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Spencer Reid couldn’t help but hear gunshots ringing in his ears. There hadn’t been any, not today, not really, but that didn’t change much. His team would call it a victory. They stopped the unsub before he could hurt anybody else, took him down without any more bloodshed, and they were taking him somewhere he could get the help he needed.
It was not a victory for Reid. It was a wound that cut far deeper that he would’ve cared to admit. Nobody had died, but he would never forget the way Adam Jackson’s broken stare vanished for the last time. Adam was dead, all the same as if they’d put a bullet in him themselves, and Spencer couldn’t bring himself to grin and lie and say that was good enough.
Reid, he’s gone.
Spencer was not a violent man. He couldn’t think of a word that described him less. But when Morgan had told him that, said it like he didn’t know it already, his fingers curled into a tight fist and urged him desperately to make contact with his friend’s perfect jaw.
He knew the physics of someone like him punching someone like Morgan, knew it’d bounce off, knew there was no part of him that wanted it to hurt anyway. But Morgan knew about Hankel. Morgan watched what Hankel did to him. Morgan was in the graveyard where Hankel took his final breath, and Reid was the last one to see that disturbed young man alive.
Did Morgan think he was stupid? Yes, his brain was better suited to equations and facts and logistics than emotions, but Reid was more than capable of using his intellect for multiple purposes. He knew exactly what it looked like when someone suffering from DID was too far gone to save. He understood it better than Morgan ever could. Those shifts in personality had once constituted his entire world, the differences in body language his only lifeline when his team couldn’t save him. Differentiating identities was a matter of life and death.
Reid knew Adam was gone. He didn’t need to be told.
But now his brain was haunted with the memory of Tobias’ last gasping breaths, the man who had helped him, the man who had saved his life. The way Tobias looked at him with such blind trust, as if he hadn’t been the one to pull the trigger, a troubled man but a decent man who didn’t deserve to die that way. Reid stood on the roof and wondered if Hankel had ever prayed for death, wondered if Adam ever hoped for Amanda to take over so he wouldn’t have to face the cold unfairness of this world any longer.
Spencer Reid stood on the rooftop and cursed the callousness with which society treated broken people.
Spencer Reid stood on the rooftop and wished death was never the solution.
Spencer Reid stood on the rooftop and watched the sun bounce off the water, and for a moment the world seemed okay.
Spencer Reid stood on the rooftop and didn’t even turn when he heard the crunch of the gravel that meant Morgan had come to try and fix him again.
“It’s time to go, kid.” Reid imagined the same words coming from Amanda’s mouth. Did she warn Adam before she banished him to the dark corners of his mind forever? Or did he just end up there never knowing if he’d see the light again?
“Reid. What’s eatin’ you, man?”
“We’ve taken the victim into custody, and we’re letting the abuser go free.” At least when Tobias died, his monster of a father and the homicidal angel that covered his hands in blood left with him. Adam’s father had been unfathomably horrible. Yet, he would walk free, and Adam may be gone for good.
May be was a nice way to say it. Reid knew there was no coming back for the submissive personality. He had seen the emptiness in his eyes. Amanda would never give the world a chance to hurt Adam ever again.
“I don’t see that as much of a win.”
“A lot of lives are going to be saved now that Amanda’s off the street, you know that.” Reid clenched his teeth together as his brain pulled him towards frustration and his heart pulsed hurt through his veins. Morgan had to know this wasn’t about Amanda. She was a killer, a remorseless machine who cared for Adam and only Adam. While Reid knew Adam’s father hurt her too, she had hijacked Adam’s life. A life that wasn’t hers to take. And for Reid, that was worse than the men she had killed.
Morgan wouldn’t understand. That was fine, but Reid wished he wouldn’t pretend to.
“I just… I wish I could’ve noticed the signs in time to save Adam.”
“C’mon, don’t do that to yourself. None of us could have noticed. Our profile was right, we just never considered that the team dynamic could be locked inside of one person’s mind.”
“I should have.” Morgan started closing the space between them and Reid fought the urge to tense up.
“Talk to me. What is this?” He forced himself to turn around, swallowing hard, his mind insisting he should give Morgan the benefit of the doubt. He knew Morgan would never hurt him intentionally. But his friend sometimes struggled with the gray area. Spencer knew he had no room to talk about other people processing emotions poorly, but Morgan had a tendency to try to fix things before he even understood them. Reid thought about the few times he had gotten the courage to tell Morgan the twisted-up things that plagued his mind. He had tried to tell the older man about the flashbacks he experienced when he looked at crime scene photos. Morgan instantly tried to change his point of view, told him empathy was a good thing, said it would make him a better person.
That didn’t make it go away. He knew Morgan had grown up in an environment where you couldn’t afford to process your traumas. You had to change your outlook, pick yourself up, and move on. But Reid’s mind didn’t work that way. He couldn’t look at a horrible thing and see an opportunity for personal growth. That sort of thing took years for Spencer to reframe, while Morgan seemed to think it could be accomplished in the span of a single conversation. His friend always wanted him to talk, but he never really heard him.
“Tobias Hankel,” Spencer forced out, trying not to see the way Morgan’s face fell.
“Tobias Hankel drugged and tortured you for two days. He almost killed you.” Reid shook his head. He didn’t know how to make Morgan understand, any more than he could explain to him that flashbacks weren’t about empathy. He knew Morgan had a speech at the ready about Stockholm’s Syndrome and Reid not being in the right frame of mind to form reliable opinions of his captor.
“No, he didn’t.” Disappointment didn’t even try to hide itself as it spread across Morgan’s face. He wouldn’t believe him. Reid had never known how to make words work for him, how to put his thoughts into sentences that sane people could make sense of. He had found that the only people who understood him were people who had been broken in the same way he was.
Morgan had been broken once, but it was too long ago and too different for the so-called empathy to build a bridge between them. And Reid wasn’t about to try and compare his two days of pain to Morgan’s entire childhood.
“The alternate persona of his father did those things to me. The real Tobias Hankel saved my life. He brought me back from the dead.” Confusion joined the disappointment as Morgan took off his sunglasses, and the combination mixed acid and regret in Reid’s blood. He didn’t know why he was even putting this explanation into the space between them. Morgan was a profiler who would know if he lied but couldn’t force him to tell the truth. And while the dishonesty might’ve stung him a little, it would be easier for the both of them to swallow than this was.
“You think because of Tobias, you owe Adam?” I killed one innocent because of actions his body took without his mind’s consent. I wanted this one to be different. I needed this one to be different.
“I just—I know he’s still locked in there somewhere.”
“Kid, you’re gonna have to accept the fact that sometimes we can’t save everyone.” Morgan sounded almost angry, and if that wasn’t a crock of shit, Reid didn’t know what was. The older man made a move to walk away, and Reid outwardly scoffed at him.
“Excuse me?” Reid asked, blood heating up.
“What?” Morgan sounded genuinely confused as he turned back around.
“I’m getting really sick of you doing this, Morgan.”
“What am I doing?” Morgan questioned, and Reid couldn’t recall a time he’d ever seen his friend look more caught off guard. He ran a frustrated hand through his tangled hair.
“The same thing you do to me all the time. You make me tell you a thing I’d very clearly rather keep to myself, make me dredge up this stuff that I hate talking about, and then you don’t even care enough to actually listen to me!” A little bit of hurt found its way to the surface amongst the confusion.
“Kid, I’m just tryin’ to help.”
“No, you aren’t. You’re trying to fix me, so you can feel better about yourself. But sometimes words can’t fix a thing, and you don’t seem to be able to accept that.” Morgan took a step towards him, and Reid immediately recoiled, three steps back, out of arm’s reach.
“Where is this coming from?”
“From you doing the same thing over and over again! I don’t like bringing up these memories in the first place, but you always make me feel like I owe you an explanation! And by the time I finally convince myself it might be okay to tell you, you give me a way to put some positive spin on it, and then we just act like it never happened. I’m sick of it, Derek. I’m sick of you pumping me for information and not caring what happens to me because of it.”
“Reid, of course I care what happens to you. I just want to give you a safe place where you can share things. I don’t always know the right thing to say, but these are conversations you need to have. Talking helps. Feeling your pain helps.”
“Maybe it helps you, but you don’t really know what I need, do you? You’ve never asked me what I needed, you always assume you know what’s best for me better than I do, and you’re never satisfied until I tell you what you want to know.” Morgan’s body language was starting to broadcast anger and Reid didn’t even care. Let him get angry. At least then I won’t be alone.
“Why are you so pissed?”
“Because it’s so obvious you don’t actually care, and I don’t understand why you can’t just leave me alone!”
“The last time we left you alone, you became a drug addict!” Reid didn’t slow down, didn’t let that comment sink in, didn’t let the wish for something numb dull his nerves.
“Oh, you mean back when I actually needed you?”
“Well, which is it kid? You want my help or not?”
“I want you to actually give a damn about the fact that I trust you instead of trying to make all the things I’ve gone through into teachable fucking moments!” Morgan took a step back in surprise, and Reid could see in his eyes that his friend didn’t have an easy dismissal or positive spin for this one. Reid was amped, swearing and hurt and heated, a combination Morgan had never borne witness to. He swallowed hard and tried not to let his voice break as the threat of oncoming sobs took hold. “My mom is a paranoid schizophrenic, my dad is a bastard with excuses where there should be apologies, and Gideon left me with a letter instead of a goodbye. You’re all I have now.”
“Spencer, your trust means the world to me.” ‘Spencer’ was a card that Morgan rarely pulled. And Reid didn’t know what to make of it. He could tell that Morgan was sorry, that he was listening for once and letting the words sink in. This was his chance, maybe his last one, to get the older man to understand.
“I still feel like a murderer for what I did to Tobias,” Spencer confessed. “And I keep thinking that if I could’ve realized he was the unsub before JJ and I went to his house, maybe we could’ve taken him in before he kidnapped me. Maybe he didn’t have to die, maybe we could’ve gotten him help. But that didn’t happen. Instead I watched the person who brought me back to life choke on his own blood because I wasn’t smart enough to come up with another way out.” He saw Morgan open his mouth to interject, but then he held himself back. That was… unexpected. Maybe he was finally getting through to the other profiler.
“I must’ve seen Tobias change personalities over a dozen times. The differences are burned into my brain, I can still see them when I close my eyes, I can still feel the way the energy in the room was altered. I see the signs in places they aren’t all the time. I used to see them on every unsub we caught. But yet, the evidence was right there in front of me, and I couldn’t see it. And because I couldn’t see it, another victim of years of abuse died for something they didn’t even do. You know as well as I do that Adam is never coming back. It’s my fault.” Morgan closed the space between them, and this time Reid didn’t flinch away, didn’t have the energy, thought maybe the contact might stop the spiral he was falling into. A heavy hand fell on his shoulder.
“Thank you for telling me that.” His eyes were so sincere it hurt. He wasn’t just telling Reid what he wanted to hear. There was understanding in his deep brown eyes.
“Sometimes I just want to forget, Morgan. Sometimes all of this is way too much.”
“I’m sorry, Reid. I know you just wanted to help that kid. But I promise you, you did everything you could and more.”
“Everything I could wasn’t enough.”
“Sometimes it isn’t. You know you’re the best of us, right, kid?” Reid shook his head.
“We’re a team, there is no ‘best’.”
“I’m not talking about your big ol’ brain, genius. You’re a good person. Better than any of us. You care, but you don’t let it ruin you. You make people feel safe. You’re better at talking unsubs down without firing shots than anyone on this team. You care about doing this job the right way and you’d lay down your life at the blink of an eye to protect someone else. And yes,” Morgan cracked a small smile, “sometimes you sass at the wrong times and give a little too much lip, but you always have the best intentions and you care more about saving lives than saving people’s feelings.” His other hand reached for Reid and the smaller man allowed himself to be enveloped into a bear hug. “We couldn’t have cracked this case without you,” Morgan mumbled in his ear. “You made your pain work for you, and you kept a killing spree from escalating any farther. Lots of people are alive because of what you did. I know that isn’t good enough. I know it still burns because the only life you wanted to save was the one beyond your reach. I’m sorry it works out this way sometimes.” Reid buried his face in his friend’s shoulder.
“She looked me right in the face as she killed him. I saw him die inside her eyes. I know we can’t save everybody, Morgan. I know that. But I was so close.”
“Do you want to talk to someone about this when we get back to Quantico?” Reid pulled back to look Morgan in the eye and sniffled quietly.
“I’d kinda like to talk to you, if that’s alright.”
“Sure, kid. Whatever you need.”
Reid knew, and he was sure Morgan did too, that this wasn’t over. He would keep visiting Amanda and try to find Adam somewhere in the shattered pieces of her mind. It would never feel like a win, saving her life just for her to destroy Adam’s. But when the losses piled up and Spencer collapsed under the weight, he finally had someone who was willing to shoulder it with him instead of trying to make it disappear.
Maybe Derek Morgan was the right kind of broken.
Maybe he was the exact shade of gray that Spencer needed.