Set roughly around season 2, episode 20 - "Honor among thieves".
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She could still feel his slap piercing her cheek with little crimson veins, the loss of balance that clouded her vision as she reached for the nearest object, not to defend herself, but to hold on to something. Some battles cannot be won and she's had plenty of these to know that if you give up, it'll end sooner. As she's regained her sight, the grisly image of blood scattered everywhere penetrated her mind. The floors. Her shaky hands. The corpse in front of her, tied up thoroughly to a chair with a bullet hole in his head. Aubert's face. Her split lip. The metallic taste on her tongue. She could still taste it today. Only today Louise was long gone.
"-therefore I will write to your psychiatrist that, in my opinion, there is no need in doubling your sedative's dosage. What do you say?" Mrs. Russell, her therapist, sat behind her motionless body, guarding her shadow, as Eleanor's thoughts wondered absent-mindedly. "I see the side effects are still taking over at this time." She went on to check her watch. It was long past noon and normally, dissociation, amongst other side effects, occurred during the first part of the day. It was a bizarre sensation, the one she was feeling right now. She could still hear her therapist's voice buzzing in the back of her head, yet she couldn't fully process it. Her mind was focused on something else entirely.
"I was just thinking," she finally managed to utter, the idea of what the next report might say concerning her all too well. "It's just- I had a rough case and the whole thing with the BAU had been bugging me." She sighed, eyes still clasped to the immense window.
There had always been noise and chatter on the busy pedestrian of Adams Morgan. Eleanor hasn't been there in months, much to Mrs. Russell's dismay. Working long cases for the FBI and being away from home for months doing undercover work wasn't a plan fitted for Eleanor's struggles. Chronic insomniacs can't only feed on pills and hope for the best whilst they lose track of their sleep schedule. And although she hadn't had a depressive episode in quite a while, things weren't entirely serene either. Yet, she always made sure to seem on the right track of things.
Eleanor had been cohabiting with her abnormal moral compass for a few years now. It had all started the minute she stepped foot in Paris, after receiving an offer from the DGSE. She had finished her second tour in Afghanistan working as a counterintelligence military for the American Government when she got the proposition, and at that time, returning to the country where an insignificant part of it was still controlled by the people that killed her family sounded appealing to her. Not anymore.
By the time she returned, she couldn't conceal her struggles anymore, nor comprehend all the trauma she brought back. Yet, none of these things were listed in her psych eval. If there was something Corine Trudeau had taught her in all those three goddamn years of working for DGSE, it was that if you cannot control yourself, you can always control your appearance. And Corine Trudeau always made sure that her agents' appearances were impeccable. She later understood that a smooth talker is better seen than a non-talker in therapy sessions. And that what was written in those reports would determine the future of her career as a law enforcement agent. So she lied until she mastered it. Until they believed. Until those reports became squeaky clean. Unlike the blood still splashed on the palms of her hands. The only person she couldn't lie to was Jason Gideon. She blamed it on the fact that he was a profiler and somehow had a better trained eye to unmask the little gestures that gave her away, something that a simple psychologist seemed to ignore. The alarming thing was that she deliberately chose to join a team full of profilers although her lying skills hadn't improved.
