Chapter Text
Spencer Reid is on a bridge.
Wind whips his hair in a frenzy and his thin coat lets in freezing weather and chills ravage his skin but he doesn’t notice because his brain has more cruel things to attend to.
His eidetic memory is destroying him.
(how did he end up here?)
Spencer is driven home by Hotch, or maybe Rossi. He doesn’t know and can’t bring himself to look because his brain is too busy reconstructing the smells and the taste of the expired chemicals the inmates used to clean laundry and every bone in his body is burning with guilt. He doesn’t want to see who is driving him home because he knows he doesn’t deserve the kindness of whoever is in the driver's seat.
Spencer watches the steam rise off the poisonous mixture he made in the laundry room of the prison, his mind cruelly reconstructing the image and having it on repeat like a broken dvd player and suddenly his heart isn’t pumping blood anymore, it’s pumping pure guilt as he watches himself pour ammonia onto the white laundry detergent.
You’re just as guilty as them.
Shut up.
He knows.
“Spencer? You okay?” Rossi side-eyes him, his voice full of concern.
“yeah.” Spencer says, shifting in his seat, away from his coworkers pitiful eyes. “Fine. Just tired.”
There is nothing else said throughout the rest of the car ride, and Spencer leaves Rossi’s car without a word when he pulls in front of Reid’s apartment complex.
Spencer can’t sleep.
(that’s a lie. He can. But when he sleeps, every smell and every sensation and every sound from that prison invades his body and he dreams he is still there, still mixing that deadly mix of ammonia and detergent, still doing things he condemned all those years ago to survive in hell.
The guilt is the worst of it all.)
And when he awakes, he wonders why he bothered to do all those things to survive. Why he made a guilty man of himself to stay alive.
He wonders if his team would’ve still tried to prove his ‘innocence’ if they knew what he did to survive.
(Was it really just for survival if he enjoyed it? If he enjoyed hurting those people?)
What a sick form of justice, Spencer thinks. What a sick form of revenge set into place by all those people he caught.
The condemner is twisted into one of the condemned.
He tries not to think about it, and fails.
He gets up to make another cup of coffee.
Spencer can’t sleep.
He runs out of coffee.
And he tries to go without because he can’t bring himself to open his apartment door and leave but he falls asleep and:
“i’m afraid i’m starting to think like them, starting to survive like them-“
“where is my mother?!”
“inmate!”
“how do you plead?”
“touching is prohibited!”
And when he wakes up, Spencer immediately leaves for coffee.
He can’t fall asleep.
Spencer Reid goes for coffee and passes a bridge and stops and stares into the water and suddenly his brain stops thinking about his guilt and starts overloading because this is one of the side effects of sleep deprivation, (he should know, he’s read exactly 12,345 words on the subject), and nothing is stopping and every word in the english, russian, japanese, spanish and korean dictionary are colliding in his mind and their definitions are bombarding him and he can’t think about anything, much less figure out why he stopped on this bridge.
(He knows why. The explanation is lost within his plethora of knowledge that is flooding every inch of his brain.)
Everything is coming back.
And not just the words, not just the textbook knowledge, not just his studies.
Everything else is coming back.
Spencer Reid is on a bridge and is trying not to think of the-
past- having existed or taken place in a period before the present
but it is coming to haunt him, and he’s desperately trying not to think of a-
goalpost- one of two vertical posts that constitutes the goal in various games.
or-
Schizophrenia- a mental illness that is characterized by disturbances in thought, perception, and behavior, by a loss of emotional responsiveness and extreme apathy, and by noticeable deterioration in the level of functioning in everyday life
and-
Abandonment- the state of being abandoned
Addiction- a compulsive, chronic, physiological or psychological need for a habit-forming substance, behavior, or activity having harmful physical, psychological, or social effects and typically causing well-defined symptoms (such as anxiety, irritability, tremors, or nausea) upon withdrawal or abstinence
Bullies- abuse and mistreatment of someone vulnerable by someone stronger, more powerful
But he does anyway and all he’s thinking about is how much he wants it to stop.
Spencer is on a bridge and he feels 14 again with his mother’s schizophrenia pills in his hand and selfishness and guilt running rampant in his veins.
He’s on a bridge and his mind is full of everything he doesn’t want to remember but does anyway because God is cruel and so is Spencer Reid because he has become the very thing he promised to catch.
He wonders if this is what he was always meant to be.
Tobias’s screams of being a sinner echo in his ear and he can almost feel the needle sliding into his skin as his brain plays the memory on repeat because this is what he was cursed with and this is what he will always be cursed with.
Spencer steps onto the railing looking out at the small waves beneath the bridge.
(he remembers his mother’s story of Spencer trying to balance on a fence at 4 years old. He smiles.)
(1985. The year he was abandoned by the one who was supposed to love him the most. The year he became the unwilling head of the family. The year his father moved 14 minutes away and left his son to grow up too fast. the year Spencer realized he could never just be a child again.)
And with this, every year of his life comes flooding back, with Spencer’s betrayal of his mother and his fault of other parents leaving forcing tears down his face and apologies from his cracked lips and he wavers on the railing and realizes that if he falls, the world would be better off without him because Charles and Raphael were right.
He was a sinner, too much of a sinner to be left alive, and maybe this was giving himself too much credit but Spencer couldn’t do it anymore; he couldn’t watch himself destroy the people around him, he couldn’t watch himself drive away anyone who dared get close to him.
The wind pushed him more insistently and he smiled.
The water below him waved for him to come closer.
“I’m coming.” Reid mumbled, and closed his eyes.
Finally .
“Reid?”
He should’ve known someone would find him. He doesn’t have it in him to be shocked.
“Hey, Morgan.”