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“Pretty Boy! You alright over there?” Morgan calls, a grin taking over his face as Reid shivers. “We’re inside a building.”
“Yes,” Reid retorts, “a garage with minimal heating during a Chicago winter. Morgan I have first dibs on arresting this unsub. I’m going to shove an icicle up his—“
“Kinky,” Morgan says, wiggling his eyebrows which only earns him a thump to the back of the head.
“Nose, up his nose. You’re disgusting.” Reid says dryly, glaring at Morgan. “Who even murders people when it’s negative five outside?”
The cops looking around the crime scene halt, looking at Reid who grins sheepishly, “I meant it... uh, I meant that rhetorically— I don’t kill people— like, at all.”
They all give him an odd look, slowly returning to looking around as the team comes to them.
“He didn’t leave anything. He’s organised,” Blake sighs, shoving her hands into her coat, “why in the middle of winter? It’s supposed reach negative fifteen degrees this weekend.”
“M-Mum-Mummification, m-maybe?” Reid’s teeth are chattering, and Hotch sighs tossing his keys in the kids directions without warning.
They thump against his collarbone before hitting the floor and Reid blinks, turning his head to glare at Hotch, muttering a sardonic, “ow?”
“Go warm up, Frosty,” Morgan says, putting the keys in Reid’s gloved hands.
“My contacts are frozen to my eyes, otherwise I’d throw one at you,” He walls shuffles away, mumbling to himself about how much he hates that cold.
“That kid is a toddler when he’s grumpy, huh?” Blake observes, watching as he clambers into the car and turns it on.
JJ shakes her head, covering her face with her purple kitten clad hands, “why do you think he and Henry get along so well?”
Once they’re ready to return to the station, they head to the cars— only to realise one major problem.
The door of the SUVs lock automatically after two minutes, and Reid? Passed out in the back seat under a blanket.
“I’m going to murder him,” Rossi growls, begging to pound on the door, “Reid! Wake up!”
“It’s no use,” Morgan mumbles, “kid doesn’t sleep, so when he does he turns into a goddamn potato. Reid! Get up!”
“I have a kit,” one of the cops snorts, returning with a jimmy. “How old did you say this kid is?”
JJ clicks her tongue, “thirty-three.”
“Oh, yikes,” He says, drawing in a breath through his teeth, “rough age.”
He grins, pulling open the car door. Morgan unlocks the rest of the doors in seconds, pulling the one closest to Reid’s face open.
He rubs snow on his hands, walking up to Spencer and giving him a playful smack across the face. It earns a groan from Reid, and a cackle from Morgan.
“Morgan?” Reid mumbles, face crunching in disgust, “Why was it wet?”
“Saliva,” he lies easily, shrugging, “Now you have cooties.”
“Oh, Morgan,” Reid coos, sitting up straight, “it’s okay, you can say Herpes.”
“I’m going to kill you,” Morgan mutters, faking a step forward and grunting when Reid doesn’t flinch.
“Behave,” JJ hits him upside the head with and audible thump. “Sit in the front.”
“Why did I get smacked! Reid said I had Herpes!” He fumbles but eventually, JJ shoves him away, climbing into the seat beside Reid.
“Just to be clear, I’d hit him upside the head but you already hit him in the face with melted snow,” she mumbles.
“Oh, so no herpes?” That one does earn a smack from JJ, and Reid just pouts.
“You look like an idiot,” Morgan says, watching as Reid writes on the board, blanket wrapped around his shoulders.
“You look like an idiot,” Reid parrots, turning around to throw a marker at his face, “I’ll tell JJ you’re bullying me.”
Morgans expressions sours, and he clicks his tongue, “I think I’m starting to understand why they threw you into trashcans.”
Reid throws him a nasty look, and Morgan knows he overstepped. Before he can try to fix the situation, someone clears their throat and both of the agents then to look at the origin.
“Hey,” it’s the cop from earlier, the one who jimmied the door, “I work in evidence, um one of the agents said you needed all the stuff we’ve got?”
“Yeah,” Reid says, taking it from the cop who hangs onto the items for a moment too long, staring into looking over him enough to make him borderline uncomfortable, “I’ve got it, thanks.”
The guy looks everywhere but Spencer, “right! right, sorry.
Once he’s out of earshot, Reid turns to look at Morgan, “was that weird?”
“Yeah. Even for you you,” and that’s how morgan get slapped upside the head with a back of hair. “Ow!”
Reid just chuckles, walking back to his board.
“Guys,” JJ sighs, heels clipping against the floor as she sighs.
“Another one?” Reid asks, setting the blanket down as all the humour leaves his voice. “He’s devolving.”
There’s something incredibly eerie about watching a serial killer devolve. Obviously, they’re terrifying enough as it is— from birth their psychopathy allows them to get sexual gratification from homicide— by nature, they’re utterly terrifying.
This time, though, there’s something else that makes this situation mortifying.
Because laying on the ground, is a young man who looks way too much like Spencer for comfort.
“Reid,” Hotch says suddenly, “I’m gonna need you to sit this one out.”
“No!” Reid hisses, “this is a complete coincidence! Hotch, all of the guys kind of look like me, but I’m not helpless, I won’t sit this out.”
“Okay, what’s the probability that the victims start looking more like you after you arrive in the city?” Hotch raises his brows, a silent dare.
“That’s not fair!” Reid snarls, “that’s not fair and you know it! Reid, worse things have happened to me! I refuse stop doing my job because you’re scared.”
“It’s not an option,” Hotch orders, “you’re done with the case.”
“Stop treating me like I’m a child!” Reid growls, following after Hotch and catching the teams attention, “I am just as capable as anyone else here.”
“If you want me to stop treating you like a kid,” Hotch states, tone low and threatening, “then quit acting like it. We’re done here.”
Spencer lets out a garbled curse, nails digging into the palm of his hand as he sits down on the curb. His jacket stops the moisture from seeping through his khakis.
“Do they always treat you like that?” It’s the same cop from earlier, and Reid glances up at him, “do y’all fight a lot?”
“We’re kind of like a family,” Reid offers, shrugging, “we don’t fight a lot, at least not with the actual intent of harm. It’s more like bickering.”
“Gotcha,” He sighs, offering Reid a cup of coffee.
In the back of his head alarms are going off, ones that tell him not to drink the coffee, and that there is something terribly wrong with this situation. He takes the coffee despite it, just letting the warmth soak into his hands— but it never comes near his lips.
“I’m Tony Sullivan, by the way,“ he introduces himself, and something is just so off about is disposition.
“Reid!” Morgan sighs, breaking up the conversation, “We need you to figure out some stats for us.”
“Hotch said—“ Reid starts, letting morgan pull him to his feet.
“Hotch is overreacting because he cares about you,” Morgan replies, “Come on, I’ll take you back to the precinct.”
Once their out of earshot, Reid throws a glance back at the cop, “Morgan, I think that cop is the unsub. I can smell the almond in the coffee from here.”
“The almond—“ his jaw slacks as the understanding dawns on him at once, “Let’s go to the ME. They can pull a screen on the coffee.”
“You were right Doctor Reid, but how did you know to check the Tox Screens for cyanide?” The Medical Examiner asks, blinking at the reports in her hands.
“How fast can you run this?” Morgan inquires, hefting over the cup of coffee.
“About an hour? Maybe two? Why?” She stares, already setting the liquid into a separate beaker.
Reid’s eyes land on a bottle of ammonium sulphide, and a bottle of ferric chloride, “Do you have a burner in here?”
“Uh, yeah, why?”
Spencer shakes his head, placing 500 cubic centimetres of the coffee into a beaker, dropping in four drops of the ammonium sulphide.
“He has a PhD in Chemistry,” Morgan responds in lieu of an actual explanation.
After the substance has evaporated, Spencer filters it and adds a drop of ferric chloride. When he turns, his jaw is clenched and he just sends a short nod in Morgan’s direction.
“Call Hotch, I’ll call Garica,” Reid says, calling a word of thanks to the medical examiner as they head out the door.
When they find Sullivan, there’s a lithe teenager with straggled, sand coloured, hair sitting in a chair in front of Sullivan. He’s holding a cup in his hands, and Sullivan is holding a gun.
When he sees the team however, he doesn’t turn around and shoot, instead he rushes out the back door and heads toward the woods on the edge of the property.
Blake takes clipped steps to the boy, kneeling in front of him and setting to cup down, “did you drink any of it?”
He shakes his head, and she nods, “good, okay, let’s get you checked out.”
They only catch the tail end of the conversation though, running out the door to follow Sullivan. It’s like he’s disappeared from sight.
Reid stutters to a stop when he catches a whiff of something that makes his chest ache. He looks around for somewhere that Tobias Hankel could be burning fish hearts and livers, but just finds a little bonfire off to the side with a grill of fish placed over it.
Visages of Hankel swim around him, and his heart drops to the pit of his stomach as he tries to catch his breath. His fingers dig into the crook of his elbow in a moment of weakness and his knees begin tremble beneath him. He’s utterly lost in his memories.
Spencer doesn’t hear the team calling his name, and when a hand goes around his arm dragging him onto the thick ice he gasps helplessly; desperately trying to get a grip of himself, and to catch his breath. He’s not trying to think of a way out, he’s trying to think of a way to stop Tobias from giving him Dilaudid.
“Reid!” Morgan roars, and Spencer snaps out of it just in time to hear the ice crack beneath their feet.
He forces himself to take in a breath and not let go as he plunges into the freezing water, heart racing. Once they’re both under, Sullivan wraps his arms around Reid pulling him down to the bottom. Reid shoves and kicks a but nothing is working.
Through the growing hole in the ice, the team can’t bring themselves to look away, hearts stopping when the bubbles stop rising to the surface.
“Oh my God,” JJ gasps, hands coming to her face.
Hotch grabs Morgan’s arm as he tries to tear off to the water, “stop.”
“I can’t just let the kid—“
“Morgan, if you go in neither of you will come out. You’ll get stuck under the ice,” Hotch states, eyes unwavering.
Under the water, Reid sees his life flash before his eyes as he reaches for his gun. Within an instant, he comes to the conclusion that he will not let his last thought be of Tobias Hankel or Tony Sullivan. He throws his head back with as much force as he can, and Tony’s grip loosens enough for him to bring the gun around a shoot him.
He pushes up from the bottom, panicking when he hits more ice. He’s quickly running out of breath, and the gap in the ice is nowhere to be found. Spencer reminds himself to relax, and it’s then that his head finds the air, and his fingers find the ledge of ice. He allows forearms to rest on the ice, and he sucks air in and out, coughing weakly.
The noise around him is a blur, and he’s pretty sure that the team is screeching at him to get out of the water but he just isn’t there yet.
Once he has enough strength, he pushes out by the weight of his forearms, lying flat on the ice, a hand thrown over his abdomen as he tries to finally catch his breath.
Logically, he realises that the more the hypothermia sets in the worse off he’ll be, so slowly he rolls himself off the ice. Reid pushes up to his knees, coughing out some more water before standing up on shaky legs.
“Kid, the great flood of molasses moved faster than you,” Morgan breathes, wrapping a blanket around him from behind, pushing him into the one that Hotch is holding out.
“Te-technically you’re right-t.” He shivers, teeth clattering against themselves, “it moved at about thirty five miles an ho-hour.”
“Really?” Morgan asks, as he and Hotch try to rub some warmth into him, “shit, you really do move slower than molasses.”
It’s clear he’s trying to get a laugh from Spencer, some form a reassurance that he’s not going to give into the hypothermia.
“Can you walk?” Hotch questions, hands still running up and down the kids arms with fervent.
“Yeah,” He mumbles, pulling tighter into himself, shaking like a leaf, “am I moving?”
If Morgan wasn’t terrified, he’d be laughing. He exchanges a look with Hotch and within a moment, Hotch lifts Reid over his shoulder.
Spencer dangles over Hotch’s shoulder limply, his fingers are ashen and his lips are tinted blue. The ends of his hair are freezing up from the frigid winter air.
“Hotch,” he mutters woozily, earning a hum from his supervisor, “you have a nice ass.”
“Thanks, Reid,” Hotch mutters wryly, “you’re so out of it.”
“Maybe, but I know what a good ass looks like when I see one,” this comments earns a surprised bark of a laugh from JJ.
For the rest of the trek to the ambulance, Reid is silent. He’s still shivering, which is a good sign and they close the doors on him.
Half an hour, Reid emerges, clad in his CalTech sweatshirt and joggers, hair still slightly damp. The color has returned to his lips, and the second Rossi catches sight of him, he pulls his extra jacket from the car, draping it over the kid’s shoulders.
“Thanks, Rossi,” Reid says softly, teeth sinking into his lips as he thinks about what went wrong. “Hey, Hotch?”
“Yeah, Reid?” Hotch responds, grabbing another blanket from the truck.
“I’m sorry for saying you have a nice ass.”
“I’m sorry for saying you shouldn’t work the case,” he replies simply, ignoring the comment about his ass. He starts wrapping the blanket around Reid’s shoulders, “we probably wouldn’t have figured it out if you had listened.”
“I mean, I probably wouldn’t have fallen into a lake,” He mumbles, voice cracking as he presses against the warmth.
“You didn’t hear us warning you,” Hotch observes, voice cautious and deliberate, “what happened?”
The façade that Reid had so carefully built, collapses at once. Silent sobs shake his frame, and Hotch just hugs him, rubbing soothing circles into his back.
“I saw Hankel,” he chokes, “Sullivan was cooking fish and he smell just brought me back to the shed. Everything was dark.”
Hotch doesn’t say a word, letting Reid continue, “I didn’t realise it was Sullivan holding me by the neck until the ice broke beneath us.”
“I’m sorry,” Hotch offers. He can’t bring himself to tell Reid it was okay. It’s been almost a decade— seven whole years, and a simple smell can bring him back into one of the worst situations he’s ever been in. “What do you say that we get you in the car and get you out of here?”
Reid just nods, wiping his face and clambering into the back seat. Morgan squeezes his shoulder, before giving Reid some space.
They’re not to surprised when he resorts to staring out the window, eyes unfocused and fingers twitching against his side.
But when Morgan glances over to see Reid’s finger settled in the crook of his elbow, he starts to understand.
Once they’ve settled into their seats in the jet, and Reid has sufficiently conked out on the couch in the back, they do what any good friends would do. They talk about him while he’s incapacitated and utterly dead to the world.
“Did he see Hankel?” Morgan blurts, and Hotch looks up, glancing over his shoulder to make sure Reid isn’t listening.
“Yeah,” he mutters, returning his line of sight to the other agents around him, “he said it was the smell of the fish that Sullivan was cooking. He only saw the shed around him.”
“Is he okay?” Blake asks, leaning her elbows on the table, eyes focused on Reid’s prone form.
“He can sleep, so that’s a good sign. If he doesn’t have a nightmare, we’re probably in a good place,” JJ answers, watching as his chest rises at falls evenly.
But as if speaking it into existence, Spencer lets out a huff, rolling from his back to his side, head, teeth finding their way into his lips, and fingers twitching roughly at his sides.
JJ and Morgan rises, Morgan sitting at his feet while JJ crouches beside his head, combing the hair from his eyes, “hey, Spence. You’re having a nightmare. Wake up.”
It takes a moment of coaxing but eventually Spencer reruns, lurching upright with a gasp as he shakes. He settles his legs on the floor, covering his face with his hands as he tries to catch his breath.
JJ and Morgan just sit beside him; Morgan runs a calming hand up and down Reid’s spine and JJ just fiddles the with the locks of hair on the base of his scalp.
Eventually, he catches his breath and sinks back against the couch, blinking rapidly.
“How long was I out?” He croaks hoarsely, shoving the fringe out of his eyes.
“An hour, maybe a little longer. We’re about forty five minutes out,” Morgan answers, “are you alright?”
“I haven’t had a nightmare about Hankel in years,” he sighs, shoulders slumping in defeat, “I thought I was over it.”
“It’s part of the job,” Morgan answers, “things come and go in waves. It doesn’t make you any less strong.”
Reid nods, and after a few moment, JJ and Morgan rise to give him space, “Wait.”
They turn to look at their friend, waiting for him to continue his line of thought, “yeah, Spence?”
“Can you guys just sit with me until we land?” He hesitates, cocking his head as he mulls over the words that have just left his lips, “unless you don’t want to—“
They hear the underlying, ‘unless I’m too much for you, right now’.
But they trample that thought, sitting right back down on either side of him.
And if he notices the correlation of Rossi inviting the entire team, kids and spouses in all over for a dinner and a movie that night, no one says a word.