A/N: Thanks for the reviews, favourites and follows.

Disclaimer: I own nothing to do with Criminal Minds or its characters.

This is set after the season 9 finale.

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Penelope Garcia

"I don't believe in guns."

The words had left her mouth while she was still experiencing the pain of her own bullet wound. But she meant them. And couldn't imagine the day when she would change her mind.

Penelope Garcia was a technical analyst; she was not a federal agent. That was an important distinction because it meant she could put some distance between herself and the horrors of the cases on which she worked. She could sit in her tech cave, as she was just now, and distract herself with the trinkets and colour which surrounded her.

Catching sight of her reflection in one of the monitors, she reached up to fix the fabric flower which was slipping from where she had pinned it in her hair. With the flower back in place, she examined her appearance. The bright lips and the dramatically made up eyes. Her blonde hair and the turquoise frames of her glasses. Did this still project her personality or was it now just a mask? Had the person underneath been irrevocably changed by the long hours she spent waiting for news on victims and killers and friends?

Six years ago she didn't believe in guns; three days ago she'd shot someone.

She'd held the cool piece of metal between her hands and squeezed the trigger. She'd caused that very real bullet to pierce into the body of another human being – just like someone had once done to her. And she hadn't even thought twice.

It had shaken her – she'd felt sick to her stomach as the bullet left the chamber and her ears began to ring. But if she had to, she would do it again, because it meant that Reid was recuperating in his apartment rather than lying on a mortuary slab.

Her colleagues were her family: that was how they survived. And she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she would kill for them. That she could kill for them.

And that terrified her at least as much as the psychopaths whose images and crimes crossed her screens.

Surely it wasn't possible to maintain a disbelief in a weapon that you were willing to use? She wondered what other paradoxes would arise from underneath her confident, carefully painted exterior.

She was no profiler. In fact, she was often glad that she didn't have the same insights into the minds of evil that her friends did. But she knew there were many catalysts which drove a person to hurt another living thing. And all she could hope was that hers would only ever be love.