Archive of Our Own ^beta

The shot rang.

It rang loud and consuming. It rang with all the anger the world had ever seen, and it rang with the strongest grief someone could know. The piercing tone was left, hanging, in the room as blood steadily spilled out on the floor. It pooled, falling in gentle droplets that seemed uncaring to what atrocity this room had just held.

It just kept falling.

The note stayed in his ears. The note stayed as he stared, unseeing, at the two bodies. Spencer was numb, a horrible cold nothing that spread through his body. He felt the tears on his face, the hair just whispering against his forehead, but it was drowned out by the nothing.

Everything was nothing.

A perfect conundrum. The definition of an oxymoron. Two adjectives that cannot apply to each other and yet very much do. Everything was nothing. Everything, every moment and emotion and memory that made him him was absolute shit in that moment, because the blood didn't stop dripping and the note didn't stop ringing.

Nothing had kept that bullet from firing, and that was everything, right?

A hand on his arm, a voice near his ear. It couldn't get through the wall separating; the blood kept dripping so it didn't matter. Nothing mattered as gauze was taped to his arm and he was laid back, gently, onto the ambulance's gurney. The blood kept dripping onto the cold cement floor, even if he was no longer there to see it. That blood was on his hands, and it would never wash off. It would never go away.

Twenty six million two hundred and eighty thousand, twenty eight. Twenty six million two hundred and eighty thousand, twenty eight seconds is the amount of time they communicated for.

Ten months.

What was left now?

.

[denial]

.

The bullpen was bright. Fluorescent lights cut into his eyes and deep into his head, making everything wavy and disoriented. A wave of pain flooded his skull but he ignored it, pushing against it and continuing to walk to his desk.

His leather bag seemed off balance, like something was missing, when he laid it across the back of his chair. Something was missing. Something....

nothings missing nothings missing youre fine everythings fine just ignore it just

He rubbed a heavy hand against his eyes, raked an even heavier one through his hair. It caught on tangles and he winced. His alarm hadn't gone off and he'd had to rush out of bed. Then he missed the train and had to wait for the next one, causing him to be a whole thirty seven minutes late.

He took a long sip from the cup of coffee he'd bought earlier that morning, wincing at the bitter taste. No sugar, he must had forgotten to put it in. Well that ruins a perfectly good cup.

she always said you were drinking too much sugar that you had to stop or your headaches would continue thats why youre drinking it black its so bitter

"Reid?" JJ said, her voice gentle. Like he was some victim; it was full of sympathy and empathy and a cautious kind of questioning that made his skin crawl. She had a file in her hand, the corner crinkling as it was steadily crushed. "What are you doing here?"

What was he doing here?

"It's Monday," He tried to smile, but couldn't get his lips to move quite right. "Last I checked, I still worked here."

"Yeah, but I thought Hotch gave you a month's leave." Now her voice was edged with concern and something dreadfully akin to pity. "No one expects you to be back here so soon. You can't... You can't get over this so quickly, Spence."

"There are over eighteen thousand injuries to law enforcement officers every year resulting from more than fifty eight thousand assaults. It's just a graze, JJ. I didn't even need stitches." He moved his injured arm up and down, before gesturing to his paperwork. "I'll be out of the field for a few days, but it works well enough to write consults. I think Hotch just really wants me to take a vacation"

Again, his lips moved, muscles pulling as he knew they should in order to smile and yet, it felt wrong. Hoping it would be enough to assuage JJ's worry (really, it was just a scratch, what was the big deal?) he grabbed one of the files off the stack on his desk, flipping it open and looking at the coroner's report. Five stabs, all to the left side of the body, removal of the fingers -

"Reid?" Hearing Hotch's voice, he looked up. The man's face was set in his typical scowl. "My office."

He nodded, jotting down a quick note on the file before standing. The world swam slightly, whites and blacks blurring, and he gripped his chair tight. Red danced in front of his vision, crimson spilled across the bland blue carpeting of the office.

she thought that the visions were manifestations of his subconscious as his mind worked faster than he could process but this was different this was real he could remember

"Reid, are you alright?"

Blinking, shaking his head, the hallucination vanished. His breaths came in shakily. His palms were coated with sweat. Pain lanced from his shoulder and, looking down at it, he half expected blood to be soaking through his sweater.

But it was just a scratch.

Right?

"Reid?!"

After a few seconds, his mind cleared. Everything was clear again. He glanced over at JJ.

"I'm... I'm fine, Jayje." The world twisted again, slightly, and he gripped the chair harder. His eyes slammed closed.

"Spence..."

"I'm fine." He said firmly, forcing his eyes to open and his hands to let go of the chair. Not sparing a glance back, he straightened himself and continued his journey to Hotch's office. He could feel JJ's eyes burning into his back as he climbed the stairs, but tried desperately to ignore it. Stepping into the small room, he watched as his boss closed the door behind him.

"I gave you a month's personal leave, Reid. Why aren't you at home?"

"Hotch, the doctors already cleared me for desk duty and said I'd be good for field in less than a week. I see no reason for me not to be here."

The older agent just looked at him, eyes unreadable, before gesturing to the small couch against the wall. "Sit down, Spencer."

Hotch never calls him Spencer.

He followed the instruction cautiously. "Is everything alright, sir?"

His hands nervously tapped against his leg, eyes glued to the older agent. There was something.... something off about him. An air of grief and languish that surrounded Hotch in a way it hadn't since Foyet.

"Have you been to see the therapist yet?"

He gave Hotch an incredulous look. "It was just a scratch! I don't know why everyone's so worried."

Hotch just kept his gaze leveled on him. "Have you?"

The veneer started to crack.

"No. It was a flesh wound, I'm not... I'm not crazy or anything." A spike of pain came from his arm and he fisted his hand. "Look, Hotch, I can work on consults. I can do my job. There's no reason for me to go on leave."

The older agent settled onto the small chair across from the couch. His hands played restlessly with the ring still around his finger. "I have no doubt in your ability to do your work, Reid. But I'm talking to you as your friend, not as your superior. You should be at home."

"My arm - "

"This has nothing to do with your arm, and everything to do with how you're acting."

He could almost hear the sound of blood dripping onto concrete.

"Acting? Sir, I've done nothing but - "

"Spencer, stop. You can't do this, you know you can't."

It was then, then that the illusion shattered. Because Hotch was right. Horribly, inarguablely, right.

he lost the best person he had ever known and now shes gone shes dead shes

"Why?" He challenged, meeting Hotch's eyes before quickly looking away. He couldn't bare the - worry, caring, warmth - they held. "Why can't I?"

"Because you're too well-versed in psychology - and too stuck in your own head - to be able to be in this level of denial." The world swam slightly. He ignored it. "And because you lost someone close to you and you should be grieving. This facade you're continuing to don isn't going to accomplish that, so stop pretending. Talk to us."

"I - " He started, but the words died. Died, simply. He just shook his head instead.

"I know how you feel, Spencer." Hotch slipped the ring off his finger, putting it into his palm and squeezing tightly. "I did the same thing when Haley... when Haley died. I know that you just want to ignore what's happened, but you can't. You lost someone, someone close to you, and you need to let yourself feel that."

He looked down, hair falling in a curtain in front of his eyes. His hands were shaking. "I'll drown."

"We won't let you. We're here, Spencer, but you need to let us in." Hotch reached his hand out, gripping his. A shiver ran through his body at the touch. "You need to let yourself grieve. For Maeve, and for yourself."

Maeve. With letters exchanged, and the subsequent hours spent analyzing her handwriting and trying to picture the person who wrote it. Of replaying her words in his mind again and again. Endless phone calls listening to her voice, of talking to her in an effortless way he'd never known with another person. He'd never had to think about what to say to her. Seeing her for the first time, a bruise on her temple and blood running into her hair, yet still exactly as he'd pictured. Still perfect. And her smile, a small half grin.

Then the blood, haloing around her. Bodies positioned exactly alike. Eyes gazing forever at a grimy wall -

A flash of red shone across his gaze. The pealing ring of a gunshot. A numbness so akin to drugs it was a wonder there hadn't been a needle in his arm when he watched the best person he'd ever known get wheeled away in a body bag.

No no no no no he cant remember that not that he needs the letters and the happiness and her voice as she talked softly into the speaker and the way her hand stilted slightly on the second 'e' in his name

"I can't." He shook his head frantically, standing up. "I can't, Hotch."

"Reid - "

"I... I have to go." He look at his boss, the disappointment ringing his face. He couldn't... he couldn't do this anymore. He couldn't do any of it.

Quickly, he unclipped his holster and set his gun on the table, followed seconds later by his badge. Eyes kept low, so he wouldn't have to meet Hotch's eyes. He could hear the older agent protesting, but he just walked to the door.

Turning back, keeping his gaze steadily fixed on polished loafers, he whispered.

"I'm sorry."

.

[anger]

.

Some part of him knew that what Hotch said in that office was right. Some part of him realized that he couldn't go on pretending that Maeve didn't exist. That, if for nothing more than the power of his own mind and the will of his friends, he couldn't live in a world where Spencer Reid never met the brilliant geneticist Maeve Donovan.

He lost that innocence. A naiveté he didn't even know he'd had until it was gone. And he longed for blissful ignorance for the first time in his life.

He spent the rest of that day wandering the tiny town of Quantico, waiting for six o'clock and his train to arrive. The hours seemed to drag on. His feet carried him across roads once seen on maps years ago and yet still remembered, and eventually he was sitting on the floor in a used bookstore.

It was the kind of place where every nook and cranny held a book of some sort. The kind of place where room after room was filled with fantastical worlds and great knowledge, any semblance of order long lost to the chaos.

He was surrounded by books written by Arthur Conan Doyle.

He'd read through them all, except one.

Maeve has always told him she loves his works.

Had. It's had now, isn't it? She can't read when she's six feet under. She can't read when she's dead.

His hands clutched the book in his lap tighter as the dark voice whispered in his head. He opened the front cover, eyes glancing down to the title page.

The Narrative of John Smith.

He could almost see the quote Maeve had written there, on his own copy. How her letters had twisted and intertwined to form something beautiful, something their's.

"He's the one thing you can never take from us."

The page looked so empty without it.

That was the one Doyle book he hadn't read yet. It'd taken him less than an hour to get through all the others, but he couldn't... he couldn't even bring himself to start this one. It seemed so final. Too final.

His fingers dug harder into the paper.

He'd read the book before, of course. The first time when he was ten. He'd read it again the night Maeve had given it to him, savoring the words she'd chosen so specifically, so carefully. Then he'd sat there, long into the morning, tracing Thomas Merton's words again and again.

Like a forgotten memory, his hands started to do it again.

But his fingers pressed too hard. The pressure was too much for the old book. A tearing sound filled his ears.

As loud as a gunshot.

Maybe, somehow, louder.

And he looked down, down at the damage he had caused. At the hole he had left. Title no longer there. No place for a quote.

And the soft carpeting of the room shifted to concrete, and he could hear Diane's voice. His arm was throbbing and he couldn't stop the emotions running through him, the feelings that wouldn't stop.

What Hotch had said was true: he couldn't grieve pretending that Maeve didn't exist. But he was right as well. When the feelings come back, he'll drown.

The tide was coming in now.

His hands moved, moved without him telling them too. It was like they needed to do something, anything, because all the emotions running through him needed some kind of outlet.

In less than a minute, a minute filled with red smears and last words, there was no longer a book in his lap. Instead, bits of paper hanging dearly onto a cracked and ripped spine.

All around him were torn pages. Little bits of words and worlds shredded by his hands. A few covers, a few spines left intact, but hardly anything to show what those pages used to be. Hands now dotted with red from countless cuts.

Every Doyle book, gone.

He couldn't breathe, couldn't find the air he needed. Tears and sweat mingled on his face as he stood on shaky legs.

Maeve had always loved Doyle books, hadn't she?

She can't read them now, but no one can. No one can.

A slight gasp behind him made him turn around. A boy, no older than seventeen, was standing in the room's doorway, jaw open as he looked at the destruction. And he forced his hands to move, to grab his wallet and shove all his money into the kid's chest.

Then he ran.

He ran out from the store, onto the street outside. Rain was pouring from the sky, plastering his clothes to him, his hair to forehead. But he kept running, all the way to the train station.

An hour later, still shivering, he put his key into his apartment's lock. Fixed a hot, sugared coffee, and sat down in his favorite chair.

His eyes flicked over to the book laying on the table beside it.

The Narrative of John Smith. A quote written on the inside cover.

He stared out into the darkness.

.

[bargaining]

.

When he was getting his doctorate in physics, he'd attended a masters course in theology. Specifically, comparitive theology. It intrigued him, in a way the hard sciences never could. In that class, he'd been surrounded by people who believed in God, who believed in worship. Who spent their Sundays at church. Who lived their lives by a series of seemingly arbitrary rules simply because they believed that was what's right. That that was what God wanted for them.

Sometimes he longed for that kind of faith.

As a child, he knew what religion was, even if he never really understood it. His mother was too sick to bring him to church, his dad too busy. But he read the Bible through when he was eight, and marveled at the way its passages were used, for good and for evil.

He'd seen the comfort it brought people, believing there was some higher plan for them. He'd seen the pain it had put some through. And of course, he'd seen those who'd twist everything about religion to satisfy their own desires.

But he'd never thought of religion in his life as anything more than an academic subject. He never prayed. He certainly never went to a service.

That changed, though.

The first time he prayed, really prayed, was after Georgia. The night he was rescued, staring up at the hospital ceiling, he'd prayed for Tobias. Prayed that, by some higher power, he found his mom. That he found his peace.

The second time, the second time came when he first went through the withdrawals. He begged, pleaded with some diety on a cold bathroom floor for the strength to get through it, to get clean.

He relapsed an hour later.

Maybe that was why he waited so long to pray again. It was only years later, lying on JJ's couch, eyes red from tears, that he clasped his hands and asked that God let Emily into Heaven. That she finds whatever peace it is that she could never have on Earth.

Then she came back. And he wasn't sure if that was an answer to his prayer, or a flaunting of it.

So he hadn't prayed, when Maeve first died. He hadn't asked God for a single thing. Because He had never granted him anything before. Why would he now?

He didn't pray, sitting alone in his darkened room that night. He simply thought. Remembered. Lost himself in the memories of a life he never got to live; a life with Maeve and him together.

He imagined what an ordinary day might be like. How she takes her coffee. How she sits when she reads - relaxed, stretched out, or curled into herself. Does she laugh loudly, or is it soft?

He imagined a future he'd never get to have. A future he knew no God would grant him. So what is the point of praying, if you have that imagination?

There's nothing he could gain.

There's nothing to bargain for.

.

[depression]

.

The reaching rays of sunlight slowly fell across the living room floor. They crawled steadily closer to the man sitting in a reading chair, eyes fixated on the wall just ahead.

Everything was numb.

He'd been thinking. He'd spent the whole night, just wondering. About philosophy, theology.

Imagining.

But now, now life was beginning again. He'd have to move on, from the comforting worlds he'd created in his head.

And he felt numb.

Maybe that numbness, far deeper than any physical sensation, was what made him stand and walk to the bathroom. Maybe it was that numbness that opened the cabinet above his sink and draw out the tiny kit. He knew what was inside.

It was easy to tighten a tourniquet. Easy to prep a syringe. Easy to find a vein. His eyes already glazed, his mind already gone, there was no hesitation when he pushed down the plunger.

There was a moment, with the thick band around his arm keeping the drug away from his brain, that he really thought. That he realized what he was doing. What he was throwing away. But his hands still moved, numb to everything, and ripped off the tourniquet.

Then he was really, truly, numb.

.

[acceptance]

.

He knew the stages of grief, of course. It was an oft-talked about topic in psychology. An almost cliché in literature. Some studies had debunked it, saying that there is no way to so easily and quickly box and label a person's grief. That the idea of a cyclical pattern of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression that continues until one reaches acceptance is a gross oversimplification of trauma.

He'd seen grief himself. Been through it, with his Dad, his Mom, and Emily. With the victims he failed to save.

Can one really oversimplify grief? Or, alternatively, can one really define it at all?

He thought of Diane. Her relentless pursuit of knowing why her parents killed themselves. How far that grief had driven her. She'd never learned to accept it. She'd never let go of her anger. But was it anger that had driven her over the edge, or the inability to accept? Or was it her twisted way of accepting - by dedicating her life to understanding suicide - that had led to her fall?

Could the things she went through be summed up into five neat little stages?

He hadn't been in denial. He couldn't deny what he couldn't forget. And he would never forget that night.

He wasn't angry. He'd never been angry at anyone but himself. Because he knew that it was his fault that Maeve died. That if he'd just put on a better act, she would have lived. It was that that made him rip up those books. Not anger, but... sorrow. A bitter kind of recompense for the person this world has lost.

He hadn't bargained. Why would he?

And depression? What is depression, really? How does one define it? He didn't care what happened to himself. He didn't care what happened to the world. He just wanted an escape. An escape into a world where Maeve was still there. Is that really depression?

Now, here we are. Acceptance. How can he accept it? How can he bear that the person he cared for the most in this world is just gone? How is he supposed to move on?

The needle in his arm seems to answer that.

What does that say about his grief?