Chapter Text
He does not feel the cement beneath his knees, nor does he feel the warmth of his own blood trickling down his arm. The sticky crimson cools in a way so similarly to the beating of his heart that he cannot help but believe that even Arthur Conan Doyle himself would be disgusted by the literary cliché— he and Maeve would talk about the idiocy of a literary cliché like that.
He does not feel it when JJ and Morgan pull him up, and for someone who can remember every word of every conversation he’d ever shared with Maeve, he can’t seem to remember how he got from the floor to the ambulance.
Maybe he never moved at all, he thinks distantly, maybe he’s dreaming and maybe Maeve is alive and he’s prone, covered in his duvets, arms wrapped around the planetary pillowcase that he’s had since his fourth birthday.
That has to be it— after everything he’s gone through, no God would be so cruel as to take away the only things that’s been giving him hope for one hundred and a half days.
And when he finally woke up, he would talk to Maeve about his dream in itself was a terrible cliché— the remedial, ‘and then I woke up’.
Yes, he would wake up with golden sun trickling into his face and ready to face another day as long as she was with him and they will meet and he will kiss her warm lips and hold her tight in his arms.
He urges himself to wake, but when he does not— he is beginning to realise, filled with dread, that inkings of unadulterated terror and grief trickling into the pits of his stomach, that perhaps he’s been awake this whole time.
But life is too much like a book to cling to clichés and the concept of sadness has been one that has wreaked the fullest extent of havoc on Spencer’s own book of life for far too long. Almost thirty one years and all but nine have been so tragic that Homer himself would collapse in the woe of it all.
The thoughts are coming down on him now, crushing him in the painful recognition that humans are a fickle species, and sometimes it is truly the neglect of their own mortality that creeps up on them in the end.
She’s dead, he thinks, trying to drill it into his brain, she dead and she’s never coming back and your life will continue to consume you until eventually you join her.
You need to snap out of it, Spencer. He thinks, but no matter how hard he tries, he cannot convince himself.
Because despite everything screaming at him to wake up and smell the goddamn roses, there’s hope.
And just as hope is the most powerful thing in the the world. It is also the one thing that holds the power to obliterate everything in its path.
False hope, he ponders, distracting himself, it is the only thing more destructive then entropy.
He doesn’t register it when JJ sits next to him, nor does he realise he’s resting his head heavily on her shoulder. The sobs that has wracked his body mere hours before are gone and yet he’s still sitting on the cold edge of the ambulance.
“We need to go, Spence,” her voice is soft, comforting.
For a moment he focuses on tearing it apart as he would someone’s handwriting. JJ’s voice is soft and sweet, he thinks as she leads him to the back of a familiar SUV, his legs carrying him despite the feeling of floating; but in direct contrast to the softness and sweetness, there is a soft underlying bite— a rasp that he only notices as his head lies upon her chest.
When had he gotten there, he wonders fleetingly, before carrying on with his thoughts. Her voice is much like a rose in itself, soft petals that can be a wide variety of colours, but the undercurrents can be much like that of the thorns that prick you when you least expect it.
JJ in herself is kind of like a rose in that way as well, he supposes.
If he focuses, he can feeling her fingers tracing up and down his spine, and he can feel his contacts drying and he stares blankly at the pocket in the car door.
He’s almost certain that Rossi and Hotch are also in the vehicle, and— oh, Morgan is sitting beside him. He cannot quite feel the burning of Morgan’s eyes on the side of his head, but he’s almost certain it’s there.
He can, however, hear the differing of pitches in the rumbling of voices around him, enough to know that everyone in the car is speaking. It’s the repeated word, one that is only composed of a single syllable that leads him to the conclusion that they are, in fact, trying to grab his attention.
He’s miles away, though.
In hopes of quelling him he lets his eyes close, somewhere in the back of his mind— the one that Maeve fell in love with, a voice supplies unhelpfully— he registers that JJ has moved her hand from his spine to the crown of his head, pulling at the strands of tangled hair.
If she continues, he may fall asleep— but he can’t help but think that maybe, just maybe, that would not be such a bad thing.
That is until he wakes up and he’s still the same place he was before. JJ is coaxing him away from sleep but he chalks it up to thinking maybe his mind just went blank, that’s it. For the first time in his life, in a dream state, he drew a blank, none of this is happening.
Once again, he’s gliding into his apartment and once he reaches it Morgan pulls his keys out of the messenger bag over his shoulder.
That looks a lot like his own messenger bag, he thinks— and he wonders for a moment if you can get drunk off of dreams— and then he realizes it is his messenger bag.
“I’ll run him a bath,” He hears Alex say, and his eyes follow her as she disappears into his bedroom.
Before he can process what’s happened, Hotch is moving Spencer’s arm around his neck and wrapping his own limbs around Spencer’s lithe torso, leading him to the bathroom where he sits him on the closed toilet seat.
Spencer stares at the chipped paint bordering the crowning of his wall, failing to eavesdrop on any part of the conversation that Hotch and Blake are having.
He knows they’re talking to him, he can tell they are, but he’s underwater— another cliché— everything is murky and he can’t begin to dissect any of this. It’s jumbled, and he cannot for the life of him recall a single time that he has been this out of it.
Hotch and Blake start bickering softly, and a third voice enters the conversation. And then, the silence begins to ring and it’s then and only then that he realises that this is the first time it has even truly silent.
His hands find his ears, trying to drown out the ringing but it’s too loud— it’s deafening. He spots a fumbling motion from the corner of his eyes, and then the ringing begins to settle— drowned out by an orchestra suite. It’s not loud enough for Reid to place it, just loud enough to get rid of the silence.
Slowly, his hands drop to his sides— but he doesn’t have the urge to tap his fingers to a pattern that only he can see. For the first time in a long time, Spencer is entirely still.
He doesn’t register that he’s in the warm bath water, or that Alex is cleaning the matted blood from his hair until she tells him, “close your eyes.”
He does as he’s told, not having the energy to fight her and Hotch. She cups her hand over his forehead like a visor, anyways, careful to keep the soap out of it eyes.
It is as Hotch scrubs the blood from under Spencer’s fingernails that a rather pressing thought occurs to him. If it were any other time, he would be kicking and screaming at the thought of being given a bath.
But he’s a shell of his former self—cliché, the Spencer that was there just a few hours ago is suppressed somewhere within him; so far gone that he hasn’t begun to even try to process what has happened.
He should be utterly abashed, his unit chief and a woman that he looks up to are seeing parts of him that few people have ever seen before.
Something within him becomes tranquil, though, reminding him that both Blake and Hotch have been parents— and no matter what the feeble and self-deprecating part of his brain tells him— they love him unconditionally.
So, he lets them take care of him, because he knows he’s not strong enough to— and more than that, he knows that the second he finds himself, he will shut them out for an indefinite amount of time.
Once the matted blood has been washed away, and the clothing made sticky and dyed has been cleaned and/or disposed of, JJ helps him into a pair of joggers and a long sleeved shirt. She lets him balance on her as he mindlessly shoves his limbs through the holes of the soft fabric, and eventually leads him to a freshly made bed.
It’s smells like lavender, he notices as JJ pulls the blankets up to his chin, that’s a Garcia signature— he must’ve been home for longer than he thought.
But then he realises, the only fabric on the bed that actually belongs to him is that of the ancient solar system pillow.
He falls asleep to JJ running nimble fingers through his hair, and they continue until he’s long since started letting out exhausted snuffles.
After a while, she presses a soft kiss to Spencer’s forehead, turning on the fan, and slipping out of the room.
She meets the team in the Reid’s kitchen, where they all stare at their folded hands, utterly lost.
“What do we do?” Garcia breathes, “This is just the beginning and not once in my life have I seen him like this.”
“We do whatever he needs us to do,” Hotch responds softly, his voice yearning to crack, “And we’ll give him however much time he needs.”
Morgan, whose own eyes have begun to mist over, speaks up, trying desperately to lighten a situation that lies in unexplored territory, “Is that an order, sir?”
And with a heavy sigh, Aaron confirms it with a nod, murmuring, “yes. That’s an order.”
One by one, they slip past their sleeping friend’s door, wishing him one last solid night of sleep.
And with his apartment locked, and their own limbs weary with the familiar ache of heartbreak, they all find solace in their own beds— unsure of how they’ll move on if the Reid they all know and love had died with Maeve in that warehouse.