Page 7 of Reid's Fixation

When he woke, he was in the hospital, face down on a bed and he hurt all over.

It was bearable, but he assumed he must be drugged.

Over the next few weeks, he recovered slowly. His body hurt, his skin felt tight and hot, and he could hardly move without jarring some part of his body.

It sucked. His body was fighting the recovery and they had to do more than one surgery on him for some skin grafts on his neck, and his back, and for his torn rotator cuff and his dislocated shoulder.

He started to go through physical therapy and when all was said and done, he sat in his bed, knowing he needed to sleep, but was not able to.

His brain kept replaying over and over his past, the bomb, his career in Chicago, finding Isabelle in that dumpster and his time with Nikolai.

As he thought over that fateful night, he kept seeing Nikolai shoot that cop over and over and trying his hardest to find the reason why the man who for all intents and purposes hadn’t done anything of that nature before, all of the sudden would.

And as that night came back to him, he did his best to recall everything that was happening, and he knew deep in his soul that something wasn’t right. That he was missing something huge and it was right on the tip of his tongue, the edges of his memory.

He would do everything in his power to figure it out though.

He had to. He knew in his soul that Nikolai was innocent, and he wouldn’t live with the guilt that he sent his best friend to prison for something he didn’t do.

He had to figure this out. Puzzles were something he enjoyed and damn it, he would put all the pieces of this one together so that an innocent man didn’t rot inside that prison any longer.