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“The only thing I was afraid of was the dark,” Morgan says plainly. He taps a group of files against the desk in the jet, shuffling them into place.
“Some of us still are,” Reid mutters.
Because of the inherent absence of light.
----
“Fuck!” He jolts, swerving his entire body back and taking several stumbling steps backward. Morgan had been inches from his face, and he had probably heard the uptick in the sound of Reid’s heart tearing out of his chest with the intrusion.
“You really are afraid of the dark,” the older man smirks. His voice is laced with good-natured humour and Reid leans against a desk as he catches his breath.
“I’m working on that,” he points out breathlessly.
“You should work a little harder.” Morgan grins, a line of pearly white teeth stark against his dark skin and the even darker room around them. Reid lets out a shuddery sigh and pushes the fringe of hair from his face.
----
They were in one of the smallest towns in California hunting one of the most sadistic unsubs of the month.
Although the bodies had been recognisable, the method of torture was extended and incredibly catered to the victim. Once they realised that, it was only a case of finding the common denominator between the four victims.
Eerily similar to a previous unsub, the man murdering these victims was a local therapist whose area of expertise was overcoming fears and traumas that produced them.
He had set up his twisted kill-shop all throughout a line of abandoned farm sheds that were repurposed into a line of warehouses. There were seven buildings and six of the team, and because of the unspoken never separate, nobody investigates a lead on their own rule, they split off into pairs and divvied out the structures.
Prentiss and JJ, Rossi and Hotch, Morgan and Reid.
It was it was twenty to three in the morning; the moon was a mere slit in the sky and the only light they had were the skinny beams of their flashlights.
Morgan frowned as he slunk into the middle building, Reid only a foot behind him. What should have been a large, open space had been split off with crudely constructed plaster walls, not unlike a maze.
“Jesus,” Reid complained from between his teeth. Morgan flickered the beam into his face for a moment, wincing and tilting it downwards again.
“You alright with this?” He whispered hoarsely.
“Am I – no! No of course I’m not fucking okay with this, Morgan,” Reid hissed. “The flashlights aren’t doing anything to help,” he seethed quietly. Morgan manged to shake his head fondly, turning back to face the hallway as he turned the corner.
“This isn’t a haunted house, we’re fine,” he flashed one expert grin in Reid’s direction. “But you can still hold my hand if you need,” he taunted.
“Shut up,” Reid murmured. Morgan had worked with the man long enough to recognise the sound of a smile through only his words and tone of voice. “Let’s just get this over with,” he sighed from behind the older agent.
They continued along the edges of the maze-like plaster walls, only slowly when they reached a corner. Morgan would lower the beam of the flashlight as they approached, and when he turned, Reid would lift his, lighting the way in case the need to fire his weapon arose.
“We’ve cleared the first warehouse, moving to the second now,” Hotch said through the comm line. Morgan heard Reid’s sharp inhale and saw the way his beam fluttered up and down in fright as their boss spoke unannounced into their ears.
“You need to loosen up,” he suggested before giving an affirmative to Hotch. “Seriously, we’re fine,” Morgan levelled.
The ground squeaked beneath him after the next turn, the wood sinking slightly at the pressure of his weight. “Something’s beneath here,” he says. Reid’s flashlight hurriedly pulls down to the piece of plywood laid out across the floor.
Morgan lifted his gun, aiming at the wood with both the weapon and his light while Reid gripped the edges of the board, ready to shift it on command. “Now,” he says softly, and the scraping of the wood against the concrete flooring fills the area.
His flashlight reflects back against his face for a moment, and when he lowers it to see clearer, Reid makes a small noise of discomfort.
A half-rotten body is sprawled in the corner of the pit. The walls and floor are covered in sheets of mirrored glass to create the illusion of hundreds of the bodies. When the smell hits him, he turns his head, lowers his gun and tightens his jaw. Reid stands from his crouch, peeling the beam away from the horrid scene beneath them.
“We’ve got another victim’s corpse in the third warehouse,” the younger says grimly. “Can someone call for an ME when we’re done?”
Hotch gives a crackly reply through the comm and with that, they proceed. The smell is overpowering, and Morgan swears he can almost taste it in his mouth as they turn corners quicker and quicker.
They can’t see anything outside of the reach the flashlights have, and it’s disconcerting to know that anything or anyone could be anywhere they haven’t run the light over. Reid can feel the hairs on his arms and neck standing on end, his chest endlessly thudding in protest.
Morgan is tense, he can tell, but not overtly afraid as he himself is.
At least, not until there’s a hand that certainly isn’t Reid’s which grips his wrist when they’re fifty feet from the back door of the building.
“Boo.”
----
The ME has just given their ETA as Hotch and Rossi exit the second warehouse when there’s gunfire.
“Talk to me,” he demands gruffly into the earpiece, already moving alongside Rossi towards the direction of the two shots they’d heard.
There’s a horrible moment where there’s no reply from anyone, and Hotch hates himself for thinking that two shots is exactly how many it would take to bring down two of his agents.
“Y – yeah. It’s Morgan and I. We’re in the back of third warehouse,” Reid answers a good half-minute later. Rossi lets out a breath at his side as they circle the building. The door opens and they both instinctively lift their flashlight and guns.
Both Reid and Morgan have to lift their hands to cover their eyes in the several long seconds it takes for Hotch and Rossi to shift the lights off them.
“What happened,” Hotch asks. Reid has one hand on Morgan’s left arm, and he drops it as they separate.
“Someone grabbed me, Reid fired,” Morgan relays.
“It was our unsub,” Reid explains. “I think – I mean I saw, he had a knife.”
“I’m fine, he just grabbed at me,” Morgan reiterates, interrupting Spencer slightly. Hotch nods, a line of tension easing in his bones as he runs a quick eye over both the agents.
“Okay,” he says slowly. “I’ll let the ME know there’s two bodies then.”
Morgan and Reid both watch Hotch run another eye over them, checking for injures before he nods once and gestures towards the other warehouses. “They’re cleared.”
“Trust us to be the only ones who had something to worry about,” Spencer grumbles under his breath.
We aren’t afraid of the dark. We only fear what it conceals from us.