I'm not crazy.

Spencer Reid glanced through the file held in his hands, reading the sentences without taking any of the information in. His head was burning. The headache that had been present had built into a migraine at some point before lunch and Spencer could already see the dark spots eating away at his vision. An odd throbbing sensation was itching at his temples and at that moment, the usually alert doctor was finding it incredibly difficult to stay focused on the task at hand.

I'm not crazy.

Blinking slowly, Spencer attempted to focus on the words typed across the paper. The letters were floating around and changing places, making the words barely legible, something that Spencer–an avid reader capable of devouring 20,000 words per minute–most definitely wasn't used to. He could barely hear the conversation taking place around the table, the voices muffled as if his ears were filled with wads of cotton wool.

I'm not crazy.

He had been to see four different doctors that week, the diagnosis from each being almost identical. There was nothing wrong, no explanation for the headaches that kept appearing and causing him to lose sleep. No painkiller could even touch them, and Spencer was becoming desperate for some relief from the constant onslaught of throbbing pain that only seemed to get worse with time.

I'm not crazy.

Spencer knew he was probably overreacting and the rational part of his brain had told him so several times. However, the young man couldn't help thinking that he knew what the issue was. It usually skipped a generation, if you were lucky, but the fact that his mother had schizophrenia and could possibly have passed it along was eating away at the corners of his sanity, and the nagging feeling that he could go down the same route as his mother terrified him. Spencer didn't care if he went crazy; he worried that he would lose his mind, the only thing that made him Spencer.

I'm not crazy.

Then again, he passed all of the psychological tests upon entry to the FBI. There had been no hint at the time that he was even remotely mentally unstable, so why should that change now? And yet again, Spencer's highly analytical mind had come up with an answer to a question that should have remained unanswered for his own sake. He was reaching the age at which the symptoms of schizophrenia actively appeared, and he couldn't help but feel that the exact reasoning for his headaches could be explained by this.

I'm not crazy.

Those three words kept spiralling around his head, almost driving him to the point of insanity. The more he tried to think about something else, the more the possibility seemed to haunt him; taunting him with that one sentence that seemed to be permanently burned into the front of his skull, driving him round the bend as he tried desperately hard to focus his mind upon something else.

I'm not crazy.

"Reid?"

Spencer jumped. The voice of the Aaron Hotchner, the Behavioural Analysis Unit's first-in-command was altogether too loud and close, a change from the muted sounds he had been hearing just moments before. He glanced around the table, meeting with several pairs of concerned eyes. Spencer shook his head, forcing a smile and ignoring the sharp pain that had suddenly appeared, piercing at his temples as he spoke.

"Sorry, I didn't get much sleep last night," Spencer apologised. He wasn't exactly lying either. He had sat up through the very early hours of the morning, head buried under a pillow in a futile attempt to shut out the dim light that made his head throb more than usual. The bright fluorescent tubes in the room right now were doing a good job of recreating that pain. Aaron glanced at Spencer for a moment with furrowed brows.

"We were just handing out tasks. I'd like you and Emily to pair up and put together a geographical profile," he instructed and Spencer nodded as an indication that he understood. Truthfully, Spencer would have preferred anything but being given a joint task at that moment in time, wanting to work alone so he wasn't pulled into Interrogation 101 due to his unusual lack of concentration. For any other body in the room, that would have been considered normal but Spencer was usually nothing less than alert, and the fact that his concentration levels had slipped would be sending alarm bells ringing in every single one of his colleagues' heads.

"JJ and I will leave for the crime scene in a moment. I have my cell if anything comes up."

Spencer could have sworn that the Unit Chief cast a sideways glance in Spencer's direction as he left, but the action was too quick to analyse, too fast for Spencer to break down. The group began to disband; Emily heading for the large boards that took up most of the floor space in the cramped police station, everyone else heading to complete their designated tasks so they could solve the case and make it home in time for the evening news.

"I'm not crazy," Spencer muttered under his breath as he lifted himself from his seat with heavy hands, the only person left in the room. "Am I?"

A/N: This is set post-six and was written around the abandoned plotline of Reid's headaches. May become a full-length story, may not.