Chapter Text
He knows glass can be cracked.
A spiderweb of patterns that reach out from point of impact but hold together, nonetheless. You could throw a rock at a window and only leave behind a chip with several tangled lines of cracks, and it wouldn’t be you who broke the window, it would be the next person who ran their fingers idly over the surface that shattered the screen.
This was why, Derek thought, he didn’t cry until eight days after his father’s funeral.
He had gotten into a stupid fight with someone on the street, it was over nothing – he can’t remember even to this day – but when he felt his fist cracking against the other boy’s jaw, that was when he cried.
He won the fight, with tears streaming down his face and choked off gasping noises he had fought hard.
So, in a way, he was similar to glass. He didn’t often break until hours after the initial damage.
Glass could slice and tear and draw blood.
After Buford, he tore holes in his relationships. He yelled at his Ma, fought with his sisters, got into fights with his friends, poured so much aggression into his football plays that he twisted bone and sprained muscle.
His words sliced up any care others had for him into ribbons, and yet throughout it all his family stayed. He hurt them, but they cared. His Ma believed it was how he coped after his father, his sisters assumed it was a part of boys growing up, but he knew. And he fractured tethers that held him close to others because of it.
When the team followed him to Chicago, dispensed everything they had into the case, he yelled. He insulted and lashed out like his words were knives and his glare was poison.
And after the confrontation he had with the man that made him slice and tear like glass, Hotch did everything he could to help. He understood, he swept files and signatures of the case under the rug to avoid picking at the scab, he said nothing, only alluded to the fact that he was there if needed.
Reid stayed quiet, kept statistics to himself, gently turned pages one seat over from him on the flight back to Quantico. He didn’t quote or explain the methodology behind his behaviour since Buford, he treated him the same.
And that was all Derek could really ask for. He was afraid of the comfort his loved ones would try to provide. Because sometimes the tenderness you are presented with, serves as the very proof that you had been broken.
He never believed in beauty after the pain. He was a survivor, yes, but he didn’t see himself as a story to worship. He wasn’t an idealistic painting of virtue in the wake of his torment, he was scarred and would be forever.
Am I supposed to be grateful to have survived this?
He appreciated the convenience of being able support the victims he worked with after cases, of course. Because God knows nobody else in the team could understand the outstretched cracks that scatter through your entire life following something like that.
So, Reid and Hotch keeping to themselves and not treating him any different meant the world because he didn’t have to hold together an armful of glass shards from his childhood and pretend they couldn’t slice him open.
Because they can, and they do.
----
Hankel made him feel like he melted as glass did.
Under the intense heat, the heavy restriction of knowing Spencer was cold, hurt, alone, he was being pulled taught in different directions. He followed each and every lead, stuck to the computer screen with Penelope after the first livestream like a wax seal.
And when he watched Spencer’s heart stop, he caved in.
----
The two of them were so unlike each other, physically or not, Spencer was nothing in the same as Derek.
He was an idealist, always alive until proven dead was his mindset for the victims. Spencer was a realist, he spoke the facts, the statistics. Derek paved his own way and Spencer was a conformist. He stood conflict in the face and wasn’t afraid to get dirty doing so, while Spencer was passive, talked unsubs down slowly, carefully.
He was self-assured and understood he was cared for despite the challenges he’d faced.
Spencer had the soft discomfort of someone who had never been treated well – hardly loved – and was forced to improvise.
And yet somehow, when the tall kid who tucked his hair incessantly behind his ear and had an IQ the size of his heart joined the team, Derek softened like tar in the sun.
The boy was uneasy with touch, with affection, and Derek was quietly glad for it. He wanted people to be afraid of touching him, of reaching out, he had to be the instigator. He had to be the one who decided he trusted and could trust another. Gradually, at least, Spencer fidgeted less under his hand, relaxed into his role in the field, grew close enough to laugh carelessly.
Derek thinks it was then that he comprehended how he felt about Spencer.
Hankel overdosing him only solidified it further.
----
The reassuring weight of Spencer pressing against him in the graveyard had welded back the fractures he had received watching the same man die hours earlier. But the scars would remain, just as the image of the younger man seizing alone on the floor of the cabin would too.
The weeks which followed Hankel were hard on Derek, only because he didn’t want to interject himself into Spencer’s recovery when the other man had given him ample space after Chicago. He had nightmares of finding the kid overdosed on the floor of the bathroom, his track marks eating up the slender, unblemished skin of his arms.
If there had been a divide in their personal lives after Chicago, there wasn’t one after the month which followed Hankel.
Derek held him against his chest when the shaking coiled throughout his smaller frame, pressed dampened cloths against his head as he heaved over a toilet bowl. He stayed by his side and gently pulled down his sleeve when Spencer unconsciously scratched at the needle marks Hankel had left behind. He was there because that was what Spencer needed.
Two months earlier, after Chicago, Spencer had given him space because that was what Derek had needed.
Spencer was good like that.
Maybe that was why he doesn’t pull away when Spencer kisses him outside of a bar after a case in California.
It takes him a long moment to close his eyes, he’s too busy processing the heat against his lips and the careful hand splayed across his sternum.
“Sorry,” Spencer says a little breathlessly when he steps back.
And Derek wants to say, it’s okay.
Instead, he finds his hands on Spencer’s waist and neck, guiding him in now that neither of them are off-guard nor unprepared.
The weight of the leaner frame against his chest reminds him of their first embrace in the graveyard, except Spencer doesn’t shake. In its place is steadiness and surety as those careful hands reach back up to cup both of his wrists, a silent proclamation of this is okay. I want this.
Derek thinks a piece of glass spurs two trains of thought; the beauty in its fragility, and the ease in which you could shatter it.
He thinks glass is what himself and Spencer are.