doubt he ever had.

Brisket let out a soft chirrup, blinking up at Gideon, and rolling over.

"He's kind of heavy," Reid mumbled.

"It's pure muscle," Gideon said.

Reid laughed, rubbing sleepily at one eye. "Yeah," he murmured. "I guess so." Putting his hand down and gently curling his fingers under Brisket's chin, he said softly, "He always tries to come in my room at night when I stay here."

"He likes you, just wants to sleep next to you," Gideon murmured. "He doesn't understand why you won't let him in."

"I have nightmares," Reid whispered. "I don't want him to be scared of me."

"Okay," Gideon said quietly, and as Reid rose to his feet, he took the cat from his arms, holding Brisket against his chest as Reid put his book aside, starting to limp back to his bedroom. Brisket purred, leaning into Gideon's chest, and Gideon nuzzled his nose against the top of the little cat's head, sighing softly.

He heard the quiet click as Reid pulled his bedroom door closed.

"What do we do, huh, kid?" Gideon asked, lifting Brisket up to look at up. With a soft paw, claws in, Brisket grabbed for his nose. "Yeah," Gideon murmured, putting him down and leading the way to the kitchen. "I don't know either."