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“The wise person is not confused by this change called death…Just as the body casts off worn out clothes and puts on new ones, so the infinite, immortal self casts off worn out bodies and enters into new ones.”—The Bhagavad Gita
Of the world’s forty-three most well-known religions, fourteen believe in reincarnation. It exists, Spencer is sure of it—he’s not sure about the eternal and overarching kind, about being buried six feet under and coming to in an entirely new body, about the idea that two hundred years ago his entire being may have been a tree or a bird or a fly. What he does know, however, is that atoms are always conserved, that the same materials that make up his fingers once flared out of now-dead stars, that animals and other materials decompose into the ground, the minerals from their beings absorbed into the new plants sprouting. Everything is renewed again physically, though he cannot speak with conviction on the subject of metensomatosis.
But Spencer Reid has suffered enough little deaths to understand what it is to both be the same and to be completely remade.
*
He comes to in the hospital, a smaller hand lightly wrapped around his. There’s a beeping that’s too loud, nearly splitting the left side of his head open. It’s also possible that pain came from Tobias. His eyes feel heavier than ever before, but Spencer pries them open to find JJ sitting next to his bed, a watery smile on her face.
“Hey, Spence,” she says, gives a little wave with her free hand, and for once the physical contact doesn’t have Reid’s mind racing over MRSA and viral contamination. “How are you feeling?”
“Hey,” he returns softly, blinking a few times to get adjusted to the lights in the room. “I’ve been better.” Spencer leaves it there, trying desperately not to think about the vials hidden in his pocket. He nearly curses when he realizes his pants are on the other side of the room, not part of the hospital gown, but doesn’t say a word. Instead, his eyes catch the clock on the wall across from him, and he asks her, “It’s late, what are you doing here?”
JJ frowns, lower lip quivering a bit before she recovers control, and Spencer realizes maybe his words seemed a little harsh. “You were pretty out of it before,” she admits, patting his hand gently. “I wanted to make sure I was here when you woke up. Just to make sure you know, you have to know, Spence, I’m so sorry, I never meant for any of this to happen—“
“JJ,” he interrupts, groaning slightly as he adjusts his sore body in the bed. Now that he’s more or less lucid, a sharp pain is radiating from his sternum and ribs—CPR, he reminds himself, you died, you owe it to Tobias that you’re not a statistic and you shot him anyway—and it’s difficult to get comfortable. “If it wasn’t me, it might have been you. It’s not your fault. Whose idea was it to split up, anyway?” he asks rhetorically, trying to put a smile on his face he doesn’t feel. He remembers in perfectly vivid detail his exuberance, his desire to get Tobias cornered without waiting for backup, even as JJ challenged him.
There’s no question about where fault lies, obviously; JJ’s too busy gripping him to be holding it in her hands anyway.
*
There was only one book that Spencer took from his childhood home, only one that he couldn’t bear to box up and donate or sell to someone who could never love or appreciate it the way he does, who could never relive the words in vivid detail in their head.
In it, the main characters drink a potion that makes them fall in love, but the woman must still marry her betrothed. The young couple still carry on an adulterous affair behind closed doors, until the jealous husband, the king, orders the man be put to death. There’s more to the story than that, but eventually the lovers both die, miserable and alone.
Spencer tries not to read too much into these things, but he thinks maybe his story was meant to be a tragedy from the beginning.
*
Morgan is the one to drive him home, after they return to Virginia. He’s perfected the art of non-hovering, of watching every little nuance of Spencer’s reactions while he talks about a home restoration he’s working on, filling the silences that are normally occupied with Reid’s enthusiasm over something.
It’s when they finally pull up outside his apartment that Reid’s excitement finally catches up. He looks up at his room, where no light is on waiting for him, and suddenly remembers exactly what it feels like to not be able to breathe. He sucks in air rapidly, beginning to hyperventilate, and he realizes that if he doesn’t stop quickly, he’ll have too low a concentration of carbon dioxide, respiratory alkalosis, dizziness, headache, fainting…
“Reid. C’mon, kid. You gotta calm down. Talk to me.”
Spencer keeps his forehead pressed against the window, peering out into the night. There are too few streetlamps lighting the sidewalk out of his apartment. Considering the low pressure sodium bulbs and an average of 12.2 hours of darkness per day, it only costs forty dollars and fifteen cents to light one lamp for a year. It seems a small price to pay for a higher level of visibility and safety.
He laughs through the deep, shuddering breaths that won’t slow down. Spencer wants to lay in bed for three days. He wants to call the city and offer to finance a new lamppost. He wants to throw a rock and shatter the lights himself, because the darkness is always there waiting, no matter how long he tries to outrun it.
“I’m fine,” he manages to tell Derek at last, after the other man’s hand becomes a heavy weight on his shoulder. The definition that Morgan is probably thinking of is satisfactory, but what Spencer really means is that he feels thin, small, requiring delicacy.
He has never been able to make few words count.
*
Derek eventually leaves him be, but sleep doesn’t come easily that night, or any of the nights after. Reid drinks rooibos tea, curls up under a heated blanket with a few familiar books, and studiously avoids digging in his messenger bag when alone. Instead, he wraps his arms around his stomach in an attempt to hold himself together, despite the fact that he won’t physically fall apart.
Instead, he dreams of conversations he’s never had with Morgan.
*
He’s sitting at a kitchen table that isn’t his, a paper filled with notes on a thesis he doesn’t remember starting, and Derek is standing on the other side of that barrier, looking like everything wonderful in the world personified.
“When you were captured,” he starts to say, and Spencer pinches his arm, hard, before he can hear any more.
*
His face itches all the time.
Logically, Spencer understands it’s a neurogenic reaction to injecting hydromorphone intravenously, but he is constantly worried that it’s not, that it’s a psychogenic manifestation of tactile hallucinations, that he was waiting, always waiting for his brain to split and now, just like his mother, just like Tobias, it has.
He tries several times to dump the vials down the sink or in the toilet or anywhere but into a syringe, because this frightens him—he can’t trust his own mind anymore, and it’s something he’s choosing. That’s what Reid tells himself, at least; he’s choosing to continue his drug use, because anything less than that would mean he’d need help to stop, and Spencer has never been unable to achieve something that simply requires mental power.
The looks from his teammates start to wear on him; this has become part of him, now, and it’s a terribly large part to hide for someone who has never had many qualms about being open and himself. They’re all so concerned, even Emily, especially Emily, who has only known him for a few short months. Emily, who constantly reaches out despite his utter dismissal of everything having to do with her.
Emily, who looks at him not like he’s breaking their hearts, breaking her heart, but like he’s breaking his own.
*
The kitchen table is back, and Spencer takes time to note the surroundings, or lack thereof. The table, the chair he sits in, him, Derek, they all exist only in this little box; white walls, white ceiling, white floor. It’s disconcerting to say the least, and Reid sends out a silent thank you that at least he’s not here alone, slowly losing more and more of himself while he’s asleep as well.
Morgan is standing there like every other time, smiling slightly when he says, “When you were captured, when we finally reached you. You hugged Hotch.”
Spencer’s pen scrapes back and forth across the paper, marring the surface as he tries to revive the ink. It isn’t writing, it doesn’t work anymore, and there’s a quick flashback to gasping for air, coming back from the dead on a dirty wood floor. Sometimes it feels like that didn’t work either.
“Morgan, please,” he murmurs, so tired but not as exhausted as he’ll be come morning. “I don’t want to hear this.”
They spend the rest of the night sitting silently until Reid blinks awake.
*
“It’s weird. I keep dreaming of you.”
The rest of the team has filtered out of the conference room, and Spencer only realizes what he’s admitted to when Morgan’s eyebrow raises questioningly. “Not like…that!” he waves his hand wildly, in an attempt to dispel any impure notions the other man might be harboring. Reid busies himself with picking up the folders on the table in front of him and stuffing them into his messenger bag, careful to avoid wrinkles. Derek, on the other hand, rests his palms on the table and leans over, trying to catch his eye.
“Okay, not like that,” he teases, grinning brightly. “How is it weird? You’re in my dreams sometimes. We spend so much time together, it’s bound to happen.”
The wood grain of the table is suddenly very interesting to Reid, who briefly runs his hand over it and tries, in vain, to interpret which season the tree was harvested in. It’s impossible to tell now, though. The lumber has been cut from its original form; it will never tell the same story it used to.
“They’re just—they’re all the same dream. It’s just you and me, and you’re talking, but you never—never finish what you’re saying.” I never let you, Spencer doesn’t say. He closes his eyes temporarily, frustrated by the slight stammering. His mouth can’t keep up with his mind at the best of times, let alone when it repeats words unnecessarily. “That’s all it is. But they keep happening. You know, Gestaltist dream theory says that recurrent dreams represent a person’s current state of psychological imbalance, and that by realizing this disparity through the repetition, a person can restore their self-balance.”
“Okay, so according to that, how exactly do you relevel yourself?”
What Spencer should tell him is the truth according to the theory, that every object in a dream is an aspect of yourself that you rejected, that to recognize the piece of you that’s missing you should retell or reenact your dream. He’s the one who brought this up, and all Derek is doing is voicing concern for him, trying to find a way to help.
Instead, he meets Morgan’s eyes and says, “I don’t know.”
*
It’s Emily that breaks him in the end. No one else really tries, despite the fact that he finally laid it out in no subtle terms that yes, he needs help. She’s there, always, always with that no-nonsense look on her face as she stands there listening. She’s the first one Spencer actually tells, explains everything to even though she must already have put the pieces together, explains how he went through all that he took from Tobias and more.
It’s Emily who stands in his bathroom with him, arms crossed, watching as he dumps every last vial he purchased down the sink, who searches the entire apartment with him and makes sure there is no more hidden anywhere, who offers her spare bedroom, just in case, while being tactful enough not to scare him with talk of withdrawal.
It’s more than Reid could have done for her, he thinks, and he wraps his arms around her in a hug that surprises them both. “Thank you,” he whispers, amazed, once more, at her caring. “I’m so, so sorry I did this to you.”
“You didn’t,” her reply is muffled by his shoulder, before she pulls back and claps both his shoulders with her hands. “You didn’t. If you apologize to anyone, Reid, it should be yourself.”
*
After the few days spent at Emily’s apartment, the first thing Reid does is knock on Morgan’s front door.
“I’m clean,” is the first thing he says when the door is opened, not letting Derek even say hello, or what are you doing here, or do you even know what time it is, kid. His hands are wringing together seemingly of their own accord. “And I’m sorry that I never confided in you about this, but. It—it’s important that you know now.” There’s a crooked grin he can’t wipe off of his face, and Morgan is serious as he lets Reid in, but his eyes are smiling.
“It’s important to me that you told me now,” he says, standing in front of Reid, his hands on his shoulders just like Emily’s were, something like pride beaming from his face. Spencer finds his brain going foggy for a moment, and he startles, scared of the feeling he’s been trying hard to run away from—at least before he realizes it comes from lack of oxygen, because the full force of Morgan’s joy is a difficult thing to stare down.
“I’m glad,” he says, breathless, “because otherwise this would have been a very unnecessary trip on public transportation.” Derek laughs, his smile pulling wide on his face, and Reid needs to tell him the rest before all of this makes him forget. “Also, you remember that recurrent dream I mentioned having? I finally got to the end.”
Morgan moves again then, drapes his arm loosely over Spencer’s shoulder and starts leading him to the kitchen table. “Then, come on, pretty boy, take a load off and tell me all about it.”
“I just spent three days in detox and withdrawal,” he points out, fixing Derek with his best approximation of Emily’s look, still feeling a little put off balance. “I genuinely doubt that I look very pretty right now.”
Morgan laughs again, letting go of Reid just in time to let him sink into the chair. There’s a clock on the wall stating it’s quarter past three in the morning, which is a terribly inconvenient time for Spencer to be crashing into his apartment, unexpected, but Derek just flops down in the chair across from him and smirks like there’s nothing else he’d rather be doing.
“You can keep saying that, but it’ll never be true. Now, start at the beginning, everything you wanna say.”
So Spencer does.
*
“When you were captured,” Morgan begins, and his smile is so natural, relaxed—that’s how Spencer knows without doubt it’s a dream, the way his lips don’t pull tightly over his teeth, the way it’s untouched by horrors, too easy, even for Derek—that Reid doesn’t even bother correcting the word. The change on his tongue—“tortured”, he wants to amend, to avoid skirting around the issue—is something he’s learned to avoid. For a group of people so adept at fishing out lies, no one wants to hear the truth.
“When we finally reached you. You hugged Hotch. I never understood why.” Spencer wants to ask if this monologue even has a point, if he’s been afraid of this table the entire time for no reason, but he averts his eyes and keeps scratching his pen against the paper resting underneath his hand. It’s imperative he finishes—he doesn’t remember what he’s writing but he’s sure it’s important.
Derek refuses to give up, however; he’s tenacious, even in this unreality, because Spencer could never imagine him any other way. “You told Hotch how to find you, but by the time we got there, everything was already over.”
Reid pauses in his writing, starts reciting the Fibonacci sequence in his head. There’s a way to quantify this discussion, there has to be; he hasn’t found it yet, but if he does he won’t have to feel this way, won’t have to feel this warmth bubbling up in his chest, growing hotter and almost burning. He’s up to 317811 before Morgan finally pulls out the chair and sits across from him, waiting quietly with that soft, easy smile until Spencer, after all this time, finally stops hiding, drops the pen and meets his eyes.
“You realize that, right? Hotch didn’t save you from Hankel. None of us did. You saved yourself.”
*
They move to the couch, eventually, sometime between five and six, slumping against each other, both too exhausted to talk any longer but not tired enough to admit it. Derek’s arm is flung around Reid’s shoulders again, a comforting warmth as a few overdue tremors wrack his body. He’s asleep, snoring softly in the low light, and Spencer thinks there’s no place on earth he’d rather be.
Somewhere in his overtired mind, he distantly remembers the story of Tristan and Iseult, the trees that grew out of their graves, and thinks that this may be a death of some sort, but it’s far from a tragedy.
“...for most men are unaware that what is in the power of magicians to accomplish, that the heart can also accomplish by dint of love and bravery.”—Joseph Bédier