I had to write, at least, a one-shot after last night's episode. The song lyrics are from a Johnny Cash cover of a NIN song. They aren't the type of musicians I usually listen to, but both renditions are so emotional and raw that I wrote this whole thing in one sitting while listening to the Johnny Cash version. It only felt appropriate to use it for this post "Lauren" one-shot. Hopefully, I did the episode, character, and song justice. Enjoy!

"I wear this crown of thorns upon my liar's chair. Full of broken thoughts I cannot repair. Beneath the stains of time, the feelings disappear. You are someone else. I am still right here. What have I become, my sweetest friend? Everyone I know goes away in the end."-Johnny Cash, "Hurt."

These days, he doesn't know who he is anymore. These days, he doesn't know if he ever was anyone at all. These days, he exists, merely because not existing takes too much effort, much more effort than he knows how to muster. These are the days where he walks, talks, and sounds like he should, like he used to, but he's not there. These days, he's everywhere, but nowhere all at the same time. And he's not sure whether or not this matters anymore.

Around him, the world continues its cycles, its monotonous repetition of sunrises and sunsets, and he knows that nothing's changed because, more often than not, he's awake for both ends of the loop. Sometimes, on a rare day off, he sits in a public area sipping a strong cup of coffee, watching everyone bustle through their lives. There are mothers with strollers and worn sneakers, completing errands only to venture to appointments, play dates, parks with swings and slides. There are teenagers with skin marked by rows of studded earrings and with dyed hair that rivals Garcia's once-flamboyant styles. The more defiant ones pucker cracked lips and chipped fingernails around stubbed cigarettes that they never finish, saving the remaining bit of nicotine into dirty, holed jean pockets. The elderly continue their slow descent, assisted and propped by the arm of a nurse, family member, or a metal walker with deflated tennis balls protecting the bottoms. He watches them more intently than the brisk-walking, cell phone-addicted men in business suits. The older ones are ticking clocks, and he debates how fair it is that they still have time left when she doesn't.

Some days, when he views her desk that was unceremoniously emptied by someone when everyone had gone home for the night, he thinks that he should really feel angry. But anger, especially pointless, clouded, concealed anger, has never been his thing. He's the type of person who uses anger when it's uncontrollable, when it's needed, and when he knows there's a point. He learned a long time ago that anger stemming from nowhere, from nothing, has its roots deep down within a problem, a habit, he left behind years ago. No, he can't be angry. Maybe dejected, always depressed, but never angry. Morgan has that one covered, and it doesn't seem fair to invade his grieving process. When he thinks about it, it doesn't seem like grieving. It feels like breathing. And he's not sure when the two became one.

There are times after trying cases where the old wounds linger in their aching joints and sleep-deprived eyes, throwing shadowed ghosts onto every late-night flight and creasing all their expressions with a palpable exhaustion. They never speak anymore, not like the used to, and sometimes he wished they would. He waits for the time when Rossi will stop being so calm, so poised, and accepting. He wants the Rossi from the hospital waiting room. The one who crumbled, who broke, but the one who stayed. He tried to leave, cowardly as it feels now, but his feet had moved and worked for him before his brain understood. These days, there are a lot of things he doesn't understand and there are many more things he refuses to question.

He longs to hear Garcia's banter, her jokes, her inappropriate, but tolerated, comments through live feeds and phone calls. Instead, the voice is clipped, controlled, and, when it isn't, it's abrupt. She tells them what they need to know, what they have to hear, but she doesn't ease the pain anymore. Then, the dial tone resounds a never-ending even blankness that makes his skin prickle with memories. Morgan almost always turns away first, breaking contact with a defiant thumb pressed onto the disconnect key. It sounds as empty as his portion of the phone calls he receives from JJ. She pries, she tries to break through the walls that he has built and watched grow to dizzying heights, but he can't tell her he's okay. He can't promise to visit her, or Henry, even thought his godson is getting older. Even though he's older. Instead, he sends cryptic, scrawled messages on post cards he buys or steals from the various places he visits during cases. He hopes she'll stop calling. When her check-ins become less frequent and then few and far between, he wants to smile because he's won. But then he realizes what that means, and how much wider the rift has become. Just like that, the connection that he once thought was impenetrable breaks.

And Seaver? She has no idea what to do, but she's recoiled inside herself. She studies her books incessantly, as if they hold the answers to everything. As if knowledge and words make up for some mistake she's made, although he knows that no one is to blame for everything that happened. And, when he looks at her, blond hair cascading down so it covers her face, lips silently mouthing words he could read in fractions of a second, his insides burn. His anger seethes, ruminates, and threatens to erupt, but he quells its rising, preferring to avoid the young agent who looks to him for guidance he doesn't want or know how to give.

Hotch sometimes looks like he wants to drop the mask, the facade, the endless game of charade they've been playing for so long now. Instead, when the moment of concern clouds his eyes and when he stares at the distant far-off horizon from a tiny plane window that does not allow for the full view of the sky, the younger agent thinks that there's something more, there's something else, the unit chief isn't revealing. But he doesn't bother interfering. In another life, he may have, but there's too much time and empty space between them all now. Hotch is allowed to grieve differently than everyone else. In a little over a year, he's buried a loved one and a friend. When he thinks about it, he knows they all loved her. Much more than they'd ever show, admit, or acknowledge. And maybe that's why they can no longer look at one another.

Sometimes Morgan's whole body tenses, as if pain is shooting through each limb, rocketing off of calcified bones, misfiring neurons, and frayed tendons. But he knows pain and he knows Morgan, at least he thinks he does, at least he used to, and this involuntary shudder is different. It's the one memories create. The kind of malady that the past lives through, and the present tries to avoid. He wants to reach out to Morgan more than anyone else because Morgan, in other worlds, did that for him. He was always there, always present, and always willing to fight. The battle's over, the white flags are fluttering in the whirlwind created by secrets, and Morgan is no more than a shell. He longs to tell Morgan he understands, he feels the same way too, but the words cease to form. In the hospital waiting room, he noticed the bloodstains and how the dried liquid cracked between the rough, calloused folds etched in Morgan's skin. Sometimes, if he looks long enough at Morgan's hands, he can still see her blood, her end, and he can't help but feel jealous that Morgan was able to say goodbye.

And he knows it all comes down to that, to goodbyes, although it's not that he's even been any good at them. It's not like he hasn't had practice, though. Enough people have left his life. By now, he should be an expert, like the way he is with facts, statistics, and tangents that he now prefers to keep to himself. But all the past departures were sudden, and all he's ever been left with are empty words, illegible reasons, and the haunting feeling that there will never be enough time or enough space in his life to understand why he must stay, must endure, must watch the blurred distance, while others vanish for some illusion of higher ground.

These days, he walks aimlessly in the fog rolling through early-morning hours, scouring the dew-soaked world for signs, reasons, and the comforts he wished came from someone, anyone, and, worse, anything. Sometimes he finds dilapidated buildings with homeless men wrapped in rags and filled with hollow stares. Other times, he rests at 24-hour diners, nursing one cup of coffee long past the welcoming point. Other times, he watches the bars empty with hoards of bleary eyed people stumbling on rough pavement that is not forgiving when they fall to meet its surface. He avoids looking when he sees Rossi walking straightly out of one, even though the older man sees him too. They all have their coping mechanisms, and his cannot be in the form of any type of substance, although he's imagined the euphoric place more than once. More than he'd like to admit. Sometimes, when it's all too much, he sits in a meeting. Any meeting, really, it doesn't matter. He listens to the stories of the lost, the broken, the recovered, and the lonely, and, when it's his turn to share, he always walks away without a word. During those times, he can't tell a group of strangers that he's no longer past the time of disjointed release.

These days, he finds her grave, the empty symbol for her life, and he traces the stone indents, the familiar name, with his eyes. Sometimes he stares, sometimes he speaks, and, sometimes, he remembers. When he's lucky, he hears her voice, meets her gaze, feels her smile, and it's all alright again. For a moment, things are back to the skewed form of normal that he once resented, but now wishes would return. In these recollections, he savors the moment before the dawn blemishes pinks and grays onto the world. He sits with himself. He tells her that he'll be better. He'll try to sleep, he'll participate at meetings, and he'll smile, joke, and even spew a fact or two again. He knows she wouldn't want this, all this darkness. She'd say her life was filled with too many lies, too many disguises already, but, these days, he's not sure how to be better. Maybe he will today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe, one of these days, he'll finally return to keeping his promises.

These days, he's only sure of one thing, if there's anything to be absolutely sure of anymore, and that knowledge propels him from one moment to the next. It circles in his mind as he tries to sleep on his stripped bed, staring at the countless rotations made by the humming ceiling fan. He chokes this truth down his esophagus, like the black coffee he now somehow manages to stomach, and it almost always pulsates in tempo to the perpetual throbbing in his head. It's the certainty that allows him to find the motions to complete his job. He pulls his gun mechanically now, never missing a mark since she left. It's the way he goes with Morgan to the gym, and how the older man silently accepts his need to squash the burning blame and guilt coursing through his bloodstream. He sees this all from far away, from somewhere he can't hurt, and he doesn't know what will happen today anymore than he knows what will happen tomorrow. Sometimes, he accepts that she wasn't just one person. She was many people; she wore many masks, yet, during brief moments, he's grateful he knew the real one.

Yet, every time he turns to leave her grave, he mouths the words he never got to say, the ones he practically would destroy himself to say, and he tries to tell himself that she hears him. He naively tells himself that she's out there, somewhere, and one day they'll all be back together. One day, but not this day, he'll be able to live completely again. Until then, he inhales, exhales, focuses his gaze on the path leading away from the memory of her, and whispers his goodbye.

These days, he's not sure who he's really leaving behind.