Author Note: Back to Reid! Time to see how he's doing! (And just wait, the whole OC thing will be resolved.)

Reid had never felt more out of sync.

He had attempted, during the first wave of questions, to lie. He'd concocted nothing but strings of air and wisps of half-truths. The questions had been basic and fairly well-centered: who are you? What is your name? Who do you work for? Who are your parents? He'd told less and less of the truth until, by the last question, he was saying nothing meaningful at all.

He had intended to come up with a baseline, some kind of standard he could use to determine how much they actually knew about his life. As it turned out, they knew everything.

As they beat him, as blood flowed from his lips, hands, and eyes, as bones crunched and joints snapped in protest, they let him know exactly what the true answers would have been. They reminded him of the facts of his existence by talking loudly over the rhythmic sounds of physical violence--- chains against bare skin, masculine grunts of physical exertion, the quick gasp of excruciating pain.

He'd taken the abuse, understanding that this was the price he would have to pay for his success. While he screamed (his body involuntarily expelling the sound as the only release it could find) his mind was a thousand miles away--- extrapolating logic, consequences, and comphrension.

When they finally left him alone, he curled up against himself, shielding his face from the darkness he was left in, trying to think.

He hadn't felt that basely humiliated since he was in high school.

He'd been an eleven-year-old freshman, with a voice that had barely lowered, hair that was a bit too long, and skin too white and clear to be considered masculine. The fairy jokes had started his first day and the freak jokes the second; by the end of the second quarter he had been shoved and locked into more lockers than he could count.

He'd been bodily picked up from the floor and shoved face-first into a used toilet, almost drowning as filthy water rushed around his head and up his nose. He'd been pushed into walls and beaten as his books were dumped on top of his head and cracked into his skull. The mandatory swimming unit had been torture--- the other boys had made fun of his lack of chest hair and his pale skin, and made references to his anatomy as being the antithesis of his intelligence. Of course, not quite in those words. ("Antithesis" was probably a bit more than they could spell.)

He thought his life was over the day the school found out his father was dead and his mother was psychotic. The fact that schizophrenia is a mental illness and his mother had been a fifteenth-century literature instructor really meant nothing. He started bumming grades, trying to lapse out of his life, trying to disappear. But then he discovered criminology, discovered a passion, discovered something he could care about.

And now he felt like a complete failure. He knew that was what his torture was designed to do: break his spirit.

Would he let it?

Once the question was out of his subconscious and into his mind, it was too late to take it back. Like a power drill driving through his ear, it wouldn't let him go until pain blinded him.

Would he let it?

He feared the answer was, already, yes.

Bearing down hard, he decided he needed to do something. He needed to do something before the situation spun completely out of control and his "yes" would be irrevocable.

But what?

At that moment, the door opened again. He felt his heart sink.

Later, through the pain, through the questions shouted at him, without his intent, something his mind began to pick up and spin.

Another day had passed. Reid had now been out of contact for four days.

Back in the conference room, the agents and the newcomer sat around their tables, dissecting, tossing back and forth information, until eventually the conversation dwindled into random, leadless musings. They knew the unsub, they knew the crime, and thanks to Dr. Walker's questions and categorization, they knew their victim.

They knew that Reid would undoubtedly break at some point. They knew that if he chose to lie, he would not be successful. They knew, also, that if the topic stayed true to matters of genius and discussion, without the threat of physical violence, Reid would, perhaps, be able to build an upper hand. But this was unlikely.

So, too, the likelihood of the team finding Reid was getting smaller by the second. Never before had they been painted into a corner the way they had. Never before had Dr. Walker been unable to come in ahead of schedule, and save some kind of day.

"Why wasn't it me?" she muttered quietly, looking aimlessly at her computer.

"What?"

It was Gideon, eyeing her with a soft kind of concern.

"I was talking to myself. Thinking. Why wasn't it me? Or, on a broader scale, why wasn't it any one of the several working geniuses in the world? There's a marine biologist in Miami, a mathematician in Los Angeles, and two geneticists in Paris. Reid and I are the only ones working in criminal justice, and I would have been just as easy to take as he."

"You weren't working this case, however," said Gideon.

"No, but I could have been. I work in the same state that this crime was committed. The only reason you guys were called in was due to the BAU's reputation, and availability at the time of the murder."

"Does it matter?" Gideon's tone was not belligerent, but curious.

"I don't know," Meg said, leaning back, rubbing her eyes with both thumbs. "Probably not. I'm grasping at straws here. Beyond my initial assistance, I feel like there isn't much more I can do."

She sighed. "I can't be that girl," she said.

"What girl?" This came from Morgan, who had clued in on the conversation.

"That girl who comes in during the last third of the movie. You know her: the beautiful career-driven scientist, the assassin working for the other side, the lawyer who wouldn't work the good guys' case. She finally agrees to help, or gets recruited, or whatever. She inevitably saves the day and falls in love with the hero. She's Mary Sue. She's everything everyone needs. And I can't be her. It isn't possible."

"Are you losing hope?" asked Elle.

"Are you?" Meg said, her voice coming out almost as a snap. "We've got nothing. I thought I could help and I can't."

She stood. "It feels as though all of our combined expertise has amounted to nothing, and this man (whom I haven't actually met, but who I have come to care about so much it surprises even myself) will die. Killed for something as inherent in him as the color of his skin."

She sighed. Then she shook her head. "I don't know. If anyone has any better ideas, you can fill me in." She sat.

"Acknowledging our shortcomings is helpful," Gideon said, "but not productive if done too thoroughly. We've got to regroup. Look somewhere we haven't looked before. Has Garcia turned up anything new?"

The question had been asked multiple times and the answer was always the same: a steadily more downtrodden "No."

The clock ticked incessantly. Somewhere, from a pickup truck driving down a nearby block, the agents heard Def Leppard. The quiet was almost too much to take.

"All right," said Hotch, using a familiar expression. "I'm going to go call my wife and get my mind back in order. I'll be back in a few minutes."

Before Gideon could speak, Hotch smiled. "I'll be careful." In response, Gideon gave him a wan smile.

As he walked out the door, he collided with the commander of the department. The graying man looked older than he'd been when they showed up; the death of his younger officer was heavy on his chest.

"Guys," he said, his voice whipping out of him like a hot breath of wind. "They found a body."

"What?" Like men rising for a woman in another time, they all stood up as he entered the room.

"You heard me! They found a body. Some guys on a hunting trip. They turned it over in a gully--- thought it was trash. I sent two men to secure it as soon as the dispatcher relayed the message, and I'm on my way right now. I thought you should be the first to know."

By the time he'd finished his last sentence, Hotch had decided his wife would just have to wait, and he and the rest of team were already piling out the door. At the last moment, Elle turned back.

"Dr. Walker!"

Meg was staring after them, somehow looking both unsure and wildly hopeful.

"Yes?"

"Come on! We haven't got time to wait."

With what could have been the ghost of a smile, Meg followed.

The night was cold and wet, the gully ankle-deep in water and thick with stagnance. The trees were dark, the moon and stars were dim, and the landscape was quiet.

Two parked squad cars' lights swung in wide, fast, silent circles--- red, blue, red, blue, red, blue. Flashlights swept in low arcs, up and down the ditch. The agents followed, armed and drawn, heading to the place where three men in blaze orange stood huddled together, talking to another police officer. The lit tip of a cigarette, hanging forgotten from the lips of one of the hunters, shook with cold and shock.

"Here! Here he is!" The young officer's voice was high and strangled, as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing.

The agents broke into a run, Converses and Brooks Brothers and loafers soaking through to the bone. Hotch's breath was coming harder than it should have been: fear of what he would see in the next few short seconds was making his chest burn with unheard of terror.

Morgan felt his entire body going hot, then cold, as if it didn't know quite what to expect: hell or a lake of ice. Elle narrowed her mind and focused desperately on picking them up and laying them down: getting from point A to point B, to see what lay like trash in the weeds.

Gideon felt his own fists clenching. If anything had happened to that boy while they were sitting around helplessly, he would resign. Period. That was it, that was the end. If they came up and looked and it was their boy---

They stopped in a rush. There, laying in the gully like a thousand other corpses of a thousand other homicides, was a body. It was very much dead, but hadn't become so until recently. Both legs were sprawled straight out, one toe pointing up to the sky, the other laying at an odd angle. One arm was flung up over his head, like a saint, index finger pointing lifelessly, while the other crossed his chest like he was asleep.

Asleep he was not. Both eyes were open. One had rolled back into his head. The other was staring straight out. What appeared to be a bullet hole had expelled dark, sticky fluid into the weeds behind his head. His face was very nearly destroyed from physical beating, but it was identifiable.

Gideon felt bile rising in his throat.

It was not Reid.

It was the man who had tranquilized him.

Suddenly another officer, who had been walking up ahead with a flashlight, swinging it back and forth, looking for anything worth seeing, shouted and began to point, jumping up and down in a movement that would have been comical had the situation not been so serious.

"Look! Oh my God look I see SOMEONE RUNNING!"

After a moment they had all rushed up beside the Officer, staring where he pointed, at a figure who seemed to shine against the darkness, a figure running for all he was worth against a limp, cradling a broken arm to his side.

Taking a wild chance, making a decision that should never have functioned, Gideon took a deep breath.

"REID!"

His shout made the running man stop, turn his head, and look back. They were well within sight of each other and in that moment, Gideon saw two large dark eyes, looking like empty holes in the darkness, shine and blink.

Then, as unexpectedly as his emergence in the first place, the other man collapsed.

The first person to shoot out from the pack was Meg. Her Converses beat the pavement as she charged towards his crumpled form. When she drew near, she saw something that made her heart seem to simultaneously stop or go out of control: he was alive.

Breathing, nearly unconscious, but alive.

He looked up at her, blinking slowly. His voice came out raspy, like it had barely been used.

"Who are you? What..."

Then, his eyes closed. His chest rose and fell, but his mind was down for the count.

And then, in another unexpected move, Gideon blew past Meg like she wasn't even there, picked Dr. Spencer Reid up as if he weighed nothing, and holding the young man in his arms like a child, ran with him towards the waiting ambulance.

The sirens wailed the entire way there, through dark backcountry roads and one-stoplight towns.

During the speeding ride, only one other person was allowed in the vehicle. At the last minute, Gideon and Meg eyed each other, then Gideon swung up into the ambulance.

The whole way, he held Reid's thin, pale left hand.

Well! I feel like that was my best chapter so far. I know Meg isn't in it much, but don't worry, her character will be resolved in good time. Thanks for reviewing! More chapters to come:-)