Author's Note #1: I don't own them nor am I making any money off of them (actually, I do own Phillips and Decker, the two local cops, and really anyone who you don't recognize from the show is mine).

Author's Note #2: Some of the information about the Verdi Requiem is from an interview the tenor and conductor Placido Domingo gave in 2001 about this piece of music. I just read it today, in exploring how other people view the requiem, and what he had to say really resonated with me – God's wrath comes blazing out of the score repeatedly, and Domingo sees it as resonating with our fear of death. I've paraphrased badly, and taken the words out of his mouth, though, and put them into someone else's instead. I don't know if it would work for Gideon, but certainly anytime I'm upset, angry, whatever, putting the Requiem on and turning up the volume certainly helps. Other people have told me that it also works for them.

Author's Note #3: The ideations, thoughts, visualizations, etc., are not ones that resonate with me, and this chapter is not an expression of my worldview. These are thoughts that I can imagine someone who is as deep-down hurt as Gideon is might have. So don't go calling the men in white coats, please!

Previously in Criminal Minds: The Prodigal

"No, I'm fine. And don't tell Morgan. Don't tell anyone about me, it's better if they think I'm dead."

"Better for who, Jason?"

Gideon stayed in the overstuffed armchair for a long time after he heard the Suburban's tires crunch across the gravel and out onto the driveway. Despite everything he had done to hide, he had been found. Not by anyone looking for him, at least he'd been able to pull the door in behind him well enough to escape a directed search, but chance certainly went wrong sometimes. No matter how hard he tried to escape it, his old way of life seemed to want him back.

Finally, he stood, switching on the desk lamp and creating a small pool of light. Normally he didn't write until after dinner, but he thought tonight might be different; he didn't have any appetite anyway and needed to sort out his feelings. Without thinking, he reached over and switched on the CD player, but the first notes made his head snap up in shock. No, the Bach cello suite number 1 was not the music he needed tonight. His heart rate had already sped up, the nausea rising in his chest, as he remembered the associations that music had. Where was it… ah, there. He slotted the two disks into the player, and sat down at the desk as the first quiet, almost imperceptible notes began.

Now, to write. His statements to Aaron earlier had not been completely in jest. He felt himself almost to be two people. But who was he?

Reaching out, Gideon selected the blue notebook and the blue pen, setting aside the red notebook and pen. Tonight, I am Me, he wrote. But who am I? Who is Me? I thought that I had set aside this part of myself, this part that questions, that pokes, that prods, that asks Who am I? How does that work? Why did he do that? Why do people kill? Why do I not kill?

Ah, there it is. Why do I not kill? Why could I not kill? I wonder if Aaron saw the brassing on that magazine, and realized that it has been in my pocket every day, carrying that one lethal piece of metal. That ever since those three days by the side of the road in northern Nevada, I have carried proof of my failure with me, half as reminder of that failure and half as means in case the motive and opportunity appear in front of me. I sat there by that car for three days, not moving except to void myself in another area. That in itself was proof that I wouldn't do it, couldn't do it. If I was going to die there, fouling myself would have been the least of my worries. But still I got up.

He lifted his pen from the page as the first notes of the Dies Irae burst from the speakers, and smiled faintly.

Why is it that Verdi's Requiem has such power over me? It is not, after all, a gentle piece of music, it is full of rage. God's rage, his anger and wrath, and the anger and wrath and fear of death that we all feel. But no matter how angry or unsettled I feel, this piece of music calms me and lets me examine things more clearly.

The first afternoon, I imagined looking down the barrel that I could see the perforations in the tip of that bullet, that I would be able to see them speeding towards me. I spent the next day and a half reliving everything that had brought me there. My inability to stop Frank the first time, my inability to protect Rebecca Bryant from the second animal to attack her, let alone the first, my inability to keep safe Sarah who trusted me. My inability to act, to decide, to think at that college, and to prevent more deaths. The voices of the dead surrounded me, whispered in my ears, shouted from the hilltops until I could hear nothing else.

The second day I thought of everything I would be leaving behind. Stephen… was I really leaving Stephen? Had I ever been there to begin with, for him to really feel that I had abandoned him now? After all, I had been more of a mentor to Reid than I had to my own son. And here I was abandoning Reid. Another father figure, tossing him aside and saying "You don't matter to me. You are not important enough for me to think of you now."

Gideon stared off into the distance as he remembered the note he had left the young man. Of all his team, he had regretted leaving Reid behind the most. But at the time, leaving had been the only thing he could do.

I know that leaving, apparently to kill myself if Aaron's reaction is any guide, confirmed Morgan's opinion of me, that I was past it, washed up, perhaps even dangerous. Well, maybe I am. Of course I am. Just ask Rebecca or Sarah. I am surprised that Garcia bothered to look for me. Perhaps simply because it represented a challenge? And Aaron, suspended and his career in danger for my mistakes. Yet another entry in the debit column as I summed things up.

And still I did not pull the trigger, launching that bullet towards my brainstem. Why not? I wanted it to happen.

After the turmoil of the first section of the requiem, the slower, calmer Offertory section slowed Gideon's pen.

The third day, everywhere I looked the faces of those I had failed were floating before me. My family, my team – as much or more my family as my wife and child – all the victims I had seen in over twenty years. But they were overlaid with the faces of those I had failed to stop, first among them Frank. His face taunted me and I could not escape it. No matter where I looked, whether I closed my eyes or kept them open, there he was in front of me. Not even switching out magazines and firing an ordinary round through that face got rid of him. But it did perhaps bring me back to myself, rouse me from the daze I had been in.

The trumpet fanfare of the Sanctus roused him from the daze he was in now, just as the pistol shot had roused him from his daze in the desert years ago, and he bent back over his notebook.

I decided, that day, that I could be someone else, that I could be Not-Me. Someone who wasn't relied on to catch the worst of society, who didn't bear the burden when the worst of society escaped the net again and again. I think I knew all along that I wasn't going to kill myself in that desert; why else would I have bought a 6-pack of bottled water at the last rest stop on I-80 before Golconda?

For months now, Not-Me has been more successful than Me. I could live without thinking for long about the things that haunted me. But now the life that surrounded Me and shaped Me is back. How do I get rid of it? How can I keep Aaron from drawing me in again? I am afraid to listen to him, afraid to hear him describe who they are looking for. But why? Is it because I am afraid I know him, because I am afraid he is someone like me? Or is it because I am afraid that even listening to him will tempt me into that wilderness again?

The last repetition of the Dies Irae – the wrath of God – burst forth from the speaker, and he lifted his head in surprise. Was it this close to the end of the requiem already?

I cannot afford to live that life again. It is tempting, my God it is tempting, but I cannot do it without losing still more parts of myself. I must not be moved, I must not let Aaron change my mind.

Tomorrow I must be Not-Me.

The final section of the requiem soared out into the room as he laid down his pen, and he sang along with the soprano. "Libera me, Domine…"

Deliver me, oh Lord.

Aaron Hotchner pulled into the parking lot in front of the Oakhurst police station and cut the engine. He sat in the car, thinking over the surprises he had gotten this afternoon. Gideon looked – different was too easy a word, with that grizzled beard and hair – not himself. His talk of "me" and "not me" was disturbing, but Hotchner was fairly confident that his old friend was suffering from nothing more than major depression. "Nothing more than depression! If only it was that easy to dismiss."

He wondered which of Gideon's recordings of the Verdi Requiem would be booming out of the stereo this evening. The entire team had always known to walk softly and stay out of the way when that music was heard coming out of Gideon's office.

Hotchner jumped as his cell phone erupted, and frowned when he saw it was Morgan.

"What is it, Morgan?"

"Hey Hotch, turns out our boy did another one this afternoon. Where are you?"

"Right outside the police station. Where are you?"

"Right inside the station. Phillips and a whole team of his people are about to head out there, and I figure if you're around I can ride with you." They hung up, and within a minute or two Morgan pushed through the doors and climbed into the passenger seat. "They'll be out in a minute, and then we can follow the parade."

Hotchner nodded, and the car was silent until the procession had swung out of the lot, heading back up the same road he'd just driven down. After a mile or so, Morgan shifted and glanced over at him.

"So who was it in the house, this afternoon?"

"Just someone who needed to be interviewed alone. Insisted on it, actually."

"So who was it? Anyone I'd know?"

Hotchner exhaled and weighed the situation for a moment. "No."

Author's Note #4: Hey, anyone want to be a beta for this? I'm nowhere near finished telling this story, and would really welcome someone else's views on it. Drop me a line and we'll talk!