I. JJ

A booming car alarm went off around two-thirty in the morning. The kind that makes a person believe that the bloody apocalypse is coming. Not that she'd been actually sleeping anyway, FBI Special Agent Jennifer Jareau, JJ to her friends, opened her weary eyes. Without even bothering to look, she knew exactly where the obnoxious and intrusive sound was coming from.

Three houses to the left. Gibson Barrett. Twenty-six. Wickedly handsome, winningly charismatic and arrogant as all living hell. They'd gone out once.. Mostly because he was cute and somewhat charming. Disarmingly so, if she were to be honest about it.

At least he had been at first. All of that that had ended about the time he'd oh so suavely informed her that him buying her a forty dollar steak dinner actually meant that he was buying a night of rock and roll fun in the sack with her. And gosh, wasn't she just such the lucky lady?

She groaned, remembering just how bad of a night that had been. To his credit, Barrett had eventually accepted her refusal to sleep with him. At least for that night. And to be honest, it hadn't come easy. He'd called her a few names, told her she was making a mistake and assured her that she'd regret it. She's remained non-responsive to his words of love, all the while her mind considering exactly how far up his ass her high-heeled boot could get.

The alarm continued to ring through the neighborhood, wailing violently. A dog a few houses down the street started to bark and involuntarily, JJ shivered, her body suddenly going quite cold. Which was silly and ridiculous really, because she knew the name of that crazy little mutt. Toby. He was an overexcited tri-colored Jack Russell who was prone to wetting himself whenever anyone would see fit to pet him a time or two.

He was harmless, gentle and even pretty cute.

And she was terrified of him.

To herself, she mused that Gibson was a bit like a dog, too. Cute just like Toby. And just like Toby, he didn't quite know how to take "no" for an answer. He didn't know how to stay away long after he'd been shooed away.

Next door, a far too bright light went on in a townhouse. It was the same model as hers. Two stories. Modern. Useful. Damned expensive. Again, she knew without looking what was going on in that house. Knew exactly who lived there and what he was doing.

Jim Murdock. He was a grouchy older man in his fifties whose starry-eyed and much younger wife had left him in the fall. Angry and five seconds from blasting off into orbit, Murdock was the kind of fellow she tried to avoid at all costs. When she had no choice but to exchange a forced hello, she did her best to escape the scene quickly. Often she failed. Far too often she was forced to endure fifteen to twenty minutes worth of how the world was going to hell in a handbasket.

She always wanted to say, "If you only knew, sir." What she usually managed to get out was, "Yeah, yeah."

Now, surely standing in front of his oversized window wearing little but a tiny terrifyingly sheer pair of bleached white boxers, Jim Murdock suddenly screamed out, "Turn that fucking thing off!"

JJ laughed, but it was more a sound of pathetic misery than legitimate mirth. Exhaustion, wariness, and perhaps even a wee bit of depression slapped down against her brow like a ton of bricks. Sleep was hard enough to come by these days without the addition of loud noises. As it was, she was averaging an hour, maybe two before the dreams would come.

They always started the same. With those horrible dogs. Jaws wide, drool and blood dripping down off of their impossibly sharp fangs.

Then the dream – "no", JJ softly chided herself aloud, "call it what it is, a nightmare" – would mutate. Sometimes the dogs would grow in numbers. From three to five or six. More often though, their numbers stayed the same, they just became more brutal. And when they did, they hurt like hell.

Dreams be damned, she could feel the bites, the mauling, the God awful tearing. She could hear it as well. The sound of flesh being torn from bone, ripped away like beef jerky. And her screams, her nightmarish screams, they echoed. Sometimes even into the day. Sometimes it was the fury of her screaming which brought her back to the world of the living.

But still, if it had ended there, with being shredded alive by the beasts, with waking up blankets soaked with sweat and shaking like a leaf, tears in her eyes and her throat raw, she could have dealt. She could have rationalized it.

Called it part of the job and moved right on down the road.

Ah, but no, they never stopped there. The nightmares always took another turn. Towards him. Towards what she'd seen on the computer screens. How those poor people had been butchered by Tobias. And in her dreams, it was Reid who was being slashed. It was Spencer Reid who was being cut down as if he were no more than corn stalk on harvest day.

Bad enough what had actually happened to him, but the nightmares made it so much worse.

And so, instead of waking up with a few tears in her eyes, maybe even a few escaping down her cheeks, she often woke up screaming his name.

But that was her secret. She wouldn't tell. Couldn't tell. Not anymore that Reid could or would tell his secret.

Something was very wrong with him. She could see that. They all could. Well of course they could. It was their job – "not mine, theirs" she reminded herself - to be able to look into a person's eyes and immediately know what made them tick. But for a reason none of them could quite understand – certainly not she - they'd all decided to step back and give him his space.

Let him heal himself, right? Let him work it out. Because they believed in him. Knew he could do it. Right?

Bullshit. Guilt. That's all it was. Fucking guilt.

And as she dwelled on her own pangs of remorseful responsibility, the alarm continued to wail, seeming to get louder with each passing moment. Blowing out air between her teeth, JJ turned a bit in her bed, towards the sound.

She could see the reflections of more lights in the neighborhood snapping on. Then came Murdock's voice again, "I'm going to come down there and kick your ass if you don't quiet that Goddamn thing, Barrett!"

JJ snorted derisively. Murdock was tiny compared to Barrett. Barrett was strong and healthy, youthful and exuberant. Murdock would be insane to take him on. But maybe he had a gun, she thought grimly. A gun could do a lot. It could even the playing field. It could kill a man dead. Dogs, too.

The alarm seemed to get louder, which considering the fact that it was already screaming at a deafening decibel, seemed impossible.

JJ rolled over and reached across the nightstand closest to her, towards where a bottle of sleeping pills was sitting. She stared at it, frowning with the awareness that maybe she'd been using the little blue capsules a bit too often these days. After a moment, she tossed that thought away.

Sleep, she reminded herself. She needed sleep. Come morning, she'd be expected to be her usual chipper and composed self. The team knew that something was wrong with Reid. She had no interest in giving them something else to worry about. Especially since she wasn't even sure she had the right to be worries about.

More guilt then, yes. Responsibility.

She was the senior agent. She'd let them separate. She'd left his back unguarded. And then…

Growling in frustration, trying desperately not to go down that mental road again – for the ten billionth time – she grabbed the bottle, yanked the cap off and popped two blue pills into her mouth and then washed them down quickly with lukewarm water that tasted oddly of cardboard.

As she put the bottle back down, her blue eyes caught on her black iPod, which was lying on its side on the nightstand. It was recharging itself, juicing up after being completely drained on the trip back from New Orleans.

For a moment she thought about the handsome detective she'd met there. He'd been sweet and handsome and a hell of a distraction for the demons in her mind. And while she'd been there, she'd even slept a bit. Which was ironic, really.

But still, she had.

Because for a few days, her nightmares had seemed like idiotic child's play next to the right here and now of the vicious Jack the Ripper style murders.

But that was then. And in the quiet of a night without a case to keep her feet and mind moving, the dreams were free to flow back. And she was free to dwell on the guilt buzzing deep within her soul. Like flies flocking hungrily to spoiling human flesh.

JJ sighed, tried to shake the mental image away. She plucked up the iPod and the accompanying earphones and shoved them into her ears. She pushed play and let the music flood her head. She didn't recognize the song that started up, it was something off a playlist that Morgan had created for her before everything had begun.

The song was loud. Too loud for her. The words blurred together, made no sense. She wondered idly if maybe the pills were already kicking in.

But in the end, she didn't actually care one way or the other. She only cared that the sound of the alarm had finally been blocked out.