Aaron Hotchner took the seat next to Reid's ICU bed, unable to comprehend what was staring him in the face. He had thought that coming here, getting away from Gideon would calm him down - but it hadn't. If anything, seeing what had become of Reid - and thinking about Gideon's involvement (however indirect) was just making him more and more angry. In all of the years they had known each other, he had never known Jason Gideon to be so senseless and careless with a victim. It brought home to him just how little he knew about his agents - and what drove them to such a demanding and emotionally grueling job. The only way a person could handle a job with this much stress was if they had the right motivation to go the extra 100 miles for the victims and their families...but where did that motivation come from?

For him merely prosecuting the criminals had no longer been enough. He had hated looking through the files as a prosecutor, counting the victims and imaging how many could have been saved. He had decided that it was up to him to save them. Haley didn't understand that it wasn't just the ego of wanting to be the hero, it was the need to save people from the destruction that he saw everyday.

J.J. and Garcia were the most emotionally fragile of the group. He knew that they both had a fierce desire for protection, though where that desire came from was still a mystery to him. Of course with Garcia the job had been at first merely a way to avoid federal prison, but he had seen her apply herself to the job above and beyond any of the other analysts and even before joining the Bureau her cyber attacks had been against those she thought were harming the innocent.

Emily Prentiss was still a complete mystery and he wasn't entirely comfortable with that. The way she had handled Reid thus far showed that she had far more experience with victims than a simple desk job rookie possibly could. That kind of calm under pressure did not come from merely looking at crime scene photos all day long. All he knew was that she had been raised overseas, knew Arabic and was a God-send to Reid. For that alone he could have kissed her.

For Morgan, it was the pursuit of justice and/or revenge against those who harmed the defenseless, a remnant of the pain he had suffered from Buford's manipulation and abuse. It was also an attempt (a successful one at that) to live up to his father's memory.

For Gideon, it was the victims that drove him the most, the need to put an end to their suffering. He felt their pain far more than any one else. So why when the victim was his protege had he been the most careless he had ever known him to be?

Then there was Reid.

Hotch gently rubbed his hand (which now lay on the cooling blanket) in soothing circles, his eyes never leaving Reid's closed ones. Somehow even in 'sleep' he looked troubled as if the horror of his memories had been etched into his skin.

"What did he do to you?" Hotch whispered. He had been banishing those thoughts all day. He couldn't focus on Reid's pain. Whenever he thought about it, it became too overwhelming. They saw crime scenes all day long, discussing the injuries inflicted at length, but not the pain those injuries caused nor the long term effects. They gave the crying and hysterical victims (the ones they managed to save at least) back to their families and in many cases never saw them again. That was how the team functioned, focusing too much on the pain would cloud their judgement. That hadn't changed on this case, personal involvement or not.

Reid had endured physical and psychological torture from the get-go, the beatings followed by being forced to choose who to save. That in turn meant choosing who not to save. He had been forced to watch the slaughter of the people he had 'chosen' to die? Had he sat there chained to the chair, hoping and maybe even praying to see the team arrive on the webcam before Hankel? Had he tried to cover his ears with his handcuffed hands to drown out the sound of their screams? Had Hankel forced them to face the camera to give Reid 'the best seat' from which to see the murder?

Had the drugging been equal amounts torture and pleasure: a method of control and pain relief all in one? Had he fought against the needle which would render him unable to escape? Or had he welcomed the reprieve from the nightmare? When he woke up would the drugs be a refuge from the pain or a reminder of it?

Gideon had been right about Reid. He was strong, he could make it. He had made it. No one who was weak could endure such psychological and physical torture and not break sooner. Had Hankel broken him? Yes, but Hotch thought he knew why Reid had broken after so long. It made him angry to think that Gideon and J.J. thought so little of him that they immediately jumped to the conclusion of suicide. Reid, after all, had shown none of the suicidal warning signs prior to this case: No deep depression, no social withdrawal, no spontaneous proclamations of love...none of it.

His own thoughts came back to him like a tidal wave: there was a line - a fine one, but still a line - between self-sacrifice and suicide.

Hotch felt his eyes sting as they welled up. "You did it to save them." Drugged half out of his mind and with little hope that the team would figure out his clue in time to save him, he had confessed. But it had been - he was sure - a self-sacrificing act, not a suicidal one. Had he been so consumed by the guilt of 'choosing' someone to die that he had chosen himself as the next victim instead?

Kill me. Reid's voice echoed in his head. I lied.

But why? Why would he value their lives over his own?

I always take advantage of Reid for his brain, but I never taught him how to deal with things emotionally, his own voice echoed in his head.

Why? Why had he thought that it was up to him to teach Reid these things? He was 25 years old, he should have learned long ago. But he hadn't - why? Reid's profile came back to him, the answer staring at him in Gideon's careworn face.

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... No guiding parental figure.

With an absent father and a mentally unstable mother, Reid had essentially raised himself, the part of parent and child reversed well in advance of their years. Normally the child becoming the parent in a relationship only started with the onset of dementia or disease, usually when the 'child' was in his/her 50s. In this case it had started when Spencer was only 10 years old. He had done well for himself to be sure, but how was it possible? How could a child have taken care of his mentally ill mother and stayed under the radar of social services for so long? Surely someone had noticed the young child struggling on his own.

That was why Reid worked the cases. He wanted to help those who felt trapped and could not help themselves. He felt sympathetic for those who came from broken homes because his own was broken beyond a hope of repair. He felt empathy for the most vile monsters humanity had to offer because he saw just that - their humanity. He wanted to give the help that he had never received so that no one would feel as trapped and scared as he had. But he was strong, far stronger than any of the gave him credit for. He had survived everything that Hankel had thrown at him. He ran through the list again, trying to wrap his head around the full picture of this case in a way he never had before: beaten, drugged, psychological torture, concussion, seizure, heart attack, knife wound...

After all of that, was it so much to ask for a little support from the team? But rather than supporting him, they had furthered his torment in their own selfish desire to 'help'. They had pushed him over the edge. They had turned a deaf ear and blind eye to his pleas for sympathy and comfort.

He thought of Reid sobbing J.J.'s arms, the horrors of the last three days overwhelming his shocked mind. What had J.J. done? Her first response for comfort had been spot on, just what he had needed so badly. And then out of embarrassment it had ended when Garcia entered the room.

He thought of Garcia, so eager to ease the pain that she had outright ignored it. But he couldn't blame her, that's what she always did. She always refused to look at the crime scene photos, always cleaned out her mind with cute pictures and music whenever she did have the misfortune of seeing them.

And Morgan? Morgan was the one he was the most mad at besides Gideon. Morgan was the profiler, Morgan was the visitor who knew the extent of Reid's fractured memory. It was part of the reason he had finally allowed himself to sleep, he had felt confident in Morgan's ability to toe the line. So why had he gotten the knife for the detective? Why hadn't he asked the detective to come back later? He could have at least pulled the curtain to hide the knife from Reid's view. But for all of his stupidity, he couldn't blame Morgan either. Reid had so many risk factors tallied up that it was only a matter of time before one of them was triggered. He couldn't have know that it would scare...

Hotch closed his eyes as his mind completed that horrible thought: scare him to death. Reid had literally been scared to death.

This whole experience was putting the team under pressure in a way they never had been before. The rest of the team, the ones who had NOT been traumatized, were the ones cracking under pressure. Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, Reid was the one who was coming out of the fire stronger than before.

Hotch let the tears fall, making no effort to stop them. He tightened his grip on Reid's cold hand, his voice breaking for the first time in...forever. "I'm so proud of you!"

* Family arrivals in the next chapter *

What got me writing this story this way was J.J.'s reaction to finding Spence in the graveyard. She comes up and gives him a hug which he leans into, and clings to but then she says "I'm so sorry" and he says "It's not your fault." She never even asked if he was okay. She eases her own guilt, Reid eases her guilt and then she turns away. He's even on the verge of tears and hugging Hotch. Hotch looks surprised but at last he returns the hug and asks if he's okay. The next episode no one seems to care or check on him as he's clearly distraught. They just seem to take away his gun for a while because we don't see him out in the field again until the season finale which in chronology is probably a few months later.