Psychopathy

Chapter 5- How It All Went Down

It wasn't a pleasant time for Isabel. Her first session of physical torture had just finished, and if that was how every session was going to go, she would break in no time. She knew it would only get worse. After all, it hadn't ended how her torturer wanted it to; not with her breaking, but just with him getting bored. For now, though, she had been given a short reprieve. Her body was exhausted, and though she didn't want to, she eventually fell victim to sleep. In her dream, she sat in a field of grass, and her friend sat beside her.

"Why are you here, Isabel?" her friend asked, and she raised an eyebrow. "You really shouldn't have come here."

"Why not?"

"Because if you spend too much time here, you may never want to leave."

"And would that be so bad? Would it be so bad if I were to just stay here and leave that awful existence behind?" Isabel asked, and her friend shrugged.

"Stay here, and you'll lose yourself forever," her friend warned, before looking her straight in the eye. "Better wake up, Isabel. Wake up before you forget how to."

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JJ watched as Akilah paced back and forth across the round table room, biting her nails as Garcia shared her findings with the rest of the team. She had never seen Akilah so anxiously worked up- she was known to get so worked up in anger, but never out of anxiety. Her mom instincts were quickly kicking in, and she tried to think of a way to calm Akilah down and ease the anxiety. But how could she calm Akilah down when her best friend was missing?

It had shocked them all when Hotch had announced that Ciara was missing. After all, they had just seen her the night before. Now, JJ knew from experience that life could change in a flash- she had learned that the hard way when Roslyn had died. But as she had gotten older and she had started to relearn how to trust the world around her, she had started to forget. Sure, she saw how quickly things could change through her job, but she had started to forget what it was like to have it happen in her own life.

And now she was paying for her forgettance by being completely blindsided when one of her teammates had vanished without a single trace.

Akilah groaned in frustration when Garcia revealed she hadn't been able to find anything new about Ciara's past. If the Unsubs were in Ciara's past, she couldn't find them- the team would simply have to go off what Ciara had already told them. Akilah scoffed, saying that was easier said than done, and JJ rubbed her face in frustration. It was true that they didn't know very much about Ciara's past. At first, they had wanted to find out more, but when every attempt only ended in failure, they had decided it wasn't that important. The only thing that mattered was who she was now- or so they had thought.

"Alright. Keep trying," Hotch said, and Garcia nodded, before looking over at another one of her screens.

"Oh, by the way, I got the analysis back on the fingerprints and the blood samples," Garcia said, and JJ watched as Reid's head shot up. This whole time, she had wanted to ask him how he was holding up, but it didn't take a profiler to figure out that the answer was not all that well. She didn't know exactly what was going on between Reid and Ciara, but it was easy to see that there was something- not that either of them would admit it.

But JJ didn't need Reid to say it to be able to tell how much he cared for Ciara. She had seen the way he had panicked when William Cartwright had taken her- he had wanted to storm right back into the house to look for her, head injury be damned. That wasn't just the behavior of a teammate- that was the behavior of something more. She didn't know how much more; perhaps Reid and Ciara didn't even know themselves.