Chapter Text
“And what if I had started taking Dilaudid again? Would you have told me?”
“You… you didn’t.”
“Yeah. But I thought about it.”
......
Spencer Reid had never liked the dark. Dark was the inherent absence of light, the absence of clarity and the inability to see. Not being able to see scared him. Not knowing scared him.
Similarly, Spencer Reid didn’t like the nighttime. Nighttime is dark, and nighttime is solitary. Nighttime is when bad things happen, when fires are set and bodies are dumped. Nighttime is perhaps the most uncertain time of all.
Nights had always been dark for Spencer Reid, but after Emily was gone, they got a lot darker.
Of course, Spencer knew they didn’t really get darker. Emily’s funeral had been in the spring, so if anything the nights were getting lighter. And all in all, it was relative - it’s not like Quantico was in the middle of nowhere, and there was a lot of light pollution from the city. It never truly got dark enough to inhibit vision; even if Spencer drew all the curtains in his apartment, light still seeped through the cracks under the door and the windows.
Still, they felt darker. Everything did. Without Emily, all the logic in the world couldn't change that.
“I- I didn’t… I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. JJ, I couldn’t- I couldn’t say goodbye to her? She can’t be gone if I wasn’t able to say goodbye-”
JJ wrapped her arms around Spencer tightly, rocking him back and forth like she would Henry after a nightmare. He seemed so small this way, his young age all the more evident in the way he clung to her shoulder and cried. The dim lights in her living room - dim, never dark, she knew Spence hated the dark - were a sharp contrast from the bright fluorescent lights of the hospital that they had sat in just hours ago.
“It’s okay, Spence, you’re gonna be okay. We’re gonna be okay.”
She rubbed circles into his back, placating him with whispered assurances of a future unchanged. Mentally, she planned her flight to Paris, planned her excuses, planned her lies. Hopefully, Spencer would never know. Hopefully.
......
The morning after Emily’s death, Spencer Reid woke up in an unfamiliar room to whispered voices.
“But Mama, can I-”
“Henry, Uncle Spence needs his rest right now. Do you wanna help with breakfast, or go back upstairs to play?”
Henry? Why would I be at JJ’s… Suddenly, he remembered. Tension rushed back into his chest as he blinked his eyes open and slowly sat up.
“I don’ wanna do neither Mama, I wanna- UNCW ‘PENCE!!!” Henry yelled, running across the room and tackling him.
“Hey. Hey Henry,” Spencer said, surprised to find his voice hoarse. He supposed he had fallen asleep crying, given his current location on a couch that wasn’t his own with a throw blanket wrapped around his shoulders.
JJ smiled thinly, coming up to the two of them and ruffling her son’s hair.
“Hey Henry, go get Daddy for me, okay?” she said, and waited for him to run off before she sat down, pulling Spencer into a bone-crushing hug and burying her nose in his shoulder.
“Hey,” she murmured, pulling back after a moment and rubbing her hands over his arms.
“Hey.”
“Are you okay?”
“Ha. Uh, I don’t… no. Probably not.”
“Do you want to-”
“No. No. I uh,” Spencer brought his hand to rub against his face, which he knew was his tell but couldn’t bring himself to care. “I think I just want- um, I want to go home?”
“Okay. Okay,” Jennifer said, her voice breaking. She wanted to tell him; she couldn’t bear to see Spence, her Spence, feeling this way. But she knew she couldn’t, so she didn’t.
“Is my, uh, is my car here?”
Spencer’s voice broke her out of her thoughts. “Yeah, Will got it for you last night… I can drive, though, do you want-”
“No, I can do it,” he murmured, standing up and brushing himself off as he fought back the tears prickling behind his eyes. Quickly, he grabbed his messenger bag and started to the door, unable to keep himself contained any longer and unwilling to cry again until he was alone. JJ stopped him with his hand on the doorknob.
“Uh, Spence?”
Reid turned, blinking back tears as he did so. “Yeah?”
He was pulled into another tight hug. “Take… take care of yourself, okay?”
Spencer pulled back quickly, turning his face away from his friend as his voice broke. “Yeah. I will.”
Only when he got to the car did he let himself sob.