"Elle, that's...crazy." There was no other word for it. "We don't profile each other, we respect each other's privacy."

"Like we respected Morgan's?"

"That was different, Gideon. Gordinsky thought Morgan was a viable homicide suspect. We HAD to profile him to help him, but this? Reid isn't suspected of anything. He's a victim, we help victims. We DON'T exploit them."

"You're not exploiting him, you're trying to understand him...it's only exploitation if you use the information against him."

"Technicalities. If Reid wants our help, he will ask for it."

"No he won't. He never has before."

"This is just wrong." Hotch put his head in his hands. He was of half a mind to just storm out, but then he thought of Reid, crying in J.J.'s arms for nearly half an hour, his cries turning into painful screeches, like he was holding back a scream. If he was in that much pain while trying to maintain control. "Okay, you're right. He needs help, but that's what psych evals and counselors are for."

"Come on, Hotch, we all know that Reid is smart enough to know the 'correct' answers to the psych questions."

"Elle, why are you doing this?"

"Why? Because the night I shot Lee, Reid realized that I was hurting and he came to me to help me. I wouldn't let him, but he was the only one who cared enough to try. I owe him. He helps people so much because deep down he hopes that he will get that kind of help in return and its up to us - me, apparently - to make sure that he gets it when he needs it the most. So what do you know about Reid? Besides the basics that's he's a genius prodigy with a - whatever kind of memory that is."

"Eidetic."

"Right, eidetic, now what does that mean?"

Elle couldn't believe that she had to walk her former bosses through this - and they called themselves profilers. It was laughable. Maybe, as a last resort, she could apply for a teaching position at the academy - heaven knew she was doing a better job than Gideon.

"It means that he remembers everything with perfect clarity."

"It means he can't forget." It meant that no matter what he did to hide from the pain and the memories, they would never go away.

"Exactly. Now what else do we know? Childhood prodigy, ill mother..."

"Absent father who left him with said mother." Elle reminded herself to get out of the way when William Reid eventually showed his face. She didn't want to be a casualty of Hotch's rage.

"We don't know that," Gideon protested. "His mother may have been diagnosed after the fact. For all we know, William Reid may have left his son in perfectly competent care." Of course Gideon would defend William...one dead beat dad defending another. Maybe she could deck him later. She hoped he gave her the excuse, not that she needed one.

"Oh, like that makes it okay?"

"Not okay, no, but it does affect the profile."

"Okay, so back to the childhood prodigy part. What do you know about his school years?"

"He graduated from high school before he was a teenager."

"He gets most of his knowledge from books, not experience. We all know that Reid -for lack of a better word - flaunts his excessive knowledge. It's a coping mechanism to cover up his lack of experience and confidence. He could probably rattle off all of the rules for baseball. That doesn't mean he's going to have good hand eye coordination. Just because you know how to do something doesn't mean you can actually do it."

"Case in point, he's failed his gun qualification several times." Elle distinctly remembered the way Reid had ripped the whistle Morgan had given him off in embarrassment. Perhaps he should have kept it after all.

"When Philip Dowd had us hostage, I kicked him so the hostages would be out of the line of fire. He, he took the beating. Hunkered down into a fetal position to protect his stomach. It was instinct...he even told me that I kicked like a 12-year-old girl."

"So he's no stranger to beatings. The question is was the abuse parental or limited to schoolyard bullying."

"Abuse victims go one of two ways: either taking that anger out on a surrogate or protecting those who they see like themselves."

"Okay, so he protects people, he's empathetic."

"Especially in the cases of the mentally disturbed. Most people see the monster first, the fact they they are sick people with families is secondary."

"He sees his mother in them. He doesn't see it as putting away a monster, he thinks of it as tearing apart a family."

"Take Nathan Harris, for example. Everyone else on the team was ready to write him off. He fit the profile. We saw an unsub in the making, he saw someone he could help. Why?"

"Because he's scared of his own mind. He knows his chances of developing schizophrenia."

"Then add his father's abandonmet-"

"We don't know that. Divorce, is messy."

"Yes it is, but what do kids automatically think? They think its their fault. But there was no divorce - the three of them still have the same name which means there was no drawn out legal process, for whatever reason. William Reid just got up and left - records show his home address matched Diana's until 1991 when Spencer would have been 10. Something just made him leave one day, and all bets are on that Spencer thought he was one of those things."

"Okay, what else?"

"He's too empathetic. He tries to help people even if its to his own detriment. Think about the Randal Garner case -"

"I'd rather not!"

"Rather than run at the sight of the bomb, he kept trying to talk Garner down, and even after the bomb went off and the building was on fire - he was on fire. He was literally on fire and he still risked life and limb to find Rebecca. Everyone else was telling him to leave but he wouldn't. We followed him, we almost never made it out. I almost never saw Haley or Jack again. But Reid -"

"'-Reid doesn't have a Haley or Jack. He doesn't have a 'family'. He most likely did at one point, had it torn away. He doesn't want anyone else to experience that if he can help it. He doesn't want other people to feel the same pain that he did - that's what drives him, just as much if not more than the puzzles."

"What we have in Reid is a young man who has been exploited for his knowledge, tormented with no guiding parental figure, has a family history of mental illness. He's organized, he's efficient..."

"Gideon STOP!" This sounded too much like delivering an unsub profile for his liking.

"Did I say anything that wasn't true?"

"Are you trying to tell me that you think Reid is going to be so tormented by this memory that he'll...snap...go all-out unsub on us to make the pain go away? The whole time Hankel had him, you were reassuring me that Reid is strong enough to pull through. You were right, he has -why are you loosing confidence in him now" The thought was ridiculous...but how many times had the families of the unsubs said the same thing...'He would never.'? Well it was certainly true that he never thought Elle would shoot someone in cold blood, but she had. It didn't even matter that the man was a rapist, even unsubs deserved to have a fair trial. Elle was doing this because she wanted to help Reid avoid a similar path to the one she had taken.

"No, he wasn't strong enough and Hankel did break him." Gideon replied calmly. "But I honestly think he'd chose suicide over homicide."

"You can't honestly think that Reid is suicidal!" Reid didn't profile as suicidal, he had too much to live for. It was true that Reid had almost no sense of self-preservation, but there was a line - a fine one, but still a line - between self-sacrifice and suicide.

"I do, because he did."

Hotch dropped his jaw in astonishment. "When did -?"

"Think about it Hotch, Reid's - he's here. Why? Because he confessed. He had the profile! He knew that Hankel killed sinners, he knew he'd given us a clue. Why do something tantamount to suicide when you are so close to rescue?" Gideon paused, not wanting to continue. "He's at the age when schizophrenic breaks happen and I do believe that Reid would take his own life if he thought he was suffering a psychotic break. He has seen too many psychotic breaks to risk -"

"He's also knows the signs well enough to seek help if they ever come up." The name Nathan Harris was not brought up again, but then again they didn't have to. Reid had been so eager to help Nathan, because in the boy, he saw himself.

Aaron Hotchner stormed out of the patient-less hospital room, fuming - not sparing a glance for either Gideon or Elle. He wanted more than anything to tell himself that Gideon was wrong. He had to be wrong. There was no way...Gideon hadn't said anything wrong and yet he couldn't see Reid in that light. The profile of an abused and abandoned child somehow did not fit the shy nerdy genius that he had known for the last three years. Everything about Reid screamed 'innocent', not 'unsub'. He had to see him.

Elle Greenaway watched Aaron Hotchner storm out of the hospital room, with a smile of smug satisfaction. Well at least now he'd had his head screwed back on. She settled down into the chair, observing Gideon who perfectly fit the part of a migraine patient with his head in his hands, rubbing at this temple.

"So, you're the one who called the press." She crossed her arms, smirking, as he raised his eyes to meet her steely gaze. The fight was gone from them. All that was left was a careworn look of someone who had seen too much, endured too much. She hoped he couldn't sleep at night, hoped he'd learned something from all of this. Well, apparently he hadn't if he'd antagonized the unsub...again."What exactly did you hope to gain?"

"From what?" He didn't have the time or energy to deal with her feisty attitude.

"This, that, any of it. Why did you go against Garner and Hankel?"

"We had nothing, we needed them to make a mistake. That's the only way to catch these guys, you know that. I thought you'd understand."

"What I understand, Gideon is that you might well have painted a target on a target on my back! And now Reid? Are we really that expendable that you can use us as target practice whenever you're stuck on a case!? We are people! Not chunks of meat to string up as bait!"

"That's part of the job!"

"No, it isn't, Jason! If its a sting operation that's planned in advance, yes. In Ohio, yes. But this? How scared do you think Reid was when he found out about this virus warning? Do you think he thought, 'Oh, good, now he'll do something stupid when he's got a gun to my head'?! Do you think that gave him any measure or relief or confidence in the team!?"

Gideon leaned back in his chair, rubbing his eyes, Reid's begging for help echoing in his ears as he was struck across the face again and again. As far as unsub brutality went it was pretty tame, but when coupled with the drug use and starvation, not to mention the threat of the knife and gun..."No."

"He had every confidence in the team and you let him down. Is there anything else I need to know about?"

Gideon paused and Elle could tell that he was trying to decide if he should tell her something. Gideon being cautious now, was a sign of self-preservation - and it was a bad one.

"Out with it!"

"We saw a video of Reid being told to choose a person to save. But that meant, that he was by default not saving the next victim. The unsub - Hankel - he was monitoring his victims through their webcams. When we got to the crime scene, he had left the webcam on. I thought perhaps that he had left the camera on so Reid could watch the slaughter -"

Elle put her head in her hands, torn between anger at Gideon and sympathy for Reid. Here she had thought Reid had suffered a gun shot, not unlike her own.

"-so I sat down and talked to him through the webcam. It was one way, so I couldn't see him, but I had to do something. I had to."

Elle felt a feeling of dread growing in her stomach. "Gideon, what did you do?"

"I told him to stay strong, that Hankel couldn't break him."

"You what!?"

"I was trying to give him some encouragement." The excuse sounded feeble and they both knew it.

"Did the unsub see this?"

"I don't know - maybe. I don't know how his computer was set up."

"Encouragement? No, Gideon. What you should have done was demean him. Tell him he was pathetic for being captured in the first place. Then at least he would feel the need to prove you wrong, instead you gave that motivation to the unsub! Better for the unsub to underestimate Reid's strength and to be proven wrong than for the unsub to overestimate it and try to prove you wrong. Tell me, what happened after that? Hmm, did the videos end? Or did you get more videos sent yo you, with brutality worse than before? And was this before or after this virus warning that Hotch mentioned?"

"Before."

"So let me get this straight: you give the unsub a challenge by telling Reid that he's the stronger of the two. What happened after that?"

Gideon swallowed, unable to look Elle in the eye. "That was the first time he hit Reid. Well, the first time we saw it. He had been beaten when the cameras first came on, but until then we just saw the aftermath, not the actual beating."

"So he was showing you his strength. He was determined to prove you wrong...and THEN you take away his control." She dug her fingers into her palms, fighting the urge beat the crap out of him. "Dammit it, Gideon! We're supposed to play it safe when dealing with hostages, but when it's Reid hostage, you throw caution to the wind? What happened after that?"

Gideon said nothing, his head between his hands and his eyes on the floor, the bloody coward. She used to have some respect for him.

"What happened?"

"Reid was chained to a chair, struck across the face several times...and thrown to the concrete floor."

"So he's in the hospital because you pushed the unsub so far that he thought he had to throw Reid to the concrete floor to prove his superiority?"

"No."

"No?"

"No, what?"

"No that's not the reason he's here. He's here because of the knife wound."

"Knife? He was stabbed!?"

"In the back, yes!"

Elle felt her eyes go as wide as quarters. She felt sick that Gideon could say that so calmly, that it had even happened at all. Of all the stupid, incompetent... He was supposed to be the most experienced...How could be be so reckless? "Do yourself a favor, when he gets back. Leave."

"Back?

"Yes, back from what ever test he's having done. I'm going to have one hell of a time playing counselor after this case!" She would help where she could but Reid was going to need professional counseling after this. She honestly wouldn't be surprised if he left the team. She hoped he did, they didn't deserve his genius help after this disaster.

"What? What test?"

"His medical test - which ever one they took him to get. This is Reid's room and there's no Reid, so..."

"Garcia didn't tell you?" Of course she hadn't, Elle had come here obviously. Gideon swallowed a lump in his throat, wishing that Hotch hadn't left. "Reid's in the ICU...comatose."