For: Pabzi
Words: 796
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort
Characters/Ships: Gideon, ensemble
Summary: Chess isn't a cure-all, so Jason looks to find additional coping methods.
Author's Notes: l3petitemort posted a story called "Doppelganger" that took grammar rules and threw them out the window (in a most spectacularly stylish fashion). I basically spent a good deal of time trying to absorb that writing style before I wrote this story. I utterly failed. BUT, I still like how this one turned out, so it's all good. As a side note, I'd like to mention that this was the only request out of seven that was 100% gen. So this also served as a nice break between shippier stories (hence the complete lack of shipping here).
02.
They deal with a lot of real sickos. They follow the steps and do the math and try to direct their impulses and delusions on some target that won't shriek and cry and bleed. At some point, Jason begins to realize that he's losing control of his own impulses. Namely the one that tells him to drop everything and get the hell out of here before he loses it.
He starts self-therapy by doing everything his therapist told him to do after he blew up six of his agents. Eating right, writing things down, controlling panic attacks by breathing deep and identifying objects around his house in a monotone ("That's a fork. That's a knife. That's a padlock, turned to the left so the deadbolt is drawn. That's a knife."). He plays a lot of chess. When he's feeling reckless, he plays against the robots in his computer. Sometimes he sets up a board on his scrubbed kitchen table and plays against himself. Usually, he wins. Sometimes he doesn't. More than the other ways, though, he likes to play chess with Spencer, because it means that two minds are thinking so hard on one common objective that, at some point, they seem to merge into one. The idea baffles and entices him; two agents sitting together and reflecting on nothing but their past and future moves across the board. It seems almost impossible, but it happens. Playing chess is good for Spencer because it keeps him from thinking about dilaudid. It's good for Jason because it makes him believe, for a few precious minutes or hours, that there is some level of order in his life.
Chess isn't a cure-all, however. He still finds himself waking up at odd hours, so sodden with sweat from face to feet that he can't tell for sure if he's started to sob in his sleep again. Control becomes one cold shower after another. Chewable caffeine tablets and riffling through his Book of the Saved to make sure the good parts actually happened.
He asks the others how they cope with the stress of the job. He corners them when they're alone during a case or if they're the last ones in the office at night. It's just a question, I'm not analyzing you. I just read a book is all, and I'm curious. Morgan says that music helps him to unwind. Prentiss sits with her fingers twisted in her lap and admits that she goes for more pedicures than the average woman. Hotch has his family to look after, when they're not looking after him. JJ says that she doesn't really have one way—she likes to read and cook, though. Spencer looks across the chessboard and responds that he's probably not the best person to ask about healthful stress-control methods.
More than once, Jason wishes he could be like Spencer. He wishes he could just shoot up and lose himself, too. But that's not really an option.
Jason looks at his bleary-eyed reflection in the mirror when he gets home. It blinks back at him and asks, So what will it be? Pedicure or cookbook? He laughs. Then he goes to the kitchen and cooks crepes in sweatpants and bare feet, and eats them with slices of banana because he had the strawberries with his cereal at seven the morning before, almost twenty hours ago. The part of his mind conditioned to never leave the office wonders if an UnSub has ever sat down to breakfast at two-forty-seven in the morning.
Jason doesn't like to believe so. He thinks of Morgan in headphones, of Prentiss with her feet in a hot bath. Hotch and his wife and son. JJ reading some trashy Irish romance novel and giggling at the sappy parts. He thinks of Spencer on a couch somewhere, the light of a television bathing his face in moving lines of gray while tiny red pinpricks of blood rise up on his forearm.
A part of him doesn't leave. It went up in smoke with his six agents and went down with him when he had his "major depressive episode" (they don't call them nervous breakdowns anymore). But it doesn't leave.
He's never seen a bird-watcher turn into a serial killer, but he looks at the painted image of a blue jay that sits over his microwave and wonders if a murderer has ever stopped to flip through the glossy pages of Birders World Magazine. He tells himself that it's not really a relevant question, and takes a bite of crepe, and thinks that a psychopath could never really enjoy things like gourmet cooking and plumage anyway.
But that impulsive side, between bouts of screaming at him to drop everything and run, pauses in its everlasting work and replies, Yes.
x
Fin.