A FRACTURE IN THE CONSCIOUSNESS ✓

JOSH

"What the fuck do you mean he's not there?" Josh yelled, slamming his good hand into the smooth surface of the conference table. Heads whipped towards him but he couldn't care less. This was his boyfriend-soon-to-be-fiancé they were talking about. "There's a fucking warehouse under his name where he went missing! Tyler said he'd use a warehouse. We need to check it again."

"Joshua, you need to calm down," Jenna warned.

Two weeks had passed since Tyler was kidnapped and Josh wasn't coping very well. Jenna suggested briefing LAPD on places to search for where Brendon could've taken him after their last raid turned out to be a trap. Since she was the second most experienced profiler- second only to Brad- and nobody else was in the mood to be talking in public, she did all of it.

A SWAT team, along with some of the L.A. officers, raided the warehouse earlier that week and found a bomb shelter illegally built underneath. It had recently been emptied, but there was nothing there to indicate where Brendon would go next.

All they found was Tyler's leather messenger bag, the pipe with Brendon's fingerprints, and Josh unconscious and handcuffed to the pipes on the wall. Officer Smith was knocked but had minor injuries.

Josh was the only other witness to Tyler's kidnapping but was useless to stop it. Mark was the one who found him unconscious and bleeding out in the stairwell of the bunker.

Hearing Jenna say that there was nothing leading them to a secondary location made Josh's blood boil, with both anger and guilt for not being able to stop that psychopath."I won't be calm until we get Tyler back," he snapped, matching Jenna's cool, emotionless gaze with his own heart-filled rage.

Despite the searches going on 24/7, they were still nowhere near finding either of them, and each hour that past was another hour that Tyler spent most likely being tortured and possibly killed. Since the time spent with the victim was so inconsistent between murders, they had no clue as to how long Brendon would keep him alive. They were running out of time without even knowing how much they had left.

"Dun, I know you're worried about Tyler. We all are. But worrying about things we can't change won't help us bring him home," Brad said with a raise of his eyebrow, challenging Josh to talk tank. As their leader, he had authority over them. Josh reluctantly shut his mouth."All we know is that we have less than a week to find him before... before we have to consider the alternative."

Mark, who sat beside Josh, excused himself from the conference room, holding a hand over his stomach like he was going to be sick. Besides Josh and Jenna, Mark was the closest thing Tyler had to family. They all were. Tyler was the baby of their team, always had been, always will be.

The two had been inseparable before Josh arrived in the BAU and were inseparable still. Even when others had come and gone- Breezy was killed in a crossfire, Debby retired, even Chris and Nick left their team years ago- nothing would change how close they were. Mark was Tyler's best friend, just like Jenna and Brad were his idols, Josh was his soulmate, Dallon was his emotional support, and Sarah and Judah, who was on paternal leave- were his partners in crime. They were a family, and in Tyler's absence, there was a hole left behind.

Josh took in a deep breath, reminding himself that he wasn't the only one looking for Tyler.

"Okay, so... Urie moved sites. That's not uncommon, especially with psychos like him, so the new question is where did he go?"

"And why go after Tyler?" Jenna sighed, rubbing her forehead with the back of her hand. "What does he have to do with this? Sure, he fits the victim's profile, but Urie must've known how dangerous it would be to go after a federal agent. He's too put himself more in harm's way than he needs to. Why risk it?"

Dallon, who was usually in his tech cave on the lower level, raised his hand. "Maybe this was his end game the whole time. Taking Tyler. Out of all the victims he'd taken, Tyler was the most high end."

"So the way he chooses his victims does something to do with his prodigal status and mental health issues like we'd predicted before with the other victims." Jenna licked her lips nervously. "But the torture... the torture is what's throwing me off. It's different for each. There's got to be some significance to what he does to them."

"But there isn't any significance. He changes his memo each time. That's why it took us so long to realize that there was a pattern," Sarah said.

"If Tyler was here, he'd be able to figure it out," Brad mumbled from across the table.

Josh looked up slowly from Brad's face to Jenna's, who had both came to the same realization as him. "What if he did figure it out?"

After the rest of the team began to piece together what they were implying, everyone looked up in unison and towards the desk Tyler borrowed from the local cops. Two boxes and a fairly large stack of files sat where Tyler should've been sitting.

Everyone silently and unanimously made a beeline out of the meeting room. Josh got to the desk first but since his left arm was still in a sling, he let Jenna catch up to him and grab all the files left untouched. She handed chunks of them to the others. When she was done passing them out, Jenna sat down on the floor with one of the boxes, smoothing out the front of her dress.

"There must be something here that could lead us to where Tyler's being held. Until we find it, we're going to go through every single one of these files, even if it means we stay in this office overnight. Am I clear?"

Nobody wanted to argue against a senior agent, especially when it regarded Tyler, so they all sat down in the middle of the walkway between desks and got to work. The police officers left them, the state trooper telling Jenna that they were going to do another once-over of Urie's apartment and warehouse in case they missed something.

Josh sat in Tyler's borrowed desk chair, rummaging through his files from past victims. Tyler's brain worked so quickly that he had a habit of putting pieces together during their cases without consciously realizing it. Each time this happened, and it happened often, he would need a second pair of eyes to see exactly how the puzzle pieces fit together. For Tyler's sake, Josh hoped this case was one of them.