Then he felt strong arms grab him round his waist, and his skin didn't come off, because that was a hallucination and Morgan was holding him and saying things in the honey-sweet soothing voice he usually reserved for Garcia on the rare occasions she got stressed or freaked out.
He opened his eyes and looked up, and the slime and the figure were gone. He'd been screaming at an empty hallway.
How embarrassing.
"Shh, shh pretty boy! There's nothing there! You're fine! You're fine. Is it gone?" Morgan asked, looking around in alarm for whatever had got Reid so freaked.
Reid nodded and sank to the floor, his hands clutching the back of Morgan's black jacket. Morgan knelt with him and stroked his hair while he calmed down. The terror slowly subsided as he took deep breaths.
"Was it the Faradays again?" Morgan asked.
"No…" Reid chuckled in between breaths. "Lake monster and carnivorous black slime."
"Oh, much more pleasant company then." Morgan smiled. Reid laughed at that.
Morgan closed his eyes and said, "God when I heard you screaming…I thought the unsub…" he laughed shakily. He kissed the top of Reid's head and then pressed his cheek against it.
(He hoped it would just about pass for a platonic expression of relief and brotherly affection, but if it didn't, he didn't really care at that moment.)
Hotch's words about getting carried away in the heat of the moment resurfaced. He stood up and helped Reid to his feet.
"Did Hotch hear me?" Reid asked anxiously.
"No, I don't think so, they're on the other side of the building still. I only heard because I was looking for you."
"But I fired my gun…four times." Reid frowned.
"Nope. I would've heard. Must have been part of the vision." Morgan said. "A good thing too. You could've shot me."
"I'm so sorry." Reid closed his eyes and raised a hand to his forehead.
"It's not your fault." Morgan said, squeezing him into a quick hug. "C'mon, I'm taking you back to the cabin now. You need to rest."
Reid shook his head. "I won't be able to sleep. I want to help."
"I know you do, but it's too dangerous. You were in your right mind enough not to shoot somebody this time, but next time you might not be so lucky."
"So take my gun." Reid said stubbornly. Morgan sighed.
"Fine." He took Reid's gun and stuck it into the free holster on his hip. "But if any more lake monsters show up you'll warn me." He said firmly.
Reid nodded.
They took the elevator back to the third floor and followed the corridor round to where Hotch was talking to Rossi outside the room.
"Where did you two go? I don't remember authorising you to leave the crime scene." Hotch snapped.
"I'm sorry, I thought maybe I could find the murder weapon. And Morgan was just following me to make sure I was okay." Reid lied.
"Well did you find it?" Hotch asked, his eyes flicking down to the empty holster on Reid's belt, and Morgan's extra gun, reading the situation in their body language.
"No, but I think I know what it was." Reid said. "I noticed right before the murder that one of the axes was missing from the woodcutter activity station."
"That's right, I remember." Morgan nodded.
"The wounds were consistent with an axe." Rossi said.
Hotch phoned Officer Jarvis and asked him to check how many axes there were.
"Um…five sir."
"Have them all tested for traces of blood." Hotch ordered him.
Hotch was not in a good mood. None of them were, but he really took it personally when kids were involved.
"There's something else." Reid said quietly. It had come to him just before he'd had the hallucination.
They all turned to look at him.
"Right before, a guy in a red baseball cap knocked into me and handed me my cell phone, saying I'd dropped it. But the thing is…I'd been walking on concrete. I would have heard if my phone fell out of my pocket. I think it fell out in the meeting room when I was talking to Young."
Morgan looked at him blankly. "What are you saying?"
"That I think the unsub was hiding in the cabinet with a bloody murder weapon while we were talking in there."
All three mouths dropped open.
"What!?" Morgan looked so horrified it almost made Reid want to laugh. It sounded so bizarre that it still hadn't quite sunk in for him yet.
"There was a porcelain fish ornament on top of the cupboard which had fallen on its side, and I remember thinking how strange that was since the window was closed, so there was no draft. It must have been knocked over when he climbed in to hide from us, on his way back from the murder scene." Reid explained calmly.
"So that means he knows Young is with the FBI." Hotch said grimly. "This just gets better and better."
"No I don't think so. He would have heard our voices but he couldn't see anything and we didn't mention Prentiss or the plan or anything. And even if he could see us, Young was sitting with his back to the cabinet. He would only have seen me."
"This unsub is really pissing me off now." Morgan scowled. "Coming right up to you and giving you your phone like that, that was unbelievably bold."
"Did you see his face?" Hotch asked.
"Not very well. Like I said, he was wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses, and my attention was drawn to the phone. I don't know if I'd recognise him again."
Hotch thought for a moment, his eyes narrowed.
"Morgan stay here I want to talk to you. You two go back and help the police control the guests." He said.
Once Reid and Rossi left he looked at Morgan and asked, "What really happened? Why do you have Reid's gun?"
Morgan looked guilty. "Reid had a hallucination where he fired his gun." He confessed. "He didn't actually fire it, but I thought it would be safer if he didn't have it on him."
"And you didn't think this was something I needed to be aware of?" Hotch asked icily.
"Well I'm sorry Hotch but the last time I told you Reid was struggling you told me to back off!" Morgan bristled angrily.
"There's a difference between not looking for problems and covering them up! What else haven't you told me about his mental state?"
"Nothing! I swear! He's not been sleeping much but there was nothing which made me think he was unfit to work!" Morgan protested. "I would have told you!"
"An entire family has just been slaughtered." Hotch rubbed his temples. "The guests are panicking and pointing fingers at our team, and if any of them had come across one of our agents screaming at thin air, do you realise how much it could damage us?"
"I'm sorry Hotch. It won't happen again."
"No I won't. I'm sending you and Reid back to the cabin right now. Rossi and I will handle this by ourselves."
"Hey look, I know I screwed up but I'm fit to work! You can still use me! What good is punishing me going to do?" Morgan argued.
"I'm not punishing you. I just know you wouldn't be able to keep your mind on the job if Reid was on his own, especially now you know the killer has seen his face."
Morgan fell silent and nodded.
"You're right. He's broken his M.O. there's no predicting what he'll do next." He sighed.
"We see serial killers devolving all the time, getting desperate and sloppy. He doesn't seem to be doing that. He's getting even more confident, and more angry." Hotch said. "It takes a huge amount of recklessness and psychopathy to pull something like this off. It's almost like he wants to get caught. He's doing this to prove a point. And every time he gets away with it his narcissism is being reinforced. He must think he's a God by now."
"Why do you think he's attacking families?"
"I think more than likely it was just a crime of opportunity. The family isolated themselves, made themselves easier targets. He was angry that his usual victims and dump site was made unavailable to him, so he made it as brutal as he could and hung them up for us as a message. Another message."
"He's definitely trying to tell us something." Morgan agreed. "Okay. I'll go get Reid and we'll head back. But keep us updated if anything happens."
"I will." Hotch nodded.
...
When Morgan got out into the courtyard it was quiet. The hotel doors had been locked, guests had been shepherded into the large function room and hotel staff were working in teams accompanied by security to get mattresses down from the rooms. A description of the unsub had been given to the guests along with advice on how to keep safe. JJ had her hands full calming people down but as always she worked her magic. A small number of guests had left against the advice of the FBI, saying they would rather risk the snowstorm and freezing to death in their cars, than stay locked in with a serial killer. But they couldn't worry about those people right now. The police would deal with emergencies not on hotel grounds.
He bumped into Prentiss standing outside the men's room on the other side of the building, looking very pissed off.
"Hey." He said. "Where's your husband?"
She opened the door to the men's room and loud vomiting noises floated out, as if in answer to his question.
"Answering once and for all the question why Mr Smartypants never joined the FBI." She said witheringly.
"Well I'm sorry I seem to have such an intolerance to the sight of dead children." Young said sarcastically, but his words were weak and slurred, and his comeback didn't have the usual snarky bite to it. His sorry state reminded Morgan how much his own emotional responses had become desensitised to violent deaths. That was always an uncomfortable feeling.
"Give him a break." Morgan said to Prentiss quietly, and went into the cubicle. Young was slumped against the wall with his head in his hands. He'd gone pale as an anaemic ghost and his eyes were red from throwing up so much.
"I'll be alright in a minute."
"No you won't."
"Well I'll stop vomiting at least."
Morgan crouched down beside him, not knowing what to say.
"So have you caught the fucker yet?" Young asked with an unusual bitterness in his tone.
"Nope. We're getting closer though."
"Do you still need us to act as bait?"
"Probably yeah. We thought the unsub might have found out you're with us, but Reid reckons we're safe. "
"What? How could he have found out?" Young frowned.
"Trust me, you don't want to know."
Young didn't argue.
"So are we staying in the hotel tonight?"
"Yeah I think so. We need to make you available to the unsub, but without making it obvious that that's what we're doing, so for tonight you'll have to stay with everyone else or it'll look suspicious. We've got until tomorrow night to come up with a plan."
"Better be a fucking brilliant plan." Young chuckled dryly. "I quite like my internal organs where they are."
Morgan laughed.
Prentiss came into the room.
"Hey! Men's room! No girls allowed." Young protested.
"I raided the minibar." She held out a handful of tiny bottles of whisky.
"Oooh gimme." Young screwed off the top, glugged it back and then downed a second bottle and made a face when it burned his throat. "You do love me!" he smiled at her.
Prentiss yanked him to his feet and glared. "Suddenly the prospect of eating your heart doesn't seem so terrible." She said, but her voice was softer than usual. "C'mon lets go find a bed."
"In the same sentence you insult me and then ask me to go to bed with you." Young complained dramatically. "You're unbelievable."
She rolled her eyes.
"So divorce me." She said and lead him away.
"Hey wait, have you guys seen Reid?" he called after them.
"He's in the function room with Rossi I think." Prentiss replied.
"Alright, thanks." Morgan said.
...
He walked through the chattering crowd, scanning the function room for Reid. He found him by the coffee machine, drinking from a cardboard cup. He eyed the cup worriedly.
"Don't worry it's decaf." Reid smiled. "Want some?"
"Sure. Thanks." Morgan nodded. "Has Hotch spoken to you yet?"
"No he hasn't. Why, what's up?"
"He doesn't want either of us working this case while you're having these symptoms. He told me to take you back to the cabin."
"Oh. Right." Reid's face fell.
"He's just worried, that's all."
"Yeah. Worried I'll disrupt the investigation and give Strauss an excuse to break up the team. He wants me out of harm's way." He handed Morgan the warm drink.
"Come on man, he's worried about you. So am I." Morgan said softly.
Reid finished his cup and threw it away. "Come on, let's go."
Morgan nodded and they started walking towards the hotel exit.
"We could walk. It probably wouldn't take more than a few minutes, but it might be safer to take one of the hotel's snowproof cars so we can get back faster if something happens." He said.
Reid shrugged. "Whatever." He sounded so frustrated.
Morgan wanted to hug him again. But he didn't.
...
Reid closed the door behind them and Morgan turned on the lights. They went through and checked all the rooms, in the wardrobes, under the beds and locked all the windows and doors then closed all the blinds. It was a little paranoid since there was a very small chance the killer would strike again tonight, but it made them feel safer. Morgan kept both their guns to hand and reset the alarm.
It was weird to know that they weren't part of the investigation anymore. Reid sat down at the table and Morgan made them some toast and scrambled eggs since neither of them had had much time to eat at the gathering. He had the eggs in a pan on the stove when his phone buzzed on the counter next to him and he reached to look at it so hastily that he not only managed to sweep his coffee off the counter and down himself, but then in reacting to that caught the side of his right hand on the hot pan and swore loudly.
"Oh! Goddamned fuck!" he hissed.
Reid stood up worriedly and took his hand, turning it round so he could see the blister.
"Here." He said quietly, pulling him over to the sink and running it under the cold tap.
"I do know how to take care of a burn." Morgan said sulkily, despite quite liking the attention.
"I know you do. But you're a disaster area when you're in this kind of mood." Reid smiled.
"Oh yeah? What mood is that?" Morgan demanded indignantly.
"When you think you've screwed up. You blame yourself and you get all loud and frustrated." Reid said matter-of-factly.
Morgan could have sworn he could see the hint of a slight teasing smirk hovering at the corners of his mouth. He wasn't used to Reid teasing him. It was usually the other way round.
That was kind of hot. It suddenly dawned on him how close they were standing, shoulder to shoulder at the sink, Reid holding his hand and concentrating so completely on what he was doing that Morgan was free to stare at him. He couldn't stop his gaze dropping to look at his mouth, imagining how easy it would be to just swoop in there and kiss him. He could do it. Reid probably wouldn't see it coming until it was too late. Even while it was happening he'd probably still be wracking his brains for some innocent explanation as to why Morgan's tongue was in his mouth.
Morgan couldn't help smiling at the thought.
In actual fact Reid wasn't as oblivious to the situation as Morgan assumed. He felt Morgan's eyes on him and the heat that seemed to radiate from his body, just as keenly as Morgan did. He concentrated on treating Morgan's hand because he didn't know what to think, and it scared him.
Young's question was still in the back of his mind. He'd rejected the notion outright, thinking it was just Young being weird, but now he wondered whether the counsellor had seen something in him that he hadn't been able to recognise himself. He'd been vaguely aware of some strange tension growing between him and Morgan, and now things which had been bugging him for a while were falling into place. His own feelings were starting to make a lot more sense.
Like why he'd felt so annoyed and betrayed that Morgan was talking and confiding in Young, why he'd been immediately comforted and brought down from the hallucination just by having Morgan's arms around him, and why he sort of missed them when he'd taken them away. Why sharing a bed after what had happened to them didn't feel weird, even knowing Morgan had seen him naked.
He looked at Morgan, hoping to God his blush wasn't too noticeable. "Better yet?"
"Not really." Morgan winced.
"Well, I think the cold water has done all it can." Reid reached behind Morgan awkwardly and grabbed a clean tea towel from the rack on the oven door. He folded it into a long strip and wrapped it around Morgan's hand neatly and not too tight. Morgan made a hissing noise of discomfort as the pain returned.
"Sorry. But I think you'll live." Reid said. "I'll go get you some aspirin."
"Thanks." Morgan smiled at him and it made Reid's tummy feel strange. No. No. He couldn't afford to let himself develop transference feelings for a co-worker. It was unprofessional. Not to mention pathetic.
He told himself this over and over as he went upstairs and opened his bag and searched for aspirin. It didn't make any sense. Morgan was like a brother to him.
Oh God. The other night Morgan had actually asked him whether he was…did that mean Morgan suspected it too? Was his crush so blindingly obvious to everyone but him?
He went back downstairs and handed Morgan the pills.
Just act normally. Don't do anything rash. You can analyse these feelings later and work out a way to get rid of them.
Morgan took the aspirin with water. In Reid's absence he'd managed to rescue the eggs and serve them into something resembling food.
"I'll just change my shirt." Morgan looked down at his coffee soaked black T-shirt and made a disgusted face. "Ugh."
Then in typical thoughtless Morgan style he tugged the hem of his shirt up and then reached behind to pull the back of it over his head right there in the kitchen. For the first time Reid let himself properly look at his friend's body through these new eyes, as a kind of experiment.
Yup. He definitely wanted that.
Not that. He corrected himself. Him. Objectifying people was wrong. But oh dear God that.
HOW HAD IT ESCAPED HIS NOTICE HOW UNBELIEVABLY HOT HIS BEST FRIEND WAS?
Morgan left the kitchen and went upstairs, blissfully unaware of the turmoil he left in his wake, and thankfully not noticing the curious, fiery shade of red his co-worker's face had gone.
Reid sat down at the table, in a slight state of shock. Of course he'd always known Morgan was attractive, in the same way he knew that JJ was blonde. But the message that his attractiveness attracted him had somehow been delayed.
He put his head in his hands and scrunched his hair between his clenched fingers as the repercussions of this discovery ran through his mind.
He didn't particularly mind one way or another about his sexual orientation. He didn't think it had any impact on him as a person. Indeed he had preferred to separate himself from all that messiness altogether, since he felt there were far more important things for people to spend their energy on.
But for the record he was surprised it was men.
Completely baffled that it was this particular man.
And a little bit irked. Of all the men in the world he could have turned gay for, it would have to be the most heterosexual, charming, womanising man on the planet, sought after by so many women far more attractive than himself. The only reason Morgan had allowed Reid to get closer to him than any of these women was exactly the reason why they could never be romantically involved. Because they worked together and because he found Reid amusing and endearing and absolutely no threat.
Besides, even ignoring the gender and attractiveness issues the chances of him getting Morgan's attention for more than one night were slim. The worst part was that he was considering settling for that anyway.
Morgan came back in wearing a white T-shirt and the black jogging bottoms he wore in bed. He looked at Reid's untouched plate and frowned.
"Is it that bad?" he asked apologetically.
Reid jerked out of his thoughts. "Um, no, it's fine, I was just waiting for you." He picked up his fork and began eating.
"Oh. You didn't have to." Morgan smiled and joined him.
They ate the food in awkward silence.
"What did the text say?" Reid asked.
"Oh, I never read it." Morgan said. He leaned across to pick his phone up off the counter. "It's just JJ, asking if you're okay."
"Funny how she asks you and not me." Reid said irritably.
Morgan laughed. "That's because she knows you'll always say you're fine."
"That's not true." Reid scowled. "I wouldn't tell her I was fine if I'd just been hit by a car and my leg was hanging off."
Morgan laughed again before he realised Reid hadn't meant it as a joke. The genius was staring moodily at his food, stabbing the pieces of egg a little too vigorously.
"Are you okay?" he asked seriously.
"I'm fi-" Reid stopped and scowled.
"Yeah. Right. I get it." Morgan sighed and shook his head.
They went back to silence. After they'd finished eating they watched TV for a while and Reid couldn't focus on anything they watched because he was too stressed out. In the end he just excused himself and went upstairs just to get away from Morgan so he could think.
He locked himself in the bathroom, and for a moment he just hopped up and down on the spot clutching his head. He let out a hoarse, muted scream, a long string of random syllables, since in all the languages he had stored in his mind there were no words invented yet which could accurately express how he was feeling. He caught sight of himself in the mirror and felt ridiculous. He was behaving like a proper schizophrenic now.
Wasn't falling in love supposed to be full of warm fuzzy feelings and happy endorphins? He just felt stressed, completely exposed and vulnerable. And he felt so unworthy and stupid to even hope for someone like Morgan to like someone like him as more than a friend.
He didn't know what to do. He was totally lost, and the one person he might have felt able to talk to about these embarrassing feelings WAS MORGAN.
He sat down on the edge of the bath and studied his reflection in the mirror opposite.
What do I even want to happen? He asked himself. For him to kiss me? To go on dates every weekend? To have sex with him?
All of the above?
Those were, he'd gathered mainly from the media and from the few members of his peer group who hadn't shunned him, the basic rituals of romantic interaction. They'd always seemed so alien to him. But in a nice, unattainable kind of way.
He'd been kissed before. Once. In a pool. By a beautiful (but scarily unbothered by danger) actress. It had been rushed and he hadn't had time to enjoy it but it hadn't been bad. He'd sort of wanted to try it again but there was never an opportunity and if there had been he'd probably have been too chicken to take it.
And Morgan had kissed him when Eric Faraday had held a gun to his head. That was very different. But in a way it wasn't.
It had almost been exciting.
When it happened he'd felt so guilty because kissing Morgan hadn't felt as wrong as it should have in that situation. So much so that his mind had obviously repressed the idea entirely as an automatic defence mechanism. But now he realised doing that had really messed with his head, because subconsciously it made him feel like he deserved all of it, even the stuff he really didn't want. Like he didn't deserve any of the sympathy people gave him.
Just facing up to that was a relief somehow. Like understanding his emotions made him feel less guilty about them.
He hadn't wanted the rest of it. Not like that. But now he thought maybe part of him had been a little bit curious to see what it would be like, kissing a man and a friend.
And now apparently he was a lot curious.
That was okay. Liking to kiss people wasn't sick or twisted. In fact it was weird not to like it. That didn't make what had happened to him his fault.
It was quite sad to think how long it had taken for him to realise that.
Now the floodgates were open his mind kept showing him the memories of that night which he'd locked away. Of Morgan, naked and aroused and sweaty, all tattoos and rippling muscle crouched over Reid like a tiger.
And then the pain, the awful…
He closed his eyes.
Tears fell out of them, stroking warm lines down his cheeks.
"Please…I-I want you to…to…"
"Yes Dr Reid?"
"To fuck me."
"Like a dirty whore."
"To…fuck me like a dirty whore."
Reid stood up and wiped his eyes.
You don't have to do this now. He told himself. Sorting out his battered emotions could at least wait until he wasn't sleep deprived and confused and possibly walking along the borderline of a schizophrenic break. He needed to calm down.
He decided to run himself a bath. To relax, not to make himself cleaner and thus more attractive to Morgan. Not at all. He stripped and sank into the hot bubbly water.
Around ten minutes later he remembered why he never had baths. They always sounded so seductively relaxing when people described them, but he couldn't stop his mind racing through things he needed to get done afterwards, and obsessing over the fact that all the time he was in the bath he wasn't doing what he needed to do. They ended up amplifying his stress levels.
He washed his hair with the complementary shampoos and conditioners and then the rest of him with the bar of soap in the dish, and got out at least feeling cleaner than when he went in, but his mind was still buzzing with thoughts and his heart was pounding for no apparent reason. He put a towel around his waist and another around his shoulders like a cape, and went through to the bedroom. He changed into his pyjamas and got into bed, and prayed so hard that tonight would finally be the night where sleep returned to him. Surely he physically couldn't remain awake when he was this tired. He couldn't function like this for another day, he just couldn't take it. He made himself lie still, counted to one thousand over and over.
He heard Morgan come up and brush his teeth and felt him carefully slide into the bed next to him, though there wasn't the slightest bit of need to be careful. Reid was still maddeningly wide awake. If anything it felt like his body was producing adrenaline. He clenched and relaxed every muscle one by one, tried every technique he could think of, but nothing helped. He stayed awake so long that he heard Hotch and Rossi and JJ get back to catch a few hours of sleep, to sharpen their minds for tomorrow.
Panic reared up inside him and he couldn't stay still anymore. He sat up and clutched his head and rocked back and forth, crying silently, fighting the urge to scream. If he hadn't been hundreds of miles away and cut off from transport by the snow, he would have gone straight to his dealer and begged him for anything he had, whatever the cost. He knew that was stupid when he only had a few more days of the withdrawal period to go, but he didn't care. Right now he would give anything, do literally anything to be able to sleep.
His thoughts felt like a hive of bees, uncontrollable and random and senseless, stinging and stinging and refusing to shut up. He started desperately trying to think of a way out.
He just wanted it to end, just wanted it to stop.
He stifled a sob to avoid waking Morgan, got out of bed, and left.
...
*creeps out nervously from behind tree*
Hello. Yes, it was a hallucination. Sorry about the cliffhanger of doom. '^^ I hope this was a satisfying resolution. Things will get even worse for poor Reid before they get better I'm afraid. I don't have time to do comments this week but as always the feedback means an awful lot to me :) thank you x