Work Text:
Forgetfulness means to be full
of forgetting, a glass
overflowing with cool water, though I'd always
thought of it as the empty pocket
where the hand finds
nothing: no keys, no ticket, no change.
-Fork with Two Tines Pushed Together, Nick Lantz
***
It starts when Derek is consulting on a case involving a mentally ill unsub. His mind flashes back to a hostage situation in Texas, a paranoid schizophrenic, a train with Elle on it. He remembers that the case went fairly well. He just can’t, for the life of him, recall how it ended.
He can’t find the records on his computer, a big blank space there where he knows the file should be, so Morgan pokes his head in by Garcia and asks for her help. She hesitantly agrees, and his blood runs cold when she calls him back later and tells him it’s gone. He comes up with a list of cases for her to check on, and still, there’s nothing. He wracks his memory and finds the same emptiness there.
[There is promise in a story that starts with emptiness, promise that by the ending, that hollow space will be filled.
Some spaces cannot be filled. Some things cannot be replaced.
This is important now. Remember this.]
***
The thing is, it isn’t just files that are missing. There’s a hole in the heart of the BAU, the pulse of the team weak and thready. It’s not just that they’re down a member; that open position has been there for so long, as long as he can remember, and Derek doesn’t understand why Hotch can’t just place someone already when they’re all spread so thin. It’s in the open faces of his coworkers, so sad when they think no one’s looking. It’s been going on awhile, he knows, but it’s also to their credit that he should have realized a lot sooner. No, it’s not just a hole—it’s more like something that was vital to the team has been surgically removed, like they’re trying valiantly to gasp down borrowed, life support air, and it’s not enough.
The problem is that Morgan has no idea what’s been taken out of the equation, at least at first, but he’s starting to get an idea. He sees it in the empty desk in the bullpen,—the one that still looks freshly cleaned though he can’t ever remember the chair being filled—in the phantom glimpses just outside his line of sight, where someone should be leaning against the break room counter every day at noon, where the coffee pot and sugar container always seem more full than they should be.
It’s not something missing, and it’s not just a body; it’s a particular body, and it’s not until Morgan discovers this that he realizes he’s missing it, too.
***
“What happened to the other team member?” he finally corners Prentiss one day, the two of them remaining to finish paperwork long after everyone else has gone home. He would have, should have asked sooner, but the truth is that it’s taken a lengthy amount of time to work up the courage for this conversation. Normally, talks between team members aren’t a problem for him; Morgan’s learned to share most things, even things he’d rather not, because it will find a way to come out in the end. But he’s spent the last few weeks worried that his mind was cracking apart, that all of this was just him being paranoid.
Emily frowns, crosses her arms tight across her body. “Don’t chase after ghosts,” she says, as if this ghost isn’t hovering in the air here, permeating everything. As if it isn’t the one chasing Morgan.
“So they died?” he asks, reaching for some spark of something in his head. There’s nothing there. Just a lonely stone falling down a well with no bottom.
“I didn’t say that,” she says, immediately packing up her things and leaving with a soft goodbye. No one said that, of course. He stares at the empty desk again, a fresh layer of dust wiped clear just earlier that day. They didn’t need to.
***
There’s a layer of dust covering things in his home, however, so Morgan takes to eradicating every particle he can in an effort to distract himself. He cleans out the cupboards, the drawers, the closet until everything sits in a large pile on the floor.
There is a box he’d almost overlooked on the top shelf, hidden behind larger ones. It’s filled with pictures, half-forgotten memories that make him smile, make him laugh. Childhood moments with his mother; Garcia smirking out at him, flowers in her arms. The last photograph is in a paper envelope, JJ’s handwriting scrawled in stark contrast to the bright white. Just in case, it says.
In the picture, his arm wraps around the shoulders of a younger man whose face he doesn’t recognize. In the picture, they both look at something off to the side, just off camera, eyes halfway between shocked surprise and laughing wonder.
In the picture, they both look happy.
***
“What. The. Fuck,” he says the next morning, when he drops the envelope and picture onto the conference table, slamming his fist into it after.
“There are rules, JJ!” Hotch actually yells.
“What gives him the right to forget?” she accuses. “I’m here, and I remember!” Tears slip down her face, past her nose, while everyone pretends not to see, not to hear. JJ’s hands cover her face, burying the feelings that shouldn’t have escaped. “I remember.”
The other members of the team sit quietly, the words echoing in their silence.
There are rules.
***
There are a million questions Derek wants to ask. The team understands he knows now, knows what they’ve been hiding. To say he knows, though, feels like a lie. Morgan cannot begin to comprehend the enormity of hiding an entire existence, of sweeping almost all evidence of someone’s life under the rug.
There are a million questions he wants answered, and their eyes overlook them all.
The members of the BAU do avoidance better than anybody, Morgan included.
There are a million questions Derek wants to ask, but there is always another phone call, another case. There is always something in the way.
***
“His name was Spencer Reid,” Rossi tells him.
“He liked coffee, obscure foreign films and magic tricks,” Emily recalls fondly.
“He refused to use the tablets, the weird little bugger,” Garcia says without venom.
“He failed his firearms qualification once,” Hotch states, the hint of a smile ghosting over his face.
“He was Henry’s godfather,” JJ says, then sits quietly for the next ten minutes, leg tucked under her body.
They’re not all he is looking for, these happy memories. Morgan tries to take all the little scraps and build a life, a person out of them, but the puzzle pieces just won’t fit.
***
There’s a painting on the wall of Emily’s apartment, some abstract swirl of color and light that might resemble a flower or an up close view of an eye or anything in between. There’s a sweep of yellow that reminds him of hair he’s only seen in a photograph. Derek looks at it and wonders what he’s supposed to feel, if he’s supposed to feel anything. All he does feel is lost.
“I didn’t choose this, Prentiss,” he tells her, shaking his head, staring at the work of art rather than her face. “I couldn’t have, how could I have wanted to forget when all I want to do now is remember?”
“You might not remember the good things,” Emily says slowly, each word carefully measured, “but you don’t remember the pain, either. We all tried to talk you out of it, but that was what mattered to you. That was your choice. And it’s okay that you chose that. But what’s done is done, Derek.”
Morgan frowns at the wall, shaking his head. He has a problem with endings, this much he knows. This doesn’t feel like an ending, yet.
***
Sorry, the man on the other side of the desk says.
My team is far more adept at removing memories than retrieving them.
There is no way that I know of recovering these things.
This is just a ripple. It will get bigger, more difficult, and then disappear into nothing again.
Sorry.
***
“It would be nearly impossible for me to forget anything,” Reid states, fiddling with some papers on the desk that Morgan has never seen him use. “Sometimes, sometimes I wonder what it would be like to just—just pluck out those old, painful memories. To just dull them a little bit.” Morgan sees his hands, delicate and sure, but they’re not really his hands. He hears his voice, but it’s not really his voice.
Derek wakes up, not sure if it’s a dream, if it’s a memory.
There’s no way for him to know, now.
***
Derek keeps the photograph under his pillow.
It doesn’t help bring back any memories, but he feels better having tried.
***
[There is a headstone on the outskirts of Las Vegas that JJ takes Morgan to see, hidden under the shade of an ash tree. The numbers, the years listed are far too close together, the man buried there far too young.
Once, there was a boy in a cemetery, digging a grave that wasn’t meant for him. There was a boy who laughed breathlessly because he was right. There was a boy kneeling on the ground and his eyes were wide open, lungs still breathing, but he was dead, dead already. These were not all the same boy, but they were. This didn’t happen, but it did.
Forgotten stories are no less true. This lesson is important, but Morgan is still learning.
He is still learning that Reid’s favorite holiday was Halloween, that he refused to eat fish, that his birthday was October 9th, and he wishes he could remember the sound of these things in Reid’s voice, wishes he really knew this man his team speaks so fondly of.
Later, Hotch gives him a letter written in a messy, unfamiliar hand, and it’s the closest thing he’ll get.]
***
—I know it’s macabre, but if anything were to happen, I wanted each of you to have something to remember me by—
—you’re my best friend, and I don’t use those words lightly. That’s something I’ve never had, and I consider it both the greatest fortune and honor of my life to have known you—
—I have met the most genius minds in the world, but I am positive no one has ever understood me as well as you—
Morgan’s heart breaks all over again.
***
Diana Reid is beautiful in a haunting way. She sits across the table from Derek, hands folded neatly on the table.
“You work with Spencer, don’t you, Agent Morgan?” she asks, frown pulling at the corner of her mouth. “At that government facility that took him away. Why doesn’t that boy write anymore?”
Morgan thinks, not for the first time, that coming here was a mistake, that bothering this woman and her fractured mind was a terribly cruel thing to do. He has been too desperate for any information about Spencer, anything he doesn’t know. It’s admittedly a wide category, but he’s already spoken to the team, read every article written by the man and about him. He has no idea where else to go from here; he just knows he isn’t finished.
“He’s been—“ a word doesn’t come to him, can’t describe the immensity of the gap that’s been left, and he barely even feels it at all. “He’s been busy. But he loves you very much.”
“Of course, of course he does,” she says, flippant, gesturing with her hand, and for just a moment, there’s a glimpse of someone else. But Morgan doesn’t see that, can’t see that, because he doesn’t know to look. “I think that he made his choice, though, didn’t he?”
Diana Reid is beautiful, speaking about her son, living in the past. Derek closes his eyes and wishes he could join her there.
***
“How did he die?” Morgan thinks it’s time he finds out. This is the one piece of information he’s avoided, shied away from, because there are too many terrifying options; maybe it’s better to know than to speculate.
Penelope pats his arm, smiling sadly. “You don’t really want to know that, do you?” she asks, and the truth is no, Derek doesn’t, but he wants to know Spencer Reid and this, this is part of him. The rest of them know, and live with it every day, but when he tells Garcia this that smile just gets sadder.
“Tell you what. Give it some more time, just live with what you do have. I’ll tell you, promise. But you already know so much of his story, and Reid was so much more than his saddest parts. You help us all remember that. I want you to remember that, too.”
Reid was more than his happiest parts, though. That’s something Morgan’s not sure they understand.
***
There is something he’s missing, somewhere; a piece that holds the key to everything else, and once he finds it, this will be over and he can move on with his life, have normal thoughts about his dead friend without having to wonder if he could still call the man a friend.
Later, Hotch will hand him mandatory time off, tell him that he has moved past caring and into obsession, and all he’ll feel is steely determination, an iron will to keep going.
Morgan doesn’t know Reid, but the thing is, you don’t need to know someone to want to save them. This is the only way to save Reid now, the only way he knows.
***
Derek never recovers the memories.
“You have nothing to prove,” Rossi swears up and down, but, no, that’s not right. Morgan has everything to prove, because he failed, he gave up and now his mind is filled with all these little facts and stories, words that can’t tell Morgan how hesitant his footsteps were walking into an unfamiliar room, if his intellect felt like an extra presence, how warm his shoulders were underneath an outstretched arm.
Not one of these facts can take the place of what should be there. Not one of them is Reid.
***
There’s an email forwarded to him, a contact from a company in LA reaching out, claiming to be able to reverse the process, with only moderate side effects as a result.
Morgan doesn’t respond to the message, but he doesn’t delete it either.
***
A man named Ethan sends him a package from New Orleans. In it is a DVD filled with small files, low quality videos shot through a cell phone, and Spencer Reid is the star of every one.
Seeing the way he moves, hearing his voice, his laugh, it might not be enough, but for the first time, Morgan feels like it could be.
***
You will always be empty, an older man tells him on his first case back.
Do not think for one second that you are the only one.
***
Garcia pulls some strings to get him access to those cases again. It’s not something that he needs, but he finds himself pouring over every word anyway, realizing all over again that Dr. Spencer Reid was more than he could ever know, that Derek gave up something special.
There’s a new file on his drive now, and when he opens it there are several thumbnails of pictures including Reid. JJ spots them over his shoulder and tells stories inspired by them, Penelope coming over and doing the same, until eventually the whole team is there, amused by each other’s versions of the truth, and Derek remembers nothing concrete, just how he loved to work in this room with the scent of coffee and the melody of laughter and the sound of a young man’s voice echoing in his empty mind, telling him a statistic that is the most beautiful thing he’s ever heard.