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Jason Gideon could have spent his entire paycheck on single malt and his nerves would have still been frayed. So he stopped after two. He had a headache from spending the day in the sun, or at least that's what he was telling himself. He rubbed his temples. He’d been pacing the bar and the team was starting to notice, so he forced himself to take a seat near Hotch.The team was celebrating Spencer in the hotel bar. The exuberant noise was doing nothing good for Jason’s aching head. JJ and Hotch were with Spencer, dipping chips in salsa and buying cocktails.“Guys,” Jason heard Spencer say. “I don’t really drink.”“But you were a hero today,” JJ chimed. “You totally saved not just Elle, but everyone else on that train.” She offered to take his drink off his hands and get him something non alcoholic.“I could compromise and have a kombucha,” Spencer said. “The fermented fungus in the beverage creates a very light alcohol content. It is a healthy alternative. Do you think they have any of that here?”“No, Spencer. I do not think they have any kombucha here,” JJ giggled. Hotch rolled his eyes at Jason and smiled as much as he ever did. Jason managed to smile through urge to check his watch again. Morgan had gone to the hospital to follow up with the psychiatrist and was waiting for Elle to be discharged. She was fine, of course, but it was protocol to be evaluated after an incident. Jason glanced at the clock on the wall over the bar. It had barely moved three minutes from the last time he checked it. He certainly wasn’t going to ask the team again if they had heard from Morgan or Greenaway. It was bad enough they’d all seen the raw panic that had gripped him that afternoon, bad enough that they had all seen him race into the train car like a madman.Robert Oxton Bolt wrote, “A belief is not merely an an idea the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind.”For a short time, standing in the scorching sun, Jason’s mind had been possessed with the idea Elle was going to die at the hands of that delusional psychotic man in there. And in that moment, Jason himself suffered a momentary lapse of sanity as he ran, gun drawn, to throw himself between her and horror.An excited whoop startled him from his reverie. Derek and Elle had just staggered into the bar and the team was greeting them in true, heroic fashion. Jason watched as Elle quietly thanked Spencer for all he’d done for her that afternoon. He watched Derek saunter up to the bar with JJ on his heels. Then he watched as Elle turned and started to slip out of the scene. He got up and followed her out into the lobby.“Elle. You okay?”“Yeah. Just tired.” She turned around momentarily to say this and then continued walking toward the elevators. He caught up to her and pressed the “up” button before she could. She glanced from the button to his fingers to his face and then turned to stare at the elevator doors, as if willing them to open.“What did they say at the hospital?”“The psychiatrist is going to be fine. They are keeping her overnight for observation, and her family is coming to be with her. She’ll probably need some good therapy herself, but other than that she’s going to make it. Teddy has been in surgery. He’ll make it and he'll be transferred to a secure facility for comprehensive observation and evaluation. The murder charge likely won’t stick because of his state of mind, but he will be held. With treatment, he won’t hurt anyone else. Or at least that’s the hope, right?” She shrugged.“I meant about you, Elle. How are you?”The elevator door opened and she stepped on. He followed her. “I’m fine.” She pressed the “7” button and the doors closed.“You don’t quite look fine.”“Gideon,” she began. Her voice had an exasperated edge that made him smile in spite of himself. “I’m tired. I just want to go to my room and lie down.”“Okay,” he said and they rode up in silence. “You mind if I just see you there?”“What? And miss the party downstairs? I know how you love your single malts after a good finish.”“Yeah, well, truth be told, I’ve got a bit of a head ache from being out in the sun today,” he chuckled lightly. He neglected to mention that the headache was more than likely from the adrenaline that had flooded then vacated his body. Headaches, shakes, they were part of the physical manifestation of trauma. They were totally natural reactions. They just were not symptoms he was supposed to exhibit after a clean finish on a case.Jason and Elle stepped off the elevator and he followed her down the hall toward her room.“You and me both. ER doc said I had heat exhaustion from being on that sweltering train all day. Guess I got pretty dehydrated so no dirty martinis for me.”“We must be getting old. Headaches. Dehydration,” Jason sighed.“Speak for yourself,” Elle said and stopped walking. She brought out her key card and said, “Well this is me.”“Right. Okay. Do you need anything? Do you want me to get you some ice?”Elle stared up at him for a moment. “You wanna come in and tuck me into bed too, Dad?”“What did I tell you about calling me Dad?”Elle rolled her eyes again, as she had done the first time he told her. She lowered her voice and growled, “You prefer Daddy? Or Big Daddy?”“Elle,” his voice was a mix of warning and tenderness all rolled up into a soft, complicated ball. “Come on. Why are you doing this?” He opened his hands in front of him. It was a symbolic gesture. A show of supplication, as if to say, I come in peace.“You tell me why I’m doing it. You’re the expert, aren’t you? You wrote the book on profiling, so why don’t you profile me?”“You don’t want that,” Gideon said.“Oh? Really?” Elle flung open her door and walked in. Against his better impulses, Jason followed her into the room. She walked straight to the mini bar and snatched a bottle of water, wrenched off the cap and started to drink. He watched her throat swallow in almost imperceptible ripples.“I don’t want to fight with you, Elle,” he murmured.“Then go back to the after party, Jason. Or go back to your room. I don’t have anything other than a fight for you here.” She rubbed at her eyes and squeezed the bridge of her nose. She turned her back to him.“Fine,” he said to her back. “Fine. You wanna know why you do it? You wanna know why you call me ‘Dad’? You do it because you’re perplexed, because every time you see my face you feel strangled with more fear and confusion than when you’re tracking an unsub. You feel conflicted and angry and you don’t know how to stop it. You don’t know how to shift it. You don’t know what to do with me so you try to provoke a reaction out of me like you would if I were a suspect in an interrogation room. You want to alter the dynamics, elicit a confession. You call me ‘Dad’ to imply I’m the one in charge, that I’m the one who was calling the shots, and maybe at one time I held a few of the cards, but you and I both know damn well that hasn’t been true for a long, fucking time. But that’s the rub, right? You’ve always secretly feared having the upper hand in an intimate relationship almost more than anything, almost more than you fear relinquishing control. You can’t fucking win and it drives you insane so you try to run from the whole thing. It’s your childish, regressive way of playing Hide and Seek and it tortures anyone who tries to get close to you, but mostly it tortures you. It’s too much for you to hold on to, so you try to foist it off on me as some kind of a puerile daddy issue, which maybe you very well have, but we both know does not apply here. That’s your profile, Elle. And you want to know how I know all of that? I don’t know it because I wrote the book. I know it because it is exactly the same way I feel, like I can’t fucking breathe, like I’m choking to a slow, agonizing death whenever I’m in the same room with you.”His words spun her around. They stared at one another across the small distance of her hotel room. She slammed her water bottle down on the little desk. He imagined the dusty remnants of their past rising in a furious cloud off the table from the force with which she put down that water bottle. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. He imagined the dust settling back down in another infinitely impossible pattern on the faux wood finish. He looked from the desk to her hand and then up at her face, for a moment wondering where they were and how they got there.He jabbed his finger angrily in the air in her direction. “See? I told you you didn’t want to do this.” He turned and started for the door.“Jason,” she croaked. She’d just drank half a bottle of water, but her throat was impossibly sore. He stopped, but he didn’t turn around. She inhaled and exhaled in a shuddering sigh. “Please?”He turned around and his eyes found hers. Never had he ever met a woman capable of looking so stunningly gorgeous when she was dead exhausted as Elle Greenaway. Her eyes were ringed with purple shadows and her lips were stretched in a thin, sad line. Makeup which he knew had been impeccably applied that morning was long since gone, most likely sweated away in the train car. Her clothes were rumpled and wrinkled and her posture bore resemblance to a wilted tulip, but she still caused his breath to hitch in his chest.Neither made a move toward one another, but their faces relaxed and their fists opened at their hips. During this standoff, a reel was loaded onto a projector in his mind and on it he silently read off a list of things he could possibly say. In the end, he uttered, “I’m just glad you’re okay.” He nodded his head a few times as if to soften his previous profile of her, and to accentuate his current statement, he said again, “I’m glad you’re okay.”“Hold me?” Her words were barely perceptible, even in the tiny room. He stared back at her incredulously. She cleared her throat and said, “Will you hold me, Jason?”“Yeah,” he said and closed the gap between them. He collected her against him and she practically collapsed. He walked them over to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, with her in his arms. She nuzzled her head against his chest. He stroked her hair and kissed the top of her head. “It’s okay. You’re okay,” he said, more to himself than to her.Elle looked up at him and he down at her. “I know I’m okay. I wasn’t scared out there today. Not at all. I mean, Reid was a bit of a wild card, but I knew you guys had my back. I knew you were all on the right track and you’d save us.”Jason sighed heavily. Elle felt his chest rise and fall. “I’m glad one of us knew,” he said.“Come on. This wasn’t the worst case we’ve worked. You’ve dealt with way crazier hostage-takers.”“But none of them had you,” he brushed his fingers against her cheek and allowed his thumb to rest, just for a moment, in the violet hollow beneath her eye. She brought her hand to his neck and gently touched his skin, as though curiously searching for his pulse.“What you said before; do you feel that now?” She asked.“What?”“Like you’re choking to death because you’re in the same room as me?”“No,” he whispered without a moment of hesitation. He touched his nose to hers.“Me either,” she said. She let go of his neck and fell back on the bed. “I’m so tired, Jason.” She used a foot to push off one of her shoes, repeated the process on the other side, then tucked her feet up on the bed.“You should get some rest,” he said.“Will you stay?” She looked up at him. He nodded and laid his body down next to her. She put a hand on his chest and he took it in both of his with a firm pressure. He placed the little vessel of her hand over his heart and felt as it rose and fell on the waves of his breath. Eventually, her breath matched his and they slept.