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Spencer Reid is a very different person than he was in high school. And that's how it should be--he's an adult now. Sort of. He's not a kid, at least. He's outgrown his childish habits and flaws.
Most of them.
Some of those habits he's so ashamed of have proved difficult to shake. He can usually keep his thoughts away from dangerous paths, but there are times when darker feelings well up from the places he hides them. Sometimes it's when he's run down--hungry, angry, lonely, tired--and sometimes something happens that triggers the deep-seated feelings of shame and inadequacy he tries to forget about. Forgetting is as close as he can get to making those feelings go away, to being normal and whole and OK. But things happen that force him to remember, and then his skin itches for the blade.
He doesn't, he hasn't (at least, not since the day he turned 18), but sometimes he still wants to. There are still nights he spends on the floor of his closet (nothing sharp or unexpected in there) with his arms around his knees, trembling from emotion and trying to convince himself it wouldn't be worth it. He's sat with his pain over many long nights, because he knows how fast the solution will spiral out of control. It's never as good as the first time, and he refuses to end up in any more emergency rooms chasing that endorphin rush.
There have been far fewer of those nights since he joined the BAU. His coworkers actually like him, and not just for his high IQ, which is a somewhat novel experience. It's also remarkably difficult to indulge in feelings of shame and self-hatred when you're surrounded by profilers--but that doesn't mean he hasn't managed it occasionally. That LDSK case, for one. Hotch had been careful about checking up on him afterward, but that had been a long night. Hotch *hadn't* hurt him, but he'd woken up all the fears and insecurities that made him want to hurt himself.
Unlike Hotch, Tobias Hankel did hurt him--badly enough to bring all those buried feelings to the surface. Hankel had understood those feelings perfectly. He'd been intimately acquainted with never being good enough, with feeling defective and broken and dirty and hurt. And then he'd given Reid a way out, one Reid had smuggled out in his pocket--two vials of instant escape.
He wants it. He wants it so badly it hurts, and this time the trembling is from more than his emotions. You don't need it, he tells himself. You know where this leads. You know it only gets worse. Because if he'd struggled for 8 long years with an addiction to something that isn't even physically addictive, how the hell can he expect to win if he starts down this path? Drugstore. Fucking. Heroin. He knows better.
Knowing better isn't doing anything to take the edge off his need. His want--it's not a need, he doesn't need it. He doesn't.
He'd give anything not to be here right now, at the edge of this new and terrifyingly high cliff. Cutting had been an addiction, and he'd struggled with it, but this is something far bigger. Far more destructive. Cutting has nothing on this, which is why he's curled up and shaking on the floor of his closet wishing it were for the usual reason. He's hurting badly, and there's only one way to make it stop.
Except that there is another way to make the pain stop. It's never as good as the first time...but it's been so long that it might as well be the first time. Maybe it will be enough. It has to be enough. And anything is better than narcotics, right? Cutting is the lesser of two evils.
Even in his head, that sounds like an excuse. But it doesn't change anything. It doesn't change anything at all.
Comparatively, would a few more scars really be so bad?