Author Note: New chapter! Yes! Here it is! Thanks for reviewing... enjoy!

The agents felt like they were at a funeral. No one had died, at least not yet, but as they stood over the sleeping form of one of their dearest friends and coworkers, a man who had been through some very serious trauma, they knew something had broken.

Even in soft, medicated sleep, Reid's forehead remained creased in pain, and his leg still hung high in a curious kind of traction. Behind them, in the hall, Meg waited in a hard, plastic chair, for some kind of word.

"He looks so tiny," Morgan said. "I guess I never really knew how much of a little guy he was until now."

The weight on his chart, hanging at the foot of his bed, put his weight at a low one-forty.

"His IQ is higher than his weight," realized Morgan, continuing to talk, although he knew no one was really listening. "Weird."

Reid's silence meant a world of unknown things. Without his traditional, constant stream of knowledge, Reid had been reduced to little more than an unconscious boy, looking far younger than his actual age.

"Excuse me," said a voice. "May I speak with you out in the hall?"

It was the doctor. Not Meg, but Reid's physician.

His prognosis was both clear and troubling. Reid was unconscious due to the incredible amount of physical exertion it had taken to escape, shoot his captor, and run down the road. In addition to the broken leg and arm, he had suffered multiple facial injuries, orthopedic and muscular bruising, as well as a general malnutrition and emotional shock. The blood they had discovered on his hands and on his clothing--- stark against his white skin and clothes, but which had been invisible in the night--- was a mix of both his and an unknown group of three other people.

He had yet to awake, but when he did, it was very likely that he would not remember what had happened. This would be his mind's block of personal trauma, and would be temporary.

Until then, all they could do was wait.

They did so, slowly, feeling time stretch out into an agonizing five minutes, then fifteen, then forty-five.

In another state, in another city, Garcia eyed the clock, waiting for news. Even her new online chat room couldn't hold her attention now.

Two cups of coffee, three cell phone calls, and fifty-four minutes later, Reid's eyes opened.

"Only one at a time," stated his doctor calmly. "You don't want to rush him."

Gideon took the opportunity. No one questioned this decision.

The older agent had been in hospital rooms before, both as a visitor and as a patient. His kind of a hospital room was one reserved for dying. There were no questions when you walked into one of those rooms. The smell of death means finality; the smell of illness and pain means nothing but uncertainty. And while you can't mask either smell with flowers, he would take finality over uncertainty any day.

He entered and sat quietly, waiting for Reid to speak.

The young man's eyes were slurred with painkillers and confusion. His voice, generally light as air and full of excitement and intelligence, came out raspy and malformed, as if the words scraped his throat on the way up and left him with little more than a breath to escape on.

"What..."

"I'm here, kid," he said. "You're in a hospital, you're safe now." The question, burning at the back of his mind, raging to charge forward, remained held at bay. No need to ask, not just yet.

Because, in the next moment, Reid answered it for him.

"What happened?"

Something that had previously shone, that light of awareness and memory, was dark.

"I know you don't remember now, Spencer," he said (employing Reid's first name as a guidance tactic), "but you will soon."

"Okay," Reid said.

"What's the last thing you do remember?"

"You spoke to me before I left the department," he said. "Told me to get some sleep." He swallowed with some difficulty. "I went back to my hotel. I don't remember anything after that, but I really don't think I just laid down and went to sleep."

"No," Gideon said, almost smiling. "No, you didn't."

Reid's eyes swung a slow, lazy left and met his own. "I can't think. I have all these... things rattling in my head and... I can't quite get them in the right order."

"Do you want something to write on?"

"Please," Reid said. "And... if you could..."

Gideon eyed him. "What do you need?"

"Could I please just..." He closed his eyes, as if pulling darkness back over them, as if generating some kind of buffer between himself and the world. "Could I please be alone?"

He turned his head.

The dismissal would have stung, had Gideon not understood it so implicitly. He'd felt the same way, once, in a time that felt like it was long ago.

He got the pen and the notebook, then left alone the man who had become something like his son.

Time passed. They all knew that one of them could give it another shot in a little while. Reid just needed time.

Suddenly, they heard Meg sigh. She was standing over at the door, looking through the crosshatched, double-paned window of Reid's room.

It was not wistfulness or lovesickness that darkened her eyes, but sympathy.

"Look," she said.

Due to the way the bed was arranged, at an angle away from the door, they could see Reid, but Reid could not see them.

He had gone through multiple notebook pages, and as they watched, flipped one aside with a hard, self-punishing sweep. More pages lay in a crumpled heap on his sheets and on the linoleum floor. His pen dug deep into the paper, until suddenly, he stopped and began viciously scrawling out whatever he had written.

That page ended up on the floor, too.

Before he began writing again, he dropped his pen on his lap and wrenched his good hand through his hair, leaving it standing up from the static. Then he pressed his hand to his eyes and moaned with something that sounded like fear.

"It's every genius's worst nightmare," said Meg quietly, as Reid began to write again, his handwriting becoming steadily more elongated. On the screen near his head, his blood pressure had gone up with a low, soft beep.

"What?" Elle said, distracted by what she was seeing.

"It starts when we are very young," she said. "That continuous desire for the answers we can give. First, we're handed books of puzzles, and pages of crosswords and mnemonics. As we grow older, the puzzles become quizzes and the crosswords become standardized tests. We fill notebook after notebook with things we've studied and facts we've learned; we recite knowledge with an ever-increasing ease. And there is always, always a demand for it."

She stepped closer to the glass, watching Reid.

"From parents, tutors, teachers, professors, supervisors, we are constantly reminded that we are important because of what we learn and understand. We are constantly given things to write, constantly given questions to answer, constantly given books to fill."

Gideon realized her eyes were beginning to shine with a hint of tears.

"As soon as we start to put that together, every genius that has ever functioned in society begins to realize that there will, one day, come a time when the answers they have will mean nothing. One day, there will be no more questions. One day, no one will want the one thing they have to offer."

She blinked. "We all realize that one day, we will run out of notebooks."

Hotch stared at her.

"What should we do?" he asked in a low voice.

Morgan made a sound in his throat, but said nothing.

"Look, this is why we brought her on, for exactly this kind of thing," Hotch said. "Meg: what should we do?"

"I want to talk to him."

"I don't think that's a good idea," Hotch said, lowering his eyes to her. "There are procedures for this kind of thing. One of us should do it."

"There are procedures?" Meg asked, one arched eyebrow raised. "There are procedures for interviewing a twenty-four year old genius who was recently abducted and tortured for days in some kind of twisted military mind game?"

Hotch's mouth tightened. "There are rules. Liabilities."

In the hospital room, Reid moaned a second time. It was louder than before, and carried with it a faint, upward cry. He was lost, lost in a place where his own intelligence couldn't rescue him.

He was scared.

"Forget 'em," said Gideon, without turning from the window. "Just forget them. Send her in."

On his words, before Hotch could move to stop her, Meg opened the door and walked inside.

Reid turned his head as best as he was able, surprise widening his eyes. His hand tightened on the pen, his knuckles widening. Meg wondered--- in a hidden pocket of her mind--- if he had been intending to throw it at her.

"Relax," she said calmly. "My name is Dr. Meg Walker."

"Doctor?" he said, taking in her appearance. She certainly didn't look like one. His mind fumbled, trying to grasp and failing. His eyes thickened with the chaos behind them, bright with tears.

"Ph. D's. Two of them. You?"

"Three," he responded automatically.

Inwardly, she smiled.

"Stanford?" she asked.

"Duke. Princeton?"

"Harvard. Yale?"

"Dartmouth."

"Damn," she said, "Wonder boy."

Where the whisper of a smile would have been, fear surfaced instead. His eyes shifted, left, right, like a ship in turmoil, like the room was dipping back and forth around him.

"It's okay," she said. "You remember that much about yourself. Your name, your degrees, your career. Where you've been and what you've done. It's what makes you who you are," she said.

Then she pulled her first card. "How smart are you, anyway?" she asked. "IQ-wise?"

His hand trembled. He began to doodle ferociously on his paper. Wild, random scribblings. Distracting his mind. The question sounded so familiar... so... threatening in a way he couldn't place... where had he heard anyone ask that before?

Like a flash of lightning or the slice of a chain: a male voice, hard, loud: "What's your IQ, Dr. Reid?"

He couldn't answer. He closed his eyes, wanted to scream. He willed this woman to be gone when he opened them. But no, there she was, standing there.

"What?" he snapped, his voice coming out fast, riding on a wave of pure, wild insecurity.

"Nothing," she said, her tone conversational. "Mine is 183. My name is Dr. Meg Walker," she repeated. "You've heard of me. You know my name."

"You're the agent from New York," he said slowly, speaking as it came to him. "The one they mentioned for awhile, when I was hired. I never contacted you," he said. What was he doing? Apologizing? For what? His pen scratched harder. Mutilating something.

"Listen," she said. "I know how you feel right now," she said. "There are a lot of things you wish you understood. You feel like you should be able to answer the questions going through your head. But you can't."

"Go away," he said. "You don't know anything about me."

"I do, actually," she said. "I've been working with your team--- your friends--- to try to find you. They care a lot about you. You remember who they are, which is good, because they make you who you are, too."

"Stop," he said. "Please. Go away."

"No. Here's the deal, Reid. You've got to understand. Whatever you're writing can't help you now. You have reached a bizarre, terrifying pinnacle in your life. The answers aren't in the past you remember, or in the random facts you've accumulated on the way. This isn't a puzzle."

"Shut up," he whispered.

"No. You can't beat your mind bloody for this. You've got to just relax, open up, and start to remember what happened in the last couple of days--- yes, days--- because there is a very dangerous guy out there, and we don't know what happened to him."

"What?"

"Yeah," she said. "So. What? You went back to your room. You laid down. You probably looked at the stuff on the walls, made some random observations. Then what? Did you fall asleep? Did you get naked? Did you---"

"I didn't do anything!"

"Yes, you did. Did the doorbell ring? Oh, right, you were in a hotel, no doorbell. So, did someone knock? Did someone bang on the door? Did room service call?"

"Wait!" Reid cried. "Wait. Someone..."

He squinted, then closed his eyes.

The sound, like a sharp, loud, rapport.

No watching dirty movies.

He'd gotten up... gotten dressed.

The door had opened. Did he open it? Did they? Did it matter?

He dropped his pen. He dropped his gun.

"Did you find it?" he said suddenly, eyes flying open.

"What?" She leaned forward, knowing that the agents could hear everything he said through the door she'd left half-open.

"Did you find it? My gun?"

She grinned.

"Yeah, Reid. We found it. What happened next?"

She reached out, took the notebook away, set it on the table. Reid didn't protest. He just let his mind wheel backwards, let his mind take in the sight of her standing there, watching and waiting, let the silence of the room and space between them fill up his mind...

"I woke up," he said.

And then he began to speak in earnest.