New Dawn, New Day, New Life... FeelingWeird

I shouldn't have been able to wake up after what happened to me, not like that. There was no way I could have made it out of that alive. So when I woke up, screaming and crying under the bright lights, I should have known something was up.

Except I didn't.

Because I was a newborn.

Which made literally no sense, but I guess I was just going to have to roll with it. "Jaidyn Lane Archer, welcome to the world." Somebody above me cooed. I was leaning up against a woman's chest, and I could only assume that she was my new mother. At her side stood a man, who had tears in the corners of his eyes. That must be my new father, then.

The first thing I noticed, other than my new parents, was the tv playing in the hospital room. It was a breaking news story about how a woman had been killed by a murderer that the news was calling the Butcher; the police believed her to be Sylvia Marks, but couldn't confirm her identity because the body was burned so badly. Sylvia Marks, why did I know that name? It took me longer than I would care to admit to realize exactly what was going on and what that entailed, and it scared me to the point I began to cry, a normal occurrence for a newborn.

It was 1984.

It was 1984, and I was born into the world of Criminal Minds.

If the timeline was right, Reid was only three years old, and the BAU was only about ten years old, possibly twelve.

If I worked my ass off, I would be twenty-one if I became a profiler in time for everything I knew to happen, which would be even younger than Reid at the start of the series' canon, the same age as when he joined the BAU. I had to be able to do this; I wasn't going to sit back and let events play out that I could stop.

I had to bide my time; I couldn't do anything as a literal infant, as much as it pained me to admit it. I would have to do it all over again until I was able to be where I needed to be; that meant relearning how to walk, talk, go through school again, be the perfect student, get straight A's, graduate at the top of my class, get into a good college, keep the straight A's up, graduate with honors, and then do what I could to join the BAU. I took my time making a mental checklist of everything I needed to do to be prepared: study anything and everything I could get my hands on, stay in peak physical condition and work out regularly, and write down everything I could remember happening and the days that the events occurred in a series of notebooks before transferring them to a flash drive as soon as I could, hopefully keeping it private from the prying eyes of one Technical Analyst Penelope Garcia. I only wished that I had my laptop, or at least access to my notes, from Before this, as I was working on compiling a complete and accurate timeline of the entire show. I had only gotten through part of Season Four in the document, but I was keeping at it, one episode at a time.

I had a long road ahead of me. I knew that. But was it a journey that I was going to embark on anyway? Absolutely, without a doubt.

I was going to do it, whether the universe wanted me to or not.

This was my second chance, and damn it all if I wasn't going to use it and exploit it in every single way that I could.

Look out world, here I come.

While I was busy planning, I didn't notice that the doctor was performing the standard battery of tests that all newborns underwent, going oddly quiet. "That's... unusual." He muttered, and my new parents and I all looked at him. He did whatever he just did again, and I looked down at his hands. He was poking the bottom of my foot with a needle, but I didn't feel any pain from it. And, as I had been through life before, I knew needles were supposed to hurt.

"What's unusual? Is there something wrong with my baby?" My new mom asked, and the doctor glanced at her, a puzzled look on his face.

"I'm sure it's nothing, but I'd like to make sure that there's nothing wrong with baby Jaidyn. If you'd allow me to, I'd like to run a few tests." The doctor answered, looking back down at me with a curious squint.

"Of course, please." My new dad agreed, and the doctor nodded in acknowledgment. He took me from my new mom and put me in a bassinet, wheeling me out of the room. All the excitement my little newborn body had just undergone proved to be exhausting, so I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep.

By the time I woke up, I was reunited with my new parents, snuggled up against my new mother's chest to get in that critical skin-to-skin contact that was so important for newborns. The doctor was also in the room, holding a clipboard with a slightly grim look on his face. "Now, you must understand, I had the lab rush the results of your daughter's genetic testing, and I'm afraid that she has a very rare genetic condition called 'congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis', or CIPA for short. Jaidyn will never be able to feel pain or regulate her temperature by sweating, which means you'll have to be extra careful with her. If she gets a fever, she can't sweat it out; it, in all likelihood, will kill her. She will also have to be checked for injuries daily, as she won't be able to feel pain to let her know that there's something wrong, and if left untreated, could lead to an infection, which, again, could lead to a life-threatening fever. Most CIPA patients don't survive past the age of three because of hyperthermia. You'll have to make sure that she stays adequately hydrated and cool in the summer, or she could overheat much more rapidly than the average child. Are you prepared to take care of her, or would you like for her to be put into an institution where she can have around-the-clock care?" The doctor explained.

My new mom began crying. My new dad just stood there, stoic. He looked to my mother, as if he was silently asking her what they should do.

The news hit me like a sack of bricks, and I began sobbing as well, unsure how to process the diagnosis.

I had only ever heard about CIPA by name on an episode of Grey's Anatomy, and that one episode of Chicago Med with the mom and baby who had Crohn's disease, but the baby didn't have the same insensitivity to pain that the mom did. I looked it up once, as a fleeting curiosity, and the occurrence rate was something like 1 in 125 million. Was my luck really that bad that as soon as I was given a second chance at life, I might not even live to see my third birthday? If this world was anything, and I only had one word to describe it, that word would be 'cruel'. If I had to pick a second word, it would be 'sadistic'.

I wore myself out by sobbing; infant bodies really didn't know how to process large usages of energy. I found myself drifting off to sleep on my new mom's chest.

I was going to make my plan work, even if it was entirely fueled by spite.

I was going to do it.

I was going to live.

And live I did.

I was praised for hitting as many developmental milestones as I could as early as I was capable; having the mouth of a baby and the mind of a college student made it incredibly hard to talk, considering I had no teeth and next-to-zero control over my gross and fine motor skills. Walking proved difficult, and I couldn't help but get mad at myself every time my tiny body didn't, or couldn't, move the way I wanted it to. But even though it felt like the days dragged on and on, I was an early talker, an early reader, and, like I was before, hyperlexic. I was breezing through any and all of the reading material I could get my hands on, and spelling errors were a very infrequent enemy of mine.

I was in and out of the hospital throughout my childhood, as a result of CIPA; the genetic condition prevented me from acting like a normal kid until I was old enough to restrain myself. My parents took to it very differently, as they were ought to do. My mother became very overprotective, trying to keep me safe from quite literally everything, even things that could in no way hurt me. My mother would give me looks sometimes, as if I had ruined her fantasy of being a perfect mother, or even one who could be applauded for being a mother. She never tried to have another kid, because she was terrified that they would turn out like me; I was her biggest failure.

My father was the opposite; he grew more and more distant, always away on business trips or working at the magazine company he ran. When he was home, he would squirrel himself away in his office, typing away on his keyboard that I could hear so clearly, fingers tap-tap-tapping away at the keys. It was always that, or he'd be in the garage, working on whatever new motorcycle he had bought. Even when he was home, he never felt like he was there. He was the paradoxical absent father, there but not really, usually focused on something else, rather than his own family.

I grew up feeling like I couldn't talk to either of them,

Even though I knew my circumstances, none of it felt real until one fateful family vacation when I was six.

That trip was what made everything real. I held it together until I was safe in my bed at home, and my parents had gone to bed, I let every horrible feeling I was bottling up come bursting out. My small body was wracked with sobs as I buried my face in my pillow, my blanket over my head as if that was going to save me from the monsters that I knew were out there, the monsters I had sworn to fight when I grew up.

Just seeing his face, hearing his voice, it was real now. He was a real person, with a mind of his own, a body that could be hurt, feelings, hopes, and fears. He was no longer an abstract concept to me, he was no longer a face on a screen. He was real, and he could be hurt, and I wouldn't let that happen to him. He was nice to me, genuinely nice, not like the fake-nice I was accustomed to, back when I was growing up the first time. He didn't treat me like I was a weirdo, he didn't treat me like an outcast, he didn't treat me like a freak; he treated me like a person. He treated me like a friend.

I was going to cherish that afternoon in the park for the rest of my life.

I had made promises to myself, I reminded myself of them as I sobbed into my pillow that night it all became real. I made promises.

I made promises that I intended to keep.

And by all that was holy and unholy, I was going to keep my promises, even if they killed me.

I was going to do whatever it took to keep them safe.

Even if that meant keeping life-altering and trust-shattering secrets from the people I was going to cherish more than anyone else in the world.

Even if it hurt them, I was going to keep them safe.

Whatever it took.