Chapter Text
Morgan is miles of unblemished skin, but he feels and acts as though his mind were frayed. He is quick to violence, and even quicker to anger. He fights, and yet he speaks about what he’s fighting with. At the best of times, he helps Reid to understand. Often, he’s wordless but the younger man still comprehends what is needed from him. On worse days, he breathes disgust and hisses sentences that lick across others’ confidence like flames.
Do I still taste of war? Can you still feel the battles on my skin, stitched across my back? Am I still rebuilding bone by fragile bone?
Reid is closed off in his silence. His careful limbs are scarred from abuse and jittery from the memories. His walls are ceaseless and unclimbable by almost everyone despite the way he smiles. Reid hates to speak, to even acknowledge his failing ability to cope. Morgan must push and dig answers from him, has to extract the truth in order to even begin helping. On bad days, Reid is quiet, gentle, but inside his head and at the crook of his elbow rages a war.
Just because you are soft doesn’t mean you are not a force. Honey and wildfire are both the colour gold.
----
Following the case in California, Spencer thinks he played the riskiest game.
Against him, he can feel the steadily growing pounding beneath his palm. Derek looks at him as if he’d swallowed a rock.
“Sorry,” he’d said in earnest, pulling backward from his exquisitely bad decision.
But there was a hand on his neck, and the weight of it was far from the familial squeeze he felt so often from the older agent. The palm which hesitantly hovered beside the dip of his waist gave him a headache, and he opens his mouth to apologise again. Because it felt to him as if Derek were trying to silently say, I care, kid. Just not like that.
Instead his decision was replicated. He stiffens momentarily, fidgeting under the affection before stilling as the hand carefully came down to rest, simple at his hip.
Distantly, he can hear the door of the bar swinging open from somewhere behind him. He pulls back for a second time.
“Y – you um…” he swallows, finally opening his eyes. “Uhm,” he coughs, taking a step backwards.
Unlike normal, Morgan is unreadable. His face is set, expression clear and even. No grin, but no regret either. His jaw is relaxed, but his eyes don’t show humour or delight. “You didn’t… you don’t have to –”
And suddenly a dark hand is wrapped starkly against the pale length of his wrist, violent in its contrast.
“I wanted to.”
----
The flight back to Quantico was quiet. Morgan used his headphones as always; Reid tried his best to keep his eyes on his chess set and not on the couch across from him where the older agent was reclined.
The paperwork in the office takes no more than two hours, and by the time seven in the morning rolls around, Hotch is packing himself up and telling everyone to take the day off to catch up on well-needed rest.
Morgan goes home, takes Clooney for a run, and proceeds to sleep for almost twelve hours straight. Reid does the exact opposite. He showers, reads eight books, finishes a research paper on philosophical discussion and sleeps – well, naps – for four hours before returning to work.
Neither of them acknowledges the warm discomfort of the conclusion to their previous case, nor do they seem to act different around each other in the bullpen in the months which follow.
But Spencer knows. He recognises it in the way Derek laughs, the way he grins, how he no longer stiffens when the younger agent brushes past him in a flurry of words and hand gestures during an influx of information regurgitation.
And Derek picks up the differences too. In the way Spencer turns his head to look at the floor, hiding his slowly reddening cheeks after unsure eye-contact from across the room. They slight tilt of his chin when he looks up from his desk and takes the offered mug of coffee with the perfect amount of sugar Derek has somehow worked out he loves.
----
It’s in the fall of the following year that Reid asks the question that makes him twitch.
They’re in the kitchenette at the office. He has a coffee, and for a change Reid is clutching black tea against his chest, nursing at it slowly.
“What is this?” He asked quietly, after Morgan had gently guided him to the side, so he could reach for the milk, with one careful hand at his waist. “What are we?” Morgan wants to brush it aside at first, but then he sees the blazing curiosity and the innocence in his expression.
He sets his paper cup aside with an exhale and clutches at the counter with two hands.
Morgan begins to prepare himself, we’re not any different to what we’ve always been. But then he remembers the cabin, and the shape of the kid’s slender frame sprawled alone, across the floor with foam at the corners of his mouth and eyes rolling into the back of his head.
So, instead, he says something else.
“This is procrastination,” he declares. “And we’re something we don’t understand yet.”
Spencer smiles, a broad, genuine one that makes Derek feel as though he’s done something right for a change.
“Okay,” the boy grins. He rests a hand against the curve of Derek’s shoulder blade. “Let me know when you understand, then.” The warmth of his palm lingers for several minutes, and Derek knows then that he had understood lifetimes ago, after the space Spencer gifted him following Chicago.
Again, it’s abundantly clear how much Spencer reads him, and how well he comprehends what he needs.
----
The frequency at which the kid manages to worm himself into harm’s way continues to baffle Morgan. It’s been three and a half months since their conversation in the kitchenette, and he truly has been procrastinating ever since. He’s trying to convince himself he doesn’t need someone at his side in the way he knows Reid wants to be at his side. But isolation and singularity isn’t safety anymore, its just a never-ending stretch of loneliness when he knows he could easily have more.
So, when he watches the sliding door to their unsub’s home shut with Reid on the other side, his heart stutters the same way it had watching Reid withdraw violently in the bathroom of his apartment after finishing that last vial of Dilaudid.
“Reid?” He yells, “what are you doing?” He jams a hand against the handle, struggling with it and ignoring the way Reid is begging him to back away. The look in his eyes is feverish and deadly serious.
Half an hour later the entire house is surrounded by doctors and a decontamination team. Morgan is persistent in his defiance, staying at the scene and conferring with Reid on everything he’s finding within the house. It only takes another hour or so before they’ve managed to extract Reid, find a potential antidote and begin showering him down in the backyard behind a confine of plastic sheets.
“Go help Hotch,” Spencer suggests.
“Hotch has plenty of people helping him,” he argues. “Reid, I’m going to see you off to the hospital,” he snaps when the kid starts to argue right back. Spencer bites his bottom lip before glaring at him.
“I’m about to have to strip, so they can scrub me down,” he clips, knowing he’s won. Derek narrows his eyes.
“I’ll turn around then,” he contends. Spencer sighs, turning his face away as it heats up uncomfortably.
----
There’s too much coughing, and it’s making Derek more worried then he should be. Spencer’s changing colours, going as pale as he was green only seconds ago.
“My throat’s a little dry,” he mumbles. “But other than that, I feel…” And then the genius is struggling against his tongue, bloodshot eyes widening and rolling around the inside of the ambulance with vigour until they settle on him.
“Driver, faster,” the doctor says sharply. Derek braces himself in his seat beside the kid, watching the blood smearing across his chin while holding eye contact, even after Spencer is long gone.
The words the doctor uses as they wheel him through the halls make Derek’s chest prickle restlessly.
Respiratory distress.
But he’s being guided into a waiting room and left alone to worry before he can say anything else.
----
He’s comfortable, anxious – but comfortable. Derek is reclined in a cushiony chair meant for family only. He’s pawing through an old magazine, mostly to look like he’s doing something other than sitting and waiting impatiently for the kid to wake up.
Spencer is the right colour now, hair long and splayed across the hospital pillow gracelessly. There’s a breathing tube resting over his nose, and he’s no longer coughing and rolling his neck around in his sleep like a ragdoll.
“Hey, kid.” Derek speaks as softly as he can manage when Spencer blearily opens his eyes.
“Is there any more Jell-O?” He asks hoarsely, eyeing the cup in the agent’s hands. “What happened?”
“You’re gonna be all right, kid.” Spencer visibly settles in the bed, his head coming down to rest against the pillows while his eyes stay open. “I – I think,” Derek huffs. “I think I understand now.”
Spencer smiles mildly, reaching one hand out in offering. Derek takes it in his spare hand, squeezing once.
“Me too,” Spencer mumbles.