Unknown- A Criminal Minds Fanfic

Chapter 41- Next Time

Let me just tell you, the next week was the worst week of my life.  Even worse than the two months of psychological torture that ended in actual torture, but against the explicit advice of my psychiatrist, I tried not to think about that.

I walked into his office at two in the afternoon on my fourth day of exile.  The office was on the second floor of a random office building in a small town approximately sixty miles from DC, where I was 'temporarily relocated until further notice'.

The only person I knew here was said psychiatrist, because it was Rossi.  Partly because they wanted to keep the whole ordeal contained within the Bureau, but mostly because I had refused to talk to the shrink they had brought in specifically for dealing with the nightmares that played on a continuous loop every time I closed my eyes. 

You'd think the pain meds they'd given me for my broken ribs, headache, and the slow-healing gashes on my shoulder and side would help knock me out into a blissful unconsciousness, but they only made them worse.  They'd knock me out, all right, but only to the point where I couldn't wake myself up when I was having a nightmare and instead I was stuck in the thralls of it until morning.

 Which is why I was skipping taking them, as Rossi immediately hypothesized when I walked in and dropped down into a chair, trying and failing to hide my wince at the seemingly constant pain.

"Why haven't you been taking your pain meds?" he asked, not accusingly but more in an observational way, like he was legitimately curious about my answer.

"Oh, haven't you heard? Drugs are bad for you," I answered, feigning innocence.

He gave me his patented don't-try-to-bullshit-me look.  It was one I had seen all too often the first time I'd met with him two days ago.

"We've talked about this, McDowell.  You should not be using sarcasm as a defense mechanism to avoid conversations that make you uncomfortable," he answered automatically.  Obviously he and the rest of the team had profiled that about me long before all this had happened.

"I am very comfortable with this topic of conversation.  I did my third grade science fair project on it," I replied, one hundred percent lying.  I hadn't even had a third grade science fair.

He sighed and repeated, "Why haven't you been taking them?  I thought they helped you sleep, and you look like you haven't been getting much of that, either."

"Obviously not," I answered, instinctively crossing my arms over my chest. And by Rossi's glance, I knew he was noting 'defensive gestures indicate unwillingness to open conversation', or some variation of that, on the notepad in his head.

He knew someone taking notes about me made me uncomfortable so he didn't have a notepad even though I knew he occasionally did when giving other members of the FBI psych evals.  Though obviously this was an entirely different circumstance than a basic psych eval.

Again he pinned me with that patented look, so I sighed and gave in, "They don't help me sleep, they just make it hard for me to wake up," I explained vaguely before adding, "From nightmares, I mean."

"Tell me about what you see," he said.

I won't lie and say I wasn't tempted to start describing what the dinky little office we were in looked like, but instead I decided to suck it up and let him psychoanalyze me.  We still had an hour and forty minutes to waste before I could go back to doing nothing with my time, I might as well see if Rossi's shrinking could do anything for the exhaustion that had been plaguing me for what felt like ages. 

And, though you wouldn't have guessed it by the way he was acting, he had asked me to talk about it the first time we'd met for my shrink sessions two days ago.  Then, I had deflected, denied, and used every other psychological trick in the book to avoid it, so I decided I might as well try it now.

I took a breath and started talking.

"Fine.  It's always the same thing," I said, searching for how to explain it.

He waited.

"It's dark, and I'm running down a street.  I can't see much, but there's this overwhelming almost paralyzing sense of dread.  Like when you just know something bad is going to happen but you're completely helpless to stop it," I started. 

That sense of dread was creeping up on me just remembering it, and I paused but then forced myself to continue, "The street suddenly stops, and then I'm trapped, walls on all four sides, and there's a man at my back."

"What does he look like?" Rossi interrupted me, and I snapped my gaze back to him.

Again, he just waited.

"Big.  Not tall, though he was taller than me, but just big," I tried to clarify the blurry dimensions of the shadowed person that flickered in my mind's eye.

"Do you recognize him?"

"No.  But I know who it is," I said.

Rossi stayed silent. I knew the trick, we used it often when interrogating suspects.  If you stay silent long enough, the majority of the time the other person will elaborate on what they were saying or continue talking just to change the subject. 

I debated if I should play into it, but I also knew Rossi knew what I was doing and he was expecting me to, unlike most people, not say anything until he talked first. 

So instead I opened my mouth first, "It's the person that tried to kill me.  And he always does, and then everything turns black and it starts over again," I explained, my voice even, objective, detached.

"In your nightmare, do you always die the same way?" Rossi asked.

"Yes," I answered.

"How?"

I paused, searching the loop of terror that had implanted itself in my memory.  The man was always standing there when I turned around/  He'd stare me down and run at me, and I always tried to back up but I was never fast enough.  I ended up on the ground with him leaning over me and then I was just...dead.

"I don't know," I replied honestly.

Rossi nodded and remarked, "Maybe you should find out next time it happens."

Thank god he was talking about the nightmare and not reality.  Because Matthew Skinner was still out there alive and well, and next time might end up being the last time.  I wasn't sure what was worse, though.  Dying once for good, or dying over and over again knowing there's always a next time to be murdered.