Criminal Minds Series Rewrite: Season Two

Revelations: Final Part

Warnings: heavy angst, spencer reid being tortured and drugged

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With another sigh, you walk into the main room where Hotch and Gideon are. The rest are with Penelope.

"We're not getting any closer," Hotch sighs.

"Reid's brilliant. He'll figure out how to survive."

"You know, I always take advantage of Reid for his brain, but I never actually teach him how to deal with things emotionally."

"Lead by example."

"What kind of example is that?"

"He'll make it." Gideon looks past Hotch to see you crying in the corner of the room. They break it off and Hotch goes back into the computer room while Gideon walks over to you. "He's going to make it."

"He's hurting, Gideon. I feel dizzy and my arm hurts like pins and needles. Something is happening to him, and it's all my fault," you sob.

"He. Will. Survive. This is not your fault. You couldn't have known this was going to happen."

"I love him," you say the three words you've been wanting to say to Spencer for the past couple of months, but never had the courage to.

"He is going to get through this."

You have no choice but to accept what he's saying because if you even think about the possibility of losing him, you're not going to survive this. You break off from Gideon and head to Penelope. No one else is in the room, and you're kind of glad for that.

"Any more signs of Spencer?" you clear your throat.

"No, but Tobias just posted the last murder online. It had over seventeen thousand hits in the first twenty minutes."

"Am I a bad person?"

"No, of course not."

"Am I a bad agent for leaving Spencer alone?"

"You did what you thought was right."

"What I thought was right was to follow him, but I didn't. Instead, I went into the fucking barn."

Penelope can see how much guilt you're carrying about all of this, and she sighs and gives in.

"I think you think you knew better, but you couldn't have known this was going to happen. It won't do you any good to feel this way. Let's just focus on getting Spencer back, and then we can see how you feel afterward. I don't think he'll blame you."

"Thanks, Pen."

You head back to the main room where the rest of the team is, and hang off to the side in thought.

"We can trace their whole family history. Here we got happy, smiling pictures of Tobias. Report cards all A's and B's, but at eight years old, we got nothing," Derek says, looking through the files Penelope managed to gather.

On the wall are pictures of Tobias and his family like a diagram or a family tree they can refer to when they talk about him.

"That's his mother leaving," Emily points out another picture. "Six months later, on the other side of the board, we have a form from child services saying they paid a visit. Then, Charles starts keeping journals about punishing sinners and needing to remove the devil from his son which corresponds to Tobias' drug use. He's trying to escape."

"So, wherever Reid is, it was Tobias' choice, not his father's."

"How do you figure?" you ask.

"Look at these two lives. They're like inverse graphs. One's getting weaker while the other one's getting angrier. Tobias would run away. His father would have stood and fought."